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a-dauntless-daffodil · 5 years

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Spop magic and classifications and stuff but honestly the main point of this is the thing with Glimmer at the end

also this is mainly based on season 1 since i can’t really watch s2

Etheria’s got, as far as I can tell, two basic kinds of people who can do magic in some form or another

There’s the Sorceresses like Glimmer’s dad and aunt who’s magic we haven’t really seen much in action yet, but who I’ll have some BIG guesses for anyways, and then there’s the Princesses like Queen Angella and Mermista/Perfuma/Frosta

And there’s also Razz, but I lowkey get the feeling Razz is a category unto herself

- Let’s start with Sorceresses

Shadow Weaver counts as a Still A Sorceress since she’s using a Rune Stone but doesn’t seem to have a normal connection to it, has trouble forcing the connection sometimes, needs her nifty red mask control gem thingy to access it, and could probably pick someone else to draw power from if she had to. She’s just draining it like a giant magical mosquito, fitting since she too is annoying as hell

Castaspella is a Sorceress who currently leads Mystacor, like both Light Spinner and Micah also used to do, but the way the hall of former leaders is set up-

(non-linear I presume and more of a memorial to the fallen/dead Greats)

[I like to headcanon Micah installed Light Spinner’s statue after he became a leader, in monument to the good that she used to be, and Castaspella later wrecked it sometime after he was killed]

-and the little I’ve heard of Light Spinner’s fall flashback in s2 makes me think Mystacor is ruled more by a council than by one single person, even though the council might have an unofficial leader who most of them trust and defer to. And this council is probably made up of masters of magic or the equivalent of teachers- People so good at magic and guiding others in learning how to use it and be responsible with it that they are given a say in how Mystacor as a whole is run

This would mean there’s another class of magic user, Sorceresses lite, that aren’t at that level yet and haven’t been accredited as experienced enough to lead/teacher others. They’re main job is to keep studying magic until they are, OR leave Mystacor and start their own lives once they’ve learned enough to not cause mayhem with their powers

THIS would ALSO mean there are people who have magic or the potential to use magic but who haven’t yet or choose not to be trained as a sorceress. Once again going off my very limited s2 info, I’d guess Adora fitted into this slot before becoming She-Ra, and it was her potential for magic that Shadow Weaver was drawn to. Maybe she was hoping to steal it or could tell it was linked to a Rune Stone or some other power she’d never felt before. Maybe she just likes collecting powerful people and brainwashing them. Whatever

And then there’s Razz. Razz might be magic. Razz might be friends with a magical broomstick that comes to her hand when she beckons. Razz has lived longer than the immortal queen of Bright Moon, long enough to know the previous She-Ra was disappeared/died over a thousand years ago. Razz is a beautiful mystery and I hope she’s stays that way

- So that’s the sorceresses, but what about Princesses?

The classic Etherian Princess has a natural connection to one Rune Stone that seems to be passed down genetically from parent to child. The Rune Stone on a global scale is important to keep Ehteira the planet alive and habitable, and the Princess’s main job is to correctly maintain, use, and protect it, which on a local scale means the area near the Rune Stone would ALSO be protected. This makes for pockets of safety and stability that people would over time flock to and populate, and the Princess’s power to protect that land would then make them the protector of the people now living there to, and thus Princesses as rulers comes to be

She-Ra is a Princess but can’t be a ruler since her whole point seems to be acting as Etheria’s referee/IT troubleshooter for all things Rune Stone related. She needs to stay impartial and has to be able to move around freely, so her Rune Stone is small and portable and has some powers but gets its real importance from how it can boost and heal the other bigger Rune Stones

On the other hand, Entrapta is a princess, a sovereign ruler, without a Rune Stone and frankly I can’t imagine what kind of Rune Stone her family would have anyway. Maybe one linked to earth and metal or magnetic force? Their land is in the mountains and does operate mines- Point is though, she has no such Rune Stone and doesn’t mention having lost one, so I’m going to assume that Entrapta at least has never heard of Dryl having a Rune Stone at all. She ‘rules’ because her family ruled, though there doesn’t seem to be much left to rule and she mainly just does her own tech related stuff anyway. But she IS considered a ruler by Bright Moon and her family has a big throne thingy at the rebel council table

