The Cat Writes

THERE’S A TIMESKIP

THERE’S A TIMESKIP

THERE’S A TIMESKIP

after losing control of the signal fire there’s a FUCKING TIMESKIP and when the next chapter starts everyone’s hair is several inches longer and their clothes have rotted to shreds and they’re still just kind of chilling!!!!

IT TAKES THE TERRIBLE IMPERIALISM MIND-POISONED EXCESSIVELY BRITISH BOYS IN THE ACTUAL BOOK SEVERAL MONTHS TO COMMIT A SINGLE ACT OF INTENTIONAL VIOLENCE, EVEN THE ONE (1) CHILD WRITTEN AS AN ACTUAL SOCIOPATH

AND then when they DO turn on each other it is because

THERE’S AN UNSPECIFIED WORLD WAR HAPPENING

AND A PILOT’S CORPSE CRASH LANDS ON THE ISLAND POST-DOGFIGHT AND THE CHILDREN MISTAKE THE PARACHUTE FOR A MONSTER AND SPIRAL INTO PARANOIA

BECAUSE CHILDREN INHERIT THE LEGACY AND TRAUMA OF VIOLENCE FROM THE ADULTS WAGING WAR AROUND THEM

HURR DURR IN THE REAL WORLD IT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN LIKE IN LORD OF THE FLIES -

yes. yes he did. i’m also gonna direct you to the real life ‘lord of the flies’ which occured in the 1960s, when six tongan schoolboys got stranded on a desert island for over a year before being rescued by an australian fisherman (who, it should be noted, later took on all six as crewmembers because the reason they were out in the first place was because they wanted to see the world, and named his ship the Ata after the island they were stranded on). nobody died. the only injuries that occurred were accidental, and when one of the boys broke his leg falling down a cliff, the others braced it and looked after him so well that it healed perfectly. if they argued, then they would literally go to opposite sides of the island until they’d cooled off. after leaving the island, they remained friends for the rest of their lives. here’s a photo of them as adults, with their rescuer (who is third from the left) and other members of his crew.

the results are in

Okay so basically this all started in 10th grade when my English teacher (idk if this context is needed but she grew up in Yugoslavia in the ‘80s before moving to the US as a teen and she has a VERY thick accent. She’s about 6’4” and has huge black hair that sticks out all around her head. She’s the human embodiment of a corvid bird. Truly such a fascinating person) anyway she was talking about Lord of the Flies in class and mentioned that a few years ago some students of hers tried to convince her that the book couldn’t have taken place during WWII and that she didn’t believe them because “there have been no atomic bombs except during World War Two” and an atomic bomb is referenced as the inciting factor for why the boys were flying over a deserted island in the first place.

But the thing is, if you actually look at all the throwaway historical context details in the book, there is no logical way that it could have taken place in WWII. I realized that all clues point towards an alternate timeline where the Cold War turned hot. About halfway through the book I started bookmarking any scrap of information related the time period and it was getting to the point where each chapter took me twice as long to read because I would continually need to check various articles and Wikipedia pages to cross reference.

Eventually, I ended up writing a 5 -page paper picking the book apart for details which you can read here but I’ll also give you the individual points (a mixture of historical details and borderline headcanon):

Early on in the book, the boys mention that there are probably maps in “the Queen’s library” that show where they are—this was one of the first things that stuck out to me, as Elizabeth II didn’t become Queen until 1952, and WWII ended in 1945

Ralph mentions watching something on television at home. His dad, although a naval officer, would almost certainly not be able to afford a TV in 1945, BUT televisions were already popularized around the time of Lizzy 2’s coronation (or at the very earliest the 1948 London Olympics) and it’s believable that Ralph could have had one at home. There’s also some mentions around space travel/putting a man on Mars that would make more sense during the Cold War

I found Piggy’s character to be very interesting. For one thing, he’s introduced  as being fat due to his Aunt owning a candy store (his parents are both dead). If you know anything about the sugar ration during WWII, you’d know that candy stores would have been non-operational and Piggy would probably not have had access to an excess of sweets.

Continuing with Piggy, I’d place his distinctive accent as either London Cockney or London Estuary. If Piggy was from London, he would have been evacuated to the British countryside via train (the same evacuations in which the Pevensies stay with their uncle in Narnia) long before the dropping of the atomic bombs. Here’s where the headcanon comes in: I’d be willing to bet that Piggy was evacuated to the countryside as a baby during WWII and both his parents were among the 27,000 killed in the London Blitz, hence why he now lives with his aunt. By assuming the years leading up to the book are peacetime instead of wartime, there’s no issue around the candy store.

