#even at this early stage when the corruption has just started to show itself

[cellgatinbo]

so i haven't stopped thinking about this ever since- what the hell was happening when tubbo ran into charlie and flippa?

like sure later on charlie was glitching out a bunch around everyone, but apparently just being around these two made even tubbo super unstable. he was being teleported around out of his control, and the longer he was with them it seemed to get worse, eventually into and through the other side of the wall. and the whole time charlie was totally oblivious, apparently not noticing anything wrong or weird about it at all?

[shippingdragons]

Toby Stephens Returns to the New York Stage to Investigate the Media In ‘Corruption’

Stephens talks about playing Tom Watson, the member of Parliament who pursued the investigation of the UK phone hacking scandal. “We’re still living in the aftermath of all the stuff that came out," he says.

By Harry Haun • 03/25/24 4:55pm

Toby Stephens as Tom Watson in Corruption at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater. T Charles Erickson

“I love doing what I do on stage,” declares Toby Stephens, more joyfully than boastfully. Call it a (very) early calling. The gifted offspring of genuine theatrical royalty (Sir Robert Stephens and Dame Maggie Smith), he plies the family trade with distinction on two continents. He can’t help it.

When Broadway first saw Stephens, he was drawing double duty in the 1999 revival of Jean Anouilh’s Ring Round the Moon, playing patrician twins who turn into romantic rivals. A quarter of a century later he has finally returned to New York in Corruption, where he is one of just two actors in a company of 13 who does not play multiple roles.

Stephens portrays Tom Watson, a British Parliament member who helped squeeze a death rattle out of Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World for hacking the phones of thousands of celebrities. Playwright J.T. Rogers adapted Watson and journalist Martin Hickman’s 2012 book Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and The Corruption of Britain into Corruption, currently getting a world-premiere staging from Bartlett Sher at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, the site of the duo’s previous Tony winner, 2016’s Oslo.

In the 25 years between his New York stage sojourns Stephens has been busy doing his thing “in an industry that’s becoming more and more precarious,” he tells Observer. That’s meant keeping “a variety going,” trading movie roles like the Bond villain Gustav Graves in Die Another Day with a turn as Hamlet with the Royal Shakespeare Company. “I still try to balance theater with making money. That’s what it comes down to—finding that balance.”

What was the lure that brought Stephens back to New York? “A number of things,” he begins. “Firstly, I worked with Bart and J.T. on Oslo in London and enjoyed the experience. Secondly, Corruption is a new piece. Really interesting new writing is quite rare these days. Lots of revivals are done, but I really want to work on something new.” And then there’s focus of Corruption: the media, privacy, and truth itself. “It’s an important subject because we’re still living in the aftermath of all the stuff that came out. It’s still on-going.”

It’s not been an easy play to bring off. “There’s a point in rehearsals and previews where you suddenly feel like ‘Oh, I’m in control of this. It’s not in control of me,’” he says. “What I hate is when you aren’t quite in control of the material. It’s just beyond your fingertips.” The challenge of Corruption was its complexity. “The play is freighted with information, and you have to get that across and make it all seem naturalistic and real. You must leave the audience believing this narrative.”

Adding to the complexity, the show changed throughout previews, a process Stephens calls “terrifying,” though, “that’s how J.T. and Bart work,” he adds. Some of the changes were subtle, others were major. “By the time we reached the first night, it was a very different piece than what we started with. The skeleton was there, but the way we told the story was different. They tightened it up, cut things, rearranged things, even put new scenes in.” Still, there was enough time to work with the material that by opening night Stephens had found the control he was looking for. “I had fun because I knew it was cemented and this would be the piece we’re doing.”

How deeply did Stephens delve into the character of the man he was playing? “Not very,” the actor admits. “I know of him because I’m aware politically in the U.K. I read the newspaper and follow current affairs. I’ve watched him through the years. In terms of research, I believe the play is the play. That’s my main touchstone. I have to trust J.T. has done thorough research, which he has.”

Tom Watson, Toby Stephens, playwright J.T. Rogers, and director Bartlett Sher on opening of Corruption. Tricia Baron

In fact, Stephens opted not to read the book the play is based on. “I find doing loads of research—beyond what the material is— isn’t helpful. All that does is confuse and muddy what you’re doing,” he says. “My business is to do the play I’m given and make my character dramatic and nuanced enough for audiences to deal with.”

So for Stephens, the research is the script, though he does admit one addition to get Watson’s accent right. “He’s got an accent that’s quite broad when he’s talking as himself, but when he’s in Parliament or talking officially, it’s slightly subtler,” he says. To nail that, he watched “a lot of videos—but up to a point. I don’t want to do an impersonation.”

Tom Watson was a surprise guest at Corruption’s opening. “Thank God, I didn’t know that he was present,” Stephens sighs. “Afterwards, Tom said, ‘If this play was done in London, it would be a lightning rod.’ I think he’s right about that. It’s still very fresh in people’s memory. There’s still legal action against newspapers for hacking.” Though Watson had read the play before seeing it, Stephens thinks he was slightly stunned by the whole thing. “Actually seeing it, seeing somebody else playing you, is a completely different thing. You’ve got someone who has lived the real story, and you’re doing a simplified version of that. But I think that he was very, very impressed by the show. ”

[historyhermann]

Steven Universe, vegetarianism, and media representation [Part 1]

My response to how some fans feel about Steven as a vegetarian. Cropped screencap from one of my favorite scenes from "Snow Day"

On December 23rd, "Snow Day," the 8th episode of Steven Universe Future (herein SUF), the mini-epilogue series to cap out the Steven Universe franchise, apart from possible games, aired on Cartoon Network. Among some fans there has been  anger and annoyance with the line by one of series protagonists, Steven Universe (voiced by Zach Callison), in declaring to his friends/guardians, Pearl, Garnet, and Amethyst, that he has been a "vegetarian for, like, a month," saying it goes against his character and is "wrong." I'd like to defend this development, using existing canon, explain its importance in the show as a whole, and media representation of vegetarians. On this occasion, I have to laugh at that article in VegNews which claimed Pearl was a vegetarian because she is grossed out by eating and "...the only thing we see her consume is tea...[and] we're willing to bet she's not adding honey or milk, either." [1] Some of these sentiments are summarized from my Reddit comments.

Reprinted from my History Hermann WordPress blog and also on Wayback Machine. Originally published on Jan. 2. 2020.

Let's start with the episode itself. With that, warning of spoilers ahead for that episode if you have not seen this episode on Cartoon Network or any other platforms. As the episode begins, Steven is overworking himself, waking up early in the morning, preparing for a day full of activities to help those un-corrupted at the end of Season 5, helping them learn how to express themselves and enjoy themselves in a universe free of the repressive rule of dictators (as Steven called them in "Famiilar"), figureheads at this point. He leaves the house without breakfast, only taking a protein shake, decides to not take his novelty backpack, and drives to the school after Pearl bundles him up for the cold, saying he had "errands" to do. When he comes back that night, the Gems (Pearl, Garnet, and Amethyst) greet him, trying to cheer him up, but he rejects their entreaties, rejecting activities and foods (like a pepperoni pizza) he enjoyed in the past. The next day, he wakes up at the same time, rejects his classic meal (a "together breakfast") as having "too much sugar," and tries to leave his house, but the snow stops him. As such, all the classes are cancelled and he gets out his notebook to work on changes to the third-quarter schedule. Amethyst sees he is too stressed out and begins a game of Steven Tag, last featured in "Keep Beach City Weird," a season 1 episode, when each Gem tagged becomes "classic Steven" (i.e. Steven from seasons 1-5), later joined in by all the Gems. The episode ends with Steven, after he is tagged and turns into "classic Steven" criticizing his fellow Gems not seeing him as grown up but rather a kid. They come around to this and rightly apologize to him. He wakes up the next day and travels with Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl, riding all in the car together, Amethyst with her own protein shake!

Perhaps that summary doesn't do the episode complete justice, but it sets the stage for the next part of my analysis: the importance of Steven becoming vegetarian (not a vegan). Steven is changing and maturing just as the world is changing, as he isn't the same person as the one who liked shows like Dogcopter (or "pupcopter" which is one for younger children), ate meat, and used a Cheeseburger backpack, like he did in the past. People like the cute, younger Steven but he is 17 years old now and fans should treat him that way. Without a doubt, he is putting a lot of emphasis on his responsibilities and it is stressing him out. You could even say that his rejection of a lot from the past is dangerous.

However, he is still making his own choices, just like every character, trying to cope with the stress, as he has "his own skin-care routine" noted by the fandom page for the episode. Steven's development reminded me of Connie in her debut in "Bubble Buddies," who talked about how her parents won't let her eat donuts because they have trans fats, although there is isn't an exact parallel of course. He seems to be cutting himself off from almost everyone, dedicating himself to his work, with Connie nor Lion making an appearance in the episode. I'll expand on that a bit later on.

Steven's choice goes beyond seeing the error of his past ways (being a meat-eater) or the possibility he is like "every teen" now (he isn't). He was acting within character, as some fans reminded us of how he acted during "Warp Tour" toward the Gems (the debut of Peridot, an autistic character like Entrapta):

In snow day he just gets kind of exasperated with the gems treating him like he's still 12, which is a totally normal way for him to feel. Part of growing up involves growing out of old interests. In the end he was happy to join them playing the new updated Steven tag and bring them with him to help do errands, and the next episode ["Why So Blue?"] had Steven being his usual happy self enjoying art and dancing and singing and stuff. So Snow Day honestly wasn't out of character for him imho.

This refutes the claim that he is "out of character" or the supposed "manipulating fan service" that some fans claimed. For those that say its a "betrayal" of his dad or of the saying "if every porkchop were perfect, we wouldn't have hot dogs," because that saying is supposed to be symbolic, and he is not the same as his dad, Greg, who can do what he wants. As one fellow user put it,

Steven has always been incredibly sensitive to the welfare of other living things, and that's only grown as he's gotten older. Honestly, for years now I've been predicting that he'd become a vegetarian eventually, although I wasn't sure if they would ever actually say so on the show.

To be fully fair, we should have seen it coming. As Leah said on Twitter, this should be a natural confusion based on all the hints in season 1 that "showed he was somewhat uncomfortable with meat." Certain users have cited the cookout at the end of Change Your Mind, that Steven seemed to eat pepperoni pizza in "Guidance," and other examples (like eating a hotdog in the openings to Season 1 episodes), we have to recognize that Steven has only been a vegetarian for ONE MONTH, so those examples are mute. Additionally, the time period between "Guidance" and "Snow Day" is not established, but is more than a month, as its assumed to be winter in "Snow Day" but perhaps summer or fall in "Guidance." Some have said that Sapphire may have made it snow, but I'm not sure she has that power, unless she worked with Lapis, of course, but Lapis didn't appear in the episode, so I don't know about that at all. He also had only potatoes and veggies during "Rose Buds" as one user pointed out, another detail worth noting.

Some can say that the episode was "depressing to watch" or grumble about Steven supposedly "starting to become unlikable and that's not good for your protagonist." The latter especially is absurd because people disliked him at the beginning (and the show in general) BECAUSE Steven was annoying. As I noted elsewhere, there is no doubt that SUF has a different tone, but Steven and the Gems are trying to deal with the aftermath of their victory in "Change Your Mind," and enforce the victory, dealing with the changes. Additionally, the Steven Universe franchise, itself, is about people changing. Not everyone stays the same and even though Steven is changing, the other Gems (Amethyst, Pearl, and Garnet) don't see it or fully recognize it, hence offending him with Steven tag, treating him like a kid. Steven has felt they don't completely understand him in the past, so this isn't a new sentiment. Those that say that Steven becoming vegetarian made them "legitimately nauseous" are about as bad as the person who argued with me on Twitter last week. I rather sympathize with a fan who said that the development is on-brand for Steven, adding that:

It shows growth and maturity; it shows that he finally understands the hypocrisy of "everyone is equal" but continues to contribute to animal agriculture. I know everyone won't agree with me, and that's okay.

Building upon this, I would say that his switch to vegetarianism, which is a recent development in the show, is an indication, among many others, that Steven is becoming more mature and modified, although not completely different from his youthful self. As one reviewer put it, "the world strikes on and Steven is shifting with it." Perhaps you could say he is doing a "speed run to adulthood," but he is growing and changing, with the show striking a much more mature tone. This is understandable because has a lot of work to do to maintain the "established peace across the stars," disbanding the "tyrannical and colonizing ways" of the Diamonds "to improve Gem life on the Gem Homeworld and Earth," as it is an ongoing struggle in an imperfect universe.

It's not flimsy that Steven is vegetarian, its awesome, showing a degree of maturity on his part and a representation of change in and of itself. I don't need funny memes to tell me that either. Sure, he needs therapy, without a doubt, which is a focus of later episodes. This brings me to the most important part of this post: representation. Before this episode, some of the best representation vegetarians had in animated shows was Lisa in “The Simpsons," still a canon vegetarian and Stan in “South Park” (not a canon vegetarian), so it should be praised that the Crewinverse and Rebecca Sugar allowed this representation in a show with great LBGTQ representation in the past, meaning that has done a good step forward. More than that, this shows "natural growth, hes becoming a teen and changing" as one user put it, and fits with his generally pacifist attitude and/or adopting the ideals of his mother who seemed to love all living things.

You could say that Steven's line about vegetarian is a throwaway line. It's not like Lisa Simpson who had a whole episode dedicated to her vegetarianism ("Lisa The Vegetarian") where Lisa reaches a compromise with her father, Homer, while spending the "majority of the show being ridiculed and ostracized by her family and friends." That leads to some songs like “you don’t win friends with salad!” chanted by Bart, Marge, and Homer. At the same time, Lisa disrupts a community event, is "saved" by vegetarians, with her belief tolerated but "for the price of no longer being a vegetarian outcast and being accommodated," in a show that has a strong tolerance for meat eaters. You could say that Lisa's moral outrage is muzzled. In fact, if we use Frinkiac as a measurement, the only other episodes that even mention the word "vegetarian" are in Homer's Phobia (in passing), Blame It On Lisa (Homer tries to convince Lisa to cheat on vegetarianism), Grade School Confidential (Bart threatens her with violating her values), Lisa's Wedding (a vision of the future), and jokingly elsewhere. This is still often cited as an example of representation in media of vegetarianism and veganism. [2] I think the one critic who noted that while it seems to be preachy, it is "overflowing with great individual scenes: the opening trip to Storytown Village; Lisa’s revelatory moment at the dinner table" with the Meat Council propaganda video as "the funniest isolated segment in the history of the show":

The fact that Steven is a vegetarian now is positive and fits with existing canon. Its really about damn time for this development, even if it is, ultimately, "pretty insignificant" in the show itself. Likely Steven will be like Mr. Peppy in Futurama: he'll be vegetarian but not "preachy about it." Nevertheless, it is worth highlighting, in part because it puts Steven among other noteworthy vegetarian cartoon characters like Tish Katsufrakis in The Weekenders and Aang in Avatar: The Last Airbender, the latter compared to Steven. [3] While it's hard to say that someone like Marceline the Vampire Queen in Adventure Time is vegetarian, we could easily assume that Perfuma, the hippy princess in She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, is vegetarian, and maybe even Lapis and Peridot in Steven Universe, if they eat food at all, like in my fan fics, lol. Of course, that's just speculation. On an additional level, this is important due to the "pattern of vegetarians making people uncomfortable in the media" (indicated by annoyance from some parts of the SU fanbase in response in "Snow Day"), along with common "negative representation of vegetarians and vegans in the media." This episode counters that sentiment on its head. I am reminded of But I'm a Cheerleader, a great film if you haven't seen it already where the emissary of the conversion therapy camp, "True Directions," Mike, declares that vegetarianism is a "homosexual tendency." It's so absurd I have to laugh.

The fact Steven is a vegetarian is not only confirmed by further developments, like Steven eating a cheese pizza at the end of "Prickly Pair," but fits with two episodes which aired on December 28, the last two SUF episodes before the beginning of the hiatus, likely less than previous hiatuses in 2019, which was, by far, "CN’s most sparse release schedule for the show as they released the show in three chunks with massive hiatuses in between" as one fan noted in their statistical analysis of the show. We are all, clearly, being Spinel'd, but that's beside the point, lol. There has been a lot of chatter about these episodes. The first of these, "Little Graduation," begins with Steven looking happy and overjoyed, a good sign to see due to everything he is been through. But this doesn't last long: he is quickly depressed by the fact that his friends Sadie and Lars are not together as he had imagined in his mind (he was literally shipping them, like a sizable portion of the fanbase), with Sadie now dating a non-binary individual named Shep (which would may make Sadie pansexual or queer), voiced by Indya Moore, Lars & the Off Colors are going back to space, and sadly...Sadie Killer & the Suspects are breaking up! [4] The latter development is no surprise, however, as Buck Dewey predicted this in "The Big Show" where he said that their rise to stardom will be "followed by the inevitable infighting and creative disagreements that will tear us apart in a beautiful explosion of emotions," which Greg dismissed as hogwash. It didn't pan out exactly this way but, the band still broke apart nonetheless. Anyway, in "Little Graduation," Steven's emotions get the better of him and he almost kills everyone by suffocation, turning into Pink Steven, including the new graduates with a rose-colored dome, which is only stopped when Shep tells Steven that he needs to figure himself out and give his friends space to grow rather than suffocating them (literally). Symbolically the dome represents, as one fan put it, "Steven's inner perceptions of reality" since he has always worked hard for his friends, but now his friends are growing up without help from him (and moving on), as he feels neglected, combined with abrasive feelings he has toward his mom along with his own problems. And the toxicity bubbles up into a dome itself.

This episode was one of the best so far, as Steven realizes that not only does the world not revolve around him, but things happen when he isn't there. At one point, he asks when Lars and Sadie talked, declaring angrily, "but when did this happen? I didn't see any of this!" to which the response is that it was private, which makes sense. This also pokes at the fact that the show is, basically, all from Steven's perspective. I think the parallels between Lars leaving Steven and Pink leaving Spinel behind is a good one, which portends problems in the future without a doubt! Anyway, after freeing them and everyone departing, the episode ends as he contemplates by himself, in a scene reminiscent of the ending of "Mother Simpson" as AwestruckVox pointed out in his analysis on The Roundtable. In the latter, Homer sits and pensively stargazes, realizing that "Homer’s long-lost mother may disappear again, but he learns that she loves him, and that’s enough," with the ending serving as "a model of restraint and a signal to start crying...[and] a sobering reminder of how powerful silence can be."

© 2019-2023 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

[testudoaubrei-blog]

Well, it’s not quite a master’s thesis, but this is (the first of) a series of posts on why Catra and Adora are the best love story in the history of kids TV animation and maybe the greatest love story in the history of TV. This may in some ways be faint praise - romance on TV is generally not very good compared with books or movies. Often it’s just some will they/won’t they sexual tension that is defused by getting characters together and re-heightened by breaking them up. TV is full of nearly shark jumping pointless dramas like Sam and Diane (Cheers, holy fuck am I dating myself, though that was technically before my time), Ross and Rachel (Friends, which was no Cheers) etc, but also some less annoying couples like Ben and Leslie (Parks and Rec) or Amy and Jake (Bk99) who are mostly just kind of cute and fun. Other shows, like the X-Files, teased viewers for years with unresolved sexual tension. In kids shows most romances are, appropriate for their target viewers, mild, sweet relationships based more on self-conscious flirting and blushing than on complex and conflicted feelings or deep passions - which is pretty realistic when the characters are young teens or even mid-teens. Some of these relationships are really well done - Finn and Flame Princess, Dipper and Pacifica (yeah I ship them), the early stages of Katara and Aang (before the showrunners imbued this childhood crush with cosmic significance), Steven and Connie, etc. Catra and Adora, though, are different. Their love story is not a side plot or a sub plot, it’s the heart of the show. It isn’t a childhood crush, it’s a very messy and passionate relationship between two young adults. She-Ra is an emotionally complex lesbian romance just as much as it is a thrilling action/adventure show. Everything about their relationship is baked into the show’s plot, its themes, hell even its musical score. The dramatic tension between Catra and Adora is not the result of stretching out a flirtation for ratings, but a coherent dramatic arc that runs through the entire show. As Noelle said, he made Catradora so central that execs couldn’t take it out without ruining the show. And the show is better for it. In this series of posts I’m going to try to show why, as well as showing why She-Ra is such a fantastic love story.

First off, let’s talk about how Catra and Adora’s character arcs are foils for each other, and how they come together and apart through the series. This is actually a post that I’ve been working on for a while but I keep summarizing the show rather than cutting to the chase, so I’m not going to recite many plot points so much as sketch out what’s going on with the dramatic structure at the time. But also, let’s talk about what each character’s arc is saying, and how they are commenting on each other. Spoiler alert: Catra’s arc is a subversion and critique of stories of empowerment through ruthless self-assertion and revenge, while Adora’s arc is a subversion and critique of chosen one narratives and stories of self-denial and self-transcendence.

