#heroes of the year

[luminalunii97]

A quick update on what's been going on in Iran

In the last month or so, the street protests have decreased. There have been sporadic demonstrations here and there but the fire from the first three months has paled. I believe soon the fire is going to be back because the financial situation is getting worse by hour now and the regime, instead of appealing to people's good side, has been enforcing inhuman laws stronger than before.

On the 40th day memorial of 2 of the executed protesters, the fire did come back alive and there were multiple big demonstrations in many cities around Iran.

The obligatory hijab law is being enforced harsher than before. Many of my fellow iranian women still refuse to wear hijab out considering all the risks. In the last two weeks, at least two drugstores have been closed because the pharmacist owning the place refused to wear hijab. A couple of higher education students have been banned from using the national library because they took off their hijab inside of the library, and many university students have been forced to sign statements that said they promise to not take their hijab off again or else they're going to be expelled from university and they won't be able to attend any university inside of Iran again. The regime has also threatened women who don't wear hijab on the streets that they would disable their id cards and ban them from receiving social services.

A female engineer also did something really courageous in an event and I suggest you check that out. The news links are below.

More than a week before the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, there was an earthquake in Khoy, a northwestern city in Iran. Not only the Islamic Republic didn't send any help to the city, they tried so hard to stop us, people, from sending help there. They restricted some of the celebrities bank accounts and prevented people from raising money for the city. Turkey even offered their aid but the regime refused. People of other cities did send some food and clothes and blankets for the victims of the earthquake in the end. Even though the casualties of the earthquake wasn't high, many people lost their homes and had to reside in tents in cold snowy weather. But the most bewildering thing was that when the turkey earthquake happened the Islamic Republic volunteered to send help to Syria while still doing nothing for the people in Khoy. Unsurprisingly the help packages they sent to Syria didn't reach the places where earthquake happened, instead it went to Assad inventory.

Also this guy, a true hero. A human rights activist to his very core:

This is it for now. I appreciate anyone who has supported people of iran so far. We won't forget you. Woman life freedom ✌️

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Azadeh Moaveni

Published: Dec 8, 2022

In the winter of 2017, a young woman called Vida Movahed stood on top of a utility box on Revolution Street, a busy artery of central Tehran, and dangled her white headscarf on a stick. As an act of dissent, it was strikingly peaceful, giving the appearance of a white flag of surrender. Still, by not wearing her hijab, Movahed was challenging the system’s dress codes. She stayed there for an hour, until she was arrested for breaking the law. Imagery of her silent, brave act raced around Instagram. A month later, a graduate student named Narges Hosseini performed the same defiant act on the same street. Soon, more women launched similar protests, and their movement took the name of where it all began: #TheGirlsofRevolutionStreet.

When I lived in Tehran in my early 20s, writing a TIME column called “Lipstick Jihad,” we used to flout the rules by wearing brilliant colors and tighter and shorter overcoats, pushing against the gloomy black and navy of official dress codes, and bringing some individuality within the bounds of an attire that was meant to erase distinctiveness. It was a way of refusing to be a model Islamic citizen, of showing the state that its plan had failed, and that we rejected its conservative vision of women as dutiful wives and mothers. It was millennials who drove the Girls of Revolution Street demonstrations of the late 2010s, leaving flowers at spots that had been sites of protest and showing the next generation how powerfully civil disobedience could challenge inequality.

These younger women are now in the streets. The movement they’re leading is educated, liberal, secular, raised on higher expectations, and desperate for normality: college and foreign travel, decent jobs, rule of law, access to the Apple Store, a meaningful role in politics, the freedom to say and wear whatever. They are quite unlike those who came before them; sometimes they feel more like transnational Gen Z than Iranians: they are vegans, they de-Islamicize their names, they don’t want children. I’ve often wondered what has made them so rebellious, because their ferocious character was evident well before 22-year-old Mahsa (Jina) Amini, arrested at a metro station by the morality police who enforce the dress code, died after being held in their custody on Sept. 16, setting off the most sustained uprising in the 43-year history of the Islamic Republic. The average age of arrested protesters is notably low—Iranian officials estimate as young as 15. I can only conclude that when a generation’s aspirations for freedom appear tantalizingly within reach, the more humiliating the remaining restrictions seem, and the less daunting the final stretch of resistance feels.

