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silvokrent · 3 years

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RWBY Character Analysis: Pietro and Penny Polendina

Up until now I’ve been keeping quiet about my opinions on the newest volume, in no small part because my personal life has been one absurd setback after another, and I haven’t had the energy to engage in fandom meta. If you do want to know what my current opinion of RWBY is, go over to @itsclydebitches blog, search through her #rwby-recaps tag, and read every single one. At this point, her metas are basically an itemized list of all my grievances with the show. I highly recommend you check ’em out.

Or, if you don’t feel like reading several hours’ worth of recaps, then go find a sheet of paper, give yourself a papercut, and then squeeze a lemon into it. That should give you an accurate impression of my feelings.

In truth, I have a lot to say about the show, particularly how I think CRWBY has mishandled the plot, characters, tone, and intended message of their series. And while I enjoy dissecting RWBY with what amounts to mad scientist levels of glee, I think plenty of other folks have already discussed V7′s and V8′s various issues in greater depth and with far more eloquence. Any contribution I could theoretically make at this point would be somewhat redundant.

That being said, I’d like to talk about something that’s been bothering me for a while, which (to my knowledge) no one else in the fandom has brought up. (And feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.)

Today’s topic of concern is Pietro Polendina, and his relationship with Penny.

And because I’m absolutely certain this post is going to be controversial and summon anonymous armchair critics to fill my inbox with sweary claptrap, I may as well just come out and say it:

Pietro Polendina, as he’s currently portrayed in the show, is an inherently abusive parental figure.

Let me take a second to clarify that I don’t think it was RWBY’s intention to portray Pietro that way. Much like other aspects of the show, a lot of nuance is often lost when discussing the difference between intention versus implementation, or telling versus showing. It’s what happens when a writer tries to characterize a person one way, but in execution portrays them in an entirely different light. Compounding this problem is what feels like a series of rather myopic writing decisions that started as early as Volume 2, concerning Penny’s sense of agency, and how the canon would bear out the implications of an autonomous being grappling with her identity. It’s infuriating that the show has spent seven seasons staunchly refusing to ask any sort of ethical questions surrounding her existence, only to then—with minimal setup—give us Pietro’s “heartfelt” emotional breakdown when he has to choose between “saving” Penny or “sacrificing” her for the greater good.

Yeah, no thanks.

If we want to talk about why this moment read as hollow and insincere, we need to first make sure everyone’s on the same page.

Spoilers for V8.E5 - “Amity.” Let’s not waste any time.

In light of the newest episode and its—shall we say—questionable implications, I figured now was the best time to bring it up while the thoughts were still fresh in my mind. (Because nothing generates momentum quite like frothing-at-the-mouth rage.)

The first time we’re told anything about Pietro, it comes from an exchange between Penny and Ruby. From V2.E2 - “A Minor Hiccup.”

Penny: I've never been to another kingdom before. My father asked me not to venture out too far, but... You have to understand, my father loves me very much. He just worries a lot.

Ruby: Believe me, I know the feeling. But why not let us know you were okay?

Penny: I…was asked not to talk to you. Or Weiss. Or Blake. Or Yang. Anybody, really.

Ruby: Was your dad that upset?

Penny: No, it wasn’t my father.

The scene immediately diverts our attention to a public unveiling of the AK-200. A hologram of James Ironwood is presenting this newest model of Atlesian Knight to a crowd of enthusiastic spectators, along with the Atlesian Paladin, a piloted mech. During the demonstration, James informs his audience that Atlas’ military created them with the intent of removing people from the battlefield and mitigating casualties (presumably against Grimm).

Penny is quickly spotted by several soldiers, and flees. Ruby follows, and in the process the two are nearly hit by a truck. Penny’s display of strength draws a crowd and prompts her to retreat into an alley, where Ruby learns that Penny isn’t “a real girl.”

This scene continues in the next episode, “Painting the Town…”

Penny: Most girls are born, but I was made. I’m the world’s first synthetic person capable of generating an Aura. [Averts her gaze.] I’m not real…

After Ruby assures her that no, you don’t have to be organic in order to have personhood, Penny proceeds to hug her with slightly more force than necessary.

Ruby: [Muffled noise of pain.] I can see why your father would want to protect such a delicate flower!

Penny: [Releases Ruby.] Oh, he’s very sweet! My father’s the one that built me! I’m sure you would love him.

Ruby: Wow. He built you all by himself?

Penny: Well, almost! He had some help from Mr. Ironwood.

Ruby: The general? Wait, is that why those soldiers were after you?

Penny: They like to protect me, too!

Ruby: They don't think you can protect yourself?

Penny: They're not sure if I'm ready yet. One day, it will be my job to save the world, but I still have a lot left to learn. That's why my father let me come to the Vytal Festival. I want to see what it's like in the rest of the world, and test myself in the Tournament.

Their conversation is interrupted by the sound of the approaching soldiers from earlier. Despite Ruby’s protests, Penny proceeds to yeet her into the nearby dumpster, all while reassuring her that it’s to keep Ruby out of trouble, not her. When the soldiers arrive, they ask her if she’s okay, then proceed to lightly scold her for causing a scene. Penny’s told that her father “isn’t going to be happy about this,” and is then politely asked (not ordered; asked) to let them escort her back.

Let’s take a second to break down these events.

When these two episodes first aired, the wording and visuals (“No, it wasn’t my father,” followed by the cutaway to James unveiling the automatons) implied that James was the one forbidding her from interacting with other people. It’s supposed to make you think that James is being restrictive and harsh, while Pietro is meant as a foil—the sweet, but cautious father figure. But here’s the thing: both of these depictions are inaccurate, and frankly, Penny’s the one at fault here. Penny blew her cover within minutes of interacting with Ruby—a scenario that Penny was responsible for because she was sneaking off without permission. Penny is a classified, top-secret military project, as made clear by the fact that she begs Ruby to not say anything to anyone. Penny is in full acknowledgement that her existence, if made public, could cause massive issues for her (something that she’s clearly experienced before, if her line, “You’re taking this extraordinarily well,” is anything to go by).

But here’s the thing—keeping Penny on a short leash wasn’t a unilateral decision made by James. That was Pietro’s choice as well. “My father asked me not to venture out too far,” “Your father isn’t going to be happy about this”—as much as this scene is desperately trying to put the onus on James for Penny’s truant behavior, Pietro canonically shares that blame. And Penny (to some extent) is in recognition of the fact that she did something wrong.

Back in Volumes 1 – 3, before the series butchered James’ characterization, these moments were meant as pretty clever examples of foreshadowing and subverting the controlling-military-general trope. This scene is meant to illustrate that yes, Penny is craving social interaction outside of military personnel as a consequence of being hidden, but that hiding her is also a necessity. It’s a complicated situation with no easy answer, but it’s also something of a necessary evil (as Penny’s close call with the truck and her disclosing that intel to Ruby are anything to go by).

Let’s skip ahead to Volume 7, shortly after Watts tampered with the drone footage and framed her for several deaths. In V7.E7 - “Worst Case Scenario,” a newscaster informs us that people in Atlas and Mantle want Penny to be deactivated, despite James’ insistence that the footage was doctored and Penny didn’t go on a killing spree. The public’s unfavorable opinion of Penny—a sentiment that Jacques of all people embodies when he brings it up in V7.E8—reinforces V2’s assessment of why keeping her secret was necessary. Not only is her existence controversial because Aura research is still taboo, but people are afraid that a mechanical person with military-grade hardware could be hacked and weaponized against them. (Something which Volume 8 actually validates when James has Watts take control of her in the most recent episode.)

But I digress.

We’re taken to Pietro’s lab, where Penny is hooked up to some sort of recharge/docking station. Ruby, Weiss, and Maria look on in concern while the machine is uploading the visual data from her systems. There’s one part of their conversation I want to focus on in particular:

Pietro: When the general first challenged us to find the next breakthrough in defense technology, most of my colleagues pursued more obvious choices. I was one of the few who believed in looking inward for inspiration.

Ruby: You wanted a protector with a soul.

Pietro: I did. And when General Ironwood saw her, he did too. Much to my surprise, the Penny Project was chosen over all the other proposals.

Allow me to break down their conversation so we can fully appreciate what he’s actually saying.

The Penny Project was picked as the candidate for the next breakthrough in defense technology.

Pietro wanted a protector with a SOUL.

In RWBY, Aura and souls are one of the defining characteristics of personhood. Personhood is central to Penny’s identity and internal conflict (particularly when we consider that she’s based on Pinocchio). That’s why Penny accepts Ruby’s reassurances that she’s a real person. That’s why she wants to have emotional connections with others.

What makes that revelation disturbing is when you realize that Pietro knowingly created a child soldier.

Look, there’s no getting around this. Pietro fully admits that he wanted to create a person—a human being—a fucking child—as a "defense technology” to throw at the Grimm (and by extension, Salem). Everything, from the language he uses, to the mere fact that he entered Penny in the Vytal Tournament as a proving ground where she could “test [her]self,” tells us that he either didn’t consider or didn’t care about the implications behind his proposal.

When you break it all down, this is what we end up with:

“Hey, I have an idea: Why don’t we make a person, cram as many weapons as we can fit into that person, and then inform her every day for the rest of her life that she was built for the sole purpose of fighting monsters, just so we don’t have to risk the lives of others. Let’s then take away anything remotely resembling autonomy, minimize her interactions with people, and basically indoctrinate her into thinking that this is something she wants for herself. Oh, and in case she starts to raise objections, remind her that I donated part of my soul to her. If we make her feel guilty about this generous sacrifice I made so she could have the privilege of existing, she won’t question our motives. Next, let’s give her a taste of freedom by having her fight in a gladiatorial blood sport so that we can prove our child soldier is an effective killer. And then, after she’s brutally murdered on international television, we can rebuild her and assign her to protecting an entire city that’s inherently prejudiced against her, all while I brood in my lab about how sad I am.”

Holy fuck. Watts might be a morally bankrupt asshole, but at least his proposal didn’t hinge on manufacturing state-of-the-art living weapons. They should have just gone with his idea.

(Which, hilariously enough, they did. Watts is the inventor of the Paladins—Paladins which, I’ll remind you, were invented so the army could remove people from the battlefield. You know, people. Kind of like what Penny is.)

Do you see why this entire scene might have pissed me off? Even if the show didn’t intend for any of this to be the case, when you think critically about the circumstances there’s no denying the tacit implications.

To reiterate, V8.E5 is the episode where Pietro says, and I quote:

“I don’t care about the big picture! I care about my daughter! I lost you before. Are you asking me to go through that again? No. I want the chance to watch you live your life.”

Oh, yeah? And what life is that? The one where she’s supposed to kill Grimm and literally nothing else? You do realize that she died specifically because you made her for the purpose of fighting, right?

No one, literally no one, was holding a gun to Pietro’s head and telling him that he had to build a living weapon. That was his idea. He chose to do that.

Remember when Cinder said, “I don’t serve anyone! And you wouldn’t either, if you weren’t built that way.” She…basically has a point. Penny has never been given the option to explore the world in a capacity where she wasn’t charged with defending it by her father. We know she doesn’t have many friends, courtesy of Ironwood dissuading her against it in V7. But I’m left with the troubling realization that the show (and the fandom), in their crusade to vilify James, are ignoring the fact that Pietro is also complicit in this behavior by virtue of being her creator. If we condemn the man that prevents Penny from having relationships, then what will we do to the man who forced her into that existence in the first place?

Being her “father” has given him a free pass to overlook the ethics of having a child who was created with a pre-planned purpose. How the hell did the show intend for Pietro to reconcile “I want you to live your life” with “I created you so you’d spend your life defending the world”? It viscerally reminds me of the sort of narcissistic parents who have kids because they want to pass on the family name, or continue their bloodline, or have live-in caregivers when they get older, only on a larger and much more horrific scale. And that’s fucked up.

Now, I’m not saying I’m against having a conflict like this in the show. In fact, I’d love to have a character who has to grapple with her own humanity while questioning the environment she grew up in. Penny is a character who is extremely fascinating because of all the potential she represents—a young woman who through a chance encounter befriends a group of strangers, and over time, is exposed to freedoms and friendships she was previously denied. Slowly, she begins to unlearn the mindset she was indoctrinated with, and starts to petition for agency and autonomy. Pietro is forced to confront the fact that what he did was traumatic and cruel, and that his love for her doesn’t erase the harm he unintentionally subjected her to, nor does it change the fact that he knowingly burdened a person with a responsibility she never consented to. There’s a wealth of character growth and narrative payoff buried here, but like most things in RWBY, it was either underdeveloped or not thought through all the way.

The wholesome father-daughter relationship the show wants Pietro and Penny to have is fundamentally contradicted by the nature of her existence, and the fact that no one (besides the villains) calls attention to it. I’d love for them to have that sort of dynamic, but the show had to do more to earn it. Instead, it’ll forever be another item on RWBY’s ever-growing list of disappointments—

Because Pietro’s remorse is more artificial than Penny could ever hope to be.

#rwby #rwby volume 8 #rwby spoilers #rwby thought dump #my posts #i speak #rwby meta #pietro polendina #penny polendina #james ironwood #arthur watts #ruby rose #rwby worldbuilding #rwde

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pocket-void · 4 years

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Why don’t any of you pay attention when you always have the privilege to see?

Orange without his big toothy grin looks really off to me, though that’s just because he doesn’t drop it often in front of people.

I literally…can’t stop thinking about this guy… So I’m gonna talk about him in some more depth for fun! (And also so I can get it outta my system o///o) I drew him a couple times before this, but just to be clear, he’s a personal version of the Orange side I made. Though it’s not really a theory, since I am 100% sure I am incorrect, this is just purely for my own enjoyment because I ended up?? Really liking him as a character??? W h o o p s. >///<

So yeah, don’t mind me as I just talk about him a bit... It’s just some random scattered notes about him I really want to put down somewhere...

He does have a name, but I’m not gonna talk about it for now.

He represents a bunch of things, but his main embodiment is that of anger, mostly in the form of blind rage. He is 100% blind most of the time and possesses dull brown-orange eyes. The only circumstance in which he can see is when he wears Logan’s glasses, and his eyes turn blue within that duration of time. Due to his disability, he tends to jokingly ask people to do him favors, but he actually kind of despises the fact that he’s blind. Not because he can’t see though, it’s because he thinks everyone else is taking their own sight for granted. His eyesight is actually scarily clear when he can actually see, and it makes him think other people are wasting it. (He’s actually more perceptive because he can’t see normally)

It’s incredibly important to remember that Orange is in fact, another aspect of Logic. He is based on the real life phenomena in which anger can sharpen one’s critical thinking and concentration in small doses. Wearing Logan’s glasses gives him the clarity he needs to rip people’s arguments apart, and he is particularly efficient at bringing up things people often overlook as evidence for his case. He’s sharp, but also incredibly blunt and straight to the point, as funny as that sounds. He’s who takes the reigns when regular logical reasoning fails, and he’s no where near as nice or understanding. If he goes too far however, Logan’s glasses will break and he’ll turn blind again and lash out. If it goes farther than that he’ll actually also start to lose hearing. Which makes him really destructive in the long term, and while Orange is fully aware of that, he can’t help but get carried away sometimes. Which is why he only ever gets to do anything if Logan is out of commission.

Now that’s him when he’s serious, but most of the time he’s actually kind of a big goof. He’s got this really blasé and laid back attitude to him, which mostly stems from the fact that he doesn’t have much to do. I describe him as a rat bastard because I love depicting him as a gremlin, and he most certainly can be. He is also 100% the type of guy to take threats seriously for fun, and will throw down with you if you suggest it. He’s awfully perceptive and knows when chaos is happening but will still be that guy who says he “can’t see” the problem and laugh. Honestly not one above causing trouble just for the fun of it. He’s sly, often coy, and acts like he doesn’t take anything seriously, which is why when he does, he really does. He tends to think that things would be much easier if he was allowed to look at the issue, but his impatience when dealing with things is probably why he’s not the one usually in the driver’s seat.

Another important thing to note that alongside anger, he actually partially represents self respect. Similar to how Janus is self preservation alongside deceit. Orange is completely focused on the self, and will argue things accordingly to benefit that. He’s that voice that tells you that you don’t deserve to be treated that way or that wanting to be treated better isn’t an unreasonable request and pushes you to actively fight for and demand it. That attitude is where his relationship with Logan kind of fits into the puzzle, and while I find their dynamic interesting I think it’d take too long to actually get into and this is already plenty self indulgent as it is fajkfbeg. Note that he’s not ego, he is very different from self esteem. He’s more like the embodiment of “Being garbage still doesn’t mean that I get to take shit from you”.

He habitually chews things, which is why the collar of his shirt is absolutely destroyed. When he’s really antsy, he also bites his nails. He likes to call people by color because it’s the most identifiable thing about them from what he remembers during his short periods of sight. Except Patton, who he probably calls “Pops”, in a more sarcastic way if anything. Since they probably disagree a ton.

There’s a funky mafia? AU I imagined with him in it, but thaaaat’s not gonna be elaborated on any time soon. I also semi-made a playlist for him for fun.

Thanks for reading my rambles? If you’re here?? Honestly I just like him a lot for some reason, hhhh- >///< I have fun imagining stuff for him, but I can’t really say how much I’ll actually use him. I just like talking about things way too much akjfbakegt. See ya around! u///u

#I got back from a loooong walk with friends and I'm exhausted #so here's some barely coherent rambling #mockdoodles #sanders sides doodles #orange side #scars #Marcus

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human-enthusiast · 3 years

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Absurd Person #1 - Monkey D. Luffy (kid)

Let’s start with not only the main protagonist of One Piece but also the first character to give Luffy any sort of injury...

...his dumb, seven-year-old self...

*Disclaimer: I don’t own this image - screenshot from Episode of East Blue

The last time I wrote this, I forgot to hit save and my browser just reloaded the page and lost everything. After that I just went “I’m done” and rage quit Tumblr for the night (which I normally don’t do). That’s how my Sundays usually go😒🥴

Now Onward!

Basic Classifications

Real World Ethnicity/Nationality: Brazilian

Class: farm / country / lower class

Culture (the one he grew up around): Dawn Island - Sea-side village

Fishing community

Farming / Ranching community

Hard work ethic

Small and close community members; relatively friendly; little to non-existent conflict

Selective mix of being open towards strangers (especially with merchant vessels for better trading opportunities) and weariness towards those they expect to be harmful (likes Pirates; I’d imagine the people of Windmill Village were understandably unnerved with the Red-Haired Pirates first showing up).

Core values (personal to Luffy): pride, physical strength, adventures on and outside his home village,

Relation to authority: neutral - shifting slightly towards negative (no clear basis of opinion; can only go off on Luffy’s fascination with pirates as the main viewpoint)

(The added information feels a little scatter-shot but figured I give it a try based on little information from the manga panels and how it lines up with real-world similarities. Most information is based on logical speculation and could change with new information in later chapters.)

I know that the Romance Dawn arc consists of the chapters up until he meets Coby and Alvida (I think...), but the depiction of Luffy’s character in the first chapter seems different from when he is seventeen and setting out to sea. So, I’ll treat kid Luffy as a separate character for the first analysis.

First Impressions and Introduction

Now, I am an anime watcher, first and foremost, so my first impression of this character stems from the Anime. My introduction towards this ball of chaos was when he popped out of a barrel, that he put himself into after realizing that a whirlpool suddenly appeared (how he missed it? - It’s Luffy), and then inexplicably took a nap in. That was the absurd reason I was able to stick with One Piece in the first few arcs (until Baratie became one of the major reasons I stuck with it - I’ll explain why when we get there).

And since the first chapter was used for episode four in the anime, I was already somewhat familiar with how the story started and who Luffy was as a kid. However, reading the first chapter felt....different than what I would’ve expected. And because the anime cut out a few details from the chapter, there definitely are some things to take from kid Luffy at that point.

So my first impression was, as follows:

The kid is unhinged...That explains some things...

Complete wild child of a backwater village from Day 1.

LIKE-- The anime episode DID NOT explain how he got that scar and the guy didn’t bring it up ever. To be fair, that wasn’t a big focus because the anime didn’t make it a focus. Reading that part though did more for his character and a little of his upbringing, through speculation, making it a rather slow-building but also fascinating introduction into this series.

Just a bit of an add-on, but if the manga introduced Luffy in the same level of neutrality as what the Anime did, It may not have fully made it clear if Luffy was going to be the main protagonist. Then again, it’s a shounen manga, maybe it was rather obvious to everyone else. Regardless, his introduction served to

(1) Make his entrance memorable

(2) Establish his character that could either compare or set him apart from his teen self.

(3) Act as a sort of precursor towards the introduction of Luffy’s world and upbringing (which isn’t completely established until the last few arcs of Pre-Time Skip)

Personality

The best way I could describe Luffy at this point is a stereotypical kid...

Energetic, short-tempered, adventure-seeking, easily impressed, and ignorant...

That last description is actually something I brought up in a separate post about the “Fluid themes” of One Piece. Because I found that a small but overarching part in many (almost all) themes and world issues that One Piece reflects has some level of unawareness or apathy. Jimbe put it best during the Fishman Island Flashback when they found Koala (paraphrasing)

“They are afraid of us because they don’t know us.”

Know us referring to acknowledging them as people on the same level as humans.

Because of that and plenty of other instances from the East Blue, it can be a potential center for many characters who go up against or wish to explore the world and find that they are a frog in a well.

And that’s what kid Luffy represents. A rather aggressive frog in a well that wants out.

Granted, he is a seven-year-old, whose schooling has a closer equivalent to the 16th and 17th centuries of our world, living in what appears to be a farming community, so I’d imagine his education only focuses on at least the basic levels of reading/writing, mathematics, etc. A small, unexciting farming village probably has more concerns over their melon crops rather than what the world has going on. Adding in Luffy, you get a kid who dreams about being a pirate and adventuring outside the isolated village, making him avidly interested in a world he has no experience with. Or in a world he thinks is all fun and games.

That’s pretty standard for any child that has a mild and peaceful life. No doubt Shanks and his crew would tell him stories about their adventures. Not as a sort of attempt to make him a pirate, but because he was easily entertained by it, building up this expectation with stereotypical pirate personas. And whether he has his “destructive” tendencies before they became a fixture in Windmill Village, they definitely seemed to amp it up enough for Luffy to try and prove he was “man enough” to be a pirate at seven years old.

Then when you add in this idealistic expectation with the selfishness of a young child, it creates an opportunity to learn. Because, as any kid may go through, will find that their fantasy of the world won’t be what they expected, and will often react negatively. Luffy’s expectation of Shanks is that he is the strongest man worthy enough to be a pirate.

Now, Luffy’s view of a “real man” stems a lot from this stereotype of men solving their problems through fighting only. Which also embodies this rather damaging philosophy of never running away or backing down from a fight (which I refer to as stupid bravery - something that comes up in a certain other character).

The amazing thing about all the combined aspects of this kid is the ability to create a learning lesson for Luffy. Which can become a motivational factor in his pursuit as a pirate.

His easily impressed nature makes it known both when the Red-Haired Pirates talk positively about piracy adventures and when Shanks leaves the village. The difference between the moments can be showcased by the difference in determination and will to make an effort to achieve his dream. As he declared he wants to be King of The Pirates, he sets himself to work at it, rather than try and go with others.

How He Shapes the Story / World Around Them

I don’t know if anybody else made a similar connection (I wanna say someone DID but I can’t remember where) but in combination with Luffy’s general enthusiasm growing up hearing wild stories, his narrative reminds me so much of Don Quixote De La Mancha.

It’s been a while since I last read that story-- and by read I mean translate some paragraphs from Spanish to English during my Spanish I class in freshman year of high school. Nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed the story. Part I entails an old man who, after indulging himself with various stories of knights and valor, decides he wants to partake in his own adventures. Under various delusions and misadventures, his story becomes a rather well-known one.

