I Can Post

The Vox article that I was interviewed for is up and running, and it contains some serious fuckign information about this whole fiasco.

Information that tumblr just straight up refused to provide to its userbase at all.

Unsurprisingly to those of us watching this website deteriorate over the last year, this full content purge and ban has been in progress for a solid 6 months. The date got moved up because of the child porn thing, but it was always coming for us.

Equally unsurprising: Tumblr’s management and ownership are absolutely destroying the actual staff working on it. The company has been hemoragghing senior staff without so much as a token attempt to keep them in place. So the drops in site quality are real, and wil probably only be getting worse.

Happy Krampusnacht!

Here is a story about how the Klaubauf, a shaggy beast who accompanies Saint Nicholas through Bavaria, came into the service of Nicholas the Wonder-Worker.

Yes. My understanding is that it actually was incredibly close, only a few dozen votes. 

There is something extremely crass and a bit mean spirited about electing to kill an unpopular character by holding a popularity contest. What’s interesting is that Jason Todd’s controversial “lil’ stinker” personality was something that came in out of nowhere and was not how the character was initially introduced.

There are several really great stories, like the Teen Titans Zendia story arc, where Jason Todd was presented as not very physically impressive or powerful, but quick thinking and resourceful, who takes full advantage of the fact his enemies underestimated and ignored him (this was how he was presented in Moore’s Man Who Has Everything as well - people forget that Jason Todd saved the day in that one). 

If a character isn’t working, or is widely disliked or controversial, the solution is not to give up, make them a part of a crass stunt. The solution differs from character to character, but it’s important to start with empathy. For instance, one way is to “get the audience on their side” by having them go through setbacks, so empathy gets the audience rooting for them (have their girlfriend or boyfriend leave them, have them lose their job, etc.)

I remember having dinner with a friend (who is a somewhat, moderately well known writer) about the character of Jar Jar Binks, and what could be done to “save him” as opposed to killing him off or forgetting about him. You have to remember that this was while the prequels were still going on, and we had no idea how it would all turn out.

My friend put forward the idea that Jar Jar was secretly evil, a swerve that she stole from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series where it turns out that the goofy, deformed, cowardly court jester who accompanied the heroes all this time actually had been the evil galactic warlord known as the Mule, befriending the heroes in order to spy on them. This has become something of a popular theory online since then, incidentally - maybe because there are a lot of Asimov fans out there. The way she described it, at some point, Jar Jar would drop the pretense of being a fool and demonstrate formidable martial arts skills we never knew he had, kind of like “drunken boxing” where it looks deceptively like lurching clumsily around, and use those unpredictable movements to pound the stuffing out of the Jedi Knights like Jackie Chan in Drunken Master.

I had another idea, one I also stole.

My idea was, at some point in the third act of a Star Wars film, the fate of the galaxy was dependent on a suicide mission where the outcome was all but certain death – flying into a sun or something like that to stop a bomb, and whoever did it would pilot a ship knowing they would absolutely go to near-certain death. Anakin Skywalker, being noble, elects to go, but Jar Jar would stop him, saying, in a moment of rare dignity:

“No. I’ll pilot the shuttle, not you. You see, Padme loves you, and you love her. Obi-Wan is your friend. But me…nobody loves me at all. I don’t have any friends at all. People care if you live or die, but me…no one cares at all if I…” And he lets that thought hang.

If you play the moment right, everyone would see for a minute how lonely and kind of pathetic Jar Jar was, like Pagliacci. If you do it right, everyone in the theater would be crying…over Jar Jar Binks.

The next time we see Jar Jar, we’d see his frail, dead, lifeless burned out body, hugged by the characters. One of the female characters would weep into his chest and clothes. But at the last minute, a toe would move and he’d smile weakly. The audience would cheer – Jar Jar is alive! Cue the credits and the music. 

“In-universe,” Jar Jar Binks is popular and respected after his role in repelling the occupation, democratically elected to serve as the junior partner of one of the most beloved public figures on his planet. He has friends. Anakin and Obi-Wan like him. Padme and Palpatine - political opponents! - both trust and confide in him. (Although his confidence is eventually betrayed when he’s used as a pawn in the scheme to start the war.)

He’s unpopular in our world. And unfairly so. It’s already a failure of empathy on a grand scale. His story is that he’s ostracized for his clumsy and irritating demeanor, dismissed by those who look down on him, but his kindness and humility are what result in the coming together of everyone whose cooperation was needed to save the day.

Qui-Gon’s insistence that the Naboo and the Gungans are interdependent was lost on Boss Nass, who justifiably resents his people’s inferior status to the land-dwellers. It was Jar Jar who was able to persuade Padme to go and form the symbiont circle Qui-Gon spoke of, by prostrating herself before someone she had previously looked down on.