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jojaqualityheadcanons · 3 years

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SDV's 1.5 update contains content that plays into racist, colonialist, and imperialist myths and beliefs.

Disclaimer: I loved SDV (which is a given, considering I have an SDV sideblog lol?), and I'm not writing this post to get people to boycott the game or stop liking it or whatever. I just want people to understand why this content is harmful, how it might be affecting your biases and beliefs, and think of how they can engage with this media without exacerbating the harm that it does. I'm Filipino, and I don't speak for all POC or all brown people, but I felt deeply hurt and betrayed by the content update. Please keep that in mind before you interact with this post. Explanation under the cut because of 1.5 spoilers (obviously) and because this got long.

(I will block people who clown on this post. Keep your opinions to yourself unless you also have firsthand experience with the issues I describe.)

Background

I was already wary of the 1.5 content update because of how the previews featured ~tropical~ and ~exotic~ stuff, but I decided to give it a shot because maybe I was being too hasty with my judgment.

I wasn't. I made a new save to play with the 1.5 content update, and at first, I was having a great time! The new special orders made gameplay more exciting and varied! I could finally get rid of the nursery from my house without mods! The remixed junimo bundles made me change my usual game strategy. And then, I finally unlocked Ginger Island.

It seemed cool at first, but I had a sinking feeling growing in the pit of my stomach as I kept playing. It got to the point that I started nursing a stomach ache and lots of anger that took me days to shake off. I know SDV has never been a shining example of racial/ethnic diversity and sensitivity (I mean... there's a reason why mods like Diverse Stardew Valley and a bunch of other diversity mods exist lol). But while the lack of diversity in the pre-1.5 content is more of a missed opportunity, the 1.5 content is just... actively harmful and hurtful, imo. Here's a breakdown of the issues with the setting and the characters:

The Setting

Ginger Island, along with the Fern Islands in general, is a tropical island that is clearly based on islands in the Pacific. Its features include fertile soil and an abundance of natural, foragable resources. And for some unknown reason, it has no native human population.

Many islands in the world are uninhabited by humans, and there's always a good reason why. The island's environment may be too hostile, it could be too small to sustain human life, it could be sacred or otherwise culturally unacceptable to live there, or some disaster may have occurred to wipe out the local population or cause them to flee. Some uninhabited islands are nature reserves or privately owned. The point is that if an island is habitable, people are bound to call it home.

Writing Ginger Island as an uninhabited "tropical paradise" feels like a copout. It's as if the game is saying, "don't worry, you're not colonizing this land because no one really lives here! You're not stealing this land or anything because it's up for grabs and is just waiting for the right person to come along to develop it and turn it into a resort for other people who don't live here!" But that claim rings hollow when there are so many signs of civilization there, such as literal computers and ancient structures. And the canon reason for the existence of these things is that dwarves, non-human creatures, lived there once. I just think it's ridiculous and harmful that the game completely ignores and erases the existence of the people who lived and still live in the places that Ginger Island is based on and goes even further to use non-human creatures as stand-ins. I don’t think I have to explain why this isn’t good, considering that people of color have been compared to animals and treated like animals to dehumanize us and justify our oppression for ages.

To really hammer in my point about whitewashing and erasure, all the human labor on the island is done by a flock of parrots that you pay with golden walnuts (i. e., resources that you get for free from the island they live on). There's even an anthropomorphized bird who's a shopkeep! I get that creating a whole cast of human NPCs to fill a town would have been way too much work for a content update, but CA didn't need to use a bunch of animals as stand-ins for non-white human characters. There’s a troubling trend of creators prioritizing animal characters over characters of color, and CA plays right into it. He seriously chose to create more anthro characters instead of adding characters of color to the game in a setting that in real life has populations that are primarily made up of brown people. The game includes brown people's land and cultures, but it draws the line at brown people themselves.

The erasure of brown people and the portrayal of our lands as wild and untamed have been used to sanitize the narrative of colonialism for centuries. Pretending that our lands were wild tropical paradises that were ripe for the taking is pretending that colonizing forces didn't use violent, dehumanizing means to subjugate or wipe out countless peoples and cultures in order to make these lands available. Ginger Island's erasure of brown people just perpetuates this colonialist myth, and the context in which it does so disgusts me: the farmer, who already runs a successful farm that was inherited from their grandfather, goes off to a tropical island they have no personal connection to and uses its natural resources to expand their business further. They also open up a resort on the island for the enjoyment of other privileged people from their homeland, and going there is treated as a luxury. This is a classic colonizer narrative, and I cannot believe the game forces players to colonize an island in order to win.

The Characters

I'm honestly amazed that the amount of feedback about the lack of diversity in SDV didn't prompt CA to create characters of color. I'm amazed that he chose the setting he did and still didn't bother to create any characters of color. The fact that all three of the new human characters who live on this tropical island are white makes me go a little apeshit, to be honest! I hate all three of them for a variety of reasons, so I'll go over them one by one:

Birdie

My reasons for not liking Birdie are primarily related to misogyny (lady spent literal decades in isolation on this island moping over her dead husband?) and ageism (if you tell her to live her own life, she tells you that she's too old to???). Sooo they're not really related to the rest of my discussion here, and I won't get into them further. Moving on!

Professor Snail

White historians, archaeologists, and paleontologists have been stealing and plundering artifacts, relics, and fossils from colonized lands for centuries. These white scientists would send their “discoveries” back to their homelands with little regard for the people they stole from. I’ll acknowledge that Professor Snail doesn’t bring the bones and fossils off the island, so his character isn’t as awful as it could be, but he still canonically has this line:

I really just don’t understand why it was necessary to make this character white when making him a character of color could have easily prevented the uncomfortable real-world implications of a white man coming to a foreign land to plunder fossils without asking anybody for permission. If he he’d been created as someone who traced his ancestry to Ginger Island and wanted to study the island’s biological history, his character could have been so sympathetic and even admirable to me! But his character as it is just makes me think of this meme:

Here are some links for further reading about colonialism in paleontology and other social sciences: 1, 2, 3, 4.

Leo

I had a hard time figuring out how to write about this character because the way CA wrote him is arguably one of the most racist parts of SDV. So many aspects of his character left me speechless and appalled because I cannot believe people are still writing shit like this in the 2020s.

I’ll start off with his storyline: this white child gets stranded on an island and is raised by animals. When the farmer meets him, he speaks in broken English to show how “wild” he is:

As the farmer continues to interact with him, he begins to speak more “proper” English:

Wow... he’s becoming more “civilized” because of the farmer’s influence!

As his story progresses, he reveals that he’s lonely because he doesn’t fit in among the other birds. Eventually, he leaves behind his non-human family and assimilates into a primarily white, Western-coded society because that’s supposedly where he belongs.

This whole storyline is made possible by the problems with the setting that I mentioned earlier. Leo wouldn’t feel so lonely and out of place if there were people on the island. He wouldn’t be depicted as wild and animal-like if he had an adoptive family made up of humans instead of parrots. But because CA chose not to have native human characters on this island, Leo can only be around other people if he leaves his home and family behind. As a result, Leo’s story has very uncomfortable parallels with how colonizers have historically separated indigenous children from their families and cultures and forced them to assimilate into the dominant colonizer culture because they considered indigenous cultures to be savage and barbaric (1) (2).

Leo’s whole narrative unintentionally implies that a good life in a good community can only be had in civilized white Western societies. I’m honestly having trouble with further explaining why Leo’s whole character makes me feel so gross, so just read up on the White Man’s Burden, The Jungle Book and other works by Rudyard Kipling (1) (2) (3) (4) (5, PDF download link), and even Tarzan (1) (2).

Leo’s character is also used to further whitewash non-white cultures:

Poi is a Polynesian dish. Mango sticky rice, which is also a recipe that Leo teaches you in-game, is a Thai dish. In the letter, Leo says that the dish is from his home and enjoyed by his non-human family. Considering that he probably learned these recipes on Ginger Island, and that the only “people” who could have taught him this recipe are literal animals, including these recipes in the game in this way just reinforces the equation of brown people to animals. I’m not Polynesian or Thai, but I know that if CA had included a Filipino recipe in the game and not only had it taught to players by a white character, but also passed off as something from the white character’s culture, I’d be angry. I’ll repeat myself: The game features brown people's food and cultures, but it draws the line at brown people themselves.

I don’t think there’s any way to tweak or edit Leo’s character to fix the issues I described. No matter how we change things, he’s still an orphan raised by animals coded as indigenous people, and he assimilates into the dominant white Western culture. The only way to address these issues is to completely redo his character and even the setting of Ginger Island. Here are some options that I’ve thought of:

Leo is related to someone in the Valley and stays with them for part of the year.

Leo lives with his human family and community on Ginger Island.

Leo’s parents are specifically from Stardew Valley/Pelican Town and he wants to visit in order to reconnect with his heritage.

This list isn’t comprehensive, but it does show that there are so many alternatives to having yet another Mowgli story in Stardew Valley.

Conclusion

I don’t think that CA had bad intentions when he made this content, but the fact is that he did create this content. I’m not calling him a bad person. However, he does have a lot of racist, imperialist, and colonialist biases that he has yet to unlearn. Considering the setting and subject matter of the new 1.5 content, he really should have hired some sensitivity readers to avoid creating harmful content. The man’s sold over ten million copies of his game, and he certainly has the resources to put together a sensitivity team.

I can’t look at Stardew Valley the same way I did before 1.5, but I’m not going to condemn the game as a whole. I might play the game again someday, but I absolutely won’t be going back to Ginger Island. If you’ve enjoyed the Ginger Island content, then good for you! Please just keep all that I’ve written here in mind and accept that that content hurts some people like me.

If you’re a content creator, I urge you to get sensitivity readers if you’re featuring cultures that you’re not a part of to avoid making the same mistakes that I’ve discussed here. Creating from a place of understanding and respect can only make your work better and more accessible to a wider audience, especially to the people whose culture you’re borrowing.

#stardew valley #sdv #sdv leo #sdv birdie #sdv professor snail #racism cw #imperialism #colonialism #blabbering #ids for images are in alt text btw!

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revenge-of-the-shit · 3 years

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Writing Chinese characters set within Western worlds

If you don’t want to read it on tumblr, go check this out on medium or go follow me on instagram at @annessarose_writes!