And finally, the most compelling argument imo…WHY WOULD BRITISH BOYS BE EVACUATED AFTER VE DAY??? In the book, it’s very clear that the LOTF boys are being evacuated from their boarding school after an atomic bomb was dropped. Victory in Europe was May 8th, 1945. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August. In what world would British boys be evacuated by a plane traveling over tropical airspace (historically child evacuations in the UK were domestic and carried out by train) to protect them from a bomb dropped in Japan four months after the end of the war in Europe?? The only plausible explanation would be that the USSR dropped a bomb on an Allied power and the boys are being evacuated from Briton all together to avoid nuclear fallout and/or future bombings.

Final note, at one point the boys consider building a new plane and decide against the idea because they “might get shot down by the Reds” even though the soviets were literally allies with Britain during WWII. Do you know when they most certainly weren’t allies? The Cold War.

Anyway, I end up giving her this essay which she reads and then promptly says “these are all very interesting points, but there was STILL no nuclear bomb besides the ones dropped on Japan in World War 2” and I’m like “Yes!! I know this!! And I’m saying it’s an alternate future!!” But she never really seemed to understand what I was saying.

Anyway a few weeks ago I was at my job (I’ve been working IT some summers at my high school after I graduated) and I ran into her and she says “I was going through my desk and I found that essay you wrote on LOTF! I read it again and it was a really good argument piece, especially for a 10th grader.”

So of course I ask her “oh really? Well, were you finally convinced?”

And she basically says “it was good…but no :)  <3”

tables confirmed!

-on the run from the law and the drunk making sure they don’t kill themselves in the woods (soldiers)

-frankenstein, his not-moms, and the worst dude they all know (seekers)

For people who are unwilling or unable to do this...work really does just dominate your life. Like we really should not have to rely on unhealthy practices just to have a social life or keep on top of housework or whatever.

Take, for instance, Star Trek: TNG. I grew up watching TNG. I was a little young for it as it was airing, but it got syndicated almost immediately and they would show an episode most weekday evenings on the Space Channel, and I'd watch it with my lifelong Trekkie mom. This was a very common thing. I was by no means unusual for watching Star Trek as a child.

Star Trek: TNG has lots of sex in it! It's never explicit (unless you have a particularly niche interpretation of some of the borg stuff) but on many an occasion you'll have a few characters doing a bit of making out followed by a closing door or fade to black, and then they wake up in bed together. If you know what sex is, you know that is what is being implied here. Even my 8-year-old self, whose understanding of the subject mostly came from books of ancient mythology that used words like 'ravish' and 'the pleasures of the couch' a whole bunch, could tell that what was happening was sex.

And I am not bringing this up as a 'see, I watched all this inappropriate stuff and I turned out just fine!'. I'm bringing it up to argue that TNG's level of sexual content is not inappropriate for children (I'm not using the legalese 'minors', because I think that lumping children and teenagers together in this conversation would make it nonsense. Star Trek is obviously appropriate for teenagers. Don't use 'minors' when you mean either children or teens, it just muddies the waters).

The point is that Star Trek: TNG was very obviously designed to be watched by children and teenagers. There's a whole character in the main cast whose role in the show is to be an audience insert for children and teenagers. The moral tone of TNG, its occasional dips into 'don't do drugs, kids' type messaging, and its general avoidance of graphic violence all scream 'we are designing this with an audience of children - but not just children - in mind'. It's a family show. It's supposed to be watched by the whole family.

Which means that, until at least the end of the 90s, this amount of sexual content was generally considered appropriate for kids to see. It's not pornographic - it's not even graphic. Maybe the very most conservative parents wouldn't let their kids watch TNG, but that might have had more to do with all the socialism and atheism.

So, why did that change? Why do we now have such a strong bullwark between 'things kids are allowed to know about' and 'things for GROWN UPS ONLY 18+ Minors DNI', and why have we relegated even the most discreet references to sex to the second category only?

I had a very unusual encounter recently in which I was talking about a video game that I played as a child (Tales of Symphonia (2003) for the Gamecube, eternal classic) with my siblings. I was 10, they were younger. We didn't have very many games, so we played this one into the absolute ground. It's a great game! It's a rare example of a JRPG with 4-person co-op multiplayer, which means it basically works as a shonen anime you can play together. The skill floor is pretty low, but the ceiling's reasonably high, so it's great for a mixed-age group. To this day, if I really needed to keep 3 children entertained for two weeks, it's probably the first place my mind would go.

