birthday post!
I turned 28 yesterday!
Bitch! That’s crazy!
Part of me wants to write something profound about officially being a decade into Adulthood™️, but the bigger part of me that drew The Hanged Man in my morning tarot really just wants to honor that and chill out as a gift to myself. The past few weeks have been a sprint to get my shop up and running in between my other tasks and obligations, then I spent my actual birthday eating Smashburgers and cake while drawing my little commemorative picture and screaming at Severance. Let me hang up the proverbial “Gone Fishing” sign. I might end up writing something more profound at the end of Aquarius season, but for right now, I have Samantha Shannon’s dragon book yuri waiting for me!
Thank you, as always, to everyone who I’ve been lucky enough to call friends and family. Thank you for your patience, time, and inspiration! You’ve brought so much happiness to my life and I hope I can provide a fraction of that in return! Let’s all continue watering our gardens and enjoying the fruits.
"Parable of the Sower" comparisons, the stupid era of American politics, "Nosferatu" + "Real Life" double feature, Last Days of Tiktok
Fires in LA aren't the start of anything. They're the latest consequence of a century of decisions.
(originally published Jan 11, 2025 on Patreon)
You know, I'm going to start considering people who bring up Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower in response to current events as Hunger Games fans that saw other adults get bullied for comparing everything to it, and who also saw The Handmaid's Tale fans get bullied for glazing a book that stole from Parable of the Sower. Please don't misunderstand me, I love Octavia Butler, probably more than you do. She's my guiding light and North Star. She is also quite observant and attentive to history. Proclaiming that the "Make America Great Again" slogan the president in the second book uses is an example of prescience is not giving mother the credit she deserves! There's many cases like this to be chalking it up to some special foresight that she has that we all must learn from. We are all capable of seeing what she saw when we have a clear-eyed view of current events and where they can go.
The story starts in 2024 with fires in California, and as I type this in 2025, fires have burned through the Palisades and Malibu, still advancing thanks to powerful Santa Ana winds. Octavia Butler predicted America's brand of climate catastrophe because the trajectory was legible by 1993, when Parable of the Sower was first published. In the year leading up to its October release, Clinton was inaugurated after H.W. Bush wrapped up the Gulf War, the World Trade Center had been bombed, the Branch Davidians stood off with the police for almost 2 months before their burning compound killed all 76 of them, an east coast blizzard killed over 300 people, the Unabomber terrorized the country, an Amtrak train derailed in Alabama and killed 47 people, the Church of Scientology gained tax-exempt status, Bill Clinton sent warships to Haiti, and wildfires begin in California, destroying over 700 homes.
Fires in LA aren't the start of anything. They're the latest consequence of a century of decisions.
In terms of politics, well, Elon Musk is now at the kiddy table with Minecraft streamers while the party that used his money to buy total federal power is setting up to return to the 3/5ths rule. Open slavery soon to follow. Speaking of the LA fires, it is my right as a 21st century American to indulge in a conspiracy theory, and mine is that the upcoming land grab will ensure the American film industry won't recover to what it once was, marking another massive slip towards modern American isolationism (but now extra fascist this time). Maybe Newsom will add a Film New Deal to his 2028 platform if the GOP doesn't go full Turner Diaries and place blue states under military occupation? Lots of interesting possibilities for the decade! Nothing more to add on that front. Everything is quite stupid.
I had a good time seeing Nosferatu and reading Real Life by Brandon Taylor this past week. Nosferatu was the Gothic bliss I hoped it would be, so I'm not surprised that people online absolutely don't know how to handle it. Did Ellen accidentally call a monster to haunt her? Yes. Did that monster traumatize her and terrorize everyone she loved? Yeah we all watched it happen. Was the final scene a genuine embrace? Absolutely! The urge to make Ellen a perfect victim when she repeatedly looked into the camera and told the viewer the horrors she dreamt and experienced made her happy... is truly giving cope. She found comfort in her trauma because no one listened to her when she described it. She named her shame and kept returning to it because it brought her the ecstasy confiding in her loved ones was supposed to bring! If anything Eggers should've made it sexier. We only got one Orlok dick shot and a couple scenes of penetration, like it's really not the vampire goonerfest some reviews led me to believe. But my goodness, what a gorgeously shot, deeply immersive, and wonderfully acted film. Shit so good it makes you consider reevaluating Lily Rose Depp's performance in The Idol and ignoring your R*bert P*ttinson boycott to finally watch The Lighthouse.
