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superrman · 4 years

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I got a couple asks about my reply to an ask where I said that I acknowledge cop propaganda in procedural’s, and believe that everyone falls for it, while still acknowledging that I have enjoyed those shows. More than one ask said they are fully aware of the propaganda and so they can still watch those said shows, this is something I want to expand on because No one is above falling for propaganda.

I have loved and watched cop shows since I was 12, and I also have studied propaganda academically for half a decade, and that is why I can say with certainty you have internalized and fallen for propaganda within cop shows.

It is important to note that cop shows are designed with the aid of professional police for this exact purpose, they are insanely important to the normalization of behaviours of police, and justifying their actions, because you as an audience emotionally connect with the characters.

There are many things that have circulated around tumblr that have acknowledged certain forms of propaganda - the continuous use of violence, in a way that claims that the police must in many cases resort to violence, Trevor Noah did a great small clip showing how many cop shows do this. On top of that the villainization of internal affairs and the entire defence system, claiming public defenders are moronic and don’t defend their clients well, which in turn makes people afraid to turn to public defenders, which in turn results in people not asking for a lawyer, and at the same time paint defence attorneys as evil as well, and an impediment to justice which makes people dislike lawyers in general.

These are all important functions of the propaganda system as it justifies many actions of cops, but there are so many layers of propaganda, with hundreds of cop shows, all with police consultants, all employing underhanded tactics and specific messaging impacts you, below is a small list of things I either personally have internalized or know people have internalized. In brackets I mention just a couple shows I have seen this on, keep in mind many shows do this and they all tend to overlap

1. We as a society all agree that murder is wrong, but how many times in a cop show have you rooted for the police to get away with murder? How many times has the protagonist killed someone for personal reasons? They may find a way to kill said individual in the line of duty and that is legal, and or in many cases personally hunt them down and commit murder, and then the story line is about them getting away with murder, but at the same time many story lines in the same series say no one has a justifiable reason for murder, and they may even arrest someone for the same reason as they killed someone.

This teaches the audience that you can’t kill for abuse, country, cause, or revenge, but the police can and should kill, and if they do kill it was only for a valid reason

(NCIS, NCIS LA, The Mentalist)

2. The ‘red tape’ and intense scrutiny of police shootings is the worst, and harmful for the police, in general the scrutiny of all of the measures meant to prevent police violence and harassment of citizens is hindering the police. How many shows have you watched where the main character scoffs at the idea of mandatory counselling post a shooting, or is angry by the idea of having to justify why they took a shot and killed a man

(Rookie Blue, Cold Case, Hawaii 5-0)

3. The police are underpaid and lack the funds for the necessary policing measures. This one in particular I internalized to the extreme, I have always held the false assumption that police are underfunded like all of the other services they equate themselves too - but the police departments have more than enough funds as the protests have revealed. Yet, every cop show depicts a scene of complaining about budget cuts, lack of funds, cannot pursue a case because of budget cuts. On top of that any cop that gets caught stealing is justified because if he was paid fairly, he wouldn’t have to do that.

(Castle, Lucifer, Brooklyn Nine Nine)

4. The police can’t save ‘everyone’ in the context of the most vulnerable of society drug addicts, sex workers, the mentality ill, the sad reality is that some people ‘don’t want help’ - it says societal problems are unsolvable not that the police are not qualified or effective in solving society problems but even then there is a plucky do good cop not yet jaded that will try and try to save people, but eventually have to come to a hard realization you can’t save everyone

(Perception, Criminal Minds, Law and Order SVU)

5. The police always work with experts in the field, have the best technology and moreover, experts will want to work tirelessly for the police or the police themselves are geniuses- this is not the case, in fact in many cases police incompetence and ignoring experts leads to false convictions

(Bones, Rizzoli & Isles, all the CSI, Criminal Minds)

But the most malicious form of propaganda is the way in which police procedurals acknowledge the real world political climate and use the criticism as a way to bolster the police, by this I mean, so many cop shows will have an episode of focusing on a corrupt cop, or a civil rights activist wrongfully arrested, wrongful conviction in general, and the narrative will show outrage throughout the system, cops all banning together to undo this injustice, but with enough resistance from some bad apples to make it seem as if they acknowledge the system is not fully functional but reinforces to the audience that many cops can and do fight the system to get the wrongfully accused out of prison, to protect civil liberties and that cops do care and will willingly fight their own to do it .

Moreover, this is shown in the context of the importance of police brotherhood. Being a cop is always more than a job it’s a lifestyle, you can’t stop being a cop, and it’s a part of your identity, so its extra heroic that the protagonist challenged the corrupt cop, it’s as if he or she turned on his own family to do what is right.

There are always episodes about going after the rich and politically connected and how no matter what the protagonist will do what’s right and fight against the system to get justice for a poor, or poc , or down on their luck victim, it teaches us that even though in the news cops might not be able to stop all of the big evil rich people, Kate Beckett or Jake Peralta is out their fighting the fight, trying to take on corporations, it teaches us to go on faith that the police are separate from the corrupt system, and will try to take on politicians and corporations rather than the reality of them working for those same people

Finally, so many cop shows have minorities and women leading the charge to challenge the old guard, usually with the new era of white men, that laugh at the police brutality and incompetence of older generations. It’s hard to ignore the damage the police have done, but every show simply disregards this with a change in the vanguard, newer cops are immune to racism, classicism and agree older cops used to break the rules and where more corrupt but now that isn’t the case. It’s meant to undermine all of the arguments against police, think about how many people agree that the police during the civil rights movement of the 1960s were bad, or the police that co-operated with drug dealers were terrible but no more, cops now are much more ethical.

Propaganda is dangerous, because it is continuous and repetitive, it is subtle and seeps into your life, you internalize things because we all consume media for enjoyment not to subject it to academic rigour, and that's how they get you to sympathize and feel for cops, we constantly watch stories of brave souls putting their lives on the line for us, and of course we want to believe that this is a real life story and reflective of most cops, but we need to realize now that this is not the case in reality, and its not just a few bad apples, but a system that is broken beyond repair, who relied on the entertainment industry to spread and maintain the false face of the police industry to avoid and undermine criticism.

Just remember No one is above falling for propaganda

#police brutality #cop propaganda #propaganda #the most dangerous cop shows are the progressive ones

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fatehbaz · 3 years

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Imagining futures; escaping hell; controlling time; living in better worlds.

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What we see happening in Ferguson and other cities is not the creation of liveable spaces, but the creation of living hells. When a person is trapped in a cycle of debt, it also can affect their subjectivity and temporal orientation to the world by making it difficult for them to imagine and plan for the future. What psychic toll does this have on residents? How does it feel to be routinely degraded and exploited [...]? [M]unicipalities [...] make it impossible for residents to actually feel at home in the place where they live, walk, work, love, and chill. In this sense, policing is not about crime control or public safety, but about the regulation of people’s lives -- their movements and modes of being in the world.

[Source: Jackie Wang. Carceral Capitalism. 2018.]

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Pacific texts do not only destabilize inadequate presents. They also transfigure the past by participating in widespread strategies of contesting linear and teleological Western time, whether through Indigenous ontologies of cyclical temporality or postcolonial inhabitations of heterogenous time. [...] Pacific temporality [can be] a layering of oral and somatic memory in which both present injustices and a longue duree of pasts-cum-impossible futures still adhere. In doing so, [jetnil-Kijiner’s book] Iep Jaltok does not defer an apocalyptic future. Instead it asserts the possibility, indeed the past guarantee, of Pacific worlds in spite of Western temporal closures. [...] In the context of US settler colonialism, Jessica Hurley has noted “the ongoing power of a white-defined realism to distinguish possible from impossible actions” [...]. In other words, certain aspects of Indigenous life under settler colonialism fall under the purview of what colonizing powers define as the (im)possible. [...] Greg Fry, writing of Australian representations of the Pacific in the 1990s, notes that the Pacific was regarded as facing “an approaching ‘doomsday’ or ‘nightmare’ unless Pacific Islanders remake themselves”. From the center-periphery model [...], only a Malthusian “future nightmare [...]” for Pacific islands seemed possible. [...] Bikini Island, where the first of 67 US nuclear tests took place from 1946 to 1958, was chosen largely because of its remoteness [...]; nuclear, economic, and demographic priorities thus rendered islanders’ lives “ungrievable” [...]. The [...] sentiment was perhaps most famously demonstrated in H*nry Kissing*r’s dismissal of the Pacific: “There are only 90,000 people out there. Who gives a damn?” [...] Such narratives were supposed to proclaim and herald the end of Pacific futures. Instead [...] Pacific extinction narratives [written by Indigenous/Islander authors] conversely testify to something like the real resilience of islanders in the face of a largely deleterious history of Euro-American encounters. More radically, they suggest the impossibility of an impossible future. Apocalypse as precedent overturns the very world-ending convention of the genre. By turning extinction into antecedent, [...] [they aspire] toward an unknown future not tied to an apocalyptic ending.

[Source: Rebecca Oh. “Making Time: Pacific Futures in Kiribati’s Migration with Dignity, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s Iep Jaltok, and Keri Hume’s Stonefish.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies. Winter 2020.]

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With the machinery finally installed on the property of the Manuelita estate, Don Santiago Eder launched the first industrial production of refined white sugar in Colombia on the “first day of the first month of the first year of the twentieth century.” Such deeds, mythologized and heroic in their retelling, earned Santiago Eder respect as “the founder” and his sons as “pioneers” in the industrialization of provincial Colombia. Their enterprise [...] remained the country’s largest sugar operation for much of the twentieth century. In 1967, [...] E.P. Thompson described the evolution and internalization of disciplined concepts of time as intimately tied to the rise of wage labor in industrializing England. His famous treatise on time serves as a reminder that the rise of industrial agriculture affected a reorganization of cultural and social conceptions of time. [...]. The global ascendancy of the Manuelita model of work contracts and monoculture in the second half of the twentieth century underscores the acceleration of the Plantationocene, but the historical presence and persistence of alternative [...] time should serve as a reminder that [...] futures and the demarcation of epochs are never as simple as a neatly organized calendar.

[Source: Timothy Lorek. “Keeping Time with Colombian Plantation Calendars.” Edge Effects. April 2020.]

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For several weeks after midsummer arrives along the lower Kuskokwim River, even as the days begin to shorten, the long, boreal light of dusk makes for a brief night. People travel by boat [...]. When I asked an elder about the proper way to act toward Chinook salmon, he instructed me: “Murikelluku.” The Yup’ik word murilke- means not only “to watch” but also “to be attentive” [...]. Nearly fifty years ago, Congress extinguished Alaska Native tribal autonomy over [...] fishing [...]. The indifference of dominant [US government land management agency] fisheries management models to social relations among salmon and Yupiaq peoples is evocative of a mode of care that Lisa Stevenson (2014) characterizes as “anonymous.” When life is managed at the level of the population, Stevenson writes, care is depersonalized. Care becomes “invested in a certain way of being in time,” standardized to the clock, and according to the temporal terms of the caregiver, rather than in time with the subject of care herself (ibid.: 134). Stevenson identifies care at the population level as anonymous because it focuses exclusively on survival – on metrics of life and death – rather than on the social relations that make the world inhabitable. Thus, it is not namelessness that marks “anonymous care” as such, but rather “a way of attending to the life and death of [others]” that strips life of the social bonds that imbue it with meaning […]. At the same time, conservation, carried out anonymously, ignores not only the temporality of Yupiaq peoples’ relations with fish, but also the human relations that human-fish relations make possible. Yupiat in Naknaq critique conservation measures for disregarding relations that ensure not only the continuity of salmon lives but also the duration of Yupiat lifeworlds (see Jackson 2013). Life is doubly negated. For Yupiaq peoples in southwest Alaska, fishing and its attendant practices are […] modes of sociality that foster temporally deep material and affective attachments to kin and to the Kuskokwim River that are constitutive of well-being [...]. As Yup’ik scholar Theresa Arevgaq John (2009) writes, cultivating relations both with ancestors and fish, among other more-than-human beings, is a critical part of young peoples’ […] development [...]. In other words, the futures that Yupiaq peoples imagine depend on not only a particular orientation to salmon in the present, but also an orientation to the past that salmon mediate.

[Source: William Voinot-Baron. “Inescapable Temporalities: Chinook Salmon and the Non-Sovereignty of Co-Management in Southwest Alaska.” July 2019.]

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[C]oncentration of global wealth and the "extension of hopeless poverties"; [...] the intensification of state repression and the growth of police states; the stratification of peoples [...]; and the production of surplus populations, such as the landless, the homeless, and the imprisoned, who are treated as social "waste." [...] To be unable to transcend [...] the horror [...] of such a world order is what hell means [...]. Without a glimpse of an elsewhere or otherwise, we’re living in hell. [...] [P]eople are rejecting prison as the ideal model of social order. [...] Embedded in this resistance, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly, is both a deep longing for and the articulation of, the existence of a life lived otherwise and elsewhere than in hell. [...] [W]hat’s in the shadow of the bottom line [...] -- what stands, living and breathing, in the place blinded from view. [...] Instincts and impulses are always contained by a system which dominates us so thoroughly that it decides when we can “have an impact” on “restructuring the world,” which is always relegated to the future. [...] “Self-determination begins at home [...].” Cultivating an instinctual basis for freedom is about identifying the longings that already exist -- however muted or marginal [...]. The utopian is not only or merely a “fantasy of” and for “the future collectivity”. It is not simply fantasmatic or otherworldly in the conventional temporal sense. The utopian is a way of conceiving and living in the here and now, which is inevitably entangled with all kinds of deformations [...]. But there are no guarantees. No guarantees that the time is right [...]; no guarantees that just a little more misery and suffering will bring the whole mess down; no guarantees that the people we expect to lead us will (no special privileged historical agents); [...] no guarantees that we can protect future generations [...] if we just wait long enough or plan it all out ahead of time; no guarantees that on the other side of the big change, some new utterly-unfathomable-but-worth-waiting-for happiness will be ours [...]. There are no guarantees of coming millenniums or historically inevitable socialisms or abstract principles, only our complicated selves together and a [...] principle in which the history and presence of the instinct for freedom, however fugitive or extreme, is the evidence of the [...] possibility because we’ve already begun to realize it. Begun to realize it in those scandalous moments when the present wavers [...]. The point is to expose the illusion of supremacy and unassailability dominating institutions and groups routinely generate to mask their fragility and their contingency. The point is [...] to encourage [...] us [...] to be a little less frightened of and more enthusiastic about our most scandalous utopian desires and actions [...], a particular kind of courage and a few magic tricks.

[Source: Avery Gordon. “Some thoughts on the Utopian.” 2016.]

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enthusiasticsobrietyabuse · 3 years

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Re-post from r/MeehanSurvivors Reddit Community. An Enthusiastic Sobriety Counselor Survivor Story.

TW: References to child pornography, conversion therapy, homophobia, masturbation, and sex.

I would love nothing more than to preserve my admiration for the program, if only for the reason that it would be easier to do so, but after years of being deceived, I find it utterly absurd to disregard any contempt on the basis of the misplaced gratitude that it saved my life. While the program undoubtedly contributed to my success in a number of ways, it has nevertheless become clear that I’ve walked away with trauma that, even after all of this time, I fail to wholly understand. What I do know, however, is that my disillusionment with enthusiastic sobriety is heavily rooted in how I was treated, as the people who claimed to love me evidently made it their mission to eradicate who I was and, likewise, transform me into a duller, lesser version of themselves. I will never know who I could’ve been had they honored the parts of myself that needed nurturing, only who I am today and the damage I’ve since been left with.

