Tumgik
#but I rather suspect it's 'would definitely include in my plans for world domination'
lyrslair · 3 years
Text
Look my bf and I got together when he was teaching me to fight. What, like I’m NOT gonna fall for Din Djarin?
2 notes · View notes
woman-loving · 3 years
Text
The “Homosexual Traitor” and US Anti-Gay Purges
Selection from The Deviant's War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America, by Eric Cervini, 2020.
According to the Russians, Colonel Alfred Redl of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had slightly graying blond hair and a “greasy” outward appearance. He spoke “sugar-sweetly, softly.”
Beginning in 1901, Redl worked as a high official in Austria’s Evidenzbureau, where he single-handedly built its counterespionage program. He had more access to classified information than perhaps anyone else in the empire.
In Vienna, Redl’s homosexuality was an open secret. He often appeared at society events with his longtime “nephew,” and he maintained several other affairs. He had no reason to be fearful of exposure, since even the emperor’s brother enjoyed cross-dressing and the occasional army officer.
Redl closely guarded his work as a double agent, however. During his service in the Evidenzbureau, he offered Austrian war plans to the Italian military attaché in exchange for cash. An Italian intelligence officer later recalled it “required no effort” to recruit him. Redl simply mailed envelopes full of Austrian secrets and received thousands of krone in return.
He then began sending military plans to the Russians, too. Redl became fabulously wealthy, lavishing gifts on his lovers and driving two of the empire’s most expensive automobiles. For years, no one seemed to question how he afforded such extravagances on his government salary.
In May 1913, after Austrian counterintelligence officials intercepted a Russian letter containing six thousand krone, they staked out the Vienna post office to identify its recipient. They were appalled to discover Redl.
The army wanted to keep the matter quiet, since public knowledge of treachery at such a high level would have been a profound humiliation. After following him to his hotel, Redl’s own protégé handed him a pistol. Army officials always maintained that Redl voluntarily took his life.
News of the colonel leaked, fact became intertwined with fiction, and the myth of the homosexual traitor came into being. A Berlin newspaper described Redl’s “homosexual pleasure palace, filled with perversities.” The Austrian Army needed a scapegoat for the 1.3 million casualties in that first year of World War I, so it blamed Redl and the larger, more insidious “homosexual organization” that protected him within the military.
Three years later, when a young Allen Dulles, the future CIA director, arrived in Vienna to work at the U.S. embassy, he found everyone still whispering about the homosexual spy who had lost the First World War for the empire.
By the end of World War II, America had become a more open place for homosexuals, but they also confronted novel threats conjured by a political coalition that exploited the uncertainty of the new world order. In 1945, only months before President Roosevelt died, Republicans and Southern Democrats formed the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). In the 1946 midterm election, after Republicans pledged to “ferret out” threats to the “American way of life,” they won the first congressional majority in sixteen years.
In March 1947, President Truman established the Federal Employee Loyalty Program, and the government began investigating its employees to determine their loyalty. Three months later, the Democrat-controlled Senate Committee on Appropriations warned about “the extensive employment in highly classified positions of admitted homosexuals, who are historically known to be security risks.” The committee empowered the secretary of state with “absolute discretion” to purge employees, including homosexuals, who threatened national security.
In September 1949, America learned that the Soviet Union had detonated its first nuclear weapon. In October, eleven Communist leaders were convicted for advocating a violent revolution in America, and in December, China fell to the Communists.
On January 21, 1950, a jury convicted suspected spy Alger Hiss of perjury.
On February 3, authorities arrested physicist Klaus Fuchs for nuclear espionage.
And on February 9, Junior Senator Joe McCarthy stood before a women’s club in Wheeling, West Virginia, and announced, “I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”
Nobody else had seen the list. When reporters caught him at an airport and demanded to see it, he offered to show them—then realized he had left it in his baggage. His number of alleged Communists soon changed from 205 to 57. “Rarely,” The Washington Post declared, “has a man in public life crawled and squirmed so abjectly.”
On the evening of February 20, McCarthy arrived on the Senate floor with an overstuffed briefcase that purportedly contained his list of Communist-linked security risks in the State Department. For six hours, he provided a warped summary of eighty-one cases, relying on unproven allegations from a three-year-old congressional investigation. “In short, the speech was a lie,” concluded historian Robert Griffith.
Two of the cases involved alleged homosexuals, who were “rather easy blackmail victims,” explained McCarthy. It was a shrewd maneuver: what editorial board or politician would dare argue that sexual deviants belonged in the federal government?
McCarthy would later recuse himself from hearings on the issue of homosexuals in the government. At forty-one, the senator was unmarried, and the issue raised questions about his own sexuality.
Other Republicans took the lead. A week after McCarthy’s Senate speech, his colleagues coerced Deputy Undersecretary of State John Peurifoy, a security official testifying in defense of his department, into making a startling admission. In only three years, he admitted, ninety-one homosexual employees had resigned upon investigations under Truman’s loyalty program.
And with that, as the New York Post referred to it, the “Panic on the Potomac” began. Conservative newspapers leapt upon the admission. Congress scheduled hearings. Homosexuality, observed a columnist on Meet the Press, became “a new type of political weapon” that could “wreck the Administration.” The chief of the Washington Vice Squad testified there were “3,750 perverts employed by government agencies.” Republican senator Kenneth Wherry alleged the Soviets were using a list of American homosexuals—originally compiled by Hitler—to blackmail federal employees for government secrets. Washington, he said, faced an “emergency condition.”
The Senate committee tasked with solving the homosexual problem, led by Democrat Clyde Hoey of North Carolina, began closed hearings in July. Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the director of the government’s new Central Intelligence Agency, testified first. He arrived with a thirty-eight-page statement, and ten of those pages chronicled a “classic” case, one “known all through intelligence circles,” an example that would leave “no doubt as to the fact that perversion presents a very definite security risk.”
Of all the intelligence available to the CIA, its director chose to rest his case against homosexuals on the forty-year-old story of Colonel Redl. In Hillenkoetter’s retelling, Redl had been an “honest” man who found himself in an imperial army with unforgiving policies against homosexuality. The Russians hired a young newsboy, who “became very intimate” with Redl. Next, they broke into the colonel’s room and caught him in an “act of perversion.” After threatening to expose him, the Russians gained copies of the Austrian war plans prior to the outbreak of violence.
And so a single urban legend, the telling of which was almost entirely, verifiably inaccurate (in fact, a 1907 Russian diplomatic cable had falsely labeled Redl “a lover of women”) became the primary piece of evidence that guided federal employment policy toward homosexuals for decades to come.
The CIA director then explained the “general theory as to why we should not employ homosexuals or other moral perverts in positions of trust.” He gave thirteen reasons to the senators.  
1.  Homosexuals experience emotions “as strong and in fact actually stronger” than heterosexual emotions.   2.  Homosexuals are susceptible “to domination by aggressive personalities.”   3.  Homosexuals have “psychopathic tendencies which affect the soundness of their judgment, physical cowardice, susceptibility to pressure, and general instability, thus making a pervert vulnerable in many ways.”   4.  Homosexuals “invariably express considerable concern” about concealing their condition.   5.  Homosexuals are “promiscuous” and often visit “various hangouts of his brethren,” marking “a definite similarity to other illegal groups such as criminals, smugglers, black-marketeers, dope addicts, and so forth.”   6.  Homosexuals with “outward characteristics of femininity—or lesbians with male characteristics—are often difficult to employ because of the effect on their co-workers, officials of other agencies, and the public in general.”   7.  Homosexuals who think they are discreet are, in reality, “actually quite indiscrete [sic]. They are too stupid to realize it, or else due to inflation of their ego or through not letting themselves realize the truth, they are usually the center of gossip, rumor, derision, and so forth.”   8.  Homosexuals who try “to drop the ‘gay’ life and go ‘straight’ … eventually revert to type.”   9.  Homosexuals are “extremely vulnerable to seduction by another pervert employed for that purpose by a foreign power.” 10.  Homosexuals are “extremely defiant in their attitude toward society,” which could lead to disloyalty. 11.�� “Homosexuals usually seem to be extremely gullible.” 12.  Homosexuals, including “even the most brazen perverts,” are constantly suppressing their instincts, which causes “considerable tension.” 13.  Homosexuals employed by the government “lead to the concept of a ‘government within a government.’ That is so noteworthy. One pervert brings other perverts. They belong to the lodge, the fraternity. One pervert brings other perverts into an agency … and advance them usually in the interest of furthering the romance of the moment.”