When the show starts, Adora and Catra are shown as rivals and friends - their first scene starts the recurring motif of them reaching out for each other as one of them dangles above an abyss, as well as establishing their flirtatious banter and easy camaraderie. We quickly learn that these two young women plan to conquer the world together. These scenes and later flashbacks show Catra and Adora as deeply enmeshed in each others lives, to the point where neither of them (but especially Catra) have clear identities outside of one another. There is so much genuine love on both sides before Adora leaves, but also resentment, envy and fear, especially on Catra’s side, as well as a protectiveness on Adora’s side that deprives Catra of her autonomy. They are both being abused by Shadow Weaver - Catra physically  and emotionally, Adora emotionally. It wouldn’t be too much to say that Shadow Weaver holds Catra hostage to control Adora (this is why critiques that Adora abandoned Catra to be abused are actually kind of messed up, since they accept Shadow Weaver’s premise that Adora is responsible for what Shadow Weaver does to Catra). In addition, Catra and Adora actually see the world incredibly differently. Adora already sees the world in terms of right, wrong and her destiny to right wrongs - this is why it’s important for her  to accept the Horde’s obvious lies - she couldn’t keep living if she didn’t. Catra, on the other hand, sees the world solely in terms of survival and personal loyalty - everything for her is about preserving herself and the person she cares about - Adora.

Then, when Adora finds the sword, she leaves because it’s the right thing to do. Catra doesn’t even have a concept of ‘the right thing to do’ being something she should care about, or perhaps, something she can care about as an irredeemably evil, awful fuck-up. So at Thaymor neither one understands where the other is coming from, and Catra and Adora begin to part. This is the first turning point in their relationship. Adora chooses duty over what she desires, Catra chooses to protect herself (such as she sees it) and nurse her sense of betrayal and abandonment.

Their relationship until Promise is a kind of weird Frenemy thing that is fascinating to watch and sold me on the show. Neither one wants to fully admit to themselves that the other is now their enemy, neither one has given up on changing the other’s mind. Each is furious at the other, and desperate to see her again at the same time. There’s a lot of heartache and just as much sexual tension, especially at Princess Prom. Both of them come alive when they fight each other (more about that in a later post). But they’re already growing apart - Adora embracing her destiny as She-Ra, Catra rising in the ranks for the Horde. Adora now has the purpose she always wanted, plus other friends and a sense of being chosen to do something great, while Catra now has power - the means to protect herself from people like Shadow Weaver as well as the vindication she had always been denied, and even the opportunity to beat Shadow Weaver at her own game.

The next turning point is Promise. Holy fuck, this episode. It’s an episode that is even more heartbreaking after you’ve watched the show because you know just how much worse things are going to get, and yet, it’s a necessary part of both of their character arcs. Even through season 1 Catra and Adora had remained very much enmeshed in each others lives in an increasingly fucked up way as they grew apart but refused to turn away from each other. Even though they aren’t -exactly- a romantic couple (Adora doesn’t recognize and acknowledge her feelings until the last episode of Season 5), Season 1 of She-Ra is one of the worst breakups I have seen on TV. As I said in a couple of previous posts, this is the kind of shit that the Mountain Goats write songs about. Everything that was poisoning their love for each other even before episode 1 bubbles to the surface and combines with them fighting on opposite sides of the war to make a truly fucked up situation. In the end, it’s Catra that makes the choice to turn away from Adora. This isn’t a -good- decision. It’s spiteful, and destructive, and based on an outright deluded understanding of their relationship (inspired by Light Hope’s manipulations and her own issues), but it’s in some ways a necessary decision. Catra has been so wrapped up in Adora for so long that she isn’t going to be able to figure out who -she- is without cutting Adora out of her life. And the same is true of Adora.

But each of them do this in about the worst way possible. Catra embraces destruction, ambition, manipulation and outright cruelty, turning the tactics of her abusers against them and against everyone around her. She first triumphs over Shadow Weaver and manipulates Entrapta into trying to corrupt Etheria itself. Meanwhile Adora ‘lets go’ and commits herself to the self-denying mantle of She-Ra. Over the next several seasons, their respective paths will nearly lead both Catra and Adora to their deaths (in the Season 4 finale).

For the next season (counting season 2 and 3 as one) Catra and Adora are still closely linked, but as enemies. Still, there’s more than enough flirtation between them (that ‘Hey Catra’ in the first episode of Season 2 is something else), and especially on Adora’s side we see her hold back with Catra, and often take responsibility for the harm Catra inflicts, just like she had when they were kids. Yet they still drift apart - after facing off every other episode in Season 1, they spend less and less time on screen together through season 2 and 3. Catra continues her ascent to power and descent into villainy while Adora becomes more of a stressed out mess as she takes the fate of the world and the wellbeing of everyone she cares about on her admittedly broad shoulders. Catra’s one moment of vulnerability is rewarded by Shadow Weaver’s betrayal and her exile, then Catra triumphs in ruthless badass fashion through sheer desperation and aggression. In the Crimson Wastes, we see Catra at her most independent, and she almost seems happy. But once Adora shows up and Catra hears about Shadow Weaver, she’s sucked back into the worst of her resentments, and she makes very clear that being happy is less important to her than making sure Adora is miserable.

This changes everything. Catra completely breaks with reality and tries to kill Adora, herself and the world rather than lose to Adora and Shadow Weaver (I do think it’s important to remember that she does that after Shadow Weaver nearly kills her). Catra betrays everyone around her when she exiles Entrapta, threatens Scopria and lies to Hordak. Then she flips the switch. When Adora tries to fix things, Catra fights to her own death to make sure that the world disintegrates with her. For her part, Adora fights first to understand what is wrong with the world and then to fix it. Finally she tells Catra that destroying the world is her choice and she has to live with it, decks her, and then sees her off with a death glare once the portal is closed. With this, Adora writes Catra off even if, as she says later, she never never hated her. By doing that, Adora casts off the guilt that had dogged her and takes responsibility for her own life rather than someone else’s - this is actually a huge step for her, and one that will become more important in Season 4.

Season 4 is in many ways the nadir of their relationship. They only see each other once during the entire season, in Fluterrina, when Adora tries to blast Catra, much to the latter’s shock. There’s a sense in that scene that Catra is trying to have the same flirtatious enmity she used to have with Adora, and Adora is having none of it. Catra almost seems hurt by this, which is an early hint at how isolated Catra is beginning to feel. Catra spends the rest of the season at her highest and lowest. On the one hand she spends most of 12 episodes winning by every standard she has ever claimed to care about, besting Hordak himself in single combat and making herself co-ruler of the Horde and coming within a day’s march of ending the Rebellion. In many ways it is the ultimate empowerment fantasy - the abused young woman has defeated her abusers, showed up everyone who doubted her and forced everyone to respect her. But I think it’s striking that the show starts with her and Adora dreaming of conquering the world together and in Season 4 Catra nearly succeeds in conquering it alone, almost like she was trying to live out her old shared fantasy while proving she didn’t need her former best friend. 

At the same time, Catra is clearly miserable. She’s always been unhappy, but in Season 4 we see her completely isolated and lying to herself and everyone who will listen in a desperate attempt to justify her actions. Turning the tactics of Hordak and Shadow Weaver against them to gain power and then against Scorpia and Entrapta to maintain it haven’t vindicated Catra, they’ve made her more and more alone as Entrapta is exiled and Scorpia drifts away. Meanwhile Catra reaches out to Double Trouble, and her interactions with them reek of a kind of desperate desire to have someone in her life (the feeling of their interaction is of an unhealthy casual relationship where one partner becomes emotionally invested and the other takes advantage of that while denying the other the closeness they desire). As people leave her, one after the other, it becomes clearer and clearer that Catra doesn’t want power at all - she wants connection, friendship, love, and power is a very poor replacement. As I said in my long Catra rant, Season 4 is both her ‘Walter White as a Catgirl’ season and the beginning of her redemption. Everything comes to head when Sparkles destroys everything Catra has tried to achieve, Double Trouble delivers those harsh truths and Horde Prime shows up and makes it all irrelevant, just highlighting how futile all her struggles and sacrifices and crimes have been.

Meanwhile Adora spends Season 4 becoming her own her and her own woman. After telling off Catra, she grows more and more disillusioned with Light Hope and critical of Glimmer (though the latter has more than a shade of her old habit of taking responsibility for others - Adora’s development is not linear). She’s gained the courage and confidence to strike out her own path, not just follow a destiny. At the season’s end she once again breaks with her best friend to do what is right, and discards the destiny that she was being prepared for. But in this case she isn’t chasing one packaged destiny for another, instead she’s making her own choice and literally shattering the thing that she thought gave her life purpose. It’s badass, and heartbreaking, and along with decking Catra and jumping after Catra into the abyss (see below) it’s the perfect Adora moment.

In many ways Season 5 starts with Catra and Adora farther apart than they have ever been. They aren’t even enemies anymore, they’re completely out of each other’s lives. And both Catra and Adora are lost at the beginning of Season 5 - Catra is useless and alone on Prime’s ship, completely defeated despite ostensibly being on the winning side, and she goes through the motions of her normal plotting without any particular conviction and none of her normal flair. Meanwhile Adora is even more miserable and self-destructive than usual, throwing herself at Horde Bots and working herself until she drops of exhaustion. In a very real way they both stay lost until they have a chance to help the other. Catra takes responsibility for what she’s done and what she can do, saves Glimmer (at least partly for Adora’s sake), apologizes to Adora, and sacrifices herself. Adora only seems to come alive when she decides to turn around, face Prime, and save the cat. And when she does, Catra and Adora’s arcs, which had separated so completely in season 4, come crashing back together to end the series.

Adora during Save the Cat is such a contrast with the uncertain, hesitant and self-destructive wreck we’ve seen so far in Season 5. This is possibly her craziest plan in 3 years of mostly cazy plans, but she never wavers or questions herself. Even when Chipped Catra appears and we see Adora’s heart break while we watch, Adora doesn’t back down or relent. She keeps at it even as the tears stream down her face. She fights better trying to save Catra without She-Ra’s powers than she fought at the Battle of Bright Moon with them. Catra’s just about as desperate - we see her cry and plead, and now is probably as good a time to any to point out how amazing a job both VAs did throughout the show, but especially in this episode, and how good a job the board artists did. 

Seeing each other for the first time in a year, and only the second time since Catra blew everything up, Catra and Adora are probably the rawest and least restrained we’ve ever seen them. There’s barely any banter, no bravado, and no pretense that they are anything other than two women who desperately need each other (Prime doesn’t help with ‘You broke my heart’.) Then Catra is flung to her death, Adora jumps after her, breaks both her legs in the fall (we see her crawl to Catra, as though she couldn’t walk) and becomes the real She-Ra. It’s such a triumphant and deeply queer moment seeing a woman transformed into a warrior goddess to protect the woman she loves, and it’s the reason that, as dark as it is, Save the Cat is my Comfort Food episode.

Let’s not sleep on Taking Control, though. This episode is like a microcosm of what this show does best, especially the A plot with Catra and Adora. Catra’s reversion to lashing out at everyone and her refusal to be open to Adora shows just how much of a struggle this whole ‘being good and trying to connect to people’ thing is. Catra’s outburst gives Adora a chance to stand up for herself and refuse to be Catra’s punching bag, while also not trying to control her. Adora’s ultimatum gives Catra a chance to reach out to Adora (quite literally), and allow herself to be vulnerable. In this episode, we see just how far Catra and Adora have come since the messed up stew of their relationship in Season 1. Adora lets Catra be responsible for her own actions; Catra lets herself be vulnerable to Adora and takes responsibility for her actions. They’re both better people and better friends and better partners than they were, and the show has shown this in a strikingly nuanced and realistic way. 

The important thing to note in the next few episodes of Season 5 isn’t just how much closer Catra and Adora get to each other and how much they flirt (So much. So much, y’all) but just how -happy- they are. We see both of them transformed in the other’s presence. Basically, since they’ve parted, both Catra and Adora have been defined in no small part by how miserable they often are. They have both had their triumphs and their lighter moments, but there’s been a sense of melancholy dogging both Catra and Adora since episode 1. And now that they’re together again, that lifts, somewhat. Catra’s verbal barbs have lost their venom, and she can openly show how much she cares for Adora and even Bow and Glimmer. She’s still herself - snarky, cynical, somewhat devious - but she’s not engaged in a self-destructive zero-sum struggle with everyone around her. Meanwhile Adora has spent 4 seasons being a neurotic and sometimes nearly joyless mess who takes responsibility for everything and often doesn’t let herself enjoy anything other than the odd BFS group hug (exceptions include trying to uh...impress Huntara and reveling with the butterfly ladies of Elberron in Flutterina).  Around Catra, though, she’s a cocky, swaggering jock who gives as good as she gets. It’s a side of Adora we’ve only seen hints of before, and one that’s so much more confident and joyful even as the world is ending around her. Apart, Catra had tried to protect and vindicate herself with power and conquest, while Adora had tried to forget herself in duty and sacrifice. Together, they can be themselves again. This dynamic is crucial to the show’s portrayal of Catra and Adora’s romance because it doesn’t just show how much they love each other, but how they’re -good- for each other now that they’ve grown as people, and that they are so much better than they were when they were apart.

Until Shadow Weaver shows up. Their old abuser reintroduces tensions but even then things are different than they were. Now Catra isn’t just resentful of how Shadow Weaver prefers Adora - she’s  protective of Adora, which is clearest in Failsafe when she calls Shadow Weaver out for being willing to sacrifice Adora. And while Adora takes the Failsafe, it isn’t to follow her destiny or because she has a death wish - it’s because she loves her friends, and she is the only one who has any hope of doing this and living (though Catra’s suggestion that Shadow Weaver take it is a good one). And finally, when Catra leaves Adora, it isn’t because she hates Adora, nor, despite what she says, is it because she really thinks that Adora chose Shadow Weaver. At least, not exactly. It’s because Catra loves Adora, and can admit that to herself, and can’t stay around and watch the woman she loves sacrifice herself rather than choosing Catra. Before Catra leaves, she asks Adora ‘What do you want?” It’s a question that echoes Shadow Weaver’s speech in Episode 1: ‘isn’t this what you always wanted since you could want anything?’ As much as Adora has grown as a person, and defined herself and stood up for what she thinks is right, she still has never answered that question - it’s never been ‘what do I want’ but ‘what do I have to do?’ and that’s how Adora answers Catra’s question. This is Adora’s last gasp as a self-transcending hero, letting go of what she wants (not that she ever dared articulate what that was) in order to do what must be done. And it nearly kills her and dooms the universe, because Adora can’t be the hero that she needs to be by being anyone less than herself.

But it’s losing Catra that inspires Adora to tell off Shadow Weaver for good (not that she’d ever really warmed to her after season 1). And it’s love for Adora that inspires Catra to stand up to Shadow Weaver and demand that she do the right thing. In both cases, Catra and Adora aren’t just standing up to their abuser, but holding her to account for the harm she’s caused, and it’s the love that they have for each other that inspires them to do this. In Catra’s case in particular her refusal to let Shadow Weaver weasel out of finding Adora is a much greater triumph over Shadow Weaver than beating her up and breaking her mask in Season 1 - it’s proof not so much to Shadow Weaver but to Catra herself that Catra really is better than this and that she deserves better than this. It’s not turning her abuser’s tactics against her, but truly holding her to a moral standard and demanding that she do the right thing.

And then there’s Catra and Adora together at the heart. Catra has already come back for Adora and stayed to the end, choosing to die with her even if she can’t share a life together (not out of some death wish, but because Adora needs her). And Adora, who’s been avoiding answering the question for three fucking years, finally let’s herself want Catra when Catra finally confesses her love (breaking the last of her self-protective shields) and asks Adora to stay -for her-. And by admitting what she wants, Adora can truly be at peace with herself and be the hero she needs to be, lesbianism saves the universe, The End.

So anyway, that’s how Catra and Adora’s stories are woven together and how they compliment and comment on each other. Narrativiely, Adora and Catra start together, come apart, find something of themselves, and truly find themselves and each other when they are reunited. Thematically, they are critiquing seemingly opposing narrative tropes - empowerment narratives and narratives of self sacrifice. But by showing the flaws in both types of story and showing how neither self-seeking empowerment nor self-negating self sacrifice can actually make us happy, She-Ra asks and answers more profound questions than most prestige dramas for adults do. I’ll get into how the show sells the idea that the power of love can bring us happiness (and save the world) in a future post. But next up, I’m going to celebrate just how much Catra and Adora’s relationship revels in ambiguity, complexity and contradiction and so tells a grown up love story in a kid’s show.

[interact-if]

Day 10, 2/2 of the A/PI Heritage Month featured authors interview! For our final entry, we have the amazing Shai!

Shai, author of Hollowed Minds 

A/PI Heritage Month Feature Author

“You will play as a disgraced detective, entangled in webs of conspiracies and betrayal as your character engages in a suspicious probation - with a whole lot of enigmatic hallucinations and explosions to deal with. It will be up to you to shape your detective’s (or Ripper’s, if you prefer to call them that) perception and motivations. After all, Gaile City is a place full of secrets - some of them belonging to your own character’s family - and you’ll have the freedom how to act accordingly.”

Author's Kofi

(INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT UNDER THE CUT!)

To put it simply, Hollowed Minds is a long quest on morality and relationships. You'll start as a disgraced detective, once a favored hero of the city until this one unfortunate mistake, and now you're forced into a suspicious probation that you shouldn't even be in. There would be a lot of challenges and suffering along the way, and you can either help your character maintain their heroic ideals or succumb to the darkness that the future brings.

Q1: First of all, introduce us to your project! What is it about?

There are a lot of things to uncover in the story, but the main issues in the first book would be the mysterious hallucinations that people are suffering from and the explosions that would shake the fundamentals of the society. There would be several approaches to choose from as you go forward, some of which may be quite outside the law, and you could opt to use a certain ‘talent’—one with accompanying repercussions—to learn more secrets. You would also have the choice to cultivate your relationships with the people you trust the most and have your interactions with them matter in the long run.

As it is, you'd have a large target on your back, owing to a sinister group with a very sinister plan—something that might be worse than death.

Q2: If it’s not too spoilery, what are you most excited about your project?

First of all, the reputation system. You can manipulate how the general public would see you, either as the hero they once saw you as, or a corrupted personality that everyone would loathe. Best thing about it? You can hide your real intentions. This would have a lot of interesting consequences, especially if your character's actions tend to be the opposite of what they're perceived as.

Second, the most awaited reunion. People who have read the available demo would know what this refers to, and well, it's about to happen soon, so I'm very excited about the idea of writing the whole scene!

Then there's this one big chapter that I know would be torturous to write and code. Basically, you'll be choosing how to 'infiltrate' this certain location, the person whom you'd be with most of the time, a decision between accomplishing what you came there for or sacrificing it for something else, how you'd get out, and where you'd go to after the whole thing. It will be a wild ride of twists and emotions, and it's not even the endgame. A lot may change with this chapter alone, and it's one of those things I think about a lot before going to sleep.

Lastly, the customization of the main character. The motivations, blame mechanic, alcoholic/non-alcoholic option, and relationships (romantic or not). Those little details would change a lot of content in the narrative and maybe in the plot itself. Whether you want to build a character who's kind to a fault or an anti-hero who wouldn't hesitate to make questionable decisions, the journey would be entirely yours.

Q3: What inspired the current project you’re working on?

It was based from a short story of mine that won a small competition back in 2018. They share similar themes, but the short story was a lot darker than I could ever put in a game that I plan to get published.

I initially thought of starting my IF writing attempts with the supernatural genre—it does seem to be a successful area—but that short story was probably the first piece of mine that I've come to appreciate, and I wanted to at least honor that. The writing style that I adopted, the evocative tone I learned to use, and the plot pieces that I've managed to be good at crafting—they all started with that story.

Looking back, there aren't much similarities anymore between the two, maybe aside from the appearance of certain characters, but the themes are still the same.

It will definitely be a huge challenge to implement what I have on mind, but I do hope people would love what's to come.

Q4: Do you pull from your own identity for inspiration? How has that been reflected in your work?

I grew up in a troublesome neighborhood, along with people who continue to fight against the struggles. That's both good and bad, I suppose. Philippines has a lot of corruption deep in its roots, I won't deny that, but there are also people working hard for the changes they want. That's one of the biggest influences I've got in this story.

As we delve into the plot, the readers would discover more questionable decisions that some characters may have made or would make. It's parallel to how I witnessed people having differing reactions to injustice and the way they make changes in their lives as a response. Adding to that, I personally know the feeling of grief, and I’ve seen how the people around me deal with it themselves.

