labingi

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.

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.

Since the end of the most recent season of Doctor Who, my family has been marathoning through Who old and new, and had I but world enough and time, that might generate a lot of meta. As it is, here's one essay on the Doctor and Susan. Basically, I'll argue that the issue of Susan, teased in this latest season, should be addressed. It's time, and it has important story potential. (Content warning for dysfunctional parenting.)

In the beginning, it was:



Spoilers for TV canon through the most recent season( Read more... )

I admit it: I was intrigued by the thought of a book by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville, so I bought The Book of Elsewhere hot off the press, and I liked it quite a bit. Here’s a little guide to it.

Brief description: John Wick if he were 80,000 years old. (Not a spoiler; this is all over the advertising.)

tl;dr: I recommend this book to people who like SF&F that thoughtfully explores the experience of a preternaturally old protagonist (and who don’t hate John Wick).

Spoiler Free Review

This book follows the adventures of an 80,000-year-old protagonist with super fighting powers, trying to figure out how to become mortal. Nominally set in the present day, about half of it is flashbacks to various points in our hero’s timeline, which do a nice job of fleshing out his experiences and how he has affected the lives of others.

The book’s great strength is its protagonist, who is genuinely interesting and thoughtfully developed. Its great weakness is plot structure, of which is has little, and what it has is not very compelling. These two things are related. This book reminds me of nothing so much as God Emperor of Dune in following a very powerful, very old protagonist who, due to his power and age, just doesn’t have much at stake emotionally. This makes sense. In both cases, the protagonist has enough experience and wisdom to take things in stride and not be deeply fazed by just about anything from life to death to torture to betrayal, etc. The price of this plausible and thought-provoking characterization is low plot conflict and relatively little story momentum. The lack of momentum leads to a fairly week ending, though I think part of its weakness is also due to somewhat shallow exploration (and setup) of themes.

I think both these books could have pulled it off better, but not by all that much. This difficulty is partly baked into the concept. Actually, in both cases, my personal revision recommendation would have been to increase the prominence of the female presence—I’ll be vague to stay spoiler free.

The book gets extra points from me for the character of the pig, which is an excellent example of a non-human animal character who is not (much?) anthropomorphized but—as an animal—is an important character (like, for example, Moby Dick). Well done.

( Spoilery Review )

( Two Sociopolitical Critiques )

I’ve been quiet about this season because I’ve really been enjoying it, and critique inspires more words than praise. I love Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor. As inherently tired as I am of contemporary, young, London woman companions, I really like Ruby, too, and I’m enjoying the stories themselves more than any season since the Tenth Doctor. But I do have a few thinky thoughts about the handling of race in the last two episodes: lots of praise, some frustration, and some hypothetical suggestions.

Spoilers below the cut( Read more... )

A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) by David Lindsay is the best book I have read in a long time (sci fi or otherwise). It’s an odd duck: never a huge success but never out of print, influential for many, apparently including C. S. Lewis in his Space Trilogy, but often absent from the Great Works of Science Fiction lists. Until I happened on a YouTube video about it, I had never heard of it or Lindsay.

Perhaps all this isn’t surprising because the book really is odd; it may be a quintessential example a very well-written “niche” work, destined to be admired by a few and passed by by most.

Like The Space Trilogy, A Voyage to Arcturus uses a science fiction setting to stage a philosophical exploration of the meaning of life, morality, and so on. This staging is so similar, in fact, that I initially expected the book to be an allegory or thought experiment on Christian cosmology. It is not. In fact, while it echoes themes from real-world religions and philosophies, the cosmology it seems to settle on is not quite like anything else I’ve encountered. (I won’t say more here due to spoilers.)

I find this book hard to understand. I could not predict where it was going, even up to the last page. And while I found the ending a bit anti-climactic (maybe I just didn’t get it), I like all that. I like being surprised; I like being perplexed. I would take that a hundred times over being bored by sameness. I am also in awe of Lindsay’s worldbuilding. Overall this book is immensely ahead of its time. It was published in 1920, but I would have readily believed it came from the 1950s, or even a less gender-progressive corner of the ‘60’s or ‘70s. It’s that far-thinking. Spoilers below the cut( Read more... )

Happy Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday, all! In the crossover ‘verse in my head, I do believe Frodo is 94 today, though I’m holding onto following that timeline by a thread. (Basically, it’s my age + 46.)

I have some Tolkienesque thoughts and weird sense of déjà vu that I’ve already written this essay, but I don’t see it in my stuff, so it may have just been in my head. It’s on Tolkien and moral culpability, based on thinky thoughts raised by this interesting video (qv):



If you’re not watching the video right now, basically Tolkien held that people could not be held morally culpable for failure to do something beyond their capacity (a very understandable view for a WWI vet, by the way). He, therefore, held that while Frodo failed to destroy the Ring (spoilers!), he wasn’t morally culpable for that failure because he had been pushed well beyond his own capacity. (Have I really not already written this? Let me know you’ve seen this somewhere—by me.)

I totally respect this view, and it’s different from mine. Tolkien’s reasoning stood about to me because one could argue my views of moral culpability are actually more judgmental than his. And I’m not used to feeling more morally judgmental than a traditional Catholic. :-) But I think his Catholicism—and my Buddhism—are in play here. ( Read more... )

Oh world, I was going to embed this excellent video for y'all, but between my watching it and looking it up just now, it apparently got tossed (is that still a term?) from YouTube for copyright infringement, which is absurd: it's commentary; it's protected. Anyway, I can only link to her post about the dispute.

This is the comment I made on Jessie’s (now effectively censored) video. (Yeah, I bombed YouTube with a whole essay. I know Jessie has better things to do than read it, but I addressed it to her anyway, as it’s a response to her arguments and observations.)

The Comment

This video is amazing: research, argument, production, emotional range are all fantastic, and I think you correctly diagnose the cowardice of season 2 of SNW. Your video clarified for me why I found this season “meh.” I’ll offer a somewhat different take below, and please know that while I may not always agree with every point you make, I always respect and admire your work. (tl;dr: allegory is a limited and insufficient tool.) ( Read more... )

I don’t think I’ve written about The Witcher before, probably because its first two seasons didn’t make a strong impression. I modestly enjoyed them, but with S3, I’ve reached a level of fannish interest that’s sparking some disjointed reflections.

NB 1: Yes, the show has gaping structural problems, which haven’t bothered me too much because I haven’t been invested in following that story structure; I watch more for character and curiosity.

NB 2: I haven’t read the books or played the games; I’m referring to the TV series as a story in itself. I gather that many (most?) book/game fans don’t like this adaptation because it is far afield from the source material, and given my own response to Interview with the Vampire, I totally get that. Neon Knight has an interesting interesting video on this. Anyway, to book/game fans, my show-based reactions may be frustrating, which is totally understandable. Spoilers behind the cut( Read more... )