From Vintage Geek Culture via Mystery Theater: Exploring the concept of “canon”.

Women have more power and agency in Shakespeare’s comedies than in his tragedies, and usually there are more of them with more speaking time, so I’m pretty sure what Shakespeare’s saying is “men ruin everything” because everyone fucking dies when men are in charge but when women are in charge you get married and live happily ever after

I think you’re reading too far into things, kiddo. Take a break from your women’s studies major and get some fresh air.

Right. Well, I’m a historian, so allow me to elaborate.

One of the most important aspects of the Puritan/Protestant revolution (in the 1590’s in particular) was the foregrounding of marriage as the most appropriate way of life. It often comes as a surprise when people learn this, but Puritans took an absolutely positive view of sexuality within the context of marriage. Clergy were encouraged to lead by example and marry and have children, as opposed to Catholic clergy who prized virginity above all else. Through his comedies, Shakespeare was promoting this new way of life which had never been promoted before. The dogma, thanks to the church, had always been “durr hburr women are evil sex is bad celibacy is your ticket to salvation.” All that changed in Shakespeare’s time, and thanks to him we get a view of the world where marriage, women, and sexuality are in fact the key to salvation. 

The difference between the structure of a comedy and a tragedy is that the former is cyclical, and the latter a downward curve. Comedies weren’t stupid fun about the lighter side of life. The definition of a comedy was not a funny play. They were plays that began in turmoil and ended in reconciliation and renewal. They showed the audience the path to salvation, with the comic ending of a happy marriage leaving the promise of societal regeneration intact. Meanwhile, in the tragedies, there is no such promise of regeneration or salvation. The characters destroy themselves. The world in which they live is not sustainable. It leads to a dead end, with no promise of new life.

And so, in comedies, the women are the movers and shakers. They get things done. They move the machinery of the plot along. In tragedies, though women have an important part to play, they are often morally bankrupt as compared to the women of comedies, or if they are morally sound, they are disenfranchised and ignored, and refused the chance to contribute to the society in which they live. Let’s look at some examples.

In Romeo and Juliet, the play ends in tragedy because no-one listens to Juliet. Her father and Paris both insist they know what’s right for her, and they refuse to listen to her pleas for clemency. Juliet begs them – screams, cries, manipulates, tells them outright I cannot marry, just wait a week before you make me marry Paris, just a week, please and they ignore her, and force her into increasingly desperate straits, until at last the two young lovers kill themselves. The message? This violent, hate-filled patriarchal world is unsustainable. The promise of regeneration is cut down with the deaths of these children. Compare to Othello. This is the most horrifying and intimate tragedy of all, with the climax taking place in a bedroom as a husband smothers his young wife. The tragedy here could easily have been averted if Othello had listened to Desdemona and Emilia instead of Iago. The message? This society, built on racism and misogyny and martial, masculine honour, is unsustainable, and cannot regenerate itself. The very horror of it lies in the murder of two wives. 

How about Hamlet? Ophelia is a disempowered character, but if Hamlet had listened to her, and not mistreated her, and if her father hadn’t controlled every aspect of her life, then perhaps she wouldn’t have committed suicide. The final scene of carnage is prompted by Laertes and Hamlet furiously grappling over her corpse. When Ophelia dies, any chance of reconciliation dies with her. The world collapses in on itself. This society is unsustainable. King Lear – we all know that this is prompted by Cordelia’s silence, her unwillingness to bend the knee and flatter in the face of tyranny. It is Lear’s disproportionate response to this that sets off the tragedy, and we get a play that is about entropy, aging and the destruction of the social order.  

There are exceptions to the rule. I’m sure a lot of you are crying out “but Lady Macbeth!” and it’s a good point. However, in terms of raw power, neither Lady Macbeth nor the witches are as powerful as they appear. The only power they possess is the ability to influence Macbeth; but ultimately it is Macbeth’s own ambition that prompts him to murder Duncan, and it is he who escalates the situation while Lady Macbeth suffers a breakdown. In this case you have women who are allowed to influence the play, but do so for the worse; they fail to be the good moral compasses needed. Goneril, Regan and Gertrude are similarly comparable; they possess a measure of power, but do not use it for good, and again society cannot renew itself.

Now we come to the comedies, where women do have the most control over the plot. The most powerful example is Rosalind in As You Like It. She pulls the strings in every avenue of the plot, and it is thanks to her control that reconciliation is achieved at the end, and all end up happily married. Much Ado About Nothing pivots around a woman’s anger over the abuse of her innocent cousin. If the men were left in charge in this play, no-one would be married at the end, and it would certainly end in tragedy. But Beatrice stands up and rails against men for their cruel conduct towards women and says that famous, spine-tingling line - oh God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the marketplace. And Benedick, her suitor, listens to her. He realises that his misogynistic view of the world is wrong and he takes steps to change it. He challenges his male friends for their conduct, parts company with the prince, and by doing this he wins his lady’s hand. The entire happy ending is dependent on the men realising that they must trust, love and respect women. Now it is a society that it worthy of being perpetuated. Regeneration and salvation lies in equality between the sexes and the love husbands and wives cherish for each other. The Merry Wives of Windsor - here we have men learning to trust and respect their wives, Flastaff learning his lesson for trying to seduce married women, and a daughter tricking everyone so she can marry the man she truly loves. A Midsummer Night’s Dream? The turmoil begins because three men are trying to force Hermia to marry someone she does not love, and Helena has been cruelly mistreated. At the end, happiness and harmony comes when the women are allowed to marry the men of their choosing, and it is these marriages that are blessed by the fairies.

