Black Tea: ssssawingbattabattabatta...

Play Ball!

Hello, everyone!

This week hasn’t been an absolutely stellar one for my focus, so I figured what would be very good in particular was to air out some of the thoughts that have been expanding in my brain this week.

To that end, here is a very quick cup of name-brand black tea about one of the weirdest recent parts of the internet, some idleness about justice, and also some more WandaVision thoughts. Enjoy!

Splortsmanship Is Back!

Earlier this week, one of the greatest and most peculiar internet phenomena of the millennium returned from its last Grand Siesta to bless the people with strange last names, stranger weather, and the all-powerful grace of splorts.

Yes, folks: Blaseball is back.

If you don’t know what Blaseball is… you know what, I can’t actually help you? The inimitable Cat Manning has not just one primer, but several (just… just subscribe to Cat’s own Substack, it’s grand). If video is your preferred method of information gathering, the Blaseball News Network has a really good recap video of the first eight seasons of the game, and the game itself has invited the Anchor himself to present a recap of the entire game up to Season 11 literally at time of writing this paragraph. (I do indeed hope the Anchor is alright.) There is also the very impeccable wiki which, like most wikis, I promise will most likely leave you more deliciously baffled than you may have been if you didn’t read the wiki. And if you care about the ‘real-world’ (eugh) implications of the game, here’s someone who looks an awful lot like the Anchor talking about it on a mechanical and narrative level over on People Make Games.

Every once in a while a thing happens on the internet where a part of the joy is the fact that you’re sharing something incomprehensible with a fandom that is as dedicated to its unfathomable glee as they are to the poetic work of deciphering it. Blaseball has a lot of chaotic energy built up in it as a rule—it’s all the best parts of sports fandom and all the best parts of media fandom with a dash of improv and the guts of an unflinching, uncaring neural network in the background, so sometimes very strange things happen.

But the beauty of something like Blaseball appearing right now is that, just like the present moment in the real world, sometimes very strange things happen. It feels very silly to say that blaseball is ‘the thing we needed right now’, but there is a kind of honesty in knowing that an online idle-game about a bastardisation (read: exaltation) of American sports replicates something genuine in its… [checks notes] incineration of a batter by a rogue umpire under the dark and foreboding visage of a solar eclipse. Because that surrealism does still weirdly capture something true about the now: that anything can happen, that it can be unfathomable and most likely have very negative consequences for people who were just minding their business and trying to make the best of the thing they loved, but that you can still find some manner of joy or solace (or, if need be, dark magicks) in community.

That’s perhaps the thing that blaseball teaches the very best: that a good community can gather around something weird and be the best thing for each other. It is the fans, not the developers, who witnessed the very strange separate facts that a.) Jaylen Hotdogfingers was the first blaseball player to die in the diamond, b.) Jaylen Hotdogfingers was still available to be idolised for her contribution to the splort, and c.) that it was possible to earn a blessing that would send the 14th most idolised player to the blessed team and responded by attempting to perform the most long-winded act of digital necromancy they could imagine—without even being sure of the effects. The team at The Game Band simply accepted their terms. Much of the game goes very well like this: the game sets up strange terms and rules in isolation, and the imagination of its fanbase considers how they play together, even when they don’t even know what those rules are or do. And the team decided to let the fiction take precedence, and the feedback loop between the strange and arcane mechanics and the eager and wild fandom narrative has been doing the story a grand service ever since.

Blaseball is in a lot of ways just a wild and nonsensical distraction for a few minutes every hour, but it’s also a peculiar evidence of the things that have given a lot of people comfort during quarantine: community, an enthusiastic embrace of media, a willingness to let the surreal hold our attention, and the fandom energy

The Sound That Justice Makes

For the past few weeks, I have been contemplating whether there is actually such a thing as a place where everyone is safe.

For a while now, it’s seemed like every creative space has within it more than one bad actor who has taken advantage of the goodwill of their neighbours and the patient language of activism to avoid responsibility for their actions. There are too many to name. In the last few weeks alone, I have been restless with the acknowledgment that there may be people I admired who have refused to take responsibility for their own violations—an upsetting thing to wrestle with since breaking off my relationship with one of my first professional spaces, when those there chose to defend abusers and seek their own advancement under the façade of true allyship with victims.

