#reality and in a way implies that women will always suffer because they have a vagina. this is what feminism tells women

[jennycalendar]

your tags on that fandom post got me thinking of how... defensive fandom is of the status quo kinda? like I'm white so this might come off like I'm absolving myself which I'm not, but so often I see "fandom is a queer run space that fixes canon! buuuut we're going to focus on the white men because they're the only ones with depth :) and we're going to make actually good female characters cookie cutter. and we're going to ignore black men and especially black women. but queer run safe space!!"

the minute i got this ask i knew i had to wait until i was at home with my laptop because my fingers cannot fly as fast on my phone as they can on the computer keys. this is literally so much of what is happening in the buffy fandom. the whole thing is built on intrinsic systemic racism n misogyny that's reinforced within the show and that many in the fandom do not critically engage with in the slightest. it is absolutely objectively insane to me that i can make a post going, for example, "hey, isn't it fucked up as hell that the show treats the romani people as evil for wanting angel to suffer?" and then people will come into my inbox or land in my reblogs and go "well, actually, the show treats the romani people as shortsighted and bad at long-term planning, and i choose to read them that way too :)" and fully not see that there is a hell of a problem with THAT statement as well (real thing that happened). OR that kennedy hate is still hugely in vogue because she's mean and bratty and terrible and doesn't know her place!!! OR kendra's death & how easily she is forgotten by the fandom!!!!! OR the entire trend of handing buffy to a person's favorite character like a little trophy they've earned for being tortured and sad, reducing her to a facet of a romantic relationship & implying that this is what she needs to feel and be complete!

OR OH MY GOD THE ENTIRETY OF EVERYTHING SURROUNDING SPIKE. where do i even start with spike. completely serious, i am honestly endlessly impressed by the people who can still handle being fans of spike, because being a fan of spike means having to wade through 20 million fics where That Bitch Buffy must be narratively punished for abusing poor baby spike who only ever wanted to love her and was totally out of character every time he hurt her (and also drusilla is a vapid whore who didn't love spike, ever.) like i am not at this point in time always strong enough to engage with spike content simply because there is so much spike content that is SOAKED in violent misogyny repackaged as Deep, Torrid Romance. it's exhausting to try and find the good stuff when sometimes even the good stuff will throw you a curveball in chapter five or shy uncomfortably away from the racist realities of spike's character. the fact that robin wood has been hated for so long because he had the Nerve and the Audacity to want retribution for his mom, and that he is framed as in the wrong for wanting that, is in and of itself so fucking upsetting to me.

AN Y WAY. i agree with you. and i get what you're saying. i think an awareness of the pattern and a willingness to feel uncomfortable within your own mistakes is always a good place to start. i try so hard never to dig my heels in if i can avoid it.

#asks #i will say that i do have a softness for xander #but a lot of that has to do with the way i see fanon handle him! #either he is written off as disgusting garbage #OR he is picked up by toxic macho assholes who write toxic macho asshole fic about him #where he saves the girls and tells them all off for not appreciating him enough #i think there is something so compelling about his half-formed journey towards trying to redefine masculinity #and it is so fucked up that he is a tool for a narrative so steeped in misogyny #he raises some interesting questions that he himself can never fully answer #i like thinking about a narrative where his growth towards accepting his role as caretaker would feel more authentic #& of course uhhhh My Joyce Thing but again I Feel Like That One Is Obvious. So.

[mr-nauseam]

The Case of Lonely Mothers p. 2

A study about the "similarities" between Mrs. Plinth and Mrs. Everdeen and their relationships with their respective children

Read only if you are interested in parallel Sejanus/Katniss. Otherwise just don't read it

For Juli (@julietasgf)

.

Remember I'm doing this for fun. I do not believe that such "parallel" between Mrs. Plinth and Mrs. Everdeen is something Suzanne put in the text with intention, I just notice a lot of coincidences in them

First part here

.

IV. The Conclusion

"You cannot fathom how much I've mourned, what thousands of years of grief has done to me"

(Rebecca Sugar)

Sejanus Plinth and Katniss Everdeen are two teenagers, lacking the skills necessary to navigate the world they live in. They survive as best they can, on their own

Why are them by their own if they are so young? Because they had no one

Their fathers, unable to communicate with them and to guide them properly, either because there is a great Incompatibility that prevents them from being on the same channel or something greater, such as death, creates a barrier between them that is impossible to overcome, are not a option

Their mothers would naturally be the other option to consider to be their guides - and in reality it is socially expected that they are the ones in charge of raising them, and not their fathers, with all that implies. But if they have no one, this mean that their mothers are neither an option?

The answer is yes, and we will now explore this further

Let's pick up where we left off: Mrs. Plinth and Mrs. Everdeen are women with previous stories of trauma, who are re-traumatized by an event of great magnitude that forever disrupts their lives (and their relationships with their children)

In Ma's case, it was the loss of home, of her family upon moving to the Capitol that plunged her into an eternal mourning of longing and sadness

For Mrs. Everdeen, it was the loss of the love of her life and the bleak future she saw before her that plunged her into catatonic depression and death mourning

Their pain ends up impacting and significantly altering their family dynamics

In the Plinth's case, Ma has many advantages that Mrs. Everdeen does not. First of all, her traumas do not have such severe effects on her body (catatonic state) and by having Strabo by her side, she has assured economic stability for her and her son, which alleviates many discomforts (they will never go hungry, they will always be warm), in fact, her privileged position within the Capitol saves her son from one of the most distressing and common experiences that parents live in Panem: the reaping ceremony, which represents the very real possibility of losing their children in a dehumanizing and cruel way

However, this does not prevent her depression, as her more fortunate position in certain respects still lacks important pillars for Ma person

Ma is isolated in a very particular way. Outside of her husband and son, she has no one to talk to, not only that, she lacks the ability to be vulnerable with another human being, as the people around her are hostile to her at every turn

While I don't believe Ma has suffered more than a few incidents of discrimination that were overly explicit verbally or physically, the Capitol is still a world of many delicate social rules, guided by microaggressions and a constant passive aggressive attitude, which makes for a very stressful environment, which for someone like Mrs. Plinth who could never adapt to the ways of the Capitol must be as overwhelming and stifling as it was for Sejanus, if not more so

For she had the responsibility of taking care of him, and having to deal with Sejanus' own trauma and xenophobic experiences (he suffering from bullying for example), placed her in a very complex decision to deal with

Which ended up causing her to become unable to handle it properly or ideally: Making her ends up becoming very dependent on Sejanus. He is her reason for staying in this world (and that may not sound so bad but it is a lot of pressure)

She don't do that with intent - in fact I would like to say that will is not something that intervenes in this analysis- but who else does she have?

No friends. No family. No community. No home. And full of emotions (sadness, frustration, homesickness, etc). She also many emotional needs that cannot be satisfied by anyone

I must say. Her relationship with Strabo doesn't seem to be bad but we know he may not be the best person to go to when it comes to her grieving for her home (he had a very strong opinion about this matter). In the text they seem to have talked about it (the mention of Strabo opining that for Sejanus' children the situation will be better), it's just that his comfort is not in tune with her emotions

But she had Sejanus and he suffers in a similar way to Ma. He can understand her and offer her the comfort she needs. They are each other's unconditional support -for Sejanus has no one to be completely vulnerable with either

The problem is that Sejanus was comforting his mother since he was 8 years old

Ma has been Sejanus' mother, she has been able to be. I'm not deny it, she's not in Mrs. Everdeen situation at the end of the day, but I don't think it's such a stretch to say that she has unwittingly forced Sejanus to meet her emotional needs

If we go with this assumption it is not strange to see why Ma Plinth could not teach her son to survive in the cruel world he was born into. For she does not know how to live in it either

Ma navigates the Capitol in the ways of the district. She doesn't fit in, she mismatches. She doesn't know how to make friends. She doesn't know how to stop the scorn of the people she lives with - or the people she left behind.

She doesn't have the tools so she can't pass them on

Mrs. Everdeen is a difficult case, and while her neglect of Katniss - and to a lesser extent of Prim - is undeniable, her circumstances were too harsh to expect her to get through them without a support system

I reiterate here something I already mentioned: willpower has nothing to do with these stories. It's not a question of if they would have wanted to / if they would have tried harder. Plain and simple, circumstances overcame them or at least impossibly - severely limiting their actions.

And this is essential to understand especially when we talk about Mrs. Everdeen. Let's review her context: she lives in District 12 -one of the most fucked districts in all Panem-, she grew up as part of the merchant class so she had certain privileges and then lost them. This influences the kind of lack she is used to face -how she lives it- and also the knowledge she has of how to survive in difficult circumstances -but let's remember that she is still a smart and capable woman, here I'm talking more about the facilities for adaptability

She falls in love and marries a miner from the Seam. The poorest and most oppressed area of D12. A totally new environment for her in which she does not know very well how to manage but she is fine because she has her husband to help her with the process. Her husband who has a high-risk job where it is possible he get injured a lot

Then they have two daughters. Whom she loves and they bring her joy, but in her world there are the hunger games. That monster on the prowl, threatening to take her daughters away from her; to kill them.

And Mrs. Everdeen knows better than anyone the suffering the games cause to the tributes and to their loved ones. Her best friend was chosen in the past, and in the midst of her grief she was forced to do interviews, without being allowed to grieve adequately for the hell that Maysilee lived through and then she perished in the arena

That nightmarish fate was more than a possibility for Katniss and Prim. What probably affected their bond, Mrs. Everdeen could not afford to love them too much without thinking about how quickly they would disappear when they reached the age of 12

There is a short time in her life where Mrs. Everdeen is happy, or as close to it as she can get. Her husband is with her. He comes home, her daughters are small and adorable. Her work as a healer flourishes, and it is a bitter reminder of their cruel reality but nothing impossible to cope with

Until a cave-in in the mines kills Mr. Everdeen. And everything falls apart

The man for she sacrificed everything to be with, her life partner, her support and joy is gone. Now only she is left, trapped in the Seam, and her poverty. Not only that, her daughters are also doomed, the girls -especially Katniss- have their own grief to face

Mrs. Everdeen will have to support them as they suffer unbearable pain, while her own will is shattered. And that is only the least of their worries. How will they live now?

Their budget was already limited for sure, but without the money Mr. Everdeen brought: What will happen to the food, to the clothes they will wear? She now has to support them financially on her own. Also her daughters could one day disappear at the games so Mrs. Everdeen is alone

She has no one who can offer her a helping hand, she gets depressed and her body betrays her. Mrs. Everdeen goes into a catatonic state. It's the only way she can cope with what she's going through

There is no treatment she can receive. There is nothing to be done. If Mrs. Everdeen couldn't take care of herself, how could she expect to take care of her daughters? How could she care Katniss? So she is neglectful of her because there is nothing to be done. No one will come to save her family and Mrs. Everdeen just can't do it

And as we know little Katniss has no choice but to be the one who tries. She doesn't want to die. Her little sister Prim can't die either and neither can her mother -even if she looks dead. So Katniss has to do it -and she does it after an act of kindness; she takes back and uses everything her father taught her, she can't ask for guidance from her mother, so she try to figure out the rest. Or as much as she can because she is still a child

Even if Katniss had no choice but to become the mother of Prim (and this is why I mentioned gender earlier, because while Katniss is inclined to follow typically male molds, she cannot escape the work that is expected of her as a woman)

Which reflects the somewhat strange and tragic cycle that surrounds motherhood and its relationship to powerlessness in the world of Panem, but before we delve deeper, let's conclude the case of Mrs. Everdeen

A woman whose grief forced her daughter to take her rightful place as the provider, and primary caretaker of her family after the death of her husband. Mrs. Everdeen was unable to care for Katniss. In fact she was cared by her, receiving her attentions, unwittingly taking away Katniss childhood and making her take care of her emotional needs and even her physical and mental health

Katniss navigate the world of Panem all by her own -before her games, where she ends up getting a strong support system and also we had other people in D12 giving her certain support later but that's another story

I'd like to end this with the theme of impotence /powerless as a characteristic feature of the motherhood that both characters experience

Mrs. Plinth and Mrs. Everdeen can't overcome their traumas, they have no way of doing so and it impacts their parenting. Both faced heavy and crushing circumstances that prevented them from living a better life. Their world is Panem. A world that slowly kills their children

And there is nothing either can do to change the reality in which they live in any meaningful way; The Capitol. The subjugation of the Districts. The Hunger Games. They are institutions that determine their fatal circumstances, and to be changed, or destroyed takes more than they can do

The truth is that they are just powerless mothers

And there is something so brilliant and tragic that in the end Mrs. Everdeen who has lived with all the disadvantages on her side; gives birth to a daughter capable of making that change in her time and Mrs. Plinth who has lived with all the advantages on her side: gives birth to a son incapable of making that change in his time

.

And BYE

#sejanus plinth #katniss everdeen #ma plinth #mrs everdeen #strabo plinth #the plinths #the everdeens #tbosas #thg series #thg #the ballad of songbirds and snakes #the hunger games #meta or something #ballad of toxic yaoi

[stuffedeggplants]

While the Shangri-La missions are great at introducing us to an important figure in Kyrati culture and mythology, I think their purpose might also be to contrast Kalinag’s journey with Amita and Sabal’s in order to talk about their characters and say something about the larger story. I’m still trying to work this out and I haven’t done the last Shangri-La mission yet, so let me know what you all think!

In the third mission, Kalinag talks about how the longer he stays in Shangri-La, the more he loses his identity and forgets his original purpose, who he is and his people, etc. He begins to feel “more at home” there than in his actual home, Kyrat. He also talks about how your state of mind determines your reality, and that Shangri-La itself is a state of mind. He comes to the conclusion that he can’t abandon his people and identity in favor of just mentally existing in some manifestation of paradise, cut off from everything else but his own enjoyment. Then he would be like a Rakshasa, literally only there for himself, and the corrupting influence of that mindset is visible in physical changes and butchery all over Shangri-La, consequences of the demons that have invaded it. This is important because though Kalinag never came to Shagri-La with bad intentions, he recognizes that he could make a choice to stay there that would only have selfish outcomes that don’t actually help anyone. So Kalinag decides to free Shangri-La from the demons and return to Kyrat and his people.

What did Amita and Sabal originally want? What was their purpose? Amita would probably say that she wants to emancipate the women of Kyrat and modernize the country, transforming it in ways that will improve the lives of all its citizens with economic and educational opportunities they could never have had before, all while throwing away superstition and cultural institutions that only oppress others. Sabal might frame his goals as wanting to protect Kyrati heritage and traditional centers of community, honoring the goddess Kyra and restoring and strengthening a cultural identity that’s undergone twenty years of damage as Pagan Min destroys religious sites and seeks to replace ancient cultural symbols like Kalinag with himself.

At some point--maybe before the game even starts?--Sabal and Amita both lose sight of their original goals like Kalinag admits almost happened to him, but while Kalinag was self-aware and realized he had to stay grounded to his true purpose and walk away from an implied path that would only lead to suffering like the Rakshasas brought to Shangri-La--or at least a path that wouldn’t actually help anyone--Sabal and Amita never have this realization. If your state of mind determines your reality, then they’re both so stuck in their own worlds and in their own concept of the right path for Kyrat that they’re both completely blind to the terrible nature of the place that leads them. 

Like Kalinag, neither of them started their journey with explicitly “bad” intentions, but they fail to realize that having good intentions does not mean you always make good decisions or achieve good outcomes. They can’t see past their own egos (maybe?) and don’t even try, so while Kalinag realizes that the path he feels inertia is leading him down is actually negative and rejects it, Amita and Sabal are unable to conceive of their choices on the road to liberate Kyrat as being fundamentally mistaken or wrong. They’re unable to look back, reassess, and see that they’re running roughshod over human rights to achieve once positive goals. They replace one evil with another and in the end both turn out like the Rakshasas, corrupting something that was supposed to be good. 

