hey folks, I’m gonna introduce you to two very important fandom terms and they are watsonian anddoylist
they come (obviously) from the sherlock holmes fandom, and they are two different ways of explaining something in a story. say I’m a fan and I notice that, in the original books, watson’s war wound is sometimes in his leg and sometimes in his shoulder. the watsonian explanation is how watson (that is, a person within the story) might explain it; the doylist explanation is how sir arthur conan doyle (a person in real life) would have explained it.
sherlock explains the migrating war wound by making the shoulder wound real and the limp psychosomatic. the guy ritchie films explain it by having the leg wound sustained in battle before the events of the film and the shoulder wound happen onscreen. the doylist explanation, of course, is that acd forgot where the wound was.
this is very important when we’re discussing stuff like headcanons and word-of-god. I see this when people offer watsonian explanations for something, and then a doylist will say something like “it’s just because the author wrote it that way,” and I see it when a person is criticizing bad writing/storytelling (for example, the fact that quiet in metal gear solid v is running around the whole game in a bikini and ripped tights) and someone comes back with “but there’s an in-story reason why that happens!” (that reason being she breathes through her skin).
there’s nothing wrong with either explanation, and really I think you need both to understand and analyze a text. a person coming up with a watsonian explanation has likely not forgotten that the author had real-life reasons for writing something that way, and a person with a doylist interpretation is likely not ignoring the in-universe justification for that thing.
but it’s very difficult (and imo often useless, though there are exceptions) to try to argue one kind of explanation with the other kind. wetblanketing someone’s headcanon with “or it could just be bad writing” is obnoxious; dismissing someone’s criticism with “but have you considered this in-universe explanation” is ignoring the point of the criticism. understanding where someone is coming from is important when making an argument; acting like your argument is better because you’re being doylist when they’re being watsonian or vice versa is not.
it’s been 5 million years but this thing still gets notes with like “can someone explain this to me in a shorter, easier way” so here it is:
watsonian: the enchantress cursed the eleven-year-old prince from beauty and the beast and all of his servants because fairies don’t understand why humans would think that’s insane and unfair. I am using in-universe evidence to explain why the character might think or act a certain way, as if belle and the prince and the enchantress are real people.
doylist: the writers didn’t realize that the prince would have been eleven when he was cursed until it was too late to change it, and the servants are also cursed because talking furniture is funny and allows for unique character design. I am explaining this plot point based on an outside knowledge of how writing works and how writers think.
Watching Dracula Daily fandom on Tumblr is really funny because if you know who’s who you see people who are like, extremely well-schooled on literary analysis, sometimes noted scholars in the field, caaaarefully phrasing long-established academic theories (boring and off-putting) as ~pithy hot takes~ so they’ll go viral.
Not as a plagiarism thing; as a public outreach thing. Trying to get people just a little bit interested in these ideas. Introducing everyone to specialized concepts like “close reading”.
It’s like a live crowdsourced undergraduate English Lit class they’re trying to coax everyone into passing. The type with midterm test questions like, “Do you think Dracula is an Orientalist text? 500 words. Please cite at least two textual examples.”
(And by “know who’s who” I mean: If you spend time in acafan (academic + fandom) circles, like convention panels or private online spaces, people will sometimes let you know their professional and fannish identities, because there is a strong agreement not to dox people in public spaces like Tumblr. It’s really hard to get a good job in academia, and shit like “this candidate writes dumb gay fanfiction about blorbo and we, the committee, think that it’s cringe” can be the deciding factor between you and lifelong job security. Most out acafans I know have given up hope of a university keeping them on staff, or have gotten tenure and don’t have to worry anymore.)
Discord message I just got:
… I swear I just heard a great and mighty noise as of ten thousand people crying “NO DON’T TELL THEM THEY’RE EATING BROCCOLI.”
This is what MOOCs never got. We will happily slurp broccoli if you drown it in velveeta shitposts
One thing about fandom culture is that it sort of trains you to interact with and analyze media in a very specific way. Not a BAD way, just a SPECIFIC way.
And the kind of media that attracts fandoms lends itself well (normally) to those kinds of analysis. Mainly, you’re supposed to LIKE and AGREE with the main characters. Themes are built around agreeing with the protagonists and condemning the antagonists, and taking the protagonists at their word.
Which is fine if you’re looking at, like, 99% of popular anime and YA fiction and Marvel movies.
But it can completely fall apart with certain kinds of media. If someone who has only ever analyzed media this way is all of a sudden handed Lolita or 1984 or Gatsby, which deal in shitty unreliable narrators; or even books like Beloved or Catcher in the Rye (VERY different books) that have narrators dealing with and reacting to challenging situations- well… that’s how you get some hilariously bad literary analysis.
I dont know what my point here is, really, except…like…I find it very funny when people are like “ugh. I hate Gatsby and Catcher because all the characters are shitty” which like….isnt….the point. Lololol you arent supposed to kin Gatsby.
I would definitely argue that it’s specifically a bad way….a very bad way.
Depending on the piece of media, it could be the intended way to interpret it and thus very effective. When I watch Sailor Moon, I know at the end of the day that Usagi is a hero. She is right, and her choices are good. She and the Sailor Scouts may make mistakes, and those mistakes can have consequences, but by presuming the goodness of the protagonists, I can accurately describe what actions and values the story is presenting as good. (Fighting evil by moonlight. Winning love by daylight. Never running from a real fight. Etc etc)
If I sit around and hem and haw about whether or not Usagi is actually the villain because she is destined to reinstate a magical absolute monarchy on Earth in the future, then I’m not interpreting it correctly. I can write a cool fanfic about it, but it wont be a successful analysis of the original work.
But like I said, that doesnt work for all pieces of media, and being able to assess how a piece of media should be analyzed is a skill in itself.
I was an English major. One of our required classes was Theory & Criticism, and I ended up hating it specifically because of the teacher and the way she taught it, but the actual T&C part of it was interesting. And one of the things we learned about was all the different ways of reading/interpreting/criticizing media - not just books, ANY form of media.
Specifically, I remember when we read The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James. We had special editions of the book where the first half of it was the novel itself, and the last half was like five or six different critical analyses of the book from different schools of theory. The two I remember specifically were a Marxist interpretation and a feminist interpretation. I remember reading both of those and thinking “wow, these people are really reaching for some of this”, but the more I read into the analysis and the history of those schools of thought, the more I got it. So for my final paper for that class, I wrote an essay that basically had the thesis of “when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail”. If you have trained yourself to view every piece of media through a single specific critical lens - well, you’re going to be only viewing it through that lens, and that means you’re going to read or watch it in such a way that you’re looking for the themes you’ve trained yourself to look for.
My teacher didn’t like that, by the way; she’d wanted each of us to pick one of these schools of thought we’d been learning about and make it “our” school of thought. She wanted us to grab the a hammer, or a screwdriver, or a spanner, and carry that with us for the rest of our lives. She somehow didn’t expect me to pack a toolbox.
My point is: Like OP said, sometimes the tool you need is a hammer. Sometimes you need a screwdriver. Sometimes you can make a hammer work where what you need is a screwdriver, but you’re going to end up stripping the screw; sometimes you can use a screwdriver in place of a hammer, but it’s going to take a lot more effort and brute force and you risk breaking the screwdriver. Sometimes you need a wrench and trying to use a hammer or screwdriver is going to make you declare that the bolt is problematic and should never be used by anyone. Sometimes what you really need is a hand saw, and trying to use any of the others…well, you can, but it’s going to make a mess and you might not be able to salvage the pieces left over.
These skills aren’t being taught in school anymore and you can see it in the way high school aged kids act about media and stuff.
They wouldn’t survive something like Lolita because I swear they’re being taught to turn their brains OFF and be spoon fed all their thoughts by someone else.
It’s really creepy.
I promise these skills are taught in school. I’m an English teacher. In a school. Who teaches them.
Now, Lolita is generally reserved for college classes. But a lot of the rationale behind continuing to teach the “classics” in high school (beyond the belief that a shared literary foundation promotes a better understanding of allusions and references) is that a lot of the classics are built on these kinds of complex readings and unreliable narrators and using historical and cultural context helps in their analysis. (I do think that we should be incorporating more diverse and modern lit into these classes, please understand)
Do all schools or individual teachers do this *well*? No, of course not. Do all students always really apply themselves to the development of deep critical thinking skills when their teacher pulls out A Tale of Two Cities? Also no.
But this isnt a “public school is failing / evil ” problem. Being able to engage in multiple forms and styles of analysis is a really high level skill, and my post was just about how a very common one doesnt always work well with different kinds of stories.
OP, why do you describe analyzing Sailor Moon in a different way than (you assume) the author intended as “hemming and hawing?” I would argue there’s a lot of value in approaching texts at a different angle.
Because ignoring context, tone, and intent when analyzing media is going to lead to conclusions are aren’t consistently supported by the text you are looking at.
“Usagi is a villain because she’s a queen and I think absolute monarchy is bad” ignores the way that Usagi, the moon kingdom, and basically all aspects of the lore are actually framed within the story. None of the characters’ actions or motivations make consistent sense if we start from the assumptions that “Usagi = monarchist=evil” and it would cause you to over look all the themes and interpretations that DO make consistent sense.
