Rosencrantz2
12hr ago
I agree it's not how the story is framed (it's not a meta story), but it's how the story works. We wouldn't accept her being rewarded if she didn't demonstrate her character by having gone through something tough first. Granted, the Miller's Boy and Cat is not exactly the same in that the princess chooses Foolish Hans, then tests him with the seven years of labour before actually rewarding him. But it's made explicit that he is neither talented nor clever, just someone who gets on with drudgework in an unquestioning manner, so the message is similar in its appeal: that if you're lucky, you may find yourself catapulted from your long suffering peasant life to fabulous riches without having to do anything particularly out of the ordinary.
Rosencrantz2
13hr ago
No, she isn't proving her worthiness to the prince with these actions. She's proved her worthiness to us the audience through her previous years of suffering with dignity though. The prince etc is her reward for that from our point of view, even though he probably doesn't know anything about her other than her beauty. You'll see this sometimes the other way round where an action hero gets the girl at the end despite her having only a very vague idea of what he's just done. E.g. he runs out of a burning building and they kiss, all she knows is that he's survived. Narratively her love is the reward for what we the audience know makes him worthy. (In such stories there's usually also an A plot in which he saves the world or such.)
I could believe that in-story characters rewarding a protagonist just for being beautiful and themselves is more common with female characters. I think they still have to manifest their character in action for us the audience to see they deserve to be selected by the Prince though.
Rosencrantz2
1d ago
It's true, but what the boy has to do to prove to the cat he is worthy is pretty easy – just stick around and do the chores he is told to do. And it's worth noting that even in Cinderella, she is not literally taken from rags to riches with no agency. She has to 'do' a few things like blend in at a high society event, disguising her real identity; sprint out of the ball before midnight to avoid humiliation; and escape being locked in a room by her stepmother so that she can try on the slipper and prove she is the woman the prince danced with.
Rosencrantz2
1d ago
The Poor Miller's Boy and the Cat is pretty much exactly Cinderella but with a boy. Basically the king's daughter, in the form of a cat picks a poor and mistreated but hardworking boy to live with her in a golden palace. https://www.grimmstories.com/en/grimm_fairy-tales/the_poor_millers_boy_and_the_cat
I guess it's not as famous because it's a bit less plausible a fantasy for a boy to be picked out of obscurity by a princess than for a girl to be picked by a prince.
Rosencrantz2
2d ago
I've only watched the first season of the Diplomat, but there is loads of stuff of her hating to dress up for functions, mentioning she needs the toilet or her chair squeaking at undiplomatic moments, and such. It struck me as a character flaw that was not really a flaw, because she is played by Keri Russell and basically looks perfect and is perfectly charming throughout and even when stumbling over her words. Like you I actually quite liked her character and the show, and only meant my crowd-pleasing comment to apply to that aspect of her characterisation, in contrast to a show where the heroine's flaws make her genuinely offputting to a big slice of the audience.
Re Fleabag, I think her flaws in ep1 are genuinely offputting (they did put you off, and me, in that I watched the pilot and didn't return to it for a couple of years) and in that sense the show is not a people pleaser. It may be in others, sure, though I think the winking naughtiness turns out later to be well-rooted in character (and actually in character pain).
Rosencrantz2
2d ago
It's kind of the MO for prestigey shows to have a reverse save-the-cat moment or several early on to make you dislike the main character, then get you to sympathise with them regardless as you get to know them over the course of the series. For this reason it may not be a bad thing for a creator if their audience dislikes the character at first – certainly I didn't much like Fleabag (the character) in the pilot ep, though I came to like her more. Any online man who's apt to hate her initially is therefore actually positioned to have an especially powerful viewing experience – though only if they actually persevere with the show.
Rosencrantz2
2d ago
As a small public service here are a few excellent shows with extremely flawed female lead characters: Nighty Night, Enlightened, Six Feet Under, Pluribus, Killing Eve, Fleabag. Many more, but these spring to mind.
The more crowd pleasing you go the less flawed they get, so you get The Diplomat on Netflix where the main character is basically a bit disorganised and supposedly not good at manners and fashion. Or Homeland where our character is paranoid but her mental illness feels kind of separate to her (she is fundamentally good but has to deal with her own mania and paranoia).
But dig deeper and there is plenty of entertainment out there that features flawed women by creators with a deeper understanding of character than the person in the above video, and they aren't actually offensive to feminists or feminism at all as far as I can tell.
Rosencrantz2
9d ago
It's pretty extraordinary to think that a country currently invading a European country, that has within living memory occupied other European countries like Estonia, leaving deep psychological scars, and that constantly operates military sorties, assassinations and influence operations across Europe, and that often talks about its grand ambitions to regain territory and influence in Europe, is not a threat to Europe.
Rosencrantz2
11d ago
I think they do "teach you how to learn" but that really consists in widening the distance between checkpoints and motivating you to figure out how to learn by yourself. Some people can develop these skills alone but it isn't easy.
Rosencrantz2
13d ago
Noting my approval for this post because it's a rare successful attempt by a (presumably) right wing person to express left wing beliefs in more or less the terms they'd use themselves.
Rosencrantz2
16d ago
If you conclude or agree that someone is experiencing visceral distress, you are agreeing that they have qualia because of what the words mean.
It's at least debatable, e.g. https://academic.oup.com/book/3353/chapter-abstract/144438238?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Rosencrantz2
17d ago
If you are wondering why your opponents, who you have modelled as cartoonishly evil, are not acting cartoonishly evil, maybe it's because your model is wrong? Maybe you should revise your model, rather than detailing all the ways their actual behavior could diverge less from your imagination's paintings of how awful they could be?
