“Being able to tell the difference between fiction and reality” is kinda… not the point. At all.
It’s a lousy argument that completely misses the point entirely.
Cultivation theory, at it’s baseline, doesn’t say that consuming, say, violent media makes you wanna kill or hurt people. What cultivation theory IS is saying “the proliferation of excessive violent media can influence how the people who consume that media perceive about the world” ie a person with already violent tendencies might be more likely to act on those violent tendencies because, due to the sheer glut of violent media, violence might seem more acceptable than it actually is culturally.
And this shit is subconscious, you can’t say you’re not affected by it because “you know the difference between fiction and reality”, because often time you don’t actively register that it IS influencing you.
Or, in the case of many ads, you do know it’s trying to influence you and you put up guard walls – but that burger on screen DOES look delicious and the Burger King is only down the road so why not grab something to eat?
The decline of sharks due to Jaws is people perceiving the sharks as inherently dangerous to human and, thus, to keep people safe, need to be culled.
The rise of the KKK in the late 1910′s and early 20′s was due to Birth of a Nation portraying the KKK as sympathetic and cool.
The decline of the KKK in the 40s can be attributed to their mocking portrayal Superman radio serials.
This shit all matters.
This shit is all people being influenced by fiction even if they can acknowledge that fiction isn’t reality.
To expand and reiterate.
Yes, not everyone is going to be affected by cultivation theory the same way or in some cases, even at all. This varies from individual to individual and from society to society, and the effects of said “cultivation” can be stronger or weaker, once again, depending on the individual. To name the name of one of the most famous studies on the subject “Some Genres have Some Effect on Some People”.
However
When content is consumed by thousands, or in the case of big budget stuff, millions. “Some Genres have Some Effect on Some People” has a non insignificant chance of impacting society.
And just because you know this, and can tell yourself “Pfft, I’M not being affected! It’s only IDIOTS and KIDS who get affected by this stuff!”
You’re not as ironclad and immune as you think.
The third-person effect is a very real and prevalent type of cognitive dissonance. Sometimes people who say “I’m immune to being influenced by media” are the ones being influenced the most.
The interesting thing about Glados/HAL 9000 parallels is that
Hal was conceived at a time when artificial intelligence was more of a fictional construct than a practical possibility. Hal is introduced as humanlike because the audience is familiar with and comfortable with humans, but they aren’t familiar with or comfortable with living computers. It’s when he starts acting robotic and calculated that the audience realizes “oh no, he’s a computer” and he becomes threatening.
By the time Glados was conceived, we had become used to computer automated systems. Synthetic voices offering us information is something we encounter in daily life. Glados is introduced as a computerized preprogrammed voice because that’s what the audience is familiar and comfortable with. It’s when she starts acting human and emotional that the audience realizes “oh no, she’s alive” and she becomes threatening.
Oh hey it’s this post again
I fucking love this observation.
@deepchrome I found the post you were talking about!
Since so many nice people (thanks everyone who confirmed there was still interest in this project!) showed an interest in seeing this, here is my GAR calculations!
For additionally nerdery about how troopers are numbered, look under the cut.
Meta and / or discussion on the argument, as well as questions, are welcome as long as everyone stays polite.
Please do not take this as canon, this is all fanon stuff I made that I plan using for my stories and am only sharing for those interested in it, as well as for anyone who wants to use it too (I’d like a nod if that were ever to happen).
(I also headcanon that Sifo Dyas ordered 5 of these GAR, so for the actual numbers of clones produced take this and multiply for 5, and that’s why he needed funds from someone like Hego Damask).
The explanation beneath the cut was made with the idea of it being interactive, in the sense of explaining how you get the whole number out, allowing for anyone wanting to use it to make a streamlined process towards creating their own OCs numbers.
Thank the Force, I’m not the only person who’s tried to lay it all out in one place… Definitely like your formatting choices better than my pencil and notebook paper, though!
I started it all off with a lot of scribbling on my notebooks too!
Most of the original work for this one is in Italy right now, but I find that ideas come out better if I put them down in paper first, then Skype (bothering my friends and fiancee) and then working on formatting them properly through Open Office.
Makes it easier for sharing 😉
Good to know!
