#cause most of my course does narrative/children's books

[koytix]

needing that deadline stress to kick in so that I make more work please. like. we have just over a WEEK can I PLEASE start crunching this deadline

[supersoakerfullofblood]

Point of View: the Biggest Thing You're Missing!

Point of view is one of the most important elements of narrative fiction, especially in our modern writing climate, but you rarely hear it seriously discussed unless you go to school for writing; rarely do help blogs or channels hit on it, and when they do, it's never as in-depth as it should be. This is my intro to POV: what you're probably missing out on right now and why it matters. There are three essential parts of POV that we'll discuss.

Person: This is the easiest part to understand and the part you probably know already. You can write in first person (I/me), second (You), and third person (He/she/they). You might hear people talk about how first person brings the reader closer to the central character, and third person keeps them further away, but this isn't true (and will be talked about in the third part of this post!) You can keep the reader at an intimate or alien distance to a character regardless of which person you write in. The only difference--and this is arguable--is that first person necessitates this intimacy where third person doesn't, but you still can create this intimacy in third person just as easily. In general, third person was the dominant (and really the only) tense until the late 19th century, and first person grew in popularity with the advent of modernism, and nowadays, many children's/YA/NA books are written in first person (though this of course doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't write those genres in the third person). Second person is the bastard child. Don't touch it, even if you think you're clever, for anything the length of a novel. Shorter experimental pieces can use it well, but for anything long, its sounds more like a gimmick than a genuine stylistic choice.

Viewpoint Character: This is a simple idea that's difficult in practice. Ask yourself who is telling your story. This is typically the main character, but it needn't be. Books like The Book Thief, The Great Gatsby, Rebecca, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the Sherlock series are told from the perspective of a side character who isn't of chief importance to the narrative. Your viewpoint character is this side character, the character the reader is seeing the world through, so the main character has to be described through them. This isn't a super popular narrative choice because authors usually like to write from the perspective of their most interesting character, but if you think this choice could fit your story, go for it! You can also swap viewpoint characters throughout a story! A word of warning on that: only change your viewpoint character during a scene/chapter break. Switching mid-scene without alerting the reader (and even when you do alert the reader) will cause confusion. I guarantee it.

Means of Perception; or, the Camera: This part ties the first two together. If you've ever heard people talk about an omniscient, limited, etc. narrator, this is what they mean. This part also includes the level of intimacy the reader has with the viewpoint character: are we in their heads, reading their thoughts, or are we so far away that we can only see their actions? If your story is in a limited means of perception, you only have access to your character's head, eyes, and interpretations, where an omniscient narrator sees through all characters' heads at once. (This doesn't eliminate the viewpoint character--most of your writing will still be in that character's head, but you're allowed to reach into other characters' thoughts when needed. You could also be Virginia Woolf, who does fluidly move through everyone's perspectives without a solid viewpoint character, but I would advise against this unless you really are a master of the craft.) Older novels skew towards third person omniscient narration, where contemporary novels skew towards first person limited. You also have a spectrum of "distant" and "close." If omniscient and limited are a spectrum of where the camera can swivel to, distant and close is a spectrum of how much the camera can zoom in and out. Distant only has access to the physical realities of the world and can come off as cold, and close accesses your character's (or characters', if omniscient) thoughts. Notice how I said narration. Your means of perception dramatically effects how your story can be told! Here's a scene from one of my stories rewritten in third-person distant omniscient. The scene is a high school football game:

“Sometimes,” he said. “Not much anymore.” “It’s not better, then?” She shivered; the wind blew in. “A little.” His tone lifted. “I don’t know if it’ll ever be better, though.” She placed a hand on his arm, stuttered there, and slipped her arm around his waist. “Did it help to be on your own?” He raised an eyebrow. “You were there.” “Yes and no.” “And the guys, the leaders.” “Come on,” she heckled. “Okay, okay.” Carmen sighed. “Yeah, it helped. I don’t think—I don’t know—I’d be me if they’d fixed it all.” She grinned. “And who might you be?” “Oh, you know. Scared, lonely.” He fired them haphazardly, and a bout of laughter possessed him which Piper mirrored. “Impatient.” “And that’s a good thing?” “No.” He sat straight. “Gosh, no. But I don’t want to be like him, either.” He pointed to the field; Devon recovered a fumbled ball. “He’s never been hurt in his life.” She met his eyes, which he pulled away. “You don’t mean that," Piper said. “Maybe not. He’s too confident, though.” The cloth of Carmen's uniform caved and expanded under Piper's fingers.

With distant-omniscient, we only get the bare actions of the scene: the wind blows in, Piper shivers, the cloth rises and falls, Carmen points, etc. But you can tell there's some emotional and romantic tension in the scene, so let's highlight that with a first person limited close POV:

“Sometimes,” he said. “Not much anymore.” “It’s not better, then?” Frost spread up from her legs and filled her as if she were perforated rock, froze and expanded against herself so that any motion would disturb a world far greater than her, would drop needles through the mind’s fabric. A misplaced word would shatter her, shatter him. “A little.” His tone lifted. “I don’t know if it’ll ever be better, though.” She placed a hand on his arm, thought better, and slipped her arm around his waist. “Did it help to be on your own?” He raised an eyebrow. “You were there.” “Yes and no.” “And the guys, the leaders.” “Come on,” she heckled. “Okay, okay.” Carmen sighed. “Yeah, it helped. I don’t think—I don’t know—I’d be me if they’d fixed it all.” She grinned. “And who might you be?” “Oh, you know. Scared, lonely.” He fired them haphazardly, and a bout of laughter possessed him which Piper mirrored. “Impatient.” “And that’s a good thing?” “No.” He sat straight. “Gosh, no. But I don’t want to be like him, either.” He pointed to the field; Devon recovered a fumbled ball. “He’s never been hurt in his life.” “You don’t mean that.” She spoke like a jaded mother, spoke with some level of implied authority, and reminded herself again to stop. “Maybe not. He’s too confident, though.” Piper felt the cloth of his waist cave and expand under her fingers and thought: is this not confidence?

Here, we get into Piper's thoughts and physical sensations: how the frost rises up her, and how this sensation of cold is really her body expressing her nervous fears; how she "thought better" and put her arm around his waist; her thought "is this not confidence?"; and how she reminds herself not to talk like a mother. Since I was writing from the close, limited perspective of a nervous high schooler, I wrote like one. If I was writing from the same perspective but with a child or an older person, I would write like them. If you're writing from those perspectives in distant narration, however, you don't need to write with those tones but with the authorial tone of "the narrator."

This is a lot of info, so let's synthesize this into easy bullet points to remember.

Limited vs. Omniscient. Are you stuck to one character's perspective per scene or many?

Close vs. Distant. Can you read your characters' thoughts or only their external worlds? Remember: if you can read your character's thoughts, you also need to write like you are that character experiencing the story. If child, write like child; if teen, write like teen; etc.

Here's another way to look at it!

This is a confusing and complex topics, so if you have any questions, hit up my ask box, and I'll answer as best I can. The long and short of it is to understand which POV you're writing from and to ruthlessly stick to it. If you're writing in limited close, under no circumstances should you describe how a character other than your viewpoint character is feeling. Maintaining a solid POV is necessary to keeping the dream in the reader's head. Don't make them stumble by tripping up on POV!

[littlecactiguy]

Aziraphale, Crowley, Herschel of Ostropol, Chanukah, and a story...

Sooo there's no way I can think of (and I have been thinking on this a lot) that this post isn't going to be a little bit awkward, but it's going to exist anyway.

A year ago, in 2022, I saw this post from 2021 by @anonymousdandelion on Aziraphale and Crowley meeting Herschel of Ostropol (protagonist of Herschel and the Hanukkah Goblins, a Jewish children's book, as well as a Jewish folkloric figure).

Then, a) being Jewish and Herschel and the Hanukkah Goblins being a fondly remembered book from my childhood, b) someone who enjoys Good Omens, c) also a fic writer and, d) the idea being adoptable, I started to write a story.

(and okay, it's taken me roughly a year to give it a solid shape (long story short that's less to do with the story itself and more to do with me figuring some things out about what and who I want to write for, but I digress), but the fic itself very much exists now.)

I planned to have the full Chapter 1 done in time for Chanukah this year. Due to life in general being pretty chaotic, that hasn't happened. Instead, under the read more is a preview (the first scene of chapter 1), because I still wanted to post some part of it for the holiday.

Some Fic Notes:

-This story is, arguably, two stories intertwined. One that takes place in the 'present day' (though before the Apocalypse, etc.), and one that takes place during the Herschel story.

-It will largely follow the perspective of and by driven by OCs. Though, Aziraphale and Crowley will have a strong presence and influence, it didn't feel like it was their story to tell.

-It is written with two base structural rules in mind;

Aziraphale and Crowley had a hand in the stories of Herschel of Ostropol being remembered. The original kernel this fic was built around and expanded from was answering the question of how that happens.

There can be absolutely no interference in Herschel's story happening in the synagogue (i.e. the narrative of the children's book cannot be altered). Though, that doesn't necessarily mean Herschel is prevented from appearing in the story ;)

Story Preview Beneath The Cut

Generally speaking, the old bookshop is almost always closed.

If one, however, is in ownership of a decent set of lock picks, they may find it otherwise.

For what it’s worth, Tziporah (Tzi to her close friends, Nora to most everyone else at school, and young lady to almost all adults—including her parents, Bubbie, aunties and uncles, and the odd, inconvenient passerby—all who’ve caught her getting into trouble), most of the time, does her best to not use her lock picks. It’s just…it’s…

It’s like this, alright?

Tzi was born into a family with a long, long, long tradition of bookbinding. The kind that historians sometimes visit to ask stuffy questions about. The kind that causes librarians to visit requesting restorations of aging tomes. The kind that means their home has a dedicated workshop full of fairly ancient machinery that no one outside of the family knows how to use. Of course, there are other bookbinders in the world who would certainly recognize and understand the functionality of the more modern pieces of equipment Tzi’s family has. They just won’t recognize all of what they use. Not the Family bits.

The point being, when you grow up in such a setting, you tend to learn certain things. The store names and locations of almost every bookshop dealing in antique or rare books fairly close by, for instance. Also, a lot of the owners become familiar faces (or have been since before Tzi could remember). As the future of the Family Tradition, it’s only natural that she should accompany whomever is doing the deliveries or house calls regularly.

Thus, when you have this knowledge and you can be an Extremely Trustworthy Child (sure, Tzi may cause trouble regularly, but some things (like books, it’s books) are far too precious not to be Extremely Careful about), you’re, more often than naught, allowed to explore such bookshops, and read to your heart’s content.

And if you’re Tzi and you’re allowed to come along on a visit to The Bookshop That You’re Family Rarely Does Business With Because Their Books Are Almost Always In Unexplainable, Impeccable Condition, you’re going to want to read something (and you inevitably will).

The problem of course becomes, if you happen to be Tzi, and your mother, or father or whomever finishes up the Official Business rather quickly, you don’t have enough time to finish whatever it is you’re reading. And it being The Bookshop That You’re Family Rarely Does Business With Because Their Books Are Almost Always In Unexplainable, Impeccable Condition, you know you probably won’t have the opportunity to come back. At least not on an official bookbinding-related visit. Not for a Long While.

First, you’ll try coming back during regular business hours, as you have for many a bookshop previously.

Except, this bookshop doesn’t seem to have regular business hours.

So, given the story you were reading has been buzzing around your head for days, you come up with an alternate method.

Tzi isn’t going to take anything of course! She’s going to be extremely careful. She just wants to finish the story.

No one will ever know she was even there!

Except the giant snake waiting for her on the other side of the door.

If Tzi didn’t regularly inhabit spaces full of delicate books in need of repair or the equally delicate tools used to repair them, she would have jumped. As it stands, she finagles the lock open, slips in through the door quietly, turns around to the face the bookshop proper, and and a yelp almost escapes her lips. The snake, black as ink and with scales bigger than Tzi’s thumb, regards her coolly with brilliant golden eyes. She stares back, hyperventilating at first, but as the seconds pass and nothing happens, her breathing evens out.

“You aren’t going to eat me, are you?” Tzi asks the snake.

The snake’s tongue flicks out and back. It doesn’t say anything, or stop gazing at her for that matter.

Tzi studies the snake with more scrutiny. “I don’t suppose you could. I mean, of course I know snakes can unhinge their jaws and all, but even if you did, you look like you aren’t big enough to fit more than my arm in your mouth, and then what would you do? You’d be stuck hanging off my shoulder.”

There’s a long beat where it seems they’re both considering this possibility (in truth, only Tzi is, in a ‘walking into school with a giant snake hanging off my arm would be really cool’ kind of way. The giant snake, for what it’s worth, is feeling mildly insulted by the implication that he’d try to eat her).

“Well,” Tzi finally says. “I did plan for this.”

Technically speaking, she only sort of planned for this. Tzi had been skeptical of the rumored sightings of a (pet?) snake in this particular bookshop when she first heard them. More so after she visited for the first time and no such snake could be located. Regardless, when One Is Determined To Finish The Book She Was Reading, One Has To Prepare For As Many Possibilities As Possible. So, Tzi had hardboiled a few eggs (because an article she read once said snakes like to eat eggs) and put them in a tupperware and put that tupperware in her bag before she left home an hour ago.

Tzi takes the egg tupperware out of her bag now and shows it to the snake. “Would you like one? They’re tastier than me, I promise.”

The snake turns its head slightly down to look at the eggs in their unassuming plastic container, and then turns back to gaze at Tzi again.

It’s at this moment that Tzi remembers the article she’d read had been about foxes, not snakes, and that she may have just insulted this particular snake (since snakes lay eggs, right? Tzi is fairly certain of that fact, but all snake facts she knows seem to have taken her seeking them as an impromptu game of Hide and Seek in her mind and they are hiding Very Well).

Tzi gulps (and briefly considers pretending one of the eggs is a stone and crushing it as a show of strength to intimidate the snake, but he can clearly see they’re eggs so that probably won’t work).

In the end, Tzi’s desire to just find the book she wants to read already, reinforced by the snake not doing much beyond staring at the eggs, wins out.

(For what it’s worth, when the snake in question has confronted intruders into the bookstore in the past, the intruders have usually taken more aggressive approaches to him. Eggs in a plastic container gifted by a girl who clearly isn’t going to run screaming at the sight of him is certainly New, and he’s not going to be given enough time to fully figure out how to respond).

Tzi places the egg tupperware down on the floor in front of the snake and snaps off the lid. “Sooo…” She draws the word out. “I’m going to go read.” She tentatively sidesteps away from the snake. When he doesn’t react, she goes to hurry off, stops herself, turns back, takes a deep breath, and “You’rewelcometojoinmeifyoulike!” tumbles from her mouth.

Without waiting for a response, Tzi darts through the chaotically organized bookshelves of the shop until she finds the one holding the book she’s after. Gingerly she plucks it off its shelf and, after memorizing its place so she can return it to exactly there, sets off for a comfortable place to sit and read.

All the while, the snake slithers after her.

After a couple minutes of fruitlessly trying to find a seat, the snake bumps its snout into Tzi’s shoulder and, when she looks at it, points her in the direction of a comfy-looking armchair that, hidden in the shadows as it is, previously escaped her notice.

Once settled, Tzi gently opens the book, finds the place she left off, and begins to read.

It’s well into the evening, after the traveler who called himself Herschel had gone up to the old synagogue, that two more visitors arrived in our small town…

[beeden96]

Coraline as a Buddhist parable

Last night while I was writing down the Four Noble Truths with a brush pen in my sketchbook (I do stuff like that sometimes), my roommate put on the movie Coraline. This was entirely coincidental but I was struck by how much the themes of the movie relate to everything I've been learning recently about the core teachings of Buddhism.

There is a concept in Buddhism called "right view." It is the first practice in the Eightfold Path. I think of this as referring to a person's understanding and perception of reality. When a person does not see the true nature of reality, they are vulnerable to illusions and delusions, which cause cravings and excessive attachments.

The Other Mother in Coraline has buttons for eyes, and she sews buttons into the eyes of other people who she lures into her illusory reality. She literally lacks "right view," and she tries to force other people to share her distorted view. She craves, and clings, and she wants other people to cling to her, so she offers them the things they crave. She controls others because she is so attached to them.

The moment when all of this hit me was at the end of the movie, when the Other Mother screams, "Don't leave me! Don't leave me! I'll die without you!"

The reason it hit me is because I suddenly saw myself in her. I think a lot of people live like this without realizing it. I am one of those people, or at least I have been. This "I'll die without you!" sentiment can be applied to any kind of addiction. The "You" could be food, it could be alcohol, it could be sex, it could be attention from others, etc. The sentiment behind the Other Mother's words can be related to any pattern of compulsive thought or behavior. But in this movie, and in my own life, that theme most often plays out in relationships with other people. Codependence is a key word to describe the pattern, at least the way I understand it.

I'm trying to develop the inner strength and acceptance of reality, to move beyond that way of existing. It is really painful to live like that. And I found myself feeling sad for the Other Mother, who is trapped in a world (resulting at least in part from her lack of "right view") where she never has enough, is never satisfied, and is never happy. Things change, and everything is impermanent, so clinging and controlling is only ever going to end in heartbreak.

There is a concept in Buddhism of the hungry ghost. They are ghosts who are stuck in a state of constant craving and dissatisfaction, and they can be extremely destructive as a result. I think that the Other Mother is a perfect, almost textbook example of a hungry ghost. I mean, she would literally consume children because she was craving their love so much.

The word "love" here is interesting to me. The cat in Coraline says that the Other Mother loves Coraline and wants to be loved in return. But the word love in this context indicates an unhealthy, all-consuming obsession, rather than mutual respect and care. A really helpful and succinct explanation is actually right in the book (which the movie is based on). Neil Gaiman writes: "It was true. The other mother loved her. But she loved Coraline as a miser loves money, or a dragon loves its gold."

Now, turning my attention to Coraline herself: I see this movie as a story about how Coraline developed "right view" after undergoing a process of reckoning with her previous approach to life. She was unable to accept reality as it was. She was unhappy, and craved a different life with different parents and different friends and different material possessions. She wanted more. And in this way, she was very like the Other Mother.

