#values dissonance

[demigodpjbth]

So…reading the odyssey. There is A LOT of values dissonance in this book.

1. Telemachus expected to send his mother back to her father now that her husband is dead.

2. Men sleeping with other women isn’t considered cheating because he didn’t love them (double standard there).

3. Odysseus casually mentions sacking a city after leaving Troy. “We killed the men and split up the women amongst us before taking all of their stuff.”

4. Gets to the island of the Cyclopes, goes inside the cave while Polyphemus is out. Odysseus already warned his crew that Cyclopes are lawless creatures, knows a Cyclopes lives in the cave, the crew offers to steal his cheeses, Odysseus says he wants to wait for the homeowner to return to follow rules of hospitality so he can get a better gift. (Seems kind of stupid to me. You expect these lawless beings to follow the rules of hospitality? I feel like you’re not really guests if you’re intruders…”We entered your house without your knowledge, give us stuff”).

5. Circe gets threatened with a knife by someone who is immune to her magic. “Sleep with me!” (This must be my Asexual self but this doesn’t track in my head). What’s weirder is that Hermes tells him that she will do this to subdue him or control him, but sleep with her anyway??? (This scene was so confusing to me. How do you go Fight—> sex —-> save your men? Was it like bribery? Why would she even want to?)

6. This story has a thing with names, epithets, and lineages. Whenever anyone is addressed they say their father’s name, country, mannerisms, and accomplishments. Whenever someone wants to know who they are, they ask for name, parents, country. How does Odysseus introduce himself, “Odysseus, king of Ithaca, son of Laertes, cleverest of men, lion-hearted God-favoured.” Wow….

7. Odysseus feels it’s necessary to kill all the suitors for eating all the palace food and sleeping with the maids (not trying to marry his wife or kill his son, but wtv), but then it’s necessary to kill all the servants that slept with them or attended them? Penelope didn’t tell them not to (“guest rights” which is weird since they are bad guests so they shouldn’t apply anyway), and I’m pretty sure the servants had no say in the matter since most of them were slaves and under threat of violence by the guests.

I just think that for someone who claims to be a clever schemer, the logic in this story doesn’t seem to track unless you lived in the time period. (Interestingly, Romans and classical writers didn’t really like Odysseus. Not for being violent or bloodthirsty, but for being cowardly and a liar, using mind games instead of brute force and telling lies instead of being honest.)

#odysseus #the odyssey #values dissonance #Circe the odyssey #telemachus #Penelope

[crownprincessoftherusalkas]

Real talk, it was such an odd thing, reading about Hades and Persephone for the first time as like, an eight-year-old. A man kidnaps a girl, and also forces her to be his wife? How awful! And her mother is so sad and angry that winter happens? But in the end she doesn't really rescue her daughter, she only gets her back for part of the year.

In my mind, the bad guy had kinda won, which wasn't supposed to happen. And in my mind it corroborated the stranger-danger warnings my mother had already been giving me since I was old enough to understand them.

And then you get older, and you'll see peers adapting it to a romantic fantasy, and you get used to seeing it retold in more consensual ways. Persephone elopes with a man because she's a powerful woman who knows what she wants

But in the back of my mind, I always remembered that odd, twisty feeling in my stomach, that kind of hide-behind-your-mother, hold-her-hand-tight fear

#Hades and Persephone #childhood fears #Greek Myth #Values dissonance

[inspectorspacetimerevisited]

It was a bit discordant that the Fifth Inspector seemed to have little trouble getting about as a woman in the past,

while her thirteenth incarnation faced discrimination again and again, especially while visiting James IV & I’s England.

