Listening to Hamiltonis one thing. Watching it is another entirely.
Let’s talk about what we get from the music. Sure, most of the story is told, but we (at least, I) assumed that a majority of the time, each character was telling their own story. It was all a general perspective. Without any visual cues, we only saw part of the story, part of the magic of Hamilton.
Yesterday, as I watched the production, I found myself tearing up for a majority of the show. Hamiltonis a work of art. And yes, of course I recognize the criticisms of the show and they are valid, but I also find the commentary of the show itself fascinating. Lin-Manuel Miranda created a masterpiece, and watching it for the first time yesterday, I could truly see that.
Now onto Aaron Burr. As high schoolers, most of us knew him as the guy who killed Hamilton in a duel. Emphasis on the duel. I distinctly remember talking about the duel in my A.P. US history class far more than the man behind the gun.
Hamiltonchanges this.
The show opens with Burr directly addressing the audience, asking them a rhetorical question they’ll eventually have answered mere minutes later. This sets him up as the narrator; it’s his lens we’re seeing the story through. Listening to the soundtrack, I didn’t realize this. It took watching the story, watching the times Burr watches the story around him, even interacting with others as if he knows how the conversation is going to go already.
As the show continues, it becomes more obvious that Burr is the one telling the story of Alexander Hamilton’s legacy. This is especially clear at the end, when he’s telling the audience to “look it up Hamilton was wearing his glasses.” He’s trying to justify his actions, to try to show he’s not a monster. He was trying to protect his family, and was unwilling to take the risk. Even so, he still sounds remorseful. As if wanting to take back his actions.
After Hamilton’s death, Burr goes on to narrate the aftermath, continuing until Eliza takes over. At that point, Eliza is the one preserving and continuing his legacy. The exchange of narration, however, is telling. Though Eliza was sharing his legacy and ensuring it endured, so was Burr by telling the story. By being the one to narrate it, to share it, despite having also been the man that killed him.
It’s as if Burr wishes to make up for killing Hamilton by making sure that he shares and continues his legacy. He’s repenting for his sin. The only way to see this, though, is by watching the musical. Though you can hear the emotion in Burr’s voice in the songs, seeinghis reactions is the only way to truly capture the full story.
Hamiltonis a reflection of Burr’s life as much as it is Hamilton’s. As the musical progresses, this becomes more obvious. Burr continues to address the audience, again asking questions and wondering why he continues to be inadequate when compared to Hamilton.
I mean, it’s obvious they’re foils of one another. Burr is unwilling to pick a side, unwilling to take a stand; Hamilton, however, is strong in his values and believes you must pick a side and stay strong in your convictions. He is unwilling to play the game of politics in the way that Burr does. Hell, they’re even divided on the nature of duels. Where Hamilton thinks the duel with Charles Lee is necessary, for example, Burr finds ridiculous. What’s interesting, though, is by Act II, they seem to have switched their beliefs entirely. When Burr chooses to shoot Hamilton, he is taking a side. He’s taking a stand via duel, something he previously believed to be absurd. Hamilton, however, aims upward, choosing this instead of risking the life of his opponent by shooting him. His actions further indicate he’s unwilling to kill someone in a duel, something he likely would have been more than willing to do in Act I. These characters have been developed so well that they are perfect foils of one another. It’s impressive.
Hamilton’salways impressed me. I remember hearing about it and thinking I’d be the only one interested (I’d recently gone through a phase where I was obsessed with Alexander Hamilton. I don’t know or understand why. I blame APUSH junior year). When I saw Hamiltontake off, I was delighted. And to finally have the opportunity to see it now, years later, after having sung the soundtrack countless times? It’s incredible.
Listening to Hamiltonis one thing. Watching it is another entirely.
Let’s talk about what we get from the music. Sure, most of the story is told, but we (at least, I) assumed that a majority of the time, each character was telling their own story. It was all a general perspective. Without any visual cues, we only saw part of the story, part of the magic of Hamilton.
Yesterday, as I watched the production, I found myself tearing up for a majority of the show. Hamiltonis a work of art. And yes, of course I recognize the criticisms of the show and they are valid, but I also find the commentary of the show itself fascinating. Lin-Manuel Miranda created a masterpiece, and watching it for the first time yesterday, I could truly see that.
Now onto Aaron Burr. As high schoolers, most of us knew him as the guy who killed Hamilton in a duel. Emphasis on the duel. I distinctly remember talking about the duel in my A.P. US history class far more than the man behind the gun.
