paigereiring:

Critiquing another person’s work isn’t as easy as it sounds. To write a critique that’s not only thorough but useful, you need to include (and avoid) quite a few things.

Tell them what doesn’t work. This might be the most obvious part of critique, something that everyone knows to do. However, it’s not enough to say, “I don’t like this” or “This is bad.” The thing about critiques is that they’re constructive, which means providing the author with a reason for why you don’t like something. If they don’t know why you think something sounds weird or doesn’t make sense, then they’re not going to know what to fix, and they won’t be able to learn. It’ll come off as simple hate, since it doesn’t offer anything for the author to work with. So always be sure to give specific reasoning.

Tell them what does. A lot of people seem to believe that writing a critique means only pointing out what’s wrong, but they ignore what’s done right. It’s just as important for the author to know what they do well as what they don’t. When you put emphasis on the good, you’re not only showing the author encouragement, but you’re also allowing them a chance to focus on and strengthen what they’re already good at. Again, avoid being vague here. It’s specifics that are going to be the most useful.

Don’t rewrite the story for them. This is not your story; it’s theirs. Unless they specifically ask for ideas or help with a section or plot idea, do not tell them what they “should” do. That’s for them to decide and discover themselves, and it can seem invasive when you try to make huge changes to their work. Showing them how to rewrite a sentence to make it flow better is fine, but telling them how to rewrite their villain is not.

Don’t focus on line-editing. When you’re critiquing something, chances are this isn’t a final draft. Therefore, line-edits don’t really matter and just take up both of your time. While they’ll certainly require line-editing at some point, it’s most likely not now. It might be worth mentioning a recurring grammatical error, but otherwise, you should probably lay off.

aenramsden:

quecksilvereyes:

quecksilvereyes:

quecksilvereyes:

anyone wanna hear my rant about how marvel basically destroyed media literacy

ok so. little anecdote before i start

back when guardians of the galaxy came out i went and watched it. bear in mind this was the first marvel movie i watched since thor. the first one. so naturally, when the credits rolled, i got up. immediately, the entire theatre started laughing at me and taunting me for missing the post credits scene. which was. you know. very fun for an autistic kid with massive social anxiety but i digress

my point is that, in order to consume marvel content, you have to have watched literally everything that came before the film you want to watch. there are lists and arguments and timelines consisting of i don’t know how many movies so the barrier of entry is *massive*. it’s so self selecting because literally only people who are committed will sit down to watch all of this stuff and god forbid you’re a casual who just wants to watch the one movie.

now i don’t have a problem with movie franchises or even movies that lean on other previous movies for an overarching narrative. but the marvel movies are exhausting mainly for these reasons:

1) they are blatantly a money making scheme. on a certain level, all movies are, naturally, but the marvel movies have such a disdain for their audience, for the people these characters are for and for the characters themselves that they will completely kill any given character’s arc - thor ragnarok did so much character development for thor and it was immediately undone the very next movie. characters are not allowed to have a consistent narrative or a satisfying ending and god forbid you’re someone who is invested in a character

2) marvel doesn’t trust its audience to put things together. everything is explained and explained again, we are on movie #4567 of collect the action hero without thought nor care for their arcs or their feelings or the things that make them themselves - the blatant whitewashing, the ableism in the treatment of characters like hawkeye, to name a few. it feels like most of the writers consider their average audience to be too stupid to follow a narrative thread without having their hand held

3) their spoiler culture. i don’t know if marvel introduced the idea that spoilers are a unique evil but GOD can it go die in a fire. not giving your actors full scripts, costumes, sets or context to play off of and then laughing at those *stupid* actors for being upset about that? the notion that the only reason to watch a movie is for the plot?
i don’t know about you, but if a spoiler can ruin your movie, it’s a fucking shit movie. even movies like gone girl or rebecca, which hinge upon their plot twists, are enjoyable EVEN IF YOU HAVE BEEN SPOILED. this enables marvel to withhold pay from actors because they are not aware how big a role they’re playing.
A PLOT TWIST SHOULD BE HINTED AT! if a few of your viewers figure it out that’s a good thing!!! a plot twist is not something that hits you out of nowhere with no hints or no possibility to figure it out by yourself! there is no merit whatsoever in punishing your audience for figuring out your plot twist (cough wandavision cough)

4) the way marvel has monopolised superhero movies. it’s not a strict monopoly, but marvel has managed to become synonymous with superhero movies and sets the standard for the way they are consumed. there are so many people whose media diet consists almost exclusively of marvel movies or movies like them, which teaches them to just accept what is thrown at them in disdain. so when they are shown a movie that doesn’t spell everything out, that is artistic or queer or up for interpretation, they get angry at the movie for not holding their hand. when you only know a very specific sort of media that never lets you think for yourself and that just keeps churning out more and more derivative content (i watched the last spiderman movie when my bf was here. not only did you need to watch ALL THE MARVEL MOVIES BEFORE, you also had to watch BOTH SPIDERMAN FRANCHISES in order to understand what the fuck is going on) that gatekeeps people who are NOT ENTERTAINED BY THIS BULLSHIT and creates a self reinforcing bubble

5) the way the movies broke apart and sanitised so many of their characters under the guise of expanding their appeal - in the most blatant example i can think of, they made PETER PARKER AT LEAST MIDDLE CLASS AND TIED HIS ORIGIN EXPLICITLY TO TONY STARK. like that is not the point. the people who write the characters don’t care about them and it shows and it is so, so exhausting.

marvel paved the way for massive, long series that get more and more difficult to enter as you go, unneccesary plot twists that literally gut punch you because you cannot have seen them coming, spoiler culture as it exists today while teaching their viewers that it’s okay to never ever have to think critically about media, just buy the next ticket for iron man 545 and no matter what we show you in it, you’re gonna be happy because it’s MARVEL

as a writer it legitimately makes me want to CRY

to the people in the notes saying i didn’t bring up capitalism i have a whole point on the money aspect. but yes, this is in outgrowth of capitalism and profit maximisation. fuck capitalism

Yeah, I pretty much dropped the series after Civil War turned out to be a colossal disappointment.