At some point you have to take a work at face value and see what it is trying to say.
Is the breakdown of monarchy actually relevant to the themes and messages presented in Sailor Moon? No, not really.
So focusing on the Moon Kingdom monarchy and the ethics there of is sort of… besides the point. The Moon Kingdom is a fairy tale, not a reflection of reality.
I’m not actually interested in the tax policy of the Moon Kingdom, you know?
Now, is it *cool* to look at works in various ways? Sure! Are some people interested in the tax policy of the Moon Kingdom and want to explore what that would look like? Sure! And honestly if you want to explore the ramifications of idyllic fairy tale monarchies on the real world, then that’s really cool too!
But if you are looking at a work to understand what it is trying to say with the text itself, then you need to take some of its premises at face value. Usagi and the Sailor Scouts being the Good Guys is one of those premises.
And really the “Usagi is secretly a princess from the moon” is just a part of the escapist fantasy for most little kids watching more than it has anything to do with actual themes of monarchy.
There is a lot of value in being able to look at a text from various angles. And it’s perfectly okay to use a text and concept as a jumping off point for other explorations.
But the problem comes when people say that Usagi was definitively a villain in Sailor Moon, or that say Steven Universe with themes of family and conflict resolution is excusing genocide by not destroying the Diamonds. It misses the point of the fantasy. It misses the important themes, the lessons and point of the show to look at it like that.
Basically: reinterpretations are cool, but you gotta know how to take a work on its own premises too.
Exactly. Like, magical princess that shows how monarchies (or the idea of princesses in general) is broken or toxic? Utena and Star vs The Forces of Evil are right there.
The idea of a cute talking cat granting girls magical powers to turn them into warriors against evil and getting them killed being evil? Not a good take on Luna, but Kyuubei in Madoka? Exactly this. That’s like, the point of Kyuubei- to riff on the trope that Luna, and Kero, and Mokona represent.
Media can raise all sorts of interesting conversations and discussions and ideas. But there’s a very real difference between trying to awkwardly force those readings on a work where the tone and framing and context don’t support it and acting like the media is actually supporting those messages, and using those ideas to explore it in a different work or to analyze the trope across the genre more broadly.
Moral and pure does not a protagonist make, and fandom is rife with that exclusive interpretation of storytelling. OP makes really good points; this thread is one of the best analyses I’ve read about lit crit on this site lately.
Stories aren’t made in a vacuum– every trope/theme/character archetype comes from somewhere and (general) you do yourself a disservice by viewing everything as whether it’s morally uncorrupted or not.
“The Dying Christian to His Soul” by Alexander Pope
VITAL spark of heav'nly flame! Quit, O quit this mortal frame: Trembling, hoping, ling'ring, flying, O the pain, the bliss of dying! Cease, fond Nature, cease thy strife, And let me languish into life.
Hark! they whisper; angels say, Sister Spirit, come away! What is this absorbs me quite? Steals my senses, shuts my sight, Drowns my spirits, draws my breath? Tell me, my soul, can this be death?
The world recedes; it disappears! Heav'n opens on my eyes! my ears With sounds seraphic ring! Lend, lend your wings! I mount! I fly! O Grave! where is thy victory? O Death! where is thy sting?
In Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, the passionate Romantic Marianne does not seem to care much for the 18th-century poet Alexander Pope: her sister teases her, “You have already ascertained Mr. Willoughby’s opinion in almost every matter of importance. You know what he thinks of Cowper [a popular poet] and Scott [a popular novelist]; you are certain of his estimating their beauties as he ought, and you have received every assurance of his admiring Pope no more than is proper.”
Pope was a satirist of the Augustan era of literature (ending in the 1740s). The Augustans valued “common sense, moderation, [and] reason over emotion” (source), as well as empiricism. Romanticism (beginning in about 1798 for Britain) was all about intense emotions, the idealization of nature, and suspicion of science and industrialization. While the Augustans and the Romantics could agree on some things, the Romantics rejected the Augustans’ insistence on moderation and reason, just as Austen’s Marianne rejects Elinor’s cold common sense.
However, this poem is anything BUT cold and measured. It’s intense, an epiphany, an inspiration. The speaker is LITERALLY “carried away” by his experience of the ecstasy of death. It’s a socially acceptable ecstasy, clothed in a religious theme, but it’s ecstatic nonetheless. Even Marianne Dashwood could enjoy this particular poem by Pope.
around the time in which dracula was written, the concept of women and womanhood was being redefined and revolutionized - so much so that there was even a name for this phenomenon of female power: the new woman.
the new woman was a feminist archetype used to describe independent women who were feminists, educated, career-driven, and sought to make a space for themselves outside of the home sphere. mina is introduced in dracula by talking of her career as a school mistress’s assistant, her hopes at getting better at stenography and typewriting, and equating herself to a journalist; mina is basically The New Woman archetype personified. yes, she still cares for and loves her fiancé, but it’s obvious that she has her own drives and goals, and that she is educated and independent.
as the book continues (and if you’d like to think about these things as you read), i think it would be beneficial to pay attention to how mina is treated by the narrative and other characters. because she is the archetype of the developing modern, independent woman, her place in the story matters a whole lot, and keeping an eye on how her power (or lack thereof) impact the narrative may just mean keeping an eye on how women were dealt with and thought of at the time
I’m so excited that we’re all reading Dracula together. As we temporarily leave our friend Jonathan in Transylvania sans shaving mirror, to catch up with Nerd Queen Mina Murray, I thought I’d volunteer a little close reading walk-through of some of the stuff we’ve already seen. I do this as someone who has 1) seen a bunch of posts saying Don’t Panic Because of Problematic™ Elements and 2) taught Dracula in both literature and history classes because I’m that kind of nerd, I mean professor. Also, I thought it might be helpful to have an illustration of how you (yes, you!) can read and find multiple meanings in a text.
If anyone replies on this post with a variation on “the curtains are blue,” that person is getting blocked. Okay? Are we sitting comfortably? Good. Let’s talk about Jonathan Harker and Orientalism. Conveniently, we can do this using just evidence from Chapters 1-2; but you’ll be able to see more of this throughout the book. The brilliant Edward Saïd came up with the term Orientalism to describe taking “the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning ‘the Orient.’” As it happens, it is super easy to illustrate how Jonathan’s perceptions of his journey participate in Orientalism.
Ex. 1, as he enters Budapest: The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule.
So here is Jonathan, in the city of Budapest, which got a massive makeover just five years before, in 1892, to celebrate the 1000-year anniversary of its mythical founding. The fancy imperial architecture is fresh and shiny. Also brand new (as of 1896) is Budapest’s electrified subway, the oldest in continental Europe. But to Jonathan, he’s entering “the traditions of Turkish rule,” which have been rhetorically opposed to European liberalism since at least the late sixteenth century. Before that, it’s muddier, and early modern political realities are much more complicated than that, but I’m not going to digress here on what the history of this region actually is. What’s crucial is that, despite all this complex reality (and the subway system), for Jonathan, he crosses a bridge and BAM, rhetorical departure from the West, entry into the East, which is characterized by sensuality, superstition, and despots (who can be sensual as well as tyrannical. Remind you of anyone?)
Ex. 2, the trains: It seems to me that the further east you go the more unpunctual are the trains. What ought they to be in China?
Again, we have a simple equation here. The more East you go, the less modernity and technology you have. Orientalism 101. The Count’s elaborate and generous hospitality, too, fits the stereotypes of Oriental rulers. And we’ve already talked a lot about all the peasants and their Primitive Superstitions.™ But wait!
The Eastern peasants, with their multiple local languages and their quaint costumes and their worship at roadside shrines and their reliance on physical totems like the rosary… they are rightabout the way the world of the novel works, and our friend Jonathan, as it happens, is wrong. If Jonathan has a hope of surviving, he had better start relinquishing some of his respectable certainties (who is more respectable than an English solicitor with vague allegiance to the Church of England?) in favor of acknowledging the messy realities of where he finds himself. And all of this is 1) pretty explicit in the text 2) very complex in terms of how it asks us, the readers, to consider how we think about categories like modernity, civilization, and superstition.
Ta-da! See? Lit crit is meant to be fun, actually. [Take a literature or history course if you can; we’re doing this sort of thing all the time.]
Elizabeth recognizing Darcy’s smile in his painting is great because:
1. It pulls together the various occasions when Darcy has smiled before now, but which readers (and arguably Elizabeth herself) are likely to have overlooked as a pattern of behaviour. Now, it’s brought forward as part of the impression she/we have of his character at that point.
2. Doing so also helps create a sense of continuity between the various phases of his development.
3. Elizabeth remembers the smiles as specifically happening “when he looked at her,” so Darcy smiling is linked closely to his feelings for Elizabeth. He doesn’t just smile around her; he smiles ather.
4. We hear immediately that the picture was painted before Darcy’s father died. This particularly rewards re-reading, because Darcy will later talk of his father in glowing terms. Darcy smiling at Elizabeth in the exact same way that he smiled during his beloved father’s lifetime links his feelings for her—his feelings beforeher rejection—to not only tumult and passion, but happiness.
