madimpossibledreamer

I’ve written more than a few over the years, and it’s interesting how different they are, even as they’re all the same person. I wouldn’t even imagine that they’d all get along.

most of the reason I’m only writing about 1000 words per chapter for Shadowed Suspicion specifically is that it gives *some* sort of goal that I can generally complete every week. Even if it’s at 2 AM the morning before. It works for this particular series, but I generally wouldn’t do it for any other series. (Then again most of my stuff I tend to write the way that feels right, leading to wildly different variations between series. The Secret Histories only works because I’m so many chapters ahead; otherwise getting out a 4000 word chapter one week might be a problem--edit since writing: it is, and there's a reason many of the chapters lately haven't been 4000 words.)

I’ve been thinking about this again lately, partly because of the remake (and what are they going to do, call it Persona 4 Golden Xtreme? That’s a kiwami joke btw). And also because I realized that if someone’s literary reading skills are so poor, then just dunking on them isn’t too productive. So rolls up sleeves part 2. It will be a lot shorter than Part 1, mostly because I’m doing a Critical Lenses 101 with some minimal ‘this is how it relates to Persona 4’.

I will also note this has nothing to do with people who want Kanji to be straight and Naoto to be cis for the purposes of genderfuckery and nonconformity which are awesome and valid reasons—unless you’re going around and telling people that they’re not allowed to read a text differently from you. That’s not only not going to happen, because everyone’s going to come out of a text with a slightly different reading due to individual differences: socio-economic class, gender, sexuality, etc, and going to make you miserable because your game of whack-a-mole of different readings will never be done, but also, the act of telling people they’re existing wrong being bad is maybe one of the key Persona 4 themes, so don’t? I’ve run into that a couple of times, but for the most part, it’s people bemoaning the existence of gender or sexual minorities within their line of sight. Which, valid reading within one interpretive lens, but it is the blandest of the bland and not just because they think it’s the only correct interpretation, when it’s more of the sorta default?

Lenses are the particular way we’ve chosen to view the text. Sending us back in history, yeah, the main lens was cisheteronormative and also author’s intent. In several cases, this involved reading every single piece of correspondence written by an author. If they hadn’t said something definitive about the point in question, it was your duty to either ignore it or argue about how some unrelated line in an interview could be stretched to apply. With the advent of the theory Death of the Author, you could just read the text and let it stand on its own without needing to know anything about the author outside the work. (I’d also argue a lot of people also like to engage in psychoanalytic or Freudian criticism these days, because everyone’s so sure about what a text reveals about the author...and while, such as with Hashino, especially combined with outside statements patterns between works might reveal something, I feel it’s safe to say that it is vastly overapplied). Other lenses you may have heard of are Marxist, feminist, queer, and critical race theory...which I hadn’t actually realized was a literary critical lens because it hadn’t been taught while I was in school, and in which case the hyperbolics against it comes off looking even less informed, because lenses are not meant to show you the capital-T Platonian Truth. Then again, I forget that for some people critical thinking is the enemy, because it lets you evaluate for yourself rather than following exactly what you’ve been told to do.

Unless you and someone else are using the same lens for a text, arguing about how “you’re reading the text wrong” is pointless. If the other person is reading in a lens that decenters the author, then arguing about how “the author said x on twitter” is useless. (And things get convoluted even if you do care about what the author says in multi-creator works, such as a game—if the writers, the voice actors, etc all were on board with a romanceable Yosuke storyline and the director said no, who gets priority?) If you’re both arguing from within the same lens, you can then look at how a particular piece of the text is better or worse for a particular reading through that lens.

I also don’t expect a lot of the people to care, mostly because a lot of the people making the argument come off like homophobic, biphobic, and/or transphobic jerks, but the idea that gay or trans stories aren’t deep, worth a deeper look, and are just shallow surface level *aesthetic~* that can be used for any story just as set dressing especially when mainly applied to either give the relief mentioned in the last chapter that “oh, phew, I’m not trans after all” or “oh, phew, I’m not gay after all” or to set up for jokes is deeply insulting.  I don’t care if you have a different critical lens, but it is yours, and it is common, but it is not universal.  Let me have mine.

(I also am going to English Nerd here and say that maybe headcanons are extensions of our favorite critical lens of reading applied with various degrees of evidence to back them up, even when we don’t necessarily realize that ourselves, but. I’d probably need a lot more research to explain that particular theory and I’ve only seen one other academic thing even dive into headcanons and how they relate to this. Let me know if you have more; I’m actually really curious how that would get defined.  Especially if there’s something in Transformative Works and Cultures [the Ao3 published peer-reviewed academic journal] or something.)

another question for antis: why are you buying clothes at the soup store?

I also wonder if the strong ‘opt-in concrit’ stance goes alongside the heavily minority-based nature of Ao3 writerbase. Because yeah, if you’re getting a lot of unsolicited ‘you’re living wrong’ criticism in real life, you’re hardly going to want that from your escape.

Actually you know if they mentioned, like, contests, or whatever, giving away androids, that would explain the mechanics in Detroit Become Human. They won’t, because all these worldbuilding things weren’t thought about, but. And also because it’d get into some dicey slavery territory, but you know, it’s already there, and if you’re going to use superficial stuff, you might as well show how absolutely horrible the realities of slavery really were. Particularly when there are still people still going “well, slavery was a good thing, actually”, like, suuuuure bud, I don’t see yourself signing up to become a slave.

