#but i am anti the way it was written

[transgendercastiel]

lesbian Annie truthing about to hit the stage. Ok Annie only loves men when it’s performative. This is canon to her “crush” on Jeff they literally have her say out loud she just wants to be “mature and cool” like Britta. She dates Vaughn because she knows he’s desired by other women- I honestly think if you asked Annie to decide if a man was attractive in a vaccuum she just wouldn’t be able to answer (because her feelings about men are determined by what she knows about how she’s Supposed to feel about men). She’s attracted to Abed only it seems when he’s playing roles- she kisses Han Solo because Han Solo is desirable. But the thing is Annie is also playing roles in those scenarios.

anyway lesbian Annie 4 life

[atopvisenyashill]

Thoughts on the Alysanne is Maegor's daughter AU? I feel like it has some interesting potential, and it vastly recontextualizes different parts of Jaehaehae (I do not like him sjsjsjs) and Alysanne's relationship (such as Jaehaehae's treatment of their daughters) but I wanna hear what you think about it!

I’ve touched on this a bit before but since you actually want to hear my thoughts, allow me to present to you my Jaehaerys Is The Goddamn Worst, And Alysanne Annoys Me Too: An Essay lmao but my answer is basically “yeah all of what you just said.”

I think it makes Alysanne much more palatable (to me) as a character because as she stands, she just fixates on forcing her daughters through these fucked up marriages at too young an age bc it traumatized her to be married and pregnant at 15 too but she’d never admit that being a willing participant in her own kidnapping by her brother-husband was the single worst thing that ever happened to her, and because Alysanne doesn’t want to admit it (and Jaehaerys would never see it as wrong or a mistake) F&B really shies away from delving into the fact that Alysanne is as deranged of a mother as Cersei is. So as she stands, she’s very flat to me because she’s presented very flatly and inconsistently. She’s so in love with Jaehaerys, she’s maritally raped by Jaehaerys, she’s a loving and doting mother, she forces her daughters into marriages when they’re the same too young age she was, she accuses her teenage girls of being scheming whores then gets angry when her husband accuses their teenage girls of being scheming whores, and worst of all we are just told “Maegelle tells them to make up so they do” so we don’t know why Alysanne gets over all of this. What is the point of riding a dragon when you never use that dragon to protect your daughters from unwanted teen marriages? We’re just not given a good enough justification for why her behavior is so weird and frustrating towards her daughters.

Make her Maegor’s daughter though…most of her behavior as an adult makes more sense. Like a worse version of Rhaenyra’s childhood almost - a father desperate for a son, but lowkey obsessed with his daughter, who makes all his hang ups about his parents the problems of every woman around him, except Maegor is out here blood sacrificing and torturing and starting wars and forcing babies on wives he discards quickly and brutally. Then here comes Jaehaerys on a white horse green dragon to save her from the horror her life has become, and he loves her so much he runs away with her even though Alyssa says they shouldn’t marry because people won’t like it. And they have beautiful children, and a beautiful marriage, and build a beautiful kingdom.

Then her pregnancies start getting dangerous. Gaemon, then Valerion, die. Alysanne thinks of the shriveled up mutants she called brothers, if Maegor’s taint has passed to her. Her perfect husband ignores her no, and forces Gael on her. Alysanne remembers that he said nothing to Rogar when Alyssa died, merely wept. Then her daughters start to die. Daella, Alyssa, Viserra, all within a few years. Then Jaehaerys makes Saera watch as he murders her boyfriend, calls her a whore, and says Alysanne cannot follow Saera to Lys. Alysanne thinks of Maegor torturing the Harroways over Alys’ presumed infidelity. Jaehaerys says he’s sorry, and her daughter badgers her into forgiving him, and she remembers how she helped Jaehaerys badger Alyssa into forgiving Rogar. Not two years later, Jaehaerys passes over Rhaenys. Alysanne thinks of how she was never enough for her father, how she felt so superior to Rhaena banished to Dragonstone and resented by Aerea, yet there she is dragging Gael away from court because she can’t stand to be with Jaehaerys. How her father was surrounded by dead women and dead babies and how Jaehaerys is surrounded by his own dead daughters, but surely she did the right thing, surely Maegor was worse, surely the realm is better off? Is he right to pass over Rhaenys? Is she enabling a man just as monstrous as her father? She will never decide, because Maegelle will guilt her about keeping Gael isolated at Dragonstone, and Alysanne will do as she’s told, just like Rhaena, and Alyssa, and Jeyne, Elinor, Ceryse, Alys, and Tyanna, just like every one of her daughters.

I do get why Alysanne is Alyssa & Aenys’ and not Maegor’s. The weird Targ babies, the line not descending from Visenya, Jaehaerys and Alysanne being held up as the perfect Targaryen couple specifically because they are brother and sister and dragon riders. I do even think canon Alysanne is likely traumatized by her time as a hostage on Dragonstone, and the ensuing war, and the trauma bond that caused with Jaehaerys, and it makes her idolize Jaehaerys, and then he isolates her at Dragonstone so he can swiftly and safely marry, groom, and knock her up. It’s not like,,,, a fun time, and it’s enough to make anyone crazy and weird about their daughters, but I think having her father be Maegor makes Alysanne herself much deeper because it gives her, as the most beloved Targaryen queen, a blood tie to the most hated Targaryen king, and a marriage to the most beloved Targaryen king. It fits better with a lot of the themes of the main series (again, imo) - forcing the spotlight on the outsiders to see how the affect the story from behind the scenes. The fall of Aegon’s sons, and The Long Reign, not told from the PoV or to serve the PoV of any of the kings or princes, but of the queen that tied them all together.

[givemewallywestorgivemedeath]

Growing up in an extremely ultra religious, cult-like family was a mindfuck for multiple reasons but that doesn't stop unfortunately, even when you escape. For example, see: The overwhelming feeling of boiling hatred and shame for who you used to be.

The angry hatred for the past person I used to be, the version of myself that mindlessly parroted my family's beliefs and listened to their every command, constantly simmered under my skin and invaded my every thought. I was embarrassed of what I used to be- even as I made friends of different ethnicities and faiths, as I listened and explored new ideas and worlds that I never knew existed, as I started the first LGBTQ+ club at my school and volunteered with kids who deserved so much more- there was always a little voice in the back of my head.

"They would hate you if they knew what you were. They would hate the horrendous teachings that were seared into your mind, the things that you used to say and believe. You are nothing but a pretender."

And it is true that my beliefs were bigoted in all the worst ways. It is true that I believed truly heart-wrenching things without a second thought and judged others in such harsh and unfair ways. I told myself that there was no coming back from that, not really. There was nothing I could do to ever make up for it.

Then I remembered that the person who said those things wore velcro light up sneakers and collected finger puppets that the librarians handed out as awards for reading picture books. The person that held signs at pro-life rallies and anti-LGBTQ+ protests had a cherished sticker book and hunted minnows in the creek after school and adored their puffle on club penguin and was really into greek mythology and had skinned knees from climbing trees at recess and knew every Disney song by heart and was absolutely terrified of the dark.

That person was a child.

I was a child.

It took a really long time. Years and years of reflection and distance, but I've decided that I can't hate the past version of myself anymore. I feel pity and remorse, I feel anger- I feel so much fury and violent rage- at what my childhood was and I grieve what could- no, should- have been, but I no longer resent who I was.

I'm not ashamed.

I am so, so, so unbelievably proud of that little kid. For being brave enough to leave the comfort and safety of what I was told was right. For not being afraid to be wrong. For seeking out information and knowledge in a culture that praised ignorance. For questioning everything, relentlessly.

I am by no means a perfect person, I never have been and I never will, but I am proud of myself in every iteration that has ever existed because I know that I have never stopped trying to understand and learn and grow, and I never will.

If you have ever been in a similar situation and feel similar things, first of all: My condolences on your lost childhood. Second of all: Please be nice to that past version of yourself and recognize all the hard work they did to make you who you are today. That person was a survivor and an inspiration. They deserve nothing but love.

[egopocalypse]

Haunting

Whumptober Day 10: "Can't you see that you're lost without me?"

No matter where Chase goes, the shadow follows.

He's ditched his car and three others in the last day, driving the gas tanks down to their last dregs in his haste to get away. He doesn't have a destination in mind other than away, yet with each mile down the unforgiving highway, the chill down his spine rankles him even more.

He slaps his hand over the back of his neck, like the sting would make the crawling fade away.

"There aren't any more cameras," he mutters under his breath. "I'm safe now. It's fine."

But how can he be so sure? Ever since those freaky scientists guys were murdered, he's had to hop between towns, losing the trail of whatever people or things want to find him. He hasn't heard from Echo since he escaped IRIS. He has no idea what the public knows about him. (Would IRIS send out a manhunt? Do people think he's a criminal?) He has no sense of where to go or what to do but survive.

Why couldn't this have been a misunderstanding? Why didn't they let him go home?

What does Anti want from him?

The ghost of a breath sends a shiver down his spine, and he cranks the heat in the current old beater to the max. It sputters out a smog of hot diesel from the exhaust; his face screws up at the stench.

He's been in this rustbucket truck for too long. Hopefully the more inland he goes, the easier it'll be to find a rural town to swap cars. The sooner he can find a gas station without CCTV, let alone a WATCHR, the better.

Except the beater doesn't get him that far.

Something rattles under the hood, and a plume of smoke sparks and slithers out through the cracks. Chase curses and slams the steering wheel and pulls over three miles before the next exit, then grabs his meager belongings and sprints away as he hears a resounding boom and a rush of heat scorches his back.

It exploded. The truck fucking exploded.

With his heart in his throat, Chase reaches for his back pocket and nearly falls over in relief. The picture is still there. Even after everything, he hasn't lost it. He can't.