❤️
Yes! He’s mentioned as smiling 8 times before he proposes to Elizabeth the first time (and yes, they’re all associated with her, aww). She’s mentioned as smiling 14 times in this same period, though 2 of those are when she’s part of a group that is said to be smiling, and 1 of those is said to be a forced smile, so I’m gonna count it as 11 confirmed and real smiles. That’s really not that many more than Darcy, especially considering that the book spends far more time with Elizabeth than him. (And yes, I actually counted. Thank goodness for being able to search the free text online!)
So, even though she perceives him as severe (due to her prejudice) and he does have a more serious disposition overall, he’s never an emotionally constipated robot, even at the start of the book. He feels happiness and can show it and be pleasant and even flirty when he wants to be.
None of the adaptations get this quite right and show Darcy smiling enough.
This may be a bit of a random post, but a recent discussion I had in one of my religious studies classes brought to my attention something… very interesting regarding the Mesopotamian Flood Myth. While the ideas are still fresh in my head, I thought I’d go ahead and write down my analysis and try and share with you my thoughts.
tl;dr / General Statement - The Lapis Lazuli gem, much like the character of Lapis Lazuli in “Steven Universe,” represents humanity’s relationship with catastrophes or, in an archetypal standpoint, represents awareness of a coming Flood. This can be seen in the Epic of Gilgamesh when, after Utnapishtim survives the World Flood, the Lapis Lazuli gem serves as a token of remembrance for the World Flood, as well as to always remember Enlil’s divine negligence as being the primary reason the Flood occurred. This can also be seen in Steven Universe in how Lapis Lazuli seems to be, herself, a Flood in humanoid form, whose wrath is kindled because of the negligence of the Diamond Authority, and after being healed by Steven, serves as a living reminder of the ever-present danger of the Diamonds and Homeworld.
I wish I could write a larger analytical paper on this subject, but I lack the time, the willpower, and the resolve to undertake such a task simply on my own time. If anyone else is interested in a further explanation of such, feel free to PM me. Lapis Lazuli is one of my top three favorite characters in Steven Universe and this recent discovery of mine has got me all up in a tizzy.
Don’t fall in love with your fuck buddy. Simple, right?
⤑word count:1k ⤑genre:smut,fwb,sex with feelings ⤑pairing: namjoon x reader ⤑warnings: smut [oral sex (f.receiving), unprotected intercourse, creampie] ⤑ rating: 18+ ⤑read on AO3‖masterlist ⤑a/n: this was written for the lovely possum @sahmfanficbts for the #possumversary!i hope you like it ♡
To read sexy COHERENT banter in a smut scene is lovely. To WRITE it is something else.
“I forget how good you feel”
“You’ll have to have me more often then,” you add with a smirk and prop yourself up on your elbows. “Get used to me.”
Sigh. What a lovely couple. KNJ is having his nirvana moment and OC comes in strong with a cheeky, teasing remark.
And then he snaps because she’s inviting him to more — more frequency, more familiarity, less fwb, less distance. Ye it’s an invitation framed in such an easy breezy way that doesn’t make him run away but makes him snap his resolve and just go for it?
“You’re so good at this, Joonie,” you pant, walls fluttering around him. He moves his hand away from your crotch and tugs at your nipple gently, relishing the way you tighten around him. God, he wants to paint your tits with cum. “Give it to me so good every time…” “Yeah? You take it so well,” he teases, imitating you once more because he enjoys the way you laugh at his antics. “You deserve it. So good and pretty for me. Want to touch and kiss all over.”
Just wow. There’s OC speech. OCs physical reactions. There’s KNJ POV. Theres KNJ speech. And after this little exchange, Dee just had to put in a “Shit right there moment!” which thrills me to no end because nothing feels better when you find the right position, the right placement, the right ahem, person.
“You start moaning so loudly he becomes dizzy from the surge of blood to his cock. Namjoon gets on top of you, damaged knees on the mattress, grabbing and lifting your ass so he can fuck into you. His mouth suckles on your neck, moaning into it, your pussy bringing him closer to his orgasm.”
You know what? This smut hits so good because of the action and reaction sequences Dee writes. We see how their bodies react step by step to each movement and how it propels them to the um finish line. *note to self— when writing smut, remember action, reaction, erection!!!!!!!
“Just like that, give it to me, Joon,” you encourage him, letting out groans with every thrust. Namjoon can’t take it any longer, his balls crying for release as your nails dig into his back and heels press into his ass. “Pretty, I'm—fuck—coming!”
I know ahem @hobi-gif always gonna call me out on things like nipples begging to be touched but O M G — I love a body part that suddenly has feelings like balls crying for release.
Fucking hell, this entire paragraph is just packing with sexy verbs and sexy sounds, and the main ingredient in a sexy ass smut scene— desperation.
Dee, you really must go to the folks at masterclass and do a workshop on how to write conversation and action in a smut scene because it all flows so seamlessly that I’m fucking envious how it reads!!!!
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: it’s more important to know and understand fully why something is harmful than it is to drop everything deemed problematic. It’s performative and does nothing. People wonder why nobody has critical thinking skills and this is part of it because no one knows how to simousltansly critique and consume media. You need to use discernment.
This is ultimately why propaganda is going to work on you. Because you never learned how to think for yourself and the actual ideology behind things. You simply rely on group think and the bare minimum explanations to tell you what’s good and bad.
Sawthis article linked on twitter yesterday and…. yeah. YEAH.
I often wish that everyone on tumblr would read the Eve Sedgwick essay cited by the post just above this one. Here is the full bibliographical information:
Sedgwick, Eve Kokofsky. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading: Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You.” In Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke U P, 2003.
I have more to say about this but it got long, so have a read more break.
This was such an edifying read, I encourage everybody to click on the read more. This puts into words something about online spaces that’s been causing me grief for a while.
thinks about how frankenstein revolves around the exclusion of women and the removal of agency from women… thinks about how a key component of frankenstein is identity and the experience of being denied identity… thinks about how women in frankenstein are stripped of identity outside of how they relate to men… thinks about how all of these things coalesce in the bride…
like ofc you have the concept of unnatural birth but like. every woman in the story lives and dies in her relevancy by a man.
carolines life was determined by the men around her, elizabeth was only adopted to be a gift for victor, agatha and safie only exist in relation to felix, all we ever learn about margaret is that she is walton’s sister, justine is introduced as william’s caretaker.
and even beyond just existing for men these women are stripped of agency. margaret listens but never speaks, elizabeth dies for a husband she had no choice in, agatha and safie are only allowed to wafch as felix strikes out against the creature, justine dies taking the punishment for the actions of men, a girl drowns in the river while her male companion is the one holding a gun.
who are these women? we learn very little about them aside from how they serve the men in their lives: whose sister they are, whose love interest, who they teach a lesson, who they die for. We never get true identity. In the inverse of the way the creature is given no identity - no home, no family, no name - these women are given little else.
and at the intersection of it all sits the bride, right? a nameless, faceless women whose existience is little more than a moral question or a fantasized daydream. her life serves men, her death serves men. she is the product of the unnatural birth, and she is the fear of it. the very moment victor considers that she might have agency, a mind of her own, that she might think to reject her assigned lot in life, he destroys her.
the racism/orientalism/antisemitism/homophobia/general “fear of the other” in dracula is such an integral part of the text and i feel like you are missing so much of what dracula is about if you are not picking up on those overtones. i love dracula a lot but i don’t think there is any use in ignoring those aspects of it or pretending they don’t exist - in fact, i think that would show a very shallow understanding of the text. i don’t have any resentment towards ppl who are reading dracula daily and making silly little joke posts about their friend jonathan harker, i love to make those jokes as well, but i do hope that the experience of reading this novel helps some people understand the sheer xenophobia and bigotry that is at the heart of this novel and lots of other iconic horror fiction. i’ve learned not to underestimate the obliviousness of white gentiles but i hope people realize it is not random that count dracula has nebulous eastern ancestry and his plan is to take over england like i hope that does not go over your guys heads.
in rhetoric there is something called a “tricolon” which is three words, phrases, or sentences that are parallel in structure, length, or rhythm. it’s memorable and catchy to do, like veni, vidi, vici.
sometimes the three parts work together to express one concept, something called “hendiatrys” (greek for ‘one through three’) like wine, women, and song cumulatively means hedonism.
a tricolon can also either ascend or descend in intensity and magnitude, called a “tricolon crescens” or “tricolon diminuens” and is incredibly rhetorically powerful. the first or final position in a tricolon is often the emphatic one, the one that lingers in the mind.
anyway the reason i’m thinking about tricolons is Star Wars, of course, as always. specifically, this passage from Kemp’s Lords of the Sith:
“You were a traitor, were you not, Lord Vader?” Vader’s breathing caught on the hook of sudden anger. “What did you say?” “To the Jedi. To Padmé. To Obi-Wan. To all those you loved.” His Master turned to look at him, his eyes reflecting the flames. Vader didn’t know the answer his Master wanted to hear, so he simply answered with the truth. “Yes.”
to me, this reads as a tricolon, with the hendiatrys lurking behind all three parts spelled out afterwards, to twist the knife. the problem is that arguably the three parts of this tricolon are not emotionally equivalent, and so it’s probably either crescens or diminuens.
if we look at it in terms of the magnitude of his treason, an external perspective might consider killing the jedi, killing padmé, and fighting obi-wan are a diminuens. however, i don’t know if vader would hear it that way. he cares more about individuals than institutions, relationships than duty.
the jedi are just not the thing that anakin loved most. that was kind of the whole problem. anakin loved padmé more than he loved the jedi. there is actually a step up in emphasis and intensity between the first and second terms, not down. this implies something about the step between the second and third terms.
why didn’t sidious put obi-wan in the middle? why is obi-wan in the emphatic third position? isn’t padmé the one anakin loved the most? so surely sidious would dig at vader with her as the final, emphatic point. but no, it’s obi-wan. his best friend, not his wife.
anyway, it’s a tiny moment and a throwaway phrase, but it’s been embedded in my brain and i can’t get it out.
