#and its so much broader and more terrorible and more wonderful than we can ever comprehend

[fireleaptfromhousetohouse]

Confessions Of A Whale

(Epistemic status: over-simplifying a culture that is not my own for the sake of an elaborate analogy)

Supposedly, Japan remains so hell-bent on slaughtering whales as a fairly direct result of the West’s own hubris.

From the day those Portuguese landed in Nagasaki, Japan found itself on a short and brutal crash course with the Occident. There was an overbearing and one-way cultural influence even before America hit Japan with two weapons of unimaginable destructive power and made them do everything they said. 

(One wonders if they’ve become wary about any new development coming from the city of Nagasaki.)

What must really sting about this is that most of our hilarious cultural stereotypes of them wacky Japanese stem directly from Western influence. The used-panty vending machines? A product of importing European lingerie, which having come to Japan was initially only really worn by prostitutes, creating an indelible link between underwear and sexuality (beyond even the obvious). Those famously long working hours? An economic system foisted wholesale upon them by their American conquerors. Even the famously pixellated genitals of Japanese pornography only came about following the Japanese legal system’s own wrangles with the translation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. And whaling itself? While Japan had practiced it for centuries, it kicked into overdrive in the twentieth century because of a helpful suggestion put forward with the best of intentions to help feed post-war Japan, put forward by military governor Douglas ‘Big Mac’ MacArthur.

Eventually, Greenpeace happened, and in most of the West, slaughtering whales went out of fashion. And obviously we appealed to our Japanese allies to give it up as well - but after years of saying yes to all our weirdo demands and requests, however uncomfortably sexual in nature they might be, this time the Japanese said no.

Awkwardly, this was a time the West’s casual, blithe demands for cultural hegemony might have actually mattered, since many of the hunted whales are endangered species - and, endangered or not, are being killed in a profoundly cruel way. But did that matter in the face of getting to tell the West where they can stick their run-dry reservoir of goodwill? Did it trousers.

(More pointedly, pro-whaling Japanese have made the point that Norway and Iceland, also avid whaling nations but European, never seem to get singled out in the same way.)

Some tradcon with a Latin username has doubtless already made the comparison between the West’s not-quite-colonial influence on Japan, and the Western liberal media’s not-quite-colonial influence on the wider population of the West, better than I could (and they probably shoehorned in a reference to used-panty vending machines too). And the most obvious parallel is that, after many years of outsize influence, the well of goodwill has finally run dry at an inopportune time.

The liberal media, bluntly, has made a series of demands which many Westerners may not have liked, but found themselves obliged to go along with. Some were good ideas (racial equality), some less so (go into thousands of dollars of credit card debt). Some were received well (the war on terror), some poorly (gay wedding cakes). Swap those sentences around according to your own opinions, obviously. The point is, there is a very long list of examples of what you might call top-down governance by the back door.

Eventually, though, the massive, building, groundswell of ‘no, fuck you, we’ve done what you told us and it’s been dreadful, time for something different, time for a change, time to defy you no matter what issue it’s on or what the consequences are’ was bound to burst. And it happened over the issue of wearing face masks during a pandemic. You know, one of the times these endless blithe demands for cultural hegemony might have actually mattered.

(The Trump presidency and the broader populist right are clearly drawing on the same groundswell, but how much they actually represent it is far more debatable - particularly given how easily they’ll flip-flop on wearing masks when they predictably contract Covid themselves, or otherwise flip-flop on any issue the second it affects them.)

Looking at any anti-masker rhetoric for five minutes gives the game away - despite some tenuous efforts to seem scientific (like the popular analogy ‘if you’re wearing trousers, farts can still get out, hur hur hur’), it always, always, comes down to a slightly wheezy version of the rebel yell. They posit wearing a mask as a sign of supplication to the world government or whoever, and conversely, see the act of not wearing a mask as something like raising the Gadsden flag or launching a broadside against the HMS Royal Oak.

The liberal media, for its part, reacts as it always does: claiming that the defiance of its will is an act of objective evil that any fool could see is flatly wrong - but, most importantly, ignoring the aspect of this being a defiance of its will. Why would anyone ever want to do that, after all? Don’t they know we’re always right?

[amwritingmeta]

15x18: The Most Loving

I’ve indulged. All day, I’ve indulged in this episode. In all of it. But, yes, mostly this scene. I’ve made gifs. And watched this scene. Obsessively. What’s life? THIS is life right now. This is the air in my lungs and the joy in my chest and, oh, my loveliest lovelies, I know you’re right there with me. Gods!

Too bad Dean doesn’t love Cas back, huh?

KIDDING. 

Just kidding. He does. I believe it more strongly than ever. *fingers crossed and sprinklings of salt* But let’s have a look at why I believe it more strongly than ever, shall we? Yes we shall! (let’s see if I get through this without crying) (highly doubtful) (update: I didn’t)

Let’s start with Dean. He’s a very good place to start.

Look at how what Cas is about to say to Dean, all those beautiful soul-affirming things he’s about to share, is set up right there, in this moment, with Dean losing hope by the second, moving softly from anger into a despair that makes him see his anger clearly, just not the root of it.

The shining brightly detail here is that the frustration and the fear don’t make him defensive, which, to me, is important because the immediate naming of the anger, without hesitation, the awareness of it, the quiet acceptance of how he got them here, leading into that gentle “I’m sorry” is like his character progression this season just balled up into one glorious half-minute of character insight: his, and ours.

With the good -- that immediate apology -- comes the bad, though -- the thinking of himself as an arrow of killer instinct, lacking control of this thing inside him when it takes over and not knowing what to do about it or how to fight it.

This thing being?

His anger.

And what is it symptomatic of?

Well, I would say his Shadow. His unconscious. His repressed emotions. His inability to be honest with himself. Which leads to frustration with himself. A feeling of perpetual alarm. He can never just be himself, because he never feels as though he’s enough. 

And feelings are weaknesses that will get you killed.

And his mother died when he was so young and shook him out of any sense of stability, and he’s longed for home, love, family ever since, but every time he’s dared dream or dared believe or even hope, something has happened to take good things away, because good things don’t last.

Not in Dean’s experience.

So the happiness of home, love, family has always been equated with pain. With hurt. With loss. So it was easier not to think an actual future was in the cards for him. Easier to push it down and begin to believe that he can’t possibly be loved for who he is, because what he is, is a killer.

What he is, deep down, is a monster.

His true identity has been covered up by toxic masculinity armour and he’s lost all sense of his true self, out of fear of rejection he has continuously rejected himself and out of fear of failure, failing to Protect Sammy -- a purpose so tightly bound to Dean’s sense of identity that anything threatening it has instantly been perceived as a threat to Dean’s entire understanding of himself -- Dean has bought into the lie that feelings are weaknesses and that, to survive, he had to walk in his father’s exact footsteps.

And of course it hasn’t helped that John’s revenge trip stemmed entirely from losing the love of his life. Luckily, Dean has seen his parents reunited. Luckily, Dean knows they’re now together, happily so, in their shared Heaven. If he can internalise this knowledge and accept it as a good thing, then there’s a basis for healing right there.

Leaving that behind because now here we are, with Dean verbalising his view of himself (hopefully for the last time) which has kept him perpetually in a pattern of behaviour that has been, at its root, self-destructive because of his lack of ability to love himself and see himself worthy of being loved.

Cas doesn’t go all “Dean” on Dean for no reason. 

He goes all Dean on Dean because he knows better than to agree when Dean claims all he knows how to do is hunt and kill and be guided by fury and the vengeance mode that his father’s image has left like an imprint all over Dean’s personality. 

And Cas is about to tell us how much better that better truly is.

*i’m cry*

The beginning of the better is linked to Dean’s instant apology, his instant admittance that he was wrong, brought by him recognising his mistake, realising he let his anger lead him once again. 

(just like he did when he shut Cas out and made Cas feel he had no choice but to leave the bunker and strike out on his own) (because Dean refused to apologise for behaving like a stubborn dickhead yeah?)

And this instant apology is... well. It’s Jensen Ackles style beautiful. Because->

->the apology starts here, with this absolutely devastated look at Cas, as though Dean thinks Cas doesn’t want to be here, with him -- he wants to be with Sam and with Jack -- and Dean is keeping him from seeing out their final hours with his entire family. And so->

But the apology, sincere and selfless and wishing there was some way out of this situation because Dean would save Cas from this fate in an instant if he could, triggers Cas’ realisation that there’s something he can do to save Dean.

Because?

Well, I would hope it’s because the narrative is rewarding Dean for learning the lesson of having so much self-awareness that it doesn’t take him ten and some episodes to land in an apology. It takes him less than five minutes into this scenario to admit that his choices were the wrong ones. To Cas, but more importantly to himself.

So then, reward time, and Cas’ brain starts working overtime as he remembers who Death is afraid of, what might be powerful enough to conquer Death itself.

It would be... everything if this moment is actually about how the defeat of Death has nothing to do with showcasing the power of the Shadow, but of what Cas’ honesty and open heart leads to: his moment of integration. 

Finding internal balance, as he’s no longer suppressing or repressing anything inside of him, but can face all of his emotions head on. No more self-deception and no more confusion. Only clarity.

And if this moment, in the broader sense, is about what brought that moment of integration on: Cas’ love for Dean.

Meaning the one thing powerful enough to conquer Death itself, really, is love.

Wouldn’t that be something? Isn’t that what has conquered Death over and over again in this narrative? Yes. It truly is. To have it stated unequivocally would be spectacular.

Now, I would look at both of them in this post, only, it’s already a long post, so let’s focus on Dean, because though I could talk for eons about what this means for Cas’ arc and it culminating in such a glorious act of self-actualisation, I believe what it means for Dean may play an even bigger role moving forward. *fingers crossed*

Cas reaches the realisation of how he can use the Empty for the purpose of defeating Death, yeah, and Cas reveals this realisation to Dean by finally laying all the cards on the table.

Cas: When Jack was dying, I made a deal to save him. Dean: You what? Cas: The price was my life.

And at Cas telling Dean that this deal, that Cas has kept from him, means Cas has bargained away his life, Dean’s face does this-->

Look... at how... his eyes... widen... with the sheer... shock and terror of that statement and then... there’s that soft... or so I see it... understanding that Cas once again has done that thing he does: he’s put himself on the chopping block. As if he doesn’t matter. (remind us of someone?)

So the first bit of information is that Cas has given his life for Jack’s and that he is, basically, a dead man (angel) walking.

Right. Shock and terror.

Then Cas delivers this gut-punch:

Cas: When I experienced a moment of true happiness, the Empty would be summoned and it would take me, forever.

And Dean’s face does this->

It’s like his brain is start-stuttering... true happiness?... the Empty?... summoned?... taken forever??... And then he’s like, wait what? What does this have to do with anything?

And he challenges this strange pick of a moment to share all these things by asking:

How exactly is this relevant in this moment in time, Cas? I don’t understand.

Because he really doesn’t. He does not have a clue for the entirety of this exchange, even with Cas stating that the one thing Death fears, the one thing strong enough to defeat her is the Empty, and they know the Empty can only come when summoned. They’ve talked about it, not that long ago, and still, Dean’s brain is not putting two and two together.

Because he would never, not for one second, ever equate Cas’ true happiness as having anything to do with him. Not ever.

All he can think is... well, wouldn’t all he can think be that he was about to get them both killed, and now Cas is telling him this other way he’ll die, so even if they did make it out of there alive, Cas is... what? As good as dead? No matter what? There’s this premeditated way that Cas has set up for him to die that Cas hasn’t told him about. Cas dead in all the scenarios presented to him right now is all Dean can focus on.

And so Cas begins to explain himself.

Cas: I always wondered, ever since I took that burden, that curse, I wondered what my true happiness could even look like. 

And Dean looks like this. 

To me, because Dean’s deepest fear is happiness.

And because his brain is trying to make sense of what is happening, but it looks like there’s white noise going on, like all he can think is What Is This What Are You Trying To Tell Me I Do Not Understand Cas Something About Happiness Why Are You Talking To Me About Happiness I Can’t Help You!

And then Cas takes it a step further, and tells Dean this:

Cas: I never found an answer, because the one thing I want, it’s something I know I can’t have.

And Dean is like... what is it??

And of course, Cas obliges, because there’s no turning back. Oh, Cas. 

Cas: But I think I know… I think I know now, happiness isn’t in the having, it’s in just being. It’s in just saying it. 

And Dean is getting softly defensive, worried at this point that this is headed somewhere wholly new and unexplored and the expression on Cas’ face is starting to get to him, those eyes already shining with tears and the earnestness all over him, and Dean doesn’t want to not listen to him, but he also doesn’t like the not understanding what the hell is going on, so->

And Cas isn’t about to slow down.

Cas: I know how you see yourself, Dean. You see yourself the same way our enemies see you...

And this is barking exactly the way Dean was afraid of: honesty. So much honesty. And Dean is taking it in like he’s still wondering what exactly this is. Is this Cas’ idea of a deathbed confession, because Dean’s not sure he wants to hear this... but...

Cas: ...you’re destructive and you’re angry and you’re broken—you’re daddy’s blunt instrument. 

At the mention of John, Dean starts to reign himself in. He’s starting to shed the confusion for the understanding that Cas is about to speak a whole lot of truth and he’s just gonna have to hear it. So he begins steeling himself. Hence the first hard swallow.

Cas: And you think that hate and anger, that’s… that’s what drives you, that’s who you are… It’s not.

I like to read this as the words “It’s not” being the last thing Dean ever expected to hear. He looks so completely taken aback. He was, because it’s his modus operandi, most likely expecting judgement at this moment (because he fucked up and brought them here) and rejection, because he always expects it and always thinks he deserves it.

And instead, he gets what he needs most. He gets told to see himself through Cas’ eyes. Because (hopefully) it’s the only way Dean can finally recognise his true identity and stop hiding from it as if it’s an abomination.

Cas: And everyone who knows you sees it. Everything you have ever done—the good and the bad—you have done for love. 

And Dean reacts the same way he reacted when Cas told him that the price to save Jack had been Cas’ life: look at the slight widening of the eyes, look at the furrowed brow -> shock and terror.

Because love?

Cas: You raised your little brother for love, you fought for this whole world for love. That is who you are. 

And Dean lets the words sink in somewhat, but still... this is not how he sees himself, this is not his understanding of himself, of who he is. It’s so far from it, but this is Cas saying these things and wait...

...this is how Cas sees him?

Cas isn’t done, of course.

Cas: You’re the most caring man on Earth. You are the most selfless, loving human being I will ever know. 

And Dean is about to start crying too, but he keeps the emotion back. Look at those clenched jaws, the hard swallow, the set expression. Determined not to just lose it. 

But he’s close. Nostrils flaring, lips trembling, he’s fighting back the tears like, no, I will not bawl my eyes out.

Cas: You know, ever since we met, ever since I pulled you out of Hell, knowing you has changed me. 

And Dean just...

This very nearly breaks the dam. He’s just swallowing down those tears like there’s no tomorrow. He refuses to cry, even now, even when his body is like Give Me An Outlet For All These Feelings. 

But naw.

Stoic stoic stoic.

Cas: Because you cared—I cared. I cared about you… I cared about Sam, I cared about Jack… but I cared about the whole world because of you.

And Dean begins to have this ice-cold feeling run through him... that Cas is saying all these things for a reason...

And all Dean can do is listen...

Cas: You changed me, Dean.

And he looks so defeated. Because he can’t even imagine having to say goodbye. And there was that other moment of dickheadery, not that long ago, when Cas left him that still smarts. 

One where Cas said some truths before walking out the door of the bunker, and Dean thought he’d fixed it with that prayer, but this feels reminiscent. It feels like Cas is gearing up to push even harder than he already has, and like Cas thinks Dean’s response will warrant him leaving.

And Cas confirms this is not the beginning, but the end.

Cas: Because it is. 

Oh. Oh no. No, you don’t. 

But Cas does. He really does.

Don’t put me in this corner.

But that’s not even close to what’s actually happening, is it?

Dean has completely forgotten how this conversation started. He’s forgotten about Death at their door, he’s forgotten about the mention of the Empty, because all he can think about is how Cas sees him as a selfless, loving human being, who has changed him for the better. 

And he comes across as though all he can think is that this is too much.

And Cas mirrors his head shake...

...because all I can see here is how Cas wants Dean to take it in now. The truth of it. He wants Dean to hear him. To know that he’s loved and deserving of it, not deny it or refuse it.

And Dean, for just the breath of a second, thinks don’t, Cas. Don’t make me question my entire self-view. Because I will.

Because though he cannot deal, he can’t lose Cas again either, as this episode has gone to great lengths to tell us. (like how he stepped between Cas and Billie plus all the loss of one half of couples that’s threaded through the ep)

And then all thoughts are interrupted. The Empty arrives. Moment of true happiness style. It has been said, and Cas is... well.

And the door opens as Billie breaks through.

And Dean turns to Cas and his face is wearing this expression->

As he says “Cas?” because he still don’t understand why this is goodbye. He doesn’t get that it’s goodbye because it has to be. Because Cas is about to sacrifice himself to save him...

And then we get this expression as Dean responds with that stunned 

“What?”->

Because he wouldn’t have pushed Cas away for saying I love you. Sure he was internally having a mild fit, and he’d need a moment or two to gather his thoughts, and perhaps he’d have to say no, you don’t a few times, and have Cas say yes, I do, back in order to really convince him, but that goodbye... 

That was supposed to happen only if Dean didn’t get his shit together.

And Dean would have gotten his shit together. He just needed a bit more time.

So for Cas to go ahead with the goodbye, even as Dean sees the Empty entering through that wall, is nonsensical. Hence the “What?”. 

What do you mean I love you goodbye? 

And then...

Oh that handprint.

Please let it be a symbol for putting the past to rest and moving forward into a healthy now, with hope for the future. Oh, Cas, please come back. And Dean, please instigate the return. You are loved because you deserve it. And you deserve good things and to be happy. Both of them do. Gods, I hope they get to be happy together.

*please please please please*

[jonthethinker]

Does the Cerberus Assembly need to be reformed, or destroyed? And can it really be either?

Let’s start with an opinion we can all agree on; Trent Ikithon sucks. He’s clearly a very bad person, and our collective hatred of him is one of the rare things this fandom seems to actually agree on. What he’s done to his “disciples” is horrifying, and his general ideology is monstrous and abhorrent, although not surprising considering the role he plays in the Empire. We can, on this, agree that the world would be a better place if he was removed from power, correct?

Now this is where I start explaining my probably very divisive opinion.

A lot of people would say that all it takes to make the Cerberus Assembly better would be to replace the members like Ikithon with Good People. Maybe Caleb Widogast, for instance. If you simply put someone with a stronger moral character into that position, then its output in turn will also be Good.

This, whether knowingly or not, implies that institutions, even those like the Cerberus Assembly, are by their nature at the very least morally neutral. That all it takes to make an institution like the Assembly be Good is have Good People run it. You do that, and with time, all is well.

But what if institutions did have a moral character? what if the responsibilities and powers given to a body like the Assembly and its requisite components are not Good or even neutral, but instead very, very bad? And what if the incentives the people deciding who stands on the Assembly, namely the members of the Assembly themselves, are actually antithetical to any ideas of a substantially reformed Assembly in the first place?

Let’s think for a minute about Trent and his job. We are all horrified by his methods of creating his Volstruckers. But as much as it bothers me, what bothers me more, personally, is what they are for. While we tend to view them as arcane assassins, what they really are is a wholly unaccountable means of performing all of the Assembly’s, and by extension the Empire’s, dirty deeds not meant for public notice. And seeing as they fall under the sole purview of the Archmage of Civil Influence, this is largely going to translate to “managing dissidence and discontent” in the polite language a body like the Assembly would use to describe its work.

What this means is that its job, and the job of Trent’s office as a whole, is to keep the wrong ideas from getting too popular and the people from getting too loud about the awfulness of their everyday lives, and inside a broader system like the Empire, this is usually going to be dealt with by means of coercion and outright violence. While it’s easy to feel sorry for the incredibly abused and tormented people under Trent’s power, like Caleb and Astrid and Eadwolf, I feel like I’m one of the few in the fandom who has really considered the true extent of terror being unleashed on so many whose faces we’ll never know.

Peasant farmers’ organizing for lower taxes on their grain sales. Laborers gathering to raise hell over the low wages they receive from mandatory state projects. Citizens concerned about the unchecked brutality of the Crown’s Guard. Religious worshipers worried the Empire is straying from the path set by their gods. The mentally ill and other people who simply don’t comfortably fit into the grand scheme of things. Races of folks seen as outsiders suspected of conflicting allegiances. How many people like this have vanished in the night, either to be imprisoned or tortured or killed, or I guess in many cases, all three? How much suffering has been caused, hidden away from any measure of accountability?

And this brings me to my next point; While Trent is truly awful, his title, and the role he plays, are also awful, and I think you don’t get into a position like that in the first place without being someone like Trent. I say this because we’ve gotten to meet a handful of people on the Assembly outside of Trent, and they’ve all generally had the same things to say about him; he gives them the creeps and they don’t like him personally, but he has his uses. I interpret this to mean he performs the responsibilities of his office well enough, and while his methods and general demeanor may be off-putting, it isn’t worth causing a fuss about so long as the work gets done. If they simply ignore what he’s doing, they get the benefits of a suppressed polity with very little of the personal hangups of what it requires to make that happen.

So let’s say, for some reason, Trent dies or is imprisoned and disgraced, and Caleb assumes his role. Caleb has experienced a remarkable amount of personal growth, although not without his own stumbles and set-backs like any victim of severe trauma such as he. He is, in my humble opinion, a Good Man. I know if given the power of this office, he’d be motivated to end the traumatizing of children, and killing of parents, and perhaps even the wholesale disbanding of the Scourgers itself. He’d maybe seek to alleviate the suffering of those his office is meant to contain instead of inflicting more pain upon them. And wouldn’t that be nice?