Considering the crowd at the Princess Prom and the ridiculous number of Rune Stone that’s translate into, I’d bet most of Etheria’s princesses are like Entrapta, princesses without and uppercase ‘P’ or a Rune Stone. They’d be more like normal royalty or officials who use the term ‘princess’ thanks to cultural tradition made by the actual Princesses

Oh and Spinerella and Netossa don’t have thrones in at the rebel council table and don’t seem to represent any sovereign lands like Entrapta would have, so I’m assuming they either aren’t the direct heirs to their Rune Stones OR they’ve lost both Rune Stones and homelands to the war (explaining why they never left the Alliance, since they have nowhere else to go and nothing else to do but fight the Horde) OR they fall into another category of princesses, in their case meaning “someone with no Rune Stone who isn’t currently a ruler but who might come from a royal line and does have powerful magic and may have trained at Mystacor so back off”. They might be princesses in title, but i think that magic wise they sorceresses- Sorceresses who chose to focus all their skill on one thing, or have some weak blood tie to a line of Princesses which makes them more attuned to one kind of magic over all others. Could also explain how they met, with both of them going to Mystacor for training and getting put in the same ‘class’, maybe under Casta, seeing as how she likes knitting so much and their powers have to do with nets and spinning.... or maybe that hobby came after she had to figure out how to teach them.. i dunno. To paraphrase Bow, I still have no Idea what they do

Lastly we’ve got Scorpia who has the potential to link to her family Rune Stone but that link was severed/never activated, she doesn’t seem to have any other magic, and she comes from a royal family but neither she nor her family are in rulership positions anymore. She’s a princess in title only at the moment

- To sum up, Etheria may have:

Princesses (rulers with Rune Stone) Angella, Perfuma, Mermista, Frosta, various unknown others

/Princess/ aka the current She-Ra (not a ruler but has a smol and very important Rune Stone) Adora, formerly Mara

princesses (rulers with no Rune Stone) Entrapta, most of the people at the Princess Prom

?princesses? (not a ruler and no Rune Stone but still titled and has magic) Spinnerella?, Netossa?

‘Princesses’ (not a ruler and not currently connected to family Rune Stone but has Princess lineage) Scorpia

High Sorceresses (a ‘ruler’/teacher who co-leads Mystacor and has magic) Castaspella, Micah formerly, Light Spinner formerly

sorceresses (someone who has magic and is trained in its use) ^ plus Shadow Weaver, most of the background characters at Mystacor, and (spoiler character)

mage (untrained person with magic potential) Adora formerly

Razz (has magic? Probably?? Maybe the magic’s different or she just as her own style of using it???)

everyone else (people with none of those things) Bow, Seahawk, Catra (unless she turns out to be a Princess), most of the Horde and Etherians

Okay so that’s a lot but pretty simple! Sure would be a shame if something flipped it on its head :D :D

Hmm

- Princesses ARE sorceresses. Kinda. It’s complicated

What is a sorceress? Someone who has magic and has been trained to use it. But what does it mean to ‘have’ magic?

Well considering how the Rune Stone system is set up-

Rune Stone: (im guessing) Crystalline structure apparently anchored to a fixed point that contains vast amounts of ‘elemental’ magic capable of manipulating/generating a narrow range of Etheria’s natural features, such as it’s water, it’s moons, ice caps, forests etc. Rune Stones seem to located at, and draw from, nexus points in Etheria’s magical ley lines, which means they are also linked to and capable of drawing on each other if a certain genius should happen to get her hands on First Ones’ tech and decide to try hacking the entire damn planet for fun (thanks Entrapta)

-and if we don’t want to make a magic system that is silly, overpowered, and broken, then I’d say having magic means being able to sense the power innate to a world and potentially being able to harness it to create all sorts of neat effects, depending how you train and how much you can stand to pull into yourself at a time without exploding or fainting from pain

The main difference between a sorceress and Princess in that scenario?

