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aromantic-shadow · 10 months

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Still thinking. Maybe this is influenced by the fact that I’m a real life goth with grief and mental illness and Angst and past emotional neglect but the way Most People have treated Shadow since Shadow the Hedgehog 05 has been so dismissive.

Like, yes, he is a edgy motorcycle-riding PTSD-ridden teenager with almost no communication skills beyond hitting the problem until it goes away. And that’s the point!

It feels redundant to say on Tumblr where we’re all mentally ill and love a dysfunctional edgelord(/affectionate), but the fact that he is a dysfunctional edgelord is the point and doesn’t mean he isn’t worthy of respect. Honestly, so much of the writing I hate seems to be the writers having a lack of respect for Shadow, and vice versa.

Let’s look at some examples. Sonic 06? Deeply respects him, acknowledges his character arc, his insecurities, and his strengths while also letting him be a loose cannon with no communication skills who gets himself Stranded In the Future for almost no reason. Rouge spends almost the whole game shaking her head at him, but when he’s in turmoil she says “even if you believe the whole world is against you, know that I’ll always be by your side.” Omega and Rouge take his fears seriously, and they both have his back in the finale.

Forces? He’s… there. Honestly so little focus is put on him that they couldn’t really screw up. He’s in character, for the little time he’s around. The other characters don’t seem to acknowledge his existence though, besides a brief “why would Shadow help the enemy” speech right before they reunite with no feeling behind it.

Boom (specifically the show)? Don’t get me wrong, I find Boom Shadow hilarious. Watching him beat up Team Sonic can always cheer me up. But despite being mandated not to make jokes, he somehow manages to be the butt of the joke. Watching it leaves you with the impression that he’s an idiot (/derogatory) with no understandable emotions who exists to beat up Sonic and be a Problem for no reason. He’s not intimidating (well he is when compared to everyone else but in a Broader Context), he’s an Edgelord that we’re supposed to point and laugh at.

Prime? He spends the entire show pounding Sonic into the ground while telling him to listen. His motivations are clear (get answers, get his frustrations out, find a solution, get revenge), his emotions are justified (even if his response is a bit overboard)- Sonic introduces Shadow as “a real buzzkill, and also, he rollerskates!” He’s allowed to be cool. He’s allowed to be a little shit. He’s allowed to be a foil to Sonic in every way I’ve been missing.

IDW? I actually have little problem with his introduction. The first peal of doom comes from Rouge’s treatment of him; when he runs off, she talks about Shadow like an unstoppable force that cannot he reasoned with- which he is, but she and the Chaotix talk about those character traits like they’re an annoyance or an obstacle. Rouge treats him like a tool to manipulate- and Rouge is a manipulator, don’t get me wrong, she’s selfish, but she also cares about Shadow, even when he’s being an edgy 15 year old (just look at 06).

That’s all of IDW- Shadow is an annoyance, a loose cannon “getting in their way”, messing up the plan by being reckless and independent and violent. The scene in issue 19 bothers me for a lot of reasons, but that’s the main stickler. Rouge and Sonic talk about him like he doesn’t care about the survivors (you could argue this point, but I’d say that while Shadow tends to use violence, he’s doing it for what he considers good reasons, not just for his ego). Shadow’s stupidity in the fight is treated as, well, stupidity- which, fair. I think the scrapped idea of him taking off his inhibitors would have at least let him be cool, go out with some dignity. But his “death” isn’t a tragedy, it’s a problem. Rouge is the only one who mourns him.

Idk- as someone who grew up as the bullied outcast, whose emotions were an inconvenience and an annoyance, who, if he tried to be himself, was just “too much”- it hits close to home.

(I haven’t read the newest IDW issues (I love my local library but could y’all PLEASE get the latest issues???), but from what little I’ve seen, the difference seems to be that Shadow is treated with dignity. Yeah, he’s mean to Sonic- of course!- but he’s also angered by the clones- “they don’t deserve to wear my face”- and that’s treated as legitimate rather than “ugh, Shadow’s ego causing us problems again.” And they let him be cool.)

TLDR: some of y’all really don’t want teenagers to have inconvenient emotions and it is not a good look. People are messy, stupid, take up space, and often don’t make sense, and they still deserve to be treated as people.

#shadow the hedgehog #shadow the hedgehog meta #tw ableism #?#vent #I’ve needed to get this off my chest for a long time #this makes me so angry. obv cause I relate to it #ppl just get so tilted when you dare to have emotions. now that I’m not a powerless kid I get to tell them to suck it #I’ll have emotions as loud as I damn please; and if that’s a problem for you then I’ll be louder #(this isn’t about hurting ppl with emotions. emotions are neutral and we’re allowed to feel as many as we need #it’s what we do with them that matters)#thank you for coming to my ted talk #🔥#EDIT: /nbh

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kenobihater · 1 year

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Don't know why tumblr made me miss your post about the ableism in fandom and the Witcher, but I've finally read it, and thank you so much for taking the time to write it! I have a question relating to that one: if one chooses to not make the Cat Witchers have mental illnesses or personality disorders or any sort of "madness", but instead try to explain their behaviour through the system in which they grew up in, could the Witchers still be called "mad" by others in-universe? I think I worded it weird, so an explanation of what I mean:

With the way I see the Cat School, they combine typical Witcher brutality with elven supremacy. While I know that "elven supremacy" in the context of the Witcher is problematic as fuck considering the oppression of the elves, I mean it to explain some of the values that the Cat School holds as a system. Humans are scum-of-the-earth, brutal savages, horrible people from the day they are born because it is human nature to destroy, to discriminate against others, and to hurt each other. It is very much modern anti-humanist nihilism. Elves, on the other hand, are seen as inherently more kind, more wise, more cooperative, gentle, so on and so forth, despite their own history or the fact that some of the worst elves are just as bad as some of the worst humans. It boils down to "elf and proximity to elfness good, human and proximity to humanity bad".

This ideological framework leads to "inhumanity" being a good thing. Human Witchers, while not outright told to, internalize the idea that they must stand in opposition to humanity. Therefore, enacting violence against humans is okay - you're making up for your humanity, you're making the world better by making the scum go away (a very Lambert perspective on things).

In the case of Gaetan, it would mean that reacting in a disproportionate manner after being cheated out of his coin and attacked with the intent to kill, and killing not just the guilty parties but also the unaffiliated bystanders and children, is fine. After all, they are human, and they associate with the worst humans by living in the same village. They might become just like the alderman and the ones that attacked him if given the chance. He only stopped that reaction when he saw his sister in Millie, which activated a mental block. "My sister isn't like other humans" basically being the reason he spared Millie. And while he does say he fucked up big time when talking to Geralt, he doesn't seem to mean it much. "Sure, shouldn't have killed everyone, but it's not that big of a deal" is the vibe I'm getting.

While I don't think this type of slaughter is encouraged, I don't think that the Cats care enough to have any policies against it. And I think that humans would only be able to comprehend this through the Cat Witchers being "mad". Would that...work? Cause I'm really not sure. I feel like the stigma of mental illness is weaponized against anyone and everyone, even when all parties involved are neurotypical.

[You can answer this publicly or privately, don't really mind either way.]

[I want to again note that the "elf supremacy" thing was just to categorize the ideological framework of the Cats, which I built based on Gezras' voice-lines, and am aware it has problematic implications. However, since there are irl groups within minorities that are just terrible on their own (Zionists) or because they internalized the oppressor's ideologies but switched them around a bit, I feel it's not too unrealistic for the Cats to function this way.]

You're very welcome for writing that post, thank you so much for engaging with it! And this is all super interesting! I agree that this reading of the Cat witchers being neurotypical but still getting referred to as "mad" by outsiders to rationalize their disregard for human life stemming from their views on humanity is a plausible one!

Ableism can be aimed against neurotypical people who ableists deem as not fitting the mold for sure, and in a world such as the Continent where mental illness is greatly stigmatized and misunderstood, I imagine it's even more common there than it is in our world to associate mental illness with morally abhorrent behavior like murder. Irl I often see this as a way for people, usually neurotypical or non-psychotic people, to distance themselves from people and behaviors they categorize as bad (e.g. "They killed that person bc there's something inherently wrong with them. I, on the other hand, being someone who is of right mind, would NEVER stoop to murder! I'm different!" and so on and so forth. If you're intrinsically different from someone, you can't make their mistakes, never mind the fact that you're both human and capable of great good and evil).

So yes, in summary, I completely agree that even if you choose to write your Cat witchers as neurotypical but deeply shaped by elf-centric views on the nature of humanity, they could absolutely still be viewed by the general populace and other witchers as "mad"!

#len answers #len's meta #school of the cat #the school of the cat #cat school #cat school meta #tw3 #the witcher 3 #love hearing your feedback on my posts as per usual and please add on if you have any other questions or comments!#:^)#tw3 meta #the witcher 3 meta

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wat-the-cur · 1 year

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Okay, so I skimmed “Rock & Chips” to find Trigger scenes (I do intend to watch it properly, by the way). I didn’t expect to love Lewis Osbourne’s Trigger so much, being such a Lloyd Pack loyalist, but his performance is really great. He, as well as the other young actors all do a brilliant job of keeping the character’s familiar tics, hinting at the men they’ll become, while also making them their own. Osborne’s Trigger is recognisable, but he also seemed to play up a confusion at the world and people around him. This would be accurate for a younger Trigger, I think. He seems to intentionally hang back more when with his friends, observing them and what they talk about and find funny, without wholly understanding any of it. You could well imagine that he would one day become Lloyd Pack’s Trigger, who is still confused by people, but gave up pretending to understand things the way his mates did, and grew content with his own view of things. I do like how the implications of Trigger being neurodivergent and mentally ill are actually acknowledged in the series, although of course, in a way that would have been typical of the time. Nobody is particularly sensitive, or helpful, but they do show a degree of concern that was not present in OFAH, probably because this show leans more on the drama than the comedy. For example, Del’s father, Reg, genuinely asks if Trigger is alright, having seen him laughing at a television that was switched off. This is a reference, I think, to Trigger confessing that he has auditory hallucinations in the final Christmas trilogy. Del defends him by claiming that Trigger probably just thought of something funny, but at points seems to be aware that Trigger might have some sort of issue and doesn’t want him to get picked on. I noticed, while skimming, a very bizarre joke that I’m not sure was actually a joke, considering the implications. Immediately before the moment mentioned above, Trigger was sent off to make coffee, after saying something that made everyone uncomfortable. For context, Del and Jumbo were showing off some carpets and Reenie made a saucy joke about bare floors and getting splinters in your arse. Trigger responds with, “My sister gets them there, quite a lot. And once her draws were covered in coal dust.” An unintentional innuendo? At first, everyone’s awkward response just seems like them being unduly judgmental of Trigger. Was it because he gave too much information? Did they think it was odd that he knew that about his sister? But, I remembered that in the original OFAH canon, Trigger’s sister is five years younger than him. If Trigger was only supposed to be fifteen, or sixteen in R&C, then his sister could not have been more than eleven, or twelve. That line becomes really odd if you recall that, which makes me wonder if John Sullivan did remember Trigger’s sister’s age at all. Trigger’s childhood and family life, in many ways seem just as tragic as Del’s and Rodney’s when you actually start to think about it.

#only fools and horses #ofah #rock & chips #rock and chips #colin “trigger” ball #trigger (ofah)

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warmageragnar · 2 years

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Metis and Kinfolk in W:TA

I complain a lot about Werewolf: The Apocalypse, so I was originally going to make a comprehensive list of things I would change about it. However, that would be an incredibly long post that even I would hesitate to read, so this time I’ll focus only on my thoughts about how the Garou nation treats its Metis and its Kinfolk.

