where i end and kylo ren begins

[cri-lit]

why consume media critically?

So what I’m saying is that it’s fine to ask questions about the social impacts of questionable depictions of relationships in media. It’s natural to have concern about the society you live in. Those video game fearing parents that I mentioned in an earlier post felt the exact same thing. It’s human nature to be wary of unknown effects of media consumption.

But creating a discourse culture that actively encourages the use of literary theory and critical thinking can take us from shoving away all uncomfortable things, to actually making meaningful social analysis of the kind of context we’re living in. Types of representation that might be lacking. We can wield this type of ability to become more knowledgeable, discerning people. We can even like things that we know are bad in real life. Maybe you love Disney princesses, even though they are enshrouded in outdated ideas of femininity and propagated by a corporation of such scale that it might one day rule our lives. Maybe you’re obsessed with serial killer biopics. Maybe you love the tropey reylo ship, how the dynamics of these two characters coming together sparks your imagination, you might find that tension between your own real-life interpretation and the media depiction fascinating to pick into, like me!

There’s something for us here. Becoming a critically literate person is so fulfilling. Even learning the most basic foundations (how does a text reflect or connect with the cultural context it came from?) can equip you with the kind of tools to find value in a huge range of media, even something as abysmal and surface level as 50 Shades of Gray, or as insulting to our expectations of a rich and interesting female character as Star Wars IX’s Reylo.

Isn’t that amazing?

[cri-lit]

reylo is problematic, and so are you

What’s the connection between social justice theories and fandom discourse?

Take one step into fandom Tumblr and you’re bound to find some kind of conflict internal to the fandom. Reylo/anti-Reylo is one of those dynamics. Reylo being the polarising Star Wars ship of goodie Rey and baddie Kylo Ren.

In short, an anti-reylo fan (those who actively dislike and denounce the ship) has the belief that the pairing should be actively scrubbed off the face of the planet, or at least be condemned by anyone with a set of respectable values as being abusive and toxic. That the sheer gross-ness of the ship has the power to corrupt the people that like the combination of these two characters, and will ultimately make the world a worse place.

Is this true?

Star wars is filled with tropes. Instead of brushing this off as problematic and disavowing people who might enjoy this dynamic or the characters, looking at this critically allows us to acknowledge that some of these tropes are problematic. Maybe they involve outdated or gross ideas of femininity, of the onus falling on Rey to ‘fix’ Kylo, to provide the path to his redemption. There is a lot to say about the kind of character Kylo Ren is traited to be. The manipulations of the plot and how his character is handled, provokes strong emotional reactions within the audience. These reactions range from empathy to contempt, and sometimes outrage.

Kylo Ren is a representation of a person, so it is our gut instinct to react to him as we would a real person, with real moral onus and accountability for his actions. However, we can also examine Kylo Ren, and further, his relationship with female protagonist Rey, as a set of social codes that, put together, are intended to send a message pertinent to the culture of the times. This is how literary analysis looks at characters and character relationships.

Why did the messy Reylo trope arise in 2019? Why are we still utilising this representation of an abusive relationship these days, and how does this instance differ from representations of the past?

Anyone who has known a Star Wars fan will know that the culture is fraught with conflicting opinions, interpretations, and an entire web of canon-turned-non-canon lore. It’s a mine field, and this makes pleasing the majority of the fanbase almost impossible to achieve. The expectations are hefty, and no doubt play a huge role in the choices the writers and productions make in portrayal. Maybe a relationship like Reylo is symptomatic of this context. Perhaps J.J. Abrams & co leaned into some of the more distasteful/abusive aspects of this character dynamic as a parallel to the preceding relationship between Padme and Anakin from the sequels.

What do you think?

[cri-lit]

Look at how this mini-analysis of reylo provided a really interesting glimpse into the culture it came from.

Why doesn’t this agree with you? Do you find it gross because you identified with Rey before and find the idea of being the shoulder for another sad, entitled boy who just sees girls as something to manipulate and vent to as tired and maybe too uncomfortably close to how you spent your sixteenth year? Is it reflective of behaviour that you recognise as symptomatic of an abusive relationship? Does it annoy you that we are supposed to feel sorry for him as this redeemable character that was simply led astray, again? Because it’s so overplayed that we have to see another male character be given the forgiveness of the audience within the machinations of the plot, without our input? Haven’t we moved past this yet? Does this plot even take us seriously? Because me too!

I don’t like Reylo. From the perspective of investment in her character as well as using my ability to analyse the literary workings going on underneath, I think that a depiction of her more virtuous and morally upstanding nature could’ve been represented in a more fulfilling and meaningful way than by using her as the bridge to which Kylo Ren crosses from villany into redemption. So let’s talk about it.