As a storytelling device, the Other Mother is useful. Characters are useful for illustrating dynamics of growth and change over the course of a narrative. But I think that ultimately, the Other Mother was inside of Coraline, and a part of her. Just as she had been a part of all the other people living in that house who were dissatisfied with their lives. She is a symbol of the attachments and cravings that all people have, taken to their extreme but logical conclusion.

In the first part of the movie, Coraline resists change. She has just moved to a new place, and she has not accepted her new reality. She has trouble connecting with the people around her, who are either overworked and exhausted (her parents), or who she barely knows at all. Because her material and social conditions are not acceptable to her, and she does not yet have "right view," she develops cravings. She lives out those cravings in the fantasy world inhabited by the Other Mother.

Sometime in the early to middle part of the movie, Coraline goes to a shop with her Mom and asks for some colorful knitted gloves. She wants them because nobody else will have them and she thinks they look pretty and interesting. Her Mom says no. This makes Coraline angry, and causes her to go even deeper into the world inhabited by the Other Mother, because that is a world in which she believes her desires can be fulfilled.

Over time, she begins to understand that the Other Mother (this dissatisfied aspect of herself) is not a good person to hang around, and that her perspective on life is warped. She begins to see the dangers of living in delusion, and clinging to sense pleasures. She becomes a firsthand witness to the instability and violence this way of living can create.

So she lets go. She lets go of her expectations, she lets go of her cravings, and instead she decides to honor her love for her parents, which is based in mutual care, rather than obsession and excessive catering to desires. It is only once she lets go of any attachment to an outcome, that she begins to receive the things she originally wanted. Love, care, attention, and even some nice physical items. Her Mom gives her the gloves she wanted as a surprise gift. But now, she is wise enough to appreciate these things for what they are. She can be happy and present in the moment, appreciating the little things while they last.

[alicesought]

{{ I will always love... the vibe of how Jervis Tetch must be seen in this sort of mythic way by the general public, like most rogues. The sheer boogeyman energy of how he behaves and what he does. Its what makes him one of the many monsters you can meet in the dark, and for all my sympathy toward him, I do love to lean into that a bit now and then. That's why I like to make him such an unrelenting figure when it comes to his pawns. Sometimes people wonder like- does he just keep the pawns forever, he doesn't let them go? Yes exactly! He isn't a forgiving figure in that regard, he's not moral and sympathetic-- he's frightening, deranged, twisted!

Of course there's his own motivations for why he keeps pawns, he needs workers, he needs tea party guests, he hates to let go of "friends", if they get loose they might hold grudges, but this causes this wonderful narrative around him where he's this little whimsical man that lures people in for the weirdest of motivations and just... keeps them, forever, in his clutches. What does he do with them? No one that's been rescued from him ever remembers. Many have been found dead in strange positions. But being captured and kept for months at a time can invoke a consequence weirder and more disturbing than death. The fact he's on record talking about his hostages so affectionately probably only adds to the skin crawly-ness of that. He's usually a recluse, he doesn't project himself on a large screen and make a big show of his existence like some supervillains, and that lack of celebrity vibe causes him to be even creepier when he finally appears. That, and his-- entirely accidental-- "corruption of innocence" aesthetic in making a horror genre out of a children's book..... it's just all so fun. He's such a fun villain... }}

[neroraven]

I saw your tags on tbk and im glad someone said it. i waited to read tbk last because everyone kept saying its dostoivskys best work but i see now why its so popular with the right-wing, podcast boys. there were parts i enjoyed but for the most part, it sucked.

the main female characters exist to be catty and dramatic (and the women in the court room of course treat the trial like a soap opera). Lise, the only one with depth, vanishes off the page.

Dmitri goes around beating, drinking, shouting and being generally awful. He cheats on Katerina, chokes Grushenkas maid and admits he couldve have killed her and also was fully ready to kill Fyodor but!! he didnt get the chance to and someone else did therefore hes a tragic character ig. seriously am i suppose to feel bad for him? cause i dont, he very much deserved to be in prison.

Ivan and Smerdyakov are both actually fascinating and both are punished by the narrative, ivan for being a well-educated atheist and Smerdyakov for not wanting to be a servant of the man who raped his mother and having ambitions to go abroad.

And finally Alyosha. i know hes adored and hes cute and all but my god does he do shit all. his crisis of faith couldve been interesting, had it lasted longer than 5 mins. after which hes exclusively a delivery boy. we are constantly told hes angelic and everyone thinks as much but what exactly he is doing to stand out is never explained. he also doesnt really engage in zosimas 'active love' when it would have been difficult but needed. most people can be kind to children- thats easy. but what about being kind to Smerdyakov and treating him as a brother? what about addressing that Dmitri is the problem rather than just being helpful to people he has slighted?

Alyosha never has to acknowledge that being passive with Dmitri and Fyodor is at odds with supporting the people they torment. Helping Dmitri escape couldve been interesting in Alyosha having to face that he might be freeing the murderer of their father but nope. he *knows* Dmitri is innocent, so no difficult choice for him.

Anyway very sorry for the rant, i was just pretty dissapointed in this book. Its heralded as a sum of dostoivskys works but it really seemed to highlight all his flaws. Its long winded and repetitive at times, the characters seem less nuanced than he usually writes, the themes are on the nose. god is good, socialism and foreign influence bad. And again, there were parts i loved and was immeresed with but holy shit did i finish it underwhelmed.

I can’t help but completely agree with you anon, I think we are on the same page after finishing the novel.

It’s obvious that the book is far from terrible, it’s complex, it has beautiful prose and an interesting narrative, but overall it's just too many things at once. I understand that Dostoyevski knew that he wouldn’t have time to finish another book so he probably put 3 in 1, so we ended up with a mix of themes and plotlines and characters that’s too convoluted at times.

And I think Fyodor doesn’t deserve to be read superficially, I don’t want to fall into the simple interpretation of “he said orthodox christianity good and atheism bad”, because the entire part of Ivan’s and Alyosha's conversation at the tavern is a debate Fyodor is having with HIMSELF about faith and god; he puts arguments in Ivan’s mouth that he KNOWS are impossible to oppose (that’s why Alyosha is unable to counter Ivan’s stance of “God might be the creator but I don’t accept the horrendous world he has created”). However, the right-wing dudebros you mention DO interpret him in simple terms because his favoritism between the brothers is TOO obvious. If the narrative punishes one side while forgiving the other for horrible sins then we have Fyodor’s judgment on paper.

I can’t help but hate Dimitri even though Fyodor wants to portray him as a victim, a romantic and a “sentimentalist”. We get to know him through a story in which he’s about to rape a poor young girl because her family needs his money, but because he changed his mind the moment she bowed to the floor and was completely vulnerable below his thumb, we have to forgive him? He’s a hedonist obsessed with money because, as Fyodor tells us, “he has never worked for a cent”. He abuses women and people around him, he lies, etc. I wouldn’t even have cared if he had killed his father. I’d even have thought it was the only good thing he did in his life.

Ivan is punished in the most cruel way: his intellect and mind are taken away from him as he falls into madness. And for what? For rejecting a cruel god and understanding that his country needs the new ideas being born in Europe? For being an intellectual? I feel like Fyodor wanted to show us a contrast between him and Alyosha and I can’t help but laugh because at least Ivan was an ACTIVE character that had an effect on the narrative. Also blaming him for Smerdiacov’s actions? Dostoyevski's thesis through this plotline is basically: “Look at what happens! You intellectuals will write your academic papers and ideas and then stupid people will read them and cause mayhem. Therefore YOU are the gilty one.” But then he turns around and gives us religious sermons and applauds orthodox christianity, as if religion and the church are not the best example of misinterpreting ideas and causing harm and violence.

Also, how does he expect me to feel like Smerdiacov was a bad person? I don’t care that he killed his horrible father. If something, he should’ve done it sooner. Even more, he is the bravest and smartest of the Karamazov brothers because he decided to cut the cause of all their suffering from the root, and even come out rich out of it. He couldn’t choose the fate his mother and he had been given but he could choose freedom and he did so. But again, Fyodor punishes him and tells us he was a coward that would‘ve chosen death before consequence. It’s almost like he thinks that some people are really born to be a slug that lives in the mud and any desire to become something else is an unforgivable sin.

And Alyosha, he could be replaced by a plant in a pot and the plot wouldn’t change a bit. He is passive, ignorant and naive, and Fyodor applauds it because he thinks that that’s what Russian people need; if they are naive and never get in contact with DANGEROUS new ideas and follow their religious teachings everything will be fine. Which is the most idiotic thesis in my opinion. And don’t get me started on the classism and the paternalistic view of “the peasants”, it made me throw up a little. And the misogyny. Ah! Everything young right-wing men who just discovered “nihilism” would love to read and feel vindicated.

Even though I didn't like the general idea of the novel there were some parts that I truly loved, my favorite part being that conversation between Ivan and Alyosha at the tavern. And to finish, Dostoyevski is a men’s writer, he's a masculinist perspective of the worst of the worst, but nonetheless a damn good writer.

[andnowanowl]

Since "Palestine Speaks: Narratives of Life Under Occupation" is suspiciously not available in the US in the form of an e-book, I purchased a physical copy and wanted to share it here for anyone else also unable to get access.

ABDELRAHMAN AL-AHMAR

Lawyer, 46

Born in Deheisheh refugee camp, West Bank

Interviewed in Bethlehem, West Bank

Abdelrahman Al-Ahmar lives with his wife and four children in a small apartment complex on the edge of the refugee camp where he grew up. The complex is surrounded by trees and garden greenery and is also home to four of his brothers and their families, as well as rabbits, birds, puppies, and even a horse. During the course of several interviews, the house is full of the sounds of his children playing. Sometimes they come to sit and listen to their father's story, interjecting parts of the narrative they know by heart.

Abdelrahman's comfortable house is a retreat from the harsh conditions he has faced his entire life. He was born in the Deheisheh refugee camp, where his family struggled against extreme poverty and regular attacks from soldiers and settlers. He later spent nearly twenty years in prison, most of it in administrative detention, where he was interrogated using torture techniques that have now been outlawed by the Israeli High Court.¹ In 1999, the court ruled that the Israeli Security Agency (Shin Bet) does not have legal authority to use physical means of interrogation. It found tactics must be “fair and reasonable" and not cause the detainee to suffer According to the Supreme Court case, a common practice during questioning was shaking prisoners violently enough to lead to unconsciousness, brain damage, or even death (in at least one reported case). However, in a society where 40 percent of men have spent time in prison, thousands of people still bear the physical and psychological marks of these methods.

Abdelrahman seems reserved at first during our initial meeting - he speaks little and watches us carefully as we ask questions. But as he relaxes, his dark humor and natural gift for storytelling begin to emerge. He switches between English, Arabic, and Hebrew as he speaks, and the only time he becomes quiet again is when talking about the most extreme forms of torture he endured. However, he also tells us about how the most difficult moments in his life have inspired him to become a leader in his community.

WE DIDN'T EVEN HAVE COCA COLA

I'm the same age as the occupation. The war of '67 started in June, and my mother was pregnant with me at the time.² She and my father were living in the Deheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem.³ They'd been pushed out of their homes in Ramla during the war in '48, and that's when they'd moved to the camp.⁴ They lived in tents in camp for over ten years, and then my father was able to build a small house in camp in the fifties. Then during the war in '67, a lot of people fled the camp and ended up living in Jordan, especially in Amman.⁵ But my father said, "We're not leaving again." He didn't want to lose his home again. So during the war in '67, my father stayed to protect the house while my mother went up in the woods and hid for a few days. She gave birth to me a few months later in the camp, with the help of a midwife.⁶

I remember the camp of my childhood was a neighborhood of shacks made of cinder blocks and aluminum roofs. Most people in the camp built their own houses, like my father had. We all had leaky ceilings, no plumbing, no bathrooms. There were just a few public restrooms we would all share, and the toilets would flush into the gutters in the streets. We didn't have showers. We'd heat up water in a basin and wash with that. We depended on UNRWA for clothes.⁷ I remember getting clothes twice a year, and they were often the wrong size, and sometimes all that was available were girl clothes. We were so cold in the winter. For heat, we had fires in old oil barrels outside our homes, and families would gather around them to warm up. I remember the fires would get so high, we couldn't see the faces of the people on the other side of the barrel. And there was so much disease - cholera, infections of all sorts.

Growing up, we could hear our next-door neighbors every day. We knew their fights, conversations, everything. And there were so many places that you couldn't get to by car because the spaces between buildings were too narrow. You had to walk between the houses.

As children from the camp, we'd feel different from other kids when we went out into Bethlehem, the city. We would see kids who had bicycles, but we didn't have any. They had good clothes, but we didn't have them. They even had Coca Cola! My parents weren't accustomed to the kind of poverty we were living in. They were born in villages with home on large pieces of land. When I was a kid, my father used to work in Israel. He was a stonecutter. But he wasn't making enough money for the family - he had four boys and two girls to support. There was no one in Deheisheh with money. So everybody was struggling financially, but at least it gave us this feeling of being equal.

OUR WINDOWS WERE ALWAYS OPEN, SO WE GOT USED TO THE SMELL OF TEARGAS

I felt pressure from the Israeli army and Israeli settlers at an early age. The most difficult issue that we had to deal with was the settlers. I was only six years old when the settlers started coming through the camp in the early seventies, so I grew up seeing them. The main road from the settlements in the south runs through Bethlehem to Jerusalem, and it goes right through the camp. I think the settlers who passed through saw Deheisheh as something they needed to control.

The settlers were led by a man named Rabbi Moshe Levinger, who saw all of the West Bank as part of Israel.⁸ They wanted Israel to claim the land around the camp, and they found ways to make life miserable for us. They would come in buses maybe once a week. They'd get off and start shooting randomly in the refugee camp with live bullets. They'd shout, throw stones, provoke fights. Whenever anyone tried to fight back, the settlers would alert Israeli soldiers who would chase us through the streets and fire tear-gas canisters. Our windows were always open, so we got used to the smell of teargas.

I remember settlers entering my UNRWA school and smashing desks, doors, windows. The teachers couldn't protect us. There was always a sense of fear and insecurity. When I was younger, these things affected me tremendously. They affected my relationship with my teachers and the way I looked at them. I kind of lost respect for them because I'd seen them degraded. And after some time, other students and I stopped listening to them because we knew they were powerless.

Then in the early eighties, the military built a fence around the camp. It was twenty feet high, and the only way in and out was a gate leading to the Hebron-Jerusalem Road, the one that the settlers passed through. I once heard that some tourists who came to Bethlehem saw the fence and wondered if it was the wall of a city zoo! In the camp, we had a curfew - we had to be in by seven p.m., or the soldiers guarding the entryway wouldn't let us back in through the gate. And we couldn't leave after curfew under any circumstances. Some people died because they couldn't go to the hospital after the gate closed at seven.

Around the same time, settlers brought trailers across from the camp and tried to establish an outpost there. I remember being stuck in the camp after curfew and hearing the patriotic music of the settlers blaring through the night.

The soldiers worked closely with the settlers most of the time. When I was fourteen, I got a backpack-the first I ever owned. Before that, I would carry my books in plastic bags, like most kids in the camp. I was sohappy I finally had a backpack. It was green. My dad bought it for me. I was going to school one morning, and a group of six soldiers and an armed man in civilian clothes - a settler - called me over. The settler kicked me and slapped me and then took my backpack and threw it into the gutter. I tried to get it out of the gutter, but the soldiers hit me and threw the backpack back in. My books were wet and ruined, and they still didn't allow me to get the pack. I watched them do the same thing to some of my friends - they threw their books in the gutter, too.

At the UNRWA school, they would give us the books for free. I told them what the soldiers had done, and they gave me new books. But I had to put them back in plastic bags again. Of course, the soldiers knew the backpack was important to me because they could see how impoverished we all were and that we were deprived of everything.

Refugees in the camp would retaliate against the settlers by throwing stones. I started throwing stones at age ten. Kids a little older might be a little more organized. Different groups of kids would decide to do something a group of five over here, a group of six over there. By the time I was thirteen, I was among them. We started to incite other children to put flags up. At that time, it was illegal to hang the Palestinian flag.⁹ So, we would tell the kids to hang the flag and to write slogans on the walls. That was also illegal then. You could be arrested by the Israeli army and go to prison. When they saw us throwing stones, the soldiers or settlers might shoot. When they shot at us, yes, we were afraid. But with time, with all the injustice and the frustration, we were just stuck, and we didn't care if we died. But we thought throwing stones made a difference. We saw the settlers as the occupiers, and they were the source of injustice and deprivation, so we had to fight back. This was before the First Intifada, but for us in the camp it was already Intifada - it was always Intifada.¹⁰

"WHAT DID YOU DO? WHAT DID YOU DO? WHAT DID YOU DO?"

Eventually, my friends and I graduated from throwing stones to thinking about throwing Molotov cocktails. It wasn't hard to make a weapon out of a bottle of kerosene and a wick. We wanted to throw them at the outpost set up by Moshe Levinger and at the soldiers who were helping the settlers to come and wreck our neighborhood. By this point I was fifteen, almost sixteen. Some in our group were younger-one was fourteen. We made a couple Molotov cocktails and tested them out by smashing them against walls in the camp when we thought nobody was looking.

December 11, 1984, was a cold, snowy night. I was home asleep, and suddenly soldiers swarmed in. I was cuffed and put in a vehicle with some other boys from my group that had already been arrested. That night they picked up me and four of my friends, and we were driven to Al-Muskubiya.¹¹

When we got to the interrogation center, it was very chaotic. There were maybe forty guys in all who had been arrested and brought to Al-Muskubiya that night. For the five of us, they took off all of our clothes, stripped us naked. Then they tightened our handcuffs, took us outside in an open area, and put bags on our heads. The snow was coming down, and we were naked out there. I couldn't see the others, but I could hear their teeth chattering, and the sound of the handcuffs shaking was so loud. The cold weather still bothers me now - it makes me remember that night. This is where we stayed for forty-five days between interrogations. Our bodies turned blue, we were out in the cold so long.

