2020’s The Invisible Man answers those questions while weaving depictions of a physically and psychologically abusive relationship into the narrative. It is a story about a woman, Cecilia (played by Elizabeth Moss), trying to fight the abject, possessive, and oppressive nature of her ex-husband, Adrian Griffin (played by Oliver-Jackson Cohen), and regaining control over her life. The movie manifests horror through the film conventions of sound and cinematography—the audience’s auditory and visual guides that place us in the world of the narrative—first in the shape of uncanny psychological warfare and then via the reveal of the monstrous male, which ruptures the uncanny, and the conflict’s transformation of Cecilia into a monstrous female. The score and sound design in relation to the camera movements, position, focus, and distance are presented as antithetically complementary to one another when depicting the delusional effects that invisibility can create and, at other times, work in tandem to enhance the visual impact of the invisibility suit and the emotional impact of Cecilia’s revenge, and it is through analyzing their use in select scenes with the aid of a theoretical framework explaining the uncanny, the abject, and gender dynamics in modern cinema that it will be possible to perceive how The Invisible Man builds a narrative of survival and liberation.

The movie’s first sequence is a prime example of how the rest of the film approaches using the camera and sound to put the audience in a state of anxiety and mimic the restlessness felt by Cecilia, establishing a vital link between us and the protagonist from the get-go and prefacing the horror that will come later. Firstly, the sound design of the scene, mixing in environmental sounds with silence and then sometimes layering instrumental sounds as part of the score, sets a tense, life-and-death atmosphere that is only heightened by the scene’s reliance on the idea of vigilance. It starts in silence, quickly broken by the acousmatic sound of waves crashing upon the cliff where Adrian’s house resides. The oceanic sound effect is layered in such a way that its internal reverberation inside the house becomes the perfect lulling cover for Cecilia to hide the sounds she makes while getting out of bed. However, the editing of her sounds is mixed in a manner that makes it seem like they are closer and louder than what the camera perspective conveys, almost as if what we hear was captured from a microphone attached to her body. This mixing helps establish the nature of the scene as anxiety-inducing since, like Cecilia—whose focus is not waking Adrian up even if she drugged him with Diazepam and thus her apprehension may make her perceive sounds to be louder than they are—we can hear them almost clearly, which is precisely the opposite of what her acting would convey to us she wants. This relativity of sound mixing effect can be perceived once again when Adrian rustles and changes sleeping positions, with his sound being mixed above all others with a boosted volume that overwhelms the soundscape in an almost deafening and jumpscare-esque way, marking how the movie tries to simulate how acute Cecilia’s senses are as a form of sound rendering. As the film’s composer Benjamin Wallfisch explains, the focus in many scenes on the sound effects over having an accompanying score was part of making “bold musical gestures, so that the absence of music is something you feel” (Tangcay 2020). The effect of the sound design in translating the protagonist’s emotional state is thus the main draw of the segment’s use of sound, priming the audience to become attuned to Cecilia’s psychology and preparing us to share her future suffering and stand with her as we experience his invisible torturing.

However, the opening segment’s sound editing also establishes another critical component of the movie, the sound of the effect associated with the invisible suit, which is methodically paired with camera work in what was previously mentioned as an antithetical relationship. Before Cecilia exits her partner’s lab after turning off the house alarm and many of the cameras spread throughout it—which, by itself, establishes how much control Adrian had over Cecilia by being vigilant of her at all times while he worked—she looks at an empty display, positioned centrally to the frame with the light refractions on the black walls surrounding it creating a guiding system for the eye, signaling its importance. As she does so, a mechanical, almost insect-like sound is mixed into the lab’s soundscape comprised of low humming sounds of machinery that become instruments in the non-diegetic score, almost imperceptibly scaling up and down in an ominous way, mixed to be clear and perceptible to point to the idea that something is there. Moreover, the shot’s long shot distance highlights the nature of the empty display as illusory since these types of shots are used to emphasize the relationship between the figure and the background. Combined, this is the example of the antithesis between sound distinctly identifying something idiosyncratic that will be further reproduced throughout the film and the camera being arranged and framed with the intent of showing something when there is nothing visually there, which is nonetheless complementary since both cinematography and sound editing are meaningfully employed to point to the existence of something. This strategy and effect is the bread and butter of the movie’s sense of disorientation and delusion that builds its uncanny, but at least here, the two shots, in showing Cecilia’s recognition that there could be something there, become the basis of her strong belief in Adrian’s living invisible haunt and thus significant as another way the audience becomes privy to details about the narrative world’s that helps us connect with her.

Cecilia escapes Adrian, but the movie does not give much space for her to take a breath since it takes only 13 minutes for the first incident perpetuated by an invisible force to happen, and the shot composition and camera movements are the methods in which such occurrences are spotlighted with the pairing between cinematography and sound design, particularly the invisible suit’s sound effects, being the most prevalent promoters of a mood of uncanniness. One example of this effect happens in a scene that occurs from 00:24:30 to 00:25:27. The movie taunts the audience by diagonally panning down to nothing while slightly increasing the volume of the insect acousmatics that populate the scene. It seems to be a fake-out since the panning movement is in the direction of the slightly opened window, as if the camera’s peek puts the audience closer to the window, and seconds later, Elizabeth Moss’s character occupies that space. However, the fake-out does lead to something as, after she goes back to her initial position, the invisibility suit sound kicks in and slowly gets louder—which she perceives—and in an eyeline match cut from her reaction to the empty space, the straight-on, leveled framing of the whole room conveys the notion that something is supposed to fill that frame. Thus, the scene’s cinematography and sound collaborate to create a feeling of uncanniness from working under the language convention of film to point to essential subjects being in frame, but they subvert those rules by putting no visual stimulus in conflict with auditory stimulus and the purpose of framing.

The idea of the uncanny can be defined as a state where “both the experience of reality and the belief about what is possible hold competing truth” (Windsor 2018, 62), which results in “an anxious uncertainty about what is real” (Windsor 2018, 60). Architecture projects gone missing, lost Diazepam bottles suddenly materializing as if they never disappeared, people getting hit and the blame going to Cecilia, e-mails she did not send being written in her name, doors opening by themselves, and, like in the scenes explored above, a recurring technological sound coming from empty spaces; all of these events are concretely unexplainable, and become uncanny in two ways. Firstly, without tangible visual confirmation of the source of seemingly supernatural or hallucinatory events, many unexplainable occurrences can be interpreted as a shared delusion between the audience and Cecilia, a folie-à-deux, where we do not know if what is experienced is real and if there is something in the empty spaces or if it is a ghost or a delusion. But then, secondly, after Cecilia is able to gather enough evidence to form a theory from a few experiences, the doubt that makes reality dubious remains as she is unable to find concrete proof and prove to others of her ex-husband’s presence, turning Adrian’s invisible interferences into a paranoia-inducing undefined Schrodinger’s cat of reality where both existence and nonexistence hold equal competing values. For anyone else, like Cecilia’s friend James, this is a situation where “Adrian will haunt you if you let him” (Whannell 2020, 0:35:30), but that is what Adrian wants: to be the Uncanny so Cecilia or others may think she is crazy. As Windsor (2018) writes, “To experience the uncanny is to lose one’s grip on reality, to experience a (...) glimpse of madness” (62). Until Cecilia could confirm that someone is present, she would forever wrestle with the idea that he might still be alive and be able to catch her, and that is the core of how the film builds the feeling of the uncanny. Fortunately, and yet also, unfortunately, she partially receives that confirmation.

About halfway into The Invisible Man, Cecilia has her suspicions verified when she pours a bucket of white paint into what seems to be the empty attic access door, revealing the silhouette of a being looking up at her, shot like a jumpscare. It is this scene that marks the movie’s transition from the uncanny to the abject since reality is no longer a point of contention, with a concrete entity becoming the object of causality. As Lawrence (2020) describes, Adrian’s reveal conveys the idea of “mental gaslighting turned physical,” and such a notion is very palpable when they fight in James’ house. As Cecilia drops from the attic to follow the trail of paint left by Adrian, the score goes from overpowering to silent, with Cecilia’s steps and breathing filling the screen while distant strings mixed below all other noises keep the tempo of tension going as a form of empathetic sound. As the kitchen sink turns on all of a sudden, the camera, which was slowly tracking the protagonist to imitate her cadence, moves briskly with the movement of her head as it turns toward the water sound, and the apparatus goes from framing her face on an uncentered shallow focus medium close-up with some space on the left, “foreshadowing” the importance of that space, to transitioning the focus to the kitchen through rack focus, framing the space as an over-the-shoulder shot from her perspective. Adrian uses the water not only to clean his suit but also to set a trap, letting Cecilia become startled and disoriented by sounds so he can attack her when she is vulnerable. Thus, after she checks the sink and gets ready to look behind her as ominous bursts of brass sounds prepare the audience for something, the distance changes into a wide shot as an invisible force lifts the protagonist by the neck while choking her. From creating a mood of tension to conveying the strength and danger of Adrian wearing the suit, the score floods the screen in a transformed form of empathetic sound into rendering where the bass instruments become alarms, blaring as the camera slowly zooms in toward Cecilia’s face. As he throws her around to subdue her, there is a moment of perfect synchresis at 1:00:00 that takes inspiration from EDM where, after drums start beating faster and violins are used to create a build-up moment with the pitch rising through Shepherd’s effect and the tempo increasing exponentially, Cecilia takes hold of some plates and smashes them on Adrian in the exact second the beat drops and an even more exhilarating part of the score starts playing. Thus, the camera work and sound design of this sequence of physical abuse are employed first to heighten the audience’s connection with Cecilia in the scene and, therefore, convey the tension she feels, then to communicate the coldness and viciousness of the man behind the invisibility suit, and then to emphasize violence, transitioning the idea of psychological terror into physical horror.

When factoring all Cecilia’s quotes about Adrian’s machiavellian and toxic behavior towards her to control the protagonist as explanations to the reason behind why the entity is Adrian in an invisibility suit with Griffin’s subsequent violent and murderous behavior exemplified above, he becomes not only an object of causality to be abjected by but also a representation of the abject male. Barbara Creed (2022) writes that what makes a male abject is their aggressive phallicity “tied to his intentions and deeds. Man can threaten society, and reveal the fragility of the law, through an excess of aggression” (10), particularly when it is destined toward women for sex-adjacent “reasons” like possessiveness and control, sadism, sexual frustration, and only treating women as objects of desire. The film combines a strategy of show and tell to reveal Adrian’s acts of violence. The former confirms the abusive history through cinematic conventions that capture Adrian’s violent nature, which also illustrated in the movie when the man threatened to kill James’ daughter and then almost punched him to death and when he fought, shot, and killed guards of the sanatorium Cecilia is detained in after he framed her for the murder of her sister, whom Adrian kills. The latter is exemplified by dialogue exploring the psychology behind his phallicity-induced actions with quotes like “He needs you because you don’t need him” (Whannell 2020, 1:22:43). These are all part of the repertoire of abjection-inducing actions the sound design and cinematography of The Invisible Man display. However, before the film ends, the man who is revealed to have punched James is Adrian’s brother, Tom. Adrian is found imprisoned in the back of his home, “taken hostage” by Tom, and thus not indicted for all the crimes committed by the Invisible Man. Cecilia and the audience do not believe in that narrative since we are presented with a portrait of Griffin’s abjection throughout the whole movie, but like Julia Kristeva (1982) writes, “it is what disturbs identity, system, order” that causes abjection (4), meaning people need to know that a systematic order was disturbed to abject what disturbs it. Before Cecilia decides to get a confession from Adrian by faking being interested in going back to him and then killing him, he would have gone unpunished. The movie ends with the world not discovering the truth behind Adrian Griffin, the powerful visionary behind the world’s leading optics business, even if he ends up dying of an apparent suicide because he was “unstable.” His culpability and aggressive phallicity are only Cecilia and the audience’s truths and our way of feeling abject towards him, not the law and the whole world’s, marking his victory over her in the “rule-abiding” systematic order in all possible ways, pushing the protagonist to become a “monster” to free herself from his monstrousness.

Finally, in many modern movies, particularly Feminist New Wave films, when the abject male is presented in conflict with a woman, she often becomes transformed into the monstrous female. Cecilia is not an exception, with the score and cinematography accentuating the power the protagonist finally seizes after being subjected to Adrian’s oppression before and throughout the whole movie’s story. Creed (2022) argues that the monstrous-feminine

Is represented as a liberating and transformative figure (4) who is prepared to use violence to avenge (8) a wrong committed to them, others, or a collective like the Earth where her only option is revolt but she is not contaminated to the point of becoming an abject thing incapable of renewal (13).

Cecilia does not fit precisely with Creed’s description of a monstrous-feminine, but she could be considered one when the protagonist decides to confront her abuser at the end of the movie. The scene that shows her violent revolt is instead a reflection of Adrian’s uncanny abuse towards her being given back to him tenfold. An eyeline match is used to set up the dynamic of the camera capturing its subject, in this case, a medium close-up of Griffin’s face that cuts to the object of his gaze, an empty seat where Cecilia was supposed to be. The movie cuts back to Adrian, and as soon as he hears a noise behind him, his right hand is suddenly holding a knife to his throat. A force—Cecilia wearing the invisibility suit—then makes him slit his neck. Up until Cecilia makes a noise, the sequence of events happens in dead silence, almost as if the movie, like the protagonist, was trying to hold its breath, underscoring the crude nature of the act of murderous revenge. One would say that by repeating his violence back to him and doing something he did to others but would never do to her, she could become the object of abjection herself. However, as Kristeva (1982) writes, “There can be grandeur in amorality and even in crime that flaunts its disrespect for the law—rebellious, liberating” (4). As mentioned before, Adrian won and could not be beaten unless he confessed to being the Invisible Man. But for someone as rich and powerful as him, who, as Cecilia asks of him to be honest so their relationship could start again on the right foot, gaslights her by saying, “I know that you feel like you are going insane sometimes. But I am the only one that can help you, remember” (Whannell 2020, 1:48:00), there is no way to change or incriminate Griffin. It is messed up that it feels like a viable option for Cecilia to kill and become a “monster,” less because she killed him and more because her last resort was to become a “murderer.” Nevertheless, in a Kristevan rebellious way of thinking, this crime may be amoral because it incurs death, yet it has the grandeur of destroying the true abject, the “immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady” (Kristeva 1982, 4), and as a result, frees the monstrous-feminine from his oppression, who become monstrous as a sacrifice to stop this bigger “phallocentric” abject. Moreover, battered woman syndrome, which could be used to describe an affliction Cecilia experienced throughout the whole story, has been part of legal defenses to describe the murder of an abusive partner as self-defense, so even the powers of jurisdiction understand the debatable nature of such drastic actions being perceived as absolutely incriminating.

The film then seems to agree with this sentiment in two ways. The first is that the scene where it is revealed Cecilia wore the invisibility suit to kill him is shot from a low angle to reproduce Adrian’s perspective on the floor bleeding as he sees his ex switching from a desperate face after calling 911 to one of complete apathy and disdain for him, and later from a high angle through an over-the-shoulder framing that puts the audience on her perspective as she sees him draw his last breath. This power dynamic established through the cinematography is the only time the film gives Cecilia control and dominance over Griffin, annihilating her fear of him and finalizing her revolt. The second way is expressed in the very last shot of the movie, which frames Elizabeth Moss’s character in a selective focus medium close-up that highlights her lit face against the darkened background to emphasize the breath of relief she takes (a stupendous contrast against Adrian’s last breath of agony) and the ease that washes over her face as she realizes his grip over her no longer weighs down her being, closing her eyes to end this horrifying chapter of her life, accompanied by a beautiful cello and piano score Wallfisch describes as evoking her “innate strength” (Tangcay 2020). The beauty and evocative nature of the composition—an empathetic masterpiece that reflects her soul in tandem with Moss’s acting—embodies liberation, and it feels hard not to empathize with her catharsis, feeling the life flowing back to her in a visceral way. Cecilia is not a monster. She is a survivor.

In conclusion, The Invisible Man employs the use of sound and cinematography to set up a dynamic tension between the visible and the acoustic that is pushed to a contrary complementary state to depict the uncanniness that denotes Adrian’s psychological torture of Cecilia until it is revealed that the possible set of hallucinatory events was performed by someone on an invisibility suit. From then on, Adrian concretely becomes an abject male to the audience, a representation of the aggressive phallicity as we are privy to his violence and impunity, which leads Cecilia to seek justice but ends up pushing her into a position of a monstrous-feminine to avenge the abuse she suffered and revolt against the story’s true monster by killing him as her last resort after following the law—the system that he revealed its fragilities—did not work. In the end, Cecilia stands liberated from Adrian’s oppression, and the way the film is composed helps the audience naturally and genuinely feel the emotions that come with her catharsis.

Bibliography

-Tangcay, Jazz. “How ‘Invisible Man’ Composer Benjamin Wallfisch Wrote a Musical Love Letter to ‘Psycho.’” Artisans. Variety, March 2, 2020. https://variety.com/2020/artisans/musicians/benjamin-wallfisch-composing-invisible-man-score-1203518331/?sub_action=logged_in.

-Whannell, Leigh, dir. The Invisible Man. Sydney, Australia: Blumhouse Production, 2020. https://www.peacocktv.com/watch/asset/movies/the-invisible-man/8fffa276-b4fd-3b00-9e91-b2da34eb0bff/.

-Windsor, Mark. “What is the Uncanny?.” British Journal of Aesthetics 59, no. 1 (2019): 51-65.

-Lawrence, Gregory. “How ‘The Invisible Man’ Makes the Camera a Terrifying Character Itself.” Collider, May 25, 2020. https://collider.com/the-invisible-man-camera-cinematography-explained/.

-Creed, Barbara, Return of the Monstrous-Feminine Feminist New Wave Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2022.

-Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

General Discussion

Pop culture and participatory culture are clear manifestations of the impact of fictional characters on audiences. Humans have a unique capacity to experience transportation into fictional worlds and narratives, and several factors about our identity, from identification (Rarity et al., 2022), perceived similarity and other factors that make a person like another individual (Tian & Hoffner, 2010), and actual similarity (Möri &Fahr, 2023) to attachment styles (Rain et al., 2017), the dark triad (Brodie & Ingram, 2021), and one’s major Big Five personality traits can affect the extent we become absorbed into fictional stories and start relating with their characters. The interactions we hold with characters have the potential to become more than simple pastime activities, helping us become more immersed in those worlds and form deeper bonds with those we come to love (Cohen, 2014), which have the potential to change who we are and how we see ourselves, almost like a distant friend. This form of parasocial bonds may lead to a relationship where a fan may imagine scenarios of them interacting in the same space, may talk to the character while reading, watching, or playing as them, may feel the desire to make fan art of the characters, may want to dress up as them or meet up with them in real life, and much more. In their infancy, these relationships first start as parasocial interactions, a far more widespread form of viewer-character association as a way to partially put aside the ontological connotation of the fictionality of a character to make them more real in order to justify an impetus to mingle with them and allow for sociality to be achieved. That makes it even easier to become immersed in the narrative or bring the narrative to one’s life and be moved and changed by it. Parasocial interactions with characters speak to our desire to experience stories, and the tendency of each person to form them has been studied in tandem with one’s personality traits. However, only a few researchers have tackled this correlation between personality traits, especially the Big Five, and PSI at large, and thus, the many factors that can play a part in how and why people form these parasocial bonds are yet to be discovered. In the current study, we sought to provide more evidence to previous studies correlating PSI and the Big Five personality traits to strengthen or challenge their results and conclusions as a way to more accurately characterize this relationship of factors while also involving the longevity of viewer-character interactions and their perceptions about the character’s personalities as new variables to be studied in correlation with a viewer’s personality.

Comparing and Contrasting the Results with Previous Literature

Firstly, only our extraversion results aligned with what previous research had already established when studying the association between the Big Five personality traits and the different domains of parasocial interactions. Following Tsay and Bodine’s research (2012), it did neither strongly nor moderately correlate with any of the Five Domains of PSI, with the highest value being a negative correlation with intimacy. The fact that all dimensions of PSI have a weak relationship with extraversion while also still being curiously all negatively associated with it—besides face-to-face desire and awareness, which were positive—points to the notion that individuals high in it prefer to seek social gratification and belonging, fulfilling their social needs, in actual interpersonal interactions (Finn, 1997), and that face-to-face desire is more like a particular feature of individuals that have this trait who like to talk to anyone face-to-face but prefer situations where everyone is present, preferably in the same space, and in at least a bilateral relationship with each other. Interestingly, Ingram and Luckett (2019) previously observed in their research that face-to-face desire was the only PSI domain predicted by extraversion, which went against Tsay and Bodine’s findings, but this result came from the conditions where fans interacted with Harry Potter characters through books (book-only and combined). With all three results in mind, it could be argued that what makes a viewer gravitate towards a franchise and the way the characters of different franchises are presented based on age, type of world, how much of an archetype they are, and the media format of interaction may affect how a participant’s personality mediates their parasocial interactions. A way to provide evidence for this hypothesis is for novel research to be conducted focusing on gathering participants that are fans of specific franchises like Pokémon, Star Wars, and Miraculous and franchises with a higher discrepancy between literary and audiovisual content like Marvel Comics and the MCU and DC Comics and the DCEU/DCU, following in the footsteps of Ingram and Luckett. In our study, the participants with the highest extraversion and face-to-face ratings had Fleabag from Fleabag and Aragorn from The Lord of the Rings as their favorite characters, a super outspoken and free-spirited woman (Cole, n.d.) and one of the noblest of heroes, while the one with the highest extraversion and lowest face-to-face ratings had PSIs with Tony Soprano.

Moreover, in terms of how a participant’s extraversion predicted how extraverted they rated their favorite character, the results are complementary to Möri and Fahr’s 2023 study since they found out that extraverted viewers liked characters who were actually extraverted (as rated by a team of coders), and in this study, participant’s extraversion was moderately correlated with how extroverted they perceived their favorite character. This correlation might be straightforward in how extroverted people tend to seek social interactions, and perceiving someone else as extroverted means that they already have an idea of how their socialization would go and what they desire in socializing with others. Extraversion can be seen as the personality trait that presents the least amount of variability in what it is and how it manifests. Not every person high in extraversion will want to be with others who are also high in extraversion, but they might be more comfortable with people who at least like socializing and do it naturally. The same may be said about more introverted people seeking to form parasocial relationships with characters who are also introverted and thus understand the reticences and boundaries of an introvert. In our study, more people who rated themselves as low in extraversion (from 1-2.5) also perceived their favorite character as low in extraversion.

Among the other Big Five personality traits, the results of conscientiousness and neuroticism almost matched those of previous research. Starting with conscientiousness, Möri and Fahr (2023) concluded that people who are high in conscientiousness tend to have parasocial interactions with characters who are rated as not being high in conscientiousness. While our study did not find this negative correlation, we also found that participant conscientiousness did not associate even moderately with any perceived character personality, so their conclusion that the former prefers to interact with characters dissimilar to them is neither supported nor really well challenged.

Moving on to the personality trait of neuroticism, Tsay and Bodine (2012) found that all four of their PSI domains were positively associated with it. Our results proposed that Neuroticism was only positively associated with guidance, familiarity, and intimacy, while face-to-face desire and awareness were negatively associated with it (with varying levels of strength). So, for our participants, Tsay and Bodine’s explanation that people high in neuroticism tend to experience states of distress, tension, and nervousness linked to social anxiety more often than others while still having a need for inclusion and belonging, so all dimensions of PSIs with fictional characters can serve as a substitute to actual interpersonal interactions, works to a certain extent. It may not when, one, a person constantly has in mind that the character is aware of them, and two, may have too much social anxiety, thus resulting in a situation that, in thinking of the character as real, who may even be aware of them, viewers might visualize their imagined interactions in the same light as an actual interpersonal interaction, nullifying the distance created by a character’s fictionality.

However, while contrasting our results to Ingram and Luckett’s (2019) findings, it is possible to see that familiarity had a positive moderate correlation with neuroticism, actually being the strongest correlation between the personality trait and PSI, which is the opposite of their movies-only condition, where Harry Potter fans experienced a negative association with familiarity. They explained it as social anxiety in action, thinking that movie audiences high in neuroticism who have PSIs with movie characters will more likely see themselves in that visual world, and because of that, any of the PSIs were bound to have a negative association, familiarity being the one in this case. Perhaps so, but with longevity being a factor in mind, which will be discussed later, one could explain our results by pointing to how people high in neuroticism are actually more comfortable with experiencing parasocial interactions precisely because of the distance factor, regardless of the medium (since we did not seek to limit it in our investigation). Over time, like any relationship, people start to know characters better, or, out of a stronger desire to form bonds, which can be a challenge in real life, viewers who connect with a character may have the desire to know more about them from the beginning. With the help of wikis and a person’s artistic or writing skills, it can be easily achieved.

Finally, they mentioned that, in the book-only condition, neuroticism and guidance were strongly associated, but we did not find such a correlation. Ingram and Luckett (2019) propose that viewers may seek an alternative to interpersonal advice from a character, but that might depend on the specific character viewers gravitate towards and what they may face in the narrative. Because Harry Potter is a story about good vs. evil and love vs. death, the challenges characters face and the lessons they both impart to each other and learn from each other are so weaved into the plot and even more apparent in the book than in the movie that fans high in neuroticism may gravitate towards liking characters that can teach them resilience in the toughest of moments and to be more easygoing, for example, which points to how, again, different types of stories might present factors that influence how much someone might want to form a parasocial interaction above just character and viewer personality. In our study, the person with a high score in both guidance and neuroticism chose Suzu, the protagonist of Belle, who starts the movie as a shy girl in anguish because of her mother’s death and loves singing but is afraid of doing so in public. But then she becomes an idol sensation in the virtual world of the movie while hiding her identity, and ends it revealing herself to everyone so she could sing a song to show the “antagonist,” a kid being physically abused by his father, that she knows what is happening and she is there for him, making him login to the system so her friends can track his location and try to do something to stop the abuse. Her character growth may reflect a person high in neuroticism’s own desire to impact other people’s lives despite their temperament, which culminates in them seeking guidance in a PSI. The conflict between generalizable results and unique viewer-character interactions may be a point of contention in these correlations.

Looking at the further discrepancies between the current study, Ingram and Luckett’s (2019), Tsay and Bodine’s (2012), and Möri and Fahr’s (2023) concerning the other two Big Five personality traits will provide more examples of what has been discussed above. Agreeableness was positively associated with guidance, intimacy, and familiarity in Ingram and Luckett’s study, while negatively associated with intimacy in Tsay and Bodine’s, but in our research, the highest positive correlation, an almost strong one, was found between agreeableness and face-to-face desire and intimacy was positively associated with it, albeit it is nearly null. As an explanation for our results, since people high in agreeableness tend to be more caring, kind, empathetic, and affectionate, it might be that face-to-face is their preferred method of interaction since, usually, someone is loving, sympathetic, and kind towards someone else. Like extraversion, this is the second most outwards-facing personality trait, and even if it is possible and meaningful to be empathetic with a fictional character on screen, for people with high agreeableness, having interpersonal interactions where a viewer can care for and be affectionate towards their favorite character also matters because that is the most straightforward way one can show this aspect of their identity. The participants in our survey who had the highest agreeableness and face-to-face desire mentioned Snoopy and Rosita Espinosa from The Walking Dead as their favorite characters. For the former, it might be that Snoopy, being a super cute merchandising icon from a franchise that is super heartwarming, may have matched part of the participant's personality, while Rosita is a character who truly is caring and loving, but because of the apocalyptic circumstances of TWD and the several tragedies she faces, presents herself as very serious and aggressive (“Rosita Espinosa,” n.d.), which might suggest the participant, who rated her as highly conscientious—so, disciplined and to the point—might see strength in her but might want to hug and confront her as well.

Lastly, Ingram and Luckett (2019) evaluated openness as being associated with guidance, but in our study, that positive association was present but not very strong. Instead, the highest correlation we found for openness was between it and awareness. Even if not strong, it is partially notable for how it possibly pacifies the conflict mentioned before. The participants with the highest scores for both factors chose Hal from 2001 and John Bender from The Breakfast Club as their favorite characters. These characters are not choices one would expect: a robot with a lack of emotion and a rash, anti-hero-esque bad boy who turns out to be a truly sensitive teenager. Still, openness is all about being creative, adventurous, open-minded, and okay with things that are different or not mainstream, which both of these characters represent (the former is non-human, and the second is an anti-hero, so someone with traits that are not that positive, desirable, or commendable, who was chosen by a female participant whose second strongest trait was agreeableness), and having parasocial interactions where they believe these different types of characters are aware of them seems to be something only people high in openness may experience. Interestingly, the highest positive scores for awareness came from people who were high in conscientiousness and openness. Nevertheless, it does not mean every person high in openness will like these more out of the left-field characters, which is shown by how the correlation is still around 0.2. That means it is possible to map how some personality traits, based on their characteristics, may affect a domain of PSI, but it might be that these interactions only become clear depending on the particular way in which a story presents a character and how they show their personalities to an audience member that decided to form a PSI with them because of how the former’s thoughts and actions in response to the world speak to the latter’s personality and why they chose to form it. That would also mean limiting the scope to favorite characters might not be the best way to understand the interactions between personality and PSI.

Big Five and Five PSI Domains-Continued

Now, in looking at the rest of our results without comparing them to previous literature, it is possible to highlight other interactions between the Five PSI domains and the Big Five. Firstly, openness was slightly moderately positively correlated with face-to-face desire. For individuals who are high in openness, because they more naturally accept unconventional situations, it might be easier for them to be okay with liking fictional characters to the extent they would desire to experience this novel situation of a favorite character of theirs appearing in reality or them being transported into the character’s world.

Secondly, conscientiousness was the true star of the participant personality-PSI relationship as it was strongly correlated with guidance, face-to-face, and total PSI and mildly correlated with intimacy. On the surface, conscientiousness is the personality trait that seems to be the least connected with motivations behind watching fictional media overall, since it is all about being responsible, organized, disciplined, and cautious. However, when looking at the specifically strong correlations, guidance, being the domain with the highest positive correlation, can make sense when considering how duty, goodness, sacrifice, ambition, and leadership (and some of their opposites) are concepts that get explored so many times in fiction, particularly in superhero, crime, law, police, medical, and political entertainment media. Fictional characters can be sources of advice for someone who is or wants to be a doctor, a lawyer, a politician, or a soldier, perhaps is inspired by the values that define a superhero (Superman’s “Truth, Justice, and Better Tomorrow” and Spider-Man’s “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility”), or already values others who are diligent, thoughtful, and responsible, especially since many writers, artists, directors, and content creators overall create their stories trying to say something, and sometimes trying to be as close to reality as possible. When considering the ambiguity between what separates a parasocial interaction from a relationship, the question of when one becomes the other comes to mind. This correlation between conscientiousness and guidance may be so strong for this study because it perfectly embodies parasocial interactions. A person can like a character in a more utilitarian way, preventing oneself from going as far as to break the barrier between fictional and real. Like an allegory can symbolize something, a character can be understood to only be a symbolic being that presents information, and that is the extent of a person’s interaction with them. That then could explain both total PSI and the desire to have face-to-face interactions, the latter coming from the desire to possibly ask more questions and receive even more guidance. The participants highest in conscientiousness who sought the guidance of their favorite characters the most out of everyone else picked Suzu, Rosita, and Leslie Knope from Parks and Recreation, a deputy director whose values and optimistic outlooks define how she envisions how governmental organizations should benefit the people they serve and whose can-do attitude and good spirits are paramount in helping her achieve her goals for the betterment of people and nature, even if some of the methods she uses to reach them and the plans she creates are not always effective (“Leslie Knope,” n.d.).

11 out of the 32 characters were from entertainment media belonging to the genres listed above, and 19 characters were rated as being highly conscientious. Since it was established earlier that there was a very insignificant correlation between participant conscientiousness and character conscientiousness, it seems this personality trait is the most appreciated by the sample of students. Does that speak to a University of Chicago reality that students at the university look up to those who show themselves to be dutiful, reliable, ambitious, and organized, and would be interested in having a one-to-one conversation with them? It is almost as if the barriers between reality and fiction are broken in a more subtle way, almost like a character becomes analogous to a more allusive university teacher or an employer, seeing them as sources of knowledge and opportunity, with an office-hours meeting serving as an insightful experience, yet one where the student/employee can still maintain a respectful distance with the professor/employer. An explanation that connects seeking intimacy with conscientiousness remains puzzling and might not fit well with the above-stated theories. Further research focusing on viewer conscientiousness and PSI may be needed to elaborate on this correlation.

Participant Personality and Character Personality-Continued

Moving on to participant personalities and how they might influence how they perceive their favorite character’s personality, before focusing on each personality trait not discussed before, it would be interesting to mention a case study that could be pulled out from the results. Serendipitously, two characters chosen as favorites were repeats: Chandler from Friends and Spencer Reid from Criminal Minds. In focusing on a trend in how the participant’s personality influenced their rating of the character personality, it is possible to see that the individual with the highest score for a specific trait rated Chandler as being higher in that trait 60% of the time (one tie with the same score for extraversion and a reverse situation for conscientiousness) and Spencer 80% of the time (one tie for openness). Moreover, the correlation between the difference between the score of each one of the participant’s personality traits and the difference between how the participants rated each personality trait of their favorite character was 0.96 for Chandler, with an R² of 0.91, and 0.93 for Spencer, with an R² of 0.86, which points to how that the discrepancy in rating between participant 7 & 8 and 11 & 12 is proportional to the disparity between their personalities. That means that how a person perceives their character’s personality may also depend on how they see themselves. Furthermore, since we found out that longevity does not have the most substantial effect on how someone rates their favorite character’s personality (besides neuroticism) and the R²s were high, this factor may not have impacted the results. These findings are seedlings for a possible new research that focuses on finding participants whose favorite characters are the same, something that seems to be difficult but possible depending on the entertainment media chosen and how widespread it is, as a way to control the character personality variable to facilitate an analysis that looks at how one’s personality might be a factor in driving how they interact with fictional characters and form parasocial bonds with them.

Focusing on the Big Five personalities and starting with openness, the only noteworthy association was a moderate negative correlation between participant openness and character extraversion. It is challenging to pinpoint why someone high in openness would perceive characters to be more ambiverted and introverted, but it might be related to the social and public status of extraversion. It might be that extraversion is just the personality trait that one sees the most around them, particularly in reality media. Socialization skills are crucial for humans to find groups to belong to and are seen to be very important for several positions of notoriety, particularly in today’s world where anyone can be an influencer and content creator, and introverts are not very fond of becoming the center of attention, instead preferring to spend a relative amount of time by themselves. One could expect all celebrities to be extroverted (so perceived rather than actual extraversion). So, it might be that characters that show themselves to be less social or less exaggeratedly so, and thus, less like the perception of a norm, are understood as less extroverted, and people high in openness are more interested in them, particularly when they go through character arcs that help them find more comfort in being with others. Also, as Möri and Fahr (2023) pointed out in their study, extraversion is the personality trait easiest to “correctly” identify in another person from the Big Five. The participants who rated themselves the highest for openness and who rated their characters as very low in extraversion chose Hermione Granger from Harry Potter and Dipper Pines from Gravity Falls as their favorites. What makes these choices interesting is that both of them are very similar in how they are more introverted, introspective, shy, anxious, and book-smart characters that are too hard on themselves and are part of a group (Hermione has Harry and Ron and Dipper has his sister Mabel) with other characters that are more sociable than them. Throughout their stories, they grow to become more comfortable with who they are and much more confident and brave. Perhaps more open people gravitate toward these types of characters, whom they see as more unique, and since everyone’s journey is unique, this type of character arc never gets boring.

In terms of participant agreeableness, neither strong nor moderate correlations were found. However, it would be interesting to quickly highlight participant agreeableness’ interaction with character neuroticism. The negative association is not strong, but not that weak either, when compared to the other character correlations. Instead, it is the strongest of all the participant agreeableness correlation values and the most negative correlation for character neuroticism. So, it appears that people high in agreeableness may be prone to perceiving their favorite character as being less neurotic, or that they may not be interested in making characters who struggle more often, and thus who they might think are “high maintenance” and high in neuroticism, their favorites. All characters chosen by participants high in agreeableness who were also low in neuroticism can be described as collected and able to perform well under pressure, like Rosita Espinosa and Captain Holt from Brooklyn 99. If this association carries over into other studies using the complete 44-item inventory, it would be a puzzling find since, as mentioned before, individuals high in agreeableness are often empathetic, caring, kind, and sympathetic. Why would someone who typically tends to care for others be less prone to seeing how much another person struggles or more prone to downplaying it? Is this true, or do they perceive that neuroticism and just do not like it? Would someone who does not care for the emotions of others and their well-being perceive the characters they most like as highly anxious, prone to being easily irritated, and in a state of emotional struggle, or prefer characters like that? This result seems to be the most complicated to analyze.

In contrast, individuals high in neuroticism may be the ones more prone to perceiving characters they like as being like them and liking characters who they think are like them. Our results showed a practically strong correlation between both participant and character neuroticism, so it appears that those who are highest in this personality trait that involves a higher propensity for psychological and emotional turmoil are perhaps more empathetic towards those characters who suffer, be it in a similar way to them or overall, and maybe these characters can also serve as examples to show individuals high in neuroticism that they are not alone. The same can also be true the other way around. Those who are not easily affected by adversity may not be able to relate to those who are and may not see certain situations of overwhelming worry or emotional pain as being dispositional instead of situational. Characters high in neuroticism selected by participants high in it include Suzu, Fleabag, and Amy Santiago from Brooklyn 99, a very dedicated chief of police who is very detailed and plans everything, ending up having bouts of anxiety and panic when things do not go how she expected, and who was a victim of sexual harassment, an event whose scars have affected her in many ways both in her personal and work lives (“Amy Santiago,” n.d.). Characters low in neuroticism selected by participants low in it include Aragorn, HAL, and Rosa Diaz from Brooklyn 99, a mysterious, tough, and blunt police officer turned PI who does not let anyone see beyond the facade she creates and who is very effective at her job (“Rosa Diaz,” n.d.).