To put it bluntly, it’s aggravating how a group that’s SUPPOSED to distinguish itself from human society by its lupine traits, still manages to embody the very worst that humanity has to offer. Wolves are family-centric creatures, they embrace and accommodate the needs of their pack members. They don’t have abstract human notions that lead to asinine segregation and ostracism.

So forgive me for being just a little perturbed that there’s an entire breed of Garou whose existence and treatment embodies a “don’t breed with the WRONG type of people” mentality. In one fell swoop, the writing introduces ableist, racist and homophobic mentalities into this group that’s supposed to be fighting for the RIGHT THING.

Why homophobic? A Garou that falls in love with another Garou is subject to rejection, hatred and even violence from the rest of their community, because they’re attracted to someone they’re “not supposed to be attracted to”, and the popular advice given is to just “get in bed with a Kinfolk, close your eyes and think of Gaia”, essentially. And then the “deformed, ill-favored child” is supposed to be a sign that their union was “unholy and impure”. I don’t even need to argue further about the racist angle, because THE NAME THEY CHOSE for the breed was a racial slur!

So might as well just do away with the whole shtick. Let Garou mate with Garou, and the chances of the child being also Garou are unaffected. If they turn out to “breed true” (another term I despise), all that means in terms of background is that they grow up in the sept and are “in the know” more than their homid and lupus counterparts. THAT’S IT. If they must have some sort of weakness to compensate for their familiarity with everything, make it some sort of spiritual hypersensitivity or something. Not racist, ableist shit.

Now, as for Kinfolk, don’t EVER make it normal for Garou to treat their Kinfolk as if they’re “lesser”, or as mere “breeding stock”. My dude... they’re your family. You grew up with them, you were loved by them, you squabbled with them, and the only difference is that that they can’t shapeshift or use all your powers.

You can’t POSSIBLY make even the most utilitarian of Garou regard Kinfolk as lesser, when they’re CRUCIAL for the war effort in more than just churning out more Garou babies! They explicitly fulfill tasks that Garou struggle with because of their Rage! They can infiltrate places Garou can’t, occupy places in human society that Garou can’t. Hell, considering how complex and multifaceted the war against the Wyrm and its forces have become, they might even be MORE effective at enacting change than the Garou tearing down factories and power plants!

So yeah, erase the Metis oppression, give the breed a different name, treat the Kinfolk as equals, and maybe even give them more special shit! Let them have Gnosis and access some limited Gifts, for fuck’s sake, it won’t break the bank to have them possess SOME supernatural power. (And let them participate in rites, you segregationist fucks).

(FOR CONTEXT: I’m part of a real-world tribe, so when I see fiction utilizing the framework of TRIBES to enforce this kind of shitty behavior, it makes me especially angry. We’re not lupine by any means, but we’re familial. We can’t keep our nose out of each other’s business, we piss each other off to no end, but I know ANY ONE OF US would be disgusted by the idea of a tribe mistreating members with special needs, and of “lesser” castes.)

#Werewolf the Apocalypse #world of darkness #metis #kinfolk #fuck me running this ended up being long anyway #if brevity is the soul of wit i must be the most witless bastard alive

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hollowwhisperings · 10 months

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VLD Retrospective: My POV as a Queer Biracial Asian Aspie

I don't generally enjoy listing my demographics in public spaces but for a Voltron Retrospective, I find it Quite Necessary to better convey how much VLD meant to me personally. This is one fan reconciling with a work I enjoyed for years, remain saddened for, and felt betrayed by. lf I'm good for anything, it's my being a Living Statistical Outlier.

VLD gave me explicit representation within its main cast: it gave me Shiro, who I clocked as chronically ill well before it was confirmed (Like Knows Like) & struggled with mental illness too (I'm not a war vet but Shiro's implicit Medical Trauma was Also There). Shiro is also, very obviously, an Asian &, as later revealed, a Queer Asian. There are few Queer Asians in western media who are Actual Characters: Shiro was (& remains) fun to have on board. It was, primarily, his struggles with his physical & mental health that most resonated with me.

Pidge is someone a lot of fans identified with, being a quirky genderbender maligned for her relative youth: I'm an autistic female who is gender "meh" so Pidge was "Representation" but she wasn't New nor Almost Unprecedented like Shiro or, as I'll elaborate further on, Keith. Every AFAB, every youth has felt undermined by their assumed gender & their youth: this is Not New. Pidge is fun but she wasn't Groundbreaking, not to me.

Keith and, to a lesser degree (as in assocoation with him), the "Half-Galra" Misfits were who I most identified with. Even before Keith was having Existential Crises over being Half-Galra, Keith read as someone biracial: his name, "Keith Kogane", makes him a white-passing Asian . I think current consensus is that Keith's Dad was "Mixed Asian*" but Keith's "orphan" (& secret alien) status prevented him from engaging with his heritage.

I am Not Galran (so far as I know) but I am a white-passing Asian & someone of "Two Worlds" (half white, half east asian). Star Trek's Spock established how most subsequent works of the sci-fi genre depicts half-human aliens: all the vibes of being Biracial, existential crises about Passing & feeling Disconnected ("rejected") by either/both halves of one's identity. Keith checks those boxes and Lotor's Halfsie Squad are similarly Coded (to lesser degrees).

Aliens, half-human ones especially, are very easily read as Neurodivergent as in "has ADHD &/or ASD": Keith continued this tradition & it further isolated him from his peers, especially because (like many of us on The Spectrum) he grew up "Undiagnosed". Keith knew he was Different but no one had the correct Context for his "Difference": this lead him to feeling Wrong, Rejected and Alien. This is an experience Familiar to anyone belatedly recognised as having ASD and also to Literally Any Queer Person.

To summarize the above: Shiro meant A Lot to me because he struggled with his health in silence (& was Asian); Keith meant a lot because his Human Demographics & Coding match almost entirely with my own. Shiro became "more" Important to me through his being Keith's Most Important Person (KH fans: you see where this is going): I was already Attached to Shiro, Keith made me invested in him.

KH fans knew from my invoking of "Taihetsu no Hito" [JP for "Most Important Person"] that, through being Invested in Keith & thus Shiro, I quickly Recognised that Keith? Desperately in love with Shiro. I did not, however, consider Shiro likely to Act on any Reciprocating of such feelings (which he did show signs of developing, as early on as that Stranded From Everyone Else and "when I die, you be Black Paladin" episode) due to the implied age gap between them. I knew Shiro was Younger Than Assumed (very early 20's at oldest, I figured from Contextual Clues), that Lance & Hunk were about 17 & that Keith was Older than Lance (so, 18). The age gap between Shiro & Keith was never that much of an issue: it was their difference in Rank & the ages they were at their First Meeting that were the "real" obstscles, to my mind. Season 6 or 7 did a Flashback that made Keith 14 when he first met Shiro: that very much explains why Shiro was reluctant to acknowledge attraction to Keith & unlikely to act on it. Keith did, however, read as Crushing On Shiro pretty much from their first encounter (Keith stealing Shiro's car was a very obvious effort to gain Shiro's attention & respect: something Keith was unlikely to recognise as Crush Evidence but Shiro definitely did).

And then Shiro lost 3 years to Time Dilation while Keith gained 2: their Reunion post-Space Whale was very telling. For the first time, Sheith actually seemed genuinely plausible to me. Keith had had a Glow Up that allowed Shiro to stop thinking of Keith as the kid he'd been when they first met & actually admit that his excuses to not act on any attraction had stopped holding weight. I remain completely convinced that "Kuron" had fallen, equally & just as desperately, in love with Keith over the series and that the Aggression Kuron exhibited toward Keith was as much caused by That (Gay Pining he refused to act on, even as Keith ran around in his Infamous Blades Uniform) as it was by Haggar (& Kuron's growing suspicions on his "true" nature).

Then there was the "You're my brother... I love you!" scene. Initially, given The Current Events of the time, I was irritated by the Abrupt Brother-Zoning from the Very Obviously Pining Keith to Shiro.

Then I noticed the order of these sentences: first, "you're my brother" (neither Shiro nor Keith have any siblings: in asia, there's MLM equivalent to "they were Roommates" in "they're sword/sworn brothers") and THEN, more desperately and while at the cusp of death... "I love you".

VERY ON BRAND, KEITH. It's also the "I love you" that gets through Kuron's programming enough for Keith to save them both. From my observations of VLD, the sole remaining obstacles to Sheith sailing were "will Shiro retain Kuron's memories and, if so, will he accept Kuron as being another Him" and "will the writers be able to get the execs to sign off on TWO queer paladins being queer with EACH OTHER"?

and then... the love confession was never addressed & Shiro stopped interacting with any of the Paladins beyond a professional setting.

By then, a lot of the show was looking Off and I actually looked at the online Voltron fandom to see if other people were Connecting Dots: some Meddling had happened, Shiro was being OOC as all heck, Allura and Keith seemed pretty miserable, Romelle was Sus as Heck, why was Allurance happening, where the heck is Lotor (etc)....

I was, like everyone else, greatly upset by Allura's needlessly being Killed Off and by Shiro's Stock Photo husband. I was also Not Impressed by the alleged "happiness" found by any of the Paladins: Shiro retiring his greatest dream, of flying and exploring the galaxy when he had just found out he Wasn't Going To Die from his Chronic Illness? Jim Kirk, another charismatic spaceship captain who loved to explore the universe, had a similar "retirement" ending for its Heroic Captain.

The first Star Trek film, set post-series, conveyed exactly how Shiro's "happy" ending played out for a character Shiro was almost certainly inspred by: Captain James "Jim" Tiberius Kirk.

Captain Kirk's "happy ending" was introduced in TMP as being: a promotion/retirement, marriage, & settling on Earth. Sound familiar, Shiro? TMP then shows how that "happy ending" plays out for someone like Jim (or Shiro): barely a handful of years later, Jim is miserable in his "retirement" (he was Promoted to a desk job); his Very Sudden marriage to a Previously Unknown Character is crumbling (& is even implied as being arranged by Starfleet's Brass to keep their Poster Boy on earth!); he clearly misses his Team (his Found Family) & at his first "valid" opportunity to get his Team together to fly into space again? That's exactly what Jim does.

Star Trek: TMP also, incidentally, features Jim living out some kind of Space Divorce Drama with his Right-Hand Man, the Half-Human Alien Spock. The two had apparently spent all those years apart and Spocks's "logical response" to [everything post-TOS] was... becoming a Vulcan Monk in order to Purge All His Emotions. (Krolia, please tell me that the Galra do not have an Equivalent to Vulcan's kolinahr & that, if it DOES, you Forbade Keith From Doing It).

Jim & Kirk saved each other, often very impossibly, in every other episode of TOS. They were also so widely shipped by fans that the "founding" of modern fandom cukture is often attributed to those first K/S shippers.

The easy Parallels between Spock/Kirk to Keith/Shiro were something that seemed to increase as VLD continued, likely as its creative team started recognising how naturally Keith & Shiro played out that epic space romance. The relationship between the Black Paladins was consistently emphasized within the series (until it abruptly Wasn't) and their bond was considered the strongest shared by any two paladins. A Sheith required very little effort from VLD's creative team and, given the Time Dilation plot point, that effort WAS made: Keith shows up Older & Blade-ier, Shiro Visibly Reacts and seems perfectly set up to Reevaluate his relationship with Keith, both of them visibly Adult and already established as "Equals".