"For someone trying to avoid me, you put on quite the show."

Chase lurches and goes for the gun in his waistband, only to jolt when he comes up empty. It must still be in the center console, melting into a mangled mess with the rest of the scorching hot metal in front of them.

His hands flex and curl into fists. He doesn't want to turn around, to face the nightmare ruining his life, but if he doesn't, it would give it all the opportunities to stab him or snap his neck, like it had with the bodies it dropped right before they started this race.

"How are you here?" Chase asks. "How do you keep finding me?"

Anti's eyes light up with an eerie white glow. "Do you think it's hard?" it says. "I've followed you from the first time you called my name, the first time you saw this face. You've only been able to run because I wanted to chase."

Chase's breath sharpens. There truly is no getting away, is there? He's crossed half the country in the past few days, and yet no matter where he goes, Anti or IRIS will always find him.

"Why me?" He hates the pleading strain in his voice, but it never seems to fall away. "Why do you want me?"

Anti grins. "You still know nothing, don't you? Those people wanted to use you, but they didn't put in the effort to teach you."

Flames spark in Chase's chest, and despite the autumnal chill, the heat from the truck fire drips sweat down his back.

"Teach me what? I want some fucking answers."

"What will you pay to get them?"

Chase balks. "Huh?"

"You heard me," Anti says. "There's a price for answers, Chase--a price for every choice you made. What will you pay to earn the answers you want?"

He bites his cheek. His wallet got confiscated the second IRIS got their hands on him. The now-unusable gun had been picked off the corpse of an agent that Anti killed on its rampage through the facility. His phone and whiskey were lost before IRIS nabbed him. He has nothing of any value to give.

Anti's smile cools. Those dark, dead eyes bore into Chase's skull.

"Stubbornness won't save you, Chase. Refuse, and you'll stay on the run, forever looking over your shoulder until the maggots put you down. You're a danger, and if you're no use to them, you won't survive. I won't save you a third time."

Chase chokes. "A third?"

Anti's voice lowers, regaining some of the rasp it once had, before the gaping wound on his neck disappeared without a sign of its existence. "Make your choice."

The picture burns a hole in Chase's pocket. Other than the tattered, filthy clothes streaked with blood, dirt, and sweat, it's the only thing he has left to his name. The only tie he has to the person he once was. The only sign that before IRIS, before Anti, Chase had a life. He had something to return to, to live for.

What use is a memento of the last light of his life when it's flickered out?

He pulls out the polaroid and burns the image into his retinas, searing into his memory the bright, joyful, loving faces of his family. He kisses the image as a final goodbye, then offers it like a lifeline.

"It's all I have."

Anti studies the picture, studies every inch of Chase's face, and studies the hand reaching out to him. He slips the picture away and clamps a hand over Chase's.

"You made the right choice, Chase. Welcome home."

@seaswalllow @asteriuszenith @pixie-in-trebleland

[hiemaldesirae]

my favourite characters thus far: the 'villain' (tamlin), the mcs sister, the LIs (dead) sister, and the queen who died like a chapter after her second scene

[anubisisms]

so i've been reading house of earth and blood (currently ~300 pages in) despite being a known disliker of sarah j maas because come on. we all need a healthy amount of trash in our lives and so far the main thoughts rotating in my brain about it are:

the use of 'male' and 'female' instead of just like. man. woman. person etc. bothers me so much. i twitch every time i read it. like why does half this novel sound like an incel forum

"alphahole". why.

how does bryce have functional feet she wears 4-6 inch heels everywhere

unforgivable sin of ms maas to have a whole chapter at the start just be characters walking and talking. i understand the need for exposition. but its a whole chapter of literally just walking and talking

if this novel was just about hunt's backstory i would unironically eat it tf up. he's by far the most interesting one

i quite like the bryce-hunt dynamic i will confess. already places this book leagues above her others. I've heard book 2 ruins it but shhhh I'll enjoy it while its tolerable

how do you pronounce ruhn (rune? run? I've been saying it as rune but like???)

lehabah is baby girl

seriously ms maas write a book just about hunt. i will buy it

legitimately though, she has a longstanding problem with handing us characters whose most interesting trait is their background. i don't want to read about their dull romance. give me the guts and gore war backstory as a novel! please!

bryce is well and truly aelin lite™️ and its both hilarious and very annoying

the copy of this book i bought was 9 whole dollars and i can't decide if it was worth every penny or worth approximately none of them. schrodingers dollars.

honestly i'm enjoying it more than i thought i would. it's a bit like the book version of a reality tv show. still think the writing could be a bit more up to par both in style and maturity for an adult fiction novel, but it's whatever. a solid trash read i may give a full review when I'm done

[r-u-s-a-l-k-a]

gay/bi mike wheeler discourse is so hilarious from my pov. I'm here sitting on my bench watching you all going at each other's troaths virtually, eating popcorn and knowing that Mike is straight, that the Duffer Brothers are lazy and they wrote Will to be in love with Mike because they wanted to take the safer route : sad gay kid pining over his straight best friend. They didn't add a new character for Will in season four because it wasn't suitable for Will and Mike storyline. If Argyle wouldn't have existed and in his place there would have been the new Will's love interest, what the fuck would Mike have done for eight episodes ? Will's storyline would have been different, he couldn't be Mike's counselor. Will and Mike's storylines in season four are attached not because there is this big plot twist around the corner and by*ler will be endgame, it's because of cheap, lazy writing. They didn't know what to do with both of them. So it's really funny reading this whole online discourse "Mike is clearly gay" "Mike is perfect bi representation" when i am here with a bitter taste in my mouth thinking that in good hands, in hands that really cared about queer identity and queer representation Will Byers would have been treated differently.

[riverdale-retread]

Riverdale S7 E 15 (Chapter 132) Miss Teen Riverdale

Betty’s idea about giving a forum to the young women of her high school to air their grievances was a huge hit immediately, as we saw at the end of the last episode. The first letter she gets is from Veronica. We know it’s from her, but Betty doesn’t immediately scream “Oh this is Veronica!” even though Veronica basically outs herself wholesale: “I’m sick of living in a world that doesn’t take me seriously as a young business woman.” Who else talks like this or thinks like this or runs her own business in the entire high school? Nobody but V. Lodge! However, Veronica says she can’t open a checking account and I’m confused because then how does she own things? What? Also, I do understand that this is supposed to go towards women not having access to full adulthood by being denied participation in financial life, but nobody should ever take a high school student seriously as a business person. This… is not… a real problem.

Toni also outs herself in her letter: “I’m Black, I’m bold, I’m beautiful” and wants to be celebrated for those things. The only other black girl who gets to talk in Riverdale High School, Tabitha, is out of town and has been for weeks (months). First, I don’t understand why Toni doesn’t have any sort of feminist/ gender consciousness. If she’s presented as so smart, why is she dumb enough to want to fuck with fashion magazines of all things? I thought she was so off the beaten path? Secondly, she keeps pretending that her real issue is racial justice but she does not give two hoots. What she wants is to be celebrated not for being Black, which is a political stance and a still (sadly) radical one, but celebrated for being pretty, which has never not happened in the history of men objectifying women. You see, I think Toni’s real problem isn’t that Black women are not yet, in 1950, a large enough spending demographic for glossy magazine advertisers to target via fashion magazines. It’s that she’s decided to be the prettiest of the Beats or the Outsiders or whatever, but actually that she is super square and super mainstream and very very boring. What she wants is to be a cheerleader, and thought just as hot as a blonde cheerleader. She’s a stolidly normcore provincial pretty girl pretending to be an outsider. In short, being Black was and remains the main framework of oppression and injustice for millions, but it is NOT TONI’S ACTUAL ISSUE.

Cheryl, being in the closet, manages to actually not out herself except in her very formal way of writing “forever worried that I will reveal myself.” She posted this letter - in an abundance of caution - from the post box downtown when she was on a fake heterodate with Kevin. She is wearing a marvelous outfit. Navy coat with red collar, and perfectly matched red leather gloves and patent leather red handbag which has a very very 2023 fashionable shape (it looks almost exactly like Prada’s reissue of the 1990s bags, and I suppose if we posit a 25 year fashion cycle, these bag shapes and materials really were de rigeur in the 50s??). OK so this really is a problem. Cheryl is the first girl with a real problem here. Her dad and mom are psycho, and she’s gay.

Next up is the pregnant Midge, who - pardon the pun - has the mother of all problems. She’s pregnant, inexplicably determined to keep the baby and marry Fangs and also has not told her parents about this. I’m so sorry, but Midge is so dumb. I’m shocked that she knows the word “stigmatizes” and also apparently how it’s spelled.

Evelyn is so annoyed at the poster that was shoved into her locker that she sends Betty the first hatemail. “Should I say Little Miss Busybody? What makes you think that you have all the answers anyhoo?” She is not wrong. She is not wrong! Why is this show making me agree with goddam Evil-Lyn Forever-Never. Also sidebar to gush that the cream sweater navy skirt 1950s cheerleader uniform, worn with the bright red lipstick everyone sports, is SO FLATTERING on all of them. I wonder if some lucky souls nabbed one of these at the Riverdale going-out-of-business sale.

Then comes Ethel. Ethel is sketching a long legged thin woman with a tiny waist, wearing a swimsuit and sash. She says that she’s finding it difficult to be grateful because she’s surrounded by beautiful people and the world “constantly reminds her” that she’s not. Betty, looking not coincidentally exactly like the imaginary beauty queen Ethel is sketching, arrives just in time to see it. She says, “That’s a beautiful sketch.”

