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lorenfangor · 3 years

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I heard that #40 was super homophobic :/ so I skipped it. But now your fic is making me want to give it a try. How problematic is it? Are the characters worth it?

Okay.

Let’s talk about #40.

The plot of The Other (a Marco POV) is that Marco sees an Andalite on a video tape sent in to some Unsolved Mysteries-esque TV show, and he assumes it’s Ax and hauls ass to save him from being captured. Ax, being Ax, has videotaped the show, and they pull it up and Tobias uses his hawk eyes to figure out that it’s not Ax, it’s another Andalite - one without a tailblade. Ax is appalled at the presence of this vecol (an Andalite word for a disabled person) and we find out that he and others of his species have deep ingrained prejudices against at least some kinds of disabled people.

Despite this, Marco and Ax go looking for the Andalite in question because he’s been spotted by national TV, and they meet a second one, named Gafinilan-Estrif-Valad. The vecol is Mertil-Iscar-Elmand, a former fighter pilot with a reputation and Gafinilan’s coded-gay life partner. The two of them have been on Earth since book 1; they crashed their fighters on the planet and have been trapped there thanks to the GalaxyTree going down. Gafinilan has adopted a human cover, a physics professor, and they’ve been living in secret ever since.

Thanks to that tape, Mertil has been captured by Visser Three, and he’s not morph-capable so he can’t escape. Gafinilan wants to trade the leader of the “Andalite Bandits” to the Yeerks to get his boyfriend back; he can’t fight to free Mertil because he’s terminally ill with a genetic disorder that will eventually kill him, and (it’s implied that) the Yeerks aren’t interested in disabled hosts, even disabled Andalite ones. Despite Ax’s ableism, the Animorphs agree to work with Gafinilan and free Mertil, and they’re successful. Marco ends the book talking about how there are all kinds of prejudices you’ll have to face and boxes that people will put you in, and you can’t necessarily escape them even if they’re reductive and inaccurate, but you can still live your life with pride.

So now that I’ve explained the plot, I’m gonna come out the gate saying that I love this book. I love it wholeheartedly, I love Marco’s narration, I love Ax having to deal with Andalite society’s ableism, I love these characters, and as a disabled lesbian I don’t find these disabled gays to be inherently Bad Rep.

that’s of course just my opinion and it doesn’t overshadow other issues that people might have? but at the same time, I don’t like the seemingly-common narrative that this book is all bad all the time, and I want to offer up a different read.To that end, I’m going to go point by point through some of the criticisms and common complaints that I’ve seen across the fandom over the years.

“Mertil and Gafinilan were put on a bus after one appearance because they were gay!”

this is one I’m going to have to disagree with hardcore. I talked about this yesterday, but in Animorphs there are a lot of characters or ideas that only get introduced once or twice and then get written off or dropped - in order off the top of my head, #11 (the Amazon trip), #16 (Fenestre and his cannibalism), #17 (the oatmeal), #18 (the hint of Yeerks doing genetic experiments in the hospital basement), #24/#39/#42 (the Helmacrons’ ability to detect morphing tech), #25 (the Venber), #28 (experiments with limiting brain function through drugs), #34 (the Hork-Bajir homeworld being retaken, the Ixcila procedure), #36 (the Nartec), #41 (Jake’s Bad Future Dream), and #44 (the Aboriginal people Cassie meets in Australia) all feature things that either seem to exist just for the sake of having a particular trope explored Animorphs-style or to feature an idea for One Single Book.

This is a series that’s episodic and has a very limited overall story arc because of how children’s literature in the 90s was structured - these books are closer to The Saddle Club, Sweet Valley High, Animal Ark, or The Baby-Sitters’ Club than they are to Harry Potter or A Series of Unfortunate Events. Mertil and Gafinilan don’t get to be in more than one book because they’re not established in the main cast or the supporting cast, I don’t think that it’s solely got anything to do with their being gay.

“Gafinilan has AIDS, this is a book about AIDS, and that’s homophobic!”

Okay, this is… hard. First, yes, Gafinilan does have a terminal illness. Yes, Gafinilan is gay. No, Soola’s Disease is not AIDS.

I have two responses to this, and I’ll attack them in order of their occurrence in my thought. First, there’s coded AIDS diseases all over genre fiction, especially genre fiction from that era, because the AIDS epidemic made a massive impact on public life and fundamentally changed both how the public perceived illness and queerness and how queer people themselves experienced it. I was too young to live through it, but my dad’s college roommate was out, and my dad himself has a lot of friends who he just ceases to talk about if the conversation gets past 1986 or so - this was devastating and it got examined in art for more reasons than “gay people all have AIDS”, and I dislike the implication that the only reason it could ever appear was as a tired stereotype or a message that Being Queer Means Death. Gafinilan is kind, fond of flowers, and fond of children - he’s multifaceted, and he’s got a terminal illness. Those kinds of people really exist, and they aren’t Bad Rep.

Second off, Soola’s Disease? Really isn’t AIDS. It’s a congenital genetic illness that develops over time, cannot be transmitted, and does not carry a serious stigma the way AIDS did. Gafinilan also has access to a cure - he could become a nothlit and no longer be afflicted by it, even if it’s considered somewhat dishonorable to go nothlit to escape that way. That’s not AIDS, and in fact at no point in my read and rereads did I assume that his having a terminal illness was supposed to be a commentary on homosexuality until I found out that other people were assuming it.

“Mertil losing his tail means he’s lost his masculinity, and that’s bad because he’s gay! That’s homophobic!”

so this is another one I’ve gotta hardcore disagree with, because while Mertil is one of two Very Obviously Queer Characters, he’s not the only character who loses something fundamental about himself, or even loses access to sexual and/or romantic capability in ways he was familiar with.

Tobias and Arbron both get ripped out of their ordinary normal lives by going nothlit in bad situations, and while they both wind up finding fulfillment and freedom despite that, it’s still traumatic, even more for Arbron I’d say than for Tobias. And on a psychological level, none of the main cast is left unmarked or free of trauma or free of deep change thanks to the bad things that have happened to them - they’re no less fundamentally altered than Mertil, even if it’s mental rather than physical. And yes, tail loss is equated with castration or emasculation, but that doesn’t automatically mean Mertil suffering it is tied to his homosexuality and therefore the takeaway we’re intended to have is “Being gay is tragic and makes you less of a man”. This is a series where bad shit happens to everyone, and enduring losses that take away things central to one’s self-conception or identity or body is just part of the story.

Also, frankly? Plenty of IRL disabled people have to grapple with a loss of sexual function, and again, they’re not Bad Rep just because they’re messy.

“Andalite society is confusingly written in this book, and the disability aspects are clearly just a coverup for the gay stuff!”

Andalite society is canonically sexist, a bit exceptionalist and prejudiced in their own favor, and pretty contradictory and often challenged internally on its own norms. In essence, it’s a pretty ordinary society, and they’re really realistic as sci-fi races go. It makes sense from that perspective that Andalites would tolerate scarring or a lost stalk eye or a lost skull eye, but not tolerate serious injuries that significantly impact your perceived quality of life. Ableism is like that - it’s not one-size-fits-all. I look at Ax’s reactions and I see a lot of my own family and friends’ behaviors - this vibes with my understanding of prejudice, you know?

“Mertil and Gafinilan have a tragic ending, which means the story is saying that being gay dooms you to tragedy!”

Mertil and Gafinilan have the best possible ending that they could ask for? They are victims of the war, they are suffering because of the war, they get the same cocktail of trauma and damage that every other soldier gets. But unlike Jake and Tobias and Marco, unlike Elfangor, unlike Aximili? Their ending comes in peace, in their own home. Gafinilan isn’t dying alone, he’s got the love of his life with him. Mertil isn’t going to be as isolated anymore, he’s got Marco for a friend. Animorphs is a tragedy, it’s not a happy story, it’s not something that guarantees a beautiful sunshine-and-roses ending for everyone, and I love tragedy, and so I will fight for this story. Yes, it hurts. Yes, it deserved better. But it’s not less meaningful just because it’s sad. Nobody is entitled to anything in this book, and it’s just as true for these two as it is for anyone else.

“It’s not cool that the only canonically gay characters in this series don’t get to be happy and trauma-free and unblemished Good Rep!”

This is one I can kind of understand, and I’ll give some ground to it, because it is sucky. The only thing I’ll say is that I stand by my argument that nothing that happens to Mertil and Gafinilan is unusual compared to what happens to the rest of the cast, and that their ending is way happier than Rachel and Tobias’s, or Jake and Cassie’s. But it’s a legitimate point of frustration, and the one argument I’ll say I agree has validity.

(Though, I also want to point out that I think there are plenty of equally queercoded characters in the story who aren’t Mertil and Gafinilan - Tobias, Rachel, Cassie, and Marco all get at least one or two moments that signal to me that they’re potentially LGBT+, not to mention Mr. Tidwell and Illim in #29 and their long-term domestic partnership. There’s no reason to assume that the only queer people here are those two aliens when Marco’s descriptions of Jake exist.)

“Marco uses slurs and reduces Gafinilan’s whole identity to his illness!”

Technically, yes, this is true, except putting it that way strips the whole passage of its context. Marco is discussing the boxes society puts you into, the ones you don’t have a choice about facing or escaping. He’s talking about negative stereotypes and reductive generalizations, he’s referring to them as bad things that you get inflicted upon you by an outside world or by friends who don’t know the whole story or the real you. The slurs he uses are real slurs that get thrown at people still, and they’re not okay, and the point is that they’re not okay but assholes are going to call you by them anyway. He ends by saying “you just have to learn to live with it”, and since this is coming from a fifteen-year-old Latino kid who we know is picked on by bullies for all sorts of reasons and who faces racism and homophobia? He knows what he’s talking about. He’s bitter about what’s been said and done, he’s not stating it like it’s a good thing.

Yes, absolutely, this speech is a product of its time, but it’s a product of its time that speaks of defiance and says “We aren’t what we’re said to be,” and in the year this was published? That’s a good message.

tl;dr The Other is good, actually, and Mertil and Gafinilan are incredible characters who deserve all the love they could possibly get.

#animorphs #animorphs meta #mertil/gafinilan #mertil #gafinilan #mertil-iscar-elmand #gafinilan-estrif-valad

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utilitycaster · 3 years

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Still thinking about the "the first campaign is better" tendencies across different shows, and I think that while it is true for all three the reasons may be different.

TAZ Amnesty is pretty easy: it's not D&D. I'm not wild about PbtA but I think it was an incredibly good fit for the McElroys and the setting, I think it was a beautifully realized setting, and I think it had some of their strongest production.

I think most of the complaints were pretty baseless (people claiming it was not fantasy because the magic happened in West Virginia instead of Faerun, for example), and it was skillfully GM-ed; it managed to be both pretty heavily on rails and not feel like it. Funnily enough, a system called "Monster of the Week" is in fact really well-suited to running a game that takes a Monster-of-the-week structure, perhaps more so than D&D.

So in short this is a matter of "it's better, but if you automatically stop listening when the game system isn't D&D (this is meant to sound judgemental. As a D&D fan I judge people doing this) or if contemporary fantasy isn't your thing (this is not judgemental, we all have genre preferences) then it might not work for you."

For NADDPod I feel like I've gotten the sense Eldermourne is less popular, but I'm not as confident as I am regarding the other two shows. I do think it is much more serious in tone which I like but is understandably less appealing to the audience, particularly since NADDPod I also think that while the Hexbloods arc was fantastic (and that Caldwell should get paternity leave!) it did mean there was a loss of momentum early on - though using it to worldbuild was smart.

Critical Role is to me the most difficult to pin down, because it did lose people who had been watching from C1 both early on and around the hiatus, but it gained so many new people as well (vs. TAZ which I think has never regained the full audience of Balance, or NADDPod which I think has had more modest growth).

With that said as someone who started with Campaign 2 and went back it does feel there's a certain level of romanticizing of Campaign 1 that is just...inaccessible and a little alienating, I guess, to anyone who wasn't there. And there are absolutely valid reasons to prefer Campaign 1 - it's a more straightforward story, it tends to hit a lot of the classic hallmarks of D&D like the Feywild and dragons and vampires (NADDPod's Bahumia Campaign shares this quality), there is at times more room to breathe - but I think a lot of it is really just romanticizing and nostalgia for their own sakes.*

Exandria Unlimited actually put this into perspective - one of the most common things i heard after the first episode is "feels like a home game!" Which I find somewhat absurd; it's slated to be a very awkward length for a home campaign (too long for most modules, shorter than most complete campaigns), and only Undeadwood stands out as being more heavily produced actual play on the channel - there have been callbacks, cut scenes, winks to the audience, and deliberate time skips.

I think that's the thing behind romanticizing Campaign 1. A lot of people like to talk about actual play as if it's a peek into someone's living room home game and they are a fly on the wall. This is amplified by Critical Role being live (or live-to-tape, currently) vs. edited and its history as coming from a home game. Here's the thing: it - and any actual play - is not a home game. Once the players know the audience exist, they respond to that. But the audience love that mythology. (I actually found some of the pre-stream mythology made C1 feel less accessible, which was no one's fault because it couldn't have been predicted, but it meant that I often felt I was being told, not shown.)