#Tbh I'm not sure about some of what I've written here but writing helps me think and synthesize things #it's a process #I also don't know to what extent Amita and Sabal were always 'like this' and were always planning to go down the path they were #if they were then ignore literally everything I've written lol it's nonsense #I did find a letter from Sabal to the extremist monk who was kicked out of Chal Jama #where Sabal thanks him for his guidance/advice #So did that guy radicalize Sabal or was Sabal radicalized before then and sought out this monk? #I wish I knew more about the backgrounds of Sabal and Amita because without that everything I wrote feels kinda shaky #like I've made a lot of assumptions #Far Cry 4 #Sabal #Amita #Kalinag

[saintkevorkian]

‘we’re decent humans bc we don’t oppress’ statements -- where is sex. lol sex is certainly a mark for discrimination

female sex faces material and sometimes violent oppression not on account of silly cultural trappings but due to unfortunate biological mechanisms (ie length of gestation vs infant mortality in the ancient world required a high pregnancy rate, average 5-6 children per woman, and robust younger populations were necessary for non-nomadic groups to maintain control of a location (early settlements and even cities)...obviously this is no longer necessary, but the mentality has dovetailed into modern political philosophies and spiralled to the point where people in rich countries are very brainwashed about what ‘female’ does and doesn’t imply-- it exceeds a level of docility necessary for governance). not everything is physical, yet some purely physical examples can still be found in the modern world: being forced to sleep outside when bleeding, or being stoned to death for having a broken hymen. in the first world, the wage gap makes everything more difficult for women on average and its pattern probably has something to do with expectations of maternity leave in otherwise healthy-looking adults. the wage gap is especially detrimental in less socialised societies where charity welfare the dole &c are seen as shameful; people share when coexisting and nothing is entirely set down in the money books, so there may be some compensations, but in a society where sharing amongst strangers is regarded with hostility and suspicion this will obviously be less. a bit tangential to the point but to illustrate that there’s probably some underlying dogma at play, people study business and or economics at uni & never discuss the claim that men also would have more liquid resources if women were paid more

gender used to be a word people used when they didn’t want to say S-E-X in an official document, letter, speech, whatever

when you change the meaning of 'woman,’ the few protections which ostensibly existed for women become technically meaningless

^this might be deliberate, i dunno

women are the marked group, yet this is farce: there is no character trait that women have in common which does not apply to all humans. what women have in common are the impositions of biology. Even female socialisation affects women to varying degrees, and there will always be an exception to every ‘woman trait’ because the distinctions were made to defame and thereby control women, and some people are more difficult to control than others. There may be some patterns in the ways people react to being treated a certain way from the inception of memory, which frames one’s entire world, but there is no female personality. And yet the crux of a movement which says you can opt into a gender is to say: there is some metaphysical difference between men and women which tradition has failed to account for. This transparently upholds sexism.

in certain biological realities, certain increased risk factors, separate health concerns, and particular traps hidden under tailored social forms, women have things in common with other women. These things are experienced, but not wholly subjective. Yet according to modern standards of correctness this group can’t be grouped and is unmentionable by changing the meaning of the word everyone has known. ‘Birthing people’ is how men have perceived women since ages, but plenty of women never have sex with men so they won’t give birth. Oddly it appears there’s a group of women who are attracted to women and absolutely must include anyone who claims to be female in their dating pool or suffer quite a significant amount of annoying conversation, plus death or rape threats which somehow people find acceptable to catalyse social ‘change’-- I guess this is another nameless group. efforts to effect change, btw, should be targeted at legislation and institutions and not at individuals (even if you bloody a person up a bit and force them to submit to your ideologies youve done nothing to change the world; violence already exists since time immemorial). anyway it's evincing the most witless docility to simply agree that an individual’s personal feelings of ~identity or ~inclusion ought to supersede legal and medical definitions in these same spheres.

apart from those whom the state deems to have forfeited rights by violation of social contract (incarcerated women most importantly, about whom literally none of these faux-left ‘activist’ (talkativist) types care a jot), all people should have the right to live their lives and be as annoying as is legal. When delicate handling of personal feelings comes at the expense of hard-won legal rights of an unnameable group, it should not, according to any considered and rational opinion, be sanctioned by law

what one feels inside should be respected in contexts where sharing on that level is appropriate. what is and isn’t legal has to do with people living cooperatively together, and depends on a common conception of reality. the law has been used to oppress groups, but in some cases laws are also floodgates against popular oppression. (See the terrifying example of a world in which people are whatever gender they say they are, regardless of physical appearance, but women still experience employment bias. A company can hire exclusively men provided some claim to be women, and women are not a group so cannot seek redress.)

The entire gimmick plays on the american left’s fear of being called racist. The movement brings race up frequently, often at very inappropriate moments (ie to gain funny social credit, not out of interest for black rights). clearly the united states cherishes a lot of sub-surface racism, which is why this fraudulent tactic can ever be successful. (then again, if white people went around calling themselves black because they’d supposedly had ‘the black experience’ people would, hopefully, tell them to get a grip...) It is common now for women to allow their rights to be jeopardised, while wearing a stupid grin. This movement was funded by male billionaires, probably under the slogan, ‘Women getting too uppity? divide them & trick those fools into denying their own existence.’ Somehow it worked.

I suppose it could be a coincidence that the acronyms movement is based in the united states, which has the lowest educational standards in the ‘first world’ and a long history of thoughtlessness. Note: the US constitution’s fourteenth amendment, which is supposed to guarantee all persons due process and equal protection under law, has been said not to apply to women, because there is no legal precedent for women being full persons (Scalia, 2011)

#in loco parentis

[idiosyncraticrednebula]

Feminism has brainwashed people so much to the point that people think of men speaking about their own problems as "misogyny". Like????

#text #you could have dudes talking about how certain societal expectations emotionally harm them #and feminists are like 'yeah but women suffer more :/' #WHY ARE Y'ALL TRYING TO MAKE EVERYTHING A FUCKING COMPETITION #y'all be like 'but women have been oppressed and mistreated' yeah according the feminist revisionists of the 20th century #this is why feminism needs to be stopped. it claims to wanna help erase gender inequality but no all it does is create animosity between #the sexes. if we wanna be honest men generally do worse in life. women are more beloved and cared for than men are #but feminism has brainwashed women into seeing their sex as a burden on them and that they will always be victims no matter what that a man #talking about his own issues is seen as a problem. feminism does this crap to you #feminism has taught women to not see anything good in being a woman because that is a pathway to being treated like less than human which is #why they need to behave like a man or whatever. how the fuck is this ideology supposed to help women?? it tells them that they are WORTHLESS #i don't believe in the concept of 'male privilege'. it's based on a lot of bs specially when you consider the fact that men are generally #viewed as expendable and tools for society. so miss me with that nonsense. i hate that concept because of the fact that it's not based on #reality and in a way implies that women will always suffer because they have a vagina. this is what feminism tells women #when in reality we all suffer and go through hard stuff. this is not a competition #it seems as though that women suffer more because of feminism and also because women are far more vocal about their problems than men are #men are just told to swallow it and shut up about it. women are not told that #but as i said before. this is not a competition. we should help each other instead of discussing whether WomEN oR MeN suFFer mORe. god i #hate feminism. this is what it has done

[wiccancaileag]

TW: T*rf slur

TERF

Normalization of violence against women. English translation.

Publicación original acá.

TERF is the acronym for “Trans exclusionary radical feminist”, in Spanish “Feminista Radical Transexcluyente”, promoting the idea that radical feminism is transphobic. It's being used as an insult, clearly misogynistic, and this concept is perpetuated mostly by people who are part of the queer movement and transactivism, but this is a totally wrong conception.

Within radical feminism we analyze gender as a social construction and as a mechanism to oppress women. We do not see it as an identity but as a tool of oppression based on our sex. This is why we are gender abolitionists, as this is the only solution to free ourselves from gender oppression and all that this entails. Queer theory aims to eliminate the category of sex and if this happens, then our oppression is invisible and denied, just as feminism would disappear.

This implies how important it is to consider biological sex, and to understand then that it is that we do not want trans-women in our movement: because they do not suffer oppression because they are women, because oppression is based on our material reality. A male person will grow up with male socialization and unborn privileges of the oppressive sex. No matter how much you transition, sex is a material and immutable reality.

To carry out this analysis, it is necessary to be clear about the definitions of sex and gender, and the difference between oppression and discrimination, since it is these confusions that cause misinformation.

It is also necessary to take into account that radical feminism already has an agenda and a defined political subject, which is the woman (adult human female, person of the female sex). We support separatist spaces to protect and prioritize ourselves. Claiming ourselves, talking about ourselves, about our bodies and experiences, defending what is ours and the few spaces that we have managed to conquer. It is not transphobia or hatred, it is to focus on women and fight for our liberation.

To sum it up, it is simple to understand the fact why we are trans-feminine separatists in the movement understanding that we are based on sex. It is contradictory to call us "transexclusive" when transmasculines are also part of the movement because they are biologically women and therefore belong to the political subject (it should be noted that this does not represent an obligation for transmasculines, that is, they are not obliged to be part of the movement if they don't want to), plus you can't exclude someone who was never part of it. The most important thing to understand all this is to have clear ideas and know how to separate things.

The fact that they want to silence women is nothing new, they have always treated us like the bad guys in history. TERF is an insult, and it is misogynistic because it seeks to silence us, invalidate us, violate us, misinform us, reduce feminism only to the criticism of gender and queer theory, since other issues are also being fought for. They look for a thousand ways and excuses in order to discredit us, they want to emotionally blackmail us by making us feel guilty for prioritizing us, they want to impose fear on us by insulting and verbally hurting us until they threaten, they twist words and invent things to make us look like the violent ones, and promote hate speech towards us.

Feminism is a movement by and for women, it must be a separatist space and where struggles are not mixed because that way the objective is lost. We must be very clear about what we are looking for and what we are fighting for, we cannot allow just anyone to come and tell us how we have to act in feminism and what we have to do... patriarchy conditions us our entire lives, let's not allow that too to break into our spaces.

TW: Violence, d**th threats, r*p* threats

JK Rowling: “'Feminazi’, ‘TERF’, ‘bitch’, ‘witch’. Times change. Woman-hate is eternal.”

“TERF. Become trans. Radfem is a trick. D1e. Im gonna r*pe you.”

“Happy pride day. Hope you kick every TERF you see”.

“sh00t radfems”

“I haven’t wished anyone d**th, but I hope every terf d1es”

#feminismo radical #gender abolitionism #radfem #radical feminism #abolicionismo #gender criticism #radical feminist community #radfem safe #radfems interact #radblr #peak trans #tras #transactivists

[faunusrights]

what is going on with all the bias on robyn hill’s wiki page, anyway? - an aside

As someone who uses the RWBY wiki with some degree of frequency - often because I’m looking for art references, or Semblance and weapon names - I’m used to... some amount of bias in the articles for different characters? Like, let’s be real, it’s not a perfect wiki! Community-maintained stuff isn’t easy to all keep on the same track! But, generally, it gives the facts well enough and doesn’t do too bad a job keeping all the balls in the air when it comes to new information from all four corners of this franchise.

Well, until you open the article for Robyn Hill, and realise it’s an absolute disaster. Like, really; the impartial voice just plain doesn’t exist for her, and almost all of her wiki is written in such a way that she reads as being an absolutely insufferable, hostile, hard-to-like character. Even if you aren’t a fan of Robyn personally, you have to admit that if you hadn’t seen the show yourself, you might very well come away from her article presuming she’s a major antagonist of Volumes 7 and 8.

Like, for instance, let’s take a look at the first paragraph of her Personality section:

Robyn has a direct and confident personality, having no trouble being confrontational with Atlas personnel, including the Ace Operatives. Robyn also seems to suffer from overconfidence and arrogance, shown in her encounters with Ruby and celebrating her election victory before it was verified. She is aggressive and hostile in nature, quickly jumping to conflict without thinking through consequences. However, she is also shown to be reasonable when the situation calls for it.

And, for good measure, here’s another paragraph from the same section:

In "With Friends Like These" Robyn displayed a rather impulsive side of her personality, when upon hearing that James Ironwood's plan to abandon Mantle and arrest those against him, she started a fight between herself, Clover Ebi, and Qrow Branwen onboard a Manta with Tyrian Callows in custody. Despite the fact, there was no order or her arrest. Her brashness led to Tyrian breaking free and crashing the Manta as well as her becoming unconscious.

(Taken from Robyn’s RWBY Wiki page. Bolding is mine.)

In every instance here, all of the “negative” aspects of her personality take centre stage; she’s confrontational. She suffers from arrogance. She is aggressive and hostile. She started the fight. Her brashness led to the crash. All of this is only compounded when her positive traits trail behind as an afterthought; she’s direct and confrontational, overconfident and arrogant, aggressive and hostile, impulsive and jumps to conclusions... but hey! As least she’s reasonable when the situation calls for it. 

The way that this information is presented to the reader is quite literally on par with how the wiki presents the personalities of the actual literal villains who appear throughout the show. Let’s take, for instance, the Personality section of Cinder Fall:

Cinder is ruthless and sadistic, as demonstrated when she delivers a killing blow to a clearly defeated Pyrrha Nikos in "End of the Beginning" and when she throws a spear at a defenseless Weiss Schnee in "The More the Merrier." She is relentlessly driven to gain power and determined to cross any line to obtain it. Cinder demonstrates a cunning that shows in her successful manipulation of events and people throughout the first three volumes. Cinder is also arrogant and egomaniacal, and as such, relishes in dominance and gloating, displaying shameless pleasure in the misery she has caused others.

Or, the Personality section of Raven Branwen:

Raven is cynical, patronizing, selfish and stubborn. She believed her act of "kindness" of saving Yang's life from Neopolitan was sufficient despite having left Yang at a very young age and refused to protect her daughter when in need after that.

Raven is also very prideful and hypocritical, refusing to acknowledge her faults and always trying to justify her actions both to others and to herself, often putting the blame on others for them even if she feels real guilt about them.

It makes sense that for an antagonist, the primary faults and flaws of their personalities will come first, as to better represent them as the villains to clarify to the reader who they are and why they act as they do in their storylines. However, the fact that Robyn arguably has an even more caustic write-up then Raven, despite not being an antagonist, goes to show the lengths this writer has gone to present her in a significantly more negative light than she ever appears in the show.

If this doesn’t seem convincing, let’s look at a more direct comparison; what does the wiki say about Ironwood? He’s present in the same seasons, and has now become more of an antagonist in the latter episodes; is the wiki quite as blunt about his flaws?

Ironwood is courteous to his allies, as shown by his first onscreen interaction with Ozpin and Glynda Goodwitch. He is also far-thinking and tactical, wondering about the future, as seen when he speaks to Ozpin about Qrow Branwen's message. He also has a jovial, friendly, humorous and proud public persona, which he uses as a spokesman for the weapon manufacturers of Atlas.

However, as courteous Ironwood may appear, he can also be incredibly blunt, often preferring the direct approach. When he feels necessary, Ironwood is not afraid to bring the full might of his military command to bear, which sparked disagreements with both Glynda and Ozpin. Nevertheless, Ironwood is extremely loyal to his comrades, and however questionable his methods may be, he seems to have genuinely good intentions behind them.

Uh, no.

Instead, when his flaws are mentioned (for example, being blunt), it’s written in a significantly less... abrasive manner. It’s referred to as the direct approach, versus Robyn who is described as confrontational. Even then, his flaws are folded in to his (alleged) positive traits; he is not afraid, extremely loyal, and has genuinely good intentions, despite the fact that the show has now proven that Ironwood’s flaws greatly outweigh these. It reveals how thoroughly all of Robyn’s actions are presented as the work of an arrogant troublemaker, whilst Ironwood’s actions are presented as the efforts of a man working towards some greater good. 

Also, I’ll add that in both examples, I used the first two paragraphs of their Personality sections. These are both the first two things you read about these characters, yet look at how differently they’re summarised.

What is interesting, however, is that despite this bias being extremely self-evident, the comments on her page generally chime agreement, referring to her as “overconfident, arrogant, impulsive and hotheaded to the point of being unlikable”, and claiming that she’s “literally the worse character in the show next to cinder, blake and yang”[1]. Someone mentions that Robyn has earned quite the hatedom... but why?

Broadly, my experiences of Robyn Hill’s writing in the fandom has been through a queer lens, and the vast majority of writers who’ve covered her and the Happy Huntresses have been women, or queer, or trans, or all the above... basically, the people who are usually responsible for a vast majority of fanfiction, let’s be real. These writers love Robyn, and have explored and extrapolated on her character to marvellous degree. Yet, at no singular point have any of these flaws ever been written quite as strongly as the wiki implies they are, nor have I seen much evidence of them myself in the show. For instance, let’s take one of the more serious points in her Personality section; she started a fight between herself, Clover Ebi, and Qrow Branwen [...] her brashness led to Tyrian breaking free and crashing the Manta as well as her becoming unconscious.