Specialization

- So in the beginning there were NO Princesses or Rune Stones on Etheria

Either A: Etheria was a barren rock floating in the middle of nowhere that the First Ones decided to terraform and inhabit- Or B: Etheria was a normal planet before some First Ones’ related event caused it to start dying and the First Ones felt bad about that and made the Rune Stones as a sort of planetary life support system, which was super convenient when Mara ended up banishing the place to the empty pocket dimension of Despondos for whatever reason

In any case, if there was once no Rune Stones or Princesses naturally aligned to them, then how were the Rune Stones used? How were they maintained?

By sorceresses of course. And with the help of the only Princess of any kind at that time- She-Ra, Princess of Power and Castle Greyskull, who made/helped to make the Rune Stone system based on her own portable Rune Stone, and who the other later Rune Stone users titled themselves after, because mimicry is the sincerest form of flattery

When Glimmer’s link to the Moonstone is disrupted and when the link between the Sea Gate and the Sea Pearl is on the point of breaking, She-Ra’s powers are able to fix it. Makes sense that she was also the one to originally forge the links between certain sorceresses and Rune Stones- Sorceresses who gained control over incredibly powerful magical storage tanks and refineries, but at the cost of being able to use their magic for anything BUT accessing their one Rune Stone

Basically I imagine a Princess’s magic being shaped like scaffolding or pipe system, compared to sorceresses having hammers and pillars

- Princesses can hold and channel a lot of magic, but not change what kind of magic it is or it’s general effects (Water, moonlight, plants, ice, ?storms?) and effectively have NO magic without their Rune Stone

- Meanwhile sorceresses have less power to work with because no Rune Stone but can change it into this or that as needed and draw it from potentially any source EXCEPT Rune Stones (usually, see Shadow Weaver’s painful shenanigans for how trying to force a connection to one works out) though they normally just get it from the smaller branches of Etheria’s ley lines

To use another analogy- They drink magic out of a straw, can change what flavor they’re drinking when they like, and would passed out if they tried chugging a whole keg like how Princesses can do

The Princesses can only chug one brand though and no one else can afford to buy it

But wait!

If She-Ra can make sorceresses into Princesses, then why isn’t THAT how new Princesses are picked?

Why not choose from a pool of trained and vetted adults, rather than pass the power down through a family via blood and end up with kids and teens in control of the whole world??

Maybe making Princesses comes at a high energy cost/and or needs both She-Ra and He-Man working together to actually do, meaning it was more of a one time deal thingy when the whole Rune Stone network was being set up

Maybe selecting each new Princess WAS the old system, and imprinting it genetically was just a safety measure in case anything happened to prevent new Princesses from being picked….Something like…. She-Ra vanishing for a thousand years… or Etheria getting cut off from the rest of the universe and Eternia… for example

So yeah, one way or another, some people who could use magic had their magic permanently keyed into just the Rune Stones and managed to pass that trait down through the generations, and the other magic people stayed normal sorceresses

Now to the whole point of this long meandering mush of headcanons and speculation

- Magic and Glimmer -

I must talk about Glimmer

(i love you Glimmer)

Glimmer doesn’t seem to be a normal or ‘proper’ Princess

Her powers are two things and those are fairly small in scope, self-teleportation with a buddy and sparkles. Not exactly on the same level as generating whole forests or summoning giant tidal waves or holding up a castle of ice while it tries collapsing on your heard

Princesses, when their Rune Stone isn’t sick of busy trying to prop up a dying defense system, tend to have pretty large scope powers

Glimmer? Not so much

She’s more like Spinnerella and Netossa than Mermista or Perfuma. Powers more narrow, with both her and the Spinnet couple having to get creative with how to use what is basically the same one or two spells. Meanwhile the other Princesses have very fluid control over their one element, basically moving it as an extension of themselves in whatever way they like and on a big scale

So why’s Glimmer’s magic Like That?

