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tommytranselo · 2 years

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mafia trilogy gameplay review

alright, here’s my full series review + my hopes for mafia 4 from a purely gameplay perspective (well, mostly). fair warning, this is not entirely spoiler free and also long as hell–over five thousand words–so click read more at your own risk.

mafia tcolh

unfortunately i have not played the original (yet), so i can’t give a real review, but i have heard about the optional end-of-chapter missions from lucas bertone to unlock new cars and about the extremely detailed free ride, including enemies spawning across the city and the game saving your progress, which i think are great features that (presumably) allow you to take your time with the game and provide replay value that isn’t just doing the same missions over and over or pointlessly driving around. it’s 21 chapters and i’ve heard it’s a pretty damn difficult game–player preference is gonna vary on that obviously, but overall i get the impression it’s meant to take some time to beat at least on your first playthrough.

mafia 2

coming in at 15 chapters (the first of which was the rather short and partly intended as a tutorial), it seems to be a significantly faster experience than its predecessor and it didn’t take me long at all to finish. replaying has been a weird experience because i honestly don’t really even like a solid third of the chapters (1, 6, and the last three), but the game is near and dear to my heart. while i have seen reports (and videos) of serious glitching, i never encountered any. one note is that the lack of character tags in subtitles was annoying because sometimes it’s hard to differentiate voices (drunk eddie and joe is my biggest gripe).

open world & graphics: whether snow-covered in 1945 or sunny in 1951, empire bay is a truly beautiful city, the npc behavior is very detailed (which can make for some funny experiences if you notice it), and there’s generally a lot to do if you wander around, but the lack of a free ride mode and lack of downtime during chapters leaves little opportunity to actually do it. i didn’t feel like i had much chance to explore or just hang out in the game world, and like i said before, the experience feels kind of rushed, especially on a replay where you know what’s coming next; i really wish we got more time in the 1945 segment because the winter atmosphere and freddy’s bar were really nice, and there was too little chance to experience them. if you die at the end of a chapter while fucking around you generally have to replay the last mission, which seriously discourages exploration and is frankly a stupid feature. there are diners, clothing shops, gun stores, auto shops etc around the city, which is really nice if you’re just hanging out, but i personally never found myself using them much (aside from the auto shop and clothing store once or twice apiece outside the prompts to use them in ch2 and ch7 respectively) because there just didn’t seem to be much time for it, and also because you lose all your stuff multiple times throughout the game, so it feels a little pointless (and it’s easy to accumulate guns from fallen enemies, but tbh i did that in every game). i’d love to go see giuseppe or harry in my off time (which you’re clearly intended to do as there’s some secret dialogue), but there didn’t seem to be much off time. overall, a lovely open world with detailed settings and interactivity that we had far too little chance to enjoy. working mirrors, though!

combat: i appreciated the limitless gun arsenal (being able to carry both a rifle and machine gun was nice) but found switching weapons to be kind of clunky (unless i just suck ass at the controls), for some reason i felt significantly worse at shooting compared to MDE, and honestly the melee fighting sucked. it’s extremely similar to la noire, so i guess maybe it was standard for the time, but it seems the strategy is to just hold down block at all times except when throwing a punch, and the fact you can end up just endlessly circling each other with nobody landing a hit both a) got boring real fast and b) ruined the immersion for me. and no knives/bats/other melee weapons, really? not to mention we only got one chance for stealth gameplay (ch3), and...tbh it just didn’t really do it for me. it took me forever the first time because i took henry’s statement of “no killing” to mean i wasn’t allowed to do stealth takedowns either, but on a replay when i did stealth attack it was honestly a little too easy. as for the healing system, as much as i love food in games, the “eat/drink to heal” and the way your health fills up significantly if you just wait a few seconds made healing feel like a non-issue for the most part; i joke about the floor sandwiches but i never actually found any, going to diners between missions to boost my health a little didn’t feel worth it ever (i only ever ate at the very end of chapters, basically), and mostly my strategy was just to duck and cover while i waited for vito's bar to refill. i didn’t hate it but i think it could’ve been done better.

cars: they handled pretty well once i got the hang of driving, and the snowy roads handling different was nice attention to detail. the customization was fantastic, and i have to say i love the garage system; it was really nice to be able to store cool cars when i snagged one off the street–and speaking of which, the lock-picking requiring effort was a bit of a pain but in a good way, so overall a nice touch. the speed limiter was also helpful, especially for the bit with the cigarette truck. no joke, i LOVED other characters (joe and henry mainly) whining about my driving (if anything it made me drive worse!)

police behavior: the lingering wanted status for both cars and people, while an absolute pain in the ass, added a lot more realism and tension. having to sneak home after the jewelry store job was, though irritating as hell, exciting. it also gives you more reason to use the clothing stores and auto shops. was honestly kind of surprised this wasn’t in other games. mostly i don’t remember the cops being too hard to get rid of, or having any other gripes about their programming.

hud: i hated the minimap honestly; it was hard to read, it didn’t show if enemies were on your level or above/below, and it didn’t show friendly npcs. it also just kinda looked bad. the health bar was confusing as hell at first too but i did eventually figure it out; it looked neat though and it didn’t take up much room. overall the hud was kinda ugly but that’s just me. i don’t recall if you can disable it (i never tried) but a quick google suggests no, at least not without mods, which sucks.

soundtrack/radio: fantastic. lovely score though not my favorite (ending song was a gut punch, though). wildly chronologically inaccurate licensed music, but most good fifties songs came out after ‘51 so i don’t care (hell, if they’d been accurate it likely wouldn’t have been distinct enough from the ‘45 songs). the choice of scripted songs was very well done and the radio stations were very distinct–having djs with clear personalities was awesome. introduced me to some cool songs (billy merman cover of 900 miles, my beloved) and the amount of little richard was much appreciated. the radio ads were more tolerable than in m3, or i remember them that way. wasn’t too fond of how, unlike the other games, the radio does NOT continue to play in big map screen and instead it plays its own, honestly very creepy map theme. on an additional sound design note, the police sirens in this were really really eerie to me, which was neat.

dlcs: i have not played the dlcs and i don’t really intend to. i’ve not heard good things about them and there was a huge lost opportunity for expansion upon the story, especially with the jimmy stuff (my gripe there is mostly that it’s a completely alternate universe).

final thoughts: overall, despite being evidently a fan-favorite nowadays, in my honest opinion i think it’s kind of the weakest of the (original) series as a video game (still one of my favorite pieces of media). this has been largely forgotten and i was not at all involved in the series when 2 came out, but i’ve heard it was largely hated by diehard tcolh fans at first only to gain popularity later. i truly loved the characters and the setting but i really wish we got more time with them, i wish so much content hadn’t been cut, and i wish it didn’t have that lingering unfinished feeling.

mafia 3

wildly different gameplay than the first two games, and while a lot of players hated that, honestly i loved it. it was a lot easier to take my time with it, and while the missions could get a bit grindy (not something i personally minded, but compared to earlier games i see why it could be an issue), there were some cool locations and you could at least decide how you wanted to go about it, something made easier by the solo gameplay. the more structured end-of-district missions were cool as hell, though tbh i don’t think i’d want it to be all scripted like that. on the other hand, it did get very lonely at times with nobody to ride along you and chat during missions, something that became extremely obvious upon playing the dlcs where i had donovan & roxy with me. i have experienced glitches with this one, a couple of which required restarting missions, but nothing truly game-breaking. the fact it always turns off my subtitles when i first boot it up is irritating as hell though. character tags for dialogue subs were nice.

open world & graphics: imo the best open-world hands down, it gave you so much room to explore and i love just existing in new bordeaux; feels like home somehow, at least for me. the existence of the fuse boxes you wiretap and useful collectibles like the circuit plugs, tac vests, adrenaline shots, and random wads of cash (lol) in addition to a ton of purely aesthetic ones encouraged exploration even if you aren’t normally a collector (which tbh i’m not). you’re getting on rooftops, on balconies, in alleyways, in stores and diners, in random people’s backyards and even houses; i’ve said it before but it appeals so strongly to my urge to get into shit that i can’t irl. and don’t get me started on the boats, that rocked (i think more games should have boats). the lack of stuff to do in stores (besides rob the cash register and maybe grab collectibles) was kind of disappointing, especially given i’d probably make way more use of them in this than in m2, but being able to visit the underbosses & lieutenants whenever still scratched the “go interact with people” itch, and the assistants (jb/betty/hank) you could call was a very convenient way of doing things. i also appreciated the random npc conversations and the way npcs on the street will say things to you that sometimes lincoln will respond to (those quick exchanges like “how’re you doing?”) added a lot of atmosphere. the districts had really distinct vibes not just in terms of architecture but also how the npcs looked and acted. i appreciated the random enemies and allies hanging around, felt very dynamic. a truly, truly beautiful game too, though the mirrors don’t work. the weather system was also really nice, although i wish there was a way to sleep through nights/storms because they can be kind of a pain to fight in (or sleep till night, if you want to work under cover of dark); while we’re on the topic, the fact lincoln seems to (technically) stay awake for weeks on end does get real weird whenever i think about it; it also would’ve been nice to see food in game just for atmospheric reasons, even though i liked the health system as mentioned below.

combat: gunplay was generally satisfying and felt balanced, and while the inability to carry more than two guns (one big, one small) is a little annoying, it didn’t bother me all that much once i found ones i liked. the stealth gameplay was hands-down my favorite; you had way more opportunity to do it, you could take on enemy territory as you pleased and find multiple ways into the target location, the survival knife tbh makes for some incredibly satisfying stealth kills, and the whistle feature is a godsend. it’s also very fun to get a bunch of enemies all riled up and actively searching for you, if you want to give yourself a challenge. the “q to punch, left alt to dodge” melee was far preferred to mafia 2’s mouse-clicking, as it made fights go a lot quicker and forced me to actually stay on my toes dodging (it’s harder and i’m worse at it, but it feels much more realistic and overall more satisfying). intel view was much appreciated and is also closely tied to lincoln’s army background (and donovan’s bootleg cia setup, presumably), though i could see how it might arguably make things too easy. personally i hate struggling to find enemies so i liked it. the throwable weapons are fantastic (throwing knives and screaming zemis my beloved), loads of variety, though the knives are a pain to find again if you miss your target and i wasn’t sure how the hell to use some of the others (landmines, namely). i fucking love that lincoln can swim; saved my ass a few times, and tbh i’d love more gaming protags who don’t insta-drown. the alligators were a nice touch if annoying (i almost died to them a couple times lol). as far as healing goes, the collectable adrenaline shots that you could administer in battle combined with the mild regen was nicely done and let you stock up before big fights; immediate healing saved my ass loads of times, and it was possibly my favorite way of doing things out of all the games. the enemy (marcanos, dixie mafia, ensanglante) retaliation was also a very cool feature. overall the combat was by far my favorite of the trilogy.

cars: the cars handled very nicely, the best out of the series imo, which i guess is a product of the 1968 setting. the slow-motion driving, though i don’t use it much, has saved my ass a few times and let me pull off some neat stunts and is quite a unique feature. there were some cool unlockable cars but the lack of customization for random ones off the street and lack of a garage system was pretty damn disappointing. i didn’t notice if wet roads drove any differently than dry (i don’t believe so?) but it would’ve been cool if they did. i got my tires shot out a lot which was irritating. the rearview mirror was a nice touch but i do wish you could turn it off. no speed limiter, i don’t think?

police behavior: the way police responded wildly differently depending on different neighborhoods was brilliant storytelling, and you could really tell the difference–you should’ve seen me trying to steal a car in frisco fields before i had the lockpicking perk, confident i could escape before the cops even showed up like i had in other neighborhoods, only to get instantly swarmed and have to tear out of there so fast i ended up wrecking the damn car (the air i caught before doing so, though–chef’s kiss). now that’s variety baby! hell, in frisco i kept getting random cops on my ass when civilians heard my gunshots during side missions, and they didn’t give up easy. the fact that the blue attention arrow (you know the one i mean?) showed up regardless of whether they were after you or not was a brilliant bit of environmental storytelling that really drove home the fact lincoln was being watched even when he did nothing wrong. the way it did search zones was well done too. the lack of a lingering wanted feature, though it made my life a hell of a lot easier, is a bit unrealistic; might’ve been interesting if you only got it in high-cop-activity neighborhoods like frisco. i appreciated the extent to which they search for you, as annoying as it was; it added drama. absolute hell to ditch them in car chases though, which was noticeable considering the random mob/cult retaliation cars were usually fairly easy to leave in the dust.

hud: much preferable minimap to 2–it showed you if npcs were above/below you as well as showing allies in addition to enemies & cops, was easy to read, and also just looked nicer lol. the health bar was extremely easy to read. it would be real nice if you could disable the damn things without mods, though; sometimes a man wants to take a fucking screenshot! overall, very legible if a bit bland.

soundtrack/radio: killer! the score itself is gorgeous, and the collection of licensed songs is fantastic (i’m a huge sucker for ‘60s music though). very careful attention to chronological accuracy, and the choice of songs during cutscenes and specific missions (del shannon’s “runaway” while escaping with álvarez!) was great. all three radio stations had very distinct character; djs would’ve been nice but it’s not a huge gripe. the station sweepers were cool but the commercials were annoying as all fuck. the uncle lou ad going off air after you kill him was a nice touch (and a relief lmao). the voice and remy had very well-written shows (like, fuck remy, but his persona was believable), but they ran way longer than my drives across the map so i ended up awkwardly waiting in the car to listen, then getting impatient and giving up–a downside of the lack of scripted driving. “all along the watch tower” as a title song was a hell of a choice, and it worked.

dlcs: the dlcs were well-integrated into the story and gameplay, brought some really unique content without feeling too forced, introduced characters whose presence made sense. they gave you stuff to do outside the main storyline that was really nice when i felt like dicking around without progressing the plot. sammy’s bar renovations gave me something to spend my cash on, which honestly i haven’t used much otherwise.