But when you’ve got this entrenched elite like the Empire does, those sorts of efforts are not going to go unnoticed, and in many cases, are going to cause one hell of a backlash among the powerful, who more often than not believe in their heart of hearts that those lowly commoners deserve their lot in life, and to spare the lash is to spoil the child, and soon you’ll have a bunch of peasants thinking they can go so far as to ask for actual power, actual control over the direction of their lives, and for any empire, but especially this one, how do you imagine that’s going to fly?

I’m reminded of an anecdote out of Brazilian politics. Former President Lula da Silva is one of the the most popular Brazilian political figures of all time, and managed to massively alleviate poverty in Brazil while also working with Brazil’s entrenched elite to make sure not to piss off the wealthiest of the wealthy. But the comfortably upper middle class, or “petite bourgeoisie” as Marx would call them, were disgusted that all these poor people were suddenly climbing the ladder. According to some folks, they complained “The airports are starting to look like bus stations,” because for the first time, working class people in Brazil could actually afford to fly. This discontent among the comfortable led to a chain events ending in the false arrest and imprisonment of Lula and the rise of their current terrifying president Jair Bolsonaro. I learned from this, and other tales like it, to never underestimate how angry some people will become when their special status ain’t so special anymore.

This is to say, that while Caleb is an undoubtedly brilliant man, without the potential intervention of DM magic, I don’t see someone with his lack of political savvy either holding power long or holding onto his convictions long enough to do anything meaningful, if someone like him is considered for the job in the first place. AND even if he does accomplish all those wonderful things through this office and survives until he’s old and gray, he will eventually die. And judging solely on the general quality of character among the wizards we’ve met thus far, I’m not so optimistic about his potential replacement.

This example does spill out my major beef with the whole “Good Person in power” idea of reform. Good People either can’t live up to their values and actually wield power, or the clock itself defeats them and everything they ever stood for. This is also my problem with governmental models overly dependent on norms, as all it takes is someone willing to just completely ignore them,and for the people in power around them to have no incentive to stop them, for things to completely go off the rails. This is why reforms generally don’t last unless they universally redistribute power itself, from the top to the bottom, and even this is going to come with its own backlashes, and it generally doesn’t happen from polite attempts at reform by well meaning leaders, at least not all on their own, but through the sheer force of mass movements or outright revolutions.

And its not just Trent’s office that has this problem. It’s every single seat on the Assembly. His is just a particularly egregious example. Vess DeRogna didn’t get her job by being polite, of that much I’m sure. She’s clever, devious, and patient, not to mention her skill set and interests directly line her up for the role as Archmage of Antiquity. I don’t really think her sole interest is making sure nobody gets hurt by all these artifacts lying around, and neither do I imagine the Empire itself has any intention of keeping her discoveries behind lock and key; they pretty clearly want them mass produced where they can and immediately wielded against their enemies, both foreign and domestic.

And I’ve hinted at this earlier, but if you think Trent is a unique monster in the halls of Dwendalian mages, I’m going to have to disagree. I’m certain there are more than a few wizards in service of the Assembly and the Empire, who if not already believing similarly to Trent, could easily be convinced of his convictions, and ready to use his power themselves in an eerily identical manner. People like Trent aren’t as rare as we’d like them to be, and they’re all ready to grab power just as soon as they can.

So it would seem I come firmly on the “burn it all down” side of things. If only I believed it were that simple.

You see, I see the Cerberus Assembly as an institution that exists, in its entirety, for the cementing of power of the Dwendalian Elite and the progression of its interests. It protects them from threats both from inside and out, it teaches their children magic, it helps negotiate its trade, it aids in putting food on its table, and makes sure its armed for bear with the deadliest of magic only the Age of Arcanum and ancient elves could provide. It’s very reason for existence is to uphold the way of life for those on top. Even if it competes idly for who sits at the head of the table, it very much is invested in maintaining the structure of that table.

So if it were sundered and destroyed as an institution, what is to stop its functions from simply being absorbed by the broader Empire? What’s to stop the Empire from simply recreating the Volstrucker program under a different name? What’s stopping them from hiring its wizards to perform their original tasks, just under the sole discretion of the king? So I’d wager the problem isn’t the Assembly, but the very distribution of power required to maintain an Empire like Dwendal’s in the first place. The assembly is an immoral institution upholding a much larger, equally immoral institution. And you can’t truly solve the problem without tearing the whole damn thing down.

Do I think this campaign is going to be one in which our lovely players start a revolution? Hell no. I expect Trent at least to die or be deposed, and with the aid of some DM magic, things will get a little better. But Matt has given enough consideration to the political forces present in his world building, that I wanted to treat his world as if it were subject solely to the forces and motivations our own is. Just to see how things could turn out without a generally kind god like Matthew Mercer at the helm.

Plus I just really love trying to understand how fantasy political structures would really work. It’s usually a lot less depressing than real political structures, at least in so far as there are no real consequences for their abject failures. But I’ve rambled long enough. Thank you to the poor souls who read this ramble. You’re truly wonderful.

[aion-rsa]

How Science Fiction’s Ensemble Stories Humanize Space

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A close-knit crew of wildly different people ride around on a spaceship having adventures. If you’re a sci-fi fan, there are very good odds that this synopsis describes one of your hooks into the genre. That crew might be a dysfunctional band of space criminals and revolutionaries, or a clean cut team of scientists, diplomats and soldiers serving a galactic Space UN, but there is a core appeal to this set up across the genre.

“Ensemble crews are one of the quickest and most powerful ways to forge a found family.  A foundational example for me was Blake’s 7,” says Paul Cornell, who has written stories for the Star Trek: Year Five comic series among his many speculative fiction credits. “They haven’t been recruited, they have relative degrees of distance from the cause, they’ve been flung together.  The most important thing is that they’re all very different people.”

These Are the Voyages…

It’s a formula that has been repeated over and over for about as long as there has been science fiction on television—starting with the likes of Star Trek and Blake’s 7, through the boom in “planet of the week” style TV in the 90s and 00s with Farscape and Firefly, to more recent stories like Dark Matter, The Expanse, Killjoys, and the Guardians of the Galaxy films. Most recently Sky’s Intergalactic, and the Korean movie Space Sweepers have been carrying the standard, while last month saw people diving back into the world of Mass Effect with Mass Effect Legendary Edition. While Commander Sheppard is ostensibly the protagonist of the video game trilogy, few would argue that it’s anything other than the ensemble of the Normandy crew that keeps people coming back.

As science fiction author Charlie Jane Anders points out, it’s not hard to see the appeal of a family of likeable characters, kept in close quarters by the confines of their ship, and sent into stories of adventure.

“I love how fun this particular strand of space opera is, and how much warmth and humour the characters tend to have,” Anders says. “These stories have in common a kind of swashbuckling adventure spirit and a love of problem-solving and resourcefulness. And I think the ‘found family’ element is a big part of it, since these characters are always cooped up on a tiny ship together and having to rely on each other.”

Over the years the Star Wars franchise has delivered a number of mismatched spaceship crews, from various ensembles to have crewed the Millennium Falcon, to the band of rebels in Rogue One, to the crew of the Ghost in Star Wars: Rebels.

That energy was one of the inspirations for Laura Lam and Elizabeth May, the writers behind Seven Devils and its upcoming sequel, Seven Mercies. In Seven Devils, a team of very different women come together aboard a starship stolen from an oppressive, galaxy-spanning empire, clashing with each other as much as the regime they are fighting. 

“So many of these stories are what we grew up with, and they were definitely influences. The scrappy people trying to make a living or rebel against a higher power, or the slick luxury communism of Star Trek,” says Lam. “What’s great and terrible about space is how you are often stuck on a ship with people, for better or worse. That isolation can breed really interesting character conflict and deep bonds. You have to have your crew’s back, otherwise space or alien plants are too large or dangerous [to survive].”

While the “Seven” duology is very much inspired by this genre of space adventure, it also brings these stories’ underlying political themes to the surface.

“What I enjoy most about space operas is taking contemporary socio-cultural and political issues and exploring them through a different lens,” says May. “I love to think of them in terms of exploration, analogous to ships navigating the vastness of a sea. And on journeys that long, with only the ocean and saltwater (space) around you, things become fraught. Yes, these are tales of survival, but they’re also tales of what it means to question the world around you. Aside from the cultural questions that [premise] raises, it opens possibilities for conflict, character bonding, and worldbuilding.”

In Yudhanjaya Wijeratne’s novel, The Salvage Crew, his ensemble don’t spend long on their ship. In the opening scene, they are plummeting through the atmosphere of an alien planet in a drop-pod piloted by an AI who is also the book’s narrator. But the book shares that sense of characters who need to stick close together in the face of a large and dangerous universe.

“What did I like about [space team stories]? Well, always the sense of wonder that the scale brought me: the feeling that Earth, and all our bickering, was just a tiny speck of dust – what Sagan called ‘the pale blue dot’ – and out there was an entire universe waiting to be explored,” Wijeratne says. “I treasured the darkness, as well: the darkness of the void, the tragedy of people in confined spaces, and a terror of the deep that only the deep sea brings me. It wasn’t the family attitude: it was more the constraints and the clever plays within terrifyingly close constraints. There’s a kind of grim, lunatic nihilism you need for those situations, and I loved seeing that.”

When asked for their favourite examples of the genre, one name kept coming up. Wijeratne, Anders, Lam, and May all recommended the Wayfarers books by Becky Chambers. The first in the series, A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, concerns the crew not of an elite space naval vessel, or a renegade crew of space criminals, but of a ship that lays hyperspace tunnels for other, more glamorous ships to travel through. This job of space road-laying is one that I can only recall seeing once before, much more catastrophically, in the Vogon Constructor Fleet of Hitchhiker’s Guide the Galaxy. A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet is a very different tale, however.

May tells us, “It’s a quieter space tale, a novel that feels very much like a warm hug. I love it with all my heart.”

Chambers doesn’t hold back when describing the impact this genre had on her growing up.

“I can’t remember life without these stories,” she says. “TNG first aired when I was three years old, and I watched Trek every week with my family until Voyager wrapped when I was sixteen. I can recite most of the original Star Wars trilogy word for word while I’m watching the movies, and I binged Farscape like my life depended on it when I was in college. This storytelling tradition is so much a part of my fabric that I have a hard time articulating what it is I like about it so much. It’s just a part of me, at this point. These stories are fun, full stop. They’re exciting. They can break your heart and crack you up in equal measure. They’re about small little clusters of people doing extraordinary things within an impossibly vast and beautiful universe. Everything about my work is rooted here. I can’t imagine who I’d be without these stories.”

The Unchosen Ones

Perhaps a big part of the appeal of these stories is that they are about an ensemble of people, each with their own stories and goals and perspectives. It can be refreshing where science fiction and fantasy frequently centre stories of “the Chosen One”, be it a slayer, boy wizard, or Jedi who is the person the narrative happens to. While Chosen One stories will frequently have a wide supporting cast, the emphasis for those other characters is frequently on the “supporting”.

“I very intentionally wanted to do something other than a ‘chosen one’ story with Wayfarers. I’m not sure I can speak to any broader trend in this regard, but with my own work, I really wanted to make it clear that the universe belongs to everybody in equal measure,” Chambers says. “Space opera is so often the realm of heroes and royalty, and I love those stories, but there’s a parallel there to how we think about space in the real world. Astronauts are and have always been an exceptional few. I wanted to shift the narrative and make it clear that we all have a place out there, and that even the most everyday people have stories worth telling.”

It’s an increasingly popular perspective. Perhaps it’s telling that one of the most recent Star Trek spin-offs, Lower Decks, focuses not on the super-heroic bridge crew, but the underlings and red shirts that do their dirty work, and that in turn echoes the ultra-meta John Scalzi novel, Redshirts.

Charlie Jane Anders’ recently released young adult novel, Victories Greater Than Death is a story that starts off with an almost archetypical “Chosen One” premise. The story’s protagonist, Tina, is an ordinary teenage girl, but is also the hidden clone of the hero of a terrible alien war. But as the story progresses, it evolves into something much more like an ensemble space adventure.

“I was definitely thinking about that a lot in this book in particular,” Anders says. “Tina keeps thinking of the other earth kids as a distraction from her heroic destiny or as people she needs to protect. Her friend Rachael is the one who keeps pushing for them to become a family and finally gets through to Tina.”

Seven Devils (and its upcoming sequel, Seven Mercies) is also a story that tries to focus on the exact people who would never be considered “chosen” or who have wilfully turned away from their destiny.

“I do like that most of them [the characters] are those the Tholosians wrote off as unimportant–people to be used for their bodies, and not encouraged to use their minds,” Lam says. “And Eris’s journey turning away from the life chosen for her and choosing her own, but having to wrangle with what she still did for the Empire before she did, makes her a very interesting character to write. In many ways, she was complicit, and she’s not sure she’ll ever be able to atone.”

Wijeratne also argues that an ensemble story is in many ways more true to life.

“Rarely in life do you find this Randian John Galt type, this solo hero that changes the world by themselves; more often you find a group of people with similar interests, covering for each other, propping each other up,” he says. “It’s how we humans, as a species, have evolved. Our strength is not in our individual prowess, but in the fact that three people working together can take down a mammoth, and a thousand people working together can raise a monument to eternity.”

While there are certainly themes and kinds of story that are more suited to ensemble storytelling, May points out that there is plenty of room for both kinds of story.

“Having written books that explore both, I find that Chosen One narratives are often stories of duty, obligation, and self-discovery,” she says. “Ensemble narratives often involve themes of acceptance and friendship bonds. To me, these serve different narrative functions and ask separate questions.”

A Space of Their Own

The spaceship-crews-on-adventures subgenre is one of the major pillars of science fiction as a whole, with the trope codifier, Star Trek, being likely one of the first names that comes to mind when you think of the genre. This means that the writers working within the subgenre are not only heavily influenced by what came before, they are also in conversation, and sometimes argument with it.

Paul Cornell is a huge Star Trek fan, and has written for the characters before. His upcoming novella, Rosebud, features the quite Star Trek-ish scenario of a crew of AIs, some formerly humans, some not, investigating an anomaly. It’s a story that very much intersects with the ideals of Star Trek.

“Rosebud is about a crew who are meant to believe in something, but no longer really do,” Cornell says. “They’re a bunch of digital beings with varying origins, some of whom were once human, some of whom weren’t.  There’s a conflict under the surface that nobody’s talking about, and when they encounter, in a very Trek way, an anomalous object, it’s actually a catalyst for their lives changing enormously.  I’m a huge fan of the Trek ethos.  I like good law, good civilisation, civil structures that do actually allow everyone to live their best lives, and Rosebud is about how far we’ve got from that, and a passion for getting back to that path.”

Other stories more explicitly react against the more dated or normative conventions in the genre. Seven Devils, for instance, both calls out and subverts the very male demographics of a lot of these stories.

“For a lot of ensemble casts, you get the token woman (Guardians of the Galaxy, for example) and until recently, things were fairly heteronormative,” Lam says. “So we basically wanted to turn things around and have a gang of mostly queer women being the ones to save the universe. We also went hard on critiquing imperialism and monarchies with too much power.”

Indeed, the “space exploration” that is the cornerstone of much of the genre, is an idea deeply rooted in a colonialist, and often racist tradition.

I’ve written my own space ensemble story, an ongoing series of four “planet of the week” style novellas, Fermi’s Progress. One of my concerns with the genre is how often the hero spaceship will turn up at a “primitive” planet, then overthrow a dictator, or teach the women about this human concept called “love”, or otherwise solve the local’s century’s old, deeply rooted societal problems in half-an-hour and change in a way that felt extremely “white colonialists going out and fixing the universe”.

My solution was simple. In Fermi’s Progress, the crew’s prototype spaceship has an experimental FTL drive that unfortunately vaporises every planet they visit as they fly away. It’s a device that riffs off the “overturn a planet’s government then never mention them again” trope of planet-of-the-week stories, keeps the ship and crew moving, and leaves the reader in no doubt as to whether or not these “explorers” are beneficial to the places they visit.

Of course, not every effort to engage with these issues needs to be so dramatic.

“Since I tend to view space operas in terms of uncharted exploration, it’s crucial that the text addresses or confronts power issues in its various forms: who has it, who suffers from it, how is it wielded?” May says. “And sometimes those questions have extraordinarily messy and complicated answers in ways that do not fit neatly with ‘good team overthrows evil empire.’ One of the things I wanted to address was this idea of ‘rebels are the good guys.’ Who gets to be a good person? Who else pays the price for morality? In Seven Devils, the character of Eris ends up doing the dirty, violent work of the rebellion so the others can sleep at night–so that they can feel they’ve made moral and ethical choices. And for that same work, she’s also judged more harshly by those in the rebellion who get to have clear consciences because of her actions.”

“I had particular beef with the homogeneity,” says Wijeratne. “An entire planet where x race was of an identical sentiment? Pfft. At the same time, this naive optimism, that people can work together on a planetary scale to set up institutions and megastructures without enormous amounts of politics and clashes. I was most frustrated with this in Clarke’s work. [Rendezvous with] Rama in particular: it just didn’t compute with what I knew of people.”

As a consequence of the genre’s colonialist roots—not to mention the nature of most real spaceflight programmes—space in these stories can feel like an extremely militarised space. Even a gang of misfits, fugitives and renegades like the Farscape cast features at least a couple of trained soldiers at any one time.

“I didn’t want my characters to be just redshirts or ensigns, who get ordered around and seldom get to take much initiative,” Anders points out. “And I was interested in exploring the notion that a space force organized by non-humans might have very different ideas about hierarchy and might not have concepts like ‘chain of command’. I tried not to fall unthinkingly into the military tropes that Trek, in particular, is prone to.”

Chambers was also driven by a desire to show people who were working in space without wearing a uniform.

“I wanted to tell space stories that weren’t about war or military politics,” she explains. “These things exist in the Wayfarers universe, and I personally love watching a space battle as much as anybody, but I think it’s sad if the only stories we tell about the future are those that focus on new and inventive ways of killing each other.  Human experience is so much broader than that, and we are allowed to imagine more.”

Getting the Band Together

Writing a story built around an ensemble, rather than a single main character, brings its own challenges with it. In many ways, creating a central protagonist is easy. The story has to happen to somebody. Creating an ensemble can be tricker. Each character needs to feel like they’re the protagonist of their own story, but also the cast is in many ways a tool box for the writer to bring different perspectives and methods to bear on the issue at the centre of their story. Different writers take very different approaches to how they put that toolbox together.

“I had some types I wanted to play with, and I was consciously allowing myself to go a little wild, so they get to push against the walls of my own comfort zone,” Cornell says of the AI crew in Rosebud.  “I created a group of very different people, tried them against each other, and edited them toward the most interesting conflicts that suited my theme.”

Anders also went through various iterations in assembling her cast of characters for Victories Greater Than Death.

“I went through a huge process of trial and error, figuring out exactly how many Earth characters I wanted in the book and how to introduce them,” she says. “I wanted characters who had their own reason for being there and who would either challenge Tina or represent a different viewpoint somehow. I think that’s usually how you get an interesting ensemble, by trying to have different viewpoints in the mix.”

In writing Fermi’s Progress, I very much tried to cut the crew from whole cloth, thinking of them primarily as a flying argument. Thinking about the original Star Trek crew, most of the stories are driven by the ongoing debate between Spock’s pragmatism, McCoy’s emotions, and Kirk’s sense of duty, and so the Fermi’s crew was written to have a number of perspectives that would be able to argue interestingly about the different things they would encounter.

Others, however, focus strongly on the individual characters before looking at how they fit together.

“I gravitate much more toward writing multiple POVs than sticking with just one. Character dynamics are catnip to me, and I love to play with them from all angles. But building each character is a very individual sort of process,” Chambers says. “I want each of them to feel like a whole person, and I’m struggling to think of any I’ve created to complete another. I just spend some time with a character all on their own, then start making them talk to each other — first in pairs, then in larger groups. I shuffle those combinations around until everybody comes alive.”

In writing Seven Devils, May and Lam began with a core pair of characters, then built outwards.

“El [Lam] and I each started with a single character we wanted to explore,” May recalls. “For me, it was Eris, who also had the benefit of being an exploration of thorny issues of morality. Eris’ natural foil was Clo–conceived of by El–who believes in the goodness of the rebellion. From there, our cast expanded as different aspects of imperial oppression that we wanted to address: colonial expansion via the military, brainwashing, the use of artificial intelligence. Each character provides a unique perspective of how the Empire in Seven Devils functions and how it crushes autonomy and self-determination.”

“We started with Eris and Clo,” Lam agrees. “Eris is sort of like Princess Leia if she and Luke had been raised by Darth Vader but she realised the Empire was evil and faked her own death to join the rebellion. Clo has elements of Luke in that she grew up on a backwater planet where things go wrong, but it was overpopulated versus wide open desert with a few moons. She also just has a lot more fury and rage that doesn’t always go in the right direction. Then we created the other three women they meet later in the narrative, and did a combination of using archetypes as jumping off points (courtesan, mercenary, genius hacker) but taking great care crafting their backstories and motivations and how they all related to each other.”

Ensuring that every character has their own story to be the protagonist of is something you can trace right back through the genre- particularly with series like Farscape, Firefly, and the more recent Intergalactic, where the crews often feels thrown together by circumstance and the characters are very much pursuing their own goals.

Balancing all of these different perspectives and voices is the real trick, especially if you want to avoid slipping back into the set-up of a star protagonist and their backing singers.

“This was a bit of a struggle, especially in a book with a single pov,” Anders says. “In the end all I could do was give each character their own goals and ideals that aren’t just an extension of Tina’s. It really helps if people have agendas that aren’t just related to the main plot.”

“We have five point of view characters and seven in the sequel, and it was definitely a challenge,” Lam admits. “For the first book, we started with just Eris and Clo until the reader was situated, and then added in the other three. We gave each character their own arc and problem to solve, and essentially asked ourselves ‘if [X] was the protagonist, what would they journey be?’ Which is useful to ask of any character, especially the villains!”