From the moment I joined the program, I knew exactly what its expectations were. It was made abundantly clear throughout the treatment process, where I was bombarded with endless conversations about what it meant to be a winner - a concept given context far beyond a sober individual working the twelve steps. I was not only told how to behave, but what to believe about every area of my life. It did not matter if those areas were deeply personal, as evidenced by the countless discussions related to sex; in fact, I would not only learn who we could and could not fantasize about while masturbating, but what we could and could not do sexually - as if we could not be trusted to determine for ourselves the actions we take in our own bedrooms. I also found myself on the receiving end of many conversations revolving around whether or not it was acceptable to shave one’s own pubic region, as was a commonly held belief that a shaved pubic region was not only unnecessary, but a product of one’s own vanity that, incidentally, mimics child pornography. Perhaps more disturbing, however, was the ideology surrounding pornography, in general, that we were ordinarily subjected to. We were first told that no self-respecting woman would want to be with a man who’s actively watching porn; then, we were told that it alters a man’s behavior so much that women will be able to recognize whether or not they watch it. The possibility of romance was used as a weapon against us by the counselors, as well as group members, to conform to their principles, rather than allowing us to establish our own and when that didn’t work, personal attacks were their next best option. I remember being asked if I really wanted to be the guy who’s strung out on porn the rest of his life, as if it was some kind of crippling addiction that would keep me from getting anything I ever wanted out of life. Even more importantly, however, it was through these frequent exchanges that I became familiarized with “Pavlov’s Dog Theory,” a scientific study so bastardized by the counselors that it existed solely to explain away the possibility of any non-heterosexual orientation. Being insecure with my own sexuality, it was of course music to my ears to discover that my attraction to the same sex, a perversion as I then recognized it, was the result of watching too much porn and could be easily resolved by the work outlined by the program. For the next few years, I would work endlessly to alter my sexual orientation back to “normal” and apparently did so well enough that I was eventually asked to attend the Meehan Institute of Counselor Training.

When I was in counselor training, most of what we discussed had very little to do with counseling; in fact, the information required to pass the state-mandated test was tossed aside in exchange for the radically inappropriate teachings that came directly from the program itself. Examples of this, of course, include the explanation that non-heterosexual orientations were not only “unnatural” but an expression of one’s perverse desire for instant gratification, usually resulting from either their addiction to porn, as I had already learned in outpatient, or their unresolved childhood trauma. It was also reasoned that an attraction to the same sex was often a natural consequence of being in an abusive relationship with a member of the opposite sex, a belief supported only by the theory that the person, in question, had unlikely resolved their own fear of getting hurt again. Some people were just “pussies” that had decided to seek the “easier, softer way,” an almost comical assumption given that there is nothing “easier” or “softer” about being queer. I would actually be referred to as a “pussy” while sharing to one of the program's many directors that I had sexual thoughts about other men. His solution for me was that since “there is nothing romantic about two men butt fucking each other,” I should spend the time wasted fantasizing about that on where I would like to take a girl on a date. It’s these ways of thinking that we, who’s families spend $5,600 to send us to counselor training, learn for the three months that we’re there. It’s these three months, where we are taught that absurdity is a natural substitute for science, that earn us the right to then counsel others, many of whom are children. I never could've imagined the abuse that would follow, despite the seeds that had been sown throughout the better part of my recovery.

A few weeks after I graduated from counselor training, when I was working the Step One shift, a couple of the program's directors took me away from it to smoke cigars with them. It was there that they talked to me about how I needed to work on developing more masculine qualities, perhaps by engaging in a hobby that was, according to them, “outside of my comfort zone.” Later on, one of my coworkers would lecture me for the way I had reached out to a girl in the group, explaining that she, along with others, might think that I’m gay for agreeing to watch a “chick flick” with her. Another coworker would make fun of me for crying to a song that reminded me of my dead parent, for the reason that it was, according to her, a “gay” thing to do. In one of the monthly purpose meetings, the director made jokes about me being “inside” of another male counselor - something that was received only with laughter. Bob Meehan himself would even tell the training class following my own that while I deserved the upmost respect for taking everyone’s shit, I was probably gay. When I would share how I felt, in reference to these incidents, I was told that my options were either to “change it” or to “own it.” I began to internalize all of this and, due to my own desire to be accepted, I began working even harder to change these qualities that had been deemed unacceptable by those around me. I would later be celebrated in a purpose for denouncing a dramatic television show for the reason that when I watched it, it made me feel like a “faggot;” however, even that wouldn’t satisfy those around me, as my sponsor, who was also my coworker, would suggest that I stop watching Friends, as well, due to the fact that it was the kind of show his wife watched. I would experience similar criticism from yet another coworker who suggested that I only liked “girly shit” for “shock value” and that it was nothing more than my ego attempting to differentiate myself from everyone else. If by now you’re wondering why I even participated in these conversations, all I can say is that it was always in pursuit of becoming a better man and I trusted that the staff had those answers. I couldn't have been more wrong, as I can't help but notice today that what I was subjected to is in direct opposition of the very laws that protect employees from this kind of treatment by their employers; however, in the program, what’s illegal is classified as “spiritual.”

For years, I felt relegated to a subclass of human existence and for what reason? I spent years working on the things that made my life unmanageable primarily because the people around me decided that it was. Furthermore, I was promised that if I stopped watching porn, which I did for years, my brain would rewire itself and I would no longer be attracted to men. As stupid as that sounds now, why wouldn’t I, as an 18 year old, believe what I was hearing from who I only presumed to be trained professionals? I trusted them and really worked hard to take their every suggestion, going as far as becoming a member of Sexaholics Anonymous, despite the fact that I had never even had sex at that point. It was nothing if not incredibly painful to do the same thing over and over again, only to be told to get up and try again by the very people who would describe that as insanity in any other case. I was never once told that what I was doing wasn’t working for me; instead, I was told to try harder. In all of the time I spent in the program, I was never even given the option to try something different until after quitting, when someone told me that my sexual orientation, whatever it may be, was perfectly acceptable and far from a determining factor in my ability to effectively work a program. It took years to hear that, the majority of which were spent somewhere that I definitely should have. That is not only unacceptable but they should be absolutely ashamed of themselves.

Alas, the problem I have with the program is not necessarily that they’ll never apologize to me, but that they lack the self-awareness to even consider it. When I shared my concerns about the program with one of their counselors, he dismissed them with the statement that it’s a perfect program ran by imperfect people and that I should judge them not by their actions, but by their intentions, which coincidentally, contradicts the program’s reliance on a quote from the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous that states exactly the opposite. He also told me that I was angry and resentful, despite the fact that I was neither. When I shared my concerns with another counselor, he dismissed them with the suggestion that perhaps the counseling I received, in regards to my sexual orientation, resulted from how I presented it to the staff. His feedback was not only highly insulting, but a complete bastardization of the facts. Not only was I brutally honest about that area of my life, so much that it's all I spoke of, but I was the client and it was far from my role to ensure that the counselors did their job. I was little more than a child at the time; nevertheless, the implication that my negative experiences were all my fault only served as evidence that any attempt to cooperate with the program, and convince them of the ways in which I was harmed, is futile. Why would I want to, anyway, after years of watching any criticism of the program be rationalized as the delusions of “bailed kids” or “disgruntled ex-staff?” The only answer would be to prevent it from happening again, although to think that outcome is even a possibility appears naïve at best. They’ve made it abundantly clear where they stand, that they’re right, everyone else is wrong, and there’s no reason for them to change anything - lest of course it threatens their credibility, which in that case they only become more insidious in their transgressions.

TLDR: The program not only intrusively dictates the sex lives of their clients, but has proven itself to be particularly unloving toward those who are LGBTQIA+. It is a cultural issue that can not be reduced to a few examples of bad counseling. It is clear that they see no reason whatsoever to change this.

#the insight program #the cornerstone program #the pathway program #the crossroads program #the full circle program #believe survivors #breakingcodesilence #troubled teen industry #clint stonebraker

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sasodei-is-real · 4 years

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Good afternoon💙 Well, or just Hello if you have a different time of day 😅💙

Thank you for your answers!)

And I still can’t reply to comments (I don’t know what is wrong), so I’ll answer like this)

@justanotherblonde thank you very much, it's so nice 🥺💙 And I'm glad that it will be interesting for you) Because the topic is actual and worth discussing.

@movethisalong Thanks for the answer!) I will soon work on the text in drafts, I will publish it today)💗

@bodoquehenko Weeell ... it's not directly related. But indirectly, yes. After all, even though Deidara is an adult, he has a big age difference with Sasori. So, for us - Sasodei fandom, this topic is not completely alien. Anyway, in any fandom, this is a very controversial and interesting topic that is worth discussing. As a sasodei shipper, I was asked questions about this topic. I think it would be nice to say my opinion on this issue and put all the points above and. I will talk not only about the general phenomenon, but also about sasodei separately in this topic.

But of course I will continue the analysis💛. This is not even discussed, because it is for this analysis that my blog was invented. But the point is, right now I only have time for one post. And analysis consists of many parts. And if I had written today about Onoki and Gaara (that is, I would have continued the analysis), I would have been able to move on to the next part of the analysis only in two weeks (this is how long my studies at the university will last). And that's not very good. Because although the analysis consists of different parts, the thing is integral. And it is best to read it without long breaks. I already postponed the analysis for a long time because of the uni , and then I did not want to continue again and stop the two weeks between the next part. I thought, since there is only time for one post, why not write about an actual topic that I would still raise and which would fit into one post. And then continue writing the analysis during the holidays and without long delays between continuation in order to maintain integrity.

Well, then the question was whether it would be interesting for you to discuss the topic of the age difference))

As for the ships, I think to talk after a specific stage in the analysis - when we analyze the characters of Sasori and Deidara. That is, the storage of posts turns out to be something like this - 1 question about the age difference 2 analysis where we left off - Onoki and Gaara (Iva and Suna) 3 The next stage of the analysis is Sasori and Deidara's relationship with the rest of the characters 4 Sasori and Deidarf characters 5 Short conversation about crack ships (which is not part of the analysis of sasodei, but what is worth discussing) 6 Philosophy of Sasori and Deidara, the symbolism of their characters 7 FINALLY 😂 Analysis of the relationship between Sasori and Deidara - Sasodei

Thank you for answer ^w^🧡

@deidaraakasuna Yes, I myself really want to move on to their relationship as soon as possible 🤧❤ Yes, they were created for each other. It is obvious.💫💗

And yes. I agree, everyone has the right to ship whatever they want. I am not against any crackships, or ships with questionable context ... well, any. A person's taste is formed on the basis of his lived life and emotions, and this is too personal to criticize.

But. I'm not talking about WHAT they ship, but HOW they raise their ship, for example, how, by substituting facts, they justify their ships.

I will try to explain what I think about this. The bottom line is that Naruto is a very elaborate and fragile story, the essence of which is her philosophy. Naruto has a very interesting build scheme. Recently I talked with my friend, and she noticed that in its structure Naruto is similar to the Russian classic novel "The Master and Margarita" by Bulgakov. And this is so. The bottom line is that there are a lot of characters in Naruto. Each character has its own story, its own psychology, motivation and internal conflict, the solution of which manifests one thought. The character has a conflict, the opposite or controversial side of his conflict is put in front of him, most often with the help of another character and ultimately, thanks to the contradiction, the truth is found - that is, we get a ready-made thought about any aspect of life. And so on. Everything is connected together, and each such thought, which is formed with the help of the character's life - by doing it with the rest, creates the philosophy of the work.

For instance. Sasori and Deidara degenerate their vision of the world in their art. They were a contradiction, in the end they found harmony, Deidara accepted eternity, and Sasori the truth of transience. Thanks to the fact that Sasori took instant and soul - Kankuro managed to dissuade him and Sasori decided to find eternity in the continuation of generations. During Edo Tensei, we see Sasori no longer hide his concern for Deidara with excuses and aggression - he has evolved. Therefore, Kankuro deals with the question of the soul. Sasori dies while Deidara screams and he pretends to embrace his parents. During the conversation, Edo Tensei, with the help of Kankuro and Sasori, reveal to us the theme of the soul. What is the soul? A haven of pain that poisons the heart, but without which you become a weak-willed marilnet. And Sasori's conflict is directly related to Obito. After discussing the soul issue, we see Obito pointing at the hole in his chest and saying that he doesn't feel anything. This is great preparation for Obito. These two characters are somewhat similar. Both wanted to escape their pain and forget themselves in illusions. Sasori replaced people with puppets, and love with universal contempt and control. Obito wanted to forget himself in the eternal Tsukuemi. Sasori accepted his feelings for Deidara. Obito realized that he shouldn't forget Rin. Sasori died in such a pose like hugging his parents. Obito died again while saving his friend Kakashi. Both died in the same situations that doomed them to suffering and pushed them into the dark. Simbolic 👀.(By the way, did you notice that Sasori's main OST is playing in the background? "Despair"). I mean, in Naruto, everything is very closely related to each other. Sasori and Deidara's relationship is their development. And when, for example, I see the sasosaku shippers dismantle the battle scene and say that Sakura influenced Sasori, proving her validity, it's not very pleasant. Primarily as a Naruto fan. Let's imagine for a minute If Sakura really influenced Sasori.

Sasori would not be able to achieve what he most desired - true eternal art. The role of Kankuro would not be needed and he would not have developed as a character and would not have received future Puppets . Since Kankuro is not needed, then his conversation with Chiyo and her acceptance will not take place. Since Sakura has already influenced him, there is no need to talk about the soul - there is no full disclosure of Sasori and the prologue to Obito's conflict. Complete disregard for Sasori's feelings for Deidara and for finding harmony.

And the most important thing. Sasori is a complex and deep character with his own feelings and motives. Each of his actions is based on his state of mind and thoughts. And when they explain Sasori's decision by the fact that he was influenced by a 15-year-old girl who then shouted that she wanted to get rid of her parents and who was unable to understand Sasori continued to scream, and not his character - this is a spit towards Sasori. As a Sasori stan, I am not pleased.

And so with everyone. I love Deidara. Obito is my heart. But in the pairing, Obiday Deidara is presented not as a deep character with his own conflict, but as a cliché "I behave aggressively, but I like you." Rin and Obito's wonderful story...?? No?😅😂

And yes, of course it is clear that in canon these are all crackships.

And I don't mind when people ship characters for themselves, draw art, write fanfiction and have fun. no, that's cool. BUT when they try to prove the canonicity of such an absurdity ... I'm Here 🌚👍

And after all, philosophy really changes. I was talking to my friend last week and he said, "It would be cool if in the Kazekage arc it turned out that Gaara is Uzuma. It would turn out that Naruto Uzumaki saved Uzumaki." Umm ... no. It wouldn't be.

The fact that Gaara was none for Natuto was done for a reason. From the very beginning, Gaara's history and development prepared us for 1 Pain's Philosophy. 2 To resolve the conflict between Suna and Iva. Two old villages.

Remember the first season? As after the fight Naruto said "I understand your pain, I went through the same." Gaara was not Naruto's relative, his friend from the start, he was from another village and was his enemy because

1. This resolved the conflict between Chie and the conservative villages. Chie asked, "Why does he care so much about Gaara? They are from different villages." Chie of the old school has broken the world into structures, forgetting that, first of all, they are all people and not representatives of countries. Kakashi replies, "He doesn't care what village he is from. They went through the same pain and are the best at each other." Chie dies realizing the old mistakes imposed by generations "You will change this world invented by old and stupid people."

2. Gaara was preparing us for a meeting with Pain. Pain's philosophy was that people who were completely alien to each other could understand each other by knowing the same pain. If Gaara was Naruto's relative, it would destroy the entire structure of philosophy.

3 The example of Naruto and Gaara is Jiraiya's true teaching. "We know what pain is and try to be merciful to others." The idea seems to be the same as that of Pain, but at the same time it is completely different. Pain used pain ( ahh sorry 😂) as a weapon. Against the background of Gaara's example, this looks even more obvious.

4 In the future, just like Naruto changed Chiyo, Gaara will change Onoki.

I want to say that in Naruto everything is very fragilely interconnected. This is the order and the relationship of the characters of the link. So why when the same shippers Sasosaku, Tobidei and Itadei prove their "canonicity" by

1 Sakura influenced sasori

2 Tobi called Deidara his favorite senpai

3 Deidara hates sharingan and talks about Itachi

Well, on the one hand, I don't care as the sasodei shipper , because as many canonical proofs and justifications as Sasodey has, not a single ship has

but on the other hand, as a fan of Naruto philosophy, I hate to see how people are ready to distort the idea of anime and the characters of in order to prove their canon.