Moreover, participants high in neuroticism also rated their favorite characters as being high in openness following a strong correlation between both, so it appears that the former seems to understand their favorite characters as being more into exploring different things, being imaginative, and, perhaps, most importantly, being open-minded. Being someone who struggles with situations of adversity may mean that not many people want to understand and accept that person, so an individual high in neuroticism may have the tendency to perceive those characters they like as being more accepting (or may like them for it) and themselves as different and eclectic. Characters like Shoshanna from Girls, a quirky and peculiar young adult in college who is carefully adventurous and often frenetic (Silman, 2016), and Niles Crane from Frasier, a man open to anything that is high society who enjoys the high arts and the best food with an old-fashioned but still particular fashion sense (“Niles Crane,” n.d.), were rated as high in openness by people high in neuroticism.

A final remark about this section before moving on to the next is that because each of the Big Five personalities encompasses a whole gamut of subsets and subtypes of traits, trying to pinpoint what precisely from each Big Five trait interacted with each other is a task that is more theoretical than practical and opens up more questions for future researchers to focus on to answer than end up answering overall.

Longevity

When breaking down the notion of longevity and its interactions with participant personality and PSI, there are two pathways to follow: how the factors of longevity are related to themselves and how they associate with the other variables. Starting with the three quantitative components that make up this variable—affection change over time, prevalence of repeated interactions, and length of acquaintance—we found only a significant correlation between length of acquaintance and affection change, moderate and negative in nature, meaning that, as our participant knew their favorite character for a longer time, they tended to like those characters less and perceive their interactions as less meaningful. That might be what differentiates a parasocial relationship from a parasocial interaction.

Through our qualitative questions trying to gage how people interacted with these characters, nine out of 33 mentioned that their affection for their favorite character decreased with time to some extent, and from those, seven mentioned that, at most, the extent of their parasocial interaction was limited to talking about that character with someone else, and eight out of the nine mentioned they had known the character from more than a year (six for more than five years). From these results, it is possible to see that the majority of participants who interacted with their character the least (or most conventionally) were the ones whose affection levels decreased the most over time, and incidentally, they also knew their favorite characters the longest. An extra observation is that one of the individuals who mentioned also wearing merch with their favorite character on it but whose affection levels decreased chose Curious George, and that person knew the character for more than ten years, which explains one of the two participants who mentions they interacted with their favorite character more than just talking about them to someone else. Since this character is heavily tied to children’s media and his merchandising has not been adopted into a more adult environment like Hello Kitty and Sanrio characters, for example, he most likely was a childhood favorite that the participant grew out of.

The opposite could be said about those whose affection levels increased to some extent. Of 11 of them, six had more than one type of parasocial interaction, and one participant mentioned only buying merchandise and/or making fan art of their favorite characters (the participant only knew the character for a few years, so they partook in these activities as a teenager, and they chose Spencer Reid from Criminal Minds, a live-action show when animations and franchise media tend to receive the most merchandise and fanart, showing how much of a fan they actually are), putting them on this group too. However, for them, the number of participants who knew the characters for the least amount of time (less than a year) represented only three out of the eleven participants with an increase in affection. From these results, it is possible to see that the majority of participants who interacted with their character the most (or in a plethora of ways) were the ones whose affection levels increased the most over time, not those who knew their favorite character the least amount of time. The bulk of the affection change-length of acquaintance correlation came from the previous point and the fact that almost all of those who knew the character for about a year or so did not experience change or did so only a little. So, it might not be that time itself is the great decider, but that, depending on how the person interacts with their favorite character, time will play a part in amplifying the outcomes of those interactions. That would then point to the difference between PSI and PSR.

For some, interacting with fictional characters is a comfort of the moment and a way to become more engrossed in a story to escape from the world. Maybe a viewer wants to learn one or two things from the character, or perhaps that character is just cool or represents something a viewer likes in others, but none of the interactions result in outcomes that change a person’s life, make them want to interact with the character beyond the medium they are presented, or mark them to the extent they continue caring fondly for their favorite character throughout their lives. Some people just do not care about characters as much as they care about their friends and family, no matter how impactful the former might be. For others, anything related to the fictional character, from the way they act to what they have said, done, or overcome, from how they look and sound to what they wear and like, from whom they wanted to be to whom they become, can become a unique or a set of unique factors that not only attract a viewer towards liking (or liking to dislike) them but also has the potential to inspire viewers to be like them, provide comfort to individuals who are or eventually get in similar difficult situations to overcome those challenges, and resonate deeply with them to the extent that the character becomes almost an extension of the self. That opens up the opportunity for future research, perhaps a longitudinal study, to more concretely define the boundaries of both. Ways to do so would be by looking into what are the factors that push a PSI into PSR, what media platforms can ease the process—if watching YouTube videos discussing the history of a comic book character the person liked the most from the ones recently featured in a live-action movie, for example, might have an effect in how a PSI can become a PSR—and what types of characters and narratives have the highest propensity of getting people highly invested in the fictional world and on specific characters from it. As for the other two possible interplays between factors—repeated interactions and length of acquaintance and repeated interactions and affection change—none were significant enough for discussion.

In terms of the longevity factor’s association with PSI and personality, guidance and awareness were the only PSI domains that had any significant interaction with longevity, barely so, and it was only with repeated interactions. Both were moderately negatively correlated with the number of times participants had interactions with their favorite characters, meaning that the more a person encounters their favorite character, the less they want to learn from them and the less they believe the character has a notion that they are interacting with audience members (for the latter, it would be safe to say that if someone chooses a fourth-wall-breaking, meta character like Dora the Explorer, Harley Quinn, or Deadpool as their favorite, awareness would only go down if the stories they consume with the character have them not talking directly to the audience). For guidance, it appears that some participants may seek to learn less from their favorite character if, as they experience that character more, the situations where the latter can impart lessons or teach something to audience members happen less often, and for awareness, keeping up the illusion of an idea of mutual perception and intent, which can be a seed to a parasocial relationship where a person fantasizes being with their favorite character, will wane with time if every single interaction does not constitute the mindset of awareness.

Finally, out of the Big Five personality traits, only neuroticism had a moderately significant correlation, positive in nature, with affection change over time. In other words, the more time passes, the higher the likelihood that individuals high in neuroticism may grow to like their favorite characters even more. That finding can serve as an addendum to the PSI to PSR discussion, where it might be that neuroticism is the personality trait that is most conducive to engendering a desire in people to seek deeper connections with fictional characters in fictional worlds and to keep fostering them. It may not be for nothing that neuroticism also saw a slightly moderate positive correlation with repeated interactions. It might be that since thinking about and imagining being with a character was not part of the description of what interaction means, and some participants high in neuroticism could tend to keep a character in their minds more than watching/playing with them on their original media, watching clips featuring them on social media, talking about them to someone else, consuming memes with them, buying and wearing merchandise with them, drawing them, and so forth, the amount of interactions does not reflect how vivid or meaningful the character may be for them. Thus, if we take into consideration neuroticism having a similarly significant relationship with both repeated interactions and affection change over time, it feels safe to conclude that this personality trait is the most important to consider when thinking about how people create long-lasting bonds with their favorite characters. Future studies could focus on investigating whether people high in neuroticism tend to build the strongest bonds with characters compared to people high in other personality traits. Moreover, they could study the tendency of people high in neuroticism to create bonds with characters when the former experience the latter, be it through watching them or consuming anything else related to them and even dressing up as them while being in a state of emotional and psychological turmoil; so, if characters that had a positive, therapeutic value to a person high in neuroticism are those they like the most or feel most attached to.

Limitations and Future Directions

Our study suffered from a number of limitations. Firstly, 33 participants might encompass a good sample size for a small-scale study, but to answer such general inquiries about human behavior by analyzing personality trends, it tends to be that the larger the sample, the better. Secondly, the demographic variety we got could have been better, suffering from the approach we took in gathering data and the sample size we achieved. Having only one Asian and one Black participant prevented us from being able to consider cultural influences on choices, and having a majority female sample prevented us from being able to analyze gender discrepancies in PSI equally. Thirdly, using the abridged Big Five scale with only ten factors instead of the complete original 44 may have simplified the nature of the five personality traits. That is helpful for data gathering and analysis since one does not feel the need to separate each trait into sub-traits based on what the items are focusing on (for example, Openness can be divided into Open-Mindedness/Curiosity, Appreciation of Art, and Ingenuity/Creativity), but it still results in interpretations of data that is less specific since if a person or character could embody one aspect of one of the traits, but not the others, it is not possible to pinpoint that for sure in the abridged inventory discussion. Lastly, we failed to control or measure the nature of perceived personality traits as, in only asking participants to think of their favorite character and then having them rate the latter’s personality without suggesting for them to refresh their brains about the character by perhaps rewatching clips or episodes, the rating process was less reliant on how the person sees the character now in conversation with how they already saw them rather than what was established in memory. An example of the possible effects of that distinction in our study is the case between the participant who selected Curious George and the one who picked Moomintroll, two children’s characters they have had PSIs with for more than ten years. While the former mentioned that her affection for the character decreased considerably over time, possibly as she grew up out of him while still liking him a lot, the latter responded that her affection levels at the moment she took the survey felt the same as when she first interacted with the character, and that, as another form of interaction, she had reread the books that featured Moomintroll and his friends (possibly recently). How does this difference in the change in affection levels over time and in the amount of time since participants last interacted with the character affect how they perceive the latter’s personality traits? How does memory interact with how one perceives the personality of one’s favorite characters? Perhaps this could be looked at further in a possible follow-up research with updated methods.

Finally, future directions have been mentioned several times throughout the discussion section, but there is one topic that can be further expanded. Research into the transition from PSI and PSR and other identity factors, mainly when it tends to happen the most, could elucidate to companies like Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. Discover that own IPs how they could approach making media that keeps on being relevant to people after they grow up. Girls may want to be like and dress like Supergirl because of shows like Supergirl on CW and DC Superhero Girls, but when they become teens, that love they used to have for those characters and what they stand for many times grows weaker, often due to social pressures about what is in, trendy, and proper for a girl to like. That is something that both male and female teens tend to establish, and it is subject to change when specific genres or characters themselves become mainstream culture, like the MCU or Harley Quinn. Entertainment media is such an interesting topic to discuss because it holds different levels of value to different people, so to discover what makes someone more invested in certain characters and how to make them invested in them to the extent they become mainstream media is both amazing and scary since, in some situations, characters like superheroes—paragons of inspiration—or figures like Shoshanna from Girls and Amy Santiago from Brooklyn 99—people who experience situations that are rarely discussed or difficult to discuss with others—represent positive influences in a person’s life and can have the power to inspire them for their good. However, since corporations hold the rights to certain characters and are the ones producing and distributing them, they tend to prioritize profits. So, if there was ever a formula for creating relationships between people and characters that evolve from parasocial interactions and that can withstand the test of time by staying meaningful to a person through all the challenges and rewards of life, the ethics of audience manipulation can be financially murky for the audience members, and subsequent stories and character treatments can become homogenized.

That discussion would be enough for a study of its own, but the point is, for storytellers and franchise architects, through understanding the psychology of audiences, it is possible to create stories that impact many people while targeting some individuals to make the narratives and characters especially meaningful to them. When looking at neuroticism, people high in this trait may be more open to forming parasocial relationships with those characters since our results showed that they tend to seek familiarity in characters that are like them and that are also creative and open-minded, and, thus, different and accepting, while also experiencing an increase in affection with such characters as time goes by. So, when having this audience in mind, a storyteller can create characters with a degree of knowledge that they might go super well with this public and be a positive influence in their lives, that, for example, struggle with the challenges of being high in neuroticism. A storyteller can then put them in relatable situations, share in-depth details about them, and, with an understanding of mental health resources and one or two “life lessons” or ways of perceiving to share (perhaps based on personal experience or from someone they know intimately), write events where these characters find ways to overcome their challenges autonomously and with the help of others. Alternatively, a storyteller could create characters that are okay with and super nonchalant about the quirks that make a person high in neuroticism different or that they developed as a result of it, and are very welcoming to the latter while maybe also having different tastes from the norm.

In the case of extraversion, our results and previous findings have correlated viewer extraversion with participant extraversion, so since trendsetters tend to be or act like extroverts, to reach a teenage audience, for example, that is heavily reliant on being interesting and desirable to matter, storytellers might look into how extraversion is used as a language today and what rules it follows (the impact of appearance, for example), especially in social media. Marketing is also another area of character business that can benefit from psychology studies linking character personality and consumer personality to become the forefront of a strategy to transform PSIs into PSRs since, beyond the stories themselves, they control how the characters are presented in social media, merch, other products, and even sometimes in non-visual forms of media like music. Creating products inspired by a character influencers can relate to that fit their influencer vibe, which they can then promote to their audiences like a make-up line, a jewelry collection, Stanley Cups, Pandora charms representing important symbols related to the character, and limited time affordable clothing items that look almost exactly what most people are buying on fast fashion websites but that are made sustainably could be one approach that psychologically fits and resonates with the target audience as a proxy to what they care most about the influencer to then make the character more relevant to them. Another idea could be running a social media account as the said character as a publicity stunt, collaborating with established content creators, moderating trollish questions and responses, and highlighting positive interactions with those fans who ask genuinely important questions that the character would be able to answer. Barbie, in the past couple of years, has been a great example of precisely this marketing approach as the marketing around the 2023 movie was a perfect demonstration of personality match combined with influencer appeal and trend setting, and she even has a YouTube channel where, until last year, the fictional character would vlog her life with a diversified cast of male and female characters and discuss topics like new year’s resolutions and racism (Barbie, 2020). Going back to Supergirl, this could be one way to continue fostering a sense of connection and reality between her and young girls, which would be a positive since Kara Zor-El, like her cousin, is a fantastic role model to have, and she has the benefit of, unlike Wonder Woman, being sometimes a teen and sometimes a young adult, so still approachable to kids, teens, and pre-teens to look up to or to see as a fictional pal. As discussed in class, much of influencer culture and content creation is not positive for pre-teens and teenagers, so if the character promoted can serve as the actual positive influence for them, working within the already established system may be one way to promote a role model character to young girls until a new form of social media system is formed.

Whether or not companies may challenge the ethics behind this hypothetical situation by seeing the human connection as a means to be exploited or by finding strategies to foster people’s attachment to a character in a “healthy” way, if storytellers struggle with touching their audiences, especially when using already established characters, more research that elucidates the emotional and psychological connections between people and characters could help them understand what aspects from the character they can use that may fit better with the intent they have and the positive impact they may want to create.

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-Fandom. (n.d). Rosa Diaz. Brooklyn Nine-Nine Wiki.

https://brooklyn99.fandom.com/wiki/Rosa_Diaz

-Silman, A. (2016, April 15). It’s Okay to Be a Shoshanna. The Cut. https://www.thecut.com/2016/04/okay-to-be-a-shoshanna-girls-hbo.html

-Fandom. (n.d). Niles Crane. The Cheers & Frasier Wiki.

https://thecheersfrasier.fandom.com/wiki/Niles_Crane

Introduction to Research Project

Stories are potent simulacra of reality, existing as ways in which people can impart knowledge, share messages, convince others of their importance, and spread different perspectives about the world surrounding them and their lives. They can scare, inspire, draw out ire, and entertain. Stories can exist as a retelling of real events, but they can be make-believe, a conglomerate of fictional characters in fictional worlds in times long gone or yet to come. To draw out the distinction between reality and fiction, one often may rely on the tropes and archetypes that prevent a character from being reasonably real and on the right-out-of-the-gate premise that the medium of its transmission and some of its formal qualities beyond the story itself already point to it being fictional. Nevertheless, it is not unlikely that the fictional quality or nature of the characters and the form in which they are present can be superseded by the desire to interact and engage with them as if they were real.

The way stories depict their social world allows for a simulation of interpersonal interactions that surpass their ontological barriers. The social content present in them, if presented as authentic to real life or as an idealistic version of it, allows for feelings of intimacy and closeness to be created between viewers and characters that can exist as proxies to how people might see themselves interacting with a stranger, colleague, friend, or family member. Studies have shown that just imagining being around a favorite TV character can elicit social facilitation (Gardner & Knowles, 2008). In watching or consuming media, audience-character interactions can impact levels of pleasure, enjoyment, and appreciation of a story, which has been mapped into five response components: cognitive engagement describes how much a viewer understood a narrative’s messages; affective engagement describes the level of emotional engagement viewers can have with a character, such as empathizing with them; behavioral engagement explains the actions people take to connect with a character while consuming the media or outside of it, through participatory fandom culture; referential involvement characterizes how viewers find similarities between themselves and the fictional characters and their degree of identification; and critical involvement illustrates the desire of viewers to break down, criticize, and suggest alternatives to the ways characters think, feel, and react in a story (Tsay & Bodine, 2012).

Much of our cognitive and emotional ability to become immersed in the fictional world comes from narrative transportation, which involves focusing most of our attention on narrative events while also experiencing diminished awareness of self and surroundings, which opens up the opportunity for emotional involvement. While everyone can experience narrative transportation, certain factors about a person’s identity and life may make them more prone to such an ability. The highest levels of transportation have been observed in people with anxious and avoidant attachment styles (Rain et al., 2017). In a study by Rain and Mar (2021), they found that the avoidant attachment style of subjects was a predictor of their favorite characters also presenting avoidant and autonomous behavioral traits, while their anxious attachment style was a predictor of their favorite characters being sociotropic, which are people who value close relationships a lot. They also found that avoidant and anxious attachment styles were great predictors of parasociality.

Parasociality describes the degree of connection between viewers and characters, usually one-sided, that lets us perceive them as individuals to interact with and relate to, not unlike other actual humans. The more the viewer consumes content with a character or a set of them, the more likely they are to form deep parasocial relationships, or PSRs, to the point that they might react as if they lost a friend when a character dies or a show is canceled/ends (Cohen, 2014). The component of behavioral engagement empowers PSR through participatory culture, where people can interact with the universe of the characters through activities and events that bring the fiction into the real world in both a physical and online capacity. With mass communication, merchandising, and new media technologies becoming accessories to our bodies and identities, it is easier than ever to be around a character almost at all times beyond the moment of media consumption. Because anyone can relate to any type of character, from heroic and good to villainous and evil, the degree of connection between self and character is a topic of interest to researchers as it involves the notion of how one’s personality affects one’s desire to relate to other people. On a parasocial level, because the character does not have a say in the relationship, a person does not need to factor in the probabilities of being disliked or not particularly liked by the other subject with specific traits, and they may even embody those desirable traits, which makes prosociality a favorable way to look at the interaction between one’s personality and what one person likes most in other people. A study conducted by Tian and Hoffner (2010) looking at people’s parasocial bonds with characters from the TV show Lost showed that PSRs are more easily formed based on perceived similarity, identification, and emulation with characters one likes or has neutral feelings about compared to those characters one dislikes, even if people are in a PSR of antipathy and hatred with them.

In the context of comic book stories where superheroes and supervillains are the mainstays under the notion that the criteria for liking another person depend on their personality and the desire to be like them, PSRs are more often created between individuals and heroic characters above villainous characters, even for those people that possess one or more traits from the dark personality triad (Brodie & Ingram, 2021). While Machiavellianism and Psychopathy saw little to no relation with parasocial tendencies and interest in either heroes or villains, people with Narcissism showed a higher likelihood of having PSRs and that their favorite characters were overwhelmingly heroes, pointing to their desire to emulate heroic traits that can result in the admiration and adoration of others.

As briefly mentioned before, character identification is another form in which PSR can profoundly affect a viewer and even influence their identity. Research by Emily Moyer-Gusé (2008) has found that when the identification is robust, any added value, belief, and personality that a character demonstrates can influence viewers to align their own with the fictional being. Therefore, viewers can both identify more with a character that shares the same traits as them and have wishful identification to be more like them, more easily putting themselves in the characters’ places and living the story vicariously through them as a demonstration of affective engagement empowered by referential involvement. In the previous study conducted with Lost characters, perceived similarities were key to fans’ identification, helping them feel like what the former say, feel, and do is much more personally relevant to them, forming a stronger bond (Tian & Hoffner, 2010). Moreover, in a study by Rarity et al. (2022) using My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic as the story in question, character identification and personality were linked to the extent that identifying with a character that embodies a specific personality or value predicted the degree to which a person had that trait.

Parasocial Interactions, or PSI, in contrast with parasocial relationships, are often used interchangeably with them, but they are slightly different in the manifestation of the “one-sided” bond between character and audience. PSIs lay the groundwork for a relationship but are limited to the scope and moment of the media consumption without extending themselves to influencing personal identity and collective culture, which constitutes a relationship. They are an “intuitive feeling of mutual awareness, attention, and adjustment with a mediated character” (Möri & Fahr, 2023, p. 1). The way it manifests in people’s use of storytelling media has been separated into four domains by Tsay and Bodine (2012), including guidance, the propensity to look up to certain characters and seek or “accept” advice from them, face-to-face desire, the desire to communicate with the character in person, familiarity, the degree of knowledge a person has about the character, and closeness, seeking and feeling intimacy with a character. Like PSR, PSI has also been investigated with personality as a covariate, and much of the research has looked specifically at the Big Five traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. In their study with college students combining the four PSI domains and the Big Five, Tsay and Bodine (2012) found that openness and agreeableness were negatively associated with intimacy, neuroticism was positively associated with all domains, and neither conscientiousness nor, surprisingly, extroversion was associated with any domain.

Moreover, in a study that used Tsay and Bodine’s domains while only focusing on the Harry Potter franchise, researchers Ingram and Luckett (2019) looked into people’s parasocial interaction with their favorite Harry Potter characters in a book-only scenario where fans could only focus on how the characters were written in the books, a movie-only scenario where fans could only focus on how the characters were portrayed in the films, and a book-and-movie scenario where fans would think of the character as a whole, and it has, until now, the most comprehensive set of result associating viewer’s Big Five traits with PSI. In the book-only scenario, extraversion predicted guidance and face-to-face desire, agreeableness predicted guidance, intimacy, and familiarity, and neuroticism predicted only guidance. In the movie-only scenario, neuroticism was a negative predictor of familiarity, and no other Big Five interaction was found, possibly because, from their more than 2,000 subjects, about 90 only watched the Harry Potter films, and they might not have that much interest in forming PSIs compared to the members of the other scenarios. Finally, in the “both” scenario, openness predicted guidance, extraversion predicted face-to-face desire, neuroticism predicted guidance but negatively predicted familiarity, and agreeableness predicted guidance, intimacy, and familiarity again. Overall, this study points to how different forms of media can moderate the dynamic between personality and PSIs.

However, results are quite complementary in studies focusing on how personality motivates PSI rather than how one’s personality explains why they have PSIs. As previously mentioned, people tend to form parasocial bonds with characters they perceive to be like them, and researchers Möri and Fahr (2023) wanted to know if “actual” similarity also impacted the extent to which someone would have PSIs with characters. Actual shared demographics like gender, age, and ethnicity had already been found to influence PSI. When looking at “actual” Big Five traits, the researchers asked members of their team to code for every character mentioned in a survey taken by subjects for them to indicate how similar they thought they were to the character of choice and as a personality self-assessment. In analyzing the results, the authors discovered that people who saw themselves as high in extraversion formed parasocial relationships with characters coded as high in extraversion, while those who saw themselves as high in conscientiousness formed the least amount of parasocial relationships with characters high in conscientiousness. None of the other traits showed significant interactions.

Until now, all studies involving Big Five personality traits and parasocial interaction have been conducted with individuals who were asked to report on their current PSIs instead of specifically thinking about characters with whom they have had PSIs for a long time. They have also not measured how one’s personality traits may affect how an individual prescribes traits to characters they form parasocial interactions with; in other words, if there may be a tendency for a person high in extroversion to assign that quality to the characters they are having PSIs with independent of how actual that quality might be reflected in the character. In order to better understand how parasocial interactions with a character have evolved through time, how one’s personality affects the perception of a character’s personality, and how that perception facilitates PSIs, while providing more evidence for the association between viewer’s personality traits and how much they predict the formation of PSIs (strength), this research aims to investigate how an adult viewer’s Big Five personality traits predict the strength and longevity of parasocial interactions with fictional media characters and how they predict the perceived personality of PSIs.

Methods

Participants

We collected data from 33 participants, all young adults around college-age students (we aimed at 18-26 years old, mean age=21.42) of both genders (60% female, 33.3% male, and 3% non-gender binary, plus one nonrespondent) and many races and ethnicities. The majority of participants were White (N=26), followed by Latin American (N=6), with three also identifying as White. Unfortunately, our scope was not racially diverse since only one Black and one Asian person took the survey. Most survey respondents were from the University of Chicago, and they most likely grew up consuming a considerable amount of entertainment and online media. Most participants also continue to consume a moderate amount of entertainment media with fictional characters at present, averaging 5 hours per week.

Measures

All participants completed a survey via Qualtrics that measured their personality, the strength of their parasocial interactions with a favorite character, how they perceive said characters’ personalities, and how their interactions with said characters have developed over time using the Likert scale. The first three measurements were achieved through psychological scales associated with personality and PSI, while the last one was assessed via four questions combined to form a method for qualifying longevity.

Personality. The OCEAN personality traits of the participants and the characters—openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—were evaluated using the shortened version of the 44-item self-report index called the Big Five Inventory (BFI) created by Dr. Oliver P. John (John & Srivastava, 1999), which instead has ten items (John & Rammstedt, 2007). Each personality has a specific number of items assigned to them. Participants first completed the scale for themselves and then completed the scale with their character in mind.

PSI. We fused two established PSI scales to measure the strength and frequency of the parasocial interactions between participants and characters, forming a more organized and comprehensive 24-item scale. The first one was established by Tsay and Bodine (2012) and used by Ingram and Luckett (2019) as a restructuring of the classic PSI scale by Rubin et al., and it involves the four domains of Guidance (8 items), with statements gauging how much of a role model a character might be to a person, such as I look up to my favorite media personality or character; Face-to-Face Desire (4 items), with statements evaluating how much a person wants to meet and interact with the character in-person like I would be happy to meet my favorite character in person; Intimacy (3 items), with statements qualifying how close a person feels with their favorite character, such as I see my favorite character as a close friend; and Familiarity (3 items), with statements assessing how much a person knows about their favorite character like I have a good understanding of who my favorite character is. Participants reported how much they agreed with each statement on a 5-point likert scale. The second scale used to create the Five Domains of PSI to correspond with the Big Five was the Experience of Parasocial Interaction (EPSI) Scale from Hartmann and Tilo (2011), with items being characterized by how a person believes a character is aware an audience member exists, almost as if breaking the fourth wall like I had the feeling [name] knew I was aware of them. We deemed this 6-item domain Awareness. Participants also reported how much they agreed with each statement on a 5-point likert scale.

Longevity. To understand the impact of time on the participant’s interactions with their favorite character, we asked participants to answer how long they have had interactions with the character (i.e., the number of months/years they have engaged with this character), how many times they have had them since the first time they interacted, what forms of interaction they have had, and for them to rate if they believe their affection for the character decreased a lot since the first time they interacted with them, decreased a little, has stayed the same, increased a little, or increased a lot. We provided options for them to select from for questions 1-3, with the first two being single-select option questions ranging between a few months (N=1) to more than ten years (N=7) and 0 times (N=5) to 30 and more times (N=11), and the third being select multiple options question, including “Talked to them while watching TV” (N=7) and “Bought merchandise or made fan art” (N=6).

Procedure

An online survey was sent to friends and colleagues of the five researchers and individuals who participated in the same social organizations as the researchers. The majority of participants were students from the University of Chicago. At the top of the survey, a paragraph described the purpose of the study. No compensation was given.

The first step of the survey involved participants disclosing their demographics, including age, gender, race, and ethnicity. Preliminary questions also asked participants to name a favorite fictional character and mention how much time they spend watching entertainment media with fictional characters today.

The next step was for participants to self-report their personalities via the BFI. Then, they completed the 5 PSI Dimension section with their favorite character from childhood in mind. After that, they rated the personality traits of their chosen favorite character via another BFI questionnaire. Finally, participants answered the questions about longevity outlined above. Analyses will look at the trends between scores on the various scales filled out.

Results

33 usable responses were collected and considered in the data analysis (four responses were left out of the analyses for being blank/incomplete). We calculated separate person correlation coefficients between each of the five characteristics of participants’ personalities, the five characteristics of their characters’ personalities, and the different aspects of PSIs. We analyzed our data using a t-test. Correlation coefficients between survey items were determined to be significant at an alpha level of 0.05, given our sample size, if they were at or above an absolute value of 0.35. In our analysis, correlation coefficients indicate a weak correlation between absolute values of 0.1 and 0.3, moderate between 0.3 and 0.5, and strong if above 0.5.

The results will address three sections from the survey data: correlations between the specific personality traits of participants and characters, between particular personality traits of participants and character PSIs, and between specific personality traits and affection for characters over time (longevity of PSIs). Stronger coefficients suggest higher degrees of correlation between a participant’s personality trait and perceived character personality traits, aspects of PSIs, and longevity of PSIs.

Participant Personality and Perceived Character Personality Correlations

The most significant correlations between participants’ personality traits and characters’ perceived personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) existed between participant neuroticism and character neuroticism and character openness. Participant Neuroticism exhibited a strong, positive correlation of 0.56 with character neuroticism and a moderate, positive correlation of 0.49 with character openness. A moderate, positive correlation was also found between participant and character extraversion (0.38). Finally, there was a moderate, negative correlation between participant openness and character extraversion (-0.37). Other correlation coefficients were deemed statistically insignificant. Please see Figure 1 for all correlation coefficients between participants’ and perceived characters’ personalities.

Participant Personality and Character PSIs Correlations

The correlation of greatest significance between a participant’s personality trait and the total PSI was a strong, positive correlation of 0.59 between participant conscientiousness (P-Conscientiousness) and total PSI. P-Conscientiousness also had strong and moderate, positive correlations with specific elements of the PSI test: 0.56 with Guidance, 0.45 with Face-to-Face Desire, and 0.33 with Intimacy. Individual participant personality traits correlated moderately with individual elements of the PSI test. P-Neuroticism had a moderate, positive correlation of 0.39 with Familiarity, and participant agreeableness (P-Agreeableness) had a moderate, positive correlation with Face-to-Face Desire (0.42). P-Openness had a moderate, negative correlation with Face-to-Face Desire (-0.30). It is also notable that P-Extraversion had no significant correlations with any elements of the PSI test.

Participant Personality and Character PSI Longevity Correlations

Overall, participant levels of change in affection for characters had a moderate, negative correlation of 0.44 with the length of time participants had been acquainted with the character.

Among individual personality traits, participant neuroticism showed significant moderate, positive correlations with reported affection levels for a character over time (0.39) and non-significant, moderate, positive correlations with reported number of interactions with their character since the first interaction (0.32). A few elements of the PSI test had insignificant, weak negative correlations with the length of acquaintance: total PSI (-0.29), Guidance (-0.31), and Awareness (-0.32). Otherwise, there were no significant correlations between the three longevity measures, between longevity and participant personality, and between longevity and PSI measures.

References for Both Parts

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However, some of the factors that play into the challenges that come with tying nosology with discrete labels are comorbidity and the nature of certain disorders to exist around the same psychological construct and manifestation, something like social anxiety, and simultaneously be classified into separate groups that represent their onset or how they affect a person more profoundly. There is always a question of what trait of the disorder is more characteristic of it, so in the case of a personality disorder that is based on anxiety as the common denominator, it may not be classified as Anxiety Disorder because the perceived essence of what constitutes the illness is more tied to how it relates to its etiology from a person’s identity, development, and behavioral patterns rather than how an individual develops this construct because of a combination of factors like genetics and challenging life events. The same can be said about how Cluster A Personality Disorders (PDs) could fit the spectrum of schizophrenia disorders, and Cluster B PDs could be part of the mood disorder categories like Depressive Disorder, even if this is a debatable point.

One of the mental illnesses from the PD category that culminates in a very pronounced manifestation of the social anxiety construct is Avoidant Personality Disorder (AvPD), which shares similar symptoms with Social Anxiety Disorder, an anxiety disorder. To differentiate both, the DSM-5 defines SAD as “a marked, or intense, fear or anxiety of social situations in which the individual may be scrutinized by others” (APA, 2013, p. 203), while it summarizes Avoidant Personality Disorder as “a pervasive pattern of social inhibition, feelings of inadequacy, and hypersensitivity to negative evaluation that begins by early adulthood and is present in a variety of contexts” (APA, 2013, p. 673). However, the writers of the manual share the view presented in the previous paragraph when they note that “given its frequent onset in childhood and its persistence into and through adulthood, social anxiety disorder may resemble a personality disorder. The most apparent overlap is with avoidant personality disorder. (...) Nonetheless, social anxiety disorder is typically more comorbid with avoidant personality disorder than with other personality disorders” (APA, 2013, p. 207), and later on, “there appears to be a great deal of overlap between avoidant personality disorder and social anxiety disorder (social phobia), so much so that they may be alternative conceptualizations of the same or similar conditions” (APA, 2013, p. 674). So, a question about the suitability of separating both illnesses into their groups and clusters instead of categorizing them in the same social anxiety spectrum or within that spectrum remains.

Researchers who have looked into the relationship between SAD and AvPD have formulated three different views on the degree of connection between the two disorders. The first one is the most classic and perhaps old-fashioned idea that both are separate disorders with distinct qualitative characteristics. Even the DSM-5 seems to disagree with this one. The second one, called the severity continuum hypothesis, is more radical, and it pertains to how the mental disorders are fundamentally parallel pathologies belonging to the same spectrum, separated only by a severity criterion. Lastly, the third conceptualization reconciles the first two into a more moderate view, ascertaining that SAD and AvPD are still separate, discrete disorders, but they do share common symptoms that diverge through severity (Frandsen et al., 2020). As the first evidence to illustrate how the second and third views hold more ground in the discussion and to provide the DSM-5 statement with numerical data, a meta-analysis performed in 2013 investigating the comorbidity of the two conditions shows that almost half of the individuals diagnosed with Social Anxiety Disorder were also diagnosed with Avoidant Personality Disorder (Friborg et al., 2013), and estimations from previous years recorded a prevalence of co-occurrence going up to 89% (Reich, 2009) with an average of 56%. Even if these results do not represent a value that more appropriately reflects today’s situation, one would expect that, the fact that no apparent studies have challenged these comorbidity values ten years later as of the writing of this paper and there is a general trend in the number of people being diagnosed with mental disorders all across the board would point to the co-occurrence of both SAD and AvPD still being substantial enough to propel the discussion into if they should remain as separate as they are, with a short note in each condition’s pages briefly explaining how it may be difficult to distinguish them, or if there should be a section of the DSM diving deep into how they could belong to the same continuum.

Although the usage of a general increase in diagnoses as one piece of evidence for why SAD and AvPD should be considered more than just two disparate disorders is a debatable issue on its own based on the spread of overdiagnosis due to how the DSM-5 is laid out, the fact that people are becoming more aware of the presence of mental illness based on pop culture, news, and mental health awareness campaigns, and are less afraid of a diagnosis in a period characterized by academic, environmental, familial, financial, health, military, moral, political, and social uncertainties and unrest that exacerbates traumatic situations that were already present in the past, supports the idea that an increase in diagnosis of many disorders is natural and expected, especially when, in the discussed illnesses, anxiety, which is directly tied with the idea of uncertainty, is key. Thus, while evidence elucidating the nature of how SAD and AvPD are linked to each other and if they should be considered part of a social anxiety group is sparse, since there is no prominent discussion of these two disorders in society and science despite their comorbidity and a so-called loneliness epidemic that is making people generally more socially avoidant in an anxiety-inducing period, discussing the methodology and results of a few recent studies that have been conducted comparing the nosology that unites and separates both disorders might still help paint a clear picture of the relationship between SAD and AvPD so that future experiments can concretize, expand, or challenge the conclusions put forward in this meta-analysis in defining how SAD and AvPD are linked to each other and, for example, if they would be better categorized as part of a social anxiety group, type, or spectrum.

One experiment that looked into the interpersonal psychological dimension that is impaired in both Social Anxiety Disorder and Avoidant Personality Disorder, characteristic of the social anxiety construct, used something called the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems (IIP-64) to measure the level of a patient’s interpersonal problems, which categorizes behavioral patterns based on eight different subscales: Avoidant, Cold, Vindictive, Domineering, Intrusive, Overly Nurturing, Exploitable, and Nonassertive (Frandsen et al., 2020). These subscales are all organized in a circumplex within the axes of Dominance and Affiliation, and a patient is located inside the meter based on the results of a 64-question self-report that asks them about excessive behaviors or comportments that are hard to accomplish, scored on a 5-point scale. The researchers also relied on a structural summary method to cluster similar groups of patients from their spread out results to average out their most likely position in the circumplex, which was applied to better represent the similarities and discrepancies between individuals diagnosed with SAD, individuals diagnosed with AvPD, and patients diagnosed with both (Cain et al., 2010). The research applied the IIP-64 structural summary method since it is a part of the way interpersonal pathoplasticity is studied, which follows the idea that a person’s manifestation of psychopathology is affected by their personality and identity, meaning that the people labeled under the same diagnoses will exhibit their difficulties depending on how they understand and accept themselves and interact with others, which varies from person to person. This concept of pathoplasticity is the bane of the stringent DSM style (which even the DSM-5 knows it should not be like that as seen through its notes about comorbidities and overlaps and the new notions about spectrums it considers) because it suggests that each individual may not fit perfectly or even properly into one or two categories due to their individualities. Moreover, pathoplasticity even proposes that personality should not be the basis of a class of disorders because all of them are, in one way or another, personality-based, while PDs exist as the most extreme, archetypal example of how pathologies can become entrenched with personality.