Reading the research done by Team Purple Lion helped me understand the many degrees of unpleasantness caused by the Forced Removal of Lotor from VLD's endgame: the series' overall plot, key themes and multiple character arcs were contingent to the ugly consequences of Voltron's [murdering] him, the emotional effects Lotor had on Allura, the ways Lotor was integral to the show's themes of Redemption & Recovery & Love (of all forms). Just about every main character (and the imexplicable presence of several other characters) had their Arc underminded by Lotor's staying [murdered]: Lotor (obvs), Allura (VLD's Actual Main Character), Lance (who suddenly became Every Creepy "Nice" Guy), Pidge, Axca, Romelle, Merla, Yzor & her girlfriend, Honnerva...

I was invested in the plot, characters and themes of VLD: its ending wasn't just upsetting, it was contradictory to its own story. Though I am not invested in any VLD ships other than Sheith (for the way the characters are individually Important to me, the ways Shiro is important to Keith, the ways their relationship parallels K/S down to the syllables), the series had set certain ships up through its Themes and within its plot: Allura/Lotor, a reclamation of Allura's agency & a thematic resolution to the major conflicts of the series; Shiro/Keith, a love story the series spent 7 seasons telling; the tentative beginnings of Lance/Pidge, a Chekhov's Gun that would round their individual character development through better understanding each other; Hunk & Recognition of his Ingenuity, Bravery, Compassion (which would, incidentally, feature Hunk/Shay and Hunk's central role in the intergalactic Recovery proces). All of these ships serve a Purpose within VLD's plot, aid individual character development, reinforce the series' overarching themes, and have a solid basis within the text of VLD (as well as outside of it, in interviews and statements from the creative team).

I was able to "recover" from the betrayal of how VLD ended, largely through the detective work of fans like Team Purple Lion and reading many "fix-fic" wherein Allura Lives and Shiro is not OOC as all heck. VLD was one of many series, at the time, whose Betrayal of its themes & characters made Waves all over Fandom. It was, however, one of the Betrayals that hurt me more "personally". It was also a fantastic example of Creatives having horrid working conditions, Corporate Interests actively Hurting their consumers, of Fans being forced to Play Detective due to the modern Media Landscape: the culture of creatives being under strict NDAs, of their being without Unions, of how abruptly Projects can be undermined by the Whims of singular entities (creating additional work on an already overworked labour force, often in ways that betray their own work).

So, uh, surprise: this was a Retrospective inspired by the current Writers Strike & growing awareness (that we have known & ignored for years) of how unethical the working standards of animators are. There are Actual Americans and Actual Artists who can speak on these issues more specifically, as well as the best ways to help the affected: this was a more individual Take, from One Fan, and the ways that media has affected That Fan emotionally (though, being an Aspie, i'm pretty distanced from articulating any Specifics beyond "upset" because "this is narratively inconsistent"). The purpose of writing this was personal catharsis, a means of discovering how I feel about VLD all these years later, and perhaps as an act of microcosm within a greater fandom macrosm RE: engagement with media & correctly identifying how the faults of its business structure sabotage excellent works of fiction from staying "excellent" or becoming "magnificent".

*"Korean-Japanese" seems to ne the current consensus but as Sourced outside the text of the series. It is not his "exact amounts of Asian" that Keith is "relevant" to me but his being both Mixed & disconnected from his asian Heritage.

#hollow whispers #vld meta #sheith meta #asian representation #queer asian representation #aspie things #half-human aliens #spirk meta #vld retrospective #go check out the purple lion project #i have not the spoons to do hyperlinks today #fandom things

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dumbledore-and-grindelwald · 2 years

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Thank you for your thoughts on the aberforth headcanons I've seen floating around. I didn't have the energy to refute them but there is nothing in canon to confirm them and plenty to offer an alternative explanation for his behaviour.

Aberforth confronting albus and gellert is entirely explained by their idea to run away and take ariana. Gellert fleeing after Ariana's death makes complete sense because of that death alone (we know he had done something bad enough to get expelledand allegedly had had encounters with the law too. A girl dieing a violent death in his presence wouldn't have looked good). There is no homophobia needed to explain either of these occurrences. Do I think Aberforth was entirely free of homophobic biases? Maybe not. He grew up in the countryside in the late 19th century. Even if the wizarding world is slightly more permissable, he probably held some ingrained prejudices. But I don't believe for a second that that's the reason he grew apart from albus

I don't know if he would have. Newt and Theseus do not seem weirded out by Albus being in love with a man; just by who the man is. I'm not saying that there isn't a chance that Aberforth would have picked up biases from the society, but there's no actual evidence or even a hint of that in the books. The casual use of ‘sod’ in FB is not homophobic as much as some people try to make it so, which is exactly why Albus does not feel offended. It’s not used in its original context and it’s not used to discriminate a gay person. If you look at words that have become slang, people shouldn’t swear at all because most of them have meaning that was targetted to specific groups, beliefs, actions or mental and pshychological states in the original context. When something has become slang it has reached the point of being taken out of that context. Looking at how a word still carries its negative connotations and cannot be completely separated from its initial meaning has been brought to attention by social sciences in much more recent years. These are characters who have not been raised in the climate of social justice and political correctness that we have, neither have they been raised at a time when ‘sod’ stood for sodomite. So the idea that one has to apologize for using it in the presense of a gay person would not have occured to anyone. Projecting our own education to that time is just anachronistic.

Also, Aberforth did not try to rip away Albus' happiness when he could let him have it. In FB mentions that he saw everything that went on in the house.This probably refers to many things: Ariana's confition, Kendra's lies, Albus' developing plans with Gellert during that summer. I doubt that there is a chance that Albus's plans came into Aberforth's attention so late, but he let him have his dreams for a while. Still, he didn't speak until two months had passed and he was about do go back to Hogwarts.

In the beginning of that summer Aberforth had told Albus that he would leave school and take care of Ariana. Albus insisted to take on as the carer of the family and for Aberforth to continue school. He was given an out but he made his choice. He did not even have his brains in his head enough to admit that he was going back on his word and to tell Aberforth that he should drop out to take care of Ariana. He was selfish. It wasn't done in an ill-intended way. He just wanted everything. He wanted to be able to use his intellect, he wanted power, he wanted to make up for what his family had gone through by controlling the muggles, he wanted love and he still deluded himself that he could do all that without letting down his siblings because he loved them and he did not want to make himself choose.

So, what should Aberforth have done, held his tongue? Would Ariana have survived being moved across Europe? Would she have survived the hunt for the hallows? If they had rallies like the one in Paris would she have been able to remain stable? I won't go into Gellert potentially weaponizing her, because that's not something that either brother would or could have thought at the time. At the end of the day, Aberforth did not ask Albus to choose between family and love. Even if I don't think for a second that he liked Gellert as a person, when he confronted Albus he did not even argue against the relationship; just against their departure. He just pointed out in his unsophisticated way that Albus could not be a carer for the family AND pursue politics. Ultimately, if Albus and Gellert were content to do so (Albus might have settled with a heavy heart and Gellert would never, but that's another discussion), they could have stayed at the Hollow. It wasn't Aberforth's fault that Albus couldn't have the cake and eat it too.

Also, as you said, Gellert's departure had everything to do with Ariana's death. Again, there is nothing in any part of the canon suggesting that Gellert left because Aberforth was homophobic. In fact it's ludicrous how out of character this sounds. if Aberforth was homophobic (which he wasn't) Grindelwald would have barely cared --certainly not enough to leave- and that would have been only for Albus' sake. Instead, let's notice how Albus describes Grindelwald's departure: "He vanished, with his plans for seizing power, and his schemes for Muggle torture, and his dreams of the Deathly Hallows...". And Bathilda mentions that after Ariana's death Gellert returned home agitated and wanted to leave the very next day. It's repercussions he feared. Not seeing any chance that Albus would follow him now, he didn't see a point in sticking around and risking himself or in not pursuing his plans.

#aberforth dumbledore #albus dumbledore #gellert grindleward #asks #harry potter

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xaryxarybdis · 1 year

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hello!!!! i have a very indulgent writing question as i am working on a short story for my creative writing class😭 for your work on archive of our own, i bequeath nothingness by no one, what inspired some of your perceptions on time loops and nihilism? what were your key inspirations for writing?

Hello ! First of all, my apologies for taking so long to answer, I hope this doesn't reach you too late to be useful. And don't worry-I love talking about writing and everything it implies, and I guarantee you your question was no less self-indulgent than my answer will be.

Concerning the time-loop aspect of the story, the most immediate source of inspiration that comes to my mind is the movie Edge of Tomorrow (2014). The movie itself is a fairly classic action flick, but I remember seeing it when it came out and immediately being completely enamored with the concept of a time loop that isn't the classic groundhog day-type situation, but rather one where the loops are dependant on the death of the protagonist. So that definitely stuck at the back of my mind and ultimately inspired the way I wrote I bequeath nothingness to no one. I have not looked into the matter and this particular movie might not be the first piece of media to put this particular spin on the idea of time loops, but it's the one I personally came across during my formative years, so that's the one I'd quote as an inspiration.

The nihilism part of your question was much more difficult for me to answer, because I found it much more difficult to reverse-engineer where most of this stuff came from. So I'm afraid my answer might not be quite as complete as you might have wished, and for that I apologize. I think part of the difficulty that much of it is simply part of the greater cultural canon I grew up in, though I can pinpoint some key elements: looking back, a lot of the sense of absolute alienation from the rest of human society can be traced back to Albert Camus (esp. The Stranger, wherein the protagonist's profound otherness and decaying sense of reality really stuck with me). Moreover, I remember reading Kafka's Metamorphosis not too long before writing this particular piece and while I don't disagree with all the classical interpretations of the story, I felt very strongly that it also served as a particularly striking metaphor for mental illness (or, well, at least mine): the sensation of slowly transforming into something monstruous and unrecognizable, of being put away in a room, neither allowed into human society nor to escape it entirely, but kept quietly, with an iron grip, at arm's length. More pertinently, I think Sasuke's mental state in the story has a lot in common with that of the protagonist of Kafka's tale: he, himself, is slowly changing, metamorphosing, into something he feels is profoundly alien, while all around him, the world stays the same, stays normal in a way he knows he will never be again.

The last work I will quote as inspiration will sound random as shit, but hear me out, I swear I have a point in there somewhere: Thomas Harris' Hannibal, third installment in his Hannibal Lecter series. I fucking hate this book. It makes me unjustifiably angry. Not because it's bad, it's great. I just hate what it does to its Main character with a passion.

Now, for context (and spoilers ahoy): Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal both follow Clarice Starling, a young FBI agent who, for reasons unclear and unimportant to our purposes, attracts the attention of the titular character Hannibal Lecter, who then proceeds to slowly, thoroughly fuck up her life. Towards the end of the book, Clarice’s life clearly has gone past the point of no return: even if she survives, she has no life to return to. Her career is gone, she is under suspicion from the law, and even her friends are in danger by association. She is cast adrift, and there she has one choice: let the man who did this to her die (not even kill him herself - simply let his death happen), or try, herself, alone, with no support, against overwhelming odds, to save him.

Here is the thing about Clarice Starling: she is not a heroic paragon of virtue. She’s a cool, calculated person, who’s clever enough to recognize in herself seeds of ruthlessness that could become evil. But here is the thing about Clarice: she chooses to do good. It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t come to her instinctively, as it does some people, because she consistently, relentlessly, makes the choices that will benefit others. And here, at the end of her journey, where all around her is darkness, and the world is screaming at her that everything and everyone is terrible and cruel and unjust, she drops the sickest line of Thomas Harris’ entire career:

The world will not be this way within the reach of my arm.

