#phyn rants

(edit: here is the link for anyone interested)

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and looking at the reviews about how bland the pilot is, i can’t help but think that’s part of why? 

And honestly? It's exhausting and a little frustrating.

I want students to succeed and feel confident in themselves, but I also don't want to be holding the hand of whole ass adults and telling them which specific passages in the textbook are the most critical to focus on and that yes they're on the right track with that analysis or that it's fine to interpret as they've done or that yes when we say apply the concepts from class those are the concepts we mean and yes when we say make a critical judgment we do expect you to apply critical thinking and evidence and that's exactly what it says in the assignment outline and -

I know it comes from a place of anxiety and it's how they're trained so I don't put this frustration back on the student but as an educator, it feels like a certain amount of bullshit to be teaching graduate level classes with the same degree of hand holding I would have sought as a student in *maybe* my first term of uni but realistically only sought early to midway through high school, if that.

not having emotions isn’t a thing. or at the very very least, it’s not a thing for soulless!sam. the writers hand-waved “soulless doesn’t feel” but that makes no sense and they’re wrong and it falls apart if we so much as poke it with a twig, let alone a proper stick.

emotions are information that act as input into decision-making. the very limited cases of human beings lacking the ability to feel fear or any other particular emotion, or lacking emotional input into their decisions? yeah, it’s not good. either wander into danger they can’t handle because there is no input into the decision-making process that says No, Don’t Do That, or at the extreme end, they can’t make decisions because they have no insight into what they might prefer or want or desire, or even not prefer or not want or not desire, so each minor choice is paralyzing because the part of the brain dedicated to do the choosing doesn’t exist.

if soulless really didn’t have emotions, he wouldn’t be doing much at all.

you can say “he’s making choices based on physiological stimulus” and that desire (like a desire for sex, or a desire to get a hunt completed and kill the monster) isn’t a feeling, but i promise you that it is, and that we can’t fully or truly disentangle physiology from emotion either.

in fact soulless!sam seems to have no issue whatsoever experiencing positive emotions like desire, enjoyment, contentment, satisfaction, pride, etc. He seems capable of vexation and irritation too. We don’t really see him angry in the same way sam would be, but he does sort of go into a violent rage and beat someone with his bare fists in a flashback, right? i promise that without emotion, exerting that kind of energy on a task just... wouldn’t happen. because you’re incapable of caring about the outcome of the task, no matter how ‘rational’ or ‘logical’ that outcome may seem (because what’s rational and logical depend on what we care about and what goals we have selected, which again, occurs in the context of having emotions to guide us toward what those desired end states might look like).

soulless!sam seems, as far as i can tell, to lack two things: 1) the ability to experience bonds with others, and 2) the ability to intuit or experience conscious insight into his own emotions.

on the first, his lack of connection to dean despite understanding he prefers to have him around, his willingness to kill bobby, his complete and utter lack of care for lisa and ben despite knowing on some level that he should care about them, or would if he were his usual self, even if only as an extension of who and what dean cares about. soulless just... doesn’t experience that deeply human need for social connection nor the automatic way it manifests nor any bonding toward others. some failure of oxytocin going on there (the soul is stored in the oxytocin receptor site?).

on the second, sam doesn’t know what he’s feeling when he hasn’t got a soul. he equates that with not really feeling anything, or at least that what we’re told as shorthand pretty quickly, because what he actually says when asked what he’s feeling is “i don’t know”. because - he doesn’t. but that doesn’t mean he’s not actually feeling anything, it means he has no conscious insight into it.

his feelings are just feelings to him, just information. they are understood in terms of how they impact his end state aims (i want to finish this hunt, i want to have sex with this hippie chick, i don’t want to put up with this fairy lady, i don’t want to suffer by having my soul put back in) but are not understood in and of themselves (i don’t know if i feel angry or sad or happy in response to setbacks or steps forward toward these desired ends. at most i know i experience a sense of satisfaction when my aims are accomplished, but this is understood mostly through checking that aim off the list and being able to direct my attention and resources toward new goals. i don’t know why i do this, i just do).

the lack of bonding means he doesn’t feel interpersonal guilt or remorse for hurt and harm he has caused, nor a sense of loss or grief based on his connections (or lack thereof) with others, nor an anticipatory sense of guilt, remorse, grief, or regret at pursuing interpersonal harm, so long as the harm is deemed as needed or even just helpful in furthering one of his desired end goals. this increases our perception that he doesn’t have feelings at all, when what he’s really missing are mostly a subset of social emotions, and that’s not even unique to soulless people! (and look, i don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of how fucked up i think it is that the writers, intentionally or not (but i suspect intentionally) more or less equated sam’s soullessness with some clinical features of psychopathy.)

