Iowa Caucuses and Why I'm With Warren

U. S. government is weird. On the most basic level, a democratic republic with checks and balances between three branches of the government designed to write, enforce, and interpret laws, with parallel structures on the state and national level, seems like an excellent and intuitive system. But when you get into the fine details, everything suddenly seems arbitrary and kind of stupid. For example, who the hell decided to have goddamn Iowa be the first caucus state? How on earth does it make any sense for candidates to pander to some mostly-white, mostly-empty state from November to February of election years, then forgot about us as soon as the votes come in?

All the same, as little sense as it makes, Iowa is the first caucus state, which means that I’ll have a wildly disproportionate power in choosing the Democratic candidate this Monday. The last few months I’ve seen student advocates handing out flyers every time I walk into the dining hall and sat through fifteen-second campaign ads every time I watch a video on YouTube. I even had the chance to see Elizabeth Warren and Beto O’Rourke live the past couple months. And, since I have this electoral power I didn’t earn and don’t really need, I figure I might as well use it to advocate for my chosen candidate, Elizabeth Warren.

My girlfriend sometimes teases me that I only like her because I’m studying to be a public school teacher, and she made a pretty explicit effort to pander to my field at her campaign rally. And really, that is a large part of it, not just that she’s a defender of teachers, but she seems to speak and act for actual citizens. Of course, being on the side of the people is something almost every candidate claims, but Warren makes the claim more coherently and effectively than any other politician I have ever seen. Her “two cent tax” on those with over fifty million dollars strips away the lie that taxing the wealthy hurts all of us, and reveals how much the push against taxation is motivated by greed. Bernie aims for something similar with his railing against millionaires and billionaires, but Warren combines rhetoric and policy in a much more elegant way that I think can reach voters more effectively.

That focus on policy is another reason I like Warren. All the candidates have a nuanced policy, but Warren has a long record of dealing thoroughly and specifically with the details of what needs to be done. I especially like how she admits the possibility of working with an uncooperative house and senate, and has a specific list of plans for how a president can enact progressive policy on her own. A common comeback is that her policy, though detailed, is too extreme to work. But I’d argue healthcare for all, for example, is neither unattainable (it works for most other industrialized countries, and with much lower costs) nor frivolous (people dying from preventable conditions in the richest country on earth is simply unacceptable).

Of course, extremely progressive ideas aren’t exclusive to Warren, and many people on the Grinnell campus prefer Bernie Sander simply because, if you chart their political leanings, Bernie comes out the furthest left. But I find Warren’s ideas much more clearly articulated in her speeches and debates, and she has a better history of working with people to achieve progressive aims, given that Bernie refused to identify with the democratic party in the senate. 

And I won’t deny that Warren’s gender is important, and one of the reasons why I’m voting for her. Donald Trump’s campaign and election sent the message that sexism, misogyny, and outright rape are acceptable, and the reaction from alt-right communities and the rise in hate crime after his election show that our politicians have real effects on our communities. This isn’t just an abstract population statistic, it’s an immediate effect: the day after Donald Trump’s election, men in pick-up trucks drove through campus harassing students of color and women. Electing Elizabeth Warren wouldn’t extinguish sexism immediately, but it would be a strong symbolic victory with positive effects on how people in our country view women. And it’s not impossible either: with a much weaker platform and less enthusiastic support, a woman still won the popular election in 2016. Donald Trump is the president, but America chose Hillary Clinton.

As passionately as I support Elizabeth Warren, all of the candidates have their strengths. I would love to see Pete Buttigieg provide the world with a progressive Christian icon, and America’s first gay president would be a huge step forward. Andrew Yang’s insistence that disabled people should not be valued for their labor but their status as human beings is a powerful truth that needs to be spread. Bernie Sanders would implement many of the same badly needed reforms as Elizabeth Warren. Even Joe Biden, probably my last choice, would still move the country in the right direction, and the progressive energy of this campaign season will mean he’ll do it with more vigor than if he won the nomination easily. I’ll happily vote for any of them come election season. But even if any of them would be a good choice, the question is who is the best, and I’ll gladly answer Elizabeth Warren come Monday.

Leaving Inklette

Two years ago I wrote a post where I recommended that every new writer, as a rule, should work at a literary magazine. I still believe that, and I still consider myself a new writer (since I plan to keep this up for my whole life, being at it for five to six years still puts me well in the beginner category), but despite all that I’m breaking my own rule and leaving the magazine where I’ve worked the past five years. The reason is simple: I’m getting busier, taking on more writing projects, and I don’t want to keep my name on the masthead unless I’m an actively contributing member, which I can’t be anymore. But it still hurts to let go of the literary community that I devoted so many hours to and made so many friends on. So I’m going to spend this week’s post looking back on my time as part of it.