Alright. You know what. I’ve seen plenty of stereotypes in fiction (and in social media) that are so incredibly pervasive I’ve seen many Chinese people within the western world internalize it themselves. So here’s a rough guide on writing Chinese characters in an English-speaking Western setting, written by me, a Chinese Canadian woman.

If you’re here to say something racist fuck off. Otherwise, welcome! This is not a comprehensive guide by any means. This is merely a brief overview based on my own experiences. My experience (as someone in North America) will differ from someone living in, say, Europe or South America. I’m not representative of every Chinese person because everyone’s experience is unique. So here were are.

1. Our names

Chinese names are usually written as follows: [family name] [name]. Let’s take a Canadian historical figure as an example: 黃寬先. In Chinese, it’s pronounced “Wong Foon Sien.” On Canadian documents — which are written [First name] [Last name], he’d be called “Foon Sien Wong.” He went by “Foon Sien” for most of his life. That’s his full “first name.” Nobody would call him Foon because that’s just half of his name (unless given permission). It’d be like meeting a stranger called Alex and calling them “Al” right off the bat. Sure, they could go by Al, but you don’t know that.

For those of us living in the Western world, some of us have both a Chinese name and an English name. In these cases, our Chinese name becomes our middle name in English (e.g. a character could be called John Heen-Gwong Lee).

For some people who immigrated to the Western world but were born in China, their legal name would be their Chinese name. Some choose to keep that name. Some choose an English name as their “preferred” name but keep their Chinese name on legal documents. It varies.

2. Parents & Stereotypes

There’s two stereotypes which are so pervasive I see it being used over and over in jokes even within Chinese (and, to a larger extent, asian) communities:

The [abusive] tiger mom and the meek/absent dad

Both parents are unreasonably strict/abusive and they suck

I have yet to see any fiction stories with Chinese parents where they’re depicted as kind/loving/supportive/understanding (if you have recommendations — please do send them my way). Not all Chinese parents are tiger parents. Chinese parents — like all parents — are human. Good god. YES, they’re human! YES, they have flaws! YES, they are influenced by the culture they grew up in!

That isn’t to say there aren’t parents like those tropes. There are. I know this because I grew up in a predominantly Chinese community where I had many a friend’s parent who was like this. Parents who compare their kids to the best kid in class. Parents who force kids into private lessons and competitions that the kid despises because the parents think it’s for the best. Parents who have literally called their kid a disappointment because they didn’t get 100%.

But please, also consider: there’s parents who support their child’s goals and who listen. Not all parents force their kid into the stereotypical trifecta of lawyer/doctor/engineer — I know of a good number who support their child in choosing the path they want. There’s parents who make mistakes and learn and try their best to support their child. So please, for the love of god, if you write a Chinese character, don’t reduce their parents to stereotypes.

3. Language & Learning

When I first read The Son of Neptune by Rick Riordan, I was so excited to see a Chinese Canadian character in Frank Zhang. Finally, there was someone like me. Finally, there was representation in well-known western media.

While I do appreciate that RR added in Frank Zhang, it’s pretty obvious that he didn’t really know how to write a Chinese Canadian character. One of the most glaring examples: in The Son of Neptune, Frank reveals he can’t really read Chinese. In like, the next book (I think — it’s been a while since I read it), Frank is suddenly able to read Chinese because he “learned” it in two week’s time.

Nope. Nuh-uh. Learning Chinese is a pain, let me tell you. There’s thousands of different characters and it is something you need to devote a lot of time to learning (especially if you’re progressed past the best childhood years for learning a language). So if you’re writing about a Chinese character living in the western world, here’s what you need to know:

A character who was born and raised in the western world does not necessarily know how to read/write in Chinese.

If they were raised by their own family, the character would very likely know how to speak their own dialect. They’d be able to understand the language used in movies/TV and they sound like a native speaker, but they may not know how to use language outside of certain contexts (the term for this is heritage speaker).

They probably went to Chinese school. They probably hated it. Chinese school is usually universally hated and does not teach you jack shit other than a hatred for the place and a vague memory of learning how to read the language without actually retaining knowledge of what you learned.

Most of my friends who know how to read/write in Chinese learned from tutors, parents, or were born in China.

There’s two main types of written Chinese: Traditional (used by Cantonese speakers) and Simplified (used by Mandarin speakers).

There are MANY other dialects (which I don’t know much about). The most common ones are Mandarin (usually spoken by people from the mainland), then Cantonese (usually spoken by people from Hong Kong).

4. Fitting into the community

Usually, the story is one of two things: they’re the only Asian kid in the entire school, or they grew up in a predominantly East Asian community. Things to consider for both of these when you’re writing:

Growing up the only Asian kid

They’re “that Asian kid.” They’re different. They walk into a class and feel weird and out of place.

They bring food from home (usually ethnic cuisine) to school. Other classmates stare at it, make fun of it, demand what that strange food is.

“Where are you from?” “Here.” “No, like, where are you really from?”

“Your name is funny.”

People literally never getting the character’s name right.

And that horrible, horrible feeling: wishing that they were white so they could avoid all of this.

Growing up in a predominantly East Asian community

It’s not uncommon for Chinese cuisine to mix with other east Asian cuisines. For special occasions (or just for a casual night out), your character could very well go out to get some sushi, or go for some KBBQ, or get some Vietnamese noodles.

Screaming “AIYAA” at/with their friends unironically if they’re annoyed (I’ve done this a lot with Cantonese friends. Less so with Mandarin friends).

Slipping into Chinese for like, two words, during a mostly-English conversation to talk about food or some other topic that can’t be adequately conveyed in English.

Reading books by white authors and learning about white history and growing up thinking white names, white books, and white history is the norm and standard even though the community is surrounded by East Asian people.

When the character leaves this community, there’s a brief culture shock when they realize how sheltered they’ve been.

Things in common for both of these:

The character has grown up on ethnic cuisine. Yes, Chinese people do eat rice with many of our meals. Yes, boba (bubble) tea is extremely popular. No, rice isn’t the only thing we eat. No, not all Chinese people love boba (though as a Chinese person I admit this sounds sacrilegious to say…)

The character likely grew up watching film/TVthat originates from East Asia. It’s not uncommon to watch Studio Ghibli films. It’s not uncommon to watch Japanese or Korean shows with canto/mando dub (examples: Ultraman, Kamen Rider). If you want to see a classic Chinese film from Hong Kong that’s fucking hilarious, watch Kung Fu Hustle.

The character has felt or been told that they’re “too westernized to be Chinese, but too Chinese to fit into the western world.” They’re torn between the two.

5. General portrayal

It’s quite simple, really. We’re human. We’re regular people. We have regular hobbies like all people do. We’re good at some subjects and bad at others. We have likes and dislikes like all people do. So here’s a list of stereotypes you can avoid.

STEREOTYPES TO AVOID BECAUSE WE’RE REGULAR HUMANS AND WE DON’T FIT INTO A SINGLE COOKIE CUTTER SHAPE, DAMMIT.

The character is a maths whiz and perfect at all things STEM.

The character is a straight-A+ gifted/IB/AP student.

The character is the next coming of Mozart and is amazing at piano/violin.

The character’s free time is spent only studying.

The character is insanely good at martial arts.

The character is either meek and submissive or an explosive, dangerous force.

I’m not going to mention the other stereotypes. You know, those ones. The really obvious ones that make fun of and demonize (sometimes through multiple untruths) how we look and how we live our lives. You should know.

Of course, there are people who fit into one or more of these. That’s not the point. The point is: molding all Chinese characters to these stereotypes (which white media tends to do) is harmful and reductionist. We’re more than stereotypes.

—

6. Conclusion

We need more diversity in portrayal of Chinese characters. Reducing us into one-dimensional caricatures has done nothing but harm us — look at what’s happening now. This guide is by no means comprehensive, but I hope it has helped you by providing a quick overview.

If you want to accurately portray Chinese characters, do your research. Read Chinese fiction. Watch Chinese films/TV. Initiate a conversation with the community. Portray us accurately. Quit turning us into caricatures.

#non sw #writing #writing reference #reference #writing bipoc characters #Chinese representation #asian representation #asian characters #chinese characters #stop asian hate #chinese diaspora #chinese american #chinese canadian #writing guide #abuse tw #racism tw #long post #annessarose writes

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themountainsays · 2 years

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>Over at the madrigalcest tag on twitter they're posting pictures of real gore.

Is it sad that I'm not even a little bit surprised at this point that antis would post pictures of real human suffering to own the pro-shippers?

It's just exhausting at this point. It feels like a battle uphill you can never win, because how do you reason with someone like that?

It's not surprising at all, no, because people are DM'd real gore and worse all the time. It's truly insane how they talk about fucking fanfic "normalizing gross stuff" when their behavior clearly shows that normalization of harmful tendencies is bred in communities of people that actively celebrate and encourage those tendencies and reproduce them in group, not in communities where people have the critical thinking skills to know that reading Cien Años won't turn you into an auntfucker and that playing call of duty won't turn you into a mass murderer. They preach about "romanticization" and "fetishization" and "normalization" but even when looked at those assumptions in the most charitable light possible, they are nothing but hypotheses that need to be tested and corroborated or discarded.

So hypothesis 1 is: shipping incest will make you want to fuck your sister.

However evidence proves otherwise, because everyone has encountered incest fiction in one way or another, to the point it's present in mainstream media such as GoT and even kid's books like P3rcy Jackson, and no one turned out to be a sisterfucker because of that.

Hypothesis 2 says: even if there is no real harm, it is still unethical and inappropriate.

And then you get a lot more subjective and philosophical because maybe they DO have this very abrahamic view of morality in which some things are bad Just Because. Why shouldn't I do X even though it hurts no one? Because God says it. It's in the book. And maybe these rules aren't entirely arbitrary, maybe they made more sense in the historical context in which these texts were conceived, and if people want to live by those rules I think that's perfectly fine, but they can't expect to force an idea of morality not based on the prevention and reduction of real direct harm on people on others who don't share their beliefs. They look like my evangelical art teacher who spent 5 years trying to convert me.