Chambers has a surprisingly practical solution to the problem: colour-coded post-it notes.

“Some characters will naturally have more weight in the story than others, but I do try to balance it out,” Chambers says. “One of the practical tricks I find helpful is colour-coding post-it notes by POV character, then mapping out all the chapters in the book on the wall. That makes it very easy to see who the dominant voices are, and I can adjust from there as needed.”

A Ship with Character

One cast member these stories all have in common is the ship they travel in. Sometimes the ship is a literal character in itself, such as the organic ship Moya in Farscape, but even when not actually sentient, the ship will help set the tone for the entire story, whether it’s the sweeping lines and luxurious interiors of the Enterprise D, or the cosy, hand-painted communal kitchen of Serenity. When describing the Fermi in my own story, I made it a mix of real and hypothetical space technology, and pure nonsense, in a way that felt like the story’s mission statement.

Seven Devils’ stolen imperial ship, “Zelus”, likewise reflected the themes of the book.

“Our ship is called Zelus, and it begins as a symbol of Empire but gradually becomes a home,” Lam says. “They took it back for themselves, which I think mirrors a lot of what the characters are trying to do.” 

The same was true of the “Indomitable”, the ship Tina would inherit in Victories Greater Than Death.

“The main thing I needed from the Indomitable was to be a slightly run down ship on its own, far from any backup,” Anders says. “I did have a lot of fun coming up with all the ways the ship’s systems work. In the second book I introduce a starship that is a little more idiosyncratic, let’s say.”

For Cornell, the spaceship at the heart of Rosebud was an extension of the characters themselves, almost literally.

“It’s a kind of magical space, in that the interior is largely digital, and reflects the personalities of the crew,” he says. “There’s an interesting gap between the ship’s interior and the real world, and to go explore the artefact, our crew have to pick physical bodies to do it in.  Their choices of physical body again tell us something about who they are.”

“My background is in theater, so I am always thinking about what kind of ‘set’ I’m working with,” Chambers tells us. “Colour, lighting, props, and stage layout are very important to me. I want these to feel like real, lived-in environments, but they also communicate a lot to the reader about who the people within these spaces are. Kizzy’s workspace tells a completely different story than, say, Roveg’s shuttle, or Pepper’s house. I spend a lot of time mulling over what sorts of comforts each character likes to keep around them, what food they like to have on hand, and so on. These kinds of details are crucial for painting a full picture.”

Stellar Dynamics

When he was writing the cast of The Salvage Crew, Wijeratne fleshed out his characters by focusing on how they relate to one another.

“My cast tends to be more of ‘what’s the most interesting mix I can bring to this situation, where’s the tragedy, and where’s the comedy?’ I go through a bit of an iterative process –  I come up with one stand-out attribute for the character that makes sense given the world I’m about to throw them into,” he says. “Then the question is: what’s a secondary quirk, or part of their nature, that makes them work well with the others, or is somehow critical? What’s a tertiary facet to them that really rubs the others the wrong way?

“Then I take those quirks and go back to the other characters, and ask why do they respond to these things? What about their backstory makes them sympathize with one thing and want to pummel the other into dust? By the time this back-and-forth is complete, I’ve got enough that the characters feel like they really do have shit to get done in this world, and really do have some beef with each other.  They have backstory and things they react to really badly and situations they’re going to thrive in.”

In The Salvage Crew, this included Simon a geologist who crew up plugged into a PVP MMORPG and who hasn’t really adjusted to the real world, Anna, a wartime medic who has PTSD around blood, and Milo, who is a decent all-arounder, but has problems with authority, particular women in authority.

In the best-loved stories of this sub-genre, it’s not just the strong characters, but the relationships between those characters that people love. Spock and McCoy, Geordi and Data, Jayne and Book working out together in Firefly. Even in the protagonist-heavy Mass Effect, some of the best character moments don’t involve Shepard, but are the character interactions you eavesdrop or walk in on while wandering around the Normandy.

“I think we’ve all experienced being flung together with a group of workmates, and nobody asking us if we like everyone there,” Cornell says. “And how the smallest quirks of personality can come to mean everything over several centuries.”

Getting those relationships to feel organic and natural is the real trick, and it can take endless writing and rewriting to get there. 

“For me, it’s usually a lot of gold-farming,” Anders says. “I will write a dozen scenes of characters hanging out or dealing with stuff, and then pick two or three of them to include in the book. I can’t write relationships unless I’ve spent a lot of time with them.”

Often it’s a question of balancing conflict and camaraderie among the group.

“It’s easy to want to go straight to banter between characters, which is a massive benefit of ensemble casts. But I also think it’s essential that they have moments of conflict,” says May. “Not just drama for drama’s sake, but in any friendship group, boundaries often have to be established and re-established. Sometimes those boundaries come from past traumas, and taking moments to explore those not only adds dimensionality, but shows how the character unit itself functions.”

For May and Lam it helped that their ensemble cast was being written by an ensemble itself.

“Having both of us work on them really helped them come to life,” Lam says. “Their voices were easier to differentiate because we’d often take the lead on a certain character. So if I wrote a Clo chapter, I didn’t always know how exactly Eris might react in her next chapter, or Elizabeth might change Eris’s dialogue in that initial Clo scene to better fit what was coming up. As co-writers, we were in conversation with each other as much as the characters, and that’s quite fun. We tend to work at different times of the day, so I’d load up the manuscript in the morning and wonder what’s happened next to our crew during the night and read to find out. We also did a lot of work on everyone’s past, so we knew what they wanted, what they feared, what lies about themselves they believed, how they might change and grow through the story as a result of meeting each other, and therefore the characters tended to develop more organically on the page.”

For Wijeratne, the thing that really brings the characters’ relationships into focus is a crisis, and it’s true. Across these stories, more often than not you want your space team to be working together against a common challenge, not obsessed with in-fighting among themselves.

“The skeleton of what you saw was the output of an algorithm. A series of Markov chains generating events, playing on the fact that humans are extraordinarily good at seeing patterns in random noise,” Wijeratne says. “But the skeleton needs skin and muscle, and that’s more or less drawn from the kind of high-stress situations that I’ve been a part of: flood relief efforts, factchecking and investigating in the face of terrorism and bombings, even minor stuff like being in Interact projects with people I really didn’t want to be working with. I find that there are make-or-break moments in how people respond to adversity: either they draw together, and realize they can get over their minor differences, or they cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war.”

Found Family

Whether we’re talking about Starfleet officers, browncoats, rebel scum or galaxy guardians, these crews are rarely just colleagues or even teammates. They are family.

“I think it goes back to many space operas ultimately being survival tales: whether that’s surviving in the vastness of space or against an imperial oppressor,” May says. “These stories bring unrelated characters closer together in a way that goes beyond the bonds of blood. ‘Found family’ is a powerful bond predicated on acceptance and respect rather than duty.”

It’s a topic at the heart of Seven Devils, set in a galaxy where the regime in power has done all it can to eliminate the concept of “Family”, but Lam also believes the found family is something extremely important to marginalised groups.

“In ours, the Tholosians have done their best to erase the concept of family entirely–most people are grown in vats and assigned their jobs from birth. You might feel some sort of sibling bond with your soldier cohort, perhaps, but most people don’t have parents,” Lam says. “Rebellion is incredibly difficult, as your very mind has been coded to be obedient and obey. So those who have managed to overcome that did so with incredible difficulty, and found each other and bonded among what they had in common. You see it in our world as well of course–the marginalised tend to be drawn to each other for support they might not find elsewhere, and the bonds are just as deep or deeper than family you’re related to by blood (just look at drag families, where you have a drag mother or daughter, for example).”

“Found family is definitely a strong narrative thread,” Wijeratne agrees. “I think it stems from an incredibly persistent process in our lives – in human lives: we grow up, we outgrow the people we are born among, and we go out into the world to find our tribe, so to speak. And this is a critical part of maturity, of striking out on out own, of becoming comfortable with who we are and realizing who we’ll be happy to battle alongside and who we’d rather kick in the meat and potatoes.

“Space, of course, is such a perfect physical representation of this process. What greater ‘going out’ is there than in leaving aside the stale-but-certain comfort of the space station or planet and striking out for the depths? What better idea of finding a family than settling in with a crew? And what better embodiment of freedom than a void where only light can touch you, but even then after years?”

Of course, the “Found Family” isn’t exclusive to spaceship crews. It’s a theme that we see everywhere from superhero movies to sitcoms, reflecting some of the bigger social shifts happening in the real world. As Cornell points out, one of the very first spaceship ensembles shows, Lost in Space, was based around a far more traditional family.

“I think one of the big, central parameters of change in the modern world is the move from biological family being the most important thing to found family being the most important, the result of a series of generation gaps caused by technological, ecological and societal change happening so fast that generations now get left behind,” Cornell says. “So all our stories now have found family in them, and we can’t imagine taking old family into space.  The new Lost in Space, for example, had to consciously wrestle with that.  And even in the original, there’s a reason the found family of Billy and Dr. Smith is the most interesting relationship.  It’s the only one where we don’t immediately know what the rules are meant to be.” 

To make a huge generalisation, that sense of “not immediately knowing what the rules are meant to be” might be the key to the genre’s appeal. After all, if your space exploration is closer to the ideals of the Star Trek model than they are to Eddie Izzard’s “Flag” sketch, then it’s about entering an alien environment where you don’t know the rules. If there are aliens, your space heroes will be trying to reach out and understand them. But for the writer, whether those aliens are humanoids with funny foreheads or jellyfish that only talk in the third person, the aliens will still be, behind however many layers of disguise, human. We really struggle to imagine what it’s like to be anything else. Perhaps our spaceship crew’s efforts in communicating with and understanding those aliens is reflected in their efforts to understand each other.

Seven Devils, by Elizabeth May and Laura Lam, is out now, as is The Salvage Crew by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Victories Greater Than Death by Charlie Jane Anders, and A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers. Rosebud, by Paul Cornell, will be out in April 2022.

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The first two parts of Chris Farnell’s serial, Fermi’s Progress, Dyson’s Fear and Descartesmageddon, are also out now, or the season pass for all four novellas is for sale at Scarlet Ferret.

The post How Science Fiction’s Ensemble Stories Humanize Space appeared first on Den of Geek.

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The Psychology of ‘Attack on Titan’: Erwin

In light of the most recent episodes of Attack on Titan, I felt inspired to write a piece on a relevant topic to this point in his story - The psychology of death and dying. Most specifically I am interested in looking at Erwin’s final soliloquy and conversation with Levi.

I remember when this portion of the story appeared in the manga and how terribly heart wrenching it was (and still is) for fans of the series. Especially for the hardcore Erwin fans. A character who stood as an icon of the fight for humanity’s freedom (albeit with perhaps some questionable choices along the way), wrestling with the idea that perhaps he really was a bad guy all along (cue Billie Eilish…)

Now in his own darkest hour, Erwin questions his motives for all of the choices he made in life. He bemuses the deaths that lie in his wake. If he fails, personally, in finally learning the truth of the Walls, were those sacrifices worth it? Was he simply a selfish monster the entire time and only ever interested in his own goals of avenging his father’s murder?

The thing is, though, that when we are faced with our own deaths, our self-reflection of the lives we’ve led to that point can be skewed based on our own personalities. Though he may not have thought so at the time, Erwin was truly a hero of the story up to this point.

This phenomenon, our mental processes that occur when we’re faced with our own mortality, is referred to as terror management theory by psychologists. This is a relatively newer theory stemming from the field of cultural anthropology in the 1970s. It attempts to explain the concept of death anxiety. “Death anxiety” is the existential dread associated with contemplating one’s inevitable death. Basically, the idea is that we all do things while we’re alive like make relationships, create families, create art, etc. in attempts to create some more of legacy that we will be remembered by. This, according to the theory, it where cultural worldviews and practices regarding the dead or ancestors may stem from.

Now a large part of this theory is that most of our choices during life are typically an unconscious creation of a legacy. Yes, we can sometimes also do it consciously too, but the point is that on a regular day to day basis  we don’t contemplate our demise every time we pick out what clothes we wear or who we talk to.

Faced with his death (termed ‘death salience’ in the theory), Erwin is forced to wrestle with his worldviews and reflects on his life choices. In these moments where death is so real, we see Erwin’s anxiety spike as he realizes his ego drove much of his life choices. (Mind you, I mean this not as an insult but in the technical sense of the term.)

Erwin’s backstory is set it’s own tragedy: His father, a school teacher, made mention to Erwin one day that the government may not be sharing all that they know regarding their history within the walls. When young Erwin blabbed this to a classmate, his father turned up inexplicably dead. Thus, Erwin made it his life mission to find out the secrets of the Walls.

In pursuing his goal, he climbed up the ranks of the Survey Corps whilst sacrificing many opportunities, including the chance of love with who is now Niles’ wife. Under his command, the Survey Corps made great strides in learning more about the Titans; increasing survival rates, inching closer towards the secrets of their history, and mayhaps freedom for humanity.

Erwin helped many find a sense of purpose. In Levi’s darkest hour Erwin illuminated a broader goal for him to shift his determination to: Freedom. For Eren, Erwin saw the determined spark within him already to free humanity. He decided to feed those flames and give Eren the opportunity he always dreamed of.

“For Humanity” was long Erwin’s motto for inspiring the masses to action. He pushed so hard to achieve his goals, of which he was incredibly proud. But that pride ultimately is what causes his death anxiety to spike and question if what he did truly was for Humanity all along.

Recent studies report a fascinating correlation between humility and death anxiety. People with higher humility personality traits experience lower death anxiety than people with higher pride. And Erwin certainly has a prideful personality. Not to say that it is a negative trait, simply that he is fully aware of his successes..

A quote from the above linked study:

“Humility, with its minimized focus on the self and its affinity for seeing the self and life within a grander context, substantially overlaps with self-transcendence…. In the case of death, this is probably especially true—not only should self-affirmation be of limited value against a threat as formidable as death, but boosting the ego would simultaneously boost life’s value, rendering mortality a more terrifying prospect (emphasis added).”

Thus, when Erwin is finally facing down a situation that he knows he has no chance of escaping from, he is forced to realize how valuable he has found his own life. The fear of death and associated anxiety makes him hyper aware of his life choices. It is therefore natural for him, due to his inherent personality traits, to wonder if he erroneously placed his own life value above those around him this entire time.

Fear of death is natural. Acceptance of death is natural as well. We all handle these somber topics in different ways. Erwin’s fear and self questioning absolutely does not invalidate his successes in life.

Erwin: Everything I’ve done until now was to get to that basement. That someday I could check if I was right. So many times I thought death would be much easier. But always the dream I shared with my father would flash through my mind. And now, I’m close enough to the answers to reach out and grab them. They’re right there. But Levi, can you see them? Our comrades? Our comrades looking at us. They want to know what became of the hearts they gave. Because the fighting isn’t over yet. Is it all just inside my head? No more than a childish delusion?

Levi: (Kneels) You’ve fought well. It’s all thanks to you that we’ve come this far. I’m making the choice. Give up on your dream and go die. Lead the recruits straight into hell. I will take down the Beast Titan.

Levi’s words are perfect at this moment. He confirms to Erwin how important his life has been and assures him his death will not be vein, assisting in allaying his death anxiety. It’s really a beautifully bittersweet scene.

The concept of confronting our inevitable demise is a very heavy existential topic and we all will have our own reactions to it. However, it does not negate the work that we did in life should we find fear in the topic. Erwin is an excellent example of that.

[gigili-jiggly]

can you list your favorite klance fics ://

(i’m not sure how to respond to your ‘ :// ‘ emoji, but i’ll take any excuse to gush about fics lol)

I have so many favorite fics, so I’ll just list some oneshots for now so that this list doesn’t become too long 

(I might post a list of more oneshots and ongoing fics if anyone is interested!)

SFW Oneshots: 

you’re lucky that’s what i like by @zenstrike

Lance rescues a hamster from certain doom.

or, Lance has Keith wrapped around his little finger and doesn’t even realize it.

This is literally the cutest and softest klance series I’ve read in a long time!! It gives me lots of feelings and feeds my need for lovestruck Keith ladfajdifjdsklf

hey, mom, i met a boy by @mothpoem

“Sweetheart,” says Lance, his hair longer, his shoulders broader, the slope of his nose uneven now where it didn’t used to be, “you don’t know the half of it.”

LISTEN. This fic owns my ass, it’s so good. It has all my favorite tropes (marriage proposals, visions of the future, love realizations, etc.) and every moment between Lance and Keith is so sweet and full of love hnnngh. 

i know what you did last summer by seventies

Saving angry, mysterious damsels in distress multiple times weren’t in the job description of being a lifeguard. It would have been slightly bearable if only everyone would stop asking Lance if he remembered what he did last summer. What really happened, anyway? AU

Pining Keith? Oblivious Lance? A little bit of Memory Loss? Heck yeah!!! This fic also made me laugh a lot, so I always reread this when I need a pick-me-up

this, our town of halloween by @tobiologist

“Yeah, well, it’s written all over both of your faces,” Lance hisses. “It’s not a big deal.”

Pidge taps her chin. “Oh, you mean Keith, the local introvert and your ex-rival, creeping out of his cave to go to a huge Halloween celebration with you and your little niece and nephew? Of course that’s not a big deal. Silly me!”

Or: Lance invites Keith to Disneyland on Halloween and glimpses an entirely new side of the boy he has a stupidly massive crush on.

Lately, I’ve been loving tropes where people go on a ‘date’, insist that it’s not a date and then finally realize it’s a date. Also, pining Lance is good shit. 

Smell as Sweet by ultimateparadox

Coffee and love, Lance thinks, are the only universal constants.

Established relationship!!! Marriage proposals!!! Becoming a family!!! Everything here is amazing!!!

Bastion by Foxcote

In a healing universe, Keith and Lance await the arrival of their daughter.

I am a sucker for klance as parents, and one scene in particular between Keith and Krolia really captured my heart

In every reality, I reach for you by @enlacinglineswrites

Stories inspired the Klance AU month prompts.

I love drabble series and this one right here has so many interesting and wonderful aus! I read it time and time again like a morning newspaper lol. 

Somewhere a Clock is Ticking by @emphasis-all-mine

This is a story about time travel, lost memories, growing up broken, ukulele lessons, peanut butter banana sandwiches, and a stuffed hippo named Patches.

This is also the story of how James Griffin saved the world, but couldn’t stop his parents from falling in love.

Literally the fic that made me warm up to James! I’ve always loved time travel stories and the characterizations in this fic is so fun and enjoyable, I hold it very close to my heart! Also, klance family aldjofiadjfdf

5 + 1 times: lance and the search for keith’s boyfriend by @starwar 

Who could it be?!

Lance tried to convince himself it wasn’t jealousy… it was just friendly concern. He had to ensure that whoever Keith was with treated him well, not that Keith needed Lance to look after him, but still, Keith deserved the world and Lance wanted to make sure whoever he was with gave that to him.

Just buddy-buddy concerns.

or alternatively; 5 + 1 times lance doesn’t realise he’s keith’s boyfriend

Oblivious Lance who doesn’t know he’s Keith’s boyfriend? Bet your ass I’m gonna read that!!

chaser of fate by freshia

Where Lance thinks everyone else is really frickin’ weird, the others spend copious amounts of time trying to get him to just remember, and Keith just wants to (re?)live his life.

(Modern Reincarnation AU where the biggest threat to face, is the looming deadlines for essays.)

One of the first klance fics I’ve read and one that I absolutely consider a classic. I love me some reincarnation au’s, and I love how this one is nice and not too angsty! 

Save the Date by @thathopelessromantic 

They had gotten married in the middle of a war, on an alien spaceship, both boasting major injuries. It was rushed and short and the team was thrust into battle almost immediately after “I do.” But afterwards, after some insistent questioning from Keith, Lance admitted to things he had let himself imagine for their wedding, were they to have had one on Earth.

Cute established and married klance celebrating their anniversary, what more can a girl want? 

Speak for the Stars by @speakswords 

All Lance has ever wanted is to prove his worth. So, maybe it’s fitting that the Black Lion picked him right when Lotor betrayed them and Shiro’s clone went rogue. Right when the team was at its lowest and closest to failing.

The desire for glory that Lance grew up with—that drove him to join the Garrison and pursue fighter class, that drove him into his one-sided rivalry with Keith, that drove him after Keith in the Sonoran Desert and into Blue’s cockpit and into space and into the war in the first place—it’s a relic of the past for him now. All he wants these days is to keep his friends alive and the Coalition afloat, and he tries his best, despite the pervasive fear that he isn’t the right person for this monumental task. Despite the growing certainty that Black picked the wrong guy.

This fear will be put to the ultimate test when the mess that ensnares the team after the clone disaster turns out to be a labyrinth more winding than any of them were prepared for. Because Lance might just be the only person equipped to lead them through this maze and into the light.

I love those tropes where peeps get stuck in their own dreams and someone has to help them snap out of it. This fic does this wonderfully with Lance and I loved Keith’s dream in here, it was so sweet

in every reality, we meet by ULTIOcean

Small one-shots about our favorite team, taken from a prompt list on tumblr for the October Writting Challenge, in which i’ll write 31 short stories, unrelated to each other, each insipred by the prompt of the day.

i adore this drabble series, each chapter is such a unique take on the prompt! 

you’ve got a hand for the taking (i’m about to take it to the moon) by seabear

“I think,” Lance says, squinting, “he’s a vampire.”

one of my comfort fics to be honest. i really really like their interactions here and the confession scene makes me very happy

where & how we’ll land by @ephemelody 

The first time Keith meets Lance is also the first time they kiss. It all goes downhill for him from there.

looking for a childhood klance fic that is so so good? this one is a classic!!!