I do wonder if that's also a factor for NADDPod or TAZ. It's strange because there's often these two paradoxical expectations in actual play fandoms: for authentic appeal, it must feel like a home game, but the audience also often feels entitled to certain plot points or choices, which requires the players react to and cater to an audience, which a home game would not do.

And so with the second season, when an audience has been established, that fiction of a home game they've been given a secret front row seat to is harder for that same audience to maintain (and it is the audience, not the creators, who made up this fiction in the first place), and they start to leave. And with those strange observations of EXU, and expectations for CR Campaign 3, and some of the attitudes I see towards TAZ: Ethersea, I think it may be something of a periodic cycle.

*I also think some people define a good campaign solely by "a specific thing I wanted came true, regardless of the narrative that came prior" and those people can do this for their own media consumption but, much like nostalgia, it fails to translate to anyone who wasn't already there with you.

#long post #on actual play #lmk if you need the works tagged I didn't because this feels too much about fandom to put in the main tag #be glad i edited out so many jokes about the g&s initial CR set #and also references to the heisenberg uncertainty principle and shroedinger's audience

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wendell-or-something · 4 years

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it is time.

I want to compile a more complete rundown of my thoughts about homestuck 2. I want all the stuff in my head to be in one place, and I know this is going to be incredibly long winded and I don’t care. I want to be honest... I want to understand why I don't like this media. on more than a "but of course" level because there are a lot of people who have it as a gut reaction that this stuff isn't right. but I think there are layers to what produces that. I wanna get in depth with this. so that's what I'm gonna attempt to do.

okay, so, the first thing I think I wanna say is a disclaimer. I have not actually read the epilogues. or homestuck 2. I have a peripheral knowledge of what happens in them because, as a concerned citizen, I poked around enough to pick up details and know that I wouldn't enjoy this media if I fully engaged with it. my assessment of the material may be flawed because of this, but I mean... if the things I've heard about the epilogues deterred me from reading it, then I guess that's what I'm analyzing? not only what I understand based on my limited knowledge, but also why it is so limited to begin with. why this media is such a huge deterrent to so many people who care so much about homestuck. ultimately, this is not to shame people who like this media... I will be addressing common takes I've heard from people who defend the epilogues, but I'm not singling anyone out, and anyone who reads this has a right to disagree, or better yet, ignore me and find enjoyment where you are able, even if I cannot. I will not begrudge you that. additionally, I am considering the epilogues and homestuck 2 to be one unit. not necessarily in terms of structure, but because the events of one lead directly into the events of the other, and the two have similar issues. I think I'll shorthand the combination of the two as EP/HS2 for simplicity, and refer to either individually if I have something specific to say about one or the other.

I think the main problem that people have with EP/HS2 is that it's depressing. and it's depressing for a myriad of different reasons, but I'll get to those in a minute. first I want to establish why them being depressing doesn't work for so many people. I feel like this should be examined first, because a lot of the supporters of EP/HS2 are viewing the complaints against it as over sensitivity from fans who only liked the comic for its lighter elements. I keep seeing a "y'all just wanted your rainbow cotton candy fluff ending" kind of sentiment going around. and like... you are right that this isn't a fluff ending. but I think it's unfair to treat the particular type of content that EP/HS2 brought to the table as the only kind of substantial, fulfilling narrative that we could've asked for.

and I think a lot of the dissonance that people see between homestuck and EP/HS2 is based in the ratio of tension to levity, and how far it's shifted toward pure tension... especially because, at the end of homestuck, all the outside threats to this group of friends have already been resolved. and yet, shit feels leagues more catastrophically bad during the epilogues than it did during the comic when the characters were actually under attack, which is super weird when you think about it. I mean, "epilogues" my ass, am I right? it is true that homestuck was never 100% sunshine and rainbows... in fact, some of the darker events that it brought to the table became some of the most hyped shit in the comic. murderstuck is mostly what I'm thinking of first in terms of this, but there was a lot of popular angst laden content within homestuck that the fans latched onto. the thing is, the fans also latched onto the content that was super goofy, and the fan works that you can still find online from the era of homestuck's initial popularity reflect both sides of its tone in equal measure. there was a huge amount of goofy fan content (octopimp's youtube channel is still a record of that, and that wasn't even the half of it). and there was a huge amount of angsty content, and there was a huge amount of heartfelt content... turns out, homestuck had broad appeal, and spoke to different people in different ways. and back then, I never really felt like the goofy stuff was being treated as any less important than the heavy stuff. it wasn't brushed off just because it was seen as lighthearted. people liked to laugh, and I fully believe that Andrew Hussie began doing homestuck as a fun activity.

the reason why I bring this up is because homestuck as a piece of media could beget all of these various takes. the fan works could be tonally dissonant when held side by side with each other, but when held against the parts of the comic that inspired them, they made perfect sense. homestuck could spawn jokes, and angst, and social commentary, and theories... and even extrapolation on canonical events, in ways both silly and serious. and when you look at the kind of content that the fans produced during homestuck's height, you see what was important to them. they put time and effort into crafting even their dumbest meme shit. the fans reflected what the comic gave to them. and humor and heart were among the most beloved core engagements that the comic provided... these were pillars on which a lot of fan enjoyment rested... you really can't begrudge a person their fun.

and treating darkness and angst as the sole indicator of maturity in a work seems misguided to me. because, speaking personally for a moment here, one of the biggest lessons I had to teach myself when I was growing up was how not to wallow in negative emotions. how to find the fun, sometimes rather aggressively, so that you don't just drown. and with EP/HS2, it feels like at every turn, readers are constantly grasping for something nice or fun to keep them afloat in all this heavy stuff, and either they come to accept mere scraps of positivity, or everything they reach for is eventually dissolved as well. and I think the character of a piece of media as a whole can sometimes tell you what level of maturity it's operating under. like, if the text lingers over making the characters miserable, or seems to revel in shooting holes in people's positive interpretations of these people, you have to kind of wonder if this is serving the narrative, or just producing author schadenfreude when they release what amounts to shock content.

it almost feels like a twisting of the way homestuck used to treat the fans, because during it's run, homestuck was very reactive towards the fanbase. this kind of canon responsiveness to the readers was baked into homestuck from the very beginning, back when Hussie was accepting reader suggestions for what John Egbert should do. and need I remind everyone that the trolls were made as parodies of different types of personalities that were common to find online during homestuck's era? they are internet trolls, who are actually an alien race known as trolls, who communicate primarily online, and whose culture and species developed to produce an ornery and antagonistic population, so like... it's trolls all the way down. that's the whole joke. but the real, valuable benefit of parodying your fans with your characters, is that when the trolls act, they reflect the way real people acted. which means that when, say, Nepeta shoehorns RP lingo into casual conversation, some people will be like "it me!" and some people will laugh/cringe because they've seen people actually talk like that, and some people will be like "aww, that used to be me!" and every time a character produces this sense of identification with the audience, it works to create familiarity, and eventually, a sense of fondness.

that fondness is fucking powerful.

that fondness is born out of recognition and empathy, no matter which character you feel it for, and when a giant community of people loves a character that you have seen yourself reflected in so clearly, that is an incredibly validating experience. especially when you’re young, and the pieces of yourself that you saw were some of the nerdiest, weirdest, most awkward parts of you. a very large community of people loves a character that is like you, even, or perhaps especially, because of the flawed parts. and of course these characters were meant to tease the fans a little... these characters were also jokes to some extent the whole time. but they were never seen as cruel or insulting, because these characters were also important. the story literally built whole worlds around their identities... these kids altered universes. and they were allowed to be that important and special without being perfect first. they were dumb, and awkward, and nerdy, and cringey, and allowed to be there anyway. they were you, and you were important.

and this is where I think that EP/HS2 really misses the point. because in homestuck, the characters experienced hardship, but that hardship went on to fuel an overall sense of accomplishment when it was overcome. the road might be long, and it might be tough, and you might face shit that you don't feel prepared for, but when triumph is achieved, it feels that much more earned. and that is a key phrase I want everyone to remember homestuck for:

triumph.

it's the feeling that cascade gave me. it is the highest of heights that this whole thing reached. and it really has so much to do with how homestuck had built itself up until that point. we were mired in the minutiae of these kids' lives. we read their every chat log. we saw them dicking around doing next to nothing. we saw them contact each other and talk to each other for basically no reason other than to catch up. we saw them sharing stupid memes, and yelling at each other for wasting time on pointless bullshit, and dunking on each other's shitty taste in media... every one of them was "you" at some point. "you captchaloged this" or "you decided to do that" and it made a subtle connection in your brain that convinced you to feel things with them and accept what they "decided" as something that you had done alongside them. in some small way, you did homestuck. and this notion was further supported by how much of what the fans were doing would make its way back into what the comic was doing. the comic and the fans existed in a kind of symbiosis, and that fed into the feeling of connection that the fans had with this particular story. this thing was alive, and it moved in tandem with the community.

so when something big like cascade happened, you were right there with them. you were deep in the center of it. and you wanted to be, because this was your payoff. you did the work with these kids... you put in the time. and the triumph was yours too.

this is why EP/HS2 shouldn't be depressing. the core of the story was triumph against all odds. to take the triumph that was earned over the course of the whole story, and ruin it for the sake of generating angst... it misses the point. I did not read all 8000+ pages of homestuck multiple times because I wanted a tragedy. if I wanted tragedy, I would choose a different story. of course a lot of fans would have trouble liking EP/HS2... this wasn't what they signed up for. it pulls the rug out from under the fans of the original comic by pulling a mean genre bait and switch. why would people who liked a story like homestuck want a story like this? and I mean, obviously some people were okay with this. some people like EP/HS2. but you have to admit that it is an entirely different thing than what homestuck was.

I’ve heard some folks try to compare the darker parts of EP/HS2 to the darker parts of homestuck, and this is why they aren't the same. the darkness performs different functions in each story. in homestuck, it contrasts the lighter parts and creates a reason to keep everyone moving. in EP/HS2, it is the whole darn thing. the story is simply woven from it to begin with. I have heard some people say that they think of EP/HS2 as cathartic... as a reflection of life when things are painful or hard. but I think we really need to remember what catharsis is. catharsis doesn’t begin and end with pain. catharsis has to do something with that pain, or it’s just pain for pain’s sake. and the further I look into EP/HS2, the more I feel like the story is just playing it straight as a tragedy... though sometimes I wonder if it knows this.

so let's pull apart the tragedy of EP/HS2. because while I don’t really enjoy tragedies, (hence why I liked homestuck, and didn’t like EP/HS2... they are opposites in this sense), I still understand how tragedies work. catharsis can be part of it... to see something sad happen, and relate to that sadness, and feel a deep emotion... that does make sense. but the line between catharsis and just plain agitation is whether or not the pain actually provides you with a sense of relief. if the story leaves the character stuck in a bad emotional place, you feel stuck too... unable to confront the emotional burden that the story has saddled you with in a satisfying way, because it isn't even your own. in real life, when you are hurt, at least you have the ability to do whatever you need for yourself, in order to eventually feel better. I have grieved before, and somehow found it in me to laugh again since. but in stories, you rely on the author to construct the characters' response to bad events, and if things just go from bad to worse, sometimes with little resistance, the audience is eventually going to feel really agitated by the lack of relief. even stories that end in death provide catharsis due to the finality of it. the life ends, and provides a sense of closure. but EP/HS2 doesn’t give you an out. it just keeps driving many of the characters into more and more mundanely uncomfortable and dissatisfying lives, or turns them into people we would rather not know or read about.... which feels like a loss to the reader, even though the character is right there. at that point, the character's presence only makes you feel worse because they used to be someone you liked, but now they're just a reminder of your disappointment. and this level of your emotional discomfort isn't even something that the narrative will address, because it's just a side effect of how things are going. it isn't poetic, and there is no real comfort given to lighten that load... it's just unpleasant.

and on a more technical level, I would like to point out that stories create a kind of transaction between author and reader. and once you understand the status quo between you and a particular author, you can gauge the level of investment you feel safe putting in the characters. at their core, it stands to reason that stories should require conflict to be interesting. but in order to stay interesting, they also need to give us a reason to care about the conflict. in homestuck, I felt like the story set up a status quo in which we felt comfortable caring about certain characters, because we subtly trusted that the author wasn't wasting our time or jerking us around. like, you knew that a lot of crazy shit was on the table, but it felt like the story was growing, the author was interested in that growth, and thus he would not kill it. even if you couldn't begin to guess what was gonna happen next, you at least didn't have to worry about the author hugely ruining things that you liked about the story. he seemed like he liked those things too. we were all on the same page in that regard.

this is where character investment was very important to homestuck... the readers needed something to hang on to, or they'd lose interest in what was going on, and in homestuck specifically, the thing that kept us hanging on, was our love for these characters, and our wish to see them prevail against the odds. we were hoping for a satisfying ending, and interested in how we'd get there. and by now, I think homestuck fans in particular are very determined to stick to the characters by nature. if we weren't, then we would've been bored out of reading the comic in the first place back in act 1, when the most exciting thing that had happened was John going through his house and finding his dad in the kitchen. if you don't love John at least a little, you won't want to keep reading about him picking up items and describing them to you for a whole chapter, with not but the entertainment value of his character's particular perspective and voice to sustain you.

