the "came back wrong" trope except like... they didnt. like this mad scientists wife died, and so he studied necromancy, brought her back, and she came back and it all worked. like she came back exactly the same as she was before with literally no difference. but the scientist guy is like "oh no... what have i done.... shes Different now!!!! she came back Wrong!!!!" and shes just like. chilling. reading a book. cooking dinner. shes just so so normal but in the guys mind hes like "oh shes soooo weird" but shes just normal
People don't understand the difference between interpretation (what some might call head canons with evidence and what I call "an integral part of engaging with a text, especially when analyzing it") and a personal head canon (aka playing with dolls)
A Book of Creatures by @a-book-of-creatures doesn't update these days but is another thing along these lines, really huge, fully illustrated all by the author and cites all sources
Hadestown means when we fail to change the system, we try again
I'm so tired.
My senator is Mitch McConnell. He might be dead.
He's still in office.
That's how it goes.
I have a friend in Gaza.
Her name is Nermen. I know her personally.
She has sent me pictures and videos of her children, audio of the drones keeping her and her family up at night. She is struggling. I used to post TikToks pushing people to her Go Fund Me every week.
The views never reached the heights they needed to reach.
She's still struggling.
That's how it goes.
There have been so many revolutions. Progress has been made. Sometimes it goes backwards.
The system has never been FIXED.
I wonder if it ever will be.
That's how it goes.
I'm so tired.
There is no end in revolution.
There is only the loop. The same song is sung again.
Red bandanas or raised fists or a flag of rainbows or a watermelon.
Over and over and over and over.
Over.
And over;
and overâ
and over,
and I am so tired.
But that's what Hadestown is about, no? It's about love and life. But it's also about revolution. Orpheus wears a red bandana for a reason. Hades demands we "build a wall" before Trump demanded the same thing. It's not an oracle if it's the same cycle on repeat on repeat on repeaâ
But he keeps walking.
We keep singing the same songs.
The falling of our feet, it sounds like drumming. And we are not alone.
And maybe this time it will be different.
Maybe this time we won't look back.
Maybe this time we will both leave Hadestown free.
And even when it doesn't go that way, we pick ourselves up and try again. And again. And againâand again,
~ The humans in the beginning wear warm tones. Many wear red.
~ The inside of Eurydice's jacket/coat
~ The bandana around Orpheus' throat
~ The back of Hades' vest
~ Persephone's bag and hair both have red in the flowers and feathers
~ The carnation. (We're going to go with carnation for the remainder of this essay for convenience sake, as the kind of flower is irrelevant to the argument I am currently making.)
I want to argue that red represents both life and love, as they are intertwined concepts in this musical.
Obviously, we need to look at the humans in the beginning in comparison to the "stiffs" in Hadestown. Both wear warm tones, but only the living humans wear reds. These reds aren't even particularly vibrant in comparison to the red of Orpheus' bandana, Hades' vest, and Persephone's hints in her flower motifs, and the carnation. However, they are there.
These humans are the most obvious indication that red means life. Eurydice is a human in the crowd at the beginning of the play. Thus, she has a similar red in her jacket to the ensemble. That jacket is then taken from her in a storm, the storm that leaves her hungry and cold. When she goes to Hadestown, she is deprived of her redâeven the carnation, which Hermes later returns to Orpheus. She was alive. She is now dead. She had red; now she only has brown.
Orpheus' throat, which, according to most experts on singing and human anatomy, is where his voice comes from. His voice brings life back to a cold world in the form of that carnation, which he gives to Eurydice as a symbol of his love. Here is where life and love intersect.
Hades also wears red, but only on the back of his silver vest. (Silver represents the static, inhuman nature of the gods, but that's a different mini essay.) He literally has turned his back on life as the king of the underworld and "Hadestown." He figuratively has turned his back on life as he refuses to love his wife, a goddess of life (spring/summer), the way she needs to be loved.
And yes, Persephone mostly wears green... then black. (With these colors she visually becomes the only god in the musical who gets on the level of mankind and the one who most seeks change, but this is, again, a different essay.) However, in her green look, the flowers on her bag have red in their center. The feathers in her hair that are arranged to look like flowers have red, too. When she comes late to Earth in the summer, she brings with her wine in that bag, to drown out the pain of her winters. Of death.
With the feathers as flowers in her hair, she plays the role of the goddess of spring here. However, those flowers are feathers, just like the brown feather in Eurydice's hair. She wants to bring life back to the world but becomes trapped by Hades. She cannot heal the world from winter with so little time. She cannot bring life to the world if she's a songbird in a gilded cage.
It is only when Orpheus sings the song of Persephone and Hades' love, the love that allowed the summer to exist, that new life can form. When Orpheus sings that song directly to Hades, the carnation springs again. That flower is given to Persephone, who gives it to Hades in turn. Then, the flower is placed on Hades' heart. He is able to let a sliver of love and life back into his heart.
