#not in spite but because of my accurate predictions of the plot

[found--family]

Gotham Knights predictions for the finale! 

I've made guesses throughout the season for how things might progress with characters and plot - most were wrong, which I love because I was pleasantly surprised, but some were right: like fugue!Harvey being Duela's real father and I truly love that twist so much! My point: this show delivers every week on the twists so I'm gonna put my theories here knowing they're probably not accurate and we'll probably be pleasantly surprised yet again, but it helps to lay everything out (heads up: I'm only focusing on Harvey, Rebecca and Duela in this post).

re: Harvey + Rebecca + Duela 

Harvey has been captured by the Talons/Rebecca. So has Duela? 

1. I'm so curious to see whether Rebecca tries to wake dark!Harvey hoping he'll join her side, because he did spin that being with Rebecca was for Harvey's benefit so maybe he knows she's evil but doesn't care? Or whether Harvey will invite dark!Harvey to take over so he can stop Rebecca and save them - but I wonder if dark!Harvey will then choose to side with Rebecca? 

2. In the trailer we hear Rebecca say Look who's come out to play, and since she knows Harvey's musical trigger she's probably the one to bring out dark!Harvey. The question is: why? Does she want to offer him the chance to join her side in her evil plan? It stands to reason that dark!Harvey knew about her because she let him out and he was still down to fool around. Perhaps she sees dark!Harvey as more of a wild card, harder to control, but he could still be a strong ally [re:pawn] if she helps get him relected as DA and/or Mayor. 

3. In any case: what happens when dark!Harvey takes control? Given his self proclaimed status as Harvey's protector - specifically against the court - it doesn't really make sense that he would join dangerous Rebecca (and keep control just to spite him) but Harvey did 'kill' him so maybe he takes some time to be selfish, which could include Rebecca offering him the same deal of immortality and maybe even a way to stay in control indefinitely? 

4. In the trailer for 1x13 we see dark!Harvey laughing in the same owl hall Rebecca is in. Has she set him free? Is he setting his own double-cross plan in motion? Another snippet shows (presumably) dark!Harvey holding a gun: it's pointed to the ground along with his eyesight so whoever/whatever he's shooting at is on the ground and honestly I have no idea aside from him needing to wound/kill someone (but he told harvey in their dream convo that neither of them were killers, so is this their first kill?) but maybe something is more likely. 

5. Though it makes some sense, personally I don't want dark!Harvey to side with Rebecca because he's not a villain (yet). I want her to try and sell him immortality (and possibly control) but he refuses - but may also play her for a bit first? Maybe he agrees to her plan if only to be freed of his restraints. In any case, things get complicated with Duela.. 

6. Duela is bound in a warmly-lit room that looks to be the same place as Rebecca (pointing a gun at her?*) and dark!Harvey (laughing at her?*) beside a ticking bomb. Tens of thousands of people will die, Duela argues and the flip of the former Joker's daughter and small-time criminal wanting to save innocent people while the former white knight DA of Gotham is now an unhinged adversary is top-notch storytelling. 

* 6b. it could be that dark!Harvey is laughing at Rebecca, and at a separate point she is pointing the gun at Harvey (who is now back in control): warning him not to try and save his own daughter, making him choose and making her choose between having dark!Harvey at her side or killing Harvey (because he doesn't have any Electrum in him yet so he can't heal from a gunshot and will likely be left behind to be blown to bits alongside Duela). 

7. It's unclear how Duela came to be where she is. Her mother would only betray her for a high price - at the end of 1x12 we see her drug Duela and say the money is just too good, so perhaps she intends to collect on the ransom for the last fugitive. Does Duela escape? But before she can help free her friends a Talon captures her and brings her to Rebecca? As for the bomb: I'm guessing Rebecca is trying to set Duela up to take the fall, and in the aftermath she (and perhaps dark!Harvey) will rebuild Gotham to her liking. 

8. But this is the finale and we know what's coming: Harvey's disfigurement is imminent. As the summary mentions: Harvey is faced with an impossible decision that could have devastating consequences. Which brings me back to both Harveys and Duela: 

9. How dark!Harvey feels about Duela is unknown. Did he know about her existence? This matters because of context: Duela is bound next to a bomb that will kill her while Rebecca does her evil monologue and dark!Harvey stands at her side. The summary mentions an 'impossible decision' with 'devastating consequences': I'm guessing Rebecca can't shoot Duela because that would prove (in the rubble and remains of the bomb blast) that she was a victim not the perpetrator, but she needs Duela to die in the blast. Perhaps we will see Harvey fight for control over dark!Harvey in order to save his daughter - which would be a beautiful contrast to Duela 'killing' him - and in so doing Rebecca decides he's not worth it and leaves them both to die? Or maybe Harvey shoots Rebecca? (and she can't die because of the Electrum so maybe while he's not looking she gets away). 

10. There's also the question of whether Duela remains with Harvey or leaves to help her friends fight the Talons coming to kill them. Does Rebecca trap them both? In any case, It seems pretty likely that Harvey's disfigurement will be caused by the bomb blast, from him trying to stop or escape the bomb (I think Harvey would try to stop it while also making sure his daughter was safe, while dark!Harvey would get the hell out of there - but I think by this plot point Harvey will definitely be back in control). Perhaps he saves Duela, but with the blast supposedly being so deadly it begs the question: are we looking at the reality of a high civilian death toll, and if so how does Harvey survive? 

11. I'm also very curious to see how Duela reacts to dark!Harvey, and whether he or Harvey gets the chance to talk to her. I think if he does know about her he'll definitely confirm he's her bio dad, but at the very least he'll confirm being involved with her mom, and maybe even clarify that Harvey didn't know about her because he didn't even know about him (this could be telling, separating Harvey from his deeds in yet another protective move, meaning he still cares about Harvey). Seeing might be believing, so she might observe dark!Harvey and side with the whole double-persona thing rather than believe her mom - who just turned her in for a stack of cash. Poor Duela. I really hope she gets a nice bonding moment with Harvey before everything goes to hell, she deserves some positive, sincere parental memories. 

What about season 2?

Sadly, GK was cancelled. But we can still discuss, and create, and spread our enthusiasm and appreciation for this awesome show!

We know the finale will give us Two-Face. So is immortal!Rebecca dead? Because a bomb blast seems like a good way to make sure an immortal person stays dead. Or was she slated to re-emerge in season 2 as Two-Face's first nemisis? That idea has potential, especially given she's now an established villain. Or were the plans for season 2 to make Two-Face the new villain? Perhaps the season would open six months after the blast that devestated Gotham, meanwhile the Bat Brats' names have been cleared and they've taken up the official savior role as the Gotham Knights. And in the shadows Two-Face takes advantage of the city's chaos. 

Throughout season 1 Duela came to truly care about her friends, so despite whatever happens in the finale with Harvey, her newly emerged goodness has me thinking she'd stick with her savior friends moving forward. But I still love the idea of her somehow being involved with or just simply fascinated by Two-Face, especially considering that's her father - proven, not some fairytale about the Joker. Like every Bat Brat, she has some serious parental issues, and part of her character journey is about discovering and defining her own self rather than be shaped by her parents, so it might not make sense for her to stay in contact with Two-Face, but I can see the fic playing out in my mind and I love it. 

I'm not sure how it works with cancelled shows, whether the showrunner and writers and cast can share what-could-have-been, but I think once the finale airs we'll get a good idea what direction they were planning to take the story. 

#gotham knights #gk spoilers #thoughts #harvey dent #twoface #watchnotes #duela dent #long post #much to discuss #fugue harvey

[thesleepykuma]

I am in the middle of trying to write a Magical girl raising project fanfiction. I'll spare you any details of the story to avoid getting your hopes up because I'm notorious for starting creative projects and not finishing them, but it lead me to think about some problems with the story that I'd want to fix in a retelling.

As a caveat, I did like the show. It's not as good as Madoka or Utena but it's structured better than Yuki Yuna (Yuki Yuna was unfortunately plauged with some adaptation issues that MGRP lacks) and is miles above a lot of the other trash that is often published in the 'dark magical girl' genre. I also haven't read the light novels but I'm aware of their existence and some of the things that happen in them.

Problem #1: Most of the characters are flat.

This is an unfortunate consequence of the ratio of number of characters to length of source material; the main source material for the anime is a light novel with is quite short and a few short stories that were published later. The vast majority of characters get one main personality trait and a backstory which can range from insightful to vauge to nonexistent. This means that the amount of emotional investment you are able to put into a character before their death is variable and often minimal. This is an unfortunate problem with a lot of death game stories and can be solved by decreasing the number of characters, making the story longer, or both, which allows for more opportunities for character development.

Problem #2: Power balance

In the show, each magical girl has either a magical weapon or a magical power of some kind. Some exceptions to this such as the Peaky angels who in addition to their transformation powers get flight and Cranberry who gets super hearing in addition to her main sound based powers. The powers are not incredibly well balanced, which I'll explain by comparing the powers of a few different characters. Hardgore Alice's power gives her the ability to regerate unless her entire body is destroyed. This makes her nigh invulnerable and if she had paired this ability with any non-magical offensive weapon she would have been a top contender the winner from raw ability alone. Compare this with Magicaloid 44's power of a random futuristic item a day, which is extremely luck based, Sister Nana's ability bless someone to make them stronger which relies on having a living ally to use it on, and Ruler's mind control power which has too many restrictions to make the most of. In my opinion the best death games are balanced so that anyone has a change of winning or at least surviving. Emotional investment in a given character drops when you can accurately predict that they won't last long.

Problem 3# Snow white

Snow white is the main character of the arc. Her Schtick as a stereotypical magical girl is a good contrast to what the story ends up being, but her main problem is that she has little agency in the plot. Her power has an offensive capability that is used in later light novels but she doesn't have the foresight in the first arc to use it, and she spends most of the plot hiding behind other characters or cowering in a corner. She has one moment where she chooses to do something significant towards the end of the show and even then the payoff relies on multiple other characters actions and not on anything that she did. She makes it to the end of the story because of plot armor.

I don't want to be completely unfair to Snow White. The idea that her simple, childish, innocent desire to spend her days spreading kindness and joy to other people was so moving to the other characters that they decided to help her in spite of what the world turned out to be is emotionally poignant in its own way. I think she works best as a foil to Ripple as Ripple slowly softens throughout the story and Snow white becomes more jaded. She just isn't entertaining to watch most of the time, however, and I suspect that's why Magical girl raising project doesn't have as large of a fanbase as other similar shows.

#magical girl raising project #discourse #mahou shoujo ikusei keikaku

[dreadwulf]

For the commentary: 😁

Jaime seizes her by the shoulders. He moves so suddenly she jerks in surprise, gasping audibly. Before she knows quite what’s happened, he is atop her, holding her down. His lips are pursed in grim determination. But his eyes are wild.

