#Religious issues

[peaceandlovepanda]

I love queer Catholics. I don't think I'll ever feel safe or happy being a member of that religion, but seeing queer Catholics who live out a kinder, truer, more livegiving version of the traditions I grew up with is very reassuring and healing to see. I can never go back- I've been hurt too much -but seeing this gives me much-needed hope for this institution that has caused so much harm, to me and to others. Keep doing what you're doing guys, and thank you <3

[mariusslonelysoul]

I fully blame supernatural, mr collins and jackles' jacting joices for me just now starting a 180 episode novela from 2015 about a girl pretending to be a nun and then falling for a priest, who also falls for her

[chaserofstarsandtheabyss]

I feel like the longer I’ve been at a Catholic school, the less religious I’ve become.

[naliya]

I have come to truly hate the sentence "you could just be polite" because you know... While politeness is nice, there are plenty of situations where people can't really afford it.

I've been thinking about what happened to Mila in France. A lesbian teenager who was insulted, send death threats and vilified for expressing her dislike of Islam, and often, when people talk about situations such as those, their go to answer to justify their discomfort is "yes blasphemy isn't a law in France, but you could also be polite" or "yes free speech is important but you could also be polite", "yes shooting up a bunch of cartoonists is bad, but they could also have been polite" and on and on it goes.

But here is the unfortunate and uncomfortable truth: when you are talking of an ideology who yield an immense amount of power worldwild, who opresses people in impressive scales in states where the scriptures are made law, and of a book who - in itself - doesn't have any rights, there are plenty of situation and cases where politeness is a luxury one can't afford. And moreover, not everybody's idea of what's polite is the same, so who gets to decide? Telling a gay (!!!) teenager that she should be polite toward an idea (an idea, not a person, let that sink in for a minute) that hates her is frankly absurd.

You should be mindful of Muslims, sure, but no, your ideology (no matter which) doesn't deserve my respect nor my politeness just because it's sacred to you, it's not sacred to me and if I think it's a bad idea, I have every right to say so. Not only are you not forced to listen to me, but moreover my rights don't end where your feelings begin, and you could just debate instead of asking me to be polite toward a book that wants me dead.

Politeness is nice and sweet but it doesn't get you anywhere when dealing with issues such as those, you cannot tell people struggling under such ideologies that politeness matters when it comes to fighting their oppression. Because it truly and sincerely doesn't.

Ideas don't have rights, they do not deserve my respect nor my tolerence for only just existing, only people do.

[whumpitywhumpwhump]

👿 + ⭕✒ if you feel like it!

👿 - demon +  ⭕ - collared +  ✒ - carving or branding

TW: branding, collar, chains, religious issues

Whumpee blinked awake slowly, head fuzzy, vision blurry. What happened?

They sat up, blinking rapidly, when they heard the clinking. A second later, they registered the weight, settled around their neck. As their fingers mapped it’s surface, it clicked--they were collared. Hard, stiff metal, wrapped tightly around their neck, and a secure chain linked at the back. 

Immediately, they began to pry at it, trying to slide their fingers under the band--they needed to get it off. When it didn’t budge, they jumped to their feet, and tried to walk to the door of the plain room they were left in.

The collar yanked them back after a few feet--they choked for a second before stepping back. They gasped from the pressure.

The door swung open in front of them, and a young woman sauntered in, swinging a cane around.

“Thought I heard ya moving around in here. How do ya like it?”

They tipped their head down and lunged at her, horns first. The chain jerked them back and they tumbled to the floor, coughing. 

“So you’re as stupid as you are evil. Hilarious.”

Evil? The only people that ever called them evil were those who wanted to pin their sins on someone--and those people were frequently...well, violent.

They looked up at her, glaring. She chuckled, tossing her head back. He saw a sunburst on a chain around her neck--yes, she was one of those. 

The woman stepped forward.

“When I saw you resting in that alley, I knew this was my chance to prove myself, prove my goodness, and you, hun, are gonna help me.”

