TKO Creations

I will readily acknowledge that I did not follow the entire Amber Heard/Johnny Depp defamation case outside of summaries, so it is entirely possible that one side made nuanced arguments that I never heard.

Secondly, I am also going to acknowledge a potential bias before we begin; that I come from an abusive relationship with both parents, who were abusive in different ways, but abusive nonetheless, and a lot of the summarized arugments that went back and forth struck very familiar chords during their divorce case.

So, with that said, here we go.

In hindsight, I find little to celebrate or bemoan when you have two shitty people behaving like shitty people in something that didn’t deserve coverage outside of tabloids. I am distressed that this case became a lightning rod for MeToo and domestic violence because of it will inevitably be used to muddy waters and discourage people who were abused from coming forward.

If it had been my decision, I would have flipped the judgment; both absolutely defamed each other, but Heard’s career and life were far more heavily affected. But at the end of day, I am not going to shed any tears for either of them, because neither of them deserve my sympathy or my sorrow.

One aspect of this trial that really grated on me was how much the argument seemed to be centered on who started the abuse. “He/She started it!” wasn’t a valid argument when I was six years old; it’s not a valid argument now either. Who started the cycle of abuse in this case matters far less than who participated in it.

For example, when you have an abusive father, do we dismiss the man’s actions because that’s how his father raised him? Of course we don’t, nor should we, because we as a society accept that agency still exists. As some point, you make a willful decision to step up to the level of those that abused you, a point where you adopt their patterns of behavior, and once you do that, you are no longer a victim of abuse; you are an abuser yourself.

So, no, I really don’t care who started it; because my answer would be the same. Either Johnny Depp or Amber Heard decided it was okay to jump to the same weight class as the other, and they have thus lost my sympathy now that it’s all come to a head in front of a society eagerly devouring the drama as children are getting shot up in schools.

But that’s another rant for another time I guess. In summary, all I can say is good riddance, and may both of those clowns get out of the big top.

So, social media is on a bit of a boil over two separate but kinda similar-ish sorta events.

1. A school board in Tennessee removed the work Maus from their library, and banned it from being taught in their school. (Link)
2. A school board in Washington state removed the novel To Kill a Mockingbird from their curriculum’s required reading list. (Link)

Now, you may assume that being a writer, I’d be vehemently against the idea of “banning” books (in the sense of academic use). You’d be wrong. As far as it pertains to teaching purposes, I’m generally not bothered by what books are and aren’t specifically used. There are many books in this world, and any of them can be used by teachers to convey the messages and writing techniques that they wish to convey to students.

I do have a bit of a problem when they are used to score political points, which to different degrees both of these incidents are. A big clue is that neither school board has shown any indication what they intend to replace those books with in their curriculum… or even if they have any plans to do so. These were decisions to demonstrate to the parents just what these school boards believe in.

Sure, both school boards will give their reasons. To Kill a Mockingbird has problematic “white savior” narratives that run through it, or Maus contains “graphic imagery” that is disturbing to young students, for example. Many of the criticisms will be legitimate on its face. But at the end of the day, it’s hard to see how they aren’t a fairly clear political message.

(On an aside, to Mike Cochran of the McMinn County School Board: I had many emotions running through my mind as I read Maus. “Enjoyment” was certainly not one of them. While I am willing to accept that you poorly chose your words in an off-the-cuff quote, there is a significant number of the world’s population that would genuinely “enjoy” the imagery of that graphic novel, and those are not good people. Anyone who said they “enjoyed” Maus would be asked to provide a pretty damn good explanation for their choice of words lest they quickly find themselves no longer talking to me, and probably for good.)

That said, these two stories are, in fact, not the same, and our fourth pillar would be served to not treat them as if they are. Much like nearly everything else in our political discourse, one side is significantly more guilty and with significantly greater severity than the other. The conservatives and reactionaries among us are a far greater threat to our political discourse and sustainability of our society at this moment, and these two stories reflect that.

Maus was outright banned. Teachers are no longer permitted to discuss it. The school library is not allowed to have it on their shelves, or even in their stacks. For students whose only exposure to books is their school library (which is no doubt a non-zero number), Maus no longer exists in their world.