…Alright, so I agree that it’s ridiculous for modern MCU movies to basically require homework, but I find pretty much every other complaint here to be excessive. They’re all problems that exist in Marvel movies, but they are also all problems that have existed in varying degrees across media for ages - the fact that you act like Marvel invented “spoiler culture” tells me you probably weren’t around for “Snape Kills Dumbledore,” for example.

Before I get into it, I want to be clear: you’re allowed to dislike what you want to dislike. Criticism of media is not only valid, but essential. If you disagree with anything I say, that’s totally fine! A lot of this is subjective. But I happen to enjoy Marvel movies and TV shows (in general), and it’s frustrating to me that people can practically say “it’s Stan Lee’s fault that the Cuban Missile Crisis happened” and everyone will applaud because popular thing bad.

So.

1) “It’s a money making scheme!”

Most movies are. I don’t think this is actually your argument for this paragraph, but it’s the first sentence, so I’ll use it as a header here.

What I suspect is that your frustration is with some perceived lack of soul - the characters you like change between iterations, like they’re puppets instead of people, gears turning in some grand money machine. And it’s particularly galling because sometimes those characters ARE used by one person with a particularly strong vision, and then when they show up in someone else’s work they’re completely different. And as much as it’s okay to be frustrated like that… isn’t it kind of unreasonable to expect a character to be written exactly the same by 5 or 6 different people?

If your problem is the fact that a character is being written by 5 or 6 different people at all then that’s a different issue, and I don’t think it’s one that can be solved in the bounds of a connected media setting. And subjectively, I think that having that sort of connected cinematic universe is better than not having it - it allows for stories to be told that we wouldn’t be able to pull off otherwise. Outside the medium of film, Brandon Sanderson is doing something similar with his Cosmere setting, and even he needs to branch out and let other authors in to fill the space. The validity of connected media is its own discussion (I think it’s a very good thing) but

2) “Marvel doesn’t trust its audience to understand plotlines!”

I don’t actually know what you’re getting at here, because you didn’t give any examples…? Also in the very next paragraph you complain that Wandavision didn’t foreshadow its twists, which tells me maybe you… didn’t understand the plotline?

Later in the paragraph you complain about ableism and whitewashing… neither of which are really connected to plotlines at all, but I do think they’re more valid criticisms, especially of earlier Marvel properties. I’m a straight, white, cis man with no visible and/or restrictive disabilities so I’m not the right person to talk about this issue - I like that they’re able to make movies that aren’t targeted toward me in particular, with an extra emphasis on lived experiences in cultures I’m not part of, and I like that they put some effort into things like the Hawkeye TV series with the protagonist’s developing deafness and his interactions with a fully-deaf antagonist, but (and I’m saying this unironically) it also means I’m not correct to judge whether they are enough.

Either way, not sure what it has to do with the writers “considering their audience too stupid to follow a narrative thread without having their hand held.” And at the risk of whataboutism… Marvel is one of the only groups in this space that seems to even be trying to improve.

3) “Marvel’s spoiler culture has gone too far!”

I agree that it was insane for them to go to those lengths in Infinity War/Endgame, though I’d argue that in those cases they were trying to do something new - it was a cultural event, a full year where Infinity War’s shocking ending was in the social consciousness, a full year where people were waiting to see how it would resolve, and if someone had come out 6 months in and said “they win but Tony Stark dies for real,” it would have taken the impact out of that experience.

This single extenuating circumstance aside, I agree that it would be crazy to keep up that spoiler paranoia… but they aren’t. Spiderman 3 had its Garfield/Macguire cameos spoiled years in advance. The full plot of Dr Strange 2 is available online. Hell, we know there have recently been test screenings of Thor 4, which means it’s probably not hard to find someone out there who could go into detail about how that’s going to look.

And as I said, spoiler culture is nothing new. I agree that a good movie is still good even if you know what’s going to happen, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t craft a movie to be enjoyed a certain way on that first viewing. When the last few Harry Potter books came out, they were full of major character deaths, and at midnight releases you’d occasionally have people buying the book, skipping to the end, and ruining it for everyone in line. When Game of Thrones was airing, people who read the books knew the Red Wedding was about to happen, and I guarantee that the experience was different for TV-only viewers. Hell, there’s a niche example with Ocarina of Time, which released in the 90s, and yet somehow Dan Avidan of Game Grumps didn’t know Sheik was Zelda… and his live, for-real reaction was caught on video here. There is value in allowing people to experience things spoiler-free, and it gets harder and harder in the age of social media.

4) “Marvel has monopolized superhero movies!”

Yeah.Because they’re the only people who seem to know how to make them good.

