I'm gonna need a minute here. :pinkiesad:
Agency and Structure, or: Diamond Tiara's Redemption · 8:10am Oct 22nd, 2015
As an addendum to my post about "Crusaders of the Lost Mark", I think it's fair to say there's been some mixed responses to Diamond Tiara's moment of redemption. One of Bad Horse's blogpost directed me to a writeup by bookplayer, Agency and Character Development, and I think it's fair to say I disagree with some of the points made. Since the blogpost is already over a week old and there's already ninety comments, some of which are the size of phone books, I thought a blogpost of my own would be a better place to add my thoughts on this whole matter, since they're quite lengthy and only a little chaotically-organized.
Click on through for the whole hot mess.
The idea of "agency" has been bandied about by writers as some sort of be-all, end-all, in much the same way "Show, Don't Tell" is. But they often outright ignore the complement of agency, structure. These concepts are so entwined that there's even a whole wikipedia entry for it, imaginatively titled Structure and Agency. Now, I'm not a professional sociologist, but right there in the intro it says, "In the social sciences there is a standing debate over the primacy of structure or agency in shaping human behavior." In other words, there is the structure, the network of social relationships, and agency, how much of a degree of freedom people have inside the structure. That's key. These two concepts are inexorably bound together, and sociologists dispute which one has more influence than the other....
Well, thank God for writers, then! They've figured out it's all agency, all the time.
Now, in case you couldn't tell by my 160,000-word treatise on the subject -- also known as The Mare in the High Castle -- I come down fairly heavily on the side of "structure". But I can be a good sport and admit that there's a wealth of opinions on the subject. I'm not trying to say any one view is better or worse, especially since, as I mentioned, I'm not a trained sociologist. However, I have noticed people saying a flaw of "Crusaders" is that it doesn't uphold the sacred cow of all-important agency, nor is it congruent with Diamond Tiara's earlier episodes.
I don't agree, because I firmly believe the episode was about structure, not agency. And I'm going to give my thoughts on why that is.
The first notion to disabuse yourself of is that this was an episode about bullying. It wasn't.
"As a Rich pony, you must always think of your social standing."
"What my family would think if I ever/Fail at anything"
"Socializing with their kind is not how you move up in Equestria!"
"You've spent your life acting like a high horse and raised me to follow in your hoofprints!"
This episode was fundamentally about class, and in that respect, it has more in common with "Sweet and Elite" than it does with "Bad Seed".
Remember these two? It was a joke at the end of "Sweet and Elite" that as soon as Fancy Pants gave his approval of Rarity's dress, Jet Set and Upper Crust immediately shifted from disdain over the dress to placing an order for it. Is this inconsistent writing, as some say Diamond Tiara's redemption was? No. Their "private self", their consciousness, conflicted with the "public face" they, as members of the upper class, endeavor to present to others. They bent like a reed in the wind in an effort to stay fashionable -- and fashion is of course dictated by the social structure.
Television is primarily a visual medium. Aside from the occasional voiceover, we're not privy to a character's private self the way we are in literature. Life is primarily a visual medium, too. So we must necessarily base our opinions on the actions of others; their public faces, that is. But nothing guarantees that their public face and their private self are remotely similar. Like, say, a homosexual-bashing fire-and-brimstone televangelist caught in a sex scandal with a male prostitute. In that case, the public facade he has worked so hard to cultivate is revealed as very different from his private self, which is the wellspring of the subconscious passions that drive human beings.
So the purpose of a public face is to navigate the social structure, the social mores (and whims, such as fashion) that govern society. In some fictional characters, such as our heroes, the private self usually comes out directly through their public faces, since we often consider honesty a virtue. 
But episodes such as "The One Where Pinkie Pie Knows" can riff on the tormented divide between the public and the private self, as well as structure (i.e. it's a social faux pas to blab secrets).
Diamond Tiara, as presented in "Crusaders", has been molded from birth in the John Lockean sense. Since the time her mind was a blank slate, her mother raised her like a member of the upper class, the elites in Canterlot, and instilled in her daughter a social interface dictating how she should behave at any given moment. In the episode, at one point, Spoiled Rich says, "Why are you making that face? That is not the face of a winner." That face, she says. Clearly, she has been instructing DT for quite some time in how, exactly, her public face should appear at any given moment.