When we watch this scene again, Robyn did initiate the fight... because she was rightfully aware that Clover would obey his orders, even if they were wrong. Despite everything that happened prior in the entirety of Volume 7, when given orders to bring Qrow in alongside RWBY, it was clear that Clover fully intended to follow it through, which Robyn knows from prior experience with the AceOps:

[image ID: two images of Clover, Robyn and Qrow in the dark-grey interior of the Manta ship. Robyn has her weapon aimed at Clover as he stands in front of Qrow. Clover is saying “Only Qrow is under arrest [...] please don’t make me arrest you too.”]

Her knowledge of the AceOps means that she reacted accordingly; trying to stop him from taking Qrow in and obeying Ironwood’s plan the only way she knows the AceOps respond to. Her reaction isn’t unwarranted. However, my point isn’t to argue that Robyn was right or wrong, but rather that regardless of who started the fight, the way the wiki explains this specific incident is that it’s solely Robyn’s fault that Tyrian escaped and crashed the Manta, but we know this isn’t the case. Robyn and Qrow both fought Clover, and it was Clover’s good luck (or Qrow’s bad luck, depending on how you view it) that allowed for Kingfisher to break Tyrian’s bonds. Her brashness is blamed for the outcome, but in reality, this outcome could have been avoided together if Clover had not chosen to follow his orders and bring in an innocent man. Also, she didn’t crash the Manta! That was all Tyrian! The intentional tying together of these two events as her fault, however, are a neat package of blame.

In these instances on the wiki, Robyn’s personality appears amplified, focusing specifically on her flaws and exaggerating them to the extremes that, as noted earlier, matches the language used to define the very villains of the series. Yet, the people who enjoy her and the Happy Huntresses often perceive those same flaws to a significantly lesser extent, or even see those flaws as actually being boons of her character; for instance, reading her alleged arrogance as passion. So, why such division?

Before, I mentioned her “negative” traits, and I put this into quote marks because traits don’t always align nicely into good and bad. All aspects of a person can vary on how positive they are based on context - even the show proves this, with protectiveness becoming paranoia (Ironwood) or loyalty becoming subservience (Winter). Even a character that is broadly composed of more unfavourable traits can have this contextual shift; Cinder’s stubbornness to her goals makes her a fast learner and a tenacious opponent.

Yet, why did the writer (or writers) choose to highlight almost every aspect of Robyn’s character as a bad thing? Why did they frame her decisions as such? I have a suspicion it’s to do with her character at large; she’s a bold socialist politician who believes in equality and fairness for all, who refuses to stand for incompetence and obedience towards evil causes. She’s outspoken in her views, and reacts strongly to those who threaten to overturn her work. Also, she’s a woman, in charge of a group of other women, at least one of whom is canonically trans. To those who agree with her in real life, Robyn appears as a great character! We admire her work ethic and we support her ends. To those who may not... well, it’s not hard to see how they might perceive her as more of a cocky, authority-defying upstart. Of course, the core text of RWBY doesn’t quite believe the latter; RWBY has always placed Robyn as the direct counter to authoritarianism, whether it be Jacques, Clover, or Ironwood, and even the article admits that she is a potent voice for the people of Mantle. Still, it’s clear that there’s plenty of people in a vocal minority who are deeply dissatisfied by Robyn, and aren’t afraid to make their stance on the matter exceedingly clear.

So, what does this all mean? Well, here’s what we can say for sure; Robyn’s article is, and has always been, stringently biased against her character, and often misconstrues her motives and decisions. This is maybe the more obvious part, but how should her article be worded to make this less so? Likely, I’d rephrase a lot of it to be less damaging to her character; she isn’t hostile, she holds people accountable. She isn’t quick to jump to conflict, she is familiar with how Atlas responds to anti-authority with violence. She isn’t arrogant, she believes in the power of the people as being the right thing to fight for. Even this makes it clearer that her character is about resisting the oppression inherent in Atlas, and is a much clearer outline of her personality as a whole. People may disagree with this phrasing and summary also, but given her character is based on Robin Hood, it’s also not far from the mark in terms of what she should represent.

TL;DR: Robyn’s wiki page is written with a deep bias against her character and what she represents, acts upon, and chooses to do in the show; I have no doubt that in canon, this sort of language would probably be used by Jacques himself as a smear campaign, haha. Whilst I can’t speak for the author and their motives, I have a distinct feeling that this article was written, or edited, by someone who is either:

not a fan of Robyn

not a fan of a new female character

not a fan of a new female character in a position of power

not a fan of a character with socialist/communist/antifa ideals

all of the above and then some???

Even though I’m not going to edit her wiki page (I’m very shy and I’ve never done it before), I think it’s worth analysing this if only as a reminder of the inherent biases of an author even when people are trying to present a character’s information impartially. This isn’t the first wiki I’ve seen misconstrue - or even make incorrect assumptions on - facts about a character, and it won’t be the last. In the meantime, though, I leave you with this fact:

Robyn Hill slaps huge nuts and I love her.

[1] I’m not naming the users who posted these things here, because it’s unnecessary. You can find them for yourself at the bottom of Robyn’s wiki, but there’s no need to respond; some people just don’t like Robyn, and that’s fine - I’m just explaining how bias leaks into wikis like water into a sponge. It happens!

#rwby #rwde #robyn hill #murphy's thoughts and vibes on this shit (again) #is this a new tag #i haven't really written this well and it was sort of off the cuff so sorry if there's mistake #*mistakes #LMAO #i just wanted to lay my Thoughts out #i swear if even one person msgs me like 'but robyn DOES suck' im banishing you to the Spray Cheese Hell Dimension #also im tagging as rwde but its not rwde against the show (FOR ONCE??) so

[animepopheart]

Wonder Egg Priority, Episode 11: “The Temptation of Death”?

Wonder Egg Priority is a beautiful, uncomfortable, moving and confusing series that starts out engaging all the things we don’t talk about—self-harm, abuse, rape, bullying, gender dysmorphia, and homosexuality, to name a few. Our silence and blindness to these issues have a weight and pressure to them, and WEP shows how this reinforces the isolation and hopelessness of the young women of the “eggs” who turn to suicide for relief. The first ten episodes have been exhilarating and exhausting alike.

And then there is Episode 11. This past week, the series took a bit of a turn, leaning hard into the sci-fi-philosophical, with appearances from Greek gods, a murderous artificial intelligence, and really, really disturbing insect girls, one of whom, despite being a brutal killer, is apparently a vegetarian. Has the show gone off the rails? Has it lost its way in departing from the familiar procedural approach of engaging a differing social or mental health issue with each episode?

Such a critique is perfectly legit, but before you write off the penultimate episode of WEP, just hear me out on why the abstract, meta turn in episode 11 may just be the most valuable thing this series has to offer so far.

Before we begin though, a little recap of what we learned this week. In episode 10, we hear the eggheads, Acca and Ura-Acca, discuss the need for warriors of Eros to battle Thanatos. This is our first hint that things are about to get lore-full and maybe a bit weird. Eros and Thanatos are of course gods in the ancient Greek pantheon, Eros being the god of love, and Thanatos, of non-violent death. Within the first minute or so of episode 11, it’s clear that the eggheads’ hope is now focused on Ai becoming the long-awaited warrior. At this point though, rather than continuing with Ai’s story, the episode shifts into flashback mode and we are finally introduced to the villain, an artificial intelligence created by the eggheads back when they were still human. Their lives gradually come to revolve around her: She is the fulfillment of their obsession to create life, and she is good.

Frill is associated with hydrangeas, which symbolise heartlessness and pride in Japanese flower language. But is it her heartlessness and pride, or that of her makers?

(Atelier Emily has done an outstanding series of posts on the flowers in WEP. Check it out!)

Only, it turns out she doesn’t play so nice when others join the happy family. After killing Acca’s wife, and putting the life of the unborn baby at risk, the AI—who named herself Frill—is unrepentant, all traces of her seeming humanity now revealed to be illusory, a mere affectation. Acca locks her away in a hole in the cellar. Years pass. The baby, Himari, grows up and is a ray of sunshine. But after effectively confessing to her ‘uncle’ (why does anime always do this?), she commits suicide. Ura-Acca discovers that Frill is still very much alive and active from her hole in the cellar, having powered up all the discarded monitors and laid down reams of electrical cables—to what end, we do not yet know. Though Ura-Acca surmises that she has somehow influenced Himari to take her own life. How else would the girl have known about Ura-Acca’s admiration for her mother? Where else would she have learned to make what will forever be to me now that uncannily sinister popping sound?

Here’s where it gets weirder. Unlike the suicides of subsequent egg girls, there is no indication that Himari, Frill’s apparent first victim, struggled with any mental health or other issues that would motivate her to take her own life. Indeed, her ‘uncle’ did not even reject her confession. (Again anime, why you do this thing?) Instead, the eggheads explain Himari’s suicide as being on account of the “temptation of death.” What now?

This is implying that death is somehow attractive, not just to someone facing overwhelming brokenness, trauma or pain, like the egg girls we’ve met so far, but to someone on the verge of stepping from a (relatively) happy childhood into young adulthood, with the promise of potential love to look forward to; someone who has not known suffering, but rather only smiles and cake. (To be fair, it is always possible that she experienced trauma in the womb, or was more deeply affected by her father’s sadness than Ura-Acca’s memories belie.)

That’s my question too, Ai.

The notion of death as somehow attractive or even beautiful is rather alien to Western culture. Certainly, there will always be some who romanticize death, à la star-crossed lovers (Shakespeare, I’m looking at you). But in general, Western culture views death as something ugly and frightening, something to avoid until it is staring you directly in the face, and even then, closing your eyes in denial is a perfectly reasonable response. Death is one of those things we don’t talk about. In my experience, Anglo-American culture is not very good at even mourning death. We lack the grieving rituals and observances of other cultures, and instead seek to confine death to the sealed, sanitized spaces of hospitals, care homes, and funeral parlors. We keep it shrouded tightly in silence. How could there ever be anything like the “temptation of death”? How could we ever consider death to be something desirable? Are the eggheads or CloverWorks simply aestheticising suicide and death here to make it sound deep and philosophical?

No, I don’t think that’s it. Instead, Acca and Ura-Acca are doing what all good researchers do—and indeed what all Christians, as believers in an unseen spiritual reality, are also called to do: They are looking more deeply into phenomena that seem, on the surface, to already be explained. The two idol fans were consumed with their obsession, so when their idol killed herself, they followed suit. The young woman whose identity was wrapped up in her own appearance ended her life to preserve her beauty. The abused gymnast saw no way out, no hope in ever living free from torment. Some explanations may be more sympathetic than others, but they all possess their own internal logic. Contemporary society is full of a vast array of pressures and stresses and each one, taken to breaking point, can result in death. Case closed. This might very well be our conclusion from the first ten episodes.

Only the case isn’t closed. Because there is a question that has pervaded every episode until now, but has remained unspoken: How is it that death could even become an option for the egg girls? Why does reaching a breaking point trigger suicide? What made death seem like a savior to these girls? This is the question that episode 11 tackles, in its own admittedly obscure way. The eggheads are focused on the underlying, deeper reality that unites all the eggs’ stories, as disparate as they are—the common thread, which is the idea that death is a release, a rescue, a beautiful ending, and as a result, it is tempting.

“But we wondered if there could be another push that drove them to suicide,” explains Ura-Acca.

This is a really important question for us to be asking. Because it’s not just these traumatized, vulnerable girls who fall for the seduction of death. We do, too.

Just ponder for a moment: Have you ever anticipated how wonderful it will be when, in heaven, you no longer struggle with that particular temptation? When your temper is no longer so short, when you’re not afraid of being hurt anymore? Or maybe you think about how one day, on those gold-paved streets, you won’t have to worry anymore. All your hard work coping and just keeping it together will finally pay off and you’ll cross that finish line and heave a sigh of relief, knowing that you made it in the end. Have you ever contemplated these kinds of things? I know I have.

But here’s the thing: When I expect my liberation to come only after I die and not right here, right now, then it is not Jesus who is my savior, but death. I am waiting for death to free me from temptation and sin and fear and brokenness, and usher me into eternal life. I make Thanatos my god.

The temptation of death is not limited to the drastic act of suicide, but also permeates all the accusations and fears that inspire us to put off living the fullness of life in Christ here and now. It’s the temptation to believe that it is death that will ultimately solve the more difficult and painful problems in life.

Acca and Ura-Acca seek to create a love that suits their ideals, just to relieve their stress.

The source of this “temptation of death” in Wonder Egg Priority is Frill, the AI. That is, a man-made, artificial version of love—with ai meaning “love” in Japanese. According to Ura-Acca, they made her “just for fun,” as a way of dealing with the stress of their enclosed lives. They designed her to suit their preferences, to make it easier to love her and forget that she was artificial. In this sense, Frill is the fruit of their self-centeredness, her every characteristic designed to satisfy their own ideals of how a daughter and woman should be. And this artificial love born of selfishness brings death into their midst and beyond, spreading it through the horrendous deformities of girlhood that she in turn creates, in imitation of her fathers. (Only perhaps her creations are less deceptive than theirs, wearing their monstrosity plainly on the outside…)

Frill’s creations. We’ve met Dash (right) and Dot (center), but who is that on the left? And is her name Morse??

To counter her destructive influence, Acca and Ura-Acca need true love, a genuine love. They need Ai, a messy, at times very weak human being, but one who nevertheless is willing to fight to live up to her name and maybe, just maybe, become a warrior of Eros.

There is also a deep, underlying force at work in our world, one that connects all despair and the actions born of it. A wide range of social issues, traumas and mental health challenges can and do trigger suicide, but they do not explain it fully. The deeper reality is the existence of an enemy who seeks to manipulate us into believing our true savior can only be death, whether it is right away by our own hand, or more subtly, decades from now by natural causes. But this is a lie, and it is one that we can combat. Just as I’m sure we’ll see in the final episode that Ai is equipped to wage the coming battle in WEP, so too are we armed, here and now, with the power to overwhelm the enemy’s “temptation of death”—we possess already the words of life, given to us by our true savior.

Jesus began his ministry with a public announcement that he had come to heal heart wounds, comfort those in pain, fill broken lives with beauty, and wrap those in despair with reasons to praise like a warm protective blanket, so that they might celebrate with joy once again. He came to bring freedom to prisoners and captives alike, giving a fresh new life to those locked up because of deeds done wrong, and those punished and injured at the hands of others. He came to take the outcasts, the weak, the traumatized and broken and transform them into mighty oaks, clean and strong; into people with the vision and skill and compassion and fortitude to rebuild a broken world (Isaiah 61:1-4, Luke 4:18),

He came to rewrite and restore our experience of life here on earth, and through us, to redeem our communities, cities, nations, and the world. God does not withhold the fullness of life from us until we finally make it to him in heaven. No, instead he moved heaven and earth to get right up close so that he could pour his own life out into us, even going so far as to breathe his very spirit into our hearts and bodies and minds. We don’t need to wait for death’s rescue—our hero has already come. But we do need to remind each other and ourselves of this truth pretty often, and let it work down deep into all the cracks and bruises in our souls until it strengthens all our weak spots.

In Deuteronomy 30:19, God tells the Israelites that he has given them the authority to choose between life and death. But he also tips the balances in their favor, urging them to choose life. In Jesus, he comes to tip the balances even further, making it possible for us to step into eternal life here and now, immediately and forever. So let’s do it. Each day, through each struggle we face. Let’s choose life and not death.

Warrior of love? And is Ai’s himawari (sunflower) related to Himari somehow?

Join me (in spirit) for the final episode on Tuesday to see Ai’s love triumph! (At least, I really really hope that’s what happens!)

#wonder egg priority #wep #wep frill #ai ohto #Christianity #blog #NOT by me but rather by one of our other writers: cajk2

[shojo-sylveon]

The Symbolism of Dios - Revolutionary Girl Utena

Okay so this is something I wrote a couple months ago. I didn’t want to post it on my main blog but now that I have this side blog I thought I’d post it. I was really confused on the character of Dios when I first watched Utena, and upon reading other people’s interpretations of him online, I found that I didn’t agree with any of them. So I started making an outline to figure out my own interpretation, which eventually turned into this little mini essay. If anyone agrees or disagrees you are welcome to provide commentary, I most certainly do not claim to understand the enigma that is Revolutionary Girl Utena in its entirety but this is just my understanding of Dios/Akio. I apologize if the formatting on this is a mess, I wrote this in google docs to organize my own thoughts.  Spoilers ahead. Trigger Warnings: abuse mention

Dios means “god.”