Hamiltonchanges this.
The show opens with Burr directly addressing the audience, asking them a rhetorical question they’ll eventually have answered mere minutes later. This sets him up as the narrator; it’s his lens we’re seeing the story through. Listening to the soundtrack, I didn’t realize this. It took watching the story, watching the times Burr watches the story around him, even interacting with others as if he knows how the conversation is going to go already.
As the show continues, it becomes more obvious that Burr is the one telling the story of Alexander Hamilton’s legacy. This is especially clear at the end, when he’s telling the audience to “look it up Hamilton was wearing his glasses.” He’s trying to justify his actions, to try to show he’s not a monster. He was trying to protect his family, and was unwilling to take the risk. Even so, he still sounds remorseful. As if wanting to take back his actions.
After Hamilton’s death, Burr goes on to narrate the aftermath, continuing until Eliza takes over. At that point, Eliza is the one preserving and continuing his legacy. The exchange of narration, however, is telling. Though Eliza was sharing his legacy and ensuring it endured, so was Burr by telling the story. By being the one to narrate it, to share it, despite having also been the man that killed him.
It’s as if Burr wishes to make up for killing Hamilton by making sure that he shares and continues his legacy. He’s repenting for his sin. The only way to see this, though, is by watching the musical. Though you can hear the emotion in Burr’s voice in the songs, seeinghis reactions is the only way to truly capture the full story.
Hamiltonis a reflection of Burr’s life as much as it is Hamilton’s. As the musical progresses, this becomes more obvious. Burr continues to address the audience, again asking questions and wondering why he continues to be inadequate when compared to Hamilton.
I mean, it’s obvious they’re foils of one another. Burr is unwilling to pick a side, unwilling to take a stand; Hamilton, however, is strong in his values and believes you must pick a side and stay strong in your convictions. He is unwilling to play the game of politics in the way that Burr does. Hell, they’re even divided on the nature of duels. Where Hamilton thinks the duel with Charles Lee is necessary, for example, Burr finds ridiculous. What’s interesting, though, is by Act II, they seem to have switched their beliefs entirely. When Burr chooses to shoot Hamilton, he is taking a side. He’s taking a stand via duel, something he previously believed to be absurd. Hamilton, however, aims upward, choosing this instead of risking the life of his opponent by shooting him. His actions further indicate he’s unwilling to kill someone in a duel, something he likely would have been more than willing to do in Act I. These characters have been developed so well that they are perfect foils of one another. It’s impressive.
Hamilton’salways impressed me. I remember hearing about it and thinking I’d be the only one interested (I’d recently gone through a phase where I was obsessed with Alexander Hamilton. I don’t know or understand why. I blame APUSH junior year). When I saw Hamiltontake off, I was delighted. And to finally have the opportunity to see it now, years later, after having sung the soundtrack countless times? It’s incredible.
into the spiderverse was a really good movie but that did not mean we needed every single production company to make a new multiverse
Isn’t it remarkable how, so frequently, those big budget studios completely fail to realize that what makes a movie succeed is good writing coupled with good performances? That’s the most basic of basics. Yet they always seem to walk away thinking it was some particular gimmick of the particular movie.
there’s something endlessly hilarious to me about the phrase “hotly debated” in an academic context. like i just picture a bunch of nerds at podiums & one’s like “of coursethere was a paleolithic bear cult in Northern Eurasia” and another one just looks him in the eye and says “i’l kill you in real life, kevin”
I heard a story once about two microbiologists at a conference who took it out into the parking lot to have a literal fistfight over taxonomy.
have i told this story yet? idk but it’s good. The Orangutan Story:
my american lit professor went to this poe conference. like to be clear this is a man who has a doctorate in being a book nerd. he reads moby dick to his four-year-old son. and poe is one of the cornerstones of american literature, right, so this should be right up his alley?
wrong. apparently poe scholars are like, advanced. there is a branch of edgar allen poe scholarship that specifically looks for coded messages based on the number of words per line and letters per word poe uses. my professor, who has a phd in american literature, realizes he is totally out of his depth. but he already committed his day to this so he thinks fuck it! and goes to a panel on racism in poe’s works, because that’s relevant to his interests.