That is not only consistent with what has been presented earlier in the show, but wildly consistent. The Diamond Tiara we have seen so far is her public face. Vicious, cunning, devious, cutthroat. An upper class snob, in other words. A more vicious version of Jet Set and Upper Crust. Tiara interacts with the social structure of Equestria with aristocratic panache, and furthermore it's exactly how her mother expects her to act. When running the Foal Free Press -- a distinctly upper crust endeavor *cough*RupertMurdoch*cough* -- why wouldn't she act with the same kind of sharklike lack of empathy her mother expects? The tales of Tiara's reign of terror would surely generate a kind of social currency that would make its way back to Spoiled, seeing how she's on the school board. DT has every reason to present herself as a soulless social terror, even when she's with her closest friend, because she's been raised to believe that's how a pony succeeds in business.
The fact that Diamond Tiara hasn't shown any remorse before means nothing. She has been raised to be part of the upper crust, to play the part of the aristocrat 24/7. But, the key thing is, that means nothing in regard to her private self. A person can play a social role for the benefit of the structure around them while feeling in their heart something completely different. What Faulkner referred to as "The heart in conflict with itself." As Diamond Tiara revealed in her solo song when she thought nopony was listening (ignore the musical logic of singing in the middle of the town).
The dichotomy between the various parts of the individual (either figuratively or literally, as in the case of Pixar's Inside Out) is fertile ground for fiction, since by our very nature we can't know the inner world of another person. We can only know what they choose to reveal, and some are better actors than others. Diamond Tiara was a very good actress. In "Sweet and Elite", the similarly high society-obsessed Rarity was a middling actress. Pinkie Pie in "The One Where...." was a terrible actress. But all of them still had to interact with the social obligations that order their lives, and an essential part of fiction is seeing how they interact with that structure.
After losing the presidency, in the club house Diamond Tiara delivers an angry tirade stating that she's perfectly happy with her cutie mark and who she is (her public face) while her strained voice and nervous expression (her private self) betray her words. She's already lost her best friend by acting the part her mother wrote for her and ruthlessly crusading for office, and she's being torn in half by the conflicting social -- that is to say, structural -- forces: filly-ial obligation to social success and upper class snobbery VS. friendship and altruism. She has been playing the role of sneering aristocrat for the structure of Ponyville for five seasons now, and the cracks in her mask are showing. She's imploding inside, under the strain of being the tiny terror she (and her mother) have created.
And so finally something that could be construed as "agency" enters the picture, but it's still subservient to the idea of the structure. The Cutie Mark Crusaders show Diamond Tiara another way, and she is faced with the choice of whether to accept it or not, and uphold her place in the social hierarchy, or abandon her ways in favor of something more altruistic that makes her more popular with the commonfolk of Equestria, as it were.
So Diamond Tiara makes her choice. She takes that leap, pulls the mask off her face and casts it aside, and reveals her private self for the first time, in a symbolic reflection of Rarity in "Sweet and Elite" saying she's proud to call Ponyville her home. She stands unchained from the burden of the upper class social structure that's been drummed into her head since probably the day she was born, and it's a brand new day in Equestria for her.
I was going to come up with a much more clever ending for this article, full of delightfully apropos witticisms to leave you chewing on, but it's late and I'm dead-tired, and besides....I wouldn't want you to get full before I finish barbequeing the sacred cow of "agency", would I? 
Another interesting blog post from you. :)
I always felt that another interpretation of it was that people were assigning agency to characters that never had agency in the first place, but seemed like it merely because the truth of the matter was never revealed until much later. While this is not the ONLY interpretation (and in truth not the one I subscribe to in THIS particular example), it's clear that the majority of the outrage was that Ms. Tiara's agency was 'taken away' by the bad writing, but why should it ever have been the case that she had it in the first place?
It's also quite possible that she was simply responding and acting within her own prescribed rules from the very beginning, except that, like a perfectly programmed robot, it mimicked agency so well that we were all too ready to give it to her. Of course, this means that she was always a robot from the start -- something that is hard to accept, but something that I can live with given her thrownness.
You're completely off-base here. The reality is that the aspect of structure and agency is extremely well known by writers, even though not many writers will refer to structure as such. Any writer worth their salt knows that backstory has a major impact on how a character views the world.
Except... this isn't actually correct. And the reason is very simple:
Characters possess neither structure nor agency.
They're fictional! They don't have any ability to make any decisions on their own. They can't rebel against the author or society unless we make them do so. They don't have backstories, don't have life events. They're entirely, 100% made up.
Characters don't have structure; they don't live in a world. Characters don't have agency; every decision "they" make is ultimately made by the writer.