This simple sentence - both acceptance and refusal, a decision to stand her ground on this undeniably dark earth - crystallises Starling as one of the most memorable characters I’ve ever read in fiction.

And then Thomas Harris just goes and fucking ruins it. The tl;dr: she succeeds in saving Hannibal Lecter’s life, he kidnaps her and brainwashes her into eating people with him, they’re in love and they go off into the sunset, to live happily ever after. The end.

In a book series about the most fucked-up murders you could possibly come up with, this might be the most repulsive thing to happen. Because, let’s be clear: Clarice Starling, at this point, is dead. The one we know, anyway. She dies the moment she saves Lecter, because what comes out of what he does to her next is a scrambled mess of the parts that used to make up Starling, but now make up this still, eerie, bobbing doll. For the reader, who has followed in Clarice’s footsteps for two books, it feels as close to a profanation as can be. It’s obscene. And perhaps it’s the point, but what I wanted to get at is: Sasuke, too, is not a “naturally” good character. His morals are fucked, he doesn’t know what normal is, he commits acts of objectively great evil. Like Clarice Starling, goodness is something he has to seek. Part of his growth is learning that not only goodness is a choice he has to make, but that it is one he can make. That the world is dark, and cruel, and terrible, but that he doesn’t have to be. He can refuse this dark and unjust world the right to be this way within the reach of his arm.

So, basically: if only out of spite, I like to think a little bit of Clarice Starling lives on in Sasuke. (She deserved better and I will die on this hill, thank you very much.)

The last source of inspiration I’ll quote is, quite simply, folk tales. More specifically folklore about fairies and elves, who contributed quite a bit to my version of Kaguya. I won’t divulge the exact area I come from because I don’t want to dox myself, but in the version of the tales I grew up with, the fair folk lives in the mirrors and crevices of the world: the water-smoothed caves underfoot, where you can still hear the slow, unescapable tinkling noise of water dripping; the burrows under the roots of elder trees; the back of a man’s mind; the hollow heart of the moon.

In the stories, the fairies, nominally, look humanoid. But they’re wrong: their limbs are too long, their fingers too tapered, their faces too pointy, too smooth. They’re imitating us, but they always get it just a little bit wrong. It clearly inspired this line in particular:

[...] its smooth white face, a triangular imitation of humanity, human skin threaded over a lion’s skull.

Kaguya - and, by extension, the concept of godhood in the story - resembles the folktales’ fairies as well in the sense that she is unchanging. If you fall into Fairyland, you are surrounded with creatures that incomprehensibly older and more powerful than you are. To them, you are, at best, a toy, at worst, vermin. But the fairies have one weakness: they do not change. They’re immortal. They cannot. But you, mortal, you have this thing they cannot name and yet so desperately crave: a heart.

This is how you outwit the fairies, in the stories: you endure. You are vermin, and like vermin you can be stamped down, but never for long. This is what the stories tell you: be patient, be watchful, be clever. Be strong, for you must endure; be cunning, for you must learn. Do the one thing they cannot do: adapt.

Sasuke’s story is pretty much a retelling of that one.

I realize now that this is getting horribly long; I apologize. (Though I did warn you: once you get me talking...) I’ve probably missed a lot of influences that i’ll feel stupid for not recalling later, but that’s life, I suppose. I hope this was helpful to you in any way, and, if not, then at least entertaining. If you have any other questions, please don’t hesitate to ask them, I think I’ve made it obvious that I would be delighted to answer. And if you ever want to share what you wrote with me, I would be absolutely honored to read it! (Though I perfectly understand if you cannot or would rather not share it, I just want you to know the option is open if you so choose.) Have a wonderful day!

#ask

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uncannybrutal · 11 months

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I wanna talk about the completely batshit levels of Twitterification and rage within the Homestuck fandom circa 2019, specifically about the human characters' races - canon, headcanon, and absolute vitriol between real people. (long post)

No one seemed to acknowledge that only 4 of the 8 kids - Jegbert, Dave, Rose and Jane - would have any real-life background on the actual history surrounding the concept of race and how it manifests on the day-to-day culture of the US, how it is, how it shaped the culture they participate in. You know, like, as its participants. They're the only ones who would even really have any meaning for it and express it in various distinctly American ways: I'm talking Rose's "especially ethnic wedding" bit, I'm talking that conversation between John and Dave where Bro is talked about as a white dude, etc.

Jade, Jake, Roxy, and Dirk, as [fictional] people, were never racialized in any significant way - feel free to lmk if this is wrong. As far as I know though, fundamentally, they are truly raceless in canon.

And look, this is actually important to me as someone who grew up outside the USAmerican culture, in which race is given a very extreme level of importance compared to most other places in the world (and kinda rightfully so? considering the violent history, the atrocities), and I had only recently moved to the US/was only just starting to learn about this when I started to read Homestuck and participate in its fan culture. Which, despite having people in it from all over the globe, IS eminently American.

People were blocking and callout-posting over Pesterquest sprites and the fanart of said sprites. Group chats were made, cliques were formed, and there was this sort of... divide between notable people of color who liked Homestuck and notable white people who liked Homestuck. It was a weird time. Headcanons were being made about fictional people then real people were being attacked over said headcanons, real people being driven to real levels of real mental illness over drawings of fictional characters.

But if that seems like a shallow and antagonistic way to put it, that's because it is. If you were IN IT, especially as a person of color, it became something that was legitimately important to you. An elaborate example based on real feelings: It meant everything to you to see Roxy with those curls after growing up surrounded by 2010s anime interpretations where any wave in a hairstyle was clearly done by a hair curler. And because it was so important to you, when it technically became the standard for Roxy, you were honestly kinda angry that some people kept drawing her with the same hair and features they always did before - the white features they always drew her in. The white features everyone treated as the default, as the most attractive, as the "you can draw them however you'd like, but this is just kinda how they are normally"-- white.

White as the default was and is a big problem in the Homestuck fandom, and if you consider the fandom history and also the existence of real people with real feelings, there was never a chance it wouldn't turn out the way it did. It was a disaster, honestly.

But it is funny, looking back into a time that never existed anywhere but the text itself, that only half the characters relevant to this thought would give a fuck about and be shaped by race in any important way. It was always about real people, never really about the characters themselves. Functionally, in this context, the characters became agents of projection. This shouldn't have harmed anybody... if not for the fact that the text doesn't exist isolated from reality. Homestuck doesn't exist in a vacuum.

Homestuck just so happened to exist in the same world and in the same culture that treats that distinct whiteness as the default, and unfortunately, both as a fandom and by itself, Homestuck couldn't have existed without that - at least not without being changed beyond recognition. That's just the reality of it, even if I wish it could've been avoided in a different reality or something. Everything that happened was just a result of this, and it was inevitable.

#==>#it's deeply fucked up but it doesn't stop being true and I hate it lol

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zvaigzdelasas · 3 years

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genuinely asking here, do you think the inability to prepare food for oneself and take showers is a product of capitalism?

I think that 'product of capitalism' is a misleading way of looking at it - "disability" as a coherent category is a modern capitalist framework, so in that way yes. But as to 'would this have happened to my brain if I didnt grow up in capitalism' thats an abstract question bc if you grew up in communism you'd be a fundamentally different person than you are today, so it's an unprovable counterfactual & leads to a lot of kneejerk reactions. There is no universal "You" somewhere out there in the stars. You are a product of the world you live in.

In pre-capitalist societies, there wasn't an idea that all these different ailments (blindness, deafness, leprosy, mental illnesses, etc) were all a part of this one big umbrella, there was specific ways ppl would treat specific people, but no universally applicable category bc different 'disabilities' have different effects on people.

Now this isn't to say we should go back to that, obviously it was incredibly inadequate - it's just to show that having an umbrella category of "people with things wrong with them" is a social choice, and that social choice leads to the development of certain social institutions, social norms, and practices. It's a consequence of capitalism seeing every person as only 'worth' whatever they can contribute financially.

The word "ability" (and consequently "disability") was first used in this context in england to figure out whether a given person should be sent to the Work House or the Poor House, and it was explicitly used to be a quick guess of 'can we wring any sellable Value out of this one?' before moving onto the next one.

Thus, "ability" should be understood as "ability to be exploited" & "disability" as "inability to be exploited" ("exploit" in the marxist sense of, roughly, 'someone else wouldn't be able to make their living without your work').

(This is a good talk abt disability, capitalism, and pre-capitalist societies.)

So what would mental health look like beyond capitalism? Well as a first universal, people would have full control over the products of their own labor, and things would be made for their usefulness as opposed to profitability, so people wouldnt need to prove to capitalists that they're productive enough to deserve to eat (or pitiable enough to eat on someone else's dime).

"from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs" is the most disability-supporting maxim imaginable, and any society not living up to that is failing people.

Your brain is plastic, it is literally impossible for it to not change in response to a changing environment. That also points to your lived environment being an obvious major factor in developing your brain meat to the point it is today. "Nature vs nurture" is a false binary, you are Always & *Only* acting in response to your environment, in comparison to past environments. Plastic changes its shape, but not all at once.

As to "well what if the world got rid of capitalism tomorrow - would I still have trouble with X or Y" if you have trouble with it today, you'll have trouble with it tomorrow. The question is about repetition & the new environments your brain adapts to, as well as broader societal health (mental & physical) programs being a natural new focus, now that production is no longer oriented for profit.

The question is about how we live as vacuum-sealed individuals atomically living in our own individual worlds - that would change, you would be able to live and interact regularly with friends who know whether you experience specific problems & would be driven to check up on you about those out of love and comradery. Having everyone live in their own boxes, sealed away from each other is an ideal handed down to us by the Settler Colonial history of the US & the US's influence on global structures in the last 500 years. "You too can be the brave cowboy living on the frontier, not needing anyone else to take care of you".

Of course that image is completely inaccurate but it's what we have, bc it's also what's easiest to profit off of.

This is a great talk on neuroplasticity & the constraints set upon our neural development by capitalism, maybe a bit academic but it's got lots of good stuff

The question isn't so much "capitalism created x or y & communism will fix it overnight", the question is more about "how is capitalist society hindering each of our growths as individuals" by adding stresses, anxieties, and dangerous norms.

#feel free to ask more #bit scattered thoughts rn #and its a giant question tbh

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camxnoel-updates · 3 years

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Cameron Monaghan brought the character of Ian Gallagher to life on Showtime’s hit series, Shameless. The series aired for a total of 11 seasons after originally premiering in 2011. It ranked as the network’s no. 1 comedy, longest-running series, and had the youngest-skewing audience of any Showtime series. Monaghan also joined two legendary universes with roles in both Gotham and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, which I got to ask him about too!

The final season of SHAMELESS finds the Gallagher family and the South Side at a crossroads, with changes caused by the COVID pandemic, gentrification, and aging to reconcile. As Frank confronts his own mortality and family ties in his alcoholic and drug-induced twilight years, Lip struggles with the prospect of becoming the family’s new patriarch. Newlyweds Ian (Cameron Monaghan) and Mickey (Noel Fisher) are figuring out the rules and responsibilities of being in a committed relationship while Deb embraces her individuality and single motherhood. Carl finds an unlikely new career in law enforcement and Kevin and V struggle to decide whether a hard life on the South Side is worth fighting for.

