Interesting video by Jessie Gender on the "redemption" of Syril Karn in Andor. It prompted some thinky thoughts I'd rather put here than throw at YouTube. (Andor S2 spoilers)



I agree with Jessie's contention that white men are often treated with kid gloves when it comes to creating space for them to see the error of their ways, while marginalized people's lives are dismissed and errors castigated. Jessie cites the difference in fan discourse between sorrow that Syril died without a chance at redemption and near silence that Cinta (a queer woman of color) got summarily killed off. I'd add that this is partly because Syril is a better written character—but, then, white men have long been better written characters. That is evidence of her point.

But I'm frustrated by recent fandom's/leftwing YouTube's discourse on "redemption." I love a good redemption story; it's my favorite kind, but I think we need to dig deeper into the concept because, too often, it gets used without being explored.

"Redemption" is (at least primarily) a Christian concept. Traditionally, it refers to being saved from damnation, and this entails is a mix of personal responsibility and external acceptance. It requires personal responsibility in the form of actions like repentance of sins, penance, baptism, truly reformed behavior, etc. It requires external acceptance because ultimately it's God's to accept or withhold, and in many versions of Christianity, it cannot fully be attained without God's grace, that is, without that mystical quality of salvation that one cannot earn but is given.

When we use in secular discussions, as of characters like Syril Karn or DS9's Garak, or real people (Jessie mentions JK Rowling), we often end up with formulations like video commenter elanthys makes: "But not everyone deserves redemption, and not everyone who does gets it...." What does this actually mean? "Deserves" according to whom? "Gets" from whom? In the theological context, the answer is God. God can grant grace to someone who doesn't "deserve" it. (In traditional Calvinism, no one deserves it.) All redeemed people ultimately "get" it from God.

So who grants redemption in secular society? I think, by default, it usually translates to "us," the people having the conversation, the good people, the good leftists, the anti-fascists, etc. "We" judge that some do not deserve redemption. "We," sometimes in error, withhold it from those who may. What does it mean to be redeemed? In Christianity, it means heading to heaven. In the secular context, it means being socially forgiven, I guess? No longer cancelled, etc.? Slate wiped clean?

I do not trust myself to determine who metaphysically "deserves" anything. There are people I have not forgiven, but that says more about me than them. I do believe in accountability, which is, in essence, what Jessie is calling for. Accountability is a comparatively easy concept, if hard to achieve. If you've done harm, own it and take proportionally appropriate steps to repair it or—if it can't be repaired—do other, ideally related work to bring more good into the world.

Syril is never accountable for his actions. If he hadn't died and was to have a "redemption" arc, I think he would have had to spend the rest of his life trying to repair the damage or, more accurately, change the system so similar damage does not continue. But did he "deserve redemption"? I don't like the God-like insight that question presupposes.

Personally, I'm a Buddhist, and I prefer a Buddhist framework: that we are all on the path to awakening. We're just in different places, going at different rates, and taking different "side trails" to get there. The question of what we "deserve" is fairly meaningless. We are where we are; we carry the karma that we carry and work through it as best we can. And we can, to an extent, recognize that in each other and help each other through it.

I feel the need for some "escapist" literature (or video), and right now I want to escape into something dreamy and otherworldly. I would love recommendations.

An example of the type of thing would be Angel's Egg, the 1980s short anime. On the fast-paced, action, heartwarming end, maybe the recent movie, Flow. At the intellectual/concrete extreme, maybe A Voyage to Arcturus.

Seeking stories with...

* nature/beauty
* a dreamy or surreal quality - like it may be a dream or metaphor or afterlife or enchantment or something.
* on the slow, quiet end.
* vaguely old-timey in setting, like anywhere from 150-7000 years ago or the rough equivalent in an otherworld.
* some story/plot, though it can be slight, long enough that I get to spend time with the characters: novella or long; hour-ish video or longer.

Don't want...

* anything YA
* anything obviously moralizing;
* any "strong feminist heroine" or anything that smacks of contemporary politics of any kind from any side of the aisle;
* anything fast-paced or action packed. (I'm fine with Flow at the extreme end of fast.)
* anything that "feels" like it was written in and for the 2020s or 2010s;
* anything really short.

Fine with or Fine with Caveats...

