#cannot reproduce that one just drew it since I liked it

[vipermenace]

Decided to put some of my Warframe pieces up on Inprnt! ☟

[thedeadflag]

I’m so confused! I know it’s not your responsibility to educate me but in your post bringing awareness to the negative aspects of g!p fanfic you say

“Why do these g!p characters rarely if ever involve experiences reflective of trans/intersex women? Why are they so utterly cis and perisex-washed? Why do nearly all writers have zero idea that tucking is a thing? “

Doesn’t that answer your original question? The reason they don’t reflect those groups of ppl is bc g!p isn’t trying to represent those groups of people or else it WOULD be transphobic to limit them to one specific fetish right? it just refers to a canonically female character with the addition of a penis (I don’t argue the name “g!p” should be changed bc that’s a no brainer why that could be offensive). But the fanfic in general, how could it be harmful? I’ve noticed in my time reading it as a non binary person it’s given me great gender euphoria reading a reader insert where reader has a penis while being a femme representing person just bc that’s a reflection of my personal experience. I don’t see anywhere where g!p fanfic ever references or tries to emulate the experiences of trans or intersex people so how could it be offensive?

Sorry this is way too long I’m just very confused

I'm going to try and lay this out as politely as I can. It's after 3:30 in the morning here, so this could be a bit disjointed and rambling. More under the cut:

In real life, ~99.999999% of women with penises are trans women. Which puts us in a tricky situation of (A) being the only women with penises around for media involving women with penises to reflect back on, and (B) being in the lovely position of precious few people actually having had meaningful real life exposure to trans women, meaning (C.) all those stigmas and all that misinformation are going to purely affect us and it’s going to be uncritically gobbled up by the masses, since they don’t have any meaningful information to fill in the blanks with instead.

When we peer into the depths of femslash fandoms and see all these folks who aren't trans women writing about women with penises, and using cis women’s bodies as platforms for these penises, it’s the simplest thing.

I mean, some of those folks might actually be struggling and confused about why they’re into it, what the real appeal is, why they get off on it, why they might have some feelings about wanting a penis of their own…

…but from our vantage point, it’s really easy to gauge 99.99% of the time. We can generally see valid, legitimate yearning to have a penis pretty damn easily in a piece of art/writing, and we can also see when people who create this media are just hung up on a boatload of baggage and fetishization.

And 99.9% of the time, the creators are just hung up on a boatload of baggage and fetishization, and see trans women’s bodies as a perfect vehicle to tap into that, generally due to deeply held cissexist views that link us and our bodies and genitals directly to cis men, to maleness. As if penises are rooted in maleness and masculinity (which is absolutely not true).

And I have sympathy for NB folks (certainly TME ones who have reached out to me in the past about this) who might be struggling with that, but just because they’re non-binary, it doesn’t mean they get to appropriate our bodies and reproduce transmisogyny and trans fetishization in their attempts at feeling better. Shit doesn't work like that.

Because again, the only women with penises in this world, essentially, are trans women. Meaning any woman with a penis in media is a trans woman, implicitly or explicitly. Meaning that when people who aren’t us want to write us, intent doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter if it’s just the writer’s fantasy, it’s still going to attach a variety of messages directly onto us.

And more often than not, due to cissexism, those messages are linking us to maleness, to toxic masculinity, etc..

While I do want to believe they're a fairly small minority, a lot of NB folks in fandom spaces like g!p characters in part because they see penises as male and the rest of the body as female and think that duality is interesting and would be comfortable, and is a nice balance of “both worlds” or a nice position “between male and female”, but that’s a wholly cissexist, transmisogynistic view to have, and it’s one that absolutely cannot be supported without directing sexual violence against trans women and invalidating our entire existence. Certainly not all NB folks into g!p like it for that reason, but holy shit a fair bit of them do and it’s weird and wrong and fetishistic.

g!p emerged from the idea that women can't have penises, and drew on the transmisogyny and cissexism of tr*nny porn to structure that frame of desire and the core patterns and trends within these works. It's always been trans women's bodies being used as a vehicle, whether or not the writers of these fics are explicitly aware of it, because the trope itself still holds true to its original patterns and cissexism. It's not the name that's the problem, it's the content; changing the name would be a surface level change that wouldn't affect anything.

g!p objectifies women with penises (trans women). A woman with a penis is more than just a woman with a penis, but the use of the term and trope is literally to (A) remind people that women don't have penises, otherwise the g!p term wouldn't be needed if people actually accepted women with penises as women, and that (B) this is a story centered on a scenario where there's a woman with a penis, with key focus on that genitalia specifically. it's the drawing point, it's the lure, it's what everything is centered on. It is a means for folks to write lesbian sex while also writing about penis in vagina and getting off to it. It's also no surprise that the penises so clearly emulate cis men's penises in these works, that is by design.

As I’ve said many times before, if you’re only writing trans women’s bodies to showcase cis men’s penises, you’re not respecting the womanhood of trans women, and this ultimately has nothing inherent to do with penis-owning women, it has to do with (cis) men and their penises, because trans women are just being used as a vehicle to emulate them. When NB folks do the same thing, and imagining themselves as those g!p characters, they are ultimately embodying cis men, their maleness, and often toxic masculinity, in a way that feels safe and distanced enough for them, a shell that they often code as cisnormative due to their own unprocessed cissexism.

And trans women don’t deserve that.

You seem caught in the idea that if something doesn't directly perfectly reflect trans women, that it can't be linked to us., which ignores the long long history of media being used to misrepresent marginalized peoples and cast us in insulting, dehumanizing lights. You show a lack of understanding of the g!p trope and the long history of its usage across a few other names, even if the content and patterns remained the same. It shows a lack of understanding of tr*nny porn and transmisogynistic stigmas, which the trope draws heavily from.

I think we can all recognize that most 'lesbian' prn that's made does not represent actual lesbians, it's overwhelmingly catered to the male gaze. We can also recognize that this category of porn has led to a lot of harassment towards lesbians from cis men who at the very least want to believe lesbians are just like they are in the porn he watches, that lesbians just need the right man. Lesbians are being used as a vehicle for a fantasy that was created externally to them, and doesn't represent their realities.

It's the same kind of situation here. The way g!p fics play out overwhelmingly doesn't reflect trans women's realities, but they are inherently linked to us regardless, as we're the vehicles for those fantasies, as unrealistic and harmful as they may be.

g!p characters are built in our fetishized image that’s based on a deeply cissexist misunderstanding of us, of the gender binary, and of bodies in general.

I mean, when 99% of cis folks don’t understand how trans women tend to be sexually intimate… when they don’t understand what dysphoria is and how it works and how it can affect us physically and emotionally…when they don’t understand almost any of our lived experiences…then they’re not going to be able to accurately portray us even if they wanted to.

And I’ve read enough g!p fics where authors wrote those as a means of trying to add trans rep, but because they didn’t understand us at all, it wasn’t remotely representative, and it was ultimately fetishistic, even if there was an undercurrent of sympathy and a lack of following certain common g!p patterns there that differentiated it from the norm.

If g!p fics were at all about reducing dysphoria or finding euphoria, then it wouldn’t be explicitly tied up in the performance of very specific sex acts, very specific forms of misogyny and toxic masculinity, very specific forms of sexual violence and exertion of sexual power, etc.

But it is.

So the notion that creating g!p fics helps NB folks? Nope. It CAN certainly prevent/delay those folks from facing a whole boatload of shit they’ve internalized, and coddle them at the expense of trans women.

Because if it was really about bodies and dysphoria/euphoria, there would be a considerable push (allying with out own) to end our fetishization and to represent us in and out of sexual contexts with accuracy, respect, and care. Because they wouldn’t care what sex acts were performed and what smut beats were hit, they’d just want to see someone with a body like their ideal being loved, being sexual, connecting, being authentic, etc. Which very much is not the case in the overwhelming majority of g!p fics. That's what we want, and it's not what g!p writers want, it's nothing they give a shit about.

Like, a ways back I started doing random pulls of g!p fics from various fandoms and assessing them for certain elements to provide some quantitative clarity. I started on The 100 here, and did OuaT here. Never finished the 100 one since the results leveled out and stayed pretty consistent as the sample size grew, so I didn't really see the point in continuing any further after about 140 fics when the data wasn't really changing much at all.

Lastly, media influences people. I've read countless posts and comments from people who use fanfiction as a sex ed guide, in essence. Which is ridiculous, but I also know sex ed curricula often isn't very accurate or extensive in a lot of areas, so people take what they can get. Representation in media can be powerful, and when it overwhelmingly misrepresents people, that's also powerful. Just because fandom is a bit smaller than televised media, it doesn't make that impact any lesser, certainly not for those whose primary media intake is within fandom.

Virtually all trans representation in f/f fanfiction is misrepresentative of us. That has a cost in how people understand us, how people react to us, and how people treat us. Not just online, but in physical spaces, and in intimate settings.

I invite you to read that post you referenced again, or perhaps this longer one which is a response to a trans guy who seemed to feel something similar to you with this trope.

All I can do is lay it out there and try to explain this. It's up to you how you handle this. All I know is whenever there's a big surge in g!p in a fandom, trans women generally leave it en masse, because it's a very clear and consistent message that we're not valued, respected, and that people value getting off on us over finding community with us.

[thebethbits]

on beauty and art.

Marble busts. A clean, organized desk. Pastel colors, Baroque art. Listed, these items may not seem at first related, but they do in fact share a commonality: they are all different examples of aesthetics. Meaning: they are ideas, concepts, or items that all have a very specific appearance or style to them, that one may find enjoyable to experience. This could stem from the appearance of an object, to the history of it, the way it is made, or colored, or simply gleams in the light. The impact, or experience we receive from looking at one of these items or others, may have a certain aesthetic appeal to you, or others.

To grapple with the relationship between art and beauty is to grapple with how we go about seeing art, seeing the world. Asking the question what is art, what is beauty, can feel vulnerable. It tilts our worldview on an axis we aren’t always comfortable with. It questions how we view our reality, which can feel like standing on crumbling ground.

This is why, historically, “beautiful art” over the last few thousand years, before the nineteenth century, has meant objectivity. That beauty lies within the piece of art, in the harmony of its elements, the symmetry in its appearance, as well as the emotion expressed or conceived that made a piece beautiful. But this perspective changed in the nineteenth century, when Immanuel Kant and colleagues wrote that it is within judgement, within critique that beauty is found, relying on the subjectivity of the experience of art, as its audience, to find beauty. (Art Must Be Beautiful) This changed the game, leaning on audiences to find beauty rather than the objectivity of beauty from the art itself. Traditional western ideals have commonly attributed “beauty” to pieces that showcase incredible skill: landscapes, still life, portraits, where traditionalism and true-to-life, near-photographic styles, or examples of Realism, are favored.

The relationship of art and beauty dances on this line of objectivity and subjectivity. Some say that you cannot have one without the other, others saying that art can exist without having to be considered beautiful at all. In this argument, many bring up Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. It is incredibly hard not to, the piece is incredibly controversial, and considers the arguments of beauty and art’s edges, the argument’s extremes. The title of Duchamp’s piece may remind one of the many majestic fountains from all over the world, with statues and architecture that is synonymous with traditional ideals of beauty. But the actuality of it is a little more every-day than, say, Florence’s Trevi Fountain.

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917, replica 1964. Tate.

Pieces along this narrative are defined as “anti-art,” or art that defies existing expectations of what art is supposed to be. (Anti-Art, Tate) Here is where the relationship between art and beauty splits, depending on your own view of the discussion. To some, a urinal brought into a gallery may be called art, but it isn’t beautiful. To others, the message of what the action of bringing a urinal into a gallery means, makes the piece beautiful. There is another group, to who a urinal could just be beautiful. The architecture of it, all slopes and curvature, may be considered beauty and worthy of being art in itself, whether it is being shown in a gallery or bathroom.

This challenge of expectations, this split from the ideals of western traditionalism, was a curveball thrown into the history of art. What started as objectivity, symmetry and fractals, turned to subjectivity, as observers sought to define their own beauty in art. Changing again in the late nineteenth century, with the start of Expressionism rebelling against Impressionistic ideals and traditionalist art, where the likes of Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Munch, among others, were famous for their Expressionist works, inspired by widespread anxiety of divergent views worldwide of authenticity and spirituality. (Wolf, 2019) Through Expressionism, beauty in art was shown through what was within, complex thought and processes, rather than from the current affairs of what the world had to offer.

Then, an explosion of radical and new age thinking in the early twentieth century. Movements like Surrealism, Bauhaus, Dada, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, among many, many others created as time went on. More artists were moving away from Realism and towards different ways of showing the world through a stylized lens, testing boundaries of meaning and definitions of what art is, what art could be.

These changes are attributed to the postwar culture left after the second World War. America having escaped generally unscathed, victorious of both a cultural and military war, among the millions of traumatized immigrants starting new lives far from their home countries. The culture that began of this mixing of ideals, of histories and cultures, jumpstarted a new age of movements every decade, one rebutting against the next. Art made in protest against elitism, against simplistic thought, against capitalism, against traditional limitations. (Willette, 2012) Like dominoes, one is the critique of the next, again and again. Old ideas turned on their head into new ones, beauty reinvented, revisited, over and over.

To talk about the change of art and beauty in art history and not mention the works of Mark Rothko would be a tragedy. Rothko’s works have been a centerpiece of abstraction and a spark to the discussion of art and beauty since their creation. His works are featured in museums around the globe, and have started a conversation of massive discontent and debate of beauty in the art world.

Mark Rothko, No. 37/No. 19 (Slate Blue and Brown on Plum) 1958. MOMA.

To many, Rothko’s works don’t feel beautiful when you first walk up and look at them. They may seem misleadingly simplistic. They may seem dull, rectangle upon rectangle of hazy dim color. But there is something about them that one cannot discount: there is a ubiquity present. Rothko’s pieces seem to loom over the gallery, viewers walking between them like they’re drowning in them, swimming from depth to depth. They are not pieces you forget it after you’ve walked away. Rothko didn’t need narrative to assist the color present in his works, an idea new in the 1950s, where having color, and color alone drew out emotion in audiences. (The Case for Mark Rothko, 2015) With this structure for his art, Rothko has said that: “‘he could deal with “human emotion; with the human drama, as much as I could possibly experience it.’ He said this style offered him ‘the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer.’” (The Case for Mark Rothko, 2:02-2:13) This experience-based narrative that Rothko stood so strongly by – in my eyes, is the goal of beauty, down to the simplest, core concepts, of color and shape.

Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue is a series of four paintings by the late artist Barnett Newman (1905-1970). The third in the series, Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue III, isn’t particularly groundbreaking at first glance, the same perspective as Rothko’s pieces showcase.

Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue III, Barnett Newman, Stedelijk Museum.

The piece features an ocean of startling red, bracketed by vertical stripes on either side: blue on the left, and yellow on right. It is featured on a massive piece of canvas, nearly 18 feet wide by 8 feet tall. It hung in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam for seventeen years. Then, in 1986, it was murdered. It was actually murdered twice, within the timespan of about five years, but we’ll come back to that.

These pieces look similar because they are both connected by being created in the same style, that of the movement of art that began in the 1940s: Abstract Expressionism. This movement has a power that not all movements of art do: their presence alone enrages some viewers. The simplistic look of the paintings makes some feel like they, or even their children, could reproduce an exact-looking copy with little to no effort, compared to some of the other, more traditionally styled pieces featured in museums. This elicit and intense reaction from audiences goes so far to where some even leave museums entirely – vowing to never go back in. (99 Percent Invisible, 2019)

Abstract Expressionists are shaped by Surrealism, a movement known to have been created as a response to the global attitude shaped by post-war anxiety and fear and trauma. These artists vowed to explore art through self-expression, through color, and abstraction, and gestural emotion featured loud and proud on the canvas. (The Art Story Contributors, 2011) Some may say that these pieces should not be considered art, let alone carry the title of beautiful. But when we are grappling with the idea that we are capable, as a species, of such intense horror by our own hands, how do we go about making something like that – beautiful? How do we look at these faces, these beautiful landscapes, and not think of those who will never be able to see them again, or those who were never able, and will now never even get the chance? How do we hold that, and how can we capture it within art?

Beauty is constantly evolving, and not everyone is comfortable with that fact. But there is a difference in turning your nose up at modern art movements, and actively seeking out to destroy them. Here is where we come back to Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue III, and it's unfortunate murders. The first begins when the painting is being exhibited at a museum called the Grande Parade, where it is being shown among other pieces to pose the question of what makes a painting, a painting. (99 Percent Invisible, 2019) During the exhibition, a man devastated the canvas, making long horizontal slashes with a box cutter. By the time he was finished, fifty feet of the fabric had been gouged out.

The man, Gerard Jan van Bladeren, was an artist himself. He considered this action one of artistic vandalism, where the painting itself was asking for it, that it provoked this action out of its audience, and he, the first to act upon it. (99 Percent Invisible, 2019) After, many Dutch citizens wrote to the museum letters of recognition, not for the fallen painting, but for the destroyer of it. “‘This so-called vandal should be made the director of modern museums’ read one. ‘He did what hundreds of thousands of us would have liked to do,’ read another.” (99 Percent Invisible, 2019)

The restoration of the piece led to another issue: how do you make a piece so thoroughly destroyed, whole again? How do you make it the same, colors beautiful and dimensional once more? Conservators have a rule of only using restorative elements that can be removed at a later point in time, in case the piece needs to be worked on later. (99 Percent Invisible, 2019) But Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue III was a momentous task to uphold: the simplicity of it would make a restoration job incredibly easy to spot.

The Stedelijk ended up hiring a New York based conservator to take on the task, one by the name of Daniel Goldreyer. The job took three years to finish. By the end of it, Goldreyer was paid $270,000 plus expenses for his work and the museum finally had their painting back, sans slashes. (Vogel, 1993) Happy ending, except, when the museum put the painting back up, there was another immediate reaction from its audience. Not of violence (though this was not the last of Newman’s work to be vandalized in such a manner, or by the same man that had attacked this one), but of confusion. There was no sign of the gashes, yes, but the painting was now different in another way. The red, the color that took up nearly the entirety of the painting, didn’t have the same quality anymore. The painting had lost its depth, it’s shimmering dimensions within the red color. (99 Percent Invisible, 2019) The museum was now stuck with a different painting than one that had hung on its walls for nearly two decades.

The story of this painting brings up an important question: though “fixed”, and similar from afar, was the painting considered the same by some in the quality of its beauty? If audiences could tell the difference, was it still beautiful to those who found it so before? And to those who did not, was there a new beauty found in its narrative deaths, a “rebirth”? Further, if more people know about Newman’s work and the journey of this piece, would they think different about abstract art? If they were more educated on Rothko’s works, emotion and color and asking more of the viewer than a common passing, but to think, and feel, and spend time with his pieces, would they do it? Or is it easier to follow the group mindset, to snidely object to these types of art as not beautiful? To not think that the thought, the hours, the concept behind the piece as motivation for the beauty of the piece itself? If this would not change their minds, what would?

Today, the way we see beauty and art has changed. We have art museums that have been built to focus on abstract, modern concepts of beauty. Where photo-like accuracy, traditional western concepts and ideals do not equal the experience of beauty we get from viewing art. Where beauty is treated like an involuntary action, seeing an aesthetic and feeling like it fits into our catalogue of likes and views subjectively.

Beauty and art still have a complicated relationship. Beauty is specific, striking, hard to pin down and define. Art, as we considered last week, hides both in plain sight, and bursts from every corner, expressive and blinding. There is a connectedness between them that feels like a balancing act – one leaning into the other. But this doesn’t mean that art needs to be beautiful to be considered art, or to be considered worthy of attention versus another piece.

All of this leads me to believe that maybe beauty, below the surface, is subjective, but in a way that is almost domesticated. Habitual. If we truly felt the beauty in everything, we’d be struck still by it. We’d have to stop what we were doing – walking, talking, breathing – and stare. It would be like seeing everything for the first time, over and over. The stars. Mountains rising into view over the horizon. Every color of the sky. The sound of someone’s laugh. Where beauty is both caught in the fleeting feeling of itself, alongside a kind of seeping feeling, full of contentment. But this is only half the story.

There is another side to beauty, and one that has only seen light since the movements started in the twentieth century: unorthodox beauty. Experiences, pieces of art that do not fit the contented, fleetingly tender concept of beauty. Genres like horror, for instance, can be beautiful. Sad movies with unfulfilling endings can be beautiful. Historically, from the many, many pieces of religious art, and especially seen in old Greek theatre: tragedy can be beautiful. These pieces do not fit into the general and common notions of beauty that we are comfortable with. They split at the seams, they are filled with the unknown, full with the feeling that something is waiting just beyond the corner, and it is waiting for us. In this way, curiosity is beautiful. Mysteries, stories that end mid-sentence, art that is worn, fragmented, broken by the process of time, can still be beautiful.

So this leads us to the ultimate question: where is the line drawn? Where does beauty begin, and where does beauty end? What happens if we ask, rather: where do we stop looking for beauty? In our environments, our interactions, in ourselves? But if art is an expression of who we are, and art is capable of beauty, what does that say of the source? The subject? Maybe whether or not beauty is really found – as in named, as in seen or discussed – subjectively or objectively by anyone other than you, as the viewer or the artist – doesn’t really matter. But even if beauty is relative, that doesn’t make it unimportant. Rather instead, it makes it the most important quality of art. Because to see beauty is to be affected by everything. To pursue beauty is to be affected by everything. By finding beauty you are finding the light in how you see in the world, whether it is peeking through the cracks, or pouring from the sky. You are looking, actively, for where and who and what is calling for your attention, demanding your eyes.

If you find beauty, and think about it, just hold it in your mind for even a moment, there begins a possibility that someone else is seeing the beauty there, too. And there, you are bridging a gap – between geographies, millennia of lives lived, stories told, meals cooked and served, sunsets and sunrises – by finding beauty, you are bringing all of us, just a little closer together.

So as you go about your day, commuting, doing work, finishing deadlines and attending meetings, try looking up. Try to see. The world is exploding with beauty.

Works Cited

“Anti Art.” Tate, The Tate, URL.

“Art Must Be Beautiful”, YouTube, uploaded by The Art Assignment. 15 Feb. 2018. URL.

The Art Story Contributors. “Abstract Expressionism Movement Overview and Analysis”. The Art Story, The Art Story Foundation. 22 Nov. 2011. URL.

“The Case for Mark Rothko”, YouTube. uploaded by The Art Assignment. YouTube, 2 July, 2015.  URL.

Fecile, John. “The Many Deaths of a Painting” 99 Percent Invisible, Radiotopia. 26 March, 2019. URL.

Vogel, Carol. “Inside Art.” The New York Times. 10 Dec. 1993. Section C, p. 26. URL.

Willette, Jeanne. “Post-War Culture in America.” Art History Unstuffed, 21 Jan. 2012. URL.

Wolf, Justin. “Expressionism Movement Overview and Analysis”. The Art Story, The Art Story Foundation. 01 Oct 2012. URL.

Art Cited

Duchamp, Marcel. Fountain. 1917, replica 1964. Tate Modern, London. Tate. URL.

Newman, Barnett. Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue III. 1967-1968, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Stedelijk. URL.

Rothko, Mark. No. 37/No. 19 (Slate Blue and Brown on Plum). 1958, MOMA, New York. MOMA. URL.