The testimony of subsequent intelligence officials echoed that of the CIA director, and the Hoey committee’s final report primarily drew from the testimony of its lead witness, sometimes verbatim. As the Hoey report concluded, homosexuals were ipso facto security risks. Colonel Redl remained its only example.
Hillenkoetter’s thirteen principles became official government doctrine. The government incorporated the Hoey report into its security manuals, forwarded it to embassies, and shared it with its foreign allies. “The notion that homosexuals threatened national security,” explains historian David Johnson, “received the imprimatur of the U.S. Congress and became accepted as official fact.” When the federal government needed to justify its homosexual purges, it simply pointed to the Hoey report.
Dwight D. Eisenhower won the presidency in 1952 with the help of the slogan “Let’s Clean House” and whispers that his opponent, Adlai Stevenson, had homosexual tendencies. Three months after his inauguration, Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, which expanded the government’s purging authority—originally given to the State Department—to all federal agencies. Any employee who exhibited “criminal, infamous, dishonest, immoral, or notoriously disgraceful conduct” had no place in the federal bureaucracy. With a Republican in the White House, the purges became less of a spectacle and more of a quiet, well-oiled machine. In Eisenhower’s 1954 State of the Union, he boasted of removing 2,200 security risks in only a year.
McCarthy’s downfall came later that year, but the purges remained alive, as did the rumors that always seemed to saturate America’s capital. After two Republican senators learned that the son of Senator Lester Hunt of Wyoming, a Democrat, had been arrested in Lafayette Park, they gave Hunt a choice. He could withdraw from his 1954 reelection campaign or face the publicity of his son’s homosexual arrest. The Senate was virtually tied. If Hunt resigned, he risked shifting power to the Republicans.
On the morning of June 19, 1954, Senator Hunt, a straight victim of antigay political blackmail, entered his Capitol office and shot himself with a .22-caliber rifle.
25 notes · View notes
violethowler · 4 years
Text
The Heroine’s Journey of Sora
I’ve spent the last couple of weeks writing out my thoughts on Kingdom Hearts and the way the series follows the framework of the Heroine’s Journey. Rather than a bunch of drabbles or a single long-winded post, I’ve decided to break up my explanations of the Heroine’s Journey and the way Kingdom Hearts fits into it as a series of ten essays posted weekly. I will put up a masterpost once all of them are finished, and in the meantime I will have all of them on my blog under the tag ‘Kingdom Hearts and the Heroine’s Journey.’
Due to the length of this essay, I will be putting the full thing under a cut. 
What many Kingdom Hearts fans do not realize is that while Tetsuya Nomura does sometimes make up the details as he goes when it comes to the writing of Kingdom Hearts, he does do things with a plan. 
In the KH3 Ultimania [1], he talked about how he’d had the conclusion of the Dark Seeker Saga outlined by the end of Kingdom Hearts II’s development. In an April 2012 interview [2] with Nintendo President Satoru Iwata, he indicated that he’d had a general framework up to Kingdom Hearts II planned out when the original game was first announced. And in a 2004 interview after the original Chain of Memories was released on GameBoy Advance, he mentioned that he’d already come up with the “last scene” that would serve as the definitive ending of the entire series[3]. 
So while some details may be hard to predict because Nomura comes up with lore and backstory details as he goes, he does have a plan in mind where the overall story is going. And the central arc of the series is entirely predictable once you understand the framework that the story fits into. 
Since the late 1800s, scholars have been studying the common patterns that repeat in stories, legends, and myths across different cultures around the world. One of the most well known templates developed from such research is the Hero’s Journey. In his 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, literature professor Joseph Campbell published a 17 step formula of storytelling. Campbell held up this framework as the monomyth, an ultimate narrative archetype from which all other stories are derived, and in discussion of his work expressed his view of The Hero’s Journey as a universal framework that showed how people grow from youth into adulthood.
However in the 1980s, Maureen Murdock began work on her own narrative framework. Believing that Campbell’s view on the universality of the Hero’s Journey did not encompass the experiences of every identity like he claimed, Murdock developed what she called The Heroine’s Journey as a critique and response to Campbell’s monomyth. Other authors have shared their own variations of the Heroine’s Journey, but for the purposes of this analysis, I will be focusing on Murdock’s model. Hers is both the oldest one I know of, and the one that I personally have the most familiarity with. Though originally conceived as a therapy tool, the core concepts of Murdock’s template have resulted in its use in storytelling for narratives about protagonists overcoming the ingrained biases and preconceptions of society. 
Some notable examples of stories that follow the Heroine’s Journey template, albeit most with different formulas, include 
Beauty and the Beast
The Hunger Games trilogy
The Princess and the Frog
Tangled
Howl’s Moving Castle
Labyrinth 
Star Wars Sequel Trilogy*
Voltron: Legendary Defender*
*Note: Voltron: Legendary Defender and the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy are examples of 3-act narratives that followed the Heroine’s Journey framework in the first 2 acts only for behind-the-scenes conflicts to result in the formula being abandoned in the final act. 
Despite the name, it is possible in theory to have a male protagonist follow the Heroine’s Journey, much like how you can have a female protagonist in a Hero’s Journey.  While nearly every story I know that follows the Heroine’s Journey template has a female protagonist in the lead role, Kingdom Hearts is the first example that I’ve discovered of a male protagonist following this formula. Sora’s arc across the series follows Murdock’s framework so precisely that I was able to correctly predict the broad strokes of how Re:Mind would go three months before the DLC was released. 
Part I: The Beginning
While the Heroine’s Journey mimics the Hero’s Journey in its early stages, it ultimately goes in its own direction. I plan to go into further detail about the differences between the two in a later essay, but for now I will say that while Campbell’s monomyth describes physical plot points and the themes they represent, the Heroine’s Journey formula focuses on the emotional conflict of the narrative and the psychological development of its main characters. The pattern of the Hero’s Journey is fluid and doesn’t have a fixed central theme, while the core element of the Heroine’s Journey is a protagonist coming of age in a society that consciously or not regards them as lesser because they do not fit in with the expectations of the dominant social group. 
I know that some people who decide to read further will be put off by the fact that the names and descriptions of the Heroine’s Journey feature gendered language and focus on discussions of masculinity and femininity, so allow me to explain. The reason for this is that in a Heroine’s Journey, the protagonist is attempting to conform to a set of traits that the audience’s culture values. In pursuing this external validation, the main character has to suppress a vital part of who they are, cutting themselves off from achieving their full potential. The traits they are suppressing are the ones which are often regarded as feminine, while the ones they are trying to conform to are typically associated with masculinity. We see this pattern frequently in movies where the female lead tries to succeed in a male-dominated career field, only to feel lonely and unfulfilled when she finally gets what she wants because she sacrificed the parts of herself that made her who she is along the way. 
Now that I’ve given you a relatively brief summary of the Heroine’s Journey, I can get down to business and walk people through the steps to this template and how it fits with the story of Kingdom Hearts. Note that this is only a basic rundown of the steps of the Heroine’s Journey and how it relates to these games, and I will be posting additional essays shortly which go into greater detail on the themes, character archetypes, and other different layers of the framework that are present in the series. 
Murdock’s version of the Heroine’s Journey begins with the “Separation from the Feminine”. This is the stage where, as mentioned, the protagonist suppresses a core part of themselves in pursuit of external validation. It often takes the form of the protagonist sacrificing their emotional strengths and focuses exclusively on proving themselves in the physical sphere. Sora has demonstrated again and again that his greatest strength is his empathy and his willingness to make connections with others. It makes him a strong unifying force because of how well it complements the people around him. But because this isn’t something tangible in the same way that physical strength is, he doesn’t see the value of it, believing that without the strength of his friends he’s nothing. 