Is it cartoonishly evil to kill people in theatrical and spectacular ways, or just a form of human nature? Romans killed people like this all the time and people loved it. There's really no reason it can't happen again. This could be the starting point for it happening again if it's what America wants.
Rosencrantz2
17d ago
I doubt they'd allow him to be barefaced and either look defiant or cry though. Instead they'd probably put something over his head and won't that take away any dignity?
Rosencrantz2
17d ago
I don't have firm positions on some of these things – I should say I don't really go in for qualia talk, but if pushed I am more inclined to deny qualia altogether than say that rocks, AIs and humans all have them.
Happy to accept that an AI could have something somewhat like a functional analogue of pain. I just don't care that much about it though. The AI version of pain does not have the connection to real damage, to possible death, and the possible repercussions on other people that a human's pain has, and I count these all as part of the wider context for a functional definition of human suffering.
Rosencrantz2
17d ago
I think we can differ about that depending on one's views of qualia. If I meet a human who recoils from suffering. Who has all the same physiological responses and averse thoughts to it as you and I. Whose brain reliably produces tokens of the type, 'Oh, that's awful, I have to do something to help those poor people' etc etc, and never has any tokens of the type 'I'm different to other people, there's nothing that it feels like to be me' ... well, I am happy to term that person as experiencing visceral distress. I don't need to additionally know if there are qualia present to conclude they are experiencing distress. One might also say, qualia are definitionally present in such a case. (In the end this is just another version of the p-zombies debate.)
Rosencrantz2
17d ago
I know I experience qualia.
You say that, but how do I know you know? To be sure, it's a pretty involved debate but I tend to think it is possible to identify pain and suffering functionally, without especially needing to use qualia language (i.e. without taking a position on whether there is something in-principle third-person unknowable about consciousness or not).
Only entities with qualia would find it viscerally distressing, so if you don't think qualia is a helpful posit, you don't think this is a helpful posit, either. Besides which, we have good inductive reasons to believe that some humans that have qualia don't find causing people pain viscerally distressing, so it's not a principle you can universally reason from.
Right but I also tend to think visceral distress is defined functionally without needing to rule either way on the presence of qualia, so I deny your premise. I also do think that we can reason universally based on a scaffolding built on subjective feelings – a kind of quasi-realism. Again it's a philosophical can of worms though.
Rosencrantz2
17d ago
Qualia are an unhelpful posit at the best of times to the extent we can't be truly certain anyone or anything does or doesn't experience them. Should we be kind to rocks because pansychism could be true and they too might experience qualia?
A better reason to object to causing people pain is because it's viscerally distressing and suggests the inflicter might do the same to us or our loved ones. I personally think this ai torment experiment is only distressing to the extent it indicates the people behind it might do similar to people or animals, and it only slightly shifts my expectations there.
Rosencrantz2
26d ago
I know all of them and so does my wife. :)
Rosencrantz2
26d ago
It now seems the "plotters" called the police on themselves (or at least one of them did) and the vans just contained fuel.
Guess: someone paid them to nick diesel and when they realised they were near the RAF base they thought maybe they were being used as stooges for a terror attack?!
Additional stab in the dark: they actually were being used as stooges but their paymasters were just testing their reliability and the fact they got caught has prevented the intelligence services making arrests up the chain.
Rosencrantz2
26d ago
The Odyssey really is a great example here. I came out thinking the film was basically pretty poor, but still grateful for all the resources and craft put into creating a common point of reference and discussion for a few weeks, and full of goodwill to Christopher Nolan. Seems like ever increasing amounts of effort need to be burned to create such moments in the current age.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
Language is limited whereas thoughts are not.
I don't buy this. There are cases of "I'll know it when I see it", sure, but a lot more of people thinking they know exactly what they think, but then finding out, the more they use language to talk and write about it, that they never knew in the first place.
As an example from my experience, clients in advertising often think they know what they want. Then they see it and realise they don't. The process goes on until they arrive at something they are happy with. Is it what was in their head originally? Basically never.
One thing I love about this forum is in stumbling across a post or comment that brilliantly summarizes my internal thoughts in a far more coherent and eloquent way than I could ever hope to do myself>
I gently suggest you introspect when this happens next. Are you really perceiving a match between what is written and what you already think? Or are you just intuitively nodding along at something without it touching the sides? Consider what is the difference between those two things. When you are on the verge of putting a smart thought into words, do you know with confidence that you already have a smart thought? Or does it sometimes feel disappointing when it is on the page?
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
Well put. Writing changes our ideas and forces us to bring thought, intuition and word into alignment. All three can change in the process. If you don't go through that usually painful process I am sceptical you are getting an ai to accurately express your thoughts. I think it's much more likely you are allowing the ai to determine what you think. Unwritten thoughts are just too inchoate for us to accurately say of an ai response "oh yes, that's exactly how I would have put it".
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
No, it's ambiguous and how you'd interpret it would depend on the speaker and context. It could be said by someone who absolutely loves pop music. A true opera lover might well hate shitty opera more than anyone.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
I don't think your example works? I like pop music, but I hate shitty pop music. I guess if I only ever say 'shitty' and 'pop music' together that would be strange, not sure that's the case with masculinity and the left though depends who you are referring to.
It's an interesting thought experiment. There have been uncountable versions of Cinderella around the world, probably some of which have originated independently. It really is a foundational story type. Perhaps there are versions like the one you suggest where Cinderella is mistreated but doesn't distinguish herself in how she reacts to that. And sure the story would still work as there'd be satisfaction in seeing someone who's been treated unfairly winning the lottery, husband and wealth wise. But it's gonna work best if we think she's a good person who bears her misfortune with patience and is kind to small animals. And if we think she's a bad person, who joins her ugly sisters in mistreating others and would happily join their ranks, the story is hardly going to work at all.
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