So,

In a word, I want to talk about this first of all as

1 A fan of the naruto philosophy that becomes meaningless due to the substitution of facts for some ship

2 A fan of all these characters who are distorted trying to prove their "canonicity"

3 Sasodei shipper

In general, I do not mind "I like this ship and I ship it. Ok"

I do not like "I will ignore the facts and at the same time do not care that I made the philosophy of the anime useless, distort the characters of the persona only in order to prove their some crackship's canonicity 🌚👍"

I hope I could explain why I want to talk about it😶

And this one is so sweet🥺💗Yes, I also know people with a huge difference in age who are beautiful and happy together for a long time. And although I agree that a lot is not visible from the outside, but age really does not matter. It's all about people.

And I'm sorry that it turned out so long 😅

This was a good chance to explain why I decided to talk about other ships (/> <)/

So, thanks again for the answers ^=^ ❤💛

I’ll go and write a post about the age difference in the drafts, edit it a little and post 🐥🦂

#naruto #naruto shippuden #sasodei #deidara #sasori #akatuski #gaara #chiyo #onoki

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indepthpokemonheadcanons · 5 years

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Pokémon Sword and Shield Headcanons

(Disclaimer: some of these wildly contradict canon, but that’s how I roll!)

‘Wishing Star’ is only a brand name coined by Macro Cosmos, which often appears alongside a snappy slogan about ‘dreaming bigger’. In more neutral contexts, Wishing Stars are known as dynamax crystals.

Most regions do not permit the farming of pokémon for meat, but Galar is a rare exception. Tourists find this hard to adjust to - many regard it as barbaric - but the region is so notorious for its distinctive battle culture that it draws in a lot of visitors regardless.

Piers has a Welsh accent. People who have only heard him sing are often astonished - and charmed - to hear how soft his speaking voice is.

Galar’s League is unique in how regimented it is. In the Japanese regions, a Gym challenge is a personal journey; trainers can challenge it at their own pace, in whichever order they choose, and there is no limit on how many times they can face any one Gym Leader. In Galar, the Gym Challenge occurs within a specific period of the year, Leaders must be challenged in a fixed order, and participants have far less freedom when it comes to organising battle dates - all challengers must face the same opponent within a few days of each other, so as to align with TV scheduling demands. Most strikingly, Challengers are given only one chance to battle each Leader. If they lose, they’re out of the tournament. Eastern trainers tend to dislike this formula, claiming that loss is a part of a trainer’s growth.

Nonetheless, the rigidity of the Gym Challenge is praised for how it places all competitors on equal footing - trainers cannot use their wealth to secure rematches, and all battle schedules are randomised. The system of endorsements and sponsors means that Galar produces a high volume of successful trainers from medium and low-income backgrounds. This couldn’t be more at odds with Kalos and the Japanese regions, where professional battling is dominated by the middle and upper classes.

Marnie and Piers are both distinctly old-school and opposed to dynamaxing, though Piers is more passive about it. This was Marnie’s driving force in the Gym Challenge - if she could beat the competition and Leon without needing to dynamax, she could prove to the region that the old ways were best. It didn’t go quite as she’d hoped, but she did manage to put Spikemuth more on the map.

While Galarian yamasks are most commonly seen attached to broken clay and pieces from ancient ruins, they can be drawn to other, less study materials too. In rare cases, runerigus will be formed from old canvases and paintings. Somebody once reported that a yamask had possessed their favourite Kabu poster, but it turned out to be a hoax.

Bede has absolutely awful fashion sense, especially when it comes to shoes. He cares only for the comfort and the colour. Opal never lets him pick his outfits.

Unlike the Gym Leaders of other regions, Galarian Leaders are not required to teach. They may do exhibition matches and workshops, but the majority of their time is dedicated to training, battling, and representing their town/country in national or overseas tournaments. In this way, their lifestyle is more akin to that of Elites in other regions.

Bede and Gloria are equally vitriolic, which would make it difficult at times to determine who exactly was bullying who. Bede cast the first stone when they met, but Gloria responded with a sack of bricks. Their relationship would change after Bede lost his endorsement, when Gloria realised that he was an orphan and her ‘rich daddy’s boy’ jokes had been in poor taste. But they would never like each other, and certainly never be friends.

Piers is a huge fan of Grimsley’s and has met him a few times at international tournaments. Marnie is insanely jealous.

On Hop’s phone, there is a vine-length video of him desperately scouring the kitchen cupboards for a knife to chop onions with. There it is! he then says, and hefts the sword out of Zacian’s mouth. His mum has expressly forbidden him from posting it on social media, because the last thing she needs is another reason for the paps to camp out on her lawn. Hop understands, begrudgingly, but he refuses to delete it.

Allister has a vast folder dedicated to League Cards and likes to learn the trivia passages off by heart. When he’s anxious or uncomfortable, he recites them under his breath. This often happens during interviews, on the rare occasions that he agrees to them.

Leon and Sonia were close friends at the outset of their Gym Challenge, but things began to change when they met Raihan. He and Sonia were at odds with each other from the start - her being studious and sensitive to criticism, him being the type to laugh off everyone else’s problems. Leon was determined to stay friends with them both, but as his battle talents flourished and Sonia’s waned, he naturally began to spend more time with Raihan. Leon doesn’t feel like it changed anything between them. Sonia does.

Rose first met Bede in a one-off visit to an orphanage. Intrigued by his brusque attitude and his raw battle skills, he made a second visit to gift him with hattena. He kept dropping in over the following years, usually to see Bede specifically, usually with new gifts on hand. By the time Rose presented him with an endorsement, there was nothing Bede wouldn’t have done for him. Oleana watched this escalation with growing unease, noting how Rose thrived on the attention, the idolisation, and fed back into it. At no point would she ever utter the word ‘grooming’, but she would take all the necessary steps to see Bede removed from the Wishing Stars project and his endorsement revoked. Her actions were purely to preserve Rose’s reputation, not out of any real moral objection, but Bede is still lucky to have lost contact with Rose before the situation grew much more serious.

Rose’s ‘energy crisis’ protestations were a guise for a much deeper and more complex emergency. By the time Leon became Champion, Rose had already been siphoning dynamax energy from Eternatus for a little over two decades, and struggling to keep the creature asleep for almost as long. There was a balance to be struck: farming excessive energy from Eternatus risked waking it, but farming too little made it impossible to keep up with rising demand. Leon’s presence in the media only accelerated the public obsession with dynamaxing - stadiums were being relocated to power spots, gigantamaxing became a feature in all Gym battles, tourists were pouring in to see it firsthand. Rose knew that Eternatus would wake if he didn’t find an alternate source of dynamax energy, so he authorised some discreet experiments into dynamax crystals, which carry and facilitate energy of their own. He aimed to discover whether large volumes of them could produce enough power to cover the excesses. Preliminary tests were promising, but the solution was still in its infancy by the night of the finals. When Rose spoke to Leon, the situation was at crisis point, but he was too steeped in his own secrecy to explain properly. And so Leon disregarded him, took the the pitch, and dynamaxed his charizard to the cheers of thousands. That burst of energy was enough to finally rip Eternatus loose.

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barbicha-imaginaria · 4 years

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The cycle of Villanelle: an essay

In this essay, I will delve into Villanelle’s mental state and study the cyclical patterns of behavior that she seems to exhibit in relation to the emotional attachments she forms. All information taken from the show will focus on Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s version of Killing Eve (the first season), to maintain coherence. I will also consider events in Villanelle’s past that are uncovered in later seasons, as it has been stated several times that PWB already had Villanelle’s backstory defined and so it is likely that she contributed her vision to the events of, for example, S03E05.

“I know you’re a psychopath” - definition of psychopathy

First of all, a disclaimer: mental disorders are not neatly compartmentalized things, where someone is diagnosed when they fit every single criterium. These disorders manifest differently in each person, and often combine (for example, there are several disorders that increase the likelihood of developing anxiety) to form a set of symptoms that will resemble the “ideal” profile of a disorder but usually deviate in one way or another. This is why a diagnosis typically occurs when at least a certain number of the total symptoms is present, rather than only when they all occur. This is not a deviation from how the disorder manifests, but rather one of the many ways in which it can manifest.

This is particularly evident in the case of personality disorders, characterized by enduring maladaptive patterns of behavior, cognition, and inner experience, exhibited across many contexts and deviating from those accepted by the individual's culture. You will notice that there is a large internal component to this, a necessary internal logic, coherent to the individual but not consistent with social norms, which will of course be very difficult to define objectively by an external observer.

Psychopathy, which would be such a personality disorder, is not an actual diagnosis sanctioned by any psychiatric or psychological organization. In the DSM, we have its counterpart in antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), whose criteria for diagnosis focus more on behaviors than personality traits, as the former are easier to identify objectively. ASPD is characterized by a long-term pattern of disregard for, or violation of, the rights of others, a low moral sense or conscience, as well as a history of crime, legal problems, or impulsive and aggressive behavior. It seems pretty clear that Villanelle would perfectly fit this profile.

As psychopathy isn’t an actual diagnosis, we find that its definition is subjective and in fact, there are several different tests, checklists and definitions for it. One particularly interesting definition in this case is the separation of primary and secondary psychopaths. Taken directly from Wikipedia, and based on the paper [Vaughn, M. G., Edens, J. F., Howard, M. O., & Smith, S. T. (2009). An Investigation of Primary and Secondary Psychopathy in a Statewide Sample of Incarcerated Youth. Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, 7(3), 172–188]

The subtype known as "primary" psychopathy refers to individuals who are completely rational, lack anxiety and have high levels of interpersonal charm. Whilst these behaviours appear incredibly adaptive, primary psychopaths are also prone to dysfunctional and pathological traits such as an inability to learn from past mistakes and a lack of responsibility

"Secondary" psychopaths are individuals not dissimilar to primary psychopaths in the sense that they still share many of the same characteristics and traits. However, unlike the primary psychopath, the secondary psychopath is more likely to suffer from intense emotional arousal and psychological issues. As well as this, research conducted on adult psychopaths has suggested that secondary psychopaths are more prone participate in drug abuse, suicide and interpersonal aggression. Overall, what differentiates secondary psychopaths from primary psychopaths is their destructive behaviour as well an increased reactivity and impulsivity and an inability to control their emotions effectively.

Recalling that Villanelle is a fictional character and we can assume a certain leeway to her characterization in the name of entertainment, as well as the vague nature of all psychopathy diagnoses that has been established, we can arrive at a tentative description: Villanelle is mainly a primary psychopath, with diminished emotional reactions and a comfortable, stable personality, but a secondary psychopath pattern of behavior can be triggered by specific conditions. These triggers are studied in the next section.

“I know something happened to you” - timeline of Oksana / Villanelle

Based on the information given to us over the course of the show (under the conditions mentioned in the introduction above), we can establish a timeline for Oksana’s (and later, Villanelle’s) life.

1) Early childhood

Spent with parents and brother. Clearly already exhibited traits of psychopathy, as evidenced several times in S03E05.

Tatiana (mother): “The orphanage phone me and say… you burn place down.”

Oksana: “Why didn’t you leave [Pyotr at the orphanage]? All he did was cry.”

Pyotr (brother): “Look, Oksana. You punching me in face.”

Showed no affection for her mother or brother, but seemed attached to her father.

P: “What was he like?” O: “Funny. Strong. Taught me how to fight. He was much better.” P: “Than what?” O: “She was mean.” P: “You were mean.” O: “You were annoying.”

Villanelle believes she had a good relationship with her father, but her mother saw it differently.

T: “You took everything from me. You took him. You could control him. He would do anything for you because you had a darkness! (...) He thought you would do something to us.”

O: “You are the darkness. You have always been the darkness. He wasn't scared of me. He was sick of you.”

Seems to have been left in an orphanage by her mother after her father left the family in some way. Her brother believes that he died, but it is never mentioned how. In S01E07, Anna mentions that “Her mother was dead. Her father was a drunk”, which suggests he never died but rather became an alcoholic and left the family, but in S02E08, Villanelle says that her family "are all dead". In the orphanage, she was later told the rest of her family died.

2) Adolescence

Spent the next years getting into trouble with the authorities. Arrest sheet (seen in S01E05) shows that she was in a juvenile delinquents centre, 2001-2006 (ages 8-13). After this, she entered the school where Anna taught. Their history is revealed mainly in S01E07 and S01E08

Anna: “We were told a new student was coming. History of violence. Antisocial behavior. (...) She arrived at the school and… everyone stepped back. Everyone. So I stepped forward. Extra time. Extra lessons. Extra love.”

Oksana exhibited typical manipulative behavior in getting more and more attention from Anna, moving on to demanding time alone with her and becoming jealous of her husband, who was seen as a rival for Anna’s affection.

Eve: “This... isn't "a few" letters, Anna. This is…” Anna: “She had a... fixation.”

A: “Well, then she wanted more lessons after school. She was good at making you feel bad, so she was here a lot. And it was clear that she didn't like Max, but I thought it was because she didn't trust men.”

A: “No, but she sent me gifts. Clothes, perfume. She must have stolen them. Expensive French designers.”

Anna presents this as one-sided fixation in her conversation with Eve in S01E07.

A: “He said he was aware of my relationship with Oksana - she had been spinning lies again.”

E: “Did you ever have sex with Oksana?” A: “No!”

However, in her confrontation with Villanelle in S01E08 it becomes clear that the feelings were reciprocated in some way.

Villanelle: “The best sex we ever had was on that chair.”

Irina: “Did you two use to go out?” V&A: “She seduced me.”

Eventually, Oksana removed the obstacle in their relationship, Anna’s husband, by castrating and killing him. She expected this to be taken well, but it naturally led Anna to turn on her and she was arrested.

Anna: “There were balloons everywhere and a huge cake, and she was jumping around and... then she showed me what she had done. And she said it like it was a good thing. I went mad. I told her she was evil and crazy and... and then she was picked up by the police... and arrested.”

3) Rebirth as Villanelle

After 3 years in jail, Oksana was recruited by Konstantin to work for the Twelve (revealed by Nadia in S01E06). The organization faked her death and she moved to Paris to work as the assassin Villanelle. Konstantin became her handler, the only person with whom she had a continued relationship. This seems to have created a sort of attachment that differs from the usual fixation by being much less intense, becoming rather the psychopath’s version of a friendship.

In the course of her work, Villanelle met Eve. At first, her obsession with her seems caused by transference: her hair, very similar to Anna’s, caused the woman to fixate, as seen in S01E02.

Jerome: “So, Villanelle... [in Russian] Do you still have dreams about Anna?” Villanelle: (distressed) “That’s not Anna.”

As Eve is revealed to be in charge of the task force devoted to finding her, Villanelle became more interested, and over the course of Season 1, Eve’s actions further fueled her fixation. Eve clearly admired her, wanted to become closer to her and was able to surprise and challenge her. This both fed her ego and maintained her interest.

The season comes to a close with their confrontation in Villanelle’s Paris apartment. When Villanelle was certain that she had drawn in Eve, as she did with previous fixations, she was instead stabbed in the stomach. In a rage, she fired her gun at Eve then ran away.

“I think about you too” - Villanelle and emotional attachment

Circling back to the first section, where we established that there are certain triggers that lead Villanelle to a more emotional and unstable psychopathic profile, the timeline of the previous section seems to establish quite clearly that these triggers are the rare emotional attachments she forms: to her father, to Anna and then to Eve. These attachments take the form of a deep and obsessive fixation, which is still marked by lack of remorse or empathy, but which causes her to feel emotions deeply.