Dios represents: childhood fantasies, an idealistic view of men as “princes” which separates them from their wrongdoings, childhood innocence Episodes evalutated: 13, 34, 39

Notable: When the power of Dios assists Utena in each duel, the outline of Dios starts to look more like Akio as the episodes progress. In the short scenes where Dios appears he begins to look more like Akio as the scene progresses. Anthy sees Dios in Utena.

I believe Dios “died” when Akio was “born.” Anthy sealed away “the power of Dios” in order to stop him from using his power to help others which would only result in his demise, and Akio perpetuates this idea that if he were to regain the power of Dios, he would once again become Dios, but this is not so, and he knows that. Anthy did not seal away Akio, only his power, as he continued to exist. Dios changed to Akio, not because he lost his power, but because his own spite consumed him. To blame Anthy for “sealing away this power” along with his “nobility” is simply a scapegoat he uses so he can continue being a piece of shit. Everything Akio does is in pursuit of power. Akio pursues the power of Dios so he can be more powerful, not so he can regain his nobility. Akio knows he may never regain that power, and he is okay with that. Failure just means he can continue “stay in his comfy coffin” where he lives in a never ending timeline where he is in control and profits off of Anthy’s suffering. He uses the promise of obtaining the power of Dios to comfort himself and maintain control of Anthy. 

The power of Dios is not obtainable to Akio. Without his nobility, which he chose to abandon, he can never again hold the power he held as someone with pure intentions. Questions:

1. Is Dios his own person? Is he a ghost or spirit of some sort? 2. Does Dios truly have good intentions? The ending of the series shows us that there are no princes, and there are no damsels in distress. These are all just idealistic fantasies believed in by children. Utena could not become a prince, not because she was a woman, but because the only person who could save Anthy was Anthy. 

 Utena’s First Encounter with Dios:  I believe that this encounter was with Akio, taking on the form of Dios to help perpetuate the “princely” aesthetic, while it is possible that this vision is some fragment of the memory of Dios, as created by either Akio or Anthy (similar to Mikage’s memories creating a reality), I think Dios’s behavior feels much more on brand with Akio and his motives in this scene. Dios eggs on Utena to become a prince and save Anthy, although there is something about his demeanor which is cold and uncaring, it is not that of a loving concerned brother. Akio sees the “nobility” in Utena’s empathy, and thinks she may be one who can help him regain his old power, which is why he manipulates her into becoming his pawn. Episode 13: 

Here we see Akio talking to Dios; himself. He says the seal on the power of Dios is beginning to break. Dios “glares” at him, and Akio, unphased, says it will benefit them both. One question that really weighed on me here was, who is the Dios we see here? The castle itself where Dios is “sealed” is only an illusion, created by Akio himself. Based on this information, I believe this whole conversation takes place in Akio’s head, and the conversation is with himself. Perhaps Akio knows that his old self might claim to feel disgust with his current lifestyle and actions, but it does not bother him in the slightest, and claims that the power of them being one again would equally benefit them both, implying that power is what the old Dios also would have wanted. If this is correct that Dios is simply inside Akio’s head, it explains how Akio continues to have control over every single aspect of everything that has happened thus far. He continues to manipulate Utena in pursuit of her nobility, hoping it will break the seal on the power he desires. He also continues to spark some sort of hope in Anthy, reawakening her memories of what her brother once was, allowing Akio to further convince her that with the power of Dios, he could once again be that memory for her, which obviously cannot happen but it helps to keep Anthy under his control. The Sword of Dios, and the Power of Dios which possesses Utena: 

The power we see in the duels raises another question: Is this truly the power of Dios? Or is this too Akio’s power? Perhaps he is mimicking Dios’s powers by insisting that these duels are noble. If it is Dios’s power, why does Dios eventually turn into Akio? Once again Akio has shown he has supreme power over everything that happens at Ohtori, especially within that observatory dueling arena castle place of his. I believe everything we see is created by Akio.

Episode 39: Once again, we see Dios in the mysterious Merry-go-round scene. Dios is supposed to be attempting to comfort her, but this time Dios is pushing her to give up, and he speaks to her in a very patronizing way. This is not a prince who wants to motivate a young noble woman to help him save his beloved sister. I believe this is just another image created by Akio to manipulate Utena.

More on Dios: Dios is always drawn with wide child-like eyes at the start of his scenes, that get thinner and start to look more like Akio’s as the scene goes on. Many abusers start out seemingly kind and loving, and that’s how they rope in victims. It’s fair to note that Dios himself was a child in the beginning, though after losing his power he grew up and became corrupted, blaming Anthy for the loss of his power. Yet, like other abusers, I do not believe Dios was ever the perfect idealistic prince he was painted to be. Perhaps this is what Anthy remembers him as, perhaps what he acted as, but as he grew up the evil surfaced. Dios likely always took pleasure in the power he had and the way women demanded his attention, the position of power he held over those he helped. It was these seeds that completely corrupted him as he matured into an adult. 

Questions Revisited:

1. Is Dios his own person? Is he a ghost or spirit of some sort? No, he is simply a vision created by Akio to further remain in control. 2. Does Dios truly have good intentions? 

No, not only are the visions we see all of him actually just Akio, but I do not believe that even the original Dios was truly pure of heart. Anthy never needed a prince, she needed to love and believe in herself, and to be loved and believed in by others. If Dios was truly a perfect man, he would have been aware of this, but the perfect man simply does not exist. 

#revolutionary girl utena #trigger warning #abuse mention #utena #dios #akio #analysis #interpretation #anime analysis #personal commentary #mine #thoughts #not sure what to tag original posts as on here #my post #(?) #long post

[kaypeace21]

The theme with “time” this season makes me think of the phrase, “wanting to turn back the clock.” And I then think of Will never wanting to grow up and wanting to go back to the old days of playing dnd in Mike’s basement.

And then I think of Will’s (speculated) reality altering bending powers. So could there be a possibility that Will may use those powers to “turn back the clock”?? Maybe rewrite how things happened? Maybe it would be after Mike’s “death” like you speculated earlier. Since he thinks Mike is “dead” he wants to go back, and that’s what he does accidentally.

ALSO, Hopper tells joyce that he was trying to runaway from his "past" trauma with sara- before he says that line in the letter about wanting to turn back the clock and then saying it's not possible to do so . (And that life life hurts you but eventually you get out of that cave and life goes on ). Similar to Will he wants to turn back the clock to better times, but a part of him isn't ready to accept his entire past/ the tra*uma that comes with that- in order to move on and heal for the future .

Like robin said about back to the future "he's stuck in the past .But he needs to get back to his time which is the future!"

HOWEVER- I DON’T THINK THERE’S ANY REAL TIME TRAVEL!!!!

I’ve mentioned  my time-theory many many many times- in relation to my DID theory.  even if my did theory is completely wrong (aka Will has powers so his alters/split personalities/innerworlds come to life)- 

We also see how memories are explored in a supernatural way in st - it’s not literal timetravel just El using her powers to explore tra*matic memories of others (Terry/Billy so far). Like NO TIME TRAVEL PLEASE-THAT’S JUMPING THE SHARK. I really don’t want it lol. XD I think hopper and Robin's lines allude to the theme that will be addressed: confronting the past/times that harmed you but overcoming it for the future because time goes on 'whether you like it or not '.

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In reference to my time-did theory. Look at the st s4 movie inspirations. In ‘what dreams may come”  a guy explores a heaven like world influenced by a painter’s emotions/created via immagination.We also have the movie ‘inside out’ -which involves “memory islands” (distinct worlds based on a child’s memories) which are influenced negatively by the kid being depressed she moved to California. The characters traveling to these memory islands are constructs of  kid’s mind -and 1 of them also has a guide helping them explore the ‘memory islands’.  Welcome to marwen- has an artist (attacked for being perceived as gay) imagining an abstract world based off his art- where the characters he made experience their own adventures (loosely based off the artist’s trauma). ‘The cell ‘ has characters explore the mind of a guy whose father ab*sed him- and the different alternative fantasy-worlds they explore are based off his memories. The cop exploring these memory-worlds, was also implied to be se*ually ab*sed by his dad . Also,in  Inception a guy says he’s a construct of a guy’s mind ( the guy who created the dream worlds that are like alternate dimensions/levels- also hates his dad). And leo’s character says he needs to help him escape the many different levels of the dream world of the mind. Movies like inception, total recall, the cell, enter the void, wizard of oz, Peter Pan, hellraiser 2, dream warriors, bill & ted’s bogus journey, the labyrinth,and welcome to marwen, all allude to this: because they involve entering simulated abstract worlds usually created/based on happy& traumatic memories/fears. While truman show/matrix are more about realizing your reality isn’t real. While in bladerunner 2044/total recall it has the theme of false implanted memories… probably relating to hopper/el realizing they’re alters of Will’s-and their memories were technically created by him.

Something some DiD suffers have are “innerworlds” .When someone has DID there can be multiple “innerworlds” that are separate from one another (and look very different from one another) .And are usually very abstract worlds that are based on the child’s memories (good &bad) . These worlds are usually created at different times and almost act like alternate dimensions (and the inhabitants -npcs/alters of those worlds usually don’t interact with one another) . So they can almost resemble alternate dimensions like how Scott Clarke mentions “Hugh Everett’s many worlds interpretation.” Russia where Hopper is- is probably one of those innerworlds.

HOPPER THEORY: 

tw:ab*se/r*pe. In s2 Nancy asks Steve how his “grandpa’s time in the war is a metaphor for your life?” And steve compares the mf to the germans in the war. Dr owens mentions Will has ptsd like “ (vietnam) soldiers’, Hopper saying he had buddies like Will . “In the 70s there was a study that compared the post-traumatic stress symptoms in Vietnam veterans and adult survivors of childhood s**ual ab*se. The study revealed that childhood s**ual ab*se is traumatizing and can result in symptoms comparable to symptoms from war-related trauma.” Hopper isn’t actually in Russia -but in one of the innerworlds (after he jumped through the rift of the machine- into Will’s mind). We’ll see flashbacks but also present circumstances of his imprisonment echo Will’s past with Lonnie (if the movies indicate anything)- being starved, guards getting payed in order to let other prisoners  r*pe a gay prisoner (than claim incorrectly because of his sexuality he wanted it) , as well as a gang of sadist men who r**e others and a warden using that as a threat to be compliant , being thrown in a dark room of solitary confinement and starved when they didn’t obey the warden, the warden being religious, etc. And the American soldiers (in Vietnam) in the movies aren’t much better and do similarly horrific acts to civilians like r**e and bragging/ happily k*lling women, children, and the elderly. The drill sergant in vietnam calling them homophobic slurs & women, and chocking one of the soldiers with one hand (like the mf/russian), slapping one for not believing in christianity. Tying up a soldier in a bed , gagging him, beating him and saying “remember it’s just a dream.” Only praising them when good in fire arms.(movies : fullmetal jacket, papillon, shawshank redemption, platoon, welcome to marwen, etc ) . My assumption is flashbacks of his life-  hints about him being an alter -the boxes in the basement are “vietnam” ,“dad”, and “ny” (and these are the memories of his we’ll see).or after escaping the prison he’s stuck in diff innerworlds of memories. And some of the bad characters in said stories will also parallel Lonnie . Like how in  the s4 film ‘peterpan’- the young girl Wendy imagines netherland and the villain -captain hook- is based off her father ( in the movie they have the same voice actors/while in all stage productions the 2 characters are always played by the same actor). Similar to the other s4 film- ‘wizard of oz’ where the wicked witch of the west from the mythical land of Oz (is played by Dorothy’s real life mean neighbor in the real world/kansas).Or in ‘the cell’- all the alternate dimensions of the dream world that were created by a guy with a ab*sive h*mophobic dad -had the same actor play the villain in each very different dream dimension. ”Not sure if they’d use Ross Patridge (actor of Lonnie) in this way . But it would be very interesting if (In makeup) Ross played many negative people in Hopper’s life.  

Also, in  s2, Jonathan mentions Indiana writer Vonnegut- In his book ‘slaughterhouse 5′- Vonnegut begins the story of Billy (William) Pilgrim, a man who has “come unstuck in time”. (time ref of Hopper saying he wants to ‘turn back the clock.’ or’ runaway from his memories.‘It accounts of Billy Pilgrim’s capture and incarceration by the Germans during the last years of World War II (Hopper captured by the russians), and scattered throughout the narrative are episodes from Billy’s life with his dad, and his own wife and kids.Billy is forced to be part of the war and similar things against his free will. The moments start from his childhood when his father throws him in the water to teach him how to swim. He was unwillingly drafted into the war. Later, he is kidnapped by Tralfamadorians  (aliens that are implied to be caused by his mental health issues/trauma) against his will. Therefore, he realizes that this concept is just an illusion.in bladerunner 2044/total recall it has the theme of false implanted memories… probably relating to hopper realizing he’s an alter and his memories are technically ‘created’ . Like in total recall- the bad ass spy is told all his memories: his wife/ years of marriage,  his name, are just implanted memories. And she says “you’re life is a dream.” We also have ‘Arrival’ -the parent’s daughter died young cause of terminal cancer- and the mother later realizes time is also just a abstract construct (a thing she can experience differently than others), but she still finds meaning/happiness in those memories/times.

I also talked about how sarah as an alter could come back and the 2 would explore the “innerworlds” of Will’s mind together (you can read the details there). 

El and Will theory 

I’m thinking of the s4 movies and 1 matrix scene comes to mind that could be an obvious hint to Did (and Will’s importance). Mr smith (the suited calm villain/ who is a literal computer program of the matrix world -cough alter/npc of Will’s) kidnaps/ ties up Morpheus to a chair (like Will in s2), injects him with drugs in the neck ( like s3 steve/ will’s arm in s2).  Then Mr smith says as everyone leaves the room “I’m going to be honest with you. I hate this place, this prison, this reality or what you call it.” (grabs Morpheus’ head and glares) “ I need to get out of here! I need to be free! And this mind is the key.”(referring to morpheus).morpheus also translates to ‘god of dreams’. Also Morpheus was wearing head gear similar to El in s1/Will in s2 . or in 12 monkeys the guy sent to psych ward -starts believing he’s just “crazy” and says “i created a world with those people in it.” “It’s not real .I’m just mentally ill, like you said ” when you know- it is all real,cause of the supernatural angle involved. in 12 monkeys a patient even tells him the fictional world he created would dissappear once his mental health was in order.

Then there’s the El stuff.  Hellraiser 2- has a normal psych hospital, but the basement floor has an evil psychiatrist experimenting on teens to open a portal to another reality. assasains creed/dream warriors -  has the psychiatric facility be similar to the s1 lab with sensory deprivation tanks, cameras, solitary confinement in dark rooms.The doctor experiments on them- and forces a character to go into the memories of another individual (we know El has memory powers).The dr reveals how the character’s reality/whole life isn’t what they think it is (and that the memories they saw with their powers-was their past life and they are that person’s reincarnation) . Aka Will is the host- and El is an alter (alters can see memories of other alters/the host irl-aka billy/terry were also alters ).

In assasain’s creed there’s 2 psychiatrists- one bad / one who is good (but influenced by the bad dr). One dr annoyed at the lack of progress, says about the patient “he doesn’t want to remember his father.” While one dr doesn’t want to rush the therapy/ the other dr wants the patient to go back into his memories regardless of how it affects him. (which could be Brenner & maybe Owens referring to Will’s dissociative-amnesia and not remembering all the ab*se Lonnie did. And Owens not wanting to rush it/hurt el by making her go into said memories …but Brenner not caring.

also other hints : Cough s4 using the movie wizard of oz refs “we’re not in Hawkins (kansas) anymore”-hint at russia. David on instagram posting st stuff and captioning it with and quotes, pretending to be dorothy from the film. Hopper in s1 saying hawkins lab was “emerald city” (referencing El- it’s also why they reference El entering our world in ep 1 and the alice in wonderland song plays) . Murray says about the supernatural “no one wants to see behind the curtain” (what was behind the curtain in wizard of oz-was a wizard aka Will). Or you know right before Will sees the mf for the first time -a clock turns rapidly/ he  has goosbumps at the back of his neck. Which he later grabs/states  are from “memories” he can’t remember that are like a “dream”. 

If i’m right-not sure how much of this may happen in s4 vs s5, though. But I think something like this is possible.  For all we know-Will/El being trapped with Brenner while Hopper escapes ‘russia’ could be how the season ends? The timeline i’m a bit iffy about-tbh.

#stranger things theory #will byers #el hopper #jim hopper #time theory #did theory

[vannybarber]

All Night Long

Summary: You know very well what he does when he leaves and you know you need to let go.