In discussing their results, the writers mentioned how all three groups of patients (Social Anxiety Disorder, Avoidant Personality Disorder, SAD+AvPD) overlap significantly in the Nonassertive subscale to establish their primary interpersonal problems, and that each group exhibited very different and non-significant interpersonal issues in five of the eight subscales. The remaining two significant subscale results came from Avoidant and Exploitable, which appear to present a discrepancy in the relationship between the groups, as both SAD and SAD+AvPD patients were more inclined to the Avoidant subscale (center-right of Nonassertive). In contrast, AvPD patients had a notable association with the Exploitable subscale (center-right of Nonassertive), even if these inclinations were not substantial and visually radical. The researchers used this relationship between Avoidant, Nonassertive, and Exploitable to formulate a Cluster system for the diagnosis groups: Friendly-submissive, Cold-submissive, and Nonassertive (Frandsen et al., 2020). This system clearly shows how SAD and AvPD are characterized by a lower presence in the Domineering Axis, but it proposes that they diverge a little in how they are presented in the Affiliation axis, with the former being more Cold-Submissive and the latter appearing more in the Friendly-Submissive cluster. These discrepancies can be further understood in the way they inform two other psychological dynamics: fearful attachment positions and therapy outcomes. The fearful attachment dynamic indicates how the people in the Friendly-submissive and Cold-submissive clusters display their interpersonal strategies toward socially adverse situations. In the former case, they are generally unintentionally warmer in speech and body patterns when interacting with others, with feelings of inadequacy and diminished self-esteem being the primary concerns that lead to a more over-apologetic and quiet situation. In the latter case, they are generally colder and distant when making new connections, with thoughts of diminished self-worth, hopelessness, and powerlessness and rising feelings of fear, sadness, shame, or anger due to how a situation will most likely go wrong dominating the person’s mindstate and affecting their overall visual and vocal presentations, causing a detached negative impression on the observer. Those individuals who are purely nonassertive then have no strategy, which the authors understood as even worse, since they are the most aversive to any communication. In turn, the treatment outcomes dynamic indicates how these interpersonal strategies can predict therapy alliance and trust between clinician and patient since studies have shown that individuals with different mental disorders that are located in the Friendly-submissive (Nonassertive and Exploitable) cluster are found to have better treatment outcomes than those only Nonassertive or Cold-submissive (Cain et al., 2010). Those observations could point out that one of the differences between patients with SAD and AvPD is how they exhibit specific relevant differences in how personality affects their behaviors in relation to the psychological dynamics of interpersonal relationships (public social and private social, treatment-wise strategies).

Other results of note from the experiment have to do with demographics, additional tests and surveys conducted on the patients of each diagnostic group, and other conclusions from their answers to the 64 questions. Firstly, there were significantly more women with Avoidant Personality Disorder than men, even in a study where 70% of participants were women. Some studies do support that there are more women with AvPD, but it is not a data that is widely accepted since other papers have not found such a correlation, which proposes a sample discrepancy between all studies that can only be corrected if more interest is put into more methodically recording cases of AvPD in the US and the world (Lampe & Malhi, 2018). Secondly, patients with AvPD displayed more severe interpersonal dysfunction than SAD in their response to the 64 questions (more 5s, the maximum score), which fits with how the DSM-5 categorized personality disorders as having one of its core domains being disturbances of interpersonal function and thus showing more drastic interpersonal issues than anxiety disorders. Thirdly, patients with Social Anxiety Disorder experienced way more severe phobic anxiety and feared more situations than those with AvPD, coinciding with their Cold-submissive interpersonal strategy and the fact that they have an anxiety disorder. However, it is not known why AvPD patients rarely encounter phobic anxiety; if it is due to less fearfulness, if it is due to such an avoidant thought process that prevents anxiety from happening, or if it is due to a more chronic form of social anxiety that is so ingrained in individuals with AvPD that it desensitized them from feeling the effects of phobic anxiety, which is the most accepted theory (Rettew, 2000). Finally, with the aid of a depression subscale from the SCL-90-R questionnaire, SAD was shown to be the least severe disorder in the way patients express that symptom (Frandsen et al., 2020). Together with the observations in the previous paragraph, the findings discussed in this paragraph support the third view that SAD and AvPD are separate disorders that converge through specific symptoms, general thought processes, and behaviors of disparate severities or even disparate particular expressions.

However, psychology is not the only perspective that can elucidate how two disorders converge and diverge from each other. Another set of experiments looked at the environmental and genetic conditions that connect Social Anxiety Disorder and Avoidant Personality Disorder based on their presence in twins. One of them had researchers interview several twins with AvPD and SAD, whom they located using the Norwegian Twin Registry twice, once between 1999 and 2004 and then again between 2010 and 2011, with a greater focus on investigating how both disorders may differ in the environmental aspect of stability over the years. There is a preconception that all personality disorders are stable and of long duration, while anxiety disorders are perceived to be more transient and diagnosable after only some months of onset, which for SAD is six months. However, studies have proposed the opposite, especially in the case of SAD, since it appears that this disorder can be one of the most chronic of all the anxiety conditions, together with GAD (Ansell et al., 2011), while it seems the AvPD can fluctuate in severity as time goes by. The results of the research corroborate both the new propositions, as the manifestation of SAD and AvPD symptoms in the participants were moderately stable from early to middle adulthood, which for AvPD in particular, contradicts the rigidity DSM model that all personality disorders will remain almost unchanged since they are identity-based, and even if personality is mutable, nobody’s identity is volatile and changes that much in life (without considering dissociative events). This conclusion does not necessarily link both disorders more strongly, but it becomes an obstacle to perceiving stability as a distinguishable feature of PDs.

Instead, a result from the study that may link both disorders together pertains to the fact that some etiological risk factors like temperamental traits such as behavioral inhibition from early childhood or before the onset of either illness and the exacerbation of the conditions with old age if they remain untreated or are not adequately treated appear to be shared between SAD and AvPD. Moreover, although in the Norwegian twin sample, co-occurrence happened in only around one-third to half of the cases, there was a marked increase observed in middle to late adulthood than in early adulthood, which could mean that SAD and AvPD are risk factors for each other, causing one to develop the other (Torvik et al., 2016). These outcomes suggest that both conditions arise from similar sensations and behavioral patterns and can and do interact with each other, especially in cases where either persists for longer in an individual’s life. Still, the writers made a case to remind readers that AvPD should be best described as anhedonic introversion (so an extreme version of the personality factor of introversion where social interactions bring no pleasure), while SAD is instead a disorder caused by an internalizing factor that is much more situation-based and less all-encompassing to all social interactions, further pointing to the third conceptualization as the more accurate perspective.

A follow-up twin study in Norway conducted by the same authors (but a different lead researcher) and published in 2019 focused much more on the relationship between genetics, environment, and the Big Five personality model in relation to Social Anxiety Disorder and Avoidant Personality Disorder. The authors of the paper used about the same information from their previous study, but their methodology involved novel assessment tools that could correlate the three factors mentioned above more strongly, without focusing on stability. They initially found out that both environmental and genetic risk factors between the two disorders substantially overlapped, even if they were distinct in nature, and for this study, they had to do with the participants’ results in the five-factor model of personality, or Big Five. In the case of AvPD, a phenotypic analysis (individual and separate) produced results that showed a positive correlation with neuroticism and a negative correlation with extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, while biometric analyses using multivariate twin models (both twins together) exhibited the same results, with the bonus that, genetically speaking, extraversion is the most negatively associated personality type. Contrastingly, in the case of SAD, a phenotypic analysis produced the same pattern as AvPD’s, except that there was no statistical association between the condition and openness and that its correlation with neuroticism was stronger than AvPD’s, while the multivariate twin models exhibited a high positive correlation between it and neuroticism, high negative correlation between it and extraversion, and low negative association with three other types. Regarding environmental correlations as shared by the twins, both SAD and AvPD showed a positive relationship with neuroticism and negative associations with all the other personality types (Welander-Vatn et al., 2019). Interestingly, the genetic results in specific almost exactly track with a 2008 meta-analysis with studies from around the world, showing that even throughout time and space, the natures of the two disorders and how they interact with personality types are about the same (Samuel & Widiger, 2008).

The contrasts found in the strength of the correlation between the personality traits and Social Anxiety Disorder and Avoidant Personality Disorder can be justified by looking into how they are displayed in people. Twins with SAD had a higher association with neuroticism than AvPD all across the board, possibly because of something that harkens back to the first experiment mentioned, where phobic anxiety is much more present in the former illness than the latter. The fact that people with SAD are more open to being social and living through many experiences in life exposes them to more situations where neurotic thought patterns and behaviors can happen, particularly when they battle and overpower the desire to communicate with others. However, more specifically, SAD’s neutral relationship with openness points to how a person with the disorder does not demonstrate a general avoidance of all new activities and situations, as the condition relates more to how previous lived or heard about experiences may provide a sense of anxiety that feeds onto itself through intrusive thoughts to increase its presence, while a person with AvPD is more averse to all new situations that can provide an emotional risk or discomfort, no matter its nature or previous experiences, which seems to prevent neurotic behavior from happening from the start. This issue of openness and neuroticism appear to be the most impactful elements that differentiate both disorders, with the latter creating possible challenges in therapy like high dropout rates and a clinician’s difficulty in building trust, rapport, and hope in their patient, while low extraversion is the key to their social anxiety roots, which relates to a “negative” position in the Domineering Axis in the interpersonal circumplex model. Thus, when put together, all results paint the picture that both disorders are very similar in how personality types relate to them, even if there are evident differences in how strongly the condition correlates with a type. These discrepancies can be explained as more evidence for the view that SAD and AvPD share symptoms and manifestations that diverge in terms of how severity constructs cognitive and emotional patterns that affect social behaviors.

As such, everything presented in this paper points to how the more moderate conceptualization of the relationship between Social Anxiety Disorder and Avoidant Personality Disorder as disparate disorders that closely share the same or comparable symptoms that diverge in severity fits the nosology of the two conditions better than considering them either entirely separate and almost not overlapping or being part of the same spectrum, with the only deviation being the severity of how the construct of anxiety, particularly that of social and interpersonal interaction, manifests in the people with the conditions. In the first paper, the similarities between the disorders relied on comorbidity, their exact position in the Domineering Axis of the interpersonal circumplex, and their very close distribution in the Affiliation Axis, centering on the Nonassertive subscale. In the twin papers, their long-term stabilities, similar etiological risk factors from early behavioral inhibition, possible influence on each other, and strong positive correlations with neuroticism and negative correlations with extraversion strongly linked the manifested nature of SAD and AvPD together. In turn, their differences relied on how the symptoms of each illness interacted with the Avoidant and Exploitable subscales to form different clusters and be present in them at different rates to affect psychological dynamics like therapeutic outcomes, interpersonal strategies, and fearful attachment, how patients with SAD present a more severe case of phobic anxiety and higher positive correlation to neuroticism without a significant negative association with openness, and how individuals with AvPD show a more severe case of depressive symptoms and interpersonal dysfunction, and a higher negative correlation to openness.

While both disorders are seen as the fear and avoidance of social situations as the meaning of social anxiety, SAD seems to be a frustrating challenge to any social interaction that is consciously developed through particular experiences and starts as specific to them, always causing a feeling of uselessness and powerlessness since individuals are aware of their challenges and most likely feel that it does not represent every other interpersonal situation. They want to change the outcomes but can’t because the fear of the effects of anxiety reinforces the justification of the proliferation of negative thoughts about oneself from the internalized idea that both the act of not facing the obstacle and failing at it, like approaching another person, makes oneself worthless or lesser, which would make confronting it later on even harder and results in even more anxiety. Contrastingly, AvPD appears to rely on an already ingrained aversion to the disturbance of social occasions that could result in an adverse emotional reaction to characterize an anhedonic automatic response to the proposition and possibility of anything social and new in the form of an interpersonal strategy that manifests as quietness, awkwardness, sometimes aloofness, discomfort, and avoidance, while their dislike towards the situation is not always directly regarded.

Thus, could there ever be a situation where the DSM adopts more than just one nosology model, considering SAD and AvPD as Anxiety and Personality Disorders and as part of a spectrum that bridges the two groups through comorbidity and their shared aspects to fit the third conceptualization and the findings of the paper better? Would that make it all more confusing, or would it make diagnosing patients perhaps less rigid in how more than one model repels the possibility of defining a person based on how one or two discrete disorders label them? The future and a lack of interest and coverage around this issue are the only boundaries for such answers.

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To entertain the thought of one’s origins is a lifelong, deep-rooted exercise of self-discovery and self-awareness that mystifies and elucidates humans about our condition as individuals in relation to our psyche, the community we belong to or strive to belong to, and the natural and cosmic environment we live in. Answers to those questions never arrive freely or easily and tend not to single-handedly satisfy our need to understand ourselves, partially because of the sometimes exciting and other times trying notion that humans exist in constant flux. Even if our psychological cores remain primarily stable in a way that we can wake up and recognize ourselves as belonging to the intrinsic conception we had about who we were yesterday and the day before, we constantly shift those psychological aspects that provide us evidence about the nature of our core, or spiritually speaking, the soul, based on how we are frequently responding to inner and outer experiences throughout life.

Nevertheless, reflecting upon how the first breath of existence came to be and how the world we experience through our senses arose has become a way for us to find the most fundamental truth about the human condition based on the basic root and common “laws” that constitute the essence of being alive. The Ancient Greeks had their Cosmogonies, or stories that retold the origins of the universe and existence, with Hesiod’s Theogony being considered by many, even Plato in his Republic, as the greatest and most influential collection of myths for Ancient Greek culture. However, other cosmogonical stories from different traditions and perspectives to the ones established by Hesiod, such as the Orphic and the Platonic, reinterpret, shift, supplement, or reframe the beginnings of everything for their own purposes. In the pursuit of deciphering the importance and impact of myths on the lives of those who believed them in a cultural context, one comes to wonder how each story connects, where certain points diverge, and what leads to such variations. Particularly against Orphism and Hesiod’s Theogony and its Chaos, Plato’s Demiurge posits an apparent contrast to the Protogenoi genealogy of their traditions that may indicate how the philosopher went about interpreting myths as sources of knowledge that can be repurposed to denote certain truths about the meaning, purpose, and goodness of the human condition as beings interconnected with a higher intelligible plane through our consciousness, and the responsibilities and possibilities that such a connection entails.

Starting with the Theogony, this epic is the source that serves as the contrasting point that all other Greek and Roman cosmologies were subordinate to in terms of the primordial beings and subsequent divinities involved in the creation of certain aspects of the Universe and Earth, and the order of whom came first and who begat whom. Regarding the genealogy of divinities and daemons, the Theogony establishes that the original nothing was succeeded by (or itself was) the force of Chaos, the first of all beings: “Surely first of all Chaos came into being” (Hesiod 35). Then came the Protogenoi, with Gaia, Tartaros, and Eros spontaneously springing out of the first primordial, and Nyx and Erebus being birthed by Chaos to form the first forms in existence. All subsequent beings arose from mostly Gaia and Nyx, with other primordials—Ouranos, Oureas, and Pontos—being birthed by the former and Himera and Aether by the latter’s union with Erebus. Gaia’s lineage resulted in the Titans (second generation deities), the Gods of Olympus and the Twelve Olympians (third generation deities), Monsters, Giants, Nymphs, and eventually plants, animals, and humans, while Nyx’s resulted in the spirits or daemons that personified concepts like Strife (Eris), Sleep (Hypnos), and Suffering (Oizys). Under the concern that each primordial represented something tangible or metaphysical, it is pertinent to consider what these basic units of Greek reality were. The Earth, the Underworld plane and its pits of torture, Desire, the twins Night and Darkness, the Sky humans see and the Heavenly plane we cannot reach (the Firmament), the Mountains, Water, Day and Aether (a concept that means the source of all Light and the atmosphere of Heaven). For the Theogony, this is the root structure of existence in its first moments: Ouranos, Gaia, and Tartaros segmented reality into planes separating the world of divinities/immortals, the living/mortals, and the dead and daimons; Ouranos, Oureas, and Pontos populated Gaia with matter like water and rocks and established the lineage of divine beings that created the mortals, with the former giving Earth its Sky; Nyx, Erebus, Himera, and Aether represented the tangible and metaphorical dualities of Day and Night, Light and Dark, with the darkness duo birthing the literal (Sleep) and figurative (Suffering) dark constants first; and Eros as Desire provided the impetus to all for all.

When reading other Greek cosmogonies, a group that stands out comes from a tradition pertaining to another poet, Orpheus (the first of all poets), who was a mythical figure in Greek Mythology, the son of a Muse (Calliope), and one of the only beings to have journeyed to the Underworld and come back alive. The nature of many Orphic Hymns was to retell cosmogonies and theogonies. One set of cosmogonical hymns is the Orphic Rhapsodies, which detail how Khronos—the pure, abstract Idea of Time as Motion, instead of Hesiod’s Kronos, the one that subjected mortals to the rules of time we experience like lifespans, beginnings and endings, and seasonal cycles—was the first primordial, how he birthed Aether and Chaos, how Night is the nether part of Aether, and how, with his first son, Khronos created an Egg that birthed the deity that shaped the rest of existence, Protogonos Phaethon, who also contained “in his heart swift and eyeless Eros” (Chrysanthou 287). Orphic Fragment 54, a summary of ancient hymns by philosopher Dasmascius, is also cosmogonic, explaining that “according to them Hydros and Gaia were the first productions” together with Khronos, and that Khronos was a dragon and had a female self in Ananke (Necessity), with whom he birthed Aether, Chaos, Erebus, and the Egg, the latter of which is a third triad consisting of Male aspects, Female aspects, and the incorporeal form of the God Protogonos or Zeus, who then hatched and formed the rest of existence.

Lastly, another interpretation of note that depicted an image of the beginning of everything was written by the philosopher Plato as he weaved a cosmogony into one of his dialogues, Timaeus. In it, Plato tells of a Supreme Being creator of All (the Demiurge) who as “He was good, and in the good no envy about anything ever comes to be” (541), wanted all things as much as possible to be like himself, so He set out to make an All. “Everything” up to that point was disorder, so He molded it into a basic order and gave the self-sufficient body, which was spherically shaped and made of intangible Fire, binding Air and Water, and solid Earth in equal proportion to each other, Intellect, a Soul, and Life to make it beautiful and whole. He then called it eudaimon. Although Plato’s cosmogony in Timaeus does not reference any divinity, he does not necessarily deny the existence of the Greek gods and does not upend the idea that there were primordial beings. The Demiurge is established as the creator of All, so for all intents and purposes, he could be the Proto-cosmos, the before Chaos. However, on its own, Plato’s cosmogony defines early existence as a calculated and motivated design by a being that remains out of reach to All.

Part II: A Comparison

When specifically drawing out a dynamic relationship between the original being/force or conglomerate of such beings from Hesiod and Plato’s cosmogonies, it is relevant to recognize a possible particular intent behind their creation and the context of where the myth stands as an individual source or as part of a work that exists to respond to an idea or argument presented inside it. When looking at the Theogony, Hesiod, a human farmer and poet, quickly announces to his readers at the beginning of the text the where and why of the existence of his text, using the pretext of an invocation to the Muses to justify both his abilities as a poet and his apparent knowledge of divine events of the past by saying, “then they inspired in me divine voice so that I could celebrate the things to come and those past, and they ordered me to sing hymns of the family of the happy ever existing ones” (Hesiod, Theogony 33). It is as if he finds a need to start his story about the divine beings he is presenting to the audience by asserting that they are the ones providing him with the information as sources, and Hesiod is more of a “servant” or scribe with the ability to translate the messages belonging to the higher planes of existence and create more evocative narrations through poetry, a sort of close imitation to the songs the Muses sang to the gods as a token of some kind of love. It was not Hesiod who originally asked them to endow him with poetry and inspiration, but the Muses who approached him and, in his words, “inspired in me divine voice” (33) like a power he unlocked. Thus, Hesiod’s necessity to organize an “original” cosmogony and theogony is portrayed by himself as a service to the divine and the people, and as every poet is chosen and blessed by the Muses with a purpose the latter provide them, Hesiod’s purpose was to celebrate the events of the past.

On the other hand, Plato’s intent can be disentangled on a literal level through his characters and on a metaphorical level through certain perspectives about his position on myths. The former is not that particularly gripping since what is known chiefly about The Timaeus is that it is framed as another Socratic dialogue where the characters serve as mouthpieces of Plato’s philosophies while interacting with each other in shared spaces like a festival, so the latter strategy is more applicable in this case. Amongst many different routes of interpretation, Historian Luc Brisson highlights in his book How Philosophers Saved Myths that “myth is an unverifiable discourse because its referent is located either at a level of reality inaccessible both to the intellect and to the senses, or at the level of sensible things, but in a past of which the speaker of the discourse can have no direct or indirect experience” (Brisson, Philosophers 23). In the case of Plato’s cosmogony, and any cosmogony, discussing it from the viewpoint of the sensible past is a dead end. Luckily, Plato pioneered the idea of the divine’s true nature as intelligible ideas that constitute a true reality that humans have partial access to due to our consciousness/mind, so his intent is charged with symbolic value. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy argues that “if we follow the metaphorical interpretation, we will read the account (...) as a statement of the principles that underlie the universe at all times of its existence” (Zeyl & Sattler). The Demiurge then becomes a being that is a principle represented by the notion of Eudaimonia, and this principle of ultimate goodness and beauty is the foundation of existence, illustrated by the line “wanting everything to be good and nothing bad, to the degree that this is possible, the god took hold of as much of the All as was visible (...) and he brought it into order from disorder” (Plato, Timaeus 541). The norm and Ananke of life should be for aspects and beings to be noble, and heroism stands as one of the highest forms one can take besides grasping and teaching this principle of goodness. Such a perspective agrees with Brisson when he argues that the truth of a myth relies on how it conforms to the established discourse to which it belongs. In other terms, mythological truth, due to its verifiability being inaccessible, is self-referential and constant. Therefore, grasping Plato’s intent is not a wholly conclusive venture, but one way to see it is as an argument toward presenting the notion that human nature is intrinsically connected to an intelligible, principal essence while casting doubt on the use of myth as a definitive answer to everything. And that is consistent with other Platonic dialogues that examine human virtue and depict gods as intelligible beings.

In contrasting the authors’ intents behind the myths, Hesiod could be lying or fantasizing about why he wrote his Theogony, but he is at least forthcoming about wanting to tell a story with an inspired voice and wishing for others to look at the world through another lens, one that shows the fantastical and awe-inducing roots of an existence where the elements of the outside world and one’s emotional experiences and consciousness are governed by supremely powerful beings. Nature, the cosmos, life, and death are big and intimidating Forces, and Hesiod provides these forces with a body and personality to make it easy for humans to become familiar with the elements of the existence we are part of and to understand who and what we are in it, starting with the notion that Everything was not Chaos until suddenly it was. Contrastingly, Plato disregards the exercise of fantasy for an exercise of self-discovery and self-actualization through the guise of universal constants that define the human self. The more each person is connected with each Idea, the more we grasp the essence of their intelligible form and come to experience them fully. His cosmogony is not about how the universe formed, but what makes it coalesce and what such unification could teach us about ourselves based on the intent of the Demiurge; the truth of reality and its meaning to humans directly instead of indirectly through the elements of Nature. It is about the point of a cosmogony rather than the details of how it happened, and what one can learn from it to better oneself.

Part III: An Interpretation

As part of an interpretative reflection, in reconciling how Hesiod’s Theogony and Plato depict the essences of the cosmogenic entities that conceived the concept of existence to argue toward the latter as a reinterpretation of the former, it could be that in the process of shaping everything, the Demiurge provided a direction to the impetus that motivated the Protogenoi to act. The Greek cosmogonies were free of conflict and thus could be interpreted as creating a Beautiful Whole, compared to the Greek theogonies, where sons are destined to murder their fathers and violence is employed to upend the divinity’s natural hierarchy. In his first two paragraphs, Hesiod uses positive words like “always-safe,” “fairest,” “thoughtful counsel,” “intimate,” “blessed,” and “graceful” to describe the progenitor beings. However, it is when Kronos is born that the first negative word appears, and it is an important one: “crooked-minded” (Hesiod, Theogony 35). Something crooked is something bent opposite to its natural shape, so when this passage is looked at in relation to the first moments of the cosmogony, it implies Kronos has a mind or disposition opposite to the essence of existence.

Through the guise of interpretation, Kronos represents the first fault in the foundation of existence that, without being kept in check, grows and grows to the point of denaturing the existential principle. The Protogenoi were all beautiful and good, but it seems such perfection was not meant to be forever. The existence birthed its incongruity as a Titan who embodies the Rules of Time, Beginnings and Endings, Entropy, and Change. Interestingly, when combining Hesiod’s way of personifying divinities and Plato’s metaphorical coat of paint that assigns a purpose to creation, if the Demiurge is supposed to be All Good, Orderly, and Beautiful and the Protogenoi are the essential elements of matter that create this harmonious picture of existence (Pontos represents Water, Gaia in itself means Earth, Chaos and Erebus are depicted as Mists of Air, and Aether is a Mist of Light, one of Fire’s traits), the moment he coalesces into its perfect, material form and starts moving, he was destined to lose its perfection. In a way, Stasis is beautiful because the definition of Beauty as we experience it is ephemerality. Time is Change, and Change modifies Beauty. Beauty can be found again, but it is not the same as before because Time and experience have modified It. Beauty is a Prism, a Morning Glory, a Kiss. Therefore, the enemy of Beauty is Time because it is impossible to keep something Beautiful as it is or to recreate it perfectly and ultimately beautifully as before if Time flows, so to stop Time and encapsulate a moment of something that is deemed Beautiful is to preserve Beauty, but of course, that is not how reality works. When Time flooded Everything, the purpose of existence changed.

As a reading of Plato on Hesiod, the moment the Demiurge finished his Beautiful Art and enclosed it in Time, his beauty was doomed to wither. Existence is Art, and as Time flows, the meaning of Art changes and the material piece decays. However, it does not mean that Beauty is not everywhere we see and in what we are. In a reality where Time leads to Entropy, embracing the Beauty and Goodness that lies within us, striving to be better, and stopping and consciously and emotionally appreciating the things in life that make us truly cherish the whole of an experience is the closest one can be to the original essence of Everything in a form of sympatheia (since the core of Everything is Goodness and Beauty), even if suffering corrupts such a connection. No wonder Eros, or the impetus of connection, is always present in the cosmogonies, and feeling it is experiencing the antithesis of suffering. So, no matter who or what, there is always a potential for Goodness and Beauty to come from any person, even if, simultaneously, anyone is as likely to renounce or be detached from it in the same way Time gives and takes.

I know this feels more like a spiritual reading and interaction than a reflection, but as I mentioned in the introduction, mythology helps us find meaning in what is daily when science and biology are just not “enough.” Interpretations can be a set of tentative answers or a belief system, but either way, they serve the purpose of helping one situate oneself in the world. It works so well as a thought exercise or a life philosophy that the Demiurge’s story was not only seriously adopted by Gnosticism and Hermeticism and became one of the bases of Alchemy, but it has also become part of today’s pop culture. DC Comics has its interpretation of how its existence was created and works, and it has a whole Multiversal map separating reality into planes (which is mildly outdated since DC is now an Omniverse). The Source is understood as a force that represents Everything that is and can be, very much like the Demiurge, living in the Overvoid above all reality, and it calls upon super celestial beings it creates to shape different realities. These beings are called the Hands, and one member recently got a name: Perpetua. There is a whole conflict that happens as she is supposed to create a universe made of forces of Justice (like the Principle of Beauty and Goodness) but is corrupted by the Great Darkness, an entity that represents the original Existential Void and Emptiness where the Light of the Source came from, who seeks to make everything go back to it, and puts together the forces of Doom instead. Her sons, the Monitor, Anti-Monitor, and Forger (Proto Protogenai), had to imprison her and change DC’s existence to be made out of connective forces of Justice as initially intended. The Source also has existential form, and that is The Presence, a combination of the Judeo-Christian God and the Gnostic Demiurge, since The Presence is an avatar that speaks for and as the Source. Lastly, the whole Map of the Multiverse separates the Planes of Matter (the different Earths/Universes) from the Speed Force (Motion itself, but much more), Limbo, the Sphere of Gods, where all the Gods and Divinites of all Pantheons, Magic Creatures, the Dead, the Endless, Heaven, and Hell lie, and the Overvoid.

In more ways than one, the Platonic myth of the Demiurge, and myths today overall, can be applied as a source of inspiration for entertainment and world-building, but ultimately, they give us the opportunity to eventually answer the forever shifting questions of who we are for ourselves, for the world, and in this vast, infinite cosmos.

Bibliography

-Hesiod. “Theogony.” Gods Heroes Monsters, edited by Carolina Lopez-Ruiz, Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 31–48.

-“Orphic Cosmogony: The Derveni Papyrus.” Gods Heroes Monsters, edited by Carolina Lopez-Ruiz, Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 48–50.

-Chrysanthou, Anthi. “Hieroi Logoi in 24 Rhapsodies.” Defining Orphism: The Beliefs, the ›Teletae‹ and the Writings, De Gruyter, 2020, pp. 274-350. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110678451

-“Orphic Fragment 54 Otto Kern.” HellenicGods.org, 2010, https://www.hellenicgods.org/orphic-fragment-54---otto-kern.

-Plato. “The Demiurge, From The Timaeus.” Gods Heroes, Monsters, edited by Carolina Lopez-Ruiz, Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 541–543.

-Brisson, Luc. “Plato’s Attitude toward Myth.” How Philosophers Saved Myths, translated by Catherine Tihanyi, The University of Chicago Press, 2004.

-Zeyl, Donald and Sattler, Barbara. “Plato’s Timaeus.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2022/entries/plato-timaeus/

Artist’s Statement

Modern media tends to favor vertebrates when writing human stories performed by anthropomorphic animals or when trying to translate the world of the animal into an intelligible form for humans to relate to and empathize with. However, media franchises like Pokémon go beyond this possibly awkward 6-feet-apart interaction of interpretations and suspensions of disbelief to allow for the cultivation of a reciprocal relationship akin to a partnership or friendship. Pokémon is about forming deep, loving, and compassionate bonds from mutual, direct, self-actualization forward interactions with sentient beings with as much of a rich conscious life and capacity to psychologically and emotionally evolve as humans, some even being able to intrinsically experience the thoughts and emotions of others through the Psychic-type powers, but that most of the time lack the communicative capacity to respond directly. I find Pokémon to be a unique and thought-provoking template for the fictionalization of life, conducive to an experience that can both elevate how one sees life and their place in it and help one feel less lonely in the world, as most Pokémon are inspired by and thus exist as analogs to real-life animals. By translating the sensibilities and creature creation design philosophies behind Pokémon into a non-fictional realm, it is possible to propose a new level of human-insect interaction beyond utilitarianism and passive and distant appreciation of a world to which we do not belong. Such interactions would be characterized by the possibility of a deep understanding between species and a sense of belonging from an intermingling that allows for specific human expressive manifestations like poetry and painting to be more genuine and emotionally rich when written about and depicting an insect under the relationship guise of Human-Pokémon interactions in a level that is comparable to human affective friendships.

My project comes from a desire to more profoundly admire the enthralling beauty and delicateness of butterflies and to find some way to be psychologically and soulfully moved by a relation that is enriched by the possibilities that fiction grants in making the real less ordinary; to witness a hidden life that speaks to me in a personal level and positively affects how I engage with my surroundings and life. As Drouin quotes Uexküll, one has to imagine a soap bubble around an insect to understand their relationship with their environment, and “If we enter this bubble ourselves, ‘many qualities of the colorful meadow vanish completely, others lose their coherence with one another, and new connections are created,’” (147). However, unlike the limited scope of an environment, Pokémon biology involves the augmentation of specific traits, from giving beings special powers and abilities that cause them to be extraordinary to making them aware of their and other’s emotions, and through their intermingling with humans and their sentience, like us, they manifest cultural practices that transcend the boundaries of a niche Plato’s Allegory of the Cave-like umwelt. Like Buytendijk once said, “Man does not have an environment, he has a world” (Drouin 147), and Pokémon are indeed world-making. One such practice that evolved between Pokémon and Pokémon, which also involves Humans, is that of the Pokémon battle. Therefore, in trying to bring Pokémon closer to the real world, a way to approach this challenge is to create a bridge between the fictional and real, where imaginary insects may act out fantastical interactions like battling, depicted in a naturalistic way that is tangentially imagined as a Pokémon Battle. It is as if anyone watching butterflies in the same space entered their world-defining, more permeable soap bubbles and imagined them as more than just butterflies, engaging in exciting combat that they could themselves join in as their trainers based on their favorite one and form this imaginary bond that ends up making one feel more intrinsically connected to nature and the beings that share it with us.

Such an exercise can invite even more exciting ways of conceptualizing how the cultural practice of battling may look like, and for my project, I decided to reimagine the idea of Pokémon sparring as a sort of coexistence system that not only strengthens the bonds between Pokémon and trainer but also provides benefits for the Fakémon species, like a sparring match that helps the Pokémon “level up,” learn new moves that they cannot naturally do so through level up as an exchange between species, and “evolve,” something that could be considered a proxy for a Pokémon-Pokémon involution. As described by Hustak and Myers, “Involutionary momentum helps us to get a feel for affective push and pull among bodies, including the affinities, ruptures, enmeshments, and repulsions among organisms constantly inventing new ways to live with and alongside one another” (97). I would say two or more Pokémon partaking in this activity is an excellent example of this interoception; a push and pull of bodies reinventing ways to live alongside one another through bonding and improving one’s connection with one’s body (interoception and power manifestation) and that of the other Pokémon. But my concept does not stop there, only between Pokémon. To include the human aspect of Pokémon training, this new cultural practice would involve physical combat, as is common in the franchise, and a gamified poetry aspect that draws inspiration from the Japanese traditions related to the artistic depiction of insect life. It is a “poetry match” or Utaawase between trainers in which taking a turn to read a poem, most specifically a tanka1, would boost the stats of the Pokémon based on how much the poem’s content matches with the Pokémon’s Type and Contest Condition delivered almost like an oath or battle cry, which could end up emotionally connecting the trainer and the Pokémon even more while raising the stakes of the battle.

As can be seen on the first page, I was inspired by Mushi no Utaawase’s scrolls and Utamaro’s poetry illustrations in his Ehon Mushi Erami to illustrate a Utaawase between two Pokémon I designed (or rather, as the fans have dubbed it, Fakémon, meaning unofficial Pokémon). As Professor Lamarre writes in his book Uncovering Heian Japan, “the general structure of an awase consisted of a number of rounds in which two teams, left and right, brought forth for comparison objects of a particular kind fixed in advance” (70). Poems were included in the comparison of things (the monoawase), which was the predominant impetus of the contests before they became the main attraction later on in the Heian Period, and even if calling Pokémon things is not a fitting parallel, there is a resonance in poems accompanying and enhancing the competitive edge of the main attraction between the awases and my reimagined Pokémon battle. To expand upon the effects of the poems in battle—the invisible rules and potentials that permeate my illustration but which are not depicted in it—only when one of the 5 Pokémon stats that can be raised is done so by 6, the maximum amount (only through poetry and thus without using stat boosting moves and abilities) is that a new Pokémon form would be unlocked, a bond phenomenon form that engulfs the human and trainer in a shared aura that not only slightly changes how both Pokémon and trainer look and viscerally connects both to the point their psyche “fuse” and they sense the world and battle as one, but also unlocks a new hidden ability for the Pokémon. I would also work as a transcendental experience for humans to be able to perceive the world with different eyes, to feel the raw connective tissue of life through the maximum potential of bonding, and to improve how one expresses themselves through media like poetry (as a Pokémon battles with moves, a person does so with words). That would signify a form of Human-Pokémon involution, an expansion of the evolutionary template that defined how we came to become social animals and to deeply attach ourselves to other humans to ultimately allow for our self-actualization and a redefinition of how we and other species can help each other evolve emotionally or psychologically. Hustak and Myers said it best when they wrote that involution is “the very momentum through which organisms reach toward one another and involve themselves in one another’s lives” (96), and that is what I sought to idealize in my project.

Artistic Concept

Like every story is conceived with a purpose behind how it is constructed and told, I put much thought into creating my illustration, from conceptualizing the Fakémon based on a combination of folklore and real species of Butterflies and writing two poems in tanka form that fit the nature of the creatures to designing a battle stage background, arranging the Pokémon inside of it, and layering all pieces together to form a final piece inspired by Japanese art.

Starting with the Fakémon, the design on the right is called Vampoza from Vampire, Mariposa (Spanish for Butterfly), and Poza (Spanish for puddle), and its design story is very comprehensive. Vampoza, the Bug and Dark-Type Vampiric Butterfly Pokémon, is male-only and its visual design is inspired by classic depictions of Dracula and two butterfly species: the male Vampire Butterfly or Batwing Butterfly Atrophaneura semperi from the Indo-Pacific Asian countries in terms of the red coloration of its body and the vividness of the contrast between the red hues and black tones and the male Red Postman Butterfly from the Heliconious erato species located in South and Central American in terms of the spot and wing patterns being polymorphic (meaning that the wings can have many pattern variations) and their mimicry-based biology, which I will explain how it fits the creature later. I mentioned that this Fakémon is male-only since the idea behind combining vampirism with butterflies comes from a male-exclusive behavior called Mud-puddling, where male butterflies lick any type of surface to gather nutrients to reproduce and also pass on to the female butterflies to help them get enough energy to lay eggs. Also, the proboscis of a butterfly is already used to suck nectar from flowers, so why not retrofit it to become a “blood-sucking” device instead of a “blood-licking” one? However, instead of blood, Vampoza feeds on emotional aura energy.

