#and we DO NOT discuss the awful racism in them nearly enough

[sluttysuperheroes]

LOTR film trilogy doesn’t get enough hate imo. We’ve been looking at those films through rose colored glasses for way too long. The fact that every single speaking character is white is already gross enough but not only that, they wouldn’t even hire extras of color. Truly despicable and vile. And the fact that the Uruk-hai were modeled after Māori warriors and that’s the only thing you could call very generously call poc “representation” in the entire trilogy is absolutely disgusting, especially considering the films were shot on Māori land. Just an absolute slap in the face and I fully believe Peter Jackson should issue a formal apology to the Māori people. Actually I believe he should be hunted for blood sport.

[causeiwanttoandican]

The Times

Prince William’s close friends on what makes him tick — and why he’s not trapped

March 20 2021, 6:00pm

As the world devours the Harry and Meghan interview, what’s going on with the brother who was left behind? He’s embracing his destiny, William’s close friends tell the Sunday Times royal correspondent, Roya Nikkhah

Next month Prince William will celebrate his tenth wedding anniversary — the day he became a duke and embarked on the most formative decade of his life. Back then, the tentative 28-year-old newlywed was not ready to devote himself entirely to royal duties. A decade on, he is in a very different position.

The job of being the heir to the heir to the throne, of finding a balance between life and duty, is difficult at the best of times. These are not the best of times. In their bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey this month the Duke and Duchess of Sussex accused the royal family and the institution around it of racism and callous disregard for a suicidal newcomer, among many other damning charges. Harry the spare also declared that William was trapped within “the system … My brother can’t leave that system, but I have.”

In the immediate aftermath of the interview William was “reeling”, a source close to the duke says. “His head is all over the place on it.” Four days after the Sussexes had their say, he hit back during an engagement with the Duchess of Cambridge at a school in east London. Asked about accusations of racism, William retorted with restrained fury: “We’re very much not a racist family.” He also confirmed that he hadn’t spoken to Harry yet, “but will do”. By the weekend it emerged they had “been in contact”.

William is thought to have been less than thrilled a few days later when that conversation made global headlines after the American presenter Gayle King, a close friend of the Sussexes, revealed live on air that it had not been an easy chat: “I did actually call them to see how they were feeling,” she told viewers. “Harry has talked to his brother and he had talked to his father too. The word I was given was that those conversations were not productive.” The intervention prompted a senior royal source to say that “none of the households will be giving a running commentary on private conversations”.

A close friend of both brothers says Harry’s “trapped” comment was “way off the mark”, insisting that William does not see it that way. “He has a path set for him and he’s completely accepting of his role. He is very much his grandmother’s grandson in that respect of duty and service.”

When the Queen turned 90 nearly five years ago William admitted “the challenge” that “occupies a lot of thinking space” is how to “modernise and develop” the royal family, and make it “relevant in the next 20 years’ time”. Twenty years now seems like a very long time. In the hours and days after the Oprah broadcast, William was at the heart of all discussions with the Queen and the Prince of Wales about how to respond to the Sussexes. He was keen that the issue of race should be acknowledged in the Queen’s statement as an area of particular concern that “will be addressed”.

William has always railed against being a “ribbon-cutter royal” and the issues he champions — mental health, battling racism in football, homelessness and his ramped-up eco-warrior role — are a window into where the future King William V will take the House of Windsor. A friend says: “He’s a small-c conservative. He values tradition and the need to go around the country, but he realises he can make a difference beyond traditional royal duties.”

Today royal popularity is, to put it mildly, in a state of flux, but William’s strategy has been working. Post-Oprah, he ranks just below the Queen at the top of a YouGov poll of royals. Not so long ago such a position looked like a long shot, when the “workshy Wills” and “reluctant royal” tags plagued him and he was clocking up fewer days of royal work than his nonagenarian grandparents. Pictures of him hitting the ski slopes and clubs of Swiss resort Verbier in March 2017, missing a Commonwealth service that even the Duke of York flew back for, didn’t help.

After the lasting PR gold dust of the Cambridges’ 2011 wedding and the births of Prince George and Princess Charlotte, it was the first public nosedive for William, who was still working as an air ambulance pilot. “That pissed him off,” a friend says. “He was leaving home at 5.30am, getting home after dark and saving lives in between, but people were still being critical of his commitment to his [other] job.” William was based at Cambridge airport with East Anglian Air Ambulance for two years, where he was on call for “some very sad, dark moments”, often working “on very traumatic jobs involving children”. He later acknowledged that “after I had my own children … the relation between the job and the personal life was what really took me over the edge, and I started feeling things that I have never felt before”. But it was a job he loved, because of “working in a team … that’s something that my other job doesn’t necessarily do. You are more out there on your own.”

A former royal aide says: “Immediately after their wedding he had a very clear idea of the pace at which he wanted to take things.” William was adamant he wouldn’t curtail his day jobs, first as an RAF search and rescue helicopter pilot in Anglesey and then with the air ambulance. “If you’re not careful, duty can weigh you down an awful lot at an early age,” he said, insisting he didn’t “lie awake waiting or hoping” to be king. He delayed full-time royal duties until the autumn of 2017, when, acknowledging the Cambridges’ future required more time at “monarchy HQ”, they moved from Norfolk to London and George started school.

He’d had to fight his corner for the air ambulance role. A source close to William reveals “there were lots of raised eyebrows in the Palace when he wanted to do that. While the Queen and his father backed him, some senior courtiers questioned whether it was becoming of a future king to be doing a middle-class role, hanging out with ordinary people. They thought he wouldn’t stick it out, he’d find it boring, or was doing it out of stubbornness to put off royal duties. He was pretty bloody-minded about it, and determined that other people’s expectations in the media or the system shouldn’t get in the way of his own values.” In the wake of Harry and Meghan’s interview much has been speculated about the extent to which royal life is dictated by Palace officials, but it is clear that William has managed to forge his own path. Who knows how high those senior courtiers’ eyebrows rose in 2019, when William spent three weeks shadowing the spooks of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ to learn how they combat terrorism. He insisted on being called “Will” and lunching in the canteen every day.

Those closest to the duke say his resistance to the idea of full-time royal duties stemmed not only from a desire to achieve something for himself but also from a fear of the impact on his family life. Miguel Head worked alongside the prince for ten years until 2018, as William, Kate and Harry’s communications secretary and later as William’s private secretary. “In his role everyone’s going to tell you you’re marvellous,” Head says. “The RAF and air ambulance jobs were about knowing what his abilities were, what he was good at in his own right. Without that he’d still be hankering for something that was his own.” After children came along he says William developed a “visceral determination to give them a life of consistency and privacy that were missing for large parts of his own childhood”.

Another close aide says the plan enabling the Cambridges to have a few years of “normal” married life, away from the full-time glare of the royal spotlight, paid dividends: “For years, the battles around privacy and paparazzi intrusion were all-consuming. He wanted to know, could we build them a credible plan allowing them a family life while slowly increasing the profile of official life? It took years to get there, but the success of that plan allowed him to be confident and content in his role. He’s not worried about his kids’ privacy any more and he has been able to be the kind of dad he wants to be.”

“Marriage maketh the man,” a friend says. “Catherine’s groundedness has been the critical anchor. And where his relationship with the media was once all fury and frustration, he now understands using the power of modern media, so the public feel they’re getting enough access.”

The children’s birthdays are marked with photographs — often taken by the Duchess of Cambridge — and there has been a noticeable increase in their public appearances of late. While not “officially” staged, William was happy to let George and Charlotte be photographed at their first Aston Villa match with Mum and Dad in 2019. Pandemic set pieces have shown the family clapping for the NHS on the steps of Anmer Hall, their Norfolk home, and, before Christmas, their first red-carpet appearance together for an evening at the panto with key workers and their children.

As they celebrate their anniversary on April 29, friends who joined the Cambridges on their wedding day tell me the partnership’s equal footing is key to its success. “They’ve got a solid relationship and she gives him confidence,” one says. “There is no jealousy, no friction, they are happy for each other’s successes.” In private William talks as passionately about Kate’s work as his own campaigns, and takes pride in her growing confidence on the public stage.

William has said his grandmother’s approach to being head of state is to take “more of a passive role. She’s above politics and is very much away from it.” He doesn’t plan to meddle in party politics, but he was not happy about the unenviable position the government put the Queen in with the 2019 proroguing of parliament, which was later ruled to be unlawful and forced an apology from Boris Johnson to the monarch. Constitutionally the Queen had no alternative other than to act on the advice of her government, but in William’s reign there will be “more private, robust challenging of advice”. His last three private secretaries — Christian Jones, Simon Case, now the cabinet secretary, and Head — had all worked in government departments, helping William to keep his finger on the political pulse. The new incumbent, the Whitehall heavyweight Jean-Christophe Gray, who served as David Cameron’s spokesman, continues in that vein.

The former Conservative leader Lord Hague of Richmond was last year appointed as chairman of the Royal Foundation to develop William’s work on mental health, the environment and a raft of new support programmes for key workers. “People internationally and nationally respect his credibility and knowledge on these issues,” Hague says. “He’s very persuasive. You only see that behind the scenes. He knows what he wants and he goes out to get it.”

Charlie Mayhew, chief executive of the conservation charity Tusk, has known William since he was 20. In 2005 Tusk and Centrepoint, the homelessness charity championed by Princess Diana, were the first patronages William took on. “In those early years I kept having to pinch myself to remember how young he was,” Mayhew says. “He was much more mature than his age and very aware of his destiny coming down the track. He had a sincerity, but never without wicked humour. His teasing is merciless.”

William knows some people see his passion for conservation as a posh man’s part-time hobby, but Mayhew says the duke’s “genuine and huge knowledge” undermines that view. “He’ll call and WhatsApp to flag up something that I haven’t even seen in the conservation space. He can be impatient to get things done.” Last year William launched the Earthshot prize, a £50 million Nobel-style environmental award to galvanise solutions to global problems over the next decade. He believes “conservation and the environment … shouldn’t be a luxury, it’s a necessity”, Mayhew says. “That’s the drum he wants to beat. He’s got a megaphone and wants to use it in the most constructive way. He speaks for that next generation and I think they can relate to it.”

A turning point for William was his 2015 official visit to China, one of the world’s largest consumers of ivory, where he met President Xi and condemned the illegal wildlife trade as a “vicious form of criminality”. Unlike his father, who has refused to visit the People’s Republic over its human rights record and treatment of Tibet, William’s view was that despite the UK’s fractious relationship with China, “we’ve got to engage”.

“It was very political, raising the illegal wildlife trade in China. I’m sure the diplomats were having all sort of nightmares in advance,” says Mayhew, who joined the duke in China. “But he was gathering greater confidence that he had the ability to be a mouthpiece for the issue.” Mayhew reveals that while William was visiting Japan before China, he still hadn’t secured a meeting with Xi. “But when the Chinese saw all the high-level meetings he was having in Japan, they changed their minds and Xi made time for him.” Later that year, as Xi began a UK state visit, William appeared on Chinese television condemning the ivory trade. Two years later China banned the trade.

In 2018 he spent months prepping for his most high-stakes overseas visit yet, to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories that summer. Navigating the diplomatic tightrope walk between Jerusalem and the West Bank, he visited a Palestinian refugee camp in Ramallah. As he travelled back to Jerusalem, he changed his speech for a reception with young Israelis and Palestinians to strengthen his solidarity with the latter: “My message tonight is that you have not been forgotten … The United Kingdom stands with you.” It was a bold move, but both sides hailed his visit a success and the officials breathed a sigh of relief. To the delight of the travelling press pack, William’s engagements on the final day were brought forward, allowing the diplomat duke and president of the Football Association to land back in the UK in time to watch England’s World Cup tie.

Ask him if he’s a peacemaker and William will laugh, saying Kate is the mediator. But according to a source close to William and Harry, his bridge-building skills were deployed in the lead-up to Harry and Meghan’s wedding in 2018, when tensions in the Kensington Palace household, then still shared by the brothers, were running high: “Every time there was a drama, or a member of staff on the verge of quitting, William would personally try and sort it out.”

As the brothers clashed more over the substance and style of their work, and the family hierarchy that William is a stickler for but Harry is less keen on, a split was inevitable. When they finally divided their households in March 2019, it had been a long time coming. But he never thought that a year later his brother would up sticks for America.

The pair went for a long walk to clear the air after the “Sandringham summit” when the Megxit deal was hammered out, but did not part shores as friends. What upset William the most was Harry and Meghan’s surprise launch of their “Sussex Royal” website before the summit, which featured their blueprint wish list of a part-time, commercial royal future. Later, when the Queen decreed they could no longer use “royal” in their future ventures, their website hit back with this bold statement: “While there is not any jurisdiction by The Monarchy … over the use of the word ‘Royal’ overseas, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex do not intend to use ‘Sussex Royal’ … or … ‘Royal’ …” Both “the content and that it’s still online is staggering”, a senior royal source says. “That was it for William, he felt they’d blindsided the Queen in such an insulting and disrespectful way,” says a source close to him, who reveals it was still at the forefront of William’s mind at the Commonwealth Day service one year ago. It was the Sussexes’ final engagement as working royals, and the froideur between them and the rest of the family was unmistakable.

It is a year since the Sussexes left for California and William misses Harry. “Once he got over the anger of how things happened, he was left with the absence of his brother,” an aide says. “They shared everything about their lives, an office, a foundation, meetings together most days and there was a lot of fun along the way. He’ll miss it for ever.” A close friend says William “definitely feels the pressure now it’s all on him — his future looks different because of his brother’s choices, it’s not easy.” Another friend says: “It’s still raw. He’s very upset by what’s happened, though absolutely intent that he and Harry’s relationship will heal in time.”

After lobbing bombs in his Oprah interview, Harry said: “I love William to bits … We’ve been through hell together … we have a shared experience … The relationship is space at the moment, and time heals all things, hopefully.” Harry would be wise not to set his stopwatch.

The first test will come this summer, when the brothers could be reunited for a series of family engagements including the Duke of Edinburgh’s 100th birthday and the Queen’s birthday parade in June. In July they are scheduled to unveil a statue of their mother at Kensington Palace, marking what would have been Diana’s 60th birthday, an emotionally charged occasion with the world watching.

While a chasm has opened up between the brothers, William has grown closer to the Queen and Prince Charles. He has helped them to navigate their way through Megxit, Prince Andrew’s removal from public life following the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and, now, the Oprah controversy. “That has changed the way the Queen sees him and values his input,” a courtier says. William also feels his relationship with his grandmother has “massively improved” in recent years and their views are “more aligned than ever”.

Friends say there has also been a “renaissance” in William and Charles’s relationship. “As the years passed there were strains imposed by the system — money, work, competition, Diana,” one says. “Part of William’s evolution is that as he has become closer to his father, he sees their similarities. At William’s wedding there was a gag in one of the speeches that he was more like his father than he’d ever admit, which made a lot of us laugh. As their respective destinies get closer, it weighs more heavily on them and strengthens the bond. The rift with Harry has also brought them closer.”

William is said to hate “flummery”, though the role of future king comes with plenty of bowing and scraping. But in 2017, for the first time publicly, he didn’t get his way. As a new parent worried about rising teenage suicide rates, he had spent a year convening a Cyberbullying Taskforce with big cheeses from tech and social media giants including Facebook, Snapchat, Apple, Google and Twitter. He wanted them to adopt industry-wide guidelines creating safer online spaces for children. According to William the meetings at Kensington Palace got “fruity” and the tech giants didn’t come close to the change he wanted. He was furious.

Tessy Ojo, chief executive of the Diana Award youth charity, sat on the taskforce. “He was deeply disappointed,” she says. “He didn’t come into it as ‘the duke’, he gave emotional pleas as a father.” William has since publicly condemned social media giants for their “false choice of profits over values” and privately offered support to the family of Molly Russell, who took her life at 14 after viewing images of self-harm online. Ojo believes it is William’s “lived experience of the fragility of life that guides the work he does”.

It also shapes the way he and Kate are raising their family. William has said he is determined that the grandchildren Diana never knew should “know who she was and that she existed”. He “constantly” talks to his children “about Granny Diana” at bedtime, so that they know “there are two grandmothers in their lives”. Earlier this month on Mother’s Day, Kensington Palace’s social media feeds published George, Charlotte and Louis’s cards paying tribute to “Granny Diana”, revealing it is an annual ritual for the Cambridge children. After a difficult few weeks for William, a line in Charlotte’s card provided poignant insight into how he is feeling: “Papa is missing you.”

He is on course to be a more modern monarch than any before him, but William is still a creature of habit at heart. He has the same tight circle of friends from his schooldays, one of whom says that, with William, “it’s all about trust and loyalty”. He plays five-a-side football in his Villa socks when he can, goes to the Chelsea Harbour Club gym he went to as a child with his mother and has a “smart casual” public uniform of chinos, jacket, blue shirt and no tie.

