Our Imposter Syndrome cancels out our Dunning-Kruger

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L.I. Underhill is a media critic and historian specializing in pop culture, with a focus on science fiction (especially Star Trek) and video games. Their projects include a critical history of Star Trek told through the narrative of a war in time, a “heretical” history of The Legend of Zelda series and a literary postmodern reading of Jim Davis' Garfield.

4 Comments

  1. Adam Riggio
    August 9, 2013 @ 4:09 am

    A bit of a tangential comment, but your description of demons reminded me of the Dostoyevsky novel Demons. Its basic idea, as far as the title is concerned, is that a demon is really an insuppressible urge or fantasy that inspires destructive actions. An entirely secular conception of the old idea of the demon. We can almost conceive of the traditional supernatural idea of demons as a way to overcome the trauma of actual evil acts: such acts may be driven by the urges of men, but we an find a scapegoat in the supernatural to avoid having to confront the terrifying potential for violence that lives in us all.

    But if the supernatural can manifest in the form of Bloch's Argelians, it might be worth living with all these personifications of evil.

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  2. Josh Marsfelder
    August 9, 2013 @ 8:12 am

    There is a very interesting trend in contemporary mysticism and spirituality that identifies the things we would traditionally have called demons with the idea of thought-forms: Energy given form and agency through powerful emotion. Sometimes this ties back into a conception of faith and the extremely Alan Moore idea gods and spirits exist and have power because the people who believe in them want and need them to.

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  3. K. Jones
    August 11, 2013 @ 12:45 pm

    Whenever I watch "Wolf" now, I immediately link it to "Day of the Dove". Because Redjack and the entity from that level function incredibly similarly as demons, Redjack feeds on Fear, the "Dove" demon on Hate; like Star Trek versions of Parallax and the Butcher from Green Lantern.

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  4. BerserkRL
    December 14, 2013 @ 8:17 pm

    This episode always puts me in mind of its B5 analogue, "Comes the Inquisitor"; but I found the latter superior in its complexity.

    Reply

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