[blankdblank]

Ridukulus Pt 5

Pt 1 - Pt 2 - Pt 3 - Pt 4 -

Tags –

@himoverflowers​, @theincaprincess, @aspiringtranslator​, @sweeticedtea​, @ggbbhehe4455​, @thegreyberet​, @patanghill17​, @jesgisborne​, @curvestrology​, @alishlieb​, @jogregor, @armitageadoration, @fizzyxcustard, @here2have-fun, @abiwim​, @jotink78, @c-s-stars, @evyiione, @menewyn

…

Rolling your eyes you shifted back in your seat and tried blinking through your exhaustion as you focused your attention to the Elf King’s face spotting his inner cogs turning as he once again mentioned some fault to the area you had mentioned in attempts to settle at least an idea of where you could plant the school at least before you collapsed from the weight of the enchantment. On his left Lord Elrond stole a glance at the Elf King then looked back at you spotting your withheld irritation clearly, so similar to your Father’s expression when trying to learn one of their kin’s more complex card games. With a glance at the clock you sighed as the King had finished his latest excuse and said, “I see the Company was correct in their wagers.” Rising to your feet you added, “I have to rest.”

Hastily the Elf King rose signaling the Elves around him to do the same as he asked, “Wagers?”

Meeting his eye you stated, “We will clear your lands, current and abandoned and leave them to you. We will simply clear and claim the mountains. If you’ll excuse me.”

He took a step to his right blocking your path asking, “We have not come to an agreement. Are you wishing to reschedule for another time?”

Wetting your lips you replied, “King Thranduil, you clearly are hoping to have your lands returned to you. That is what I am promising. We will look elsewhere.”

Hastily he asked, “You mentioned mountains. What mountains?”

“The Grey Mountains and those in the lands of Angmar.”

Sharply he drew in a breath, “Those mountains are riddled with Dragons. You would unleash destruction on us all!”

With a sigh you turned to a glowing cloud of mist passing around the Elf King then filling out to your normal form again softly stating, “I have an early class in a few hours to rest for, if you wish to we can continue this argument tomorrow after school hours are through.”

After his parted lips shut he hastily followed after you on your path to the lone doorway open to your family home where you halted at his hand grabbing your wrist. Rolling your eyes you caught a glimpse of Elrond’s amused smirk when you turned to face the King with a forced flash of a smile, “Yes Your Majesty?”

With narrowed eyes he repeated, “Those lands are riddled with Dragons!” In a moments pause his eyes widened at Opal flying through the doorway and landing on your back tilting her head as she accepted your lending her part of your sight turning your left eye milky white.

The Elves stepped back as he released you, unable to grip his sword as you stopped them by saying as Norberta joined her on your right side, “So are our lands. But our Dragons mean us and you no harm.”

Elrond cautiously stepped forward saying, “Your Father mentioned your knowledge of their tongue.”

You nodded, “Draconic. I am fluent in it. Some of our oldest spells stem from it. There are even myths to state our first Wizard was gifted his powers through befriending a Dragon that wished him to live eternally beside him.” Your eyes shifted back to Thranduil, “The Dwarves are well aware of our bond, part of our deal, in return for reclaiming Erebor we earn Dale. I am certain we can extend the deal to the northern mountains if we work out a fair portion of lands to share through them. No harm will come to your kin concerning Dragons. Now, as I said, I need to rest.”

Thranduil, “Your class can wait.”

Your brow rose as you crossed your arms stirring a confused once over from the King at the clear refusal of his order, “If you were unaware, I am the Defense Against the Dark Arts Professor and I have six classes of students to prepare for quarter exams on Tuesday. Now Monday through Fridays I teach from 8 to 5, after that I am free to continue this discussion since it is a weekend.” After drawing in another breath eyeing his partially stunned reaction to your final statement, “I will see you tomorrow Your Majesty. The doorway will switch back to your Kingdom when I pass through allowing you to return home if you wish. You have my word my people will not harm yours. We are far too tired and simply wish to settle and start again.” Turning around after those words his eyes scanned over the smiling Dragons bidding the group goodnight in the recited Elvish they had learned through your lessons with Gandalf before the door closed then promptly opened again to the Throne Room in Greenwood.

Turning to Elrond Thranduil asked, “What?!”

Smirking Elrond motioned his head to the side, “I’ll brew us up some tea.”

Thranduil joined him on his left, “Miss Black abandoned our negotiations all together to-, to go on some death mission to the Grey Mountains!”

Elrond glanced up at his friend saying, “Negotiations? For all your reasoning to refuse her claiming the portions she suggested I am surprised you wish to claim them at all.”

Thranduil scoffed, “I refused nothing.”

Elrond chuckled, “The Western stretch apparently contains trees that will maliciously poison the youth, twice you mentioned them. The East is far too rocky to use for housing and the Southern stretch around the old keep is full of marshes and the North floods, just what portion were you allowing her?”

Thranduil inhaled sharply as he entered the small study claiming his usual seat as Elrond prepared the kettle, “I was simply trying to see to the Children’s safety.”

Elrond nodded, turning to catch his eye, “Ah, yes. Seeing them safely away from your borders.” Earning a chuckle from himself as he returned to the tea.

“I am not being unreasonable. They have dragons, what do they need of my lands?” Elrond raised a brow at him, “Yes I know, homes. Why my lands? Why not, live in the plains below Laketown?”

Elrond smirked, “Men now claim those lands. Those overpopulating Rohan have moved closer to our borders to claim their own kingdom. Rhovanion plains now have a new King to claim and protect it. I would not allow them to go against those armies. Men would be far to willing to abuse their naïve ways.”

Thranduil sighed, “My people are far too crowded in our lands.”

Elrond sighed again knowing his own people could use the extra lands that reclaimed forest could offer. “We will discuss it tomorrow. She has duties to see to, same as we do. We will plan a dinner or something agreeable to Miss Black and continue the terms then.”

…

In a soft groan you walked through the halls and stopped at a thick mahogany door a tune softly rippled through from a harp that halted with your gentle wrap from your knuckles on the door. Shuffling footfalls later you greeted Thorin with a weak smile, his head bowed to you, “Miss Black.”

You bowed your head in return, “I was wondering if I could have a moment?”

He nodded stepping back to allow you inside the room he’d been gifted to join him on his bed near the foot as he claimed a spot a foot away eyeing the map you set between you on the bed. “This area between the Celdwin and Carnen Rivers, is that occupied?”

Thorin shook his head, “No, it’s far too hilly and it gets too harsh to house in through the winter.”

Wetting your lips you asked, “Would, and I know you might have to consult your Cousin King Dain, would your kin mind if we claimed it for our schools at least to start settling at least some of us?”

He nodded, “Of course.” Patting your hand gently, “Was King Thranduil that obstinate?”

“Apparently there is no habitable land in all of Southern Greenwood. So, we will help clear it and hand it over to him. Also, these Grey Mountains, would we be able to claim a portion of those as well? I know you said the lands of Angmar were all ours, but a portion of those would help to house Durmstrang and Bauxbatons schools.” His lips parted, “I know those lands used to be your kins,” you wet your lips again, “I was thinking, we could combine the Grey Mountains all through Angmar and down to Moria even.” The idea parted Thorin’s lips as he considered it.

“You would only want a portion?”

You nodded, “Yes, if you could find a set of maps for those peaks I could tell you which ones. But we need I would say at least two peaks, and then the valleys between we could occupy leaving your kin the rest in the Grey Mountains. Moria would be yours, and we could mix in the bits between Moria of course.”

He nodded, “Of course.” He wet his lips again, “This deal would greatly calm any objections to a union between Fili and Miss Granger. Oh, I am to ask for a future date to discuss the full courtship expectations from her Parents.”

You smiled at him, “Our people and yours have different cultures on courtship, but I am certain they would love to meet you all. We’ll have to discuss it with Hermione of course,” Your brows furrowed, “Does, does this much thought always go into all of your relative’s romantic choices?”

He smirked at you, “Fili is my heir, and since my,” a soft blush struggled to coat his cheeks as he continued, “Future Consort, Bilbo and I will be unable to continue my line Fili will be claiming my throne when I pass on.” Your momentarily parted lips drew a curious furrow from his brows, “Do you object to Miss Granger claiming Fili?”

You shook your head, “Of course not. Simply, this might seem a bit, odd, to ask. You both don’t want children or is it simply the obvious reason why you assume you’re barred Children?”

“We have magic in our world but two men cannot reproduce on their own.” His eyes scanned over your face, “Is that not true in yours?”

“Well, we have a potion to change the gender of the drinker, it’s usually used for, fertility issues like these.”

His lips parted as his eyes lit up, softly asking I a hopeful tone, “We could have a Child?”

You nodded, “As long as one of you would be willing to live for possibly years as a woman until successfully birthing and nursing the Child or Children.”

“The young, are there any, defects?”

You shook your head, “No. Just one painful transformation for the drinker later and a set of fertility boosters, if you wish to speed it along, and, Baby.”

His hands cradled yours, “You have no idea what you’ve just offered me, my kin. This potion is easily crafted?”

“It takes, three weeks to brew properly if I recall, two possibly, but it is easy to make.”

“I, that is, Bilbo and I would not be the only ones of my kin to require aid in this.”

You smiled at him, “Thorin, part of our place in Dale and your kingdoms would be to help aid in situations like this. We want our people to flourish and find peace. We would protect our lands, ours as in both of ours, and yes, we would love to help you with this.”

His smile grew as he tried to reign in his urge to tackle you in a hug, “When we get to Erebor we will find the maps to settle the issue of the peaks, the valleys and plains are yours. The area between Celdwen and Carnen are yours along with our sharing Dale. I cannot thank you enough for this!”

You smiled at him, “Hey, kids is kinda what I do now.” Making his smile grow, “I’ll let you sleep, or ambush Bilbo or whatever else you’re planning, thank you for being so agreeable.”

He smiled at you walking you to the door where he smiled up at you and crashed into you with a tight hug you returned as he repeated his thanks earning a giggle from you before you left to head to bed as he raced next door to knock on Bilbo’s door that opened leaving the Hobbit nearly knocked over through his excited kiss.

… The next day ...

Rolling your head in a circle you sighed and walked through your classroom apperating into your bedroom back home removing your outer blouse and cardigan in the oddly warm evening leaving you in your strapless midriff bearing corset top over your sheer tank top and jeans. Softly your heeled boots tapped across the marble floors in your home to the enchanted doorway where you exited to Rivendell finding Elrond already seated with Thranduil and Thorin, who was surrounded by Bilbo and his kin. As you entered Gandalf and Albus did as well flashing you kind smiles joining your sides to claim the seats around you while King Thranduil locked his eyes on you curiously looking over your skin baring outfit, especially the tattoo along your forearm before meeting your eyes again.

After a steady inhale he bowed his head to you saying, “Miss Black. I believe we were discussing central Greenwood before you had to retire for the night.”

You nodded, “Let me guess, screaming toads live there?”

His brow rose as Elrond chuckled and interrupted, “I do believe we could manage to be a great deal civiler this time around?” He glanced between you both smirking as you eyed the map Thorin slid closer to you with a confirming nod reminding you of your prior agreement as Bilbo curled around his other arm happily beaming at you remembering your offer.

“It was civil.”

Thranduil nodded, “I was simply stating the faults in the locations suggested, and no, there are no screaming toads. Though there are some very unfriendly owls.”

You nodded and rolled your eyes stirring a curious tilt of his chin, “As I said, we will clear your lands and return them to you. Thorin and I came to an agreement. Your lands are safe, if you need help with sealing spells for your borders once they’re cleared don’t hesitate to ask.”

His lips parted suddenly feeling a rush of panic at not playing a part in the terms at all. “What agreement?”

“We are claiming the Mountains in Angmar and Grey Mountains along with the bare patch between the Celdwen and Carnen Rivers.”

Thranduil, “But those are full of hills and far to harsh to live in.”

You smiled at him, “We will manage.”

On your left Albus asked, “When would we be able to manage the shift?”

“All we really need is to scan over the lands to see just where we’re setting it all up.”

Albus nodded as Gandalf said, “We could go now, if it would suit you.”

You nodded and turned to him with your glowing hand raised to tap the side of his face as Albus sent a small folded paper swan off through your doorway to summon a group of your fellow DA members along. With the memories passed on you guided the group through your door that closed and you re-opened revealing a vast stretch of hills whistling with winds whipping through the vast empty stretch of lands. Wetting your lips you grabbed your broom along the wall from its resting cubby as you led the group out, soon joined by Fred and George sandwiching you with a curious smirk eyeing the blank canvas to shape.

The three of you led the group of teens to straddle their brooms while Albus walked behind you to sit sideways on the back of yours while Fili curiously eyed Hermione on her broomstick hovering at his side with a wondering smile. In a glance between his Uncle and her he hopped on just as Albus had, holding onto her tightly while Kili and Thorin both climbed on behind the twins as Bilbo adamantly chose to remain behind. The two Elf Lords watched your group start to rise only to turn to Luna, Neville and Draco clearing their throats before Draco asked, “Going up?”

Wetting their lips the King sat behind Draco assuming he was the closer relation to you than Neville while Legolas sat behind Neville as Elrond smiled claiming the seat behind Luna affectionately spotting a resemblance between her and his Wife. The trio held on for dear life as they joined the formation in the sky eyeing you and the twins leading Albus through the final set up while shifting an ice formed model of the school and grounds visually marking where you would set them up. Soon followed by marking the spot for Hogsmeade, your home and the Weasley’s relieving a great deal of strain on you and the energy needed for housing them and all the others. In the far empty stretch you also set out the borders to set up Diagon alley temporarily until Dale could be fitted and shifted for it properly.

.

Upon landing you were eyed by the Elf King as you yawned after your body violently shivered to keep yourself awake, allowing him to see a bit of the additional stress he had put on you by keeping you so late. But your head turned to Elrond feeling his eyes on you stirring a smile from you, as he walked to your side he asked, “I was wondering. Perhaps we should introduce you to Lord Celeborn as well.”

“Am I going to have to barter with him as well?”

Elrond chuckled softly, “No, but you will be neighbors, and I am certain he would be honored to meet you and your kin.”

You nodded, raising your hand to see the next location you were sending your doorway to from his mind before the door closed and opened again, straight into the study of the Elf Lord staring stunned at his Son in law through the previously non existent doorway. Rising to his feet he eyed the group entering and greeted you all before his exhausted body slumped back into his chair. Behind you you felt the Elf King’s eyes scan over you in your absurdly deep reach into a small bag you drew from your pocket until you drew out a small bright red and gold wrapped candy and held it out in your palm for the Elf Lord who eyed it curiously before looking up to meet your eyes.

With a smile you stated cheerfully, “It’ll help you feel better.” He raised a brow, “It’s chocolate covered cherry flavor.”

In another glance at the rectangular candy he collected it and folded back the shining paper revealing the feather etched bar he curiously sniffed then placed in his mouth eyeing you as he chewed it slowly then swallowed it. A single double blink later his pale complexion shifted and began to glow brighter than the other Elves around him leaving him to stand and look himself over then you again, asking, “What was that?”

You Fred and George answered with wide grins, “Pheonix Phables.” His brow rose, “We own a shop, sell healing, protective and joke goods. Those are one of our top sellers. Big surge of energy from the chocolate and all minor ailments fade at the Pheonix tears kick in.”

Celeborn, “Pheonix tears?”

Legolas, “You know where to find Pheonix?”

Albus chuckled as through the doorway Fawkes flew through as you and the twins morphed into Pheonix as well stirring soft gasps from the Elves around you before shifting back again. “We have a great deal of mystical creatures from our world if you’d be willing to learn about them properly.” Celeborn glanced at Elrond only to watch as you stepped closer raising a glowing hand, “To save time, I can share everything you’ve missed.” Timidly he nodded and felt the warm wave of memories being passed over to him allowing him recognition of all around him and your reasoning for coming there, at least as much as you knew about why you were there.

He looked at Elrond, “I would love to join you for the re-settling but my people need me. When the ring was destroyed Nenya ceased to aid in protecting these lands. Our borders need defending.”

With a smile you caught his eye as Fred and George stated, “Sounds like you need a good old fashioned bubble charm.” He glanced between you three then guided you towards the main ledge where he normally greets his guests and joined the Elves in watching you and the twins cutting the sides of your hands you joined into a woven knot in between your circle as you deeply inhaled and closed your eyes raising your wands muttering the ancient spell sending light pulses out through you and your wands forming a giant bubble around his lands. As the seal became solid your fingers unlocked and you stepped back revealing a ruby coated ring spinning between your palms that dropped into yours when the spell ended. In a turn when you pocketed your wand again you offered the ring to the Elf Lord who eyed it carefully as you stated, “Only those with your blessing may enter these lands, all foes are unable to cross your borders.”

His eyes met yours in shock as he slid it on his finger unable to feel anything special about the ring even in his great power and knowledge, “Thank you, Miss Black.”

You nodded your head then turned your eyes to the woman clad in white walking to join you in a steady pace saying, “Just what creature are you Child?”

Her eyes scanned over you trying to pierce your mental wall before you answered, “I should warn you, my people have laws against scanning the minds of others without permission.”

Her eyes met yours coldly, “These are my lands and all will endure inspection upon arrival. You will tell me what you are!”

You nodded, “I am a member of Dumbledore’s Army, the Order of the Pheonix and Leader of the Death Eaters.”

Softly around you Elves echoed the final title as Galadriel’s eyes scanned over you, “And just what does it take one to become an Eater of Death?”

With a smirk you offered out your glowing hand she smirked and tapped with her fingertips only to stagger backwards dropping to her knees rocking back and forth slowly curling into a ball as the Elf Lords caught the echoes of the memories you had granted her lingering in your now emotionless eyes, “To become a Death Eater requires weeks of torture to ensure your loyalty and seal in our mark. What I showed you was merely the first few hours. If you wish to continue?” Your hand extended and her ragged breaths between tears streaming down her cheeks continued as she curled tighter and shook her head, “I am 21, and unfortunately, that is not the worst I have endured. A mind is a fragile thing, you should be vary wary of tapping the minds of my kin without permission. No telling what you’ll be forced to endure. But, do as you wish, after all, curiosity did kill the cat.”

Her eyes scanned up to you tearfully seeing the truth in your words as you led the path back to your doorway you snapped calling it to you. Stunned the Elf Lords joined you as Galadriel managed to stand and stagger away using the rails and walls to remain steady as Lord Glorfindel tried to walk closer to you to no avail as Thranduil tried the same keeping his eyes locked on you wondering just what you had faced to torment Galadriel so with just a few hours of recounting.

.

Waves of eager voices spread through the school as everyone gathered the infants and toddlers to carry out into Rivendell, with Elrond’s permission allowing you to guide the enchanted orbs from your home and office out into the field again and lined them up with the markers you had formerly set. Hovering high above the ground you broke the enchantments and allowed the giant castle free first along with the vast island it was housed on reshaping the lands where it was placed forming an island in the new lands before the shimmering ripple cloaked the castle causing it to appear as ruins surrounded by water and the freshly reset enchanted forest to the stunned Elves and Dwarves. After that you and Albus moved onto releasing Hogsmeade that happily settled into place at the usual distance between two hills in its own little happy shimmering bubble leaving it appearing as a giant swamp.

In the hovering doorway Celeborn asked Thorin on his left, “Is that how my lands will appear? Ruins or a swamp?”

Behind him your Father stated, “No.” The Elf Lord jumped earning a smirk from him behind his mug, using it to hide the reaction as he claimed a sip of his tea, “It only appears like that on the schools to keep Non Magical creatures out. Old spell, came with the castle, refuses to change.”

He let out a relieved breath as they watched you set up the Weasley home stirring a pleased squeak from Molly beside Sirius widening his smile as he returned her gleeful hug before catching the giant Black family mansion being set up between two hills with the Malfoy Manor across from it. The three homes also shimmered as their seals grew around the well manicured grounds stirring pleased smiles on the Elves’ faces inspecting the grand homes from above. Around those between another ring of hills were more homes of the members of Dumbledore’s army and the Order of the Pheonix, including those of their families, both Muggle and magical forming a small neighborhood relieving the great strain on you, Albus and the others fueling the enchanted orbs to remain intact.

Next the door shifted allowing them to see the curious maze of Diagon Alley being set up along with a few dozen or so shops around it Aurors had managed to capture in the flight before the giant near castle sized hospital was set up stirring an inquiry as to what was what. The final touches were added before the door lowered allowing the Elves down to catch everyone out into the school and new town and neighborhood you had set up before all the Elves watched as each wand available was drawn and pointed upwards sending out pulses of light to aid you Albus and the Order to form another much larger bubble barrier over your new lands.

Safely inside cheers echoed through the giant bubble as you went through allowing some of the housed mythical creatures out to explore inside the river barriers they respected upon your sharing them. Timidly they all circled the ground and sky under the shimmering dome with the Dragons breeding and taming ground from Romania were also set down allowing them a first glimpse of the new world. Their reaction was altogether unimpressed, at least until you informed them of the move to another place as soon as the mountains could be reformed for them properly to a perfect setting. Their smiles inched out relaxing that it was temporary and you would ensure their needs and desires were seen to before settling in as the sun began to set.

.

The Great Hall in Hogwarts was filled after the puzzling interaction between you and the other teens in a jumble of languages to alert the other two magical schools you had hidden away and contained Wizarding villages and shops choosing to remain with their schools. While you finished delegating Albus stood addressing the Children and Teachers all exhaling in relief that they were at least settled for now and safe in the new Wizarding Kingdom an eager group of Children asked, or shouted more like, if it could be named Pumpernickel.

Around you the Elf Lords watched you and the teens switching between tongues alerting them to the vast mingling of people living in your lands. Between fumbling frantic flips through translating dictionaries the messages were passed off before a sharp gasp drew your eyes to Fleur. Along the wall she clutched Bill’s shirt as he steadied her, in a scoop up in his arms he led you all to the Healing Wing as the Elves followed after watching Molly and Madam Pomfrey burst into action as Gabrielle raced off through the halls to collect their relatives while the twins gathered the Weasleys. Barely half an hour later she smiled holding their little girl with bright red hair bringing joy to you all in your mingled family as Fleur finished the last of the healing elixirs she was passed.

Carefully she joined you into the Black Family Home to the waiting meal for you and your guests while the Elves focused on you and your relieved expression at the weighty strain taken off you. As the night carried on Gandalf happily joined you and the twins in leading everyone outside to enjoy the stash of fireworks you had saved for a safe new home. Warmly in your dome you laid back on the grass under the stars slowly drifting off as the curious creatures all cuddled around you and your group to join you in your sleep through the Elves curiously looking over your group. The Elf King especially still feeling the sting of his not aiding in this peaceful moment, rather making it much more difficult for you and prolonging your struggle through another night and long day. His eyes however not lingering on you long as the other tall blonde in the mix approached you with a blanket he’d brought from inside your home he laid over you, careful not to wake you as he smiled at your sleeping form softly.

Behind the King a throat cleared bringing Glorfindel to join the curious Elf Lords eyeing Snape as he drew out a small ledger from his pocket after gaining Thorin’s attention. “King Thorin, Jaqi informed me of your wish for the birthing potion.”

Thorin nodded as Thranduil asked, “Birthing potion?”

Thorin met his eye, “To aid my Consort and I in conceiving.”

Glorfindel glanced between him and Bilbo, “Um, what is in the potion to solve the obvious dilemma?”