final thoughts: gameplay wise, this one is definitely my favorite. it’s been an extremely long playthrough (i haven’t actually done the absolute last mission yet) which has some downsides but overall was a lot more relaxed than the others and had much more room for screwing around, exploring, etc which was valuable to me. i understand the gripe about no chapters (for series inconsistency reasons mostly) but personally it didn’t bother me and overall i absolutely don’t get the hate for it, mafia 3 is a great fucking game.

mafia definitive edition

twenty chapters long (combining two from the original), it was the first mafia game i played and has a special place in my heart for that reason. i have some complaints, but i adored the game on my first playthrough; i’ve yet to replay but i’m considering. not too quick of a playthrough, especially with that goddamn race. in terms of mechanics it had a lot of similarities to mafia 3, since it used the same engine, so some of this is a bit briefer. same as 3, it had character tags for dialogue subs, thank god. i mostly didn’t deal with any glitches, except for one major one: the armored car section completely broke because of a graphics issue where the turret hitbox seemed not to register, so none of my shots landed even with aim assist; online advice said to fiddle with graphics settings, and turning off one feature (v-tuning? i forget the name) let me beat it almost instantly, but if i hadn’t known that it would’ve made that section literally unbeatable and the game unplayable, which is a pretty major flaw. i’m not sure if it’s been patched yet but i sure as hell hope.

open world & graphics: the graphics and setting design are spectacular. i’ll be honest, seeing the intro sequence for the first time damn near brought me to tears; it felt like coming home. lost heaven is a beautiful city...with fuckall to do. pretty much zero downtime during missions, combined with a free ride that had absolutely jack shit to do for kicks besides drive, antagonize pedestrians & cops, and those obnoxious herbert baskerville missions (i haven’t done much, but they really haven’t done it for me tbh) results in...a world you can explore, sort of, but it’s not even that enjoyable. all those weapons in vinny’s workshop and nobody to use ‘em on–would it kill the devs to spawn a few enemies to fight? or to let us explore inside mission locations? (which, btw, makes collections hell to complete because you have to replay whole chapters, and unless you’re a diehard collector probably isn’t gonna be worth it to most just for that). or to even let me climb on stuff easier? or to give us any kinds of shops, or food somehow, or have any characters besides ralphie (doesn’t talk to you at all), vinny (has like one or two lines), and lucas bertone (whom i visited loads because he actually talks)? it was lonely as hell and driving around started getting depressing, as much as i enjoyed the scenery. for a truly gorgeous, detailed, giant map (the countryside went on for miles!) they wasted it with no interactivity. at least the random npcs will sometimes say hi to you like in mafia 3.

combat: gunplay was very easy to learn and very fun. i’m not sure if this was specific to easy difficulty (it was my first game of the series and on an unfamiliar computer, give me a break) but there was a neat feature with the crosshairs where they’d turn red if you were on target to hit and form an x if the shot would be fatal, so i got real good at pistol headshots real quick (picked this up again in mafia 3 even without the red crosshair but struggled in mafia 2, so i suspect it’s partly a game engine thing). melee was the same “q to punch, alt left to dodge” as mafia 3 that kept me on my toes, albeit a little clunkier given tommy isn’t a combat trained vet (nice attention to detail albeit potentially motivated by fan complaints toward previews), so i had fun with it. knives and bats were nice but i found little chance to use them, knives especially. the stealth missions sucked major ass (one you had to get right up behind them and one you couldn’t stealth kill–just for relaxation, my detested). the healing system with the med boxes scattered throughout missions was pretty damn brutal and i got killed a lot (granted i was inexperienced so idk how i’d fare on a rerun), which definitely made me strategize, and honestly it helped balance out the easy shooting. i’ve heard gripes it was too easy (aside from the fucking race!), and while i played on the lowest setting, i’m kind of inclined to agree, though i’d have to see on a replay on medium/hard.

cars: the driving, once i got the hang of it, was surprisingly smooth, though driving in free ride after i’d been playing mafia 3 was a trip. some of those ‘30s cars handle like hell though (race car my detested), and one time in free ride i snagged a car in front of a cop just to see what he’d do...well, turns out it was a jalopy with a top speed of 41 mph, and he chased me down and shot me. on the other hand, the hearse from the saint and the sinner survived me whipping off the top of a hill, slamming down through the trees, and crash landing in the airport parking lot to ditch the cops (wasn’t in good shape afterward, but she made it!) so make of that what you will. i don’t recall a speed limiter either. the motorcycles were fucking awesome. all in all not bad.

police behavior: considering i’ve heard the cops in tcolh were absolutely brutal, comparatively this was a cakewalk. they were a huge pain to get off my ass in certain chase sequences, but so long as i stayed out of sight especially when they were first called out, they’d give up way too easy, even on hard mode (something i tested pretty extensively in free ride). lack of wanted feature was surprising to me even when i had yet to play mafia 2; i ended up ditching the hearse in the saint and the sinner before we got back into town, though that was as much about the fact it was slow as hell by then as getting recognized (but still).

hud: similar to mafia 3, especially the minimap, which honestly looked even nicer tbh. very legible, and afaik you can disable it easily (photomode). no complaints here.

soundtrack/radio: absolutely beautiful original score; the main theme will genuinely never cease to haunt me and is pretty much without question my favorite original song of the series. i’m not huge on thirties music so nothing stood out to me as far as licensed songs, but it was a nice and very atmospheric collection. the radio stations felt much less distinct but the berringers commercials were funny, and overall the ads weren’t annoying at all really. the news breaks were pleasant and well-timed. i don’t actually know if djs would’ve added much here, really.

dlcs: besides a few outfit/car packs? there are none! for fuck’s sake, h13.

final thoughts: a gorgeous and very fun game that could stand to let the player breathe a little. cutting the lucas bertone end-of-chapter optional missions (and adding the cars to free ride instead) was a mistake, because that would’ve given the player a chance to fuck around in-chapter, especially given free ride is so damn empty. overall, despite its flaws, the game is a generally well-paced experience that i really enjoyed.

mafia 4: my hopes

i expect it’ll be chapter style like 1 and 2, rather than more open like 3; i don’t really care either way but slightly more structure might be nice. i do hope it’ll be on the longer side (longer than 2, at least) but...i don’t know if i expect that. that would also mean more of a wait till it comes out but that’s probably worth it. here’s hoping they put character names in dialogue subtitles!

open world & graphics: good visual design (given the quality we’ve seen, i’m not at all concerned) and interactivity. give us shops, give us random npcs that engage with the player (the “how you doing?” went a long way), give us chances to talk to side characters, give us the ability and reason to go get into shit like in mafia 3. give us FREE RIDE with stuff to do (enemies to fight and locations to explore, namely) that isn’t horribly lonely and limited, and give us time to screw around in the main story (specifically, let us end chapters at our own discretion like mafia 2 rather than automatically like mafia DE) that won’t result in having to restart stuff if we die. honestly i much preferred the integrated free ride style of mafia 3 though i have no expectation of that again given i seem to be very in the minority there–but please, i want a good balance of plot progression and messing around. oh, and let me climb on things.

combat: unlimited arsenal would be nice, so long as switching isn’t clunky, but i wouldn’t mine the 3/DE style of one big gun, one small; so long as the gunplay isn’t totally fucked i don’t really care. i am however begging for melee in the style of mafia 3 & DE and not 2–make us block on the spot and not just hold it down, that shit got so boring so fast. i’m also desperate to see mafia 3 style stealth, especially enemy searching, the whistle feature, and knives. pleeeease give us melee weapons and the chance to use them. intel view or similar would be nice but is very character specific so i have no hopes of it and i’m fine with not getting it. i’d love for there to be some kind of food in game (at least alcohol like in 2), but i’d rather a healing system closer to mafia DE or mafia 3–or if they do food, at least make it easier to find during levels or able to be carried with you. and let us swim, dammit! unless it’s set in los ondas and there’s no water, but still.

cars: i’m leery of these 1920s automobiles having shit cornering and top speeds, but if they handle like mafia DE’s cars did, i’m fine with it. rearview mirror (disableable!) and speed limiter would be nice. and give us motorcycles! and boats, if applicable. mafia 2 style garage system and customization please for the love of god. and other characters bitching about our driving!

police behavior: lingering wanted feature on cars/players (especially cars), and differing police response based on neighborhood. more intense search for suspects. don’t get so pissy over traffic offenses.

hud: legible, detailed, and disableable. show us allies and give us the hollow icons if npcs aren’t on the same level as the player. and make the health bar easily readable for the love of god.

soundtrack/radio: my hopes are not particularly high for the licensed songs given it’s almost certainly a 1920s setting (i’m still bitter about that ‘70s soundtrack we aren’t getting, and also i’ve had a very hard time finding pre-1930s music in the past), but here’s hoping we get a good original score and distinct radio stations. djs would be nice. i do have high hopes the newsbreaks and ads will be pleasant this time.

dlcs: hard to predict or hope for anything when we know basically nothing of the game, but i hope we actually get at least one (hopefully more) and i hope they’re well-integrated like mafia 3’s were.

final thoughts: i kind of doubt we’ll get this, but put goddamn subtitles on ALL speech, not just the main dialogue. radio announcements? subtitle it. random npc chatter in the background? subtitle it. stack them and make the less important ones slightly smaller if there’s cross talk (hell, especially subtitle things if there’s cross talk), but for fuck’s sake it’s basic accessibility and the fact i never see this done irritates me to no end. also, i really hope we see food in game. doesn’t even have to be for health reasons i just want my little pixel buddy to eat. and let me sit down, sitting down should be in more games. and also, please for the love of god don’t have loads of timed missions; i don’t think it will given we haven’t seen a lot of them besides the joe’s adventures dlc, but just in case.

#IT'S HERE FINALLY #mafia 2 #mafia 3 #mafia definitive edition #m4 speculation

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writingforfun0714 · 2 years

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I know I’m a bit late, but I just watched the 1st 3 eps of Star Wars Andor

So spoilers (for Andor and Rogue One)…

I hadn’t really seen Andor on my Tumblr dash so honestly, I wasn’t sure what to think. I watched OWK (Obi-Wan Kenobi) and honestly, I thought it could’ve been better. I’ll do another post on my thoughts on OWK but I really wanted to talk about Andor (because I haven’t really seen anyone talk about it??). So because I was slightly disappointed with OWK, I was skeptical about Andor (despite the trailer). Because we know that pretty much everyone dies in Rogue One, I thought Andor was a bit…out of order? Idk if that’s the right term. I thought Andor was similar to Marvel’s Black Widow movie tbh. It was good but because we already know that Cassian dies, events preceding Rogue One seem a little…unimportant? Again, I’m not sure if that’s the right word to use.

After watching the 1st 3 eps, despite the story going all over the place (there are so many characters they introduce), I actually kind of liked that? It reminded me of Game of Thrones. Mixing in the flashbacks of Cassian’s backstory (he’s like a tribal kid or something) also reminded me of TBoBF (The Book of Boba Fett) with the Tusken Raiders flashbacks. I liked BoBF tbh and I know a lot of people have mixed reviews about it, but I really enjoyed it, more so than OWK (honestly I like both shows, but I’m more knit-picky about OWK).

I think the only thing I’d change so far in Andor would be the addition of subtitles. I’d like to know what everyone’s saying in the tribal flashbacks. I know it’s supposed to be one of those things about understanding what’s happening just from setting/context/whatever, but I’d prefer subtitles because I, personally, have a hard time reading people’s emotions/expressions so when the kids all decided to check out the crashed ship and Cassian’s little sis had to stay behind, I was a bit confused as to what was happening/why they were going. I had to rewatch the flashback tribal scenes a couple times to really understand what was going on. Strange thing is, I really enjoy Spirit Stallion of the Cimarron, a movie where there is little dialog and the animals do not talk. I think maybe Andor could’ve done a little narration over the flashbacks if they were persistent about not using subtitles, similar to Spirit.

Also I really enjoyed the music and even if I couldn’t understand at some points what was going on, the music really helped set the tone for each scene. I think SW has always been pretty consistent having great music. People used to shit on the prequels but one thing no one ever said was the music was trash. Like Duel of the Fates and Battle of Heroes is amazing (TPM and RoTS respectively). Even in the Clone Wars series, I thought the music was great. It had such a mid-2000s vibe to it that I can’t really describe other than ‘mid-2000s’ lol. So I’m not surprised Andor would continue with the good music.

I know the first few episodes are supposed to be more world-building and exposition to explain what’s going on so I’m sure the episodes will seem more…put together, if that makes sense, as the season goes on. Also, I heard S2 was confirmed??? Lemme know if that’s true or not cuz I’m sure having an extra season also allows the writers/people involved to go as slow/detailed as they want with the world-building, but rn Andor just kinda seems all over the place.

I like that the Empire hasn’t really shown up yet either. I’m sure that’ll change as the season goes on as well, but I like that there’s more than one ‘evil’ presence. I’ll be real here and say that I’m not too sure who the guys in the blue uniforms are. They’re like the policing force on whatever planet Cassian was on (after the flashbacks and Cassian ends up killing 2 of the guys). If anyone knows who they are and if we’ve seen them before, please lemme know. But I like that they weren’t Empire (and if they are, sorry I didn’t pick up on that), though it seemed like they reported to the Empire?? Again, idk.

I don’t think I have any expectations going forward really, but one thing I do hope they show is how K2 and Cassian met and Cassian reprogramming him (like how Nick Nolte’s character on Mando reprogrammed that IG11 droid). But other than that, I don’t really have anything else I wanna see other than a good story lol. It doesn’t matter how pretty the settings are, how good the music is if the story sucks.