obviously, character investment isn't always a story's draw... but it was definitely homestuck’s. and even giving EP/HS2 the benefit of the doubt... let's say we're just judging it on the merits of being a tragic story. there are many levels of engagement that a story can hit, and in a lot of tragedies, the interest comes from the machinations of the plot. you already know it's going to end sadly, but you have the ability to process the sadness (a negative emotional experience and potential reader deterrent) while still maintaining interest, because you want to know how it will happen. it is unfortunate then, that EP/HS2 isn't a stand alone story, independent from homestuck itself. because if you tell a homestuck fan that the story will now only end in sadness, they likely won't want to know how it happens. because they already decided to like and relate to these characters, and wish for their happiness. they were taught it was okay to hope for that, based on the way the story used to be. basically, one of the essential appeals of homestuck (character investment) is actively working against the core appeal of a tragedy (understanding how sad events came to pass) because homestuck's appeal worked so well to begin with. it's basically nonsensical to try and jump track from one to the other, because the reader is much more likely to fall off the wagon entirely, and ignore your story in order to preserve their enjoyment of the story they already consumed.

but to get way more blunt about this... homestuck was good, and ruining what it left us with was unpopular for obvious reasons. fans were successfully invested in the story, the final triumphant payoff was a satisfying way to cap the narrative, and honestly... I think homestuck probably should've just stopped while the vibes were good. people were satiated. they were sad that it was over, but the sadness came from fondness, and that just sort of felt appropriate. we had it so good.

the transaction between author and reader was stable at that point. we had conflict. we had a reason to care. we got a resolution. there was a level of trust established, and honored... we trusted that there was a rhythm to the story. a push and pull between the kind of threat that would necessitate action from our heroes, and the ability of the characters to overcome the conflict well enough that we'd be left with something satisfying in the end. this trust no longer exists in EP/HS2. the epilogues broke it, and homestuck 2 has failed to repair it because, to be honest, it was already too badly damaged. it would take a full retcon to actually bring that back after the epilogues, but then it uh... screwed the pooch all over again. sorry, that was insensitive.

anyway. so like... what about the particulars of the story's content? I mean... I know I'm dissatisfied because a lot of the characters have been blatantly destroyed. Dirk will be my example for this bit, I mean, just look at him. in one epilogue route he commits suicide, and by making Ult. Dirk a thing, they effectively unestablished the identity of Dirk as he was in homestuck. and my limited knowledge of the epilogues doesn't allow me to really know about this, but was there even any acknowledgement of how death works in homestuck? Dirk must've known that if he killed himself, he'd end up as a ghost out in the dream bubbles. that is still a thing, right? Dave could've gone looking for him. considering Dirk's pesterquest route, he should've wanted to. and see, there's an example of what might've approached catharsis in a situation like that... pain, but also a human person dealing with that pain in a way that feels like fulfillment. but as far as I've heard, the story didn't go there? so it's just pain for pain's sake... or maybe just a bid to get rid of the more complex version of his character and replace him with an anime villain. and the method doesn't even make any sense, like, Dirk is the last character that would ever commit suicide because, by his own canonical words, he is scared to not exist. he literally couldn't bring himself to destroy the AR because of this, in spite of having every technical and emotional reason to want to. this is a major pain point for him, and I know it's typical to think of someone with self hatred wanting to kill themselves, but Dirk is a particularly different case. he should not be shoved into such an ill fitting generic narrative for shock value.

and beyond that, let's say you're someone who identified with Dirk. let's say that when homestuck said "you are now Dirk Strider" you were like "oh fuck I kinda am tho" and you were invested in him ever since. let's say that the points of investment you felt with him were in his troubles with self loathing, his fear of not existing, or his trouble communicating his true feelings to others. this is a rather dismal end for Dirk to have come to... and a rather dismal story for you to read if you still relate to this character. if you're coming off the end of homestuck still securely relating to him as heavily as you did when he was allowed to triumph, how fucking bad is it gonna feel to see him so thoroughly obliterated? to whiplash so hard from a perceived success to such abject failure is just mean. this story is so mean now, like, everyone's got the bug it seems.

and not only do several characters perish (literally, or by being mismanaged) for cheap drama in EP/HS2, but some just turn into shitty people? like, Rose recently revealed that she cheated on Kanaya. I simply hate the idea that Rose would grow up to be the type of person who would do that. I remember Rose in acts 1 through 5 being the kind of person who had misguided ideas about what course of action she thought would be effective. she would make some pretty big decisions, and act on destructive impulses, often in spite of what her friends thought was safe. in essence, I can see where the authors of homestuck 2 would get the idea of Rose going off and doing big shit without telling people. but this ignores why she was so determined to do any of that stuff in the first place... Rose was just as invested in protecting the people she cared about as anyone. and besides that, I thought her arc in those early acts had taught her something about that approach? I thought she got closer to people, to the point where they could voice a concern and she'd listen.

in regards to her relationship with Kanaya in particular, there's a huge difference between knowing someone for a day at the age of 13, and spending 3 more years getting to know and love that person before deciding to marry them. so even if this was the reflection of a quality that Rose had back then, I thought she grew past it... she had ample time and opportunity... we even watched her get better about this sort of thing. literally this rolls back her character development to when she was a child, and makes her a shitty adult. and if I’m being really scathing here, I might as well say that this feels like an example of that thing that stories sometimes do, where they only care about a relationship while the characters are struggling to get together. and then once they are together, it timeskips past their relationship being functional and lands you at a point where they're experiencing turbulence. at which point it leverages their relationship trouble for drama, rather than letting the two function well as a unit against an outside threat of some kind. like, no happy couples exist in fiction! gotta wring your conflict out of the fact that they’re falling apart! it feels like they’re being exploited by the writers.

and worst of all... this betrayal of trust by Rose either ruins Rose and Kanaya's marriage, or makes Kanaya seem like a fool. I keep thinking back to their time on the meteor, when Rose asked if Kanaya was breaking up with her because they finally reached that tipping point where Rose's drinking had to be acknowledged as a problem. and Kanaya said that no, she wasn't breaking up with her, and stuck with Rose because she was dedicated to loving her even if that meant helping her with a serious problem. that was such a strong character moment for Kanaya. it displayed her loyalty and dedication to Rose, but also a nuanced understanding of when a problem can actually be solved by dedicated effort. having her be so committed to staying with Rose in spite of Rose's transgressions is like a perversion of those positive qualities. now it just feels like Kanaya is irrationally willing to put up with anything from Rose, no matter how egregious. it takes a trait that was so nice about Kanaya, and uses it in such an upsetting way... and honestly, there was no reason to do that.

but this is a huge problem with EP/HS2... there's like, juuuuuust enough of a through line for people to think that it makes sense. so when I try to say that the characters are just better people than this, and that they're smart enough to do the most basic fundamental things to prevent pain in people that they care about... when I say I believe in the integrity of these characters, I could very well get someone adamantly insisting that I was just being naive. that sometimes, in reality, people disappoint you. what can I even do about that, without sounding like I'm in denial, or like I'm only interested in liking these characters when all their rough spots are smoothed away? how can I begin to articulate that these aren't decisions being made by the characters... they're decisions being made by authors who I don't trust for exactly this reason. and I very especially hate this because just... no! I know what these characters' flaws actually were! and what their strengths were! I had a solid read on their identity, because homestuck was so friggin good at establishing that! I know that a huge part of Rose coming into her own was learning how to cut all the snarky passive aggressive sarcasm and just be honest about her feelings... something that she actually advocated for when talking to Dave, but also had to learn to do herself. the logical escalation of Rose’s character would be a trend toward more openness... but also, just in general, Rose never had a kindness problem. like, I guess that’s the biggest thing I have an issue with. Rose was never this unkind.

it just feels like the writers want us to believe that not only was Kanaya played for a fool, but we were as well. we thought Rose was better than this. we thought we were better judges of character than this. and honestly... we were! the writing was not on the wall about this development. but that just doesn't mean anything because EP/HS2 said that it happened.

and this also harms the relatability of Rose for the people who used to identify with her. I'm not saying she has to be perfect... obviously, characters can and should be flawed. and characters can have flaws that you don't perfectly relate to the specifics of. Rose developed a drinking problem at a young age, which a few people might've related to, but it's very specific. but if you broaden the implications of that in the context of a story... a ton of people will be able to relate to the concept of developing an unhealthy coping mechanism, or doing something you don't really enjoy just to relate to a relative who has been distant to you for whatever reason, or even just having a complicated relationship with a parent. so what if you apply this kind of broadened meaning to Rose's cheating? the idea that she is not trustworthy. that she hides major, life altering information from people who are very close to her and should've been told. that she doesn't trust her partner, and would rather sneak around and hide this for years, rather than either letting her partner be involved in this part of her life, or accepting that her partner isn't comfortable with this development and respecting that boundary. this sort of thing is really alienating to people who know that they themselves are better than this. and “alienating” is the exact antithesis of what homestuck always was to the people who loved it.

what's especially interesting to me, is that the effects of this alienation actually come through in the way that people talk about EP/HS2 nowadays. I don't know if anyone has noticed this trend yet, but people tend to talk about the events of EP/HS2 as decisions made by writers, rather than decisions made by characters. which is weird, because people didn't do that so much with homestuck. and for this I wanna break out Vriska as an example. a lot of people like Vriska, and a lot of people hate Vriska. she's controversial. but no matter what, people always take Vriska's actions as though they're hers. and if they hate what Vriska does in the story, then they hate Vriska. not Hussie, for writing her that way. not even the vague concept of the narrative. they consider Vriska's actions to actually belong to her and form her identity, which they then pass judgment on, one way or another. Hussie is even a character that canonically exists within homestuck, and nobody ever thought to blame him, in universe, for being the origin of Vriska as a trouble causing entity in the story. compare that with how many times you'll see someone say that they don't like what the EP/HS2 writers have done with Rose, Jade, Jane, etc.... they tend not to actually level blame at the characters themselves. obviously this does vary a lot from person to person, but as a vague trend, I would say that people are starting to detach themselves from the characters, or at least detach the characters from their actions in EP/HS2. and to me it reads as a bit of a defense mechanism. it is a degree of separation that lets these characters keep their integrity, and the potential for positive development that they had when homestuck initially ended. it is a trend that, to me, proves the point that the level of pain for pain's sake in this story is too much. without relief, people disengage. even if they want to keep up with how the characters are doing, they no longer want to buy into the narrative's reality... so they acknowledge the author, and the fact that this is fiction. they remove themselves from the act of being invested. and the more adamantly you see people doing this, the more uncomfortable you can assume it feels for these people to buy into the events of the story and treat them as real.

to jump track to another odd point that I think creates a further barrier between cast and audience... has anyone noticed the age of the main cast's children that we've seen appear so far? all of them seem to be similar to the ages of the beta kids when we first met them. they're teenagers. and that means that, if my knowledge is correct, we kinda skipped a chunk of these people's lives. we never really spent time seeing the original homestuck kids as new parents... we never saw them raising their babies. and I get that this is an odd complaint, but it's an example of the story not growing with its audience. it's missing a huge opportunity, not only to show us this portion of their lives, but to fill in with some major world building when it comes to Earth C. are we supposed to assume that absolutely none of the main cast of homestuck made any new friends on Earth C? did they not explore what kind of culture popped up on this planet? what if one of the main cast had gone out and met someone totally new to befriend or love on this planet? but no... we're strictly only interested in the original cast and their kids, which they only ever had with each other, and nobody is really friends anymore, but nobody has met anyone new either... basically depression and isolation is the only option for these characters if the writers aren't willing to actually let them live in the world they're living in. and besides that, at time of writing, there is one friend of mine from my friend group that is just now planning on getting married. he'll be the first of all of us. and while he and his fiancé want kids pretty quickly once they're settled down, it still hasn't even happened yet. we're in our late 20s. and believe me, I understand the desire to timeskip to when the kids are old enough to be full people, but you have to remember not only that there are other ways to introduce new characters, but also who we're even trying to relate to here. is it the new kids, or their parents? because most of us aren't parents yet, much less the parents of teenagers, but we aren’t teenagers anymore either, and this isn’t framed as their story anyway. how are the majority of homestuck’s older fans represented in EP/HS2?

and when EP/HS2 skips the portion of these characters' lives that we, in real life, are actually living, it subtly hints that a story that would reflect what our lives are like isn't interesting, and tells us that not much good is expected to be waiting in our futures either. and the bigger problem with that is that the writing decisions in EP/HS2 represent the authors' answer to the question: how do we make this interesting? clearly they didn't think that anyone would be satisfied with a nice little romp through the lives these characters might've built. like, a slice of life type of story? or maybe something with a smaller stakes conflict? I dunno why, but my first thought was like... what if Jane ended up actually becoming a detective, and the story just had an intermission-style detour into her solving a case or something? at least a weird, hyper specific detour like that would signal that we care about what she's doing... that'd be fine by me! but they couldn't even give us something that would frame her as a good person... they just treated her like she never got un-possessed by the Condesce, and called it a day. it just feels like these are authors who wouldn't be satisfied with a story that lets the characters be at ease in their private lives. peace is something that is off the table, like, if the characters are living good, satisfying lives, we will never hear about it because apparently that counts as nothing to report.

but also... in the absence of the larger plot machinations that SBURB provided, what was left to create a struggle for these characters to face? it couldn't be Jack Noir, Lord English, the Condesce... those threats all got resolved. and they couldn’t let the characters exist in any facsimile of peace. so the writers needed something to stir things up. and in trying to find a new challenge to drive the story, they dug into the stuff that, in my opinion, should not have been used in this way. they began grasping at character drama, trying to wring conflict out of the deterioration of the relationships between the characters.