Along with the final season, fans also got a six-episode series that featured new Shameless scenes juxtaposed with a retrospective look at each character’s journey over the prior 10 seasons, titled, Shameless Hall of Shame. The first episode followed Ian and Mickey, showcasing their unique relationship and its evolution from a teen fling into a loving, complicated marriage.

I was able to chat with the actor over zoom and ask him all of my burning questions regarding the series finale, Ian and Mickey’s future, the show’s open ending, the representation his character provided to those watching, what he kept from the set, his future projects, and so much more! Keep reading to find out everything he told me.

So first of all, I want to say a huge congrats to you for wrapping Shameless after 11 seasons and bringing this character to life, who has inspired so many and that so many relate to. I wanted to ask, what has your time on the show meant to you and how would you describe how it helped you grow as an actor?

Cameron Monaghan: I mean, it’s so difficult to distill 11 years into some sort of concise answer, but it’s meant a lot for so many reasons. I think that obviously it’s been important for my career and my life in a sense of how it’s not only given me exposure but also given all of us a platform as performers to be able to tell interesting and challenging stories and to really develop and grow. Obviously, we had a couple of old pros on the show– when I say old pros, I’m not calling them old, just that they’re professionals and they’ve been doing it for a long time, but like William H. Macy, Joan Cusack, and a number of people who had very storied careers. Then we had actors on the show who had never appeared on anything prior and for a lot of us, we were somewhere in the middle, where we’d been working for a number of years, but hadn’t been given the opportunities to really put ourselves out there in such a significant way.

So being able to get an audience over the course of 11 years– and the show grew steadily, it was a marginal success at first, but it wasn’t until like season 4 or 5 that it really started to be seen by people and really connect on a larger platform, and a lot of that had to do with Netflix. When that happens we had such an influx of people kind of saying how they related to it and I think that that’s something that I’ve really taken away– I think we’ve all taken away, to be able to hear a lot of other people’s stories and how they’ve connected these stories in entirely different ways. Everyone has had different favorite characters or storylines and they have brought their own personal experiences to that, but for people to say that they feel seen or heard in some ways by these stories, I think is very special. You know, the character that I was playing was an LGBT love story, as well as a story about mental illness, and coping and struggling with that. I had so many positive responses from people regarding those things, and it was amazing to hear people’s responses. So I think that not only was I able to grow as an actor but being able to hear that response and feedback helps you grow as a human being too. I guess that’s what one of my major takeaways is.

What was that final day of shooting like for you, and how did you feel when you officially wrapped?

It was a bit surreal. I don’t think it really set in at first. It’s always funny when you wrap on a project, I feel like it comes in waves, and with something like a TV show, you start to feel it on the last few episodes of like, “Oh, wow, it’s going to be over.” You start trying to find your little ways of saying goodbye to people and understanding that these conversations are obviously not the last for everyone; we’re still close with each other, but you start to recognize that within the context of the show they’ll be your last so that’s a difficult thing. I’ve never been particularly good at saying goodbye, you know? I feel like in general, I’m kind of a person that just likes to be like, “I’m just going to walk away from it cause I don’t know what else to do really.”

So, we were shooting pretty late at night and we were all there hanging out and cracking jokes, and it was just of like, “Oh, I guess that’s it.” We all kind of looked at each other like, “Well, what do we do now?” A bunch of us stuck around for a few hours afterward, we popped a bottle of champagne, and we sat in each others’ trailers and just kinda hung out until pretty early in the morning, the next day. Then we’ve all kind of just been hanging out and seeing each other since. Everyone’s been really busy, thankfully. So we’ve been traveling and going to different cities for work, but when we’ve been in town we’ve been trying to see each other. I had dinner with Jeremy and Ethan, who played my brothers on the show last week. Noel Fisher, I just saw yesterday. I’m going to see Shanola Hampton in a few days. We’re all still staying in touch with each other is what I’ll say.

Were you personally satisfied with the ending of the show? I think it was very open-ended, which was kind of nice and left a lot open for the future. And was there anything you wanted to see for your character that we weren’t able to?

Endings are difficult in general, but I feel like, especially with a show like Shameless, which is a show about a slice of life and sort of how existence doesn’t really fall into a perfect narrative; it tends to be messy and kind of just continue in spite of itself, and it’s a stream of these little victories and these constant mistakes. So you can’t really cap off a pure ending to a story like that. I think that what John Wells tried to do with writing it is not really conclude the stories. He concludes certain aspects, but the way that he explained it to us is he wanted it to feel like if you were walking through the streets of Chicago, maybe you might bump into these characters. Maybe they’re still out there and maybe they’re still doing things. Some of us had more resolution than others.

I would actually say that the Ian and Mickey storyline was one that did have a fair amount of resolution for the final episode. It was about their anniversary, how they were going to deal with their future, and they’ve kind of figured out some sort of life with each other. There are still large questions, whether or not they’re going to have kids and what the terms of their marriage will entail in the future, but those are questions that are lifelong questions, and ones that I think that we know these characters well enough and we understand their relationships well enough that we can draw our own conclusions for. I think there is something beautiful about the fact that the audience will project what their future for these characters will be.

I think it was a challenging final season because of so many extenuating factors in the world. All shows, businesses, everything was trying frantically to keep up with a changing landscape, and the fact that we were able to make it in spite of all of those things, I think is a victory in itself; one that we are all proud of and happy with. I do think there’s still a future, years out, where we might return to these characters and explore them further. I think that I’m happy putting them to bed for now, I think we all are, but I would like to maybe check in with these characters in 5 or 10 years, and just kind of see where they’re at and what they’re doing.

Kind of like a little Shameless movie, just to play catch up for a little bit.

Yeah, I think that’s something that is kind of more possible now with these streaming networks. They’ve done it with a few series, to sometimes success and sometimes mixed results, but I do think there is a possibility of a reunion season or something like that, depending on where the show fits into the public consciousness in a few years, you know? It’s an open question, but one I’d be excited to see.

How you would describe Ian’s evolution and journey on the show?

I think that Ian has come a long way in terms of confidence and assuredness in himself and his own decisions. I think that’s what a lot of the exploration of the character was, especially in the middle seasons between seasons like 3 to 8 or 9, are this guy who sort of just doesn’t necessarily know what he wants for himself and he’s dealing with a bunch of surprises about himself that he doesn’t necessarily understand, or hasn’t really come to terms with. I think it’s amazing to see Ian in these earlier episodes where he’s kind of getting kicked around by his relationships and by his family. He’s kind of a forgotten kid a little bit. He’s like a middle child, who’s just sort of– people aren’t really looking out for him. His brother does to a certain extent, but also his brother is kind of telling him what he wants for himself and Ian isn’t as active.

At a certain point, he starts to really come into his own as an adult and as a human being. I think it’s amazing how we see him as not only a big brother by the end of the series, but also sort of– there’s something a bit paternal about him. He becomes a bit of a father figure, even a little bit in his relationships. I think it’s interesting how Mickey was always sort of the commanding force and deciding factor for so much of the series; when Ian was really struggling with mental illness and down in the dumps, Mickey is the kind of guy who was looking after him, but by the end of the series, Mickey is a bit childlike in certain ways. Ian is kind of protecting him to a certain extent, and even with his older brother, Lip, Ian is sort of looking out for him in a slightly paternal way, which I think is kind of interesting. He really comes a long way in sort of being confident enough in himself to start looking out for other people that I think is a really great quality. It makes him a character who has made a fair amount of mistakes but mistakes that we understand, and I think that ultimately he’s a guy that I understand and really relate to because he does have this quality to him.

So I have to ask you some questions about Ian and Mickey. I personally love them together, they were one of the reasons I started watching the show. In the end, as you said, we kind of get some closure, but also an open ending with them and it’s a happy one; they’re together and celebrating their anniversary. In your head, what do you think that their future holds? Do you think kids are in the picture; do you think they’re going to be parents? Ideally, what is your version of their happy ending, if you could create it?

I think that they both still need to do some work. I would say that they need to do work as a couple in their marriage still of just defining the terms of what is it that they want financially, sexually, intimately, personally, all of these things. It’s a show full of people who aren’t great at communication or dealing with their own feelings– I mean to a certain extent, most human beings aren’t, but these guys, especially, come from a rough background and they have that tendency of just kind of wanting to push that stuff down. Ian has really opened up Mickey and Mickey to a certain extent has really opened up Ian over the course of the series, but I still don’t think they’re fully all the way there. Mickey has a lot of emotional baggage when it comes to parenthood, his father, and dealing with responsibility.

I don’t know if Mickey is fully there. Hopefully, he would be one day in the future. And hopefully, Ian would be patient enough to give him the space to make that decision and to not want to rush into it. I do think that it would be something in their future. Parenthood was a huge motivating factor for Ian earlier in the series, going so far as to steal someone’s baby at some point because he wants to be a father. I would hope that they would be able to provide that for him and for themselves, but there’s no way to know, we have to sort of make that assumption for ourselves, but I think so.

Ian and Mickey have been this fan-favorite couple that means so much to the LGBTQ+ community in terms of representation. What was the moment that you personally started rooting for them?

I think it was pretty early. I was rooting for Ian from the first episode, from the pilot, but the second that Mickey gets introduced to the show, he brought such a fun dynamic with him. Obviously, a massive amount of charisma that was coming from Noel Fisher. The scenes were always fun, exciting, and felt steeped in a lot of dramatic tension. Whether or not they were destined to be together was kind of a question that still was developing. In the first season to the third season, the Mickey character is pretty rough emotionally and physically; he is at points pretty, extremely abusive in a way that is great for a character and for a story, but if I was talking to Ian as a person in real life, I would probably say, “Get the hell away from this guy. He’s awful for you.”

But within the context of the story, we’re able to get the internal life of these characters and we understand them well enough to really want to be rooting for them and see them succeed. It builds into this pretty epic love story of these characters that really do feel kind of intertwined by fate and something greater. It feels like you have these forces pulling for them in a way that you want with every fiber of your being to see it work out for them because you care for them. So obviously, Noel and I had been rooting for these characters the entire time, but it was really fun playing some of the ridiculousness of the situations of the two of them, where they were just very at odds with each other at times. It was a joy bouncing off of each other in both the highs and the lows of the character.

Is there sort of a message that you hope their love story gives to viewers that see themselves in these characters?

Well, I think the aspects of the characters, especially for Mickey, that I’m sure a lot of people relate to, and it is sort of the greatest tragedy of the character, is how he is deeply in the closet and he feels that he can’t embrace his own self and also this beautiful love because of this situation that he’s in; a traumatic home life, specifically an abusive father, and also an environment that doesn’t allow him to be what he wants to be. I guess the message that I do hope that people who are relating to that get is that there are places where you can be accepted and there are better options for you, and sometimes that takes time, but as cliched as it is, it does get better. So hopefully people are able to find these safe environments for themselves to be able to improve the quality of life and to get better situations. I hope that people find hope in the story ultimately.

Another relationship of Ian’s that I have to discuss is his relationship with the whole Gallagher family; that was a focus of the series since day one. What was your favorite part of their dynamic and playing off that?

Obviously, the chaos of the family is always really fun to play. We had these scenes that were kind of an amazing balancing act of like 8 or 9 people in a scene, all messing around with these different storylines that are bouncing off of each other, intertwining, and you have this really biting sharp satirical dialogue that all had a very specific rhythm to it and was a sort of flow that was established early in the show that was kind of kept across the entire series; one that was a genuine joy as a performer to play. But I think that specifically the relationship that I’ve always been a fan of and I love from the start, is probably– it’s definitely one of my favorite relationships on the show– was the relationship between Ian and Lip.