From the way the other kids on Destiny Islands talk about their competitions, Sora’s focus is on trying to prove that he’s just as strong and capable as Riku is. But he’s so focused on proving himself in physical challenges that he doesn’t notice the signs of Riku’s jealousy that lead his friend into the arms of Maleficent. And we see through Anti Form and Rage Form that Sora is still repressing his own negative emotions in Kingdom Hearts III. His narrow focus on external skills has cut him off from achieving the full potential of his internal ones. 
When Sora awakens in Traverse Town after the destruction of Destiny Islands, we come to the second stage of the Heroine’s Journey, “Identification with the Masculine and Gathering of Allies”. This is where the main character chooses to align with the traits and roles that the dominant social group sees as desirable in order to achieve their goal, and where they acquire the allies who will help them in their quest. With the adults around him focusing on his ability to destroy the Heartless, Sora latches onto the Chosen One status that implicitly comes with having a Keyblade. His interactions with Phil and his disappointment with the status of Junior Hero in subsequent games paint Sora as being focused on heroism in the sense of overcoming obstacles with force. Even Donald and Goofy, in the beginning, are focused on Sora’s value as a Keyblade Wielder in terms of how their fight against the Heartless can lead them to King Mickey’s location.
By setting off with Donald, and Goofy, Sora embarks on the “Road of Trials” stage of the Heroine’s Journey. This is one of the few points of similarity between the Heroine’s Journey and the Hero’s, corresponding to Campbell’s “Tests, Allies, and Enemies” stage. This is where the main character faces the initial obstacles and challenges of their quest. In the first few Kingdom Hearts games we have Sora face off against Maleficent, Ansem, and the Organization, before reuniting with Riku and Kairi in The World That Never Was. The final stages of Kingdom Hearts II correspond to the “Finding the Boon of Success” stage of both the Hero and Heroine’s Journeys. 
Part II: Interlude
In a Hero’s Journey, the Boon of Success is the end of the story. They slay the dragon, save the princess, and go home to live happily ever after. I suspect this is one reason why a lot of gamers in the KH fanbase tend to think of Kingdom Hearts 2 as the best game of the series - because in their minds Sora’s quest had been completed now that he had found Riku and Kairi like he set out to do in the first game. His journey, as far as they were concerned, was done. 
(This may also have an affect on how some fans reacted to Kingdom Hearts III, expecting it to be a grand epic finale that wrapped everything up with a bow and left a completely blank slate for the future of the series)
But in a Heroine’s Journey, the Boon of Success is not the end of the main character’s story. They have achieved their external goal, but they have not addressed their internal motivations for seeking that goal in the first place. And as their story continues, they find themselves facing challenges that their attitude thus far has failed to prepare them for. Finding The Boon of Success typically occurs early during the second act of the story. Usually it is achieved in the second half of Act II, but can sometimes happen as early as the end of the first act. For Sora, this was of course finding Riku and Kairi so that they could all go home to the Destiny Islands together.
But because the protagonist of a Heroine’s Journey has not addressed the underlying insecurities which set them on their current path, they “Awaken to Feelings of Spiritual Aridity”. 
They begin to learn that the conflict they find themselves involved in is not as clear cut as they previously believed, and the challenges that come with this new knowledge are ones that their current way of doing things has failed to prepare them for. They may have found their boon of success, but things quickly begin to go wrong until they are ultimately forced to sacrifice their reward. 
The first game already showed through Riku and Mickey that Sora was not the only person able to wield a Keyblade, but because of his heroic deeds the story still framed him as the Keyblade Master and treated him as having a more significant role to play in important events than anyone else. It’s only after he hears from Mickey of the Keyblade Wielders who came before him that it begins to sink in for him that being a Keyblade Master is not a special Chosen One status. He thinks that because of all that he’s accomplished, he doesn’t need the recognition that comes with the official title, and because of that he’s careless and almost gets himself Norted at the end of DDD. 
His failure in the exam is a blow to his self confidence and shows that despite what he had said at the start of the test, deep down he really does want that kind of external validation. His insecurities and doubts continue to eat at him over the course of KH3, culminating in his breakdown at the Keyblade Graveyard. Outside of battle, we see him bottle up his doubts and other negative emotions because his friends (Except for Riku. More on him later) brush his concerns and problems aside. It is very much like Joy from Inside Out doing everything to keep Rylee happy and refusing to let Sadness take the controls. 
When their current way of doing things ultimately costs them their boon, the protagonist tries to go back to the way things used to be. To return to a simpler time and avoid the pain of the present. When literally going back to where their journey began isn’t possible, a Heroine’s Journey story will use this stage symbolically. The main character will cling to a person, object, or relationship that they associate with a simpler time. But as comfortable as the sense of familiarity they get from that is, it ultimately cannot truly address their inner pain in the long run.
This is reflected in the Re:Mind DLC, where Sora goes back in time in order to find the pieces of Kairi’s heart and bring her back. One of Kairi’s most consistent character traits is her fear of change and desire for things to remain the way they were. 
At the end of the DLC, Sora compares his connection with Kairi to the bond between Ventus and Chirithy, a friendship explicitly strained by distance, time, and Ven’s amnesia. In an interview at E3 2018 [4], Nomura commented about Kingdom Hearts III tying into a theme of childhood friendships changing as one gets older, a plotline that Merlin calls attention to after Sora’s visit to the 100 Acre Wood. And in a 2006 book titled Character’s Report Vol. 1, Nomura specifically calls attention to Kairi’s anxiety about growing apart from Sora and Riku as they get older. [5] All of these details combined frame Sora’s quest to save Kairi as an attempt to symbolically recover the innocence he lost when he began his journey.
But while he is able to find a way to renew his connection to Kairi, it can never be the same as it was before, and attempting to go back to how things used to be is ultimately doomed to failure. By the time he brings her to The Final World at the end of Re:Mind, Sora has realized that he and Kairi cannot stay on the same plan of existence anymore as a consequence of his actions. So he takes her on a tour of the worlds to re-establish their connection before fading away at the end of KH3. Thus, we come to the final act of the Kingdom Hearts narrative. 
Part III: The Future Story 
It is at this point that the protagonist of a Heroine’s Journey begins the “Initiation and Descent to the Goddess” stage. Having failed to achieve meaningful success through their old way of doing things, they must look inward and examine the cause of their insecurities and accept that in order to move forward they need to heal themselves. In this step, the main character travels to either a dream world or a physical location that is closed off and forbidden to them, like the West Wing of Beast’s Castle in Beauty and the Beast. In Jungian psychology, this metaphorical dark cave represents the main character’s subconscious, and entering it triggers a dark night of the soul for our protagonist as they are forced to confront the parts of themselves they’ve been keeping locked away.
While Sora knows in his head that darkness is not inherently bad, he continues to rely entirely exclusively on light, on his connections to others, and has not properly accepted it in his heart. In order to truly finish his coming of age narrative, Sora must learn to balance his inner light and darkness the same way that Riku has. And to do that, he needs to look inside himself and figure out why he feels so badly that he needs his connections to others in order to be strong. And in order to achieve that level of understanding of himself, he needs to understand his Animus. 
Derived from the psychological theories of Carl Jung, the Animus in a Heroine’s Journey is an external representation of the protagonist’s masculine-coded traits in physical form. While not every Heroine’s Journey features an Animus, many of the stories I’ve seen that follow the formula do. Usually the Animus appears in the form of a deuteragonist who often functions as the protagonist’s Shadow, an archetypal character that embodies the aspects of the main character’s personality that due to their immaturity they either aren’t aware or don’t want to acknowledge that they have. 
In order to complete their character arc, the protagonist must symbolically integrate with their Shadow by learning to embrace the parts of their psyche that the Shadow represents. In many stories the protagonist has more than one Shadow figure, all of whom challenge the protagonist by forcing them to become faster or smarter to stay one step ahead, giving their interactions with the main character a push-and-pull dynamic as they drive the main character to grow. Shadow figures who fill the role of the Animus also challenge the protagonist to look inside themselves and examine their own emotional needs. With an Animus, the push to grow runs in both directions, with the main character motivating their Animus’ growth just as much as the other way around. 