Pokédex Entry 1: Vampozas feed on the aura of any female Pokémon they encounter. It is said that those who are directly bitten by its fang-like proboscis transform into a vampiric zombie being with a detached head that seems to have a life of its own and an even fiercer thirst for the aura energy of humans and Pokémon alike.

This first Pokedéx entry highlights the fact that this species is only male. The lore that I devised behind it goes as such: long ago, the single male ancestor of the Vampoza species arrived in a new Japanese-inspired region alone and started interacting and predating on the Pokémon of this novel land. There were no females for it to reproduce with naturally2, so it had to adapt3 and find a way to turn female Pokémon into members of its species. The species of the ancestor can be female, but they are only located in their region of origin. This Vampoza developed the ability to exchange a small quantity of its genetic information when biting its victims, something that changes their physiology so it can then “reproduce.” Only the male offsprings become Vampozas while the female offsprings share the same fate as Vampoza’s victims: the outcome of the “corruption” that occurs after a male sucks the emotional aura energy of a female Pokémon with its “signature move” and specifically KO’s them with that move is a butterfly Pokémon whose proboscis has its origin point merge with their necks in the processes of “corrupted evolution,” which makes their heads expand with the proboscis-neck merger looking almost translucent to make it seem like the head is floating. The description for the “female version” of the species is inspired by the vampiric Yokai Nukekubi, a monster that feeds on blood and has a detached head, and the point of making the female originate from the Japanese region and not be from a foreign place is to give a reason to why the story of a vampiric Yokai is intrinsically Japanese while Vampiroza being in a Japanese region is a nod to Dracula coming from a foreign country to terrorize England. Each female version would also have the type markings based on what type they once were, since, when the victim becomes corrupted, they lose their typings and become ??? (the official nomenclature for Typeless). I did not design the corrupted female members of the species because it would not fit the competition motif of the final illustration.

Vampoza also changes after interacting with its prey by having the wing pattern in the hindwing morph into the icon for the primary Pokémon Type of its victim. For example, if it sucked the emotional energy of Gengar, the hindwing pattern would resemble a ghost-like figure (which is the case of my illustration). Its signature move would—when used by any other Pokémon—transform the user it into the typing of the primary Type of the Pokémon attacked, but under the effect of Vampoza’s new ability, Hemomania, which makes it gain an extra Type while conserving their previous Types after attacking any enemy with a move that cause a Type change, Vampozas can gain a third one, and that is how it can effortlessly change its hindwing patterns while the corrupted female Pokémon’s patterns are permanent.

Pokédex Entry 2: Members of the Vampoza species seem to focus on caring for their appearance more than any other Pokémon. They love showing off their vibrant colors and hypnotizing patterns to Pokémon around them, almost as if wanting to be the center of attention. If they go without feeding on the aura of other Pokémon for more than a day, their striking red coloration starts fading, and their presence becomes as drab as their hues.

Pokédex Entry 2 refers to how Vampozas’ natural powers work, as they look drab red and ugly until they suck the emotional aura of humans and Pokémon to make the red spots glow bright, which helps the Pokémon “compel” others, causing Vampozas to both become more powerful and also attract more Pokémon for them to breed with and become even more powerful. Vampoza also uses its hindwing patterns to attract and hypnotize Pokémon that specifically have the Typing of the pattern it currently exhibits, so it can showcase 18 variations.

The tanka I wrote for Vampoza is an English translation and “rewrite” of Pablo Neruda’s poem Sed de Ti into a modified form of tanka. Here is the poem in both its English and Spanish variations:

Heliconius butterflies like Postman (melpomene) and Red Postman (erato) feed on passionflower, the passion fruit flower, and the latter is also called red passion flower butterflies, something that fits very well with the sensual undertones and sexual attractiveness of many vampires, so I do not think there was a better South American poem than a piece written by Pablo Neruda about desiring someone like vampires thirst for blood. Also, I know tankas typically do not feature punctuation and follow the structure of 31 syllables separated into a pattern of 5,7,5,7,7, but I believe changing the rules fits the gaijin4 nature of Vampoza and breaking the rules is fitting of a Dark-Type.

Finally, harkening back to my mention of mimicry, Heliconius butterflies are classic models of Müllerian Mimicry in the Western Hemisphere, which perfectly explains how the infected Pokémon transform to look like butterfly monsters. The Heliconius seem to be able to adapt very quickly to new surroundings because of their ability to hybridize with species that have aposematic colors in various tropical environments, their wing pattern alleles are the ones with the highest rate of genetic transfer between species, and through backcrossing, this hybridized kin-forward survival strategy to change one’s wing pattern looks to mimic toxicity spreads steadily, forming speciation (Smith & Kronforst 4). Vampires drink blood, so their blood is already mixing with that of their victims in a penetrative act that many ascribe to an allegory of sex, and they create other vampires in popular lore through the bite itself, infecting their victims with their “genetic information,” or by letting their victims drink their blood before dying. That act hybridizes the victim’s blood to be made out of both their and the vampire’s mystical and genetic information, creating the idea that both the vampire and the victim have hybridized blood, but only the victim’s blood is changed. Moreover, the mimicked colors mark how they may taste bad to predators, a reflection of people’s aversion to blood, something that makes them survive and spread even more. Müllerian mimicry is mutualistic, enhancing how a possible predator may associate a color or pattern with an aversive reaction, and thus, having multiple individuals sporting the look benefits their chances of survival (Flanagan et al. 9704). Vampires are parasitic, so one would believe this type of mimicry does not fit. However, in the case of this Pokémon, it is both mutualistic and parasitic. A Vampoza transforms female Pokémon into beings that sort of mimic their appearance, adding to the buffer effect against the victim’s former predators while making the transformed being an apex predator. So that is mutualistic. Nevertheless, the male Vampiroza takes advantage of female victims, and the latter are zombified versions of themselves that have changed physically and psychologically to accommodate the thirst for aura/blood and lost their free will, and that is parasitic.

Moving on to the second Fakémon, it does not have that much of a design description because I decided to be more succinct with it. Tamachoyume, the Ghost Psychic Soul Pokémon, has an interesting name because it mimics the Fakémon’s design5. Tama is a word in Japanese that signifies the soul of the dead, Chō is Japanese for Butterfly, and Yume means dream in Japanese, and the design illustrates that with its right wing (our left) representing a ghostly soul, the middle body a butterfly-shaped kanzashi hairpin, and its left wing (our right) the soul of a living being flying away from its body when dreaming. From the name itself, it can be perceived that I took heavy inspiration from Japanese folklore to design Tamachoyume, particularly as written by Lafcadio Hearn. In his books Insect Literature and Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, he mentions how much Japanese folklore around butterflies is inspired by Chinese myths (6), but that some stories are intrinsically Japanese. One of them includes the play “The Flying Hairpin of Kocho,” in which the hairpin of a woman who was murdered becomes a butterfly and hovers above the killer to point toward his sins (Hern 10). Another concerns the older man Takahama, whose dead wife’s soul appears as a white butterfly in his room and lies next to his bed, almost like a psychopomp, the day before he died (Hern 36-42). The last story I was inspired by was “The Dream of Akinosuke,” in which a man dreams about a life he has as a prince in a distant land, and when he wakes up, his friends mention how a yellow butterfly seems to have flown out of his mouth when he fell asleep and was taken by ants into a tree. When they go to investigate, they find that the ants correspond to the people Akinosuke dreamed of being with, almost as if his soul left his body as a yellow butterfly when he was sleeping, and he perceived everything that happened to it as a dream (Hern 143).

Pokédex Entry 1: Tamachoyume tends to appear to those who are close to the end of their lives. Because it changes its left wing to match the soothing white color and wispy ghostly pattern of its opposite wing when it senses someone is passing away, this version of the Pokémon is sometimes called the Sweet Kiss of Goodbye.

In my design, I tried to incorporate all three stories into one Fakémon, with the patterns on the left looking like the ghostly flames of Ghost-Type Pokémon and the ones on the right mimicking the shape of the dream clouds created by the dream Pokémon Musharna, a Psychic-Type. The tanka I wrote follows the traditional form and tries to reconcile the nature of the soul and how, as a ghost or a dream, it seeks to answer the most elusive of questions: Who am I?

In terms of the butterfly species that inspired Tamachoyume, I tried to look into butterflies that are found in Japan that could present the genetic condition called binary gynandromorphism, where half of a butterfly’s wings are made with the genetic information of a male and half are made from the genetic data of a female. I discovered that the Common Brimstone Butterfly, Gonepteryx rhamni, is found in Japan, and the female coloration is white while the male is yellow, which fits very well with the butterfly characters in the stories (Akinosuke is the man with a dream, and Takahama’s wife was the white butterfly). Luckily for me, this species has been found to manifest gynandromorphism, so it was the perfect species for me to use as Tamachoyume’s model.

Pokédex Entry 2: Some have reported seeing Tamachoyume flutter above the head of those asleep, moving back and forth in motions that appear to show that it is enacting their dreams. Because it changes its right wings to match the energetic yellow hues and wobbly psychic pattern of its opposite wing when dreaming with those near it, this version of the Pokémon is sometimes called The Dream Adventurer.

Lastly, in conceptualizing the battle stage where the utaawase would happen, I was inspired mainly by Maria Sibylla Merian’s drawings, particularly those found in her book Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, and how she creates her compositions in a realistic way that does not necessarily capture scenes but rather the real possibility of them as a way to visually illustrate the naturalistic interactions of insects in that space to define my artistic interpretation of her drawings while supplanting the real with the fictional. If I were to imitate her, the tracing of the Bonsai and the Fakémon would be softer and not black, and the proportions of the insects and the tree would be so realistic that the butterflies would lie on it like they were letting time fly in their home; as if the Fakémon had basically become real and substituted the species that inspired them6. But I favored incorporating the dynamic nature of battling with Vampoza, looking like it is whooshing away to dodge an attack, and my vision of their proportions7 to make the fictional part of it even more active and alive.

Nonetheless, the choice of a Bonsai tree to be the “plant world” where the Pokémon reside and intermingle was made so because of its miniature nature, so the effect of “peeking into the insect soap world” that Merian’s drawings convey is still maintained since the scope of the whole scene in respect to a room, for example, is relatively small. Moreover, to care for Bonsai trees, one requires patience, discipline, a love for and connection to the plant, the willingness to observe and understand its needs, and the open-mindedness to learn something new from it every time one cares for the plant. Is not mastering the art of cultivating a Bonsai similar to the involution I highlighted as the result of the sparring matches between Pokémon? What about writing poetry? Does it not involve patience, connection with self and the subject/object of inspiration, learning something new about oneself or one’s perception of the world, and, in sharing with others, being willing to hear other people’s reactions and to accept feedback when it arrives so one can continuously improve their writing? Thus, I found that the Bonsai could perfectly reflect the nature of involution that I wanted to capture in my illustration. Finally, in terms of the final presentation, I colored the background to resemble how I remembered the pages of Merian’s original Metamorphosis looked like when I went to the University of Chicago’s special collections, and I added the tanka poems arranged from right to left vertically to follow the tradition depicted in both Mushi no Utaawase Emaki and Utamaro’s scroll. The poems are located on the same side as their respective Fakémon but outside the field of battle, which is my way of visually interpreting Professor Lamarre’s quote, “Thus utaawase, contests of poems, could run parallel to contests of things” (80).

Bibliography

-Drouin, Jean-Marc. “Worlds and Environments.” A Philosophy of the Insect. Translated by Anne Trager, Columbia University Press, 2019, pp 143-156.

-Utamaru. Ehon Mushi Erami. 1780, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

-Unknown. Mushi no Utaawase Emaki. n.d, University of Michigan, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/a/asialibrary1ic/x-18/SCROLL_MERGED

-Lamarre, Thomas. Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archaeology of Sensation and Inscription. Duke University Press, 2021.

-Hustak, Carla, and Myers, Natasha. “Involutionary Momentum: Affective Ecologies and the Sciences of Plant/Insect Encounters.” Differences, vol. 23, no. 3, 2012, pp. 74-118.

-Sbordone, Patrick. “Speaking of Lepidoptera.” Chicago Botanic Garden, 22 Jul, 2018, https://www.chicagobotanic.org/blog/wildlife/speaking_lepidoptera

-“Nukekubi.” Yokai.com, https://yokai.com/nukekubi/. Accessed 1 Dec 2023.

-Neruda, Pablo. El Hondero Entusiasta. Imprenta Universitaria, 1924.

-Smith, Joel and Kronforst, Marcus R. “Do Heliconius butterfly species exchange mimicry alleles?.” Biology Letters, volume 9, no. 4, 2013, pp. 1-4. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2013.0503

-Flanagan, N. S et al. “Historical demography of Müllerian mimicry in the neotropical Heliconius butterflies.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, volume 101, no. 26, 2004, pp. 9704-9709. https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.0306243101

-Hearn, Lafcadio. Insect Literature. Translated by M. Ōtani, Hokuseido, 1921.

-Hearn, Lafcadio. Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1904.

-“Brimstone Gonepteryx rhamni.” British Butterfly Aberrations, https://www.britishbutterflyaberrations.co.uk/species/gonepteryx-rhamni/aberrations. Accessed 1 Dec 2023.

-Merian, Maria Sybilla. Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium. 1705.

Through the popularization of social media and the development of virtual spaces into perceptual simulations of a believable reality—a fitting successor to the transition of material fashion to image-wave-image fashion (material to video images to radio waves to video images back again) that now exists as an image world that can be both tethered and untethered from material inspirations—people are increasingly being able to explore their relationship with fashion in ways that challenge the notion that it is subordinate to the necessities of the physical body. Fashion aestheticizes the body, clothing or no clothing, so what happens when someone can have a second one? What if technology advances so much that we can become a second being in a virtual world? Across social media, garments become trends detached from one person’s body to exist as a popularized image idea. In our digital society, the individual propagates an appearance of itself and, via photos and videos, gains a second life and a second body that can be edited and clothed with items that become performative for their second Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube self. Furthermore, through fully digital worlds, where the human body is broken down into codes and rebuilt as a sometimes faithful and other times artistic rendition of the human body, an impetus of fashion in the digital space becomes to make the body into a canvas, a tabula rasa where the imagined wardrobe, which now is a bedroom-sized closet and hair salon of the mind, has its closest analog in the external world. By looking at the many ways people have approached digital mediums and remade themself there, including video game character and clothing customization and “real world” brand integration, and the 3D virtual garment experience through AR and NFT collections, it may be possible to gain a glimpse into the psychology of what makes the aesthetic of fashion and appearance so appealing to humans and a bit into what the future of self-expression through clothing may resemble.

Starting with character and clothing customization, the worlds created inside a video game, particularly those of the RPG (role-playing game) genre, where shaping a character helps enhance a player’s feeling that they belong within that world, can become conducive to the formation a stylistic persona that functions and behaves similarly to how people interact with consumer fashion in our material realm, but in a more volatile yet also accessible manner. What a video game can do, especially one that incurs certain freedom of movement and story exploration, is to match that sense of vastness and possibility with how a person can look as a character. As Lars Svendsen states in Fashion: A Philosophy, “Clothes are a vital part of the social constructions of the self. (...) Fashion is just as much about expressing one’s individuality” (19), pointing to how clothing is one of the ways people identify and share who they are. In a space where an individual has the power to control the actions of a character, one of the building blocks to feeling like the said character and connecting the self with a body that people have no sensorial connection to (yet) is to model them to look like the player or to look like signs that represent whom the player understand themselves as. The construct of self relies on an anchor to the world it inhabits, a signifier that makes a person identify that they exist, and usually, said anchor is our body, especially our facial features. However, the self is more than just a face; its complexity hooks onto abstract signifieds that become associated with personality and tastes, which, due to their intangible nature, can be detached from one space and attached to another. When someone enters a new reality, they can choose to behave like someone new or try to be themselves, and developers understand that there is a need for some form of relatability in the way a character looks, thus providing them with countless options for facial features and clothing that matches the game’s aesthetics and genre. 2020’s Cyberpunk 2077 has almost too many options to mold the body, going from eye and nose shapes to facial and body tattoos, blemishes, cybernetic body enhancements, and nipple and genital looks, an approach that matches John Flügel’s fashion of nakedness, and around 1000 clothing options (Appendix A), making it extremely easy for people to combine what they believe themselves to be and how they look like to become part of its futuristic world. So, through character customization, players can find ways to replicate their natural looks and experiment with other possibilities of facial details, hair, makeup, and clothing that coincide with their abstract identity, thus building an anchor in the digital world.

However, replication of one’s identity is not stationary, and much like how people interact with their clothing daily, creating personal clothing cycles where we change our looks throughout the day from pajamas to sportswear, to school and work clothes/uniforms, to evening clothes, or how we are consumeristic beings that are constantly renewing our closets, selling or donating old or overused garments to make space for new ones, players can do the same in video games. When gaining in-game currency becomes part of the gameplay as a reward for battling and completing missions in games like Pokémon Violet, a simulacrum of the consumeristic experience of fashion is formed where players can choose to spend the remuneration on buying new clothes rather than spending the currency with more relevant purposes for the game itself like healing and battle performance-enhancing items. The in-game closets grow as players battle more and more, and with a push of some buttons, they can change into anything they want (Appendix B1). As Svendsen quotes writer Elizabeth Wilson, “Fashion is dress in which the key feature is rapid and continual change of styles” (13). Like a person going through their clothing options, selecting garments based on what they want to wear in the day, putting them on, and appraising the look to see if it is visually pleasing to their aesthetic sense and identity, in a video game, doing the same activity is a seamless and hassle-free experience where clothing combinations can be experimented and played with for some hours until the player decides they want something new after constantly looking at the same outfit, creating a cycle that always seeks novelty. In Flügel’s ideal future, there is nothing more convenient (besides nudity). Add to that Jean Baudrillard’s point from Symbolic Exchange and Death that “the passion for fashion connects the passion for collection with the object-passion” (93), and wanting something new becomes justified by a desire to collect every single garment that is deemed personally pleasing. Baudrillard’s argument then gives way to what Fred Davis points out in Fashion, Culture, and Identity, where “boredom and restlessness” (155) are natural parts of the stages of the fashion process, and in games like Pokémon Violet, where buying clothes, putting them on, and removing them requires only button pushes and instantaneity, the fashion experience becomes so hectic and fast-paced that boredom can also arrive quickly. Combining everything with what Ann Jones and Peter Stallybrass write in Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, where the rapid transformation of clothing styles was seen in the past as “a dazzling play of surfaces” (2) and “clothes are detachable, they can move from body to body” (5), a system is created where video game series like Pokémon basically gamify the shopping experience and the idea of being able to afford anything from cheaper to luxury items by making it approachable and feasible to do so through constantly streamlined experimentation.

The topic of being able to go from affording cheaper clothing options to eventually buying more expensive garments in a simulacrum of a virtual, in-world economy is expansive on its own, working as another way in which the fashion experience merges with the realities of a game. There are two ways expensive costume options can be valued in a video game: utility and pure aesthetic value. In the former case, utility and costume matter significantly when garments and outfits are tied to stats or attribute points that buff a character’s defense, magical power, attack, luck, etc. In extreme cases where utility>fashion, like in Hogwarts Legacy, player avatars may look overburdened (Appendix C1). Transmogs fix such concerns by masking the appearance of a clothing item tied to a stat with the look of another, more aesthetically pleasing garment, working purely visually and reflecting Jones and Stallybrass’s dazzling play of surfaces. Contrastingly, there are situations where utility=fashion=high cost in games like Injustice 2 (Appendix C2), but it is more often than not that the fashionable value of clothing is only tied to high prices without impacting utility. Reverting to Pokémon, since the manner in which player avatars look has no bearing on the results of a battle, the incentive of a trainer to spend in-game currency on expensive clothing has its roots in what economist Thorstein Veblen means when he asserts that it is “a gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name of beauty” (128). As mentioned before, games tend to imbue elements of real-life systems to create simulations of the world in a digital form, and the signifieds that attribute a sense of costliness to a garment tend to be translated to the most expensive pieces of clothing. In Pokémon Violet, something like a shining golden sock paired with a bright silver loafer accessorized with white and golden leather gloves and an in-game version of a Louis Vuitton backpack (Appendix B2) could look aesthetically pleasing, but most of its appeal is how much of its beauty concerns each item’s association with the signified of luxury and ostentation to justify its cost, all sold from a clothing shop Veracidad with a name and facade with its deluxe signifiers. It could be that the signifieds of opulence (shining, bright, regal, classy) are what make those items aesthetically pleasing in the first place. What about Pokémon Sword’s Motorcycle Jacket (Appendix B3), the most expensive item in the game? Could it be because Galar, the game’s region, is inspired by the UK, where the Punk youth subculture thrived, which provides the jacket with the signified of iconicity and boldness to justify its cost? Some players may not care about buying expensive clothes and making their characters wear them, but it is a possibility. In video games, the prospect of moving up a “social ladder” and looking wealthy is real and attainable.

Furthermore, another way high prices can be explained is through the brand concept, and video games are not exempt from partnering up with them for character customization. Through real-life brand integrations, avatars can sport garments deemed high-end due to the signifieds associated with a brand’s image that can cost no real or in-game money (sometimes items might be only purchasable via real money converted into in-game money, but that is not something that always happens). The appeal of branded clothing, especially from luxury brands, follows what Veblen argues when he says, “Our standard of decency in expenditure, as in other ends of emulation, is set by the usage of those next above us in reputability” (104). Humans tend to want to replicate those deemed to hold influence, power, and dominance as a fantasy and as a form of measuring up to such authority, at least in appearance, almost like biological mimicry. A person can look and act like someone of influence, and they may be treated as such, possibly resulting in them actually becoming influential. How can we identify power if not by enacting the signifieds we associate with them through sartorial and behavioral signifiers? This conception is backed up by sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky’s argument in his The Empire of Fashion that “Objects are mere’ class exponents,’ social signifiers and discriminants; they function as signs of social mobility and social aspiration” (144). So, there is an inherent class-based appeal to being able to wear the logo and design aesthetic, be it of a person’s liking or not necessarily, of a brand that is deemed by many as a ticket to clout town, particularly when these video game and brand collaborations target a generation that is so reliant on wanting to gain influence in a digital space. This reliance of today’s teens and young adults on social media and the internet to dictate what it means to be part of a group and, most importantly, to feel liked and popular can be translated to the way we visually present ourselves through what Baudrillard says is a “desire to (...) be submerged in pure signs [the Brand image], moving towards a raw immediate sociality” (93). When Niantic partners up with Gucci and North Face for Pokémon Go, Polo collaborates with Fortnite, Burberry with Minecraft, Balmain with Pokémon Unite, and Tommy Hilfiger with Roblox (Appendix D), they are penetrating a Gen Z market to establish themselves as hip, hype, the ones that sell the “real fit,” adapting to the times so they can remain as the exponents and faces of the most desirable and socially influential trends and styles where those who wear their clothing can be perceived as having clout and deserving of many followers, culminating in others also wanting to be like them, boosting sales, and ultimately doing what Davis writes as “increasing social visibility, which of course, is necessary if the fashion is to reach a level of massive assimilation” (151).

However, brand integration is not the only way digital fashion has been tied to core concepts of social media. Digital fashion clothing marketplaces like DRESSX propose a future where consuming fashion to construct a social media persona can be done more sustainably, aiming to remove Veblen’s idea of the conspicuous waste of consumeristic fashion from the social media side of the equation. The clothing sold by the multi-brand retailer are 3D models, and as of the writing of this paper (May 2023), the only way people can wear them is by using the AR function on their app and by purchasing the 3D garment, which involves a buyer sending a well-lit picture of themselves wearing skin-tight clothing equivalent to the surface area around the body of the digital item that will be edited to make it seem like the customer is wearing the 3D model. The photo can then be used and shared anywhere as if the customer had taken a natural picture of themselves and their outfit, and since social media is the space where most people tend to share their looks in posts and stories, that is the digital domain that has the most considerable potential of popularizing and justifying 3D clothing. However, their vision is to transform the way people dress when they are seen through the digital screen by being able to export the assets to video games, dating apps, and even video calls.

Moreover, fashion houses like The Fabricant also sell 3D clothing, but their design and sale methods differ from those of DRESSX in a similar way to the differences between haute couture and prèt-a-porter. The Fabricant’s garments are all NFTs, and the way they are designed exists as a collaboration between fashion designers who model the shape of garments, fashionistas who model prints and patterns, and any fashion enthusiast that, in the first collection, had signed up to be part of this fashion experiment, but now has to own a garment from the previous collection, who selects a blank garment model and chooses the best patterns and colors to paint the object and create their unique version of it (a literal play of surfaces, one might say) (Appendix E). Unlike DRESSX, where designers (who call themselves brands) and established brands can sell their collections to the public to be worn in AR platforms and photos, bought with real-life currencies, that one day could be translated to other digital spaces like a person sporting their newly purchased sweater to the movies, a dinner, and to feel cozy at home, The Fabricant’s solely NFT approach makes it so anyone can be a designer of these conceptual, artistic pieces that can be owned and traded with cryptocurrency like a piece of art to be exhibited rather than worn all the time. One day they may be exported to a “meta space,” but it is years to come, and right now, minted garments work as invitations to events held by the house and to design even more objects. They exist as an asset of the moment where the owner, be it a creator or someone who bought it, can only look at them, and their designs are styled as costumes rather than outfits.

When analyzing The Fabricant and DRESSX under specific considerations of the theory of fashion, the topics of transformation and authorship resonate with the boundaries that digital clothing is redefining. In the former case, when Roland Barthes writes that fashion relies “on an activity of transformation: there is a transition from the technological garment to the iconic. Yet (...) the real garment can only be transformed into ‘representation’ (...) from one code to another” (6) in The Fashion System, he speaks of the transition of material fashion to a photographed form. But when reinterpreted into the digital format, this transformation from material garment to the iconic undergoes a third metamorphosis, combining the technical and iconic to give life to the representation inside another realm. The digital or virtual garment is the next step in this system. Moreover, Barthes’ assertion that “‘Real’ clothing is burdened with practical considerations; (...) these finalities disappear from ‘represented’ clothing, which no longer serves to protect, to cover, or to adorn, but at most to signify” (8), can be applied to digital dress in a partial way since stripped to its fundamental roots—virtual realities are simulated spaces that imitate reality—so clothing has no true practical purpose beyond existing as an imitation of how human express ourselves; a semblance of familiarity that only exists in meaning and not in action. For The Fabricant’s NFTs, as long as there is no metaverse space for the costumes to exist in, they will continue being museum pieces that can only signify. However, the impetus of creating digital clothing is to cover and adorn the image-body or digital body; it is the purpose of its existence, especially in DRESSX’s case, where the mode of representation changes instead of finality. So, protection may depend on the simulated world created, but when clothes are digitally worn, decoration and coverage will always retain a functional status.

Finally, concerning authorship, the purpose of The Fabricant House is to develop a symbiotic system of collaboration between co-creators where everyone is an author, while DRESSX’s system works almost like the average consumer experience, but where the main impetus and concern behind it is the novelty of being depicted with limitless clothing that is only worn on digital spaces (since 3D models can look like and be made of anything a computer can render, while the reality is limited in the fabrics that can be used) rather than who specifically designed it. When the selling point is the object of curiosity, not who made it, curiosity and the “new experience” are the driving factors of interest, which can be employed for the sake of social media presence or to create a more unique collection of photos. A story could be told by the designer/brand, and that is the case with all 3D garments sold at DRESSX; they all strive to sell clothing with meaning, but when what receives attention is the image itself, how much of an audience is that story gaining? Baudrillard writes that “Fashion aims for a theatrical sociality (...) turning into the goal-less stake of a signification without a message” (94), and there is nothing more theatrical than wearing a digital dress on a photo that was taken for the sole purpose of this experience and possibly to get more views and followers on social media, especially ones that look exaggerated (Appendix F), and particularly when that is not the norm. If this type of digital clothing succeeds as a trend of tomorrow, it could entail the “perfection of a system where nothing is any longer exchanged against the real” (Baudrillard 94), a consumerist approach that is befitting of human’s ever so increasing passion, better, addiction, to artificial worlds and experiences.

Contrastingly, The Fabricant’s focus is something Michel Foucault discourses as the effect of an author when he argues they produce “the possibilities and the rules for the formation of other texts” (217). The symbiosis of The Fabricant system relies on the designers of 3D models and textures being the authors of works that audience members can combine to create their versions of the texts. It is an interpretative work based on personal aesthetic taste that follows the rules or assets given by the designer authors, who also provide descriptors to inform co-creators of the inspirations behind each piece. Thus, when a person combines a garment with a pattern, they are also helping to tell a story that the original authors started. Such a system allows for precisely the formation of “something other than [an author’s] discourse, yet something belonging to what they founded” (Foucault 218), as The Fabricant co-creators invent something new that bears the inherent mark (visual and written qualities) of the original author’s designs. An author’s work is never dead as long as there is someone to keep being inspired by it.

In conclusion, through the advent of technology and the creation of digital worlds, fashion has been subjected to a new realm where our relationship to it can be translated and enhanced from how humans experience it in the “real” world. Through character and clothing customization, we can express our complex and multifaceted identities seamlessly, allowing for constant variety and novelty. We can also explore fashion trends and experiment with garments that in real life may seem unreachable due to cost concerns, possibilities that high-end brands can exploit to attract newer, younger generations of customers. In addition, 3D digital clothing has the potential to both cover and adorn our digitally translated bodies, be it through photos, videos, or avatars, providing humans with a virtual closet that could exist to populate the social media lives that many people have. And through democratized and decentralized experiences, digital garments can serve as bodies of text for fashion designers and enthusiasts to collaborate in weaving them. As Baudrillard once wrote, “Under the sign of fashion, all cultures play like simulacra in total promiscuity” (88), but in the case of a virtual dimension, everything that is fashion is simulated and can exist in total promiscuity.

Bibliography

-Mackie, Erin. Market à la Mode. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

-Svendsen, Lars. Fashion: A Philosophy. Reaktion Books, 2006.

-Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic Exchange and Death. Translated by Ian Hamilton Grant, SAGE Publications, 1993.

-Davis, Fred. Fashion, Culture, and Identity. The University of Chicago Press, 1992.

-Jones, Ann Rosalind and Peter Stallybrass. Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory. Cambridge University Press, 2000.

-Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of The Leisure Class An Economic Study of Institutions. The Macmillan Company, 1912.

-Lipovetsky, Gilles. The Empire of Fashion Dressing Modern Democracy. Translated by Catherine Porter, New French Thought, 1994.

-Barthes, Roland. The Fashion System. Translated by Matthew Ward and Richard Howard, Hill and Wang, 1983.

-Foucault, Michel. “What Is An Author?.” Aesthetic, Method, and Epistemology, edited by James D. Faubion, translated by Robert Hurley and others, vol. 2, New York, The New Press, 1998.

Appendix A: Cyberpunk 2077 Character Customization Options

Body Appearance

Body Type

2

Voice Tone

2

Skin Tone

12

Skin Type

5

Hairstyle

51

Hair Color

35

Eyes

22

Eye Color

39

Eyebrows

9

Eyebrow Color

35

Eyelash Color

35

Nose

22

Mouth

22

Jaw

22

Ears

22

Beard (Male Body Type only)

13

Beard Style (Male Body Type only)

3

Beard Color (Male Body Type only)

35

Cyberware

9

Facial Scars

10

Facial Tattoos

12

Piercings

15

Piercing Color

16

Teeth

5

Eye Makeup

21

Eye Makeup Color

14

Lip Makeup Style

4

Lip Makeup

20

Lip Makeup Color

14

Cheek Makeup

15

Cheek Makeup Color

8

Blemishes

4

Blemish Color

6

Nails

2

Nail Color

37

Chest (Female Body Type only)

3

Nipples (Female Body Type)

4

Nipples (Male Body Type)

2

Body Tattoos

6

Body Scars

3

Genitals

4

Penis Size

3

Pubic Hair Style

6

Pubic Hair Color

5

Information from:

“Character Customization.” Cyberpunk Wiki, Fandom, https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Character_Customization.

Clothing Options

“Character 2077 Clothing.” Cyberpunk Wiki, Fandom, https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Cyberpunk_2077_Clothing

Appendix B

B1: Pokémon X and Y Clothing Customization Options

Image From: D, Alex. “Pokémon X and Y Clothes.” Pokémon Buzz, Pokémon Buzz.com, 19 Sept. 2021, https://www.pokemonbuzz.com/pokemon-x-and-y-clothes/.

B2: Pokémon Violet Veracidad Outfit

Images From: My version of Pokémon Violet

B3: Pokémon Sword and Shield Motorcycle Jacket

Image From: Diego. “BLACK LEATHER JACKET AND TARTAN PANTS.” Dandy in the Bronx, 3 Dec. 2019, https://dandyinthebronx.com/black-leather-jacket-and-tartan-pants/.

Appendix C: Utility and Fashion in Customization

C1: Hogwarts Legacy outfit with the highest stats

Image from: CompetitivePayment5. “This is what I’d look like based on higher stats if Hogwarts legacy didn’t allow us transmog outfits.” Reddit, 3 Apr. 2023, https://www.reddit.com/r/HarryPotterGame/comments/12atgwb/this_is_what_id_look_like_based_on_higher_stats/

C2: Injustice 2 Epic Gear Sets (with the best attributes) for Batman and Catwoman

Image from: DuckyDucko. “My Billionaire Batman.” Reddit, 3 Aug. 2017, https://www.reddit.com/r/INJUSTICE/comments/6rdo5z/my_billionaire_batman/

Image From: Game Review. “Injustice 2 Legendary Edition - All NEW Epic Gear Sets.” YouTube, 5 April 2018,

Appendix D: Brand Integration in Video Games

Image from: “Avatar items from The North Face x Gucci Collection are coming to Pokémon GO!.” Pokémon Go Live, Niantic, 4 Jan. 2021, https://pokemongolive.com/post/gucci-northface-collection/?hl=en.

Image from: Adams, Alessandra. “Fortnite and Ralph Lauren Launch An Epic Collaboration.” Modern Luxury Miami, Modern Luxury, 3 Nov. 2022, https://mlmiamimag.com/fortnite-ralph-lauren-collab-collection.

Image from: Anderca, Cristina. “Minecraft x Burberry.” Minecraft.net, Microsoft, 1 Nov. 2022, https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/minecraft-x-burberry

Image from: “Balmain x Pokémon.” Balmain, Sep, 2022, https://us.balmain.com/en/experience/balmain-x-pokemon.

Image from: Lockwood, Lisa. “Tommy Hilfiger Reveals Tommy x Roblox Creators Virtual Collection.” WWD, 16 Dec. 2021, https://wwd.com/feature/tommy-hilfiger-reveals-tommy-x-roblox-creators-virtual-collection-1235019532/

Appendix E: My The Fabricant Design

Note: I do not support the environmental impact that the process of minting NFTs creates as of 2023, and as long as the blockchain process continues to waste roughly 142 kWh, an equivalent of 83 kgCO₂, per mint, I am resistant to continue doing anything NFT-related. I was only interested in the Fashion angle in the first place, and I could have listed my designs to be sold, but a transaction also wastes energy, about 87 kWh or 51 kgCO₂. I was unaware of such an impact when I minted the garments, but at least The Fabricant writes that it is collaborating with Offsetra, a company that calculates the carbon impact of the fashion house’s work and offsets the carbon footprint by investing in CO₂ reduction projects. I also did not buy any minted garments since I had signed up to become a co-creator for Season 1 and got accepted, so I did not monetarily incentivize the NFT practice. As long as minting NFTs negatively impacts the environment, it is safe to say nothing related to it will ever become widespread. Yet, I decided to still discuss The Fabricant’s projects since, when removing the NFT consideration, it is an approach to digital fashion that hits many of the points we discussed in class, and the authorship angle is genuinely something I find fascinating and that I hope other people can emulate without the crypto aspect.

Image from: hankerkronecaldas. “Desire in the Cabaret of Lisbon.” The Fabricant, 2022, https://www.thefabricant.com/item-detail/0x3b2d51e837848786/A.7752ea736384322f.TheFabricantS2ItemNFT.NFT_1330

Appendix F: DRESSX

Image from: Printemps. “Liquid Suit.” DRESSX, 2023, https://dressx.com/collections/ar-looks/products/liquid-suit

Before I explain the importance of horror and how it manifests in the story, I would like to examine how the narrative is set up briefly. Page three of the first issue (effectively the first page of the story) establishes that Rowena (or Ro as she liked being called) is in search of a house for rent so she can be inspired to paint her next collection. The realtor showcasing the house points out that “it says here that over the years several of its owners have…” (Young 2021, 1.3) but restrains herself from saying what happened to them and mentions how people speak of the house being haunted. Ro does not seem to care, though, as she nonchalantly states that it is “exactly what I am looking for” (Young 2021, 1.4). Page four features a splash page of the house, which itself is not drawn to be spooky in its first impression; instead, it relies on the Dutch Colonial style to fit the aesthetic of the ominous. However, the devil is in the details, and the colorist Jean-Francois Beaulieu plays with the idea of darkness and shadows inside the house by coloring the light reflections in the windows more messily and abstractly compared to the preciseness, neatness, and realism of the rest of the art, with the same blue as the sky but muted by the darkness inside the house, almost as if the inky darkness of the inside consumes the freedom of the outside. Perhaps, though, the choice of reflections being blue may not only be due to the sky being such a hue but also because the dark entity inside is black and blue, and, since windows and eyes are connected through vernacular tradition, it is as if the windows are showing the true dark nature of what is inside. When combined with the idea that Ro wanted this aesthetically eerie house even before the realtor spoke of it being haunted and does not seem to care one way or another, the immediate attraction toward it may speak to something profound inside of her that the house reflects, something that makes the house feel familiar in a sense. This connection between the artist and the house through a possible sense of familiarity becomes the first moment that brings Ro close to the entity inside of it.