She swung the cane up that she’d been holding, and they saw the same holy symbol at the end of it, carved in gold. She extended it, and they scrambled backwards, away from it. They didn’t want to know what she planned to do with it. 

The chain pulled taut before them, keeping them from moving back further. She still approached, a confident smile on her dimpled face. She held out the cane, with the symbol at the bottom, and touched it to his cheek.

It burned, like fire and metal and acid and--and--it was hot and they were screaming and it was burning--

The cane pulled back from their face, but the pain didn’t stop. The side of their face throbbed, hot, pulsing. Their fingers reached up and gingerly brushed over the tender, scorched skin. The holy mark was set into their skin, and as they teared up, the salty drops stung over the burns. 

She chuckled, and before they could move away, she pressed the cane down against their midriff. The shrieked, back arching, as the skin seared and blistered beneath it. When she pulled back, they dropped, limply, against the floor. Every breath pulled at the burn, sapping their strength. They moaned, pain too sharp for silence.

“Can you burn the hell out of a devil? I’d really like to know.” Her eyes were wickedly bright, and as she leaned over them, their vision hazed to an indistinct blur. Distantly, they felt the sting of another burn arriving on their thigh, and then everything was black.

[lupinepublishers]

Lupine Publishers| Vietnamese Chronicle. A brief report from a distant part of the world

Abstract

This article is about Vietnam, a place I wanted to visit since my childhood. Forty years ago, I took the road and started to struggle for the accomplishment of my geographical dreams. Simply by coincidence, in 1980, I headed for Argentina, whose name commences with the first letter of our alphabet; my second international trip happened to be a “B” one, as I decided to make for Bolivia in 1982; after four decades travelling around the world and without having found any place to call “home” yet, Vietnam (a “V” country) was visited by me in 2020. The name New Zeeland is on the top of my current list and has a capital “Z” within it; does that mean that I am destined to finally settle down somewhere in the next few years?

Keywords: Vietnam, Communism, Religion, Disability, Travels

Introduction

Figure 1 Half of my childhood and teenage years were spent hearing, reading, watching and talking about the War of Vietnam (1955-1975). The subject became compulsive on a planetary scale; its ubiquity in the media made it subject number one in the hearts and minds of everybody. Therefore, I was no exception to the rule; in fact, I was just one more unity to be added to the statistics. Along with the Counterculture and its variants (the Beat Generation, the hippie and the punk subcultures, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the rock and roll in general, etc.), Vietnam was the fashion in those days. To tell the truth, the very word “Vietnam” may have been one of the first I learnt to speak, giving my having been born in the very beginning of the 1960s, a time that was “the closest the Cold War came to escalating into a full-scale nuclear war”[1]. George Englund’s The Ugly American (1963), Alfred Hitchcock’ Topazio (1969) and Ted Post’s Go Tell the Spartans (1978) – based on Daniel Ford’s novel Incident at Muc Wa (1967) - are among the few motion pictures that are faithful to the truth concerning this crucial phase of our history. My first intention in writing this article was not to talk about the war, neither to portray nor convey any political landscape concerning the period spanning from 1955 to 1975. As much as I could, I tried not to delve into many details concerning Vietnam’s communist fate. I could not help, however, saying something about the fate of the Vietnamese people, especially with respect to disability (which happens to be my field of research) and religion, being this sphere of human life the most affected when freedom of though and of speech are under the constant threat of censorship – as in the case of any and all Communist regime, being Vietnam no exception to the rule. The following lines are basically a brief account of a visit I made to Vietnam, besides an overview of some geographical and cultural features of this land described as “one of the most intoxicating destinations on planet earth”. Vietnam, the same literary source states, is “a kaleidoscope of vivid colours and subtle shades, exotic sights and curious sounds, grand architecture and deeply moving war sites. The nation is a budget traveller’s dream, with inexpensive transport, outstanding street food, goodvalue accommodation and bia hoi perhaps the world’s cheapest beer”[2]. It remains for me to tell that my childhood and teenage years were also fed by my mother reports of a travel she made to Europe in her youth (more precisely in 1950). Countries like Belgium, Holland, France and Italy were no more than mere sounds in my first years of life – just like “Vietnam”. It was these sounds that started to shape my dreams about travelling and knowing personally some parts of the earth. Vietnam was one of my dreamed targets, all of them geographical abstractions, much like Baudelaire’s “Anywheres”, exactly the kind of place “of which we had no memories and where no one knew our names” [3]. The opportunity to make it a reality came in February 2020.