My interrogation lasted two months. During the interrogations, they beat me, and there was loud music playing the whole time. We were allowed to go to the bathroom just once a day. They would tie our hands to the pipes. It was really painful for me. After some time, I stopped feeling my arms - sometimes I didn't know if I still had them or if they had been amputated. There was constant beating, all over my body, to the point where my skin would be as black as my jacket. If I lost consciousness, they would throw water on me or slap me so I'd wake up.

This mark on my wrist is actually from the handcuffs during that time in prison. The handcuffs were so tight, they cut to the bone. I still have marks on my legs from the beatings. They wouldn't give us any medical treatment. And the interrogators wouldn't ask you direct, obvious questions. They would just keep saying, “What did you do? What did you do?" And that was it. With all the beating, I couldn't focus anymore, even if I was conscious. I couldn't remember anything that I did from the time before prison, even if I had anything to confess.

Most of the other kids told the police what they'd done - they made some Molotov cocktails and tested them out. I didn't tell them anything. Not because I was being secretive, but because I was too confused and disoriented from the beatings. It was a very hostile environment. Sometimes they would keep me awake for many days straight before they gave me four hours of sleep. And with the pressure of sleep deprivation, I started hallucinating, and I didn't actually know what was happening around me. I would imagine I was in a kindergarten and there were a lot of crying kids causing all this chaos, but I couldn't do anythingto calm them down. I stopped knowing if what was happening was real or just a product of my imagination.

Eventually, a lawyer came to visit me. Her name was Lea Tsemel. She was an Israeli lawyer.¹² She came to meet me in the visiting room one day and she gave me cigarettes. She told me she was taking on my case. I was so confused. I just asked her if what was happening to me was real, or was I just trapped in my imagination. So many times I was convinced that the prison was full of snakes. I asked her about that, and she told me I was just hallucinating. She told me about my charges and let me know we'd be in court soon.

There was one police officer who was nice. One morning, I asked to go to the bathroom, and the interrogators wouldn't let me go until midnight. When this one police officer saw me in pain because I had to go so badly, he said, "Godammit! What happened to these people? Why do they torture people? Godammit!" He was angry, and he let me go to the bathroom. Then he brought me tea and cigarettes and said, "Rest, rest." This was very risky for him, and I really appreciated it.

The whole interrogation was two months. I was afraid that they were going to kill me and my friends, because we had heard all these terrible stories of torture. I had an uncle who had been arrested a while before, and I knew that he'd died in prison. He participated in a hunger strike, and when the prison guards force-fed him, he choked to death.

The main thing that consumed my thinking was that these people were crazy, and they wanted to torture me and mentally destroy me. And they would actually say it right to our faces. They would tell us, "We want to ruin you psychologically." In fact, many prisoners do become mentally ill. Some of them die. I didn't go crazy. I focused on all the other people suffering besides me. And also, I think people who are really religioushave a hard time with this kind of abuse sometimes. They pray to God for help, and when none comes, it breaks them mentally. But that wasn't me, and I was able to focus on the future and what I needed to do to get myself out of that situation. After two months of interrogation, my friends and I were taken to trial and charged with terrorist activities. The judge sentenced us to four to six years each. My mother was in the courtroom, and she fainted when she heard the sentence.

WE WERE ALL STILL DREAMING OF GROWING A MUSTACHE

After my sentence, I was sent to Damun Prison.¹³ I learned more in prison than I would have at a university. I met some leaders of the resistance.I was so proud of myself. They were the big fighters. And the other boys I was arrested with, they were all so happy. We thought we were so grown up, even though we were all still dreaming of growing a mustache. We'd actually shave four times a day to try to get our beards to grow in stronger so we could look older. I acted angry about my sentence - not because I thought it was too long, but because I thought it was too short! They gave me four years, I wanted twelve years. I thought it was sort of an honor. In Damun, I was in with a bunch of Israeli mafia guys, drug dealers - all sorts of criminals. I think the soldiers wanted to put young guys in the resistance in with real degenerates, sort of to corrupt us. But we all got along, and before long I was one of the leaders in prison. I became the representative of a group of young prisoners in dealing with the guards. I'd voice our demands and objections to the ways we were being treated.

In 1986, I led a hunger strike. We were actually protesting about not getting enough food. Besides that, it was winter, and there was no heat, and we only had one thin blanket each. And we weren't getting enough exercise time outside. So there were dozens of us not eating as a protest. I remember we used to dream of food at night. The Israeli soldiers, they would tease us. They'd have barbecues outside the walls of our cells, and the smell would come into our cells through the windows.

We stuck at it for eighteen days, and on the eighteenth day I announced we were going on a water strike as well. The guards quickly brought in doctors from the Red Cross, and they told us that we'd be dead in two days if we tried that. So I said, "Okay, we won't do that." But it was enough to make the guards think we were crazy enough to try. The next day, the prison administrators came and agreed to our demands - more food, two more blankets at night, and fifteen more minutes of exercise time a day. It felt like a big victory. For two weeks afterward, we had to relearn to eat, like we were babies all over again. All our stomachs could handle was milk, a little soft potato, that sort of thing.

So I had a reputation as a dangerous prisoner. Not because I was violent, but because I could lead the prisoners to rebel against our conditions. The authorities decided to transfer me to Ashkelon, which was where they put the prisoners they considered the most dangerous.¹⁴ Inside Ashkelon, there were a lot of leaders of Palestine's resistance movement. To Israel, this was where the worst of the worst went. But as a Palestinian, I felt much safer in Ashkelon than I had at Damun. Those of us who were young and in prison for the first time started to study. We wanted to know everything. We would sit with the older men in Ashkelon, and they told us about their experience. The older prisoners would even organize more formal education - lectures and lessons every day. These were guys who had been in prison forever. Some of them had been in since 1967. I think a few of those guys had been around to hear Jesus lecture! So they had a lot of wisdom to pass on.

We learned about history, economics, philosophy. We had to wake up at six in the morning and start reading and studying. At ten there was a lecture until noon, and then there was a ninety-minute break. After the break, we had to write an article - it could be political, educational, whatever. But we had to write something. Every day inmates had to lecture the others about what he had written and read earlier. And then we would go back to reading. They served us dinner at seven, and then between seven and ten we could read, and then we would go back to sleep. If we didn't finish our writing, we could stay up late and write. We didn't have enough time for all our activities.It became an addiction, and I was consumed with, What am I going to read next? What am I going to write?

Every inmate had his own specialty. Some of them were political, some of them philosophical. One specialized in economics, another in Marx. Some people taught chemistry and explosives inside the prison. We also learned languages. Some of the prisoners knew Greek, Russian, Turkish, so they would pass on their languages. Getting into Ashkelon for me was like getting accepted to Harvard or Oxford, or even better! But the treatment in the prison was still very harsh. Solitary confinement at Ashkelon was the worst in all the prisons in Israel. Prisoners could be isolated from others for years.¹⁵ One inmate I knew lost his mind because of all the pressure from solitary. He needed psychiatric help. To protest this, we set all the cells on fire. Every prisoner was part of it. We all piled up clothes in the middle of our cells and lit them with smuggled matches. The smoke was terrible, and many of us suffocated. Forty-eight prisoners had to be hospitalized, but our protest got attention. They still used solitary confinement to torture people afterward, though.

The relationships you form inside the prison are very strong. There are a lot of people from different cities - Ramallah, Nablus, Hebron, so many places. So there's a lot to learn, and you become more knowledgeable about the situations in other cities. When you get out of prison, you're going to stay friends with them. And they're really influential in their own societies. So many of the leaders of the First Intifada met in prison. I got out of prison in 1989, during the First Intifada. I was still only twenty, but I was more influential in our society because people respect someone who's been in jail - we weren't seen as criminals, but leaders.

I WAS JUST LIKE THE POPE

I didn't stay out long after my release in 1989. I was only out for six months. I hadn't done anything this time, but because of my record and people I knew, and because it was the Intifada, I was rounded up.¹⁶

This time after my trial I was sent to Ktzi'ot Prison.¹⁷ In Ktzi'ot, I improved my Hebrew. Ktzi'ot was like a big open-air prison with lots of tents, and one of the tents was the "Hebrew tent," where only Hebrew was spoken. I taught Hebrew lessons there and translated Hebrew-language newspapers for the other inmates. I had a lot of experience and I knew a lot, so the new inmates would ask me how to do things. I was just like the Pope. They would respect me and ask me for things. In prison culture, if you're an alumnus of prison, you get special treatment from both the inmates and the wardens and guards. I would get the best bed in the tent, you know, the one in the corner. The guards also gave me special treatment because I was an asser to the prison. They knew that I could influence everyone else, and if I said something, everyone was going to listen to me. It was a give and take.

I was out of prison in 1994, but of course, the Israeli authorities kept an eye on me. The authorities have this obsession, that once someone like me has been to prison, then we're a terrorist for life. I got picked up a few times, and sometimes I'd be held for a day, sometimes for two weeks. Then, in 1995, I was arrested, and this time they took me to Al-Muskubiya. They didn't have charges, they just wanted to interrogate me about people I knew. During the interrogation, I was tortured.

After twelve days of not being allowed to sleep, not getting enough to eat, that's when the interrogators started shaking me. There are two kinds of shaking they'd do - one of the head and neck only, and one for the whole body. Of course when they start after nearly two weeks food or no sleep, you can't really physically resist at all. You're too weak, and your neck starts to flop around, you don't get oxygen, and you pass out. They'd bring us prisoners close to death.

I remember waking up in the hospital. I'd been taken to Hadassah.¹⁸ After I was better, I was taken back to Al-Muskubiya and interrogated some more. They'd use other methods, too. One thing the interrogators liked to do was to make the handcuffs really tight and bind me to a chair that slanted downward. They would leave me like that for twelve days at a time, with the handcuffs slowly cutting into my wrists. They would also put a dirty bag over my head that was soaked in vomit or that had been dunked in the toilet. After twelve days, they'd give me four hours of rest. This went on for months. Sometimes they'd only ask me a few questions, for just fifteen minutes a day. And then I'd be bound up in the chair for the rest of the day. Sometimes they'd say they were going to give me "stomach exercises," and then two interrogators would twist my body in opposite directions while my hands were cuffed. They would put me in these stress positions until I threw up or fainted.

They didn't have anything to accuse me of in Al-Muskubiya, but they didn't want me out on the streets. Also, they wouldn't let my lawyer see me for many weeks. Finally, a lawyer came. She was a new lawyer I'd never heard of named Allegra Pacheco. I think as a prisoner, I had developed a keen sense of who was dangerous, who was safe, and who I could trust. I knew I could trust Allegra right away.

After six months, they sent me to Megiddo Prison in northern Israel. They never charged me with anything. They just gave me a one-year sentence of administrative detention that they renewed for a second year. By this time, I was a real expert at life in prison. I was able to convince some of the guards that I was a Jew because of my good Hebrew. They used to ask me, "You're among Arabs. How can we help you?" I asked them for a mobile phone, because we couldn't have one inside prison. They gave me the phone.

I got away with other tricks because of my good Hebrew. We had newspapers inside, and there were ads in the back. One ad was for a pizza place. I used one of our smuggled phones and called the pizza place, and I pretended as if I was the prison director. I ordered seventy-five slices, enough for all the inmates. And the pizza guy told me they'd deliver in two hours. In three hours, the prison director came to my tent and gave me a long look. He asked, "Do you still want pizza?" So I answered him, "If you're going to give it to us, why not?" He was pretty mad. He said, "I know that you're the one who asked for the pizza, because you have really good Hebrew. Now you're going to solitary." So I had to spend two weeks in solitary. There was another ad in the newspaper for belly dancers. I wanted to call and ask for dancers as well, but because I got busted for the pizzas I didn't have the nerve to do it.

THE JUDGES HAD NO MERCY

During the time I was in prison, I kept seeing my lawyer, Allegra. She helped me appeal every six months during my administrative detention hearings, and she kept me thinking about the future. I must have proposed to her twenty times while I was at Megiddo. She told me I was crazy.

Finally, I got out of administrative detention in 1998, and I started working for human rights groups, like the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group and B'Tselem.¹⁹ We'd investigate cases of human rights abuses against Palestinians. And I stayed in touch with Lea and Allegra and other lawyers who were fighting in courts to end the torture of prisoners. In 1999, they took some cases to the high court in Israel, and they won a huge victory that made certain kinds of torture illegal.

It was also around this time that I got Allegra to agree to marry me. I think I just had to ask her enough times. As a prisoner, I'd learned to be persistent in speaking out for what I wanted, and I used the same tactics to win over Allegra. We just sort of agreed we might get married someday soon, and then she went to the U.S. on a fellowship. She was working on abook about how a Second Intifada might be right around the corner. But she didn't finish it, because the Second Intifada started in 2000 while she was still writing and that spoiled the concept of her whole book!

During the Second Intifada, I was still working for B'Tselem, and sometimes I'd sneak into Jerusalem to talk to Palestinians for reports on human rights abuses. I also worked with Gideon Levy, a reporter for Ha'aretz, which is Israel's major newspaper. I'd show him around the refugee camps and help with stories. When I went to Jerusalem, I'd always bring a really nice leather briefcase, so I'd look like a businessman. But in May 2001, I was stopped by a police officer in Jerusalem and arrested for not having a proper permit to travel into the city. So once again I was headed to prison.

I was taken back to Al-Muskubiya. Already, interrogation had changed, but not much. They still put me on a chair that was angled downward with tight cuffs. But now, instead of hitting, shaking, that sort of thing, they tried to mess with my mind more. They would do things like show me a photo of my house in ruins and tell me it had been demolished. But it was all Photoshop work.

At the time, Allegra was in the United States. She was supposed to be done with her fellowship and come back to Israel in June. She was in Boston trying on a wedding dress when she heard I'd been picked up. She got back just in time to represent me during my administrative detention hearing. She showed up along with Lea, her mentor and my first lawyer. They had a photographer from Ha'aretz with them who was going to testify on my behalf, and they brought a lot of snacks - burek, cola, and cigarettes.²⁰ Allegra also brought wedding bands with her. We got to have a reunion in the lawyer's meeting room, and that's where we announced that we were engaged. We had a little party with the burek and cola, and then Lea took some pastry to the judges to tell them getting engaged, and she asked if we could have a little more time in the meeting room. Meanwhile, the Ha'aretz photographer took pictures of us exchanging rings. It was beautiful!

But the judges had no mercy. The prosecutors kept bringing up how I was mean to my interrogators, cursed at them, called them sons of bitches and how I wouldn't cooperate. That was their big case for me being asecurity risk to Israel, just that I wasn't nice enough in the interrogation room. Allegra was wonderful - she demanded that the judges look at the deep grooves in my wrists from my recent interrogation. But they refused. And so I ended up spending another year in administrative detention.

When I got out in May 2002, Allegra and I were married, and she was five months pregnant when I was arrested again in November. This was right in the middle of the Second Intifada still, and a lot of former prisoners were being arrested. The night they picked me up, they were looking for my brother. But because I had a record, they decided they'd pick me up as well. I was sentenced to six months administrative detention and sent to Ofer Prison.²¹ I was in prison when our son Quds was born in April 2003. Allegra was all by herself during the birth. When June 2003 came around, I was up for another renewal of detention. This would have been the seventeenth six-month detention I'd been given during my lifetime. My lawyer Lea tried to bring photos of Quds into court near Ofer to show me. It would have been the first time I'd seen my son, but the judge refused to let me see the photos. He gave me another sentence of six months. During the hearing, I was able to slip the photos of my son into my prison uniform when nobody was looking, so I at least had the photos of my son in prison with me. My detention was renewed twice more for a year and a half total, so I didn't get to go home and meet Quds until he was almost two. By that time I had spent almost seventeen years in prison all together, with at least thirteen of those years being in administrative detention without charges.

THIS IS LIFE FOR THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE

I've been out of prison since 2004. When I got out the last time, I started studying law, and now I'm a lawyer, like Allegra. Last January, I was in military court to help my friend. I argued his case in front of a judge who has sentenced me to administrative detention many times before. I was going to rub it into his face that I was a lawyer now. But they didn't let me enter the courtroom.

I also defend prisoners who have been arrested by the Palestinian Authority.²² The conflict with the Palestinian Authority is even more complicated than the occupation. I make visits to the prisoners in the PA prisons, and in some cases they get tortured and humiliated there even more than with the Israelis. I visit my clients in prison every day. And I sit down and talk to them and listen to them. The conditions are extremely harsh. In the important cases, the information from the interrogation is shared among the intelligence agencies of the Americans, Israelis, and the Palestinians, together.

I still see many of the people from my time in prison, including other prisoners and my first lawyer, Lea Tsemel. She's like a mother to my wife and me. She still visits me now. She's a good person.

Now we have two girls and two boys. It's even. The boys are ten andseven, and then the girls, five and two. To raise a baby girl is much easier than raising a boy. They're much calmer, and they're nicer, easier to deal with. Boys just want to rebel all the time. But my boys are not aggressive.The kids just want to play. They're very sweet.

Of course, I worry about my kids and the situation they're growing up in. I want my kids to grow up in a good atmosphere, with justice and liberty and freedom, and a life with no problems. We've been deprived of so many things, and that, of course, always takes its toll on you. So whatever my kids ask from me I get for them. I buy them expensive bicycles and that sort of thing. Allegra says no, but I spoil them because I was deprived of so many things when I was a child. I want my children to have what I never had. I admit, I have a psychological problem with shoes! I buy them for my kids all the time. Every one of my four children has dozens of pairs of shoes. Every time Allegra asks me, "Why did you buy that?" I say, "You can't possibly understand." One of my daughters also has five little backpacks.

I would like to go to the U.S. to visit my wife's parents. My wife is an American, but the U.S. government rejected our visa application on security grounds.²³ What's the security problem? I haven't been convicted of any crime by an Israeli court since I was a child. I've been trying to get a visa for a long time. The lawyer for the visa asked for $120,000. We've stopped trying.

From a physical aspect, I do still have effects from the torture. I still can't feel my left hand completely due to the nerve damage I got from being handcuffed. And it's not easy to live with the fact that I went through such a horrible experience. It has impacted me.

