#holocaust stories

[endusviolence]

Rowling isn't denying holocaust. She just pointed out that burning of transgender health books is a lie as that form of cosmetic surgery didn't exist. But of course you knew that already, didn't you?

I was thinking I'd probably see one of you! You're wrong :) Let's review the history a bit, shall we?

In this case, what we're talking about is the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, or in English, The Institute of Sexology. This Institute was founded and headed by a gay Jewish sexologist named Magnus Hirschfeld. It was founded in July of 1919 as the first sexology research clinic in the world, and was run as a private, non-profit clinic. Hirschfeld and the researchers who worked there would give out consultations, medical advice, and even treatments for free to their poorer clientele, as well as give thousands of lectures and build a unique library full of books on gender, sexuality, and eroticism. Of course, being a gay man, Hirschfeld focused a lot on the gay community and proving that homosexuality was natural and could not be "cured".

Hirschfeld was unique in his time because he believed that nobody's gender was either one or the other. Rather, he contended that everyone is a mixture of both male and female, with every individual having their own unique mix of traits.

This leads into the Institute's work with transgender patients. Hirschfeld was actually the one to coin the term "transsexual" in 1923, though this word didn't become popular phrasing until 30 years later when Harry Benjamin began expanding his research (I'll just be shortening it to trans for this brief overview.) For the Institute, their revolutionary work with gay men eventually began to attract other members of the LGBTA+, including of course trans people.

Contrary to what Anon says, sex reassignment surgery was first tested in 1912. It'd already being used on humans throughout Europe during the 1920's by the time a doctor at the Institute named Ludwig Levy-Lenz began performing it on patients in 1931. Hirschfeld was at first opposed, but he came around quickly because it lowered the rate of suicide among their trans patients. Not only was reassignment performed at the Institute, but both facial feminization and facial masculization surgery were also done.

The Institute employed some of these patients, gave them therapy to help with other issues, even gave some of the mentioned surgeries for free to this who could not afford it! They spoke out on their behalf to the public, even getting Berlin police to help them create "transvestite passes" to allow people to dress however they wanted without the threat of being arrested. They worked together to fight the law, including trying to strike down Paragraph 175, which made it illegal to be homosexual. The picture below is from their holiday party, Magnus Hirschfeld being the gentleman on the right with the fabulous mustache. Many of the other people in this photo are transgender.

[Image ID: A black and white photo of a group of people. Some are smiling at the camera, others have serious expressions. Either way, they all seem to be happy. On the right side, an older gentleman in glasses- Magnus Hirschfeld- is sitting. He has short hair and a bushy mustache. He is resting one hand on the shoulder of the person in front of him. His other hand is being held by a person to his left. Another person to his right is holding his shoulder.]

There was always push back against the Institute, especially from conservatives who saw all of this as a bad thing. But conservatism can't stop progress without destroying it. They weren't willing to go that far for a good while. It all ended in March of 1933, when a new Chancellor was elected. The Nazis did not like homosexuals for several reasons. Chief among them, we break the boundaries of "normal" society. Shortly after the election, on May 6th, the book burnings began. The Jewish, gay, and obviously liberal Magnus Hirschfeld and his library of boundary-breaking literature was one of the very first targets. Thankfully, Hirschfeld was spared by virtue of being in Paris at the time (he would die in 1935, before the Nazis were able to invade France). His library wasn't so lucky.

This famous picture of the book burnings was taken after the Institute of Sexology had been raided. That's their books. Literature on so much about sexuality, eroticism, and gender, yes including their new work on trans people. This is the trans community's Alexandria. We're incredibly lucky that enough of it survived for Harry Benjamin and everyone who came after him was able to build on the Institute's work.

[Image ID: A black and white photo of the May Nazi book burning of the Institute of Sexology's library. A soldier, back facing the camera, is throwing a stack of books into the fire. In the background of the right side, a crowd is watching.]

As the Holocaust went on, the homosexuals of Germany became a targeted group. This did include transgender people, no matter what you say. To deny this reality is Holocaust denial. JK Rowling and everyone else who tries to pretend like this isn't reality is participating in that evil. You're agreeing with the Nazis.

But of course, you knew that already, didn't you?

Edit: Added image IDs. I apologize to those using screen readers for forgetting them. Please reblog this version instead.

[historicity-was-already-taken]

To any Palestinian folks who have sent me requests for aid: I’m so sorry—there are active scammers going around posing as folks in Gaza, and I don’t know how to figure out which ones are real and which ones are scams.

En lieu of those. I’d like to direct you all towards NGOs which I know are not scams

[still-searching-for-something]

Today was Yom HaShoah, the day that Jews remember the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the industrialized genocide of the European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators from 1941-1945.

This is a really simple opening statement, but bear with me--I think it gets a lot more... 'yeah, buts' than most people may realize. And I think a good way of illuminating that is to break down the difference between how gentiles and Jews commemorate and remember it.

In my experience, gentiles seem to view the Holocaust as the ultimate example of mankind's barbarity to mankind. Like, the distillation of evil, the most obvious example of dehumanization and bigotry brought to its horrifying and extreme conclusion. They emphasize Nazi Germany's responsibility, elevate the instances of non-Jewish Frenchmen and Poles and Germans who made efforts to save Jewish lives, and generally view Nazi oppression as a catastrophe of whom Jews were one of many victims. And they emphasize the Allied Powers' role in ending it by liberating the camps and invading Germany. Hence why International Holocaust Remembrance Day falls on January 27th, the day Auschwitz was liberated.

But Jews have a different perspective.

We view the Holocaust as the most extreme manifestation of--but far from the conclusion to--mankind's barbarity to Jews. Not to his fellow man, per se, not to some universalized insert minority here slot, but to Jews, particularly and deliberately. The Nazis could never have accomplished their genocide were it not for the two millennia of anti-Jewish hatreds and dehumanization embedded deep in the institutions and political structures of European society. They didn't have to persuade Europe that the Jews were incurably evil, the Europeans already believed that. The Nazis had 99% of their work done before they'd even come to power, work that was done by the the Russian Empire, the Romans, Martin Luther, Christian Passion Plays, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the centuries of blood libels, the Fourth Lateran Council, the New Testament, the Spanish Empire, and on and on and on and on. It's as if some people think Hitler just woke up one day, out of the blue, with a total hatred of Jews and managed to use propaganda to convince the previously 100% tolerant Germans to hate Jews, too. Antisemitism did not begin or end with the Holocaust.