The Land, the People… and some Religious Issues

Figure 2 Occupying the easternmost swath of the Indochinese Peninsula, Vietnam is a mostly hilly and forested land. Its 127,882 sq mi make of it the sixty-fifth largest country in the world, inhabited by 95,5 million people, thus ranking fifteenth when compared with other countries’ population. The human presence in what is now Vietnam is a fact since the Lower Paleolithic, as attested by some 500,000 years old fossils of Homo erectus found in the north of the country. Time passed, and different human groups overlapped each other until their combined cultural achievements converged to the Đông Sơn Bronze Age culture, so named after the northern Vietnamese village of Đông Sơn, where their remains were found. What is more, Đông Sơn’s influence “spread to other parts of Southeast Asia, including Maritime Southeast Asia, from about 1000 BC to 1 BC. The Dong Son people, who are also known as Lạc or Lạc Việt, were skilled at cultivating rice, keeping water buffalos and pigs, fishing and sailing in long dugout canoes. They also were skilled bronze casters, which is evidenced by the Dong Son drum found widely throughout northern Vietnam and South China. To the south of the Dong Son culture was the Sa Huỳnh culture of the proto-Chams” [4]. The homo vietnamiensis – if we can him so – started to be shaped in this cultural scenario. Yet more times than not, the influence from the giant of the North has been unavoidable. Chinese presence is a fundamental constant in the Vietnamese way of life.

In essence, Vietnam’s history is not different from that of other nations we may be more familiar with: we will find there the same cycles of dynasties, kingdoms, internal and international wars, territorial expansion and shrinking. As for particular historical landmarks, July 2 1976 is a date not to be forgotten for all Vietnamese; on that day, North Vietnam and South Vietnam merged by force of arms into one single country (the Socialist Republic of Vietnam). Atheism become the “religion” of the State, being all true forms of religion subjected to persecution. Not content with eliminating all other political rivals, Communist leaders usually do not want competition in the spiritual arena either: no other being can be worship but the Communist Party, the Communist People and the Communist Dictator (see North Korea and China). Notwithstanding, religiousness heroically survives in Atheistic Vietnam. Within this small spiritual universe, Buddhists are majority and Hindus minority. Christianity ranks second in terms of number of followers, but leads the ranking of martyrdoms. In fact, “The atheist dictatorship of Vietnam persecute all kinds of religion. In particular, Christians are most affected. Open Doors has ranged Vietnam on place 21. The country’s Communist regime can close churches without any reason. In 2012 the regime closed at least seven Catholic churches. A Catholic orphanage was also closed and a pastor was beaten by the regime’s authorities. In the Vietnamese countryside, the situation is worse as in the cities, because tribal leaders discriminate against Christians for their faith”[5].

More: “Christians in Vietnam are targeted by both the government and, especially in rural contexts, tribal leaders. The government has some level of tolerance for Christian groups, particularly Catholics, but if any believers are deemed to be politically active, they can be imprisoned. In places where religion and ethnic identity are closely tied, Christians who convert from traditional religions are often victims of pressure and violence from their families and communities. On the state level, villagers collude with local Communist authorities, beating believers, kicking them out of their villages and stoning places of worship during meetings. Local and national government authorities persecute the Christian minority through their laws, and Christian bloggers and political activists have been arrested and sentenced” [6].