#Inspector Spacetime #The Witch Hunters (episode) #Values Dissonance (trope) #Values Dissonance #it comes across as #discordant #the Inspector (character) #Fifth Inspector #Thirteenth Inspector #13th Inspector #had little trouble #getting about as a woman #as a woman #in the past #her thirteenth incarnation #faced discrimination #in the James IV & I's England

[rexalogy]

Every Taylor Swift song

#I truly truly cannot empathize with anyone in limerence with her in fact it feels betraying. #all of the interesting beautiful art in the world and the only thing you can blow up is another implicitly conservative value white woman? #having to write narratives about her hypothetical dykeishness to feel comfortable with that dissonance? as if that would even absolve her #it’s not that I hate Taylor I just hate this unwillingness to engage with where her worldview has serious limitations and it seeps #throughout her discography. I think loving art comes with being able to recognize where it fails #what politics are present in it. it’s not deep it’s not subtext it’s all just right there

[knightsickness]

really really like how criston exhibits the medieval knightly virtues (generosity courtesy chastity fellowship and piety) more than almost any modern hero archetype and is unambiguously a bad person. he genuinely doesn’t believe he’s going to hell for killing a lot of people (that was for the greater good) he thinks it’s for having sex once

#values dissonance stuff with medieval fantasy characters vv interesting esp in relation to masculinity #good masculinity meant being chaste and temperate and a scholar but sex and violence and drinking was still manlier #even if it was officially ‘bad masculinity’ compared to evoking cain instead of abel. many such cases #daemon as an aspirational kind of bad masculinity but also a modern hero archetype as a rogue #criston struggles to maintain medieval good masculinity and a chivalric hero archetype that modern works basically never have uncritically #hotd #house of the dragon #criston cole #asoiaf #a song of ice and fire

[marzipanandminutiae]

A gritty modern thriller about a woman trying desperately – perhaps a bit unhinged by worry – to get her teenage daughter out of a cult whose leader killed her husband

And then you realize partway through that it’s a retelling of The Magic Flute

#the magic flute #opera #note that I have not actually seen the operating question. I read the synopsis on Wikipedia just now #and like. Holy values dissonance Batman #*opera in question

[pezpenser205]

ngl if youre "emo" and you genuinely judge people for expressing "cringy" joy or overdramatic sadness beyond poking fun at friends you know are ok with it you arent emo youre a poser. nothing less emo than shaming complete strangers for having emotions imo.

#op #you cant be emo and be an actual bully #well you can. but your dissonance is insane and your beliefs are inconsistent and your values are outta whack etc etc #scene/emo/goth tags

[oneknightstand-if]

How do you feel about Camelot the Musical?

Never saw it on Broadway, I've only seen the 1967 movie version lo those many years ago. Since I grew up on Disney musicals, that inclines me to like it by default.

Cool costumes and sets in the movie. Can't say I particularly liked the hyper focus on the Lancelot & Guinevere affair though. Since it's a stage play/movie it kind of had to pick a few things to focus on with it's short run time...

But generally my reaction to all the Arthur/Guinevere/Lancelot and Mark/Isolde/Tristan and all that courtly love cuckoldry stuff is "f#ck that noise".

#Some modern values dissonance there! #oks-asks

[its-not-a-pen]

low quality liu bei memes i found by intercepting cao cao's messenger hawks

#romance of the three kingdoms #san guo yan yi #liu bei #im not a cao cao apologist im his defense attorney #history meme #i dont hate liu bei btw he's my blorbo but its SOO funny to make fun of him #i love reading old books sometimes i'm struck by how prescient and universal certain ideals are. other times the values dissonance slaps #me across the face like a wet fish. it's so interesting to see what 14th century ppl #consider to be virtuous and righteous ideals

[terrence-silver]

What do you think Terry's idea of "rock bottom" is? Like we know Dynatox was doing some shady deals, and Terry was paying people off to cover his tracks all willy nilly. But do we think he actually lost all of his money? Or was his version of rock bottom moving out of the Ennis house to a more "humble" appearing mansion?

---

I think his definition of rock bottom is the World changing.

The dissonance of values.

The depression that came with.

Now, stay with me on this one. Could be fakedeep, but I truly believe this:

No, I don't think Terry Silver was ever here struggling to pay bills, buy groceries on a discount and make rent like an average Joe Schmoe; that's not the type of struggle he meant, I feel. Don't figure this is something that ever happened to him. It's just not that realistic. 🤷‍♀️

Terry Silver's 'rock bottom' is more of the deeply existential sort.