What of the romances? In The Tempest, Prospero holds the power, but it is Miranda who is the key to salvation and a happy ending. Without his daughter, it is likely Prospero would have turned into a murderous revenger. The Winter’s Tale sees Leontes destroy himself through his own jealousy. The king becomes a vicious tyrant because he is cruel to his own wife and children, and this breach of faith in suspecting his wife of adultery almost brings ruin to his entire kingdom. Only by obeying the sensible Emilia does Leontes have a chance of achieving redemption, and the pure trust and love that exists between Perdita and Florizel redeems the mistakes of the old generation and leads to a happy ending. Cymbeline? Imogen is wronged, and it is through her love and forgiveness that redemption is achieved at the end. In all of these plays, without the influence of the women there is no happy ending.

The message is clear. Without a woman’s consent and co-operation in living together and bringing up a family, there is turmoil. Equality between the sexes and trust between husbands and wives alone will bring happiness and harmony, not only to the family unit, but to society as a whole. The Taming of the Shrew rears its ugly head as a counter-example, for here a happy ending is dependent on a woman’s absolute subservience and obedience even in the face of abuse. But this is one of Shakespeare’s early plays (and a rip-off of an older comedy called The Taming of a Shrew) and it is interesting to look at how the reception of this play changed as values evolved in this society. 

As early as 1611 The Shrew was adapted by the writer John Fletcher in a play called The Woman’s Prize, or The Tamer Tamed. It is both a sequel and an imitation, and it chronicles Petruchio’s search for a second wife after his disastrous marriage with Katherine (whose taming had been temporary) ended with her death. In Fletcher’s version, the men are outfoxed by the women and Petruchio is ‘tamed’ by his new wife. It ends with a rather uplifting epilogue that claims the play aimed:

The Taming of the Shrew and The Tamer Tamed were staged back to back in 1633, and it was recorded that although Shakespeare’s Shrew was “liked”, Fletcher’s Tamer Tamed was “very well liked.” You heard it here folks; as early as 1633 audiences found Shakespeare’s message of total female submission uncomfortable, and they preferred John Fletcher’s interpretation and his message of equality between the sexes.

So yes. The message we can take away from Shakespeare is that a world in which women are powerless and cannot or do not contribute positively to society and family is unsustainable. Men, given the power and left to their own devices, will destroy themselves. But if men and women can work together and live in harmony, then the whole community has a chance at salvation, renewal and happiness.  

elizabeth's grand theory of faramirs

(Note: I do not like Faramir in the movies, and this is mostly an exploration of their differences from that perspective. I tried to avoid bashing, but eh. It’s also really long, much longer than I originally expected. You can watch/listen to the whole thing here.)

–

I think I’ve finally–after all these years–had an epiphany about movie Faramir vs. book Faramir. How the discussions generally seem to go is this:

Faramir = nice and mild, thus where movie Faramir = nice and mild, movie Faramir = book Faramir. Where movie Faramir comes across as morally unjust, movie Faramir not only isn’t book Faramir, but falls outside the acceptable range of Faramirness. These unacceptable breaks are regarded as lapses in his character, inconsistencies between mostly-like-Faramir and not-at-all-like-Faramir.

On the other hand, if we look at movie Faramir’s character as a whole, I think two critical traits emerge. One, he’s generally accommodating, good-natured, and conflict-averse (not willful or independent; also not scholarly or otherworldly). Two, he’s overpoweringly driven by the desire to earn the affection and approval of his father–it defines who he is in a very large part, and is his overriding motivation for everything. 

It’s not that he’s ‘not exactly like book Faramir,’ but rather, exactly what his defenders always said: he’s a different person. He doesn’t have OOC lapses now and then; his personality is radically, and consistently, different.

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yall you cant just cut clean through a bone

fingon had to saw that sucker off

other variations i have seen:

1. strong-arm chopped off with a sword

2. cut through through the wrist joint

3. breaking the bones first and then cutting through the flesh wtf

Uh, why would you NOT go through the joint, that just seems like the obvious thing to do? Who the fuck thinks lumberjacking through the damn arm with a sword whilst airborne is a good idea?

Oh right, Fingon, carry on. 

I did a lot of research on this quite some time ago, because I’m a massive medicine nerd like that (not that that’s my day job or anything). It’s definitely easiest to go through the joint where the hand bones meet the wrist bones - least flesh and once you’ve addressed the outermost tendons, you could kind of “pop” the joint out with the right leverage on the blade. It’s called disarticulation.

Another method could have been to just take the thumb off and slip the cuff, because without the thumb joint most hands aren’t any wider than the wrist. There’d be some sawing involved, but through more meat than tendon (which is easier going) and the muscle is likely to be massively atrophied anyway, making it easier.

I’ve entertained that second option a few times because although what’s left of the hand is almost certainly dead and/or useless, it fits with one of the versions in HOME where Maedhros was maimed but didn’t lose his hand.

I like to think that Fingon did indeed do the amputation through the joint - and it was bloody difficult from eagle back, thank you - and then someone suggested ‘or you could have just cut his thumb off’ to him afterwards mostly just to watch the look on his face.

Nobody’s going to deny that, as it’s conventionally depicted, Middle-Earth - the setting of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings - is awfully monochrome. In art, basically everybody is drawn as white, and all major depictions in film have used white actors.

When this state of affairs is questioned, the defences typically revolve around “accuracy”, which can mean one of two things: fidelity to the source material, and the internal consistency of the setting. Being concerned primarily with languages and mythology, Tolkien left few clear descriptions of what the peoples of Middle-Earth actually look like, so in this case, arguments in favour of the status quo more often rest on setting consistency.

Of course, we need hold ourselves neither to fidelity nor to consistency - the author’s dead, and we can do what we want. However, what if I told you that there’s a reasonable argument to be made from that very standpoint of setting consistency that Aragorn - the one character you’d most expect to be depicted as a white dude - really ought to be portrayed as Middle Eastern and/or North African?

First, consider the framing device of Tolkien’s work. The central conceit of The Lord of the Rings - one retroactively extended to The Hobbit, and thereafter to later works - is that Tolkien himself is not the story’s author, but a mere translator of writings left behind by Bilbo, Frodo and other major characters. Similarly, Middle-Earth itself is positioned not as a fictional realm, but as the actual prehistory of our own world. As such, the languages and mythologies that Tolkien created were intended not merely to resemble their modern counterparts, but to stand as plausible ancestors for them.