Complete Mature/Explicit Oneshots: 

assemble by groovystars

‘there was an idea- katie and hunk know about it- called the voltron initiative. the plan was-is, god, it is- to bring together a group of remarkable people, and see if together they could become something more. to fight the battles we never could. i wasn’t sure though. just knew that katie and hunk could do it, maybe lance if he wasn’t knee-deep in cover work. but now that cap’s used to the century and keith kogane turned up from the dead, and we have a literal god on our hands… now- now i think we can do that. i think we can believe in heroes.’

aka the marvel au that’s probably already been done

As a huge Marvel fan, this is an amazing superhero au!! It has klance and shatt, as well as lotor and allura in a thor and loki dynamic! 

i like me better when i’m with you by @reader115 

His mother’s advice when the war is over? That he should ask for what he wants.

Keith joins Lance and his family on their farm, and Lance wishes for a never ending visit.

i’ve read so many post-canon fics when vld ended and this one is one of my absolute favorites. It’s because of this fic that i started associating the song with klance, haha! I love the characterizations and the overall sweetness/lovey dovey feeling the fic has and aldoifjaidfd I just love reading this over and over again

there are worse things i could do by @peachgrdn 

His chest went tight when he recalled Keith’s face. What did it have to mean? They’d never been lovers; that much was clear.

When Lance goes out to buy himself a gift for his own pleasure, it comes with a little emotional baggage. Only just as he thinks he can manage it, Keith throws himself into the mix, and Lance realizes he must come to terms with buried feelings.

honestly, i consider lyssy the queen for fluffy and feely smut lol. I love her humor in this one as well as the many feels it gives me…just aldkjodfa i love this fic a lot okay?

kiss me (like it hurts) by mottainai

Purple light streamed through his kitchen window from the neon sign across the street, getting tangled in Keith’s hair and painted on the planes of his shoulders. He held his breath, afraid to disturb the moment. Keith’s eyes were on his, too soft to be coming from a dangerous man. Lance could see himself becoming caught in the gap in his teeth, pressed into the groves of his calloused hands, inked across his ribs. It should terrify him, the kind of terror of one looking into the belly of the beast.

But it didn’t.

Or: Keith and Lance, told through arguments and resolutions

i’m such a sucker for gangster keith stuff and this fic here has one of my favorite takes on it. perfect for rereading again and again! 

lure by chaeriee 

Becoming indebted to Keith Kogane was not a part of Lance’s future plans. Falling for him, even less so.

another gangster keith fic and it has almost all of my guilty pleasures in it uwu. i love those /person A needs to pay off a debt and works for person B while unknowingly becoming the most important one to them’ storylines haha! 

 Alpha Affairs by marizousbooty

Keith and Lance take a romantic vacation to the mountains for a snowy weekend getaway.

vampire lance and werewolf keith….doing it….good stuff

Heaven in hiding by i_write_shakespeare_not_disney

Keith finds something interesting in Lance’s drawer and it leads to one of the most amazing nights of his life.

insecure lance in lingerie and keith helping him become comfortable with it? sexy. 

Beast of Burden by melancholymango

“Keith, no, we can’t go again.” Lance pleads fall on deaf ears. Keith is honed in on him now like predator to prey. He’s fighting a losing battle and they both know it. He sees it in the way Keith is raking his eyes over him, sizing him up. “We’ll be so late getting to the bar.”

“Just one more.” Keith insists, herding Lance toward the counter with a stubbornness that is innately wolf. Lance pouts, but he doesn’t have anywhere else to go but backward.

“That’s what you said last time! And the time before that!”

–

The week leading up to a supermoon, as told by the world’s best werewolf boyfriend, Lance McClain. The good, the bad, and the horny.

I read this on Halloween and I’m not even ashamed of how much I enjoyed this. This fic made me very very biased towards werewolf keith lol. 

[let-me-love-you-loki]

Summer in New York--Ch. 4

Chapter 4

           “Are you sure you’re up for this?” Chris asked, a faint smile on his bearded face. His hair was a little longer than I’d ever seen it. He’d spent the last month in South Africa filming a new movie, and he’d come back tanned and scruffy-haired. In a way, I would hate to see it all disappear.

           “Of course,” I said, settling one hand on the wide curve of my belly. The spring had quickly bled into summer, the days lengthening even as my belly began expanding. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

           He leaned against the counter, drying his hands with a bright blue towel. His blue eyes went slightly sad. “Last time, it didn’t go so well.”

           My heart lurched even as I moved to put my arms around his waist. “I know. I’ll do whatever I have to do to make it right, Chris. They’re your family, and I want to be part of that.”

           Chris sighed, taking me gently by the shoulders and pushing me back so that he could look me in the eyes. “You are part of my family now, Tati. And I think they understand things better now.”

           “Even if they don’t like me… they’ll love her, right?” There was no hiding the nervousness that turned my voice small.

           “They do like you, Tati. And they are going to love you, just like they did before. And when this one shows up,” he said, pressing his palm on the side of my belly, “they’re going to be the most loved baby in the world. I promise.”

           Smiling, I leaned my forehead against his. For a brief, perfect moment, time stood still.

---

           I stared at myself in the mirror, surprised to find that I looked almost normal again. True, my face was a little puffy and I could tell I’d gained weight, but my eyes weren’t as sad as they’d been during those long weeks without Chris. The smile on my face wasn’t a fake. For the first time in a very long time, I felt happy again.

           After wriggling into some leggings and pulling one of Chris’ Henley shirts over my head, I took the time to braid my hair and wrap it up around the top of my head. My face showed pink and clean after a quick scrub. I looked ready to face the Evans family once again.

           I heard them coming in downstairs—first Lisa and Scott, their voices muffled as they spoke quietly with Chris. There was a faint huffing followed by Chris’ excited voice. I assumed it was Dodger.

           When there wasn’t much else I could do to calm my nerves, I took a deep breath and headed down the hall to the stairs that emptied out in the living room. Chris sat next to his mom, Dodger’s head resting on his knee while his ears got scratched. Scott wasn’t far away, sitting on the arm of one of the battered sofas we’d brought from the “bro-pad.” It took a moment for them to notice me, even if I did come waddling down the stairs with a good bit of groaning.

           Scott was the first to see me. His easy smile momentarily slipped away, hidden behind a furrowed brow and worried eyes. It was gone and back again in the blink of an eye. In its place was a faint, polite smile—as if we’d never met before.

           “Good to see you again, Tatiana,” he said coolly.

           I forced myself to smile, to make it as genuine as possible. “You too,” I replied. “Would you like something to drink? I think there’s some leftovers from the spaghetti we made last night for dinner if you’re hungry.”

           “No, thanks. I ate before I got here.”

           I bit the inside of my lip, trying hard not to cry. Where once Chris’ family had welcomed me as one of their own, suddenly there was this feeling of being entirely on the outside. It was as if they were happy with me when I was just Sebastian’s cousin, visiting from overseas. A winter-time fling. Perhaps what happened when spring came around had soured them on me, but it seemed that the moment they heard the words baby and marriage they began to suspect the absolute worst of me.

           Did they honestly think that I had done all of this just to move to America? I had a life I was proud of back in Constanta. Yes, it had been quiet and small, but it had been mine and it meant something to me. The only reason I would ever have given that up was because of Chris and how I felt about him.

           Chris glanced up just as Dodger wriggled out of his grasp. The dog bounded over to me, his tail wagging and his jaws agape in a canine smile. He bumped his nose against my shin, then looked up for confirmation that he was, in fact, a very good boy.

           I reached down to pat him on the head, unable to do anything more while I was still on my feet. Satisfied that he’d gotten approval, Dodger began to sniff at my belly, leaving dark spots of drool wherever he went. I giggled. It tickled.

           “Hey, Dodger,” I said, a truly happy smile on my face for the first time that night. I flopped into a wide chair and leaned as far forward as I could, cradling his face in my palms as my fingers scratched just under the bottom of his ears. His tongue lolled, big doe eyes closing in contentment. “I’ve missed you, buddy.”

           “He’s missed you, too, momma,” Chris said from a few feet away. His blue eyes danced, even as his brow furrowed in a silent question of concern. I wondered if he could see how my fingers trembled, how it was only Dodger’s warm presence that kept me from going to pieces just then. “It’ll be good to have him here with us.”

           I glanced up, trying to even out some of my joy. “Oh, but won’t Stella and Miles miss him?”

           “They can come visit. And we’ll bring him when we head to Sudbury,” he replied, his steady voice a balm to my frayed nerves. It was a wonder the baby didn’t sense my terror. Perhaps he did, but he was just as strong as his dad.

           “Tatiana,” Lisa said at last. She turned away from her son, facing me with her hands splayed out on her knees. She looked so perfectly motherly, just as she had the first time we’d met when Chris had brought me up for a visit that first time. “I’m very sorry about how things happened the last time you visited. It wasn’t fair of us to have any conversation like that without you and it’s embarrassing that we let ourselves think that way. You make Chris happy, and that’s all that matters.”

           The words were kind, and I was relatively sure that she meant them. But I couldn’t help how hurt I’d been that night. How hurt I still felt.

           “Go ahead, Tati,” Chris coaxed softly. “You can say whatever you need to say. We’re going to figure this out.”

           I sighed, drew a deep breath, burrowed my fingers into Dodger’s warm fur. “What did I do to make you think that I… that I didn’t love Chris?”

           Lisa looked away, clasped her hands together in her lap. “Oh honey, we never thought that. You were never anything but good to him, even when you two had your little… misunderstanding. It all happened so fast, to be honest. Chris, well, when he loves, he goes all in. Quickly. And after everything that’s happened to him… none of us want to see him hurt like that again. So I think we just assumed the worst and tried to talk him out of it so he wouldn’t get the raw end of it, you know? But we didn’t do a very good job. Instead, he ended up going weeks without speaking to any of us. As a family, we messed up, Tatiana. And we’re sorry.”

           Bile rose against the back of my throat. I didn’t know whether I wanted to vomit or scream. Instead, I looked directly at Scott, who had been so very quiet. “You feel the same way?”

           Chris sat up a little straighter, puffing out his chest. Dodger growled low in his chest, the rumbling sending soothing vibrations through my fingers.

           “I overreacted,” Scott replied, deadpan.

           I glanced at Chris. It seemed as if his shoulders had gotten even broader as he straightened. Something heavy sank into my stomach—the realization that I’d never be completely accepted by the Evans family now. Not with Scott as such a staunch holdout, regardless of how Shannon and Carly felt.

           “You acted like an idiot is what you did,” Lisa said firmly. She looked back at me. “Honey, I completely understand if you think we’re the worst sort of people. This has made me think that perhaps we’ve got a bit of soul searching to do as a family. But I want you to know—and I mean every bit of it—that I am so happy to have you here with us. And if you and Chris want us to be, we’ll be part of your lives as much as you’ll let us. I promise you both that we will be better.”

           Chris rested a gentle hand on his mom’s shoulder. I blinked back tears, trying to find the right words to say. I didn’t want Scott to think that his behavior was forgiven, but I didn’t want to be one of those people who holds a grudge. If Scott continued to have a problem, then it would be his problem and not mine.

           “I think that’s wonderful,” I said at last. Dodger harrumphed before plopping down onto the floor, his warm body settled over my feet.

           Lisa started to cry, just a little, and I couldn’t help but get misty eyed myself. Chris gave me a faint smile and a whispered thank you before getting up to bring the two of us something to drink. Scott sat on the arm of the chair looking less than happy, but it didn’t matter. As long as Chris and his mom were good, I could deal with just about anything.

________________________________________________________________

Tag List

@hallotom @habeshawit-konjo @mizzzpink @cosmic-impala @aletheladyinred @kategorically-challenged @triski73 @tacohead13 @firedolphin04 @whimsicalscientist @xceafh

[thetygre]

30 Day Monster Challenge 2 - Day #1: Favorite Dracula

1.) Castlevania’s Dracula

Iconic lines and wine tossing aside, Castlevania’s Dracula stands out in just how utterly villainous he is, while still blending class and a hint of tragedy into his character. He is bigger and grander than Stoker’s original vampire, and that is slowly leveraged into a broader cosmic role. Dracula in Castlevania is more than just a bad guy; he is the manifestation of evil on Earth. He’s comparable to the Antichrist, but even that kind of falls flat. An Antichrist is supposed to bring about an apocalypse or change; Dracula in Castlevania is presented as a moral necessity, a rebuttal to the post-modern death of a moral center. His presence is necessary for there to be good in the world. In the process, Castlevania’s Dracula has become the patron saint of the world’s monsters. Every kind of demon, fiend, boogeyman, freak, and specter are gathered into his lair and given a home and purpose.

And every now and then, not for too long, depending on the game, a bit of pathos peeks through and you’re reminded that there’s a man behind it all. It’s never enough to make you stop enjoying Castlevania’s Drac as a villain, but it makes you wonder if he could have been different. Is he bound to his role as the Prince of Darkness? Is it his curse, or does it give him power? To me, Castlevania Dracula is the summation of the character in media as he is now; as a man, as a monster, a villain, a tragic figure, and everything else.

2.) Dracula Classic

Over a century later, Bram Stoker’s original Dracula still confounds us and fascinates us. Every generation brings a new lense, a new reading to one of literature’s greatest monsters. He is an idea about superstition, about xenophobia, about masculinity, sexual deviancy, disease, poverty, degradation, and so on and so on for as long as there are people who can read. For all the grandiosity of the other Draculas on this list, Stoker’s still has an air of realism to him, a banality that makes his horror human. Maybe Dracula classic can’t shapeshift into a dragon or summon an army of spears, but his power is more than enough to eclipse the Victorian Enlightenment. Stoker’s characters are human; doctors, lawyers, teachers, a... cowboy, so it only takes a little bit of inhuman evil to remind the reader of how fragile we and our society really are in the face of the unknown.

3.) Christopher Lee

Moving on into the live actors portion, you gotta’ give it up for THE KING. Lee’s Dracula was the first to go beyond horror into terror; that quickened, gut-wrenching primal scare. He was fast, he was bloody, he was dangerous, and still classy as all hell. The Emperor of Metal planted his roots by starting out as The Prince of Darkness. If I had one complaint, it’s that Lee doesn’t really come off as convincingly Transylvanian; Lee’s pretty clearly British, and the closest he’s ever been to being Slavic was that time he played Rasputin. Christopher Lee didn’t die in 2015; he’s just practicing for when the world needs Dracula again.

4.) Bela Lugosi

But you have to give props to the original. It’s hard to believe now that anyone ever found Lugosi’s Dracula scary, but I still remember my dad and older horror buffs talking about how they had nightmares after seeing Lugosi’s Dracula, or were afraid that he was lurking in the dark when the lights went out. What gets me is just how enmeshed with the role Lugosi was. Bela Lugosi was Dracula, no doubt about it. Other men can fill the role, but Lugosi embodied the character. Most actors don’t star in as many movies as Bela Lugosi starred as Dracula. When he died at a ripe old age, he was laid to rest in his cape and amulet.

5.) Duncan Regher

Every actor brings something to Dracula. Lee brought terror and nobility, Lugosi brought charisma and otherworldliness. Regher? Regher brought pure villainy. The Monster Squad is a gem of 80s monster nostalgia. Regher’s Dracula is a hybrid of Lee and Lugosi, blending sheer evil with overwhelming presence. Regher’s performance is a treat, drawing from that same well of post-Darth Vader villainy that brought us Frank Langella’s Skeletor and James Earl Jones as Thulsa Doom; the kind of guys that could convince you to carry them to the moon and be happy about doing it. Also, and I feel this detail to the lore cannot be overstated enough; Dracula-mobile.

6.) Richard Roxburgh

No, this is just a guilty pleasure. Van Helsing is a guilty pleasure. Get used to this, because I love this dumb movie. Roxburgh doesn’t bring anything to Dracula as a character except camp. Cheesy, cheesy camp. Roxburgh’s Dracula is like some unholy hybrid of Bela Lugosi and Tommy Wisseau. He has two emotional ranges, and they are both over-acting. But I can’t not love this Dracula; he takes a lower place because... come on, but he still makes my list.

7.) Fate/Apocrypha

The brief anime portion of this list starts off with Fate/Apocrypha. It’s actually a little disingenuous to call Fate’s Dracula by that name since he insists on being called Vlad Tepes III. I mean one look at his character design next to Castlevania’s Dracula tells you everything you need to know, but it’s still an important distinction. In Fate, Vlad recalls how he is a hero in Romania, a champion of his church and land, noble scion of the house of the dragon. While actually in Romania, Vlad’s power becomes near god-like. It offers an interesting reminder that Vlad Tepes was a real man, and is still viewed as a Romanian folk hero, even after he has become intertwined with Dracula. But because characters in Fate are composed of how they are perceived through time, Vlad can still become a vampire. And, frankly, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t worth it when he finally does turn.

8.) Alucard

The quintessential anime Dracula. I’m putting him beneath Fate’s though because, well... Hot take, but Alucard isn’t much of a Dracula. He’s a vampire monster, but he’s mostly just a kind of edgy antihero with a Dracula underlay. Every now and then something resembling Gary Oldman’s Dracula pops its head up and offers a bit of pathos, especially towards the end of the series. But what Alucard lacks in substance, he makes up for in style; it’s not every Dracula that kills Nazis by bombing themselves from an airplane only to sail back to London to a fairly effective quotation of the original novel.

9.) The Sacred Ancestor

We’re now in legendary Dracula territory; Draculas who lose some points because they don’t make an actual appearance in their series, but still have an impressive presence. It’s never overtly stated that the Sacred Ancestor in Vampire Hunter D is Dracula, but the reader can put two and two together. D’s dad might just be the most powerful Dracula on this list; his powers are nothing short of god-like, and he single-handedly led the Nobility in conquering the world. And yet, from the first novel, there’s an arc present; a Dracula who achieves vampire supremacy, then gains a conscience. What’s left is a mystery that strings the reader and D along through all the novel, presenting a Dracula simultaneously ruthless, brilliant, nurturing, and regretful.

10.) “Someone worse than me.”

You never meet Dracula in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The closest you ever get is a hallucination Mina has in 1969. It’s presumed he’s dead since League is following the novels. But every now and then you’re reminded of his presence through Mina, and the picture she paints is a being of absolute and horrible evil. You already know Mina’s story, but she’s such a strong character in League that you can only begin to imagine what Dracula must have been like. Dracula in League is a trauma, a scar, and like Mina you both dread and hope that you never meet that horrible and beautiful man ever again.

[theculturedmarxist]

Directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck; written by Boden, Fleck and Geneva Robertson-Dworet

The production and release of Captain Marvel, the new science fiction superhero adventure from Marvel and Disney, has a number of remarkable features, but none of them involve the film’s drama, action or characters.

Briefly, Captain Marvel, in convoluted fashion, follows US Air Force pilot Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) who absorbs an awesome energy source, making her potentially “one of the universe’s most powerful heroes ever known,” according to the film’s publicity.

However, six years later, she is suffering from amnesia, doesn’t know who or what she is and has become a member of the repressive Starforce Military under her mentor Yon-Rogg (Jude Law). The shapeshifting Skrulls, the apparent enemy, force Danvers to crash-land in the US in the mid-1990s. But all is not what it appears. Danvers discovers secrets about herself and about a “galactic war” between two alien races.

Not much of this is interesting, although it is noisy and “action-packed.” Captain Marvel, as a film, is predictable, empty and tedious. The more “sensitive” scenes on Earth, focusing on Danvers and her African American friend Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch) and daughter (Akira Akbar), are possibly the most contrived and least convincing.

The first genuinely noteworthy fact about the new film, not surprisingly, concerns money.

Disney, the film’s distributor, is the world’s largest media company, with some $100 billion in assets. With a market value of $152 billion, it ranks as the 53rd largest company of any kind in the world, just behind Total (oil and gas), Merck (pharmaceuticals), the Bank of China (one of the four leading state-owned commercial banks in China), Unilever, DowDuPont and BP.

Media reports place Captain Marvel’s combined net production and global marketing costs at $300 million. To date, the film’s global box office stands at $774 million.

Captain Marvel is truly “corporate entertainment”—i.e., the very process by which it came into being prevents it from being entertaining or enlightening in any meaningful fashion.

This type of large-scale, officially sponsored filmmaking, whose success is avidly promoted and tracked by the media and business publications in particular, inevitably intersects and overlaps with other aspects of American establishment culture. In the case of Captain Marvel, this means militarism and feminism specifically.

The US Air Force was involved in the production of Captain Marvel.

In fact, Task & Purpose reported that Marvel Studios launched the official start of production “with a photo of Larson, and Air Force Brig. Gen. Jeannie M. Leavitt, then-commander of the 57th Wing and the service’s first female fighter pilot, atop an F-15 at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.”

“To prepare for her role, Larson,” according to The Wrap, visited the Air Force base “to join simulated dogfights. The film’s red-carpet premiere included testimonials from Air Force men and women and a flyover by the Air Force’s Nellis-based Thunderbirds.”

Task & Purpose, a website that follows the American military, also cited the emailed comments of Todd Fleming, chief of the Community and Public Outreach Division at Secretary of the Air Force Public Affairs: “The Air Force partners on any number of entertainment projects to ensure the depiction of Airmen and the Air Force mission is accurate and authentic. Our partnership with ‘Capt Marvel’ [sic] helped ensure the character’s time in the Air Force and backstory was presented accurately. It also highlighted the importance of the Air Force to our national defense.”

“[Captain Marvel] is not part of a recruiting strategy but we would expect that audiences seeing a strong Air Force heroine, whose story is in line with the story of many of our Airmen, would be positively received,” Fleming said.

The issue of female recruitment is no small matter. American imperialism, recklessly gearing up for war against Russia, China and other rivals, needs vast new supplies of human fodder. Task & Purpose explains, “The spotlight on airmen [in Captain Marvel] comes at a time when the Air Force, like the other services, is hunting for the next generation of pilots. The Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps are all short 25 percent of their pilot billets, according to a GAO [Government Accountability Office] report published this summer; the Air Force in particular has doled out cash incentives like candy in a vain effort to prevent pilots from defecting to the private sector. Indeed, the branch’s plan to increase its number of squadrons by 76 to Cold War levels will require an additional 40,000 personnel, further straining the service’s recruitment capabilities. At the Air Force Academy, female cadets are increasingly encouraged to vie for pilot spots to help bridge that gap.”

