"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.
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.