“The neck,” he tells her through gritted teeth, his voice lowered, “will kill at the slightest cut. The groin will spit blood to ten paces and empty you in under a minute. The belly - that would kill you slowly. The knee, that long cord at the ankle, you’d live, but you’d never walk rightly again. But here –”

He pushes his hand into her wound roughly, painfully, until his hand is bloody and she is wincing so hard her face nearly collapses in on itself.

“- this will heal,” he finishes, with great emphasis. “It will heal.”

He glares at her, wild with worry, completely unable to look away.

Her mind reassembles itself slowly. Takes in what he has said.

“I would have-” she tries to say, but he stops her. He cannot help himself.

“You didn’t. And now no one we left alive will believe you came willingly. My forces destroyed the Brotherhood, killed their leader, and took you prisoner. When you escape the villainous Kingslayer in the Riverlands you can safely journey North, or wherever decent people go now.”

This is the first chapter of Ring of Fire which is pretty emotionally brutal - everyone is at their lowest point.

I don't intend Ring of Fire to be a prediction of TWOW at all because I don't actually think any of it will play out this way in terms of plot. But, I wanted it to be emotionally accurate to how I think Jaime will react to the Lady Stoneheart situation, and play out realistically given a single plot twist: Illyn Payne followed Jaime and Brienne when they left the Lannister camp, and he brings a rescue party.

The result is that Brienne doesn't get the chance to enact whatever plan she's going to follow, she doesn't get to try to save everyone and sacrifice herself which I imagine she wants to do. Instead she doesn't save anyone, and Jaime is stuck in that initial reaction to the betrayal without getting to witness Brienne's turmoil over the situation.

What would Jaime do in those conditions? Well.

This excerpt is what reveals that he is even more hurt than he is angry -- and he is furious, so that is very hurt indeed. He takes this betrayal as a judgement on him, on his honor, on his worth. And Jaime cares very much what Brienne thinks of him. So while he is angry with her, he also in a weird way accepts that judgement as something he had coming to him. In the last chapter of the story he reveals even further that if Illyn Payne hadn't come to the rescue he would not have tried to save himself from Lady Stoneheart. He would have met his fate knowing that Brienne and her companions were riding on, free, to complete her quest. He is plenty pissed off, afterwards, to learn that he would have done such a thing, in that very Jaime way where he thinks "why would I do that?" without actually interrogating the question at all.

What Jaime did, in the heat of the moment, when his Lannister soldiers rode in to save him specifically, and they were killing the Brotherhood forces including Lady Stoneheart, is he strikes Brienne down himself with a knife to the shoulder. But as he points out, this is not a killing blow. It is intentionally a blow that she will recover from without too much danger to her life or lingering damage. Then he takes her prisoner, and chains her up in full view of all his men, because they all know she betrayed him. He can't just let her go. He has to make it look good -- both for the Lannister army and for Brienne's potential allies, who he now knows don't look kindly on their friendship (he heard Kingslayer's Whore more than once among the Brotherhood). He will have to display her publically as a prisoner, and then when she "escapes" she will find sympathetic allies who supported the brotherhood, or at the very least loathed the Lannisters.

In other words, he is being incredibly selfless and forgiving, while being simultaneously a huge dick about it. He hasn't breathed a word to Brienne of his plans until now, when it became clear that she was just going to starve herself to death rather than escape. He just let her think he hated her, that she would suffer some terrible fate at his hands. Just like he lets himself think he hates her while behaving in exactly the opposite way.

But Brienne isn't reacting the way she is supposed to, and he's worried about her, and he can't ADMIT he's worried about her, so instead he's going to harass her, and when that doesn't work he is going to confess his plans to her in the most accusing and angry way possible so that she might not guess how very, very badly she has hurt him.

Now in TWOW, if they even get in front of Stoneheart (they might not!) I expect Jaime will not have very long to be angry and hurt before it is made very clear to him that Brienne would have died for him, and she is trapped in a situation very similar to the one he faced with Aerys. But even at the worst scenario, where he doesn't get to see that, I can't see him completely turning on Brienne and somehow becoming a mustache-twirling villian because fuck everyone. He's past that point; it absolutely doesn't make sense for his character arc. Jaime has already said that it pleases him to do the opposite of what everyone expects, and that he will explicitly do the right and honorable thing out of pure spite, and that's what I have him doing here.

Writing-wise I wanted this confrontation to be nasty and painful, so kind of clipped and sharp, and for you to feel awful for both of them. Brienne from how low and defeated she is through this entire chapter, and Jaime through this exchange. Up to this moment it looked like Jaime had completely turned on Brienne and hated her guts, here he inadvertently reveals that it's a lot more complicated than that. Hopefully I was able to convey a lot of inner turmoil this way that he wouldn't be able to explain in his own POV.

#wow that was long sorry

[cinema-tv-etc]

‘Bridgerton’ Isn’t Bad Austen — It’s An Entirely Different Genre

Critics and viewers have dinged the show for being a cliché-ridden period piece or a sloppy historical drama. But it’s neither: It’s Regency romance, and it’s spectacular.

By Claire Fallon

I was deep in a Regency romance binge a few years ago when I pitched a highly self-interested piece to my editor: an investigation into why this didn’t exist onscreen.

This was a creature apart from the Jane Austen adaptations and sedate period pieces I already enjoyed, or sexy but bloody cable costume dramas. A Regency romance is set in a fantasy version of British high society in the early 19th century, and the central action revolves around the courtship between a woman (often a well-bred beauty) and a man (often a rakish peer). They consummate their attraction in improbably acrobatic sexual encounters, and then they live happily ever after.

In the post-2016 election malaise, these novels became my anxiety palliative of choice. They piled up next to my bed and in my e-reader. But sometimes I wanted more, wanted to see the gossamer petticoats and lingering glances and gently unfastened bodices. The piece I pitched never materialized, but the object of my longing did. On Christmas Day 2020, Shondaland’s “Bridgerton” arrived on Netflix.

What ensued was both somewhat exhilarating — getting to see my Regency escapism come to life — and unnerving. My private indulgence, one generally viewed with dismissiveness if not contempt by non-romance readers, had become the target of a full-blown cultural discourse. “Bridgerton” was met with valid and vital critiques, especially over its treatment of consent, but also ones that made me wince: that it was formulaic, predictable, vapid, historically inaccurate, best suited for teens.

Many of the critiques, understandably, seemed rooted in unfamiliarity with the genre’s conventions, or in the expectation that “Bridgerton,” which is based on a series of books by Julia Quinn, would resemble a “Pride and Prejudice” remake. “You don’t get it!” I wanted to shout. “That’s not what this is!” The historical romance has finally gone mainstream — and that means a whole new audience is learning how to read a genre so long relegated to the margins. Sometimes that can be a bumpy ride.

With its bounty of sherbet-hued satin gowns, scandal rags full of malicious gossip, unblinkingly earnest romance, and on-screen lovemaking, “Bridgerton” seems to defy easy categorization for many critics, journalists and viewers — and even Regé-Jean Page, who stars as the smoldering Duke of Hastings.

“It’s a little bit of Jane Austen meets ‘Gossip Girl’ with maybe ‘49 Shades [of Grey’],” he told The Wrap in a December interview. Critics and viewers, at their wits’ ends trying to make sense of this sexy, gossipy, frothy Regency costume drama, also tried to characterize it in terms of beloved on-screen classics: “Pride and Prejudice,” “Downton Abbey,” and, yes, “Gossip Girl.” These comparisons convey some bafflement, an uncertainty about how to categorize a show that isn’t really a realist historical drama, nor an edgy satire, nor a campy soap.

Though it’s true that Austen was the inspiration behind the whole subgenre — the first Regency romance novelist, Georgette Heyer, was emulating Austen’s work — it has evolved into a well-established genre with its own tropes, conventions and standards.

“There’s a way that those kinds of incredibly popular adaptations of Austen will make you, I think, expect that you’re watching a certain kind of thing, and romance novels are not trying to do the same thing at all,” critic Aaron Bady said in a phone conversation. “If you go in watching ‘Bridgerton’ and say, ‘I think I’m watching Jane Austen,’ you’re going to be disappointed. It feels a little Jane Austen-y, but it doesn’t work like a Jane Austen novel.”

Nor is period romance merely a form of realist period fiction. In her review of the show, Patricia Matthew, an associate professor of English at Montclair State University, placed it in a long artistic tradition of Black women depicted in Regency settings. But ultimately, she said in a phone interview, “Nobody’s reading Julia Quinn because they’re looking for disquisitions on historical precedent.”

Bursting though a romance novel may be with carefully researched, period-accurate details about Vauxhall entertainments, Almack’s vouchers or ribboned chemises, these novels really aren’t about the Regency era, or at least not primarily.

“Historical romance does a different kind of work than historical fiction,” Sarah MacLean, a popular historical romance author, told me during a phone call. “The work of the romance novel is not to tell the story of the past. It is to hold a mirror to the present.”

By building a love story between the primary couple, one that is guaranteed to end “happily ever after” or “happy for now,” a romance novel not only provides escapism and the heart-pounding rush of vicarious passion, but a space in which to explore how romantic relationships can and should be, and how women can find fulfillment and happiness. And that means these stories have little to do with how the marriage market of Regency high society actually functioned; they’re about what readers — predominantly women — want to see in their lives today.

“The appeal of the time period for readers is very much about being able to distance readers from certain kinds of social issues and then reframe them as a reflection of society now,” MacLean explained. In the 1970s, novels typically featured brooding alpha males who took what they wanted sexually ― a narrative device, MacLean argued, for the fictional heroines of the time to have plenty of sex without being seen as loose and deserving of punishment. Historical romance novels today often feature heroes and heroines having what seem like rather anachronistically tender exchanges about consent.

Ella Dawson, a sex and culture critic, sees period romance as a way to provide a balm — an experience in which violence and trauma are, if not absent, superseded by a reassurance of ultimate well-being — while also walking readers through more thorny questions.

“Romance as a genre is really interested in consent, in diversity representation, in political issues,” she said. “Romances are so infused with these issues that I [am] really passionate about, and they explore it through this really fun, romantic, swoony, but still very intellectual, thoughtful, accessible lens.”

As odd as it felt to see a straightforward romance adaptation dissected as if it were a failed attempt at matching Jane Austen, it makes sense. Because the genre is generally regarded with such disdain in mainstream culture, it occupies a rather marginalized niche. A non-romance reader is unlikely to have a firm grasp of many things about the genre, outside of well-worn jokes about throbbing members and Fabio’s flowing hair, and though romance is among the bestselling genres in the book industry, it’s rarely adapted for TV or film.

