"A response to [@TracingWoodgrains](https://x.com/tracewoodgrains) and a lot of other people
The 2024 Paris Olympics opened with, among other things a rock opera performed in part by the French death metal band Gojira, depicting the French Revolution, and a drag queen Last Supper tableau. That this is controversial is unsurprising. It is 2024, everything with enough reach is inevitably controversial, even apparently [kitten burning](https://x.com/ozyfrantz/status/1816872114055709121), given current GOP party dynamics. The neo-"trad" movement and the broader right wing routinely positions themselves as pro-beauty and against ugliness, condemning such diverse groups and trans people and modern architects for their sins against what they view as aesthetic good sense, while also, perhaps ironically, making heavy use of the usually deliberately ugly "wojak" image macros and less ironically AI art, sometimes with an eye toward fixing what feminism, "wokism", or whatever the term of choice is, has apparently broken and made ugly.
Into this steps something of an online friend, or perhaps frenemy, of mine, [TracingWoodgrains](https://x.com/tracewoodgrains), who I'll be calling Trace rather than his now revealed government name because when you've known someone by their pseudonym for probably a decade, it kind of sticks. Trace is among other things a gay furry and an ex-Mormon who views his former religion much less negatively than many others who have left. A couple months ago, Trace wrote [this post](https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1803995918146166801) about beauty, ugliness, and his own problems with "queer" aesthetics. Around the same time, he came out swinging against the Rugrats and modern Western cartoon art styles. Last week (the thing which prompted this essay), he, perhaps predictably given his own aesthetic preferences, derided the opening ceremony as [ugly and pointlessly edgy](https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1817180900305535329), while also not having the balls to go full Charli Hebdo with it. In that thread about Western cartoons, Trace leaned on his Mormon background as a reason for disliking things that are ugly, as that is, apparently, one of the reasons Mormons give for disliking shows like The Simpsons. I thought that was quite interesting, because my parents, devout Baptists, had completely different justifications for not wanting me to watch The Simpsons as a child, much less shows like South Park or Family Guy. The recent Paris kerfuffle returned this apparent religious connection (and contrast) to the top of my mind and it made some things snap together in a shape that was sufficiently interesting that I felt I had to write it down.
## There is no \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ in Ba Sing Se
First, no offense to Trace, but I have always found Mormons off-putting. Some of this was religious. Baptists, like most Protestants, don't consider The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (aka Mormonism) to be a part of Christianity, and consider it a divergent, heretical cult much like the Seventh-Day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses (for those unfamiliar, they are relatively small, high-control offshoots of Christianity which are fairly non-controversially cults in the "rampant spiritual abuse" sense that the Church of Scientology is a cult as well as the "Christian-ish heresy" sense). But a lot of it was in retrospect aesthetic, and more, what those aesthetics seemed to mean.
The local LDS temple looks like this.
The churches I went to growing up tended to look like these (the latter holding services in a room in a building in a business park).
Or this.
While the Mormon temple in the same country as the above church (admittedly in Kinshasa, the capital, so this isn't the fairest comparison) looks like this.
Mormon missionaries show up at your door in impeccable suits, their smiles gleaming white. Baptist missionaries show up in ~~a Toyota Hilux with a DIY snorkel rigged to the engine's air intake by one of said missionaries, so that it can make it through the potholes of the Congo Basin Rainforest in the rainy season to help fix your village's contaminated spring~~ fairly everyday clothes, though not necessarily poorly dressed, Most Baptist missionary work, at least the kind that my family was involved in, was about utilitarian aid more than direct evangelism.
I realize this is a fundamentally aesthetic argument, the kind which I normally dislike, but bear with me, I'm going somewhere with this.
The attitude which my childhood church took toward Christianity's past involvement in things like slavery, religious violence, and other horrors, centuries past or more recent, was imperfect. We sang Amazing Grace, and pastors used that to talk about William Wilberforce and the movement to end slavery in the British Empire. It was in one respect a transparent attempt to co-opt a figure on the "right" side of history, but in another it was a very deliberate acknowledgement that a lot of actual Christians had been involved in an atrocity.
