Just William Shatner yelling about “misandry” on Twitter

So my feeling was they’re hinting that Rey is incredibly instinctively Force attuned. So she’s going to end up being a super-powerful Jedi. Hence the Force Awakening.

Exactly, that was the sense that I had as well. Beyond the Skywalkers, possibly even beyond Yoda in terms of Force sensitivity, the full potential of the Light side in a single person. And Ren is her Dark side counterpart, clearly proficient and somewhat trained, but emotionally unstable and torn in his devotion, whereas Rey is emotionally grounded and self-assured (with some natural trepidation) but hasn’t been trained, so her use of the Force is just as unpredictable as Ren’s for the time being. It’s possible their proximity on Starkiller is what allowed Rey to tap into her abilities without the training that an ordinary Jedi would have received, so I’m willing to give the film a pass on that one.

I’m sure The Last Jedi is going to clear up some of these questions, but that seemed to be what the film was trying to get across in terms of Rey’s and Ren’s roles in the unfolding events.

Yep, “Man learning to fight quickly in a few minute training montage” is “heroic archetype”. Woman doing the same, but without as much montage? “couldn’t have happened that way”

Not to mention, we’re talking about fictional space magic. Space magic that has been established to “work in mysterious ways.” As if there aren’t a million ways that this sort of thing could be written in as a plot point that expands on the existing lore?

“Luke couldn’t do it!” isn’t a very convincing argument (for obvious reasons I hope), and it borders on hypocritical when accompanied by criticisms of “It was too much like Ep IV!”

I had some serious shower thoughts on Janeway and why people don’t like her. Im’a share! First, though, @latsot, I’m not pickin’ on you! Lots of people think her voice is annoying and she’s a bad character. I’d just like to give you something to think about I guess. Whenever someone says “x is annoying” or “I just don’t like x”, it can be a sign that there are deeper things creeping underneath. I don’t know whether that’s true in your case, but Im’a talk about the generic phenomenon. So don’t take it as an attack on you, it isn’t!

Here’s how it goes down. New Star Trek series about a grand space adventure! Awesome! People are eager to watch, and the first thing they see/hear is – space captain woman with an annoying voice. They think “ugh, her voice is annoying.” This sensitizes the brain to be more aware of other things that could-be-construed-as-bad about the character (and, since she’s such a central character, the whole show). This makes it easier to interpret things about the character as bad, inferior, improper, etc. A character that didn’t have that “annoying” trait wouldn’t sensitize the viewer towards interpreting that character as annoying-in-general. So, Janeways’ character development is shallow and inconsistent, the show has boring characters, the scripts are terrible, they don’t do things the way they should be done.

An important point to note is that none of these factors are anything but personal observations. Her voice isn’t actually annoying, it’s just a voice. The character development may or may not be shallow depending on your interpretation. The plot may or may not be well constructed. All of these problems can be and are overlooked in other shows for a huge number of reasons, but they aren’t for Voyager. Why?

Slide backwards. Her voice is annoying. Why is it annoying? There’s nothing annoying about a voice – there’s no biological bad-note. (errata: there might be, but there’s no evidence for that sort of thing. Null hypothesis is that there’s no biological basis for emotional interpretation of voice.)

When we are born, we see faces and hear voices. These patterns develop into the foundation of our face-and-voice-recognition systems. They’re the foundation of how we think and behave socially, because they help us identify our kin group. (Another shakeup happens during puberty, it’s unknown what happens to this system during that period. My guess is that you get significant changes then too, helping the person adapt to an adult societal role.) People who fit that mold quickly will be accepted as “kin” and help activate the complex social interaction structures to help us gauge our position to them. People who don’t fit that mold take extra time to match (on the order of hundreds of milliseconds I believe). This delay creates stress and can stimulate the fight-or-flight systems. It’s believed to be a biological source of racism.

We live in a patriarchal society. Our role model women that form our recognition systems often speak in certain ways – softer, higher pitched, more deferential, with more linguistic softeners. This ‘bakes in’ a concept of “woman” that fits that role, and when we meet a woman that doesn’t fit that role, we balk. The delay in recognition increases production of stress hormones (those hormones being the primary neurotransmitter in memory recall). A knock-on effect (or potentially designed in) is that it stimulates anxiety and threat detection. We feel annoyed.

Slide forwards again. We see Janeway in the Voyager pilot. Her voice doesn’t fit our person-categorization system very well. Stress hormones spike. We’re annoyed. Those hormones activate our threat evaluation system. This makes us evaluate things more negatively than we otherwise would. We dislike the show. Our forebrain constructs reasons for why we dislike the show, so as to create a compelling narrative that casts us as being good, reasonable, capable people, because that’s what forebrains do. The show plot is contrived, Janeway’s inconsistent and shallow, none of the characters are likeable. We turn off the TV.

It’s not to say that this is a bad evaluation of a TV show! I could do the same thing from the perspective of someone who really likes Voyager. I could slice it apart and talk about how the same systems cover over the poorly-made parts of the show, and how it’s all an exercise in the forebrain masking over blatant self-congratulation.

