Tarume - Untitled

I'm so tired of people saying that the Prince from Snow White is a creep for kissing Snow White when he thought she was dead.

People act as if he put his tongue down her throat while she looks like a regular corpse.

Maybe I'm just more comfortable with death because of my upbringing.

There's a European tradition that you would kiss dead people goodbye. You would also wait with a dying person because dying alone was one of the most horrible ways to die.

In Poland, you would spend three days with the dead body of your relative in the house so family and friends have time to say goodbyes. We even have pictures of family members in coffins, so we could remember them.

Yeah, it's a very post-modern, historically, culturally-small-minded way to look at it.

Specifically in this movie (which is a fairy tale's fairy tale) people just...totally ignore the scene where The Prince is introduced.

Seriously and truthfully, BECAUSE the Prince only takes action in three scenes of the movie, you HAVE to take all three of them very very seriously. Because thats all there is to know about him. That's how fairy tales work: lots of information hiding under very brief, simple snippets of information. It's called nuance.

Anyway.

The Prince kisses Snow White as a culmination of their promised love for each other.

First scene he's in, he falls in love with her because of her obvious purity and he overhears her longing for someone to love her. Then she runs away because she's not sure of him, and doesn't know him. But he sings his part of the song, which is all about how he has just one heart to give, one devotion to spend, and he's choosing to give it and spend it on her if she'll have him.

And she will have him. How do we know? She sends a kiss to him on the dove. That's how the exchange ends; that's how she responds, and that's why he leaves satisfied. It's their engagement scene. They're promising their hearts to each other.

Fast-forward, the Queen messes up what might have been the natural follow-through of that engagement which is marriage by trying to kill Snow White, she's living in the woods, but she won't forget the Prince and wholeheartedly believes he'll come find her.

And the very next thing we hear about him is that he keeps his promise. He's got one heart, one love, one devotion, and it's promised to Snow White, and he will not stop searching for her. When he finds her, he's returning her kiss from their engagement scene. He thinks she's dead, but he has to finish his quest anyway. This is him, trying to keep his promise even if she's dead; he's trying to fulfill the exchange they had when they saw each other last.

It's ridiculous to assume that she needed to be awake and alive to give permission for him to kiss her; it's ignorant of the whole relationship, symbolic and literal, between these two fairy tale characters. She already sent him her kiss and her heart; he already promised to claim it; he's fulfilling the promise in that scene.

Crazy postmodern people, don't know how to take in a story. Not everything gets to have your socio-cultural lens imposed upon it.

And here is the Krista post that I’ve been mentioning in the Rashta analysis. Krista is like Rashta level 2 but less prickly, and she can garner way more sympathy compared to our other problem girl. This is going to be 100% spoiler because we’ve only seen her once and had a name drop in the English Webtoon comic.

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Stop saying capitalism when you mean consumerism.

Stop saying capitalism when you mean corporatism.

Stop saying capitalism when what you're experiencing is actually much closer to socialism.

"Battles are ugly when women fight" =/= "women shouldn't fight ever." Jack never said that. In Narnia, women demonstrably do fight in battles. Case in point: Lucy in HHB, Jill in LB.

You can judge the moral value of any society based on how it treats its most vulnerable members: women, children, minorities. Women are inherently vulnerable in wartime. Any battle in which women must fight is de facto extremely ugly, and it reflects very poorly on the society that placed them in that position.

That said, "Women feel that they must fight in the battle because the situation is so desperate/the culture fails to recognize their vulnerability/the culture actively exploits them" is entirely different than "adult women choose to fight as a matter of calling and do so in culturally appropriate ways." There's a very good reason why most modern democratic nations allow women to enlist, but don't include women in their drafts.

Father Christmas says "battles are ugly when women fight" specifically to clarify that Susan and Lucy don't have to go into battle against the Witch even though he's arming them. He's saying, "That's not your job; Narnia won't put its women in positions where they must fight." This is not a remotely misogynist statement; it's saying that a noble society has a responsibility to care for women during wartime. Which. Yes.