but at the same time, they're trying to capture the grandeur of homestuck during its more iconic moments. and okay, this is a pretty far out there speculation, but I've always made this observation about homestuck, and the way it got popularized. early on, fans would get into it with no real idea of how big or ambitious the story was going to be. going into act 1 blind, you wouldn't suspect this comic of being much more than a quirky, funny little weekly strip, set up for the sole purpose of making weird jokes about Nic Cage or Harry Anderson. then you get to the big shit. which in act 1 could just be the meteor destroying John's house. but that's a pretty impressive amount of escalation based on the expectations you had. fast forward to a bigger moment, like the reveal that the trolls' SGRUB session created the human universe, and you're super excited about this. so you tell whoever will listen that they should really read homestuck! and maybe they listen, and they go to page one and... well... they seem kind of unimpressed by the way the comic looks. this is what all the hype was about? and you really wanna sell it to them, so you're like, no, seriously, it gets so much better. and maybe you show them bits like the LOWAS walk around flash game, or maybe [S] make her pay, or something. and they're like, whoa, the comic gets like that? so perhaps they slog through the early acts, or maybe they just skip to the trolls and double back when they're confused enough... but either way, the comic's selling point is now it's climax, not the buildup.

and the problem with viewing the comic this way is that homestuck is both things. proportionally, homestuck is actually way more composed of the tedious little stuff than the grand big stuff. but homestuck was popularized via the grand big stuff, and sometimes I feel like EP/HS2 is attempting to fill itself with big stuff like that, but it isn't doing the legwork right. it's using character drama to fuel itself, but it's also trying to be highly epic in terms of its presentation. the lack of contrast flattens everything out, and as I described earlier, the story no longer has that essential push and pull between the terrorizing forces that threaten the characters/raise the stakes, and the unity and likability of the cast that makes you care about their struggle/gets you invested in seeing the conflict resolved. and I just wanna point out that those little interstitial bits... the ones that are typically viewed as the stuff you have to slog through in order to get to the interesting part? those were our main source of knowledge when it came to the characters. it's how we got invested in them and came to know that we liked or related to them in the first place.

the larger ramifications of this lean away from the little things, while also leaning into character drama to fuel conflict in the plot, leads to the overuse of bombastic character drama. sensationalized character drama. everything is always a huge fucking deal, while also being primarily concerned with the existing characters, rather than any kind of outside threat. so what are the tools? a wedding? a funeral? terminal illness, betrayal, a change in ideology that creates a schism... the loss of identity. all these high drama moments that generate conflict by sacrificing the bonds these characters shared. you know... letting that core piece of investment self destruct. the story is basically eating itself in order to sustain its momentum, but there's basically no point anymore. it's been gutted of the stuff that really mattered.

so why did everything go so badly? why do half of the characters not even like each other anymore? why do we not even like half of them anymore? why did the writers feel the need to dismantle them like this? well, because what else do we have to work with... how do you introduce a new threat to these characters without it being either SBURB all over again, or something entirely different that just makes these characters seem overwhelmingly put upon by the universe, like, more than any other individuals that have ever existed. it's actually a very rudimentary power escalation problem. gotta find that next level of bigger problem to set on everyone.

but do you wanna know what kind of homestuck fan I’ve been since the very beginning? I started reading homestuck 9 years ago. I think I was like 16 or 17? and at first I wasn’t sure how to interact with the comic, so I went to the “about” section of the website. it told me, in a broad sense, what mspaintadventures.com was, as a collection of work, and suggested that I begin by reading problem sleuth. not knowing that it wasn’t part of homestuck, I did just that. I read all of it. before I even got to homestuck. I am a fan that lives for the small, stupid, tedious fucking around. the slow buildup of total bullshit... the complex setup that gives you a million microscopic payoffs on it’s way to god knows what end goal. it’s like watching an explosion in reverse. all the tiny little pieces fly chaotically together and coalesce into a whole story, and you got to watch it build itself, piece by tiny little piece. I live and breathe for that level of detail. and the most fun I ever had with the story was when the characters were wandering around an environment, exploring and using various objects to set up these wacky chain reactions, half of which you’d never see coming, but which would all retroactively make sense in the end.

what I’m saying is that small scale conflict is interesting. and there are whole genres that build themselves off of this. I actually think that in certain instances, homestuck may fall under the slice of life genre. and slice of life is largely misunderstood as a rather bland genre, but the appeal is watching people with personalities that you enjoy. you watch them live their lives, and you go along for the ride. true slice of life is not a soap opera... it’s just enjoying the company of people who happen to be fictional. there's always been an element of that in homestuck... these were characters that you could see yourself getting along with if you met them. they were entertaining because of how they saw the world... how you would see the world if you were looking through their eyes. and homestuck gave you that opportunity. sometimes, that actually is all that you need.

I'm not saying that homestuck's ideal form is as a purely slice of life type of story... but wasn't that kind of what a lot of the fan works felt like? little comics about funny scenarios, or preexisting comedy bits with roles assigned to the characters they reminded you of... that stuff was the form that fun took for the fans of this comic. why is that so easily dismissed as frivolous? why is it so bad to want a little of that back? sometimes, you do wanna get into the hard stuff. maybe you wanna see Dave and Dirk have a conversation where they both admit that all they wanted as kids was a brother, and neither felt like they got to have that, but in very different ways. maybe you wanna see Roxy and Rose compare their similar feelings of estrangement, and explore the emotions that led them into their respective struggles with alcohol. maybe you wanna see John have a moment of sadness when he decides he wants to raise a kid, because he misses his own dad, and while Jane's dad is definitely family, he isn't the guy that actually raised John for the first 13 years of his life. maybe you wanna see Jade get inordinately clingy with every single one of her friends until one of them finally voices a concern about needing some space, only to see a glimpse of Jade's absolute terror at the thought of being alone again. and that pain is something that could definitely find a place in a story with more actual down time. maybe these moments of actually cathartic lingering pain could be explored with sensitivity in a story that gives them room to breathe. if the writers played their cards right and let the characters heal in meaningful ways, they might've even gotten tears of happiness out of a few of us. wouldn't that have been wild.

I just hate the idea that something is more realistic if it's dark. that's not true at all. I understand where the sentiment comes from. I understand the merits of taking an unflinching look at hard truths. but cynicism is not the same as realism. and realistically, people will try hard to seek good things for themselves in life. and even if they miss the mark... even if they fall into depression, or lack the ability to make their dreams a reality, these particular characters had already sought and found good people. people who would, realistically, absolutely help a friend if they needed it. I know this, because I watched them do that. the whole first five acts were literally about the trolls yelling at the humans because there was a huge problem that they blamed the kids for causing, and what did these kids do? they said "hey wait, let's fix that" and they did. even though the trolls made a horribly rude first impression. even though it was monumentally challenging. these kids have fought and died for each other's sake. they are family. if not by blood then by bond. and when that part of a story resonates with an audience, it is valuable.

I feel like I shouldn't have to defend the value of connecting positively with an audience. I get that this may be kind of a hokey take... I get that the people who currently like EP/HS2 will probably think I'm asking for something far too saccharine. but at this point I don't even care. once again, this is just my personal opinion, long and rant-like though it may be. and clearly it will change nothing about the current state of homestuck's most canon non-canon continuation. I guess my one major frustration is the extent to which some people have bought into what I consider to be blatant character defamation. it pains me when people talk about the actions of some of the characters in EP/HS2, because while many blame the writers for the unsettling behavior displayed by them in EP/HS2, some will readily consider this to be where the kids from the early acts really ended up as people.

#homestuck #homestuck^2 #fair warning this is all criticism #don't like don't read #and all that jazz #I'm pinning this post cuz I don't wanna lose it #because looking at it will be my self control when I wanna rant about it again and I know I will #like no you asshole you already ranted you don't have to do it again #cw: suicide #I legit forgot to tag that til I went to get a shower and realized halfway through #I basically info dumped all this here and then my head was well and truly empty #also #cw: cheating #?#idk that's the only other thing I can think of that I discussed here which might be a problem for some folks #btw subtle tag whispering that the reblog with tags explaining where a couple of the things I mentioned were addressed a little was nice #I knew I wouldn't get everything spot on... this is definitely criticism coming from a not 100% informed place #but yeah... I still kinda feel like even if the epilogues acknowledge the writer as an entity that differs from the characters...#that just kind of doubles down on the inability of fans to engage? like it cements it.#and even if meat does focus on their 20s while candy timeskips (which I wasn't aware of) like...#look at what happened to meat #look because I don't want to lol #is there anybody left who isn't sad?#cuz real talk I like using happy characters as wish fulfillment when I'm sad #and seeing a character get challenged and still come out with some determined positive energy... I love that #anyone remember when Aradia went god tier? I was overjoyed #literally all it took was her beating apathy and regaining her personhood #I love that stuff #god fucking damn it I'm still ranting what is even up with that

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cannot-decide-on-a-fandom · 3 years

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I think what has become, or possibly has always been, a big problem in regards to criticisms directed towards creators and works is that perfectly legitimate and understandable complaints get mixed in with things that are really not their fault or not worth criticising or it’s sometimes actual hate and abuse for things not deserving.

A couple examples from fandoms I am in/have been in (these are by no means the only critiques that these things get, I’m just not going to list every single thing):

It’s perfectly understandable to critique Horikoshi Kohei/My Hero Academia for how he writes his protagonist, as he pretty much keeps giving him power ups every time he needs a new development (deus ex machina) or have issues with him describing Momo’s costume as sexy. However, sending abuse to him about something like a character’s birthday, when there’s only so many birthdays in the world that someone could have and some of them are going to share dates with bad people from history, is really weird and unnecessary.

Criticising and having issues with the way Rick Riordan has written some minority characters is legit and valid and understandable and if someone misrepresents characters, even if it’s not out of malice, it is something that’s more than okay to comment on. I have heard from people about mistakes made regarding Piper quite a bit, and I fully understand that there does need to be work done to not incorrectly portray people of marginalized communities, I have no issues there. It’s also more than okay to discuss the issues you feel the story had in regards to the plot. But before Tower of Nero came out (I won’t spoil anything that happens in it, don’t worry) I saw a lot of hate and abuse, and I do mean actual abuse not just disagreements, because people believed that Will was going to die, and saying that he was doing the bury your gays trope. Whether that happened or not doesn’t change the fact that a) it was prior to the books release when nothing was really known, b) it was based entirely on fan theories, and c) he’s had several LGBT characters in ToA alone (Apollo himself is bi, Jo, Emmie, Lavinia, Nico, Will) and none of them had died before, so there was no basis for this. Even if he did kill one of them, out of the main 5 in ToN who we spent a lot of time with throughout the story, 3 were LGBTQ+, and if people believed someone would die before the book got published, then the only possible reason to think that is if they thought it made narrative sense, in which case hating on it is really strange and incredibly unneeded.

There’s a lot to criticise Supernatural for, and I recognise that. The ratio of white people to people of colour (in the shows run, I believe they went through 6, maybe 7, actors who were billed as main characters and all of them white), the lack of main LGBT characters, aside from the representation perspective there’s the story’s lack of commitment when it comes to keeping characters dead, and some kind of weird and subpar plots throughout the years being a few. But hating it purely for running long is just kind of like hating something for being successful. It’s fine to say that you think it should have ended earlier because it’s gone downhill in your opinion, but I’ve seen a lot of complaints purely about the fact that it’s gone on too long, when just the act of something running a long time is not bad in any way.

The issue with this is that not only does it give unnecessary stress to people (some of whom are trying to be better) but it also dilutes the perfectly legitimate critique that is directed at these creators and their creations. It’s very serious to say someone has poorly represented certain people, and it’s constructive to say a story is badly structured, but it gets confusing what to take seriously if both things like “this ___ keeps killing off every minority character that exists and misrepresenting and treating them poorly” and “one character who was LGBT/a person of colour died among several other important ones who didn’t, so that means they’re homophobic/racist” are treated as the same level of problematic.

It very much isn’t “this thing has never done anything wrong ever” but rather “let’s hate this for the things it has actually done”. Even with someone like JKR (who I do not like, I need to state this right away), saying that her stories are inherently badly written because she’s a crappy person is not going to achieve what was intended. What that is going to do is make people who have similar writing styles feel bad, make people who enjoyed the stories, even well before being aware of her beliefs, feel bad, and it’s also taking to spotlight away from what’s so serious about her attitudes to certain communities.

#my hero academia #kohei horikoshi #rick riordan #percy jackon and the olympians #heroes of olympus #trials of apollo #supernatural #I need to stop being so wordy with my statements

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chamerionwrites · 4 years

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@permian-tropos replied to your post:

I guess it doesn’t hit a single aesthetic sweet spot for me and that makes all the difference when it comes to how you feel about art. Rogue One is a movie I’d have to meet at the middle to like, I’d have to put something of myself into it, and I have no instinct to do that, which is entirely a gut response.

I would like it if other Star Wars content was made that was like Rogue One that improved on everything I thought was flawed. (Hopefully that wouldn’t make it unwatchable for people who liked R1?)