The sole responsibility of Nazi Germany in the Holocaust is also just... not true. Vichy France rounded up 13,152 Jews in the Vel' d'Hiv roundup, with not a single German participant, and sent them off to be murdered in Auschwitz. Vichy passed antisemitic legislation without any outside coercion--French Jews were hiding as much from the French police as they were from the Gestapo. France, of course, was the home of the Dreyfus Affair--antisemitism was and is a deep part of French society. And it isn't just France. Ukrainian nationalists participated in the Lviv pogroms, killing maybe around 8,000 Jews, Poles perpetrated the Jedwabne pogrom, and that doesn't even bring in that countries like the US, Switzerland and Ireland and Britain blocked Jewish emigrants, and I could just keep going on, but I think you get the point. Quite simply, six million Jews interspersed throughout Europe don't get murdered if it isn't without the collaboration of--or at minimum, silent assent and indifference--of all of their neighbors. The Nazis were the primary perpetrators of the Holocaust, of course, but almost all of Europe collaborated on some level, too. And this is a history that gets wiped away in favor of the comforting narrative of the Allied Powers bursting into Auschwitz, killing Nazis, and being horrified by what they've found, and then the poor people in the surrounding towns having NO IDEA about what had been going on. I think this narrative is why gentiles have International Holocaust Remembrance Day when Auschwitz was liberated--when they 'came to the rescue'--and why we have Yom HaShoah on the day in the Jewish calendar that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began--when we died on our own terms in spite of our murderers.

Think of the tiny, unwritten, centuries old minhagim of small Jewish shetls and towns like Trochenbrod, which were entirely annihilated. The end of the burgeoning Yiddish cinema. Yiddish going from 13 million speakers to 600,000 today. See how many entries in this list of shetls end with "town/city survived, but all/most Jews exterminated." Imagine for a moment, the potential rabbis and scholars and actors and scientists and artists who could have lived, had they survived or been born of Jews did. Three and a half million Polish Jews, to around 15,000 to 20,000 Polish Jews today. Imagine if Thessaloniki were still a majority Jewish city. How many Jews worldwide would be alive today had the Holocaust never happened? I've heard estimations of 32 million, compared to the real life 16 million. To kill such a massive number of people from an already tiny minority group--that has real consequences. The cultural loss for the Jewish people is staggering and beyond human comprehension.

And yet, the Nazis deliberate targeting of us is, in many ways, being pushed aside. Magnus Hirschfeld was gay, yes, and advanced the Institute of Sexology way ahead of its time and yeah, the Nazis were homophobic. But they were homophobic for antisemitic reasons. They viewed his work as Jewish perversions BECAUSE Dr. Hirschfeld was Jewish. In fact, they viewed homosexuality as a creation of the Jews. But so many progressive queer people, especially those who run in antizionist circles, seem to be trying to co-opt the Holocaust as being their trauma, downplaying Hirschfeld's Jewishness and holding the Institute up as proof that queer people were the 'real' victims of the Holocaust, entirely shutting out the millions of Jews, Sinti, Roma, and Slavs who were murdered. You can also see this in anti-mask conservatives comparing masking mandates during the pandemic to anti-Jewish legislation in the Holocaust, or the comparisons of the ongoing war against Hamas as being a 'modern day Holocaust.'

This phenomenon, Holocaust universalization, gets so much pushback from Jews for a reason--it downplays the anti-Jewish character of the Holocaust. It's softcore Holocaust denial. And it's so ridiculous we even have to say that, as the whole point of the Holocaust was to be anti-Jewish, to be the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question." It's 'All Lives Mattering' the Holocaust. Holocaust universalization, and Holocaust inversion--the phenomenon of talking about Jews, Zionists, or Israelis as perpetrating a 'new Holocaust'--minimizes and trivializes the astounding damage and traumas and death and destruction wrought by the Holocaust. It's a polemical lie, so incendiary and so insulting--imagine telling a sexual assault survivor that they're morally no better than their rapist--that the only thing it can be is antisemitic. It is beyond reprehensible to talk like that, but it's so mainstream and acceptable to do it. Activists who say these things need to examine their own rhetoric, because it's dangerous, antisemitic, and adjacent to Holocaust denial. Not a place I think anyone should want to be.

The Holocaust is not a lesson Jews should have learned, an educational seminar, a 'card' Jews play, a choose your own adventure novel, a philosophical meditation on the nature of mankind's evils, or an empty slate upon which to project modern politics, warfare, or your ideology onto.

The Holocaust is, quite simply, the industrialized genocide of the European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators from 1941-1945. And today was Yom HaShoah, the day we remember that.

[sadclowncentral]

there has been some discussion on here that people should not call themselves central european, as that "doesn't exist, there is only the west and the (ex-soviet) east".

so here is the story of how my parents met. it's a long one snd it features a world war, the cold war and the iron curtain, but i promise it is a love story. here goes:

1936. my german grandfather lives in a small village in eastern pomerania, then germany, with his mother. my polish side of the family, part of an indigenious slavic minority, the kashubians, lives just six kilometers east across the border in poland.

1939. germany invades poland. with the front and the border moving east, my kashubian grandfather is incidentally born on german territory as a german citizen. he is the youngest of eleven - all his siblings are polish citizens.

1942. my german grandfather is drafted into the army and taken as a prisoner of war. the same year, my kashubian grandfather is murdered in a concentration camp for collusion against nazi germany.

1945. my german grandfather has returned from russia. the border has moved, west this time, and his old home is in poland now, and behind the iron curtain. he decides to stay in western germany.

1946. my kashubian great-grandmother, a widowed woman with eleven children, has lost her house during the war. she moves into an abandoned home in a now polish recovered territories.

1982. it's the height of the cold war. my german grandfather has not stopped wondering what has happened to his old home. with a sailing ship, he and my father make it to poland and to his old house. my kashubian grandfather, now married and father of seven children, opens the door. and in true kashubian hospitality, invites them to stay the night. my parents, both teenagers, and without a shared language, meet for the first time. and fall in love.

1987. my father is discharged from the west german army because of his frequent travels behind the iron curtain to visit his girlfriend. my mother gets a german passport issued without a citizen test as her father is technically german.

1996. the berlin wall has fallen, but more importantly, my parents are getting married in poland. their families got over the language barrier, and my grandfathers have gotten over their different sides in the war. the reception is in three languages - german, kashubian, and polish. in the house both my grandfathers grew up in.

a few years later, my brother and i are born. german- polish- kashubian. with two passports and three mother tongues. and then again. from one single house in germany- poland- recovered-territories- kashubia- pomerania.

so we just say we are central european.

[sanityshorror]

AY YO, WHERE MY HORROR HOMIES AT?

WHERE MY HOMIES AT WHO FW THE FUCKED UP SHIT AND NOT THAT TAME STUFF?

WHERE MY EXTREME HORROR AND SPLATTERPUNK HOMIES AT?

IM DESPERATE FOR MORE HARDCORE HORROR MUTUALS

[cabinetofotherthings]

i have a historiographical quibble with how the antisemitic campaigns in the soviet union in 1948–1953 are often framed as an extension of the holocaust in the scholarship rather than being fully considered within the context of the soviet nationalities policy. except when i'm applying for funding from institutions that do holocaust studies. then i'm fine with it

[very-uncorrect]

Sorry not sorry but I genuinely cannot trust anyone who likes Harry Potter anymore

[charlesoberonn]

One time in high school we went to the Yad Vashem museum (the main Holocaust museum in Israel) and the guide told us a story about one time when a delegation from Rwanda visited the museum. They told him that they came there so they could "learn how to remember" because their own genocide was already being forgotten and not taught to the next generation.