It turns out it’s not for art class, but for the sign up sheet for Miss Riverdale Teen Queen Pageant. The person who conveys this information is Alice Cooper. The very strange echoing of clothing that’s going on between Ethel and Alice in this scene creeps me out. Ethel is wearing a yellow inner top that matches the gold-ish tone of the Cooper sofa, and over that, an unadorned magenta cardigan. Standing right behind her, Alice is wearing a blue inner dress or top, and the exact same shade of magenta cardigan, except hers is bedazzled all down the front.

Ethel is so polite. She says that Alice has ‘asked her’ to be the assistant for the pageant (instead of, you know, made it clear that Ethel is in no position to refuse Alice Cooper anything if she doesn’t want to be sent back to the 19th century insane asylum). Betty finds the entire affair an “embarrassing cattle call” but Alice is extremely proud that it’s going to be broadcast live on national tv from the RIVW studios. Betty is not interested in participating, even though Alice lays it on very thick, saying it’s “glorious, and wholesome, and all-American.” She tries to manipulate Betty into participating by dangling the prizes - a new car, Hollywood screen test, or a scholarship.

OK that last one is huge. I mean the US college tuition inflation has been extraordinary, but this is from a Time Magazine article I just googled: At the University of Pennsylvania, students were charged $600 in 1950 (nearly $6,000 today) (This article is from 2016, and $6,000 in 2016 has the same "purchasing power" or "buying power" as $7,642.05 in 2023). $30,000 is not anything to sneeze at!

Betty is very enticed by this scholarship money, as Alice knew she would be. Apparently this is the first time this particular pageant is giving an actual scholarship. Riverdale is 10 years behind Miss America, by the way, which made itself a scholarship program in 1945.

While Betty is thinking about it, Ethel is trying to hide her bitterness at Alice’s assumption that she wouldn’t even want to try out.

At school, Betty runs into Veronica giving a speech to the other girls about how Edith Head wants to design something for her to wear that would be perfect for the pageant. What is it with Veronica insisting that these very ancient people born at the end of the 19th century (Edith Head was born 1896, a few years after Cole Porter) are all about Veronica Lodge. Is there a chance she’s lying? I mean, that song that she sang with Betty which she insisted was written by Cole Porter didn’t sound like his style whatsoever. Betty is very disapproving, but Veronica says that if she won a beauty pageant it would be great publicity for her movie theater business. It’s a business decision.

Her saying this doesn’t seem to ring any bells for Betty in terms of the letters she’s read, but maybe she’s fixated on the one singular hate mail she got, which okay, fair.

Betty says that the pageant objectifies girls. Cheryl is very defensive of this pageant, so she attacks Betty. She brings up the fact that Betty flashed Archie from her bedroom that one time and also that Betty flashed her underpants on live television. This is very interesting though, that Betty outwardly pushes back against her mother while Cheryl appears to defend the family against any and all attacks (while insisting on being herself to much higher risk of peril).

Anyway, Veronica agrees that pageants are objectifying to women but since she “loves being beautiful” she enjoys participating in a game that she can win. Cheryl rolls her eyes at hearing her say this as Veronica leads the way to the In Group Sofa. Ahead of her is Midge and behind her is Toni, who is wearing a really very odd outfit. All the other girls are covered up right to the collarbone but Toni is wearing a super low cut, like, barely covering her nipples low-cut, top with extremely thin spaghetti straps. She looks like she forgot to put on a shirt. Veronica’s logic gets very very twisted up. Even though she is going to be participating in a pageant in which “old fuddy duddies will decide” - this is literally what a pageant is - she says that in the end, she “decides if I’m beautiful or not. And I am, as are we all.”

This is something I find myself between a rock and a hard place about. In my country & culture (I’m not born or raised in America, I just sound like I am, because cultural softpower of the US is immense) there is no such thing as ‘we are all beautiful.’ Exactly one type of body is beautiful, exactly one shape of face is beautiful, and they will tell you down to the last cm and kg what beautiful is, and you can see how far you are from beautiful using the metric. The inability to meet this standard means all sorts of indignities happen to you, ranging from people being mean and dismissive of you all the way to being unemployable regardless of your qualifications. This sucks.

HOWEVER, this same shit is reported to exist in the US (fat women are underpaid by factors more than thin women are, even though all women still lose vis a vis comparison to men doing the same work) but the American cultural norm is to tell this stupid fucking lie about it, which I find insulting to my intelligence. Every time I hear this idiotic “we are all beautiful” bullshit I want to holler NO I’M NOT AND FUCK YOU FOR LYING.

If you aren’t the ideal, I think it’s just more efficient to know you’re not and flunk out of that race and do something else with your time. This is our way. The American way is to keep insisting that being beautiful is essential to being allowed to exist as a woman, which I find truly offensive.

Plus, it’s only standard issue pretty girls who are thin (like Veronica Lodge and the actress that plays her) that say bullshit like this. Are all men tall? Do all men have good hair? No, right? So it can’t be true that all women are beautiful.

Now, in the context of the show, Veronica is saying this to Betty, Toni, Cheryl and Midge, who all of them have perfect skin, lovely hair, symmetrical faces,perfect teeth, huge doe eyes and very narrow waisted shapely figures soooooo - Veronica is correct that “we all” are beautiful if you limit it to these five people.

And this is the point at which I started to truly, deeply, genuinely despise this episode. I hate this even more than the very strange Racism Against Koreans is Bad episode with Reggie.

Veronica says that the way to subvert the girl-on-girl implicit violence of a beauty pageant is for all the participants to stick together and ‘support’ each other.

No it isn’t. This is just reinforcing toxic femininity in the American style where women are never allowed to actually openly compete and show actual human feelings like aggression, power-hunger, the urge to dominate, disappointment or anger.

Toni of course is all about hypocrisy. Betty is shocked that Toni is going to participate because unlike me she believes Toni’s hype about herself. There is something VERY INSIDIOUS going on with Toni’s character hideousness this season. I hate it so much. I know that ‘playing the race card’ is a racist tool specifically designed to prevent racial minorities in the US from bringing up any topic which might lead to their being given fair compensation and recognition. The thing is, Riverdale the show keeps having Toni actually use ‘the race card’ over and over. Riverdale thinks playing the race card is a real thing for black women. The stupidly reductive thinking seems to be that if you’re a ‘real’ black woman who ‘really’ cares about racial injustice you should just disappear from white society like Tabitha Tate and deal with the problem of wrangling the ‘really bad’ white people who are elsewhere, not here. If you choose to continue your education and not place yourself in mortal danger all the time, then you forfeit your right to bring up racial prejudice unless you’re a ‘race card player’ like Toni. Toni just wants to do what she wants to do - indulge in her inner square that wants to wear ball gowns and have the other squares smile at her and call her pretty - but she will stick some racial element (“This is the first year this pageant is integrated” but see also, “I am the first black cheerleader”) as justification.

The only two with rights about this ar Cheryl and Midge. Cheryl says very simply that she has to compete because her family sponsors the pageant. Casually, she drops the fact that she wins every year. It made me wonder if this is why Betty is truly not interested - she’s not any more interested in playing a game she can’t win than Veronica, and she has insider information to know that it’s more likely to be Cheryl than anyone else. But see, at least Cheryl’s answer is honest, both to herself and to others. High marks.

Midge later tells a concerned Fangs that the reason SHE is participating is because she just wants to do something silly and lighthearted, where she gets to be a mainstream one-of-the-girls before her pregnancy is inevitably revealed.

Veronica comes to find Betty later in the locker room to finally come honest. She wants one of those prizes - for Veronica it’s a toss up between the car and the scholarship (I’m pretty sure she’s had her Hollywood screen test). That’s why she’s participating. She openly admits that she was bullshitting the other girls. She only tells Betty what her real intentions are. Then she asks Betty if she isn’t deeply tempted by the scholarship - the ability to pay for college.

Sidebar - a 4 year full expenses paid scholarship, which is what Veronica seems to think the prize is, is massively more powerful an incentive than the actual prize given to the Miss America winner in 2021. She would’ve gotten $100,00, which would cover literally 1 year and some change at Yale University which costs $88K a year minimum, all in.

Of course, Betty is extremely tempted. In the direct antithesis of a Cheryl slow-mo walk down the hall, which are usually to express Cheryl in a really great, world-conquering mood, Betty does a nervous, worried slow-mo walk full of hesitation towards the sign up sheet immediately after. She signs her name right under Veronica’s.

In the kitchen of the Cooper house, Alice needles Betty about having signed up after all. She interrogates Betty, wanting to know if Betty plans to win and then pull off some stunt (“pull down the temple”). When Betty says she genuinely wants the scholarship money for college, Alice scoffs at her, telling her that she could probably earn an academic scholarship. Alice wants Betty to not go to college, which makes this Alice consistent with the Alice of the OG timeline. And this is how you know Betty is not going to get the scholarship money - Alice is involved.

Alice reminds Betty that she won the pageant one year, calling it a major highlight of her life, before she reveals that she had a dream of a career as a stewardess, which she gave up as soon as she married her husband and had two kids in short order. Betty is so nice - she wishes that the dream could’ve come true for Alice. But of course, Alice always has to puncture any kind gesture by Betty by bringing on the bad news: The pageant is not a one-and-done event. It requires spending a huge amount of time with Alice as she makes the participants ‘rehearse’ for the pageant. Betty is deeply aggrieved by this news. Too bad there wasn’t any fine print on that poster Ethel drew up.

All the participants in the pageant are walking in a circle with a book on each of their heads to give them better posture. Apparently this is going to be a two hours-long ordeal - Alice orders “one more hour of posture work.” Alice sounds absolutely deranged as she lists out the femininity checklist for all the things the girls are supposed to aspire to be. Toni, even though she’s participating just as obediently as all the other sheep, pretends to be above it all and makes a little self satisfied joke about how she’s proud of her “shapely backside.” Evelyn calls her “Greaser Garbage” to which Toni shoots back “Preppy Troll.” I’m with Evelyn. Shut up, Toni.