I mean, I do think the foundation of good criticism is distinguishing between what appeals to you on a personal level and what makes a solid story in the technical sense. It’s a bit like architecture: there’s a difference between “this building is ugly to me” and “the load-bearing structure is flawed.” Or editing: the goal isn’t to nudge the story toward your own preferences, but to figure out what the already-existing story is trying to do and how can it accomplish that most effectively. Obviously the distinction isn’t always a clean one - it can be harder to judge how well a story works when it doesn’t work for you, or conversely harder to see a story’s flaws if it presses your id buttons - but I do think fandom (I don’t mean you, just fandom in general) has a strong tendency to confuse the two. So when I say that a story is good, in the objective sense, what I mean is not necessarily that it resonates with me but that it resonates with itself - that the various pieces of the narrative orchestra are (mostly) playing in tune.

So imo there’s a difference between saying “this story doesn’t hit a single aesthetic sweet spot for me” and saying “this story is flawed.” Both complaints can be legitimate - like I said, personal taste is valid, and Rogue One is hardly a flawless movie - but they aren’t the same complaint, so I am a little confused by you saying that you don’t like it because it doesn’t appeal to you aesthetically but you WOULD like it if its flaws were improved, because aesthetics are about style and flaws are about storytelling structure.

Obviously R1 does resonate for me personally, but just for the record I think the film’s most glaring structural flaw is a threadbare transition between the second and third acts - there’s a lot going on so I can see why they rushed it, but imo Jyn’s arc really needs one more scene to feel organic. “A somewhat shaky script elevated by fabulous acting across the board” is probably a very fair description. It’s just that that kind of consistent overall quality married to thematic coherence is honestly kind of rare in SW movies, which at their best tend toward being wonderful in concept and a little (or a lot) sloppy in execution.

#I just think it's unusually solid for a star wars movie #without being timid the way most of disney sw barring tlj has been #and even if i'm biased when I say it's the best overall I think it's the pretty clear winner of best acting across the board in a sw film #ask box #star wars #rogue one #my posts

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pigballoon · 4 years

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Marriage Story

(Noah Baumbach, 2019)

Still with Netflix two years on from arriving there with The Meyerowitz Stories, but now with a greater degree of acclaim on his side to be making waves large enough to have them moving him back on to selected big screens, Noah Baumbach returns with his latest look at young artistic types, marriage, divorce, and a little of his beloved New York City.

Indeed, stylistically too there is a little of his previous work in there, Marriage Story closer in tone to his more recent, more polished works (the aforementioned Meyerowitz, While We’re Young), with some of the almost play like tendencies of Mistress America, the bitterness that defined him when he broke out with The Squid and the Whale in 2005 certainly on the backburner, but also certainly not completely absent, thus ensuring he’s not taking the edge entirely off the story thus keeping the bite so essential to any dramatic tale of divorce.

Yet for me the magic in Marriage Story is less in that bite, and more in the many moments of levity it introduces, thanks in large part to the likes of the great Merritt Wever, and the mighty Ray Liotta, it’s not a dour movie, at almost 2 hours and 10 minutes it does feel a little long, its final act giving in almost to Return of the King ending syndrome, fading to black again and again, almost unsure of just where and when to call it a day, but still, the comic stuff it unleashes early on and holds on to tight all the way to the close is key to making it feel like something more than just say the very straight and to the point Kramer vs. Kramer.

The fact that he continues to be so strong a director of actors helps makes this all so watchable too. Adam Driver is tremendous at balancing all of the levels of the character, the good and the bad, the funny and dramatic, even in scenes like one late on where he finds himself soul baringly singing on a night out with friends he plays the moment brilliantly even if you find yourself sitting there wondering why you have to sit through so many minutes of this so late on.

I mentioned Kramer vs. Kramer before, a film so famously about a divorce focused entirely upon the husband in which the wife barely features, Marriage Story is more balanced in comparison, but it’s still tilted overall Driver’s way, Baumbach’s structure keeps things even early on, but the longer it goes the more we see of him, the less we see of Scarlett Johansson, so good early on, her long monologue in her lawyers office one of the movies absolute highlights, and maybe the high point of her entire career, but the mysterious, deceptive, questionable nature of her actions become key to Driver’s unravelling as the movie goes along, and thus the movie requires her character, more so her perspective to become less prominent. Some may say in a movie made by a man (indeed one, a New Yorker, who as a has been through his own divorce from an actress from California) he’s just keeping it real by telling the story he knows, but it feels a little sad he couldn’t have found a way to even up the scales.

That’s not to say that it villainizes either party, they are both given their flaws, their issues, the screenplay does a decent job at getting both their views across, but the fact that it sets up her issues fairly early on and never thereafter really probes any deeper into his supposed selfishness feels like a major missed opportunity for me, it feels content to map his experience, rather than his reaction to and dealing with her specific and valid complaints. A mistake as damning to a movie as a marriage.

Still, it’s all very watchable, there’s many great scenes peppered throughout, but the longer the movie goes the more rare they seem to become, Johansson’s previously mentioned monologue in the office of her lawyer played by Laura Dern (who radiates bags of charm in every one of her scenes, but whose own climactic rant is an embarrassing mix of contrived dialogue and a total misstep of a creative choice where the performer gazes directly at the lens that robs the moment of any humanity, less character talking to character, more actress grandstanding for the camera) and the other Merritt Wever, Julie Hagerty introducing paper serving scene and Driver’s initial visit to meet Ray Liotta’s lawyer, the highlights of the film, perhaps along with the climactic fight scene that builds to a fairly satisfying crescendo after all we’ve been through. Wever, Hagerty, Liotta and also Alan Alda being one of the few to introduce a little warmth and humanity in to the middle of all of this madness definitely help prop the movie up, but to me it’s very much a mixed bag of great, often inspired filmmaking, and missed opportunities and miscalculations.

#marriage story #noah baumbach #adam driver #Scarlett Johansson #alan alda #ray liotta #laura dern #merritt wever #julie hagerty #2019 #reviews #film #films #movie #movies

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thebackloggamer · 5 years

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Darksiders II: Deathinitive Edition

Is this game beloved? It is not, right? I mean, I really haven’t heard a ton of people saying that they love this game. Right? Well... I just played it and I gotta say, I really, reeeally like it. It is a solid game, the likes of which seems to me that should have some sort of cult following.

I played the first one way back when it first came out and have been meaning to play this one since it was released. Then the remaster came out and I still skipped it, until now. The game is nothing groundbreaking. Nothing is about it is super unique or revolutionary. And it even has some refinement problems like a few wild bugs and some less than ideal camera work. And still, I had such a great time playing through it, exploring the world, fighting enemies, etc.

Yeah, this is a pretty good game. As I said, nothing groundbreaking, just an honest, solid, fun game that I enjoyed a bunch.

What is it?

So anyway, what is this game about? The best way that I would describe Darksiders II is by saying that it’s a mix of several good things. This is an 3D action adventure game with RPG elements. The combat is just like pre-2018 God of War. It’s got a world structure just like the pre-Breath of The Wild Zelda series. Also like Zelda, it’s got dungeons with puzzles and traps and enemies and the like. Traversal feels like Prince of Persia mixed with Uncharted most of the time. It’s got a progression system based on your character leveling up as he fights and gains experience, like any RPG. And, finally a loot system akin to the ones found in games like Diablo.

Darksiders II takes all these well established gameplay elements and merges them together into a cohesive package that, after summing up all of its individual parts, comes out being something great. In a sense, you could say that this combination is the very thing that makes Darksiders II unique: an expertly executed mix of these specific genres. That could maybe be a little bit of a stretch though, but really, that’s neither here nor there. I don’t subscribe to the belief that a game needs to be unique or have a twist to be truly great and enjoyable. To me, Darksiders II is a validation to that sentiment. This is just a fun game.

The combat

Darksiders II is made up of many parts. All of which I think are well implemented enough. The combat, while not being nearly as deep as something like what the genre defining games like Bayonetta or Devil May Cry have, still feels good and fun. It’s also nuanced enough to keep it from being a mindless button mashing festival. It’s your classic God of War-esque affair of two attack buttons (light and heavy attacks) and a jump button that, when pressed successively in different orders, can produce a variety of combos. That, along with some special items, attacks and buff skills sprinkled in, make the whole combat competent enough.

The level design

The level design of both the over-worlds and the many dungeons are intricate enough so that exploration feels rewarding. The puzzles are a mixed bag that go from just-ok to pretty good. These brainteasers are a good way to take a break from hacking and slashing, slowing things down for a while a bit. Save for a very few instances, they never overstay their welcome.

The loot

Tying back to the rewarding exploration idea that I mentioned earlier is the loot system. Your character can equip multiple pieces of armor and main and secondary weapons. The game world is littered with treasure chests both hidden and in plain sight that contain such items in varying rarity levels, along with healing potions and good old money, which can be used in shops throughout the adventure.

The traversal

Traversal though these these worlds also feels very good. There’s a combination of climbing, wall-running, swinging, wall-jumping and more, that make you feel like a very capable acrobat.

The presentation

All these aspects are well executed in Darksiders II and make for a pretty good game. Where I think it excels though, and is what propels it to the next level, is in the overall presentation. This game looks gorgeous. And make no mistake, this is no technical marvel, but the art direction is so on point that I couldn’t help but stare at times at the architecture, vistas, and the design of weapons and armor which are made with so much intricate detail.

All of this looks so cool.

That said, what takes the cake in the presentation department is the character designs. I feel like all the characters, including the player, NPCs and enemies got a ton of work put into their designs as well as in their realization within the game world. Everyone looks great, from the goat person that sells you weapons to the king of the undead that at some point has you running errands for him. Everyone is so unique, interesting, fun and just... cool. So cool. The voice acting is also great, backed by some excellent writing. Particularly Death, the player controlled character, has some great lines and great deliveries. I’m no writing expert but I found the way people speak in this game so appealing. The words they use, their accents, their voices, everything works together to really sell the high fantasy setting. And nothing feels weird or out of place.

I mean... Look at this guy.

As far as the plot goes, it’s not the most intricate tale in the world. But I feel like it is well executed. In this game you play a Death, one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, who, after learning about his brother’s wrongful imprisonment, embarks on a quest to redeem him by bringing back humanity from extinction. The story is pretty simple but there are several events that transpire and characters that you interact with during the journey that manage to keep things interesting. That, combined with some good acting and writing, makes the whole thing pretty effective.

Not everything is rosy though, I have two complaints related to game refinement:

1. Bugs. I encountered a couple of weird bugs. Nothing game breaking thankfully. There was a time when the physics engine went haywire and threw me into the sky when I was actually supposed to drop down. Died and had to restart from the latest checkpoint. No biggie, just a minor annoyance. Another issue that happened to me sometimes was that almost everything would go silent and I had to restart the game. I’m talking about most sound effects and background music, gone. Super weird.

2. The camera. The camerawork, overall, leaves a lot to be desired. I feel like the camera could’ve been used much more effectively to highlight some key moments in traversal (like some tricky jumps or swings) and in combat. Which is a shame too, because this game’s animations are so cool and well done. It would’ve been great to be able to enjoy them with a camera that actually made sure we saw them in all their splendor. And this is just camera placement, not bugs with the system per se. I feel like many times the camera was too close to the character or not having the action front and center. A missed opportunity there for sure, but overall it didn’t hamper my enjoyment of the game too much.

Death is a pretty cool guy

So yeah, that’s my opinion on Darksiders II. In case you couldn’t figure it out, I really enjoyed this game. It is, as I said, nothing groundbreaking as it takes heavy inspiration from other industry heavy-hitters like Zelda and God of War, but it’s still, nevertheless, a super fun time. Would definitely recommend to any and all action adventure fans out there. Looking forward to getting around to playing the sequel soon.

#darksiders #darksiders ii #action #adventure #puzzle #rpg #action rpg

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caffeinated-telescopes · 7 years

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Yuri!!! On Ice: The Power of Delivering to Your Audience

Introduction:

Ask yourself: what do you you want to get out of your entertainment? If someone were to ask you to make a detailed outline of everything you want to see in any television show, movie, game, book, album, or other form of media, what would be on your list? Not what type of genres, settings, characters or stories you would prefer, but what themes, qualities and values would you look for? When you go into a movie theater, pick up a book, put a disc into a console or reach for the remote, what is it you hope to come away with?

One thing I’ve noticed from personal experience and from spending time with other fans is that sometimes recognizing everything we want in entertainment is difficult to do. We might prioritize things like good writing, representation, a unique concept or a story that wraps up all it’s threads, but all of those things can be present in a piece of entertainment and still leave us underwhelmed. In cases like this we often discover that we have more expectations for entertainment than we originally thought. While we receive everything we thought we wanted, we walk away disappointed because it wasn’t everything we internally craved.

There are some critics who have large, specific lists of things they look for in media, but generally, that’s not the case for most casual fans of entertainment and storytelling. Our mental list of things we want out of a story is constantly changing as we grow and develop as people and as society changes around us. If we knew what we wanted to see all of the time, we’d never get excited or surprised or disappointed by anything. We’d never have that inexpressible feeling that leaves us with nothing else to say except for, “I don’t know what I just witnessed, but I loved it.” We may not be able to point out everything that needs to be included in a story for us to feel satisfied, but when we receive something that speaks to and connects with us in a surprising and personal way, we realize that it’s exactly what we’ve wanted all along.

