It's "Death of the Author" in play, Gryph. The only person who's not allowed a say in what you meant with your work is you. Your opinion is invalid and irrelevant to the discussion -- only outsiders are allowed true insight into your purpose.

Bleagh.

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

See, Traitor was asking me a while ago why capital-C Criticism gets on my tits so? This. This is why.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

At the risk of derailing this thread, I will briefly state that while that is part of "Death of the Author", it never was the only part of it. The original essay which named and explicated the concept argued against including the author's intentions into analysis of the work as well as his biographical details and context.

Of course, the original essay was raising a point about a kind of literary observer effect -- how do the critic's own biases affect his ability to accurately determine the author's intent from the work itself?, to briefly and somewhat imprecisely put it -- but far too many self-congratulatory hack critics have pretty much redefined it as "the foolish author has no idea what he's really doing, only we enlightened elite do".

Like I said, bleagh.

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

I failed my literary criticism classes in college, and that's starting to look like a good thing.

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

That's a part I tend to agree with.

>... ar too
>many self-congratulatory hack critics have pretty much redefined it as
>"the foolish author has no idea what he's really doing, only we
>enlightened elite do".

No argument here. The way I tend to approach it is that the final authority on the work is the work itself; authorial intent is informative but not definitive. There are good reasons for this; intending to communicate or portray one thing and ending up with something far more horrible happens quite a bit, and it bites especially hard when it's part of a larger cultural trend.

The above examples are rather extreme, but they're there to establish why "death of the author" is a thing. It means that, although Zack Snyder was trying to create a female empowerment fantasy and also make geek males feel guilty for male gaze and reduction of women to eye candy, what came out was a misogynistic, exploitative mess that commits the same sins Snyder said he was trying to skewer.

All of which rounds back to why the Corwin/Utena relationship (and the Corwin/Utena/Anthy triad) ultimately killed my ability to enjoy Symphony of the Sword. I get that Gryphon intended otherwise, but intention alone doesn't stop me from reading that progression in a far more unsettling fashion. It starts with this bit from Interlude at Bancroft Tower No. 1 in D Minor:

        "Is that all you're going to say?" Corwin persisted.  "What I
mean is... aren't you going to give me the usual speech about how I'm
a really great guy, and you like me a lot, and you hope we can still
be friends?"

That line of his? It reminds me of how Internet "Nice Guys" tend to view rejection. His subsequent behavior towards her -- going out to spend time with just her, including extended trips with just of the two of them, behavior that's dating in all but name -- reads an awful lot like he's put her in the girlfriend zone, and he's taking advantage of her being in an emotionally vulnerable and isolated state (consciously or otherwise) to level up from "friend" to "love interest."

Alternatively, she's aware of what's going on with their not-dating, and that ... really doesn't let Corwin off the hook (much), and it also means that, by poly standards, she's cheating on Anthy.

Either way, it skeeves me the fuck out when their relationship goes from friendship to romance, because it reads to me as validating the Nice Guy victim complex at the very least, and perhaps also tacitly endorsing cheating.

That's as may be, but upon careful introspection, I find that it does absolve me of any need to feel as if I've failed because you Don't Get It, particularly since at this point it's dawning on me that you're willfully Not Getting It out of some misplaced sense of obligation to Take a Stand. This is the wrong place to be doing that. It's like picketing a car dealership to protest abuses in the beef-cattle industry - makes no damn sense.

>It starts with this bit from
>Interlude at Bancroft Tower No. 1 in D Minor:

        "Is that all you're going to say?" Corwin persisted.  
"What I mean is... aren't you going to give me the usual speech about how I'm 
a really great guy, and you like me a lot, and you hope we can still 
be friends?"

>That line of his? It reminds me of how Internet
>"Nice Guys" tend to view rejection. His subsequent behavior towards
>her -- going out to spend time with just her, including extended trips
>with just of the two of them, behavior that's dating in all but name
>-- reads an awful lot like he's
>put her in the girlfriend zone], and he's taking advantage of her being in
>an emotionally vulnerable and isolated state (consciously or
>otherwise) to level up from "friend" to "love interest."

All right, I'm going to take one more hack at this, and then I'm done with it: You are overanalyzing the fuck out of the entire thing. For one thing, the whole point of Corwin at that age, and indeed any age, is that when he says things that otherwise seem like they ought to involve weird buried-context ulterior-movie bullshit like the above, they don't. That's a recurring feature of his that I think a reasonably perceptive reader can't have missed... except possibly on purpose, because it's inconveniently out-of-line with her Purported Agenda Theory.

For instance, he asked her that in Bancroft Tower because she omitted it, and he was seriously concerned that, on top of failing at his first-ever attempt at romance, he'd broken a friendship in the process. His need to be assured that he hadn't, and his relief when that assurance was forthcoming, was exactly what it looked like. He's not putting on some kind of calculated, manipulative act. He's just a big-hearted, open-hearted kid in a completely unfamiliar situation, playing it by ear.