In these types of stories, every aspect of the character is tailored to make the Animus and the protagonist fit together like Yin and Yang. In visual stories such as film, television, and video games, the Animus’ entire look is designed to complement the main character and they are framed in the narrative as the protagonist’s equal physically, intellectually, and spiritually. This serves to emphasize that despite their surface differences, much of the conflict between the protagonist and their Animus comes from the ways in which they are fundamentally similar. While their circumstances may have led them to drastically different lives, the characters are ultimately two sides of the same coin, and their character development is driven by learning to balance their contrasting traits.
And within the structure of the Kingdom Hearts series, there is only one character who fulfills all of these qualities in relation to Sora’s journey. 
The same character who Testuya Nomura said in the KH1 Ultimania was designed to balance Sora; [6]
Who series producer Shinji Hasimoto said was part of the core of the series alongside Sora [7], as has been repeatedly emphasized by the number of games where he is given a major focus and is a playable character alongside Sora. 
Tumblr media
[Image Description: Riku walking towards a door to light in the opening of Kingdom Hearts III. End Description]
While Sora and Riku have addressed some of the latter’s behavior in the first game during their conversation on the dark beach at the end of Kingdom Hearts II, they have yet to truly dig deep into why Riku felt the way he did in the first game. Riku has not told Sora about how he felt like he was being left behind and forgotten. And since that conversation, Riku has gone to the opposite extreme, dealing with his emotional problems on his own instead of lashing out at others like he had done at the start. Likewise while Sora has accepted that darkness is not inherently evil he has yet to apply this to his own negative emotions, as seen in Kingdom Hearts III. Neither character has truly achieved an ideal balance yet, and they cannot until Sora completes his journey. 
After the protagonist returns from their spiritual journey, they experience an “Urgent Yearning to Reconnect with the Feminine.” As the main character recovers from their period of soul searching, they embrace the parts of themselves that they had neglected in their pursuit of outside approval. Their Descent allowed them to recognize their value as a person and an individual outside of their ability to fulfill the role that they were expected to fill. Following this realization, they go about “Healing the Mother/Daughter split”. Reclaiming the aspects of their personality they’ve been repressing gives the protagonist the clarity necessary to gain a different perspective on their old way of thinking. This new understanding is what will allow them to find the inner balance needed to truly complete their journey. 
The Japanese version of the “My friends are my power” mantra often repeated across the series is “Connected hearts are my power.” For Sora, who has long relied on his connections to others as a source of strength, he should come to realize that these connections go both ways: that his friends draw strength from him just as much as he draws strength from them. This should help him come to accept that he is still strong and worthy all by himself. Ven’s version of the mantra from the English version of BBS summarizes it best: “My friends are my power. And I am theirs.” After he accepts this, Sora will finally be able to use the full extent of his emotional abilities.
After achieving that new perspective, the protagonist’s next step is “Healing the Wounded Masculine Within”. This is the stage of the Heroine’s Journey where the main character, having come to understand themselves, reconciles with their Animus, thereby symbolically integrating the aspects of their psyche that the Animus represents and permanently healing the rift between the two characters. This will be where Sora and Riku need to have a longer, more in-depth conversation than the one they had on the Dark Magin at the end of KH2. Where they talk about why Riku acted the way he did and finally address the underlying reason for why he was so jealous of Sora in the original game. 
The final stage of the Heroine’s Journey is the “Integration of Masculine and Feminine”. This is the point at which the main character and their Animus finally achieve a perfect balance between them. They are united both internally and externally. There are no more secrets between them, and they are now free to move forward and overcome the main antagonist together. 
Part IV: Conclusion: 
While there’s too many different possibilities to completely predict every twist and turn of the series’ lore in future games, once you understand how Kingdom Hearts fits into the framework of the Heroine’s Journey, the broad strokes of how the story will go in terms of Sora’s growth and character development are entirely predictable. When Re:Mind first released and the rest of the fandom was reacting on Twitter, I was sitting back with a smug smile on my face thinking:
Tumblr media
[Image Description: Emperor Palpatine in Star Wars: Episode VI: Return of the Jedi sitting aboard the Death Star II with the caption ‘Good, Good. Everything is going according to plan.’ End Description.]
While I didn’t expect the precise mechanics of how Sora went about saving Kairi, Re:Mind was exactly what I expected it to be in terms of themes and its place in the Heroine’s Journey framework, and then the Secret Episode came along to reinforce that the next game is going to be Sora’s Descent.
While there isn’t a complete guarantee that the series will continue to follow the formula, I find it extremely unlikely that it won’t. Kingdom Hearts follows the stages of this framework too precisely for me to ever believe it happened by accident. So as long as there is no corporate interference from Disney like what happened to Voltron, I’m confident that Nomura’s plan for the finale of the series will be exactly what the Heroine’s Journey predicts it should be, no matter how unexpected future additions to the lore may be.
Special thanks to @dragonofyang and the rest of Team Purple Lion for everything I know about the Heroine’s Journey. I wouldn’t be as enthusiastic about analyzing the story of Kingdom Hearts if they hadn’t taught me the vocabulary to realize the kind of story that Nomura has been telling right under my nose for the last 18 years.
Sources:
[1] “Kingdom Hearts III Ultimania interview with Tetsuya Nomura”; March 12, 2019
https://www.khinsider.com/news/Kingdom-Hearts-3-Ultimania-Main-Nomura-Interview-Translated-14763
[2] “Iwata Asks: Nintendo 3DS: Third Party Game Developers, Volume 12: Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance], Part 3: Square’s Intentions”; April 2012.
https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/3ds/creators/11/2
[3] “2004 GMR Nomura Interview 2004!”; Translation by Kingdom Hearts Insider posted May 5, 2012. 
https://www.khinsider.com/news/GMR-Nomura-Interview-2004-2563
[4] “E3 2018: Tetsuya Nomura on If Kingdom Hearts 3 Is the End of Sora's Story”; June 14, 2018.
https://www.ign.com/articles/2018/06/14/e3-2018-tetsuya-nomura-on-if-kingdom-hearts-3-is-the-end-of-soras-story
[5] “Character’s Report Vol. 1 Translations”; Jul 16, 2014
https://www.khinsider.com/forums/index.php?threads/characters-report-vol-1-translations.195560/\
[6] “A Look Back: Kingdom Hearts Ultimania Gallery Comments Part 1″; August 30, 2019;
https://www.khinsider.com/news/A-Look-Back-KINGDOM-HEARTS-Ultimania-Gallery-Comments-Part-1-15519
[7] “How Kingdom Hearts III Will Grow Up With Its Players.” September 24, 2013
https://www.ign.com/articles/2013/09/25/how-kingdom-hearts-iii-will-grow-up-with-its-players
[X] “The Heroine with a Thousand Faces”; June 13, 2019;
https://www.teampurplelion.com/heroine-with-a-thousand-faces/
[X] Murdock, Maureen. The Heroine’s Journey. 1990.
[X] “Maureen Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey Arc”. The Heroine Journeys Project. https://heroinejourneys.com/heroines-journey/
373 notes · View notes
legionofpotatoes · 4 years
Text
My assorted musings/theories about Control in one post!! I am having a lot of fun dissecting the implications of all the information we’re getting tiny peeks at. This WILL be a thought torrent so I won’t make any literary-essay-level structuring promises; click through at your own risk of losing sanity over my tangents.
So the base axiom the lore stands on is that reality in Control is shaped by the collective human subconscious in unpredictable ways, causing altered world events, subsequently creating altered items imbued with archetypal properties in correspondence with their historic context, and generally having things go way out of whack. 
But, as seen with the whole slide projector hubbub, we also know that other realities/dimensions exist in their own right and can, by virtue of their agenda, and not that of our thought, attempt to invade our reality through resonance-based means. Their motives can run the gamut but we know that their involvement/influence can have far-reaching consequences on our reality.
(there is an argument to be made that both the Hedron and the Hiss could have been extremely potent creations/projections of Jesse and Dylan’s minds altogether, especially since Polaris exists within one of them inherently, and that the slidescapes could simply have been an extension of the slide projector’s astral power still fully fed on human perceptions. But this theory sort-of runs everything else to the ground and makes us the center of the universe, and I don’t like that too much).
