Well, ladies and gentlemen, at this point we are at the end of the latest round of essay content. From here, I plan to return to fiction starting next week!
Due to a general state of business over Thanksgiving I wound up taking last weekend off unannounced, for which I apologize. Long term readers of this blog are aware that I typically take a week off between essays and the beginning of a new project. Since I took Thanksgiving off I’m going to call that my vacation week, which means we’ll be kicking off my next fiction project on December 13th.
Before diving into that, a few housekeeping notes. After finishing The Drownway I took a slightly longer than normal break for reasons that I did not explain. I feel like I owe you, my oldest audience, an explanation for that. You see, I was cheating on you.
In late August I learned that the website Honeyfeed was running a novel writing contest that ended on September 29th. It carried a generous cash prize and the potential to earn a publishing contract, things which I confess interested me a great deal. So I spent a large chunk of that month chained to my writing desk, writing and publishing a manuscript for that contest. Alas, I did not make it through the initial round of judging. However, the entirety of The 7th Sphere is available there for your reading pleasure! If you wish to check it out I think you’ll find it enjoyable. You can find it here:
My next project is a return to the Columbian West! It’s been a year or so since I set down any of the adventures of Roy Harper and I’ve missed him a lot.
Roy was conceived of as a set of eyes to see the world of Columbia through so I always intended to keep him on the move. One of my intentions was to never show him in the same place twice. However he is a man with a home and obligations as well, and I knew that I’d have to look at what those are like sooner or later. Towards that end I created Oakheart Manor and put it on the shelf, an idea for a tale somewhere down the line. It’s one of the earliest storylines I conceived of when thinking about the character.
Alongside that idea was the difficulty of addressing Roy’s history. I don’t want the stories to get bogged down in naval gazing but Columbia is a setting with a lot of history and I wanted to work as much of it in as I could. Anyone who’s read Roy’s previous adventures can see that. Yet I didn’t want to the novellas to move all over in the time line but instead flow one into the next. (Short stories are another matter.)
All of these ideas and needs came together to weave together into A Precious Cornerstone. It’s a story I struggled with for a while but I’m finally ready to present to you. I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I enjoyed working it out. If you need to get caught up to speed on Roy’s adventures and you want to support what I do here, be sure to check out my book Have Spell, Will Travel, which collects all of Roy’s adventures up to this point in one convenient package. You can snag a copy on Amazon here:
Andor is one of the few Disney Star Wars projects that has received any kind of widespread praise in the last year or two. However, when the conclusion of the series came out earlier this year it wound up in the center of a great deal of controversy. A lot of time was spent discussing one five minute sequence in the third episode of the second season. The questions at issue were very interesting to me. The discussion itself struck me as… superficial.
Because the issue at hand is a very bothersome one, let me be upfront with the topic. In the third episode of Andor season 2 Bix, the heroine of the series, is nearly raped by an Imperial officer. This was a significant event in her character arc for the season but it was also very divisive.
Basically all of the controversy revolved around whether rape was a topic suited to Star Wars. Many felt such a nasty thematic element was against the spirit of the story. While there is some merit to that discussion, as a way to understand audience expectations and how to fulfill or subvert them, I feel the story itself was badly served. The reason for that is simple. The audience had a reaction to the story as presented and the Internet’s band of media critics had a reaction to that reaction but the elements of the story itself went unanalyzed.
You see, most of the discussion of that episode of Andor was about whether the audience had the right reaction. Critics didn’t question why audiences had the reaction they did. It is that second question that is most important, in my humble opinion. Attempting to point an audience towards a “correct” reaction is generally a vain waste of time whereas finding the source of the reaction may allow you to work around it.
So, today, we’ll attempt to address Andor season 2, episode 3.
But first, one thing I heard many critics say to dismiss the audience reaction to rape as a plot element was that rape was very tame compared to the war, slavery and planetary extinction of the original Star Wars trilogy. Saying a single attempt at sexual assault was somehow against the spirit of the series supposedly makes no sense in this paradigm. I feel this argument overlooks one critical element.
War, slavery and genocide are all outside the experience of most modern Westerners. On the other hand, rape is sadly still a somewhat common element of modern life. As a result, touching on this particular subject is much more likely to provoke a powerful emotional response than the other topics. Thus it must be handled with a greater level of care than these other topics if you want the audience to hear your message.
And there was a very specific message buried in this part of Andor’s narrative.
Many people have noted that the planet Ghorman, where most of the season’s action takes place is heavily patterned on occupied France during the Second World War. The local language is spoken like French, although the vocabulary is different. The clothing is also vaguely French, after a fashion.
Bix’s attempted assault doesn’t take place on Ghorman but thematically it’s connected to the ideas of occupation and intimidation the Ghorman storyline embodies. So before we directly address Bix we need to discuss another story. It takes place in a place that is like France, but isn’t French, where the people express themselves through song and a terrible empire is starting to make its presence felt.
Captain Louie Renoult is the chief of police in Casablanca, Morocco in 1941. As a French official he answers to the city of Vichy, where a collaborationist government has reached an agreement with Adolph Hitler’s Germany. While Europe is far from Casablanca its troubles are not.
Louie is expected to play host to Major Strausser, a German officer who has come seeking the resistance leader Victor Lazlo. Louie doesn’t like the Major but he’s a charming man and manages to fake good cheer when around the German for quite some time. Matters come to a head when Louie takes Strausser to Rick’s Cafe Americano.
While in Rick’s some of Strausser’s men commandeer the piano and begin singing a rowdy drinking song. The patrons aren’t happy about it but they’re not sure what the right thing to do in response is. Victor Lazlo, who is also visiting Rick’s that night, gets up in front of the house band and demands they play “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem. He leads the bar in a rousing rendition of the tune, shouting down the boisterous Germans.
This angers Strausser. He doesn’t have ultimate authority over Casablanca so he turns to Louie and demands the bar be closed. Renault doesn’t want to do it. However we’ve already seen the power Strausser holds over him. Power rooted in the Nazi war machine and the fate of an occupied people, power enough to hold sway over even a police captain in his own city. So Louie relents and he shuts down the bar.
This is a pivotal moment in the movie’s story and a classic scene in movie history but that’s not what makes it significant for us today. Instead, what makes it important is how it illuminates events earlier in the film.
Before Rick’s is shut down the eponymous proprietor is approached by a Bulgarian refugee named Annina. She is fleeing Europe with her husband and they need an exit visa to leave town. All such papers need to be approved by the chief of police and Louie is happy to sign them. For a fee.
The problem is Annina and her husband don’t have the money to pay off Louie. Her husband is trying to win the money at the roulette table but if he cannot win it Louie has offered to make a separate deal with Annina. He will sign the papers in exchange for sex. She isn’t sure he will uphold the deal and Louie sends her to Rick, expecting that Rick will vouch for him.
Instead, Rick has his roulette dealer rig the game so her husband wins.
This little story has a happy ending but the dialog during it makes it clear that this is not the first time Louie has made this deal with a desperate woman, nor will it be the last. Now, to modern eyes and ears that may sound harmless. Prostitution isn’t a positive thing but in today’s permissive culture most will probably think exchanging sex for a life saving opportunity is acceptable. Louie ultimately sides with the good guys and doesn’t do that kind of thing anymore so it’s fine, right?
Well, no. See, this is where the scene with Strausser comes into play, casting its long shadow over the rest of the movie. The threat of violence he represents underlies everything the refugees of Casablanca do. If Louie cannot resist the might of the Wehrmacht how can they? Even if we accept that Louie’s deal with Annina is nothing more than an exchange of sex for services; if the exchange is made under threat it is still deeply immoral. Everything Annina does is under threat from the Nazis. She would not make this deal if she did not fear for her life.
Or, in other words, Louie is a serial rapist.
By leveraging the power of the Nazi regime he can extract endless sexual favors from refugees while flattering himself a philanthropist. It is ugly, scummy and incredibly evil. What makes it so incredibly unsettling is how easy it is to give him a pass for it. Louie is somewhat handsome, very charismatic and generally good natured. He does, in fact, uphold his end of the bargain and sign the papers so his victims can escape the city like they wish. In time he will turn against the Nazis and join Rick in the French Resistance.
But that does not undo his crimes.
With that established, let’s turn back to Annina for a moment, as she is the closest analog to Bix in this example. Consider her dialog with Rick. There are two lines she says of particular note.