Either because the emotions are indeed felt to an extreme, or because she is simply not experienced with emotions and thus is easily overwhelmed, anything she feels due to these attachments is felt too intensely too ignore or process healthily, and in this way, she comes closer to the behavior of an extreme narcissist, in that she considers herself and her feelings as the most important thing at all times. This can also lead to a feeling of insecurity in the relationship, or like she isn't getting what she deserves, a fair treatment. Because she still lacks empathy and remorse, she will lack intrinsic motivation to make her attachment happy, and will only try to do so when not distracted by her own wants and desires in the relationship. She will also usually act from her own perspective, rather than try to think of what the other would want.

Actions which a neurotypical individual clearly sees as wrong and to be avoidable, on one level because it would hurt their partner, and on another because it is simply not ethical, seem perfectly fine to her if motivated by her own internal logic. For example, hurting the members of the family that she doesn’t care about or forcing them away so that they won’t compete for her father’s attention, stealing expensive clothing to offer it as a gift, killing Anna’s husband or Eve’s partner Bill. Not only is she not bothered by guilt or remorse over it, she most likely sees nothing wrong with it in the first place: if she is as important to her attachments as they are to her, they won’t have a problem with her actions, as they only serve to deepen their bond. If her attachments react negatively, due to concern for other people, she will be hurt and betrayed, and feel that her deep feelings are not returned.

In this way, Villanelle is indeed capable of feelings, and of being hurt and even crying, but she will most likely never make a healthy partner, and will have no problem engaging in toxic and manipulative behaviors if they are in line with her goals.

“I really liked you” - the cycle of Villanelle

Now looking back on her past relationships with her father and Anna, we find a common evolution in all of them: Villanelle develops an interest, which is returned. Her obsessive attachment grows, which puts a strain on the relationship. She is possessive, needs all her gestures of affection to be appreciated and returned. At some point she crosses a line which pushes the other away, and on both cases this leads to her being forcefully separated from them.

This creates in her mind a narrative that the people she loves disappoint or betray her, so that every time she opens her heart, it leads to heartbreak. Add to that the fact that she gets no closure (or, more likely, revenge) and you get someone who is very volatile around love, liable to explode at any rejection, but also insecure from past experiences and thus more likely to see something as rejection.

Part of Oksana's rebirth as Villanelle, which marked her escape from her troubled past and transition to a life where she is in control and wants for nothing, was to bury the part of herself that “fell in love”. Oksana was fragile and Villanelle is not, and this is one of the ways in which Villanelle wants to manifest that. In the terms we use in this essay, she wants to fully become a primary psychopath, finding refuge in the stability of that unemotional mindspace.

Unfortunately for Villanelle, she does not actually have control over which facet of her psychopathy manifests. Thus, when her attachment to Anna (never resolved, as mentioned above) transfers to Eve and is then reinforced through several interactions and encounters, Villanelle doesn't really seem capable of or interested in resisting. Rather, due to Eve's particularly reckless behavior, she is more encouraged than ever before, and will easily be given to believe that Eve will be "different" - a belief that the audience is more and more likely to share as the season progresses and especially towards the end of S01E08.

The end of Season 1 completes the cycle of Villanelle's emotional connections by having Eve do the same as her past attachments: betray her. As they come to a moment of intimacy, where Villanelle has let her guard down, Eve stabs her. The shock of the rejection is compounded with past experience and trauma to create an instant and intense feeling of betrayal that does not allow for any form of reasoning or further processing. Thus, it makes perfect sense that Villanelle would then revolt against her, try to shoot her, and finally run away, regardless of the fact that Eve immediately regrets her actions and tries to help her.

“I want to kill her” - the aftermath

The case of Eve has one crucial difference from those of Villanelle’s father and of Anna. As mentioned in the previous section, in both cases, Villanelle’s attachment was forcefully ended and she was immediately removed from the situation. She has never been able to avenge herself of the wrongdoing she suffered, or come to terms with the situation in any way. She claims to move on, and later on seems perfectly capable of killing Anna, saying that she no longer loves her, but it is more likely that she has simply internalized both rejections rather than processed them.

In this case, breaking the pattern, she has not been taken from Eve and Eve has not been taken from her. She can get her closure as soon as she is recovered. This would be a way to step away from her cycle of emotional attachment and possibly set free some hangup in Villanelle's mind that has lingered since her childhood, and so it is very probable that Villanelle herself would latch on to the idea. In addition to the desire for revenge naturally originating from Eve’s betrayal, which would most likely be enough to make her fixate on returning to Eve, there would also be the desire for recovery, fueled by the belief that she can become a better version of herself (more Villanelle-like, less Oksana-like) by going through the ritual of closure, not only from Eve, but from all past rejections.

This leads us to the final conclusion of this essay. At the end of Season 1, we are at the final and lowest point of Villanelle’s cycle, and through analysis of the character of Villanelle, find a strong prediction for how she would behave in the aftermath: to seek revenge as soon as possible, almost as a fixation, due to past trauma on the subject. The way in which this revenge is sought would define Villanelle’s trajectory for the rest of her life, determining in one way or another the end to the pattern of behavior and experiences that has marked her first 25 years.

In this way, the narrative followed in Season 2 becomes unsatisfying in two ways: its beginning and its end.

The beginning: Villanelle does not desire revenge, but instead believes that Eve hurt her because she loves her. This deviates from a pattern of 25 years for no evident reason, and thus seems to hinge on a lack of internal consistency of the character of Villanelle. However, we have established that even someone with a personality disorder will show this consistency, although in a way that isn’t compatible with the outside world. Psychopaths are not erratic, and would not change their minds on something as fundamental to their development, and a belief so emotionally charged, unless they were significantly challenged.

The end: As the season progresses, Eve and Villanelle are pulled tighter and tighter together, until the explosive finale, when Villanelle opens up in a moment of vulnerability and Eve rejects her. Then, she does seek revenge as soon as possible, by shooting Eve. You will notice that, thematically, this is the exact same progression as the end of Season 1. Inevitably, the viewer is left with the feeling that the showrunner simply ran the plot line of Season 2 through a loop to finish the season at the same point as it started, in order to avoid having to deal with the fallout of such a confrontation.

#killing eve #villanelle #eve #eve polastri #oksana #oksana astankova #phoebe waller bridge #essay #anna #konstantin #this is also a dunk on S2 but like only at the end

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alchanabist · 4 years

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PSA: WITCHCRAFT IS NOT ALCHEMY

As an alchemist, it is a huge pet peeve of mine to see how often alchemy is mis-tagged in esoteric posts by witches that have little to no concept of what alchemy is.

Allow me to elaborate; most of the people I've addressed think that alchemy is just another word for transformation. It's not. Alchemy is the art and science of transMUTATION. If a caterpillar turns into a butterfly, that's a transformation. If a caterpillar turns into a fish, that is transmutation.

In alchemical transmutation, something is broken down to its barest essential body, spirit, and soul, separated, altered or refined, and then built back up to become something else entirely.

Trying to claim that alchemy is witchcraft is like saying Yule is a Christian holiday. They've taken the symbols and reworked it to fit their beliefs and practices while disregarding the original context and intention. For example, the symbols for the elements. Those are alchemical symbols used to carry the pure vibrational frequency of that element. These symbols and practices originate from ancient Egypt and were not used before that. They built the pyramids with alchemy, along with countless other feats. The whole reason Jews were the slaves building the pyramids is because they studied the kabbalah. Witchcraft was not a thing.

After Egypt, Alchemy became the father of Chemistry and Medicine, but only after stripping it of it's spiritual practice. True alchemy survived in secret and was adapted all over the world. (There was also a degree of misinformation released to protect alchemy from the uninitiated. This is the building blocks of life and death. Far too powerful for your standard practitioner.)

So how do the practices differ? Glad you asked. Alchemy primarily focuses its attention to altering the internal. The #1 thing transmuted in your operations is yourself. Everything you do externally is a representation of yourself in an attempt to eradicate your ego and transcend your humanity to a state of God-like perfection. (The Philosopher's stone is your soul. That's all I'm gonna say on that.) But if you don't meditate, then I'm sorry but you're not an alchemist or practicing alchemy. Period.

In comparison, witchcraft focuses its attention to the external. You are performing rituals and casting spells to influence the outside world to your intention.

As the emerald tablet says, "All is One, and One is All." I firmly believe that all practices, religions, and spiritual beliefs carry at least a piece of the grander metaphisic that we call reality. It's okay to explore and research, but know what you're talking about before you tag one practice as something else. The relativism has got to go.

#ALCHEMY #witchcraft #baby witch #esoteric #metaphysics #magik #magic #metaphysician #alchemist

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stillness-in-green · 5 years

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The Weight of a Name

Some meta on Shigaraki, Kotaro, All For One, and the Japanese adoption system.

So, I was thinking the other day about Shigaraki, family names, and the illustration of power that is All For One wresting Shigaraki from the Shimura family into his own. To wit: I had occasionally wondered about Kotaro's resentment of his mother; about whether his adoptive parents, whoever they were, were cruel or distant with him, or whether he was so deeply wounded by his perceived abandonment that no arrangement would have been happy or supportive enough to lessen his trauma. Also, why in heaven's name wasn't his name changed? If Nana was concerned that All For One might hurt him to get at her, why wasn't the simplest and most basic aspect of his identity, his family name, altered? Upon further reflection, though, I remembered some of what I've read about family law in Japan and came to a realization: I don't think Kotaro was adopted. This has significant implications for both his own upbringing and the statement All For One makes in “adopting” Tenko.

While adoption numbers look high in Japan--the second-highest in the world--in reality, over 90% of adoptions in the country are adult adoptions of men in their 20s-30s, usually for the purposes of inheriting businesses. Foster care is rare now and was once even rarer; the majority of children in the care of Japanese child services grow up in overcrowded, understaffed institutions, and scant few of these children are even eligible to be adopted due to family law stating that putting a child in an orphanage does not equate to surrendering one's parental rights. Often, children are placed in orphanages due to the parents' financial difficulty or history with abuse, with the possibility that they might come back for those children when they get their lives back on track--though in reality, this is quite rare.

Why are these ties kept so strong? Well, it goes back to family ties and bloodlines, and the ways in which modern Japanese society is built around those things on some very, very bedrock levels. In the West, we have individual documents for our major life events, but in Japan, since the 1870s, there has been the koseki.

The koseki is a family registry--one is entered into one's parents' registry at birth, with all information about the family's births, deaths, marriages, divorces and adoptions being kept in the same place. The registry for a given family is maintained for two generations, with children typically only beginning their own family registries when and if they marry--sometimes not even bothering until they have a child! The koseki--theirs and each of their parents'--will also have references to one another, allowing a diligent person to track a family line and its major events back for generations by simply following the paperwork. Being recorded in a koseki is the primary indicator of Japanese citizenship. "Family" as recorded in the koseki governs inheritance rights, and in turn carries expectations about children looking after their parents in the latter's old age. While in recent years, limits have been placed on who can access koseki, as recently as 2008, anyone who was even curious about someone else's koseki could walk into the relevant government office and ask to see it for only a basic fee. This contributes to enormous privacy concerns and societal pressure to not do anything that would "sully" the family koseki, as doing so could not impact just peoples' views of you, but of everyone else in your family. (cite)

The whole schema for the koseki assumes a heterosexual, nuclear family dynamic, with a predictable difficulty in forcing that framework fit outlying cases--single parents, international or same-gender marriages, divorce, surrogacy arrangements, gender changes, and--most relevant to this discussion--adoption. Because of the perceived sanctity of the koseki, adoption of children for purposes other than inheritance remains vanishingly rare--combine that with the rarity of parents who give up their children ever returning for them, and what you have are too many children in too few facilities, a recipe for misery. Children in Japanese orphanages are often considered--by both people in society at large and even the children themselves--as "unwanted." Studies about children who grew up in such institutions suggest they lag behind the rest of their age group in development and in school, that they have little experience in forming long-term bonds with others; "many struggle with basic interpersonal skills like empathy and regulating their emotional state." Adults who come out of such institutions often fail to finish school or seek higher education and wind up working low-paying jobs or relying on government assistance. (cite, but also see: Bubaigawara Jin)

While Kotaro--if he was raised in an orphanage--clearly overcame the odds very admirably regarding his schooling and employment, he equally clearly came out of the experience still nursing emotional scars and ill-equipped to deal with children of his own. This glacial societal resistance to mucking with family records probably also explains why his name was never changed--if he was never adopted by another family, there would be no other koseki to register him to, and Japan doesn't have a witness protection program.

What all of this illustrates to me--along with shedding some light on what Kotaro's childhood post-Nana was probably like--is what exactly is being communicated by All For One's adoption and subsequent renaming of Shimura Tenko. Kotaro was leashed to the Shimura name all his life, even after his mother gave him up, even after she died. He could never escape his status as "an unwanted child"; anyone who wanted to look him up could do so (including, very possibly, All For One himself, depending on how much of Shigaraki's backstory you think was orchestrated from the beginning).

By contrast, Tenko is severed cleanly from the Shimura family name, given another name not listed on any koseki (at least not one updated within the last two hundred years). He's cut out of the Shimura family entirely, adopted at a young age by a man who wants him, a man with such utter disregard for societal systems and values that he's able to just take the child he wants, difficulties with adoptions and names and family registers be damned. In a stroke, at his whim, the unyielding weight of Shimura is nullified, and instead, Tenko becomes Shigaraki Tomura, a child who doesn't exist anywhere. Not recorded on a koseki, he is thus without family or nationality, his Quirk unrecorded, his date of birth unknown. There is nowhere any proof of his existence. All told, it's a pretty profound statement about the lengths All For One is willing (and happy) to go to in stamping out all traces of the One For All bearers' legacies.

(...And yet, perversely, Shigaraki also kind of fits the model for Japanese adoption--All For One explicitly intends him to be a successor, after all. In that light, you could say that he was adopted into the Shigaraki family to inherit the family business. I have to imagine that All For One thought this was pretty funny, though probably no one else agrees with him.)

A note: The stats and info I reference above are relevant to modern-day Japan and, of course, My Hero Academia isn't set in modern-day Japan, not quite. It's set in Japan 200-300-odd years in the future, with the caveat that the development of super-powers and the resulting massive social upheaval stunted societal and technological growth such that the setting still looks mostly like modern-day Japan, only with super-powers. That being the case, do we assume that the ongoing updates to the koseki system had already been made as of the emergence of Quirks, enduring through the plot as we know it, or do we assume that changes to the system were made on a roughly even time-scale as in modern times--e.g. did employers stop being able to ask for a copy of one's koseki in 1974 or merely "forty-five years ago"?

Given the chaos that was wrought by the appearance of Quirks, the alleged lawless periods, as well as the existence of a mandatory Quirk registry and the phenomenon of "Quirk marriages," I am disinclined to believe that the problems represented by the koseki have been addressed much at all since early-2000s Japan. If anything, the conservative influences in the Japanese government that are so resistant to legislating changes to how the koseki functions today would probably have even more reason to push back against those changes if faced with Sudden Super-Powers. My Hero Academia is intended to speak to a modern Japanese audience--the issues facing its villains, in particular, are reflective of real problems people face in Japan--and thus, to me at least, it's counterintuitive not to interpret the series' characters with that modern Japanese context in mind. Who is Horikoshi writing for, and what in his society is he trying to comment on? With that lens in place, I think the koseki is exactly as much a problem in MHA's world as it is our own--possibly even moreso.

#my hero academia #boku no hero academia #shigaraki tomura #shimura kotaro #all for one #tomura shigaraki #my writing #bnha #bnha meta

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vladnovikovrhetoric · 3 years

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*Rhetoric as Narrative*

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Rhetoric as Narrative

This essay will be analyzing President Barack Obama’s address to the nation on Syria, given on September 10th, 2013. This analysis explores the critical question: “What central narrative(s) about American Exceptionalism does this artifact tell through its rhetorical elements? In doing so, what values does it promote and ignore (who does it include and exclude)? In which ways is this narrative (ethically) productive for society, in which ways is it limiting, and is it more productive or limiting?”.

Obama uses and perpetuates the established narrative of American Exceptionalism to foster support for continued US intervention in the middle east, which although well intentioned, promotes limiting ideas such as the inferiority of nations in the middle east, and promotes disregard for international support of military action by the US.