Why has this omission persisted for so long? “I can’t imagine that it isn’t a huge amount [due to] patriarchy, in the sense that for the same reason it gets disdained on the page, it gets disdained on the screen,” said MacLean. To this day, the people deciding which films and shows to finance are almost entirely men. Shonda Rhimes is that rare exception — a woman with creative control over a TV empire, and a fan of the Quinn series.

Practical obstacles to adapting romance also pop up. A novel stuffed with sex scenes and building toward a tidy happy ending may be tricky to adapt for network TV, which needs to keep things a bit cleaner — and keep the narrative drama going indefinitely.

And it’s not just the network TV standards and the tidy endings. The heightened reality and bodice-unclasping of the genre, Matthew said, rely on an intimacy between the reader and the page that’s difficult to translate to the screen.

“I think the plot lines are bananas. I think they’re so extreme that they strain credulity,” she said, laughing. “You have to believe that a sane man, an adult, would say, ‘Oh, I’m just not going to have children so I can spite my father.’ It only works if it’s you with a glass of wine, kind of throwing yourself over to the world of romance.” It’s awkward to sit with someone else, knowing they’re watching the same melodramatic story unfold, partaking in a pleasure that feels somewhat private, if not embarrassing. “We all have these fan worlds that when they’re exposed to other people that aren’t a part of that world we might feel protective of, or feel bashful,” she said.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bridgerton-netflix-romance-genre_n_60086fd5c5b6ffcab969dafa?utm_source=pocket-newtab

#Bridgerton #Jane Austen

[musicprincess655]

The sun shines brightly overhead, and Dazai hates it. He would drown it out and disappear into the shadows if he could, disappear from sight, hide away.

He doesn’t let any of that show on his face, though. He keeps the same carefree, vacant expression in place, the one that people see and dismiss immediately, perfected from a life of being seen and not heard. If anyone knows how to disappear, it’s Dazai.

He knocks on the door of his destination, grateful to be there, grateful to escape the mass of people living their stupid, boring lives prescribed by the stupid, boring city. He’d sooner be alone than surrounded by them.

“Dazai-kun.” Fukuzawa gives him a stern look that only reads as welcoming because Dazai’s been coming here for years. “You’ve found your way back here again.”

“I always do,” Dazai says, falsely cheerful in a way that puts people at ease around him. “May I come in?”

The answer is always yes, but Dazai’s learned that Fukuzawa likes to be asked anyway.

“There’s always a place here for someone trying to escape Mori Ougai,” Fukuzawa says, stepping out of the way to let Dazai in. “Ranpo’s in the back with Yosano. I’m sure the three of you can find something to amuse yourselves.”

“You don’t have any new cases?” Dazai asks. Disappointing. The best part of coming to the detective agency is that sometimes, if he’s lucky, there’s a weird case, one that makes him work for it. He gets a spark of something like a genuine emotion when he has to push his brain to the limit to puzzle out something difficult.

“I have new cases, but none you’ll be interested in,” Fukuzawa says. “Just the old staples. Cheating, open and shut murders, theft, you know the drill.”

“That’s boring,” Dazai complains.

“That’s what Ranpo said,” Fukuzawa tells him. “Why don’t you go commiserate with him?”

Dazai wanders to the back of the building to do just that. Ranpo sprawls in his chair, leaning back on two legs, opening chocolates and throwing them in the air, trying to catch them in his mouth with limited success.

“There’s nothing to do,” Dazai complains, sitting across the table from Ranpo and dropping his head to his arms.

“Oh, good, the sassy lost child is here again.” Dazai twists to see Yosano levelling an unimpressed look at him.

“Hi, Sensei,” he grins. Yosano rolls her eyes and goes back to what she was doing.

She likes him. Dazai knows it. He laughed when she threatened to dissect him and suggested she take a souvenir for her troubles. She retaliated by leaving him anatomy textbooks she thought he’d find interesting and teaching him how to suture on a banana.

Dazai reaches across the table to steal Ranpo’s abandoned laptop. If there’s really nothing to do here, he’ll just default to an old favorite: poking at things he has no business sticking his nose in.

It’s not like he couldn’t have done this at his guardian’s house. It might have even been easier. His parents might have pawned him off on Mori as a cousin just closely related enough to be coerced into watching him, but he still has access to things most citizens of No. 6 don’t because of them. But that defeats his entire purpose of getting away from Mori.

He doesn’t hate his guardian. In some ways, Dazai is even grateful to Mori. He’s a difficult child to deal with, and he knows it. A combination of being smarter than both his parents and not yet having the social skills to pull his punches about it got him sent to live with Mori in the first place, though both of them will swear up and down that they needed to focus on their careers. Mori isn’t like that, though. Mori is smarter than him, and perfectly willing to let Dazai play whatever mind game he wants, mostly because Mori is capable of winning. He’s a challenge that Dazai desperately needs, especially back a few years ago when he was so bored by everything around him that he threw all the pills in his medicine cabinet down his throat just to see if that would make him feel anything.

But Mori also, in some ways, represents everything Dazai hates about his life. For one thing, he’s been remarkably good at stopping any further suicide attempts. For another, as much as Dazai likes a challenge, it’s not fun when he never wins.

So, instead, he comes running to Fukuzawa, someone who’s more than willing to take in a refugee from Mori. He gets to help Ranpo solve cases that challenge him, but that have a possibility of victory. Ranpo’s better than him, but Dazai’s learning.

And when there aren’t any cases to solve, and when Dazai’s feeling particularly spiteful, he likes to try and find all the secrets No. 6 wants to keep hidden.

His parents are both politicians, though Dazai doesn’t have a clue what they actually do. He doesn’t much care to find out. Instead, if they’re the ones making the laws, he’ll see what they hide in a place where they punish those who break their laws.

The Correctional Facility has more security around its information than Dazai thinks is strictly necessary. If all they have is prisoner information, it shouldn’t be worth this much effort. It was Ranpo who pointed out, in the middle of one of Dazai’s bitch sessions about it, that if it was really so hard, they must have something to hide.

What could a prison have to hide?

Nothing Dazai can think of in answer to that question seems like something No. 6 would be comfortable having any citizens know, and that’s reason enough for him to want to know anyway. He’s almost got it, too, teasing his way around a tricky firewall.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

Fukuzawa joins them in the back, giving Dazai a reproachful look. He knows what Dazai’s doing, or at least has an idea, and he disapproves, but he hasn’t bothered to try and stop him.

“Looking for the truth behind the biggest lies No. 6 likes to tell,” Dazai says breezily.

“You should be more careful,” Fukuzawa says. “You never know who might be listening.”

“Sensei!” Dazai gasps, laying a dramatic hand over his heart. “How could you? I thought we had something special!”

“Please,” Yosano rolls her eyes. “You should be looking at Ranpo. He’s susceptible to bribery.”

“That is true,” Ranpo says. “I would sell you for snacks.”

“I am hurt.”

“That’s enough,” Fukuzawa says. “Ranpo, I need to get working on this murder case, and I need to interview witnesses. I need your help.”

“But going door to door sucks,” Ranpo complains.

“Not even you can solve a case without any evidence to look at,” Fukuzawa says.

“Make Dazai do it.”

“Dazai is not technically an employee.”

“Because you won’t hire him.”

“I will when he finishes school.”

“Ugh.” Ranpo casts a dark look at Dazai. “Thanks for nothing.”

“My pleasure,” Dazai says, turning back to his work.

He’s almost got it. He can even get a few pieces of information at the lowest security clearance levels. And, as suspected, what he finds isn’t good.

In fact, if he’s reading the snippets he can find right, the Correctional Facility might be more accurately described as a lab. It’s not that he doesn’t believe No. 6 is capable of human experimentation. He just wishes they were less cartoonishly evil. A government that does experiments on its own citizens? It’s like a plot from a low budget movie.

“What’s that face for?” Yosano asks him. “You look like you’re about to start laughing maniacally.”

Maybe Dazai should develop maniacal laughter. It would probably be a good skill to have.

“I found something cool,” Dazai says. And then yawns. Without him even realizing it, night has fallen. “I should probably go home.”

“You’ll be careful, right?” Yosano says. “The Lost Town is dangerous at night.”

“Aww, Sensei, you do care,” Dazai simpers. She rolls her eyes, already writing him off. “I’ll be fine.”

Dazai whistles to himself as he walks, hands stuffed in his pockets. Predictable villain plot or not, he still found something interesting, with the promise of more if he keeps digging. He should get at least a couple more weeks of entertainment digging out all the secrets of the Correctional Facility, and weeks more trying to decide the best way to use it.

Part of him wants to just release it to the internet and let chaos make its natural way through the city, but surely if he puts his mind to it, he can come up with something better. Something more targeted.

“Dazai Osamu?”

Dazai slows to a halt. A police officer looks him up and down, takes in the bandages around his wrists, the perfect wide-eyed innocent expression Dazai’s perfected over the years.

“Can I help you with something?” Dazai asks, pleasant, just a hint of fear, the perfect cocktail to portray a well-raised young boy with nothing to hide.

“You’re under arrest,” the officer says, stepping forward with a pair of cuffs. Dazai takes one step back before he thinks better of the urge to run. He knows his own ability, and if a real chase starts, he won’t win.

“For what?” Dazai asks as the officer shoves him in the back of the car. The man’s partner turns around, holding up a device and pressing a button.

“Looking for the truth behind the biggest lies No. 6 likes to tell.”

Dazai wishes he could at least feel surprised. It’s so predictable, he just never bothered to predict it. Of course No. 6 would spy on their own citizens. It’s probably in the wristbands everyone has to wear. ID bracelets, keys to anything in the city, why shouldn’t the also be listening devices?

Dazai suddenly realizes that the part of him that still wants to die is about to get its wish. Will they even bother with taking him to the Security Bureau? Surely they won’t bother with a trial. If they accuse him of stealing state secrets, they’ll have to admit what those secrets are or contend with the possibility that he will. Wouldn’t it be easier to shoot him out here and be done with it?

He’s not sad about the certainty of his death. He never has been. But it does seem like a shame to die for something when he barely found anything out. And, of course, he finally found something to hold his attention for a while. Now he doesn’t even get to finish it.

“Why are we going this way?” one of the officers asks. “Shouldn’t we just…you know?”

“Not for this one,” the partner answers. “Don’t you know who his parents are? We can’t just kill him, and we can’t take him to the Security Bureau either, he might be recognized. Looks like his mother.”

Dazai has never put much stock in his parents, is sure they don’t really want him around. But he also doesn’t want to die painfully, and that’s almost a certainty if No. 6 is the one sentencing him to death. Maybe they can at least spare him that.

Wait.

If they’re not killing him here, and they’re not taking him to the Security Bureau, there’s only one place they could be going.

