#The way y’all ignore white perversion

[daughterofdessalines]

We all know that criminal activity from the rich white people often goes unpunished…

And not only is violence from the privileged not taken seriously…. perversion is ignored as well.

If you research, historically this violence and perversion was often inflicted on BIPOC populations (missing Indigenous women, forced sterilization, medical experiments on Black women)  … this is why the overturning of Roe vs. Wade didn’t shock me & the GOP’s r*pe sympathizer rhetoric doesn’t surprise me either. This had always been America.

So now our societal enabling of the “predatory & privileged looks like : Rich White men like Woody Allen & Errol Musk publicly celebrating grooming the daughters they raised. And Government officials can question a 10 year old r*pe victim, while their “pro-life” supporters can suggest (that children can “ask for it”) & minors should be held accountable for her own violation by being forced to give birth.

[daichimack]

drunk thots:

I love humanity, even though i feel a certain way about white folk since they took that humanity and perversed it to colonize Asia/Africa. I genuinely don’t dislike white people, bc I can see how bitter Black Israelites are, and hell most my friends/lovers are white, so I don’t feel no ill will, tho....if this makes sense I am bitter towards y’all mfs at the end of the day. LIke...white people will disregard a black persons feeling as long as it fits their agenda, which hey, fair enough, we all selfish, though being a black man in that society I’m tired of dealing with white people’s ignorance. deadass

[yourwakingnightmares]

Daenerys Targaryen, Moral Absolutism, and why the Mad Queen isn’t that far-fetched.

Alright folks... so I’m about to blow y’all’s mind here. Moral Absolutism, cultural invasions, ‘history forgives the victor’, and how this fan war is a great example of American culture today.

Let’s start.

So let’s talk about the 163 Masters first, shall we? This is one of the first cases where we notice some intrinsic flaws about Dany’s character.

Point 1. In her anger of the situation, she demands immediate retribution. She rounds up the first 163 Masters she finds, and declares them guilty -regardless of whether or not they were involved.

Now, a lot of people always take this argument to the ‘Nazi’ approach (which, interestingly enough, I’ll delve into later), by saying that I’m saying those Masters were good people, but they still owned slaves so they were bad people, like concentration camp guards. But that’s not the point here.

The point is, she decided they were guilty for doing something that -until she took over -was a morally and culturally accepted practice: owning slaves. She didn’t care that Yunkhai had owned slaves for thousands of years: she was angry, and people were gonna pay, and she didn’t care who. She could have hunted down the Masters who came up with the plan to crucify children. She could have hunted down 163 Masters who beat, tortured, raped, and kill their slaves on the regular. But she didn’t.

She just grabbed the first 163 Masters she saw.

Point 2. She insists -again- that this is justice. Justice for the 163 slave children. Is it really, though? Justice would have been finding their killers, and punishing them. We’ve seen this time and again throughout history, particularly with the British: when the natives would do something they disliked, they’d punish whichever ones they could get their hands on, typically innocents who had no idea what was happening, or why. Rarely did they ever actually catch the rebels. It was easier to execute everyone else, and call it ‘justice’.

Were any of those 163 the ones who had originally proposed the idea? Maybe. Maybe not. We don’t know, because Dany was more interested in making herself feel morally superior, than in actually ensuring justice was done.

Point 3. Even after crucifying the 163 Masters, she leaves them there. How long? We’re not sure, but long enough that Hizdahr finally gets brave enough to ask her to remove his father’s body. How long do you think that would take? A day? Two? How long is enough time that you’re willing to face down the Dragon Queen who is -or so it seems to Yunkhai -slaughtering random citizens at will, and ask her to remove the bodies of the citizens she crucified?

Either way... She was inspiring through fear, long before she declared so to Jon. That’s some full-on dictator shit right there: See these people that I executed? Yeah, keep staring at all 163 of them, lined up throughout the city, to show exactly what I do to people who piss me off.

At the end of the day, however... this all boils down to Dany’s twisted, and perverse sense of Moral Absolutism. The idea that everything can be handled and dealt with in shades of black and white; there is no grey. It’s either right, or it’s wrong.

While we see several characters with this flaw in the show (and more in the book), Daenerys takes this a step further. While you have men like Ned Stark who realizes that he is human, and needs this ‘moral absolutism’ to guide his life, to live honorably, Dany decides her absolutism based on her own opinions. What she wants is good, what she dislikes is wrong. Since she is ‘good’, if you disagree, you are ‘bad’.

We see this often in American culture today; people calling everyone a Nazi, fascist, dictators, accused of being anti-semitic, or racist... This is the exact same logic.