A sort of dread you can't shake off or control. The same way many people miss the 2010's. Or the 90's. Or the 70's. Or whatever period in their life was meaningful, important or deeply impactful. This sense that time is ever changing and it cannot be stopped or contained; that maybe the best days of your life are already behind you and they're never coming back. The melancholy and fear that comes with it; this is, actually, a re-occurring theme for several characters in the show (Johnny Lawrence, anyone?) And we all know that if Terry loathes one thing it is not having control over things. Passage of time being chief among them. In his own words vaguely paraphrased; you can buy back everything but your youth...or something like that, don't quote me.

That's what Terry was plagued with when he told John he 'hit rock bottom'.

Sure, he lost an unimaginable sum of money due to various fiscal crashes and had, effectively, for a while, less zeroes attached to his already immense networth which he for sure could've considered a state of decline compared to what he used to have, living quite literally overlooking all of Los Angeles like a sort of self-proclaimed Emperor, but the fact that the morals and the ethics of 1970-80's America which birthed The Terry We Know became so very different at the turn of the millennia that he might've felt that the economic boom and the very values that underlined a prime in his life were now over and that he, along with them, would either change, shed skins, or be over as well was what led Terry to sense that he had to begin again, from rock bottom, reinventing himself.

It was an end of an era.

First thing he had to do, is change mansions.

He couldn't just live in an unsustainable concrete brutalist castle anymore without people rightfully considering him bad for it...or telling him he should house some homeless people in there since he clearly has ample space. He needed to make a shift to something acceptable. Something digestible. He needed to box himself in.

No, he couldn't just slam coke, be driven around in a Rolls Royce, drop around racial slurs, make a living off of literally polluting places, lounging naked in front of his elderly secretary in a hot tub without facing some serious allegations later and coming dangerously close to what would be considered grooming today either. Those days were over. The days in which Cobra Kai as an upper crust extracurricular boy's club was considered aspirational and cool leading to a post-millennial pipeline where most people would consider it a militant cult was the new norm. The days in which you could send your friend to an all-expense paid trip to Tahiti to be entertained by two masseuses without both you and your friend being promptly branded sex tourists were gone too.

Martial arts were at their height in the 60's-80's, but by the time we're reintroduced to Terry at his garden party, it's a relic of the past people laugh and cringe at at best and bring up as a quirky joke. Hey, even his ponytail would just promptly be laughed at because men's fashion changed too; what was badass then ain't so badass now.

Everything changed.

It's like everything that made Terry Terry was just...finished. Passe.

In a sense, Daniel Larusso's lines proved to be prophetic:

Terry Silver wasn't even a memory anymore.

Yuppie culture was dead and Terry Silver was so intrinsically tied to this culture that I do believe he suffered what we would consider a mental breakdown due to it, the same way I believe he was facing so many lawsuits, indictments, scandals and legal issues thanks to his accumulated less-than-stellar behaviors and dealings in the past few decades that he would either 'clean up' his act or suffer the consequences. Become one of those creepy Billionaires shunned from society entirely. It would be social suicide. And I do believe Terry Silver had many, many, many skeletons in his closet. So many in fact, that him going to therapy, letting go of narcotics, quitting smoking, presenting himself as mellow, not really talking about his time in Vietnam (whereas, in the 80's, he's out there, openly saluting John at an airport) and ultimately surrounding himself by a veneer of Liberal upper class 'acceptable rich diverse people' was legitimately needed to hide himself. Even the way he dressed was different; he appeared less like a Bond villain and more like an elegant, approachable old man on a sea-side porch, hair in his loose curls.

Presentation; it matters.

The man who knew how to dress up as 'poor' and even instructed his stylists to deliberately ruffle the collars of his 'working class attire' when tricking Daniel would understand this like an intricate science. Really, just think of celebrities in real life who were awful in the past and who tried to polish up their image with the advent of social media and the internet. Yeah. Just like that. That's exactly what happened to Terry Silver.

He was bad and he loved it, but he couldn't be bad anymore.