There are also moral choices to be had in the game, and when I speak of that, it's not going to be just around choosing between saving/killing people. It's about the main character's intentions and emotions, and how the revelations might slowly change their views. It would be a story that will steadily define your character’s perceptions amid the threats.

Q5: What’s been your experience so far? With writing, with the if community...

It's been great. I appreciate the people who have reached out in various ways to share their love for my work and to give meaningful feedback that are continuously helping me shape the story in a better way. And honestly, I'm so overwhelmed with excitement for all the support I'm getting. I didn't even expect a lot of people to like the story this early. That's why I'm so thankful!

There's also a great IF author whom I've been occasionally getting advice from, and they've been a huge reason as to why I even managed to make the first steps. Interacting with other writers is something that I never really expected myself to do, but I’m quite glad I did it.

Q6: Do you have any future projects in the works?

There are three more interactive fiction stories I've already thought of, though I won't be actively working on them until I finish the Hollowed Minds series, which would take a long while. Their temporary titles are respectively "Corrupted Legacies" (fantasy), "The Remnant's Keeper" (supernatural horror), and "A Hero's Touch" (superhero story with a twist).

Aside from that, I'm also looking forward to finishing my fantasy novel, one that I've been delaying for years, literally, as soon as I finish the first book of Hollowed Minds.

Q7: Finally, what piece of advice would you give to fellow authors?

Write what you want to write. I know that you're all probably tired of hearing this, but it is still very important. During the planning stages, you'd most likely be excited to show the readers what you've got in store. You'd be proud of it, and you'd believe that it's one of the most brilliant ideas out there. Then a few days after you finish planning, you'll realize it may not attract as much readers as you may have expected initially. Then you'll get tempted to change your visions for the story and adopt the plot lines that the famous works have.

Do not abandon your own vision.

It's your work. It's your masterpiece. Listen to feedback, sure, and let them guide you into becoming a better writer, but do not let go of the things that made your work your own. Some way or another, there will be people who would love your story, and they'd deeply appreciate that you made it the way it is.

So don't hesitate. Is it weird? Is it unconventional? Does it belong to a genre that's not as popular as the others? It doesn't matter. Write it, polish it, and show it to the world.

People will love it as long as you do.

[skyeventide]

hi, if you are planning on writing the embalmed M.E. post, I'd be extremely interested! amazing topic

oh man okay I'll try to put it together. I'm gonna stick mostly to one single text for this one because, as a topic, memory-embalming is really large and I think you can construct a lot on like, solely the concept of memory and fading and preservation in the legendarium. and I’m not gonna try that lol

the quote where Tolkien uses the "embalming" word is letter 131. I should preface this by saying that more often than not I take great issue with the way jirt talks about his theology-adjacent Goodness and Good Choices, and I think it's pr... pro... pronghhh I don't wanna write that word lmao, please take it as me intending "it has non-straightforward issues that are worth a second look", not as anything else. it’s problematic, there I put it down lol academic gremlin brain won, for anyone who doesn’t wholly align with him philosophically. so I suppose anyone who generally agrees with jirt's own reckons will disagree with my takeaway here, but so are things. anyway, I'll try to explain why I called it a value judgement.

screenshots first:

I know this is a lot of text, but it's needed. so there's kind of a lot to unpack there but to strip it down to the relevant basics:

part of the reason why some of the exiles do not return is that they don't want to return as exiles, but remain where they have power and stand at the top of the hierarchy (this to me feels like, specifically, a very Galadriel motive — but that's yet another post lmao); they also want peace and bliss, and that is another motive, the same peace and bliss that exist in Valinor (and while the first motive I list, I believe, is directly consequential to the status of the first age's survivors, this second motive, having the peace and bliss of Valinor outside of Valinor, has been present and thematic since the speech of Feanor to the Noldor, and likely before that); they can't therefore abide the "fading" of the land, the way it changes with time, and endeavour to preserve it — embalm it (this becomes emblematic in one of the various versions of the creation of the Elessar, or one of the them: a stone that, if someone looks through it, shows things as they would be when healed, whole, and beautiful. in one of said versions, Celebrimbor gives this stone to Galadriel, who is saddened by the change of time. this is Celebrimbor of Gondolin, or perhaps Telerin Celebrimbor, but no matter the origin, the theme persists)(second parenthesis to point out how third-age Lothlórien, preserved by Nenya, is in all effects a land out of time, where ancient things aren't simply echoed but continue living, and where trees literally don't die. leaves change colour during autumn and winter, then fall down in spring when immediately new buds start growing); fourth motive is the healing of the land's hurts and its adornment.

the difference between healing the land and “embalming” it, I suppose, is the acceptance of its change under the sun, so the acceptance of time's passing, while healing and adorning it work in unison with said passing. of course the matter here is, the absence of decay is kind of Valinor’s whole thing. but we know, both from letter 156 and the Akallabêth, that Valinor isn’t inherently a blessed land and it doesn’t give immortality by virtue of being Valinor. in fact: “'for it is not the land of Manwe that makes its people deathless, but the Deathless that dwell therein have hallowed the land; and there you would but wither and grow weary the sooner, as moths in a light too strong and steadfast.” and letter 156: “for as emissaries from the Valar clearly inform him, the Blessed Realm does not confer immortality. The land is blessed because the Blessed live there, not vice versa, and the Valar are immortal by right and nature [...]”

so, really, it’s not the where that counts. jirt, I believe, makes it pretty obvious that it’s the why and how, and through whose counsel. what I think is identified here as the fault isn’t that preservation of the land isn’t possible and therefore should not be attempted (clearly it is), rather it’s the wish to create a paradise of their own, a desire that Sauron identifies and exploits. now, obviously I’m not trying to argue that Sauron is right or anything the like (even at early stages, and despite the partial overlap of motives, Sauron’s goals can’t really be called good, even though you might argue that they gain some form of internal conflict), or that in pursuit of a challenge to the divine harm becomes justifiable — this isn’t really about characters and more about jirt the man himself and his production. 

I just generally take issue with the idea that wanting a heaven of sorts, made with your own skills, which is within the realm of possibility, and by no one’s leave but your own, is inherently a bad thing, or that it must come with harm and corruption, and compromised motives. but in the narrative of these books, from an outside-of-text perspective, it doesn’t seem to be possible to issue the challenge that letter 131 talks about without also giving aid to evil (Sauron, earlier Morgoth) willingly ot unwillingly, without getting closer to “magic” and “machinery”, without it being written and interpreted under a lens of “embalming”, of refusal to let the world live its course. it isn’t possible to have that cake and eat it (yeah jirt kind of wrote that saying wrong lmao), which is identified as a corruptible weak point. 

it isn’t possible because this discontent, or this wish for independence, is in itself a seed that the story connects to evil and lies (Morgoth’s work in Valinor, and possibly earlier than that his discord); because it’s inherently linked to wanting the top-of-the-hierarchy authority granted by Middle Earth. and because the legendarium doesn’t truly leave room for any gods-challenging story that isn’t some form of taint and mistake, a Fall™ (challenges to Morgoth here don’t count, he is the fall; this is about Eru and the Valar).

(I think here it’s relevant to note that the elves not being in ME is elsewhere called out as a loss for Men, who do not have the “elder siblings” at hand who were supposed to teach them and guide them; as well as the fact that Eru in morgoth’s ring mentions, himself, that the elves have been “removed to Aman from the Middle Earth in which I set them”. so it’s not necessarily so straightforward in all aspects — but I think a discussion on that would be going a little too much beyond the scope of this tbh)

I believe my point is exemplified by a note in this same letter:

“preservation in reverent memory” here is not negatively judged, despite being effectively an antiquarian lore memorial to (”good”) tradition. Elrond also rebukes Sauron, and is not at all subjected to the same Ring-related test as Galadriel in LotR. and I think this is sort of the narrative point of the story, part of the greater (in good measure theological) thesis underlying it. and why I called it a value judgement. 

[viviae]

The Red Plague: An Analysis

Ok, I’m to preface this that I am not at ALL a student of medicine or science I am just a humble blogger who really likes diseases, literary analysis, and the science behind death. This will also be a STUPIDLY long post so I am letting you all live by putting it behind a readmore this time

This goes without saying but there is a content warning to this. I’m talking about death, stages of decay, rotting, corpses, vomit, and other gross medical stuff. There will be NO images however. I subjected myself to viewing those images and I will not condemn you all to view them. 

I’m going to start this off making sure everyone is on the same page and post an image from the art book about the Red Plague itself

So let’s start with the canonical facts about the plague first

Average life expectancy was 3-7 days once symptoms show, Averages are also liars which means it could’ve taken a little bit more than 7 days or under 3 days to die. 

Spread by the plague beetles, exact method of transfer is unknown but Julian was force fed one and contracted the plague however they are safe to keep in containment.

Plague beetles also infected nonhuman objects like the water supply which is shown as a thick ichor. This ichor no longer possesses infectious properties at the time of the story

Julian believed that it had to do with a corruption in the blood hence the usage of leeches 

The Lazarus started as a containment center before becoming a crematorium, meaning people believed that it was spread from contact or things like that

HOWEVER This is not the first appearance of the plague as it would show up at locations Lucio stayed for too long but no note if it spread from these locations. 

It’s not a disease, its a curse.

So, this is one nasty plague on our hands. Most diseases that are this lethal would never be able to spread as much as it did unless it could spread from corpse contact or through other means like a carrier. I think that it could be spread through a combination of both which would add an additional need for cremation. 

Corpse Disposal & Spreading

Historically during plagues you would simply toss bodies into mass graves or ‘plague pits’. This would be, substantially, easier than what they do in Vesuvia. Cremation is not an easy process and is an art form. The heat needed for a cremation alone is incredibly hot and needs special methods to be contained. Not to mention the tedious cleaning process to make sure ashes don’t damage the heat element. So you are telling me that Vesuvia... went through the process of rowing away their dead to the middle of a lake to do mass cremations because it was the easiest? Yes they would’ve run out of grave space a while ago but no one is saying they can’t go make a plague pit out in the woods for half the work.

Now granted, I understand the imagery of making Asra wade through bodies of rotting corpses to find the apprentice’s bloated corpse is uh,,, graphic. Or making us stumble upon an open plague pit of bones in the woods with you LI is not what most people call romantic. (you’re welcome for that image) So they could’ve just made mass cremations on a separate island for tone reasons but that’s BORING.

Not a lot of diseases are actually capable of surviving in dead body simply because when we die our bodies lose the necessary high heats for them to multiply and survive. But this isn’t a disease in a traditional sense, its a curse to Lucio. And this is Lucio we are talking about, some one who is famously afraid of death and dying, which was grafted by a demon of pestilence who is obsessed with worms (cough maggot symbolism and death by disease cough). So I propose that the plague is spread in addition to plague beetles but by dead bodies themselves. This would put additional pressure on proper corpse disposal and the need for cremation. This fact would also explain why plague doctors were present at the boats leading to the Lazarus instead of simple plague carters (rowers?) as doctors would probably have to keep a closer eye on proper disposal of bodies.

As for how I think the beetles themselves spread the plague, I think it’s probably in a similar way as to how Lyme Disease is spread. I can’t name any disease that is spread by beetles themselves off the top of my head but ticks are pretty similar to beetles (I am not an entomologist). Lyme disease is spread by infected ticks biting into the hosts skin and regurgitating its stomach contents that includes the bacterium for the disease. 

This would explain why Julian got the plague pretty awful real quick. He consumed all of the plague beetle’s contents and Lucio didn’t have to try and force a beetle to bite Julian, which would’ve given Julian time to fight back. This is also working with the fact Lucio got bit by a plague beetle when running from Morga in his tale. He most likely contracted the plague, or perhaps he contracted the curse then and later on got re bit, in that bite. This would also explain the ichor that infects the water in the south end. Beetles are significantly larger than ticks, and so they might have a need to empty their stomach contents more and its more waste produced. 

Symptoms and Inspirations

The Red Plague is obviously, influenced by the Bubonic Plague in terms of symptoms and Tuberculous in treatment. I will list some of the common symptoms of Black Plague and signs and be comparing these to the Red Plague. I cannot stress enough that I do not have any knowledge in medicine but I don’t think the dev’s are all doctors so we are on even ground.

There are generally speaking three types of plagues; Bubonic (Most common type of The Black Plague and mainly targets your lymphatic system), Pneumonic (When the Plague enters and infects the lungs), and Septicemic (When the plague enters the blood stream, either form can lead to Septicemic)

Bolded Symptoms are what are obvious symptoms the Red Plague has taken from these three variations of plague. Italic is Lucio specific. 

High Fevers

Chills

Headache

Muscle Pain

Weakness

Seizures

Swollen black lymph nodes known as Buboes (Bubonic)

Internal Bleeding (Septicemic)

Gangrene (Septicemic)

Shock (Septicemic)

Vomiting Blood (Bubonic & Septicemic)

Coughing Blood & Mucus (Pneumonic)

Shortness of breath (Pneumonic) 

The Red Eyes

By far the most obvious symptom of the plague and its trademark. Consider this the equivalent of Buboes to the black plague. This is the first obvious symptom that marks you for dead and probably one of the first symptoms to show after a possible resting phase. 

Apparently it takes each eye individually as seen with Julian or it may not take both? The stage we see Julian in isn’t the clearest but I’m assuming he was rather early on with a pretty serious case. 

It’s also a debate of what exactly is going on with the red stringy bits under neath the eyes. For the sprite models it appears to be veins under the eyes that have been aggravated. While in the concept art above it has a more liquid and viscous look which is probably blood. And in Julian’s CG of him dying of the plague he has no marks around his eyes. So I’m saying its a fun combo of all of the above.

Essentially I think that the plague is causing the blood vessels in the eyes to pop and do serious damage. There can also be a foreign growth to occur behind the eyes or just magical nonsense, doing additional damage to the veins surrounding the eyes and cause bleeding from putting stress on the veins. 

The Arms and Lower Extremities

Ok, remember how I talked about Lucio’s fear of death and how its incredibly likely that the plague is manipulating his fear? In death there are various stages of decay, and different functions occur at each stage. And one of these functions is Livor Mortis. 

Livor Mortis is when your blood cells rupture out of your veins and die. These dead blood cells sink down to your body based off of gravity where they settle. This is seen as a purple color on the skin based on gravity, normally the back. This can be disrupted by any disruption to the body, but depending on time you are likely to receive lighter marks based on its previous position. 

What I think is going on all over the body is veins are rupturing and the body is going through an extreme form of living Livor Mortis. Just that it’s in red and not purple because this is the “Red Plague” and not the purple plague. And due to the patients still being alive when Livor Mortis is occurring it simply pools into the extremities instead of one specific location, with the fingers and bottom of the foot being the most severe. To add to the veins popping suddenly the subtle bruising through origin points to where the red vein-y look begins remind me of my own experience of having four veins burst in my arm. 

Julian had reason to believe he could use leeches to treat the plague and in typical plague doctor fashion of “They were right but not exactly” he was on the right track! Using leeches to drink the settled and dead blood would be beneficial to the patient. As likely leaving these areas to accumulate dead blood would put it at serious risk of rot, since maggots first grow on open wounds and areas affected by Livor Mortis. 

Julian might not have been curing the plague but what he was probably doing is preventing a lot of people from developing gangrene and needing amputations. A beneficial skill for a previous combat medic to utilize and what might have drawn additional attention to him. Julian’s uses of leeches could also explain why Lucio does not have any of these red marks since Julian is his personal doctor and Lucio would spare no expense for his treatment. 

Lucio’s Unique Symptoms 

Portia’s route mentions that due to Lucio’s longer surviving time he developed unique symptoms. We don’t know much details about this besides he was extra miserable and was confined to his bedroom most the time. From my provided list above I think that generally speaking the Red Plague is a combination of Bubonic + Septicemic plagues.

However, Pnuemonic plagues were considered especially deadly, but rarer. Lucio is described as having a cough when he has the plague and generally a wheezy voice. It wouldn’t be odd to think the plague had spread into his lungs due to the increase longevity he had. 

There is a dramatic irony in Lucio losing his lungs to sickness as well. Morga tells us about how when Lucio was very young he almost drowned and that instilled a fear of death in him at a young age. He’s also a man with a lot of stamina who can run in the freezing cold carrying a fully grown apprentice on his shoulder or run away from Morga who also possesses a lot of energy. Lucio has trained his lungs to be stronger more so than the average person, and now with his downfall he loses them. 

It goes along with his general want of having a new body as well. You can rebuild muscle mass although hard, but recovering from illnesses that target your lungs? You’ll almost never get back to the same degree you previously were. 

The imagery of the dead is also present in the animal itself used to spread the plague. Although the beetle comes from Lucio’s tribe, beetles play a role in decomposition. Beetles like to come after the body has been nearly completely rotten, after the maggots and wasps consume most of the dead flesh beetles come in and eat the scraps. Beetles are also used in skeletonizing items, one example I think of off my head is a man who had his amputated foot skeletonized by beetles for keeping.  So these beetles are coming in and spreading a plague that forces the body to go through stages of decay while living, for their own food. Just like Lucio’s tribe came in and slaughtered other tribes for their own need to eat.

The plague was handcrafted to torture Lucio for his inability to finish his end of the deal. That’s why it uses imagery of dead bodies, it steals Lucio’s lungs from him, and why even the dead can cause severe damage. 

Of course this is all my own theory and analysis of the plague but thank you for reading all of this. 

[maxwell-grant]

Vincenzo: The Gentleman Villain Reborn

Long before there were loudmouth buff guys in spandex, there was the gentleman villain.

There once was a time when the gentleman villain, whether a gentleman thief in the Raffles or Lupin mold, or murderous arch-criminals like Fu Manchu and Fantomas, organizations like Les Vampires, and even in-between figures like Rocambole and Judex, was the coolest thing in the pop culture block. The figures right around the corner of Baker Street, when Nick Carter and Sexton Blake and any billion old serial detectives weren’t quite cutting it. Their time was not to last long in the spotlight, as the pulp heroes consolidated domain in the 30s and then the superheroes took over, but every now and then, they return in various forms, never fully gone. But I’d dare say I’d never seen a gentleman villain story quite so bold, so modern, so dynamic and so gloriously over-the-top in pride over it’s existence, until I began watching Vincenzo.

Vincenzo is BADASS and I don’t use the term lightly. Not just the titular character, but the show itself. It’s currently a couple episodes short of the finale and you should stop everything you’re doing or watching and go watch Vincenzo. It’s been an utterly glorious ride from beginning to end with no shortage of great characters, terrific writing, great relationships and jaw-dropping moments as every episode succeeds in topping each other in WOW HOLY SHIT factor. It’s a shot of adrenaline and storytelling excellence to the eyeballs and you don’t have anything better to be doing right now than watching this.

I mentioned a while ago that Black was a show that, besides being also terrific in quality, captured my interest as a Shadow fan specifically because I saw in Black what I believe is the heart of The Shadow as a character: an embodiment of evil, motivated and created and warped by social catastrophe and strife, set loose to punish true evil in order to protect humanity. In that regard, if Black is where I find the heart of The Shadow, Vincenzo is where I find the spirit of what I like about The Shadow as a series: Cathartic urban fairytales where an extraordinary agent of change, armed with incredible cunning, sleight-of-hand and combat skills, rises above a dark background to command a folk brigade of ordinary people who reveal themselves to be extraordinary through their newfound purpose, to right the wrongs of society’s predators, by being better at their tactics than they are and turning their tools against them. 

I’m gonna spoil it a bit under the cut but please go watch it. I cannot praise this show enough and I’ll do my best to try.

Vincenzo centers around the titular character, Vincenzo Cassano, an Italian lawyer who works for the mafia as a consigliere, adopted by it’s Don at the age of eight. After the death of the Don and an attempted betrayal by his son, Vincenzo flees to Seoul and ends up taking residence at a ramshackle building called Geumga Plaza. Geumga Plaza is the hiding place of a gigantic stash of gold hidden by one of Vincenzo’s former clients, and he intends to retrieve it to rebuild his life somewhere else. Naturally, not only is the hidden room completely impenetrable, but the building is occupied. by residents who are being forced out of it by criminals working for the Babel corporation, which intends to take possession of the building. And thus, Vincenzo has to put his skills into working out progressively bigger problems, as his efforts to uncover the gold turn into a fight against Babel and it’s lawyers, as the problems take on bigger and bigger proportions. 

Vincenzo’s got a lot of what you’d expect from a k-drama at first glance. The leading man is a dashing young man, the leading lady is headstrong and stubborn, you see their romance coming a mile away and they take their damn time getting there, there’s emotional backstories that take a long time to be revealed, lots of wacky side characters and comedy interspersed with the darkest moments, a focus on corporate corruption, and so on. But it’s got an intrusion of elements brought by Vincenzo’s inclusion, such as mob drama, tonal and cultural imbalance, and the gentleman villain tropes that Vincenzo brings, as the catalyst of change whose antics backflip through action hero, romantic hero, super hero and super villain, cunning puppetmaster and gun-toting warrior alike, and start to have an effect on the world around him. His allies become stronger, more determined and effective, and the villains grow smarter and more horrid as they desperately try to avoid their own downfalls.

