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{ FIREBENDER }
GO HUMAN BEINGS!
{ wear }
The other guy saved both our lives.
+10 points for Subway
and this machine, it rips through the both of us
“Dan Harmon is Community” -Portrait Illustration by Sam Spratt
A quick tribute to Community’s lost showrunner. Brilliant mind. Can’t wait to see what he makes next.
Kids:
A few hours ago, I landed in Los Angeles, turned on my phone, and confirmed what you already know. Sony Pictures Television is replacing me as showrunner on Community, with two seasoned fellows that I’m sure are quite nice - actually, I have it on good authority they’re quite nice, because they once created a show and cast my good friend Jeff Davis on it, so how bad can they be.
Why’d Sony want me gone? I can’t answer that because I’ve been in as much contact with them as you have. They literally haven’t called me since the season four pickup, so their reasons for replacing me are clearly none of my business. Community is their property, I only own ten percent of it, and I kind of don’t want to hear what their complaints are because I’m sure it would hurt my feelings even more now that I’d be listening for free.
I do want to correct a couple points of spin, now that I’m free to do so:
The important one is this quote from Bob Greenblatt in which he says he’s sure I’m going to be involved somehow, something like that. That’s a misquote. I think he meant to say he’s sure cookies are yummy, because he’s never called me once in the entire duration of his employment at NBC. He didn’t call me to say he was starting to work there, he didn’t call me to say I was no longer working there and he definitely didn’t call to ask if I was going to be involved. I’m not saying it’s wrong for him to have bigger fish to fry, I’m just saying, NBC is not a credible source of All News Dan Harmon.
You may have read that I am technically “signed on,” by default, to be an executive consulting something or other - which is a relatively standard protective clause for a creator in my position. Guys like me can’t actually just be shot and left in a ditch by Skynet, we’re still allowed to have a title on the things we create and “help out,” like, I guess sharpening pencils and stuff.
However, if I actually chose to go to the office, I wouldn’t have any power there. Nobody would have to do anything I said, ever. I would be “offering” thoughts on other people’s scripts, not allowed to rewrite them, not allowed to ask anyone else to rewrite them, not allowed to say whether a single joke was funny or go near the edit bay, etc. It’s….not really the way the previous episodes got done. I was what you might call a….hands on producer. Are my….periods giving this enough….pointedness? I’m not saying you can’t make a good version of Community without me, but I am definitely saying that you can’t make my version of it unless I have the option of saying “it has to be like this or I quit” roughly 8 times a day.
The same contract also gives me the same salary and title if I spend all day masturbating and playing Prototype 2. And before you ask yourself what you would do in my situation: buy Prototype 2. It’s fucking great.
Because Prototype 2 is great, and because nobody called me, and then started hiring people to run the show, I had my assistant start packing up my office days ago. I’m sorry. I’m not saying seasons 1, 2 and 3 were my definition of perfect television, I’m just saying that whatever they’re going to do for season 4, they’re aiming to do without my help. So do not believe anyone that tells you on Monday that I quit or diminished my role so I could spend more time with my loved ones, or that I negotiated and we couldn’t come to an agreement, etc. It couldn’t be less true because, just to make this clear, literally nobody called me. Also don’t believe anyone that says I have sex with animals. And if there’s a photo of me doing it with an animal - I’m not saying one exists, I’m just saying, if one surfaces - it’s a fake. Look at the shadow. Why would it be in front of the giraffe if the sun is behind the jeep?
Where was I? Oh yeah. I’m not running Community for season 4. They replaced me. Them’s the facts.
When I was a kid, sometimes I’d run home to Mommy with a bloody nose and say, “Mom, my friends beat me up,” and my Mom would say “well then they’re not worth having as friends, are they?” At the time, I figured she was just trying to put a postive spin on having birthed an unpopular pussy. But this is, after all, the same lady that bought me my first typewriter. Then later, a Commodore 64. And later, a 300 baud modem for it. Through which I met new friends that did like me much, much more.
I’m 39, now. The friends my Mom warned me about are bigger now, and older, bloodying my nose with old world numbers, and old world tactics, like, oh, I don’t know, sending out press releases to TV Guide at 7pm on a Friday.
But my Commodore 64 is mobile now, like yours, and the modems are invisible, and the internet is the air all around us. And the good friends, the real friends, are finding each other, and connecting with each other, and my Mom is turning out to be more right than ever.
Ah, shit, I still haven’t called my fucking Mom.
Mom, Happy Mother’s Day. I got fired.
Yes, Mom. AGAIN.
I’d never taken the time to get to know each and every cast member’s and most of the crew member’s names, study every scene for things in the background, and watch DVD commentaries and content more than once, let alone buy every season of any show upon release. I’d never invested nearly every fiber of my being into a show because I thought it was a stupid waste of time. Until I met Community.
