Thoroughly whelmed

Stand up now!

Content warning: domestic violence.

The ultimate female revenge story. My only complaint is that she gives her bastard husband a second chance instead of walking out at the first opportunity.

I want to go into that a bit more.

The whole point of humanism is being good for goodness' sake. You stand at the edge of horrible oblivion and you do the right thing without any expectation of divine reward or retribution. You do it just because it's right and it would make the universe a little bit less wrong. You try your best knowing that at the very end what you'll get for your effort is... Nothing. Total nothingness. This point would have been undermined somewhat if things had gone differently for Crowley and Aziraphale just because they're them and they're special. It had to be a choice between eternal life or oblivion and it had to be proper oblivion, not a last minute psych-out by a benevolent god (or fan servicey writer). The fact that the writers snuck in an almost-but-not-quite loophole by showing us a human version of the pair who were able to live their lives oblivious to the sacrifice that their alternate selves had made was a bittersweet bonus that managed to avoid muddying the message.

I thought it was beautifully done. There are way too many stories about good and evil, but not nearly enough about right and wrong.

First of all, there's the absurdity of calling it that when literally everybody and everything else in the universe died first. It's sort of *technically* true if you twist the meaning so that Bury Your Gays is no longer about the issue it was originally intended to describe. It also ignores the fact that they ended up living humanly ever after anyway, but I guess queerness doesn't matter if it's not exactly what you wanted exactly the way you wanted it. What kind of representation is a realistic queer human couple, anyway? What does it matter if the value of humanity itself was represented with queerness? It's not how you would have written it, so it can get in the bin. And of course your ship sailing on your preferred course is far more important than ending the story in a way that has significance for the overarching theme. Who gives a shit about that boring stuff? Storytellers? Pah! What do they know, anyway? It's not what you wanted, so it's ethically wrong.

It reminds me of those fans who described the death of Izzy Hands at the end of OFMD as an example of Bury Your Gays, despite the fact that practically every other character was at least as queer and far less dead.

I could just ignore it as typical, silly fandom bullshit, but it bothers me when people appropriate social justice concepts for petty fandom grievances. Sometimes there are real, complex issues lurking within our favourite pieces of media, but this sort of faux outrage obscures the voices of people with real, thoughtful criticism.

Don't even get me started on how 'queerbaiting' gets misused. No, Stranger Things didn't queerbait you. For all it's faults, it's not guilty of that. Take your shipping goggles off and see how you baited yourself.

You're allowed to just be disappointed, or sad. It doesn't have to be that deep. You can feel your feelings without having to find ways to turn them into moral indignation. You weren't wronged just because you feel bad.

It was a picture of a wood carving. A wood carving of a frog. A wood carving of a frog inside a church.

I know everybody's bodies are different, but I've never seen anybody with 'mature content' that looks like that.

Really liked the Good Omens finale. I honestly can't imagine how else it could have ended. The book was a bizarre, funny, slightly disjointed humanist parable. The adaptation ended as a bizarre, funny, slightly disjointed humanist parable. Predictable, but only because it makes sense.

I thought it was very much in the spirit of the late great Sir Terry Pratchett, or at least it shared a lot of the philosophies he included in his work. As a mega Pratchett fan, I felt a twinge of his almost-presence there. It was not quite his unique brand of dark, cynical optimism, but at least it was a passable Aldi-branded lookalike version. Pratchett was inimitable. Close enough is the best we're going to get. The ghosts of his ideas were there, at least.

It probably wasn't what the fan fiction fans wanted, but then again I'm not sure a lot of fan fiction fans are particularly interested in the messaging of the stories they consume. I realise I'm digging my own grave by saying that on Tumblr of all places, but what the hell. It's how I've felt about fandoms generally for a long time. Fandom is a wonderful thing, but it does tend to make people preoccupied with the details instead of the big picture.

I have criticisms of GO3 too (dodgy pacing, the literal fizzling out of the Jesus plotline, characters that were introduced only to never really do anything, etc.), but the ending was the ultimate culmination of the overall message. It was always about humanity, not about angels and demons. Humanity as our own good and evil. Humanity as our own makers and destroyers. The humanist message was by far the strongest through-line of the entire series. And if you think the messaging was off, I've got to wonder what you thought the original book was about. Hint: it wasn't about Crowley and Aziraphale being super special guys. I know some other fans will be angry their guys didn't stay special. In fan content characters tend to be more static. They don't have to be part of a bigger story or serve some kind of point. But being mad because something happened in an original story that wasn't what you wanted isn't particularly sensible criticism. You need to meet the story where it is, not just where you would have put it.

I'd love to nerd out with people over the ideas and imagery and meanings and all that fun stuff more. Like, did anybody else think that in the probably-controversial bit right at the end the dialogue was far more naturalistic than ever before? As if to crack the fourth wall a bit and say, yes, it was all a story. A parable. This is real life. Now go away and be real humans, but maybe try doing it better.

The OSYS Strawman looks like this: 

Person A: ‘I think being nice is quite nice’

Person B: ‘Oh, so you're saying that nobody should ever express anger no matter how justified it is?’

The phrasing may differ, but the tactic is always the same. I consider it a distinct subspecies of the common-or-garden strawman fallacy because I don't think it's intended to make Person B’s argument easier (I mean, it can be swiftly countered just by going ‘No…?’). There’s no attempt to debate even the bad faith interpretation of the other person's statement, only to imply that by saying one thing Person A is practically saying something else. Its the unholy union between a strawman and a slippery slope. A Slippery Strawman, if you will, except that sounds weirdly sexual so I’d prefer you don't. Person B probably doesn't believe and doesn't expect anybody else to really believe that they've pulled the mask off Person A and revealed they were Old Man Problematic all along. I suspect the intention is to align Person A with an unreasonable take just so Person B seems more reasonable by default. Or maybe it's a way of virtue signalling (the actual kind, not the ‘help, somebody was considerate towards people I don't care about!’ kind) that Person B won't stand for a certain thing, regardless of whether or not that certain thing has entered the conversation.

If you’re worried that you might be using the OSYS Strawman in conversation, ask yourself one simple question:

Is the thing you're suggesting somebody else is saying a reasonable summary of the words they've actually said?

No? Well, there you are, then! Consider responding to the actual words being uttered by the other person instead of summarising your AU fan fiction of the discussion. Even if their argument is the smelliest of shit takes, it's still better to argue with what they've said than to stuff it into an ill-fitting strawsuit and act like that's a counter-argument all by itself. That's not a critique. It's just laziness. If you can't be bothered arguing with somebody’s actual words, don't argue at all. Mock them instead if you want and if they deserve it, but don't pretend you're engaging in debate if you're just going to clog up the discourse with non sequiturs. I feel like at least half of all online discourse involves arguing against things that not only nobody has actually said but also that nobody even really believes anybody is out there saying. It's aggressive peacocking, except half of the peacocks are really just chickens who have no idea what's going on. 

‘Oh, so you're saying you should never disagree with somebody in case you accidentally mischaracterise them? So what you're saying is nobody is allowed exaggerate for the purposes of satire? You're saying that criticism is always virtue signalling? So you think people with blatantly shitty takes should always be given the benefit of the doubt?’

I'm hesitant to grout it, though, because I want to be able to rescue the face in the middle if I ever decided to chip the whole thing apart again.

This is Frog:

And this is Frog's surprisingly badunkous badonk:

If you know nothing else about Frances Hardinge, know that everybody who reads her books wants you - yes, you - to start reading them right now. If you've already read them all then read them again. I have a story-pellet lodged in my gullet and the fandom isn't active enough to help me cough it up!