I probably would be different today if I hadn't gone to prison. Probablywould've gone to med school instead of law school. But I've never really thought much about how my life would be different if I hadn't gone to prison, because this is life for thousands - millions even - of people in refugee camps in Palestine, in Lebanon, or in Syria. It's not a personal problem, it's a broader thing. I want to solve it because it affects everybody else, not just me. If the situation doesn't change, my son Quds may soon have the same experience. This is a problem for generation after generation - we've been fighting for sixty-five years. It's going to be the same thing until we break the cycle.

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Footnotes

¹ Administrative detention is a system of incarceration without official charges used by occupying military forces.

² The war in 1967 is known as the Six-Day War.

³ The Deheisheh refugee camp was established for 3,000 refugees in 1949 and is one of three refugee camps in the Bethlehem metropolitan area. Deheisheh is located just south of the city. Current estimates of the camp's population range up to 16,000 persons living in an area that is roughly one square mile.

⁴ Ramla is a city of 65,000 people in central Israel. Today the city is approximately 20 percent Muslim - most Arabs fled the city during the 1948 war.

⁵ Amman, the capital of neighboring Jordan, is a city of around 2 million residents. Amman grew rapidly with the influx of Palestinian refugees after 1967.

⁶ In 1967, the Israelis seized the West Bank from Jordan, which had administered the region since 1948.

⁷ The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has provided services such as education and medical care to Palestinian refugees since 1949.

⁸ Rabbi Moshe Levinger was born in Jerusalem in 1935 and helped lead the movement to settle the West Bank after the Six-Day War. He was especially active in asserting settler presence around Hebron, a large West Bank city fifteen miles south of the Deheisheh camp.

⁹ After the Oslo Accords were put into full effect in 1995, Bethlehem was administered by the Palestinian Authority. Between 1967 and 1995, however, Israel maintained full control of the region and outlawed symbols of Palestinian nationalism such as flags.

¹⁰ The First Intifada was an uprising throughout the West Bank and Gaza against Israeli military occupation. It began in December 1987 and lasted until 1993. Intifada in Arabic means "to shake off."

¹¹ Al-Muskubiya ("the Russian Compound") is a large compound in Jerusalem that was built in the nineteenth century to house an influx of Russian Orthodox pilgrims into the city during the time of Ottoman rule. Today, the compound houses Israeli police headquarters, criminal courts, and a prison and interrogation center.

¹² Lea Tsemel is a prominent human rights lawyer in Israel.

¹³ Damun Prison is in northern Israel, near Haifa. The facilities were once used as a tobacco warehouse during the British Mandate, but they were converted to a prison by Israel in 1953. It houses up to 500 prisoners.

¹⁴ Now called Shikma Prison, the facility is a maximum-security prison just outside Ashkelon, a city of 115,000 people just north of the Gaza Strip. Shikma was built following the Six-Day War in 1967 as a lockup for security prisoners in the newly occupied Palestinian territories.

¹⁵ 1986, the same year Abdelrahman was transferred to Shikma Prison, Israeli nuclear sentenced by military tribunal to Shikma for leaking details of Israel's secret nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu was captured by Israeli intelligence officers in Rome and weapons program. He spent eleven of his eighteen years in prison in solitary confinement.

¹⁶ Abdelrahman was arrested under suspicion of being a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

¹⁷ The Ktzi'ot Prison is a large, open-air prison camp in the vast Negev desert, located forty-five miles southwest of Be'er Sheva. Ktzi'ot was opened in 1988 and closed in 1995

after the end of the First Intifada, and then reopened in 2002 during the Second Intifada. According to Human Rights Watch, one out of every fifty West Bank and Gazan males over the age of sixteen was held at Ktzi'ot in 1990 during the middle of the First Intifada.

¹⁸ Hadassah Medical Center is a health care complex in Jerusalem.

¹⁹ The Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group was founded in 1996 partly by members of the Palestinian Authority to record instances of human rights abuses in the West Bank and Gaza. B'Tselem was founded by Israeli citizens in 1989 to document human rights abuses in the occupied territories.

²⁰ Burek is a traditional Turkish pastry stuffed with cheese, potatoes, or other fillings.

²¹ Ofer Prison is a large open air prison near Ramallah. At the time of Abdelrahman's arrest in 2003, there were approximately 1,000 Palestinian men and women serving administrative detention sentences.

²² The Palestinian Authority was chartered to administer parts of the West Bank and Gaza following the Oslo Accords in 1993. As part of the Oslo agreement, the Palestinian Authority is responsible for security control in parts of the West Bank such as Bethlehem.

²³ It It is very difficult for any Palestinians who have spent time in prison to travel, and especially to get visas to the United States, even if they were held under administrative detention and never charged with a crime.

---

Apparently his name may be Abed Rahman, not Abdel Rahman, according to an online report on the OMCT Network.

[phoenixyfriend]

.......right so. Maybe I need to do some soul-searching about my feelings on the way most people gloss over Ottoman imperialism in the Balkans and the effects it had.

I'm Serbian. I grew up with some... well, some very biased stories from my grandmother, but I later checked them against history books and found that yes, women mutilating their sons so that they wouldn't be taken for the devşirme was a thing that happened, and those kidnapped children were brainwashed into loyalty to the Sultan and anyway I'm getting pissed again because hahaha maybe the Mandalore discourse was a lot more personal than I thought because hey, the thing Death Watch does is what happened in my cultural background that most History Conversations gloss over when discussing colonialism and imperialism because the narrative is so much less convenient than most.

(We aren't 'white enough' by North European standards to care about, but we aren't people of color so we're at a significantly lower risk of danger on sight, which means a lot of modern activism has bigger issues to worry about. Meanwhile, American media solidified the US's lack of interest in actually learning about Balkan history.)

Just. Balkan politics are such chaotic bullshit and a friend even joked the other day that it sometimes it felt like the massive mess of Mando politics sometimes looked like the clusterfuck of Balkan history--do not expect simple narratives of oppressor/victim (unless someone is getting backed by the Ottomans or by Nazi Germany, or if you're saying the Rroma were victims because lbr they usually were), but there is always someone's revenge driving the problems and atrocities by all sides, and Western media benefited from picking a villain for the rest of the world, and fanning the flames, instead of showing just how complicated it was, and there's even evidence of Western powers helping cause some of the conflicts like they did later in the Middle East--but it wasn't until I glanced off of the Janissaries and related that I just.

Oh.

Yeah, the three hundred years that the Ottomans spent kidnapping and brainwashing children from my region have a lot in common with some of what Legends tells us about old-school Mandalore, huh. Like of course I'm angry when New Mandalore gets accused of cultural genocide due to poorly-chosen visual design, while Death Watch and even unaffiliated traditionalists (see: Falin Mattran's forced assimilation) are the ones actually shown deliberately doing this.

Fuck.

ANYWAY TL;DR

(You can reblog but to borrow phrasing from a number of posts on similar topics: please don't clown on this.)

GUESS WHO JUST REALIZED THAT THE BUILDING OBSESSION WITH THE CULTURAL GENOCIDE ACCUSATIONS MAY BE BASED ON MY OWN CULTURAL HISTORY OF CHILDREN BEING KIDNAPPED AND BRAINWASHED INTO THE OPPRESSOR'S ARMIES

It's too far back to be generational trauma but the effects never ended.

[snifflesthemouse]

Harry’s the Problem. His wife is the symptom. He is the real Diana 2.0 Wannabe...

         Since the Oprah interview aired, my whole perspective regarding the spare and his spouse has shifted. It would seem that I’m not alone in my thought process as more and more media outlets start reporting similar stances. Just recently, there was an article suggesting Harry didn’t change; but rather, he is only finally revealing his true self. The more I think about it all, the more I’ve come to the realization #6 is the real culprit behind everything.

         I’m not saying that his wife doesn’t have her own agenda or shares responsibility for her part in all this. Her hands are far from clean. What I am saying is it’s finally time for all of us to consider the cold, hard truth. Harry is his mother’s child. Harry is the bad egg, and his wife is only a side effect of the real problem here.

         Had it not been for the Oprah interview, I would have never put it all together. The problem with oversharing is too much information gets put out in the public. Most assume PR firms would worry about oversaturation in the press, but the real problem comes from personal interviews they cannot control in real-time. Puff pieces can be edited before publishing so facts and statements align; live interviews cannot. Over time, one of two patterns form from this oversaturation. Consistencies, repetitions, and similarities can be found in oversaturated truth-telling. Inconsistencies, changes, and huge differences result from those like Harry who prefer their trousers scorching hot from bursting into flames from deception. When you consistently lie, the only constant is the inconsistencies. 

         Now, those of us who have been following these two already know by now inconsistencies and changing stories should be expected. But the Oprah interview really highlighted some interesting things I had previously missed. The interview with Dax Shephard only solidifies my theories. Up until lately, those two have been together through most everything. Very seldom have we seen Harry alone in an interview or speech. There’s never a time where the missus isn’t popping up. James Corden proved that. Then we have the Oprah interview where she was supposed to be the star of the show. But, that was the moment it all changed. That interview was the moment she became the understudy. 

          Think about it. Who is the one being used in the media lately? Most people would suggest that the impending delivery of child number dos is why the missus is absent. One would then argue the Apple + special with Oprah started production well before the second child was a topic for discussion. The missus is being used less and less on camera or in the media. Everything is all about Harry. Forget about when Harry met Sally; Harry Met Hollywood! 

         Harry is the one doing the interviews, dropping projects, and talking with big Hollywood names. Even their announced Netflix projects are focused on one of Harry’s pre-married concepts. All the wife has going for her is a book that’s only number one in the “Books written by ex-Royals who couldn’t hack it” category. Seriously though, as of this posting the Bench is #2130 on the Amazon Books list, #12 in Children’s Black and African American Story Books, #73 in Children’s Emotions Books, and #167 in Children’s Family Life Books. Being pregnant isn’t a disqualifier for being interviewed. But, apparently being just the wife is.

         So, if it was his wife’s plan from the beginning to marry Harry, get him to abandon his family, move to California, and become a big star with a Prince for a husband, her plans have been ruined. And if you think about what she said in the interview with Oprah, you can actually see the moments she told us all exactly that. She clearly tells Oprah Harry was her direct link and source to the Royal Family and everything she needed to know. She didn’t misspeak or misunderstand a thing; she was telling us that Harry’s next to be markled. In every weird answer or revelation where she gave her versions for why their child(ren) were without title, saying they wed three days before the chapel, or having to cry out to HR since Harry failed to help her while she was so depressed she wanted to kill herself and her unborn child... all of it. It was all just the beginning. It may seem like she is attacking her husband’s family, but Harry’s the real target now.

          In just a couple sentences, she managed to reveal who Harry really was. Harry, of all people, should (and does) know how to navigate the press. Clearly, he failed to not only help her acclimate to Royal life, but it could also even be argued he set her up for failure for the get go. Let me give you an example. When my husband introduced me to his family for the first time, he told me little tidbits of information he found important for me to know. He essentially prepped me for the meeting so things went well. He wanted his family to like me because he loved me. I wanted them to like me because I loved him, too. So, I took to heart everything he told me. Yet, Harry’s wife shared with the world how little Harry cared about that. She credits Fergie with teaching her to curtsey, google for teaching her the National Anthem, and even said Her Majesty made her feel especially welcomed. So how did Harry not do more? If they started seeing one another in the early Summer of 2016, how is it Harry failed to teach or explain anything to her prior to meeting his grandmother, the Queen, when he had months and months of time to do so? How is it he failed his wife so miserably, she didn’t even understand basic UK custom, laws, or protocols? Why might you ask?

         Simply put, Harry is so much like his mother, all he knows is how to play the victim narrative while using the link to the Royal family as a nonstop ATM machine. Many people aren’t honest with themselves when it comes to Diana. She wasn’t the Mother Theresa everyone makes her out to be. Mother Theresa wasn’t a Mother Theresa either, though. Did Diana do some great things? Absolutely. Did she do them only because they were nice or great? Absolutely… not. Diana’s PR team would even have her switch up her charity causes whenever they felt it was getting to martyrdom level. They’d refer to her PR stunts as flavors. Does that sound like an innocent woman?

         Not to me. This whole time we all have seen his wife as the root of all issues, but she’s the side effect. It’s becoming more clear by the day that Harry searched out her. He wanted someone with the basic Hollywood connections that he could capitalize. Someone that seemed so controlling and ambitious it would be easy to believe they were controlling him, too. Of course he knew she would invite all the celebs she did. He probably inspired that guest list. Instead of guiding her in the press and in British society, he leads her to slaughter. He hides behind her repeated gaffes and wokeness to keep on his own mission.

         You see, Harry is obsessed with his brother eventually becoming king, being the “Second Son of Diana” and being the misfit. He is obsessed with his brother and father. They are all he talks about. When you obsess on something like that, it is more revealing than anything you say. Harry’s true motives aren’t protecting his wife and children. His real motive is making a name for himself like his mother did. If he can manage to get some revenge by making the Firm feel some backlash, hey that’s a bonus. 

         While his wife may think in her mind she will be the next Diana 2.0, the truth is we all missed who really will be. Harry is the one wanting to be Diana 2.0. If that’s the case, then that means the much older spouse for whom there are two children with, aka the wife, would be his Charles. Remember, Diana lost her HRH and titles. And we have Harry being very aggressive and pushy, to the point it seems he is trying to get ahead of a Palace announcement of them losing their titles. But it makes sense now.

         They aren’t trying to lose anything, but instead Harry keeps opening his mouth to create pressure in the media. He knows his wife does not want to give those titles back. But if he himself keeps saying outrageous things, then it would put everyone in ultimatum mode. Either Harry will push hard enough that Parliament and the Queen will have enough, or the press will get so critical of the two, Harry will push his wife to agree to returning the titles.

         Harry is following the Diana business model. While in the Royal Family, they both were seen as rock stars who had more star power the the Sovereign, which was an issue. Then, they couldn’t take all the abuse, coldness, and inhumanity, so they bolted for freedom. Instead of putting the past behind them, they use the past to monetize grief and trauma in such a way, they become their own brand. Right now, the trauma being monetized comes from the past, but the problem will soon come when that trauma is tapped out. He will need a source of new pain or victimhood. Enters the wife stage left.

          The wife is a tool. She of course has her own plans and thinks she is the one in control or the genius. She thinks she is the one everyone wants to work with. But it’s becoming clear to her that isn’t the case and she’s been played by her elite buddies. They all want him, not her. They all duped her for him. If I can see it, and I can see her already finger pointing that Harry is the failure here, then she can see it. And that means paradise will soon be lost in those Montecito hills. His wife won’t go down without a serious fight here. I wouldn’t even be surprised if she eventually causes him to lose his special visa. 

         Overall, Harry hides behind his wife like a beard or shield protecting him from the press’s glaring lens. He lets her do and say whatever she thinks is great so he can keep plotting his own plans. He allows her to take the fall, look stupid, pull stunts people can see through, etc. for a reason. He isn’t completely sure he can make it in his new California life. He knows he can’t if he keeps her for too long, but he also knows he needs an exit strategy in case it blows up. So, he pins the press to attack her as the true culprit. If they split and he has to, he can return home and play the victim of her. If they split and he is doing okay in Hollywood, she can be the reason he plays victim to big named people like Oprah and Gayle. 

         I can see it now. An Oprah Special with Harry tonight on Apple +. Something cheesy or corny that is almost plagiarism. Like Narcissus and the Prince or something. Watch. Mark my words. Oprah talking to Harry about surviving the marriage while trying to rescue two small kids, being in the spotlight as a Royal while being gaslit by a narcissistic wife… yes I can see the green screen set up now.

         I know this is difficult to digest, but I do ask you to try. While his wife is not innocent, she clearly is guilty for her own part indeed, his wife isn’t the true problem. The true problem here is a man who has a serious issue with living in the shadow of his future-King father and future-King brother, and his future-King nephew, that he has chosen to use the same exact attack model his own mother used to merch and marginally disrupt the institution that made her a star. Harry and his mother both wanted the entire spotlight, but both knew they could never have it the way they wanted it. So, they wrote their own victimhood narrative.

         And here we are now. Mark my words. Harry will keep pushing until those remaining titles are removed by them forcing the hands of Parliament and the Queen. Or, they’ll push and push in the press so much the outrage and hypocrisy will leave them no other option but to renounce and re-gift those titles and rights to the line of succession. That is what he wants, even if his missus doesn’t. Also make no mistake about it. Harry is the real Diana 2.0 wannabe, not his wife. Keep an eye out. I have this gnawing feeling that soon enough, there will be plenty leaks from the wife about the husband. She won’t go quietly into the Beverly Hills… but neither will he.

[professorthaddeus]

Mother, Father. This will be my final letter.

You know, I used to find the two of you everywhere. I would see the love I betrayed in the faces of families who are whole. I would hear your terrified screams in laughter. I would see your bodies twisted in agony in the flickering of a campfire. I would feel your blood on my hands every time I cast a spell.

I would find you everywhere, and so I held fast to the possibility that I would bring you back.

Today, I relinquished the chance of it ever becoming a reality.

I could have gone back and saved you. It would have worked. There were puzzle pieces in that chamber that I would have clicked into place; there was magic buried in those relics that I would have unlocked and unleashed.

I would have joined the ranks of mages of myth. I could have unraveled everything.

The chamber is nothing but ashes now.

I still find the two of you everywhere. Your dreams for my potential are in the spells I learned from Essek. Your hope for the Empire is in Beauregard’s pen as she fights for our people, stroke by stroke. Your love is in the grin that Veth shines on her son when he fires a toy crossbow at the ass of a local shopkeeper.

I miss you. I love you. I am sorry.

I hope I can still make you proud.

~

Caleb closes that worn, leather-bound book for the last time. Tucks it back beneath his arm, stands, walks to the entryway of his tower. His hand shakes as he reaches for the handle.

Well, you and the Nein got me to the door. Now I have to walk through it.

He takes a deep breath, then takes his first step outside.

He arrives in Blumenthal alone, visits their graves, leaves his letters in the ground.

And he gets to work. But in this, he is not alone.

