Hannibal Recap: Aperitivo & Contorno (S3 E4-5)

Originally posted on Athena Genevieve:

Athena:

Can I just begin by saying wow? That was quite the episode. So many emotional punches. Also we had some questions answered, and substituted for new ones. It was good to see the what has in my head become ‘the old crew’. Friends, enemies, and characters in between. Right now they all seem to me like pieces on a chessboard. They seem sure of where they’re moving, but I don’t think they’re going to end up where they expect.

So the title. I’m finding two meanings for what an aperitivo is. The first is that it’s a light alcoholic beverage to be consumed before the meal, to warm up your appetite. I’ve also found that it could be a small meal for the same stimulating purposes. I think this fits my idea of the chessboard. This episode was setting us up for something big, a collision I think. I…

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Hannibal Recap: Antipasto, Primavera, Secondo (S3 E1-3)

Originally posted on Athena Genevieve:

Welcome to our belated, bloody, and bloated Hannibal recap! Working laptops and internet are apparently hard to come by. We’ll be recapping all of season 3 for you weekly(ish) from this point forward!

Heather:

So first, I am so excited to be back watching and recapping Hannibal! If there’s any show that needs to be dissected (ha ha) each week, it’s this one. There is always so much going on, and the first three episodes are no exception.

So starting with the season premiere…it’s titled Antipasto, which is really fitting given that this season sees Hannibal in Italy. All the episodes are titled after Italian courses in a meal (just like season 1’s episodes were titled after French courses and season 2 was titled after Japanese courses). According to the internet, the word antipasto translates to “before the meal,” which makes sense for this episode. It is the beginning of…

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Conversations with Gamer Dudes – Girls Don’t Play Games

It’s been awhile since I’ve done anything with the Conversations comics I’d been creating. So here’s something new.

That thing where women and other marginalized gamers are simultaneously told that we don’t play games and that since we do play games we must be fine with the representation in them. And of course neither are true. We do play games. We play games despite the fact that there isn’t adequate (let alone exemplary) representation of ourselves in them.

Jupiter Ascending: A Domme’s Tale (Part 1, The Recap)

Expect part 2 with actual, like, analysis and whatnot to come soon. This is a spoiler filled recap of the sub/Domme moments in the movie.

If you see one BDSM fantasy movie this weekend, see Jupiter Ascending. No, seriously. Forget about that 50 Shades nonsense which romanticizes abuse. Go see Jupiter Ascending. ‘But isn’t that the Wachowski siblings’ space opera that reviewers panned? How’s that a BDSM fantasy story?’ I hear you ask as you read this. Yes to the first and keep reading to figure out the second.

The basic plot of Jupiter Ascending is something like Star Wars + Hitchhiker’s Guide + Farscape, with a dash of The Matrix and Dune. What I just wrote may lead you assume the plot is derivative. Make no mistake, it is. Except that the protagonist is a woman and that change actually affects more than one might first think. Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) is going about her humdrum life on Earth when she unexpectedly gets caught up in the family drama of space royalty. Caine (Channing Tatum) rescues her from some aliens trying to kill her, then he explains what the heck is going on, and then he basically escorts her throughout her Hero’s Journey.

Caine’s first interaction with Jupiter is to rescue her from being murdered by aliens working for one of the movie’s villains. This is pretty standard White Knight Rescues Damsel. However in this case the movie is being told from the perspective from the damsel. Also, Jupiter’s next moments are anything but damsel like. She wakes up in a strange room with a strange man (Caine), sees a space gun next to her bed and immediately grabs it. It turns out Caine has left the gun there for her on purpose. He says something about how he thought she’d feel more in control if she had it. He even tells her how to arm it or unlock the safety or whatever.

Usually this sort of scene plays out in such a way as to reveal that the man who the woman had at gunpoint was really in control the whole time; that the woman’s sense of control was an illusion. Maybe we discover the gun was never loaded. Or maybe the man says something to the effect of “I knew you’d never shoot me.” Or maybe the man quickly and effortlessly takes the gun from the woman if he becomes worried she’ll use it. ‘The woman might have a gun,’ this sort of scene usually says, ‘but the man is still in control.’ Not so with this scene. Jupiter raises the armed space gun and Caine raises his hands. But in Jupiter Ascending, Caine actually really ceded control over to Jupiter while he explained what was going on. Just, like willingly gave up control of a situation for a few minutes.