On paper, Vincenzo is almost a textbook example of how to craft a villain protagonist. He’s a mysterious foreigner with a hidden past and incredible skills who shows up uninvited in “our” world, who starts terrorizing and manipulating people into doing his bidding. He’s got a hotheaded and foolish investigator chasing after his every move, and frequently employs misdirection and sleight-of-hand to fool the authorities. He commits crimes and employs underhanded methods in the service of stamping out people worse than himself. He never really makes any claim of being a hero and actively rejects the notion he’s fighting for justice, but instead states he’s doing it as a matter of principle. One of the characters early on even states he gives off the vibe of a movie villain, even Vincenzo himself tells Hong Cha-Young, the female lead, that he’s teaching her how to be a proper villain. In another series, Vincenzo would be the hypercompetent sidekick to the main villain, or secretly the main villain, the lone badass that the action hero would have a tough fight against before defeating and moving on. But Vincenzo does not allow himself to be dismissed so easily. 

On the first episode, when we’re introduced to him in Italy, he’s painted as the badass to end all badasses. But the minute he arrives in Seoul, he falls for a trick at the airport and is mugged by two cabbies, and has to walk around penniless and without dignity, shouting curses in Italian that nobody understands. He has to sleep in a broken down apartment, his “taking a steamy shower with classical music playing” fanservice scene keeps being interrupted because the shower doesn’t work, and a pigeon chattering outside his window keeps ruining his sleep. 

The tenants of the building are all introduced as varying levels of unsympathetic and useless, or downright creepy. The tailor screws up his favorite suit, the chef who claims to have studied in Italy is a total fraud, there’s tenants who scare us by passing as ghosts and zombies, and Hong Cha-Young is introduced as an unlikable stooge for Babel. Vincenzo is a villain protagonist who is forced out of his grand mafia epic film, where he conducts business around lavish manors while classical music plays, and stumbles onto a korean drama, a world that operates by different rules and where no one has any reason to take him seriously at first, and gradually finds out that the difference between both worlds is not as big as he’d imagined.

It’s only at the very end of the first episode, when the neighborhood gangsters show up to terrorize the tenants, that Vincenzo starts to kick ass again, and he has not stopped so far. In fact, not just him, ALL of the tenants have gradually started kicking ass with him. Hong Cha-Young severs all connections to Babel and proves to be, as his main partner in crime, just as cunning, twice as driven, and three times as batshit and kooky. The tailor who ruined his suit turns out to be an ex-gang member capable of fending off groups of thugs with only his scissors. The creepy piano girl reveals herself a hacking genius, the zombie impersonators become incredible actors, the failed wrestler and badass wannabe becomes his most active field agent along with his equally strong wife, the chef improves his cooking and lends his restaurant as a meeting center, all of the characters, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM gradually become incredible, competent, resourceful people, really no different than they were before, it just took a little courage and pushing. 

The headstrong and foolish agent pursuing Vincenzo becomes 100% smitten with him and quickly becomes one of his greatest allies. Even the neighborhood gangsters, after being left to die by Babel and forced to start anew, quickly become some of his most loyal allies, and gradually redeem themselves in the eyes of the tenants to the point they become friends. In departing from his old family, Vincenzo forms a new one, even if never by his intention. They even all get matching suits.

This incredibly potent, human core surrounding the antics of an extraordinary figure of action is part of what used to make the Agents of The Shadow such a special, meaningful and beloved part of the series, and something every adaptation since then has been 100% poorer for neglecting. But Vincenzo does it, and does it right. I could watch a billion adventures with these people and never get sick of them. 

Vincenzo is a slick, modern take on the gentleman villain that takes many of it’s oldest conventions and provides blueprints for making them work in modern times. His plans often take a performance art-edge as he employs tactics both old-fashioned and modern, like using social media to stage an event in front of the Plaza so the bulldozers set to demolish it won’t be able to pass, or copying files and passing them to his police contact while keeping the real ones when said police contact inevitably betrays him. The tenants put all of their skills to use, no matter how unusual or seemingly useless. Every episode lays the groundwork for a smashing finale where all of the threads come together and we bare witness to a grand tapestry of karmic retribution.

The villains themselves are no slouch, and also have that modern edge that gradually ramps up. They stage discreet assassinations involving gas leaks and watches meant to burst into flames. They stack the deck impossibly against all characters. They employ masked goons by the dozens, armies of lawyers to smudge any connections between themselves and their actions, and every sector of society in covering them, from journalists publishing pro-Babel propaganda to police commissioners. The assistant of the main villain does zumba classes amidst ordering assassinations, and is often likened to a snake and a witch with her "Crystal Ball” (the name she uses for ordering assassin contacts by the phone), complete with a cowardly, scheming assistant she bullies at every turn. The CEO of Babel has a dual nature not out of place in a Jekyll & Hyde/Dorian Grey kind of story. 

The main villain is often painted as a slasher villain backed by massive corporate power, murdering people with hockey equipments and even outright named “Jason” at one point, with a tense string theme song accompanying his deeds. The show hides the villain at plain sight by using one of the most familiar set-ups of romantic dramas and the tension never stops even after he’s revealed. 

Mobster films tend to paint an idealized version of it’s protagonists, not necessarily because of a genuine love or interest with mobsters (I mean, it really goes without saying that real life mobsters are obviously not admirable figures), but out of a sense of displaying a “this is what it could be” fantasy, a fantasy where the mafioso is a dark hero who will still ultimately do the right thing and stick up for the little guy, in a similar way to how superheroes often function as police officers except, y’know, actually dedicated to protecting people. 

Vincenzo does go to great lengths to address the imbalance of putting such a dark figure as it’s hero, through showing how the situation can only be addressed by the intrusion of a figure such as Vincenzo. There’s a scene where Vincenzo and Hong proceed to explain extremely succintly to their cop ally why the “bad apples” argument is horseshit.  One of the show’s characters, someone who’s spent his entire life being the best person he could, and dedicating himself 110% percent to fighting evil even at the expense of connecting with his own family, someone who absolutely should be the hero to take down Babel, admits shortly before dying that it wasn’t enough, that it was never going to be enough, and that what the situation calls for isn’t a hero, but a monster. That monster being Vincenzo, who is not only powerful and monstrous, but commands the loyalty of people high and low class alike, criminals and law enforcement agents, to fight Babel. In his words, “the ultimate monster”, something even the world’s biggest badass cannot defeat by himself. 

On most other set-ups, Vincenzo would be pretty unmistakably the villain. But here, when he’s set up against a starkly realistic depiction of how corporations actually function in our world, depicts that Vincenzo’s ability to clear his way through goons John Wick-style is nowhere near enough, and to that end, he’s gonna have to fight impossible battles using his brains and his allies. And in the end, he defeats them, time and time again, and proves that they were not that impossible after all. 

One can only hope he’s on to something.

Oh yeah and THE PIGEON BY HIS WINDOW ALSO KICKS ASS and I will not explain how, just watch the show, I can’t do it justice no matter how much I talk about it.

[cecilspeaks]

172 - Return of the Obelisk

“Nothing lasts forever” is a phrase with two meanings, and they’re both true. Welcome to Night Vale.

All of Night Vale is aglow. There is music in the air. You know what that means, listeners: the Obelisk has returned. It’s been nearly 8 years since the Obelisk last appeared, but it’s right back where it always shows up, in Mission Grove Park over on the east side, right next to the Wailing Pit. But a little bit south of the Memorial Debris Heap. The Obelisk returns every 5 to 10 years, sometimes as long as 50, and it brings with it joy, anticipation, and a deep fear. A terror so deep in the gut that it feels like you’ve eaten too much ice cream, but in all reality, your body is simply bracing itself for death. The Obelisk has always behaved benevolently, but so hast he sun, and we don’t trust that thing fully either, so I dunno. Past performance is not an indicator of future results. Unlike the sun, the Obelisk radiates a soft blue light, but like the sun, the Obelisk makes a lot of noise. In particular, music. The obelisk sounds like a Bach concerto played like a French horn and a theramine from inside a refrigerator. Everyone in town is gathering at Mission Grove Park to see the Obelisk in person, to pay homage to this rare visit, and to confront their fears head on. Hopefully everything works out fine, because there are some cool events I want to get to this weekend, and it would be terrible to have to cancel them over a rogue obelisk.

Let’s take a look at the community calendar, shall we? This Friday night is opening night of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Tony-winning musical “Sunset Boulevard” at the Night Vale Community Theatre. I’m very excited to finally see this show, it’s supposed to be a really lavish production, too. And it’s based on one my all time favorite Billy Wilder films about an aging silent movie star who finds an amulet that lets her travel in time, but whenever she moves through time, she enters someone else’s body and can’t leave until she saves her life. This staging of “Sunset Boulevard” is directed and produced by… oh my god, Susan Willman?? Really? Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrhooonestly, this has been a pretty long week and Iiii might need to just rest at home on Friday. I mean I’m not trying to be rude here, but Susan Willman is the worst! Did you know she once judged the chili cook-off, and I came in third? Third! Behind Joel Eisenberg, which is fine, Joel’s an OK cook, but also behind who else? Susan Willman! You can’t be a judge and win first place. I’m also pretty sure Susan used a prepackaged spice mix in that chili. [laughs oddly] I don’t have that verified through a secondary source, but I can confirm, it was oversalted, again. I’m not saying, I’m just saying. Anyway, go see “Sunset Boulevard” on Friday if you want to watch uninspired actors and muddled blocking.

Saturday afternoon is the PTA bake sale fundraiser to send our Academic Decathlon team to a tournament in our state’s capital. The PTA secretary… [sighs] Susan WiIlman, says this money will go toward hotel and bus travel for our brilliant and talented Ac-Dec squad. “Academic Decathlon is about intelligence and perseverance,” says Willman in this overwrought press release. “Ac-Dec is about freedom and fastidiousness. It is a celebration of hard work, and we want Night Vale to show the rest of the state that blah blah blah blah blah,” God she just runs on! I mean yes, Ac-Dec is very cool and I wish our kids well. But chill with the grandstanding! Anyway, go buy a cake to support those amazing students, even though I’m sure Susan will still manage to mess up a box mix.

Sunday is Youth Reprogramming Day at the Night Vale Museum of Forbidden Technologies. Does your child love learning about new gadgets and advancements in technology? Well, come on down to the Museum of Forbidden Technologies on Sunday for a day-long reprogramming event. Docents and curators will engage those curious kids through hands-on unlearning. They’ll take their patented mindwipe beam and point it right at each child’s forehead until all interest in forbidden technology has been removed. Kids love the mindwipe beam, because it smells like grapes, and they don’t feel any pain for weeks after. Youth Reprogramming Day is a family friendly day of discovering that you know too much, and knowledge is treason.

Today’s appearance by the Obelisk is the 19th in recorded history. Little is known about what the Obelisk is, who controls it, or what it wants. Most scientists and historians agree that it was created by subterranean gods millennia ago, and they think its purpose is a type of census for life at ground level. The Obelisk is about 25 feet tall, it is oily and soft like a fresh brick of parmesan cheese, and when it appears, everyone in town carves their name into one of its four sides. We do not know why or when this practice began, it’s simply how it’s always been done. And to question tradition is to admit weakness. When the Obelisk eventually disappears, perhaps today, perhaps several days from now, it will take our names with it. And when it returns, those names will be gone and we will begin the tradition anew. No one knows what happens to those names. Are they simply erased, or are they read and recorded? Is this data mining for some ancient technology startup, or does the Obelisk truly belong to the gods? We only know what happens to one of the names carved on the Obelisk, and for that person, we feel both envy and pity. For while the Obelisk has always behaved benevolently, past performance et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Let’s have a look now at traffic. Route 800 is shut down until 4 PM today, as it has turned into a river. No cars are on Route 800, it’s just water. Rough and choppy, spiking white rapid caps atop nearly black rushing death. Highway officials are investigating the sudden appearance of this river, perfectly overlaying our main thoroughfare in and out of town. Beneath the quickly moving rush of the river, a single fish, probably a bass of some sort. Highway officials are uncertain because they don’t think about fish. Why would they? Highway officials are annoyed that you think so little of their awareness of fish species. They can tell a salmon from a marlin from a mackerel. “See what you made us do?” one highway official said. “We could have been repairing route 800, but you started picking on us for not knowing if that’s a bass or a mackerel or a whatnot. In fact,” the official continued, “we just looked it up on Wikipedia and it’s a bass. And fun fact,” they added, “did you know that bass can grow up to 25 pounds, have four rows of human teeth, and speak Spanish at a first grade level?” The river is now branching out down sides of streets and into neighborhoods. Pavement everywhere is a network of fresh water capillaries through town. Expect delays of up to 10 or 20 minutes, as you try to get to Mission Grove Park. This has been traffic.

The whole town feels like a carnival now with the flashing lights of the Obelisk and it’s crescendo of lively music filling the cool twilight air. We dance, we sing, we revel in togetherness and share our  fears of what will happen next. What will the question be? And more importantly, what will be its answer? When every name has been placed upon the Obelisk, then the blue glow of the towering monolith will die away. The entire structure will turn black. All except one name. One name will remain lit on the Obelisk, and that person shall be sent forth to ask their question. They may ask any question they choose and the Obelisk will tell them and only them the answer. No one else will hear this communication. If the receiver wishes to share what they now know, they are allowed to do so.

Many years back, this ritual was more organized. Early Night Vale townships planned a democratic approach to this opportunity: a committee of the Obelisk was formed to decide on the single most important question to ask. This approach came about in response to the super blunder of 1932, when a 6-year-old boy named Bartholomew Thomason was chosen to deliver the question. He  asked the Obelisk if he was, quote, “gonna have corn for dinner”. The obelisk apparently said no, because little Bart started crying and the Obelisk quickly disappeared, not to return for almost 10 years. By that time, the committee of the Obelisk was established and they chose the question: “how do you cure cancer?” Ah, this is a good and noble question. But the citizen chosen by the Obelisk was a farmer named Barry McKenney, who tried his best to take careful notes, but a lot of the detailed medical jargon was just too complex for him. The committee tried this question again 6 years later, but the Obelisk refused to respond to any question it had already answered. So Sidney Laynord of Old Time Night Vale, not having a backup question from the committee, asked if his wife Jessica was cheating on him with Gerald Framingham, and the Obelisk said no, but it only said that because Gerald’s actual last name was Framington, so Sidney just messed up.

Over the decades, the committee of the Obelisk asked: “Is God real”? And the Obelisk said yes, but nothing more. After that, they tried to ask questions that would elicit more detailed response. Um, one year they asked: “who planned the assassination of JFK?” and were disappointed to learn that it was a CIA - Fidel Castro – Frank Sinatra triumvirate that conspired to murder our 35th president. This was the most boring answer, but at least it verified what everyone already knew.

By the 1990’s, though, the committee of the Obelisk had kind of fallen out of fashion after years of corporate funding and corruption. See, this controversy exploded in 1997, when the question put forth by the committee, which at the time was headed by the CEO of Pepsico, was: “what’s the best tasting carbonated soft drink on the market today?” The Obelisk’s answer, to the chairman’s great disappointment, was Surge. Today, whoever is called on by the Obelisk is given free reign to ask whatever they choose. However many news outlets regularly publish lists of recommended question, but there is always the risk that someone will ask something frivolous like “what’s Jason Mraz up to these days?” or “where is the body of my missing fahter?” Please, God please, just don’t call on Susan Willman. She will blow it.

And now a word from our sponsors. Are you tired of wrinkled shirts? Do your clothes get static cling? [increasingly angry tone] How many times do you show up to work with your shirt all rumpled and not smelling like seafoam mist? You’re not going to get a promotion looking like that, and while no one deserves anything, you certainly should appear to earn that promotion. You need crisp, clean, non-ionised clothing that smells like seafoam mist. Don’t you wanna smell like seafoam mist?! Try Tide pods. With our special formula of citrus extract, kelp and milk fat, Tide pods can be the all natural solution to all of your laundry problems. You deserve Tide pods, because you deserve that promotion over Michaela, who’s only like 22 years old. What has she ever done to deserve a promotion? What’s Michaela’s deal even? Tide pods. Remember when we seemed like a big problem?

Oooooooo listeners, the Obelisk has gone dark. The music has ceased. The whole town encircles the tower waiting for its declaration for who shall ask the question. In the quiet night, under few start peeking thru the purple sky, we can hear only the sounds of crickets. The Obelisk, so black as to appear cut out from reality, suddenly shines a small blue line. It is a name, it is on the south face and is it… Oh no! No no no, listeners, I don’t know if I can stop this but I will try. Uuuh, let’s go now to the weather.

[“Pros and Cons” by Sugar & the Mint https://www.sugarandthemint.com/]

Welllll it’s too late. She’s asked her question. I’m not sure how I could have stopped this disaster, even if I made it over there before she could ask it. OK, as you know by now, the Obelisk lit up with Susan Willman’s name, and she grinned smugly and did that fake like “who me? What, oh my god!” gesture and then walked on up to the Obelisk. The crowd was calling out questions to her like  game show audience trying to help a contestant, no single phrase discernible above the others, and Susan just looked around, her big goofy eyes scanning the people around her, as if she would actually lower herself to listen to their questions. [scoffs] She thinks she’s so high and mighty with her PT officer status and her hit Broadway musical. No no no, Susan’s above us all, just as important as she can be. She waved her arms like wings for quiet, and the audience obeyed, she’s so self-important, so attention seeking. And then she asked her question. The one question we as a town get only every decade or so, and Susan said: “Hey, so what’s your name?” What’s your name?!! God! What a waste! Did she forget we only get one question? The crowd began to boo, or at least I did. I started booing and I am part of the crowd.

The obelisk began to speak only into Susan’s mind and Susan listened closely. She giggled at first, like a little girl hearing a silly joke from a grandfather, and then her tear-filled laughs turned into tear-filled breaths, which eventually became tear-filled sobs. After about three minutes, the Obalisk vanished, and Susan stood alone on the small hill between the Wailing Pit and the Memorial Debris Heap, and she told us what she heard. Or [scoffs] she told us some of what she heard.

Susan said, in an unusually booming authoritative voice: “Whosoever speaks aloud the name of the Obelisk shall become the Obelisk. Whosoever becomes the Obelisk shall live forever. Whosoever lives forever shall know all things. Whosoever knows all things shall be damned. And whosoever hears the name of the Obelisk spoken aloud shall perish.” The crowd parted for Susan as she left the park. They mumbled their disappointment in both the question and its answer. Some spoke with pity, some with disdain, while some thought it was all pretty cool and now. “Much better than last time, when Dave asked who would win the 2013 NBA championships,” said one person. “Dave won a lot of money on that answer, though,” responded another. “He has a yacht now over at the Harbor and Waterfront Recreation Area.”

But most everyone whispered their fear for Susan’s power itself. I mean, Susan received a gif today, a cursed cursed gifts. You know what? I think I might go see that “Sunset Boulevard” after all and I love it. I don’t get to tell Susan very often what a visionary theatrical director she is, but I, I, [chuckles] I might even put some stacks down on her cakes Saturday too. Really support that academic Decathlon team. And the spirit of American ingenuity and perseverance, and all that.

Good question, Susan. I’d like to never learn the answer, but good question nonetheless. You’re one of, if not the, best person I know. Thumbs up.

Stay tuned next for our newest game show, “Nothing will ever be the same”.

Good night, Night Vale, Good night.

Today’s proverb: Bite your tongue. Fun, right?

[thelastofgala]

I started The Last of Us, Pt. 2 last night, and here are my first impressions, musings on parallelism, Naturalism, Ellie’s characterization, Joel’s characterization, the “presence” of Riley, gameplay, story development, and more:

***SPOILERS UNDER THE CUT***

Starting with Joel. I always imagined The Last of Us 2 would begin at the end of Joel’s journey, though I will say that I did not expect to pick up so close to the end of the first game. I thought they would start us somewhere COMPLETELY out of context. Like I was prepared for much deeper flashback. In this way, I really felt like I was playing a sequel, which is not a bad thing. I just had no idea how they were going to frame this. The compelling thing about starting with Joel is that it immediately sets up parallels between Joel and Sarah, the character we start with in The Last of Us. There’s no way this was not a pointed decision. Just like it was with Sarah, Joel is our point of reference in a new, strange world. His point of view in this new world is all that we know. We don’t know what the new special world contains, and we don’t know grown-up Ellie at all. Plus, old fans will have missed him. It is a comfort to be Joel, and like a daughter protected by her father, a false and short-lived comfort. We are also now thinking of Joel as, like Sarah, someone who is in danger, whose agency is compromised, who, for whatever reason, is weakened this time around, and who may not survive the story. 

