9k:RD/ Rudolph the reindeer (Q68,98)
Main entry
- Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer (song) [1]
Motifs in song
- all the compañeros laughed / todos sus compañeros se reían / Todos sus compañeros se reían sin parar; Y nuestro buen amigo no paraba de llorar ->
so today while looking up versions of "Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer" I found out that the Spanish language has one of those nondescript 'teammates' or 'one of our group' words. seeing this word compañeros after already having loosely connected the idea of Trotsky in exile to Rudolph for reasons, that word became incredibly funny to me. because I may not know a lot of Spanish but among the things I know from listening to a couple of Trotskyist talks in Spanish with captions is that the IMT referred to "comrades" as compañeros. all the comrades turned on him. the revolution betrayed. - Rudolph was useful -> plot motif in Christmas movies or similar fictional works when a character supposedly finds acceptance for being different but it falls flat.
"Rudolph was useful" is a local joke in the United States about misunderstandings that happened somewhere between Japanese speakers attempting to translate the Rudolph song and Japanese-language students trying to make sense of the translation. the bigger part of the misunderstanding probably occurred the second time around, as "役に立つ" can be a perfectly positive and complimentary thing to say in the moment, similar to "a towel comes in handy wherever you go", and not very similar to the flat and uncaring connotation of "was useful". - your nose will come in handy (sense) / おまえの鼻が役に立つのさ / 暗い夜道は ぴかぴかの おまえの鼻が 役に立つのさ [2]
Other motifs
- Rankin-Bass reindeer -> you know it: the baby "reindeer" that is so overly stylized it looks like a white-tailed deer.
to be fair: this is closer to being accurate to European reindeer than North American ones. but the people who made the movies were not from Europe...
Wackytown fallacy
- Wackytown monomyth / be-yourself monomyth / kids' movie monomyth (generic) / emoji movie monomyth / Everything was normal in Wackytown — Until... — Something bad happened! Or, one of the Wacks wasn't wacky enough — "mommy, I'm too nice or sad or lame or something" — "Wacks". Coming soon [3] [4]
- Rudolph was useful -> plot motif in Christmas movies where Santa gets to say whether Rudolph is useful. this is specifically about Rudolph as an individual, or Olive the reindeer in that movie, etc.
- Many attempts equal success / Wackytown fallacy (children's stories) / whoops there goes another rubbertree plant (song lyric, High Hopes ) ->
the more general version of the Wackytown fallacy as it actually appears in kids' movies, rather than as it appears among the directors and writers who create them. "Rudolph was useful" is the Wackytown fallacy applied to specific individuals in a "biographical" way. this is the more general notion of it applying widely across a fictional society or multiple works of fiction.
this feels so omnipresent in Liberal capitalist and political-agorist philosophy that it almost needs to be turned into a proverb, it needs a nice little phrase that's as repeatable as a Chinese 4-character idiom or something. I looked up a couple. I haven't found a totally satisfactory one but I'll think of something eventually. - Many attempts equal success / 狡兔三窟 (jiǎo tù sān kū, A cunning rabbit has three burrows) [5] / 半途而废 (bàn tú ér fèi, Giving up halfway) [6] / 水滴石穿 (shuǐ dī shí chuān, Dripping water wears through stone) [7] -> "水滴石穿" seems more applicable to quantity transforming into quality actually. some books, in this very Aristotelian tone, use it in the context of tiny wounds to an empire being an offense to justice [8]
- Wackytown monomyth -> so I remembered this a little wrong, thinking it was about characters "succeeding" and "triumphing" when actually it just mentions a comically generic conflict being introduced in every animated movie trailer, but it's funny how the actual plot mentioned in the Wackytown post neatly interlocks with the "Many attempts equal success" plot; they're basically describing the same thing from different angles. I don't feel bad about calling this second kind of monomyth the Wackytown fallacy.