I don’t want to change anyones’ opinions on the show or the characters with this. I’d just like to show that those opinions one holds aren’t really statements about the show – they’re statements about one’s brain and what they value. Also, I’m very likely completely wrong, and you shouldn’t trust a thing I say!

Your rationalism homework for today is to find a piece of media that you dislike, and discover the root of why you dislike it. Bonus marks if you can subvert that dislike and bring yourself to the point of liking it after that discovery.

There’s all sorts of ways to use space magic and say, “Yeah, Rey could have done it”

Simplest is probably the way that Ben/Luke’s lightsaber has been through so much, it got some sort of Force imprinted on it. Rey had this very strong vision when she just touched it. Magic sword is … wait for it … magic! Obi-wan wasn’t just sticking around Luke, he was in the saber. It’s possible that Yoda and Anakin’s spirit also did something like that, either in their own sabers, or Luke’s.

It’s not just Finn’s “natural skill” allowing him to use it. It’s the saber itself helping out.

First Order’s troopers were also not clones, without the extra training during the growth process. Some even managed to work around the compulsion to follow orders. We have one example, and since they have a method of dealing with it, we know there are others.

Of course, the real answer to “why are the alt-right so against Star Wars” is “in the end, the fascists will lose”. The rest of their complaints are just rationalizing stuff.

The only ST series that I just couldn’t get into was Enterprise.

One of my favorite parts of TNG was Dr. Pulaski. For some reason, the character just appealed to me, and I was genuinely disappointed when Crusher returned. There was a scene in which Worf was going to have some Klingon delicacy (a beverage, IIRC) that was unhealthy for Klingons and toxic to humans. Pulaski dosed herself with the antidote so he wouldn’t be drinking alone. When she mispronounced Data’s name, and he corrected her, she was visibly intrigued that he could have an algorithm for bruised feelings.
“Data, data, what’s the difference?”
“One is my name, the other is not.”

I also liked the Doctor’s arc on Voyager, as he gradually grew a personality instead of remaining a holocartoon. His prickliness against Janeway’s brusqueness was always entertaining. I wept no tears when Neelix went away.

@Scildfreya:

Your rationalism homework for today is to find a piece of media that you dislike, and discover the root of why you dislike it.

“Reality” TV. It’s not hard to see what’s not to like. So much of it seems to be designed to humiliate the non-winners. The contestants themselves are abasing themselves for a shot at some money, attention, or fame. The whole genre strikes me as exploitative.

Adding to that are annoying production values: overly loud and brassy music that makes a TV airing one of these things dominate the attention of anyone within a four mile radius; excessive phony drama — a contestant has a hangnail or misses a bus and the music is more appropriate to an action movie where the hero has been shot, or the ground crumbled and he’s now dangling by one hand over a precipice. Toward the exciting finale, they’re likely to play a track more suited to Bruce Willis disarming a ticking nuke rather than two people about to find out which one of them wins a few hundred bucks.

Oh, and then there’s the way the genre is taking over the entire TV schedule like kudzu, elbowing aside quality shows with actually interesting content, because it’s much cheaper to produce and for some silly reason doesn’t get near-zero ratings. It’s not even just that the percentage of non-reality TV is going down; it’s that individual reality shows behave like 800-lb gorillas, moving around and randomly changing size and elbowing aside everything else whenever they do. Everything I actually ever like to watch gets pre-empted 3 to 4 times as much as 20 years ago, and nearly all of the excess is attributable to one reality show or another. Multiple shows I’ve liked (Fringe, Grimm, others) appear to have been killed by reality shows, because their final seasons showed a pattern where year after year the show would be pulled off the air in mid-season for several whole weeks at a time while some reality show suddenly wanted to air 2-hour instead of 1-hour episodes, and of course these shows returned to lower ratings as people forgot about them or assumed they’d been cancelled. And because they had story-arcs the ratings didn’t tend to recover. And eventually they got axed due to the declining ratings. In Fringe’s case I specifically remember that the guilty reality show was one of the cooking-themed ones. It would usurp Fringe’s time slot for several weeks every single year.

Some of these things might not be the reality shows’ faults, in a certain sense. For example, if they know two different shows are going to need to use the same time slot at two different points in a season, why don’t the scheduling people put all of show A before all of show B? Sure neither show can take advantage of all three sweeps periods then, but if that’s a problem, then they should redesign that as well. Most shows would work better IMO if they were divided into two or three “seasonlets” that aired contiguously — no reruns or preemptions — for say 8-10 weeks and had self-contained story arcs. Some recent shows have even been trending in that direction — Gotham and OUaT spring to mine — but they won’t go all the way to consolidating the new-episode-weeks into just a couple of contiguous blocks. Gotham was outrageously scheduled last season, having a long break over the holidays, then coming back for 3 episodes and disappearing again, this time for no good reason, for nearly THREE MONTHS before the rest of the back half aired in a big rush right before summer rerun season. The no-good reason? Some reality show wanted its time slot temporarily, of course.