There’s not a lot of depictions of brotherhood and intimacy between men that are deeply sensitive, close, and uncomplicated. Those are definitely scenes that I felt very personally moved by, of two brothers who have just had a world of shit, a lot of complicated and messed up things that have been dropped on their heads that they’ve been dealing with for the entirety of their lives, but they’ve sort of made a pact that they were just gonna be there for each other no matter what. If they weren’t there for each other, who knows if they would have survived. I think that there’s something really amazing about those scenes in that they’re just very open with each other, and that’s something that’s established right from the start and was kind of one of those key relationships for the show that survived until the very last episode and that I’m very proud of, cause I do think that those are some of my personal favorite scenes of the show.

Here’s a fun three-part question: most challenging, fun, and insane storyline for you as an actor?

Most challenging would probably have to be… we reached a point in the series around season 8 and they were trying to contextualize the characters in a modern way, put them into new circumstances, but try to retain what the characters were, but they’ve moved a lot from where they originally were. We were at a point where we were getting so many new writers onto the series, and the show I feel struggled for a second, which happens with any series that’s been on for a while. It felt like there was a point where they didn’t know what they wanted to do with Ian. There were a couple of episodes where I was kind of looking at the story and being like, “What are we doing here? It doesn’t really feel like anything is happening with him and we’re kind of floating across these relationships.” I wasn’t sure what we were trying to say, but that being said, that is kind of true to life, to a certain degree, where we do find ourselves sometimes in these ruts where we don’t know what we’re doing with our relationships, our lives, and ourselves. There is a little bit of a struggle there and that is kind of real to a certain degree, and I do think having those episodes make when they started finding the way with the character and relationships again, kind of more satisfying cause he sort of loses his way and he comes back. So it was kind of a challenge, but I think it all worked out ultimately.

Craziest would have to be… so this is one that no one would even know is like a thing really, no one would even think of it as a thing, but the scene in the pilot episode, Lip and Ian jump out of like a window and they run out of a house to escape an angry parent, right? And they’re kind of running in a rush. So they run out in their socks, down the street, and it’s the middle of January in Chicago and the streets are covered in mud, water, and ice. I think it’s the first time I’ve ever felt in my life that I actually thought my feet were going to like fall off. I thought we were going to have to amputate a toe because of frostbite. We did the scene a bunch of times, and because Jeremy and I were young, we were just sort of trying to be tough, just like, “Yeah, whatever, it’s not a problem. We can do this over and over, not a big deal.” Then I definitely learned a lesson of like, when something is a problem, you have to say, it’s a problem.

Most fun… I don’t know if I can distill it to just one scene. I think the most fun was just getting to interact with all of the wildly different personalities of our show, and just kind of get to sit around and hang out with everyone. There were times that we would just be laughing so hard that one of us would start and we just end up crying, laughing. Usually, it was because of Howey cracking jokes or something like that, but it could be just the dumbest to smallest thing, but it’s the kind of thing when you become so comfortable with people, it just starts to happen. Sometimes it was just the downtime and these little small kind of boring or mundane moments that really ended up being some of my favorite experiences.

Did you take anything from the set at all?

I did. So in the final season, there’s a storyline where Frank steals Nighthawks, the Edward Hopper painting, and that was actually done in cooperation with the Art Institute of Chicago and the Edward Hopper estate. They did these really high-resolution prints of it that were then painted over by hand, and they even took pictures of the back and mimicked the way that the canvas wrapped over, the small writing, and everything. It’s a pretty damn good forgery of Nighthawks. So I stole one of those and that’s hanging up in my living room. I also stole one of the mugs cause in the show we’re always having breakfast and drinking coffee, so there are these rooster mugs and I stole one of those.

Since you’re talking to The Nerds of Color, I have to ask you about Star Wars and Gotham. What stood out to you about Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order compared to your other work, and what did it mean to you to join that iconic universe?

I mean, what stood out pretty quickly was that it had a tone all of its own. Star Wars is a very specific tone. It has sort of its own language, pacing, style, and rhythm; there’s something very specific about it, something that I’m a big fan of. I grew up watching the Star Wars movies and that was definitely… you know, anytime that you’re jumping onto something with an active and passionate fanbase it’s going to be slightly intimidating. There’s no way around that. Thankfully, I’ve at this point done enough projects with really passionate fanbases to kind of understand what that entails, which is that there’s going to be a lot of opinions. A lot of people are really excited about things and no matter what, even the smallest things, someone’s going to be very, very angry about it. That comes along with the territory, but that’s kind of fun to a certain degree; it’s fun to hear such minutiae and being examined, and these conversations are ones that are being had on set too.

There’s so much conversation between the Lucasfilm story group, Respawn, and EA, who are the production companies behind the game, and also the cast, directors, and everybody involved are sometimes discussing, “How does a person stand? How does one get onto a speeder bike? What kind of sound does this monster make?” And there’s always a genuine deference and respect to the series. We know how much people care about it. We know because we care about it a lot, and everyone on this project are huge fans of the source material. So that was exciting to be a part of, obviously; I mean, that should go without saying. It’s so freaking cool to be a Jedi and to be the face of this massive franchise, and to be able to not only be a part of a really well-known property and part of this large project but also to be able to tell an interesting and intimate story within it. For as bombastic as all of the action is, and as big as the Star Wars universe is, I feel the story of Cal Kestis and the people that he interacts with is a somewhat smaller one and a more intimate one. It’s ultimately, at least for me, a pretty emotionally resonant one and a story that I actually very much care about and relate to. I think that was probably the most exciting part about it, was being able to within the framework of this big machinery of what Star Wars is, still tell a story that might actually affect people and make them feel things, I think was just really cool.

Could you describe how it felt to take on the role of the Joker?

Exciting, intimidating, an honor, and challenging; it’s a role that I didn’t take lightly. I understood what it was, which is that a lot of the people who were seeing me in the role had never heard of me and didn’t know who I was, and it was a way to prove myself and to show off my take of what I could do with this. It was really cool too with that show that we were getting to do something that had never really been done before with the character, which is to show multiple versions and possibilities of what that character could be, and to kind of tip our hat to some of the famous stories that came before, and then kind of give a unique spin and show off some new things with it as well.

Obviously, that show was heightened to a certain degree and kind of existed in this wacky over-the-top violent, but also slightly cartoony universe that was kind of its own little thing. That was really fun to play around with it and to totally get to do something kind of different with that, something that we hadn’t seen before. But I think it was specifically really intimidating because, at that point of casting when I performed the episode in the first season of that show, no one had played the role since Heath Ledger had posthumously won the Oscar for the role. So the only people who had touched it in live-action had been Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger, which are just massive, massive shoes to fill and two people that I deeply admired. Again, it’s just sort of a case of respect and wanting to kind of come in, just do my absolute best with the material, and to try to pay a certain level of honor to the people that came before.

Anything you can tease about what you’re going to do next? Any future projects?

Absolutely. It’s always difficult with this stuff because there’s only so much you can say. I can say that I just shot a film that hasn’t been announced yet, but I was out of town shooting it for a while. It’s the starring role in the film, and that will come out to theaters in the near future. I’m also working on another project over the course of the next year that I will be working on and off for. Again, thanks to the joys of NDAs, I can’t actually say what it is. I have a movie that I will be doing in June and then also I’m starting to move a bit behind the camera as well. So I’m working on producing and starring in a feature in August or September. And I’m writing a couple of projects right now as well. So it’s a loaded year for the next year, but it’s all very exciting that’s happening.

#LOVED THIS #cameron monaghan #shameless #shameless us #ian gallagher #gallavich #noel fisher #mickey milkovich #jerome valeska #the joker #gotham #jeremiah valeska #mr j #cal kestis #jedi fallen order #star wars

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musings-and-overanalyses · 2 years

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"only kids of immigrant parents will get this..."

This trend is genuinely frustrating to me personally. When one hears- asian parents, brown parents, immigrant parents, no further context is needed. These terms paint a certain picture- strictness, probably corporal punishment, high prioritisation of academics, high expectations from kids, easy disappointment and utter disregard for mental health.

And it's not even just western media or social media that has these tropes. Content from each of their respective communities also largely confirms these most of the time.

A part of this is because many times the parents are from developing countries aka. the middle class of the world. And this struggle for class mobility is woven into the general culture[look up colonialism].

Moving to the western developed nations doesn't change this at all, the only difference is a perceived increase in opportunity to achieve that dream. And so making sure their kids live in better conditions than they grew up in is a natural priority ( flexing to relatives being another one). In fact after moving to a western country there is also this pressure to be as productive and ideal as possible, lest they be considered freeloaders or as unworthy of staying in that country.

And parents pass on these expectations and "duties" onto their kids.

That still left me curious as to why was this disregard of mental health so rampant ( not that white parents are paragons of virtue in that regard ). I don't have an answer honestly. But I have two theories.

One is that maybe they consider mental health issues as being first world problems; a bit higher up in the Maslow's heirarchy of needs.

The other, is mistaking mental illnesses as being an attack on their parenting which they probably inherited from their parents. " I was hit as a kid, and I turned out fine. " " How could you say this to me after everything I have done for you"

And then, of course, social stigma. In tight knit communities, rumours and gossip spread around like wildfire. The scandal! "My child is NOT perfect?!"

It's not at all to say all immigrant parents are like this. And generally speaking, the more affluent and educated they are, the more do they behave like white parents ( maybe that tells something about how the rich everywhere are the same). In fact middle-class or lower middle-class white families might be able to relate more to their non-white counterparts than their rich counterparts.

The reason I find this whole thing frustrating is because it's not funny. Like the kids have to live with themselves with self esteem issues and people pleasing tendencies well into adulthood.

PS. Sorry if I tend to meander a bit. I tend to have a short-circuiting of thoughts when I talked about a topic.

#analysis #short essays #asian parents #brown parents #immigrants #culture #parenting #mental health #middle class #musings and analyses #musings #ramblings

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ecoamerica · 16 days

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cizzisblog · 3 years

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things that piss me off about dabi and fans’ reactions to this arc:

-Dabi is definitely, absolutely not justified in going after Shouto (who deserves none of this!! this boy deserves only love and support and some gotdamned therapy) ima just say that now.

-It’s also shitty of Dabi to say he didn’t care if Natsuo was hurt/killed.

-The canon characterization may very well be Dabi is so far down the path of revenge and has spent so long suffering alone away from his family members that he no longer cares for them/feels anything and is willing to proceed with plans to hurt Endeavor even if they are caught in the crossfire. However, I also feel it’s worth mentioning that right now, he very much seems to be caught up in a manic episode/meltdown/basically losing his shit. Think about it- he’s spent however many years plotting this moment and his chance to get revenge on his father and expose him to the world is finally here, and I think the likelihood that he’s saying whatever shit he thinks will hurt everyone the most is likely. That, or he’s so caught up in the mania he’s just lashing out at fucking everything. I think to some extent he means it, because he’s shown signs of being severely depressed and there’s a numbness that comes with that, but I also think deep down there is still some care there, even if small, or at least some acknowledgment that the other members of his family aren’t the main target and source of his suffering. He literally hasn’t seen them in years and it’s easy to say ‘I don’t care’ when it’s not to their faces. (Why send a tape specifically to Rei and keep track of her? Why not hurt Shouto at the summer camp when he so easily could have?) I think it’s also clear he didn’t mean to kill Endeavor with the previous Nomu attacks, but wanted him to succeed (in a ‘Build him up bigger so when I bring him down he falls even harder’ type of way. After all, Dabi obviously wanted to be the one to take down Endeavor, not a random Nomu.) Again, shitty he didn’t care that Natsuo/Shouto got caught up in it, but I think he didn’t think Natsuo would die due to Endeavor saving him. (Again, that doesn’t justify it, and is some twisted logic, but this is complicated.)

