I Really Wanted To Ask You About This:

I really wanted to ask you about this:

Do you have any advice of how to develop critical thinking and media literacy?

There are many, many ways you can practice critical thinking, evaluation and media literacy. At its most basic, you can access student resources for lower levels of education like earlier high school years and look at the examples and guidance given there. Rehashing this will often give you a good foundation to build off of and apply.

One of the main aspects of critical thinking involves discerning what is fact and what is opinion. A good portion of media analytics is opinion. What is 'bad' by one person's standards is 'sub-par' or even 'great' by another's. Similarly, the majority of fandom space is opinion-based. The main pitfall of fandom spaces is that everyone wants their opinion to be taken as fact, which is where critical thinking and even basic communication begin to fall away.

"I'm right and you're wrong" and "this is the way it should be, if you do it or think differently, you're wrong" are common roadblocks people run into when engaging with things like media analysis and even basic fandom activities like fanfiction.

'Mischaracterisation' is fanfiction is one popular topic, especially here on Tumblr. What people often fail to recognize is the true creative depth of fanfiction and using someone else's pre-existing characters. Characters as they are in the source material may not make the choices or behave in the ways necessary to activate or validate certain plot material or author intentions in fanfiction. Which is, inherently, one of the main points of fanfiction. Exploring the alternate.

While you might immediately recoil and say "he'd never do that!" you then have to sit back and recognise that that's exactly the point. That this iteration of that character is not meant to directly reflect the source material. Its a re-imagining, a re-interpretation. That doesn't mean its bad. Its simply different.

'Mischaracterisation' is only actually applicable in fandom spaces when someone is trying to insist as a blanket fact that a character would do something or behave in a way that blatantly contradicts their canon behavior, opinions, morals and perspective or deliberately interpreting an action in biased bad faith. It is not actually applicable to fanfiction where creative liberty dictates you can do whatever the fuck you want with a character because you're not trying to claim it as part of the source content.

Questions To Ask Yourself

Am I reacting to [media] emotionally instead of rationally? Is my emotional response to [media] blinding me to the rational or critical approach(es)?

Am I allowing my expectations to get in the way of me understanding [media] fully? Am I forming a biased negative opinion of [media] because it isn't meeting my expectations?

Even if I disagree with [media], do I actually understand it? Can I recognise the reasoning behind choices made or actions even if I don't agree with them?

Am I searching too hard to hidden meaning or purpose in absolutely everything? Can I recognise what is simply passive information/detail and what is active information/detail? (E.g; English tutors saying a character's curtains are blue because they're depressed when throughout the literature its passively reinforced that blue is the character's favorite color.)

Even though I disagree with the statement or opinion shown, is it necessary to argue against it? Is there any benefit to making my counter-opinion known or is it simply a no-end argument? Am I just using arguing as a means of release/fulfilment? Am I treating this person poorly because of their opinion/statement?

Resources

Critical Thinking Exercises & Explanations #1 The Critical Thinking Activity Workbook Early Stage Critical Thinking Games Five Media Literacy Activities Six Media Literacy Ideas

Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence // Ada Limón, "Lies About Sea Creatures" // Sherita Walker // @itsbaditsgood // Richard Siken, "I Had a Dream About You" // Richard Siken, "You Are Jeff" (8) // Richard Siken, "Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out" // @_demarmol on Instagram // Anne Sexton, "The Touch"

It's funny, on the surface, when Oliver tells Elspeth's comatose body that he knows how to work, when he calls people like her lazy dogs who don't know how to work. At this point, we the audience know full well that Oliver grew up comfortably middle class, and then he had presumably enough fuck off money from James Catton after that summer to live comfortably until his return to Saltburn.

That surface level incongruity, however, hides a deeper truth - a truth that I doubt even Oliver, by that point, would have been able to acknowledge.

There was something for which people like the Cattons never had to work; something for which people like Oliver, like Pamela, almost certainly like all of Elspeth's and Felix's poor dear friends over the years, worked desperately hard for the barest scraps of: acceptance, friendship, respect from their peers.

That's what Oliver lacked growing up, what he wanted desperately but didn't know how to achieve, what he got a taste of through Felix; it was that taste of what he'd always wanted that he clung to with such starved and anxious desperation to keep it that it drove him into the obsession which ultimately paved the way for his loss of Felix, too.

Once Elspeth is dead, it is also what Oliver, in a sense, has finally found a way out of, if only by reaching a position in which he effectively has no peers. He's now an obscenely wealthy recluse, set apart from even the other wealthy elite by his made-up backstory and the way he got his wealth.

And thus, by way of having no peers to seek acceptance, respect, or friendship from, Oliver has finally reached a position where he may not be able to get those things which he craved so badly they destroyed him, but at least also can't fail to get those things either, now that there's no one left he needs/wants to seek them from.

Thinking about this again, and how Saltburn overall does such a fantastic job with characterization.

Especially when it comes to the ways that people lie to themselves and others about who they are and why they make the choices they make, because we all want to see ourselves in certain lights - confident, clever, kind, good - even when our behavior reveals us instead to be selfish, irrational, insecure soups of chemical interactions and hormones and silly animal instincts and all the things we grew up learning from people just as flawed as we are.

And Felix is so shitty and yet so good at convincing people otherwise.

The first time I ever watched Saltburn, though, I got to the bike scene, saw Felix's behavior, and went, "Ohhh, he sucks."

And I have never felt so validated or so seen as I did when I learned that Emerald Fennell actively intended for Felix Catton to be terrible.

Saltburn has brought Emerald Fennell onto the list of writers whose work I will at least try to watch in the future, regardless of what she winds up writing next or whether she sometimes winds up also writing things I just don't vibe with.

It makes me so happy that Emerald Fennell has said outright that Felix was doing something shitty in every scene. He's pretty, he's wealthy, he's charming; he's so spoiled with privilege that he can get away with casual cruelty underlying everything he does and still think of himself as a good person.

The fact that so many people can watch Saltburn and come away thinking that Felix is a nice person is both a testament to the quality of Emerald Fennell's writing, and it is a perfect example of how Oliver himself got drawn in by the facade of kindness that Felix presents.

I want her to write so many more things, and I want to watch all of them.

sorry to the haters but saltburn will always be the movie of all time actually