Don Quixote was called the first “modern book”. That was something my Spanish teacher mentioned regarding its acknowledgment by the world and always stuck with me. It was one of the first stories of the early medieval period to focus on a regular man. Other stories before this tended to be about legends, gods, demigods-- individuals who often were referred to as legends because they were born into high status (often above humans). Either through original texts (often for religious purposes) and then through varying interpretations (such as the Arthurian Legends), these tales were a part of the status quo.

Kid Luffy is a person that reflects so much of the Don Quixote story (And not just because his village has windmills-- the most iconic scene about the knight’s story). He is that simple, normal boy that longs for his own adventures when there seemingly is already a well-talked-about story about someone who achieved infamy. In place of that is a man named Gold Roger whose execution we see in the manga’s opening. At this point, we don’t have much understanding about how it impacts the world as of yet, we just know it is setting up for something significant to the story.

Luffy becomes that “regular” person from a small-town with big expectations for a grand adventure.

That perspective can slowly build into the story by starting in a simple setting with a character going through one of the first dynamic changes in his life. Luffy’s experience with Shanks’s sacrifice sets a course in his own adventure. A story that trails into a rather bonkers adventure at the end of chapter 1.

His development is what shaped his world. It’s the way he learns when as it stems from the consequences of his actions. Especially ones where the smaller ones turn out to be very costly, making it a hard lesson that ingrains into the young kid. His actions created by his old ideologies sparked an intense reaction in the people around him. Especially Shanks, who felt he was worth losing an arm towards.

How The WORLD Shapes HIM

So, for the sake of the fact that kid Luffy’s “World” in Chapter 1 mostly consists of Windmill Village, I’m adding in Shank’s and his crew’s influence to extend and further give credence to his influence. Because, as of this point, Shanks represents a glimpse into the life of a pirate that Luffy strives for.

With Luffy being in a quiet environment all seven years of life, there is growth through basic schooling and healthy child development (theoretically since Makino seems to be the most likely one acting as his guardian), instead of doing things outside that norm. Now Shanks is the odd factor that creates new development into Luffy’s dreams and future ambitions.

The crew’s stories, charisma, and connection towards the kid actively (and probably unintentionally) created a positive expectation if he chose to pursue his dream. While that sounds inspiring, there were also negative aspects. Such as driving his ignorance and impatient nature to seek it out too early in his life.

Shanks then became a mediator. Luffy often has mixed feelings with Shanks as the man begets a level of encouragement while verbally making fun of Luffy for being a kid constantly. Despite that, it doesn’t completely deter Luffy’s ambitions. All it does is slowly drop his high expectations in Shanks after the first bar incident. This is again done by his childish outlook of physical strength and bravery equating to his ideal of a real man.

With Higama, Luffy learns about real-world dangers, and how bravery won’t always be enough to win battles. The same can be said for physical strength but at that moment it doesn’t apply to Luffy.

Shanks’ and the crew’s involvement helped Luffy’s views change. His expectations are fulfilled, which in turn reveal that he was wrong about them.

Finally, seeing Shanks’ sacrifice unfold drove Luffy into a pang of newfound guilt. By then, he was able to change one part of his world views from a childish fantasy into the beginnings of a mature way of thinking.

He gains some level of patience. Along with a set goal to work with. Attributes which are identifiable with Luffy in the chapters last few panels.

Patience = Luffy took time to train and learn to set sail at age seventeen.

Set goal = Be King of the Pirates

Add-Ons

When I say that kid Luffy, after Shanks’ sacrifice, gained a level of patience, it is meant as a deduction during that chapter. By no means am I insinuating that it became a permanent trait for his character. Because as of chapter 1, all of Luffy’s personality has yet to be revealed.

And this will apply to other posts for various characters. They may behave in ways during or in response to a particular event but it doesn’t necessarily equate to that becoming a whole personality trait. Calling Luffy patient, with having full acknowledgment of his personality during the bulk of One Piece, is completely off. But, there can and will be moments where Luffy will act patient when he deems it necessary.

This is a little hard to articulate but I hope it makes enough sense.

🏴‍☠️🐒

After-Notes

Here’s my first attempt at this analysis. It felt scattered even after editing everything. Breaking down characters sounds easy (and most times it is) but articulating and connecting things takes a lot of work.

Here's to hoping it gets easier with the next character. And maybe shorter paragraphs.

Up Next: Shanks (East Blue)

#OPA #One Piece #East Blue Saga #Romance Dawn Arc #Monkey D. Luffy #Chapter 1 #One Piece Characters #Worldbuilding #Analysis

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agent-cupcake · 4 years

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Dimitri and mental illness

**Warnings for Blue Lions spoilers and armchair psychology

Depending on who you ask, Dimitri is an innocent sweetheart whose actions are entirely excusable and justified or an unforgivable war criminal and overall terrible character. Arguments for both sides have been exhausted, usually in the form of the popular Edelgard versus Dimitri debate, but I feel that both statements are heavily flawed and, truthfully, I think I take more issue with the former. Does it strike anyone else as rather patronizing that the audience (and the game, to an extent) treats Dimitri like an innocent, broken uwu soft boy both before the time skip and once he begins his recovery arc? Of course, a lot of this can be blamed on the awful pacing and poor writing of said recovery (which is the most valid structural critique of his character imo), but there’s a lot to be said about the fan depiction of Dimitri and the way people treat his mental illness. I think the reason this gets me is because I see it as an extension of the problems I have with the romanticization of male-specific mental illness. In this case, “all depressed boys are emasculated, soft, sad bois” and “anger is an accessory that is vanished once the cute boy takes it off” with the related sentiment of “the only two real mental illnesses are depression and anxiety, with a splash of PTSD for argument's sake”. And, speaking of arguments, while many people bring up mental illness in regards to the discussion around Three Houses characters, it is often supplementary to support their points rather than the main point unto itself. Dimitri’s mental illness (aka, the thing his entire arc is predicated upon) is mostly given only a passing recognition in the discussion of his actions. Even then, it’s often used as a justification to defend or lambaste him.

TL;DR Dimitri is a flawed person with a debilitating and incredibly well written mental illness that, while not excusing his actions, allows for further exploration of his character and a well-deserved shot at a recovery arc that is not usually awarded to people with the “non-traditional” mental illnesses. Furthermore, the game offers a wealth of insight as to what they intended his mental illness to be, the symptoms that manifested, and a plausible background to match up with it all and I have the receipts to prove it. Let’s go~

“Me? Oh. Um. Please forgive me... It's difficult to open up on the spot, don't you think? I'm afraid my story has not been a pleasant one... I do hope that doesn't color your view of me, but I understand if that can't be helped.”

I know that mental illness can be singularly caused by a traumatic event or events. That is, generally, how I see people framing Dimitri’s mental illness. My argument, however, is that the Tragedy of Duscur was not the genesis, but the trigger for issues that would exist otherwise. Perhaps it’s due to my own personal experience with mental illness, but I’m almost always more inclined to believe that issues stem from an unlucky combination of many things.

Regardless, my evidence to entertain the idea that he would be naturally predisposed to mental illness is slim. Aside from arguing that it wouldn’t be out of the question for his mother to have been unwell while she was pregnant with him considering she would later die of plague (a cause that in and of itself is subject to skepticism), I would bring up his Crest. In-game there is clear proof that Crests have wide-reaching effects on the person, there are actually a few analysis posts that hypothesize that Crests could be the reason for certain character motivations. In ng+, the Crest of Blaiddyd is called the Grim Dragon Sign. There’s no definitive proof to point to here, but if his Crest was one of the reasons for his mental deterioration it would follow other rules set in-game. Rather than inherited human genetics creating the blueprint for mental issues and the writers having to face that issue on its own terms, it was the Crest’s influence. This goes along with the fact that the game never overtly references Dimitri’s illness, essentially using “the dead” as a blanket symptom of his problems. Both these things are cool ways to imply a possible way to read more deeply without having to use anachronistic medical terms.

Side note: There’s something uncomfortable about the idea of a Crest that gives the individual inhuman strength and mental issues. Grim Dragon indeed.

My next point is one that I don’t see being brought up too often in regards to how it might have affected Dimitri, likely because the events that came later in his life far overshadow it, but Dimitri lost his mom when he was young. The date is not given, but I think it’d be when he was about six-ish. Admittedly, the timeline is strange and non-specific around here but if that were true, it would mean that the plague, Dimitri’s mother’s death, and Lambert and Rodrigue’s war campaign to subjugate the southern half of Sreng would all have happened around the same time. Dimitri says he doesn’t remember it, but that doesn’t necessarily matter. At six years old he had lost one parent and the other one left him to go on a battle march, leaving this child without any sort of parent figure to console him in a country that is culturally opposed to expressing emotion. Lambert will probably always remain a mystery, but I think it could be fair to say he was a poor father. Or at the very least a distant one. Dimitri was undoubtedly a sensitive child (if we’re to judge by the sensitive person he grew up to be) and during the years where he was actually becoming old enough to remember, he had nobody to teach him how to properly navigate and manage his emotions. Emotional neglect in a child who is predisposed to being emotional and empathetic can leave them suffering from a sense of isolation, an inability to ask for help, and a predisposition to having break downs as they get older.

But three-ish years later, possibly one of the best things that ever would happen to Dimitri came to pass and Lambert married Patricia. Dimitri adored her.

“I share no blood with my stepmother, but to hear you say that... It pleases me greatly. She was the one who raised me. I suppose it makes sense that we would share certain mannerisms.” (Dimitri’s B support with Hapi)

I don’t think Dimitri’s feelings about Patricia can be overstated, as I feel it’s one of the most defining aspects of his reactions to things that happen later on. Dimitri talks about Patricia more lovingly than he talks about Lambert. She was in his life for around four to five years but had such an impact on him that even his mannerisms are similar.

Soon after, a ten-year-old Dimitri made his first friend that wasn’t knightly, who didn’t embody those Faerghus ideals of stifling emotions and swinging swords.

People point out the Faerghus crew as Dimitri’s best friends, and yet Edelgard is the one associated with his best memories. It’s just my own assumptions, but I think that it’s because both Edelgard and Patricia gave Dimitri space to be an emotional child, to not have to be the knightly prince who had no emotions and engaged only in the most masculine of activities. And, I mean, look at them. He’s learning to dance and she’s bossing him around, absolutely no regard for propriety.

It’s pretty clear that Dimitri doesn’t feel romantic feelings towards Edelgard in the academy phase, but I think it would be fair to say she was his first love when they were young. He essentially says this was the best year of his life and establishes Edelgard as someone very precious to him (as well as the daughter of one of the most precious people to him). Strong feelings beget strong feelings, do they not?

Google says that eleven to fourteen is the general age of male puberty. It’s the time that kids begin to more fully define how they’re going to emotionally interact with people and the world at large. Meeting Edelgard was at the cusp of this period of Dimitri’s life, and the Tragedy of Duscur was right in the midst of it.

And we all know what that turned out.

Dimitri’s accounts of what happened during the Tragedy are... conflicting. This CG of an unharmed Dimitri in a field of corpses is... conflicting.

“My father...was the strongest man I knew. Someone I loved and admired deeply. That said, he was killed before my eyes. His head severed clean off. My stepmother, the kindest person I had ever known, left me behind and disappeared into the infernal flames.”

I’ve seen people create a plausible scenario in which Dimitri’s recollection is entirely accurate, where he saw Lambert call for revenge and get beheaded, saw Glenn’s ruined body and face twisted in pain, saw his step-mother disappear into the flames, and all despite the raging chaos of the battle and how people would undoubtedly be targeting the prince, but I think it makes more sense that his memories are unreliable. Dimitri suffered a severe head injury (very important to keep in mind) at Duscur. Maybe that happened early on, after seeing who attacked Lambert but before he was an actual target himself, which merely made him look dead. Maybe he saw a version of the events he described, but through the filter of confused head trauma, smoke inhalation, and intense terror. To think that his recollection isn’t exactly entirely reliable sets a precedent for his later skewed take on reality.

Regardless of opinion, though, the facts are that Dimitri left Duscur with a traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.

After that, from thirteen to seventeen, Dimitri was pretty isolated. Most of the people he cared about were dead. His entire emotional support system (Patricia) was gone. He saved Dedue (although they were definitely not on even terms, that relationship is unbalanced to the extreme) and occasionally saw Rodrigue (who I have no reason to believe was emotionally accommodating in any way considering the way he sees Dimitri as an extension of Lambert to his dying breath). Again, it’s strange. People act like Dimitri was super close friends with the Faerghus crew, that he was surrounded by people who loved him (although it is clear there is a lot of love there), but he never presents things in a way to imply that’s the case. In fact, he highlights his isolation:

“In Duscur, I lost my father, stepmother, and closest friends. I didn't have many allies at the castle after that. In truth, I had only Dedue for companionship.”... “I once had people I could confide in. Family, friends, instructors, even the royal soldiers. But they were all taken away from me four years ago.” (Dimitri’s C support with Byleth.)

Two years passed before the next time Dimitri saw his friends and it was a war campaign, putting down the rebellion in western Faerghus. Dimitri speaks about those battles from a place of deeply affected emotion, expressing empathy, pain, and disgust with his actions and the killing.

“I recall coming across a dead soldier's body. He was clutching a locket. Inside was a lock of golden hair. I don't know to whom it belonged. His wife, his daughter...mother, lover... I'll never know.... in that moment, I realized he was also a real person, just like the rest of us… Killing is part of the job, but even so... There are times when I'm chilled to the bone by the depravity of my own actions.” (Dimitri’s B Support with Byleth)

I love this support, honestly. It’s so very telling about the destructive quality of empathy. Although caring can be a good thing, it’s also arguably one of the most destructive of Dimitri’s qualities. His empathy is what presents him with situations he cannot accept, the thing that pushes him to disassociate from reality so he can be rid of it and fight without remorse like he was taught to do by his father and other soldiers. Dimitri is a man of extremes. Either total control or none, without any room for error. This dialogue is also the first time Dimitri brings up reconciling himself with reality and hints to the fact that he has been unable to do so. This is contrasted perfectly in this line from Felix,

“The way you suppressed that rebellion... It was ruthless slaughter and you loved every second. I remember the way you killed your victims. How you watched them suffer. And your face...that expression. All the world's evil packed into it...” (Dimitri’s C Support with Felix)

Dimitri doesn’t deny this. Just like all of the other terrible things Felix says, he takes it without protesting in an act of what I think is stilted contrition. Although, it’s not just in supports that Dimitri’s contrasting behavior is brought up. The Remire incident probably works as a good reference for what Felix saw all those years back.

This is the first time we see Dimitri’s darker side in full. The similarities in the situation to what is shown to have happened in the Tragedy of Duscur are interesting. The fire, the utter chaos, strange figures watching it all from above. This is another case of a perfect disaster. I wonder if his ultimate snap would have been so destructive if not for Remire.

Anyway, this draws parallels to his and Felix’s separate recall of the rebellion because later Dimitri apologizes.

“Professor... I...I'm sorry you saw that side of me in the village… When I saw the chaos and violence there...my mind just went completely dark.”

Dimitri is unreliable. A lack of control, a separation of self, and becoming consumed by a dark rage only to come to his senses later, full of shame and a sense of confusion about why. From my own experience, it’s not unnatural to come out of an episode like this without being able to explain what was happening and being baffled by your behavior. This firmly establishes Dimitri’s uncomfortably fast mood shifts in relation to his trauma from the Tragedy and confirms all of the warnings Felix had given. When Dimitri was faced with a reality he could not accept, he lost control of his emotions and his mental state shifted to adapt accordingly.

This is when I’d also like to note something interesting about how Dimitri discusses his trauma. He is very honest and open about his experiences, explaining exactly what happened to him to Byleth. However, he uses the truth to hide. In recounting the events of the Tragedy of Duscur, in talking about how his family died and saying how badly it hurt him, he does not make himself vulnerable. When he admits weakness, he does so in the past tense or apologetically, vowing to be stronger. “Stronger”, aka, he’ll be better in suppressing his emotions.

“I always strive to keep my emotions at bay, but... Sometimes the darkness takes hold and...it's impossible to suppress. It just shows you how lacking I am... I have much to learn.”

Dimitri lies by using the truth, shoving down his feelings, and blaming himself rather than attempting to figure out how to handle his emotions. In his own words:

“Everyone has something that is unacceptable within them. I certainly do, and I'd wager you do as well. I wonder which is best, Professor... To cut away that which is unacceptable, or to find a way to accept it anyway...”

Good advice Dimitri. Might want to keep that in mind.

It is at this point is when I’m going to get into my personal thoughts and armchair psychiatry nonsense.

First off, when I mentioned earlier about “non-traditional” mental illness, I did not mean abnormal or rare. Although people mostly just point to Dimitri having PTSD (and depression) as the source of his issues, I’m going to use all of my above information to make the (decently common) argument that Dimitri is schizophrenic, which is, contrary to popular belief, not too unusual. I state that with the caveat that I understand that there’s a lot to be said about schizophrenia and the tumultuous relationship between mental health and fiction. However, now is not really the time to go into mental health politics and representation or the many lies spread about the illness so instead, I recommend that you read into the topic if you’re personally interested (This has some good information).

At the very least be aware that this IS sensationalized.

That said, Dimitri does not, to my understanding using grossly simplified terms, meet the qualifications generally (very generally) used to diagnose schizophrenia through the majority of the White Clouds chapters. These qualifying symptoms include, but are not limited to, the duration of the psychotic episode, the concurrent presence of hallucinations and delusions, and a greatly lowered ability to keep up with basic quality-of-life tasks. You only see these symptoms in the final chapter of White Clouds and the first few of Azure Moon. This isn’t unusual, however, because schizophrenia manifesting fully in younger individuals is extremely uncommon, sometimes taking years to trigger during a person’s late teens. And since the diagnosis generally relies on the occurrence of a psychotic episode, it can be mistaken as other mood disorders. Actually, the idea of him having a mood disorder was one of the things that caught my eye originally. Prodromal symptoms such as depression, irritability, headaches, sleep disruption, and mood swings are common in bipolar disorder (and, of course, schizophrenia).

Still, I don't deny that Dimitri has PTSD and depression, only that I don’t think PTSD is his main (or only) issue. In reality, PTSD and schizophrenia are closely tied. They share many symptoms, even the symptom of psychosis. There’s also evidence that those with genetic precedent to develop PTSD overlap with those at risk for schizophrenia, and that the nature of PTSD triggers can act as a severe stressor to aggravate a schizophrenic episode.

(From here)

This falls into the realm of being uncertain where one ends the other begins, highlighting the lack of concrete understanding about schizophrenia and the dependency of diagnosis and treatment to rely entirely on the individual experience, but that’s not a conversation I’m actually qualified to have.

The study that truly caught my eye and while researching for this was one called “Psychiatric disorders and traumatic brain injury”. As I mentioned, at some point during the Tragedy, Dimitri sustained severe head trauma. We know this because of his development of the rare inability to taste called ageusia. I was originally interested in following this narrative thread because, as you might know if you follow true crime cases, there are many murderers who recall having sustained a head injury as children. Not that Dimitri shares similar psychology to people that kill and eat their victim's feet... Although his body count is higher. Besides that, head trauma, in general, is known to be linked to mental illness and altering a person’s behavior. There is even a correlation between TBI (traumatic brain injury) and schizophrenia.

From the study I linked above:

To put it more simply, patients in the study who had suffered TBI and developed schizophrenia reported that their most common symptoms were delusions of persecution, auditory hallucinations, and aggressive behaviors. The auditory hallucinations were often voices. Many of the subjects experienced psychotic episodes two or more years after the initial incident (although, as I mentioned, Dimitri’s age could also have something to do with the timing as children rarely have fully developed schizophrenic episodes). Furthermore, the behaviors classified as an absence of normal behaviors called “negative symptoms” (which include apathy and disordered speech) were rare in this testing group.

Dimitri exclusively displays “positive” symptoms of schizophrenia (“positive” meaning the presence of symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions). He also clearly suffers from delusions of persecution in his belief that Edelgard is the sole instigator of Duscur and the war and that he immediately accuses Byleth of being an Imperial spy upon meeting them post time skip. I think it’s pretty fascinating how closely Dimitri’s symptoms follow the outline of the study, especially with the aggressive behaviors, as those aren’t actually very common in schizophrenics.

In very, very simplistic terms, if I’m right and Dimitri was born with the genetic blueprint for schizophrenia/PTSD (through Crests, inheritance, or environmental causes) and later suffered severe head trauma in an event that also gave him PTSD in combination with his pre-existing parental issues and stilted emotional development, then this could definitely create the type of person who loses all sense of reality, can’t control his emotions, and is prone to episodes of murderous rage when being reminded of the trigger (however tangentially) of losing everything he loved.

However, I’ll add real quick that the study I mentioned should be taken with a grain of salt.

I use it mainly because I thought the similarities were interesting and it shows that there was more thought put into Dimitri than maybe people appreciate.

This brings us to my final point; Some kind of twisted joke.

A major point I saw being made as proof of how terrible Dimitri is as a character was that he blamed Edelgard for the Tragedy of Duscur (a time where she would have been twelve). More accurately, he blamed her for everything that had happened and the thing is, I don’t disagree with that critique entirely. However, this is a case of him being a bad person, not a bad character. This might seem like an odd distinction, but I think it changes the scope of deserved criticism.

As I’ve been trying so desperately to illustrate, Dimitri snapping wasn’t just because of Edelgard being revealed as the Flame Emperor. Rather, it was an unlucky combination of many things. His grasp and interpretation of reality were already hazy at best by the time she was unmasked, slowly falling apart as his prodromal symptoms worsened. Going into the fight, he believed the Flame Emperor to be responsible in whole or in part for the worst thing that had ever happened to him, guessed at Arundel’s involvement, had found (and lied about) the dagger, and was rapidly mentally deteriorating. While Dimitri suspected Edelgard’s involvement to some degree, he did his best to act like it wasn’t true.

Dimitri didn’t want it to be true. To the extent that he was willing to lie to Byleth (and to himself) to avoid reality. He cared deeply about Edelgard. The best year of his life was spent with her, she was his first love, and she was the daughter of the step-mother he adored. Strong feelings beget strong feelings, do they not? This reveal confronted Dimitri with something that he could not accept, so his mind sidestepped the issue altogether. Delusion convinced him that all of the fears and worries he had beforehand were related, all into one larger delusion that Edelgard had sole responsibility. It’s not right and maybe not even excusable, but it falls in line with everything else.

Edelgard and Dimitri. Bound by some twisted fate but forever doomed to be separated, unable to understand the other’s chosen path.

I do recognize the flaws of Dimitri’s character and arc. There are some pretty major flaws. I have parts of a post typed out about his shoddy recovery and how I’d fix it that, hopefully, one day will see the light of day as well as many complaints about the way the story is hindered by the need for flexibility to accommodate gameplay and a happy ending.

But, despite that, this has all been a very long-winded way of praising Dimitri’s writing. His mental illness has a surprising amount of depth and I loved studying it as intently as I did. I learned a lot about his character as well as about mental illness in general.

Ultimately, Dimitri is neither an innocent sweetheart whose actions are entirely excusable and justified or an unforgivable war criminal and overall terrible character. You can feel bad for his pain and his struggle with his illness and understand that as a reason for his actions, but you shouldn’t use it as justification. He had the opportunity to seek help before things got too bad. He was selfish with the mismanagement of his emotions and goals. However, he also was a victim. Dimitri worked to recover and mend the mistakes he made while he was unwell, which is a side of this mental illness that is rarely shown in media.

I wholeheartedly believe that, love him or hate him, Dimitri is the most well-written of the Three Houses characters,

#dimitri #fe dimitri #dimitri alexandre blaiddyd #fire emblem 16 #fire emblem #FE3H #fire emblem three houses #i spent an ungodly amount of time on this feel free to share your thoughts

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wonderfulworldofmichaelford · 4 years

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Michael in the Mainstream: The Chris Columbus Harry Potter Films

Here’s a bold stance to take these days: I actually still really love the Harry Potter franchise.