I will say, too, that I really loved that after the 4-years-later cut, Joel is held off-screen. He and Tommy are out on a patrol. They are out there, in danger, and that sort of restraint is really effective. We are ALWAYS looking for Joel, just like we were in the run-up to the release, because he is the only person we truly know in this strange, new world. ND knows and takes advantage of this.

There are many parallels between Joel and Riley. Both Joel and Riley sneak up on Ellie during their first interaction. They’re even wearing similar colors. Both Joel and Riley lied to Ellie in the previous story, and both betrayed her as an act of self-preservation. In Left Behind, Ellie is somewhat chilly toward Riley in the beginning, even as her younger, more optimistic self, just as Ellie is chilly toward Joel in the beginning of The Last of Us 2. Still, you can tell through Ellie’s dialogue with Dina that she and Joel are knitted together—he defended her against the bigoted bartender, and she appreciates this even if she doesn’t outright say it. They share taste in movies and have plans to watch a movie together soon. I haven’t interacted with Joel in the current timeline, but I do know that in Left Behind, Riley has to earn back Ellie’s trust and take measures to reenter her good graces, and that this is a large part of their relationship arc. I also know that, by the time they reconcile, it proves to be too late. The world will not let them have what they want, and nothing is simple. All of these parallels worry me a lot, as Left Behind, while still driven by a strong undercurrent of love (it is a love story, interwoven with Ellie’s desperate search for medical supplies in a bid to save Joel’s life), is a much bleaker, sadder story than The Last of Us, and it has a tragic ending.

Joel's conversation with Tommy feels important. I was very glad to hear Tommy say that he would have made the same choice, in terms of saving Ellie or letting her die for the possibility of a cure. It shows that Tommy is more like Joel than perhaps we knew. Plus, Maria will have taught him something about love and commitment, as the notion of saving the one you love above all else should make more sense to him now that he has foregone the youthful idealism of the Fireflies in order to focus on the practical wisdom of family. As a parent, I understand Joel’s decision to save Ellie at the end of The Last of Us and know I would have done the same. I also understand why Joel lied, even though I think it was the wrong choice. Hearing him confide all of this in Tommy was cathartic. It was also very characteristic of Joel to respond that Ellie “didn’t say nothing otherwise” when Tommy asks if she believed him. In all of his denial, Joel chooses to believe what is conveniently in front of him, even if he knows it’s untrue. Also, I couldn’t tell, but was that a Firefly logo on that guitar he’s shining up? Maybe I hallucinated that. But if it is, I do wonder where he got it.

Ellie’s character is much more deadpan and ruminative in young adulthood. She seems tired, and a little lacking in self-esteem and sort of immediately defeated by what happened during the experience with Joel. When Joel sang, we could see her return to that place, just a glimmer, and her response—that it “didn’t suck”—shows how she still shields her heart with sarcasm, something Dina points out to her later on (“Did I ruin your punchline?”). Joel has been broken down by the events of The Last of Us and now bears his soul to her with his music, unabashed and dedicated to her, and Ellie is now the stoic one, unshakable, sealed inside a heavy, protective armor that seems impossible to pierce. I look forward to getting to know Ellie as a young adult and, ultimately, crying a lot. She is artistic and honest and still a little soft underneath. You can tell by her early interactions with Dina especially that she can still blush, and she can still come undone.

I love the snowball fight lol. I am always so frustrated when these big environment games, like Red Dead 2, Dragon Age, etc., don’t have any kids running around. Why don’t these stories pay attention to kids? Kids exist. They are an important part of almost any open world or quasi open world environment. I love the presence of kids in The Last of Us 2, because the loss of childhood innocence is an important theme for Ellie as a character. It’s also clear we’re trying to set up the edenic innocence of Jackson. It is childhood, in a way, and just like childhood, it will come to inevitable corruption. The scene, too, reminded me of Ellie and Riley on their teen dream adventure, romping through the Halloween store at the mall, trying on masks and talking to the magic eight ball.

I’m really pleased by all the parallels with Left Behind and Ellie’s portion of the journey in The Last of Us. Winter was her season, and that’s where we’re starting now. The horseback riding, the blizzard, and all the blood in the snow bring flashbacks of Ellie hunting on the woods, Ellie alone in the frozen mall, David, and the Lakeside Resort, all of which layer the current moment with a lot of emotional tension for the player.

The opening is, I think, sprawling. I’m having fun but there’s this sense that I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of the story. Like Joel in the first game, Ellie is also big-timing me a little and I feel far away from her. I know this will change soon, and I’ll warm up to her, but for now, like Joel, we’re all being held at arm’s length. I actually like the POV shifts we’ve gotten so far and the multiple POVs is something I predicted a while ago, based on ND’s tendencies in the first game. Ppl are going to give The Last of Us 2 shit for being too cinematic but tbh it sometimes feels more like a playable novel than a traditional video game. We’re on a cable car headed straight into disaster and there’s nothing we can do. In this way the game is using the medium itself to perpetuate its Naturalistic themes. We play and we play, and we fight and we fight, but the environment entertains no interest in our struggle and the outcome will always be the same. There is no free will in The Last of Us.

On that note, the gameplay so far is, I think, pretty fun. I have played a lot of stealth games and am always looking for ways the genre is reinventing itself. Like Sekiro and Tomb Raider, The Last of Us 2 is increasing the verticality of the map with rope climbing and scaling up obstacles (though I do miss using Joel’s immense upper body strength to move those dumpsters around lol). In a stealth game I want creativity and problem solving to be central to the gameplay. I don’t want to be magically handed tools and weapons on a constant basis, to meet every individual need. I want to be forced into resourcefulness, and I don’t want to enter a shoot-out unless I absolutely have to. That said, I’m nearly to the tower checkpoint with Dina, and I’ve only fired my gun twice. The dodge/melee mechanic is neat, but more than anything, having real, actionable help from an AI enables stealth kills even in zones crawling with enemies. On that note, I am playing with a headset, and I’m glad I am, because I find the sounds of the goddam clickers to be all-encompassing this time around and a LOT bigger and scarier than they were in The Last of Us. Holy shit. They’re absolutely terrifying. I can only imagine the horror to come lol.

Now, finally, Abby: I don’t have much to offer on this yet. Abby is not who I thought she’d be. I’ll just say it. Still, the melee battle with her and the runners in the woods was AWESOME. For me, the most fun I’ve had yet, because it was completely different than anything from The Last of Us. Playing her, however, I will say, filled me with foreboding. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to help her. She seems beyond desperate and while deeply sympathetic, she is a new character and her loyalties are not mine...so far. I could be very wrong, and please don’t correct me if I am, but I get the sense she might be a Firefly, or somehow associated with Marlene, and she is looking for Joel, in vengeance. Her group was small and rogue, and they seemed new to the area. All I know is that ND is creating a moral dilemma here, and as to what will become of this, the jury is still out completely.

One small personal criticism, take it or leave it: I don’t personally love that the kiss with Dina and scene with Joel defending Ellie was kept off-stage in the game and left to the trailer. We could have started at the dance. That would have taught us everything we need to know about Ellie, Dina, Jesse, and Joel and Ellie’s relationship state. This is my only criticism of the story so far. From a writer’s perspective, it’s just inefficient and clumsy to try and cover all that in expositional dialogue, taking into consideration that many casual players will not have seen all the trailers. Even still, it’s not hurting my experience in any way. Just an observation and maybe a bit of personal opinion on the fact that perhaps the choice to reveal so much scene in pre-release trailers might be a great way to build hype but might not be the most efficient choice in telling the actual story. My two cents!

In the end, I’m overall super excited and can’t wait to keep playing. These are just my own personal thoughts, and I’ll be back with more thoughts soon!! PLEASE NO SPOILERS OR SPOILERY SUGGESTIONS IN THE REPLIES!! I am NOT privy to the leaks and I do NOT want to know what’s coming. Thank you!! ^_^ 

[dustedmagazine]

Punk’d History, Vol. VIII: This Machine [blank] Fascists

Photo by Richard Young

It has the appearance of a worrisome pattern: any number of punk rock’s founding figures embraced the symbolics of Nazi Germany. Ron Asheton, an original and indispensable member of the Stooges, played a number of gigs wearing a red swastika armband, and liked to sport Iron Cross medals and a Luftwaffe-style leather jacket. Sid Vicious loved his bright scarlet, swastika-emblazoned tee shirt, and Siouxsie Sioux, during her tenure as the It-Girl of the Bromley Contingent, mixed her breast-baring, black leather bondage gear with a bunch of “Nazi chic.” And how many early Ramones songs (inevitably penned by Dee Dee) referenced Nazi gear, concepts and geography? “Blitzkrieg Bop,” “Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World,” “Commando,” “It’s a Long Way Back to Germany,” “All’s Quiet on the Eastern Front,” and so on—for sure, more than a few.

“Appearance” is the key term. Poor Sid lacked the sobriety and smarts to have much of a grasp of fascism as an ideology. Siouxsie was just taking the piss, and gleefully pissing off the mid-1970s British general public, for much of whom World War II was still a living memory. Asheton and Dee Dee? Both were sons of hyper-masculine military men. Asheton’s father was a collector of WWII artefacts, and the guitarist shared his father’s fascination. When the Stooges adopted an ethos and aesthetic hostile to the late-1960s prevailing Flower Power rock’n’roll subculture, the Nazi accoutrement seemed to him fitting signs of the band’s anger and alienation. Dee Dee hated his father, an abusive Army officer who married a German woman. Dee Dee spent some of his youth in post-war West Germany, in which Nazi symbols were highly charged with anxiety and vituperation. Casual veneration of Nazis was a convenient way to reject the triumphal ennobling of the Good War, and of the military men associated with its traditions. And (as Sid, Siouxsie and Asheton also noticed) it really bothered the squares. 

None of that makes the superficial use of the swastika or phrases like “Nazi schatzi” any less offensive — it simply underscores that in the cases noted above, the offense was the thing. The politics weren’t even an afterthought, because the political itself had been dismissed as corrupt, boring or simply the native territory of the very people the punks were striking out against. If that’s where the relation between punk and fascism ceased, there wouldn’t be much more to write about.

The post-punk moment in England provided opportunities to rethink and restrategize the nascent détournement of Siouxsie’s fashionable provocations. Genesis P-Orridge and the rest of Throbbing Gristle were a brainy bunch, and their play with fascist signifiers was a good deal more complex. The band’s logo and their occasional appearance in gun-metal grey uniforms clearly alluded to Nazism, with its attendant, keen interests in occult symbols and High Modernist representational languages. TG’s visual gestures were also of a piece with an early band slogan: “Industrial music for industrial people.” Clearly “industrial people” can be read as a highly ironized coupling: the oppressed workers marching through the bowels of Metropolis were a sort of industrial people, reduced to the functionality of pure human capital. TG seemed to impose the same analysis on the middle-managers of Britain’s post-industrial economy, and their uncritical complicity in capital’s cruelties. But it’s also possible to argue that industrial people are industrious people; like TG, industrial people (middle managers, MPs) can get a lot of stuff done. They can produce things. They can make the trains run on time. And what sorts of cargo might those trains be carrying? What variety of conveyance delivered the naked “little Jewish girl” of “Zyklon B Zombies” to her fate?  

To be clear: I don’t mean at all to suggest that TG was a fascist band. Like their punky contemporaries, TG traded in fascist iconography in a spirit of transgressive outrage, expressing their hot indignation with equally heated symbols. And other British post-punk acts flirted with fascist themes and images, ranging from ambiguous dalliance (Joy Division’s overt references to Yehiel De-Nur’s House of Dolls and to Rudolph Hess; and just what was the inspiration for Death in June’s band name?) to more assertive satire (see Current 93’s appealingly bonkers Swastikas for Noddy [LAYLAH Antirecords, 1988]). But a more problematic populist undercurrent in British punk persisted through the late 1970s. The dissolution of Sham 69—due in large part to the National Front’s attempts to appropriate the band’s working-class anger as a form of white pride—opened the way for a clutch of clueless, cynical or outright racist Oi! bands to attempt to impose themselves as the face of blue-collar English punk. And literally so: the Strength through Oi! compilation LP (Decca Records, 1981) featured notorious British Movement activist Nicky Crane on its cover. It didn’t help that the record’s title seemed to allude to the Nazis’ “Strength through Joy [Kraft durch Freude]” propaganda initiative.  

Of course, it’s unfair to tar all Oi! bands with an indiscriminate brush. A few bands whose songs were opportunistically stuck onto Strength through Oi! by the dullards at Decca Records — Cock Sparrer and the excellent Infa Riot — tended leftward in their politics, and were anything but racists. But for a lot of the disaffected kids sucking down pints of Bass and singing in the Shed at Stamford Bridge, it wasn’t much of a leap from the punk pathetique of the Toy Dolls to Skrewdriver’s poisonous palaver.  

In the States, a similarly complicated story can be recovered:

In numerous ways, hardcore intensified punk’s confrontational qualities, musically and aesthetically. The New York hardcore scene made a fetish of its inherent violence, which complemented the music’s sharpened impact. So it’s hard to know precisely what to make of the photo on the cover of Victim in Pain (Rat Cage Records, 1984). If inflicting violence was an essential element of belonging in the NYHC scene, with whom to identify: the Nazi with the pistol, or the abject Ukrainian Jewish man, on his knees and about to tumble into the mass grave?  

Agnostic Front seemed to provide a measure of clarity on the record, which included the song “Fascist Attitudes.” The lyric uses “fascist” as a condemnatory term. But the behaviors the song engages as evidence of fascism are intra-scene acts of violence: “Why should you go around bashing one another? […] / Learning how to respect each other is a must / So why start a war of anger, danger among us?” That’s a rhetoric familiar to anyone who participated in early-1980s hardcore; calls for scene unity were ubiquitous, and the theme is obsessively addressed on Victim in Pain. But the signs of inclusivity most visibly celebrated on the NYHC records and show flyers of the period were a skinhead’s white, shaven pate; black leather, steel-toe boots; and heavily muscled biceps. Those signifiers clearly link to the awful cover image of Strength through Oi! The forms of identity recognized and concretized in the songs’ first-person inclusive pronouns have a clear referent. 

Agnostic Front wasn’t the only NYHC band to refer to and engage World War Two-period fascism. Queens natives Dave Rubenstein and Paul Bakija met at Forest Hills High School—the same school at which John Cummings (Johnny) befriended Thomas Erdelyi (Tommy), laying the groundwork for the formation of the Ramones. Rubenstein and Bakija also took stage names (Dave Insurgent and Paul Cripple) and formed Reagan Youth. But unlike the Ramones, there was nothing tentative or ambivalent about Reagan Youth’s politics. Rubenstein’s parents, after all, were Holocaust survivors. The band’s name riffed on “Hitler Youth,” but specifically did so to draw associations between Reagan and Hitler, between American conservatism’s 1980s resurgence and the Nazi’s hateful, genocidal agenda. Songs like “New Aryans” and “I Hate Hate” accommodated no uncertainties.  

Still, it’s interesting that Victim in Pain and Reagan Youth’s Youth Anthems for the New Order (R Radical Records, 1984) were released only months apart, by bands in the same scene, sometimes sharing bills at CBGBs’ famous matinees of the period. And while Reagan Youth toured with Dead Kennedys, it’s Agnostic Front’s “Fascist Attitudes” that’s closer in content to the most famous punk rock putdown of Nazis.

It’s odd what comes back around: Martin Hannett, whom Biafra playfully chides at the track’s very beginning, produced much of Joy Division’s music, moving the band away from its brittle early sound to the fulsome atmospheres of the Factory records, and to a wider listenership. “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” similarly addresses a formerly obscure, tight scene opening to a greater array of participants, some of whom were attracted solely to hardcore’s reputation for violence. Like “Fascist Attitudes,” the Dead Kennedys’ song itemizes fighting at shows as its chief complaint, and as a principal marker for “Nazi” behavior. Biafra’s lyric eventually gets around to somewhat more focused ideological critique: “You still think swastikas look cool / The real Nazis run your schools / They’re coaches, businessmen, and cops / In a real fourth Reich, you’ll be the first to go.” The kiss-off to punk’s vapid romance of the swastika (it “looks cool”) complements the speculative treatment of a “real fourth Reich.” Both operate at the level of abstraction. The casual, superficial relation to the symbol’s aesthetic assumes a sort of safety from the real, material consequences of its application. And the emergence of a fascist political regime is dangled as a possible future event. That speculative futurity undoes the “real” in “real Nazis.” The threat is ultimately a metaphorical construct. The Nazis are metaphorical “Nazis.”  

Still, it’s the song’s chorus that resonates most powerfully. So much so that the song has found its way into other artworks.

Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room (2015) is frequently identified as a horror film on streaming services. We could split hairs over that genre marker. The film gets quite graphically bloody, but there’s no psychotic slasher killer, no supernatural force at work. And cinematically, the film is a lot more interested in anxiety and dramatic tension than it is in inspiring revulsion or disgust. It terrifies, more than it horrifies. What’s especially compelling about the film (aside from Imogen Poots’ excellent performance, and Patrick Stewart’s menacing turn as charismatic fascist Darcy Banks) is its interest in embedding the viewer in a social context in which the Nazis are a lot less metaphorical, a lot more real. In Green Room, the kids in the punk band the Ain’t Rights are warned about the club they have agreed to play: “It’s mostly boots and braces down there.” And they understand the terms. What they can’t quite imagine is a room — a scene, a political Real — in which fascism is dominant. Their recognition of the stakes of the Real comes too late. The violence is already in motion. In that world, the Dead Kennedys song provides a nice slogan, but symbolic action alone is entirely inadequate.  

OK, sure, Green Room is a fiction. Its violence is necessarily aestheticized, distorted and hyperbolized. But perhaps the film’s most urgent source of horror can be located in its plausible connections to the social realities of our material, contemporary conjuncture. You don’t have to dig very deep into the Web to find thousands of records made by white nationalist and neo-fascist-allied bands, many, many of which deploy stylistic chops identified with punk rock and hardcore. You can listen. You can buy. (And yeah, I’m not going to link to any of that miserable shit, because fuck them. If you do your own digging to see what’s what, be careful. It’s scary and upsetting in there.) It feels endless. And the virulent sentiments expressed on those records are echoed in institutional politics in the US and elsewhere: Steve King (and now Marjorie Taylor Greene, effectively angling for her seat in Congress), Nigel Farage, Alternative für Deutschland, elected leadership in Poland and Hungary. Explicit white supremacist music also has somewhat more carefully coded counterparts in much more visible media (the nightly monologuing on Fox News) and in very well-positioned, prominent policy makers (Stephen Miller, who’s on the record touting “great replacement” theory and is a big fan of The Camp of the Saints). It’s a complex, ideologically coherent network, working industriously to impose and install its hateful vision as the dominant political Real. 

Sometimes it feels as if no progress at all has been made. Maybe we’re moving toward the reactionaries. Contrast Skokie in the late 1970s with Charlottesville in 2017. And now if the Neo-Nazis have licenses for their long guns, they can strut through American streets wearing them in the name of “law and order.” It’s even more disturbing that a subculture that wants to clothe itself in “revolution” and “radicalism” is so tightly in league with institutional politics. Say what you will about Siouxsie’s Nazi-fashion antics, no one suspected that her prancing echoed political activity, policy-making or messaging in Westminster.

So what’s a punk to do? It’s certain that a vigorously free society needs to preserve spaces in which unpopular speech can be uttered and exchanged. Punk should pride itself on defending those spaces. But speech that operates in conjunction with an ascendant political power and ideological agenda doesn’t need defense or energetic attempts to preserve its right to existence. In October of 2020, that speech (in this case, speeches being written by Miller, texts by folks who have spent time in Tucker Carlson’s writer’s room and songs by white supremacist hardcore bands) has become synonymous with political right itself.  

So now more than ever, it’s important to be active in the public square, to stand up to the fascists and to say it, often and out loud:

Jonathan Shaw

[rpgmgames]

February’s Featured Game: Ressurflection

DEVELOPER(S): charlottezxz ENGINE: RPG Maker MV GENRE: Fantasy, Cartoon, RPG WARNINGS: Paranoia, fear and tension, mild swearing and blood. SUMMARY: Ressurflection is a Fantasy/cartoon RPG set in the fictional universe of the Arbvar and taking center stage primarily at the coastal city of ‘Horizon Bluff’. Its story and game play are heavily character driven, with its narrative divided into two parallels told both within and outside the mirror itself. Ressurflection’s core themes draw from our inevitability of fearing death, and that at some point or another, we all must accept it, and to treasure what’s really important in the time that we have.

Our Interview With The Dev Team Below The Cut!