Our relationship got off to a shaky start when the show was still finding itself. Community would get a couple of chuckles out of me every now and then and I loved the fact that one of my friends was an extra for it so we definitely had some mutual friends. However, I was still keeping a close eye on Community, waiting for it to screw up somehow. There would be little things that irked me but relationships were about compromise and I was willing to do that as long as Community would keep me interested. As soon as I saw the first paintball episode, I was floored. After that, there were times when our relationship would get pretty passionate and intense with all of its feelings. There were also many cooldowns where we could be laidback and not care about anything. It quickly built up to something real and amazing. If I could marry the show, I honestly would and, to pull a Britta/Jeff, I don’t believe in the institution of marriage for various reasons.
The show won’t be the same without you and I’m really hoping that you will participate in as many ways as possible with the creation of Season 4. I won’t let NBC or Sony ruin this for me and I’ll continue to support the characters you’ve created. The Season 4 characters might not turn out to be the characters you imagined. Someone on LiveJournal said: “They’ve effectively created two different timelines with two different endings to Community. And somewhere out there, there’ll be a timeline where we all get to see the ending Dan Harmon wanted. And I hope the other users enjoy it (which I’m sure they do).” Blogon so much for these past three years. Again, I hope you’ll be able to and will try to participate in any way you can and keep your vision going on.
All my love,
Constable Priscilla
“Pairing men with femininity is seen as like an insult, like you’re lowering yourself. Yet women doing masculinity - not an insult to women. I think it’s safe to say that there might even be some fear of the feminine. I’ve heard this phenomenon referred to in some circles as femmephobia. So this aversion to the feminine in marketing and products is one of the outcomes of femmephobia. Another outcome is that anytime someone who is perceived as a man is aligning with anything feminine-y - it is perceived as a direct threat to Mr. Manly Man’s masculinity. You can be aggressive, you can be intolerant, you can be hateful; but don’t you dare wear a dress. Or so comes, ‘you’re a fag,’ ‘you’re a pussy,’ and the violence.” - Laci Green
Which is why I fucking hate the idea that pictures of American soldiers with Afghan/Iraqi/Pakistani children are “cute” and “hopeful.” No, they are not. It’s exploitative. It hides reality.
Well wtf is going on in this picture? Is that soldier aiming a gun at the kids face?
I’m really confused as to the commentary.
You’re confused because you haven’t seen foreign soldiers invade America and pose with young American children to show a “positive image” of the war they have directly and indirectly engaged in. If it happens one day, you’ll understand “what the fuck is going on in this picture.”
Breaking down a sourceless photograph through a microblogging platform isn’t exactly the most convenient way to actually understand some concepts within a photograph, and Stonzie actually brings up a pretty good question: “The fuck am I looking at?” (which is always an important question to ask yourself whenever you stumble across a generic photo of the typical “third world child meets US soldier” or any photograph that perpetuates the third world archetype)
Tumblr really likes to attack US soldiers — don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of the US army nor am I fan of them occupying numerous other countries, including my own country — but they are still human beings, and they are only products of a much larger problem.You want to incite some powerful emotions? Take a photograph of a cute “third world child” standing next to the men who socialize and train soldiers to kill. To refer to Muslim people as rag heads. Show me the men who create glorified Nike-esque commercials of “what it means to be a Marine” — the men who are able to safely stay tucked away in their homes while US soldiers and local civilians die as a result of war and confusion. Would you even be able to recognize those men if they were walking down the street?
I always ask my family members in Iraq (Most of them are now refugees in Syria) what their opinions of US soldiers are. I usually get similar responses:
“They actually aren’t bad, they always give candies to children. At first, they were very nice, but they became more hostile and bitter as the war went on. We don’t blame them very much. How can you? So many of them still look like children.”
I’ll go out on a limb and say that every photo of a third world child in rags is exploitative.
Good points, Hiba. My issue is, however, with the apologists who take these photos up and and give more preference to the soldiers over there while trying to understand why they did what they did. There are American bases in Pakistan. Soldiers take photos with children in the agencies and send them back. Those photos are uploaded on mainstream media outlets where the ‘patriotism’ and ‘valor’ of the soldiers is admired. I find that disgusting. I can’t speak for the Iraqi people but the Afghans that I know who fled from their land to Pakistan and the Pakistanis near the bases all agree on one thing: These photos are hypocritical, exploitative and disrespectful to the people of the land. That’s all.
Oh, I absolutely agree that these photographs are exploitative and disrespectful, because we know that US soldiers aren’t saviors to our poor oppressed people. That being said, I see the US soldiers as more of
pawnsa brand (ie the West’s face of spreading liberation throughout the world) than the institutions who actually destroy other nations.Photos that portray US soldiers as saviors exist because they feed in to the shattered remains of the American dream, and they perpetuate the idea that the US is home to freedom and liberation. Iraq, for example, doesn’t need the West in order to be “saved” from “the horrors” of WMD, a non-secular government, or an oppressive regime, but I’m sure many of us know that isn’t the actual reason as to why there are US soldiers in Iraq, despite those messages being constantly ingrained in to the minds of people all over the world.
I just don’t believe that much of the manipulative imagery can be solved by criticizing individual troops. We have to criticize larger institutions for the widespread brain washing of people in the West.
