Sketchy

What a privilege it is to show signs of aging.

What a privilege it is to not have passed at a young age.

What a privilege it is to have smile lines, wrinkles, graying hair, healing scars, and other signs your body has lived for years.

Semi-related. IT WAS JUST A BOX OF ASHES. Still, in campaign 3, she was suspicious. The man just wanted his wife’s wishes to be honored. That drove me nuts.

so I will admit the box of ashes was the smallest and least egregious example, and I gave it because I wanted to point out how I dislike this on every level but that bothers me way less than some other examples. In fact some initial suspicion feels valid and even in character - Vox Machina are coming off an incredibly exhausting and demoralizing arc - it's just like, okay, we did our insight checks, it is what it is, either spread the ashes or don't.

But more seriously I think that, for example, Ashton's belief that you can only trust people who work for money is in-character, but it's a little bit frustrating to work with in a campaign that has a lot of people who are doing things out of a sense of moral conviction. Similarly, Murray asking Mara why she's doing all these noble goals is like...well, she lives in this world that is flooded with undead and has six giant cursed locations that are stated to probably be getting worse and haven't been healed in 70 years. Why do you try to help poor students access the Penteveral? What do you gain out of that? Like, it's not that a DM can't fool you, but there's a scale, and I also think that like...you can play a character who is cynical about moral conviction who still trusts the DM (this is one of the many appeals of Julien, who tells Sir Obzaz Claw that virtue means nothing and then proceeds to ride into a Barrowdell to see if he can rescue some of his brothers-in-arms). There is a difference between "I'm playing a skeptic" and yeah, being so convinced that they're going to pull the rug out from under you that you won't walk on the rug.

One of my professors was straight up like "I don't want you reading papers about this book until we finish it!" and we had writing things for the first 20 minutes of every class because he wanted to know what WE thought, not what we had become convinced was THE thing to think.

When I was in my second year of college, I spiraled out into this whole "Jane Eyre is a lesbian!" thing, and my professor (not the same guy as above but delightfully insane in her own right) was like, "Wow, I've never heard this from anyone," and instead of being like, "um this is not what has been agreed upon by everyone else" went "Tell me more." Now, as a forty year old woman who has never stopped engaging with stories on both an enjoyment and academic level, the paper I would write with age and distance would be more "Homosociality, desire, and the domesticated male in Jane Eyre" or something like that, nineteen year old me was a little reductive and simple, but same vibes.

But my professor did not think I was right, she thought I was being INTERESTING, and so she encouraged me and championed me to write that paper and I actually presented it at the student division of a conference! The cool thing about that was, that when I was defending it, I was having to think about it, but it was in the spirit of collaboration, it felt like. No one was trying to 'win' the conversation.

Doc, what the fuck are you--I saw a really interesting thing this morning, someone talking about Shrek, of all things, and how they thought it was about how you cannot turn an ogre into a man, but he can make you become an ogre. And I immediately went, "Wow! Okay, interesting, not how I read that at all, TELL ME MORE." It was really jarring for me, then, to see pretty much every comment be like, 'uh you are wrong and also stupid." Sure, maybe that's not the intention of the work, but I don't for one goddamn motherfucking second think Charlie Bronte was sitting down going "I am going to write a woman so gay..." nor do I think the read of her as same sex-attracted is the end all be all of interpretations. It's mine, for sure! But like...talking about stories is supposed to be fun and it's supposed to be about possibility.

That one post got me thinking about how we are, in fandom often all looking at this same text, and there's immense pressure to have a 'right' interpretation--I was at the nexus of so many Sailor Moon fandom wars, and while I got into a few tussles, I was also stupid to do that. This characters are not real, and I was shutting down POSSIBILITY. And even after I was like, 'Wow, I don't think this is actually a very fun way to do stuff" it turns out you can't magically give everyone the same revelation you have simultaneously. Which is upsetting. And I see these same patterns repeat over and over and over again.

In my old age, I'm less interested in he "He would not say that" and more interested in "Cool, tell me why he would say that?"

Don't misunderstand me, there are points of view and ideas on different texts where I'm like, "Hm. I don't care to engage with that." Remember that the window we're looking out of is as important as what we're looking at, and will DOUBTLESS change the appearance. But the whole reason we have each other is to try and find other windows! It's not actually to find someone who is the next pane of glass in your same window. I miss that environment, where you could trust that everyone coming to the table was engaging with the same ground rules and that there was an expectation of, detachment doesn't quite get to the heart of what I'm talking about, but we were expected not to take the text or the analysis of it personally, even when it was hard. And sometimes it was. But I think it led to me having--for example it's crazy to me to have one 'right read' on any given text. I had a SUPER FUCKING ANIMATED conversation with a fellow lit nerd about whether or not GdT's Frankenstein was emotionally faithful to the text (which is not the same as being literally faithful nor the same as being good)and it was so fun, EVEN THOUGH we were coming at it completely opposed. But it was so fucking fun.

I wish I could do that with anime and cartoons, but you can't. People take Shrek personally. So I'll never have that same fun.

Phrases I think are delightful and useful:

if fandom makes you feel like you swallowed a beehive with the bees still alive then you aren't actually having fun!

something that has Unzipped you

Laypeople (and also a concerning number of scientists) have often got the idea that unethical human experimentation is some sort of ultra-effective super science that would fix all the disease and discover all of the medicine and we only don't do it because it isn't nice (see: every science fiction show ever). No! Jumping straight from abstract theory to human trials is a terrible way to do science. It produces incoherent results and useless observations and nonsensical conclusions. We have pages and pages of historical precedent demonstrating this.

And lots of people have got the idea that totalitarianism is some sort of magic super-government that does all the government stuff really effectively abd efficiently and we only don't do it because it isn't nice. No!!!! "Let's put one idiot in charge and do whatever dumb shit they say" is the worst way to organize any project at all, let alone an economy and a political machine. Fascist regimes are models of corruption, waste, and inefficiency.