“I am a good person. Because I am a good person, what I do is right. Because I am a good person who does what is right, you disagreeing with me makes you a bad person. If you are a bad person, what you do is wrong.”

Is there any proof for this? No. Dany literally walked into one of the oldest cities in that setting, and decided that she was going to free all the slaves, right here, right now, and if you didn’t like it, you were wrong. If you were were wrong, you were bad, if you were bad, it was okay to kill you. Why? Because you were bad, of course.

And none of us argued because... well, sure, the Masters had slaves, and having slaves is bad, right?

But when that same moral absolutism was turned on King’s Landing... Whew, boy. Did shit hit the fan then, right?

Because these were characters we knew. We’ve been seeing shots of people from King’s Landing for eight years now: average people, just trying to live their lives, doing their thing. They don’t care who sits on the ugly-ass chair in the ugly-ass keep.

But they didn’t immediately side with Dany. They didn’t prostrate themselves before her, presenting her with Cersei’s head on a stick. Therefore... They were wrong. Because they were wrong, they were bad... because they were bad, it was okay to kill them.

It literally is the exact same thing that happened in Yunkhai, in Meereen, with the Dothraki. But their culture was foreign; it was different from ours, and it was easy to pick it out as ‘weird’ or ‘bad’, because we didn’t understand the culture.

Now look, I don’t subscribe to this notion that ‘white people all bad’ mentality; this isn’t a white people thing, it’s a cultural thing. Anything that’s not ours is different, and therefore strange. The more different it is, the stranger it seems, the more okay we are with committing atrocities towards it. Throughout history, we see this whenever two new cultures meet.

But it must be said... The Dothraki were painted as horrible bad terrible people. They pillaged, raped, plundered, and all that good jazz. They attacked random cities because they were bored, took whatever they wanted, and moved on.

They were the horse version of the Greyjoys. But we didn’t view the Greyjoys as evil people who should be slaughtered and burned alive, did we?

No. Because the Greyjoys were Westerosi. We’d seen them, interacted with them... Their culture wasn’t all that different from everyone else’s, right? They spoke the same, dressed the same, had the same mannerisms... And the Dothraki didn’t. 

Dany forgave Jorah for his ‘sin’ of selling slaves: a man who knew better, was raised to believe that slavery was wrong, sold slaves for money, and she forgave him for it. But people who grew up in a culture where owning slaves was no different than owning cattle did not deserve forgiveness, or a chance to be better. If they messed up, death was waiting for them.

Why? Because Jorah spoke like her, looked like her, and shared similar mannerisms. Or more simply... He was her peep, and the other folks weren’t. So she could forgive him.

That’s what people are talking about when they talk about ‘foreshadowing’. It’s all there, for us to see, but we don’t want to see it; we refuse to see it, because it matches up with our world view. We can ignore the injustice of Dany crucifying 163 random ass masters, because they owned slaves. We can ignore her burning the Dothraki, because they raped and pillaged. We can ignore the slaughter in Meereen, because they are bad people who refuse to free their slaves, and let Dany rule in peace.

We could ignore what happened, because -while it might have been wrong -it happened to people we figured deserved it either way. We knew nothing about those people, or their culture beyond ‘they have slaves’, so -as a whole -we decided Dany doing what she did was okay, and screw any other part of their culture. The benefits it might have offered, the good things about it... Maybe they didn’t have any good parts to it. Maybe they had a lot of amazingly progressive ideas... We’ll never know though.

Because we all decided it was okay for her to kill them. Because they owned slaves. Something that wasn’t a crime, and was a completely normal part of life until Dany rolled into Slaver’s Bay.

We watched that entire thing from Dany’s perspective. We watch it from Grey Worm, and Missandei’s perspectives. We only see this from one side. And the side we’re seeing... is the side that won. That’s the whole point to the saying, ‘history forgives the victor’. Because the victor is the one who is left to justify what he did. He’s the one who gets to say why he did what he did.

Because the other dude? He’s dead.

Now look, I’m not saying that Dany going nuts was done ‘well’ -her slaughtering millions in King’s Landing was poorly executed, had little lead up, and was completely OOC -Dany wouldn’t have gunned down kids running through the streets, regardless of how mad she went.

But the idea of her going nuts, and becoming the mad queen, isn’t that far-fetched either. You just have to look beyond your own sense of moral absolutism to see it.