The comic book’s play on the familiar and the uncanny is crucial to developing Ro’s romance with the entity inside the house and the reader’s increased concern for the protagonist. As the artist settles into the building and tries to paint, her inspiration does not come. The more days pass, the more she becomes frustrated. Ro drinks more and more wine, something she points out is part of the ritual to get her into the flow. One day, she decides to “speak” with the supposed ghost, telling it that it “could at least start the record and pour my wine for me” and “at least give me some inspiration or something” (Young 2021, 1.10). Nothing responds, but her mind is set on accepting anything that can be different and exciting enough to spark artistic intent, and it is shown that she hopes for some answer when she eventually proclaims to the house, “And you… you are no fun, ghost. Good-night” (Young 2021, 1.10) after chastising herself for not being able to paint. It is only the following day, after her agent calls demanding results, culminating in Ro trying something out, disliking it, throwing her wine at the canvas, swinging at her painting materials with a chair, making a huge mess, and externalizing her anxieties and concerns to her supposed companion—expressing how she wants to find herself and that it may be time to quit—that the entity talks to her. Ro freaks out and runs out of the house, and when she goes back in, she finds everything neatly organized, and the message I’M SORRY is written in the center of her canvas. Her reaction: with a smile, she says, “This is crazy. But also… a little sweet” (Young 2021, 1.21).

In explaining Freud’s theory of the uncanny, Mark Windsor writes:

The supernatural can be better understood in terms of an apparent impossibility. When the uncanny is characterized in terms of an elision of the categories of waking and dreaming, reality and imagination, what this characterization describes is (...) having uncertainty about what is real caused by an apparent impossibility (Windsor 2018, 59).

A ghost or an incorporeal entity is a being that exists in the intersection of real and imagined, particularly today in an age where many people want to believe they are real, but it does not mean that our inability to explain the what and how of them and the fact that we still deep down know they are not yet proven real would not scare us. Yet for Ro, it is in this moment, in this demonstration of humanity and consideration by the entity, that she becomes endeared by it, losing the fear that made her run out of the house. The uncanny nature of a disembodied voice is no longer uncanny to her. Ro’s isolation, her need to create art, her need to find herself, and her need to create something tangible shifted the priorities of reality, and the impossibility of what is supposed to scare her, like anyone else, no longer matters. Instead, she started hoping for the impossible, even if it was initially understood as a ghost. And as disembodied, unexplainable voices have no bodies and faces, it is easier for Ro to shape what she perceives as the entity’s nature.

Ro quickly starts considering the entity as a companion of sorts, and the idea that the distinction between real and imagined is malleable and that what is imagined can be imposed into the real to become one’s affective reality is essential to understanding her growing affinity toward it, while the comic’s first reveal of the monster to the readers enhances our sense of dread for Ro due to the abjection it creates. After getting to know the entity and expressing to him what she wants to paint—“I have been painting nonsense for years (...) I want something…more. Something real” (Young 2021, 2.12)—the first art piece Ro can make is an outline of what she imagines the entity to look like without facial features. This painting becomes an essential item to the story in how Ro uses it to establish how she wants to imagine this being, allowing her to fill “his” face with whatever features come to her mind. The reveal of how the protagonist wants to imagine it then parallels with the reveal of the monster’s appearance in a framed splash art on issue 2’s page 23, which plays with light and colors to horrify the readers. Ro is located in the center of the panel, front-lit by the warmth of candlelight. She is wearing dark colors, but they all blend with the darkness of the background, creating a contrast that makes her skin pop with brightness. However, lying behind Ro, the entity has its grasp on her, with its dark hands touching her illuminated body as if slowly trying to assimilate her into itself, merging realities through the comic book form where Ro’s black shades blend with its dark body, bringing them close into the same 2D space. Ro smiles with pleasure with her eyes closed, seemingly imagining the entity as the man she drew and incorporating the imaginary with her real sensations in a display of sexual tension, once more breaking the boundaries that separate the real and unreal, completely obliterating uncanniness with desire taking its place. The framing of this panel with the surrounding gutters looking like white vignettes makes the page resemble a couple’s portrait, and with Ro closing her eyes in a passive position while the entity holds her and looks directly at the audience, asserting ownership, the composition establishes that she now belongs to “him.”

To the better judgment of someone who spent only days talking to a non-corporeal entity, Ro does not want to look up, relishing the touch of this being, but the readers do, and the illustration depicts a monster with half of its face looking human-like and the other half being made out of composite structures of various blue eyes and teeth intermingled together. In explaining Kristeva’s definition of abjection, Zachary Sheldon writes that it is “a threat to the social order that prompts an urge to exclude such disruption and to seek a return to normalcy (...) [but] the elements that disrupt also hold a grim fascination” (Sheldon 2019, 45). The entity is a contradiction. It has a humanoid face, but it also has one made out of fused body parts, sharp and crooked; it exists incorporeally and corporeally; it might be real, as it might not. However, because the artist, through her isolation, her mental health issues, and her struggles with her art as a symptom of an underlying discontentment with her life choices1, expressed desire the moment the entity touched her, it is challenging for the audience not to have a grim fascination for it as a result of our connection with her. From then on, as Sasha from the YouTube channel Casually Comics states, by choosing not to look, “[Ro] doesn’t give herself the agency in this relationship. (...) Her control has been taken away” (Casually Comics 2023, 9:31). Such control is fully concretized when, at the end of issue three, after being able to paint so many pieces, the artist asks to have sex with it and does not seem to care when it presents itself to her as this dark humanoid figure with a blurred face as long as she can imagine how he looks. That serves as a role reversal to films like The Entity and The Legend of Hell House Dahlia Schweitzer mentions in her essay Haunted Homes, movies that feature the rape of women by the spirits residing inside the home in their plots (Schweitzer 2021, 65). At this point, Ro’s eyes are literally open, but she is so enthralled by how achieving what she thought she wanted makes her feel that even seeing the entity’s dark body is not enough to push her away from it.

That is, until she can finally see the entity’s true horror and feel abjection when she stops closing her eyes, literally and then figuratively, and looks. As Sasha points out,

But even in those moments [Ro is in the flow], she is descending, and the entity and his home represent that beautifully, creating this dark cave-like space where Ro can have anything except a healthy relationship with her creative workflow. Ro has no life balance, no friends, no space to interrogate what she wants out of life (Casually Comics 2023, 16:23).

The entity created an environment where Ro could feel the pleasure and fulfillment of sex and art, and hoped she could never feel satiated. However, when she starts pushing away, he screams and becomes manipulative and abusive. The protagonist struggles to find it in herself to leave her “cave,” so it is when she makes herself look at the entity’s face instead of imagining it after it kills her agent who came to check on her that she sees what it really is: an interstitial repulsive monster of looks and deeds. That then contrasts with Linda Williams’ essay “When the Woman Looks,” where the look is what breaks Ro free from this delusional love. The look breaks the reality the artist created with the entity and makes the protagonist truly realize the toxic nature of their relationship, giving Ro her agency back. The look is what ends up saving her, and it does not penalize her like Williams argues when she writes, “The woman’s gaze is punished, in other words, by narrative processes that transform curiosity and desire into masochistic fantasy” (Williams 1984, 19). Ro’s look gives her the clarity to sacrifice all her work instead and burn down the house, killing the entity. It is on the final page of the story before the epilogue, in a series of 5 consecutive splash panel tiers that show the house burning down behind Ro, that she has time to cry, to let all the pain that got her to this point out, and to realize how the entity took control of her. Ro’s story ends with her looking up with tears in her eyes and smiling with relief as if freed from a heavy burden and ready for a new life.

In the end, The Me You Love In The Dark paints a hauntingly meaningful story about a woman seeking to understand herself and what she wants for her life, relying on art as the answer to bring her excitement and fulfillment and yet being unsatisfied with that choice, thinking that she has yet to feel and paint something real. Art was supposed to provide Ro with answers, but it only made her feel empty. Without fully realizing it, her fear and dejection about her growing emptiness made her vulnerable to the influence of an entity that provided her with what she thought she wanted, becoming romantically and sexually entangled with it instead of sensing the uncanniness of the situation, choosing to feel the entity as real but to see in its place an imaginary picture. The comic’s panel framing, layering, and the use of colors and lighting excel in portraying the seductive pull of the entity’s darkness. Ro subsequently became reliant on this supposedly fulfilling and revelatory experience of creating art to fill the hole made by her emptiness, an illusion that distracted her from perceiving that the hole never stopped growing. Only when the protagonist faces the entity by looking at its reality, looking at her current reality, and sensing the abject of it all in a reversal of the look of the female characters in horror movies is that she regains agency and breaks free from its influence, destroying it as the first step in the process of seeking new ways of reconnecting with herself and life.

Bibliography

-Young, Skottie. The Me You Love In The Dark. Portland: Image Comics, 2021.

-Windsor, Mark. “What is the Uncanny?.” British Journal of Aesthetics 59, no. 1 (2019): 51-65.

-Sheldon, Zachary. “Hell house or something more? Horror, abjection and mental illness.” Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook 17, no. 1 (2019): 43-56.

-Schweitzer, Dahlia. “Gender, Horror, and the Home.” In Haunted Homes, 61-113. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2021.

-Wood, Sasha. “Toxic Work Habits RUIN Creators | The Me You Love In The Dark.” Casually Comics. September 22, 2023. Video,

When looking at how Belle transforms Suzu, the protagonist, into an idol, one scene precisely encapsulates that transition in the movie. It visually utilizes media compositing and switching as the central pictorial motif presented in full display to illustrate how she becomes a viral sensation, happening around the beginning of the movie when she checks her number of followers on the U app in class. As the shot cuts from her surprised reaction to the follower count exponentially increasing, the camera tilts upward toward her profile icon as countless videos depicting Belle singing for the first time inside U burst from the image. That seamless transition bridges the real world with a digital space through a media switch. The switch turns into a full media compositing experience as the Belle icon is minimized while a vast amount of videos of her that are framed through different formats like vertical and horizontal, full screen and default web view, populate the screen, forming a sample illustration of the number of people watching her performance at the moment to depict the birth of fan engagement with the avatar. The sheer amount of screens organized in a flat compositing style that creates this depthless portrait, though, start introducing the idea that, as Galbraith says in his essay “Idols,” the idol is reduced “to an image that is understood in relation to other images encountered in the media” (Galbraith 186), as the first Belle, represented by the now small shining icon in the center, is overcrowded by her reproductions, each one being a version of her created from the projected perspective of a follower that stars to be distinct from that “original” Belle.

Such a personalized experience is explored further in the same scene, where the camera pans away from the establishing shot to focus on the specific image screens depicting Belle in different costumes, portraying her transition from a viral sensation to a marketable asset. Through open compositing with layers of various media styles, the visual composition embellishes the screen for the purpose of attracting a person’s interest in experiencing Belle’s music. Since the illustrations look like album covers/wallpapers as the avatar is stuck in various poses in a 3D effect of volumetric texture to push outwards and drive more attention—created by a layer of words in several languages circling her body and localized light and shadow interactions to form depth inside the posters, paired with remixes of “Swarms of Song” that match the music genre visually depicted in them to synergize and fuse the visual and sound dimensions—and the front layer consists of digital confetti effects that add only decorative value to the screen, this entire composition exists to sell Belle as an attractive product to the world. And as Galbraith writes that “what is accessible in cultural products is a construction of reality” (Galbraith 186) and that “fiction is part of the makeup of an idol” (Galbraith 185), what the marketization of Belle by her producer friend from an unknown avatar to a popular hit tries to accomplish even further is to “manufacture” a global idol through promoting her not as a set entity with a specific look and personality, but a chameleonic one to maximize people’s ability to create conceptual realities around her.

Moreover, as the scene progresses, the production value of Suzu’s digital persona increases and becomes even more hinged on having no set target audience by appealing to people’s diverse visual preferences, expanding her global reach and the possibilities for people’s construct of Belle to be uniquely theirs. As media compositing further takes hold in the form of text bubbles of people sharing their thoughts about the character—layered above the stacking of more wallpapers showing in a sequential rhythm the many costumes she has worn before, almost like a flip book—Belle is no longer Suzu’s but everyone’s and nobody’s. Even if the character was created using the combination of the protagonist’s biometrics and a photo showing her and her female classmates—a mirror image to Galbraith’s example of Eguchi, who “fans could make their own [versions] from parts (...) of AKB48 members” (Galbraith 193)—what resides of Suzu in Belle—her iconic freckles, the only features that she says is her own in a sea of beauty—are no longer hers, disconnecting Belle from being Suzu’s avatar and making it a mere sellable mask. The flip-book quality, paired with the computer aesthetic of the image stack, translates the experience of going through different costumes in a fashion catalog to a modern aesthetic in a combination between media coding and compositing that provides the still figures with the illusion of animated life as if the act of imagining Belle in a different costume is already giving her life in a person’s mind as an image commodity. That is, the still, promotional version of her has as much life as Suzu’s performing version, pointing to Belle’s total transformation into an Idol.

The idea that Suzu and Belle are no longer unified and that her idol avatar has received a life of its own in the individual conceptual realities of her followers is vital for understanding how and why Suzu decides to unravel this artificial mask of hers. Suzu’s wish in entering U was to be able to sing again after the death of her mother, who taught and encouraged her to sing and compose, and Belle provided a sort of dissociation from the trauma of her mother’s passing and shelter from her insecurities and the judgments of potential listeners over her real look. So when the time came for her to unveil Belle as Suzu and rupture the images everyone held over whom they imagined Belle was, the sacrifice came as a challenge, not necessarily because she would lose her idol “brand” and return to old “crying all the time” Suzu as her friend says, but because she was afraid she would put a psychological lock on her singing again.

That is the preface to the transformation scene, which relies on formal henshin conventions to inform the process’s visual depiction with the 3D and 2D animation mix, creating an illusion of a toggle between flat and open compositing that most of the time is only open. In Belle’s case, a reverse henshin occurs where, as a green light first engulfs her, the first frame looks to be almost flat, existing to picture Belle with a pose as a “one-dimensional” product/icon one last time. But then, media compositing starts the process of moving the shot into open compositing by creating a sense of texture depth where materials with different states of matter circle her and switch the frame of reference as if the virtual code of U is being dissolved in a crisis, and when her body becomes pure flat light, the energy residue from Belle’s features becomes green 3D bubble-gems that populate a new layer, bridging her new 2D state with the 3D world until what remains is Suzu, whose real projected body is positioned in a layer separated from the virtual one. As Galbraith writes, “people chase around images and objects for the pleasure of immediate interaction, without necessarily achieving a stable (...) position” (Galbraith 194), so in the case of Suzu, she reveals herself and breaks the fiction of the image of the idol because the relationship between fan and idol is purely superficial, requiring her to show her authentic self to emotionally connect with others through her singing. Suzu wants to break the constructed realities formed by the illusion of people’s relationship to her Belle avatar to drive true impact in a collective, and the protagonist does so by drawing attention to her own produced artificiality, with the henshin scene existing to say that Suzu’s true power is within her in her words and in who she is, not her avatar’s beauty.

In the end, Belle is an anti-idol movie that designs a social media virtual reality as a thematic backdrop to comment on today’s ever-present and ever more widespread commoditization of engagement through superficiality and artificiality. Such a consumption is individualistic in a way that results in the formation of personal versions of people as idols, and the film relies on authenticity and an impactful message to push for the bursting of the bubble of the second persona we create in social media and content creation environments and for us to emotionally connect with our and others authentic selves.

Sources

-Hosoda, Mamoru, director. Ryū to Sobakasu no Hime [Belle]. Studio Chizu, 2021.

-Galbraith, Patrick W. “Idols: The Image of Desire in Japanese Consumer Capitalism.” Idols and Celebrity in Japanese Media Culture, edited by Patrick Galbraith and Jason Karlin, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 185-208.

Starting with Ghost in the Shell, a moment in the movie that showcases the existential quandary that remains as an ever so slightly increasing intrusive thought of Major Kusanagi throughout the story—if she is truly human and has an actual and biological consciousness1—exists as a non-dialogue piece that serves as a contemplation on the nature of the material world and on what Major really sees herself as. Is she more like a Human or more like a Mannequin? Alive or inanimate? The scene is a montage that travels through New Port City’s urbanscape, showcasing the life and decay that permeates the metropolis through an interplay between shots that exist as static—with movement being felt by the motion of vehicles like cars and a ferryboat, the rain, and its citizens like an animated painting—and shots that gain a sort of life with a fixed point of focus while the camera moves toward and away from it to emulate the perspective of someone inside the ferryboat. Such quasi-POV shot moments in the montage work as a way for the audience to experience the protagonist’s perception, particularly since it comes after a moment where Major looks toward New Port City and the scene fades to white, which connotes the idea that the spectators are moving into a space that belongs to her psychology. Moreover, in the previous scene, the protagonist says “what we see now is like a dim image in a mirror” (Ghost 32:27-32:32), referring to how, even if she has conviction about what makes her identity unique in thinking that “My thoughts and memories are unique only to me, and I carry a sense of my own destiny” (Ghost 31:53-31:58), she still believes she has an imperfect perception of her reality and the meaning of reality due to limitations of her existence in a mutable shell, and the montage comes to illustrate such reflections on the nature of her identity.

The nature of montage, not being clearly linear in the overall continuity of the narrative, complements its primary narrative purpose in showcasing Major’s quandary in a purely visual form by existing as a non-specific moment in time where the protagonist can visually project herself into people and objects as a psychological manifestation of such identity crisis. Through the “fixed point” motion camera framing imitating the motion of a boat, even before we know the female cyborg in the scene altogether, one of the montage shots features a wide shot of the side of a building with a woman centered in the frame captured from below, and through a dissolve, it becomes zoomed in to show her in a mid-shot distance. As the woman turns toward the widow, she looks down and, through an eyeline match cut, we see her looking at the Major from a high angle. Their faces are drawn exactly the same, and as the protagonist realizes it, she tries to maintain eye contact while the boat (and the camera) move her outside the frame. That leads to a match-on action cut close-up shot of her still looking up and then looking to the horizon, puzzled, as the scene’s hard lighting natural “setup” has her hair casting a harsh shadow on one side of her face, showing the duality that represents Major’s nature as human and machine.

As the montage proceeds, a reverse setup situation occurs where the movement of the ferryboat is not depicted by the camera but visually seen through a shadow reflection cast over a clothing store, and even if this time, Major is not presented directly looking at her surroundings, the movie depicts a Mannequin that looks precisely like her through a Dutch low angle shot. This change in formal conventions sets up an ambiguity about whether the film was still depicting Major’s POV and, thus, whether she saw or did not actually see the Mannequin, but it does not detract from the point that Kusanagi is being depicted in contrast with two different entities that have the same face as the her in an almost non-linear, overall psychologically driven scene, which can be interpreted as a way for Ghost in the Shell to manifest her doubts about being a human or an artificial thing. That is especially so because, as the opening scene demonstrated that her body could be replicated countless times, the woman she saw could have been the original inspiration for her synthetic body, or she could have been just projecting her wish to identify as human onto another person that resembled her shell. And in the case of the Mannequin, the fact that the audience might not be seeing through Major’s perspective (the camera is not moving like the perspective of somebody on the ferry) points to there actually being a Mannequin that looks like Kusanagi’s body, which might mean that the Mannequin looks like her because the appearance of the protagonist’s body is a reproducible and commercial asset that can be used anywhere, adding even more fuel to the flame of her cognitive dissonance. But if the Mannequin shot was still psychological and symbolic, and Major projected her body onto the object, that would mean she also sees herself as an inanimate thing to be displayed and manipulated, and such an interpretation concretizes the montage as a projection of the pure manifestation of her dual self: part woman, part Mannequin.

So, what is the effect of the scene on her? Did she see a human that looked like her shell’s model, which made her feel like an impostor and lesser because somebody who looks like her is fully human? Or did seeing her face in a “full human” make her feel even more human? Is the fact that there are possibly other versions of the body she wears being used for any purpose something dehumanizing? As Sharalyn Orbaugh writes in her essay Sex and the Single Cyborg, “But since a ‘ghost’ (evidently) cannot exist without a container, the body is not (yet) a disposable element of selfhood” (447), which, combined with all of these questions, points to one’s identity being made concrete and whole by a visual construct and basis, even if it is something that is mainly based on a combination between thought, memories, and sensorial perception that mix to create consciousness and the ghost, as Major mentions before. That relentless focus on the body and the visual defining what selfhood means ends up becoming a motivator for her to fuse with Puppet Master, foreshadowed by the fact that the montage ends with a shot of a black mannequin with just a torso—an empty body, the winner of the quandary—a symbolic demonstration of how Major ended up renouncing the idea that she is more of a human and should try to believe she should be defined by everything that makes one human. As Orbaugh mentions in her essay, the interest of Ghost’s narrative is “the limits imposed on subjectivity by such perfect control [of the body] and how these limits may be transcended, moving to the next step of evolution” (446), pointing to the next step in Major Kusanagi’s path to comprehending and embracing what can become of her identity being an entire renunciation of the limitations of being human. This renunciation comes as a fusion between her and Puppet Master’s body, which Orbaugh sees as both a way for her to “have carried out one of the defining characteristics of a life form, thus proving that she is more than an automaton” (447) and to level up by being able to access the Net and have almost unlimited technological power while still having her ghost and being tattered to a sense of natural consciousness in contrast with the antagonist’s A.I. spontaneous yet manufactured “consciousness.” In the end, this fusion becomes the ultimate answer to the montage, showing that identity can be malleable and become more than an intuitive sense of the self based on memory, thoughts, and perception anchored to the material world by a familiar and unique look and that there are other ways to be alive than just having a biological and human body filled with a ghost; that Major Kusanagi can be more alive than a human.

In contrast, unlike how Ghost in the Shell portrays identity as a source of individual struggle addressed by two consciousness coming together, Persona deals with the borders of the human psyche and how one’s identity can be projected onto another person to the point that it takes over the other’s identity as a psychological manifestation of processing inner conflict. One scene, or rather two, in the movie that illustrate this conflict do end up with a fusion between characters, but it is more allegorical than literal. They depict a repetition of the same monologue from different camera positions focusing on the reaction of one character first, Elizabet, and then exhibiting the delivery of the monologue that the actress is reacting to by nurse Alma in a way that presents a dissociation of the former’s identity projected onto the latter through the motif of a memory that was never shared (since Elizabet’s selective mutism, the initial impetus of the narrative, would preclude her from communicating this knowledge). The first scene starts in the same way as the second one, with a close-up of Elizabet’s hands covering up a photo of her child, and as Alma removes the former’s hands from hiding it, a quick, almost diagonal tilt settles on a close-up of both Alma and Elizabet’s faces. The first scene then differentiates itself through a cut that puts the camera behind Alma’s back under an over-the-shoulder angle, but with Alma’s face and back being wholly engulfed in shadows, therefore indicating that her voice is detached from her body, and thus that the character of Elizabet is the singular entity on the scene. A later cut completely removes Alma’s body from the frame to focus solely on the actress, further pointing to this effect. Throughout the scene, the camera distance and Elizabet’s body are in a relationship, starting in a medium close-up, jumping to a close-up, and then an even closer close-up, and ending in a big close-up that frames the actress’s regretful face in a hard light chiaroscuro effect that becomes one piece of the portrait that ends the second scene, with each distance representing a different emotion: denial about the reasons she was coerced into being a mother, desperation and guilt for the realization that she wanted the baby gone when she was pregnant, anger for the pain of childbirth and being removed from acting, and regret for thinking he was repulsive and not loving him.

Then, the second scene uses the same stylistic choices the first one employs in a structural repetition but reversed, with Alma, partially cloaked in shadow, being the figure that motivates camera movement as she utters the same lines from the previous scene, ending with the framed big close-up shot of her face partially obscured by shadows. In terms of lighting, Alma’s chiaroscuro makes her stern countenance appear more menacing and serious compared to how Elizabet’s works as a way for her to hide from herself. It is then through the structural parallelism between the shots that Persona visually prompts the fusion between the character’s faces into one identity through the mirroring of the camera positions under the 180° rule, with the darkness casting shadows on the opposite sides of the character’s faces and the OTS angle being positioned on their opposite shoulders literally setting those two scenes as mirrors, and thus works as a way to say that Elizabet and Alma are working as reflections of each other as two aspects of the same being, the same identity. When the fusion of faces happens with the lit sides of the character’s faces (Alma’s right and Elizabet’s left) aligned to depict this new Persona identity visually, it is as if the scenes were fragmented aspects of the whole, with Alma’s being the shadow of Elizabet’s and vice versa. So, it could be interpreted that the final identity depicts a conflictive duality between having to face a traumatic experience and wanting to hide from it coalescing, with the shadows representing one side suppressing the other where hiding becomes ineffective after Alma’s side “takes over the film” and forces the former to face itself and merge into a form that characterizes a new realization about the past.

Finally, to better appreciate the scenes’ filmic and psychological interplay, it is relevant to look at their context in Persona. These two scenes come right after a sequence where the movie becomes Elizabet’s mind, and the audience is exposed to the actress’ recalling and reprocessing of the traumatic realization about her indifference to being a mother through Alma serving as a proxy in her place, which retroactively establishes that her shame over such a perspective is what led to her renunciation over her acting career and her hospitalization (how can she act and make art if she cannot act like a mother?), so there exists an instinct of self-preservation in reexperiencing trauma that requires a dissociation to prevent the trauma from becoming destructive. As the director mentions in the interview, he acknowledges the application of the idea of people sharing masks between them after an interviewer tells him that Jungian’s Persona means “a masked personality complex which is adopted by an individual (...) with intent to serve as a protection, a defense, a deception, or an attempt to adapt to the world around him” (Bergman 202). That points to how the fusion of identities through shared masks can be seen as a psychological mechanism with an intended outcome of self-evaluation, understanding, preservation, and self-actualization through seeing one self from what we perceive as another’s perspective, but such a process can also incur being subjected to traumatic memories and regrets, which can result in one wanting to lie to oneself more to never to relive the shame of the past and thus internalizing and suppressing that guilt (a backfire) more through using another person’s Persona mask as a shiny gate pushing one’s disdain for one’s true self back and protecting one’s identity from it. That previous scene is the base moment in the film where the identities start permeating each other as Elizabet uses Alma (meaning Soul) as an identity double and “mask.” Unlike Ghost in the Shell though, Persona uses that moment in a more ambiguous way where it becomes emotionally cathartic for the actress to listen to this shared Persona (a being that has her memories and thoughts but Alma’s face) saying back to Elizabet everything that consumed the latter about her relationship with her husband and son, but it is not clear whether this moment where she faces herself literally and figuratively served a positive or harmful purpose. Did the end of the movie point to her being healed since she and Alma finally left the beach house? Or did it mean that Elizabet came back to the hospital? The slight glimpse the movie shows of Elizabet lying down in a movie set may point to her returning to being an actress, so the beach house experience may have helped her mental health, or is it a last memory of what she once was but won’t ever be?

In conclusion, even if Ghost in the Shell and Persona present the culmination of the theme of identity as a fusion through the context of an expression of a more profound truth and crisis in each character, the former employs the fusion as a way for the protagonist to grasp the meaning and uniqueness of her identity regardless of her body and feel assured about it through an esoteric, futuristic, and philosophical context, while the latter uses it as a manifestation of a psychological phenomenon based on a traumatic experience representative of a character’s shame and guilt. Ghost in the Shell explores the concept of an identity crisis with a montage sequence that displays the point of how, if Major Kusanagi’s belief in identity also relies on the conception that a person’s visual recognition of their human ghost is intrinsically tied to the look of the shell, illustrated through the depiction of a human and a Mannequin looking exactly like her in a scene that explores a psychological underpinning of her predicament, then she cannot veritably conceive herself as a human. However, she ends up contesting the notion that not having a fixed body is the same as not being alive, which the fusion with the Puppet Master showcases by not only being a symbolic analogue to reproduction, one of the criteria that define living beings, but also a way in which Major can transcend the limitations of her mind and artificial shell interface while maintaining her ghost and the belief that her identity is uniquelly hers to become the ultimate mix between natural and synthetic.

In contrast, Persona makes use of the theme of identity crisis through a couple of scenes where the character of Elizabet dissociates herself and projects part of her identity (thoughts and memories) onto Alma as a way for the actress to reprocess the heart of the matter that has been afflicting her and influenced her attitude towards life that resulted in her renunciation from acting and selective mutism. Alma becomes transformed into a form of Elizabet’s identity that holds her accountable for her disregarding and not loving her son and wants her to face that truth while Elizabet remains as the reactive and frightened part of herself that wants the truth to be forever hidden so she does not experience and feel the barrage of emotions that she has been suppressing. The scene then ends with a fusion of both identities into a new actuality that is somewhat ambiguous over whether such a face-off led to a restorative epiphany, a further denial that left Elizabet more of the same—disillusioned with art, her world, and her life—or both.

Sources

-Ghost in the Shell. Directed by Mamoru Oshii, performances by Atsuko Tanaka, Akio Ōtsuka, Iemasa Kayumi, Sochiku, 1995.

-Orbaugh, Sharalyn. “Sex and the Single Cyborg: Japanese Popular Culture Experiments in Subjectivity.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 29, no. 3, 2002, pp. 436–52. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4241109. Accessed 24 Apr. 2023.

-Persona. Directed by Ingmar Bergman, performances by Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann, AB Svensk Filmindustri, 1966.

-Bergman, Ingmar. Bergman on Bergman: Interviews with Ingmar Bergman. Simon & Schuster, 1974.

Melanie Martinez’s one-hour and thirty-two-minute K-12 film, released on September 6th, 2019, is the pictorial depiction of her second album. It tells a complete story through both acting and music videos that visualize the contents of her song, making the film a peculiar combination of a visual album and a musical, very fitting of the genre-bending style of the female singer. Like the music videos for Cry Baby, K-12 features Martinez’s intent of reflecting serious topics like bulimia, sexism, and distrust towards authoritarian figures through the context of growing up, forming an analogous image with the setting of a boarding school that runs from elementary years to the end of high school. Keeping up with her previous artistic intent, in a few songs, the singer cleverly injects social criticism into scholastic situations that partially reflect the composition’s message, as the K-12 period of a person’s life can be understood as an experimental microcosm of society with similar relationship dynamics. As such, Melanie Martinez’s K-12 film provides a boarding school visual language to establish and connect all the songs from the eponymous album within a single aesthetic thread, and thus, depending on the recording, impart an even more glaring contrast between what is being shown and its alternative social critique. The songs “Strawberry Shortcake” and “Show & Tell” are particularly relevant because they rely on a visual aesthetic to magnify the textual and sonorous experience and flesh out their connection to the school context while staying true to their broad social criticism.

“Strawberry Shortcake” is a song against sexism and the objectification of the female body. With powerful lyrics like, “They say boys like girls with a tiny waist,” “It’s my fault, it’s my fault ’cause I put icing on top,” “That’s my bad, that’s my bad, no one told them not to grab,” and “Just teach him to keep it in his pants and tell him to stop,” Martinez textually exemplifies how society creates a beauty standard and protects boys and men that sexually harass women by citing the latter as provocateurs of desire or that the former didn’t know what they were doing was wrong. Then, she lays out the most straightforward solution to the problem in the song’s bridge: teaching boys to stop and holding them accountable for their harassment. Furthermore, by saying, “Now, the boys want a taste of the strawberry shortcake,” the singer translates the title of her song into a euphemistic metaphor to define the female body.

In the sonorous background, an acousmatic experience is created by three sounds: zippers being opened, something that sounds like suntan cans being shaken, and a less audible set of noises from whistles, trainers slipping, and balls hitting the floor. All these sound effects construct a supporting cast that forms a pertinent soundscape to the song’s meaning while not being visually featured in the film. The zipper and the suntan exist in the soundscape realm of beautification, where the former provides the image of undressing and the latter of conforming to a “skin tone” beauty standard. Conversely, the court noises create a more “masculine” soundscape, with sounds of people playing a sport like Basketball, activities that, even if stereotypical, are more associated with men. Consequently, both soundscapes work in tandem with the song to construct a more layered depiction of gender and the conflict Martinez narrates in “Strawberry Shortcake.”

But then, how did the K-12 film address the composition? To follow the film’s school aesthetic, the song occurs during the female swimming class, a choice that contrasts with the sports court soundscape that appears in its second half and is suitable to the song’s message as swimming involves showing more skin, something that is considered more (or sometimes less) desirable by men. The choice is significant because, being a female-only synchronized swimming class, some of the shots featured in the film display girls dancing together and holding hands, which could be interpreted as a depiction of women standing united. Moreover, in the mission to further “Strawberry Shortcake’s” social critique, the film depicts Melanie Martinez’s character as a Marie Antoinette-esque strawberry cake with a nude chest cover, the latter of which simulates sexuality and male desire without explicitly displaying nudity. It also features boys in school uniforms eating pieces of her dress, a metaphor that carries over from the lyrics into the video, illustrating the “uncontrollable” and unfortunately rampant and sometimes praised harassing actions of some men.

In turn, the song “Show & Tell” provides a commentary about the hardships of fame, elucidating the struggle Melanie Martinez and other celebrities face with the demands and pressures of being a recording artist. Lyrics like “I’m just like you, you’re like me/Imperfect and human are we,” “Buy and sell me, baby/Like I’m a product to society,” and “It’s really hard for me to say just how I feel” illustrates the unachievable demands of music consumers and fans who see celebrities as perfect, untouchable beings that do not suffer and, as such, should be able to churn content year round. Moreover, Martinez argues that such a consumer mindset transforms singers into commodities, simultaneously making them punching bags of those who dislike them while objectifying and preventing artists from speaking their minds about mental health and what they disagree with due to the hostile atmosphere around public opinion.

To acoustically translate the message in “Show & Tell’s” lyrics, the artist fancied the concept of toys as fitting examples of singers being controlled by the demands of those who experience their work. The song features various sounds pertaining to a toy-based soundscape, with cranking and metallic hoop noises, a squeak, and children speaking and laughing in the intro and then variations of the wind-up toy clicks throughout it, coupled with toy bricks falling in the bridge. The acousmatic experience created in the song enhances the text’s purport, where this feeling Martinez inscribed into it of having to comply with being shaped and manipulated as an object of entertainment to continue being a celebrated singer is translated into a vivid soundscape full of toy sounds, which brings out such emotions from noises that remind listeners of a concept that figuratively replicates unwanted compliance: a marionettist playing with a marionette toy.

Finally, the visual aesthetic of K-12’s “Show & Tell” employs the marionette motif to visualize and boost the power of the song’s critique. Its music video already starts in an impactful way: when Martinez’s character enters her 3rd-grade classroom, students suddenly jerk their bodies toward her and smile menacingly, an initial taste of their monstrous portrayal in the rest of the video. This 3rd-grade classroom framework is relevant because it links children’s wild and often unsympathetic conduct with some fans and consumers’ exhausting and inconsiderate behavior toward singers. Then, the teacher becomes a marionettist, and the protagonist transforms into a doll, being puppeteered to dance in a show-and-tell presentation and entertain the students, who now violently clap and beat on their tables. The marionette-teacher relationship is the primary image of the video. The former could visualize a singer’s anxieties toward being objectified and tethered to a life and career manipulated by the latter, a superior force akin to the music industry or public opinion. The video portion ends with the marionette being tossed into the crowd of students, who proceed to ditch her for having her entrails exposed. This injured doll is a critical visual feature because it exists to argue that many consumers are only interested in the product and don’t care about a singer’s inner thoughts, vulnerability, and humanity outside the art form.

Conclusively, Melanie Martinez’s K-12 is a feature-length narrative of music videos, which provides a visual aesthetic that both augments the effects created by the lyrics and the acousmatic experience and generates a creative parallel between textual social criticism and the realm of scholastic images. “Strawberry Shortcake’s” critique against sexism and female objectification is sonorously depicted by a contrast found in gendered soundscapes and visually exhibited through images of female students performing synchronized swimming as a unifying activity and male students euphemistically consuming Martinez’s character’s shortcake body. “Show & Tell’s” commentary against the objectification of artists as products of consumerism and their inability to speak about their social and mental health concerns is acoustically exemplified by a toy soundscape that primes the audience to imagine the singer as such, visually displayed through Martinez’s character becoming a marionette in a horrifying and claustrophobic show-and-tell of feral students and overbearing teachers. In the end, a cake and a doll are, fittingly, Martinez’s instruments against objectification, the thread that connects both songs.

Bibliography

-Martinez, Melanie. “Melanie Martinez - K-12 (The Film).” YouTube, uploaded by Melanie Martinez, 6 September 2019,

-Martinez, Melanie. “Strawberry Shortcake.” Genius, 6 Sept. 2019, https://genius.com/Melanie-martinez-strawberry-shortcake-lyrics.

-Schaffer, Pierre. “Acousmatics.” Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, edited by Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, Continuum, 2004, pp. 76-81.

-Schafer, Raymond. “The Soundscape.” The Sound Studies Reader, edited by Jonathan Sterne, Routledge, 2012, pp. 106-114.

-Martinez, Melanie. “Show & Tell.” Genius, 6 Sept. 2019, https://genius.com/Melanie-martinez-show-and-tell-lyrics.