“We can keep him in the Correctional Facility,” one officer says. “They can keep him out of sight until his parents come get him.”

If my parents come get me, Dazai thinks darkly. He sits quietly in the back and, for once, tries not to think as he’s driven to his own death.

#soukoku #skk #bungou stray dogs #bsd #my writing #no. 6 au #spectres

[myfrancismorales]

Never Skip the Inspection

If you have ever been fortunate (or dumb) enough to buy a house, you know the rush of the searching process, especially in “hot markets”, where houses come and go as fast as popping popcorn. You waited all this time saving for your down payment and your credit score has finally given you the green light to even enter the bank and say the word “loan”. Surfing Zillow and making Pinterest boards are your new hobbies and you just have the best realtor you could possibly wish for.

A house meeting all requirements pops-up. You and your realtor go and check it out…it is perfect! You call some of your buddies to the scene and they all agree that it all looks great: good paint, good bathroom, no cracks on doors or windows…looks ready to roll.  It looks so good in the surface that you decide to skip the inspection in spite of your realtor’s best advise…it is a newer construction anyway (you repeated to yourself while closing the deal).

Six months later you are hiring a contractor to come and fix the pillars under the house because “under the surface” things were actually not-so-good (bummer!!). This would not have happened if you had followed the advice of your realtor and done the inspection!

This is exactly what happened to me while working on my first data science project. I read in the curriculum something about train/test split and Mean Squared Error, but who needs those when all of my other indexes are looking so pretty?! My R-Squared was looking great, all p-values under 0.05 and my QQ plot was looking okay (to me anyway). I was feeling accomplished the night I thought I had my model ready, closed my computer and slept like an angel for a solid 5 hours.

I was getting ready to start working on visualizations of my model when for some reason I though that maybe maybe maybe I should look into that train/test split thing…it was going to be a formality anyway since I was pretty sure my other indexes were not lying to me. An hour later I was starring at a Train MSE =0.04 and a Test MSE = 114.83…. after searching the net to figure out what those numbers meant I came to the realization that my model was overfitting (only good to the particular dataset I used to built it). After a long pause and a coffee break (because caffeine), I started almost from scratch my second model.

After that bitter-sweet experience my fellow Data Scientists I come to remind you of the importance of train/test split your data to get the so called Mean Squared Error.

Mean Squared Error

The Mean Squared Error (MSE) is a simple but powerful way to get a sense of the accuracy of your model and can also help confirm if the model is reliable to be used in datasets different than the one it was built on. All MSE does is getting the average of differences (errors) between the real values and the model’s predicted values. If you have a low MSE, this means that the average error of your model is low, therefore your regression line is very accurate. Now, this alone does not tell us if the model is overfitting or underfitting…we need one prior step to be able to confirm this: train/test split.

Train/Test Split

The name gives away the content: train/test split is simply that, splitting the dataset in two parts: one part to build the model (train) and one part to perform the sanity check (the inspection of the house!). There are Python libraries with methods that do this for you as the split needs to be random. I used the train_test_split method from  Scikit-Learn library and found it extremely easy and intuitive to work with.

Now, in terms of the data itself, make sure that if you perform any type of data cleaning or transformation you do it in both training and testing data; or better yet, do all data cleaning and transformations prior to splitting the dataset.

The Moment of Truth

Time to confirm if the model will serve well to its future masters or if it is too loyal to the original dataset. You take the Train Test and get the MSE. In a separate exercise, you take the Test data and take the MSE. Finally, you compare both MSE and hope for a small difference between them. If you get a small difference then go treat yourself, you have a model that will do well with future datasets. If you have a big difference...well...go grap a cup of coffee as I did and brace yourself.

Below the code I used to get the MSE of both training and testing data in case you were wondering:

#data science #mean squared error #train test split #regression analysis

[hollowedrpg]

CONGRATULATIONS, ANNE! — You’ve been accepted for the role of Sybill Trelawney. I’m so freaking ecstatic to have Godric’s Hollow’s own little seer! I’m so happy to have someone writing Sybill that understands just how complex she is. While so many members of the Order can escape the war by hiding away, for Sybill, there’s constantly a battle being fought in her mind, and you conveyed that beautifully. I can’t wait to see where you take her character.

Thank you so much for applying. Please create your account and send in the link, track the right tags, and follow everyone on the follow list. Welcome to Hollowed Souls!

ooc.

Name: Anne

age: (seventeen and up only) 31

preferred pronouns: she/her

timezone: EST/GMT-8

activity: (include a brief explanation)  I work full-time and am in a 6-month training course that meets once a month two hours away from me. I also haven’t rp’d in a tragically long time because of my mental health. That being said, I do have two days a week all to myself and a fairly generous work schedule, so there’s absolutely no reason I can’t work in a few hours 4-5 days a week. I’m also counting on my excitement keeping me going long enough to form a habit of checking the group regularly.

are you applying for more than one character?: Not at this time.

how do you feel about your character dying?: (in a roleplay centered on war, death is always a possibility. as an admin, it’s best to know ahead of time which players are comfortable with playing it out.) I would definitely be disappointed, but I could play it out. I’m a sucker for good plot and drama.

anything else?: (questions, concerns, etc.)

ic details.

full name: Sybill Audra Trelawney

date of birth: Nov 10th 1953

former hogwarts house: Ravenclaw. A reputation as a seer that left everyone clamoring for readings made them forgetful of the fact that Sybill was actually incredibly competent in most of her other classes. Transfiguration gave her some difficulty, but when she actually put in the time to practice, she’d master any of the spells and techniques thrown her way. The lives and futures of her peers tended to keep her preoccupied, at least until the courtyard accident in her fifth year. Traumatized by what she’d seen and then lived through, she dove into her studies as a way to distract herself and her inner eye. It didn’t work - she was still haunted by visions of the cruelty and violence burning through the country and of what terrible things some of her classmates got into when no Professors were around to catch them. The only thing her new devotion to her studies did for Sybill was successfully isolate her from the rest of her classmates, who in time stopped coming to her for readings as often. By the time she graduated, she was considered an oddity who they could mock, until they needed her for something, usually some hint of news of how a family member was faring in the war.

sexuality: bi/pansexual. Sybill likes to dramatically state that it isn’t the person she’s attracted to, but their aura and their sense of person. She isn’t exactly in the market for a relationship, however. Something about seeing the death of someone you dearly love can do that to a person. Sybill can’t yet bring herself to be too close to anyone in a long-term sense, but there’s nothing wrong with occasionally spending a long, cold night staying warm with someone else.

gender/pronouns: cis-female/she and her

face claim change: No, thank you! Zoe Kravitz is wonderful.

more.

how do you interpret this character’s personality? how will you play them? include two weaknesses & two strengths.

Sybill is incredibly complex and full of contradictions. She is intensely dramatic in her presentation, but down to Earth at her core. Part of her drama is all in fun. Since she was a young girl, she’s enjoyed teasing others and making fun of the stereotypes people hold about seers. She loves playing a role and being over the top. However, when it comes right down to it, she takes the inner eye very seriously and doesn’t appreciate it when others are flippant of the sight. Time is such a fickle creature and there are so many variables and players that being able to make accurate predictions is not some cheap parlor-trick (even if it is fun to play that part). However, as the war goes on, she finds it harder and harder to keep up the act. Sure, she tells her clients what they want to hear, but never anything too real. She won’t tell old Mrs. Boyce anything about her great-grandson, not even that he is actually still alive. The joy the old woman would feel would be beyond words. But then, how could Sybill protect the woman from searching for him and discovering the truth - that he’s a Death Eater who was responsible for the murders of his cousin and her family? Dark truths have always haunted Sybill, so she swallows them with shots of whiskey and assurances that the weather will be just fine for that small garden party you plan on throwing this weekend. Sometimes small and petty comfort is all we’re afforded.

Sybill doesn’t make friends easily. Her peers rarely seemed interested in her - just what she could do. She grew close to some girls in her year at first, but as time passed and her visions grew darker, she found it hard to be there for them. She would grieve twice for them - once when the vision hit, and then again when it came to pass. Her friends found it harder to relax around her. They would always be wondering what terrible things she had seen that she wasn’t telling them. If she did happen to tell them, they would desperately search for ways to prevent the vision from coming to pass, which more often than not was in vain and just served to make them resent her more. Her father’s condemnation of her curse ate away at her. After the accident in fifth year, it became a roar. Sybill would only ever bring misery and misfortune to others. The more she tried to bury her abilities, the more closed off she became. The day she graduated Hogwarts, she rode away on the Express in an empty compartment, with only her cat to keep her company.

She may not make friends easily, but she is not unfriendly. Perhaps distant, but never cold. She genuinely cares for others, even if she isn’t sure how to do right by them. Being surrounded by so much pain in Godric’s Hollow will be a real test to Sybill’s compassion. A platter of biscuits won’t be enough to ease the heartache felt by those who’ve lost everything. If she had done more, could she have prevented some of the tragedy? Her father had always told tales of how Cassandra brought misery and destruction when she unleashed her sight, but Sybill had done far worse by locking it away. Her guilt will not pass easily and will eat away at her until she can find someone to trust who can help her through it.

+Sybill is resilient. She could fog her mind and keep the visions at bay, but she refuses. She believes that she was given the sight for a reason, and that day Arabella found her was it. Sybill believes that she was always meant to prophesize the fall of the Dark Lord and now it is her duty to help keep the child safe. It’s why she’s come to Godric’s Hollow. Though a deceptively capable witch, she has no interest in war strategy and little stomach for battle.

-Sybill is often condescending. In school, things came so easily to her that it would baffle her that anyone could struggle or need her help with test questions. She just could not understand how people might have struggled with simple charms or potions. Her sight and ability to make predictions gave her insights to the manners of thinking of her peers and so she couldn’t understand how people might mis-read others. When her classmates would come to her for love advice or for answers to their homework, Sybill would often lose patience. It was all so simple - how did they not get it? For a time, she was forced to be a tutor in an attempt to get her to learn a little empathy and to make her a little less haughty, but it could only end badly, which it did.

+Sybill is reverant. She has a great deal of respect for her gift and for time itself. Though not common, she’s seen visions change midway through their playback and the outcome be completely different than what appeared to be the path at the start. She’s had the feeling of a vision float in the back of her mind, refusing to come into focus until moments before the event pass and then overheard a participant breathe a sigh of relief, stating “I had absolutely no idea how I was going to handle that!” She overall is a very respectful person. When she came to Godric’s Hollow, she first walked slowly through the town, breathing in the despair and heartache until she felt it. Stopping in her tracks, there was a house on the right. Pristine, except for a blown-out bay window that overlooked the destroyed garden. At that moment, she knew she’d found it - where she was supposed to be. While there are those who balk at her and call her disrespectful for taking up residence in the abandoned dwelling, it’s quite the opposite. It’s a house that has experienced such great love and loss that to simply abandon it and allow it to decay would be doing it a disservice. It’s not and never will be her’s. She is simply its caretaker. No one is coming back to claim it; she knows this. But she can’t let it fade away.