Introduce yourself! *charlottezxz: Hiya this is Charlotte, lead game developer for Ressurflection! I’m some silly, overactive drawing monkey who works a lot with Narrow on Ressurflection! I’m always sketching and conceptualizing monster bois, taking a lot of inspiration from various games, primarily monster hunter! I’ve had avid interest in the Indie scene for a while now and a lot of the great friends I've made have been due to it and a lot of my recent favorite games have come from it! I would have had Narrow say a few things here but he’s hiding in a corner somewhere!

What is your project about? What inspired you to create this game initially? *charlottezxz: Ressurflection started out as what can be described as two separate stories. Myself and Narrow wrote our own stories and every so often we swapped over ideas or combined them together with each other. One day I said to ourselves ‘You know what? This could work quite well as a game rather than just a story’ so eventually Ressurflection was conceived, around the idea of a mythical mirror capable ‘Ressurflection’ the title of the game. We’ve gone through quite a few iterations of the story before it came to its current form and to be honest if we even showed or compared them side by side they’d be pretty unrecognizable as the same thing except for certain characters, locations and the mirror itself to identify its primordial form having any kind of ancestral relevance to how it is today. As for what Ressurflection is about, I think our synopsis can get that across quite nicely! ‘Horizon Bluff has always annually held its ‘Legend of the Wyvern Glass’ festivities. The Wyvern glass was a long lost mythical mirror, once fabled for its power of ‘Ressurflection’ and coveted by a kingdom now all but gone. That is quick to change however with the arrival of the Roulette Runner’s circus to the coastal city of Horizon Bluff. Trouble is soon to set in motion not just the kingdom’s sudden reappearance but the entrapment of one of their own acrobats within the mirror silver. Yet things are soon to worsen...with the spread of a purple ‘corruption’ across the city and the fact that our most unfortunate trouper is far from alone within the mirror, finding himself at the mercy of its ‘Mirror Maiden’. > The apparent all powerful manipulator of its realm…’

How long have you been working on your project? *charlottezxz: Conceptually we have been working on it for 4 years which is hard to even fathom, however that’s more tinkering around the idea for the story and conceiving it as we learnt the engine. The blog itself is hitting its 4th birthday in February! Ressuflection’s development went on as i attended university, so its always been a side lined hobby of ours.Steam says 108 days worth of hours in the engine and most of the game progress other than concepts has been done in 2019. So I could say 4 years for the ideas/stories and concepts and a year of that for actual game making!

Did any other games or media influence aspects of your project? *charlottezxz: We each have our own inspirations, Lost Odyssey, Final Fantasy 9, Xenoblade Chronicles, Monster hunter and many older PSX titles such as Medievil, Tomba and Heart of darkness are great influences and inspirations to me personally. The dark, dangerous environments of Heart of darkness contrasted by some innocent characters, the monster designs in capcom’s franchise and the storytelling and themes with a cinematic approach to cut scenes found in some of FF9, Xenoblade and Lost odyssey, a lost game stuck in the recess of the xbox 360. There are many more but these spring to mind first and foremost. Narrow himself draws inspiration from games such as Earthbound, the Persona series and FF10!

Have you come across any challenges during development? How have you overcome or worked around them? *charlottezxz: We started the project in VX ace to begin with, until MV released. It was in Ace that I experimented learning RPG maker and in the early days of MV too. Although before Ressurflection’s time i also dabbled a bit in XP. MV seemed more in line for what we wanted, as i really wanted to try animating beyond SV sheets and do more, with Java being a bit more flexible and the scope of it being able to allow dragon bones later. However it hasn’t been without its hiccups! Part of that is the sheer amount of time you underestimate games and certain elements to take in their development. That and everything that comes with it, streamlining, trimming the fat...in the past week alone i spent days optimizing pictures, sounds and music in the game to cut down the staggering file sizes they were. So far they have retained their form without being as costly on the MB! Since I do the vast majority of the game development myself, everything takes a lot longer to develop. You underestimate all the little things to consider and that you may need later. By the end of development, I hope to have the vast majority of the game consist of custom assets and be able to truly call it something that is ours. Though that path is long ahead we won’t stray too far from it.

Have any aspects of your project changed over time? How does your current project differ from your initial concept? *charlottezxz: The game itself has always been a story-driven RPG at its heart, although certain game mechanics have been scaled down or developed further from puzzles to battle flow. As mentioned previously, the story has changed considerably which changed the direction of the overall narrative and gameplay as a whole. Certain characters and scenarios have been culled completely too. At its start the story wasn’t as heartfelt nor was the scope of the story all that big - Oh and the game had a time limit, a bit like Majora’s Mask! But it is a lot more meaningful now and we hope that you will enjoy it when the time comes.

What was your team like at the beginning? How did people join the team? If you don’t have a team, do you wish you had one or do you prefer working alone? *charlottezxz: It has been just myself and Narrow for the majority of the development but we reached a point where we wanted to reach out to find a musician for our game. We eventually came across Geoff who has done the majority of our music up until recently. However we have had friends help and contribute along the way such as Harry helping sprite some NPCs for me, Bart helping formulate and do some math balancing, Vaijack has also contributed to music making him our second musical boi and more on the way, our preliminary demo testers( it would take a little to list them all) and more peeps i’ll be sure to credit!

What is the best part of developing a game? *charlottezxz: For me it has to be conceptualising all the little ideas we have and bringing them all into being. This is especially so for any monster and character bois! I spend a lot of time visualizing and planning the design of areas, locales and creatures. Would this thing live here? Why would it be this way? If this is a historical town wouldn’t it have x and x? Then when we ultimately put it together, and all the pieces of the puzzle line into place and then you can just...experience, the final thing, that for me is the best part in developing our game for me.

Do you find yourself playing other RPG Maker games to see what you can do with the engine, or do you prefer to do your own thing? *charlottezxz: I learn best by doing, so more often than not I just dive into things, including the engine blind and tussle around with it. It’s a silly way of doing it, but I've often found myself learning more that way than following tutorials. Although in any game I've played, RPG maker or not, i do like to ponder and deconstruct scenes within them. The Witch's house, Pocket Mirror, Dreaming Mary, Mad fathers and Ib are all wonderful games that are great to learn from, dissect and understand what makes and made them tick. This applies across any game I've played or intend to play! I look at game making as one giant puzzle with lots of intricate little details that need to be solved, it’s more fun and engaging that way!

Which character in your game do you relate to the most and why? (Alternatively: Who is your favorite character and why?) *charlottezxz: There’s some characters I like a great deal, but i can’t talk about as it would be spoilers to the plot, that and it’s hard to pick any overall favorites. Charm comes across as a fun character to write for as she’s quite witty and sarcastic, the kind of dialogue that comes a bit too naturally to me. She’s a budding magical prodigy of the circus under the tutelage of Jerine. She bigs herself up a lot but isn’t quite ready to deal with the problems of the adult world just yet, as much as she strives to get into it. Then there’s the likes of Ashley as well, she’s the loudest circus member and a close friend to Zakai, its ringmaster. She’s a super hard working down to earth country girl who isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty and jump into the thick of things. Honestly I love all the cast, but there’s those two for now!

Looking back now, is there anything that regret/wish you had done differently? *charlottezxz: I would say ideally we should have had all our ducks in a row before we dove into development. My development style is very messy, especially since when we started development we had a lot of learning ahead of us. That combined with focusing on a lot of coursework and real life things meant I often forgot how we made things for consistency. This has improved considerably since i started getting more organised now, keeping lists and things tabbed for reference. My desk has bits of paper kept with it with information I need to retain. I forget far too many things for my own good, but now I'm taking better count measures! I would advise anyone to keep tabs of important information about your game such as consistent sprite style sizes, resolution size, x and y positions of certain things and important variables and switches.

Do you plan to explore the game’s universe and characters further in subsequent projects, or leave it as-is? *charlottezxz: There’s a few ideas bounced about to do side stories for some of the cast of characters in the circus, such as before they became one and the origins of how certain members joined the circus essentially the ‘First Stringers’ and ‘Second stringers’, these being those that joined afterwards. These would be great to do as small little episodes added onto the game post development, but currently they are just ideas and won’t be given too much thought until the game is either done or close to fruition.

What do you most look forward to upon finishing the game? *charlottezxz: My most hopeful thought is for people to enjoy the game and have as much fun and interest in it as myself and Narrow have had in creating it. It’s the kind of game we want to make and hope that the characters and story chime with people enough for people to see the journey through to its end! It’s a big scope of a project but i have endless enthusiasm for it, no matter how long it takes it will get out there at some point!

Is there something you’re afraid of concerning the development or the release of your game? *charlottezxz: That the games story and overall feel doesn’t quite hit the right notes, it's always a little back concern. From a technical perspective I would say that the game might have some oversighted bugs or critical crashes that slip under the radar or not run as smoothly on other PCs on release. We will do our best to optimise the game as much as possible for MV and squash those pesky bugs during testing, but it is on our minds often as a niggling fear.

Do you have any advice for upcoming devs? *charlottezxz: Gut everything from the base project that you know you most definitely will not be needing and give all your files smart tags and naming conventions. It would be great if MV allowed for sub folders, but it does not so naming your files smartly is key to finding what you need. Any of these files you know you will use often in certain ways, make them common events and call for those in events and cut scenes. This saves you mass editing them later. With naming conventions this could be Actor_1_Hurt or Chapter_1_NPC. Anything you want at the top of the list name it with _ to begin with. The bigger our project gets, the more important this has become for us and we hope it serves other inspiring devs well all the same.

Question from last month's featured dev @rojisroomrpg: How do you keep yourself happy and healthy when making your game? *charlottezxz: I’m normally a happy-go-lucky person, so I'm rarely not happy when working on Ressurflection. It's the happy little hobby I devote most of my spare time to. However, recently i would say my hands, wrists and neck have been hurting from spending a little too much time drawing assets and pieces for the game. Taking more breaks and spreading that time with other activities in between has helped to ease that pain and i would like to advise any dev to do so for their own health, including always having one or two bottles of juice, water or whatever beverage always at hand to sip at as you dev away!

We mods would like to thank charlottezxz for agreeing to our interview! We believe that featuring the developer and their creative process is just as important as featuring the final product. Hopefully this Q&A segment has been an entertaining and insightful experience for everyone involved!

Remember to check out Ressurflection if you haven’t already! See you next month! 

- Mods Gold & Platinum

[route22ny]

ON 19 OCTOBER 2016, in the third and final presidential debate, Hillary Clinton opined that Vladimir Putin would “rather have a puppet as president of the United States,” meaning Donald John Trump, than a formidable adversary like her. As Trump short-circuited like a Star Wars droid on the fritz (“No puppet. No puppet. You're the puppet!”), she continued:

It’s pretty clear you won't admit that the Russians have engaged in cyberattacks against the United States of America, that you encouraged espionage against our people, that you are willing to spout the Putin line, sign up for his wish list, break up NATO, do whatever he wants to do, and that you continue to get help from him, because he has a very clear favorite in this race.

So I think that this is such an unprecedented situation. We've never had a foreign government trying to interfere in our election. We have 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin and they are designed to influence our election. I find that deeply disturbing.

As usual, HRC was right. But even the most cynical viewer could scarce have imagined, in the fall of 2016, just how on the nose she was.

Trump’s activities since taking office—the gutting of the State Department, the jackals in the Oval Office, Helsinki, Mueller obstruction, Ukraine skulduggery, and his willful non-response to the covid pandemic—make clear that the longtime mob money launderer has spent most of his presidency doing Putin’s bidding, just as Clinton predicted. Allow cyberattacks against the United States? Check. Encourage espionage against our people? Check. Spout the Putin line? Always. Sign up for his wish list? Like a porn addict on OnlyFans. Break up NATO? Western Europe is as divided now as it’s been since the forties. Continue to get help from him? Every fucking day.

Three years after that third debate, almost exactly to the day, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stormed out of a meeting with President Trump concerning his strategically obtuse decision to withdraw US troops from Syria—a move that was ore in Russia’s interests than ours. “Why,” she exasperatedly asked the press, “do all roads lead to Putin?”

It’s actually quite simple: Trump has been mob property his entire life. The difference is that now, in 2020, the mobster who owns him is not “Fat Tony” Salerno, or “Big” Paul Castellano, or Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, or even Semion “The Brainy Don” Mogilevich. The mobster who owns him is Vladimir Putin—which makes Trump, by extension, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Russian government.

Previously, I wrote about Trump’s longtime association with the mob, both Italian and Russian, and his almost certain career as a top echelon Confidential Informant for the Justice Department. He is, as I said, “second generation mobbed-up.” Although he is not, and never can be, an actual mobster—a front can never be a member of the family, for obvious reasons—the unscrupulous Trump is an extremely useful asset to his underworld associates, and has been for decades. Front men, after all, are a vital cog in the global crime syndicate machine. That dirty money’s not going to wash itself.

While the Trump Organization does deals overseas, for most of his career Donald Trump was a stateside operator. The bulk of his revenue is homegrown. As a business professional of my acquaintance who worked for years in Russia colorfully put it: “The thing to remember about Trump is that he’s a venal crook, not some international criminal mastermind. His primary source of wealth, such as it is, comes from a string of golf courses, hotels, and mixed-use office buildings spread around the world, but the corn nuggets in his crown of shit are in the New York metro area and spread across the beaches of Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Broward County, Florida.”

So how did a Queens-born front-man and mob money launderer, whose business was overwhelmingly domestic, wind up an asset of a hostile foreign government?

To understand this transformation, it is instructive to think of Trump not as a human being but as an asset, in the strict sense of the word—a piece of property, like a beach house, a private jet, or an HBO Go password. Just as two different families can share a beach house, and your buddy down the street can use your login to stream Succession, so Trump can be utilized by more than one entity at a time. He can also be sold outright—or rather transferred, like the deed to a house. None of this is up to him. At all. To paraphrase Elvis Presley: he’s caught in a trap, he can’t walk out, because the mobsters own him baby.

As for Vladimir Putin, while he may have started as an intelligence operative, and he may pretend to be a diplomat and statesman on the world stage, his true profession, at this stage of his career, is mob boss—probably the most powerful mob boss in the world, more powerful even than his longtime associate from back in his Dresden days, Semion Mogilevich. (There was, and is, a lot of blur between IC and OC in Russia.)

Putin and Mogilevich are two foci of the small circle of oligarchs—there are subtle distinctions, but for all intents and purposes, oligarch is basically just a euphemism for mobster—who own almost everything of value in Russia. In mafia states, the mob runs the show—charging protection for businesses, taking bribes, imposing restrictions on airports, seaports, etc. The Russian mafiya is closer to the East India Company administering the entire colony of British India than some Scorsese picture. It steals from the people, and manipulates the weak central government, to keep itself in power.

(Sidenote: per Robert I. Friedman’s Red Mafiya, Mogilevich has complete control of Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow. So if a self-styled NSA “whistleblower” contrives to spend 40 days there avoiding the media, coughEdSnowdencough, you can be damn sure the “Brainy Don” authorized it).

An ex-KGB chief, Putin succeeded Boris Yeltsin as president in 1999. He’s been in charge ever since. Under his reign, Russia has regressed from a burgeoning democracy to a veritable dictatorship. Putin consolidated power, destroying the independent judiciary, clamping down on press freedoms, using false-flag operations to win popular support, and exploiting his power for personal gain. He is more like a tsar than a president—although the Romanovs did not possess nuclear weapons, and their wealth, obscene as it was, paled in comparison to Putin’s own.

Bill Browder, the American-born British national who was an early investor in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and who left the country after the government became too corrupt to continue doing business there, tells a hair-raising story about Putin: After the rise of the oligarchs in the early 2000s, Putin had the richest, most powerful oligarch—Mikhail Khodorkovsky, head of the energy concern Yukos—arrested. At a humiliating show trial during which the accused oligarch was kept in a cage, Khodorkovsky was found guilty of fraud. He was sent to prison, and his sizable assets seized.

After this sobering display, the other oligarchs approached Putin and asked what they needed to give him to avoid the same fate as Khodorkovsky, whose fate none of them wanted to share. Putin replied: “Half.” Since then, ill-gotten gains have poured into his coffers. The oligarchs boast fabulous wealth, but by virtue of claiming half of their money, Putin bests them all. Browder has suggested that Putin may well be the world’s richest individual.

And if this all sounds like the world’s greatest mob boss making the world’s biggest mob-boss flex, well, you say “tomato,” I say whatever the Russian word for “tomato” is. Whatever he might have been before that series of power moves, Putin emerged afterward as a no-doubt-about-it mob boss. Khodorkovsky, the fallen oligarch, himself said as much, in a recent interview.

Whether Putin is more powerful than Mogilevich is anyone’s guess. But only one of them is concurrently the head of state of a G8 country, one of a handful of nations that has nuclear capability—and, despite what revisionist historians at Fox News would have us believe, America’s chief adversary since 1945.

Donald John Trump’s association with the Russian mafiya—as opposed to the homegrown Italian one—began, best as we can tell, in 1984, when the Soviet soldier-turned-mobster David Bogatin purchased five of his condos for $6 million. Trump Tower was one of just two buildings in all of New York City that allowed units to be purchased by shell companies. Fishy deals like this did not deter Trump, who had traveled in underworld circles all his life.

By ’84, as covered previously, Trump was already a Confidential Informant for the FBI. He’d been on the radar of the KGB since 1977, when he married the former Ivana Zelníčková, a Czechoslovakian national who someone managed to emigrate from that Eastern Bloc country to Canada. As Luke Harding writes in his masterful and must-read book, Collusion (excerpted here by Politico):

Zelníčková was born in Zlin, an aircraft manufacturing town in Moravia. Her first marriage was to an Austrian real estate agent. In the early 1970s she moved to Canada, first to Toronto and then to Montreal, to be with a ski instructor boyfriend. Exiting Czechoslovakia during this period was, the files said, “incredibly difficult.” Zelníčkováa moved to New York. In April 1977 she married Trump.

According to files in Prague, declassified in 2016, Czech spies kept a close eye on the couple in Manhattan.…There was periodic surveillance of the Trump family in the United States. And when Ivana and Donald Trump, Jr., visited [her father] in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, further spying, or “cover.”

Like with other Eastern Bloc agencies, the Czechs would have shared their intelligence product with their counterparts in Moscow, the KGB. Trump may have been of interest for several reasons. One, his wife came from Eastern Europe. Two—at a time after 1984 when the Kremlin was experimenting with perestroika, or Communist Party reform—Trump had a prominent profile as a real estate developer and tycoon. According to the Czech files, Ivana mentioned her husband’s growing interest in politics. Might Trump at some stage consider a political career?

The KGB was really, really good. Are we to believe that the Soviets would not at least try to use Ivana—and her father Milos, stuck behind the Iron Curtain in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic—to get to Trump? Would not some cooperation be expected as the price of her being allowed to emigrate in the first place?

The Russians began to actively cultivate Trump in 1986, soon after his landmark real estate deal with Bogatin. As Harding tells it, Trump was invited to Moscow by Natalia Dubinina, the daughter of the Soviet ambassador to the United States, whom he met at a luncheon in New York in ‘86. The following year, he took her up on the offer. “On July 4, 1987, Trump flew to Moscow for the first time, together with Ivana and Lisa Calandra, Ivana’s Italian-American assistant,” Harding writes. “Moscow was, Trump wrote, ‘an extraordinary experience.’ The Trumps stayed in Lenin’s suite at the National Hotel, at the bottom of Tverskaya Street, near Red Square….The hotel was linked to the glass-and-concrete Intourist complex next door and was—in effect—under KGB control. The Lenin suite would have been bugged.”

Donald John Trump was a textbook KGB mark. The agents must have been drooling. Harding cites an internal memo circulated by the agency at the time, advising how to spot potential recruits: “Are pride, arrogance, egoism, ambition or vanity among subject’s natural characteristics?” Like a great baseball prospect, Trump was a five-tool player. Harding continues, writing about the internal memo:

The most revealing section concerned kompromat. The document asked for: “Compromising information about subject, including illegal acts in financial and commercial affairs, intrigues, speculation, bribes, graft … and exploitation of his position to enrich himself.” Plus “any other information” that would compromise the subject before “the country’s authorities and the general public.” Naturally the KGB could exploit this by threatening “disclosure.”

Finally, “his attitude towards women is also of interest.” The document wanted to know: “Is he in the habit of having affairs with women on the side?”

We don’t know what, if any, kompromat was gathered on that first trip to Moscow. But we do know that Trump is a serial philanderer, with a taste for Eastern European women. This wasn’t exactly a state secret; by ‘87, he was already a tabloid legend. Are we really to believe that the KGB—arguably the best intelligence agency in the world at human intelligence gathering—would not have tried to honeypot him?

It was upon his return from that fateful Moscow trip that Trump began to branch out in his interests. “For the first time he gave serious indications that he was considering a career in politics,” Harding points out. “Not as mayor or governor or senator.

“Trump was thinking about running for president.”