“William’s not trying to be down with the kids,” a friend says. “He never wants to be painted as irrelevant or dull, though he’s allergic to being compared to celebrities. The public doesn’t always get to see his funny side, but otherwise he’s the same in private as in public. He once said, ‘I’ll be in the public eye all my life. I can’t hide who I am because I’ll be found out.’ ”

In 2019, during a visit to a youth homelessness charity supporting LGBT people, William was asked how he would feel if one of his children was gay. “Absolutely fine,” he replied. “I fully support whatever decision they make, but it does worry me from a parent’s point of view how many barriers, hateful words, persecution and discrimination might come.” Such a personal exchange was a radical departure from royal engagement small talk. But William, the first in his family to be photographed for the cover of a gay magazine, had personally put the issue on the agenda.

As president of Bafta he gave the academy a diplomatic dressing down in his speech at last year’s ceremony, expressing his “frustration” over the lack of diversity: “In 2020, and not for the first time in the last few years, we find ourselves talking again about the need to do more to ensure diversity in the sector and in the awards process — that simply cannot be right in this day and age.” The 2021 nominees announced this month suggest his words hit home.

William “thinks the public look to him to keep royal work looking modern”, a confidante says. “The Queen and Prince of Wales are providing continuity and stability. He’s carving out his own relationship with diverse communities. He sees it all as a way of doing things now that will help a smooth transition when the time comes.”

Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, as a former frontline worker himself, William has led the royal charge supporting key workers. “Now, more than ever, he knows what his role in public life is, and he sees the value in it,” a close aide says. Chatting to NHS workers in January, William said: “Something that I noticed from my brief spell flying the air ambulance … is that when you see so much death and so much bereavement, it does impact how you see the world … as a … darker, blacker place.” Soon after the first lockdown was announced, the Cambridges’ Royal Foundation launched Our Frontline, a round-the-clock mental health and bereavement service for key workers.

Miguel Head says the future King William will continue to campaign on his big issues: “I can’t see him backing away from causes he’s passionate about. And while he’s not someone who loves ceremony, he knows the importance of it. When he gets the top job he won’t do away with it all. He’s mindful the monarchy represents something timeless that’s above all of us, and many people like the magic and theatre of it.”

Roya Nikkhah

Roya is royal correspondent at The Sunday Times. Over more than a decade she has covered royal events for the BBC, interviewed the Prince of Wales and Prince Harry and presented the films Prince William, Monarch in the Making and Meghan and Harry: The Baby Years.

[agent-cupcake]

Hey AC! I love your blog and was wondering if I could get your opinion on something. I've seen some people complaining that Ingrid and Hilda are treated by the fandom, with Ingrid stans saying that Hilda is also racist towards Almyrans (which, granted, she is) but doesn't get nearly as much hate about it as Ingrid does. But personally I feel like their attitudes and the way they react towards Dedue/Cyril are wildly different and Hilda generally seems less hateful/irrational about it. Thoughts?

This is... kind of a touchy topic... I like it though! It’s worth discussing, especially since I feel like it’s broke criticism to simply deflect blame onto a character in order to prop up another.  Full and obvious disclosure: I very much dislike Ingrid and very much love Hilda. That said, I don’t think it’s fair to compare them for the sake of which is worse. I fall into the trap of character criticism through comparison far too often and it's not really valid unless you can fully explore each character in their own right beforehand. Which is why, while writing this, I came to the conclusion that the ways these two characters are interpreted and the reason people view their racist tendencies differently has far more to do with the characters themselves than their actual beliefs.

From first impressions to subsequent playthroughs, this is pretty much how I feel about Ingrid: she brings up her hatred of the Duscur people and Dedue unprompted and uncontested several times at the very beginning of the game, putting it front and center to her character. This is important, it sets a foundational component for how I could come to view her. According to her introduction, she is honorable and respectful, a model lady knight trope. But, as mentioned, she's really racist. Literally standing around thinking about how awful it is that Dimitri would trust a man of Duscur because they are all bad people. Yikes. And nobody calls her on it. Again, this is very important for perception. People judge Sylvain for his bad behavior in a much more harsh way than they do Ingrid for her vitriolic loathing for another classmate who we have seen as nothing but respectful. It's weird. And then, despite the fact that her close friend Sylvain was able to reason out that it’s not possible for the Duscur people to be at fault for the Tragedy, despite the fact that the prince of the country she supposedly hopes to serve with unwavering respect and loyalty has made it clear that he does not believe that Dedue or Duscar are responsible for the Tragedy, and despite the fact that Dimitri, her close friend and the one most affected by the Tragedy (seriously, she lost a guy she might have married and he lost his best friend, mother, and watched his father be killed in front of his eyes) continuously insists that neither Dedue nor Duscur are at fault, she loudly and openly believes that the ensuing massacre of Duscur was deserved and Dedue is inherently culpable simply because of his race. Her motivations for this hatred feel even more cheap considering her dogged hero worship for Glenn was born out of the fact that she was promised to him, making the fact that she’d use his death as reason enough for the destruction of countless innocent lives even more unsympathetic in my eyes. I mean, seriously, she was around 13 and he was older than her, how close could they have truly been? Dimitri says they were in love, but she was a child. Abandoning my modern sensibilities about age of consent or whatever, kids at that age don't have the emotional or mental capability. Maybe this is just nitpicking, but I have a very hard time caring about that relationship. But, if her actual justification is because of what happened to Faerghus as a result of the Tragedy and feels duty-bound as a knight to find justice through the systematic destruction of the Duscur people, then it just circles back to confusion considering the future leader of said country doesn't hold Duscur or Dedue responsible. The importance of perception comes in because despite these paper thin excuses and her seemingly willfully ignorant hatred, she is never challenged on her racist beliefs. The reason she seems to change her mind about Dedue and consider that maybe excusing a genocide is wrong stems from guilt that Dedue continuously comes to her aid in battle at the potential cost of his own life. I can understand, to a certain extent, why she might feel the way she does. But, again, I have such a hard time with any justification when nobody that she's close to is even nearly as hateful as her, there is plenty of evidence (evidence that the people close to her have found!) to provide a very reasonable counterclaim to Duscur's guilt, and that none of that even matters when it would require her to openly contradict the prince of her country to make the claim that Dedue was in any way complicit in the Tragedy. Which would be fine if she wasn't established as the model Lady Knight archetype, which also brings us into Ingrid's moral high horse. Admittedly, I hate the Lady Knight trope. I have a significant bias against these types of characters. However, I really do think that this moral crusade is where she lost me completely. Without even a shred of empathy or self awareness, she lectures Sylvain about his shitty behavior even though their circumstances are at least somewhat similar and he has his reasons (bad ones, maybe, but ones worth understanding if she actually cares about him), she lectures Felix about not being interested in knightly endeavors (an aspect of his character that is born of the trauma she has appropriated), and she lectures Claude about behavior that is befitting of a man in his position. Not because she cares about the girls Sylvain is hurting, not because she thinks there are any grave stakes from Felix choosing to do his own thing, and not because she knows that Claude's behavior affects his ability to lead, but because she doesn't like these behaviors and thinks they should be fixed. Yet, at the same time, she believes Dedue deserved to lose his family, country, and culture based on his birth and nobody ever does anything to morally correct her, it is something she eventually is forced to acknowledge on her own. It's frustrating, infuriating even, that the game lets her get away with being so grossly hypocritical. And, all the while, she is being painted as sympathetic. Again, I have a hard time feeling sympathy for her about Glenn, and I certainty don't feel sympathetic towards her issues about marriage because there's never any actual tension there. Of course she won't be forced to marry, she's a Lady Knight. Beyond being unsympathetic, I also find her massively unlikable. Awful design, poor voice direction, food-loving-as-a-personality-trait, the fact that she's written as one of those stock "feminist" characters who hate makeup and girly things until it benefits them, and constantly butting in on other characters to give her opinion without taking any criticism herself are all aspects that I just personally dislike. Ultimately, Ingrid being racist is only a symptom of the many reasons her character is one of my least favorites. Most of these points can be countered by someone who doesn't take issue with the things that annoy me and to point out that Ingrid DOES get over her racist beliefs. It's not fair to say that she doesn't change but, for me, the damage was already done by the time she became tolerable so I still have a hard time appreciating her. My assumption would be that there are a lot of other people who feel similarly to me regarding their dislike of Ingrid so they focus on one easy character flaw, her being racist at the beginning of the game, as a reason to validate their dislike of her overall.

On the other hand, Hilda's racism isn't a main trait of her character. It's related to her overarching character flaws, but she doesn't bring it up unprompted and can actually be pretty much missed without the Cyrill supports. Like you said, Hilda does seem less hateful and irrational, it doesn't take willful malice and an active rejection of reason for Hilda to dislike the Almyrans, they pose a genuine and provable threat to her family and territory, seemingly senselessly testing the borders and throwing away lives for the sake of conquest. To be clear, her "you're not like those OTHER Almyrans" schtick is legitimately nasty. Her behavior is gross and condescending and it really underscores the fact that Hilda is ignorant, lazy, inconsiderate, and incredibly comfortable in her privilege. She accepts what she's been told at face value because she's too lazy to look into it further. Cyrill does tell her she's stupid to think that way, though. Which is satisfying because Hilda in those supports is insufferable, it really highlights the worst aspects of her character, dismissive, manipulative, and very selfish. However, for me, she's also very likeable. I'm not interested in going over my opinions on her like I did with Ingrid as I don’t feel it’s as important to my point but a few reasons I really like her is because I think Hilda has a fantastic design, cute supports, amazing voice work, and is secretly sweet in a way that absolutely tickles my fancy. I am sure many people do not agree with me, which is fine. Additionally, just as Ingrid grows out of her racist beliefs, so does Hilda. They both end the game as more tolerant and caring people. Still, for the same reason a person could argue that Ingrid is actually great and I'm being unfair, they could argue that Hilda is terrible and I'm too biased. That's fair and true..... but I think the fact that Hilda is more generally appealing in conjunction with the less obvious nature of her racist attitude makes people less likely to dismiss her as a racist in the same way they do Ingrid. Unless they dislike Hilda, in which case, it’s all fair game.

Anyyyways, a main takeaway from this is that I highly doubt people are truly arguing on the individual basis of who's more racist, but that they're engaging in the age old waifu war. As with many characters in this game, it's easier to argue moral superiority when you can't quite articulate what you like or don't like about a character. Or, even worse, when you're arguing opinion. Even now, as is clear by reading this, I am arguing my opinion of why I don't like Ingrid. Not because she's racist, but because of the character traits and writing choices that make her unlikable to me. I like Hilda because, flaws and all, I find her to be compelling and enjoyable. From the people that I know, at least, that is basically how the Ingrid stans v Hilda racism argument is structured, even if they dress it up in different language.

By the by Hilda never talks about how the Almyrans deserve to be wiped out. I think that probably sours a lot of people's opinions of Ingrid no matter what happened afterward but that’s fine we can just pretend that didn’t happen

[leviathangourmet]

(Archive Link)

I recently attended a Washington-D.C. event focused on community-building hosted by The Aspen Institute’s Weave project, which works to reduce social isolation and build bonds between Americans. During one portion of the event, various activists described how racism had impacted their lives and their communities. Following a number of such testimonials, a white woman from southeast Ohio named Sarah Adkins spoke about her own community work, which involves raising money to provide post-trauma support to individuals affected by tragedies.

Perhaps because several speakers had discussed racism and issues related to white privilege, Adkins spoke about her own self-perceived racial privilege. “I followed the perfect mold…I did all the things, I went to college, and I keep thinking of white privilege in my head so forgive me, that’s what’s in my head right now, very much white privilege,” she said, while reflecting on her middle class life in an affluent neighborhood.

But Adkins also went on to describe the reason she originally had become involved in community work—which is that her then-husband had killed both of her sons and then later took his own life. One can only imagine how much suffering this caused her. Yet she still viewed herself as privileged due to her race.

“I was wealthy, okay, I was a pharmacist, I made a lot of money, right? So after that happened, I really wanted to understand that for me there definitely was a lot of white privilege. I had money, I had health insurance, so people came in and cleaned up my house. I was able to pay for a funeral for my children,” she said.

I wondered how someone who’d lived through such an awful tragedy could consider themselves to be in any way “privileged.” Yes, she had the funding to clean up her home and bury her relatives. But nearly everybody has at least some advantages in life. It feels perverse for someone who has suffered so much to be confessing their perceived advantages.

When activists and academics invoke the phrase “white privilege,” they typically are speaking of advantages that whites, on average, have over members of other ethnic minority groups in our society. And there is no doubt that racial inequality is both real and persistent in the United States, where I live, and elsewhere. There is a sizable racial wealth gap, a life expectancy gap, and an incarceration gap. Many of America’s most pressing social problems disproportionately harm people from minority groups.

But there is a danger that, by talking about this inequality as an all-consuming phenomenon, we will end up creating a flattened and unfair image that portrays all whites in all situations and all contexts as benefiting from unearned advantages. Indeed, it’s possible that we will cause people to confuse a structural inequality that exists on the level of group average with the circumstances of every individual within a particular racial group.

In the case of Adkins’s tragic story, it’s not even clear that being white in any way constituted a form of privilege. Recent research has found a huge surge in white working-class suicides. In 2017, whites in the United States had a suicide rate of 17.8 per 100,000; for Hispanics, that rate was 6.9; for African-Americans, it was 6.9. The only group with a higher suicide rate than whites was Native Americans, at 22.2.

The phenomenon of suicide is not perfectly understood, but it is generally believed that loneliness and alienation are driving factors. Whites in America tend (on average) to be more culturally individualistic, while those from other groups tend (again, on average) to exhibit more collectivist social values. The group of which I am part, Asian-Americans, would be “privileged” on this index, since our rate (6.6) is well below that of whites. But would it really be wise for me to tackle the social problem of suicide by zooming in on some idea of “Asian privilege?”

In fact, research recently published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology suggests that such an approach wouldn’t just be unhelpful. It would actually be harmful.

I recently interviewed Erin Cooley, a psychology professor and lead researcher at Colgate University, about her research for Greater Good magazine. She studies prejudice and structural inequality and her research has illuminated the ways in which persistent racism continues to negatively impact the lives of racial minorities in America. A study she recently published, for instance, shows how participants were more likely to associate poverty with blacks as opposed to whites. Her team found that this association helps predict opposition toward policies that involve economic redistribution, since it is widely believed that these policies benefit blacks over whites.

Her team was curious about the impact of teaching people about white privilege. Would it make people more sympathetic toward poor blacks? As part of their research, Cooley and her colleagues offered study participants a reading on white privilege—based partly on the seminal work of Peggy McIntosh, who originally formulated the concept in the 1980s—and then described to them the plight of a hypothetical man, identified as either white or black, who is down on his luck.

What the researchers found is that among social liberals—i.e., participants who had indicated that they hold liberal beliefs about social issues—reading a text about white privilege did nothing to significantly increase their sympathy toward the plight of poor blacks. But, as Cooley told me, “it did significantly bump down their sympathy for a [hypothetical] poor white person.” (Among conservative participants, there was observed no significant change in attitudes at all.)

What accounts for this? One possibility is that social liberals are internalizing white-privilege lessons in a way that flattens the image of whites, portraying all of them as inherently privileged. So if a white person is poor, it must be his or her own fault. After all, they’ve had all sorts of advantages in life that others haven’t.

When we talk about racial inequality, it is important to understand that we’re often talking about structural or society-wide averages, not the status of all individuals at all times. It is true, for instance, that African Americans are disproportionately impacted by poverty. That means a higher percentage of African Americans live in poverty as compared to whites. But the largest number of individuals in the United States who live in poverty are white. We can’t, and we shouldn’t, assume anything about any individual’s life solely based on his or her race, or based on larger facts about racial inequality.

Racism exists, of course, and its impact is disproportionately felt by society’s minority populations. I have personally spent a decent chunk of my reporting career documenting this. But the fact that disparate treatment is inflicted on racial minorities doesn’t prove the existence of an all-encompassing pattern of white privilege. “If you’re white, chances are seeing a police officer fills you with one of two things: relief or gratitude,” writes one advocate of a privilege-centric worldview. But around half of the people who are killed every year by U.S. police officers are white. True, police violence falls disproportionately on ethnic minorities, especially African Americans. But if you’re white and you’ve been abused by a police officer, your individual experience may be just as painful as that of a black person who’s suffered similar abuse.

If we extend the logic of privilege beyond the issue of race, it’s easy to see the flaws with this approach. We know, for instance, that 93 percent of people in U.S. federal prisons are men. In nearly every part of the criminal justice system, in fact, men on average have it worse than women do. But does that then mean we should be discussing “female privilege”? Would it be beneficial to the men behind bars for women to proclaim awareness of their “privileged” status?

A typical conservative response to privilege discourse is to downplay the very real inequalities that exist. This isn’t helpful. We can’t escape talking about inequality in a diverse society. For instance, we shouldn’t shy away from looking at high maternal mortality rates among black women and how it may be linked to inadequate cultural competence among medical staff. However, what I would suggest is that we change the way we talk about this inequality. Asking whites to publicly confess their white privilege—in a manner that often resembles a religious ritual more than anything else—may lead us to unfairly flatten the experience of whites while, ironically, actually shifting attention away from those who are underprivileged. The Cooley study shows that this isn’t just a hypothetical concern; it’s a reality that has been demonstrated through research.

