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maximumqueer · 13 days

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One Piece and Media Literacy

So this entire post was born out of me trying to understand why there are certain readings and interpretations of one piece that get under my skin so much. I like to think that I am normally pretty open to different readings of a text. I’m an English major, literally 90% of my degree is discussing different interpretations of fictional media, and that often involves encountering people with different readings than my own. That is good, and I think that as long as a reading can be backed up with good faith textual evidence it’s a valid reading. And that was the sticking point for me, that the takes that I kept seeing had logic behind them. I could see how and why the person sharing them came to the conclusion they did. But, what I realized is that even though these conclusions did make sense, it also relied on an incredibly literal, surface level take on the scene that also oftentimes ignored the context of how and why the moment was taking place. In other words, a lack of media literacy.

I’m going to use two scenes that I personally view as getting misconstrued as a result of this as examples. The first one is Shanks' conversation with Whitebeard, particularly this sentence Shanks says in response to Whitebeard questioning Shanks on the loss of his arm.

I have seen this moment be interpreted as Shanks intentionally losing his arm to teach Luffy a lesson in leadership, that what makes a good captain is one who is willing to put themselves and their life on the line for the people they care about. I do think that is a lesson Luffy took away from this moment, but I don’t think that this scene is framing it as intentional. The meeting between these two characters is grandiose, and the dialogue they use exemplifies that. Just before this, Whitebeard asked Shanks “What enemy did you give that left arm to?” (One Piece, Ch. 434, pg. 11). Whitebeard isn’t asking Shanks if he literally gave his arm to an enemy, but rather asking who he lost his arm to, but in a verbose way. As such, Shanks doesn’t mean that he intentionally gave up his arm. And while he could have said that a sea monster took it, he instead switched focus from the thing that took it to the person who he lost it for. It shows Shanks' mindset towards losing his arm, and how he does not actually view it as a loss, as it was lost saving a kid Shanks saw potential in, a kid who would be a part of the new era.

I will also say that the implication of Shanks intentionally losing his arm makes him a worse person, and cheapens his and Luffy’s relationship. The implication being that the emotional distress we saw him in when Luffy was kidnapped and in peril was at least to a point faked. A person in distress is not worrying about what lesson they can impart onto the person they’re saving, and as such saying that Shanks could have in that moment decided to intentionally give up his arm paints him as a much colder, more calculating character, which I would argue would be to the detriment of his character.

And I know that this reading is in part trying to explain why Shanks, a very powerful character, would lose his arm to a sea monster in the East Blue. But this was Shanks from 12 years ago, I don’t think it takes a massive leap in logic to assume that he simply wasn’t as strong of a character back then. Add to that his attention mainly being focused on making sure he got to Luffy in time, and I think him losing his arm in that moment makes perfect sense.

The second scene is when Rob Lucci suggests that Luffy’s use of gear 2 is causing him to shave years off his life.

What Lucci says here is often taken at face value, and then applied to every other gear we have seen Luffy use. This is also information that is stated as fact, more often than not. That every time Luffy uses gear 2 or 3 (pre - ts) or gear 4 or 5 (post - ts) that he is taking a couple years off his life. And as this all stems from Rob Lucci, we have to ask 1: Is Rob Lucci knowledgeable enough to actually make this claim? And 2: Is he a trustworthy source of information?

The first question is up for debate. Lucci could very well make an educated guess about the strain Luffy is putting on his body. But at the end of the day he is only going off of very limited knowledge about both Luffy and his devil fruit. The second question, I would argue, is a resounding no. Lucci is a member of CP9 (now CP0) an intelligence agency that focuses on infiltration. Part of Lucci’s job is to lie and coerce people. This is also the man that killed his fellow soldiers that had been taken as POWs to prevent the county they were fighting from having the upper hand. That is not the kind of person whose word you can take at face value.

It is also worth noting that the broader scene that this line of dialogue belongs to involves Lucci trying to psyche Luffy out by telling him that there is no hope of him or his friends winning, using the claim that he is shortening his life, as well as information that his crew is in a tunnel that will soon flood, killing them. And while some of this info is true, that is not the reasoning behind Lucci telling him it. He wants Luffy to be discouraged and to feel like there is no possible way for him to win. The information he tells to Luffy does not have to be true for this tactic to work.

What I’m trying to get at here is that analysis that does not take in the broader context of the story, or the established characterization of the people in the specific scene being analyzed leads to a reading based in ignorance, as not all of the information is being considered. It can also lead to misunderstandings within the fandom, like how I’ve seen it stated that Luffy using gear 5 shortens his life span. There is no canon backing for this, other than the literal interpretation of what a villain said about an entirely different gear nearly 20 years ago in real time. Or it can unintentionally paint a character that has previously been characterized as deeply caring for the protagonist as being cold and distant instead, more focused on making the next generation is strong - both physically and as leaders - than about saving the protagonist's (who at the time was a child) life.