[cri-lit]

reylo is problematic, and so are you

What’s the connection between social justice theories and fandom discourse?

Take one step into fandom Tumblr and you’re bound to find some kind of conflict internal to the fandom. Reylo/anti-Reylo is one of those dynamics. Reylo being the polarising Star Wars ship of goodie Rey and baddie Kylo Ren.

In short, an anti-reylo fan (those who actively dislike and denounce the ship) has the belief that the pairing should be actively scrubbed off the face of the planet, or at least be condemned by anyone with a set of respectable values as being abusive and toxic. That the sheer gross-ness of the ship has the power to corrupt the people that like the combination of these two characters, and will ultimately make the world a worse place.

Is this true?

Star wars is filled with tropes. Instead of brushing this off as problematic and disavowing people who might enjoy this dynamic or the characters, looking at this critically allows us to acknowledge that some of these tropes are problematic. Maybe they involve outdated or gross ideas of femininity, of the onus falling on Rey to ‘fix’ Kylo, to provide the path to his redemption. There is a lot to say about the kind of character Kylo Ren is traited to be. The manipulations of the plot and how his character is handled, provokes strong emotional reactions within the audience. These reactions range from empathy to contempt, and sometimes outrage.

Kylo Ren is a representation of a person, so it is our gut instinct to react to him as we would a real person, with real moral onus and accountability for his actions. However, we can also examine Kylo Ren, and further, his relationship with female protagonist Rey, as a set of social codes that, put together, are intended to send a message pertinent to the culture of the times. This is how literary analysis looks at characters and character relationships.

Why did the messy Reylo trope arise in 2019? Why are we still utilising this representation of an abusive relationship these days, and how does this instance differ from representations of the past?

Anyone who has known a Star Wars fan will know that the culture is fraught with conflicting opinions, interpretations, and an entire web of canon-turned-non-canon lore. It’s a mine field, and this makes pleasing the majority of the fanbase almost impossible to achieve. The expectations are hefty, and no doubt play a huge role in the choices the writers and productions make in portrayal. Maybe a relationship like Reylo is symptomatic of this context. Perhaps J.J. Abrams & co leaned into some of the more distasteful/abusive aspects of this character dynamic as a parallel to the preceding relationship between Padme and Anakin from the sequels.

What do you think?

[cri-lit]

An intro to the rise of toxic fandom culture

[degenderates]

“anti” fandom needs to stop

guys if you hate a ship or a character I love, hate it! go ahead! but making a whole ass blog about how you hate the darkling or you hate mal or you hate etc.etc. is really too much. can’t we have respectful convos in modern society instead of insulting each other and saying that the opposite fans “don’t have rights” or “are psychos” or “crackheads” seriously??? Are we this immature?

[cri-lit]

aesthetics vs ethics

Does consuming media that spits in the face of your own political or moral views make you a bad person? Does watching too much Alex Jones slowly brainwash you into becoming an alt-right conspiracy theorist?

My title was inspired by a quote from the late Seymour Chatman, a literary critic and scholar who was a prominent figure in the field of narratology and rhetoric.

The full quote reads,

“One’s moral fibre cannot really be “seduced” by wily implied authors. Our acceptance of their world is aesthetic, not ethical. To confound the implied author with a certain historical figure whom we may or may not admire morally, politically, or personally would seriously undermine our theoretical enterprise.”

-- Seymour Chatman

First off, you don’t really need to know the theoretical concept of ‘implied author’ to understand what this quote is getting at. But to give you a brief introduction, the implied author is basically the framework of a narrative, including its underlying ethical ideology and embedded cultural critique. It’s that intangible thing in American Psycho that tells us Patrick Bateman’s bigoted and brutal tendencies are to be reviled. Sure, he’s positioned as the protagonist of his story, but there’s something going under the surface that just won’t stop screaming that he is a bloodthirsty narcissist with dangerous delusions. The story itself doesn’t support him, he is an unreliable narrator.

There’s the implied author.

Chatman invokes an interesting idea. We fall into fictional worlds in order to bask in their aesthetics. A powerful story might touch us deeply, or impart some invaluable wisdom on us. A good narrative representation might make our identities feel validated, or provide a stirring social commentary.

On the flip side, a narrative could do the exact opposite of all of these things. Fiction can be insulting. It can hurt. It can fumble a representation so hard that our personal identities are left stinging like a slap in the face. But we don’t take our ethical cues from this kind of text. “One’s moral fibre cannot really be “seduced,”” and that goes doubly for those of us who nurture our critical thinking abilities.