background info: edgar allen poe was a broke white alcoholic from virginia who wrote horror in the first half of the 19th century. rule 1 of Horror Academia is that horror reflects the cultural anxieties of its time (see: my other professor’s sermon abt how zombie stories are popular when people are scared of immigrants, or that purge movie that was literally abt the election). since poe’s shit is a product of 1800s white southern culture, you can safely assume it’s at least a little about race. but the racial subtext is very open to interpretation, and scholars believe all kinds of different things about what poe says about race (if he says anything), and the poe stans get extremely tense about it.
so my professor sits down to watch this panel and within like five minutes a bunch of crusty academics get super heated about poe’s theoretical racism. because it’s academia, though, this is limited to poorly concealed passive aggression and forceful tones of inside voice. one professor is like “this isn’t even about race!” and another professor is like “this proves he’s a racist!” people are interrupting each other. tensions are rising. a panelist starts saying that poe is like writing a critique of how racist society was, and the racist stuff is there to prove that racism is stupid, and that on a metaphorical level the racist philosophy always loses—
then my professor, perhaps in a bid to prove that he too is a smart literature person, loudly calls: “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE ORANGUTAN?”
some more background: in poe’s well-known short story “the murder in the rue morgue,” two single ladies—a lovely old woman and her lovely daughter who takes care of her, aka super vulnerable and respectable people—are violently killed. the murderer turns out to be not a person, but an orangutan brought back by a sailor who went to like burma or something. and it’s pretty goddamn racially coded, like they reeeeally focus on all this stuff about coarse hairs and big hands and superhuman strength and chattering that sounds like people talking but isn’t actually. if that’s intentional, then he’s literally written an analogy about how black people are a threat to vulnerable white women, which is classic white supremacist shit. BUT if he really only meant for it to be an orangutan, then it’s a whole other metaphor about how colonialism pillages other countries and brings their wealth back to europe and that’s REALLY gonna bite them in the ass one day. klansman or komrade? it all hangs on this.
much later, when my professor told this story to a poe nerd friend, the guy said the orangutan thing was a one of the biggest landmines in their field. he said it was a reliable discussion ruiner that had started so many shouting matches that some conferences had an actual ban on bringing it up.
so the place goes dead fucking silent as every giant ass poe stan in the room is immediately thrust into a series of war flashbacks: the orangutan argument, violently carried out over seminar tables, in literary journals, at graduate student house parties, the spittle flying, the wine and coffee spilled, the friendships torn—the red faces and bulging veins—curses thrown and teaching posts abandoned—panels just like this one fallen into chaos—distant sirens, skies falling, the dog-eared norton critical editions slicing through the air like sabres—the textual support! o, the quotes! they gaze at this madman in numb disbelief, but he could not have known. nay, he was a literary theorist, a 17th-century man, only a visitor to their haunted land. he had never heard the whistle of the mortars overhead. he had never felt the cold earth under his cheek as he prayed for god’s deliverance. and yet he would have broken their fragile peace and brought them all back into the trenches.
my professor sits there for a second, still totally clueless. the panel moderator suddenly stands up in his tweed jacket and yells, with the raw panic of a once-broken man:
Important: when kids grow up doing projects like the one on the left, they have no idea what to do when presented with projects like the one on the right. They get so used to being given step by step instructions that they develop what’s called learned helplessness - that is, they’ll sit there and say “I can’t do it, I don’t know what to do” until the teacher comes and tells them exactly what to do.
If you’re teaching kids who have developed learned helplessness, you may need to ease them into this with a project somewhere in between where some guidance is given but they have opportunities for creativity.
Keeping on the penguin theme, an in-between activity may be giving them an outline of a penguin and a variety of materials they can use to fill it in - maybe feathers, pom poms, tissue/construction paper, etc.
The goal is the assignment on the right, but we want to support kids as they develop their creativity - especially if public school has already damaged it.
Also, for homeschooling parents - remember that you don’t have to separate subjects. This may be an art project, but it lends itself naturally to a science discussion on why the penguin has black/white/grey feathers and how those colors help the penguin adapt to its environment. (Hint: don’t think about a penguin in the snow, think about a penguin in the water looking for fish while avoiding seals).
In fact, you could have a lesson for each subject centered around penguins.
Kids can read a book on penguins appropriate for their age level which covers both the science aspect and their informational text reading skills, they can write something about penguins (maybe a story or a poem), they can paint or draw penguins, and it’s easy enough to make up math story problems involving penguins and fish, depending on which math skills kids are learning, anywhere from visual adding (penguin has one fish and catches two more) to comparing average swimming velocities of penguins and seals.