Later in the tour, he showed an exhibit of the various circus performances that happened just outside the Warsaw Ghetto. He talked about how while Jews were suffering and being slaughtered, other people were living normally like nothing was happening. And that made him think about how while the Rwandan Genocide was happening, he was probably at home watching TV.

That tour stuck with him, and his story stuck with me.

[positivelybeastly]

Do you think you can explain in explicit detail why Percy's version of beast doesn't work?

All right, so, hopefully you can forgive me for taking a bit of time to come to this ask, because it's quite the subject matter, and it's one I take very seriously. I want you to have a good answer or no answer at all.

In order to explain why Percy's Beast doesn't work, we first need to establish a continuity for Beast, and why and how he works.

Which is why it's a good thing I have a 14 page Google Doc that goes into detail about all of this, which I'm going to drag and drop here:

Beast in the Krakoan era is a fascist mutant supremacist, who believes that the ends justify the means; he's cold-hearted, cruel, endlessly self-justifying, unfunny, shortsighted, and overall, a bastard. He is without nuance - and it's not just me saying that, that's both the writer and the characters saying that. He has, apparently, always been evil, and all it took was power for his true self to come out.

This does not jive with any of his characterisation prior to this point. Don't believe me? Let's deep dive.

Hank McCoy was born in Dunfee, Illinois to two very normal human parents. His mutation was apparent from the moment he was born, due to his father taking an enormous dose of radiation after an accident at the nuclear power plant he worked at, and while it would occasionally raise an eyebrow, he was able to hide what he was for the first 15-17 years of his life (Marvel ages are vague, but Hank is usually portrayed as the oldest of the O5, so we'll just say he was 17). He was recruited for the X-Men by Charles Xavier after his parents were taken hostage by a Z-list supervillain called the Conquistador, who wanted Hank to steal components from his father's place of work.

I should note that already, pre-X-Men, Hank did not believe in giving obvious supervillains nuclear power plant components, and gave the Conquistador a box full of flashbangs that disoriented him and his goons before defeating them in a fight. He did the right thing, at potential great personal cost to him and his parents, whom he loves very much.

Xavier then proceeded to step in, and, depending on the continuity, wiped the minds of everyone Hank had ever loved of the memory of him, so as to keep him 'safe,' or wiped the mind of Hank's first love, a girl called Jennifer Nyles, who is consistently depicted as being the woman who encouraged Hank to step out of his shell and do something with his obvious natural physical and intellectual gifts. Either way, this quite irritated Hank, and mere hours after he had put on his X-Men uniform, he was already about to fight the Professor over an egregious breach of mental privacy and security. But because he believed in what the Professor espoused, he let it slide.

It's worth noting that this mindwipe was seemingly undone later, because there are comics released both before and after Mike Carey's Origins issue that depict Hank having a deeply loving relationship with his parents. This will be important for later.

Now, a lot of people love to point to Uncanny X-Men #8 as the first evidence that Hank has always been a supervillain in disguise, and while I think it's a little egregious to point to any issue of any 60s comic book and say that anyone acts in a way that is sensible, moral, or decent, it's worth noting that the act in question, dialling up Unus the Untouchable's powers to a point where he can't control them, is in direct response to Unus attempting to defeat/kill the rest of the X-Men, or at the very least, hand them over to Magneto (who, let's not forget, in the 60s was a homicidal maniac happy to nuke entire countries). Is the response of threatening Unus with a slow death by starvation disproportionate? Yeah, it is.

Scott and the rest of the X-Men seem completely fine with it.

So, now you have to ask yourself - do we accept the morality of the time, and assume that Hank was basically justified to do what he did, to save his team and stop a dangerous mutant, or do we judge him for acting like a supervillain would, and thus everyone else on the team is fine with it? Iunno. That's a personal judgement. It's 60s X-Men, it's shit. I basically hardly regard it as canon, and given that any time anyone comes on to the Reddit board looking to start X-Men gets waved away from starting there, it clearly isn't regarded as very well written, is it? Maybe we regard it as a point for him to grow past? After all the very next issue, Cyclops starts a fight with the Avengers over jack fuck nothing, just because Professor Xavier told him to, and he clearly outgrew that.

All right, so let's speed forward a little bit. Hank's been an X-Man for around 3 years when he gets a job with the Brand Corporation, a scientific research company in Long Island. People love to bring up the fact that it's a subsidiary of Roxxon, who are notoriously evil, or that it has its own nefarious plans going on, but we don't judge people who work at Cat Chow for the fact that Nestle is fucking evil, do we? Hank didn't know. He was a 20 year old scientist with budding aspirations of helping the world in ways he couldn't with the X-Men. So, what was he researching?

Now, this is where we get into a bit of a sticky wicket, because this has been retconned to hell, but in the original version of events, set in the early 1970s, Hank is working as a scientist at Brand when he finds out that the Secret Empire want to steal his research into genetic mutation. Understandable thing for him to want to research, given his father's accident and his own obvious mutation, and an understandable thing for the Empire to want to steal, especially given what his research had resulted in.

In the process of Hank's research, he manages to isolate the chemical/hormonal extract that causes mutation - naturally occurring, it's also the basis for MGH, or Mutant Growth Hormone, which later becomes used by humans all around the world to obtain temporary mutant powers. But this can't be attributed to Hank, especially since he goes to great efforts to destroy all of his research, rather than let it fall into the hands of spies.

Now, this is the point that everyone likes to point to as the moment that Hank reveals his true colours, as a true mad scientist, a Jekyll hiding a Hyde - except that even just hours after his mutation, even in the midst of a rage at his own stupidity, Hank attacks Professor Maddicks, one of the Empire spies, and tries to kill him. He has him dead to rights, he's strangling him, it would be easy.

He stops. He can't bring himself to do it.

It's worth noting that Hank already starts to show signs of a marked personality change here. Gone is the long winded, stuffy, Superman curled Beast of the 60s - now we have the grey furred Beast of the 70s, soon to turn blue due to the limitations of comic book printing. He cuts himself off from the X-Men, starts to fall into depressive slumps and fits of mania, which is a personality pattern he falls into regularly, leading to a lot of people, including myself and Grant Morrison, to consider Hank bipolar. Obviously, here, it's exacerbated by his mutation and his extreme circumstances, but it's something he comes back to, again and again. It also explains why he decides to attack Iron Man, also investigating Brand, and nearly kills him.

It's also worth noting that this is the first appearance of the Beast - not just Hank's codename, his mutation has now given him an animal bloodlust that he struggles to keep control of, not unlike Wolverine. This is something to keep in mind because it helps frame Hank's self-hatred, which is often brought up but not really examined as a character trait, and especially later on, it becomes clear that Hank hates himself for a good number of reasons.