Sony recently released a movie about Morbius, a villain from the Spider-Man franchise. It was a complete fucking mess. None of the characters have realistic motivations. Stuff just happens for plot convenience. There are entire action scenes where you can’t tell what’s happening because the CGI obscures the characters’ actions and decisions. Previously they made two Venom movies, which were better-received, but I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who said Venom was their favorite superhero movie.

On the DC side of things, you have a bunch of Superman stuff where the focus is on how haaaard it is to be the only person in the world who matters, how you can’t let yourself help people because then they’ll relyyyy on you… and then you have 3 or 4 different Batman series, which tend to be stronger movies but also incidentally tend not to be part of cinematic universes. As far as the DCEU goes, the only stuff that was well-received almost across the board was James Gunn’s Suicide Squad, James Gunn’s Peacemaker series, and the Justice League Snyder Cut - the first two being basically Marvel properties in DC clothing, and the latter being practically an Auteur piece by a guy who finally managed to convince Sony execs that his movie would be better without their input. To rephrase, the best DC movies are the ones that were made without DC execs having much say in the matter; they hired James Gunn to do the James Gunn things he demonstrated at Marvel, and they caved under pressure from fans to let Zack Snyder throw money at his Ayn Rand wish-fulfillment magnum opus (which, admittedly, was beautiful to look at even if I took issue with a lot of the subject matter).

The reason Marvel has monopolized superhero movies is because they have a pattern that works - treat the character like a human being who happens to have special talents and/or a higher calling, allow your directors to express themselves, and then once all’s said and done sprinkle in some cameos and promises that there’s this other thing that the audience should get excited about. It’s formulaic, it produces a lot of stuff that is just acceptable, but it’s reliable - not every MCU movie is a world-shaking hit, but it’s been a while since there was one that was actively bad.

5) “They made their characters bland under the guise of expanding their appeal!”

Okay, but literally the only character you mention is Spider-Man, who was kind of a special case. In his own stories, he’s a normal guy who occasionally gets involved in things that are way bigger than he is, but in the MCU he showed up in Civil War - he literally started out by being defined by a guy who gets involved in big things, subbing in Tony Stark for Uncle Ben (because his introduction to the MCU didn’t allow for an Uncle Ben arc), and then they… realized they’d made a mistake, and at the end of his most recent movie he ended up with no money, no connections, no safety net, just a desire to do good and a set of superpowers that gave him the ability to accomplish it. Which is to say, Spider-Man in the MCU is now Spider-Man from the comics.

Other than that, the characters have - at least in their introductions - been pretty loyal to their source material, as far as I can tell. Tony Stark was an irresponsible alcoholic playboy, driven to superheroism by a need to redeem himself. Steve Rogers was a good-hearted kid who was granted the power to stand up to bullies. Thor was a larger-than-life braggart who needed a dose of humility from time to time.

Hell, if you want to see evidence that they’re willing to branch out with their characters, look no further than Moon Knight, which opens with an everyman struggling to live his life while being disrupted when an action hero takes over his body and then leaves him to pick up the pieces. (I’m not confident it will stay at this level of quality, as every single Marvel TV show so far has had a promising opening and a weak-ass ending, but that’s a different discussion!)

TL;DR: Your complaints are valid, but it’s totally unfair to say exclusively a Marvel problem. Most of your points are either wholly untrue or only point to exceptions-with-good-reasons within the MCU, and they all generally point to problems with media as a whole - there’s an inherent conflict between fan-loyalty and broad accessibility, between artistic merit and financial viability. Marvel is a big obvious target because they consistently make financial successes, but the problems you lay out are symptoms evident in Marvel properties, but not caused by Marvel in any capacity, and pretending it’s the case means people are going to be way less likely to address the problem effectively.

It isn’t Marvel. It is capitalism. Punishing Marvel somehow won’t make the problem go away, especially when your main complaint appears to be that they’re making the movies broadly appealing.

Most games and organisers welcome feedback to improve their games. Here’s a non-definitive guide to help you through the process.

I think it’s worth clarifying from the off that feedback is different from a froth or venting post. My only tip there is if it’s a mostly negative post, filter the organisers out for a bit after the game. They’ll likely be feeling wrung out and stressed, and probably not in a place to see the solution in amongst the problems.  Manners, innit. 

Now, the feedback guide.

STEP ONE: AFTER THE GAME.
It can be super useful to note down soon after the game immediate impressions and thoughts you had. Keeping hold of fleeting thoughts can be difficult, and noting them down minimises the risk of forgetting them.

STEP TWO: DO NOTHING.
Recover from the game, gain some distance, indulge in froth or comfort! Giving it a little time encourages some objectivity and emotional distance. 

STEP THREE: LOGISTICS
Find out when the organisers want feedback (and in rare cases, if they want it at all). In most cases, this is at least a week after the game, so they’ve had some time to destress and rest. In some cases, it’s longer. Respect this. 

Also useful to know is how they like to receive feedback. Almost all ask for it via email, but some create forms especially for this purpose. If it’s a form, the rest of the guide is probably mootish, as it’ll specifically walk you through what the organisers want. 

STEP FOUR: THE FIRST DRAFT
Write down everything you liked, and everything you didn’t. Good is just as important as the bad here. They need to know what you liked so they can keep doing it! It’s also a bit disheartening to get an email full of problems and no praise. But also, be honest. It’s useless if it isn’t true.

