Previous: Tales of Personal Drama
In pt. 3 of this News on News special, the Globe trio tackled the "Zizians'" blogs! They didn't mind the Zs debating on rationality, but turned up their noses at the Zs' "tales of personal drama (TOPD)". In so doing, they may have scuppered this entire story.
We explored which critical plot points they missed thru their snobbery, & elegized these TOPD for what they reveal abt our "Zizians'" invaluable inner lives.
We finished by marveling that, while the trio has no time for TOPD, they have nothing but time for the Rationalists' two-bit Zphantasmagoria (Ziz phantasmagoria). This led us to interrupt ourselves w/ a small soliloquy, which we will recite for you now.
What first got us hooked on this story was— well, tbh, it was the lurid headlines; but what next got us hooked, really hooked, was an overwhelming sense of uncanniness to it— by “it”, we mean the version of the story we first got thru outlets like Wired & The Guardian. We left these early reading sessions shaken: shaken w/ something b/w laughter & rage.
Our rage was a rage to understand why— how— “the Zizians” could appear so cartoonish— how were these ppl real? Ofc, we now know, these ppl weren’t real: they were scary shadows on a wall. But they had us fooled!
These Zizian projections looked almost human, but not quite. They had, for ex., no real motivation for their dastardly & audacious (alleged) deeds (DAAAD). We provisionally wrote off these gaps as signs of their madness & delusionality; but that, thank goodness, didn’t feel right for long. Once we saw how they were being treated in the right-wing media, we indignantly sat down & wrote our sketch on the Specter of the ~Traaans Villain~… only to realize that we, via our liberal media sources, had been haunted by just such a specter, albeit in subtler ways.
Oh, we were so embarrassed! —But also impressed by our sources’ stagecraft. They had led us to believe that the “unhuman” qualities of their projections were faults of the “Zizians”— faults which, neatly, explained the “Zizians’” DAAAD.
In hindsight, our sources— slick as they appeared— were desperately scrambling to cover up their two main weaknesses.
They had not uncovered who the “Zizians” really were, & so were writing scandalous longreads on a mirage. Likewise, we do not believe they could explain the “Zizians’” DAAAD, but were themselves too embarrassed to admit this, so fudged those 3 critical turning points to the saga, & hoped their audience would misinterpret the uncanniness of their fudgery as being due to the “Zizians’” inherent inhumanity (TZII).
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W/ a heavy heart, we came to suspect that this entire media circus rested on a mutual agreement b/w us in the audience & our journalistic showmen (OJS): a mutual agreement to believe in TZII.
We disliked this for two reasons: first, bc OJS’s belief in TZII had kneecapped their ability to write a really good, rich story, & we resented that. Second, bc belief in TZII implied belief in the SOTTV*!
The SOTTV is an unreal person. That, & not this specter’s transness, is perhaps how it manages to frighten so many.
Unreal ppl— like humanoid robots, or haunted dolls— reflect us back at ourselves, but wrong. They’re brought into stories to destabilize us, to highlight fragilities in our identity, & to evoke fears of replacement or deception— all functions they share w/ the SOTTV.
The media’s humanoid yet unhuman “Zizians” can likewise be seen destabilizing the nation!
They, too, evoke fears of deception— perhaps in the sense of Ziz’s mesmeric blog (ZMB); perhaps thru the media’s maxim that nothing these ppl say should be believed or taken seriously.
They may evoke fears of replacement— thru the unfounded rumor that reading ZMB will turn one into a Zizian!
The sight of them may highlight, for some readers, fragilities in their own gender identities— this may be part of why the media has chosen this moment to rip off its gender-affirming façade, to remind us all that such fragilities are not to be explored.
Unreal people are fearsome indeed— but luckily for us, there is a silver-bullet solution! The solution is to humanize them: to take seriously what they have to say, to learn abt their backstories & their “tales of personal drama”, to try & see the world from their perspectives.
This would, ideally, be a task which the media would guide us through. Alas, it is a task which the media has continually tried to upstage w/ their ragged shadow-puppet charades.
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