#one piece #one piece spoilers #one piece meta #monkey d luffy #red haired shanks #rob lucci #media literacy

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dancefloors · 2 months

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the thing is that she's getting caught up in the storyline of taylor swift the celeb, and i feel like a lot of songs on here were processed through that, so instead of writing and releasing creative albums, she's focused on the album being an update on the storyline of her '"life'

I very often feel that way about not only her music but her branding, marketing, etc but from first listen I actually don't feel that as much here! while some songs dip their toe into the TS mythos pond (Clara Bow, The Alchemy, Who's Afraid of Little Old Me, and maybe the title track) there's a lot unsavoury and unexpected moments. and whether you like the writing or not, so so much RAW unfiltered emotion. I'd even argue it's less of "life update" than she could've done given how hungry her fans were for "tea" from their 6 yr relationship. meanwhile this feels like total catharsis and shedding of angry bitter ugly emotions and a women hitting their breaking point.. just not the one most people expected.

I do agree with u that she doesn't push herself artistically at all on this album. and that the marketing is totally disjointed and depends on the image she projects as a songwriter... even though most of it has like. nothing to do with that really. like it rlly is so scattered and emotional and verbose that she doesn't even have time to attempt the Faux Deep Poet thing, instead you just feel like you're listening to the girl in the bathroom stall next to you at the club have a complete breakdown while you're wondering where her friends are.

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thesungod · 4 months

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it just makes me sad bc i don't want to be a hater or pin everything on the queer author- i've heard their other books are good!- but also a lot of the stuff i dislike about tsats is explicitly stated to be oshiro's writing/influence. and they talked about how much research they did on the other books for this! but. the hades dream sequence. nico claiming to not have dream powers. the tartarus flashback overall was bad and underwhelming, but also nico saying he missed his "dear friend jason" even though they'd literally never met atp. picking the stymphalian birds for will bc "heracles killed them with archery"- yeah, but in that exact same myth he initially keeps them at bay by making a lot of noise! guess who has a sonic whistle

it’s honest to God embarrassing that r*ck and m*rk claimed to have reread the books for this mess.

i said so much about the Ha*des scene because it’s the biggest offense for me but all the sequences you mentioned are pretty terrible too.

“his dear friend Jason” give me a break😭😭😭😭

i genuinely have no idea how they managed to get such a product out. it’s so incoherent with previously established lore, badly written and (the worst thing) NOT funny or entertaining at all!!! it had the christ on a bike audacity to be a boring fucking book too!! that’s insane!!!!

and the way we were accused of not knowing how to have fun and taking shit too seriously for not liking it like girl, it’s a verbose, unedited, slow, confusing mess. what fun.

i remember i received so many asks complaining about it in May that i had to put a stop to it at one point because I didn’t want my pj*o blog to be a t*sa*ts hate page but god they (the writers) made it hard.

#if anyone wanna hit my discord or dms tho i assure you i could talk about this book for hours lmao.#ask #anti tsats #<—- using this just in case even if i’ve censored any name

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you-cant-spell-subtext-without · 2 years

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@doctorprofessorsong and I are working on the holiday TBATT timestamp this w/e and I'm pleased to report its at like 36 pages girl (gn) help we’re writing a literal fucking novella at this point

#what are we if not verbose #TBATT #The Birds and the Ts

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legionofpotatoes · 3 years

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you can almost see the earnest nucleus at the center of the new space jam in its shallow affectation of Big Smart Satire towards franchise-building media companies, just as it is swallowed whole, chewed up, and spit out by the very thing it is clunkily attempting to make some tangential points about. idk fellas but if there is a way to be a cynical artist driving your own commercial vehicle, it surely won't be paved by cartoonishly villainizing the very algorithm that will be selling this exemplary deconstruction of parent-son relationships sat in a ready player one IP orgy of a basketball game

#one of the strangest most self-hating 'bad' movies I've seen in a while #and I want to give it credit for being entirely POC-centric but then again they had porky pig win a rap battle so I don't know anymore #anyway see guys! it's us WB! we think algorythms are evil and here we made one that was a mistake and lebron james defeated it! all is well #please see this movie or our ad retargeting will never stop generating unskippable youtube bumpers for your google cookies #and yes it was absolutely the overtly verbose robo don cheadle that represented ALL of the issue with the cinematic universe vomit comet #there is nothing else more sinister or subtle or artistically damaging going on at all that we need to touch on in this convenient vessel #neope #text #negativity for ts

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remythologise · 4 years

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hilarious to me that the ending of spn was truly bad but honestly if they had dean and cas kiss or whatever nobody would care. like 0 people would be slamming them on twitter for the bad ending. all media outlets would be praising them for rep. just very funny

#tbd #unhinged text posting by tumblr user thylaa #I don't think in all my decade+ of tumblr I've ever been so verbose lmao #spn spoilers #supernatural spoilers #kira for ts

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chansondesalleurs · 7 years

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Picking up a tag from @natsumi82 and @theon-greyjoy-has-a-good-day who gave some A+ answers in their turn, and are super-fun and loving all-round. I only want to apologize for what I deem an awful lot of toing-and-froing in between trying to make sense of my own inclinations and individual preferences – it really was a case of a surprise host of half-formed ideas collapsing in on themselves before they could get past that early developmental stage – and scouring my mind for outcomes to go with a piece that is easy to assemble and assumes a larger perspective than even a cursory reading of the characters involved would have me adopt.

