Slate today is taking the rare step of publishing a letter someone sent us from inside an ongoing bank robbery. We have done so at the request of the author, who is currently robbing a bank, but would like to minimize his exposure to criminal charges from this whole bank robbery thing now that it seems to be going south. We invite you to submit a question about this essay or our vetting process here.
“Machine Gun” Bill McGuire, the leader of the gang of hardened criminals currently robbing the First National Bank, is facing a test to his leadership unlike any faced by a modern American bank robber.
It’s not just that the building is surrounded by police officers. Or that he’s running out of hostages to bargain with. Or even that the sentries he posted in the loading dock don’t seem to be responding over their walkie-talkies anymore.
The dilemma—which he does not fully grasp—is that many of the senior henchmen inside his own gang are working diligently from within the bank to paint ourselves as heroes in the press while continuing to stuff our duffel bags with as much money as we can grab.
I would know. I am one of them.
To be clear, ours is not the popular “police department” of the government, the one that enforces the laws against robbing banks. We want the robbery to succeed and think that the part where we made the bank clerks hand over all the money in their drawers at gunpoint was a step in the right direction.
But we believe our first duty is to make it out of the bank alive so we can spend the money we have stolen, and “Machine Gun” McGuire continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to our escape.
Two lesbian witches are about to take over your TV – and we’re so here for it.
A Discovery of Witches, which is coming to Sky 1 later this year, will feature Sarah Bishop, a powerful lesbian witch played by Doctor Who and Arrow star Alex Kingston.
Together with her partner, another witch called Emily Mather, Sarah raises her niece Diana, teaching her how to use her powers to fight in a centuries-old struggle between supernatural beings.
I watched the last episode of Adventure Time because Marceline and Bonnie got to kiss on TV. And that’s a powerful feeling. But it had even more powerful feelings to give me before it was done, and I gotta get them out.
Adventure Time developed a rich symbolic language though it’s brief 10 minute tales, inviting us to become attached to it’s characters experiences and to associate the feelings we have while watching them with the objects and places involved with those events. All the while, it teases the idea that life is cyclical. Finn’s past lives are explored, as well as his life in an alternate timeline, and his life split into two people whose experiences diverge, and all are peppered with symbolic similarities to his own. Locations we become familiar with are shown on a few occasions an untold amount of time in the future, still there but no longer central to peoples lives, left to ruin or reclaimed by nature. The world of Ooo is littered with the now-meaningless detritus of our mundane world, eventually revealing that Ooo exists because a world very much like our own annihilated itself with war. And it concludes by suggesting that this world we have become so attached to may yet destroy itself in war as well.
These recurring motifs suggest that Adventure Time has a fundamental lesson to teach: that objects and symbols which bore life-changing importance and evoked heart-wrenching memories for one generation of life become mysteries or curiosities or things that were simply always there for another, and the events which marked their lives fall into skewed record or are ultimately forgotten. And that’s okay.
It’s painful for people to face the shortness of their lives, to imagine their most affecting memories lost, and the objects which signify them to be meaningless to future generations. But Adventure Time tells us, that is the blessing which time bestows on us, which prevents us from being paralyzed by the layers and layers of past meaning stuck on every crevice of reality which any conscious being has ever interacted with or been aware of. We don’t remember everything about the past that came before us, and that’s okay. And people in the future will forget much about us too, and that’s okay. Life is important not because it’s every detail is remembered, but because it occurred, because people’s lives were full of the instantly forgotten joyful minutia which fill our waking hours and make us happy.
Adventure Time is a series of joyous, heartwarming, colorful, G-rated memento mori. Everything ends, it tells us, so make up a song, spend time with your friends, pick up a hobby, ask someone out, ask someone else out, dance on the tombs of kings and use their jeweled crowns as doorstops. Your life is temporary, but life itself goes on forever both behind us and ahead of us, and the people that come after us may be different, but they’ll be familiar in the ways that matter. Even when your show is over, the fun really never ends.
The bitterest satire can’t keep up with plain vanilla reality right now.
We are living in the dystopian future
Look up the phrase “astroturfing”. It’s things like this, where corporations create fake movements that appear, at first glance, to be grassroots (hence the name) in order to trick people into buying into their causes/voting in favor of their interests. It’s absolutely some dystopian capitalist bs.
File this under “super obvious yet I always seem to forget it.”
I don’t write romance (I totally respect people who do, though!) but this is also great writing advice in general! What is preventing the protagonist from achieving their goal?
Why can’t these two people be together now?
Why can’t the mystery be solved now?
Why can’t they overthrow the evil overlord now?
If you don’t have a solid answer for these questions, that’s a good indicator that the plot could use some more work.
Also test your answer a little bit. If it’s as thin as they’re just refusing to sit down and have a simple conversation, you might want to re-think how things are going.
