Random Thoughts

[14]

~

Warning! This post contains spoilers up to chapter 170 of Tsubasa (and Chapter 71 of xxxHolic). Please skip this if you have not read that far. 

Please also make no comments about what happens after that point in either manga. 

~

Actually here’s a nice little moment that’s setting up another intentional misdirection by CLAMP. The cast is being looked down on for being human - a trait that is bad specifically for “living for under a hundred years”. There’s no real reason to pay particular attention to that detail in the first read through, since it’s mostly being used to establish the level of power and mystery that Lady Debonair/the Kishiim has, but it also establishes a presumed fact that will be absorbed by the audience. 

Since no-one in the cast counters her statement, it’s now safe to assume that everyone in the cast is human (which, fair) and is under a hundred years old! 

Which is NOT true. 

And of course Fai isn’t going to correct her here (because why would he?) but it’s a very subtle and smooth way to establish audience expectations that aren’t necessarily true. By the time we find out the truth we may question why we just assumed Fai was in a similar age range as everyone else, but that’s not the case either! CLAMP fed us that info deliberately to make SURE we assumed he was a regular aging person, specifically so that we COULD have the benefit of that plot twist later. Moreover, when we get the eventual payoff we’re already familiar with the reason behind Fai’s aging, because we already met it here! Right near the start of the entire manga we are introduced to the the idea that [greatly magical beings can have slower aging] safely tucked away in our worldbuilding knowledge for safekeeping. 

It’s all very seamless groundwork. Even better, if this idea had never been brought up at all the later reveal might not be as surprising as it could have been, since we may never have thought about it in the first place. But in small exchanges like this CLAMP not only feed us the correct idea to think about, as well as what they mean in context, but also lead us directly to the assumption we’re supposed to make WHILE making the entire process invisible. 

This is the one about a time traveler who ends up in a different genre story than she expected. As it turns out, many people before her have succeeded at traveling through time, but none of them accounted for the way the planet moves. She’s the first one to do it and live – by the sheer luck of landing on a spaceship.

If you like Good Omens, there are some blatant references. (Ineffable wives in space, anyone?)

If you like “humans are weird / space orcs,” then you’ll be delighted to know that the rest of the ship’s crew aren’t human in the slightest. There’s a Stabby cameo and everything.

Some desperate remnant of his soul knows what he needs. As soon as his debt is cleared, he goes on to live what many would call an utterly charmed life: working no more than 20 hours a week, travelling and spending time with friends (which he, at $150,000 a year and no mortgage, has ample money to do). He has a loving relationship also.

But his brain is so rotten that he cannot understand happiness anymore. He is incapable of conceptualising it other than in money.

A man who has everything except the ability to feel it.

How poetic.

Which means that when he says he regrets the months he didn’t pick up more hours to earn more money, what he’s describing here is boredom. He’s doing it in the crassest, shallowest, most income-obsessed and unattainable for most of us way possible, yes. But this man is expressing that once he achieved a certain financial goal he relaxed, enjoyed himself, got bored, realized on some level he was understimulated, and then started working more hours to meet whatever stimulated activity threshold he personally needs. 

This is infuriating because this man experienced the counter-argument to that nonsensical talking point that if we meet people’s financial needs with a universal basic income they’ll grow lazy and won't do anything. 

Anyone trying to develop $200,000 in passive annual income is not working three minimum-wage jobs to live paycheck-to-paycheck. This man’s basic financial needs were met. Working more hours to make more money is just his own personal code for ‘I still needed to use my mind to do things’ (using what might be the only metric of personal achievement he might actually have). This man lived the argument for universal basic income and I genuinely don’t think he realizes that. Once his basic income needs were met he still needed to do things to keep himself stimulated and engaged with his own life.

Horizontober day 4: Night

Also a HUGE part of the emphasis in this class is on the themes of a work and you know what, I think I know why people get pissy about concepts of close reading because here's the deal: as soon as you're out of 100 level classes you stop doing shit like typing out "The theme of The Most Dangerous Game is Man's Inhumanity to Man" or "The Theme of The Lottery is that Tradition for Tradition's Sake is Harmful."

Most people do NOT get past the absolute worst parts of studying literature and WHY WOULD YOU if you think that it's four years of sitting around and identifying the same themes in hundred-year-old books that students have been identifying for a hundred years?

The five paragraph analytical essay makes me bonkers because a lot of the works we're studying have themes that are pretty fucking plainly stated and I don't think there's really enough there to make a thousand words of sense so you're gonna write a hundred words of sense and nine hundred of nonsense.

And, like, I get that this is a starting point. You tell students "make an argument about some element of a work using only that work and no outside sources" so you can figure out whether they even know what they read and if they can put a paragraph together but the problem is that for people who don't understand how to construct a paragraph this is an impossible challenge and for people who DO understand how to construct a paragraph this is an impossible challenge.

"The setting in A Cask of Amontillado is important to the story because it sets the tone. The catacombs isolate Fortunado and Montresor. The men are surrounded by images of death and Fortunado is eventually entombed in bones. As they descend the light fails and Fortunado experiences a worsening cough. Their march into the catacombs, replete with opportunities to turn back, could be seen as a descent into hell for both characters - Fortunado is damned by his pride and Montresor is cursed by his wrath. The setting, which is bones, doesn't let the reader forget this."

It's bullshit! I agree! Heartily! That it is bullshit!

One of the stories we have read so far is Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant" and. Like. Doing a thematic analysis on that story is bullshit. Pure bullshit. "Explore the theme through one of the elements of storytelling."

Cool, the element I'm exploring is the narrator repeatedly and explicitly stating that Colonialism fucking sucks. What Orwell does here is to use the narration to say that colonialism is bad. He does this several times, usually by having the narrator say that the colonizers and the colonized suffer under colonialism and that the construct of colonialism forces groups into combat with one another when they should be allies. He does this on these pages, where the narrator laments that he is in this place and is supposed to be representing empire to these people. In conclusion, Orwell uses a first-person limited perspective narrator to say that colonialism is bad by stating that he believes that colonialism is bad in his internal monologue. Essay done. The end.

It's not "black as symbolic in Hamlet" it's "Shakespeare's use of the Fools as a sympathetic attack on monarchy."

And it depends on the class. My 400-level Chaucer class required us to research the pre-chaucer tales the Canterbury Tales were based on, learn proper ME pronunciation for reciting a tale with a group, and translate 500 lines of the Tale of our choice accurately and to be able to defend our choices in that translation.

We all gathered together to celebrate our refusal to fucking die and put a collective middle finger up to Mark Zuckerberg.

nobody does shit like that anymore. I can’t just put “the 5th moon of jupiter” as my facebook location anymore because they decided to be killjoys so they could stalk people better and windows won’t let you customize your whole interface in stupid ways and they treat their user base like idiots.