Real Life gagged me in a different way, specifically as a Black person who grew up in predominantly white spaces. It's a unique form of insanity. I just did not understand how people I knew since we were kids could parrot the racism my parents used as teachable moments. Middle school during the origins of the BLM movement must have been a chrysalis that devolved them. So I ended up relating in a very sensitive way to Wallace, the main character, through the reality distortions that tokenism creates. The fact I enjoyed it so much is crazy because. despite following Brandon Taylor on Twitter for years, its campus novel nature repelled me at first. Despite being a bit of a scholar in my free time, I do not find fictional academia that interesting. My nostalgia around college revolves around how I was away from home for the first time and got to be a person separate from my parents — I wasn't really into the actual work or stress of it. Real Life soothed my worries by including classroom scenes for emotional context, not Peaked-In-School indulgence. We read about Wallace slicing nematodes apart because we're learning about how European-American delusions grate against his detailed myopia. He accepts dull, repetitive work he's good at to lighten the workload of lab's superstar senior, then gets berated for it, to show that his best intentions can't overcome the locked box of another's life. He tries to correct the technique of his Gifted™️ first year lab partner and receives hostility from her in kind because Gifted Kids™️ are the result of other inflated egos seeking to make a cult of snobbishness. He meets his friends at orientation and optimistically toasts the rest of their lives together because we just read a novel about all the ways they needle and cling to each other. That's what I'm talking about!! Make every single detail serve the theme! Turn the lake and the color yellow into characters, then combine the two during Wallace and Miller's greatest moment of trust in one another, bitch! I love that shit! If any mention of credit requirements got in between that I swear I would've bit somebody's head off.
On top of that, the more I sit with it the more I appreciate how Taylor shows the way Wallace, despite being genuinely persecuted by his surroundings, contains plenty of hurtful blind spots himself. A lifetime of homophobia and racism is traumatic. Trauma makes you selfish. There was a moment at the end where he questions the struggles of the only Asian woman in his biology postgrad, which is insane from everybody else aware of the stereotype, but why would Wallace clock that in the moment? He's drowning in a mille-feuille of desirability politics and social structures. He's not immune to similar genres of ignorance. The messiness of existing with and loving the place and people who easily hurt you, where everybody steps on toes and leaves fractures, where a sense of obligation drives you to hold onto a dream that makes you worse and where you get mad when someone points out the bubble you've made — if every campus novel was like that, I'd be happy.
I'm a bit sad that the Tiktok ban is likely to go through. I hope the potential backlash reverses it, but I don't like the implications of that either. Many things are worse and stupider than we can imagine. I'm sad for the small businesses and unlikely stars that the app brought to prominence and I hope our paths cross again down the line. Since it's not the Internet's first rodeo with losing a generation-defining platform, I have confidence people will bounce back elsewhere. I just wonder about what will happen between then and now. I've been thinking of Alternatives For Myself, but truthfully, I'm at the point where I think leaving social media is something everybody needs to do quickly because they're just disinformation machines at this point. The factors have changed and we need to be very intentional with where we put our information. Personal websites seem to be a steadily gathering wave, so if we must be online, I think it'll be great to get our own operations up, running, and established before ZuckerMuskThiel McFascism mandates all of us to post twice per day on the AI Panopticon under the threat of the Boston Dynamics machine gun dog posted at our front doors. But as someone gathering marketing knowledge for my own purposes, I understand that the more cross-platform you are, the better your reach and promotion is. I'll have to reconcile my highfalutin positions with good business, I fear. I'm considering something like: for timely updates, you can add me to your subscription ecosystem or visit my website; for everyone else, wait it out for a couple of weeks. We'll see.
procrastination post
(i’m writing this long after the sun went down, at 8pm and 11 pm and 3am. i’ve always been a night owl. i’m embracing it now, but i definitely could have started working earlier. that’s the thing, though — anticipation is always worse than the act.)