-I want to make very clear I’m not absolving Dabi of his actions, but as an abuse victim and someone who’s intimately familiar with familial abuse, his actual feelings do not make him a bad person and are actually more common than you’d think if you’ve never experienced abuse. When you’re suffering that kind of trauma for so long, you lash out at and feel angry at other people in the household, even other targets of abuse, because your abuser fucks you all up so bad and turns you against each other (even if not intentionally). It becomes a sick competition for attention even from a person who’s horrible and terrible. Dabi undoubtedly felt like he’d been thrown away and jealous of Shouto, the ‘perfect child’ Endeavor finally succeeded in getting (again, this doesn’t excuse him actually hating Shouto, but I can see why he might feel bitter). In a perfect world he would’ve dealt with those feelings with therapy and realized Shouto was just as much a victim and not murder attempts, but this is bnha lmao. Him wanting to hurt Shouto- a fucked up urge, but in a trauma-inducing environment as a mentally ill teenager, you can understand why he felt it. Acting on it is what’s truly fucked up. I also find it unlikely he doesn’t care for Natsuo at all. Natsuo, who he went to specifically for comfort for his whole childhood, not even his mother but his brother?

-At first glance, it may seem many “fanon” interpretations of Dabi are now ‘invalid’ or whatever but I disagree. Sure, we do know that he wasn’t secretly skulking about watching out for his siblings from the shadows- clearly. But narratives that involve him reconnecting with his siblings, remembering or learning to care for them again, realizing he’s hurting them and he isn’t the only one with trauma, reconnecting with his want to protect them as his family, etc. still make sense. People are not static. They still hold the capacity for change and healing given the proper circumstances. Most fanfic are AUs, given they don’t follow canon exactly and word for word, and characters can make different decisions and feel differently if different events happen. Even if you do want to write a very different characterization for Dabi, that’s fine, especially if bnha ultimately ends up doing the whole Todoroki narrative dirty.

-In conclusion: yes, currently Dabi is acting a madman and doing some very reprehensible things. He is a severely traumatized individual who grew up in a home involving copious amounts of violence. However, I do not think the point of all this family drama is just to say “fuck it, Touya’s dead now he was too far gone whoops! But heroes are good anyway!” I think it’s likely we’ll get some scene with him arrested and being confronted by Rei or Natsuo or something along those lines and see some regret. (Why spend so much time on this arc and show their reactions if they aren’t going to be involved at all?) Simultaneously, it’s also possible the story will go the “he’s too far gone” route and basically have him end up as a mirror of Endeavor: so obsessed with his own trauma he threw his own family under the bus for his own revenge plan. While possible, I think that’s a shitty and lazy way to go and disrespectful to Touya himself as an abuse survivor. He is definitely extremely deep in his revenge right now, but I do not want that to be the end of his character.

-I want Dabi to have to face up to his own actions. I want him to realize he fucked up and hurt people he shouldn’t have. I don’t think we’ll get some mushy apology montage, but we have not once seen all the Todoroki siblings together at one time, and I want Dabi to have to deal with the repercussions of seeing his family again and realizing oh, they were never the ones I should have hurt, and I don’t think he’s too far gone to do that.

-I think it’ll be really shitty if Dabi, an abuse survivor, is ultimately depicted as the insane lunatic that needs to be put down and has no chance for any kind of redemption while his abuser who bought his wife for eugenics and neglected/abused his entire family gets to walk free with a shitty redemption arc. Don’t get me wrong, I’m aware Dabi is a villain and as such is going to be on the losing side in a story where heroes win (I mean, it’s technically all a flashback from number one hero Deku) but he still has very valid points about hero society and how fucked up Endeavor truly was, and throwing it all away would be such a cop out. If bnha does truly go with the most insulting route for Dabi I feel it shows a lack of understanding for abuse and abuse survivors and fanfic authors are justified in ignoring and changing that for fics, especially if they’re abuse survivors themselves. I guarantee they’ll write better narratives about abuse lmao.

-Lastly: Dabi is a morally grey character. He’s a villain. But people who like his character or want to look at the why and how of his actions in a nuanced way are not just ‘dumb villain stans’ or whatever weird shit the bnha fandom has come up with. We just want this narrative to actually make some goddamned sense. Dabi’s actions are not all justified but do make sense in the context of his backstory and motivations and current mental state, I just hope to god hori doesn’t ruin it completely from here.

Edit: this post is also highly likely imo and also explains Dabi’s behavior (but as a reminder for those who don’t read closely, explaining something is not the same thing as justifying it.) “I can’t feel anything anymore” is a hallmark of being depressed/suicidal and his supposedly not caring for his siblings anymore most likely has to do more with his own suicidal state than aggression towards them. Dabi acting as manic as he has these last few chapters makes sense if he isn’t planning on living.

#dabi #Todoroki Touya #bnha #Touya #bnha 292 #Todoroki #touya todoroki #bnha spoilers #character meta

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low-budget-korra · 3 years

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Lets talk about Korra (again)

i already made this analysis, and it was well received but i dont know, i wanna do it again. Why not right? My english is better now than was when i made that analysis so i think this one will be better written

What a way to introduce a protagonist. This line and this scene tell us everything we need to know about Korra at that time and everything she knew about herself.

In book one Korra is a 17′s old teenager who have no idea how the world, how life is outside the training center she grew up in and had been locked up since ever. So she is not only naive but have lack of social skills

Oh, and not everyone who lack’s social skills will act like Zuko and Azula okay? Korra can be confident, expressive and outgoing and still have problems when it comes to social skills.One thing dont exclude the other.

“I’m the Avatar and you gotta deal with it” did you guys notice that only for that line we can see the entire opposite on how she treat her role as avatar in comparisson with Aang? And im not here to judge because is two very different contexts.

As far as we know, Korra grew up without friends or romantic partners. Of course, she had her training partners but i believe that they are just that.

So her entarely perception of herself was around her duty as Avatar, she didnt have personal life, she barely was Korra...She was The avatar and thats that.

So she came to Republic City, it was a mess.

Its funny to see that she have no touch when it comes to simply talk to people, i guess when you grew up away from society, this happens. And yes, she is cocky and had to learn that people arent there to somewhat please her, and she learned that quicky.

Thats why the Pro Bending was important for her character, not only for training but also as means of socilization.

Now lets talk about the villains: Amon and Tarrlok

The two of them represents two differents threats to Korra. Amon represents a threat to her duty as Avatar while Tarrlok represents a threat to Korra as a person.

In episode 4 we have what i still thinks is the darker episode from TLOK. In this episode Amon ambushes Korra in the final moments... Even knowing that they did their best to make Amon’s power and control be non-sexualized as possible still...He have her down on her knews, totally helpless and he even invades Korra’s personal space by touching in her face forcing her to look at him. He didn't have to sexually touch her to violate her.

And right after, the fear in Tenzin voice when asking what happened after seeing her laying in the ground like that, and how Korra is sobing in his arms teeling him how powerless and helpless she felt. I mean...Oh, and she keeps terryfied by him until he takes her bending.

Tarrlok in the other hand doesnt do much different from his brother and started to harass Korra because he cant take ‘no’ as a answer when Korra didnt wanted to join his task force.

Whats interesting is that if it wasnt for Tarrlok harassement and maniputation, Korra wouldnt have joined his task force and wouldnt have confronted Amon and wouldn't have gone through that terrible encounter.

The thing is that Korra is caught right in the middle of a politcal power dispute over the city, something that she for sure wasnt prepare for it. And both Amon and Tarrlok woud hurt or kill her without think twice about it if that means gain power. And that was exacly what happened

Tarrlok tried to manipulate her and keep her on leash where he could, and when his tatics didnt worked anymore he alreay had a plan B. Yes that whole metal box in that cabin in the middle of nowhere was made especifically for her and maybe Tenzin if he also get in his way.

In the end Korra lost the physical battle against both but won the ethical battle also against both. She was the responsable for expose both of them as corrupted and hypocrites. But at what price? Amon was able to remove the bends of the Avatar. And without them, how could she be the Avatar?

Remember that her entirely conception of herself was built around her duty as Avatar, be the avatar. After all, everything she was, everything she'd trained so hard for, had been destroyed in minutes. Thats why i still strongly believe that she was thinking about killing herself at the end, nobodys goes all sad and crying to in front of a clifft without thinking about jumping from it.

But she, i think given up the idea and just sit and started to crying when Aang appeared and help her, giving her bendings back in one of the best scenes of the show. So after have everything solve and still managed to get the boy she was in love with, things where great and she “move on”

In that first half, Korra is unbearable. Everything she learned in Book 1 how to be more mature, less spoiled and all, was thrown in the trash and she was the same "child" of the book one only worse.

Until I stopped and realized that I was also unbearable and childish like this when I had my bad phases of anxiety and depression, as defense mechanism and keep people away. Returning to Korra, and if this way of acting of her was nothing more than this defense mechanism?

Because guess what, i dont think she “move on” from all that happened in Book One that fast, and for add more drama she discovered that was her father idea of keeping her locked up training in that training center we saw in book one and not traveling like avatars before her. No wonder she felt betrayed. And for adding even more drama, people still keep treating her like child, so she was despered for some validation. Something that she found in her uncles arms but she was betrayed by him after.

In the end, Korra again goes through a traumatic experience when she has her connection with past lives destroyed. We see how it affected her when she apologizes to Tenzin, through tears. And Tenzin, as the excellent master he is, tries to motivate her to face Vaatu again (now merged with Unalaq, her uncle) and again she saves the day even after go throught a traumatic event

In the final moments, we see the innocent decision to reconnect the world of spirits and the world of men. And we also see Korra and Mako permanently end their turbulent relationship.

Book 3 begins in a more mature, we see all the characters being presented in a more mature way and it seems that Korra now has overcome everything that has passed. We have the relationship between Korra and Asami deepening as well

In Book 3, called "Change" we have a great sacrifice from Korra. Her life goes down a notch when she decides to save the new airbenders from Zaheer and the Red Lotus, the only villain until now that really threat her life since their sole goal was to kill the avatar.

Korra won again but this time victory costed way too much. Yes she save the day again but now she was physically and psychologically defeated. It was too much, she broke.

Book 4 begins and we only saw Korra in the final minutes and she is unrecognizable. We see that, once proud and courageous avatar, in someone depressed and cowerd. We never have saw Korra like that, even when she was afraid of Amon she wasnt like that.

Korra is afraid of being the Avatar again and her fight against PTSD is still one of the most sensitive, responsable and honest representation of Mentall Issues that i saw, and it was before this subject gain more space on media. It was before people started to give attention to this

I also think that she was having flashs from her other fights and not only the one against Zaheer.

Another thing I think is worth mention is that Korra took 3 years to feel safer and re-embrace her duties as Avatar. It was not 3 weeks or 3 months, it was 3 years. And anyone who suffers from some mental illness knows very well the stigma that is, the fight that is, because everyone wants you to be well faster as possible when the truth is that many times you spend years fighting against this. And this is a pressure that falls on you.Imagine, seeing all your friends moving forward while you continue "stock in the same place"?