It turns out it’s just as difficult for creators to understand what their audience wants to see as it is for fans. While a lot of entertainment is about creating art for the sake of art and telling our stories through media, it’s also an industry in which creators hope to appeal to general audiences to make a profit, which is a lot harder than it might seem. We see tropes and trends in entertainment that people are generally dissatisfied with and bored of, but we don’t see them disappearing. At least not quickly, because its just as difficult for creators to recognize the growing trends and wishes of their audience as it is for the audience to recognize their ever changing expectations.

Hayao Miyazaki, the critically acclaimed anime director and founder of Studio Ghilbi, recently made some bold complaints about Japan’s current anime industry. “Some people spend their lives interested only in themselves. Almost all Japanese animation is produced with hardly any basis taken from observing real people...it’s produced by humans who can’t stand looking at other humans.” (Source) While Miyazaki takes a very cynical approach, I think he may be onto something concerning how many creators, not just in anime, but in all entertainment mediums, don’t seem to know how to connect with their audience.

Delivering To Your Fans:

However, every once in a while, a group of creators come along that seem to grasp the answer to this mystery. Sometimes it’s in the form of paying tribute to fans. When BBC’s Sherlock Season Three began airing, written by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, fans immediately took note of the show’s unique structure. Even now jokes are still made about how it’s essentially “like watching fanfiction”. In a lot of ways, Sherlock Season Three feels like a big thank you fans and a sign that the creative team was keeping an eye on what their fans wanted and appreciated their support.

In Spring 2016, anime studio Trigger, famous for their ridiculous, over the top stories, characters and settings, started airing two new shows. One, called Kiznaiver, was structurally different from anything the studio had ever done before and what fans had come to expect from them. This experimental project received mixed reviews. The other was Space Patrol Luluco, which felt less like an actual story and more of a tribute to their fans. In this show, Trigger returned to the wacky, senseless style of storytelling people loved them for while heavily referencing all of their previous works, making the whole thing feel like a giant thank you to their fans for putting up with their weird experiments and a promise to deliver what they wanted to see in the future. These, of course, are examples of creators who observed their fan base and gave them what they wanted to see. However, there are some pieces of art and entertainment that appeal to the general public on a fundamental level, whether the viewer is a fan of the genre and medium or not.

Delivering to the World:

One such show from the Fall 2016 season surprised everyone with how quickly it took root within the internet fan community, given how little it was hyped up beforehand. Yuri!!! on Ice, an original sports anime, began its run and managed to capture the hearts of anime fans and non-fans alike. This show swept the internet by storm, rapidly gaining popularity with every new episode. Viewers started noticing how the show was constantly one step ahead of what they wanted and expected to see.

What gives Yuri!!! on Ice this power to connect with such a large group of people is the humanity of its characters, both in conception and action. While they all reach for the same goal, to win a gold medal in the world ice skating competition, we’re given in depth looks into their lives and who they are as people. Both Yuri and Viktor are set up to be complex and interesting characters far before the show goes the final step to establish their canonical gay relationship. When that happens, it still doesn’t become the point of the show’s focus, nor is it fetishized or aimed towards the fujioshi community in any way. It’s presented as just one of many parts of their lives as they work together to accomplish their goals. Their love and passion for their dreams and for each other is something that all audiences can easily connect with. What’s really interesting about how this show presents Yuri and Viktor’s relationship is that all the supporting characters accept the fact that they’re in a relationship without question. There aren’t any jokes or gags revolving around their sexuality like we’re used to seeing in most entertainment. The way the show portrays Yuri and Viktor is what many have been wanting to see for a long time: gay characters and relationships that aren’t the butt end of a hetero-normative punch line. This show doesn’t ignore the sexual orientation of its characters, but they never become the primary focus. Rather, it strips the characters of their sexuality and genders until all that’s left is who they really are: people. Real people with dreams, goals and passion.

In addition to having a great cast of lead characters, Yuri!!! on Ice has a diverse and interesting cast of supporting characters as well. Although many of them don’t get as much screen time as one might hope, they all have dreams, lives, relationships and struggles that they have to learn how to deal with. A large selection of nationalities are represented, once again avoiding stereotypes. Each of the skate performances are accompanied by an incredible score that uniquely represent their dreams, identities and personal struggles.

As with any show that explodes in popularity, there are always those who don’t believe it’s worthy of the recognition its received, and in this case it’s not without reason. Yuri!!! on Ice has a handful of flaws. Its supporting characters aren’t developed or explored as much as I would like them to be, the animation, while gorgeous at times, is inconsistent for most of the show’s run, and many of the in between episodes can easily start feeling repetitive and boring. However, the fact that it’s become so popular that it’s starting to be considered mainstream is a sign that it’s making a real impact on people, and that isn’t something that should be ignored, and the amount of work that Mitsurou Kubo and Sayo Yamamoto put into discovering what trends viewers were tired of, what both Japanese and Western audiences wanted to see and the risks they took in creating a show based on the results is something I think should be respected.

Even though part of entertainment and storytelling is telling your own personal story, there’s a lot of power in searching out what your audience wants and delivering it to them. One of the most incredible things about stories is how they connect with people. They connect fans with each other and with the creators. They give us things we can be surprised by and excited about. They create that transcendental feeling of satisfaction that make us feel like we’re not alone and are understood by others. They appeal to our basic human needs of acceptance and validation. They speak to our emotions and brings us to tears. They inspires us to push ourselves to the next level of life, to continue to survive and improve. Stories have the capability of changing us on a fundamental level as we see the world through the eyes of others and discover new things about ourselves. When a show’s creators take the time and effort to make a connection with their consumers, the result is powerful. Like Yuri and Viktor, stories like this are capable of stripping away the differences between people because they don’t speak to our genders, sexuality, races, politics or religions, but to our humanity.

Conclusion:

Surprising, the things that people ended up wanting last fall weren’t the things one might expect. They were things like respectful ethnic diversity, realistic LGBT+ representation, characters who acted like real people with real lives, relationships, mental struggles and questions about their identities, a powerful soundtrack that reflected the nationalities of the characters represented, interactions between characters that could go from funny to tear jerking in just minutes without feeling out of place and, ultimately, something we could all connect with. The reason Yuri!!! on Ice is so loved and praised by such a large and diverse audience that under different circumstances would have nothing in common is because it’s everything we wanted and were ready to receive. It appealed to our humanity, our differences, and our most basic emotions. It speaks to that burning desire in our hearts to reach farther than ever before, to dream, to break rules, to be ourselves, no matter what anyone thinks or says. At its core, this show is terrifyingly, beautifully, powerfully human.

Critically, Yuri!!! on Ice is far from being a critical masterpiece, but for many, it was perfect. And I think that’s powerful.

#yuri!!! on ice #yuri on ice #anime #fall 2016 anime #yuri katsuki #viktor nikiforov #yurri katsuki #viktor x yuuri #yuri x victor #yurio plisetsky #entertainment #essay #storytelling essay #storytelling #fandom

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thedeadflag · 7 years

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So, I'm reading this fic, a HP AU of The 100, and I'm not that far into it, but so far it's been very good, and then there's a fight between Raven, a muggle born, and Fox, a pure blood, because Raven keeps ranting about the purebloods awfulness, which I totally agree with her, in a general way, as if every pureblood is like that and it hurts Fox, because she is a pureblood and she's not like that, and Raven knows that she isn't, but she still talks in general terms about purebloods and (1/?)

like, I understand and agree with what she means, but, being myself a white man who sees a lot of generalization on tumblr about things white men do, I understand how it can hurt your feelings to be lumped together with people you disagree with, and so I don’t think Fox is wrong on this matter, but then Raven gets angry, because it’s not like Fox suffers any restrictions or reproaches from society, while Raven, because she is muggleborn has to deal with a lot of shit from purebloods and (2/?)

and Raven says a lot of hurtful, mean things, saying that purebloods are a bunch o inbreds and that, basically, Fox should just suck it up, because there are people, the muggleborns, that are persecuted just because they weren’t bred, and like, I understand Raven, I do, some purebloods can be downright disgusting, but like, saying this thing to your friend just because she is a pureblood just, to me, feels a little too much like being discriminated for being muggleborn, and I guess (¾)

what I’m asking is, what do you think on this matter, seeing that it can be translated to current issues, issues of color, religion, sexuality, gender. (4/4)

Okay, so this is going to be long, because there’s some important lessons here on interacting with marginalized people.

Muggle-born folks are, within the context of the magical world in the Harry Potter Universe, an oppressed group. That’s just facts. There’s purebloods, halfbloods, and then muggle-born. Only thing deemed worse in some ways is a Squib, due to being from magical parents but lacking magical prowess, who are considered traitors to their blood, the purity of their people. Squibs put the ‘natural superiority’ of their people (or, at least, the argument of superiority) at risk by not being magical, and thus not carrying their people’s power that’s used to prop up their standing in society as superior to halfbloods and especially muggle-born folks

This sets up a pretty easy race/ethnicity allegory (that is also inherently infused with classism) from what I’ve seen, heard, and read in the books (I made it partway through the books, watched all the films, have a large number of HP fanatic friends).

Which means Raven can talk shit about purebloods all she wants if she’s muggle-born in that story. Maybe it might be a little mean of her sometimes depending on her word choice if she’s directing it at Fox, but honestly, marginalized people need to be able to vent their hurt and anger and frustration in order to be healthy. It’s a legitimate need that’s backed up by decades of science. Our friends and allies need to understand this and not take it personally.

Like, even remarks like “They’re all inbred!”, which might seem to be an insult against purebloods, would really just be a commentary on how purebloods aggressively discriminate and wield their power to the point where even in their relationships, only other purebloods are good enough, pure enough, valuable enough, worthy enough to be their partners (or sometimes even just their friends). It’s letting out anger that you and your people are so thoroughly deemed worthless and lesser-than. it’s turning the discrimination she faces into an attack to try and reclaim the violence done to her people.

Marginalized groups tend to discuss their oppression at a social level, not an individual level, since discussing things like racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. at an individual level basically never accomplishes anything except maybe, at best, a good venting session about a single person who upset them. These are social processes. They attack whole groups of people, not individuals, and by default, conversations and material about them will be on a social level unless explicitly noted otherwise.

When someone says, for instance (and to make this simple and easy for me to explain from my pov), that all cis people are transphobic, we’re saying intent does not matter, because society weaponizes cis people against trans people whether you’re aware of it or not, and usually promotes you being unaware of it (on top of all the largely invisible privileges that status offers). It doesn’t matter if someone wanted to hurt us, it just matters that we were hurt. Everyone’s raised in a thoroughly transphobic society, one cis people benefit from by being cis, and one where any inactivity or indifference or neutral stance on transphobia is, in effect, helping the reproduction of that oppression, because we do not live in a neutral society…we live in a society that actively oppresses large amounts of people in varying ways, and so any decision not to fight that oppression, not to attack the benefits cis folks gain from that oppression, is essentially a decision to permit that oppression. The marginalized, after all, are not responsible for overcoming their oppression…that’s the oppressing class’ responsibility, to work with the marginalized to dismantle those structures.

Society conditions us with thoughts and beliefs about marginalized peoples and buries them in our ‘common sense’ to be used via gut reactions, and unchallenged ‘truths’. Everyone, everyone needs to put in the work to unlearn these. It’s more visible for marginalized folks, since our oppressions tend to stand out when they’re directed at us, but it’s more important for those in power to put in the work to unlearn. That can be hard if they might not actually see themselves reproducing harm, or clearly recognize what is or isn’t harmful.

This is much larger than individual people. None of this is solely a single individual’s responsibility, but it is the responsibility of categories of people. Like, if you’re white, it’s your responsibility to be active in unlearning racism, and seeking out poc voices to manage that. Same deal for for privileged folks in relation to marginalized folks across just about any axis. If you’re not putting in the work, you’re effectively helping retain the status quo, and it’s important to be mindful of that. It’s important that folks do what they can, not just what they’re comfortable with, not just some notion of ‘if I treat everyone equally, I’m fine’ because that’s a non-solution, and it’s rarely that folks will end up treating everyone equally anyways, since they won’t have assessed the biases and stigmas guiding their common sense and instincts and gut reactions.

Cis folks can be visibly nice and still contribute to our oppression and harm us in ways they may or may not be unaware of. Malicious intent is not required for something to be transphobic, but even if it WAS, it’s very easy to attribute malicious intent to society as a whole, given it’s been operating a genocide against trans people for ages.

Far too often, when we vent about transphobia to our friends and family, we eventually experience hostility and aggression from them, and they experience burnout. Because I know my friends wouldn’t like me complaining a dozen plus times a day about varying instances of transphobia I face. Maybe a small handful every few days, but eventually I get the “Jeez, stop being so negative/sensitive/etc.” or the “well, I’m not like that!” remarks. Or, if I’m venting to coworkers, i could get complaints to my manager. Or my family members would stop picking up the phone when I call them, and/or stop answering when i text them. I, as well as well over a hundred trans folks I’ve known personally, have experienced being cut off from our social supports (whether temporarily or permanently) for trying to get support over the transphobia we face. Generally, people don’t want to hear about it, not on blast, not all the time, not every day for months and months, even though that’s our reality, and we need help managing that reality. Folks don’t want to hear it. And while it’s nice to feel validated by our local, in-person trans friends, sometimes that negativity can be draining on our relations with them. This is why having multiple outlets is good, and why we need good allies who know not to take it personally.