Larson, who has made all sorts of useless (or worse) comments about #MeToo, alleged sexual abuse and her own “social activism,” like most of affluent Hollywood, is entirely oblivious to the criminal role of the US military, the greatest source of terror and “abuse” on the planet by an order of magnitude of 100 times or more.

The female heroism in Captain Marvel, of course, has been greeted with plaudits. Entertainment Weekly noted excitedly that the film would “mark the first time a woman will be headlining her own solo superhero movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It also marks the first time a woman will direct a superhero film for Marvel Studios: Anna Boden will co-direct with her Mississippi Grind partner Ryan Fleck.”

The hope is that Captain Marvel will do “for women” what Black Panther did “for African Americans”—which is, of course, nothing whatsoever, except for a small layer of prominent studio executives, writers, performers, etc.

This comment from Deadline is typical: “One film finance source believes that it’s pretty much certain that Captain Marvel will see $1 billion around the world and break the glass ceiling for female-led pics at the global B.O. [box office], dashing past Wonder Woman’s final global of $821.8M.”

As is this Vox headline: “Why Captain Marvel’s milestone status creates so much pressure for it to succeed—Why Captain Marvel represents more than just a superhero movie.” The article proposes to answer these important questions: “What does a woman superhero mean for Marvel Studios and the MCU [Marvel Cinematic Universe]? What are the takeaways from Captain Marvel’s already overwhelming box office success? What does the film have to say about feminism? What might have happened if it had flopped? And who gets to shape the conversation and narrative surrounding it?”

The final and perhaps most remarkable feature of Captain Marvel involves its writer-directors. (And, secondarily, its performers. What are Larson, Jude Law and the talented Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn, whose acting in The Land of Steady Habits we recently praised, doing in this rubbish?)

We have made the point previously on more than one occasion about the objective significance of the “long march” of numerous so-called independent or art filmmakers toward empty-headed, “blockbuster” movie-making. We noted the examples of Steven Soderbergh (Ocean’s Eleven, etc.), Alan Taylor (Terminator Genisys), the Russo brothers (the Captain America and Avengers franchises), Kenneth Branagh (Thor), Christopher Nolan (Batman Begins, etc.), John Singleton (a Fast and Furious installment), Lee Tamahori (Die Another Day, one of the James Bond fantasies), Marc Forster (another of the Bond films, Quantum of Solace), Sam Mendes (yet another Bond film, Skyfall) and Patty Jenkins (Wonder Woman).

To that list, one can add the more recent examples of Jon Watts (two Spider-Man films), Taika Waititi (Thor: Ragnarok), Ava DuVernay (A Wrinkle in Time) and Ryan Coogler (Black Panther).

In a number of these cases, the filmmakers had earlier indicated vaguely oppositional political views or a certain concern at least for the fate of broader layers of the population.

The lure of large amounts of money is obviously an issue. But perhaps the more pertinent question is: what are the social and ideological conditions that make writers, directors and performers susceptible to this “lure”? It is not inevitable. Artists, including in the US, have been known to repudiate such offers with contempt. Almost inevitably, however, such resistance has been rooted in political and social conceptions and opposition of a left-wing character, sustained by a confidence in the better instincts of the population and its willingness to struggle. Those conceptions and that confidence are sorely lacking today.

The directors of the dreadful Captain Marvel, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, should not be entirely unfamiliar to readers of the WSWS, although the context—big-budget Hollywood—may be unexpected. We have reviewed two of their films in the past, Half Nelson (2006) and Sugar (2008).

The Atlantic notes with surprise that Fleck and Boden “until now have worked in the realm of quiet, sensitive indie films.” More than simply “quiet” and “sensitive,” Half Nelson centers on an obviously left-wing high school teacher working at an inner-city school in Brooklyn.

A 2006 New York Times article about the making of Half Nelson is worth citing. The Fleck-Boden film, wrote Dennis Lim, “is a political allegory, a film about a would-be visionary who wants to change the world but can’t get his act together and is often his own worst enemy. It’s not a stretch to read it as a comment on the sorry state of the American left.”

“‘That was more or less conscious,’ the film’s director, Ryan Fleck, said of the political subtext.” Fleck and Boden “started writing Half Nelson … four years ago, as the Bush administration was preparing to invade Iraq and the antiwar movement was gaining momentum. ‘It felt like we were going to protests every other week,’ Mr. Fleck said recently. ‘But ultimately you don’t have the energy to do it all, and you feel like you’re doing very little. A big part of the frustration was the inability to make meaningful change.’

“The activist spirit comes naturally to Mr. Fleck, who was born to socialist parents on a commune in Berkeley, Calif. As a child he was taken to rallies and protests. As a teenager he read Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn.”

In an interview with Slant magazine, Fleck, asked about religion, replied jokingly “I was raised communist.”

Fleck and Boden’s Sugar, about a Dominican baseball player playing in the minor leagues in the US, the WSWS commented, was “about immigration and acculturation, capitalism and exploitation, hospitality and loneliness.”

Now, a decade later, Captain Marvel.

The same 2006 Times article referred to above contained this passage:

“Mr. Fleck said he hoped that their future projects would remain, however obliquely, rooted in a sense of social justice. ‘Filmmaking is kind of a vain hobby when maybe we should all be taking to the streets,’ he said. ‘But it seems irresponsible not to be informed by politics in some way.’

“Ms. Boden’s idealism is more tempered. ‘I don’t have an inflated sense of what a movie can do,’ she said. ‘But you can at least try not to put something out there that you don’t believe in.’

“Mr. Fleck added: ‘That’s a rule we try to follow, to not put garbage in the world.’”

Unfortunately, they have now.

[redcurrents]

Social Anarchism, Individualism and Lifestyle Politics

This is a talk I gave around 2016. As such the writing style is the same as speaking rather than aiming to sound academic. Since this talk was given if I have any reflection I think I was far too fair on individualist and lifestyle politics. But that reflected my attempts to engage the broader ‘anarchist movement’ in Australia at the time, which I now think was basically a waste of time. I should have argued more directly for a platformist/especifist & syndicalist forms of organisation.

Lets start here;

It’s the symbol associated with anarchism... We see it everywhere from actual anarchist propaganda, to graffiti, to printed on t-shirts at kmart. Most here probably know this, but it’s not an A in a circle, it’s actually an A in an O. It means, 'Anarchy is Order', which is one of those wonderful juxtaposing quotes Proudhon used. What he meant is that anarchism will be a highly sophisticated, highly organised and well developed social order. A social order based on the maximum of human freedom, federalism, socialism, equality and development.

Proudhon was the first person to ever use the label anarchist, back in the 1800's France. It’s with him that the confusion between social and individualist anarchism immediately starts. See, he was certainly a type of socialist, he was totally against the exploitation of labour, and he developed an economic system called mutualism based on free contracts between producers, meaning both collectives of workers and small craftsmen would have equal freedom in the economy. This is a bit divorced from the anarchist communism that has become the main tendency since then, but it certainly laid many of foundations. He was anti-state and anti-authority, though sadly he never extended this to women. His ideas on economics and social reconstruction were so popular its said some people in the Paris Commune had little copies of 'What is Property' they used to carry around in their pocket (don’t quote me on this actually happening!), and his economic theories some influence on even Marx. Some people like to argue that he was more of a precursor to anarchism, theres some truth in this – in that his politics where not totally coherent or developed to what is specifically anarchism today. But he did, and was the first, to use the label.

Before him we had William Godwin and Max Stirner, both libertarians certainly, both anti-state, but neither used the term anarchist, and this is important, because alot of individualists certainly like to base their ideas on Stirner. I'm not going to talk about Godwin, but i'd like to point out that Stirner really was more like an early existentialist, his radical 'freedom' was entirely about the ego and the mind, and was anti-everything. There wasn't a trace of positive content in his ideas (besides affirmation of the ego, and this extremely undeveloped ‘Union of Egoists’), which were also pretty racist if you take the time to read The Ego and His Own. About the best thing he had to offer was a critique of state-socialism, and that’s not saying alot.

Anyway after these three “Anarchism” definitely had a name and existed in the world as a political ideology.

Since the birth of Anarchism people have often found it quite hard to define a coherent theory of anarchism; Chomsky always uses that quote 'Anarchism has a broad back, like paper is can endure anything.' And Rudolph Rocker believed that anarchism was something of a tendency in human nature towards egalitarian non-hierachical forms of social organisation. He also believed it was the inheritor of the best parts of both Liberalism and Socialism, the ‘descendants’ of the Enlightenment. Emile Armands Individualist manifesto entirely bases its definition of anarchism around freedom from any social constraint. While from people like Bakunin and Malatesta we see that anarchism is a very specific political philosophy based around class struggle, with the realisation of libertarian socialism as the goal. They use examples like the Paris Commune to point to future potentials, but recognise that anarchism is a modern political philosophy that started with Proudhon and the French workers movement. In modern attempts to look back at anarchism we see both these kinds of definitions in action. Authors like Peter Marshall in his 'Demanding the Impossible' takes the opposition to state as the only requirement to anarchism - and often Marxists who like to have a crack at anarchism use this weak definition too. Modern authors like Van Der Walt and Wayne Price will however often present more coherent and consistent understandings of anarchism.

So basically we kind of have two fields; Social anarchism and Individualist anarchism. Social anarchism sometimes gets referred to as organisational anarchism, and individualist anarchism kind of leads on to what often gets called lifestyle anarchism today. Within both fields we can find a whole range of ideas on both strategy and economics. Still we can somewhat represent where the ideas and who represents them sit.

Obviously we could add hundreds more authors into these fields, but it’s a basic illustration.

So, lets kind of compare the two and I think it will lead us to a better understanding of how anarchism manifests in the world today.

I realise here I am presenting these fields as something of strawmen. But this is not an academic essay and there is only so much time.

As you can well imagine by its name, individualist anarchism starts, and ends, with the demand of maximum liberty for the individual. There are to be no fetters on the development of the so called natural qualities of the individual, and while they think everyone should be free, it really begins with personal struggle and ends with the individual. The only freedom you have is what you can take. Society is also as much a crushing source of authority as the state. There are to be no programmes set for what anarchism might look like, because everyone has different wants and needs. Rebellion is emphasised over revolution – revolution will either lead to a new state or to a new social tyranny. Despite rhetoric against capitalism, market economics are permissible provided there is no boss-worker relationship (although sometimes that’s ok too!.) It is this retreat into the self that actually shares a lot of parallels with new age spirituality, with existentialism and most importantly with neo-liberal capitalism. It’s this abstract opposition to 'the state' and 'society' that allows authors like Peter Marshall to give the nod towards people like Thatcher and Friedman as being somehow libertarian.

Individualism did not have much influence during the emerging the working class, nor did it do much to shape collective politics of rebellion. Individualists often expressed their 'anarchism' and 'freedom' through forms of dress, individual acts of insurrection, and living in small communities of other radicals only. While today we use the word ‘insurrection’ to mean something like when a community/class violently attacks a regime/authority, the connection between the term insurrection and anarchism actually comes from Stirner, who believed revolution was impossible, and that individual 'insurrection' was the only tactic that would keep authority at bay, however temporarily. It was during times of severe social repression, when little other avenue for struggle existed, that individualist anarchism did come to attention - usually with assassinations and bombings - this image of the anarchist bomb thrower still exists. Terrorism became, and to a large degree remains, the peak form of struggle for this tendency. I don't want to say much on it, but I believe that the terrorist and guerilla war is a Leninist strategy, not an anarchist one, despite the flowery rhetoric.

This still happens today. Not long ago some group let off a bomb in Chile at a church, and a year or two ago some insurrectionists kneecapped the CEO of a Nuclear Power company. The targeting of the Nuclear CEO has obvious reasons - the church not so. They issued a massively irrelevant manifestos crapping on about religious feeding the people bullshit. Not exactly a material analysis of religion. The most famous example of this strategy today would be Conspiracy of Fire Cells in Greece. They’re a group known for robbing banks, having shoot outs with police, and bringing ‘left wing terrorism’ back to Europe. They’re all arrested now, and have been involved in struggles for prisoners’ rights and hunger strikes over the last few years.

If you're interested in the terror question, and the rather bold statement that terrorism is a Leninist strategy, i'd highly suggest grabbing a copy of "You Can't Blow Up A Social Relationship," quite a famous essay written by an Australian libertarian socialist group.

So then, what’s social anarchism?

Taking the concept of freedom as the basis of anarchism, I want to start with a quote from Bakunin, he says;

"The individual, their freedom and reason, are the products of society, and not vice versa; society is not the product of individuals comprising it; and the greater their freedom - and the more they are the product of society, the more do they receive from society, and the greater their debt to it.

Here we find a definition of freedom based entirely on social bonds - what Bakunin is saying is that we are all products of social development – it is through relationships and education we find the ideas, motivations and influences that will make us free. Without the development of all, without equality, we will never know real freedom. The more free the person beside you is, the more free you are. Social anarchism is therefore inherently committed to collective methods of organisation - be it through things as various as unions, affinity groups, syndicates, communes, or whatever. Social anarchism also collectivist in economics. We have had Proudhon, and the Spanish economist De Santillian. But ultimately social anarchists owe a great debt to Marx for their understanding of economics - it's over questions of political organisation that we divide.

It’s this freedom through solidarity that found such fertile ground in the workers movement. The ideas of social anarchists, particularly Bakunin, Kropotkin and Malatesta flourished in many parts of the world, namely Spain, Italy, Argentina and China, and had profound influence on the mass anarchist organisations that were to develop. We often sell ourselves short as anarchists today, because much of our history is lost, and because our movement is so small and insular we often feel like a subculture. But when it comes to history, remember we are talking about a movement that affected the lives of millions of people. These were no small propaganda groups or insurrectional cells. These were mass organisations that had obvious anarchist politics. Maybe not all 2 million members of the CNT or the FORA were anarchist – but anarchism had an influence on their lives.

So in comparison, while social anarchism first found its roots in the federalist sections of the international, in the Paris commune, and in the emerging union movements, it is fair to say that Individualism came to prominence when anarchism lost its connection with the working class, and interestingly has largely been a phenomenon tied to the USA and Europe, and Russia. While also in places like Korea, South America, and parts of Africa where anarchism has had periods of significance, individualism has been for the most part irrelevant (feel free to correct me if you’ve come across individualist literature from these parts of the world!) Perhaps the tactic of insurrection by small groups and individuals had some grounding, but its irrelevance seems to be the broader rule. This loss of social influence for anarchism in most countries has never been recovered. The withdrawl of self-styled anarchists from social movements for activities that don't require long-term commitment, thinking, responsibility or coherence is a serious problem if we ever want anarchism to be a philosophy that can change the world again.

Members of the Korean Peoples Assosciation in Manchuria. From 1929-31 Manchuria ‘was Anarchist’, a little remembered period of history.

It’s pretty clear that the irrelevance of a coherent and social anarchist philosophy is also tied to the reactionary and conservative societies we live in. Despite efforts to break out of the leftist ghetto, much like our socialist mates, today we remain largely irrelevant. The anarchist principles of federalism, direct action, anti-parliament politics, and mutual aid are barely connected to a class struggle that is largely institutionalised. With no solid, commited organisations to use our tactics, we don’t feed back into the movements, we don’t test our ideas and fresh activists are few and far between. It’s a two way street. The end result of this isolation can often be liberalism dressed in radical clothing, and the dominance of ‘lifestyle anarchism’ is basically the black flag version of the socialist politics that believes in the revolutionary potential of Bernie Sanders, SYRIZA and Jeremy Corbyn.

Anarchists today are finding our way back to relevance in struggle; in a number of places around the world anarchist organisations and movements are beginning to flourish again. Greece, Ireland, Brazil are a few examples.

I found it illuminating that in this Workers Solidarity Movement talk about the growth of anarchism in Ireland, Andrew Flood says that as anarchists have regained their social relevance over the last two decades, they went from the stereotype of 'punks and people dressed in black' to 'looking like your everyday person', and that about that time the media began to have to acknowledge that anarchism was actually a factor in Irish political life. The Black Rose/Rosa Negra Anarchist Federation in the USA is another wonderful example.

I want to give a historical example of anarchism finding its feet in a concrete situation. It is an example of anarchism feeding into a movement, and developing as a result. Actually, it’s the worlds first example of specifically anarchist organisations doing just such – for all its many limits, there are many lessons to be learnt; I just finished reading Makhno’s account of the revolution in the Ukraine, and during some of the most intense periods of social upheaval he expresses extreme frustration with the revolutionaries in Russia. He points out that the combination of armchair intellectualism and obsession with aspects of theory – like the proletariat over the peasantry means that they're entirely ignorant of the revolutionary and of the practical means these anarchists can take to expand the revolution. This isn't just frustration with individualists either, this is with anarcho-syndicalists, communist and whatnot. He points out the inflexibility of anarchist theory at this time can't deal with practical situations. For example when he was elected leader of his particular battalion he had to give orders right- and he recognises that most anarchists don't believe in giving orders or leaders or whatever. And he expresses that he felt quite uncomfortable with the role he was given. But they were fighting a war. An actual revolution. Not having accountable roles or rules is crap, and I think this is a frustration because of the individualist influence. Just because anarchists didn’t believe they should ever be told what to do, doesn’t mean they can’t develop structures of collective responsibility.

Nestor Mahkno, (elected) leader of the Insurrectional Army of the Ukraine

Anarchists have leaders. This is something that modern anarchism really struggles to acknowledge. Just because we refuse to put a label on power doesn't mean that it doesn't exists. Let’s consider this quote from Bakunin;

“Nothing is more dangerous for a man’s private morality than the habit of command. Two sentiments inherent in power never fail to produce this demoralisation; they are: contempt for the masses and the overestimation of one’s own merits.”

So what makes anarchist 'leadership' special is that what we are actually wanting to achieve is to create structures that limit the concentration of power. Informality does not do this. This is a serious danger that exists in individualist and lifestyle anarchism. Rather we should look to have strict mandates given by the collective to their delegates, when assemblies are not practical. That’s why we try to rotate roles - to assure one person doesn't end up with too much power, and to assure that everyone develops skills keeping the field more even if you will. Individualism doesn’t address this. Actually egoist individualism like Stirners ends up justifying power over other people – hardly an anti-authoritarian philosophy. If you ever get a chance I recommend reading 'The Tyranny of Structurelessness'by Jo Freeman.

As I said, this delegate-mandate-rotate structure is actually infinitely more anti-authoritarian than not having any kind of accountability. Bakunin talked about this, the CNT knew this, the anarchist army in the Ukraine knew this (though it wasn’t great at it.) But it's quite lost these days. Obviously, how we structure this leadership isn't the same as socialist groups - there are practical things that differentiate us here. At any rate - that is a topic for another time.

So I want to skip back to individualism, I want to explain why I believe often the result of individualist philosophies put into practice can be damaging to social movements, how they often become anti-social rather than anti-capitalist. I think this confusion that starts from the concept of imminent rebellion against authority, meaning that things that aren't actually anti-authoritarian can end up with tacit anarchist support.

Groups like Crimethinc tend to border this line, advocating and fetishing sub-cultural practices as anti-capitalist in and of themselves with little conceptualisation of how they assist in the struggle against capital and the state, if at all. Squatting, sabotage, petty-crime, theft, arson, and assassinations all register in the arsenal of insurrectional-individualist tactics. Actually, I think this is the definitions of the vague term we throw around; ‘lifestylism.’ Precisely this fetishisation. A comrade has raised with me that it is perhaps not only that, but it’s the result of despair at the failures of long-term organising that leads to believing only immediate actions and ‘living politics’ can be revolutionary.

Crimethinc, elevating great ways to get arrested to a lifestyle.

It’s not that say social anarchists don’t use tactics like insurrection, sabotage etc too. But what is to be considered is if the action is beneficial or negative, collectively empowering or just alienating and anti-social.

For example, tactics like sabotage have often been used during union campaigns, the IWW was pretty famous for this. When used as an individual tactic, workers often risk alienation from others, punishment from the state, a waste of comrades resources who bail them out or organise legals. Individuals may get a small benefit from stealing, squatting, living on the dole as a ideological choice etc, but there are always consequences. So when sabotage is done collectively, it can be a powerful tool against the boss, especially so because everyone has each others backs, and the decision to take action has been made together. It’s the small sums of collective actions that become a movement.

Consider;

"Shoplifting, dumpster diving, quitting work are all put forward as revolutionary ways to live outside the system, but amount to nothing more than a parasitic way of life which depends on capitalism without providing any real challenge."

Obviously with this quote we don't want to conflate what it takes to ensure survival under capitalism, or to demonise people who are unemployed or anything ridiculous like that. Rather whats being said is that if you have the option to make these choices, if you can always move back in with your folks or whatever, you're not actually contributing to anti-capitalism - you're just living out some kind of radical liberalism.

The rich, politicians, anyone in a position of power surely has plenty of time for people who become 'non-participants' in the system. They do not actually challenge power, they do not help organise collectivelly, they may create small concessions and 'spaces' of existing without the yoke of capitalist burden, but the ability of this to both spread and become empowering has to be considered. The truth is, you cannot, ever, completely drop out of capitalism or get saway from the state. People in power are afraid of the Assata Shakurs, the Malcom X’s, the union organisers, the organisations that demand and fight for collective rights. Not hippie communes.

I'm not saying everyone who's doing some kind of activism has to rush out and form an anarcho communist collective, join an organisation or start towing a political line – I’m not here to say 'hey, you should join X because we have the best politics ever! Actually what’s more important as anarchists is that hopefully you go away with some ideas about organising yourself- what i'm saying that there are differences in ideas and hence organisational methods that have very real impacts on the effectiveness of our activism.