Beauregard is there, matching every armload of books he carries with two of her own. They spend their days compiling records and narratives, wielding the truth both in court and behind the scenes—children of the Empire leaving their home better than they found it for the children who will come after them, just as they always vowed.

What wasn’t planned is this: a couple times every week, Beauregard drags Caleb out of the library. They teleport to a remote cottage in a location that few are privy to, where Yasha will have started preparing the ingredients for a new recipe from Caduceus. The instructions are often passed through a jumbled chain of Jester’s messages, and there always seem to be a suspicious number of bugs included for supposedly vegetarian dishes, but they make it work all the same. On more than a few occasions, Caleb plays referee while Beauregard and Yasha spar, safe in the knowledge that their attacks are of their own free will and they will never truly harm each other again.

Jester and Fjord spend much of their time on the open sea, but Jester’s voice is never far from Caleb’s ear. She tells him of everything from her newest tattoo victim to an encounter with a dragon turtle with a grudge, from a shanty about dicks she came up with on the fly to an update on a young half-orc girl Fjord has taken under his wing. Every once in a while, Jester will demand a reunion, too. Some of them are out of necessity—such as when Uk’otoa finally comes knocking and Fjord can no longer sail the other away—but many are not. They meet in Nicodranas when the Nein Heroez docks for a pastry run, they meet in Hupperdook for a night packed with drinking contests and celebone sticks and hugs for Kiri, they meet on Rumblecusp when life becomes too much and the nine of them sorely need to fuck off to a vacation. Soon, even Darktow is open to them, once Kingsley has unseated the Plank King and lifted their ban from the island. His reign is long, and it is magnificent. Until he grows bored.

Caduceus joins them for every mandated reunion, but for the most part, he tends to his garden or explores the world on his own. But he is never out of reach, and when he does not come to the rest of them, they go to him. It is not uncommon for Caleb to arrive in the Blooming Grove to see Beauregard already meditating by the pond. Other times, Fjord will be there drinking tea with Caduceus, and the three of them will share a quiet conversation, each far more secure in their words than they’d been over fish and chips all those years ago. Often it is just Caduceus and his parents and siblings, and Caleb will be invited to a family dinner in a home that Ikithon could not burn down.

Veth remains a constant in Caleb’s life. Of course she does. Sometimes, when the two of them are teaching the neighborhood kids how to point a copper wire, or reminiscing over a glass of sherry, or simply talking while she weaves flowers into his hair on the beaches of Nicodranas, he’ll think back to his old fears of losing her to her family and laugh. After all, how could such a thing be possible when he is a part of her family himself?

There are others, too.

Countless students who pass under his tutelage and grow into young mages who know that power should be used to protect, not to manipulate. A cat—well, there are many cats, but there is one in particular that Caleb does not own, a snowy white fey cat who slinks in and out of his classroom as he pleases, whose eyes seem to flash when the Martinet arrives to have a word, who settles into place around Caleb’s shoulders with a purr when the rare nightmare returns.

An unexpected kinship with Yeza, forged at first through mutual respect and an understanding in their love for Veth, but eventually growing into a friendship in its own right. It is one that unfolds in quiet nights by stacks of books, in gleeful debates when comparing notes on magic and alchemy, in exhausted evenings watching over Luc together while Veth takes a girls’ night out to cause some chaos with Jester, Beauregard, and Yasha.

His old friends, who, try as they might, never seem able to sever the threads that have always tangled their fates together. It is Eadwulf who comes around first, with the silent offering of a bottle and a grim smile as he and Caleb crumble the bricks of Vergesson to dust. Astrid takes time. It makes sense—she has always been a fantastic dancer, and for a while, it appears they will be trapped in a precarious political tango forever, stepping around each other in their roles as the Archmage of Civil Influence and a simple teacher who may or may not be practicing treason in his classroom. But in the shadows, Astrid pulls a few strings to keep Caleb out of prison. Caleb hears a rumor and sends the might of the Cobalt Soul after a colleague who wants Astrid dead. And eventually, she begins joining him and Wulf on their evening walks through the streets of Rexxentrum. They return to the dance hall. They get lunch. They share memories, relearn each other’s old scars, and discover that solace can still be found in each other the way it was when they were children. It will always be complicated. It starts to become beautiful.

And of course, floating by Caleb’s side every step of the way is Essek, a drow who has learned to curb his ambition and care for others, who has decided to make his own amends. The former Shadowhand to the Bright Queen, who now spends his days picking up cupcakes for Jester in Uthodurn, planting seeds in the Blooming Grove. Sitting in on Caleb’s lessons with a different face each week, sketching runes into the floor of Caleb’s home amongst scattered papers and spell components, curling up on a couch beside Caleb and begrudgingly getting through Tusk Love because he promised. A traitor, a hero, a lifelong friend. A steadfast love.

So when Caleb Widogast arrives at the final page of his story, he is no longer shrouded in guilt, or grief, or regret. No, he is surrounded by the warmth of his chosen family when he takes his last breath, when time has run its course and he is finally ready to meet his parents again.

(And even before he sees their faces, he knows. He knows he made them proud.)

—————

also on ao3 | my other cr fics

[iheartbookbran]

Ok so actually my biggest problem with the whole “Daenerys will burn KL” theory—not even the Mad Queen Dany theory, which is of course very sexist for obvious reasons, but just like, the idea that Dany will ~accidentally~ ignite the wildfire in the city, burning it all to the ground. That, at first, doesn’t sound that bad, but the longer I think about it the more I hate it because tbh it doesn’t do anything for her character? And also… that fate for her is just down right cruel.

Like, the most frequent argument I see on why this would be at all satisfactory for Dany’s arc is basically that it would be a sort of lesson for her about the dangers of unchecked power and the real threat the Dragons can pose on humans and that she shouldn’t use them to fight against other people. And that’s all well and good, excellent message… except that’s not something Dany’s ever really needed to learn? Not anymore that her fellow rulers, which I will touch on more detail later, but in general Dany has seen what the abuse of power can do. Starting with her conflicting feelings regarding Viserys and how she recognizes that even though he was her brother and she loved him, he also abused his power over her as her older brother, her only family and her king; she feels guilt about the atrocities Drogo committed to the lhazarene and tries to help them; she feels so much guilt about not handling things correctly in Astapor that she decides to throw away all her plans to go to Westeros and instead stays in Meereen.

And about not knowing the true danger that her dragons can pose? I mean, this is the same girl that literally agonizes across several of her ADWD chapters because Drogon killed a child, and then takes the extreme measure of caging Rhaegal and Viserion to prevent that from ever happening again. I think she’s at least a little bit aware that the dragons can be dangerous, thank you very much.

Ok so this got long...

Anyways, the only time Dany legit uses Drogon to harm someone and not just as bluff was at the house of the Undying, where she was being attacked, and in Astapor… and like, lmao, that asshole Kraznys mo Nakloz and the rest of his slaver buddies deserved it. Don’t at me. Also, Dany’s hardly the only one with a big magical and deadly beast at her disposal, why didn’t Robb had to go through some horrifying traumatic incident to learn he shouldn’t use Grey Wind in battle to tear his enemies’ throats. Bran will be learning about the dangers of abusing power, but that’s linked to his magic powers and an actual reprehensible thing he’s doing, not the use of his glorified prehistoric dog to kill, which he’s done, just like Robb. By all means let the narrative hold Dany accountable for her mistakes… but her actual mistakes and not shit she has no control over, because she doesn’t have much control over Drogon or the other dragons even though she’s trying to, and that’s very obvious in her last ADWD chapter where she’s delirious and Drogon could kill her at any moment, and she knows that.

The other big argument people make for Dany burning KL (even if it’s by accident!) is that it will teach her about the price of war, that someone as young as her shouldn’t be leading armies and conquering kingdoms, and that fighting for the Iron Throne is not a worthy cause, and I feel like that misses the actual point of her story by a mile. First of all because a) Dany is hardly the only teenage ruler in the story and b) this is a fantasy medieval story, a lot of the characters shouldn’t be doing the things they do, aaaand yet. Also speaking of other teenage rulers with far more power that they should have—Robb and Jon, being the biggest examples.

Granted, Robb and Jon aren’t exactly successful during their time as rulers, they’re literally betrayed and killed by their own men (even if Jon will technically come back for round 2 of bullshit he’s too tired for). But the moral of their stories is not that they lost because theirs was an unworthy cause and they were stupid kids wholly unprepared for their roles. And I actually partially agree! They are just kids, including Dany, and they shouldn’t be responsible for looking after so many others and going to battle, but their cause is still just and worthy, even with all the mistakes they make along the way. Robb didn’t loose because he was wrong in demanding justice for his family or trying to protect the riverlands from the Lannisters and their minions, he lost because Tywin Lannister was a giant coward who couldn’t take him out in a fair fight.

Likewise, it isn’t wrong of Jon to try to incorporate refugees from beyond the Wall into Westeros. He’s not too stupid and honorable to do politics like his father (how I hate when people insult Jon and Ned like that), and while he did some very obvious mistakes that inevitably ended in a coup and in him dying, this is more connected to his inability to let go of his ties with his family (mainly Arya or who he believes to be her), and in isolating himself from his friends and the people he could actually trust.

I’ve always thought that Dany and Jon share a parallel narrative within the story, so while Jon is struggling with that Dany is faced with similar problems. She cages her dragons, that to her represent the only family she has left, and she tries to compromise with the slavers, marry a man she doesn’t love, pretend she’s ok with reopening the fighting pit. While she tries her best to rule wisely in Meereen, it all comes at the cost of betraying herself and her beliefs, so it’s no surprise when it all crashes around her and she’s betrayed and nearly killed. Ironically, it is Drogon who comes to rescue her.

If they are monsters, so am I.—Daenerys II, ADWD.

This is hands down one of my favorite Dany quotes from the whole series, and I hate that it’s been given such a negative connotation in the fandom, when for me it represents Dany’s humanity and compassion at the fullest.

GRRM has a knack for humanizing the ‘monsters’ of his story, for showing the good in the outcasts and the ugly and the scary. He embraces their ‘otherness’ and makes them the heroes of his stories; Arya, Bran, Brienne, Dany, Tyrion, Jon, Theon and many others are all compared to monsters or beasts at one point or another in the books.

Dany sees herself in her dragons, literal monsters in every sense of the word. Later on she faces Drogon inside the pit, and in that moment you could say that she accepts that ‘monstrous’ part of her, and in doing so she’s saved from her fate of dying at the hands of the men who would crucify innocent children and gleefully profit off of the suffering of their fellow human beings while watching them fight each other to the death for their own amusement. Now tell me who’s the real monster in this situation.

But shortly before that happens, Dany is able to see the humanity in Tyrion, an outcast who has been branded as monstrous and unlovable due to his disability all his life, a man who has come to believe in his abusers’ rhetoric about him so strongly that he’s started to act cruel and detached. She saves his life. She sees value in his life when few others would, because she cares.

I’ve always find it funny that the “dragons plant no trees” is—another—example fans use to argue in favor of Dany’s descent into Darkness™ because the actual scene goes like this:

You are a queen, her bear said. In Westeros.

"It is such a long way," she complained. "I was tired, Jorah. I was weary of war. I wanted to rest, to laugh, to plant trees and see them grow. I am only a young girl."

No. You are the blood of the dragon. The whispering was growing fainter, as if Ser Jorah were falling farther behind. Dragons plant no trees. Remember that. Remember who you are, what you were made to be. Remember your words.—Daenerys X, ADWD.

Now am I the only one who finds it at least a bit relevant that it’s freaking Jorah Mormont aka Jorah the Enslaver whom Dany’s subconscious, at her literal lowest moment, utilizes to represent this particular thought, which btw I’ve always interpreted as Dany’s own self-loathing manifesting in her, and this is something she’s actually always struggled with—the idea that she’s not enough and she’s failing. Because above all things, even Westeros or the Iron Throne, what Dany wants is peace, she wants to plant trees.

When Dany made her descent, Reznak and Skahaz dropped to their knees. "Your Worship shines so brightly, you will blind every man who dares to look upon you," said Reznak. […] This match will save our city, you will see."

"So we pray. I want to plant my olive trees and see them fruit." Does it matter that Hizdahr's kisses do not please me? Peace will please me. Am I a queen or just a woman?—Daenerys VII, ADWD.

But of course the world doesn’t work like that, and so long as there’s Jorahs and Tywins and Eurons out there, men who would take the freedom of humans and submit them to their will, Dany can’t have the luxury of peace, just like Jon can’t have the luxury of belonging and family so long as there’s people still beyond the Wall who need his protection.

And I think that’s fine. It’s fine that Dany failed, it will help her develop as a character and realize that there’s no room to compromise with slavers, the metaphorical monsters of the story who do far more harm than the other more literal ‘monsters’ of the story. So that when she has to face down Euron Greyjoy—who btw, there’s a high chance he will end up stealing one of Dany’s dragons via Victarion using Dragonbinder… y’know, as in enslaving one of her children and using said dragon to inflict god knows what horrors, yet not many people ever consider this for some reason?—she will know. When she has to face down the Others, the magical ice fairies with no regard for human life, she will know.

That’s why I believe that it would make absolutely no sense for Dany to have to go through such a tragic and traumatic experience like burning a whole city even by pure accident, over something that’s either never been a problem with her character or she’s well into her way of learning anyways, so it would just feel repetitive. As I have pointed out, she’s already reached one of the lowest moments of her arc. Not saying there will be no other blows for her, and probably the destruction of KL will be one of them, and knowing Dany she will feel responsibility over it no matter what, but that doesn’t mean she has to be the culprit, intentional or otherwise.

[incorrectwutheringheightsquotes]

Sometimes people think that Heathcliff does not care about worldly matters at all, that his only concern in life is his spiritual love for Cathy and that even his revenge is either just a distraction or a way to feel closer to Cathy. It is definitely true that Heathcliff is mainly motivated by his love for Cathy, but there are indications that he has ambitions unrelated to it:

-Heathcliff and Hindley’s rivalry does precede Heathcliff’s separation from Catherine, and is actually initially focused on more by Nelly in her narrative than Heathcliff’s friendship with Cathy. The horse incident at the end of Chapter 4 showcases Heathcliff being acquisitive and manipulative regarding a matter completely unrelated to Cathy.

-Contrary to popular belief, Heathcliff does seem to have had a love for learning as a child:

“In the first place, he had by that time lost the benefit of his early education: continual hard work, begun soon and concluded late, had extinguished any curiosity he once possessed in pursuit of knowledge, and any love for books or learning. His childhood’s sense of superiority, instilled into him by the favours of old Mr. Earnshaw, was faded away. He struggled long to keep up an equality with Catherine in her studies, and yielded with poignant though silent regret: but he yielded completely; and there was no prevailing on him to take a step in the way of moving upward, when he found he must, necessarily, sink beneath his former level.”

Heathcliff did once possess a curiosity regarding learning and knowledge, and he only had given up on it because of Hindley’s abuse. Heathcliff is smart and I think he thought that he could benefit from being educated, and his only concern wasn’t just impressing Cathy. If he were the personification of Nature or the personification of Cathy’s “wild self” that many people think that he is, he wouldn’t be so spiteful about not being given an education and he wouldn’t try to take revenge on Hindley by keeping Hareton uneducated. His later hatred for books and learning could be a defense mechanism. Heathcliff did actually spend a good part of his childhood being the favored “son” of a middle class man and Catherine was the primary source of mischief and wildness in the house, not him.

-When he returns to Gimmerton after getting rich Heathcliff doesn’t actually know that Cathy loves him back. He technically got rich to impress Cathy but he doesn’t really have hope that they could ever be together at this point (either in life or in death) and his final goal is to just kill Hindley and then himself. His hatred for Hindley is of course partially caused by him having caused the separation between Heathcliff and Catherine, but he still hates him so much that killing him is the next best thing to being with Cathy.

-There is this line that Heathcliff says to Nelly:

“You suppose she has nearly forgotten me?’ he said. ‘Oh, Nelly! you know she has not! You know as well as I do, that for every thought she spends on Linton she spends a thousand on me! At a most miserable period of my life, I had a notion of the kind: it haunted me on my return to the neighbourhood last summer; but only her own assurance could make me admit the horrible idea again. And then, Linton would be nothing, nor Hindley, nor all the dreams that ever I dreamt. Two words would comprehend my future—death and hell”. (bolded part mine)

Of course this is another declaration of the intensity of his love for Cathy by Heathcliff, but the bolded part makes clear that he has other dreams of less importance, and that these dreams are related to his revenge on Hindley and Edgar, which means that his revenge is not just caused by his anger at losing Catherine but also by his hurt pride and ambition. Though admittedly it could also mean that his revenge would be meaningless if Catherine didn’t love him, I am a bit conflicted over this quote. Wuthering Heights: The novel where you have to ponder over the possible interpretations of a single line to learn the motivation of the main character.

-Far from completely giving up on his worldly life after losing Catherine, Heathcliff does have hopes and plans for his son:

“Yes, Nell,’ he added, when they had departed, ‘my son is prospective owner of your place, and I should not wish him to die till I was certain of being his successor. Besides, he’s mine, and I want the triumph of seeing my descendant fairly lord of their estates; my child hiring their children to till their fathers’ lands for wages. That is the sole consideration which can make me endure the whelp: I despise him for himself, and hate him for the memories he revives! But that consideration is sufficient: he’s as safe with me, and shall be tended as carefully as your master tends his own. I have a room upstairs, furnished for him in handsome style; I’ve engaged a tutor, also, to come three times a week, from twenty miles’ distance, to teach him what he pleases to learn. I’ve ordered Hareton to obey him: and in fact I’ve arranged everything with a view to preserve the superior and the gentleman in him, above his associates. I do regret, however, that he so little deserves the trouble: if I wished any blessing in the world, it was to find him a worthy object of pride; and I’m bitterly disappointed with the whey-faced, whining wretch!’” (bolded parts mine)

Losing Catherine to marriage and death might be Heathcliff’s primary motivation for his revenge but his anger at the class system and the inferiority complex that was caused by this oppression are clearly also important factors. As the latter bolded part makes clear, he also had hopes of finding his son a worthy object of pride, of course he is haunted and in a deep depression, but he still could wish for a blessing in the world, he hadn’t completely given up on worldly concerns.