Only after Korra confronts Zaheer, I think that was a way to show her coping with the trauma, she improves to the point of returning to be the great Avatar we know. I personally still struggles with this scene because put the victim in front of her agressor may not be the best idea but i understand that she needed to see that he was just a man and not the invencible monster her mind was telling her

One of the lines that stuck with me the most was in the TLOK version of the ember island players, the one that made a recap of the show before the finale. When Korra said “I was so naive” just before we watch her narration of her journey, we can feel pain, sadness and strenght. Janet was amazing in the way the delivered this line.

And this fucking quote i saw here on tumblr still is the goat: “The Last Airbender is a story of a boy who becomes a god. The Legend of Korra is the story of a goddess who becomes a girl "

And I still get really pissed when someone comes to talk shit about Korra because she is such an incredible heroine and her journey is also so incredible.

The story of how life can be hard and unfair, how it can hurt and paralyze, but there is always a reason to move on. We should always move on.

Korra is definitely not weak, quite the opposite, she is one of the if not the strongest heroine I have ever seen. Korra inspires overcoming

#korrasami #avatar korra #asami sato #mako #tenzin #bolin #lin beifong #su beifong #kuvira #zaheer #amon #unalaq #tarrlok #the legendd of korra #legend of korra #tlok #lets talk about #avatar

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brown-little-robin · 2 years

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Oooooh 4 and 14 for the fanfic ask game!!!

4: What’s your favorite line of dialogue?

“I’m not a ‘growing boy’, I’m a hyper-decelerated clone.”

This is one of Thad's quips. He says it in response to Helen saying "Come eat dinner! You're a growing boy!" or something normal like that. And he grumbles this at her.

For context, he thinks he's dying of a genetic disease, so the whole clone thing is weighing on his mind. But it's an unusually forthright moment from him. "A growing boy" has a familiar sense to it: eat, eat, you're our boy and you're growing! Thad feels the need to correct this assumption. He's not growing. He takes 43 years to age 1 year. He's not their boy. He's a clone of their boy. It's clever, it's spiteful, it's matter-of-fact, it's true, and it's kind of also a cry for help.

It was really hard to choose; I had a couple other lines that I felt were particularly poignant and in-character, but this is the one that lives rent-free in my brain. I'm not a growing boy, I'm a hyper-decelerated clone.

14: Is there anything you wanted readers to learn from reading this fic?

An appreciation for life. I linger in this on the very small moments: the hot showers, the movie parties, the smallest touches, the most inconsequential moments. Thad is very old and cynical and has almost no experience of the world; he grew up in virtual reality and then in a metal box, and his best and only friend was a robot, and his only purpose was his mission. And then he gets to live... just live... and he's so amazed by everything that it dips it in magic and makes me, at least, appreciate all the things he loves in my day-to-day life.

I started thinking about, then writing this fic when I was particularly depressed, and I needed Thad to love life in order for me to reach through the fog and enjoy anything. Anything at all. It started with the showers. I remember when I wrote chapter two, wrote "He hasn’t felt so warm since he left the speed force", and I took a shower and it was suddenly a gift, a luxury, not just another daily drudgery. It was magic.

Ways to live with mental illness. I struggle with depression, along with some other things, like sensory issues. I first considered mental illness as something I might have / something I could address after reading batfam fanfiction. Fanfiction put a face to depression in the form of Tim Drake, a face to sensory issues in the form of Jason Todd... it lets mental illness not be clinical and frightening, but human, with lots of individual ways to live with the conditions. Fanfiction brought me a lot of... almost "folk knowledge" of mental illness; practical, lived-in knowledge. I'm bringing my own lived experience of mental struggles to the fanfiction in as honest a way as I can.

In some ways, this fanfiction is a tribute to all the good I have received from fanfiction, understanding of mental illness being one of the big ones.

I hope the fanfiction reflects God's grace. The overflowing undeserved love that God gives us... the way he draws people to him and saves and sanctifies them... maybe Thad's story will mythologize that in some way. I hope so.

Also, cool penguin facts!

#Danielle speaks #fanfiction #About The Strange Redemption of Thaddeus Thawne

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scripttorture · 3 years

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I’m not sure if you’ll be comfortable answering those, but with recent police brutality in the U.S, I want to write about police torture of protestors and protestors’ feelings. I have a wheelchair user Latina girl and a blind Black trans man. They will be arrested together after the trans man tries to talk down a cop (inspired by a real video) and I wanted them both to be tear gassed. I have experience with police brutality, but was not arrested.

Part 2- How do they arrest blind people and wheelchair users? I understand mobility aids are usually taken away. Does this apply to canes for blind people? Also, I was going to have them in holding for 1 day with no treatment for their eyes after being tear gassed. Is this realistic or do you think police should pour water on them? I was going to involve the arrested characters all going on hunger strike, which might cause the police to transport them to booking faster. Does this sound okay?

‘Comfortable’ feels like the wrong word for all of this subject to be honest. I don’t think I could do this if I was comfortable, I am incandescent with rage. I am furious that the world we live in is still infested with this pointless, preventable brutality. Yes I am essentially a ball of rage and ferrets.

And a portion of that is about the fact it only really makes the news when it affects wealthy countries. Seeing the response in Kenya and Nigeria to these movements/events in the West has been… interesting.

Let’s start off with some definitions here because I think that will help as we discuss the story idea.

Realism in the context of these discussions doesn’t necessarily mean ‘this would happen to 100% of people in this situation.’ If we’re talking about torture techniques used and treatment of particular groups in society then it’s less a case of ‘does this happen or not’ and more a case of ‘how often does this happen?’ ‘how likely is this?’

Most modern torture is ‘clean’, which means that it doesn’t leave obvious external marks. But you do still get incidents (including in rich Western countries) where scarring torture occurs. They just a lot rarer.

And, continuing this example, if a writer came to me asking about writing a scarring torture in a modern setting I’d warn them about the implications that can go with that. I’d talk about how survivors of clean tortures are dismissed and belittled. I’d talk about how the harm clean tortures do is downplayed. And I’d say that while there’s nothing wrong with wanting to use a scarring torture in a story, when we do it’s important to be aware of the context: that scarring tortures are rare and that they’re not ‘worse’.

Everything you’ve described for your story is possible and it’s the sort of thing that’s more common in the country and time period you’ve chosen for your story.

I’ve found it difficult to get hold of larger studies focused on the US. A lot of the statistical analysis I’m seeing focuses on mental illness or doesn’t draw a distinction between mental illness and physical disability. That can be pretty common when you’re looking up stuff about disability. It can be a helpful approach in some respects, showing how the disabled population broadly is discriminated against. But it also masks things that affect particular sub sections of the disabled population by lumping everyone in together.

The Prison Policy Initiative has a page here you might find helpful, but most of these articles focus on mental illness and low IQ. Solitary Watch has a frankly horrifying list of cases in a prison where the disabled were routinely denied treatment and left in neglectful conditions that amount to torture. (The list includes a blind man denied a cane for 16 years.)

Based on individual cases I’ve read I’d say that what you have planned is realistic, in the sense that it is possible. Similar things have occurred in America.

In the absence of clear statistics on the number of disabled people in custody in the US, let alone how they’re treated, I’m finding it difficult to say how common this would be.

Part of the problem is a lack of consistent standards or definitions across the country. This is from a Reuters investigative piece on deaths and abuse in US jails: ‘Seventeen states have no rules or oversight mechanisms for local jails, according to Reuters research and a pending study by Michele Deitch, a corrections specialist at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. In five other low-population states, all detention facilities are run by state corrections agencies. The other 28 have some form of standards, such as assessing inmates’ health on arrival or checking on suicidal inmates at prescribed intervals. Yet those standards often are minimal, and in at least six of the states, the agencies that write them lack enforcement power or the authority to refer substandard jails for investigation.’ (Emphasis mine, full article series can be found here. It contains video footage of torture (beating), some graphic descriptions of racist abuse and miscarriage.)

What this means for you is that there’s massive variation between jails in the US. The variation affects everything from the structure of the jail itself, to staffing levels, to workplace culture, to oversight, to provision of medical care. Basically some jails are a lot more abusive and dangerous then others.

It’s also difficult to identify problem facilities because, as the Reuters article points out, a lot of the relevant statistics aren’t released to the public. Reuters came up with their statistics by examining jail records and reporting of deaths or abuse in local newspapers over a period of several years.

In some of the accounts from US prisoners I’ve read people were allowed to keep wheelchairs. In others they were taken away.

The cases where wheelchairs were taken were generally reported as part of a wider pattern of torturous neglect. I do not have enough evidence or cases here to say that that’s always the case: I don’t think this proves that prisons or jails which take mobility aids always neglect disabled prisoners. Because I don’t know whether taking a mobility aid, in and of itself, would be reported if it wasn’t happening alongside prisoners being left lying in their cells for days, unable to eat or clean themselves.

I’ve tried my best to read about disability generally over the years. Because I live in the UK most of what I know about disability is based here. I know about attitudes in Saudi, where I grew up and a little about Cyprus where my family is from.

Based on what I know about disability generally I’d say that when mobility aids and canes are taken away neglect and abuse are more likely. And I think that would include being left in a cell, having been tear gassed, with no water.

In terms of physically arresting people with disabilities, well there are problems with abuse of disabled people the world over. I’ve heard stories from a lot of different countries about people being ripped out of wheelchairs, being tackled, being dragged. Unfortunately a lot of people are taught to doubt disability and to treat obviously disabled people with contempt.

But you should remember that I read about the worst case scenarios. My knowledge is focused on abuse and ideas about what encourages or discourages it. Which can skew the perception of how common these things are. (I really wish I could find some decent statistical data here, the absence is maddening.)

I think part of the way to approach this is to break it down and figure out how many groups these characters are being passed between. I don’t actually know how the booking in process in the US works. (I’m sorry but the nature of the blog is that I’ve got a lot of broad knowledge, I’m not an expert on every police system in the world.)

The standard of treatment could easily vary between the people making the arrest and the people actually holding the prisoners.

And all of this means that I think you’ve got a lot of leeway here. There’s a big range of things that are possible here. So there’s scope to choose how bad it’s going to be.

You’re already doing that to some extent with the way you’ve planned this out and thought it through. That’s good, it’s important to work within your limits and focus on the elements you’re interested in.

There will be real cases similar to your story that went a lot worse and there’ll be cases where things went a lot better. No one story can capture everything and that’s OK.

I think these characters will probably be acutely aware that things could go very badly for them. They’ll probably have heard stories about people of their race, disability and gender being abused or even murdered by police. Use that in the story. Try to bring some of that fear and rage and defiance into the story.

I’m not sure what kind of cultural weight hunger strike carries in the US. I can link you to my masterpost on starvation which outlines the physical and psychological effects of hunger.

I also want to leave you my masterpost on solitary confinement, because I’m aware that US jails and prisons often put vulnerable prisoners straight into solitary.

It’s really clear just from your question that you’ve already put a lot of thought into this and done a fair bit of reading. Keep going.

You’re probably going to need sensitivity readers. It’s also probably going to take a lot of time, editing and re-reading to get this story as good as you want it to be.

And it’s going to be hard. Researching this stuff is incredibly exhausting. For the love of gods take breaks. I’ve got a guide to researching difficult topics here. It can be hard to follow the advice there, hell I struggle to sometimes, but you can’t let this stuff poison you.

I hope that helps :)

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#writing advice #tw torture #tw racism #tw police brutality #tw transphobia #tw ableism #disability #clean torture #tear gas #pepper #America #American National Style #jails #abuse of prisoners #prison systems #blind characters #paralysis

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