So I think that’s all of my main thoughts on Andor so far, which I’m sure will change once more episodes come out. In short, the story is just starting but because of how many new characters there are, the story seems a bit all over the place. I’d also like subtitles for any of the flashback tribal scenes (though with Maarva taking him at the end of ep3, I’m sure there won’t be so many long talking scenes w/o subtitles and she will teach him English/Basic? Idk if it’s Basic or Common). The music was good and the scenery/effects looked nice. I think maybe this show would’ve done better had it been released before Rogue One (because watching it all I could think about was how similar it was to Black Widow, not in the story but b/c the main characters die in movies released before). Overall, not bad and I think Andor’s better than OWK by ep3. I’m a bit surprised I haven’t really seen any posts on Tumblr about it.

I’d love to talk to anyone and hear your thoughts on the show because I haven’t really seen anyone talk about it. Thanks Readers!

—Maisy

PS—I’ll do a more in-depth review once the series is over as well

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ironwoman359 · 3 years

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This is probably not the best place to ask, but you’re also a Christian woman too. I was wondering what you thought about what the Bible says about women and how we must submit to husbands and some other stuff that has me (a potential ace) Christain woman kind of terrified. I would go to my church but social anxiety and my church is pretty conservative. I don’t want to think that we’re just second rate citizens with this. Um…that’s all. You don’t have to answer. Love your Tumblr. It’s one of the main ones I look at. Thanks for countless enjoyment!

— — —

(I’m responding on the submission and not the ask because the ask refused to post properly, I think it was too long for Tumblr’s fancy)

So I know you just asked for my thoughts and not a biblical interpretation lesson, but I didn’t spend 3 months writing an exegesis in college for me to never use those skills again, so buckle up for something of a long answer! (literally, this is almost 3 thousand words, so....sorry about that) *rubs hands together* The thing we need to take into consideration when reading the bible is Interpretation; any truly honest biblical scholar would tell you it is a mistake to take every word in the bible at its literal face value, ESPECIALLY since most of us are reading translations of scripture, not the original ancient hebrew/greek/aramaic/whatever else. So when interpreting scripture, we must consider these things:

Author (Who wrote it?)

Audience (Who was it written for?)

Context (What is written around it?)

So the verses you’re referencing are Ephesians 5:22-23, and in the NIV, they read as follows:

22 Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

Isolated from author, audience, and context, they sound pretty sexist, don’t they? And male authority figures have used these verses as justification for the oppression of women for centuries, just as white men used the passage only a few verses away, Ephesians 6:5, as justification for the oppression and ownership of black people (Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ). So let’s look at each of the points above in regards to Ephesians 5 and 6. First, who wrote it? Sometimes that can be a tricky question to answer, but in this case, it’s actually very easy (though there is still a bit of fuzziness/debate). Traditionally, Ephesians is one of the Apostle Paul’s letters to the early church. Specifically, to the body of believers in Ephesus, a Greek city that was a part of the Roman Empire at the time. According to two different study bibles I have, the letter of Ephesians was not addressing any particular problem that the church in Ephesus had (as was often the case with Paul’s letters), but was meant as an encouragement of faith and to increase his readers’ understanding of what it meant to be a follower of Christ. So now what about the Context? Why are the verses at the end of chapter 5 and beginning of chapter 6 so damning to our modern sensibilities? To answer that, we must look at the passages both in context to the verses around them, and in historical and cultural context (which is where 1 & 2 come into play again). Going back to the beginning of chapter 4, which is subtitled “Unity in the Body of Christ” (and remember, these subtitles and groupings were come up with LONG after they were written; we grouped sections together in a way we thought was most logical, which honestly for a book as short as Ephesians I would argue is barely even necessary), we can see that the letter from chapter 4 onward is about living a Holy and Godly life. Chapter 4 urges us to be “completely humble and gentle, be patient, bearing with one another in love” and warns us against living “as the Gentiles* do, in the futility of their thinking.” *Gentiles in this case meaning not neccesarily all non-Jews, but non-believers. AKA, we should live like Jesus lived, WWJD and all that jazz. If the Holy Spirit is in our hearts and our relationship with God is at the forefront of our lives, then that should show clearly in our actions. The very first verse of chapter 5 reads “Be imitators of God, therefore, as dearly loved children and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” Chapters 5 and 6 especially are meant to act as a sort of guide for how a follower of Christ should act. There’s some stuff about obscenity, greed, sexual impurity, 5:15 sums it up pretty well basically, “Be very careful, then, how you live- not as unwise but as wise,” and then we reach the all important verse. Ephesians 5:21, “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” That’s a full sentence, just that there. Submit to one another. The following three sections are all subsections of this point: one for Wives submitting to Husbands, one for Children submitting to Parents, and one for Slaves submitting to Masters. But when looking at all of these, bad shepherds (ie, racist, sexist assholes) like to ignore that first bit, submit to one another, just as they like to ignore 5:28, which says “husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself;” or they ignore 6:4 which says “Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord;” and they ignore 6:9, “Masters, treat your slaves in the same way. Do not threaten them, since you know that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no favoritism with him.” I do highly encourage you to read chapters 4, 5, and 6 in full, or at least start at 4:17, which is where Paul starts talking about “Living as Children of Light,” because it makes the intent of these apparently damning verses much more clear. Paul is stating that as Christians, we should treat everyone around us with honor and respect. According to one of my study bibles, the grammar of the original Greek suggests that the “submission” involved in all three sections is intended to be mutual submission, and is to come from a filling of the Holy Spirit. However, to be quite frank, Paul still Lived In A Society. A highly structured, patriarchal society, in which all members of a household (women, children, slaves) were expected to submit to the patriarchal head of that household. Male children until they reached adulthood, Slaves until they were freed (remember that, while by no means a purely morally good thing, the system of Roman Slavery was VASTLY DIFFERENT from the Atlantic Slave Trade that men later used this passage to justify existing), and women, unfortunately, for their whole lives. In another one of his letters, what is now the book of Galatians, Paul says in chapter 3 verse 27-29 that “You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.” This would have been radical at the time. Paul is promising all people of all genders and classes that, in the eyes of God, they are Equal, One, and all “sons,” meaning that they all have a right to the Inheritance of the Father (remember, at this time and in this culture women did not get any inheritance, and younger sons got significantly less than the firstborn. Paul assures the believers that they ALL are equal receivers of the Promises of God). But this equality that Paul speaks of was, in his eyes, a spiritual equality. He was not particularly concerned with overthrowing the earthly patriarchal society that subjugated women and lower classes, but rather instructed all members of that society who also were Believers to submit equally to one another out of love and respect, for they were all Equal in God’s eyes and would be Equal in heaven. This is why he both tells women to submit to and obey their husbands, but also husbands to love, cherish, and care for their wives. Children, obey your parents, but Fathers, don’t be dicks to your kids. Slaves should obey their masters (slavery was much more like a job that you weren’t allowed to quit until your boss said so) but Masters shouldn’t abuse their slaves. There are Societal Authorities, and Paul is telling his readers “look you can’t just go around not respecting those Authorities, but also hey, if you’re the Authority? That’s not a free pass to be an asshole.” As one of my study bibles puts it, “Paul counseled all believers to submit to one another by choice…this kind of mutual submission preserves order and harmony in the family while it increases love and respect among family members.” Paul is basically saying “it’s better for everyone if we all get along, and remember that Christ had a servant’s heart, and intentionally lowered himself for us, so we should do the same for each other.” And while a patriarchal class system is still super sucky for like 80% of the people involved, at least it’s a whole lot more bearable if everyone involved is being a Nice, Good Member of that Society. You mentioned being worried about being treated like a “second rate citizen.” The fact of the matter is that when this was written, women were second rate citizens; that is the context in which Paul is writing. And while I firmly believe that that was wrong, in every sense of the word, Paul wasn’t especially concerned about challenging that aspect of society. Priority one was “Spread the Gospel” and Priority two was “Don’t Get Killed while Spreading the Gospel.” Speaking of Paul, let’s talk a little more about Saul of Tarsus, shall we? In all literary analysis, it is important to examine the author’s beliefs and what biases may have made their way into the work. And while we believe the bible to be a Holy Book, it can and should be subject to the same rules of literary analysis as non-religious texts. First, you must ask yourself, what do you believe about the bible? There are four general ways of looking at it (which are called Theories of Inspiration).

The bible is the Divine Word of God, dictated word for word across centuries directly to its human authors by God Himself.

The bible is the Divine Word of God, written across centuries by men Inspired by the Holy Spirit. While they are writing in their own words, this Inspiration means that the bible is Wholly Perfect with no errors.

The bible is the Divine Word of God, written across centuries by men Inspired by the Holy Spirit. However, because they are imperfect, fallible men, there is a possibility of errors in the text, both in the account of events that happened and in the teaching therein.

The bible is a collection of accounts written by men, with no Divine Intervention from God. It is not Holy, God’s Word, or Infallible.

I was raised to believe theory 2, but now I personally believe theory 3. And since I’m the author of this analysis, it is through the lens and bias of theory 3 that I now present my next point: Paul was sexist. I don’t think he was maliciously so (see again, Galatians 3, and the statement in Ephesians 5 that men should honor, cherish, and care for their wives), but he was a product of his time who had ingrained ideas about women and their place in society. This does not A) mean he was right about how women should act OR B) mean that we should toss out everything he had to say, about women or otherwise, because he was Problematic. Most biblical authors were, in fact, Problematic. Either by our modern standards, due to the time in which they lived, OR by the standards of their own time, because God liked to use Imperfect People (we’re all imperfect, but He liked particularly imperfect people) in His plans. David was an adulterer and murderer. Paul happily sent dozens of Christians to their deaths. Peter was hotheaded and super prejudiced against Gentiles and Samaritans. And most of them were, in one way or another, sexist, racist, and homophobic. These biases then found their way, intentionally or not, into their writings, and then other racist, sexist, homophobic men used those writings to justify systemic oppression of anyone who was not like them. Oppression that is not Christlike. So where does that leave us, in our 21st century application of scripture to our daily lives? We must examine how it was to be read at the time (which we have done), and then see what we can apply from it to our own lives. For myself in my marriage, I look again to the original grammar of Ephesians 5, that indicates the submission is to be mutual. I “submit” to my husband, and he “submits” to me. In other words, our relationship is built on Trust, Clear Communication, and Respect for one another. Sometimes we have to compromise, and I have to put aside my own desires for his sake, or he must set aside his own desires for my sake. It is a willingness to listen to one another, to approach conflicts with an open mind, to consider each other’s feelings before we speak. It is an equal, mutual submission based on love for each other, which doesn’t contradict what Paul says at all. God created all people to be equal. Humans are stupid sometimes and try to insist that we know better, try to create hierarchies and use the bible to try and justify that, but that doesn’t mean those humans are right. If your church is trying to make you feel less than because of your gender, or if you date somebody who pushes TradWife rhetoric and tries to use Ephesians as their justification, then you Run, and feel justified in doing so. (Especially if they also try to use Paul’s words to tell you why you owe your partner sex; see again, Paul was not only sexist but also lived in a patriarchal time when women were second class citizens that had very specific expectations placed on them AND he wasn’t even in a relationship himself, forgive me if I take his advice on my sex life with a grain of salt. Without doing this whole process again, a good modern reading of “don’t deprive one another” is “don’t use sex as a weapon in your relationship/withhold it for bs reasons when you’re mad at each other, etc. Like all other relationship things, sex (or a lack thereof) with your spouse should be based on mutual trust, communication, and love, not petty arguments or the standards of others.)

Trust me, as an ace woman myself, I totally get the fear. I’ve felt it myself, in the past. But God’s intentions for you are not that you become a doormat or servant to a man. If a romantic relationship (or any other partnership) is part of His plan for you, then the bible clearly states, both in Ephesians and elsewhere, that it should be one built on Love and Trust, not Subjugation and Servitude.

I hope this helped you, and again, sorry it was so long XD. Have an amazing day! <3

#christianity #biblical analysis #religion #anti trad wife #ephesians 5 #ace things #taylor talks #for a loooong time

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voltronfandomhag · 3 years

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Albegas/Gladiator Voltron Revisited

A few years ago I posted about Gladiator Voltron, the proposed third Voltron season which was to be adapted from Lightspeed Electroid Albegas. Ultimately it was abandoned in favor of producing another batch of Lion Voltron episodes. About a year ago Toei released the first two episodes of Albegas with English subtitles on Youtube. You can watch both episodes here and here.

This post is meant to be an update of my first Gladiator Voltron/Albegas post, with more detail about the characters and setting. I also briefly share my thoughts on the show based on the two episodes available.

SETTING AND STORY

In the future, the nations of Earth have been at peace with each other for many years. Our three protagonists, Daisaku, Tetsuya, and Hotaru, are talented students at Aoda School, which is famous for its robotics program and located near Mt. Fuji. Their lives are turned upside down when the evil alien Derringer Empire, who already rules the galaxy, invades Earth. Earth’s only hope against this threat is the super robot Albegas and the three teenagers piloting it.

THE HEROES

Our heroes are teenagers who attend Aoda School in Japan. Each of them created a robot for a school competition. Their bots were later improved and modified so they could combine into Albegas.

Daisaku Enjoji

Daisaku is brash, confident, loud-mouthed, and a total cad. Despite his bad grades, his skills in robotics are apparently superior to both Tetsuya and Hotaru’s. He comes from a working class family consisting of his painter father, stay-at-home mother, cheeky younger brother Jiro, and a younger sister. Both he and Tetsuya have a crush on Hotaru, though Daisaku is more blatant and perverted about it. His hobby is soccer. Pilots Alpha Robo (black).