One alternative to white-privilege discourse would be to focus on the causes and consequences of deprivation rather than on naming groups of people we believe to hold special advantages—and to stop referring to things that we should expect for all people as “privileges.” It is not a privilege to have a decent and safe childbirth, or avoid harassment by the police, or to have enough to eat. All of those things should be something we expect. While we can and should aggressively address inequality, we should make sure the methods we employ serve to strengthen our sense of empathy rather than sap it.

[tartareus]

Do you condone/ship incest? I was reading your rules and got confused about your sentence where you said if people are uncomfortable with fictional consensual incest this isn’t the blog for you. Except Incest is incest regardless of if it’s fiction

hi there, friend, how do you do?

while i'm not particularly fond of anons (nex time you'd like to discuss something regarding my rules and/or character portrayal, i strongly encourage you to do so via ims - i don't bite, and if our points of view don't quite match? that's alright, i promise i'll leave you in peace :) ) for various reasons, i'm so glad you've read my rules (that probably makes you one of the few who follow me - at least i presume you do, idk - who has done so, so thank you so much!), i cannot stress enough how important they are to me. if i happen to follow you, rest assured that i have read yours (unless, ofc, i couldn't find one in your blog - in any case, if i happen to accidentally break one of yours, just hmu or gimme a nudge).

considering that you've asked more than one question, i'll answer to you in separate sections - needless to say that while i break it down your questions, the answer might become a little longer than usual (again, i'm sorry). i'll keep this tagged, in case any of my followers don't feel like reading about this. without further ado, let’s dive in.´

“do you condone/ship incest?”

short answer? nope. but that is not a black or white question i’m afraid. no, i – nox, the human behind this blog of fictional characters – personally do not condone incest , never have and never will, and  don’t ship it. i do, however, ship consanguinamory on rare occasions, and when i do happen to write it i never do it in a good light.

for those who are not familiar with the term, here’s a little bit of info about it x && x. in short, the key difference between them is: incest is usually linked abuse (a fictional example that can be used, taking in consideration one of my very own muses, in this case is margot verger – who was sadly abused by her brother in the hannibal books) while consanguinamory (the lannisters, for example, or even the sharpe siblings from crimson peak are examples of consanguineous relationships) is the consensual romantic and/or sexual relationship between members of the same family who are of consenting age.

[ personally, i find both of them gross as fuuck irl but when it comes to fictional works i may get over this first disgust and ponder more on that && take in consideration the characters arch, plot, thoughts and the whole world they are set in. ]

i suppose the turning point here is the consent. i never, never, condone any sort of abuse – not in fiction and neither in real life – and while it’s a subject that bothers me to no end in real life, when it comes to fiction i am less inclined to project into them. i may write dark and toxic relationships, but i obviously do not condone them. that’s the point here – people on this hellsite usually mix the two together (condoning something and shipping/writing it, that is) when in fact they shouldn’t even be in the same box to begin with.

let’s say you write a fictional serial killer – norman bates, tate langdon, hannibal lecter, catherine tramell (that chick from basic instinct), patrick bateman, mrs lovett and sweeney todd, kai anderson, bellatrix, grindelwald and voldemort (the list of plausible examples could go on forever…) – here and ship with them; does it mean that you, the writer, condone every single action and choice your muse does? if writing something purely fictional equals to condoning it in real life, well… the world is even more fucked up than i first thought.

you see, in this little exercise in imagination, you could’ve easily picked a good guy or gal to write, the hero; the goody two shoes. why didn’t you? well, it’s complicated to pin point why some are drawn to darker works of fiction and characters while others are not, i suppose each individual has their own reasons && i can only speak for myself when i say that i am drawn to these sort of fictional works because they the safest way to explore dark topics that pertain to human society. on my side, it’s nothing but raw curiosity.

there’s also the issue of how different cultures see these relationships. in case you haven’t noticed, i am not from the states but actually from brazil. especially in the rural area, it’s not uncommon for second cousins to date or even marry (ew, i know, pretty gross). that’s something that is luckily falling out of practice, but you can easily find it, more so in the poor rural areas that are really far from the cities.

you may have noticed that most of the sources for the terms come from a blog that advocates real life consanguinamory – but make no mistake, i don’t support it. these were the only places i’ve found as sources in a quick look online. i don’t support it irl, but whatever consenting adults are doing amongst themselves is no concern of mine – i have no say on the matter and all in all, i don’t give a damn. i just don’t like it. everything i’ve discussed here is related to fiction, consent and is only ever related to people of consenting age.

“i was reading your rules and got confused about your sentence where you said if people are uncomfortable with fictional consensual incest this isn’t the blog for you. except incest is incest regardless of if it’s fiction”

to be honest with you, anon, i couldn’t possibly see how you’ve got confused with this. i thought i was pretty clear with that, but perhaps not. sorry, my english is not perfect. however, with the risk of sounding like a meme, i said what i said. if you personally feel uncomfortable or even triggered with fictional consensual incest otherwise known as consanguinamory, maybe my blog isn’t for you. not because i – as the mun –  condone it, but because i might mention it or even allude to it when i write certain characters. again, consent is the main thing here – you won’t ever see me writing that awful part of margot’s past, but i might mention it on some threads as it is part of her trauma but i will write jaime’s feelings regarding cersei and joanna’s love for tywin – and that should not be overlooked.

“except incest is incest regardless of if it’s fiction” 

so far so good, am i to assume that you also believe that “murder is murder, regardless of if it is fiction or not”? should we call the police on, idk, george rr martin for killing....hell knows how many characters...at this point i’m sure not even he knows. leaving my petty comment aside (it’s the arthritis, i’m always annoyed when in pain), i see where you’re coming from; fair enough.  but you missed a big point here – consensual. i do not write abuse, even to the muses who – in the canon source material – have done so    ( like jaime lannister himself – who’s in a consanguinamorous [therefore, falling under the category of fictional consensual incest] relationship with cersei – who abused his sister next to their son’s dead body [ yeah, jaime apologists, i’m out to get y’all...jokes aside, i do not acknowledge people claiming that cersei manipulated him into going to bed with her, while they are both shitty and toxic as fuck people, their relationship is mutually messed up – gag if you must but jaime lannister is far from innocent angel ] )     in the past. i. don’t. write. it. but i do write jaime’s feelings for cersei because they are canon and are also a big part of the character he became.

all of that, of course, has to do with my own position on the “war” between the people who believe fiction has a great power and influence over reality vs the ones who do not believe in that. personally, i find it hard to believe that fiction is a brainwashing tool rewiring people’s brains  - i find the idea itself ludicrous, the ones who strongly stand for that aren’t that different from flat-earthers and people who believe in reverse racism tbh – but i do acknowledge the influence media has on society. its not nearly enough to turn someone to the “dark side” alone by itself – those who claim that videogames, for example, made them violent most likely already had something different and perhaps wrong with them before the games triggered something. i don’t believe that media creates things on people, but brings buried things (fears, feelings, emotions, hopes) back to the surface. it’s all about the stimulus.

if you wanna be scared, watch an horror movie; if you wanna be happy, a comedy video.  wanna feel warm inside and live unrealistic romantic expectations vicariously through fictional characters? read a 50.000 words slow burn fluffy happy fanfic of your otp at 3 am even though you gotta wake up early in the following morning....

point is, they are not creating things, they are bringing forth responses from you that were already there in your brain (everybody has laughed before and felt fear, it’s part of human development). and how you react to certain content is entirely to you and your past. say, if you drowned as a kid on the sea - and had trauma from that - the idea of watching titanic is not so fun, is it?

it’s not my place to decide what you should do, that is entirely your own choice to make, just be aware that, as i’ve stated before countless times, i may write dark topics that may or may not be triggering to some.  i do so because it is my blog, and i don’t react so harshly to this content (in fact, i love horror, thriller and dark fictional stuff – meanwhile i dread the thought of rom coms, hell knows why??) for i am lucky to be able to separate fiction from reality. basically, whilst writing a villain, i myself do not become one in real life – that part remains in fiction only and doesn’t affect me.

that is not a constant, sure. i don’t just write dark shady stuff – there’s plenty of fluffy shit on my blog, but i like to warn people beforehand to make sure we are all on the same page. it’s for your own comfort, i suppose, because i may not understand certain points of view on fiction but i will always defend your right to be comfortable and safe.

so yes, if you aren’t feeling well at that notion, please unfollow and block me if you must – i never wish to cause any discomfort to anyone – however, before you do so (that is, if you do so) i beg you to just send me an im warning me beforehand, please? that way i can block you – and your other blogs as well – so the chances of me running into you again and causing you discomfort will be minimal. that way we’ll both be on own respective lanes and happy about it. i mass follow very often and don’t usually know which blogs belong to whom (uh, did that make sense? my latina ass is not used to using whom in a sentence....), i may follow another blog (or the revamped blog) of someone who has blocked me and never even realise it – that’s not me following you around and stalking like a total creep, that’s probably me not even remembering who you are. again, sorry – i don’t mean for this to come off rude or anything but???? its the truth? you know the drill, big following list, big followers list (well, big for me tbh, i cannot remember the name or alias of 600 people for the life of me, excuse me if my memory doesn’t serve me right), hard to keep track. there will be no witch hunts, at least on my part, because i deem them to be childish and way too dramatic for my taste. if you’d like to speak in private, adult to adult, i’m always game – i dread vague posting, i personally see it as a pathetic and weak trait. 

as long as you’re civil, so am i.

either way, do whatever makes you feel comfortable and safe on your blog – your  mental health is far more important (to me, and hopefully to you as well) than a hobby, than tumblr, rp or whatever fictional stuff someone’s writing or reading; you are responsible for your own online experience, and i am responsible for mine. that’s an empowering thing that should be reminded more often.

i truly hope i’ve managed to answer whatever doubts or questions you had in mind, if not my ims are always open and so is my discord. once again, thank you for reading my rules and stay safe!

edit; my dumb ass forgot to drop my disco handle, since i change often. it currently is   DOCTOR BITCHCRAFT !!! | 𝒏𝒐𝒙#1398

[queerfables]

Supernatural Post-Mortem (1x12 - 1x15)

P, N and I discuss these episodes after the fact, because I didn’t make notes while we watched them. I don’t think I actually have any major warnings for our conversation about these episodes. 

1x12 - Faith

Notes to self, as a reminder of what it was about: “Dean faith healed, reapers”

When I read these out to P & N, they both start making excited sounds and I join in because yeah, we all really loved this episode!!

N: This is when Dean nearly died saving kids, too. P&I: Is it? N: Yeah, at the beginning, when he got electrocuted! Another point for Dean is good with kids! P: A good boy!!

This is the episode where Dean’s life is saved when it’s traded for the life of the gay man.  Me: So, like, Dean was given his heart! P&N: Ohhhhhhhhh. N: Aw, Dean has a queer heart. Me: I mean, we knew that already.  N: Yes, but it’s surprisingly literal and I love it.

N says, “I think every time Dean tries to problem solve in an episode, there’s probably a simpler solution.” When he was in the tent trying to stop the faith healing from happening, he yells, fire, but he could have like ACTUALLY started a fire, which would have stopped the lady from hanging around and trying to continue killing the guy. Or he could have faked a heart attack, which might have made people doubt the whole faith healing thing. 

P&N disagree with me on this, but I personally think the subtext of the villain in this episode trying to kill Dean when she realises he’s trying to stop her is that it’s because he’s queer. She doesn’t try to kill Sam, even when he’s trying to stop her just as much - she locks him in a basement and tries to reason with him about why his brother is an abomination. (Ofc I do tend to think Sam is queer too, but maybe she hasn’t figured that out). 

I generally loved the lady who had a brain tumour in this episode. It was really powerful to set her up as, like, complicating the narrative of “We have to stop these healings from happening”. It’s not wrong but she kind of shows why it’s not that simple, there’s always a cost even to doing the right thing. She also feels like one of the first ladies Dean actually had a real connection with, their - maybe romance? maybe friendship? whatever it was - really worked for me. 

N says they loved how the reaper was super keen to kill the lady who’d been controlling him. “I mean, I would be too. I don’t wanna go around murdering queer people!” P agrees. “Right? I love queer people.” I would definitely rather murder homophobes instead. 

1x13 - Route 666

Notes to self: “Cassie, Racist Truck”

P: Oh! I loved Cassie!  N & I agree. Cassie was great. 

I actually did start making notes from this episode while we watched but I never finished them. Here’s what I had: --Dean says he was called by a friend who really wouldn't have called if it wasn't urgent. Me: "That sounds like an ex" --It's Cassie! I'm excited to meet her! --P, N & I agree Cassie is a babe and we're excited to see how Dean fucked this up

N says, “It might have been me reading too much into it but I actually thought this episode was a pretty solid commentary on race.” 

N: I really thought that, despite the entirety of supernatural handling race about as well as a greased football, this episode had a solid multiple-layer analogy for the way racism, historically and currently, expresses itself across communities and generations. the analogy goes as far as making it clear that the instigating incident that prompts the angry, racist resurgence is done by a white dude, but that he is shielded from the initial backlash and consequences while the revived racism starts out targeting tangentially-related black people instead--something that definitely happens irl. It also makes it clear that a) racism is something you have to actively examine and purge, sometimes multiple times, b) it is not over even when the racists are dead and its spectre lurks amongst our communities and, most importantly, c) respectability politics are junk and sometimes you have to help cover up a racist’s murder

P says that they love that the white dude was a cop but, like, actually a good cop. Again, because of the covering up racist murder. 

I’d like to emphasise that I loved the way that Dean and Cassie’s relationship was portrayed. It turned out it was actually not entirely Dean’s fault that this fell apart. I mean, I personally think he should have lied to her until he was able to come back and then told her the truth, so she wouldn’t think he was coming up with a bizarro lie to leave her, but also like... He was trying to be honest, he wanted to really connect with her, and I have a lot of feelings about that. 

I’m sad that Dean and Cassie aren’t going to work out in the long run but I understand why. Would have been cool to see her again, though.

I just want you all to know that through a very, VERY meandering conversation, we now have N and P arguing over whether octopi or alligators have the perfect body.  N: Sack! Tentacles! Beak! P: SCALES AND TEETH. N: I’m just saying that the number of problems you can cause as an alligator is kind of limited. All you can do is bite things.  P: That’s all you need!!!! We’ve declared the conversation a draw for now but they’ve promised (threat) to come back to it later

Also N is now looking at Giant Squid fanfic and keeps announcing things like “There’s a whole tag for ‘Dubious Consenticles’??” and “SQUIDITCH”

None of this is related to Supernatural but it IS very funny. 

1x14 - Nightmare 

Notes to self: “Sam’s visions, telekinetic abuse victim gets revenge”

N says, “This was just fucking intense, if I remember” and P says, “Yeah, it was scary.” 

N says they saw the guy’s death coming as soon as it was revealed it was him committing the murders.  Basically, Sam and Dean couldn’t have trusted a rehabilitation arc without being directly involved and the nature of the show is that they couldn’t have been directly involved.

We understand why the episode played out the way it did but we wish it handled it differently. We were all 1000% on the telekinetic victim’s side and fully supported him murdering his abusers. I remember when we were watching it, being, like, horrified by the things that happened to his dad and his uncle and then when we found out the truth about how they were abusing him we were like “Oh, yeah, warranted.” We do think the mother was probably abused too and that’s why she didn’t step in to stop anything. Still understandable that he can’t forgive her, though. 

My main thing I’d like to say about this one is that I love Sam connecting with the other people who’ve been affected by the yellow-eyed demon (in later episodes too) I would really, really love more of that tbh, I want him to form a network. I love how much he understands and relates to this kid, and how hard he tries to save him. 

I also love the part where seeing a vision of Dean in danger allows him to use telekinesis too. We’re in the middle of s2 now and we haven’t seen that again and it’s a shame!!! I want more of that!!!!

P says xer mad the show dropped Sam’s telekinesis stuff too. “In a later episode, Sam says he gets visions but other people get other things, and it’s like, ‘No! Buddy! You have more than that!’” N says it would be cool if they set it up so that Sam’s powers, in addition to getting visions about the other people like him, included being able to use their same powers when he’s near them. Like the episode later on where a guy can use mind control?? Instead of just being immune, wouldn’t it have been rad if Sam could do that too?? KILLER. 

1x15 - The Benders 

Notes to self: “THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME. Sam in a cage.”

P: OH YEAH, this was the one that wasn’t even like -- N: It was just people.  P: Yeah, it was just dudes being dudes. 

I very much enjoyed this episode. N agrees. I think P is distracted typing something on xer own computer. N says, “It wasn’t as fast paced as some of the other ones but it was fun.”