For one, he makes dumb, impulsive decisions, usually with the best of intentions, and he chews himself out for one he made already, turning himself into a furry monster. For another, he hates the part of himself that wants to hurt people. To call forward many, many years into the future, Hank doesn't believe in the law of the jungle. He believes in art, and literature, and music. He believes in humanity. He desperately wants to maintain his own, and he hates his mutation because it literally makes him less human every time, it makes his impulses harder to control, it makes him dangerous - and oh, it does make him dangerous.

And here's the thing. Beast nearly kills Iron Man (or at least, he thinks he has, Mastermind is in play), and the moment he realises what he's done, he screams in anguish and runs away, hating himself. "Humans can't catch me there." He believes himself to be less than human - not because he's a mutant, but because he regressed to animal behaviour and thinks he's killed someone. What a monster, right? What a villain!

"During that fight, I saw his face up close - and got a hint of what's behind it. I saw a soul in torment - and I can't play God with that."

All right, so now we have to take a sideways trip, and go to X-Men Unlimited vol 2 #10, which depicts Hank going home to his parents right after he turned grey. It's honestly a kind of hard read, because if the Beast's rampage was his mania ramped up to eleven, this is his depression ramped up to twelve. He staggers through the streets like a ghost, unwilling to let anyone see what he looks like. "I could have been someone, Jennifer. A lonely high school kid with big, big fears and big, big dreams, I could have done something really wonderful. I could have become anyone, done almost anything. But now, Jennifer, now just look at me."

The story is called Ghost in the Graveyard, and it's aptly named because this is the moment Hank grows into who he's truly meant to be. His ego, which drove him to consume his research and nearly kill, is dead. He believes he is worthless, he believes he's fit only to flit between the waking moments of the living when they aren't looking. "What would you think of me if I was to tell you how terrified I am of everything right now, Jennifer?"

He saves his hometown, incidentally. Even while sleeping for days, depressed, barely eating, he still has enough curious spirit and intelligence to work out that the radiation coming from the bodies of people who worked in the same plant as his father has contaminated the water table, the soil, even the townsfolk. Jennifer tells him they should go to the newspapers, and he tells her he can't. He can't bear to. He can't bear to be seen. He reveals his appearance to her, and she tries to kiss him softly on the forehead, but he still can't bear it. He runs.

"Perhaps, then, a ghost is nothing more than a memory. A memory of who we once were, before we become what we must."

And this is the moment that Hank McCoy decides to run back to New York and join the Avengers.

Out of a moment of sheer despair, out of a moment of shame and guilt, out of a moment of self-hatred so deep he can barely get out of bed, he grasps onto hope, and the desire to do good, and he does it. He goes to New York, and he decides he's going to be a good man. And he is. He's a very good man.

He saves the Avengers from the Stranger at his team tryout. He becomes a master of disguise so adept he passes himself off as the President of the United States and gives a speech that makes the Squadron Supreme question their own spurious morality. He saves Henry Pym's life from a super-microbe. He's almost singlehandedly the reason that Patsy Walker becomes Hellcat, a storied superhero in her own right. He's the one who reaches out to Simon Williams, Wonder Man, former villain, and becomes his best friend in the whole world. He becomes the third mutant Avenger (technically first, depending on Wanda and Pietro's current genetic status), and the first X-Man to cross over. He becomes one of the most popular, celebrated, and beloved mutants on the planet.

Yet, he still cares enough for his friends that the moment the X-Men need him, even though they don't think to call him, he puts it all at risk. He catches the Hellfire Club's police call during the middle of the Dark Phoenix Saga, wipes the tapes, and abandons his post as a prestigious Avenger, a position Cyclops says he loves . . . to be with his original team. He's integral to them standing a chance against her, fashioning the diadem that immobilises Jean and gives Cyclops and Xavier the chance to shut away the Dark Phoenix for a short time - enough that Jean, or the Phoenix, or whatever is walking around in that story, can put together a plan to deal with herself.

He gets zapped to an alien spaceship, and the first damn thing he does is make a Wizard of Oz joke, then he calls Lilandra out for lack of due process.

Throughout the 70s and 80s, Hank becomes one of the most popular heroes in-universe, instantly recognisable and on first name terms with almost every hero. He goes through his hardships. His own mother struggles with his mutation, calling him a freak in a moment of despair, only to realise that no matter what he looks like, he's still her boy - still the man who throws himself in the direct path of Professor Power's attack to save a child.

One of my favourites is Avengers 209. Hank's girlfriend is poisoned by a Skrull, and he's forced to go back in time and fetch the two halves of the Resurrection Stone back to save her. One of the pieces is in the hands of a concentration camp prisoner in 1945, who keeps using it to try and hold on to his dead family, and Hank breaks down into sobbing tears as he begs in Yiddish for the man to please let go and be at peace. His heart breaks for a man he's never met because his pain is so mighty and so vast and it's so damned unfair.

But even when he has the Resurrection Stone in his hands, and he can use it to save Vera, he destroys it instead, rather than give it to the Skrull and risk the power being in any one man's hand. He puts his own wants and desires to the side, and hopes that another man smarter than him can save Vera, who's put in suspended animation and later saved by Daimon Hellstrom. Hank joins the Defenders at around this point, and goes through quite a bit, including quite the humbling as he realizes that he may be cock of the walk, but he's not yet a leader - or maybe never a leader.

One of the accusations I've seen aimed at Hank is that he resents Cyclops for being made leader of the X-Men, and I honestly don't see where this comes from, but it's not something I think has any truth to it. Hank almost actively avoids leadership where he can, because he knows he can't make hard decisions like who to leave behind, who to let die, who to hurt. Indeed, the one time we see him lead the X-Men, it's in Grant Morrison's New X-Men, where the strain of it causes him to break down and turn to Kick just to keep going. X-Club, a team of his creation, is barely in its infancy before he leaves, and it's pretty clear that Beast just . . . doesn't, care, about being a leader. He knows he's not good at it. He knows he can't inspire like Captain America. He knows he can't strategise like Cyclops. He knows that.

It's also at this point that Hank is called out in public for not doing enough for mutants, coasting on his celebrity and acting the clown - and he takes on the criticism. He becomes more politically active, forming an advocacy group. As we learn later on in Secret Avengers, he also becomes fast friends with a secret mutant politician by the name of Leonard Gary, and he's present at multiple meetings of Congress where Lenny blocks Senator Kelly's anti-mutant legislation. Way later on, he helps Lenny push through workers rights laws during Fear Itself, and makes sure that he can give a speech inspiring the nation at a time when they needed it most.