And indeed, in 1988, Trump flirted with the idea of entering the presidential race, going so far as to deliver a speech in New Hampshire. He toyed with running again in 2000, on the Reform Party ticket, even hiring his old friend Roger Stone to run the exploratory committee before ultimately dropping out. Is it really a coincidence that his dormant political ambitions manifested themselves immediately after his Moscow trip, and never went away?

So, yes, the Soviets were absolutely, positively recruiting Trump on his 1987 visit to Moscow—which began, not coincidentally, on the Fourth of July (Russians love that kind of symbolism). But the KGB was not the only spy network interested in the real estate developer. The trip also attracted the attention of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency—the latter, by this time, becoming the bigger outfit, owing to the emphasis on signals intelligence collection that began in the late seventies.

As the pseudonymous mob expert known as Lincoln’s Bible put it, during our recent telephone conversation: “It’s 1987—the height of the Cold War. Ronald Reagan is president. The Russia desk is the largest, most important desk in the largest intelligence agency in the world (the NSA). And Trump was already a top echelon Confidential Informant for law enforcement. How could they not have known about that trip? It would have been gross negligence not to have known.”

And if our intelligence community knew, would they really not bother interviewing Trump upon his return from Moscow? He’d been wined and dined by the Party elite, after all, and they would have wanted to hear all about it. Beginning in 1987, then, Trump was not only a Confidential Informant for the FBI, but was also being utilized by the CIA.

Again: the two intelligence services were really fucking good. If the KGB was all over the guy, the CIA would have known, and thus taken some kind of action. “There is no universe in which he wasn’t being surveilled/tracked and used by our guys,” Lincoln’s Bible told me. “Not one that I can see.” If so, Trump’s counterintelligence file is over three decades old.

Moscow also marked a transition of sorts. Ownership of the mob asset known as Donald Trump began its gradual transfer from La Cosa Nostra to the Russian mafiya. Not long after the trip, Trump spent time aboard the Lady Ghislaine, the yacht owned by the British publishing magnate Robert Maxwell. That sounds perfectly above board, until you consider that Maxwell, born Jan Hoch in Czechoslovakia, was a seditious little fucker. His classified dossier at the British Foreign Office described him as “a thoroughly bad character and almost certainly financed by Russia.” He was affiliated with Israeli intelligence and the KGB. He was business partners with Semion Mogilevich, so he was mobbed up. And his daughter, Ghislaine Maxwell, would in 1991 begin a long and scandalous relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. For all we know, nothing untoward happened on that yacht. But given the nexus of key OC figures—Mogilevich, the two Maxwells, Epstein—it is hard to write it all off as mere coincidence.

Four-and-a-half years after Trump’s visit to Moscow, the USSR fell. Rapacious “oligarchs” raced to gobble up the country’s wealth and natural resources. Untold billions, maybe trillions, of dollars were removed from Russia, most to banks in quasi-Western places like Cyprus. This created unprecedentedly vast opportunities for willing money launderers in the West—and Donald John Trump was well positioned to benefit from the windfall.

Trump needed the help. By the early nineties, his casinos were going bust, US banks had stopped lending to him, and he desperately needed Russian capital to stay afloat. My business professional contact who lived in Russia explains what likely happened, incrementally, over the next two-and-a-half decades:

Take someone who cannot get credit from a bank headquartered in the English speaking world because he’s already burned every major US and UK bank in New York and London. Canadian banks don’t take American risk that American banks won’t take and Australian banks won’t touch him because their government blacklisted him from doing business in the country. But he has a massive cash need because if he does not have lines of credit to keep servicing his previous debts and his lifestyle and his next big thing, he can’t attract investors into his businesses to keep the ball rolling.

This is a critical point. Trump is not just greedy for his own sake. He has to keep earning, or he will have outlived his usefulness to his mafiya whoremasters. His very life depends on his ability to do deals.

The professional continues:

So Trump needs money that doesn’t ask a lot of questions. He’s happy to pay extra—and pay it he will—because in his mind interest comes without cost: he can write it off his taxes, or he can flush it in bankruptcy, or he can pass it on to his customers, or he can get his investors to give him enough to wash it all out, or he can refinance if and when the straight lending world comes back to him. He’s happy to take Russian money because in his mind, it’s an asset to him to have Russian lenders; it makes him more likely to play the real estate market in Russia.

But he knows that if his name and a Russian lender’s appear on the same finance document, that’s discoverable: by the IRS, by the agencies he probably reports to, by the gaming commissions, by the state regulators, by his ex-wives, by his last set of creditors, by the next bankruptcy trustee he has to deal with. So how does he get money from a Russian bank into his pocket, and how does he repay money to the Russian bank, without leaving that paper trail?

Simple. He does not borrow directly from the Russian bank. He borrows from a straw-man bank, like Deutsche, and has the Russian bank act as a silent guarantor.

The Mazars and Deutsche Bank documents almost certainly contain damning information that confirms all of this, and that will collapse his Trump Tower of Cards—which is why Trump has moved heaven and earth to keep them secret.

Whoever ultimately controlled the dirty rubles in the nineties, when Trump first opened his doors to the Russians, in the twenty-tens the kopek stops with Vladimir Putin. Would any Russian bank be able, in this day and age, to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to Deutsche Bank, or any other straw-man bank,” without Putin’s awareness, if not approval? If you borrow money from a loan shark, but the transaction is made through your local branch bank, guess what? You’re still borrowing money from a loan shark—and in that world, the penalties for nonpayment are brutal.

In the event, by the time Trump began his presidential run in 2015, the transition was complete. He was no longer a creature of the Italian mob. He was fully owned by the Russians—by Mogilevich and the mafiya, and ultimately by Vladimir Putin. The president really is Putin’s puppet, just as Hillary Clinton claimed.

What’s more, plenty of people in the intelligence community and the Justice Department know this is the case, because they have seen his counterintelligence file, or have worked with Trump in his capacity as CI. Robert Mueller must know. James Comey must know. Andrew McCabe must know. James Clapper and John O. Brennan must know. And while all of these individuals have dropped hints, none save Mueller have produced actual receipts—and a lot of his Report remains redacted. It’s no accident that Trump has done everything in his considerable power to impugn these people. He knows what they have on him, so he must attack their credibility.

To wit: When Lisa Page texted Peter Strzok that Trump is “not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” and Strzok replied, “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it,” they were discussing national security, not Democrat/Republican politics; two of the FBI’s best Russian mob experts were highly, and rightly, concerned that an asset of a hostile foreign power would win the White House. No wonder Trump wants us to believe their text exchanges were romantic in nature, and constantly frames Page and Strzok as lovers—the truth could end his presidency.

Alas, Page’s worst fears were realized. The President of the United States answers to the Kremlin. That sounds like something from a bad movie, but in the time of the worst pandemic in over a century, it has immediate, and grave, real-world consequences.

“We have been taken over,” Lincoln’s Bible said, “and a quarter of a million innocent civilians are going to die because of it.”

***

As with “Tinker, Tailor, Mobster, Spy,” this piece was written with a lot of help from Lincoln’s Bible.

Photo: President Ronald Reagan Shaking Hands with Donald Trump and Ivana Trump During The State Visit of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia at The State Dinner in The Blue Room, 2/11/1985. From the Reagan Presidential Archive.

[6601-timeline]

It is November 8th, 1994.

Two short years ago, Ross Perot was snubbed of a chance to be the President of the United States by a “corrupt bargain”, designed to uphold a duopoly of power.

Two short years ago, Ross Perot started a political party to tear down the system which denied him a chance at representing America.

And two years later, the Reform Party and Ross Perot are the most powerful force in American politics.

-- March 1, 1993 --

The aftermath of the presidential election of 1992 still fresh in his mind, Ross Perot begins 1993 with a resolve to change the United States political system as everybody knows it.

Perot first considers immediately announcing his candidacy for the 1996 presidential election–even though 1996 is still four years away–but ultimately decides against it as too ineffectual. Four years is a long time in politics, and Perot sees a need for urgency, not measure. More importantly, though, Perot wants a movement, not just a moment.

One day in March, in New Jersey, Ross Perot meets a man named Frank Conrad. Conrad was an ardent Perot voter in 1992, heartened by his promises of change and his populist attitudes–the two exchanged pleasantries before local news cameras and talked about the pressing issues of the day: Clinton’s controversial victory, what the new administration might do, and the future of NAFTA, then working its way through government and something which Perot had strongly opposed on the campaign trail.

But toward the end of their meeting Conrad also suggests something to Perot offhand–a new political party. “There is no two-party system;” said Conrad on that fateful day, “it just looks that way. We all want some kind of new party.”

The remark makes a little wave in the local press, getting slapped deep in the pages of a local newspaper with other amusements and oddities–but it has a big impact on Ross Perot.

One day later, Ross Perot calls together the political groups which had supported him in 1992 and immediately begins organizing his political party: he calls it the Reform Party of the United States of America, or Reform Party USA.

-- June 1, 1993 --

“We come to serve the people, not the powerful!” were the words that Ross Perot used to kick off his June 1st announcement in Dallas–rumor had been building for weeks that he was up to something, and the movement of the groups which in 1992 had nearly lofted him to the presidency raised eyebrows on its own, although his confidantes were tight-lipped about it all. Even as press passes were issued and reporters filed in, the purpose of Perot’s conference remained uncertain; but the grandiose pageantry of Perot’s podium flanked by dozens of American flags made it abundantly clear that spectacle was certain–and if there was anything Perot excelled at, it was spectacle.

Perot’s speech decried the two-party system and the failure of the Clinton administration to make amends with the majority which had dissented from President Clinton’s election. He declared the political system corrupt and its machinations undemocratic, and that only wholesale reform could provide everyday Americans with a say in the system. Perot rejected the Electoral College as diluting the vote of every man and woman; he rebuked the Senate’s design as archaic and in need of drastic change; and he called for campaign finance reform, to level the playing field.

But Perot said too that he did not expect such changes from the “two-party duopoly” which had “denied him a fair shake.”

“Therefore,” Perot continued, “the change must come from America itself–and a new party must form to facilitate this change, the Reform Party!” It was obvious now what Perot was setting out to do.

Perot launched into the meat of his speech: “We come here to declare that we are building a party of the people, by the people, and for the people!” The party was to represent Americans–to build for them an America they could say they had a hand in. As he had done with the beginning of his presidential campaign just a year earlier, Perot called on the “ordinary American” to draft the Reform Party onto the ballot and to run on the Reform ticket. He concluded with hope for change, and a dream of a more equal America for all.

And within a week of Perot’s speech inaugurating them, the Reform Party of the United States was a major player in American politics.

-- January 1, 1994 --

Over three-thousand candidates.

That was how many candidates the Reform Party had recruited or seen sign up in just seven months, from Senate seats to House seats; from governorships to mayorships; from state house races to state attorneys, and everything in between. The Reform Party, by far the newest kid on the political block, had started lofty and stayed that way–and voters certainly seemed receptive to these unorthodox politicians in the same way they were receptive to Perot just two years earlier.

It had simultaneously come as expected–and a surprise–to the punditry.

Opposition to President Clinton had certainly been expected. For one, the incumbent was bogged down in political scandals litigated by an increasingly bloodthirsty Republican minority and incompetently managed by the Democratic majority. For another, the then-developing Clinton healthcare plan was uniting the right in opposition, and an incompetent rollout left many Americans (and even many liberals) skeptical at best and ardently opposed at worst.

More pressingly, though, President Clinton was nursing a wounded economy which–although recovering–was still felt by the average American. Altogether, the consequence was hurt in the polls: an abysmal 37% approval for the President, and a high likelihood of what was currently a 40-seat majority in the House and 7-seat majority in the Senate evaporating in November.

And it was no surprise, then, to forecast Republican benefit from Clinton’s mishaps. The Republican Party looked almost destined to deal a huge blow to the Clinton administration–one which Perot had ensured they could cast a shroud of illegitimacy on, although George H. W. Bush had performed exceptionally poorly. Newt Gingrich, essentially the face of Republican leadership by this point and likely Speaker of the House if they won, was still months from formulating the Contract for America but seemed to be itching to add another blow to an already reeling presidency.

But nobody had anticipated the maverick Ross Perot forming his own party–it was widely assumed he would bide his time for another presidential run. And even if they had, it was unimaginable that such a party would garner such a wide base as Perot had in his 1992 run.

But even at this early stage, something strange was happening: Reform candidates were winning in private polling. First these were isolated occasions or outliers, and they could be “comfortably” discarded as outliers or bizarre artifacts of early polling.

Then, they began to multiply.

-- June 1, 1994 --

By June, only a single conclusion could be expressed by all: 1994 was a three-party race.

All throughout the winter and spring, both parties believed the Reform tide they were seeing behind the scenes would ebb–but it never did. It strengthened, actually, and soon both Democrats and Republicans were scrambling to get their campaigns in order. Ross Perot had promised a better world, and Americans were seemingly prepared to take a gamble.

In some cases, the Reform Party scored veritable coups in recruiting candidates and that seemed to contribute to their successes: Angus King in Maine, for example, had been set to run as an independent in Maine’s gubernatorial race–but when approached by Perot gladly took the Reform Party line. But more often it seemed people simply wanted a change of scenery, as it was when ordinary-girl Dina Salberg suddenly seemed within striking distance of Tim Johnson, a Democratic whip in the House.

Inexperienced or seasoned, Democrats and Republicans alike soon found members of their caucus battling back not only against the other party but against a tide of seemingly-insatiable Reform Party supporters.

Democrats stay quiet and keep their heads down, but Republicans are actively confrontational: on May 30, 1994, Newt Gingrich tries to force a discussion of the issues to the forefront by releasing the still-in-development Contract for America.

Initially, Gingrich seems to catch the Reform Party completely off-guard, and questions of what the Reform Party stands for abound in the press. For all the support it has, few of its candidates have yet been seriously pressed on what they would support. But within days, a response comes from the very top of the party: Perot releases a “People’s Contract” of his own, establishing that a vote for the Reform Party is a vote for term limits, a balanced budget, and significant structural reform among other things. Nearly every Reform candidate to whom it is relevant signs on–and ultimately when Perot threatens to make one of the talk show blitzes that so defined his early 1992 campaign Gingrich backs off, recognizing the dangerous charisma Perot has.

Going into June–and now having been seriously tested on the issues for the first time–the Reform Party’s support barely flinches.

-- November 5, 1994 --

In the Democratic Party, meanwhile, it is clear by August that the Democratic majority is all-but-lost, and the Reform Party especially looks like a devastating blow to it.

President Bill Clinton hits the trail–months earlier than he had anticipated–to try and salvage what he can of a seemingly untenable situation for the Democratic Party. Unpopular as he may be (and unpopular he remains as he does this), the party is facing a crisis both from Reform candidates and Republican ones. Things look especially grim in the South, where Republicans look poised to sweep into power; but more concerningly for the party, Reform candidates increasingly seems to hold the balance of power in both the House and the Senate. Clinton tries to shore up the Democratic South, and especially tries to keep Texas in the Democratic column.

Ross Perot also knows by August 1 how perilous the Democratic majority is, and recognizing his unlikeliness to box out major Republican gains focuses his attention on Democratic seats, particularly in Texas and the Pacific Northwest. In mid-August he begins a series of whistle-stop tours: first through the PNW and the Mountain West, then later through the heart of Texas, stopping to promote every major candidate he can. In one week he makes nearly twenty campaign stops, every one of them with a new Reform candidate.

In September, polling only confirms what seems so inevitable for Democrats: Reform candidates pull ahead in Nebraska’s Senate seat and gubernatorial races in Idaho, Nevada, and Texas; Republicans meanwhile are poised to flip both Tennessee Senate seats and look almost certain to carry Oklahoma’s Senate seat too. Some see it as inevitable realignment–some see it as the work of the Gingrich Contract with America, which is disproportionately favored by conservative whites who dominate the South. Regardless of cause, the outcome is the same nonetheless.

Gingrich for his part doesn’t feel especially comfortable either when, late in September, Perot suddenly turns his guns against the Republican minority’s efforts to hold the Democratic majority in check. Perot demurs Gingrich’s congressional hardball as “play acting” and suggests it to be “a lie engineered to make the Republican Party look like they care about corruption.” When reporters push Gingrich to comment on Perot, Gingrich ignores it and stumps, committing to his earlier stance of depriving Perot media blitz material–but Perot presses the matter when he can continually and it seems to eventually register with at least some on-the-fence voters.

Gingrich begrudgingly engages with Perot thereafter, knowing that he needs to keep the Republican vote consolidated behind him. He calls Perot a “demagogue” and suggests his folksy-populism to be entirely at odds with his incredible wealth–a criticism from Gingrich that would have been an unimaginable irony two years before. “We have kept the radical liberal left in check,” Gingrich would say, “and yet if you took it from this guy you’d think that was the problem!”

But ultimately the exchange seems fruitless for both parties–a tactical win for Perot, in one sense, since it wastes Republican time and energy.

In October, the late party pushes come. Clinton, having stumped all around the country, seems desperate to avoid a beating in the South in particular, the region which had allowed him to narrowly clear 270 electoral votes just two years earlier. Here, Democrats are at least willing to embrace the native son, but just as many of them also seem hopelessly behind in their races and effectively dead on arrival. Elsewhere, his distance is welcomed–many Democratic candidates think his presence is a harm to them.

Republican leadership in the meantime likes their chances in the South, but is cynical elsewhere. Perot, ever the optimist, has no projections but positive ones. He takes a final Midwest tour in mid-October, beginning in North Dakota and ending in his home state of Texas, and promotes dozens of his candidates along the way. Then November comes, and the final few days are essentially academic.

-- November 8, 1994 --

In contemporary American politics, there is no analogue for the election about to take place. Not since the Populist Party of the late 1800s has a third-party been in such a strong position as the Reform Party seemed to be. Not since 1955 has the Democratic Party been in a position to be ousted from power in the House of Representatives. Not since Reconstruction have Republicans been in a position to run the South. All of these things seem not only possible, but entirely likely in 1994.

The going is slow at first for the Reform Party’s possibilities–their strong states almost all close late, and the South (Perot’s weakest link in 1992 and where they hardly recruited) closes early. For Republicans, however, their big test comes early.

Indiana and Kentucky are the first states to close–at 6pm–and they quickly suggest a wipeout for Democrats. Three Democrats start down in Indiana and stay down–another in Kentucky follows. Georgia is a bloodbath at 7pm, with three more Democrats getting destroyed–Florida sees another–South Carolina sees another. By 7:30pm, when North Carolina sees no less than four Democrats tossed out ignominiously, it’s obvious the rout is on and nothing can be done.

But, in the north, New Hampshire closes: and it suggests something much more ominous for both major parties. Both House races–one held by a Republican, the other by a Democrat–are quickly called for the Reform candidates. New Hampshire had been a state Perot won by just 43 votes, yet the Reform Party had sniped two incumbents.

And at the 8pm hour, it became clear that the Reform Party had made deep cuts. Both Maine seats went purple, along with the governorship and the Senate seat–then a Connecticut seat–then Illinois and Kansas Reform candidates lit up the map. Oklahoma Reform candidates sniped two would-be Republican pickups–Michigan and Missouri candidates also picked off single seats. North Dakota fell to the wave easily, with a Reform candidate ousting single-term Democrat Earl Pomeroy. But the wave came particularly hard in Texas: eight Democrats fell in quick succession to Reform candidates, and two more to Republicans.

Republicans, meanwhile, continued dismantling the Democratic South: two Democrats in Tennessee–and both Senate seats–were easily pried away. Oklahoma’s Senate seat, long since written off, also fell quickly. Governorships fell in Tennessee and Alabama, then later in Oklahoma too.

Just as quickly, however, the feast of Southern seats dried up. Individual seats continued to fall to Republicans throughout the night in states like Florida and Mississippi, but the bulk were in by 9pm–and Republicans began to get nervous as it became clear that the Reform Party wave was still coming.

Arizona provided some initial solace for Republicans: a Senate seat flip and a House seat suggested Western gains were still to be had. But the Midwest soon made it clear that Arizona was an anomaly. Three Reform candidates flipped House seats in Minnesota–then Dean Barkley flipped the Minnesota Senate seat from Republicans–and a Republican gain in Nebraska was met with a Reform gain and the Reform Party ousting Senate Democrat Bob Kerrey. Wisconsin broke hard for the Reform Party, giving them four seats–then in the 10pm hour, a deluge.

Montana went purple–then South Dakota–then Nevada–then Iowa. In Idaho the Reform Party picked up a governorship, then they did the same in Iowa and Nevada. In Texas, a tight race broke for them, taking out governor Ann Richards and denying a gubernatorial flip to George W. Bush. Unbelievably, by the 10pm hour it seemed entirely possible that the Reform Party would hold the balance of power in the House–and, very possibly, the Senate.

