potentially going to look like a listicle of "unpopular opinions" but i'm condensing down my points from each paragraph of the post that got eaten so i can maybe expand upon them later when i remember what i had to say. and i'm kind of looking at it from a standpoint of like... as if i'm studying The Documentary, to steal from the disney parks guest services lexicon lol. like as if it's history and i'm looking back on them as figures of the past. disclaimer again as always im not excusing alma's actions--and also she's not real. i just find it interesting to comb over this stuff
1. jake didn't start a revolution with intentionality, he tried to cover his ass and make up for his mistakes, it snowballed into a movement far bigger than him. much of this he owes to the big red bird that kills everybody. neytiri and honestly trudy chacón are just as instrumental but i think they are overlooked as heroes of a revolutionary movement due to misogyny, machismo, latent racist biases--white guys get all the credit basically
2. alma cortez and jake are very similar when you look at their circumstances and it's difficult to divorce the way they're treated in the movement from their identities. think about it--sub-points:
jake is a white USMC veteran who fought on foreign soil
alma is a black woman who presumably was in academia before working with the rda in a corporate research capacity
jake is collectivist-minded (besides 'the [nuclear] family is our fortress' lapse in judgement), probably more in a militaristic unit-cohesion type of way than a communalist type of way, but still, it influences the way you rally and organize and go about building a movement. he also seems very active and impulsive. and he doesn't seem to care when others doubt or judge him--he just keeps hammering away at proving himself
alma seems hyperaware of how she's perceived by others. this is a defense mechanism i think a lot of people of color in hostile systems develop out of necessity just to stay afloat. she's also a chronic overthinker, another thing i can't really divorce from the context of a poc's lived experience--she probably expects that her actions are going to be judged more harshly than those of her white peers, or that she can't 'get away' with as much or the same things. i think as a result of this fear she lives with, she has a 'looking out for herself' (and eventually the sarentu kids not as their own people but as extensions of herself, as her students) individualist type of mentality.
so where i think i'm going with this one is how important their backgrounds are in this situation--not necessarily just race but the entire background of the character much of which is hidden to us but at least we know what was NOT there--that alma was probably not military, that jake was not in academia or a corporate environment--and how they move through those environments taking race gender maybe even age etc into account.
so maybe..alma, had she been in harding's position maybe? in another life? might have taken the jake route rather than the one she did. but her personality is very different from jake's, and her fears partially stemming from the type of life she presumably has lived are different. she's extremely passive. her passivity is very important to her character to me. she's cautious to the point of it being a huge flaw--and the one time she wasn't totally cautious it blew up enormously and a whole clan was massacred thanks in part to her. cementing that fear of acting with confidence and intentionality. so where jake just acts and things fall into place, alma freezes and things fall apart around her due to her inability to act and take responsibility. is this anything?
ok i have to actually work at my job now so i'm going to just post this so my drafts don't eat it again but probably back with more later because this is super incomplete
annaxmalina
gummygunk
jacobvanloon
vaporwave