When we're writing characters, we grant them the illusion of these things to make them appear to be real people. When you fail at this, the characters cease to seem to be real, because they don't seem like or act like real people. Indeed, we create these things around the character we're building, because we usually start out with the story, and the character will need to fit into that, rather than vice-versa.
When you write a story, you are making the decision of whether structure or agency dominates. Structure dominating leads to a feeling of suffocation, of inability, of futility. When agency dominates, freedom - for good or for ill - and the power of choices and consequences matters more. In a character about a story with agency, their success or failure is on their shoulders; in a story about a character without agency, their success or failure is fixed.
This leads to massively different tones, but it also leads to very different characterization. People who are dominated by structure behave very differently from people who are dominated by agency. This is true not only in stories, but in real life - people who recognize their own personal agency behave very differently from people who believe that structure controls their life, and also have much better life outcomes on average.
The kind of story you're telling determines how much agency you give your characters. Romeo and Juliet is about the triumph of structure over agency, and the tragedy that brings when the characters can't overcome it. Many dystopian novels are about the same general theme. It is a predominant idea in bleak and hopeless works, horror stories, and similar things.
MLP is about agency. Is there structure in the world? Yes! Immense amounts of it. And yet, we see through the actions of the protagonists, that what they choose to do matters. The show is fundamentally hopeful and joyful. And it isn't limited to the heroes; the villains, too, are dominated by agency. Discord CHOOSES to behave the way he does; he can make different choices, and while he is used to behaving in certain ways, he can indeed choose otherwise. Luna chooses to stop torturing herself with the Tantabus, just as she chose to embrace Nightmare Moon out of jealousy. Tirek chose to betray Discord rather than befriend him.
Characters might have butt-stamps that supposedly determine their destiny, and yet, they can still choose to do different things. Rainbow Dash walks away from the Wonderbolts when she believes they aren't living up to her standards. Twilight chooses to disobey Princess Celestia in The Crystal Empire because other things are more important than following orders.
This is a common theme throughout the show; that we can make different choices. We can choose to fight or get along. We can choose to be grumpy or friendly.
Indeed, Lauren Faust outright said that one of the central themes of the show is that there is no one right way to be a girl, which is a message all about the triumph of agency over structure.
That's a pretty big problem.
But there are two other problems on top of that.
The first is inconsistent characterization. Diamond Tiara's behavior in this episode doesn't fit with her behavior elsewhere at all. She became the editor of the Foal Free Press and made decisions on her own about what to run, what to assign ponies to do, and how to best keep control. She chose to dangle the carrot and wield the stick. And ultimately, her choices lead to her own failure when she goes too far.
Indeed, this is not the only time we see her seizing opportunity; we also see her doing the same thing in Flight to the Finish, where she mocks Scootaloo for being a cripple in order to sabotage her opponents and win the competition herself.
She is displaying a great deal of agency. She chooses to be nasty to Apple Bloom in private, repeatedly, instead of just ignoring her. She chooses to mock her friends.
Her actions are not those of someone whose actions are controlled by structure. She goes out of her way to do these things, and never mentions or gives any hint of any extrinsic reason for doing it - it is always for her own personal benefit.
She's also extremely two-faced towards authority figures like Cheerilee and Twilight Sparkle, which further suggests a general disrespect for the authority of others on some level - while she respects their power, she doesn't respect them being right.
Worse still, we have hints that her father tries to get her to behave more nicely in several episodes. Wore still, in One Bad Apple, Babs Seed specifically threatens Diamond Tiara by threatening to tell her mother about her bad attitude, and Diamond Tiara is afraid - despite, according to this episode, it being her mother's imprinted attitude.
You claim that she is dominated by structure, but none of her previous behavior gave any indication of that at all - indeed, her resistance to her father making her go along with the Apple Family's zap apple ritual suggests that, while her dad can make her do things, he certainly can't make her like doing it.
It doesn't fit. It doesn't ring true. We never saw any sign of it, and indeed, every sign pointed the opposite way. This means she was out of character for this episode.
And this set up the second issue: disempowerment.
Disempowerment is when you take a character who has agency and then remove agency from them. The purpose of this is to make said character helpless and weak. This is actually a pretty core component to many horror movies with "bad ends"; the characters, despite all their struggles, can never succeed, and for all their apparent agency, in the end, the malevolent world was only toying with them and they lose anyway. Note that in cases where awful things happen and the characters aren't disempowered but fail anyway - like The Mist - things are actually darker, because then the character's failures are not the result of helplessness but their own falliability.