In the corner is poor Ethel, who is so humiliated at being disregarded that she has a full on hallucination. She imagines herself as having won the pageant. And it turns out her parents are still alive! Ethel also wants her paintings - not comic book work - to be hanging in a gallery or a museum. And voila - her self portrait is at the Guggenheim!

(By the way, I’m reading The History of Art Without Men and this is history -accurate. Many of the earliest Renaissance women painters’ most famous works are their self portraits at first, because that was a permissibly feminine topic and you could just look at yourself in the mirror so it wasn’t a disadvantage you weren’t allowed to learn anatomy). The final thing that Ethel wants in this perfect night to start the rest of her perfect life fantasy is to have Jughead Jones be her boyfriend. (“Just the ginchiest” is what she says.) Alice thinks that this is a terrible choice, because Miss Riverdale Teen Queen as the pick of the litter and Jughead is substandard. (I mean. I love Jughead Jones but he kind of is - and especially in this universe. He was last seen flipping his shit about milk.) Jughead comes up to the stage in a suit with a bowtie, tells Ethel she’s always been his best gal, and gives her a little peck on the cheek.

I WAS ROBBED.

I suppose 1950s and on live tv and her lipstick can’t be messed with and all that but I AM ROBBED.

Ethel deserves to fuck Jughead Jones’ brains out just the one time to get this fixation out of her system. She’s so much cooler and more talented than he is.

I am very discomfited by the way that the way Ethel is being treated by Alice is both accurate to life (if you are a child that all the adults around know you have no other adult advocate, you tend to get fucked over) and yet extremely annoying because Ethel is and always has been so interesting and so shafted all the time and this is more of the same.

Alice treats this orphan exactly like a hired servant - “I hope you did the thing?” is such a nasty way of giving a work instruction, and she’s making Ethel do all this for FREE.

The appointment that Ethel was supposed to have made is at Mary Andrews’ dress shop, which is called Perky Peach. I mean it says “Perky IN Peach” but from afar it will look like PERKY PEACH. “Shop for Ladies and their Daughters.”

While the young girls are all standing silent like mannequins in a circle, Alice and Mary chitchat “back in the day” when they competed for Miss Teen Queen. They are both wearing flower patterns (Alice, tight-ass ones, Mary, blowsy ones) but the girls are all in single colors. Red for Cheryl, purple for Veronica, Toni in emerald, Evelyn in maroon, Betty in hot pink, Midge in blue.

Mary and Alice start out pretending they don’t hate each other. Alice tells Mary that she always “gave me a run for my money” to which Mary concedes that Alices always won. They sound like they’re joking but they’re not, and Betty is the only one who picks up on the fact that these are the first shot of a battle to come. Mary says she thought being Miss Teen Queen might have been “a stepping stone to doing something important with my life, like… being the First Lady.” As in - Alice may have won this crown every single year of high school, but she has *not* done anything at all important with her life. Alice picks up on it immediately, saying that there’s “nothing more important than being a wife and mother.” This is an aggressive thing to say to a woman whose husband is dead and so she can’t be a wife to him for one, and for another, Mary owns a business and Alice doesn’t. Alice also has more than one child too. Mary pivots to say that she thinks these girls of the new generation can do “anything that they want.” Which indicates that she didn’t actually WANT to be either a wife or a mother or perhaps even a dress-maker.

Veronica, who doesn’t really fight other women, seems not to understand that the old biddies are actually fighting, so she suddenly pipes up to ask the group if they think there will ever be a female president. (FYI, Hilary Clinton was born 1947, Geraldine Ferraro was born 1935, Sara Palin and Kamala Harris in 1964).

Evelyn is (of course) immediately repulsed by the idea but see, I like how she puts it. She just says it outright: “I wouldn’t vote for a woman.” I like this better than coming up with some stupid statement about why women can’t do the job or whatever. Just own your misogyny.

Toni, of course, doesn’t really care about women but she also can’t stand it when she isn’t the one who started a social issues conversation so she brings up an entirely different topic when she says, “Or a black president for that matter?” She does tack on man or woman but then it just makes things unclear what the hell they’re talking about thereafter -The Civil Rights Act was in 1964 and women in the US could not open bank accounts on their own until l1974.

Betty is the most optimistic of everyone and *almost* correct - she says (from the context) that she thinks there can be a black woman president within her lifetime. President Obama aside, since Betty was born in 1938, she would’ve been 83 when Kamala Harris became a female, black and asian Vice President in 2021. Cheryl clearly thinks that there would have to be seismic changes in society for either scenario - a black president, a woman president, a black woman president - to be possible.

Alice doesn’t like where this conversation is going because being political is not good for ratings on her beauty pageant, so she comes bearing down on Mary to say that it’s “important to manage expectations.” It’s just for a second, but Mary sneers directly at her even as she says “Of course,” to keep up a united front of adults against the girls.

This entire time however, Ethel has been kneeling at Betty’s feet pinning Betty’s dress.

Mary said at the start of the segment “Look at all these gorgeous girls,” but she didn’t mean Ethel. Ethel was left out of both gorgeous and girls and nobody noticed except Ethel. Because she was implicitly told off by Alice for not keeping the conversation on track, Mary takes it out on Ethel by suddenly remembering to issue an instruction to the charity case: “Can you make sure you pin Betty’s dress all the way around the hem?”

Alice is totally shit but so is Mary, no exception. Not even waiting for any sort of response from Ethel, Mary turns to one of the ‘gorgeous’ people who still counts as a girl - Midge - to ask how the fit is on her dress.

Ethel has a choice between a) homicide and b) tears, so she starts crying. I would d

too. What a horribly pitiful thing they’ve reduced by Ethel to, the one who can kill a man with her bare hands when she has to! Betty asks her if she’s crying, to which Ethel promises to “not get any tears on” her dress which just broke my heart. Betty though is a nice person in this universe, so she does care about Ethel, but she’s not very bright, which is why she asks Ethel WHAT THE MATTER IS. What the fuck do you THINK the matter is, Betty??

This is something Riverdale the show consistently does by the way. Betty has had immense difficulties in previous seasons - her mother was and is both insane and abusive - but she’s also privileged and very blinded by that privilege. As a consequence she has a sort of stupidity when it comes to even the most obvious kinds of empathy - like the situation that Ethel is in right now, forced to work as a slave seamstress for her classmates because she is living on charity in one of their homes. Her only other option is the insane asylum. I think this is why Betty stans are completely unable to cope with any criticism about Betty in any way whatsoever - not just because they’re stans, but because the show is very adamant that Betty for all her aspirations to goodness is actually very unkind and unjust in action because she is blinded by her privilege, and being able to stan Betty Cooper requires totally tuning out this very important point about her. Her privileged blindness is inexcusable and obnoxious, and so is yours.

Ethel like all disadvantaged people who are wronged knows exactly what is happening, including the fact that if she were to try to tell Betty the truth, Betty would take offense at being called privileged, at being called blinded by that privilege, which are all true, and so she just gives up. “Nothing” is wrong, Ethel weeps, “You’re just so beautiful, Betty.”

There’s a lot in there. Why is it the oppressed and wronged always feel so protective of other people? (Don’t answer that. I know the answer. Fuck me if this didn’t get me right in the feels.).

Betty really does not understand why she’s crying. She’s trying, but she just doesn’t get it, at all. Because blinding pretty woman privilege, blinding middle class privilege, etc etc.

There isn’t time to go through any of this though because Mary announces to everyone that she’s going to have let out Midge’s dress a bit. Somehow this is taken as a huge BANG sort of realization on Alice’s part. Evelyn is very smart. She says a sentence perfectly constructed to out Midge’s pregnancy to Alice: “You better start cutting back on those desserts, otherwise that cute Serpent boyfriend of yours might decide that you’re too much woman to handle.” Though she means well, Cheryl only makes things worse by overreacting, telling Evelyn to kill herself (“Take a long walk off a short pier.”) Midge is smarter than Cheryl. She’s smarter than Midge as well.

And can I also just put in a word for us ruler shaped girls who only gain weight fore and aft -directly in the belly? I’ve always had a fat tummy but I’ve never been pregnant. When I gain weight I gain it in the FUPA first and most.

Midge needed to have more of a plan and a lie ready - like “Oh yes I’ve been gaining weight in my middle giggle giggle”???

Alice approaches Midge like a shark to demand a conversation later.

Later that evening Betty is hanging out with Ethel. Since she’s essentially a kind person in S7, she is still worried about why Ethel burst into tears at the dress shop, but appears to also be no smarter or less blinded by her privileges than she was earlier in the day.

What ensues is an INFURIATING fumble of a conversation. Ethel says that she wishes she was competing with all of them. She wants to be considered a girl, in other words, in her cultural context. Betty says - and she both seems to mean it and it is true - that Ethel is beautiful, so she should be competing if she wants to. Ethel counters that Betty’s mom said Miss Teen Riverdale is supposed to be an embodiment of the ideals of the town, which Ethel has understood she can’t be because “I’m the girl whose parents were murdered, quiet, likes comic books, draws creepy pictures.”

What she doesn’t say is made deafening by the fact that she doesn’t say it. She’s fat. Ethel is beautiful and fat. But the show absolutely refuses to address the fact that all the actresses other than Ethel for that generation are extremely slender - even the ‘expanding with pregnancy’ Midge has stick thin arms and the whole of her clavicle bones show end to end through her skin.

Because the show can’t let Ethel say she’s fat, Ethel doesn’t say that it’s because she’s fat that she’s not being allowed to compete in the beauty contest, and Betty, because being cosseted lessens her intelligence, simply takes Ethel at her word. But Betty not knowing that the beauty standard of the 20th century leans towards extreme thinness for women is exactly like Toni having to ask Tabitha what it’s like to be black in the rest of America.