Now, Aragorn is the king of a tribe or nation of people called the Dúnedain. Let’s take a closer look at them in the context of that prehistoric connection.

If the Dúnedain were meant to be the forebears of Western Europeans, we’d expect their language, Adûnaic, to exhibit signs of Germanic (or possibly Italic) derivation - but that’s not what we actually see. Instead, both the phonology and the general word-structure of Adûnaic seem to be of primarily Semitic derivation, i.e., the predominant language family throughout the Middle East and much of North Africa. Indeed, while relatively little Adûnaic vocabulary is present in Tolkien’s extant writings, some of the words we do know seem to be borrowed directly from classical Hebrew - a curious choice if the “men of the West” were intended to represent the ancestors of the Germanic peoples.

Additionally, the Dúnedain are descended from the survivors of the lost island of Númenor, which Tolkien had intended as an explicit analogue of Atlantis. Alone, this doesn’t give us much to go on - unless one happens to know that, in the legendarium from which Tolkien drew his inspirations, the Kingdoms of Egypt were alleged to be remnant colonies of Atlantis. This connection is explicitly reflected in the strong Egyptian influence upon Tolkien’s descriptions of Númenorean funereal customs. We thus have both linguistic and cultural/mythological ties linking the survivors of Númenor to North Africa.

Now, I’m not going to claim that Tolkien actually envisioned the Dúnedain as North African; he was almost certainly picturing white folks. However, when modern fans argue that Aragorn and his kin must be depicted as white as a matter of setting consistency, rather than one of mere authorial preference, strong arguments can be made that this need not be the case; i.e., that depicting the Dúnedain in a manner that would be racialised as Middle Eastern and/or North African by modern standards is, in fact, entirely consistent with the source material, ethnolinguistically speaking. Furthermore, whether they agreed with these arguments or not, any serious Tolkien scholar would at least be aware of them.

In other words, if some dude claims that obviously everyone in Tolkien is white and acts like the very notion of depicting them otherwise is some outlandish novelty, you’ve got yourself a fake geek boy.

(As an aside, if we turn our consideration to the Easterlings, the human allies of Sauron who have traditionally been depicted in art as Middle Eastern on no stronger evidence than the fact that they’re baddies from the East, a similar process of analysis suggests that they’d more reasonably be racialised as Slavic in modern terms. Taken together with the preceding discussion, an argument can be made that not only is the conventional racialisation of Tolkien’s human nations in contemporary art unsupported by the source material, we may well have it precisely backwards!)

IT’S A GOOD THING NONE OF YOU CAN SEE ME IRL CAUSE THERE;S A LOT OF YELLING

god this is good

About our “broken” fan culture

(P.S. Devin Faraci tried to fight with me and subsequently blocked me on Twitter because I retweeted a bunch of things he’s said over he years about fan culture, which are handily quoted in this Tumblr post! Please enjoy! :D )

So as we all know, movie critic Devin Faraci caused a minor internet brouhaha Tuesday with a controversial piece about online fandom. “Fandom is broken” — which piggybacks off a milder but similar article published last week by the AV Club and argues that fan culture has entered an ugly phase — was largely met with solemn nods of agreement by everybody except, uh, anybody who’s actually in fandom and actually knows what the fuck fan culture is about.

The main target of the piece is fan entitlement, which Faraci believes is the result of fandom being “post-fanfic.” That is, he thinks the current state of fandom — which can be overwhelmingly polarized and activist — is a natural result of fans having so much personal autonomy over their own fanfiction and other fanworks (including fanart, fan film, fan meta, shipping, and fan theories). Consequently, they seek to have the same level of creator control over their canons, too.

Before we go any further, let’s be clear here. Some people should be told at all times that their diminishment of cultures they don’t understand only makes them look small, petty, and ridiculous. Faraci is one of those people. He has demonstrated again and again that he has only a cursory understanding of what fanworks-based fan culture is, and utterly no interest in examining it to a closer degree.

Faraci’s consistent response to fanworks and remixing in general is to be cavalierly dismissive. Please enjoy this litany of Faraci being cavalierly and unilaterally dismissive of virtually every fannish practice, from shipping to fan films to fanfiction:

To anyone who’s spent any amount of time immersed in fan culture, Faraci’s attitudeabout fandom is unilaterally tone-deaf, laughably inaccurate, and full of hubris. He is jawdroppingly secure in his opinions, and when you attempt to suggest that fanworks are far more complex than he’s acknowledging — as I once did in a brief exchange after one of his derisive tweets about fan theories — he typically dismisses you out of hand or ignores you altogether:

And then there’s this gem:

When I retweeted all of these tweets just now, Faraci responded by a) calling me out to his 40,000 followers, most of whom are apparently male and who naturally began brigading and harassing me on Twitter; b) blocking me, and c) tweeting this:

So. Now that we’ve established that Devin Faraci is a dismissive demeaning sexist shitbag and everything he says about being “concerned” about “fan entitlement” is concern trolling because he HATES fanworks and fans who create stuff and overanalyze and generally actively engage with texts, let’s move on, shall we?

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Oh my god this is so worth reading

long and accurate

It puzzles me when people cite LOTR as the standard of “simple” or “predictable” or “black and white” fantasy. Because in my copy, the hero fails. Frodo chooses the Ring, and it’s only Gollum’s own desperation for it that inadvertently saves the day. The fate of the world, this whole blood-soaked war, all the millennia-old machinations of elves and gods, comes down to two addicts squabbling over their Precious, and that is precisely and powerfully Tolkien’s point. 