* melancholy, dark, horror-tinged if not super dark/depressing/horror
* relatively thin characters, as long as what's there isn't any of the "don't want."
* romance if it's subtle, not the main point, not stereotypical. (Romance will be an easier sell if it's m/m.)
* child, teen characters as long as the story itself doesn't feel aimed at modern kids/teens (see Angel's Egg).
* written/created in pretty much any time period from ancient to present, if it more or less fits the above.

Thanks in advance for rec's!

My overall take: it’s excellent, and my chief feeling at the end was “disappointed.” This is only partly the series’ fault. It’s partly the inevitability to ending up at Rogue One, which is melancholy. It’s partly that it was a long three years’ wait with high expectations, and there’s no way a handful of episodes could live up to those fantasies.

The series falters in its own right due to its compressed timeline. You can tell it was four seasons’ worth of storytelling compressed into one. It reminds of seasons 4 and 5 of Babylon 5: it’s clear they had a good plan, and they had to pivot hard to align it with a different production timeline. They couldn’t quite pull it off, but they came about as close as anyone could. I hope there may be either deleted scenes (maybe a directors’ cut?) or a novelization/comic book that uses the five-year story they clearly had mapped out, character building and all. I’d buy it. The action, script, filming, etc. remain top notch.

As many have noted, this series is incredibly important, trenchant, and bloody prophetic as a fictionalization of the fascist upsurge we are currently living through. At times, it was difficult to watch because it hit so close to home. That’s needed and deserves high praise.

Spoilers follow( Read more... )

Feral Historian has a great (spoilery) video on Blake's 7 as a sadly realistic take on rebellion:

Okay, in my belated Arcane thing, I’m going to jump in with some character analysis, specifically arguing that Silco is the same basic character type as Scrooge, not in terms of their ultimate arcs but in terms of their psychological dynamics. Spoilers for S1 and maybe tiny bit of S2 under the cut ( Read more... )

This is a comment I posted on Jessie Gender's patreon in response to the podcast episode she did with Vera on the Crusade ep., "The Path of Sorrows." I'm not sure the review is available off Patreon (I certainly encourage joining her patreon), but the gist was they liked the Gideon and Matheson plots okay and were annoyed by the Galen plot.

Mild spoilers for Crusade (including some info on where it was headed post-series cancellation and Technomage novels)

Your readings are really well explained and make sense, yet my response to this episode is just about the opposite of both of yours. I find most of it fairly boring/okay but enjoy the Galen parts, and I wanted to share why. Personal context: I watched Crusade when it first aired when I was in my early 20s, so my core response to it is very “romantic young adult” and less sensitive to overused tropes than I would be today. (I think that’s also true of our pop culture, in general, so I give the fridging some handicap points for being from the 1990s.) If I were encountering the series for the first time today, I’d probably share more of your critical disappointments. As it is, I love Crusade, not as well-made art but like you love a flawed friend who died young but lives in your memory. What I love most about the series is Galen, so let me do a reading of his character.

Re. the bitter atheism, I am more in Jessie’s camp that this works as being in character. I’ll refer briefly to the Technomage novels, though I’m on the fence about whether I personally consider them canon. (I’ve heard JMS does, but they also contradict bits of the series, so...?) But if we sort of follow the novels, Galen in Crusade is only about thirty, though Peter Woodward was older. At roughly the time Isabel died/Galen met Gideon, he was about twenty. His experience of losing Isabel is effectively a late adolescent experience. Since her death, he has been stuck in that grief, which means his attitude toward her death—and much of his emotional life—is still rather adolescent. His slightly incoherent splice between denying God/hating God is stupid, yes. It’s an adolescent response; it’s rather Ivan Karamazovian, another “angry young man” with a big brain and a lot emotional immaturity. The point of the episode, for Galen’s character, is pretty explicitly that he’s stuck; he can’t forgive and move on. That’s a feature, not a bug in his character.

Galen’s self-construal is deeply invested in having someone to love. His sense of duty is sweeping: to find a cure for the plague, etc. But his sense of his emotional life’s meaning reduces largely to investment in the object of his love. And he keeps losing those objects. He lost his parents as a child. He next attached to Elric, who died, then to Isabel, who died. And then he attached to Gideon. Light spoilers in the next paragraph for JMS’s plans for the later show...