Everything that brought him joy was gone, a cancellable offense (for good reason too) something that would ruin his life and have him viewed in an unfavorable light and everything that was considered positive nowadays were things that didn't make him happy in the least bit. Not at all. He wasn't happy eating vegan screws in a vegetative, fake existence. He wasn't happy pretending therapy worked. He wasn't happy letting go of all the markers of insurmountable wealth to seem relatable; he earned that shit. He deserved to flaunt it! He wasn't happy discarding his vices. He wasn't happy dressing like a retired grandpa wearing khakis sadly counting lettuce leaves in his plate and in equal measure counting the days until he died as the last vestige of the 80's. He wasn't happy not mentioning Vietnam. Martial Arts. Cobra Kai. Not when that's his life. It is who he was. For better, or for worse. His rock bottom, was such, feeling he had to become a blank slate and start over in a great many ways; returning to everything he was was him recapturing the old glory days and having one last go at everything that ever sparked him joy. Better to burn out than fade away and all that jazz.

#terry silver #kk3 #cobra kai #character analysis #tw; values dissonance

[fellhellion]

This part of the editorial from 2099 (pic sourced from this post) is so interesting to me because i don’t even think the idea of Miguel having these kinds of flaws is uninteresting or impossible, but I just personally would never have come to this conclusion just based on the text.

Like, when I personally look at how Miguel and Dana interact, I don’t see any indication that he emotionally condescends to having a relationship with her, when you’d think this strain of elitism should shine through in some part of their relationship at least initially in his arc.

I don’t look at Xina and Miguel’s interactions and interpret any sense him feeling threatened by her intelligence (even if we're just talking purely pre-spidermanning), when you’d think an element of that would be present, even in a flashback. He was a callous dickhead about the cheating explanation, but that alone without some corresponding behaviour to how he speaks to/treats Dana, even just as a flashback, just doesn’t offer the bridging piece to displaying what the authorial intent apparently was, at least for me.

Also, and by god we always come back to Dana’s writing being so damn lazy, but if Miguel - even if only at first - sought Dana out due to the emotional convenience she provided, what has prompted enough change that he is willing to bear and forgive actions like her seeking out the company of the man who drugged him when she wants to needle Miguel.

ALSO. PETER DAVID I AM SPEAKING DIRECTLY INTO YOUR EAR RN. ITS VERY SILLY TO ME TO POINT OUT THE MISOGYNISTIC STREAK INTENDED IN MIGUEL’S ACTIONS HERE BUT THEN LITERALLY JUST NOT BOTHER TO MAKE THE WOMAN THIS IS ABOUT MAKE LIKE. SENSE WHEN YOU WROTE HER. OFFER NO EXPLORATION INTO WHAT HER ACTIONS SPEAK TO IN HER PERSON AND DELVE INTO WHAT CONTRADICTORY ACTS MIGHT TELL US ABOUT HER.

#'a component to miguel's cheating is misogynistic thinking' AND IS THE MISOGYNISTIC THINKING IN THE ROOM WITH US NOW #idk idk...i genuinely have no issue with grappling w this as a character flaw of his i just would never have come to this conclusion on my #own PURELY from how he treated dana and xina. absolute asshole move w how he spoke of the cheating intially to xina #but that alone just makes him an asshole. not someone who felt threatened by her intelligence and THATS the piece that i dont personally se #in the text. #not to mention. the way dana and miguel's relationship is tonally depicted just. speaks of some lvl of sincerity to me. miguel isn't an #overly physically affectionate person and the times he does display that are really interesting (holding Gabriel when the abuse was going o #holding Xina when she blamed herself for Dana's death etc etc) #and then you have the way he holds Dana when he accidentally hits her while hallucinating from the rapture. he calls her lover and honey. #they cuddle in the bath that one time together. he recognises he hasnt been spending enough time w her and went to invite her out because o #it. and yeah. some of these we can absolutely chalk up to the character development hes having at the same time due to spidermanning but #even BEFORE that its like. it feels tonally dissonant to even try read Dana's actions at face value because the narrative doesnt CARE #about them making sense as part of a coherent whole person who thinks and rationalises actions to achieve a certain outcome or satisfy a #desire. it doesnt CARE enough to give her that sadly and so youre just left like. what does this relationship mean to these two characters? #for one party in particular i genuinely have no idea. and i dont know what to infer is the reason for a change from the mentality outlined #as authorial intent. because i didnt get that impression in the first place. #tunes talks 2099 #tunes talks critical #long post