And then the hero goes home, and finds home a smoking desolation, his neighbors turned on one another, that secondary villain no one finished off having destroyed Frodo’s last oasis not even out of evil so much as spite, and then that villain dies pointlessly, and then his killer dies pointlessly. The hero is left not with a cathartic homecoming, the story come full circle in another party; he is left to pick up the pieces of what was and what shall never be again. 

And it’s not enough. The hero cannot heal, and so departs for the fabled western shores in what remains a blunt and bracing metaphor for death (especially given his aged companions). When Sam tells his family, “Well, I’m back” at the very end, it is an earned triumph, but the very fact that someone making it back qualifies as a triumph tells you what kind of story this is: one that is too honest to allow its characters to claim a clean victory over entropy, let alone evil. 

So where’s this silly shallow hippie fever-dream I’ve heard so much about? It sounds like a much lesser story than the one that actually exists.

+1 You know how Frodo leaves Sam with the legacy of the quest - the job of bearing witness to what happened - and the duty to finish and protect his writings? Tolkien lost all but one of his friends in WW1. He was founder member of a literary club at school - the TCBS. There was a larger group and a core of four. They all stayed friends, they kept writing and sharing their work with each other. And they were almost all killed. One of them, Geoffrey Smith, wrote this to Tolkien in 1916. My chief consolation is that if I am scuppered tonight – I am off on duty in a few minutes – there will still be left a member of the great T.C.B.S. to voice what I dreamed and what we all agreed upon.  […] May God bless you my dear John Ronald and may you say things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them if such be my lot. And that was his last letter. There’s something eerie about the way he seems to have pegged Tolkien as an eventual survivor.  Sam’s survival (and his emergence as the true hero of the book) are beautiful because they’re suffused with loss, because they’re not the grand conquering heroic narrative that on some level was “supposed” to happen.

Ok so we all know that the answer to “Where did Captain America learn to steal a car?” is “Nazi Germany” but I think the more pressing question here is when the fuck did this complete maniac get a driver’s license Because ok, Mighty Mouse 1.0 is too poor to own a car, too short to reach the pedals, has vision problems, and is a goddamn New Yorker in the motherfucking 1930s, why on earth would he ever have learned to drive? So this little bastard can’t even tell the gas from the brakes, he gets all beefified, he goes on tour with the USO. Unless one of the showgirls coached him through stalling out a car all over some Hollywood back lot, he still can’t drive. He goes to Europe. At some point, some genius looks at him and thinks “this strapping specimen of American hunkhood obviously knows his way around a vehicle, let’s give him a motorcycle,” and Steve “no parachute” Rogers is like “how hard could this be?” and promptly wraps himself around approximately eight trees at the same time. So then he’s kickin’ ass, fightin’ Hydra, and it’s just months of Bucky being like “give me the goddamn keys, Steven,” and Dum Dum and Morita endlessly encouraging his fucking insane Fury Road bullshit, like the Howling Commandos just use “grenade” as code for “Rogers” when they’re reporting why yet another truck has been destroyed beyond recognition. Yes, sir, another grenade, I agree, sir, it’s very odd that we keep losing vehicles in the same way, that’s the third this month alone So then he’s in the future and SHIELD is sorting his shit out, and they’re not going to force Captain goddamn America to wait in line at the DMV, they’re all in complete awe in him and they’ve seen the old reels of him on his bike, so when they issue him his driver’s license without any type of road test they go ahead and give him a motorcycle license too

and steve is like …neat.

Ok so then Bucky is back, shit is settled down, everyone’s heading somewhere and Steve gets in the driver’s seat and Buck’s like WHOA WHOA WHOA are you people out of your goddamn minds?! Why is Steve driving, is this some kind of mission, are we heading into a combat zone, is the plan for the vehicle to get blown up?? GIVE ME THE GODDAMN KEYS STEVEN And Sam is all “what are you talking about, Steve’s a great driver, I saw him jump his bike over a car once” And Buck is all “yes but have you seen him use a turn signal?” And Steve’s like, “Listen, we never needed to ‘signal’ our ‘turns’ in Nazi Germany.” And after that Bucky always drives. Fin.

okay but

this is basically how just about everyone in the us army in ww2 learned to drive

most infantrymen didn’t receive any instruction in vehicle use, but during ww2 they shipped about half a million jeeps overseas. most of them got used by logistics units and a lot got shipped to russia, but there were still so dang many of them that they would hand them to just about anyone who could have an excuse to use one.

gotta run a message? here’s a jeep. running gear up the line? take a jeep. got a 24 hour pass? just bring this jeep back safe, will you? you’re a cartoonist? here’s your own jeep. they handed them out like candy to everyone.

it wasn’t unreasonable on the face of it because the us was a car culture basically from the minute the car was invented, so most rural kids knew how to drive already. but tons of them didn’t, and at some point they’d almost certainly end up behind the wheel of a jeep.

as a result, accidents were hilariously common.

they pretty much assumed everyone knew how to drive based on the exact same logic used in this post. it was only after the war that somebody sat down and was like, yo, maybe we should make sure these kids know what a car is before we let them drive them.

I ACCIDENTALLY A HISTORY

well this got better improvement reblob

been thinking more about the sokovia accords and how… impractical they are? time for a random history lesson, but thinking back to the league of nations and how they, despite having no regulated army, had to decide unanimously whether or not they could even just send a country’s army/forces to go and help another country in need, and of course this led to decisions and crises being prolonged and left out to dry for way way longer than was necessary or helpful – basically bc nobody could decide whether or not it was a good idea to send x to y, it meant that shit just got worse and worse whilst all these powers wasted time deliberating, and the actual problem got worse. so. y’know. #teamcap