Later in the movie, Jupiter and Caine are talking about genetics and how Caine apparently attacked and bit an “Entitled” (aka royal) due to his faulty genetics. Jupiter decides that’s a great time to start up a bit of flirting. She makes her way into Caine’s personal space talking about how she always picks the wrong guy and suggests that may be due to her own faulty genetics. Her body language is basically saying, “rip off your clothes and get on this bed.” Caine doesn’t think it would work. He’s like, “You’re the genetic recurrence of royalty and I’m a defective werewolf. I’ve got more in common with dogs.”  Okay the first sentence isn’t in the movie, but the second is. Jupiter replies that she’s “always loved dogs.” It’s meant to be silly but I’m like, yeah, a little wink and nod to pet play there.

Up until this point it’s all very subtle, though. There’s nothing that says a woman making the first move must necessarily make her a Domme. Like, clearly. And that whole scene with the space gun is really subtextual. But then there’s a shift. Jupiter has to jump through a bajillion bureaucratic hoops (hello, Hitchhiker’s Guide) in order to claim her birth right as a genetic recurrence of some royal lady. Even though Caine has no real incentive to do so, he sticks around with her to help her get through it. Once Jupiter’s been given her space-tattoo officially making her An Entitled, she and Caine have this little chat. Caine is talking about something, I can’t quite remember what, and he calls her “Your Majesty.” And she’s like, “Say that again.” (See, now we’re getting into something a bit more explicit). Caine, loveable puppy that he is, is really confused as to what she wants him to repeat. And Jupiter explains that when other people call her “Your Majesty” she feels uncomfortable but when he says it she really digs it.

Then, if that weren’t enough of a neon sign saying ‘Jupiter’s A Domme,’ the two have a conversation about biting. They’re talking about whether Jupiter is really the same person she always was, even after getting this royal tattoo. She’s like “yeah I’m the same person,” and he’s like, “naw you’re royalty now.” So then Jupiter walks into Caine’s personal space again and is like, “You’re the one with the Entitled instinct,” (referencing the fact that he was convicted of attacking an Entitled way back when), “do you want to bite me?” And Caine looks all uncomfortable and replies, “No. Well, maybe.” Jupiter’s like, “Go ahead.” But Caine’s got intimacy issues so he backs away. Then the next series of plot points happen.

Eventually Caine’s got to rescue Jupiter from one of the movie’s villains, Titus. Titus is an Entitled who’s tricked Jupiter into marrying him. He’s promised that by marrying him, she’ll be gaining more control over Earth and her future. It’s a lie, though. Titus is really planning on killing Jupiter after they’re married. Caine knows this because right before Titus threw Caine out of an airlock, he confessed it to him. See, Titus was pretty sure Caine would die in space. Little did Titus know…

So Caine barges in at the 11^th hour to stop the wedding. He literally flies in and pulls out his space gun and points it inches from Titus’ face. And then he does the following: first he makes sure Jupiter is safe and unmarried, second he explains what Titus’ plans were, and finally he asks, “May I kill him?” And this is important. We’ve already established Caine’s got this genetic ‘go berserk and kill royalty’ thing. And we saw Titus try to kill Caine earlier in the movie. Like, if this were Caine’s story, Caine would have just pulled the trigger. But it’s not. So Caine asks for Jupiter’s permission to kill Titus. And Jupiter’s like, “Just take me home.” And Caine does. No argument. No “But my lady it is too dangerous; let me kill him.” Jupiter just issues an order and Caine follows it.

And that keeps happening from here on out in the movie. They return to Jupiter’s home and the most evil of the royalty villains has kidnapped Jupiter’s family. One of the villain’s lackeys is there to be like, “If you come with us, we will release your family.” And Caine steps in, like a good guard dog, and is like, “Not going to happen.” But Jupiter realises she needs to try to save her family so she agrees to go. “It’s too dangerous,” Caine says. “It’s not your decision to make,” Jupiter replies. And that’s that. Jupiter made a decision and by golly Caine’s going to follow it.

With Jupiter’s permission, Caine and some space marshals follow the villain’s ship that kidnaped Jupiter’s family (and now has Jupiter). And as all that’s going on and there’s more plot stuff, a friend of Caine’s (Stinger) comes up to Caine in the ship and has a heart-to-heart. The audience has already been informed that Caine’s a bit messed up because he’s a werewolf without a pack. He’s basically been used and abused and had to toughen up in order to survive. And so Stinger (who also knows all this) tells Caine that he knows Caine’s been searching for a pack to belong to for so long, Caine’s terrified now that he’s found it. His pack, meaning Jupiter.

So there’s more plot. Jupiter is given the choice of sacrificing herself and her family for the Earth, or sacrificing the future of the Earth for herself and her family. And this is really quite important given that Jupiter is a woman. Often women protagonists are given a choice of sacrificing themselves for their family or their family for themselves. Rarely is a woman hero given the choice of saving or sacrificing the world.