Betty says true things about Ethel - that she’s inspiring because she’s overcome so much adversity. That Ethel has as much right as anyone else to be competing for the prize and the title.

Because the show - and Ethel and Betty - won’t address the obvious visible physical difference between the two characters, Betty’s line about Ethel having “more pep in your little finger than the rest of us do in our whole bodies combined” comes out really really cringe.

Ethel can’t stand it anymore and takes off, saying she shouldn’t have said anything.

Betty means what she’s saying, but how seriously can Ethel be expected to take this sincerity? Not very, honestly.

Meanwhile, Midge is getting the third degree from Alice, who knows she’s pregnant. Teedum.

And now we are five (plus Ethel standing in the back). Alice announces to the group that Midge is “no longer with us” and is no longer a student at Riverdale High, because she’s been carted off to the Sisters of Quiet Mercy. Alice Cooper is so obsessed with depositing girls with the Sisters of Quiet Mercy, isn’t she? She’s the type of person who can’t stand the thought of having to suffer something alone - she has to inflict the same suffering on others.

She drops the hints as heavy as anvils: “When you see her in six or seven months, Midge will be right as rain.”

Veronica finally gets it. She seems to know the duration of human gestation anyway. She tries to ask if Midge is pregnant, but Alice, wearing pink gloves (she’s pink handed rather than red-handed, I guess?) makes ‘close your mouth’ motions with her hands so she can continue her lecture about how “we must treat our bodies as temples.” Alice does have a way with words. She wants the girls to “guard against defilement” and instead regroup that afternoon to have some “good clean fun” preparing for the pageant.

As she exits the room, we see that she was using Ethel as a literal clothes hanger tool to hold on to her purse.

Later, wearing what looks like a dinner napkin as a scarf, Betty, who is really very dumb this episode, just simply does not understand why Midge was sent away. I was a bit taken aback by this. Betty Cooper is supposedly a straight-A student but she just does not know at all how long pregnancy lasts (Uhhhh does Midge also not know??). Evelyn AGAIN SAYS EXACTLY WHAT I AM THINKING because she snaps, “I thought you were supposed to be smart” before explaining to Betty that “Midge has a bun in the oven.” She just keeps the truths coming! “She let a greaser paw at her like a dirty rag.” I meannn I hate Fangs so yeah, I’m even going to excuse her misogynistic language.

Why does this keep happening to me, the humble Riverdale episode recapper? In S4 I was BRET. I had to identify with BRET WESTON WALLIS and now in S7, I’m Evelyn. Thanks Show, for the realizations I did not want.

Evelyn is just laying all the truths out on the table - that Midge is pregnant, that Betty is not very smart, that everyone knows that Cheryl and Toni are a dyke pair, and that Fangs should never be allowed to breed and now he’s gonna have offspring.

She gets threatened by Toni with physical violence which is just comical. I’m a short girl myself, but dude, Toni should never threaten people with physical violence. You’re literally like 90 lbs, Toni, shut up.

Betty really is dumb.

Like, actively stupid.

Look at this face:

Betty finally FINALLY puts it together that Midge has fucked Fangs and that’s why she’s pregnant. When she seeks confirmation, Toni clearly thinks she’s stupid just as much as Evelyn does, so she’s short with Betty, “Yes, Betty.” Betty wants to know if it was once or multiple times. The femme superdykes give her identical, OMG faces because they are both the type of queer girl who didn’t realize for a long time that they were queer because they thought they were just smarter than the majority of other girls, who of course happened to be straight.

Veronica’s love for Betty is everlasting, plus she’s a virgin herself, so she is willing to meet Betty on the same grounds. “I’m guessing they were doing the deed on the reg,” she says, trying to elevate Betty’s grotesque stupidity to the level of something akin to banter.

Toni starts to try to explain the ‘situation’ to all of them like they’re all 4 years old. “Midge loves Fangs and Fangs loves Midge.” Evelyn comes in once again with the correct take: “Quite the cautionary tale if you ask me.” Cheryl is completely unable to come up with a good come back beyond a very paltry No One Asked You type of comment, because I think Cheryl also thinks fucking around with boys is stupid and for the weak and always is going to end up with a cautionary tale type situation. She dislikes Evelyn, in other words, but doesn’t disagree, and only wishes she wouldn't keep spouting truths.

Betty continues to be extremely idiotic - “I’m wondering how Midge could have ended up getting…” is what she says. Not even Veronica knows how to salvage this. Both dykes, Evelyn and even Ethel, who as I’ve said wants to preserve Betty in her innocent stupidity rather than have her face the hardness of the world, give her looks. I think Betty is lying when she says that she “of course” “understand[s] how it happened.” But she’s seen now that her ignorance has shaded fully over into just a lack of intelligence, so she makes something up about "wondering if they were using…” because she’s heard that a man and a woman need to ‘do’ something ‘at least once’ to have a baby but there are ways to maybe make that not happen. Betty Cooper simply does not understand the mechanics of sex.

Veronica continues to want to adore Betty, because she just does, so she supplies the word - protection! Using protection! - because she can’t in good faith adore someone who is irretrievably stupid, and she doesn’t want to admit that about Betty. I am rather surprised to hear from Cheryl that she asked about birth control to Midge, with enough specificity to receive an answer: “Midge said they were, but once it slipped.” And then even more squick- Toni asked Fangs about birth control too, and heard about his incompetence with a condom directly as well. Ew. Cheryl does make an annoyed, oh these damned hetero morons type of eyeroll face as she tells her tale, to her credit.

This makes Veronica burst out that this is why the birth control pill is necessary, that birth control needs to be in the hands of women (not on the dicks of men) because “we’re the ones who have to live with the consequences.” I wish Veronica could be more radical in her feminism -that there should BE NO consequences, but as she’s said at the start of this episode, she likes inhabiting a face and body that’s considered beautiful too much to want to topple the whole thing over.

It’s clear from Betty’s expressions that she still isn’t sure how exactly Midge got pregnant, she doesn’t at all understand what ‘protection’ means really or what ‘it’ is that could’ve have slipped nor what it slipped from, and isn’t following Veronica’s train of thought whatsoever. But the looks that even Evelyn and Ethel gave her has had a silencing effect.

It’s really kind of a violation of human rights, isn’t it, that Betty just does NOT KNOW simple basic facts.

Anyway, Veronica is going on about how boys who impregnate girls have proven their manhood but girls who get impregnated by that same boy are treated as ‘fallen’ to which Betty starts to voice a very conventional fact; "Midge’s life is just… [ruined]."

Cheryl is a leader.

Can I say that again?

CHERYL BLOSSOM IS A REAL LEADER.

She cuts Betty off at the pass: “Her life is not ruined,” she says, categorically. Cheryl Blossom is not going to LET “this”- i.e. Fangs’ incompetence with keeping a condom on his damn dick - hurt one of ‘her’ Vixens in some irretrievable way.

Toni only WISHES she could exhibit this sort of moral, almost compulsive, valor.

Anyway.

Evelyn is so very even keeled. I kind of love that about her. She hates everyone at a very chilled temperature. Even her bright red lipstick has a chilly blue undertone. Evelyn points out that Cheryl and Midge are neither of them Vixens.

Toni wonders if Fangs even knows what has happened to his baby mama, to which Evelyn again acts as oracle to say everyone will eventually know. Cheryl and Toni take off to try to find Fangs so he can learn the bad facts from sympathetic tellers.

Veronica is still worried that she’s very in love with a very dumb girl, so she checks in with Betty to ask what she’s thinking about. Betty says that she’s thinking about how one night can change everything for you. I mean. That isn’t true though, not when you’re Alice Cooper’s daughter. Ethel had two very big nights - one was when her parents were murdered, which is the same night she got sexually assaulted by Julian Blossom, and then the night she killed the Milkman, which made all the adults back off from hauling her directly to the Sisters of Quiet Mercy again. Betty by contrast got caught doing a long distance strip tease with Archie, and then flashed her panties on live television but she has had to deal with no consequences whatsoever, other than her mother continuing to be crazy. So no, it isn’t true that one night can change everything - it only is true if you don’t have the right combo pack of protections.

Betty follows up with Ethel. Ethel is thinking about Midge at the Sisters of Quiet Mercy. Betty basically Yes-ands her, by saying she cares a lot about Midge being sent to an insane asylum (she doesn’t) as lip service so she can get Ethel to agree to take Midge’s spot at the beauty pageant.

You know what? I think I understand now why Betty has nothing to say about Ethel being beautiful and fat and how her fatness might be a problem for a beauty pageant. She’s too stupid to know the facts of heterosexual reproductive intercourse - so by extension she’s too stupid to know that fat girls are given a much harder time in life, a harder time than girls with bad skin, girls with glasses, girls who are too skinny, girls with bad teeth. All she sees is that Ethel is beautiful (factual) and deserving (also true) and so in a true genuine way, thinks she should compete if she wants to. Rather than Ethel being judged ineligible by reason a biography marred by violence and her body type by her mother, Betty genuinely thought Ethel didn’t want to be in the beauty pageant (because she herself didn’t) and genuinely also thought Ethel didn’t mind playing scullery maid to Alice Cooper and her own classroom peers. There’s clueless and then there’s criminal levels of clueless. Betty is fast approaching the latter.

Ethel in any case does not need to be asked more than once. She is so very conscientious though. She is immediately worried that Alice will be left high and dry without an assistant. Betty says she has a plan for that.

Meanwhile, Fangs has been told. He is hollering about how he’s going to “go out there to that convent.” Toni stops him from developing this scheme any further. Cheryl also chimes in, saying two kidnappings does not a solution make. Both these girls are betting that Midge’s parents don’t know that Fangs is the father. Cheryl says something weird - “We need to keep it that way so that you’re not arrested.” Why would Fangs get arrested? Are there anti miscegenation laws in Riverdale? Will they accuse him of raping Midge? What?