[celiciaa]

if there’s one thing céline would rather not being close with is probably leon,,, and maybe jin or yves…i think there’s other princes in mind i should write down when i brainstormed enough but her experience as belle will not let her believe in what heroes like leon believe and what they want to achieve; she can’t understand them on any level when it comes to trying to be good and be selfless to more than like 10 people who are really close to her. she — herself willingly chooses to be selfish and just protect those who she cares about because that’s the only road to go and if she goes to hell for it? so be it. she is honest with herself and she will never accept idealistic views because she just cannot. it’s connected from her childhood until her current life, it’s connected to her not being able to feel emotions, it’s connected to her being isolated/distant to 99% of circles she’s in, and so much more. it’s just. hmm. 

#my ocs ♡ #yeah céline’s a villainous/antagonistic/anti-heroic figure #still doesn’t change the fact that her core value is family and has always been family #on the very same level as her own self even a bit above #and i love it. it gives a dissonance in so many ways #oh btw she became belle on different circumstances that i’ll write about it later

[sunhalf]

something about aika being raised by her human mother until she was six and therefore having her formative years happen with her growing up with human values and how that fucked her up then spending the next nine years of her life with reapers

#its hard... #like in the context of renjirou torturing her by human values torturing a little girl and your SISTER #to target another family member is beyond the pale #is insanely insanely horrible and awful. 100% worth killing for #but only one of aikas many siblings — siblings who aika loves; who love her too — think its That Bad #and even alice struggles to rly intuit and comprehend just how horrible the betrayal feels to aika #so to aika it feels like she was betrayed by renjirou while ALSO being betrayed by much of her other family #including her FATHER who is PROTECTING THE MAN WHO TORTURED HER WHEN SHE WAS A BABY #while to her father and other siblings aika is the one being unreasonable for thinking that the torture is crazy #its a weird awful kind of cognitive dissonance

[nova-rogue]

it's funny to me that many people lately have found elves to be "sUcH a PrObLeM" to write because everyone thinks that elves are a monolithic fantasy race that has to bend specifically to tolkein's worldbuilding whims

you know you can just

make them different right

anyway, i have my own way to solve the "elf problem" that i'm applying to my own story, and i don't really know that i can (presently) succinctly elaborate on that much, but it involves stripping away the annoying "longevity = wisdom = intellect = maturity = pretentiousness" nonsense and using a taffy puller to elongate both elven physical and emotional maturity so that you don't wind up with mind numbing pretentiousness all the time (though some can still exist lol) and snobbishness. they can be a little naive, as a treat. a slower moving, more stubborn race. turn their emotional maturity on its head.

if you're annoyed by certain aspects of elves, but still like them in general, just get rid of the problems you don't like with them. it's that easy.

#roguish archetype.txt #ESPECIALLY bc people always create this mind numbing cognitive dissonance within elves. #why would a race that lives a long time and can easily see the value in other life so look down upon other races???? that's just. stupid lo

[the-mediaeval-monk]

For the AMA:

Brother Eberwolf, what do you hope to accomplish with your experiments? And how close are you to your goal?

Brother Eberwolf: I hope to gain knowledge about life! I crave to know everything about the human body and animals. I truly desire to be able to create life with my own two hands. Fornication is a sin, so I've been collecting dead animals and sewing them together. Some day I hope to be able to create an actual chimera! I have no idea how I'll bring it to life, but I'm sure I'll find a way! I study decay and rot as well. I've discovered so much about how bodies decompose! It's fascinating! I've been working on embalming methods. My last concoction has worked very well. Some day I hope to autopsy an actual human being. I just have to find and befriend an executioner. Just don't tell anyone I told you this, alright? I'm on thin ice with Abbot Gunter already...

#the values dissonance is strong here #brother eberwolf #medieval monk #mad scientist #viktor athelstan's tales from the monastery universe