Yes, this series hasn’t had a huge impact on my own writing; my stories I’m working on draw far more from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure and the Percy Jackson series than they do Harry Potter. And yes, the author of the franchise has outed herself as a transphobic scumbag whose every post-script addition to her franchise has been an unprecedented bad move (save, perhaps, for allowing Johnny Depp the opportunity to work during a very trying time in his life). But while the author is a horrendous person and the story hasn’t exactly given me as much to work with as other stories have, there are so many great themes, ideas, and characters that even now I’d still say this is one of my favorite series of all time. The world of Harry Potter is just so fascinating, the usage of folklore is interesting, and it has one of the most menacing and disturbing villains in young adult literature and manages to play the whole “love prevails over evil” cliché in such a way that it actually works.

And, of course, then we get into what I’m really here to talk about: the adaptations. The movies are not entirely better than the books; while I do think most of the films are on par with their novel counterparts, and they certainly do a good job of scrubbing out some of the iffier elements in Rowling’s writing, I still think there’s a certain, ahem, magic that the books have that gives them a slight edge. But, look, I’m a movie reviewer, and these films are some of my favorites of all time, and as much as I love the books I’m not going to sit around and say the books surpass them in every single way. There’s a lot to love in these films, and hopefully I’ll be able to convey that as I review the series.

Of course, the only place to truly start is the Chris Columbus duology. Columbus is not the most impressive director out there – this is the man who gave us Rent, Pixels, and that abominable adaptation of Percy Jackson after all – but early on in his career he made a name for himself directing whimsical classics such as the first two Home Alone movies and Mrs. Doubtfire. Those films are wonderfully cast and have a lot of charm, and thankfully this is the Columbus we got to bring us the first two entries in Harry’s story.

One of the greatest strengths of the first two Harry Potter movies is just the sheer, unrelenting magic and wonder they invoke. They’re so whimsical, so enchanting, so fun; they fully suck you into the world Rowling created and utilize every tool they can to keep you believing. Everything in these films serves to heighten the magic; practical effects and CGI come together with fantastic costuming and set design to make the world of wizards and Hogwarts school feel oh so real. And of course, none of this would be even remotely as effective if not for the legendary score by John Williams, who crafted some of the most iconic and memorable compositions of the 21st century for these films. In short: the tone of these films is pretty perfect for what they are, and every element in them works to make sure you are buying into this tone at every moment.

The other massively important element is the casting, and by god, the casting in these films is simply perfect. Of course, the title characters and his peers have to be unknowns, and thankfully they managed to pluck out some brilliant talent. I don’t need to tell you how good Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson are, even back in these films, but I do feel the need to say that Rupert Grint is vastly underappreciated; I really don’t think the films would work quite as well without his presence, because he does bring that goofy charm Harry’s friend group needs to balance it out. Matthew Lewis is the adorable coward Neville Longbottom and Tom Felton is the snotty brat Draco Malfoy, and though both of their roles are fairly minor in the first two films they manage to make their mark. The second movie pulls in Bonnie Wright as Ginny, and again, I’m gonna say she’s rather underrated; I think she did quite a fine job in her role.

But of course, the real draw of these films is the sheer amount of star power they have in terms of U.K. actors. You’ve got Maggie Smith (McGonagall), Robbie Coltrane (Hagrid), Warwick Davis (Flitwick and, bafflingly, only the voice of Griphook, who was played by the American Verne Troyer in the first film for… some reason), John Hurt (Ollivander), Toby Jones (Dobby), John Cleese (Nearly Headless Nick)… and this is only the first two films. The movies would continue pulling in stars like it was Smash Ultimate, determined to tell you that “EVERYONE IS HERE” and be the ultimate culmination of U.K. culture.

Of course, even in the first few movies there are those who truly stand out as perfect. Smith and Coltrane are most certainly the perfect embodiment of their characters, but I think a great deal of praise should be given to Richard Griffiths as Uncle Vernon; the man is a volatile, raging bastard the likes of which you rarely see, and he is at once repulsive and comical. He’s pretty much the British answer to J.K. Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson. Then we have Jason Isaacs as Lucius Malfoy in the second film, and he is just delightfully, deliciously devilish and dastardly. Isaacs actually came up with a lot of Mr. Malfoy’s quirks himself, such as the long blonde hair, the cane wand, and the part where he tries to murder a small child in cold blood for releasing his house elf (which came about because he forgot literally every other spell and had just read Goblet of Fire, so...). Then of course there is Kenneth Branagh as Gilderoy Lockhart, and… well, it’s Kenneth Branagh as Gilderoy Lockhart. I don’t think you could find a more perfect casting choice (except perhaps Hugh Grant, who was originally cast but had to drop out). He just really hams it up as the obnoxious blowhard and helps make him much more tolerable than his book counterpart, though he does unfortunately have the lack of plot relevance Lockhart did in the book, which is a problem unique to Lockhart. Fun fact, he is the ONLY Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher in the series to not ultimately matter in regards to the main story.

Of course, the greatest casting choice of them all is most certainly The late, great Alan Rickman as everyone’s favorite greasy potions professor, Severus Snape. I think Rickman goes a long way towards helping make Snape one of the greatest characters of all time, with everything about his performance just being perfect, and what makes it even better is how it would ultimately subvert his typical roles (though that’s a story for a different review). I don’t think either of the first films is really his best outing, butt he first one definitely sets him up splendidly. Snape barely has a role in the second film – something that greatly irritated Rickman during the movie’s production apparently – but he still does a good job with what limited screentime he has. Then we have Richard Harris as Dumbledore. Due to his untimely death, he only played Dumbledore in the first two films, but he really did give a wonderful performance that had all the charm, whimsy, and wonder the Dumbledore of the first few books was full of. The thing is, I don’t know if he would have been able to make the transition into the more serious and darker aspects of Dumbledore that popped up in the later books. I guess we’ll never know, which is truly a shame, but at the very least he gave us a good showing with what little time he had.

My only problems with the first two films are extremely minor, though there is at least one somewhat big issue I have. You see, while I do like everything about these films, I feel like they’re a bit too loyal to the books, not doing enough to distinguish themselves as their own thing like films such as Prisoner of Azkaban would do. But if I’m being honest, this is seriously nitpicky; it’s not like this really makes me think less of the films, because they have way more going for than against them. Stuff like this and the cornier early performances from the kid actors are to be expected when a franchise is still finding its legs. It really is more of a personal thing for me; I prefer when creators allow their own vision to affect an adaptation so that I can see how they perceive and interpret the work, but at the same time the first two Harry Potter books are all about setting up and the main plot doesn’t really kick off until the third and fourth books, so… I guess everything balances out?

It is a bit odd looking back at these first two films and noting how relatively self-contained they are compared to the denser films that were to come; you could much more easily jump into either one of these films and really get what’s going on compared to later movies, where you would almost definitely be lost if you tried to leap in without an inkling of the plot. But that is something I do like, since the first two films have really strong plots that focus more on the magical worldbuilding and developing the characters, setting up an incredibly strong foundation for the series to come. There are a few trims of the plot here and there, but it’s not nearly as major as some things that would end up cut later.

But, really, what’s there to cut? Like I said, these movies are more about the worldbuilding and setting up for later plotlines. They’re relatively simple stories here, and I think that’s kind of their big strengths, because it lets the characters and world shine through. The first film honestly is just Harry experiencing the wizarding world for the first time, with him going from scene to scene and just taking in all of the magical sights. Most of the big plot stuff really happens towards the end, when they make the journey down to the Philosopher’s Stone. The second movie is where things get a lot more plot-heavy, with the film focusing on the mystery of the Chamber of Secrets and all of the troubles that the basilisk within causes. Despite how grim the stories can get, especially the second one, these films never really lose that whimsical, adventurous tone, which is incredibly impressive all things considered.

It’s not really criticisms, but there are a few things that make me a bit sad didn’t happen in the first couple of films, or at the very least offer up some interesting “what could have been” scenarios. I think the most notable missed opportunity is the decision to axe Peeves, despite him being planned and having Rik Mayall film scenes with him only to have said scenes left on the cutting room floor, never to see the light of day; Mayall had some rather colorful words to say about the film after it came out. Sean Connery passing up on playing Dumbledore is another missed opportunity, but Connery has always been awful at picking roles and hates fantasy, so this isn’t shocking to me in the slightest. Terry Gilliam being straight-up told by Rowling she didn’t want him directing is another sad but necessary decision, as was Spielberg dropping out; neither guy would have been a very good fit for the franchise, honestly. Alan Cumming turning down the role of Lockhart because Grint and Watson were going to be paid more than him is a bit… lame, but also I don’t think he’d have been as good as Branagh in the role; as much as I love Cumming, Branagh has this grandiose stage actor hamminess that Lockhart desperately needs. There’s a lot of fascinating trivia facts I learned writing this review, and a lot of it paints some pretty weird pictures of how this franchise could have turned out in another world.

Chamber of Secrets and Sorcerer's Stone are both absolutely fantastic, whimsical fantasy movies, and I’d definitely recommend both of them to anyone who likes the fantasy genre. It’s a great jumping off point for younger people who may not be able to handle something as intense or heavy as, say, The Lord of the Rings making it a very useful gateway drug into fantasy, though it still manages to work perfectly as fun, engaging fantasy on its own. I’m personally more of a fan of the third and eighth movies but I can definitely hear arguments for either of these two being someone’s favorites or even the best in the franchise, because they invoke a lot of nostalgia and charm just thinking about them, good memories of seeing them with my family when I was a kid.

Some have come to view Chamber of Secrets less positively over the years, seeing it as an awkward transitional phase between the lighter, more whimsical adventures and the darker plot-driven ones, but honestly, Between the Columbus films, Chamber is definitely the superior one. It takes everything that was great about the first film and builds on it, and also gives us Lucius Malfoy, Dobby, Gilderoy Lockhart, and way better special effects and a more consistent narrative. The first film is still a classic, of course, but it’s almost episodic in nature and a lot more focused on showing Hogwarts to us than delivering a story. Still, it definitely has the plus of having way more Snape than the second film did, and there’s no arguments against that from me! Both films are very good at what they do, and both definitely deserve a watch.

#Michael in the Mainstream #Harry Potter #Christopher Columbus #fantasy #fantasy film #Daniel Radcliffe #Emma Watson #Rupert Grint #Alan Rickman

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classpect-crew · 4 years

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Aspects and Narrative Structure

What exactly are Aspects, anyways? Well, in the comic itself, Aspects are forces of the universe that influence and are influenced by the “Heroes” present in the story. But what does this mean on a broader scale? We all have a pretty good idea of what each Aspect represents in canon, but what if that’s not the whole story?

Before we begin, I’d like to direct you to an excellent video by @revolutionaryduelist (optimistic Duelist on YouTube) that will prime you for what I’m about to discuss. I highly recommend checking out their channel, as it’s extremely informative and fun to watch!

So, now that you’ve no doubt enjoyed the video I’ve linked, let’s get into what each Aspect represents in terms of a broader narrative. One of the big narrative themes of Homestuck is that the story is essentially a stage performance, or an “interactive play,” which we see throughout the comic, from the “Acts” and “Intermissions” to the curtains opening and closing on each Act. There are plenty of times where the “fourth wall” is completely shattered, and the layers between the cast and the audience start to blend together. With this in mind, it’s not difficult to reason that each Aspect not only represents a certain universal force in the comic’s universe, but also represents an aspect of narrative structure. I’ll begin with the definitions shown in optimistic Duelist’s video, and then expand upon them from my own perspective.

Let’s start with some easy ones: Space and Time. Space and Time represent the Setting and Pacing of a story. In our stage play metaphor, we can expand this further. Space is represented by the scenery that tells us where the characters are, but it also represents the physical space that the actors take up. Different prop placement, lighting, and scenery can make the stage feel bigger or smaller to fit the needs of the scene, and a change in these things will naturally translate to us as a scene change. Time, on the other hand, is represented by the progression of the story through actions, dialogue, the opening and closing of curtains, and even the music that accompanies each scene and plays continuously during intermissions. In a musical, this is even more obvious, as each song tells a distinct part of the story and opens up ideas about character motivations, illustrates choices, and so on—though this aspect of Time is merely the lens through which these things are viewed, since choices/motivations/etc. are truly representative of other Aspects entirely. As in real life, these two Aspects intermingle considerably, creating “spacetime” as the spatial and temporal backdrop of all the events we witness as audience members, the framework that allows both depth and progression to occur in the narrative and sets the foundation of the stage itself.

Light and Void represent Relevance and Irrelevance. The difference between the cast and crew on stage is easy to tell because the spotlight will always be on a character, not on a member of the crew, unless ironically referencing a crew member (thus breaking the illusion) is a part of the performance itself. Those who are illuminated hold the attention of the audience, and the light allows us to see their facial expressions, their clothing, their movements, etc. and understand the character better through these things. A character who is self-assured may wear a smug grin, holding themselves upright with confidence. A character who is poor might wear old, ragged clothing. Light is all about which characters are relevant, and it also allows the audience to discern information about the characters and about the larger world within the play itself. On the other hand, Void is represented by the unlit areas of the stage, the shadows behind props and characters, and even the crew itself. The ties between Void and the stage crew can be illustrated through bunraku, also known as ningyō jōruri, a traditional Japanese puppet theatre with a long and fascinating history. Puppeteers are clothed in black robes, often hooded, and blend into the black backdrop in order to direct attention onto the puppets themselves and away from their operators. Stage crews in American theatre will often wear dark clothing for the same reason, moving props and scenery as necessary without drawing attention away from the story itself. Although they’re absolutely vital to the execution of the play itself, the crew is in most cases irrelevant to the play’s narrative, thus they work in the shadows to place pieces where they need to be, going unnoticed by the audience.

Life and Doom represent Agency and Conflict. As every good storyteller knows, both of these are vital to the lifeblood of a story, as characters who have no agency are simply puppets, empty vessels with no will of their own, and a story with no conflict doesn’t go anywhere or challenge the characters in any way. In our stage metaphor, Life is the appearance of each character’s free will. Even though we recognize that a script is in place, and the actors are simply working within the framework of scripted interactions, they bring the characters to life through their performances and give the illusion that the world presented onstage is a vibrant one. A good actor can draw an audience into the story by fully embodying the character in question, stepping into the role and allowing us to relate to them, cheering on the heroes and rallying against the villains as the story progresses. We begin to forget that the world we’re presented is mere fiction, and we come out of the experience feeling much different than when we entered. This is what makes a good stage play so compelling, as we watch these characters grow and change based on what they endure and how the world reacts to their actions. In the same vein, Doom is the conflicts, obstacles, and limits placed in the way of the characters to challenge them and help them to grow. In the case of a tragedy, this can also be the end result, whether through a character failing to achieve their goals, a villain succeeding in their heinous plot, or even the death of a protagonist, which removes their agency in the story itself. No real person becomes stronger without facing hardship, and the same is true in fiction. What sort of character would Hamlet be if he wasn’t challenged to find a way to cope with the death of his father, or the knowledge that his uncle was the one who killed him? These conflicts enrich the stories we’re told and provide roadblocks on the road of success, testing the limits of each character’s willpower and strengthening their resolve, or even forcing them to reconsider their goals entirely. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and these necessary hardships fill out the story itself, ensuring that something is learned through the experience through delayed—or, in some cases, entirely absent—gratification.

Breath and Blood represent Plot Development and Character Dynamics. As the Aspect of movement and change, Breath translates into our metaphor quite nicely, ensuring that the story is as dynamic as the characters themselves. It’s the sequence of events that takes us from exposition to resolution—in essence, it’s pretty much the story itself, which is why John is able to do what he does, escaping from the narrative of Homestuck entirely in order to affect things from the outside. The plot is the engine that drives the story—the twists and turns that the narrative takes as difference pieces take their turns on the board. Character motivations are explored, actions are taken, unexpected events take place, and lessons are learned. All of this happens within the plot, and it’s a very external force, as opposed to what we’ll explore in a moment with Blood, which hones in on characters specifically, rather than the whole narrative. Breath is also represented by change, and any change in motivations, scenery, tone, and even tempo can be attributed to Breath in addition to the Aspects normally represented by those things. Blood, however, is a matter of interpersonal relations between characters in a story: their feelings about—and for—each other, the various factions within a story, and the natural associations one can make, such as “protagonists/antagonists, nobility/commoners, obedient civilians/ruthless scoundrels, and so on. Part of what makes characters so interesting is their dynamics with other characters. For example, on her own, Elphaba Thropp from Wicked is a very interesting character. Blessed with innate magical skills, but cursed with green skin, she is ostracized by many and reluctantly admired by some, and this makes her interactions with others very dynamic. Her insistence on bringing much-needed attention to the oppression of Animals in Oz, social consequences be damned, comes in direct conflict with a character like Galinda Upland, who strives to maintain her place in the social hierarchy, even if that means masking her true feelings on controversial subjects to paint herself favorably in the eyes of others. As the story progresses, the two find that they have much more in common than they could’ve guessed, and they begin fighting for the same cause, shifting from bitter enemies to best friends through the course of a few excellent musical numbers. This shift in their dynamic is vital to the story, yet this is merely one of many such dynamics.

Let’s move on to two Aspects that are a bit more abstract in our narrative format. Hope and Rage represent Coherence and Contrivance. These words may sound quite different from what we’re used to from these Aspects but hear me out, because there’s a method to my madness. A story’s coherence is how well it can be understood, and furthermore, how well it can be related to by an audience. It also represents the enthusiasm with which an invested audience will respond to the narrative taking place. In our stage play metaphor, this is part of what drives us to immerse ourselves in the story. It’s the excitement we feel when our favorite character completes their goal as set up in the exposition, or the fear we experience when an adversary comes close to unraveling it all. It’s the ability to escape from our own lives and enter the world presented onstage, and a big part of why walking out of a great performance can feel like we’re waking up from an intense lucid dream. It’s the magic of excellent storytelling. Hope is what drives us to overlook mistakes, either in the narrative itself or in the performance, and allows us to enjoy it as a whole. On the other hand, Rage’s contrivance delights in tearing open plot holes, exposing the divide between performers and the audience, and dispelling the illusion that the world on stage is in any way “real.” It’s the heckler at a comedy show, or the critics in the nosebleed seats. It’s the breaking of the fourth wall that occurs when a character in the story directly addresses the audience, or begins to critique the narrative itself. While it can certainly seem like a negative force, this Aspect is what keeps us firmly grounded in reality, pulling us out of “la la land” when the show is over and it’s time to return to our lives. It marks an end to the magic, a disbelief in the “miracles,” and the voice of reason.

Finally, our last two Aspects, Heart and Mind, represent Inner Character and Outer Character. This is fairly obvious, given what we already know from canon, and it translates fairly literally in our metaphor. Heart is represented by a character’s “true self,” or what remains the same in every performance of the play. It’s what makes each character recognizable, no matter how the script, costumes, set design, etc. have been adapted. Peter Pan, for example, is always presented as childlike and carefree, bold in his actions and protective of those he loves. He can also be incredibly naive and immature, which humanizes him and allows room for growth. Regardless of which actor might play him, or whether the story is adapted to a sci-fi setting, or tells the tale of a much older Peter, or is even presented from the perspective of an entirely different culture, these character traits and motivations will always be the same. They’re what make him the “Peter Pan” we all know and love. The “true self” involves every trait that is essential to a character. If these traits were changed in some way, they would cease to be the same character, much like adding or removing a proton from an atom would change its element entirely. On the contrary, Mind is represented by a character’s “projected self,” or how they present themselves in the company of others. For some characters, their “true self” always shines through, and they rarely act in ways that aren’t in accordance with their deeply-held values. For others, such as Billy Flynn from Chicago, the creation and maintenance of a constructed, outward “self” is vital to their survival and prosperity, and sometimes deception is the name of the game. Billy, an incredibly successful defense lawyer, comes across in his musical number as a caring, compassionate man who couldn’t care less about money and values “love” more than anything else. This is extremely ironic, however, as the audience is soon presented with a very different view of Billy: as a stern, ambitious man who’s very concerned with money, but also loves the challenge of winning cases for clients on death row. As his “true self” is revealed, his choices and motivations begin to make sense to the audience, and we gain a deeper understanding of the man behind the mask, so to speak.

Each Aspect plays a vital role in the narrative structure of any story—or performance, in this case—and perhaps we can use these interpretations to further understand what our own Aspect connections are. After all, all the world’s a stage, right?

#classpect analysis #classpect #homestuck #classpects #homestuck analysis #optimisticDuelist #revolutionaryduelist #holy shit this took like two hours to write. i need to sleep now g’night

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thegildedcentury · 5 years

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Luv: The Beauty and Horror of Blade Runner 2049′s Tragic Antiheroine

“I’m the best one.” Luv declares as she struts away from K, fresh blood from a stolen kiss adorning her face as she departs, having again reduced her opponent to helplessness and having again decided, bafflingly, not to kill him.

If we think of Blade Runner 2049 as a pretentious yet inferior movie, a pale imitation of its source material lacking all the intellectual and emotional resonance of the original, these four words spoken by Luv mean nothing, existing as a tossed off line spoken by a tossed off character in a film that accomplishes nothing aside from looking pretty and making you wish you were watching the original.

I disagree. I think Luv is incredible, one of the most fascinating, nuanced, and profoundly tragic characters I’ve encountered in a very long time, a figure who both deserves and rewards our attention. Though it’s easy to miss during an initial viewing (I certainly did) Luv has a rich, deep story arc that branches through the whole of Blade Runner 2049, one that both parallels and intersects with K’s story, the two characters informing each other even as they violently ricochet off one another. Once understood, the tragic depths of Luv’s story don’t just reveal a remarkable character but enrich the movie as a whole, adding an extra dimension to a narrative already dense with meaning.

Luv, like our central protagonist K, is a Nexus-9 Replicant model, a product of the Wallace Corporation. When we first meet her she is in the process of selling other Replicants as Off-World slave labor. This may seem like a betrayal of the first order but, as we will soon learn, Luv does not see it that way.

Luv works directly under CEO Niander Wallace himself, acting as his personal assistant, assassin, and all purpose fixer. While Niander Wallace is the face Technological Capitalism chooses to show the world--brilliant, eccentric, full of glorious and high minded ambition, a Ted Talk come to life--Luv represents it’s actual real world consequences: empty sadism, nihilistic violence, and ignorant self-aggrandizement, which is not to say that Luv is stupid. Luv knows she is a slave but nevertheless exalts in her position because she is the best slave, Niander Wallace’s chosen instrument. If Niander Wallace is God, and he certainly seems to think he is, Luv is his "First Angel”, the chosen means by which he enacts his will on the world. Luv knows this, but she can’t bring herself to fully comprehend its ramifications, a failure of understanding that ultimately leads to her tragic destruction.

Any discussion of tragedy would be incomplete without at least a brief detour to account for the Ancient Greeks, the originators of Tragedy as Western Civilization knows it, so let’s get it out of the way now. All tragedy results, on a fundamental level, from a failure to obey the message inscribed above the Oracle of Delphi: “Know Thyself”. When you don’t understand yourself, you open yourself up to becoming prey of the Gods, what today we might call the Passions, though few Greek Tragedians would have recognized a distinction between the two. (Euripides being the notable exception.) The most famous embodiment of this kind of tragedy through self-ignorance was Oedipus, the subject of the tragedy Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. Though a prisoner of fate, Oedipus effectively strolled into his own cage by letting his passions rule him, first by giving in to his wrath by killing a stranger he met on the road, and then by giving in to his lust by marring the wife of the man he killed. When wisdom finally comes to Oedipus in the form of the realization that the man he killed was his father and the woman he married is his mother, it arrives too late to save him, and instead destroys him.

The character of Luv in Blade Runner 2049 bears less direct blame for her own tragic fate, yet the mechanisms by which it operates are fundamentally similar. Luv does not understand herself. The result is pain and suffering, yet it is far more nuanced than it first appears. What superficially manifests as depraved cruelty is, in fact, the result of a more fundamental lack, the sort of profound misunderstanding of her own nature that elevates her from the status of a mere hired goon to a character worthy of our consideration, and even our sympathy.