Before I joined Inklette, I didn’t think that there were really all that many real writers. There were hordes bright-eyed high schoolers and bored adults working at night and weekends on novels that would never make it beyond a few beta readers, of course, but the only a few people, as lucky and rare as lottery winners, actually ever got published. Joining Inklette was my introduction to the enormous ecosystem of how publishing actually operates, with millions of stories searching for publication in thousands of little magazines like us, which might gain traction and win contests and send the authors flying up to big name awards and publishers.

My job as an editor was a lot like a miner, or maybe it’s more accurate to say scavenger. We’d get a lot of submissions each issue, sometimes as many as five hundred, and read through each one, looking for promise. Even if you aren’t super picky with your reading and overlook grammar and spelling errors, it isn’t hard to sort through them. Most are simply poorly written, the sentences too simple or overloaded with adjectives, the stories and characters predictable or random, it’s easy enough to list why the story doesn’t work in two sentences. But every so often, there was a story that just simply worked. It’s hard to explain what exactly worked about them. They weren’t all typo-free, they didn’t all have well-rounded characters or some particular kind of elegance in the writing. Read through our issues, and you’ll see that there isn’t any unifying theme between all the stories. Not all of them are even stories, strictly speaking. The best way I can describe it is to say that the author promised something in the first few sentences, and after a page or so you learned to trust that promise, that you weren’t going to be let down, and you let yourself get swept along in the ride. It’s an odd feeling, reading a story that might be a winner: you want to be wise and discerning and objective, and so you try your best to mentally note weak phrases and spots for improvement, but another part of you really wants to like it, to trust it, and those two critical urges play off one another until some kind of breaking point when it works or it doesn’t, and if it does then you let the momentum rush you to the end.

But oddly, when I think back to those nights in the library, reading through submission after submission after submission, I don’t remember much about which ones we ended up rejecting or accepting. What sticks in my mind is that moment when I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not yet, when I weighed this weak characterization against that wonderful sentence and read on, waiting to see how it developed. That was the real joy of the appraisal, I think. Maybe it doesn’t make much sense, but it felt worth writing about.

Defense of Slacking

In the winter of my junior year of high school, all student-athletes got out of class to see some sort of “Excellence Assembly.” It turned out to be something like a TED-Talk, except the presenter appeared to have a passionate and personal hatred for each and every one of us. His speech jumped wildly between topics, veering from drug use to social media to nutrition to sleep to exercise, but on each point he had a consistent message: there was a right and a wrong way to do these things, and we were all doing it the wrong way. He personified the right way as some U.S. Marines that he’d known, who he described as perfect human machines who rarely talked and never laughed and always marched in perfect formation.

In case it isn’t clear, I despised this presentation, and as soon as it let out I wrote an editorial response that I planned to send to the student newspaper. I don’t have it saved anywhere (though, given my writing at the time, I bet it was hardly more intelligent than the presentation itself), but I still remember the last line: “After all, someone has to defend having a good time.”

In the end, I decided not to try to publish it for two reasons. First, if anyone who didn’t know me read it, they’d dismiss it as another lazy kid trying to find an excuse to be lazy (“Teenager DislikesBeing Told What to Do” is hardly headline news). And, second, anyone who did know me would know that I was the last person to defend having a good time. I hardly ever missed a day of cross country practice, never turned an assignment in late, and my idea of a splurge was to push my bedtime back to 10:00 and watch two episodes of The Simpsons in the evening instead of just one. Not to mention that due to my OCD (undiagnosed at the time, but still very much present), I was probably even more obsessed with doing things the right way than the presenter, though my right way mostly focused on the number thirteen in some way.

But an important factor of my OCD is that it only affects what I do. Sure, I’ll be certain something terrible will happen if I stop reading a book on page thirteen, but I don’t care if other people do what they will with that number. But there are a lot of people like that TED-Talker who can’t stand other people doing things the wrong way, however trivial the difference between right and wrong is. You run into these kinds of people often in schools: class picture photographers who spend an hour making sure everyone has the same expression and proper posture, choir directors who demand a hyper-specific dress code, coaches who publicly shame anyone doing the drills wrong. What’s worst is when these people in charge try to be enthusiastic about their strict and arbitrary rules, those teachers who explain the proper way to write a cursive G with a huge smile on their face, not because of any use this letter has, but because the pointless act of writing a cursive G is somehow supposed to be fun. There’s actually a fairly popular and respected teaching technique called behaviorism that is essentially this: embracing obedience as a virtue, rewarding the right behaviors and punishing the wrong ones, while leaving the student with no uncontrolled choices.