We can also discuss how red represents revolution, especially since the red bandanas represent the red necks of the labor movement in the early twentieth century. However, I want this post to remain a simple approach to the colors of the musical. Feel free to add and discuss in reposts. I want to hear your thoughts.
I love propaganda like those hand washing posters in bathrooms. Genuinely glad to have a consorted effort to get ppl to wash hands. Glad to have a neutral word like propaganda to talk about those posters with. I hope no one misunderstands the word propaganda and believes any media curated and designed with the goal of influencing the public is bad simply because it's called propaganda.
At an orientation. So far we're just learning about the bureaucratic structure of the organization I'm about to work for. Wondering when we get to gay part???
Stories didn't used to have a "canon." There was the story told in the moment, inspired from so many stories that came before but individual as it was told. Then, there were stories that spread, and because they were a part of oral tradition, each voice that told it again would make small changes. Some were unintentional, the consequence of this centuries-long, sometimes millennia-long game of telephone. Other times, the changes were on purpose. Your audience may have been your friends, your family, your children grabbing at your linen skirt with grubby hands while you went about your daily chores, only satiated once balanced on your hip and listening to the stories her mother told her all those years before, now in your mother's lips. You changed the stories to fit that child. Or your partner. Or your friends. Or whoever gathered around in your moments of rest, listening to your new version of that old tale to pass the time.
There was no canon carved in stone because the point of stories wasn't some inalienable version for the world to witness in its frozen perfection. The point of stories was to communicate, to learn, to entertain.
Even when Shakespeare wrote his plays, he borrowed from stories that came before. And we borrow from him in turn, but call it derivative in our hands as if it wasn't derivative in his.
Canon as something to revere rather than something we have collectively decided exists for convenience baffles me. For comic books, deciding what events took place and what was swept under the rug in retcon is important. DC and Marvel have sweeping interconnected stories from different writers and artists over the course of literal decades. Deciding what is and isn't true in certain timelines and story lines is vital for establishing a base for the new stories to bounce off of. Same thing for Star Wars sweeping away extended lore decades in the making because they didn't want their sequel trilogy beholden to that lore.
But that doesn't make the newly "non-canon" works lesser. They simply will no longer be built upon in future extensions of the IP.
Unfortunately, if you apply "canon" to the past, this falls apart. "This wasn't in the original myth," I've heard people say, dismissing Ovid. Sure, Ovid was a Roman. You should categorize his work as Roman. That is an important context one must have when understanding his myths and what he was trying to say with them. However, there is no "original" myth. Ancient Greece was a series of city states with hundreds and hundreds of years of different oral traditions. There are different renditions of each myth. Some may have been more common, but each had their own slight differences. By "each," I don't mean each common iteration. By "each" I mean each time that myth was retold, each lips those stories passed through. Even if every word of the story was the same, both the story teller and their audience would add their own nuances and interpretations of the tale. It is different in each mouth and in each ear.
To pretend canon can exist in this set of circumstances, it is naive at best and an absolute insult to the thousands of tongues who shared their own versions of the tales, a complete disregard for history and oral storytelling as a tradition reeking of misunderstanding and misinterpretation and misinformation at the worst.
When our framework for analyzing stories relies on the idea of canon, we miss what stories are. We miss so much of what different stories are trying to say. We dismiss outright any version that doesn't agree with our misguided notion of the "original" or "true" version of the story/myth.
Do fathers still walk their daughters down the aisle?
Do men still undervalue fashion?
Do women still shave their armpits?
If you wrote a story that was "free of sexism," and any of these things are still a part of that world, then you are claiming that all of these aspects of society are the natural state of things.
You can write a story that tries to limit sexism, that doesn't deal with tiring themes and where no one is explicitly oppressed. But in order to claim a story is free of sexism, you have to do REAL. SOLID. WORK.
The coconut didn't just fall from the tree. There were a million tiny steps and biases and perpetuated societal structures that made our world today. Ignoring them doesn't make the world "not sexist." It claims that all of these accidental isms are the True State of Things. That is scary. That is dangerous.
a lot of teaching is learning how to corral silliness into small, managable portions, and then use those bursts of silliness to have ur kids enjoy their class
This is not an indictment of escapist literature as a whole, nor do I seek to assert that one cannot or should not mitigate these issues in their world building if they so choose. However, I have noticed that a lot of literature that sets out to erase the â-ismsâ of our modern world (e.g. sexism, racism, classism, abilism, homophobia, transphobia) actually serve to reinforce them. Or, in other instances, create a similarly flawed system unintentionally and, in ignorance of what these authors created, ignore those flaws within the narrative.
For example, often I will read a book that exists in a world âwithout sexism.â However, because the authorâs notions of what sexism entails are surface level, sexism seeps in. Soldiers are still revered. Textiles are undervalued. Relationships still suffer from inequity, despite the male lead and female leadâs insistence this is not the case. Women are still expected to be thin and pretty. Or, if the author wants to make a point against fatphobia, sheâs expected to be curvy and pretty. Sometimes sheâs ugly, but not to the male lead. His lens is the exception to her otherwise plain or ugly appearance.