“If someone loved you very much, so that your happiness was the only thing that she wanted in the whole world, but she did a bad thing to make certain of it, could you forgive her?”
“He never knew, and the girl kept this bad thing locked in her heart?”
Note the way Annina phrases these questions. She doesn’t say what she intends to do, just that she is considering a bad thing. She’s anxious to know if she could be forgiven. She intends to keep the entire matter locked away forever, telling no one. Keep this in mind as a reference.
Let’s get back to the main focus of this post. Bix is the central character of this scene and it’s important to say a few things about her before we talk about the specific events of the scene in question. First of all, Bix is a member of a burgeoning resistance movement. In her role as such she was previously captured and tortured by the Imperial Security Bureau. This has kept her out of action in the second season as she recovers her physical and emotional ability to take part in resistance activities.
The problem with that is that Bix is currently a refugee. She’s not on her home planet and doesn’t have any of the paperwork she needs to escape official scrutiny. She’s not alone in that predicament, of course. Lots of people throughout the galaxy are refugees. However, her life as a resistance fighter makes this issue particularly dangerous for her.
The issue comes to a head when an Imperial officer named Lt. Krole discovers Bix. Krole learns that Bix has no papers and offers to make the issue go away in exchange for sex. She turns him down. Krole forces the issue and Bix hits him with a power tool, fracturing his skull and eventually leading to his death.
However, Krole lives long enough to die in a public place, in front of another Imperial officer. Bix looks this officer in the face and tells him, “He tried to rape me.”
This is the line that provoked such a strong reaction from audiences, prompted the writing of multiple audiences and led to several heated debates among culture critics on livestreams. All of which missed the point save one, which we’ll get to. The question that everyone has overlooked is simple and straightforward.
In this situation, would Bix have said these five words?
No. No she would not have.
I will build my case from the particulars outwards. First of all, Bix is talking to an Imperial officer, a category person who she has learned, through experience, temperament and ideology not to trust. Second, Bix is at her mental and emotional nadir of the entire season. She is still traumatized after being tortured by the ISB. It would be shocking if she revealed this secret to a close friend or lover without significant pressure from said trustworthy person.
Revealing it to an enemy, a stranger, on the street? Not a chance.
One of the greatest difficulties of combating sexual crimes is how reluctant victims are to discuss them. I point you back to Annina’s attitude in Casablanca. She calls it “a thing” she planned to keep “locked in her heart” when discussing pressure from Louie. Police and trauma counselors agree victims are reluctant to admit they’ve been raped. The behavior is deeply, wildly outside the norm for people who have been assaulted.
It is a possible reaction, of course. Everything happens once or twice and particularly resilient or motivated individuals might respond to that kind of trauma in a frank, open and assertive fashion. However Bix’s characterization is already deeply established by this point. She is not any of those things, at least not at this point in her life. In these scenes we are given no reason to expect Bix to act in a way that departs from the normal way – guilt, shame and silence.
Yet she does. Why?
Well, the answer is actually pretty simple. The show is working hard to show us all the excesses of authoritarian governments and one of those excesses is coercing sex from women. I previously mentioned that there was one discussion I heard that I felt tangentially touched on what I think happened in this moment. It’s this summary of the situation by YouTuber Little Platoon, which I’ve timestamped for your convenience:
Platoon points out that this is all to play up Bix’s forthcoming character arc, the hypocrisies of totalitarian rule and how this all plays into the themes Gilroy had for the show. I’ve attempted to locate the article he mentions but Gilroy did a lot of interviews around this time and I couldn’t locate a particular one that seemed to match what Platoon mentioned, so I can’t source that for you. That said, I think what Platoon says here is all true. The scene did have these goals, it was aiming to set out the evils of the situation very bluntly and obviously for the audience.
The problem is, Bix baldly stating the situation goes against her own motives and characterization up to this point as well as the way people generally react to this particular kind of trauma. It is the beginning of a change in Bix, sure, but she behaves almost as a character at the end of her arc. That kind of forthright behavior speaks to an emotional core the character just doesn’t have. Gilroy had Bix say something not because it is in keeping with her character and the situation but because he had a point to make.
That’s bad writing.
Exacerbating things is how it rubbed people the wrong way. I believe that happened for two reasons. First, recall that sexual assault is the greatest travesty most western people have encountered in their life. That makes them more emotional about it. It also makes them most familiar with it and how people react to it, which means they are far more likely to recognize when something is off in how a character reacts to it.
Second, this is the only time Gilroy speaks directly through his characters. Most of the time, he lets them speak for themselves, orchestrating things with a much subtler hand to get the outcomes he wants. The contrast in this moment is very striking.
Audiences aren’t stupid but they rarely fully realize why they’ve reacted the way they have when they are taking in a story. It often falls to critics to do the extra legwork and figure that out. For some reason, in the case of Andor, it didn’t happen anywhere that I’ve seen, so I’ve done my best to perform that analysis here. Of course, I doubt this analysis will spread far. The discourse over Andor is largely done with, at this point.
So I want to offer a little bit of extra value to this discussion, something authors should keep in mind when they approach these very fraught topics.
You have to get them right. The more people have experienced them, the greater that necessity. It is the goal of the storyteller to provoke an emotional response from their audience, to do so without getting caught and, ideally, to put the audience in the same emotional state as their characters. The more emotional baggage the audience can bring to your story the greater the danger they will wind up in an emotional place you did not anticipate.
You must know. Must know. Where you are leading your audience. The rockier the emotions you navigate the greater the chance you will lose them. This doesn’t mean you avoid them. Just that you must navigate these story beats with the greatest care of all. They are certainly not the point to preach your own message.
This is why Casablanca succeeded where Andor tripped up. That film does more than present you with the ugliness of a sexual predator using a totalitarian regime as cover for his crimes. If you’re not very careful, it will trick you into helping Louie excuse them. Where Andor loudly proclaims the things that make people hate the regime, Casablanca whispers that you would collaborate.
Even if Gilroy’s message in episode three could have been presented more skillfully I’m not sure it would be better than Casablanca’s. But that’s not for me to decide. I encourage you to study both examples of this theme and draw your own conclusions.
Art is a fascinating and difficult subject. It’s difficult to tell when art is being done well and, even when perfected, it still offers little more than an experience. It’s very powerful but, at the same time, almost entirely intangible. This may be why, for better or worse, art that explores the intricacies of making art is one of the most enduring genres of art in existence.
Akane-banashi is one of the best examples of this genre I’ve read. It’s a rich exploration of the difficulties that come with performing arts in the modern day, along with a meditation the egos and rivalries that make most artistic circles go around. At the same time, it’s very down to earth. The most recent story arc, the Zuiun Cup competition, was a fascinating blending of the all the story’s usual thematic elements with an added twist to it.
This particular story is about the problem of the artist themselves.
Before we talk too much about that, some context.
Akane Ozaki follows in her father’s footsteps, studying the Japanese comedy format known as rakugo. Her goal is to show up the influential figures in the entertainment industry who effectively blacklisted her dad, ruining his career. The name at the top of her list is Issho Arakawa.
After years of studying under Shiguma Arakawa, her father’s mentor, Akane becomes a professional rakugoka (the term of art for a rakugo performer) and begins to make waves under the stage name Akane Arakawa. In time she learns about the history of the Arakawa school and her mentor’s rivalry with Issho. Finally, Shiguma performs an incomplete tale that has been passed down by the Arakawa for some fifty years, hoping she can finish it one day.
Shortly thereafter, Shiguma is diagnosed with throat cancer. The tumor is operable but the surgery leaves Shiguma’s voice too weak to continue performing. Shiguma’s four students are shared out among the four remaining Arakawa masters to continue their education. This is how Akane winds up apprenticed to Issho.
It is he who gives Akane the assignment to enter the Zuiun Cup and tells her to win without making the audience laugh. Let me remind you that rakugo is a form of comedy. As always, Issho is a magnificently obtuse antagonist.
The Zuiun Cup is a particularly noteworthy moment in the story as it hails back to Akane’s first encounter with Issho during the Karaku Cup. This was the moment that defined the conflict between Akane and Issho. Along the way she competed against two other up and coming rakugoka and faced the reality of trying to make a name with traditional artforms in the modern day. Clearly, our story is coming full circle in order to make a new point about Akane’s journey.
The full story of the Zuiun Cup is too long to examine fully here. What is important is that Akane comes into the competition with something to prove. (So do her two rivals, who have also made a return from the Karaku Cup, but they’re not important to this analysis.) Akane’s constant state of low key irritation with her mentor, along with Issho’s cryptic demands, has left her with a chip on her shoulder.