How’d you gather your data for it? I took notes from the wikia pages about the GAR, and guesstimated when necessary… Then threw most of it out to build a completely different system for an AU of mine. xDx
There are actual canon numbers for the GAR, but they are made … well, I can find them for you if you want me to and then we can bitch together about them. Mostly they account up to 3 million total soldiers, which is complete and absolute bullshit.
I decided, much like you did, to throw it out of my window (with many mutterings of “It’s like the 10k total Jedi all over again” [another rant for another day] and “these people do not realize how vast a fucking galaxy is, Force save from fucking Lucas and his inability to plot things even half way decently” as well as “you cannot have five different ranks all named Jedi General with no other specifying denominator, for fuck’s sake”) and then took inspiration from the Roman Legions and from officer titles in army rosters on wikipedia and did my own thing.
I decided to go with base 5 for the CTs because it made the most numerical sense to me (and it went well with the Cadets episode stuff where they had Echo, Fives, Cutup, Hevy and Droidbat forming a single unit) but you cannot simply send your men in the field without a superior officer of sort around, and that’s where the two CCs came from.
Medics had to be included, but medical track is so different that I decided to make them their own group.
Then I started reading up on troopers and I found out that there actually were many Legends-canon troopers that had very specific fields of action (and thus would have required specific training) and that’s where the DC and EC companies came from.
At that point I realized that I also had to slot in the various commandos / ARC (Alpha ARC are the original ones, Beta ARC are the ones who were CT first and then trained for ARC) / spec ops guys and that’s where those units came from.
I threw in a reminder to myself that the Nulls were around and that apparently there were also clone space marines on the ships, which I found out while I was reading about transportation and such for the GAR, and decided to call it a few weeks of work well done XD
I have also headcanons re: production as view by the Kaminoans, the fact that extra-troopers were made and then repurposed (read: moved to support / command deck / comm position) when the Kaminoans had to whittle down the clones to the required numbers (because given the time needed to raise-train a clone, it makes no sense for them to just make the precise number they need and hope for the best, but it does make sense for them to make extras and then repurpose the ones who are scoring the lowest in their specific tracks), Tipoca City being a Showcase Facility rather than an actual training facility (hence why they had undeveloped, still-fetal clones at various stages of growth as well as child clones still around when they were so close to their estimate delivery time) and other similar things.
the funniest thing in the entire pirates of the caribbean series is definitely that one scene in At World’s End where they have parlay but davy jones is part of it, and rather than have him stand in the shallows or something they get a big bucket of water and have in stand on it on shore
who thought of that idea? who thought “put davy jones in a bucket of water” and had the guts to suggest it aloud? and then who went “hey that sounds like a great idea!”
at some point someone told davy jones their idea was for him to stand in a bucket of water and he agreed to it
*stands majestically in a bucket*
ok but notice the trail of buckets behind him meaning he walked from the ocean through three other buckets of water before he got into the one hes standing in
It’s even funnier when you consider how he must have figured all this out in the first place.
Some folks are asking “well, if he can avoid the no-dry-land curse simply by standing in a bucket, doesn’t that ruin his whole motivation?”, but he’s not on dry land here.
The parley takes place on a sandbar – which, for the unfamiliar, is a temporary “island” of sand deposited by breaking waves, unconnected with the shore, that spends most of its time submerged, being exposed only at low tide.
What Jones is doing here is rules-lawyering his curse. Can you imagine the trial and error he must have gone through in order to determine that this would actually work?
“Okay, do islands count as dry land? How about parts of the shore below the high tide mark? Reefs? Shoals? What if I stand in a pool of water on a shoal? Does it have to be seawater, or will any water do? Does it have to be a natural tidepool, or can it be something artificial, like a bucket?”
What I am saying is that there must have been a process.
Pretty sure that this implies that the reverse – a bucket of sand, floating on the water (big bucket with just a bit of sand), would qualify as dry land. That’s absurd, so I’m pretty sure that his lawyer pulled a fast one over the curse governor.