N: I have thoughts about the way they handled the cop killing the head of the family. I feel like he was already cartoonishly evil--to make him openly sneer in the cop’s face about her dead brother and hunting ppl as an in-the-moment justification for killing him seems... almost cowardly? he was an irredeemable human-hunter who raised an entire family to hunt ppl in the woods. that’s enough justification! i think viewers should get that. you don’t need to make him have a rude snarky one-liner to justify his death. commit to ‘some humans are Bad’ properly!  P: I have thoughts about the little girl. She was weird and creepy and I didn’t like it. I think my major issue with her was that she was a child, who was used as a twist to be the worst one of the family, which is so overdone. We get it, kids are creepy. And also, given that the rest of her family - her dad+uncles/brothers(??) and her grandpa/dad(??) - were murderers, implied cannibals, and general all around awful people, she’s more likely than not a victim of abuse. So I think portraying her as the worst of them all is callous at best, highly problematic at the worst. Get her therapy and away from the people that call themselves her family. Anyway, it boils down to that I think it’s overplayed, and I wish she had a happier path than “Oh, she’s so creepy!!!!”

I love N & P’s really interesting and coherent thoughts but I have to be completely honest that 90% of my thoughts about this episode were like “Mmmmmmm, Sam in a cage” and later “Mmmmmm, Dean tied to a chair.” The other 10% was me having emotions about Dean being desperate to find Sam. Don’t let that undercut the extent to which I loved the episode though. I really loved this episode. 

[matildainmotion]

An Encouraging Blog about Despair

Recently I have been in despair. I notice as I write this that despair is like love – it’s a feeling that you do more than feel – you are in it. In love. In despair. Something larger than you, in which you reside, an atmosphere, a weather.

I am not good at being in despair. At Halloween I wrote a blog about fear, about being good at feeling afraid. I’m experienced at fear, paradoxically comfortable with the discomfort of it. This is not true of despair, at which I am terrible. Fear is energetic. It makes my heart go fast, ready for fight or flight. Despair makes me want to lie down and never get up again, and I don’t know how to manage this, how to carry this wish for an absolute lack of action, a kind of anti-wish, a wish for no more wishing.

I had an afternoon of despair in John Lewis in Kingston. It was one of the last shopping days before Christmas – crowds of people, multiple storeys of multiple mounds of stuff. I had to steer the children past the gold-wrapped chocolate boxes and giant gingerbread men, walk them through glossy, mirrored aisles of carefully coloured lipsticks and nail varnish. We made it to the lifts. We were headed for the bed linen department: displays of patterned duvets covers; shelves of fitted sheets; a choice between foam, feathered and other kinds of fluff-filled pillows. My son and I had a disagreement about which duvet cover to purchase for my husband. My son wanted the blue, stripy one. I wanted the one in black and white with a pattern reminiscent of trees. I thought I should get to choose what I bought for Daddy. He was okay with that, he said, as long as I agreed with his choice. He got angry and tried to kick me. His little sister meanwhile was running up and down the shiny floors and veering off to press her nose against the glass of the balcony that looked down over the many other departments. In that moment, for many reasons, I wanted to lie down and never get up again. Not on one of the display beds. Right where I was on the department floor, between the balcony and the start of the shelves of sheets. It was not because of the kids – they were my best reason to keep standing. But I couldn’t do it, because I am not good at despair- I’d rather be scared or angry. So I got more angry with my son, which wasn’t fair, and we all ended up in tears, and Daddy got more sets of duvet covers than I had intended.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine, writes Mary Oliver, who died this year, in her poem Wild Geese. Let me try to do that, to tell you about my despair, in an attempt to get better at it. This is the time of year for writing lists – lists of things achieved in the last year, lists of things to get done in the next. Hopeful lists. Lists are generally hopeful – they imply possibility. I don’t think, out of all the lists I have written in my life, I have ever made a ‘To Despair List.’ Let me do that now.

Here are some things about which I am in despair:

-       My impatience with my mother, which comes from not wanting her to be nearly 80 and ready to sit down sometimes, or to focus on the small things – what kind of wood to put on the stove- when I am screaming quietly about the big things (the melting ice, rising seas) which I know she cannot fix but still, like a little girl, wish that she could.

-       How often I do not stop to give someone who is homeless money, either because these days I pay for everything by card and so have no change, or because I am not brave enough to get over the awkward, uncomfortable gap of me, upright, walking past, and the man or woman, sitting, propped up outside Tescos with a paper cup.

-       How when I do have the courage to stop and give money a part of me believes this makes everything okay.

-       The election result and Boris Johnson. How I do not allow the children to call each other names but do allow them to call Boris Johnson “a stupid idiot,” even though I know this solves nothing and, long term, makes the deep divisions, that are the real problem, worse.

-       Climate change, of course, but also how I am too cowardly to read the literature that would make my despair better informed.

-       Consumerism, how many duvet covers I could choose, how gross are the inequalities of rich and poor, and the many ways in which I participate in the system that creates this disparity.

-       The number of emails I get every day from people doing good work and asking for money to support their work and how I do not know to which to give or how much because it is all good and all critically important.

-       How often I end up shouting at the children or making threats to them despite having read numerous conscious and alternative parenting books.

-       My ability to sleep soundly through the night.

-       Brexit, what it will mean and how I keep on putting off getting my daughter a passport.

-       My children staying seated at the kitchen table and eating a wholesome supper I have made them – an image of motherhood I daily fail to fulfil.

-       The big things – racism, poverty, refugees, rape, war, starvation, environmental destruction - and knowing that under all the big things are a million little things, specific people, animals, habitats, details, and a million moments of exact and awful loss.

I could go on, but that will do, for now, because writing this list has reminded me of when I was 7 and rather religious, and the lists I made back then. I used to go in secret to my room every day after school and pray. I felt simultaneously embarrassed about this- too shy to tell even my mother- and yet also that it would be shameful not to do it. I had decided that to be a good person it was necessary for me to list, on my knees, every day, all the people and troubles that I knew – it took me a good hour and I remember worrying about how to explain my absence to everyone during this time. Even back then I felt furtive about despair, about my sense of inadequacy in the face of all that is troubled and all that needs care in the world.

           You do not have to be good, writes Mary Oliver. You do not have to walk on your knees/ For a hundred miles through the desert repenting./ You only have to let the soft animal of your body/ Love what it loves./ Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine./ Meanwhile the world goes on…

Meanwhile the children, those soft animals, are growing up. My son turns eight next week. What to do? How to go on, caring for him and my daughter, whilst despairing? I can’t lie down and weep whenever I wish. Punishing prayer is not the answer either, but I do find myself coming round to a word that has religious connotations: faith.

           I am finding that being a mother requires me to have faith in the future. I realise as I write this that faith is different from hope. I can feel hopeless but be faithful. Hope has expectations. Faith does not. Hope involves trying to guess what the future might look like. Faith involves embracing genuinely not knowing. I am in despair, I can live in hope, but with faith, I am not ‘in’ it – rather it is something I must actively put into other things no matter how I am feeling: I must have faith in the children.

When my husband and I got married we wrote our own wedding vows. The ending of my vows to him went like this:

I don’t promise never to have crazy crushes, or even fall in love with other men, women, books, landscapes, ways of life….but I promise to be faithful to you, for you to stay as my centre, my home. A final word on being ‘faithful’ - not sleeping with anyone else seems like the least of it. Faithful, full of faith - faith is a belief not based on proof: I promise to believe in you and in our togetherness for the rest of our lives, even at the times when there is no evidence, no proof that it is a good idea.

Rereading this vow helps me now. I hope my children may live long and joyful lives, but I often despair that this is possible – there is no proof that it will happen. Meanwhile, I can still have faith in them and in my act of caring for them. I can believe in this process – the process of them growing up and me witnessing and supporting them to do it, however imperfectly it unfolds.  

As has become my practice, I find it useful and affirming when I align my mothering and my making. I am writing a novel. I have been writing it for a long time, for the same length of time as I have been a mother. I hope it will be brilliant. I hope it will get published. Some days these hopes seem ridiculous. However, every day I have faith that it is worth my writing it whatever happens.  

The first gift my husband ever gave me was a book called The Gift by Lewis Hyde. In it Hyde describes the act of making and the act of giving as inextricably connected. You make something, then you give it away so that you can make something else, and then you give that away too, and on and on. When you make and give in this way it is an act of faith because you have to let go entirely of whatever you have made – you do not know and cannot control what will become of it. Like being a mother to a child. And maybe this is what despair has to teach me, because being in despair, like being in love, involves a kind of letting go, a relinquishing of control – no wonder I’m not good at it.

           Meanwhile, as the children bounce on the bed, with its new duvet cover, I read others online discussing how much to share or not with their children of the woes of the world that are present and coming, and of climate change in particular – do we bring them up to be aware? Or protect them from the anxiety of it for as long as possible? It is a good question but there is something in it that, for me, is often missing from the conversation. It is this: the future is theirs, not mine. My son learnt to read by studying danger signs and the exact instructions to be followed in states of emergency – I suspect he and my daughter both understand more about the future already than I do. To quote from another poet, Kahil Gibran, “Your children are not your children…For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.” I can tell them what I know about climate change but my knowledge is necessarily limited, no matter what I have or haven’t read. I can’t tell them about the future – I can’t even visit it in my dreams. But I can continue to have faith in them and in their tomorrows. I can continue the process of mothering and making, of giving away whatever I have made, including them.

“Meanwhile…” Mary Oliver says again, “Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,/ are heading home again./ Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,/ the world offers itself to your imagination,/ calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -/ over and over announcing your place/ in the family of things.”

Meanwhile, the world keeps on offering itself to you, whoever you are – the world, the geese in it and everything else, carry on gifting regardless. Isn’t that amazing? And my job, I think, in despair or in love, has to be to keep on offering my imagination back to the world, regardless. I will do that, even if all I can offer right now is a blog about despair.

One thing I offered to the world a few years back is a thing called Mothers Who Make. It is a grass roots, peer support network, growing across the UK and overseas. It is about announcing the place of two activities- mothering and making - in the world, over and over, keeping faith in their value no matter what, no matter how lonely or despairing any mother may feel.

If you are a mother and a maker, of any kind, you can come to a hub meeting and tell the other women there about your despair, and they will tell you about theirs. You can also tell them about what you love. And you do not have to be good. You can find out if there is a meeting near you here.  

And if you cannot make it in person to a group, you can connect online - we have a lively Facebook community.

Mothers Who Make is currently unfunded and so if it feels like a good kind of gifting to you, an act of faith you can make, you can give us £3 per month, so that we can, meanwhile, go on – go on making and giving, making and giving, for now and for the future which we cannot visit, but which our children will.  

[fylauraharrier]

What’s most striking about Laura Harrier when she stands to shake my hand in Soho House, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, is her delicacy. She’s slender as a tulip, in high-waisted baggy jeans and a black silk camisole. Her make-up and jewellery are barely-there — gossamer golden threads around her neck and fingers. What makes her gentle vibe all the more remarkable is that, just the night before, I was sitting in a dark screening room spellbound by her fierce, gripping performance in BlacKkKlansman. Directed by Spike Lee and co-starring Adam Driver and John David Washington (Denzel’s son), it’s based on the true story of two cops infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s. Harrier, 28, plays Patrice, a student leader in the Black Power movement and a force for political awakening for the other characters. Patrice’s look is anything but demure, with her halo-like afro and leather jackets. In particular, Harrier says of the afro wig she wears throughout, it made her hold herself differently: “I felt royal.” She pauses a beat and laughs: “It hit doorways. Sometimes it got skewed.”

She was on holiday in Greece with friends last year, lying on a beach on a “random Tuesday”, glass of rosé in hand, when an unfamiliar number popped up on her phone. She answered. “‘Laura, this is Spike Lee. Vacation’s over. See you in New York on Thursday,’” she says, doing a not completely terrible impersonation of the director. She scrambled off the island and met Lee for an unorthodox audition that included sitting in on his film-making class at New York University, participating in the class discussion, and making a nearly hour-long video. “At one point I got really mad at him and I walked out of the room and slammed the door. I came back expecting him to be, like, ‘And, scene.’ But no. He was still going. I was, like, ‘We’re still acting. OK, cool. When will this end?’ ” She was offered the role the next day and, without reading a script or even knowing much about her character, Harrier jumped at the opportunity, thinking, “I’ll do whatever, it’s Spike!”

The film won the Grand Prix award at Cannes in May, and Harrier and her castmates were given a six-minute standing ovation after the screening. As if a meaty role in the latest Spike Lee film wasn’t a cool enough credential, Harrier has also scooped up contracts with Bulgari and Louis Vuitton, for which she is a brand ambassador. She met Vuitton’s creative director, Nicolas Ghesquière, after a catwalk show a year and a half ago and they “hit it off and clicked”. He featured her in his SS18 campaign, wearing a futuristic take on an 18th-century-style brocade jacket. For Cannes, Ghesquière made her a peach dream of a gown. “It was so beautiful,” she swoons. “I cried when I tried it on for the first time, like it was my wedding dress.”

Harrier spent her formative years in what is perhaps America’s quintessential picket-fence suburb: Evanston, Illinois, the area where John Hughes set Sixteen Candles and his other romcoms about middle-class (and mostly white) teenage angst. Harrier���s father works in insurance and her mother is a speech therapist. Her mother is white — a fact that she says people often find “weird” now, but was a non-issue growing up. “My parents never talked about it,” she says, as she tucks into a veggie burger and fries. “There were no big heart-to-hearts.”

To prepare for her role in BlacKkKlansman, Harrier met Kathleen Cleaver, one of the most famous female leaders of the Black Panther Party, and spent time talking to her own father, whose ancestors were slaves, about the racism he faced growing up on Chicago’s South Side and then going to a boarding school in Michigan where he was the only black student. The movement, he told her, taught him to celebrate and embrace his blackness — a message Harrier finds as relevant to her now as it was to her father back then.

“I’m not surprised that racism still exists in our country,” she sighs. “I think people were comfortable during the Obama years and these things were kind of suppressed, and now everyone who has hateful views has the encouragement to make them known. But also it’s [about] trying to be hopeful and not feel like we’re all in despair.”

Harrier is vocal about activism on her Instagram feed, regularly posting in support of trans rights, anti-gun rallies and gender equality. We are meeting during Donald Trump’s visit to London. “The blimp was hilarious,” she says of the inflatable balloon depicting the president in a nappy.

There is, also, the glamorous stream of fancy coiffures and modelling shots across her social media that she admits is part of her job. “My Instagram isn’t me, it’s a very curated version of things,” she says. “I don’t post myself with zits and cramps and rolling out of bed.” She applauds friends who are more open, but is wary herself. “I think people use it to stalk people,” she says. And she’s tired of the sexual harassment that all women face “across the board” online: “It makes me mad. It’s so gross. I’m, like, ‘I don’t want to see your dick pic.’ ” Though the It girls she poses with — Zendaya, Bella Hadid, Sophie Turner — are her real friends, social media can never convey her real life, she says, which mostly involves being “really f****** busy, honestly”.

She recently moved from New York to Los Angeles, “for work and to escape the winter and some life stuff”, but says she has barely been home. Life stuff? “Just personal bullshit,” she says, waving her hand. A boy? “Yeah,” she admits, with a rueful laugh. “I don’t want to talk about that. Sorry.”

Harrier had been living in Manhattan since leaving home to study art history at NYU. She dropped out to model and eventually enrolled in a two-year acting programme. Success came swiftly: before she had even graduated, she was cast by the 12 Years a Slave director, Steve McQueen, in a pilot for HBO (sadly, the show was never picked up). The career-making role of Peter Parker’s high-school sweetheart in Spider-man Homecoming quickly followed.

The fantasy aspect of fashion has always interested Harrier, even before she began, as she puts it, professionally “playing make-believe”. In fact, she was voted best dressed in high school — although she’s not willing to vouch for her teenage sense of style. “I remember wearing a lot of boots — like, high boots,” she says, pointing to a spot above her knee, “which is such a weird, awful trend.” Her style icons at the time were the women of 1990s black sitcoms: Hilary in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and Denise, played by Lisa Bonet, on The Cosby Show. “Those were the people on TV that looked like me, so it was what I identified with. Also they were beautiful and looked really cool,” she says.

Back to BlacKkKlansman. She has no fear about what the reaction to the film might be among white supremacists and fans of Trump, for whom the movie has a pointed message in its coda. “I hope [there’s blowback],” she says, “because that means they saw it and are paying attention. It starts a dialogue. Spike is really taking on Trump.”

However, BlacKkKlansman isn’t just an American story, she says. She’s spent the past few years travelling around Europe and Asia and sees the issues of racism and xenophobia as universal. “How do people treat Muslims? How do people treat immigrants? It’s not just about black and white. We’re seeing the rise of right-wing movements around the world,” she says. “So I think and I hope that people all over the world will see it and identify with it. This is everywhere.”

BlacKkKlansman is out on August 24

[aceofwhump]

Whump Fic Recs - The Greatest Showman

I’ve read a lot of really good whumpy TGS fics so I thought I’d share them. Putting under a read more because it’s long

Up High, No One Can Break Us by masterroadtripper

Summary:

The fire changed Phillip. He’s getting better, but it will take time.