Now we move on to X-Factor, where Hank has his ups and downs, but it's significant that it starts with him being publicly discriminated against by no less than 15 universities for his visible mutation. His response? To call them a bunch of racists, strip off his clothes, and tell them to go hang. He doesn't descend into self-pity, he gets angry and embarrasses them the only way he knows how. But it's interesting, because Hank starts the series wanting to teach, and in a way, he gets to do precisely that. Enter young mutants Fire Fist, Boom Boom, Skids, Wiz Kid, Artie Maddicks, Leech, and Rictor.

Rictor is the kid that Hank becomes closest to. He teaches him to read, encourages him in learning how to use his powers, plays with him - when his intelligence is reduced by a quirk of mutation, he's still aware and good enough that he attacks someone scaring Julio. He fucks up a ton in this series, especially with Boom Boom, with him and Iceman being downright dicks to her, and there's no real excuse for it - but it's kind of important that Hank wants to learn to teach, and he has to learn. He's not immediately good at it. He softens. He gets better. In fact, in an alternate universe not dissimilar to 616, Forge remarks that no-one was quite as patient and as good a teacher as Hank.

Then we come to the 90s, where Hank is faced with his biggest challenge yet - the Legacy Virus - and his biggest moral failing yet - Threnody. Now, this is where I kinda have to call out the Cerebrocast, because there's this narrative that Hank is an Avenger narc who will sell mutants down the river at the drop of a hat, and I'm fairly certain it stems from the moment when Hank surrenders Threnody over to Sinister.

It's not a great look, tbh. I wouldn't have done it. I wouldn't touch Sinister with a thirty foot barge pole. I certainly wouldn't leave a vulnerable woman with him. But Sinister is an excellent manipulator, and he plays Hank like a fiddle here. He points out that Hank won't cross certain moral and ethical boundaries. "Admitting it, and despising the choice are the first steps toward changing the indecision that has ruled Xavier's roost of late." Sinister is very canny about playing Hank's fear of inferiority, of not being good enough to save everyone, of not living up to his potential, against him. It's also worth noting that Rogue and Iceman don't seem to disagree with Hank's decision, and while I believe he's acting as field leader here, these are not people who would let something like an 'order' stop them from doing what they feel is right.

It kills Hank to do this. He feels dirty, unwashed, like a piece of shit on humanity's shoe, for doing this. He risks Infectia's - or rather, Josephine's - powers infecting all of them with the Legacy Virus she's dying of, because he needs to do something human, something good, something compassionate, or else all he's left with is the bad. "Henry McCoy holds her, tears flowing freely, not just for the loss of another life, but for what Infectia's death has meant to him. For in granting her last wish, Hank contradicted the scientist in himself for the sake of the man."

What a villain, right?

It's also worth noting that we see Threnody again, in X-Men #34. She's lucid, in control of her powers, vibrant. "Threnody, dear lass! I am both pleased, relieved, and - I must confess - a bit surprised to see you so lucid? No offence meant, of course." "And none taken, Dr. McCoy. When we first met, I was rather a headcase, wasn't it? I want you to know, Doctor, that going with Sinister was the best thing that could have happened to me."

Hmmmmm.

"I've thought about you and worried quite a bit over the decision we made to allow Sinister to take you with him. Seeing you here and doing so well, rather uplifts my spirits - but it beggars the question, why do you stay?" "Dr. McCoy. You're sweet. But isn't this a better life than the one I had?"

HMMMMMMMM.

"Thren, I'm concerned about you. You seem to be playing a very dangerous game here. I cannot in good conscience allow you to stay here and play in this danger zone any longer." "You have no choice, Hank. There's knowledge and glory [here] . . . and I want that, too."

HMMMMM???

All right, whatever, let's keep it moving, on to the point where Hank undergoes his most drastic change yet.

It's the year 2001. Hank is on the X-Treme X-Men team, and they're searching for Destiny's diaries foretelling the future. Putting himself in harm's way to try and save Psylocke's life, telling her to go on and leave him, he's forced to watch as Vargas kills her - and poses her on top of his own fatally wounded body for the rest of the team to find. Barely hanging on to life, he sits in a Spanish hospital room, until Sage decides to take matters into her own hands.

"But despite your appearance and the name they call you I will assume you are a man and not a beast . . . and that you have a soul - !"

"He has a soul, padre. Bright and shining as the stars."

She jumpstarts the next evolution of Hank McCoy, and he becomes feline. He loses a finger on each hand. His animal instincts explode into the forefront of his brain. His hormones are blazing. His brain is on fire. He's doing the best he can to cope, but it's - hard. Yet he still finds it within himself to be there for others first of all. He mentors Beak, serving as an example of a physical mutant who's made something of himself. He tries to counsel Scott and Jean through their ailing marriage. He reaches out to Emma, and they become fast friends. Meanwhile, Genosha burns, students are killed, and Cassandra Nova rips him to pieces and picks on those fears of devolution that have been skirting in the back of his mind for decades, bringing them right back to the front of his mind.

"Remember when you looked almost human in the mirror? Then it started. The fall from man to ape, from ape to feline. Poor ugly Henry McCoy. There's no place for you in ANY mutant future. You're a devolver! Zoo animal. Stumbling backwards down the tree of life."

This, coupled with Trish Tilby's decision to break up with him over allegations of bestiality from her coworkers, shatters his psyche, and he arguably never recovers until his body changes again in All-New X-Men. He covers up his body almost all of the time, he overdresses in human clothes and uniforms that are a stark contrast to his old X-shorts, he becomes more verbose, more mature, more bipolar, more depressed, more lonely. And yet, even through all of this, with the help of his friends, especially Jean Grey, he starts to recover. He starts to become more like his old self.

In Astonishing X-Men, he even starts to show a bit more skin and fur as time goes on and he gets further away from Cassandra Nova's attack. And then it gets worse. The mutant cure. "I used to have fingers, a mouth you could kiss." Cassandra Nova, living on in his friend Emma Frost's guilt, attacks him again, and pushes him further, causing him to feast on human flesh and nearly kill students. Pushing him further down the tree of life. And not only that, but he has to come face to face with the ghost of one of his greatest failures, that should have been his greatest success.

Roll it back to 2001. Just before the whole X-Treme X-Men thing, Hank manages to piece together a Legacy Virus cure, using fragments of his own research and Moira MacTaggert's - but he immediately regards it as a failure, not because it doesn't work, but because it would require a mutant to metabolise it and kill themselves in order for it to be released into the atmosphere. Hank regards the cost of one life to be too high, and locks the cure away - but not securely enough that Colossus can't get at it and use it anyway.

Colossus dies because of Hank, and it kills him inside. When he matches the mutant cure sample to Piotr's DNA sample, it mortifies him. It shames him. It deadens him. No good deed ever goes unpunished. Even while Scott and Emma are faffing around with relationship problems, Hank is quietly wallowing because this is his fault. He killed Piotr.

Well, he didn't. But he might as well have, right? He put the 'gun' in his hand.