Thorin met his eye with a smirk, “It will change me into a Dam allowing me to carry and nurse our Child.”

Their expressions dropped as Lindir stepped forward asking with a slightly hopeful tone, “They have potions to do that?”

Snape met his eye giving him a nod before telling Thorin, “There are a few ingredients I will need from you first though. I was told you might not find it agreeable.”

Thorin, “Anything.”

Snape nodded, “I will need a clump of your hair and a few of your beard hairs as well. Plus a few drops of blood.”

Thorin nodded, wetting his lips, “You can shave my head if it is required.”

Snape raised a brow, “I admire your dedication, however, the only potion requiring that much hair should never be agreed to by you and your kin, for future reference.”

Glorfindel, “What is that potion for?”

Snape, “It turns the drinker into a naked mole rat. Irreversible as far as we can figure out.” Smiling Thorin joined the Professor on the stroll through the school to his office to claim the small dime sized clump of hair to add before the others were as well through the Elves inspecting his classroom and its curious decorations.

Pt 6

[not-as-bad-as-frankenstein]

Asexuality and Identity

So since it’s the first day of pride I thought I’d share an essay I wrote on, well, asexuality and identity. It’s a bit long and I’m sorry to day I didn’t really get into aro identities, but it covers the ace spectrum instead of just being ace=no sexual attraction, plus it’s written by a bonafide asexual, so I drew from my experiences as well as my research. Anyway if this sounds interesting to you, if you don’t get asexuality and want a better understanding of it, or you just hunger for more posts you can relate to, read below the cut for my full research paper! 

What does it mean when someone is asexual? In biology asexuality means a creature can reproduce by itself, but, in a social context, asexuality can mean someone who has no or little sexual attraction to anyone. This new sexual orientation is hard to understand due to it being uncommon and nuanced, and much more complicated than lacking a sex drive. The best way to explain asexuality would be to compare sex and sexual attraction to cake. Cake is something that most people enjoy and actively wish to eat. Some people may want to eat cake most of the time, while others may only have occasional cravings. Being asexual doesn’t mean a person doesn’t mean a person won’t want cake, some asexual individuals are happy to have cake, they just do not crave it. Others will only eat one specific kind of cake from their favorite bakery, while others still may eat it out of courtesy but do not receive pleasure from it one way or another. Then there are what people might think of as “typical” asexual individuals, people who either never eat cake or are disgusted by cake. This analogy is not perfect however it is meant to demonstrate how asexuality is more complex than lacking a sex drive. Asexuality is a sliding scale, like other sexual identities. Many asexual individuals struggle finding and developing their identities. This is partially due to asexuality not being as well recognized as a sexual orientation. It can also be difficult to identify oneself as asexual due to society’s emphasis on sex being a vital part of a relationship and a basic human function. The fear of perceived abnormality in asexuals can cause asexual individuals to deny or delay their identity formation similar to the way other LGBTQ+ individuals have struggled to be accepted in a primarily heteronormative society.

As stated before asexuality is not necessarily the complete lack of sexual desire or attraction, rather there is a sort of continuum people fall upon (Chasin, 2011). Asexuality can be referred to as being on a spectrum upon which there are two important terms. The first being grey-asexual; this is a person who may occasionally experience sexual attraction, and the second being demisexual, which is a person who cannot experience sexual attraction unless they already have a close bond with the person. It is important to understand that these definitions are also very basic, and do not fit every asexual individual. Much of the confusion about asexual identities is rooted in the definitions. The terms seem to be very loosely defined and it is difficult to label a person’s drive and emotions. For some asexual individuals romance can be enjoyable, “‘I enjoy cuddling, and kissing and even pleasing my wife, but I don’t desire sexual intercourse’”(Scott & Dawson, 2015), while others find pleasure from neither; “‘I am sexually attracted to men but have no desire or need to engage in sexual or even non-sexual activity (cuddling, hand-holding, etc.) with them’”(Scott & Dawson, 2015). Asexual individuals may also derive pleasure from sexual behaviors such as masturbation and sexual fantasies, though they may be different from that of a person who is not asexual. Desire for asexual people may not be directed at anyone in particular. In fact a significant number of asexual people mastrubate or have sexual desires that are not specifically targeted at any one particular person (Bogaert, 2015). Many asexual individuals report that they mastrubate as a way of relieving stress, or as a means of maintaining sexual health, instead of deriving pleasure from it as a sexual activity. During sexual fantasies, asexual individuals may feel distanced from the scenario they are creating, “One AVEN participant reported: ‘I almost invariably think of fictional characters. My thoughts have never involved people I know, and they have never involved myself’”(Bogaert, 2012). This isolation from their own sexual fantasies and experiences is fairly common among asexual individuals, and is part of what differentiates asexuality from other sexual orientations. This is how people that identify as asexual can still participate willingly and find pleasure in sex. Unfortunately, these nuances do not completely match the oversimplified definition of asexuality, and this is why many asexual people have trouble identifying themselves as asexual.

As stated before, the nuances of asexuality create an orientation that is difficult to navigate and to find an identity in. Already, many people have trouble accepting the most basic definition of asexuallity such as when “Prause and Graham reported that asexual participants struggled with negative public perceptions of asexuality and pressure to conform to the universal assumption that humans are sexual beings”(Robbins & Low & Query, 2015). Public opinion on asexual individuals often struggles with the belief that sex is an unequivocally human quality and that if a person were to not experience sexual desires then there is something wrong with them. Historically asexuality has been denied or there has been resistance to recognizing it since it does not fit within a heteronormative society’s expectations (MacNeela & Murphy, 2014). This sentiment is hurtful not only because it dehumanizes asexual people, but also because it causes asexual individuals to believe they are broken. “Similar to the experiences of lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals, it is likely that the distress and psychological symptoms experienced by asexual individuals is secondary to their experience of prejudice and discrimination, rather than asexuality being the result of an underlying psychological disturbance”(Brotto & Yule, 2016). Asexual people not only face similar discrimination that other LGBTQ+ people face, but they have their own unique struggles with trying to sort out an identity in a sexually grey area.

There are many possible reactions an asexual could have to sexual behaviour, and thus it is practically impossible to have words that describe all of them. This creates the grey asexual spectrum. This undefined area makes it considerably harder to carve out an identity. People want words to describe who they are and when there are no words to describe so many unique experiences it can be extremely difficult in finding identity. A problematic area for many asexual individuals is the distinction between romantic attraction and sexual attraction. Often outside of the asexual community, the general population does not understand the difference between the two types of attraction and will often believe sexual orientation matches romantic orientation (Cranney, 2017). Many asexual individuals still feel romantic attraction, so it can be confusing to tell someone you’re asexual, but still attracted to a specific gender. This romantic distinction uses similar wording for sexualities just repurposed for romantic only attraction. For example an asexual individual can be homoromantic, biromantic, heteroromantic, aromantic, and many more. While the asexual community has now embraced these terms to help identify themselves, the public often is unaware of these terms, so it can be hard to find someone who will understand the differences in sexual and romantic attraction. Sometimes this just leads to people being informed of this new vocabulary, however, like with all changes, people push back against these terms and refuse to understand what they mean and how they are different. People want asexuality to be an easy to understand orientation “from this construction emerges the ideal of the "real" asexual in contrast to other asexual individuals who cannot be rightly articulated and who are therefore somehow less legitimate”(Chasin, 2013). While asexual individuals do not always face the persecution other members of the LGBTQ community face, there are still biases that affect the development of an asexual identity. The idea that an asexual person can never feel sexual attraction or want sex creates this standard, that if strayed from, somehow invalidates the asexual identity. Not only is there a struggle to find one’s identity in a society that finds it invalid, but it is often hard for asexual individuals to understand what they themselves are feeling. Trying to identify a lack of feelings is near impossible, so for those that do not experience sexual attraction it can be hard to define their identity when it relies on an absence of something (Bogaert, 2015). There is not only a struggle to define oneself by society's standards but also an internal struggle over understanding why there is a lack of attraction. Puberty is already a confusing time in one’s life and sexuality is often overlooked in education, so if people are never taught what sexual attraction is meant to feel like, it is almost impossible to understand when there are no feelings of sexual attraction. Even if asexual individuals do understand that they don’t experience sexula attraction, it can be hard to accept that fact, “compared with men, women find it more easy to indicate that they are asexual and that the reported gender difference is not a real difference. After all, men are more expected by society to behave sexually, compared with women”(Enzlin & Gijs & Houdenhove & Sjoen, 2014). Finding a personal identity takes a lot of insight into one’s own feelings, and if these feelings are misunderstood or repressed it leads to confusion later in life. As Erikson would believe, identity development as a young adult is imperative, and without properly forming an identity people become confused and have a weak sense of self in later years. Identities allow people to more easily connect with others by uniting them with a common bond. A well developed sense of identity also allows people to more easily understand when they are struggling in life and need to seek help. However for many asexual people, they go much of their life without understanding their entire identity which causes strain on their mental well being and interpersonal relationships.

As one might expect, most likely the largest problem posed by asexuallity is trying to balance a relationship with someone who is not asexual. In Bogaert’s first study, he found that only about 1% of the population identifies as asexual (Bogaert, 2004), so it is likely many asexual individuals who are seeking out romantic relationships will date someone who is not asexual. Many non asexual people might think relationships require sexual attraction however, “asexual people may serve as an exemplar that sex/lust and love/romance are, at least partially, separable constructs and can be “de-coupled” in individuals, given that many asexual people evince romantic attraction without sexual/lustful attractions”(Bogaert, 2016). While some asexual individuals are also aromantic - they do not feel romantic attraction - many wish for romantic relationships and find fulfilling partnerships with both asexual partners and non asexual partners. However, “as might be expected, asexual/non-asexual couples face exaggerated discrepancies between each partners' level of sexual desire”(Chasin, 2013). It can be tough for couples to work out their sexual differences, especially since for non-asexual individuals, abstaining from sex is denying an important part of their identity, just as forcing an asexual person to have sex would be denying their identity. Some couples choose to work this out by having an open relationship, so when the non-asexual partner desires to have sexual relations with someone, both parties have agreed that they can have sex outside of their relationship. Sometimes an asexual person will agree to have sex with their partner “the asexual person may accommodate to his or her partner’s desire for sex, or agree with them (sometimes explicitly) an alternative way of demonstrating intimacy”(Scott & Dawson, 2015). Contrary to popular belief many asexual individuals are not sex repulsed and will have sex with their partner, much the same way someone may cook for their partner. It may not be something they are passionate about, but they will perform the task out of love for their partner. Similarly, asexual people may use sexual actions as a way to relieve stress, “I do not have any desire to have sex with another person. I masturbate at times but I don’t connect it with anything sexual. I know it sounds like a contradiction but it’s just something I do every now and then and it seems to help me relax when I am stressed”(Scherrer, 2008). This is a common trend seen among asexuals, where they will perform sexual acts, but instead of performing them because of desire, they are used as more of a maintenance for the body.

While it is entirely possible for asexual people to have relationships similar to that of non-asexual people, in this new era of sexual identities, the very structures of relationships are changing. There is a higher rate of aromantic individuals within the asexual population (Bogaert), which means not only does this subset not seek out sexual companionship, but neither do they require romantic relationships. This begs the question, what kind of relationships do these people seek out? For many the relationships they seek are platonic in nature and many asexual/aromantic individuals are happily content to surround themselves with close friends (Scott & Dawson, 2015). As reported in one survey Alex, an aromantic asexual had this to say about his relationships, “‘an ideal relationship for me is a close friendship, where we can be accountable to each other. No kissing, hugging, or anything else. Just a mental and emotional relationship’”(Scherrer, 2008).  Being able to find a stable relationship is a large part of forming an identity, all relationships throughout one’s life helps create an identity, and finding a lifelong partner is a big step in identity development. Once an aromantic and/or asexual person can begin to understand their sexual and romantic identity, they can take that step forward to find relationships that they are happy in. Like in all relationships, communication is key and it’s best to be open and honest about sexual identities with a potential partner as that will lead to a more fulfilling relationship. Many people assume aromantic and asexual people are incapable of having meaningful relationships, but as these studies have shown the relationships these people do have are different, not nonexistent.

The world is a constantly changing place, and as more diverse sexual identities are recognized, people can start to find their personal identities all the more easier. While asexuality may be a fairly new concept, even compared to other sexual orientations, it has quickly become adopted as a legitimate sexual orientation in ever growing circles both on the internet and in the world. As with any deviation from the norm, asexuality has been criticized in many of the same ways homosexuality and bisexuality were, and still are. While asexual people still face many hurdles when seeking an identity, with the more exposure this sexual identity gets, the easier it will be for people in the future to sort out their feelings and come to terms with their identity. The way society’s views of sexuality are shifting in this modern era it is increasingly likely that someday developing a healthy sexual identity by young adulthood will no longer be the struggle against social norms that it is currently.

[ruminativerabbi]

Machines and People

Art is the medium that allows an artist to communicate something profound and meaningful to his or her audience in a way that does not merely inform but truly inspires…and which also allows the artist to transcend the brevity of human life to speak not solely to contemporaries, but to countless future generations as well. When put that way, the underlying concept sounds fairly abstruse. But when considered in the context of real life, it feels almost natural: when we sit in the audience and watch King Lear talking to his daughters on stage as the curtain goes up and the play begins, it’s not at all difficult to understand that it’s only him talking to them in a certain sense, but—and far more profoundly—it’s really the playwright talking to us. Indeed, the difference between a great artist and a hack lies precisely in his or her ability to communicate deeply and movingly with an audience in a way that merely telling them that same information would not even slightly accomplish: what we learn in a few minutes of King Lear about parent-child relations and the degree to which greed can poison even the most natural kind of love couldn’t possibly ever be conveyed as deeply or as effectively by even the most talented university lecturer giving a public talk about the ins and outs of childrearing. Or about the nature of love. Or about greed.

That all being the case, art requires three things (or feels as though it must): an artist, an audience, and an artistic medium of some sort. The first and the second absent the third is just two (or more) people standing in a room. The first and third absent the second is the artistic version of a tree falling in a forest with no ear drum present to vibrate sympathetically when the tree hits the earth. The second and third is, at best, unrealized potential, a batter at the plate and a ball resting on the pitcher’s mound…but no pitcher in sight actually to throw the ball and, as such, no game to watch and either to enjoy or not to enjoy. And, of course, also no winner or loser.

So that’s two living, breathing people and one artistic medium that feel requisite. But now that we live in a new world in which machines can think—if not quite in the way human begins do, then at least to an extent that even a quarter century ago would have been unimaginable—the time may have come to revisit that those requirements.

Take, for example, these eyes:

They are expressive, thoughtful, fully human. It is a man or a woman? Is that the hint of a moustache under his nose or just a shadow? These eyes suggest a certain sadness to me, a certain world-weariness born of insight into the way that people are so often their own worst enemies. Without being able to see the rest of the face, this person seems to exist outside of time. If the rest of the picture depicted him or her dressed like an Italian aristocrat of the sixteenth century, I could believe it. But if the rest of the picture portrayed him as a cowboy or her as an astronaut, I could believe that too.

Here’s the rest of him:

So, not a cowboy or a doge, but a Dutchman. And this, I can hear you thinking, must surely be a work of Rembrandt, the greatest of all portrait painters and (of course) a Dutchman himself. But this painting is neither a Rembrandt nor a work by any of his contemporaries or students. It was created by a 3-D Printer that was programed over the course of an eighteen-month experiment by a team of art historians, computer scientists, and engineers brought together by Microsoft, the Delft University of Technology in Holland, and two Dutch art museums, the Mauritshuis in The Hague and the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam. Bringing together digital data culled from 346 of Rembrandt’s real paintings created between 1632 and 1642, the idea was to create a portrait of a man not only dressed in the style of the time and with facial features similar to the men in Rembrandt’s real paintings, but to use the finest gradations of shading, texture, perspective, brush usage, pigmentation, and lighting to create a new portrait, one of no one at all but that surely feels as though it could be of someone whom Rembrandt could easily have known.

Is that art? It’s hard to say. The work has an audience and it exists…but does it have an artist? Clearly, a 3-D printer is not an artist, just a machine that does its programmers’ bidding. But are its programmers then the artists? I want to say no, that this project was just some digital silliness dreamt up by people because they had the technical skill to pull it off. But then I look again at the man’s eyes…and I feel a certain sense of kinship with this non-man who never existed. Does that make me a crazy person? Or does that make this a work of art?

Christie’s is about to auction off a portrait called “Edmond de Belamy, from La Famille de Belamy,” a work created by an algorithm (whatever that means exactly) and thus a product solely of its machine-creator’s artificial intelligence. The bidding is going to begin at $10,000. The creators, if that’s the right word (since they specifically did not create the painting), are a trio of French businessmen with degrees in business and computer technology who call themselves Obvious. No artistic implement was used to create the picture—no pencils, no paints, and no drawing tools of any sort. Nor was human creativity involved other than tangentially: what the members of Obvious did, almost simply, was to feed thousands of portraits from the 14th to the 20th centuries into a computer that had been programmed to analyze the images in a dozen different ways and then attempt to mimic them as best it could. And here is, so to speak, Edmond de Bellamy himself:

Is this art? Most of me still wants to say no. But I find myself unexpectedly unsure as I look carefully at the painting and allow it to speak to me in precisely the way great works of art communicate outside of language and without being themselves animate.

I saw Her, Spike Jonze’s 2013 movie, and came away unconvinced that a man could truly love a machine, even one possessed of as intelligent and enticing an operating system as the one whose voice in the movie is Scarlett Johansson’s. Machines are not people. They cannot love. They cannot reproduce. But can they create? That is the question the portraits pasted in above awakens in me.

These questions lead to others. Can machines make music? Can they write books? Can they make scientific discoveries other than by processing huge amounts of data that their human masters have programmed into them? All these views have their proponents. Listen, for example, to Drew Silverstein, the CEO and co-founder of Amper, a company eponymously named after its sole product, an artificial-intelligence music composer.  Touted as the ultimate in artificial creativity, the program, so claims its founder, can create “unique, professional music tailored to any context in seconds” once you’ve provided it with the style of music you wish it to create, the mood you’d like to convey, and the length of the piece of music you wish to end up with. It’s beyond impressive. (To hear the whole spiel, click here.) And the product is certainly something like music. Maybe even it is music…at least in the sense that what they market as “cheese food” is some version of cheese. But what it lacks is the inner quality that, at least for me, defines what music—and what art itself—is: the ability to transcend the temporal and physical boundaries of the universe to communicate deeply moving ideas and emotions through the medium of human creativity. And that is what is lacking in all of the above. If there is no human artist, then there simply is no one for me to commune with through the medium of his or her art, no one to speak to me either deeply or superficially. Or at all. And without that psychic bridge between one human heart and another, all that’s left is technique and content.

Coming closer to my own turf, I find myself wondering if machines can write books. You may recall reading in George Orwell’s 1984 about a world in which the “proles” of a dystopian future solely read books written by machines. You may also be aware that amazon.com features over 10,000 books by one Phillip Parker, each of which is computer-generated and so, at least in some sense, “written” by a machine—but those books are merely compendia of facts and data, so hardly literary works other than in the sense that tax returns are or that telephone books would be if there still was any such thing. But other efforts are more intriguing. A Russian computer scientist, Alexander Prokopovitch, programmed a computer to produce his (or do I mean, its) 2008 novel, TrueLove, an attempt to tell the story of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in the style of one of my own favorite authors, Haruki Murakami. It was, however, not deemed a particularly successful undertaking and is no longer in print. (For a fairly dismal appraisal of Prokopovich’s efforts, click here.) Others will do better, I’m sure: to teach a computer to produce a text that retells a story that it has been programmed to regurgitate on command using a specific set of literary quirks and tendencies it has also been programmed to bring to bear in its effort to recast the story in different words doesn’t sound anywhere near impossible. But we’re back to the tree in the forest: if there is no beating heart inside an actual human breast with which I am being invited personally to commune through the medium of that person’s art, then there is—at best—a document, a story, or a book…but not literature. An image but not a painting. Sound, but not music.

The bottom line, at least for me, is that art should be defined first and foremost as a mode of communication, as a way for two souls to meet even if their possessors never will or even could. If there is no other person involved, then even the most sophisticated effort to mimic art is just so much unrealized potential. Art, like love, requires two.

[akarorax-blog]

Fruit fly Management Techniques in India

Journal of Entomology and Zoology Studies 2019; 6(1): 245-257

                   Fruit fly management techniques in India : A Review

                                             Anil Kumar

Department of Entomology

Dr Yashwant Singh Parmar University of Horticulture and Forestry Nauni, Solan H.P. 173230

Email: akarorax@gmail.com

 ABSTCACT

Fruit fly belongs to order Diptera and family Tephritidae is distributed widely in tropical, temperate and subtropical area of the world. There are about 4,500 species of fruit flies (Drew and Roming, 1997) among which 2,000 are considered economically important and are widely distributed in the temperate, tropical and sub tropical regions of the world (Christenson and Foote, 1960) of which 5 per cent of these occur in India (Ramani, 1998). The extent of losses vary from 30 -100 per cent depending upon the crop and season. Feeding by fruit fly larvae may cause complete destruction of fruits, rather than cosmetic damage as is caused by many other insect pests. Gupta and Verma (1992) observed about 80 per cent fruit fly infestation on cucumber and bottle gourd, 60 per cent on bitter gourd and 50 per cent on sponge gourd in mid hill conditions of Himachal Pradesh. Keeping in view the economic  importance of fruit fly  and crop, its management could be done using local area management and wide area management techniques (Dhillon et al.,2005). The use of geographical information system could also be used as an IPM tool to mark site- specific locations of traps, land use areas and fruit fly population within a specific operational region.Although, the sterile insect technique has been successfully used in area-wide approaches, the wide area management needs more sophisticated and powerful technologies in their eradication programme, such as insect transgenesis, which could be deployed over wide-area and is less susceptible to immigrants. Since, fruit fly is a pest which cannot be eradicated by opting one method so combination of methods like cultural, physical, biological, chemical, genetic and quarantine methods are adopted to manage fruit fly besides  other local area management options.

Introduction:

Fruit fly pests are members of the Family Tephritidae in the Order Diptera. Fruit flies are one of the most economically important groups of insect pests world wide. There are about 4,500 species of fruit flies (Drew and Roming, 1997) among which 2,000 are considered economically important and are widely distributed in the temperate, tropical and sub tropical regions of the world (Christenson and Foote, 1960) of which 5% of these occur in India (Ramani, 1998). The first detailed report on fruit flies from the Indian sub-continent was made by Bezzi (1913) who enlisted the species from India, Pakistan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Nepal. Superior mobility, great dispersive powers, high reproductive rates, movement through market chain and extreme polyphagy are among the common traits of Bactocera species.

Several Bactrocera species are well-documented invaders of horticultural crops and also rank high on quarantine lists worldwide (Clarke et al, 2005). Since these are of quarantine importance they are of great concern to fruit producing countries where these species occur, requiring them to re-evaluate and revise their control strategies. In countries where these species have not been recorded, quarantine measures have been considerably strengthened to minimise the risk of their entry, establishment and spread.