This is because stress is far more dangerous when it’s routine and relentless…major individual stress events like a death in the family can be difficult but there’s usually some form of supports in place to help manage that. But dealing with a dozen instances of minor to moderate stressors daily, ones that generally will not cease? That tends to have a more significantly negative impact on a person’s mental and physical health, especially since there’s rarely any support resources in place to help people deal with those. And those stressors, combined with social stigmas, and high rates of poverty, and high rates of unemployment and homelessness, and high rates of medical discrimination, tends to lead to us attempting suicide. These are the main reasons why 43+% of trans people have attempted suicide at least once (and that’s honestly a very conservative number). Not being permitted to manage our stress and pain without consequence is a huge reason for that. We’re attacked for expressing our pain, constantly, and that hurts.

Because when trans people vent “I fucking hate cis people!” they’re not thinking of each and every individual cis person alive, so it would be wrong to take such a statement personally. They’re likely speaking of the cis people that have harmed them recently, and how they wield transphobia against them. Because let me tell you, as a trans woman who has worked retail in numerous public positions, eventually, you just start to forget their faces. Too exhausting to be angry at each of them, and it’s much easier to just get upset at society for weaponizing cis folks against us, and use ‘cis people’ as shorthand, a form of metonymy, which is commonly used all across society in similar ways. And since the category of cis people is used to wield transphobia against us (remember transphobia exists at the social level first and foremost), it is logical for us to use metonymy. Easier than listing out the gritty details of each instance, each person involved, each form of transphobia, etc. When I’d come home from work and close the door, and loudly vent “UGH! FUCKING CIS PEOPLE I SWEAR TO GOD” my roommate would (if he was home) toss me a gummy worm and nod sagely, asking if the cis were at it again.

He, a cis dude, knew I wasn’t raging about him. He was well aware I was raging at all the cis people who wielded transphobia against me while I was away. Much in the way that when a friend of mine would slump down beside me after a failed date and complain about how “men are jerks”, I’d understand that she was not, in fact, attacking my best friend, who is a man, and a very good person. She was using hyperbole as a form of emotional expression. Just like someone who says “I hate litterers” does not in fact hate all people in the world who have littered, they are likely upset that littering is such a common, destructive thing that folks don’t really care much about. Hyperbole. Used all the time.

It’s healthy for us to do this. It’s important we have the ability to do this unrestricted, and without being attacked for it. it’s important that our allies jump through trans 101 hoops and recognize that when we vent like this, it’s not a personal attack.

It’s not necessarily actual hatred against cis people. Usually just anger, and we’re allowed to be angry when cis people harm us on the daily and rarely care to change what they’re doing or how they think of us. We’re allowed to express that anger, and we shouldn’t be attacked for it. Allies wouldn’t attack us for it, they’d understand it.

Recognize that this is bigger than your feelings, it’s bigger than you, it’s bigger than any single one of us. Recognize that we can be generally good people but still participate in widespread oppression. Recognize that you have a long way to go, and that’s okay, because so does everyone else.

The Fox in this story should work at understanding this dynamic better and getting past her initial defensive reactions, because no one’s attacking her, and it’s not personal

#long post #allyship 101 #education #hyperbole #racism #classicm #transphobia #metonymy #terminology #social justice

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boythirteen · 4 years

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This is my sermon.

Hello to everyone. I miss seeing you all but here we are together in the strange new world. I feel so susceptible to the strangeness of it that I’ve possibly become strange and will say something strange. So be it.

In the first reading for today, the prophet Jeremiah laments his calling to prophecy as something degrading that has made him a “laughingstock.” This is because he doesn’t get to herald positive news. “Violence and destruction” is what will happen—Judah will fall to Babylon (is what I was able to piece together as the context). And since no one in Judah wants to hear this or believe it at all, they berate Jeremiah for his negativity. Like Peter berating Jesus in the verses from Matthew.

But let me start with Jeremiah:

Jeremiah 20: 7-9

O God, you have enticed me, and I was enticed; you have overpowered me, and you have prevailed. I have become a laughingstock all day long; everyone mocks me. For whenever I speak, I must cry out, I must shout, “Violence and destruction!” For the word of God has become for me a reproach and derision all day long. If I say, “I will not mention God, or speak any more in God’s name,” then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.

Jeremiah feels betrayed by God, “enticed” into God’s service, maybe with big ideas about the glory of it, and so is angry and embarrassed to be God’s prophet who has to foretell despairing news of destruction. He doesn’t get to bring uplifting news and feel proud about it in the funny way that we can feel proud when we bear interesting news. He doesn’t even get to be believed. Jeremiah is a debbie downer who people want to avoid or ridicule as a charlatan or even to actively restrain to make him shut up about his stupid fake news. Jeremiah blames God for putting him in this role. His expression of anger is a private complaint he makes only to God, not the public face he shows to the world, kind of like you wouldn’t believe some of the mad things I say in the privacy of my home, but still he gets mired in it. What he really wants is for God to intervene and deal with his detractors, to “bring down retribution” on them is what he asks for in chapter 15. And similarly, the people of Judah, those who are Jeremiah’s detractors, are at odds with Jeremiah in the first place because he isn’t validating their expectation that God will intervene and assure them victory. What seems to be happening overall is a kind of wishful thinking about God, a human projection about who God should be that everyone around Jeremiah must have, and possibly Jeremiah has, too, and Peter has in the New Testament, and probably all of us have to a degree, which is that God is supposed to intervene to alleviate suffering and assure victory or vindication for those whom God is supposed to love, because God is all powerful and should be able to and want to. Even though everyone’s experience of life and struggle doesn’t bear this out. Even though what is born out is that God is with us in the face of suffering— that God empowers all of us to abide the suffering and grow through it. But somehow this isn’t good enough or obvious enough or glorious enough, even though it is all of that but maybe is just too equitable and not as immediately, personally gratifying and ennobling as having God swoop in and hand out victories. It doesn’t allow people to rank their favorability to God according to their perceived “blessings” or positive outcomes. Which, I’ve been thinking, is part of what the crucifixion story is meant to illustrate—that there isn’t a ranking with God. That even Jesus isn’t plucked from the cross and afforded the human satisfaction of seeing his enemies brought low. That even the victory of the resurrection is lost on those who would then have to face their wrongness. Oh no that maybe we won’t get to see the Trump Administration squashed under God’s angry foot.

I’m getting ahead of myself but this is how my thoughts are unfolding. I’m having emotional thoughts. I’m mad about the world’s ways of ranking people. I’m very mad about the Christian Right’s coopting of Christianity, of the patriarchy’s manhandling of Christianity almost from the very start in service of upholding oppressive systems and hierarchies that privilege some and condemn others, as if God smiles on some and not others, as if God would bless one country over another, as if God would allow for a monstrosity like the Trump administration and its enablers to consider themselves chosen and blessed by God. And this corrupting of Jesus’ message, or, more accurately, the removal of Jesus’s message from what has become the most visible face of Christianity to the wider world—the patriarchal, white supremacist face that labels itself “Christian”—is beyond embarrassing and enraging to be even remotely associated with.

I’m just thinking about ways that claiming faith in God can be embarrassing to me since Jeremiah has brought up being embarrassed by it. Because something else affecting me about Jeremiah’s self-pitying complaint is his extreme, bare honesty, even coming close to being blasphemous. I feel inspired by the blasphemy of it, though, or permitted by it to look at my own blasphemous thoughts and even to speak them: That sometimes it feels ridiculous to believe in God, not because God isn’t alleviating suffering, which I’ve kind of deeply learned not to expect, or not to expect too eagerly, but just because the whole notion of a biblical God seems archaic and quaint and not so different from believing that the earth is 6000 years old or even that the earth is flat or that the sun is being carried across the sky by a chariot or that wives must obey their husbands.

But even if I succumb to the blasphemous thoughts and find myself at the very precipice of unbelief, I can feel what Jeremiah calls the burning fire shut up in my bones that belies my unbelief and kind of hurts. Remember in Miracle on 34th Street at the end when Natalie Wood is in the car, having not yet gotten her dream house for Christmas, and she’s saying “I believe, I believe” in a despondent way like she doesn’t want to but can’t help it? Like that.

It also occurs to me that having a fire shut up in my bones is something like how “growing pains” can feel, or what I think of as growing pains that I still do feel sometimes in my bones however fully grown I am. What it feels like is that I need to be bigger. And this is making me think of something I read in The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin, which maybe you read as a young person but I never did so I just read it now. It’s about a boy studying to become a wizard, and Harry Potter is a knock-off of it. There’s a big emphasis in the story on the true names of things and of people, and how people and things are known in the world by their worldly names but also have true names that no one knows, or very few know, other than wizards, because magic is rooted in the knowledge of true names. But along the way in the story the boy does a terrible thing and falls from grace. His truest friend from wizard school comes to see him in the school hospital where he’s been recovering from his grave mistake,(which I won’t tell you about in case you want to read the book). But his friend shares with him his true name, which people almost never share with each other because it requires a level of trust that is rarely attained. So this is a great gift the friend gives of trusting the boy even after his terrible act. LeGuin writes that “[The boy] stood for a while, like one who has received great news, and must enlarge his spirit to receive it.” What I’m thinking about is the necessity of enlarging our spirits to receive something profound, something we don’t feel big enough for. I’m also thinking of true names, and of the name Emmanuel which is the name Matthew uses for Jesus in writing of Jesus’s birth, and how the name Emmanuel means God is with us. And how we have to enlarge our spirits to be big enough to believe this.

I have yet to enlarge my spirit enough to remain in belief. “I believe—help my unbelief.” I have yet to feel big enough for my true name—Beloved Child of God. What I’m seeing now is that believing that God is with me is kind of the same thing as believing that God loves me. This is what’s hard to consistently believe—that I’m loved. This is why it’s so tempting to believe in a God who proves love by bestowing blessings, to want this kind of God who takes away doubt.

Something about these several months of the world being turned upside down feels like just the time for believing and unbelieving all at once— for enlarging my spirit and not being big enough at the same time. I remember in the beginning of the pandemic when the preface to everything written or spoken was “during these uncertain times.” I don’t know if we’re still needing to say that, but not because we aren’t uncertain but because uncertainty is where we exist now. I was thinking that this sermon could kind of be about our collective uncertainty as a spiritual condition, a spiritual practice or discipline that has been imposed on us in the most intense way by a natural phenomenon beyond our control, but that is also something we’re beginning to wield or to use as a tool to effect change. We’ve all become far more acutely aware of the societal structures of oppression that those who cling to power have imposed on everyone else over generations. We see the need to tear down the old and oppressive structures, but with incomplete or early-stage ideas as to what will replace them, or whether to replace them at all. I’m thinking of things like the abolition movement and Defund the Police—these movements that strive to push us toward a more just and loving world free of dehumanizing prisons and brutal cops on patrol with their guns. But always the questions arise about what then to do with those who perpetrate violence if we won’t be arresting them and jailing them, as if the grossly profitable business of incarceration, the brutish system of racist policing we now have in place in any way serves to secure justice or staunch violence. Maybe we don’t have a fully formed imagining of what society could look like, how it could function without prisons and police forces to beat it into submission. What we can fully imagine, though, is that such a society would be far, far closer to the Commonwealth of God than what we live in at present. We can move forward with uncertainty—not as a deterrent but as an inspiration, a new and uncharted way.

And in saying this, it’s striking me now that I’m possibly talking about faith, or maybe about hope, a driving force of hope and faith—a belief. Maybe belief is the spiritual aspect of uncertainty. “God is with you” is the belief we share at MCCNY. It’s the solid truth to hold on to amidst the swirling uncertainty, but is also what requires a spiritual discipline to fully and consistently believe, because of uncertainty, or doubt, being so persistent. But faith is strengthened by doubt. Uncertainty is kind of like fuel that keeps us ever restless and reaching for truth, with truth seeming to be the solid place where maybe we could rest if we could just keep our footing there.

Well, now I want to read the verses from Matthew:

Matthew 16:21-28

From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?” For the Son of Humanity is to come with his angels in the glory of God, and then will repay everyone for what has been done.

I think of Jeremiah being upset that he must herald news of violence and destruction instead of a victorious kind of news that everyone would love to hear, but what about the news that Jesus foretells? Not only is it about violence and destruction, but the violence and destruction is what will happen to Jesus personally. And Peter doesn’t want to be told about it. But Jesus, instead of being mad at God for any of this, is mad at Peter for not enlarging his spirit enough to accept it and be supportive of Jesus in the midst of it. Because it isn’t easy, even for Jesus, to accept. It’s hard enough that Jesus calls Peter Satan for not helping him, even though Peter thinks he is being helpful and supportive. Peter thinks Jesus should be victorious in a traditional, worldly way of defeating his enemies and rising to the top, But Jesus is talking about something so radically different that here we are still trying to accept and understand.