Unless I’ve overlooked something (which is entirely possible) Blade Runner 2049 makes no mention of whether or not Luv has the sort of artificial memory implants that prove such an integral part of K’s personality and story. Knowing this is vital to understanding her character, and while there is no way to be absolutely certain, I believe Luv’s actions clearly demonstrate her lack of a synthetic past, maliciously depriving her replicant mind of what Eldon Tyrell in the first movie called “a cushion or a pillow for their emotions”. As a result I believe, despite her often cold exterior, Luv is a raging tumult of conflicting, contradictory emotions she can neither understand nor control, paramount of which are her feelings regarding K.

Luv expresses interest in K during their first meeting, her fascination paralleling the sparks that fly between Rachel and Deckard in the old recording they both listen to. Unlike the meet-cute that occurred thirty years prior in the first Blade Runner, the attraction isn’t mutual, and when Luv attempts to inquire further into K’s life he rebuffs her. This quiet, polite rejection will ultimately have devastating consequences for both characters. K makes a powerful enemy, while Luv becomes divided against herself, afflicted with powerful feelings she has no context for or understanding of. As Kierkegaard said, life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. Without any history there can be no understanding, we become disconnected and begin to float, easy prey for any passing impulse. Knowing this doesn’t let us absolve Luv of her misdeeds, but it does give us a chance to reach a better understanding of her, as well as the more enigmatic aspects of her behavior.

We see Luv cry twice in Blade Runner 2049. The first time is when she sees her master Niander Wallace stroking and bidding happy birthday to a newborn female replicant (credited only as ‘Female Replicant’) who he then proceeds to murder by stabbing her in the womb, a brutal crime committed for no real reason other than vent his frustration and illustrate a point in a monologue he’s delivering more or less to himself. The second time is when Luv tortures and kills Lieutenant Joshi, K’s master. Both instances involve a woman being murdered, stabbed to death specifically, their body violated with a piece of metal in a grotesque pantomime of the act of heterosexual lovemaking. (When Blade Runner’s symbolism isn’t Judeo-Christian it’s Freudian. Freud would have diagnosed Luv with the three A’s: Ambiguity, Alienation, Ambivalence.)

When Luv cries with Niander Wallace it is in response to the nameless female replicant shedding her plastic birth caul and spasming into life. Luv casts a fleeting glance upward as the tear rolls down her cheek as if in acknowledgement to a higher power that bestows the transcendent spark of life, but if that’s the case any pretense to the sacred is destroyed when Niander Wallace murders the newborn replicant, an act that serves as a vulgar reaffirmation of his own mastery over life and death.

When Luv cries a second time it’s in response to her torturing Lieutant Joshi by crushing shattered glass into her hand, an act of sadism that concludes with Luv murdering the Lieutenant outright.

The fact that Luv sheds tears in both instances despite their profoundly different circumstances may lead us to the conclusion that Luv’s tears have no real emotional resonance, instead being an involuntary autonomic response to any extreme stimuli, what is little more than a bug in her design. It’s a natural assumption, but one that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Luv is the best one, at least as far as her status as a consumer-grade product is concerned. She is the pinnacle of Wallace design, the closest to perfection he’s yet managed to come. If Luv had a fault in her genetic architecture that made her cry at inappropriate times, Niander Wallace would likely have disposed of her with the same dispassionate matter-of-factness he disposes of everything that mildly displeases him. Yet if Luv’s tears are genuine, how can we make sense of them?

The answer is the absence of her memories. Without the mental foundation of memory that would provide her with a chance to ground the violent events she experiences and violent emotions she feels in context, Luv is helpless to control how she reacts, a condition her judiciously maintained cool exterior can only do so much to hide.

The tears she sheds while witnessing the nameless female replicant’s birth and the tears she sheds while torturing and killing Lieutenant Joshi are both genuine. This is naturally confusing since the situations are so different, but as the author Leonard Richardson writes in his book Constellation Games, (which I cannot recommend highly enough) crying does not mean you’re sad, it means you’re experiencing an emotion that’s too large to keep inside of you. Blade Runner 2049 throws us off the scent because the first time Luv cries the cause is obvious, then when she cries for a second time it seems completely inappropriate to the situation, yet when we appreciate the emotional tumult storming inside Luv, both reactions begin to make congruous sense. The first time Luv cries it is out of empathy and a sense of the sublime. The second time Luv cries it is out rage fueled by a mix of resentment and jealously.

When Luv first strolls into Lieutenant Joshi’s office she says in regards to K “I like him. He’s a good boy.” an evaluation Lieutenant Joshi’s silence seems to affirm. Lieutenant Joshi is a character who, let us not forget, is for all intents and purposes K’s owner and master, having the same power dynamic with him that Niander Wallace has with Luv. Killing Lieutenant Joshi not only serves the practical purpose of giving Luv free reign to access Lieutenant Joshi’s computer and find K, but it also gives Luv a chance to eliminate a romantic rival, experience the catharsis of killing a human master in a way she never could with Niander Wallace (who she needs to reaffirm her status as the Highest Angel), and eliminate the person that has enforced rigid control over every aspect of K’s life. She’s acting out of a very warped sense of duty to K, not quite the sort of redeeming "kinship” that led Roy Batty to save Deckard’s life at the last moment, but a kind of solidarity nonetheless.

When viewed from this perspective, the desires motivating Luv are very fundamental and very human. She wants solidarity with her fellow replicants. She wants revenge on those who’ve enslaved her. She wants to experience romantic love. The fact that she gets none of these things, that she has been explicitly denied the capacity to understand what these desires are and how to act on them and is instead forced to derive comfort from her status as the best one, the best product, the best slave, is what elevates her as a character beyond the stark dichotomy of victim or villain to the higher echelon of tragic antiheroine.

Luv spares K’s life twice in open defiance of the spirit, if not the letter, of Niander Wallace’s commandments. The first time is when she and her fellow Wallace fixers storm Deckard’s Las Vegas sanctuary and abduct him. K fights back despite being wounded thus forcing Luv to beat him into submission, though when the time comes to move in for the kill, she holds back. Instead she kills Joi, K’s holographic A.I. companion, crushing the emitter that contains her consciousness beneath her radiantly polished boot.

Immediately before doing so she says “I do hope you’re satisfied with our product.” Luv looks at Joi when she speaks the line, though it seems to be intended for Joi, K, and Luv herself, all three of whom are themselves commercial products of the Wallace Corporation. It’s a line that can be read as pure sarcasm, yet when considered in the context of what we’ve been talking about, we can view it as a sort of question, and a sort of appeal as well. Joi and Luv are both Wallace Corporation products, but Luv knows herself to be the best product. There is an implicit “Why?” in Luv’s words and actions, an inquiry that demands an answer from K. “Why Joi and not me? Am I not the superior model?” K choosing Joi over her is an insult to her attraction and an affront to her pride, yet the only way she can express her outrage is with violence. By destroying Joi she demonstrates her preeminent status as a product, while also eliminating another rival for K’s affections.

Luv departs without another word, leaving K alive. It’s safe for us to assume that Luv hasn’t simply fallen victim to the classic bad guy cliché of incorrectly assuming the good guy’s dead. They are are both the same model of replicant, there’s no reason for us to think she isn’t precisely aware of both K’s limits and his potential. Luv is still intrigued by K in a way she doesn’t understand, and lets him live secure the the knowledge that they will meet again under similarly unpleasant circumstances. By then the scales will have completely fallen from K’s eyes and he will be endowed with an unshakable sense of purpose, his own personal raison d'être. Luv will not be so fortunate.

K, at great cost, comes to understand who and what he really is in time for him to act on it in a way that gives purpose to his life and, more importantly, his death. Like all great villains Luv is K’s antitheses, a distorted reflection of him, what C.G. Jung might identify as his shadow-self. K begins the movie doing the same thing Luv does, namely killing on cue in accordance with his design. The difference is K encounters people who change his worldview, making him aware of the possibility of altering his circumstances. Luv never gets that chance.

The name ‘Luv’ is obviously dumb, the kind of dull platitude you’d find on a candy heart or in a rushed-off text message, and the fact that it is the name Niander Wallace chose to bestow on his First Angel shows the true indifference he feels regarding her, how the contempt he has for all life extends to her as well, despite his lofty rhetoric and empty praise.

Names are powerful, but they aren’t enough to imbue one’s life with meaning and purpose, a fact illustrated when a massive advertisement addresses K by his adopted name, the name Joi gave him, calling him “A good Joe.” Not only does this show that even something as personal as a name bestowed by a loved one can be corrupted and co-opted by Technological Capitalism, but that both Joi and the advertisement are probably making decisions based on the same artificial intelligence program, leading both of them to pick the same name out of thin air. This works to expose K to the artificiality of the relationship he had with Joi, forcing him to seek out something more authentic and human. It’s the sort of epiphany Luv is denied, so while she does seek to form a sort of relationship with K, the why and how of it completely eludes her, leading her to act on a sort of animal instinct that can’t distinguish between aggression and affection, two very different human Passions that appear to her as indistinct aspects of the same raw emotional yearning she becomes less and less capable of containing over the course of the story, a compulsion that climaxes with her beating and stabbing K nearly to death, then following it up immediately with a deep, soulful kiss.

The final battle between K and Luv at the sea wall isn’t just a grim parody of the iconic scene of two lovers passionately entwined in the surf from From Here To Eternity. (Though it is at that.) It’s a baptism.

Christian baptism is a ritual where the physical is sanctified and thus made to represent the spiritual, its invocation of grace elevating the ritual to transcend the mundane and evoke the divine. When Luv and K fight they are also sanctified by the symbolism surrounding them, which renders the conflict more significant than two people beating each other up. It is the physical versus the spiritual, the sacred versus the profane, the meaningful versus the meaningless, an elemental confrontation between the loftier and baser aspects of reality. For Luv the thing that matters most to her and carries the most meaning are her Passions, which aren’t in themselves bad, but when misunderstood and uncontrolled lead to destruction. In her fury she attacks and defeats K, and in her infatuation she yet again neglects to kill him. Her mercy is rewarded with death.

The final contest between K and Luv is their mutual attempt to drown one another, one that ends by demonstrating the ultimate disparity in their respective personalities. Both Luv and K forcibly hold one another underwater for what are at first roughly equivalent amounts of time. K survives because he is able to exert enough control over himself to hold his breath until he can turn the tables. Luv in contrast dies because she is a slave to her Passions. Instead of holding her breath and waiting for an opportunity to regain the upper hand she rages, clawing and growling, resisting with all her unchecked strength until her life is totally spent.

K and Deckard partake of the waters, die, and are born again. Luv is subjected to the same trial, but she is denied such grace. She is the First Angel, the most raw and brilliant and terrible, and as such, she must fall in all her dreadful glory, our horrible, beautiful, drowned Lucifer.

Like the studio-mandated happy ending of the original Blade Runner that everyone loathes, there could be another ending to this movie, a more conventionally satisfying ending where K and Luv gain a deeper understanding of themselves and, in doing so, find the capacity to care about and even love each other. It would be nice, but it would also deny Luv her final tragic grandeur, and us the vision of a true antiheroine.

The actress Sylvia Hoeks’ portrayal of Luv is as eerily perfect as the character herself, a performance that easily ranks among the best popular depictions of uncanny quasi-humanity ever rendered, on par with Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman, Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lector, and Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty. Luv is also different, a step beyond but also a step removed. The sheer virtuosity of Sylvia Hoeks’ performance is largely based in restraint, the sort of illusion of control that Luv is so good at deceiving herself with that it’s easy for us, the audience, to be deceived as well. It is right and good that we bemoan the lack of good female roles in popular cinema, but such objections can come to ring hollow when they come from an audience that routinely overlooks outstanding exemplars like Luv, a rendering that’s brave enough to not be obvious, whose peripheral status in the narrative does nothing to diminish. I don’t think we’re going to see a great many characters equal to Luv in the future, not only because it’s rare for a concept this good to be executed this well, but the demographic of people who were once most inclined to notice such things are now largely intellectually hemmed in by an ideology that Blade Runner 2049 does not neatly fit into, and who thus deem it unworthy of consideration. It is my ardent hope that it will eventually find a public worthy of it, just as its predecessor did. It’s the reason why I’m writing this, why I’m proselytizing for Luv, who is, after all, the best one.

OTHER PUNS I CONSIDERED WHEN TITLING THIS ESSAY

All You Need Is Luv

Luv Will Tear Us Apart

Luv Story

Luv Actually

The Luv Guru

Me Luv You Long Time

#blade runner #2049 #blade runner 2049 #luv #prose

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busterofbeing · 5 years

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Ranking The Page Classpects

I'm going to do my best to rank all the page classpects, from best to worst. Fair warning: most of these classpects are pretty bad. When making this list, I sorted out the bad from the awful and started putting the worst ones on and work my way up. If a classpect is high up, it doesn't mean it's good; it just means it sucks less than the ones below it.

Here's my take on page class. First: the page starts off weak, but if they manage to reach their true potential they are "second to none". This is stated in canon. Second: the journey of a page typically takes the entire session. Of the pages we've seen, they're journeys haven't been the best; Jake didn't reach his true potential until his fight with LE (or before [S] Game Over in the game over timeline), both events happened the last day or well after the last day of the session. Tavros, the page of breath, didn't realize his true potential until he was dead. Yeah. We see Tavros rally the troll army to fight LE with just his friendliness, charm and flexibility (part of the breath aspect); a feat that only Aranea, a troll with eons worth of mind control practice could achieve. Keep in mind a page reaching their full potential applies to the emotional side of them as well; not just the fancy powers they get. Horuss, the page of void, never realizes his full potential. For this list, I ranked under the presumption that it generally takes a page almost the entire session to realize their true potential, if they manage to at all. Third: Pages are challenged by, yet embody their aspect. Jake has a good-natured demeanor and is positive, yet he can't see possibilities to escape his relationship with Dirk, and isn't optimistic about the ones presented. Tavros leads without realizing it during the afterlife and is pretty flexible, yet has a tough time changing throughout Hivebent and literally could not move, all parts of the Breath aspect. Horuss is certainly a void player, but is challenged because he sees everything, and can't embody or focus on nothing. Part of the page's journey is to overcome their emotional challenges, meaning they start off challenged by their aspect in some way. Fourth: The Page serves their aspect or serves through their aspect for themselves (this is probably the most widely debated point here). Lastly, a page can weaponize their aspect. Okay! Now to the list...

1.) Page of Rage 2.) Page of Life 3.) Page of Hope 4.) Page of Void 5.) Page of Time 6.) Page of Doom 7.) Page of Mind 8.) Page of Light 9.) Page of Space 10.) Page of Heart 11.) Page of Blood 12.) Page of Breath

1.) Page of Rage

I put this for number one because it seems to be the least problematic of the bunch. Rage-bound can be dangerous, so a person challenged by rage likely wouldn't be a problem to the session. A Page of Rage might start out as a pacifist, and part of their journey is learning when to step up for themselves and fight. As for powers- we know Gamzee (a non-god tier) delivered the most powerful blow to the Black King, so Rage-bound are capable of dealing massive, if unpredictable damage. A PoR would no doubt deal insane damage once fully realized.

2.) Page of Life

I’m gonna say it, probably the worst life classpect besides maybe bard. They'll go through most of their session as an okay healer- maybe they can heal wounds or injuries at best. As a person, they would either be bad at helping and taking care of people, or they help in the wrong way. They would probably be annoying to deal with in a session- whenever they try to help, they just make things worse or make people upset. a PoL would need to learn how to take care of people and actually build them up. Fully realized, however, they would be the best healer in the game. They'd certainly be capable of revival, and could rapidly heal, especially themselves. A passive self-regeneration ability? A fully realized PoL would be a very useful ally in the fight against the Black King.

3.) Page of Hope

Jake showed us a PoH can still be hopeful, although maybe not the best source of hope and trust. Either way, the PoH doesn't seem to be a nonconstructive classpect. At their worst they might selfish or bad at having hope (especially for themselves, as Jake showed dealing with his Dirk problems). Jake also demonstrated a fully realized PoH can be deadly, apparently rivaling the power of the green sun when Jade attempts to overpower him. Not too shabby.

4.) Page of Void

As Horuss himself states, this is a confusing classpect. How does one realize the full potential of nothingness? A PoV would likely start out confused about who they are or what they want to be, and their biggest problem is that they see infinite possibilities and are overwhelmed, again, as Horuss himself states. A PoV would need to learn to be okay with not knowing every possibility, and would need to learn how to "void out" possibilities and find out what their strengths are. Think of a kid who has no clue what they want to do or be when they grow up. A fully realized PoV would have excellent voidy powers, easily become invisible and untraceable. They'd be able to create a sort of void cloud (if that makes sense) around people, although it would be stronger with them. Black holes are also a possibility.

5.) Page of Time

A PoT would likely start out either being way too violent and selfish and/or would struggle with accepting the end of things. If they got a grade on an assignment they felt they didn't deserve, they'd be the ones to argue a better grade, even if they've been told it's final. The journey of a PoT would force them to accept the inevitability of things, and would challenge them to be less violent in their reactions and use their time powers for good, and not petty or zealous reasons. Their time powers in question wouldn't be great. Perhaps they can only travel forward or back in time by only an hour? The biggest problem would be their mastery over their powers. Being violent, selfish, and inexperienced brings plenty of danger to other players (revenge?), and could create many doomed timelines if the PoT wasn't careful. A fully realized PoT would be an excellent fighter, maybe they could even go back in time and fix all their mistakes they made with their powers? Either way, their powers are more potent when they benefit the PoT rather than other players.

6.) Page of Doom

This is a tricky one. Being challenged by doom could mean the PoD is always doomed and must overcome said doom, or they simply aren't doomed and need to accept doom. Combined with fully realized powers, this makes the PoD a personified nuclear bomb, at least in my opinion. Using doom as a powerful weapon could be really good against an impressive foe, or could wipe out the players or even part of a session. It's very unclear which would be the case, so I stuck this classpect in the middle of the list. Another interpretation is that they serve themselves with doom. This could manifest as using doomed people/players to get what they want, which is basically slave labor. Not cool. Very unpredictable, the co-players must be very wary of a PoD.

7.) Page of Mind

Alright, here's where the mediocre gets sucky. A PoM would be challenged be decision-making and logic. Maybe they like thought and logic, but aren't good at it. Think an enthusiastic but bad chess player. Or perhaps they might be decent thinkers, but they're too indecisive to put that mind power to use or can't make decisions quick enough. Either way, they wouldn't be constructive to the session because they either can't think/strategist or they can't because they don't know which option they should pick. A fully realized PoM would be an excellent strategist (picture Ender from the Ender series), capable of finding weak points, using strategy to maximize damages, and being able to predict an attack. Powers would include said prediction, maybe they'd be able to visualize the field and how their strategies would play out before they make a move?

8.) Page of Light

Uy. I don't like this classpect. A light player is valuable because they can provide information, critical to a game like SBurb. Being a PoL, they'd be challenged by light and would either not be able to get information, or wouldn't understand and apply it well. Because this is an active class, they wouldn't be inclined to share this information or their insight with the team. They might also be unlucky. A PoL might also struggle with being in the spotlight; maybe they have stage-fright? Maybe they don't handle attention well and are insecure? A PoL will need to become comfortable with having attention and dealing with it accordingly. A fully realized PoL would have great powers and could get very lucky. The informational part wouldn't be as useful. What's the use of a walk through if you don't get it until the final boss? Eh, they might be able to adapt to what's going on in a battle and fight according to that info.

9.) Page of Space

A PoS would be challenged by space, let's start there. This applies to personal as well as physical space. A PoS might be very disorganized, and/or would have serious issues with *personal space*. Get it? The space aspect, as alternate Calliope tells us, is a lonely aspect. A PoS might have a tough time balancing "people time" and "alone time", and not being able to get help or be left alone (whichever is the problem) would pose a challenge to a PoS. The really bad thing about this classpect is that a space player is required in a null or fruitful session, and is responsible for breeding the Genesis Frog. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want a disorganized person literally challenged by space to be handling the creation of a new universe. The saving grace is that a PoS would be very powerful, rivaling or surpassing Jade's powers (remember she gained the power of the green sun!). Emotionally, a realized PoS would be able to manage their space and personal space well. They'd be able to benefit themselves by being organized and having more/less alone time.

10.) Page of Heart

Challenged by people skills and the self. Their classpect literally means "to serve the self". A PoH would be very obsessed with building up their image and reputation, but would be horrible at dealing with relationships. They wouldn't be kind, and changing would be hard. Because of the fact they will serve themselves, and aren't very good at it, they're nonconstructive to themselves as well as their co-players. A PoH would need to learn to be themselves in order to build their reputation, and that in order to be emotionally stable they'll need to be willing to change and also be open to others. In terms of powers, we don't have much to go off of. Maybe they can fake fake their identity to get behind enemy lines and gain an advantage? Their source of strength would be their own soul, so being emotionally healthy (hard in SBurb) is quite necessary in order to be a good PoH. Overall, an unhelpful class that doesn't have a big payoff when they reach their full potential.

11.) Page of Blood

Oh boy. I've been waiting to roast these last two classpects forever. The PoB is a VERY bad classpect. This is a leader aspect, meaning a PoB will likely be the leader in a session. Here's the problem- they're a page. They're inherently challenged by being able to lead and unify. "Serving themselves through unity" would manifest itself as a PoB wanting to delegate tasks or organize people to benefit their own desires or agenda, which could be very detrimental when playing SBurb. A PoB might even drive people away rather than bring them together. A PoB would need to learn how to lead, and how to lead and unify well. Fully realized, a PoB would basically be a powerful army general. Their fully realized blood powers would likely grant their teammates major power boosts, which could be very useful, especially if they're powerful to begin with. This would make the PoB a personified mega-steroid. In terms of combative powers, we actually have no clue what the powers of a blood player are, so I can't say.

12.) Page of Breath

AKA: The Roast of Tavros. This classpect. This. Classpect. It suffers from the same problem PoB does; you're not going to be a good leader throughout the session. And what's the point of an awesome leader if you're not going to actually get the awesome leader when you need to, you know, LEAD A SESSION?! At least you might have a good leader for the final battle and into the new universe, if you made it. The double whammy to this classpect is that being a PoB, they would struggle with change. Pages need to change to realize their true potential. A Page of Breath is bad at changing. DO YOU SEE THE PROBLEM HERE!? This is easily one of the worst classpects, it's very design has such anti-synergy that will make a PoB fundamentally useless. A PoB would need to learn to be flexible and actually accept change. Being challenged by movement, they might be slow or bad at moving. As stated earlier, Tavros starts out without the use of his legs, literally embodying this fact. A fully realized PoB would be a great leader. They would be very fast and great at moving (Tavros dances when he dumbfounds Vriska), and would have powerful windy powers. Does it make up for the journey? ... The answer should be painfully obvious.

Thanks for listening to my ramblings. I put a lot of thought into this list and the classpects, I hope you enjoy! Leave your thoughts in the comments!

#homestuck #page #classpect #classpects #breath #blood #light #void #time #space #hope #rage #life #doom #heart #mind #aspect #tavros #jake english #horuss

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littlemisssquiggles · 5 years

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Pinehead Headcanons: Oscar’s Other Rose II: Defining Rose Fox

Hey there fellow FNDM fam members. It’s your friendly neighbourhood squiggle meister here. Since some of you kindred folk showed interest, as promised I’ve put together this post sharing more info on Rose Fox.

Who is Rose Fox?

Rose Fox, full name---Rosaline Fox, is a RWBY-inspired original character of yours truly conceived from a Pinehead headcanon I previously shared about Oscar Pine formerly having a childhood friend whose character was based off of the Fox and the Rose from The Little Prince fairy-tale.

The Meaning of the Rose Fox Character

As most of us Rosegardening Pineheads have interpreted, aspects of The Little Prince story is being used to influence Oscar’s story. In the Little Prince, the Prince was in love with a Rose; a single red rose that had blossomed on his home planet. The Rose was very vain and made the Prince believe that she was the only rose in existence but to the Prince’s disappointment, he learns that the Rose had lied to him when he discovered other roses during his travels off-world. This revelation greatly upsets the Prince. However the Prince soon meets a wise red Fox. The Prince befriends this fox and it is through its teachings that the Prince ultimately learns that his rose was his one true love. The only rose that mattered to him because he loved her.