STEP FIVE: EXAMINE FURTHER.
Look at your list. Look at what you dis/liked and try to put your finger on why, and put it into words. Sometimes, you won’t know the answer and that’s okay. 

Examples:
What you liked: “I enjoyed the final boss fight on Friday.”
Why: “Because it felt like every player had a role in it’s defeat, and nobody got left out.” 

What you disliked: “I had a bad time on Saturday morning about ten am.”
Why: “I found it hard to find out any information due to there not being enough communication from the NPC.” 

Another useful thing that is much tricker is to suggest improvements. Again, if your brain can’t produce them, that’s okay! It’s not your job after all! But it can signpost possible solutions to the organisers, even if they ultimately choose a different route. 

Example:
“I found the encounter on Saturday afternoon tough due to feeling like I had nothing to do. I think if some healing plot was added, more characters that weren’t fighters could have joined in.”

STEP SIX: DOUBLE CHECK
Some last checks of the content are useful. For instance, making sure some of the points don’t need to be actual complaints against another player (like if someone broke the rules and it ruined your day). Another thing is to ensure it’s actually the organiser’s responsibility. If you were unhappy due to forgetting to hydrate, there’s not much they can do about it. Additionally, if the game just turned out not to be your thing, suggesting they completely change the themes or tone is not likely to be a goer. 

STEP SEVEN: FORMAT
Generally bullet points are a lot easier to digest than a solid paragraph with no separation. Be sensitive to access needs that may be present, such as the need for a bigger or plainer font. Copy in any refs/organisers who have requested it.

Wait the allotted area of time and send!

Other relevant points:

- You may or may not receive a reply. 
- You don’t HAVE to submit feedback if you don’t want to.
- Sometimes there is also a closing date for feedback entries, make sure you note this!

SKALDIC TECHNIQUE IN BRUNANBURH

 SKALDIC TECHNIQUE IN BRUNANBURH John D. Niles Scandinavian Studies, Vol. 59, No. 3, Anglo-Scandínavían England (SUMMER 1987),pp. 356-366. According to established wisdom, the Scandinavian settlements in England left little imprint on the language of Anglo-Saxon literature even though English and Norse were long spoken side by side. As H. R. Loyn puts it, “Traditional literary Anglo-Saxon,…

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The Lost Literature of Medieval Iceland

The Lost Literature of Medieval Iceland: Sagas of Icelanders Judith Jesch PhD Thesis, University College London (1984).   Click here to read this thesis at Academia.edu

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Scyld Scyldinga: Intercultural innovation at the interface of West and North Germanic

Scyld Scyldinga: Intercultural innovation at the interface of West and North Germanic Carl Edlund Anderson   While many agree that Scyld in Beowulf was back-formed from Scyldingas, the context in which thisoccurred is rarely discussed. It seems frequentlyassumed that Scyld was created in Denmark andexported to England along with the name Scyldingas. However, the way that names and terms…

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Old English Literature: A Guide to Criticism with Selected Readings

Old English Literature: A Guide to Criticism with Selected Readings John D. Niles This review of the critical reception of Old English literature from 1900 to the present moves beyond a focus on individual literary texts so as to survey the different schools, methods, and assumptions that have shaped the discipline. Examines the notable works and authors from the period, including Beowulf, the…

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anxietyproblem:

Guilty

The way it screams Virgo

Another big company used for tits windows displays mannequins that highlight a different dietary pattern, which only healthy we can not characterize it. The reason for the-famous-Primark, which did not hesitate to decorate their windows with mannequins whose rib bones were clearly visible.

The event got magnified when an indignant client staged in her Twitter account a picture of one of these…

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phantom-of-thee-library:

Watch “The Three Problems with Writing Prequels l Crimes of Grindelwald and Star Wars” on YouTube

“In our writing, opposites that in happier periods fertilized one another have become insoluble antinomies. Thus science and belles-lettres, criticism and production, education and politics, fall apart in disorder. The theater of this literary confusion is the newspaper, its content ‘subject-matter’ which denies itself any other form of organization than that imposed on it by the readers’ impatience. And this impatience is not just that of the politician expecting information, or of the speculator on the lookout for a tip; behind it smolders that of the man on the sidelines who believe he has the right to see his own interests expressed. 

The fact that nothing binds the reader more tightly to his paper than this impatient longing for daily nourishment has long been exploited by the publishers, who are constantly opening new columns to his questions, opinions, protests. Hand in hand, therefore, with the indiscriminate assimilation of facts, goes the equally indiscriminate assimilation of readers who are instantly elevated to collaborators. In this, however, a dialectic moment is concealed: the decline of writing in the bourgeois press proves to be the formula for its revival in that of Soviet Russia. 

For as writing gains in breadth what it loses in depth, the conventional distinction between author and public, which is upheld by the bourgeois press, begins in the Soviet press to disappear. For the reader is at all times ready to be come a writer, that is, a describer, but also a prescriber. As an expert – even if not on a subject but only on the post he occupies – he gains access to authorship. 

Work itself has its turn to speak. And the account it gives of itself is a part of the competence needed to perform it. Literary qualification is founded no longer on specialized but, rather, on polytechnic education, and is thus public property. It is, in a word, the literarization of the conditions of living that masters the otherwise insoluble antinomies, and it is in the theater of the unbridled debasement of the word – the newspaper – that its salvation is being prepared.”