[awkwardwriterpilot]

Lexicon of the Evangelical Homophobe: a primer guide

Calling all church gays! Especially young and impressionable youth group-age lgbtq+ people! Here is a handy reference dictionary to all of the catchphrases, euphemisms, and assorted vague and confusing linguistic quirks that are used by people who don’t believe queer individuals deserve to live or have rights. :) Compiled by a Jesus loving lesbian who’s heard it all. Enjoy!

Abandonment of values (and/or virtue) (n.): translation: oh no, lgbtq+ people are getting civil and social rights.

Biblical Marriage (n.): translation: heterosexual marriage. see also traditional marriage.

Biblical teaching/values/principles (n.): translation: heterosexual-affirming only. Used in complete disregard of the fact that there are thousands of ways to interpret what is “Biblical”, and that this is in fact the reason the church is divided into thousands of denominations. “Biblical” means “evangelical orthodox”.

Family values (n.): translation: anti-lgbtq values

Godly womanhood (n.): translation: heterosexuality; submission to male authority figures; traditional feminine behavior and presentation. Lesbians, bi women, and trans men are especially targeted by evangelicals arguing that it is in their best interests to embrace their roles as Strong Women of God... by allowing themselves to live in submission to male headship figures and conform to White Western ideals of femininity. see God’s design; biblical marriage.

Homosexual (n.): not an inherently bad word, but often used by the Evangelical Homophobe, because referring to lgbtq+ people as “queer” or “gay” feels too much like admitting that their identities are real parts of them and not just disgusting aberrations. see deviant, pervert, sodomite.

Homosexual lifestyle (n.): translation: a committed relationship ethically identical to their own marriages, where both spouses are the same sex. The implication of this phrase is a life of unbridled lust, for self-gratification only--a gross misconception propped up by stereotypes and strategically ignoring the fact that heterosexual promiscuity abounds in this world. see perversion, debauchery.

Lesbian lover (n.): translation: girlfriend. Usually used in reference to a normal, committed, non-exploitative relationship, but linguistically spun to imply moral decadence and “naughtiness”.

Love the sinner, hate the sin (n.): translation: I technically love you but I absolutely think you and your significant other are going to hell for your love for each other. Also you’re getting kicked out of your house and church, and will not be allowed any help until you repent of your obviously chosen lifestyle.

Pro-family (n.): translation: anti-lgbtq

S.S.A.; SSA; Same-sex attraction (n.): translation: gay, bi, lesbian, or other queer orientation. Usage of this term is preferred by the Evangelical Homophobe in order to be consistent with their position that queerness is a choice, and that “urges” and “lusts” that are not in line with their guidelines are temptations that can be avoided, thus condemning queer youth to fruitless lives of trying to “pray it away” and the knowledge that they will never be able to grow old with someone they truly were created to love. (Spoiler alert: Too bad. Straight evangelicals will always choose not to give a shit.)

Dishonorable mention~

The Face™ : y’all know what this is about. Conversational examples: “he’s... you know.. *the Face™*”; Used when an Evangelical Homophobe is too disgusted to even name the group of people they are degrading, and instead reduce them to a meaningful glance, stare, eye roll, and nod. (We love that. It totally makes us feel like human beings, with souls. A+ job loving your neighbor as yourself.)

Variant of The Face™: a performative sorrowful/disappointed look when referring to a “lost” church member or how they “can’t support your... choices”.

Variant III of The Face™: Conversational example: *downcast eyes* “they’re... struggling...”; when Evangelical Homophobes treat happy people as tragic losses. This includes treating side-B celibate people still involved in non-affirming churches as though they have contracted some incurable disease.

[glittering-snowfall]

Prompt: “He told me to follow him.”

WARNING: ANGST, PAIN, MAJOR CHARACTER DEATH

This is the sequel to the previous prompt I filled. It makes the crossover much clearer.

He is long and lanky, like a shadow cast at the end of the day. Bony cheekbones. Sunken, shadowed eyes. They match the color of his carnivalesque attire, those eyes. He wears a coat of dark purple – or perhaps maroon, Elsa cannot tell. When the light catches it one way, it seems only the ragtag outfit of a street performer. But when the light catches it another way, it reminds the queen of dried blood. The vest he wears is bright purple – gaudy like a showman’s garb. It makes him seem cheap, a two-bit huckster, hardly a threat. Even the skull and crossbones on his top hat seem only a gimmick to catch the eye of some bumpkin. Yet the rusty, bloody quality of his coat in the light keeps Elsa ill at ease. In the same manner, his eyes seem to flicker in the dim light, shifting like a slippery shadow... one moment violet, another moment seeming to be just touched with flecks of red…

Like a slippery shadow…

His shadow… Elsa keeps her eyes fixed on it, for it seems to move of its own accord. It mimics his movements, but something is just off enough in the synchronization to make her anxious…

“Who are you?” she demands.