One of the most difficult thoughts to confront in the face of how tiring and angering these feelings have been is how to be truly abolitionist when I admit that I am in pain. Suffice it to say that I definitely get it if someone were to say that they perfectly believe that their abuser is incapable of taking accountability and accepting that they’ve harmed someone. Suffice it to say that I also definitely get it if someone were to say that they didn’t care very much about whether someone was capable of becoming a better person in some imagined future, because their self-improvement does not undo the harm they’ve caused. But what does that mean for the perpetrator of harm? Does it mean that such potential rehabilitation is moot, that the lingering oppression of the culture of intimate partner violence makes abusers irredeemable at their core? Does it mean that the growth necessary to make amends for abuse is so invisible that it’s impossible to even know whether you are safe with anyone? Are those potentialities arguably even more unsafe for survivors and those most likely to experience harm?

I was already fairly largely abolitionist before I saw Abigail Thorn’s latest video on the topic, but one of the things I particularly admire her video for in comparison to most conversations on the topic is… she’s willing to admit that, hey, there are some contradictory feelings that come up in our search for justice, and we only really come to a conclusion about abolition as a solution by confronting those feelings head on.

Maybe there is a part of each of us, even the most anarchic of abolitionists, which harbours a very strong retributivist nucleus that, if you don’t confront, will grow and become sturdy without your noticing. In a lot of ways, the things we consider fundamental about police and prisons are as new or newer than the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and let’s just say that wasn’t a good idea either. But wanting to be ‘tough on crime’ is an easy instinct: it can often come from the same place that wants to see someone lose something you think they don’t deserve, making it on some level a sense of schadenfreude more than a sense of justice. (I don’t say that as a mockery. I get it, really. But what does it do?)

One of the things that I find most upsetting in the wake of our international reckoning with harassment, abuse, and violence in our professional spaces is what men do when they have found themselves staring into the space of accountability. It so happens that a lot of men just… disappear. This isn’t to say that many of them should stay—survivors should have the power to insist that they want to continue to work and thrive in safe spaces separate from their abusers, and should be empowered to keep that stricture alive no matter how much time passes; in fact, I speak for my own experience when I say I wish it were easier for survivors to truly evict those who harmed them from their professional spaces. But what irks me is when men… don’t say anything. They don’t acknowledge what they’ve done at all, they don’t give any sense of remorse or understanding. They just flee the scene, their social media reduced to a wasteland where accountability could have been a brief, if doubted, oasis. That lack of reckoning only breeds more doubt: it’s the space where people assume that the perpetrator’s real goal is to lay low, find another creative space where they are unidentifiable, and continue to prey.

What matters equally to me, I think, is that they find a space to forget it. That because the work to achieve true accountability is so disconcerting and self-alienating, even those who don’t want to get in trouble again never do the work to interrogate their harm, so they ultimately end up ill-equipped to truly break the cycle, both in terms of their own capacity for action and their own capacity for emotional awareness. Another complication here is that discussions about rehabilitation from violent crime is the space of abolition discourse where everyone (even otherwise abolitionist-minded folk) seems to assume that abolition is about doing nothing at all and not actively replacing the punitive or the carceral with something more proactive and affirming.

We need to find a better way to create space for bad actors in our communities to engage with such a proactive rehabilitative alternative. And I don’t know how. I say I don’t know how because I know that the nugget of rage in me will sometimes cloud my sight to the answer. I want perpetrators to be given a space where they can say, ‘just because I haven’t hurt anyone in a long time doesn’t mean I don’t owe myself a deeper knowledge of what happened and what I owe my space’. I want communities and their leaders to have a space where they can admit that they fear the ways in which their otherwise good work can be destroyed by the selfishness of bad actors under their brand. Hell, I want survivors to have the space to say that they wish those who hurt them would suffer.

I can only hope that within that unlocking-space is some greater clarity about how we truly make our workspaces safer and more affirming for everyone all at once. I do believe in abolition, and I do believe that its true merit will be won in confronting the issues of abuse and harassment, but we owe each other a lot of very challenging dialogue first, which may be a long time coming.

an adjective meaning ‘grossly and glaringly offensive‘

While we’re on the topic of justice…

Sooooooo… WandaVision’s done, eh? What did you think?