Whump tags:

Injury Recovery

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD

https://archiveofourown.org/works/13847976

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I Lost The Hat… by mightydeafeningmouse

Summary:

Maybe Phillip shouldn’t have lost the hat, but maybe Barnum shouldn’t have made him cry.

Whump tags:

Hurt/Comfort

Emotional Hurt/Comfort

Child Abuse

Past Abuse

Phillip Carlyle Needs a Hug

Angst

Angst with a Happy Ending

https://archiveofourown.org/works/13797780?view_adult=true

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So Don’t Keep Saying Our Hands Are Tied by SobbingInACorner

Summary:

Their kiss had become somewhat of a tradition upon finishing each show. As the final line of their song rang out, he swept her around and pressed his lips to hers, caught in the thrill of the moment. Fireworks seemed to fill his mind, and there was only the cheers of the crowd, and her. But there were hisses. Boos. Names called, names so horrible Phillip couldn’t bear to think of them.

Whump tags:

Hurt/Comfort

Emotional Hurt/Comfort

Angst

Fluff

Period Typical Racism

Racist Language

Blood and Violence

Aftermath of Violence

Injury

Stabbing

Period Typical Attitudes

Medical Procedures

https://archiveofourown.org/works/13611675

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Seeing the Other Side by GreenPhoenix3

Summary:

Phillip said he would be disowned, he knew he would be disowned, but when it actually happens it hits him like a ton of bricks. He loses everything that makes the Carlyle name: dignity, connections, and money. Fear and misunderstandings drive him to pull away from everyone. Can fate and his family show him the truth before it is too late? 

Whump tags:

Family Feels

Angst

Implied/Referenced Child Abuse

Sick

https://archiveofourown.org/works/13640829

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See The Other Side by overlycompensatedapprentice

Summary:

Phillip’s parents come to the circus to try to drag him back to high society: Phillip’s circus fam has his back

Whump tags:

Abuse

mentions of child abuse

Hurt/Comfort

Angst

Found Family

Family Feels

Angst with a Happy Ending

https://archiveofourown.org/works/13583898

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A Simple Conversation by overlycompensatedapprentice

Summary:

Phillip runs into his parents on his way home, and they try a new tactic to get Phillip back, P.T. and Charity step in to help, and Phillip never realized how much he needed a mother (aka adopted circus mom Charity Barnum)

takes place after See the Other Side

Whump tags:

Abuse

mentions of child abuse

Hurt/Comfort

Angst

Found Family

https://archiveofourown.org/works/13588965

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Lost and Found by overlycompensatedapprentice

Summary:

Phillip’s parents take drastic measures to save their reputation and get Phillip back to high society. The Circus is prepared to do whatever it takes to protect their family

Takes place after A Simple Conversation

Whump tags:

Kidnapping

Major Hurt/Comfort

Child Abuse

Found Family

Circus fam

Blood and Injury

https://archiveofourown.org/works/13598127

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Up and Down by dancergrl1

Summary:

He checked his pocket watch, and swore out loud. He’d missed lunch…by several hours. That’s what was causing it. – Philip disappears and Anne finds him in his office with a migraine. Fluff and a discussion ensue.

Whump tags:

Headaches & Migraines

Fluff

Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism

Angst

https://archiveofourown.org/works/13586256

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The Family We Choose for Ourselves by The_Girl_Who_Got_Tired_of_Waiting

Summary:

Phillip attempts to reconcile things with his parents. It does not end well. But, he also discovers he may be looking for his family in the wrong place.

Whump tags:

Angst

Hurt/Comfort

Fluff and Angst

Emotional

Non-Graphic Violence

Implied/Referenced Child Abuse

Phillip’s Parents are Poison

https://archiveofourown.org/works/13588023

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Cure Your Aching by overlycompensatedapprentice

Summary:

P.T. Barnum is a better dad than Phillip’s actual dad

Whump tags:

Implied Child Abuse

Emotional Whump

https://archiveofourown.org/works/13575723?view_adult=true

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Sprint of Faith by Chrisii

Summary:

My take on how Anne ended up trapped inside the building, her point of view throughout it, and of course, her vigil by Phillip’s bed side, and above all, the aftermath.

“In the early afternoon, Anne was growing anxious. She had never seen him so still. The man was always moving, always fidgeting with something or bouncing on his toes or anything else except being utterly still. He was a creature of movement, and because of her he was laying motionless in a hospital bed, still struggling to breathe even after almost 12 hours. ”

Anne never thought he’d make a miraculous recovery, but apparently Phillip didn’t seem to take the hint to not push himself. Therefore, she’d be there every step of the way, along with her brother and the rest of the circus, to keep him from falling over his own two feet or else dying in front of her, again.

Whump tags:

Whump

Hurt/Comfort

Emotional Hurt/Comfort

Angst

Fluff and Angst

Hospitals

Unconsciousness

Nightmares

https://archiveofourown.org/works/13574043

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More Than One Way Home by fancastik

Summary:

Phillip shouldn’t feel the way he does. He has a new family, a better life, but there’s a part of him that can’t help but yearn for things in the past. When the letter comes, it feels like his perfectly crafted world is shattering. He’s not strong enough to pick up the pieces, not alone anyway.

Additional tags:

Emotional Whump

Alcoholism

https://archiveofourown.org/works/13520217

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Losing Sleep by forsty_and_niryda

Summary:

It’s been months since the fire, and even if the circus is all together again Phillip still can’t let the horrors of that night go.

—- Phillip has a night terror and needs a lot of comfort.

Whump tags:

Night Terrors

Nightmares

Slightly graphic description of being burned alive

Hurt/Comfort

Emotional Hurt/Comfort

Angst

https://archiveofourown.org/works/13512054

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You’re here by forsty_and_niryda

Summary:

“Just gonna fetch my coat, and then we’ll head straight home. And then there will be pancakes made by yours truly,” Phillip smiled at her.

“Well, don’t leave a girl waiting, go get your coat,”

He never returned with his coat.

—- Back at it again being mean to Phillip and Anne. This time with a healthy dose of comfort and an unhealthy dose of angst and hurt.

Whump tags:

Angst

Hurt

Hurt/Comfort

Gun Violence

Swearing

Kidnapping

https://archiveofourown.org/works/13500750

 —————————————————————————-

You’re in luck by forsty_and_niryda

Summary:

No big plot, mostly Anne taking care of Phillip who got his ass kicked.

Whump tags:

Minor Injuries

Minor Violence

Fluff

Period-Typical Racism

https://archiveofourown.org/works/13475412

 —————————————————————————-

The Brightest Colours Fill My Head

SobbingInACorner

Summary:

She leant into the embrace: she had pushed away his love, then she had nearly lost him. She wouldn’t make the same mistake again.

Whump tags:

Hurt/Comfort

Emotional Hurt/Comfort

Fire

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD

Flashbacks

https://archiveofourown.org/works/13485060

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At Eight in the Evening by woodburn

Summary:

This is a canon-compliant little moment set while Phillip is still in the hospital - it was written because I love physical hurt/comfort.

Whump tags:

Hurt/Comfort

Injury Recovery

https://archiveofourown.org/works/13258107

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from the fading light i fly by LydiaOfNarnia

Summary:

Anne is huddled with her family, watching their home go down in a blaze of flame, when the first shout rings out.

“Where’s Phillip?”

Her heart drops like a stone. At once a thousand voices seem to rise out of the night, all carrying the same awful question. “Where’s Phillip? Where is Phillip Carlyle? Is he still inside?“

Whump tags:

Fire

Anne to the Rescue

Canon Divergence

https://archiveofourown.org/works/13259718

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[permian-tropos]

essay which eventually makes an argument about which fandom discourse is good political praxis and which is ungood

I know it’s crass to connect inane fandom crap to real world atrocities so to be just minimally crass: recent real world atrocities have indeed made me think of inane fandom crap I’ve seen, but then I wondered what the right way to discuss the parallels even is. Stories resemble reality and things fans say diegetically about fiction (like, the thing we all do where we phrase it like it’s real) can resemble things people say about reality. Diegetic opinions can resemble shitty real world opinions. And we argue constantly about what to do about it.

I’m feeling fucking pissed about some real world opinions, but I don’t think dumb Star Wars fandom arguments technically cause the real world opinions I’m super fucking pissed about, the way people think they do. So this isn’t about that. (spoilers it eventually is about that but I’ll say it’s not for now)

I want to argue that discourse should be about examining every diegetic opinion that feels possible. Everything from baseless nonsense, to things you agree with, to things you are comfortable agreeing to disagree about, to opinions canon tries to slip by unquestioned, like, “there’s nothing to be done about the fact that Coruscant has billions of poor people buried underground like a wealth inequality layer cake”. 

I’m reframing the inflammatory “your diegetic opinions describe your real world ones” or the moral panicky “your diegetic opinions will become your real ones”: The more possible it feels that you’d find fans with the diegetic opinion, the more valid your society/culture treats the real-world counterpart.

So I’m angry, because our society treats horrible opinions about state violence now being applied to the recent Gaza massacre as valid, and it has treated them as valid for a long time, and it’s reflected in some diegetic opinions on the Jakku massacre. Opinions which I now am extra disgusted by. But the people with those opinions might not have the same bad opinions about the real world; it doesn’t work like that. I want the discourse to stop focusing on that.

The ease with which people could, if not justify, minimize, the awfulness of Kylo killing of the Jakku villagers, shows some culturally non-taboo things to say about state violence (“they were fighting back, the villagers were protecting the Resistance/were armed by them, maybe they weren’t a threat in that moment but they clearly would have threatened the Order if they’d had the means, and the Resistance was wrong to use them as a shield”) and its actors (”Kylo didn’t really want to do it, he had to prove he was tough in front of Phasma, he’s desensitized to this because everyone in the Order does it”).

Diegetic opinion: What Kylo did was not excusable. It was completely brutal and unnecessary. The villagers had been disarmed, Kylo killed not just the men combatants but the women noncombatants and children too, and the villagers fought back in the first place because the Order was imposing entirely illegitimate authority. Kylo did not have the right to use military force to get a map to find a man who was hiding because didn’t want to fight, to enact personal revenge because that man held a weapon over his head for a hot second. What would that even be, a cosmically strained stand-your-ground defense? Anyway it was definitely an evil thing to do. 

And those opinions aren’t super radical so they’re treated by society as valid too. As people have pointed out, though, when “war crime good” and “war crime bad” are treated as equally valid, it actually favors war crimes. People have to waste time justifying not doing war crimes. War crimes can be done before facing the court of public opinion, and then the noise of the debate can go on until the next war crime happens. And the same is true of “racism good”/”racism bad” and so on. 

But okay now I want to make an even more complicated-ass point about villain stanning. The more prevalent the garbage stan opinion is, the more support it gives to the overarching stan opinion: “this villain is a normal person”.

Cause I think there are three strains of fan apologia:

1) I forgive it because it’d be excusable in real life (not always wrong! but with the Jakku massacre it does indicate offensively crap politics) 

2) I forgive it because it’s not real and enjoying the thing doesn’t significantly affect my moral judgement or anyone else’s (basically always valid when true)

And the one that intrigues me, 

3) I forgive it not because it’d be excusable in real life but because a normal person could excuse it

If you’re excusing actions the narrative doesn’t present as wrong, the person you’re imagining as normal isn’t the character but the writer. Or, using Death of the Author, some hypothetical authorial intent -- but only if it’s possible to conceive of a writer with this intent. And it’s only palatable when the projected (if not actual) author is a decent person. Their opinions might be bad but it’s from a failing of society, not the individual. This is what so many of us use for the HanLeia kiss in ESB to avoid hating Han for what would count as sexual assault IRL, or to avoid deeply loathing the writers or the movie. 

Also if you project opinions onto a narrative that either aren’t there or aren’t provably intentional or explicit, and construct the hypothetical authorial intent behind it and find it unforgivably abnormal, and then decide the actual writer must be as well, that’s called Rian Johnson Retire Bitching. 

Imagining the writer as normal is one way we can forgive fictional bad behavior, if we think the writer intended it to be excusable. If we think they might not, we can turn to another version -- the character excuses their own behavior, and under certain circumstances we believe a normal person could make those excuses, so the character can be normal (we empathize with normal people, we want them to redeem themselves).

Type 3 stanning arguments about the actors of state violence (eg. what people argue the bottom line of Ben Solo’s moral capacity is), show that we think decent people can be actors in state violence. With the justifications people make, Kylo Ren could technically be a “normal” person because “normal” people can be convinced of all these justifications. And you know what, I’d say that’s true. Nearly every human is born with a healthy ability to develop good morals, so societies where tons of people condone or excuse atrocities do not have abnormally evil people. They have abnormally evil culture.

But the more people repeat the justifications as valid, the more it shows that Kylo is normal. Kylo has a lot of fans, and if enough of them express these diegetic beliefs, it’s sort of evident that “normal” people can have them. The part where I think fiction does end up maybe affecting reality is that diegetic opinions are treated as more potent if the real-world counterparts are good ones. And it’s moral purists and antis and ~discoursers~ that keep encouraging this perspective. 

So the antis give the stans a reason to present their diegetic opinions with real world opinions. Or to defend them without talking about real world opinions. To show that lots of people can have this opinion. Normal people. Good people, decent people. People who, even if they don’t have all the right morals, could have them in a healthy society. But they’re not really clarifying that these aren’t the right morals. Even people in the kylux fandom slipped into this from time to time despite a big push to make “we know they’re evil” the motto.

It’s tempting to use a more potent argument. Push the fandom Overton Window. “Kylo killed those villagers and it was evil but I can imagine him justifying it in ways that show he’s capable of good, and I want to see him become good” is just not as potent as “it was a wartime execution and if the stormtroopers are people maybe the villagers are also bad for killing them” when it comes to making people more sympathetic towards Kylo. 

Thanks to the anti framework of “your faves must be unproblematic” (nice work folks :/) and thanks to people who care too much about their problematic faves and don’t pay attention to the real world, diegetic opinions can end up implicitly encouraging people to push real world opinions for the sake of protecting Your Misunderstood Cinnamon Woobie who you’re very emotionally invested in but doesn’t actually exist, and that is kind of how I’m seeing fandom team up with bad politics when it doesn’t need to. Your Evil Woobie Boi can represent something good for you and you can express this and enjoy yourself. I have an evil woobie boi. He’s a great creative outlet. I absolutely stan the institution of loving villains. 

Which means we have to a) get rid of the purity wank framework and b) prioritize getting good opinions through ongoing interrogation of the real world and not expecting that we can indirectly absorb wokeness through media crafted to convey only the right messages. 

To ensure that people absorb those messages you have to get them to take all messages in media as correct. If your idea of media criticism is, when you get down to it, “criticize the things I think are wrong until they’re all gone and then make fiction tell people the right way to think”, your logical end goal is a society completely uncritical of media. A benevolent dictatorship of woke fiction. Forgive me if I don’t find that so reassuring. 

And you know what? Because so many normal people (like me, before I discoursed myself) toy with this dystopic underlying ideology, our society clearly treats the idea of a benevolent media dictatorship as valid. 

A creepy realization, but look how we got there with the “what opinions feel normal?” method. That’s why I think this model of discourse is one that actually gets us somewhere.

[painandinjury]

A Look into George Floyd’s Cause of Death, From an Anatomical Perspective

On May 25, 2020 an African-American man named George Floyd was apprehended by four police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  During the apprehension, a police officer named Derek Chauvin placed the handcuffed Floyd prone on the street, then knelt over him, placing his left knee on top of Mr. Floyd’s neck.  From the image circulated in the media, it appears that Chauvin exerted his full weight over his bent knee.  He kept his knee in position for 8 minutes and 46 seconds despite please from Floyd that he could not breathe.  Tragically, Mr. Floyd died at the scene.  Two autopsies on Mr. Floyd ruled the death a homicide.  The county version “revealed no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation” while a private autopsy ruled he died of “asphyxiation due to neck and back compression.”  Asphyxiation is the deprivation of oxgyen to the body, resulting in death.  Chauvin was fired and arrested shortly after the incident, and charged with 3rd degree murder and second degree manslaughter.

This tragic and awful case spurred protests and civil disobedience throughout major cities in the U.S., against systemic police brutality and racism towards African-American men, which continues as I write this.  It is also a case that has drawn interest in the medical and forensics community, as to how exactly George Floyd died.  This is important to investigate, as it has consequences for the trial and also provides information to police forces to help them determine which types of restraints should and should not be used.

Before discussing the medical aspects of Mr. Floyd’s death, I want to emphasize that the most important thing about this incident is that a man unnecessarily lost his life to a trusted law enforcement officer, in a most inhumane way.  It is especially bad because of the systemic racism element to it, and the fact that Chauvin had several opportunities to get off of him in time after being warned by another officer at the scene and multiple witnesses, but failed to do so.  This was a textbook lesson on how not to subdue a person, and the price of this lesson is going to play out for weeks to months and will be costly to society in more ways than one.