Anyway, at first Jupiter is going to sacrifice the Earth to save herself and her family. But she realizes what a colossal mistake that would be, and so she decides at the last minute not to do it. The royal villain guy is pissed off and (you guessed it) right at that moment Caine comes crashing in ready to rescue her and her family. Caine and Jupiter end up in the chamber where her family is being held. He’s like, “get your family out of here.” And she responds by kissing his face off (not literally). Jupiter then moves her unconscious and floating family to safety while Caine fights off the villain’s lackeys. But, surprise, stuff happens and she ends up in danger again with the main evil royal villain. Caine tries to rescue her but can’t and once it becomes clear that if he goes after Jupiter, he’ll put her family at risk, he goes back and finishes getting Jupiter’s family to safety. Why? Because he knows she’d be pissed the heck off if he came after her without securing her family first. She’s a capable human being; her family are unconscious.

So eventually (of course) Caine comes back for her and escorts her to safety. Mind, by this time Jupiter’s already taken care of the evil villain. At this point in the story, Caine really is more of Jupiter’s assistant than anything else.

And then in the final scene she’s putting on some space flying boots on top of a roof with Caine. He calls her “Your Majesty,” and she’s like, “say that again.” And Caine gets all bashful and puts on a sexy voice and is like, “you mean, Your Majesty.” Jupiter responds with something along the lines of, “that really works for me.” And then there’s a bit more talking and kissing. And in the final scene she flies off the roof with her own space boots because she doesn’t need a man to carry her anymore. And Caine, flies off the roof behind her because the dude knows his place.

Are GamerGaters Just Recreating the Sexist, Racist, Homophobic Dominant Culture?

(This was originally published at Good Men Project)

If you haven’t heard by now, Gamergate is a hashtag created to solidify the already troubling prevalence of misogyny, homophobia and racism found in gaming culture. It began with an angry ex-boyfriend’s screed against a woman game developer (Zoe Quinn). It’s only become more toxic from there. Quinn’s had death threats and people stalking her and folks actively planning to try to get her to commit suicide. Quinn’s been forced to leave her home. So has Anita Sarkesian and a number of other people who have had their private information made public and used against them.

Beyond the simple fact that a lot of Gamergate supporters are abusive people, I’m interested in trying to understand how this so-called movement has become so large.

First, I’d like to debunk a certain myth I’ve seen floating around. Gamergate is not, as Noah Brand writes, the result of “people with certain handicaps” reacting poorly to society “failing to acknowledge and understand the world they live in.” Gamergate is not really about a lack of validated pain turned into rage. For one thing, gamer culture has recreated the older, non-gamer culture’s disdain for authentic expressions of emotion. Also, were Gamergate about a lack of validated pain, it’d be headed by a diverse group of marginalized folks who’ve had their pain invalidated and their attempts at creating spaces for themselves thwarted. In fact, were this about validating expressions of pain, Zoe Quinn’s Depression Quest would be widely lauded by Gamergate supporters. After all, what is Depression Quest if not an expression of pain? Instead, Gamergate is headed by mostly straight white cis men who have targeted Quinn with online harassment since Depression Quest was first released.

The reason I point this out is not simply to critique Noah’s piece, but to examine what I think Noah (and others who have written similar pieces) are trying to do. I think they are all trying to humanize Gamergate. But as I’ve written before, humanizing someone who has done something horrible doesn’t mean creating excuses and absolving them of responsibility. The thing is, human beings are both individuals and social subjects. They both act on their own and are influenced by the culture around them. Gamer culture is, as Noah acknowledges, misogynist, homophobic and racist. But it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. So in order to truly humanize Gamergate supporters, we must examine the culture in which Gamergate exists.

Gamergate (and most of gamer culture, really) is the result of a group of young men who were rejected by toxic masculine, heteronormative, white normative capitalist dominant culture, and then collectively recreated that toxic masculine, heteronormative, white normative capitalist culture in such a way that they were no longer excluded from it.

Even that doesn’t quite sum up the situation given that gaming has become so ubiquitous. There are professional football players, like Chris Kluwe, who are huge gamers and the Greenbay Packers hold regular Settlers of Catan gaming nights. Being a gamer doesn’t really completely exclude people from dominant culture. If we open that up to talking about nerd culture as a whole we see that nerd culture already is dominant culture. The two are the same. Add onto that the fact that the gamer identity and the culture surrounding gaming weren’t really created by gamers; they were a marketing tactic. When we consider these things, it becomes clear gaming culture was a bill of goods sold to people who wanted more access to dominant toxic masculine, heteronormative, white normative capitalist culture than they had previously been granted.