[ahem]

[expect some mild to moderate spoilers in the forecast from this point onward]

For what it’s worth, I’ll open by saying I enjoyed the finale of WandaVision. It wasn’t perfect by any means. For an episode that was a few minutes longer than any other single episode of the season, it did have moments where it felt like no matter what kind of action took place on screen it was a bit dragging. Also, as someone who was incredibly invested in Monica Rambeau as a character, it did feel like a bit of a letdown to see her finally enter her superheroic space only to be underutilised in the combat department (although I get why on some level, and don’t think it rises to the point of full-blown spitefulness rather than a finale juggling a bit too many balls a bit too haphazardly during pandemic filming—after all, I feel like the finale underutilised Agent Woo and Darcy, too). But it wasn’t bad.

But a lot of ink has been spilled at this point about how strange, even un-heroic it felt for a Marvel series to end with the mostly dour revelation that, even though Westview was now free from the overbearing magic that controlled its denizens’ every action, they would get no true closure, no greater sense of justice against the so-called superheroine who enslaved them for weeks. In a genre so often about powerful people doing the right thing at all costs, how come these folks are only afforded… freedom from slavery?

Framing it like that makes it seem facetious, but it is a fair question. If it were Iron Man or Captain America who had somehow used his power to subjugate a small town, the argument goes, we would not simply want them to stop, but to witness the consequences of their actions and resolve to make things better. What about Wanda would make her exempt from the same? Her grief? Others have lost just as much, you may say—hell, one would argue that such a calibre of loss is par for the world these characters live in. Is it because she’s a female Avenger? (This is not a notion worthy of elaborating, I’d wager.) How dare Monica look Wanda in the eye and imply that she had ‘sacrificed’ something that they ‘will never know’ when instead they had been figuratively and literally shackled by her for months?

So why, then, is she let off the hook?

That’s the thing: she isn’t.

TVLine’s Matt Webb Mitovich had a pretty decent conversation with the show’s team that seemed to clarify that the intention was something more complex and upsetting than immediate justice:

As director of the Wanda/Monica scene at the end, [director Matt] Shakman says “there were many versions of that, for sure, but nothing that was much longer.” He then echoes [head writer Jac] Schaeffer’s reverence for the complicated moment, saying, “I think it’s a beautiful scene. We’re not trying to let Wanda off the hook at all. The daggers that she’s getting from every townsperson as she walks through town should clearly show that she’s not being forgiven, and she won’t be forgiven, by them. She understands that.”

It can feel like it’s not enough… and that’s the goal, I think. It’s kind of hard to prosecute someone after you’ve just learned that they have the power of spontaneous creation and that any feeling of sorrow or guilt will suddenly and accidentally trigger its worst blowbacks. And while it isn’t any consolation to these people that they barely even get an apology from her for using her newfound family as justification for their suffering… I think that’s the goal, too. There are not going to be any easy answers out of that kind of experience. Wanda’s tragedy brought out the worst in her even without her acknowledgment, and she will still owe these people true amends.

Justice in fiction is very complicated to me. On the one hand, I really do respond strongly when I see a redemption arc that seems thoroughly unearned, or when the response of the aggrieved seems diminished in the face of trustworthy protagonism, because that feels like it isn’t how the world works. On the other, I think that a lot of why I give WandaVision grace is because its alternative isn’t either an easy trust or an unchallenged distrust, but just the truthful acknowledgment that it would take more than a sudden apology and a quick magical fixer-upper on Westview to provide closure to those she hurt. She has to come to a reckoning of her own first—as part of the process of genuine atonement, she has to know what she did wrong, know why, and know how to confront that part of herself until it changes—before she can ever see any of those people again. Anything less to me would be hollow.

I suspect I will have a lot more to say about this in a wider context as it pertains to suffering, abuse, and closure in drama—I would love, for instance, to draw some otherwise off-kilter comparisons I’ve seen between WandaVision, Jessica Jones, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, and more. It may even be a longer, more serious essay I may host over on my Patreon page sometime later this year (if I can muster the focus). If you want to support the development of this newsletter, as well as the rest of my work, you can do so by subscribing to my Patreon below!