about red rooms and such
(originally published Jan 21, 2024 on Substack)
i’ve got some books on aesthetics on hold at the library. i’ve been trying to write a post about -cores and internet microtrends and i’m doing that thing where i’m writing around a hole because i don’t have as much to say as i thought. i typed the first draft of this at 1am after getting high and staring at the other document for 45 minutes, picking at my face.
i’ve showered and my face is plump with aquaphor. i have on the top half of a flannel pajama set with mean little gingerbreads printed on it, part of a matching christmas pajama set with my mom, buttoned underneath a carpet-textured coat with some of the pile dyed to form roses. it’s cold in my apartment. i should go to bed.
my planner sits in front of me, my day job and my unpaid post job where i post things online hoping people see both broken down into neat little bullets. i need to call the bank tomorrow. gotta treat my passion like a job if i want to get anywhere since shouting for attention isn’t working like it used to. there are people who are talented at getting and maintaining virality and i am not one of them — hard to do so when i’m just learning how to conceptualize myself as a Self. i make a lot of different things and hope something will stick, a naive hope that resists learning from others, even if it’s myself.
my behavior grew out of a home kinda enmeshed by my mother’s force of will, a kind of avoidant style of rebellion that defines itself through opposition. i already didn’t like to be bothered and the pandemic pressure cooker covered me in antisocial plate. i pried off just in time for the winter.
it’s still a bit raw underneath, i’ll admit. in a recent fit of post-viral paranoia, i packed a go-bag of identification and cash because i thought government agents were going to bust down my door. people are being doxed and fired for tearing down propaganda and i was being posted across the internet for clocking propaganda — attention and empire do not mix. i’ve been conscious of the surveillance state ever since i had to ask to use the computer room, but it’s been rather acute lately. once i calmed down i got a vpn and one of those door stops that’s a metal pole from your doorknob straight to the ground. can’t barricade the windows but i can get a fire escape ladder. solutions and executions, process improvement, my mom would say.
but that door stop is serious business. try breaking that down, deep state!
of course i have no reason to worry, i’ll be swept along in a mass, not targeted. i’m not at the center of the world, in fact, there are no centers if everyone’s their own universe.
(i wonder how the guy down my childhood street is doing. i need to text people more. i’m sure, later, my dad will tell the groupchat his weekly neighborhood findings and receive no answer.)
inertia is my worst enemy. i’ve got lots of practice at sticking things out, not grinding things out. my self-evaluated absence of effort bothers me. it’s an american/black/victimofcapitalism trait, yeah, but i want to be someone that crushes through stuff, that just does it, i want to be ayo edebiri memorizing her pages, everyone else’s pages, watching a season of tv, writing journal entries, and knocking out five chapters of my current read. a bit greedy, considering my lethargy.
the ingredients are there for sure: i’m a good writer and artist, my cooking is good and my taste is better, my ideas are solid, my personality can be charming, and i’ve worked for all that to be true. yet in the five years since mediocre grades got me a bachelors none of that effort went to a creative career. late to start, i’m launching an enterprise in a dead mall. my mom gave me a lot of productivity and self-help books in that time, trying to help. she’s the worst liberal i know.
i’ll tell you something i’ve only told my college roommates: i believe my first memory is of dying. before i can remember being Someone, when i running across my parents’ bed in san antonio toddler-legged and onesied, there’s a memory of laying down in a red room and closing my eyes. there’s explanations for sure, none that line up with my two-year-old reality, but they exist. you can have your theories, i have mine.
one that presents itself during an anxiety spiral is simple: i am in hell. the obstacles in my daily life and the horrors of my country’s government are hypertargeted against my personality and morals as recompense for a crime i’ve committed before that red room. there a world that hates me while i create for my little audience. someone out there can recognize my old face in my smile lines and panic. i can be hated in complete bliss. guilt-by-osmosis sure is something. america is the perfect country for hell.
the day before mlk jr. day it snowed. it snowed twice more in the same week — not too heavy, just a couple of inches that made me nervously watch the tree branches outside my window droop. i first saw snow as a blizzard congratulating my family’s piecemeal move from louisiana “up north” to virginia. it was a fresh 2007, and my dad and i went first in a red truck i would crash 13 years later, followed by my mom and our eldest cat who would die 12 years later.