-He does try to get richer by renting Thrushcross Grange or by being close-handed and mean to his tenants. He does not seem to do much with his money, he does not care for luxury or goods, but he clearly does like having money.

-Even after starting to become obsessed with Cathy’s ghost and wanting to join her, Heathcliff initially does not think of or hope for dying: “Afraid? No!’ he replied. ‘I have neither a fear, nor a presentiment, nor a hope of death. Why should I? With my hard constitution and temperate mode of living, and unperilous occupations, I ought to, and probably shall, remain above ground till there is scarcely a black hair on my head”.

Even after being completely absorbed in Cathy’s ghost, he still does think about his will: “When day breaks I’ll send for Green,’ he said; ‘I wish to make some legal inquiries of him while I can bestow a thought on those matters, and while I can act calmly. I have not written my will yet; and how to leave my property I cannot determine. I wish I could annihilate it from the face of the earth”.

I think this is more impressive than Heathcliff just wanting to die. You can see him gradually being completely convinced that he should die to be with Cathy. At one point he does care about worldly matters, later he cares about them less, at the end he does not care about them at all. You read this guy being gradually haunted to death by a ghost and it is psychological horror.

Conclusion: Of course him having lost Catherine is Heathcliff’s primary motivation for revenge, but I think these make clear that he is a character with other mercenary and vengeful ambitions and that it is ridiculous to say that he is a pure manifestation of Nature’s anger or just the wild side of Cathy.

[army-of-mai-lovers]

Jet and Yue’s Deaths: Were They Necessary?

Two of the most common ideas I see for aus in this fandom are the Jet lives au, and the Yue lives au. I’ve written both of these myself, and I’ve seen many others write them. And while yes, fanfiction can be a great way to explore ideas that didn’t necessarily have to be explored in canon (I’m mad at bryke for a lot of things, but not including a Toph and Bumi I friendship is not one of them, even though I wrote a fic about it), it seems to me that people are mad that Yue and Jet are dead, to varying degrees. There’s a lot to talk about regarding their deaths from a sociopolitical perspective (the fact that two of the darker-skinned characters in the show are the ones that died, and all the light-skinned characters lived, is ah... an interesting choice), but I don’t want to look at it that way, at least for right now. I want to look at it as a writer, and discuss whether these deaths were a) necessary for the plot and themes of ATLA in any way whatsoever and b) whether it was necessary for them to unfold in the way that they did, or if they would have been more impactful had they occurred in a different way. 

(meta under the cut, this got really, really, really long)

Death in Children’s Media

When I first started thinking about this meta, I had this idea to compare Jet and Yue’s deaths to deaths in an animated children’s show that I found satisfying. And in theory, that was a great idea. Problem is: there aren’t very many permanent deaths in children’s animation, and the ones that do exist aren’t especially well-written. This may be an odd thing to say in what is ostensibly a piece of atla crit, but Yue’s death is probably the best written death in a piece of children’s animation that I can think of. That’s not a compliment. Rather, it’s a condemnation of the way other pieces of children’s animation featuring permanent character death have handled their storylines. 

I’ve talked about this before, but my favorite show growing up was Young Justice, and my favorite character on that show was far and away Mr. Wally West. So when he died at the end of season 2, it broke me emotionally. Shortly thereafter, Cartoon Network canceled the show, and I started getting on fan forums to mourn. Everybody on these fan forums was convinced that had Cartoon Network not canceled the show, Wally would have been brought back. And that is a narrative that I internalized for years. Eventually, the show was brought back via DC’s new streaming service, and I tuned in, waiting for Wally to also be brought back, only to discover that that wasn’t in the cards. Wally was dead. Permanently. 

So now that I know that, I can talk about why killing him off was fucking stupid. Wally’s death occurs at the end of season 2, after the main s2 conflict, the Reach, has been defeated, save for these pods that they set up all over the world to destroy Earth. Our heroes split up in teams of two to destroy the pods, and they destroy all of them, except for a secret one in Antartica. It can only be neutralized by speedsters, so Wally, Bart, and Barry team up to destroy it. It’s established in canon that Wally is slower than Bart and Barry, and it’s been played for laughs earlier in the season, but for reasons unexplained, the pod is better able to target Wally because he’s slower than Bart and Barry, and it kills him. After the emotional arc of the season has wrapped up, a literal main character dies. There’s some indication at the end of that season that his death is going to cause Artemis to spiral and become a villain, but when season 3 picks up, she’s doing the right thing, with seemingly no qualms about her position in life as a hero. In the comics, something like this happens to Wally, but then he goes into the Speed Force and becomes faster and stronger even than Barry, in which case, yes, this would have advanced the plot, but that’s probably not in the cards either. 

In summary, Wally’s death doesn’t work as a story beat, not because it made me mad, but because it doesn’t advance the plot, nor does it develop character. Only including things that advance plot or develop character is one of the golden rules of writing. Like most golden rules of writing, however, it’s not absolute. There is a lot of fun to be had in jokey little one off adventures (in atla, Sokka’s haiku competition) or in fun worldbuilding threads that add depth to your setting but don’t really come up (in atla, the existence of Whaletail Island, which is described in really juicy ways, even though the characters never go there.) But in general, when it comes to things like character death, events should happen to develop the plot or advance character. Avatar, for all of its flaws, is really well structured, and a lot of its story beats advance plot and develop character at the same time. However, the show also bears the burden of being a show directed at children, and thus needing to be appropriate for children. And as we know, Nickelodeon and bryke butted heads over this: the death scene that we see for Jet is a compromise, one that implicitly confirms his death without explicitly showing it. So bryke tasked themselves with creating a show about imperialism and war that would do those themes justice while also being appropriate for American children and palatable to their parents. 

The Themes of Avatar vs. Its Audience

So, Avatar is a show about a lone survivor of genocide stopping an imperialist patriarchal society from decimating the rest of the world. It’s also a show about found family and staying true to yourself and doing your best to improve the world. These don’t necessarily conflict with each other, and it is possible for children to understand and enjoy shows about complex themes. And in a lot of cases, bryke doesn’t hold back in showing what the costs of war against an imperialist nation are: losing loved ones, losing yourself, prison, etc. But when it comes to death, the show is incredibly hesitant. None of the main characters that we’ve spent a lot of time getting to know die (not even Iroh, even though he was old and it would have made sense and his VA died before the show was over--but that’s a topic for another day.) This makes sense. I can totally imagine a seven year-old watching Avatar as it was coming out and feeling really sad or scared if a major character died. I was six years older than that when Wally died, and it’s still sad and terrifying to me to this day. However, in a show about war, it would be unrealistic to have no one die. Bryke’s stated reason for killing off Jet is to show the costs of war. I’ve seen a lot of posts about Jet’s death that reiterate some version of this same point--that the great tragedy of his character is that he spent his life fighting the Fire Nation, only to die at the hands of his own country. Similarly, I’ve seen people argue in favor of Yue’s death by saying that it was a great tragedy, but it showed the sacrifices that must be made in a war effort. 

Yue

When we first meet Yue, she is a somewhat reserved, kind individual held back by the rigid social structures of the NWT*. She and Sokka have an immediate attraction to one another, but Yue reveals that she is engaged to Hahn. The Fire Nation invasion happens, Zhao kills Tui, and Yue gives up her life to save her people and the world, and to restore balance. Since we didn’t have a lot of time to get to know Yue, this is framed less as Yue’s sacrifice and more as Sokka’s loss. Sokka is the one who cares for Yue, Sokka is the only one of the gaang who really interacts a lot with Yue on screen, and Sokka is the one we’ve spent a whole season getting to know. While I wouldn’t go so far as to call Yue a prop character (i.e. a character who could be replaced by an object with little change to the narrative), she is certainly underdeveloped. She exists to be unambiguously likable and good, so we can root for her and Sokka, and feel Sokka’s pain when she dies. In my opinion, this is probably also why a lot of fic that features Yue depicts her as a Mary Sue--because as she is depicted in the show, she kind of is. We don’t get to see her hidden depths because she is written to die. 

In light of what we’ve established earlier in this meta, this makes sense. Killing off a fully-realized character whom the audience has really gotten to know and care about on their own terms, rather than through the eyes of another character, could be really sad and scary for the kids watching, but not killing anyone off would be an unrealistic depiction of war and imperialism. On the face of it, killing off an underdeveloped, unambiguously likable and good character, whom one of our MCs has a deep but short connection with, is the perfect compromise. 

But let’s go back to the golden rule for a second. Does Yue’s death a) advance the plot, and/or b) develop character? The answer to the first is yes: Yue’s death prompts Aang to use the Avatar State to fight off the Fire navy, which has implications for his ability to control the Avatar State that form one of the major arcs of book 2. The answer to the second? A little more ambiguous. You would think that Yue’s death would have some lasting impact on Sokka that is explored as part of his character arc in book 2, that he may be more afraid to trust, more scared of losing the people he loves, but outside of a few episodes (really, just one I can think of, “The Swamp”) it doesn’t seem to affect him that much. He even asks about Suki in a way that is clearly romantically motivated in “Avatar Day.” I don’t know about you, but if someone I loved sacrificed herself to become the moon, I don’t think I would be seeking out another romantic entanglement a few weeks after her death. Of course, everybody processes grief differently, and one could argue that Sokka has already lost important people in his life, and thus would be accustomed to moving on from that loss and not letting himself dwell on it. But to that, I’d say that moving on by throwing himself into protecting others has already shown itself to be an unhealthy coping mechanism. Remember, Sokka’s misogyny at the beginning of b1 is in part motivated by the fact that his mother died at the hands of the Fire Nation and his father left shortly thereafter to fight the Fire Nation, and he responds to those things by throwing himself into the role of being the “man” of the village and protecting the people he loves who are still with him. Like with Yue, he doesn’t allow himself to dwell on his mother’s death. This could have been the beginning of a really interesting b2 arc for Sokka, in which he throws himself into being the Avatar’s companion to get away from the grief of losing Yue, but this time, through the events of the show, he’s forced to acknowledge that this is an unhealthy coping mechanism. And maybe this is what bryke was going for with “The Swamp”, but this confines his whole process of grief to one episode, where it could have been a season-long arc that really emphasized the effect Yue’s had on his life. 

In the case of Yue, I do lean toward saying that her death was necessary for the story that they wanted to tell (although, I will never turn down a good old-fashioned Yue lives au that really gets into her dynamism as a character, those are awesome.) However, the way they wrote Sokka following Yue’s death reduced her significance. The fact that Yue seemed to have so little impact on Sokka is precisely what makes her death feel unnecessary, even if it isn’t. 

Jet

Okay. Here we go. 

If you know my blog, you know I love Jet. You know I love Jet lives aus. Perhaps you know that I’m in the process of writing a multichapter Jet fic in which he lives after Lake Laogai. So it’s reasonable to assume that, in a discussion of whether or not Jet’s death was necessary, I’m gonna be mega-biased. And yeah, that’s probably true. But up until recently, I wasn’t really all that mad about Jet dying, at least conceptually. As I said earlier, bryke says that in the case of Jet’s death, they wanted to kill a character off that people knew and would care about, so that they could further show the tragedies of war and imperialism. Okay. That is not, in and of itself, a bad idea. 

My issue lies with the execution of said idea. First of all, the framing of Jet’s original episode is so bad. Jet is part of a long line of cartoon villains who resist imperialism and other forms of oppression through violence and are punished for it. This is actually a really common sort of villain for atla/lok, as we see this play out again with Hama, Amon, and the Red Lotus. To paraphrase hbomberguy’s description of this type of villain, basically liberal white creators are saying, “yeah, oppression is bad, but have you tried writing to your Congressman about it?” With Jet, since we have so little information about the village he’s trying to flood, there are a number of different angles that would explain his actions and give them more nuance. My preferred hc is that the citizens of Gaipan are a mix of Earth civilians, Fire citizens, and FN soldiers, and that the Earth citizens refused to feed or house Jet and the other Freedom Fighters because they were orphans and, as we see in the Kyoshi Novels, Earth families stick to their own. Thus, when Jet decides to flood Gaipan, he’s focused on ridding the valley of Fire Nation, but he doesn’t really care about what happens to the Earth citizens of Gaipan because they actively wronged him when he was a kid. That’s just one interpretation, and there have been others: Gaipan was fully Fire Nation, Gaipan was both Earth Kingdom and Fire Nation but Jet decided that the benefits of flooding the valley and getting rid of the Fire Nation outweighed the costs of losing the EK families, etc, etc. There are ways to rewrite that scenario so that Jet is not framed as an unambiguously bloodthirsty monster. In the context of Jet’s death, this initial framing reduces the possible impact that his death could have. Where Yue was unambiguously good, Jet is at the very least morally gray when we see him again in the ferry. And where we are connected to Yue through Sokka, the gaang’s active hatred of Jet hinders our ability to connect with him. This isn’t impossible to overcome--the gaang hates Zuko, and yet to an extent the audience roots for him--but Jet’s lack of screentime and nuanced framing (both of which Zuko gets in all three seasons) makes overcoming his initially flawed framing really difficult. 

So how much can it really be said, that by the time we get to Jet’s death, he’s a character that we know and care about? So much about him is still unknown (what happened to the Freedom Fighters? what prompted Jet’s offscreen redemption? who knows, fam, who knows.) Moreover, most of what we see of him in Ba Sing Se is him actively opposing Zuko and Iroh. These are both characters that at the very least the show wants us to care about. At this point, we know almost everything there is to know about them, we’ve been following them and to an extent rooting for them for two seasons, and who have had nuanced and often sympathetic framing a number of times. So much of the argument I’ve seen regarding Jet centers around the fact that he was right to expose Zuko and Iroh as Firebenders, but the reason we have to have that argument in the first place is because it’s not framed in Jet’s favor. In terms of who the audience cares about more, who the audience has more of an emotional attachment towards, Zuko and Iroh win every time. Whether Jet’s actually in the right or not is irrelevant, because emotionally speaking, we’re primed to root for Zuko and Iroh. In terms of who the framing is biased towards, Jet may as well be Zhao. So when he’s taken by the Dai Li and brainwashed, the audience isn’t necessarily going to see this as a bad thing, because it means Zuko and Iroh are safe.

The only real bit of sympathetic framing Jet gets are those initial moments on the ferry, and the moments after he and the gaang meet again. So about five, ten minutes of the show, total. And then, he sacrifices himself for the gaang. And just like Yue, his death has little to no impact on the characters in the episodes following. Katara is shown crying for four frames immediately following his death, and they bring him up once in “The Southern Raiders” to call him a monster, and once in “The Ember Island Players”, a joke episode in which his death is a joke. 

So, let’s ask again. Does this a) advance the plot, and/or b) develop character? The answer to both is no. It shows that the Dai Li is super evil and cruel, which we already knew and which basically becomes irrelevant in book 3, and that is really the only plot-significant thing I can think of. As far as character, well, it could have been a really interesting moment in Katara’s development in forgiving someone who hurt her in the past, which could have foreshadowed her forgiving Zuko in b3, but considering she calls Jet a monster in TSR, that doesn’t track. There could have been something with Sokka realizing that his snap judgment of Jet in b1 was wrong, but considering that he brings up Jet to criticize Katara in TSR, that also does not track. And honestly, neither of these possible character arcs require Jet to die. What requires Jet to die is the ~themes~. 

Let’s look at this theme again, shall we? The cost of war. We already covered it with Yue, but it’s clearly something that bryke wants to return to and shed new light on. The obvious angle they’re going for is that sometimes, you don’t know who your real enemy is. Jet thought that his enemy was the Fire Nation, but in the end, he was taken down by his own countryman. Wow. So deep. Except, while it’s clear that Jet was always fighting against the Fire Nation, I never got the sense that Jet was fighting for the Earth Kingdom. After all, isn’t the whole bad thing about him in the beginning is that he wants to kill civilians, some of whom we assume to be Earth Kingdom? Why would it matter then that he got killed by an EK leader, when he didn’t seem to ever be too hot on those dudes? But okay, maybe the angle is not that he was killed by someone from the Earth Kingdom, but that he wasn’t killed by someone from the Fire Nation. Okay, but we’ve already seen him be diametrically opposed to the only living Air Nomad and people from the Water Tribes. Jet fighting with and losing to people who aren’t Fire Nation is not a new and exciting development for him. Jet has been enemies with non-FN characters for most of the show’s run at this point. There is no thematic level on which the execution of this holds any water. 

The reason I got to thinking about this, really analyzing what Jet’s death means (and doesn’t mean) for the show, was this conversation I was having with @the-hot-zone in discord dms. We were talking about book 2 and ways it could have been better, and Zone said that they thought that Jet would have been a stronger character to parallel with Zuko’s redemption than Iroh and that seeing more of the narrative from Jet’s perspective could have strengthened the show’s themes. And when it came to the question of Jet’s death, they said, “And if we are going with Jet dying, then I want it to hurt. I want it to hurt just as much as if a main character like Sokka had died. I want the viewer to see Jet's struggles, his triumphs, the facets of Jet that make him compelling and important to the show.” And all of that just hit me. Because we don’t get that, do we? Jet’s death barely leaves a mark. Jet himself barely leaves a mark. His death isn’t plot-significant, doesn’t inspire character growth in any of our MCs, and doesn’t even accomplish the thematic relevance that it claims to. So what was the point? 

Conclusion

Much as I dislike it, Yue’s death actually added something to atla. It could have added much, much more, in the hands of writers who gave more of a shit about their Brown female characters and were less intent on seeing them suffer and knocking them down a peg, but, in my opinion, it did work for what it was trying to do. Jet? Jet? Nah, fam. Jet never got the chance to really develop into a likable character because he was always put at odds with characters we already liked, and the framing skewed their way, not his. The dude never really had a chance.        

*multiple people have spoken about how the NWT as depicted in atla is not reminiscent of real life Inuit and Yupik people and culture. I am not the person to go into detail about this, but I encourage you to check out Native-run blogs for more info!