One thing about fandom culture is that it sort of trains you to interact with and analyze media in a very specific way. Not a BAD way, just a SPECIFIC way.
And the kind of media that attracts fandoms lends itself well (normally) to those kinds of analysis. Mainly, you’re supposed to LIKE and AGREE with the main characters. Themes are built around agreeing with the protagonists and condemning the antagonists, and taking the protagonists at their word.
Which is fine if you’re looking at, like, 99% of popular anime and YA fiction and Marvel movies.
But it can completely fall apart with certain kinds of media. If someone who has only ever analyzed media this way is all of a sudden handed Lolita or 1984 or Gatsby, which deal in shitty unreliable narrators; or even books like Beloved or Catcher in the Rye (VERY different books) that have narrators dealing with and reacting to challenging situations- well… that’s how you get some hilariously bad literary analysis.
I dont know what my point here is, really, except…like…I find it very funny when people are like “ugh. I hate Gatsby and Catcher because all the characters are shitty” which like….isnt….the point. Lololol you arent supposed to kin Gatsby.
I would definitely argue that it’s specifically a bad way….a very bad way.
Depending on the piece of media, it could be the intended way to interpret it and thus very effective. When I watch Sailor Moon, I know at the end of the day that Usagi is a hero. She is right, and her choices are good. She and the Sailor Scouts may make mistakes, and those mistakes can have consequences, but by presuming the goodness of the protagonists, I can accurately describe what actions and values the story is presenting as good. (Fighting evil by moonlight. Winning love by daylight. Never running from a real fight. Etc etc)
If I sit around and hem and haw about whether or not Usagi is actually the villain because she is destined to reinstate a magical absolute monarchy on Earth in the future, then I’m not interpreting it correctly. I can write a cool fanfic about it, but it wont be a successful analysis of the original work.
But like I said, that doesnt work for all pieces of media, and being able to assess how a piece of media should be analyzed is a skill in itself.
I was an English major. One of our required classes was Theory & Criticism, and I ended up hating it specifically because of the teacher and the way she taught it, but the actual T&C part of it was interesting. And one of the things we learned about was all the different ways of reading/interpreting/criticizing media - not just books, ANY form of media.
Specifically, I remember when we read The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James. We had special editions of the book where the first half of it was the novel itself, and the last half was like five or six different critical analyses of the book from different schools of theory. The two I remember specifically were a Marxist interpretation and a feminist interpretation. I remember reading both of those and thinking “wow, these people are really reaching for some of this”, but the more I read into the analysis and the history of those schools of thought, the more I got it. So for my final paper for that class, I wrote an essay that basically had the thesis of “when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail”. If you have trained yourself to view every piece of media through a single specific critical lens - well, you’re going to be only viewing it through that lens, and that means you’re going to read or watch it in such a way that you’re looking for the themes you’ve trained yourself to look for.
My teacher didn’t like that, by the way; she’d wanted each of us to pick one of these schools of thought we’d been learning about and make it “our” school of thought. She wanted us to grab the a hammer, or a screwdriver, or a spanner, and carry that with us for the rest of our lives. She somehow didn’t expect me to pack a toolbox.
My point is: Like OP said, sometimes the tool you need is a hammer. Sometimes you need a screwdriver. Sometimes you can make a hammer work where what you need is a screwdriver, but you’re going to end up stripping the screw; sometimes you can use a screwdriver in place of a hammer, but it’s going to take a lot more effort and brute force and you risk breaking the screwdriver. Sometimes you need a wrench and trying to use a hammer or screwdriver is going to make you declare that the bolt is problematic and should never be used by anyone. Sometimes what you really need is a hand saw, and trying to use any of the others…well, you can, but it’s going to make a mess and you might not be able to salvage the pieces left over.
These skills aren’t being taught in school anymore and you can see it in the way high school aged kids act about media and stuff.
They wouldn’t survive something like Lolita because I swear they’re being taught to turn their brains OFF and be spoon fed all their thoughts by someone else.
It’s really creepy.
I promise these skills are taught in school. I’m an English teacher. In a school. Who teaches them.
Now, Lolita is generally reserved for college classes. But a lot of the rationale behind continuing to teach the “classics” in high school (beyond the belief that a shared literary foundation promotes a better understanding of allusions and references) is that a lot of the classics are built on these kinds of complex readings and unreliable narrators and using historical and cultural context helps in their analysis. (I do think that we should be incorporating more diverse and modern lit into these classes, please understand)
Do all schools or individual teachers do this *well*? No, of course not. Do all students always really apply themselves to the development of deep critical thinking skills when their teacher pulls out A Tale of Two Cities? Also no.
But this isnt a “public school is failing / evil ” problem. Being able to engage in multiple forms and styles of analysis is a really high level skill, and my post was just about how a very common one doesnt always work well with different kinds of stories.
OP, why do you describe analyzing Sailor Moon in a different way than (you assume) the author intended as “hemming and hawing?” I would argue there’s a lot of value in approaching texts at a different angle.
Because ignoring context, tone, and intent when analyzing media is going to lead to conclusions are aren’t consistently supported by the text you are looking at.
“Usagi is a villain because she’s a queen and I think absolute monarchy is bad” ignores the way that Usagi, the moon kingdom, and basically all aspects of the lore are actually framed within the story. None of the characters’ actions or motivations make consistent sense if we start from the assumptions that “Usagi = monarchist=evil” and it would cause you to over look all the themes and interpretations that DO make consistent sense.
At some point you have to take a work at face value and see what it is trying to say.
Is the breakdown of monarchy actually relevant to the themes and messages presented in Sailor Moon? No, not really.
So focusing on the Moon Kingdom monarchy and the ethics there of is sort of… besides the point. The Moon Kingdom is a fairy tale, not a reflection of reality.
I’m not actually interested in the tax policy of the Moon Kingdom, you know?
Now, is it *cool* to look at works in various ways? Sure! Are some people interested in the tax policy of the Moon Kingdom and want to explore what that would look like? Sure! And honestly if you want to explore the ramifications of idyllic fairy tale monarchies on the real world, then that’s really cool too!
But if you are looking at a work to understand what it is trying to say with the text itself, then you need to take some of its premises at face value. Usagi and the Sailor Scouts being the Good Guys is one of those premises.
And really the “Usagi is secretly a princess from the moon” is just a part of the escapist fantasy for most little kids watching more than it has anything to do with actual themes of monarchy.
There is a lot of value in being able to look at a text from various angles. And it’s perfectly okay to use a text and concept as a jumping off point for other explorations.
But the problem comes when people say that Usagi was definitively a villain in Sailor Moon, or that say Steven Universe with themes of family and conflict resolution is excusing genocide by not destroying the Diamonds. It misses the point of the fantasy. It misses the important themes, the lessons and point of the show to look at it like that.
Basically: reinterpretations are cool, but you gotta know how to take a work on its own premises too.
Exactly. Like, magical princess that shows how monarchies (or the idea of princesses in general) is broken or toxic? Utena and Star vs The Forces of Evil are right there.
The idea of a cute talking cat granting girls magical powers to turn them into warriors against evil and getting them killed being evil? Not a good take on Luna, but Kyuubei in Madoka? Exactly this. That’s like, the point of Kyuubei- to riff on the trope that Luna, and Kero, and Mokona represent.
Media can raise all sorts of interesting conversations and discussions and ideas. But there’s a very real difference between trying to awkwardly force those readings on a work where the tone and framing and context don’t support it and acting like the media is actually supporting those messages, and using those ideas to explore it in a different work or to analyze the trope across the genre more broadly.
Moral and pure does not a protagonist make, and fandom is rife with that exclusive interpretation of storytelling. OP makes really good points; this thread is one of the best analyses I’ve read about lit crit on this site lately.
Stories aren’t made in a vacuum– every trope/theme/character archetype comes from somewhere and (general) you do yourself a disservice by viewing everything as whether it’s morally uncorrupted or not.
from the comments:
anyway, this has been a question on my mind besides for a little while now, and I do feel like what is perhaps missing from the perspective of that particular school of analysis is the recognition of this sort of ineffable sense that things don’t always have to be pleasantto be enjoyable, let alone worthwhile.
I don’t particularly like spicy food, but there are plenty of people who love it, even when their eyes water and their face gets flushed. My tastes for both the sweet and sour are more extreme than my partner’s, and I love the tartness of a really sour dish or drink, even if I pucker or, occasionally, give myself a mild acid burn on my tongue. (I was not allowed to eat as many Warheads as I would have liked as a child.)