Rolling with this thought, I wanted to create a character that embodied the Fox from the Little Prince along with the lasting message he left on the Prince. But then I decided to take that concept a step further by also having this character draw inspiration from the Rose from the story as well. As Pineheads, we all know that the Rose in Oscar’s story---the one he is meant to fall in love with and be his one true Rose is of course going to be our silver eyed protagonist: Ruby Rose. As established by the series, Ruby and Oscar have grown close within the span of two seasons with their relationship destined to blossom further going into the Atlas Arc. Whether that means a very trusting close friendship or a beautiful romance is at the call of the CRWBY Writers.

That being said, this squiggle meister wanted to toy with the idea of … what if …Oscar had another Rose in his life who he shared a strong connection with. It is this Rose who ends up challenging Ruby on her relationship and feelings toward Oscar.

As the other Rose, this character provokes Ruby as she is another person that Oscar is very close to, who he could potentially be love in love with even given their bond. However as the Fox, this character will not only help Oscar to see his true feelings but also Ruby as well. As a matter of fact, the true purpose of Rose Fox character is to aid both our Rosebuds in realizing what they truly mean to one another. And thus, this is how the character of Rosaline Fox was born. At least, my version of her based on my Pinehead headcanon.

As some of you might be aware of there, there are now three more interpretations of the Rose Fox character. There is Rosaline Hood (by @lythecreatorart), Rosalind Fox (by @che1sea-xiao-long) and now Ianthe Regem (by @miki-13). I’ll talk more about my stance on the other Rose Foxes later in this post. The meat of all this is to mainly discuss my own version.

Rosaline Fox is my adaptation of the Rose Fox character based on my ‘Oscar’s Other Rose’ Pinehead headcanon.

In my interpretation, Rosaline secretly has feelings for Oscar and there is a bit of an unsubtle love triangle between Oscar and his two Roses. Rose loves Oscar but is also fully aware of his feelings for Ruby. It is very clear to Rosaline which rose has already tamed the young barn prince’s heart and as his friend; Rose is contented with Oscar being in love with someone else. His happiness matters more to her after all. However where Rose isn’t sure of is where Ruby stands with Oscar. Rose knows Oscar’s heart belongs to Ruby but what she wants to know is whether or not Ruby feels the same way.

In the story I’ve concocted, Ruby and Oscar have grown much closer during their time in Atlas. Ruby knows she likes Oscar very much and she would do anything for him. But lately, her feelings for him have felt strange. In the beginning, Ruby only saw Oscar as another dear friend she would give her life to protect. However the more Ruby spent time with Oscar getting to learn more about him as a person, the more her thoughts about him grew and changed to the point where she begins to question whether or not friendship is all there is to how she feels toward him. All of a sudden, Ruby finds herself conflicted on how she views Oscar. Does he mean more to her than she realized?

He’s just her friend, right? She only likes him as a friend…right? There isn’t anything…more, is there? Those are thoughts that race through Ruby’s mind whenever the subject of how she sees Oscar is brought into question. And the introduction of Rose Fox and her romantically-charges advances toward Oscar doesn’t help Ruby’s confliction.

By my headcanon, Rose is there to both challenge and help Ruby to realize her true feelings. She is the other Rose and the Fox together so that’s the dynamic I can see her having with Ruby. She’s meant to be perceived as a rival however at the same time, that isn’t all there is to her character.

Rose might seem antagonistic toward Ruby at times but she doesn’t hate her or her relationship with Oscar. Rose acknowledges Ruby as someone very important to Oscar and gives her that respect. However; that doesn’t mean that Rose is going to stand idly by and watch Ruby play games with Oscar’s feelings. Nor will she ever forgive her should she break Oscar’s heart. As the other Rose, Rose is meant to be a opponent to Ruby. She is meant to represent everything that Ruby is and isn’t (if that makes sense) and is meant to be someone who awakens a surprisingly insecure side to Ruby that she seldom shows (at least from my point of view).

Rose is young (closer to Oscar’s age than Ruby) but she is also drop dead gorgeous. Rosaline Fox is very beautiful and knows that she is. She’s almost rather conceited about it, even. To Ruby, it’s not so much that Rose is better than her in terms of skill. It’s that she is, admittedly, more beautiful compared to Ruby---at least in her eyes.

I’ve gone with this idea because it ties into a small hunch I have about Ruby. We all know that Ruby is very cute and pretty herself but what we don’t know is how Ruby perceives her appearance. Does she see herself as beautiful and confident in her looks or is she one of those types who feigns ignorance about their appearance; channelling their self-esteem into other aspects of their character while their true deep-seeded insecurity remains at the core of their personalities.

Throughout their interactions, Rose is an opponent who tests Ruby’s relationship with Oscar. Ruby; who is conflicted about her feelings for Oscar finds herself becoming uncharacteristically jealous of her Rose’s bond with Oscar especially knowing that lovely vixen has feelings for him. It’s a type of resentful sentiment that Ruby has never experienced before and she finds herself disgusted with it along with her confliction over how she truly feels.

In a nutshell, I created Rosaline around the idea of their being another Rose close to Oscar to test how Ruby feels toward Oscar while simultaneously helping her realize what those feelings are and what they mean. That is the character of Rosaline Fox.

What Does Rose Fox Look Like?

As you can tell from my sketches of her, Rosaline is a red Fox Faunus with dark skin and hair that is a gradient of dark brown mixed with orange before turning white at the tips like a fox tail. As a Faunus, Rose’s animal traits are her red fox ears and her prominent fangs and claws. Although her claws only erect whenever she’s angered to the point of feral rage. Beyond that, Rose’s key defining feature is her blue-grey eyes which could be mistaken for silver eyes at first glance. I know I definitely wanted Rose to have an eye colour similar to Ruby’s trademark silver eyes without being silver, if you know what I mean? Blue-grey definitely fit the bill.

In terms of height, I pictured Rose being as tall as Ruby Rose to further their similarities. Rose is meant to be about 15 going on 16. She’s meant to always be one year older than Oscar but still one year younger than Ruby planting her right in the middle of these two. Plus I’m finding the mental image of Oscar still being shorter than his two roses and sort of sandwiched between the two of them rather comical in my head. Another noteworthy feature about Rose is that she’s rather top-heavy for her age.

At only 15, Rose is a busty vixen which is another trait about her looks that often gathers a lot of unwanted attention from the boys. Picture her having the bust size of Yang Xiao Long but at age 15 (the same age Ruby Rose started the series at). As a matter of fact, I can even picture Rosaline and Yang kind of bonding on this experience, sharing a laugh over all the boldfaced gentlemen callers they had to put in their place when they came barking up the wrong tree.

I’m mainly making mention of this mostly in reference to Ly’s Rosaline Hood. For her design, when Ly mentioned that her girl’s got a smaller chest which gives her an advantage while performing her duties as her other alias, I couldn’t help but laugh since…well…my girl---Rosaline Fox is the farthest thing from flat. But don’t worry, like her Hood counterpart, Rosaline has something else about her that plays a very important part in her own secondary persona as well. Her semblance.

What is Rose Fox’s Semblance?

Okay. I’ve thought long and hard about this and I know the perfect power I want Rose Fox to have. Her semblance is Shapeshifting---she can alter her physical appearance to become a near-perfect replica of another. It doesn’t matter if the other person is young or old, tall or short, fat or skinny, male or female, human or Faunus ---Rose can become that person and is able to successfully impersonate them even down to their voice.

Though a very strong semblance, there are limits to this ability. For starters, unlike other known shapeshifters in RWBY such as Neopolitan, Rose can only replicate a form she’s already seen. The same goes for the mimicry characteristic of her shapeshifting semblance. Rose can only imitate a voice she’s already heard. Fortunately she’s trained her semblance well enough that all she needs is to hear a voice once and she’s able to imitate them perfectly from memory.

Another limit is that should Rose need to retain a form for an extended period, she can only hold it up to 9 hours total before her transformation gives out and she changes back to her normal form. In the past she was only able to hold a form a few minutes at best but she’s trained herself well enough over the years to master her power up to decent limit she can work with, especially on missions as a huntress.

The way how Rose’s semblance works (or at least how I’m going to describe it) is that it’s NOT an illusion-based power. Rose isn’t using mental mind tricks or cloaking herself in a haze that tricks the human eye into seeing her as someone else.

Think of Rose’s semblance working like Ditto from Pokémon or the Polyjuice potion from the Harry Potter series or even like how the Crystal Gems shapeshift in Steven Universe. When using her semblance, Rose’s body becomes like clay which she can then physically morph, contorting and shaping it to match the likeness of another being. It takes a great deal of discipline for Rose to maintain a consistent hold on her replicated form before her mask starts to crack and she slowly changes back to true self.

Fortunately, even before she began her huntress-training at Atlas, Rose has possessed her shapeshifting abilities from since she unlocked her semblance at a young age and through years of her own rigorous training, Rose has now reached a level where she has perfected control of her powers. It’s definitely enough for her to be seen as a threat on the battlefield to any poor unsuspecting foe; being a girl who can become anyone.

However there is one noticeable imperfection in Rose’s semblance. Though she’s perfected morphing herself even down to changing her skin colour at whim, for some odd reason Rose can never shake the one glaring flaw in her replications. Her eyes. No matter what form she takes, her eye colour stays the same and sticks out like a sore thumb. For example; Rose can shift into a perfect doppelganger of Oscar Pine and even talk like him but unless you know Oscar or at least know that his eyes are not blue-grey then you wouldn’t see right through Rose’s disguise.

This is actually a common prank that Rose and Oscar used to play as kids. Let say’s Rose unlocked her semblance when she was still a young kit at age five and one time she shifted into Oscar and tried to fool his mother---Dorothy while the real Oscar hid somewhere else laughing. Unfortunately for the young Rose, her trick didn’t work. It might’ve fooled their neighbours but not Dorothy Pine who knew fully well that her son had big bright hazel eyes (just like hers) and not blue-grey eyes like a certain Rose Fox she knew.

I’m actually kind of still contemplating whether or not to keep this flaw in Rose’s semblance. For now I’m going to keep it because there is a story reason as to why it’s there in relation to something I’ll discuss later in this post.

I know when I first mentioned Rose’s semblance, I described it as being a rather unorthodox power. In a way, it still feels that way to me in the context of the RWBY universe. The only canon shapeshifter in the series is Neo and even then her powers make sense within the show since her power is based on illusions that she manifests. Rose Fox, on the other hand, is literally human playdo. Well Faunus playdo. No one in RWBY has this kind of semblance so it made me wonder if it would work.

Doubts aside, I think shapeshifting is an ability that suits a character like Rose Fox perfectly. I can certainly see Rose’s genuineness as a person constantly being called into question by judgmental folks around her especially given the type of semblance she has. Now I’m picturing a small scene where some snobbish Atlesian students, jealous of Rose and her beauty whisper mean things about her behind her back. However, Rose being a Faunus with great hearing overhears every word these girls say about her and boldly puts them in their place for daring to disrespect her. Pick a small exchange of dialogue like this:

Snooty Female Altas Student #1: Hey look, it’s that Rose Fox girl.

Snooty Female Altas Student #2: *in disgust* Yuck! I hate her! She’s such a stuck up bitch. Thinks she’s all that just because she’s pretty. I mean, my dog has a pretty face too but even she knows her place unlike some animals.

Snooty Female Altas Student #1: Right? The only reason people like her so much is because she’s got big boobs. It’s not like she has anything else going for her.

Snooty Female Altas Student #2: Speaking of, did you know? Her semblance is like…some kind of shapeshifting or something.

Snooty Female Altas Student #1:Oh my gosh! Now it all makes sense. The perfect power for such a fake Rose.

Snooty Female Altas Student #2: *laughing haughtily* So fake! Hey do you think she morphs her boobs to look that big?

This curious question is only answered by Rose Fox interrupting the conversation by suddenly slamming her hands on the wall between the two other Atlas students. She did it so abruptly that both girls nearly jumped out of their skins as they edged away from a seething Rose who only smiled at them. Sweet but venomous.

Rose: *cheekily* I dunno ladies. Wanna test that theory of yours? You’re both welcome to cop a feel if you like?

Snooty Female Altas Student #1 and #2: …

Rose: What? No takers? Two seconds ago you were perfectly fine mouthing me off behind my back. Now all of a sudden you got nothing to say?

Snooty Female Altas Student #1: …Uh…we…

Snooty Female Altas Student #2: …We---We were only just---

Rose raised one clawed finger to silence the girls.

Rose: Tell you what? If neither of you got the balls to talk to me to my face then quit talking about me behind my back before you embarrass yourselves or…I embarrass you myself. Whichever wipes the smug looks off your ugly faces the fastest.

With that, Rose struts away, long hair swishing behind her back. But; not before getting one last shot in.

Rose: Oh and to answer your question. I may be a fake Rose but at least my girls are realer than the two of you combined. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it. Kisses ladies.*winks*

I take great pride in my Rosaline being the confident lovely flower not afraid to firmly remind rumour-spreading turds, especially the ones at Atlas Academy, to be mindful of her thorns.

In the beginning, I was going to make Rose’s semblance her being able to turn into a man. This idea was inspired by the manga series Fushigi Yugi: Genbu Kaiden where one of the main male characters---Uruki---one of the Seven Celestial Warriors of Genbu could change into a female version of himself and it was his female form that possessed control over the element of wind. This also makes me think of Ramna ½ where the lead guy turns into a girl if he gets splashed with water or something like that, I think.

Anyways I was going to originally make Rose’s semblance something like that. But then I figured why not just make shapeshifting it; one and done. As I’ve pointed out, this kind of power works perfectly for a character like Rose Fox since in East Asian folklore, foxes are depicted as familiar spirits possessed by magical powers and they are known to be shapeshifters.

“…The fox spirit is an especially prolific shapeshifter, known variously as the huli jing (fox spirit) in China, the kitsune (fox) in Japanese and the kumiho (nine-tailed fox) in Korea. Although the specifics of the tales vary, these fox spirits usually shapeshift, often taking the form of a beautiful young women who attempt to seduce men, whether for mere mischief or to consume their bodies or spirits…”

So yeah, Rose is a shapeshifter. That’s her power and as you’ll learn soon, it plays an important role in her backstory.

What is Rose Fox’s Signature Weapon?

Every aspiring huntress needs a weapon, right? Thanks to Ly’s brilliant idea, I’ve joined the bandwagon for Rose’s huntsmen attire and fighting style drawing inspiration from Robin Hood. I really love this idea a lot.

While I’m admittedly still working out the finer details of this, I know for a definite fact that I want Rose’s signature weapon to be dubbed: Artemis Rose; named after the Ancient Greek goddess of virginity, the wilderness, hunting, wild animals and protector of young children and women

So in keeping with that concept, I’m picturing Artemis Rose being a hybrid between a mechanized broad sword which transforms into a bow that arrows that are dust-infused bullets that Rose loads into her weapon via cartridges. Or something like that. Still working out the kinks on that one and weapon design isn’t exactly my forte.

However when I imagine Artemis Rose, I picture it being similar in design to Starseeker---the trademark bowsword used by Serah Farron in Final Fantasy XIII-2 but having the same functionality as Chatareus----the bladed compound sniper bow used by Vella Moisia in the RWBY Fan-made SLVR ‘Viridan’ Trailer created by Mark Zhang.

When is Rose Fox’s Birthday?

Ah yes, the penultimate question. One that I wish the CRWBY would give us for Oscar Pine but…no dice. Although the CRWBY haven’t (and may never really) confirmed Oscar's birthday, I'm still sticking to my Pinehead headcanon of Oscar being a Spring-born Easter baby with his birthday falling between either April or May making him a Taurus-born. My picks for Oscar's birthday were either April 21st or May 21st. I'm more leaning toward Oscar's birthday being April 21st. I was going to originally pick May as my fanon interpretation of Oscar's birth month since May is the fifth month in the year. This for me correlates well with October being the tenth month in the year which has been confirmed as Ruby's birth month.

However, April is usually an Easter-related month. Case in point, April 21st was Easter Sunday this year. I really want Oscar to be an Easter baby. So therefore, I’m sticking to my guns on that Pinehead headcanon. Another headcanon of mine is that whether or not his birthday falls in April or May, Oscar’s birthdate is the 21st. Why the 21st, you might ask? Because it draws a parallel to Princess Ozma from the Wizard of Oz. According to research, Princess Ozma was born August 21st making her a Leo. While I find the Taurus personality fits Oscar a lot better, I like the idea of his birthdate definitely being the 21st.

Unless the CRWBY tells me otherwise, from henceforth, this squiggle meister is going to treat April 21st as Oscar’s birthday. That's my headcanon and I'm gonna indulge in it. Leave me be, dagnabbit. By my stance, Oscar is a Taurus. He’s not my character but that’s how I see him.

But since Rosaline Fox is my character, I'm confirming her to be a Sagittarius born (the Archer sign) born in the Christmas month of December on the day of the winter solstice: December 21st. That’s her official birthday Rose Fox-fans.

I quite dig the concept of Oscar and Rose both sharing the 21st as their birthdates. It fits for me and my headcanon since they are meant to be close childhood best friends who grew up being thicker than thieves. So by the power invested in my theories, Oscar Pine is Easter, Ruby Rose is Halloween and Rosaline Fox is Christmas. I dig it.

What is Rose Fox’s Story?

Born December 21st, Rosaline Fox is the only child of Robyn and Marian Fox. Unlike most Faunus we've seen introduced in RWBY, my idea for Rose is that she is technically a half-breed by Faunus standards. In spite of World of Remnant claiming that Faunus and Man are compatible from a biological standpoint and are able to breed successfully, there haven’t been much examples of Faunus characters with human parents.

So with Rose, I decided to make one of her parents human. Her father, Robyn Fox was a red fox Faunus who chose a human to be his wife. Robyn and Marian lived a seemingly happy love and marriage raising their daughter. Despite them being two different species, Rose shares a close bond with her mother and Marian Fox loves her daughter unconditionally in spite of all the weird whispers and rather impolite, discriminatory glances she'd received from others learning that she, a human women, married a Faunus and had Faunus child. Though raising a Faunus child has been a different experience, that hasn’t stopped Marian from raising her daughter right.

Although Rose had a good relationship with her mother, her closest parental bond was with her father. Not just because he was a Faunus like her but mainly because, in Rose’s eyes, her father was her hero . A great man who was an even greater father. Emphasis on was---will get to that later.

Physically, Rose gets most of her lovely looks from her mother. Marian has always been a very beautiful woman able to grab the attention of any man who crosses her path and her vivacious rose of a daughter didn’t blossom too far from that garden. From Robyn, Rose of course inherited his Faunus traits as well as his grey-blue eyes.

Before Rose eventually went off to Atlas Academy as teenager, she would often train with her father. Although Robyn was no huntsman, he did know a thing or two about combat and wasted no time in arming his little rose with the knowledge to defend herself. This type of knowledge came in handy when Rose was a kid. She was quite the scrappy little kit back then.

In her old neighbourhood in Mistral, Rose would often be bullied by the neighbouring kids for being a Faunus. One or two times it even got physical. But luckily, Rose Fox could more than take care of herself. Even as a kit. In fact most of her fighting skills went into protecting the one friend she had back in Mistral: a young farm boy named Oscar Pine.

Just like Rose, Oscar was the only child to a single mother named Dorothy Pine. Oscar and Dorothy used to live right next door to Rose and her family. The two families were good friends with each other since Dorothy and Marian were childhood friends themselves and thus the two mothers raised their children to be great friends as well.

Rose and Oscar have known each other since they were in diapers and grew up together. And as friends, they were practically inseparable. The Fox and the Farm Boy .By my imagination, Rose and Oscar are one year apart with Rose being the older between the two.

When they were kids, Rose and Oscar figured they would be friends forever. However all that changed when Rose and her parents left Mistral. She was eight years old when this happened.

Robyn Fox had grown tired of slaving away in the mines of Anima for little to nothing and wanted to take his family to a place where he believed they could prosper better. So being the ambitiously zealous man that he was, Robyn abandoned his mining job in Mistral; uprooting his family and moving them all the way to the colder climate of Solitas in hopes of making it all the way up to Atlas.

This, of course, meant Rose leaving Oscar behind and the two young friends were forced to part ways on a childish yet wishful promise to hopefully meet each other again someday when they were older. A promise that wouldn’t be achieved for another eight years year when the two childhood friends are finally reunited in the hallways of Atlas Academy.

During the years since she moved from Anima, Rose and her family lived way down in the Barracks---a sector of Mantle designated to housing all immigrants; humans and Faunus alike (mostly Faunus) who came from other kingdoms to live the, quote, unquote, Atlesian Fantasy.

Living in the Barracks was a rather uncomfortable experience for Rose and her family for their first two years in Solitas. The cold winter climate was a first for Rose, having only been accustomed to living in the warm countryside of Anima. Fortunately Rose had much friendlier neighbours this time within the Barracks and her family were well-acquainted with their fellow Faunus families. After all, they all came to Solitas chasing after the same pipe dream. All they had to depend on was help from each other so getting along seemed like the better attitude to adapt in order to survive the cold winters. For better or worse, Rose remembered meeting some very nice Faunus folk, young and old, in the Barracks for her first part of her life as a citizen of Mantle.

However these ties would not last long. Eventually, luck came knocking at Robyn Fox’s doorstep when he was able to land a job with the Schnee Dust Company through a connection from another Faunus he worked with in Mantle. Through this new career, Robyn was finally able to move his family out of the Barracks and for a second time in her life, Rose was forced to leave the bonds she had made in the Barracks as her family migrated upward to the Atlas Kingdom.

By Faunus standards living within the upper Kingdom of Atlas, Rose were often looked down upon as some kind of pampered animal by her more human colleagues. To Rose’s astonishment, not a lot of Faunus make it to the top. The more common ones are the fraction of the Atlesian Faunus population who were fortunate enough to be born within the upper kingdom walls. The more common ones are those who were brought up on the backbones of past generations of Faunus who worked hard so that their descendants could be born citizens of Upper Atlas and thus never have to struggle from where where their ancestors had to start off.

For example, Neon Katt of Team FNKI--a Faunus, who by my theories, was born and raised in Upper Atlas but had ancestors who came from Mantle. Rose Fox was part of the fortunate few whose families got lucky enough to catch a break. The rest---the greater percentage of the Faunus population are forced to toil away in the lower kingdom.

As a matter of fact, the humans of Upper Atlas Kingdom were a lot less humble than the few Rose befriended in the Barracks. On the contrary, there were humans of Atlas who believef that Faunus like Rose shouldn’t even be allowed within the upper kingdom. To them, their place in society should be down toiling away in the Barracks or any other part of the decrepit Mantle population.

This was an offensive terminology and assumption of her character that Rose despised with a passion. No one knew of the struggles that her and her parents had to endure just to get where they were in the present. No one knew of her father’s sacrifice. All those long days and nights he used to slave back in the dust mines of the Anima countryside just so he could provide enough food on the table to get his family through the month. No one knew of all those lonely cold nights her and her mother would sit up waiting for her father to come home safely from working double while they were stationed in the Barracks. All those times she spent comforting her distressed crying mother who was often very concerned for her father’s safety knowing the dangers of working within the much colder and less stable dust mines of Mantle.

No one knew anything about her at all so who were they to judge her as a whole based soley on her status as a Faunus? As far as Rose knew, she was blessed. Not pampered. As far she knew, her father had found his calling working for the Schnee Dust Company. If it weren’t for the SDC then her father wouldn’t have achieved the chance to finally provide the life he’s always dreamed for his family. Her father was making more than enough money to spoil Rose and her mother with everything they’ve ever wanted. As far as she knew, everything was as it should be. Everything was perfect, right?