It is not of today that Christians have been persecuted in Vietnam. Communism has only continued with a centuries-old tradition. Indeed, since the 16th century, Vietnam has bequeathed to eternity a great number of Christian martyrs; in the West, the best known of them seem to be the Blessed Andrew of Phu Yen (1624- 1644), also named the “Protomartyr of Vietnam”, and Saint Andrew Dũng-Lạc (1795-1839). As a matter of fact, “The tortures these individuals underwent are considered by the Vatican to be among the worst in the history of Christian martyrdom. The torturers hacked off limbs joint by joint, tore flesh with red hot tongs, and used drugs to enslave the minds of the victims. Christians at the time were branded on the face with the words ‘tả đạo’ and families and villages which subscribed to Christianity were obliterated” [7] (Figure 3).

Disability in Vietnam

Disability is, among many others, a sensitive issue in Vietnam. The country has one of the world’s highest rates of disable per capita [8], which means that nearly 15% of the Vietnamese population suffers from at least one kind of disability. A simple outing in Vietnamese cities and villages demonstrates that the expression accessibility, unfortunately, is not much more than a flatus vocis, i.e., a mere abstraction – or, as the nominalist philosophers would say, a name that lacks any individual and objective reality to correspond to. Nonetheless, progress has been made in recent years, as testified by the partnership between the Vietnamese Government and institutions like UNICEF, USAID (United States Agency for International Development) and ILO (International Labour Organisation). Mention must also be made of the Vietnamese institution called Hòa Nhập (“Reaching Out”), established in the historical city of Hoi An in year 2000, with the purpose of opening professional doors and windows for the disabled of Vietnam, thus providing them a better quality of life. In their own words, “Reaching Out (Hòa Nhập) was established in 2000 with the vision of providing opportunities for disable people to learn skills and gain meaningful employment so that they are able to integrate fully with their communities and lead independent and fulfilling lives. Over the years, our social enterprise, Reaching Out, has grown to a multi-location group of businesses where people of different abilities can showcase their unique talents in an array of exquisitely crafted goods and gracious services. Driven by strong core values and a commitment to quality and integrity, more than 70 employees, both able bodied and disable, now comprise a strong team who, together, have created this world-renowned enterprise” [9].

[reportwire]

Christian nationalism on the rise in some GOP campaigns

Christian nationalism on the rise in some GOP campaigns

PITTSBURGH — The victory party took on the feel of an evangelical worship service after Doug Mastriano won Pennsylvania’s Republican gubernatorial primary this month. As a Christian singer led the crowd in song, some raised their arms toward the heavens in praise. Mastriano opened his remarks by evoking Scripture: “God uses the foolish to confound the wise.” He claimed Pennsylvanians’ freedom…

[peaceandlovepanda]

"You're too emotional." "You can't let your heart lead you." "That's how it starts, feeling too much compassion for them." "People go to Hell for loving too much." "You're being lead astray by your sympathy." no. full stop. screw that notion, actually. I am sick and tired of people assuming my emotions are a weakness, especially in the context of supporting marginalized people. My emotions, my LOVE, is my greatest strength, and screw anyone who tells me it isn't. I do not subscribe to a religion based in a fear of having too much love for another person, and a fear of loving them in a way that actually LOOKS like love instead of this halfassed "love the sinner hate the sin" crap. I would rather spend my life striving to unconditionally love and understand all people and find out I'm wrong later than block myself off with bigotry and ignorance in promise of a future heaven. Heaven is here, Heaven is now, and I WILL love my neighbor- and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.

[usasharenews]

3 arrested after passerby attacked by neo-Nazis in Florida

3 arrested after passerby attacked by neo-Nazis in Florida

Authorities say three people have been arrested days after a Jewish passerby was attacked by a group of self-proclaimed neo-Nazis who yelled antisemitic slogans outside a central Florida shopping plaza over the weekend ByThe Associated Press February 5, 2022, 2:21 AM • 3 min read Share to FacebookShare to TwitterEmail this article ORLANDO, Fla. — Three people have been arrested days after a…

[calm-your-breath]

Haha so apparently this year is the year of Crises:

Gender

Name

Religion

Job

Maybe identity for the fun of it because WHY NOT

This year just started and I am so over it

[naliya]

Do you mind developing about the interview Zineb El Rhazoui gave to the BBC?

