seeing news about the fallout remaster announcement feels like cruel irony to me
microsoft games are a bds boycott target, and because both bethesda + obsidian are owned by microsoft, this includes the games published by them.
microsoft is gonna further profit from a new virtual playground of ~post-apocalyptic bombed out towns in the desert~ while contributing to creating bombed out apocalyptic conditions in gazan towns, by collaborating with israel on so many fronts that bds calls microsoft the most complicit company in palestinian genocide.
and nostalgia-baited fans will still buy it bc playing pretend in a virtual world thats a knockoff of what real life people are currently facing ā a virtual world funded by that very suffering of those real life people ā is more important to them than simply playing a different game
Hey all! Normally when I post for Mona's community aid initiative, I post about the communities of refugees she is helping. But today I went to Instagram to update you all and saw that she hasn't posted since April, and we hadn't spoken since then either. She hadn't messaged me updates like she normally does. I was very afraid. It turned out she had broken her phone during a displacement, and she hasn't been able to replace it due to the high costs. Mobile phones are a scarce and expensive resource in Ghazzah but they are a lifeline for the families there. And for Mona it is not just a lifeline for her family but also for the refugee community she has dedicated the last few years of her life serving. She cannot connect with her usual network of volunteers or access funds without her phone (she had to contact me through her mother's phone). Despite helping displaced refugees, her and her family are also displaced refugees also living out of a tent, and she cannot currently afford a replacement. Please please please help her get a new one so she can continue doing the life-saving work she has been doing. Chuffed link to support Mona.
Aren't we putting to much pressure on Deku for saving Shigaraki. They real issue isn't that he failed in doing, so because ofcoure he did he was 15/16. We can't really expect thess children to save these traumtised individuals. I think his inability to think past his ideals or what he has been brainwashed to believe since a child is very fitting for a teenager. People paint him to be horrible, but he was one of the few to see that villains are still human. Ig Uraraka did it way better. Let me say it like this he was one of the consider them as human a big majority of the class simlply didn't. The change is bigger with him that as he grows up he might be able to actually start realising they messed up system their society runs on and perhaps do something about it, then the rest of the classmates who simply donāt see villains as people. The real issue remains their system. But allot of people treat Deku as if he is evil because he didnāt save Shigaraki, whilst most of his classmates would chose to kill him off too and they wouldn't even care to understand him. As if Deku also isn't traumatised kid as well that is brainwashed like everyone else to think the villains are not humman. I think it makes sense he failed, the child shouldn't have been in the front lines of the war in the first place
Okay, so hereās the thing, anon: no, we arenāt putting too much pressure on Deku to save Shigaraki because Deku is not a real teenager.Ā Deku is the main character in an ultimately-intended-to-be-uplifting fantasy action story about the nature of heroism, not a dystopian tragedy about the consequences of training children to partake in unthinking, politically reactionary law enforcement.Ā (I mean, it is that, but thatās not what itās trying to be.)
The promise of the very first chapter of the series is that we are reading a story about how our narrator became āthe greatest Hero.āĀ Unless you are telling me that Narrator!Deku was flat-out lying to us about that, then I have to assume that he believes we are reading a story about how he fulfilled his dreams of becoming saikou no hiiro.Ā Nobody reading the first chapterāor, indeed, any part of the series all the way through the aftermath of the first war, in which Deku stoutly defends One For All as a power intended to save, not to kill, clearly drawing a line between the two actionsāwould have a reason to think that the series would wind up allowing āsavingā to include ā(only) their heart, anywayā[1] or that it would end up so badly conflating Heroism with stoic endurance.
1: There were, of course, plenty of people who thought Deku would/should kill Shigaraki, but I donāt think I saw even the most hardcore of those types describe that as āsavingā; the assumption was rather that Deku would realize that some people were beyond saving, not that saving would get hastily redefined so that killing Shigaraki would qualify.
That being the case, I and every other Deku criticizer are perfectly within our rights to look at BNHA and say, āThatās what you think qualifies?Ā Are you serious?Ā This is awful, your heroism is awful, and you have failed to live up to what you told us this story was going to be about.ā
(Hit the jump for more.)
Regarding Deku and his classmatesā presence on the battlefield, one of the things Iāve talked about in the past is āspotting a series its premise.āĀ That is, if youāre going to get anywhere in a story, you have to allow it its basic scenario or you might as well not bother with it at all.Ā In BNHA, that basic scenario is āHero Academy.āĀ The idea of a school for heroes is presented as something cool and positive, and if you canāt deal with that at all without starting to talk about child soldiers and police states, then BNHA was never going to be the series for you.