i called virginia the north until nyc natives in moschino gloves and small-town pilgrims from the rust belt asked where i was from. if i went to vcu like my mom wanted, maybe the state would still be the arctic. i might’ve kept with my “i was born in texas, then moved to louisiana when i was 5, then moved again to virginia when i was 7, so kinda all over, i guess. yeah my parents were military. they were army, but like, ethical army. medics, not butchers.” those ages feel so remote now that i’ve typed them out. it was a different life of catching lizards with the kids in the cul-de-sac and looking for the toad hiding from summer under our porch.
a fire alarm is going off somewhere down the hall. the me that drafted this wondered what i would take if i smelled smoke. i took a lap around my apartment building to make sure nobody else had evacuated. i entertained theories such as every alarm besides the room down the hall got disconnected. the me that first revised this knows that maintenance shut it off after an hour, and i sit here again, revising again after a building-wide fire alarm had me shivering alongside two women living four floors below me, disproving my hypothesis within 48 hours and introducing another: this place is rent-controlled, and a corporate arsonist might be test running burning it down for insurance money. a late night apartment conflagration could’ve been the red room i remember.
(i’m writing this long after the sun went down, at 8pm and 11 pm and 3am. i’ve always been a night owl. i’m embracing it now, but i definitely could have started working earlier. that’s the thing, though — anticipation is always worse than the act.)
a better world
To look at someone with a few aesthetic and cultural differences, then decide those differences inherently make you the arbiter of their fate, is a mentality I find inaccessible. It’s a choice to dehumanize. It’s a choice to lie. It’s a choice to erase. It’s hard to look into another human’s eyes and declare they do not have a right to exist. It’s not as hard to toss unruly animals into a cage.
(originally published Oct 27, 2023 on Substack)
The ongoing genocide in Gaza is at its darkest moment. All of it has weighed heavy on my heart.
My first inkling of something being Wrong with the world came with my understanding of my identity as a Black person in the United States. The reason I couldn’t trace my family tree the way other kids could growing up is because it was stolen from me. My ancestors were kidnapped, raped out of their lineage, and turned into animals. I have no connection to Africa that isn’t vestigial — my nose, my lips, and my eye color gesture at a homeland I do not recognize. My family just popped into existence from soil our ancestors’ blood watered.
Molding history in such a way requires power that is inhuman to me. To look at someone with a few aesthetic and cultural differences, then decide those differences inherently make you the arbiter of their fate, is a mentality I find inaccessible. It’s a choice to dehumanize. It’s a choice to lie. It’s a choice to erase. It’s hard to look into another human’s eyes and declare they do not have a right to exist. It’s not as hard to toss unruly animals into a cage.
The news coming out of occupied Palestine is the culmination of so many axes of arrogance. I see and read so-called “truth-tellers” and “allies” become the mouthpieces of lying regimes with documented histories of every single lie. Stories of Arab terrorists beheading babies get worldwide front page coverage while Gaza runs out of body bags in silence. Occupying Zionist forces bombed a hospital after a week of sadistic warnings, then their social media accounts engaged in cartoonish bait to distract people while they dropped another thousand pounds of munitions elsewhere. In full view of the world, the sadists in Israel toy with millions of people’s lives, and the only thing people with revolutionaries on their walls and bookshelves do is excuse it as “the nature of war”. What war? Gaza is not a sovereign state. Gaza is no-man’s-land, a legal technicality existing outside of legality, both a state and not a state according to the excuse needed in the moment to slaughter its people. If Gaza is its own state, why can Israel, a foreign power under this definition, declare it illegal for it to build its own infrastructure? If it’s not a state, then why can Israel decide to bomb the people under its administration with impunity? What war features a captive population with no army being attacked with high tech weaponry with no aid allowed? Why is Israel even able to bar humanitarian efforts to begin with? These simple questions are unanswerable to liberals outside of the usual “Israel has a right to defend itself.”
I thought that genocide would be everyone’s line in the sand. My mistake was in expecting people to recognize it at all. Liberals pride themselves on the moral superiority their “impartiality” affords them, and that means when someone says (in English) that they’re not committing genocide, that’s the end of it. They’re not like emotional leftists with their refusals to compromise, because the world was built upon compromise! Everyone must turn away from violence except for when the violence is against targets, then everything must be done to eradicate them. Poison the earth with righteous fury, not grief or pain, and when the smoke clears, always remember that “they” started it.