Fiction is also this way. There’s something really enjoyable about being frightened, or feeling a sympathetic pang of sorrow, or a rush of anger, even when these emotions are not immediately pleasurable. I absolutely, positively, would not want to be an FBI agent on whom a serial killer has become romantically and sexually fixated, but my enjoyment of Thomas Harris’s novels is not all down to the flourishes in the writing I admire–the content, too, compels me.
Aristotle called this catharsis. Expurgation. We live through these things vicariously but experience these emotions in ourselves. Better that way than in real life, seemed to be his thinking. Sometimes, I agree.
At other times, to me the greatest virtue of fiction is the opportunity for connection. To see your experiences reflected and connect with yourself through this lens of comparison and recognition. Or to see a completely alien experience made legible to you because you have connected to this story in other ways. This is what the drive for representation is about, to me; that desire to feel a text reaching back for you as you extend yourself to it, and the ability of a work to reassure someone that no matter who they are or what they’ve lived through, they are not alone in this.
Sometimes a work isn’t always about something so straightforward as joy, as the assurance that good will triumph, as demonstrating–in the words of GK Chesterton–that monsters can be beaten.
Sometimes it’s about solace, sometimes it’s about processing a feeling or experience in the author’s life, sometimes it’s about indulging a very basic drive in a safe and controlled way, like the desire for sex or impulse for violence or the need to make sure everyone knows you are the smartest, coolest, specialest person in the room.
The extent to which you are supposed to agree with or like or even trust the protagonist of a story should not be the only yardstick in your toolbox, to borrow a metaphor from an earlier poster.
ok i think what gets me about the kind of post that’s like ’[children’s media] has child soldiers, where are their parents!!’ is that those stories really and truly aren’t forpeople who’ll think about that, they’re for the people the children’s age, who don’t, for the most part, want to be kept safe or told they’re too young to participate in the world, they want to be given a sword
i did not anticipate that this post was going to be this popular so like.
when i said “a sword” i was speaking metaphorically. i mean, literally as well, swords are cool as hell. but metaphorically: agency and the power to do something about their situation and the situation of the world.
a bunch of people have said that children who do not have supportive parents love this kind of thing, which is very true and part of a thing i was thinking of but is not in the post - often when you feel alone, reading about someone who is alone but in a much more dramatic way, with, again, the power to do something about it, is much more comforting than reading about someone who is kept safe and given the “right” supports. the dragon takes on the face of the fifth grade bully easily and naturally.
when i said “where are their parents” and “child soldiers” i was generalizing these kind of complaints. “why didn’t any adult step in”/ “these are bad pedagogical techniques” are some of the ones i see a bunch. and the answer is the same. they didn’t step in or teach in a way that would be good in real life because it is the opposite of empowering for a child to hear “when you’re older” in fiction as well as in real life.
someone reblogged this post with tags about how their younger self would have been furious if the events of one of those “villain gets mad at seer for sending children to fight them” posts had played out in real life, and that’s about right - one of the central things about being a child is not being taken seriously. those posts are by adults who have forgotten that, because being wrapped in a blanket and told to sit this one out means that you are not being taken seriously - as a threat; as an enemy; as a hero; as a person.
if your “counterexample” is not directed towards people under 20, you’re misreading the post. The new crop of adult fantasy books really examining the post-traumatic stress of child heroes is very much not for me, but if people like it, that’s fine. but that’s very different from stuff focused on kids with heroes who are kid-aged. “wow, the hero of this book is too young, it’s kind of funny that no one else can do anything/this Great Mage War is between a 12 year old and a 10 year old/whatever” is maybe a funny joke but it is not any sort of real or, more importantly, interesting criticism of the work.
kids’ literature is a great way of exposing kids to the thrill of danger while keeping them absolutely safe.
kids’ literature where the adults are a problem is a great way of teaching kids that authority is not inherently trustworthy.
kids deserve to be safe; kids deserve to feel powerful. a kid reading about an 11-year-old taking on the Dark Lord and winning is safe and feelspowerful.
i want to add that there’s still a difference to be made even inside kids’ media.
like sometimes the adult character really does do their best to help and support and protect the kid but the danger / hero quest really cannot be avoided through their effort
(the owl house is a great example of this. edalyn goes all the way out of her way to keep the kids safe but the world is still more dangerous than that)
and sometimes the child character is explicitly denied support, attention and protection from adults when they ask for it / want it / could really use it. in a way that kids recognize as bad of the adult character too. and sometimes it’s normalized by the society in general even though kids are angry about it and this is worth examining is all.
(steven universe is great at examining this, when steven’s moms are explicitly written as just not quite. managing. and steven has to do something about it)
(but that’s a deliberate example and there’s also books that don’t really think about it. like harry potter early books have professors not listening to the kids which gets them into entirely avoidable danger from lack of competent adult support. that is very much worth talking about in the specific way the books didnt)
i am once again thinking about how suzanne collins went back to her 10 year old series to publish a prequel to say “just in case it wasn’t clear. you are the capitol. you are not from district 12, you are not the uprising. you are sitting in your house, enjoying a level of wealth unimaginable to billions, and you are watching the hunger games for your entertainment. you are reveling in it, all its violence and romance, and you got caught up in it and its characters. but this story is about you. i am stripping away the entertainment and the characters and the distraction because this story is about your horror and and complete and total lack of empathy and perspective. that is what it has always been about. look at it.” and some people still don’t get it. anyway very iconic of her
oh i never know how to explain this properly but i looooooooooooooooove when a story just absolutely TELLS you something and it’s so obvious it goes right by you. like the equivalent of hiding in plain sight. i’m thinking in the original cut(?) of alien where they showed the full xenomorph, crouched and ready to pounce, but because we’ve never seen it before, we can’t tell what it is and interpret it as part of the spaceship.or it’s a detail that seems so out of place or wildly insane that you automatically ignore it and assume you misinterpreted until that exact detail comes back in a big way? (like when noah the raven boy flat out tells everyone he’s a ghost and they take it as a joke, so the reader does too) is there a tvtropes name for this i’m obsessed with it
I think that this is known as “delayed decoding” in literary analysis. The term was coined by Ian Watt in the ‘70s, don’t remember the exact year, to describe a technique used by Joseph Conrad in Lord JimandHeart of Darkness, but a lot of writers picked it up. It’s basically what you described: you present a detailed image but don’t make its moral and psychological relevance obvious. You give facts but not their meaning, not until later, and the revelation can come directly from the characters who suddenly realize what they have observed or it can also be left in the text, to be understood by the reader. You can see why Modernists loved it!
I find a big stumbling block that comes with teaching Romeo and Juliet is explaining Juliet’s age. Juliet is 13 - more precisely, she’s just on the cusp of turning 14. Though it’s not stated explicitly, Romeo is implied to be a teenager just a few years older than her - perhaps 15 or 16. Most people dismiss Juliet’s age by saying “that was normal back then” or “that’s just how it was.” This is fundamentally untrue, and I will explain why.
In Elizabethan England, girls could legally marry at 12 (boys at 14) but onlywith their father’s permission. However, it was normal for girls to marry after 18 (more commonly in early to mid twenties) and for boys to marry after 21 (more commonly in mid to late twenties). But at 14, a girl could legally marry without papa’s consent. Of course, in doing so she ran the risk of being disowned and left destitute, which is why it was so critical for a young man to obtain the father’s goodwill and permission first. Therein lies the reason why we are repeatedly told that Juliet is about to turn 14 in under 2 weeks. This was a critical turning point in her life.
In modern terms, this would be the equivalent of the law in many countries which states children can marry at 16 with their parents’ permission, or at 18 to whomever they choose - but we see it as pretty weird if someone marries at 16. They’re still a kid, we think to ourselves - why would their parents agree to this?
This is exactly the attitude we should take when we look at Romeo and Juliet’s clandestine marriage. Today it would be like two 16 year olds marrying in secret. This is NOT normal and would NOT have been received without a raised eyebrow from the audience. Modern audiences AND Elizabethan audiences both look at this and think THEY. ARE. KIDS.
Critically, it is also not normal for fathers to force daughters into marriage at this time. Lord Capulet initially makes a point of telling Juliet’s suitor Paris that “my will to her consent is but a part.” He tells Paris he wants to wait a few years before he lets Juliet marry, and informs him to woo her in the meantime. Obtaining the lady’s consent was of CRITICAL importance. It’s why so many of Shakespeare’s plays have such dazzling, well-matched lovers in them, and why men who try to force daughters to marry against their will seldom prosper. You had to let the lady make her own choice. Why?
Put simply, for her health. It was considered a scientific fact that a woman’s health was largely, if not solely, dependant on her womb. Once she reached menarche in her teenage years, it was important to see her fitted with a compatible sexual partner. (For aristocratic girls, who were healthier and enjoyed better diets, menarche generally occurred in the early teens rather than the later teens, as was more normal at the time). The womb was thought to need heat, pleasure, and conception if the woman was to flourish. Catholics might consider virginity a fit state for women, but the reformed English church thought it was borderline unhealthy - sex and marriage was sometimes even prescribed as a medical treatment. A neglected wife or widow could become sick from lack of (pleasurable) sex. Marrying an unfit sexual partner or an older man threatened to put a girl’s health at risk. An unsatisfied woman, made ill by her womb as a result - was a threat to the family unit and the stability of society as a whole. A satisfying sex life with a good husband meant a womb that had the heat it needed to thrive, and by extension a happy and healthy woman.