So their arguments as to why we're Bad People^TM hold no water. They're entirely based on the knee-jerk reaction of disgust they get when they see the concepts we like to explore. It's entirely emotional. They're basing their entire sense of morality on gut feelings. Imagine if I went around telling everyone that blood transfussion is gross (which kinda is imo, like that's someone else's body juice inside of you), and because I think it's Icky and Uncomfy I threaten to doxx rape and kill everyone who's ever donated blood, had a blood transfussion, performed one or participated in scientific research surrounding it. Because i get a Nasty Feeling about blood transfussion so it must be Immoral. Actually I'm pretty sure there must be idiots who think that. Really, whatever I feel about ugly-looking medical procedures is irrelevant because I know that no matter how scary they look, they're usually performed with the patient's best interest in mind, and I should probably get over my fear of blood transfussions one day anyway. You can't callibrate your moral compass on what you perceive is "gross" and "weird", which is already too subjective. You need more objective rules, such as "does this hurt anyone?".

Why am i trying to psychoanalyze them? I'm giving them more credit than they deserve. These fuckers are just sick pieces of shit who want an acceptable target to torment and use everything we do against us, to justify our punishment.

#shipping discourse

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shihalyfie · 3 years

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Comparing the original Best Partner character song series and the new one, and what that says about the 02 cast

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So if you haven’t heard yet, a new series of 02 (it’s actually Kizuna) character songs dropped! Allegedly intended as a slightly delayed 20th anniversary project, the series is a callback to the original “Best Partner” character song album series that released during 02′s actual airing.

If you know anything about the original Best Partner series, it’s one that sets an insanely high bar, even for Digimon standards (and that’s saying something, given the deep associations this franchise has with music). The series of character songs before it, Adventure’s “Character Song + Mini Drama” series, has a…kind of questionable amount of relevance to each character; it’s not like they’re super amazingly out of character, but they don’t really tell you a lot about each character beyond some gloss details (this is probably best demonstrated in how Mimi’s song is blatantly just an AiM single disguised as a Mimi song). Best Partner, on the other hand, very intimately goes into each character’s head and their relationships with their respective partners, even putting in direct words what wasn’t stated explicitly in the series.

So does the new series live up to the high bar its predecessor sets? Answer: on top of some abnormal attention to detail on the covers, it is very obvious that the new series not only has a lot of the depth of the 02 characters in mind, but also is made in direct response to the original series itself. Moreover, putting the original Best Partner series and this one side by side reveals a lot about each of the 02 characters and what they got out of 02′s story, in a surprisingly neat summary.

Let’s go into how!

Since this is something that has a deep relationship with all of these characters in regards to the series, this particular meta would not have been possible without input from multiple people who know these characters better than I could ever hope to by myself. Thank you for all of your help.

A bit of historical context

The original Best Partner series consisted of a set of albums, one representing each pair of partners in 02. Notably, even though nowadays there’s a specific order of the Adventure/02 characters that’s used in modern media, not only does the original series not follow that ordering (as it hadn’t been set in stone at the time), it also leads with the original Adventure characters and not the 02 ones, which is pretty unusual for a series that’s ostensibly supposed to be for 02 (modern lineups will usually favor leading with whichever group the relevant product is branded with).

A lot of this probably makes more sense when you realize that the original Best Partner series was released during the first half of 02’s airing. The final album was released on August 23, 2000, four days before the fateful 02 episode 21 (yes, that means the third track on Ken and Wormmon’s album is actually a spoiler). So in other words, while the original Best Partner series accurately reflects the older Adventure group’s character development and what problems they were able to sufficiently overcome, the 02 group does not have anything about their character development from 02′s second half reflected in it at all.

That’s actually a really huge disparity, when you think about it, especially because a lot happened with the 02 group in that second half – that second half was where the emotional payoff and the results of everything that had been building up over that first half came together. So in comparison to the Adventure group, composed of people confidently talking about what they’ve decided for themselves from now on, you still have the 02 group drenched pretty deeply in insecurity. Watch 02 to the end and listen to those songs again, and you might even think “wait, this is supposed to represent these characters?” So, in essence, the new Best Partner series serves to address that gap, and what the 02 group gained and learned out of 02′s second half.

Best Partner (and its successor series for Tamers, Best Tamers) follows a uniform format: a solo song for the human partner, a solo song for the Digimon partner, and a duet between the two. (Given that, the original Best Partner series was really huge, at a whole 36 songs.) Recalling that, in the Adventure universe, a Digimon partner reflects the human’s inner self and psyche, it’s pretty extensive coverage: what the human has to say about themself, what place their Digimon partner is in relative to that, and what the nature of their relationship is due to that.

Let’s go into each pair of partners in detail!

Daisuke and V-mon

For those who love 02 and love Daisuke in particular, when you ask “what kind of character is Daisuke like?” or “what’s Daisuke’s best quality?”, you’re probably going to get answers like “forward-thinking” or “positive” or “good at uplifting others” – basically everything to do with how Daisuke is an encouraging presence who doesn’t give in easily and has a strong mentality of moving forward in the face of despair. Someone who appreciates and understands others’ best qualities, and loves them for everything they are. So when you look at his original Best Partner solo song, Goggle Boy…

But more than just saving the world I really don’t want to lose, you know

…Uh…

These goggles are my proof Given by a certain someone to me The precious thing he handed over It’s just like his Crest, you know Aren’t they cool?

…Well, that’s nowhere to be found.

This is the kind of song that might make you think “wait, this is supposed to be Daisuke’s representative song?!” (It’s possibly because of this that Daisuke’s song from The Bridge to Dreams, Tomorrow, generally tended to be far more favored among Daisuke fans, although it’s more relevant to 02 as a whole than it is to Daisuke in particular.) if you listen to Goggle Boy knowing about what Daisuke’s best qualities should be, this is almost a little frustrating, because this is the kind of thing he really shouldn’t be pigeonholed as – basically, begging for others’ approval and praise and focusing on idolizing others. Even his most insightful moments in this song come from his appreciation of something that came from someone else (Taichi), not from himself.

Well, the thing is, that was Daisuke’s character for most of the first half of 02. Of course, even in early episodes, there were many times where Daisuke’s potential for positivity and forward-thinkingness were starting to poke through, but most of the time he was rolling over trying to please others and chasing after his seniors. The real period of time he started to grow into his own about this was 02 episode 24 and its aftermath – when his time spent with his friends started to fill the void in his life and his need for validation, and the escalating situation, especially with Ken, led him to have a proper grasp of what was properly important and what needed to be done.

So when we get to his new solo, RUNNING MAN…

I’ll keep on running far ahead Let’s bring everyone along with me, today, too Really, always, thank you, Thank you so much Riding the wind, going past the sky Grasping your hands and flying I’m even starting to see beyond my dreams

Even in only one section, you can get an instant image of the Motomiya Daisuke we all know and love – someone who appreciates his friends’ role in his life, loves their company, and moves positively towards the future. Because, again, after the events of 02, and after being able to bond further with his friends and gaining his own strengths in leading everyone forward, he became able to more properly express his love for everything instead of constantly vying for others’ attention. Even the title reflects the change, from a “boy” who’s flashing the symbol of courage he got from someone else, to a “man” who’s positively running forward on his own merits.

(Interestingly, RUNNING MAN is composed by Ohta Michihiko, a legendary composer who’s made many of some of the most important songs in the franchise, and also composed many of the original Best Partner songs, including Goggle Boy. It’s interesting how RUNNING MAN is the one most like the original songs in atmosphere as a result – possibly representing how Daisuke is a simple-minded person who ostensibly doesn’t change drastically in disposition – yet has lyrical content that’s so starkly different.)

As a result, this is subtly reflected in the other two songs in each album as well – remember that V-mon is one of the partners who most “matches” his own partner in terms of disposition and mentality. So as Daisuke shifted his own priorities, V-mon did too; we go from Go Ahead! being about taking a stand and fighting, whereas Beyond the Future is about a similar forward-thinking mentality to Daisuke’s.

Likewise, the duets have different priorities as well; 2-TOP was composed of Daisuke and V-mon bickering for the most of it, and the most substantial point you could get about it was that despite their bickering, they made it work, whereas HEY-rasshai! has them almost entirely in sync (with one minor moment of deviance). It’s also interesting to see the topics covered in each; 2-TOP is about soccer, which ultimately is revealed to be a fairly incidental hobby for Daisuke, whereas HEY-rasshai! is about ramen making, which, while comical, also has a very strong tie to “Daisuke’s dream for the future, and his willingness to single-mindedly dedicate himself to something when it’s something he truly wants”. In other words, while Daisuke knew what he wanted since elementary school, it says a lot that he’s at a point where he and V-mon are now taking proactive steps to have that dream achieved, now that they’re able.

Ken and Wormmon

Like with his position in 02 itself, Ken’s is probably the easiest to see the contrast without trying too hard, but there’s still quite a lot to unpack!

When you think about it, in the modern era, it’s actually surprisingly hard to find stuff too relevant to Ken’s time as the Kaiser. The reason is, simply, that the series itself discourages this – Ken himself had an obvious aversion to dwelling too much on it, and the entire series itself has a strong theme of “moving on”. It’s not to say that the Kaiser doesn’t have a fanbase (I’m sorry if you’re reading this and find that I might be implying too hard that you don’t exist), but rather that there’s a franchise and fanart tendency to focus more on “Ken-chan” than “the Kaiser” these days, and old merch from the first half of the series will all too often get responses of “it’s really sad Ken-chan can’t be there…” Of course, 02 itself was also about accepting one’s mistakes, not pretending they never happened, so it’d be foolhardy to deny Ken’s dark history entirely, but it’s retroactively interesting to see such a prominent and persistent piece of merch like Ken and Wormmon’s original Best Partner album focus so largely on Ken’s time as the Kaiser when most of the franchise ended up trying to move on.

Starting with Ken’s solo songs, and his first one, ONLY ONE:

I’ve lived without showing my true feelings, wearing this mask

Well, this was easy to tell from the series itself, but the point driven home is that Ken didn’t want to expose his true self to others, putting on a front of “strength” and smashing his true feelings into the corner so that he could become more of the “perfect” person he thought he was supposed to be. There’s also another interesting line that one should pay attention to:

I polished the knife in my heart and put my belief in infinite power

Basically, putting up a defensive front to prevent anything from approaching his weaknesses.

Anyway, moving onto his new song, Never Ending:

If I want to be proud of tomorrow’s version of myself I wonder, what can I do? Never Give-up I’ll keep fighting, even doing someone else’s part No, I won’t be afraid anymore

First of all, the main theme of the song is about putting conscious thought into understanding how to stay true to himself – basically, understanding what it is he really wants to do and become, instead of putting on fronts and hiding it from others. Not only that, we see traces of what exactly he gained over the course of the second half of 02 – because so much of it involved constantly trying to blame himself for everything, this song is about what he came to learn in terms of proactively making it up and actively fighting forward. He’s working hard!