BNHA plays its premise of a school for Heroes with fantastical optimism, so it suddenly diving for a ārealisticā ending, one grounded in a deeply pessimistic view about redemption and rehabilitation, is an active betrayal of its own tone and themes because its author lacks the courage to follow through on what his main character wants to believe.Ā By āwantsā here, I donāt mean that Deku has some kind of independent life and desires to believe something his creator wonāt let him act on.Ā Rather, I mean that Dekuās in-universe characterization and actions should be harmonious with Deku as a narrative device and embodiment of the storyās overall message.
Based on Dekuās presentation through the first war arc, he should have stuck to his guns about saving Shigaraki!Ā He should have been willing to defend Shigaraki against All For One and Hero Society and Shigarakiās own fatalism! Ā Instead, though, he cowered in the face of all of them.Ā He didnāt just fail to save Shigaraki; he actively killed Shigaraki.Ā The tension (which had always existed in Deku) between his admiration of the Hero System and his innate, overwhelming drive to save should have resolved in favor of saving, not in favor of upholding a status quo he knows to be riddled with problems!
And that being the case, of course he should have been on the front lines.Ā Heās the main character and it was the last battle!Ā Where else should the main character have been?Ā The trouble with Deku being the focal point in the final battle isnāt that it turns him into a child soldier; he was always that because itās inherent to the premise of BNHA and the structure of young adult adventure stories more broadly. Ā The trouble is that the story fails to convincingly justify his presence under its own previously established standards.
Like, if you look at how U.A. is stated to normally approach its classes, itās obvious that the situation with Class 1-A is the result of unprecedented challenges!Ā Iām totally willing to roll with that as part of spotting the series its premise!Ā Itās when the series stops being able to justify 1-Aās role in events that my acceptance of the scenario starts breaking down.
Let me go over that in some more detail:
Internships: Per the story, internships are heavily chaperoned and focused on light work, really just dipping a studentās toes into what a normal day in the life of a Hero looks like, including all the non-combat procedural stuff and the social angles of endorsement deals and the like.Ā Even a hardass like Gran Torino states that his intention is to take Deku to someplace where āminor crimesā are common, not to plunge him right into the deep end.Ā Indeed, a fight breaks out, he firmly orders Deku to stay on the train.Ā When Deku pursues, the first Hero who notices him tells him to follow police instructions and get to safety.Ā Itās obvious that the focus is on a safe first-time experienceāitās even observed later on that the internships basically treated the kids as āguests,ā and they werenāt allowed to do anything dangerous.
Work Studies: These arenāt even supposed to be offered to first-years.Ā The only reason they are is that Class 1-A has been repeatedly targeted and thus, amidst a very divided staff opinion, U.A. made the choice to offer them to the first-years to better prepare them for the increasing danger and uncertainty that is both targeting them personally and becoming more prominent in a post-All Might world.Ā U.A. personally vetted agencies offering work studies before approving them.Ā These are more dangerous, but still strictly overseen, carried out with as much caution as can be managed for a job that inherently carries with it life-or-death risk.
So far so spotting-the-series-its-premise.Ā The problem starts kicking in harder once the war arc rolls around.Ā There are hundreds and hundreds of active Heroes in the country; I simply do not believe that the planners of the raid on the PLF needed e.g. Juzoās earth-molding when they could have tapped Pixie-Bob for hers, or Tokoyamiās darkness-boosted strength when they could have just used Midnight to flood the staircase Re-Destro was using with sleeping gas.
However, thereās still a bit of an acceptable handwave in that we have started to see the corruption and desperation of the HPSCāa number of the adult characters comment on it being kind of Weird and Sus that the HPSC is ramping up combat training for high schoolers, especially first-year high schoolers.Ā The anime adaptation goes out of its way to note that the studentsā involvement in the war was hidden from the media, further emphasizing that the HPSCās actions are intended to be read as over-the-line and suspicious in ways that the internships and work studies were not.
But that all goes completely off the rails for the second war.Ā The story wants us to believe that all the HPSCās corruption was neatly dealt with by Clone!Re-Destro murdering the President (as if she wasnāt succeeded first by a man who also took part in the child assassin program and later by one of the actual child assassins).Ā Suddenly the kids of 1-A are cornerstones of the battle plans, with the only feeble handwaves given being that the first war reduced the number of Heroes drastically (but somehow didnāt impact any of the Heroes weāre actually supposed to care about beyond Midnight) and that the kids have extended experience with fighting the League (equally absurd; if it was just the experience, they should have tapped the kids for their knowledge during the planning stage, not the actual battle).