Tetsuya Jin

Tetsuya comes across as more reserved than his two teammates. Like the others, he’s a student at Aoba School and skilled in robotics. It’s unknown what his grades are like, but at least one of his teachers, Ms. Danko Kibi, scolds him for his rebellious attitude. He and his sister grew up orphans with no other family to take care of them. Currently he lives alone in the school dorms. Tetsuya feels lonely and envies those who still have parents. What happened to his parents, along with the whereabouts of his sister, aren’t mentioned in the first two episodes. Unfortunately, he’s something of a slob; his dorm room is a mess. Like Daisaku, he also has a crush on Hotaru. However, he’s more subtle about it and expresses exasperation at Daisaku’s pervy antics towards her. His hobby is playing guitar. Pilots Beta Robo (blue).

Hotaru Mizuki

Hotaru is the daughter of Professor Mizuki; her mother isn’t mentioned, but it’s implied she’s been out of the picture for a long time. Beautiful, intelligent, and feminine, she’s the star of Aoba School and her class representative. Despite being adored by her teachers and the heartthrob of her male classmates, she’s bullied by her female peers. She also longs for a mother figure; there’s a scene where Hotaru outright tells her father and his assistant, Saeko Asabuki, that she approves of their relationship and hopes they get married so Saeko can be her stepmother. While annoyed by Daisaku’s caddish ways, it’s implied the attraction might be mutual. Her hobby is tennis. Pilots Gamma Robo (red).

SUPPORTING CHARACTERS

The allies, family, and friends of our heroes.

Goro Kumai

HIS JAPANESE BLOOD TINGLES! A well-meaning but bumbling classmate of the main trio who serves as the show’s comic relief. Goro does his best to help defend Earth with his self-made gorilla robot but he’s simply out of his league. Daisaku considers him a burden while Hotaru pities him. He has an unreciprocated crush on Hotaru.

Professor Mizuki

A brilliant scientist and Hotaru’s father. His knowledge of robotics is second to none. After the main trio’s robots were nearly destroyed by invading Derringer, he not only rebuilt them, but made them much more powerful and able to combine into Albegas. He also serves as both a mentor and the voice of reason; he tries to encourage the trio to exercise caution and patience. However, his words often fall on deaf ears, and the trio’s insistence on rushing headlong into battle against his repeated warnings frustrates him. But he believes in the trio’s abilities. It’s implied he’s sweet on his assistant, Saeko Asabuki.

Saeko Asabuki

Professor Mizuki’s assistant and love interest. She’s soft spoken, beautiful, and lady-like. Hotaru wants her as a stepmother.

Ms. Danko Kibi

An overbearing, outspoken and strong willed teacher at Aoba School. She takes her job very seriously, is fiercely proud of the school, and believes it’s important her students grow to be strong, stout, and fearless. Despite not being the head teacher, she often gets her way through sheer force of personality.

THE VILLAINS

The villains aren’t very fleshed out, but given I only had two episodes, that’s not very surprising. Anyway, the Derringer are an evil purple-skinned alien race of conquers who have set their sights on Earth. They desire our planet for its beauty and consider humans primitive. Albegas is humanity’s only effective weapon against their superior technology. Their giant robot Mecha-Fighters are the Derringer’s most fearsome weapon.

Lord Deran the Great

Supreme ruler of the Derringer. We don’t actually see him in these episodes. The only information we learn about him is he desires all things beautiful as his own.

President Azass

The leader of the invading Derringer force stationed in a base orbiting Earth.

General Duston

President Azass’s top officer, at least during these first two episodes. He’s ruthless, prideful, and doesn’t take humans seriously.

General Catastra

Another army officer on President Azass’s orbital base.

Dyme

Yet another Derringer officer. He considers Duston an incompetent moron for not taking Albegas more seriously as a threat

LIGHTSPEED ELECTROID ALBEGAS

The three robots that compose Albegas (Alpha Robot, Beta Robo, and Gamma Robo) were not originally designed to combine together. Instead they were individually built by the main trio as entries into a school competition. When the Derringer attacked Japan, the three teens attempted to fight off the invaders in their robots, but were soundly defeated. Professor Mizuki, seeing the robots’ potential, both rebuilt and heavily modified them, making them far more powerful and able to combine together into multiple configurations. However, the three pilots, at first, don’t know and understand just how extensive the modifications were despite Professor Mizuki’s repeated warnings. Unfortunately, circumstances in the first two episodes have not given them time for proper training. As a result, the pilots are learning about Albegas’s abilities, and how to use them, in the heat of combat.

As stated, the robot comprising Albegas can combine in different ways, with each combination having its own specialization.

Denjin Dimension

Alpha, Beta, Gamma. This is the basic combat configuration. Can use the finishing move Denjin Sanbai Sword.

Sky Dimension

Beta, Alpha, Gamma. We don’t see any of its abilities, but I’m guessing it specializes in flight and/or aerial combat.

Professor Mizuki mentions four other modes: Space, Sea, Underground, and Rescue.

My Thoughts

Do I think American Voltron fans missed out by not having Albegas localized? Not really. Between this, Golion, and Dairuggar, I feel this was the weakest show of the three, and I don’t think it would’ve captured kid’s imaginations the way Lion Voltron did. Granted, in some ways Albegas has more elements in common with GoLion than Diaruggar: small number of pilots, planet bound, faster paced, and a simpler story. But, again, I only have two episodes to go by, so I could be wrong on some of those points. But I’m interested enough that I’d watch more episodes if they became available.

#albegas #lightspeed electroid albegas #gladiator voltron #tetsuya jin #hotaru mizuki #daisaku enjoji #voltron

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iturbide · 2 years

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So, in the Spite Project we have Dimitri recovering in the Alliance during the time-skip, Claude even argues that while it is a selfish thing to do Dimitri should be selfish because the people have asked so much of him and he needs to heal to do good. Then we have the fix-it fic, where Edelgard has to go through a painful process of change where most of her friends and allies turn their backs on her for the sake of the world. I want to take you in good faith, but this feels a bit mean spirited.

So, I'm willing to take you on good faith here and try to explain this, because I really think that the issue is this: you seem to think that treating all characters fairly means treating them all the same way, rather than specifically addressing their individual needs. And this is not the fair way to handle them.

Think of it this way: you have two people that want to watch a movie in a language neither one speaks. How do you handle that? Do you find a version dubbed over in the language they do speak, or do you preserve the original language track and turn on subtitles? They both have their pros and cons -- it can be hard to keep up with subtitles sometimes, especially when they includes notes on cultural nuances, but dubbing can lose cultural nuance if there's no equivalent in the target language (and that's not getting into how different language tracks can have strikingly different levels of quality). So which one do you choose?

Whichever one you picked, you're going to make one of the two unhappy.

On the surface, the question of how to approach it is simply a matter of preference -- but it doesn't factor in the individual needs of the people that want to watch. One has an auditory processing issue, making it hard to catch everything; they need subtitles in order to follow the dialogue at all, and without them they're not going to enjoy the movie because they're not able to keep up. The other person, meanwhile, has difficulty looking at screens for long periods of time, so having to keep up with subtitles will give them a splitting headache; they need the dub so that they can disengage periodically and still be able to hear dialogue in a language they can understand, and with subs over the original language track they're either forced to risk a migraine or lose track of what's happening because they don't understand the spoken words.

(Arguably the most fair solution is "do captions over the dub" but a lot of movies don't do captions and subs, they do subs only, which means that there are going to be places where the subs and dub don't match and that in itself is jarring but that is not the point here.)

Now, you're concerned that it's mean-spirited for Dimitri in the Spite Project to be treated one way while Edelgard in the Pre-Timeskip is treated in another way. But my concern is that you're looking at them in these situations as though they have the exact same needs, and I do not feel that's the case. They are two very different people, from two very different backgrounds, with two very different kinds of trauma and associated trauma responses, not to mention the mental health component that's much more pronounced in Dimitri than it is in Edelgard. Because of that, what they need as individuals to address their trauma, learn to cope, and finally begin to heal, is going to be very different: therapy is not one-size-fits-all, and the first step is always admitting there's a problem (which is why therapy generally doesn't work on someone who doesn't think they need it, even if they arguably do).

Let's start with Dimitri. He is a young man who lost his mother before he really had a chance to know her. He gained a stepmother in Patricia and a close friend in Edelgard during her time in Faerghus, though the latter ended in a bittersweet parting as she had to return to the Empire. Two years later, at the age of 13, he lived through the Tragedy of Duscur where his father, his close friend and personal guard Glenn, and everyone else in the party was presumed dead (he understandably believes Patricia died but we learn that's not the case much later): he suffered not only physical trauma (burns and a likely concussion leading to his loss of taste/ageusia) but mental and emotional trauma (survivor's guilt and PTSD), exacerbated by the dismissal of his first-hand account that ultimately led to Duscur's effective destruction in retribution for the Tragedy. Two years after that at age 15, Dimitri's uncle Rufus -- acting regent of the Kingdom, since Dimitri was not legally of age to ascend the throne -- ordered him to put down a rebellion in the western territories, leading to his first arguable mental break where he ruthlessly cut down the rebel faction despite the minimal threat they posed; this in turn led to Felix calling him a beast and a boar and piling further guilt and shame onto the teenage prince.

There's also a cultural context to take into account: Dimitri has spent the past four years since his father's death not only burying his unaddressed trauma associated with Duscur, but getting rapidly brought up to speed on how to lead the Kingdom of Faerghus so that he can ascend the throne as soon as he comes of age. While there were certainly those who did not approve of Lambert and his policies, a far greater number loved him dearly, and Rufus is not a well-loved regent during his short term in charge. Dimitri has effectively been groomed to put his own needs and feelings second to those of his people because of this treatment: he was not believed when he tried to defend the people of Duscur, his trauma associated with the Tragedy went unaddressed in favor of preparing him to take over leadership, and when he finally shows signs of his own distress, he's criticized for it by someone who had once been a close friend. This has led him to repress everything negative within himself, speaking rarely if at all about his personal feelings or troubles until the pressure becomes so great that he can no longer hide it.

So, to sum it up: Dimitri has suffered a combination of physical, mental, and emotional trauma, all of which he has been conditioned to repress with the message that his personal needs are secondary to the needs of the Kingdom's people. This eventually manifests in attempts to satisfy the voices of those who died at Duscur by viciously eliminating Imperial forces with the ultimate goal of taking Edelgard's head: even the desires of the dead outweigh his considerations for his own life.

Then we have Edelgard. She is a young woman who was very close with her father, something we can glean from context cues in how she speaks of and to him in the secret coronation. When political unrest began brewing in the Empire, her uncle secreted her out of the country for several years, where she made a new friend in Dimitri before her uncle brought her back home to the Empire. Once there, her happy homecoming instead became a nightmare as she and her ten siblings were confined beneath Enbarr Palace and subjected to torturous experiments at the hands of Those Who Slither, bankrolled by the nobles who had stripped her father of his power and leaving him unable to help his children as they died one by one, leaving Edelgard as the sole survivor. Driven by her hatred of the three powers that led to the situation -- the nobles who wanted an unassailable pawn of an Emperor, the Twisted who conducted the experiments and therefore had her family's blood on their hands, and the Church of Seiros run by monsters whose societal system valued Crests over human lives -- she ultimately allied herself with the enemy faction that could grant her enough power to make the changes she believed needed to be made in order to change the system, fully intending to stab them in the back once her other goals had been achieved.

There is, again, a cultural context to consider here. The Empire and the Kingdom have some of the most toxic approaches to the Crest System that we see in the game, and it has ruined countless lives in both nations. Edelgard's own life has been destroyed in this way: she lost her siblings to the Great Nobles' desire to create a Major Crestbearer that they could put on the throne, and therefore has every reason to hate the Crest System crafted by the Church of Seiros to the point of wanting it razed to the ground: without that bias, there would have been no reason for her family to undergo those experiments, meaning her siblings would still be alive. Her trauma has left her determined to destroy the existing social systems, created by non-human forces, and replace them with something crafted by human hands -- and in her mind, there is no cost that outweighs the benefit of that ultimate goal.

So in summary: Edelgard has suffered a combination of physical, mental, and emotional trauma, all of which she has used to fuel a determination to change the world by undoing the influence of Crests and the Church of Seiros that enshrines them. This ultimately manifests in her seizing power in the Empire and ordering an attack on the Church, condemning those not from the Empire or who do not immediately ally with her as enemies, and conquering her way through the Leicester Alliance and the Kingdom of Fodlan based on her belief that her way is best for Fodlan.

Are there similarities between these two? Yes: they are both victims of extreme trauma, and neither of them have had that trauma addressed in the years following the events. But so many other factors, including their coping responses, are wildly different, such that if you tried to give them the same treatment only one would benefit.

Dimitri, who has constantly repressed his own needs for the sake of others, needs to have his health and personal feelings validated rather than shunted off to the side as less important than some other matter. He needs an opportunity to get out from under the pressures placed on him since Duscur, develop some healthy coping mechanisms, learn how to self-advocate and enforce personal boundaries, so that he can unpack and deal with the trauma he suffered. Now, if you tried to take this same validation approach with Edelgard, it would only further enforce her view that she is right in her belief that dragons are inhuman monsters that need to be eradicated and that the Church of Seiros needs to be wiped out and replaced: it would entrench her yet more deeply into what's already a toxic mindset, and make her more determined than ever to see it through regardless of the cost.

On the other hand, Edelgard's first issue is that she does not recognize that there's a flaw in her mindset. She wants to reform Fodlan, but by her own admission she's willing to drag people into a conflict they had no part in because in her view those sacrifices are necessary to achieve her goal. It's part of her trauma response, no doubt -- but it's also a very toxic one that needs to be confronted. The first thing that needs to be done with Edelgard is make her recognize that there is a problem: the flaws in her logic and her beliefs need to be highlighted, and she needs to be pushed to try to understand other people rather than locking herself in an echo chamber that's constantly reinforcing her beliefs. Challenging Edelgard is the first step toward making her realize that she needs to change -- but that same approach has already been used on Dimitri: arguably that's what Felix did with his confrontational response toward Dimitri's mental break...and it led to Dimitri further repressing his trauma out of guilt and shame.

