I’ve been avoiding tumblr because we couldn’t watch new episodes of The Good Place until today and I have a lot of feelings of course, but two main thoughts.
1. Palto
2. Eleanor holding up a copy of The Nichomachean Ethics was so great right? It’s so funny!
um. I can literally feel people scrolling by. I swear it’s funny if you’ve read Aristotle’s Ethics, which I’m guessing not that many people have. It’s not a page turner. I didn’t understand any of it until my second read and it helps if you’ve read The Physics. The texts go together. I still don’t understand a lot of it.
But. I can sum up a bit of the Ethics badly if you’re interested and explain why I am so excited . . .
In the Ethics the way to be a good person is to be Virtuous. You create good habits, you educate yourself, you learn from others--especially other people who are trying to be good. (notice I did not say ARE good.)
The bestest thing you can do to be VIRTUOUS is “contemplate contemplation.” Look. Ask a farmer what’s good and he’ll tell you to compost, or grow beets or something, but you ask a philosopher? They tell you it’s thinking about thinking. A close second to philosophy--is Friendship. Aristotle calls a good friend “another self,” or someone you consume much salt with. Someone you know well enough to eat regular meals with.
Friendship is a key virtue because when you pay attention to what a friend (another self) is doing, you have more perspective than when you examine your own bullshit. You can see their choices, actions, and consequences more clearly than your own. You can try to do good things your friends do and avoid mistakes they’ve made. This is simple to explain and very complicated in practice. Which is why I find this joke so brilliant and funny. Because you can’t forking explain “virtue ethics” or the Nichomachean Ethics in a sitcom by trotting out the text or discussing it directly. You apply it to specifics. Here’s some people trying to do good things and be good people for themselves and for others.
And I hope I’m not making Aristotle sound mercenary about his friendships, because he wasn’t. Out of all the European philosophers in the western canon--he’s one of the very few who was married. Friendship is important because it’s a big part of what makes us human. We’re to varying degrees--social animals. Being human is virtuous and the opposite behavior is vice/viciousness--or doing the wrong thing when you know it’s the wrong thing. Doing bad things on purpose makes you less human.
Eleanor holding up a copy of the Ethics, but then not referencing the massive importance of friendship by quoting the book--lets this story be about the messiness of friendship--not some ideal, but actual, real, developing friendship. There’s no chalkboard notes for this. It’s not abstract. It’s people being sweaty and defensive and difficult and yet helping each other and bringing good things into each other’s lives. (And sometimes bad things, or things that seem bad in the short term.)
This is why I prefer Aristotle to Plato. You do your best to judge the right thing to do and then you do it. Sometimes you’re wrong and other times you’re less wrong, and sometimes you’re closer to right. There’s no perfect virtuous state you can achieve. You can’t actually be GOOD, you’re always moving towards it--he has this delightful description of it--staying at work becoming yourself. I like it because it allows for the murkiness of actual life. You’re not trying to be perfect. You’re trying to live a good life. The messiness and change of life negates perfection.
Plato had Forms--like there was a perfect version of every thing in some magic place and Aristotle was like, “I know we’re bros and I love you man, but the Forms are really dumb, Palto.”
That’s why “Palto” is so funny. The only damn thing written on that board was Palto. The guy who advocated perfect Forms had his name misspelled in a philosophy discussion that was derailed by a demon in a story line that’s about Aristotle in practice.
You can kind of see why people read and quote Plato more. I spent the last two seasons wondering what the hell they were going to do about Aristotle and if they’d just skip him, because imagine trying to put all this into a bloody TV show in breezy snippets? You can’t. They did it anyway, but it’s sneaky. It’s all in there, but it’s not spelled out.
Imagine a body horror story of a monster who takes pleasure in scaring humans, but slowly, they discover just how similar to the humans they torment they truly are. The monster starts to look at themself in disgust as they start to see more and more similarities. They start growing hair, skin, hands, and other such human features. What tips them over the edge is when they attempt to scare a human and that human jumps but treats them as if they were human.
The more "monsterous" the monster tries to act as, the more human they become.
And yet, the kinder they are and the more they accept they have to be human, the more monstrous they become perceived as. Their kindness let's their hair, skin, or whatever else fall back into their previous monstrous forms.
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Themes: body dysphoria (gender and otherwise), perception of humanity, morality, social hierarchy, demonization of innocence, youth
Inspired by the book "Someone You Can Build a Nest in"
Imagine a story where people are, in the most literal sense, forced into boxes (or perhaps rooms) that they are not allowed to leave. People admire celebrities, who are the ones with the tightest, most constricting boxes.
There are people who have fought for larger boxes, boxes of different shapes, and even different colors, but never for freedom. Why? Because those boxes are all they have ever known. What would happen if they were to even leave their boxes? "How selfish of them to even suggest such an idea. You already have such a large box, now you want to leave it all together? There are people out there without these boxes that you just want to throw away!"
I think that a fitting name for this story may be "Think Outside the Box." It will display themes of activism, censorship, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, (+ other similar hatered for marginalized groups), the idea of freedom, and how scary true freedom may be.
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A way to emphasize the story's themes of activism for the marginalized would be to emphasize the fact that numerous characters may be trans, gay, POC, etc, but also the fact that there are people who are stereotypically privileged whom are in the exact same boxes as them (symbolism: societal pressure of playing the part of their particular "role" or part). Perhaps as a minor point, a character may realize they're nonbinary during the same times they realize they no longer fit in their box and they want a new one. Hell, give them neopronouns!
I believe the best perspective to tell this story through would be through the 1st or 3rd (limited) perspective of the true main character's friend. The main character will obviously want to be the one to escape, but the friend will want to stay. They fear the unknown of what may lie outside of the boxes they live in. As the story progresses, the POV character may even become even more resistant the closer they get to freedom. Hell, even after they get out, they may see a bird (synbolism: freedom) flying by, and they'll shoot it out of fear or something because they've never seen anything like it before and, well, it mightve attacked them!
I am uncertain if this should be a small group of people, if this is the entirety of the human population, if it should be a post-apocalyptic setting where humans set up shop in their safe boxes, or perhaps there is a true haven just out the doors of the boxes.
What would they do in case of a fire? Either high-tech stuff that drowns it out, or.. they get a glimpse of the outside. Ohh that would be a cool plot point: the fire escape leads everyone out into a yard, but it's fearmongered by the people in charge. Something like, "Be careful of anything green! Do not touch anything, do not eat anything, even if it looks similar to your food! And most of all: if you see anything move that isn't one of us or yourselves, shoot it!" (Mmm racism symbolism)
Imagine a video game where basically, it would be like one of those "spot the imposter" games where you have to decide if someone is real and if they are allowed into whatever you're guarding. The thing is, is that the "imposter" stuff is all just mass hysteria, rumors, and general paranoia perpetuated by people in power.
You are given "evidence" that certain people are fake, but in reality they are immigrants and homeless people with false or outdated paperwork, people with mental illness, non-conventionally attractive people, anxious and angry people, and just people with really bad luck. Sometimes, if you ask them too many questions, they'll offer you bribes or beg to pay up next time just to get in. As time goes on, people get more and more desperate to be let into this safe space (apartment or bunker or lab or country or something) as the people's paranoia grows.