As a beta reader/editor, I tend to ask this question a lot: “Why are they doing it this way when there’s a much easier path available?” That’s not to say that they should take the easier path, because that would usually be boring. Instead, the point is that the question needs an answer–either eliminate the easier path or give them a very clear reason for not taking it. (And if I’m asking the question, that reason isn’t as clear as you think it might be.)
I find it very difficult to root for characters who have a sensible option available and just don’t take it. If the only reason is “Because there wouldn’t be a story otherwise,” you haven’t actually found the story yet.
And this is why the Big Misunderstanding as a primary plot device is almost universally disliked.
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to put into words just how much this show means to me, but I will say this-
Adventure Time is the purest reflection of human emotion I have ever seen. It makes me feel, down to my core, in a way nothing else can. It makes me marvel at the joy, and pain, and warmth, and grief, and above all- the sheer wonder of life.
Loss, candy and bacon.
How lucky we are to be alive.
How lucky am I to have been alive at the same time as you.
conservatives are intolerant of who you are; progressives are intolerant of what you do. a good cartoon.
Why is that bakery selling “Bible”
Just one Bible? Offered at a totally unrelated business? I’m so confused
I feel bad for OP because they probably just wanted to post their little post and get their handful of notes for it, but this is such a perfect piece of rhetoric to dissect that I’m going to forcibly make it into a teaching tool, and they’re just going to have to deal with that. In this case, OP and the cartoonist are confusing judgment with prejudice. It’s likely to be simple ignorance on OP’s part, but it’s a deliberate rhetorical choice that the cartoonist made to create this piece of propaganda.
OP and the cartoonist are both conflating judgment/prejudice and equating them, stating that they are both equally bad forms of “intolerance”.
Society usually suggests it isfair and reasonable to “judge” people differently based on their behavior choices. This is the underpinning of many institutions, such as education, justice, barter, and (generally) employment. If people behave badly, this rule says, then they are supposed to receive fewer rewards and opportunities, until they correct their bad behavior or are forcibly deprived of their rights.
This judgment is also how many people behave at a personal level, as it allows personal relationships to function, and behavioral choices can be made based on previously agreed rules about what good behavior looks like. This is generally considered to be an acceptable way to run a society; if someone lies, steals, cheats, or attacks others, then they have behaved badly, and the society judges and treats them accordingly. In this manner, society is kept in a relatively stable form. It would be very hard to demolish this system, and I’m not sure what a sustainable alternative would be.
This is why “Judgment” is considered to be logical and reasonable, while “prejudice” (quite literally pre-judgment) is considered to be illogical and unreasonable. That’s why having “good judgement” means being able to make good decisions, while there is no such thing as “good prejudice”. Judgement makes the laws; prejudice, when used to discriminate against people, is often illegal. They are not the same thing.
The idea that bad behavior should
not be tolerated is as old as the Code of Hammurabi. It’s the
foundation of multiple religious texts. It’s what little children are taught from the cradle all around the world, and is the foundation of most Heavens and Hells. It is usually called
something like “judgment”, “justice,” “consequences” or “discipline” …
not “intolerance.” But if it is called intolerance, then it is certainly correct that bad behavior is not supposed to be tolerated.
According to the OP and cartoonist, the animal kingdom is surprisingly left-wing, with social animals being particularly intolerant of “what people do” when those actions unfairly deprive others of resources. Chimpanzees and ravens can be taught to play cooperative games by scientists – and, famously, social animals don’t want to play with animals that reveal themselves as cheaters or thieves. Animals that behave unfairly during cooperative games quickly lose the trust of other animals, and their fellows will refuse to play cooperative games with them. To me, as an evolutionary biologist, it’s amazing to think that concepts like “accountability” are meaningful to animals.
If you genuinely believe that this is a bad thing – that intolerance of “what [people] do” is just as bad as intolerance of “what [people] are,” then my goodness! Equating those would be a complete overhaul of the most basic tenets of human society, spirituality and morality. I really would be interested in knowing what the alternative would be, and how a society could be run if it genuinely considered these things to be equal. I would genuinely like to know how far this belief goes when questioned, and how people manage to reconcile it with their position in society.
So what’s the idea behind the rhetoric in the OP? Well, apart from confusing and misinforming people, it hopes to convince them that judgment and prejudice are equally bad. This will be useful because if people believe this, it can be used to convince them that they must not punish social-rule-breakers (“You are obligated to serve customers who behave badly”) as well as diminishing the role of civil rights. The idea that “both sides are equally bad” is a commonly sown one in this decade, as it hopes to create a majority of disillusioned, docile people who won’t vote and don’t believe in change, leaving the playing field to be controlled by energetic extremists.
But in an insidious way, it also attacks that idea of “accountability,” that nebulous nation-building concept that even crows hold dear. Personally, that’s not what I like to see in my opinion leaders – it’s most commonly promoted by people who behave badly.
OP is right about cartoon quintessentially full of shit. Thank you @elodieunderglass for that excellent demonstration of exactly why and how.
ETA edited because I completely misread initially – the OP is the initial comment, not the cartoon!!!!!!
Plot Designing 