>Alternatively, she's aware of what's going on with their not-dating,
>and that ... really doesn't let Corwin off the hook (much), and it
>also means that, by poly standards, she's cheating on Anthy.

No. No, no, no, for fuck's sake. Did you not notice any of the places where one, the other, or both of them looks directly at this, or are you just ignoring them because they don't support your conspiracy theory? Between Monolith and Knights 3 inclusive, they both grapple with this apparent dichotomy several times, often in full view of one another. There's no secret agenda happening there, just two young people in a complicated situation, making shit up as they go along and trying to do the best they can without making themselves miserable. Jesus Christ, why has every relationship got to be a some kind of ruthless sub rosa zero-sum game to some people? Did I miss a memo? Are characters not allowed to just be in love any more?

>Either way, it skeeves me the fuck out when their relationship
>goes from friendship to romance, because it reads to me as
>validating the Nice Guy victim complex at the very least, and
>perhaps also tacitly endorsing cheating.

All of that is predicated on a frankly insulting assumption that Corwin's playing some kind of subtle, manipulative game, much like Akio's, with the mind and heart of a woman he loved before he even understood what that kind of love was, and that Utena would fall for that kind of thing twice. If you really think either of those scenarios is even possible, let alone likely, then you have never understood Thing One about the character or the story arc and I cannot help you any further with that. Good day, madam. I said good day!*

--G.
* Obligatory Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory reference to make it plain that I'm not completely serious about the furious dismissal part, except I kind of am.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Not going to get into the bulk of this discussion, but I did want to comment on this. Personally, I have always interpreted Corwin to be one of those rare souls who not only can and should be taken at face value, but who essentially goes out of his way (so to speak) to remind you of that fact whenever possible. He doesn't just mean what he says, he is what he says. Other than a few clear occasions when he's scheming to surprise someone, he's simply incapable of doing otherwise (and even then, you know something's up even if you don't know what).

The problem with this is that there are so few people out there who actually behave like that, that many people are simply incapable of truly believing that anyone could be that way, even a fictional character. It's not that he's poorly written or inconsistent or any of the standard problems with a character that can make them unbelievable, it's that he's "too good to be true", so people are looking for the catch. The fact that there isn't one is irrelevant; either people will believe or they won't, and there's unfortunately nothing you can do about it.

I know this doesn't help your interpretation of success/failure, but if it makes you feel any better I think you succeeded.

Offsides

[...] in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
-- David Ben Gurion
EPU RCW #π
#include <stdsig.h>

Eh, that's a separate discussion, and depends partly on how one defines "poorly written."

>or inconsistent or any
>of the standard problems with a character that can make them
>unbelievable, it's that he's "too good to be true", so people are
>looking for the catch.

Neil Gaiman once put it this way: "Life is always going to be stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be convincing and life doesn't."

Yes, this is actually a problem, at least for me; Corwin's supernatural gifts are actually more plausible to me than the idea that anyone could be ... well, as Gryph's spirited defense upthread states. In many ways, Corwin is too perfect -- he just isn't believable to me.

I don't have an agenda here; I'm saying that the relationship skeeved me out, both in its potential back when SotS started, and when it became canon. It was much later that I managed to articulate why.

As a writer, I do not sit down and say to myself, "I'm going to include this point from my political/socal agenda." I sit down and say, "What does this story need?" If a stance I agree with comes up in my story, I don't call attention to it. My stories are just that; I'm trying to entertain, not pushing any sort of position. I see no evidence the EPU staff are doing anything but writing complex stories, barrowing characters from vastly different series and wrapping them all togeter so they actually go together.

So, in those immortal words from MST3K: "It's really just a show, so you really should relax."

Craig

The problem with the above thought is that you've got some baseline, implicit assumptions and beliefs about how the world works, many of which you're likely not aware of. Everyone does; that's just part of the state of being human. That framework -- your acculturation, socialization, individual experience, your own brain chemistry -- informs everything you write.

I've talked about some major personal revelations and life changes I've gone through over the years, and they tended to make me pretty starkly aware of many of the above that formed my own mental landscape. Further, as an economist, I have a professional obligation to identify unstated assumptions as they pertain to various questions; economics, being a social science that tends to look at large groups of people, means that those sorts of things tend to be rather large.

... er, I'm not? As I've said repeatedly?

As for why I was still discussing it, above, was because Gryph expressed having second thoughts about it, though not for the reasons I've outlined.

The topic, at this point, has run its course, however.

Forgive the obvious response, but, um...

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

Pre-empting the riposte concerning my undisguised, heart-of-a-dying-sun intense loathing for RWBY with the brief reminder that this isn't a RWBY fan forum.