It's been pointed out plenty of times that activists who have no 'home team' will often find they've put incredible amounts of energy into a single campaign, sometimes for years, but when it ends - those lessons are lost, there is no where to keep moving, there is no collective development of knowledge that comes from critical reflection on what you've been doing. Unlike individualists would believe everyone is an island, we are all socially formed, and it’s through society we find our freedom. Anyone who thinks they can come to the perfect answers alone, that they can live outside and beyond society is a joker. Here’s an anecdote; did you know its not common for anarchists in the Uruguayan Anarchist federation to talk in first person? They're so adamant that every individual’s personality is a product of collective development that to talk in third person shows humility and acknowledgement of each’s contribution to one another. I'm not suggesting that we stop talking in first person but I think that such humility is quite an inspirational revolutionary value.  

I think what individual libertarian/anarchist activists who aren't in organisations do though is help the development of libertarian values. By participating in social struggles as anarchists we hope to help build a culture that empowers from the bottom up. And developing an anarchist culture is really important. We want to have our own morals, different to those advocated by a capitalist and statist society - we want a world without patriarchy or racism, and conscious cultural reconstruction is important if we understand that there are forms of exploitation and repression that are reinforced by more than just capitalism.

I think the strength of actions by anarchist individuals is more like a reproduction of ethics, rather than any programmatic revolutionary strategy. Because we recognize that there are two levers of power in society right - the state and the point of production, you could maybe say that the third is the social reproduction of capitalist relations - and that’s where community organising is important. We can't and don’t just fetishise the workplace. We are not marxists and we don't agree that societies problems are limited strictly to the superstructure of production (not that they all do! It’s hard to avoid strawmen in such a broad piece of writing.) Anarchists know power exists in all social relations, we have talked often about the centre and the periphery of power. And knowing that centralisation creates power we acknowledge that we can't ‘take the state’ – that’s completely against anarchist strategy and understanding of how society works - what we do want to do is build counter-power to where capital and oppression are created. That’s absolutely key to overthrowing this society. And that’s not done by throwing a bomb into a bank, it’s done by organising workers and communities.

Many people today are drawn towards anarchism because it offers space to individuals who feel marginalised by predominant social constructions. When you identify as an anarchist its okay to be totally yourself. But we have to acknowledge the whole idea of the individual against society is absurd - anarchism IS the single most social political philosophy - we believe in a world of completely free and equal individuals - how can we be anti-social, unless you're you think society and the state are the same?

What I think is useful from here is to talk a little about how there are differences in tactics, politics and strategy. Now this is pretty key and will lead us onto a bit of discussion about particular things anarchists today are into. To be honest, the useful terminology for this distinction was only just brought to my attention by another comrade.

Firstly; we have politics. This is the level at which we identify the philosophy we believe in - which is anarchism. So starting from the vision of building a world without states, capitalism or authority we have to decide on the appropriate strategies for making that happen.

So, strategy. Here’s where we do maybe the most reflection - what does our society look like? What kind of changes do we need? How could we start making them happen? Are we insurrectionists, are we syndicalist, are we into community organising, should we be concentrating on propaganda? There is alot to be figured out.

Finally; tactics. The tactics we employ are the specific details of the strategy we decide upon, as in, what particular actions we undertake to implement the strategy. For example if you did believe you needed an insurrection, you might form a cell that wants to annihilate capitalists and cops or something, I dont know. If you chose syndicalism you might look at what industries are most important to organise in right now, and if you want to start a specifically anarchist union or if you want to radicalise existing ones by building shop stewards networks and advocating wildcats. Within social anarchism there are a variety of ideas about strategies, these are just two, very different and broad examples.

The problem in Australia seems to be that our movement is so confused, so unsophisiticated that we don't take the time to work our way through these considerations. We as the collective that is anarchism in Australia tend to fetishise one or the other, or completely muddle them up. Remember here i'm not just talking about individualists; most anarchist groups in Australia are completely guilty of this too. But at the same time, I think what we like to call 'lifestyle' can be traced back to the early individualism, where personal rebellion and individual, violent insurrection are considered as the total strategy against the state.

All the same, I want to look at a few places where we see the confusion at work. Firstly i'm going to talk about squatting.

So squatting is a tactic, yea? But if you believe that it’s inherently political, you're going to get stuck repeating it over and over when it's not the right strategy, or when you can't do it, where are your politics? This kind of thing happens all the time. It's a really big problem in the environmental movement. I'm not really involved in that anymore but it's kinda where I started back in Newcastle, and I saw a fair bit of this confusion.

Squatting is not really a huge thing in Australia, though I do know a number of squatters and there are a few in Melbourne - it's a much bigger thing in Europe. Many anarchists seem to consider squatting as a lifestyle choice (though there are some, i'm sure, who do it because they haven't any other option - I know at least one person who fits this category.) There’s a difference between a choice and survival here. Living in a squat would appear to give people the space to exist outside typical property relations, maximising personal freedoms and somehow 'propagate' the idea that squatting is an option to the broader community. There is an element of truth in this, but it's actually extremely limited.

Creating 'liberty' for oneself doesn't necessarily mean it creates it for others, sometimes it can even limit the freedoms of others. Squatting isn't necessarily one of those times, but it's not as helpful a tactic as other options. There is a difference between punks who want to live in a squat cause its free and they can have parties, and a squat that’s used as an accessible social center that, for example, that helps house refugees. The first is fine; it doesn't really matter to anyone except the landlord. But the second has collective and social power. I'd argue that as anarchists this is exactly our task. We don't just want revolution for ourselves, we want it for everyone.  

To turn a squat into a viable social center it seems obvious that it needs resources, organisation, community outreach, and importantly the backing of other social groups willing to defend it when eviction time comes. I believe this is a task for anarchist organisations. Lets look at WSM in Ireland for a second, they're an anarchist group who doesn't operate, control or dominate any squats. What they do however, is help initiate them, have activists involved in their on going upkeep and daily activity (one squat in Ireland that has a few WSM members used the workshops to build heaters to send to refugees in Calais), and defend them and their autonomy against repression from the state. They also organise forums and do the important task of political propaganda helping legitimate squatting as a strategy against capitalism. I use WSM as an example of this because they're particularly successful - they have an anarchist publication reaches thousands of people monthly, and they have public attention for being at the forefront of several social movements. Imagine what such a powerful anarchist organisation can bring to the defence of autonomy?

On the other hand - it doesn't take an anarchist organisation to make squatting a valid social project - im just pointing out what I think tasks of anarchist are.

EDIT: Since this was written the totally super awesome squat project in Bendigo St, Collingwood has popped up! This occupation was organised by the Homeless Persons Union of Victoria, and is drawing attention to the rate of homelessness in Melbourne compared to the enormous number of empty homes. This is a fantastic example of the social value of a squatting project.

Lets look at Social Log Bologna in Italy for a moment. This was a squat that is now quite a large social center. The site itself used to be a postal facility. The people who set it up were autonomist marxists, and you know what - they didn’t just use it for themselves -now it’s entirely self-run by refugees! It had enormous social potential and outreach. A while back the cops tried to shut it down - look at how many people turned out to protect it!

This wasn't just a venue for gigs - this actually demonstrated that when we get rid of fucking capitalism - there going to be so many creative things we can do with the economy to make sure everyone has everything they need. It was also the result of serious planning and looking at the specific things the working class of a particular area needed at a particular point in time.

Some of the local community coming to defend Social Log from eviction.

So then I’d like to ask; “what is a squat compared to a rent strike?”

This I believe is where we begin to see real collective action forming. Rent strikes aren't a thing here anymore, but Australia does have some history with them. Actually, I almost never hear people talk about them! If you don't know what a rent strike is, it's basically like this; the community in a particular area organises against inflated rents and evictions, you hold some mass meetings, do some propaganda and whatever, maybe you target on the basis of community, maybe you target a particular landlord, but you get to a point where collective power is established and people stop paying rent. When the cops turn up, you picket in defense of whoever they try and evict, maybe you go hassle the state department or the rental agents or something. Not really something we're in a position to do now - but worthy of remembering this exists for when struggle around housing intensifies even more. If you want to look at historical examples, i'd suggest Scotland during the 30s' and Italy in the 70s'. There is a pretty good article on libcom.org about the Italian rent strikes - which were significantly influenced by the autonomia movement. For those that don’t know, Autonomia was/is a branch of marxism that started to question the significance of the party, started including feminism and talking about 'social reproduction' and all that. It reproduced a lot of the problems of Leninism, and some of the problems of unorganised Anarchism, but has some very valuable lessons to draw from.

What makes rent strikes so much more powerful is that, unlike squatting, they're a viable tactic to a huge portion of the population. Squatting is unavailable to so many people, for so many reasons. There are only so many places, its unsuitable for families, for people who need to keep stuff secure for work or whatever, for people with disabilities, for people who want to be guaranteed a hot shower. For those who require stability and security, things we all deserve, squatting is not a real option. Even for many of Australia’s homeless squatting wouldn't be viable - what’s deserved is secure housing. Wouldn't it be better if we could organise a mass renters and housing movement committed to direct action and direct democracy, with total autonomy from political parties and the upper classes? Social movements provide the space to lay the real foundations of a society built from the bottom up.

Let’s look really quickly at another places the anarchist movement finds itself sometimes fetishising tactics rather than politics. Sections of the anarchist left often have an idea that they can provide social services purely because it seems ideologically sound. Services that have often been won by the left are now provided by the state and far better than what we can do. Why would anyone want to go to a dodgy anarchist day care in a squat if there’s a nice clean one run by professionals and provided by the state?

I think a relevant example can be Food Not Bombs. I’m not here to have a go at people doing FNB. I’m just raising it as an example we can relate to! FNB is a sweet idea, you get the food that Woolies or Coles or whatever were going to throw away - cause you know, capitalism is extremely fucking wasteful. Or you take what you've grown at your co-op or whatever, and you turn it into a feed and put it on for free in a park or down a street in the city and give it out to whoever needs it. You produce some propaganda around it that points out that capitalism is fucked. Rad, this is actually a great idea. Practical things like this is the way we make our politics seen, the way we prove we can do things differently, the way we prove we have something to offer, and we have a way to talk to people that can be way less alienating than shoving a newspaper in someones face. (Note; Anarchists need a newspaper. I’m pointing out that there are ways of doing things that are less alienating, and that we believe in ‘propaganda of the deed.’)

But you know, taking into account the politics, strategy, tactic formula... is this the best thing to do in Australia? There are loads of charities and even state institutions that feed the homeless. Sometimes you're competing with mega churches and the state! In a society where *most* people have what they need to eat, then maybe resources are better put into something else? That’s where you go back to your politics, look at the concrete situation, start talking about a strategy to build anarchism and then figure out what tactics are going to be effective. If we were in say, Greece, where the soup-kitchen idea is really important, then fuck yes anarchist should be setting up Food Not Bombs or whatever name you wanna give it. That’s exactly our territory and the perfect place for demonstrating alternatives. There’s a Marx quote I like, "every real movement is worth a dozen programmes." Anarchism is meant to be connected to the real needs of the people - actually anarchist organisation exists to support the real struggle, not to establish socialism by decrees. The principle of mutual aid comes from was the early workers movement, not Kropotkin. It wasn't some ethic dreamed up by intellectuals. Early anarchist movements were dealing with the lack of social services, they were dealing with real social needs.

So what I’m saying is that now when we establish these mutual aid groups, filling these 'holes' in social needs isn’t a great idea if they have been filled by capitalism and the state, because until anarchism becomes a large and organised social force, we can’t really compete with capitalist or state facilities without wasting a large amount of our own time and resources. We’re far better off organising workers to struggle in those sites and to take them over.

So at the current state, I think we need to stop and reflect where anarchism needs to go. What are our politics? What strategies have we got to make anarchism relevant? Do they reflect how Australian society looks today? We can't just take the CNT model from 36 Spain and make it happen here, we're sure as fuck are not going to the hills to start a peasant Insurrectional Army.

To summarising a few points, let’s start with this contradiction between individual and social anarchism.

Anarchism is really the most completely social philosophy - we seek a world based on solidarity, mutual aid and co-operation. How these values could go hand in hand with anti-social elements is beyond me. We are anti-capitalist, because capitalism is toxic for a healthy social system, not because we're angsty teenagers.

To consider how we want to see a future influenced by anarchism, we need only take a moment to look at the past. There have been times anarchism has been a fruitful social ideal, and during those times it’s only ever been the social and well-developed anarchist organisations and movements that have made an impact; the CNT/FAI in Spain, the Insurrectional Army of the Ukraine, the FORA in Argentina, FAU in Uraguay. There has never been a 'Union of Egoists', armed terror groups like Conspiracy of Fire haven't started a revolution, assassinations by individualists have only brought down the states wrath on broader society. Individualist anarchism cannot achieve what collective organisation can. Individualism is the result of bourgeoise and liberal tendencies, it is the dreams of intellectuals trying to mix itself with workers struggles. In contrast, social anarchism comes from the real social struggles of the lower classes.

We certainly believe in building the new society in the shell of the old, and this involves individual action and development, but its always connected to the realisation of a real communal society. Small organisations that fulfill immediate needs, like Co-operatives, affinity groups, etc, have been important parts of working class culture, and their general demise has come hand in hand with repression and co-option of working class movements. Models and examples help point the way, they demonstrate that another world is possible, but again these are models of communal action - we are not led to the revolution by the image if the anarchist bombthrower, by Stirners unlimited Ego, or by this terrible 'temporary autonomous zone' idea. We're led by images of the Paris commune, the Russian Soviets, the Spanish syndicates, the Hungarian workers councils, even today glimmers of hope exist in the new communal structures in Chiapas, the grassroots councils of Syria and the TEV-DEM in Rojava, not for the political forces that defend them, but the practical institutions of counter-power that are building a new social life.

The considered undertaking of practical activity, connecting it to a broader political programme, and the building of dedicated anarchist organisations will only strengthen our ability to make a difference and increase the scope of human freedom both in the here and now, and to lay the preperation for a revolutionary situation. I'd urge any who believe anarchism is achieved by autonomous, atomised and unorganised individuals to seriously reconsider how they believe revolution is possible, and if it is, what it will take to get there. But for anarchists in dedicated organisations, it is worth a reminder that actions undertaken by the working class will not come with a perfectly worked anarchist line or program, that developing ideas takes time, that the revolution is messy and slow, that patronising or dismissing peoples genuine individual needs and concerns is not a helpful attitude. But if we stick to our guns, to our morals of solidarity, co-operation, equality, and autonomy that we will sow the seeds of freedom today, so that tomorrow we may have truly free society. I don’t know about you, but I want to take this really seriously, I want to live to see anarchy. If we refuse to acknowledge the lessons of the past, if we don’t take on the lessons of the past we will just let the state continue to exist, either in its capitalist or socialist form.

[xyliane]

I just realized where we are rn in HxH is about Aug 2001. So now I am wondering if Togashi will have a special event corralating to 9/11 and I'm worried.

let me preface this response by saying I’ve been in research paper spiral for the last four months due to my impending advancement in june, and your question provoked a knee-jerk reaction that led to a 4h-long research spiral by someone whose specialty is absolutely not japanese foreign policy and nationalism.

the tl;dr version here, and then the explanation for it under the cut: I don’t think that’s going to happen. for one, they’re currently on a boat headed to Big Murderous Landmass (unless kurapika and co sink the whale). they’re not in yorknew/nyc. also, japan’s perceptions of 9/11 and the media representations of it are not as pervasive as american or even broader western collective trauma. while togashi is unafraid to address contemporary social politics, I don’t think he’s going to correlate a particular event to 9/11. he’s more concerned with the failings and strengths of humanity, as a whole or in parts, and might reference particular events to get across a greater point, not draw direct parallels.

now, a cut, and then several hundred words on 9/11 as a moment of collective trauma, japanese militarism, and media perceptions. it is 4000% nerdier than this ask expected.

I don’t think togashi is going to include a 9/11 parallel in a large part because of how japanese media, and anime in particular, addresses japanese communal trauma, and how togashi uses moments and evocations of these in his stories (at least, yyh, and hxh, although level e has its own quirks). namely that japan really doesn’t deal with 9/11 like americans do–but they absolutely have other traumas that make their way into anime, manga, and other media.

the thing is that, while 9/11 is absolutely a moment of international trauma (I work in india, and people there are highly conscious of it), the moment that hit the US was very different in other parts of the world. I’m old enough to remember the whole “where were you on 9/11,” itself a sort of marker of solidarity and belonging within the trauma that kind of unites people around a time. the plane crashes were broadcast everywhere in the US, and no one didn’t see it. but we got it live, fed right to the tvs in our classrooms at 8am. and america didn’t get attacked by foreigners before, not like this–problems existed “out there,” not in nyc, for however many times it’s been destroyed on film. (we have our own homegrown terrorists, but that’s a whole other can of worms.) and when it did happen, the country as a whole kicked into a jingoist gear on top of the collective trauma of someone murdering a bunch of americans. freedom fries. they were a thing.

it’s probably important to note here that media doesn’t exist in a vacuum. we’re perpetually influenced by things that happen, whether they’re collective and historical memories, personal experience, or social trends. we get our references and jokes from somewhere, and they sink into our brains and affect what we put out into the world. trauma does this more effectively than most things. trauma elicits a search for meaning, whether it’s a question of “why did it happen” or “why did it happen to me/us?” sometimes we find a meaning in the disaster, and sometimes we don’t. but it marks us and connects us (Halbswach 1992, Updegraff et al 2009). and it affects us for a long, long time.

in japan (and again, I’m not an expert on this), 9/11 is a moment of international trauma that marks japan’s re-entering into the international military sphere, but also economic flux. of the approximately 3000 people killed in the twin towers attack, 316 were non-american, including 26 japanese nationals. japan joined the war coalition almost immediately, and spent billions of USD to support the “war on terror,” while also dealing with things like shohei koda’s beheading in 2004 or the kidnapping and release of 5 journalists and anti-war NGO workers the same year, which arrived back in japan only to be ostracized for “causing trouble” for japan, with accusations that they had “got what [they] deserved” (x, x). the effect on the news media in japan was of increasing conspiracy theories and warmongering, while simultaneously wary of tensions with china, north korea, and taiwan. basically, japan politically and militarily had a lot of pots on the fire, and was feeding yen to the american pot real fast. the japanese SDF pulled out of central asia in 2007, and it’s still a divisive subject from the papers I read, but it’s more about the military than 9/11. 9/11 is not, for example, the topic of a j-drama directly or indirectly. shohei imamura’s short film “japan” in the september 11 (2002) anthology is a parable set during world war ii, although he’s much more famous for his palme d’or wins and a film about hiroshima (black rain, 1989). and uh. apparently pokemon black and white has a reference to ground zero in their map of not!nyc?

japanese media’s collective trauma in anime is often the deep personal connection with the atomic bomb, or terror attacks and natural disasters on japanese soil. which makes sense: humans will generally latch onto things that affect us personally, whether it’s a cute puppy video shown to us or an act of terrorism we watch on television. for the US, we were–and still are–being forced to confront our place in the international community (hero, victim, villain, collaborator, all of it–and americans are not very good at shades of gray) through the “war on terror,” and it comes out in everything from comic book movies like bvs directly evoking 9/11 while cavill!supes ruins buildings to kill zod, to the rise of partisan tv news. but we don’t evoke nuclear war or radioactive waste with the same reaction that japan does–there’s a lot of fear of the bomb in the 1950s and 1960s, like with dr. strangelove and them!, but it’s centered less around the impact of the bomb and its literal or metaphorical nuclear fallout, and more on the fear of the other or an outsider destroying good ol’ american culture. or giving us superpowers. (personally, the closest I think american art and literature ever got to japanese sentiments is with a canticle for leibowitz, which focuses on the cyclical nature of human failure and how the past becomes changed through the present.)

(please read a canticle for leibowitz, it changed my life and only grows more potent with age.)

for japan, the dropping of atomic bombs on nagasaki and hiroshima provides a similar and long-lasting moment of national trauma that’s been preserved in public policy and popular culture. and it’s not just grave of the fireflies or barefoot gen, anime that address the bombings through direct reference. the bomb transforms into concerns about nuclear destruction and environmental fallout, with kaiju like godzilla rising from nuclear waste. osamu tezuka’s work like astro boy is in direct response to the abuse and use of technology and hope for humanity’s future, and naussica of the valley of the wind is a fantasy post-nuclear bomb situation blended with hayao miyazaki’s love of humanity and nature (x, x). I think it’s worth noting that both tezuka and miyazaki personally experienced the 1945 bombings. miyazaki was 4, and one of his earliest memories is fleeing utsunomiya’s bombings. tezuka, at 16 and working in arsenal factories during the fire bombing of osaka, later wrote kami no toride (1977) about his personal experience, which served as both autobiography and condemnation of the vietnam war. 

of more recent stuff evoking trauma, naoki urasawa actually uses 9/11 as a moment in billy bat, as part of getting to questions of humanity and modernity and technology and progress. other anime dealing with terrorism, like GITS:SAC, the “brain scratch” episode of cowboy bebop, and of course urasawa’s 20th century boys, locate terrorism not through 9/11 (and the underlying racism and not-us-ness) but more often with these japanese cults like the ‘aum death cult that carried out the 1995 tokyo subway sarin attacks, and the changing landscape of terrorism in japan. we could point to shinichiro watanabe’s zankyou no terror (or terror in resonance? iunno) as a potential 9/11 parallel, and I think it’s got the 9/11 connections, but watanabe himself places it closer to the 1995 terrorist attacks. he even commented how much “darker” zankyou no terror is than the film he was influenced by (the man who stole the sun (1979)), directly citing the 1995 attacks as one reason the last 30 years have impacted japanese understandings of terrorism. more recently, there’s also been connections to the 3/11 disaster with kimi no na wa, where shinkai explores his perennial theme of personal connection across space and time via a form of natural disaster. outside of anime, there’s also a growing body of literature on 3/11 and music, which is super interesting and well worth a look if you’re interested.

fwiw, I think it’s interesting that both urasawa and watanabe are explicitly interested in western and specifically american culture, but through a japanese lens. and not the sort of “japanese lens” that leads to the americas of g gundam or yugioh, which are The Most American Ever, but a more nuanced representation that explores technology, human connection, and modernity. which is the sort of lens creators should try to do when engaging other cultures, at bare minimum. (/soapbox)

trauma isn’t often addressed directly, but allegorically or displaced: lindsay ellis has a great pair of loose canon episodes on 9/11 and how film evokes collective trauma. while she doesn’t talk about anime or japanese films, she uses bollywood as a way to talk about indirect expressions of nationalist trauma. in the second video, she suggests that, for countries like india working through their own terror attacks with mumbai in 2008 (the 26/11 attacks), it’s easier to use other countries’ or places’ or–I would suggest–fantastical trauma rather than directly address it. so bollywood used 9/11 to understand its own trauma. not everyone does this–and a lot of times, I doubt it’s done purposefully, at least initially. but it’s there implicitly, informing decisions of artists and content creators that sometimes doesn’t get revealed until placed under a critical eye. it’s why editing and getting outside or sensitivity readers is important! for japan, the parallels aren’t to other countries, but fantastical situations in japan with Very Heavy Symbolism ranging from akira’s totally-not-a-bombs to kimi no na wa’s processing of the 3/11 disaster via comet.

as for togashi, he uses world events and figures as ways of exploring his own interests (yu yu hakusho has multiple “wow capitalism suuuuuuuuucks” subplots with yukina’s arc and the dark tournament, plus the very anti-war/anti-hate/anti-capitalism/”humanity sucks but people [kuwabara] can be amazing” sentiments of the chapter black tape; while hxh’s chimera ant arc has both a-bomb parallels and north korea/china references on top of killua’s soapbox about how corrupt and terrible governments can be). the parallel between “humanity sucks” and “people can be so very good” threads throughout togashi’s work. but it also uses a very buddhist understanding of rebirth and reincarnation to get these points across, whether it’s the unconditional vore love of pouf and youpi giving themselves to rejuvenate mereum after he’s nuked or the reincarnations of former humans as ants. but all of it connects to togashi’s personal experiences of things happening to and by japan, whether it’s the invasion of and tension with taiwan, the boom and bust of the economy, or the militaristic push by parts of the government under koizumi and abe. that, layered on top of the trauma that informs a lot of japanese media, makes for a fascinating playground togashi is more than willing to dig into.