My disdain for the machinery of the Western world has turned into utter disgust. I have no grace for cowards who dress up in progressive causes only when the blood has been washed out. Every famous evil in the past was conducted under their gleeful watch. I drafted this when 4,000 Palestinians in Gaza were being buried in mass graves while Anderson Cooper corrected his use of “civilians” when referring to them, now I revise it while Gaza endures indescriminate bombing without telecommunications. The US government’s official stance is that the Gaza Health Ministry collaborates with terrorists and is lying about the number of dead. It’s barbarism trying to convince others of its civility.
I’m not sure what to do with this rage I feel. I think something fractured in me and revealed depths to it that I don’t know how to deal with. Writing, creating art, and speaking about it feel like grabbing for kid tools when I’ve been tasked with digging a mine. But I know a better world is possible. I’ve been sitting with myself and praying to all who listen to decide what parts of my political education can stay or go, and I keep being guided back to Black American history and the horrors my people survived. So here’s my new mental rubric when faced with two parties in conflict:
If one imposes similar conditions to what kept my ancestors in bondage upon the other, my support will start with the subjugated.
If one party is described as animals like my ancestors were as justification for their brutalization, I know the descriptors do not need me to waste sympathies on them.
If people are sent into diaspora clinging to fragments of old lives they will never return to, I will do everything in my power to advocate for their right to return to the same homes they left.
Above all else, I cannot ever trust or respect people who make excuses for this current world. It is traitorous to humanity itself to collaborate with today’s status quo. Good intentions will not free Palestine, it will not end discrimination, it will not solve climate change, and it will not put an end to the structures squeezing our only Earth for more pennies in immaterial profit. Continuing to support the same evil with different faces is described as insanity in fiction. Only in the real world will people try hard to convince you it’s “rational”.
The United States looked at itself after experiencing plague, continued poverty wages, unsustainable price gouging for corporate profit, housing held hostage by petit digital bourgeoise, and crumbling infrastructure, and decided to write a blank check for an occupying force that celebrates the chance to create an ethnostate. It’s a betrayal of the highest order, yet laughably par for the course for the longest-lasting banana republic the world has seen. The anger I feel will color the rest of my life, and it will motivate me toward a better world.
Because it will exist. It must.
THE WAY ODA DRAWS WOMEN IN ONE PIECE GRIPPED ME FOR THREE HOURS
the way oda draws pretty women is so insane.
(originally published Dec 13, 2022 on Substack)
the way oda draws pretty women is so insane. every single woman you’re supposed to find attractive has melons for boobs, a waist thinner than the stem of a wine glass, hips that could birth a jeep, and legs that contain 83% of her height. the women in the main cast receive revealing designs and are objectified in all the shonen-typical ways you can imagine (except, curiously, upskirt shots, indicating that oda’s voyeuristic perversions do have a limit).
it’s fascinating how consistent it is, because they’re sexy in the same exact ways. all the sexist, problematic vectors end up neutralizing after a thousand episodes and/or chapters, incorporating themselves into the overall symbology and forming a simple shorthand: if you see a tall woman shaped like a sphere-tittied hourglass, she’s under 40 and can pull a man. get fluent enough in oda’s visual language and exhausted by how they’re outfit swaps of each other (with the occasional wrong-head-on-doll-body moment that’s probably meant to be comedic) and you can mentally redesign them to whatever you find sexy. use their paper-doll nature to your advantage and go crazy — imagining boa hancock looking like anna diop gets me hot, and that is the only justification i need within oda’s hedonistic framework.
i just can’t stop thinking about how absurdly consistent the man is. it’s shocking! one piece’s pared back storytelling mechanics completely kneecapped the women under 40 and eagerly crossed the bridge into camp. it’s in such bad taste. it’s so obviously shameless. the toony style oda draws in barely supports the sexiness he’s trying to communicate, so it often comes off grotesque. there’s no reason for it other than the fact he likes it. in the absence of shonen jump’s teenage boy audience, oda would still probably be drawing his deranged version of pretty women. his crazy lady bodies encompass over 20 years of dedication: he’s aware of the criticism, he’s directly addressed it, and he does not care because it’s his story and he genuinely thinks the two-circles-over-an-X template he’s created eats.