In the past two or three years, young women effectively already canceled the compulsory hijab. I was struck on a round of bureaucratic visits to government offices last summer by how casually and liberally young women dressed in even these traditionally austere official outposts. I felt ridiculous in a long black robe and a navy headscarf, as though I were a tourist who’d read all the wrong travel books. I was struck when a relative told me she’d received so many fines for driving without a headscarf that her driver’s license was about to be suspended. She was obliged to attend a mass lecture, the equivalent of moral traffic school, and after promising to abide by the rules, her fines were canceled.

The state has known for some time it’s on the back foot with dress codes, and is clearly spooked. Last winter, instead of the usual dreary billboards of a pious woman in black chador with some hectoring message about modesty, a panoramic image went up over Modarres expressway in Tehran of a woman in a minimalist, sport hijab sprinting up a mountain, with the words “you chart the path. #findyourself.”

[ Graffiti that reads "Woman, Life, Freedom" seen on the streets of Tehran. The authorities frequently cover protest slogans up with fresh paint but demonstrators put them back. ]

At this writing, an estimated 400 Iranian protesters have been killed by security forces, though some human-rights groups put the number higher, and judicial authorities are seeking harsh penalties for some of those detained. Despite measures to block the internet, reports continue to surface of deaths and abuse in custody. After nearly three months, protests on college campuses are not letting up, with students demanding the release of detained friends and defying gender-segregation rules in plazas and classes. At the World Cup, Iran’s team stood silently during the national anthem, signaling their solidarity with the protesters.

Confronting the compulsory hijab is such a deft way of rejecting the wholesale failures of Iran’s system that I often wonder why my generation didn’t take the same path. We were caught up in unwinnable battles over equal marriage and inheritance rights, and other forms of legal discrimination that required us to operate within formal political spaces, through formal processes. Those were arguably more important challenges, but the state had no intention of allowing such reforms, and over time, activists were so blocked that they gave up. The space simply didn’t exist. It didn’t exist for feminists, and soon it didn’t exist for the private sector petitioning for regulatory reform, for environmentalists, for labor activists. What’s happening in Iran may look familiar, but it’s different because, today, the aspirations of all of those who have sought change are on display, swirled into the chants of “woman, life, freedom,” a feminist revolt carrying a whole society’s varied grievances.

It’s telling that even schoolgirls have been swept up into these protests. A relative’s daughter told me that every day in her eighth-grade classroom someone scrawled a chant on the blackboard, and one girl even had the courage to ask what dictator meant. These words are not irrelevant to them. They’re all on Snapchat and can peer into the lives of their cousins around the world, acutely aware they’re the only ones who have to wear a school uniform that includes a hooded headscarf, as though they are Benedictine nuns.

The contrast between the lives they lead, especially online, and the inherited imagery and ideological messaging of the Islamic Republic couldn’t be more stark. The regime is devoted to martyrs. Solemn portraits of soldiers lost in the Iran-Iraq War still line freeways, though in recent years the system (as Iranians refer to their enveloping government) has recast its propaganda into content that tries to be competitive on Instagram. But these historical grudges and traumatic memories have no particular hold on Gen Z youth, who are preoccupied with their own struggles: years of crushing U.S. sanctions that have devastated Iran’s economy, and navigating life under a paralyzed, dogmatic system that prefers isolation to economic and social openness.

Among the many reasons the rebellion has gone on so long is the stuttering response of a government that recognizes the validity of the complaint. There are old revolutionary elites who have warned of a system that has utterly lost its way, can no longer afford to subsidize its traditional social base, has alienated everyone else, including the religious, and has subordinated the well-being of its citizens to the notion of security. An outside analyst might see a regime shaped by decades of international isolation. An Iranian analyst might see a narrow, brittle system desperate to cling to power at any cost. An Iranian teenage girl only sees herself as the unfortunate child of what is increasingly a pariah state, cut off from the world economically, socially, and culturally, and all for what? In whose name?