I am crazy attached to some of these folks, and I wanted to be able to think things through to ensure that the underlying aspects and idiosyncrasies attained their most vivid expression and slotted right into place in my head.

Basically my answers for the ubiquitous A Song of Ice and Fire ensemble – guessing you can pick any fandom, though?

Rules: Answer the questions and then tag seven people.

• First character I fell in love with: Daenerys – like many others, be it part of GRRM's earliest fanbase or stumbling into fresh territory through an episode or ten of the famed television series, royal exile Daenerys and her entourage were my introduction to some of the author's most varied, diverse even, work to this day. I remember being handed a copy of the first volume in the series to look over at my leisure, and whether a closer squint was enough to hold my attention, when my folio fell open in the middle of a pretty engrossing Dany chapter. I am not a hugely sentimental person when it comes to fictional characters, and I rarely, if ever, loosen up enough to allow myself the occasional sniffle, all the same I kept rooting for Dany to bail the crap out as she gamely went through the rigmarole of pitiable deprivation and a dearth of general levity, with no real sense of belonging and the looming absence of lasting familial comforts to prospectively sketch her demands of the world and help ease her way through life.

Dany's overreaching arc is essentially about being displaced. It's not that she accepts her marriage to Drogo (she doesn't) any more than she wishes for the cruelty visited on her by Viserys to continue – including, apparently, a measure of sexual cruelty – or the material eschewal of what property they may yet stand to salvage to endure, barely more than a girl herself, if ironically old enough to see through her brother's illusions of grandeur, and just as conscious of his manifest shortcomings. We talk a lot about the moral and social dilemmas that face Daenerys on the heels of her outlandish fire and blood, birth-of-the-dragon one-off, which likewise marks the high point and execution of a narrative crescendo laden with symbolism in the structuring of ASoIaF's three-act fantasy plot. A similar consideration is whether a uniform, non-peddling approach to competing claims of distinction and the gamut they seem to run from “Dany is a petulant child monarch with questionable ethics and twice the gall that renders one a liability more than an asset” to “Dany is Mary Sue-material, and I'm an owl” is tenable. I'd be lying if I said that the love I have for the Mary Sue type myself is circumstantial and a little tongue-in-cheek, quite the opposite. Besides, I like to think of owls as choice company which, as is the way with all things impossible, rocks way harder than I do.

Most of the time, the thematic conflict here is enough to compact all the absurdities of the political and the personal, as action and re-action both are being attributed to Dany to lay out a dawdling path for the major events at work. In such a context, even her route around Slaver's Bay is clearly, if concisely, mapped out as she travels from Illyrio's vast Pentoshi mansion out to the plains of the Dothraki sea at the heart of the Essossi continent, and eastward by the sea. As the book opens, it becomes evident that her function is to serve as a stepping stone for her brother's vengeance, who is later revealed to be a pawn in an ongoing game of political ambition and secrets, and (let's face it) probably severely traumatized due to circumstances as a young fugitive on the run. In time, the covey of strands merge to form one long, drawn-out account. Although new cracks appear in the wall as Dany stumbles and falls in her pursuit of an autonomous existence, which the text insists is all the present concern, she nevertheless looks poised to rise above her predicament as a child bride and dweller in foreign lands, and much like the narrative imperatives of suspense and intensity dictate, lead her people to greener pastures to perform the sort of zippy junk the priests foretell.

I interpret Dany's single most prolific desire as this i n t e n s e yearning for a place to call home, which is not so much a conversion as a double-natured energy at the edge of her inner vision, and thus difficult to quantify. Initially, Dany is projected to vary her brother's concentration circa-Game on the massive landmass across the Narrow Sea, theirs by right, notwithstanding that a certain idle desire of their former abode (“a house with a red door” outside Braavos) does still remain with her, tinting her expectations about Westeros. Now I've only ever heard the term “identity” used about this series of books, but my understanding of it is that it compresses all the debates within itself, rather than set them in awkward juxtaposition. I feel like the whole of A Song of Ice and Fire is predicated off of a descriptive relationship between belief and prejudice, intended and unintended consequences, the semiotics of power and intent, interacting motivations and an expunging of the self, which, at times, might threaten individual subjectivity and its foray into the surrounding hinterland of public conviction with a kind of falseness.