The problem with disempowerment is that it removes agency from the character by its very nature. It is different in nature from an obstacle or setback - something that puts the character in a much worse situation may screw them over, but it doesn't deprive them of agency, it just makes victory that much harder. A character who is thrown in jail may not be able to do a whole lot physically, but that's not the same thing as the character not being able to do a whole lot as a person. Winston, at the end of 1984, is disempowered; he cannot resist anymore. He loves Big Brother. The fact that he could, physically, resist is meaningless, because he is no longer capable of doing so as a person.
The nature of disempowerment is why the story fundamentally doesn't work on a structural level: the story is entirely about overcoming your family's structure by showing character agency, but the character's agency was removed at the start of the story. Diamond Tiara was disempowered, changed from a self-centered bully with a sadistic streak to a filly who is bullied by her own mother and does what she says to satisfy her, and yet the story is supposed to be about a character's agency overcoming their structure.
It feels tremendously artificial. Its like Superman finding out that all he had to do to beat the enemy he was fighting was punch him and pretending like hasn't done that a thousand times before, even thoug he has. It isn't consistent with what came before, and it is throwing up an arbitrary thing in the way. The obstacle here was lack of agency (something the character always had previously) and the solution was... the character finding agency. Which they had always had previously, before it was arbitrarily removed for this episode.
So, yeah, the episode was ill-conceived, as the very central conflict for Diamond Tiara didn't make any sense.
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It was poor writing because the episode was supposed to be about empowerment, but to make the point, the episode disempowered the character. Disempowerment is a narrative device, not an in-character obstacle, so Diamond Tiara "overcoming" her disempowerment was merely the author arbitrarily giving her back the agency she always had previously.
Disempowerment is about the removal of agency from a character; it isn't an in-character obstacle.
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Well, I do agree with you there in all points, but I feel you didn't get the gist of my comment, or maybe I didn't explain it well enough.
This is based on the assumption that she had any agency to begin with. What I was trying to propose was a simple alternate reading of her events up until now (from the start of the VERY SHOW, not just that one episode) that she perhaps didn't have this agency at all whatsoever.
Now, if you interpret it that she had it all along, then yes, there's really no argument to your points, and anyone ought to be able to understand it perfectly -- that the writer, specifically for that one epsiode, decided to turn a character with agency to one without agency for the specific purpose of giving it back to her.
To put it another way, he dug the very hole that he then later filled up and proclaimed that he proudly solved a problem.
However, my point is that WHAT IF there were the interpretation that Tiara HAD NO AGENCY from the VERY beginning? From the VERY start of the show? Now, let's put aside the 'how reasonable would it be' questions and 'it wouldn't fit' analyses for the time being, and just for the very sake of this argument, pretend that this is fact. (Besides, most of these points you already covered in your other response, so let's just park it there just for this moment. Please bear with me.)
Let's pretend for a moment that indeed, Tiara HAD no agency from the very beginning. How would that change things? To me, what it looks like is that in this understanding, the writing no longer suffers the problem you outlined because there was no initial Agency for the writer to 'take away' and the episode THEN becomes a story of overcoming certain boundaries and enjoying a new character freedom.
Correct?
Now, let's bring back the other questions and you can talk about feasibility all you want. Ultimately, that's a separate issue because, and I'm trying to be extremely clear here, there are people who might interpret Tiara's actions from the start of the entire show in the way that she has had no agency. Yes, it would be a shift to an understanding built up upon 4 years of the show thus FAR, but when new facts and new information is introduced into a show, the viewer can then choose to use that information in one of two ways.
The first of course, is to adjust their world view to INCORPORATE the new information and results in my proposition.
The second is to say that this new information is counterproductive to the show's development and choose to REJECT it as part of canon.
Neither understanding is more correct than the other for various, various reasons that would take too long to discuss. But suffice it to say, I am not specifically arguing for either side (I actually personally believe that it was just a case of laziness, to be honest), but I do just want to respect that people are allowed to incorporate this new information as they will, and I was merely pointing this out.
You too, are free to believe all you want that this is a case of the writer dicking with agency. I'm super cool with that. Everyone SHOULD respect this, and everyone SHOULD be cool with it in turn, because it is just an opinion and everyone is entitled to one.
But I think it would be remiss for anyone to deny the existence of the other interpretation.
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Just to play devil's avocado for the heck of it, because why not, there's a couple of things I want to agree with and disagree with, again, for no express purpose except just to point out there might be another line of thought (at least one that I could think of).