What are Iranians willing to suffer in order to see their demands for fundamental change realized? The question will be resolved by Iranians themselves, those inside the country who will live with the outcome of their actions. For now, the regional and wider reverberations of Iranian girls’ revolt could not be more seismic. In neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan, countries where violence against women is endemic, activists have held up posters of their Iranian sisters. Feminists across the globe, especially in Europe and Latin America, see the outcome in Iran as a bellwether for their own struggles. No one, not the officials in Iran nor governments around the world who’ve made hostility to women a brand of politics, saw the power of a girl standing on a utility box, demanding to be left alone.

[ A woman's tattoo reads, "Woman, Life, Freedom." Tattoos are not illegal in Iran but are frowned upon by the religious authorities. Some tattoo artists work for free these days, inking slogans into protesters' arms. ]

[violent138]

League members discussing meeting Robin at work:

"Compared to Bats, Robin was a total sweetheart. Ball of sunshine."

"Man, must've been a good day then, the kid I met was a real anklebiter. He pulled out a sword and everything."

"Anklebiter is harsh, the sweet boy I met barely said a word, he just kept asking about Themyscira and the lasso."

"He? I met a blonde girl."

"No, no, black haired boy with blue eyes. We're talking about Robin."

"Yeah same here, blue eyed and tanned."

"Pretty sure he had green eyes. And talked fancy. And kind of scolded me for time travelling."

"The child I met was paler than the moon."

"I'm telling you I met a girl, and she was Robin."

"Well... either we're all wrong or we're all right."

So they arrive at the conclusion that Bats has a shape-shifter for a kid.

[alltears]

the intrepid heroes reached new levels of Accurate Teenage Friendship tonight

[hermemescabin]

Percy pre last Olympian: I don’t like Annabeth. We are FRIENDS. My feelings are FRIENDLY. Stop looking at me.

Percy post last Olympian: My beautiful, talented, wonderful girlfriend Annabeth. Light of my life, the sun rises and sets with her smile. My greatest accomplishment is being her boyfriend and I killed a titan once.

[saphic-with-t]

When joking about how ridiculous it is that Fabian is popular I don’t think people realize how insanely cool the bad kids are in universe. As viewers we see their cool moments but we also see them being dorks and lame idiots. Think about their in universe reputations and how you would react to hearing about them if you lived in the same world as them.

There is a group of six people who saved the world 3 different times before they even entered their junior year of high school.

One of them never showed up to any of their classes until their third year and still passed. She is a rockstar and arch devil of rebellion who owns a recording studio in hell where she plays the bass.

One dude threw the greatest party the entire high school has ever seen, is captain of the sports team, and killed the school’s evil principal without facing any punishment.

One performed a motorcycle kick-flip that was doing a jump off of a mansion’s roof into a pool of flaming tartar sauce. Said kick-flip student has created a god, killed that god, brought herself back from the dead, and resurrected a completely different god.

One of the girls is the chosen oracle of all elves and punched her dad so hard he instantly died. Also if you dig deep enough into the political history books it turns out she caused there to be a feud (bordering on full war) between her home nation and the nation she currently lives in.

The quietest kid of the bunch is a super genius who invented a solar lasso that captured and contained an eldritch horror into his van, took 4 years of high school all at once and passed all of them, is currently acing his arcane mechanics and physical Ed studies, and is the second hand man on the school sports team. He also is the drummer for the arch devil’s band and launched a fully working satellite into space before he even started studying arcane mechanics.

Finally the “dork” of their group is an arcane consultant of heaven, became a P.I. after freshman year, is currently in every extra-curricular school club, and is beloved by seemingly all of his underclassmen. Also after he found out that the dragon his party was fighting ate his dad he fucking ATE IT to avenge him.

Obviously we know the truth behind all of these things and the actual way these six dorks act, but think how insanely sick they all sound in universe.