I also don't understand the claim that I'm not treating Edelgard kindly in Pre-Timeskip. Edelgard makes a personal decision that directly and negatively affects the lives of her allies, and she suffers consequences for it: that's not unkind, it's a logical follow-through based on what she personally did. And at no point is she expelled from the group, either: she is confronted with the fact that her beliefs were wrong -- that her allies are not, in fact, thrilled to have their lives put on the line for her personal ambition, especially since she never told them what she'd been planning -- and then given every opportunity to learn from the mistake she made and try to repair the relationships her choices and actions damaged; in the end, because she personally puts the necessary work in, she is able to do so. This is exactly the same approach that I've taken with Grima in Askr: the only difference is that Grima erred toward self-isolation at the beginning and needed to be coaxed into interacting with others. They are well aware that they have committed atrocities that cannot be forgiven, and they do not seek forgiveness from those they harmed: they only seek to do better here with the opportunity they've been granted. Edelgard, too, has every opportunity to change and do better -- and the key factor is that she takes it, learning from her mistake, starting to open up more and listen to the people around her rather than making assumptions based on her personal beliefs.

So ultimately, you're right: I have taken very different approaches to helping Dimitri and Edelgard in these two stories -- because they are two different characters who require two different approaches when it comes to addressing and overcoming their traumas. There is no one-size-fits-all therapy, and so there can be no one-size-fits-all story mold for them. I'm simply doing the best I can, based on their individual character traits and personalities, to give them the opportunity to heal and grow.

#answered #anonymous #fire emblem: three houses #spite project #pre-timeskip fix-it #edelcourse #i have spent roughly four hours typing this #it's a lot okay #i think it comes down to equality vs equity #equal treatment would only solve problems for one of them #equitable treatment will help them both get what they need

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infinitelytheheartexpands · 3 years

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My Personal Opinions on Some French Grand Opéras

Here we go. I’ll be focusing solely on pieces in what’s widely considered the “Golden Age” of grand opéra (from 1828 to about 1870).

1828, Auber: La muette de Portici: never seen or heard so I cannot comment, but I do think it slaps that it helped start both the Belgian Revolution and the genre of grand opéra.

1829, Rossini: Guillaume Tell: I love this one. it’s one of the few grand opéras that has a happy ending and it’s fully deserved. it’s long but it all has a point-- the first act introduces us to the community spirit that drives the rest of the action; even though it’s called Guillaume Tell, it’s not just about Guillaume Tell. it’s about a whole movement coming together, with all these vividly-drawn people of different social statuses, ages, heritages, and livelihoods coming together to do good in the world in the face of oppression. also it’s Rossini so it bops start to finish. the finale is one of opera’s best. I could not have higher praise and admiration for this piece.

1831, Meyerbeer: Robert le diable: another rare case of a grand opéra with a happy ending, but it feels a bit more contrived, something I wrote about when I watched it about a year ago for the first time. it’s quite a clever ending, however, and I love that these lovely characters get a happy ending. Robert is the least interesting principal character both musically and dramatically; the musical highlights of the show are mostly Bertram and Isabelle’s big scenes. the former is also arguably grand opéra’s most exciting ballet sequence, the Act III ballet of the nuns (or as I like to call it, the Zombie Nun Ballet). it’s long but it is incredibly worth it. overall, I really do enjoy this opera although it is very much an uneven piece.

1833, Auber: Gustave III, ou le bal masqué: here’s a thing I wrote about it like 3 months ago and I stand by every word.

1835, Halévy: La juive: It’s damn near impossible to find an even remotely close to complete recording. However, what the recordings have is excellent. The score is marvelous all the way through, although for the most part I tend to prefer the ensembles to the arias (the exception, of course, being Éléazar’s 11 o’clock number). Speaking of Éléazar, he’s an extremely complicated and frankly uncomfortable character, toeing the line between being one of opera’s most complex characters, an even more complicated proto-gender-swapped-Azucena if you will, and being an unfortunate vessel of antisemitic stereotypes. This is made even more complicated because Halévy was an assimilated Jewish composer. On the whole, Rachel is the only wholly sympathetic character in the piece, although all five of the principals are lovingly scored.

1836, Meyerbeer: Les Huguenots: *holds things in because otherwise I would write an entire essay about this opera and you all know that because I have done that several times* Both a great strength and a great weakness of this piece is its sheer wide-ranging-ness, particularly in terms of mood. Unlike, say, La juive, this opera does not have one overall mood, instead steadily progressing from bright, brilliant comedy to one of the most horrifying endings in opera. Dramatically, this is great for the most part, although the sheer amount of exposition in the first two acts may take getting used to. Just as the drama gets more intense and concentrated as the opera goes on, the music gets more intense- and frankly, more often than not better- as the opera goes on. The window/misunderstood engagement business is something I still struggle to see the exact dramatic purpose of, because I think the question of religious difference would likely be enough to separate Raoul and Valentine at the beginning anyway; to me, it feels like Scribe and Deschamps were struggling to find a way to integrate Nevers into the story, as he is crucial to the opera’s lessons about love and tolerance, so they stuck in a quasi-love-triangle in order to justify his presence earlier on. (Also, for goodness sake, could you at least have given him an onstage death scene?) Anyway, in this way the story can be a bit unwieldy and uneven at first, but stay the course with this one...and even a lot of the first couple of acts are wonderful. The characters are all wonderfully written if rather episodic in many cases, but this opera is ambitious and by the end, it’ll tear your heart to shreds. It’s amazing. Uneven, yes, but amazing nonetheless, and I will defend it to the death.

1840, Donizetti: La favorite: I’m not as familiar with La favorite as with some of the others on this list (I’ve seen two different productions once each and I have a recording of it saved to my Spotify library that I listen to bits and pieces of very occasionally) but I do think it’s an excellent piece overall. LÉONOR DESERVED SO MUCH BETTER. The music is lovely all around; I know Donizetti wrote at least one other grand opéra in full and part of another, both of which I need to check out because in its own way, Donizetti’s style works wonderfully with grand opéra.

1841: Halévy, La reine de Chypre: here is a post I wrote about La reine de Chypre. basically all my thoughts remain the same except I have to add: Halévy as a whole just needs more love. there’s a few other of his operas I have waiting (a recording of Le dilettante d’Avignon that has been sitting in my Spotify for who knows how long and a film of Clari with Bartoli and Osborn I’m also sitting on) but there are so many pieces that sound fascinating but have basically ZILCH in terms of recordings.

1849, Meyerbeer: Le prophète: before I say anything else about this opera, I need to ask a burning question: WHY THE HELL IS THERE ONLY ONE GOOD VIDEO RECORDING OF THIS OPERA?!?! on the one hand, I adore the Osborn/Aldrich/Fomina production; on the other, I would also like other productions, please. anyway, I said one time in the opera Discord that while Les Huguenots will probably always be my favorite Meyerbeer opera for an array of reasons, this one is definitely Meyerbeer, Scribe, and Deschamps’ strongest work. it is both unusually dark and unusually believable for an opera of its time—and the fact that it still holds up so well is disturbing to say the least. this opera thrives on complexity in all forms and yet has probably (and paradoxically) the simplest plot to follow of the four Meyerbeer grand opéras. the score is brilliant start to finish, mixing the best of bel canto, Romanticism, and something altogether darker, stranger, and more original. definitely one of the most underrated operas ever. the aforementioned production is on YouTube with French subtitles; give it a watch here.

1855, Verdi: Les vêpres siciliennes: Vêpres is an opera I love dearly although I have yet to find a production that is completely satisfying. I think it’s because this opera is a lot deeper, a lot more complex, and a lot more troubling, frankly, than people are willing to go. also it should be performed bilingually and I am dead-set on this: the dissonance of an opera about French capture of Italian land being sung entirely in either French or Italian is always a little off at least (and also part of the reason why my brain probably adjusted to hearing this opera in either language better than, say, Don Carlos). but anyway, neither side comes off particularly well here, particularly due to the violence and sexual assault on both sides of the equation: both Montfort and Procida are heavily in the wrong, and while Verdi sympathizes with both for personal reasons (Verdian Dad in the former case, Italian Liberator in the latter), there is a lot of troubling stuff in here. nevertheless, the music bops, the story is intriguing, and I think we can all agree that Henri and Hélène both deserved better, especially considering how close they got to bliss (although I think we can also all agree that the end of Act IV twist to almost-rom-com is pretty abrupt).

1863 (full opera: 1890), Berlioz: Les Troyens: I wrote this review of Troyens after watching it in the Châtelet 2003 production in December 2019 (first time ever watching it) and I still stand by just about every word. Such a fascinating opera, great adaptation of the first few books of the Aeneid, marvelous score (of course, it’s Berlioz!)...but could there be a ballet or two fewer, Berlioz? Or at least shorten them up? And that’s coming from someone who likes ballet. But anyway, in every other respect it’s absolutely marvelous. Some people say it’s the greatest French opera ever, and while I hesitate to say that, it comes pretty damn near close.

1865, Meyerbeer: L’Africaine (Vasco de Gama): Vasco da Gama/L’Africaine is even more troubling—much more troubling—of an opera than Vêpres to me and I wrote a whole thing here as to why. I still stand by most of it, although upon reflection, I feel like the ending that drove me so crazy has virtually the exact same idea behind it as the end of Troyens/Book IV of the Aeneid: empire has consequences and those consequences hurt real people, who, though different and not among those perceived as “heroic”, are worthy of being treated as human, not being collateral damage. (I’ve written at least two essays about this for different classes, both specifically in regards to the Aeneid.) It may be time to revisit this one. The score is lovely, after all, although it didn’t stand out to me as much as others by Meyerbeer.

1867, Verdi: Don Carlos: *holds myself back from writing a 10-page essay* y’all, there is a reason that when someone asks me what my favorite opera is, I always choose this one even though I’m horrible at favorites questions. it’s Verdi, grand opéra, romantic drama (SO MUCH romantic drama and SO MUCH gay), political drama, religious/social struggle, personal struggle, social commentary, spectacle, intimacy, masterful characterization all in one. what more could you want? I first saw/heard this opera in Italian long before I did in French, so my brain is more hardwired to hearing the Italian but both are good. my motto is “Italian or French, I don’t care, but Fontainebleau has to be there.” fuck the four-act version. I mean, I will watch four-act versions but five-act versions are just superior. I’d prefer uncut performances (the first part of the garden, the Lacrimosa, the extended opening and ending), but these aren’t dealbreakers for me. it’s the perfect synthesis of Verdi and grand opéra, much less unwieldy than Vêpres (as much I love that one), both musically and dramatically.

1868, Thomas: Hamlet: Part of me wishes this was more faithful to the actual source play (why??? the??? fuck??? does??? Hamlet??? live??? although there are alternate endings), but part of me also realizes that the play is already four hours long as is and singing it plus ballet would make it WAY too fucking long. This does a pretty respectable job. The music is gorgeous, by turns almost sugary-sweet and thrillingly ominous. The Murder of Gonzago scene is an absolute masterpiece. The Mad Scene is justifiably one of opera’s best (although I’m not sure it was a good idea to have that and a frequently-cut 20-minute ballet with no relation whatsoever to the main plot to make up all of Act IV). There are a lot of bops in this one. The four principals are closely followed and still very well-drawn. Both of the stagings I have seen were excellent. An underrated opera.

1869 (grand opéra version), Gounod: Faust: Another of my absolute favorite operas. Since this existed for a decade before its transformation into the grand opéra we all know and love, I won’t comment much about its actual format and adherence to grand opéra tropes aside from saying the Walpurgisnacht ballet is one of grand opéra’s best and extremely good at giving off Vibes TM. I used to hate how the character of Faust was written and thought he was incredibly boring. Not anymore (although of course, I still hate him as a person. fuck him tbh). This opera has a reputation for being saccharine and old-fashioned and I think that’s a bunch of garbage right there. It’s about the search for eternal youth and the expectations of conforming to social values and people’s struggles with themselves when a) they “fall short” and b) when the world ostracizes them for being “different” and “out of line”. I am also firmly convinced that Marguerite is the real protagonist of Faust (like how I’m convinced that Valentine is the protagonist of Les Huguenots if there even is a singular protagonist in that opera but I digress). The music slaps. People need to stop cutting whole scenes out of this. I’m still undecided on the order of the church and square scenes of Act IV. Marguerite and Siébel just need everything good in this world.

Anyway, those are my two cents! I tried to keep these pretty short, so if y’all want any follow-ups, let me know!

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blackswaneuroparedux · 4 years

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Treat Your S(h)elf: The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise Of The East India Company (2019)

It was not the British government that began seizing great chunks of India in the mid-eighteenth century, but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in London, and managed in India by a violent, utterly ruthless and intermittently mentally unstable corporate predator – Clive.

William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise Of The East India Company

“One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: loot. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this word was rarely heard outside the plains of north India until the late eighteenth century, when it became a common term across Britain.”

With these words, populist historian William Dalrymple, introduces his latest book The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company. It is a perfect companion piece to his previous book ‘The Last Mughal’ which I have also read avidly. I’m a big fan of William Dalrymple’s writings as I’ve followed his literary output closely.

And this review is harder to be objective when you actually know the author and like him and his family personally. Born a Scot he was schooled at Ampleforth and Cambridge before he wrote his first much lauded travel book (In Xanadu 1989) just after graduation about his trek through Iran and South Asia. Other highly regarded books followed on such subjects as Byzantium and Afghanistan but mostly about his central love, Delhi. He has won many literary awards for his writings and other honours. He slowly turned to writing histories and co-founding the Jaipur Literary Festival (one of the best I’ve ever been to). He has been living on and off outside Delhi on a farmhouse rasing his children and goats with his artist wife, Olivia. It’s delightfully charming.

Whatever he writes he never disappoints. This latest tome I enjoyed immensely even if I disagreed with some of his conclusions.