African American churches were already sites of nontheatrical movie screenings and discussion, especially in communities that had been segregated from White spaces. With the possibilities created by amateur filmmaking, churches could expand what they screened to become part of their community-building and community-fostering religious activities. As Martin L. Johnson writes in his essay “I’ll See You in Church,” “Within church communities, films were primarily used in three ways: to educate and inspire church members about prominent issues, to document the activities of church members and their supporters, and to allow people who attended church regularly to see themselves on screen” (73). More ethnographic work than a narrative experience, as religious leaders gained access to filmmaking tools, they started using movies as powerful promotional material and connective tissue to unite their congregations even more. One such leader was Oklahoma’s Reverend S.S. Jones. After being selected to be part of a trip to Europe and the Middle East where he and another minister took pictures and recorded their experience with Bell & Howell cameras later to present those records in lectures all over the Midwest, he continued to make movies focusing on organizational activities, community events, and the life of people belonging to his church in Muskogee and other Oklahoman African American communities. One of his reels titled Rev. S.S. Jones Home Movies: Reel 1 is a great example of his ability to capture glimpses of the candid life of Black people in Oklahoma, and when putting it in dialogue with the horrific events of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, especially how it is poignantly depicted in 2019’s Lovecraft Country Episode 9 “Rewind 1921,” a picture of resilience is revealed.

Reel 1 documents the life of Black Oklahomans in a casual and realistic way through a combination of shots of people and locations. Reverend S.S. Jones is no seasoned cinematographer, but his camera movements and framing from shooting everything handheld give each shot an intimate quality beyond pure observation and record keeping, which would benefit more from static shots. Reverend Jones’ pans and tilts are moderate in velocity, neither slow nor fast. He does not stop, almost as if he wants to show everything he feels needs to appear on camera. The reverend sometimes does minor tracking shots of people that walk in and out of frame, which he would not have needed to do if he had not had the camera zoomed in at a medium close-up framework distance. Any of his shots could have been captured from afar, but Reverend Jones always seems to be deliberately close to his subjects and the locations he films. These are all details about his approach to shooting movies that make the reels so idiosyncratic to him and unique, showing that there is a human behind the machine; that every shot has an intention behind it that can be felt as the camera moves, and that filmmaking does not need to be perfect to have an impact.

Speaking of the contents of Reel 1, some of the people Reverend Jones captures include African American individuals leaving their church congregation in Sunday Morning attire, cutting once to a woman who passed by the camera earlier and now smiles gleefully at the camera; people standing outside a cafe; teens and children leaving school, playing on a playground and then leaving the area inside automobiles with extended rear sitting areas; workers plowing and families working their field; a woman getting out of her house to greet the reverend and the camera and then calling her husband to do the same; men walking by the camera going by their business; a mother ushering her young son out of the house to be on camera; a woman gardening with a young boy; a father holding her baby daughter to the camera; a couple near a house under construction close to being fully built; two boys around tween age gripping each other in what seems to be a friendly fight or scuffle. Some look at the camera in curiosity and reticence. Others smile and interact with it as if happy to be captured in the moment. Adding to his focus on people as subjects, the reverend records what could be perceived as b-roll footage supplementing the main shots, capturing the Willis Grocery Cafe, Douglass School, the porch area of the farmer family’s house, several suburban residential streets and their houses, a pool, a house for rent owned by Dunmore, a house with two W M. S. Dunmore Contractor and Builder signs in front of it, a Mosaic Temple of America, a closed store, another in a state of renovation, a Dentist’s office, Dr. Payne Physician and Surgeon’s office (what a fitting pun), Kellar’s Pharmacy, and P. W. Ross’ House. All the names matter because every single one of them represents Black people who thrived, built businesses, and owned their own houses. Therefore, Reel 1 paints a picture, or rather, tells a story of construction and life.

One could say Reel 1 exists in stark contrast with any portrayal of the Tulsa Massacre in media that only depicts the event itself and the dark type of legacy of violence the massacre left or the reflections one can see in today’s racial tensions, but TV shows like Lovecraft Country depict that day as more than just the tragedy that it was, building a bridge through time that establishes another legacy, one of strength for Tulsa and its Black citizens. Lovecraft Country’s “Rewind 1921” is a heartfelt, impactful, weighty, and sometimes difficult yet almost necessary-to-watch interpretation of May 31st, 1921, or at least a piece of it that is enough to show the suffering and destruction White rioters caused in Greenwood. The episode weaves a thematic web that sees May 31st as a date of trauma but also of renewal, a date that caused two legacies to unfold.

The first is a result of Montrose’s suppression of his sexual orientation as a way to both wipe out any memories he had of Thomas—his crush whom Montrose blames himself for letting get killed during the Tulsa Massacre—-and the shame that came from his final lie to the boy, and to conform to 1920s society so he could be a father by cutting all his soft parts to be a man because as he tells Atticus, his son, only men have sons. This interaction happens on the day Montrose, as a teen, is beaten by his drunk father for being discovered to be gay, precisely in the moment a group of White rioters arrives to taunt and kill the two boys. In the episode, the father, the son, and Atticus’ girlfriend Leti go back in time to find an important book that can save the protagonist’s cousin, and it is this travel that provides the opportunity for Atticus to change the legacy of abuse that continued as a result of the consequences of Montrose’s first of many sacrifices to suppress his authentic self so he could have Tic. Montrose’s history with violence started with his father’s abuse and was aggravated by the Tulsa massacre and the death it brought to his first love, experiences that became root causes of his later aggression and the physical abuse he perpetuated on his son. After May 31st, 1921, his past self started to peel away, leaving a husk of a man, even if that was the only way he found to be able to survive in an already racially segregated society and to be who he came to want to be—a father.

However, this legacy of violence did not breed a perpetual cycle of it, but rather the opposite. That is the second legacy. As the protagonist and his father watch the White rioters punch and kick young Montrose, his brother George, and his future wife Dora, both remember how, from what Montrose recalls from the experience, a man with a baseball bat comes out of nowhere swinging it at all the rioters and saves the teens. However, nobody arrives to save them. That is when Atticus steps on a baseball bat near him and realizes he might have been the person who saved his dad, and decides to become the hero of Montrose’s story, despite the pain his father has caused him, a man who ended up not actually being his biological father. In doing so, in showing bravery in the face of pain and anger, Atticus proved to Montrose that, even through the abuse, even through their complicated relationship and love, he became a good man. While Montrose lost himself during the massacre as a kid, he and his son understood each other and found a more profound love for each other after reliving it. And when Tic dies at the end of the show, making the ultimate sacrifice by trading his life to prevent any White person from becoming immortal, he writes to his father asking him to help raise Tic’s unborn son, George, by teaching him new ways of living instead of repeating the cycle of abuse, having a second chance at being the father he always wanted. Atticus quotes Dumas’ in writing, “he who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness” (“Full Circle” 00:55:14-00:55:20), and that ultimately becomes the true Afterlife of the Tulsa Massacre: even if it is very hard to accept that true happiness can only arrive from the most profound grief, which an event like the massacre undoubtedly caused, and even if for those who survived, it will be very tough—sometimes feeling like near impossible—to continue living life like before, when one is in a place of love and unity, when one is not alone in the dark, the fight toward the light is always possible. In spite of the suffering and the trauma, with love, one can rebuild almost anything, and one can hope that, through resilience and community, a happier future can be achieved.

That is precisely what both media artifacts tell us about an Oklahoma Afterlife: rebirth. Power can be many things: authority, dominance, oppression, will. Power can come from different states: being in love, feeling superior, completing a challenge, and liberating oneself. Power can be easy to achieve or something sought after for a lifetime. Rebirth is an ultimate form of power, an experience that relies on a build-up of empowering experiences to be felt in its full force. It took one day for a group of White rioters to destroy a thriving Black neighborhood, kill dozens of Black citizens, and burn most of it to the ground, and it took so many years for Tulsa to be rebuilt, but the city never went back to its former state before the tragedy. The dream of, at the minimum, fully thriving communities around Oklahoma that could expand into haven neighborhoods and cities for Black people was killed that day. But murder and destruction are not power. They represent bigotry, hate, and cowardice. They are a show of weakness of character and virtue, however empowering it might have been in the moment. True power is surviving adversity and rising above it, having the strength to mourn those lost and keep on going and rebuild what was destroyed, especially without hate in one’s heart. True power is achieved by helping and being helped by others, by loving and fighting so hard for a better tomorrow despite those forces that try to prevent that from happening, be it an inner demon or outer obstacle. True power is rewarded with profound happiness. Even if Reel 1 does not show Tulsa rebuilt, which Reverend S.S. Jones did record, as mentioned before, the impact of such a horrendous act was not enough to destroy the community and spirit of all Black Oklahomans. Movies like Reel 1 were rather responses against White oppression, serving as tools to help build stronger and more unified communities of Black people and to show that Tulsa was only one of many united Oklahoman Black communities. Like in “Rewind 1921,” the fight is not over as long as there is one last person standing, and like Montrose having a second chance to be the best father figure he could ever be to his grandson and break a history of violence to build a history of love, Reverend S.S. Jones and all other reverends who sought to make movies to inspire their churchgoers used the movie camera as a representation of the truth of how the power of love, unity, rebirth, and autonomy1 can drive communities closer and foster their growth and development. That is Resilience. That is Power. And that is one of Oklahoma’s Afterlives. People may try to tear us down, but we will keep on going.

Bibliography

-Johnson, Martin L. “‘I’ll See You in Church’ Local Films in African American Communities, 1924–1962.” Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film, edited by Allyson Nadia Field and Marsha Gordon, Duke University Press, 2019, pp. 71-91.

-Jones, Solomon Sir, director. Rev. S.S. Jones Home Movies: Reel 1. 1928.

-“Rewind 1921.” Lovecraft Country, season 1, episode 9, HBO, 11 Oct. 2020. Max, https://play.max.com/video/watch/7f4c7f31-ee1f-4d97-93e3-ce8bf6bf30bc/248ee350-bf2c-44d9-b53e-c2d0f55829c5

One way Homura is characterized in the anime is communicated through the way she exists in her direct surroundings, more specifically in how the deuteragonist (at least for the initial episodes of the anime) is depicted to dwell in the shadows. This first scene she is introduced as a magic girl outside the nightmare sequence, which happens in the parking lot of the shopping mall in episode one, has this ominous atmosphere that combines with the illusion of open compositing coming out of flat compositing based on how Homura’s body interacts with the red light in the darkness to give her this ghostly feel that makes her appear more like a threat than a savior. The effect is very subtle because of the composition of the shot and her existence in it, but the way the two red light beams allocate her into a liminal space forms this sense of depth that is so fragile that by blocking one of the lights, her interaction with the background switches to make her become the shadows as part of flat compositing, but by existing between both light—the furthest of which has a lens flare that exists both behind the deuteragonist and simultaneously breaches this liminal space, creating the appearance that she is not wholly material even if the light source comes from behind her—Homura is being depicted as a being that gains and loses depth when navigating in a realm of shadows.

Another scene that depicts Homura as a being of the shadows happens at the end of episode four after Sayaka saves Madoka from the Witch Kirsten’s labyrinth. In it, the character is positioned in the background in a manner that makes her resemble a shadow as her body is transformed into a flat black silhouette that is only given life by the wind blowing her hair. The open compositing nature of the scene is achieved by the discrepancies in light between the foreground and background, where the former has three-dimensionality because of the interactions between light and colors, while the latter is mostly two-dimensional because the figures represented are devoid of anything but their shadow forms. By stripping Homura of her individuality and assigning her body a figurative 2D shadow self, the effect created results in the character’s association with darkness as wholly encompassing, physically and emotionally. Everything she is becomes the shadows, especially as she remains silent for the rest of the scene.

Another way Homura is characterized in Madoka Magica is communicated through how often she is pictured from above in relation to the other characters, usually in a dark environment. The scene directly before the one described above features the deuteragonist standing above a metal column of sorts, gazing at Sayaka and Madoka with the moon shining behind her after the former defeated Kirsten. Based on the context of the shot, it appears that she was watching the fight from above, experiencing the struggle without intervening. The compositing of the scene is such that it looks open only in the illuminated areas, which rely on light to unveil the details in the column, thus giving it depth, something that is of note because without the light of the moon illuminating the character, Homura, who belongs to the foreground layer, is once more pushed into the background layer, becoming one of with the night and the moon behind her. Moreover, realistically speaking, the crescent moon would not be that big and only illuminate a piece of the scene, and the details on the pole appear to come from a dim front light. Thus, the moon’s illumination properties (is that celestial body even Earth’s moon?) are not dictating the lighting of the scene, making it take on a psychological/mystical role as another way to alienate Homura into a darker space within a lit body, and Homura’s staging and compositing as being inside the satellite give her a larger-than-life feel as the moon’s eyes while also associating her even more with the night and its darkness.

However, as seen in episode one, when Mami warns the character to leave, the separation that happens when the deuteragonist is placed on a higher ground than other characters makes her appear more distant and reserved while simultaneously assigning her a position of relevance and power, an effect created by Homura being placed in the path of sunlight. The long shot’s relationship with natural light is based on a diagonal projection that runs first through her to then reach the other girls, emphasizing their link as the relevant aspect of the scene through this chain of light. Coupled with Homura’s placement at a level above the others, this composition stipulates a dynamic between them, where Homura is portrayed as powerful yet lonely—the former since she is at a higher position being lit as the scene’s main subject, denoting a level of dominance to the character, and the latter since she is completely separated from Madoka, Mami, and Sayaka by the degree of exposure to those two factors, reflecting the schism created by the scene’s dilemma. Still, that does not mean her moral alignment is opposed to the other girls since, formally speaking, Homura exists in the same flat compositing space as them, rather than being drawn as part of another layer with the crate she is standing on (also, she still is a magic girl, after all). Nor does being closest to the light suit the deuteragonist; it does not bring her and her colors alive. The shades of purple in her ribbons are so muted that there is nearly no difference in how they are perceived under light and darkness, and the rest of her magical girl costume is black, white, and grey, so the revealing powers of light don’t have much of an effect on her. She may be pulled and motivated by it, but as seen before, her personality, even if definitely not evil, dwells in the shadows.

Homura’s relationship with the shadows is not only depicted through how she dwells in her “shadow land” but also through how shades physically complement her design to heighten the effect that the anime wants her to have. Up shots from a lower camera angle with a tilt upward utilize the lighting of the scenes and how shadows can accentuate Homura’s figure to build the impression that the character is aloof and intimidating. An example of this effect happens when the deuteragonist asks Madoka to go to the nurse’s office with her. The anime employs this type of shot to depict Homura in contrast to other characters throughout the first episode. Besides the moment mentioned above, it is used when she walks into class, when she tells Madoka about the sacrifices of being a witch, and when she wants Madoka to drop Kyubey. The camera being placed in a lower position as a representation of another character’s perspectives already establishes Homura as the more dominant and assertive person since the effect enlarges her proportionally to anybody watching her. But the shadows and the open compositing of the highlighted scene, which distances her from the bright blurred background, make it unique compared to the other scenes since the umbra add an extra layer of intimidation to the deuteragonist as its stands out from the radiance of her surroundings and partially distort her face by segmenting it. Therefore, Homura is further depicted as an intimidating figure based on camera perspective and how the darkness rests in her image.

In conclusion, Puella Magi Madoka Magica relies on the compositing of its backgrounds, created and unmasked by lighting, and low-angle shot framing with an upward tilt camera work enhanced by lighting employed to generate a direct emotional response, to reflect Homura Akemi’s inner psychology and help inform audiences about how to react to her. The deuteragonist’s affinity and inclination toward residing in the shadows, how they are illustrated to redefine her body, and the way the camera augments her from a below viewpoint, all identify Homura at the beginning of the anime as an aloof and distant character who commands respect through an intimidating façade, even if she is portrayed as a morally good magic girl.

Sources

- “I First Met Her in a Dream... Or Something.” Puella Magi Madoka Magica, written by

Gen Urobuchi and Yoshiharu Ashin, directed by Akiyuki Shinbo, 2011.

- “Miracles and Magic Are Real.” Puella Magi Madoka Magica, written by Gen Urobuchi and Yoshiharu Ashin, directed by Akiyuki Shinbo, 2011.

However, stories told throughout media, from movies like Arrival to Slaughterhouse-Five’s graphic novel adaptation, have challenged the notion that human existence and living experiences can only follow the linearity of Time. They posit a new possibility of human interaction with Time, rather, through Time and the permutations that construct what a lifetime is. This interaction is coded through the idea of being able to be in different moments in Time, one after another, in tandem with existing by being led by the unilateral, objective past-present-future linearity of our third-dimensional lives. While Time is almost always graphically reproduced as a guideline that dictates the confines of the person’s perceptual nature of it, to be unstuck from Time, to speak its language is to move in Time as if it is a plotline, with each transitional moment existing as jumping-off points and arrival points, almost like a teleporter, rather, a “chronoporter,” inside a person’s own timeline. Past, present, and future are redefined and employed subjectively in contrast with their objective characterizations, with the subjective grammar of Time being unstuck from the main course of itself to follow the course of the person’s own previous, current, and possibly subsequent experiences while their mortality still follows objective Time. Through modeling this new conception of sensorial time experience as a transition from a guideline timeline to a plotline timeline format in visual and audiovisual media, it will be possible to comprehend how the spatiotemporal relations that define how one usually exists in Time can be challenged by an individual’s ability to experience their own lifetime, or rather, life-line, in a non-linear manner. Moreover, by focusing on the affective impact of such a new way of living, one can wonder how one’s perception and affective appraisal of self could be impacted for the better or worse, and what that means for each moment to be lived with a more holistic knowledge of what one’s life entails.

Before exploring how media has depicted this non-linear “chronoportation,” it would be wise to explain the differences between guidelines and plotlines and how they impact the nature of being in Time. In How The Line Became Straight, Tim Ingold differentiates between two forms of the straight line in an example that follows his maxim that humans are too fixated on controlling the shape of the line to always try to make it as straight as possible, something he calls “fundamentally artificial” (155). He explains the nature of a guideline as a rigid, concrete line that is progressively displaced along its length, exemplifying it as a conveyor belt in an assembly line in how the belt is the surface of which matter is laid, arranged together, continuously shaped to be what it is intended to be, and moved along to its final destination (Ingold 156). In itself, guidelines always exist the moment they are drawn, and what exists in them defines their nature. In contrast, a plotline is made from existing pieces like a plane and several points, becoming the unity between the points. Its nature is to connect what already exists together, and in the assembly line metaphor, when looking at it through another lens, the plotline exists as the movement that connects the different “stations” or machines, recontextualizing the line to be about the importance of the phases of the construction of matter and the transition from one to the other rather than giving emphasis to the line as subservient to the state of completeness of matter. The nature of guidelines is to “guide” things toward an end regardless of the contradiction of whether they are finite or infinite and move endlessly or with an end moment in sight, while the nature of plotlines is much more intimate, localized, and definite, starting in one place and ending in another, making it also infinitely and endlessly reproducible. Concluding its purpose by reaching the other point is the event that makes a plotline a plotline as if, for this type of line, Time starts and ends simultaneously, entirely devised and always existing from the moment the points become connected, while for a guideline, its existence is not predicated in having a starting point but instead being the vector of motion toward an endpoint that does not need to be reached.

Harkening back to the idea of the artificiality of defining the nature and quality of lines, it does not come as an isolated situation as academics like Sybille Krämer point to how this embodiment and materialization of the concept of the line is a process that relies on subsuming something so invisible and intangible into a comprehensible form that it becomes subservient to how humans graphically interpret its nature by making it visual. The line, like many things in the world, is a human construct, much like Time, and the way we tend to arrest concepts that fly above our third dimension is to transform them into a 1-3D object or assign them as a proxy to the object so we can use our hands to manipulate its form. As Krämer writes in her Graphism and Flatness, “everything that can be conceived or perceived is linearised and made subordinate to a regime of pictorial visuality” (13). That is a human specialty: we seek to control, and the more we learn and become cognisant about ideas that elude our understanding, and thus our control, we try our best to shape them into a version that speaks to us so we can feel some sort of comfort in knowing that we can work with the idea and not be threatened by it. We also seek to imbue objects and subjects with a bit of ourselves as a way to call something our own, which involves an even more profound comprehension of its nature, and that constitutes how things mainly gain artificiality. Artificiality becomes nature interpreted and acted upon by consciousness.

For Time, artificiality incurs becoming spatialized. As Krämer explains, “the irrevocable passage of Time is potentially averted through spatialization. For us it is a relevant hint that the graphical line has the potential of transfiguration: it converts Time into space - and vice versa” (11). When humans draw Time, we, by the nature of our understanding of endings and beginnings, either represent the essence of Time “fittingly,” where it begins and ends, and that is it, or we denature it by giving it a start and end when perhaps Time is a circle, or there was never such thing as a beginning, and there may be no end to this concept. Either way, we are assigning our judgments and understanding about the character of Time to it and thus artificializing it. Time as a guideline would constantly move, and for someone to visually spatialize it with proper fidelity, they would have to keep drawing a line until their death. Time as a plotline could be experienced in many ways that just connecting two or more dots, drawing an event in between, and calling it a day is reductionist at best1.

However, it does not mean that filtering the character of Time does not allow us to imagine more easily how we could exist in relation to it in the same way we live in tandem with things belonging to spatial dimensions; to imagine how we could be if we were fourth-dimensional beings that could manipulate and move through Time as we control and move through matter. Going back to Krämer, she observes that “the passage of time is irreversible, yet the timeline can be returned. (...) The line is the embodied potential of imagination, transformation, and revision” (16). Through the visual representation of a timeline, from a simple 2D drawing to a slider below a video on streaming or YouTube to a CGI conception of how Time could look from an outsider’s perspective, it is possible to play with one’s presence in Time, jumping between points, reversing and going forward (also known as time axis manipulation), slowing down and fast-forwarding, and cutting/editing moments. Imagination is only limited by the constraints of the technology used to depict Time as spacetime visually. A critical power visualizing Time gives us pertains to what Krämer describes when she writes that timelines picture the succession of Time as simultaneous in space (12), so the idea of all Time, all moments, everything in a timeline already made of individual timelines interconnected into a major one condensed into space is the true essence of what makes the visualization of Time such a powerful tool for humans to have in grasping this all-encompassing entity.

After all, models are representations, not one-to-one renditions, but it does not mean that, as we learn more about something, models cannot propose more and more accurate interpretations of Time or at least help us imagine a reality that is less about using empirical scientific knowledge to define the truth and more about believing in a truth that is established in a space that can feel almost more real than one’s life such as entertainment media (depending on how much someone is willing to suspend their disbelief), and perhaps one day, virtual reality. As Edwin Abbott writes in his novel Flatlands, “even I cannot now comprehend [Spaceland], nor realize it by (...) any process of reason; I can but apprehend it by faith” (1). With technology being able to make theoretical interpretations of Time almost feel real, one starts asking how feasible it is to use scientific methods like mathematical modeling and quantum theorems to crack the nature of our reality and explain how it truly works compared to our ability to artificialize Time to such an extent that we can simulate a version of it through our means by applying those scientific models or other philosophical ones to a reality we created in a computer—the ultimate manifestation of the impetus to arrest power over the abstract by bringing it down to our spatial dimensional realm that made us draw a line and say it is Time in the first place, and something way more feasible and timely. Furthermore, is it even possible to reconcile cracking the code of how we may be able to access that higher dimension with the power and possibility of timeline models to be seen and felt as actual? Or does displaying them in a story through audiovisual means that are so immersive that they picture reality in a more digestible and exciting way become more enticing due to how, in experiencing a very riveting and emotionally touching illusion, the affective reality of a person may resonate more with this fiction and whenever the concept is brought up through scientific means, they may speak of it or recontextualize it based on this emotionally-driven mode of comprehension, following Abbott’s perspective of how lower dimensional beings may perceive or grasp higher dimensions through faith more than science? Wouldn’t that speak to the human impetus of artificialization, where we tend to want to control what is challenging to understand and shape it to make it our own, but now making something ours involves our affective connection to the idea? As Gabriel Tarde wrote in his Monadology, we tend to shape matter in line with our convictions (19), and isn’t conviction another word for belief?

Regarding our perceptual and affective connection with Time and where we are in terms of visualizing our relationship with timelines, the mind is capable of so much more than what we can do to transform what it pictures into tangible objects and emotions and the intensity of how we feel them have a great deal of influence in how it works. Imagination itself is the first component of the process of arresting Time and the pre-visualizer of its spatial presentation, and as such, it defines so much of how we achieve artificiality, but it is nothing without motivation to exist. A person’s affective reality is one of the greatest modulators and architects of imagination, and much of its impact can be traced to how affect is impacted by the intensity of an experience and the intensity of the emotional response to it. As Brian Massumi writes in Autonomy of Affect, “Intensity would seem to be associated with non-linear processes: resonation and feedback which momentarily suspend the linear progress of the narrative” (86). How someone feels something is impossible to pinpoint in Time because the footprint it leaves is felt in the moment. In other words, the intensity of emotion gives meaning to the points in a plotline and makes the present so much more powerful than Time itself, as if stopping it and embodying the moment, crystallizing it. For all intents and purposes, intensity is what makes a moment meaningful and charged enough to become a salient point in an abstract plotline mapping of Time. Moreover, measuring discrete moments to create a plotline of Time only defines the what of a moment, and the reason why the what is measured is because intensity made the what capturable. As such, the graphic plotline maps the hidden story of intensity. That is its nature as a giver of meaning. Intensity is an invisible, internal force that, in humans, can only be externalized, be it through physiological means or imagining something in response to the intensity, and as such, it only exists as meaning that mediates cause and effect. That is important to remember because something that has the power to arrest the flow of Time to extend the duration of an experience and establish its own time in Time2 and that can only be measured through what it does and not what it is, creates a precedent where affect, which dictates the intensity of how emotions are felt, becomes capable of opening one’s mind to and influencing how one’s relationship with linear Time can be restructured.

One way a person’s relationship with Time can be modified is through experiencing it non-linearly, which media can simulate, and as mentioned before, the more media can emotionally impact audiences and populate their minds, the more people become willing to incorporate new perspectives that explain human psychology, social interactions, and the nature of reality to their belief systems about life. In stories where characters live through their lives non-linearly and psychologically and emotionally react to that non-linearity, affect is expressed and felt from the psychological and emotional experience of characters experiencing each moment in life with knowledge and context about all that is going to happen in their lifetime. In this non-linear type of storytelling, the linearity of Time is broken, creating an experience of Time as a collection of moments where past, present, and future are given new meaning, but a character’s own timeline of linear perception becomes entangled with the non-linear events of Time itself, creating something more akin to a life-line3 since the way they interact with their own life sees their timeline become subservient to the entirety of their lifetime. As such, the character’s lifetime defines how they experience Time instead of being caught up by what philosopher Alfred Whitehead calls “‘the principle of conformation,’ whereby what is already made becomes a determinant of what is in the making” (Shaviro 19),” while they still experience mortality. That is a form of psychological and affective time travel or “mental chronoportation,”4 where the affect and the psychological experiences and reactions of characters are inherently tied and are a result of a spacetime infrastructure showing them moments in Time as if they were a door or a portal—interstitial spatiotemporal structures between one moment and another—to different points in their life-line. As mentioned before, timelines are inherently guidelines, and people experience them as such, but in this type of non-linear movement through Time, the jump or transition from one moment to the next works through a plotline system.

A couple of media pieces have explored this concept, and briefly going over how their characters experience Time would be beneficial to understand the nature of living non-linearly in a plotline-like manner. In the movie Arrival, as Linguist Louise Banks tries to uncover the nature of the pictographic language of the heptapod aliens that arrived on Earth, the more she is exposed to it, the more she starts seeing what she first interprets as dream-like experiences. But then, as Louise understands the meaning of certain symbols and comes close to apprehending the language’s true nature, those dream-like blurry images become vivid vision-like experiences that seem to speak of a lived moment. Throughout the movie, language becomes a key aspect of the story to the extent that it dictates part of how the film is shot to depict Louise’s altered time perception, which is explained as a result of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis or linguistic relativity hypothesis where a person’s perception, affect, judgment, personality and overall cognition that defines how they experience reality is determined by the language they speak. As Massumi explains, “Linguistic expression can resonate with and amplify intensity” (86) to almost a level of affective redundancy. Language is the determinant factor in shaping Louise’s reality, and when she is finally able to speak with the heptapods, she fully grasps that all her future visions were not visions but the result of her consciousness moving through future points in her life-line and going back to her “present” moment5. In this story, “mental chronoportation” is an event that involves Louise learning how to control her ability to experience life non-linearly and dealing with the aftermath of being the only person who knows how to do so (at that point), having to embrace a future that has already been written, one where her daughter dies from an incurable disease and her husband leaves because she knows it and never told him. That becomes the emotional crux of the whole film. It is only when Louise can thoroughly express the language of Time that she can fully experience several moments of her future, reinterpret past experiences she did not know will happen, and feel the emotional weight of the beauty and joy of every single moment she will have with her daughter and husband before nature takes its course. Thus, the intensity of her affect that comes as a result of piecing together the meaning and consequence of her future knowledge, and in turn, the audience’s affect in watching her, is exponentially amplified by the context that Time language gives her.

Lastly, in Ryan North’s graphic novel adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s anti-war book Slaughterhouse-Five, protagonist Billy Pilgrim becomes “unstuck in time” (North 4), which succinctly means that he no longer is stuck following the normal flow of Time, making him go back and forth in his life-line. He jumps between what is generally interpreted as memories of the past and future, disorganized in his brain as a result of psychological trauma from being a soldier in WWII and experiencing its horrors, especially seeing the aftermath of the Bombing of Dresden, but for him, they are not memories but experiences he is constantly having—his real present. The graphic novel plays with that notion by telling the story starting with the first time Billy experiences “mental chronoportation” as a soldier and layering all succeeding events as a result of this ability, making it intrinsic to the story instead of having it start after the protagonist survives the war. As the protagonist’s consciousness moves through different points in his life-line, he is always aware of when in his life he goes to and when he was before, and his affective response to every experience he is in is what controls his non-linear reality and ties succeeding events together, rather than Time’s normal flow.

Nonetheless, the visual nature of the graphic novel style is explored by artist and colorist Albert Monteys to convey the idea that no matter how many times he jumps, mortality is linear and present alongside his non-linear experiences. In one of the introductory pages of the novel, a timeline is laid out consisting of shifting hues from Red to Magenta to Violet, with each hue representing an important year in Billy’s life, organized in chronological order from Red 1922, when he was born, to Violet 1976, when he died. This illustration is perfect for representing the simultaneity of Time’s non-linear and linear experience as represented by plotlines and guidelines, respectively, since it works as both types. Every moment highlighted—the moments the book shows him “chronoportating” to—exist as a point in a plotline that is chosen because they carry an emotional weight to the character as critical points in his life, and as such, the images seem to illustrate what Massumi writes as “intensity is qualifiable as an emotional state, and that state is static-(...) a state of suspense” (86) where the emotional intensity of the specifically depicted moments marks something so crucial to his life that his affective response and appraisal embeds those moments with the time sink, a present expanding quality that is characteristic of intensity itself. But the graph also maps an invisible gradual progress from beginning to end through the changes in years and colors, pointing to the notion that while Billy’s experience of Time lets him see all the moments in his life, from birth to death, he is not unattached to the linear flow of mortality and its own time-tracking nature.

Billy’s Life

Altogether, the way humans have come to normalize the action of grasping abstract concepts like Time through philosophical and graphical means with our power to shape everything in the image of our human nature has evolved from an impetus and a simple visualization of Time as a line to a storytelling mechanism with the potential to present theory and imagination as plausible and enticing perspectives about the inner workings of reality, which can be assimilated by audiences by their desire to believe in them. Belief is a state reliant on a person’s affective appraisal of an event, and a non-linear narrative that presents a character’s involvement with their lives as being about how they ARE their life in its totality rather than how they live in it depends on how experienced moments are given recontextualization by an engagement with everything there was, is, and will be in their lifetime to enhance the affective quality of these moments, increasing the intensity of those events that are already emotional, like falling in love or the death of a loved one. As such, it is through the intensity of how affect is portrayed by the characters in response to “mental chronoportation” throughout their plotline life-lines that audiences can become immersively engaged with a story, empathetically resonate with the characters when experiencing their life’s non-linearity with them, and be emotionally touched by it all. So it goes.

Bibliography

-Ingold, Tim.“How the Line Became Straight,” Lines: A Brief History. London,

Routledge, 2017, pp. 152-71

-Krämer, Sibylle. “Graphism and Flatness,” The Power of Line, edited by Marzia Faietti and

Gerhard Wolf, Munich, Hirmer, 2016, pp. 10-19.

-Abbot, Edwin A. FLATLAND: A Romance of Many Dimensions. London, Seeley and Co.

Limited, 1884.

-Tarde, Gabriel. Monadology and Sociology, edited and translated by Theo Lorenc,

Melbourne, re.press, 2012.

-Massumi, Brian. “The Autonomy of Affect, Cultural Critique,” The Politics of

Systems and Environments, Part II, no. 31, pp. 83-109, 1995.

-Shaviro, Steven. “1 - Whitehead on Causality and Perception.” Rethinking Whitehead’s Symbolism, Thought, Language, Culture, edited by Roland Faber, Jeffrey A. Bell, and Joseph Petek, Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 13 - 28.

-Adams, Amy, performer. Arrival. Paramount, 2016.

-North, Ryan, writer. Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children’s Crusade A Graphic Novel Adaptation. Art and Letters by Albert Monteys. Los Angeles: Boom! Studios, 2020. Print.

The seven documents I selected for the following exploration of the democratic nature of the Singing Revolution constitute a collection of primary evidence of the national and international coverage of the events that ignited a revolutionary spirit in the Baltic countries and led to an inspiring nonviolent movement of resistance that resulted in the independence of the three states from the oppression of the Soviet Union. The relevancy of this democratic revolution is felt very strongly today, a time where the geopolitical state of Eastern Europe is at its worst point since the USSR, and the former Soviet countries are haunted by the prospect of Russian invasion and unification, with Ukraine suffering the first offensive. All the documents that will be presented in this project were extracted from an ebook sponsored by NATO compiling reports about the East European transition from 1988 to 1991, the online archives of major news publications like The Washington Post, Time Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times published during the revolutionary events or in retrospect of the events years after, and from and a video showing the Estonian people singing at the Tallinn Song Festival Grounds in 1988. The NATO compilation was selected because it elucidates the beginning of a revolutionary sentiment in the Baltic states after the glasnost and the defiant spirit in the people of these countries, culminating in the first protests against the USSR. The Washington Post article was chosen because it covers protests that occurred as a retaliation against the secret deal that was part of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, which culminated in the Soviet takeover of the Baltic states. I picked the Time Magazine article since it recounts the Baltic Way, a human chain of solidarity and resistance that stretched from Tallinn to Vilnius. The Los Angeles Times news reports were selected because one describes the decision from the Parliament of the Soviet Baltic republic of Estonia to proclaim Estonian “sovereignty” within the USSR, and the other narrates the results of independence referendums in the three countries. The New York Times report explains the events after the independence referendums of the three countries and the USSR’s recognition of their independence. Finally, I chose the Eestimaa Laul at the Tallinn Song Grounds because it depicts the moment the meaning of the Singing Revolution was born.

Introduction to the Collection:

Was the Singing Revolution a Democratic Revolution?

Europe’s geopolitical state had more recently reached a more stable state with the end of the Soviet Union and the beginning of globalization. Countries like Ukraine finally became independent states after years of trying to do so. Unfortunately, the current Russian leadership refuses to accept Ukraine’s sovereignty and self-determination, even after two decades of Ukrainian independence, resulting in the abrasive and unjust invasion of the latter. In order to stand in support and celebrate those countries that gained their freedom from the USSR, I will explore what is called the Singing Revolution, a nonviolent demonstration of resistance to reestablish equality, liberty, and national identity amongst the Baltic countries through protests, songs, and a democratic political push to use newly established political freedoms through glasnost to advocate for greater democratization of their political structure as to achieve self-management and sovereignty within or without the Soviet Union, and elevate its admirable non-conflictive nature in their pursuit to regain self-determination.

Since glasnost was put into effect in 1986, several demonstrations of nationalism occurred as defiant measures against the leadership and oppression of Soviet Russia, including social and cultural manifestations created to reestablish the past identity of the Baltic states and the press’s use of their acquired freedoms to condemn past and new actions of the Soviet government and inspire action against them. For example, according to NATO reports from 2019, as a swift response to glasnost, the governments of Latvia and Lithuania tried to pressure the non-native, Soviet population to learn their language, and in the latter country, students were finally able to attend Catholic school after not being able to do so because of the USSR’s unofficial atheistic policies. Concerning Estonia, the reports describe how The Estonian Cultural weekly Sirp ja Vasar of November 27th “provided detailed statistics of the deportations which took place on 14th June 1941” and the Estonian literary monthly Looming published “the first part of a novel (...) dealing with the fate of sixteen Estonian families deported to Siberia” (p.22), which exemplified ways in which the Estonian press was able to use glasnost to talk about “emotive historical issues” and condemn crimes that the USSR committed in the past. Even more importantly, in February 1987, when the national television’s environmental program called “Panda” revealed a Russian plan to open a phosphorite plant in Virumaa, which would cause catastrophic ecological consequences (one year after Chernobyl), the significant public outcry to the news led to the first major national protests since the Soviet era began. Famous Estonian Pop and Rock singers wrote the song “Ei ole üksi ükski maa” (“No Country is Alone”) and performed it in the Estonian Song Festival, which would serve as a prelude to the future events of the revolution and an effective way to shut the construction down.