Could be that only one person can have main access to a Rune Stone at a time, meaning Glimmer won’t become the real Princesses of the Moonstone until/unless her mom gives up HER link to it and passes one the admin password, meaning Glimmer is stuck with just some really limited powers for the foreseeable future

Could be, but while that makes sense in some ways, like why none of the other Princesses have anyone in their family help them use their Rune Stone-

(though that could also be explained by stuff like, Mermista’s dad being tried of fighting or incapable of using the Rune Stone because he married into the family, or not wanting to risk ending the line by having everyone in it out fighting, or former Rune Stone users being able to sever their connections when they step down and doing that as part of the official transfer of power..)

-but the idea also really doesn’t mesh with a lot else about Glimmer and her relationship to Angella

There’s no resentment between them, not in the ‘Mom why won’t you give me moar powar’ way, and not in the ‘im not sure this person can be trusted with a magical nuke’. There’s no talk of Glimmer training her magic to prepare for someday maybe having to take full control of the Moonstone. Glimmer is scared of not living up to the same level as her mom, yeah, but she’s talking about things like being a good leader, not leveling up magically

So I don’t think her mom being Princess is keeping Glimmer’s magic stunted

Instead, thanks to her dad’s genes, I think Glimmer isn’t actually a Princess. Not in the total sense. Not in the traditional or official sense

Because a traditional Princess, going by the rules I’ve laid out above, WOULDN’T have been able to ‘switch’ from Moonstone to Black Garnet, even partially, the way Glimmer’s escape in ep 9 and resulting glitches make it look she did

(more on that in a second)

So. What if Glimmer is a sorceress?

A sorceress who, through sheer will and stubbornness and her desire to help people and make her mom proud and not be a failure daughter, managed ON HER OWN what Shadow Weaver needed a forbidden spell to get

What I’m saying is, Glimmer unknowingly figured out how to feed off the magic of the Moonstone

Just like with Shadow Weaver, staggering to the Black Garnet to recharge, this has made Glimmer dependent on its power in a dangerous that way other Princesses haven’t shown to share yet. Angella’s fear when Glimmer comes back nearly drained of magic in ep 3 is very real, very much a parent scared their child might be about to drop dead if they don’t get them treatment in time, mirroring Bow’s fear when Glimmer runs low on magic in Thaymor

They were both scared she could die if she got too low on magic. Maybe she would, maybe she wouldn’t, but running low on it definitely does seem to be painful for her, just like it is for Shadow Weaver

Glimmer can drain magic and specifically knows how to do it from a freaking RUNE STONE

A skill she used to pull the Black Garnet’s power INTO herself and her teleportation in ep 9, creating a paradox that made impossible for it to imprison her, and accidentally overwriting her link to the Moonstone with a new one with the Black Garnet

And her Glitches? If she linked with the Garnet, then why the Glitches?

Her glitches were caused by two different Rune Stone links bleeding into each other, something that isn’t supposed to be possible and they aren’t set up for and turns out doesn’t work so well when the person dealing with this has never even TRAINED to be a sorceress

Speaking of the Glitches, that’s the main reason why I think Glimmer could have figured out the whole Drain Magic spell on her own without realizing it

During the battle for Bright Moon in ep 12, Glimmer fights with Scorpia on her way to protect her mom. In that fight with Scorpia, Glimmer has a lightbulb moment

She has a moment when Scorpia has her pinned, keeping her from her mom who is need help right now, which makes Glimmer pissed enough she starts Glitching and somehow SHOVES Scorpia back with brute force (pls rekt me Glimmer)

Then Glimmer, who’s still Glitching, looks down and sees how her Glitches and red lighting are now running up her dad’s old staff

and she goes ‘OH’

and smiles

And she deliberately uses her Glitches, the Black Garnet’s red lightning, to blast Scorpia away

also look. The last frame after she zapped Scorpia. Glimmer isn’t Glitching anymore, but the red lightning? The Black Garnet’s magic??

it’s still there

and that could be animation wonkyness but hey this is speculation, and also also- Compare the first time she stabbed a Horde bot at the start of the battle, before she learned her new trick, to the one she stabbed right AFTER

The electricity on the first bot is blue. Maybe it’s normal and just a sign Glimmer managed to hit the right spot to make it explode. Maybe it’s the last drops of magic her dad stored in the staff when he was a alive

but when she stabs the bot attack her mom? the electricity's a different color

this time it’s red/orange

So maybe she didn’t just stab it that time. Maybe Glimmer had figured out how to zap things even when she wasn’t Glitching, and hit the bot with everything she had