Dalrymple recounts the remarkable rise of the East India Company from its founding in 1599 to 1803 when it commanded an army twice the size of the British Army and ruled over the Indian subcontinent. Dalrymple targets the British East India Company for its questionable activities over two centuries in India. In the process, he unmasks a passel of crude, extravagant, feckless, greedy, reprobate rascals - the so-called indigenous rulers over whom the Company trampled to conquer India.

None of this is news to me as I’m already familiar with British imperial history but also speaking more personally. Like many other British families we had strong links to the British Empire, especially India, the jewel in its crown. Those links went all the way back to the East India Company. Typically the second or third sons of the landed gentry or others from the rising bourgeois classes with little financial prospects or advancement would seek their fortune overseas and the East India Company was the ticket to their success - or so they thought.

The East India Company tends to get swept under the carpet and instead everyone focuses on the British Empire. But the birth of British colonialism wasn’t engineered in the halls of Whitehall or the Foreign Office but by what Dalrymple calls, “handful of businessmen from a boardroom in the City of London”. There wasn’t any grand design to speak of, just the pursuit of profit. And it was this that opened a Pandora’s Box that defined the following two centuries of British imperialism of India and the rise of its colonial empire.

The 18th-century triumph and then fall of the Company, and its role in founding what became Queen Victoria’s Indian empire is an astonishing story, which has been recounted in books including The Honourable Company by John Keay (1991) and The Corporation that Changed the World by Nick Robins (2006). It is well-trodden territory but Dalrymple, a historian and author who lives in India and has written widely about the Mughal empire, brings to it erudition, deep insight and an entertaining style.

He also takes a different and topical twist on the question how did a joint stock company founded in Elizabethan England come to replace the glorious Mughal Empire of India, ruling that great land for a hundred years? The answer lies mainly in the title of the book. The Anarchy refers not to the period of British rule but to the period before that time. Dalrymple mentions his title is drawn from a remark attributed to Fakir Khair ud-Din Illahabadi, whose Book of Admonition provided the author with the source material and who said of the 18th century “the once peaceful realm of India became the abode of Anarchy.” But Dalrymple goes further and tells the story as a warning from history on the perils of corporate power. The American edition sports the provocative subtitle, “The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire” (compared with the neutral British subtitle, “The Relentless Rise of the East India Company”). However I think the story Dalrymple really tells is also of how government power corrupts commercial enterprise.

It’s an amazing story and Dalrymple tells it with verve and style drawing, as in his previous books, on underused Indian, Persian and French sources. Dalrymple has a wonderful eye for detail e.g. After the Company’s charter is approved in 1600 the merchant adventures scout for ships to undertake the India voyage: “They have been to Deptford to ‘view severall shippes,’ one of which, the May Flowre, was later famous for a voyage heading in the opposite direction”.

What a Game of Thrones styled tv series it would make, and what a tragedy it unfolded in reality. A preface begins with the foundation of the Company by “Customer Smythe” in 1599, who already had experience trading with the Levant. Certain merchants were little better than pirates and the British lagged behind the Dutch, the Portuguese, the French and even the Spanish in their global aspirations. It was with envious eyes that they saw how Spain had so effectively despoiled Central America. The book fast-forwards to 1756, with successive chapters, and a degree of flexibility in chronology, taking the reader up to 1799. What was supposed to be a few trading posts in India and an import/export agreement became, within a century, a geopolitical force in its own right with its own standing army larger than the British Army.

It is a story of Machiavels from both Britain and India, of pitched battles, vying factions, the use of technology in warfare, strange moments of mutual respect, parliamentary impeachment featuring two of the greatest orators of the day (Edmund Burke and Richard Sheridan), blindings, rapes, psychopaths on both sides, unimaginable wealth, avarice, plunder, famine and worse. It is, in particular – because of the feuding groups loyal to the Mughals, the Marathas, the Rohilla Afghans, the so-called “bankers of the world” the Jagat Seths, and local tribal warlords – a kind of Game Of Thrones with pepper, silk and saltpetre. And that is even before we get to the British, characters such as Robert Clive “of India”, victor at the Battle of Plassey and subsequent suicide; the problematic figure of the cultured Warren Hastings, the whistle-blower who became an unfair scapegoat for Company atrocities; and Richard Wellesley, older brother to the more famous Arthur who became the Duke of Wellington. Co-ordinating such a vast canvas requires a deft hand, and Dalrymple manages this (although the list of dramatis personae is useful). There is even a French mercenary who is described as a “pastry cook, pyrotechnic and poltroon”.

When the Red Dragon slipped anchor at Woolwich early in 1601 to exploit the new royal charter granted to the East India Company, the venture started inauspiciously. The ship lay becalmed off Dover for two months before reaching the Indonesian sultanate of Aceh and seizing pepper, cinnamon and cloves from a passing Portuguese vessel. The Company was a strange beast from the start “a joint stock company founded by a motley bunch of explorers and adventurers to trade the world’s riches. This was partly driven by Protestant England’s break with largely Catholic continental Europe. Isolated from their baffled neighbours, the English were forced to scour the globe for new markets and commercial openings further afield. This they did with piratical enthusiasm” William Dalrymple writes. From these Brexit-like roots, it grew into an enterprise that has never been replicated “a business with its own army that conquered swaths of India, seizing minerals, jewels and the wealth of Mughal emperors. This was mercenary globalisation, practised by what the philosopher Edmund Burke called “a state in the guise of a merchant””.

The East India Company’s charter began with an original sin - Elizabeth I granted the company a perpetual monopoly on trade with the East Indies. With its monopoly giving it enhanced access to credit and vast wealth from Indian trade, it’s no surprise that the company grew to control an eighth of all Britain’s imports by the 1750s. Yet it was still primarily a trading company, with some military capacity to defend its factories. That changed thanks to a well-known problem in institutional economics - opportunism by a company agent, in this case Robert Clive of India, who in time became the richest self-made man in the world in time.

Like many start-ups, it had to pivot in its early days, giving up on competing with the entrenched Dutch East India Company in the Spice Islands, and instead specialising in cotton and calico from India. It was an accidental strategy, but it introduced early officials including Sir Thomas Roe to “a world of almost unimaginable splendour” in India, run by the cultured Mughals.

The Nawab of Bengal called the English “a company of base, quarrelling people and foul dealers”, and one local had it that “they live like Englishmen and die like rotten sheep”. But the Company had on its side the adaptiveness and energy of capitalism. It also had a force of 260,000, which was decisive when it stopped negotiating with the Mughals and went to war. After the Battle of Buxar in 1764, “the English gentlemen took off their hats to clap the defeated Shuja ud-Daula, before reinstalling him as a tame ruler, backed by the Company’s Indian troops, and paying it a huge subsidy. “We have at last arrived at that critical Conjuncture, which I have long foreseen” wrote Robert Clive, the “curt, withdrawn and socially awkward young accountant” whose risk-taking and aggression secured crucial military victories for the Company. It was a high point for “the most opulent company in the world,” as Robert Clive described it.

So how was a humble group of British merchants able to take over one of the great empires of history? Under Aurangzeb, the fanatic and ruthless Mughal emperor (1658-1707), the empire grew to its largest geographic extent but only because of decades of continuous warfare and attendant taxing, pillaging, famine, misery and mass death. It was a classic case of the eventual fall of a great power through military over-extension.

At Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, a power struggle ensued but none could command. “Mughal succession disputes and a string of weak and powerless emperors exacerbated the sense of imperial crisis: three emperors were murdered (one was, in addition, first blinded with a hot needle); the mother of one ruler was strangled and the father of another forced off a precipice on his elephant. In the worst year of all, 1719, four different Emperors occupied the Peacock Throne in rapid succession. According to the Mughal historian Khair ud-Din Illahabadi … ‘Disorder and corruption no longer sought to hide themselves and the once peaceful realm of India became a lair of Anarchy’”.

Seeing the chaos at the top, local rulers stopped paying tribute and tried to establish their own power bases. The result was more warfare and a decline in trade as banditry made it unsafe to travel. The Empire appeared ripe to fall. “Delhi in 1737 had around 2 million inhabitants. Larger than London and Paris combined, it was still the most prosperous and magnificent city between Ottoman Istanbul and Imperial Edo (Tokyo). As the Empire fell apart around it, it hung like an overripe mango, huge and inviting, yet clearly in decay, ready to fall and disintegrate”.

In 1739 the mango was plucked by the Persian warlord Nader Shah. Using the latest military technology, horse-mounted cannon, Shah devastated a much larger force of Mughal troops and “managed to capture the Emperor himself by the simple ruse of inviting him to dinner, then refusing to let him leave.” In Delhi, Nader Shah massacred a hundred thousand people and then, after 57 days of pillaging and plundering, left with two hundred years’ worth of Mughal treasure carried on “700 elephants, 4,000 camels and 12,000 horses carrying wagons all laden with gold, silver and precious stones”.

At this time, the East India Company would have probably preferred a stable India but through a series of unforeseen events it gained in relative power as the rest of India crumbled. With the decline of the Mughals, the biggest military power in India was the Marathas and they attacked Bengal, the richest Indian province, looting, plundering, raping and killing as many as 400,000 civilians. Fearing the Maratha hordes, Bengalis fled to the only safe area in the region, the company stronghold in Calcutta. “What was a nightmare for Bengal turned out to be a major opportunity for the Company. Against artillery and cities defended by the trained musketeers of the European powers, the Maratha cavalry was ineffective. Calcutta in particular was protected by a deep defensive ditch especially dug by the Company to keep the Maratha cavalry at bay, and displaced Bengalis now poured over it into the town that they believed offered better protection than any other in the region, more than tripling the size of Calcutta in a decade. … But it was not just the protection of a fortification that was the attraction. Already Calcutta had become a haven of private enterprise, drawing in not just Bengali textile merchants and moneylenders, but also Parsis, Gujaratis and Marwari entrepreneurs and business houses who found it a safe and sheltered environment in which to make their fortunes”. In an early example of what might be called a “charter city,”

English commercial law also attracted entrepreneurs to Calcutta. The “city’s legal system and the availability of a framework of English commercial law and formal commercial contracts, enforceable by the state, all contributed to making it increasingly the destination of choice for merchants and bankers from across Asia”.

The Company benefited by another unforeseen circumstance, Siraj ud-Daula, the Nawab (ruler) of Bengal, was a psychotic rapist who got his kicks from sinking ferry boats in the Ganges and watching the travelers drown. Siraj was uniformly hated by everyone who knew him. “Not one of the many sources for the period — Persian, Bengali, Mughal, French, Dutch or English — has a good word to say about Siraj”. Despite his flaws, Siraj might have stayed in power had he not made the fatal mistake of striking his banker. The Jagat Seth bankers took their revenge when Siraj ud-Daula came into conflict with the Company under Robert Clive. Conspiring with Clive, the Seths arranged for the Nawab’s general to abandon him and thus the Battle of Plassey was won and the stage set for the East India Company.

In typical fashion, Dalrymple devotes half a dozen pages to the Company’s defeat at Pollidur in 1780 by Haider Ali and his son, Tipu, but a few paragraphs to its significance (Haider could have expelled the Company from much of southern India but failed to pursue his advantage). The reader is not spared the gory details.

“Such as were saved from immediate death,” reads a quote from a British survivor about his fellow troops, “were so crowded together…several were in a state of suffocation, while others from the weight of the dead bodies that had fallen upon them were fixed to the spot and therefore at the mercy of the enemy…Some were trampled under the feet of elephants, camels, and horses. Those who were stripped of their clothing lay exposed to the scorching sun, without water and died a lingering and miserable death, becoming prey to ravenous wild animals.”

Many further battles and adventures would ensue before the British were firmly ensconced by 1803 but the general outline of the story remained the same. The EIC prospered due to a combination of luck, disarray among the Company’s rivals and good financing.

The Mughal emperor Shah Alam, for example, had been forced to flee Delhi leaving it to be ruled by a succession of Persian, Afghani and Maratha warlords. But after wandering across eastern India for many years, he regathered his army, retook Delhi and almost restored Mughal power. At a key moment, however, he invited into the Red Fort with open arms his “adopted” son, Ghulam Qadir. Ghulam was the actual son of Zabita Khan who had been defeated by Shah Alam sixteen years earlier. Ghulam, at that time a young boy, had been taken hostage by Shah Alam and raised like a son, albeit a son whom Alam probably used as a catamite. Expecting gratitude, Shah Alam instead found Ghulam driven mad. Ghulam Qadir, a psychopath, ordered a minion to blind Shah Alam: “With his Afghan knife….Qandahari Khan first cut one of Shah Alam’s eyes out of its socket; then, the other eye was wrenched out…Shah Alam flopped on the ground like a chicken with its neck cut.” Ghulam took over the Red Fort and after cutting out the eyes of the Mughal emperor, immediately calling for a painter to immortalise the event.

A few pages on, Ghulam Qadir gets his just dessert. Captured by an ally of the emperor, he is hung in a cage, his ears, nose, tongue, and upper lip cut off, his eyes scooped out, then his hands cut off, followed by his genitals and head. Dalrymple out-grosses himself with the description of Ahmad Shah Durrani, the Afghan invader of India, dying of leprosy with “maggots….dropping from the upper part of his putrefying nose into his mouth and food as he ate.”

By 1803, the Company’s army had defeated the Maratha gunners and their French officers, installed Shah Alam as a puppet back on his imitation Peacock Throne in Delhi, and the Company ruled all of India virtually.

Indeed as late as 1803, the Marathas too might have defeated the British but rivalry between Tukoji Holkar and Daulat Rao Scindia prevented an alliance. “Here Wellesley’s masterstroke was to send Holkar a captured letter from Scindia in which the latter plotted with Peshwa Baji Rao to overthrow Holkar … ‘After the war is over, we shall both wreak our full vengeance upon him.’ … After receiving this, Holkar, who had just made the first two days march towards Scindia, turned back and firmly declined to join the coalition”.