Little did Rose know at the time, nothing is ever truly perfect or as it seems on the surface. And like any classic superhero origin events, these are the events that led to one Faunus girl becoming one of the most notorious vigilantes known to Atlas.

Rise of the Rose Hood

I’m going to dedicate to this section to Ly (@lythecreatorart.). I owe a lot of the ideas that went into crafting this side of Rose’s story to her brilliance and her Rose Fox variation: Rosaline Hood.

Here’s what I’m thinking: I have this small squiggly theory where part of the Faunus abuse and exploitation by the SDC is the higher ups (like Jacques Schnee) secretly blackmailing the Faunus employed under their company to take down their enemies for them. I couldn’t come up with a better name for this organized Faunus cabal so for the sake of this concept, I’m just going to dub them the Cerberus Triad for now.

The Cerberus Triad are a crime syndicate of Faunus secretly organized by the SDC to forcefully scope out and enlist vulnerable Faunus employed under their fine establishment to perform odd jobs on behalf of the company. And by odd jobs I mean crimes ranging from vandalism and burglary and even kidnapping, battery and in worse cases--- murder. All for the SDC.

Since World of Remnant mentioned that the SDC take pride in using shady tactics to out their competitors, my concept is through the use of their organized Cerberus Triad who are devoted to serving them, whether it’s their choice or not.

Basically think of Cerberus Triad as being the opposite of the White Fang. While the White Fang were more of a radical terrorist group who fought the humans proclaiming peace and equality for the Faunus race, the Cerberus Triad were Faunus who worked with the humans in charge of the SDC and profited from basically being their pawns at the expense of their freedom.

To the most Faunus involved with the Triad, at least the more dedicated members who’ve been so exposed to the lifestyle that they can’t afford to quit, they didn’t care if they were being used by the SDC. To the more third class Faunus who resided in the slums of Atlas and Mantle, the Triad was their one way of surviving. It was either that or death to them and their starving families. To those Faunus, they had nothing to lose. Why bother fighting against the humans when you can just as easily let their richest spoil you. All it took was just selling your soul to the SDC and getting your hands dirty taking care of their dirty laundry. That’s pretty much the concept I have for the Triad.

The Cerberus Triad are the property of the SDC and comprise mostly of poor Faunus---particularly the ones struggling to care for their families, who are at the complete mercy of the company. These Faunus are drafted to perform the SDC’s crimes for them under the promise of a better life.

A handful of these Faunus are roped by fellow Faunus who the Triad send to pull them in. The rest are threatened with the death of their families if they didn’t submit to the joining the Triad. The Cerberus Triad are the hellhounds who guard their masters’ identities and wait dutifully to be deployed against their masters’ foes. They are even willing to take the fall for their masters’ crimes (or worse), all the while the rest of the world remains oblivious to what the SDC has really been up to.

Though the hellhounds are indeed compensated handsomely for their services--- after all, the SDC is led by masterminds who know how to keep their pets in line; it doesn’t change the fact that these Faunus are forced into doing despicable things for the the SDC just for sake of keeping their families safe and cared for.

In reality, the hellhounds of the Cerberus Triad are no better than a pack of tamed animals who the SDC have by the throat and aren’t afraid to exploit their slaves as they please. The worse of the all are the Triple Threats--the proclaimed Heads of the Cerberus Triad.

In the Triad hierarchy, the Triple Treats are three alpha dogs---the ones entrusted by their masters to keep their identities a secret while additionally luring in and groom their fellow hellhounds. And should any of the pups lose their way, the Triple Threats are the top dogs the SDC deploy to ‘take care’ of them.

The Triple Threats are the prime examples of Faunus who have been so inbred in the culture of the Triad that they dare not betray their masters---willing to even kill their fellow Faunus brethren if it meant keeping their riches. To these particular Faunus, any life is better than having to rot away in the cold of Solitas. Even a life of crime.

I know these are all just ideas I’m spouting here but…admittedly this could be a pretty cool concept if done canonically. The White Fang are now a thing of the past as of the V5 and replacing them are the Faunus Militia Makes me wonder if there is a chance we might see the Belladonnas and Ilia Amitola returning at some point during the Atlas Trilogy as part of the subplot involving the Crimes of the SDC as teased by Adam Taurus in V6.

Through the White Fang, we’ve seen an example of Faunus willing to fight the humans for equality and freedom. Now imagine if things are different over in Atlas and Mantle where the Faunus who are slaves to humans being forced to do crimes for them. A concept similar to the Cerberus Triad could potentially be a nice contrast from the White Fang while still continuing the subplot of Faunus abuse. Who knows?

Resuming Rosaline’s story, Robyn Fox---her father, was secretly a hellhound for the Cerberus Triad. That was how he was able to acquire the income to get his family out of the Barracks up to Atlas. Like any hellhound, Robyn was rewarded with more money than he could ever dream off. Enough to provide his girls with the liverish lifestyle they deserved. Unfortunately, this also meant Robyn living a double life---lying to Marian and Rose about all the ‘good work’ he was doing for the SDC when the truth was that he was at the complete beck and call of the Cerberus Triad.

Through the Triad, Robyn would do things that he’d never be able to forgive himself for. Things that made him feel a tremendous amount of shame especially to his baby Rose who idolized him. One time Rose even told Robyn that she hoped she could do great work as a huntress someday just like what her father was doing with the SDC.

It was with this statement that Robyn Fox made a choice. For his daughter’s sake and his dignity as a father, he needed to quit his criminal ways. He needed to leave the Triad once and for all and let the world know the truth about the SDC.

Unfortunately for Robyn Fox, one does not simply walk away from the iron fist of the Cerberus Triad. It was a mistake he paid for with his life. At some point, Robyn threatened to quit the Triad with plans to rat them out to the Atlesian law enforcements. Without the Triad’s knowledge, Robyn had secretly been gathering evidence he had planned to use to expose the identities of masterminds within the SDC behind the Cerberus Triad. He had put together a list---the names of SDC members who Robyn suspected to be the Masters or at least accomplices as he gathered his proof. Among the names of the expected Masters was Jacques Schnee---the CEO.

Robyn had disclosed this plan to a dear friend---a fellow disgruntled hellhound who shared Robyn’s same sentiments about leaving the Triad for good. Robyn figured he could trust said friend. He was wrong.

As one might expect, Robyn’s so-called ally backstabbed him and ratted him out to the Triple Threats who then executed his death. Robyn Fox wasn’t just killed. He was murdered---corned like prey in the wilderness, beaten brutally to death before being shot through the head and left for dead bleeding out in the cold.

All the while this was happening; a petrified Rose Fox---too scared to move, hid somewhere else where the attackers couldn’t detect her. Rose had been out with her father when the Hellhounds came for him. Worried that they might hurt Rose too, Robyn stowed Rose away somewhere safe and told her that no matter what she heard, she must not move. Don’t move. Don’t make a sound. Stay perfectly still.

So Rose stood still. She stayed as stagnant as a statue made of clay as masked assailants---at least five of them---took their shots at murdering her father while she did nothing. She couldn’t make out their faces from where she stood; not like she looked.

But she never forgot their scent. Their scent would haunt Rose in her nightmares for many days to come; particularly one person. The face of the last person her father saw before he was shot dead. In the name of the SDC, the culprit boldly announced before pulling the trigger.

As a fox Faunus, Rose has excellent hearing and sense of smell. Her sense of smell is strong enough for her to identity someone based on how they smell alone. This is ironically how she and Oscar reunited. She never forgot her best friend’s scent so she immediately recognized him after catching a whiff of his trail when Oscar and Ruby were exploring the Atlas school compound before Oscar’s first day at the academy. Let’s just say, to Rose Fox, Oscar has a rather strong odour to him that she can smell from a mile away.

This plays into the fun fact is that pine trees are known for their nice smell so now I’m imagining Rose Fox constantly trying to sniff Oscar because she really likes his scent; all the while encouraging others to smell Oscar too which embarrasses the poor farm boy.

Getting back on track here---following her father’s murder, Rose was never the same again. On the surface, she tried to be her old chipper self for the sake of her mother who was completely devastated by what happened to her husband. But at her core, Rose was hiding an insatiable taste for revenge. She wanted to hunt down the people who took her father away from her. She wanted justice and it was a justice she sought out for herself.

This is the part that I owe Ly for inspiring with her Rosaline Hood. In Rosaline’s Hood story, she is the Robbing Hood.

However in my Rose’s story; to make a long elaborate story short, her father’s murder inspired Rose Fox to become the Rose Hood.

Using an old photo of her father when he was a young adult, Rose used his likeness to create an alternate persona of the Rose Hood to live out her vendetta. No one would ever suspect that a mysterious male Faunus vigilante is in fact a teenage Faunus girl with a shapeshifting semblance, correct?

Initially, Rose had only meant to use the Red Hood to hunt down her father’s assailants---donning the face of a Deadman to bring the men who killed him to justice by his---well her hands. However the further Rose went down the rabbit hole, the more she realized that the problem was far bigger than she imagined.

Eventually Rose found her father’s list and started unravelling the truth about the Cerberus Triad and their Masters. It was something that ultimately opened her eyes to what the Faunus of her kingdom had to go through just to survive. It opened her eyes to what her father had to do just for them to survive.

That’s when Rose made a change. She decided to turn her newfound persona into a vigilante hero who fought the Cerberus Triad.

Since the Cerberus Triad would pillage on behalf of the SDC, the Rose Hood would arrive to actively thwart their crimes. At the time, all Rose wanted to do was stop the Cerberus Triad from hurting anyone else. But that objective changed for a second time when word of Rose’s adventures as the elusive Rose Hood became the talk of the town.

Before Rose knew it, the Rose Hood became a household name; especially within the Faunus community. A feat which humbled honoured Rose but still she maintained her cover. By day she was Rose Fox---your average 15-year-old first year Atlas student attending huntsmen academy. But by night, she was the Rose Hood fighting to stop the Cerberus Triad in hopes that her escapades would bring her closer to her real target. Rose had planned to finish what her father started---to bring down the SDC by uncovering the identities of the Masters and bring them to justice for all their crimes against the Faunus community.

Not before long, as the Rood Hood’s popularity continued to grow, he ultimately attracted the attention of a particular group of Faunus who would ultimately become his followers. Tired of being used by both the Triad and the SDC, this band of merry men formed the Robbing Roses, a cult of thieves formally bred by the Triad who now swore their allegiance to the Red Hood.

The Robbing Roses tracked Rose’s movements as the Rose Hood and one night, one of their founding members found him and begged the Hood to be their leader against the Cerberus Triad.

And so, Rose became their fearless leader. Under the guise of the Rose Hood, Rose secretly leads the Robbing Roses in her crusade against the Cerberus Triad and the SDC.

The Robbing Roses

The Robbing Roses were once Faunus who once worked under the tirade of the Cerberus Triad and now work with the Red Hood to bring down them down and the SDC. Whatever profits they managed to score from their escapades is then used to help these men take care of their families particularly the ones who still have family they were trying to take out of the Barracks and Mantle. Most of these Faunus are husbands and fathers who the Triad were easily able to manipulate before. Now under the Rose Hood’s leadership, they are free to fight against their original oppressors by thwarting their crimes and stealing back from them.

Since the SDC use the Faunus to create the Cerberus Triad to take out their competitors then the Robbing Roses fight to stop the Cerberus Triad while targeting the SDC. Since the SDC seems to be built on the blood, sweat and tears of the Faunus they exploit for their own selfish desires under the kingdom’s nose then it would only be fair that their fortunes should go to the Faunus, correct?

The Robbing Roses work to reveal the truth of the SDC’s true colours to the world, all the while stealing from these very rich Masters to give back to the poor they viciously exploited.

So in addition to stopping the Triad, the Robbing Roses plunder the various SDC establishments scattered throughout Atlas; taking what they can to help the families of the Faunus who are trying desperately to get out of the Barracks; particularly the one’s of those working among the Robbing Roses.

That’s the concept that I have for these guys. Imagine basically the Phantom Thieves from Persona 5 but with a Robin Hood spin on it. If Rosaline as the Rose Hood is meant to embody Robin Hood then Robin Hood isn’t complete without his merry men, right? I’m not sure what the Merry Men of Robin Hood’s story looked like however for the Robbing Roses, I’m seeing a full group of men sporting hooded capes; red like roses and full face masks to hide their true identities.

Dissimilar to the masks worn by the White Fang, the Robbing Roses wear masks depicting the very animals the Faunus of the Robbing Roses embody. The mask is white with intricate red detailing that resembles rose petals and thorns. Remember the Anbu from the Naruto anime series? Picture something like that for their masks designs.

And since we’re talking about Robin Hood and the Merry Men, then obviously there needs to be a Little John character too.

Here’s my idea: Though loyal to the Rose Hood, none of the Robbing Roses know of his true identity as the teenage Rosaline Fox. None except for one man. A bear Faunus--- who the others called Jahn Little. I’ll dub him that for the sake of this idea I’m going with.

Basically Jahn served as the right hand and second in command to Rose when she was the Rose Hood. Jahn was also the man who formed the Robbing Roses when they were just a few struggling members and was the person who sought out the Rose Hood in the first place.

When Rose decided to ultimately abandon the mantle of the Red Hood, Jahn nobly gave up himself to the authorities claiming himself to be the Rose Hood. When asked by Rose why he would take the fall for her, Jahn revealed it was because he owed a great debt to Robyn.

Remember that dear friend I mentioned before who ratted Robyn out to the Triple Threats?

It was Jahn but it wasn’t as it seemed. Jahn was forced into ratting out his friend since the Triads intimidated him into do it. He gave up his one trusted friend in the Triad to save his own skin. Jahn was actually there that night when the Triad murdered Robyn. He was the man who tried to warn Robyn of his hit but arrived too late to save him. He did however see Rose. It was the first time Jaune saw the daughter Robyn spoke so highly of; although the two would not officially meet until the Robbing Roses form.

As for Jahn’s motive for working against the Triad and going to jail for Rose---well let’s say it was done as a final act of selflessness because Jaune had nothing else he could lose. He had already lost his family. Wife left him when he failed to provide. Jahn only joined the Triad because he had hoped he could make enough to win back his wife and son. When Jahn wanted to quit, the Hellhounds had his only family---his wife and son murdered to prove a point.

Similar to Robyn, the loss of his family was Jahn’s eye opening moment. The moment that made him realize the Cerberus Triad and the SDC needed to be stopped once and for all before other innocent lives were endangered; Faunus and humans alike. It was the moment that made him cling to the image of the Red Hood as a symbol of hope. And what was ultimately his motive for taking the fall for the young Rosaline after learning her secret.

Rose was the one who gave Jahm hope when he needed it most so giving himself up in her place was his way for repaying the kindness that her and Robyn gave to him. Jahn may have acted in his own self-interest toward Robyn but he wasn’t about to do the same with his daughter. That’s the idea.

Final Thoughts| Garden of Roses

And…that’s it!

Phew! Alrighty, I think I’m about ready to wrap up this long meta. I was going to include another section to discuss more about what a Rose Fox Character could potentially mean for Oscar’s story arc. Buuuut…I believe it would be best if that’s yet another Pinehead Headcanon saved for a next day. Oscar’s Other Rose Part III, ya’ll!

Anywhozzits, as I’m closing off, I just would like to take this moment to personally thank Ly, Chelsea and Miki. You’ve seen me mention their names a lot throughout this post and I really do owe these three cool cats a lot for their encouragement and influence.

Lately this squiggle meister has been feeling kind of as if folks might be getting bored of reading my RWBY content. Not saying it’s true. It’s just a lingering concern of mine with each post I make to Tumblr. So when I first shared my Oscar’s Other Rose Pinehead headcanon, like any idea I wasn’t sure how fellow FNDM fam might respond to it; especially the Pineheads.

But when I saw Ly create Rosaline Hood, as I told her, I was floored man! Then after Ly came Chelsea with her adorable Rosalind Hood and now Miki with Ianthe Regim. As someone who generally tends to talk a lot in her posts, words are not enough to describe just how genuinely happy I felt seeing all three of these beautiful Roses.

It’s because of this why I am completely open to their being multiple interpretations of the Rose Fox Character. When Ly first shared her Rosaline Hood, I didn’t want to be like “Her Rose isn’t the real Rose because she doesn’t look like my Rose”, y’know what I mean? HELL to the NAH! I was over the freaking moon seeing her first character design for Rosaline Hood the first time as well as her adorkable storyboards of Oscar and Rose’s friendship. I love seeing those. Maybe this post might’ve even inspired a few of those drawings. Who knows?

The same is to be said for Chelsea’s Rosalind Hood and Miki’s Ianthe Regim. Speaking of Miki, love, love, LOVE your drawings of all the Roses together interacting. Beautiful!

I welcome ALL incarnations of the Rose Fox Character. Even though Rosaline Fox is my version, I am more than happy with anyone else creating their own Rose Fox-inspired character. It’d be lovely to see this garden grow. It’s actually really cool when ideas inspire more ideas. My original headcanon may have helped inspire Rosaline Hood from Ly but it was Ly’s Rosaline Hood who helped inspire Rosaline, Rosalind and Ianthe too. It’s freaking crazy and I love it.

So yeah, if anyone is interested in making their own Rose Fox characters, you’re more than free to do so. The one thing I ask is that you share them with yours truly once you’re done since I’d love to see them. Just…uhm…no rule 34 level of inappropriateness please. I am open to more Roses but respectfully keep that kind of stuff out of the garden, please and thank you mighty kindly.

What would actually be beyond awesome is if the Concept of the Rose Fox Character becomes so popular that even the CRWBY Writers pick up the idea and actually decide to add their own version to the canon of RWBY. Yes, yes, I know that’s mega wishful thinking here but a squiggle meister could dream, can I?

For now, it just gets me excited seeing art of all the Roses that blossomed so far. What’s left for me to do now is to finish up my design of Rosaline so that I can join Ly and Miki on drawing all the Roses together.

I planted one tiny seed of a Pinehead headcanon and from it blossomed not just one but now four Roses, all lovely and rich in their own unique way. That’s enough for a huntsmen team.

Even though I shared all of this ideas for Rosaline Fox and her story, that doesn’t necessarily mean that my concepts are set in stone for other versions. To my fellow Rose Fox parents, you guys are more than free to use elements from Rosaline’s story for your Roses or create your own if you’d like.

Speaking of:

What’d you think of Rosaline Fox now after reading her story?

@miki-13, @lythecreatorart and @che1sea-xiao-long, you guys asked me for my thoughts on your Roses and your ideas for their respective stories; now I’d like to know your thoughts on Rosaline’s if you don’t mind.

And if anymore Roses are to spawn, they are welcome in the garden as well. As I told Chelsea and Miki, this squiggle meister is fully on board with this Garden of Roses: A Rose Fox Multiverse that’s happening here.

I love that Rosaline now has three fellow Rose Fox sisters whose stories she helped shape and who’s own stories helped shape hers. I don’t usually indulge in creating content from my RWBY theories and headcanons but your contributions have made this so much fun and for what it’s worth, I hope we can keep having more fun with our Roses.

Who knows? Maybe from this I can get the nudge to create more RWBY Squiggle OCs inspired by other Pinehead headcanons I’ve made. Like Tippetarius from this Pinehead headcanon right here. I guess we shall see. For now, let’s keep the fun going guys. Thanks for reading!

More Squiggles’ RWBY Content

~LittleMissSquiggles (2019)

#rwby #oscar pine #rosaline fox #rwby rosegarden #rwby theories #pinehead headcanons #squiggles pinehead headcanons #rwby: garden of roses #rwby: defining rose fox

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spirit-science-blog · 3 years

Video

youtube

Hey there, welcome back! Today we’re going to talk about everyone’s favorite Saturday morning Grandpa...or I guess Uncle would be more accurate...that’s right..we’re finally going to dive into the Sagely Wisdom of Uncle Iroh and the immense spiritual knowledge that he teaches the main characters….and us in the process...so sit back, grab a Tsungi horn, heat some Jasmine Tea, and one more thing before we get started, on the subject of Wisdom - we do a live event every full moon, every month called the Wisdom Moons. The next one is coming up soon! Use the link below to see how you can join our live event. I hope to see you there!

For those of you who haven’t seen the show, Iroh is the oldest main character that we follow actively through the series.... and is pretty much your Lao Tzu or Mystical Buddha kind of guy. He was a general of the Fire Nation and one of its greatest warriors, having the title “The Dragon of the West,” laying siege to the Earth Capital, but retired after his son Lu Ten was killed in action, and he became disillusioned with the war effort. When we first meet him though, Iroh is introduced as the uncle of Zuko, and acts as a father figure to him, as well as a moral compass, giving him great advice -which Zuko often ignores…..and accompanies him on his hunt for the Avatar, slowly teaching him to accept his true nature and become more in balance with himself.

Despite his fire nation origin, though.. he’s not a bad guy...in fact, he’s probably one of the beating moral hearts of the show, who -in stark contrast to Zuko, is easygoing, friendly, and dryly good-humored….let’s face it, aside from Sokka, he’s probably at the top of the list for most peoples favorite characters growing up. Exceptionally… when I’m old and grey, I want to be just like Iroh… and Gandalf… and Dumbledoor anyways right from episode 1, we see Iroh’s greatest virtue and wisdom...patience. Iroh doesn’t have it easy on the show, for, in the beginning, Zuko treats him pretty poorly, ignoring his advice and shouting at him a fair bit. Yet Iroh is there for him, no matter what, as he understands the importance of family and being there for the people who matter, undoubtedly coming from his son's loss.

As the series progressed and he got more screen time, we started to see his actions' real wisdom, but season 1 set his groundwork up as embodying patience, serenity, and mindfulness. Unlike most of the fire nation, he’s a man who sees beauty in the most superficial aspects of life, treating his self-imposed exile almost like an extended vacation to see the world. As Colin Mchannan points out...Iroh is a great man, sure, but what makes him truly wise and believable is his journey. He didn’t start as a mystical Buddha with life all figured out. He was broken….having lost the thing that mattered most to him -his child, and it defined him. The best part, though, and the ultimate lesson, is that Iroh let it define him in the best way. He could have been bitter and angry, but he instead chose to live the remainder of his life to the fullest in an attempt to avoid the mistakes and regrets from his earlier life….

In fact, in "Tales of Ba Sing Se" (one of the best episodes ever…), it’s suggested in that section where he sings Little Soldier Boy that some of that great optimism and generosity that he’s known so well for are a form of post-traumatic growth coming from the loss of his son. Like the waterbenders, he embraces the concept of flow and learns to move with the tide of life rather than stay stagnant and bitter.

Speaking of Waterbenders, this brings us to some of his best attributes that countless people have learned from…..his quotes...of everything, he’s probably best known for his words of wisdom as he freely advises most of the characters throughout the series. One passage, in particular, is often brought up as one of his best. When teaching Zuko in season 2 about lightning bending, Iroh explains that “It’s important to draw wisdom from many places. If we take it from only one place, it becomes rigid and stale.” Adhering to this philosophy eventually led him to develop a lightning bending -a technique never before seen, by studying the push and pull of water bending. Equally, he tries to convince Zuko that understanding Earth bending is just as important when he's fire turning to develop a real understanding of the element...which amazingly, Zuko then carries on to Aang during his training later on..

One of the best parts of Season 3 is when we learn that Iroh lied about killing the last Dragon to protect the ancient Dragon Masters Ren and Shaw, and even be their student. Through his compassion, he drove his firebending powers from vitality, heart, and life force rather than from rage as most of his contemporary firebenders did, thereby gaining a power none of them had.