The Shadow Man chuckles to himself. Oh, that’s the voice of a girl born with a silver spoon in her mouth, alright. Surly. Proud. Thinks she’s in command. He’s heard voices like hers all his life, talking down to him from their fancy cars, from up on high in their big New Orleans mansions.

He loathes them so.

No matter the time or place, these fat cats always sound the same. High and mighty. Holier than thou. They treat you like the mud beneath their boots, but they’ve got skeletons in their closets, oh yes…

He feels the tremble in her voice. It does him good to feel it. She’s still clinging to her fine airs. What will she do next, threaten call the guard on him? Well, let her wear her haughty tone like armor. No armor will protect her. He already knows she’s bleeding from the inside.

“A friend,” he says smoothly.

Elsa feels her hands grow clammy. His voice is rich as chocolate, deep as caverns beneath the mountains…

“What do you want of me?”

He only laughs a soft laugh, but it has the rumble of far-off thunder. “I think the better question is,” he answers, “‘What do you want?”

She eyes the stranger cautiously. “What do you mean?”

He loves watching the squirms of guilt, loves the moment wayward souls realize in horror that he can see into their hearts.

“Oh, I know what is to have a hard life, sweetheart,” he murmurs. “Since I was a kid, I’ve scraped the shit off the streets. But you? Well, darling, I’ll be damned if you don’t put me to shame! Your life seems to wind like one long river of sorrow… How far it goes, you can’t tell, but the black waters seem to stretch on endlessly. You escape drowning once and, why, your little boat up and topples over again… Living in fear all those years, then your parents dying, then seeing your sister cold as ice. My, my!”

As he speaks, her life swirls before her in a cloud of purple tinged with flame. She sees her parents’ ship swallowed by the sea, sees their anguished faces when they realized there was no hope for them. She sees herself helpless in the darkness of her room. And then she sees Anna’s lifeless form before her like a statue hewn of purest ice.

The purple cloud spreads into a fog, and when the fog rises, a world of light and vapor is before her. The light is not purple or crimson, but white as heaven’s light. And there, at the heart of this glistening vision, half shrouded in pearly mists, she sees Anna and herself.

Naked.

Locked in an embrace.

She feels that rich-as-chocolate voice rustling in her ear:

“All your life, you’ve known pain. You’ve thought of others, buried your own wants for others’ sakes. But you know what you want, Elsa. Take it. Isn’t it time you thought of yourself for once?”

Elsa screams – and with her scream, the shadowland of light and pearl tears asunder, falls to pieces. She slumps to the ground and finds herself in the palace hallway once again.

“Never,” she breathes, and her voice is firm.

But her heart is pounding.

“I… I could never… No… Anna is not some bauble you can dangle in front of my face,” Elsa murmurs through gritted teeth. “She’s her own person with her own life to live. She… she wants to be with Kristoff… She is… happy… with Kristoff…”

Crumpled on the ground, she cannot see the Shadow Man’s face.

She cannot see how his face falls, his lips purse together and pencil-thin moustache bristles… only for his whole countenance to regain composure in an instant.

For the situation is salvageable. His mind works steadily as he studies the young queen curled up on the floor, sweat dripping from her waxy face.

As grubby and slick as a bit of shrimp…

…ready for the skewer.

“Always the honorable one,” he says softly. There seems to be no malice in his voice. “Always trying to do what’s best for your dear sister… but think about this, Elsa. The more the guilt, the shame, and self-hatred from this… lustful obsession… eat away at you… the more pain you’ll cause your sister. Already, your inner turmoil is making you revert to your old ways. You’re seeking out solitude, cutting yourself off from Anna again… and she can feel that, I promise you.”

Elsa looks up helplessly. “I don’t mean to…” she whimpers, but the Shadow Man goes on.  

“She might try to pay it no mind now, but give it a few more years, and there’ll be a gaping wound in her heart she cannot name.”

There is violent panic in Elsa’s voice now. “No… no, please, no…”

“Is that what you want, Elsa? To make the same mistakes you’ve always made? To torture Anna slowly in the process, torture the one person you love most in this world?”

Ugly sobs tear through Elsa’s body. The very act of trying to answer chokes her. At last, after many ragged breaths, she manages to speak.