So anyway, I was talking about how great this game is for kids, and the reaction I got was... horror. I was told, repeatedly, that this game is not appropriate for children on account of its violence and heavy themes. Because this game's story is, in large part, about racism. Specifically it is about how racism is bad and stupid. And in the story of the game, the kinds of things that people do out of racism do occur. People are driven from their homes, used as expendable test subjects, and put in prison camps to work themselves to death, amongst other things. The game isn't afraid to really let those heavy themes sit, either. The characters discuss these things with each other often, and the way that their fucked up world affects their perspective on these events is a big part of each character's journey.

But, like, there's no blood in this game. At all. The graphics look like this:

These character models barely have fingers, let alone intestines.

And this isn't a situation where the cutesy character models are then used for shock horror. All depictions of violence are all either in-engine combat (with people shouting out their shonen battle special attack names left and right) or just, like, a janky animation of someone swinging a sword, a slash noise, and the recipient going 'Argh' and falling over. The engine just can't render it. Discussions of violence within the game are similarly non-explicit. People will talk about, say, the death of a loved one, but it's never and more detailed than 'and so-and-so killed them and I have all these feelings about it'. The focus is squarely on how the characters feel about the violence, not the violence itself.

So, any argument that this game is too violent for, say, an 8-year-old is really an argument that the discussion of violence is too much for an 8-year-old. And that represents a real and troubling change from how we talked about violence and media for children when I was a kid.

The concern with violence on screen when I was a kid was twofold: first, that violence is scary and could give kids nightmares; and second, that seeing too much violence - especially gun violence post-Columbine - would inspire a child to do violence. Both those concerns really only applied to the imagery of violence, though. Violence that happens off-screen isn't a concern. That's the whole point of the Disney Death - if a character falls off a cliff, we don't actually see them die, but we can still talk about their death in the rest of the story. An adult brain can wonder if Mufasa died from the impact of the fall before being brutally crushed by the stampede, but a kid isn't going to worry about that and it's not going to give them nightmares. And I've yet to hear anyone even claim that Mufasa's death would be likely to inspire kids to push their schoolmates off cliffs. People sometimes joke about being 'traumatized' by Mufasa's death, but nobody actually was. We know that, right?

Any concern about the appropriate levels of violence for children that implicates Tales of Symphonia (2003) can't be relying on either of those arguments. None of the imagery onscreen in that game could give anyone nightmares (unless they were unusually frightened of model clipping) and there's none of the glorification of violence that would lead one to have Columbine-y worries. Hell, there aren't even any guns except for one guy with a laser arm cannon.

No, the concern here is not about violent imagery. It's about discussions of violent subject matter. About a story that talks allegorically about racism, death, trauma, and how we come to terms with living in a world where these things exist. And not even in a particularly novel way! Honestly, I think it's a bit both-sides-y about the whole subject but that's a matter for a different day. The only way you can argue that this game's subject matter is inappropriate for 8-10-year-olds is if you argue that 8-10-year-olds shouldn't know that racism exists. That violence exists. That bad stuff happens sometimes.

And I promise you. A lot of children already know all that.

*reluctant sigh*

*scrolls back up*

José Sarria was a World War II veteran who made his living as a popular drag queen at San Francisco's Black Cat Bar. When drag queens at the bar were harassed by the police for impersonating women, he made them cat-shaped tags that said "I'm a boy" so police would not have cause to arrest them. He also encouraged those charged with crimes to never plead guilty and draw the police and DA into long, drawn-out trials that couldn't prove anything.

In 1961, Sarria made history by running for the San Francisco board of supervisors, becoming the first openly gay person to run for public office in the United States. When city officials realized that Sarria would win because there were four candidates and five seats, they flooded the ballot with 34 candidates, ensuring that Sarria would lose. Eventually, the seat he ran for would be filled by Harvey Milk.

In spite of the loss, Sarria continued with his political activism. He founded the Tavern Guild of San Francisco, which protected gay bars from police persecution, and the Society for Individual Rights, which helped educate the gay community about their rights when facing the police.

Sarria continued to perform in drag. When he was crowned queen at the Beaux Arts ball in 1964, he declared himself "Her Royal Majesty, Empress of San Francisco, José I, The Widow Norton," and founded the Imperial Court System, a network throughout the US, Canada, and Mexico that did fundraising for various LGBT charities.