I also wonder about Toni playing the Friar Lawrence role to this pair. Her advice has thus far been singularly bad, hasn’t it? She knows how to rig up a home pregnancy test using frogs but doesn’t know any abortionists or even advise Midge on trying to find one. She ASSUMES that Midge’s parents will simply not accept the whole truth, and so steers Fangs and Midge into trying to get their ‘romance’ accepted first before dropping the pregnancy bomb, but that just isn’t how conservative families work. If Fangs and Midge had gone to the parents to say, do you want Midge to have a bastard child or do you want the baby born in matrimony, Midge’s mother wouldv’e gotten her an abortion whether Midge wanted one or not OR allowed them to marry. Here again, if Fangs let’s say showed up in all his biker glory and just burst into the Sisters of Quiet Mercy, wouldn’t that have been materially better for them both? Toni has done no research about this. She hasn’t asked Ethel anything. Ethel got out - why not ask HOW she made that decision stick?

I think Toni has a lot of unexamined hidden motives here -she simply does not want Fangs to have a happy romance with Midge in any direction. She’s very pleased, actually that Midge has been sent away.

When Fangs wants to know what he should do, Toni smirks and giggles as she tells him to write a hit song that becomes a gold record so that he becomes “undeniable to Midge’s parents.”

Yeah so what conservative racist parents (as per Toni’s assumptions about them) would want their child impregnated out of wedlock by not just a guy who is of color but a rock’n’roller of color?

This is insidiously evil of Toni.

Cheryl, of course, never liked Midge being with Fangs to begin with. But she’s moved by his plight, so she actually comes up with useful solutions. She’ll arrange a phone call between Midge and Fangs, and she wants Fangs to remain calm.

Meanwhile, I assume Betty and Ethel have made good use of the insider information that Ethel has access to from her days of slave labor as Alice’s assistant and have gotten Ethel a really gorgeous pageant dress. Ethel really does have “perfect poise” as Betty says. She can do spins in a ball gown with a book balanced on her head. That’s a neat trick.

Alice is very startled to hear that Ethel will be replacing Midge but lies in a white way (“That’s WONDERFUL” she screams) before insisting that she must have an assistant.

Turns out Betty has roped Long Duk Dong - no sorry, Dilton Doiley, into the role of the assistant. I hope she gave his extra huge Asian cock a blowjob.

Sorry. Sorry. I hate S7 Dilton and I hate this actor and I hate what they’re making him do.

Alice asks to speak to Betty in the hallway. She is enraged. Alice yells at Betty about trying to undermine her. Betty says she doesn’t understand what the problem is. I think she genuinely is stupid enough this season for this to be actually true. Alice tries to explain: “Ethel does not represent the ideals of Miss Riverdale Teen Queen.” Betty snaps back, “Why? She’s not pregnant!”

Alice says that Ethel has “an unsavory history.” Betty is again struggling to catch up, asking if this is about Ethel’s parents being murdered or if there’s “something else.” It occurs to me that maybe only a handful of adults other than Jughead and his editor, that is, Sheriff Keller, the principal, his husband, the head nun at the Sisters, Alice and maybe also Mary know that Ethel managed to avenge her parents and kill a man in self defense.

Alice doesn’t actually say if it’s the parents being killed or something else, to which Betty comes to some sort of conclusion that makes her put on a a horrified face to say “Woah, you are awful.”

Uh. What is this, by the way? It’s entirely not clear. Does Alice in fact blame Ethel for her parents being killed? Like, are we doing an Oscar Wilde thing here? ( “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness”??) I’m still inclined to think that this is about Ethel being fat, but Alice and Betty both think fatness is unspeakable on the level of leprosy so they can’t even say it to each other. I say this because Alice says, “I am not gonna let you turn this competition into one of your crusades!”

Crusades for what? Advocacy of murder attempt survivors? Surely not.

Alice is very clear about her priorities. She wants “to protect the office of Miss Riverdale Teen Queen” first and foremost, because it seems to have been the only competition and externally validating thing she ever went out for and won. Ethel’s well being is a secondary priority, and again the wording is so weird. She wants to protect Ethel from “the scrutiny that Miss Teen Queen demands.”

Scrutiny like somehow a tabloid somewhere is going to take an avid interest in a small town electing a teen beauty queen to say OMG TWO PEOPLE WERE MURDERED THIS ONE TIME IN THIS TOWN IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE? Or scrutiny like, if you include a fat girl in a beauty contest everyone will mock her and the contest because that’s how fatphobia works?

Betty, who has been steadfast in calling Ethel beautiful, makes me lose faith in her. She says it plainly to Alice. For Betty, participation in this entire competition is purely pecuniary. To her it’s quite simple - Ethel is an orphan and she needs the money. But this carries no weight to Alice, because she can’t stand the only competition she’s ever won to be reduced to a mere charity. Alice screams at her that she must be the one to get Ethel to withdraw from the pageant. Betty stamps her foot in frustration.

Then she goes exactly to the Dyke Triumvirate for advice, down in the Dark Room. Veronica, for whom this is really just a lark to assuage her everlasting boredom and loneliness in Riverdale, Alice’s decision to not allow Ethel into the competition doesn’t make sense.

Betty finally fully (well as much as Betty can be fully honest about anything which isn’t much) admits that she knows the issue is Ethel’s non-ideal body type (“Ethel doesn’t represent the ideal blah-blah-blah”). After saying a bunch of things she may or may not have meant about Ethel’s looks, Betty really doesn’t want to be the one to admit to (a) cooking up this whole plan to sabotage her mother (because it’s plain now that this was the intention) and (b) telling Ethel she can’t participate. She tries to get the other three on board by talking about Ethel as a charity case. - “Imagine what winning would do for her.” She’s saying this to one girl with hereditary wealth, a daughter of major Hollywood players who owns her own apartment and her own movie theater (somehow, without also having access to a bank account) and Toni, about whom nothing is known but who doesn’t at all seem lacking for resources.

I don’t know how Ethel would feel if she knew this conversation happened other than humiliated. These four skinny girls held a round table ABOUT her without her, silently agreed among themselves that she doesn’t represent the ideal, but decided that she deserved their charity and graceful self abnegation for the scholarship money (which assumes that she’d choose the competition money and not the Hollywood screen test or the car by the way, which nobody has asked Ethel about).

Cheryl because she has the most leadership chops comes up with the best solution - all the thin, telegenic participants will withdraw if Ethel doesn’t get to participate. Without competitors, there can be no competition. Furthermore, all four of them seem unduly certain that Ethel doesn’t actually represent any sort of threat to their own bid for the title.

When Betty says she will confront Alice about all this again, Veronica stops her. Veronica knows Betty is not just kind of dumb, and that Alice Cooper might not be. She assumes that Hal Cooper is just as stupid as Betty, for one, and for another, Veronica Lodge is an expert at patricide (actual and metaphorical across all universes). She suggests threatening Hal Cooper, and volunteers herself as “a more seasoned negotiator.”

Right away, the girls go to “bend” Hal’s ear. Veronica immediately says that Ethel must be allowed to participate in the pageant. Hal says he’s already been yelled at by Alice about the Ethel issue, so that’s all already decided. Veronica knows a lot about TV so she starts dropping references that make Hal Cooper very vulnerable - “ad spending” “money brought in by live television” “sold all your commercial spots” and “cash those checks.” Having softened him up, they threaten to have all the participants pull out. They also want the swimsuit promenade cut. Hal says, grossly, that the swimsuit segment is a judge favorite event. Veronica incongruously points out that it’s the swimsuit competition that is “Plainly sexist.” My dear pretty little hypocrite - THE ENTIRE THING is sexist. WHY even bring up sexism? Do any male competitions exists that look anything like this pretending to be scholarship competitions? NO THEY DON’T.

Veronica, I love you, but fucking stuff it. Don’t bring up critiques about sexism if you’re going to participate at all. You’re disqualified from feminist discourse.

Hal and Alice have a big blow out fight right before the competition about Ethel. Hal says that since the judges like thin girls (he doesn’t say this but this is what he means) there is no way that Ethel will win the contest (because she is fat) because all it comes down to in the end is does the girl conform to the conventional standards of beauty, which in living memory has NEVER been not skinny and Ethel is fat (he doesn’t say this either but this is what he means). Alice is simply freaking out.

They are screaming the name ETHEL but Ethel pretends not to hear, and asks Betty if they are fighting about her (because they are screaming ETHEL MUGGS at each other). Betty does what Betty does and lies.

With 13 minutes of this episode to go, we are finally at the Miss Riverdale Teen Queen Pageant. The audience that we see for this is 100% all the boys who have ever had a speaking part this season. Not a single girl who is not in the pageant is shown watching this. They just weren’t selected so they disappear from existence. This pageant is entirely for male eyes only. Any talk about these sort of events being anything other than pornographic entertainment for the era when actual pornography was not readily available for private viewing is completely disagreed with by Riverdale the show.

Julian says he is mad they cut the swimsuit bit. Jughead makes fun of him, asking why he wants to “see your sister prancing around like a bathing beauty.” Archie totally looks like he has taken something, he looks so manic, and when Jughead calls Julian pervy about the desire for the swimsuit competition, guffaws. Jughead also laughs a lot as his own joke. Julian is annoyed, telling Jughead to drop dead. Is this - is this the first time they’ve actually said anything to each other? I can’t recall.

The judges for this event are Cheryl’s father, the high school principal and the high school child psychologist. This is very gross. The thing is being emceed by Betty’s father. Kevin is singing in the most oleaginous way over the girls silently parading around modeling their gowns. Jughead whistles at Veronica’s turn on the catwalk. Fangs wants Toni to win (why?).