“I wish I… didn’t have these… these feelings…” she gasps. “I wish I wasn’t such a… degenerate… I wish Anna and I could live as sisters, without this… this canker between us…”

In that moment, she wants something only he can offer.

In that moment, he has her.

How changed she is from when she first spoke – the queenly aura crashing down! He loves watching the mighty fall!

He puts a tender hand upon her shoulder. His shadow reaches out from the wall and does the same. She doesn’t even flinch.

Shadow and man cling to the young queen in a perverse image of comfort.

“Me and my friends can help with that…”

***

The great masks leer down at Facilier from the squalor of the voodoo emporium.

“Now, fri-i-e-e-e-nds,” he drawls in his smarmy singsong, “I know y’all were expecting me to swish the smoky souls of both that queen and princess into your waiting nostrils, nudge ’em into each other’s arms and watch ’em fall together like Paolo and Francesca, pretty as a picture, but–”

At Faciler’s “but–”, the eyes of the great masks narrow, burning with unearthly light. The greatest among the masks bares its teeth, a growl rumbling from beyond its jaws.

“Now, let me finish! Let me finish!” he cries, arms gesticulating wildly. “What I mean to say is, y’all don’t know that much about how to work human nature. Y’all are fine fellows, sure, but the darkest thoughts are the only ones to draw you in. Now, I’ll admit, I don’t have the highest opinion of my fellow man, but I know what love is and how it works within a body. You wanted to give her the power to sate her lust, but she doesn’t just lust after her sister. She loves her true. She wasn’t going to go jump at that offer. I threw it in her face and she threw it back at me. She’d rather her sister be happy than she herself have her own happiness. So I had to go about things my own way.”

When Facilier had begun to speak, there had been panic in his voice – but the more he spoke, the more pride scourged that panic away. They from the other side, why, they’d almost bungled the deal. He’d saved it. He alone. Through his own raw wit.

In his heart of hearts, he thinks he is cleverer than they are – and while he’d never say it outright (for he knows their rage would be terrible), in this moment, he cannot help but gloat a little… lord their own ignorance over them a bit.

“What did I do?” he says, in full showman style, as though he speaks to a tourist on the street and not the forces of darkness. “I appealed to that love. I made out that, the more her desires consume her, the more she tortures her sister. Queenie has to push her sister away so as not to succumb to temptation, but the more Queenie pushes her sister away, the more devastated the little princess becomes.  You see, that put our Ice Queen in a bind. If she sacrifices her own longings for her sister’s sake, it doesn’t matter. The sister still comes out hurt. That broke Queenie, broke her down but good. And when she was good and broken, I was able to slip a subtle word in…”

The great masks grin horribly now. Facilier basks in the glory, never realizing that he is less than a dog proud of doing a silly trick for its master’s favor.

“She wants to be washed clean of her sin. She wants never to think of her sister in that away again. That way, she doesn’t have to avoid her – and that way, her sister doesn’t end up hurt, heartbroken, and alone. Isn’t that sweet?” he coos. “Well, gentlemen, I’ve never been much in the revivalist spirit before, but now? What are we waiting for?! Let’s cleanse this poor soul! And don’t you worry, don’t you worry! I’ve been watching the sister too! She’s already on the hook, doesn’t even realize it!”

Facilier’s laughter mingles with the laughter of his friends, shaking the shabby voodoo parlor. His long-fingered hand glides across the floor and the floor opens beneath his feet. Instead of wood, that remote part of Arendelle Castle spreads below him. He sees Elsa where he left her, kneeling as if in prayer. Yet he knows she has not the strength to pray. He studies the fine details of her face as though she were an ornately crafted chess piece. He savors the creases of pain about her eyelids, relishes the brittle grey straw of her hair…

Then he reaches down through the portal and whispers:

“So, your majesty, do we have a deal?”

Elsa’s bloodshot eyes snap open at the prickle of his voice.

Other voices whisper to her and she does not know if they are the Shadow Man’s friends or her own pained thoughts…

You’re a pervert…

Monster…

If you remain as you are, you hurt Anna…

You cause her pain…

You can live with yourself this way…

And with her…

As you were meant to…

As sisters…

What does your soul matter – if you can cleanse this contamination in your mind?

What does your soul matter – so long as Anna is safe from the darkness in you?

“We have a deal,” she murmurs, and shakes the Shadow Man’s hand.

There is a sea of light and color and the world becomes a blur.

***

Queen Elsa of Arendelle sleeps better than she has in ages.

That first night, the Shadow Man watches over her like a dark god. The lines of pain which he so loved in her face are melted now. He has kept his end of the bargain.