If you just show up and take, and even worse just show up and demand an existing community change to suit your needs without putting in even basic effort to learn how it operates

Some of them also have some of the most naturally booming voices designed to carry that I've ever heard. Across the hall or down the hall it doesn't matter, you can hear every word.

And some of them will do this even when they're on a zoom call with at least one another person in our hallway, and sometimes you can literally hear the echo from one person speaking and then it coming out of another's speakers two doors down.

like yeah, we can criticize that as a pretty weak message. but y’all get that’s not what these stories are saying, right?

the point of choosing not to kill/murder in the villain in revenge isn’t “i’ll be as bad as this villain if i kill them” it’s “continuing a cycle of violence and revenge is incapable of bringing either justice or peace.”

vengeance isn’t justice. that’s not how a person lays their ghosts and traumas to rest. 

i’m not saying i don’t support the idea of bringing a villain to justice; i do. justice matters. I’m also not saying villains should be consequence free to continue to hurt others in the future. but that is actually not the same thing as vengeance.

often the notion of vengeance goes hand-in-hand with that of justice, with stopping the villain, and also with saving vulnerable others -- all of which result to frame the hero in a positive light as they mete out vengeance (and thus draw critique from tumblr if and when they forego vengeance or murder). and we can problematize this broad-strokes conflation of killing, vengeance, justice, duty, and protection of the vulnerable, and we can talk about why that’s interesting and flawed and human and what we give (and take) from a story when we do that, but that’s not the conversation i see y’all having.

and look yes there is a deeply flawed message in some of these stories about powerful elite doing horrible things and then the underdog hero who is a victim of these elite ultimately forgiving the villain for their selfish greed and violence, leading in the confines of the story to a complete lack of justice. 

so let’s have that conversation if you’re ready for it. a conversation about why we’re told that death/murder is justice, and that no other forms of justice should be considered, and that failing that we should set aside our quest for justice and forgive our abusers and allow the villains to be consequence free. 

and i’m not saying that stories in which a hero kills a villain or another person are all bad and evil, or that protagonists and heroic characters shouldn’t ever be killers. that would throw out like 85% of the media i consume tbh. but good god some of what i’ve seen is exhaustingly reductive on the subject and when we say ‘consume media critically’ it means this. it means consider the messages and themes underlying what you’re being told by a story.

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(and look we can also have a totally separate discussion about framing death as the ‘only’ means to enact one’s duty or the ‘only’ means to prevent future harm from an individual. that’s a conversation super worth having. 

and i acknowledge that stories are also exploring these themes not necessarily as an endorsement of this message either. sometimes when handled well these stories are actually critique of our very flawed justice systems in which those with power can escape consequence, posing difficult questions of what the hell do we do with ourselves at that point, both as justiceless victims and as a function of our real or perceived duty to others. depicting the hero killing the villain is not necessarily an endorsement, and can act as an exploration of how these systems harm people, with the hero killing the villain framed as a tragedy not a triumph. but that’s also not the conversation we’re having here)

Like I control for participant suspicion in all of my experiments because I’m using deception in my studies and my undergrad education in psych labs really pushed the importance of participants believing the cover story for internal validity of an experiment, right?

So I say in the first experiment what items I used to measure it, then keep referring back to that study. And this dude on my committee, in his revision notes, is like “you need to say what items you use and put them in an appendix”. 

And I’m like... dude??? They are - right there. Just - right here. Wasn’t hiding them. Same items, all studies, kept referring back to them all the time. Right here. I’m not putting them in an appendix, they belong in the main text, right where I put them, the whole time.

But that’s easy, simple mistake, the type I’d honestly make so eh (except this dude noticed a typo in my citations list like he went through this shit with a fine fucking toothed comb and somehow missed that???) - 

But then he’s like “and you need to include in the appendix what happens to all the results if you don’t control for this”

And i’m like did you miss the giant bolded section called “robustness analyses” where I already do that?!

And I know he read that section and didn’t just miss it because the dude refers to it specifically when (wrongly) complaining about how I don’t specifically detail the items I used for suspicion.