Damage caused by fruit flies to various fruit and vegetable crops has been estimated up to 100 per cent (Dhillon et al., 2005; Philippe et al., 2010). In mid hill conditions of Himachal Pradesh (Gupta and Verma, 1992) observed about 80 per cent fruit fly infestation on cucumber and bottle gourd, 60 per cent on bitter gourd and 50 per cent on sponge gourd. Losses result from direct feeding damage, decay by opportunistic pathogens, and the loss of export market opportunities through quarantine restrictions imposed by importing countries to avoid entry and establishment of these pests. Many species of fruit flies are considered as high priority quarantine pests in various countries.

Fruit fly is a highly polyphagous species (Metcalf and Metcalf, 1992) and can disperse using mosaic of host crops available and take advantage of human agricultural trade. Bactrocera dorsalis infests plants of 40 families including many commercial fruits (Smith, P. H.,1989; Vargas et ah, 1984; Vargas and Carey, 1990). The attack of B. dorsalis on 173 different varieties   of fruit and vegetables has been reported by Metcalf and Metcalf (1992). It is a destructive pest on a wide range of tropical and sub tropical fruits and vegetables (Ye and Liu, 2005a). To name a few, mango {Mangifera indica L.), guava (Psidium guajava L.), custard apple {Annona squamosa L.), apple (Malus pumila M.) star fruit (Averrhoa carambola L.), banana {Musa paradisiacal L.), orange {Citrus sinensis jL.), papaya (Carica papaya L.), peach {Prunus persica L.), plum {Prunus domestica L.),j and tomatoes (Lycopersicum esculentum M.) (Clausen et ai, 1965, Koyama, 1989). In India this species attacks mango and causes serious loss ranging from 5-80% (Kapoor, 1993, 2004; Verghese et a i, 2002, Verghese and Jayanthi, 2001) and damage caused on guava is up to 44 percent (Stonehouse et a i, 1998, 2005).

Almost half of the world's mangoes are cultivated in India alone, with the second-largest source being China (Jedele et al., 2003). Mango is usually available in India from March to mid-August. During off season B. dorsalis survives on its alternative host, guava {Psidium guajava) thereby completing several generations within a year. Guava is an important crop commonly called as the poor man’s apple. In India, guava occupies 3.2% of the total area under fruits contributing about 3.3% of the total fruit production in the country (Indian Horticulture Database, 2011). India is the second largest producer of jbanana after China. These three fruit crops are commercially important hosts which are severely damaged by fruit flies. In India B. dorsalis attacks commercial varieties of mango (Verghese et al., 2002). Fruit fly eggs are laid into unripe or ripening fruit where the larvae develop and feed on the pulp of the fruits. Infested fruits are spoiled quickly and often fall to the ground before ripening. If that controlled, growers may lose the entire crop. Generally, the Oriental fruit flies are able to reproduce in most envirormient and climates. Since, the maggots damage the fruits internally, it is difficult to control this pest with   insecticides.   Therefore,   there   is   a   need   to explore alternative methods of control, and develop an     integrated     control     strategy     for     effective management of this pest.

 Classification:

—  Kingdom: Animalia

—  Phylum: Euarthropoda

—  Class: Insecta

—  Order: Diptera

—  Family:  Tephritidae

Major fruit fly species found in India

Insect

Scientific  Name

Guava  Fruit Fly

Bactocera  correcta

Mango  Fruit fly

B.  dorsalis

Peach  Fruit Fly

B.  zonata

Ber  Fruit Fly

Carpomya  vesuviana

Fruit  fly

B.  cucurbita, B. tau

Citrus  fly

B.  minax

Three  stripped fruit fly

B.  diversa

Olive  fruit fly

B.  oleae

Carambola  fruit fly

B.  carambola

Caryea  Fruit fly

B.  caryeae

Life Cycle of fruit fly:

Under favourable conditions female fruit flies become sexually mature and capable of laying eggs about 5 days after they emerge. After mating they actively seek out ripening fruit, and deposit their banana-shaped eggs in a small cavity just below the skin. Oviposition (sting) sites appear as small brown spots on the surface of the fruit, under which is a cavity with one to more than 20 eggs.

After 2 to 3 days in favourable conditions the minute, transparent larvae hatch and start feeding on the flesh of the fruit, slowly tunnelling towards the core. The larvae have a sharply-pointed front end with no obvious head, and a blunt rear end, and become cream-coloured as they get older. Early infestation is often indicated by a brown colouration of the fruit flesh in the area of feeding due to oxidation of the tissues. From about 7 to 40 days later, depending on fruit kind and temperature, the larvae reach maturity (8 to 10 mm long), when they leave the fruit, fall to the ground and pupate just below the surface of the soil. About 8 to 40 days later, depending on temperature, the adult flies emerge from the pupae, crawl up to the soil surface, and the cycle is complete.

During warm conditions and in ripe fruit, the life cycle can be completed in as little as 3 to 4 weeks. This duration can increase to about 2 or 3 months in winter or where eggs are laid in greener fruit.

Damage:

Fruit fly adults most often lay their eggs in the fresh flesh of fruits and vegetables. Fruit is a term that refers to the fertilized embryo of fruit and vegetable flowers.  The eggs hatch into larvae (maggots) which most often feed on the inside of the fruit, resulting in a soft, mushy mess. The maggot destroy and convert the pulp into a bad smelling, discoloured semi liquid mass unfit for human consumption. The infestation results in fruit drop and start rotting from inside. On complete rotting of the fruits, the damaged fruit develop yellow spots with black centers through which liquid oozes out on pressing.

 MANAGEMENT STRATEGY:

As with the control of many pest species, a single control method by itself is often not sufficient to eradicate (or even effectively control) the fruit fly from an area. The best results are gained from a combination of the methods found in the section below. For example, bait spraying, male annihilation and good hygiene have been used in combination in attempts to eradicate Fruit fly in New South Wales, Australia (Gilchrist, pers. Comm. 2008).

·           Physical

·           Cultural

·           Biological

·           Chemical

·           Genetic

Cultural Control:

·           Sanitation

Sanitation is a method that you can use to help: prevent fruit fly egg and larvae (maggot) development in infested fruit; and deny female adult flies a suitable place for egg laying. This method requires that you collect and destroy all fallen and unwanted fruit from the garden. The destruction of this fruit ensures that larvae do not survive to pupate in the ground, and later emerge as adult flies. Sanitation is considered an essential practice since fruit trees with fallen and rotting fruit around the base are a major source of fruit fly infestations.

·           Trapping

Fruit fly traps can be divided broadly into three groups: monitoring; mass trapping; and liquid protein trapping. With the range of products commercially available there is some overlap in these groupings.

ü   Monitoring

Monitoring traps are simply containers which fruit flies can enter, but which they cannot easily escape from. When combined with a powerful lure (parapheromone), male fruit flies will be strongly attracted into the trap and this will let you know when fruit flies are active. The numbers of flies caught will give you some indication of the level of fruit fly activity, but should only be considered as a guide.The main management advice provided by traps is an awareness of whether fruit flies are active in your orchard and whether it is time to commence other fruit fly management activities.

As a general rule, monitoring traps are deployed at a low rate, often only one or two per hectare or per orchard block. Some types of these traps are also used to monitor and verify that a pest free area truly is pest free.

There are a variety of traps available on the market, including the Lynfield (used primarily for fruit fly pest free area monitoring), the Bugs for Bugs Fruit Fly Trap, Bio-Trap, and the Susbin trap. Forms of stick traps like Jackson traps and the Fruition trap can also be used for monitoring fruit fly activity.

ü   Mass Trapping

Mass trapping can use the same traps as monitoring, but deployed at much higher rates. The theory behind this approach is to attempt to catch as many active flies as possible. However, it must be remembered that the lures used in many traps are specific to male fruit flies and the damaging egg laying females flies will be unaffected. Therefore, mass trapping must be used in conjunction with other proven techniques such as protein bait sprays. Mass trapping for male flies is also similar to another control methods, the Male Annihilation Technique (MAT).

Some fruit fly traps are able to be use a female attracting compound. Bio-Trap also supply a fruit fly attractant gel that attracts both male and female fruit flies. The Fruition trap used a lure sachet and visual cues to attract fruit flies.

ü Liquid Protein traps

Liquid protein traps can be used in some cases for monitoring in pest free areas, but their main use is to capture female fruit flies. They target the female fruit fly’s need to feed on protein in order to develop their eggs to maturity. By using a protein attractant, recently emerged female fruit flies will enter the trap, get caught, and eventually drown. There is a range of different traps and lures, and it is also possible to make these at home. The main shortcoming of liquid protein traps is that they tend to have a limited range of attraction. Commonly these traps will be placed at a 5m interval around the perimeter of an orchard.

·           Covering of fruits

Bagging of fruits on the tree (3 to 4 cm long) with 2 layers of paper bags at 2 to 3 day intervals minimizes fruit fly infestation and increases the net returns by 40 to 58% (Fang, 1989; Jaiswal et al., 1997). Akhtaruzzaman et al. (1993) suggested cucumber fruits should be bagged at 3 days after anthesis, and the bags should be retained for 5 days for effective control. It is an environmentally safe method for the management of this pest.

·           Exposing Pupae to Direct Sun

Deep ploughing is done in summer to expose the pupae to the direct sun. Pupae are killed by deep summer ploighing. In fruit crops raking of soil is done in summer to expose pupae to sun.

·           Early Harvesting

Early harvesting is method that you can use to help prevent adult fruit flies from infesting your crop. It is the practice of picking your fruit and vegetables as early as possible from your garden, even sometimes when it is green. This practice may deny adult flies the opportunity to infest your fruit, depending on fruit fly pressure. Note that early harvesting can also be achieved by planting early fruiting varieties of fruits and vegetables. These plants tend to bare produce before fruit fly populations increase as the season advances and temperatures increase.

·           Host Plant Resistance

Host plant resistance is an important component in integrated pest management programs. It does not cause any adverse effects to the environment, and no extra cost is incurred to the farmers. Unfortunately success in developing high yielding and fruit fly-resistant varieties has been limited. There is a distinct possibility of transferring resistance genes in the cultivated genotypes from the wild relatives of cucurbits for developing varieties resistant to melon fruit fly through wide hybridization.

Crop

Examples of  Resistant Varities

Bitter  Gourd

IHR-89,  IHR-243, Hisar II,

Pumpkin

IHR 35,  IHR 40, IHR 79-2, IHR 83

and IHR  86

Sponge  gourd

NS 14

Round  melon

Arka Tinda

 Physical Control:

·           Disinfestation

Disinfestation is a process which removes all life stages of Fruit fly from fruit, prior to export, to prevent the spread of this pest around the world. The most common, approved methods of pre-export disinfestations are mainly chemical treatments such as methyl bromide fumigation, or the application of insecticides. These chemical are becoming “increasingly unacceptable” to people at all stages of the export process, from the technicians performing the treatments to the end consumer (Jessup et al. 1998a). In recent years there has been an increasing emphasis on finding more consumer-accepted methods of disinfesting fruit prior to export.

Jessup et al. (1998) have shown that sealing fruit in polyethylene bags and storing them at 38°C for 3 days caused 100% mortality of Fruit fly eggs and larvae in a number of fruit. The treatment components, polythene wrap and mild heat, are relatively inexpensive when compared to both cold-storage and chemical disinfestation methods. The 3 day duration of heat treatment is substantially less than the 12 – 16 days needed to achieve 100% mortality in cold treatment programs. The heat treatment process did not promote mould or shrivelling, or negatively affect the colour evenness or taste of the fruit. Some judges used in this experiment “preferred the flavour of sealed, heat-treated tomatoes and apples over that of non-treated fruit” (Jessup et al. 1998).

 ·           Cold Treatment

Fruits are subjected to cold temperature to potentially kill fruit fly in them. Fruits that have been subjected to cold treatment include kiwifruit, pome fruit, stone fruit, citrus and grapes etc. Most of tropical fruits are susceptible to frost injury, are not given cold treatment.

0.0°C ± 0.5ºC for  minimum 14 days.

·           Male Annihilation Technique:

Male Annihilation Technique (MAT) involves the use of a high density of bait stations consisting of a male lure combined with an insecticide (usually technical malathion, and more recently fipronil), to reduce the male population of fruit flies to such a low level that mating does not occur. 

 There are several examples of the successful use of methyl eugenol in the technique.  Oriental fruit fly (Bactocera dorsalis) was eradicated from Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands in the 1960s by Steiner and his colleagues.  The insecticide used during the eradication was nailed.  Outstanding successes using this method have been recorded for eradicating oriental fruit fly from California and from the Amami Islands of Japan.

·           Vapor Heat Treatment

VHT is process in which fruits are subjected to hot saturated water vapour, and without the use of any chemicals under controlled temperature and humidity. Fruit fly larvae are sterilised and made incapable of growing and multiplying. VHT is a very important step used in quarantine. This treatment is used to kill many disease causing organisms and different insect pests.

Biological Control

Over 200 hymenopteran parasitoids species have been unequivocally associated with members of the Tephritidae family. Among them, about 150 are Braconidae, most of them belonging to the Opiinae subfamily. Less than a tenth of these Opiinae are commonly used in present biocontrol programs or have the potential to be used in future classical and augmentative projects. Most of these species belong to the genera Fopius Wharton, Diachasmimorpha Viereck and Psyttalia Walker. However the importance of some other families cannot be neglected.

·           Egg-pupal parasitoids

This first category includes the egg-(pre)pupal parasitoids within the genus Fopius. Though Fopius arisanus (Sonan) is the only species in this group commonly used in various biocontrol programmes, F. ceratitivorus Wharton and F. caudatus (Szépligeti) might also be of interest against some Ceratitis spp.. Fopius arisanus has been used in classical biological control for the last 60 years. Diachasmimorpha longicaudata has been the most widely used species in tephritid biocontrol to date. Despite being outclassed by F. arisanus on all studies on competition, D. longicaudata is easier thus less expensive to rear and more efficient in regions where Bactrocera spp. are absent, especially in Florida, Central and Latin Americas.Wharton and Yoder (2007) provide its detailed native distribution as well as the list of countries where it has been introduced. This species has been associated with about 70 Tephritidae including rare cases of gall- forming species used in weed control. It is mainly used to suppress the populations of Anastrepha spp., Ceratitis capitata (Wiedemann) and B. dorsalis. Numerous papers deal with its bionomics, its response to olfactory or visual stimuli, its dispersal or its avoidance of host immune response. Many of the idiobiont parasitoids attacking fruit fly pupae are not specialists on Tephritidae. Most of them are small Chalcidoidea or Evanoidea with a very low dispersion range. Some of them may also hyper-parasitize other primary parasitoids. Coptera haywardi (Oglobin) (Diapriidae) is an exception and has provided promising results during the last decade. Recent studies on its host selection behaviour suggested it could be of great interest to suppress the populations of C. capitata and Anastrepha spp. in augmentative programmes in Central and Latin Americas. The use of fungi for biocontrol purposes pre-dates the first introductions of exotic beneficial insects. However, they received comparatively little attention during the 20th century. This is mainly due to their lack of specificity, to the heavy constraints linked with their mass-production and/or their storage and to their instability under adverse environmental conditions. These general aspects were reviewed in several papers during the last 20 years. These constraints generated a lack of interest, which in turn led to a lack of research.

Against tephritid flies, pre-2000 published works are consequently sparse. Some examples are the experimentation of mycoinsecticides against C. capitata, Anastrepha fraterculus (Wiedemann) , Bactrocera tryoni (Froggatt) or B. oleae . The early 21st century has seen a growing tide of interest for entomopathogenic fungi, particularly to replace parasitoids when or where their use is impracticable. Two fungal species are mainly used: Metharhizium anisopliae (Metschnikoff) and Beauveria bassiana (Balsamo-Crivelli) Vuillemin (Deuteromycotina: Hyphomycetes).

Genetic

·           Genetic analyses to aid management

The relatedness of Fruit fly captured in traps can be examined through the analysis of microsatellite markers. This technique can be used to find out if invasions occurring in different places and at different times involve individuals which are from the same source population and that are related to each other, or if they represent distinct invasions independent of each other. In Adelaide, Australia at least six Fruit fly which were full siblings of each other were caught in traps in the same month, by Gilchrist et al. (2004). These six flies were trapped at a number of sites separated by “distances greater than the unaided dispersal distance of Fruit fly,” which provides evidence for human-aided dispersal of Fruit fly in Adelaide. Previously, many outbreaks occurring at the same time in places separated by large distances were thought to be separate outbreaks, but this research showed that this situation could be a single outbreak, spread around by humans (Gilchrist et al. 2004).

·       Transgenic control strategies

Recent developments have led to the possibility of genetically engineering “factory strains of pest insects which produce male-only broods.” When released into the wild in large numbers, these flies would mate with female flies, but all of the next generation of flies would be male. This would improve the sterile insect technique (SIT) currently used to control Queensland fruit fly (Fruit fly) populations. A 100% male population cannot reproduce, and so the fly species population would collapse. This control strategy has become near-possible due to the development of transformation vectors for insects other than drosophilid flies. There are 5 transformation vectors developed which have the potential to be used in the Fruit fly. The process by which this method works is very complex, but involves ‘RNA interference’ (RNAi) targeting genes critical to early development. The sex ratio of a population could be altered by placing this RNAi under the control of a sex-limited gene promoter. This would mean that no young which were either male or female would develop properly (Raphael et al. 2004).

·       Sterile Insect Techniques (SIT)

A technique called the sterile insect technique (SIT) is used to contain and exclude populations of Queensland fruit fly. The goal of SIT is to release a large amount of sterile males to mate with any introduced wild females, resulting in the production of infertile eggs (Knipling, 1959).  The potential of SIT for controlling pests has been around since the 1960s, when SIT trials first caused large declines in the size of fruit fly populations (Monro, 1966). Compared to insecticidal control methods, SIT has some advantages including increased specificity and can be targeted to affected regions (Knipling, 1959).  SIT programs in the past have failed due to continual immigration into the areas being targeted (Meats et al. 2003). The most common method used to make fruit flies sterile for SIT programs is to irradiate them.  The most effective time of the life cycle for irradiation to occur is when pupation is approximately 70% complete. (Gilchrist & Crisafulli, 2005). The most effective irradiation dose rate for SIT programs should be at a level which makes individuals sterile without reducing its reproductive competitiveness. Irradiated males are not reproductively disadvantaged against normal males in terms of female remating – levels of female remating have been found to be similar for irradiated and normal males (Harmer et al. 2006).

Chemical Control:

·       Cover Spray:

Cover sprays are applied to the whole tree, and target Fruit fly sheltering in the tree canopy and maggots located within host fruit. Insecticide sprays used include dimethoate, fenthion and trichlorfon, depending on the tree being sprayed (Dominiak, 2007). After cover spraying, there is a period of time for which fruit should not be picked or eaten. The length of this withholding period depends on which insecticide was used . As mentioned above, cover spraying is often used in combination with bait spraying to achieve suppression of high populations of Fruit fly.

·       Ground Spray

Ground sprays are done to target larvae and emerging adult in the soil. It is done by drenching the insecticide solution under the tree trunk. Application of insecticide in the soil as trunk of tree and the compost heaped in the viscinity of field. No more than two spray required.

Eg., Chloropyriphos.

·       Bait

This method of Fruit fly control involves the spot spraying of a combination of a dilute protein mixture and an insecticide (eg. Maldison). The protein servers as an attractant, and when the Fruit fly feed on the protein mixture the insecticide component causes death: this method targets both the male and female Fruit fly. A recommended bait spraying regime is 100 ml doses, targeting the shady spots which Fruit fly like to occupy. A density of 100 spot sprays per hectare (around 6 to 8 per residential property) is used in the Fruit Fly Exclusion Zone (FFEZ) of Eastern Australia. This amount of spraying is thought to be effective due to a bait spot being within the “daily wandering range of each fly within the treatment area. The effectiveness of this control method can be reduced by rain washing off bait spots and the pesticide degrading over time (Gilchrist, pers. Comm.. 2008). Maldison is used as an insecticide in bait spraying within the FFEZ, as it has a short residual life and low mammalian toxicity. “Bait spraying alone will not be enough to control high populations of fruit fly. It should be use in corporation with other control methods.

  Local Area management

Local area management means the minimum scale of pest management over a restricted area such as at field level/crop level/village level, which has no natural protection against reinvasion. The aim of local area management is to suppress the pest, rather than eradicate it. Under this management option a number of methods such as bagging of fruits, field sanitation, protein baits and cue-lure traps, host plant resistance, biological control, and soft insecticides, can be employed to keep the pest population below economic threshold in a particular crop over a period of time to avoid the crop losses without health and environmental hazards, which is the immediate concern of the farmers.

Wide area management

Wide area management is not a unitary concept, but incorporates a number of related but distinct methods including local area management. The methods used for a wide area management approach include male-sterile insect release, insect transgenesis, and quarantine control techniques in combination with available local area management options. The aim of wide area management is to coordinate and combine different characteristics of an insect eradication program over an entire area within a defensible perimeter. The area must be subsequently protected against reinvasion by quarantine controls, for example, by pest eradication on isolated islands. The USDA-ARS areawide IPM programs of melon fruit fly started in 1999 in collaboration with the Hawaiian State Department of Agriculture and University of Hawaii, using the environmentally sound strategies such as field sanitation, male annihilation with male lures and attractants, protein bait sprays/traps, augmentative releases of biological control agents (Fopius arisanus and Psyttalia fletcheri), and sterile insect release. It has proved to be economically viable, environmentally sensitive, sustainable, and has suppressed fruit flies below economic thresholds with the minimum use of organophosphate and carbamate insecticides (Wood, 2001; Mau et al., 2003b; Vargas et al., 2003; Klungness et al., 2005). An IPM program that used field sanitation, protein bait applications, male annihilation, and release of sterile flies and parasites reduced fruit fly infestation from 30 to 40% to less than 5%, and cut organophosphate pesticide use by 75 to 90% (Vargas, 2004).

The recent wide area management program eradication program of B. cucurbitae in Seychelles demonstrated a three tier model including a) initial population reduction using bait sprays, b) elimination of reproduction using parapheromone lure blocks to eradicate males and thus prevent oviposition by females, and c) intensive surveying by traps and fruit inspection, until it can be certain that the pest is entirely eradicated (Mumford, 2004). Although, the sterile insect technique has been successfully used in area-wide approaches, the wide area management needs more sophisticated and powerful technologies in their eradication program, such as insect transgenesis, which could be deployed over wide-area and is less susceptible to immigrants. Above all, the use of the geographical information system has been used as a tool to mark site-specific locations of traps, host plants roads, land use areas and fruit fly populations within a specified operational grid.

 CASE STUDIES:

Dr. Rana K and Kanwar HS, (2014) conducted a field trial to evaluate the efficacy of  some eco friendly techniques to manage fruit fly at Dr. Yashwant Singh Parmar University of Horticulture and forestry, Nauni, solan. Treatments were poison bait spray and cue lure baited traps individually and in combination  for the management of melon fruit flies (Bactocera spp.) infesting bitter gourd crop during kharif 2011 and 2012. It was found that all the treatments were effective in reducing the fruit damage during both years.  The combined treatment of cue lue baited traps and poison baited spray proved the most effective for management of fruit flies with significantly less fruit damage(20.92%) as compared to control (45.66%) and their separate application 22.36% and 25.42% respectively.