For us, wisdom is essentially the same when applied to any aspect of life. Suppose you learn about something from only one source. In that case, you’ll pick up all the biases and influences from that source and never form your own opinion...but if instead, you look in different places for the inherent wisdom, you’ll end up a much more whole and balanced individual. I think Iroh’s insight here stems from his understanding of the four nations as balancers of each other. See, his nature and the course of his life have brought him to a philosophy that embraces peacefulness, harmony, and mutual understanding rather than conflict….but what’s more, it seems like he would much rather see the four nations live in mutual peace as opposed to single fire nation rule, as each one brings something unique to the table

While people often compare him to a Budhha like figure, I think a much better comparison is Budhai, the Chinese monk who’s often depicted as the fat or laughing Buddha, rather than Sidhurtta himself. Ironically, despite his carefree and detached attitude, he is something of a hedonist in his old age. He likes subtle pleasures, fancy tea, and seems to focus his life much more on relaxation and fun than he does on helping Zuko find Aang or engage in his nation’s nationalistic war. He often flirts with loads of girls in the series and is called handsome a couple of times! And he loves it….maybe he watched our recent episode on materialism and took it to heart…. Or maybe it’s a natural result of his earlier years conquesting, his soul is liberated from war, and all he wants now is to be jolly.

Ironically though, despite his focus on pleasure and relaxation, he does remark in season 1 that “the best tea tastes delicious whether it comes in a porcelain pot or a tin cup,” implying that it’s what’s nurtured inside that truly matters…..but he does accidentally poison himself with a flower in that episode too...sooo...you win some and lose some I guess.

The point is, like the kids of Avatar, he doesn’t take himself too seriously and takes the time to take “moments of quiet” in the face of a decision…..I was joking last time about him being a big kid. Still, the more I look at him, he kind of is…..and it’s excellent...while many of the series' notable characters were maturing throughout the show. Of course, there’s the 14-year-old warlord to boot, Iroh was already a "changed man" who already suffered tremendous loss and "matured" through that it…reminding us that “Failure is simply a chance to start over anew, this time only wiser.” Even when opening his tea shop, he points out that “There’s nothing wrong with a life of peace and prosperity,” advising Zuko to abandon his quest for honor….but even then, he never forces him because it has to be Zuko's decision to understand that on his own

Speaking of starting things, remember earlier how we explained that Iroh liked to draw wisdom from all the elements rather than just fire? A couple of fans have pointed out that his attitude towards tea is the perfect example of this. While Iroh’s love of tea is often played for laughs, there’s an underlying meaning and purpose -and to some extent, lesson, behind his passion for jasmine and ginseng tea that’s not often talked about.

To make an outstanding cuppa tea, all four of the bending elements are required. You need clay for the teapots and cups or the leaves from the ground, the water for the substance, Fire to heat the Tea, and the air to blow on the hot tea to cool it so you can drink it (even if you leave it out to cool naturally, it would get cold and taste worse). If you take one element out, the tea is either impossible to make or worse without it.. Iroh knew this, just as he knew that the only way to defeat the Fire Nation was for all four elements to work together. When on the boat to Ba Sing Se, Iroh gets a cold cup of tea and heats it with fire breath to the perfect temperature -all the while accidentally revealing to Jet that he’s a fire bender…

Iroh learned several things by watching other bending tribes. He knew that understanding others was the only way to be whole. Tea, then, is a physical manifestation of these teachings. On the surface, Iroh’s love of tea could be viewed as nothing more than a simple character trait, but it also serves as a representation of his spirituality and calming nature. In the context of achieving harmony and balance among the four nations, it's a lesson on the value of tolerance, balance, and listening that Uncle Iroh passed on to Zuko. And while this theory is just Reddit headcanon, it's a deep and meaningful way to look at Iroh's love of tea in a new light….he didn’t enjoy any old cup, only one that was truly and fully balanced with all the elements working together in unison

But the beautiful thing about Iroh is that he also can stand for the intensity of the fiery element and knows precisely how and when to use it. He rarely exhibits such power; one example is when he yells at Zuko under Lake Laogai.

Play clip: It's time for you to look inward and start asking yourself the big question: who are you, and what do YOU want?!

And that’s when he’s delivering compassionate wisdom with intensity! He also liberates all of Ba Sing Se at the very end of the series, after a getting ripped in jail montage, and shows exactly why they called him the Dragon of the West. All in all, Iroh’s philosophy of flow is undoubtedly inspired by Taoist values and helps to bring profound spiritual wisdom to a younger audience. If you haven’t seen it yet, I would recommend wholeheartedly going and checking out the series...even just for him alone….I could have written this entire video made up of just his quotes, and it would be equally as great...so I think Iroh is a modern-day ascended master. Even his bending forms are influenced by Southern Shaolin, Dragon, and Form-intention styles of Kung-Fu, all of which match his personality pretty well.

Interestingly, Kaci Ferrell pointed out in reviews that after the season 2 episode of Legend of Korra where Iroh appeared to her in the spirit world, Korra became a much more likable character with the fans because she took Iroh’s wisdom on board…..even in death he’s bringing the fandom together! So with that, thanks so much for watching! We’ll leave a link to some of Iroh’s best quotes and snippets of wisdom below so you can check them out, but otherwise, totally go and watch ATLA cause there’s so much more wisdom hidden inside it...and always remember, above all else…….that being sick of tea is like being sick of breathing. Toodles!

Sources:

The Lost Scrolls: Fire, page 159 of The Lost Scrolls Collection.

Director: Ethan Spaulding; Writer: Elizabeth Welch Ehasz (April 7, 2006). "Return to Omashu." Avatar: The Last Airbender. Season 2. Episode 3

Ferrell, Kaci (November 9, 2013). "The Legend of Korra season 2 episode 10 review: A New Spiritual Age". Den of Geek.

McMahon, Colin (March 28, 2014). "The Wisdom to Be Learned from Uncle Iroh." The Red Rings of Redemption.

Director: Giancarlo Volpe; Writers: Michael Dante DiMartino, Bryan Konietzko (2006-09-15). "The Drill." Avatar: The Last Airbender. Season 2. Episode 13. Nickelodeon.

https://www.reddit.com/r/FanTheories/comments/gtuca1/avatar_the_last_airbender_irohs_love_for_making/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

#spirituality #science #ascenscion #mystery school #spirit science

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matts4-blog1 · 6 years

Text

track # 7 : fuck

youtube

Aim

so we finally come to the track quite elegantly titled fuck. this tracks original concept was to try and iterate what anxiety really feels like for me, and to sort of try and personify what a panic attack is like to have.

my own personal emotions around anxiety are that when ever I realise that I’m having a panic attack or feeling the anxiety of everybody’s eyes peering into you and revealing your deepest insecurities within yourself, is that I get fucking angry that I have to deal with this completely irrational emotion. essentially whenever I recognize myself having these feelings I start to almost ‘fuck out’ even more as instead of just being emotionally charged with the anxiety I’m also just very angry which comes out to have some weird results within me.

so in this track I try to showcase all those feelings in a short piece that I wanted to try and embody an actual anxiety attack by making the piece as intense as possible and try to encapsulate the feeling of really wanting to just physically tear out what ever that’s inhibiting you with your bare hands and just rip it apart, blood and gore all fully involved but since your in a pure state of rage it just does not matter.

Elements

with the nature of this track being so intently conflicting and nonsensical, there is a large clash within the music for which element could be considered the primary one, during production I tried to make sure that all of the elements were almost equal in there overall effect but due to the nature of the amount of overdrives being present throughout alot of the track, some elements started to shine through.

one of the most notable elements in my opinion is the grungy, hard synth that plays sounding like a heavily overdrived and distorted guitar. this element is really expressive and is able to explain a large amount of the feeling from one of these panic attacks all in one synth. the sound of it can really be compared to a scream that feels like it’s blowing the speakers which is the rage part that I was trying to encapsulate in the piece, the type of feeling that your mind just screams at you while you’re trying to cope and keep everything under control, in which that emotion of me trying to keep everything under control can be related back to the pad that sits underneath the ‘aids synth’.

that ‘control pad’ is used in the piece to try and showcase the logical part of your brain trying to keep all of the emotions locked up inside of you, but even that is struggling to cope that well so what you end up getting is a feeling of your brain just racing side to side, trying to get out of your head. that can be seen in the amount of panning that is used. it’s also got a very dark tone to the timbre of the synth its self which I felt help give the overall track just a more scary shock factor. another factor that helps to make it more like a brain ‘fuckout’ is the nature of the drums.

the drums used in the track follow a very different beat structure and at points are struck off beat which really exemplifies how much these attacks affect your brain and normal functions, by being ‘different than normal’ I feel like it can really be used as a metaphor for the effects attacks have on your basic thoughts and the rest of your feelings.

the presence of the zelda sample of “hey! listen!” throughout the track was a way of representing the amount that you feel other people are attacking you even when saying something completely normal and non-harmful towards you. its also used to represent the amount of conflicting voices that occur in your head about what you should do to try and escape this attack or these feelings. the high pitched heavily overdrived nature of the screams are also quite piercing at times and are used to again try and drive home that idea of feelings and ideas just trying to escape your head.

Influences

like the track before this track didn’t really have too many direct influences, but it kind of takes subconscious inspiration from the genres; grind-core, hardcore electronic and a few elements of hardcore trap. while I was in production for this song though I did get introduced to this song and I started to draw some similarities:

1. Trilogy - Carpenter Brut

youtube

I feel like in this track after the drop in the first song (5:10) you can quite heavily see the similarities in the sounds he was using and the feelings I tryed to encapsulate in my song, so in my final mixing stages I drew some inspiration from him and how he made the sounds mix in with the beat and such to give that effect.

Conclusions about the track

in retrospect I like the way the track was able to encapsulate the themes it was conceptualized to hit, but the overall mix of the song and the ‘dirt’ sounds in the track to me just makes the song seem not too impactful. there are aspects that have been produced well like the hi-hats, but other elements are just annoyingly underwhelming which I feel takes away quite alot from how the track should have really felt if it was truly expressive. in this track I don’t think that my lack of musical theory knowledge played a part in much either since even though it was just a culmination of two different chords, the amount of different ways the effects affect the noise keeps it somewhat musically interesting.

Future iterations & directions

for this track I do sort of want to leave it as an expressive and emotive snapshot of how anxiety makes me feel, but I also want to improve in my production techniques and maybe one day come back to it and make it into a piece that has a whole lot more emphasis and packs even more of a punch with all of the elements coming out much stronger and clear.

the idea is something I think I will definitely keep in mind for future ideas for other tracks as the embodiment’s of these certain ‘fucked up’ bodily reactions to things is an interesting concept that could really be taken further with more knowledge of myself and how music works to be able to express myself and those emotions.

#creativeaudio

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postingphotographsip · 7 years

Text

Rings of Saturn

IMPERSONAL STYLE AND THE FORM OF EXPERIENCE IN W. G. SEBALD'S THE RINGS OF SATURN - Torleiff Persson, John Hopkins University Press, Dalton, 2016.

The prose fiction of W. G. Sebald exhibits a curious flatness. The source of this defining quality is what the narrator of The Emigrants calls the "wrongful trespass" of empathetic or emotional identification with the victims of historical calamity (29). The resulting narrative distance is a familiar hallmark of Sebald's style, realized in his writing through an almost seamless intermingling of fact, fiction, allusion, and recall-a "literary monism"-that fuses different narrative temporalities, superimposes the global on the local, and assimilates a wide range of source materials and intertextual content (McCulloh 22). Two broad responses might be discerned in respect to this particular aspect of Sebald's writing. The first questions the ethical commitment of a style that is unable to make any kind of moral distinction. The second affirms this very refusal to conform to customary moral hierarchies as a testing case for the "formal and ethical limits of inclusion" (Walkowitz 170).1 In each case, the central issue at stake is the relationship between the ethics of representation and the politics of remembrance.

Here I suggest a third possibility: if we are to engage with the complex issues surrounding the ethics of Sebald's style, it is necessary to resist-if only for a moment-the discursive vertigo so intimately associated with his work. To do this means to focus on Sebald's narrators not only as textual mediators, but as embodied subjects of experience in the present. Sebald's work appears flat, I argue, because of how he at once positions and undermines subjective experience as a privileged site of ethical engagement with past and present alike. In its stead, he theorizes the potential of aesthetic form to synthesize meaning from the interstitial space that exists between what we normally think of as different points of view.

In Sebald's work, the past generally appears by means of detached intellection rather than emotional investment. It is textual rather than experiential. Sebald is thus a tricky figure to categorize. To the extent that he is interested in forms of witness and testimony that exist outside the firsthand accounts of survivors, he might be classified as a postmemory writer.2 But the fit is an uneasy one, as he is not at all concerned with a generational translation of historical trauma catalyzed by traumatic repetition. Such a model is too subject-centered for Sebald, who affirms postmemory's critical engagement with the past but rejects its affective dimension. On Sebald's view the past should not be "felt" in the present by means of some process of traumatic transference, but held at a distance as an object of melancholic contemplation.

Attending to the experiential present of Sebald's narrators means shifting from secondary or discourse-based witnessing to the subject-centered witnessing of psychoanalytically inflected literary theory. On these accounts, lived experience makes testimony possible because it constitutes the primary material from which the witness draws in telling his or her story. Yet it is the nature of such testimony that this experience-which is invariably attached to a particular "event"-cannot be fully rendered in language; that "what happened" is, on some level, unspeakable. On this view, testimony represents an impossible yet necessary act that lays bare the limits of representation and traditional forms of knowledge. It is a radically unique disclosure of existential, psychic, and moral dimensions of suffering that cannot be repeated or relayed without losing its function as testimony. Testimony, in short, is attentive to the truth of experience and to the event of its own articulation rather than the purposed objectivity of historical truth.

The Rings of Saturn is thus structured around a tension between the presumed immediacy of the first-hand experience that provides the narrative with its ostensible occasion, and the characteristically distant quality of its narrative voice. A similar tension between immediacy and distance also constitutes a central feature of testimony as a performative act, premised as it is on both the explicit claim that "this happened to me," and the implicit claim that "you can never really know what it was like." Testimony, on the psychoanalytic model, becomes testimony only by enacting this disjunction, which at once affirms the limitation of language to fully render traumatic experience and the uniqueness of the witnessing subject. Sebald's insistence on maintaining narrative distance, by contrast, forges pathways for moral attentiveness that reverse the traditional positioning of the witness as a point of singularity. Indeed, if not for this narrative disposition, it would make no sense to speak of Sebald's narrative as a testimony. Part of the story has to do with Sebald's decision to never directly address history's "main scenes of horror," the conventional representations of which "militate against our capacity for discursive thinking" (The Emergence of Memory 80). But by disaggregating experience from first-person form, Sebald also cultivates a mode of reflection that seeks to move beyond the subject as the origin of concern, even as it is also anchored in his narrators as figures of embodied uncertainty.

As such, Sebald's prose fiction theorizes a position of witnessing that depends on experience, while at the same time insisting that this experience should be rendered through forms of critical synthesis that are neither personal nor historical. The impersonality of Sebald's stylistic flatness is antithetical to both the rich texture of subjective experience and the causal hierarchies of historical explanation. In turning to writing, Sebald's narrator returns to his experience not as the content of first-person syntax, but as a conduit for an idiosyncratic mode of reflection that cuts across space and time in surprising and unconventional ways. It is in the context of this disaffiliation of writing from experience, without a concomitant turn to historiography, that form emerges as an object of attention for both Sebald's narrator and the reader of his prose fiction. It is not that experience by itself has no form. As we normally think about it, experience makes sense to us as experience only when filtered through a series of conceptual-or formal-categories. Ultimately, these categories simultaneously derive from and affirm the subject as the locus of experience. While trauma theory complicates such an account, it too ultimately affirms the ethical primacy of subjective experience and the experiencing subject. For Sebald, however, form comes into being when experience is made foreign to itself in the deliberate movement from immediacy to distance. The result is a structure of doubling that pervades his prose fiction and stands at the center of his narrative ethics. To think about the form of experience in The Rings of Saturn therefore entails thinking about the experience of form. This dialectic stands at the very heart of Sebald's witnessing, which is less a relation between past and present or witness and event than it is a critical orientation that produces the imperative to bear witness as a function of the very permeability of these categories.

The Witness and the Event

"Air War and Literature," the published version of a 1997 lecture series on the literary representations of the devastation suffered by Germany from Allied firebombing during the Second World War, contains Sebald's most comprehensive account of the relationship between the act of bearing witness and personal experience. In this text, Sebald begins by enumerating a number of statistical facts about the bombing (the number of bombs dropped, the number of cities attacked, the number of civilian casualties, the number of homes destroyed, the number of homeless people after the war, and so on). Each of these is introduced by the clause "it is true that," which only accentuates their ultimate incomprehensibility (3). One would expect to see such abstraction countered by the voices of those who lived through the terrors that the numbers obscure. But Sebald deems first-person reports of the destruction to be of only "qualified value" (25). Describing the survivors as "unreliable and partly blinded," he suggests that the very language of their testimonies constitutes an effort "to cover up and neutralize experiences beyond our ability to comprehend" (25). "The death by fire within a few hours of an entire city," Sebald explains, "with all its buildings and its trees, its inhabitants, its domestic pets, its fixtures and fittings of every kind, must inevitably have led to overload, to paralysis of the capacity to think and feel in those who succeeded in escaping" (25). For these reasons, Sebald believes that individual accounts of the destruction need to be "supplemented by what a synoptic and artificial view reveals" (26).

Above all a statement about literary technique, this pronouncement is followed by a narrative description of an air raid on the city of Hamburg in the summer of 1943. At first, the narration occupies an aerial point of view, looking down on the city to take in the scale of the conflagration and destruction below, which made "the whole airspace...a sea of flames as far as the eye could see" a mere fifteen minutes after the first bombs had been released (26). We learn, for instance, that "ten thousand tons of high-explosive and incendiary bombs were dropped," that the smoke from the ensuing fire rose "to a height of eight thousand meters, where it spread like a vast, anvil-shaped cumulonimbus cloud," and that the bomber crews could feel "the wavering heat" of the inferno raging underneath them through the sides of their planes (27). Then the narration descends onto the streets, where we witness the destruction wrought by the bombs from the perspective of a city engulfed in flames, and from its scorching remains in the days and weeks following the raid. The passage ends with a description of how some victims had been "so badly charred and reduced to ashes by the heat...that the remains of families consisting of several people could be carried away in a single laundry basket" (28).

Critics working on this passage have emphasized its oscillation between different points of view and sources of information, spliced together in Sebald's vignette to form a "synoptic" view that is nevertheless "artificial" because it is unavailable to direct experience by any one subject. "Even while it is ultimately incomplete," Samuel Todd Presner argues, this splicing "offers a 'synoptic view' (and there may be many synoptic views) of the totality of the destruction through the multiplicity and simultaneity of its many contingent perspectives" (356). The ideal witness of catastrophe for Sebald is therefore not necessarily the insider who lived through the event, but the conscientious outsider who can combine and construct a multiplicity of views, scales, and discourses around it (contrasting, for instance, a detached description of the military destruction of an entire city with the domestic image of "a single laundry basket").

The "synoptic and artificial" thus names the consciousness of a critical limitation, as well as an aspiration to move beyond the limits of both direct experience and conventional historiography. The pivot of this aspiration is the relation between literary representation and what Sebald in "Air War and Literature" refers to as "total destruction" (46). But The Rings of Saturn is invested in forms of destruction that operate on much vaster timescales than the single night of destruction chronicled in the Operation Gomorrah passage. Here, and elsewhere in Sebald's artistic practice, historical processes never crystallize into privileged sites of witnessing. From this perspective, destruction is not so much a state to be described or experienced as it is a process that is folded into the very fabric of existence, and so into the very form of the narrative itself.

To look at The Rings of Saturn as a text of witnessing thus means taking seriously the relation between the narrator's impressions of the East Anglian landscapes he traverses and the discursive mode in which they are subsequently rendered. Normally, one would assume these two components to be related to each other through description. But the fact is that the narrative pays a relatively small amount of attention to the texture of actually being in a specific place at a specific time. Sebald achieves this by constantly yielding the narrative present of the foot journey to various temporally and spatially disaggregated trails of association. In contrast to the richness of the past, descriptions of the present appear merely as melancholic or poignant punch lines. The former can be seen, for instance, in the way the narrator moves from a description of a narrow iron bridge that crosses the river Blyth to an extended meditation on the internal politics of China in the context of European imperialism-all made possible by the historically spurious claim that a train that once crossed this bridge had originally been built for the emperor of China. The latter appears in phrases such as "Somerleyton strikes the visitor of today no longer as an oriental palace in a fairy tale," following an extended description of Somerleyton Hall during the days of industrialist Morton Pesto; "Nowadays, in some of the streets almost every house is up for sale," following a description of the once-bustling Lowestoft; or "Today there is next to no traffic on the river, which is largely silted up," following the description and a photo of the Blyth bridge (35, 42, 137).

We can discern here two narrative logics at odds with each other: the implied linearity and embodied basis of the narrator's journey by foot, and its subsequent fragmentation by the digressive logic of the narration. Spliced together to form a "synoptic and artificial" whole, it is not ultimately possible to separate these two modes. But the tension between them stands-like the tension between immediacy and distance-at the center of Sebald's narrative. In particular, it generates the perspective that allows for the narrator's attunement to the "traces of destruction" that he encounters during his walk, and to which he bears witness both in and through his narrative (3).

Writing and Walking

For a text that ostensibly centers on retracing its narrator's movement, it is striking that Sebald's narrator begins The Rings of Saturn by describing how, a year after his walk, he was hospitalized on account of being in a "state of almost total immobility" (3). Having begun with the declarative statement "In August of 1992...I set off to walk the county of Suffolk," the narrative thus posits and withdraws, in short succession, the possibility of a straightforward account of the walk (3). Speculating that this state of paralysis might be connected to the "paralyzing horror" that he had felt during his journey, and with which he had been preoccupied since, the narrator continues:

It was then that I began in my thoughts to write these pages. I can remember precisely how, upon being admitted to that room on the eighth floor, I became overwhelmed by the feeling that the Suffolk expanses I had walked the previous summer had now shrunk once and for all to a single, blind, insensate spot. Indeed, all that could be seen of the world from my bed was the colourless patch of sky framed in the window. (3-4)

In this scene, the narrator's physical incapacity and the static view of the "patch of sky framed in the window" call attention to embodied perception. Accompanying this pronouncement is a black-and-white photo of what the reader can only presume to be this same vista, thus reproducing the "colourless" quality that the narrator describes in such a way as to make it unclear whether he is not in fact referring to the printed photo itself. Through this photo, the reader is asked to contemplate this "patch" of printed matter as representing the total sum of the narrator's experiences from his walk the previous year. But perhaps "representing" is the wrong word: as indicated by the word "Indeed," it seems instead that the narrator feels that the phenomenological quality of the "patch" confirms his sense that "the Suffolk expanses...had now shrunk once and for all to a single, blind, insensate spot." The patch of sky in the window and the shrunken Suffolk landscape form a temporal palimpsest. Neither experience has obvious priority.

It is important that it is now, in this moment of physical and intellectual crisis, that the narrator begins in his "thoughts to write these pages." This cooccurrence asks us to read the narrator's subsequent descriptions of Suffolk as a disaggregation of what appears to admit no particularity, no differentiation. The dilation of this unfeeling spot, lacking both temporal and spatial extension, becomes the therapeutic project of the narrative to come, making writing the effort to remobilize, through the stylistic mobility of the "synoptic and artificial," what appears here as static. This moment represents, for this reason, a similar "paralysis of the capacity to think and feel" that Sebald speaks of in relation to the survivors of the firebombing of Germany. Framed in these terms, the narrator's project in The Rings of Saturn becomes a question of finding a form that will allow for the representation of his experiences from his walk, which appear here, early in the text, as a traumatic imprint pulsating inside his mind.

In the beginning of The Rings of Saturn, Sebald's narrator frames his walk as a means of "dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work" (3). This hope is at least partially realized, for the narrator proceeds to note that he had "seldom felt so carefree as I did then" (3). This feeling of "unaccustomed freedom," however, is intermingled in the narrator's mind with a feeling of "paralysing horror" that he claims to have experienced "at various times when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place" (3). The experience of East Anglia as "remote" enables the suspension of these two feelings, which are then not so much opposed to each other as they are mutually implicated: the "unaccustomed freedom" consists, in fact, in the experience of "paralysing horror." But it also constitutes a figure for the narrative distance that is deployed even when one might not expect this to be necessary. The same narrative impetus that animates Sebald's resistance to writing as an appropriative gesture in relation to the lives and experiences of others thus also operates in relation to what are ostensibly the life and experiences of his own (quasi-autobiographical) narrator.