When she awakens the next morning, she remembers nothing – not of the Shadow Man, not of the deal, not of her unnatural passion for her sister.

She awakens refreshed. Sunlight streams through her gauzy curtains. Birds twitter with joy.

Anna bounds into the room, hair wild in the morning. “You’re up!” she cries happily. “Yay!”

Elsa smiles at her, a serene and peaceful smile.

“Kristoff and I are going for a walk later on today! We’ll tell you all about it when we get back!”

“Of course, Anna!”

Anna pauses to look at Elsa closer. “You look… different today, Elsa! It’s a good different! You look better than you have in weeks!”

Elsa feels a warm rush of pure happiness.

“I feel better than I have in weeks, Anna.”

The Shadow Man lets out a sharp bark of laughter.

Days roll into months, months into years. The world seems in eternal summer for the sisters of Arendelle and their loved ones. They frolic in the garden. They go for picnics. In afternoons ripe and lush, they make daisy chains in the meadows. Olaf makes friends with the buzzing bees. In the blue glow of nights, Kristoff plays his lute merrily. Anna rests her head gently against his shoulder and Elsa looks on, beaming like the sun.  In all their hearts, it is summer – warm and glorious summer!

Until the day of reckoning comes.

Usually, in the days before a debt is due, The Shadow Man contents himself with his victims’ mounting panic – their hysterical desperation, their attempts to find any way to weasel out of the deal…

This, though? This might be better.

Queenie doesn’t have a clue.

It makes it so much more beautiful when she starts screaming.

Her sister is there beside her, gazing at her with adoring eyes. Adoration turns to horror as that huge mask shows itself, opens its glowing maw, and inhales.

Its first breath flays the skin from off the queen’s back, sucking her backward.

She tries to cling to Anna.

“What’s happening to me?” she sobs, her face contorted with tears and pain.

She screams her throat raw.

Weke, weke! so cries a pig prepared to the spit.

Her screams are music to his ears.

In clinging to Anna, Elsa pulls her along with her.

Even in the cyclone of pain, she senses Anna being dragged along too.

That is why Elsa finally lets go.

For Anna. To save her.

Anna can do nothing, can only watch Elsa be consumed by the neon glow radiating from that mask’s jaws.

The princess of Arendelle stands still as stone, eyes deadened in shock, gazing at the blinding glare of light emanating from the dark entity.

It is at this moment that the Shadow Man strides into her view, striking against the brilliant green behind him.

Seeing this shady figure of flesh and bone, cold shock kindles into outrage. Anna lunges at the Shadow Man, pummeling him with her fists.

Alas, her pummels are far weaker than usual and come to naught, for Anna is too overwrought with anguish and grief to put much force into them.

“Easy there, girl!” the Shadow Man cries. “Easy there!”

“What have you done to my sister?!” Anna demands.

“I haven’t done a thing to her. She made a deal with some friends of mine.”

And he tells her all in naked detail. He even tells her of Elsa’s love for her, how it ran deeper than the love of a sister.

He sees Anna blanch at that and wishes he could take a photograph of her face – so his friends could taunt Elsa with it over on the other side.

He dearly wishes that he could immortalize that look of confused disgust and use it to sting the young queen for eternity.

But as the Shadow Man goes on, Anna’s features soften. Her disgust for Elsa turns to pity and then to some strange mixture of pity and love – love tarnished by bitter knowledge, but love just the same.

That’s what the Shadow Man has been banking on.

“Take me instead,” Anna murmurs.

“What was that?”

“Take me in Elsa’s place. She’s… she’s suffered enough…”

Ah, the better angels of our nature! Sweet, self-sacrificing Anna! Tinged with pity, tinged with guilt. Maybe a trifle of self-blame in there too considering the way he framed the story he just told!

His grand design works.

“You would do that… for her?” he intones gravely.

Anna stares into the yawning chasm of the gigantic mask’s mouth. She stands upon the brink.

“I… I would,” she says softly, and her voice shows she is afraid.

“Done!” the Shadow Man thunders – and with one rough shove, he hurls Anna headlong into the neon-green abyss.

“I’ll mention your offer to my friends on the other side!” he calls after her. “To tell the truth though, I don’t believe they’ll take you up on it! They’re not the sort of folks that go altering deals out of the goodness of their hearts! I’m sure your sis’ll appreciate the sentiment though!”

He leans in over the mask’s teeth to mock her, then pulls himself back.

Wouldn’t want to get pulled in himself.

He twitches in mild apprehension.

When the mask’s mouth closes, he looks up at it with a smirk.