JMS’s plan, as I recall, was that Galen and Gideon’s friendship would break down badly. Gideon, for some valid reasons, would feel betrayed by Galen, and working through that would probably have taken a good chunk of the planned five years. This could have been, in its own way, Crusade’s Londo and G’Kar arc. This would have been absolutely agonizing for Galen because Gideon’s friendship is emotionally his reason for living.

This episode is a building block in a narrative that was never built. But just as the first half of S1 of B5 is pretty clunky, Crusade clunked but was going somewhere. Its character work, especially around Galen, Gideon, and Dureena, had the potential to be amazing.

A while back on Facebook, I was part of a thread where someone asked JMS if he’d ever share his plans for Crusade in more detail. His response was that asking him that was like asking a parent whose child died at four where they would have sent them to college, and he requested never to be asked that again. I took that to heart. We’ll never really know the story of Crusade, and I’ll always regret that and always honor what it started to try to do.

via annavere

"TV questions: pick your five favourite TV shows (in no particular order) and answer the following questions. Don’t cheat!"

I don't know if these are literally my fav's, but they're the ones that came to mind (excluding anime). There may be spoilers below.

1. Blake’s 7
2. Andor
3. Game of Thrones
4. Crusade
5. Doctor Who
( Read more... )

Content warning: some critique of the left by someone on the left behind the cut. Please feel free to skip if you're emotionally bleeding too much for self-critical, political strategy talk.

Like pretty much everyone on my reading list here, I'm pummeled by this election. A little surprised by the degree of landslide but mostly just scared. Not looking forward to a minimum of four years under fascism.

A big hug to everyone who is tired and scared.

I'm trying to think, though, about why so many voted for him. Some are hateful racists, etc., but that's not over half the country. Misinformation and propaganda are also huge, of course. Beyond that, these are some reasons I see, based on my vantage point teaching service classes in higher education...( Read more... )

I was watching a YouTube video essay on girls being acculturated to the male gaze and learning to perform for it from a very young age—and it hit me like a ton of bricks: I didn’t experience this. I don’t think I had any awareness of a male gaze until well into my young adulthood (maybe 25-30), when I did become aware of occasionally being catcalled or—on the nicer end—being praised by a passing guy for looking nice today.

But from my earliest memories all the way through puberty, all of high school, and well into college, I never had a sense of males “gazing” at me or a sense that I should perform for their benefit.

I wanted to be a pretty girl. I had a sense of what that meant aesthetically and enjoyed dress-up. But my sense from childhood through high school was mediated almost exclusively by my social feelings about other girls. I wanted to be as good as they were (or better, let’s be honest). I wanted to be acceptable to them—not sexually, but socially. I didn’t want to look sexy; I wanted to look cool, not necessarily chasing-the-latest-trend cool (though I pegged my jeans like everyone else) but what I considered to be looking good in my own body.

Much this, though, happened as solitary dress-up “play,” even into adulthood. In public, I mostly wanted to look nice but not attract attention. And I wanted to be comfortable, so I wore pants and T-shirts as much as I was allowed and mostly based “looking nice” on whether I felt things fit well. This dressing down may have been a large part of why the “male gaze” never imposed itself on me: and the glasses and being a skinny bean. But I wasn’t “ugly,” and teen boys being teen boys, I expect some of them “gazed” at me (and probably everything else female), but I was literally never aware of it. I was so unaware of it that by the time I graduated high school, I was painfully convinced that no guy would ever find me attractive or ask me out. But my solution to this was not to dress sexy; it was to “stop being so shy” and start asking out the guys I liked. (Yeah, that didn’t work.)

Thinking about this now—how totally oblivious to the ubiquitous “gaze” I was—I wonder if this is a sign that I have always been a friendship bonder (and maybe asexual-adjacent), that bonding through sexuality just never occurred to me. The idea that a guy would find me sexy on a purely physical level always has felt uncomfortable and, frankly, insulting to my personhood. And while I definitely had a physical taste in guys, I couldn’t imagine ever crushing on them without admiring them personally, mainly for what I perceived as their moral values and intellect. Meanwhile, at the end of the day, my central relationships, the ones that mattered and sustained and were real and badly scarred me, were always friendships, with girls, guys; it didn’t matter.

I wonder how genuinely uncommon my experience is, or is it just one that doesn’t get talked about?