Specifically, I would like to address the concept that none of Tiara's past behaviours being in line with her being a victim of structure. I find that while a few of your points are un-debatable, which is primarily why I land on the 'CMC ep had a bit of the lazy writing' side of the fence, I think that not everything you said lends itself to the 'agency' idea.
Let me cut out the ones that are definitely true:
Those are pretty undeniable. They do show a high level of personal agency, yep yep. So, nothing much to say here.
I think one of the things that perhaps isn't being brought up strongly enough is the fact that there is agency within structure. Agency and structure is never and either/or deal. To put it into other terms, even if you told a ball that it could only bounce within the confines of a box, it still has the agency to decide what sort of methods and patterns and ways it can do so -- just as long as it's in the box (and we're talking about sentient balls, too.) To also take from Romeo and Juliet, which you pointed out, both Romeo and Juliet displayed an insane amount of agency within the structure they were meant to follow, finding ways to get what they wanted within the rules they were given.
So I do propose that the following points can be interpreted in the way that still allows her character in the latest ep to be in sync with her established character:
Her mother could have suggested or guided her to do so. Tiara is a 'molded' pony, behaving in the way that her mother wishes. Her mother might not need to dictate every single action, but she might dictate a method and a mindset. We can argue that Tiara at the time was too brainwashed to see differently, and this difference only started to appear recently as she grew older. People change. People are allowed to change. Her mother may have simply just groomed her to think that 'it would be good for you to be in a position of high power'. Tiara then saw an opportunity with the Foal Free Press and pushed forward with the idea and failed because she's a stupid.
By the way, to get it clear also, it is not necessary to actually mention at this point that her mom was behind it all. It wasn't necessary to the narrative back then unless you were explicitly setting up for the downfall of Ms. Mom at some point in the future. Remember that plot twists and reveals rely explicitly on the withholding of information to the audience. However, it can be done effectively and ineffectively. For the purposes of this argument, let's just say that the writing of the latest ep did this INCREDIBLY ineffectively.
I can easily see this behaviour being done by someone groomed with a 'do anything to win' mindset. Remember, the commands of structure need not be specific. It can be very broad, allowing a character to display agency in how they wish to execute it. I don't see how this would be out of sync if indeed her mom had just been telling her to bloody be a better and more powerful woman like meeeeee~ all this while.
As a result of her mother's constant brainwashing that blank flanks are to be disrespected and that she should mock them viciously. She never questioned why in the past. Maybe she started to later, which is what led to the episode. Again, done sloppily, but still possible.
Unless that reason is to look good and seek approval in the eyes of her mother, which she then later grew up despising once she became older. Dominating figures, in psychology, have this effect on the subservient. The subservient will do a lot of things they don't question themselves in order to simply get approval of the dominant, whom in turn holds it juuuust out of reach in order to keep the subservient under their control. This is a very common relationship in criminology, for example. We don't know that Tiara doesn't later go back home at the end of the day and tell mother that she did XXX and YYY that day to seek her approval. If she did, that would explain a lot of her behaviour in this way. The other interpretation -- that she is just a cock -- is an equally reasonable interpretation.
Her father may not... necessarily be the pants-wearer of the family, if you know what I'm saying. Her father may have been trying to help break his daughter out of it, but knows that his wife is equally manipulative. Maybe he's planning divorce behind the scenes. Maybe he's doing a lot of stuff.
--
Either way, don't take this too seriously either. I'm just enjoying myself looking at things from all angles. I want to reiterate again lest people yell at me, I don't think this is the only way to interpret the scenes. Everyone has their own logic, and if you can overturn my points to push the needle of logic toward the 'agency' angle, then that's great! Otherwise, I just say, everyone give it your own thoughts, think about it more, and give it some consideration before coming to your own determination.
Peace out~
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"But what if she never had agency?" is to misunderstand what disempowerment IS. Frequently, disempowerment is a retcon, turning a previously competent charater into an incompetent one retroactively, often with a disregard for continuity.
Disempowerment is about removing agency from a character, including retroactively in many cases.
"But what if she never had agency?", then, is a meaningless question to ask, because what matters is how they were presented. As far as the audience was concerned, the character had agency. Then, they lost agency. Any retcons are irrelevant; what is relevant is what is in the actual text.
This is why Bookplayer was making the point about "not knowing anything about Diamond Tiara" in her blogs - because they retconned her into an entirely different character, with little regard for her past actions, desires, and goals. Removing a character's agency changes who they are in a very fundamental way.