And therein lies your difficulty, I think. As you state just after this, you have over the past few years dealt with powerful personal revelations and adjustments, and those are informing how you interact with and interpret everything you read. From what you're saying, it sounds to me as though you have become not so much "starkly aware of" the baseline, implicit assumptions and beliefs of others, as you have become oversensitive to them. Like night-vision that you just can not turn off, even when having it on isn't practical.

-Droken

Wow, that's made me feel more like a woman on the Internet than anything else in the past week.

One is loath to put words in someone else's fingers, but perhaps hypersensitized connotes a slightly less inadvertently judgmental shade of meaning. In this context, you certainly seem to be perceiving monsters where there are only shadows at this point.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

-Droken

Yes, well, as you say, that's generally known as having a worldview. I'm not going to be lectured on what thoughtcrimes someone else may believe mine to contain.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

        "Is that all you're going to say?" Corwin persisted.  
>"What I 
>mean is... aren't you going to give me the usual speech about how I'm 
>a really great guy, and you like me a lot, and you hope we can still 
>be friends?"

To quote Freud, "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar". You seem to be reading this scene as if it's propaganda, and it's not. Neither Utena nor Corwin picked up an Advanced Gender Relations elective during their time in school, and because of that, they didn't realize that their relationship was inappropriate and so they went ahead and did what worked for them.

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

        "Is that all you're going to say?" Corwin persisted.  
>"What I 
>mean is... aren't you going to give me the usual speech about how I'm 
>a really great guy, and you like me a lot, and you hope we can still 
>be friends?"

...

Or, and work with me on this, he's worried that, by telling her how he feels, he's destroyed the chances of a friendship continuing, because the whole romance thing is a risky line to cross, regardless of age?

It's pretty simple to see. All you have to do is remember that most guys aren't 'Internet Nice Guys', and it's been pretty clearly established that Corwin is NOT AN ASSHOLE.

You're acting like Tumblr. That is not a good thing.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

I'm a real girl! I'm being mansplained at!

... Not sure if you're joking or being serious...

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

Think of it like a zen koan.

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But
I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

(That's not sarcasm, by the way. I love arguing and literary criticism so much, you guys, you don't even know.)

>B) She might have been lying. She does that sometimes. ...
>Quite a lot, actually, when she's trying to accomplish something that
>she doesn't feel she has time or mental bandwidth to explain to the
>muggles.

In all fairness, Ben... I suggested this as a possibility some time ago, and you had some deeply uncharitable things to say about my views of women if I thought she was being manipulative in this instance.

-Merc
Keep Rat

No, I had deeply uncharitable things to say about your assertion that it was in some way "awesome".

I think it's a bit loathsome. I'm just acknowledging that she may have done it anyway.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Ah! I see. That makes things clearer.

I would, in fact, agree with you that it would be a bit loathsome. I just don't think that would preclude it also being awesome at the same time.

It's like... mmm. Take the Anthy-on-Nanami action from the source materiel. What Anthy does to Nanami is kind of petty and cruel; Nanami is a deeply damaged adolescent girl who lashes out because she's emotionally traumatized, and Anthy is a deeply powerful witch many times Nanami's age who can read her like a book. So messing with Nanami's head the way Anthy does is kind of messed up.

It's also awesome, though! She tricked Nanami into thinking she'd laid an egg! She sent her on a maybe-real, maybe-hallucinated trek across the world in search of a body-switching spice, sent surfing elephants to harass Nanami during said trek, and then had her familiar trip the girl at the finish line. That is choice.

It helps that she isn't real, of course. Anthy-the-character can do stuff that is, narratively, pretty awesome, but that reflect less than well on Anthy-the-person.

I feel the same way about her brother, really. Akio is deeply loathsome in all his forms, but he's also impressive. He did a lot of stuff that left my jaw hanging slack going "Damn, yo. The writers know what they are doing here."

TLDR: something can be narratively awesome without it necessarily being a positive or laudable thing for the people involved. Well, at least to me. I'm not the arbiter of all things awesome.

EDITED TO ADD: Also, I am always excited when you let Anthy's ruthless side shine through. I love me some moral ambiguity in my protagonists and my narratives. I know that's not really your thing on a large scale (and there's nothing wrong with that!) but it totally is mine. :)

-Merc
Keep Rat

Azalynn would be a bit miffed that you're pigeonholing her as bisexual. That's so... geminormative.

>But the rest of the pattern doesn't exist where I can see
>it. No such dynamic exists between Liza and Azalynn, Kate and Juri,
>Amanda Dessler and Rina Dragonaar, or Juniper and Gunnr.

If such a dynamic did exist between Amanda and Rina, one expects it would run counter to the expectations their job titles would imply. I'm just saying.

