She Tries Not to Shatter #2, Lobster edition

"Loner, seen from behind" is #1 in some lists of visual tropes for lazy movie-poster designers, as compiled by lazy Pop-Culture websites. Actually these lists are all the same, in different orders, so I link to one which (unusually) credits the original compiler / montage creator.

It would be very wrong to cobble these all together into a stroby, twitching, epileptogenic GIF.

So when Jordan Peterson monetarised his Interweave notoriety by pitching Self-Actualisation MBA seminars for overly-dramatic Emo kids Incels who want to Think for Themselves and Rediscover their Manhood and Make $$$, naturally he (or his ad advisor) slavishly followed the conventions of that trope:

H/t Adam Rutherford

People have grappled with those sentences and sought to wrest sense from them, only to conclude that Peterson missed his métier and is still writing lyrics for the Glam-Metal band he fantasised about fronting while at university. They make more sense if you imagine them on the B-side of 'The Final Countdown'.

As for his Disruptive-Learning Fellow-ships, they are a standard MLM / Pyramid-scheme scam, though stealing the skin of Robert Bly's "Iron John" tradition so I am concerned that there may be drum circles. The $65,000 tuition is not motivated by personal greed, and is only imposed to motivate the suckers and focus their attention. I am not making this up:

How much will I need to pay in tuition?At Acton you’ll learn the importance of aligning incentives with key success factors, to attract and motivate the right people. Our innovative pay-it-forward financing, made possible by Acton teachers, alumni and other successful entrepreneurs, is designed to mirror this lesson and make Acton as accessible as possible, while making sure every participant has “skin in the game.”

Just saying, you can gain the same insights for free from the Peterson Quotation Generator.

In other news, I am here to report another sighting of the 'disintegration' / 'visual fragmentation' trope in movie poster art. It is the lazy designer's default symbol for themes of dissolution of identity or memory, and the increasing virtuality of reality... so popular, in fact, that it spills over into themes of assembly and integration.

Fortunately other chroniclers besides your humble Riddled scribes keep track of phenomena such as these. I am not sure that the Batman instance entirely conforms to the trope, but whatthehell.

[Mostly stolen from 'Jay']

It would be very wrong to cobble these all together into a stroby twitching epileptogenic GIF, also too.

We can count ourselves fortunate that Jordan Peterson's graphic designer did not opt for this trope instead: instead of Johnny Cash cosplay, we could have been subjected to an image of the Great Philosopher deliquescing at the edges into a pile of lobsters.