#ALSO HIGH KEY TONY BRINGING UP THE LEND LEASE BILL WASN’T AN ACCIDENT!!! #THE LEND LEASE BILL DRUG AMERICA TO THE PRECIPICE OF WWII ON THE PREDICATION THAT THE USA #WOULD OFFER MILITARY FUNDING AND EQUIPMENT TO ANY COUNTRY #WHOSE DEFENSE THE PRESIDENT DEEMED VITAL TO THE DEFENSE OF THE UNITED STATES #literally tony sits in that room with steve and reminds steve #of a time when the US was so afraid to enter a conflict #that it would throw money and equipment and power behind other countries as literal cannon fodder #and looks steve in the eye and says #essentially #he wants to let them do the same goddamn thing to the avengers #let the UN tell the Avengers where to go and what’s important #let the Accords dictate with no room for discussion at present time what conflicts and what countries and what enemies are vital #Tony Stark doesn’t understand what it’s like to lose your ability to make your own decisions because he’s never lost it #Steve Rogers has spent a lifetime having choices made for him

I damn near cracked up in the theater when Rhodey was trying to defend the accords on the basis of them coming from the United Nations. As if U.N. interventions and resolutions have never stalled out due to the veto of a single member of the security council. As if the U.N. hasn’t repeatedly failed to intervene in genocides. As if the U.N. has never been corrupt and made things worse. As if U.N. “peacekeepers” always lived up to their name, and never sexually exploited children, as if those who blew the whistle on this corruption were never punished.

If Steve has bothered to catch up on his 20th century history at all, he must have known about this shit. Add that to living through the failure of the League of Nations? Rhodey saying that this was all above board because it was from the U.N. must have sounded, at best, dangerously naive.

So Peggy Carter actually pointed out a solution of sorts:

Compromise where you can.

It does make sense to have oversight.  But what I found interesting is how Ross presented the idea of collateral damage to the Avengers, as if nothing similar has ever happened in the world before, done by any military force in any armed conflict. 

So it makes sense for the Avengers to at least be held accountable or to make some sort of reparations in situations such as Sokovia - where we all know shit went down because Tony Stark screwed up massively - or even Lagos, in which Wanda actually saved the lives of hundreds of people in the marketplace as opposed to the very regrettable loss of 11 Wakandans and an unknown number of other civilians in the office building. 

But what I find interesting is that Tony, Natasha and Rhodey never mentioned “Hey, let’s see where we can reach a compromise here because nobody wants the Avengers to be used in some political power play but we can’t just run around doing superhero shit without considering the people who might get caught in the crossfire.”

And yeah, if Rhodey called Cap “arrogant” for believing the “safest hands are still our own” - I would call him dangerously naive for believing the U.N.’s hands are safer, considering the World Security Council’s own disastrous decisions (e.g. decision to nuke New York and Project Insight). 

Also consider:  HYDRA infiltrated the US government all the way to the point where the Secretary of Defense was the head of HYDRA USA and the handler of the Winter Soldier, who was going to use him and three WMDs to engineer a massacre of twenty million people and an actual coup d’etat to overthrow the U.S. government.   What guarantee do we have that there aren’t any undiscovered HYDRA heads in other nations’ governments, especially when Zola himself admitted that HYDRA had infiltrated and nudged world events to get the planet ready to accept totalitarian rule?

So while I don’t hate #teamtony or Tony himself, this is ultimately why I am still #TeamCap. 

#also#SUDETENLAND#Steve remembers that shit#Steve watched that go down#even WITHOUT being caught up on modern history#which he 10000% is#probably more than anybody else tbh#he knows the risks in letting a council of nations make those calls#he’s not here for that shit

OH AND ANOTHER CIVIL WAR THING

I’ll shut up soon, really, I will but but but:

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Steve Rogers did, in fact, realize that something was off when he saw the outline of the woman’s odd bra (a push-up bra, he would later learn), but being an officer and a gentleman, he said that it was the game that gave the future away.

#EXCUSE ME MA’AM BUT YOUR TITTIES ARE NOT CONES I’M CALLING BULLSHIT (via)

No, see, this scene is just amazing. The costume department deserves so many kudos for this, it’s unreal, especially given the fact that they pulled off Peggy pretty much flawlessly.

1) Her hair is completely wrong for the 40’s. No professional/working woman  would have her hair loose like that. Since they’re trying to pass this off as a military hospital, Steve would know that she would at least have her hair carefully pulled back, if maybe not in the elaborate coiffures that would have been popular.

2) Her tie? Too wide, too long. That’s a man’s tie, not a woman’s. They did, however, get the knot correct as far as I can see - that looks like a Windsor.

3) That. Bra. There is so much clashing between that bra and what Steve would expect (remember, he worked with a bunch of women for a long time) that it has to be intentional. She’s wearing a foam cup, which would have been unheard of back then. It’s also an exceptionally old or ill-fitting bra - why else can you see the tops of the cups? No woman would have been caught dead with misbehaving lingerie like that back then, and the soft satin cups of 40’s lingerie made it nearly impossible anyway. Her breasts are also sitting at a much lower angle than would be acceptable in the 40’s.

Look at his eyes. He knows by the time he gets to her hair that something is very, very wrong.

so what you are saying is S.H.E.I.L.D. has a super shitty costume division….

Nope, Nick Fury totally did this on purpose.

There’s no knowing what kind of condition Steve’s in, or what kind of person he really is, after decades of nostalgia blur the reality and the long years in the ice (after a plane crash and a shitload of radiation) do their work. (Pre-crash Steve is in lots of files, I’m sure. Nick Fury does not trust files.) So Fury instructs his people to build a stage, and makes sure that the right people put up some of the wrong cues.

Maybe the real Steve’s a dick, or just an above-average jock; maybe he had a knack for hanging out with real talent. Maybe he hit his head too hard on the landing and he’s not gonna be Captain anymore. On the flipside, if he really is smart, then putting him in a standard, modern hospital room and telling him the truth is going to have him clamming up and refusing to believe a goddamn thing he hears for a really long time.

The real question here is, how long it does it take for the man, the myth, the legend to notice? What does he do about it? How long does he wait to get his bearings, confirm his suspicions, and gather information before attempting busting out?

Turns out the answer’s about forty-five seconds.