Not that this chip is a new thing but it is bigger these days.
The problem Akane faces is that her life has been lived making other people laugh. In many ways the tragedy that befell her father pushed her deeper into this way of living, creating a way for her to cope with the sudden transformation of her home life. Humor is a core part of her identity. She loves making people laugh and doing that is also her primary coping mechanism when she, herself, is upset.
Her challenge in the Zuiun Cup stems from the fact that rakugo is a highly traditional art form where each story is an entity in and of itself. These stories are guarded quite jealously. Before a story is entrusted to a new teller, the rakugoka must first prove that they understand the story. In order to do that they must put the story first.
What Issho challenges Akane to do is put herself aside, her own desire for laughter, her own grudges, and put the story first. However he does not say this directly. As always, he speaks in riddles. He does this in the hope that as his student struggles with his lesson she will develop a deeper appreciation for the artform than if he just handed her answers. Akane succeeds in this challenge but it’s a difficult thing for her to achieve.
After all, Issho isn’t asking her to master a skill but instead asking her to master herself.
The importance of this to art cannot be understated. In most forms of art you are asking people to believe something, moving an idea from within your mind into their mind via a medium of transmission that ranges from spoken word to sculpted stone. They must invest in the idea as much as you have, to the point where the fact that it isn’t real doesn’t matter. In storytelling we call this “the willing suspension of disbelief.”
The catch to this is that belief must rest on something.
The more the creator inserts themselves into the art the more the creator is asking you to rest your belief on them, rather than on the idea they are conveying. That can work, in certain contexts. The more the art is about you the more sense it makes for your art to rely on how believable you are. (Of course, you must actually be trustworthy, as well, but that is neither here nor there.)
The problem arises as art becomes less and less about you and more and more about something else. All art contains a part of its creator, of course, but that’s not all art is. Truth, excellence and beauty are all important factors in art as well. More than that, art is often about people other than you.
When you bring your own agendas and priorities to stories about other people your own ego obscures what you are asking the audience to believe. At that moment you are undoing your own art. This creates a tension which can never be fully resolved and thus requires the constant vigilance of the artist.
The solution is to do exactly what Issho makes Akane do. Go back to basics and strip your art down to its essence. Pull as much of yourself out of your art as you can and see what you have, then only begin to let yourself back into the art once you are confident in its integrity. That way you can be sure there is room for the audience to invest as well.
The prize for this is not great. It is only the integrity of your work. However, the artist who doesn’t have that has nothing at all.
Long considered one of the first landmark villains of One Piece, Arlong casts a long shadow across the history of Oda’s pirate epic. In spite of appearing in only two significant story arcs and last appearing in the pages of Jump over a decade ago, he remains a formidable figure in Luffy’s rogue’s gallery. There are many reasons for that.
The first is the most obvious, which is his striking physical appearance. Oda isn’t known for his standard character designs but Arlong is extreme, even for him. The serrated nose and wild, glaring eyes makes the Fishman captain uniquely memorable, so much so that when his sister appears, a decade after Arlong’s last appearance, their shared pupils made it immediately obvious to most that the two characters were related.
Arlong’s physical stature is significant in no small part because of how closely tied it is to his other memorable characteristic – his bigotry.
The pure contempt Arlong holds for human beings comes from an obvious source. As a fishman, he is bigger, stronger and tougher than a human and he can breathe underwater to boot. He routinely demonstrates all those qualities to keep the people who pay him tribute in line. When they don’t pay up he feels no qualms in destroying their livelihoods or ending their lives in order to serve as an example to others. Why should a fishman care for the lives of humans, after all?
Arlong’s insistence on categorizing people by species eventually sets him at odds with the protagonist of One Piece, Monkey D. Luffy. Luffy is unable to grasp why human or fishman are such important categories to Arlong. However, as is often the case, Luffy would have been perfectly happy to ignore Arlong’s ugly prejudice and brutal regime if not for one little detail.
Luffy was trying to recruit a member of Arlong’s crew. The only human member, in point of fact.
Yes, as odd as it sounds the crew known as the Fishman Pirates had a bonafide human girl serving as their chief cartographer and navigator. Arlong brought on the orange haired girl when she was only eight. Nami offered to serve Arlong after the fishman murdered her mother, on the condition that Arlong would allow her to buy back her village for the measly price of 100,000,000 beri, the world’s standard currency. (For those wondering, that’s the rough equivalent of $1,000,000 USD circa the year 2000.)
Luffy meets Nami when she’s in the process of robbing another pirate crew and eventually follows her all the way back to Coco Village and the eventual showdown with Arlong. For the entirety of the storyline, we’re primed to hate Arlong. This is a carefully balanced thing on Oda’s part, because the story goes to great pains to make it clear not all fishmen are like Arlong. In particular, Oda introduces us to the character of Hachi, Arlong’s first mate.
Hachi is a very likeable character. He’s cheerful, helpful and never demonstrates any of the overt prejudice that so clearly defines his captain. He just seems to like people until they give him a reason not to. In this respect, he’s not that different from Luffy. However, Hachi is agreeable to Arlong’s bigotry, so he’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination.
Yet Hachi is important. Of all the characters introduced in the Arlong Park he is the only one Luffy will meet again.
For the next seven years, more or less, of One Piece’s publishing history very little happens to change our mind about fishmen. We only meet one who isn’t a villain. We meet several more we don’t really care for. Then the Straw Hats arrive at Sabaody Archipelago, an anchorage on the doorstep of Fishmen Island, and they run into Hachi again.
They find him in a cage. He has been captured by human traffickers, who are using him as bait to capture prisoners for a slave auction. This, we learn, has been the fate of fishmen for centuries.
Sabaody Archipelago tells us a lot about the state of the world but for our purposes the most important thing it tells us is the fate of the fishmen. Arlong’s hatred for humanity was ugly and evil. However it sprung up from a fertile soil of other evils such as slavery, ostracisation and dehumanization. That context opens us up to a new understanding of the fishmen we’ve seen before. It prompts Nami to forgive Hachi for his role in Arlong’s pirates. And, ultimately, when we arrive on Fishman Island, it prepares us to hear the story of Fisher Tiger.
The great explorer Fisher Tiger is one of the heroes of Fishman Island and he stands in sharp contrast to the other major figure his story is intertwined with, Queen Otohime. However, in order to understand the crime of Fisher Tiger she is unimportant. So I plan to set her half of the storyline aside and those curious about it can read it at their leisure. They are quite separate stories, for the most part.
What is important to understand about Fisher Tiger is that he lived and died in the past. Luffy and the Straw Hats hear his tale from Tiger’s first mate, a fishman named Jinbei. Among the fishmen, Fisher Tiger is a legend. He united the forces of Arlong and the Fishman Pirates with many powerful warriors from the Ryugu Kingdom, Jinbei first among them, to create the Sun Pirates. Then he dedicated his life to raiding ships and freeing slaves.
To Fisher Tiger, the species of slave did not matter. Slavery was an equal opportunity evil and both humans and fishmen suffered from it. And Tiger was a man particularly suited to recognizing the evil of it, as Tiger himself had suffered the humiliation of being a slave. He was wise enough to see that freeing every slave would create a larger push to abolish the institution than just freeing a few. So he fought against all slavers, although the fishmen may have benefited most from it.
At the same time, Tiger forbid his pirates from senseless killing. While fighting carries the risk of death Tiger knew that any killing beyond that would undo all the work he was doing towards abolishing the system and set fishmen and humans at odds for decades to come.
The combination of these two strategies made Fisher Tiger very effective.
Unfortunately, it only made him effective in creating pressure to abolish slavery, it did not do much to improve the reputation of fishmen in the wider world. This would eventually lead to his downfall. When not hunting slavers and freeing slaves the Sun Pirates would help liberated slaves find their way home. When they freed an eight year old human girl named Koala they naturally set out to do so.
However, Koala’s home village was fairly far inland. The whole crew couldn’t go with her, so Fisher Tiger took her there himself. Once Koala was reunited with her family Tiger headed back towards the sea but along the way he was ambushed by Marines.
The people of Koala’s village had notified the World Government there was a fishman in their town and they showed up to arrest Tiger. When he refused to surrender they opened fire. Tiger managed to escape this ambush but he was badly wounded. The Sun Pirates were also attacked and lost their ship but managed to capture the Marine ship instead.