– Walter Benjamin, The Author as Producer, 1934

“Disenchanted, the mind perceives naked existence in its nakedness and delivers it up to criticism.”

–Adorno

whorological:

Professor Andrew Hurley, the best-known translator of Borges into English, on reproducing Borges’ intentionally-stilted style:

https://www.inversejournal.com/2019/02/01/what-i-lost-when-i-translated-jorge-luis-borges-by-andrew-hurley/

“But what I saw was interesting from a Translation Studies or reception-studies point of view, because what I saw was that English-language writers and critics always commented with great wonder and admiration on Borges’s themes, the subjects and philosophico-literary treatment of his stories, his playing with genres, whereas Spanish-language writers and critics, especially at the beginning of his or their career, almost invariably commented on another aspect of his work: his style, his prose, his writing itself. Not that the themes and subjects and genre play didn’t startle and waken Spanish-language readers’ imaginations, sometimes even change their lives and art — Carlos Fuentes, for instance, has spoken very movingly about the influence on him of Borges’s subjects and cultural eclecticism. But to writers and readers in Spanish, the subjects or “stuff” of the fictions was often simply not as shocking, not as disorienting, not as liberating, not as “new”, as the prose itself was. {…}

What I Lost When I Translated Jorge Luis Borges — by Andrew Hurley | INVERSE JOURNAL

Clearly, Borges himself felt that he was doing something that he, at least, had not done before: he was purifying, streamlining his style, paring it down, trimming away the fat, bringing it out of an earlier complexity into a “plainer” mode. (Not, he said, that it was “simple”, for there was nothing simple about it; it was just not as decorative and/or shocking and relentlessly “avant-garde”). So that became one important rule for me: the prose of the translation was to be as “frugal”, as “direct”, as “restrained”, in Vargas Llosa’s words, or as tight, economical, and efficient, as I saw it, as Borges’s own prose was. As in the Spanish, every word had to carry its own weight. I had to shift gears out of the baroque of the writers I had recently been translating, Reinaldo Arenas and Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá, and into a taut classicism.

{…}But what I needed to guide me in the actual choices I had to make were the details of the style, and there were two things that made me aware of the most remarkable of Borges’s hallmarks: his adjectives. First there was a remarkable sentence by Borges himself in the preface to El Hacedor: “To left and right, absorbed in their waking dream, rows of readers’ momentary profiles in the light of the ‘scholarly lamps’, as a Miltonian displacement of adjectives [hypallage] would have it. I recall having recalled that trope here in the Library once before, and then that other adjective of setting — the Lunario’s ‘arid camel’, and then that hexameter from the Aeneid that employs, and surpasses, the same artifice: Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbran’”. This hypallage, as it is called in English — arid camel, scholarly lamps — was, I realized, everywhere in Borges, for it both opens and closes the fictional corpus. In the first sentence of the first “biography” in A Universal History of Iniquity (1935) we read this: “In 1517, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, feeling great pity for the Indians who grew worn and lean in the drudging infernos of the Antillean gold mines… ”, laboriosos infiernos. And at the end of his career, in one of the last fictions that he wrote, “The Rose of Paracelsus”, in the volume Shakespeare’s Memory, Borges uses this trope twice: fatigado sillón/ “weary chair”, and mano sacrílega/ “sacrilegious hand”. Thus we are presented with a stylistic trait, a fingerprint, that identifies Borges throughout his career. Other clear examples of this technique are una cicatriz rencorosa/ “a vengeful scar”, alcohol pendenciero/belligerent alcohol”, biblioteca ilegible/ “illegible library”, and dentelladas blancas y bruscas/ “brusque, white bites”.{…}

{…}The second part of my awakening to the importance of Borges’s adjectives came in that Vargas Llosa essay that I quoted a second ago. There, Vargas Llosa specifically mentions Borges’s “strikingly original use of adjectives and adverbs”. That made me realize that I had somehow to deal with the words that Spanish-language readers and commentators had puzzled over for years; I could not simply translate them into invisibility. One of the most famous opening lines in Spanish literature is this: Nadie lo vio desembarcar en la unánime noche: “No one saw him slip from the boat in the unanimous night”. What an odd adjective, “unanimous”. It is so odd, in fact, that one is sorely tempted to put something like “all-encompassing”, so as to make it “comprehensible” to the reader. But it is just as odd in Spanish, as Vargas Llosa has told us, and it clearly responds to Borges’s intention, expressed explicitly in the story “The Immortal” (which I’ll talk about in just a second), to let the Latin root govern the Spanish (and, by extension, English) usage. In “The Dead Man” there is a “splendid” woman: Her red hair glows; indeed, I believe that in Borges, splendid always has either the etymological sense of glowing or the sense only slightly metaphorized from that, of glorious. Somewhere else there are “concave” hands: cupped, of course. And there are many more “odd” examples besides. These two techniques, hypallage and etymologized adjectives and adverbs, are present throughout the entire course of Borges’s career. They are also traits he surely found and recognized in some of the English writers he most admired, and sometimes translated — Emerson and Thoreau and de Quincey and Sir Thomas Browne — all of whom employed words with their etymological force, though none of them were so radically “classical” or “plain” as Borges himself. Indeed, unlike them Borges used the technique of what I’ve called etymologized words as a way of cutting through the baroque, trimming it down, not perpetuating it — as a way of making an efficient writing, packing a great deal of meaning into the story by freighting words with not just dictionary meaning, but their entire historical significance.