Sometimes clever posts die a quiet death in the abyss of the unreblogged. Some clever posts get attention, get comments, get better. Then there’s this one which I’ve watched evolve into a thing of brilliance.

#his little jaw twitch well done chris ( @thewomaninthetanjacket )

Oh shit I hadn’t noticed that, god this just gets better and better.

I love everything about this.

Moral Injury, Tragedy, and Kylo Ren

I was a little trepidatious about covering the topic since it’s sensitive. I am not being flippant by connecting this to Star Wars.  I promise.  Bear with me.  Works referenced sprinkled throughout.

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In January of 2013, Timothy Kudo, a Marine and veteran of the War in Afghanistan wrote an article “I killed people in Afghanistan.  Was I right or wrong?” In February of 2013, twenty-two service men and women killed themselves per day.  Timothy Kudo eventually took his own life.

From his article:

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The Theater of War

From The Theater of War by Bryan Dorries:

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Moral Injury

Moral Injury is related to, but distinct from, PTSD.  A morally injurious event is a transgression which “hatters moral and ethical expectations that are rooted in religious or spiritual beliefs, or culture-based, organizational, and group-based rules about fairness, the value of life, and so forth.” (x).  They are perceived by the actors as gross moral violations.  Not every soldier who kills in war (or participates in killing or other acts many would find transgressive) will experience moral injury.  But a significant portion will.

This is extremely taboo to say.  An article in a prominent political journal rebutted Kudo was titled “A Morally Confused Marine.”  I will not link to or quote it here.

Timothy Kudo’s experience challenges a couple of very dearly held and nigh-taboo-to-question modern beliefs.  First, that if we kill in the context of a moral war (if there is such a thing) it will protect us from feeling violated by killing.  And second, that we have absolute free will.  That is, regardless of the situation, there is a right choice.  There is a best choice.  And that we will always have the resources to make it.

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The Ancient Greek Conception of Evil and Choice

This is not what the Greeks believed.  The Greeks had a blended idea of free will and fate.  Plato explained it as an arrow.  We have the ability to aim the arrow.  We can make the choice when to fire it, how to aim it.  But once it is in the air, it is not in our control.  They believed we had a nature.  An acorn does not become an elephant, it becomes an oak tree.  We develop into our own fullness, but along a course.  And over time, our actions mold us (which is where we get the word character, from the Greek for engraving).

We have swung very far in the direction of free will, and of a free will idea of sin.  The Greeks believed evil was a thing you could do, but it was also a thing that could contaminate you and prevent you from being what you were meant to be.  Moral injury, as it is perceived, is more like that.  It is more like a disease.  It feels like being tainted.

(work referenced)

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Tragedy as Ritual

After decades of constant war (in which most adult males participated), the Greeks had a clear understanding of what war did to the people in it, and they had a medicine for it:  the spring Festival, the central ritual of which was a tragedy.  The most prominent tragic playwright was Sophocles, a general, and he wrote for his men.  To give you a sense of scale:

You were not considered an adult man unless you had attended this festival. A third of the population went to each performance.

This was not just entertainment.  This was designed for mass mourning.  This was meant to portray what happens, without judgment, without sugar-coating.  Without trying to enforce “this should not happen” onto anything.  This was a reflection of what does and did happen.

Viewing a tragedy with a third of your city in this mass spectacle meant you saw your experience reflected on stage, and you mourned for it, and you did that with everyone you knew.  You experienced catharsis.  That word has changed to something else, but in the Greek, it was feeling your emotions in a safe setting, feel connected with others, and they would lose their negative hold on you.

Nobody had to tell you you were not alone.

You were not alone.  That was and is important.  That is what drama can do and be in people’s lives.

—

Moral Injury Outside of War

My own editorializing:

I personally believe moral injury applies outside of the context of war.  Suffice to say, I know this applies outside of soldiers from personal experience.  

I believe this idea applies to victims of abuse, neglect, mental illness, and oppression.  Anyone who has been put in a situation with no right answers, who must survive, may have done things they are not proud of.

There’s a lot of shame around that.  We cannot talk about it, because admitting to it is like admitting being tainted.  It feels like it invites blame from people who want to believe bad things happen to bad people.  What one has to do to survive is beyond taboo to talk about.

I do not mean to take the spotlight away from soldiers.  I want to emphasize if you’ve felt this, your experience is more common than you might think.

The only place the taboo is, almost, lifted is in art.  Art, especially theater, lets us have a communal experience.  Lets us portray without judging.  Lets us feel compassion and pity without excusing.  It lets groups of people who feel immensely isolated and unable to express their experience feel like they are not alone.

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Kylo Ren as Tragic Protagonist

Maybe the mythology Americans are best versed in is Star Wars.  We don’t have any media a third of everyone holds in common.  But Star Wars is pretty close.

There are elements of Greek tragedy in the OT, especially in Vader’s final scenes.  But you know who is a textbook Greek tragic figure?

Kylo goddamn Ren.  I am not minimizing Rey or Finn’s role; they remain the protagonist and deuteragonist of the movie respectively.  But his arc is still classic Greek tragedy in structure.

How do I know?  Let’s break out motherfucking Aristotle’s Poetics (or a summary of it, he’s a dense read):

The incentive moment is the discussion with Vader’s helmet.  

His driving conflict is that he is not yet committed to the darkness.  Because his is a complex tragedy (more on that in a minute), he has two climaxes, the bridge scene and being defeated by Rey.

Aristotle stresses that Tragedies should not be episodic at their best.  However, I believe TFA’s plot stands on its own sufficiently to still qualify.  He has a complete arc within the film.

Complex Tragedy

peripeteia:

anagnorisis:

The catastrophe is his defeat and his final scene of suffering is being abandoned in the snow to die.