Most of the Sun Pirates were fine but Fisher Tiger needed a blood transfusion to survive. The Marine ship had plenty of blood in stock in the sickbay but when it was offered to Tiger he screamed, “No! I would rather die than have their blood inside me!”
In the end, Fisher Tiger lost his long battle against the hatred he had harbored and died saying, “It’s foolish to die and leave only hatred as a legacy. I know that! But my reason is overpowered by the demon in my heart… I cannot love humans. Ever.”
At that moment this was Arlong the Saw.
At that moment, he was me.
After escaping Marine custody due to the influence of his crewmate Jinbei, Arlong would set sail for the eastern oceans with a bone in his teeth. He would take his vengeance on the humanity of those seas, saving his cruelest treatment for an eight year old girl he found begging for the freedom of her village.
Thus the circle closes and we see the full weight of the evils that had piled up. Arlong was just one final stone in the ever growing pillar of prejudice, hatred and abuse that had been building and building over generations. Yet he might not have been as vile if he hadn’t watched his captain try to break that cycle and fail. If the cycle hadn’t looked so inevitable perhaps even Arlong could have been someone different.
The crime of Fisher Tiger wasn’t that he tried to change the world and end slavery. It was that he tried to change himself and couldn’t.
Around these parts I have a simple concept. That the goal of art is to create an emotional response in the audience. If you are telling a story, try to make the audience share that emotion with a character in the narrative. I call this emotional synchronization.
This storyline, what I call The Last Crime of Fisher Tiger, is buried in four larger story arcs told across a dozen years of publishing history. It is one of the greatest examples of the power of emotional synchronization I have encountered. Through the use of it Oda showed his audience a person they despised.
And let me tell you, we despised Arlong in those days.
Then, over time, Oda gradually maneuvered the audience until we experienced an overwhelming wave of sympathy for Arlong when we saw him heartbroken by Fisher Tiger’s death. This moment was quickly tied back to the Arlong we saw torture Nami, creating a powerful dissonance in the audience. Never have I seen a moral message so seamlessly integrated into a story with such clarity.
Anyone can say, “You, too, would be a monster.”
To take the hand of the audience and slowly and patiently walk them through the path that would make them a monster demands incredible skill. Many writers today wish to tell morality tales. Yet so many of those who attempt it fail miserably. Fisher Tiger is a powerful model they would do well to learn from.
But that isn’t all they should learn from.
After the death of Fisher Tiger a strange custom takes root in the Ryugu Kingdom. The fishmen there refuse to share their blood with any human who passes through their ports. The kingdom isn’t strong enough to directly defy the World Government and this becomes their way of protesting.
In modern times the Ryugu Kingdom is not a peaceful place. Luffy takes up their cause and fights on their behalf, doing much to warm the hearts of Fishman Island towards humans. But things don’t end cleanly. Luffy suffers quite a bit in the battle and at the end he’s in danger of bleeding out. His own crew doesn’t match his blood type. Yet none of the fishmen he’s just saved will help him.
So it falls to Jinbei, Fisher Tiger’s first mate, to break the custom and offer his own blood to Luffy. When Luffy recovers he finds himself linked to Jinbei in more ways than one. So he smiles and says, “Jinbei, join my crew.”
With that, for the first time in centuries, the wound is closed and the crimes of Fisher Tiger are redeemed by his successor. The dawn of the world grows a step closer, and we raise our sails with hope once more.
Behold the flag of the Straw Hat Pirates. Once the ensign of a single-masted caravel from the tamest ocean on Planet Bluestar, this flag now flies over the heads of nearly five thousand merry freebooters plying the Grand Line. The most powerful enforcers of the World Government avoid confronting those who fly it. In a world of fictional pirates, those who fly this flag are among the most known and most feared.
On Planet Earth this flag has marched on the capitals of Nepal and Madagascar. The young men and women marching under it have toppled those governments and declared themselves free. The flag has been spotted around Paris, but the French have not surrendered just yet.
As someone who has followed the adventures of the Straw Hats for some twenty years, I have mixed feelings about this.
On the one hand, it is wildly entertaining for me to know that Eiichiro Oda’s mythology has achieved a spot on the world stage. On the other hand, I feel like an important part of the story I know and love is being lost.
Or perhaps it just hasn’t been seen. One of the most difficult elements of One Piece as a story is how stretched out it is and how buried many of its thematic elements are. Summarizing nearly thirty years of storytelling in one blog article isn’t possible. Summarizing the state of world politics on top of that demands even greater amounts of time and, further, isn’t something I’m well qualified to do.
So I am going to do something that I normally wouldn’t. I am going to point you to an excellent summary of the Nepalese and Madagascar revolutions as covered by Simon Whistler on his Warfronts vertical. Any attempt to recap these upheavals on my own would just be duplicating the work he and his team have already done.
Hopefully that satisfies your curiosity on the current event issues. The initial summary of the Nepal revolution also gives a reasonable summary of why the Gen Z revolutionaries might adopt the Straw Hat flag as their symbol. There are problems with this summary, of course. Simon pronounces Luffy’s name the way it’s spelled in English, for example, whereas the correct pronunciation is “loo-fee.”
Also, the revolutionary reading of One Piece is completely incorrect.
To put all my cards on the table, I am not the first man in the Straw Hat Grand Fleet to find fault with this reading of One Piece. Vice Admiral Liam of Grand Line Review has already done a decent job rebutting it. If you want to hear his thoughts on the issue I will include them here as well.
However, unlike Simon Whistler’s work I will be duplicating a part of Liam’s breakdown here, except from my own perspective. So let’s get started, shall we?
Just in case you didn’t watch the Warfronts videos, a brief argument for why One Piece is relevant to revolutionary movements around the globe goes like this: Planet Bluestar is under the control of a World Government. That government is incredibly tyrannical towards the people who cross it and is guilty of horrific crimes, including endorsing slavery, censorship of history and genocides. Everywhere you look, the people of Bluestar are in chains.
However, when Monkey D. Luffy arrives in a new location he punches the local tyrants in the face and liberates the people. It is both cathartic and inspiring. The people transform the freed nation into a new, better place and Luffy sails onward, bringing the dawn of the world to the furthest reaches of the planet.
Thus, in conclusion, Monkey D. Luffy is a revolutionary figure whose example we should follow.
Let me begin my rebuttal to this premise by showing you this image.
These men are the Five Elder Planets, the supreme authoritative council of the World Government. They are one of the most significant antagonistic forces Luffy faces. They also share an important element with the Marine Admirals, another group of powerful World Government antagonists – they all seem to be based on real world people. However, where the Admirals are all based on Japanese actors the Elder Planets are a little more varied.
Let’s look at them from right to left, as Japanese is meant to be read.
The gentleman on the right is Saint Jaygarcia Saturn and his appearance is likely based on Giuseppe Garibaldi, a revolutionary Italian politician who contributed to the unification of the nation in the mid-Eighteenth Century.
Standing next to him is Saint Marcus Mars, whose appearance is probably based on Itagaki Taisuke, a member of the Meiji Revolution that overthrew the Japanese Shogunate and restored the Emperor to power.
Seated in the center in mustachioed splendor is Saint Topman Warcury, whose bald pate suggests his appearance is based on Mikhail Gorbachev, who held power during the revolutions that broke up the Soviet Union.
Beside him is Saint Ethanbaron V. Nuspar, who bears a strong resemblance to Mahatma Ghandi, the man who led the movement for Indian independence from Britain.
Finally, on the left is Saint Shepherd Ju Peter. It’s not clear if his appearance is based on any specific person but his name contains several hints that suggest he is based on Simon Peter, the disciple of Jesus who led the evangelical push that transformed the Roman Empire and, eventually, all of Europe through the establishment of Christianity.
For those keeping score at home, of the five supreme leaders of the World Government, all five are based on real world revolutionaries. There is a message in that, I think.
Very little is known about the founding of the World Government. It came at the end of a period of lost history known as the Void Century, a time period we, the audience, know very little about. All we know for sure is this: during the Void Century the world was ruled by a single, powerful nation. Other civilizations existed, of course, but they were all in thrall to this great power. That nation was eventually overthrown by a coalition of twenty other nations that banded together in a military alliance that would eventually become the World Government. In short, the World Government came into existence by revolting. It is, in and of itself, a commentary on revolutions.
It is not a flattering one.