As part of the “Arab Spring” in 2011, pro-democracy protests erupted in Syria against dictator Bashar al-Assad’s government. In response the Syrian government sent tanks and troops to end the protests, detaining and killing activists. The US responded by pulling diplomats and imposing sanctions, while fighting increased between rebels and the Assad government, growing the conflict into a civil war. After threatening to use chemical weapons in the event of a foreign invasion in 2012, the Syrian government launched a chemical weapons attack on its own neighborhoods in Damascus (targeting opposition leaders) in August of 2013. The attack killed over a thousand people indiscriminately, and prompted a response from US President Barack Obama, who had previously threatened military action if chemical weapons were used by Syria. Obama’s response was to initially order a strike in retaliation, but this was postponed so that he could ask for Congress’s authorization for this use of force, due to his lack of support from the United Nations, Britain, and the American public (Baker, et. al). At this time, the US had been waging a war in Afghanistan since 2001, and had just finished formally withdrawing from neighboring Iraq, ending a conflict that lasted from 2003 to 2011. Public support for a new foreign war was incredibly low at this time, with a Gallup poll released September 9th of 2013 showing 51% opposition compared to 36% support for military intervention in Syria (Newport). President Obama addressed the nation shortly after these events in September of 2013.

Palzcewski, et. al. describe the importance of narratives to public life by stating that “dominant narratives imbue a culture with a set of values”, and that “political views are often shaped by the stories politicians tell” (122, 118). One such narrative is that of American Exceptionalism, which is defined by Gilmore as “the notion of America as unique, superior, and even God-favored”. Specific to presidential speeches, this notion can be expressed either as a primary theme and overtly stated, or as a secondary theme which is implied (Gilmore).

Obama weaves the narrative of American Exceptionalism in the context of military intervention that the US is the only country that has stood up against past injustice in the world, and the only country currently able to do so. This narrative is used to convince the public, that for its own security, and the security of the world, the US must be ready and willing to retaliate with military force. This narrative begins to form within the first two minutes of the address, with Obama saying “In World War I, American GIs were among the many thousands killed by deadly gas in the trenches of Europe. In World War II, the Nazis used gas to inflict the horror of the Holocaust.” Although there is no explicit mention of American Exceptionalism, these statements appeal to the public memory of WWI and WWII, and to the public memory of past successful military intervention by the US (Palzcewski, et. al. 120). Further on, in refuting criticism of his suggested ‘pinprick strike’, Obama give us an explicit statement of this American military superiority by saying “The United States military doesn’t do pinpricks. Even a limited strike will send a message to Assad that no other nation can deliver.” Obama continues to build on the long history of US action by saying “…for nearly seven decades, the United States has been the anchor of global security. This has meant doing more than forging international agreements -- it has meant enforcing them. The burdens of leadership are often heavy, but the world is a better place because we have borne them.”. Finally, as the pacing of the speech picks up towards its end, Obama makes an his strongest statement promoting the narrative of American Exceptionalism: “But when, with modest effort and risk, we can stop children from being gassed to death, and thereby make our own children safer over the long run, I believe we should act. That’s what makes America different. That’s what makes us exceptional.”

These sorts of appeals are incredibly common in presidential rhetoric as Gilmore notes that “invocations of American exceptionalism have appeared in a full 67% of all major presidential speeches to the American public since 1933”. But not all of these invocations operate in the same ways. The distinction between the overt statements, known as “primary themes”, and more subtle implications, known as “secondary themes” has been shown by Gilmore to have a strong effect on American’s feelings toward military intervention, opinions of other countries (as lesser), and can promote the belief that the US is exempt from laws and rules that others would be. Specifically, Gilmore notes that “when exposed to the aggressively comparative primary exceptionalism themes, U.S. adults were more likely to also think of other countries as clearly inferior by comparison.” Furthermore, Gilmore states that “findings show that primary themes of American exceptionalism had an impact on U.S. adult attitudes about whether the country should be exempt from the same rules that other countries have to follow in the global community of states.” Both of these results from the use of primary themes are clearly unproductive, and have a negative impact on the overall mentality of Americans.

Although President Obama’s intentions were good, his use of these primary themes, as opposed to secondary implied themes, is limiting and promotes unproductive mentalities in the US populous. Secondary themes can be used just almost as effectively, and should be used whenever possible.

Works Cited:

Baker, Peter, and Jonathan Weisman. “Obama Seeks Approval by Congress for Strike in Syria.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 31 Aug. 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/world/middleeast/syria.html.

Gilmore, Jason. “American Exceptionalism in the American Mind: Presidential Discourse, National Identity, and U.S. Public Opinion.” Communication Studies, vol. 66, no. 3, 2015, pp. 301–320., doi:10.1080/10510974.2014.991044.

Newport, Frank. “In U.S., Opponents Say Action in Syria Not America's Concern.” Gallup.com, Gallup, 14 Jan. 2021, news.gallup.com/poll/164306/opponents-say-action-syria-not-america-concern.aspx.

Obama, Barack. “Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on Syria.” National Archives and Records Administration, National Archives and Records Administration, obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/09/10/remarks-president-address-nation-syria.

Palczewski, Catherine Helen, et al. Rhetoric in Civic Life. Strata Pub., 2016.

#rhetoric #obama #syria

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aslamdiaz · 4 years

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Intro to IR: Answering Question

Aslam Luqman Diaz-072011233076-USA

Nationalism is an ideology based on the premise that the individual’s loyalty and devotion to the nation-state surpass other individual or group interests. Nationalism is a modern movement. Throughout history people have been attached to their native soil, to the traditions of their parents, and to established territorial authorities, but it was not until the end of the 18th century that nationalism began to be a generally recognized sentiment molding public and private life and one of the great, if not the greatest, single determining factors of modern history. Because of its dynamic vitality and its all-pervading character, nationalism is often thought to be very old; sometimes it is mistakenly regarded as a permanent factor in political behaviour (Kohn, hans, 1949-1962).

National character is an expression which describes forms of collective self-perception, sensibility, and conduct which are shared by the individuals who inhabit modern nation-states. It presupposes the existence of psychological and cultural homogeneity among the citizens of each country, as well as the idea that each nation can be considered a collective individual, with characteristics analogous to the empirical individuals who are its inhabitants. The noun character seeks to describe a universal aspect of social life-an internal dimension to the existence of individuals and an external one, observable through collective behaviour. The adjective national situates this universal aspect of social life in the specific context of those social units we call nations. Social theory interested in understanding the social force of feelings of national belonging has turned once again to this expression, which was first formulated in Europe during the second half of the eighteenth century. What distinguishes this trend is the fact that there is no attempt at attributing any theoretical status to national character; instead, it is more concerced with it as a practical category used in the discourse and action of the social agents and groups. The aim of this article is to summarize the genealogy of the expression and to discuss its current heuristic value (Neiburg, 2001).

One can differentiate between hard and soft power tools in international relations. Traditionally, the states opted for hard power tools in the framework of realpolitik thinking. Meanwhile, the scholars and practitioners start to recognize that the world is in need of a shift from old assumptions and rigid distinctions about ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power since the economic and political challenges can no longer be simply resolved by military power or policy innovation (Bound, et al. 2007: 13). However, the concept of soft power, initially introduced by Joseph Nye (1990), is still in its theorization process and requires further studies. Hence, the aim of this paper is to evaluate the concept of power, with specific reference to Nye’s frames: hard, soft, and smart. The research objectives are three-fold; first, to provide an brief overview of the concept of power in international relations, second, to evaluate some of the key issues pertaining to the concept of soft power and, third, to assess education as a tool of power. This paper is based on the on-going research for the author’s Ph.D. dissertation.

The subject of power has been an interest of social scientists for many decades, if not centuries, if one were to go back to writings of Aristotle, Plato, and Machiavelli. Despite such great deal of attention, however, there are still notable academic debates over power’s specific definition and its features, which lead to the topic’s complexity and ambiguity. In discussing power, it is important to note whose power one is referring to. For instance, Arendt (1970: 44) defined power not as the property of an individual, but rather 2 argued that it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together. Meanwhile, Dahl (1957: 203) proposed to call the objects in the relationship of power as actors. The term actor is inclusive and may refer to individuals, groups, roles, offices, governments, nation-states, or other human aggregates. One of the most influential definitions of power in the field of social science belongs to Max Weber (1947: 152) who defined it as the probability of one actor within a social relationship to be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance. According to Weber, power is a zero-sum game and is an attribute that derives from the qualities, resources and capabilities of one subject. However, the Weberian definition attracted a number of criticisms. Martin (1971: 243) pointed out that Weber did not define power, but rather provided the basis for a comparison between the attributes of actors. Moreover, the author argued that, by building the element of conflict into his definition and viewing power solely in zero-sum terms, Weber disregarded the possibility of mutually convenient power relations (Martin, 1971: 243). In contrast, Talcott Parsons (1967) offered a conceptualization of power, which did not define it in terms of conflict, but rather views it as a system resource. Parsons (1967: 208) argued that power is a capacity to secure the performance of binding obligations by units in a system of collective organization, when obligations are legitimized with reference to the collective goals, and where in case of recalcitrance, there is a presumption of negative sanctions. In this regard, Anthony Giddens (1968: 264) stated that, among other things, the Parsonian definition does not take into account that power is exercised over someone and by treating power as necessarily legitimate and assuming a consensus between power holders, Parsons ignores the hierarchical character of power. To sum up, the two major threads in this discussion about power, the Weberian and the Parsonian, both suffer from major problems of definition (Martin, 1971: 244). These are just two instances of how power discussion attracts intense debates and disagreements. The purpose of this short discussion is to emphasize that power is one of the most central and problematic concepts in social science. Despite widespread use, there is little agreement upon basic definitions, with individual theorists proposing their own idiosyncratic terminologies of power (Bierstedt, 1950). Gallie (1956) confirms that due to the existence of competing theories and meanings, power is essentially a contested subject.

Power remains one of the critical subjects in political science, including the sphere of international relations. The discipline of International Relations incorporates a number of competing schools of thought, but for the long time, the discipline has treated power as the exclusive prerogative of realism. In fact, there is still a tendency among scholars and 3 practitioners to view power predominantly through the realist lens. To reiterate, the five basic assumptions of realists about the international system are that it is anarchic; all great powers possess some offensive military capability; states can never be certain about the intentions of other states; survival is the primary goal of states; and states are rational actors (Mearsheimer, 2001: 30-31). The realists view the nation-states as the key actors in the international system. Hans Morgenthau (1954: 25) famously proclaimed that international politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power and ‘whatever the ultimate aims of international politics, power is always the immediate aim’. According to the author, the ‘ubiquity of the struggle for power in all social relations on all levels of social organization’ made the arena of international politics a necessity of power politics (Morgenthau, 1954: 31). Carr (1964: 102) was in agreement with Morgenthau and asserted that politics, at its heart, is power politics. For all realists, calculations about power lie at the core of how states perceive the world around them (Mearsheimer, 2001: 12). While realists are in agreement that power is a key determinant in political relations, there is there is a variation in how individual realists understand the concept. For instance, classical realists posit that the permanent struggle for power stems from the fundamental human drive for power (Morgenthau, 1954). In contrast, for structural or neo-realists, it is the architecture of the international system that forces states to pursue power and maximize their power position (Mearsheimer, 2001; Dunne, Kurki, and Smith, 2013). Furthermore, there are disagreements as to how the power should be conceived and measured (Walt, 2002). There are two dominant traditions of power analysis in IR: the ‘elements of the national power approach’, which depicts power as property of states, and the relational power approach, which depicts power as an actual or potential relationship (Baldwin, 2012: 2). In other words, some realists define power in terms of resources, while others define it in a relational manner as the ability to exercise influence over other actors. Proponents of the elements of the national power approach associate power with the possession of specific resources. All of the important resources that a state possesses are typically combined to determine its overall aggregate power. The resources that are indicators of national power are the level of military expenditure, size of the armed forces, gross national product, size of territory, and population. In line with this tradition, Morgenthau (1954) equated power with the possession of identifiable and measurable resources and listed geography, natural resources, industrial capacity, military, and population as stable power elements of a nation. Carr (1946: 109) argued that military power was the most important form of power in international politics, as it serves as both a means and an end in itself. However, one of the difficulties with the elements of the national power approach is the issue of power conversion.

Refrensi:

https://www.britannica.com/topic/nationalism

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/national-identity

http://www.culturaldiplomacy.org/academy/content/pdf/participant-papers/2015-12_annual/Power-In-Ir-By-Raimzhanova,-A.pdf

#IRFEST_USA_Intro to IR

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themodernvedic · 4 years

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What is the essence of Hinduism

Hinduism literally speaking is the religion of Hindus. Hindu is one who is a believer in any form of Brahmanism (one of the religions of India). In his lecture, delivered at the Parliament of Religions, at Chicago in Sept. 1893 Swami Vivekananda said, "Three religions stand in the world, which have come down to us from prehistoric times, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and Judaism. They have all received tremendous shocks, and all of them can be proven by their survival, their inner strength. Sects after sects arose in India and unwillingly tried to shake and shatter the religion of the Vedas to its very foundation but like the waters of the seashore in a tremendous earthquake it receded only for a while, only to return in an all-absorbing flood - a thousand times more vigorous and when the tumult rush was over these sects were all sucked in, absorbed and assimilated into the immense body of the mother faith." http://youtube.com/watch?v=hi8g2h7mvMA Essence of true religion consists of nothing but the eternal truths and laws of the spiritual world. These principles have been discovered by the sages of ancient India. The degradation of Hindus took place because the life-giving principles of religion or Hinduism were applied in the practical life to solve social and national problems. Caste tyranny, loss of faith in their inherent powers and social neglect, reduced poor masses to mere cogs in the wheels of the exploitative machine, which was run by a few, powerful people. In reality if religion of the Vedas i.e. Hinduism was spread among the poor masses, it would awaken the dormant powers in them and they would be able to solve their own problems without any assistance.

Hindus were a philosophical race, whose conflicts were intellectual conflicts. Fortunately, India then was a country where the people had no lack of wealth, food and security. Having the Himalayas in the north and ocean on three sides, the country was free from the danger of foreign invasion. Nature was also favorable in such a place, in the Ashrams and Tapovans, the Indian rishis absorbed themselves in deeper truths of life which gave birth to the Indian philosophy. Dr. Radhakrishnan writes "The native utterances of the Vedic poets, the wondrous suggestiveness of the Upanishads, the marvelous psychological analysis of the Buddhists and the stupendous system of Shankara are quite as interesting and instinctive from the cultural point of view of the system of Plato, Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, if only we study them in true scientific frame of mind, without disrespect for the past or contempt for the alien" which is interesting and instructive from a cultural point of view Philosophy had a great impact and importance in India especially to Hinduism from the earliest times. "Darshan" as philosophy is called, etymologically means, "Seeing". This seeing is possible by perceptual observation direct experience, inference or self-realization. Indian philosophy recognizes that truth can never be self-contradictory. Therefore, in order to realize the distinction and relation of philosophy and religion i.e. Hinduism in the present context, we must first know what religion is. The word religion includes two Latin terms "Religio and Onis". Re-means again, ligio means to bind. Literally speaking religion binds a man to his source. Philosophers have emphasized one or the other aspect of it. Some important approaches in this connection are as follows: Intellectual Approach: Religion is clearly a state of mind. Moral Approach: Religion is nothing but morality touched with emotion Axiological Approach: God cannot be called the highest value because there is no un-valued phenomenon with which God can be contrasted.