But then we get to Abigail Brand, and man is this dynamic just Hank as hell. She's a government fist in green haired body suited form that doesn't care about your feelings, he's a blue furred idealist who constantly blames himself for everything and can do nothing but feel. They connect. Not because they're both awful people . . . but because they see in each other something that they like. For Hank, it's something base - she finds him sexually attractive, not in spite of but because of his mutation, and honestly, at this point? Being fetishised sounds kind of nice to Hank. For her?

She wants someone to keep her honest. Someone who will question her decisions. Someone who does nothing but question her decisions, in fact, because she fucked up, and she needs someone to call her out on her bullshit. Hm. Almost sounds like there's a human being behind those green shades.

More on this later.

Because we've started to reach the point where I'm told Hank's descent into villainy has started, and quite frankly, I'm not seeing it. He got sadder? He got more lonely (yes, the cat story happened, it's tragic and embarrassing, move on)? But villainous? "I always saw him as vulnerable," said Grant Morrison. "The thing about Hank McCoy is that he was always presented as the loquacious, happy-go-lucky character and then he became a little darker when [he turned into] the furry Beast, but then he became happy again in Avengers. Basically, I'm looking at this bipolar kid. It's not so much that he's a villain; he just falls into bad situations and that makes him more human."

If people mean Here Comes Tomorrow, then I invite you to read that story again and remember that Hank is only really present in maybe eight panels of that story. The rest of the time it's Sublime piloting his body, and Hank has nothing to do with it. You might as well blame anyone ever possessed by Malice for what they did while under her influence.

But anyway.

The Decimation.

What a time for mutant kind. 198 mutants left, and falling. And everyone is looking to Hank McCoy for answers. He'll do almost anything to get them . . . right? In comes Endangered Species by Mike Carey, wherein Hank scours the corners of the Earth and gets his hands dirty trying to find a way to kickstart the mutant race again. He consorts with villains, he exhumed corpses, he nearly kills a drug dealer who wants fresh MGH from him and Bishop's bodies. He's on very thin ice, and in danger of cracking. He is, quite literally, facing his darkest impulses.

Enter Dark Beast.

Now, Dark Beast has been a thing since the mid-90s, and honestly, I kind of love the guy because he's so incredibly and over the top evil - but I also kind of hate him because his very existence seems to make people think that Hank always had evil inside of him, that he was just born that way. How very Graydon Creed, to believe that evil is something people are born to be rather than something that people do or become. The truth is that Dark Beast was born into a world completely different from Hank's, and while we don't know the exact divergence point for him, X-Men Unlimited vol. 1 #10 provides us with some clues - namely, that he never knew his parents.

Hank's incredibly loving, incredibly guilty, incredibly proud parents.

The parents that Dark Beast, violent psychopath, mutant supremacist, literal killer of children and Age of Apocalypse's own Dr. Mengele . . . couldn't bring himself to kill, because they loved Hank McCoy so much, and on some level, Dark Beast recognised that. Felt afraid of it. Felt weakened by it. Felt infuriated by it. Had to kill a random passerby just to feel more like himself. Because they were just so damned good, and maybe if he'd had parents like that, maybe?

It's also worth noting that Dark Beast, both here in the 90s, and later in Endangered Species (2008), points out that Hank isn't him. "I told you when we started on this that we'd have to think the unthinkable, Henry. I knew you'd let me down. But I didn't think you'd reach your limits this quickly. [...] You're fighting for the future of your species. Did that slip your mind? It's the only fight that matters, Henry. It's the war in which nature enlists every last one of us. And you're a deserter."

Hmmm.

Where have I heard that before.

So, Hank gives up. He stops searching for a cure, because one doesn't exist - or if it does, it requires a moral sacrifice that he isn't capable of. He disappoints mutant kind, and it won't be the last time. He fails to find answers in 1906 San Francisco, he fails to keep the faith at Utopia, he fails to stop things from escalating at a demonstration and ends up captured by Osborn - and Dark Beast. What a pathetic sack of crap, right? How dare he fail. He should be more like Cyclops.

"We make the choice for ourselves. And we have to live with the consequences afterwards."

"I'll live with it."

"I said we. I need to live with it."

Hmm.

"Sometimes in war you have to do things that you hate. Things you can't even bear to think about. This is one of those times. [...] I'm not making that choice for any of you. If you have any doubts about what we're about to do, stand out of the line. No one will blame you or question you. Ever."

Hmmmmm.

"All's well that ends well, Scott?"

"Looks that way from here. Why? Something on your mind?"

"Something, yes. The fact that you decided to use the Legacy Virus before you asked me if I had a working antidote."

"Your conscience is one of the things I value about you, Hank. Really. Never stop challenging me on that."

HMMMMMMMM.

#CyclopsWasRight?

But whatever, let's keep moving on. Utopia's X-Force happens. It's bloody. It's messy. It's grim. Hank doesn't approve. Scott tries to keep him on side, but it's not easy. Eventually, it reaches a boiling point. Hank decides he can't stay anymore, because he's not effective in his current capacity. Scott doesn't need him anymore, he needs more guns and soldiers and mutants, and Hank can't make those anymore. He deserts. What a piece of shit, caring about morals at a time like this. What a traitor. Oh, it's also worth noting that before he died, Kurt found out about X-Force, and was on the verge of quitting the X-Men, just like Hank. Just a sidenote, by the way.

Now, I believe in fairness, and I don't believe in whitewashing Hank's actions, especially when he wouldn't want me to, so it's only fair to bring up the Ghost Box laser strike and the Secret Avenger nuclear bomb that Hank constructs. Clear examples of the slow erosion of his moral fibre on his way to becoming a villain.

Or he feels massively guilty, sickened, and disgusted about what he had to do, while both times, the leader that he tries his best to believe in and follow tells him not to lose sleep over it. Except, Hank does. Because that is the kind of character Hank is.

Hank McCoy is a "superheroic overcompensating altruist [...] perfectly nice people who think the universe is full of perfectly nice people." Hank McCoy is Scott Summers' "biggest brain and [his] oldest friend. Moment comes you have to take action, I'll never question it." Hank McCoy is "the most hard working, brilliant and heroic [person] I know." Hank McCoy is "a name well known in the great game of worlds. Others yous have done this before [...] simply evacuate this world, and then destroy it completely," rather than risk the destruction of two. Hank McCoy is "no killer [...] and no force, however great, could make you kill."

Hank is the man who reaches out to villains, and tries to help them. He did it with Wonder Man. He did it with Emma Frost. He did it with Infectia. Hank is the bleeding, dying heart of the X-Men. He believes in second chances. He believes in art, and literature, and music.

He doesn't believe in the law of the jungle.

I'd also like to point out, that even though he was called a traitor, and met with a frosty reception by the other X-Men when he asked for their help, he still came when they called for medical aid. He still held out hope that he and Scott would reconcile. He was one of the few people to look at the Phoenix Five and remember who they were before they got power, and believe that they could possibly control it. Even after Scott kills the Professor, even though Hank is furious with Scott, even though Scott literally says, "I've done abominable things. I don't ask for forgiveness. I don't deserve it. [...] But I'd do it all again"?