That being said, I will discuss the anatomical and physiological factors involved in Mr. Floyd’s death.  There is some controversy over how he died, which will determine what sentence, if any, Derek Chauvin will receive.

As you will see, the neck contains several structures directly tied to sustaining life, which is why the neck is a logical target when it comes to martial arts/ self-defense, and yes, murder.

Mr. Floyd was lying prone (stomach down) with his hands handcuffed behind his back and neck turned to his right.  So when Chauvin placed his knee over his neck it contacted the lateral (side) aspect of his neck and some of the anterior portion.  The critical structures found at the side of the neck include the vertebral arteries, cervical nerve roots, carotid arteries, jugular veins and lymphatic vessels.  Attached to the carotid artery is the carotid body, a cluster of special cells that detect oxygen saturation levels in the blood leaving the heart, and passes the information to the brain, which the brain uses to regulate heart and breathing rates accordingly.

Inside the cervical spine (the neck bones) there is the spinal cord which is comprised of the neuron axon bundles that control body movement and sensation; and lying just outside and against the cervical spine is the sympathetic chain ganglia, which play a role in innervating the heart, lungs, adrenal glands (adrenaline secretion) and other organs during “fight or flight” moments of stress.

The critical structures found in the anterior neck are the esophagus, trachea (wind pipe), larynx and thyroid gland.  Also present but not critical to life are the vocal cords.

The contact area on Mr, Floyd’s neck, based on the typical size of a bent knee, was about 4 square inches.  Chauvin weighs about 170 pounds, so I estimate that the force placed on Mr. Floyd’s lateral-anterior neck was (.9)(170 lbs)/4 in sq. =153 lbs/ 4 in sq. = 38.25 lbs./in sq.  So imagine four, 40 pound dumbells stacked and resting on the side of your neck for nearly 9 minutes.

What I believed happened is blood flow to the brain was cut off, making Mr. Floyd unconscious after a few minutes, as would happen in a martial arts choke hold.  We can assume the loss of consciousness due to restricted blood flow to the brain occured the moment he stopped talking.  Chauvin kept his knee in place for nearly 3 minutes after Floyd stopped moving.  If there was any chance of resuscitation, that chance ended with this additional time of compression.

The pressure also activated Mr. Floyd’s sympathetic chain ganglion, which caused a surge of adrenalin– a neurotransmitter secreted by the adrenal glands of the kidneys that prepares the body’s response to stress.  This increased his heart rate, increased blood pressure by vasoconstricting his arteries; dilated his pupils, and attempted to increase breathing rate.  However, with Chauvin’s knee on Floyd’s neck, the increased respiratory rate did not result in more oxygen getting to the body and the diaphragm, the sheet of muscle that pulls down and expands the lungs for breathing may have spasmed as it fought against the air blockage.

Most of Chauvin’s knee was over the side of the neck, but the front (anterior) was subject to some compression.  This likely partially collapsed the trachea, restricting air flow.  Mr. Floyd was initially able to express his inabilty to breathe, suggesting that his trachea was still patent, but his words became less and less as the seconds ticked.  Perhaps Chauvin’s knee shifted forward with his weight, slowly closing off the trachea.  This makes sense, as the neck has a curved contour which would promote such slipping.

As the knee hold persisted cutting blood flow to his brain, Mr. Floyd’s blood rapidly turned acidic as all oxygen was used up (the brain has a high metabolic rate and therefore a high rate of oxygen consumption) and CO2 levels were rapidly rising (CO2 is a byproduct of cell respiration).  This may have affected his speech center, which is supported by the fact he stopped talking a few minutes after the knee hold.  The apneustic (breathing) center in his brainstem was starting to break down as well from the hypoxia (insufficient oxygen), hampering his breathing further.

It’s not clear at what point Mr. Floyd expired.  Coroners define time of death at the point when brain activity ceases.  But the nature of Mr. Floyd’s death was so prolonged, it is likely he experienced irreversible brain damage and would have been in a vegetative state even if Chauvin had gotten off of him a little earlier and Mr. Floyd was given immediate medical attention.

One of the tell-tale signs of asphyxia by strangulation is ruptured blood vessels in the conjunctiva (whites of eyes) and face, called petechial hemmorhaging.  This information, as far as I know, is not available to the public.  If there was no evidence of this, I can see why the county autopsy reached the conclusion that he did not die of asphyxia.  In this case, it would suggest that Mr. Floyd’s primary cause of death was something else; perhaps sudden stoppage of the heart due to a breakdown in the cardioregulatory system.  But, it is not clear if you can die from asphyxia from “gradual” strangulation and not have petechial hemmorhaging.  It could also be that death was from a combination of both asphyxia and heart stoppage.

The autopsy did not mention fractured cervical vertebrae, which I could see happening if it were a smaller-framed person.  The force Chauvin exerted on the neck appears enough to break one or several neck bones, especially if the person had osteopenia (bone thinning).  Fractured neck vertebrae often result in spinal cord damage and paralysis.

Conclusion

George Floyd’s tragic death is a wake-up call for police forces across the country.  Knees to the neck to restrain someone must be prohibited.  There are too many ways for this to go wrong, given the high concentration of structures critical to maintaining life that reside in the neck.  I understand that safety to police officers is important and fully support it, but it must not be accomplished by jeopardizing the safety of the person being restrained.

[suzanneshannon]

Design for Safety, An Excerpt

Antiracist economist Kim Crayton says that “intention without strategy is chaos.” We’ve discussed how our biases, assumptions, and inattention toward marginalized and vulnerable groups lead to dangerous and unethical tech—but what, specifically, do we need to do to fix it? The intention to make our tech safer is not enough; we need a strategy.

This chapter will equip you with that plan of action. It covers how to integrate safety principles into your design work in order to create tech that’s safe, how to convince your stakeholders that this work is necessary, and how to respond to the critique that what we actually need is more diversity. (Spoiler: we do, but diversity alone is not the antidote to fixing unethical, unsafe tech.)

The process for inclusive safety

When you are designing for safety, your goals are to:

identify ways your product can be used for abuse,

design ways to prevent the abuse, and

provide support for vulnerable users to reclaim power and control.

The Process for Inclusive Safety is a tool to help you reach those goals (Fig 5.1). It’s a methodology I created in 2018 to capture the various techniques I was using when designing products with safety in mind. Whether you are creating an entirely new product or adding to an existing feature, the Process can help you make your product safe and inclusive. The Process includes five general areas of action:

Conducting research

Creating archetypes

Brainstorming problems

Designing solutions

Testing for safety

Fig 5.1: Each aspect of the Process for Inclusive Safety can be incorporated into your design process where it makes the most sense for you. The times given are estimates to help you incorporate the stages into your design plan.

The Process is meant to be flexible—it won’t make sense for teams to implement every step in some situations. Use the parts that are relevant to your unique work and context; this is meant to be something you can insert into your existing design practice.

And once you use it, if you have an idea for making it better or simply want to provide context of how it helped your team, please get in touch with me. It’s a living document that I hope will continue to be a useful and realistic tool that technologists can use in their day-to-day work.

If you’re working on a product specifically for a vulnerable group or survivors of some form of trauma, such as an app for survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, or drug addiction, be sure to read Chapter 7, which covers that situation explicitly and should be handled a bit differently. The guidelines here are for prioritizing safety when designing a more general product that will have a wide user base (which, we already know from statistics, will include certain groups that should be protected from harm). Chapter 7 is focused on products that are specifically for vulnerable groups and people who have experienced trauma.

Step 1: Conduct research

Design research should include a broad analysis of how your tech might be weaponized for abuse as well as specific insights into the experiences of survivors and perpetrators of that type of abuse. At this stage, you and your team will investigate issues of interpersonal harm and abuse, and explore any other safety, security, or inclusivity issues that might be a concern for your product or service, like data security, racist algorithms, and harassment.

Broad research

Your project should begin with broad, general research into similar products and issues around safety and ethical concerns that have already been reported. For example, a team building a smart home device would do well to understand the multitude of ways that existing smart home devices have been used as tools of abuse. If your product will involve AI, seek to understand the potentials for racism and other issues that have been reported in existing AI products. Nearly all types of technology have some kind of potential or actual harm that’s been reported on in the news or written about by academics. Google Scholar is a useful tool for finding these studies.

Specific research: Survivors

When possible and appropriate, include direct research (surveys and interviews) with people who are experts in the forms of harm you have uncovered. Ideally, you’ll want to interview advocates working in the space of your research first so that you have a more solid understanding of the topic and are better equipped to not retraumatize survivors. If you’ve uncovered possible domestic violence issues, for example, the experts you’ll want to speak with are survivors themselves, as well as workers at domestic violence hotlines, shelters, other related nonprofits, and lawyers.

Especially when interviewing survivors of any kind of trauma, it is important to pay people for their knowledge and lived experiences. Don’t ask survivors to share their trauma for free, as this is exploitative. While some survivors may not want to be paid, you should always make the offer in the initial ask. An alternative to payment is to donate to an organization working against the type of violence that the interviewee experienced. We’ll talk more about how to appropriately interview survivors in Chapter 6.

Specific research: Abusers

It’s unlikely that teams aiming to design for safety will be able to interview self-proclaimed abusers or people who have broken laws around things like hacking. Don’t make this a goal; rather, try to get at this angle in your general research. Aim to understand how abusers or bad actors weaponize technology to use against others, how they cover their tracks, and how they explain or rationalize the abuse.

Step 2: Create archetypes

Once you’ve finished conducting your research, use your insights to create abuser and survivor archetypes. Archetypes are not personas, as they’re not based on real people that you interviewed and surveyed. Instead, they’re based on your research into likely safety issues, much like when we design for accessibility: we don’t need to have found a group of blind or low-vision users in our interview pool to create a design that’s inclusive of them. Instead, we base those designs on existing research into what this group needs. Personas typically represent real users and include many details, while archetypes are broader and can be more generalized.

The abuser archetype is someone who will look at the product as a tool to perform harm (Fig 5.2). They may be trying to harm someone they don’t know through surveillance or anonymous harassment, or they may be trying to control, monitor, abuse, or torment someone they know personally.

Fig 5.2: Harry Oleson, an abuser archetype for a fitness product, is looking for ways to stalk his ex-girlfriend through the fitness apps she uses.

The survivor archetype is someone who is being abused with the product. There are various situations to consider in terms of the archetype’s understanding of the abuse and how to put an end to it: Do they need proof of abuse they already suspect is happening, or are they unaware they’ve been targeted in the first place and need to be alerted (Fig 5.3)?

Fig 5.3: The survivor archetype Lisa Zwaan suspects her husband is weaponizing their home’s IoT devices against her, but in the face of his insistence that she simply doesn’t understand how to use the products, she’s unsure. She needs some kind of proof of the abuse.

You may want to make multiple survivor archetypes to capture a range of different experiences. They may know that the abuse is happening but not be able to stop it, like when an abuser locks them out of IoT devices; or they know it’s happening but don’t know how, such as when a stalker keeps figuring out their location (Fig 5.4). Include as many of these scenarios as you need to in your survivor archetype. You’ll use these later on when you design solutions to help your survivor archetypes achieve their goals of preventing and ending abuse.

Fig 5.4: The survivor archetype Eric Mitchell knows he’s being stalked by his ex-boyfriend Rob but can’t figure out how Rob is learning his location information.

It may be useful for you to create persona-like artifacts for your archetypes, such as the three examples shown. Instead of focusing on the demographic information we often see in personas, focus on their goals. The goals of the abuser will be to carry out the specific abuse you’ve identified, while the goals of the survivor will be to prevent abuse, understand that abuse is happening, make ongoing abuse stop, or regain control over the technology that’s being used for abuse. Later, you’ll brainstorm how to prevent the abuser’s goals and assist the survivor’s goals.

And while the “abuser/survivor” model fits most cases, it doesn’t fit all, so modify it as you need to. For example, if you uncovered an issue with security, such as the ability for someone to hack into a home camera system and talk to children, the malicious hacker would get the abuser archetype and the child’s parents would get survivor archetype.

Step 3: Brainstorm problems

After creating archetypes, brainstorm novel abuse cases and safety issues. “Novel” means things not found in your research; you’re trying to identify completely new safety issues that are unique to your product or service. The goal with this step is to exhaust every effort of identifying harms your product could cause. You aren’t worrying about how to prevent the harm yet—that comes in the next step.

How could your product be used for any kind of abuse, outside of what you’ve already identified in your research? I recommend setting aside at least a few hours with your team for this process.

If you’re looking for somewhere to start, try doing a Black Mirror brainstorm. This exercise is based on the show Black Mirror, which features stories about the dark possibilities of technology. Try to figure out how your product would be used in an episode of the show—the most wild, awful, out-of-control ways it could be used for harm. When I’ve led Black Mirror brainstorms, participants usually end up having a good deal of fun (which I think is great—it’s okay to have fun when designing for safety!). I recommend time-boxing a Black Mirror brainstorm to half an hour, and then dialing it back and using the rest of the time thinking of more realistic forms of harm.

After you’ve identified as many opportunities for abuse as possible, you may still not feel confident that you’ve uncovered every potential form of harm. A healthy amount of anxiety is normal when you’re doing this kind of work. It’s common for teams designing for safety to worry, “Have we really identified every possible harm? What if we’ve missed something?” If you’ve spent at least four hours coming up with ways your product could be used for harm and have run out of ideas, go to the next step.

It’s impossible to guarantee you’ve thought of everything; instead of aiming for 100 percent assurance, recognize that you’ve taken this time and have done the best you can, and commit to continuing to prioritize safety in the future. Once your product is released, your users may identify new issues that you missed; aim to receive that feedback graciously and course-correct quickly.

Step 4: Design solutions

At this point, you should have a list of ways your product can be used for harm as well as survivor and abuser archetypes describing opposing user goals. The next step is to identify ways to design against the identified abuser’s goals and to support the survivor’s goals. This step is a good one to insert alongside existing parts of your design process where you’re proposing solutions for the various problems your research uncovered.

Some questions to ask yourself to help prevent harm and support your archetypes include:

Can you design your product in such a way that the identified harm cannot happen in the first place? If not, what roadblocks can you put up to prevent the harm from happening?

How can you make the victim aware that abuse is happening through your product?

How can you help the victim understand what they need to do to make the problem stop?

Can you identify any types of user activity that would indicate some form of harm or abuse? Could your product help the user access support?

In some products, it’s possible to proactively recognize that harm is happening. For example, a pregnancy app might be modified to allow the user to report that they were the victim of an assault, which could trigger an offer to receive resources for local and national organizations. This sort of proactiveness is not always possible, but it’s worth taking a half hour to discuss if any type of user activity would indicate some form of harm or abuse, and how your product could assist the user in receiving help in a safe manner.

That said, use caution: you don’t want to do anything that could put a user in harm’s way if their devices are being monitored. If you do offer some kind of proactive help, always make it voluntary, and think through other safety issues, such as the need to keep the user in-app in case an abuser is checking their search history. We’ll walk through a good example of this in the next chapter.

Step 5: Test for safety

The final step is to test your prototypes from the point of view of your archetypes: the person who wants to weaponize the product for harm and the victim of the harm who needs to regain control over the technology. Just like any other kind of product testing, at this point you’ll aim to rigorously test out your safety solutions so that you can identify gaps and correct them, validate that your designs will help keep your users safe, and feel more confident releasing your product into the world.

Ideally, safety testing happens along with usability testing. If you’re at a company that doesn’t do usability testing, you might be able to use safety testing to cleverly perform both; a user who goes through your design attempting to weaponize the product against someone else can also be encouraged to point out interactions or other elements of the design that don’t make sense to them.

You’ll want to conduct safety testing on either your final prototype or the actual product if it’s already been released. There’s nothing wrong with testing an existing product that wasn’t designed with safety goals in mind from the onset—“retrofitting” it for safety is a good thing to do.

Remember that testing for safety involves testing from the perspective of both an abuser and a survivor, though it may not make sense for you to do both. Alternatively, if you made multiple survivor archetypes to capture multiple scenarios, you’ll want to test from the perspective of each one.

As with other sorts of usability testing, you as the designer are most likely too close to the product and its design by this point to be a valuable tester; you know the product too well. Instead of doing it yourself, set up testing as you would with other usability testing: find someone who is not familiar with the product and its design, set the scene, give them a task, encourage them to think out loud, and observe how they attempt to complete it.

Abuser testing

The goal of this testing is to understand how easy it is for someone to weaponize your product for harm. Unlike with usability testing, you want to make it impossible, or at least difficult, for them to achieve their goal. Reference the goals in the abuser archetype you created earlier, and use your product in an attempt to achieve them.

For example, for a fitness app with GPS-enabled location features, we can imagine that the abuser archetype would have the goal of figuring out where his ex-girlfriend now lives. With this goal in mind, you’d try everything possible to figure out the location of another user who has their privacy settings enabled. You might try to see her running routes, view any available information on her profile, view anything available about her location (which she has set to private), and investigate the profiles of any other users somehow connected with her account, such as her followers.