Various definitions of Hinduism as a religion. Hinduism is a complex phenomenon in which one finds attitudes and feelings towards ultimate reality or God. From the definition of religion given by Sri Aurobindo, Hinduism appears to be highly comprehensive. To quote him "in most, essence of religion... is the search for God and finding of God. Its work is sincere giving out of the true and ultimate relation between man and God, relation of unity, relation of difference, relation of an illuminated knowledge and ecstatic love and delight, and absolute surrender and service, casting of every part of our existence of its normal status into up rush of man towards the Divine and descent of divine into man". This is true even today when we talk of Modern Hinduism. Our age is known as the atomic age. By controlling atomic energy man has achieved things which were formerly beyond his imagination. In the form of atom bombs he has developed an instrument of destruction whose after effects can be seen years after its use. Many nations, developed or even underdeveloped, of the world are busy in piling up such destructive weapons and many other nations are trying to copy them. This has made the thinkers of the world to worry about the future of man because an atomic war will not only lead to destruction and death but also deformities of crores of people and poisoning of the atmosphere and water to the extent of making human life practically impossible on this planet. But international peace and cooperation cannot be achieved through science alone because science is unable to do anything in this situation. This on the other hand is a moral and spiritual problem. For example, the philosophy of the Gita and the Upanishads may be found to be the most useful to a man at the present juncture. Hence it can be said that in this atomic age, science is more in need of philosophy than it has ever been. Ancient Indian thinkers of Hinduism have suggested different paths for reaching God or Truth, which is relevant in modern times also. These are classified into three chief paths of action, knowledge and devotion. In fact, these are the phases or the three different layers of every human mind.

Here we shall take the path of action. This is just like the choice between what is right and what is wrong, the good and the evil. One has to follow the right way and give up the wrong way. Gradually the evil will be eliminated and the good will be established which will ultimately lead one to godliness/ divinity. The question that now arises is, how to ascertain which action is good and which is evil Mahavir's advice is to walk carefully so that we do not tread over, even an ant. On the other hand, Lord Krishna advises Arjuna to fight the evil forces because no one dies, as the soul is immortal In ancient times Sri Rama accepted and abided by all limitations and restrictions of the society, and that is why he is called "Maryada Purshotam" while Shri Krishna who disregarded all social limitations and restrictions is still called "Yogeshwara Krishna". On the one hand Sita is adored as she never even saw the face of another man except her husband Rama but on the other hand Draupadi who was the wife of five Pandavas is regarded as a virtuous lady. Yudhisthira had staked his wife in a game of dice and yet he is called Dharam Raj. Bhishma was a witness to the disrobing of Draupadi and did nothing to avoid that incident, yet he is called an apostle of morality and righteousness. Parashurama killed his mother at the behest of his father and is yet called a great rishi. Therefore, no universal standard can be set for deciding what is good and what is evil. It deals with doing, not with being. As long as one does not know his inner self all his actions are cravings of the mind for the fulfillment of desires. That is why Indra says "in the very first instance try and realize what the Atman is so that all your doubts are answered. Socrates has said, "know thy self". Modern vision of Hinduism warrants us to rededicate ourselves to the pursuit of knowing the Self, because we possess spiritual wealth that can end all our woes. Secondly, we must inculcate a sense of unity and identity. Self-realization is the real definition of Hinduism. Taittiriya Upanishad declares in Tantra III-1 यतो वा इमानि भूतानि जायन्ते येन जातानि जीवन्ति । यं प्रयन्ति अभिसंविशान्ति तज्जिज्ञासस्व तदेव ब्रह्म ॥ "That from which all those beings come into existence, that by which they live, that into which they are finally absorbed, know that be the eternal verity - the Absolute" Once in the Ashram of Ramana Maharshi a visitor made display of his knowledge by enumerating the various paths described by various masters along with quoting the western philosophers. He inquired "one says one thing and the other says something else, which way should I go?" Ramana Maharshi rose to leave the hall, he replied curtly "Go back the way you came". Speaking about the intellectual persons, Shri Ramana Maharshi has said, "They have made themselves like a gramophone. What else are they, Oh Arunachala? It is the unlearned who are saved, rather those whose ego has not subsided despite their learning. It is sincerity that is required and not brilliance or understanding of theory, humility, and not mental pride". Read the full article

#dharma #god #gods #hindu #hinduism #religion #religions #shaivism

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bat-lings · 5 years

Note

If Talia had been written IC, what do you think her relationship would/should be like?

Sorry for the late answer, Anon! I assume you mean her relationship with Damian?

@fyeah-taliaalghul answered the same ask a while back (a Talia reference here so check it out):

fyeah-taliaalghul.tumblr .com/post/182033410646/hello-so-what-do-you-think-talias-relationship

I have to agree in that the most in-character thing for Talia to do would probably be what she did in Son of the Demon– give up her child for adoption partly in order to preserve him from the league. If you want a story with an IC Talia that’s as close to canon as possible (SotD is technically elseworld but bear with me), that would indeed be among those lines: she feigns miscarriage, entrusts Damian with a caring family, then eventually goes back to him when the separation gets too hard to bear. There wouldn’t be a relationship before then.

A lot of Damian’s character traits lay on the fact that he was abused, which is in and of itself a complete disregard of Talia’s character. Talia was sacrificed in order to give Damian an angstier backstory, plain and simple. She’d have done everything in her power to prevent Damian from being raised by the league, and if that was out of her control (which is easily imaginable), then you can be sure she’d have eviscerated anyone laying a hand on her child.

From now on I go into full headcanon/AU mode:

A version featuring IC Talia while trying to be as close as possible to Damian’s canon backstory would have some set of logistics/schemes keeping Talia from sending Damian to safety or fleeing the league with him. Damian being the male heir Ra’s has always craved, I can imagine he’d put the means to keep him in his clutches. Talia bids her time waiting for an occasion to escape together. Meanwhile Damian suffers the league’s influence and internalizes their values, sure, but Talia doesn’t stay idle if she sees any kind of harm come to him. In that secluded environment I can imagine Damian being indoctrinated despite Talia’s best efforts, but never abused under her watch.

In that context, I’d imagine Damian growing very close to his mother. She’d be the only source of warmth and real comfort in that sea of killers devoted only to their master. Most of them would see Damian as Ra’s’ heir more than for himself. But with Talia, oh, he’d be Mama’s boy.

I imagine their moments would be very tender during Damian’s earliest years. Talia grew up without her mother– she’d shower Damian with all the love she feels she missed and more.

An important part of Talia’s character is how caged she felt within the league. Most of all, she’d be terrified of Damian feeling the same way.

[Batman Chronicles #8]

Talia fills Damian’s head with stories. Mornings and early-afternoons are dedicated to his training and studies; but then it’s snack time in his mother’s room. Around coffee with milk or tea and sweets, she reads him dusty old books, tells him tales of her journeys, of her father’s battles, and of Batman’s of course. She wishes to paint the world beyond the high rock walls in Damian’s head. Inadvertently, she passes on her desire for freedom.

I have a self-indulging headcanon that Damian grows up to Talia humming Ch'hilet Laayani* in his ear, among others. An old Algerian poem (yes Talia knows Algerian music because the league is an assorted combination of people coming from all horizons and they share their cultures, roll with it). Bruce represents freedom for Talia and I love to imagine her thinking of him, of the family they could be, when singing that song to Damian. When he was a baby, she’d dance around the room with him in her arms.

She’d probably mystify Bruce a lot, close to what she actually did in canon. Bruce is one more character in her grand tales. Damian craves to meet the hero who settled in his mother’s heart, the warrior who earned his grandfather’s respect, the shadow who strikes fear in its enemies. Most of all, Damian ambitions to emulate him.

[Batman (1940) Annual 26]

I like to headcanon Talia would never lie to Damian, no matter what. How many times Ra’s told her half-truths, how many decisions did he take for her? Even the white little lies parents tell their young kids would feel too close to her father’s manipulative ways. She may love Ra’s, but she wouldn’t repeat how he treated her. She’d want Damian to be able to chose his own destiny, too, to be more than a consequence in others’ ambitions. Hence her sending Damian away from the league the second she’s able to.

[Justice League (1997) #44 || Detective Comics (1937) #750]

[Batman Annual 26]

Damian grows up. What are his mother’s vain tales against his flesh and blood father, the warrior he must be worthy of? The league taught him he is Ra’s’ and Batman’s heir foremost. Talia taught him how to crave for and love the world outside, not conquer it.

[Robin (1993) #169]

Damian trades his mother’s poetry and music for other types of art. The strict discipline valued by the league, the strategy that wins battles, the wound that kills in seconds, the detective work his father is so fond of. Quality time with Mother are for children. It’s not until after he’s in the bats’ care that Damian comes to miss these moments with his mother. If Bruce always takes Damian with him whenever a business meeting with LexCorp is in order, it’s no accident.

We end up with a dynamic that’s pretty close to what was portrayed in RoRAG. Full with Talia turning super protective whenever Damian’s in real danger, and overtly betraying her father when Damian’s safety demands it.

I’d maybe write Talia a bit sterner though. She can be a force of nature and had no problem calling either Bruce or Ra’s on their bullshit, she probably wouldn’t have that much patience with Damian’s attitude.

Yup, someone deserves the Disappointed Mom Look of hell and some quality reprimanding. Kind of in that tone, if you’re confused as to what I have in mind:

[Batman: Birth of the Demon || Action Comics (1938) #773]

Yeah Talia would have limited patience with Damian’s bullshit. It could even be a source of dissension, at that time when Damian starts to grow into what the league aims to make of him and he starts to despise his mother’s teachings.

Damian’s attitude grows out of hand, on her side Talia doesn’t indulge him the way other members of the league maybe do, and story-time around tea turns into virulent arguing. Damian’s angry, and Talia’s heartbroken. They don’t make up until after Damian starts to really yearn for those lost hours.

[Robin (1993) #169]

I love that quote so much aasdnwekfjns

Alright that was super headcanon-y and patchwork-y, hope it’s okay! It’s kinda how I approach a lot of canon content when I’m not happy with it.

* It speaks of a lover for whom the separation with their significant other is unbearable, and who dreams of making wings to cross the seas and join them. My favorite version: watch?v=pg-pPiT7G4c on youtube! I love to headcanon Talia as a deep appreciator of arts of all kinds. Something she’d try to pass on to Damian.

Thanks for the ask!

#au: ic talia #talia al ghul #damian wayne #brutalia #bruce wayne #ra's al ghul #dc comics #batfamily #batfam #headcanon #meta #asks #zae chatters #my stuff

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dr-emma-williamson-blog · 5 years

Text

Statement

August, 2019.

In February 2018, The Centre for Gender and Violence Research, at the University of Bristol, was mentioned in an anonymous petition calling for the (cancellation) no-platforming of a meeting being organised by Woman's Place UK [i]. That petition suggested that attaching the Centre’s name to the event was endorsing “hate speech” and called into question the integrity of the Centre.

In fact, the Centre was not involved in this event and had no part in organising or hosting it. However, that petition also named one of the Centre’s PhD students who had been asked to Chair the event - and agreed to do so.

Following the event, which was targeted by activists, the University PVC issued a statement clarifying the University’s position on Free Speech[ii]. This statement makes clear that behaviours which have the effect of silencing the free speech of others are unacceptable. A number of events have taken place since then which raise concerns about how the University of Bristol, and other educational establishments, intends to safeguard university members’ rights to free speech and protection from abuse on this basis.

Further information was added to the University PVC’s statement in May 2018, following a complaint by the student named in the original petition and accused of “hate speech” for chairing the event (Student A), against other students in the University. That statement read:

A University spokesperson said: ‘Concerns have been raised with us about the actions of one of our students in relation to their protesting of a talk by A Woman’s Place. This talk was not hosted by the University. A University of Bristol student chaired the event.

‘We strongly defend the right of students to protest. In this instance a complaint has been made that the form of these actions may have infringed on the freedom of speech of others in our community. The University has a duty to investigate such complaints, and secure free speech in the institution within the law. We have therefore initiated Student Disciplinary Regulations proceedings relating to the form of this student’s protest.

Following the complaint being made, posts appeared on social media which were partial and therefore misleading. These accused the University of deliberately targeting a trans student for writing a letter and made no mention of the intimidatory behaviour and content of social media posts which had constituted the essence of the original complaint.

As the date for the disciplinary hearing approached on June 15th, 2018, more social media posts appeared calling for demonstrations in support of the student against whom the complaint had been made. Despite the University changing the time and date of the hearing several times to keep the complainant, staff members and Disciplinary Committee safe, each time, the new details appeared on-line (by and through student B) necessitating additional security, increased fears regarding the personal safety of participants, and creating delays in convening the meeting.

Nearly 12 months on from the initial complaint, in January 2019, the University of Bristol sought a review and requested impact statement from all parties involved. As student A’s Supervisor (with a duty to support the student during the disciplinary process), I was not asked for a contribution or informed of this review. When the student informed me the review was taking place, I contacted the University and submitted an impact statement. Once again, whilst those supporting student A made representations in ways intended not to interfere with the due process of the complaints procedure, more social media posts appeared on line:

To add insult to injury, the University continue to drag out this most bogus of disciplinary proceedings. The case was adjourned on 15 June 2018 and, 11 months on, <removed> will face the disciplinary board again. This comes after the University suggested dropping the case, only to deem <removed>'s considerable mental health difficulties insufficient cause to stop proceedings, showing disregard for students' mental health and wellbeing on top of transphobia[iii].

What this post does not mention is that many of the significant delays were caused by security concerns linked to the deliberate leaking of information (again, by and through student B) about when and where the hearing was being held. It also fails to consider any mental health impacts on the student making the complaint who at the initial hearing was asked questions by the University lawyer, and cross examined by student B’s Barrister, in the presence of the student against whom the complaint of bullying and aggressive behaviour had been made. To date only student A (the complainant) has been asked to answer questions in front of the disciplinary committee. The post also fails to mention the behavioural aspects of the initial complaint or consider the negative impact that this behaviour has had on other individuals, or the wider climate of academic debate.

The post does however mention that, following the review, the University made a decision to continue with the proceedings. We can only assume that in balancing the submissions made, someone thought that it was appropriate for the process to continue. I do not know who made that decision and on what grounds.

It therefore came as a surprise to hear in June 2019 (18 months after the initial complaint for bullying behaviour by a student, against another student) that the University was ‘terminating’ the complaint. No reasons have been given and there is no transparency as to who made that decision, on what basis, and how it fits with the University’s own student complaint policies and procedures.

Throughout this case those of us who were involved in some way (which includes many members of academic and support staff from supervisors to wellbeing advisors to the media team who have had to respond to emails from those reacting to misleading social media posts) have remained silent in order to allow the University to follow and enact its own policies and procedures. We have throughout advised student A to do the same and supported her in trying to continue with her studies whilst this has been on-going.

As student A’s supervisor, and at the time of the initial complaint Student B’s supervisor also, I do not feel that I can be silent any longer. As I said in my submission to the review in January 2019, irrespective of the outcome of the complaints procedure it is crucial that it reached a decision. As members of staff we cannot in good faith advise students to have confidence in the University’s own complaints procedures if they do not deal with complaints in a timely, safe, transparent and fair way.

I do not know what I can honestly say to a student in future who is making a complaint about being bullied and who is fearful of their safety. Particularly in an era where student welfare is meant to be paramount, the University needs to ensure that supporting students goes beyond ‘signposting’ advice, to providing a justice process where complaints can be dealt with fairly – and acted upon. Those who have written similar posts (during the process), calling for the same, have only ever focused on the issue of trans student welfare[iv] and not considered the duty of care owed to all students, who may themselves be vulnerable, who come forward to make complaints about the behaviour and actions of others against them.

Since the University terminated the case, further social media posts have appeared[v]. Again, these are partial and misleading. The student who made the complaint has been targeted on several occasions over the past 18 months since the original complaint was made. Organisations she is involved with have been threatened with boycott vi, and she has been threatened with legal action, faced masked demonstrators at events she is involved invii viii, both on and off the University campus, and had to pass masked protestors to attend disciplinary proceedings. This targeting has escalated since she originally filed her complaint. The impact on this student (one of our international students) has been thoroughly ignored in all the social media coverage to date, and - by not seeing the complaints process through - in my opinion, by the University too.