Itās obvious by this point that the only reason the endgame is rotating around the main characters is because they are the main characters, not because the admirable adult Heroes the story tells us weāre supposed to be rooting for have actual justification to put those kids in that position.
Now, I talked earlier about treating Deku as a character because he is one, so whatās the problem with accepting his presence because of his role rather than trying to examine the realism of the situation?Ā Well, the problem is still the same: the story is trying to sell us one thing (realistic explanations for the kidsā presence that respect the prior worldbuilding and donāt undermine the good guy chops of their whole side) while providing us with something else (transparent contrivance that shrinks the scope of the world while doing nothing but undermining their good guy chops).
If the story had Deku stick to his principles on saving Shigaraki, to the point that he was willing to depart from the entire professional structure that was telling him he couldnāt, then it would be perfectly reasonable for him to have to fight Shigaraki one-on-one!Ā Indeed, he have had to, and worse, he might have had to fight off his own erstwhile allies too.Ā Conversely, if heād stood up to the planners of the war and convinced them to believe in his intentions regarding Shigaraki, the same way he did the prior bearers of OFA,[2] then it would also make sense for him to be the central point of the battleplan.
2: Give or take the shamelessly easy out Horikoshi took by having Yoichi convince Kudou and Bruce rather than making Deku find a way to do it.
But Deku doesnāt do any of that.Ā He passively lets himself be steered into a confrontation with a guy he wants to help but refuses to defend against othersā violence or to engage with honestly.Ā The battle arena for Shigaraki is literally called, in-universe, the Flying Coffin; all the planners wanted to do at that point was kill Shigaraki.Ā Deku never even whispered a protest, never so much as asked for a chance to talk to Shigaraki before firing up the electrical field.Ā So not only do I not believe the Heroes' justification for putting Deku here, I don't believe Deku as-established by the story should have let himself be put here. The only Watsonian explanation is that Deku is a much lesser Hero than I thought he would be, and yet the story is still trying to convince me that he's this amazing Hero whose āmadā ādrive to saveā āeclipses all common understanding.ā
You, anon, canāt tell me I have to credit Deku for doing the bare minimum when the story is telling me he changed the world.Ā You can't tell me I have to see him as someone who might start realizing his society is fucked up and perhaps will start trying to do something about it when to the bitter end all he could talk about was about how he planned to Bring It All Back, with all talk about doing things better falling to characters as minor as Mirio or Jirou.Ā You can't tell me it makes sense that he failed when the story is frantically trying to spin his failure into a feel-good success.
Deku being sad about killing Shigaraki for approximately a day and a half does not negate the story depicting Deku's defeat of Shigaraki as him literally punching the sunshine back into a stormy sky.
Deku told me that this was the story of how he became a great Hero, he told me that for him being a Hero meant saving people, and then he failed to save the person his whole arc was leading him to save.Ā And then he had the gall to tell me that the point of the story wasnāt about him becoming a great Hero after all, it was actually about āreaching out to help,ā regardless of whether that reaching out is actually successful or not!
I can and I will blame Deku for failing to save Shigaraki, not because Iām arguing about whether itās realistic for a traumatized and brainwashed child soldier to be able to save a traumatized and brainwashed young terrorist, but because Deku lied to me about the kind of story I was reading.
If it had been framed as a kid being given unfair expectations and failing, it would work
If it had been a turning point where Deku actually learns what created Shigaraki the villain and how he focused on dealing with the societal demonization based on quirks and the bystander effect perpetuated by over dependence on heroes, it would work
But it isn't. My Hero Academia frames Deku as the world's greatest hero for murdering a man society discarded and was led to extremes in response, and then everything magically got better because of the murder.