Ari Levinson x Reader

Words: 1.2k

Warnings: angst, cheating, cursing, implies of smut.

They told you. All of them did. But you didn't need anyone to tell you because you knew. And stayed anyway. Why? Because you were a fool in love. You know he needs you and that is what keeps you there. And you needed him.

At first, it was 2 or 3 times a year. He would leave to Sudan with other agents to save refugees and sneak them to Israel. A man with a good heart. For those in particular of course. You had recieved a piece of that heart, but not all of it. You weren't enough. Not enough to stay faithful to. Not enough to give everything to. Just not enough.

Fast forward 6 years later, it became 5 or 6 times every year in between months. You barely saw the man. But you stayed. Because you loved him enough. Enough to stay faithful to. Enough to give everything to. Just enough.

After he'd come back home, you were there. Waiting for him, like he always knew you would. And every time, you could see it in his eyes. It's like as soon as he saw you, there was pain. Pain of remembering what he does when he's gone. Pain of knowing that you were aware and continued to play it off. Pain of knowing you'd still stand by him and suffer in the process.

Sometimes his agent buddies came and picked him up for their next expedition. All of them were kind to you, partially out of pity. Especially Rachel. But only she was nice out of straight guilt. Because both of you knew she was on her back for him every time he left.

Before and during your relationship.

You could even see it in their body language. It became a numb feeling you were used to after a while though.

What gave everything away in the first place, was when he came back, he would make love to you so good, you could still feel it for the time that he left. At first you just took it as him missing you since he was away for so long.

But as time went by, it gotten to something you couldn't explain. It was passionate, but it was as if he had hurt you. Like makeup sex or something. As if he was fucking you, asking for forgiveness. Because he was getting it from someone else. Well others, you should say.

But you took it anyway. To forget everything in that moment. The pain. The lies. The blatant disrespect. Just a moment of bliss no one could take away from you. Until you both came and it was back to square one. Back to reality. But reality set in and you had to get real. Do for you. Get out.

That's what led you to your current position.

Standing in the middle of you and Ari's shared bedroom. You took all of your belongings and moved them into your new spot hours from here, across town. He was on his way back from his last voyage. He told you that he managed to get 1200 Sudanese from the attacks on their village to safety.

You were happy that he used his privilege to help out these people that needed a better life. That wanted a better life for their kids. But you wanted him to use that same energy into you. Keyword: wanted. That was a past dream that couldn't come true even if tried.

After moments of random thoughts to yourself, you hear your lover come through the door. The sound of his infamous brown backpack you grew to hate, hitting the floor snapped you back into reality, agony washing over you. You had to do this. You didn't deserve to be treated like this.

Walking in the room, his eyes fall on you. And you see it for the millionth time. Pain. It would never stop. That's why you had to put an end to it yourself. He comes over and hugs you. A guilt covered one. Of course you hug him back. That would be the last time you do.

In his arms, you look up at him and give him a tired smile. He mirrors your action and leans down for a deep kiss.

From the mouth that has been on many different faces and other places you could not name.

You kiss him back, nothing less of desperation and tongue, with a touch of cherry lipstick that you've never owned, but do remember Rachel showing you after she bought it the last time you saw her. Pulling away, you're met with those sea blue eyes. The ones that scanned over the resort after one of him many artifices. Sadness washed over you at that moment. You wouldn't be seeing those any longer.

"Ari, I can't do this anymore."

He looks at you, not with confusion, but shock. Shocked that you were finally putting your foot down. Even you yourself were flabbergasted at your own thoughts. You've always had them but never acted on them.

"Baby, what do you mean?" he pulls back a little. "I d-don't get it." You almost laugh at that word. Baby. The name he had for all the women he allowed on his body. It was nothing to you but a starter for a sentence.

"You know exactly what I'm talking about. For 6 years I stayed beside you. Alone. No marriage. No kids. Everything I wanted was flushed away for you. Even though you were unfaithful to me." Your arms were crossed, fingers playing with the keys in hand. Every word you let out was shakey.

"I'm going for good. To start over with someone who actually loves me. With someone who feels I am enough." Raising your voice a little, you continue. "You got your fucking resort. You got your countless whores. But you don't have me."

As you walk away almost at the door, he grabs your arm. Pulling you back like he always does, you find yourself back in front of him.

"I know you don't mean that, sweetheart." His hands trail up to your waist. "You know I love you and you love me. No one can do you as good as me." And he was right. You weren't someone who got around. He was all you knew. He taught you everything. Nothing could come close to him.

Feeling his breath fan over your face, you get nervous. All the dignity and confidence you had earlier was slowly fading away. He got to you per usual. Your plan was falling apart. You were falling apart.

He proceeded with his persuasive speech. "You can't leave me baby. You're all I got. I need you." By now, his front was against yours, face near your ear, right cheek rested against your right one. His little plan was working oh so well. You were giving in and it hurt so bad.

"Ari.. "

"Shh." He silences you and kisses down your neck, sucking on your sweet spot, hands gripping the soft flesh on your lower back through your jeans. He was touching you just how you liked him to. He knew all the moves to get you in his court.

"Please don't leave me. I can't live without you." He was begging, but not enough that he was actually desperate. He knew your answer. He sucked harder, hands moving up to squeeze your breasts. It was a done deal now.

"Okay, okay" you spoke shamefully. But that all went away when he picked you up and placed you on the bed. Here was your moment to forget. The moment of pure bliss. And you were gonna bathe in it. All night long.

I'm messed up in the head for enjoying writing sad stuff like this. 😭

#Spotify #cevans #chris evans #chris evans fanfiction #chris evans x reader #chris evans fluff #ari levinson #the red sea diving resort #fanfic #fanfiction

[eldritchamy]

I watched “Happiest Season” and no it fucking wasn’t.

Here’s a review so you don’t have to suffer like I did: if I wasn’t watching it as the host of a movie night, I would not have made it past 20-30 minutes in.

It was very uncomfortable to watch.  I feel like I just spent two hours on a plane with a crying baby.  Except the baby was a homophobic rich white Republican that I was forced to campaign for.  All of the people I watched it with, including myself, found it stressful, anxiety inducing, and deeply unpleasant.  The first thing I did when it was over was warn my best friend not to watch it.

90% of the movie is rich white straight people drama forcing lesbians into the closet.  It’s not fun.  It’s not happy.  It wasn’t enjoyable.  At all.  Watching this was an uncompromisingly depressing and miserable experience.

It was marketed as a romantic comedy and it was neither of those things.   I feel repressed for having seen it.  

Every relationship in this movie is toxic and hard to watch, with the sole exception of two other characters who aren’t part of the family both having much better chemistry with Kristen Stewart’s character than her girlfriend.

Aubrey Plaza playing Gay Aubrey Plaza one of two redeeming things in the movie and she’s in it for about ten minutes, and even one of her scenes was hard for me to sit through (the awkward and dubiously written drag bar scene)  The other 90 minutes are agonizingly drawn out and unbearable.

If you are determined to support this movie because god knows we need more (and MUCH better) representation and we live in a hellscape where money is the only way to ask for such things, press play on it and then take out your headphones and go read a book instead until it’s over.

For your own sake please do not watch this.  

I genuinely can’t tell who it’s even FOR.  If anything about this movie resonates with you, I am SORRY to hear that, because you are probably the lesbian daughter of a very rich white man running for office as a Republican, and watching any of the rich housewife reality shows probably gives you PTSD because those are the kind of people you grew up with.  

And even IF that is the case, spare yourself the trauma of watching your own life and watch something else instead.  This movie will only hurt you.

Nothing about the experience of seeing this was worth it.

Plot spoilers ahead.

The plot is as follows:

Abby (Kristen Stewart) loves her girlfriend Harper (Mackenzie Davis).  But she does not love Christmas.  After a night out together, Harper asks her to join her when she visits her family for the holidays.  Abby says yes, and gets her gay male friend John (that guy from Schitt’s Creek) to cover pet sitting for her. While running a few errands with him, she goes to pick up an engagement ring which looks completely unattainable for a woman who makes a living as a pet sitter.

When they are almost to Harper’s family’s home, she awkwardly brings up that she lied about coming out to them earlier in the year.  They still don’t know she’s gay and they have to make sure the family is perfect and scandal free because her dad is running for mayor or something and one of his donors? campaign manager? is going to be there.  So they have to pretend Abby is her straight roommmate.  They fight about it before Abby very reluctantly agrees.  This is a pattern that repeats until Abby can’t take any more.

The family is like upper-class-Republican terrible.  They are AWFUL people.  The parents treat their children like trophies in a display case, and the children all feel forced into brutal competition with each other to see who the parents will actually be proud of.  One of Harper’s sisters (Jane) is actually an okay person who does nothing wrong, but she’s an aspiring writer who has spent 10 years not finishing her book and she’s played like she belongs in a different movie, and it feels like she’s meant to be seen as the useless layabout sibling, in a cruelly funny way.  

The other sister is a nightmare of a woman (Sloane? I think?) played by a completely unrecognizable Allison Brie.  She’s a lawful evil cutthroat monster who is straight up VICIOUS to the other two, and is especially terrible to Harper, because neither of them even see Jane as competition.  Her own family is the thing she uses to try to be worthy of her parents’ pride and affection.  

The dad is focused entirely on his campaign and is more or less indifferent to all of them unless they aren’t “presentable” and “scandal free” enough to keep his potential donor/campaign manager satisfied, in which case he “expects better of them” until they behave.  The children are like 30.  

The mom is maybe the worst of all of them.  She’s invasive, ignorant in that forceful way where she doesn’t give a shit about anything except her own bubble of reality that she thinks she’s living in and blows past any contradiction to it like it’s not even there, nitpicky about what everyone’s doing, is willfully out of touch with everything she’s told (Abby’s parents died when she was 19, and she spends the movie acting like she thinks Abby grew up in an orphanage made of dirt and never had a Christmas before).  And she will not leave the two of them alone.  She insists it’s ridiculous for two grown women to share a bedroom and gives Abby a room without a lock in a basement that’s bigger than my whole house, while Harper’s room is upstairs.  Everyone is constantly barging into Abby’s room with less than two seconds of notice, which leads to the kind of tension and awkwardness you’d expect.  The first morning, Abby wakes up to Sloane’s children staring at her.

Abby is clearly MISERABLE.  And so are you, because you’re watching this movie.  Abby and Harper are constantly pushed apart by the family, and Harper pushes Abby away while pretending to be perfect and straight for her family.

Her family invited Harper’s ex boyfriend, who thinks they should rekindle things.  Super fun thing that I always love to see in my lesbian media.

While out at dinner, Abby and Harper have another mini fight in the bathroom.  Harper promises she had no idea Connor(?) was going to be there and that there won’t be any more surprises.  They walk out of the bathroom, right into Harper’s OTHER ex, her first girlfriend Riley (Aubrey Plaza, who literally just plays herself and is the only good thing about the movie).

This is the first 20 minutes.

There’s a party that leaves Abby feeling isolated and pushed away.  She goes outside to make a phone call.  She makes regular texts and phone calls to John for support and advice throughout the movie.  He’s terrible at taking care of fish, but he’s genuinely a good friend to her and it’s clear he cares about her a lot.  It’s probably unfair not to say his friendship is the second redeeming thing in the movie.  After Abby gets off the phone with him the first time, Riley comes out from around the corner and tries to be nice, saying she could relate to what she’s going through.  Abby kind of closes off from her and she takes the hint without any fuss and leaves her alone.

The movie slogs on with compounding stress and anxiety and a moment when Abby is LITERALLY forced to hide in a closet and pretend she was sleepwalking on her way to Harper’s bedroom at night.  It MIGHT have been an attempt at a joke?  I’m genuinely not sure because I did not come close to laughing once in the entire 100 minutes of this nightmare.  Harper instead sneaks into Abby’s room while she’s awkwardly trying to get away from Harper’s mom.  That’s where the gifs of the sneak-snuggle from behind the door come from.  Enjoy the gifs because everything that wasn’t giffed is not worth seeing.  Harper spends the night there.

Bright and early, Harper’s mom comes knocking on the door, trying to open it and barge in again but Abby blocked the door with something heavy claiming it was to “keep her from sleepwalking again” (her excuse for being in the closet) while Harper frantically gets almost-dressed and hides behind the door as BOTH parents come to bother them, and the evil sister’s children see her partially dressed through the crack in the door.

Later that day Abby has to go shopping for a present for the “White Elephant” Harper didn’t warn her about.  She bumps into Sloane at the mall, who dumps her kids off on her before quickly leaving.  The kids very intentionally frame Abby for shoplifting by putting a necklace in her bag, and there’s a really awkward and uncomfortable scene with her being interrogated by overly forceful mall cops who are yelling at her.  When she finally gets back to the house, Harper’s entire family now thinks she’s a criminal.

Abby spends the night alone during another (campaign?) party that Harper told her she’d probably be happier getting left out of, and she bumps into Riley on the street and gets to talking with her, still more frustrated by Harper and her family.  She says she needs some alcohol, Riley takes her to a drag bar which gave me really bad vibes and bonds with her there, telling her a bit about her relationship with Harper.  They dated secretly (obviously) in their first year of high school (which implies she knew she was gay before she dated Connor, and used him as a cover).  They would sneak each other romantic notes.  When someone found one in Harper’s locker, she threw Riley under the bus completely, outed her, and said she was obsessed with her so she could go on pretending to be straight.  They bond a bit and seem like they could be friends, at a minimum.  They have a few more scenes together over the next hour (yeah there’s still that much movie left, and if you’re wondering how it could be that bad, you’re welcome for the warning, because I was wondering that too) and they have better chemistry than Abby and Harper by miles.

Eventually Abby becomes so miserable she checks the movie-specific version of Uber to try to go home by herself, but it’s running at holiday rates so it would cost over $1000 for her to leave.  She’s still tempted to do it, and calls John again for advice and says she feels awful, completely alone, and with no way out of this horrible situation.  He gives her some more friendly support.

Abby still needs a White Elephant gift, but has no way to go by herself because Harper drove them there.  So she calls Riley to go with her.  They spend a day hanging out together while Harper is doing some other thing with her dad’s campaign, and Abby makes text excuses to Harper, who then immediately sees Riley and Abby walking by on the street together.  Before she gets a chance to run out and say something, she gets interrupted by something I thankfully don’t remember (I long for the moment this is true of the rest of it).

Riley and Abby bond some more but nothing romantic happens.  The plot only wants them to be good friends, even though their chemistry is really good.

At the end of the day Abby comes in and Harper immediately almost starts a fight with her but they get interrupted again somehow.

I have willed most of the next 20 minutes out of my mind, apparently.

There’s yet another party at this gigantic house because I hate the rich, Abby and Riley talk more.  This is the one with the really gay outfit.  Abby admits to Riley that she was planning on proposing to Harper, but at this point it’s like she’s a completely different person and she can’t tell who the real Harper is.  Riley says it’s probably both of them.

SURPRISE JOHN IS HERE.  He comes in the front door and calls for Abby.  After Abby’s last phone call he arranged for his therapist to do the pet sitting and he drove all the way here just so he could take her home.  Seriously, John has incredible Good Friend Energy.  Yet more awkwardness ensues, while John mixes some awkward flirting with Connor into his poor attempt to come off as straight.  Abby then walks right up to Harper, says “we’re done” and goes to grab some things to leave.  Harper follows her into the room and tries to get her to stay, Abby says she can’t take the hiding and the general misery, the whole experience has been terrible and she’s not sure if Harper is the person she thought she was.  Harper argues for her to stay and says she’s caught between being afraid of losing her family if she comes out and knowing she’ll lose Abby if she doesn’t.  She promises to come out to them as soon as the holidays are over because Abby is more important to her.  They kiss briefly and realize Sloane is in the doorway.

Sloane tries to run to tell the rest of the family because burning Harper’s reputation forever means she’ll be the one their parents love most.  They fight in the many hallways of this stupidly enormous rich people house (this is when “Stay out of it, Sappho” happens) and on the way to ruin her sister’s life Sloane finds her husband making out with another ....campaign person? in the pantry and or closet which is big enough to fit two people inside.   Now Harper has something to use against Sloane.  This family is fucking horrible.  Sloane gets to where everyone else is first, and outs Harper.

Harper tries to swear she’s not gay, and sees Abby watching her.  She silently turns and walks out the door with John.  Harper then grabs a giant painting that Jane spent 100 hours on for the white elephant and smashes it over Sloane’s head and yells at her before falling apart.