2. He arouses both pity and fear.  The pity is widely covered and causes much fanboy and girl gnashing of teeth.  Seriously, you can’t throw a rock without hitting an article trying to solve this as a tragedy by getting rid of pity as an element.  He’s not really also pitiful.  Or we’re supposed to laugh at the pitiful parts.  Or we’re supposed to think of him as a school shooter or something.

Make no mistake: this is people trying to worm their way out of feelings, or out of having to contemplate limited free will.  Actual fucking Greek tragedies challenge the taboo against challenging absolute free will we discussed above.

Anyway, but one of the turns of his character arc, the peripeteia, is an act of moral injury.  From the script:

Kylo Ren’s Roles

Kylo Ren is explicitly a knight, a soldier.  He is coded as mentally ill (his room in production was called “the padded room”).  Based on a vivid description of Snoke’s interaction with Ren in the novel, he is coded as groomed and abused.  As discussed above, I believe those populations are susceptible to moral injury. And that is exactly who seeing a person like Kylo Ren portrayed can serve.  Maybe not everyone in that group, or everyone who has experienced moral injury.  But I think a lot of people.

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Applying this to life

Kylo Ren serves a function.  I can only speak for myself, as someone who has experienced moral injury:  It is amazing to see someone like Kylo Ren and know so many people have also seen it and felt what I feel.

Kylo Ren has helped me find a community.  Kylo Ren has helped me say, publicly, “there but for the fucking grace of God go I.”   I watch Kylo Ren fuck up, and it is cathartic.  I watch Kylo Ren and know someone fucking gets it.  I watch Kylo Ren and hope someone like me has the vocabulary to both avoid his fate and have compassion for him.  By having compassion for him, I have compassion for myself.  He is not excused.  What he does is not portrayed as a good thing.  Not even remotely.  

But it is portrayed.  It is not solved, it is not made pretty, it’s not made black or white.

It’s the truth, and we’re all watching it together.

Does Driver know about this?

Driver not only knows about this, he narrated a book about it, the dude who wrote the book is on the board of the charity Driver founded with his wife, and the Charity is about community for soldiers through theater.  In case you were not convinced this is a big deal to Driver.

If dude doesn’t know how this applies to Star Wars it is a hell of a fuckin’ coincidence.  By the way, donate to his charity.

Driver gets this.  Not only that, but he knows exactly what this could mean to some people.  Isn’t that neat?

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Wrapping it Up

Kylo Ren’s story as tragedy is not only good writing and acting, it is transcendent writing.  It is important.  It is worthwhile.  It is supported by the actual text of the movie and by the stated intentions of the actor with the character.  It is consistent with his known interests outside of it.

And it’s good.  It’s very very good.  And given how hard some people try to worm out of it, it’s needed.

Miscellany

I see a lot of the Sophocles tragedy Philoctetes in Luke Skywalker.  Philoctetes is left on an island to rot after a grave injury.  He survives nine years until an Oracle tells the Greeks only he can save them.  But he is so heartbroken (beyond heartbroken) by being abandoned to suffer with a festering wound he cannot return except by divine intervention.

Read this post by @oldadastra too.

@loveyournightmare, you want meta?  You got meta.

This is a fucking phenomenal post, OP.  Even the first half alone is incredible before we even get to star wars.  Thank you so much for writing this up.  This is fantastic.  I’ve learned a lot of useful and very sad stuff here (again, even before we got to star wars).

Ok so we all know that the answer to “Where did Captain America learn to steal a car?” is “Nazi Germany” but I think the more pressing question here is when the fuck did this complete maniac get a driver’s license Because ok, Mighty Mouse 1.0 is too poor to own a car, too short to reach the pedals, has vision problems, and is a goddamn New Yorker in the motherfucking 1930s, why on earth would he ever have learned to drive? So this little bastard can’t even tell the gas from the brakes, he gets all beefified, he goes on tour with the USO. Unless one of the showgirls coached him through stalling out a car all over some Hollywood back lot, he still can’t drive. He goes to Europe. At some point, some genius looks at him and thinks “this strapping specimen of American hunkhood obviously knows his way around a vehicle, let’s give him a motorcycle,” and Steve “no parachute” Rogers is like “how hard could this be?” and promptly wraps himself around approximately eight trees at the same time. So then he’s kickin’ ass, fightin’ Hydra, and it’s just months of Bucky being like “give me the goddamn keys, Steven,” and Dum Dum and Morita endlessly encouraging his fucking insane Fury Road bullshit, like the Howling Commandos just use “grenade” as code for “Rogers” when they’re reporting why yet another truck has been destroyed beyond recognition. Yes, sir, another grenade, I agree, sir, it’s very odd that we keep losing vehicles in the same way, that’s the third this month alone So then he’s in the future and SHIELD is sorting his shit out, and they’re not going to force Captain goddamn America to wait in line at the DMV, they’re all in complete awe in him and they’ve seen the old reels of him on his bike, so when they issue him his driver’s license without any type of road test they go ahead and give him a motorcycle license too

and steve is like …neat.

Ok so then Bucky is back, shit is settled down, everyone’s heading somewhere and Steve gets in the driver’s seat and Buck’s like WHOA WHOA WHOA are you people out of your goddamn minds?! Why is Steve driving, is this some kind of mission, are we heading into a combat zone, is the plan for the vehicle to get blown up?? GIVE ME THE GODDAMN KEYS STEVEN And Sam is all “what are you talking about, Steve’s a great driver, I saw him jump his bike over a car once” And Buck is all “yes but have you seen him use a turn signal?” And Steve’s like, “Listen, we never needed to ‘signal’ our ‘turns’ in Nazi Germany.” And after that Bucky always drives. Fin.