That's why it fails because what it is telling us one thing and showing something else entirely. It is breaking the in-world's logical and tone for faulty selective 'realism'. It's saying the answer is 5 while showing us 2+2
The way all the 2020s have done so far have been making me categorically against every new generation of tech that comes out is insane. Like I'm from a technological boom generation, saw the first portable phones, nokias & blackberries & flipphones etc, and the first smartphones, and the first ipods & ipads & tablets in general while still having cassettes & DVD & MP3 players around so I know how all of it work, I had computer classes in high school, I did the transition between home desktop computers to laptops and back to gaming computers. But then they started to put internet in your printer & microwave, everything has ads & AI now and every update is worst than the last. I literally loved technology and they ruined it
I will not call myself or other people "gooners" or "npcs" or "larpers". i will not call things i dont like "slop". i will not use terms like "-oids". i dont like how common language is slowly becoming more focused on shorthand terms for hate and apathy
The biggest misconception in public schools is that literary analysis is about proving you can be right or wrong about a book you read
Literary analysis isnāt about the book
Itās not even about being right
Itās about performing an investigation and presenting your case to the jury
It doesnāt matter if your defendant killed that guy or not. If you can convince the jury he didnāt, youāve won
And the incredible life skill of spinning bulletproof bullshit out your ass with a handful of facts and a prayer is soooooooo much more valuable than anyoneās ever gonna tell you
If the average tweenager knew that good media analysis meant you could force your English teacher to admit that fuckin- (rolls dice) Whatās Eating Gilber Grape is a metaphor for (rolls dice again) Why the crack cocaine epidemic is good actually- we would have far better literacy and critical thinking skills as a nation. And I stand by that
You could develop the magical psychic and illusory power to force the middle aged bitchfuck who makes you raise your hand and beg for permission to take a shit accept the premise that Cocomelon is a subversive and scathing artistic commentary on the pitfalls of modern democracy. Chat GPT essay engines are stealing this from you
The most significant lesson I ever received in Literature classes was that everything is actually about abortion.
My regular teacher was out for the day, so the āthis guy works here but nobody quite knows what heās supposed to doā substitute was in for her. His name was Mr. Moony. I suspect, knowing more now, that Mr. Moony was the special education coordinator for gifted and talented students. But thatās all besides the point.
The only thing that mattered about Mr. Moony for this story is that every student knew you never learned anything when he was in, because he was always batshit insane. He would completely disregard plans, throw them away, and tell us to do something different.
When he came in, we had just finished reading Waiting for Godot. We were well on our way to an AP Lit exam, tired and worried, and we had a practice essay coming up based on this play. And he said, āyouāre all burnt the hell out, so Iām going to write an essay for you.ā We all cheered because, hell yes, a lecture day. We didnāt have to do shit. We could all tune out and stop caring.
And then he started going.
We were enraptured. This man deconstructed the two act play into a masterpiece, quoting ancient literature on theology and God, as well as personal details about the author, to reveal to us all that, actually, Waiting for Godot was the authorās roundabout way to show the anguish behind the politics of the pro-life/anti-choice movements, and the authorās criticisms of abortion.
He went on for a half hour, writing faster than we could really keep up with. By the end of his rant, we were all nodding along. At the end, he slammed his hand on the board and shouted āABORTIONā to really make his point.
āSo, do you all think thatās what this story is about?ā
The majority of us nodded, myself included. And this man looked at us, scrunched his face like Kermit the Fucking Frog, and went, āno the fuck itās not. I made all that up.ā
There was a beat of everyone feeling like their time was wasted. Some students very frustrated because they were trying to take notes and just realized it all was fabricated. One or two who were angry about being woken up to him shouting abortion.
And then he looked at us. āHow many of you only believe itās about abortion because thatās what I just told you to think?ā
Quite a few raised their hands.
āThen I did English good.ā
The rest of the time of class was spent with him teaching us various styles of analysis, though sadly my amnesia has claimed most of this part from me. I remember my belief in English being entirely shaken at this point. But at the same time, I also got what he was saying, and it opened my eyes to new things.
There is no right answer in literary analysis. Thereās just answers people want to hear, or answers that are compelling, or answers that arenāt those things. The answer that Waiting for Godot was about abortion was not something all of us wanted to hear, but he made the answer sound compelling ā and so we were riveted.
My next essay I wrote for that class was about the setting of the play, and how the entirety of Waiting for Godot centers on the anxieties of losing the modern family ā and even modern life as we know it ā to technology, and via that idea, the climate crisis.
I got a 100%. My teacher highlighted my (thankfully anonymous to the class) essay, particularly because the first sentence was ācompelling,ā due to my absence of proper grammar rules; Iād started it off by just saying, ātrees.ā
That was the day I really knew I loved English ā not just enjoyed reading and writing, but genuine love of playing with the language. And itās this love that I try to instill into my students.
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