Where to begin... I didn’t publish this short post to develop on it, it was more an “in the moment thing” that I wrote out of frustration, so, pardon me if this post is a bit messy and for any spelling or grammar mistake that might slip in.

Recently, I had been binging a french docu serie on youtube, and Zineb El Rhazoui was one of the person interviewed in one of them, of course, youtube being youtube, this interview ended up being recommended to me. Now, people who have been following me for a long time, know that I’m very interested in questions of religion, human rights, freedom of press, and secularism, and so, I was bound to be interested in what she had to say since she is... well who she is. 

For those who don’t know; Zineb El Rhazoui is a French-Moroccan journalist and an activist who worked for Charlie Hebdo when the 2015 attacks took place. She is a Muslim born woman who was raised in Morocco and has been outspoken in her pro-secularism and feminist positions. For her ideas, she’s had a price put on her head by Islamists (such as Al Qaida or Daech), she’s suffered numerous fatwas put against her (the first one, before she even worked for CH) and has been living under heavy police protection for a long time as the threat to her life is immense. She is said to be France’s most protected woman, she can’t even live in the same place for longer than a few months; it’s that bad.

Anyway, she apparently gave an interview to the BBC a couple of years ago or so (maybe a bit more or a bit less depending of when it was aired), and it was the most frustrating pile of patronising victim blaming bullshit excuse for an interview that I have ever seen. I’m honestly not sure I want to link it on here because I don’t think I even want it on my blog. 

But basically, to be as short as possible (and keep in mind that I’m paraphrasing because I have no desire to go listen to it again): the guy pretty much accused her and Charb (yes, that Charb, Charlie Hebdo’s murdered editor) of being responsible for everyone’s death because they “went too far”, he pretty much accused her - without outwardly saying it but the underlying meaning was very clear - of being many very unpleasant things, such as a racist for instance (... for criticising her own culture, go figure), he took advantage of the fact that she was speaking in what must be her third language to constantly cut her off and never letting her develop her thoughts. 

She kept trying to explain to him that criticising an idea isn’t the same as criticising a person, that since religions are ideas they should be open to criticism the same any idea ought to be. She gave the example of how she personally dislike the veil as she sees it as a sexist symbol, but it doesn’t mean that she hates every veiled women, because the veil itself is an idea while the women wearing it are people, but he didn’t hear her, he was completely dismissive of her very real lived experience in favour of his weird moral outrage. He never listened nor addressed anything she had to say, really; when she brought up the fact that if every papers, every media, had had the moral courage to publish the cartoons and stood up for freedom of press, of speech and of thoughts, then no one would be personally targeted, he completely ignored her point, he basically constantly ignored every single of her points, regurgitating more victim blaming instead.

But I think the most frustrating and, quite frankly, disgusting moment of the interview was when he pretty much tried to play the motherhood card. Yes, he went there. He basically asked her if she didn’t think she should stop fighting her fight after what happened, and after she told him she had no intention to do so, he kept insisting that “now you have child! But you have child now!” blatantly implying that she was now responsible for endangering her baby and therefore implying that she was a terrible mother for refusing to back down. 

So yeah... that was more or less the interview that prompted that short frustrated post of mine, which left me a bit disgusted and quite saddened to realise that people still don’t get it. Even years later, they just don’t. . 