In A Song of Ice and Fire, the difficulty of matching one's core self-definition and aspirations is highlighted by the contrasting responses of the world. The question of how to truly know another hangs over GRRM's characters as they attempt to recommend themselves to their social and cultural milieu, and with respect to Dany, who seems to be motivated by some sort of reduction of suffering for the most people possible, it is none the less striking. Rather than allowing her experiences to enfranchise her from any duty toward her immediate circle, the personal happiness secured by Dany is presented as not just a matter of carving out a niche for herself, but of drawing in the communality of her charges, on the alert for future trouble, and on an unprecedented scale. As she sets out without a settled home, her brief stint in Yunkai, Astapor and Meereen becomes the acme of transient living. In the midst of backchanneling to a rigorously-ordered hierarchy, smashing the entire economic structure of Slaver's Bay in one fell swoop, and from no model but the vision of her meditations, runs an unstaunchable river of need, so that Daenerys must long either to return to the dwelling-place of her brother's manic summoning, or to substitute the distance in between with her own philosophy in life. Her oft-repeated mantra of 'I am the blood of the dragon' and 'If I look back, I am lost' is almost a prayer with Dany, not ominous in hindsight, yet furtively reminding us that security is beyond certain. In any case, it is some combination of her identity as a dragon and last surviving daughter of House Targaryen that steels her resolve, and ultimately saves Daenerys from beyond the pale of actual matrimony when Viserys (or rather, Illyrio) and Drogo come to an arrangement between them.

Two kinship plots contrast and tangle from this point onwards: her relationship to motherhood, and that of Daenerys as a dragon. In the beginning, Daenerys is unwilling to expose herself to the visitations of dragons – a direct parallel to Bran's encounter with the three-eyed crow and his uninhibited arsenal of wolf dreams – as they regularly conflate with thought-trains of Viserys, and all that may be bestial or ungovernable in human behaviour. With the passing of Viserys, Dany literally becomes the dragon, and in giving life to a triple-clutch of fossilized dragon eggs, she becomes a mother, too. Thus begins Dany's quest to re-make herself as her own patchwork mishmash of ideals and circumspect values, and because the only realistic source from which to take her opinions is, and always has been, Viserys, she must expend thrice the effort necessary to incorporate the originals available into a larger schema, one that she can be reasonably proud of.

During her time in Meereen, Daenerys is placed in a peculiarly tender relation to her Targaryen heritage and its vocabulary as the only other inhabitant of her commonwealth, which is a solitary island more than a permanent country seat. Soon she feels compelled to put away her dragons, keeping them under lock and key, and that decision, in turn, proves a threat to her usual blithe equanimity and conception of selfhood. At a stroke, the dragon motif and its invocation within Dany's inner orbit achieve yet greater intensity in this double deuce of names as talismans, as diminutive item forms full of meaning that is impartial and genuine and unique to the individual. ('Remember who you are', per Quaithe's words.) Daenerys later formulates this in an almost therapeutic burst of feeling imbued with a past beneath consciousness, now finally 'in play', and if there is a failure of tact in her haste to relieve herself of the traditional tokar before she takes off on Drogon, she is all the better for it.

By the end of Dance, Daenerys is shown at her most self-conscious: smarting under an increasing series of moral concessions, buried beneath the rehearsal of fixed impressions, a meagre ghost of all that has gone before in the confines of her formal position. All she can do to recover any sense of equilibrium is to gaze with clear eyes on past mistakes and admit, at last, to the full scope of her decisions against the political landscape of Meereen, much as her actions are curtailed, and she is relegated to interpreter between all the various household commonwealths, and an observer in each. In Daznak's Pit, her psychic drama is addressed when she finally breaks through the barriers raised by her intelligence of her own mixed motives, and in this switch from a state of stasis to acceptance, she is released from last lingering pretensions and reunited with one of her children. For one, Dany is left to contend with the discovery that she has been seeing in glimpses, or through distorted lenses, for she must indeed 'go back to go forward', and it is a monumental experience that frightens her, because she cannot pinpoint the apparition of Drogon and what it portends. The reader can share in the sumptuous relief, communicated for the most part through an imitation of intimacy as Dany acts to reconnect with Drogon, swooping in to bodily snatch her from her path of ruling malaise, and to rediscover a part of her as well.

So, it is definitely some sense of character emerging from the gloomiest surroundings that resonates with me, not the sort of button-pushing, id-pandering thrill of being given a magical boon of recognition and going around dispensing justice as if all it takes is a pinch of salt (and glittery effervescent Faerie Dust), but the author's express engagement with such an ambivalent setting, politically and ethically, and hence perhaps his reluctance to let the character off the hook easily enough, or without the compensatory gravitas of charting Dany's journey after she acquires her dragons, and its implications for the text. Like, Dany is 14 when she performs what has been, on numerous occasions, described as a miracle. Even if we assume that she has the chutzpah to get by well enough and survive by the heft of her own clever bootstraps, the fact that her retinue now consists of quite a few people and a triptych of hatchlings cannot be ignored. Obviously humanity doesn't work like that, but let's put this argument aside for the sake of the books being pure, unbridled fantasy. Dany is forced, early in Clash, to navigate the Red Waste unprepared, and riven by a shortage of supplies. Are we meant to believe that a teenager who has already suffered an assassination attempt on her person, and whose grasp on politics can be defined as rudimentary at best, would not be casually roped into a situation where the more leisured would seek to placate her for their benefit, if not write her off as a nuisance in light of her most recent investiture?