Abby and John have another heartfelt conversation where John asks how she came out to her parents, and she said they loved and supported her.  Then he said his dad kicked him out on the street and didn’t talk to him for thirteen years.  He says everyone’s story is different, and Harper was still going through hers, and it was a hard one.  I THINK he acknowledges that if Abby doesn’t feel like she belongs in that story, she shouldn’t force herself to?  But that might have been wishful hindsight.  Abby comes back into the house to grab her things and leave, Harper comes out to her family right in front of her, Abby says it was too late and leaves anyway.  Harper is crushed and the rest of the family starts to see how fucked up they all are.

And then in the span of 7 fucking minutes the parents realize they were shitty to Sloane and Harper and the only reason Jane turned out okay is because they gave up on her, they give a minimal apology to their children, who also realize they were shitty to each other, and then it’s the next day and Abby is there with them, Harper has the ring on her finger, and everyone is magically happy now because the dad turned down his campaign advisor who said she could still work with him if he kept Harper’s “problem” a secret.

Jane’s book becomes a best seller and she’s friends with John now, because he was the only person who seemed genuinely interested in her passion.  He sits next to her at her book signing.  The end.

No, I’m not kidding.

As soon as it was over, I thought, wow that felt like a rushed happy ending that got slapped onto the end with nothing building up to or deserving it.

After further consideration, that gives it too much credit.

Because honestly? after the first hour and thirty five minutes of this hell, Abby and Harper being together at the end is not even something I would consider a happy ending.  I wasn’t satisfied at all.  It DEFINITELY felt like Abby ending up with Riley would have been a better movie.

If I had been told beforehand that a lesbian romcom starring Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis, and featuring Aubrey Plaza as Gay Aubrey Plaza would have been an absolutely miserable experience that was hard to sit through and nothing but unpleasant to watch, I would probably have been shocked and disappointed.  

But at least I would have not seen this movie.  That is my gift to you.  Please do NOT watch this.

It was marketed as a romantic comedy and it lived up to neither of those claims.  Absolutely terrible movie.  The happiest season of all is one where you don’t watch this stressful, uncomfortable disaster.

#eldritchreviews

[weasleydream]

dreams are my reality - last part

this is the last part, finally! I really hope it’s good, please let me know! 

As usual, feel free to like, comment, reblog and enjoy!

Masterlist

~ although it’s only fantasy ~

If I was being completely honest, opening my eyes the following morning surprised me a lot. However, this bubble of relief exploded when I realized three things: Sirius was not next to me in the bed, this bed was not in my room, and I wasn’t alone.

_ _ _ 

I was pretty sure I didn’t know the woman. She was wearing some strange kind of white dress and a headdress that was covering her hair. She said something to me, but I didn’t understand. Another woman, younger than the first, said something too, but no sound reached my ears. I thought with annoyance that they were just moving their lips on purpose, but then I realized I was plunged into a deep silence, and if what I felt until this moment was anxiousness, this new information made me trip over the edge. The women reacted quickly; one put her hands on my arms, firmly but with goodwill, I knew it. The other quickly left the room, and something caught my eyes just before the door closed, something familiar even though I couldn’t put my finger on it. She came back a few seconds later with two vials in her hand and made me drink them one after the other; the first transformed the deep silence into an annoying buzzing and the second made my eyelids so heavy that I didn’t have any other choice than to close them. 

The next hours, or maybe days, passed in a blur. The only things I perceived were a mix of undefined forms and colours, with sometimes a sound I was unable to identify and sensations I couldn’t hold onto. It was just me and my confused mind, a succession of questions I didn’t really formulate and answers I couldn't even begin to think of. 

I didn’t know it yet, but soon I would wish for things to stay like this forever. 

_ _ _ 

It was usually a bad idea to go to St-Mungo’s when we were hurt after a mission for the Order, but Sirius’ life was threatened, and no one thought of another option. James and Remus had disappeared through the magical barrier way before Lily, Peter and I. They were carrying Sirius’ body as carefully as they could considering the fact that they were running. Lily and I were helping Peter whose leg seemed to be broken in several places and making sure no muggle was around. At first I had taken this task as an opportunity to avoid thinking about Sirius’ lifeless body, but it appeared that it was inefficient. Each dark corner of the empty street was a new hiding spot for the ghost of the death eater, and each pavement seemed to be stained with blood that shouldn’t have been spilled. 

The barrier eventually appeared in front of us and we crossed it without a second thought. The boys’ arrival had already disturbed the usually perfect organisation of the nurses; they were running everywhere, sometimes barely dodging patients that didn’t understand what was happening. Three nurses stopped in front of us. Only now did I realize how much of a poor sight we probably were: Lily’s left arm was folded against her stomach, Peter was standing on one leg and he was paler than death, and my shirt was soaked in blood. That was without taking into account the shock that was paralyzing us. Two of the women exchanged places with Lily and I to bring Peter in an empty room at the end of the main corridor while the last put a hand on Lily’s back and a hand in mine to lead us in another room.  

“How- Sirius?”

The nurse looked up to me with a neutral expression. 

“I don’t know. I’ll ask my colleagues as soon as you're up and around.”

She left a few minutes later, and Lily and I followed her. She brought us to the part of the hospital where Sirius was being taken care of, and we joined James and Remus who were already waiting. Peter wasn’t here yet. That’s when the longest hours of our lives began, as we were waiting to know if Sirius would live.

_ _ _ 

Slowly, the different sensations that were forming my world for way too long stopped being confused. And before I could even clearly realize it, I opened my eyes for the first time since the incident with the two women. 

This time, the room seemed empty. It was getting dark outside, and the light that was coming through the window was weak enough for me to look around me without being blinded. The walls were white, the sheets were white, the bedside table was white, everything was white. The only touches of colour were coming from the flowers on the bedside table and from the blanket that had been thrown on a chair that seemed uncomfortable. If my instincts were correct, I was in a hospital. 

As if my questionments had summoned her, the old woman I had seen the first time opened quietly the door and her head appeared. When she realized I was awake, she slipped through the entrance and closed immediately behind her. 

“Miss Y/L/N, how are you feeling?” Without waiting for my answer, she reached the side of my bed and helped me sit before arranging the pillows on my back. 

“How long-” I croaked out, and the soreness of my throat gave me the beginning of an answer. 

“You arrived here five days ago. You woke up a first time yesterday but there was a problem with your ears, I guess you remember that.” I nodded and she squeezed my forearm gently. “Your friends have been waiting impatiently for your awakening. I’ll have you pass a few exams and then you’ll see them.”

The next hour or so was full of all sorts of medical exams that I had never heard of. The nurse made me drink dozens of different potions, cast several spells, and she even asked me to cast a few myself. Finally, after what felt even more tiring than a match of Quidditch, she took a few steps back and grabbed the flying booknote that had followed her since the beginning. 

“Mmm, yes, okay…” she murmured as she was reading her notes again. Then she stayed silent for a few seconds before looking up to me again with a small smile. “You’ll stay here with us for another few days, simple precaution. But I’ll allow your friends in your room - this way, maybe they’ll stop harassing me with questions every time they see my shadow.”

I nodded, amused to think that it was indeed like them or at least like Sirius. The nurse put the notebook on the other table that was on the other side of the room and opened the door widely. A split second later, a hurricane burst through the door.

“Y/N!” It was Lily’s voice. I barely had enough time to register her red hair flying behind her that she was kneeling on the bed and tightening me against her as if her life depended on it. “Don’t you dare do this ever again! We were so scared!”

I wrapped my arms around her and attempted to stroke her back in a soothing way, but I only had one question in mind. 

“What- what…?” Talking was too painful, so I looked up to Lily hoping she would understand what I was asking. 

“You mean what happened?” she asked with furrowed eyebrows. “You don’t remember?” I shook my head. “It was- I don’t know if I should tell you, then, I think- I think it’s better if you forget it.” She seemed embarrassed now, as if what had happened would be too much for me to bear. “You really don’t remember the mission?” 

_ _ _ 

Four days and still no amelioration. No one said it because it was our duty to stay hopeful for each other, but we had all thought of the possibility that… Sirius wouldn’t make it out alive. The first time it had been implied by a nurse, James had exploded and almost pierced the wall with his fist, and nothing like this had been said again. It was twenty-four hours ago. 

Peter had obtained the right to keep his room, but he was never the one sleeping in his bed. We were all so worried that walking away from Sirius’ room for two minutes was too hard; the only moments when Peter’s room was occupied were when one of us would fall dead asleep on a chair. It never lasted for long, though. 

The night after the fourth day was the hardest without any hesitation. Somewhere around 3 a.m. Sirius' state changed brutally. It was so unexpected that we didn’t even understand what was happening, not until Peter, Remus, James, Lily and I were told to wait outside of the room. It was a strong stream of people that was coming in and out of the room and no one ever answered our questions. We were all on the verge of a nervous breakdown; it seemed so difficult for James that he repeatedly snapped at Lily whereas she was giving him news about Harry, who was still at the babysitter. Remus hadn’t said a word in hours, Peter had been staring blankly at the wall for at least ten minutes, and it felt like my heart was simultaneously stopping and exploding with every noise that reached us from the room. 

It’s during the middle of the fifth day that, finally, a nurse told us what had happened. 

“Your friend woke up during the night,” she first announced before lifting a hand, which stopped Peter’s exclamation. “He’s suffering from aftereffects, but we have good hope they’ll be temporary.”

Then she stopped and looked at us one by one, visibly waiting for a reaction. For my part, I was afraid I had understood it wrong, and I didn’t dare say anything. The last days had been so hard, so horrible, that it seemed impossible that they could have a happy ending. 

“What- what…” stuttered Remus. 

“He’ll be fine. I’m positive he’ll wake up today or tomorrow.”

I wanted to let my relief and my joy burst, but I didn’t have enough energy. Instead, I looked up to my friends: James had wrapped Lily tightly in his arms and she was murmuring soothing words in his ear, Peter was looking like he had deflated and Remus was as white as the wall. And yet, there was a bubble that had taken place around us, a bubble that had brought warmth and a feeling of security. Sirius was going to live, everything would be okay. 

He would live. 

_ _ _ 

Lily knew there was an internal battle that was raging in my body. She used to say my eyes always showed what I was feeling; this time, however, she didn’t say anything. She was sitting on the uncomfortable chair, waiting for the news to sink in, and I was sitting in the bed. I was staring at something that I couldn’t see, probably because I needed to fix my eyes on something to be sure I wouldn’t have to face reality. Somehow, it didn’t seem that surprising to me; maybe it was because deep down I knew it, or maybe it was because of some strong instinct, the fact is that I wasn’t exactly flabbergasted. But it didn’t make it easier to accept, far from that. In a way, it made it even more painful, as if the knife that had just been plunged in my chest was now being shaken in every direction. 

Since I was a kid, I had always had this little notebook on my bedside table. When I was 7, it was pink with flowers on every page. When I was 10, it was the colour of the sky in the middle of a summer day. When I turned 11, it took the colours of an old parchment and some green ink, and it had stayed the same since then. If the colours had changed throughout the years, its content had always been the same: it was my dreams. Sometimes, I just described an image, a vague memory of something I thought I had seen, and sometimes it was a detailed account of everything I remembered. Now, if I had felt like thinking in an ironic way, I would have said that I soon would have a novel to write. 

Without even realizing it, I crossed my fingers. This is when the missing of the very simple golden ring Sirius had given me hit me, and it took me a second to comprehend what it meant. 

“Do you understand what it means, Y/N?” Lily asked quietly. “Whatever you remember… It didn’t happen. It was just- it was all in your head.”

_ _ _ 

“How is it possible?” Lily saw my lips moving but my voice didn’t reach her ears. She got up slowly and sat next to me without a word. “How is it possible?” I repeated, louder this time. “It was three years ago… I- I remember every day, I’ve lived everyday… Lily, it’s impossible! It’s- no, I don’t believe it, I-”

“Calm down Y/N, it will be okay.” 

Lily used her most soothing voice and put both her hands on my shoulders. If usually it was enough to help me, this time it was completely useless. I jumped backwards and folded my knees against my ribcage. This position made me feel a bit later, as if being curled up in the tightest ball would make me become invisible. 

“You’re lying…” I sniffled. “I want to see Sirius…”

Lily sighed and got up. Without a word, she opened the door and glanced once again at me before disappearing. A few minutes later, the door slammed open again. 

“Y/N! I’m so glad you’re alright!”

It was Sirius. I had the hardest time believing all of this was true, but to see him brought me another proof. His hair was longer than they were the last time I had seen him - or the last time I thought I had. His cheeks were more hollowed too, and he had dark bags under his eyes. It was exactly how I remembered he was before that mission. 

“Y/N… What’s wrong?” Uncertainty was filling his voice; he had probably realized I was looking like a scared animal. 

I was now sobbing. With each sound that left my mouth my throat tightened a bit more, and each tear that rolled on my face made my eyes sting a bit more. No matter how firmly I was trying to brace my knees, my arms and the rest of my body were shaking like a leaf when the wind is the most powerful. Sirius’ hand slowly brushed my back; it earned him a weak flinch. 

“Tell me what’s wrong.” he murmured again before delicately stroking my hair. “I need to help you, please…”

I shook my head, and Sirius rolled his eyes. 

“Have I already told you how stubborn you are?”

“Only a dozen times... “ I whispered. 

Sirius chuckled softly and his fingers brushed my cheek. 

“Is it a smile that I see?” 

The only answer I could give him was a slightly larger smile. My heart was still heavy and my face still covered in tears, but Sirius was next to me and wedding or not, he was still my anchor to this world. His arms surrounded my shoulders, and without thinking about it I hid my nose in the crook of his neck. It was hard not to think about all the things I had lost without having had them at all when his scent was all around me and when his hands were on my skin, and they soon became so vivid that I couldn’t ignore them anymore. 

“We were married…” I whimpered, and the lack of reaction from Sirius led me to wonder if he had heard me. Until he asked me more about it, that is. 

“What did you just say?”

However he didn’t move, and it made it easier for me to tell him everything. Absolutely everything. I didn’t know what terrified me the most; that he could laugh, tell me it would never happen, or just think I had gone crazy. Clearly, the story of the three years of living together my brain had created had taken a toll on him, he was tense and stayed silent for way longer than usual. I couldn’t bring myself to talk first, so I just sat there, still hidden in his neck, waiting for any reaction he would give me. 

“You said James cried when we told him?”

It was my turn to stay silent, because I didn’t understand why the first thing he found to say among all the possibilities was to ask if James had really cried. Sirius slowly loosened his grip on me, and his shining eyes found mine. 

“And… Were you happy?”

“I was.” 

Sirius nodded and lifted his hand to untangle a strand of hair. He was smiling, not really looking like he was outraged or something like this, and several times he opened and closed his mouth. He was obviously looking for something to say and I was too, but what was I supposed to add to clear the air? 

Even though it was less violent than earlier, the door suddenly opened and three heads appeared. James, Remus and Peter rushed in the room and literally jumped on the bed, which sent Sirius on the floor. James was just in front of me, his arms were the first to wrap around me and he hugged me for a few seconds before pushing me backwards and looking at me with a mix of anger and relief. 

“Why the hell did you do that?” he shouted, even though in his voice too different feelings were fighting. “I was that close to cast Protego! Remus would have killed him without a problem and- and-”

“Shut up James, would you?” intervened Peter. “You see that she doesn’t understand what you’re saying, don’t you?”

Indeed, I was completely lost; I did remember Remus killing the death eater, but the rest was obviously very different. I glanced at Sirius: he had gotten up but his eyes were attached to the floor. 

“What happened?” I enquired. “I don’t-”

“You protected me, that’s what happened.” Sirius’ voice was firm and emotionless, way too similar to the one he used when he was deeply hurt or ashamed. “You shouldn’t have done that, by the way. It was stupid… I’ve never wanted you to risk your life for me.”

“Sirius, a thank you would have been great too, you know.” 

“Certainly not! You almost died and I’ll never forgive myself for it! Y/N, I just can’t bear the thought of you being hurt and even less when it’s because of me!”

“Hey, hey, Sirius!” I tried to reach out for his hand, but he was too far. Sirius sighed and sat on the edge of the bed and I grabbed his hand. “You know, one day you told me- or no, I imagined you telling me… No, said like this it’s weird. It’s just that… Sirius, dying to protect you is not something I fear. It would be… an honour.”

“Don’t say that…” he murmured. “Please, never say that again.”