For Dalrymple the crucial point was the unsanctioned actions of Robert Clive and the bullying of Shah Alam in the rise of the East India Company.

The Jagat Seths then bribed the company men to attack Siraj. Clive, with an eye for personal gain, was happy attack Siraj at the behest of the Jagat Seths even if the company directors had no part in this. They “consistently abhorred ambitious plans of conquest,” he notes. Clive’s defeat of Siraj at Plassey and the subsequent chain of events that led to Shah Alam giving tax-raising powers to the company in 1765 may be history’s most egregious example of the principal-agent problem.

Thus, the East India Company acquired by accident the ultimate economic rent — a secure, unearned income stream. Company cronies initially thwarted attempts at oversight in London, but a government bailout in 1772 following the Bengal Famine and the collapse of Ayr Bank confirmed the crown’s interest in the company, which had now become Too Big to Fail. Adam Smith called the company’s twin roles of trader and sovereign a “strange absurdity” in Book IV of The Wealth of Nations (unfortunately, Smith’s long condemnatory discussion of the company receives only a cursory reference from Dalrymple).

As part of the bailout, Parliament passed the Tea Act to help the company dump its unsold products on the American colonies by giving it the monopoly on legal tea there (Americans drank mostly smuggled Dutch tea). This, of course, led to the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution.

By 1784, Parliament had set up an oversight board that increasingly dictated the company’s political affairs. The attempted impeachment of Governor-General Warren Hastings by the House of Lords in 1788 confirmed that the company was no longer its own master. By that stage, the company was an arm of the state. Dalrymple’s coverage of the subsequent racist policies of Lord Cornwallis and the military adventures of Richard Wellesley make for compelling reading, but they are not examples of unfettered corporate power.

Overlaid on top of luck and disorder, was the simple fact that the Company paid its bills. Indeed, the Company paid its sepoys (Indian troops) considerably more than did any of its rivals and it paid them on time. It was able to do so because Indian bankers and moneylenders trusted the Company. “In the end it was this access to unlimited reserves of credit, partly through stable flows of land revenues, and partly through collaboration of Indian moneylenders and financiers, that in this period finally gave the Company its edge over their Indian rivals. It was no longer superior European military technology, nor powers of administration that made the difference. It was the ability to mobilise and transfer massive financial resources that enabled the Company to put the largest and best-trained army in the eastern world into the field”.

Dalrymple pretty much loses interest once the Company gains full control. “This book does not aim to provide a complete history of the East India Company,” he writes. He skips past one mention of Hong Kong, which the East India Company seized after the opium wars in China. A few sentences record the 1857 uprising of Indian soldiers that led to the British government taking India from the Company and establishing the Raj that lasted until Indian independence in 1947.

The author makes passing reference to the fact that the struggle for American independence was underway for much of the period about which he writes. He notes that It was British East India Company tea that patriots dumped into Boston harbor in 1773. American colonists were so grateful that the Mysore sultans tied up British forces that might have been deployed in America, they named a warship the Hyder Ali. Lord Cornwallis provides a connection, having surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown in 1781, an event confirming American independence, and turning up in 1786 in India as governor-general, taking Tipu Sultan’s surrender in 1792.

That reference raises an interesting side question that may someday deserve closer examination - Why were American colonists successful in driving off their British overlords. At the same time, Indian aristocracy and the masses over whom they ruled were unable to rid themselves of the British East India Company and the British Raj for another century?

No heroes emerge from Dalrymple’s expansive account that is rich, even overwhelming in detail. He covers two centuries but focuses on the period between 1765 and 1803 when the Company was transformed from a commercial operation to military and totalitarian — to use an appropriate term derived from Sanskrit - juggernaut. Among the multitude of characters involved in this sordid story are a few British names familiar in general history, Robert Clive of India, Warren Hastings, Lord Cornwallis, and Colonel Arthur Wellesley, who was better known long after he departed India as the Duke of Wellington. None - with the exception of Hastings - escape the scathing indictment of Dalrymple’s pen.

At the core of the story we meet Robert Clive, an emblematic character who from being a juvenile delinquent and suicidal lunatic rose to rule India, eventually killing himself in the aftermath of a corruption scandal. In particular Robert Clive comes in for much criticism by Dalrymple. After putting down one rebellion, Clive managed to send back £232 million, of which he personally received £22m. There was a rumour that, on his return to England, his wife’s pet ferret wore a necklace of jewels worth £2,500. Contrast that with the horrors of the 1769 famine: farmers selling their tools, rivers so full of corpses that the fish were inedible, one administrator seeing 40 dead bodies within 20 yards of his home, even cannibalism, all while the Company was stockpiling rice. Some Indian weavers even chopped off their own thumbs to avoid being forced to work and pay the exorbitant taxes that would be imposed on them. The Great Bengal famine of 1770 had already led to unease in London at its methods. “We have murdered, deposed, plundered, usurped,” wrote the Whig politician Horace Walpole. “I stand astonished by my own moderation,” Clive protested, after outrage intensified when the Company had to be bailed out by the British government in 1772. Clive took his own life in disgrace.

Warren Hastings, whom Dalrymple portrays as the more sensitive and sympathetic Company man, was first made governor general of India for 12 years and later endured seven years of impeachment for corruption before acquittal. Hastings showed “deep respect” for India and Indians, writes, Dalrymple, as opposed to most other Europeans in India to suck out as much as possible of the subcontinent’s resources and wealth. “In truth, I love India a little more than my own country,” wrote Hastings, who spoke good Bengali and Urdu, as well as fluent Persian. “(Edmund) Burke had defended Robert Clive (first Governor General of Bengal) against parliamentary enquiry, and so helped exonerate someone who genuinely was a ruthlessly unprincipled plunderer. Now he directed his skills of oratory against Warren Hastings (who was finally impeached), a man who, by virtue of his position, was certainly the symbol of an entire system of mercantile oppression in India, but who had personally done much to begin the process of regulating and reforming the Company, and who had probably done more than any other Company official to rein in the worst excesses of its rule,” Dalrymple writes. At his public impeachment hearing in 1788, Burke thundered: “We have brought before you…..one in whom all the frauds, all the peculation, all the violence, all the tyranny in India are embodied.’ They got the wrong man but, by the time he was cleared in 1795, the British state was steadily absorbing the Company, denouncing its methods but retaining many of its assets.

Dalrymple has a soft spot for a couple of Indian locals. “The British consistently portrayed Tipu as a savage and fanatical barbarian,” Dalrymple writes, “but he was in truth a connoisseur and an intellectual…” Of course, Tipu, Dalrymple confesses a bit later, had rebels’ “arms, legs, ears, and noses cut off before being hanged” as well as forcibly circumcising captives and converting them to Islam.

Emperor Shah Alam (1728-1806) is contemporary for much of the time Dalrymple covers. “His was…a life marked by kindness, decency, integrity and learning at a time when such qualities were in short supply…he…managed to keep the Mughul flame alive through the worst of the Great Anarchy….” Dalrymple portrays a most intriguing figure in Emperor Shah Alam, a man attracted to mysticism and yet as prepared as his contemporaries to double-deal; someone who endures exile and torture and who outlives, albeit in a melancholy fashion, his enemies. Despite his lack of wealth, troops or political power, the very nature of his being emperor still, it seems, inspired affection.

Part of Dalrymple’s excellence is in the use of Indian sources – he takes numerous quotes from Ghulam Hussain Khan, acclaimed by Dalrymple as “brilliant,” who threads the story as an 18th-century historian on his untranslated works, Seir Mutaqherin (Review of Modern Times). Dalrymple has used a trove of company documents in Britain and India as well as Persian-language histories, much of which he shares in English translation with the reader. However he does this a bit too often and portions of his account can seem more assembled than written.

These pages are also brimming with anecdotes retold with Dalrymple’s distinctive delight in the piquant, equivoque and gory: we have historical moments when “it seemed as if it were raining blood, for the drains were streaming with it” (quoted from a report c1740 regarding events that preceded Nadir Shah’s infamous looting of the peacock throne) as well as duels between Company officials so busy with their in-fighting that it’s a miracle they could perform their work at all; there’s also homosexuality, homophobia, sexual torture, castrations, cannibalism, brothels and gonorrhoea.

The principal protagonists of the “Black Hole of Calcutta” incident are both, naturally, certified pervs: Siraj ud-Daula is a “serial bisexual rapist” while his opponent Governor Drake is having an “affair with his sister”. And one particular Mughal governor liked to throw tax defaulters in pits of rotting shit (“the stench was so offensive, that it almost suffocated anyone who came near it”). All this gives one a rough idea of what historically important people were up to according to Dalrymple. But all things considered, Dalrymple’s research is solid and heavily annotated.

However entertaining and widely researched using unused Urdu and Persian sources, Dalrymple’s overall approach doesn’t tell us very much about the general tendency in eighteenth-century imperial activity, and particularly that of the British, that we didn’t already know. And other things he downplays or neglects. Thus, the East India Company was one of a series of ‘national’ East India companies, including those of France, the Netherlands and Sweden. Moreover, for Britain, there was the Hudson Bay Company, the Royal African Company, and the chartered companies involved in North America, as well, for example, as the Bank of England. Delegated authority in this form or shared state/private activities were a major part of governance. To assume from the modern perspective of state authority that this was necessarily inadequate is misleading as well as teleological. Indeed, Dalrymple offers no real evidence for his view. Was Portuguese India, where the state had a larger role, ‘better’?

Secondly, let us look at India as a whole. There is an established scholarly debate to which Dalrymple makes no ground breaking contribution. This debate focuses on the question of whether, after the death in 1707 of the mighty Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1658-1707), the focus should be on decline and chaos or, instead, on the development of a tier of powers within the sub-continent, for example Hyderabad. In the latter perspective, the East India Company (EIC) emerges as one and, eventually, the most successful of the successor powers. That raises questions of comparative efficiency and how the EIC succeeded in the Indian military labour market, this helping in defeating the Marathas in the 1800s.

An Indian power, the EIC was also a ‘foreign’ one; although foreignness should not be understood in modern terms. As a ‘foreign’ one, the EIC was not alone among the successful players, and was not even particularly successful, other than against marginal players, until the 1760s. Compared to Nadir Shah of Persia in the late 1730s (on whom Michael Axworthy is well worth reading), or the Afghans from the late 1750s (on whom Jos Gommans is best), the EIC was limited on land. This was part of a longstanding pattern, encompassing indeed, to a degree, the Mughals. Dalrymple fails to address this comparative context adequately.

Dalrymple seems particularly incensed at “corporate violence” and in a (mercifully short) final chapter alludes to Exxon and the United Fruit Company. Indeed Dalrymple has a pitch ” that globalisation is rooted here, albeit that “the world’s largest corporations…..are tame beasts compared with the ravaging territorial appetites of the militarised East India Company.”

It is an interesting question to ask: How might the actions of these corporate raiders have differed from those of a state? It’s not clear, for example, that the EIC was any worse than the average Indian ruler and surely these stationary bandits were better than roving bandits like Nader Shah. The EIC may have looted India but economic historian Tirthankar Roy explains that: “Much of the money that Clive and his henchmen looted from India came from the treasury of the nawab. The Indian princes, ‘walking jeweler’s shops’ as an American merchant called them, spent more money on pearls and diamonds than on infrastructural developments or welfare measures for the poor. If the Company transferred taxpayers’ money from the pockets of an Indian nobleman to its own pockets, the transfer might have bankrupted pearl merchants and reduced the number of people in the harem, but would make little difference to the ordinary Indian.”

Moreover, although it began as a private-firm, the EIC became so regulated by Parliament that Hejeebu (2016) concludes, “After 1773, little of the Company’s commercial ethos survived in India.” Certainly, by the time the brothers Wellesley were making their final push for territorial acquisition, the company directors back in London were pulling out their hair and begging for fewer expensive wars and more trading profits.

So also for eighteenth-century Asia as a whole. Dalrymple has it in for the form of capitalism the EIC represents; but it was less destructive than the Manchu conquest of Xinjiang in the 1750s, or, indeed, the Afghan destruction of Safavid rule in Persia in the early 1720s. Such comparative points would have been offered Dalrymple the opportunity to deploy scholarship and judgment, and, indeed, raise interesting questions about the conceptualisation and methodologies of cross-cultural and diachronic comparison.

Focusing anew on India, the extent to which the Mughal achievement in subjugating the Deccan was itself transient might be underlined, and, alongside consideration, of the Maratha-Mughal struggle in the late seventeenth century, that provides another perspective on subsequent developments. The extent to which Bengal, for example, did not know much peace prior to the EIC is worthy of consideration. It also helps explain why so many local interests found it appropriate, as well as convenient, to ally with the EIC. It brought a degree of protection for the regional economy and offered defence against Maratha, Afghan, and other, attacks and/or exactions. The terms of entry into a British-led global economy were less unwelcome than later nationalist writers might suggest. Dalrymple himself cites Trotsky, who was no guide to the period. To turn to other specifics is only to underline these points.

After Warren Hastings’ impeachment which in effect brought to an end the era when “almost all of India south of [Delhi] was…..effectively ruled by a handful of businessmen from a boardroom in the City of London.” It is hard to find a simple lesson, beyond Dalrymple’s point that talk of Britain having conquered India ‘disguises a much more sinister reality’.

One of the great advantages non-fiction has over fiction is that you cannot make it up, and in the case of the East India Company, you cannot make it up to an extent that beggars belief. William Dalrymple has been for some years one of the most eloquent and assiduous chroniclers of Indian history. With this new work, he sounds a minatory note. The East India Company may be history, but it has warnings for the future. It was “the first great multinational corporation, and the first to run amok”. Wryly, he writes that at least Walmart doesn’t own a fleet of nuclear submarines and Facebook doesn’t have regiments of infantry.