Glimmer took new magic, magic she has no experience with and no training in, magic that has been HURTING HER, and in the course of one battle, she found out how to use it to her own ends anyway

She harnessed the damn Glitches and weaponized them

Now imagine her as a kid going to the Moonstone day after day, lying under and glaring up at the Rune Stone who’s magic she can’t use yet. Imagine her promising herself she’d prove herself worthy of it, as any daughter of Angella the immortal queen, in Glimmer’s mind, should and NEEDS to be worthy

Especially during a war. Especially with the Alliance broken and the Rebellion left on the defensive against the Horde. Especially when Glimmer is already unsure if she can be a good enough leader or Princess in any other way, and needs every tool she can get if she’s going to help save more innocent people from dying like her father did

I can totally imagine that princess-slash-untrained sorceress breaking a few magical traditions without even noticing it

plus think of the drama if she ever found out that, not only is she not a ‘proper’ princess, but she’s actually been using the same spell that let Shadow Weaver rise to power

mmm.... delicious angst....

or Adora figures out how to She-Ra correctly someday and now Glimmer has to choose if she wants to lock her power to the Moonstone permanently or keep the magic she’s scraped together herself

and maybe that’s also a choice of gaining ‘immortality’ & wings like her mom, or staying mortal like all her friends and probably someday leaving her mom behind just like her dad did when he died

anyway yeah, both canon and headcanon Glimmer own my heart and soul and i cannot stop thinking about her

#spop #glimmer #queen angella #adora #shadow weaver #magic headcanons theories #probably working with a lot of outdated info but eh just say it's an AU