If by the end of this you’ve managed to uncover some of her location data, despite her having set her profile to private, you know now that your product enables stalking. Your next step is to go back to step 4 and figure out how to prevent this from happening. You may need to repeat the process of designing solutions and testing them more than once.

Survivor testing

Survivor testing involves identifying how to give information and power to the survivor. It might not always make sense based on the product or context. Thwarting the attempt of an abuser archetype to stalk someone also satisfies the goal of the survivor archetype to not be stalked, so separate testing wouldn’t be needed from the survivor’s perspective.

However, there are cases where it makes sense. For example, for a smart thermostat, a survivor archetype’s goals would be to understand who or what is making the temperature change when they aren’t doing it themselves. You could test this by looking for the thermostat’s history log and checking for usernames, actions, and times; if you couldn’t find that information, you would have more work to do in step 4.

Another goal might be regaining control of the thermostat once the survivor realizes the abuser is remotely changing its settings. Your test would involve attempting to figure out how to do this: are there instructions that explain how to remove another user and change the password, and are they easy to find? This might again reveal that more work is needed to make it clear to the user how they can regain control of the device or account.

Stress testing

To make your product more inclusive and compassionate, consider adding stress testing. This concept comes from Design for Real Life by Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher. The authors pointed out that personas typically center people who are having a good day—but real users are often anxious, stressed out, having a bad day, or even experiencing tragedy. These are called “stress cases,” and testing your products for users in stress-case situations can help you identify places where your design lacks compassion. Design for Real Life has more details about what it looks like to incorporate stress cases into your design as well as many other great tactics for compassionate design.

Design for Safety, An Excerpt published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/

[paraclete0407]

Pretty sure I'm going to become Catholic if I don't die from Delta tonight - I've been thinking about it my whole life and I feel awful contemplating how much time and how many people I've lost.  Recently I concluded what might have been my last intimate love-relationship with someone - the last person I feel I ever wanted to marry, it's just  over now. I have a lot of flaws like sensualism, aestheticism, expectation of unending maternal unconditional love.  Ever since 18 I relied on the same few pieces of music to hold me, Franz Biebl's 'Ave Maria,' Praetorius' 'Es It Ein Rosentsprungen.'  Biebl only wrote a few pieces of music in his life. I don't know why in the past decade I went to war with the world when meekness had seen me through for a long time and kept me surprising everyone who said I wasn't doing enough or getting with the times.  I'm really dumb, blind.  I also accumulated various cupidities and preciosities.  It's pathetic.  Today there are race-wars, class-wars, gender-wars, identity-wars, age-wars.  Covid I still feel is just anti-Asian racism though - I can't see it any other way and I always, always lose my motivation for studying or reading about anything but the history of Western imperialism.  I don't want to speak ill of Protestants b/c I read Metaxas' Luther bioraphy at least in part and the cynicism of that priesthood... but 'Heil Hitler point 1' in Milwaukee is like 'Joshua and genocide' every day, showing no mercy.  I love John Piper, John MacArthur, RC Sproul I only wish I'd listened more like 35 years ago.  But.  Chest-beating.  However the fault is mine for I'd be more masculine if I simply abided with probity by the rules of Scripture and subjected myself to wholesome discipline.  I don't know why I'm so skittish of everything. Honestly I'm a Satanist - in the Baudelarean sense and otherwise.  There was a student I worked with in KR who reminded me of the poem 'Benediction' which is 'bad sauce' but poems like that and K-Pop stuff like Aespa or 'Lamborghini Angels' by Lupe fiasco is kind of 'advanced, ultramodern' religious contents.  I can't say more than that b/c those are real people and also part of my 'patrimony' or simply my experience as a man / human; specific responsibilities. One thing I really regret is in past I always tried to blow my family off with cheap gifts which was 'pozzed' b/c cheap gifts and fake gifts and twisted as opposed to linear gifts is part of what's wrong with all of Europe Germany Netherlands et cetera.  Like, 'I have a perfect idea- nah, let me f--- it up to personalize it or sth.'  Milwaukee's obsessed with ethnography like 'Wales has mining and its own language' but they never ethnographize German culture which is all about hiding your virtue and doing less than you can - 'be more than you seem.'  But why?  It's completely diametrically anti-biblical to hide your light.  Anyway criticizing the Church when 4 million people died and my own DNA (Dutch) just got an 800% spike in Delta infections might seem kind of idle / academic but lit-crit is sth I've been doing all my life.  Why wait? I keep thinking of 'Lincoln' lately which is not a great movie and Kushner says a lot of dumb stuff.  But the 'now now now' and 'millions unborn' is absolutely epic and it's what is going on right now all the time.  Today I got lost in Chicago while trying to report to the ROK Consul General literally to discuss matters fro mthe past as well as literally to tell them to evacuate Koreans from Milwaukee (most of the ones I knew in past are already gone).  Right now I wish I could make myself as little but perfect a box / chamber as possible in which to exist like a prison-cell just to I stop wrecking my own chances.  I also remembered a Sowon hyper-fanfic called 'My Brother's Type' about someone I knew who used to like these leggy lissome slightly remote types but decided to trash their own taste in women (nothing wrong with changing mind per se but) and deciding B-52's and gangster / clan / tribal conspiracy is better than being open and honest.  Ironically 'B-52' was a nickname given to Chairman Mao by I think [I forget]'s son since he had a huge stomach that dropped out all kinds of murderous ideas which again I can't see any other way but that's the origin of Covid.  I was thinking of all these snice things to say about my carpet-bombing-philc family but thta's pozzed too at this point I just need to get baptized and hopefully plenary indulgence(?) before  Iget flamethrowered in my containment-zone.  I remember this picture of a Vietnamese woman with a crashed B in the background; I read 'Fire Road' and 'Ru' with that boy named Pascal and I read 'Pensees' over and over and over again like, 'Finally my friend.'  if I live to be even 51 or 52 I really want to go back to Asia or even just K-Town LA; I miss all my friends; I hear them, Protestants don't need me, Milwaukee doesn't need me, I'm just a 'little flower' or something.   I remembered today the face of the person I most wanted ot marry and the day we went on this kind of 'communication session' with a chaperone(?); went home and started reading Proust feeling 'everlasting gratitude.'  Never finished Proust nearly.  I bought a Korean language version of 'The Remains of the Day' which was the other novel I read that year and remembered trying to interpret 'South of the Border West of the Sun' in terms of a geographic-anagogic sort of Dantean-Northrop-Fryian system that would turn the title in to 'Before the Beginning and After the End.'  Sitting in the meditation-garden of the Church of Peter and Paul and just thinking of sailed ships and corners turned but that too was years ago.  I don't even know how to work gas-station pumps anymore.  Remebering the last words of someone from a vanished era, the 1990s when we thought that every little people could have their own republic and now the passive resistance people in Myanmar etc. are all getting jailed by dictators.  Richard Holbrooke with his arterial dissection, 'I love so many people.'  Maybe I should just wait outside the local church gate all night; little kids from Syria in France and such are sleeping in parks.  IDK why I stopped letting myself be acted on b/c my typical 'seizure of agency, self-coup' modus operandi is to headbutt immoveable objects and feast the obese.  I should've been a Jesuit or Cistercian, love Bernard of Clairvaux, 'Honey and Salt.' I am only sad that HH.1 et al. talk so much about saints from like 500 years ago in this 'winter of peril' era.  Where is Francis Chan?   Llove Augustine who seems to be watching over the whole world right now, 'an intellectual giant,' hoping we will all remember Original Sin and the 'curse in hope' instead of thinking of C19 as somebody's technical error / lack of being a smart Democrat... I also liked 'Humana Vitae' to say the least; Koreans always talk about love of life and I realize death and evil and the Devil are things I should've taken more seriously in the past but... Anyway I also noticed how people are scrambling to conceptualize everything in terms of 'oxygenation' nowadays.  Concept of 'holiness' related to separateness but what can that mean if not integrity when we're all part of the metabolism of the Earth.  I'm saying too much now I always do too much or too little.  The future appears to be cereal-grains and the consciousness of chains. I ate some 'rice-salad' and remembered 'The Last of Hanako' just to hopefully teach myself once and for all that my mother's body is a graveyard of her best dreams b/c women in the end [cynical I-read-Nabokov] - 'Abolition of Woman' Gen-Alph; 'town bike.'   A few weeks ago I had the 'Stepfather' idea about reading the Episcopalian newspaper with Minju b/c Scripture says don't talk with daddy-daughter 'extend my love to the unfinished woman' ppl but I talked to them again and got R. Kelly'd.   I remember watching 'I Miss You' and almost breaking my hand (Minah looks like s1) but now I'm more trained.  

[henryofgreatbritain]

Up close and personal with Prince William: an intimate portrait of the future king

As the world devours the Harry and Meghan interview, what’s going on with the brother who was left behind? He’s embracing his destiny, William’s close friends tell the Sunday Times royal correspondent, Roya Nikkhah

Next month Prince William will celebrate his tenth wedding anniversary — the day he became a duke and embarked on the most formative decade of his life. Back then, the tentative 28-year-old newlywed was not ready to devote himself entirely to royal duties. A decade on, he is in a very different position.

The job of being the heir to the heir to the throne, of finding a balance between life and duty, is difficult at the best of times. These are not the best of times. In their bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey this month the Duke and Duchess of Sussex accused the royal family and the institution around it of racism and callous disregard for a suicidal newcomer, among many other damning charges. Harry the spare also declared that William was trapped within “the system … My brother can’t leave that system, but I have.”

In the immediate aftermath of the interview William was “reeling”, a source close to the duke says. “His head is all over the place on it.” Four days after the Sussexes had their say, he hit back during an engagement with the Duchess of Cambridge at a school in east London. Asked about accusations of racism, William retorted with restrained fury: “We’re very much not a racist family.” He also confirmed that he hadn’t spoken to Harry yet, “but will do”. By the weekend it emerged they had “been in contact”.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s explosive interview with Oprah WinfreyAVALON

William is thought to have been less than thrilled a few days later when that conversation made global headlines after the American presenter Gayle King, a close friend of the Sussexes, revealed live on air that it had not been an easy chat: “I did actually call them to see how they were feeling,” she told viewers. “Harry has talked to his brother and he had talked to his father too. The word I was given was that those conversations were not productive.” The intervention prompted a senior royal source to say that “none of the households will be giving a running commentary on private conversations”.

A close friend of both brothers says Harry’s “trapped” comment was “way off the mark”, insisting that William does not see it that way. “He has a path set for him and he’s completely accepting of his role. He is very much his grandmother’s grandson in that respect of duty and service.”

When the Queen turned 90 nearly five years ago William admitted “the challenge” that “occupies a lot of thinking space” is how to “modernise and develop” the royal family, and make it “relevant in the next 20 years’ time”. Twenty years now seems like a very long time. In the hours and days after the Oprah broadcast, William was at the heart of all discussions with the Queen and the Prince of Wales about how to respond to the Sussexes. He was keen that the issue of race should be acknowledged in the Queen’s statement as an area of particular concern that “will be addressed”.

William has always railed against being a “ribbon-cutter royal” and the issues he champions — mental health, battling racism in football, homelessness and his ramped-up eco-warrior role — are a window into where the future King William V will take the House of Windsor. A friend says: “He’s a small-c conservative. He values tradition and the need to go around the country, but he realises he can make a difference beyond traditional royal duties.”

Today royal popularity is, to put it mildly, in a state of flux, but William’s strategy has been working. Post-Oprah, he ranks just below the Queen at the top of a YouGov poll of royals. Not so long ago such a position looked like a long shot, when the “workshy Wills” and “reluctant royal” tags plagued him and he was clocking up fewer days of royal work than his nonagenarian grandparents. Pictures of him hitting the ski slopes and clubs of Swiss resort Verbier in March 2017, missing a Commonwealth service that even the Duke of York flew back for, didn’t help.

Prince William on an official visit to Coventry War Memorial Park in 2014GETTY IMAGES

After the lasting PR gold dust of the Cambridges’ 2011 wedding and the births of Prince George and Princess Charlotte, it was the first public nosedive for William, who was still working as an air ambulance pilot. “That pissed him off,” a friend says. “He was leaving home at 5.30am, getting home after dark and saving lives in between, but people were still being critical of his commitment to his [other] job.” William was based at Cambridge airport with East Anglian Air Ambulance for two years, where he was on call for “some very sad, dark moments”, often working “on very traumatic jobs involving children”. He later acknowledged that “after I had my own children … the relation between the job and the personal life was what really took me over the edge, and I started feeling things that I have never felt before”. But it was a job he loved, because of “working in a team … that’s something that my other job doesn’t necessarily do. You are more out there on your own.”

A former royal aide says: “Immediately after their wedding he had a very clear idea of the pace at which he wanted to take things.” William was adamant he wouldn’t curtail his day jobs, first as an RAF search and rescue helicopter pilot in Anglesey and then with the air ambulance. “If you’re not careful, duty can weigh you down an awful lot at an early age,” he said, insisting he didn’t “lie awake waiting or hoping” to be king. He delayed full-time royal duties until the autumn of 2017, when, acknowledging the Cambridges’ future required more time at “monarchy HQ”, they moved from Norfolk to London and George started school.

He’d had to fight his corner for the air ambulance role. A source close to William reveals “there were lots of raised eyebrows in the Palace when he wanted to do that. While the Queen and his father backed him, some senior courtiers questioned whether it was becoming of a future king to be doing a middle-class role, hanging out with ordinary people. They thought he wouldn’t stick it out, he’d find it boring, or was doing it out of stubbornness to put off royal duties. He was pretty bloody-minded about it, and determined that other people’s expectations in the media or the system shouldn’t get in the way of his own values.” In the wake of Harry and Meghan’s interview much has been speculated about the extent to which royal life is dictated by Palace officials, but it is clear that William has managed to forge his own path. Who knows how high those senior courtiers’ eyebrows rose in 2019, when William spent three weeks shadowing the spooks of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ to learn how they combat terrorism. He insisted on being called “Will” and lunching in the canteen every day.

Those closest to the duke say his resistance to the idea of full-time royal duties stemmed not only from a desire to achieve something for himself but also from a fear of the impact on his family life. Miguel Head worked alongside the prince for ten years until 2018, as William, Kate and Harry’s communications secretary and later as William’s private secretary. “In his role everyone’s going to tell you you’re marvellous,” Head says. “The RAF and air ambulance jobs were about knowing what his abilities were, what he was good at in his own right. Without that he’d still be hankering for something that was his own.” After children came along he says William developed a “visceral determination to give them a life of consistency and privacy that were missing for large parts of his own childhood”.

Pomp and splendour at his wedding to Kate Middleton, April 2011ARTHUR EDWARDS / THE SUN

Another close aide says the plan enabling the Cambridges to have a few years of “normal” married life, away from the full-time glare of the royal spotlight, paid dividends: “For years, the battles around privacy and paparazzi intrusion were all-consuming. He wanted to know, could we build them a credible plan allowing them a family life while slowly increasing the profile of official life? It took years to get there, but the success of that plan allowed him to be confident and content in his role. He’s not worried about his kids’ privacy any more and he has been able to be the kind of dad he wants to be.”

“Marriage maketh the man,” a friend says. “Catherine’s groundedness has been the critical anchor. And where his relationship with the media was once all fury and frustration, he now understands using the power of modern media, so the public feel they’re getting enough access.”

The children’s birthdays are marked with photographs — often taken by the Duchess of Cambridge — and there has been a noticeable increase in their public appearances of late. While not “officially” staged, William was happy to let George and Charlotte be photographed at their first Aston Villa match with Mum and Dad in 2019. Pandemic set pieces have shown the family clapping for the NHS on the steps of Anmer Hall, their Norfolk home, and, before Christmas, their first red-carpet appearance together for an evening at the panto with key workers and their children.

Prince George celebrates a goal by Aston Villa at his first football match, October 2019JASON DAWSON

As they celebrate their anniversary on April 29, friends who joined the Cambridges on their wedding day tell me the partnership’s equal footing is key to its success. “They’ve got a solid relationship and she gives him confidence,” one says. “There is no jealousy, no friction, they are happy for each other’s successes.” In private William talks as passionately about Kate’s work as his own campaigns, and takes pride in her growing confidence on the public stage.

William plays with Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis in their Norfolk garden during lockdown, June 2020PA / THE DUCHESS OF CAMBRIDGE

William has said his grandmother’s approach to being head of state is to take “more of a passive role. She’s above politics and is very much away from it.” He doesn’t plan to meddle in party politics, but he was not happy about the unenviable position the government put the Queen in with the 2019 proroguing of parliament, which was later ruled to be unlawful and forced an apology from Boris Johnson to the monarch. Constitutionally the Queen had no alternative other than to act on the advice of her government, but in William’s reign there will be “more private, robust challenging of advice”. His last three private secretaries — Christian Jones, Simon Case, now the cabinet secretary, and Head — had all worked in government departments, helping William to keep his finger on the political pulse. The new incumbent, the Whitehall heavyweight Jean-Christophe Gray, who served as David Cameron’s spokesman, continues in that vein.