In other cases, homophobia and transphobia are done away with but gender norms are still intact. That could be interesting to explore if the author is actually willing to explore it.
Worlds without abilism will often forget disabilities are still⌠disabling.
Iâve read a book that tries to get rid of capitalism. The system they set up gives every act of labor a set of points that can be exchanged. These points can be traded. Everyoneâs points are listed in the town center. When asked if this might cause problems where people become competitive about their points or are ashamed when they are in the negatives, the person explaining the system basically said âno,â and then moved on without ever addressing this again.
Well, they also explained that the whole town rallies around those that are in the negatives to help them. This, at the very least, is a privacy concern. It doesnât matter how collectivist and caring your town is. People are going to want help at their own pace and on their own terms. Broadcasting someoneâs depressive episode for all to see is mortifying. (Mind you, the main character went through a depressive episode in the first book and felt shame for not feeling like they contributed to their community enough or correctly. That was their whole arc in book one. Why are we not addressing how this system might have contributed to that in book two???)
Or, what if someone is chronically disabled and can never get into the positives? What if there is no rallying the town can do that will allow them to contribute the same amount or more as their abled peers? Is it not dehumanizing to constantly broadcast someoneâs inability to an entire town? The main character would say no, and move on. It will not be addressed again.
The point is, when you take away an âism,â you canNOT only focus on the surface level. Sexism and racism and abilism and more are not simply issues of blatant, unapologetic bias. They are systemic problems that need to be solved systemically.
Now, what if you do not want to address that at all in your world building. You want something that doesnât disrupt the status quo of our world today too much, but you also donât want to dive heavily into all these systemic issues. You want your escapism set in this familiar, flawed world, but you donât want to address all those pesky flaws. You can do that! As long as you ensure your fluffy story isnât accidentally reinforcing oppressive systems, you can still set fluff in our oppressive systems. You must write with intention, or you will end up writing those very biases you hoped to avoid.Â
HOWEVER, if you want to genuinely get rid of those oppressive systems for your fantasy world, you HAVE TO do the work. How does getting rid of the rotten roots of our modern society fundamentally change every aspect of the society you are creating? EXPLORE THAT! Then, if you accidentally embed new issues into your world, you can work to get rid of them, or embrace them or explore them. But creating a new world with rotten roots and having the narrative itselfânot only the characters who may be unreliable in their biasesâignore all the issues inherent here just recreates the very monsters you sought to destroy.
As a reader, I donât feel like I am escaping. This isnât escapism. Itâs bias in a pretty bow, and I donât like it.
When you pretend you have wiped out all patriarchy, abilism, racism, etc, you insinuate that any "ism" you accidentally left in is actually the natural state of things. Gay men naturally are weaker. Black folks naturally are more aggressive and less intelligent. Women really are more emotional, less logical, and that's a hindrance. Etc etc etc.
It's honestly worse in my eyes than admitting that you have biases cuz it pretends those biases are actually how the world *is*
I advance too fast in Tomadachi Life: Living the Dream
Leveling up your character should be exciting, not frustrating. And yet, I have avoided feeding my characters because they're on the verge of leveling up. It is too easy to get them to the next level, and then I have to choose a new trait for them (I haven't figured out how to delay that) when all I wanted was to give them a cool pair of rainbow socks.
I made a character to dump all the clothes that I don't want another Mii to wear just yet, and they're already at Lv. 20. They have not interacted with a single other Mii.
I can't seem to stop playing once or twice a day, but I also wish the gameplay was just... better...
whenever folks talk about harry potter and separating artist from art they always have this indignant 'OH SO IM A BAD FOR BUYING THESE BOOKS?' but thats not the question. the reality is that many will BELIEVE you are bad, and that is VALID. its not your choice what others think of you
'AM I BAD?' is a grand and cosmic question that is well beyond our scope. fine. here on the ground, the DAY TO DAY effects are that your actions contribute to hurt and suffering in small or large ways, and those who hurt and suffer because of you are allowed to not like you because of it. SORRY BUD.
what is alternative? forcing folks to enjoy the art of those who hurt them? THEY DONT LIKE IT. someone saying 'your choices harm me so i dont like your creations and i dont like you' is not offensive, it is the most basic use of human autonomy and it is SO bizarre when folks argue otherwise
if you are a bigot or support bigotry or act in a movie built on the profits of hate, people are allowed to not like you 1. because bigotry is bad and 2. because people generally DONT LIKE THINGS THAT HURT THEM. like this is so obvious. it is not 'canceling' it is an exercise in basic human autonomy
i swear if we had social media in the past people would call the hippie and punk movements 'cancel culture' too. LARGE GROUPS OF PEOPLE MOBILIZING AGAINST THE THINGS THAT HURT THEM IS NOT NEW. SORRY BUD IT IS NOT SOME GEN Z FAD IF YOU SUPPORT HATEFUL THINGS AND FOLKS DONT WANT TO BUY YOUR STUFF ANYMORE
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