CBT- Cue lure Bait Trap, PBT- Poison Bait Trap

A field experiment was conducted by Ahmad et al., (2005) at the Arid Zone Research Institute Bahawalpur, during the year 2005 to assess the efficacy of different methods of fruit fly control on Ber. Five different methods namely insecticides, baiting, cultural, Integrated Management and no treatment were compared for percentage fruit damage and Yield. It was concluded that application of integrated pest management methods was most effective than other applied singly.

 Liu et al (1985) reported that cultural operations in guava orchards in Taiwan suppressed the adult population of B. dorsalis temporarily, but as a result of emigration, the number of flies

increased again as soon as conditions became suitable. Hoeing with discs was also found effective in checking the pupating larvae of B. dorsalis (Mann 1989). Larval density and per cent fruit infestation was lower in half and fully ripe fruits collected from the fields where sanitation was practised. Likewise, the relative density of tephritid adults was lower in the orchards with sanitation. The orchard without sanitation had an irregular harvesting pattern which resulted in abundant ripe fruits on trees and fallen rotting fruits on the ground (Liquido 1993). Singh (2004) reported sanitation and tillage practices to be effective against B. dorsalis on guava. The infested fruits particularly the fruits on the tree which have signs of attack should be removed instead of removing fallen fruits on the ground as the larvae from such fruits have already left for pupation. In fields where sanitation measures were practiced, the level of fruit flies decreased significantly (Verghese et al 2004). Different cultural practices like soil raking by hand and, collection and destruction of fallen fruits were also helpful in reducing the damage (Singh 2004, Stonehouse et al 2007, Kumar 2011, Sharma et al 2011b, Kumar and Sharma 2012, Verghese et al 2012).

Methyl eugenol is the most powerful of all the male lures attracting usually the males of Oriental fruit fly and others and is being used for both monitoring and management of fruit flies (Drew 1974, Hardy 1979, Drew and Hooper 1981, Kapoor et al 1987, Drew and Hancock 1994, Verghese et al 2006b, Vargas et al 2009b, Singh and Sharma 2011, Singh et al 2011, Kumar and Sharma 2012, Sharma 2012, Verghese et al 2012). This technique has been successfully used for the eradication and control of several Bactrocera species (Steiner et al 1965, Bateman et al 1973,

It was reported that 1 per cent methyl eugenol alongwith 0.5 per cent malathion or 0.1 per cent carbaryl was most effective against B. dorsalis (Balasubramaniam et al 1972, Lakshmanan et al 1973). It was also advocated the monthly replenishment of methyl eugenol. However, Cunningham et al (1975) used 83 per cent methyl eugenol alongwith 10 per cent naled and 7 per cent thixein for management of B. dorsalis. Methyl eugenol (0.025, 0.05, 0.075 and 0.1 ml) impregnated on 2 cm² cotton wad had no significant difference in their efficacy when replenished at weekly interval (Belavadi 1979). Under field conditions, it was observed that single application of methyl eugenol at 0.075 ml was most effective upto 17 days for capturing B. dorsalis if the population was low (0-22 fruit flies/trap) and upto 32 days when the population was high (0-81 fruit flies/trap).

 Conclusion:

Fruit fly belongs to order Diptera and family Tephritidae. It is a very important group of pests on account of their potential to cause damage to fruits and vegetables. It is a direct pest of the crop as directly feed on the fruit and make it unmarketable hence is a very big problem agricultural point of view. There are 4500 spp of fruit flies in the world out of which 2000 are economic pests of crops and about 5% of these are found in india. Fruit fly is a pest having a wide host range it feeds on fruit crops as well as vegetable crops. The extent of losses vary from 30 -100 per cent depending upon the crop  and season. Feeding by fruit fly larvaemay cause complete destruction of fruits, rather than cosmetic damage as is caused by many other insect pests.   Keeping in view the economic  importance of fruit fly  and crop, its  management could be done using local area management and wide area management techniques (Dhillon et al.,2005).In mid hill conditions of Himachal Pradesh (Gupta and Verma, 1992) observed about 80 per cent fruit fly infestation on cucumber and bottle gourd, 60 per cent on bitter gourd and 50 per cent on sponge gourd. The use of geographical information system could also be used as an IPM tool to mark site- specific locations of traps, land use areas and fruit fly population within a specific operational region. Although, the sterile insect technique (SIT) has been successfully used in wide area approaches, this technique should be used  in eradicating pest from the field. ( Sarwar, 2015) Fruit fly is a pest which can not be eradicated by opting one method so combination of methods like cultural, physical, biological, chemical, genetic and quarantine methods are adopted to manage fruit fly besides  other local area management options and coordination of local farmers are important in eradication of fruit fly. No fruit or vegetable should be exported or imported from other place without undergoing quarantine or disinfestations of fruit or vegetable.

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Goblin mortal Backlash Explained: Why it is the Most disputable Anime This Season

Goblin mortal stands because the most polarizing of this season’s broadcast anime offerings. From the primary episode, the show has generated contentious opinions regarding the direction, framing, and use of loaded subject material (Warning: the subsequent can embody discussion of sexual assault). The uproar round the graphic nature of White Fox’s adaptation of Kumo Kagyu’s light-weight novel series caught Crunchyroll abruptly. The streaming service speedily issued associate apology and place a content warning on the primary episode and every one ulterior episodes of the show. What specifically John Drew such a lot attention to the current ostensibly ancient fantasy anime?

 Goblin mortal began as a series of sunshine novels (although the core of the story could originate from fanfiction boards) printed on-line by author Kumo Kagyu starting in early 2016. Since then, eight such novels are discharged in Japan, 5 of that have official English translations. The series proven to be therefore well-liked that Kagyu fenced in a production prequel titled hobgoblin Slayer: Year One. A second production novel received a serialized unleash consisting of 9 chapters across problems with Gangan GA on-line. Kosuke Kurose has been adapting the sunshine novels into manga kind since mid-2016. a shot by Kento Eida to adapt Year One began this past Sept.

 Related: ten Fantasy comes presently In Development (And ten Rumored)

 That brings North American nation to the anime adaptation that launched at the start of Oct. With a crisp vogue and an attention grabbing title, hobgoblin mortal brought in several viewers trying to find a replacement action series. tho' hobgoblin mortal had gained quality in Japan, several within the west had ne'er detected of the dark fantasy heroic tale.

And hobgoblin mortal is definitely dark, despite a visible vogue that may now and then seem indistinguishable from a a lot of lightsome shonen series like that point i used to be Reincarnated as a Slime. hobgoblin mortal tells the story of a person UN agency created it his life’s mission to destroy all goblins. It’s a brutal show wherever the careless and also the innocent have their bodies ripped apart on screen. Monsters go well on the far side what a typical viewer would possibly expect with their grievous attacks.

 The series strives to place the viewer within the indefinite quantity of its protagonist, the titular hobgoblin mortal. the primary few episodes define his hate of the goblins and also the detachment he feels from those around him. None of the characters even have names; the audience just is aware of their titles or roles.

 To get the viewers into the outlook of abhorring goblins, hobgoblin mortal builds a fairyland supported the thought that there’s a race of monsters out there waiting to rape anyone they are available across. and that is not hyperbole; within the fiction of hobgoblin mortal, that’s specifically however goblins reproduce. That brutality, terribly honestly shown on screen, caused associate uproar.

 The initial episode of hobgoblin mortal focuses on a 15-year-old priest connexion her first adventuring party, a bunch of 3 equally inexperienced, however spirited children - a group of personalities that a typical shonen would possibly pay a complete season exploring. By the half dozen minute mark, things go awfully awry. Members of the cluster suffer horrific stab wounds, and die to swarming goblins with clubs and arrows and knives. Then comes the scene of goblins cacophonic the covering off one in all the party members before they start to rape her.

 It’s virtually sexy, however the audience sees and hears the motions. The scene nearly repeats itself with the priest and her last remaining companion, till the hobgoblin mortal makes his unveiling, interrupting the deed. The armored adventurer kills the goblins solely to tell the living priest that her wounded companion cannot be saved from the poison slowly pumping through her veins. Our protagonist then mercy kills her as she begs for death. the remainder of the episode consists of the couple traveling through the cavern system; they discover the cut off limbs of her companions, rescue variety of rape victims, and at last hobgoblin mortal bashes one or two of hobgoblin kids to death.

[kashishipr]

What is Meant by a Family of Trademarks?

Trademarks are distinctive marks, symbols, or labels used to differentiate goods belonging to one entity from that of another to avoid deception concerning the origin of those goods or services. These intangible assets are often used in collaboration with other marks by the formation of a trademark portfolio, which consists of marks sharing a few characteristics and belonging to one entity. In the Bainbridge judgment (2006), the court, in reference to a family of marks, said that “they reproduce in full the same distinctive element with the addition of an element, graphic, or word, which differentiates them from each other or when characterized by the repetition of a single prefix or suffix taken from an original mark.”

The doctrine of the family of marks is simply a common law extension of the Trademark Law that not only prohibits registration of similar marks, which is likely to create confusion, but also those marks that are similar to a pre-existing group of marks from which the proprietor of the group derives market utility since the market recognizes the collective uniqueness of the entire group.

Characteristics of a Family of Trademarks

A family of trademarks is generally identified by the common use of a syllable(s), which may be prefixed or suffixed. In addition to this, a family of trademarks is a congregation of trademarks that has the following features:

A recognizable common characteristic(s);

Distinctive in nature; and

Brought into commerce since the purchasing audience recognizes the common features of the many marks and contemplates that the goods or services originate from a common trademark owner.

Therefore, the adoption of a series of marks to commercially market goods and services would not suffice the creation of a family of marks. The purchasing audience must recognize the shared characteristics indicating a common origin. The same is majorly influenced by the mode of use, nature of advertising, and inherent nature contributing to the inherent distinctiveness of the mark owing to its common characteristics.

The issue of the distinctiveness of a family of trademarks was brought forth in the case of Pure & Simple Concepts, Inc. v. I H W Management Limited DBA The Finchley Group. Here the applicant was seeking to register ‘Blue Industry,’ which was opposed by the opposition on account of it causing a likelihood of confusion with a family of its ‘Industry’ marks used for the same nature of goods as the applicant, i.e., clothing. The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board decided against the opposer since the use of ‘Industry’ did not reflect a secondary meaning. It was submitted that 74 third-party registrations were existent, and the consumers did not associate with the brand as a household name. Therefore, all the previously mentioned characteristics should be satisfied to acclaim a series of marks being formative of the family of trademarks.

Popular Examples of Family of Trademarks

One of the most well-established and popular trademark families known across all age groups alike is the McDonald’s mark, as also recognized by the EU Court in 2016. The court acknowledged the existence of the family of marks characterized by the use of the prefix ‘Mc’ alongside the name of the food products like McFish, McToast, McMuffin, McCurry, McChicken, McFeast, etc.

Another well-cited trademark is Apple, where it uses its distinctive ‘i’ prefix with its cellular and other electronic devices like iPhone, iPad, iPod, etc.

Toys “R”Us also owns a family of trademarks, which is inclusive of Babies”R”Us, Rewards”R”Us, and the “R”Us Credit Card. The feature setting it apart while holding the identity together is not a suffix or a prefix, but a word conjoining two different words, i.e., “R.” Therefore, a family of trademarks should have a common recognizable feature.

However, creating a trademark family requires greater deliberation and decision-making since it is imperative to depict a secondary meaning of the said marks. A group of loosely associated marks cannot be said to be contributing to a family of marks. Consider, for example, the instance of Little Caesars’ Pizza, which was denied registration of its mark ‘Deep! Deep! Dish Pizza.’ Little Caesar argued that the mark signifies a family of double-worded trademarks, just like its famous ‘Pizza! Pizza!’ trademark. However, the same was rejected by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) on the ground that ‘Deep! Deep! Dish Pizza’ is not a distinctive mark; instead, it is a descriptive mark that lacks a common characteristic shared with the existent ‘Pizza! Pizza!’ mark. In the given case, the previously mentioned mark could have been registered if it would have gained secondary meaning by acquiring distinctiveness amongst the masses; however, it still wouldn’t have qualified as a constitutive element of the family of trademarks since it had no connecting feature to the main brand.

Benefit of Establishing a Family of Trademarks

The logic behind streamlining efforts and investing capital in the creation of a family of marks is that it helps strengthen the original brand name, as is said, “The more, the merrier.” With every other launch of the Apple product using the prefix ‘i,’ the core value of Apple increases significantly. It not only helps establish the brand value but also alerts potential infringers against trespassing of such rights since these products gain such renowned status that cannot be ignored. Furthermore, more marks mean better recognition and increased distinctiveness.

Therefore, every new introduction to the trademark family would not face major difficulty in establishing market presence due to inter-relation created by common characteristics of the marks. It helps in the proliferation of the identity of the brand in general and aids in further expansion of business endeavors. An example of this is the use of Reliance by the Ambani group, which has delved into different sectors extending into footwear by using Reliance Footprints, a clothing line by using Reliance Trends, jewelry by deploying Reliance Jewels, etc. The business sectors may be different, but they are all united by a common logo utilizing the ‘R’ alphabet and a shadow of the flame.

Using Family of Trademarks from a Strategic Point-of-View

The Doctrine of Family of Marks Can be Used Where:The Doctrine of Family of Marks Cannot be Used Where:An applicant wishes to strengthen his or her claims that the mark applied for has acquired distinctiveness as a new member of a well-recognized family of marks.Some third party is a prior registrant of a trademark, which the proprietor of a family of trademark (applicant) wishes to use. In this case, the applicant cannot assert the family of marks as a valid reason to obtain registration over the prior registrant of rights. Here, the family of marks would be irrelevant to the issue.A plaintiff, in a cancellation or opposition proceeding, wishes to assert that the defendant’s use of his or her mark is likely to be confused with the plaintiff’s family of marks.

It becomes easier to entrap the defendant by citing either of the plaintiff’s marks in separation or through collective mention.

The family of trademarks was used as an argument to successfully defend the ‘Mc’ mark in favor of McDonald’s in the case of McDonald’s Corp. v. McBagels Inc. In this case, the court prevented McBagels Inc. from using the word ‘McBagels’ in connection with their bakery and restaurant even though ‘Mc’ is a common surname. McDonald’s prevailed against McBagels since its items such as ‘Egg McMuffin,’ ‘McChicken,’ ‘Big Mac,’ and ‘Mac Fries’ gathered secondary meaning due to international advertising.

Element of Risk while Using the Doctrine

A major risk of confusion may arise upon the proprietor of the family of trademarks where a mark may be used by a third party to associate with the family in bad faith. In such an instance, there is a possibility of the consumer to believe that the mark being used in bad faith has originated or forms a part of the said family. It may introduce a detriment to all the marks being deployed as a part of the trademark family and tarnish their respective image while the third party freely rides upon the reputation created by the bonafide proprietor.

The same was visible in the EU Court case T-518/13, which acknowledged that the trademark MacCoffee did not belong to the proprietor of McDonald’s; however, it drew a close association with the ‘Mc’ family of marks. It was established that since the two prefixes ‘Mc’ and ‘Mac’ were phonetically and visually very similar to one another and dealt with food-related products, it was difficult to differentiate between the two categories of marks. Therefore, it is crucial to remain aware of such notorious brands willing to associate with the family of trademarks.

Conclusion

Although the birth of this doctrine was incidental, it has viably grown and provided greater protection within the sphere of Intellectual Property (IP) laws. It has been often contended that this doctrine has benefitted the already established and dominating actors in the market like Apple and McDonald’s, while smaller enterprises have not gained much from it as they are usually thrown off from directly competing against the prior mentioned actors. Keeping such debate aside, the spirit of this doctrine can be deployed to promote a company by strategically deploying marks in consonance with the company’s development goals and marketing ambitions to secure better outcomes. ✅ For more visit: https://www.kashishipr.com/

[chiseler]

A Ragtime Mind

Watching Bob Milne perform is like seeing the next step up in humanity’s progression, but realized in the form of a man you can engage in a friendly chat. He is the most phenomenal piano player I’ve seen or heard – for accuracy, speed, dexterity, emotion, sensitivity. His staples are ragtime and boogie-woogie, with a smattering of blues. He claims he never practices, but he plays some 250 gigs a year around the world. He owns no recordings or sheet music; he has no need for them because he can assimilate and reproduce any piece of music after hearing it once (putting him, perhaps, in a class with Mozart as far as that ability goes).

He was a French horn player in his late teens, but quit because the horn does require practice to keep the lips in form. So why doesn’t he play classical piano? He started out in honky-tonk bars in Detroit, playing what people wanted to hear and also trying to duplicate the speed and complexity of piano rolls – a supposedly impossible endeavor, since the rolls were reproduced by combining multiple players (Milne succeeded). Many say that ragtime is the most complex of all piano music. So maybe it’s the ultimate, continuing challenge.

But the simple fact that Milne was coming up to northeastern Pennsylvania – to Lycoming College, about which I knew zilch, though I live only fifty miles away – was not the clincher that drew me to hear him; it was the fact that his brain apparently functions like no one else’s. The neurologist who’s been studying him, Kerstin Bettermann from the Hershey Medical Center, would be giving a talk about his mind before he gave his concert.

Both Bettermann and Milne are delightful human beings, and Bettermann is an excellent presenter. Using functional MRI, she had documented the unique ways in which Milne’s brain works and proved that he can indeed do what he claims he’s been able to do all his life: hear, process and view three or four orchestral productions in his head at the same time.

For her testing, Bettermann had used Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn and one other that I can’t recall. As a control, she also tested an orchestral conductor who would likely have the closest sort of musical mind to Milne’s. She played them a specific rendition of each piece, then asked them to repeat them mentally while she timed their progress. She would interrupt randomly and ask them where they were in the score, checking their progress against the timing of the recording. The conductor, while able to visualize and accurately reproduce the unfolding of a single orchestral piece, could not manage two, much less three or four, as Milne clearly could.

And the differences in brain connectivity Bettermann discovered between the two were striking. She flashed schematics to show how the two brains had functioned under fMRI during the test. Milne used fewer neural connection systems, made more equal use of the two brain hemispheres, and mostly ignored (or suppressed) normal inhibitory feedback. With Milne’s internalization of music, there is apparently almost no “waste” brain activity – no neural searching, no misdirection.

Milne himself – quiet, charming and funny as hell in an offhand way – answered audience questions after Bettermann’s presentation, before his concert. Yes, he’s always had these abilities, and until his teens assumed everyone (or at least all musicians) did. No, he had no particular offsetting problems in other areas of schoolwork, though math bored him – “maybe because it was too easy” – and “I just hated social studies, what awful stuff."

He has no interest in puzzles, is good enough at chess to beat three players simultaneously behind his back while playing the piano, but obviously doesn’t take any of this sort of thing seriously. Amateur players at festivals are nasty to him, probably because it all comes too easy for him.

When he sat down to play, Bettermann used a back-lit screen to highlight his hands, giving us a close-up yet bird’s eye view of something I didn’t expect I’d see again: a combination of delicious motion, fluidity and certainty. He talked to the audience casually while playing, explaining the elements of music with superb clarity. He gave little demonstrations of how to introduce different, overlapping time signatures into the same piece, playing them off against each other while his thumb – his thumb! – carried the melody. There seemed to be no effort involved in doing something that few alive could accomplish, no matter the time they might put into it.

Not long after the Lycoming evening, our local arts council was setting up its first Ultimate Musical Theater Weekend, in 2015, and we needed to fill a performer slot. Milne was the immediate choice. He arrived from Michigan in November, traveling with a trailer that he and his wife slept in. For his concert, he played a wide variety of ragtime, boogie and blues, some standards, some unknown to most of his audience. He interwove tunes, turned medleys into quiet explications of musical theory and technique. Playing at floor lever, rather than on a stage as at Lycoming, he seemed even more at living-room ease, in quiet rapport with his audience, chatting back and forth.

He played one piece at almost blinding speed (he’s equally effective with slow numbers) while maintaining crystalline clarity. An audience member asked how he could rampage through the music like that. "What, I didn’t play fast enough?” and, standing, he leaned sideways to play a few bars twice as fast.

I’ve nearly always found descriptions of a musician’s technique and effectiveness to fall flat, and I’m sure that’s been the case here. One of Milne’s caliber has to be experienced. Fortunately, there are entrancing videos of Milne online, especially those conducted at the Library of Congress.

During intermission, I was one of several who had the chance to chat with him as he fielded questions sitting in the back row. Does he have an overall eidetic memory? He doesn’t think so, hasn’t considered it that much. Does he think his rare mental and physical abilities are necessarily linked – that he couldn’t have one without the other? He answers with a sort of mental shrug. In general, he doesn’t seem to feel that such things are worth a great deal of bother.

Yet beyond his performance, there’s an immense amount to be learned from Milne. Because of his singular brain functioning, he raises interesting questions about art – what it is, how it’s produced, the relation between the mental (creative) and the physical (production).

Suppose we consider artistic creation as a continuum from abstract impulse to concrete realization:

• Can someone have the abstract impulse toward a particular form of artistic creation but not the physical ability to realize its execution? (Milne’s playing flows without clear distinction between the two. I love music but can’t master repetitive motion to play even the simplest instrument.)

Suppose we consider the production of art as a physical continuum from neural brain processes to bodily execution:

• Should we then say that art can legitimately be described in terms of science? Also:

• Can we call someone an artist who can produce no external art?

• Can one have an “advanced” mental state – artistic or otherwise – but not be able to communicate it because it cannot be realized in action or not recognized by the individual in isolation?

• Conversely, can one have latent physical ability like Milne’s but not the internal creative impetus to produce art? There have been savants who could identify prime numbers up to nine digits long, yet their stunning (and incomprehensible) ability produced no external beauty or usefulness in the real world.

But, for the moment, forget all that and go visit Bob Milne at the Library of Congress.

by Derek Davis

[esandcasg]

Chatper 12: The Sound of the Underground

Part 1

We entered the illuminated tunnel, a stunning engineering masterpiece somehow dug into the rock of K2 at over eight thousand meters. I paused and tried to take in my surroundings. What was this place? Asides from the obvious feelings of uncertainty caused by such a discovery, there was something greater that didn’t seem right here. A nagging feeling. I could almost sense the evil drifting along the tunnel and escaping into the Karakoram mountain air.

But clearly Ifan didn’t share my concern. “This way,” he said, as he stormed off down the tunnel, convinced he knew where he was going. It reminded me of the night of Andrew’s wedding. This time I only hoped I wasn’t calling him repeatedly in a few hours and getting his voicemail. I hoped that it was the version of Ifan that we saw in Mallorca, the super hero Ifan who saved our asses when no one else knew where the fuck we were.

Gingerly, I set off after him.

After about one hundred meters we came out in a large cavernous room, much like a few chapters ago. Please refer to that if you want more details. A tall man dressed entirely in black Rab climbing gear stood in the centre, breathing into bottled oxygen.

He turned and faced us.

“I knew you would fail me,” he said, his voice distorted behind his high altitude breathing mask.

Suffering under the effects of high altitude, it took a moment to realise that he was in fact talking to me. He knew who I was. Something flashed in my memory. This room. This figure in front of me. I had been here before, just a few weeks before. Perhaps it was even what caused my injuries…

In recent weeks my mind had been like a swamp, as I tried in vain to drag memories to the surface through some sort of viscous fluid. But seeing this figure triggered something in the depths of my brain; the memories came flooding back. Kangleong. The disaster. The hunt for Craven… For my father.

Finally, the realisation that he was the man who stood before us.