Unsurprisingly, supporters of Gamergate have blatantly dehumanized those they are against. In fact, it’s a tactic Gamergate supporters use against anyone who disagrees with them. They label anyone they view to be against them “feminazis” and “social justice warriors.” Gamergate supporters put forth grand conspiracy theories where Zoe Quinn and other feminists who play, make and write about games control the entire gaming industry. Some Gamergate supporters even go so far as to use anti-Semitic imagery when discussing these conspiracy theories. Zoe Quinn (and other Gamergate detractors) aren’t human beings to Gamergate; detractors are all enemies and Zoe Quinn is an end boss. In fact, we see a repeated theme in pro-Gamergate media; that this entire series of events is a game that Gamergate will eventually “win.” This is part of how they rationalize doxing and SWATting anyone who speaks out against them.

Less obvious, however, is that the people people using the Gamergate banner actively seek to obfuscate their own humanity. Matthew Rozsa wrote about how Gamergate uses a mob mentality to erase the individuality of its supporters. However, I think that it goes further than erasing individuality. One of the Twitter hashtags that was created in parallel with Gamergate was #OpSkyNet. Skynet is a fictional artificial intelligence; it isn’t human. And there are plenty of other images and pieces of media that Gamergate uses which cast Gamergate supporters as something other than human. In their own minds, Gamergate supporters aren’t simply people; they are “noble paladins,” mechanized warriors, artificial intelligence, superheroes, etc.

Then there’s the fact that the mascot of Gamergate is the fictional character, Vivian James. Vivian James features prominently in a lot of Gamergate media. Sometimes she’s depicted as a little girl; sometimes she’s depicted as an adult woman; sometimes she’s overtly sexualised and sometimes she isn’t. She morphs into whatever the artist wants; she is purely a symbol of what Gamergate supporters want women to be. Even real women who support Gamergate, such as Christina Hoff Sommers, are turned into symbols by the group. Hoff Sommers, for example, has been dubbed “Based Mom.” And then there are the many minority game players who tweet under the hashtag #NotYourShield. Gamergate supporters actually end up using the few women, queer people, people of color, etc. who supporter Gamergate as a shield against critiques of the Gamergate. If any minority gamer players support Gamergate, they claim, then Gamergate cannot be hostile to minority gamers. This is the sort of attempt to use “pure logic” that results in Gamergate supporters being really quite wrong.

I mentioned above that Gamergate supporters fail to understand that they are social subjects; that they are part of a larger social context. This is nowhere more apparent than with their popular call for absolute and pure objectivism in all things. They created a website dedicated to “objective game reviews.” When interacting with Gamergate supporters on Twitter, I have occasionally asked for someone’s age or gender to better understand where they might be coming from. Most of the time these questions to give the the people on the other end of the computer social context are met with hostility. “A statement should be judged on its merit, not on who says it,” is the sort of thing I’ve seen said by many Gamergate supporters. Many Gamergate supporters seem to have a desire to separate themselves from their opinions. They wish for ideas to exist on their own, without having to contextualize them with the people who support those ideas. Again, this serves to dehumanize themselves.

Finally, there is the frightening contingent of Gamergate which has found its home on the /baphomet/ board on the website, 8chan. This is the board where Gamergate supporters spend their time sharing the private information of detractors and planning how to harass and attack their detractors. Ironically, many /baphomet/ users maintain their own anonymity while doxing others. Though anonymity itself can actually serve people (see: trans women finding safe spaces online); in this case it serves to further dehumanize the people using it. If no one can tie any of what is said in /baphomet/ back to real people, then the people in that board can abdicate responsibility. As an added note, Baphomet is a mythological creature and deity; this is yet another example of Gamergate creating a mascot for themselves that is at once dehumanizing and superhuman.

That Gamergate supporters have chosen superhuman identities for themselves makes a certain kind of sense when we consider how the gaming industry has catered to straight white cis male “gamers” as a core marketing demographic for decades. Consider the many ‘revenge of the nerds’ narratives that exist in gaming culture. Consider too the simplistic morality found in most AAA games. The playable character (usually a straight white cis man) is created to give the player (assumed to be a cis white straight man) a feeling of empowerment; a feeling that they cannot do any wrong. Look no further than the recent “PC Master Race” controversy to see how this power fantasy seeps into real life gaming culture. In a sense, this power fantasy serve to dehumanize the player; to divorce the player from any authentic emotion that does not serve the fantasy.

This gets to what is perhaps the heart of the problem. In order for games culture to ever get better, the people within games culture would first have to recognize their own humanity along with the humanity of those they consider ‘outside’ games culture. Yet big studio, AAA games (as they currently exist) largely de-emphasize the humanity of the player and encourage the perception of the player that they are superhuman. This isn’t going to change any time soon, I don’t think. Publishers make large amounts of money selling people the lie that they are better than non-gamers, that gamers aren’t really like other humans. So long as gaming culture centers on that superiority complex, it will be exclusionary along racial, sexual and gender lines.