Let me go through my own attempt at understanding. First about Jesus “undergo[ing] great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be[ing] killed.” It isn’t my belief that Jesus will be killed because God demands a sacrifice for human sin. I don’t believe in a God such as this and feel embarrassed that so much of Christianity adheres to the notion of the crucifixion being required by God for our salvation, as if Jesus is a lamb slaughtered on God’s altar to please God in some perverse way. This, to me, is something a sadistic tyrant would demand, not a loving God. It’s something a patriarchal power structure would set up to keep the citizenry in obedience to it, the concept of benevolence being tied to sacrifice, a tit for tat, and the ultimate benevolence of the patriarchal tyrant being exhibited by their willingness to offer their own child as the sacrifice, as if this makes such an unthinkable act somehow good and loving. As if our loving relationship with God is reliant on God having to symbolically kill us in the first place. This interpretation of the crucifixion, of God and of Jesus, is upsetting me now in an overwhelming way. It feels like the ultimate thing to fight against, the patriarchal insistence that something grossly submissive is required of us—obedience or sacrifice or swearing of allegiance—to be loved by God, to be accepted into the commonwealth of God. Imagine a loving parent requiring this of a child. Imagine any kind of genuine love being predicated on this sort of trade—I’ll love you if you obey me. I don’t believe in obedience to God. I’m sorry if I’m being blasphemous again. I believe in accepting the loving guidance offered by Jesus and burning in my bones, the deep prompting to love. Jesus is crucified because misguided people demand it, not a loving God. Trump is who demands obsequious obedience. The people in authority in Jesus’s day, the elders and chief priests and scribes, (or, so as not to generalize, those among the religious leaders who are driven by greed and lust for power), demand that Jesus be crucified because Jesus’s teachings about love and equity threaten their control, their patriarchal power structure that secures their high place. But still God won’t be swooping in to rescue Jesus from the suffering they impose on him. It won’t be like a movie with God cutting Jesus’s persecutors down to size at the end, to all of our great satisfaction. Jesus says to Peter, who wants that kind of ending, “for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

I can’t say for sure what I believe the divine things are, because divine things are mysteries that get talked about in parables or strange statements like: “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” Or “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

I can say what I think these statements don’t mean. I don’t think they mean that God requires everyone to be crucified, or that Jesus must suffer and die in the most humiliating way as some sort of proxy for humanity, a payment for the reward of God’s love. The God Jesus reveals to us isn’t one who implements a system of reward and punishment or makes trades for love or loves some of us more than others. Maybe the meaning is something closer to it just not being the point of God to remove our suffering— that God’s eternal love for us isn’t exhibited in this way and isn’t bounded by our earthly lives. And that the commonwealth of God isn’t what will come because God snaps God’s fingers and removes all the man-made, self-serving, patriarchal obstacles that stand in the way of it, even the most violently destructive ones. Humanity is trudging toward the commonwealth, not having the winding road miraculously straightened and cleared as we casually skip to my lou. We grow toward the commonwealth. We carry our heavy crosses of humanness, of mortality, through all of our wide array of human experience.

So maybe the divine things, the very most divine thing, is simply and grandly that God will be with us to the very depths of all of these human experiences. God will be the burning fire shut up in our bones. Because this is what Jesus’s crucifixion will exemplify—that the divine Jesus knows first-hand what it feels like to suffer to the extremes of human experience, and, strangely, that God knows what it feels like to lose a child. And this is what the resurrection will insist—that God can’t be driven out of us, not even through the most acute suffering and humiliation even unto death.

Because God being with us is the certain thing, but we just can’t seem to be certain of it in a consistent way. Or I can’t—let me speak for myself. Because of what I told you—that I can’t seem to feel fully loved. I think of God being with me as something divine that can be added to me, something that isn’t already part of who I am. Because I think of myself as a lesser, frail being who, on my own, is lacking in all ways—flawed, selfish, only human after all— but who can perhaps be strengthened and bettered by the loving presence of God. And this seems to be a positive thing to believe and try to hold on to—that God will be with me and strengthen me, that I can do all things through God who loves me. That being loved by God will allow, impel me even, to love others. But what if the truth is bigger than that? That God isn’t a separate, greater thing to love me and bolster me but is actually inside of me, the essence of me that is in my bones. If God is Love, then this means that I am Love, too.

Maybe eternal life is when I am wholly, absolutely immersed in the certainty of God 's Love to the point of being fused with God. I can’t completely do this in my earthly life because earthly life is organic and earthy, and if I did completely fuse with God I would be divine and not of the earth anymore, even though I already am eternally divine but don’t know it completely because of being an organic, mortal creature. Even Jesus didn’t know his eternal divinity completely until his resurrection, and the resurrected Jesus didn’t remain on the earth.

But I can come close to knowing my divinity, which maybe is part of what losing my life for Jesus’s sake means, or for others’ sakes, for my neighbors and even my enemies sakes, by practicing the ways of love that Jesus teaches me are in my truest beloved and loving nature to practice, even as simply as wearing a mask for the sake of my neighbor’s, my enemy’s wellbeing.

Maybe what all sermons are meant to do is proclaim in the widest range of preacher voices and perspectives that God is with us and loves us, and one of these ways will deeply resonate with you and kindle your fire.

Amen

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articulate-response-blog · 7 years

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“I Think 'Dunkirk' Was Mediocre at Best, and It's Not Because I'm Some Naive Woman Who Doesn't Get It”

The offending article in question: http://www.marieclaire.com/celebrity/news/a28515/dunkirk-movie-review/ by Mehera Bonner

I am a white man. I take issue with Bonner’s article not because I hate “SJWs” or “Feminazis,” but because this article stylizes itself as a movie review and instead uses most of its space to tear down strawmen and generally be misandrist.

misandry: noun; dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against men

Let’s look at the text of the article itself:

“That movie was fucking bomb." That was one reaction I overheard after watching Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan's new directorial gift to men, who are currently spending their time fervently ranking his movies, arguing about said rankings, and—presumably—wearing fedoras completely un-ironically. Or even worse, ironically.

Bonner begins with a thesis of sorts: Dunkirk is a “directorial gift to men,” and men who enjoy his movies like to wear fedoras, presumably because they are stupid.

However, as we will see, Bonner does not fully support her thesis. She does bring up some valid criticism of the movie, but the article seems to devolve into repeating the same language found in this first paragraph without explaining her points. I’m not saying she needs to provide “data and statistics” for her movie review. Movie reviews are subjective. She needs to explain why Dunkirk is a “directorial gift to men,” and, if possible, why men are stupid and like to wear fedoras.

Obviously she doesn’t outright state that men are stupid here (that comes later), but for Bonner, the fedora is a synecdoche for the stereotype of a “neckbeard”: a white, fat, fedora-wearing man, who generally holds sexist beliefs and attitudes, while at the same time complaining and loudly wondering why they are not socially popular. The neckbeard is a strawman- but it’s not even clear what should be in place of the strawman. For no better reason, Bonner seems to mention men if only because Dunkirk is generally about a war populated heavily by men. There are no neckbeards in Dunkirk.

If Bonner wanted to address the societal implications of Dunkirk, or explain how the heated anti-woman and anti-minority atmosphere of the current day played into her opinion of Dunkirk, I would be fine with that. In fact, I wouldn’t be writing this at all. I don’t think movies or any other art need to be divorced from the society in which they were made to be able to judge them fairly. But Bonner doesn’t do that. She just attacks “pretentious men” who “would love nothing more than to explain to [Bonner] why [she’s] wrong about not liking it.”

There are points about the film in this article:

The thing is, I just don't think Dunkirk is a very good movie—if your definition of the word movie is "moving images held together by a plot." Like, yes: Dunkirk is very well-made. I felt like I was going to vomit during it, because that's how intense it was. And if your interests include riding a visual roller coaster called war, you will love it. But if you're a fan of films with plots, Dunkirk doesn't play that game. It's as if Christopher Nolan (sorry, "Nolan") plucked out the war scene from a script, and was like "let's just make this part extra long and call it a movie, lol."

Here Bonner notes that she believes the film is well-made, but criticizes the overall plot structure of Dunkirk- something which has been divisive. Some critics like the structure, others don’t. I wonder what part of Dunkirk’s “plot” didn’t resonate with Bonner, but she doesn’t elaborate, instead choosing to mock “war movie fans,” “Christopher Nolan fans,” and Nolan himself.

The film, in case you aren't already aware due to the endless critical musings devoted to it, is about the real life battle of Dunkirk—where British and Allied troops were rescued by civilian boats and evacuated. It's a story worthy of being told and re-told, and I really enjoy war movies in general, but still—actual stuff needs to happen. Stuff other than scenes of men burning in oil-covered water, ships sinking, and bodies drowning. If you want to argue that the non-stop violent intensity of the film was the point, and that we should feel fully immersed in the war like we're living it ourselves—I present Harry Styles.

I would disagree with her that what is pictured in Dunkirk isn’t “actual stuff.” I’m not sure what she means by “actual stuff,” again, because she doesn’t elaborate, but she does bring up a good point about Harry Styles:

The One Direction band member did a surprisingly impressive job in what turned out to be a pretty major role, but I refuse to believe it's possible for any viewer with even a semblance of pop-culture knowledge not see him and immediately go "OMG, it's Harry Styles."

I think this is an interesting point. I haven’t seen it mentioned by any other critics and it is definetly something I would agree with Bonner about. Seeing Styles in the movie distracted me from the overall tone (the “violent intensity” that Bonner mentioned earlier), and made me focus more on his performance.

Much like Ed Sheeran's cameo in Game of Thrones, having a pop star casually show up in a film will inevitably remove the audience from the narrative and ground them back in reality. Harry Styles is a constant reminder to the viewer that the movie isn't real, while the entire excuse for the film's intense and admittedly-impressive cinematography is to convince the viewer that they're right there in it. You can't have your Harry Styles cake and eat it too.

Yup.

But my main issue with Dunkirk is that it's so clearly designed for men to man-out over.

Unfortunately, here we veer off the rails and return to Bonner’s “thesis.”

And look, it's not like I need every movie to have "strong female leads." Wonder Woman can probably tide me over for at least a year, and I understand that this war was dominated by brave male soldiers. I get that.

A prevailing theme in this article is language that suggests Bonner needs to justify her criticisms even before she makes them, especially in regards to the “directorial gift to men” argument.

Let’s watch how Bonner begins to make a point about the film, but instead replaces it with misandry:

But the packaging of the film, the general vibe, and the tenor of the people applauding it just screams "men-only"

Ok, how?

—and specifically seems to cater to a certain type of very pretentious man who would love nothing more than to explain to me why I'm wrong about not liking it. If this movie were a dating profile pic, it would be a swole guy at the gym who also goes to Harvard. If it was a drink it would be Stumptown coffee. If it was one of your friends, it would be the one who starts his sentences with "I get what you're saying, but..."

Oh.

I guess congratulations are in order for Nolan managing to unite high-brow male critics and very annoying people on Twitter under a common bromance, but to me, Dunkirk felt like an excuse for men to celebrate maleness—which apparently they don't get to do enough.

Oh.

I might as well ask again- how did the packaging and general vibe promote this idea of “men-only?” How does Dunkirk feel like an excuse for men to celebrate maleness? Why are the men (and only men) who like Dunkirk, douche bros?

Bonner does not go on to explain.

Fine, great, go forth, but if Nolan's entire purpose is breaking the established war movie mold and doing something different—why not make a movie about women in World War II? Or—because I know that will illicit cries of "ugh, not everything has to be about feminism, ugh!"—how about any other marginalized group?

Because that’s not Nolan’s idea of “breaking the established war movie mold.” In Nolan’s other films, he focuses heavily on non-linear plots, among other things. Bringing that conception of plot to war movies does break the war movie mold. Taking out “men” and slotting in “women or other marginalized groups” to make a war movie does not break the war movie mold.

These stories shouldn't be relegated to indie films and Oscar season. It's up to giant powerhouse directors like Nolan to tell them, which is why Dunkirk feels so basic.

Here is a list of 10 films about women in wartime, by the British Film Institute. Here is Red Tails, a movie about the (all-black) Tuskegee Airmen, released in late January 2012 (after Oscar season), with a budget of 58 million dollars.

I agree there is a shortage of movies about the experiences of women and minorities in all time periods, but to charge Nolan with creating a movie that was “an excuse for men to celebrate maleness” because he didn’t focus on who Bonner wanted him to is ridiculous.

It's a summer war movie. It'll make you fear for the future and pray that we never fight again. You might get kind of sick. If you're like me, a random man will come up to you after and explain why you're wrong for disliking it. But this war movie isn't special. At the end of the day, it's like all the rest of them.

As a side point, I’m not sure how a random man could come up to you and explain why you’re wrong for disliking it- how would this random man know you disliked it?

Bonner’s conclusion, and article overall, is very weak. It spent some time discussing the movie, but also spent more time leveling ridiculous attacks at people who like the movie, mostly because they are men.

I’m conflicted, however, because I can somewhat see the reasoning underpinning Bonner’s complaints about “pretentious men.” There has always been a culture of male eliteness in filmmaking, and especially in film criticism, and for a movie like Dunkirk, helmed by one of the most successful directors in the world, it’s not surprising that such a culture would be on display. But none of Bonner’s article seems to be addressing that culture, and Bonner doesn’t handle the subject with any seriousness.

The article comes off as a way to bait other critics, especially male ones, into a session of “well you’re sexist because you can’t handle my opinion. har har isn’t the male ego so fragile?”

But what do I know? I’m a man, after all.

#dunkirk #review #response #articulate #feminism #sjws #strawman #misandry #misogony #marie claire #mehera bonner

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