Your brain loves to rewrite your past with the knowledge you have now. This is called hindsight bias. It makes things look clear that were not clear at all when you were in the situation.
Hindsight can make everything feel like it was obvious. Patterns feel clearer. Red flags look brighter.
But you did not have that clarity when you were in it. You were acting with the knowledge, feelings, and instincts you had at the time.
Even if someone warned you, even if part of you suspected something was wrong, the way you felt then mattered. Hope mattered. Fear mattered. Attachment mattered.
You were trying. You were surviving. You were not foolish for wanting things to work.
Be kinder to the version of you who did not know what you know now.
Be kinder to the
version of you who did not
know what you know now.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
“I very proudly entered the forestry school as an 18-year-old and telling them that the reason that I wanted to study botany was because I wanted to know why asters and goldenrod looked so beautiful together. These are these amazing displays of this bright, chrome yellow and deep purple of New England aster, and they look stunning together. And the two plants so often intermingle rather than living apart from one another, and I wanted to know why that was. I thought that surely in the order and the harmony of the universe, there would be an explanation for why they looked so beautiful together. And I was told that that was not science, that if I was interested in beauty, I should go to art school. Which was really demoralizing as a freshman, but I came to understand that question wasn’t going to be answered by science, that science, as a way of knowing, explicitly sets aside our emotions, our aesthetic reactions to things. We have to analyze them as if they were just pure material, and not matter and spirit together. And, yes, as it turns out, there’s a very good biophysical explanation for why those plants grow together, so it’s a matter of aesthetics and it’s a matter of ecology. Those complimentary colors of purple and gold together, being opposites on the color wheel, they’re so vivid, they actually attract far more pollinators than if those two grew apart from one another. So each of those plants benefits by combining its beauty with the beauty of the other. And that’s a question that science can address, certainly, as well as artists. And I just think that “Why is the world so beautiful?” is a question that we all ought to be embracing.”
— Robin Wall Kimmerer, “The Intelligence of Plants”, from the podcast On Being with Krista Tippett (via peatbogbodyhasmoved)
Googled it and you know what, it is beautiful:
[ID: a photograph of purple asters growing amidst bright yellow goldenrod flowers. End ID]
There is a really frustrating thing where some kinds of speculative story are hard to write because they will be assumed to be bad (clumsy, harmful, regressive) metaphors for real-world events or people, rather than exploring completely speculative ideas. Like:
“What if a small group of religious extremists, persecuted in their own country, moved to an inhospitable uninhabited island and had to rebuild society there?” - But the Americas and Australia weren’t inhospitable and were full of Native nations, why are you perpetuating the idea of Terra Nullius and manifest destiny? - Yes, that’s because this isn’t a metaphor for the British invading other countries, it’s a metaphor for finding out how much of a person’s religious practise is rooted in worldly concerns, vs how much they will really stymie themselves for the sake of God.
“What if 1/100 children born was a werewolf?” - But queer people are no danger to straight people, and disabled people don’t have predictable patterns to their illnesses, and most people who have uncontrollable rages really CAN control them and are just lying, and no minority group has superpowers… - Yes, but that’s all immaterial, because I wanted to talk about a load of other metaphors about the passage of time and responsibility and the relationship between humans and wildlife.
It almost feels like death of the author, like “Death of the most obvious metaphor” - If you couldn’t reach for the (tormented) parallel between being an alien species and being stateless, what stories could someone tell? If your changeling-baby was neither disabled nor adopted, what would the story be about? Etc.
I was literally just thinking about this yesterday! It’s a trend I’ve seen a LOT in recent years in lit crit, particularly when discussing fantasy.
I think it particularly comes up the moment an author includes any sort of marginalisation/oppression for their fictional/fantasy world. I’ve lost count of the times now where I’ve seen people read a book on, say, the terrible oppression of the Gwyllion, and immediately gone “Oh, so the Gwyllion are a metaphor for the real world X people, either deliberately or accidentally through the author’s inherent racism. This is therefore super problematic because the Gwyllion are also described as Y, which means the author is also saying that about X people.”