However the World Government is not the only revolutionary thing to sail the seas of Bluestar. The Elder Planets are opposed by the world’s greatest criminal, Monkey D. Dragon, leader of the Revolutionary Army that works to destroy the World Government’s influence. Dragon has seen the evils of the world first hand and he despises them. His life’s work is to sweep the World Government and its founding families, the Tenryubito, from the face of Bluestar.
Names are important in storytelling but they are especially important in mythic storytelling. One Piece is a mythic tale and Dragon’s name is a signpost left for us from the earliest chapters of its narrative. Of course, it’s very easy to see that Monkey D. Dragon and Monkey D. Luffy must be related. In the Japanese name structure surnames come first so we see that these two come from the same family and thus it is no surprise that Dragon is Luffy’s father.
However, that’s not the only significance to Dragon’s name. It also draws another parallel between the Revolutionary Army and the World Government. The Army was founded by Dragon, the Revolutionary. The Government was founded by the Tenryubito, a term which translates to Celestial Dragons. Trust me, this is not superficial or a chance alignment. This is almost certainly a deliberate choice made to hint at the similar path the Tenryubito and Dragon are on (albeit at very different places along said path.)
Again, One Piece is not drawing flattering comparisons with its use of revolutionaries.
However, the analytical mind will no doubt object to this, recalling that the protagonist of the story is not Dragon but rather his son, Luffy. Surely the son will redeem the failures of his father. Clearly Luffy, who strives to be the most free person in the world, is the model revolutionaries should strive for. Right?
Well.
Let’s talk a little bit about Monkey D. Luffy.
Twice, when given the opportunity to overthrow the monarchs of Alabasta and Fishman Island, Luffy chooses to fight on behalf of those kings against the rebelling citizens instead.
In the kingdom of Dressrossa Luffy chooses to overthrow one monarch to restore the previous king to the throne.
On Drum Island Luffy approves of the election of Dalton as the new king of the nation.
One of Luffy’s first friends is Koby, a young boy who wants to join the Marines and defend the people from pirates. Luffy helps Koby to the nearest Marine base, parts ways on good terms and takes immense satisfaction whenever he hears that Koby’s career is going well, in spite of the fact that the Marines work for the World Government.
When his friend Camie is kidnapped by human traffickers Luffy searches the wares of several slave traders in an attempt to rescue her. He doesn’t lift a finger to help the other slaves he sees.
Luffy is a terrible revolutionary.
To be perfectly clear, Monkey D. Luffy has never once set out to overthrow the governing body or political structure of a nation. It’s not even certain he understands what governments or politics are. Monkey D. Luffy is out to have an adventure, to see new things and go new places, to eventually become King of the Pirates and thus, the most free man in the world.
The pirates, spies, Marines and governments that Luffy destroys are incidental to this process.
The protagonist of One Piece is a fascinating character. In many ways he is a chaos agent, pursuing his own ends without any regard for the social structures that stand in his way. He has no problem helping people he likes but insists he is not a hero. On the other hand, he also has no issue with fighting to the death when he runs into people who he hates.
Luffy is wild, violent, noisy and gluttonous. At the same time he is kind, friendly, warm and encouraging. It can be very difficult to square that circle in the abstract and if you are just looking at Luffy as some kind of a role model you are going to have a very hard time of it. If you are trying to understand him, let me suggest you begin by not viewing him as a role model. That said, analyzing Luffy is yet another thing outside the scope of this post.
What is important to the question of revolutions is how Luffy sets himself free.
You see, Luffy is always free. This is the great secret that underlies One Piece, that makes its protagonist so appealing and interesting to the audience and allows Luffy’s rougher edges to coexist with his softer side. Luffy is free for two reasons.
The first reason is that he takes everything as he finds it. Even if he hates a person, if they do something he likes he will praise them for it. Even if he likes a person, if they do something that makes him angry he will fight them over it. When Mr. 2 Bon Clay offered to work with the Straw Hats, in spite of the fact that Luffy had just destroyed Bon’s organization and sent his boss to jail, Luffy accepted immediately.
Luffy is free from expectations, he’s free from reputations and he is free of the past. With this freedom he chooses to progress towards a future that is promising for himself and those around him, up to the point where those around him actively get in his way. Because of this, Luffy has no need for revolutions. He’s already thrown off all the chains revolutionaries rage against and he didn’t have to scheme, assassinate or steal anything to do it.
The second reason Luffy is free is his own understanding of himself. When Luffy is confronted by Arlong, an amphibious bigot convinced of the superiority of his own species, Arlong asks what Luffy can do that makes him so special. Luffy responds by listing all the things he cannot do. He cannot cook, cannot fight with a sword, cannot lie and cannot navigate. His understanding of these limits drives him to seek out friends who will help him, whose strengths offset his weaknesses, who will make him more than he could be alone.
And, at the same time, Luffy uses the fullness of his own gifts to raise up those friends as far as he can. Because of this, Luffy has no need for revolutions. He has already organized a society that is as beneficial for himself and his friends as it is possible to be.
If Luffy were to spend all his time obsessing over systems and politics it would mean giving up the freedom he treasures. It would mean disregarding the friends who make him strong. It would mean seeing only the ugliness of the world, shackling himself far from the adventures and unexplored places he longs to see. Most of all, it would mean locking himself into the cycle of revolutions his father and the World Government represent, rather than chasing after something new.
There are many reasons to be skeptical of revolutionaries. Their focus on big picture systems frequently blinds them to the vicious damage they inflict on the people they claim to free. The flag of the Straw Hats represents the opposite of that. It’s the standard of a man who values his people and their dreams to the point he will not act until he figures out whether he can ensure everyone gets what they are aiming for.
Ultimately, Luffy is not a real person. He has powers beyond mortal men and he finds himself in situations where his own ideals and physical prowess are what are needed to solve problems. His approach to the ills of his world will rarely translate to ours. But his values often will. That’s why I hope more people will study those, and see what the story really says about them, rather than just mindlessly flying a flag without really understanding what it stands for.
Two weeks ago we discussed the many threads of manifesting culture that run through the film Captain Marvel. This is a part of a longer examination on the influence of New Thought on modern culture, a premise we began looking at in my discussion of the Gospel According to Southern California, and a study I’m hoping to continue today. These posts have performed very well so I hope that means you’re interested in talking about it as well.
The short of it is simple. Affirmation culture believes saying a thing makes it so. A quick scan of manifesting TicToks reveals most of the people who promote this lifestyle believe this power extends to the point of controlling other people. If you want people to respond to you in a certain way all you have to do is speak it into existence.
Sound unsettling? It really is, which may be why there are so many lists out there explaining how you can tell when it is happening. (Like this one.)
However, the fact that a thing cannot happen doesn’t prevent people from trying to make it happen, which is a distinction that is important to keep in mind. The conversation around Captain Marvel on the Internet in the days leading up to and following its release showed many attempts to manifest things. (And not entirely from the creators of the film. More on that later.) These threads of commentary demonstrate how SoCal’s religion of choice doesn’t just warp the art they produce. It also distorts attempts to discuss that art.
I am not the first person to notice this tendency. I found a review published at the time the movie was released that commented on the attempt to manifest trends around this movie at length. I found the author’s discussion of the marketing around Captain Marvel very fair and insightful. The attempt to turn just watching a movie into political activism was a very common theme of the time period, though it’s lost some favor in the last few years.
Marketers were not the only ones to partake in this kind of vision casting. This article on Vox dot com recounts a discussion between two women where the following is said by Constance Grady:
“Captain Marvel has to make enough money to prove that movies starring women can do well, so that studio executives will make more of them. It has to be good enough to make up for decades of movies that relentlessly focused on the narratives of straight white men. It has to give women a superhero in whom they can see themselves and their lives.”
All of this is absurd. I’ve watched the movie and discussed the film last week and I can confidently say nothing that Grady insists the movie seeks to do is a part of the movie itself. She is just trying to manifest these things through the movie. She wants people to be thinking about these things and thus she speaks them into existence with her positive attitude and wide ranging public platform. Or, at least, that is the goal.
Note that reality is not a part of these musings. For example, the film Wonder Woman had already released at this point, making huge box office numbers and proving that movies starring women can do well (not that there was any doubt about that even before Wonder Woman.) In point of fact, Captain Marvel was almost certainly made because of Wonder Woman’s success. So Grady’s first desire was already fulfilled – a movie starring a woman did well and prompted executives to make more of them.
That said, I don’t know if either movie really gave women a superhero in whom they could see themselves and their lives.