I don't have a lot of time for that dominance-and-submission business, though, frankly. I suppose that's probably vanillanormative of me.

>>Utena, as portrayed in Symphony, seems to be closer to a 0 on
>>the Kinsey scale
>
>So she says, and I concede that she's not your typical 3.

Somewhere between 1 and 2, I should say, if only because Anthy would probably take exception to her husband making love to her being filed as "incidental homosexuality". :)

>I have very
>little knowledge of the source, but I can't recall anything from SotS
>to disprove the idea that she's mostly asexual.

... Wait, what?

>In Utena's
>case, philia is prerequisite to eros, and she doesn't
>seem to have much of anything in the "base lust" department.

In fairness to Utena, that doesn't indicate that she's somehow not a sexual being. (In Dìqiú alone, there's a certain clearing up on the mountain road outside Republic City that would beg to differ with your assessment there. And a suite at the Phoenix House Hotel. And a dark corner on the observation deck of the Harmony Tower. And one of the staterooms aboard the Mirai. And the ensuite shower in the big house on Air Temple Island. Among other places. :) It indicates that she's wary of "base lust", and for very good reason. As a teenager, she got burned twice by responding to the "oh 'ello" system call, once incredibly badly, once just to the tune of a really unpleasant evening reliving the first time. Even the dumbest animal eventually learns not to stick its nose in a fire, but her not sticking her nose in fires doesn't mean she somehow can't perceive them, to thoroughly belabor the metaphor.

Besides, how would you "disprove the idea that she's mostly asexual" by looking at stories where she's in stable relationships? Count up the number of scenes in which she's not looking at someone other than her partners and thinking, Yes please, I'll have some of that? That's not really her style. Doesn't mean she's asexual. I mean what?

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Edit for clarity: That is to say, this is what I deserve to get for posting without doing a sanity check.

Well, hey, at least the odd assertion in your post only baffled me, it didn't enrage and insult me. That's a win in this thread! :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Not sure if I've said this before- the symphony stories rock. Thank you for writing them.

The source doesn't support Utena being any degree of asexual, but it does give plenty of reasons for her to be skittish about physical and emotional intimacy, and to have some trust issues.

>but I can't recall anything from SotS
>to disprove the idea that she's mostly asexual.

In the text itself, I don't think there's much grounds to claim that she's asexual specifically, as opposed to the trust and intimacy issues above. Certainly, what I recall of the Symphony material that addressed her history on Cephiro (pre-Symphony), seem to support that interpretation, rather than asexuality.

>In Utena's
>case, philia is prerequisite to eros,

The term for that is demisexual. It's a relatively new term, as far as I know, and has emerged because, like "pansexual" as opposed to "bisexual," or the -romantic suffix (e.g. heteroromantic, homoromantic) in addition to the -sexual suffix, human sexuality is really really complicated and not remotely binary (even on multiple axes). (And that doesn't even touch on gender identity, which is no less complex but only tangentially related to sexual and romantic attraction and desire.)

>and she doesn't
>seem to have much of anything in the "base lust" department.

See above about the intimacy issues; while it's been some time since I last read the stuff from before I gave up on Symphony, I got the impression that her recalcitrance had more to do with the way she was used and abused by Akio and Kouga (as I recall, though it's been some time since I watched RGU in its entirety) and, well, Anthy still being out there.

>In either
>case (3 or x), her claims of being almost 0 could easily owe more to a
>heteronormative cultural background than her own feelings.

This is a bit of dissonance between RGU and SotS; in the anime, as I recall, being bi- or pansexual was the rule; the show was not remotely ambiguous about Kouga and Akio, and only somewhat ambiguous about those two and Saionji. Similarly, girls crushing on other girls (if not much more) was pretty routine -- Utena and Juri, IIRC, both had substantial female fan clubs. (There were a few people who had only a single target of attraction, at least functionally speaking -- Nanami's fixation on Kouga, for example -- but that doesn't invalidate the general impression. Nor does Miki's apparent asexuality.) SotS alluding to Cephiro having some degree of baseline homophobia in the cultural background is a bit at odds with that.

Some of the RGU bit can be explained by Japanese cultural attitudes towards adolescent sexuality, in that "experimenting" with the same sex (as we'd call it here in the West) is an accepted and normal part of growing up. (This is more true for girls than boys, mind.)

-- ∇×V

That, and his love for swashbuckling might just outdo Liza. Let's keep in mind that when he was dead (In Modern Marvel Comics, not UF), Kurt was travelling the afterlife in a pirate ship fighting demon pirates, usually with three swords and lots of glorious banter. And no one was at all surprised.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

As was pointed out, there's a repeated theme of Utena or Corwin deciding things were 'good enough', right up to the point where Anthy does push them together and they realise they can have more than 'good enough'.