This is where the Oldest House comes in! And I love its deeply rooted historic/theological implications just as much as its impression at face value. I believe that since time immemorial, the Oldest House was a stabilizing element, a kind of ward against dimensional rifts threatening our reality. And it did that by presenting itself as a guide for human thought; a house of worship, a monument to service, whichever concept happened to elicit inherent respect and trust in that period of time, allowing the House to then control (ha) our thought through belief systems. Today, it’s a brutalist office building with no windows, which is, like, so on point. But anyway.
The Board. We know that it controls the Oldest House to an extent. Whether it represents the gods and deities we once made up is hard to tell, but its influence over the House’s functions is clear. We know that it had chosen individuals in the past to possibly represent the House’s intentions (today – the Directors of the FBC), giving them access to the Service Weapon and a direct link to the astral plane. I believe these would be our Thors and King Arthurs and Greek heroes and what have you. We KNOW that the Service Weapon is, by definition, the archetypal concept of “weapon” as shaped by human thought, and that the BFC suspects its past forms may have included Mjolnir and Excalibur among others. Today, it’s a handgun. Again, the implications. Delicious.
And I think the Oldest House is the same way; constantly shifting form, shape, and even geographical location to best fit its own archetypal concept, which I conflated with place of respect and/or worship up there, but even that can change to best fit the agenda of, what I think, is stabilizing and warding our reality against foreign resonances. It does this by presenting itself as a guidebook for human thought, tapping into our inherent astral potency, and utilizing resulting constructs – the Service Weapon, the anointed Director, and certain altered items – to serve its own upkeep. As directed by The Board.
(I believe that is also part of the reason why the FBC ended up discovering the House when it did – The Board allowed it per the alignment of the Bureau’s motives with its own. They both wanted to identify, neutralize, and contain AWEs both external and internal in order to keep the public – and by extension their thoughts – fully under control. I believe this had happened numerous times in the past, as well)
But to circle back – why does The House need upkeep at all? My guess is, it’s an extension of the initial agenda, and we KNOW it is inherently tied to (read: contains) thresholds, or dimensional rifts, or just other worlds. Let’s call them other worlds. The Oldest House is an ever-shifting place of power that both shapes and is shaped by human thought, in order to keep that very human thought – our “resonance” – the sole dominating astral force in our dimension. It focuses all incoming “traffic” within its walls and creates the thresholds as bottlenecks – while the traffic it can’t focus on itself, it contains, and brings in anyway - and finally, it uses the Director to keep all these foreign rifts and aberrations in check.
We are the House’s assistant. Familiar word? There’s one person in Control who keeps calling us their assistant despite our formal title being a peg above that definition. It is the Janitor – another very common archetype of stabilization, maintenance, fixing things up; in this case, Ahti – The Janitor – is simply a way for the House, and not The Board, to communicate its intent. The Janitor is as much part of the place of power as are its walls and rooms. They are one and the same. And a Janitor is a role that would be chosen with very particular intent. He knows the House’s innards as intimately as he knows how to keep them functioning.
So to recap, again – The House both feeds on and forms human thought constructs in order to keep other worlds at bay and is very much willing to directly cooperate with people when that agenda is mutually expressed. What if this whole entire system then, of a dimensional hub, a place of power trying to keep our resonance separate from others, is in itself a construct, an ancient expression of a basic human need? Or rather, a basic human emotional response? To go a bit meta, as a story with thematic underpinnings, that would make a sensible endgame to Control’s ideas and messaging. 
The Oldest House exists because we needed it to exist, and by consequence, we saved OURSELVES from the Hiss. Among a lot of other things in the past, I’d reckon. And The Board is our “representative” in the astral plane. We made them, too. We cocooned ourselves in constructs that would protect us from all outside resonances – all outside worlds – all outside points of view.
So what am I saying? Is The Oldest House a staunch apotheosis of conservative thought given form? I’m not willing to bet my life on it, but again, it all oddly falls into place. Think about it.
TRENCH let the Hiss in. Why? We’re told the Director of the Oldest House grew irrationally scared of the Hedron’s (arguably benevolent) influence and opted to fight it with fire; with an otherworldy horror. My guess is the House made him do that. The Board, sorry, made him do it. As firm believers in isolating humanity’s resonance from all others, they feared the Hedron’s presence as a variable incompatible with that agenda, and brought the Hiss in AS A WAY of proving their point, of keeping the cycle of fear strong in humanity’s thought, by killing Hedron and then using a newly appointed, freshly brainwashed Director Faden to remove the Hiss from the equation, as well. 
Status quo restored, all branches clipped, everyone agrees other dimensions bad.
The emotional response I mentioned was fear. We created The Oldest House out of fear. Fear of the unknown. And it became a feedback loop that disallowed us to ever consider anything else outside of our world as anything other than a threat.
Oh and you know what’s a real swanky way to impose fear on a willing humanity? *guitar riff* religion babyyyyyy
To wit, The Board refers to the House as a Tree at one point. We can find a scribbling of a tree in the Foundation. Ahti hands us a cassette tape from “his old friends” – and the band that starts playing call themselves the Old Gods of Asgard. So a tree connecting worlds. A housekeeper who is a friend to Odin’s pantheon. A chosen hero wielding Mjolnir. Did the House parade as the Yggdrasil at one point? Followed by some other nexus of blind human faith or a system of belief? Or just as religion itself?! And since now we all worship capitalism or some other forms of financial labor/revenue funnels and shoot each other dead in the streets, our Oldest House is an office building smack dab in the middle of Manhattan, its Director carries a literal handgun, and together they keep us safe from outsiders.
It all makes sense with a big ole asterisk that spells out “Yikes” in the end. 
Except there’s a caveat here cause!!! Within Jesse lives a spark left behind by Hedron; within her lives Polaris, a remnant of the slidescape, of the outer worlds; a hope for maybe liberating human thought of the endless cycle of fear that keeps it under its own Control. Will we bring the Oldest House down in a possible sequel? Is Jesse a Trojan horse? A byproduct of the Board’s arrogance? I mean we KNOW the pyramid is a hyperfocused, almost blatantly jealous entity that downright bribed us with healthcare plans in order to steer us away from The Former, another extradimensional being that was trying to get in through altered items. So maybe the House itself can be preserved, and its agenda retrofitted, and it is the Board we will have to tear down. It still all fits.
The Board is our projection of fear, the Oldest House is the wall we built to protect ourselves, and Jesse is poised to bring it all down. That’s my theory in a nutshell!!!!
I think I’ll end here for now. I could be entirely wrong about EVERYTHING here but the JUICE in this story is too damn nourishing, dudes.
64 notes · View notes
hayingsang · 3 years
Text
Read in 2014
As Peter Thiel seems to be in the news again, here are some notes I made several years ago after reading Zero to One.
*
Peter Thiel, Zero to One
I read this book on the recommendation of a friend.
First reaction: for a short book – 195 pages, with not many words on each of those page (less than 45,000 in total, I calculate) – it has a fair amount of filler.
Its last chapter, on founders, was pretty vacuous. As were the pictures of various people it featured. Were they put in to get the book up to nearly 200 pages?
I made a few notes as I went along:
* Have a plan
* Dominate a small market
* Have a mission – to do something – and have the right people; ones who get on/work as a team
* Sales is everything – reread this chapter
* Have a product that’s 10x better
And made one comment:
p140: things I don’t want to hear again: that a smartphone has more computing power than the processors that guided astronauts to the moon.
Not a big haul.
Of my list of notes, the fourth is perhaps the most important, for me at least. Sales is hugely important. Most people don’t like doing sales – it means asking someone else for money. Most people feel uncomfortable doing this. Good salespeople don’t have this problem, or have figured out how to circumvent it. As a former boss of mine once said: salespeople are different from everyone else; they’re only interested in selling – they don’t care what they sell (though it helps if it’s good), they see success in black and white: make a sale, and they’re happy; don’t make a sale, and they’re down.
But that was is something I knew already. As was have a plan and have a mission. Dominate a small market – best of all, be a monopoly – was a new thought for me. As was have a product that’s 10 times better. But neither were exactly that new: yes, you want your product to be better; maybe it’s better if it’s ten times better – but how do you measure this? And what about all those businesses who have something that’s not the best, let alone ten times better? That’s what most businesses are – ok, doing things that people need, getting by. Dominate a small market made most sense: of course – have something that no one else does and get the most you can for it from those who find it invaluable.