Daenerys is unique among GRRM's cast of compelling characters in one respect at least: her own network of connections and other affiliations is, unlike the rest of the action, located in Essos. She is also, iirc, the first character to accomplish so much about a fraction of the way in. If the trajectory of Dany's character arc convinces, it is because it gives the reader direct representation through Dany's inner-POV, and so largely escapes bathos before rebuking the audience with this Celtic knot of complicated interactions and endless politicking, which the author has spent way too much time building up to tear it, in a matter of pages, down. It is interesting to me that the exploration of the different shades of right and wrong, withdrawal and passion, has clear advantages to a fabulist in search of the perfect sequence to take Daenerys out of Essos and drop her in the middle of Westeros, when the alternative is easier to accommodate and far, far more appealing. I'm not the biggest GRRM fan, and if we're talking aspects of the main plot, there's a lot to pick apart, but I have rambled since whenever, and I need to get this into shape. I'm just saying that I consider this Meereenese thing one of his best/worst experiments with fictional spaces, and though mileage on how successful this has been may well vary, following Dany as she proceeds to shed her brittle exoskeleton and cross an invisible boundary upwards to become her own person is a seminal experience, 10/10 would rec, especially since the result of this ecdysis is a character refusing to be daunted into submission, refreshingly uncowed by the immensity of her cutting designs, and much as this word has grown obsolete, c o m p l i c a t e d. Then again, what isn't?

(Brevity and I have now gone our seperate ways. Imagine if I tackled fandom religiously and with gusto. This could be a joke for the ages.)

• A character I never expected to love as much as I do now: Stannis – so. here. First off, I love Stannis. Took me a while to warm up to him, but it was bound to happen.

I figure I'm just going to be earnest here as I admit to a queer sort of fascination with Stannis Baratheon, whom I found so irritably dour in Clash, and then in over his head, and then kind of arrogant, and then FINALLY about when he went north and everything that happened there and blah blah blah, I grew to love with a passion. Plus, I really ship him with both Jon AND Davos now, but what even is a Stannis without his Onion Knight, you might ask. Besides, his interactions with Jon throughout Dance are like, the highlight of the book for me, so very clever and typical of both characters.

Stannis is devisive internally; my headspace splits and goes in all sorts of different directions and it’s consequently really difficult to gather my feelings into a cohesive opinion. I think he’s a fascinating character, partially because he does inspire such confusion. Stannis is charmless, inflexible, stubborn, confoundedly upright, and has persistence past the point of common sense. He has no charisma, and his insistence on kingship seems to me to stem not so much from ambition as from some misguided attempt to reinstate himself as the rightful ruler of Westeros, born of duty and a sense of obligation. This is an unpopular opinion to fess up to, but I'm not one to hold any degree of coldness or callous behaviour against Stannis, at least not to the exclusion of any real depth of feeling. However, it's the sort of feeling that motivates those who have known immeasurable grief and despair, who have been loved and forgotten, and above all, denied everything they've ever deserved that defines Stannis more than anything else.

Even as a person rather than a name/title, Stannis is flawed, if not outright tragic. He's a character full of diametric contradictions, which is why I could talk about Stannis till the cows come home and still never quite get to the core of who he is. Part of this, I suspect, is because GRRM is not all that inclined to allow his readers to peer into Stannis's head, and so Stannis becomes accessible to us solely through the POV of his advisors on one end, and Jon on the other. It is my contention that Stannis tries to do good, even as he fails. The king/man duality with Stannis does not negate the tensions between the contradictions, but even so it will probably be his undoing.

While we're at it, I will also say that I come to Catelyn Stark from a slightly different angle (albeit with similar results.) Catelyn is probably my favourite character in the entire AsoIaF!verse, bar none, as well as someone I identify with on a deep, personal level. Just to paint you a little visual, when expressing love for Catelyn among a group of my rl friends, I was told that the character isn't necessarily the most fun to read, that they were systematically put off by how dreary and maudlin she can get, and I understand that. For one thing, Cat's chapters are like getting dragged through the grief of a woman who is living out the destruction of her house's words (“family duty honour.”) GRRM's portrayal of Catelyn is that of a typically feminine character who embodies a classical role of historic femininity (motherhood), and who refuses to be rendered as a passive agent. I can only think of one or two other characters with ties to motherhood like those assured in the figure of Catelyn Stark – the entire Dany narrative provides a rich seam in that regard. But while Catelyn refuses to be objectified or designated to a footnote, even written on a course to become a voice for conciliation, it is in death that the pressures threatening to suffocate her in life are relinquished. The point here is not a channeling of un!Cat's involvement in an ongoing crisis through the accents of renewed importance, but rather becoming in death the incarnation of impulses her living counterpart would struggle against. As such Cat's tragic narrative progression, in which she is sadly unmade in terms of her principles and begins to unravel mentally as a result, is thematically beautiful and so very poignant.

(Btw, I realise that I'm biased in favour of both Cat and Stannis, if for no other reason than show-wise, Michelle Fairley and Stephen Dillane are two of my absolute favourite actors, so this a lot like tying up all that's ever mattered to me in a nice little bow and everything.)