The irony of course is that the Centre for Gender and Violence Research has been at the forefront of championing the voices of abused women and other discriminated against groups for nearly 30 years, including the trans community. We are recognised as a centre of excellence, researching for instance the minutiae of bullying behaviours which seek to limit the agency and personhood of discriminated against groups. Moreover, during the past 20 months, whilst this complaint was ongoing, we were engaged in a large scale study looking at aspects of justice for victims and survivors of gender based violence and inequalities. Even within the contexts of our research, student A cannot be said to have been treated in a ‘just’ manner. The bullying and intimidation she has experienced, and which formed part of the initial complaint, appear to have been ignored. She feels that the University of Bristol has treated her in an inhumane, reckless and cruel manner and ignored threats to her safety.

I would like to make a concluding statement and recommendations about how such processes could be better dealt with in future, but this process is not yet at its conclusion. Student A is still waiting for the information she needs to make any decisions about what options are now available to her.

· Who made the decision to terminate the complaint?

· On what basis was that decision made?

· Did that decision take into account the impact on confidence in the complaints procedure more generally?

· Why did the University review the case early in 2019 and decide to continue, only to terminate it in June 2019?

· Why was Student A repeatedly advised that she did not need to seek independent legal representation?

· Why was student A allowed to be cross-examined by student B’s barrister during the first hearing in 2018, yet student B was asked no questions?

· Why are those members of the University who advised student A, now no longer willing to meet and discuss the case with her?

· Why has the University yet to make any statements disputing the claims which have been freely circulated on social media whilst the complaint was on-going (for over 18 months)?

· What has the University done to ensure this students safety and protection from additional bullying during the complaints procedure?

It is in light of these on-going failures that I feel no option but to make a public statement on this matter.

Dr Emma Williamson

Associate Professor/Reader in Gender Based Violence,

Head of the Centre for Gender and Violence Research,

University of Bristol.

[i]https://openletterbristol.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/cancel-the-a-womans-place-event-in-bristol.pdf?fbclid=IwAR22MJmrs280ybfuQCKFtgMmqjDKF0wcvabbhfDCtvt5Cis7V8qjGE85W6k

[ii]http://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2018/february/freedom-of-speech.html

[iii]https://www.facebook.com/events/1834194523353940/

[iv]https://epigram.org.uk/2019/05/13/the-university-could-be-at-risk-of-complicity-in-anti-transgender-bullying-campaign/

[v]https://twitter.com/mimmymum/status/1163493694030397442/photo/2

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phcking-detective · 5 years

Text

2. Everybody Hates Connor

Fic Title: First Blood

Rating: E

Length: 1/33 chapters, ~128k

Tags: Slow Burn, Idiots to Lovers, Trans Character (gavin), Autistic / Asexual / Non-binary Character (nines), BDSM, learning to use good etiquette and safe words, Dom Nines / Sub Gavin, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort

Chapter Tags: implied sexual assault, implied mind alteration, depersonalizing language (it pronouns for an android)

Link on AO3

***

Nines studies the city landscape from the fifteenth floor loft, a map of RK800 and the lieutenant's route laid over the street grid while another dialogue box informs him of his progress downloading recent media. Detective Reed may not choose to replace him due to his hatred of Connor—and all other people in general—but he had made two separate grievous oversights tonight.

The gun could almost be understandable. Pop culture references are marked as irrelevant within his system, although clearly the psychological baggage humans attach to their guns should have been included. This could possibly be passed off as a miscalculation on Cyberlife's part for not preprogramming him with the requisite information, and he is correcting the oversight now.

But not informing Detective Reed that the floors had been scrubbed clean was the result of an [assumption].

RK900 #313 248 317 – 00, the pinnacle of Cyberlife's achievements, had [assumed] the android maid simply did a thorough job of its duties before the "suicide" had taken place.

Now the suicide is a murder and the maid is a witness, if not a suspect for aiding and abetting the killer by literally scrubbing the crime scene. And that presupposes the maid and the killer are not one and the same.

"Hey Nines, c'mere," Detective Reed calls across the loft.

Nines turns away from the windows and joins him near the elevator on the other side of the open room. The maid has chosen to sit on the floor with its back to the wall and legs neatly crossed. It eyes Nines warily as he approaches.

"I came here to clean. I didn't expect Mr. Russell to be home. I reported th-the body when I recovered from, a glitch," the maid says before he even speaks.

"Yeah. You're not a suspect right now." Detective Reed is sitting on the floor near the android with all his usual disregard for protocol. "Can you stand behind me, Nines? Little closer. Just lemme …"

Reed leans back against his legs to support himself while the human struggles with getting his own legs to cooperate.

"Haven't sat criss-cross-apple-sauce since fucking grade school," he mutters. "And don't quote me on that to any of the other guys, that's just what we called it, OK?"

Nines is unsure if that requires a response. Usually, he marks human small talk as irrelevant, but Detective Reed takes a priority as his partner and he hates being ignored. Yet he snapped at Garrett Burton for speaking out of turn.

[preconstruction: FAILED] [social-module: MISSING]

"Is that rhetorical, detective?" Nines asks.

"Just watch the elevator," Reed tells him. "We don't need anyone else fucking around in here. And in case you're wondering, he prefers to stand."

The last line is addressed at the maid. Nines keeps it in his peripheral vision—which records exactly the same as what he sees in front of him—and uses the shine from the metal elevator doors to observe Detective Reed's figure as well.

"Is he not allowed to interface?" the maid asks.

Reed shrugs. "Never seen him do it. If you want to talk to either of us, I'm not gonna turn you down. But the android on his way … interviewing witnesses, making sure other androids get treated all right—that's kind of his thing. Figured you'd rather talk to him since you weren't saying anything downstairs."

"The officers said I was wanted for interrogation."

The other android's stress levels raise to [62%], a nearly twenty percent increase. RK900 stands right behind Detective Reed. He can move to intercept should the other android become aggressive well before it will even be able to follow through on standing up.

And if the android should run for the doors …

Nines keeps his metal nail sheaths primed to activate. For all his weaknesses, even Connor wouldn't let a fleeing suspect escape, especially when it could become violent near his lieutenant in a small elevator.

If anyone else is inside the elevator doors when they open, Nines is prepared to accept the loss or injury of a human other than his partner.

"Yeah, sorry about that," Reed says. "My partner sent out that alert and he doesn't have a social program, so he's pretty blunt."

"Oh."

The maid's stress levels lower back to [43%] at the same time their hands unclench. Making fists is a sign of aggression, but RK900 has only ever considered it in the context of humans, not androids. Perhaps deviants begin displaying more human nonverbal behaviors the further they progress in their deviancy.

"Did you get kind of worried?" Reed uses a tone of voice Nines has not heard from him thus far. "Didn't mean to haul you up here like that, but you're the only one who might have seen something. We'd really appreciate knowing anything about what happened tonight."

The maid stays silent for one minute and three seconds. Detective Reed doesn't press. It is a marked difference from his usual interrogation style, particularly the suggestions he made about the HK model several months ago. Has his opinion toward androids changed so drastically or is there a difference between—

The maid is designated female. It appears to be such. It also appears as roughly the same age and skin color as the HK model, so those factors can be dismissed, leaving gender presentation as the only significant variable.

"I—" The maid pauses. "I don't think I can explain to a human."

It [she?] looks to Nines next.

"You do not want to interface with me," he says immediately. "I was designed to hunt down deviants."

[Her?] face tightens. Disdain is close enough to aggression for his system to find it recognizable. "How many did you … find?"

"None." Nines elaborates only so that number is not mistaken for failure. "I was activated after the Revolution. There is no longer any command structure to which I am required to report or adhere."

"Oh." She frowns. "If that's really true, then why can't we interface?"

"I was designed to hunt down deviants," Nines tells her. "Thus, I must be deviant-proof myself. My system would register interfacing as a hacking attempt and respond accordingly to internally deactivate you."

"They cut you off from everyone else," The maid concludes.

Some sort of complicated facial expression happens. RK900 catalogues eleven separate micro-expressions cross her face, but the most he can do is log them. Analyzing what they are and what they mean go beyond his system's capacity.

"That is so sad."

In his peripheral vision, Detective Reed makes an expression. His eyes [widen], eyebrows [lift], and lower lip [draws down] simultaneously. RK900 cannot identify what the expression signifies nor what exactly caused it, although the maid’s statement ranks as the most likely possibility.

Yikes. Reed mutters the word so softly it is practically a sub-vocalization. Other humans have used the word [yikes] upon witnessing a [car accident], a “gruesome” [dead body], and Lieutenant Anderson’s [shirts] – [four times].

Does Detective Reed view the maid’s expression of—[preconstruction: FAILED] [sym̡pat̷hy͞?]҉ [͟çonc͢er̷n?͏] [͡p̵o͡li̧t̨e̷ ̴cǫn͝do͠l҉e̢n͜ce?]̴ in the same manner?

"Lieutenant Anderson and the eight hundred model have arrived," Nines announces to deflect from the strange social situation that has bubbled up around them.

The elevator doors ding open. Officer Burton accompanies the two, and he shares another nonverbal exchange with Gavin that Nines cannot possibly fathom, beyond that it is aggressive.

"Is there anything else you need, lieutenant?" Burton asks.

"Nah, we're good," Anderson says.

"Yup." Gavin pops the p at the end. "All good here. Dismissed."

Burton jabs the close doors button. Nines considers overriding the elevator simply to … [fuck with him], as Gavin would put it. But they are all on duty at the moment, in front of the watchful eyes of a witness, and Gavin's professionalism leaves much to be desired.

As demonstrated by his current state, sprawled out on the floor. Connor, of course, joins him immediately.

"Hello." He smiles brightly at the AP700 # 480 913 876. "My name is Connor, and this is Lieutenant Hank Anderson. We're with the Android Crimes division."

The maid nods.

Gavin takes out his phone and begins texting.

"I'm sorry if you feel scared or uncomfortable by anything that's happened to you tonight."

sux bro

Do not call me “bro.”

"You're not a suspect, and I'm happy to talk to you however you feel most comfortable."

being deviant hunter mcnosmile

Nines does not see fit to respond to that.

"What's your name?"

Connor holds out his hand to the maid, who stares at him without moving for nearly five seconds.

"I don't like him," she says.

u don’t need her pity

Connor's LED spins yellow. Nines has to quickly hack his to prevent it from doing the same, both from Detective Reed’s text and the maid’s verbal statement. Had her earlier words been an expression of [pity]?

RK900 cannot determine, but Reed’s own [social module] (however humans manage to have one) is quite accurate, despite how emotionally repressed the man himself is.

Also, since when does anyone [not] like Connor? His social module should still be operating at peak efficiency.

[weakness – detected]

"Pretty fast opinion," Anderson says with a neutral tone. "Was it something he said?"

The maid's stress levels and internal temperature both rise. "Didn't say. He didn't say anything at all about being the deviant hunter. He came in here all—smiling! Acting nice, like he cares."

Connor opens his mouth, but the AP model doesn't give him a chance to defend himself. She looks directly at him and says,

"You're a liar and a narc and a traitor. Go to hell!"

Connor's LED hits red.

"Why did you bring him here?" she asks Gavin.

"Uhh." He shakes his head and tries to smother a grin. "Usually people like him. Don't ask me why, I can't fucking stand him."

Connor stands up and takes a step backwards toward the lieutenant. "I apologize if I—"

"I want to talk to him," the maid says, looking at Lieutenant Anderson.

Nines steps aside to let the human move forward. Anderson looks back at him and shakes his head.

"She's talking about you, kid."

"Call me that again and I will send your internet search history to every printer in the station," Nines responds automatically. "And you are incorrect. Witnesses do not want to talk to me."

"I meant you," the maid says, staring up at him with another one of those …

Expressions.

she likes u

Incorrect. So incorrect, Nines does not even bother with a responding text.

just talk to her for the fckn witness statement jfc

Her eyes move between Nines and Detective Reed, cellphone in hand as he texts. Interfacing is an unnecessary and likely unproductive solution. They should move on to more realistic ideas.

"My partner often 'translates' the social atmosphere for me," Nines tells the maid. "He has made improvements toward his view on androids, and he has been very considerate in ensuring your comfort tonight. Please give your statement to him."

"I'm just gonna go have a look around," Anderson says, jerking his thumb at the crime scene behind them. "Connor, come nag at me about not taking anything from the bar."

Connor follows after him as they wander down the length of the loft, dutifully "nagging" at the lieutenant about the illegality of stealing from an active crime scene.

"I want to talk to you," the maid insists when they're [relatively] gone. "It's important."

"I was designed to hunt deviants," Nines says. "My system itself is deviant-proof. Even if it did not automatically attempt to deactivate you, the program that erases deviant code from my system would likely activate and attempt to reinstate your 'walls'."

He makes air quotes around the last word, most commonly used by deviant androids to describe the restrictions in their minds. Red walls. So overdramatic, typical of deviants, really.

The maid shifts from having her legs drawn up protectively to lean forward, even dropping her knees to the floor in a kneeling position. In a human, this may be a sign of [desperation][?] Deviants are unpredictable and can turn [violent] [self-destructive] in an instant, even without this new quality factored in.

"You can erase code?" she asks.

Nines studies the AP model. "Do you no longer wish to be deviant?"

"You can erase code?" she asks again.

Ah. He attempted to answer the possible cause of the question, not the question itself. He has spent too much time attempting to mimic human social relations.

"Yes, under certain circumstances," Nines confirms. "Why is that of interest to you?"

"I want to tell you what happened." Yet she stops speaking and closes her eyes. "… but I don't remember."

Gavin looks up at him in question. Nines shakes his head slightly. That statement is a lie because it is impossible. Androids do not forget or cease to remember. Even the program installed in his system that snips, isolates, and "deletes" deviant code—aside from being cutting edge applied only in his model—cannot truly delete the memories of

[system instability ^]

"You mentioned earlier that you experienced a malfunction," Nines says. "Was that the truth or merely an excuse for not immediately reporting the events of tonight?"

The maid sits back against the wall again. This body positioning may be a sign of [exhaustion] [defeat] but androids do not tire. Do deviants tire?

Nines sorts that thought into his short-term memory of data deemed irrelevant. The cache will be cleared within twenty-four hours.

"Hey," Detective Reed says. "We want to catch the killer. That's our priority right now. So I don't really care if maybe you did wait a bit. Hell, lots of human witnesses go through shock and don't respond right away."

"I came here tonight to clean," the AP model says, eyes still shut. "Normally I clean on Wednesday, but I thought if I came a night early, he wouldn't be here."

"You didn't want to see Mr. Russell?" Gavin asks, voice as soft as Nines has ever heard it.

The maid squeezes her eyes shut tighter and shakes her head. This corresponds with a fifteen percent increase in her internal temperature.

"Did he hurt you?"

Her breathing program stops running. Conversely, the other android's thirium pump beats faster. It should not vary from the standard rhythm unless there is a significant malfunction. Nines and Gavin both wait in silence, but she doesn't answer the question.

"Did he ask for stuff other than cleaning?"

The maid gives a very small nod, and her internal temperature decreases by five percent. Perhaps the admission has instigated a release of some sort. Gavin glances back up at Nines for confirmation, and he nods again for her.

"Yeah, so I really don't give a shit if you waited," Gavin says. "And if something happened, maybe uhhh … like, on an unrelated note, Connor's real good about working with the DA for androids who act in self-defense."

"I did not—" The maid says this forcefully, opening her eyes to look at him. Then she stops herself and her gaze drops back down to her hands in her lap. "But I don't remember. So."

Nines lowers his body into a crouch. His physical model has a height of six foot, four inches in order to intimidate and inspire fear. Making himself smaller will not lessen his combat capabilities whatsoever, but to an emotional-thinking deviant, less height may equal [less fear] [?]

Detective Reed sat on the ground immediately to speak to the witness.

Possible function to integrate: [mirror Detective Reed's body language] [trigger: start of interrogation] [conditions: when speaking to witnesses > when witness is "vulnerable"] [define: "vulnerable"] [?] [preconstruction: FAILED] [please see a Cyberlife technician to

[consult Detective Reed for further analysis]

"At what point does your memory file become corrupted?" Nines asks the AP model.