[voteforspoon]

I think the worst part of being Christian nowadays is other Christians, or as I call them “Christians.” All the time you see people being so hateful then saying they follow Jesus, that they follow God, and there’s no way that’s true when you’re hateful. The Bible literally says both ���Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins,” in 1st Peter 4:8, and “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love,” in 1st John 4:8. Im not someone saying Christians are being persecuted, cause the last time they were really persecuted was well over a thousand years ago. I am saying many “Christians” are lying when they call themselves Christians. They talk about how the world got corrupted and how America is no longer a Christian nation but why are we ignoring the reason it isn’t. It isn’t because Christians stopped being Christians. They became hateful, and rude, and attacked people. They became homophobes, and transphobes, and racists, and even capitalists. Idk if y’all remember but Jesus kinda didn’t like greed all that much. He did like giving and loving recklessly. “Reckless Love” is even a song that gets sung often in my youth group, and my favorite line in the whole song is “…and I couldn’t earn it, and I don’t deserve it, still You give Yourself away…” and that’s beautiful. But if we are to be Christlike, that means showing love to those who don’t deserve it. Be that whoever you think it is. Growing up as a liberal teenager in the ultra-conservative Bible Belt shows me a lot of things that simply aren’t Christian. And I despise it. People can hate me for being Christian but that’s no better than the “Christians” who hate people for whatever reason. Idk. It’s saddening. It’s really saddening to see a religion that is based on love, reckless love, and it gets turned into hate. We as humans are made to love, not to hate. And it’s really saddening.

[spiralstain]

👁not!not!not me!👁

[inbarfink]

The thing about “No one can choose who they are in this world” is that it doesn’t JUST apply on the meta-narrative level where it’s about the railroading of the player and how Kris is actually their own person who is being possessed. I mean, that IS part of it. But it’s also a central element to understand even the ‘surface-level’ parts of the story. 

After all, it’s “no one can choose” not just “you can’t choose”. Pretty much all of our central characters deal with some sort of identity that has been forced upon them without their control. And that’s why it’s important that these characters are all teenagers. It’s not just to show the game is more ‘mature’ than Undertale, it’s also important to the theme of identity.

Because for a lot of people, teenagerhood is an important, and messy and importantly messy part of their identity-formation process. Authority figures who might have previously tolerated your ‘quirks’ start pressuring you to ‘grow out of them’ so you can become the person THEY want you to be.  You’re starting to become more self-aware of yourself and how people perceive you and how you would like to be perceived. You’re also becoming more independent, and that includes the desire to define yourself, but at the same time you need approval and acceptance from authority figures and your peers. (And even if you’re kind of a late bloomer, you’re at least aware that this is the common narrative and it still effects your Teen Experience.)

“No one can choose who they are in this world” can mean ‘high-school’ just as much as it can mean the whole world of Deltarune. And like I said, you can see it in all of the teen characters.

Kris clearly had some self-image problems even before the possession started. There’s the “it’s only you” comment at the mirror in Chapter 1, their rather barren room, the wistful description of their wardrobe in Ralsei’s castle. 

Kris is the hardest to judge because we actually know the least about them, but it seems like they’re not very happy being the Only Human in Town. There’s the story about the horned headband, the fact that they’ve been researching how to do magic, the way they shut the “How to Take Care of Humans” book as soon as they saw pictures of more humans. 

It seems that being the Only Human in Town is very isolating experience. Even if people are friendly enough towards Kris and their family tries to be supportive -- - they still know they are Different from anyone else they know, nosy kids keep asking invasive questions, some of the books in the library are ABOUT you but none are FOR you. Is Kris a weird loner because they WANT to be? Or is it that they feel like they don’t have any other choice by be an Outsider in their own home so they might as well lean into it and try and have some fun?

Berdly is more textually obvious. Even though on the surface he seems to revel in nothing more than being “the Smart Kid in Class”, that is also a label he has not chosen on his own. He only got it by a twist of fate, because he beat Noelle at a Spelling Bee (which he only managed to do because Noelle had to spell a word that seems to be Literally Traumatic for her). 