We also have this part:

The knife that’s pointed at someone, or at myself If it’s been let go of

Two things going on here: firstly, we have an explicit reference to the metaphorical “knife” Ken referred to putting up in ONLY ONE, talking about finally letting it go instead of bothering with this kind of front. He also points out that, in a sense, the knife was pointed at himself too, either in the sense of actually having hurt himself through this entire ideal, or in the sense that he constantly was trying to blame and punish himself for everything. None of that should be necessary anymore. Moreover, Never Ending contains a lot of references to “daily life” and the happiness that comes with the simplicity of just being alive – because that was indeed what Ken gained through his experiences, the ability to treasure living life in itself instead of aspiring to an impossible standard.

Another interesting thing about Never Ending is that it’s technically in a similar rock genre to ONLY ONE instead of being “soft”, like Ken’s personality is often thought to be. This was a surprise to a lot of people who commented on how surprisingly “cool” the song was, but this is actually completely in line with Ken arguably being one of the most openly assertive people in this group even after his reformation. Note that it’s very difficult to call this song purely angsty – it’s definitely positive and forward-thinking, and the chorus itself is partially in major key – but it has the vibe of someone who’s fully aware of everything that’s happened, is putting proper thought into it, and is pushing on despite everything. Remember, the intensity the Kaiser had originally came from somewhere; Ichijouji Ken is the same person, in the end.

In regards to Wormmon’s song, the contrast is also obvious: The Future You Dreamed of, the Future I Dreamed Of. is of course about Wormmon’s tormented feelings during the Kaiser’s abusive relationship with him, whereas can change it! is about its aftermath and how they made up (including copious references to the events of 02 episode 23). Even then, there’s a certain “forward-thinking” attitude that marks this song as being representative of being after 02’s events and not during – see the line “The mistake we made that day/is exactly the reason we’ll never let it happen again”, instead of the self-punishment and shame Stingmon expressed in 02 episode 26).

On top of that, the duet song Forever Adolescence also marks a subtle progression from the point they were at from True Strength – remembering that Best Partner 12 was released at a time when True Strength was actually a bit of a spoiler, while Ken and Wormmon obviously had made up by that point, the key line in it is still “everything truly begins from here”. So what, exactly, happened after that? According to Forever Adolescence, the decision made was to keep moving forward, and, moreover, to stay “the way they are”, especially with the nuance that it means it’s okay to not force oneself into the role of an adult and stay “young at heart”. This is really, really important in light of the events of Kizuna, the 02 group’s unusual role in it and its relevance to 02′s themes (more on this below), and how Spring 2003 referred to the pressure placed on Osamu as him being “forced to grow up too quickly” – in essence, Ken and Wormmon have firmly resolved to actively move away from that kind of pressure.

Miyako and Hawkmon

I’ve pointed out several times on this blog that the actual complex Miyako was going through in 02 was that she hated herself more than anyone else in the group would be willing to criticize her – and if you don’t believe me, it’s put in a pretty heavy-handed manner in her original song, Crash and Bingo!:

Fussing about it won’t get anything done But my selfishness and problems and panic keep coming out

…and even more viciously in her own and Hawkmon’s duet, Fly High:

I can’t do anything right, besides playing around with computers

Everyone would be still be fine if I weren’t there

If you thought it was subtle in the main series, it certainly isn’t here: Miyako considered herself good for absolutely nothing and unable to be accepted by others for being too useless – in these songs, despite Hawkmon’s attempts to uplift her, she criticizes her own messy tendencies and considers herself a burden. Best Partner is a positive series, so it still has the attitude of “we’ll try anyway”, but it’s clear that Miyako really didn’t have the highest opinion of herself at all. Hence, Fly High also shows off the worst of Hawkmon having to deal with the fallout – with Miyako flailing around in panic and considering herself good for nothing, he’s forced to carry her around.

But come Miyako’s new solo, From Spain with Love!, we see a huge contrast all over the place:

I, who have evolved into an adult make everyone do a double-take at me when I walk by!

Exhibit A: actual confidence in herself and ability to consider herself worth something;

If I can always, always be honest with myself Even if I don’t put together some program, even if I keep screwing up Ah, you understand me

Exhibit B: understanding that she’s worth something to others besides her utility abilities, and knowing that she has friends who’ll support her despite her flaws (which is very true);

When things are feeling hard, the first thing you should do is call me, okay? I’ll take the wings of love and purity, spread them, and get there as fast as I can Ah, I’ll open up any gate I need to

Exhibit C: indulging in her capacity for helping and supporting others;

Al mal tiempo, buena cara We laugh exactly when things are hard

Exhibit D: understanding the strength to get through hard times, instead of emotionally crumbling under the pressure.

Yep, that’s exactly what her character arc in 02 was about; 02 episode 31 was a huge turning point for her because, in the depths of her berating herself for her messiness and expecting Hikari to be secretly judging her the whole time, Hikari revealed that she was outright jealous of Miyako being able to speak her mind, and Miyako shortly after ended up showing her true capacity for reaching others who needed her help and supporting them, a role she ended up growing into for the rest of the series. Note that, other than the casual remark of confidence at the beginning, Miyako hasn’t necessarily become arrogant or anything – it’s just that, by focusing her energies into how much she loves everyone and turning her “nosiness” and “sticking herself into others’ business” tendencies into positive energy to help everyone, she gained more confidence in her ability to be loved and accepted by others.

This is reflected as well in her new duet with Hawkmon, where, instead of Hawkmon dragging her around everywhere, their differences and mismatched personalities are outright celebrated, and while Miyako still has awareness of her messy tendencies, she’s no longer letting it emotionally rip her apart and has confidence that Hawkmon can be by her side to help her through it. Perhaps reflecting that, Hawkmon himself goes from the over-the-top, dramatic, high-strung Knight of Love to the more calm and straightforward Gentle Tornado, perhaps because his own partner isn’t constantly bouncing off the walls recklessly nearly as much anymore.

Incidentally, it’s not like all of this is without nuance, either; even if Miyako’s become more of a confident person, she’s not all put-together. Considering that the entire song has her gushing about how she’d be willing to drop anything to go see her friends (which was pushed forward in Kizuna itself, what with her willingly taking the same request she’d refused to do earlier just because her friends were involved, and even inventing D-3 gate exploitation just to go see them), when you get to the end, and her gushing about her fun in Spain suddenly derails into reminiscing about the events of 02 episode 42, the implication is clear: for as much as she wants to be wholeheartedly enjoying this fun trip abroad for what it is, she can’t help but let her thoughts float back to memories and friends she cares about, and her bonus conversation with Hawkmon drives it in further that, ultimately, she dearly misses them too much.

Iori and Armadimon

Iori also went through some drastic changes in character over the course of 02, so when you look at My Conclusion, it’s basically Iori at his “worst” point of black-and-white morality:

Everyone, I will be speaking my conclusion Evil will not be tolerated Even evil in itself will be defeated by justice That will always be a certainty in the end

I mean, let’s even consider the fact that the song is called “My Conclusion” in the first place. Iori’s slamming this all down like this is the end-all of everything, and you can’t change his mind! He does briefly admit that there are certain things reason itself won’t change, but it’s more like he’s on the verge of having an out, because in the end, really…

Everyone, I will be speaking my conclusion Our enemies are beyond reason Again and again, to the very end They will certainly use cowardly means to come and attack us

Rationality. No feelings involved. Evil is evil, and justice is justice. No takebacks. Life exists by rules, and nothing else.

Message to the Future is possibly one of the most interesting songs in the original Best Partner collection, because it does actually provide hints about where Iori should be going in the future, and also has a lot of things that retroactively hit a lot harder from the meta perspective. The song fully fleshes out Iori’s feelings and concerns about how to grow up into a proper adult (which was hinted to be his real motivation as to why he was so strict with himself in 02), and that, most of all, what he wants is for his “feelings” to never change no matter what happens. Iori expresses concerns about how he might change as an adult to Armadimon, and Armadimon assures him that he’ll still be “Iori”, no matter what.

So, come the new character song collection, Iori’s new solo song is aptly titled “Things That Won’t Change” – because, in the end, despite everything that changed, his feelings did not. He says it himself: the important parts that he really wanted, the desire to do the right thing and to protect others, never changed a bit at all since “back then”. What did change, however, was his way of going about it.

Rather than what someone else has decided I’ve chosen my own future now

and again:

Rather than imitating someone else This is to shout out my own future

The emphasis on this being Iori’s own choice is important because Iori has finally decided not to live by strict rules imposed on him nor by imitating others (remember, part of the reason he kept doing what he did back in 02 was because he had such a strong belief “my father would have done this”). Others had been encouraging him to “make his own decisions” from the get-go – even Hida Chikara himself had told him that he was the one who needed to decide what to do in any moment in 02 episode 5 – and after dealing with a violation of his own morals in having to kill a Digimon in 02 episode 44, one episode later, in discussing with Takeru, Iori has to come to terms with the decision to continue fighting because “this is what I have decided myself”, because it’s not about whether he has an obligation to keep fighting for the sake of justice, but because he, himself, wants to protect others, and will do what it takes to do so. There’s no more of these strict rules of “because it must be this way” or the black-and-white morality that caused him to be so initially hostile towards Ken and Oikawa, but an understanding that these things need to be decided from the heart.

Moreover, unlike My Conclusion, Things That Won’t Change isn’t written like Iori’s turning in some school essay, but rather, more than half the song is in casual-form Japanese (which was associated with Iori when he became more emotional and wasn’t keeping himself in check anymore), and is more of a thoughtful reflection of his own feelings rather than trying to pass itself off as following rules because he must.

Thus, while the duet Choo Choo Tryin’ isn’t as heavy-handed as Message to the Future, Iori and Armadimon acknowledge that they need to be forward-thinking and keep going (generally tied to the message of 02 in itself), and Iori outright discusses the potential pitfalls of becoming too stiff. Furthermore, the song has copious rap portions, which seems rather unfitting for Iori on its face – until you realize that not only was Iori sometimes willing to indulge in more fun even back during 02 (just because he was strict with himself didn’t mean he was a complete killjoy), Iori’s also just a lot more flexible-minded in general, and has a penchant for wanting to do things right when he’s given a task. (His delivery of the rap in the song isn’t monotonous nor overly emotional, but has the nuance of someone who’s trying to recite all of it with caution.)