Open-ended learning isn’t limited to individual assignments - it can be your educational philosophy from day one.
Story time:
My last year in public education I was asked to teach art as a paraprofessional bc the school I was at (as a special education parapro for preschoolers) had too many students to only offer 2 activities ( PE & Music).
I taught the entire school- Kindergarten-6th grade. This school had never had art before so my students came to me only having done projects like the one above. I knew this going in so we started with the basics for everyone. We started with the most basic element- line, and worked our way through the basic elements of art.
I spent the entire first semester navigating students having mini meltdowns or just flat out refusing to touch a piece of paper with a utensil. They were terrified to not have things prepared and done for them. I worked so hard to help them gain confidence in their abilities and the hardest lesson to learn: its okay to mess up. These kids were terrified of failure.
The education system is failing to teach kids grit and determination. They are completely dependent on their teachers, especially when presented with something new. They aren’t encouraged to explore and learn outside of the curriculum and it was evident in my art classroom everyday in every class.
THIS! ALL of this!!
Another story: It’s not just like this with children, it follows people their whole lives.
At one point I was a workshop instructor at a school of art for adults/older students. For my first classes (for instance painting a botanical illustration using real specimen as reference), I was demonstrating the project in front of the class by simultaneously doing it myself to show how to use the materials and tools. But I would also go around each student and instructed them on how they each were doing based on their strengths. I was encouraging them to push in whatever direction they felt naturally interested in, even if it wasn’t exactly like how I was doing, or if the work was more whimsical or abstract, etc. I was basically saying it was important to discover their own way to capture what they saw and to be open-minded about it; to be playful. Every single person had a clear, unique style and direction and I thought it was going extremely well. I could also show the rest of the class what made each piece personal and how to identify your own unique direction.
However I received negative feedback from the school. This was not what was expected. I was supposed to literally just do the entire project step by step and have the students copy me. That’s it. They had to do exactly everything I did. I was gutted and appalled; I wanted to ask why would anybody pay good money to learn ART just to be made into a clone of someone else.
To this day, this remains one of the most profoundly disappointing and frustrating experiences of my life. I started off being so happy to share and teach art but the philosophy was utterly against what I feel art should be. I couldn’t do it.
It’s a slightly different example, but this same attitude to “learning” - that is, the idea that you’re just meant to copy and memorise, not think independently - is why, despite wanting to be an author since age 11 - despite growing up to become an author, even - I was so burnt out on English by the end of high school that I didn’t study it at university.
Why? Because even though “critical thinking skills” were one of the much-touted outcomes our English curriculum was meant to teach, the fact of the matter was that you weren’t allowed to challenge the desired interpretation. We’d be given set texts and told, “here is how this text relates to the theme of the unit,” but we weren’t allowed to argue the opposite or for a different interpretation, even if we could do so intelligently using the text itself. It drove me absolutely insane: it wasn’t literary analysis, it was just parroting back buzzwords attached to quotes selected by someone else.
If I hadn’t cared about the subject, it would’ve been easy to just shrug and go along with it. But English was my favourite subject, and I cared then - as I care now - about literary analysis and interpretation, and it was infuriating to be told what my opinions had to be in what was a purely subjective medium. Each unit would be something stupidly broad and vague, like Journey or Change, and the texts would be completely disparate things that we were meant to link together because of their apparent shared relationship to the unit title, no matter how forced it felt. One time, we were given a Shakespeare play and a book excerpting diary entries from various Australian explorers, and we had to talk about how they both related to Journey as something intended by the author, and I was like: Shakespeare wasn’t writing about fucking journey as a metaphor! He wanted to tell a good story and get paid! And those explorers were all writing about literal journeys, not metaphoric ones! You cannot compare their motives here, let alone say they’re ultimately the same! But pointing this out, I was told, was “cheeky” and meant I wasn’t taking the work seriously.
Another time, in an exam in the Change unit, we were given the visual image of a woman with butterfly wings and told to write an essay, a poem, a script or a short story inspired by it, as related to change. I wrote a poem about metamorphosis, and look: a lot of teenage poetry is bad, and I certainly wrote my fair share of it, but it was a decent poem, and when I got a really middling mark for it, much lower than my usual English score, I was confused. I went to the head of department and asked him what I’d done wrong, and he said, well, the poem was good, but it wasn’t original. I said, dude, you gave us a picture of a butterfly woman and asked us to write about it through the lens of a specific theme - there’s only so much originality you can manage in that context, and in any case, the grading rubric, which was printed on the exam paper, didn’t mention originality. He looked uncomfortable and said, well, it’s not so much that, it’s just that we prefer it when students don’t write poetry in the first place, because it’s harder to mark. I said, then why is it even an option if you’re going to mark me down just for choosing it?