Because of that one event, the adults around him put that label on him even though he didn’t feel like he deserved it. Even though he felt like he couldn’t fulfil it on his own. And because of that, his Inferiority-Superiority complex only grew in a way that was both detrimental to his own mental health and also made him kind of a crappy person to all of his classmates. Because Berdly was once an insecure little kid, and kids really have no control of the way adults see them. 

Meanwhile, Noelle herself... according to Berdly she’s the real Smart Kid in Class. But is that really a label that SHE wants? How much of her achievement in school and her athletic extracurricular activities are a result of her own interests and passions and how much are they a result of her harsh and demanding mother?

Noelle really gets hit really hard with all kinds of labels from other people, probably because it’s so hard for her to say ‘no’ to any of them. She’s Queen’s Peon, she’s Berdly’s damsel in distress, she’s a Weird Route’s Player personal attack dog, she’s a [[hochi mama]]. But first and foremost she’s the Mayor’s Daughter, and she hasn’t chosen any of these identities. 

Ralsei is another kinda-mysterious one because Ralsei never tells us ANYTHING but, look...

RALSEI DOESN’T EVEN FULLY UNDERSTAND WHO HE IS!! Despite his personality being seemingly obvious and well-defined to the outside observer, Ralsei doesn’t know who he is and so obviously he didn’t choose to be who he is because he doesn’t even know what it is yet!!!

If his explanation are to be believed, he lived a totally isolated existence until the events of Chapter 1, just waiting for Kris and Susie to arrive and become his friends (whatever he actually did exist for the last 12-18 years in total isolation, or if he was just created yesterday but with memories of a whole lifetime of loneliness isn’t said, but it would probably feel the same to him). And without anyone to interact with, without anyone to perceive him... well, how can he form an identity?

In a way, Ralsei’s struggles kinda form a Foil to those of the other teens. Everyone else grew up in a small but tight-knit town where none of them ever lacked for Other People’s Opinions on them. And that’s how they all got settled with identities that they never chose for themselves. But Ralsei grew up with no one, and that meant that he didn’t have an identity forced on him - BUT ALSO that made it impossible for him to pick an identity for himself!

Susie is the one I wonder about though. It’s clear that she’s much happier having friends and being a hero, so she probably didn’t 100% choose to be the bully she was at the start of the story. The archetypical way that story goes is “well, everyone was already scared of me because I was big and ugly so I had to become something they’re afraid of”, and Deltarune can certainly play into that. But also...

Susie is the character most likely to rage against the rails of the plot, and that includes the identities she didn’t ask for. She gets told that she has to be a hero? lol nope she’s gonna be a Bad Guy now. And I wonder if maybe a similar thing happened to her before, if she was put under some sort of pressure to be a ‘good girl’ and she tried to rebel against it by becoming a mean bully.

But that’s still not really ‘choosing’ who you are, is it? If Susie was forced into one option and so she went as opposite as possible as a show of spite and rage, even as violently pushing people away made her sad and lonely, was that really a free choice? it’s a show of free will, but would that be what Susie would have chosen if she was Allowed to be whoever she wanted?

... but on the other hand, maybe it is as simple as the “well, everyone was already scared of me because I was big and ugly so I had to become something they’re afraid of” thing. Like maybe the whole point is that Susie can chafe and rage against the puppet-string of the Player and the rails forced on by some unseen cosmic force, but it’s actually much harder for her to face against the Societal Expectations of people in Hometown. 

Because with all of her magical adventures and magical powers and observational skills, in the Light World she’s still just a teen going to high-school.

And no one can choose who they are in this world.

[news-21]

2 Catholic bishops at odds over Biden receiving Communion

2 Catholic bishops at odds over Biden receiving Communion

They share Roman Catholicism as a faith and California as their home base. Yet there’s a deep gulf between Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco and Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego in the high-stakes debate over whether politicians who support abortion rights should be denied Communion. Cordileone, who has long established himself as a forceful anti-abortion campaigner, recently has…

[ladylannisterxo]

midnight mass had no business putting a hot sheriff and a hot priest in the same show. like ??? what kind of personal attack is this ??