so... with that there's another interesting question to ask. are the Wackytown monomyths specific to the United States? is an anime episode where Ash and Pikachu keep getting back up also the "Wackytown fallacy"? that was definitely what I was thinking when I recorded — that it could equally apply to Japan / Korea / China inasmuch as they try to weave 'lessons appropriate to capitalism' into stories. like, Japan is full of . the United States knows it from the Rudolph song and maybe things like Sonic the Hedgehog, but when you look at Japan you have Digimon / Ultraman Series, Kamen Rider, Dragon Ball (good example, it gets quite literal), My Hero Academia maybe, I've never watched that but all the characters have unique powers and there is like a thing where one of the characters has other previous users of a Quirk standing behind him. I think it's the Wackytown fallacy specifically when it tries to make things bright and colorful and simplified for kids even though the themes are more characteristic of young-adult fiction. if something was as absolutely dreary as The Hunger Games I don't think it would be the Wackytown fallacy. although that kind of implies Harry Potter does fit the Wackytown fallacy... and that actually feels about right, at least for the first few books; as a series I think it about half fits. - "Wackytown fallacy" monomyth -> what should we call this. is like the Goku monomyth. the Angry Birds monomyth. you know, Angry Birds is not a bad metaphor here because the game really is about throwing birds at walls until you knock them down; I don't know how anyone expected the movie to not contain that as a monomyth. the movie would have to be like, way more experimental and artsy than you'd expect a movie for a popular mobile game to be to come up with anything else. I guess you could have some kind of bizarre post-structuralist Angry Birds story but yeah, the studio isn't making that.
- Diversity should be accepted because it's useful / Being different is okay only when you're useful / Red (Angry Birds) is useful to society because he's different in the perfect way -> the proposition people pick out and regard with much confusion when they're actually looking at the Wackytown fallacy. this is more a subjective thing than an error because you probably find this proposition some places too.
- Uniting against the Wackytown fallacy is progress / It is progressive to unite people against the Wackytown fallacy (Liberal-republican framing) / It is the correct direction of history to unite people against the Wackytown fallacy (meta-Marxist framing) -> [old]
this is one of the very few things where I genuinely feel like Communists and anarchists can safely come together behind it even if they have totally different justifications for why it's bad. it's just so obvious this thing is bad that there's nearly no way anarchists can complicate it and screw things up. - Adversity yields to growth (arts) / Adversity is a time for growth (arts) / (9k) -> ... a lot of literature deals with the difference between emerging from pain safely and being destroyed by pain. this is the point of concepts like "eucatastrophe" and the 'unwanted institution' of modernist art, versus postmodernist art.
- Adversity yields to growth -> this is what you argue if you really want to play devil's advocate. you argue that ultimately Rudolph has to emerge from adversity through his own power because he can't control all the reindeer that don't believe in him.
- Any fictional narrative (literature; art) that insists on a happy ending is partially didactic (meta-Marxist literary analysis) / (9k)
Wackytown fallacy in economics
- Trying hard enough enough times always makes money / Individuals having skills or good ideas always leads to making money with enough time and attempts / Wackytown fallacy (specifically in reference to jobs or investments and money) -> the more people are born and compete for jobs as more unique products exist the less true this gets. MDem entry 4.4/2050 baxter
- Columbus Industries conjecture / Spain and Columbus can conquer any nation or land if they spend enough money and try enough times / if Spain and Columbus were a startup, their success is proportional to how much money or how great of assets they start with and how many things they try -> Wackytown fallacy + possible mathematical equation = Columbus Industries conjecture. the sinister framing of this is on purpose. all too many people regard businesses as inherently good as long as they don't contain "bad people", and simply ask, well how do I succeed?? and here's your answer. you can succeed at anything if you burn enough money, time, linked social graphs of people, useful political connections, goodwill, and collateral damage. all you have to do is have enough money or people to try the thing enough times.
what really gets me about political-agorism is this. for normal people it's overwhelmingly intuitive to believe that Nothing should be done unless everybody considers it wonderful. they even apply this to science, arguing to varying degrees of success that animal testing is unnecessary, or more dubiously that there are some things it is inherently unethical to probe and understand with science because science is a tool of domination, and liberation can only be unscientific. but like, once everyone has been arguing this all the time. then Artists show up and are like I surely deserve to succeed just because I'm an Artist, what are ends and means, surely any means can justify my wonderful ends. welcome to Columbus Industries. if you would only burn enough money you can make the world do whatever you want it to.
Related
Ideologies or fields
- / Christmas songs