-Sybill is spiteful. She doesn’t get past slights easily. A lot of it comes from embarrassment of not always seeing the betrayal coming. The more blind-sighted she is, the harder it is for her to forgive. She forgave most of her school friends for their abandonment of her. She nearly always saw it coming and could understand why they did it. It was the kids who knew nothing about her but turned mean and cold that she couldn’t forgive. The kids who never appeared in any of her visions, who she had no reason to suspect, who suddenly turned on her - those were the betrayals that hurt the worst. When she was an adult, the hurt mostly came from those who still didn’t understand. Those who thought a seer in a dusty shop on Knockturn Alley would stop the war. They came wearing their mourning robes, throwing Sybill’s tea in her face and screaming that she ought to have told them - told them that their son was next. She should have told them not to let him go off by himself that day. She should have warned them that he was going to be snatched - that their family would be made an example of by the Death Eaters. She understands their pain and she tries to forgive it, but it hurts her too. Their blame hurts and is unfair. They’re adults - by now they should understand how this works (there’s that condescension again).

how has the war affected this character, emotionally and otherwise?

Compared to a great many others, Sybill has gotten off light and she knows this. Her family escaped being casualties of war by instead succumbing to completely natural calamities. If the Death Eaters know the source of the prophecy they fear, they haven’t considered her important enough to do anything about. That isn’t to say that she’s unscathed. Sybill has lost her friends. She’s lost any hope of making a significant connection with another person. She dreads the visions that come to her, showing her flashes of violence and misery. She is surrounded all day by death and sadness and that’s certainly taken a toll on her mental well-being. She maintains a dramatic and sometimes playful air, but it’s a desperate clinging to simpler times.

where does this character currently stand? with those who wish to hide in godric’s hollow until the war ends, with those who wish to rebuild the order and continue fighting the war, or on neither side? Why?

Honestly, Sybill stands with those who want to rebuild. She doesn’t understand how they can just hide until the war is over, when the Order is the only cohesive group fighting the Death Eaters. In her mind, if the war is ending and they’re hiding, then it’s only over because Voldemort has won. At that point, she fears that everyone will be too defeated (literally and figuratively) to resume fighting. If they don’t start getting their act together and begin striking back, then there will be no coming back.

But she never says any of this. Sybill is not a member and doesn’t feel that her opinion matters. She isn’t a strategist. She isn’t a warrior. She would be arguing for other people to do the fighting and she knows that isn’t fair. So for now, she keeps her mouth shut. She avoids vocally taking a side and she focuses on getting everyone somewhat settled in. She fixes up the home she has taken over as “caretaker” and she helps others do the same.

Has Sybill had any new visions since arriving in Godric’s Hollow?

No, I don’t believe that she has. It’s only been a few weeks since she’s relocated. While it’s true that she can’t prevent herself from having visions (not without powerful concoctions that she hasn’t taken since she was forced to as a child), she has been trying her hardest to make herself preoccupied by throwing herself into repair projects around the town. With everyone else reeling from the events from the past few months and walking on eggshells, Sybill doesn’t want to rock the boat with an untimely vision. But she can feel them brewing. She can feel them just on the edge of her sight, not quite in focus, but gaining form with each passing day.

Does she think she can help the Order, or does she believe her visions will only hurt?

Sybill wants to help the Order. She thinks she can help the Order. But she knows that her visions will only hurt - they already have. If it weren’t for her vision, Godric’s Hollow would still be a cozy village filled with witches and wizards of all ages. If it weren’t for Sybill’s visions, there wouldn’t have been such a massacre. The Order would not be in such a ruinous state and the war wouldn’t be stuck in some standstill threatened with mutually assured destruction if the fighting should continue on like this.

But as much as she blames her visions, they’re a part of her. They’re who she is and she wouldn’t change for anything - not even peace and an end to this bloody conflict. They all know that the boy will be the downfall of Voldemort. It’s just a matter of time and keeping the boy safe. In that capacity, Sybill is determined to help the Order. It was her prophecy that started this, it’s her responsibility to see it through.

extra

I wasn’t sure I’d be applying for Sybill, so I went ahead and tried to get a feel for her with the “if I were…” questionnaire. In my mind, she’s incredibly complex and loves the melodrama associated with seers

if i were a god/goddess, i’d be Hanuman - the Hindu deity of perseverance, service, and scholarly devotion, he aided Lord Rama in his battle against evil forces. After the things you’ve seen and witnessed, it would easy to admit that father was right - that you’re cursed and a bringer of dark tidings and misery. But you refuse to give up. You wrap yourself in another shawl and you persevere. Though great, you resist the temptation to give up and fog your mind or dull the senses as father made you do so many years ago.

if i were a season, i’d be false spring - the weather is on the upswing, the snow and ice have melted. The mud is thick, and grass will appear any day now. But up above, the sky is a deep blue and the wind has a biting chill to it that can only mean an impending freeze. Take the plants back inside and gather the firewood. These good tidings never last long.

if i were a time of day, i’d be early dawn, when the dew clings to grass and spiderwebs and a fog sits in the field - the day has barely begun and there’s still plenty of time for a few surprises.

if i were a place, i’d be the hidden reading nook in the dusty bookshop you didn’t know was still open - quiet, dark, but with a hidden hope and optimism.

if i were a type of weather, i’d be an oppressively hot day in summer - though scared of the power within, there is no denying its intensity. The opposition was given its first real taste of it and it made them desperate and overly aggressive. They paid a heavy price for their arrogance and there’s no telling what more tales of the future could do.

if i were a scent, i’d be coffee and whiskey mingling with an uplifting haze of sandalwood.

if i were a plant, i’d be a wisteria - beautiful in its blossoms, it appears delicate, but is incredibly resilient and can be poisonous.

if i were an element, i’d be earth - grounded and steady but intensely dramatic and moving.

if i were a color, i’d be a dark slate blue - haunted yet calming.

if i were a song, i’d be The Chain - your father promises that if you would just stop this foolishness, everything will be better. He isn’t mad at you, he still loves you, but you make it so damn hard when you carry this burden and insist on growing it instead of stamping it out. But he doesn’t realize that this thing that you have isn’t a burden. It isn’t a curse. It’s who you are. And if he can’t love you in spite of it, then, well… he never really loved you and never will.

if i were an item of clothing, it’d be a shawl - you cover yourself and who you really are. You bury yourself in the smooth fabric and become what they want you to be. You pull the silk over your nose and breathe in, letting it filter out the perfumed ash that hangs heavy in the air, the kind you’re supposed to sit in, as if that helps your inner eye see their futures better.

if i were an object, i’d be a candle - so smooth and solid from a distance, but covered in a thin layer of ash and brimming with uncertainty. A giver of light to illuminate the darkness, but reveals and strengthens the shadows in the process.

if i were one of the seven deadly sins, i’d be sloth - the fear of the known and the inability to stop it, leading to inaction. It is said that evil thrives when the good fail to act. When faced with visions of the future, it’s so much easier to forget it and move on.

if i were one of the seven heavenly virtues, i’d be humility - a deep respect and subservience to the nature of time. There are things that will always come to pass and others that are far more fickle - how do you know which is which? How do you know what won’t be made the worse with your meddling?

#hp rp #rp #marauders rp #lsrpg #hp roleplay #accepted

[pcurrytravels]

Thoughts: New Orleans (Part III)

We first made our way across Rampart to Louis Armstrong Park. I was already excited as it was here where I laid eyes on the famed Congo Square. You see, under French and Spanish colonial policy, African slaves were allowed a day off. On this day, this was the place where they would gather to sing, dance, play music, make and sell wares and just keep in touch with their original cultural identity. A strange….happy feeling came over me as I walked around it. I would say hopeful even, and it’s not hard to see why. The Louisiana slaves were quite lucky to have a brief escape from their predicament such as this; you can’t quite say the same for slaves elsewhere in the south.

Anyway, after briefly stopping in Congo Square, we then walked over to the edge of Louis Armstrong Park……only to learn that said park was built over dead bodies. Apparently, the southern portion of it was originally the location of St. Peter Cemetery. In contrast to the above-ground tombs, crypts and vaults ubiquitous in the locale today, this was your run-of-the-mill, six feet underground-style cemetery. Given the region’s high water table, it was quite the morbid sight to behold when it was still in existence. Any time there was even just a little bit of flooding, the bodies would resurface, sometimes even floating down the street. Fed up, the residents of New Orleans insisted that they get a Catholic-style cemetery akin to the ones in France and Spain (being well-acquainted with the area’s disposition to flooding and hurricanes, you’d think they would have done this in the first place but I digress). So, in 1789, they got one, and it’s still in operation today. St. Louis Cemetery No. 1; the oldest continually-used cemetery in the entire United States.

A literal city of the dead, with 700 tombs, and over 100,000 burials. Okay, I’m sure you’ve gotten confused again, so here goes: The reason why there can be so many burials despite the limited amount of tombs is because the tombs double as cremation ovens. They never embalm anyone before burying them here; that way, the natural cremation process won’t be interrupted. Each vault is checked after an arbitrary period of a year and one day to see if the body has disintegrated into ash yet. If it has, then the ash is to be swept down a chute that has been installed into the back of each vault. Thanks to this process, each tomb can be reused an infinite amount of times. And let us be real here; this just makes SO much more sense than having large, sprawling fields of graves. After death, the human body will eventually decompose into dust anyway, and as the generations pass on, said person’s grave will likely have fewer and fewer visitors. At some point you’re just going to have empty coffins using up space. It’s a wonder why this technique isn’t utilized by more people; but there were some stubborn people who simply weren’t having it. More on that later.

Thanks to years of vandalism, grave robbery, gangbangers and drug dealers using the alleys to conduct business, and muggers attacking visitors (the now-demolished housing projects of Iberville used to be right next door if that says anything), you can now only enter this cemetery if you’re with a licensed tour guide or have been granted permission by NOLA’s Catholic diocese. It felt so odd having to show wristbands and identification to enter a cemetery of all places, but given all of the aforementioned issues, I can understand why. Then again, this was a strange and odd place. There was just something so simultaneously beautiful and eerie about weaving in and out of these pathways and alleys between tombs. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind the place is haunted AF.