OCD aside, it’s strange that I get so mad at people who value obedience. After all, I want to be a teacher, and even if I’m not a full-on behaviorist, no one can run an effective classroom without some emphasis on obedience. I guess it’s the arbitrariness that frustrates me, how the rules are supposed to sit invincibly once they’re laid down. But that arbitrariness is necessary sometimes. I ran into that problem teaching basic literacy skills to elementary schoolers this summer. Capital letters and silent e’s seem perfectly natural to me, but I’ve seen firsthand how much students despise constant correction, even if it is the only way to learn. There’s no way to make it not arbitrary either: I love it, but I have to admit that English writing makes no sense at all.

As useful as obedience is, I think that it’s overused, especially in schools. Having a little room for natural deviation or a little time for slacking off is a necessary resource for sanity. When possible, teachers should enforce the least strict version of the rules, or at least explain why it exists in the first place. I get that it’s probably premature to lay down my laws for teaching before actually doing it on my own yet, but maybe it’s best for me to lay it down now, before life as a teacher grinds away at me too much. After a few years of not being a student, I might be in danger of forgetting what it’s like to be bossed around all day, and I never want to end up like the irate TED-Talker.

Play

I found a youtube video earlier this week that made me pretty nostalgic for Bionicle and, since I was at home, I took out a few that I’d built myself. I’d meant just to look at them, to admire all the time I’d put into making them, but pretty soon I was playing with them. And by playing I mean actually playing, in the kind of uninhibited way a five-year-old plays, bashing them together, speaking for them and making sound effects, the kind of playing that looks totally deranged to anyone else. But, to me, a setting emerged, and so did personalities for the characters, and pretty soon it was a story. Not a story that would work all that well if you wrote it out (the whole thing was premised on nine robots fighting each other for no reason, after all), but a story that I liked, at least in the moment. Afterwards it was shameful, partly because I’d made nine character I halfway liked without any effort, while a week at a writing desk trying to come up with a single decent character got me nowhere, but mostly because I’m supposed to be an adult. And adults don’t do that.

You could say that things aren’t so black and white, but if there’s a totally accepted way for adults to play, I haven’t found it. There are online communities of adults who like Legos, sure, but as someone who has been part of that community, I can say that it’s all about creation and display: the fun part is making the model, not doing anything with it. There are adults who do role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, adults who create stories in writing or inhabit characters in acting, adults who get physically active in sports. But none of those are the same, exactly. They follow rules and create something from the experience and feel like a job sometimes. None of it feels as spontaneous, or fun in the same way.

It makes sense, I guess, that people grow out of play. I’ve often heard that play is an evolutionary adaptation, a way of simulating adult experiences so children will be better prepared when they come of age. Once you’re an adult, play doesn’t make sense anymore, you’re supposed to have learned what to do and started doing it. Movies like the Toy Story series assume that this process works normally: the tragedy isn’t that Andy won’t play with the toys anymore, but that he simply can’t. Even the man-child archetype, pathetic as it is, doesn’t offer a model of adult play: he tends to be a snobbish collector who won’t take the toys out of their original packaging.

I’ve been worried about this for a long time, actually. I remember going through a period of acute anxiety at the beginning of middle school around growing up. Most of that was a natural fear of independence that I’ve mostly come to terms with by now, but part of it was that I wouldn’t be able to play anymore, that all my toys would just be more lumps of plastic in my mind. Now I know that didn’t come to pass, but it brings problems of its own.

I don’t mean to oversell this. The fact that adults don’t feel allowed to play like kids is hardly the most pressing issue in our society at the moment, and anyway, I can still get part of the thrill from writing or D&D. But it’s still a shame that there’s no straight-forward to play as an adult, that you have to be part of a society for Live Action Role Play or a parent humoring your kid. The issue is that people take themselves too seriously, I think, that there’s a sense that your boss is always looking over your shoulder to see if you’re doing a good job at being a grown-up, so you’d better make even your hobbies look like work. 