Headcanon:

At some point between the Silver Chair and the Last Battle, as Susan is slowly falling away from her faith in Narnia, she and Eustace have a fight about it. She just can’t understand how someone who used to be so logical, someone who hadn’t grow up on fairy tales at all, could believe something so fantastical. She calls him a baby, tells him he needs to grow up and open his eyes to the real world because this is all there is.

His answer?

“Well, you know, I don’t really care what you say about it. Maybe it is all just a silly game, something we made up to pass the time in a world that is so dreary and dark. But it was real to us anyway, and that’s all that matters. So I’m going to go on believing in Aslan even if there isn’t any Aslan. I’m going to keep living as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. Because even if it wasn’t real, that make-believe world, as you called it, is a good deal better than this one.”

(Bonus: He doesn’t even realize he echoed Puddleglum’s speech to the Lady of the Green Curdle. But the situation is uncanny, and Puddleglum’s words had stuck with him in such a way that he’d never forgotten them.)

I’m glad Maes Hughes died.

He’s a fan favorite character and I enjoy him a lot too, but I think fundamentally he’s a character who has to die. His role in the narrative is to haunt it.

I might be even more of a weirdo because I enjoy his manga characterization over his Brotherhood or ‘03 portrayal, but I love the idea of Hughes being someone the Elric brothers barely know - someone we, the audience, barely see.

Until he dies.

Because suddenly he’s everywhere. He was Roy’s friend and Armstrong’s superior officer and Winry’s acquaintance and Elicia’s father - and he was the soldier both Ed and Al knew, but didn’t actually know, that got killed because of them anyway.

In the manga Winry stays at Hughes’ place, but Ed and Al enter his house for the first time after they found out he died. For them, it’s not about losing a friend (though I am sure they liked him just fine) because that story is already Roy’s - for them it’s about realizing that this plot they’ve involved themselves in kills people that aren’t actually directly involved at all to begin with. It makes sense for their allies and friends and loved-ones to be targeted by the antagonists - but a soldier who mostly joined in because he was at the right (or wrong) place at the right (wrong) time? That’s not supposed to happen. And that’s what makes Hughes’ death so hard on them.

(and poor Elicia - abandoned children without their fathers were always a weakness of Ed’s)

But Roy? Yeah… he suffers. From the moment of Hughes’ dead on, Roy is haunted by it. By him. His best friend follows him everywhere. We see it in the way Roy only involves himself in the plot because Hughes figured something out and Roy is desperate for answers. He hunts down the homunculi to save this country, sure, but mostly so he can burn his best friend’s murderer to the ground. When Riza talks about winning against the Führer and their military dictatorship, she talks about all of them, not a hint of revenge coloring her vision - but Roy? It is telling that it isn’t a greater ideal that makes him torture Envy, but the agony of his best friend’s death.

The thing that almost breaks Roy is Maes.

No.

It’s Maes’ memory haunting the narrative.

And isn’t that beautiful?

The tragedy of it all, the horror, and the realization that Roy Mustang never really recovered from the War, that his friends are the only think keeping him in one piece, the fact that Roy Mustang is a Hero and a Monster and a fallible human capable of love.

Maes Hughes has to die to remind all of us of what Roy Mustang is capable of: love, loyalty, devotion…. and the slaughter and torture of numerous people.

His ghost is haunting the narrative - and for that I love him.

Peer to peer reviews are definitely something to ask for always!!!!! With insurance that isn't UHC the denial might just be one document missing and if they can get that in the P2P then the denial might be overturned!!!

Ars Technica

UnitedHealth uses AI model with 90% error rate to deny care, lawsuit alleges

For the largest health insurer in the US, AI's error rate is like a feature, not a bug.

UnitedHealthcare, the largest health insurance company in the US, is allegedly using a deeply flawed AI algorithm to override doctors' judgments and wrongfully deny critical health coverage to elderly patients. This has resulted in patients being kicked out of rehabilitation programs and care facilities far too early, forcing them to drain their life savings to obtain needed care that should be covered under their government-funded Medicare Advantage Plan.

It's not just flawed, it's flawed in UnitedHealthcare's favor.

That's not a flaw... that's fraud.

Quick reminder that vending machines kill more people annually than sharks do.