• A character that everyone else loves that I don’t: [/confession time] i was about to say Jon Snow, which FRANKLY is a bit of a ridiculous statement considering how much I stan the guy. Ugh, Jon, my apologies; I am a mess. ALSO! because I went into some detail with Dany, I figure I might just have to whip out my devious card of deviousness and dodge the question a teeny bit by talking about what attracts me to Jon as a character. Saying that I'm only tangentially interested in Jon's arc is nothing short of an understatement; mostly, there's enough fandom people who talk about Jon more and better than I ever could, sorry!

Since I have very little defence against this double-whammy of understanding of character and Jon's motivations, to my notions, the range of feelings provoked by his inner-POV has imo more to do with Jon learning that he's not the centre of the universe – not because Jon himself seems to think that, but because it's what makes him more than a troperiffic prophesied saviour of mankind within the heroic paradigm that he inhabits. Of course, that may change, what with Aemon's stanza of “kill the boy and let the man be born”, and the mystery (?) of his parentage coming out to test, as I suspect, Jon's deep-seated convictions. I strongly believe that Jon is the key to the restoration of balance/fighting off the White Walkers thing (along with Tyrion and Dany) and the only secret Targ that is needed. In simpler terminology, everything from Jon's tentative introduction to his arrival at Castle Black to the ranging beyond the Wall to his coming-of-age narrative with Ygritte and the wildlings leading up to his et tu-Brute moment at the end of Dance has been expertly crafted so far, and explored with the lightest touch. Good stuff.

• A character I love that everyone else hates: Aeron Greyjoy – the “Damphair” is on the little support ship I tug along beside me dubbed the U.S.S Kraken Force Extaordinaire. I love Asha, and I love Theon. I just really love the Greyjoys, and Aeron's Kingsmoot chapters in Feast are fascinating to me.

• A character that I used to love but don’t any longer: not being coy here at all, but honestly, I can't think of any. At the most, I guess I wasn't all too keen to take up Bran and Arya's stories again in Dance, which BUGS, because bb Starklings!! But no, that's about it.

• A character I would kiss: natsumi82 speaks to my soul; Jaime and Theon are like obvious choices here.

• A character I would slap: um, Gregor. Worst plan ever, I know. /whelp

• A character I’d want to be like: Brienne! Who is not just a hell of a fighter (!!!) but also has the ability to remain kind in a world that seems bent on pitting her ideals against the harsh realities of her setting. Brienne is my lodestar, and my second favourite character within ASoIaF, one that I've written about and will continue to write about. For my part, I'm still hanging on the edge of my seat, hoping against hope that GRRM delves deeper into her relationship with Jaime, and in that way we as readers will be able to examine how their characters have changed, and the comparison of that will be sizzling.

• A character that makes me laugh: all three Lannister siblings are hilarious to me!

• A character that I miss: Ned (also, if you didn't know how I felt about this character, now you do.)

• A pairing that I love: Jaime/Brienne (see above), Theon/Robb. Further yet down the ladder are SanSan, and Ned/Cat.

• A pairing that I don’t like: While I'm only really at the omnishipper point for fandom as a whole, at this point I have het ships, slash ships, crack ships, OT3 ships, poly ships, doomed ships (you don't want to know), and just about anything else you could name, I can’t think of any off the top of my head that I’m just immediately like GET IT AWAY FROM ME AND KILL IT WITH FIRE. With that in mind, I might have to make an exception for Petyr x Sansa.

Here are some people I tag: @irhinoceri @drafee @valorfaerie @blackbetha @gwendoline @earningbournvilles @bibliophilic-cat

#text post #about me #thank you for tagging me <3 #tumblr meme #a song of ice and fire #abuse cw #heed the warnings #though ultimately #whatever this is #it isn't any more graphic than asoiaf #verbosity for ts #wow okay stopping now this novel thing is obscene #i never said i was a rational human #shipping for ts #long post

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appassaddle · 3 years

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20k+ words and only 2/5 chapters done, I started this thinking it would be a oneshot at most oof.

#posts #it always cracks me up when i end up being so verbose in fics #bc i am actualy a very succinct writer and meeting word cou ts has always been a nightmare #but apparently many thoughts head full etc about tenzin #who knew! not me!#maybe after this is done ill be able to finish the one about kuzon

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iverna · 6 years

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I just caught my finger in the car door - like, properly slammed it in there. Idiot. But it was my left index finger, I’m right-handed, who cares, right? So after the initial pain shockwave makes its way through I’m like, grand, it’s gonna turn blue but it’s not bleeding all that much, I’ll just put a plaster on it and it’ll be fine.

Then I sit down at the computer to write, and realise... oh. Yeah. Typing is a lot easier with two hands.

#typing one-handed takes aaaages damn #now i want to write a fic #where modern killian refuses to do email #because it's easier to be verbose in hand-written letters #except well #i can't bloody write it now #svenja for ts #random nonsense

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thelegendofclarke · 6 years

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wow only 3 whole episodes in and the blorkes are already dumber than they have ever been any other season!

lol sure Jan!

Do you want to do this?? Because, I mean… we can do this… if you want.