It may be absurd, but the text of the film bears it out. Davy Jones can sense the presence of his heart while it’s at sea, but not while it’s on land (indeed, that’s why he buried it on land in the first place: to break his connection with it) – yet placing the heart in a simple jar of dirt conceals it from Jones’ awareness just as surely as burial on land does, even if the jar is on a boat at the time. Suitably prepared vessels filled with dirt absolutely count as dry land for the purpose of Jones’ curse.
Then the reverse should also be true. If he buried it in a jar of water, no matter how far inland it is, he would be able to sense it. So by this logic, any container of seawater counts as not dry land, ergo, the bucket is a perfectly viable loophole.
Not necessarily. It’s traditionally a lot easier to accidentally get whammied by a curse than it is to weasel around it – I figure that’s why he’s using multiple layers of indirection here. He’s forbidden to set foot on dry land, but it’s technically not dry land (it’s a sandbar, a non-permanent landform exposed only at low tide) and he technically didn’t set foot on it (he’s standing in a bucket of water). It’s entirely possible that either one of those things alone wouldn’t make the grade.
okay but this all raises one further, very important question: if it’s specifically “dry land” he’s forbidden from, what about wetlands.
can Davy Jones fight you in salt marshes? can he throw down in a peat bog?Swamp Battle?
I’m a dumb idiot who needed Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria to hit in the same month to realize Kaijus in Pacific Rim were a metaphor for climate change and hurricanes and, like, the movie isn’t even subtle about it
Can you imagine how differently their lives would’ve gone if Ron, in trying to transfigure Scabbers, had actually transfigured him back into a human? Just take a moment to imagine McGonagall’s reaction if Peter Pettigrew had abruptly appeared in her classroom from Ronald Weasley’s rat. Take a moment.
Or if Ron had fucked it up a little worse and couldn’t get ‘Scabbers’ back and McGonagall had take him to disenchant him and next thing we know there’s a naked Peter Pettigrew sitting on McGonagall’s desk and the kids in that class learn six new swear words, a hex they will never dare to use, and a fear of Minerva McGonagall’s wrath that will be with them until the day they die.
Ten and twenty years later first years are being pulled aside and warned never mess around in Transfiguration seriously the last time a kid mucked something up in that class Professor McGonagall used two semi-legal hexes, took down a Death Eater and sabotaged the rise of the Dark Lord before Potter had time to get his wand out.
What most of Hogwarts learned first on that otherwise-unexceptionable day was that Professor McGonagall could sure scream loud.
Professor Flitwick’s Charms 5th-year Charms class was close enough to catch the full effect, and the door had been left open besides; en masse the students recoiled with shock and a miscast Hiccuping Charm broke one of the windows (out which the entire flock of ravens they were practicing on escaped to the Forbidden Forest where they only had to worry about centaurs, rather than annoying young humans with wands).
Up in the Divination Tower, Sibyl Trelawny preened over her foresight to have warned her students of an unprecedented catastrophe likely to occur before the hour was out.
Out in Greenhouse Five, a NEWT-level Herbology class looked up in puzzlement, and most of them were subsequently bitten by the Venomous Tentaculae they were attempting to propagate. It does not do to ignore a Venomous Tentacula when you’re prodding at its intimate parts with a cotton ball held in tweezers, so the class was cancelled while two-thirds of the students headed for the infirmary and the rest of them headed into the castle because if they stayed with the Venomous Tentaculae they’d be outnumbered, and nobody wants that.
And down in the dungeons, Professor Snape turned away from comparing Lee Jordan’s Pepper-Up Potion to spoiled cream at what sounded like a woman screaming from the entrance hall. As the scream continued, rising in pitch, he ordered the class to remain where they were and behave, sweeping out of the room just in time to miss Theodore Nott suddenly jumping up and yelping as though someone had put a crocodile heart down the back of his robes.
Fred Weasley stepped back from the unfortunate Slytherin, shared a smirk with his twin, and stuck his head out the door to make sure Snape had rounded the corner before leading the way out of the classroom.
–
Back in the Transfiguration classroom, about forty-five minutes ago, it had started innocently enough. Ron Weasley, possessed of a broken wand and a lurking suspicion that most of the family’s magical talent had been soaked up by his siblings before he was around to get any, had attempted to turn his pet rat, Scabbers, into a teacup.