“You don’t plan to take her up on that offer, do you?”

The chamber rings with ominous laughter.

“I thought not.”

[titleknown]

I keep seeing you mention this "Ella Guro" person and I finally decided to look her up and I honestly wished I hadn't. The sad thing is I think some of her points have at least a decent foundation but a lot of the time she takes them to a ridiculous extreme. Like blaming rationalism for the alt-right which yes people like Sargon of Aakad have exploited the language of rationalism for there own gain but that doesn't mean you have to be all "fuck rationalism" ugh!

Well, I’d kinda defend part of her stance, because from what I read of the article she wasn’t just talking about the Zargon of Baator-types, but also the “boy genius” dickheads of Silicon Valley who try to formulate solutions for the rest of the world based on some grand master plan, that is inevitably woefully reductive and colored by privelege in a way that makes it unworkable.

Like, relating to another post, basically what Swift was mocking with A Modest Proposal. Or, for a more relevant example, why Hillary fucked up this election through the magic of Neoliberal failures.

But, ironically enough, the main issue I have with her is that very dismissivness. I do agree with her point that nerdery has an incredibly perverse relationship with the corporate producers of its content, and a lot of the ideological troubles relating to it with corporation-worship and hegemnony worship draw back from that.

Hell, as a case in point, Funko Pops are one of the biggest Monuments To Nerdkind’s Corporate Worshipping Sins there ever was.

Hell, that’s related to the reasons why I’m so big on Open Source culture. But, what I fucking loathe about her philosophy is how this leads to a reductive dismissivness of anything that’s not “avant-guarde” enough for her tastes and the people who like any forms tjat arem’t tjat being characterized as anti-intellectual idiots; and treating any emotional attachments they have to a work that contains the taint of corporatism as an opiate indulged in by priveleged idiots

Like, y’all, look at this horseshit and tell me I’m wrong:

at first i thought people in games were just ignorant, or that it was just the cis white dudes who did this - but more and more, i think people in games (regardless of who they are) delight in only being interested in talking about games-about-games, they delight in feeling like they're experts and part of a culture, no matter how insular, and they delight in not talking about or exposing themselves to anything that might ever challenge that idea to its core. they delight in "comfort food" to the exclusion of everything else. this blog post, which exclaims "...but sometimes you don’t want The Seventh Seal or Citizen Kane. Sometimes you want to huddle up with a bowl of popcorn and watch, I don’t know, Buffy." as if it's some kind of revelatory statement to make about videogames. but there is no Seventh Seal or Citizen Kane in videogame culture. it's ALL Buffy - all of it.

Like, fuuuuuuuuck yooooooou too lady.

I can’t stand that one Twine game “The Uncle Who Works For Nintendo” because of that, because of how linked it is to those theories. Dismissing pulp/popular-culture as the opiate of the masses and treating emotional attachments to it is Not Fucking Helping in any way shape or form in getting people to shuck off the chains of megacorp-worship.

Which is why I would punch Adorno and Horkheimer in the fucking face if I had a time machine, but I digress.

TL/DR, I think the anti-corporate-worship messages are important, it’s just her anti-populism and extreme dismissiveness towards the “lowbrow” I find deeply disgusting on a personal and political level...

[anarchistettin]

the charge i’ve been jailed for the most often is ‘obstruction of justice’

in the 80s there weren’t cell phones, but people would still stand around mutely in shock when cops pulled off public assault torture & kidnap on their (black) target du jour. I’d get in their faces and yell about their badge numbers and beg sideliners to do something - they’d usually respond by frowning at me; one or two would croak “this isn’t helping” (though twice I helped a person escape custody so… I didn’t believe em). Other than a couple of cannabis nabs and a fake (dismissed) DUI in south carolina, that’s all I’ve ever gotten time in jail for. Saying “NO” to the police. Looking back, I think of how I could have been smarter about it but honestly? I’m way, way more pissed off about shit these days, and I’ve got nothing to lose. All the shit my heart adored back in the 20th century is dead now, or in prison, or has morphed into an officer of plutocracy (or worse, as in the case of the Childhood Friend who’s Now A DHS Agent Jesus Fucking Christ, B, wtlf).

thinking about the day the filth piled up on Dread Sam, one cop per limb and another for his chest, and then Hippie Andrea, whom everyone pitied, got taken down for saying “stop” “don’t hurt him” - all the Fellini’s / L5P culture-colonists say there mutely, not knowing what to feel - noting that only “street kids” ever got bad attention from the police -

Sam did get away & his lawyer sawed his cuffs off. They sent choppers looking for him; they buzzed back and forth over Candler Park (ha) for hours. THE CHARGE: suspected weed sling. No ‘drugs’ recovered. No weapons recovered. THE CRIME: five klansmen were allowed to maraud with impunity, violently assaulting two young people, kidnapping them after beating them severely, in broad daylight / under the approving gaze of all the ‘liberals’ in the city. Two years later those same onlookers had priced out all the kids they seemed to enjoy watching be battered.

