RE: Otter's Official Television Thread
October 23, 2019 at 11:08 pm
(This post was last modified: October 23, 2019 at 11:48 pm by Rev. Rye.)
Currently watching Cracker, specifically To Be Somebody, and just... fucking wow.
This is a story of a man who's been so marginalised that he felt he had no choice but to become the biggest bastard he can be: "Treat people like scum and they start acting like scum!". And while the video implies it's just racism, at least in his case, it's so much more than that. Earlier in the episode, he had to bury his father, and he had to deal with the relatively minor microagression of being ignored when asked about the spelling of "Rottweiler." And later in the serial, it becomes clear just where the root of this alienation comes from: he survived the Hillsborough Disaster, an incident where 96 fans of Liverpool FC were trampled to death and The Sun blamed the victims for their own deaths and even aired false allegations about the supporters (like that they pickpocketed the dead, pissed on cops and even assaulted one for trying to give one of the injured the kiss of life) on the front page. And people still called the Kopites scum even after the Taylor Report exonerated them. The Sun have since apologised, but it's highly unlikely that Merseyside will ever forgive them (it still barely sells in Liverpool and Liverpool FC refuses to allow the Sun access to Anfield).
Make no mistake, Albie's actions are completely unjustifiable, and probably would still be if he decided to just drive to the Sun's offices and hold them hostage (to be fair, he does blow them up, but only after a lot of murders of people who did nothing to deserve death), and so many of the targets he pick are just people who've also had to deal with a lot of shit and don't really have much power over him anyway. It's kind of like how many are turning to the alt-right in similar ways, just replace one lone and unbalanced Liverpool FC supporters with millions of gamers and you get this:
And they use their bigotry as their weapons because they feel like it's all they have. Hell, elsewhere, he talks about how he feels left out by Labour, which mirrors how a non-negligible number of them were disaffected leftists who feel like they're leaving them behind (but didn't have the sense to try for a less horrible option.) You're looking at me and you're looking at the future indeed.
But the fact remains that what Albie's going through is something millions of people went through, and honestly, for well over a decade, I was one of them. To quote a post I made a couple months ago:
Or, as Albie says, "Treat people like scum, they start ACTING like scum." And I still believe that it's important to try and break the cycle before they start acting like scum and we have to get Fitz to break them down and tell them where the bodies are buried.
Then again, maybe it's at least a step up that here Robert Carlyle needs a 4-penny upcharge to commit a horrific act of violence, when other times, he doesn't:
This is a story of a man who's been so marginalised that he felt he had no choice but to become the biggest bastard he can be: "Treat people like scum and they start acting like scum!". And while the video implies it's just racism, at least in his case, it's so much more than that. Earlier in the episode, he had to bury his father, and he had to deal with the relatively minor microagression of being ignored when asked about the spelling of "Rottweiler." And later in the serial, it becomes clear just where the root of this alienation comes from: he survived the Hillsborough Disaster, an incident where 96 fans of Liverpool FC were trampled to death and The Sun blamed the victims for their own deaths and even aired false allegations about the supporters (like that they pickpocketed the dead, pissed on cops and even assaulted one for trying to give one of the injured the kiss of life) on the front page. And people still called the Kopites scum even after the Taylor Report exonerated them. The Sun have since apologised, but it's highly unlikely that Merseyside will ever forgive them (it still barely sells in Liverpool and Liverpool FC refuses to allow the Sun access to Anfield).
Make no mistake, Albie's actions are completely unjustifiable, and probably would still be if he decided to just drive to the Sun's offices and hold them hostage (to be fair, he does blow them up, but only after a lot of murders of people who did nothing to deserve death), and so many of the targets he pick are just people who've also had to deal with a lot of shit and don't really have much power over him anyway. It's kind of like how many are turning to the alt-right in similar ways, just replace one lone and unbalanced Liverpool FC supporters with millions of gamers and you get this:
And they use their bigotry as their weapons because they feel like it's all they have. Hell, elsewhere, he talks about how he feels left out by Labour, which mirrors how a non-negligible number of them were disaffected leftists who feel like they're leaving them behind (but didn't have the sense to try for a less horrible option.) You're looking at me and you're looking at the future indeed.
But the fact remains that what Albie's going through is something millions of people went through, and honestly, for well over a decade, I was one of them. To quote a post I made a couple months ago:
Quote:When I was in the third grade, Columbine happened. And people started to create profiles of potential school shooters. Kids heard about it and used it as an excuse to bully me. Even several teachers bought into it and at least one of my grade school teachers said they thought I could potentially be a shooter. And this idea just got me more and more bitter and full of hatred. And so they just kept doing it. By the time I graduated grade school, I was convinced that I was a ticking time bomb ready to go off. At least in High school, some of the teachers were good enough to me that I started to mellow out. I still got two attempts to frame me as a school shooter, but those fizzled out. But still, that fear remained in me for years. At one point, I wrote a story and sent it to a college teacher and she said I seemed really interested in Svidrigailoff-types but that I wasn't one myself. This legitimately shocked me. Around the same time, I started to go to therapy, and I wrote an essay about Children of Paradise and talked about how much I saw myself in Pierre Lacenaire, the sociopathic murderer. My therapist said that "that's not the [Rev] I know." It was only then that I started to figure out maybe I might be a decent person after all. After all, through all of this, I had only even gotten into a fight once. As a result of all this, if I see someone who I think may be on the edge between good and evil, I WILL feel sympathy for them. If possible, I might find some way to help them. If I see people who I think are so locked in their righteous indignation that they don't care if they're potentially pushing them towards evil, I WILL be enraged. Why, you may ask? Because when I saw Zootopia in theaters, I saw the scene where Nick talked about how he was so excited to join the scouts and the other animals decided he couldn't be trusted without being forcibly muzzled, and I saw an alarmingly long stretch of my life in it, and I would really prefer to not see people come to the same conclusion Nick did (and I came alarmingly close to coming to): "If the world's only going to see a fox as being shifty and untrustworthy, there's no point in trying to be anything else."
Or, as Albie says, "Treat people like scum, they start ACTING like scum." And I still believe that it's important to try and break the cycle before they start acting like scum and we have to get Fitz to break them down and tell them where the bodies are buried.
Then again, maybe it's at least a step up that here Robert Carlyle needs a 4-penny upcharge to commit a horrific act of violence, when other times, he doesn't:
Comparing the Universal Oneness of All Life to Yo Mama since 2010.
![[Image: harmlesskitchen.png]](https://i.postimg.cc/yxR97P23/harmlesskitchen.png)
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.