But it’s kids who really need play, after all, and as someone who spent the past summer socializing almost exclusively with second-graders, I can assure you that they’re doing it. There’s a cantankerous ending here begging to be written about how play is precious and disappearing from our tech-saturated children, but in my experience, so long as kids have unstructured recess time, there’s no danger of that. Sure, these days they pretend to play live-action Minecraft, which gets pretty confusing if you don’t know the lingo (“let’s punch down this tree so we can make a crafting table and make our gold into a railroad!”), but it’s play all the same, and you only need to look at the kids to know that they’re having the time of their lives.

The Fall 2019 Anthology of Hellfire Cross Country Speeches

Being my final year on cross country, I tried to make things special by giving a hellfire speech at every meet. Here’s how it went:

Central Dutch Invitational:

[Slowly growing passion and volume as it goes along.]

Men, what did we come here to do? [Pause.] We came here to win! But what is that, even? What is winning? Webster’s Dictionary defines it as “Successful in competition.” But what competition? Webster’s tells us that it is “A contest between rivals.” But who are our rivals? Well, first we must ask, what are our rivals? Webster’s defines rivals as “One of two or more striving to reach or obtain something only one may possess.” But what is this something that we both want? Webster’s defines something as “an indeterminate or unspecified thing!” And what does indeterminate mean? You want to know what it means? Well, there are two definitions actually: “Not precisely determined” or “characterized by a sequential flowering from the lateral or basal buds!” And you better be damn sure Webster knows what a bud is: “An incompletely opened flower!”

[Suddenly quiet.]

And that, gentlemen, is just about all that you need to know.

Les Duke Invitational

At the Central Meet I announced to the team that I’d give a hellfire speech at every meet, but I’d actually given up on that goal by our second meet when I couldn’t think of any decent concept. That didn’t stop a couple team members from pushing me forward when people were giving pump-up speeches and cheers. Keep in mind that this wasn’t just the team: at least fifty alumni and parents were also watching. What follows was completely improvised.

Hey, yeah. So I’m giving a speech! I’m giving a speech on a very important day. A very important speech and I haven’t prepared at all. But, even if it’s all just incoherent and stalling for time, I’m sure you’ll are read something profound into it. And isn’t that the great thing about the human mind, that we can- no, that is so damn clichéd. And now I just swore in front of a bunch of alumni and parents. Crap. No, that’s it, I’m done.

Loyola University Edward Kelly Memorial Lakefront Run

Men, none of us would be here at this race today had it not been for Edward Kelly, a monumental figure in the field of biology, a man who changed so many of our lives forever, the man for whom this race is named. In 1936, Edward Reginald Kelly, or Eddy as he would soon be known, was born in a small Wisconsin town on December 23rd. In 1956, at only twenty years old, he graduated from Loyola University with a major in biology. In 1960, his graduate degree already complete, he patented a series of new techniques and medicines that saved millions of lives as soon as they were released into the world. In 1959, God appeared to Edward in a whirlwind, roaring, “Pitiful man, why have you seen fit to question of my judgement? Did I not punish Adam and Eve, the first of your kind, with pain death for their transgression in the Garden of Eden? For your arrogance, not only will you suffer all the torment that lurks beneath the earth, but your alma mater and other nearby division three schools shall offer tributes of both men and women every year, to toil and weep as they run across the ground!” Then the earth opened up and Edward was thrown into the abyss.

So remember Edward Kelly, and why our pain is the cost of his hubris, so that none shall ever defy the will of God again!

Agustana College Invitational

Me: Give me a G!

Team: G!

Me: Give me an R!

Team: R!

Me: Give me an I!

Team: I!

Me: Give me an M!

Team: M!

Me: Give me a Q!

Team: Q!

Me: Give me a 2!

Team: 2!

Me: Give me an uppercase L!

Team: Uppercase L!

Me: Give me a question mark!

Team: Question mark!

Me: And what’s that spell?

Team: I don’t know!

Me: The wifi password!

University of Wisconsin Lacrosse Invitational

There is a dragon before us, men! It is a beast with five heads: fear, weakness, not trying hard enough, St. Norbert college, and hills! And it has a tail called fatigue, and it breathes a fire called running-induced iron deficiency. We cannot run away from the beast, men, we can only run towards it. But do not be afraid, for we are armed with the mightiest weapons in all the land! We have a sword, a sword named teamwork! And an ax, an ax named confidence! Our bow is named support, and it shoots arrows of cheers crafted by the women’s team and coaches and family members! And our hammer is named lifting and our armor is named shoes! Now let’s go and slay this overdone allegory!

Midwest Conference Championship

The course was very muddy, so we had been instructed not to run on the course itself, but on the outside, so that it wouldn’t be torn up before the race even began. We followed the rules, but none of the other teams did.