The part that’s particularly striking from the meta perspective is that Iori and Armadimon are no longer voiced by the same voice actress; Message to the Future was essentially Urawa Megumi talking to herself. So now, Iori has a new voice actor, and in many ways has become very different from Armadimon – but because Armadimon sounds a little like Iori, you could say he’s helping preserve the childish side of Iori that’s more important than ever to hold onto, especially since Iori himself worried about changing too much. And so, Iori’s still willing to indulge in a sort of “fun” song like this, and in the end, despite everything, you understand that they haven’t drifted apart at all in the slightest.

That’s not to say that Armadimon himself hasn’t changed either – in fact, he’s changed himself in response to how much Iori has. His original solo song had a lot of easygoingness to it, and some constant reminders for Iori to please, please chill – but his new one has a much stronger sense of resolve and forward-thinking attitude, reflecting that, while Iori himself technically had to learn to embrace more emotional uncertainty through the events of 02, it was also able to give him much stronger resolve that this was something he was doing because he was emotionally prepared for it, not out of some sense of moral obligation.

Takeru and Patamon

I’ve already covered Takeru’s original Best Partner song Focus and how it’s probably not about shipping as much as the fanbase tends to pin it as, but in any case, the operative part is here:

Before I knew it, I was watching over you Still standing at a skewed angle from behind The focus of your heart I wonder, is it on me, or… No, I can’t ask

Takeru couldn’t bring himself to ask sensitive questions or be straightforward about his emotions – which is basically what was Takeru’s lingering problem over Adventure and 02, that he kept swerving around or even lying about sensitive topics and holding everything inside, until one of his triggers was hit and everything exploded. Therefore, even when an important question about someone else comes up, he “can’t ask”. Moreover, for all Takeru is known as a lighthearted and kind person, Focus is a really turbulent song with a really harsh arrangement, and it’s a pretty accurate view of all the complicated and sometimes even negative emotions that Takeru was (badly) coping with over the course of 02.

This was the whole issue with Takeru and Iori’s Jogress arc in 02 episodes 34-36 – that Iori felt he couldn’t understand nor communicate well with Takeru, and had to eventually take matters into his own hands in order to properly understand his feelings. Takeru’s further interactions with Iori were significantly more straightforward for the rest of the series, and the experience also led to Takeru being able to more openly communicate with Ken as well, since the two had been on awkward speaking terms for most of the third quarter of the series.

So when we get to Step High Step…

You lament, you don’t have confidence in yourself I’m saying this to you as I’ve been watching you You’re amazing at all times

The song features Takeru being fairly straightforward about his feelings and opinions instead of just dodging it and going for an “everything’s okay” keeping-the-peace attitude, and not only that, he’s commenting on someone else, something that he probably would have refrained from in 02 for being intrusive. Of course, Takeru was always a nice person, but he wasn’t exactly straightforward about being nice back then – and yet here we are.

Since Focus is probably about his relationship with Patamon and how he kind of wasn’t exactly straightforward about his worries with him either (see 02 episode 34), it’s also interesting to compare Takeru and Patamon’s duet songs as well. Steppin’ out does portray a progression from Adventure in that they’ve accepted they can “do things over” again after things crash down (presumably referring to Angemon’s death and rebirth), but you’ll notice there isn’t much in the way of actual communciation between the two – something that’s not only present in Le Lien, but also portrays them as outright in-sync to the point of “telepathy”. We’re talking about a pair where the fanbase has historically had doubts about how similar they were back in 02 because of how “mismatched” they seemed!

Which, incidentally, they weren’t actually – you can see Patamon pretending he’s not about to cry in his original Best Partner song Don’t Stop Pata-Pata, much like how Takeru would cover up his own emotions, and gritting his teeth and resolving to fight harder. Meanwhile, while Ring of Smiles ostensibly continues to have Patamon be “sweet and cute”, it contains a lot of important nuances of “appreciating daily life with friends”, even if Patamon himself can’t quite find words for it – in other words, it’s actually some rather insightful and thoughtful sentiments from Patamon about the importance of being with and connecting with others, mirroring what Takeru himself learned in connecting with the others around him, especially Iori.

Hikari and Tailmon

Remember, Hikari has two lines (one in Adventure and one in 02) that basically summarize the main “issue” she was dealing with in both series: she was selfless to unhealthy levels, and would prioritize others’ welfare over herself to the point of self-destruction. So in her original solo Best Partner song, Gentle Rain, she puts it pretty explicitly:

I want to always be wearing nothing but smiles But I can’t be cheerful all of the time

or:

So that I can become a greater version of myself Please give me strength

All things considered, Gentle Rain is full of Hikari’s own insecurities, and her belief that she doesn’t have enough strength to do anything for herself. She makes references to being pulled to the Dark Ocean, mainly because – as she says – she doesn’t want to go there, but she doesn’t have enough strength or willpower to resist it. In fact, Best Partner 11 is full of a lot of angst; Gentle Rain is Hikari angsting about her own weakness and inability to do much for herself, Getting up is Tailmon angsting about her painful past and everything to do with it, and Shining Star is basically a plea for both of them to be able to do anything despite all the pain. It’s all pretty severely heavy content, despite the initial sparkly-looking sentiment of it all.

Considering the circumstances, it’s not really all that surprising. Hikari spent her time in Adventure and the first half of 02 very “emotionally isolated” from the others, to the point very few people could understand what she was thinking, and while she’d never hesitate to put herself out for other people, anything to do with herself, like getting pulled to the Dark Ocean, would result in resignation “it’s over” and “I can’t do anything about it”. Tailmon came from the background of being effectively raised by the abusive Vamdemon, so 02 was really only part of the earliest portion of her moving on with her life and being able to spend happier moments with Hikari. But, of course, the real turning point was 02 episode 31, when Miyako finally managed to break through to her and convince her to not accept the inevitability of things happening to herself, to accept help with the support of others, and to not take things happening to her as a sign she’s doomed.

So when we reach Hikari’s new solo song, Tomorrow’s Blue…

I want to chase after my dreams and hopes, it’s fine even if they’re incomplete I won’t lose, I won’t stop, I’ll do this to stay true to myself

The most striking thing about the song is that it features Hikari assertively talking about her own desires and feelings, when back in 02 she basically tried to kick them out of the picture for the sake of everyone else (and, really, even in Tailmon’s new solo song, Tender tale, she outright calls Hikari out for still prioritizing other people over herself). It’s not demeaning herself, it’s not resigning herself to anything, it may have a slight admission that she’s not super-confident about everything yet, but it’s still her looking forward and choosing to pursue what he wants. It’s a big deal!

And instead of the constant angst that permeated Best Partner 11, the new album is about Hikari and Tailmon talking about their feelings towards each other – something that neither of them really verbalized that well over either Adventure and 02 – and contextualizing their importance to each other over the course of their “story”. Hikari talks about Tailmon’s role of assertiveness in helping her break out of her shell, and Tailmon generally provides an extremely accurate description of Hikari in a nutshell – that she’s a bit mysterious, that she’s emotionally sensitive, that she’s cheerful and lifts others’ spirits. What’s more, Tailmon makes a reference to the same kind of “pain” and “losing things” she referred to in Getting up, but instead of angsting about it, she positively accepts it as something that may happen in the process of protecting others. (Oh, and it and the new duet A Tale of the Light also make reference to Hikari’s photography hobby in 02, contextualizing it as something Hikari did to chronicle their precious memories.)

So in summary, Hikari and Tailmon have both been able to accept 02′s philosophy of becoming forward-thinking, positive, and accepting the help of others in order to move forward. Not bad!

Conclusion and digression

Despite how these songs are almost polar opposite in portraying their before-and-after development of the 02 kids, nobody’s really argued that any of them are out of character! In the end, it’s a pretty succinct depiction of what these kids were dealing with and what they grew into by the end of the series. Seriously, I never, ever want to hear that these kids were underdeveloped nor that they didn’t go through any significant development over the course of 02 ever again. That’s just not true at all, and this simply happens to be one of the many illustrations of how.

Moreover, the songs themselves and the “conversations” that came with the new albums solidify firmly that the 02 group has extremely tight relations with their partners even at this time – with Daisuke actively consulting V-mon for help, Miyako, Takeru, and Hikari actively dragging their partners everywhere with them, Ken having Wormmon be his effective alarm clock, and Iori being so close with Armadimon that his Nagoya dialect is rubbing off on him. Daisuke, Miyako and Hikari have a huge point made that, regardless of the rather easygoing way they’re going at it, they’re very aware of what they want to do from this point out and are following it with gusto (and while it’s not stated in words, Iori carrying a huge textbook, presumably a law one, with note markers all over it drives the point home that this applies to him, too). It’s a really, really huge contrast to what was going on with the directionless Taichi, Yamato, and Sora effectively neglecting their own partners back in Kizuna – and further reinforces the reason the 02 group was in such an unusually favorable position during the movie.

#digimon #digimon adventure 02 #digimon adventure last evolution kizuna #shihameta

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janedrewfinally · 3 years

Text

Been thinking about how I’ve read brief references to the ways that Zhou Zishu’s disguise in “Word of Honor” involves him darkening his skin, but not a lot of explanation as to specifically how that’s potentially connected to not just ideas about skin color and attractiveness but also runs into racist stereotypes that are connected to skin color. So then I spent way too much time on this, because I think there are multiple levels of connotation and intention and practical film-making stuff.

This is, of course, not meant to be the final word on the subject; I used a list format to try to wrangle my thoughts better (ie, not go off on tangents… much) and have put it under a read-more for anybody who wants to just skip it. There’s a general set of points and some more show- and character-specific thoughts (which are also just my opinions).

1) Important to note that the context and the cultural history of East Asian stereotypes/racism connected to skin tone are not the same as the context and cultural history of Euro-American stereotypes/racism connected to skin tone- HOWEVER, Western Imperialism and colonization clearly did have an impact.

2) Looking for sources that were accessible and reasonably short, I found a 2015 piece by a senior undergraduate at Arizona State here, and a 2019 web column here. Both of them are more focused on female beauty standards, but the second in particular also talks about men.