And he engulfed me in a strong embrace that I gave him back. Our friends had discreetly left the room to leave us some intimacy, and I stayed in Sirius’ arm for a long time. For the first time since I had opened my eyes, things felt like they made sense. 

_ _ _ 

Real life was less easy, that was for sure. The war wasn’t over, Voldemort hadn’t magically vanished, we were all still more or less hurt after that mission, Harry was still growing up in a dangerous world. But we were fighting to make it better, and things were slowly working out the way we wanted them to. 

Sirius and I had spent a lot of time together, and he had made a point to make sure one day, my dreams would become my reality. 

It was a promise that he had stuck to, and that he had fully kept the day he had asked me to marry him, more or less three years later. 

The end 

tag: @padsfirewhisky​

#Harry Potter #harry potter imagine #harry potter imagines #Sirius Black #sirius black x reader #sirius black imagine #sirius black x you #sirius black x y/n #marauder era #marauders era #marauders imagine

[nestable]

Just to clarify on my previous post, I was not attacking elains character or doing any sort of character analysis because I can see how it may be interpreted as this way. I was merely focused on describing women as strong even if they arent and how I believe this is done for the sake of trying to make women valuable in any narrative. Fictional or in reality.

If a woman is weak, it's okay. If a woman is strong it's okay. No woman should have to be forced into the strong narrative in fiction just so that they are worthy of respect. Weak women are deserving of respect too. And in my perspective, based on the evidence presented, elain is weak and THATS OKAY.

Of course she has other aspects of her character that may be noteworthy but I'm not talking about that, (and her stans can go ahead and make character analysis' about her to their hearts content) I'm talking about weakness. Women should be allowed to be weak, it really isnt a bad thing guys let's just remove the stigma attached to that word. Everyone suffers from moments of weakness,it's a part of being human.

It may sound harsh, but I'm saying this from a factual point of view based on the books and even OTHER CHARACTERS perception of her, elain is weak which is why shes allowed to get away with a lot of her behaviour.

The argument is that elain is excused for her inaction in acotar because shes kind and likeable, but I think it's also because the other characters are aware that shes weak and dont expect much from her. This was perfectly depicted with Rhysands 'elain is elain' line. He said this because even he is aware that elain is weak and wouldn't be able to take care of feyre and step up in the house to help out. No one expects much from her because of this trait of hers.

Another example is right back to acotar when feyre says that helping around the house 'just never occured to elain' (this line/ justification makes her seem like a complete dimwit but whatever) this line alone you can tell that even feyre sees elain the same way and that is weak. I mean how else can you describe a person who sees her sister struggling but it never crosses her mind to help out even though shes described as the nicest person out there?

Theres many other examples that prove my point and you just have to read the books to find them. And let me reiterate because the word weak has a bad quanitation. ITS OKAY TO BE WEAK, SHE IS STILL DESERVING OF RESPECT.

Weakness isnt a negative thing, especially if you are a woman because it has its advantages. We see elain get excuse for her behavior in acotar because shes weak and nesta attacked because she strong. This is because strength on women is seen as a target and people try their best to pull it down, and apart from the female aspect, strong people tend to get tried alot and put through unimaginable hell because people believe that they can and should handle it.

This happens with nesta a hell of a lot because her exterior and general attitude may shout mean, but that is associated with her strength. The ability to be unfazed and stand her ground regardless of how many people take shots at her. The first time this happens is how feyre seems to be more frustrated with nesta for not helping around the house because she is strong but doesnt expect the same from elain. The next time is when cassian reads her for filth in acomaf for not helping feyre and doesnt do the same to elain because at that point hes concluded that nesta is strong and at his level(remember how feyre said that he looked at her as an opponent) so she can take his verbal 'abuse' and not be deterred by it. Then we watch her be thrown into the IC dynamic and watch them badmouth her when shes present even though theyd never even attempt that with elain. There are a lot of other occurrences where the IC take shots at nesta and think that she can take them because shes strong, and again we have rhys confirming this fact with his 'nesta is illyrian line'. This implies that nesta is strong and is capable of doing more to help (and I agree) whereas elain is the complete opposite because shes 'weak'. (Although I think this has more to do with choices, because feyre had to do backflips to call nesta out on it yet finds an unreasonable excuse for elain. But i digress)

Being described as strong can be a compliment but can be damaging as well because people think that you are made of steel and immune to feeling. 'Strong' peoples mental health is often over looked and downplayed because people believe that they are always okay and can handle anything. Acofas and nestas situation while everyone ignores her plight, was a perfect example of how this happens. If it were elain who was exhibiting nesta behavior then the whole IC wouldve bent over backwards to help her, because 'elain is elain' yet ignore nesta because shes strong and can handle it. Even though it's clear she cant.

Personally, I would love to be labelled as weak because then people know about your boundaries and go out of their way to respect them, but if you are seen as strong then people constantly push you and ignore your feelings because you can take it.

Alas, unfortunately that will never happen for me because I'm black and a woman and immediately fall into the dangerous rhetoric of 'strong black women' so me being strong is seen as a given by society.

To end this convoluted essay I leave you with this 'Tough times never last, only tough people last.' And 'When the going gets tough, the tough get going' And that can be applied to every character in the acotar series to determine their 'strenght' or 'weakness' as a person and both descriptions are valid.❤

#acotar #acomaf #acowar #acofas #feyre archeron #rhysand #elain #nesta archeron #weakness is okay

[orsuliya]

Since you do such detailed asks and give a well thought out answers, I want to know your opinion on the Ma brothers. Zilong, Zilu and Zitan. What do you think about them?

Ah, our three intrepid Ma princes... Wait a minute, why three? It's not like we're in a fairytale and while Zitan is certainly a fool, he's not nearly good-hearted enough to play the role of Ivan the Fool.

But seriously, it seems mightily suspicious of Daddy Emperor to sire three sons in quick succession and then, as far as we know, never ever procreate again. He's an Emperor and obviously fertile, so how come the imperial nursery remains so glaringly empty? Could it be that he has no concubines at all except for his beloved Xie Guifei?

Or... has the Empress been aborting babies left and right, and poisoning her way through swathes of women to boot? Not impossible, knowing her temperament, but it doesn't really make sense within the dynamic presented in the drama. Drama!Emperor hates, hates, hates the Wangs and especially his wife, so it's hard to believe he wouldn't have used this juicy tidbit to weaken their influence. In the book Wanru is allowed to run roughshod over Potato's concubines and feed them contraceptives willy-nilly, but that's because Potato doesn't really care. The Emperor, as we see him in the drama, would have found reason enough to care upon being given such an obvious opening to start a smear campaign against his favourite enemy. Stymying the imperial bloodline?! Why, I think it might be a crime and easily provable one at that!

This leaves the other option - perhaps there aren't any concubines in the palace or, if there are, they're not being, pardon my French, bred. It's not that multiple imperial concubines of lower rank aren't a thing in this universe - Potato gets at least two and possibly more after sitting on the throne for a relatively short time. It's a pity we don't know what's the policy on entering the palace. Is there a multi-stage selection process? There is certainly no indication of that! Xie Guifei might have been an attempt to balance out a Wang Empress, Seagull was Zitan's impromptu choice, Miss Screecher was meant to be chosen by Potato outside of any organized selection and the same could be true for Potato's other concubines. Our only outlier might be Zilu's Mom and even then it's rather doubtful she was ever processed properly as it would have required a lot of effort and luck to conceal an already existing pregnancy. No, Zilu's Mom was most probably a gift of 'peace' from one brother to another.

My guess as to what Daddy Emperor is thinking? If Zitan has been his preferred heir from the start and he very well might have been since it never had anything to do with Zitan's actual qualities, then it's possible that he simply didn't protest - or did so in a purely symbolic manner - when the Wangs started limiting his reproductive chances. Why breed competition? We already know he has no use for any sons lacking powerful backing of their maternal clans, see: his treatment of Zilu. And any son with such backing would be a direct threat to his favourite, not to mention a potential upset to the carefully maitained Wang-Ma-Xie balance.

...or it could be that Daddy Emperor really loved Xie Guifei and wanted no other. Seeing as he's strongly implied to spend his nights in her chambers twenty years after their only and last kid was born, this would make a staggering amount of sense. The same principle applies - he'd still not protest Wang tyranny over the inner courts, only he'd do it for Xie Guifei and not for Zitan. It does seem to fit with Daddy Emperor's general mindset. Let the others do open battle and exert all that effort, he'll just sit there, look sage and reap the benefits!

After this rather senseless and overly long prelude, let's finally get to answering your question. Mind you, those are not going to be organized, thoughtful opinions, just my subjective impressions on each and every Ma Prince.

His Imperial Spudness Ma Zilong

The not-so-little Potato that could not, but still tried! Let's start with the elephant in the room, namely his rapist tendencies or the lack thereof. See, I'm convinced that raping Awu wasn't actually in the cards, at least as far as Potato was concerned. Compromising her, sure, just lure her into an emptied palace and cry wolf. Outright raping her, no, if only because Potato is way, way too weak and soft to execute a plan this ruthless in its entirety. Besides, harming Awu to this extent would be risky as all hell and sure to provoke authentic wrath in both Daddy Emperor and Daddy Wang. The Empress is not stupid enough to give her husband the perfect excuse to do away with her son nor to alienate her main supporter in the same move. Even if she was able to force a marriage in the first place, Potato would be pretty much done for politically unless both Daddies suddenly dropped dead. The most she would be able to get would be a grandson in a privileged position, so she'd be back to square one, only with one more female to share power with. No, what Potato did and what Wanru suffered was mostly courtesy of Zilu's suspicious drugs. Not to say Potato isn't a rapist all the same, but I'd argue for diminished capacity.

As for Potato himself in his shining spuddy glory, I truly pity the man. From time to time we see glimpses of the ruler he could have become and whom he still tries to be, and it becomes clear that there was something there worth cultivating. The problem is that nobody could be bothered to even try. Daddy Emperor certainly didn't, leaving Potato pretty much to his own devices and believe me, it had nothing to do with his talents or the lack thereof. Do you remember that lovely family scene at the beginning of episode 1.? You know, the one where Awu, Zilu and Zitan lure Zilong into a trap and then leave him there to lie amidst icy rocks in the middle of winter? He could have easily hit his head and died right then and there. Or get pneumonia and die a little bit later. Does the Emperor care? No, not at all! Baby!Awu isn't that good of a liar, but even if she was, perhaps it would behoove him to actually investigate. Not from any kind of fatherly feeling, let's not expect miracles, but perhaps from political expediency? Yeah, no. And I doubt that was the only incident of this kind. Potato must have known even this early on that his father doesn't care for him, not even like an Emperor should for his eldest male scion. Moreover, there is no way Mommy Dearest wouldn't harp on about the Emperor's negligence in private, further affirming this awful truth in Potato's mind.

Mommy Dearest might care, but her care is no less toxic than Daddy Emperor's open negligence. Potato is her key to power, her only way to win the game of thrones and make all her sacrifices worthwhile... and this is exactly how she treats him. Oh, she loves him well enough as her son, clings to him in his role as Crown Prince and then Emperor, but she doesn't actually like him as a person. And oh boy, does it show! I get it, he's not this perfect shining prince that would justify her long years of suffering, but then I have this feeling she gave up on him the moment he showed himself to be perfectly average. Sure, she offers him (toxic) love and (conditional) support like nobody's business, but there's always this nasty undertone in their relationship. Mommy knows best, don't even try to think on your own, listen to me and only me. It's no wonder that Potato thinks he's perfectly useless and doesn't bother to try and better himself, if he knows that even his own mother sees him as a perfect nincompoop. Uncle Wang's open derision isn't helpful either!

And yet Potato is, deep down, a decent enough man. Better than the average Ma, I'd say. I mean, he has some scruples! They might be really, really tiny, but they're there, even as he's being subjected to a barrage of mental attacks from both his mother and his wife. Why, given proper support and a competent cabinet, he'd make a somewhat ineffective, but decent enough ruler, his handling of the flood crisis shows us this much. Potato's best quality is that he really tries. Oh, he fails, but he's no Zitan, content to sit in his room and mope while the country goes to hell. When it's important, he can make actual decisions! Which he may then go back on (or not), but it still counts. Also, he's not petty. Like, at all. He'd like nothing better than for everybody to get along and have lots and lots of plump babies. Even his decision to do away with Xiao Qi is not motivated by jealousy, no matter how hard Wanru and Mommy Dearest keep pressing on that particular button.

Is he childish? Yes. But then, he's never been given any real responsibility and for years and years languished under the care of a helicopter parent who never forced him to man up nor face actual reality, hence his disillusionment with Wanru, once she stops being this perfect smiling automaton. Is he selfish? Oh yes and it shows nowhere better than in his last will. But even so, such selfishness is pretty much par for the course when it comes to the Mas and at least Potato didn't wreck a country for the sake of personal spite, which puts him way ahead of his father, uncle Jianning and bro Zitan. And perhaps even cousin Zilu, who cared less for the country than for Huanmi.

At the end of the day, our humble root vegetable is a tragic figure. I can't help but pity him every time we see him bloom under somebody's attention. Give that man some respect and he'll pay you back with the same, weird comments about killing you nothwithstanding. And he did give us Miracle Baby, Our Lord and Saviour!

Our beloved Groomzilla, Ma Zilu

Daddy Emperor must have been stupid, high, blind or all of those in order to let Zilu and his beautiful brain slip through his fingers. He was right there, that defenseless, motherless boy and ripe for the taking too! If after years and years of being neglected and treated as an afterthought, after suffering an obvious slight of losing his love on Daddy Wang's say-so, after being allowed to supposedly run wild with no attempt at parental intervention... If after all this Zilu still craved his father's approval in whatever form he could get it, craved it so much that he allowed himself to be led into an obvious trap, then what kind of loyalty might he have offered, had somebody bothered to nurture him properly?

And it's not like his talents were easy to sweep under the rug. It's not until after he's an adult that Zilu takes up the pretense of being a never-do-well; during his adolescence he was still giving it his all, hoping in vain that his father might notice and offer him some sweet, sweet parental validation. Alas. The lack of powerful backing from his maternal family is an obstacle, but not if one actively tries to fight against consort kin clans and their influence. Or is it only the Wangs who are the enemy? Must be so, otherwise why the hell would one not see Zilu's relative independence as his greatest asset? You don't even have to make him Crown Prince to use him; just instill some sense of pride and validation, feed his need for attention and put him behind Zitan's throne. Okay, maybe don't do that last thing, deadly brotherly competition being a whole thing in palace environments, but still, use him! But no, Huanmi remained the only person to actually see and appreciate Zilu for what he was. Is it any wonder he was so absolutely loyal to her that even when it looked like she had attacked him with lethal intent, he still cared about her safety most of all?

And is it any wonder that he expedited his considerable will and brainpower solely for her benefit? I was absolutely floored when I realized that becoming an Emperor wasn't actually his ultimate goal - marrying Huanmi in the biggest, reddest wedding possible was! Even if he needed to drag the more august guests in at swordpoint. Not to say he didn't want to take the throne for his own sake; he absolutely did, but only as far as it served as a big fat fuck you to every person who kept dismissing him out of hand, so basically every person other than Huanmi. Taking the crown was a power fantasy, an idee-fixe of sorts, but for all that keeping a throne in one's basement can be seen as somewhat peculiar, there are very few - if any - signs of actual delusion in Zilu's actions. The throne is not a goal in itself, merely a way to achieve his primary goal, which is to marry the woman he loves, take revenge for Huanmi's sake as much as his own and build a life worthy of her. She's his Empress and by gods, she's going to be the real deal soon enough, no more cosplaying in private villas, however nice it might be!

Ma Zitan, the one and only Master of Mope

With every Ma Prince I become more and more convinced that there was something seriously wrong with Daddy Emperor's brain. Neglecting Potato makes some sense within the greater political picture, letting Zilu lie fallow is the height of foolishness, yet it's more a matter of criminal inaction than actively doing something wrong, but Zitan? Oh, there is no excuse for the way Daddy Emperor chose to deal with Zitan. If the Third Prince was truly his intended heir from the start and there is little reason to believe otherwise - if Wangs are to go then Potato is done for, Zilu was never even considered and Zitan remains the favourite long after showing his complete uselessness - why not try to prepare him for his future role? True, doing so openly might provoke the Wangs, but it's not like there aren't any ways to present such ruler lessons as something else, even a punishment. But no, let's just hope he turns out okay all by himself!