We are destined to conquer this course, men! Our victory is written in providence as surely as if it were already history. And this is why: yesterday, the Midwest Conference Championship authorities proclaimed that any may run on either side of the course, but none may touch the sacred soil of the path until the race has begun. The other teams scoffed at this warning and flaunted the decree. For this they shall be condemned. But we alone respected the law! Except for Kody, he’s doomed. But the rest of us are guaranteed to run over happy pastures while our impure opponents shall be given up to the earth’s maw, to join their companion in sin, Edward Kelly. This is not to say there will be no sacrifice or suffering for us, as the land takes arrogance as tenfold more insulting than disobedience. But if we humble ourselves and respect our course, victory is already assured!

NCAA Division III Regional Championship

We were not favorites to win this meet.

People say that we have no chance at all of winning. But I say, you can do anything if you put your mind to it! Seriously, I really mean it, you can do absolutely anything, all you have to do is believe in yourself. You could win regionals, you could win nationals, you could go to the olympics with no effort at all, if only you believe in yourself! And it’s not just running, if you believe in yourself you could be famous! You could be president! You could dismantle our democracy, seize power, and lock up your opponents! The power of your self-belief could conquer the world, oppress billions just for your own fame and wealth, and torture anyone who stands in your way!

So yeah, you can do anything if you believe in yourself, but it’s probably best for everyone if you don’t do it that often. Just use it to win regionals. Or don’t, we don’t need it that bad.

Crying

I cried for the first time in a while today. My girlfriend Mica and I were watching a TV show* we’ve been following for a long time. The main character’s goal for the entire show up to this point was to be a published writer, and she’d finally done it, but the manuscript she sold was an autobiographical story about the death of someone she loved. She’d finally gotten what she wanted, through incredible pain, but then she almost decided not to publish the book because it would feel too much like giving up the memory of the one she loved. I didn’t realize I was crying until Mica said something tenderly to me, (telling me it was okay, I think). After that I wiped the tear away and we went on watching the show. For most people getting watery eyes over an emotional TV show episode wouldn’t be such a big deal, but it’s been a long time since I cried, so it stuck on my mind.

I’ve been thinking of crying a lot these days, actually. I’m writing an essay on the short story “Protozoa” by Ellen Martinsen Gorham, which is about an eighth grade girl who, among other things, secretly videochats an older girl she met online for daily crying rituals. It sounds absurd, but it makes a sort of emotional sense. The older girl says that “sharing tears is a high and a release,” and I get it so much that it almost makes me want to give it a try. I was a real crier in elementary school, up until my family’s move to Minnesota in sixth grade, and the things I cried over were so trivial (poor skills at Pillow Polo, hearing a death metal song in a babysitter’s car) that I must have only done it for the endorphins. Because there is a wonderful feeling in crying, especially when it dries up and you realize you’ve crested whatever feeling you were on and things can only get better from here.

After the move to Minnesota I stopped crying quite so much. I grew up a lot around that time, physically at least, and probably felt that it wasn’t appropriate any more. By ninth grade, I think I went the whole school year without crying, which I noted as something of an accomplishment at the time. But it became a problem in midsummer of that year, when I woke up to the news that my eight-year-old cousin Stephen had died. That’s when I should have cried, right? What the hell else was I supposed to do? But I didn’t. When I thought about, I didn’t feel sad, just confused. People didn’t just disappear, certainly not little kids like Stephen. So I lied, pretending to feel some monumental grief when I really just felt blank. Sometimes I worried that someone would figure out it was all an act and expose me for the psychopath I was, not even crying at my own cousin’s death.

I finally cried at the memorial service. We held it at on an island in the Detroit river, a local tourist destination with a water park and ice cream trucks and screaming kids running everywhere. It was the way my uncle said, “I’ll miss you, buddy” as we threw yellow flowers into the river that broke me down. It was just such a simple way to put it: missing someone.

I’ve never trusted crying since then. When the tears cleared, nothing was better, really. Any happy rush that came fled quick. It hadn’t changed anything.

Sometimes I feel guilty that I could cry about a Pillow Polo game in elementary school, cry about a TV show now, but that I took almost a full week to cry over my own dead cousin. It makes me feel selfish, or at least like someone with very skewed priorities. I know that’s not true. I know that there’s no one-to-one correlation between how you feel and what you express. I still mourned Stephen for that week before the memorial, the feeling was just so new that I didn’t know I was doing it. Crying is still useful, though. Maybe we shouldn’t make a self-help cult around it like the characters in “Protozoa,” but it also couldn’t hurt to be a little less ashamed.