Grady’s other concerns seem equally as detached from the history of film. However that doesn’t actually undermine an attempt to manifest something, because reality is just another thing that was manifested. You can always remake history with enough work, right?
The problem there is that in order to manifest something you need positive emotions like joy and love. You can’t have negative emotions. This resulted in a huge secondary concern for the media apparatus around Captain Marvel, namely the so-called misogynistic trolls. Early on these were set up as the enemy scheming to undo all the work Captain Marvel was putting into making women bolder and more empowered. Of course Vox got into the action, opening its article about the film’s box office take by slamming the sexists. However they were not the only ones on the hunt for the Patriarchy and its anti-empowerment schemes. Even PBS credited most of the dislike for the movie on trolls.
Reviewers just giving their thoughts on the film felt the need to go out and make it clear their problems with the film didn’t make them raving women haters, as you can see in this review from YouTuber Cosmonaut Variety Hour:
The whole situation stinks of an attempt to manifest the opposition to your goal and sideline it as ontologically evil.
Now, to be as charitable as possible, not everything commenters pointed at as evidence of unwarranted hostility to the movie is purely manifesting behavior. For example, many people did post reviews of the movie on Rotten Tomatoes before the movie was available to the public. At least some of those reviews have to have been made by people who hadn’t seen the movie. Captain Marvel’s star, Brie Larson, had actively antagonized a large chunk of her audience and they weren’t amused by it but weaponizing the review scores isn’t the best way to voice that displeasure.
That said, it is the privilege of the audience to show their displeasure. It cannot simply be manifested away. In point of fact, by attempting to affirm their own product and manifest their critics into irrelevance they may have actually empowered them rather than diminished them. Certainly many of the people who pointed out the shortcomings of Captain Marvel as a story have more of a career than Larson these days.
Sadly this wasn’t the only case of manifesting around the movie. Many people who took issue with Larson’s hostile behavior during press tours would later spread rumors of her bad relationship with the cast of the film Avengers: Endgame. This also strikes me as an attempt to manifest something in the lives of others. There’s not a lot of evidence to back up this assertion, although that’s not surprising given how difficult such rumors are to disprove. It could just be typical gossip mongering. Either way, I don’t think it’s a positive part of media discourse to have such things eating up so much of the space.
This is particularly true because Captain Marvel needed a lot of critical feedback. It wasn’t a good movie and it had nowhere to go after it was done yet it still received a sequel in 2023, a film called The Marvels. Unlike Captain Marvel, The Marvels flopped badly, costing the studio a lot of money and effectively ending Larson’s career, at least in the movies. She has not announced a film role since.
These failures were also blamed on trolls.
Positivity had to be maintained so the film would manifest as intended. Negativity had to be shoved onto critics, or else their own vision will manifest instead. It’s a horrible approach to media analysis.
Worse, all this casting of blame is that it doesn’t ring very true. As noted in the Transmedia review linked at the beginning of this discussion, just going and sitting in a movie doesn’t feel like doing something for a cause. Just saying things doesn’t really change ourselves or others. Manifesting is not a viable way to create art or live our lives.
If we want good art, and I do, then it is incumbent upon us to do things, not just say them. Yet in art, particularly literary arts, that line becomes blurred very easily, as many of the things we do create words. It is quite gratifying to imagine that our skill with words creates reality. Thus, the lines between words and work is blurry and ignoring the line entirely stokes our ego.
This is why I think the dogmas of SoCal have caught on so easily among the creative classes of the West. Yet they have proven far more poisonous to us than those who espouse them anticipated. We cannot continue to live by this faith and enjoy the bounties of great art.
Art is a collaboration between creator and audience. You cannot just manifest the art and audience you want, you must exist in cooperation with both these things if you hope to create something enduring. The religion of Southern California tempts you dominate them, instead. Turning away from this doctrine doesn’t guarantee your art will improve but as long as you stick with it your skills will only rot away. Hollywood proves it. Learn from their mistakes.
Last week we talked about the role I feel the creeping influence of New Thought – more commonly known as “manifesting” or “affirmations” – had in the collapse of American storytelling. I originally intended to include a short discussion of what an affirmation film looks like but things got a bit out of hand. Last week’s post was nearly double my usual target length for an essay on writing without that section. It was already late and adding another 1,200 to 1,500 words to it wasn’t ideal. So this week you get that part of things.
Today we’re going to look at Captain Marvel (2019), a film from the MCU that was released near the peak of that franchise’s popularity. Also, a film I had not watched until just a few weeks ago. The things I do for this blog…
The story of Captain Marvel revolves around Carol Danvers (portrayed by Brie Larson), an American fighter pilot who is kidnapped and brainwashed by an alien race called the Kree so that she will use her abilities in service to their interstellar empire.
In the beginning of the tale Carol was test flying a faster-than-light craft when it crashes, irradiating her in supernatural energy from the engine when it explodes. Instead of dying instantly, she gained superpowers. The energies that suffused Carol came from the Tesseract, one of the MCU’s six Infinity Stones, objects that govern the universe.
As a fallout of this, Carol suffers from amnesia and is discovered by the Kree. They brainwash her to believe she is a Kree soldier and her different appearance and superpowers are a result of an accident. She wears a regulator that helps her use her powers safely and is told to control her emotions. She’s put under the command of a superior named Yon-Rogg, who answers directly to the Kree supercomputer called the Supreme Intelligence.
Eventually Carol returns to Earth, the lies that have been told to her are revealed and Carol chooses to control her power no longer. She awakens to her true potential, beats Yon-Rogg and throws the Kree off of Earth.
As a story this narrative is not really interesting. Carol goes through the each stage of the narrative without playing much of an active role. She goes from place to place, listening to other people tell herself about herself. The events of the story in the present don’t have a lot of thematic ties to her past, revolving largely around Carol hunting a lost Kree on Earth while dodging shapeshifters called Skrulls. These events catalyze her learning she’s been brainwashed but don’t do much else.
However, as a vehicle for New Thought concepts the story is very interesting.
The first element in this is the kind of power Carol has, power drawn from the Tesseract and, from there, from an Infinity Stone. Carol is a literal conduit for a cosmological force. This is about as direct an analogy for the manifestation belief that you are a shard of the divine as you can get without putting the concept directly into the story.
The story itself, however, doesn’t establish this right away. It begins by showing us the “illusions” that Carol is surrounded by, the things that keep her from expressing her full potential right away. The movie opens on her talking with Yon-Rogg. In the course of this discussion he tells her not to get angry, avoid fear and most of all, don’t express humor. These are all framed as things that interfere with a soldier’s duties. Finally, Rogg points to her heart and tells her to stop thinking with that. Instead he points to her head and tells her to think with that, instead.
In affirmation calculus, clamping down on emotions is a way to cut you off from the divine, as negative emotions are signs you’re far from the source of your power and positive emotions help you draw out divinity. This is the first “lie” that New Thought insists people are taught. Modern society makes people too intellectual and too emotionless.
This leads directly to the movie’s second illusion, which comes about when Carol meets the Supreme Intelligence. Most of this exposition has more to do with the film’s plot than its themes, but it ends with an illuminating line. The Intelligence warns Carol, “What was given can be taken away.”
Manifesting is all about using the power you already have to get what you want using the divinity that is yours already. Since all things are divine by the nature of the universe, your divinity cannot be lost. However, the fear of losing something is presented as one of the most negative emotions a person can experience and one of the things most likely to keep you from realizing your own divinity.
The Supreme Intelligence directly threatening Carol in this way is an empty threat in this calculus, to be sure. But just making the threat can keep her under control.
Both of these themes are occasionally reinforced throughout the movie, especially in a flashback sequence where we walk through a jumble of Carol’s early memories. In this sequence she’s repeatedly told she can’t, or she’s too emotional. As Carol begins to remember her life on Earth she asks Rogg about it, who tells her she’s getting emotional and she should remember her training.
Finally, when Carol knows the truth and confronts the Supreme Intelligence about what happened to her the computer tells her, “Remember… without us…you’re weak. You’re flawed. Helpless. We saved you. Without us… you’re only human.”
Carol replies, “I’ve been fighting with one arm tied behind my back. But what happens… …when I’m finally set free?”
During this sequence Carol removes the regulator that the Kree gave her and manifests her true abilities, allowing her to defeat all the Kree in and around the planet without significant effort. This sequence is obviously the moment when Carol realizes she is divine and embraces it. With the power of the cosmos on her side she easily tramples over the lies that tried to hold her back. This is the emotional and narrative climax of the film.