Alice is in some sort of culty fugue as this event goes on. There’s an in studio audience cheering.

Veronica’s trick was tightrope walking. WHAT? WHY COULDNT’ WE SEE THIS? Reggie thinks this was awesome (“Who knew she was an acrobat!”).

Ethel closes the evening with a big song. I found it immensely cheesy though wow, Ethel is graceful and can sing really well, who knew?

Oh and Betty delivered the Gettysburg Address, apparently, which Jughead found “stirring.” Uh OK. Now THAT is really pervy.

Julian wants it just to not be Cheryl (we aren’t told what her talent was) that wins

Clay says they should’ve made the musical about Ethel instead of Archie.

Then they announce the winner. I realized at this point that I misunderstood what the prize was - you get ALL of the above. A car AND a screentest AND a scholarship. It wasn’t Or. It’s AND. For all her money having ways, neither of Cheryl nor Veronica have a car of their own so I see now why they want to be in this competition still. Everything else I said still stands though!

There’s a drum roll. Julian is intensely begging it to not be Cheryl (Why doesn’t Julian want Cheryl to have a car? Selfish dipshit.). Fangs is not thinking about the locked up knocked up Midge at all, focusing all his nervous attention on Toni, just like she wanted. Clay, despite thinking Ethel should win, does not expect her to, so he braces for impact with a wince.

The Coopers open the envelope with the winner’s name in it. Alice takes it from Hal, who look happy, and announces that it’s Ethel Muggs. Hal looks unhappy. The judges glare at each other. The boys in the diner lose their shits, screaming and hollering. Ethel is overjoyed. Betty looks overjoyed. The only one with a very honest, human reaction is Evelyn Evernever once again - she is upset and finds this whole thing incomprehensible. She also refused to do that deeply insulting thing of making the girls who are standing in a row begging with their tits for scholarship money hold hands with each other as the one winner among them is announced. I stan Evelyn Evernever for this. When she competes against other women she competes wholesale. I find this much more honorable. Why the fuck do the girls have to hold hands?

The next morning, Fangs runs into the diner to get a call from Midge. These two not very bright people being guided by Toni Topaz with ulterior (possibly unexamined) motives are very miserable. Midge’s despair at the end of the call is entirely Toni’s fault. Because all she has is this one phone call, Midge has to pretend she’s fine. Fangs should’ve driven into the convent on his bike.

That same morning, Betty walks into her mother’s kitchen. They have the scariest conversation I’ve ever seen between mother and a daughter on television. I’m not sure that this moment of complicated terror borne out of two women who represent the absolute most insane sides of white culture (I’m not white by the way, just in case that wasn’t clear) is worth the cost of having to sit through this horrible episode (because it truly was horrible) but this is what happens.

Betty launches the first attack. Is Alice exhibiting ‘sour grapes’ because Betty lost and Ethel won? Alice counters by showing Betty that she was in fact the winner. Betty has a hard time (Because as I’ve said for the umpteenth time, she is really stupid for this episode) wrapping her mind around what she’s lost. Alice says that all the men were deeply unhappy but live television’s demand that they put on a ‘flawless’ show forbade any of them from contradicting her.

As I’ve said, winning this contest multiple times is the only accomplishment Alice Cooper has had in her life, and Betty, by pushing a fat orphan to compete in a beauty contest, tries to besmirch exactly the things Alice values about her winnings by turning into a charity. It stamped her as beautiful and rewarded her apparently painful conformity with standard hetero culture. So in turn, Alice took Betty’s win away from her and gave it to Ethel.

If the winner had been any of the other girls, it’s strongly implied, she wouldn’t have done it. She even says it herself - “Maybe I just didn’t want you to win.” Alice tries to have a total victory - for all of Betty’s “grandstanding, Ethel would still have lost,” and moreover, it’s Alice, not Betty, that changed Ethel’s life for the better. And she also got to take something away from Betty that Betty really wanted - a way to go to college, without having to ask Alice for permission. I cut your achilles tendon and popped all your balloons, basically.

Then Betty does the most white woman thing of all time and tells her mother that she will think well of her. She stabs her mother in the face with the words “I love you.” Instead of expressing a natural human feeling - I am angry with you - which white women are not allowed by their culture to feel, Betty says “I know you are a good person” but in the most stony-faced, glassy-eyed way possible.

I think the victory belongs with Betty though. Sure, Alice materially hurt her daughter, and did that thing of cursing her daughter to “live the life I lived." But in retaliation, her daughter announced that she thinks she’s a piece of shit and she hates her, using the Opposites Day language of white womanhood. Moreover, it was Alice’s dream to a) keep Miss Teen Queen a validation of womanly perfection and b) to have some sort of legacy in the world which for her boiled down to being a Miss Teen Queen who raised a second generation of Miss Teen Queen. By hurting Betty, Alice hurt herself, because Alice cares about this competition and Betty does not want to give her mother any sort of legacy.

White anglo culture takes insidious passive aggression to a HIGH ART level and these people scare the shit out of me.

Secure in her victory, Betty goes to write an answer to all her girls who wrote into her newsletter. “There is a hope for a better tomorrow. In fact, we girls are that hope.”

This is completely unearned. Betty just engaged in a final battle of mortal combat of the soul with her mother, and has come out with like severed limbs and severe blood loss, though she won because she took away the one happy achievement her mother ever had in her life. She made Alice kill her own one shining earned-it-myself achievement. This event that Alice told the world on national TV is something more special to her that Christmas itself has been permanently tarnished for her, because in a desperate bid to survive this hate-filled battle with her daughter, Alice stabbed herself in the heart. There is absolutely nothing hopeful here. Betty is lying as per usual.

[charliespringverse]

rewatching house led to me infodumping at my mother about ao3 and gen z purity culture and honestly . if she didn't want these things to happen to her she shouldn't have had children with a man so incredibly neurodivergent

[demadogs]

whats a popular byler hc that u completely disagree with or just hate lol

i dont HATE this i just really dont want it (but like i wouldnt complain if we get it obviously ill take any byler endgame)

but i really dont want their first kiss/love confession to be mid-fight. it would be too chaotic and too reminiscent of mike blurting out he loves el. and i also dont want it to be panicked and a “we’re about to die” kinda thing bc that would be too reminiscent of the monologue.

i neeeed it to be a really soft quiet moment with just the two of them, the same way theyve shown the best moments with all the other couples. i want them to just be alone with no monsters or anything after them and theyre talking for a while and then mike kisses him. i really really dont want them to be yelling at each other and have it interrupted with a kiss or a “BECAUSE I LOVE YOU” moment. plz just let them be soft with each other again. for this same reason i dont want a rain kiss. its too dramatic (and cheesy) i want it to be more like lucas and max passing notes. where theyre just happy and in love and they forget its the end of the world for a moment.

also…. unpopular opinion but i dont want heroes by david bowie to play over it. it needs to be one of their original score tracks, not a song with lyrics no matter how well those lyrics fit the context, it would kill the vibe. it needs beautiful synth music instead. preferably the track “being different”.

[musical-chick-13]

I wish I liked the books. I really, really wish I liked the books.

[autumnrory]

you ever think how tragic it is that in terms of mcu canon steve’s characterization mostly revolves around being a man out of time thanks to whedon and endgame regardless of what the captain america trilogy showed really being important to him and bucky’s characterization mostly revolves around his suffering and “atoning” for what he did as the winter soldier regardless of canon showing time and time again that he didn’t have a choice and he still gets the villain treatment it’s all so insane that the mcu just constantly went back on things they already showed us and people just ignore it and let canon be written over by something new like unless you engage with fandom or truly care about previous canon you’re just like “ya of course steve went back he said peggy is the love of his life so that must be true” and “ya of course bucky absolutely has to atone for what he did a peaceful life is not an option bc he totally made those choices himself” like seeing people buy into these storylines just because they don’t wanna think about how deeply inconsistent the mcu is…it’s just tragic

[florida3exclamationpoints]

.

[ghostiboos]

Anti-Capitalism and ChatGPT

(wordcount: 1,177)

Here’s the thing. I’ll be the first to admit that ChatGPT is cool, yeah? And I’m far from ignorant of the wonderful things it’s made possible. But there’s a pretty big problem with its professional usage,

and before you stop reading,

I promise that the point of this post is not "you have to stop using ChatGPT." Just. Stick with me for a minute, cuz contrary to what you might expect, this is not a problem contained to just the normies that don’t use ChatGPT: this is about how ChatGPT will affect you.

I’m about to use some scary words like “scalping” and “exploitation,” but remember I’m not accusing you of anything. In fact, let’s start with the good stuff.

Among other things, it could be argued that ChatGPT actually enhances workplace accessibility by “leveling the playing field,” in a way. Any job candidate can quickly make up for lack of time/skill/ability in one area by using ChatGPT to fill in the gaps, right? An individual’s personal quality of life can improve by “outsourcing��� aspects of their work to ChatGPT — they have more free time, and maybe their work quality and pay grade improve too.

But I’d like to point out that this isn’t ChatGPT making life better for employees. This is actually ChatGPT eliminating the entire role of “employee.”

Okay, crazy statement time:

A person using ChatGPT in a professional setting is no longer an employee, but, in practice, actually a corporation.

What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Well, in concise terms, ChatGPT catalyzes the exploitation of labor by collecting it all in one place, meaning that the labor of hundreds of people can be scalped and represented as the work of a single entity: the individual using ChatGPT.

This essentially transforms the individual employee into a CEO of their own small corporation, which is being outsourced to larger corporations for work. Our new “CEO” doesn’t even have to pay any “employees,” keeping all of the profit they earned with the labor scalped by ChatGPT. This is why the individual is able to reap so much more profit from using ChatGPT than they ever could from working as a single employee.