In Shakespeare’s plays, sexual compatibility between lovers manifests on the stage in wordplay. In Much Ado About Nothing, sparks fly as Benedick and Beatrice quarrel and banter, in comparison to the silence that pervades the relationship between Hero and Claudio, which sours very quickly. Compare to R+J - Lord Capulet tells Paris to woo Juliet, but the two do not communicate. But when Romeo and Juliet meet, their first speech takes the form of a sonnet. They might be young and foolish, but they arein love. Their speech betrays it.
Juliet, on the cusp of 14, would have been recognised as a girl who had reached a legal and biological turning point. Her sexual awakening was upon her, though she cares very little about marriage until she meets the man she loves. They talk, and he wins her wholehearted, unambiguous and enthusiastic consent - all excellent grounds for a relationship, if only she weren’t so young.
When Tybalt dies and Romeo is banished, Lord Capulet undergoes a monstrous change from doting father to tyrannical patriarch. Juilet’s consent has to take a back seat to the issue of securing the Capulet house. He needs to win back the prince’s favour and stabilise his family after the murder of his nephew. Juliet’s marriage to Paris is the best way to make that happen. Fathers didn’t ordinarily throw their daughters around the room to make them marry. Among the nobility, it was sometimes a sad fact that girls were simply expected to agree with their fathers’ choices. They might be coerced with threats of being disowned. But for the VAST majority of people in England - basically everyone non-aristocratic - the idea of forcing a daughter that young to marry would have been received with disgust. And even among the nobility it was only used as a last resort, when the welfare of the family was at stake. Note that aristocratic boys were often in the same position, and would also be coerced into advantageous marriages for the good of the family.
tl;dr:
Q. Was it normal for girls to marry at 13?
A. Hell no!
Q. Was it legalfor girls to marry at 13?
A. Not without dad’s consent - Friar Lawrence performs this dodgy ceremony only because he believes it might bring peace between the houses.
Q. Was it normal for fathers to force girls into marriage?
A. Not at this time in England. In noble families, daughters were expected to conform to their parents wishes, but a girl’s consent was encouraged, and the importance of compatibility was recognised.
Q. How should we explain Juliet’s age in modern terms?
A. A modern Juliet would be a 17 year old girl who’s close to turning 18. We all agree that girls should marry whomever they love, but not at 17, right? We’d say she’s still a kid and needs to wait a bit before rushing into this marriage. We acknowledge that she’d be experiencing her sexual awakening, but marrying at this age is odd - she’s still a child and legally neither her nor Romeo should be marrying without parental permission.
Q. Would Elizabethans have seen Juliet as a child?
A. YES. The force of this tragedy comes from the youth of the lovers. The Montagues and Capulets have created such a hateful, violent and dangerous world for their kids to grow up in that the pangs of teenage passion are enough to destroy the future of their houses. Something as simple as two kids falling in love is enough to lead to tragedy. Thatis the crux of the story and it should not be glossed over - Shakespeare made Juliet 13 going on 14 for a reason.
I saw this in my emails and couldn’t see why I’d been tagged in it (all the while nodding vehemently along) and then I saw my tags and ah. Yep. Still forever mad at how badly Shakespeare is taught in most schools.
Wait but then why does Juliet’s mother talk about being already married younger than Juliet currently is?
Likely because her match to Juliet’s father was an arranged match to solidify family names and houses in order to avoid conflicts or to establish wealth. (It also serves to denote the tragic undercurrent of the play ie love is secondary to wealth and power.)
It wasn’t so uncommon for children of royalty or nobility to be betrothed from birth, or even symbolically married, in order to make alliances. But that doesn’t mean they were engaging in the kind of adult relationship we envision when we think of marriage today.
Which isn’t to say some people didn’t buck the norm and do horrible things Margaret Beaufort is a prime example of this, which the Tudors would likely be aware of. Her first marriage contract actually happened when she was one year old. It was later dissolved and she was remarried at the age of 12, and her second husband, Edmund Tudor, did in fact get her pregnant before dying himself. She was 13 years old when she gave birth, and it caused major health issues for her and nearly killed her. When she survived it was considered miraculous. Which should tell you just how not normal this kind of thing was thought of even back then.
I agree with absolutely everything in this thread of discussion. Even so, my long-standing fascination with both Shakespeare and late medieval / early renaissance history makes it impossible for me to to reblog without throwing in my extra few cents:
I. Margaret Beaufort
In my mind, there are few cases that better demonstrate the tensions between medieval norms and medieval realities than that of Margaret Beaufort. Like many other women of her time, she had only one child surviving to adulthood: Henry Tudor (later Henry VII and the founder of the Tudor dynasty). In that, Margaret wasn’t so remarkable: infant mortality made this a common enough outcome, though undoubtedly a tragic one.
Where Margaret’s case was exceptional is that Henry was also her only known pregnancy, without so much as a stillbirth, infant death, or even another pregnancy ever being mentioned in connection to her. In her own time, it was commonly assumed that her experience of childbirth at a very young age was what accounted for her barrenness, and even to us today, it doesn’t seem implausible to assume some kind of physical trauma that prevented later pregnancies from taking place, given all the medical knowledge we’ve accumulated about the risks of childbirth at either extreme of age.
But there was more to this. The vast Beaufort estate that came with Margaret’s young hand was so valuable that, to 15th/16th century English minds, it perfectly explained Edmund Tudor’s motives for having been so reckless with the health of his wife: having an heir of his own would ensure that her lands would stay with him, in the name of any children they might have together, whereas the lands would pass to someone else if she should die before having a child. Of course, most men in that situation would have waited anyway, as a child whose mother died in childbirth was much less likely to survive anyway, so contemporaries portrayed Edmund Tudor’s actions as short-sighted and foolhardy at best, amoral and cruel at worst. But Fate must have a sense of irony, because Edmund died before his son was even born, while Margaret lived, and as aristocratic women tended to do in those circumstances, she was remarried to Henry Stafford, 1st Duke of Buckingham.
Since Margaret was Stafford’s first (and only) wife, he would have depended on her to give himany heirs at all, to whom he could pass on the lands he alreadyhad, let alone any of Margaret’s own (and it would be logical to assume that the Beaufort inheritance would have been no less tempting to Stafford than it was to Tudor). He must have at least hoped for children from her, and at the time, there wasn’t any reason to expect she was totally barren either: there was the traumatic birth to consider, but she was more physically mature when she remarried, and there was room to hope that widowhood had given her time to recover. And yet, despite all this, it seems few people (if any) were surprised that Margaret did not bear any more children. It didn’t seem to doom her relationship with her second husband either: on the contrary, Margaret enjoyed a happy relationship with Stafford for well over a decade until his death, so if there was any bitterness on his part over his lack of heirs, he must have managed it well. Even in the contemporary sources (who don’t tend to be charitable towards female figures), any blame for her barrenness is laid squarely at the feet of the various men who were her guardians in her early life, who clearly abused their authority over her for their own benefit, rather than to safeguard Margaret’s well-being as guardians are supposed to do (one of them being Edmund Tudor himself… he wasn’t supposed to even be in the running for her wardship, but Henry VI actually outright broke a promise he had made to Margaret’s father to let Margaret’s mother be her guardian in the event of his death).
This indicates to me even more strongly that late-medieval / Tudor people would have not only been sympathetic towards what Margaret and women like her had suffered, but also understood that neglectful attitudes towards the health and happiness of dependents have consequences. Shakespeare’s own words make this clear, at the beginning of the play:
Paris: Younger than she are happy mothers made. Capulet: And too soon marr’d are those so early made.
Tudor audiences would have understood these lines as the words of a benevolent father protecting his daughter from the advances of an overeager young suitor, invoking what seems to have been a Tudor-era trope that early marriages do not make for happy endings… not for the woman, not for her family or husband, and certainly not for the children she might otherwise have borne. Because Capulet came off as the “good father” in the beginning of the play, it makes it all the more shocking when his attitude changes and he becomes the all-too-familiar figure of the cold, uncaring patriarch who regards his children only as pawns*. I imagine the juxtaposition would have invited Tudor audiences to feel Juliet’s sense of betrayal as if it were happening to them.
* Jane Grey, the famed “nine days’ queen” was also rumored to be such a victim of her parents’ ambition: they also saw fit to force her into a marriage that she seriously objected to, and historical records point a fairly consistent picture of their callous disregard towards her wishes and genuine happiness.
II. Consent in Medieval Marriages
Twelve and fourteen are actually also important numbers in their own right, and Shakespeare’s choice to place Juliet between those two ages has an important symbolic meaning. Late medieval Catholic doctrine defined marriage as a sacrament, like the Eucharist (Communion), or Holy Orders. Many of the sacraments require those who receive them to understand what they’re getting into for the sacrament to have the desired effect. To guarantee understanding (at least from a theological perspective), you would have to be above “the age of reason”, the age at which you were considered to be able to think for yourself. Conservative definitions of the “age of reason” sometimes defined it as the age of fifteen or fourteen (or older), but was later fixed at twelve. Since marriage was one of these sacraments, a marriage where both spouses had notfully and knowingly given their consent was no marriage at all.* Therefore, twelve was considered the absolute lower age limit at which a person could marry without compromising the very spiritual foundation of the marriage itself, while fourteen was considered a safer age at which to assume the person had full control of their reasoning capacities.