I guess you could read this a few different ways. Is Hank just pushing Scott out forcefully? Is he gentle? Is he squeezing his shoulder in a moment of what could almost be comfort? I don't know. I kinda think it's the latter. I think the best of Hank where I can.

"Thank god, Hank. You're alive. I was lost. I thought I killed y - "

Hank is still a man that Scott Summers wants to be alive, because Hank is good. Yeah, he can be FUCKING ANNOYING, and he can be hypocritical, and he can be an asshole, and he can be flawed, and he can be a nuisance, and he can be insufferable, but he is good.

Enter Brian Michael Bendis.

This is the point where Hank's character wrecks and arguably never recovers, to be honest. It's not just the small details. It's not just stupid things, like 17 year old Hank apparently being a medical doctor, or modern day super genius ultra mechanic Hank being incapable of putting a motorcycle back together for the sake of a joke. It's not even the egregious things, like Uncanny X-Men #600 and All-New X-Men #25 being a double header of literally everyone in the universe kicking Beast in the shins because Bendis wanted to write teenage Jean Grey as just the worst. It's just a fundamental misunderstanding of the character.

"Somewhere along the way you convinced yourself that your brilliance allows you the right to do whatever you want whenever you want to do it."

I'm sorry, fucking what?

If you're this far deep in this thesis - and it is a thesis, and I don't apologize for that - do you think this is the same character? This man who is obsessed with consequences, obsessed with guilt, obsessed with being perfect, obsessed with controlling himself, obsessed with morality . . . is convinced that he can do whatever he wants whenever he wants to do it? He learned this lesson 40 years ago! Beast is not like this!

Now, Bendis' Beast might be like this. But I have to ask you, reader, who presumably frequents comic book boards, or Reddit, or Tumblr tags, or Twitter . . . is Bendis the guy you go to for thoughtful, evocative, well considered characterisation? Is he on the level of Mark Waid, or Al Ewing, or Jonathan Hickman, or Grant Morrison, or Louise Simonson, or Marjorie Liu, or Rainbow Rowell, or Kelly Sue DeConnick? Is he known for respecting what came before and creating a throughline of character and continuity?

No, he fuckin' aint.

He's known for Bendis-speak. He's known for ignoring continuity. He's known for big shake-ups of established status quos that often leave characters in the doghouse for decades. Yeah, he can write some good comics, but I just - why is this man's characterisation of Beast considered the definitive one? Is the voice that shouts the loudest really the most articulate? Go ask a fan of the Scarlet Witch, or X-23, or Jon Kent, or GOTG fans about his entire run on that comic.

Beast wrecks here, and he never recovers. He loses his entire character development track about his mutation because it got changed. He loses his entire dynamic with Abigail. Everything good about 00s Beast is just gone, and there's nothing left to replace it but failure. Not really. Every now and then, someone tried to steer him back on the right path, get back to a more thoughtful, less dipshit Hank McCoy. A+X #12 by Christos Gage, and Uncanny Avengers by Jim Zub, both try the same trick, 4 years apart, having Hank reunite with his best friend Simon Williams and drink, and reflect on what's happened.

Each time, there's another crossover event that Hank has to answer for, because now Beast is the designated load. It happened in All-New X-Men, it happened in Black Vortex, it happened in IvX. It was just easy. He was never a guy with a massive fanbase, and all the casual fans filtered away as domino after domino falls. Every time, HOW DID I BECOME THIS?

Iunno. No-one seems to give enough of a fuck to answer the question. The real answer is that the writers need plot to happen, and, well.

Who cares if Beast is ruined? Well, I think Matthew Rosenberg cared a fair bit. I think Max Bemis cared quite a lot. I care, probably too much.

There are tons of little fun appearances here and there, mostly scattered across other books, that are more reminiscent of the Hank that used to be. Mariko Tamaki, in her last X-23 run, used him really nicely, having him take pictures of Laura and Gabby bonding, helping Laura run down immoral scientists (HA!), being a big man with a bigger bow tie. Being "the nerd I trust, so I like having him around," says Laura.

Hmm.

Well.

I have two points left to make. One? It is a stone cold, actual fact that we go from warm, intelligent, thoughtful, loved Beast, to Percy's narcissistic, cold, and genocidal war criminal in the space of maybe ten issues. The change was not gradual, it was abrupt. Read almost any comic prior to Krakoa featuring Beast in it, and he does not sound or act the same. Read the dialogue for X-Force #1 through 9, and tell me you can really tell that that's Beast.

Tell me that's the Hank McCoy that loves his human parents.

There's a reason everyone was speculating for the longest time that it was Dark Beast, or something else was afoot, because he sounds wrong. There's no jokes, no warmth, no charm, no energy. He's a slow, lifeless cadaver of a character, plodding along his course to become a Bond villain.

Two? There was a story to be told here. Hank has definitely toed the line a good few times before. Crossed it less times, but he did. Each time, it cost him. Each time, it hurt him. Each time, it left a scar upon his soul. Each time, maybe it got a little easier, but I don't genuinely think that's the case. I think that Hank McCoy is the kind of guy for whom it never gets easier to hurt people. The building blocks were there for a story where that man has to keep doing it, again and again, cutting away pieces of himself, because it's what Krakoa needs.

But that story would require sympathy, and I don't think that Ben Percy, "People who think that Beast is loveable have only read a small selection of comics," really has any sympathy for Beast. I think he finds him annoying. I think he finds him contemptible, and up himself. I think that Ben Percy believes that Beast is cold-hearted, cruel, endlessly self-justifying, unfunny, shortsighted, and overall, a bastard. I don't believe that was ever the case.

It makes me sad that the fandom believes that was ever the case.

His character was assassinated. It was assassinated back in 2013, and it's been being assassinated every month since 2019. The version of Beast that existed from 1981 to 2012 will be gone, dead - literally killed - when the classic version of him comes back at the end of X-Force. I liked the 1981-2012 version a lot. The version from 2012 to 2018, I liked a lot less. The version from 2019 onwards?

Don't go off vibes. Read the panels. Tell me what you think. Is that the same character?

Now we come to the end of my thesis. I feel like I've covered most of the main points here, but TL;DR?

Ben Percy's Beast doesn't work as a continuation of Hank's character, because his version of the character is an idiot. He is cruel, unfunny, lacking in any humanity, inherently evil, moustache twirling, disrespectful. He is without nuance. He is Mister Sinister in a blue fur coat without any of the camp.

The fact that people will go on Twitter or Reddit and say that they prefer this Beast over the old one makes me want to fucking spit because fuck you. Fuck you that you think that this travesty, this half-formed mish mash of Bond villain tropes and fat shaming stereotypes, is in any way better than what we had. Grow up. Read better comics. I hope to god you mature, because fuck, man.