C-3PO makes me laugh because you have to remember he was assembled by a child out of things from a scrap heap. Everything about him makes sense if you bear that in mind. Anakin wanted a droid who could help his mother, but the only AI package he could find was one somebody threw out for being too fussy. The combination of tweaking to give him a worried/caring personality makes him constantly anxious. A protocol droid comes with a fair amount of language packages, but why stop there? Somebody threw out like, three different galactic language dictionaries because they weren’t the recent edition. Just load ‘em all up. all of them, even the packs that contain things like ewok and a thousand variants of different manufacturers’ droid codecs. don’t add half the other requirements most legal protocol droids have included at the factory like emergency wipe protocols or shutdown failsafes, or programmed obsolescence. Build that sucker out of non-commercial materials that are already over a hundred years old and still good, tweak it to withstand tatooine of all places.

so now you have this droid that is over thirty years old and it could never be obsolete because it was never manufactured by anybody but a kid on a sand ball somewhere, it’s never running down because it was built to last on tatooine and there’s nothing programmed in to try and urge you to buy the latest model because there is no latest model. 3P0 is simultaneously totally useless yet hyper functional because he was not made according to any specs except “the best most toughest things possible to help my mom for a long long time on a hot desert planet”

I let out a very soft gasp

#‘its experiences’ did you mean: #poe dameron awake at 4AM singing BB-8 songs he makes up as he goes #poe dameron running back into a firefight to save a disabled BB-8 from certain destruction (sustaining a shoulder wound) #poe dameron speaking in binary even though BB-8 tells him he sounds absurdly stupid #poe dameron sewing a little hole into all his tents so that BB-8 can charge next to him while he sleeps even when they’re on recon missions #poe dameron referring to BB-8 as ‘my friend’ and making sure his programming equips him to fully understand what that means #poe dameron always asking BB-8 to do what he needs instead of ordering it #poe dameron rewriting the astromech default programming that would force BB-8 to call him master #poe dameron rebuilding BB-8 by hand himself whenever BB-8 gets damaged #and keeping his hard drive and his audio sensors live so he can reassure BB-8 as he goes that it’s all going fine #IS THAT WHAT YOU MEANT BY ‘EXPERIENCES' #DID YOU MEAN ‘POE DAMERON' #because that’s what BB-8 would mean #‘strong loyalty subprogram’ is one way to put it #‘loves poe dameron right back’ is another (via @gyzym )

HOW VERY DARE

I was thinking about Tolkien and accents today, and I really like this idea that even within the Fellowship, you’ve got this happy cacophony of different accents. Boromir speaking Sindarin with a distinctly Gondorian lilt, his Westron a functional thing cobbled-together from the slang of his men and what he learned in order to speak with traders, messengers, foreigners.

Aragorn, so widely-traveled, being an excellent mimic—he can speak Dalish like a man of Laketown or a Haradrim like trader from South Gondor, but in moments of sincerity or seriousness, he slips into the tones of Rivendell, with all the careful articulation of someone who was scoffed at for every slip into the harsher pronunciation of Arnor.

Legolas who speaks Sindarin as his mother-tongue cool and green and fine, but whose Westron is harshly-accented, borrowed from fishermen and dwarves.

Gimli who speaks Khuzdul with that particular Longbeard cadence, which not even growing up in the Iron Hills as part of the Erebor diaspora could shake from him. Exile from Erebor forced many of the dwarves to become, if not fluent, then at least conversant in the languages of Men, in order to trade and travel on soil not their own—Gimli is no exception. (It amuses him to no end to speak to Aragorn in Dalish, and have Legolas puff up, offended not to be part of the conversation.)

Merry and Frodo and Pippin and Sam speaking Westron like the country bumpkins they are, all rounded vowels and drawls, but happy to learn all the languages that fly about them, laughing with their fellows when they mangle even the simplest of Sindarin words.

All of them sitting around the fire, telling stories, laughing at Gandalf when he can’t remember the Westron word for the Sindarin word for the Quendian word for the Valarin, who protests that he is an old man and has known too many tongues, so stop laughing, Peregrin Took, you are spraying crumbs everywhere.

#oh noooo I’m gonna cry this is perfect #but Aragorn oh my god oh my //god// #because imagine little tiny Estel in Rivendell trying to learn Elvish #and Elrond is so patient with him and doesn’t chide him for his accent #but the other elves are sometimes less kind #teasing the young human for sound so much like a man when he speaks! #we don’t need to hear your heavy footsteps to tell you’re mortal Estel we can hear it in your words! #so Aragorn trains himself to talk exactly like them #memorizes how their cadences change on certain words or how they string their words together #like one long line in a song or poem that doesn’t break until the end of the sentence #and eventually he loses whatever his original accent was #because it is so engrained in him to mimic others that that’s what he falls back on no matter what #he doesn’t know how to speak unless he sounds like a native speaker and that saves his life on more than one occasion #but he eventually finds that he’s spent so long perfecting the voices of others #that he’s almost entirely lost his own (willowenigma)

poe dameron, about as force sensitive as a potato, taking jedi-in-training rey and finn to his homeworld to show them the tree. sitting back, smiling and basking in their wide-eyed excitement, because this thing the two of them share is utterly inaccessible to him, but all the more wonderful for that.

poe telling them about growing up with the force sensitive tree and how to him it was only ever just a tree: a great, solid tree he could climb and hide in and nap or have family picnics under, but nothing more.

poe telling them about luke skywalker visiting his family when poe was five and a conversation with luke that he can’t quite remember, and luke telling his parents some things afterwards and then leaving, with a smile and a ruffle of poe’s hair and nothing more 

(the overall gist of luke’s conclusion was ‘100% certified muggle, but the good news is he wouldn’t know the dark side if it roundhouse kicked him in the teeth’. poe’s parents, both of them soldiers with soldiers’ superstitions, took this as a bit of a prophecy)

‘were you disappointed?’ rey asks. for a second, poe considers dismissing it with an easy laugh, but the truth is he had been. bitterly, bitterly disappointed when he figured out what he was going to miss out on, hearing about other kids who got picked, hearing about the things they could do, because when you’re five years old the prospect of learning to make things float with your mind is pretty much the pinnacle of coolness. 

‘a little,’ he says. ‘for a while. then my mother took me flying.’