_________________

* I won’t say which to avoid spoilers.

Guilty Pleasure

When I started this blog, I thought that reviews would be easy filler content. I read a lot, I watch movies pretty often, and I tend to have a lot of ideas about how stories work (or don’t). But aside from two posts early in the blog, I’ve mostly stayed away from reviews. It has often occurred to me to write more, but I never go through with it, no matter how much I have to say on a given story, because I never know how I’d end it. Reviews almost always have some kind of verdict, usually stated at the start and reiterated at the end like a thesis statement. The finality of that judgement always scared me, because I never knew which question to answer: should I say whether or not it’s good, or whether or not I liked it. It’s rare that I have a clear answer on either one of those, and when I do, it’s rarer that they’re the same.

To explain this point, I’m going to compare two pieces of media that have no business being discussed in the same post: the hyper-violent neo-noir film Drive and the children’s fantasy cartoon The Dragon Prince. These two really don’t have anything in common aside from being a series of still images shown in quick succession so as to create the illusion of motion: one is animated and the other is live action, one is a TV series and the other is a movie, one has mostly bloodless violence and the other shows a human head crushed flat by the heel of a man’s shoe. But I’ve seen them both recently and had opposite reactions to each. If there were some perfect formula for determining the quality of cinema, I suspect Drive would rank high and The Dragon Prince would be mid-to-low. But I didn’t enjoy Drive at all, and I loved The Dragon Prince. 

Drive is about a nameless and almost entirely silent getaway driver who falls in love with a woman, tries to help her unlucky husband get out of debt with a gang, and reacts poorly once things go wrong. The film is a wonder to look at, with a kind of enormity even its dingy settings. The action scenes all have just the right number of elements: never cluttered, always clear, and very memorable. As art, you have to say it’s well crafted. But, when the credits rolled and I closed the laptop, all I felt was that I should be feeling more. There wasn’t any symbol that I wanted to dwell on, no character relationship that I wanted to imagine further. What happened happened, it was beautiful and terrifying, but I couldn’t find any more of it to hold onto at the end.

The Dragon Prince only came on my radar because it was created by the writers from some of the all-time best episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender, which was my favorite show growing up. The mythology isn’t exactly complicated, but it’s a lot to summarize, so suffice it to say that it’s a journey story set in a pretty generic fantasy world (magic, elves, dragons, monarchy, etc.). There isn’t any part I can fasten myself onto as something that I really like. The characters display a racial and sexual diversity not often seen in children’s shows, but while that’s a good thing societally, it doesn’t automatically make for good storytelling. The animation is a weird 3D-2D hybrid, and the best you can say about it is that you get used to it. The setting is something we’ve all seen a thousand times since Tolkien. And the writing reveals that this really is a show aimed for kids: humor that’s mostly fart jokes and sarcasm and dialogue that states every theme or plot development over and over, always in the clearest possible terms, never giving the audience the satisfaction for figuring something out for themselves. It’s that last point that really bugs me, actually, how the writers never trust the viewer enough to let something stay unstated. 

But maybe ambiguity is overrated. Drive never spells anything emotionally meaningful out too clearly, especially since the characters hardly ever talk. There’s no dialogue in the scene where the hero falls in love, just some beautiful shots and pretty good music of two people hanging out by a stream. With every character left an enigma, though, you start to wonder if there really is anything to them at all, or if they’re just vehicles for all these wonderful shots that don’t come together into an actual story worth caring about.

And maybe that explains what it is about The Dragon Prince that I like, actually. It says what it wants to say: when characters are friends or rivals or enemies, you can always tell right away. When they feel something, they don’t hide it, and even if it gets a little overplayed, at least it’s there. And with that kind of openness right from the first episode, it’s hard not to care about the characters and feel whatever they do, even if what they feel is inordinate joy at some stupid fart joke. Maybe that’s why Drive needs to trade in cool detachment, actually: it’s hard enough watching anyone get shot or stabbed to pieces, it’s just too much to watch that happen to someone you like.

I don’t mean to say that nuance or subtlety are always bad for storytelling. But these two examples show a larger point, I think: that maybe it’s best to trust your instincts on what you think is or isn’t good. Drive just seemed like it was good because it had legitimately great visuals and sophisticated pretensions, but neither of these make for a good storytelling. And if that means I like a stupid (but not that stupid) children’s show more than a film festival award-winning movie, then fine, I’ll take it.