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fionaharnett · 5 years

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Written by Frank Natter

Here is the speech I gave today Before I properly begin, I think it is also important to state that I am not here representing Grenfell United. I am a supporter of their campaign and I work with them to make their videos, but I am not a member of Grenfell United. I didn’t lose any family members in that fire, nor did I survive it. Grenfell United is composed, solely, of those people directly and profoundly (profundamente) effected by the fire, for obvious reasons. It was only by calendar errors that a member is not sat with me today. I am here as last year my friend Hannan showed the film I co-made. It was deeply moving to have the film translated into Spanish and to hear of its appreciation. It is an honour to be invited to speak this year. With that said, let me begin. I have a confession to make, I didn’t read up enough on you all before I came here. I therefore find myself in a place, where I find myself a kind of heretic (hereje). You see, I am not wedded to non-violence. In certain contexts, and in many historical moments, I will defend political violence - the Haitian revolution for example. Moreover, I have never found myself at home in Gandhian philosophy, his actions in South Africa, organising to be considered a class/caste/race above Africans racialised as black foretold (predicho) the hierarchies that would define the battle he had with the anti-caste (casta) resistance hero, Ambedkar. My appraisal of the Gandhi and his legacy cannot detach itself from the figures of resistance who preceded him, who used violence, nor from the violence of partition (dividir) that followed, tearing Pakistan from India and bringing about millions of deaths and the largest forced migration in human history. I come from a philosophy where you need both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X to achieve justice, and I follow the logic that the necessary response to the assassination of MLK was the forming of the black panthers. I say this all, not to prod or poke to seek debate or fury, but to make proper sense of the position I hold at this moment in time, and to put in a context the poem that I will end this speech on. It would be disingenuous (insincero) any other way and I think frank and open discussion is what we all came for. With that said, despite my philosophical and political differences, I am here to represent a campaign - like that of Fateme’s - that is non-violent by necessity. Political violence was not an option for meaningful change in the wake of the state crime at Grenfell Tower, because of the state’s power and the vulnerability of the communities affected by the fire. For those who are not aware of what happened at Grenfell, allow me to explain. On the 14th June 2017, a fridge caught fire in a fourth floor flat in a social housing tower block with 24 floors. The fire spread to the external of the building. Within twenty minutes, the fire had spread to be uncontrollable. It engulfed (envuelto) the building. The fire service responded with a policy to contain the fire, “stay put.” Their advice was for people to stay in their homes. This ended up as a death sentence for many of the 71 people who perished that night, 72 if we add Pily Burton, who died due to health complications from the fire months later. The fire service were not prepared for the fire they faced on that night, an inferno that haunts in unimaginable ways those who witnessed it, fought it, lived through it or spoke to family members as they breathed their last breaths. The reason the fire service were not prepared was because deregulation has allowed for buildings to be covered/clad to buildings that some fire experts hold should not be allowed on dog kennels (residencia canina). The insulation and cladding that was on Grenfell was the equivalent of 30,000 litres of petrol. Margeret Thatcher began the process of deregulation (desregulación) that killed, but it was not solely her doing, the fatal change came from the ‘socialist’ New Labour. This was the outcome of what I will call the market state, what we generally call neo-liberalism. The power of finance capital over our lives has meant global corporations are in many ways more powerful and financially secure than our nation states, so they get to determine the policies and regulations that exist to preserve our lives. Grenfell was a sign of how bad things had become. The reason 30,000 litres of soldified petrol was clad to the homes of over 300 people at Grenfell Tower (and hundreds of thousands more across ‘Great’ Britain) was because companies like Arconic and Cellotex could tell the government and local authorities that their products were safe without lab testing, this is called ‘desktop studies’. They allow somebody like myself, with no scientific knowledge beyond the basics, to combine materials based upon reports that were not independently lab tested. Allowing corporations to regulate themselves put hundreds of thousands at risk of death across the UK and killed the family members of my friends and traumatised a community I love. Not only that, in the aftermath of the fire, in the words of our former prime minister Theresa May, there was a “failure of state.” The community of north Kensington, where the fire took place, were abandoned by the state and left to fend for themselves. Grenfell was the UK’s Katrina, it exposed the rot of our system. If you hear the names of the deceased read out, you will hear names from across the world. People who had come to Britain fleeing the war in Syria died in Grenfell. In Britain, despite not only 15% of the population being non-white, racialised groups are most likely to live on the top floors of tower blocks. No one from the highest floors at Grenfell survived. Grenfell was a crime that cut along race and class lines, in a very serious way, but it also transcended them. So since then, we have campaigned, we have fought, we have argued, we have screamed, we have cried, we have weeped and we have exhausted ourselves in the fight for a justice that seems so elusive. The reason justice is as elusive is because so many people are implicated in this crime. Central government were warned of the dangers; fires in the UK and abroad had warned of the issues, they were ignored. Calls were muted, messages were ignored. Government ministers in the previous administration were warned 21 times of the threat of Grenfell. They did nothing. Their names are Eric Pickles and Gavin Barwell. But they are not the only ones responsible for this. Arconic - the developer of the cladding - in its own brochure, said the cladding should not go beyond 10 metres. Grenfell was 67 metres tall. Their head of UK sales targeted the local authority (The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management organisation) for the sale of the materials. The local authority - the richest in London at the time - applied needly