{…} But back to the distinguishing marks of Borges’s style. As I began to edit and revise my translations, I discovered that they seemed choppy to me, that I could never manage to read with any speed, that I kept getting stopped by what were remarkably short sentences, by periods or by the semi-colons that linked otherwise independent clauses together. It has been my experience through the translation of a couple of million words of Spanish or so that Spanish writers do not use many semi-colons; they use commas and conjunctions, or frequently relative pronouns, to link clauses together so they flow. They employ a style filled with compound-complex sentences; they concatenate clauses, pack a sentence with all the baggage it will bear — and then pack in a little more and sit on it. Not Borges. Borges apparently wanted to slow the reader down by using the speed bumps, those policias muertos, of the period and the semicolon. As I began to look more closely, I realized some other things. Borges, of course, as I had known since the beginning, likes parallelism, chiasmus, subtle repetitions-with-variations. He is a very classical writer, in that sense. But what I also realized was that he is a paratactic rather than hypotactic writer, using coordinating conjunctions (and, but, etc.) much more often than subordinating. This is also the style of Whitman, from whom Borges seems to have borrowed those “mismatched catalogs” that he is famous for. And punctuating with the semi-colon correlates with that tendency toward parataxis, for it suppresses or soft-pedals the causal connections that another writer might make with subordinating conjunctions and other sorts of explanations. The suppression frees Borges from having to make explicit how one detail or fact or sentence is related to the other — does a consequently go here? a while? a nonetheless? a because? a despite? — and I believe it adds to the mysteriousness that we sense in some of the statements, the sense that some unexplained or inexplicable thing lies under the surface of this prose. The semi-colon also produces spareness, and a particular, recognizable rhythm. It became clear to me in a way that I had never really analyzed before, but only intuited, that Borges was, in a word, a man who had not just studied but absorbed the rules of classical rhetoric.

shakspaere:

“And what we’re often left with at the very end of Shakespeare’s tragedies is a tableau of death, a kind of spectacle of these corpses and some bewildered people who try to gather themselves up and give a gloss on events. If you want to look at inadequate philosophical explanations for the mystery of life, look at the very last lines of Shakespearen tragedies. They are people who have no idea what to say and they’re just struggling with what they’ve seen.”

— Dr Emma Smith on Shakespearen tragedies

adhdsocialist:

sleepsleepnotwoke:

overwatch

idolomantises:

can i say its still insane to me that people frame criticism of true crime commentary as misogynistic. like yeah okay karen im not criticizing the rampant devaluing of murder, trauma, and the way people will treat violent tragedies as something quirky they can make money off of, its because i hate women

idolomantises:

can i say its still insane to me that people frame criticism of true crime commentary as misogynistic. like yeah okay karen im not criticizing the rampant devaluing of murder, trauma, and the way people will treat violent tragedies as something quirky they can make money off of, its because i hate women

The implied equation between being “talented professionals” and having “souls” is a telling expression of current literary attitudes. People’s souls are more likely to be found in the ways they betray each other, their modes of love and hate, than on their résumés. Authorial image management now seeps into the writing of fiction itself. The more readers (and critics) are content to conflate alter egos with authors, the more authors are tempted to idealize their fictional selves: confessional literature cedes the field to the autofiction of self-flattery. Characters in middlebrow melodramas are fine-tuned to avoid the ruffling of sensitivities. Elsewhere villains and victims are flattened so that the readers of contemporary gothic narratives can easily tell them apart. A pseudopolitical moralizing about these issues has crept into more and more of our criticism, and prizes are bestowed on maudlin therapeutic narratives of abuse and recovery. (See last year’s Booker winner Shuggie Bain.) Roth was rarely maudlin, and however much his characters indulged in therapy (analysis, as it was called back then), it never worked.

– Christian Lorentzen, whose output led him to be described as “two of the five best book critics we currently have”

Does Relatability = good movie? And which story line is better?

so yesterday I was have a civil disagreement with my boyfriend. the disagreement was concerning some disney movies.

I personally really like the movie Encanto and Brave. Like, I really like them for their story, their characters, the music, the setting, and their emotional appeal. But my boyfriend said “they’re okay.” and that bothered me.

So I said: “ you probably just don’t like movies that are emotionally driven so you don’t find it relatable.”to which he responds: “what. I like Brother Bear. That’s very emotional.”

to which I initially agreed. but then I thought about it.

Brother Bear is “emotional”. But not in the way I mean.

Brother Bear’s protagonist is Kenai. Kenai’s actions lead to his big brothers death. He then goes after the bear that he blames for is big brothers death. He kills the bear successfully, but is then cursed to become a bear. He later meets the child of the bear he killed. He learns that he had made a mistake for the sake of revenge.

That’s a great story yes, but here’s the problem for me.

Is it relatable?

…kinda?

The real emotional connection for me is with the baby bear Koda.

Koda’s situation is more relatable. Could you forgive someone who wronged you in such a tremendous way?

So I emotionally connect with Koda, and not Kenai who is the main character.

Not saying brother bear is bad. But it is a movie where I don’t empathize with the main character that much.

so then I go down the list of other movies my boyfriend actually likes.

He likes The Iron Giant, Emperors New groove, Atlantis, Treasure Planet, Sinbad, Aladdin, Hercules, Tarzan.

So he generally likes movies with a male protagonist. That’s fine. Because its more relatable if the character is the same as you. But I noticed some similarities between these movies. A lot of them don’t really dive that deeply into the main characters emotions.