[mega-ringsandthings-world]

I’m rewatching all my fave? english-centered period dramas in preparation for  new one coming out, twq, twp, tsp, the tudors, and I know we all love the tudor family here, but good lord was twp such a mess that I ended up actively hating every Tudor character in it. (which was kinda the point, imao) The twp show was based off phillipa gregory's books (that are even worse than the show) and they both shredded the characterizations of everyone in them to the point that they might as well be OCs based on historical figures. Literally the only reason I was able to make it through was because of the actors. jodie and jcls acting carried it at the best of times, and JCL is hot, so... and I’m so glad they got michelle fairley and essie davis as EW and MB, or else it would of been unwatchable.  I couldn’t really root for either lizzie or henry, because their characterizations and personalities were so inconstant and varied wildly from ep to ep, its like I was watching different people in each ep. nd that’s a big part of why I favored the York plotlines/characters more, at least most of them (except lizzie) stayed constant in their characterizations/motives (even if all they were consistent with was revenge against the tudors) And rooting for the tudors in general was hard too, since the show was bending backwards to make them all assholes. (JT gets a pass tho, he was just trying to raise his kid right) No one was really likable, you get a good moment with someone and then the next moment they’re doing something batshit, e.i, henry’s good for a while and then starts being a dick, (wtf was up with imply he slept with cathy gordon and him being such a bitch to lizzie out of the blue?) or you’re starting to sympathize with Margret Beaufort and then she kills another kid, which like, the decision to have her kill the two princes was a choice, and I won’t hesitate to say I enjoyed the drama it brought. Along those lines, the show is marginally enjoyable if you divorce it from the history its trying to retell and treat it as a game-of-thrones-bodice-ripper-drama, which was the intent of the author in the frst place, but whatever. That some of the best acting on the show came plots/situation that weren’t even real irl is wild, and that says a lot. henry’s talk with lizzie about her loving him, but not like she did w/rIII, and his depression-breakdown (never happened),  over his mother being a murderer and the whole thing with Richard Jr./percy warbeck was just juicy, later moments with lizzie and the bit when she talks to richard jr./pw in the tower and his laugh reminds her so much of her father? and then the execution scene? good shit.  A fave bit was henry sitting all despondent in his room remembering the killing of richardIII, and yes they did actually have richardIII buried alive in this show, jfc. It goes again to the bad characterization that ep 1 lizzie would have strangled him outright if she’d found that out, but lizzie in this ep would have been meh. Speaking of which, the short-lived friendship between richard jr./pw and teddy was extremely sweet, which made their executions all that more horrific. within the narrative of the show, R jr./pw seemed like he would have actually made an excellent king, he never seemed anything but kind and honorable, although adamant about his claim, and lizzie’s fear he would kill her children, which was  not unfounded of course, was also made mostly her entire basis for having him killed in the show, even though he was never presented as someone who would do that? make it make sense, or at least hint he would want to harm the kids after taking the throne, instead of showing him as incredibly nice. And in this show, with richard jr./pw being the actual richard, and mb having tried to kill him as a boy and framing richardIII for it, he’s more than justified in wanting the throne and justice. except that never happened irl, and the show has me rooting for a pretender instead of the certified monarchs, which are SUPPOSED TO BE THE “HEROES” OF THIS SHOW. and like, claimants to the throne are usually entitled fucks by nature, I don’t know why everyone hates richardjr./pw for being entitled, when every person who ever laid claim to a throne ever does so on the belief of entitlement to that throne?   And tell me how there was more chemistry between lizzie and faceless richard III in a four-second flashback than she and henry had in most scenes? I’m not saying that lizzie and henry didn’t have chemistry in the show, because they did, (at least the actors did) but once again, their inconsistent characterization marred a lot of scenes that would otherwise be amazing. Then the whole thing where henry r*ped her nd it was shown to be directly caused by her mentioning her relationship with richardIII? Messy, messy messy. after that, it was hard to “feel” lot of her and henry’s scenes even in better contexts. I ship lizzie/richardIII out of spite for that nasty-ass scene alone, because I can’t sit there and watch lizzie falling for her rapist. and then lizzie is vilified for her relationship with richardIII, yet the show implies that Margaret B is in love with her own brother, has lizze taunt her over it, and then present JT marrying/ MB her arranging his marriage as a tragedy for MB? Sir? Ma’am? Jasper Tudor straight up implying that his sister should get a fucking annulment so they can be together, and MB actually considering it gets a pass? more like margaret lannister. Then they bring up richarchIII as a gotcha to lizzie every other ep? someone inform henry that his beloved mother wants to fuck her brother, his beloved uncle and see if he keeps throwing rIII in lizzie’s face every five minutes. EYE. god, this show is bad, bad.  Don’t get me started on the burgundy plot. if you’re going to have the duchess start a war on a whim, at least imply she was possessed to do so by EW’s magic, or have the balls to make her stepdughter’s death actually the fault of the tudors. And poor fucking maggie. it was hard for her irl, but it’s intolerable for her within the show.   Sorry, this got long, I’m ranting at this point because holy hell ITS BAD. If you take it as a show that’s supposed to be about real life historical figures it’s a trash fire, but you really should just watch it as a story like bridgerton. makes it more tolerable.  You know you’ve lost it when a show that’s supposed to be about the unification of two great houses and the love story (not that it was reallly that great of a love story irl either, but that’s for another day) between the scions of those houses gives me hives and makes me wish the burgundy plot succeeded.   

[cyanide-latte]

Here's a debatable take:

Smash or pass Jason Voorhees?

Some people say that he died as a child and thus still is mentally a child, others claim that he's mentally an adult and can consent. And then there's claims that even if he could he wouldn't because his mother cockblocks him into thinking sex is bad.

So, smash or pass and your thoughts?

OOOHOHO, YOU ALWAYS ASK THE MOST THOUGHT-PROVOKING THINGS!! PREPARE YOURSELF, THIS ONE IS GOING TO GET VERBOSE.

Pass, largely because first and foremost, Jason's always been my first choice of "if you could pick any slasher for a brother, who would it be", but since you added your reasoning behind why Jason's a debatable pick for Smash Or Pass, let's examine it a little further.

With regards to Jason's mental-emotional age, I would say that point probably books down to an individual's personal headcanon assessment of the character. I've heard decent arguments on both sides. But for me, it is a lot less about whether or not I consider Jason an adult.

It boils down to Momma Pam and her influence on him.

Now, there's the statement of Pamela believing sex (particularly the implication within the Friday the 13th films of premarital sex, which is even echoed in a rather bald meta joke in Jason X) is bad. And why does she have such a vendetta? As she tells Alice Hardy (and the audience,) Jason drowned and she holds the young camp counselors the most accountable because they were off having sex and neglecting their duties to watch the children.

So then, premarital sex is bad, right? That's Pam's takeaway she passed on to Jason, isn't it?

I'd make an argument that's not quite the case. There's a little more to analyze here.

Yes I'm not done yet. Sorry not sorry.

I'm not sure how many within the slasher fandom have read the two-issue comic published by DC's Wildstorm imprint called "Pamela's Tale", but I want to reference it here in regards to my point. Whether or not you consider this two-issue backstory canon (and I personally struggle with it because I feel it removes more than it adds, and takes away tragic and sympathetic elements from her and Jason,) reading the comics did give me a different angle on analyzing Pam's character.

We get the majority of her backstory in flashback panels while she narrates, and the juxtaposition between the narrative text and accompanying images is there to prove to us that she's an unreliable narrator. The majority of this unreliable narration pertains to her relationship with her husband. And amid that, I'd like to draw your attention to this one panel in particular and what it implies.

You see, I don't think it's a case of premarital sex or even just sex in general being bad. The idea here isn't that [sex] is ""bad"".

It's that in Pam's mind, sex is violence.

If you take the comics as canon, then Pamela's marriage illustrates married sex for her has become a direct equivalent to violence. If you don't, it still invites the reader to examine her thoughts and feelings on a deeper level, because it suggests the [premarital] sex of the camp counselors also causes violence. Perhaps more indirect, as their sex caused negligence that led to violence against Jason and caused his drowning, but the lines are drawn and tangled all the same. And given how regularly sex and violence [and death] are almost imutably connected in horror media to serve as a subtle textual commentary, it feels not far off to posit that Pam is a—if not the— voice behind that concept.

Now, isn't killing people an act of violence as well? Yes of course it is. But we know Pam isn't in her right mind; she's on a vigilante-style mission she gave herself to punish those who indulge so freely in sex that they cause harm to innocents like Jason. We know it's a path of vengeance she's on, but in her mind, she probably views it as meting out justice as is due.

All of which ties back to Jason. We know from canon that Pamela's influence on him is rather total. She was so protective of him that in a way, he would have been unable to separate the ideas of a higher power and his mother, because she was the higher power of his world! And if the higher power tells you from the point in your childhood where you are of an age of understanding that something is wrong or violent because it hurts others, you're not likely to question that. (If you want to take it a step further and argue for the idea that Pam and Jason are connected by the Shining a telepathic link, then her influence on Jason can and does continue long after she is killed.) Punishing those who potentially harm others like himself by an act of self-indulgence like sex may not be the only reason Jason kills, but there's a lot to suggest that he's carrying on that self-appointed mission his mother had. The major difference is that Pamela did it out of an impetus for vengeance while Jason does it in honor of his mother or because he believes her views with totality.

All of that is the deeper reason why I'd say pass to Jason in this game anyway. You'd have to work like hell and hope you could overcome the equation of sex to the idea of acts of violence, which is something arguably coded into Jason's beliefs by his mother. And given Pamela's influence and self-assured beliefs, I don't see that being easily overcome, if at all.

[andnowanowl]

Since "Palestine Speaks: Narratives of Life Under Occupation" is suspiciously not available in the US in the form of an e-book, I purchased a physical copy and wanted to share it here for anyone else also unable to get access.

ABEER AYYOUB

Journalist, 26

Born in Gaza City, Gaza

Interviewed in Gaza City, Gaza

In the spring of 2013, we manage to travel to Gaza after navigating a maze of bureaucracy with both the Egyptian government and Gaza's ruling party, Hamas. Inside the tightly sealed borders of Gaza, our guide and translator is a young journalist named Abeer Ayyoub. Through our conversations, we soon realize Abeer possesses an interesting perspective on life in Gaza. And though journalists generally avoid interviewing other journalists for stories, the more we get to know Abeer, the more we know her narrative is a valuable one to share with our readers.

During our time with Abeer, she is constantly on her phone or tablet. Like many full-time journalists, she compulsively checks her e mail, keeps track of social media, and plans meetings throughout the day. But her real weakness is Instagram. If she's not using her devices for work, she's taking pictures of what she's doing. Sitting at a café: picture. Walking down the street: picture. At the corner store: picture. Nothing is too banal to make her Instagram feed, but it makes for a thorough view of life for a young working woman in Gaza.

As part of Gaza's small middle class, Abeer has better access than other Gazans to resources that are hard to come by in the midst of the blockade that Israel has implemented since 2007. She also has access to small comforts that make her going to Jordan, the envy of her peers. "My friend from the American consulate was and he asked me if I wanted him to bring me back anything," she tells us. "And I said, 'As many lip glosses as you can carry.' I'm usually out on the streets looking for stories for ten hours a day, and I need three things in my bag a notebook, a pen, and lip gloss."

GAZA WAS LIKE A HOLLYWOOD MOVIE

Oh, well, of course it was just lovely growing up in Gaza. It was like a Hollywood movie. But not a romance or comedy more like an action movie. I've witnessed two Intifadas, two military offensives, one Hamas coup.¹ Still, the more trouble I've witnessed, the more I've felt lucky to survive, and to be alive.

I was born in Gaza City the year the First Intifada started, in 1987². By the time I started school, I'd already become used to the sight of Israeli soldiers patrolling the streets every morning. I used to be really scared of them - my grandma would warn me that I shouldn't talk to them. In school, we'd teach each other tips about dealing with the soldiers. For example when you see an Israeli jeep, don't run, 'cause the soldiers will think you're doing something bad. But we were naïve as children, and I didn't think too much about who the soldiers were or why they were around. I only knew there were strange people with green uniforms everywhere. And I wondered, All of the soldiers have guns, but nobody else I see ever does. Who do they need to protect themselves against with guns if everyone else only has rocks as weapons? But I didn't understand the occupation at all. It just wasn't something my family talked about when I was growing up.

I grew up feeling like a typical Gazan. I have four brothers and five sisters. I'm number eight out of ten kids. My dad had a good income when I was young - he ran a metalworking business. But because there were ten children, it cost him a lot to send us all to school. So even though my family was relatively well off, my childhood seemed typical. I got the things I needed, but not all the things I wanted. We'd get new clothes for school, but not whatever we asked for or anything like that. Like most people in the community, we'd go to shop when the school year started, and then shop around Eid Al-Fitr, the feast after Ramadan, and then Eid Al-Adha.³

We lived on a street that was made up entirely of my family. My dad had one house for his family, and he had four brothers with their own houses on the block. So between my siblings and my cousins, I spent my whole childhood playing with family. As boys and girls, we'd play soccer together in the street, go to school together, then come home together. We had a few neighbor kids nearby who would come play with us as well.

My mother was a normal housewife in many ways. She worked very hard and tried to give all of us kids the attention we wanted. I remember when it was time to do homework, she'd try to help us all. Of course, she couldn't spend much time with any one of us! I still remember her teaching me how to write my first words, though, in Arabic and in English. She didn't know English herself, but she'd memorize my English lessons and try to help me understand them. I remember her reciting the days of the week in English, so that I'd learn, even if that's all she knew.

The Second Intifada started in 2000, when I was twelve or thirteen. I saw a lot of shooting and violence - there were direct clashes around the Israeli settlements.⁴ And I used to go to school some days and not other days because of what was happening out in the streets. Young people from schools around the area, they used to come and get us out to the participate in the clashes. It was violent all the time. Mostly, we just tried to stay safe. A lot of days, we'd leave school early because there were often clashes at the end of the school day. If we slipped out before the day ended, we might not have to walk home through tear gas.

During the time of the Second Intifada, I was a teenager, and back then I was the stereotypical stupid girl who wanted to get married at the age of sixteen. I'd never dream of having male friends I might just hang out with alone.

The separation of boys and girls was actually something that surprised me at first, but I got used to it quickly. Some of the neighbor boys I used to play soccer with every day suddenly stopped talking to me around the time I turned fifteen, and my brothers and cousins told me I should just pretend I didn't know them. This was the culture - these boys I'd played with for ten years every day were suddenly strangers to me, since they weren't related and I was a young woman. It was disappointing, but I got used to believing that wearing a hijab was something important, that I had to hide myself from men.⁵

My dad always told me that I was the most clever of his children, and I got great grades. But I never had any examples of women who went on to have impressive careers, and nobody ever encouraged me to think in those terms. But I studied very hard. Honestly, I didn't think I was very pretty and I thought I'd have a hard time finding a husband. I thought I'd prove I was special instead by getting good grades and a very high grade on the college qualifying exams. And I did. My parents were so impressed

by my score, they told me that they'd support me in going to any school and in any field I chose. I was studying for the exams in 2005, and that was a big year in Gaza as well. It was the year Israeli soldiers left Gaza. That felt like a real achievement.⁶

The next year, I started at Islamic University of Gaza here in Gaza City.⁷ I wasn't happy about religious control of the university, but it had a curriculum in English literature that I wanted to study, and it was impossible to attend a university at the time that wasn't under Islamist control if you lived in Gaza. I'd been studying English through school, and I wanted to keep that up. I thought it might be a good way to get a job doing something important after school.

So I spent my first year at university studying English literature. Then, in 2006, Hamas captured Gilad Shalit, and Gaza became a different place.⁸ Israel began cracking down, and we had less money and less freedom. Because we didn't have as much money coming into our household, my dad wanted to pull us out of school. My mom is fond of gold and accessories, but she got all of her jewelry together and sold it all to pay for our college fees. So she's the reason I could continue my education. In many ways, it was my mom who made me what I am today.

I WOULD WAKE UP AND SCREAM, "I JUST NEED TO SLEEP!"

In my second year at university, I took a course where the teacher asked us to do a research project on people working with English-language skills. I hit on the topic of news editing. I don't remember the reason. I just wanted something to write about so I could hand in a paper. But when I started searching, I found so many books on the subject, and they were really interesting.

Then as part of the project I interviewed a journalist here in Gaza - his name was Saud Abu Ramadan. He was a freelancer, and he wrote for newspapers all over the world. Our interview was really lovely, and he told me he'd be happy to mentor me as a journalist if I wanted. I accepted. Here in the media world, there are so many creeps who expect something from a girl. I've met so many men who will be like, "I'll teach you about journalism, but you have to do something for me." Bad stuff. But Saud wasn't like that, and through his office I also met a journalist named Fares Akram, who was a journalist and also a research consultant for Human Rights Watch.⁹ They were both professional, and I learned a lot working with them. I started training with them once a week until I figured out it was exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a journalist.

I was still a student when Israel sent soldiers into Gaza in 2008.¹⁰ Because of the bombing, I was shut in at home for twenty-two days with my extended family. There were more than thirty of us in a single apartment, and we'd have breakfast, lunch, and dinner together - being together made us all feel a little safer. There was no electricity at all during that time. It was very cold, and we spent many hours huddled up under blankets. We cooked our food on an open fire and we had a little tank of propane gas to cook with as well, but we were trying to conserve the gas as long as possible. Nobody was selling things out in the open in Gaza during that time. During the days, some of my brothers would sneak out and head to secret black markets they knew about for some basic supplies. I spent most days listening to news on a battery-powered radio. I was trying to understand the situation as a journalist. What is really happening? What's the real story? How are journalists trying to cover these stories? As scared as I was, I felt like that time was a kind of training for me.

There were air strikes day and night. We were all especially scared at night, when we were trying to sleep. I remember falling asleep for a couple of minutes, then hearing the bombs start to fall. I would wake up and scream, "I just need to sleep!" By the final days of the campaign, we were all crying because we wanted to sleep so badly. We learned to distinguish two types of noise - the zzzz of drones passing overhead, and the whoosh of F-16s coming in for air strikes.

