Almost nothing is a spectrum (and Stannis was right)

[azdaema]

The video has since been deleted, so I cannot get the exact quote word-for-word, but detrans youtuber Mackenzie Leigh said something like, “Gender expression is not a spectrum, it’s a mosaic.” And this was a lightbulb moment for me, and crystalized some ideas I’d been having regarding Stannis Baratheon.

A spectrum implies a point system, where things balance each other out and work toward some great sum average. Except for the fact that—outside of math—things rarely do cancel each other out.

And even if you could derive some overall sum of the pieces, it would not properly reflect the pieces that made it up. Is 5 the average between 4 and 6, or is it the average between 0 and 10? A bunch of middling things, or several differing extreme things? The two are very different. Perhaps any one instant may fall on a spectrum from happy to sad—but a life is made of innumerable moments. Perhaps any one garment may fall on a spectrum from masculine to feminine—but we wear multiple different garments. Perhaps any one decision may fall on a scale from moral to immoral—but we make lots of decisions.

The way I see it, every life is a pile of good things and bad things. The good things don't always soften the bad things, but vice versa, the bad things don't necessarily spoil the good things or make them unimportant.

Doctor Who, "Vincent and the Doctor"

And you know who understand this? Stannis Baratheon.

Stannis is frequently criticized by others for being overly rigid or absolute. Except… he’s not, actually. Melisandre is rigid, with her, “If half an onion is black with rot, it is a rotten onion. A man is good or he is evil.” And Stannis often goes along with Melisandre. But Stannis—when he’s working with his own ideas—is not actually rigid. He's able to hold dualities better than almost any other character.

Stannis was able to see that Davos was a smuggler and a criminal, and also the hero who saved them. He was able to hold both truths simultaneously without seeing them as a paradox, or some math that sums up into middling neutrality. They don't cancel each other out. They're both true. Stannis can accept the multiplicity of this. And so he treats each piece independently, punishing Davos for being a smuggler, and knighting him for saving them.

The real world is rarely made of spectrums. Rather, it is made of mosaics: disparate parts which exist simultaneously, the difference between them creating a distinctive picture.

Comments

[tabacoychanel]

thank you for this <333 i'm a stannis stan until the end