RIPNARUTO

GREAT novelty knot for this obi shaped like a cute bat. The soft fabric must flutter a bit when you walk, making the bat wings move (LOVE!).

truly my better half. today i got to wake up to this

Bonus:

『War Paint』

Katie McGrath as Queen Sabran Berethnet from The Priory of the Orange Tree by @sshannonauthor

And the kind of media that attracts fandoms lends itself well (normally) to those kinds of analysis. Mainly, you're supposed to LIKE and AGREE with the main characters. Themes are built around agreeing with the protagonists and condemning the antagonists, and taking the protagonists at their word.

Which is fine if you're looking at, like, 99% of popular anime and YA fiction and Marvel movies.

But it can completely fall apart with certain kinds of media. If someone who has only ever analyzed media this way is all of a sudden handed Lolita or 1984 or Gatsby, which deal in shitty unreliable narrators; or even books like Beloved or Catcher in the Rye (VERY different books) that have narrators dealing with and reacting to challenging situations- well... that's how you get some hilariously bad literary analysis.

If I sit around and hem and haw about whether or not Usagi is actually the villain because she is destined to reinstate a magical absolute monarchy on Earth in the future, then I'm not interpreting it correctly. I can write a cool fanfic about it, but it wont be a successful analysis of the original work.

Specifically, I remember when we read The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James. We had special editions of the book where the first half of it was the novel itself, and the last half was like five or six different critical analyses of the book from different schools of theory. The two I remember specifically were a Marxist interpretation and a feminist interpretation. I remember reading both of those and thinking “wow, these people are really reaching for some of this”, but the more I read into the analysis and the history of those schools of thought, the more I got it. So for my final paper for that class, I wrote an essay that basically had the thesis of “when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail”. If you have trained yourself to view every piece of media through a single specific critical lens - well, you’re going to be only viewing it through that lens, and that means you’re going to read or watch it in such a way that you’re looking for the themes you’ve trained yourself to look for.

My teacher didn’t like that, by the way; she’d wanted each of us to pick one of these schools of thought we’d been learning about and make it “our” school of thought. She wanted us to grab the a hammer, or a screwdriver, or a spanner, and carry that with us for the rest of our lives. She somehow didn’t expect me to pack a toolbox.

They wouldn’t survive something like Lolita because I swear they’re being taught to turn their brains OFF and be spoon fed all their thoughts by someone else.

Now, Lolita is generally reserved for college classes. But a lot of the rationale behind continuing to teach the "classics" in high school (beyond the belief that a shared literary foundation promotes a better understanding of allusions and references) is that a lot of the classics are built on these kinds of complex readings and unreliable narrators and using historical and cultural context helps in their analysis. (I do think that we should be incorporating more diverse and modern lit into these classes, please understand)

Do all schools or individual teachers do this *well*? No, of course not. Do all students always really apply themselves to the development of deep critical thinking skills when their teacher pulls out A Tale of Two Cities? Also no.

And a very easy place to begin with transforming the things is "what if it's all upside down? What if the people presented as the bad guys are the ones we're supposed to like, and the good guys are the ones we're supposed to hope lose?

What if canon is Good Guy propaganda?"

Which is why I run so afoul of antis (or at least why I used to before I grew a thick layer of I'm Too Old For Your Shit, Now Run Along and Fuck Off), I think.

Because I'm asking "what if the good guys were propagandists and it's all really complicated, and some of the things the good guys do are terrible and some of the things the bad guys do are not so great either but a cultural norm?"

saying “speedrun strats” every time you fuck up