Scabbers had not become a teacup.
Scabbers, blast his useless scraggly little backside, had become a furry, vaguely teacup-shaped monstrosity out of which absolutely no one would have been tempted to drink, and to make matters worse, he still had a tail.
It was moving.
Harry was hiding a smile behind his hand. Dean and Seamus weren’t even trying to hide theirs, elbowing each other and laughing. Parvati and Lavender were looking with disgust and horror at either Scabbers or him, and Hermione was opening her mouth, no doubt ready to tell him exactly what he’d done wrong.
Which only made it worse that he really thought he’d done everything right this time.
He snatched Scabbers off the desk (eww, the base of the cup had the same texture as rat feet) and turned away from Hermione. He made the wand movement again, picturing in his mind the way McGonagall had demonstrated it. “Erreverto.”
“Erreverto. Erreverto. Erreverto.”
It didn’t work. It didn’t work when Professor McGonagall stopped by and gave Hermione two points for Gryffindor for getting the spell perfect in both directions. It didn’t work when Harry made his successful transfiguration (Ron looked; the pattern was a little bit furry but it was definitely a teacup). Ron’s lips formed the shape of a word that would’ve made his mother box his ears had she heard it and attempted the reverse transfiguration, which didn’t work either.
Finally, faced not only with the indignity of failure but the threat of Scabbers being stuck like that, he’d gone up to Professor McGonagall’s desk.
“Um, Professor?”
Professor McGonagall looked up from the paper she was grading and looked from him to the squirming teacup. “Problems, Mr. Weasley?”
“Um, yeah, Professor. I can’t get it to work in either direction and it’s not fair to Scabbers to make him stay as a teacup just because I can’t do a spell right and can you maybe … ?”
“I suppose so, Mr. Weasley,” she said, and waved her wand in the exact manner Ron had been doing all along.
Nothing happened.
Professor McGonagall looked very, very puzzled.
“Now that’s odd,” she said softly.
As one, the other students looked up; a few of them rose from their seats and quietly moved closer.
She did not attempt the transfiguration in the other direction. Instead, she made a complex motion with her wand and murmured an incantation that possibly only Hermione recognized. The teacup squeaked. Professor McGonagall looked more puzzled than ever, and made a sweeping wand movement that ended with a sharp jab and uttered, “Arcanum finite!”
And there was a loud bang, and there was a pale, pudgy, and very naked man sprawled out on her desk, and she jumped back hard enough to knock her chair into the wall and screamed.
–
Having taught a particularly rigorous course of magical study to children and teens for quite some time now, Minerva McGonagall had become accustomed to certain things. Students who didn’t listen. Students who did rude things to the mice when they thought she wasn’t looking. Students who accidentally turned a frog or a raven into a flock of starlings or a school of strange slimy South American fish (and tried to solve the immediate problem by filling the classroom with two feet of water, neglecting to consider the gap under the door). Students who tried to transfigure their noses into a more appealing shape and wound up in the hospital wing regrowing their nostrils.
Naked men on her desk was something Minerva McGonagall had never had an occasion to get used to. What made it worse was that she recognized this one, and he’d been dead for more than a decade.
Inferius! ws her first thought, followed shortly thereafter by Animagus, which collided with Peter Pettigrew! and produced the utterly horrifying thought of what if all four of them were Animagi? which didn’t bear thinking about at all, so her brain jumped to if he wasn’t killed by a Dark Wizard then why didn’t he say so? and realized there was only one possible explanation why, and about that time her eyes registered that parts of Peter Pettigrew she really doesn’t want to know about were flopping about in front of her face, and she was screaming as she jumped back.
The flow of invective which followed somehow failed to astonish her one bit. Some part of her registered, peripherally, the shocked faces of her students, but most of her attention was directed at Peter Pettigrew, who at very least faked his own death and at worst framed Sirius Black and if Black didn’t betray the Potters then who … did. And the words poured out of her, filthy English and filthier Latin while Pettigrew squirmed on the table, his face rage and guilt and fear and something shifty and contemptible, and he turned to look at the stunned students, calculating, and then lunged for Ron Weasley’s wand.