I didn’t have a chance to think what these developments meant before he was on the move, striding over towards us.

“But what have you brought me here?” He asked, approaching Ifan.

He stood in front in him and grabbed his shoulders, as if he was measuring him up. At this close proximity his physical presence was overwhelming. He stood at around six and a half feet, which put him over two feet taller than Ifan.

“My, what an amazing physical specimen,” he said, taking a step back from Ifan. “You’re a little short to be a stormtrooper, but you will do nicely.”

“What is this?” Said Ifan, finally speaking up. The confusion in his voice indicating that he had about as much idea of what was going as I did. There was also an element of fear.

“You will be the source subject for my army.”

“What source subject? What the hell is this?”

Ifan started stepping backwards, towards the tunnel that we’d come in. I knew we should have turned around. I knew it was wedding night Ifan.

In a flash Craven covered the distance to Ifan once again, drawing his ice-axe in the process. He went to strike, but stopped just below Ifan’s chin (so his upper chest).

“You misunderstand, it wasn’t a request. You will join me, or you will meet your destiny.”

*

For three years we had been Craven’s captives. Never confined or imprisoned, but never free to leave either. It wasn’t like the Indian kids on Temple of Doom, for example.

Living life in the death zone had been tough, but gradually we acclimatized, thereby proving theories wrong that the body cannot adapt to these altitudes and it starts breaking down. It was somewhat helped by the fact that Craven had created an vacuum air lock and set the air pressure to reproduce the conditions of 7,999m above sea level, so we all felt pretty good after a while.

Well, as mountaineers we felt good. As human beings we felt like shit (Elbrus reference).

We had witnessed horror. We had seen Craven becoming more and more twisted and evil, more machine than human, and gaining greater power and wielding it as he saw fit.

In these three years we had helped in the construction of all of Craven’s weapons. First, there was the machine that destroyed mountains or could at least create localised avalanches, code name ‘The Death Peak’. Then the weapon that could control the weather, code name ‘The Death Storm’. And finally a secret project that Ifan was involved with, code name ‘The Death Finger’.

Whenever Ifan returned from a secret rendezvous he was a broken man, like the morning after a drinking session before he discovered Alka-Seltzer. And self-control. I had feared for his sanity. But I was also secretly jealous. Craven had cast me aside and labelled me incompetent, whereas Ifan now seemed key to his plans. But no matter how much I probed, Ifan refused to tell me what was going on. The only information that I managed to get out of him was that it involved capturing Andrew, and the meetings tied in with the arrival of Craven’s boss. I shuddered at the thought of someone being higher up the crazy ladder than Craven.

It had left me with a feeling of frustration. What was I doing here? What was Craven up to? What did he want with Andrew?

One morning Ifan was missing. Over the past three years I had grown used to his routine: Get up. Coffee with muesli or granola. Few episodes of Frasier. Decaf coffee. Intertwined would be at least two trips for a dump. But not today. Had Craven finally broken him?

After searching for a few hours, I had found him at the entrance to a cave nestled deep in Craven’s jungle district within the K2 tunnel network, a feng shui type arrangement Craven had introduced to bring balance to all the evilness. He was standing in the middle of the tunnel passageway, staring into the cave, a vacant expression on his face. As I approached him I tried to follow his gaze and see what caught his attention, but could only make out the opening meters of a cave, the light quickly fading and leaving a deep blackness.

“What is it?” I asked, as I drew level with him.

He didn’t answer. Instead he continued to stare ahead.

“What is it?” I asked again. “What’s got you so spooked?... Ifan!”

I grabbed his shoulder, and he suddenly snapped out of his trance, turning to face me, his eyes bulging with something that resembled fear. I hadn’t seen him this spooked since I suggested a takeaway pizza on the way back from having an Indian.

“There’s something in those trees,” he said at last.

I suddenly became aware of a change in temperature. Up until now my green Arcteryx shell jacket had been sufficient at this elevation and temperature, but now suddenly it didn’t feel appropriate. Like the moment Heidi’s mum started wearing Arcteryx gear.

“Something isn’t right,” I said. “I feel cold.”

Ifan turned back to face the cave.

“This place is strong. Craven. A domain of evil, he is. You must go.” He pointed towards the cave opening.

“What’s in there?” I asked.

“All that you can’t leave behind,” he replied.

Not sure what that meant, I set off towards the cave opening. Darkness was to keep us apart, and daylight felt like a long way off.

I walked only a few meters before Ifan spoke again. “Your ice-axes. You will not need them.”

I ignored him and continued my passage into the cave. Why I had listened to Ifan, I could not tell you. But intuition told me that the answers to the questions that I sought lay deep within these granite walls.

I navigated my way through snakes and iguanas, briefly stopping to chow down on a Yoda sausage, before coming into a clearing. At this distance from any light source it was difficult to see much of anything. I was surrounded by near blackness, and could only make out vague shapes in front of me.

From somewhere close by came the unmistakable sound of mechanical breathing. Almost immediately the cave was illuminated in a dull red colour, as Craven lit up his ice-axe. He was just meters away from me. The red light hit his black outfit, creating a purple colour that Samuel Jackson would have liked. I scrambled to get my ice-axe out of the holster as he started walking towards me. I had seen Craven move with lightning speed, but now he sauntered, almost as if time had slowed down.

I felt the overwhelming drive of adrenaline take hold in my body.

His ice-axe sliced through the air. I raised mine and blocked his strike. As he drew back again I saw an opening and slashed at his head with my full force. There was contact, and his head was removed clean from his body. Who knew an ice-axe was this lethal?

As his severed head rolled to a stop, the oxygen mask and balaclava exploded revealing a face behind. I walked over.

For a moment I thought it was Nicholas Lyndhurst, before realising it was Andrew.

Shocked, my mind was unable to process what I was seeing. Was Andrew in fact Craven? That made no sense. Especially as this is a flashback and both Andrew and Craven are still at large. And Andrew was nowhere near six and a half feet… but then neither was Hayden Christensen. But as the shock subsided and the more logical part of my brain started taking over again,  the answer became obvious. This was a sign. And it opened up my eyes.

I realised Craven’s plan for Andrew, and most importantly, why.

I ran towards the cave exit, where I saw Ifan still standing in a trance, like the time he saw the Jenna Jameson doppleganger on the dancefloor in Ealing. He seemed to snap out of it as I ran past him. He grabbed hold of me.

“Woah, what is happening?” He asked.

“You know what is going on. How did you do it?”

“Do what? What are you talking about?”

“Craven… in the cave.”

“What?” Ifan seemed genuinely surprised by what I was telling him. He turned and stared into the cave opening.

“You genuinely don’t know what I am talking about?”

“No.”

“I know what Craven is up to. We need to get out here. We need to save Andrew.”

“What!? Why? We haven’t seen Andrew since Kangleong.”

“Andrew is our friend, we have to help him.”

“This doesn’t make any sense. Why this sudden need to save Andrew.”

How much could I trust Ifan now? He’d been a slave to Craven for the last few years, a key part in some sort of operation. But I realized that I couldn’t trust anyone else. Ifan was it. And I needed help to escape. I had to roll the dice.

I drew a breath. “Okay. You know Craven has wanted Andrew, right? The question we have never asked is why. I now know.”

“Go on…” said the beefy Instagram influencer in front of me.

“Because… because Andrew is also Craven’s son. He’s my brother. But whilst he’s given up on me, Craven sees him as the natural successor.”

“What? This is a crazy plot twist! How did you not know this before now?”

“I guess we were separated at birth or something. So do you see now? It’s obvious; save Andrew, save the world.”

Ifan seemed to consider this for a moment. “Even if this was true…”

“From a certain point of view?” I interrupted.

“Right, even if it was true from a certain point of view, surely the biggest issue here is that we can’t escape this place. We are trapped as Craven’s prisoners.”

He was right. But then an idea flashed in my mind. Something that was totally original.

“We dress as Craven’s troops, and we simply walk out.”

Ifan nodded. “My God, that’s brilliant.”

It had taken some time and effort to escape K2. We were deep in the depths of Craven’s tunnels – I think I wrote that – and whilst we were dressed as Craven’s men, we didn’t want to draw suspicion. Eventually we reached the serac door and pushed it open.

It had been over three years since we’d seen daylight, and we both winced as the harsh mountain sun hit our faces. Looking over, I was pleased to see that Ifan was sporting his permatan however. We stepped through the opening and began our descent down the face of the bottleneck.

At the base of the infamous passageway, we came across the body of a mountaineer who had seemingly been left for dead. As I drew closer I saw that it was in fact the body of mountaineering legend Lewis Hamilton. And he was still alive.

“Lewis, are you okay?” I asked, kneeling down next to him.

“Oh man, aye iz like proper fucked, bruv.”

I could see now that his gangsta braids were all frozen. He must have been out here for quite a while.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I climbed Kota Kinabalu and then everyone was like ‘you should totally climb Kilimanjaro next, man.’”

“This isn’t Kilimanjaro, this is K2.”

“That iz like da same ting. Anyways, turns out mountaineering is proper bo.”

I did the whole world a favour and kicked him off the side of K2.

I turned back to Ifan. “Come on, let’s go.”

Ifan didn’t follow me. “Wait. What are we even going to do when we find Andrew?”

“We’ll make some shit up (refer to chapters 1-11). Let’s just get him moving. I think heading to the Gasherbrums could be a good place to start.”

With that Ifan pulled back his sleeve and hit a few buttons on his wrist computer.

Part 2

A blast of frigid Himalayan air brough me back to present day. I was momentarily rocked backwards on my heals, and I became aware of how close to the edge of New Kangleong summit plateau I was. I instinctively took a step forward. A step towards Craven.

“I have waited a long time for this moment,” he said. He was standing around twenty meters away on the actual summit mound, his black cape flapping in the wind. “Don’t ask me precisely how long, as I have totally lost track of timings in this book. But long enough.”

I kept quiet. I took the prayer flags out of my jacket pocket and held them in my hand. If I could only plant them where Craven stood, then… then what? This would be over? Craven would instantly combust and bring order to the galaxy? I started to doubt the plan.

“Prayer flags won’t save you, my son. It’s over, I have the higher ground.”

I kept quiet. Instead I bravely took a step towards him. He drew his ice-axe back, adopting the ancient Muay Boran attack stance. But his next move surprised me as he knelt down and drove the ice-axe into the ground. There was an instantaneous explosion of piercing red light. I turned my back to him and simultaneously covered my eyes…

…the next second I was hit by a massive force that knocked the air out of my chest. It was shortly followed by an explosion that took me off my feet. As I slid across the ice and snow of the summit plateau, I realized I had been rugby tackled by a man. Was it Craven? I desperately tried to get free, but my body was still reeling from the multiple blows. But as we came to a stop I looked up and saw it was Ifan. Except he was dressed as Ram-Man. Where the hell did he come from?

“Are you okay?” He asked.

“Where is Craven?” I asked, looking around. There was no sign of him.

“Craven?” Said Andrew, as he ripped his shirt off and joined us on the naked pile-on. “When we got here you were suspended in some sort of red light.”

“I was what?” I asked.

“Wait,” said Ifan, a look of concern etched across his face. “Tell me what happened.”

I explained to him the confrontation with Craven, and how he had driven his ice-axe into the snow causing a blast of red light.

“Get up,” he said, as he wriggled out from under Andrew. He stood up and pulled his pants back on. “I know what this is.”

“Ifan, what is it?” Andrew asked, adjusting his knickers.

“It’s a trap!” He said.

In that moment, there was a flash of red light again, and Craven appeared in front of us. Gone was the ice-axe. In its place was an assault rifle. He aimed towards me and fired, the round clipping me in the shoulder. I was spun around, and I tripped, falling down on my backside. I tried to push my way backwards, away from him, but my shoes skidded on the ice.

“Far too easy,” he said, approaching the three of us.

He grabbed hold of Andrew, wrapping his arm around his neck in some sort of choke hold. He aimed the gun at the side of his head.

I slowly got to my feet. “Stop screwing around and let Andrew go. It’s me you want, and I only have one arm. You can beat me.”

I could see the look of desire flare in Craven’s face. The craving for arm-to-arm combat was there.

“Come on Craven, put away the chickenshit gun,” I continued, drawing my swiss army knife and selecting the can opener function. “You don’t want to pull the trigger. Put the knife in me and look me in the eye when you turn it. That’s what you want to do.”

He pushed Andrew away, and threw his gun off the side of the mountain. He drew his knife.

“I don’t need the gun, Adam. I can beat you. I don’t need no gun! I’m going to kill you now!!”

From behind me came the unmistakable war cry.

“Finger!” Shouted Ifan, as he launched himself towards Craven. Rage was etched on his face. Pent up anger caused by years of abuse from Craven and The Death Finger was pouring out of him.

Craven and Ifan became interlocked in combat. I was secretly interested to see where this fight would go. Bruce Lee once said that the man with the stronger neck would win any fight. So if a man has no neck does that mean that he is unbeatable?

But clearly Craven had no time for Bruce Lee, and Ifan was brushed aside as if he was nothing. Craven landed an uppercut with his left hand that sent Ifan sprawling backwards on the ice. He stood over him, knife in his other hand. The opening was there to end Ifan, but instead he turned and faced me and Andrew. The decision not to kill Ifan would be something that I pondered over in the coming days.

But for now I saw my opportunity. I grabbed the prayer flags and sprinted towards the summit, ramming them into the snow at the peak of Kangleong. For a moment nothing happened. Then we were hit by the biggest blast of wind I had felt in my life, almost as if we had stepped straight into a hurricane. Unprepared, I was blown off my feet, and dragged towards the edge of the summit plateau. Scrambling on the ice, I finally managed to wrap my fingers around a rock.

I looked up. Craven stood where he had been before, unmoved by the storm. He looked at me and tipped his head back. For a moment I thought he was going to unleash an epic Nooooooo!!! but instead he simply started laughing. I saw now what had happened, and what was about to happen.

I looked over at Andrew. He was clinging on for life too, buffeted by the winds.

“Andrew!” I shouted over to him. He looked up at me. “The next part is very important. He’s going to take you.”

Andrew let out a whimper.

“Andrew, stay focused, baby, this is key. You will have five, maybe ten seconds…”

But he didn’t even have that. Craven ran to Andrew, slicing his way through the storm. He grabbed hold of Andrew, and threw himself from the summit of Kangleong. The Vertical Summit.

They were gone.

[midnight-in-town]

Rereading TG: :Re vol 1-4

Just some friendly reminders about things that we weren’t given an answer to yet, or simply stuff that are cool to remember. :)

[TG vol1-7] [TG vol8-14] [some more posts]

Some stuff related to (ghoul) biology:

- The QS’ and Sasaki’s initial Rc cells rates:

- Why Kaneki/Sasaki is so strong:

- The Quinx surgery:

- The treatment of ghouls locked in Cochlea:

- About Kagune marks:

- About Tsukiyama’s genetic condition:

The way I understand this, because of consanguineous marriages, the Tsukiyama family is more vulnerable to the “poisonous effect*” of Rc cell types different from their own, which is why cannibalizing is a “bad eating habit” in Shuu’s case, because he can’t become a kakuja and remains vulnerable to Rc cell interference*.

*(Remember how Shinohara described each type as being “effective poison” to at least one other type (Rinkaku -> Koukaku, for example)? If not, it’s explained in TG ch53) 

About the Washuu family:

- who created the Quinques:

- the legend of the Washuu family:

Now that we know that they’re ghouls though, I’m wondering if they didn’t simply feel threatened by the old OEK (the OEG before Eto, the one who took the ghouls to the 24th ward) which is why they went out of their way to create V to destroy that OEG (same reason when it comes to giving quinques to humans). 

That might also be why they kept V afterwards and pretended to be humans so as to remain the winning party by establishing the “equilibrium” (aka ghouls and humans “cannot live/mix together” and the fact that the ghoul kind was the one depicted as the enemy). 

About Shirazu:

I remembered that some patterns associated with him…

were also associated with Uta at least once…

And while I have no idea whether it really means something or not, I also remembered that Ishida-sensei drew a picture for one of their birthdays (I think it was Shirazu’s) with the two of them 

So it’s probably nothing but I felt like mentioning it, just in case.

Some more random things:

- Akira calling Haise “my Sasaki” :3

- Kaneki being a sub confirmed xDD

- Ayato changing and going from being a very bratty teenager to an outstanding young man, thanks to Shachi?

Though, I think that, since his motivations for joining Aogiri always were to protect Touka from ending like their parents, it’s quite natural that he ended up becoming such an impressive young man once he was done with his bratty phase, but maybe Shachi still had a hand in making him realize that he had an overwhelming potential (and that it was okay to care) between TG and :Re? 

- Still unanswered (important) plot point?

Touka visiting Kimi who was attacked by Torso? Or Uta pretending to be her to visit Shinohara, in order to later be able to reproduce his face to mess with some investigators?

I’d rather go for the first idea though, I love the idea of Kimi and Touka becoming friends ever since they met back in TG (+ it would mean Touka supporting Nishikimi and that’s just how the Nishiki/Touka brotp goes for me). 

- Foreshadowing if things end well?

I really hope that these two will work together :3

- We still don’t know with who Uta was playing chess back then

[revolutionarygnosis]

COVID-19 and Proto-fascist media subjectivity

In the wake of the COVID-19, the state and media apparatus has managed to create a veritable biopolitical tragedy that synonymizes biological necessity with economic control. The ruling class is exploiting the crisis to pass draconian economic measures in this country and across the world, and we have no means to stop them, quarantined as we are, most of the time on order by those carrying out such measures. At the same time, we cannot not leave our house, or we could spread the virus around and cause people in at-risk groups to get sick or die.  Employers across the country laying off millions of workers, abrogating union contracts by invoking force majeure clauses, and the Gates foundation is furthering its agenda of global health imperialism; as per usual people of color are disproportionately bearing the brunt of all these measures. We are witnessing what will probably be the largest transfer of wealth to the ruling class in history. Capitalism never lets a crisis go to waste, and it seems impossible to organize against the state under the circumstances. But what can we do?

Further complicating the scenario is the discourse of “social distancing” (not social distancing itself), which has so effectively turned even the most well-meaning liberals basically into libertarians that move the onus of public health from institutions onto individuals. It is a critique of the discourse of social distancing (and lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, etc.), not social distancing itself, that I want to mount in this brief post. This post does not call into question the scientific efficacy of social distancing or engage in any “anti-scientific” conspiracy-mongering. This is also not a poststructuralist critique of the truth value of the scientific method. It is rather a critique of the ideology that the media and state have clandestinely packaged into the public discourse of science that preemptively disable a critique of neoliberalism. It is a deconstruction of the media discourse.

(preliminary note: when I say “proto-fascist” I mean what many people mean as “neoliberal,” since the latter inevitably becomes the former when placed under the socioeconomic duress of the likes we are seeing now.)

As an introduction, let’s look at a recent commercial by “America’s biopharmaceutical companies” declaring how hard they are working (not even mentioning what exactly they’re working on), concluding with “we believe in science.” Yes, I believe in science too. Great, I’m on board. But why is the biopharmaceutical industry saying this? Is it different from why us normal people say we believe in science? When they mean they believe in science, do they mean “the epistemological value of the scientific method” and nothing more at all? I don’t think so. These companies are commodifying “pro-science, anti-Trump” sentiment to convert into political capital to lobby for political and economic measures that will, now or later, line their pockets. What is most dangerous is that a critique of biopharmaceutical companies and their accompanying discourse of science is often taken to be equivalent to a critique of science itself. 

When they say a dangerously simple truism like “we believe in science,” in the context of capitalist semiotics they mean “believe in us.” When they say “we believe in science,” they mean “we believe in science (only insofar as it its findings can be turned into profit, and despite all our nefarious dealings ignored by the media, we can still manage to appear as saviors and capitalize on anti-Trump sentiment to present ourselves as pure embodiments of the scientific method, abstracted form all economic and political motivations). However, when you and I and a scientist says “we believe in science,” we mean that, and only that. This is an important distinction.

This commercial is a microcosm of the political discourse around science as a whole in the U.S. When we hear that Trump does not believe in science, what exactly is meant? Do they mean that he takes a principled opposition to the epistemological value of the scientific method? Is he a creationist or flat-earther? Do they mean he has some mysterious aversion to scientists, labs, and flasks? Or does he oppose science because its findings often threaten the profits of key industries like oil, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, and the military-industrial complex? Without a doubt, it is the latter, and unless this distinction is made the truisms hammered out by media and various congresspeople about “facts over fiction” and “we believe in science” feed the neoliberal, proto-fascist ideology that breeds people like Trump. Without this distinction, these proclamations encourage a very particular kind of political discourse and serve a purpose opposite their intentions. This ambiguous presentation of science in the media, on both sides, allows to slide the most chronic and systematic commandeering of the public perception of science by neoliberalism. The point is not to reject science.

The discourse of social distancing is part and parcel of the Manichean tendency of American news media that produces reductive political narratives that narrowly circumscribe the ideological ground on which we can discuss the impact of COVID-19 and excludes the possibility of any critique of capitalism. As Pepe Escobar writes, social distancing is being treated as an “abstraction, defined and lived in quite unequal terms.” When social distancing is abstracted from a whole host of socioeconomic issues, it can be inserted combinatorically into media discourse with a vast reservoir of other abstracted ideas, to construct narratives that prompt myopic political reactions from viewers. Unless there is an intervention in this discourse, we will reproduce and enunciate in everyday life neoliberal narratives under the guise of “pure science,” which I believe in the long-term will diminish the public’s trust in the value of the scientific method.

By all this, I mean to draw attention to how the discourse of science as it is presented in the media--as a conflict between the “pro-science” Democrats and “anti-science” Republicans--is a red herring for an underlying issue that pervades the state as a whole and is more pertinent to the experiences of the working class of whatever political orientation. When the scientific issue under consideration is one of biological necessity, that is, the scientifically-backed method of social distancing, we are faced with a biopolitical tragedy: we will literally die if we do not heed the science, yet by propagating in everyday conversation the media’s discursive paradigms surrounding science and social distancing we unwittingly contribute to the development of a proto-fascist subjectivity and accelerate the economic processes that allowed COVID-19 to become a crisis in the first place, and got Trump elected. The issue is not in social distancing, isolating, quarantining, etc. itself, it is in the habits and mannerisms of talking about science and these individualist measures developed by the media and disseminated by us in everyday life. 

Through various ideological mechanisms, the state and media have managed to posit the “non-Trump” as the most subliminal defense of Trump, equating biological necessity with proto-fascist subjectivity. Of course, the alternative is not to reject science and not social distance. That causes death, which is not good. We confront a tragedy, a paradox, and it could be the premonition of neoliberalism’s necropolitical end-point. We can either die or live while participating in neoliberalism, the very system that made us confront this paradox in the first place. However there is one alternative: we can to grapple with this paradox so we can look for ways to combat proto-fascist microaggressions in everyday life and also try to develop a revolutionary subjectivity that combats the fatalistic necropolitical spatiotemporality of the pandemic subject.

All that said, let us now investigate the the pragmatics and ideology of “social distancing” as it is being deployed. I insist again the problem is not social distancing, which is a biological necessity, the problem is the discourse that has emerged around the concept. Yes: it is necessary to social distance. But the fact I feel the need to include that clunky performative sentence to evade straw mans or equating my views with right wingers attests to the power of the reductive ideology disseminated by the media. Media furnishes the language with which we talk about social distancing, and as to be expected, the resulting discourse is completely devoid of a critique of capitalism. We need to critique not only the media discourse, but also how we are deploying it in our everyday lives. So, in what follows I will show some examples of this discourse.