#i've dragging bitches on reddit in the name of my fictional faves since the day my parents finally took the gd parental controls off our int #i went to 3 years of grad school to learn how to argue and be as verbose as possible #and i got nothing but time!#go ahead and lmk #alys answers #alys anons #Anonymous #wank tw #wank for ts

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third-nature · 3 years

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In the context of knowledge capitalism, we find that in various social interactions and situations, we are presenting our entrepreneurial selves, which often means presenting our self-fashioned personal brand (“Me Inc”), consisting of our cultural capital, intellect, skills, and whatever else we believe to be our marketable, unique selling point. Knowledge capitalism encourages us to accrue not wealth and physical commodities but knowledge. In knowledge capitalism, the winning, high-status players are the know-it-alls, not the have-it-alls. This doesn’t mean the have-it-alls aren’t also high-status and powerful, or that knowledge capitalism has replaced material capitalism – the former is just another permutation of neoliberal ideology, existing alongside and reinforcing the latter.

Without even realising it, knowledge capitalism motivates us to leverage our cultural capital when conversing with others (think of name-dropping, using verbose language, overusing technical jargon, desperately trying to prove others wrong or to prove oneself right, failing to admit one’s ignorance, straw-manning people’s arguments, dominating conversations, and looking for any opportunity to debate and undermine another’s intellect). Following [Ulrich] Bröckling’s appraisal of neoliberalism, ‘debate me culture’ (which is most pronounced in online forums and on social media) is characterised by individuals wishing to flex their intellectual prowess, to show off what they know and how cultured they are. This is, arguably, another reflection of market capitalism.

In daily life, when presenting ourselves and our thoughts, how often are we driven by competitive feelings, by a wish to simultaneously undermine someone and elevate our social status? If we are honest with ourselves (myself included), it seems that this is, indeed, a recurring feature of human interaction and relationships. Neoliberalism, thus, instils in us a drive to push our persona of ‘intellectual’, ‘expert’, or ‘knowledgeable person’ onto others, but in the process, we become inauthentic, with our relationships devalued by competitive discourse and intellectual one-upping.

#neoliberalism #knowledge #anti capitalism #socialism #sam woolfe

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vanillabutspicy · 3 years

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I see a lot of overly verbose image descriptions on tumblr. This link lists details that are helpful in an image description vs details that just add words and make the visually impaired user wonder when it will end.

A user with a visual impairment who employs the use of screen reader technology has to listen to text dictated to them. That means they can’t really scan a large paragraph of text for the helpful parts. They either have to sit and listen to the whole thing, or decide to just move on if the description is full of things they don’t care about.

I specialize in web user experience and accessibility for work. Alt text and image descriptions are important for visually impaired users, but HOW they are written is equally as important as writing them at all.

#image description #image described #id in alt text #alt text #accessibility #image and text #psa #important psa

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izzyovercoffee · 7 years

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I've been a fan of the Republic Commando series for a long time now, but just recently I realized what an asshole Kal really is. As well as problems with how Etain's pregnancy is handled. I still want to enjoy the books but these facts really disappoint me. Any suggestions?

Well … yes and no. I’ve been through this, and I have a few suggestions, but I feel like… it’s dependent entirely on what you want out of Republic Commando and/or what you need out of it. Just like any other piece of media, there will always be bad (sometimes horrible) parts alongside the good. Focus on the good parts of the series while recognizing the bad parts that are still there.

I guess I’m going to come at this from a specifically personal point of view, because I’ve had the ups and downs with regards to Republic Commando quite a few times.

You, of course, don’t have to take any of my advice whatsoever, of course, and you’re not obligated to create content either.

What worked for me was four things:

picking a specific character (or characters) to focus my attention on, and lots and lots of meta

fanfic, headcanons, drabbles, art of the characters

creating OCs either based on or inspired by RepComm (new RC squads, developing Death Watch Cuy’val Dar, creating OC Cuy’val Dar, creating pilots, etc etc etc)

deconstructing the literature, starting with Kal and moving on from there

aaand I’m putting a cut bc I just realized how long this is lmao

Pick a character you really like, and go through the times they’re mentioned in the books. For me … I really grew attached to Mereel, and I’ve done … a lot, a lot of meta, not least of which was the accelerated aging cure I posted the other day. I wouldn’t have been able to finish it if I didn’t focus on Mereel. I also wouldn’t have really come to understand his character if I never up and decided one day to pay extra attention to the mirsheb.

Try writing drabbles, if that’s something you like to do, or come up with headcanons, or little snapshots of moments they might have with other characters. Fill up the gaps, because there are a lot of gaps, for all of them. Share your thoughts with other fans, or friends, or me! I’m always excited to talk about RepComm, honestly. I hope my salt about Kal is not too … off-putting? I do gush a lot about the other characters, too, just not as often lately. (I have to fix this. I will fix this.)

Create AUs. Make fix-it scenarios — pieces of the narratives that you don’t like, or that just don’t fit, and come up with ways to make them so. AUs I’m a fan of, too, because it gives us different environments in which to exercise ways to recreate our favorite characters. In this new setting, what could possibly be the reasons that x character is still x way? why? how do they get reacquainted with the rest of them? That sort of thing.