Meanwhile, To Kill a Mockingbird is simply no longer required reading for students in the Mukilteo school district. Teachers are still allowed to present it to students as supplementary text (and I’m sure many will). Students can still be recommended it and it can still be found in their school libraries. Depending on what book is chosen, there is not necessarily any meaningful loss in the education of these children. Presuming, of course, that a replacement actually is chosen or at the very least some rationalization that other books already in the required reading list can fill that niche.

Which it may not be, because again… it’s hard to see how at its core, this move isn’t political posturing of its own. But at the same time, it is long past due to stop approaching such decisions as binary actions of equal severity.

Welcome back to another (extremely intermittent) commentary on people and the things they do to be noticed and stay noticed.

In today’s episode, we meet Tectone.

Tectone is a content creator, most notably for the game Genshin Impact, but not exclusively. Now, Tectone’s typical creative process runs something like this:

1. Make a juvenile but otherwise largely innocuous bawdy tweet about something, like “waifus” or the size of a game character’s chest or ass.
2. Soak in the angry replies from the professionally outraged on Twitter who seem to make a living out of overreacting to anything that happens to come into their vicinity.
3. Make a Youtube video complaining about how he’s being attacked on Twitter.
4. Repeat.

Now, let’s get some things out of the way.

Firstly, this process is entirely intentional. Tectone knows exactly what he’s doing.

Secondly, there’s absolutely nothing new about this. If anything, Tectone has merely refined the process of instigating a fight, then crying foul when he gets exactly what he was looking for, that has existed on social media pretty much since it’s inception.

Thirdly, Twitter is certainly filled to the brim with people who haven’t matured emotionally since fifteen and giggle delightfully when someone makes a tweet about “[insert character name here]’s massive mommy milkers,” and a legion of people who are too chickenshit to fight in real life, so they trawl the internet for hours every day looking for an opportunity to throw metaphorical hands.

Of course, none of this should happen this way. Is Tectone playing down to the juvenile? Yeah, he is. But there is absolutely nothing the dude says that should warrant anything more than an eyeroll. The proper response to his games is to mute the conversation, then go on with your day. Let him have fun with the forever teenagers. It simply isn’t worth ruining your day over. They aren’t an army of dangerous incels. They’re a bunch of just out of college aged kids that still laugh at fart jokes.

On the flip side, you kinda start losing sympathy for a person that keeps sticking his hands in a cage filled with angry dogs and inevitably gets bit. Should there be a pack of angry dogs in that cage? Probably not. But they are, and at some point, you lose the right to whine when the dogs in that cage attack you after you’ve stuck your grubby mitts in their face one too many times. I mean… what do you think is going to happen?

At the end of the day, social media has gone all in with the old journalistic maxim of, “All press is good press.” It doesn’t matter what you say, as long as a million people react to it.

And it’s just as tiring to witness now as it was twenty years ago.

Okay… deep breath time.

I’m about to criticize some good friends.

Now, as I do so, I want to lay down some opening caveats. Firstly, there is no way the creators here could have anticipated what was going to unfold in our society at the time they committed to their story. Secondly, it’s not really a criticism of them, as much as it is a criticism of our entertainment and the tropes it leans on. Thirdly, people should be able to make the distinction between fantasy and reality.

Now, with all that said, let me paint you a rhetorical picture.

A cabal of elitists, potentially spanning the entire globe, have been pulling the strings of society for decades, if not longer, manipulating people, killing people, starting wars, conflicts, abusing men, women and children, etc… all to advance their twisted machinations of power… until a small movement of scrappy heroes untangle all those sinister knots and finally take the fight to the secret society!

Does that story sound familiar? You’ve probably seen that many, many times in the dramas of our age. It’s one of the most enduring tropes in dramatic entertainment for the last fifty years.

I’ve never been a fan of “Illuminatti” style storylines. I don’t think they represent how people or societies work at all. We can’t even keep a secret between three people for more a couple days. A group of logistically thousands (if not more), operating in secrecy across an entire country or the world? There is no way that doesn’t come unraveled even before a second generation has a chance to take the reins.