*note that it’s more like the multiplicity of humans, but that’s less catchy of a title.

So for this one, thank you to a wonderful comment by Axsan_Kat, I probably wouldn’t have figured out the reason behind this choice without you.

For the longest time, I wasn’t sure why I’d gone with multiple-personality disorder in Self-Made Hero, other than maybe the vague idea that I didn’t want to only use one version of Tony Stark. Turns out there was more going on in my subconscious that I was aware of, which kind of leads into the actual reason why I’d made the decision: Personas.

Not exactly from the hit SMT series, mind. Going back to Carl Jung, in fact. The basic premise is this: we wear different personas, or masks, depending on what we’re doing. That might seem strange, but if you think about it, it makes perfect sense: we’re different people at work, by ourselves, on the internet, with our best friend, with our family (and sometimes, with different family members), at a concert, shopping, etc. We put on our work persona just like we put on our work clothes. We should remember this more often, for example, when someone says “Oh, that person treats me like garbage” and we go “but they’ve always been nice to me”, but that’s the basic premise.

There’s a little of that in every superhero tale, and part of the enduring appeal of the genre. Who you are when you put on that mask or faceplate or transform or whatever. But a character that definitely takes that to extremes (even when he’s got a Public ID) and is thus fascinating to write is Tony Stark.

To the average person, it might seem like Tony is the same no matter where he goes; sarcastic, irreverent, never taking things seriously, but there are layers.

Some of it is probably neurodivergence (probably ADHD, maybe autism), trauma (Howard Stark, either as a terrible parent in most of it and as a good parent but presumed dead in Armored Adventures), and PTSD (getting the arc reactor in whatever permutation that happens). But there’s also a whole lot more. Let’s turn to the movies specifically. I might have a lot of problems with The Avengers (and most of Whedon’s work, looking back, honestly), but I do think the ‘tinker tailor soldier spy’ genius millionaire playboy philanthropist line is great for this. He’s intelligent and he knows it, it’s probably the thing he’s most confident in. Millionaire is something he’s probably coming to terms with, especially once finding where a lot of that blood money had come from, and he’s also starting to get the sense that, you know, maybe the eccentricities that come with being a millionaire aren’t actually all charming. Playboy, also mixed, because it’s started to feel a little more hollow and unfulfilling. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, mind, but it’s hurting Pepper, maybe, and he doesn’t want to do that, but at the same time sometimes he needs to just stop thinking and it’s that or alcohol, and sometimes he just needs to feel like someone cares even though that’s maybe a line. Philanthropy may just be throwing money at problems to make amends, but it’s something he knows how to do and it’s something, and he’s not so great at apologizing (maybe, partly, because with his self-worth he doesn’t actually think he deserves to be forgiven).

When he’s with the bots, for example, he might be sarcastic but he’s more gentle and patient than he’d be with humans. On a lot of occasions, he’s leaning on Pepper, and it’s almost impossible to tell what’s him not feeling up to dealing with things, trusting her, trying to figure out how she works (because he adores her but I don’t think he ever reaches a point where he’d say “I can predict how she’ll react”), and stress testing, trying to find her boundaries and breaking points. Rhodey’s more predictable but they definitely don’t see eye to eye on everything—Rhodey is a soldier first, and doesn’t react well to Tony starting to come to terms with his past, legacy, and family legacy as a (legitimized) arms dealer. He probably is grateful to Howard for the inheritance of his intelligence, but resents him for how he was treated. In some ways, it was probably more comforting to think it was black and white, that Howard never loved him, because that’s easier to deal with. Obie he saw as more of a father figure than his own dad, because Obie made the time to actually treat him that way, even if it was mostly selfishness on Stane’s part. His meeting with Cap was largely one of resentment, too, because Howard cared more about Steve Rogers than his own son, but there was probably some fear, too, because you tell yourself that they’re not right about you, when your family tells you you’re not good enough, but part of you will always whisper and wonder maybe they’re right. (Another thing that could have been great in the Avengers, except it never got followed up on or resolved so there’s no learning, no character growth.) It’s probably clear that his confidence waxes and wanes, but he hides it more or less well (in some cases especially Iron Man 3 it’s cracking) because some of his role models (Aunt Peggy and Edwin Jarvis) were British, so stiff upper lip and keep calm and carry on are the adult coping mechanisms he’s learned to emulate. Actually opening up and showing he’s vulnerable takes work and effort and honestly there are some days it’s probably impossible for his brain. Iron Man 3 did such a good job with compassionately and realistically portraying not only his PTSD but him learning how to deal with it and maybe, just a little, starting to heal.

So, yeah, it follows naturally that actually kind of making that literal and have Xander have to deal with all that in a YAHF (Yet Another Halloween Fanfic) is a writing decision that isn’t quite as out of the blue as it seems. Not that I recognized that for years, just “this is happening and I am writing it, okay”, but I got there in the end.

Along those lines, I had a similar depressing thought. It occurred to me why the Hispanic/black/other minority population is lower than it should be. I heard on a True Crime show that serial killers who get away with it for a while usually target “people who wouldn’t be missed”, i.e. those the media and police won’t make as much of a fuss about. “Smart” demons and vampires probably target them, too.