There will always be real world parallels when discussing oppression. Always. But that’s because oppression is oppression - precise details may vary, but it follows the same pathways the world over, and that will naturally be copied into fiction as well. This does not mean the author is intentionally telling the exact allegory that you’ve projected onto it. If that’s how you read everything, then yeah, everything becomes super problematic, but also, why are you reading any fiction that isn’t solely about real world historical events? It’s clearly not for you
And, you know, obviously there are works that are racist/misogynistic/etc, including deliberately so. But I really don’t like the way people have started going “I have spotted a PROBLEMATIC ALLEGORY here, I’m ever so smart” and acting like they’re the cleverest little critic that ever lived. You have to meet a work on its own terms. Lovecraft was a big ole racist, sure. Someone who has written a book about the oppression of magic users in their fantasy world, however, is rarely writing a story about how queerness lurks in family lines and must be controlled; they are way more commonly writing a story about a world with magic that they then wanted to take seriously, and while there might well be elements of queerness there, those magic users are not a 1:1 replacement.
Sometimes these lines are blurry! But we’re going way too far to one end of that spectrum
The post that got me thinking about this yesterday was someone talking about how they’d love to write a vampire story exploring vampirism as a disability (dependence on a substance to manage the condition, blindness/weakness in daytime, can’t enter buildings without accommodation, etc). But, they said, they can’t, because they don’t want to be making the point that disabled people are parasites, and vampires are generally considered parasitic.
And like. What an incredible shame. That we’ll lose that, because they’re already afraid of the “I have spotted a PROBLEMATIC ALLEGORY” crowd. That would be a great story for exploring disability themes, OR just a great new take on vampires, and either of those things would be so good to read. But there would be so many people who would jump in with “So you think disabled people are draining the life force of the ableds around them?”, never stopping to actually think “Vampires are not a 1:1 stand in for real world disability because they are fictional and do not exist.”
Anyway sorry I’ve rambled here, not sure how coherent I’m being. But yes, I was thinking about this just yesterday! Wild.
I thought I was losing my mind when the “Researching the North Pole” scene started showing different languages for the “Santas on Strike” news headline and “The Discovery” as well as the “Devoid of life” headline in the Boy’s encyclopedia.
Apparently that can happen when someone starts playing around with the backwards-forwards controls a bit too much on a portable DVD drive. My guess is if you let the DVD play from an earlier point, my guess is that it’ll show the English text as it’s supposed to, but once you start scrolling backwards or forwards to one of those moments, it’ll show either French or Spanish, and if you resume playing from there the language stays there.
Haven’t checked the whole movie, but Santa’s note at the end also reflects whichever non-English language is used.
For The Polar Express fans who have some musical training under their belt, this is a fantastic (albeit fast-paced) breakdown of the frozen-lake orchestral score. One of my favorite strategies Alan Silvestri uses here (at 1:45) is inverting the triumphant main Polar Express theme into a minor key to turn it into a darker version. Sticking it here if anyone’s interested in checking it out!
the thing is, im always interested in The Paperwork. whenever The Characters moan and groan about The Paperwork and whenever it’s left unspecified what The Paperwork entails i go aw… The Paperwork… u dont deserve this attitude, The Paperwork… im sure you’re very interesting and important… this is because i like my job at The Paperwork factory and because i like homework and it’s also because The Characters often hold positions of power attained through superhuman abilities and enforced with violence and i know that The Paperwork is there, aspirationally, to document their actions and protect people. from institutional neglect and from The Characters. when The Characters ignore The Paperwork to fuck each other on The Desk i think less of them for it. i do.
i made this post offhandedly, but resentment/dismissal of The Paperwork is a trope from procedural fiction and commercial sff that is really really common in fanworks bc it makes for an easy shorthand when u don’t want to research or invent the details of a job, and i do seriously want to ask everyone to get skeptical of it. it’s part of a broader narrative type of the ultra-talented Maverick, usually law enforcement or pseudo law enforcement (e.g. a monster hunter, a status-quo-enforcing time traveler, a man in black, a moral mercenary, etc.), whose ability to police the boundaries of Civilization (“normal,” defined by hegemony, Flawed But Worth Preserving!) and protect a homogenous Public (white, heteronormative, bourgeois, documented, “law-abiding,” “innocent,” helpless!!) is limited not by his energy or ability, but by forces (small-minded, foolish, persnickety, overcautious, sexless, dull, effeminate!!!) of Overhead, from whence comes… The Paperwork.
The Paperwork might be generated by administrators, journalists, lawyers, judges, civilian oversight committees, the village elders or the intergalactic legislature, depending on the story. and who benefits from us telling each other stories that belittle & villainize those professions while lionizing The Maverick? “if only The Maverick were given unlimited resources, unlimited access, unlimited privacy in his operations, and unlimited use of excessive force, he would be able to protect The Public (and find love! maybe on The Desk).” you see it, right? this is how copaganda will get in your head.
