Art Goes Brrr

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.

Is the breakdown of monarchy actually relevant to the themes and messages presented in Sailor Moon? No, not really.

So focusing on the Moon Kingdom monarchy and the ethics there of is sort of... besides the point. The Moon Kingdom is a fairy tale, not a reflection of reality.

I’m not actually interested in the tax policy of the Moon Kingdom, you know?

Now, is it *cool* to look at works in various ways? Sure! Are some people interested in the tax policy of the Moon Kingdom and want to explore what that would look like? Sure! And honestly if you want to explore the ramifications of idyllic fairy tale monarchies on the real world, then that’s really cool too! 

But if you are looking at a work to understand what it is trying to say with the text itself, then you need to take some of its premises at face value. Usagi and the Sailor Scouts being the Good Guys is one of those premises. 

And really the “Usagi is secretly a princess from the moon” is just a part of the escapist fantasy for most little kids watching more than it has anything to do with actual themes of monarchy.

There is a lot of value in being able to look at a text from various angles. And it’s perfectly okay to use a text and concept as a jumping off point for other explorations.

But the problem comes when people say that Usagi was definitively a villain in Sailor Moon, or that say Steven Universe with themes of family and conflict resolution is excusing genocide by not destroying the Diamonds. It misses the point of the fantasy. It misses the important themes, the lessons and point of the show to look at it like that.

The idea of a cute talking cat granting girls magical powers to turn them into warriors against evil and getting them killed being evil? Not a good take on Luna, but Kyuubei in Madoka? Exactly this. That's like, the point of Kyuubei- to riff on the trope that Luna, and Kero, and Mokona represent.

Applying the first sale doctrine to digital content could enable libraries to simply buy e-books and lend them on a 1:1 basis rather than having to constantly renew their expensive contracts with vendors. Most public libraries use a huge chunk of their increasingly-limited funds on these licensing agreements, and if some of those funds are freed up they can go towards local communities. This isn’t just about keeping the Wayback Machine. This is about open access to information. This is about ending the artificial scarcity that tech monopolies have created.

Please make an account on Internet Archive, and consider donating.

Please use your local library and check out the FREE events and services they offer.

while sure it’s sad when a character is suffering from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune through no fault of their own but simply because the world they live in is cruel and unfair or whatever, it hits me much harder when a character is suffering because their own actions have come back around to cause them pain. then you have the dual layer of the suffering on top of the knowledge, acknowledged or unacknowledged internal to the narrative but present for the reader, that it’s…not even their fault, necessarily, I’m not really interested in language of fault, but that something they did or choices they made had unexpected and unwanted consequences.

it’s like…I sort of hate the concept of “got what they deserved” as a sentiment, broadly speaking, and I feel like that’s sometimes where people go with this, but for me it’s just much more resonant and much hurtier to look at the ways in which someone, intentionally or unintentionally, ends up causing themselves pain - and what they do with that.

not sure this is making any sense, but “I feel like the juiciest angst is the angst that comes from the destructive impact of your own actions” probably kinda gets at it.

sorry to tack my silly story onto your serious/ emotionally traumatizing one, but years back I made a poorly worded post about my cat being on a diet (it was vet-prescribed, they gave me a calorie count to follow to get her to a healthier weight), and it got a lot of backlash from people who didn’t realize that an overweight Oriental cat will still look slimmer than your typical tabby because those little dudes are built different.

like this is fat:

versus a healthy weight:

anyway, I try not publicly disagree with people because it can lead to dog-piling with the receptor experiencing legitimate emotional distress (plus accusations of me “directing an army of followers to harass them”) so in this situation I was like “okay, I’ll be more sensitive about that” and instead privately messaged the folk who were being the loudest about me being a reprehensible animal abuser for withholding Whiska’s Temptations from god’s most innocent creature.

I think I said something like “hey there, I saw your commentary and wanted to give some clarification: the cat is on a vet-prescribed diet and is of a breed that is unusually slender”, and the response from multiple people was “ha, nice try doing damage control behind the scenes! you’re obviously trying to protect your reputation and income, but you can’t silence me!”, as though I were, as beast-glatisant put it, some sinister shadowy manipulator. 

someone sitting at home alone, an active alcoholic, squandering your charity, drinking all day is better situation than a street homeless alcoholic. someone using drugs in your charity house is better than them doing the same w no shelter

most of you would not like most street homeless people, I definitely don’t and didn’t when I was street homeless. for every one person who uses unconditional shelter to turn themselves around, someone else will do jack shit and very slowly, if ever, work through the issues that made them homeless, will maybe never be able to live independently. still better than street homelessness, still worth doing. ultimately either you believe that shelter should be universal or you don’t

I think about the long shifts, working on your feet all day, with breaks scheduled down to the minute. Every second of your day controlled by the clock, regardless of how tired you might be. However, in food service, there is one exception. The smoke break. Most managers respect the smoke break. The old school ones do, at least. The newer crop less so. Food service is fast paced, highly stressful work, and nicotine, in addition to all of its addictive and damaging properties, is a relaxant. If a burger flipper or barista says they need to step outside for a smoke, you let them do it, and you dont begrudge them for it.

this is the same reason that "politicians should have to live a month on minimum wage to see what it's like" doesn't work. poverty is a lack of resources beyond monetary ones. it's not having family members you can borrow money from. it's not having a place to stay if you were outdoors for a bit. it's not having the nice kitchen equipement with which you could make food more cheaply. it's having to buy cheaper things which will break sooner because you can't afford the better ones.

the bit about knowing the end date is not a semantic point to make me feel better. if you know you'll be out of this soon, it enables you to make choices you otherwise couldn't. you can splurge on pizza delivery or spend half your paycheck on good shoes because it isn't real. if a crisis comes, the irreality of this situation allows you to deal with it. you can ask your parents for money, you can stay with someone for a while. impoverished people can't.