I ended up with a better grade, but the whole experience was maddening. They claimed a desire for us to be original, but wouldn’t let us think critically or interpret the themes in our own way, or god forbid choose our own; and meanwhile, you got the highest marks for just parroting back what you were told. We were given printed lists of ‘signpost words’ and told to use them in essays, as their presence would signal to the marker that we knew what we were doing - just the presence of the word, not how we used it or whether our argument was good.
Anyway. It burned me out hugely, and even though I still ended up writing for a living, not a day goes by where I don’t see some absolute terrible discourse going around online and think, this person was taught in school that agreeing with and mimicking someone else’s analysis is the same as critical thinking, even when that analysis draws a really long fucking bow in service to a specific agenda that it doesn’t want to acknowledge, and like. Is it really so hard, so threatening, to give people the tools to think and be creative, rather than just rote-learning a bunch of bullshit? AUGH.
Before you use the term Mary Sue, ask yourself, do you really understand what it means and where it originates? PROBABLY NOT.
A writer named Paula Smith coined the term in the 70s to refer to an author SELF-INSERT character. She wrote a satire of a popular trend in Star Trek fan-fiction of the time where writers would introduce a random character who came into an established universe and immediately jived with everyone and everything. A little ridiculous? Sure. But only because these young writers were forced to insert into material that already existed. Actual canon stories are RIFE with self-insert characters.
In reality, the “Mary Sue” character archetype actually helped young women and other people of underrepresented identities find a way to see themselves in popular stories which literally never featured MCs that weren’t white men. Sure, Paula Smith thought these self-inserts were a little ridiculous (internalized misogyny hello there), but most of them were written by teenagers just trying to connect with popular material.
IN FACT, male characters in “canon” stories are actually WAY MORE LIKELY to be “Mary Sues” (or Gary Stus if you wanna get gendered about it) because male writers didn’t have to write fan-fiction to self-insert, they could just do it in their own original material (which they were allowed to create because of their privilege).
JUST BECAUSE A CHARACTER YOU DONT LIKE SEEMS OP DOESNT MEAN THEYRE A MARY SUE. The Force Awakens was written by a MAN, Rey is not a Mary Sue! She is not a self-insert character! You know who definitely is? LUKE. That TEENAGER destroyed the DEATH STAR after like a week of makeshift training with one guy on a rickety old smuggler ship.
Paula Smith really grew to regret the evolution of her coined term, as it has become a tool for men to put down competent female characters and something of a specter that haunts many people trying to write non-white, non-male protagonists today. Since the 70s, Smith has pointed out that characters like Captain Kirk, Superman, and James Bond are just as much “Mary Sues”as anyone else. In 2012 she said -
“"[W]hat gets focused on in the culture is defined by boys and young men. Psychologically, there’s a turning point in men’s lives. There’s a point where they need to break away from women in their youth, and then later they come back to women as grown men, but many men never make it, never quite come back to a world that includes women as human beings.“
The next time someone tells you that your favorite female or POC character is a Mary-Sue, you give them this list:
Luke Skywalker, James Bond, James T. Kirk, Superman, Batman, Indiana Jones, Iron Man, Captain America (which is honestly PEAK self-insert), Sherlock Holmes, Ender from Ender’s Game, Peter from the Chronicles of Narnia, Ethan Hunt, Malcolm Reynolds, Marty McFly, Nathan Drake, John Carter… ETC.
Note: I actually love many of these characters, and I don’t think that any protagonist that matches the gender of the writer is a Mary Sue or a Gary Stu. My point is that these are all protagonists who, for a lot of their canon, at least, face basically no obstacles they can’t overtake just by being their OP awesome selves. Certainly many of these characters have evolved past their original “do no wrong” status, but only because they were given room to do so. They weren’t immediately written off by trolls.
STOP CALLING CAPABLE FEMALE AND POC CHARACTERS MARY SUES AND JUST ADMIT YOU DON’T LIKE IT WHEN YOU CAN’T AUTOMATICALLY RELATE TO THE PROTAGONIST ON THE BASIS OF YOUR GENDER AND SKIN COLOR.