Tonight’s Tunes

hey look a new Hikaru Utada track!

This week saw the premiere of the much-anticipated Evangelion 3.0+1.0: Thrice Upon A Time in Japanese theatres. While it will arguably be quite some time before it’s available for English-language audiences, by all accounts it will be somewhat close to the kind of conclusion I’ve wanted for some time to the Evangelion story, wherever this may fall in the ‘timeline’ of Ikari Shinji’s story.

I think very fondly of the Rebuild of Evangelion. I very strongly believe that it exists to plug some of the very serious ideological gaps that emerge from the way people speculate about the series. Suffice it to say I think there is a kind of ‘otaku AT Field’ that distorts our best attempts to step away from the ways that we tend to latch on to certain interpretations of the characters and storylines we like or dislike. I don’t say this out of any harshness, but by simply reframing the way in which we encountered those first moments from the series, and drawing them closer to much darker and more peculiar realisations later on, I truly feel like the Rebuild gave the entire breadth of Evangelion canon more room to dwell on the interpersonal questions it is best known for, and to reckon with their answers a bit more removed from bias. (Although, to be fair, that could just be because I’m biased toward valuing specific things about Evangelion.)

Evangelion as a franchise, even its silliest parts, fall into place for me as a very curiously articulate observation of how we create and maintain relationships, especially how young men experience their own romantic and sexual desire. So much of what presents on its face as the overarching story of dozens of generally emotionally broken people struggling to deal with loneliness and ennui manifests itself first and foremost as the story of a teenage boy surrounded by attractive women who only work with him because his neglectful father willed it so. What lesser fans consider ‘whiny’ or ‘beta’ about Shinji is that he is but a teenage boy: willing to withhold his frustrations so that people would like him, likely to deny himself romantic expressions so as not to be rejected, struggling with the harshness of his family dynamic, and all too willing to silently consider that someone else’s fault instead of ask what he’d like to do about it. It’s what, for my money, makes the otherwise controversial series-run ending so powerful to me: it’s a kid learning (in the most surreal way possible) that no matter how undeniable it is that he’s been dealt a bad hand, he has some capacity to eke out a greater value in his life if only he chooses to see that life as valuable in itself and not for validation’s sake.

That’s also why I love Hideaki Anno’s next attempt to bring the series to an end, the aptly titled End of Evangelion—that is, the movie where we catch up to the story just before Shinji would have had the above revelation, and imagine what it would have looked like if, just for a moment, he hadn’t at all. If he thought and behaved not only as a teenage boy might, but as a teenage boy who hadn’t ever asked himself any deeper questions about his desires or his habits might. They’re not good decisions, but from a larger cultural perspective, they’re not out of place, either.

I suspect Anno has been trying to, for want of a better word, kill Evangelion for some time. Not only in the sense of simply bringing the franchise to a rewarding end, or even working to uncouple it from its otaku attachments, but also to bring it to the point where it can say all that it can say about people (even and especially young men), their bodies, and how bodies connect both through intimacy and through violence. I reckon even here there will be a lot unsaid—the very notion is much too large if you set out to say everything at all. But I’m very curious what does end up being said, and how.

Also, a new Rebuild also meant a new Hikaru Utada song, which I absolutely loved the first time I heard it. It’s perhaps the very best song for what may be the final attempt to kill Evangelion: full of longing, but also the closure of accepting that this moment must come to an end eventually.

I can’t wait to finally see the movie when it finally drops for the rest of us. Until then, I’m gonna be listening to this on repeat.

Dregs

That’s all for now!

A reminder that you can help keep this newsletter and the rest of my work afloat by supporting me on Patreon, buying me a coffee on Ko-fi or sending a donation via PayPal, or by buying one of my small game projects over on Itch! And by all means, if something intrigued you here, don’t hesitate to share it!

Before I go, though, here are some questions:

1. Rooting for anyone in blaseball? If so, which team?

2. What are your thoughts on justice as it is or can be? (Without specifics,) are there any fears or frustrations that help shape those thoughts for you?

3. What songs have been stuck in your head right now? Bonus points if it’s from the soundtrack to a movie you enjoy!

Here’s some Fantastic Cats on the way out!

Until next time, I hope you enjoyed the tea!