Yet Facebook and Uber does indeed have the potential power to usurp national authority - Facebook can sway elections through its monopoly on how people consume their news for instance. But they do not seize physical territory as Dalrymple states. Even an oil company with private guards in a war-torn country does not compare these days. This doesn’t exonerate corporations though. I know from personal experience of working in the corporate world that it attracts its fair share of psychopaths and cold blooded operators obsessed with the bottom lines of their balance sheets and the worship of the fortunes of their share prices and the lengths they go to would indeed come close to or cross over moral and legal lines. Perhaps the moral is to keep a stern eye on ‘corporate influence, with its fatal blend of power, money and unaccountability’. Clive reflected after Buxar, ‘We must indeed become Nabobs ourselves in Fact if not in Name…..We must go forward, for to retract is impossible.’ That was the nature of the beast.

Speaking of being beastly, some readers may disagree with the more radical views presented in taking apart the imperialist project and showed it for what it was - not about civilising savages, but about brutally exploiting civilised humans by treating them as savages. I think that’s partly true but not the whole story as Dalrymple will freely concede himself. Imperial history is a charged subject and they defy lazy Manichean conclusions of good guys and bad guys.

Dalrymple’s book is an excellent example of popular history - engaging, entertaining, readable, and informative. However, I honestly think he should have stuck to the history and not tried to draw out a trustbusting parallel with today’s big companies. Where the parallels exist, they are to do with cronyism, rent-seeking, and bailouts, all of which are primarily sins of government.

The Anarchy remains though a page-turning history of the rise of the East India Company with plenty of raw material to enjoy and to think about. To my mind the title ‘The Anarchy’ is brilliantly and appositely chosen. There are in fact two anarchies here; the anarchy of the competing regimes in India, and the anarchy – literally, without leaders or rules – of the East India Company itself, a corporation that put itself above law. The dangers of power without governance are depicted in an exemplary fashion. Dalrymple has done a great service in not just writing an eminently readable history of 18th century India, but in reflecting on how so much of it serves as a warning for our own time when chaos runs amok from those seeking to be above the law.

#treat your s(h)elf #books #review #reading #bookgasm #book review #history #east india company #william dalrymple #the anrchy #britain #colonialism #imperialism #british history #india #personal

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yeahidontgohere · 4 years

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Too many thoughts on SPN 15x17, “Unity”

Welp, I don’t usually do this, but this episode was so great and packed with so many good parallels and callbacks I couldn’t help it! Meredith Glynn is such a great writer. So, let’s begin. Lots of spoilers under the cut.

The first scene opens up to Amara living life to the fullest in an Icelandic hot spring (I’ve been to some in Iceland and would 10/10 recommend – don’t bother with the Blue Lagoon, though). My eyes were immediately drawn to the super recognizable cover of Murakami’s “Norwegian Wood”. Now, I haven’t read this book since, like, high school (now realizing that was a DECADE ago), but I do remember the general plot and themes of the story (I should really reread that again, it’s a good book). Basically, the story is recalled by our narrator and protagonist Watanabe at a later point in his life as he is reminded of a time of life when the Beatles’ song “Norwegian Wood” plays. I don’t want to spoil the whole book, but basically it is a coming of age story that is steeped in themes of regret, sex, love, and death (among others, it really is a literary treasure trove!). Skip the next paragraph if you don’t want “Norwegian Wood” spoilers.

In short: Watanabe’s best friend from high school commits suicide which haunts him and his friend’s girlfriend, Naoki, for the rest of their lives. Watanabe and Naoki become close and romantically involved, but she leaves for a sanitorium. Watanabe wants to be with Naoki despite her telling him that she doesn’t think she can love anymore (she described herself and her high school boyfriend as soulmates). Watanabe later meets Naoki’s opposite, Midori, a lively girl who Watanabe grows close to and is also interested in. Watanabe essentially doesn’t move forward as he is waiting on Naoki while having Midori waiting on him. At the end of the story, it is revealed that it has always been Midori and he realizes he wants to be with her.

I thought that this was an EXCELLENT pick for Amara to be reading. It really sums of a lot of surface and not-so-surface level themes in Supernatural. Wondering if there is a parallel between Dean and Watanabe about sort of idealizing a life (with someone) that isn’t meant to be while ignoring love in front of you? Would love to hear all of your thoughts.

Moving on (I’m skipping through parts of the episode to just focus on some key observations)! Amara tries to convince Chuck to fight on behalf of this world and wants to show him some of his creations. So, she brings him to Heaven to see his ‘first children’ (i.e., angels). She also refers to angels as having prefect angelic devotion which immediately made me laugh because our fave angel Cas is really devoted to Dean humanity and not Chuck. Ahh! This whole episode just kept pointing out how special Cas is.

And then, callback after callback began. Amara brings Chuck to the bunker so Chuck says, “Is this a trap?” which made me think of episode 9 (“The Trap” by Berens). This was almost immediately followed by another callback when Chuck says, “You can’t hold me here forever,” to which Amara replies, “I can hold you long enough.” Um, Lily Sunder Has Some Regrets (12x10, Yockey), anyone?

Ishim: “You can’t hold me here forever.” … Lily’s powers are wearing off as Ishim approaches her until Cas stabs Ishim in the back with his angel blade. Cas: “You held him for long enough.”

Like, COME ON! Almost verbatim.

Skipping forward to Dean and Jack’s adventure to visit my favorite hippies, Adam and Serafina (like seriously, they were fantastic characters!). Adam refers to himself as, “…first dude off of the assembly line,” which is similar language that has been used to referring to angels in the past (again, invoking Castiel?)

Then Dean assumes the woman is Eve but they both just shake their heads and chuckle, “I’m Serafina,” I’m definitely not the first one to point this out but… the First Man being in a near-lifelong romantic relationship with an angel named Seraph Serafina?! Uh, yeah, ‘nuff said.

Serafina also mentions that she saw Jack when she and Adam were, “…sipping mushroom tea on the Hanging Gardens of Babylon,” which made me wonder if there was some sort of connection with Glynn’s season 14 episode, “Byzantium” (14x08), which is the episode Cas makes his deal with the Empty. Babylon was a fortress of the Byzantine empire (not going to lie, my historical knowledge about the Byzantine empire is preeeeetty limited).

I also loved the whole speech by Serafina to Dean: “I mean, just think of everything that has had to happen to get Jack to this place, to this moment. Baby, it was meant to be,” Dean, of course, is upset by this because he is probably thinking that this was all basically predestined, and he has had no free will. However, he just needs to wait a little while longer until Chuck tells him to his face that he has never been able to control Cas since he laid his hand on Dean saving him from Hell.

Serafina also heals Adam’s wound and it is, of course, super reminiscent of Cas healing Dean (although, even Serafina doesn’t directly touch Adam when healing him – it’s, once again, unique to Castiel). Obligatory hand squeal: HANDS!!!! Wow, they are not even trying to be subtle about the whole hands thing. It is so IN YOUR FACE begging for the audience to notice it.

Adam then mentions how much power is in his rib: “But this puppy? Is packing enough punch to create LIFE. Or, in your case, destroy God.” Well, at this point I think we can all be pretty certain that in the end it will NOT be used to destroy God, so will it instead be used for creation? Excited to see how they defuse Jack’s supernova bomb next episode.

Rounding off Dean’s vignette is a heartbreaking scene with him and Jack in the Impala. Dean says, “I don’t know how to explain it. When I learned about Chuck, it was like – it’s like I wasn’t alive. Not really. You know, like, my whole life I’ve never been free. But like, really free. But now, me and Sam, we got a shot at living a life…But now we have a chance. And that’s because of you.” Again, this is before Dean learns that Cas’ actions were made of his own free will, and from the sounds of it, Dean’s connection to Amara as well. I also immediately wondered if Jack bringing Dean some sense of freedom was what Cas saw when Jack showed him “paradise”.

Moving on to Sam’s vignette: Sam remembers that Sergei mentioned the Key of Death was in the bunker (how did he remember this, wasn’t he unconscious at the time? A little disappointed Cas didn’t get to provide that little fact but I’m also glad that Sam actually served a purpose this episode and was a bit more front and center). They find the Key of Death and there is an inscription in Latin on the box:

Viator mortalis, cave, quoniam scias Clavem Mortis pensare graviter. Il tamen desideres ut introeas illum abyssum obscurissimum artis opus est tibi porta.

Okay, fair warning: I took Latin for 4 years but it has been awhile so my translation is super not perfect, but I figured I would take a stab at it because the subtitles were wrong at times and Google translate is not perfect. I translated it as something like this:

Mortal traveler, beware, because you know the Key of Death should be considered seriously. However, if you want to enter the darkest abyss, this work of art is the gate/door.

Honestly, there were a few words that I couldn’t find the right conjugations to and I know this isn’t 100% accurate, but it gives you the gist.

Sam then visits Death’s library and finds the Empty there, killing people (?) to get in touch with Death, whom they hasn’t been trusting as of late. We learn that Death’s plan is to assume the role of New God and restore the world back to order, bring back rules. The Empty is wary because they don’t know if they can trust the promise of being able to go back to sleep. Trust issues, the Empty says, because of “your busted-ass friend in the trench coat,” another subtle-not-so-subtle mention of Cas. But why, exactly, did Cas give the Empty ‘trust issues’? Was it because he woke up in the first place? Because he has ‘traipsed in and out’ of the Empty without dying?

We also learn that only Billie can read Chuck’s Death book, and, this may be a crack idea but… maybe Cas should be able to read the book because he was the one that killed Billie and made her Death in the first place? Seems like Cas might have a connection to Billie. It would be cool if Cas were the one to read Chuck’s book.

Finally, we learn a bit more about the Empty, and how they can’t go to Earth unless summoned. Hmm…

Flash forward to Amara and Chuck in the bunker. Amara tells Chuck, “It’s not too late, brother,” and, if you’re like me, you finished that sentence with “it’s never too late (to start all over again)”. So many great Destiel songs out there, but “Never Too Late” takes the cake for me.

Amara and Chuck decide to become one, become ultimate balance. Chuck extends his hand and Amara grasps it as she is absorbed into Chuck. I don’t even know if I really need to say this, but… HANDS! (Destiel is already canon to me but if the show is going to make it more explicitly canon for the audience, it’s going to be through hands as I know people have been shouting about for several seasons now).

To finish, let’s talk about that kick-ass scene with TFW 2.0 at the end of the episode. We find out that Chuck’s real ending is to have Dean regress and give in to rage and kill everything he loves, probably ultimately leading to his own death. Woof, what a tragic ending (tragedy ≠ good ending). So, we’ve got to subvert that which Dean does after a heartfelt plea from Sam (“You would trade me?”). I enjoyed how much Dean looked back at Cas during this exchange, especially after Sam tells Dean that Eileen will die again. The parallels, the connection.

Honestly, I’m not sure why Cas and Jack were in that scene other than to have some meaningful glances exchanged between Cas and Dean and because TFW2.0 is together in the next scene. But… whatever, more Cas so I liked it.

And finally, the scene that had me shaking with VINDICATION.

Cas to Chuck: “What, you consumed your sister?” Chuck: “We came to an understanding, so spare me your contempt Castiel, the self-hating angel of Thursday. You know what every other version of you did after ‘gripping him tight and raising him from perdition’? They did what they were told. But not you. Not the ‘one off the line with a crack in his chassis’” (Cas looks back at Dean after a moment)

Okay, so let’s break this exchange down. So much satisfaction with just a few sentences. Bravo, Ms. Glynn.

“We came to an understanding.” Didn’t Michael and Adam say the same thing after they decided to share equally in their bond and vessel? Callback #1.

“…self-hating angel of Thursday.” Ahh, it’s been so long since we got mention that Cas is the angel of Thursday. The last time was, what, when Crowley says it to Cas back in season 6? By the way, it was totally meant to be that Supernatural will finish off the series on a Thursday. Callback #2 (ish).

“You know what every other version of you did after ‘gripping him tight and raising him from perdition’?” This is the second time the show has repeated Cas’ first line to Dean near-verbatim in two seasons. You know, just in case the audience forgot Dean and Cas’ infamous first meeting (which I am like 99% sure we are going to get hella callbacks to next episode). Callback #3.

“They did what they were told. But not you. Not the ‘one off the line with a crack in his chassis.’” Again, Chuck is closely paraphrasing what Naomi said about Cas in season 8:

8x21 “The Great Escapist” – Naomi: “You're the famous spanner in the works. Honestly, I think you came off the line with a crack in your chassis. You have never done what you were told. Not completely. You don't even die right, do you?”

Callback #4. Seriously, Glynn packed four callbacks into such a short time period. Wizard.

My only *criticism* of this final scene is that Dean and Cas didn’t seem to react too much to Chuck’s news about Cas always having free will (although, I think Cas already knew this, but it is news and confirmation to Dean!). I highly suspect that will come next week, though. I’m SO excited (and also terrified) for next week. We are definitely going to be getting a lot of Cas next episode. Misha, in an interview, mentioned that we would get Cas’ ‘chapter’ in 18, and I’m wondering if this will be the true Cas-centric episode? I don’t know, maybe the Cas-centric episode was “Gimme Shelter” but I was expecting more of a “The Man Who Would Be King” kind of Cas-centric episode.

All in all, 10/10. I keep reading and seeing things that are galaxy braining me, so it has been super fun reading all the meta and reactions to this episode.

Three episodes left. Get your tissues ready for Cas’ death (oops, is this even a spoiler at this point?) next episode. And remember, “Nothing ever really ends,” and “The end has no end,”

#spn #spn 15 #spn spoilers #spn 15 spoilers #spn 15x17 #15x17 #Unity #Meredith Glynn #Destiel #Deancas #hands #meta #maybe?#spn meta #meta or just random thoughts and reactions #awesome episode #profound bond #castiel is key #supernatural

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