You may think I’m trying to frame our new little “CEO” as the villain of this story, but it’s exactly the opposite. They’re just playing by the rules of the system, and within the system, it’s way nicer being a corporation than it is living as an employee. It’s just proof of concept that life on top is exactly as easy as we’ve all been guessing it is, and the only requirement for leveling up is a willingness to exploit labor. ChatGPT is a shiny new miracle tool that makes exploitation easy and accessible to everyone, and it doesn’t even look or feel like exploitation because there are no faces attached.

But that’s where this short-term improvement goes downhill: it’s accessible to everyone, including the actual corporations, who have already amassed the means to exploit labor en masse. If ChatGPT gives individuals a level-up by eliminating the role of employee and allowing them to act as corporations, how does that same level-up work when a corporation uses it? Well, I guess it’s a good thing the role of “employee” has been eliminated, because they aren’t needed anymore lol: not if your goal is to turn a profit, and we all know that’s just how things go.

But hey— galaxy brain here, but couldn’t that be kind of a good thing actually? The current system doesn’t function without people on the bottom who are available for exploitation, so if ChatGPT can automate the exploited parties for us by scalping labor from the past, then doesn’t that mean that the endless work necessitating human employment in the first place is finally… unnecessary? For the first time ever, we could be looking at a society where pretty much all of the labor is already accounted for, meaning all humans are free to pursue any passion they want regardless of their background, regardless of their class, regardless of how much money they- oh, right… Money.

The world I described above either sounds like a utopia to you or a dogshit stupid pipe dream, and unfortunately, both are true.

The problem is,

while technology has advanced to the point where it’s finally ready for automated labor, society has not.

We still live in a system where if you don’t work, you don’t eat, regardless of whether any work actually needs to be done. So… what actually happens in the current system if labor is automated?

Well, I won’t bore you with the typical “THE ROBOTS ARE TAKING ALL OUR JOBS” routine, but like. It’s only half wrong? I mean, we don’t even have the tech to automate all labor anyway, so it’s not like that’s literally what’s happening. But there are still… a lot of jobs that can be automated now, and that puts a lot of people in positions where they have to compete with ChatGPT in order to keep food on the table. It’s already a losing battle for a lot of people.

Using ChatGPT gives you a taste of corporate power, of the ability to exploit if it makes things financially easier for you. And that’s understandable, right? We’re all struggling in a system like this. Just don’t forget that line of reasoning when it comes full circle, where instead of getting to do the exploiting, you’re the one being exploited (again). Don’t forget what it was like to be on top: how normal it felt, reasonable, unremarkable. It didn’t feel like exploitation when you only experienced the profits. That is who owns you now. Let that radicalize you.

So long story short,

the existence and usage of ChatGPT is not the problem. In a better world, you’re right that ChatGPT could be a great ally, but the current structure of the job market has transformed it into a competitor. The human working class and ChatGPT are forced to compete against each other, not because it is rational for us to be enemies, but because the system pits all laborers against each other for the “privilege” of work. People are realizing that they really can’t beat the competition this time, so don’t scold them when they don’t share your enthusiasm. We’re all dogs in this fight, and ChatGPT has fucking lazer eyes.

It’s not the end of the world – the job market has always been prone to fluctuation – but this is different from your average fluctuation. It re-frames so much that used to seem impossible, but if we don’t change the system itself to match this advancement in technology, I guarantee it’s not gonna be the people at the top who pay the price.

The choice is not whether or not to use ChatGPT.

The choice is whether to discontinue ChatGPT so that society can continue with the relative stability it had before, or to embrace ChatGPT as the ally it could be by changing the structures that weaponize it against us.

(Okay I’m getting off my soapbox now, I sure hope nobody else is in this abandoned soapbox factory, can you imagine how embarrassing it would be if anyone actually heard me say all that lol)

[ursie]

Brennan’s statement on Palestine :

[ ID: Statement from Brennan Lee Mulligan, on Instagram. It consists of three black squares with plain white text. The text reads as follows:

"I'm calling on my government officials to immediately demand a ceasefire and de-escalation in Gaza.

I applaud anyone and everyone calling for peace, with the understanding that real peace only exists if it deeply and honestly accounts for and fully ends violence in all its forms. Real peace addresses and corrects wrong-doing in the past and guards against it in the future. It goes hand in hand with justice and requires truth, restoration, reconciliation, reparation.

Peace cannot co-exist with collective punishment, ethnic cleansing and forced displacement. It cannot co-exist with blockades, embargoes, or with 2.2 million people, half of which are children, trapped with no hope of escape or political recourse. it cannot co-exist with murdered journalists, bombed hospitals, or years of protesters being shot and killed at the border. it cannot co-exist with illegal settlements, segregated roads, and the silent, imperial chill that settles over the gaps in the violence - the unspoken geopolitical consensus that a group of people need to unflinchingly accept permanent subjugation and occupation.

My hear breaks for every Israeli person who lost loved ones during the attacks of October 7th. It breaks for every Ukrainian person who has lost their loved ones. It breaks for every Congolese person who has lost their loved ones. I do not speak on behalf of Palestinians now because some lives are worth more than others. I speak on their behalf because I, and all Americans, have a responsibility to pressure our government because we are responsible for this. Some have said that this situation is complicated. The Unites States government clearly disagrees. It has definitively, categorically, militarily chosen a side, and I do not agree with that decision.

In wiring this, I have been wrestling with what I am sure many people like me wrestle with: There is a powerful narrative surrounding violence in the Middle East that asserts and ever-moving goalpost of self-education and study in order to even be qualified to have an opinion. As someone with a love of research, I have at times in my life fallen into the trap that I am not educated enough clever enough, or aware enough to have a worthwhile perspective, and that three more articles and two more lectures and one more book will do the trick. Unfortunately, democracy doesn't work that way - we, the citizens of any democracy, cannot possibly be experts on every aspect of the policies of our governments, and yet if we do not constantly weigh in an make our voices heard, the entire experiment falls apart. Not only do people constantly doubt themselves and the things they can see with their own two eyes, but old shortcuts for political action can fall apart as well: This specific issue exists along a raw, charged and unique faultline in American Politics. Nobody I grew up with has ever challenged me on my support for abortion rights, LGBT rights, Black Lives Matter, anti-capitalism, anti-fascism, none of it. The people in my country who would despise me for those positions are, for all intents and purposes, strangers to me. But there are people who I've broken bread with and shared honest affection with who will see the words I've written here and incorrectly conclude that I do not wish for the security, dignity and happiness of them and their loved ones, and that breaks my fucking heart. Full-throatedly condemning the actions of the Israeli government while battling rampant anti-semitism at home is an urgent moral necessity, and doing so is made unnecessarily challenging for the average person to navigate by the pointed obfuscations of cynical opportunists, bigots, and demagogues on all sides of the political spectrum who see some advantage in sowing that incredibly dangerous confusion.

So, I'm calling my representatives. I'm having hard conversations with friends and family. I'm here, talking to you. I should have done it sooner. If you're Israeli and hurt by this statement, know that I want freedom, dignity, security and peace for you, and that every ounce of my political awareness believes whole-heartedly that the actions of your government are not only destroying innocent lives, but doing so to the detriment of you and your loved ones' safety. If you're American and feel lost and confused - I understand and empathize. This, the whole country, only works when we get involved. I am constantly haunted by the specter that maybe I missed some crucial piece of information on this, or any, important world event. I'll just have to make my peace with that self-doubt and trust my gut by going with Jewish Voice for Peace, Amnesty International, the Geneva Conventions, the United Nations, etc. And if you're Palestinian and reading this: I unreservedly support your right to life, to freedom, to happiness and human flourishing, to full enfranchisement and equal rights, to opportunity, prosperity and abundance, to the restoration of stolen property and land, and to a Free Palestine." End ID ]

[communist-ojou-sama]

Like, this may come as a shock to people like Tumblr liberals who are totally stuck in the Western anglophone neoliberal ideology echo-chamber but like, outside of the west, out there where the majority of the worlds people live, Kwame Nkrumah's thought is taken more seriously than Milton Friedman's. So why will left liberals engage with Friedman's thought, even if only to debunk it, but not engage at all with Nkrumah's writings on neocolonialism, and just write it off?

There's a common charge leveled by supposedly "open-minded" liberals toward anti-imperialists, that we just 'blindly' support any force that's contravailing US the US on a regional or global scale, but how am I supposed to take this seriously as anything but projection?

We anti-imperialists often make specific, verifiable claims about happenings in global geopol, such as that the so-called "Free Syrian Army" consisted mostly of salafi jihadists allowed into Syria through their northern border with Turkey, and that it doesn't make sense that a civil war could simply Materialize in a country like Syria which right before the war started had one of the lowest ratios of guns to people in the world, or that the Maidan coup regime that swept into power in Kiev in 2014 was heavily infiltrated with fascists, and would not have been able to consolidate power without the instrumentalisation of fascist gangs and paramilitary organizations.

The liberal response to these specific claims, then, is to point to reports from corporate media with every incentive to lie, themselves doing no independent investigation but instead parroting verbatim the word of the State Department as fact, and dismissing all independent media investigations out of hand with no further thought.

In a situation such as this, can that response really be considered "open-minded"? It seems that time and time again intellectual rigor is reserved for discussions of technocratic tinkering within the west's iron curtain, and not the lives of people outside of it.

There's plenty of brain-juice to be expended on justifying why the US economy is actually in good shape and the people saying they're struggling more than before are just stupid, but when it comes to considering why African heads of state choose the China Development Bank over the IMF as an economic partner or Russia over the NATO states as security partners, these leaders of millions are dismissively written off as histrionically anti-Western, paranoid, and too mentally weak to see through Russian and Chinese propaganda. Is it this really a 'rational' way to look at the world?

Personally, I think not.