The book also had a couple of other noteworthy thoughts that I hadn’t noted: that maybe university is over-rated, especially when everyone is going. I’ve turned this one over in my mind a few times, concluding that maybe not going to university in this world where everyone middle class goes to university would not be quite the disaster middle class families think it would be. Nonetheless, the default position should probably still be going to university unless there were good reasons for not going. As insurance, it still seems like the right option – especially for a parent wondering in which direction to point their children.
The other was that finance doesn’t really contribute anything much. But I know that already – it was nice to have a little confirmation.
In short. I didn’t think that much of it. So why did my friend rate it so highly?
“I see it as a book of ethics”, he emailed me, including a link to a 1,500 word review by Elizabeth Winkler in The New Republic (here: https://newrepublic.com/article/119532/peter-thiels-zero-one-review).
Winkler suggests that it isn’t really a management manual or guide to startups, which is true. But I hadn’t thought about it as either. I had thought about it as a book, and like most books I read, I had hoped it would be a source of new ideas.
She suggests it’s a “call to intellectual originality” and an “extended polemic against stagnation”.
Well, as I noted at the start, it’s not very extended, I didn’t feel like I was reading a polemic and I didn’t see stagnation as the target.
Maybe I missed something.
OK. There’s some stuff on how different people think about the future – optimistically or pessimistically, definitely or indefinitely. The optimism/pessimism dichotomy I get. But definite or indefinite? That’s a little more nuanced – do you think there are actual steps you can take to get to that future, or is it just something out there which we’ll get to in due course?
Thiel illustrates various things with grids put together using two pairs. Here's one for definite/indefinite:
DEFINITE INDEFINITE
OPTIMISTIC US, 1950s-1960s US, 1982-present
PESSIMISTIC China, present Europe, present
The first and last quadrants I see – the US in the 1950s and 1960s – ok, yes, it seemed to have a notion that it was doing concrete things that would make things better; and Europe – pessimistic about the future, and not really sure what it would all be about.
But the other two had me scratching my head. The US? Optimistic over the last 35 years? Really? Hadn’t it been a place of declining confidence? And China? Pessimistic? Really? Rather to the contrary, it’s been a place that has seen things finally going its way.
And there’s the rub. Thiel tries to squash too much into his grids.
It’s a shallow book. The world’s interest lies in variety and richness.
Sure not everyone believes that. Some people see things in black and white/one dimension.
Which is fine for them – but not for others. Those one-dimensional figures can have their world. But they can’t deny those who want other things their desire for more dimensions
Thiel’s world it seems to me is overly dominated by his 2x2 figures.
Yes, they can capture something by simplifying it – drawing out its essence.
But that’s all they do. They don’t reveal fundamental truths. (Perhaps because there aren’t fundamental truths – more ways of looking things that allow us to grope our way forwards – coming up with hypoytheses, testing them, refining them, retesting them …)
Like many “epistemologically naïve” thinkers – my label for people who seem to think the world revolves around a handful of conditions – he ignores:
- those who are victims
- those whose measures of success can’t be captured so tidily (most producers of culture, for example)
- those who want to say there’s a little or a lot more going on here than meets the eye
- those who see the word as hard to explain, possibly even unexplainable, but still want to try.
Of course, Thiel’s book’s interest stems from his business success. If he hadn’t been so successful, few would have been interested in his views.
But the world won’t turn on his thoughts – or technology – it will turn on how we get on at managing the nitty gritty, the day to day, applying the technology we have and develop, in ways that among other things solve the various problems caused by the success our technology has brought in the last two centuries – enabling us to have seven billion people on the planet, but not yet able to figure out how to do that in a long-term manner that won’t devastate our environment.
I suspect in the long-term, how well we do things will turn a lot more on how we manage “indefinite” challenges such as figuring out the bureaucracy we need for us to cope with things, whether we can get by without putting constraints on consumption, whether it will be possible for us to have a planet of inequality, where those at the top do just fine, and everyone else has to put up with crap or worse.
I fret that in Thiel’s world, you will either be a one or a zero; and more – far more – will be zeros.
0 notes
moretalk · 4 years
Text
“I’ll briefly discuss one element of postmodernism that’s absent from the modern academic and cultural politics that are criticized as postmodern. Then I’ll give three potential explanations for its absence – not the only ones, maybe not the best; but hopefully what I say in elaborating them will be somewhat illuminating. The absent element I will discuss is play.
Playfulness predates postmodernism; perhaps in a sense it was an inheritance from the experimentalism of the moderns. “Language games” were an integral part of Wittgenstein’s philosophy; “the death of the author” made a game of interpretation; games made their way into many of Nabokov’s novels and other modernist fiction like At Swim-Two-Birds; found art, aleatory music, John Cage’s “4’33” – whether the idea was to take play itself seriously or to inject play into things wrongly supposed to be serious, game-playing was everywhere in the fifties and sixties.
The classic statement of play in continental philosophy, often (though not always) conceived of as the sort of think tank of postmodernism, was Jacques Derrida’s break from structuralism into poststructuralism, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” A lecture he delivered at a 1966 Johns Hopkins conference sparkling with French thinkers like Lacan and Barthes, it ended up overturning much of the tradition the conference was intended to crystallize. Derrida argued that his proto-postmodern forebears like Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, though critical of the history of Western thought, had engaged in an ultimately futile effort to substitute new “centers” of new “structures” for the ones they renounced. He expanded on this idea the next year in Of Grammatology. Drawing on Ferdinand de Saussure, and arguably on Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, he wrote that words mean things only by differentiating themselves from other words, and not by transcending this referential game in reaching reality. When one term in a dyad like male/female, presence/absence, being/becoming, signified/signifier, speech/writing, etc., is privileged in some sort of theory, it amounts to a kind of violence, which Derrida thought his interpretive method, deconstruction, could only ever uncover, not end. (The now-disgraced philosopher John Searle dissected this approach at length. Compare the fatalism to that of Ta-Nehisi Coates.)
The context of the conference where he originally delivered this lecture is fascinating but outside the scope of this article. For us what came after is more important. Over time, the influence of Derrida and like-minded theorists led to a break on the left which has resurfaced with the “new old Left” of e.g. Jacobin and Current Affairs. Derrida, critics said, was just playing around with words. How could serious moral or political claims follow? This was at best a well-intentioned distraction or a symptom of professionalization, at worst a ploy by the ascendant corporate sector (represented no doubt in the imagination of some Marxist critics by the Ford Foundation which had sponsored the Johns Hopkins conference).
But Derrida’s students and followers included feminists like Hélène Cixous and postcolonial theorists like Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha. Though still criticized by Marxists like Frederic Jameson and Terry Eagleton throughout debates in the 1990s, they surely sounded as though they were talking about right and wrong. When Spivak waved her hands about a “subaltern” more “other” than the Levinas-Derrida-inspired Other, it was taken to have implications for our view, and practice, of justice. And even concepts long abandoned by theorists, like Spivak’s “strategic essentialism,” continue to apply, whether as inspirations or simply as descriptions, to social justice activism today.
That words matter; that symbols matter; that talking about how we talk about things, and debating about how we debate, is a form of activism: maybe nothing distinguishes the social justice left – from the more traditional Marxist left as well as from many centrists, conservatives, and libertarians – more than these contentions. But there has also been a change. In deconstruction, the game was to show how a text problematized its own “violence.” Every text, Derridaeans thought, contained resources sufficient for its own critique. But in the new era of virtue-signaling and apology-extracting this method obviously hasn’t remained popular. Rather, the project of “critique,” outlined recently by Rita Felski in The Limits of Critique, is now carried out by the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” It is not that seemingly bad texts are subject to interpretive free play, to Derrida’s jouissance, which can draw out their ultimate complicity in the right thing; seemingly good texts remain suspect and are constantly interrogated as to their complicity in the wrong thing....
... The phenomenon I’m interested in is this: The “playful” terms and topics of the postmoderns retain a great deal of currency in academia and in social justice more broadly. But it is no longer a game. Alongside this, the elaborate and often terribly wrongheaded philosophical justifications fall by the wayside. Now that the moral importance of words and symbols, especially when it comes to identity, is common ground for many academics and lefty activists, there is no need for elaborate theories about words gaining meaning through differentiation, or about the inaccessibility or the nonexistence of an extra-linguistic world....