As climaxes go, it’s not a very inspiring one. There’s not a whole lot of build up to Carol’s decision to stop controlling herself and cutting loose. She just goes around talking to people until she decides to change sides. Her self control is never shown as an impediment, keeping her from connecting to the people around her. In fact, most people who meet Carol like her immediately. She manages to make her way through life just fine before finding “freedom” so it feels as if she just has an epiphany and chooses to do something else.
That’s a feasible path for a person to go down in real life but it isn’t the most satisfying story to hear. Carol’s personal journey is surrounded by events but those events don’t feel very impactful either. She meets Nick Fury and Phil Coulson, agents of the SHIELD organization that runs day to day things in the background of the MCU. She meets some Skrulls, one named Talos being the most important. Most importantly, she meets Maria Rambou, her former wingman in the Air Force.
These characters are the third interesting New Thought thread in the movie. Fury, Coulson and Mari all serve as reflections of Carol as she goes through her journey. It’s harder to see with the first two, as they are already preestablished characters who are written somewhat in line with their previous appearances. Discrepancies can be papered over by pointing out both men are younger in Carol’s story than they are in other portions of the MCU. Maria is a new character and her presence is more informative.
We never see Maria Rambou on her own, pursuing her own ends. When she speaks it is almost always to Carol, almost always about Carol. She’s not an independent character, but rather a mouthpiece to speak affirmations into Carol until she’s ready to sustain them on her own. Consider one of Maria’s longest lines of dialog in the film:
“You are Carol Danvers. You are the woman on that black box risking her life to do the right thing. My best friend… who supported me as a mother, and a pilot when no one else did. You’re smart and funny, and a huge pain in the ass. And you are the most powerful person I knew, way before you could shoot fire from your fist. You hear me?”
Even when Maria talks about her own life in that line it is entirely about Carol’s impact on it. Carol is the only person who matters. It’s eerie, but very indicative of how manifestors look at other people.
Skrulls are another interesting element in the film. They can shapeshift, making them a simple metaphor for how affirmations shape our lives. They want to be someone else and then instantly manifest it, something that is noteworthy in affirmation culture. The fact that Skrulls are recast from definite villains in the comics to sympathetic figures in this film plays into the positive ideas the writers have for this idea. The fact that it might bother other people is never explored.
In fact the film doesn’t engage with many of the questions the movie sets forth. It doesn’t ask the hard questions about when emotions are more important than self control or vice versa. The movie isn’t interested in the effects Carol’s long disappearance might have on her friends and family. It doesn’t ask about the nature of the Kree-Skrull conflict. The idea that shapeshifters who lie about their appearance on a daily basis might be naturally more dangerous than people who don’t is hinted at but never expanded on. Carol simply strolls through all these things, decides how she wants to see them and proceeds as if her assumptions are true. These assumptions are never challenged.
In short, the movie simply manifests around its protagonist.
When Captain Marvel was first released I didn’t see much point in watching it. While I’ve enjoyed many offerings from the MCU I’ve never sought to partake right away and I’ve found the franchise in general to be a mixed bag. It has some high highs but there are very low lows in there as well and Marvel’s hit rate was fairly average to begin with and has declined drastically over the last five years. Captain Marvel was definitely near the beginning of that declining trend and reviews of the film didn’t inspire me to check it out. Now that I finally have watched it I don’t imagine I’ll go back to it again.
I don’t think Captain Marvel was the first New Thought film. There are probably many others, some that I suspect are much older than this one. Yet going back and looking through it was very informative for me. I hope you’ve found this discussion of the film’s religious threads interesting but we’re not quite done with it yet.
You see, affirmation culture isn’t just about manifesting the story. It’s about manifesting positivity around that story. That’s very, very important. So, if you’ll spare me just a bit more of your patience, in the next week or two we’ll take a look at how critics reacted to the movie, both positively and negatively. More importantly, we’ll take a look at how the critics reacted to each other, and try to draw some conclusions from that.
Since this will require a bit more work than just watching a movie and pulling up the film’s script I’m not sure when I’ll have this final installment into the New Thought Saga prepared but it will be before we return to fiction again. In the meantime, thanks for reading!
I’ve spent a lot of time over the last ten years or so trying to figure out how the art of storytelling has entered into such a prolonged decline. Any art form goes through swings and roundabouts, of course. Mediums ebb and flow. Trends are just that, trendy, and the public rarely hews to them for a long time. However, beginning somewhere around 2012, stories in all forms began to slip in quality in pronounced, drastic ways.
It began with novels and comics, where most storytelling trends begin. These are low risk mediums outside the mainstream, where experimentation is quick and cheap. However, over time this bizarre collapse in quality began to spread. What happened? Was it some kind of mass psychosis? A conspiracy of cultural revolutionaries? Perhaps the Aztecs were right after all and 2012 was just the end of the world as we knew it.
I have not been alone in my quest to understand the change in culture. Many, many other people have tried to analyze the trends and crack the code and, over the last five years or so, a few conclusions have been reached.
First, and most importantly, it’s not just a question of a decline in talent, although a certain amount of that has certainly taken place. However, some of the people producing terrible stories have produced excellent work in the past. Now they do not. Furthermore, the ebb and flow of talent is a part of any artform but this kind of collapse in artistic merit far outstrips the norm. So there has to be more to it than a question of talent.
Most pundits suggest artists have fallen into the grasp of a political ideology, a form of Marxism that reduces stories to a myopic obsession over the oppressed and the oppressor. This singular focus squeezes out many of the typical elements of good story. Character details, choices, consequences and more are all obscured behind the grandiose narrative of terrible, oppressive society and the virtuous but downtrodden masses.
There’s merit to this notion as well, because any kind of orthodoxy like this is going to put blinders on creatives that strips them of their ability to think artistically about their story. However, many great artists have fallen into this orthodoxy and still told great stories. This could even be a kind of Peter principle. Only so many good storytellers are out there and the bad ones are more vulnerable to this kind of groupthink, so we will see more stories toeing the party line doing terribly. While I think this is a factor I don’t think it’s the whole story.
About a year ago I wrote about the Empire of Southern California, which I believe is another part of the puzzle. If you want the full details you can read about them in the linked post but the highlights are simple. Most of our storytellers come from a handful of isolated, insular cultural centers like SoCal or university campuses. That limits their experiences to a very narrow sliver of real life. As a consequence they’re unequipped to tell stories that appeal to the majority of people. I still think that is the case. But when I wrote that blog post I said I still didn’t think I had all the pieces of the puzzle.
You may suspect, based on this long introduction and the title of this post, that I believe I have the missing piece.
If you did suspect this, you are correct.
In 1937 a man named Napoleon Hill published a book titled Think and Grow Rich, a book that has had a profound impact on American culture in the roughly ninety years since it was published. That may come as a surprise to you, since most people I’ve spoken to have never knowingly heard of Hill or his work. The reality is, they have heard his work. They just don’t know it.
The truth is Napoleon Hill’s schools of thought have infiltrated a breathtaking swath of modern American thought. Everything from self help to multilevel marketing groups draw on his ideas. Many self styled “Christian” preachers actually draw on his ideas as gospel and many of the most powerful and wealthy denizens of Silicon Valley, Hollywood and DC swear by some variety of Hill’s theosophy.
The high priestess of Hill’s religion is known to practically every American and she wields incredible power among the nation’s largest cultural power brokers. If you haven’t guessed who she is I’ll give you a hint. She owns her own TV network, which she uses to promote Hill’s gospel on a regular basis.
Her name is Oprah Winfrey. She calls herself a Christian but what she preaches is the power to manifest. So what does that mean and why is it bad for storytelling? Let’s break it down.
The technical term for Hill’s theosophy is New Thought. It contains ideas which he updated for the modern age but they are not really very new. Since New Thought is a clunky term I am generally going to abbreviate it to “manifesting” or “affirmation” as these are the core ideas of the movement. The basic idea of manifesting is that you can think about a thing and reality will warp around you until it becomes real.
This is possible because you are divine.
Let me stress that I am not exaggerating nor am I making a joke, manifesting is a theological assertion grounded in the belief that all things are fragments of the divine and the divine is what creates the world we see around us. Since we are supposedly divine we have within us the power that creates the world. All we have to do is become aware of that power then apply it by manifesting the world we want to live in. In short, we can think and grow rich.