One place where things get even creepier (or utterly hilarious, depending on your interpretation) is in this little corner deemed the “American Section.” Remember what I said about some people not being down with above-ground burials? Yeah, this is what I was talking about. The backstory goes a little something like this: After the Louisiana Purchase, Protestant Americans started flocking to New Orleans in droves, despite the fact that most of them detested Catholicism (again: what is this logic?). Naturally, they perceived the Catholic way of laying the dead to rest as an abomination and insisted on being buried underground. Even after receiving explanation of why that was a bad idea, they still didn’t care, so when the time came, they were buried in the Protestant fashion of six feet under, with heavy concrete slabs atop their graves to prevent the bodies from resurfacing.

The concrete slabs worked, but only to an extent. Whenever heavy rains and the associated flooding occurred, the underground water would still penetrate the grave. While the heavy concrete on top did prevent the coffins from resurfacing, said coffins would still rise up and loudly bump against the concrete (………could you even imagine hearing something like that in a CEMETERY?). Catholic parents used this to tell their frightened children to be good Catholics, lest they wish to be restless in death like the noisy Protestants in the corner. Eventually, Protestant burials were moved to Girod Street Cemetery, that cemetery now being underneath the Superdome (no wonder the New Orleans Saints are cursed). Interestingly, despite being designated as a Protestant/American cemetery, the former Girod cemetery also had above-ground tombs and vaults. I’m guessing the Americans learned their lesson after the fiasco at St. Louis. Anyways, moving on.

Something of note is how, eschewing Protestants/early American migrants, the cemetery was never really segregated. French, Black, Mixed-race, Italian and what have you were dispersed throughout the entire plot of land equally. It did have “sections” but they were never strictly enforced. Example: Marie Laveau (a free person of color in her life) was interned in the Glapion crypt (a prominent white Creole family). Oh yeah, that’s right, Marie Laveau!

Arguably the most famous tomb in all of St. Louis No. 1, for years upon years, people would leave offerings and write “XXX” before putting their hands on the vault and praying to it. It’s even long been alleged that her spirit inhabits a crow that can be seen perched atop said crypt at night. Because of that, this particular tomb used to look a mess with old candles, rotting flowers, Mardi Gras beads and other sorts of junk all over the place in addition to being covered in scribbles of XXX. That’s all been cleaned up in recent years, and the only thing anyone’s allowed to do these days is bring flowers. A necessary move, because not only was all of that disrespectful vandalism, but none of it actually worked anyway. This little ritual was not Voodoo of the Louisiana variety, but of the Hollywood variety……something Marie Laveau indirectly created herself.

In regards to Marie Laveau’s life, not much is known with certainty (though it must be said that American Horror Story: Coven wasn’t even close to accurate). It’s said she had fifteen children, but the only ones much of anything is known about are three daughters, also named Marie, who looked identical to her. General consensus is that her day job was hairdressing, but there’s also evidence that she worked as a liquor importer, in addition to claims that she was a matchmaker and/or the madam of a brothel. She was known as being a devout Catholic with a strong sense of justice and charity for her community, regularly nursing patients of the infamous yellow fever back to health and posting bail for jailed Blacks. Ironically (and disappointing if it was true), it’s alleged that she may have had a slave or two herself despite how much she championed for fair and equal treatment (sadly, it wasn’t uncommon at all for free people of color to own slaves back in those days, especially in Louisiana).

One has to wonder just how much of the mystery was intentionally created by Laveau herself. After all, when she divorced her first husband, a man by the name of Jacques Paris, she called herself his “widow” even though he was still very much alive. Apparently, she took the divorce quite hard and her reasoning was that he was dead to her. Coincidentally, several months later Paris DID turn up dead, and the circumstances surrounding his death were very mysterious (seeing a pattern here yet?). Everyone in town insisted that she must have predicted his death, even though she was shocked by the news herself. Her reaction? She just went along with it. And thus the legend was born.

During the early/mid-19th century, Laveau was probably the most popular woman in town. People came from far and wide to her home on the corner of St. Ann and Burgundy in the Quarter, in hopes of her using her powers for good fortune, be it in wealth, relationships, lawsuits, business or a number of other matters. Now, she was quite competent in Voodoo of course, or else she wouldn’t be officially sanctified as a Voodoo Queen, but as far as her practice with the Creole elite of New Orleans is concerned? She was basically a fortune teller. Being a hairdresser to upper-class women put her in a prime position to hear a LOT of gossip and rumors. If Miss Robichaux told her all about Mr. Delacroix having an illegitimate child with his Quadroon mistress over in Marigny, then she would know exactly what to tell Miss Delacroix when she stopped by to ask for marriage counseling.

Laveau had no qualms about passing the torch either. There was one daughter in particular who would regularly make a spectacle of her rituals on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, inviting all to stop by and watch. Interestingly enough, she wouldn’t address herself as Marie Laveau’s daughter, but as Marie Laveau herself. And in spite of her significantly younger appearance, it worked, leading some to allege that the OG Laveau was immortal. Whether this was part of her mother’s instructions or not is unclear, but the myth was only further amplified after her death. Mere days after her burial, either Marie II and/or another one of the alleged lookalike daughters would begin to regularly emerge from her home and go about town, dressed head-to-toe in the same manner as their mother, and claimed to be her. This explains the rumors that swirled around for years after her death that she was still alive.

Regardless of what’s fact and what’s fiction, one thing that’s for sure is that Laveau-Mania never died. Our tour guide, Dartanya for those who missed it in the first post, told us that the cemetery tours have long been plagued with people who were only there for Marie Laveau. In frustration, many tour guides would pick some random tomb and claim it was hers, and people would perform the phony ritual on it and everything. This has led to a number of tombs called “Faux-Laveaus,” with “XXX” scribbled on them. I spotted about five myself.

Aside from Marie Laveau, there’s a number of notable people also buried in this cemetery, including, but not limited to: Homer Plessy (of Plessy vs. Ferguson fame), Ernest N. Morial (the first black mayor of New Orleans), Barthelemy Lafon (noted architect in 18th/early 19th century New Orleans who was in cahoots with the pirate Jean Lafitte) and possibly Delphine LaLaurie (more on THAT woman later *shiver*).

Another thing of note is that the cemetery is slated to be the future resting home of Nicolas Cage (the cemetery is still in operation today, remember?). He has a large pyramid vault smack dab in the middle of the cemetery that’s impossible to miss. Strangely enough, before the recent crackdowns, just like Marie Laveau’s tomb, his future tomb had a little ritual of its own. Apparently, girls were kissing it for good luck which is weird because…….he’s still alive? And his religious background is Catholic? And he’s still alive? And he’s a has-been actor that’s been plagued with financial problems? And he’s still alive? And who on Earth told you to do that? And did I mention that he’s still alive?

One hour and enough sweat to fill a bucket later (for some reason the cemetery is ten degrees hotter than the rest of the city), it was time to go and I must give my compliments to our tour guide, Miss Dartanya. It was truly a pleasure listening to her talk, even making the heat slightly more bearable. She was very thorough and informative without ever being boring, backing up her facts with examples and adding lots of humor as well. If you do any tour through French Quarter Phantoms, I highly recommend requesting Dartanya as your guide. When I visit New Orleans again, I plan to do the same myself.

Of course, I had to ask about the second most famous burial site, St. Louis No. 2. A number of early Jazz and R&B musicians as well as slightly more recent notable figures in New Orleans history were entombed there. However, very few tours go through there because, in comparison to No. 1, it’s a longer walking distance from the French Quarter, hasn’t been kept up very well, with an even worse vandalism problem and has a rather unsafe location to boot. You see, as already stated above, both cemeteries were located on the fringes of a notorious public housing complex known as Iberville. Not even tourists visiting the cemeteries were safe from the rampant crime in the area; with No. 2 having it even worse due to having a somewhat more isolated and hidden location in comparison to No. 1.

In 2013, most of it was demolished in favor of a mixed-income development called Bienville Basin, and the neighborhood is much safer now as a result, although caution should still be exercised. Interestingly enough, I did see one building of the former complex which still stands, being protected by the National Register. Even more interesting is how, before Iberville came into being, this plot of land used to be Storyville.

The city’s official red-light district from the 1890’s to the 1910’s; in a locale already known for sin and debauchery, this was an interior island where the morals got even looser. Judicial loopholes were exposed that allowed prostitution and recreational drug use to be legal within the 38 blocks that made up the district. There were numerous brothels side by side, from fifty cent joints or “cribs” housed in Creole cottages to the lavish, high-rent mansions on Basin, all of which had white, black and quadroon/octoroon girls offering their services. The saloons and restaurants in the area were also early hotbeds for the then-burgeoning sound of Jazz.

Thanks to being a close neighbor with Basin St. Station (it’s been said that prostitutes would stand on their balconies to wave and blow kisses at train passengers……….while naked), many New Orleans residents began to protest the presence of Storyville. The then-heavy Navy presence in the area brought even more tension. The scandal that emerged when several servicemen from the local base turned up dead within the district definitely didn’t help matters in the slightest. Eventually, under intense federal pressure, Storyville was formally shut down as a red-light district in 1917. It still continued on in a more sanitized capacity well into the 1930’s however, with a small number of speakeasies, casinos and brothels still operating undercover until it was all razed in favor of Iberville. Very little of the district remains today aside from a few buildings which once operated as saloons, but operate today on more benign terms (Lulu White’s old saloon in particular is now currently occupied by a grocery store). Well, unless you count Basin Street Station.

Although its days as a train station have long since passed, the structure has found new life as a time capsule of New Orleans history. On the website it’s termed as a “welcome center” for New Orleans, and it definitely fulfills its purpose in that regard. Oh, it’s also free. Within, you’ll find small exhibits about Jazz, French and Spanish colonial history, Afro-Creole/African-American history, Pirates, Mardi Gras, Hurricane Katrina and several other topics in addition to a gift shop. After leaving the cemetery, we came in here to cool down from the humidity before requesting a shuttle to Mardi Gras World. Stay tuned.

#new orleans #louisiana #Southern U.S. #U.S. Gulf Coast #st. louis cemetery #treme #congo square #louis armstrong park #iberville #storyville #basin st station #french quarter phantoms

[nbanalytics]

Ranking the NBA Teams with a Genetic ML Algorithm

Ranking the NBA Teams with a Genetic ML Algorithm

Which team is the best in the NBA? A question that most of us basketball fans think we know the answer to yet often we find it so hard to come to a consensus. In the ever-popular world of basketball analytics, I would argue that mathematical team rankings are probably the most popular and contentious problem that people try to “solve”.  About two years ago I attacked this topic of debate in my very first foray into the world of basketball analytics. I was naive and inexperienced at the time, but my eventual failure led me to continue to explore the world of basketball data, statistics and machine learning…

From a math point of view there are lots of ways to approach the problem developing a computer ranking system. I will begin by establishing that the goal of any NBA ranking system should be to predict playoff success. If two teams are paired together in a playoff bracket, the higher ranked team should win more often.  Additionally, the larger the difference in rating scores, the more likely the favorite team should win the playoff series. Here are a couple of simple models one might use to predict playoff success. I will use these as baseline models to which I compare my own ranking system.