[family-on-6]

Brennan can say that his self-insert OC is the aarakocra agent all he wants but we all know it's Sklonda Gukgak and it always has been.

[hamable]

You’re Ruben Hopclap. You’re a teen rock star headlining a local festival. Your interim principal attempts to kill you multiple times. The elusive crush you wrote all your songs about vanishes with some other kids and returns covered in gore. The most popular guy in school jumps fifteen feet in the air, turns to you with a smirk and says, “I’m actually a huge fan,” and spears said principal through the core. Your crush boards a bus going who knows where. Someone gets on a mic and tells everyone to go home. It’s been four minutes.

[habken]

how can I be the greatest hero without you ?

fly high king 🙏😔

[vampirehayfever]

something i genuinely will always love about fig's character is that she will always stand up for the outcasts or people who aren't considered "cool". like without even missing a beat fig immediately goes to play twister with mazey because ivy wanted to put her down for even suggesting it. it genuinely is one of the best parts of her character and i adore it so much.

[helpallthenamesaretakenblog]

i saw someone talk about how they have to prepare the future actor for Nico di angelo. But the real question is how are they going to prepare the paid guinea pig actor in s2?? That tiny little animal has to look scared, insecure and at the same time, has to look like a simp.

[luminalunii97]

What Real Heros Of The Year Have Been Up To!

TW blood and rubble bullet wounds

These are real pictures of Iranian women inside of Iran fighting for their basic rights. Fighting to replace a misogynistic regime with freedom and a better democratic future. These were made by nxtanimal a content creator on Instagram.

[satoshy12]

My hero actually DID his job!

It had been a political meeting with the big media, as Vlad had to listen to other citizens talk about their heroes and complain about how they have more supervillains and damage. As a reporter, asked Vlad, the mayor of Amity Park, what he thought about it. He himself didn't talk about villain attacks or similar.

Vlad:" It's not my fault that your heroes are failures."

Yeah Vlad insulted every hero and city just with 1 sentence.

Politician angry from Metropolis:" What the hell are you talking about?"

Vlad:" How many years did your heroes fight their villains in your cities with collateral damage?"

Someone from Gotham said, " Maybe now 20 years maybe more."

Vlad:" The hero in Amity Park only took 1 year to show all his villains the right path, that they dropped being evil, and only once in a while visit to fight the hero without any damage to the city other than that place where they fight."

Vlad had built an Arena for it; it helped both Ghost and Danny fight and train.

Many of them are silent, as if they couldn't believe 1 word to say, " Impossible. Our heroes tried it for so many years."

Vlad:" If your failures did their job, you wouldn't have any villains years ago. So, yes, I don't think your heroes do their jobs."

Vlad then didn't talk anymore about this theme; he got bored of it.

And for the media and politicians, 1 online search and they saw Vlad told the truth... And they were kind of angry and confused. How comes that boy in 1 year fixed all his villain but someone like Superman or Batman wasn't able to do it for years!

[dimension20official]

🚨DIMENSION 20: FANTASY HIGH JUNIOR YEAR Trailer

🏫Premieres January 10th on Dropout

🌽Featuring Brennan Lee Mulligan as Game Master, Emily Axford as Fig Faeth, Ally Beardsley as Kristen Applebees, Brian Murphy as Riz Gukgak, Zac Oyama as Gorgug Thistlespring, Siobhan Thompson as Adaine Abernant, and Lou Wilson as Fabian Aramais Seacaster A full FAQ can be found here

[islandoforder]

fig and kristen are making up all these v dumb campaign promises and i can’t stop thinking about the v real and legit campaign promises they could make if they understood the things they’re friends are struggling with: more acceptance of and support for students with unusual multiclassing requests; provision of mandatory spell components by the school, especially for those without financial means; breakfasts provided on campus for those who might not be able to eat at home; removal of the rule that all members of the party should become pass/fail with any party composition change; more support and provisions made for students with unusual relationships to their chosen major, or who do not thrive in a typical academic classroom….

[h0rsegirlpercy]

Just realized that when I first read TLT I was younger than Percy and now watching the show I’m close to Grover’s actual age