I suppose this is all a very, very long-winded way of saying that while it’s possible togashi could include a 9/11 parallel, I don’t think it’ll be tied to some september 2001 date in the hxh universe. if he uses it, it will be 1: through a togashi/japanese lens; 2: unattached to a particular date; 3: layered in dialogue with broader war and terror issues togashi’s interested in exploring.

if you’ve made it to the bottom: holy crap congrats, hello, talk to me about anthropology of media. and if you’re somehow still interested in more, here’s an brief list of sources I used on top of the ones explicitly referenced in the post:

Baffelli, Erica. “Media and religion in Japan: the Aum affair as a turning point.” Working paper, EASA. 2008. (media-anthropology.net)

Broderick, Mick (ed.). Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film. Routledge and Kegan Paul International, 2014. (google books)

Deamer, David. Deleuze, Japanese Cinema, and the Atom Bomb: The Spectre of Impossibility. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014. (google books link)

Japan pulls troops from Afghanistan (npr, 2007)

Japan ends ban on military self-defense (time, 2014)

Japan’s 10 years since 9/11 (al-jazeera, 2011)

Krystian Woznicki (September 1991). “Towards a cartography of Japanese anime – Anno Hideaki’s Evangelion Interview with Azuma Hiroki”. BLIMP Filmmagazine. Tokuma Shoten. (archived here)

manga responses to 3/11 (nippon.com, 2012)

Saft, Scott, & Yumiko Ohara. “The media and the pursuit of militarism in Japan: Newspaper editorials in the aftermath of 9/11.” Critical Discourse Studies, 3(01), 2006. 81-101

[misty040]

The Summer of 1899

A Grindeldore(ish) oneshot of mine, also posted here https://www.fanfiction.net/u/6404945/Misty040 https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_whore_of_pastry/works hope you like!:)

June, 1899 - Grindelwald's garden in Godric's Hollow

It is early. The sun is still timid - barely awake - spilling light across a fresh sky in mild apricot streaks. Although the beginnings of birdsong indicate morning's onset, the street lamp across the road is still on. Its circle of light is growing more and more feeble as the world wakes up, but a faint greenish glow remains.

'Deluminos.'

The lamp's light flickers slightly, but survives. Albus frowns in frustration, but his fourth attempt yields a similar lack of results.

'Poor show, my friend,' Gellert laughs, with his signature easy confidence. 'I expected more of Hogwarts' golden student!'

Albus' expression of concentration breaks. He grins and raises his eyebrows. 'Well, perhaps I expected more of the infamous Durmstrang education.' He counters. 'You attend the most notorious school in Europe, famed for its Dark leanings and strict discipline - and you come away having invented Deluminos, of all spells.'

Gellert gasps in mock outrage. 'You agreed it could be very useful when trying to evade detection in a Muggle environment!' He protests.

'Oh, it would be, I'm sure. Especially if you transferred the verbal incantation to a physical signal, and used an everyday Muggle object to direct it. But, Gellert, you must admit it's a rather meagre achievement for a genius - especially one who's just left the school which teaches how to master the complexities of the Dark Arts.'

'We'll leave the complexities of the Dark Arts until you've defeated the formidable Muggle street light.' Gellert laughs lightly. Then he lowers his voice. His dark blue eyes glisten conspiratorially. Captivating. 'Besides, I have come up with much bigger plans.'

Albus leans forward, intrigued. Before this week, he had seemed doomed to a life in Godric's Hollow, cut off from following any of his ambitions - and from anyone of his intellect. All his doors reopened when Gellert arrived. But his neighbour does not merely engage him as an academic. Every minute with him is exciting, electric.

'There's one issue, though.' Gellert says, and Albus blinks to attention.

'What would that be?' He frowns.

'Well, to help me with my plans, I'd need someone who can actually perform a spell I invented when I was fifteen...and apparently, that isn't you.'

Albus narrows his eyes and smiles, flicking his wand behind his back. A shower of twigs and leaves lands on Gellert's golden head.

'I'm rather good at non-verbal Summoning Charms, though.' Albus says, in tones of great satisfaction, as his friend shakes himself free and lunges for his wand. Within a minute, both are laughing.

As Albus sits with his friend in the slowly warming air, there is something deeper than amusement in his smile.

August 1899 - Grindelwald's house in Godric's Hollow

'Are you listening to me, Albus?' Gellert is irritated. The tension in his voice betrays it. He's sounded this way quite a lot, of late - the rapid acceleration of their scheme has clearly come at the cost of his once-merry temperament. The midday heat is searing, turning their makeshift office into a furnace, which surely isn't helping; Albus wishes they were outside, but knows better than to ask. They must concentrate on their plans.

'Yes. Of course.' Perhaps lying to a skilled Legilimens is an unwise decision. Although, Albus reasons, he is not quite lying - he's been following Gellert's words, vaguely, at least. Though he has, admittedly, devoted more attention to looking than listening. Gellert's eyes have become shadowed, he's noticed, his hair unkempt.

'Be sure you mean that, Albus, because I have extremely important news.' Gellert clears his throat and fixes Albus with an intense gaze. 'I may have a lead on the Stone.'

Albus tenses sharply. 'You think you've found it?'

'If I'm correct, it could be ours within the fortnight!'

Albus drops his quill and stands up abruptly. 'That's wonderful, Gellert!' He exclaims, turning to his friend in jubilation. 'My parents can be back in two weeks' time - I'll be free to travel with you!'

'Well.' Gellert returns the smile, but there is more than a touch of impatience on his face. 'Yes. But then we must think of its broader applications.'

Albus nods intently, thinking quickly. 'Agreed. It'll be revolutionary - to think, they always said there was no spell that could bring back the dead! This will be the single greatest asset to our cause...who wouldn't be convinced by the power of resurrection?'

He expects to his own intense excitement reflected in his friend's face, but Gellert avoids his eyes. 'And... the Statute's advocates might not be equipped to deal with an army of Inferi.'

Albus falls silent. Should he be shocked? The image of animated corpses is unpleasant to say the least - it is certainly not what he would like to represent their mission, their great mission of hope. 'But Gellert,' he begins, cautiously. 'Why should we need Inferi? Surely our cause is strong enough to attract the living to fight for us?'

For someone so intensely convinced by his cause, Gellert can be surprisingly pragmatic. 'Indeed it is; you don't need me to tell you that, Albus. But people can be short-sighted...foolish. They don't always know when something is for the greater good. They might take a little...persuading.'

In the pit of his stomach, Albus is sure there is something wrong. Inferi are an instrument of Dark Magic... but then, he reasons, sometimes sacrifices must be made to truly make the world a better place in the long run. Gellert knows what he's doing, doesn't he? Albus looks over at his friend; already, he's writing again, his quill moving across the page at amazing speed. His hair is unruly, falling to his shoulders in waves he has been too distracted to tame. The dark blue eyes are trained on his heavily scrawled-on parchment, in a face that's focused, determined.

Albus can trust him. He can.

'Yes. Yes, of course you're right.'

1945 - a Muggle street in London

Once again, the Elder Wand has changed hands. Its loyalties, as always, are fickle.

Albus turns it over and over in his long fingers. The wand is his, that is absolutely undisputable; it was a long and epic duel, perhaps the most magnificent to ever grace wizardkind, and he is the victor. Grindelwald is defeated, his reign of terror over. But still, the Wand's weight feels alien in Albus' hand. Perhaps because of the power he knows it wields.

Albus now regards power a little like he does fire: beautiful, enticing, from afar - and exceedingly dangerous when allowed to grow untamed. He learnt more from one summer with Grindelwald than seven years at one of the world's finest magical schools. Albus smiles, but there is a trace of bitterness in it. The lesson has been expensive. It has cost his sister's life, and his own self-respect.

But he can gain the latter back, perhaps. He can teach - an unthreatening talent - and pass on his lessons to his students so that they will not make his mistakes - or those of Grindelwald. The Elder Wand finally has a master who is not infatuated with it, but unnerved by it. He will use it well.

Albus wishes he did not remember Gellert's seventeen-year-old face quite so clearly.

Time to leave, he decides; time to return to Hogwarts, where the chatter and chaos of a castle full of young wizards will drown out any thoughts of that kind. Or so he tries to tell himself.

No Muggle can see him Apparate; the street must be dark. Albus eyes the streetlight above him with something like regret. Holding the Elder Wand as if it were made of glass, Albus aims, and quietly whispers 'Deluminos.'

The streetlight flickers once, and goes out.

[kingdomofthelogos]

No Greater Love

Read Mark 8

Download a printable version here.

To begin our message, let us consider the words of Mark 8:2, whence Jesus chronicles the noble allegiance that stirs His compassion: “for they have been with me for three days and have nothing to eat.” The crowds that pursued Him were burdened with hunger, having sacrificed the earthly certainty of their next meals in order that they have the greater certainty of time with the Master. 

We know that “no one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends,” for John 15:13 assures us of this immovable truth. When we consider the hunger endured for three days by those crowds who sought Jesus in Mark 8, let us then ponder how much greater the love of God Himself to undertake three days in death. Being truly dead one is in hunger for life itself, but Jesus undertook this sacrifice to accomplish so perfect a victory that it excelled anything our world has seen.

Let it be known that God hates death, taking no joy in the suffering and chaos of our world. But despite His great hatred for death and suffering, let us not think Him afraid of them. Inasmuch as through His Word the heavens and earth wove together, so also through the power of His Word was victory found over fallen man’s final calamity. This Word came to us, made itself flesh in the man of Christ Jesus.

The modern church spends a great deal of time deconstructing those around Jesus and dismantling their character. However, let today be inspired by the loyal perseverance which moved our Lord to have compassion on His dear creatures. The crowds displayed a sacrifice, giving up the ordinary circumstances of life which would have likely sustained them in order that they might gain some proximity to God, to obtain a higher assurance in His truth.

There are a lot of questions we might wonder about the crowds and their motivations. Were these crowds truly of faith, were they sanctified that they might not fall back into sin? Or were they just here for a good show? The exact conditions of their hearts we cannot obtain, but we know that they, like all Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve, are indeed fallen creatures prone to sin. We know that the Holy Spirit had not yet come in its fullness as on the day of Pentecost. Notwithstanding these truths, we also know that the Lord who knows all things saw their hungered state and was sincerely moved to stand for them against the wiles of death as their advocate.

Moreover, just as Jesus would stand for them in order to prevent their starvation, He would ultimately stand for them in order to prevent their eternal condemnation. But let us not be confused, God does not desire that His children be condemned, for He has never desired such irrevocable terror. 

Our world is plagued by a curse which we have no power to revoke. Yet, the great Master has had compassion on us and desired to relieve us of its burden. He is the Master who laid down His life for the servant.

As we discussed last week, the fiends of hell take joy in having people believe the darkness within them is light. Every major and minor issue discussed on our planet is designed in such a way that truth cannot be ascertained, but the only result which can be effected is war between tribes. Political tribes, ethnic tribes, material wealth tribes, and so forth and so on. Perhaps the most despicable work of evil is how many people sincerely believe the darkness in them is light, people who pervert the Gospel of Christ to attain unrighteous control over others. There is great confusion about what is good and true, and what is deceptive and evil. These words are coupled together deliberately. Deception, from Genesis to Revelation, is always a critical part of evil. Whether in the Garden with Eve sincerely believing her conversation with the snake is of no major consequence, or the beast worshippers in Revelation 13 firmly believing they are on the right side of history. Our modern age has bought the foolish idea that in order to be deceived then one must feel like they are deceived.

In our day, there are many things in which only one viewpoint is permitted. Often, people are told they need not speak of something that might be offended, put something on or take something down that might make someone else more comfortable out of respect. But let this be known and let it be certain: it is not grace if grace is only granted one way. It is not respect when only one viewpoint is permitted, especially when that viewpoint is the dominant one of the fallen world, which is neither sanctified in its worldly offices nor saved by its intentions. That is not respect which is demanded, although many will sincerely believe it is, but truly a behest for submission to an idol, it is malice well dressed as modesty. It is malice of the most sinister dimension, a darkness which has convincingly masked itself as the light, a task often accomplished by perverting the truth or making it unattainable by way of official knowledge. Without choice, it is not real virtue.

There are no magic rules, and there is no lukewarm sanctuary where all will be comfortable and at peace. In a fallen world, every decision will offend someone. Therefore, when the call beckons, it is best that one be found standing with the one who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. We must have grace and mercy and be willing to yield, but firm and unmoving when asked to bear false witness. It is moral bankruptcy to deconstruct without a greater motivation to build up the good, and it is the work of satan to accuse without warrant. I am quite often shocked by how little discernment is found in our age, much of which I do not consider a sincere lack of discernment but rather a lack of courage to stand for what is true; a willingness to turn a blind eye to things preferred not to be true, and a willingness to sit idle as to avoid suffering. 

We live in an era which has perhaps the least amount of people concerned with the spiritual warfare which preys upon every soul, and yet we are also in an era which has the fruits of spiritual warfare made more obvious than any time before. One may be distracted by questioning the exact location are the demons, the presence of those fomenting contortionists, but in pursuit of that specific image one might fail to look in the mirror of our society and see that people have not the slightest idea who they are at even the visceral level of being made fully in the Image of God as a man or woman. There is not the slightest idea of how to value a child of God based solely on the irrevocable value of life, life that was so precious to God that it was worth Him dying in order to make available its communication with eternity.

In our age, noble courage is not exemplified on its principle, but always through corrupt schemes to taint the great virtues of God with personal interests and political theater. Those wretched intruders who stole into God’s set apart family have indeed perverted the grace of our God into licentiousness. Everything we do is reduced down to an ever unsatisfying sensation in exchange for nothing that will matter for more than a moment aside from those cursed side effects which attach themselves to the soul.

The Pharisees of Mark 8 demanded a sign, and let us ponder for a moment what sign is. A sign is not a thing in and of itself, but a marker which indicates another thing. When you see a sign for a street, the piece of metal is not what one travels but instead the road which the sign describes. When one hears the ringing of the phone, it is not a sign of the sound that asks for one’s attention but the conversation of which the sign makes you aware. The world loves signs more than it does truth, virtue signals and scams more than virtue itself.

Signs are secondary affairs, not the primary item of our interest. Considering this fact, we realize the Pharisees are not truly asking for the Kingdom of God, but instead for something much lessor. Moreover, in wanting the lesser thing they have forsaken that which is greater. They are, to use an imperfect illustration, like someone who might trip over a dollar to pick up a penny. 

Jesus, however, is not interested in the secondary things which often fixate the world. Instead, He is sincere. Rather than showing us a sign He actually shows us the Kingdom of God. The love which His imperfect creatures impress upon Him in Mark 8:2 is returned immediately with daily bread, but eternally with the River of Life.

In Genesis 22:1-19, we find the Sacrifice of Isaac, where Abraham is willing to forfeit the peaceful comfort of life with his son for some greater thing which God might have for him. On the face of it, this story might seem initially horrifying. However, God has never been in the business of loving death, but wanted to teach Abraham that if he really wants true goodness in life, for himself and his children, which includes Isaac, then they are going to have to fully entrust their lives to God. They are going to have to set aside the certainty of their small things for the eternal certainty of God. Abraham has to set aside his will for the teachings of God.

The principle of the Sacrifice of Isaac is quite simple. It is a question of courage to step into the broader truer life with God, even though it does not appear obvious on the front end. The courage found in the Sacrifice of Isaac was the same faith which embraced Jochebed as she placed Moses in a basket and entrusted him to God. It was the same virtue through which Esther stood before the throne of Persia, and Nehemiah who left the certainly of his servanthood to dawn the blood and sweat of Jerusalem. Ultimately, and incomparably, Jesus would show us the real manifestation of this courage when He descended into death, leaving the certainty of life, that He might come out victorious. The Lord has provided many times, but He expects His creatures to put forth effort and sacrifice the easiness of the world for the great charge of the Kingdom.

Those crowds who came with Jesus in Mark 8 possessed a willingness on some level to sacrifice the certainty of the world for the greater certainty of God. We now live in an age with barely any certainty at all. Therefore, it is all the more important that we should find it in our hearts, not the certainty of our design or even that of the world, but that which is of God. God has placed on this earth, that we might live honorably as His creatures who reflect His Image.

Our world is fallen, and I charge us today, rather than merely seeking to show signs to our world, that we aspire to raise up noble courage in our hearts to trust the great virtues of God in the world around us. Our world has designed its wiles and schemes in such a way that truth cannot be determined, that people cannot even understand what is good and true. Therefore, we must do the good work of the Kingdom and declare what is good and true, take the leap of faith which puts a real sacrifice on the line in assurance that our God is as noble as He revealed Himself to be.

[liberty1776]

Who is Antonio Gramsci?  He was an Italian Marxist (more accurately, an Italian communist), writing on political theory, sociology and linguistics.  His work focused on the role that culture and tradition plays in preventing communism from spreading through the West.

Gramsci was born in 1891 and died in 1937, the middle of seven children.  Hunchbacked, either due to a malformed spine from birth or a childhood accident, it is not clear.  One of the stories has him falling from the arms of a servant down a steep flight of stairs.  Though his family gave him up for dead, his aunt anointed his feet with oil from a lamp dedicated to the Madonna.  Ironic.

Continuously sickly, until the age of fourteen a coffin for him was kept at the ready in his bedroom.  His father was thrown in prison for political cause and his mother, somehow, kept the family alive.

Prior to leaving Sardinia for Turin and university, he was a nationalist – Sardinia for the Sardinians.  Upon arriving in Turin, he came upon the automotive factories of Fiat.  It was here that he found the class struggle: workers and bosses.

World War One made this clear: half a million Italian peasants died, while the profits of industrialists rose.  He left university and began writing.  He founded a newspaper: L’Ordine Nuovo, The New Order, with its first issue delivered on May Day 1919.  He was a founder and leader of the Communist Party of Italy, and a member of Parliament.

With Parliamentary immunity suspended by Mussolini, he was sent to prison.  Several years later, a prisoner exchange was proposed by the Vatican: send Gramsci to Moscow in exchange for a group of priests imprisoned in the Soviet Union.  Mussolini put a stop to these negotiations in early 1933.

It was during his time in prison when he wrote his famous Prison Notebooks, describing the contents as “Everything that Concerns People.”  It comprised over 2,800 handwritten pages.  Twenty-one of the notebooks bear the stamp of prison authorities.  Given the risk of censorship, he used bland terms in place of traditional Marxist terminology.

Though completed by 1935, these were only published in the years 1948 – 1951, and not in English until the 1970s.  By 1957, nearly 400,000 copies had been sold.

Suffering from various heart, respiratory and digestive diseases, he was eventually transferred to a prison hospital facility.  On April 25, 1937 – the same day that he received news that he would be released – he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died two days later.

Through his notebooks, he introduced several ideas in Marxist theory, critical theory, and educational theory.  Most important was the idea of Cultural Hegemony, which was the unifying idea of Gramsci’s work from 1917 until he died.

Cultural Hegemony: Why hadn’t the Marxist Revolution swept the West by the early twentieth century?  Gramsci suggested that capitalists did not maintain control simply coercively – as Marx would describe it – but also ideologically.  The values of the bourgeoisie were the common values of all.  These values helped to maintain the status quo, and limited any possibility of revolution.

While Lenin felt culture was ancillary to political objectives (as do many libertarians), Gramsci saw culture as the key.  The working class would need to develop a culture of its own, separate and distinct from the common values of the larger society.  Control their beliefs and you control the people.  This was only possible if the hegemony of the ruling class was in crisis.  