The other side of the “consent” coin when it came to marriage was that consent wasn’t just a necessary condition to finalize a marriage, it was also sufficient condition. If a man and a woman had given their knowing consent to marry one another, and if they had intentionally verbalized this promise to one another and consummated their marriage, then no earthly power could invalidate this pact for any reason (outside of a few very specific ones, like incest) without risking damnation. Witnesses were convenient as a way to prove that the marriage had taken place, if a family member or some segment of society disapproved of the match, but they weren’t needed in order to make the marriage spirituallyvalid. Basically, the Catholic Church at this stage somehow ended up putting the idea of consent at the very heart of the idea of what made a marriage valid or not, and this had consequencesnot only because of the threat of hellfire, but also because Church law was secular law when it came to domestic matters like marriage and divorce. And then it came to pass that the English Reformation left this specific area of the doctrine mostly untouched, so the Tudors would have had similar ideas surrounding the question of consent and marriage as did their late medieval forbears.
This theological point is not only the whole raison d’etre for the most central plot device in the play, but also adds an extra note of pathos to Juliet’s situation and an extra layer of moral judgment towards Lord Capulet’s behavior. If she did not insist on keeping her marriage vow, or if she married Paris knowing full well that she had already been married, both of those would be mortal sins for which she would risk damnation. And by extension, because he used duress against Juliet to try to make her comply with his sinful wish, Lord Capulet has also damned himself (albeit unknowingly, but even so, the narrative clearly presents forcing his daughter’s marriage as something he should know better than to do, anyway).
Until this point, Juliet’s marriage is characterized as an impulsive decision such as only foolish youth could make, but ironically, in that confrontation with Lord Capulet, this slip of a young girl is now portrayed as conducting herself with far more spiritual maturity and grace than any of the adults around her. Her parents are failing in their duty towards her by putting their dynastic concerns ahead of her health and happiness (when it’s been made clear they already know this is a Bad Idea), and her Nurse, who actually knows about the secret marriage and all the reasons why it cannotbe taken back, is actively pleading with her to just forget it and pretend Romeo never was. Juliet’s choice here is monumental, because it involves not only disregarding her parents, but also an active decision to completely break with the woman who has been with her for literally everything in her life up to that point, a break so thorough that even Nurse herself doesn’t know that it’s happened. This dramatic turning point is a bittersweet portrait of the girl losing her innocence and growing up into an adult, from one angle, and from another angle it’s a paean to the pure-hearted idealism (different from the limpid innocence of childhood in that it’s willful and risk-taking, and fiery in quality) that can only be found in the young. Either way, it does Juliet’s character AND Shakespeare’s dramatic talents a massive disservice to portray her situation as something so simplistic or reactionary as lovelorn pining after an absent boyfriend, or rebelling against her parents, or “staying true to her own heart”.
This wasn’t just a plot device for the stage: many real-life lovers leaned on this feature of the Church’s teachings, when faced with the opposition of their families and communities, and in many cases, the Church was indeed forced to side with the couple, however reluctantly. Margery Paston, the daughter of a genteel landowning family in the 15th century, and Richard Calle, the Paston family’s longtime housekeeper, were one such case of a real-life Romeo and Juliet: they mutually fell in love, and married in secret when they came up against heavy opposition from Margery’s family. The Pastons responded by separating them, firing Calle from his job and having him sent to London, while Margery remained in Norfolk under house arrest. There, she seems to have been subjected to ongoing and intense pressure to walk back her marriage… if the couple had been married formally in church, this would not have been possible, but secret marriages were vulnerable to challenges like this because they were secret. A witness would have helped her and Calle’s case and made it more airtight, but even if the couple had had any, apparently the Pastons had succeeded in intimidating them into silence.
But even though the Pastons seemed to be winning, it’s hard to believe that bystanders wouldn’t have objected to at least some of what the Pastons were doing to try and get their way. Otherwise, Calle could not have written Margery in 1469, during their separation, saying “I suppose if you tell them sadly the truth, they will not damn their souls for us”. Their situation was objectively quite bleak. For the months they were apart, it was made very clear to both Margery and Calle that, if the couple continued to insist on their marriage, the Pastons would disown Margery and throw her out of the house, therefore leaving her with few options for survival, let alone to find her way to Calle over a distance of a hundred miles. He mournfully acknowledges that their gamble might fail, and their worst fears might come true, but there is also defiance in his resignation, as he concludes, “if they will in no wise agree [to respect our marriage], between God, the Devil and them be it.”
Margery, for her part, was no less determined. When Margery was finally brought before the local bishop, he turned out to be sympathetic towards the Paston family, and gave Margery a long speech about the importance of pleasing her family and community (so much for the theological importance of consent, but then, clerical hypocrisy was nothing new to medieval people). But Margery remained steadfast (in fact, I am inclined to think from her next words that the bishop’s words only goaded her to greater resolve) and when she spoke, she not only continued to insist that she had said what she had said, but according to her mother she “boldly” added, “if those words made it not sure […] she would make it surer before she went thence, for she said she thought in her conscience she was bound [in marriage to Calle], whatsoever the words were.” Her wording left absolutely no room for doubt in the mind of even the most flexible theologian. And when Calle was cross-examined and his testimony found to match that of Margery’s, the bishop of Norfolk had no choice but to rule in the couple’s favor.
Margery’s mother did indeed make good on her word: she didboth disown Margery and throw her out of the house. She seemed to have done it more to save face, however, than to actually punish her daughter, since she does seem to have made arrangements behind the scenes for Margery to stay with sympathetic neighbors. In the end, Calle was right, the Pastons were not willing to risk their own souls. Margery and Richard Calle got their happy ending, and had at least three children (and we know about them because we know Margery’s mother left them money in her own will).
* This also meant that Edmund Tudor actually would have been Margaret Beaufort’s first husband, not her second. It was true that she had already been “in a marriage” before being married later to Tudor, but strictly speaking, it was only a precontract (what we today would think of as an engagement) with signficance limited to the secular realm; there are a lot of reasons this would not have really been considered a marriage at the time, but the most theologically pertinent one is that the bride’s consent could not have been involved, because she was too young to be able to give it. Consequently, this paper marriage was easily dissolved as soon as her guardians thought it more politically expedient to marry her to Edmund Tudor. And for all intents and purposes, Margaret Beaufort herself considered Tudor to be her first husband, not John de la Pole.
tl;dr: the study of Shakespeare cannot be separated from historical and societal understanding of the times he lived in, and frankly, it’s a terrible shame that English classes don’t emphasize this more, because then you’re throwing out about 80% of the meaning his works actually hold.
I know y'all did not read the books but Roald Dahl talks about this in the book. Charlie’s teacher points out the fact that unless you buy a shit ton of bars you’re probably not gonna win. Just like the lottery. Just like how all of the other winners of the tickets bought a shit ton of bars. Except Charlie, who just got lucky. And Charlie was originally black. Literally the whole point of the book was that wonka wanted to give the less fortunate a fair opportunity and it wasn’t fair because the system isn’t fair.
Stop the car.
Charlie was originally black?!?!
!?!!
He was and Mr. Dahl was forced to make him white. Also his widow has spoken and confirmed that as well.
because you shouldn’t believe everything you read on a tumblr post at face value, here is a guardian article confirming that charlie was originally conceived as black but dahl made him white at the behest of his publisher
WHAT
But yeah, coming back to the original point, the other kids, especially Augustus Gloop and Veruca Salt, cheated the system by claiming a ridiculous amount of chocolate bars. News reports mention people hoarding Wonka chocolate bars in hopes of finding the Golden Ticket. Mr Salt even admits that he refitted his staff at a nut-shelling factory for opening chocolate bars, without a doubt losing a huge amount of capital in lost profits and mass bulk-buying of chocolate, just to win. The working-class lady who actually found that ticket didn’t benefit from that luck or labour - she was immediately made to hand it over to her boss for his spoiled daughter, who holds it as ‘his’ victory and good luck.
Charlie didn’t even find the ticket in his first bar, or his second. His first bar, his birthday present, was a dud, and he even failed to enjoy it like normal because he dared to hope, just for a moment, that he might actually be lucky enough to get the one. Later, he is lucky enough to find a dropped 50p piece in the street, and goes to buy a chocolate bar for himself. Finally holding a treat that is all his, he wolfs the thing down, stopping only long enough to realises that he didn’t get lucky and win a Golden Ticket. It’s only on the third bar that he gets it, and, smelling blood in the water, the shopkeeper tells him to immediately go home and not tell a soul that he has it, knowing what people might do to this small starving boy if they find out what he has.