Explanation 1: Boundaries coming down and the dominance of the political
...In his essay “Modernity – An Incomplete Project,” in the 1983 collection The Anti-Aesthetic, Jürgen Habermas cites Max Weber’s definition of cultural modernity as the separation of science, art, and morality, which had previously been unified by religion, into “three autonomous spheres.” These three domains each had an “inner logic” according to which they would develop toward the ends of truth, beauty, and the good. Postmodernism tore down these walls, leaving us with the interdisciplinary “studies” characteristic of contemporary academic inquiry and the “Real Peer Review”-style autoethnographies, papers punctuated with poor poetry, dissertations on Miley Cyrus, and so on. (Interestingly, Habermas calls what we vaguely know as postmodern thought the “anti-modernism” of “young conservatives,” among whom he includes Foucault and Derrida; traditional “old conservatives” he calls “premodernists,” whereas he reserves “postmodernism” for “neoconservatives.”)
Of course, the breaking down of boundaries and “binaries” was a central postmodern project. But my first explanation goes like this: Having been gloshed into one undifferentiated mass of discourse, the three former spheres did not remain equal in influence. Rather, it was politics, a subset of the moral sphere, that came to dominate both science and art. Commentators like Peterson could thus be excused for seeing a “neo-Marxist” hand in things, as it is generally leftism that tries to expand the political sphere and rightism that tries to contract it.
One open question regarding this explanation is what the influence of science and art are on politics. For instance, the 2016 American presidential campaign could be seen, very schematically, as a battle between Clintonite postmodern science, “we have the data” and so forth, and Trumpian postmodern art, the meta-theatricality of a candidate also acting as pundit. If it could be shown that science and art have intruded into politics comparably to politics’ intrusion into science and art, that would disprove this explanation.
To be honest, I doubt that they have. Political intrusion into science and the arts takes what a philosopher might call not only a causal but a constitutive role. It is not just politically-minded outsiders trying to censor expression they consider wrong. True to their playless postmodernism, politically-minded insiders, artists and academics alike, see their role, the one they ought to occupy, as participating in a political project from another sphere. This goes beyond the obviously laudable authoring of political arguments or policy papers, or the possibly beautiful articulation of moral ideals or mournful depiction of their transgression. It also encompasses the entryist goal of making a field thoroughly political: the “long march through the institutions.” This goal was expressed with admirable honesty by a paper cited on Real Peer Review, which outlined a “pedagogical priority of women’s studies”: “to train students . . . to serve as symbolic ‘viruses’ that infect, unsettle, and disrupt traditional and entrenched fields.” This, I think, is unique to politics
One nice feature of this explanation is that it brings to light an aspect of early and middle postmodernism that is now forgotten, or taken for granted: the interdisciplinary trend in academia. Current criticisms of “studies” fields, from “women’s studies” and “African-American studies” to “fat studies” and “plant studies,” generally revolve around their narrow and often identitarian (or just plain silly) approach. But when interdisciplinary programs were first fashionable, they were criticized instead for failing to really and rigorously teach the (hopefully epistemically viable) methods of a single discipline. As the replication crisis in psychology and the open science movement that followed it have shown, one salutary aspect of following a method is that a researcher is somewhat “locked in” even if they end up with results they don’t like. Think how many college departments’ descriptions include some version of the following: “We advocate a pluralistic approach to [our topic], drawing on lessons from history, philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, literary studies, critical theory, queer theory, postcolonial theory, and urban planning.” With this many tools, a student or professor will be able to find their way out of any conclusion that troubles their preconceptions....
Explanation 2: Winning by your rules, then playing by mine
...Veuillot’s point is what is commonly attributed to Karl Popper as the “paradox of tolerance.”... We needn’t resolve the question of whether this pseudo-paradoxical process actually occurs on a large scale – large enough to determine the course of a civilization. It is enough to see that it is plausible on a small scale – in the psychologies of individuals, the rhetoric of workshops and training sessions, the minor incidents that roil a profession but lead only to a few firings at worst. So-called postmodernists, this explanation would have it, played around with words and symbols just long enough to gain a foothold in a few different institutions. Now the same tools that were used for play, to suggest for instance that a certain possibility can’t be definitively ruled out, are used for other purposes, to suggest for instance that a certain possibility is definitively correct. Under the regime of play, the risible notion that the “okay” sign is a symbol of white nationalism, for example, could be subsumed under a theory of a multiplicity of indeterminate meanings. Now that regime change has been effected, the multiplicity evaporates, and the chosen interpreters, the ones who were just playing a game, turn out to be quite serious about precisely the eventuality that had been justified as just a bit of fun. 
The influence of feminist epistemology and feminist philosophy of science, heroically but inadequately defended recently by Will Wilson, makes this sort of dynamic evident. Starting from dubious examples where a researcher’s identity is asserted to have led them to see, or to fail to see, some important fact about a problem they were investigating, we end up with required “positionality” sections in dissertations, and scandals about whether people of certain identities are cited enough, or in the right way. Starting from the milquetoast fact that researchers must care more about some truths than others, and must hold e.g. parsimony as a “value,” we end up with the dogma that all inquiry is value-laden, and hence political, and with inquiry’s concomitant wholesale politicization. Values and identity, allowed to “play around” on the field of otherwise objective research, become the only game in town; and then it’s not a game anymore....
Explanation 3: Generational fragility and coddling minds
...While the first two explanations suggest there has been a change that was, in some sense, internal to postmodernism, the third explanation is wholly external, so I will not bother too much with the details. This explanation goes: Postmodernism is just one small trend in academia, the media, and the arts. A larger trend is what Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff called, over two years ago now, “the coddling of the American mind,” an increasing sensitivity to (especially emotional) injury, discomfort with novelty, lack of willingness to hear opposing viewpoints, and so forth. Lenore Skenazy is a notable activist for “free-range parenting” and documents on her blog and on Twitter the overzealous protection of young children by their parents – children too young to have read Derrida, that’s for sure, and parents who are probably not thinking of Foucault when they’re telling their kids not to go outside. (In fact, free-range types might find some common ground with Foucault when it comes to the nightmare of the “Panopticon”) Haidt has gone on to suggest that the things people like he and I see as problems of American college campuses are already visible in high schools: fear of expression, fear of giving offense, “debates” with predetermined conclusions, mantras that can’t be questioned. This doesn’t rule out postmodernism, and the transformation and exclusion of its sense of play, as a causal factor; but it does suggest a limit on the size of its effects.
Will play make a comeback? As part of postmodernism, as part of something else? On this I’m undecided. But critics of postmodernism should take its history of play seriously, regardless of which explanation for its loss they find most convincing. The frivolity that rubbed so many people the wrong way would be a pleasant salve in many contemporary debates; and its place, as well as its erosion, may bear lessons about the dynamics of freedoms so valued by postmodernism’s classical liberal critics.” - https://areomagazine.com/2018/01/08/postmodernism-isnt-playing-around-anymore/
1 note · View note
aion-rsa · 7 years
Text
Jamie Delano Talks Politics, Anger and His World Without End
Jamie Delano is quite simply one of the most talented and influential comics writers of his generation. Perhaps best known as the original writer of “Hellblazer,” Delano’s run established the character of John Constantine as a solo lead, and crafted the book’s combination of political and social commentary with horror in a way that has endured in the years since.
Delano went on to write many other comics, including a long string of projects at Vertigo including “2020 Visions,” “Hell Eternal,” “Tainted” and more, accompanied by some of the best artists in the business. In recent years, Delano has stepped away from comics and focused on writing prose, which he publishes through his own Leepus Books.
One of Delano’s Vertigo projects was the miniseries “World Without End,” which he created with artist John Higgins. With the series just collected in a hardcover edition by Dover Publications, Delano looked back on the project with CBR, also discussing the novels he’s been working on in recent years, and the benefits of creative work being driven by political anger.
“World Without End” hardcover edition cover
CBR:It’s been a while since it was released, so how would you describe yours and John Higgins’ “World Without End?”