The simplest way to do this is with words. Affirmations are generally cited as the easiest way to begin exercising the power of manifestation. Repeating phrases like “I am healthy” or “I am loved” over and over supposedly sharpens one’s powers until these simple truths manifest. To do this we must be in touch with the divine.
To get in touch with the divine we have to vibrate at higher frequencies, which bring us closer to our true natures. We vibrate at higher frequencies when we experience joy and love, so we focus on those emotions, we affirm ourselves and the world itself bends to our whims. It might sound like there’s more to it than that but there’s really not.
This is because affirmations and manifesting are fraudulent ideas.
However, many, many people have bought into this fraud and believe it whole heartedly. Oprah isn’t the only one. Again, it has wormed its way into a huge number of places. I’m not going to break all of that down in this blog post. If you want an introduction to the history of the New Thought movement I recommend Melissa Doughtery’s book Happy Lies, which I read as my starting point for understanding the concepts.
What’s important for today’s topic is the effects that an affirmation mindset has on creative work. In my experience, they are entirely toxic.
The first, greatest example of that is the demand for positivity. Now in general the concepts of joy and love do not have to equate to positivity but in creative circles that is an association that has become very pernicious. When a creator is discussing a story their thoughts tend to hinge on how positive the discussion is.
Creators of failed projects will often blame their failure on the widespread discussion of the weaknesses of their project. Talk around many of the recent flops in the realm of scifi and superhero franchises are good case studies. The failure of Star Wars projects like The Acolyte or DC films like The Flash are often blamed on Internet critics spreading negativity. Conversely, people who speak highly of projects are credited with positivity. They are trying to help the project manifest, so they are viewed kindly.
All this means that the creators of failed projects cannot hear any kind of needed, critical feedback. This, more than anything, is the greatest weakness of the affirmation mindset regarding creativity. A creator who cannot stand critical feedback is already a failure. Let me reiterate, if you are trying to manifest a successful story you will fail. Just sitting and muttering to yourself is not the way to make a story come about, you must work relentlessly and be open to feedback, revision and hard, hard work.
Things only get worse from there.
If anyone who achieves a state of joy and love is uniquely in touch with their divine nature then anyone who contradicts them is a blasphemer. Clearly, they aren’t in touch with the divine. After all, if we all are shards of the divine spark when we are in touch with the divine we should all agree. In this way affirmation culture is given a pass for viewing anyone who contradicts it as evil. Far from god. Worthy of any and all condemnations that fall upon them.
Many people have noted the hostility of creators towards audiences over the last decade or so and with good reason. However, the source of this hostility is often blamed on mundane factors. An entitled background. Cultural siloing. A lack of appreciation for the economic realities of the situation. However, since learning about the details of manifesting, my view on the situation has changed radically and I now believe it’s much simpler. Most creatives view their critics as ontologically evil because by taking issue with mainstream creators in any way they are resisting attempts to manifest the divine.
Thus the rift between creator and audience widens.
Yet at a fundamental level, even if the impulse to fight with critics and vilify feedback were resisted I don’t think the gap between affirmation culture and American culture could ever close fully. (I stress American culture here mostly because it is American culture that has gone through a nosedive in the last decade.) It is true that in American culture there is a spirit of exceptionalism, that we are special. However, the notion that we have all we need within us already, that the spark of the divine will change reality if we only attend to it, runs contrary to our culture at large.
Americans value hard work, hustle and adapting to circumstance. American men, in particular, are always on the lookout for the next thing coming up in the world around them. The idea that we magically have everything we need within us already is highly counterintuitive to us. That has created an ever growing rift between the culture at large and our storytellers. Feedback on the technical shortcomings of story craft will not close that gap.
The idea that words can change reality is very intoxicating to the creative mindset. Making your way through the world by artistic craftsmanship is incredibly difficult and those who achieve it might really feel like they’ve cracked some cosmological secret. As someone still looking for a way to break out from the pack, I sympathize.
Yet it’s not true.
The people who have become drunk on manifestation as the secret to success, wealth and virtue have strayed far from reality and that makes them dangerous in more ways than one. In the arts, it puts them at odds with their audience and unable to improve. Thus, their work rots on the vine. As with many issues caused by misguided religious movements, correcting the errors will take time, patience and grace from men and God. The first step is realizing the problem is there. The next will depend on the individual.
Every person tries to usurp reality in their own small ways. Find where you’ve done it and get back in touch with the way things really are. Then make the best work you can while confronting your shortcomings and, most importantly, don’t fall for the false promises of affirmation culture. It will take a long, long time but eventually things will change.
Due to a very busy schedule this week I am unable to bring you a post of a quality that is to my satisfaction. I apologize for this. Two major, looming deadlines synchronized this week and I’ve been very busy. More on this at some point in the future. I hope to be back with you next week,
“Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.”
Like many lessons we learn in our youth, this one has the ring of truth but frequently fails on contact with reality. In point of fact, this is not a truism. It is an attempt at manifestation, a practice we will talk more about soon but that we’ll pass over for the moment. The idea of the sticks and stones adage is simple. We should be injured by physical things and not by nonphysical things thus when ephemeral things like words seem to cause pain we should take comfort in the fact that words cannot cause actual pain.
The problem with this way of thinking is that it crunches words down into nothing, ignoring that words are tools. You can use them to build or destroy. When words are used to destroy a person then the saying becomes meaningless pabulum. We have all seen this. Words used to reduce a spouse or child to a nervous wreck, fearing the constant disapproval of their own family. Words used to destroy a reputation, taking away a person’s livelihood. Words used to accuse, dragging the innocent to jail or an early grave.
“Words will never hurt me” is one of the most empty, worthless lessons I learned as a child. There is a reason so few people in the generations after mine repeat the saying. I was made to repeat the saying not because it was true but because those who taught it to me hoped that my saying it would make it true about me. The irony there is palpable.
If words do not have the power to hurt a person they do not have the power to shape a person at all, as causing pain is the simplest task there is.
So let us dispense with this childish fantasy. The lesson we learned about words in the past were conceited and contradictory. Let me propose a new standard for understanding words.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through Him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.”
In this understand, words are the foundation. They set the structure and shape of our lives, rooting us in the world and giving us an understanding of what is and is not. Words all rest on a foundation of truth, a single Word that we find at the beginning of all things. Like sticks and stones, words can be used to build upon the foundation, creating monuments, homes and communities.
The problem with words, as with sticks and stones, is when they are used irresponsibly. When you don’t build on the foundation the structures you make quickly collapse. When you casually drop debris on the ground it doesn’t vanish, just stacks up in ever more unstable piles. A diligent person can clear up the rubble and stack the pebbles into new, useful structures but it takes time. Far, far more time than it takes to scatter new loads of gravel along the ground.
All this detritus is unstable. As it grows deeper and deeper it becomes unsafe to cross. And sometimes it moves on its own. Titanic piles of self serving lies, reckless hyperbole and malicious slander can sit stable for years or decades, until a single word, said a bit too loud, shakes it all free and the avalanche sweeps aside everything in its wake.
It will crush institutions.
It will demolish careers.
It will end lives.
I know it. You know it. We have seen this happen, not just in the broad sweep of history but in this, the year of our Lord 2025.
When these avalanches come along they are as indiscriminate as any other disaster. Those who have build studiously and responsibly on the foundation of truth are as vulnerable to this as those who haven’t. When they come, if you aren’t prepared the carnage is shocking.
You realize the gap between stones and words is not so wide as you thought and you begin to wonder how to fix things. You begin to think of ways to deal with the problem. Certainly, you think, an avalanche so large requires an equally large solution. We must seize institutions! We must change laws! We must win elections!
This is the natural response. We see this happen, not just in the broad sweep of history but in this, the year of our Lord 2025.
Yet none of this is true. It’s just more rubble, scattered recklessly over the foundation of truth, laying down a foundation for the next disaster and nothing more. The problem is not the avalanche. It’s the pebbles.
There are many people building many things on our cultural edifice. Very few seek to build them on the foundation of truth and, so long as that remains the case, these disasters will continue to sweep over us. Yet the truth is a mountain and it cannot be moved by the wild movements of a few pebbles. If we seek to build on that foundation we must clear away the lies from it.
To do that, we must first confront the lies we’ve been told about the nature of words. In my generation it was sticks and stones. Now, it’s something much more sinister. The lie of today is thoughts are things. But that is a topic for next week.
For now, clear away the rubble. Find the foundation. Build on the Word. He will always be there.
Nate Chen Publications 