First, the media discourse of social distancing has engineered verbal policing habits that preemptively de-center a critique of the power structures that value profit over lives. To bring up social distancing in your everyday talk without in the same breath criticizing power structures is to participate in, inadvertently or not, the formation of an individualist, proto-fascistic subjectivity. As an analogy, consider the ways in which we discuss the means of pushing back the impending climate apocalypse, which will make COVID-19 seem like a walk in the park. Here as there personal intervention is never enough, as to nearly exclusively focus on this intervention in your everyday discourse is ethically dubious: reduce, reuse, recycle (a.k.a distance, isolate, quarantine) is nowhere near enough, or encouraging your friends to do the same, and certainly not whipping up hatred against someone who had the gall to trash something that could have been recycled. We must always go beyond these individual acts, towards a consistent critique of the state and corporations that have sacrificed the planet to the altar of Capital, or in the present scenario, that have sacrificed public health, human bodies, and the economic stability of tens of millions to the altar of Capital. 

This type of critique not something one should do every now and then in socially sanctioned scenarios, but should be attached to every mention of social distancing. A common archetype is the well-meaning individual that lives an environmentally-conscious lifestyle, and encourages other to do the same. Even though they may silently agree with the necessity to hold corporations and the state accountable and whatnot, they will rarely voice such concerns, often claiming they prefer to be apolitical. However that is a screaming silence--unless one, as an individual, does not contribute both discourses to the marketplace of ideas, that silence is easily commodified by fascism and turned into an extremely political act.

A notable case of this discourse is the reception of the photos featuring a bunch of right-wing people protesting the stay-at-home order in Denver, Colorado; they are trying to block the roads in front of a hospital though nurses prevent them from advancing (below). I am less concerned with the intentions of those depicted, but the way the photo’s  meaning is created by and disseminated through the media. This image is full of subversive neoliberal motifs, and is particularly convenient for Manichean media narratives since the reductive binary conflict is presented with great clarity and photography skills!  Nonetheless, with some viral semiotics we can unearth within this binary conflict two readings of this image operating simultaneously. 

On the most immediate level, in this image, we have the Forces of Science reigning in the Uncouth, Spontaneous Right-Wing Working Class. For sure, the right wingers need to be stopped. We believe in science, and the lady with the chauvinist sign is an anti-science person. But is that all this photo is saying? Is it purely a demonstration of science? In other words--what makes this type of photo stand out from other demonstrations of science?

We need to look at the semiotics of the nurse. The nurse’ scrubs allow him to appear to come from an entirely different universe. He looks so out of place. A burst of color in the drab cityscape. He is standing with good posture, arms crossed, looking very resolute. He is wearing a mask. He stands parallel to the red stop light--a symbol of technology, integration, and city-planning. And it’s red, it’s saying stop just like he is. We can see how the mask, while biologically necessary for a pandemic, is convenient for the neoliberal narrative. By obscuring the face it dehumanizes the wearer. The photo would just not have the intended effect if, say, masks were typically transparent. The image does not insist on the wearing of masks for public health purposes, but as a symbol of participation in neoliberal subjectivity. Ideally we would want the former without the latter.

What is most about this image is the extent to which he is portrayed as a kind of David fighting the reactionary Goliath, and the fact he and the other nurses depicted in similar images have been deemed badasses on social media. This uncritical, reductive interpretation is welcomed by the media, as they reduce its multivalent meaning to a One that is easily integrated and disseminated by neoliberal forces. The image equates nurses with neoliberalism, and then says that neoliberalism is under threat from spontaneous, chaotic right-wing sentiment, and we have to save it. The point is not to save anything here. We don’t want either.

Certainly, these right-wing protesters will not agree with my desire to shift the responsibility of public health and social ills broadly from individuals onto institutions. But unless we understand the psychological effects of these two conflicting readings, the socioeconomic reasons for the “anti-science” biases of the right-wing working class will continue to mysteriously elude us, and we will never develop a revolutionary programme that can appeal to them. 

Another notable media moment is the response of pundits and social media to the photos of crowds of people on Florida beaches despite stay-at-home orders. It is a prime example of the red-herring nature of the social distancing discourse as it is being deployed by the state and media. A million pundits will afterwards be brought on to talk about the necessity of social distancing and individual measures, but none will be brought on to talk about how the entire capitalist class is exploiting the crisis for economic gain and leaving the working class in ruin. This fact alone should be enough to reveal the neoliberal sympathies of major news media all across the political spectrum, even if the sheer necessity of social distancing in the abstract is something we agree on. 

Nonetheless, on this note, the virus has revealed one promising fact regarding class consciousness. The anger conjured by such an image as the Florida beaches one demonstrates how media can organize and tap into mass reserves of working class anger, encompassing an even greater swathe of people than had voted for Bernie Sanders. Our mission needs to be redirecting that anger towards the right sources. I am excited for the day when people will harbor the same degree of resentment towards photos of healthcare executive meetings where they plot the indirect murder of millions, as they harbored towards those crowds of people on Florida beaches. 

Finally, we need to be wary of the neoliberal ideology implicit in the “left-wing” media’s critique of Trump administration. It is misleading to write off Trump et. al’s “lack-of-preparedness” as “incompetence.” CNN/MSNBC routinely deploy these narratives as a front for the real reason: capitalism is designed to be insufficiently prepared for epidemics, and profit is at the top of Trump’s list of priorities as it is every other member of the ruling class. It is a defense of Trump that is more clandestine, clever, and pernicious than the outright jingoism on Fox News, which is so easy to criticize. When something is too easy to criticize, when the fruit hangs so low, when something appears so absolutely ridiculous (such as Trump’s recommendation to inject detergent to kill the virus), we do not name it childish and stupid and call it a day, we move to analyze why this is politically efficacious for him. The media never goes this extra mile, because it necessarily implicates themselves. 

In this way, we need to be careful in the manners in which we criticize Trump and the Republicans. In a bewildering fashion, criticizing Trump without criticizing the enablers and propagators of the subliminal fascist ideology that produce Trump, criticizing Trump on the terms of the media by rehashing stale truisms, rather than on our own terms, becomes more dangerous than just not saying anything at all. In many social circles criticizing Trump risks becoming the mere political performance of a neoliberal media-sanctioned, acceptable politics when the bulk of our criticism should be directed towards capitalism. We redeem these performances by incorporating criticism of Trump into a Marxist analysis of the coronavirus response and the state-media apparatus.

In essence, for the entire the ruling class, regardless of the response to the coronavirus they propose, are entirely pleased with the virus. It means more sick bodies, more hospital beds filled, hospitals raking in millions, a chance to abrogate countless union contracts, engender mass unemployment and establish a massive labor reserve army to be redirected wherever workers are needed, upending millions of lives so that the labor and markets can be realigned as necessary. All the while the military budget will not be reduced by a dime. 

The logic of capitalism will always find a way to work, regardless of the stated intentions of even the most progressive politicians. Many progressive Democrats will criticize the shortcomings of this or that stimulus package but will put on the most pathetic resistance to the Republicans; the best we may get is a tweet declaring their belief in its insufficiency but a week later they’ve forgotten about it. Then with the military budget, nobody questions it, not even AOC, and Democrats are routinely signing off on all Trump’s increases of the military budget with the media not even batting an eye. The virus hits, and all of a sudden nobody is talking about socialized medicine; the virus hits, all of a sudden, Nancy Pelosi is peddling a universal basic income, a reactionary policy being dressed up in progressive language that if implemented would slowly eat away at the welfare state. If public health really mattered to the state, the military budget would have been sacked ages ago and a health care system a million times more efficient and advanced would have been implemented. The virus would have been eliminated in a week. If public health really mattered to the media, they would have spent a million collective hours analyzing how we got here and providing systematic  instead of policing the masses for their personal failures to stop the spread of the virus. And “how we got here” goes far beyond criticizing Trump’s decision to dissolve a pandemic response team. 

TL,DR, or conclusion. Social distancing is not the problem, but the discourse around it is. To talk about social distancing without also talking about at the same time the failures of the state is to contribute to the formation of a proto-fascist subjectivity that clandestinely moves the onus of public health from institutions onto individuals. Again, I am not critiquing the science behind social distancing, I am just trying to draw attention to the implicit biopolitical tragedy: when the state and media apparatus manages to ideologically correlate science biological necessity, our own survival, with its own economic interests. We cannot talk blithely about social distancing. We must always mention the failures of the state every single time we talk about social distancing. We cannot do one or the other, or neither--it must always be both. To do only the one is proto-fascist, to do only the other is anti-science and anti-life. To brag about one’s quarantine or social distancing skills without also engaging in a political critique of the capitalist state is to wave your proto-fascist carrying card, a performance of faith and support in the neoliberal state. To wish death on those not social distancing, on Twitter, is neoliberal. One might argue one is simply trying to be “apolitical” by talking about social distancing and not explicitly about the need for institutions to act though in fact, it is a silence that is a thousand times more political than this entire post.

We are dealing with an ideology in many ways more subversive and pernicious than the jingoistic chaos of Trump et al., especially since it is taken to be representative of the “Good” in the media’s Manichaean political discourse. To uncritically reproduce this ideology and discourse is to contribute to the socioeconomic factors that led us to Trump, and will certainly lead us to people far worse than him in the future.

[thetygre]

Dark Souls Lore Ramblings #5

Well, fuck. Given that I’ve said ‘I’ll talk about it later’ in every other of my Dark Souls ramblings, let’s talk about it now.

Magic!

So way back in Demon’s Souls, magic was kind of a big deal. I’d go so far as to say that it was even one of the driving parts of the game’s narrative. @soulsmusings could probably tell you more about it, but the crux is that God (a real one, singular, with a capital G) granted humanity magic in the form of a giant world tree. Magic derived from the soul, and the soul derived from cognition. So when people started abusing magic and acting like butts, the giant world tree turned into the Old One and started making demons and devouring the world. A deist God’s fail-safe against sin.

One of the signs of the end times in DeS is that priests can cast miracles again, which as they take as a sign from God. At the same time, sorcery and witchcraft are making a comeback, which is viewed as a sign of demonic corruption. The truth, of course, is that all of it is the same magic coming from the Old One. Big revelation. Requires you to kill a good NPC to get it. Totally worth it. Nets you one of the best items in the game.

Since in Dark Souls the soul proper is split between the Soul as animating energy and Humanity/whatever as cognition, there’s obviously some differences. But I still think there’s still some similarities too; all magic is magic. It’s not different kinds of energy, but the same eldritch force being manipulated different ways. Magic’s ‘material’ is Soul, the energy of life, and can be performed by anything with Soul.

The exact process works like this from how I see it. The caster’s intelligence or faith is the initiating force in their being for magic. It not only starts the process of magic, but how it is to be formed specifically. Maybe the caster says a prayer, maybe they conjure a spell. However they do it, this recitation draws on the caster’s Soul to produce the energy needed to actually perform the magic. Finally, this internal process is directed to the external world through a focus.

I imagine that focuses are necessary so that the caster’s own body doesn’t act as the focus. That could lead to all sorts of nasty effects; head explodes Scanners style, spontaneous combustion, nasty mutations. All kinds of gnarly Warhammer shit. (It’d be freaking sweet.)

The most common form of magic is (arguably) sorcery. Sorcery draws on and projects the caster’s own Soul energy, plain and simple. It’s based on Intelligence, which I take to mean that spells are based in reciting rituals, formulas, magic words, all that stuff. There’s definitely a Vancian element to all the spellcasting in Dark Souls (which makes me miss the mana bar from DeS) i.e. the caster prepares their spells beforehand like bullets in a chamber. When the caster runs out, that’s that; they have to rest before they can ‘reload’. It’s the classic magic system from Dungeons and Dragons. (And by ‘classic’, I mean ‘nearly everyone hates it’.) Anyway, what this has to do with Intelligence is presumably a connection between memory capacity for spells and the ability to comprehend just exactly what the magic is doing and how it works in the universe.

Seath is credited as being the creator of sorcery in Lordran. I’m assuming that doesn’t mean he created magic itself, but rather that he was the first being to come up with the formulae and methods of sorcery and, more importantly, that he taught it to humans. Kind of reminds me of those old myths about fallen angels who taught humans about make-up and astrology and everything else. Seath gets remembered in a big way since the Dragon School of Vinheim is the Souls’ world’s number one prestidigitation destination. Dragon School’s sorcery is focused mostly on practical uses, like offense and defense. Of course other schools have other specialties; Oolacile focused on illusions and mind-tricks, for instance. I get the feeling that Vinheim doesn’t really allow much room for other schools by the time Dark Souls rolls around. They’ve become kind of THE authority on magic, and anyone outside of them is looked down upon.

The focus of sorcery is the catalyst. It’s a wand, it’s a staff, it’s whatever. I can’t really add much that doesn’t exam each catalyst item-by-item or gets into the entire history of why wizards and witches use staves and wands. But for basic, universal magic-users, the catalyst is the perfect item for channeling energy and acting as a focus.

Dark/Abyssal magic is where things to start to get interesting. Like I talked about when I talked about the Dark, dark magic has a tangible, physical force to it. It isn’t just energy like soul sorcery, but a worldly material. Even if that material is just the same kind of nebulous half-stuff that the Dark and Humanity are made of, it still packs enough of a wallop to add some extra damage.

Dark magic works by drawing not just on the caster’s soul like regular sorcery, but also their Humanity; hence, it is a school exclusive to humans. The actual process used is a projection of the Jungian shadow or the Freudian id, to use them there fancy academical terms. Dark sorcery is a projection of malice, envy, or desire; the base things that the Dark is made of. By drawing on their own Humanity, the sorcerer is essentially drawing on a piece of the Dark and, therefore, drawing on the Dark as a whole to empower their spells. This begins an interesting trend in magic that we see where casters get their spells not just from their own Soul, but by channeling a Lord Soul. Which brings us to our next topic...

Pyromancy! Or, more precisely, true pyromancy. As you’ll recall from the opening cinematic and the Izalith catalyst description, pyromancy originally began as an extension of sorcery. But why fire in particular? First reason I can think of is that it’s a sign of alliance to the First Flame. Heck, it would make more sense for sorcery to be based off of true pyromancy instead of the other way around, all things considered. Second reason goes back into my theory about channeling Lord souls. If dark magic draws on the Dark Soul, or at least little bits of it, than true pyromancy might have been drawn from the Life Soul, or whatever you want to call the Witch’s Lord Soul.

There’s a morphological debate about what the precise scientific definition about what ‘life’ actually is. One definition states that life is anything with a core temperature, that must consume resources to survive, and is capable of reproduction. The definition was immediately refuted when it was pointed out that, by this criteria, fire is a life form; it certainly has a core temperature, must consume tinder to sustain itself, and is capable of reproducing itself by fission. The point of this little anectdote is to demonstrate that, out of the natural elements, fire is the closest to being its own life-form. So it only makes sense that the Life Soul would produce fire when it is used for magic. Fire is alive (in a sense), and life cannot survive without the things that fire is associated with providing (light, heat, etc.), including on a broader civilized scale.

Whole thing’s rather moot at this point. Witch of Izalith took the Life Soul and true pyromancy with it and sent it all to Hell in a handbasket. Now the Witch, the Life Soul, and true pyromancy are swallowed up by the Flame of Chaos. I have to think that every original true pyromancer was affected by the Flame of Chaos, and only a select few made it out alive without either being burned to crisp, mutated into a demon, or both. Quelaana is, as we know, the founder of all modern pyromancy. And the very nature of a pyromancer’s flame lends it to being spread across the world.

There appear to be different attitudes to pyromancy across the world. In the Great Swamp, pyromancers are looked down on as weird swamp hermits with destructive capabilities. By contrast, in Lordran, even modern pyromancers are still given some respect for carrying on the legacy of Lost Izalith. I have to imagine that Lordran is the exception, not the rule. Outside Lordran, the Dragon School and the Way of White are still the primary organizations for magic, and pyromancers operate outside that organization. The Dragon School might look down on pyromancy as a corruption of ‘true magic’, and the Way of White might even demonize pyromancers as witches or demon worshipers. This is dark fantasy after all, and what’s dark fantasy without a good inquisition?

The pyromancer’s flame is probably the most fascinating out of all the magic foci. It is, in essence, a piece of the Flame of Chaos, a sprite that fissioned off of the corrupted Life Soul. What Humanity is to the Dark Soul, the pyromancer’s flame is to the Life Soul. (More or less.) Like Humanity, it can be grown, split apart again, and distributed even further. Pyromancers literally hand their students a little bit of their own flame as they pass it along. In the process, the flame draws from the pyromancer’s soul and cognition; each flame carries a little bit of whoever is passing it on. Just think; the pyromancer flame you have has a little bit of Quelaana and the Witch of Izalith in it by default, and all the people in between you and them as well.

The sheer potency of the pyromancer’s flame means that it doesn’t need an initiating force like intelligence or faith; it is active on its own volition. It is both the focus, the Lord Soul being drawn on, and the projector itself. True pyromancy was magic that drew on the Life Soul; modern pyromancy is magic projected into a fragment of the Life Soul. Kind of switched around.

That being said, modern pyromancy still draws on environmental sources like true pyromancy might have done. The main place pyromancers come from is the Great Swamp. A swamp, in perspective, is the perfect place for pyromancy, especially if it draws on life. Swamps, especially in dark fantasy, are generally pictured as these stagnant rotting holes filled with mire and decay. The truth is, swamps, from an ecological point of view, are cradles of life, and host an immense variety of species of flora and fauna. When you are in a swamp, you are immediately surrounded by life. Ergo, a swamp is an ideal place for anybody wishing to draw on life energy to fuel their magic.

There’s also the practical advantage of a swamp for pyromancy. Swamps produce gases that naturally ignite; philosophical pyromancers might hope to gain some insight from observing this natural process on how nature produces flame. More importantly, swamps are damp; any accident that happens with a fire in a swamp will be immediately contained. This is in contrast to say, a forest, which is also full of life. But one stray spark in a forest can set the whole thing ablaze. Probably how pyromancers got such a bad rap for themselves outside Lordran.

Finally, there’s miracles. Miracles are supposedly magic powers drawn on from the gods themselves. Given that the term ‘god’ is somewhat nebulous in Dark Souls, it’s hard to figure out what that could actually mean. Maybe miracles are magic that draw on the Light Soul or even the First Flame itself for power? I’m kind of doubtful about this theory; the whole crux of Dark Souls is that the First Flame is dying and Gwyn is portioning out the Light Soul just to keep it alive. He probably wouldn’t want humans endangering it in any way, and the Way of White would have stepped in and quit teaching miracles and rites.

Which leads me to think that this is all like Demon’s Souls again; it’s all magic. Miracles are the same as sorcery, just through different methods. And really, how different are miracles and sorcery? Miracles are generated by the spellcaster reciting stories and psalms in their mind. (Which I actually think is really cool, especially when it’s revealed that weaker miracles are just abridged stories or fragments of them.) But in the end, it’s still memorizing a formulae and drawing on Soul to bring magic into the world. The only notable difference between sorcery and miracles is the nature of spells; miracles focus on healing, divination, and protection. But as we’ve established, different schools of magic focus on different effects. It’s entirely within reason to conclude that the miracles of the Way of White are nothing but another school of sorcery. There are even items that let you trade out what you the caster uses to initiate magic; Velka’s items let a cleric use intelligence for magic, for instance.

The focus for miracles is talismans. Talismans strike me as being a kind of fetish more than anything. When looked at with a certain eye, they look kind of like little dolls, even if it’s just a simple head and body. So the caster might use the talisman as a kind of totem, having it represent themselves as a focus for the miracle they invoke. Sympathetic magic kind of deal. The relative simplicity of talismans means that they are available to all members of the Way of White, from poor lay practitioners to arch-clerics. And that really speaks to how far-reaching the Way of White is across social strata both within Lordran and in the broader world outside of it.

So... I shrugged this off for a while. Anybody want to hear about anything in particular for the next one?

[chanoyu-to-wa]

Nampō Roku, Book 4 (14):  Concerning the Display of Musical Instruments in the Shoin.

14) If the host or [one of the] guests has a passion¹ [for music], a koto [琴]², biwa [琵琶]³, shaku-hachi [尺八]⁴, fue [笛]⁵, or some [other instrument] of that sort⁶ may be displayed on [or beneath] the chigai-dana⁷.

_________________________

¹Ete araba [得手あらば].

    The word ete [得手] means not only technically skilled, but also includes the nuances of motivation and inclination:  ones “strong point.”  The person in question not only can play well, but is devoted to his music, and seeks solace in it -- and is capable of infusing his playing with overtones of his emotions.  The word can sometimes be translated “be in one's element,” and “get the wind in one's sails.”

    It is in this element of passion* that the word differs from jōzu [上手], which means skillful, proficient.

    There is no indication that the interested party would be expected to perform on the instruments that were displayed (though that might be a possibility), but that their presence would inspire a corresponding interest in the instruments themselves:  as will all things displayed in the shoin, any instrument exhibited there would have had to be an exceptional piece, either a venerable antique, or one with special, perhaps historical, associations‡

    While this entry seems to be an authentic part of Jōō's original set of notes (or at least was written by Jōō himself), nothing is said about the display of musical instruments in either the Kun-dai Kan Sa-u Chō Ki [君臺観左右帳記], or the several versions of the O-kazari Ki [御飾記] / O-kazari Sho [御飾書].  This material, then, may derive from conventions that prevailed in the residences of the high court nobility at that time**.

    The same may also be true of several of the other entries that follow this one. __________ *Which, since the Edo period, the Japanese seem to consider the mark of an amateur.

†And so describes the dispassionate professional.  Not, of course, that Jōō and Rikyū were devoid of passion in their practice of chanoyu, but as a result of the convention of people being forced into doing things that they despise (as are many of the tea masters even today) which arose as a result of the special circumstances that prevailed in the Edo period.

‡Instruments of this sort are frequently mentioned in the classics, and this kind of thing would have been common knowledge, and so does not need to be mentioned.

**Many of the participants in the practice of kōdō [香道] were court nobles -- who often had little to do once the reins of government had been usurped by the military class.  And while the Shino family (with whom Jōō seems to have been more closely connected) drew more of their guests from among the wealthy machi-shū of Sakai than from the nobles (who patronized the Sanjō-nishi [三條西] family of incense masters), Jōō would have the opportunity to interact with members of the kuge [公卿] (the hereditary court nobility) during his poetic activities (the antiques displayed in the homes of the impoverished nobles were the prime targets of his acquisitive activities, first on behalf of his customers -- and later, when his finances allowed, for his own collection -- and the pretext of poetry gatherings provided Jōō with entrée to their mansions).

²Koto [琴].

    Often translated “Japanese harp” (on account of its sound quality), or “Japanese zither,” this word names a whole family of musical instruments, which differ in both size and the number of strings with which they are strung.

 ³Biwa [琵琶].

    The biwa is a kind of lute.

⁴Shaku-hachi [尺八].

    This is a variety of bamboo flute, which is held vertically while being played.

    The shaku-hachi was traditionally made from the most dense part of the bamboo clum, cut from near the root, and it is this that accounts for its remarkable, rich tone.