The former Conservative leader Lord Hague of Richmond was last year appointed as chairman of the Royal Foundation to develop William’s work on mental health, the environment and a raft of new support programmes for key workers. “People internationally and nationally respect his credibility and knowledge on these issues,” Hague says. “He’s very persuasive. You only see that behind the scenes. He knows what he wants and he goes out to get it.”

Charlie Mayhew, chief executive of the conservation charity Tusk, has known William since he was 20. In 2005 Tusk and Centrepoint, the homelessness charity championed by Princess Diana, were the first patronages William took on. “In those early years I kept having to pinch myself to remember how young he was,” Mayhew says. “He was much more mature than his age and very aware of his destiny coming down the track. He had a sincerity, but never without wicked humour. His teasing is merciless.”

William knows some people see his passion for conservation as a posh man’s part-time hobby, but Mayhew says the duke’s “genuine and huge knowledge” undermines that view. “He’ll call and WhatsApp to flag up something that I haven’t even seen in the conservation space. He can be impatient to get things done.” Last year William launched the Earthshot prize, a £50 million Nobel-style environmental award to galvanise solutions to global problems over the next decade. He believes “conservation and the environment … shouldn’t be a luxury, it’s a necessity”, Mayhew says. “That’s the drum he wants to beat. He’s got a megaphone and wants to use it in the most constructive way. He speaks for that next generation and I think they can relate to it.”

William greets President Xi on his state visit, 2015PA

A turning point for William was his 2015 official visit to China, one of the world’s largest consumers of ivory, where he met President Xi and condemned the illegal wildlife trade as a “vicious form of criminality”. Unlike his father, who has refused to visit the People’s Republic over its human rights record and treatment of Tibet, William’s view was that despite the UK’s fractious relationship with China, “we’ve got to engage”.

“It was very political, raising the illegal wildlife trade in China. I’m sure the diplomats were having all sort of nightmares in advance,” says Mayhew, who joined the duke in China. “But he was gathering greater confidence that he had the ability to be a mouthpiece for the issue.” Mayhew reveals that while William was visiting Japan before China, he still hadn’t secured a meeting with Xi. “But when the Chinese saw all the high-level meetings he was having in Japan, they changed their minds and Xi made time for him.” Later that year, as Xi began a UK state visit, William appeared on Chinese television condemning the ivory trade. Two years later China banned the trade.

In 2018 he spent months prepping for his most high-stakes overseas visit yet, to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories that summer. Navigating the diplomatic tightrope walk between Jerusalem and the West Bank, he visited a Palestinian refugee camp in Ramallah. As he travelled back to Jerusalem, he changed his speech for a reception with young Israelis and Palestinians to strengthen his solidarity with the latter: “My message tonight is that you have not been forgotten … The United Kingdom stands with you.” It was a bold move, but both sides hailed his visit a success and the officials breathed a sigh of relief. To the delight of the travelling press pack, William’s engagements on the final day were brought forward, allowing the diplomat duke and president of the Football Association to land back in the UK in time to watch England’s World Cup tie.

William at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, 2018PA

Ask him if he’s a peacemaker and William will laugh, saying Kate is the mediator. But according to a source close to William and Harry, his bridge-building skills were deployed in the lead-up to Harry and Meghan’s wedding in 2018, when tensions in the Kensington Palace household, then still shared by the brothers, were running high: “Every time there was a drama, or a member of staff on the verge of quitting, William would personally try and sort it out.”

As the brothers clashed more over the substance and style of their work, and the family hierarchy that William is a stickler for but Harry is less keen on, a split was inevitable. When they finally divided their households in March 2019, it had been a long time coming. But he never thought that a year later his brother would up sticks for America.

The pair went for a long walk to clear the air after the “Sandringham summit” when the Megxit deal was hammered out, but did not part shores as friends. What upset William the most was Harry and Meghan’s surprise launch of their “Sussex Royal” website before the summit, which featured their blueprint wish list of a part-time, commercial royal future. Later, when the Queen decreed they could no longer use “royal” in their future ventures, their website hit back with this bold statement: “While there is not any jurisdiction by The Monarchy … over the use of the word ‘Royal’ overseas, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex do not intend to use ‘Sussex Royal’ … or … ‘Royal’ …” Both “the content and that it’s still online is staggering”, a senior royal source says. “That was it for William, he felt they’d blindsided the Queen in such an insulting and disrespectful way,” says a source close to him, who reveals it was still at the forefront of William’s mind at the Commonwealth Day service one year ago. It was the Sussexes’ final engagement as working royals, and the froideur between them and the rest of the family was unmistakable.

An awkward Commonwealth Day service for the Cambridges and Sussexes at Westminster Abbey, March 2020GETTY IMAGES

It is a year since the Sussexes left for California and William misses Harry. “Once he got over the anger of how things happened, he was left with the absence of his brother,” an aide says. “They shared everything about their lives, an office, a foundation, meetings together most days and there was a lot of fun along the way. He’ll miss it for ever.” A close friend says William “definitely feels the pressure now it’s all on him — his future looks different because of his brother’s choices, it’s not easy.” Another friend says: “It’s still raw. He’s very upset by what’s happened, though absolutely intent that he and Harry’s relationship will heal in time.”

After lobbing bombs in his Oprah interview, Harry said: “I love William to bits … We���ve been through hell together … we have a shared experience … The relationship is space at the moment, and time heals all things, hopefully.” Harry would be wise not to set his stopwatch.

The first test will come this summer, when the brothers could be reunited for a series of family engagements including the Duke of Edinburgh’s 100th birthday and the Queen’s birthday parade in June. In July they are scheduled to unveil a statue of their mother at Kensington Palace, marking what would have been Diana’s 60th birthday, an emotionally charged occasion with the world watching.

While a chasm has opened up between the brothers, William has grown closer to the Queen and Prince Charles. He has helped them to navigate their way through Megxit, Prince Andrew’s removal from public life following the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and, now, the Oprah controversy. “That has changed the way the Queen sees him and values his input,” a courtier says. William also feels his relationship with his grandmother has “massively improved” in recent years and their views are “more aligned than ever”.

Friends say there has also been a “renaissance” in William and Charles’s relationship. “As the years passed there were strains imposed by the system — money, work, competition, Diana,” one says. “Part of William’s evolution is that as he has become closer to his father, he sees their similarities. At William’s wedding there was a gag in one of the speeches that he was more like his father than he’d ever admit, which made a lot of us laugh. As their respective destinies get closer, it weighs more heavily on them and strengthens the bond. The rift with Harry has also brought them closer.”

The British line of succession — the Queen, Prince Charles, Prince William and Prince George, December 2019AP

William is said to hate “flummery”, though the role of future king comes with plenty of bowing and scraping. But in 2017, for the first time publicly, he didn’t get his way. As a new parent worried about rising teenage suicide rates, he had spent a year convening a Cyberbullying Taskforce with big cheeses from tech and social media giants including Facebook, Snapchat, Apple, Google and Twitter. He wanted them to adopt industry-wide guidelines creating safer online spaces for children. According to William the meetings at Kensington Palace got “fruity” and the tech giants didn’t come close to the change he wanted. He was furious.

Tessy Ojo, chief executive of the Diana Award youth charity, sat on the taskforce. “He was deeply disappointed,” she says. “He didn’t come into it as ‘the duke’, he gave emotional pleas as a father.” William has since publicly condemned social media giants for their “false choice of profits over values” and privately offered support to the family of Molly Russell, who took her life at 14 after viewing images of self-harm online. Ojo believes it is William’s “lived experience of the fragility of life that guides the work he does”.

It also shapes the way he and Kate are raising their family. William has said he is determined that the grandchildren Diana never knew should “know who she was and that she existed”. He “constantly” talks to his children “about Granny Diana” at bedtime, so that they know “there are two grandmothers in their lives”. Earlier this month on Mother’s Day, Kensington Palace’s social media feeds published George, Charlotte and Louis’s cards paying tribute to “Granny Diana”, revealing it is an annual ritual for the Cambridge children. After a difficult few weeks for William, a line in Charlotte’s card provided poignant insight into how he is feeling: “Papa is missing you.”

He is on course to be a more modern monarch than any before him, but William is still a creature of habit at heart. He has the same tight circle of friends from his schooldays, one of whom says that, with William, “it’s all about trust and loyalty”. He plays five-a-side football in his Villa socks when he can, goes to the Chelsea Harbour Club gym he went to as a child with his mother and has a “smart casual” public uniform of chinos, jacket, blue shirt and no tie.

“William’s not trying to be down with the kids,” a friend says. “He never wants to be painted as irrelevant or dull, though he’s allergic to being compared to celebrities. The public doesn’t always get to see his funny side, but otherwise he’s the same in private as in public. He once said, ‘I’ll be in the public eye all my life. I can’t hide who I am because I’ll be found out.’ ”

In 2019, during a visit to a youth homelessness charity supporting LGBT people, William was asked how he would feel if one of his children was gay. “Absolutely fine,” he replied. “I fully support whatever decision they make, but it does worry me from a parent’s point of view how many barriers, hateful words, persecution and discrimination might come.” Such a personal exchange was a radical departure from royal engagement small talk. But William, the first in his family to be photographed for the cover of a gay magazine, had personally put the issue on the agenda.

As president of Bafta he gave the academy a diplomatic dressing down in his speech at last year’s ceremony, expressing his “frustration” over the lack of diversity: “In 2020, and not for the first time in the last few years, we find ourselves talking again about the need to do more to ensure diversity in the sector and in the awards process — that simply cannot be right in this day and age.” The 2021 nominees announced this month suggest his words hit home.

William “thinks the public look to him to keep royal work looking modern”, a confidante says. “The Queen and Prince of Wales are providing continuity and stability. He’s carving out his own relationship with diverse communities. He sees it all as a way of doing things now that will help a smooth transition when the time comes.”

First-day nerves as Prince William joins the East Anglian Air Ambulance, 2015GETTY IMAGES

Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, as a former frontline worker himself, William has led the royal charge supporting key workers. “Now, more than ever, he knows what his role in public life is, and he sees the value in it,” a close aide says. Chatting to NHS workers in January, William said: “Something that I noticed from my brief spell flying the air ambulance … is that when you see so much death and so much bereavement, it does impact how you see the world … as a … darker, blacker place.” Soon after the first lockdown was announced, the Cambridges’ Royal Foundation launched Our Frontline, a round-the-clock mental health and bereavement service for key workers.

Miguel Head says the future King William will continue to campaign on his big issues: “I can’t see him backing away from causes he’s passionate about. And while he’s not someone who loves ceremony, he knows the importance of it. When he gets the top job he won’t do away with it all. He’s mindful the monarchy represents something timeless that’s above all of us, and many people like the magic and theatre of it.”

[dreamsofthescreen]

Michelle Obama’s Radiance in Netflix’s ‘Becoming’ - Review

The classiest first lady radiates light and hope on her tour for her autobiography ‘Becoming’.

As memoir of the Former First Lady of the United States, Michelle Obama’s ‘Becoming’ was received with great praise, the 2020 Netflix adaptation was sure to do the same. The radiating light and hope that this icon bears is highlighted in documentary, directed by Nadia Hallgren. The pure poise and intellect coming from the former First Lady is one that is rarely seen in many leaders nowadays, as she shows her truly open support for minorities. Inspiring those close to and far from her, Hallgren’s film strictly gives us insight into Obama’s growth and continued, beaming influence. Though with not nearly enough time to go further than skimming the surface of the woman she is known to be, the feature still ticks the boxes of what a documentary should be.

Following Obama on the tour for her autobiographical novel ‘Becoming’, she crosses the United States to speak on her experience living and working as the 44th First Lady. Michelle’s life is split into moments at home, her time on the road working, as well as perfectly discussing touching issues with the younger generation. As documentaries go, ‘Becoming’ certainly offers rare insight into the woman behind the glorified persona that she is expected to live up to. As we get to see Obama dashing to and from high security events and paraded around in Range Rovers, we can feel as though we’re getting an exclusive look into what goes on behind the curtain. Yet, as much as these scenes are shown & backed by an emotive soundtrack, we’re never given real insight beyond the inspiring, lighthearted material. We are given the promise of hope from the Obama’s, followed by the shots of stadiums filled with crowds staring at the former First Lady in awe, as she somehow relates her experience living as a family in the White House to the audience. Sure, there are some snippets of secrets that we wouldn’t have heard from the media, like how Obama had told her butlers to take off their tuxedos and stop serving her kids’, so that they can be raised knowing how to make a bed. Or a story about as the White House was lit up in rainbow to celebrate the legalisation of gay marriage, she and daughter, Malia, snuck out to join the moment.

However shallow the documentary’s presentation may be, it is the real nature of Obama that is powerful. Following her time after the 2016 election, she highlights how the ending of her role as First Lady affected her, stating ‘I was sobbing on Airforce One for 30 minutes. I think it was just the release of eight years of trying to do everything perfectly.’ In another moment of reflection, she touches on that same pressure, revealing, ‘It’s hard to wake up everyday and maintain that level of perfection that was absolutely required of me and Barack as the first black President and First Lady.’ Again, we are only presented snippets of touching moments to give a sense of ‘realness’ to Obama’s life. Yet, by keeping in shallow waters, we are left without an in depth look at who Michelle really is, beyond the glamorisation of her life as a political icon. Her grand elegance and light is there, but what really drives her to stand so proudly on such a high pedestal? And why is she so greatly recognised as a universal inspiration? Touching moments that are seen is when she visits her family home in Chicago to speak about her life growing up. There is, of course, a great contrast between what she was and has now become, which can be said is a vulnerable place to go, as the role of a First Lady can be seen or expected as someone born into privilege. Certainly not a rags to riches story, but we can see the environment of her real upbringing, and how the people around her made her who she is today.

To find relatable ground with audiences and speak on the importance of ones personal journey is what is touched on the most, getting those watching to see eye to eye with such a respected leader. When visiting Chicago, she speaks about losing her father to MS, as well as sharing the sweet story on how her and Barack met at a law firm. These aspects give us a sense of her as a ‘real’ person who’s ‘just like us’.  This realness is further seen when following Obama around as she speaks, not only to, but with wide-eyed college students on stops of her tour. These scenes in the documentary can be seen as the most compelling, as it is what Michelle is best at - being a leader & boldly inspiring the next generation to come.

The importance of her visiting community centres to talk to the younger generation, is not because it’s something that is required as the job of First Lady, but because it is something that she genuinely wants to do. To connect and share the relevance of a journey. Where we could see First Ladies as passive and only a figure fulfilling their duties, it’s clear to see that it means so much more to her. She states, ‘I crave some longer experiences with young people. Through the community events. The tour could do a great job of giving me a little taste of it’. As a feminist, supporter of the LGBTQ+ community and advocate for racial issues, her democracy and connection with others shines through. Where politicians lack empathy, Obama’s everpresent support for all is what has the youth grasping at her for advice, and listening to her with sheer adoration. Speaking on using your voice in the world today, she states, ‘we can’t afford to wait for the world to be equal to start feeling seen. We’re far from it…so you’ve got to find the tools within yourself to feel visible and to be heard and to use your voice.’  These moments focusing the value of ones education and personal journey can strike a chord with the younger generation, as Obama’s teachings come from such a powerful place - her experience.

Another memorable quote from Becoming that sums up Obama’s heartening attitude towards groups of young dreamers, stating, “I have been at, probably, every powerful table there is in the world. I’ve been at G-summits, I’ve been in castles and palaces, in boardrooms and academic universities. And I’m coming down from the mountaintop to tell every young person that is poor and working-class and has been told, regardless of the colour of your skin, that you don’t belong, don’t listen to them. They don’t even know how they got into those seats.” With oppression brought unto her and Barack as the first Black President and First Lady, millions can even sympathise with her time in the White House. Amongst all the pressure and radical racism coming from so much of the United States throughout her eight years leading, to relate to todays generations is a through her embracing of youth and diversity is a superpower. It, again, is this pure openness and encouragement of the younger generation that sets her aside from any regular politician. The promise of tomorrow and inspiration given to those once like her years ago is what makes a leader.

As a sense of cool is brought to the table, as Obama dresses in a yellow silk frock, with striking Balenciaga boots before walking on to speak to another crowd of thousands. The closing scenes are backed by Frank Ocean’s ‘Godspeed’, and one of her fitters comments on a blazer of hers that reminds her of Elvis. Obama’s mix of grace, understanding and style are all elements that have her seen as such a powerful figure. It is the quality of openness that we so love in figures like Michelle Obama. Someone dangerously and boldly supportive of minorities, like icons Malala Yousafzai or Princess Diana. Nadia Hallgren’s adaptation of Obama’s autobiography ‘Becoming’ hit Netflix in May of 2020 & successfully gave insight into the publicised life of Michelle Obama. Though skimming the surface of Obama as a person, we can see the grand influence that she had and still has unto others following her time as one of the most inspirational First Ladies of all time.

Stars Out Of Five: 3/5