3) @geges did a great set of concise points that are focusing on Northern and Central Asian stereotypes in Chinese media, which does include some discussion of skin tone, particularly when combined with hair and eye color. But I think it’s relevant to note that Zhou Zishu’s disguise isn’t trying to make him look non-Han Chinese- in “Word of Honor,” it’s Wu Xi who is very clearly that kind of “exotic Other” character (that’s a lot more explicit in “Lord Seventh”)...

...and Xie Wang is also ticking off a lot of those boxes, particularly in terms of hair and accessory choices (which opens up a lot of room for looking at things like where exactly Zhao Jing picked him up and why it is that this particular foster child is getting this kind of visual coding when the other two foster sons we see are not being exoticized/Othered like this, because wow).

4) Historically (and both of those web articles mention this briefly), there’s a strong association between skin color and social class (and hence beauty standards, because “beauty” and “high class/wealthy” frequently overlap, because it’s the upper classes that have the time and the resources to invest in wardrobe and accessories and beauty products and routines and so on… and they’re the people getting written about and painted and whatever, while the lower classes are historically the people out working in the sun and getting tanned, weathered skin -there’s a reason why getting a tan doesn’t become a sign of status and leisure time in Western cultures until the early 20th century, when the working classes are more likely to be in factories rather than out in the fields).

5) Looking at the history of beauty in Japanese and Chinese culture, Cho Kyo notes “Among the Han themselves, descriptions of beauty and ugliness formed metaphors of vertical relations. The Chinese expression “talented men and fair women” (cairen jiaren) by definition implies their class origin. The phrase “fair women” does not simply refer to women of lovely appearance but to those of literary families.” I realize that that’s more about women again, but there’s a connection being made between paler skin tones, attractiveness, learning, and social class that I think is relevant.

In terms of the decisions made by the show:

1) Look, this is not a show that had the budget to have Hu Ge somebody else play Zhou Zishu for the first five and a half episodes in the name of having him look significantly different- and that also would have messed up the entire relationship development arc.

2) This is a show that basically had the budget to buy, like, a couple of bottles of darker foundation and create a messier hairdo and grab an eyeliner pencil that they could use to draw on some facial hair.

3) There’s also the fact that the show really needed Zhang Zhehan’s facial expressiveness- I mean, Zhou Zishu’s entire complicated emotional journey when Uncle Li demands that he swear to escort Zhang Chengling to safety is amazing and would not have worked if Zhang Zhehan had been wearing anything that impeded that.

In terms of the decisions made by Zhou Zishu as a character:

1) He’s not trying to look non-Han Chinese or play off racial stereotypes; he’s trying to look invisible. He wants to be Random Background Peasant Guy (Intrepid Roommate: Alcoholic #4!), who spent his anonymous life toiling under the hot sun and is just there in the background. He’s deliberately using all of those social and cultural stereotypes about who is important enough to pay attention to.

2) Like… you know how Zhou Zishu constantly answers that he doesn’t belong to a sect, he doesn’t have a name, he’s nobody, please pay no attention to him (and then Wen Kexing jumps in and messes this up)? It’s the visual equivalent of that. He’s nobody important- he’s not of the martial arts-educated, literate class, and you can obviously tell that! Just by looking at him!

3) ... unless you’re Wen Kexing (who, by the way, also has a skin tone that’s coded for a certain social class- just, you know, a much higher literate Confucian scholar one).

#word of honor #word of honor spoilers #wenzhou #self-indulgent rambling #word of honor meta #zhou zishu #zhang zhehan

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hawkinsschoolcounselor · 3 years

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Hi there ‘not queer-baiting’ anon here. I want to apologize. I didn’t mean to come across like I was lecturing you. I’m a queer woman born in 1983, and I was aware we’re close to the same age. I brought up Teena and Shepard because some of those who read your blog might not know those names, who weren’t around when those tragedies happened. I was pretty certain you would know who they are.

As for my what I was getting at, I do think the show itself needs to confirm Will is gay, whether he only admits it privately to himself or perhaps to his direct family. I just think within the universe the idea that Will might not come out to his friends and live as an openly gay boy is a realistic possibility. Like you pointed out, the media back then didn’t have a lot of positive representation. Will had no role models, very little access to accurate information, or a gay community. He’s also from a traditionally conservative State. I can easily see a fifteen year old boy not feeling ready to come out under such circumstances. So, those who talk about the situation like Byler has to happen or else it invalidates Will’s story is reductive to me. The story of a closeted gay kid is just as valid, if disappointing to the modern audience.

I’m hopeful that if the Byers are in California that Will does get to see and experience a more positive depiction of gay people than Hawkins probably gave him. I think that would be a very organic way to open him up more to be comfortable and accepting of himself. I do want Will to come out and be happy, I just want to temper those expectations with acceptance that it might not be the outcome.

Once again, I’m sorry if it seemed like a lecture or that I’m unsupportive of LGBT+ persons and depictions in media. That was never my intent.

I apologize on my end, too. I appreciate you wanting to take the historical context seriously, but I was being defensive, and I overreacted a bit. I get angry when it's suggested that it's unrealistic that Mike and Will could get together. It ends up feeling like the burden of evidence is sky high for a gay couple, but two straight kids just need to be in the same room.

I honestly feel like the story of the closested gay kid is played out, and it sends a hopeless message to the audience in this particular case. On a show where Will has constantly been made to suffer, he deserves more than to accept himself in silence. It would feel to me like he ends the show the way he started, only he's just hiding from a different type of monster. I'm not saying that Will should end up "out and proud" or that he and Mike would dance together at the Prom, but there is a middle ground here that perhaps we're both ignoring.

They've spent three seasons now showing the unique relationship Mike and Will have. People out there still seem to think they're "just friends," but the details make it clear that they have something special that they don't have with any of their other friends. If they didn't plan to go somewhere with this, I can't see why they'd repeatedly build it up. And it's not solely on Will's end, like some people seem to think. Will's homosexuality is actually something we're largely informed of, rather than shown. Honestly, the only part we actually see from him is his jealousy in season 3. It's really Mike who makes all the grand gestures, but most fans don't think twice about Mike being gay. I find that to be an interesting phenomenon. Apparently, in our heteronormative society, you're straight as an arrow until someone says you're gay.

I don't know how they plan to go about portraying this. I feel like there's no way they can really do the journey justice with the time they have. Still, I do believe that the seeds have been planted for both Mike and Will over the years, and they seemed to be priming it to bloom in some way next season. I just can't see the Mike and Will saga going nowhere after everything they've done leading up to it. I don't know if Robin will play a role in this now that she's opened the door for explicitly gay characters. I don't know if a relatively more liberal area like California might play a role, either. I just don't it would be baffling to me to not take this to some sort of satisfying resolution. I just know that they've gone to lengths to show that these boys have something special, and it would make no sense to me to end it with anything else but them together. It doesn't need to be over the top. I don't expect them to be able to go out in public in a place like Hawkins, but I do expect them to show these two boys finally finding peace and happiness with each other.

PS: If anyone out there is genuinely interested in why I feel the way I do about Byler, or any other topics, then please look at my pinned index post. I've talked about these topics too many times, and I don't wish to repeat myself over an over.

#stranger things #byler #mike wheeler #will byers

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brosencrantz · 2 years

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I've spent the last week and a half glued to news feeds of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is, in a sense, something I have spent half my life preparing for: the formal training of tactical, operational and strategic analysis from my degree, the informal source-analysis training of a life bullshitter-spotting on forums and social media, and the tragic fact that I find it fun to chat about post-Soviet weapons system with a lot of people for whom GRAU codes and NATO reporting names are a third language. I've found myself making observations and predictions on how the war is going to be shaping up and it turns out I'm very good at it, though not enough that I want to do so publicly and add to the - to steal a phrase - already densely betwatted military-speculative complex. So I'm going to share some good explanatory articles and some trusted ongoing sources, people who know a lot about this and whose actual job it is to talk about the war all day (some are even getting paid).

Also, not to be all "DON'T TRUST THE MSM" but I have found even relatively trustworthy news outlets on other topics are hopelessly behind the tactical reality and full of pointless opinion pieces from self-evident wingnuts screeching about vacuum bombs, no-fly zones and nuclear war. I get this is Just How Modern Meeja Be, but it's an unbelievably tiresome waste of time when dealing with fast-paced events that require specialist knowledge to understand.

Articles and Writers

Bret Devereaux is the single best public explainer of military history currently operating on the internet. Everything he writes is worth a read but I'd start with his highly accessible understanding of the historical, political and strategic context for the war. He's also written an intro to protracted war which is entirely correct, but which I pray is going to be less relevant than he thinks it is.

Lawrence Freedman has so far produced several very astute reads on the situation and made accurate predictions. I'd recommend some very lucid articles here, here and here.

Mark Galeotti is the Russia-watcher I most trust. It's worth reading some of his actual books, but for something more up to the minute I'd recommend his article on why this is the end for Putin and his interview on the current Russian political context (30m audio).

Sources

Here's a Twitter feed of trusted sources, put together by my friend Árpád who is even more terminally into this stuff than me. It's a mix of exceptionally clued-up, reliably correct academics, and people actually on the ground. There's a lot there, it updates fast and there are lots of pics of blown up tanks, so let me draw out some particular users worth following: Michael Kofman. Kofman is the premier online expert on Russia's military aims and capabilities and has so far called basically everything right. The only thing his eve-of-the-war map got substantially wrong was missing the Mariupol corridor. Mark Galeotti. Galeotti is a trusted Russia-watcher and expert on the politics and history of this all. He's not super active on Twitter (to his credit) but he does post links to articles and interviews hosted elsewhere, which are always worth a read/listen (use 12ft.io to get around paywalls, they're often on trash sites like the Telegraph.) Oryx. Oryx is an open source intel aggregator working up a list of confirmed casualties (equipment, mainly) on both sides in this war. They did it previously with the Nagorno-Karabakh war. Caveat: they're only as good as the intel being posted, and there are much fewer pictures of Ukrainian casualties floating around, so Ukrainian losses are probably higher. However, this is an excellent source for the astounding amount of equipment the Russians are currently losing. Nathan Ruser's maps. Almost all maps I see elsewhere look at the furthest extent of Russian advance and assume everything behind it is under Russian control. This is wrong and stupid. These are OSINT-based, regularly updated projections of the actual areas of Russian control in the country.