oda’s creative approach cannot ever be accused of nuance. one piece’s overall themes are compelling enough to hold people’s attention for 25 years, but the sheer amount of stuff oda needs to tie together necessitates oversimplifying everything else. an argument can be made that there is a version of one piece as indulgent as oda wants where the women are more nuanced and varied, but i just don’t think he’s put much effort over the years into learning how to write and design women more effectively. shonen authors are frequently guilty of creating more diverse male designs, and to oda’s credit, skinny women with pinched waists and overbearing chests aren’t the only women he creates. they’re often squat, fat, and frequently played for jokes, but at least that particular problematic archetype is applied semi-universally to represent how characters age and lose strength.
the most excellent woman-centered moments occur when their stories intertwine with the overall plot. for example, nami’s backstory is the starting point of an arc that ends with anime mermaid waifu martin luther king and the impact of a few hands holding complete power over the rest of the world — all the weak points of her character stem from typical misogynistic impulses to have women sit back while the men do the work, and one exceptional skill (navigation) attempts to bridge the gap. if it’s something you care about, you can use headcanon to beef up the characters. the vast, living world of the story and the mystery at its core encourages such thinking.
unfortunately, if you’re particularly media literacy poisoned, you will frequently heave a sigh every time Sexy Lady No. __ appears. at the end of the day, it’s your mileage that will vary. shonen-typical objectification means something different to everyone, and its existence as part of the canon men are expected to participate in could be analyzed in a whole other essay. i just got too high and was looking at a group picture of the girls and lost my mind a bit.
because it’s so egregious. how does he not get bored?
the cult of not knowing sh*t
Actors’ appreciation of genre pioneers was interpreted online as stuck-up posturing aimed to place them out of reach of the audiences who sustain their careers. Occam’s Razor says that those actors named those movies because they appreciate what they set out to do and what they achieved. Social media is not built to reckon with that.
or, "how are u a movie fan and you don't recognize 'bicycle theives'???"
(originally published Dec 17, 2023 on Substack)
“Fascism… expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of spectacle/contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”
“A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it… In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art.
- Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Loathe am I to base a piece on TikTok discourse because I want my writing to remain evergreen, but some set dressing is needed:
Letterboxd, once a movie review site, now the secondary social media for the Film Twitter Entity, went onto the red carpet for the movie Poor Things and asked actors Emma Stone, Kathryn Hunter, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe and Yorgos Lanthimos their four favorite movies.
To my pleasant surprise,The Magician, Le Dolce Vita, Bicycle Thieves, and Husbands were mentioned, all important titles to film history that movie devotees should either recognize or be made curious enough to seek out and deepen their knowledge.
That’s not what happened. Instead, people accused them of putting on airs, of saying “obscure” names rather than popular ones just so they can look more cultured than the “rest of us”. Why couldn’t they choose something like Jurassic Park and The Matrix, why say names that signal “insider status”? These actors’ appreciation of genre pioneers was interpreted as stuck-up posturing aimed to place them out of reach of the audiences who sustain their careers. Occam’s Razor says that those actors named those movies because they appreciate what they set out to do and what they achieved. Social media is not built to reckon with that.
Bicycle Thieves didn’t get huge box office numbers, which means that people didn’t like it because nobody went to see it, which means it isn’t actually good, which means Kathryn Hunter must have mentioned it because nobody liked it and it isn’t good. It’s true that people at the time didn’t like Bicycle Thieves becaue they didn’t get what it was doing, but nowadays? It’s a wild accusation based on logic that seems sound at first — why would something be popular if it wasn’t good? The real answer is that “good” is its own spectrum with many axes, but the real-ER answer is that marketing budgets often determine success. In general, quality sneaks into the mainstream rather than the mainstream producing quality that sometimes misses what exists on the fringes. Artistic statements are often appreciated by the masses on accident rather than intention. People broadcast approval of things through exclamations of “Why didn’t anybody tell me about this?” and “It’s worth the hype” rather than engaging with any context. Discourse and criticism has been boiled down into win/lose dynamics for maximum social media reward, and the best way to take advantage of algorithms is to translate thought into binary. Either you’re with “us” (the mainstream, the hivemind, the society), or you’re against “us”.