Or from there, start creating OCs. There’s at least 100 Cuy’val Dar, not including trainers for other parts of the Grand Army of the Republic, outside of Special Operations. 10,000 Republic Commandos, and each squad of 4 is different from the others.

There’s also quite a bit of mandalorian cultural worldbuilding packed into these novels, so long as you’re also able to unlace Kal’s heavy-handed misogyny and cissexist heterocentric bias. It’s been fun trying to figure out how mandalorian enclaves (Little Mandalores) might look on city planets, for one example.

When the series gets something right, it gets them really right. And it’s important to recognize how … well, good, and right, the things it does get right actually are — and this goes for most every piece of media out there. In this one, it’s the intense loyalty and sense of found family that really drew me in. The relationships between the commandos, the relationships between everyone (that isn’t Kal) … the potential for hijinks and the really intensely emotional moments across both platonic and romantic lines is really, really high between everyone, and it’s actually really easy to miss the first go around because how focused the narrative is on Kal, specifically … which is weird, given that these stories should be more focused on the clones and not him.

Everything seems to revolve around him, and you kind of forget about the other characters, or that they have relationships, interactions, conversations with the others beyond Kal’s gaze.

And the last thing is to tackle that disappointment head on. Part of the reason why myself, and others, are so adamant about being vocal of Kal’s abuse is because this type of abuse (emotional, mental, psychological) is often invisible, or outright ignored/forgiven by people in real life — not just in fandom. It’s especially concerning when all the things that Kal does are all surprisingly textbook abuse, but learning about the intricacies of how and why, and learning how to really pick apart abuse as committed by someone as beloved as Kal … well, learning to identify these things does extend to learning to identify them in real life, and in fighting them — or in, at the very least, supporting those affected by abuse.

I mean, it does not by any means make one an expert (though I do recommend, say, picking up books about abuse, like Why Does He DO That and Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, just for references and personal knowledge), but again — learning how to break these things down and identify them in a relatively safe capacity (literature) really helps to put things into perspective that would otherwise be incredibly hard to do because of how rarely we get the opportunity to see someone actually emotionally abusive in action.

Or how difficult it is to realize that abuse is happening when you’re under its direct influence.

Some people might laugh or scoff, but Republic Commando as a series is really an excellent example of how insidious and damaging emotional abuse committed by a parental figure can really be — and how easily we, as people, are willing to overlook abuse or outright forgive it because we want to like the abuser, or because we personally understand his reasoning in spite of the harm he’s committing.

I was actually going to go through the books and ignore all of Kal’s POVs, just to see how that changes the narration. Not because I dislike Kal so much as I recently noticed that Kal actively erases entire characters from his narrative that isn’t done in other chapters by other character POVs (most notably Mereel and his work towards the cure, but I’m sure this happens w/ other characters too). If a character, and it doesn’t matter how close to them they are, doesn’t fit exactly as how he defines they are or should be … he actually erases their achievements or outright ignores their contributions and qualities.

And when I realized he does that, I was like what !! Because after all this time, going through the novels like I’ve done for meta, and I never noticed this before. And it’s upsetting, yes — but it’s also interesting. It’s fascinating to really take apart the narrative and try to really get inside characters’ heads and understand them.

Or, well, I find a lot of enjoyment out of doing that.

Of course, your mileage may vary, and you might not find my advice helpful … and that’s totally okay! This kind of thing is not enjoyable to everyone. Ultimately, once you get to this point, to get enjoyment out of RepComm (or any media, really, but I digress) you sometimes have to acknowledge that it will have bad parts — most things inevitably do, and few things are ever perfect. How you deal with those bad parts determines how you enjoy the work — but also, don’t forget to focus on the good parts, too, because there are good parts … it just sometimes takes more work to find them again once the realization of the bad hits.

And if you’re totally put off from the work, even after all this, then that’s totally okay, too. It’s entirely understandable, entirely reasonable, and I would never fault you for that. I’ve known quite a few people who hit that realization, put the books down, and never picked them back up — and, again, that’s totally okay. Disappointing, yes, but like … that’s also life, sometimes. Things that you liked when you were younger, when you come back to them … they’re not what you remembered — or you notice things that make you balk you hadn’t noticed before. It happens.

Oh, and also — take breaks. Lots of breaks. Take RepComm in small chunks, so that you don’t get overwhelmed if you’re the type that can or could (I am, sometimes). And, like I said before, drag some friends into it if you want, or drag me into it, if you’d like. I try to be as available as possible, even if I’ve been busy lately. It’s always nice to bounce ideas off another person, even if it’s just liveblogging or whathaveyou.

#Anonymous #asks.txt #izzy.txt #I really did not intend for this to end up as long as it did ... and I'm really sorry I'm so verbose my g ods #anyway I hope that ANY of this helps even a little bit #izzy talks repcomm #b: Republic Commando #if it doesn't I am so; so sorry #long post for ts

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