It was well-known in them days that officers Frank Lizzie and Terry McPharland were straight up white supremacists. It is still widely considered obvious, among the disintegrating punks and sage lefties of that generation, that McPharland personally murdered at least two of us. He certainly tortured, terrorized, & framed plenty of us. In my case he assaulted me repeatedly and vigorously while I was in handcuffs, planted drugs on me (quite overtly as other cops watched), whispered really disturbing shit into my ear, then attempted (unsuccessfully) to use perjury and procedural manipulation to sway my court case.

Today’s reality makes all my rage and frustration - with the uselessness & corruption of courts, the unrestrained lust of the filth, the mindless smiles of the supposed liberals that didn’t just watch dumbly but paid for the spectacle - seem so innocent and small. What still does have the power to enrage me is watching the children of the boomers embrace that neolib psychopathy but now add their sneering hauteur and stupid childish self-regard to their defense of it. Today’s ‘adult’ is a powerful education to me: I really thought that moronic Victorian narcissism and blatantly unselfconscious tyranny of the bourgeoise was dying. Apparently, it was just taking a breath. I really did think, for a second there, that y’all were going to be so much better than yr ‘rents. I guess that’s why it stings so much, why I type this, on day 3 of neoliberal Chickamauga with all but 1 responses this blog gets coming from … ugh. ‘People’ who pretend to be things like socialists, ‘thinkers’ (jesus!), ‘leftists’ using the Slur Thesaurus to make their cases, missing the point, cheering on the unelected state’s assassins, the military, praising Obama and now W?!?!? with their whole hearts, egregiously perverse in their weird belief that they’re “very left” - deliberately? I don’t know if it’s better if it’s genuinely ignorant. I’m pretty sure the fooled liberal is a zillion times more toxic and destructive than the world’s most competent out-nazi. Circus Peanut wouldn’t exist except for Clinton. It’s one thing to insist they don’t ‘see it that way’ - IE so incredibly stupid that it’s better if it’s a lie - but then to double down on this dumb bullshit, fully 2 years since there was any possible excuse for still being hoodwinked by the dem failure-fundraiser engine?

It was tough, in the 80s, when there were 1000 boomers for each kid - now? it’s triple. And climbing. The boomers and their soulless horde of children now form a neoliberal-defense-bloc that, by the terms of the “system” they claim will save us all, simply insurmountable. Forget electoral pageants and just think ‘buying power’. They won’t stop. They won’t curb their ravening, not for anything. The sum of discourse I’m seeing - outrageously high numbers of fresh new unselfconscious neoliberal agents, flat-affected lecturing from people who truly believe their phones give them life experience, bewildering pride at being so malleable to their masters - seems to be “it is worse than your worst most far-flung prophecies of how bad it would get”. That’s alarming because I was certain, then, that life on earth for us apes would become impossible within a few hundred years. It’s been about 20 since my worst imaginings were codified (i’m nutty) and everything has gone to shit about 5x ahead of what I imagined.

???

Biosphere dying is a shitty way to go. There was a very recent time when I had a positive feeling about this crop of USAns. It seemed like they understood that not rioting was a fault they’d been indulging in, a bad habit of childhood. Nope. Just like their parents, they worship appearance and decorum above all. They’ve made a culture - one they’re not just proud of but viciously defensive over - from standing on the side, wide-eyed and hungry, enjoying the spectacle of us getting assaulted, beaten, tied, and taken away in broad daylight. They love watching the earth die. They make their heroes and gods from the worst criminals.

Blocs, voting, “awareness” - nope. 

It’s not going to work out that way. Our hope comes from forming communities, intelligent action, and planning for a future. Ordering our efforts toward a world to live in now. USA, its officers & legerdemain & vigorous passionate young people with a vision - there’s no good shit coming out of there. No revolution, no evolution, no sanity, no freedom. They’ll offer up ‘liberty’ - license granted by Master, with gorgeous packaging and tiered rewards - like a Good American Should, but they will not stop. The terrible reality is that most mothers feed their children right into the machine, first chance they get, because they believe it is the only hope.