A lot of them aren’t relatable characters. though I will say that all the movies my boyfriend seems to like have an arc of feeling inadequate or unnoticed, or unappreciated by those around them. That’s the part that makes them relatable to the viewer. (says more about my boyfriend than anything really)

The premise of the movies I listed (other than emperors new groove) is about men who have a passion for something “to be accepted for who they are”. The characters are all trying to fit in, trying to make a difference, trying to achieve something great. Their whole existence seems to be based on the approval of others. Now that’s pretty common in movies with a female protagonist as well, so it’s not just unique to male movies.

So lets make a simple breakdown of the movies my boyfriend likes.

Brother Bear: main character makes a mistake. The man needs to come to terms with his mistake and face the consequences. Become a better person. Relatable character is the side character. Kenais whole arc is also, “I don’t want my totem to be the bear of love, thats lame.” to “I’m now literally a bear and I love this baby bear.” So in a way Kenai’s arc is to not be consumed by the need to prove himself.

The Iron Giant:

Though the movie is called “the iron giant” the main character is technically Hogarth. Hogarth does not really have a personal arc. He’s a smart kid that does things that worries his mom. He finds a machine of destruction, saves machine, machine becomes his best friend. People want to destroy machine. Hogarth and friends try to stop them. The giant is the one to go through a character arc. He goes from “my only purpose is to destroy” literally a giant made of weapons, to “I don’t ever want to kill anything ever. I want to be superman and do good.” Side character is relatable. A character that doesn’t just want to be what he was made for or what society sees him as.

Emperors New Groove:

( just an amazing movie) But the story to put it simply is, Kuzco is a little shit that is selfish, self-centered, and does whatever he wants, and doesn’t care about other people. AT ALL. But by the end of the movie he learned to be less shitty. Not a whole lot of emotional stuff here, but its about a man realizing he needs to be a better person.

Atlantis:

A guy whose passion is finding atlantis. He’s got nothing else in his life other than that. No one respects him, his only thing is Atlantis. He then finds atlantis. saves atlantis, gets the pretty girl. Lives in atlantis. (great movie, but personally Milo doesn’t really go through any character arc. He’s a nice guy at the beginning, and he’s still the same nice guy at the end. He didn’t need to really ever change, because he was already a fulfilled person. He never makes an actually bad decision. He’s always trying to do the right thing.) The side characters get somewhat of a shift from, “I want money” to “ killing people is probably bad, so I’m okay without money.)

Treasure Planet:

Kid that likes adventure and having fun, but doesn’t want to cause trouble for his mom. also has daddy issues. He wants to be a man that can help his mom financially and achieve something. In the end he does. (treasure planet is one of the more emotionally driven and relatable male protaganist movie.) He wants to do better with his life. But see Jim doesn’t have much of a character arc either. He doesn’t like to fuck up, and he wants to be seen as more than a fuck up. Thats why the whole rope cut scene is important to Jim’s character. He did his best, and he thinks he fucked up. But he didn’t. People around him thinks he fucked up. He’s always trying to prove he’s worth something. The actual character arc is in Silver. the side character. A guy that only cares about money, realize he cares about this kid. That affection and understanding is what Jim needed. Jim didn’t need to change as a character, he just needed someone to accept him.

Sinbad:

(personally think sinbad is kind of a boring movie, but I love Eris) So anyways. Sinbad is similar to some of the others. He’s not a great guy, he’s selfish, he care about freedom and money. But he cares about his friend, so he’s willing to die for his friend. He just becomes a better person. Or really, lets himself be the good person he is.

Aladdin:

A guy living on the streets that is seen as a nuisance. Told he’s worthless. "rift raff street rat, I don’t buy that. if only they look closer… would they see a poor boy, no siree. They’d find that there’s so much more to me. The story of Aladdin I think isn’t really about "getting rich and getting the pretty girl.” It’s about him wanting to be seen as something more than worthless. And he is already a good guy from the start. Aladdin steals bread, goes through the whole chase sequence, but just ends up giving his bread to starving kids. He doesn’t need to actually have a character arc. He’s already a good guy. He just needs someone to notice that. Genie is the character that notices that. And even proven further by freeing genie instead of using his last wish. Aladdin was always a good guy, but he didn’t believe it himself until Genie basically tells him.

Hercules:

a guy that can’t control his strength is seen as a freak, and an outcast. All Hercules wants is to be accepted. “I have often dreamed of a far off place where a heroes welcome will be waiting for me.” Hercules is always a good guy from the start to end. The only arc he goes through is, “I need to be adored by people and accepted and become a god.” but ends up with “I only need this one person. I love her and she loves me, and I don’t really need to be a god to feel like I belong”.

Tarzan:

Tarzan is seen as an outcast in his family/herd?/group because he’s a human in a group of gorillas. He has to try extra hard to get recognition. He has the same issue as Jim Hawkins. Daddy issues, and causing trouble for his mom. A lack of belonging. He proves himself by showing what he’s capable of, fixing his mistakes, and getting the girl.

So overall for male protagonist movies the premise is, “fix your mistakes, prove yourself, and be recognized for who you are.” This is also a common premise in female protagonist movies. the whole

“You’re special just the way you are, don’t change that, be true to yourself.” example: Mulan, Pocahontas etc.

And that’s not a bad premise. Self acceptance is important.