–
Severus Snape had reached the Entrance Hall by the time the scream died away and the invective replaced it. He almost smirked, amid the alarm; of all the things he’d never expected to hear from Minerva McGonagall … he took the stairs two at a time, still not noticing the students who followed.
He did notice the Herbology class, which had stopped on the way to the Infirmary and were staring transfixed in the direction of the Transfiguration classroom, but pushed his way through them, getting Venomous Tentacula pollen all over his robes in the process.
From the other end of the corridor came Professor Flitwick’s Charms class, with Professor Flitwick bringing up the rear and pushing his way between students.
–
Ron looked stunned as the man who’d been his pet rat snatched the wand from his hand; Professor McGonagal’s expression shifted to one beyond fury and when the entire class recoiled, it wasn’t from the naked man with the wand.
“Laedo!” Minerva McGonagall snapped.
–
Ron Weasley’s wand cast a Splintering Curse many years beyond its rightful owner’s abilities, and it did Peter Pettigrew the poor favor of eliminating the door, which might have slowed him down a bit.
–
Severus Snape flailed and skidded to a halt as the Transfiguration classroom’s door shattered. He stepped back just in time, and stared, jaw dropped in shock, as a naked man he recognized from his school days flew past him and bellyflopped against the wall, bounced, and collapsed to the ground just in time to avoid the “Exitium!” which followed and vaporized an impresive chunk of the castle’s stone wall.
Fred and George and Lee Jordan, determined to stay at the front of the crowd, had been pushed almost against Professor Snape by their fellow Potions classmates and some pollen-coated Hufflepuffs. Fred squirmed aside hastily as Professor McGonagall appeared in the doorway, the look on her face so utterly livid that Professors Snape and Flitwick both reflexively stepped back.
Snape tripped over George’s foot and fell against a knot of Hufflepuffs, releasing another cloud of pollen and knocking them backwards. Pettigrew saw his opportunity and took it, scrambling to his feet, stumbling sideways, and launching himself towards the gap.
And Minerva McGonagall made a thrust with her wand and said, “Perdo.”
CRACK!
In the very loud silence which followed, Filius Flitwick squeaked, “The Splinching Charm, Minerva?”
She might’ve looked embarrassed for a moment, and then she smiled as she looked down at Pettigrew, who lay on his belly, his arms and legs lying akimbo some distance away.
“Unorthodox,” she said, “but useful in a pinch. If someone would inform the Headmaster, and send an owl to the Ministry—not Fudge, not Crouch, someone competent—Shacklebolt, perhaps. Students, return to your classrooms, please. Mr. Weasley, I’m very sorry, but I do believe it’s impossible to return you your rat. However, the zero I was going to have to give you for the day’s work is entirely undeserved, as you were not transfiguring a normal rat. You may make the lesson up any time this week.”
–
The story was, of course, much embellished by the time it reached all the students. Versions of it had the intruder peppering Snape with a Glitter Hex or transfiguring Ron’s rat into a pair of boxers, and people had to be disabused of the notion that it had been Voldemort who’d been hiding as a rat all this time.
Snape gave both Weasley twins detention for tripping him, and took forty-seven points total from Gryffindor over the next few weeks for various and sundry pollen references.
Kingsley Shacklebolt showed up with a team of Aurors in time to meet Professor Dumbledore; the Wizengamot launched an investigation into the events surrounding the Potters’ murder; the results turned into a scandal which saw the release of Sirius Black and the forced resignation of both Director Bartemious Crouch and Minister Cornelius Fudge. Director of Magical Law Enforcement Amelia Bones was confirmed as Minister of Magic shortly thereafte, and the Daily Prophet reported that Sirius Black (“Godfather to the Boy-Who-Lived!” “Framed, Abandoned, Condemned to Living Hell!” “Heart-Wrenching: His Release In Pictures, Page 17!”) was considering applying for a teaching position at Hogwarts, “but just for a year, I’ve been cursed enough for one lifetime.” (“The Prophet reminds its readers that the so-called “curse” on a certain Hogwarts teaching position is almost certainly a mere string of coincidences.“)
And, Minerva thought with relish some months later, it was almost seven weeks before anyone attempted messing around in her class.
Steel Phoenix Studios 