Think about it. There is no massive covert operation that has survived more than a couple of decades, even in the most repressive countries in our planet’s history. And even those were more of the “open secret” variety where anyone who wanted to know could have found out, but there was an implied investment of the public to not confront it.

Watergate literally came unraveled because one dude couldn’t figure out where to stand. You want me to buy that a cabal has gone [x] number of years without even one critical misstep? Sorry… my suspension of belief only stretches so far.

So when The Uniques went head on into the secret society angle, my eyes started rolling. And they kept rolling as it ticked every single “conspiracy” trope in the book. Our intrepid heroes, taking on the “burden” of exposing this themselves? Check. The nutty recluses that have a few critical pieces but are too out there for anyone to take seriously? Check. The galaxy-brained chess masters who have every step our heroes make plotted out ten moves ahead of time? Check.

I am giving the creators the benefit of the doubt, because they have been so very good at twisting tropes on their head. But… ugh… I will admit that this particular part of the volume has been a tiring slog for me.

But now, I have another reason to not like this type of story.

Because that picture I painted for you at the start of this blog post? That was also in the heads of the people who charged the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021. People are believing this sort of shit, and it’s getting people hurt, and even killed.

Our entertainment is awash in conspiracy theories. As I said, it has been one of the most enduring tropes in our entertainment for a long time. We are obsessed with conspiracies, and I do believe that our fiction is tinting how people see the real world.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying Comfort Love and Adam Withers have any culpability in a bunch of morons who thought baby-eating leftists were trying to steal an election from Donald Trump. And they would have no way of foreseeing this happening at the time they were plotting their magnificent story.

But it is informing me as I read through this storyline, which is but one of hundreds and hundreds of such stories that fill our media every year. And it reinforces to me that I really need to remain committed to a different direction.

A moment of disclosure, I wasn’t really a Dr. Seuss fan even as a child. While my peers were reading Horton Hears a Who, I was reading Where the Sidewalk Ends. While my friends were flipping through pages of The Cat in the Hat, I was lost in the pages of Where the Wild Things Are.

Point is, this current scuffle over the legacy of one Theodor Geisel doesn’t hit me as deeply or strikes the core of my childhood like it does a good many people. So, if I seem particularly dismissive of the impact he has had on so many developing minds, I apologize. Nonetheless, as he has become the latest front in the United States of America’s ever expanding culture war, I am compelled to speak on it, as it ties to something else I have noticed repeatedly as modern society tries to reconcile with its past.

The facts aren’t really in dispute. During Geisel’s rise as a cartoonist, he did a lot of work that contained exceedingly blatant racism. As in nakedly obvious, even for the early 20th century. It was a trait that informed even his later work where he tried to be more inclusionary. And he did try, even if the work was more allegorical rather than direct… and even though it still fell short in many instances.

This reality and problematic history has been met quite frequently with the same refrain that a considerable number of historical creators and figures when their own backgrounds are brought to the forefront of the discussion.

“They were a product of their times!”

On its surface, this is a true statement. As bad as we can be culturally in terms of inclusion and tolerance in the current day, past eras were far worse in nigh every aspect, and it is easily seen by what was considered acceptable discourse in those times by those who influenced those cultural periods, and that culture would inform and influence every single person who grew up and contributed to it.

So, I do not object to the statement. I object to its usage.

Because when this line has been invoked, it is used as a deflection. It’s used in hopes of burying the troublesome so that it doesn’t have to be reckoned with, and those who enjoy it can continue to enjoy it with a clean conscience. They want a clean break that doesn’t require retrospection… because that would invariably lead to introspection, and there’s nothing your average American hates more than having to look in the spiritual mirror and take stock of the warts on their soul.

We want to be free of the troublesome aspects of our icons, without even knowing why its troublesome to begin with. Even if it was good faith attempt (and in most cases, it isn’t), it is akin to sweeping all the dirt under the rug. It doesn’t actually solve the problem.

I’d contend it’s of utmost importance to remember that everyone is a product of their time, especially as we consume their work. I dare say that is vital. Because it’s with that knowledge that we can learn and build upon the past to be better in our time.