Ben Percy's Beast doesn't work as a villain, either, because he's simultaneously incompetent, and yet constantly given karma houdinis that have no basis in his ability, only in the plot. Any semblance of grounding in the idea of 'necessary evils' is so fucking amateurish and put to paper with no real belief in it. Percy just thinks Beast is an asshole, it's as simple as that.

And you know what makes me feel vindicated? You know what makes me laugh?

Marvel really don't give a fuck about this version of Beast. They really just do not care and I get the distinct impression people can't wait for it to roll back. Don't believe me?

How come Nightcrawler is apparently gossiping with Hank in issues of She-Hulk that take place in the Krakoan era?

How come Hank is still appearing in Avengers and X-Men variant covers as his traditional, heroic self?

How come Marvel Age #1000, a self-styled "CELEBRATION OF THE MARVEL AGE OF COMICS," had an X-Men story that was about the O5 - and yet, really, it was about Jean and Scott falling in love, with Hank on the sidelines, gently nudging Jean in the right direction?

How come no-one appears to give a fuck that Beast, one of the pillars of the superhero community, killed a small country?

In-universe, there is no explanation. This is 'Blade begging Captain America and the Avengers to help kill all the vampires' level of disconnect. It makes everyone involved look like a goddamn psychopath.

Out of universe, it's because no-one is interested in this story. If writers other than Ben Percy wanted a villainous Hank McCoy, they would just use Dark Beast, because he's substantially more entertaining and charismatic and enjoyable as a villain than Percy's edgelord Beast.

Ben Percy is 44 years old, allegedly. I wouldn't know that, judging by the level of maturity with which he handles his villains. If he intended to write a mutant Henry Kissinger, then he failed, because Kissinger was pure evil, but he also, you know, made sense.

Percy's Beast is trash.

I write him on this blog with substantially more care and thought put into his character than Ben Percy ever could. Because even though I'm not the one getting paid to do so, I'm the one putting in the work to make it make emotional sense. There's a story there. There's a compelling character there. If only Ben would have put the fucking work in.

Thank you for your question. :)

[maysshortmoviereviews]

We Were the Lucky Ones (2024)

A Jewish family separated at the start of World War II is determined to survive and reunite.

A brilliant, thought-provoking, and extremely moving true story of a Jewish family during WWII. A quality production that is very impactful.

[naurasweetarudesu]

🎉🎈Happy 1.27🎈🎉

It's already 27th of January in my country. It's Sri's birthday! Have some hair down Sri to celebrate it.

Bonus: Old Lady Sri

[high-quality-tiktoks]

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Not to mention all the other stuff

[yellowocaballero]

I love how your Bruce is traditional but it is also like a mix of different types of traditional. Like he comes across as both "Rich white old money type" traditional AND "member of a marginalized minority group who take great pride in their identity to cope with years of ostracization and going "the world wanted me dead for my culture and religion so i might as well die loud and proud instead of conforming to their unachievable ideals" " traditional

Thank you for this ask, I really love it! I have a shitton to say on this topic, including a lot of worldbuilding decisions on Gotham cultures, immigrant spaces, segregation, how it ended up like 1920s-1930s NYC/Chicago mixed with my own city, Jason "Foil" Todd's Inferiority Complex, but that would make this depressingly long. Long time readers would know that I have, like, really complex and discrete religion headcanons for everybody I write. It's important.

Any decent Batman Story (TM) is about Gotham. It has to be a huge presence. It's like writing Dick Tracy without Chicago, or Cheers without Boston. When he's written well, Batman is a reflection of Gotham, and they metaphorically represent each other.

Most Batman writers get this, so there's always a lot of historical worldbuilding and everything. But I'm a community health person, and I grew up in the inner area of my own very large city, and creating a Gotham that feels real and rich is more complicated than the Court of Owls stuff. For me, cities are the intersection of culture, community, history, oppression/SES/war etc, and the modern day to day lives of people. When I want to make a rich city that was relevant and important to the story, I wanted to focus on immigrants and cultural minorities. You know - the people who create the cities lol. I decided on a history that involved the idea that Jewish families were the oldest in Gotham, and that they were one of the people to help create it and influence its culture.

I read a Daniel Handler quote just now that said "there is something naturally Jewish about unending misery". What is more Batman, Bruce, and Gotham than that, lol. The Jewish diaspora experience - the traditional history just as you outlined it in your ask - is baked into Gotham, it's the foundation. Gotham is a city of unending misery, but it's a city that stands tall. It takes a thousand hits and always gets back up again. People within it experience unending poverty and suffering, but they stand together. Just fucking refuse to die, as a whole. What's more Jewish than that! What is more Batman than that! Gotham should always be allegorical for Batman and Bruce, and through Gotham existing in that traditional Jewish experience, I think that's where you got the impression of Bruce as very traditional too.

Tim and the Drakes are the modern reflection of this. I was extremely explicit that Tim is alone in the world because of the Holocaust. I talk a lot in the story about how war and violence destroy children's lives, and that stretches back to the 1940s. About how war and violence creates violent children, which is what Tim became. His acting out was from the trauma of seeing his family slaughtered in front of him, and like a lot of people he used his religion to justify it.

There's a reason why the very first moment when Tim and Bruce actually connect as a family is when they find kinship and understanding through their shared backgrounds and values. They both saw their families slaughtered, they're both alone in the world - but they found each other, and they'll keep living.

OK BELIEVE IT OR NOT THAT'S THE SHORT VERSION. Seriously, though, I'm not. Uh. Actually fucking Jewish. This is like the fourth time I've talked out of my ass about this. I'm actually really interested in reading about the actual Jewish themes in Batman, because from what little I know they HAVE to be there. Any smart people out there who know about it, or who can link something written about it?

[houseofpinkboombox]

Leftist antisemites are such fucking clown shoes fucking bigots y'all wanna hear the latest?

Cool so this is Miriam Libicki

Her comics are based around basically the Jewish experience. Her own, and Holocaust survivors. She joined the IDF and now is a peace activist. If there's anything left to buy it if you can.

In her own words.

Now what does this mean for the ghoulish fucking cancel pigs bigots? It means they want her gone. You can't hate Jews in peace if one is around making you look fucking stupid, with being a literal peace activist and telling the story of Holocaust survivors.

She's Vancouver based and there was Vancouver Comics art festival...... I hope you can see where this is headed.

They banned her from the festival! Sighting I shit you fucking not "safety" of the other guests.

From a fucking peace activists. They have of course deleted it as it was wildly antisemitic and actionable.

I'm sure they're bailing out now like rats from a fucking ship.

Anyways if you're in Vancouver and are into comics stuff please don't support this bigoted fucking shit show. If you're feeling spicy their comments aren't locked yet on instagram fuck these clowns.

This woman is recording Holocaust victims stories and is a peace activist and didn't once look around and think:

Anyways fuck them Nazi clowns.

[doyouknowthisjewishcharacter]

Do you know this Jewish character?