    While both Shibayama Fugen and Tanaka Senshō give the name as shaku-hachi [尺八] as common to all of their sources, the Sadō Ko-ten Zen-shu [茶道古典全集] text, which purportedly replicates the text preserved in the Enkaku-ji manuscript, uses two kanji for this name that are found nowhere else (including in the large, unabridged, Chinese and Japanese dictionaries available on line).  These kanji are shown below*.

    Whether this word was a variant unique to Edo period Japan -- or even a copyist’s mistake -- cannot be said, though such “koku-ji” [国字] (kanji-forms created in Japan) are known, and occasionally have became mainstream (at least in Japanese usage).  I attempted to find a Unicode editor on-line that would allow me to create the kanji so that I could include them here (since I would like the quotations reproduced in this commentary to be as faithful to the Enkaku-ji text as possible), but without success.

    The pronunciation of this compound would presumably be shaku-hachi. ___________ *Adding a take-kammuri [𥫗] to the kanji shaku [尺] and hachi [八] would make it clear that the kanji refer to the name of the instrument, rather than a linear measurement.  That said, context would surely prevent any misunderstanding -- and the fact that the usual kanji are found in every other source strongly suggests that, over the centuries, there has been no misunderstanding whatsoever.

⁵Fue [笛].

    This instrument is more like what Westerners think of when they hear the word flute.  It is made from a length of bamboo with uniform thickness, producing a lighter, refulgent tone.  The range is determined by the length of the bamboo, which is variable.

    The Japanese fue (above) seems to have had seven holes, while the Korean fue (known as the Koma-bue [高麗笛];* below) had only six.  Both varieties had been popular since ancient times.  This seems to be a kind of transverse flute -- one that is held horizontally while playing, as seen in the painting, below.

    The classics indicate that the fue was often the preferred instrument of young men, since it was easily carried on their person, and so ready for an impromptu concert at any time of day or night. ___________ *The name of the Korean flute is also written Koma-bue [狛笛], and koma-bue [駒笛].  While the initial kanji in Koma-bue [狛笛] refers to Korea (specifically the ancient ethnic-Korean kingdom of Koguryeo [高句麗], from whence the prototype of this kind of flute was brought to Japan), that in the second compound should be regarded as a hentai-gana (koma [駒] means a colt, a small horse; possibly the substitution was the result of confusion over the second kanji “句” in the name Koguryeo).

⁶Nado mo [なども].

    Instruments arranged on (or beneath) the chigai-dana must, in the first place, be of a size that allows them to be displayed comfortably.  But, also, there must be a reason for displaying them, and this is something that the wording of this entry might seem to obscure (since it is not just a matter of the host, or one of the guests -- by implication, the shōkyaku, since it is for him that the gathering was arranged -- having an interest in music).

    Commonplace objects should never be displayed in the shoin, simply for the sake of having something to arrange in that setting.  Rather -- and this is true not only for the shoin, but for every kind of room used for chanoyu -- the host must always have a reason for deciding to display them.  And this does not necessarily mean that they must be costly antiques.  But there should be a reason for everything that the host chooses to do -- nothing should be done in a perfunctory, or seemingly off-handed, way.

    This is the lesson that we should learn from the Mozuno ko-yashiki:  when the host has no particular reason for displaying something, then it is best not to display it.  In this case, the utensils necessary for the service of tea should be brought out at the beginning of the temae, and taken away again at the end.  The mizuya-dōko, which Rikyū created for that tiny tearoom, helped to facilitate this process.  But it was the maturation of his reasoning that inspired the creation of the mizuya-dōko, not the other way around.

⁷Chigai-dana ni kazaru nari [違棚にかざる也].

     Instruments that were of large size -- the koto and biwa, for example -- would have to be displayed below the chigai-dana*.  Small-sized instruments, such as the flutes, could be displayed on one of the staggered shelves. ___________ *Indeed, the size of these things meant that they could only be displayed in a room where the alcove for the chigai-dana was 1-ken [一間] (6-shaku or approximately 182 cm) wide.

    During the Edo period, a style of tokonoma termed the biwa-toko [琵琶床] (below) made its appearance.  This arrangement basically removes the chigai-dana, so that the focus is directed to the display area for a biwa (which formerly was beneath the staggered shelves).

    The shelf on the right side of this kind of toko is often (incorrectly) interpreted as being a tsuke-shoin.  it is, in fact, a biwa-dana [琵琶棚] (or, biwa-dai [琵琶臺, 琵琶台]).  A tsuke-shoin would be narrower (rarely extending more than 1-shaku 5-sun from the window which forms the outer wall), while the biwa-dana is square, as can be seen in the above photo.

    In this photo, a kanshō [喚鐘] is shown suspended above the biwa-dana, but this might be objectionable (I hesitate to say “wrong” when this kind of thing has been done in every instance of a biwa-dana that I have seen in modern Japan -- at least in cases where the shoin is used for chanoyu), since it shows that the biwa-dana has been interpreted as a tsuke-shoin.  (In the case of an actual tsuke-shoin, there must be a pillar on the right where the shumoku [撞木] -- the wooden hammer for striking the kanshō -- can be suspended; but no provision for the shumoku is made when the shelf is a biwa-dana.  In the photo, the shumoku has been hung on the pillar projecting from the wall at the rear of the tokonoma, but since the shumoku is held in the right hand, this is problematic -- and suggests an attempt that was made to redress an oversight.)

    This kind of thing is, unfortunately, common in the modern tea world.

[myviewmyvoice]

    Overview This project was inspired by and drew from Alexander Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus, Hortense J. Spillers “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987) and Sylvia Wynter’s “‘No Humans Involved’: An Open Letter to My Colleagues” (1994) in connection to the Black woman’s body through time and space in conjunction with “Fragment of a Queen’s Face,” a figure in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) in New York.

Theory I: Flesh and Fragment Theory I is an epistolary to “The Fragment of a Queen’s Face.” The figure was made from yellow jasper during the Amarna Period (ca.1353-1336) during the reign of Pharaoh Akhenaten in the late 18th Dynasty. The most significant feature of the figure is that more half of the head is missing and only the lips are visible. In the letter, I use personal history and connect various works that articulate historical and sociopolitical views of the Black female body.

The Visits describes my first visit and subsequent returns to the “Queen’s Face” and my affinity to the figure. Decoding the Hieroglyphics features theoretical groundings of how the “Queen” came to be. #SayHerName challenges the silence about the violence experienced by Black women throughout history. The Killmonger in Me discusses the role Black women in science and cultural institutions. The Riddle connects the past to the present. P.S. The Ties that Bond makes universal connections.

The Visits

I first met you when I was 16. As an US History assignment, I had to visit cultural institutions and landmarks around New York City including The Met. When we got there, my home girl and I headed towards the Ancient Egyptian section. I was in awe of all the artifacts. Out of them all, I was most intrigued by your warm and welcoming polished yellow jasper. I was looking at half of you, yet you still seemed complete. I had never seen anything like you. Your label read, “Fragment of a Queen’s Face.” Who were you and why do you look foreign yet familiar? We circled the museum and bounced, but since then I have always returned to see you. When I was bored, when I broke up with him, when I started college, when I wanted to escape New York without leaving the city—it was a no-brainer, all I needed was a MetroCard and time.

I have since wondered about how you were damaged: who damaged you? Why do I feel such an affinity with you? The damage done aligns with the history of removing noses is hardly a coincidence. The fracture right above your cupid’s bow looks like whoever struck you was trying to destroy your nose and ended up taking off most of your head. However, I see the attention to detail that went into creating you. Your smile line, the creases in your neck…You were loved. Your plaque reads: She cannot be securely identified with certainty.

The Met speculates that you are either Queen Nefertari or Kiya. The museum also gives possible reasons for what happened to you, among them a territorial conquest, but after looking up other the images and figures of Nefertari and Kiya—some of their noses are missing as well. Apparently, when the artists created their works with wide noses, they were likely to be destroyed.

In November of 2017, I needed to escape and decided to pay you a visit, but this time was different. My knowledge of the Black experience had grown exponentially, now you weren’t just a face of curiosity. In my naiveté, I was a bit voyeuristic; now I looked and thought of you critically. Without words and sealed lips, you began to tell a story. I listened with my eyes.

She cannot be securely identified with certainty.

Decoding the Hieroglyphics

hieroglyph, n. 1. a. A hieroglyphic character; a figure of some object, as a tree, animal, etc., standing for a word (or, afterwards, in some cases, a syllable or sound), and forming an element of a species of writing found on ancient Egyptian monuments and records; thence extended to such figures similarly used in the writing of other races. Also, a writing consisting of characters of this kind. 2. a. transf. and fig. A figure, device, or sign having some hidden meaning; a secret or enigmatical symbol; an emblem. b. humorously. A piece of writing difficult to decipher. 3. One who makes hieroglyphic inscriptions. Rare.

A few ways that we identify people is by how they look (from their physical appearance to their fashion statements), the way they speak (soda vs. pop) and their name (Hayashi vs. Hernandez). This is not perfect because it is always an incomplete picture. I state this because somewhere along my life journey, I learned how looters and destroyers—who called themselves archaeologists, soldiers, historians, geographers, and the likes—visited Egypt and did as they pleased. Their colonial practices  excavated and disrupted histories and legacies in the name of research, imperialism and culture. Despite the great cultural history here, ankhs as a symbol of religion and wide noses, signifying Blackness, were damaged and destroyed.

“I would make a distinction in this case between ‘body’ and ‘flesh’ and impose that distinction as the central one between captive and liberated subject-positions. In that sense, before the ‘body’ there is the ‘flesh,’ that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography.” (Spillers, 1987: p.67)

By highlighting the works of Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter, Alexander Weheliye (2014) argue that racial assemblages—humans, not-quite humans and non-humans—determine differentiation and hierarchy of races through sociopolitical processes. Using the term habeas viscus (you shall have the flesh), Weheliye relies on Spillers’ distinction between the flesh and the body along with the writ habeas corpus (you shall have the body) to examine the “breaks, crevices, movements, languages and such zones between the flesh and the law” (p. 11).

I decided to look at Spillers’ (1987) and Wynter’s (1994) work and how they examine language in relationship to the violence against Black bodies. In reference to the violence committed against Black bodies during slavery, Spillers (1987) argues that flesh tells the narrative of the body and when it came to physical trauma—breaks, fractures, brandings, punctures, missing parts, etc.—the body kept score. This is what Spillers called the hieroglyphics of the flesh.

         According to Spillers, the hieroglyphics of the flesh is not just the violence committed against the Black body, like the “chokecherry tree” on Sethe’s back in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, but the flesh itself as a marker for racial violence no matter the institution whether scientific, social, political, educational or economic, it is the color of the flesh, which determines if and what kind of violence is inflicted on someone (Spillers, 1987). For example, the impact of mass incarceration on the Black and Latino communities versus white communities. Blacks and Latinos get harsher sentences than their white counterparts simply because they are not white.

Wynter’s and Spillers’ work overlaps when they discuss “captivity.” Spillers writes about the “captive body” while Wynter references James Baldwin’s term “captive population” which describes how Black lives are viewed and how we are a nation within a nation (Baldwin, 1968/2017). From these captivities emerge questions surrounding the value of captive lives and how they communicate our truths and what happens when we refuse the hegemonic “truth.”

“A riot is the language of the unheard.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

When discussing the rhetoric of the hegemonic “truth,” Wynter (1994) calls out grammarians, the scholars (gatekeepers) who over centuries have perpetually reproduced gender and racial inequities through their literature. Wynter argued that rhetoric in the Humanities and the Social Sciences creates and maintains a caste system of racial hierarchy where whites are on top (dominant) and Blacks on the bottom (inferior). However,  grammarians, who can identify as any gender or race, erase race and codify racialized language using economic and geographical terms such as “middle class suburbia” to mean white and “inner city poor and jobless” to equal young Black males (Wynter, 1994). Of course, there are exceptions to who is being identified and discussed within these categories, as previously mentioned, but for the most part, this framing of language conceals the racial oppression and the “hidden cost” of “subjective understanding” (pg. 60).

I wanted to argue about “today’s world,” but truthfully the hidden cost has always been a thing post-1492. In Spillers’ analysis about the “truth” value of the words that represent race, she wrote “We might concede, at the very least, that sticks and bricks might break our bones, but words will most certainly kill us (p. 68).”

You not only have markings, but part of you is missing. Was someone clumsy or was it a violent sociopolitical process used to maintain hierarchy? If those who committed this act against you were rivals during ancient times, why didn’t they just break you down to rubble? What purpose does keeping half of a face serve? We know the natives used to go in and steal gold and things that bling bling. You’re not that. Or maybe your lips weren’t destroyed because they thought no one would listen to what you had to say? I study your fractures again, especially the groove above your cupid’s bow…

The Met can keep their postulations. I’m wiser now.

She cannot be securely identified with certainty.

#SayHerName

While looking at you, Sarah Baartman (1789-1815) came to mind. Of course there is a huge difference between the exploited life of a Black woman and the exploited life of statue of a Black woman, but parallels are present. Born approximately 4,000 miles south from where you were on the same continent, Sarah Baartman was called a “freak” and was used for “science and spectacle” because of her large buttocks (McKittrick, 2010 p. 117). Enslaved people were commonly being used for medical research without any ethical consideration (Spillers, 1987). Sarah Baartman was no different because her body was used to explain inherent Black inferiority. As McKittrick (2010) argued:

“…across time and space, and sometimes across race, Baartman is the analytical template through which racist pornography, the grotesque, and the lewd seduction of black female popular-culture figures can be understood in relation to a history of racial imprisonment, bodily dismemberment, sexism, and white supremacy.” (p. 118)

I sat with that. In between those lines is a patriarchal component that we, as Black women, sometimes unconsciously privilege before our own lives: the lives of our brothers. Sometimes we don’t think or know how to articulate the violence inflicted on us (Love, 2017). I think of my brothers safety in this world knowing that I am just as vulnerable. Not until the last two years, did I center the violence inflicted on me because that is the way the world turns and I have things to get done….until one day it caught up to me. I began to do a survey of my spirit injuries—more than I thought—and some were unrecognizable, a hieroglyph. I guess I should consider myself lucky because I know what needs healing while many others don’t and/or can’t. Adrien Katherine Wing argues that if there are many injuries it results into a what Williams calls a “spirits murder” (1990).

Then there is the actual murdering of Black (trans)women and the lack of recognition when she has taken her last breath at the hands of the state. Things are starting to change with social media platforms like Twitter, to share our sisters’ stories. Think tanks such as African American Policy Forum (Crenshaw, Ritchie, Anspach, Gilmer, Harris, 2015) and sites like Black Perspective that make sure these women are not erased. The margins in which these stories reside are now disrupting the mainstream. We are learning their stories, honoring their lives, finally having these conversations and saying their names…

#ShantelDavis #MyaHall #KendraJames #LaTanyaHaggerty #FrankiePerkins #KathrynJohnson #DanetteDaniels #AlbertaSpruill #EleanorBumpurs #MargaretMitchell #ShellyFrey #YuvetteHenderson #KaylaMoore #TanishaAnderson #ShereeseFrancis #MichelleCusseaux #KyamLivingson #ShenequeProctor  #RekiaBoyd #AiyannaJones #TarikaWilson #AuraRosser #JanishaFonville #NewJersey4 #YvetteSmith #FrankiePerkins #KathrynJohnson #DanetteDaniels #AlbertaSpruill #DuannaJohnson #NizahMorris #IslanNettles #RosannMiller #SonjiTaylor #MalaikaBrooks #DeniseStewart #ConstanceGraham #PatriciaHartley #KorrynGaines #AlteriaWoods #CharleenaLyles #MorganRankins #CariannHithon

The Killmonger in Me

After Baartman’s death in 1815, her body was dismembered and placed in the Museum of Natural History in Paris until 2002. You, Queen, were “gifted” to the Met in 1926…The year my favorite girl was born…In Black Panther, when Killmonger stared at the mask with intrigue and Ulysses Klause asked if it was from Wakanda, Killmonger replied, “Nah. I’m just feeling it.” Killmonger wasn’t just “feeling it.” The connection is  much deeper than that. N’Jadaka (Killmonger) saw something in that Igbo mask. There was an affinity; a connection. I thought of our relationship, me and your fragmented face. I am not a psychoanalyst, but I know a lil’ sumthin’ sumthin’. For me, we are both fragments of a disjointed story. Our story.

Killmonger effortlessly challenges the history of artifacts placed in the museum. “How do you think your ancestors got these? Do you think they paid a fair price? Or did they take it…like they took everything else?” Art reflecting life.

Killmonger later states, “You got all this security in here watching me since I walked in…” He is addressing the surveillance of the Black body which determines the imprisonment, dismemberment and sexist cataloguing the body is to undergo (McKittrick, 2010; Spillers, 1987). As I write this there has been a surge of videos in where white people are calling the police because of the mere presence of Black people, which demonstrates the criminalization that follows the Black body in different spaces Anderson (2004) and the non-police surveillance of Black bodies (Dancy, Edwards and Davis, 2018).

Your life in a glass case is for the white gaze. You weren’t initially placed there for me to learn about my history. Of course, some could argue that if you weren’t brought to the museum, how would I get to see you. To that I say, if my ancestors and their artifacts weren’t brought over here, there wouldn’t be anything to debate. Therefore, I will need the colonizer and their pigmented minions to stay silent on the matter.

Speaking of pigmented minions, on May 25, 2018 at approximately 3:30pm, Mike and I went to the Met and I was showing him another sculpture with a missing nose and as I was raising my hand to its’ face, a security guard standing by the partition of your gallery and Gallery 119 yells at me, “Don’t touch!” My back was turned so I don’t know how long she was watching me, but clearly she had her eyes on me. I finessed a clapback that let her know I’m not the one without getting kicked out. She tried it.

Anyways, you’re made of jasper, a semi-precious stone which is a six and half to a seven on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness. Jasper can be harder than steel depending on the composition and when broken has a conchoidal fracture. Your impeccable smoothness and detail may have confused a perpetrator into thinking that you were actually weaker than you looked. Perhaps thinking you were going to break like granite, which was used for many of the figures. I think of all the Black women who have endured so much, but you wouldn’t know by looking at them. Even if you can see it, they are still standing despite the violence committed against them.

She cannot be securely identified with certainty.

The Riddle

Another movie filmed in a museum came to mind…when I was a little girl, I used to watch Don’t Eat the Pictures: Sesame Street at the Metropolitan Museum of Art all the time. Long story short, in the movie, a young Ancient Egyptian prince, Sahu or the “hidden one”, was trapped in the Met until he met two criteria: to answer the riddle, “Where does today meet yesterday?,” and his heart had to be lighter than a feather. If he fulfilled the requirements, he would reunite with his family as a star in the sky. The Sesame Street gang was also locked in and tried to help Sahu.

As the night went on, Big Bird and Snuffleupagus kept thinking of the answer. Finally, Big Bird figured out the answer: a museum. He also negotiated the weight of Sahu heart that was heavier than a feather because he missed his family. In the end, Sahu was able to reconnect with his family. That was real cut and dry, but my point is, like the riddle, you are part of my history and I am part of your future and we met at a museum; where today meets yesterday.

She cannot be securely identified with certainty.

P.S…The ties that Bond

“Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words.”  Rumi

I started to grow impatient with this project because I started it in the fall of 2018; the seasons changed, life and death happened. Black Panther and Everything is Love were released. I continued to learn about Black women, #Blackgirlmagic, Black Feminist Theory, Black Girls Rock!, Professional Black Girls, the ways in which Black women heal, the ways in which we love, and most importantly, our different survival mechanisms. We have survived a lot (shout out to Lorde and Gumbs).

I also realized that the universe is in concert, seeing N’Jadaka (Killmonger) in the museum scene staring at that Igbo mask gave me goosebumps. When I saw Beyonce at Coachella donned in Ancient Egyptian garb, it motivated me to step up and complete this project despite my demanding priorities and Murphy’s Law. Beverly Bond’s book, Black Girls Rock!, is filled with the narratives of Black women, young and old for us to embrace each other and to tell our stories. Then the Carters dropped Everything Is Love and their visual for “Apeshit” in the Louvre (the Met of Paris); lyrical references “I will never let you shoot the nose off my Pharaoh” and a nod to Prince’s Purple Rain (a project I completed, but not ready to share with the world) in “Black Effect”; “Black queen, you rescued us, you rescued us, rescued us” on “713” and; how can I forget the mature Jamaican woman explaining love and laughing. I realized we are all telling stories of Black women, Black experience. No matter where you get the message from the story will be told through the screen, audio and text whether in print or digital format. Kruger, Bond, The Carters…and people like me. We were all telling these stories in our own way. (Shout out to the homies, Kia Perry and EbonyJanice!)

Of all the bonds connected to this work, this is in honor of my grandmother, aka My Favorite Girl and my shweeheart. The woman who only had a third grade education, but a Ph.D. in Life from the School of Hard Knocks. The woman whose heart was bigger than her body and had a warrior spirit. In honor of her strength, her courage, her sense of humor (because sometimes you can’t do anything, but laugh) and her undying love. Although she is no longer here physically, her prayers, love and lessons still with me. Every once in awhile a lesson whispers in my ear. As I was making final edits, I heard: Nothing is due before its’ time. I miss you and thank you. 

Sources

Anderson, E. (2004). The Cosmopolitan Canopy. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 595, 14-31.

Baldwin J. (1968/2017) “Captive population.”  Esquire.

Crenshaw, K. Ritchie, A., Anspach, R., Gilmer, R., Harris. L., (2015). “Say her name: Resisting police brutality against Black women,” African American Policy Forum, Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies, Columbia Law School

Dancy, T. E., Edwards, K. T., & Earl Davis, J. (2018). Historically white universities and plantation politics: Anti-blackness and higher education in the black lives matter era. Urban Education, 53(2), 176-195.

Love, B. L. (2017). Difficult knowledge: When a Black feminist educator was too afraid to #SayHerName. English Education, 49(2), 197–208.

McKittrick, K. (2010). Science quarrels sculpture: The politics of reading Sarah Baartman. Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, 43(2), 113-130. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/44030627

Spillers, H. J. (1987). Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: An American grammar book. African American Literary Theory, 257-279.

Weheliye, A. G. (2014). Habeas viscus: Racializing assemblages, biopolitics, and black feminist theories of the human.

Williams, P. (1997). Spirit‐murdering the messenger: the discourse of fingerprinting as the law’s response to racism in: A. Wing (Ed.) Critical race feminism: a reader New York New York University Press 229-236

Wing, A.K. (1990). ‘Brief reflections toward a multiplicative theory and praxis of being’ Berkeley Women’s Law Journal, Vol. 6: 181–201.

Wynter, S. (1994). “‘No Humans Involved’: An Open Letter to My Colleagues.” Forum N.H.I.: Knowledge for the 21st Century, in N.H./. Forum: Knowledge for the 21st Century’s inaugural issue “Knowledge on Trial.” 1, no. 1 : 42-73.

  Theory I: Flesh and Fragment Overview This project was inspired by and drew from Alexander Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus, Hortense J. Spillers “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987) and Sylvia Wynter’s "'No Humans Involved': An Open Letter to My Colleagues" (1994) in connection to the Black woman's body through time and space in conjunction with “Fragment of a Queen’s Face,” a figure in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) in New York.