Thoughts

(written 06/03, so we'll see how badly this all dates)

1. This is not the third world war. NATO has already given the clearest possible signals that it will let Ukraine burn to the ground rather than risk a confrontation with Russia which could go nuclear (which is a horrible call but probably the right one). This is a proxy war like any other. Proxy wars between nuclear powers are not new and while it suits the panic reactions to talk up the chances of Putin going bonkers and planting mushrooms on European capitals, it's not at all helpful. (I'm not going to waste time debunking it, calm down, but I'll add a good debunking if I find one.) 2. There is nothing particularly "new" about this war (so far). We have seen the use of drones, the militarisation of social media, war videoblogged in real time, media-narrative-driven fascism, large-scale conventional combat with tanks and modern jets, the deliberate/indiscriminate use of unguided weapons on civilians, and Russian invasions of sovereign states, all over the place in the last twenty years. There are some rancid takes out there from journalists who should know better about this being the "first social media war" or "unprecedented brutality". Nothing is happening here which didn't happen in Syria/Armenia/Georgia/Iraq/Afghanistan/Chechnya. The chief difference here is it is happening to a white Christian European country which you can walk to from the EU in a day. 3. Russia cannot win. There is already no possible win state that Putin can sell to his people. They have already lost too many people, too much credit, and taken too much economic and cultural damage for this to be a positive. This doesn't mean that Ukraine will win. It just means that this was a disastrous waste of time even for Putin. I have no doubt Russia is going to lose, and lose quicker and more badly than most people expect. Russia's ongoing collapse into a parody of fascist militarism is terrifying, and I can only hope it collapses still further and the entire state crumbles - although last time that happened it didn't go great for the human race either. 4. There is no good argument for this war. There is a certain category of whataboutists and useful idiots in the Western political space who see (or want to see) no difference between the voluntary NATO and the at-gunpoint Warsaw Pact, between Ukraine's (sometimes troubled, sometimes struggling) democracy and Russia's violent, kleptocratic autocracy, and between a Peter the Great-era world where regime changed required you to march a hundred thousand bayonets to the enemy capital and our modern age where economies can be gutted, governments undermined and cities vitrified without anyone having to leave their office. They advance the view that by trying to choose a life other than a sclerotic, Russia-dominated buffer state, Ukraine is threatening Russia's rightful imperial entitlement (they use the phrase 'sphere of influence' but it's the same thing) to do what they want to their neighbours. This is a point of view, and is one that Putin's siloviki actually believe. But they are wrong, and beyond seeing where they're coming from we are no more obliged to accept their psychotic view of the world than we are to accept any of Hitler's arguments that he was entitled to murder everyone between him and the Urals. The Russian regime is a cabal of paranoid thugs too mentally ossified to realise that the Cold War is over, they lost, and the game has changed. It is a monstrous throwback which needs to be killed. I don't know if that will happen this year, but I think it can be beaten and shamed. 5. Any of four things need to collapse for this war to end. Ukrainian will and ability to fight, Russian will and ability to fight, the Putin regime, and the entire Russian economy. The only one of those which is definitely not happening in the next week is the first. 6. Russia still thinks Kyiv is the strategic centre of gravity, yet never had a realistic plan for taking it. Kyiv is a dense megacity with Soviet-capital levels of fortified bunkers and air defences, straddling one of the greatest rivers in Europe, and full of highly motivated and well-armed people. I don't think Russia can even manage a plausible encirclement, let alone either the sustained siege or urban assault needed to capture the city. None of the potential moves available to Russia - try and to flatten the city with dumb bombs, have forces east of the Dnieper smash pointlessly into the eastern districts of the un-encircled city, or have the Crimean forces abandon their objectives to try for an improvised encirclement from the south - will work, and all will only play into the Ukrainians' hands. So I hope they do all of them. 7. The most important known unknown is what state the Ukrainian military is in. I have no idea how much they've lost, and that more than anything else will shape the war to come.

#history #military history #ukraine 2022 #ukraine

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smol-lydia · 4 years

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Subculture Appropriation: A conversation with my therapist fiancee about the Beetlejuice musical

Okay so, some context before go into this. I don’t normally like going into identity stuff but antis will come for you if you don’t so here we go:

My fiancee is a trans clinical psychologist, likely neurodivergent. However before going into clinical, they got their undergrad in social psychology and because I was a historian before I became too ill to work, I love to talk to them about culture, society, social movements, etc (my brand of historian was a sub-type called social historian, ie I studied the societies, and social movements and every day lives of ordinary people in the past rather than say, military bullshit. I fucking hate military history lol). As additional context for what I am about to talk about here, I was raised by two gay dads, one of whom was an OG 80s punk who lived in Philadelphia during the AIDS crisis.

Also, full disclosure: I love the Beetlejuice musical. I don’t love what it’s done to the fandom but I love the musical; not all Beetlebabes hate the musical.

Okay so:

The thing that gets my goat about the shitty hot takes a lot of gen z has around Beetlejuice comes from what my partner has termed “subculture appropriation.” Let me explain.

Goth and punk are subcultures. They were, in the 80s, revolutionary. They were radical, and they were not accepted in the mainstream. My dad, with his mohawk and tattoos designed himself (he was a horror comic artist) and multiple hand pierced ears and chains around his neck, was not well received in my small town in NJ. When we lived there, in the early 2000s, we were the only gay family in the neighborhood. Gay marriage wasn’t legal, and I was shunned in school for being the girl with two dads. Gay rep in media was pretty much limited to Queer Eye and the L Word. It was a different time.

Gothic subculture, even in the early 2000s, was not mainstream. My small group of friends in high school (we were all goth and emo) were shunned. A lot of us were some flavor of queer. Some of us were POC. Some, like me, autistic. A lot of us had eating disorders. We were bullied incessently, to a point where many of us had severe mental health problems and had spent time in and out of psych wards. This was also not seen as mainstream and labeled us even more as “freaks.”

Beetlejuice was the movie and cartoon for us, by us. It was a cult classic. It was not something most kids were watching, but I grew up strange and unusual. Beetlejuice spoke to an entire generartion of goth subculture.

Nowadays, things are different. Hot Topic doesn’t play Pierce the Veil at ear numbing volumes when you go into the store. You’re likely not gonna find those hideous punk pants we were all enamored of back in the day. Instead, you’ll find Disney. Fandom. Anime. Bob’s Burgers. In the last decade, goth has been watered down to appeal to the masses (much like other nerdy subcultures) because capitialism ruins everything. So, enter the Beetlejuice musical.

I love the musical because it spoke to me, the little girl I once was, who watched the cartoon with my dad on CN. But I noticed, once the show blew up on Tiktok, things changed. And the reason was a mainstream teen audience picked up on something very specific to a subculture. And then they made it there’s-- hence the term subculture appropriation.

Beetlejuice has its roots in gothic literature, dating back to the 19th century (my friend magicalmolly on tiktok has an excellent “understanding gothic literature” series that covers this). One of the main tropes of gothic lit is Death and the Maiden-- aka Beej and Lyds. It is not a mainstream romance, and it’s not supposed to be. If supernatural romance makes you uncomfy, then maybe this genre isn’t for you.

The problem is when something with tropes specific to a subculture enter the mainstream, they are going to be villainzed and misinterpreted because mainstream Beckys who think they’re goth because they paint their nails black have absolutely no sense of history, context, and nuance that the themes of the show give. As a result, suddenly the shitty hot takes pop up. And yes, age gaps are icky irl. But in this genre, they are bread and butter (Lindsay Ellis has a good video on this called My Monster Boyfriend). As a result, suddenly a bunch of kids come into a niche that isn’t theirs, demand we re-arrange the furniture for their comfort, and in general start trying to push the subculture out of its own space.

This isn’t, by the way, gatekeeping. This is appropriation. When you go into a niche subculture created by the marginalized and try to make it your apple pie bullshit, you are appropriating a space that doesn’t belong to you. As a result, you have two choices: you can either educated yourself on the culture, its history, context, nuance, and decide its for you and dive in. Or you can leave. But it’s frankly gross af for you to barge in, try to rewrite history that in the case of the subculture, goes back decades, and in the case of gothic literature, centuries. That is the playbook of colonization (and I know you little fake woke shits are gonna derail the entire argument because of this but I haven’t seen any of y’all write a fucking 60 page thesis on nationalism, colonialism and antisemitism in France so get fucked).

I’m bad at conclusions so if you made it this far, any OG babes feel free to add on with your thoughts bc we old ass goths gotta stick together. Thanks for coming to my historical context essay.

#Beetlejuice #beetlejuice musical #Beetlejuice and Lydia #BeetleBabes #beetlejuice bway #anti culture #anti beetlebabes

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pebblysand · 2 years

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hello! on the topic of everything ginny went through and people finding out about it, i was wondering about your approach to general wizarding britain’s interest in the events of the year at hogwarts during voldemort’s reign. i have seen other fics like annerb’s armistice series where the events of the year at hogwarts get turned into a media circus, like tragedy porn. what made you decide to have wizarding britain as a whole seem to take the “we’d rather not know” approach? why do you think they’d rather not know? and do you think this attitude will continue indefinitely or that at some point (even if not in the timeline of castles) the wizarding world will want to know what happened in the castle that year? thank you!

Hi there! Thanks for your question, and sorry for taking so long to answer. I had a friend visit last weekend and this week was my last week at my current job so it’s been a very busy few days!! I’ve not much left to do in work today though and I had my booster shot yesterday afternoon which basically has made me unable to really do anything so I’m finally (finally) answering your ask. Sorry about that!

As a disclaimer, I first want to say that just because I wrote it differently, it doesn’t mean that I believe Annerb’s version of this moment in HP History (or other people’s, for that matter - I’m also thinking of this fic) is wrong. In fandom, there’s a natural tendency to assume that if an author chooses to opt for a different take on a particular trope, they automatically think that the people who’ve done it before are wrong or misguided. That is definitely not my case. I’ll explain why below. Also, please note that I only read the Armistice series once, a couple years ago, so while I remember the gist of it, my memory may be hazy on some of the details.

Secondly, I’m not a History expert, just someone who’s taken college classes and… reads shit. I am aware that the below is a gross oversimplification of contemporary History, and told from a very western perspective. Lads, I’m writing a tumblr post about context for fanfic, not an academic thesis. I’m also mostly focusing on European History because a) that’s where HP is set and b) that’s what I know best. You can pretty much find examples of the below in a lot of countries/wars around the world, though.