The most basic way to measure team quality from the regular season is winning percentage.  Below we see a plot of playoff wins versus regular season winning percentage.

There is definitely a positive and statistically significant correlation of  0.571, but can we do better? The percent of the variance in playoff success explained by regular season success alone is only 33%. Not to mention that half of the NBA champion teams fall outside of the 95% confidence interval for prediction.  Obviously there are other factors that should be taken into account when predicting postseason success.

Another way to measure team quality and a popular one with computational ranking systems is average margin of victory.  Below is a plot of the average margin of victory versus playoff wins.

This metric also has a positive correlation with playoff success with a statistically significant value of 0.599, which is slightly better than using regular season wins to predict playoff wins.  The percent of the variance explained is also slightly better for margin of victory at 36%.  However, this model also fails to include many of the champions in the 95% confidence band.

So how can be expand our ranking system to better predict postseason success? Similar to my take on measuring home court advantage, I believe that any ranking system needs to take into account the various strengths of the opponents that each teams play as well as the quality of performance in each of those games relative to an average team would against the same opponents.

From this simple criteria I developed 10 performance measures that could be included in the ranking of every team in two different categories for every game they play:

Strength of opponent

Total opponent winning percentage at time of the game

Opponent winning percentage at site of game (home/away) at time of the game

Opponent’s avg. margin of victory

Opponent’s avg. margin of victory at site of game (home/away)

Opponent’s winning percentage in last X games

Quality of play in each game compared to expected performance

Margin of victory

Over/under opponent’s points against avg.

Over/under opponent’s points for avg.

Over/under opponent’s points against avg. at site (home/away)

Over/under opponent’s points for avg. at site (home/away)

I added a few other factors to consider in the ranking algorithm as well. Overall winning percentage was included because it is a standard baseline for team rankings. Additionally, the opponent’s recent level of play could port be factored into the strength of the opponent, as well a discount factor for how long ago games were played.

From these factors I created a linear function to combine the Strength of Opponent factors and Quality of Play factors with coefficients.

These two larger factors are then linearly combined with how recent the game was to the current point in time and the overall team winning percentage, again, with coefficients.

For a final team ranking, the score of every game is summed and the teams ordered from highest to lowest.

The value of each of these factors and how I combined them is debatable.  Any ranking system is going to have some inherent subjectivity and assumptions based on the system designer and the data feed into it. The reason that I support this model is not because of the factors it takes into account, but rather that the factors can be combined in an infinite number of ways in an effort to fit the model to historical results.  The theory behind the model is that the coefficients will shed light into what actually matters in winning basketball games.  If defense is more important than offense the the coefficient X with be fit to be larger than the coefficient W.  If performance on the road or performance at home matters, then the site specific coefficients with be large and they will be close to zero if site-specific performance is irrelevant. 

This raises the question of how to best train the coefficients on historical data.  At the time that I did this study, I had zero training in machine learning, so I hacked together an algorithm of my own creation that would generate random starting coefficients and search through the infinitely sized set of coefficients looking for the most predictive set.  I was inspired by nature’s own machine learning technique and used breeding, mutation and natural selection to move through the coefficient search space. 

The steps of the genetic algorithm were as follows:

I populated a number of “parent” sets of coefficients.  I used my basketball knowledge to create coefficients I assumed would be near the optimal values for some of the parents, but randomly generated others so that my population would attack the problem from multiple “perspectives” as my intuition is not necessary what is best.

The parent sets were then “breed” with each other, two at a time, to create a large population of “children.” Each child received half of the coefficients from two different parents.

Each coefficient for every child was given the opportunity to “mutate” into a value other than that of the child’s parents.

Each child set of coefficients was then used to calculate the end of season ranking for every playoff team during the 2002-2003 through 2011-2012 NBA seasons.  These rankings were used to see if the children accurately predicted the winner of each of the 150 different playoff series that occurred during those ten seasons with extra weight given to predicting the eventual champion. 

The top 10 most predictive children sets were “naturally selected” to be the parent sets for the next “generation” of the algorithm.

The algorithm stopped when it accurately predicts all 10 NBA champions or reaches a pre-specified maximum number of generations.

After creating the algorithm I sat back and let it run for a while to see what kind of results would pop out. It was good to see that my “expertly” chosen coefficients accurately predicted the result of most playoff series but the algorithm quickly found a better combination.  In general, the the algorithm asymptotes very quickly just above 70% prediction accuracy for all playoff series.  However after just a few generations, it struggles to improve itself and never seems to predict more than 4 out of the 10 championship teams before the start of the playoffs, but it does predict 8 out of the 10 winners given the Finals match-up.  

More importantly it appears that the set of coefficients that produce relatively high accuracy has many local maxima, as very different sets of coefficients produce very similar accuracy results. It was interesting to see these various formulas that my genetic algorithm converged on.  Perhaps this sheds some light into being able to forecast post-season success. Either some playoff series are easy to predict (this makes sense for first round match-ups, but not for later rounds) or there are many ways to create quality teams. To avoid getting stuck at the first local maxima encountered, the algorithm allows for every child to have a random mutation that differs from either of the parents.  Just as in nature this allows for innovation and diversification of the population.  Along these same lines, one of the keys for arriving at the best model in light of many local maxima is to have a suitably large population to breed from. The more parents in the population, the more diverse the population, and the more opportunity the algorithm has of finding the true most-predictive model. 

I investigated the impact of having a larger population, in spite of the extra computation time, by increasing the parent population size and the number of children produced each generation. As an example, here is a plot of the progression of the model over each generation with a population of 100, rather than the 10 shown above.

The variance in the population of models accuracy increases any time the population size is increased.  It also takes more generations for the population to converge toward a homogeneous level of accuracy. More importantly, changing the population size does not increase the models ability to converge to a global optima as the total accuracy does not change much for any population size of at least 10. It was disappointing that the model very quickly reaches its most optimum set of coefficients regardless of the model parameters. 

I after investigating the effect of changing the population and it’s effect on convergence, I ran the model one last time and the genetic algorithm found the most predictive model. Here is the final rankings of the model compared to the baseline models’ rankings for the 2012-2013 season.

Overall the rankings of all three are pretty similar. This is not too surprising given that my model is linear combinations of values that are for the most part derived from winning percentage and margin of victory.  The teams with the largest changes in my ranking from the baseline rankings are either teams that were doing much better or much worse in their most recent games. So this is how the teams fall into order during regular season, but does it translate into playoff prediction?

Here are the predictions for the 2013 NBA playoffs for he three models along side what actually went down….

In this particular season, my model is no better than the simple predictive models based on regular season wins and regular season margin of victory.  Only the wins model was able to predict the champion by ranking Miami first before the start of the playoffs.  However, the goal is not to have the highest accuracy in a single season but have the model generalize to be the most predictive in any future season.  Here is how the my ranking model predicts the results over the ten seasons to which the model was fit. The assumption of a linear relationship was used just as with the baseline models earlier.

My ranking system scales each team’s score to fall between 0 and 100 where the 30th ranked team has a score of 0 and the top ranked team a score of 100. As expected this team score is positively correlated with playoff success with a statistically significant value of 0.525. This is unfortunately worse than the baseline models despite being the model that the genetic algorithm found to be most predictive of postseason success. The percent of the variance explained is also worse at only 28%.  But, it turns out that the team’s score it not the best metric from my ranking system for predicting playoff success because team scores are scaled based on the teams’ stats for that season.  So scores can not  be accurately compared with one another across seasons, and it is more realistic to predict playoff success based on the teams’ rank for that season.

This performs better, as expected, but it is still worse than the baseline models of regular season wins and regular season margin of victory. The correlation is only 0.553 and the percent of variance explained only 31%. 

In light of these results, there are certainly areas where this model could  be improved. Because of computation time, many of the algorithm iterations were done with too small a population and converged on local optima too soon. I did not play with any of the parameters around the randomization of the coefficients to mutate or how the parents that were “mated” were chosen.  I suspect that there are ways to create population clusters or engineer other algorithm features to make the genetic algorithm converge on the best optima quicker.  However, the real problem with the model has to do with the choice of a genetic algorithm to begin with.

If I were to re-do this analysis with my skill set today, I would use a different method to optimize the linear model coefficients.  Ordinary least squares optimization would converge more quickly to the best-fit coefficient values, but it unclear how to set up the data set to accommodate this method and a squared error penalization may not be the best assumption in this situation.  Another option would be to use an expectation maximization algorithm to converge the parameters to the best fit values from my initial assumption values.  This would be an interesting experiment and is more similar to my original concept. Of course, something more powerful such as Random Forests or Neural Networks could prove more accurate with enough input information, but these methods are not for fitting parameters to an assumed model structure, but rather black-box model generators that sacrifice model interpretability. My choice of a genetic algorithm was driven by personal curiosity, and as a novice in machine learning I was unaware of what tool would be best suited to the task. 

One last way to improve model would be to include more information such as, number of days rest, injuries and how types of teams match-up with one another.  

In conclusion, it seems noble in the scientific sense to try and put a formula of the results of the NBA playoffs and be able to measure the quality of a basketball team, but the truth is really the old cliché, basketball games and trophies aren’t won on paper, but rather, on the hardwood.  I learned a few analytics lessons. More complex models are not guaranteed be better than the simpler models they hope to improve upon, and any data scientist needs to know when to use the right model for the given problem. While I never expected a genetic algorithm to be the best way to fit my model, it turns out that it was never properly suited to the task given my evaluation measure and the computation time involved.

As fan of the port I have come to realize that this is actually an encouraging result.  It should not be easy to change conventional wisdom or predict the future. I am glad that there is the white noise randomness of blown charging calls and streak-shooting that make each game dramatic and exciting. Sure there are better measures of the true quality of a team beyond winning percentage or margin of victory, but if we knew with any certainty the outcome of a basketball, why would we even bother to watch?

This analysis was done in Matlab and the results processed in a combination of Matlab and R.

All of the data was courtesy of basketball-reference.com 

More general information about genetic algorithms can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm

Other computer ranking systems for NBA teams can be found at:

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/nba/sagarin/

http://www.teamrankings.com/nba/ranking/overall-power-ranking-by-team

http://espn.go.com/nba/hollinger/powerrankings

Feb 7

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What started out at a hobby trying to separate basketball facts from opinion has led me to a career in data analytics. Perhaps I should share some of my mathematical musings...