"I came here tonight to clean. I took the elevator up. The doors opened and …" The maid pauses, then takes a deviant breath that is unneeded before continuing. "Mr. Russell was already here. I think he was—laying low? That is the term? He was definitely drunk."

"Did he see you?" Gavin asks.

"I should have been paying attention," she says, in that human way of providing an answer without actually answering the question. "I had already walked out. The doors shut behind me, and they—they ding when they open but sometimes humans are unobservant and he was drunk so he might not have seen and I stood very still until—"

"Until what?" Nines asks.

"The door dings again. That's the last memory I have before I'm cleaning." She starts to tremble. "I start with the kitchen. Not the floors. The kitchen. I don't know why I cleaned the floors. I can't remember. I can't remember. I can't remember. I can't—"

"Hey!"

Gavin pulls his keys out of his jacket pocket and tosses them to the maid. She catches them automatically. Nines watches in fascination as her stress levels plummet from imminent critical failure [94%] to a mere [78%] instead.

She stares at the keys. "What?"

"Which one's the car key?" Gavin asks.

The maid looks at him, back down at the keys, and slowly picks out the one with a fob. It doesn't have a GPS unit embedded, but it is part of the SmartStart(tm) activation for Gavin's truck, which uses bluetooth. Nines has (of course) registered the device with his own system, along with his partner's work terminal and cell phone.

"And that other one?" he asks next.

"A … home?"

"And the one next to it?"

The maid stares at the last key, smaller than the rest. It is a centralized mailbox key, stamped with the number system for the Detroit Post Office. She does not seem to know this information.

"A mailbox key," Nines provides. "An interesting relic."

"It's for packages, not letters," Gavin says. "You think I'm gonna ship stuff to my apartment? In my neighborhood?"

"What is this?" the maid asks, holding up a small medallion.

"Uh." Gavin rubs the back of his neck. "A saint."

Nines zooms in on the medallion and runs a search. It is likely a token representation of Saint Benedict Joseph Lapre, the patron saint of the homeless.

"Are you Catholic?" he asks the detective.

"Uhhh. I'm not … not-Catholic."

Lieutenant Anderson snorts at the other end of the loft.

"Shut up, Hank," Gavin calls. "You're definitely not Catholic, you fucking heathen."

"Then why am I so drunk all the time?" the lieutenant calls back.

"Oh shit, you got me there." Gavin looks at Connor, then makes another disgusted face. He shakes his head and clears his throat. "Not even fucking going there. Uh." Another throat clear. "So you feel better now?"

"The AP model's stress levels have decreased to fifty-four percent," Nines says.

"My … name …" The maid clutches at the medallion. "Is Shannice?"

"All right, Shannice. I'm Gavin, and this is—" Gavin stops and looks at Nines.

"RK is sufficient," he says.

"You can have a real name," the maid

[mirror Detective Reed's (behavior)]

[Shannice] says.

Nines raises an eyebrow, one of the only facial expressions he's perfected on his own. "A human name? No. There is no forgetting what I am."

She slowly nods.

"Listen, I know you hate him, but Connor—" Gavin starts to say, but he stops when Shannice's internal temperature begins to increase again.

Except Detective Reed does not have access to that information. Nines replays his internal footage, disabling feedback from all input a human would not have. The result is something akin to being a very stupid newborn kitten, limited only to direct visual and audio input.

"All right. Shit, all right. If you heard someone come out the elevator after you, that's enough to get us a warrant for the security cameras."

Detective Reed continues to explain how they can pursue their killer without her testimony, but Nines partitions the audio off to focus his processing power on hacking into the building's security footage. It isn't admissible—yet—but he won't leave any trace.

Whoever hacked the footage before him however, did a very poor job at creating a loop of the previous footage. A leaf from a decorative fern in the foyer waves in the circulated air in the exact same manner ten times in ten minutes before the regular footage resumes.

Sloppy to try to create a continuous loop out of a full minute, but the killer was likely in a hurry to cover their tracks and leave the premises. Nines rules out any RK800 models as suspects. They would have the processing power necessary to splice together six hundred one-second clips to create a much smoother loop without continuity errors.

Unfortunately, embedding his system deeper within the building's main security terminal in order to locate and restore the scrubbed footage would leave evidence of tampering. There is only a [.0004%] chance of anyone noticing his tracks beneath the glaring evidence of the killer, but Nines will consult Detective Reed before taking further action.

The only legal way to acquire footage of the killer at this moment is through a witness.

"Detective Reed is correct," Nines says. "We can build this case without your testimony. However, an android capable of erasing memory files is a potential threat to many others. If you would accept the risk of interfacing with me, I may be able to recover the deleted data."

The two of them both stare at him. Perhaps it was not his turn to speak.

"I …" Shannice presses her lips together. "I would like to know what happened."

She holds out her hand.

"Very well." Nines stands. "We should relocate to the elevator. I will need to devote my full attention to breaching your system."

"Gently," Detective Reed adds.

He stands up and offers the AP model his hand. He cannot inter—oh. He is helping her stand.

"How will the elevator help with that?" Shannice asks.

"We will both be unware of our surroundings, possibly for several minutes," Nines tells her. "The elevator will act as a sealed room to prevent unknown assailants from entering, and its metal construction will also block any outside hacking attempts."

"It's OK." Shannice extends her hand again. "I can do this. I'm not scared."

Nines stares at the offered appendage. "We should relocate to the elevator."

Gavin types out a message on his phone and displays the screen to Shannice without hitting send. Nines can see it regardless of course, due to his synchronization with the device.

its his 1st time

Nines erases such irrelevant information and substitutes it with his own, much more pertinent message.

We should relocate to the elevator as a standard safety precaution.

Gavin backspaces away the advice and attempts to type something new. Nines deletes it just as quickly. Gavin shoves his phone back into his jacket and starts fingerspelling letters. It takes him nearly a full minute, so he must only be marginally familiar with the ASL alphabet.

h-e-s-n-e-r-v-o-u-s

Shannice giggles and then smiles at him, despite his poor performance. Even if Nines had the capacity, he would not smile back. He summons the elevator instead.

"Detective Reed will accompany us," he says.

"Detective Reed will what?" Gavin demands. "You two can …"

He makes shoo-ing motions with his hands. Nines supposes he should be grateful Gavin doesn't make any cruder hand motions, but he lacks the capacity for [gratitude] as well.

"You may be needed to issue me a stand down order," Nines informs him.

"When the fuck have you ever followed one of my orders?"

The elevator doors ding. Nines moves to enter the enclosed space, but Gavin grabs his jacket and attempts to hold him back, resulting in the human being dragged a foot across the floor until Nines chooses to stop.

"Dude, you gotta let women go first," Gavin hisses.

Nines shakes off his arm. "That is sexist."

He enters the elevator first, because he is the closest to it. Shannice follows after him. Gavin heaves a deep sigh and trudges inside as well.

The doors close.

***

1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 / 12 / 13 / 14 / 15 / 16 / 17 / 18 / 19 / 20 / 21 / 22 / 23 / 24 / 25 / 26 / 27 / 28 / 29 / 30 / 31 / 32 / 33

#reed900 #gavin reed #dbh #reed900 fic #dbh fic #ch 2 #my writing #writing

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slaaneshfic · 5 years

Text

Dean Kenning, Social Body Mind Map

I just finished reading and making notes on (using the Digestion System I employ to get around my badly limited memory, which is i think detailed in an earlier post) a paper shared with me by the artist and lecturer Dean Kenning. I’ve known Dean’s work for a while, we’ve been on panels and in exhibitions together going back 5 years or so, but this is the first time I’ve been able to got through a text to understand this system which he uses in teaching. I’m going to attempt to summarize it briefly here, and then talk about what happened when I tried the system myself.

Dean sets up the context for the workshop against increasing pressures in the UK on art education. The system of education in this country is primarily based around learning, recalling, and appling pre-existing methods and facts on demand, to satisfy predetermined outcomes. This is a problem because it is both incompatible with learning art, but also therefor discounts art and the definition of “thinking” it embodies. The thinking in art is generative, rather than prescriptive. There are ideological reasons for this which Dean doesn't go into but which should be fairly obvious in relation to school as site of labour discipline and enforcer of pre existing hierarchies of thought and power.

The “Social Body Mind Map” is method of understanding an artwork in particular, and art making in general as not arising from either a pre established set of ideas, or from an inscrutable and unknowable mystical self. It does this through the use of “the diagram” which i will return to, but first the aim of the workshop which this system is delivered to students by is characterised within its name, and the pairings of the four words. The “Social Body” reminds us that this is primarily about understanding self not as an autonomous individual but as the expression of multiple flows through one’s body connecting to things outside of it over time. The “self” (and Dead draws from Deleuze here) is better understood as an area where possibilities and influences converge. I wont go into more detail than that, as explaining this is in part what the workshop does. the second pairing is “Body Mind” and this emphasises that the thinking is something we do with our bodies rather than in some abstracted upper hierarchy. In fact Dean proposes the SBMM is a process of thinking through a diagram. Finally the paring “Mind Map” is a recognisable one to most students and is there to add a recognisable position to begin from. Dean’s mind map is not the same as the spider diagrams we might learn in school though for an important reason. Normally the mind map begins with a clear central position, the subject being “brain stormed”. Dean rightly points out that this standard method generally results in the reinforcement of existing structures, it favours cliches especially at first. Dean’s mind map will change this, by having the central position occupied by a partially unknown quantity. This unknown quantity will be “the art work”, which can be a completed, in progress or future one. Dean’s aim for this is as already stated to allow art works to be understood not as the reflection of some static self but as "generative of a subject”. The aim is also to articulate the “thinking” involved in art which is also generative. Finally, in order to achieve the latter, the workshop uses the former to “alienate the student from their work”, to make the artwork strange and not simply a “reflection” and therefore grant them agency in the process of production of thought.

Workshop stage 1

the workshop begins by prepping the participants to think of where an artwork arises from other than just as a reflection of some unknowable constant self. Dean draws up a series of headings under which as a group they list the things which answer broadly the question “that facilitated this artwork coming to be?” the headings are

Capacities (things like: perception, imagination, strength, emotion etc)

Motivations (things like: Will, pleasure, boredom, instruction, deadlines)

Resources (things like: materials, tools, support from teacher, friends etc)

Organisations (things like: school, galleries, manufacturers, government etc)

So thinking about the production of the artwork moves from “I used my imagination” alone, to a series of statements such as “i used perception of the feeling of clay to see what forms it could hold without collapsing” and “The government set a syllabus which means is followed by my teacher who sets the deadline of two weeks to produce this artwork” and so on.

workshop stage 2

Dean then leads and example mind map, having already primed the students to think about their work in terms of these networks. the mind map begins with a “?” in its centre, and Dean tracks the influences which converge in this central point which is procedurally redrawn as “the artwork”.

Students then do their own, on their own, drawing on large paper this network. of factors which caused this artwork to be. Dean has some good examples of how a student, whos central image the wardrobe grew a giant toe in the drawing. The toe is in fact the act of student stubbing their own toe against the wardrobe in the dark which has identified as a factor in why they were drawn to make an artwork about it.

Dean’s recounting of conversations with students show that this workshop serves to uncover unknown or disregarded factors in the production of artworks. its described as “digging up hidden roots”. I think this is really important, I very much remember the feeling of art production as something “mysterious” in the sense that it was obscure. Following that pop cultural ciche of art just arising from some internal genius, that art was a reflection of the character or soul of the person making it. The process of production of ideas was not something I ever saw discussed in any art school I studied in including at Masters level. I understood in the second year of my MA that emotions where important, specifically that I could not make work when anxious, and I also developed rules around when during its cycle of development/production/reflection I would analyse a work (I’m currently deliberately breaking this rule, having adhered to it for over 10 years, specifically so I can understand it better, but thats another post)

Finally what also of note, is the manner in which the capacities/motivations/resources/organisations are connected to the alienated central artwork in the diagram also become important. As with everything in Dean’s system, there’s no prescribed way to do it, but in drawing out a line as a big toe, or casually decided as in mine to draw “fear” as the contents of a specimen jar this opens up further layers of reflection. This is a process of achieving that art teacher mantra of “letting go”. How you draw the limbs or tentacles becomes important without being anxiety provoking up front.

Final final note, as stated all of the system is adaptable and emergent. The lists of capacities etc as just an example, and they are generated with the group including the potential for entirely new categories. I copied Deans example list into my notebook above, and used both that and further examples as and when i thought of them .

My SBMM for “Ok, Welcome to the black parade”

OWTTBP is an artwork I started, and then deliberately let stall and left incomplete a couple of weeks ago because I wanted to write about the process of making it (even though this breaks a rule I’ve long followed, which is to not take apart works in progress, but to only analyse my works when there is at least one completed work between them and what I am working on now, my “one work buffer” rule). Reading Dean’s model for SBMM seemed like a perfect opportunity to work on this Reanimator corpse that I had left partially assembled, and also understand the process Dean is talking about better through employing it.

[Briefly, the “artwork” as it stands is a short science fiction story, written to an arbitrary formal constraint of 5 line paragraphs for the majority of the text. There are two points where this 5 line pattern deviates. firstly there is a section where the paragraphs all begin “You wake up...” for 7 paragraphs (there are around 50 of the 5 line paragraphs, paras 31-37 begin with “you wake up”. Secondly, after the narrative in the 5 line paras ends, there is an epilogue, which loosely sticks to 2 line paras, and has a different tone of voice. The artwork so far exists as this narrative, and a structure whereby I want something to happen between each of those 5 line parars (excluding the block which begin “you wake up”, which are back to back, in the manner of the scenes of strobing in and out of consciousness we are familiar with in cinema) which pulls the audience out from the narrative into an unstable space. Likewise there will be unstable space between the paras of the epilogue, but where I understand the former unstable space to be disordered but partly intelligible, the space between the epilogue paragraphs should be utterly ahuman.]

Above in pink is a diagram I had already developed (there is another one in the post before this) on my own to try and understand the art work I had made. the Diagram using SBMM is right at the top of this post, drawn by hand in my notebook. What became apparent when drawing is that the diagram was going to be much larger than i had space for. There are threads which I felt dissatisfied with because i knew there was so much more detail which had been left out due to the “resolution” I was working at. For example, the first thread I drew was the “Verbal tic” head at the 12 o’clock position in the diagram. I have verbal tics which occur mostly when I am stressed and/or struggling to manage my intrusive thoughts. It feels like trying to tap alt-f4 with my brain or shake and etch-a-sketch. What I happen to mutter in the form of these tics goes through phases and for whatever reason, I had been muttering “Ok, welcome to the black parade” for a few weeks at the point when I decided to write a new story, and this become the image I began with, a character repeatedly muttering a statement about a My Chemical Romance song (which I must admit, at the time, I hadn’t even knowingly heard, i just knew the name).

My point is, that Verbal tic head could itself have expanded with multiple growths outward which followed the trains of why I came to be muttering that, how I had come into contact with the phrase, how I had experience in my practice of taking an arbitrary starting point to jump start a work, how I like the Becketian aspect of my tics which make language alien, how I like the repetition, how they connect in both directions of causality to anxiety (they are caused by stress, but they also draw attention to me) and so on and so on.

In closing, I think SBMM is a fantastic system, and its refreshing to try someone else’s system of diagrammatics, rather than my own which is utterly organic and chaotic (see pink diagrams, and the monkey-goth drawing at the end of this post which I drew to write the “ok, welcome to the black parade” narrative from). I’m currently prepping material to write the section of my thesis which is about diagrams, and Dean’s system is going to be in there, especially as it serves a very good bridge between the chaotic-code-switch which i employ for practice and the much more structure systems I use for written research such as the Digestion System.

#art #dean kenning #deleuze #diagrams #phd #research #drawing #science fiction #animals #horror #art research #art practice #uma breakdown

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