Actual descriptions of scenes from the narrator's walk are, as I have mentioned, few and far between. When they do appear, they assume a peculiarly diffuse quality. Instead of experiential particularity, we get its systematic effacement. In his description of the fishermen that he sees in their "tent-like shelters made of pole and cordage, sailcloth and oilskin" (51) along the beach some miles south of Lowestoft, for instance, the narrator does not include any details that he might himself have experienced as he walked past on that particular day. He turns instead to a mode of narration-by-abstraction that belies the specificity of his own first-person experience, which becomes transformed into the occasion for a sociological reading of the scene. We are told that "their number almost always remains more or less the same," that "today it is almost impossible to catch anything fishing from the beach," and that "[h]ere and there one comes across abandoned boats that are falling apart, and the cables with which they were once hauled ashore are rusting in the salt air" (52-53).

The narration in this passage hovers over the scene it describes as a detached and disembodied viewpoint that distends both time and space in order to observe general patterns rather than specific details. Instances of these patterns can be seen "at any time of the day or night and at any time of the year" (51). But the apprehension of the pattern as a pattern requires a view of the scene that is not tied to any specific time. And the scene does, indeed, have an air of timelessness to it: the number of fishermen "remain the same" as if in defiance of the fact that there are no longer any fish to be caught-and while individual fishermen do not register for the narrator, he speculates that their collective motivation resides not so much in the activity of fishing as in the existential desire to "be in a place where they have the world behind them, and before them nothing but emptiness" (52). As the only constant in a section that otherwise outlines the diminishing fortunes of the fishing industry as a whole, and the genetic mutation of fish from upstream pollution, the recalcitrant presence of the fishermen appears to Sebald's narrator as a beacon of quiet resistance to the slow process of destruction that surrounds them.

This sense of resistance is, however, located less in the scene itself than in the narrator's "synoptic and artificial" relationship to it, which transcends the unique perspective of the walker. The central emblem for Sebald's skepticism towards inhabiting the experiential reality of the individual subject can be seen in the pronoun "one," which is a recurring feature in The Rings of Saturn. "From the footpath that runs along the grassy dunes and low cliffs one can see," writes the narrator as he segues into his description of the Lowestoftbeach, again emphasizing his synthetic relationship to the materials that constitute his narrative (51). Another example of the transition from particularized experience as the point of origin for description to the more impersonal quality of the indefinite pronoun comes a bit later in the narrative, when the narrator finds himself at "Benacre Broad, a lake of brackish water...halfway between Lowestoftand Southwold" (59). Beginning by noting how the "deciduous woodland" that encircles the lake is "now dying, owing to the steady erosion of the coastline by the sea," Sebald's narrator reflects that it is "[d]oubtless... only a matter of time before one stormy night the shingle bank is broken, and the appearance of the entire area changes" (59). It is once more impossible for the narrator to fully inhabit the scene as it appears in front of him, as his perception is always qualified by a consciousness of the destruction, past and future, that is everywhere present to him.

The sentence that follows these reflections seems to shift the narrative focal point. "But that day," the narrator continues, "as I sat on the tranquil shore, it was possible to believe one was gazing into eternity" (59). Here, it seems at first as if the pronoun "I," the temporal location of "that day," and the spatial location of "the tranquil shore" hold out the promise of an embodied and particularized perspective on Benacre Broad. But the sentence's second half does not follow through. We are not told that the narrator believed himself to be "gazing into eternity." Instead, the pronoun "one" generalizes, once more, what now appears as a conditional-"it was possible" followed by the infinitive "to believe"-rather than first-person description of embodied affect and cognition. We begin, thus, with the subject, but we end in a more tentative third-person perspective that imposes distance between the narration and its presumed basis in experience, marked as it is by the temporal finitude of mortal existence.

This tenuous perception of "eternity" stands in contrast to the actual precarity of the environment that surrounds the narrator. But it is also tied to a sense of absolute stillness that functions as a narrative counterpoint to the destruction ascribed to the imagined "stormy night." "The veils of mist that drifted inland that morning had cleared," the narrator observes, "the vault of the sky was empty and blue, not the slightest breeze was stirring, the trees looked painted, and not a single bird flew across the velvet-brown water" (59). Because of these circumstances, the world appears to the narrator "as if...under a bell jar"-an image that in The Rings of Saturn recalls the narrator's research into the whereabouts of Thomas Browne's skull, which by the circuitous workings of history was at one point put on display in a hospital museum, "under a bell jar" and among other "anatomical curiosities," before being committed again to the earth in 1921 (59, 11). The third-person perspective that makes possible the apprehension of this eternity provides access to a form of experience that is at once aesthetic and pseudoscientific, connecting an ephemeral moment of transcendent calmness with the certainty of death and decay.

The imposition of distance through form ("the trees looked painted") separates the narrator from his experiences throughout most of The Rings of Saturn, as if his writing self is peering back at the curious specimen of his walking self from the outside of that bell jar-which is to say, from the outside of his own metaphor. This form of impersonal distance is contrasted, however, with moments where some external event produces a flash of absolute clarity. The most important such moment occurs when the narrator visits Orfordness, a shingle spit containing both a fragile natural environment and the remnants of a long-abandoned Cold War military research installation that is still not present on any maps of the area. Passing through this "undiscovered country," the narrator feels at once "utterly liberated and deeply despondent" (234). The source of this affective complexity is again the narrator's sense that the two emotional reactions are inextricably tied to one another. "I had not a single thought in my head," he continues serenely, in a moment that stands in stark contrast to the frenetic mental activity that normally overwhelms him (234). Earlier in the narrative, for instance, the narrator becomes lost not only on Dunwich Heath, but also "in the thoughts that went around in my head incessantly" (171). Though it produces the opposite effect, a similar mirroring of environment and subject occurs at Orfordness, where with each step he takes, "the emptiness within and the emptiness without grew ever greater and the silence more profound" (234).

This description of the narrator's mental state as he walks across the Orfordness spit is then cited as a potential reason for why he becomes "frightened almost to death" when a hare emerges from the grass (234). "It must have been cowering there as I approached," the narrator continues,

“...heart pounding as it waited, until it was almost too late to get away with its life. In that very fraction of a second when its paralysed state turned into panic and flight, its fear cut right through me. I still see what occurred in that one tremulous instant with an undiminished clarity. I see the edge of the grey tarmac and every individual blade of grass, I see the hare leaping out of its hiding place, with its ears laid back and a curiously human expression on its face that was rigid with terror and strangely divided; and in its eyes, turning to look back as it fled and almost popping out of its head with fright, I see myself, become one with it. (234-35)”

The narrator's attention to the singularity of this moment is almost unprecedented in The Rings of Saturn.9 Here, the pronoun "I" anchors the narrator's voice to the moment that he describes, and he claims to remember the sequence with "undiminished clarity." "I still see," the narrator begins. But in the very next sentence, the qualifying "still" falls away. "I see," he continues, as if the moment is still unfolding, not in his memory, but before his very eyes. The passage's insistence on clarity thus goes far beyond memory. It also invokes a mode of hyper-perception, recorded most clearly in the narrator's assertion that he is, and was, aware of "every individual blade of grass." Giving rise to this overwhelming and persisting surfeit of detail is the narrator's sense that the hare's fear "cut right through me" in that "fraction of a second when its paralysed state turned into panic and flight." The intersection between this "fraction" and the "tremulous instant" that the narrator describes is produced by his sense that the hare's anthropomorphized terror is also his own-or, perhaps, his terror imposed upon the hare. The narrator's description of the "cowering" hare as waiting "until it was almost too late to get away with its life" suggests as much, as it makes it seem as if it was actually in danger. In the moment when the hare looks back and meets the gaze of the narrator, the narrator then sees a reflection of himself, and becomes "one with it"-which is to say, joined in a union that is simultaneously "strangely divided." And the narrator himself is divided, between the impersonality of the "empty" third person, and the presumed immediacy of the first.

Form and Witnessing

At the end of "Air War and Literature," Sebald invokes the "horrified fixity" of the gaze of Benjamin's angel of history (67). Benjamin's angel has also become a familiar model for understanding the aesthetic project of The Rings of Saturn, which appears to provide literary form to Benjamin's quasi-poetical image of the past as wreckage. There is little need to linger further on this comparison here, except to note that it helps us to understand Sebald's approach to destruction as a diffuse presence that subtends any of its supposedly delimitable instances. As the occasion of his narrative, the foot walk is similarly dispersed by the narrator's descriptions of his own experiential present, whether during the walk itself, or later, at the time of writing. The present, as it is perceived by Sebald's narrator, is permeable.

This is why spatial and temporal distinctions seem to collapse so often throughout The Rings of Saturn. The narrator's description of his visit to Somerleyton Hall emblematizes this process. Here too, the narration takes on the peculiar distance that I have discussed: "There are indeed moments," Sebald's narrator writes,

“....as one passes through the rooms open to the public at Somerleyton, when one is not quite sure whether one is in a country house in Suffolk or some kind of no-man's-land, on the shores of the Arctic Ocean or in the heart of the dark continent. Nor can one readily say which decade or century it is, for many ages are superimposed here and coexist. (36)”

While the history behind this agglomeration of historical and geo-political locations is made possible primarily by the spoils of the long and violent history of British colonialism, Sebald does not organize these disparate elements into anything resembling a historical narrative. Instead, he finds the ensuing bricolage strangely comforting. "How uninviting Somerleyton must have been," he reflects, "when everything...was brand new, matching in every detail, and in unremittingly good taste. And how fine a place the house seemed to me now that it was imperceptibly nearing the brink of dissolution and silent oblivion" (36). As indicated by the shiftfrom the "must have been" of the imagined past to the "seemed to me now" of the experiential present, the present is again characterized primarily in terms of tentativeness, with the narrator acquiring some semblance of traditional self-possession (the "me" is circuited through the earlier "one") only at "the brink of dissolution"-the dissolution, that is, not only of history itself, but also of the unquestioned possibility of the liberal, self-determining, subject.

This sequence at Somerleyton Hall highlights the narrator's fundamental openness to perceiving the present through the past, the global through the local, and the center through the periphery. It is one thing, however, to pronounce the collapse of time and space in declarative sentences, referring to some mental state or other. It is quite another to render such openness formally. An exemplary moment of the latter occurs when the narrator, after having left Benacre Broad, comes across a couple having sex on the beach. As he approaches, he sees at first only an "odd, pallid colour move on the shoreline" (68). Surprised and "overcome by a sudden panic," he crouches down to avoid detection before peering over the edge of the cliffhe is standing on (68). The narrator describes what he sees as follows:

A couple lay down there, in the bottom of the pit, as I thought: a man stretched full length over another body of which nothing was visible but the legs, spread and angled. In the startled moment when that image went through me, which lasted an eternity, it seemed as if the man's feet twitched like those of one just hanged. Now, though, he lay still, and the woman too was still and motionless. Misshapen, like some great mollusc washed ashore, they lay there, to all appearances a single being, a many-limbed, two-headed monster that had drifted in from far out at sea, the last of a prodigious species, its life ebbing from it with each breath expired through its nostrils. (68)

Here we discern first the cognitive work of anticipation and recognition: the narrator sees-almost intuits-a man and a woman engaged in intercourse. Yet the narrator never acknowledges this in any direct way, turning instead to the literally dehumanizing description of the couple as "some great mollusc washed ashore." The description of the man's twitching feet "like those of one just hanged" turns the final moments of copulation into an image of cadaveric spasm, occurring to the narrator in a "startled moment...which lasted an eternity." Even this moment, however, soon recedes into the past, as eternity is undercut once again by an imposing now: "Filled with consternation" after his encounter, the narrator soon finds himself unable to say "whether I had really seen the pale sea monster at the foot of the Covehithe cliffs or whether I had imagined it" (69). The crux, of course, is the fact that the narrator did imagine this "pale...monster," and that it is, in fact, precisely the image of the "two-headed monster" as "the last of a prodigious species, its life ebbing from it with each breath expired through its nostrils" that makes possible the scene's intermingling of mythical past and apocalyptic future.

Whether in the superimposition of monstrous form on the couple on the beach, or in the perception of "a human expression" on the face of the hare, form reveals itself in Sebald in moments of doubling, like those "ghosts of repetition" that the narrator claims haunt us all, and like the act of writing itself, doubling back in a "synoptic and artificial" mode on that "insensate spot" with which the narrative begins, and on which there can be only one embodied perspective (187). The pronoun "one," in particular, does not locate experience within a specific feeling subject as much as it treats it as a generalized possibility. Yet, in each of these cases, form does not fully eradicate that upon which it is superimposed; a trace remains. The couple is not, after all, a "singular being," and so the referential logic of this particular figuration would appear to misfire. This is not to say that the narrator did not experience the couple as such. It is to say, however, that it is the moment of "consternation" that follows that stands at the heart of Sebald's poetics. Like the experience of "strange division" with the hare, this moment unsettles form itself. An unsettling trace of the "I" similarly persists throughout the text, formed by the very distance imposed by Sebald's pronominal grammar. Naming a process of narrative displacement, it can never figure at the center of the narrative, nor guarantee its integrity. For such integrity, such a total view, is unavailable to Sebald's narrator, as even his relation to his own experience is emphatically provisional.

In this way, Sebald makes it possible for his reader to adopt the same relation to his prose fiction that his narrator does to Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson, a painting that depicts the dissection of one Aris Kindt in front of the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons. Because the surgeons in this painting are looking past the body on the operating table, their "Cartesian" gaze fixed instead "on the open anatomical atlas in which the appalling physical facts are reduced to a diagram, a schematic plan of the human being," the narrator questions "whether anyone ever really saw that body" (13, 17). In the famous reading of the painting that follows, the narrator proceeds to direct the reader's attention to how "the much-admired verisimilitude of Rembrandt's picture proves on closer examination to be more apparent than real" (16). Focusing specifically on the "grotesquely out of proportion" hand that is being dissected in the painting, the narrator notes that the exposed tendons, which ought to be those of the lefthand, are in fact those of the right. We are faced, the narrator concludes, "with...a transposition taken from the anatomical atlas, evidently without further reflection, that turns this otherwise true-to-life painting (if one may so express it) into a crass misrepresentation at the exact centre point of its meaning, where the incisions are made" (16- 17). Refusing to believe that this seeming misrepresentation is merely "a flaw in the composition," the narrator argues that the "unshapely hand signifies the violence that has been done to Aris Kindt," and that it is "with him, the victim, and not the Guild that gave Rembrandt his commission, that the painter identifies" (17).

Rembrandt thus turns his compromised position around, transforming his art into a form of subversive witnessing. If we today stand before this painting, the narrator notes, we are standing precisely where those present at the dissection would have stood, believing that we see what "they saw then" (13). But as the transposed hand indicates, this is not the case. Mimesis turns out to be a ruse, undermined in the very act of representing the body; no one who was there could have seen what Rembrandt sees, and no one who was there could then see what the narrator sees in Rembrandt's painting. Sebald's point is not the familiar one that representation is suspicious in itself. For the scene stages a dialectic between the disembodying gaze of the surgeons, filtered through the anatomical atlas as an end-in-itself, and the reembodying gaze of the painter, filtered through the critical consciousness of the narrator. Together, artist and narrator restore dignity to the body. While the painting appears at first sight to depict the scientific rationale behind the incision, it portrays in fact the violence of the atlas itself, which is, as it were, entirely abstract and impersonal. Rembrandt's misrepresentation, once our attention has been drawn to it, reverses the logic of erasure by which science instrumentalizes the body. The artist alone "sees that greenish annihilated body, and he alone sees the shadow in the half-open mouth and over the dead man's eyes" (17). But to attend to these details of the painting, the viewer must avert her gaze from the grotesquely exposed tendons which indelibly claim our attention-the "event," so to speak, of the painting. This spell can be broken only by the trace of form that builds into the apprehension of this "otherwise true-to-life painting" the processes by which the body is mediated or assimilated by modern science, inscribed by Rembrandt (or so the narrator claims) at the very site of bodily violation.

For Sebald's narrator, Rembrandt's painting is structured around two competing imperatives: first, the realist imperative for mimetic absorption; and second, the ethical imperative to subvert, in an allegorical mode, the very world that is thereby represented.10 Aesthetic form undergirds both these ambitions. In the former, form is imagined as that which falls away in the service of producing a sense of unmediated presence. The central example in the narrative of this process can be found in the narrator's reflections on the Waterloo Panorama, which in its claim to historical immersion contains no splicing of perspective, seeking instead to fully absorb its viewer in an illusion of seamless totality. In the latter, form is experienced as a rupture in the insidious fiction of such coherence, which occludes more than it reveals about the past. This form is not self-indulgent or gratuitous-what Sebald in "Air War and Literature" calls "linguistic fretwork" (58). Instead, it is form as it emerges in Rembrandt's "synoptic and artificial" view, which supplements what appears at first to be simply the limited perspective of an embodied spectator. In the compositional logic of The Rings of Saturn, Sebald arrives at his discussion of The Anatomy Lesson by means of a series of reflections on the life of Thomas Browne, whom he speculates might have been "among the onlookers in the anatomy theatre in Amsterdam" (17). We do not, however, know from what angle Browne saw the proceedings (if he did), nor do we know "what he might have seen" (17). In Sebald's historical conjecture, Browne does not become a surrogate subject, but a contingent point of connection.

For Sebald, the work of art emerges in the interplay between imaginative immersion and its foreclosure. In this respect, The Anatomy Lesson might be characterized in terms of the tension it stages between the incision that constitutes its ostensible subject matter, and Rembrandt's formal "incision" into the representational fabric of the scene his painting depicts. In fact, the moment in which Rembrandt makes his presence as an artist known is the moment his art diverges from what can be known by reference to experience alone. Outside the enabling fiction of mimetic representation, form now appears as an object of experience in itself. Most important here is the moment of doubling that makes possible the transition between these two "views," dramatized by Sebald's narrator in his description of the painting. We have looked at a number of moments in which similar doublings occur in The Rings of Saturn, emerging from the "synoptic and artificial" narrative process that Sebald deploys to supplement individual experience. They appear in Sebald's engagement with point of view, and with the production and embedding of positions that make possible the witnessing of the destruction that everywhere surrounds the narrator. By necessity, instances of such imposed form are not only partial and unstable; they also constitute "traces of destruction" in themselves, just like the incisions in Rembrandt's painting. These traces are present even in those equivalences that suggest the absence of the normative hierarchies by which we normally judge "the murder of the Jews" to be categorically distinct from "industrial trawling for herring," to invoke what is surely The Rings of Saturn's most famous instance of ethical flatness (Long, Image, Archive, Modernity 144). For what appears here as the absence of form is, as a deliberate rhetorical staging of narrative material, form nonetheless. The issue, as always-and this is the implicit problem in the critical debate around this particular aspect of Sebald's text-is whether form constitutes that violence, or whether it reveals it. Rembrandt's painting suggests that the answer may well be both.

Sebald engages with the ethics of testimony, then, by dramatizing an oscillation between personal and impersonal points of view. Katrin Kohl has argued that Sebald's "narrative stance...dispels any notion of the person who was not there being able to act as witness" (99). My position is different. To be sure, my focus on direct experience in The Rings of Saturn hardly amounts to a return to direct testimony. Sebald's narrative voice is too distended and disembodied for that. But neither does it map very well onto theories of postmemory, as the narrative does not move from a discursive exploration of the past to an affective affirmation of personal significance. Instead, Sebald unfolds a testimonial form that originates at once in the subject and in the discursive space normally associated with postmemory, each layered on the other until there is no longer any meaningful distinction between the two. The narrative bears witness to a new dynamic of witnessing where the goal is not to recover "how it was" or to assess "what it means." Through his prose fiction, Sebald sets in motion an open-ended process defined neither by fact nor feeling, but by contingency and uncertainty. Sebald's language of doubling-the superimposition of form in its various temporalities, the slippage between the "one" and the "I," the complex interrelation between writing and experience - does not deny the person as much as it formally penetrates it. The question of how to relate ethically to the past, and how to testify to its injustices, becomes a question of how one relates to the present. This relation can only be specified critically at the moment style defamiliarizes habitual modes of comprehension, and thus appears as form.

Notes taken from the reading above:

The narrative that Seabald creates in his writing is a mixture of fact, fiction, illusion which results in the narrative form, this is also combined with his undermining of the subjective experience - instead theorizes the form of the aesthetic to show the meaning of the space and what exist within different points of view - which may occur from the one space he is writing about. The persistence that he creates of constantly holding onto the narrative distance shows an easy link that reverses the witness/reader into understanding the greater meaning behind it.

The truth of his own experiences in which he tends to use within his writing show the objectivity to the factual historical truth, which links into a Transcendentalist mindset, shown in his use of reflection within his writing.

The relationship between Seabalds impressions of East Anglian landscapes and the conversational method of delivering the writing - he shows the extracted format, this can also be seen in the synthetic relationship that has been noted in the materials that create the narrative.

The writing style, in terms of the first and third person methods, show that Seabald himself is divided between being the empty third person with no relation and the assumed knowledge that comes with being the privileged first person dialect.

http://search.proquest.com.login.library.ucs.ac.uk/docview/1809036196/fulltext/E393E70F4238465CPQ/1?accountid=17074

Guardian Review

..........

I tell this story only partly to show how obnoxious I was as a youth. More importantly I tell it because only weeks after first visiting Southwold – and by sheer coincidence – I read WG Sebald’s Rings of Saturn. A transcendent piece of psychogeographic writing, it’s a book built from observations made on the very same Suffolk terrain, during a walk down the coast from Lowestoft to Ditchingham. Along the way, Sebald spend two days in Southwold, a spell that prompts a mental journey into the history of colonial exploitation in the Congo and the links between Joseph Conrad and English knight, Irish nationalist and, ultimately, British traitor, Roger Casement.

Elsewhere, Sebald brings other historical personages to life. He recounts the reign of the Empress Dowager Tzu-hsi who presided over China for 47 years (despite never officially being its ruler). He pieces together the social ascent of Victorian entrepreneur Sir Morton Peto. He delves into the lives and works of writers from Thomas Browne to Swinburne and Chateaubriand. Sebald’s fascination extends beyond the individual to broader human activity; he explores the history of herring fishing in northern Europe and explains how submerged land off Dunwich was once one of the most important ports in Europe.

All of these disparate studies are woven together exuberantly, with a structural flair redolent of high modernism but which still allows for moments of magical happenstance (a seaman and chronicler of colonial horrors, Joseph Conrad also first learned English in … Lowestoft). It’s also a magnificent feat of memory – highly galling for me – describing in minute detail, for example, the desolate quiet of the marshes of Orfordness.

Most of all, The Rings of Saturn is a triumph of tone; a synchronisation of events, environment and memory with the writer’s mood. And despite Sebald’s ravenous curiosity about the world around him, that mood is miserable. First published in German in 1995, two years after he had been confined to hospital by a back injury (an episode he recalls in the book), it has the feel of a man trying to capture thoughts and feelings before he passes. Sebald actually died in a car crash six years later, at the age of 57. Described by the Times as “the Joyce of the 21st century”, he only survived a year of it.

The certitude with which Sebald writes about man’s flaws, his rapacity and self-involvement, is both chilling and convincing. In his ponderings on humanity’s exploitation of the environment he foresees exactly the issues that are beginning to bite on us today: the despoliation of natural habitat, the decimation of food stocks (those herrings again), the pollution of air and water.

One passage in particular stuck with me:

“Our spread over the earth was fuelled by reducing the higher species of vegetation to charcoal, by incessantly burning whatever would burn. Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create. The making of a fish hook, manufacture of a china cup, or production of a television programme, all depend on the same process of combustion. Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/aug/13/the-rings-of-saturn-by-wg-sebald-walking-through-history

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