But it’s not the broadcast network reality shows that are the worst, oh no. I reserve my greatest ire for the way the “ice road truckers” style shows have all but completely erased educational television from existence. No more history, geography, or science documentaries. No, now the cable channels nominally devoted to these topics are wall to wall pink-slime schedule filler, and most of that is, on top of that …

Blatant right-wing propaganda.

The cop/border security shows are the worst, of course. Hour after hour (in long marathons) of poor, brown, female, and foreign traveller people portrayed as barbarian hordes at the gate (or, in the cop case, already inside the gate) always trying to get away with something (usually something victimless, of course). The whole subgenre is a paean to authoritarianism: The rules are the rules, whosoever tries to circumvent them deserves whatever they’ve got coming, nevermind whether there is actually a legitimate public purpose served by the rules, and, of course, those insert-oppressed-group-here, always trying to get away with something. The impression these shows create is that only a thin blue line of valiant uniformed thugs (mostly white and nearly all male, natch) stands between civilization and anarchy, and but for them it would be some sort of Mad Max dystopia in literally seconds.

And of course, the Fox-watching uncle that inevitably exists in my family is also a giant fan of these propaganda shows.

Bonus marks if you can subvert that dislike and bring yourself to the point of liking it after that discovery.

I don’t think that’s going to be happening, in my case. The reasons for my dislike being what they are:

1. Many of these shows are exploitative.
2. Many of these shows are blatant propaganda for politics I don’t, and never will, agree with.
3. The producers of these shows are given special-snowflake privileges to bully those of other, nicer shows, resulting in pre-emptions that harm shows I find more desirable to watch and, worse, inducing the complete destruction of all educational television.

In case 1, to be entertained by the shows at issue I’d have to enjoy a vicarious thrill of superiority at seeing other people humiliated and abasing themselves in various ways, in a situation where this would constitute punching down rather than punching up.

In case 2, I’d have to combine the above with being willing to soak my brain in what’s basically Nazi propaganda. I’d sooner drink poison. At least the latter wouldn’t make me a danger to others on the way to killing me.

And in case 3 I’d have to no longer prefer genuine educational shows and decent storytelling to overgrown game shows that, all too often, are rigged or otherwise manipulated in dishonest ways, in addition to having the problems outlined above.

Thanks, but no thanks. 🙂

Grand Jury impaneled by Mueller. Clearly he thinks something real is going on.

Also, f*** WSJ’s damn pay wall.

@Surplus
Then first 2 seasons of Hell’s Kitchen were fun (it got so much worse after the producers seemed to realize Ramsay yelling at genuinely incompetent cooks was more crowd pleasing than watching people with potential and skill succeed despite the yelling). Sorry it fucked over your show tho. The seasonlet model is definitely a better one for all shows, but, yeah, sweeps… 🙁

Sarah Sanders and Trump find 10 year old who wants to mow WH lawn.

Next Week: An 11-year-old wants to hug Trump in the Oval Office.

Also… Grand Jury impaneled… I know I keep repeating myself, but this should lead to some sort of indictment for somebody. I’m quite sure Mueller can work out probable vote counts better than Corbyn (my “Senator” *pfbbbt*), plus he only needs a majority to indict.

People who fit that mold quickly will be accepted as “kin” and help activate the complex social interaction structures to help us gauge our position to them. People who don’t fit that mold take extra time to match (on the order of hundreds of milliseconds I believe). This delay creates stress and can stimulate the fight-or-flight systems. It’s believed to be a biological source of racism.”

@Scildfreja-
Thank you for that explanation! I see this hesitation frequently when people are faced with my children that don’t match. I have to confess, I do nothing to prepare them, preferring to see them work through that moment of discomfort as they process the “other” into “kin”. I think it’s good to challenge people that way. 🙂

@lastot,

That is one amazing over-analysis.

You’re right! It is. It goes much, much deeper than one might normally. I wasn’t trying to tell you that your beliefs were wrong or bad, I was just trying to describe how they came about.

Don’t mind me, my duck! I’ll stick to my studies and leave you in peace.

http://i.imgur.com/4OS3ucF.jpg

@Surplus, a lovely little exploration! I don’t like reality TV at all either, for a lot of the reasons you list – the exploitative authoritarian shows, the blatant product placement on home building shows, the loud music and contrived story. Nor would I suggest that’s something you should want to change your mind on!

I will say, though, that you should practice changing your mind about things. It’s an important thing, in my opinion.

Take a smaller bite. You don’t like the unrealistic storylines. Why? Some people think they’re fun. Try to pull apart why you dislike these stories. See if there’s anything meaningful in there. If there isn’t? Try to change yourself – just a little. Try to see the other perspective, see how someone could enjoy it. See the fun in it. It’s good exercise in empathy.

Thank you for replying!