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[scorbleeo]

Diary of a Murderer: And Other Stories | Book Review

by Kim Young Ha and Krys Lee (translator)

Diary of a Murderer is an electric collection that captivates and provokes in equal measure, exploring what it means to be on the edge—between life and death, good and evil. In the titular novella, a former serial killer suffering from memory loss sets his sights on a new, and final, target: a killer whose next victim is his daughter. In the following three stories we witness an affair between two childhood friends that questions the limits of loyalty and love; a family’s disintegration after a baby son is kidnapped and recovered years later; and a wild, erotic ride about pursuing creativity at the expense of everything else.

Source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48499087-diary-of-a-murderer

Why I Ended Up Dreading This Book?

I have to admit, when I picked up this book at work I did not see ‘And Other Stories’ part of the title. I simply thought I was going to read the Diary of a Murderer. Until I was reaching the end of it and realised I still had half of the book to go through. It takes a lot for short stories to fascinate me and the short stories in this book were not close at even attempting to interest me. I just prefer thick books with a developed plot over short stories.

With that being said, I did enjoy Diary of a Murderer. It was new reading from the point of view of someone diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. I do not know how accurate that portrayal really is but I liked that I was exposed to a new look at life. With the Other Stories, I really only liked the endings (probably because it was the end).

The entire time I was reading the book, I could only think about how Korean the book was. I can actually imagine Korean dramas with plots from this book. So, there was nothing original about the book at all. I really wanted more mystery but it was just so predictable.

In spite of my minimal enjoyment in the journey through Diary of a Murderer: And Other Stories, I regret picking up this book in the first place.

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

#book review #diary of a murderer: and other stories #diary of a murderer #kim young ha #young ha kim #krys lee #short stories #fiction #thriller #translated fiction

[lawful-evil-novelist]

Why Joker Getting Character Development Might be a Good Thing

Disclaimer: This is a long rant/essay primarily based on opinion and I am a bitter salt pile so if you disagree in any way that’s fine, this is just my personal take on things and you are free to disagree.

One of the few things that tends to irk me about DC Comics, particularly Batman, is that villains are not permitted arcs or development, save for a select few “choice” villains, and even these villains are severely restricted in what options are available to them in terms of character development.  Selina Kyle is allowed development, but only if it revolves around Batman or a member of the Bat Family.  Harley Quinn always has development in the comics, but it always follows a predictable pattern.  Even in Bombshells, to some extent, Harley grows independent of the Joker in some manner.

Harleen Quinzel is not Harley Quinn until she meets the Joker, and she cannot be with Pamela Isley until she learns to let him go.

And I think this is a problem we see with all villains in the DC canon but I think it’s especially prominent in Batman villains.  The Gotham Rogues Gallery is not allowed to stray outside of the very narrow boxes set out for them, and development they are allowed must remain inside these boxes.  Characters like Harley, Selina, Pamela, and Edward are allowed to dip into antihero territory, but only in predictable ways that the writers know the audience is comfortable with.

And I think this makes it so their most recognizable villains feel stale and overused.  They don’t stray far from their usual traits because they aren’t allowed to change in any way.

And for anyone’s money, I think we all know the biggest culprit of this lack of development and incessant use in spite of it.

Now I’m no Joker fan; I think the character is boring, overused, and frankly, an asshole.  But here’s the thing: he doesn’t need to be. Of all the plots they’ve stuffed Joker into, I’m surprised they’ve never tried to give him an actual arc.  He’s usually the bearer of an arc, usually one for Batman and is always the main bearer of Harley’s arcs, which I find particularly annoying because Harley’s development ends up centering around a man and it becomes often her only motivation to change.

Joker does not change, no matter the story. Even characters like Harvey Dent and Jonathan Crane change slightly, though the change often skews negative and they tend to get worse as a result (a different problem for a different day. Even as we laud Lego Batman’s Joker, we need to keep in mind that he does not change in that story.  The context makes it clear he has always been obsessed with Batman, and always will be, and the events of the movie do not alter his obsession, and in the end, it is used in Bruce’s favor.

This, in large part, is why Joker feels stale and overused, besides that he is forced into stories where other villains belong.  And though he is regularly used, he is not used to his full potential.  Writers pick him thinking he’s an easy write but he isn’t.

Now I’m not going to stand on a pulpit and list all the symptoms of ASPD to convince all of you Joker has it because, let’s face it, you’ve all heard it before and at this point it’s just part of the culture, but I don’t think that ASPD is an accurate summation because it has some caveats.  ASPD does not apply to conditions where the patient has another Cluster B disorder, and Joker’s “symptoms” as it were, fit closer to BPD than ASPD and a big portion of that is how he interacts with the world and how he himself acts, and in any case, I’m not here to give a sermon on how he has BPD instead of ASPD either. Diagnosing Joker doesn’t get us any closer to my point and it doesn’t make him any easier to write.

And my point is this: Joker doesn’t just need to be used less, though he certainly does.  What Joker desperately, desperately needs is to change and grow as a character.  Why? Well aside from not having the most boring thing that has ever dried your brain to a fine powder.  Joker is hard to write, I’m not going to sit here and tell comic writers or fanfic writers that giving him a character arc is easy because it isn’t.  Joker is a tough character to write.  He is simultaneously a man who is too far gone to care that anyone is getting hurt or killed in his jokes and a man who has lost everything and now desperately wants to die.  That isn’t easy to write and I think people tend to trivialize just how hard it is.

Or they do stupid shit like make him tear off his own face like that is exactly how a suicidally depressed person self-mutilates.

Yeah that’s totally an inoffensive portrayal of self-harm.

There’s probably a resounding question of why I should care.  Joker’s a manipulative, abusive asshole he shouldn’t be allowed redemption, right?  Well, I think there is a point where you need to look back and wonder: why is Joker so boring compared to the other rogues?  Because he really is painfully boring in comparison.

I think it’s because he doesn’t feel like a real person.  With Ed, Harley, Jon, Pam, Selina, we relate to them because they have personalities that feel organic and feel human.  We relate to Jon because we have all been scared children in situations we could not escape, we relate to Pam because we have all had scars that did not heal correctly, we relate to Ed because we have all been told at one time or another that we were not worth the time or effort to be loved.  None of us have been Joker.  None of us know, much less understand, what’s going on in his head. We know Jon is angry at the world, and we know it is because when he was suffering and scared no one did anything to stop it.  We know Pam is angry too, and we know she is angry because when she needed help to heal, help was not given.  We know Ed is overcompensating, and we know he is doing so because he desperately wants to prove that he is worthy of love.  We know and understand these characters and their motivations, they are human.

They are also not extremely offensive portrayals of mental illness and are seldom used as such.  If it sounds like I’m bitter about that face thing in New 52, it’s because I am, moving on.

When people call Joker a monster, it is accurate in that he is not humanized.  Even his very explicit wish to die is usually telegraphed by other characters.  The only time he mentions it is in probably the most human we’ve seen Joker in any comic: The Killing Joke.

And frankly this is one of my favorite comics involving the Joker because while I still didn’t relate to him, he still felt human to me.  And further, he recognizes, in this moment, that he has gone too far. This is something I think is important to recognize about Joker: he still has standards, he still knows there is a point of no return, he just doesn’t care.  And he doesn’t care because he wants to die.

But I don’t think Joker’s wish to die should be fulfilled, though I would like to see it explored, I’d actually really like to see Joker come to terms with the person he’s become, because he clearly hasn’t.  If he is so desperate to die that he purposely pushes at everyone’s threshold in an attempt to be killed, even Harley’s.

Harley even recognizes it. Can you imagine reading a comic where the main conflict is not dealing with someone who is mentally ill but someone who is mentally ill coming to terms with the fact that, no matter what, they can never be the same person as the one they were before their mental illness occurred?  That would be interesting!  In fact, I’m not even sure we’ve explored this with Bruce.  The only people who have come to terms with living with a mental illness and never being able to return to the people they were beforehand are Jon and Pam, and this acceptance is always before they ever become rogues, because they know what they went through and the changes they underwent as a result are how they’re coping, and that they can’t just pretend it never happened because that doesn’t change the fact that it did.

And keep in mind coming to terms with being unable to return to the time before the onset of mental illness is not the same as rejecting that time altogether, because that’s what Ed does and we know this is a coping mechanism and we know it isn’t healthy.  Ed does not like the person that came before the Riddler, Harley and Joker want to return to it so desperately they’re rejecting themselves now, and Jon and Pam, while not happy with the way they are now, know they cannot go back.  And the irony is that they both know they need to move forwards, and almost never do. Jon and Pam are frequently static in the comics, because the status quo is god and we must have a fear-obsessed delusional psychiatrist and a man-hating plant lady on the evil side because there is no way two people that have come to terms with themselves and are at best chaotic neutral types can ever do anything good and if they do it is with the aid of someone else because they are helpless to change on their own despite being intelligent human beings.

And if you are wondering, I am bitter about this too and it��s making me get off track.

The thing is, Joker has never been in a situation where his hand has been forced.  He has never been made to do something he doesn’t want to do and he has never had a single moment where, when the chips were down, he had a chance to definitively say: “I don’t want to die.  I want to be in control.  I want to do better.  I want to live.”

And I think he hasn’t because comic writers have never placed him in situations like that for whatever reason.  I think, and this is just speculation, that they are afraid that there is no situation you can put Joker in where he would, without a shadow of a doubt, say “I don’t want to die.”  There is an underlying feeling that Joker has no situation where he will look inward and realize that it is his fault he’s the way he is and he is the one that needs to change.

But no human is that stubborn or immovable, no human is so averse to change that they will never do so.  Somewhere out there, there is a situation where Joker would willingly change or even turn his life around, I can dare to dream of a world where instead of the Joker we have the Jokester because of character development instead of an alternate universe.

Especially since Jokester was summarily given the shaft in the Countdown series and we can add that to the third thing in this rant I am extremely bitter about.

Here’s the thing, there is something admirable about comics that address suicidal depression in a respectful and serious manner, there is a reason the Deadpool comic addressing it is so well-loved.

And the thing is, there are Gotham Rogues who suffer from depression, whether suicidal or not, and Joker is one of them.  It is perfectly fine to address suicidal depression with a character your audience will never see again, but I feel like it might also be accepted, or even welcomed, to have a character who suffers from suicidal depression address that it isn’t just a one-shot character, but one you always see.  Joker works for this too because it brings something up: you can be happy and still suffer from depression, these things are not incompatible.

I think Joker developing as a character is almost, in its own way, vital to the character as a trope. In continuities as long and extensive as Batman’s, characters need to grow and change to keep them from growing stale or feeling overused.

Though it might help to not use the characters so fucking much.

And that is the end of my bitter angry rant on the subject.

#i am salt and fucking rage #rant #joker #don't murder me #seriously y'all #suicide tw #tw suicide #gore tw #body horror tw