Jamie Delano: “World Without End” was, and is, a far-future fantasy, an extreme speculative fiction extrapolation of some of the more undesirable political and cultural tendencies that afflict our human psyche. Its setting is a world whose geological landscape has been long-superseded by living flesh, evolved to the point of degradation — as I think I recall — from a ‘prehistoric’ biologically engineered elite leisure resort. Bedlam, as this future is known, is peopled by the mutated descendants of the staff and guests preserved by this autonomous establishment through a catastrophic environmental degradation. The dominant culture is “masculist,” authoritarian and oppressive, but there exists — “underground” in the necrotic wastelands — a feminist resistance. Both these divergent cultures are mutated beyond the recognizable to the point of parody. The resulting conflict of “fundamentals” provides the focus for some outrageously tongue-in-cheek drama, depicted through gorgeous painted art and florid linguistic flights of fancy of a somewhat purple tint.
Brother Bones is a strange but memorable character. Where did he come from and how much of his look and his language was your idea?
Brother Bones — a genetically engineered masculist super-commando — has his genesis in an idea for a series originally destined for a proposed British anthology that (and I hope but won’t guarantee that I’m accurate here in my recollection) David Lloyd was trying, ultimately unsuccessfully, to put together. Longer story short – some time later, a high-ranking member of DC staff suggested at a party that maybe I would like to consider working on a Batman graphic novel, maybe painted by John Higgins. Somewhat arrogantly perhaps, I replied that I’d rather do an original project with John, and, as it happens, we have this thing we’d like you to consider…
Bones was kind of my sly take on a perceived adolescent-male desire for uncompromising, ultra-violent warrior “heroes.” His look was entirely of John’s imagining; I take full responsibility for his motivation and language.
I kept thinking that for comics this was a weird book, but it reminded me in some ways of this tradition of science fiction stories like Russell Hoban’s “Riddley Walker,” and people like Burroughs and Ballard and Wyndham and others. Were those the sort of books you found interesting?
Wyndham to a lesser degree, but the others mentioned can definitely be described as both of interest and influential. I read and enjoyed a lot of science/speculative fiction in my formative years, and might expand your suggestions to include such as (and in no particular order): Dick, Jose Farmer, Disch, Delaney, LeGuin, Brunner, Lessing, Moorcock, etc.
“World Without End” interior page by Jamie Delano and John Higgins
Now, you were writing “World Without End” after “Hellblazer” had become a big success, and it’s a very different book from that. Besides just wanting to do something different, what did you want to do? I assume you and John Higgins had a lot of creative freedom with the book.
We did have a lot of creative freedom; I’m very grateful for the trust – perhaps misplaced – of DC’s management of the day. Specifically, that of editor, Karen Berger.
What did I want to do with this freedom? I don’t think I really had a plan, other than to take the opportunity to indulge a penchant for building bonkers allegorical worlds and playing around with weird concepts and language. I was deeply involved in my work on “Hellblazer,” and mired in the persona of its lead. But John Constantine’s was an intense and oppressive reality to inhabit – perhaps a bit too close to my own, and he was not a totally original product of my imagination. Maybe I was a bit stir crazy. “World Without End” offered me a chance to splurge all over a blank imaginary canvas and I guess I went a bit nuts with it.
I was rereading your “Hellblazer” run earlier and I was struck by how good it is — which I always thought — but also by how political it was, and how angry it could be. A lot of creators are politically angry right now, and honestly, it’s hard writing political stories that aren’t didactic or dull. You’ve done this throughout your career, and I wondered how you’ve approached it.
For me, the two biggest incentives encouraging me to the keyboard — other than the piteous whimpering of hungry children — have been boredom and anger. Whether my fiction is fantasy or “real-world” based, it is generally powered by my existential preoccupations. Far-future flesh-scapes and the supernatural are usually co-opted by my imagination for the purpose (however tenuous) of allegory — although the intention is not didactic. Writing, for me, is a largely subconscious process. I’m not good at planning, or structuring rational moral arguments; I allow the writing process to subsume me – immerse myself in the “reality” of a story and inhabit the characters in more-or-less successful attempts to subjectively share their experience of the worlds to which I consign them. Since most of them therefore must reflect aspects of myself and my worldview, I guess maybe the politics is more organic than polemic. Others may well disagree.
I can’t speak for other writers, but I am certainly currently angry/despairing, while oddly resigned to the probably catastrophic change bearing down on our “civilization.” Politically, culturally and environmentally, we have reached a tipping point — which I have anticipated for decades — from which it is probably too late to scramble back. It remains to be seen what nature of beast crawls from the wreckage — maybe a degenerate monster; maybe a wonder of evolution. I suspect it may take a while to know for sure. I presume to offer no advice for others on how to address this situation, other than to remind them of the power of imagination — to inspire both good and ill — and to be careful what you wish for. The raw potential of revolutionary chaos relished in youth may seem less appealing in one’s dotage.
“World Without End” interior page by Jamie Delano and John Higgins
“World Without End” and “Hellblazer” aren’t the only work you did at DC/Vertigo — I first got to know your work from the mid-late 1990s like “Ghostdancing,” “Tainted,” “Batman Manbat,” “Hell Eternal,” “2020 Visions.” Is there any chance we’ll see any of these reprinted one of these years?
The rights in most of the titles you mention above remain with DC. I’d be happy to see any of them reprinted. “2020 Visions” is back in the ownership of its creators and currently without an English-language edition. We’re open to any offers to rectify that situation. Same goes for “Cruel & Unusual.” There is a chance that a new, re-colored edition of “Outlaw Nation” might eventually be forthcoming, if enough interest can be engendered. Otherwise, I have it vaguely in my mind to one day do them through my Lepus Books imprint as print-on-demand editions.
So, reading “World Without End” in this new collection, 25 years after it first came out, I’m curious what you think of it.
I haven’t re-read “World Without End” properly since it was published. I generally find it hard to revisit finished stories — uncomfortable even, in that they are products of my mental condition at a specific time of my life and, consequently, (as well the worry that I’ll be embarrassed by their ineptitude) I find the dissonance between the evoked then and now a little disconcerting. Maybe I’ll keep them by me for my accession to the eventual Dementia Home, to use as aides memoir to a past riddled by confusion. That said, I have looked through the book and found it a very pleasing production. Dover have done a fantastic job on their edition – probably some of the highest printing standards enjoyed by anything I’ve written. And John’s art certainly deserves such treatment. Let me just take a moment to thank the editors — Drew Ford and Peter Lenz — and the design team at Dover for making this excellent edition happen; and DC Comics and Karen Berger, for taking the original chance. Not forgetting top lettering by Richard Starkings and insightful afterword by Steve Bissette.
You’ve been writing prose in recent years. What have you been working on?
I took a short break from writing comics a few years ago, which somehow grew into an indefinite hiatus. It was my expectation as child that, one day, I would write novels. Realising that I was approaching sixty years of age without having made any effort to achieve this ambition, I decided maybe I should get on with it while I still had time. Much angst and procrastination ensued- but eventually I completed “Book Thirteen,” an in-no-way-autobiographical black comedy family saga, featuring a blocked “Old Writer” who’s harassed to the point of dementia by his perceived need to successfully craft a plot in which the arcs of his nearest and dearest carry them clear of calamity. When it was done I liked it, but was too shy to risk it with agents and conventional publishers, opting instead for the financially suicidal route of publishing it myself.
Since its one-title inception Lepusbooks.co.uk, has expanded its remit a little to become a small co-operative publisher-of-last-resort for a few pals with something to say and an interesting way of saying it. “LEEPUS | DIZZY” is my second novel, and a bit more “genre” than the first: file it under weird, dystopian, alternate reality, apocalypse junkie wish-fulfillment. Although sales and exposure have so far been minimal, I like the Leepus environment enough to be two-thirds through a second visit. I expect “LEEPUS | THE RIVER” to be finished and in print before the summer of 2017. Emotionally, I haven’t completely abandoned comics- but writing prose is absorbing, personally satisfying and time-consuming.
Dover’s hardcover edition of “World Without End” is now available.
The post Jamie Delano Talks Politics, Anger and His World Without End appeared first on CBR.com.
http://ift.tt/2l9NUUc
0 notes