So I’ll leave you with this.

Do video games cause violence?

[shipsa-hoy]

Y'all really said fuck healthy non toxic relationships 😩😭

[problematic-faves-appreciation]

They're fictional relationships.

Let people enjoy things, okay? c:

[tuntematonkorppi]

has this been done yet

[lily-orchard]

I’m having too much fun

[cri-lit]

a straw man for toxic racist ideology?

Is it a coincidence that the lone mass murders in the West in recent memory have predominantly been young, white men?

It’s easier for middle road news outlets to spout rhetoric about video games causing violence, than to acknowledge the idea that our particular socio-political context can propagate extremist, racial hate ideology. That the kind of social progress that might conflict with the interest of the multi millionaire-billionaire conglomerates that own these outlets could effect changes to prevent this kind of festering from happening in corners of the internet.

The world is changing at a dramatic pace. The development of video games, social media, online streaming platforms are all happening in parallel. Alongside extremist groups that come from the generation that is growing up in this time period. Gaming and internet use is ubiquitous in the western first world for most people, so statistically is it really that significant that some violent mass murderers have partaken in the culture they are immersed in? Is the evidence really there to show a massive increase in radicalisation of young men exclusively through the medium of gaming?

One last question.

Are you an adult? If you are, how do you feel about calls to ban certain violent video games ‘for the sake of the children”? For the sake of the men that the media would have you believe cannot control their violent urges with a little virtual prompting? What if it was your favourite series? To you, is it someone else’s right to decide whether you can draw the line between fiction and reality when it comes to gaming, lest you turn into a mass murderer (although the evidence is severely lacking)? Or do you believe that the concern over children should be filtered through parental monitoring and rating systems rather than total shunning of the game?

Maybe the answer is obvious to you. Of course we, as adults, can tell the difference between reality and fiction.

Right?

[cri-lit]

are we listening to mass murderers now?

I just wanna play some old Japanese dating sims. But they won’t stop asking me, what about the children?

I’m sure you’ve seen the story on your local morning show, or evening current affairs. Maybe the newspaper, I don’t know. Do people still read the newspaper?

To catch you up if you didn’t watch the clip, the Christchurch shooter claimed that he used popular Battle Royale game Fortnite as practice for committing a racially motivated terrorist mass murder in 2019.

Do video games cause violence? Well, let’s think about it.

[cri-lit]

I can poke a few holes in the ‘video-games-cause-violence-protect-the-children’ rhetoric without even pulling stats. I’ll do this by exercising some critical thinking.

First, some questions.

Why are we taking the word of a mass murderer about the influence of violence in video games? You don’t have to be an expert in psychology to recognise that the mass murder of unsuspecting people in a place of worship is not the action of a vast majority of people. Do we really trust a man who committed an atrocity on this scale to assess the potential influences on his actions?

How much weight does one expert have? What are their credentials? What is the academic consensus? The news media has a tendency to use the ideas of the nebulous ‘expert’ to confirm the fears of their audiences. I don’t think this is an outrageous claim.

Could there be other factors that are simply correlations? In other words, are we looking only for positive confirmation of the theory the video games cause violence?

The likelihood of a person’s openness to this theory probably decreases with age. This is simply just the barrier for entry with video games. It’s harder to pick up a technology that you haven’t grown up immersed in. And anyone who has an even moderately deep knowledge of the game-sphere would know that the variety of video games is huge, and first person shooters are only one genre that is rapidly diversifying and gaining both story complexity and mechanical complexity. I digress.

I’m not here to prove that this theory is wrong. In fact, Dr. Orlando states in the attached Sunrise video that there is no evidence that proves a connection between video games and susceptibility to violence. What I want to show is that with just a few questions critically engaging with the claim presented, I was able to expose multiple angles from which this concept could be viewed in a less fear-provoking way.

In my next post, I’ll look a little deeper into why our culture of the moment might have spurred this new rhetoric around gaming.

[cri-lit]

are we listening to mass murderers now?

I just wanna play some old Japanese dating sims. But they won’t stop asking me, what about the children?

I’m sure you’ve seen the story on your local morning show, or evening current affairs. Maybe the newspaper, I don’t know. Do people still read the newspaper?

To catch you up if you didn’t watch the clip, the Christchurch shooter claimed that he used popular Battle Royale game Fortnite as practice for committing a racially motivated terrorist mass murder in 2019.

Do video games cause violence? Well, let’s think about it.

[cri-lit]

Our acceptance of their world is aesthetic, not ethical.

Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure and Fiction in Film