And Wonka knows! He knows he done goofed! He realises almost immediately that the people who have been attracted to his lottery, who have stacked the decks in their favour, are awful, cruel, entitled people! Augustus Gloop, the glutton, doesn’t care what placed in front of him so long as it’s food - and the first obstacle? A room where everything is a kind of sweet. Violet’s gum-chewing is excessive, but the modern film adapts this into a more realistic and sinister flaw - overcompetitiveness. It’s not just that she’s been chewing the same piece of gum for months, it’s that she’s been chewing the same piece of gum, weeks after its taste is gone, whether it is socially acceptable or not, just to break a record. So when Wonka promises a new treat, a personal favourite of one of the kids, but says it’s not ready yet and you can’t have it, of course Violet seizes it, because damn the consequences, she will be the first to try it. Veruca is shown a collection of unique animals, and immediately declares that she wants one, because she’s always had the bragging rights and luxury rare items. And when Mr Wonka refuses to sell? She steals it, because dang it, she will have that golden goose/trained squirrel! Mike Teevee, in his hubris, mutilates himself almost beyond recognition because he had to challenge Mr Wonka’s outlandish claim of transmitting physical objects via television. Charlie was the perfect heir, not because he was humble and poor, but because he had the wonder and appreciation for the treats Wonka made but also the sense and caution not to risk messing with the many dangerous things in an active factory. If the lottery was more fair, maybe Charlie would have had more stiff competition, but as it stands, Charlie is almost the poster boy of ‘won by doing nothing’.
Sorry, got sidetracked
TLDR: Apart from Charlie, most of the other kids were entitled rich (white) kids who gamed a system that should have been fair, and were punished for it by revealing to them their greed and hubris
One thing about fandom culture is that it sort of trains you to interact with and analyze media in a very specific way. Not a BAD way, just a SPECIFIC way.
And the kind of media that attracts fandoms lends itself well (normally) to those kinds of analysis. Mainly, you’re supposed to LIKE and AGREE with the main characters. Themes are built around agreeing with the protagonists and condemning the antagonists, and taking the protagonists at their word.
Which is fine if you’re looking at, like, 99% of popular anime and YA fiction and Marvel movies.
But it can completely fall apart with certain kinds of media. If someone who has only ever analyzed media this way is all of a sudden handed Lolita or 1984 or Gatsby, which deal in shitty unreliable narrators; or even books like Beloved or Catcher in the Rye (VERY different books) that have narrators dealing with and reacting to challenging situations- well… that’s how you get some hilariously bad literary analysis.
I dont know what my point here is, really, except…like…I find it very funny when people are like “ugh. I hate Gatsby and Catcher because all the characters are shitty” which like….isnt….the point. Lololol you arent supposed to kin Gatsby.
I would definitely argue that it’s specifically a bad way….a very bad way.
Depending on the piece of media, it could be the intended way to interpret it and thus very effective. When I watch Sailor Moon, I know at the end of the day that Usagi is a hero. She is right, and her choices are good. She and the Sailor Scouts may make mistakes, and those mistakes can have consequences, but by presuming the goodness of the protagonists, I can accurately describe what actions and values the story is presenting as good. (Fighting evil by moonlight. Winning love by daylight. Never running from a real fight. Etc etc)
If I sit around and hem and haw about whether or not Usagi is actually the villain because she is destined to reinstate a magical absolute monarchy on Earth in the future, then I’m not interpreting it correctly. I can write a cool fanfic about it, but it wont be a successful analysis of the original work.
But like I said, that doesnt work for all pieces of media, and being able to assess how a piece of media should be analyzed is a skill in itself.
I was an English major. One of our required classes was Theory & Criticism, and I ended up hating it specifically because of the teacher and the way she taught it, but the actual T&C part of it was interesting. And one of the things we learned about was all the different ways of reading/interpreting/criticizing media - not just books, ANY form of media.
Specifically, I remember when we read The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James. We had special editions of the book where the first half of it was the novel itself, and the last half was like five or six different critical analyses of the book from different schools of theory. The two I remember specifically were a Marxist interpretation and a feminist interpretation. I remember reading both of those and thinking “wow, these people are really reaching for some of this”, but the more I read into the analysis and the history of those schools of thought, the more I got it. So for my final paper for that class, I wrote an essay that basically had the thesis of “when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail”. If you have trained yourself to view every piece of media through a single specific critical lens - well, you’re going to be only viewing it through that lens, and that means you’re going to read or watch it in such a way that you’re looking for the themes you’ve trained yourself to look for.
My teacher didn’t like that, by the way; she’d wanted each of us to pick one of these schools of thought we’d been learning about and make it “our” school of thought. She wanted us to grab the a hammer, or a screwdriver, or a spanner, and carry that with us for the rest of our lives. She somehow didn’t expect me to pack a toolbox.
My point is: Like OP said, sometimes the tool you need is a hammer. Sometimes you need a screwdriver. Sometimes you can make a hammer work where what you need is a screwdriver, but you’re going to end up stripping the screw; sometimes you can use a screwdriver in place of a hammer, but it’s going to take a lot more effort and brute force and you risk breaking the screwdriver. Sometimes you need a wrench and trying to use a hammer or screwdriver is going to make you declare that the bolt is problematic and should never be used by anyone. Sometimes what you really need is a hand saw, and trying to use any of the others…well, you can, but it’s going to make a mess and you might not be able to salvage the pieces left over.
These skills aren’t being taught in school anymore and you can see it in the way high school aged kids act about media and stuff.
They wouldn’t survive something like Lolita because I swear they’re being taught to turn their brains OFF and be spoon fed all their thoughts by someone else.
It’s really creepy.
I promise these skills are taught in school. I’m an English teacher. In a school. Who teaches them.
Now, Lolita is generally reserved for college classes. But a lot of the rationale behind continuing to teach the “classics” in high school (beyond the belief that a shared literary foundation promotes a better understanding of allusions and references) is that a lot of the classics are built on these kinds of complex readings and unreliable narrators and using historical and cultural context helps in their analysis. (I do think that we should be incorporating more diverse and modern lit into these classes, please understand)
Do all schools or individual teachers do this *well*? No, of course not. Do all students always really apply themselves to the development of deep critical thinking skills when their teacher pulls out A Tale of Two Cities? Also no.
But this isnt a “public school is failing / evil ” problem. Being able to engage in multiple forms and styles of analysis is a really high level skill, and my post was just about how a very common one doesnt always work well with different kinds of stories.
OP, why do you describe analyzing Sailor Moon in a different way than (you assume) the author intended as “hemming and hawing?” I would argue there’s a lot of value in approaching texts at a different angle.
Because ignoring context, tone, and intent when analyzing media is going to lead to conclusions are aren’t consistently supported by the text you are looking at.
“Usagi is a villain because she’s a queen and I think absolute monarchy is bad” ignores the way that Usagi, the moon kingdom, and basically all aspects of the lore are actually framed within the story. None of the characters’ actions or motivations make consistent sense if we start from the assumptions that “Usagi = monarchist=evil” and it would cause you to over look all the themes and interpretations that DO make consistent sense.
At some point you have to take a work at face value and see what it is trying to say.
Is the breakdown of monarchy actually relevant to the themes and messages presented in Sailor Moon? No, not really.
So focusing on the Moon Kingdom monarchy and the ethics there of is sort of… besides the point. The Moon Kingdom is a fairy tale, not a reflection of reality.
I’m not actually interested in the tax policy of the Moon Kingdom, you know?
Now, is it *cool* to look at works in various ways? Sure! Are some people interested in the tax policy of the Moon Kingdom and want to explore what that would look like? Sure! And honestly if you want to explore the ramifications of idyllic fairy tale monarchies on the real world, then that’s really cool too!
But if you are looking at a work to understand what it is trying to say with the text itself, then you need to take some of its premises at face value. Usagi and the Sailor Scouts being the Good Guys is one of those premises.
And really the “Usagi is secretly a princess from the moon” is just a part of the escapist fantasy for most little kids watching more than it has anything to do with actual themes of monarchy.
There is a lot of value in being able to look at a text from various angles. And it’s perfectly okay to use a text and concept as a jumping off point for other explorations.
But the problem comes when people say that Usagi was definitively a villain in Sailor Moon, or that say Steven Universe with themes of family and conflict resolution is excusing genocide by not destroying the Diamonds. It misses the point of the fantasy. It misses the important themes, the lessons and point of the show to look at it like that.
Basically: reinterpretations are cool, but you gotta know how to take a work on its own premises too.
Exactly. Like, magical princess that shows how monarchies (or the idea of princesses in general) is broken or toxic? Utena and Star vs The Forces of Evil are right there.
The idea of a cute talking cat granting girls magical powers to turn them into warriors against evil and getting them killed being evil? Not a good take on Luna, but Kyuubei in Madoka? Exactly this. That’s like, the point of Kyuubei- to riff on the trope that Luna, and Kero, and Mokona represent.
Media can raise all sorts of interesting conversations and discussions and ideas. But there’s a very real difference between trying to awkwardly force those readings on a work where the tone and framing and context don’t support it and acting like the media is actually supporting those messages, and using those ideas to explore it in a different work or to analyze the trope across the genre more broadly.
Moral and pure does not a protagonist make, and fandom is rife with that exclusive interpretation of storytelling. OP makes really good points; this thread is one of the best analyses I’ve read about lit crit on this site lately.
Stories aren’t made in a vacuum– every trope/theme/character archetype comes from somewhere and (general) you do yourself a disservice by viewing everything as whether it’s morally uncorrupted or not.