As peaceful demonstrations were shown to be a successful way for the people of the Baltic states to speak up against Soviet Russia and seek their voice inside the USSR, they continued to happen during the following years and became key to Baltic independence. For example, on August 23rd, 1988, the Washington Post documented that, “Tens of thousands of demonstrators (...) poured into streets of cities along the Baltic coast today to (...) protest against the secret pact between Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler that resulted in the 1940 Soviet takeover of the three Baltic republics” (Lee, 1988). These protests were one of the first manifestations through glasnost of the desires of the Baltic citizens for accountability and justice for their past suffering, condemning the horrible past actions of the Soviet Union that, in this case, highlighted the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact as a sham that resulted in parts of Eastern Europe being trapped in a metaphorical prison for 49 years as if people’ freedoms were assets to be traded around. It, therefore, marked a non-conflictive action of unity by the oppressed in defiance of their history of suffering and political puppetry.

That feeling of unity that started with the environmental protests and songs would remain for years, and in 1988, the Baltics benefited from it the most since it had around four song festivals where performing nonviolent patriotic songs, something that was already part of their cultures since 1873 and suppressed when the Soviets integrated them, became common once more. One of them, the Eestimaa Laul held on September 11th, 1988, was the most crucial of all. The video used in the curated collection is a perfect source for anyone to visually and auditorily comprehend the moment that inspired the people of the Baltic states to seek their independence through peaceful, cultural, and nationalistic means. The songs sang at the festival spoke of the power of music, hope, unity, happiness through peace, the desire for independence, and singing for the sake of singing, with folk and religious song weaved in, all sung in such a motivated and courageous way that, when coupled with the waving of Estonian flags, conveyed a message that a singing and smiling nation would not pose a physical threat, yet it would not stop celebrating its identity. That stance inspired the other two Baltic countries to do the same. In the same year, the Estonian Popular Front Party was founded, and heir presence at the 1988 Eestimaa Laul marked the party’s popularity, where they announced their central policy of working with other Estonian political parties to reform the system from within, which was realized when, in November, “The Parliament of the Soviet Baltic republic of Estonia voted Wednesday to proclaim Estonian ‘sovereignty’ within the Soviet Union and to give itself the right to veto national legislation” (Parks, 1988). This demonstration of democratic self-management clearly established the democratic political aspirations that fueled the revolution.

Yet, the nonviolent demonstrations against Soviet Russia did not stop there, as on August 23rd, 1989, on the 50th anniversary of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, the “Baltic Way” happened. As Time Magazine article described, with the help of the Estonian government, the Baltic people joined hands to demand the right to restore independent statehood as the Estonian Popular Front proclaimed it by creating “a human chain, formed by an estimated 2 million people, that stretched from the Estonian capital of Tallinn across Latvia and into neighboring Lithuania to end at Gediminas Tower in Vilnius, some 400 miles from the starting point” (1989). Such was another example of how the Baltic countries used nonviolent methods of protest to seek democracy and freedom.

From there on, the domino effect had already taken hold. Lithuania declared independence in May 1990, and in March of 1991, as the Los Angeles Times reported, “citizens of the Baltic republics of Estonia and Latvia (...) voted by margins of 3 to 1 for the re-establishment of their republics’ independence in referendums Sunday” (Parks, 1991). These referendums represented a reliance on the people to vote and decide the country’s political future based on a majority vote, something undeniably democratic. Both countries’ independence only came into effect in September after the USSR desperately tried to attempt a coup d’état against Estonia in August, which was met by a resistance of human shields. As The New York Times reported in a news article on September 7th, 1991, “The Soviet Union’s new ruling council recognized the independence of the three Baltic states” (Schmemann, 1991). Three months later, the USSR ended, and the Baltic countries were finally free after five years of nonviolent protesting and doing everything moral to assert their democratic sovereignty amongst the other countries of the world.

In conclusion, the Singing Revolution is an inspiring democratic event that showcases how it is possible to fight for one’s rights through the unanimous unification of the people of a nation in pursuit of solidarity and a bright future, and it may represent a memory of a moment when freedom once prevailed against Soviet oppression with the power of peaceful protests, a democratic political push, hands held together, smiling, and music. It is unfortunate that today, after years of peace talks and globalization, after many years of destructive conflicts that shaped the world and guidelines to prevent them from happening again, current events show once more that the history of freedom is never perceived the same by everyone. Still, as Heinz Valk, the artist who coined the Singing Revolution motto, once said, Ükskord me võidame niikuinii! (One day, no matter what, we will win!).

Sources

Main Sources:

Kecskés, G. D. (2019). A View From Brussels Secret NATO Reports about the East European Transition, 1988–1991 [eBook edition]. Cold War History Research Center. http://www.coldwar.hu/ebook/NATO-E-book.pdf

Lee, G. (1988, August 24). Baltic Protests Denounce Soviet Takeover in 1940. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1988/08/24/baltic-protests-denounce-soviet-takeover-in-1940/271378c4-3bf5-4f9b-be8f-fc280de6afc7/

Silveri Filmid. (2014, July 08). Eestimaa Laul 1988. [Video]. Youtube.

Parks, M. (1988, November 17). Parliament in Estonia Declares’ Sovereignty.’ Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-11-17-mn-458-story.html

A Chain of Freedom. (1989, September 04). Time. Retrieved March 13, 2022, from http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,958534,00.html

Parks, M. (1991, March 4). Estonia, Latvia Vote Overwhelmingly for Independence : Baltics: Secession from the Soviet Union passes by wide margins in both republics. The next test is a countrywide referendum on Gorbachev’s plan. Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-03-04-mn-92-story.html

Schmemann, S. (1991, September 7). Soviet Turmoil; Soviets Recognize Baltic Independence, Ending 51-Year Occupation of 3 Nations. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/09/07/world/soviet-turmoil-soviets-recognize-baltic-independence-ending-51-year-occupation-3.html

More Sources:

McBride, B. (n.d.). Collapse and Rebirth: A Living Archive on The Collapse of the USSR and Beyond. The Baltics. https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/a9c894d7c0114a33a55f3ba49edc462e

UWashingtonPress. (2013, December 4). The Power of Song: Nonviolent National Culture in the Baltic Singing Revolution. [Video]. Youtube.

Sky Films. (n.d.). The Music. The Singing Revolution. https://singingrevolution.com/about-the-music

Tambur, S. (2018, September 11). 30 years since the most important Singing Revolution concert. Estonian World. https://estonianworld.com/life/30-years-since-the-most-important-singing-revolution-concert/

The Singing Revolution. (n.d.). Estonica. Retrieved March 13, 2022, http://www.estonica.org/en/The_Singing_Revolution/

Cope, D. (n.d.). 10th June 1988 The Singing Revolution. On This Deity. http://www.onthisdeity.com/10th-june-1988-%E2%80%93%C2%A0the-singing-revolution/

Zunes, S. (2009, April). Estonia’s Singing Revolution (1986-1991). International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/estonias-singing-revolution-1986-1991/

When looking at how the monarchical system and power dynamics of pre-Revolution XVIIIth century France fostered an environment of critical and reactionary political thought against it, two texts that characterize the French Court’s belittlement of affairs that did not concern their interests and their efforts to perpetuate the privileges that benefited them above the rest of society, attitudes that in some shape or another became common targets of future revolutions, come as a courtesy of Enlightenment philosophers Diderot and Sieyès. In the former case, Diderot argues in his 1764 essay “The Definition of an Encyclopedia” inside the book Rameau’s nephew that, “An enterprise of this sort may on occasion be proposed in the course of a conversation at Court; but the interest it arouses in such circles is never enough to prevent its being forgotten” (76), establishing that the monarchy did not care to fulfill any project that could advance human intellect and education and that their projects were resource-heavy investments large in scale created for pomp rather than utility, which would be abandoned as time went by and more hurdles appeared. Moreover, Diderot explains that workers were aware of their monarchs’ wasteful, useless whims, and it was precisely that which caused their indolence (76). In other terms, the French monarchy was fond of squandering the country’s treasury in hollow projects of shallow ostentatious substance instead of investing in ones that could promote the social development of the subjects or saving enough money to keep its economy afloat, an example of one of the many ways they put their interests above the stability of their country in a time where more individuals were becoming educated, being critical of it, and had their interpretation of how state leadership should work.

Focusing on Sieyès’ arguments, several after Diderot’s, he not only elaborated on the mechanisms by which the Court took away from the people and existed under a position of special privileges, but he also established a claim that undermined their place as being part of French society in his 1789 pamphlet What is the Third Estate?, which became the ideological basis and initial backbone of the revolutionary spirit. When he writes, “the most ill-organized state of all would be one where (...) a complete class of citizens would glory in inactivity amidst the general movement and contrive to consume the best part of the product without having in any way helped to produce it” (156-157), the philosopher comments on how the privileged nobility becomes a burden to the nation. He moreover believes that “because of these special rights, the nobility does not belong to the common order (...) thus its private rights make it a people apart in the great nation” (157). When looking at how explicit Sieyès is in condemning the nobility in charge of France compared to Diderot, the former solidified the argument that those who took and consumed in excess unabashedly in a time of crisis from a country where many of the unprivileged common society of givers lived poorly, did not deserve to be part of that society, much less have the authority to lead it. The privilege of special laws and rights and preferential consumption of goods and living conditions were of one-sided, self-centered benefit, running counter to the interest and basic needs of those who produced the resources and enriched the nation, which made up around 96% of the country, and thus had an unjust, parasitic character in the welfare of the collective. So then, when a thinker puts thoughts that seem to be shared amongst many, as exemplified by Diderot’s comments, in at least their basic forms, into more concrete words while also offering actionable solutions in the form of the Claims of the Third Estate, action becomes more a likely reality, thus resisting the circumstantial reading of the development of a revolutionary spirit.

Furthermore, it is not only political thought that matters when looking at the frequency of revolutionary upheaval, but also an urgency in basic needs. An event that illustrates the contrast between the living conditions of the privileged and the underprivileged was the crisis in France due to bread shortages. The October Days event of 1789’s more aggressive nature was an example of how being forceful in the face of power could be used as a means to acquire something of necessity in response to desperation since a violent event like the storming of the Bastille had aided in pushing the monarchy to “legitimize” the National Assembly and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. In the depositions of women who had to testify for an investigation conducted by the Paris municipal government about the event, they all mentioned being practically coerced to join a mob of women marching to Versailles to “ask for bread there” (236). Jeanne Martin, more specifically, was present during the storming of the Palace, describing such events as a Royal Guard being wounded by a “hatchet blow which cut off half his face” (235) and later being seized and killed off. Even if the initial context of marching to Versailles was to demand bread “or else,” the confrontational and resolute image the gathered women created inspired more people to join in, mixing in their anxieties about King Louis XVI not fully backing the Declaration of Rights into the original intent, which culminated in a self-fulfilling prophecy where many did not believe his majesty’s promises and wanted to speak to the monarch directly but the perceived power of the mob created an atmosphere of righteous anger that “emboldened” the women to act more violent in the Palace, even if the intent was more peaceful. Therefore, in terms of revolution, what the October Days propose is that acting on an impetus similar to the previous situation that set the example for combative responses to transpire leads to other events following such a stance, which ignites a chain reaction where belligerence becomes a viable option for change that is not specific to a particular circumstance.

Then, the Revolution of 1848 synthesizes the next step in arguing for the nature of revolutionary upheaval as a cascading reaction to structural changes in society, economy, and politics since it relied on the rampant nature of revolutions at the time, the evolution of government structures, and the political thought and education of masses to exist in the form it happened and unhappened. As Karl Marx explains in his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, the February days of 1848 aimed at widespread political reform, where more people could have political representation as a reaction against the exclusive domination of the financial aristocracy. It was a democratic movement that the proletariat understood as the first step in constructing a social republic where they could have a space to voice their ideas about improving their welfare, seeking a sort of desperate “salvation” from their poor living situations. However, as the writer remarks, “the demands of the Paris proletariat are utopian nonsense” (Marx 248), constructed “with the material available, with the degree of education attained by the masses” (Marx 247). They were partially utopian nonsense because they stood against the bourgeoisie republic, a much more developed and organized force, which Marx mentions “signifies the unlimited despotism of one class over other classes” (249), and as the Constituent and later Legislative Assembly were put into motion, political intrigue between the bourgeoisie parties took over, further alienating the proletariat from power. They, who had attempted to incite another violent takeover of the government during the June Insurrection, tried and tried again to join insurgencies against the Assemblies when they sprouted, but nothing concrete ever came out of it, while a portion of the small-holding peasantry also tried, but got “violently repressed by the bourgeoisie whenever they set themselves in motion” (Marx 259). Thus, historical and revolutionary political thought had been spread, even if in a limited way, to a larger section of what Sieyès considered the Third Estate. As Marx even writes, “From 1848 to 1851 only the ghost of the old revolution walked about (...) An entire people (...) had imagined that by means of a revolution it had imparted to itself an accelerated power of motion” (244). So it seems that the idea of revolution became something very attractive to all classes, but for conflictive reasons—social democracy and a more egalitarian future for the masses and self-interested exploitative capitalism in different forms and degrees for the bourgeoisie—and under the guise of having the power to vote, and this chaotic misuse of democracy and revolution had sway on Napoleon III’s takeover, ending once and for all the Age of Revolution in France.

The next major revolution to happen in Europe after the events of the mid-XIXth century occurred in Russia during the final years of WWI, but one almost broke out in Germany after the war ended, led by the ideals of Rosa Luxemburg, whose arguments in her 1915 influential pamphlet to the German socialist movement established once more the importance of the political consciousness of the masses, the history of revolution, and the antagonism of those in power and their self-interest in governing the country in arguing for the history of revolution as a result of structural changes in the organization of European civilizations. In her Junius Pamphlet, she writes, “The masses have ceased to be willess, thoughtless herds. That is the new history of the world. (...) The masses have ceased to be instruments, the yeomen of the war profiteers” (Luxemburg 16). From this quote alone, Luxemburg acknowledged a development in the political and social consciousness of the masses throughout recent history to the extent that in the early XXth century, the idea of the politically-knowledgeable and active proletariat was already global. The spread of the proletariat’s political agenda was systematized in such a way that the international organization and the sharing of perspectives and knowledge from individuals all over Europe created the image of a unified class beyond nationalism and national borders, and socialism started gaining more staying political influence by having representatives in the governmental institutions of several European countries. That posed a great contrast to how Marx saw the French proletariat in 1848 as a fledgling that had only recently understood itself as a class made up of individuals with similar life circumstances and desires, and so poorly organized that it consistently failed to form a triumphant insurgency. It also shows how, in this 1915 case, rather than a Court that indulged in the scarce resources and privileges of a bankrupt country or an almost oligarchic democratic system that privileged the landholders who were allies of the King, the enemy of the masses was imperialism and the contentious self-interest of the leaders of the warring nations manifested in the form of the conscriptions of the male population as puppets of war, a conflict built and further powered by capitalism’s stake on the manufacturing and competitive innovation of weapons employed in battle.

Furthermore, in another part of her pamphlet, Luxemburg mentions that Socialism “will never be accomplished, if the burning spark of the consciousness will of the masses does not spring from the material conditions that have been built up by past development” (18). In this quote, the philosopher contends that a socialist revolution could not exist solely as a contingent effect of the moment but instead could only have manifested as a result of past struggles inch by inch creating small changes that were significant enough for them first to find a political voice, congruence, and culture, and then develop more effective ways to represent themselves in the newly democratic governments. She later even mentions how the fallen who fought for the proletariat cause, like the June rebels of 1848, were to be remembered as martyrs and heroes of the history of socialism to inspire future revolutions, possibly like the Spartacist uprising of 1919. So, through this perspective, a shared history of the working class was built from pieces of the complete picture of past struggles starting with the French Revolution of 1789, a narrative that defined the socialist ideology of people like Luxemburg, based on the evolution of the many structural changes happening in Europe that served as opportunities for its political and ideological advancement; and as this Great War completely put a halt to the proletariat’s more peaceful ingress into the world governments, the idea of starting a new revolution became somewhat attractive.

Finally, when connecting Rosa Luxemburg with the Bolsheviks, the point she makes concerning Marx’s previous predictions over the future of the revolutionary masses came into fruition with the Russian Revolution of 1917, where class struggle resulted in the ascension of the proletariat as Russia’s governing power, and as stated by A. A. Solts, it was partially due to the existence of discipline and cohesion at the formation of the Bolshevik party in the early XXth century. She writes that Karl Marx’s previous writings were prophetic in how, since before WWI, they have ordained to drive the German proletariat “to the leadership of the people, and thus to create the organizatory beginning of the great international conflict between labor and capital for the political supremacy of the world” (Luxemburg 12). However, as history demonstrated, the unified power of the SPD was not strong enough, possibly because it was a party made up of several perspectives of what socialism could be, which later split before WWI ended into a pro-war and anti-war stance. Contrastingly, according to Solts in his 1922 Communist Ethics speech:

The existence of party discipline is the greatest foundation and achievement of our party. Why? Because what existed earlier in theory, when the founders of the party spoke of the necessity of military discipline, of the solidarity of all forces for the attainment of a quicker victory, now has received corroboration in life, and has become apparent to everyone. Undoubtedly it was precisely the creation of such a party, united, with a single will, which facilitated the possibility of victory for us and secured success for us in the struggle with hostile forces. In the revolutionary epoch, we were the only organized party with a single will which firmly knew what it wanted, what it was striving for, and for whom words were not divorced from deeds (44).

From Solts’ perspective, theory was made into practice, even if highly romanticized. What was stated to be the prime structure of the party apparatus, the single will of its members, had coalesced into a unified victorious action. From the beginning of the Revolution until the end of the Russian Civil War, the Bolshevik party endured, according to Solts, because everyone who fought in its name had a voluntary discipline springing from a shared goal, a struggle that, as the politician mentioned, brought “delight” to those fighting for such cause because, under their understanding, that was a way they could express what they strived for in life. The Bolshevik proletariat seemed to have internalized the idea of revolution as part of their self-concept, and as all self-concepts aligned under a name, an ideology that defined their ties to each other, they all fought as an entity. The Soviet Union may not have been politically what the proletariat envisioned, as that unity and solidarity achieved voluntarily through the revolution would not remain a constant of the USSR as idealized by people like Alexandra Kollontai. However, the fight was not for this already made system but for the possibility of the proletariat to become the de facto leaders of the first country in modern history where the masses had the power, a legacy struggle that had its roots in Siyès’s words, finally putting an end to the monarchy vs. the masses saga that started with the French Revolution; at least in Russia.

Ultimately, the frequency of revolutionary upheaval in Europe from the XVIIIth to the XXth century could be explained as a response to government structures organized to designate privilege over the law, living resources and conditions, political representation, and the right to vote and created to benefit the self-interest of those in power and with power by a group of people from a nation. It was initially empowered by the Enlightenment ideas of authors like Sieyès, which made the concept of revolution more familiar to a certain extent as a movement to rely on to restructure the social order of a country. Then, later revolutions like the Revolution of 1848 in France did not unfold in a particularly similar manner to the French Revolution, yet they relied on the latter as a historical example that revolutions could work to restructure a government, something the masses were more privy to due to an expansion in education. After the 1848 revolution, governments started reshaping themselves to accommodate the new socio-political trends, and education became even more widespread. So then, when the XXth century arrived, the masses had found a common identity under the idea of a class and a greater political consciousness, and through several organized bodies and a Marxist ideology to follow, much like the French Revolution, they were able to more and more become an influential part of European governments. However, when their progress was once more directly threatened by the self-interested machinations of those in power through WWI, the structural nature of the proletariat unity was tested, with the Bolshevik party relying on the allegiance of the masses through a revolution to consolidate themselves as the sole governmental power of Russia for almost a century, ultimately demonstrating how history cascades onto itself. When events concern an interconnected contained space and are constantly repeated throughout it over centuries, almost as if they become ingrained in the cultural history of the interconnected societies, particularly of a group like a proletariat, anything, such as revolution, is hardly purely contingent.

Bibliography

-Diderot, Denis. “The Definition of Encyclopedia.” The Old Regime and the French Revolution, edited by Keith Michael Baker, The University of Chicago Press, pp. 1987, 71-89.

-Sieyès, Emmanuel. “What Is The Third Estate?.” The Old Regime and the French Revolution, edited by Keith Michael Baker, The University of Chicago Press, pp. 1987, 154-179.

- “The October Days.” The French Revolution, edited by Philip Dawson, Prentice-Hall, pp. 59-61.

-Marx, Karl. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” Nineteenth-Century Europe: Liberalism and Its Critics, edited by Jan Goldstein and John W. Boyer, The University of Chicago Press, pp. 1987, 242-266.

-Luxemburg, Rosa. The Crisis in the German Social-Democracy (The “Junius” Pamphlet). The Socialist Publication Society, 1915.

-Solts, Aaron. “Communist Ethics.” Central Control Commission Party, 1922, Sverdlov University, Moscow. Speech

The gender dynamics explored in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, Brutus, written between 110 and 115 A.D., Beowulf’s manuscript published around 1000 A.D., The Letters of Heloise and Abelard compiled in 1133 A.D., The Letters to Filippo degli Strozzi written from 1447 to 1470 A.D. by his mother Alessandra, and Galileo’s Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina from 1615 A.D. are particularly striking because when put together, they trail a story of women achieving increasing importance and freedoms in society and how dangerous that ends up becoming to men, who, as I will argue, saw women as auxiliary to the triumphs and disgraces of their gender. As such, women’s roles, particularly those of noble blood or those who entered into wedlock with a wealthy man, started being less restrictive and defined, especially in regard to men, as time went by.

Starting with Plutarch, his assertions of Brutus being the most virtuous of men during the period that ended the Roman Republic are further solidified by the politician’s relationship with his wife. His biographer perceives Brutus as a man of philosophy and warfare, a reader of classic texts who did so constantly, even on the eve and middle of battle, having a balanced temperament in his search for virtue. He was somebody who disliked sycophants and opportunities and could not bend to unjust proposals because of, as Plutarch expresses, “the earnestness of his characters and the fact that he could not easily be persuaded (...) but acted only upon due reflection and a deliberate moral choice” (8.6). Brutus was also merciful, sparing several in his war against Octavius and Aurelius, especially the latter’s brother, whom Brutus allowed to keep his badges of rank and his soldiers. These descriptions of the politicians build him up as an influential man of the public sphere, but Plutarch did not shy away from exploring his intimate life and the influence of his private sphere on the extent of his virtuous character.

Porcia, the wife of Brutus and daughter of Senator Cato, was deeply devoted to her husband. Plutarch describes her as being profoundly in love with him, having not only an affectionate nature but also being loyal, full of spirit, and perceptive, and having much good sense. One could come to argue that her passion towards Brutus coupled with her virtues were crucial aspects that led him to carry out Julius Caesar’s assassination since it was because she cut herself with a knife after seeing her husband brood for several nights and proclaiming that “what proof can I give you of my love, if you forbid me to share the kind of trouble that demands a loyal friend to confide in, and keep your suffering for yourself” (Plutarch 8.13) that led him to share with her his struggles, and thus unburden himself. Therefore, Porcia was such a pivotal character in solidifying Brutus’ emotional strength that she may have played a hand in driving him to ultimately continue with the murder plot, purely because the woman trusted her husband completely to do the right thing for Rome and kept the plan a secret.

As a sort of indirect appreciation for all that she bared for him, Brutus’ trust and perception of his wife is recorded in a quote he told his friend Acilius, saying that he sees Porcia having “the spirit to fight as nobly for her country as any of us” (Plutarch 8.23). Even if coming after his comment about Porcia not having the strength to undertake the exploits of men, this excerpt demonstrates the level of respect and admiration Brutus had for his wife in equating her to all of the soldiers under his command, indirectly stating that her emotional sensibility was not a negative quality of hers, but one that benefited him after quelling his anxieties. Therefore, when comparing how Plutarch portrayed Brutus in his exploits as general and politician against how he is written in regards to his wife, one can perceive that the extent of Porcia’s active role in his life was as a private supporting character to the further invigoration of the virtues that Brutus was so publicly known for and that Plutarch celebrates in his work.

From real accounts to fictional stories, the way queens are represented in Beowulf, a story that happens after the fall of the Roman Empire, resembles the bolstering of a man’s virtues seen in Brutus’ biography, but now with a shining coat of gold instead of existing in a manner of conduct. I am referring to the idea that a king’s wealth in the story denoted their power status and, as such, the amount of treasure they could bestow to another party in a gift economy. Throughout Beowulf, the custom of gift-giving is very present, especially in the relationship between the Danes and the Geats, represented by King Hrothgar and Beowulf. An example of its effects, after Beowulf kills Grendel’s Mother, Hrothgar says, “What you have done is to draw two peoples (...) into shared peace and a pact of friendship in spite of hatreds we have harboured in the past. For as long as I rule this far-flung land treasures will change hands and each side will treat the other with gifts” (“Beowulf” 1855). Thus, the gift-giving illustrated in Beowulf was a conduct of mutual benefit that marked the start of political alliances and the prosperity of a realm. A queen or princess, being heavily adorned with garments of gold, may have been an indicator of the political prowess and receptiveness of such kingdoms.

When reading the descriptions assigned to Wealhtheow, the Queen of the Danes, and her daughter Freawaru, one cannot gloss over the narrator’s emphasis on their golden appearance. Regarding Wealhtheow, almost every time she is mentioned, a descriptive word of a lofty nature follows suit. “Adorned in her gold” (“Beowulf” 614), “decked out in rings (“Beowulf” 621), and “regal and arrayed with gold (“Beowulf” 641). By the minute interval between the lines in which each description is featured, it is possible to see how repetitive the idea that Lady Wealhtheow is wearing plenty of gold is. As I perceive it, repetitiveness marks a deliberate pattern, and patterns should be studied more closely. The same vocabulary of words is attributed to the Princess of the Danes, who is presented as the “young bride-to-be to the gracious Ingeld, in her gold-trimmed attire” (“Beowulf” 2024).

In Beowulf, men are also described as wearing gold, but the emphasis on the female characters, especially from Hrothgar’s lineage, being adorned with the luxury and preciousness of the glistening metal cannot be overstated. They are mannequins, models exhibiting the wealth of their patriarchal leader, the King of the Danes, so whenever another kingdom was to speak with the “Shieldings,” they would know of their great treasures and wealth, and therefore power, based on the Queen and the Princess’s looks, which could signal to future prosperity in an alliance marked by the economy of gift-giving. No wonder when Wealhtheow arrives at Heorot, she has to offer a goblet to all men in the hall and address them all, and Freawaru becomes the bride of Ingeld, the prince of Heathobard, an enemy realm, to appease the feud between the domains. The former is a show of formalities for the sake of making all guests acknowledge her, and as such, the possible benefits of a partnership, and the latter marks the result of the “women as objects of display” approach in the promise of a diplomatic relationship between Heathobard and the Danes. Therefore, in Beowulf, ornamenting royal women in gold was an objectifying symbol of material prowess in the interest of creating a positive image to strengthen a kingdom’s foreign policies.

From an object of wealth to an object of desire, The Letters of Heloise and Abelard is a text that elucidates the thoughts, remarks, and emotions surrounding the tragic love affair between the eponymous lovers. It presents the perspective of not only a man of renown in his time but of a woman of academic prowess, a rarity for the early High Middle Ages, and as such, constitutes a unique text that does not simply sideline women to roles assigned to them by men, even though one segment of it does try to do so. Such a segment is Abelard’s Historia Calamitatum, which mentions Heloise fleetingly and sparingly and depicts her as a sexual partner, the catalyst of his downfall, and then his sister in the face of God. When the scholar writes he was “All on fire with desire for this girl” (Abelard and Heloise 1.10), “with our lessons as a pretext we abandoned ourselves to entirely to love,” and “nights were sleepless with lovemaking” (Abelard and Heloise 1.11), he describes love and desire as all-consuming and uncontrollable. However, when Fulbert tested their bond, what Abelard once described as true love was unmasked as mostly libido, something Heloise’s plea to be his amica would have prevented. As Abelard himself wrote before, his sexual drive and interest in women arose from pride feeding on his success as an orator and philosopher and creating a sense of superiority that emboldened his instinctual propensity towards lustful actions. So, when Abelard’s pride was deflated by his fear of losing his reputation and his castration, he completely disregarded his wife, whom he had a son with, married against her will, sent to a nunnery, and tried to ignore for years, to the degree that it drove him to focus on Catholic scriptures entirely and disregard their tryst completely as a mistake. Thus, it is possible to see how Heloise, in his perspective told through his first letter, was only a pawn for Abelard’s lascivious self, a victim of his celebrity pride and dread over losing it.

In turn, Heloise’s letters depict a woman who had genuinely fallen in love with her instructor and who, even though she never stopped admiring Abelard, lost everything because of him. Heloise was one of a kind among most women in Europe, achieving a unique position in society in her teenage years of being trained in reading and writing in several languages, including Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and receiving renown for her intelligence and insight. She had a life ahead of her that only a few could even come close to achieving in her time. Could Heloise have become one of the first female scholars of France or the first woman to teach a class for men in Medieval times, gaining certain freedoms no other woman had at the time? Could she have married an aristocrat or nobleman of considerable wealth, moving up the social ladder into a position of greater influence and more liberties than she ever had before? Heloise’s good reputation amongst scholars was hard-fought and well-earned and the easiest to break from the two, particularly because she was a woman, and indeed, it did. However, by being relegated to a nun, Heloise never got to enjoy the spoils of her hard work, and while Abelard became a monk himself, he never stopped achieving fame. In her own words, “you know, beloved, (...) how much I have lost on you” (Abelard and Heloise, 2.50). So, while his letters alone portray Heloise as solely a turning point in his story, her letters prove that she was more than just a label, but rather a woman who had a bright mind and a possible fortuitous future, but who loved a man so profoundly that she ended up being at the mercy of his faults, showing that even if women like Heloise found increased liberties, they were still subjugated to a man’s world. Like him, she also possessed a hamartia, but unlike his inability to feel a genuine connection, she had too much love to give.

Yet, with time, the fact that women could be educated stopped being such a rarity, even if Heloise’s case is remarkable. Further in time, around 300 years later, the academic instruction of women started becoming a more commonplace situation, particularly in wealthier and nobler families, partially as a “competitive edge.” Alessandra Macinghi negli Strozzi was the daughter of two of the most affluent families of Florence and was brought up to learn how to read, write, and perform arithmetic operations, useful skills for women to administer their household and maintain their own patrimony. In Florence during the Renaissance, wealthy women like Alessandra could own property and, in some situations, conduct businesses, two liberties that were missing from the previous examples. Strozzi’s case is even more impressive to acknowledge since she returned to Florence after her husband was exiled and had died with only the amount of money that was paid by her parents to her husband as dowry, while also receiving a portion of his property proportional to it, and was able to transform a deficit into a profitable situation using the skills she was thought during her upbringing in various business contexts.

The letters Alessandra wrote to her son Filippo stand out from all other sources since they present a woman’s involvement in her historical context, Renaissance Florence, without the direct purview of men, so gender dynamics are understood from her perspective. In talking to her son through a letter sent in 1448, it is possible to perceive the acumen Strozzi possessed in conducting the family business as a widow. She says, “It seems to me that if you have a mind to send it, you may have waited too long to buy it and won’t have it as cheaply as you would have a month ago” (Alessandra Strozzi 2.107). Moreover, when talking about either selling or keeping a piece of their property in the same letter, Alessandra demonstrates a considerable comprehension of how the housing market worked at the time when stating, “This house would be worth nothing if the courtyard lost its sunlight. (...) And if I am in 1450 as I am in 1448, I wouldn’t let it slip out of my hands” (2.108). Furthermore, through the following words concerning her daughter and a potential husband, “as long as he’s a person who deserves her and who can help her and be good to her” (Alessandra Strozzi 8.110), Alessandra establishes the idea of a man respecting his wife as something more prevalent and possible during the 15th century Florence, which points to women becoming more valued in society. However, that is around the extent of women’s increased liberties in this context, as seen through one of Strozzi’s comments in a 1450 letter saying that, “as long as there are young girls in the house, you do nothing but work for them” (Alessandra Strozzi 8.109), pointing to the idea that young women were still generally seen as mostly necessary for reproduction and maintaining the household and should require the best preparation for such. Strozzi’s position as a businesswoman was largely unique to her because of her wealth, her son and extended family’s help, and her widowhood, but she was still living in a Europe where most civil affairs were reserved for men only.

The importance of education for women of primarily noble blood, both in interest and practice, continues as a trend in European history when one focuses on their participation in the significant events happening on the continent. Concerning the Reformation and Post-Reformation periods, the Catholic Church was experiencing several ideological and political losses throughout Northern Europe as more countries started accepting faiths that dissociated them from the influence of the ecclesiastical institution. That resulted in a radical response from the Church, culminating in the establishment of an office that oversaw the inquisition of any heresy committed in a country affiliated with it. A victim of this Holy office was Galileo Galilei, who by defending his heliocentric findings and perspective in a letter by explicitly saying, “I hold that the sun is located in the center of the revolutions of the heavenly orbs, and does not change place, and that the earth rotates in itself and moves around it” (4.2.311), went against lines inside the Bible that stated that Earth was stagnant and the Sun could be moved, therefore being considered a heretic. But in this event, what matters for this essay is the addressee of his letter, one Christina of Lorraine, the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, who, even if not recorded as particularly educated, was interested in academic matters.

Galileo’s letter to the Grand Duchess indirectly presents her as a tool that matters because of her social position, which gave space for her academic curiosity. He makes it evident that by rarely mentioning Christina throughout his letter besides calling her “Most Serene Ladyship” (Galileo 4.2.309) at the beginning and “Your Highness” at various points, Galileo is not discoursing with her directly and only, even if the letter in itself is written as an appeal to the Duchess, who he was already fond of and wanted to appease her thoughts about the conflicting nature of Scripture’s geocentrism vs. Copernicus’ heliocentrism. His writing is more suited for a treatise than a personal letter, which typically features more second-person pronouns, a sign-off, and a language that is unique to the relationship between addresser and addressee (as seen in the previous two epistolary sources in this essay), instead containing several pages of theological discourse weaved with scientific knowledge and perceptions as if the scientist was writing her a textbook instead of a letter. Therefore, it could be understood that Galileo’s stratagem was to use Christina’s interest in consolidating her grasp of nuances between the theological and physical worlds, something that resulted from her fondness for academic matters out of the freedoms and powers granted to her by the position of Grand Duchess, as an intermediate to spread his views to the upper courts, banking on her influence in the political and religious sphere to cast a wide net around Italy. As such, Grand Duchess Christina’s role in this event was as a facilitator to Galileo’s expanded notoriety and eventual persecution, a broadcasting asset, and a title possibly seen by him as a key to opportunity more than anything else.

In the end, after examining the evolution of gender dynamics and the gradual increase in female liberties, it is dispiriting to know that women still struggle to achieve gender equality nowadays. Recorded European history has shown time and time again the struggles that women face by existing and trying to prosper in their lives, even if the space of self-expression and respect given to them by men increased piecemeal, though such freedoms were more frequently granted to women in better social status within limited conditions. Such a struggle has not stopped, even though many advancements in gender equality have been achieved. It feels weird being a man writing about a situation I only know about from written records of the past, the news, and the women surrounding me, without ever feeling it directly. Nonetheless, it is a topic that needs to be discussed because women are not side characters to a man’s story, tools for success, and models of their wealth, nor should they have to conform to the labels and limitations assigned to them and lose their independence. After all, the history of gender inequality should not be forgotten but rather regarded by current and future generations when defying the discrimination women face today.

Bibliography

- Plutarch. Parallel Lives. Translated by Ian Scott-Kilvert, Penguin Books, 1965.

- Heaney, Sean, translator. Beowulf. W. W. Norton & Company, 2000.

- Radice, Betty, translator. The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. 2nd ed., Penguin Books, 2003.

- Boyer, John W., and Julius Kitishner. University of Chicago Readings in Western Civilization. Vol. 5, The Renaissance, Chicago and London, 1986-87.

- Finocchiaro, Maurice A., translator. The Essential Galileo. Hackett Publishing Company, 2008.

The percentage of people with schizophrenia who manifest visual hallucinations is not as clear-cut as one might imagine. The data from study to study varies widely, ranging from 16% to 72%, reflecting variations in population and detection methods (Teeple et al., 2009). An explanation could be that in some subgroups of individuals with schizophrenia, the rate of VH may be higher than traditionally thought of because older standard assessments in clinical settings that are not updated to the recent scientific research in schizophrenia often fail to include questions and tests with more recent and adequate information about the nature of visual hallucinations. It has only been until recently that VH has been researched even more and understood as a more common and pernicious trait of the disorder (Adriann & Silverstein, 2021). Still, something that is very well established about the presence of VH in individuals with schizophrenia is that auditory hallucinations will always co-exist with VH when the latter is a symptom, but the former can be found without VH, suggesting that aspects of visual pathophysiology are shared with that of auditory hallucinations, but that the nature of the auditory hallucination makes its onset more likely to happen (Waters et al., 2014).

The severity of the symptoms in people who have schizophrenia may play another important part in the statistical variation in the percentage of people also experiencing visual hallucinations since they are heavily associated with a history of severe trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder. In those patients with a definite diagnosis of schizophrenia as a chronic illness, the occurrence of VH is more likely to happen (Mueser et al., 1990). Visual hallucinations can also increase the severity of specific symptoms since VH in people with schizophrenia most commonly causes distress, which often leads to a panic state and a later depressive state, and functional impairment. Recent studies have demonstrated that schizophrenia patients with VH show hyperconnectivity between the brain areas involved in higher-order visual processing and the amygdala (Ford et al., 2015). The increased visual imagery experienced during visual hallucinations reflects survival, emotional, and self-maintenance concerns. Some images involve vivid scenes with family members, religious figures, animals, and sometimes giants, and they may be very colorful and even pleasurable (Teeple et al., 2009). However, hallucinations can not only be surprising, but they may also be highly self-relevant, frightening, and disturbing, particularly in cases where an individual has experienced trauma, bullying, chronic social defeat, and other adverse events, something sadly common in people that have schizophrenia, because they are re-experienced as part of a changed perceptual reality (Yildirim et al., 2019).