(see 2,000 more words under the cut)

1. The Historical Perspective

I think - like a lot of other post-war authors - I tend to look at Muggle History to shape the post-war HP world. Obviously, fantasy and dystopian works are meant to act as a metaphor and a distant reflection of our society, and I don’t think HP is any different. You could argue that we need to think of brand new worlds and dilemmas that humans could face in a parallel society, but that is neither my circus, nor my monkey. So, yes, my reflections of the wizarding world are completely bred and influenced by modern day Muggle history.

Now, if you look at Muggle History in the past century, you see that generally, rebuilding society after a war is hard, and the result of years of struggles. In Europe particularly, both the head-in-the-sand perspective and the media circus/tragedy porn perspective have happened, at some point or other. As such, reproducing both those takes in post-wizarding-war fanfic is historically and ideologically accurate. In my opinion, as I said before, there’s no wrong or right way to go about this.

To give you an example: in France, after WW2, a lot of time was spent, immediately after the war, trying to punish those responsible for collaborating with the Nazi regime. This was a time of show trials, imprisonments, shaving women’s heads, etc. You’ve surely seen the pictures in History class if you’re from Europe.

Now, if you transpose what happened there a) to modern-day (well, to the 90s at least) and b) to the Wizarding World, you very quickly get into the realm of Annerb-like tragedy porn. This is a very human (albeit abject) reaction, and I find her take on it incredibly realistic, well-written, and also supported by the way these things have happened in the past. In the wizarding world, this is also kind of what happened after the first war (see Barty Crouch trial) and as humans, we are very prone to endlessly repeat our own mistakes. So, my point is, the tragedy porn perspective works.

However, I think the other version, the put-your-head-in-the-sand version has an equally strong basis in modern day History. If you go further back in European History, you’ll know that after the humanitarian disaster that was WW1, most European countries spent years playing a blame game, especially with regards to the “losers” of WW1, i.e. Germany. In simple terms, the cleansing, airing-the-dirty-laundry-out approach led to Germans holding a lot of resentment towards their neighbours for the post-war humiliations and punishments they’d received (on top of economic difficulties, political imbalances, etc.), which ultimately led to the rise of Hitler, and to WW2.

As a reaction to this (and this is where this whole historical context becomes relevant to Castles), a line of thinking emerged in modern political theory where, post-WW2, many experts thought that assigning blame, hosting trials, and generally holding people responsible for crimes committed during a time of war and punishing them, both as a nation and as individuals, was maybe not the most productive way for society to move forward. According to them, replicating the post-WW1 approach would inevitably foster resentment and blame on both sides, and accentuate threats of populations turning against each other, resulting either in another war (as it had with WW2) or in civil war. Today, you can kind of see that with terrorism where the more the west fought and tortured the populations of Iraq & Aghanistan in “retaliation” for 9/11, the more resentment built against the US and its allies - it’s a very noxious circle of violence.

The line of thinking geared at reconciliation to avoid this circle became more prominent in the 1950s and onwards, where many countries stopped chasing after Nazi criminals, or generally looking for justice/revenge (up to you to decide which applies term here), and instead focused on reconciliation of their people, and the glorification of the “good guys” but without necessarily blaming the “bad guys.” Through that, you get initiatives in Europe like the ESCS, which much later became the foundation for the EU. At its height, this line of political thinking led to many Amnesty laws being passed after subsequent authoritarian regimes fell in the 70s. Spain and the fall of the Franco regime is a pretty striking example of this. This meant that individuals who had committed crimes during these subsequent wars/regimes would simply be allowed to walk free, in the name of moving on and reconciliation and not wanting to turn a very traumatic period of History into an ex-post-facto blaming game.

Now, obviously, the shortcomings of this mindset have become pretty apparent in modern day. Today, in Spain, you can see that countless families of victims and people who were brutally murdered under Franco are still trying to obtain justice for their loved ones. It turns out that sweeping all the pain and anguish brought by a war (especially a war where the enemy is inside, i.e. the government, a part of the population, etc.) under the carpet and making it so that it never existed is… not a thing. People don’t actually forgive and forget. People want justice, and when you’ve suffered a loss, that’s a pretty legitimate request. Amnesty laws can be incredibly brutal on victims and equally fail at avoiding resentment and payback mentalities to emerge.

As a consequence, you can see the hardest feat of modern day post-war reconciliation emerge: striking the right balance between the two options. Between: a) people on the oppressed side having a very legitimate need for justice and reparation, but b) also not wanting the trials and the media circus and the blame game to result in another conflict/civil war. And, let me tell you, the English and Irish have tried to do it with the Troubles (which is IMO a very interesting comparison with HP as these wars are contemporary), and have failed. Hardcore. Satisfying all parties is virtually impossible.

So, to come back to Castles after this short Muggle interlude, this is the dilemma that, I believe, Kingsley (and his government) face in Castles. Especially because the way justice was carried out after the first war was very much a reflection of option a) above (see the Barty Crouch trial). This spectacle-trial/revenge approach, like it led to WW2 in the Muggle world, kind of led to the second wizarding war in theirs (or, at least, failed to prevent it). And, I think like we did in the Muggle world, in Castles, the wizarding world is trying to learn from its mistakes and strike the right balance between providing its people with justice and a witch hunt. This is quasi-impossible on its own, but is additionally complicated by the fact that Kingsley himself and most of his government was part of the rebellion and legitimately wants justice for the people they’ve lost. As Minister, Kingsley is obviously trying to rise above that, above his own instincts of revenge and exposing all the wrong that’s been done, which is a very hard thing to do as a human being.

And, so, I think, to answer your question, I wrote Castles the way I did because I wanted to show how hard that balancing act is. It’s not really the rather-not-know, Amnesty-law approach because they are having trials, they are trying to provide some sort of resolution, but they’re just not very thorough. They know justice is important so they’re holding trials, yes, but they’re not being very effective, because they also don’t want to stir up resentment and end up in another civil war. Exposing what happened during the war, especially what happened to children during the war, as your question relates specifically to Hogwarts, would only worsen the rebuilding and reconciliation efforts that are being attempted by the Ministry. For the trials themselves, they’re also struggling with providing a defence to the accused, but that defence is not allowed to cross-examine or hear witnesses, because that would be too traumatic for the victims. The Ministry is encouraging guilty pleas, because they specifically don’t want a media circus. They know that a lot of their own war heroes have committed crimes, but you’re not going to put Harry Potter on trial, are you? Press is allowed in the trials, but only friendly press, etc… It’s a whole lot of trying and sometimes failing at that balance between competing interests.

And, again, don’t get me wrong: I am not saying that mine is the only way to write this moment in wizarding History. The media circus version is just as interesting and legitimate as mine. But, I think, as an author, you’re always looking at what’s been done before and thinking: okay, but how would that work differently? If everyone’s writing about the media circus, I want to write something else, you know? I think it’s part of those executive decisions you make as an author, i.e. the ones that aren’t dictated by character/the world. You could go either way and you’d be correct, so you need to make a choice, and that’s generally where, as an author, I tend to gravitate towards the road less travelled, because to me there’s more space there and it’s more interesting to write.

To give you another example, another executive decision of this type I had to make was: would Harry talk to the Commission, or would he go no comment? Which is a larger question of: would he speak up and try to right all the wrongs after the war, or would he shut down? Frankly, I don’t know. Both options work. Sometimes, in the books, he wants his truth to be heard by everyone and their cousin, and sometimes, he shuts down and refuses to talk to anybody, thinking they won’t understand, and telling himself he doesn’t care. Well, in that case, I’ll look at what other people have done and if everyone else has written him speaking up after the war (which is kind of the case, from the post-war stuff I’ve read), I’m going to go the opposite road and see if I can make it work. I think that’s the challenge of writing something as common as post-war fics - to see what different perspective you can take on them, while still being faithful to the books.

So, tl;dr, I wrote it this way because it fits historically and because I hadn’t seen anyone else write it that way before, so I thought it was an interesting thing to explore

2. My Own Personal Writing Preference

Now, I could stop with the above demonstration and surely sound very clever and cultured, but the truth is, there’s another reason why I didn’t go the media circus road: I’m shit at writing dramatic scenes. By which I mean: when you read the Annerb stuff, she is incredibly good at writing dialogue-y scenes where people argue, shout, or make stunning declarations in front of a grand audience. I guess you could call it “melodrama” but like, in a good way? Big and loud drama, maybe. And, let’s be honest, if you’re going to go into the media circus road, you need that. You need the glitter and the bling of a spectacle. Harry, Ginny, or whoever is on the spot will have to argue and get angry and make points and all of that, for it to work towards your plot.

I - on the other hand - am utterly shit at writing those scenes. If you look at Castles, every time there is an argument, I sort of skim over it or change perspectives, etc. because to be honest, I’m just bad at writing that shit without sounding cliche. I am not a good ALL CAPS writer. So, I’ll admit it, by choosing the aforementioned road of a more quiet head-in-the-sand perspective, I’m also playing into my strengths, as an author, and that’s definitely something I considered when I made the executive decision I wrote about above. It may not be as noble of a reason as wanting to do things differently from a historical perspective, but it’s definitely a reason. I think knowing your strengths and weaknesses as an author is very important and I’m much better at writing the quiet moments than the loud ones.

3. Lastly, a Couple of Ending Thoughts

First, I remember you asking me in your initial PM about Molly (and the Weasleys) participating in that head-in-the-sand mentality. I think for them, this is not a reconciliation thing, like Kingsley, it’s purely a thing of: there’s only so much suffering someone can take. For Molly, specifically, she’s lost a son. As long as her other children are alive, to her, that’s enough - they’re doing well. Especially, since Ginny is trying very, very hard in Castles to appear fine. Sure, she’s being provocative and lying to herself, and hiding how she’s really feeling, but Molly is and has always been someone who’s pretty surface-level with her children. Percy’s behaviour was clearly bred in fear of inadequacy and teenage rebellion but both his parents take his actions at face value. And, that isn’t to say Molly is a bad mother, but I think she’d be much more inclined to console someone who’s clearly struggling, like George, rather than someone who tends to hide their symptoms more, especially behind provocation, like Ginny.

Second, you’ve asked if that perspective will change later on in the fic. Without revealing too much, I think it’s pretty much a given that yes, it will. Our perspectives on wars and historical events change as time washes over them, and that’s - I think - one of the most interesting aspects of writing a post-war fic.

Okay, this post is already way too long, so I’ll stop there. But thanks so much for this wonderful question, it’s the kind of ask I live to answer, ahha.

#asked and answered #castles

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