I do not appreciate how this economic mindset that fetishizes high numbers has transplanted onto media criticism. Media loses its ability to forge personal connections when you use it to signal belonging and not belonging. In an era addicted to aestheticizing the real world, the -cores and Pinterest “___ aesthetic” searches turn rich histories into surface-level, SEO-ready symbols. Spotify popularized the concept of a “rewind” that atomizes your listening habits into languages of virality (or rather, publishes the tracking they’ve done in the background so the algorithm can curate your taste as screenshottable graphics to post as a form of advertising and artist loyalty), and with its rise came an increased tendency for people to describe their media consumption as numbers. It’s cool to read 300 books a year, but when people question the value of a number obtained through mass consumption of cookie-cutter smut and easily digestible YA, it becomes such a threat to the perceived value of being the Person Who Read Three Hundred Books This Year that the questioners are accused of treating the hobby like homework. Letterboxd reviews have degraded into attempted one-liners with no mention of the movie’s substance, yet when people question why attempts at going viral have overtaken longer form discussion, the threat of not being the Funniest Reviewer Whose Takes People Look Forward To often kickstarts a day of whining about filmbro pretentions. A pattern emerges: users aim for status, other users question the methods used to obtain that status, the fragility of the status reveals itself through overgeneralized and relentless antagonism. Within an aestheticized mind, questioning isn’t part of an additive process, it’s a weapon to knock someone down a peg.
Here’s the thing: thinking is slow. It’s ponderous. There’s a lot of dead ends that demand further research. Looking up interpretations takes time. Seeking out discussion redirects your attention away from the next thing. Numbers don’t increase when you take a moment to breathe, so if you seek endorphins from rapid completion, there’s no incentive to delay gratification with analysis. Name the technique in use but not its function in the narrative. Describe the story, do not connect it to context. Venerate apoliticism even as it contradicts the text. The curtains are blue because they’re blue.
It’s a fascist way of moving through the world described by Umberto Eco in Ur-Fascism: “No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism… In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.” If you’re part of the biggest crowd, you’re part of the “right side” that “everybody” “wants” to be part of. If you don’t, you just want to be contrary, not because there’s richness to be found away from the well-worn path. Numbers (box office performance, Goodreads ratings, Metacritic scores, album sales) become “objective” measures of quality that are further divorced from human culpability by making “objective” computers do the calculations; the hand is abstracted away to manufacture consensus and silence dissent.
Quarantine isolation allowed people to find community through new hobbies and it metastasized into a constant performance for clout. This performance is always tied to an implied authority, “For Ur-Fascism… the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity, expressing the Common Will… citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People… a theatrical fiction.” The “hobby” is not genuine. There’s no striving for quality and no drive to know the most out of anyone. Nerdiness became cool because floor-to-ceiling shelves of paraphernalia are satisfying to look at. They’re something to look at, a tangible product of being a Fan. Spending hours within digital archives sourcing obscure scraps of information to develop a world you love is invisible labor, and can therefore be discarded since it’s already out of sight. Why spend years on a single Dungeons and Dragons campaign when you can listen to Critical Role or play Baldur’s Gate 3, transposing your favorite tropes onto whomever looks the best in fanworks? Why argue over meta and worldbuilding when contemporary offerings don’t provide anything to chew on? Game developers crunch their teams into burnout for the sake of unfinished games that future patches, guided by audience reaction, can massage into a completed state. Art becomes a vehicle for crowdsourced mythologizing — the motivation behind everything made into external pressure to quickly align with a majority to manufacture satisfaction. If genre-sustaining depths in the text must be sacrificed for this, then it is done with glee. The ones who mourn its absence are carceral mood-killers that want to ruin “everyone else’s” fun.
Totalitarians love it when people think that way. Shallow populations that prioritize groupthink are the fascist’s bread and butter: fit into an archetype, the majority is always good, life is good versus evil, evil needs to be destroyed. As reactionary movements sweep the planet under the United States and Europe’s malevolent watch, the human desire to belong will continue being manipulated to stifle critical thought. This must be resisted with intention. Let yourself be absorbed by what you love.