The sound of drones was annoying, but hearing the whoosh of F-16s was frightening, because it meant bombing was about to start. My nephews, who were just infants at the time, they learned to tell drones apart from planes. Nowadays, they don't even wake up for drones. We were never hit, though we did have windows broken on our building from nearby strikes. The windows on an apartment above ours came down. Nobody was injured, but I still remember the sound of the bomb falling - schhhhh.

I became paranoid after so many days of bombing. I used to to think, My house will never be targeted because we have no one engaged in military work. But it could be for any reason - a militant passing by in a car. Maybe someone in one of the empty fields by our building - the bombers used to target empty fields because militants might use them for launching rockets.

Then, after three weeks, there was a cease-fire. I went back to the university the day after the cease-fire, even though it was still dangerous. When I saw the campus, I cried. It had been demolished. In many ways I hated that school - I didn't like the strict religious element - but the devastation made me cry. The school made many repairs over the next month, just fixing broken windows and making sure standing buildings were safe enough. And then all of us students went back to classes, even in buildings where the roofs were still broken. I was in school another year before I graduated, in 2010.

For the next year I worked as a fixer - someone who helped journalists make contacts in Gaza, set up interviews, that sort of thing. I was actively learning about journalism, meeting a lot of journalists. It was a good apprenticeship.

I WAS NAÏVE AND ANSWERED ALL THE QUESTIONS THEY WERE ASKING

I had my first big exposure to how the media world works in Gaza in January 2011. I was going to take part in a solidarity gathering with the Egyptian revolution." I was also going to meet one of my mentors, Fares Akram, who was going to cover the story. There were about twenty-six of us at the demonstration. But really, as soon as everyone showed up, the Hamas police force was already there preparing to shut it down. I think Hamas was afraid of protest movements in the Middle East spreading to Gaza and challenging their authority.

Just as I arrived at the scene, I got a call from Fares, who told me the demonstration was off, and he told me where to go to find his car so he could give me a ride home. I went and got into his car, and then a Hamas policeman walked up and said, "Your identity cards, please." Fares gave his identity card to them.

But while this was happening, some female police officers were attacking some of the female protesters. One of the protesters wasn't wearing a head scarf, and the female officer pulled her by the hair, slapped her, asked her why she wasn't a real Muslim. I was worried I might get in trouble - Hamas would check to see if men and women riding in cars together were married or related, and if not, there could be an arrest.

The officer at our car was distracted, and so I just stepped out of the car and started walking. After a couple of minutes, I found the policeman following me on his motorcycle. And when I turned around and made eye contact, he pulled up and said, "Your cell phone and your identity card." I started crying like an idiot and gave him the phone and my ID. Then he said, "You can come and retrieve them from the police station."

I followed him to the station. And when I entered, I found four other women from the demonstration. They were acting strong and tough, but I was crying. My family didn't know where I was, and the police refused to give me a phone call. Then they began interrogating me, and I was naïve and answered all the questions they were asking.

I was interrogated by a female officer, and she kept asking me about Fares and what I was doing with him. I was like, "I don't know him. We just met. He's a journalist, but I don't know where he lives." The interrogator said, "He's the brother of so-and-so, we know." And I was like, "Eh, no, he's not." She was trying to outsmart me.

Then the officer started going through my bag, asking me what was in it. She found a prescription drug I was taking for an injured leg, and she wanted to know about that. Then finally she said, "Okay, call your family members to come." And that was the worst moment, because I thought, What should I tell my mom and dad? I called my brother - he has good relations with people from Hamas. And then I signed a paper saying I wouldn't participate in such events later. I went back home to find the story all over the news in Gaza. Everyone was talking about it, because it was the first time that Hamas had arrested women for protesting. It was a big story to see women arrested for activism. They had my full name on the news. I felt like I had made it big!

Then the rumors started. The media had its own spin. Suddenly commentators on the news were like, "Maybe it wasn't a protest, maybe these girls were just immoral and showing off, not even covering their hair," and stuff like that. I cried for a couple of days, because it was a little overwhelming, the whole exposure.

The experience of getting arrested, and then the media spin that maybe we were just prostitutes or something, it was crazy, and I decided to write about it all on a personal blog. So I wrote about this online and then someone from Hamas's Ministry of Information e-mailed me and said, "It's insane what you wrote. It's biased." This guy with the ministry said he would go to the website and start leaving comments if I didn't take down the post - Abeer's not a professional journalist, you shouldn't hire her, and stuff like that. It was my first run-in with Hamas over my writing. It was a little intimidating, but since then I've learned better how to deal with the government.

MY ONLY FEAR WAS ABOUT MAKING DEADLINES

I chose journalism as a career, which is not a very acceptable job for a girl here in Gaza. After I started working, some of my own relatives started to say bad things about me - my uncles and cousins would talk. And they were always pushing on my parents, like, "This is not the way Abeer should be, and everyone's going to talk about her, that she goes around talking with guys alone." Some of my cousins, they'd say things like, "This is the bitch who goes with guys all the way." My parents could have reached a point where they'd say, "Enough. Just stay at home and don't do anything because everyone is talking about you, and we know you are not doing something bad, but it's our reputation at the end of the day." But my family didn't have that reaction. No.

Slowly, my parents began to trust me with travel, with my work. I was getting assignments for web stories for outlets like the Egyptian Independent. Basically, eyes-on-the-ground sorts of stories about what was happening in Gaza. At first, I might get an assignment that would mean I'd have to travel to Rafah crossing, and my parents would be like, "Make sure you have a driver. We're worried."¹² And they didn't want me to leave Gaza City. But the more they saw that I could take care of myself, that nothing happened, the more they trusted me.

I also got some work as a researcher and fixer for Human Rights Watch. For work with HRW, I got a chance to get out of Gaza and go to Jerusalem for the first time in early 2012. I got a pass from Israel to be in Jerusalem for eight days. When I went to Jerusalem, I was sure it was a dream. So I kept waiting for the moment I would wake and find myself in bed. And then an hour passed, two hours, three hours, four hours, and I was slapping my cheek, like I should wake up. Then when the night came, and I slept, and then woke up again and I opened the window and it was Jerusalem - I was sure it wasn't a dream. I went to East Jerusalem, and I was seeing other parts of my homeland for the first time. I had a friend from HRW in Jerusalem, and she took me for a ride. She wouldn't tell me where we were going, but we kept driving up and up. Suddenly, out my window I saw the Dome of the Rock.¹³ I started screaming like an idiot. This was an image that I saw on posters or framed in pictures in every house in Gaza when I was growing up, on all my school notebooks. And here it was, right in front of me.

But being in Jerusalem was a strange experience. One amazing thing was that other Palestinians in Jerusalem were seeing a Gazan for the first time. I remember going into a hotel in East Jerusalem. I wanted to tell everyone I met I was from Gaza, and I talked to the receptionist at the hotel—a Palestinian man. He was shocked. Then he made a dumb joke and asked me if I had any bombs in my pockets or something like that.Then the next day I got to take a bus ride to Ramallah, and I made small talk with a man on the bus who was from Bethlehem. When I told him I was from Gaza, he was as surprised as the receptionist. He said something like, "No way you're from Gaza, you're cute and smart!" The trip out of Gaza was really eye-opening for me.

IT WAS GOOD THAT I STAYED HOME

In 2012, I got a scholarship to go to Sweden for six months. My father wasn't ready for me to travel that far yet. He was worried. So he wouldn't let me go, and I cried for days. But it was good that I stayed home, because it led to one of my first big breaks.

During the first Israeli strike on Gaza, I was still doing my training, so I was reading news all the time. But in the second strike, in November 2012, I was already a professional journalist, so it was a bit different.¹⁴ By this time I was only focusing on how to get news. My only fears were about making deadlines.

I used to go out into the street immediately after the air strike happened. I got used to seeing bodies: corpses lifted out from under the rubble. I would go into the hospital as well.¹⁵ In the hospital, I was always watching the entrance. And cars would speed in so fast after a strike. Everyone outside would scream to back up, to give the arriving passengers more space. And I'd stay in my spot, watching women, and then men, and then children, and then old women - people of all ages and all different backgrounds come in with all sorts of injuries from the air strikes.

And during the strikes I would be outside my home most of the day, and I even slept outside my home. The strike lasted eight days, and then afterward, I thought, I was under the rockets and I didn't even cry. It was the most important phase in my life, because I wrote for the biggest newspapers in the world, and I used to have my voice on international radio. I was turning in reporting for the Guardian in the UK and Al Jazeera. Ha'aretz in Israel hired me, because they weren't legally permitted to send journalists to Gaza to cover the strikes. I thought, This is my real start. And after, I felt like I had all of these experiences to deal with, all of these feelings, but I didn't have time to even think about what I'd seen. It was insane. I felt like I needed a break just to process what happened, but there was no time. I got a lot of new opportunities to cover stories about the aftermath of the strikes, and there was just no chance to get away. I wanted to do something for the Palestinian cause itself, and I wanted to be a journalist, and I knew Gaza was the best place for me to be a journalist. But it was hard to keep working here without a break.

HEY, IT'S NOT ROCKETS ALL OVER GAZA

I'm studying again at the Islamic University of Gaza, where I got my B.A. in English Literature. I'm studying Hebrew because I want to learn a third language besides Arabic and English. There's nothing much I hope to do with Hebrew. I just want to speak the language and listen to Israeli news and Hebrew news, because some of what comes out of Israel is better news, when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Honestly, you're likely to hear the truth from a few of the good Israeli sources than from Hamas sources. (Blogger's Note: This interview took place a decade ago.) After my work for Ha'aretz, Hamas announced that Gazan journalists would no longer be allowed to work for Israeli media. I contacted them to ask why, and they told me I better just go along with the ban without complaining. I said, "I would understand if you stopped Israeli or American journalists who are totally pro-Israeli. I would understand if you banned them from working here. But I don't understand when you ban me, as a Palestinian who works for Israeli media - which I actually consider a kind of resistance." It was my pleasure just to sit down with a laptop and just write things to the Israeli audience. It was a kind of resistance, addressing the Israeli community and being credible at the same time. I would say exactly what's going on and convince the Israelis of how misled they are about Gaza by most of Israeli media.

But people around the world have the wrong idea about Gaza, not just Israelis. My mission in life is to destroy the stereotypical image about Palestinians in the media, so I keep taking photos of things that people don't think exist in Gaza. This is what I do inmy news, and my reports, and my feature stories. In my Facebook and in my Instagram. So when I take photos, I try to take photos of girls without hijab, or young girls wearing shorts and stuff like that. And the beach. Hundreds, thousands, going to the beach just to swim, thinking of nothing. No fucking occupation, no fucking Hamas, nothing! They just want to have fun. I go to the market, take photos of mannequins with short dresses. And it's something normal to see a young girl with hijab, but I would try to avoid catching photos of her, because Western people in Europe and America, they already know about these people, and they are not my concern. I would rather focus on the type of people Western media never heard about. I also take photos all the time of fancy hotels and fancy restaurants - like hey, it's not rockets all over Gaza. We have cafés, restaurants, clubs, gyms, whatever you can think of.

So this is my main mission. I would love everyone - not only in the U.S. - to know that Gaza is not Afghanistan. We have educated people and people who have nothing to do with the ongoing clashes. They should give themselves the chance to see the picture from outside and stop having this preconception when it comes to Gaza, because we have everything here, and the Western media always intend to prove the preconceptions people have. They would see that for most of the people, they are harmed by what's going on rather than being a part of it.

The thing is that I'm an Arabic-speaking journalist who writes in English, not my mother tongue. If I write in my mother tongue, then I will be addressing Palestinians themselves. And why would I address Palestinians themselves Palestinians know that they were occupied, and they know their rights, they know their duties, they know everything. I'm writing in a second language, so I need to use that, because few international writers come regularly to Gaza. Usually, these people come with a preconception, the preconception of what they hear. And they come to prove what they have in mind, not to rectify it.

Still, being a Gazan journalist is not always easy. Every time I write something sensitive, I keep my phone with me because I'm waiting for someone to call me from the government offices in Gaza. I'm strong enough to face it. Every time I write something sensitive, I read the story ten times because I attribute every controversial quote to someone who actually said it, not anonymous sources, so I won't be accused of making it up. So even though I like to cover daily life in some of my work, I also want to uncover what's really happening in Gaza. I don't think you are doing anything unless you are risking something. I'm not consider myself a real journalist if I'm just covering the openings of new shopping malls in Gaza City.

With time, my relationship with the government has become fine. I have good relations with the government members and ministers and everything. I think they decided, Sure, that Abeer is a journalist who talks a lot, but she never makes up stories. It's true that I write about the but it's true also that I write about the Israeli occupation. There is a big government, difference if you are focusing only on Hamas or on Israel or the Palestinian Authority. I write everything. But it's not my fault if the Hamas government commits five human rights violations in a row and I write about the five violations.

I DO STUFF THAT GIRLS HERE DON'T USUALLY DO

To help cope, I try to live a non-traditional Gaza life as much as that's possible. I wake up in the morning, go to the gym, hang out with friends, spend the night out. Now I'm applying for a swimming class. I do stuff that the girls here don't usually do. I'm learning a third language, just because I want to stay as busy as possible. Also because I don't want to feel the occupation is limiting things I can do. I'm busy 24/7, but that doesn't mean that I'm working 24/7. I have some specific hours of work and specific hours of fun - sport, swimming, hanging out, sleeping. But I never had a time of thinking, I can't do anything.

I feel like my society does not accept me, but I always say, "It's their problem, not mine." I pray for them that they will have enough awareness and education to understand what I'm trying to do. Society wants me to get married when I'm twenty years old and wake up at six a.m., cleaning, and serving my men. This is not the life I want to live.

There is a word that means "against the feminine." Patriarchy. I hate it, and I feel like I'm totally opposing this idea in my life. I want to prove that I can do whatever men can do. And I can do it better than many of them. I see men looking at me, but I don't give a shit because me being a girl doesn't mean that if you look at me, I'm a bad girl. No. If you look at me, then it's your problem. You have a problem with controlling your desire. Then I go to do my work in places that are usually occupied with men, and when I enter, everyone's like, "You can't be here because you're the only girl." And I'm like, "So what? Does it mean that you will all rape me? Because I'm the only girl here?" You know, this is the main obstacle in my life. I'm here now just because I want to prove to myself I can go out at a late time and go back home, and no one will ever talk to me or do anything bad to me, because my brothers do it and they know no one will make trouble for them.

IF PALESTINE WASN'T OCCUPIED, EVERYONE WOULD WANT TO VISIT

I always say, if Palestine weren't occupied, then everyone would want to visit. I've been to the West Bank, and it's like a heaven. They have everything - mountains, hills, deserts, ancient cities. In Gaza we have the sea and a beautiful beach. But Palestine is this small besieged territory, and even the residents here can't move around freely. All of this powerlessness over movement leaves Palestinians feeling very dependent on other countries, as though we can't be independent.

I belong to this place for many reasons, because I was raised here. The apartment where I was born is my grandfather's family house. The family is originally from Gaza, so I do belong to this place. And I love it. And me I love everything about it.

I'm a journalist, and I want to have my name get bigger and bigger. I will never have a better place than Palestine in general to achieve this dream. I would love to leave Gaza for a month a year, just to explore around. Just to meet new people, to make new relationships, and work on improving my writing. I would like to do assignments abroad. Like if I can be sent to Turkey or Egypt, I would love to do that. But I'll always return to Gaza. I'll never live outside this country. Never.

Starting with reports of bombing on July 8 2014, Abeer covered the invasion of Gaza for Ha'aretz, Los Angeles Times, New York Daily News, +972 Magazine, BuzzFeed, as well as through social media outlets such as Twitter and Instagram. Abeer investigated the shelling of UN schools, visited the morgues, and wrote a passionate open letter to Israeli citizens that was published in Ha'aretz. She posted on social media on August 3 that she had just woken up from her first night of sleep in over three weeks.

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Footnotes

¹ In 2006, Hamas won parliamentary elections in Gaza and largely took control of the government through democratic means. However, in June 2007, Hamas clashed with the

Palestinian Authority, and its leading party, Fatah, in a series of armed confrontations. Following the armed conflict, Fatah and the Palestinian Authority withdrew from Gaza.

² Gaza City is the largest city in the Gaza Strip. It has over 515,000 residents. The First Intifada was an uprising throughout the West Bank and Gaza against Israeli military occupation.

³ Eid Al-Fitr and Eid Al-Adha are the two major feast days of Islam. Palestinian custom is to purchase new clothing for the feast days, when family members exchange visits.

⁴ In 2000, there were seventeen Israeli settlements in Gaza and a little over 6,200 settlers.

⁵ The hijab is a garment that covers the head and neck and is worn by many Muslim women throughout the world.

⁶ In 2005, Israel announced a unilateral withdrawal plan from the Gaza Strip.

⁷ The Islamic University of Gaza is an independent university system in Gaza City. It serves just under 20,000 undergraduates.

⁸ Gilad Shalit was an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldier who was kidnapped in Israel in June 2006 by Gazan militias affiliated with Hamas. He was released as part of a prisoner swap in October 2011.

⁹ Human Rights Watch is a non-profit organization based in the U.S. that investigates human rights abuses around the world. HRW conducts fact finding missions with the help of journalists, lawyers, academics, and other experts.

¹⁰ The strikes on Gaza in 2008 lasted around three weeks, from December 27, 2008, until a cease-fire on January 18, 2009. The invasion was named Operation Cast Lead by the Israeli military.

¹¹ In January of 2011, millions of protesters throughout Egypt gathered to demand the ouster of Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, who had been in power for three decades.

¹² The Rafah border crossing is the sole border crossing from Gaza into Egypt, and since Israel imposed a blockade on Gaza in 2007, the Rafah crossing is often Gazans' only accessible point of exit from the Gaza Strip. The crossing is often closed as well, however, and since 2007 it is very difficult for Gazans to leave the Gaza Strip.

¹³ The Dome of the Rock is an Islamic shrine built on the site of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

¹⁴ Operation Pillar of Defense was an eight-day assault by the Israeli military starting November 14, 2012.

¹⁵ Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City is the largest medical facility in Gaza