The LDS church has plenty of red in its own ledger, from exploitative polygamy to hilarious racism. The LDS attitude toward this seems to be primarily one of insistence that, once the official church line has changed, that it was always thus. [There is no war in Ba Sing Se](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/there-is-no-war-in-ba-sing-se), there was no official LDS teaching saying that Black people didn't have souls. Obviously, this isn't universal, and many individual devout Mormons are willing to acknowledge previous or current problems with their religion, but the official line (and one of the largest differences between Mormons and Baptists, aside from the whole Joseph Smith/Book of Mormon thing, is that the former has a strongly top-down organizational command structure which means there is very much an "official line", and the latter is (for better or for worse) more or less anarchist, with much variation between churches and quite a minimal set of necessary precepts) is broadly one of denial.
## Glossiness vs. beauty
The above LDS temples are more elegant and arguably beautiful than any of the Protestant churches (Baptist, Presbyterian, and Mennonite, respectively), though I'd quibble about the 150-year-old stone Baptist church, because I really like that aesthetic. They have excellent stonework and impeccable landscaping. But if I were to walk into the Toronto Temple, my skin would crawl. Why? Because as much as I love beauty, some of the core values my parents taught me were humility and modesty and one atheist conversion and gender transition later I still haven't quite shaken that sense that a church shouldn't feel so glossy and expensive. And there's a limit, I'd be floored by St. Peter's Basilica and the Sistine Chapel as much as anyone if I were to visit, but the vibe from the LDS temple is off. I used "glossy" as the adjective for a reason.
Much has been written about AI art and its merits or lack thereof, ethical issues, and potential impact on society. But as models like Midjourney and DALL-E have been further developed and learned to give people the right number of fingers most of the time, they've converged, perhaps partially in an attempt by their creators to avoid them being used to deliberately and very directly copy an art style (just as much of OpenAI's safety training is largely to eliminate the possibility of "ChatGPT said something super racist! \[when prompted in a specific way\]" headlines), after that capability angered a lot of artists, on an oddly glossy sort of generic digital hyper-realism, unless you make quite a bit of an effort to knock the models out of that mode.
And it's that glossy not-quite realism aesthetic space which a lot of the neo-"trad" aesthetic exists in as well, whether done via AI art or not. In some ways this is an extension of the already existing trends on image-focused social media toward more Facetuned perfection, projected idealized reality. We saw this as well on video platforms like YouTube, as normal people uploading short videos for fun gave way to a pseudo-professional class of "YouTuber", who had a brand and cared about engagement and so on, with very high production values but maintaining the affectations of amateur videography, the most popular and emblematic of which is the remarkably aptly-named "Mr. Beast".
But the online right, or at least a subsection of it, seems to take this stuff oddly seriously and literally. When the makers of Horizon: Zero Dawn rendered the game's (very conventionally attractive, athletically-built) main character, Aloy, in such incredible fidelity that you could see the tiny, transparent hairs on her chin (typical for anyone of any sex who doesn't shave their face religiously) catching a bit of the light, this caused some gamers to fly into a rage. It is somewhat interesting that Aloy is, arguably, less "hot" than the voice actress and motion capture performers who play her. The artists made a somewhat conscious design choice there, to make her a bit more of an everywoman in her looks (and also absolute catnip to sapphics the world over). But the anger over this was remarkable, they were offended that a game artist might make a female protagonist who didn't look like she'd stepped out of a lingerie catalogue (not that we have those anymore, those have both gone online and brands hire more diverse models these days, something which also doesn't sit well with this demographic).
But if you're expecting this to evolve into a diatribe about how caring deeply about beauty leads to fascism, you've got the wrong tranny.
I'm just barely enough of an elder Millennial to remember when "poser" was a serious insult. Whatever you were into, you were supposed to be genuine about it, to take the values of your subculture seriously. And the subcultures which developed through the 90s and 2000s usually had both aesthetics and sets of values, values which often condemned things like "selling out", prioritizing marketability and commercial value over artistic integrity. That obviously put the most successful outgrowths of those subcultures somewhat at odds with the rest of the subcultures, with"