Now, logically reasoning, if Zitan was Daddy Emperor’s favourite and the prince he originally wanted as his heir, then Zitan should be given all possible help, right? So why wasn’t he taught any actual skills, whether in governance or in military matters? The thing is… they might have tried. In episode 61, when Zitan asks his faithful pair of retainers if he would be able to best Xiao Qi, their first answer is not that he’s the Emperor so it’s a given. Well, that too, but the first, immediate response? You studied the art of war. Which, okay, might be a reasonable guess when it comes to any prince, but those retainers are rather young and only recently-promoted. Before their soujourn at the Imperial Mausoleum they probably served somewhere within the wider imperial household, but not close enough to any great personage to be knowledgeable about what the princes might or might not have studied. Also, that answer, should Zitan’s lessons be limited to his early childhood, would make them look like idiots or bootlickers of the worst sort. But let’s say that Zitan actually studied the art of war and did so longer than his brothers. Or, alternatively, with more famous masters. That would naturally be a subject of some talk, if only within the imperial household itself. If so, then the female retainer, who seems rather astute in general, gave the best answer she could give.

Okay, so maybe somebody actually tried to help Zitan along. It still failed. Zitan at twenty or so is singularily useless and strangely unambitious, and no, calligraphy doesn't count as useful, not if one is an imperial prince and Emperor-to-be!

It's not Zitan's uselessness or even his refusal to feel any kind of reponsibility for his own people (as shown in the Huizhou arc) I have the most issue with. Although the latter is simply disgusting. And... really, really short-sighted. If Huizhou falls, as it surely must, Jianning and Co. get a clear way to the capital, leaving Xiao Qi to play deadly catch-up. Which means that Zitan's family is pretty much done for. Now, he might not care about Potato and Zilu, but surely he should feel something towards his father? Some filial piety, if not actual love? But no, screw the people of Huizhou and screw Daddy Emperor. Still, does he think that Jianning wouldn't pursue him to the ends of the earth in order to eradicate a potential claimant?

No, what really angers me is the way Zitan treats the women he claims to hold dear. And I'm not even speaking of Awu, although it's rather obvious that he cares little for her internality and rather more than is healthy for his idealized image of her. Xie Guifei dies for him, which is not his fault in the least... or is it? See, I'm pretty sure that Zitan's insistence on marrying Awu despite his mother's reservations was what provoked the Wangs to take certain... steps. Provoking a power struggle is all fine and good, if you're at least somewhat prepared for the consequences. Zitan is no fifteen year old well-bred young lady, he's an imperial prince right in the middle of a delicate balance of power, how the hell does he not know or care about possible ramifications? Naivety is theoretically not a crime, but that surely is criminal naivety. Which begs the question - how hard was that boy coddled by his mother? My guess is a lot. But Xie Guifei is but a trifle compared to the elephant in the room.

Xie Wanru. Xie Wanru, who supported Zitan as much as she could while being in a precarious situation herself. And whom he had no problems with asking for further support, going as far as to aim for the throne, disregarding her own and her children's potential interests. Xie Wanru, who didn't make the first move, even knowing Zitan to be a potential threat to her and hers. Xie Wanru, whose baby got a full portion of avuncular love in form of actual torture and was lucky to get away with his life. Xie Wanru, his sister, whose ghost must have screeched with fury upon hearing Zitan laud himself as this paragon of brotherly feelings in comparison to the well-intentioned Turnip.

Oh, and he just sat there like an offended child while the country kept sliding into chaos, simply because some evil old men didn't let him kill Cheng's entire army with his sheer incompetence. Those dastardly old bastards! Let them scramble around and let the people in the provinces keep dying; they all deserve this for not recognizing Zitan's awesomeness! I'm not saying he should have fixed everything. I'm saying he should have done the bare minimum. He killed a brother for that throne, now he should actually do something with it. Other than purposefully provoking the only guy who actually restored peace and stability simply because the man happens to be married to Zitan's first love.

I'm sorry, I cannot with Zitan. There's a lot more to be said about that twerp, much of which has already been said, but at this point refraining from plowing on it's a matter of mental hygiene.

#ask and answer #the rebel princess #no but seriously how come there are no other Ma scions in the main line #is Daddy Emperor overly careful after his own experiences with his brothers? #could be could be #Zitan oh so pretty and oh so useless #and that was the last ask in my inbox! #I can hardly believe it

[pandaemoniumpancakes]

General Introduction to the 'Bloom's Major Literary Characters’ series.

   Character, according to our dictionaries, still has as a primary meaning a graphic symbol, such as a letter of the alphabet. This meaning reflects the word’s apparent origin in the ancient Greek charactēr, a sharp stylus. Charactēr also meant the mark of the stylus’ incisions. Recent fashions in literary criticism have reduced “character” in literature to a matter of marks upon a page. But our word “character” also has a very different meaning, matching that of the ancient Greek ethōs, “habitual way of life.” Shall we say then that literary character is an imitation of human character, or is it just a grouping of marks? The issue is between a critic like Dr. Samuel Johnson, for whom words were as much like people as like things, and a critic like the late Roland Barthes, who told us that “the fact can only exist linguistically, as a term of discourse.” Who is closer to our experience of reading literature, Johnson or Barthes? What difference does it make, if we side with one critic rather than the other?

   Barthes is famous, like Foucault and other recent French theorists, for having added to Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God a subsidiary demise, that of the literary author. If there are no authors, then there are no fictional personages, presumably because literature does not refer to a world outside language. Words indeed necessarily refer to other words in the first place, but the impact of words ultimately is drawn from a universe of fact. Stories, poems, and plays are recognizable as such because they are human utterances within traditions of utterances, and traditions, by achieving authority, become a kind of fact, or at least the sense of a fact. Our sense that literary characters, within the context of a fictive cosmos, indeed are fictional personages is also a kind of fact. The meaning and value of every character in a successful work of literary representation depend upon our ideas of persons in the factual reality of our lives.

   Literary character is always an invention, and inventions generally are indebted to prior inventions. Shakespeare is the inventor of literary character as we know it; he reformed the universal human expectations for the verbal imitation of personality, and the reformation appears now to be permanent and uncannily inevitable. Remarkable as the Bible and Homer are at representing personages, their characters are relatively unchanging. They age within their stories, but their habitual modes of being do not develop. Jacob and Achilles unfold before us, but without metamorphoses. Lear and Macbeth, Hamlet and Othello severely modify themselves not only by their actions, but by their utterances, and most of all through overhearing themselves, whether they speak to themselves or to others. Pondering what they themselves have said, they will to change, and actually do change, sometimes extravagantly yet always persuasively. Or else they suffer change, without willing it, but in reaction not so much to their language as to their relation to that language.    I do not think it useful to say that Shakespeare successfully imitated elements in our characters. Rather, it could be argued that he compelled aspects of character to appear that previously were concealed, or not available to representation. This is not to say that Shakespeare is God, but to remind us that language is not God either. The mimesis of character in Shakespeare’s dramas now seems to us normative, and indeed became the accepted mode almost immediately, as Ben Jonson shrewdly and somewhat grudgingly implied. And yet, Shakespearean representation has surprisingly little in common with the imitation of reality in Jonson or in Christopher Marlowe. The origins of Shakespeare’s originality in the portrayal of men and women are to be found in the Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer, insofar as they can be located anywhere before Shakespeare himself. Chaucer’s savage and superb Pardoner overhears his own tale-telling, as well as his mocking rehearsal of his own spiel, and through this overhearing he is emboldened to forget himself, and enthusiastically urges all his fellow-pilgrims to come forward to be fleeced by him. His self-awareness, and apocalyptically rancid sense of spiritual fall, are preludes to the even grander abysses of the perverted will in lago and in Edmund. What might be called the character trait of a negative charisma may be Chaucer’s invention, but came to its perfection in Shakespearean mimesis.    The analysis of character is as much Shakespeare’s invention as the representation of character is, since lago and Edmund are adepts at analyzing both themselves and their victims. Hamlet, whose overwhelming charisma has many negative components, is certainly the most comprehensive of all literary characters, and so necessarily prophesies the labyrinthine complexities of the will in lago and Edmund. Charisma, according to Max Weber, its first codifier, is primarily a natural endowment, and implies a primordial and idiosyncratic power over nature, and so finally over death. Hamlet’s uncanniness is at its most suggestive in the scene of his long dying, where the audience, through the mediation of Horatio, itself is compelled to meditate upon suicide, if only because outliving the prince of Denmark scarcely seems an option.    Shakespearean representation has usurped not only our sense of literary character, but our sense of ourselves as characters, with Hamlet playing the part of the largest of these usurpations. Insofar as we have an idea of human disinterestness, we tend to derive it from the Hamlet of Act V, whose quietism has about It a ghostly authority. Oscar Wilde, in his profound and profoundly witty dialogue, “The Decay of Lying,” expressed a permanent insight when he insisted that art shaped every era, far more than any age formed art. Life imitates art, we imitate Shakespeare, because without Shakespeare we would perish for lack of images. Wilde’s grandest audacity demystifies Shakespearean mimesis with a Shakespearean vivaciousness: “This unfortunate aphorism about art holding the mirror up to Nature is deliberately said by Hamlet in order to convince the bystanders of his absolute insanity in all art-matters.” Of Hamlet's influence upon the ages Wilde remarked that: “The world has grown sad because a puppet was once melancholy.” “Puppet” is Wilde’s own deconstruction, a brilliant reminder that Shakespeare’s artistry of illusion has so mastered reality as to have changed reality, evidently forever.    The analysis of character, as a critical pursuit, seems to me as much a Shakespearean invention as literary character was, since much of what we know about how to analyze character necessarily follows Shakespearean procedures. His hero-villains, from Richard III through lago, Edmund, and Macbeth, are shrewd and endless questers into their own self-motivations. If we could bear to see Hamlet in his unwearied negations, as another hero-villain, then we would judge him the supreme analyst of the darker recalcitrances in the selfhood. Freud followed the pre-Socratic Empedocles, in arguing that character is fate, a frightening doctrine that maintains the fear that there are no accidents, that overdetermination rules us all of our lives. Hamlet assumes the same, yet adds to this argument the terrible passivity he manifests in Act V. Throughout Shakespeare’s tragedies, the most interesting personages seem doom-eager, reminding us again that a Shakespearean reading of Freud would be more illuminating than a Freudian exegesis of Shakespeare. We learn more when we discover Hamlet in the Freudian Death Drive, than when we read Beyond the Pleasure Principle into Hamlet.    In Shakespearean comedy, character achieves its true literary apotheosis, which is the representation of the inner freedom that can be created by great wit alone. Rosalind and Falstaff, perhaps alone among Shakespeare’s personages, match Hamlet in wit, though hardly in the metaphysics of consciousness. Whether in the comic or the modern mode, Shakespeare has set the standard of measurement in the balance between character and passion.    In Shakespeare the self is more dramatized than theatricalized, which is why a Shakespearean reading of Freud works out so well. Character-formation after the passing of the Oedipal stage takes the place of fetishistic fragmentings of the self. Critics who now call literary character into question, and who proclaim also the death of the author, invariably also regard all notions, literary and human, of a stable character as being mere reductions of deeper pre-Oedipal desires. It becomes clear that the fortunes of literary character rise and fall with the prestige of normative conceptions of the ego. Shakespeare’s lago, who wars against being, may be the first deconstructionist of the self, with his proclamation of “I am not what I am.” This constitutes the necessary prologue to any view that would regard a fixed ego as a virtual abnormality. But deconstructions of the self are no more modern than Modernism is. Like literary modernism, the decentered ego came out of the Hellenistic culture of ancient Alexandria. The Gnostic heretics believed that the psyche, like the body, was a fallen entity, mechanically fashioned by the Demiurge or false creator. They held however that each of us possessed also a spark or pneuma, which was a fragment of the original Abyss or true, alien God. The soul or psyche within every one of us was thus at war with the self or pneuma, and only that sparklike self could be saved.    Shakespeare, following after Chaucer in this respect, was the first and remains still the greatest master of representing character both as a stable soul and a wavering self. There is a substance that endures in Shakespeare’s figures, and there is also a quicksilver rendition of the unsettling sparks. Racine and Tolstoy, Balzac and Dickens, follow in Shakespeare’s wake by giving us some sense of pre-Oedipal sparks or drives, and considerably more sense of post-Oedipal character and personality, stabilizations or sublimations of the fetish-seeking drives. Critics like Leo Bersani and René Girard argue eloquently against our taking this mimesis as the only proper work of literature. I would suggest that strong factions of the self, from the Bible through Samuel Beckett, necessarily participate in both modes, the sublimation of desire, and the persistence of a primordial desire. The mystery of Hamlet or of Lear is intimately invested in the tangled mixture of the two modes of representation.    Psychic mobility is proposed by Bersani as the ideal to which deconstructions of the literary self may yet guide us. The ideal has its pathos, but the realities of literary representation seem to me very different, perhaps destructively so. When a novelist like D. H. Lawrence sought to reduce his characters to Eros and the Death Drive, he still had to persuade us of his authority at mimesis by lavishing upon the figures of The Rainbow and Women in Love all of the vivid stigmata of normative personality. Birkin and Ursula may represent antithetical and uncanny drives, but they develop and change as characters pondering their own pronouncements and reactions to self and others. The cost of a non-Shakespearean representation is enormous. Pynchon, in The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow, evades the burden of the normative by resorting to something like Christopher Marlowe’s art of caricature in The Jew of Malta. Marlowe’s Barabas is a marvelous rhetorician, yet he is a cartoon alongside the troublingly equivocal Shylock. Pynchon’s personages are deliberate cartoons also, as fat as comic strips. Marlowe’s achievement, and Pynchon’s, are beyond dispute, yet they are like the prelude and the postlude to Shakespearean reality. They do not wish to engage with our hunger for the empirical world and so they enter the problematic cosmos of literary fantasy.    No writer, not even Shakespeare or Proust, alters the available stock that we agree to call reality, but Shakespeare, more than any other, does show us how much of reality we could encounter if only we retained adequate desire. The strong literary representation of character is already an analysis of character, and is part of the healing work of a literary culture, which implicitly seeks to cure violence through a normative mimesis of ego, as if it were stable, whether in actuality it is or is not. I do not believe that this is a social quest taken on by literary culture, but rather that we confront here the aesthetic essence of what makes a culture literary, rather than metaphysical or ethical or religious. A culture becomes literary when its conceptual modes have failed it, which means when religion, philosophy, and science have begun to lose their authority. If they cannot heal violence, then literature attempts to do so, which may be only a turning inside out of the critical arguments of Girard and Bersani.    I conclude by offering a particular instance or special case as a paradigm for the healing enterprise that is at once the representation and the analysis of literary character. Let us call it the aesthetics of being outraged, or rather of successfully representing the state of being outraged. W. C. Fields was one modern master of such representation, and Nathanael West was another, as was Faulkner before him. Here also the greatest master remains Shakespeare, whose Macbeth, himself a bloody outrage, yet retains our imaginative sympathy precisely because he grows increasingly outraged as he experiences the equivocation of the fiend that lies like truth. The double-natured promises and the prophecies of the weird sisters finally induce in Macbeth an apocalyptic version of the stage actor’s anxiety at missing cues, the horror of a phantasmagoric stage fright of missing one’s time, of always reacting too late. Macbeth, a veritable monster of solipsistic inwardness but no intellectual, counters his dilemma by fresh murders, that prolong him in time yet provoke him only to a perpetually freshened sense of being outraged, as all his expectations become still worse confounded. We are moved by Macbeth, however estrangedly, because his terrible inwardness is a paradigm for our own solipsism, but also because none of us can resist a strong and successful representation of the human in a state of being outraged.    The ultimate outrage is the necessity of dying, an outrage concealed in a multitude of masks, including the tyrannical ambitions of Macbeth. I suspect that our outrage at being outraged is the most difficult of all our affects for us to represent to ourselves, which is why we are so inclined to imaginative sympathy for a character who strongly conveys that affect to us. The Shrike of West’s Miss Lonelyhearts or Faulkner’s Joe Christmas of Light in August are crucial modern instances, but such figures can be located in many other works, since the ability to represent this extreme emotion is one of the tests that strong writers are driven to set for themselves.    However a reader seeks to reduce literary character to a question of marks on a page, she will come at last to the impasse constituted by the thought of death, her death, and before that to all the stations of being outraged that memorialize her own drive towards death. In reading, she quests for evidences that are strong representations, whether of her desire or her despair. Such questings constitute the necessary basis for the analysis of literary character, an enterprise that always will survive every vagary of critical fashion.

#harold bloom #character