austerity (austeridad) measures to the redevelopment and it led to mass death. Criminal culpability (culpabilidad) is easy to establish here, the charge we have for such offences is manslaughter (homicidio involuntario). But as the rapper Lowkey put it, this shows in extreme fashion how neoliberalism kills people. It was deregulation that spread the fire from the outside and austerity within. You see the fire did not spread just from the outside but inside as well. The richest local authority in London, one of the richest spaces in Europe, did not even invest in proper fire doors. In 2008, we saw the logic of too big to fail applied. Bankers who crashed the economy and indirectly killed millions through the damages that spread like a tidal wave were too central to the system to face criminalisation. With Grenfell, the logic is the same. To pursue meaningful justice would, by its very nature, undermine the system as we know it. So these corporations and bodies - and the people who sit above them - are too big to fall. So what has been done? There have been many who have operated for those affected by the fire, but few have acted with. Again I will refer back to Fateme’s speech, with a slight rephrasing: everyone was speaking about Grenfell, very few were speaking with those most affected. Much of the early politics around Grenfell were problematic, and threatened social order. Political violence seemed a very real possibility in the immediate aftermath, because of the state’s failure and the nature of the intrusions coming into the community, in large part by the media. Much of the work undertaken has been to keep up resistance, without falling into violence, which would benefit the state. Grenfell United formed shortly after the fire, their first aim was humanitarian, it was to look after those most in need. The second phase was to sort things out, to get people rehoused, to extend support. Their third phase has been to campaign for fundamental change. They have successfully campaigned - again by necessity - for the government to adopt new regulations for buildings, which though limited and not by any means what was demanded, they have achieved. They have got hundreds of millions released by the government to assist local authorities to remove these materials from buildings. Yes, my government, despite the fire, had to have the survivors and bereaved campaign to remove this stuff. And they still haven’t done anything but the basics. The other day, almost two and half years since the fire, the government finally removed the cladding from a children’s hospital. Let that sink in for a minute. This stuff is on homes, hospitals, schools, student accommodation across my country, and much of the world. The majority of buildings covered with this stuff in 2017, before Grenfell, still are now. That is a crime unto itself, in my book. The government have used anti-terror laws to hide the extremity, but we all know who the terrorists are here. So what are my demands? 1) Housing is a human right 2) That housing must be fit for human habitation, it must be clean, it must be hooked up to utilities, and it must be regulated, people must live in places that do not kill them. 3) That standard for housing should be universal, housing regulations have to cut across borders, because no one in the world should have to face what happened at Grenfell, nor live in the conditions that we know exist across the third world, I have the recent fire in Bangladesh in mind and extend my deepest solidarity with those affected. 4) Those at a state level implicated in such crimes, and those in the board rooms, have to face the same justice as the rest of us, this is bound to my second demand. If you provide a home that kills, you face the same justice as if I give you a pill of cyanide (cianuro) and call it a sweet. Yet, in my country, this is not the case, and it is the sixth largest economy within the world. We are going further into the problems that caused this in the first place. Regulation is seen as anti-business, not pro-life. We are not alone here, this is the case now for the majority of the world’s population. It may not be fire safety, but corporations - aided and abetted by governments - are putting us at increasing risk of death. This makes me violent in my mind. I am not serene. I do not find compassion for those responsible in my head or heart. I am driven to stand up against these people, to tell them as loudly as I can that in my book they are criminals and I will keep saying their names. There are many more names I could say, but for the time being, we are still hoping that the British state will do its job and criminalise these people, so certain people will remain hidden, for now… Yet, the process of taking the steps, of walking, of collectivising for a common sense of justice is what we have done. We have walked two marathons as a collective since Grenfell by meeting silently and walking on the 14th of every month. Our silence has lasted the best part of a week, if you add it all up. And we will continue to do this, not because we think it will deliver justice, not because it is tactically astute (astuta), not because it hits the pockets/wallets/money of our oppressors, but because it is a way of us coming together, marking the date, taking stock and cementing the bonds in what promises to be a very long struggle for any sense of justice. With that all being said, I will end on a poem I wrote about the silent march. If any of you come to visit London and you are there on the 14th of the month, come and join us. Follow Grenfell United and Grenfell Silent Walk on social media for more information and to follow the campaign. We walk in silence out of respect. We walk in silence because we are mourning. We walk in silence because even if we didn’t know someone who died directly, someone who lost their world could be standing next to us. We walk in silence because words so often offend. We walk in silence because to speak is to vent and to vent is to rage. We walk in silence because if we spoke, our throats would burn. We walk in silence because otherwise our fists would quickly come to talk too. We walk in silence because our muted presence should scare those responsible. We walk in silence because we cannot say a word that the events of the 14th June don’t speak for us. We walk in silence because we carry the weight of history and the burden is easier in quiet. We walk in silence because it pains those who wish to speak for us. We walk in silence because if we even whispered about what justice looks like in totality, the streets would stir with revolt. We walk in silence because it is stealthy. We walk in silence because we are waiting to be done right by. The silence has an end point. The silence is not there to comfort the powerful, it is to soothe those living with hell. The silence speaks for itself. Respect what it says. Don’t speak over it.

Written by Frank Natter

#5IMAG001W #beyondtheframe

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