It was a garden variety retcon or Out of Character Moment. This is hardly the first time the show has done something like this; Spike At Your Service is another example of inconsistent characterization which contradicts with other episodes, as Spike is suddenly portrayed as being incompetent at things he had previously been shown to be competent at.
The show does contradict itself at times due to poor writing. Other examples of bad writing include things like the main characters standing around in Daring Don't for no reason, which was totally at odds with their behavior in every other similar situation.
Saying neither understanding is more correct than the other is wrong. It was an example of inconsistent writing and disregard for previous characterization and continuity. Some people will decide they like clumsy incompetent Spike better than the Spike presented in other episodes, others won't, but when someone argues that Spike was characterized the same way in every episode, they'll simply be wrong.
As I noted in my post, it is important to remember these people don't really exist. It is possible for someone to take "Spike" and present him in a totally different way. People will note it as being out of character, but that doesn't mean that the writer can't do it, merely that they shouldn't. Writers can and do do it all the time, it just is poor writing.
Whether or not you decide to go with whatever variation of Diamond Tiara, that's on you. But acting as though this was an example of something other than inconsistent characterization is simply incorrect, because that's what it was. Old Diamond Tiara got angry when she was thwarted; new Diamond Tiara becomes sad. Old Diamond Tiara got joy out of hurting the CMC. Old Diamond Tiara was ambitious. Old Diamond Tiara was a good judge of character and what other people wanted; the new one was presented as not understanding this in the election.
I want to make a much smaller point here: The public face Spoiled Rich constructed for Diamond Tiara is such counterproductive one. There's a reason even bullying parents don't encourage their children to act overtly like bullies, outside of fiction's need for antagonists: It has the potential to get the child in trouble, which in turn creates hassle and annoyance for the parent.
If Spoiled Rich's mask caused Diamond Tiara to laugh at Granny Smith, then Spoiled Rich jeopardized a key source of her family's wealth. By season 5 its public knowledge that the CMC are the personal students of an alicorn princess, but Spoiled Rich encourages her daughter to openly disdain these potential sources of future connections. The reason rich people/nobles always act so much overtly rude and cruel than they do in real life (unless you are Donald Trump) is that a public mask of such behavior is always damaging to ones status and reputation, doubly so in a place like Equestria.
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I'm not going to respond to all of that point-by-point, because it would be three times the size of your comment and I'm trying to keep this slim. I'm also not going to debate whether Diamond Tiara's behavior is inconsistent, because that boils down to a philosophical difference on the nature of fiction whereby a reader assumes all character have agency unless presented otherwise, which I don't share. I've said my piece on the matter in the article already.
But I will say you missed my point:
As I said in the introduction, neither stories about agency nor stories about structure are bad. But I've read far too many poorly-thought-out op-ed pieces about Game of Thrones taking away Sansa Stark's agency -- despite being in a show about the lack of agency inside the feudal structure -- to buy that writers and critics en masse understand the nature of agency and its relationship to structure. I am writing against the tendency to say all fiction should be agency-centric cathartic wish fulfillment, not to say one way is definitively better than the other.
As to FIM being about agency, it is not. It delves into both sides of the argument, because agency is a sliding scale that exists in real life in different proportions. Some episodes are about agency, others are about structure. Aside from the class issues raised by "Sweet and Elite" (an episode under Faust's tenure as showrunner), as I mentioned in the article, there's also the most recent episode, with the Pies and the Apples chafing over each others' social traditions (a form of structure). Applejack's choice to redo the Pie family's holiday traditions are shown to be a bad decision, because her choices do not align with the social structure the Pie family has created.
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Actually, to put it another way, the ball doesn't have any agency at all, because its trajectory is decided by its initial momentum and the laws of physics. To be honest, this is how I feel about human nature in general. Our upbringing is the thing that sets us off on our trajectory, and we spend our lives just bouncing around on a predetermined path because of how we've been
emotionally scarredconditioned by social forces.But, as I agreed in the blog post, you're totally right; people and fiction both have different spectra of belief on agency vs. structure.
That said, I think Babs threatening to tell Diamond Tiara's mother on her actually supports my side, given how, in "Crusaders", she's portrayed as utterly emotionally crippled by her mother's conditioning and reproachment. It's a common real life occurrence, as well as a common trope -- I'm thinking in particular of Wesley Wyndham-Pryce on Angel here -- that characters who outwardly seem composed can be reduced to quivering blobs of emotional jelly by the threat of being confronted with their parents' domineering presence.
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I never said they were effective high-class snobs, mind.
3499239 It's pretty clear she married into money, I doubt she could earn it on her own.