#mobile killer

Makes sense to me. You're saying that the discussion needs to be on the system that allows for and causes bullying instead of the bully, right?

Yes, but my point was more about syntactic structure. The entire spiel is literally a single sentence.

Note how “the purposeful-or-not omission of broader systemic violence from discussions of bullying and blaming it instead on the a priori inherent evil of the bullies” is just the subject of the verb “causes”. And how the other argument of said verb is itself a new clause. And how there is an oblique clause starting it in “to apply his point to bullying”. And how “redirect discussions about the actual systemic causes of bullying” and “instead reinforce it as generically bad” are the coordinated arguments of the “causes” clause.

True, it doesn’t have any garden path processing or even central embedding, but it’s still an unwieldy sentence in terms of syntactic processing. I tried to diagram it several time, but the process of hammering in the clauses in order became gibbering after it started looking like this:

(@ budding young linguists: real talk tho, phpSyntaxTree is your best friend bookmark it yesterday; plus it works best if you do the brackets first and then fill in, which is good practice for writing code)

Fuck? Fuck. Fuck, fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck. Fuck.

So I do have a lot of criticisms of the “Wicked” musical, especially as a huge fan of the book. But I’d be remiss to say that this really is one of th best musicals ever made.

Christen Chenoweth goes the extra mile in giving Glinda a palpable sadness and guilt through her performance while walking that line where we, as an audience, accept that she’s hiding it enough for the assorted citizenry of Oz.

Also, it was a brilliant move to start the musical at the end of “The Wizard of Oz”, which is a point the audience already knows via cultural osmosis/ The new parts of “Wicked” (both the book and the musical) are in the prequel. So using a familiar starting point and falling back was a great hook for the musical.

And notice the details about “a celebration throughout Oz that’s all to do with (Elphaba)” or “so happy I could melt”. That’s a fantastic way to use the cultural osmosis as foreshadowing. Hell, there’s something almost Hitchcockian about it, in how it use information that the audience has but the characters don’t to create suspense.

And that little “Unlimited” motif? Does that sound familiar? It should, nd here’s a hint as to why:

Yeah, it’s the first seven notes pf “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”. Incidentally, eight notes is the cut-off for legally plagiarizing music. But those seven notes are still enough to kickstart the brain into thinking about “Over the Rainbow” (and by association, the entirety of “The Wizard of Oz”). Except that putting that segment in a new context forces us to reevaluate it and how it could relate to Elphaba’s story.

So yeah, I dislike how the book is less political and how it cut out the bisexual, interracial polyamory and the gay Tiger sex (the Tiger can talk, so it doesn’t violate ssc; it’s more like having sex with a really convincing furry), but fuck me with a rake if the musical version of “Wicked” isn’t fantastic. And still gay as hell.

I mean, you have to try pretty hard to make a “Wicked” musical adaptation not gay as hell, but I mean listen to this.