So when Senators Slade Gorton and Craig Thomas suddenly fell to Reform-wave candidates in Washington and Wyoming, all but ensuring Senate control rested with the Reform Party, it was stunning. Equally stunning, however, was the tidal wave that befell the West Coast: 14 Reform candidates elected in California, Oregon, and Washington alone. Tom Foley, the incumbent speaker, is ousted; so are Sunny Bono and Jay Inslee, among other notable names. As the remaining seats trickle in, it becomes clear:

The Reform Party has not only won a major victory, it in fact holds the balance of power in the House of Representatives and the Senate. It has broken fifty-years of effective one-party rule. It has stymied Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolution.

It is the most powerful party in contemporary American political history, and Ross Perot is its powerbroker.

-- November 10, 1994 --

The following results can be officially confirmed:

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Democratic Party: 191 seats (LOSS of 67)

Republican Party: 184 seats (GAIN of 8)

Reform Party: 59 seats (GAIN of 59)

Independent: 1 seat [Bernie Sanders] (NO GAIN, NO LOSS)

SENATE

Democratic Party: 49 seats (LOSS of 7)

Republican Party: 46 seats (GAIN of 2)

Reform Party: 5 seats (GAIN of 5)

GOVERNORSHIPS

Democratic Party: 20 seats (LOSS of 9)

Republican Party: 23 seats (GAIN of 3)

Reform Party: 7 seats (GAIN of 7)

Independent: 1 seat [Lowell Weicker, CT] (LOSS of 1)

[alexsmitposts]

Why Nagorno-Karabakh and Why Now? Several months ago, I wrote that things had been tense on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict zone since the collapse of the USSR, but only now are we hearing of a resumption of active hostilities, the deployment of heavy weaponry and heated engagements. Observers on the ground have no doubt that the heaviest fighting in years is going on, and this is only the early stages of what may develop into a larger geopolitical conflict, involving proxy sources. Each side is posting videos of their forces destroying the heavy armour of the other. Both Azerbaijan and Armenia may be playing to a domestic audience by mobilising, but Turkey is involved too. As ever, anything involving military aggression in support of an ally also plays well for a Turkish domestic audience. Outside meddling in the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict is nothing new, and one should keep in mind that much is below the surface. Different actors have different reasons for wanting this conflict to either remain frozen or escalate, and what happens will be governed by how much these actors respect each other, or don’t. Moscow and Washington may be happy for the conflict to stay frozen, as they can then pursue their own agenda, goes the traditional theory. Those who don’t like either Moscow or Washington, either now or historically, see a potential geopolitical victory over both sides in resolving the conflict by force when the big boys have failed to do so. All the while neither country fully develops, and the status quo is maintained, at least in the case of Azerbaijan. After thirty years, negotiations have not worked and the populace of Azerbaijan is tired, seeing others spout off about “territorial integrity” while not being interested in restoring its own. Mutual Cards House Select Committee on Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff (D-CA) was the first US Congressman to condemn Azerbaijan’s alleged pre-emptive attack back in July, saying, “I am very concerned by the recent provocative and destabilising actions taken by Azerbaijan in recent days along the Armenian border, including the shelling of Armenian soldiers.” His diatribe continued with “how these actions must also be viewed in the context of Azerbaijan’s consistently bellicose rhetoric towards Armenia and Artsakh, and its refusal to allow international monitoring of their borders. I urge the State Department to make clear to all parties the need for restraint and diplomacy, and reduced tensions.” Making such statements about one side of a conflict is hardly going to reduce tensions. But Schiff is talking to Armenian donors to his campaign chest, and Armenian voters in his district. The Armenian lobby has always been better organised than the Azeri one, another factor which might propel Azerbaijan to war against what it sees as the rest of the world. But that very imbalance of international support can be used to win friends. Back in the 90s MEGA Oil, a US-CIA proxy company, was importing fighters from Afghanistan to fight on the side of Azerbaijan to keep some balance on the battlefield. The Azeris could not fight, as they lacked training and equipment, and seemed to have no taste for it. But an Armenian victory would have benefitted Russia, its greatest ally, more than the US, and, however, much the US listens to Armenians, it wouldn’t want that perceived threat to its own interests. Turkey obviously supports Azerbaijan, as it is a fellow Turkish nation. Once again, the Turkic Council, this little-known international forum few are interested in, is showing that it is more ruthless than any other in achieving its aims, which are ultimately about the religious and ethnic cleansing of the highest order. Turkey now needs to relocate Syrian operatives and other US/Saudi trained and paid “freedom fighters,” and is glad the opportunity this long-frozen conflict presents. With all sides playing what appears to be a very big game of chicken, a sudden influx of mercenaries with nothing else to do is certain to change the situation in Turkey’s favour—or at least that was the plan. All Of A Sudden The conflict has been more or less frozen since 1994 when Armenia occupied not only Karabakh itself, which is ethnically Armenian, but several districts surrounding it, which are not. Armenia argues that this has actually prevented further conflict, but the US used the same argument to destroy the Native American population, and Argentina’s “disappeared” died of the same logic. Things are spinning in a different direction now with offensive fighting, and pro-war rallies in Baku. Several weeks prior to the start of fighting in July I personally saw lots of Green Evergreen containers, freight forwarding company, crossing the Georgian border. Border guards and customs officials both told me that it was not possible to check them, but agreed that weapons were within. I wouldn’t put anything past Ankara either, despite the danger of Turkish engagement in the Caucasus inviting an immediate and strong response from Moscow. The two governments have already locked horns in Syria and Libya, but this has not dissuaded Turkey from pursuing an ever more openly aggressive international agenda. Sheep in Wolves’ Clothing The bits and pieces I have read about who has started it this time just don’t add up. What is written says nothing, which is why I am all the more suspect, especially about pro-war protests. Take for example, “… thousands of protestors rallied earlier in the centre of Baku, calling on the government to mobilize troops and retake Nagorno-Karabakh. News outlets estimated that 30 to 50 thousand protestors gathered in front of the parliament building.” Why now, and why is this one of the international news items chosen to be reported? If the Azeri are tired of this frozen conflict, tens of thousands of them are not going to come into the streets demanding further engagement with it unless they think they can end it on terms they find acceptable. So, who has guaranteed what, and why are they bothering? However, the move towards conflict is still more likely to have come from the Azeri side. Armenia has done pretty well out of international sanctions and blockades imposed since 1994. These have enabled it to remain friendly with Russia, its only real supporter, and find a way for good terms with the West, without compromising its national independence. No other regional state can do this, but if the conflict ended, Armenia would have to find a wider group of friends and sink back into the pack like the rest. It is money paid by US and Turkish defence contractors, and therefore by the US government indirectly, which is painting the conflict in a new light. Azerbaijani oil prices are low, Dutch Disease is running rampant, there is little diversity in the economy and corruption is well-ingrained and supported by networks of patronage (especially the ruling family). Armenia has similar problems. The Pashinyan government has been highly criticised by a wealthy and influential political and business figure, Gagik Tsarukyan, and some legal and political backlash has been felt in this case. The trial of former president Kocharyan is also sputtering along in fits and starts, and a major reform package directed at the country’s Constitutional Court has also brought up significant controversy. But none of that dents Armenia’s dependence on Russia, and the benefits it is gaining from that which the US never wanted it to. It seems the US wants Armenia back in the pack, and this is the way of getting it there. Certainly, it will act as this is a regional affair to be sorted out by the local players, diplomatically or by brute force. Old Hands Make Light Work Who might be linking these indirect US government funds to the Azeri side? No one is ever likely to put their head above the parapet. But as often happens in this region, the name Matthew Bryza is one which keeps coming into the frame. Bryza was once the US Ambassador to Turkey, and subsequently Azerbaijan. He is married to Zeyno Baran, a Turkish-born foreign policy analyst at the Hudson Institute. She has worked with Neo-Con think tanks in the past, which is why Bryza kept insisting in interviews that he no longer worked for the (Bush) White House but for the State Department, even when he was not being asked a question about this. In 2005 Baran told a US Senate hearing that she opposed the Congressional resolution on the Armenian Genocide, a position generally seen as partisan as that of Richard Verrall’s book on the Nazi atrocities, “Did Six Million Really Die?”At the same time, Bryza was busy telling reporters that Turkey was his “second home,” and was removed as Ambassador when he too made statements opposing the Armenian Genocide. Bryza is no longer a diplomat. He claims to earn his living as a consultant on “business and democratic development,” which is a not very subtle way of saying that he is still finding new markets and areas of influence for his friends, but is no longer restricted by diplomatic protocols. But he is still a regular visitor to Turkey and is a board member of Turcas Petrol, which is linked to the Party of War in the US and the corporate interests behind it. His explanation is that Turcas is “a private company that is traded on the Istanbul stock exchange” but “has no affiliation of any sort with the Turkish Government (or the Azerbaijani Government). In fact, the Turkish Government’s energy policies often work against the commercial interests of Turcas.” This is despite the fact that Turcas is an affiliate of SOCAR, the Azerbaijan state oil company. Through this, the Azerbaijani and Turkish governments either own, fund or sponsor most business in the Caucasus, thereby buying off many politicians along the way. In Georgia in particular, you see a connection with SOCAR (share ownership, personnel, supply) whenever you look at the lists of business owners, or investigate the many businesses whose known real owners do not appear on the published lists. This helps explain why Georgia, having partly reformed itself since the Saakashvili years, is no longer the regional arms smuggling hub but has simply exchanged illegal arms for semi-legal oil. Turkish and Iranian business interests have been subject to investigation in Georgia on charges of oil smuggling. New, modern-day versions of MEGA Oil, US-funded companies, have inevitably been involved. These include Frontera Resources, a company which once ostensibly left Georgian, but re-entered it when a new US Ambassador was appointed. Following this, the Government of Georgia suddenly decided not to terminate its contract with Frontera Resources Georgia Corporation, under hard US pressure, and allowed the company to continue operating in part of the original contract area, where oil has been produced since Soviet times. The justification used for this at the time was that this was necessary, “especially in times of low oil prices and heating up conflicts.” The phrase “heating up” cannot refer to new conflicts but to dormant ones which are starting again. Making such a comment casually, when talking about a seemingly unrelated issue, is an old trick for establishing in the minds of listeners that everyone knows a conflict is going to heat up again. Which conflict is being referred to, and to whom is it inevitable that the fighting will resume? You Know Who Still Knows Too Much Do we have anything else which will support this assertion? In the words of an old radio show, “It’s That Man Again.” If the US is up to something by proxy, it always chooses the same, compromised mouthpiece. The aforementioned Mikheil Saakashvili, the President of Georgia when Bryza was the US envoy to the region, can’t live in Georgia anymore because he is wanted there on a multitude of criminal charges. Having been ratlined out to Ukraine and given a job in its government, he was also expelled from there facing more criminal charges. He has since lived in Poland and Hungary, also US allies like the other two countries, where he likewise faces multiple criminal charges. Saakashvili has more criminal indictments against his name than Al Capone and Pol Pot put together. Yet his US protectors (for now) present him as a politician and buy him column space in newspapers that otherwise don’t care about him, or are sick of seeing his name. Misha has suddenly reappeared from wherever he is hiding now with the following statement: Nagorno Karabakh is Sovereign Territory of the Republic of Azerbaijan and nothing will change it. What does he have to gain by saying this, especially now, given how many Armenians live in Georgia, and he ruined his own relations with Azerbaijan by making advances to Aliyev’s wife? All Saakashvili has to live for is the continued protection of his handlers. They want to build a climate of opinion in which everyone expects Azerbaijan to go to war with Armenia over the injustice of the Armenian occupation. The Azeri government and people may not be interested, but they can easily be blackmailed or at least manipulated by international opinion pointing fingers at them for not doing what they expect, as if they are not worthy of support, independence, or office. However strong the Armenian lobby is, the US interest is paramount. An ongoing war, and funding committed to it, always ensures policy continuations in election years, regardless of who wins those elections. The US wants this war, and its Armenian lobby will donate more to politicians who blame Azerbaijan for it, in the hope of getting more US themselves in return if Azerbaijan is successful. The only question is how much Turkey will be blamed for pulling the trigger when it is all over.

[mdo-1903]

IN DEFENCE OF WHITE SOUTH AFRICA

Anyone who attended any of the recent public hearings on the SA government’s proposal to introduce legislation permitting land to be expropriated without compensation would have realised that there are two distinct trains of thought in this country, and never the twain will meet.

If ever the unbridgeable abyss between white and black thinking about land, a modern economy and food security was so starkly exposed, these sittings were it. Western logic was set against a strange mixture of racial resentment and at times open hatred, plus a thought process on the use of land which, if unconstrained, would lead to famine in SA.

As black after black speaker stated that whites were “rotten people”, that they “belonged to Europe and should go back”, that they took the land “because we were black”, that “we are impatient and we will take the land by force” and “these 1652 white gangsters robbed us”, whites in the audience simply shook their heads in hopelessness because who can argue with such obtuseness?

The futility of trying to debate with those who said they were “sick and tired of white people”, and that “whites won’t reconcile with us” was obvious. Whites were warned that “going to international courts” wouldn’t help because “the land will be taken physically”. One ANC provincial official declared that “since Jan van Riebeeck set foot on South Africa’s soil, whites have been rapists!”

The fact that the government used these public hearings as an endorsement of their own imbecility shows what South Africans are up against. Whether savvy urban blacks agree with the fatuous declarations by officials who clearly know nothing about how a modern economy works, or that scientific farming is the only path to food survival in a drought-ridden country like SA, is a moot point. Suffice it to say that anyone who thinks that the people in the halls will somehow uphold food security when they get “their land” needs to quickly go back to the drawing board.

MOMENT OF TRUTH

The moment of truth is upon us. We now must acknowledge that with the coming to power of the ANC, the stage was set for the inexorable destruction of, inter alia, South Africa’s food security. The government must be stopped in its tracks with this legislation. Amazingly there are still those who argue for “debate” and “compromise” on land expropriation (read theft). The immutable fact remains that only South Africa’s commercial farmers can produce enough food for 57 million people. No other group in the country can do this, and tinkering with this fact on the altar of political correctness or Freedom Charter humbug is setting South Africa on the road to Zimbabwe.

The unashamedly racist blacks spouting bile and venom against whites are clearly too backward to realise the bald irony of their situation – here they were hectoring the meeting chairmen about the evil whites in a hall built by whites, using a microphone not indigenous to Africa, wearing Western clothes, speaking a Western language, sending their children to schools teaching Western education, using Western money, buying food produced by white farmers, and travelling in Western transport. Virtually nothing inside or outside those halls, or in South Africa’s cities, towns and rural areas, is indigenous to Africa. Yet the people who created every single thing around them while they shouted and complained, were vilified. This strange anomaly has been commented upon with incredulity by several overseas TV presenters.

Not one jot of credit is ever given to white South Africa for taking most South African blacks out of the stone age. When the first Europeans arrived in South Africa in 1652, it was more than 1970 years after Ptolemy the First built the magnificent library at Alexandria in Egypt. In 1652 all that existed at the southern tip of Ptolemy’s continent were mostly warring tribes, living in mud and grass dwellings and using some decorated clay pots. Kraals held African wealth – cattle - while rudimentary crops were planted. Land did not “belong” to anyone in the Western sense of the word – it was just there, to be used. (It seems as if this mentality still exists - we want the land, is the clarion cry, with nary a thought about what will become of it (and them!) when it is “used up”.)

Living from day to day – the modus vivendi of Africa before Western influence – still exists in the minds of those now clamouring for land, otherwise they would be thinking of what they would do after taking the land. They haven’t the slightest idea, of course, and herein lies the danger, not within their minds but within the mind of the so-called sophisticated president of South Africa Cyril Ramaphosa. He is pandering to this lunacy for thirty pieces of voting silver in next year’s election. He’s also looking over his shoulder at the most backward of them all, Mr. Six Percent Julius Malema, he of the fiery but empty promises. The President is not telling his people the truth, and they will turn on him when they find out! And there will be no country south of South Africa to run to (as did the Zimbabweans) when the SA cupboard is bare!

In the meantime, the “land grab from the whites” clarion call rings loud and clear across the veld where no jobs exist, where the soil is degraded, and where nothing is produced. No wonder ignorant poor people are led to believe that a “piece of land” will improve their lot!

Ramaphosa’s blustering will not save South Africa. The despised whites will do so, with the other population groups. Whites are only 8.5% of the population (2011 Census) but without them there is Zimbabwe, there is Haiti. By 2030, based on SA’s current age 0 – 24 years population growth, there will be only one white for every 91 blacks. This is just over ten years hence!

GETTING RID OF THE WHITES

What will be the consequences of “getting rid of the whites”? Messrs. Ramaphosa and Malema would do well to read some history books. History is an unerring teacher. For those who never had the written word, they will need to consult the history of other nations. And history has shown us what happens when “getting rid of the whites” became a reality.

In 1804 a massacre occurred in the Caribbean country of Haiti, a French colony where slaves had already rounded upon their masters and slaughtered many whites during a revolutionary uprising some years before. Subsequent mass killings of whites were carried out on the order of one Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a mulatto. Full details of this relentless purge are in the history books, but suffice it to say that practically the whole French population of Haiti was annihilated.

Starting in the 1730’s, French engineers had constructed complex irrigation systems to increase sugar cane production in Haiti. By the 1740’s, Haiti and Jamaica (a British colony) had become the main suppliers of the world’s sugar. Haiti was the wealthiest colony in the New World. There existed tremendous racial friction and the slave revolt was certainly understandable. But the aim of relating this story is that once the whites were thrown out, Haiti never recovered. That is the point. The Caribbean nation of 10 million today cannot feed itself. More than a million families a day are fed by UN food aid. The country has had its share of natural disasters, often used as an excuse for its poverty. But Japan has more natural disasters per capita than any other nation, yet it is the world’s third largest economy.

Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. The Duvalier family who ruled Haiti from 1957 to 1986 left the country economically decimated. Other corrupt and inept leaders followed. The hated colonists at least had created an economy, even though poverty existed. What followed the annihilation of the French was complete collapse. Ironically, educated professionals left Haiti for the lands of their former oppressors. Agriculture was destroyed, while deforestation and soil erosion worsened the impact of hurricanes and tropical storms.

ZIMBABWE

We don’t have to look further than across the river Limpopo to see what “getting rid of the whites” did to the once beautiful and productive land, Zimbabwe. The first white hunters, traders and missionaries who, in the 19th century came to the region, found a land devoid of infrastructure. The wheel was not in use. Early travellers moved around for days without seeing any human habitation. They recorded this fact. With a black population of about 250 000 at the time, most of the land was not occupied. (At the time of the Mugabe government purge of the whites in the 1980/1990’s, the black population stood at around 12 million.)

Commercial farming was started by white settlers on what was, for the most part, virgin land. There were no roads or railways, no electricity or telephones. There were no fences, boreholes, pumps, windmills, dams, irrigation schemes, cattle dips, barns or any other farm buildings.

From this barren starting point, commercial agriculture developed faster than it had anywhere else in the world, courtesy of the whites. Soon the country became self sufficient in most agricultural products. In many cases yields per hectare and quality equalled or bettered those in the developed world.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Year Book of 1975 ranked the then Rhodesia second in the world in terms of yields of maize, wheat, soya beans and groundnuts, and third for cotton. In the combined ranking for all of these crops RHODESIA RANKED FIRST IN THE WORLD. Rhodesia’s Virginia tobacco was rated the best in the world in yield and quality. The world’s largest single citrus producer was developed early in the country’s history.

The story of the destruction of this productive country is that Western political correctness trumped good sense and the morality of being able to feed a population. Whites were literally chased out and murdered. Their farms were taken for “the people”, which farms mostly ended up in the hands of the governing party’s chums. Today it is estimated that more than three million black Zimbabwean refugees live on the fringes of South Africa’s cities.

In 1972 around 50 000 prosperous, hard-working Indians of Uganda were forced out of their own country by the puerile and mentally-retarded Idi Amin. His actions reveal the same inferiority complex now evident in the anti-white behaviour of SA’s rulers. They are patently unable to rule a country successfully. Instead of trying to learn, they destroy those who are successful. Do they care? Apparently not. In the early seventies, a top official of the Transkei homeland government told a visiting American that Transkeians didn’t care “if the roads turn to dust”, as long as they “got rid of the whites”. Well, the whites left and the roads did indeed turn to dust.

(It is noticeable that current Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni asked the Indians to return. Despite making up less than 1% of the population, Uganda’s Indians now contribute 65% of the country’s tax revenue).

Those meeting hall provocateurs who think milk comes in supermarket packets may be in for an unpleasant surprise. From SA’s 50 000 commercial dairy farmers in 1997, the figure is now a paltry 1600. Many could leave the industry in future. Will the new owners of these uncompensated farms continue to produce sufficient milk for the country? Mr. Ramaphosa should be thinking about this but of course he’s not. He’s worrying about holding on to power at the next election

SOUTH AFRICA BULLETIN

from the headquarters of

TAU SA in Pretoria

Web: www.tlu.co.za