Hegemony is described as an order diffused throughout society in all institutional and private manifestations.  All tastes, morality, customs, including religious and political principles, are infused with its spirit.  This tone is set from the top – one class or group over other classes.  From Cammett:

The fundamental assumption behind Gramsci’s view of hegemony is that the working class, before it seizes State power, must establish its claim to be a ruling class in the political, cultural, and “ethical” fields.

There are three phases to the revolution in this regard: first, take claim to be the ruling class in culture; second, seize State power; third, transform completely the economic base.  You can decide how far along we are in this path.

A second important idea was Gramsci’s focus on Intellectuals.  Gramsci believed that the working class would have to develop their own intellectuals, with values that were critical of the status quo.  This would require the takeover of the educational establishment and institutions.  These intellectuals, through the educational establishment and the state, had almost free reign to push forward the revolutionary idea.

Gramsci’s idea of intellectuals is much broader than academicians and the like.  From the book Gramsci’s Politics, by Anne Sassoon, Gramsci identifies two groups of these intellectuals: organic intellectuals, coming from the working class, and traditional intellectuals – the clergy, philosophers, academicians.  This latter group presents a false air of continuity from their predecessors.  Today I would include thought leaders from entertainment, sports, business, and politics into one or the other of these two groups.

Gramsci is, perhaps, the foundational theorist for what we now call Cultural Marxism.  When it comes to the importance of the culture and the value of mass media in influencing the political and economic system of a country and economy, Gramsci’s work spurred the growth of an entire movement in the field of cultural studies.

Gramsci argued, and the Frankfurt School followed his lead, that the way for Marxists to transform the West was through cultural revolution: the idea of cultural relativism. The argument was correct, but the argument was not Marxist. The argument was Hegelian.

The Frankfurt School further developed the concept of Critical Theory.  Critical Theory teaches one to be critical of every prevailing norm, attitude, and cultural attribute in society; the purpose is to challenge power structures and hierarchies.  Spelling out precisely the discourse of tolerance that we are faced with today, Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School would write:

While firmly committed to global Communism, [Gramsci] knew that violence would fail to win the West. American workers would never declare war on their middle-class neighbors as long as they shared common Christian values.

The main weapons would be deception, manipulation and infiltration. Hiding their Marxist ideology, the new Communist warriors would seek positions of influence in seminaries, government, communities, and the media.

Gramsci agreed with Lenin that there was an inner force in man, driving him to the “Worker’s Paradise,” but he felt that the assumptions underlying this Marxian view were too basic and gratuitous.  Yes, the great mass of the world’s population was made up of workers, but this was insufficient, as Martin would note:

What became clear to [Gramsci], however, was that nowhere—and especially not in Christian Europe—did the workers of the world see themselves as separated from the ruling classes by an ideological chasm.

These workers would not rise up against their co-religionists, those with whom they shared culture, custom, and tradition.  They would certainly not offer a violent overthrow as long as these traditions were held in common.  Again, citing Martin:

Because no matter how oppressed they might be, the ‘structure’ of the working classes was defined not by their misery or their oppression but by their Christian faith and their Christian culture.

Gramsci found the logic of Marx as it found its home in Lenin to be futile and contradictory.  Was it any wonder that the only state in which Marxism took hold was the state which held it together by force and terror?  Without changing that formula, Marxism would have no future.

A common culture, grounded in Christianity, would always stand in the way, requiring ever-increasing terror…or requiring a different path.  Gramsci’s path.  Murray Rothbard noted the Gramscian “long march through our institutions” in 1992, writing so colorfully: “Yes, yes, you rotten hypocritical liberals, it’s a culture war!”

There would be no need for brute force – at least not on the front end; again, contrary to the general Marxist view.  Transform the enemy into the soldier you need; he will then do the rest.  Gramsci’s method would be more Machiavellian than Marxist; in the place of the Prince, it would be the party.

This method would eliminate the very possibility of a cultural resistance to the communist’s progressivism.  There would be no cultural force standing in its way.  As Gramsci believed human nature is not fixed and immutable, it would be the modern Machiavellian prince’s job to change human nature.

This method would eliminate the very possibility of a cultural resistance to the communist’s progressivism.  There would be no cultural force standing in its way.  As Gramsci believed human nature is not fixed and immutable, it would be the modern Machiavellian prince’s job to change human nature.

Destroy the old laws, the accustomed ways of living; inculcate new ways of thinking and speaking – in essence, introduce an entirely new language.  Language is the key to the mastery of consciousness.  Language can achieve what force never could.  Reform the morals; reform the intellect.  In this way, people who would otherwise never spend a minute on such things would become the most rabid soldiers.

A blunt force hammer would not work.  Ranting about a revolution or a dictatorship of the proletariat would only make enemies of the working class.  The educational system was the key. Gramsci’s path to revolution would take much longer than that proposed by Marx or Lenin, but it would be much more thorough and successful.

Use their rules against them: the democratic process, lobbying and voting, full parliamentary participation.  Behave just like the Western democrats – accept all political parties, forge alliances where convenient.  Unlike the majority of Marxists, Gramsci would make common cause with all leftists – communist and non-communist alike; every group with a bone to pick with tradition and Christian culture was an ally.  Knowingly or unknowingly, they would assist in the communist cause.  Martin writes:

Marxists must join with women, with the poor, with those who find certain civil laws oppressive. They must adopt different tactics for different cultures and subcultures. They must never show an inappropriate face. And, in this manner, they must enter into every civil, cultural and political activity in every nation, patiently leavening them all as thoroughly as yeast leavens bread.

[vide0-nasties]

hi there! you're a darling, eustacia is a babe. how about 2, 3, 11, 17, 21 questions for the ask thingy? (ps. your answer to 20 question was something. i didn't know i need this imagery, god bless you *furiously fans self*)

i'm blushing irl because you called eustacia a babe, i've seriously never lived before today!!! ALSO, real talk? i'm probably going to make that into a longer standalone bc holy shit it was fun to write

asra angst at the top bc i love dying.

3. How would your apprentice handle being so close tosomething that they desperately want, only to have it ripped away? What was it?

It comes back—all ofher, she comes back. Asra’s done it—he’s done the impossible, he’s given her back to her. Only moments ago, hewas a complete, but friendly stranger, and now—now—

“Asra,” she sobs,reaching for him. He looks so relieved, tears spilling from his eyes, and hebreaks down himself, hacking up his own sob, “Eustacia, oh, shit, fuck, thank god! Thank all of them—”

He tries to bury his face in her chest, her stomach, but shedoesn’t let him. No, she drags him up and kisses him so hard they will bothsurely wear bruises.

Everything. She remembers everything. Every little detail.His hand lies flat on her chest, over the heartbeat he so excruciatingly loves,and they cry against each other’s mouths. It’s been so long, too long. Neveragain. They’ll never be apart again. She won’t let it happen.

She’ll tear apart the fucking heavens with her bare hands before he’s made to hurt again.

“The Count?” she asks, between kisses. “He’s dead?”

“Lucio’s dead,” he promises her. “He’s dead, and he’s never coming back.”

Another sob rips from her, and she’s made even stupider andmore boneless by relief. “Nadia lives?”

“Nadi lives. She’s alive, I think she’s safe.”

Eustacia draws him back against her mouth, mistaking the wetfrom her nose and the sting in her eyes as tears. But when her body begins tojerk, disobeying her will, and something trickles from her ears, and her mouthfills with the unmistakable tang of blood…

NO, she wants toscream, but she is frozen in place. Her body stands rigid as her expressiondrops and goes hollow, blank, even wrapped around Asra.

NO! NO-NO-NO! WE HAVESUFFERED ENOUGH. HE HAS SUFFEREDENOUGH. NOT AGAIN, NOT THIS, NOT ASRA. NOTASRA. NOTASRANOTASRANOTASRANOTASRA—

“Eustacia? Eustacia?!Wh-what happened, you’re—why are you bleeding? Eustacia? You…can you hear me?! No, no-no-no, PLEASE,” hepanics, and his panic turns to anger, despair, heartbreak. All of it, writtenplainly on his face, and she can do nothing but watch and scream silentscreams. Agony so intense, it might’ve shattered her beyond repair, if Asradidn’t take it back.

#’s 2 (nsfw), 11, 17, and 21 under the cut!

2. Does your apprentice get flustered over anything? Whatmake them flustered? Do they turn red? Stumble over words?

To give herself some credit—not the overblown, clownishly arrogant kind of credit a person thatthinks poorly of themselves uses to make cover for their self-loathing—Eustaciais usually the one to throw someone off-balance.

But, then Doctor Julian ‘I’m Actually Taller Than You And,Also, Look At My Lovely Red Hair, Dashing Eyepatch, And Big Pretty Hands’Devorak breaks into her shop, and ever since that moment she’s hasn’t knownpeace.

What a fucking suckershe is.

The Rowdy Raven is in rare form tonight, packed to therafters and so loud you’d be lucky to hear a thought in the confines of yourown head. The fugitive and the witch are hardly worthy of note, tucked into a far-backbooth as they are. But they’re having their own party. The masquerade is soon,and everything is up in the air, down to the wire, and all to sea.

It’s a shame Eustacia’s never had a knack for divination,otherwise she would’ve foreseen Julian’s very pleasant, and handsy mood.

The absolute filthhe whispers in her ear. It would make a seasoned brothel girl blush. But, toher credit, it takes Julian slipping his hand down the front of her pants toreally begin to undo her. She remains tucked into his side—nose-to-nose, hisarm around her shoulders—wheezing jagged, nervous laughter. Even with his gloveon, his fingers feel amazing circlingher clit.

She has to be an obscene red from her navel to her chin, andshe knows she keeps trying to bunch up like a dead spider—crossing her legs, duckingher head, hugging her middle, or tryingto. Julian’s making such good arguments.

Her laughter rises to a wild pitch, one of her hands flyingup to cover her mouth when he removes his hand and sucks her slick off hisfingers. She knots a hand in his shirt and thinks her howling laughter willrattle her apart when he kisses her and purrs, “You are the best thing I have evertasted. I really think I might die if I don’t get to hear how you laugh whenyou cum.”

11. Talk about how your apprentice deals with emotions. Boththe ones they like to feel, and what they don’t like to feel.

Unfortunately, especially for Asra, Eustacia knows she isthe sort of person that either feels everythingat the height of their extremes, or she plays numb to cover what she does notwish to display.

Her elevated moods, the good and the manic, make her brassy,brazen. Difficult to stomach for long periods unless you’ve trained yourself towithstand them. In these states she’s loud. Overwhelming. Her energy isfrantic, and she’s too lost to it to remember things like volume control, ormonitoring her mouth, or keeping her hands from being destructive when shetalks with them.

Everything is exciting, and everything needs done right now, right this instant.

Sadness, fear, anxiety—they all become anger. Her teeth andher muscles clench like her fists. Her voice bottoms out and her eyes weighheavy and unforgiving on any and all that cross her path. She stops walking,and ends up stalking, prowling. She watches empty air and waits for a fight tocome to her. When it doesn’t, she wants to look for one.

She doesn’t remember her old life, what kind of historycould happen to produce a person like she is, but she wonders how often shegave into the urge. She wonders if she ever tried to smother the impulse, killthis ugly beast with her hands breaking its neck, like she tries to do now.

When she is overtaken by anger, or clued into the vulgarityof her good moods, she pulls away from herself, putting her mental reins underan iron hand. Her incorporeal self takes a step away from her physical body,needing time and space to right herself, and her expression slips into a coolmask. Her body quiets, starting with her hands.

Only once she has made herself as placid as unbroken glassdoes she return.

17. Can they bear pain? How much pain can they bear? Do theyhate it or do they like it ala our good Doctor?

There’s something mean inside her, something ugly, and itfeels good to feed it.

This is a bar she’s never been to, and never will again. Shepours a beer in the lap of a man she’s never met, and never will again.

Her head snaps to the side when his fist connects. Laughterpipes up her throat, and a crimson bubble of blood on her lips breaks apartwhen it exits. The world blurs when the brawl starts. Eustacia splits herknuckles open on whatever they catch, throws her elbows, crushes feet with herheels, launches her knees.

Starbursts of pain make fireworks explode behind her eyes.Her nose gets broken, her brow split, her jaw rocked. Her cackle is howlingwhen she feels a rib grind together—broken. She rears her head up, catchingsight of Asra’s white hair weaving through the violence. He wades inthoughtlessly, as if he’s done this more times than he can count, a dance thathe knows by heart.

His expression is almost as murder as hers is, but itblanches to rabbit-hearted terror when she wipes her mouth on her sleeve,pushed by the crush of bodies out the door, bar brawl turning street riot likelightning.

It feels like the ocean is sliding off her body, and shestands straighter, taller, broader, as dark as an ocean trench’s bed.

She spits her blood in the face of a man that floors her,his hand eclipsing her head to slam it into the coarse pavers. The side of herhead shreds, pebbling with blood. Asra finds her again, hands glowing dangerously.He grabs the man by the nape, and Eustacia is bombarded by the stench of burnthair, laughing when her attacker screeches and wheels away.

“Get up,” Asra wheezes, taking her wrists. “You have to getup. The guards are coming—get up!”

He’s able to haul her away, her arm flung over his shouldersand her steps sometimes catching. Her head’s fogged, and she’s a littleconfused.

“I was gone for fiveminutes,” he barks. “Five minutes, and you start a riot. What were you evendoing?! What if you got stabbed?! Youcould’ve died, Eustacia—you could’ve died—!Do you know what that would do tome?!”

“Felt good,” she croaks, trying to wipe at her mouth, endingup hitting her nose and sending sparks into her vision. “Felt so good, getting—gettingthe pressure off. Don’t feel so badnow. Always feel so bad, like I’msick. It never stops.”

21. What’s their relationship history look like? What weretheir previous datemates like? Do they have a type?

At thirteen, she had her first kiss, and ever since thatmoment she was ruined. Completely andforever, in fact! When the girl that kissed her immediately stood up and left,scrubbing her mouth on her shirt and retching melodramatically, Eustacia was tooheartbroken to understand this was the beginning of a trend.

Through the rest of her teens, she would find herself drowning in romances—incredibly powerful,painfully short romances. The actualperson mattered very little, she went for all types if they spared a kind wordor a sweet touch on her.

There was a green-eyed woodcutter’s son that wooed herrelentlessly for weeks, and left her minutes after they finished fucking in hismother’s woodshed. A fellow witch in the Sisters that only met her in the dark,who went around calling Eustacia pathetic and creepy behind her back. A poetwith long, silky hair that introduced her husband to Eustacia the way wardensreleased hounds on escaped prisoners.

Her last ‘real’ romance, if you could’ve called a single onereal, was an opera singer. Renaldo Sarintoni, a man twice her age with a tenoras sweet as church bells. She’d gone to two of his shows, and after one of themhand-delivered a bouquet of roses to his door.

She’d scraped and scraped to afford those roses, and she thoughtshe might burst into tears when he ran his fingers over the petals and calledthem beautiful. What a sonorous voice you have, he marveled, do you sing?

Not much—she knew three arias and countless pub tunes—but,for Renaldo, she cleared her throat and sang a piece of a love song for him—libiamo, libiamo ne’lieti calici che labelleza infiora. The sparkle in his eyes was incredible.

That was probably her most intense love. He’d swept her offher feet, dressed her in fine things, wasted money on her to the point of embarrassment,took her to beautiful restaurants. They talked endlessly, for hours, abouteverything. She never wanted children, but might’ve had his.

Three months of otherworldly loving, until they woke up onemorning and he said, “I’m sorry. But…”

As badly as she wanted her heart to scar over and feelnothing, it didn’t happen. Left and right, she continued to fall in love, butno longer did she allow herself to wander into a place where her misshapen littleheart could get broken again. There was little to it left, and she wanted it toherself.

For a time, she fought herself, her nature, her ways. Shesnapped at suitors, laughed off ladies, and heaped scorn upon romantics that sniffedher out like bloodhounds.

And then, Asra found her.

She will end up wishing she hadn’t fought that love so hard.

[darkarfs]

On Thursday night, President Donald Trump flew to Montana to headline a rally for Matt Rosendale, the Republican nominee against Sen. Jon Tester (D) this November. Trump's speech was, like most of his addresses, a remarkable mix of stream-of-consciousness thinking, fact-challenged claims and demagoguery.

Normally, I go through the transcript of Trump's speeches to pick out 30 or 40 (or 50) of the most eye-popping lines, the sentences that stood out most to me for whatever reason. I tend to take a light-hearted approach to this exercise because Trump's word-salad tendencies when speaking extemporaneously are exacerbated when reading a transcript of his speeches.Today, I am going to take a different approach.Trump's speech on Thursday night contained a number of genuinely dangerous lines, lines no president before Trump would even considering uttering among a small group of friends -- much less in front of thousands of people. Below, then, are the 11 most dangerous lines Trump said last night -- and why each one poses a real risk to the body populace.

1. "She gets special treatment under the Justice Department. ... Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. She gets special treatment under the Justice Department." Trump is talking here, of course, about Hillary Clinton. He's interrupted in his attack by chants of "lock her up" from the crowd. Trump's undermining of the Justice Department -- which he has done on an almost-daily basis since winning the White House -- is deeply dangerous to how people perceive those who are tasked with enforcing our laws. When the President of the United States insists the Justice Department is biased and can't be trusted, it erodes one of the long-standing pillars of civil society. 2. "It's a rigged deal, folks. It's a rigged deal. I used to say it. It's a rigged deal. It's a disgrace." It's not entirely clear to me what Trump is referring to here -- whether he's reiterating that the FBI is biased or, more likely, casting aspersions on the whole system of government. Either way, he's fomenting (for political gain) the resentment that lots of people feel toward their government and toward societal establishment more generally.Trump is provoking people to believe that there is some "they" out there working to keep you down. And enjoying doing it.

3. "But we signed a wonderful paper saying they're going to denuclearize their whole thing. It's going to all happen." Trump's assertion that North Korea has agreed to denuclearize and that "it's going to all happen" is a massive overstatement of the facts. What Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un signed in Singapore last month was a sort of outline of an agreement. There was nothing binding in it. And this week we got word that

satellites have picked up what looks to be more construction at a ballistic missile site in North Korea

. So yeah, this version of the North Korea story via Trump misses some major points. 4. "They are so dishonest. Fake news. They're fake news media." 8 days ago, a man walked into the Capital Gazette newsroom in Maryland and murdered five staffers. His motives were his own -- he held a grudge against the paper for its coverage of a criminal harassment claim against him -- and had nothing to do with Trump's repeated rhetorical attack on the media as "fake." Full stop. That said, one might think that in the wake of such violence committed against reporters, the President of the United States might be more mindful of savaging the media to a crowd of his supporters. That would be the responsible thing to do. That isn't what Trump did. 5. "You know what? Putin's fine. He's fine. We're all fine. We're people." This is a dangerously naive view of the Russian president. First of all, the US intelligence community has unanimously said that Russia actively meddled in the 2016 election. Under Putin, Russia invaded the Ukraine and annexed the Crimean peninsula. Then there's the fact that people critical of Putin -- including journalists -- keep winding up murdered under very suspicious circumstances. These are not the actions of a "fine" person. 6. "They're fake. They're fake. They quote sources -- 'A source within the Trump organization said' -- a source. They don't have a source." Trump's impugning of the media's use of unnamed sources is part of a broader attempt on his part to undermine a free and independent media. For those who cheer that effort -- and insist the media deserves what they get -- I would ask you a simple question: Have you ever seen what life is like for the citizenry in a country in which the media is state-run? 7. "A vote for the Democrats in November is a vote to let MS-13 run wild in our communities." Campaign rhetoric can be a bit over the top. But this feels beyond the pale to me. Trump is purposely weaponizing fear here. Democrats do not, in fact, want to let the violent MS-13 gang "run wild in our communities." But Trump knows that the image of tattooed thugs marauding your neighborhood strikes terror in the hearts of many people. And that terror is useful to him in a political context. 8. "Democrats want anarchy, they really do, and they don't know who they're playing with, folks." Two things here. First, Trump is saying Democrats want "anarchy" -- total chaos to be loosed on the United States. Again, weaponizing fear. Second, the threat inherent in "they don't know who they're playing with" is purposeful and dangerous. If the 2018 or 2020 election is regarded by people as a war between the rule of law and anarchy or between war and peace, then there will be people out there who feel as though using any means necessary to win is totally justified. And that is a scary proposition.

Why Donald Trump hiring Bill Shine should be a much bigger deal

9. "I said it the other day, yes, she is a low-IQ individual, Maxine Waters. I said it the other day. High -- I mean, honestly, she's somewhere in the mid-60s, I believe that." What Trump is saying: A prominent African-American female politician is very dumb. And, no none of this is by accident.

10. "Winning the Electoral College is very tough for a Republican, much tougher than the so-called 'popular vote,' where people vote four times, you know. Much tougher. Much, much tougher." Study after study has shown that claims of widespread voter fraud and abuse are simply not borne out by the facts. Which doesn't stop Trump from pushing the idea to his base by insisting that people "vote four times" in the popular vote. And if you don't think trying to disqualify the results of an election without evidence is dangerous, then you aren't thinking straight -- or at all. 11. "We will take that little kit and say, but we have to do it gently. Because we're in the '#MeToo' generation so I have to be very gentle. And we will very gently take that kit and we will slowly toss it, hoping it doesn't hit her and injure her arm even though it only weighs probably two ounces. And we will say, I will give you a million dollars to your favorite charity, paid for by Trump, if you take the test so that it shows you're an Indian." Truly remarkable. In his usual riff about the questions surrounding Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren's claims of Native-American heritage, Trump shows his true colors on the #MeToo movement. He seems to suggest that the movement, which grew out of a series of news stories of powerful men sexually harassing women, is about political correctness run rampant. Trump seems to think -- or at least say -- that he has to be careful not to offend the #MeToo movement by throwing a DNA heritage kit at Warren. Which both deeply misunderstands what the #MeToo movement is about and denigrates the entire idea of women feeling safe to come forward with allegations of sexual misconduct. Be afraid, folks. The would-be dictator wants his  very real fascism, and it seems ever-likely that he’s getting it.