But the issue I see with this all is:

The main character doesn’t really change. He’s already perfect from the start, he just needs society to recognize it. Mind you not all male protagonist movies are like this I think, So let’s really see.

Kenai: from brother bear in that sense does actually change as a character. He actually grew and BECAME a better person.

Kuzco: learns to think about other people. He becomes a better person.

Toy Story: Woody learns that there’s more to life than being the center of attention, and he becomes a better person. (like if you actually watch the first toy story. woody is such a dick towards buzz the whole time. He is both technically the protagonist and Antagonist for a good chunk of the movie. But he learns to be better.)

Lion King: Simba goes from “cocky i’m a badass” to “my dad died because of me, so I’m going to stop caring” to “ I have to be the leader.” Simba actually goes through the “heroes journey”. He actually changes and grows.

A Goofy Movie: actually a movie where both characters grow and change. Max learns there is more to life than being cool and accepted at school. Goofy learns that his son is growing up, and he needs to respect that. Max learns that his dad isn’t terrible. They learn to accept each other along with their difference. But they both change for the better.

I like these movies where the character actually changes, instead of the ones that blame society for not accepting them. For the perfect person they are.

But I feel like a majority of movies with male protagonist usually boils down to about two basic tropes:

1. I’m a male protagonist who is misunderstood and not accepted by society for who I am. My story ends with society accepting me for who I am
2. I’m a male protagonist that learned from my mistakes and has become a better person in the end.

I’m not really sure which is better. Which is the better lesson?

Accept yourself for who you are. Get society to accept you for who you are.

Or

Realize you have flaws and work on them.

Now back to the relatability factor.

How relatable are these characters?

Do you relate more to a character that feels unappreciated by society?

or

Do you relate more to a character that learns from his mistakes and grows as a person?

Maybe that depends on the type of person you actually are. I don’t personally relate to Kenai because I don’t think I’ve personally wronged another person. But I could be wrong. Maybe I just don’t realize it, and maybe I need to be a better person. So the movies where the character changes for the better aren’t as relatable as the movies where society accepts them for who they are.

So am I wrong in thinking a movie is BETTER if its more relatable?

From my boyfriends opinion:

Brother Bear is a good movie

but

Brave is an “okay” movie.

For me Brave is a much more relatable movie. Not because I’m a girl, and Merida is a girl. But because Merida’s conflict is, “my mom doesn’t listen to what i say, and my opinion doesn’t matter to her.” But Merida herself is also at fault for ignoring what her mom is trying to do

Both her mother and Merida learn that they need to change and better understand the other. The movie starts off with the option 1 trope of “I want to be myself and people around me need to accept me for who I am, but ends with. both technically. My mom needed to see me for who I am, but I also needed to see my mom for who she is.

Encanto has a similar premise. Mirabel is struggling to be accepted by her family because she has no gift. Her Abuela is mean to her, and doesn’t see Mirabel for who she’s trying to be. Mirabels mom even says to her "you’re special just the way you are” but Mirabel rolls her eyes because she doesn’t believe it herself. So Mirabel’s arc is, “I want people to see that I’m someone.” But her arc changes to, “my family members who I thought were so special and better off than me are also struggling. it’s not just me.” Mirabel realizes that there is more to life than being “special” and unique. Her sister Isabella struggles with being seen as ONLY special. and perfect, and pretty. and Louisa is ONLY strong. Her arc is learning that she’s not the only person that struggles with feelings of inadequacy.

Both Brave and Encanto recognize that YES society doesn’t see you for who you really are, BUT you aren’t looking at society. You’re not looking at the other people. Human beings are complicated. And it can’t just be easily put as “you’re special just the way you are and society needs to accept that. ” and its also not just, “ you need to change” so that you are accepted.

and I relate to that concept, thus I really like both the movies.

So I asked the boyfriend:

“which movie is better. Moana or Encanto”

and he says Moana. ( Which is mainly because he just likes Maui and the Rock) And yeah the music is pretty fantastic in Moana.

But do I relate to Moana?? nah. Which is fine. Her Arc is, “I just feel like I have to do this thing.” to “I fucked up” to “I’m doing the thing”. She doesn’t really change that much with the story. Yeah she cries when she thinks she’s failed but in the end she succeeds, she saves the day, she changes society to accept her as the voyager she is. So she falls into option 1. Moana doesn’t change as a person, she’s perfect just the way she is, and society changed.

So in conclusion

My interest in movies generally involve The main character changing themselves, while my boyfriends movies usually involve the people around them changing to accept the character.

Maybe that’s just the difference in our personalities.

I just really hate it when characters have no introspection. It’s like a lack of responsibility.

I may expand on this thought later, but i just really needed to write it down. maybe an analysis of female protagonist characters that have the same trope issues.

just saw that new turning red movie. it isn’t as bad as people thought lmao. most of the film’s nature is really innocent, i don’t know why grown and “mature” people are trashing over it. whyyyy? because this film tackles a normal part of a human’s life? oh boo-hoo “this film is so inappropriate for kids. i don’t know why disney would allow such thing.” tf? how about toy story 3??? toy story 3 has mature and really dark theme throughout the movie (and a really intimidating villain) yet people doesn’t complain about it??? i don’t really understand the hate. really. it’s not bad it’s cool, wacky, and cute. i don’t really see the problem on pixar’s new film. but i think lightyear could be a better one. we shall see.