Scientists have classified visual hallucinations into three categories based on which pathophysiological factors affect their onset. The syndromes include deafferentation, cholinergic (Ach), and serotonergic (5-HT) syndromes. Only the former two have been shown to relate directly to visual hallucinations in schizophrenia, since, even though the nature of VH due to serotonin has been researched thoroughly because of the excessive interest in learning more about psychedelics, the direct serotonergic alterations that play an important role in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia are not evident (Adriann & Silverstein, 2021). Deafferentation syndrome features an impairment of the proper afferent connection of nerve cells from the eye to the brain that affects the proper functioning of visual cortical neurons. Recent reporting has suggested that abnormal visual activity in schizophrenia may be a result of reduced accurate retinal input to the visual cortex (Silverstein et al., 2017) and that glaucoma can precede a diagnosis of schizophrenia (Liu et al., 2020). Cholinergic syndrome exhibits a dysfunction on the ascending brainstem cholinergic neurotransmitter pathways, particularly to the cerebral cortex and basal forebrain, with the reduced presence of acetylcholine and nicotinic and muscarinic receptors, which ties into schizophrenia through the idea that reduced basal forebrain Ach results in a decrease in the reliance on sensory data being processed, as without it, perceptual stimuli are not received; and therefore an increase in the dependence of top-down cognitive process in determining the nature of the sensory stimuli being understood by the brain (Terry, 2008). A consequence of this cholinergic syndrome is thalamocortical dysrhythmia, which reduces the inhibition of something called Default Mode Network (DMN), the daydreaming, self-reflecting, recalling passive system of fluctuations, which makes altered dissociative states more likely to happen and the creation of unconscious representations that may become part of visual hallucinations (Russo et al., 2019).

Other factors affecting a general increase in top-down, introspective, self-reliant psychological processes over sensory input include the apical drive and dopamine in the striatum. The apical drive is crucial in modulating sensory information with perceptual stimuli. Pyramidal neurons serve the function of reconciling bottom-up and top-down data, with their apical dendrites receiving signals from the higher cognition parts of the brain related to memory, attention, emotion, and future thought directly into what is called Apical Integration Zone (AIZ) while the cells in the cortical layer 5 receive sensory data. During dreams and anesthesia, the AIZ dominates pyramidal neuron activity, meaning that top-down stimuli are understood as sensory (Aru et al., 2020). In schizophrenia, visual hallucinations may happen under a similar situation where a specific moment in which the AIZ is both modulating and driving the top-down influences in the processing of perception leads to those top-down cognitions becoming the primary mode of sensory stimuli processing in the form of trauma-based memories and related emotional and symbolic material, exerting more control over perception and determining what is real or not from internally generated visual representations (Adriann & Silverstein, 2021). Concerning dopamine, the dopamine hypothesis is well known to be part of what causes schizophrenia in general, and studies have shown that its oversaturation in the striatum can cause internally generated processes to receive a higher priority in understanding perceptual reality over external stimuli (Sterzer et al., 2018).

More recently, oculomics, a field that studies the insights provided by ophthalmological biomarkers about the health of different body systems, has become the key to understanding the perceptual side of how visual hallucinations occur in patients with schizophrenia. This very recent and not even 100% official medical field has discovered evidence undeniably connecting the quality of how the external visual stimuli are transduced in the retina to an increased influence of the internal brain system in comprehending reality, which in itself is a form of a deafferentation syndrome. For example, it has been observed that the retina in the eyes of patients with schizophrenia experiences a thinning that is not present in the eyes of control individuals, a situation that creates a certain ambiguity of visual information from the degradation of many functional areas that would typically provide a complete picture of an environment but in this case, only transduce incomplete pieces of a visual puzzle (Silverstein et al., 2020). These incomplete pieces are then processed by the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus (LGN) and then the Primary Visual Cortex, which need to find ways to compensate for the lack of a complete picture, something that may result in the brain relying more on top-down cognitive processes like memory retrieval based on overall perceptual context from others senses to create comparisons between top-down and bottom-up signals and fill in the gaps. That could lead to and/or pair with the disinhibition of the DMN and result in visual hallucinations from errors in the reconciliation of both types of signals that increase the likelihood of prior negative feelings, thoughts, and experiences seeping into the processing of perception (Adriann & Silverstein, 2021). Other retinal issues that result in abnormal, distorted, and degraded visual stimuli in the brain include an increase in the cup-to-disc ratio, which is a particular indicator of glaucoma (Silverstein et al., 2018), and slower signaling in bipolar and retinal ganglion cells (Bernardin et al., 2020).

In sum, an updated model for visual hallucinations in schizophrenia features both perceptual and neurobiological factors. The former includes alterations in the retinal structure and activity, resulting in ambiguous signaling and predictive processes within the visual cortex to compensate for the imbalance in visual input and an increase in the influence of the DMN and apical drive. The abnormal reliance on DMN and apical drive for perception is a consequence of the latter factors, which include changes in activity in the ascending cholinergic pathways, dopamine prevalence in the striatum, and functional impairments in visual processing in the LGN and basal forebrain.

Finally, something relevant that needs to be mentioned is that there are several questions yet to be answered and limitations to the research and science behind visual hallucinations, especially since the most elucidating pieces of evidence are coming from relatively new fields like oculomics. What are all the factors that trigger visual hallucinations? The how of it is known, but what moments and experiences specifically do so? What mechanisms are necessary and sufficient for visual hallucinations to work, especially concerning the effects or correlation of VH with auditory hallucinations? Why does VH occur less often than auditory hallucinations? Why do visual hallucinations happen in some patients and not others? To what extent are VH risk factors for schizophrenia? (Adriann & Silverstein, 2021). In the end, there is still a lot to research and discuss about the nature of visual hallucinations in schizophrenia so scientists can find ways to implement biological and psychological knowledge into helping clinicians create more comprehensive and inclusive treatments that seek to alleviate some of the more emotionally distressing symptoms that occur in this disorder.

Bibliography

-Schizophrenia. (2022, January 10). World Health Organization. Retrieved March 9, 2022, from https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/schizophrenia

-Adriann, L., Silverstein, S. M. (2021). The Phenomenology and Neurobiology of Visual Distortions and Hallucinations in Schizophrenia: An Update. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.684720

-Teeple, R. C., Caplan, J. P., & Stern, T. A. (2009). Visual hallucinations: differential diagnosis and treatment. Primary Care Companion to the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 11(1), 26–32. https://doi.org/10.4088/pcc.08r00673

-Waters et al. (2014). Visual hallucinations in the psychosis spectrum and comparative information from neurodegenerative disorders and eye disease. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 40( 4), 233–245. https://doi.org/10.1093/schbul/sbu036

-Mueser, K. T., Bellack, A. S., & Brady, E. U. (1990). Hallucinations in schizophrenia. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 82(1), 26–29. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1600-0447.1990.tb01350.x

-Yildirim et al. (2014). The relationship between adulthood traumatic experiences and psychotic symptoms in female patients with schizophrenia. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 55(8), 1847–1854. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comppsych.2014.08.049

-Silverstein, S. M., Demmin, D. L., & Bednar, J. A. (2017). Computational Modeling of Contrast Sensitivity and Orientation Tuning in First-Episode and Chronic Schizophrenia. Computational Psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.), 1, 102–131. https://doi.org/10.1162/CPSY_a_00005

-Liu, C. H., Kang, E. Y., Lin, Y. H., Wu, W. C., Liu, Z. H., Kuo, C. F., Lai, C. C., & Hwang, Y. S. (2020). Association of ocular diseases with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder: a retrospective case-control, population-based study. BMC Psychiatry, 20(1), 486. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-020-02881-w

-Terry A. V., Jr (2008). Role of the central cholinergic system in the therapeutics of schizophrenia. Current Neuropharmacology, 6(3), 286–292. https://doi.org/10.2174/157015908785777247

-Russo, M. et al. (2019). The Pharmacology of Visual Hallucinations in Synucleinopathies. Frontiers in Pharmacology, 10, 1379. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphar.2019.01379

-Ford, J. M. et al. (2015). Visual hallucinations are associated with hyperconnectivity between the amygdala and visual cortex in people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 41(1), 223–232. https://doi.org/10.1093/schbul/sbu031

-Aru, J., Siclari, F., Phillips, W. A., & Storm, J. F. (2020). Apical drive-A cellular mechanism of dreaming?. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 119, 440–455. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2020.09.018

-Sterzer, P. et al. (2018). The predictive coding account of psychosis. Biol Psychiatry, 84, 634–643. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2018.05.015

-Silverstein, S. M. (2020). Measures of Retinal Structure and Function as Biomarkers in Neurology and Psychiatry. Biomarkers in Neuropsychiatry, 2. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bionps.2020.100018

-Silverstein, S. M., Paterno, D., Cherneski, L., & Green, S. (2018). Optical coherence tomography indices of structural retinal pathology in schizophrenia. Psychological Medicine, 48(12), 2023–2033. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291717003555

-Bernardin, F. et al. (2020). Retinal ganglion cell dysfunctions in schizophrenia patients with or without visual hallucinations. Schizophrenia Research, 219, 47–55. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.schres.2019.07.007

There is a clear gap in fictional insect-based mass media starting in the 2010s. However, it does not mean that there have not been media that, instead of making humans see themselves empathizing with insects that are presented as almost humans, propose the notion that an insect can be cool and endearing and engaging as worthy of appreciation or contemplation on its own by given them human-like attributes such as emotional responses and awareness. That is the case of Pokémon, which has around 100 different Bug-type Pokémon that are inspired by real-life species and that are given a sense of agency, emotional intelligence, and emotional response that almost no other living animal in our world experiences. What better place to show the connection between humans and insect-based Pokémon than the Pokémon anime series? Through dissecting the way the episode “Bye Bye Butterfree” portrays the bond between Ash and his Butterfree as that of friends and how, through the way the Butterfree in the episode emotes, it explores the medium of animation to visually depict the inner world of sensations that would be locked away and imperceptible to any human trying to understand an insect, and discussing some implications for the human-nature and human-insect dynamics presented in Nealon’s Plant Theory, Konishi’s Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan, and Drouin’s A Philosophy of the Insect, it will be possible to see how Pokémon’s approach of creating creatures that are externally non-human but internally close to human and of writing emotionally resonant stories that make them feel so real offers a new perspective into how people can engage with insects in life.

Certain animation principles used to express the emotional life of the Butterfree in “Bye Bye Butterfree,” like exaggeration, secondary action, squash and stretch, anticipation, and staging and other cinematic features like lighting and superimposition editing are employed to highlight their ability to emote and make their reactions to the events of the episode more human-like, driving the audience to understand the Pokémon as an entity that feels, acknowledges, understands, and interacts and to empathize with the Butterfree’s responses to the episode’s dramatic experiences. This episode—the 20th of the original series (21st in the Japanese release order)—features Ash and Pikachu and his traveling companions Brock and Misty finding themselves near a flutter of Butterfree on their way to Saffron City. They are “celebrating their season of love” (“Bye Bye Butterfree” 00:01:40), Brock says, pointing to an understanding by the character that Pokémon can feel such strong feelings as romantic love. The audience is quickly made to believe in the idea that these species of Pokémon’s ability to feel love is possible through the staging of iconic imagery of love from 00:02:41 to 00:02:45, where a zoomed-in perspective shot of the group as they come close to the Pokémon frames several Buttterfree paired together, beating their wings in opposite synchrony (one’s wings open, the other ones close) as if responding to each other in a conversation, with pink hearts spread around specifically the ones paired up in the foreground.

The paired-up dance coupled with the hearts forms only the first visual establishment of romantic affection experienced by the Butterfree as Ash’s Butterfree and his eventual partner, the Pink Butterfree, will become the emotional core of the episode, working under the tropes of the “boy conquers the girl’s heart” storyline to present an emotionally rich story to the audiences. Firstly, the moment the former sees the latter at 00:04:41, his eyes transform into red hearts, and through exaggeration and squash and stretch, they grow very big (particularly the left eye), and then become smaller to simulate a heart beating. This externalization of Ash Butterfree’s feelings through the heart in the eyes works to transmit the magnitude of its spark of desire for Pink, where exaggeration through squash and stretch makes it clear and visible for the audience that the emotion is intensely felt. Brock even describes it as “love at first sight” (“Bye Bye Butterfree” 00:04:48). Its response to Pink also comes as a result of the use of exaggeration and secondary action to “humanize” the butterfly by giving it an action trait that is almost exclusive to women: hip swaying, from 00:04:37 to 00:04:41. Unlike all other Butterfree, the animators employed the hip sway as a secondary action to wing beats and exaggerated a side to side movement to make it perceptible that this Butterfree is stereotypically feminine, a human construct, which is also portrayed many times in movies and series through the male gaze as actions that elicit desire in male characters. This secondary action, albeit possibly problematic today, thus becomes a signifier of a humanizing signified that posits the spark of Ash Butterfree’s desire, which even if Foucaltian thought can be interpreted to establish that “our unconscious drives are animal in nature, and it is those unbridled desires that make us most truly who we are” (Nealon 11) and so desire is fundamental aspect of animal nature shared by all, still comes to be and functions under human dynamics. All of these animation strategies have been used to demonstrate affection between animal characters in animation before, but doing so to establish a romance between insects appears to be unique.

Love at first sight is not the only trope that “Bye Bye Butterfree” visually depicts to humanize Butterfree. Rejection and its emotional effects are also explored. As Ash’s Butterfree approaches Pink Butterfree and dances around it (or under the trope reading, her, and by necessity then, Ash’s Butterfree is going to be referred as him now, male being his actual gender in the series) from 00:05:08-00:05:19, she slaps his face with her wings, and staging and stretch and squash are employed to make it even more potent by setting up a tight close-up to fill the screen with the action and stretching the slapped face to convey the strength and direction of the strike. The subsequent response by Ash’s Butterfree enhances the empathy the audience would feel for a person being rejected even more through his facial expressions. The staging of the tight close-up now has the function of making his physically hurt face—now bearing a red scratch mark, making Pink’s strike even more visceral by giving it a dual notion of momentary forcefulness through the stretch and long lastingness through the scratch—feel even more hurt as if it becomes an indicator of both external and internal pain, and it does so by emphasizing Ash Butterfree’s eyes, which are now, through a play on lighting, crying. This play on lighting is achieved by using the reflectiveness of the species’ compound eyes (the white area inside the red) as another piece of it, like a pupil that dilates and constricts based on the emotions of the Butterfree, which in this scene becomes distorted as a reflection of the tears he is accumulating. The tight close-up shot also makes it visible for the audience to see that what would look like the exoskeleton of a real-life butterfly is not hard, behaving rather skin-like and thus near human-like in the way it folds around the eyes to facilitate Ash Butterfree’s ability to emote sadness that stings. Those are pleading eyes that, in their staging, are made to feel like they are a direct result of the emotional and physical pain caused by Pink’s rejection, and all of these components together make a more significant case for the idea that Butterfree are being animated to behave and visually express themselves like humans. As an explanatory argument for why people may lack compassion for insects, Drouin quotes Georges Chapouthier as stating:

Humans do not fundamentally differ from many of their mammalian cousins, and even from birds, in their emotional relationships with their young, their emotional expressions of joy or anger, in the mechanics of their sociosexual relations, which come close with some differences, to that of the monkeys, and in most of their mechanisms of memory (153).

“Bye Bye Butterfree” already undermines that with the romance plot and continues to do so further.

Other emotional expressions Ash’s Butterfree is depicted experiencing range from feeling defeated and down, to anger. Starting with “defeated and down,” as he is rejected the first time, Ash’s Butterfree flies into a forest to hide from everyone (a behavior that connotes shame). When the protagonists find him at 00:06:10, the camera cuts from a high-angled shot above him to a leveled one to transport Ash and the audience to his level, and the staging makes it perceptible for us that Butterfree is ashamed and apprehensive because he by holds his hands near the chest and looks down, refusing to meet Ash’s eyes as his trainer asks the Pokémon why he looks sad. Later on in the episode, after Brock gives Ash’s Butterfree a scarf and he gets rejected again, Team Rocket shows up to steal all the Butterfree, and Pink Butterfree is sequestered. Instead of running away, he decides to fight back, and the staging, secondary action, and anticipation depict anger in a very idiosyncratic way. Staging is utilized to set up his relationship in space with Team Rocket’s helicopter (his target) from 00:10:10-00:10:16, so it is possible to see the outcome of the emotional response. The two other principles are then used to highlight the intensity of Butterfree’s emotion, where the frown created by his head folds pairs up with the main action of the tackle to show how the anger he is feeling powers up the attack, which unlike many of the flying animations in the episode, is not only detailed through more frames used to illustrate it but profits from anticipation to build up the momentum, culminating in a bang of emotional transfer into power that is so forceful that, in the anime’s flat compositing style, results in energy coming to the surface. Such emotional intensity can only be justified by a personified experience, especially one that aims to right a wrong and rescue a loved one. Later into the episode when Ash’s Butterfree attempts to save all his conspecifics at 00:13:38, the superimposition that is used to fuse his frown (which connoted anger before) with a high angle close-up shot of Pink Butterfree’s face looking up at him in a staging that suggests appreciation (“my hero” moment) both works to solidify their relationship as now possible and rewrite anger into heroic determination. It feels as if the variety of emotions he is posited to feel, all springing from desire turned love, determines the possibility of expressions and how they affect how the world is animated, putting front and center an insect-inspired creature as world-defining in a story where humans are so too. The animal, particularly the insect, is no longer “poor in world.” They are “world-producing” (Nealon 37).

Finally, “Bye Bye Butterfree” is not called so for no reason. Sadness, once more, plays a considerable part at the end of this episode, but this time, a more heartfelt one that truly proves that the bond between Pokémon and humans is powerful. The true emotional strike of this episode, the one that transcended the screen to make people consider this one of the saddest episodes of the anime, comes at the end when Ash realizes that for him to make Butterfree happy, he needs to release him. He was the first Pokémon Ash ever caught, and had been with him since episode 3. An essay could be written exploring what makes the events from 00:16:40 to 00:20:16 so emotionally evocative (the animators left their best tricks for this section, including a montage sequence highlighting their best moments together to the sound of “Tears, After the Cloudy Weather” and the Pokémon Theme Song), but what is important is that once more, shots highlighting Butterfree’s facial expressions never stop being able to communicate his internal emotional life clearly. At 00:19:28, his inner world comes flooding out in the form of a constant stream of visible tears in shots that are edited through a combination of dissolves into new shots of him crying and moving away from Ash, glancing at him one last continuous time, that are superimposed upon each other to represent Butterfree’s reluctance to look away while time pulls him so. Butterfree’s reactions mark how his sadness is very profound, coming from a deep attachment to Ash, one that can be interpreted as that of a friend. As Ash himself says, “Be happy, old friend” (“Bye Bye Butterfree” 00:19:40). Throughout the episode, Ash, Brock, and Misty treat Butterfree like a person, calling him “buddy” and asking him to have confidence. On a specific occasion, Misty even tells Team Rocket, “Can’t you see these Butterfree are in love?” (“Bye Bye Butterfree” 00:09:26), suggesting that it is pretty evident in the Pokémon world that Pokémon can feel human feelings and that all Butterfree are capable of the same emotions as Ash’s, but like any show where the human protagonist is the one that is centered by the story to express themselves more than background characters, his Butterfree is the focus of it. So, how can we doubt Brock and Misty after the episode establishes a few times that it is very likely that what humans call love is what these Pokémon are experiencing? From that logic, and based on Ash’s crying, the audience should take what he says about his relationship with Butterfree at face value1. Thus, the complexity of emotions experienced by Ash’s former Butterfree in this episode is encapsulated by the evocative portrayal of love and sadness represented by their goodbye, which cannot be understated as something other than a representation of a departure between friends, of which bittersweetness and longing are mutually felt.

It is fascinating that all of this emotional power derives from a ten-year-old’s relationship with his insect. Pokémon is a franchise that originated from a man’s memories of catching bugs and playing video games when he was a child. Such childhood wonder for insects was also very much part of 19th-century Japan and before as part of a set of traditions around these animals, as Lafcardio Hern observes in the compendium of his writings, Insect Literature:

All over Japan, the children have their firefly-hunts every summer—moonless nights being usually chosen for such expeditions. Girls follow the chase with paper-fans; boys, with long light poles, to the ends of which wisps of fresh bamboo-grass are tied (...) While hunting, the children sing little songs, supposed to attract the shining prey (Hern 140).

Japanese people’ wonder toward insect seems not to have stopped since then, being so ingrained in certain aspects of Japanese culture that what once was a rural activity has not waned with the advance of urbanization and has transformed into a commercial business where many more kids can engage with variety of species, without having to go to the wild as seen in the movie Battle Queen Conquers Tokyo2. This continuous deep connection Japanese people have had towards insects throughout their history has not only been part of their cultural expression through poetry, art, and folklore, of which Pokémon becomes their legacy, but also socio-political thought. Anarchists like Ōsugi Sakae and Ishikawa Sanshirō proposed a cooperatist principle putting natural sciences in a constant dialogue with culture and society, where:

Human subjectivity and social relations ought to reflexively mirror scientific findings about the nature of the physical and natural universe around and within human beings. (...) Progress would be to aim at that ideal of a human civilization deeply interconnected with nature (Konishi 308)3.

Following this principle, cooperatist anarchists turned to a scientific source that could explain a perception of nature outside the notion of survival of the individual through competition; one of cooperation. Even if many animals are known today to be cooperative or altruistic, Fabre’s Souvenirs had such an effect in Japan after being translated—most likely because of their deep-rooted social interrelation with insects—that the dung beetle’s cooperative niche became a model for a cooperatist society, and these animals were not ever shown to emote and have awareness and emotional lives. In a world like Pokémon, such conception as the divisions between culture and nature posited by Freud as antithesis (Konishi 303) are as thin as how Imanishi presented them when he studied the proliferation of learned traits in Koshima monkeys, so there is not even a need for human societies to mimic Pokémon societies with their cultural practices to achieve interconnectedness since the emotional and cognitive life of Pokémon exemplified by “Bye Bye Butterfree,” which is just one of many ways such life can be perceived, already presents how both are intrinsic to each other; how Pokémon society and human society and their cultural practices (“the boy conquers the girl’s heart” trope and coaching influencing Butterfree while humans ride air balloons to see the Butterfree choosing their mates) are constantly merging. Human and Pokémon are not “politically” on equal footing to assign biopower to both (although Mewtwo and other Legendary and Psychic-type Pokémon could challenge that point), but their social interactions work less of a way of fully integrating Pokémon into societal structures4 and more as a way to let them exist in human society while still being themselves (when not oppressed by a trainer). Although Pokémon are not animals, many of their resemblances to them, such as looks and behavior, point to analogs that connect the fictional to the real. Butterfree, categorized as the Butterfly Pokémon, is a species inspired by the Aporia crataegi butterfly, or the black-veined white butterfly. It is visually different to make it feel unique and more like a creature than a simple insect, but not enough that the butterfly aspects are minimized5. Therefore, the Pokémon world proposes a state of interaction between creatures and humans that surpasses imagined human interactions with the natural world, particularly that of Western philosophy, and realizes the true potential of cooperatist anarchist thought of interconnectedness into a dynamic that merges socio-cultural practices and emotional experiences of beings that resemble animals and plants but that interact with the world in a human-like way, and although Pokémon is a fictional world, it does not mean nothing can be learned or intuited from it.

In conclusion, through the model of the butterfly and its Pokémon analog Butterfree, the Pokémon-human dynamics presented in “Bye Bye Butterfree” and the use of animation principles, physical attributes that are already conducive to emotional interpretation like big eyes, and anime conventions to reveal and comprehensively display that an insect-like Pokémon can feel emotions that are not only ephemeral and instinctive but also motivated and profound and can think and perform in ways that are limited to human behavior and constructs in real life, posits a challenge to the notion that media related to insects has to portray them as monsters, inferior pests, or tools or need to make them look humanoid for humans to be able to relate, empathize, and embrace the dramatization of their world. How the episode weaves love—one of the most potent forces that describes the ultimate and transcendental experience of affection—as romance and friendship and the base motivator for Ash Butterfree’s actions and subsequent emotions does more than give a human framework for an insect-like being to work under to prove its awareness and reveal their inner self: it provides a basis for the idea that non-human species in the Pokémon world are capable of culture that is in a constant dialogue with human culture to the point the former are able to socially coexist with humans in both public and private spaces. It shows Butterfree to be more human than humans, as it unabashedly wears its heart on its sleeve. In a society that is ever so slightly edging into a pattern of social radicalization and isolationism, where loneliness is an epidemic of its own, it is so amazing that there are fictional beings that not only keep us company but may also help us feel certain ways that could change how we look at ourselves and our world, how big or small what we see may be.

Sources

-Drouin, Jean-Marc. “Worlds and Environments.” A Philosophy of the Insect. Translated by Anne Trager, Columbia University Press, 2019, pp 143-156.

- “Bye Bye Butterfree.” Pokémon, written by Takeshi Shudo, directed by Kunihiko Yuyama, season 1, episode 20, OLM Inc., 1997. Pokémon Channel, https://watch.pokemon.com/en-us/#/player?id=d120746b3bd1413fa79e9fdd0ec1e2d6&channelId=pokemon-indigo-league&cameFromHome=false

-Nealon, Jeffery T. “Preface: Plant Theory?.” Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2020.

-Hearn, Lafcadio. Insect Literature. Translated by M. Ōtani, Hokuseido, 1921.

-Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo. Written, Directed, & Produced by Jessica Oreck. Myriapod Productions, 2009. DVD

-Konishi, Sho. “Nature in Culture, Culture in Nature: Phagocytes, Dung Beetles, and the Cosmos.” Anarchist Modernity, Harvard University Press, 2013, pp. 296-327.

- “Butterfree.” Bulbapedia, https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Butterfree_(Pok%C3%A9mon). Accessed 16 Oct. 2023.

Participatory culture is an active state of identity formation, and it can be perceived as a more psychologically desirable one since it is in itself a conversation between the different parts of the self trying to piece together who they are, can be, and will be, where fandom offers a rich environment for that conversation to happen. Pop culture conventions are centers where fans and fandoms can physically interact with each other and are perfect forums for the dialogue between self and self and self and others by approaching many aspects of participatory culture created, desired, and fostered in other environments. By analyzing how pop culture conventions like the São Paulo CCXP adapt a few manifestations of participatory culture throughout Japanese history, it will be possible to understand how they satisfy fans’ needs and foster a feeling in them of belonging to a fandom.

Fandom transcends borders. Beyond the identities of a geographical location, fandoms today have the possibility of existing as a worldwide community that does not need a physical location to grow and thrive, relying on the internet for global connectivity. Nevertheless, fans have found ways to gather around in a physical space and celebrate their chosen identities by forming fan conventions. Over the years, these conventions have grown into “meccas” of popular culture, true pop cosmopolis where fans around a country (and sometimes, the world) will experience not only the cultural manifestations of their favorite franchises, which already can represent the cultural identities of any group of people, but of many other IPs and creator-owned stories. Certain pop culture conventions like New York Comic-Con, SXSW, and San Diego Comic-Con are so big that they provide millions of dollars to their host cities (Finch).

However, no other convention has experienced such a skyrocketing growth as Comic Con Experience (CCXP) located in São Paulo, Brazil, which went from 97,000 guests in 2014 to 280,000 in 2019, beating SDCC’s 135,000 and pumping 265 million reais into the city’s economy (Vitorio). Not unlike the magazine Shōjo no tomo and how it fostered the creation of a girl’s culture back in 1910s Japan by “encouraging readers from all parts of the nation to identify as a community through letter columns, contests, and local meetings” (Shamoon 48) and showcasing the meeting highlights through images and participants’ comments on the magazine, CCXP was first idealized by a collaboration between Ivan Costa1 and the creators of Omelete, the leading entertainment news source in Brazil at the time, whose website and YouTube channel featured reviews, news roundups, movie speculation, trailer breakdowns, and in-depth videos and articles about the history of entertainment (Pacheco). Since Omelete already had a massive following in 2014, they served as the leading advertiser of the event, and kept on being so to the point they grew so large that they are now a company that owns several other entertainment brands. As of May 2024, CCXP and Omelete’s Instagram accounts have 2 million followers combined, both posting photos about the celebrity guests, cosplayers, and the major events of CCXP, but also showcasing fans walking by the expo center, fans interacting with the booths and installations, the enormous lines, and much more. Moreover, like the relationship with Shōjo no tomo’s editor, Uchiyama Motoi, and its readers, part of the initial appeal of CCXP was for fans to be able to see the Omelete crew (writers, YouTubers, interviewers, the creators) in person and be close to them. Something called the Omelete stage was created to fulfill that need (“A CCXP”), breaking down parasocial barriers by existing as a space above a platform in one corner of the expo open for anyone to see. It was once enclosed by glass, but in the last three iterations of the event, the stage has been open-air. That space also features interviews between the Omelete crew and celebrities, which are recorded and live-streamed, making it so anyone waiting around the stage may appear in a video from their favorite creators while also being able to see their idols up close.

Some of the most significant components of major entertainment conventions—what puts them on the radar of fans and casual consumers alike due to heavy media coverage—are the major announcements and exclusive audiovisual content from upcoming movies, TV shows, and video games exhibited inside the conventions’ main auditoriums. They are unique since not only does one have the possibility of watching something people will only see in the future (or perhaps never in the state that was presented), but actors and directors also tend to appear in the halls and auditoriums that host these announcements to promote them. At CCXP, their main auditorium, Palco Thunder, has a maximum capacity of 3000 people, as indicated on their website (“A CCXP”), and since it has to be so big to hold everyone in the same space, it means not everyone can see the celebrities well and feel close to them. Appendix 1 showcases three photos that depict the inside of Palco Thunder, illustrating the length and scope of the main screen and the two smaller adjacent ones. This style of content presentation is an enhanced form of what NTV’s broadcasting aimed to achieve with their “attention-grabbing programs” (Chun 62) shown on strategically located TVs in Tokyo, which attracted crowds on their way home past stations and plazas back in the 1950s. Even if 3,000 people is not comparable with the 20,000 that watched one of Rikidōzan’s wrestling matches against the Americans at Shimbashi station, it still is a representative of a group of people gathering around a shared space to experience a mass event, one that was also enhanced by the close-up, in which action could be “underwhelming watched in person from a distant seat, but through television and the power of the close-up, became a spectacle that overwhelmed the senses and grabbed one’s attention” (Chun 65).

Furthermore, as an augmented manifestation of crowds screaming and crying at the wrestler matches, inside Palco Thunder, fans unite in their reactions to movie scenes screened, and as soon as a famous actor enters the stage, they scream with an overwhelming force, a reaction that perfectly fits the auditorium’s name. The emotional responses to the media pieces exhibited and to the celebrities that appear in the Thunder Auditorium are enhanced by the sense of fan unity; that 3000 people love and feel such a connection toward the actors present and the content displayed that they are capable of screaming at the top of their lungs in some form of collective ecstasy. The mass unified reaction to a moment in a movie exhibited is one thing, but the response to the actors is something more potent, literally lasting for minutes. There are many ways to decode the frenzy caused by meeting a celebrity, but one of the possible focal points of discussion for fandom is embodiment. Brain Bergstrom writes that Anne of Green Gables “as an icon of domestic consumerism began to proliferate in women’s fashion and lifestyle magazines” (234), pointing to a shared desire by fans of fictional characters to experience life as them and with them in spirit. Actors are desirable people whose job is to embody and become the character we love so much. To see an actor who portrays a character fans love is a collective stance that defines the closest people can ever be to the fictional in reality. If fans interact and build relationships with fictional characters with a component of guidance/influence in mind, meaning there is a component of the desire to be influenced by them to be, think, ir feel more like them, and the lines between actor and character begin to blur, whomever the actor is can start seeping into people’s perception of the identity of the fictional character. That would make the former’s outer persona an inseparable component of the latter, resulting in a heightened desire to be and look like the actor because it would be one of the closest ways a fan could perceive themselves as the character they love. And if fans hold the celebrity or character in high regard already because of their parasocial desires to be close to them and to be perceived as someone unique by the celebrity or characters in a similar way the fans consider them to be so special, that is a bonus way in which proximity enhances feelings of embodiment and affiliation. Thus, the ecstasy is so much stronger when seeing the person who portrays a character a fan wants to be real because fans are reacting to their parasocial interactions and relationships with the character and the celebrity simultaneously.

However, there is a personal stance that also defines how fans can interact with fictional characters that exist in conjunction with the previous notion. Like Bergstrom characterizes Okuda as portraying “herself as embodying a variation of a heroine of a fictional text that overlays a physical place that she can literally inhabit” (238), people still enjoy embodying the original character in their own ways, becoming a combination of self and character. CCXP fulfills that form of embodiment of characters and worlds through the recreation of sets and the fashion possibilities that the convention allows for. Starting with sets, the showroom is filled with franchise booths and installations that the studios and rights-holders plan out as exhibitions or experiences. Much like Japanese Anne fans “being a major part of the Anne-centric tourism industry in Prince Edward Island since the late 1970s, and this tourism is driven by a desire to see the ‘real’ version of Avonlea” (Bergstrom 227), the pull of many of the experience installations is to create a sense of being on the actual set. Since so many IPs are represented, a fan at CCXP can jump from one world to the next and not have to be confined to only one of their favorite franchises (Appendix 2). Moreover, the Harry Potter franchise has always been important for Brazilian fans, and they used to get a particular spot on one of the corners of the showroom, with the biggest IP-specific shop in the whole convention. Every year, next to it, there was a life-size recreation of a set from the films (Appendix 3), which was designed by their Art Director, Alan Gilmore (Bridi). The effect of seeing a perfect recreation of a movie set up close by the person who originally designed it is the next best thing to going inside, and it gives one the illusion of experiencing the “real version” of Hogwarts. The CCXP world-hopping experience resembles a combination of Canadian World, with its focus on replicas and props to recreate Prince Edward Island in Japan (Bergstrom 234), and Disney World and Universal, which feature IP-based lands guests can move seamlessly from one to the other.

Finally, fashion manifests as another way a person can embody a version of a character they like or identify with, and it does so through two forms: merchandise and cosplay. Vera Mackie encapsulates fandom fashion when she writes, “members of each fashion subculture are skilled at reading the signs which provide a sense of belonging in their own subculture,” becoming “part of an imagined community” (2) when describing the Gothic Lolita style. For fandom fashion, options vary from garments with character arts and logos and full-on costume clothing that seek to replicate iconic looks from movies that can still be considered fashionable and everyday wear, like Hot Topic’s Harley Quinn’s Caution Tape Jacket, to cosplays that exist as a complete transformation into a chosen character. Like Gothic Lolita style’s conversation with shojo manga, anime, pop music, fairy tales, and Sanrio characters, fandom wear “is also implicated in transtextual links with literary and popular cultural genres” (4), be it comics, movies, TV shows, book series, or video games. Unlike the former’s overreliance on aesthetic sensibilities, though, the signs that are read are actual representations of a piece of a franchise. In wearing character merchandise, fans signal to others that they enjoy the character(s) featured, but it does not necessarily mean that they are the individual’s favorite or are necessarily special to them. It can just mean that they liked the design and the franchise, and that is how fashion can showcase that part of their identity. It also means other people can judge fans for it. So, inside a venue where everyone is a fan, people are welcome to wear (almost) anything representing their fandom, and if they are not, the convention is also populated by clothing stores, where studios can offer exclusive official clothing and national brands can sell licensed franchise products. As Mackie writes, “community is also forged through shopping in particular specialist stores” (2), and CCXP is a marketplace for fandom goods.

Furthermore, cosplaying also results in the judgment of others if not done in specific locations, so CCXP offers a space where fans can dress up to visually embody a character, walk around, take pictures with other guests, and become a part of other people’s experiences, having the chance to feel more connected to whom they are acting as through both personal and social perceptions of transformation and embodiment. However, that is not all. CCXP also features a Cosplay Runaway, where cosplayers can showcase their creations for people to praise, a Cosplay Masters Contest, where a selected number of cosplayers are picked to create a short show where they can add even more details to their version of the character, and professional dressing rooms to assist them with any makeup and dressing needs as a way to validate the craft and assist them in becoming the character and keeping on being it whenever an unforeseeable situation happens (“Universo Cosplay”).

In conclusion, fandom is a multifaceted collective force that involves a conversation between self and others through a play between reality and one’s interaction and immersion into fictional worlds and characters. Fandom can be manifested in various ways because of different personal inclinations collectively felt as a result of fans finding points of subjective affinity with a text that reflects their reality and history as individuals, from a need to find a community who shares the same passion for a franchise and a yearning for presential forms of fan interactions with other fans and those who foster the creation of fandom to the excitement behind experiencing spectacle and a desire to more profoundly connect with the characters they love and experience a world like theirs through embodying them or a variation of them. Pop culture conventions like CCXP have been able to address those needs by being organized by fans for fans, by featuring unique spectacles in a vast closed space that allows for the unification of fan ecstasy, opportunities to see celebrities up-close and meet them, and semi-immersive attractions, and by opening up the space for people to dress one’s identity, being filled with shops and creating rewarding events around cosplaying.

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Appendix

1. Palco Thunder: Marvel Studios Panel

2. Two Riverdale installations, the first depicting Pop’s Chock’lit Shoppe in 2018 and the second Riverdale High in 2019.

3. Harry Potter Sets- Hagrid’s Hut (2018) and Hogwarts Express (2019)