#i also genuinely think there’s an argument for russia being in it

[larsnicklas]

btw the most annoying thing about the four nations cup or whatever they’re calling it is that of COURSE i’m going to watch it!! i’m just going to be so miffed the whole time that they didn’t make ANY effort to include any of the other countries. imagine hosting this thing IN BOSTON and the bruins’ BEST PLAYER isn’t able to play in it. in fact depending on your personal top ten lists nearly half of the best players in the nhl (kuch, drai, pasta, panarin) won’t be in this tournament!! when pasta said he probably won’t even watch, i FELT that

[heavens-roses]

A long rant related to some takes I've seen from anons from hotsystemtakes that are genuinely just racist. Hi, I'm a Native Hawai'ian + Asian mixed POC, and today, we are going to talk about cultural appropriation within the system community. For reference I was raised in a predominantly white city and moved to a small US city that's still predominantly white. While my small city does have at least 2 other hawai'ian families, it is still hard to ever see my culture. Whether it be through our names, our tattoos, traditional dances, our chants, or simply seeing other families and people who look like me. Now you might be wondering what does all of this have to do with me a random system on the internet who thinks telling to stop using closed names is stupid? Here is your answer.

For decades starting in the in 1860 my people's king Kamehameha signed a law to regulate our names. This law was not repealed till 1967. This meant our names that have a very deep spiritual and familiar connection to who we were as people was ripped away from us. Next we have laws against Chinese and Japanese immigrants who were often targeted for hate and bigotry. There is a reason #stopasian hate became a thing in the first place as we experience racism and culture appropriation too. There are also many other minorities who likely have had similar experiences such as having your voice not heard in the conversation of racism within the CDD community, having their cultural names stolen, microagressions, and many others. I mainly mentioned my culture as well as Asian culture simply because those are the groups I typically fall under and I have a closer connection to.

You see all of this was not because our people were bad or because our cultures were wrong in any way. It's because our cultures, our lives, our beliefs were a threat to white folks. You now praise and love to fetisize each of us in your own way. You think now that we have a bigger population that it's ok, you can use our names that have genuine deep meaning to our people simply because you are an introject and have CDD. I've talked to many of my aunties and uncles*[1] about having haoles*[2] name themselves our names. We not only find it extremely disrespectful but to us shows the true lack of understanding for our culture. Our names are not simply given to us for no reason. Each was created us as individuals, we might be named after our grandparents, be given names after big parts of our lives, have names are also linked to our mana*[3] and who we are.

You claim you care about POC and to have our issues heard, yet when it comes to your own racism you are ignorant. You throw out that Kai is a name from many cultures and while while it's true. You should not use Kaimana as a name because it's not open for haoles to use freely. Yuri, a common name in both Japan as well as Russia + Ukraine, does not mean it is now suddenly open for non Japanese, Russian, and Ukrainians people. You still need a tie to those cultures in order for you to use it.

If you are white, I'm not sorry to say you're not allowed to have any conversation in our cultures names and who is allowed what. There are plenty of open culture names, whether they are Irish names, Scottish, Latin, Italian, French, and many more. Stop your damn bitching about but but my name is apart of your identity as a part/alter when you are literally ignoring our culture and history. Suck it up all you sound like is a whiney coloniser, an appropator, and most of all, someone who gives no respect for cultures that you were never a part of. I've seen this argument for the last 3 years of being out as a system. If you even as another minority can not respect someone else's culture and traditions, you can shut up and keep it to yourself. Also yes even if you are apart of a different minority group you are suddenly not exempt from being racist and appropriating cultures.

[1] not literal uncles/aunts - in my culture to refers to those older men/women who are hawai'ian or are apart of our culture

[2] a hawai'ian word for foreigners often times white people

[3] Mana is a Polynesian word for energy, spirit, power, and many more words. It's often spiritual in nature and is all around us.

[weiszklee]

I wonder how other internet commies square their principled opposition to US sanctions against e.g. Cuba with their support for the BDS call for sanctions against Israel.

Like, you could just say "sanctions for good causes good, sanctions for bad causes bad", but the typical line against sanctions I see is much more general, that it's an injustice to punish the general population, to cause widespred misery on purpose.

I guess with Israel being more democratic, you could argue that sanctions against Israel have a realistic chance of succeeding, of pushing Israel towards peace, at which point the sanctions could be lifted again, long before the longterm effects would immiserate the population. That these sanctions would not be a punishment of innocents therefore. But that would be a bit of a funny argument, wouldn't it? It's like saying: Sanctions are only bad when they don't work. Which is not how we usually formulate our principles.

As I have expressed before, I am highly skeptical that BDS has any chance of ever becoming mainstream, and so I think it does not serve a strategic goal at all, it only serves as another of the many purity tests which have become the social glue of nominally progressive circles as of late. Paired with the (genuinely unjust!) persecution and defamation of BDS as antisemitic, it really is a perfect means of identity formation. And who needs consistency when you have identity?

But that is quite a cynical view. I wonder if there is a non-cynical way to resolve the contradiction.

Cuba is of course an extreme example, it's more of an embargo really. But I have also seen opposition to sanctions against Russia for example, and not just from Comintern-LARPers, but simply because sanctions deliberately target uninvolved civilians. And not every BDS supporter is a "settlers don't count as civilians" would-be-Red-Guard. So I think there really is a contradiction there.

[chamerionwrites]

i genuinely did not intend for my previous ask to come off as accusatory. i have ASD and have problems conveying and interpreting tone, so if it seemed like i was trying to paint you as something you’re not then i sincerely apologize. you are, however, correct in pointing out that there’s a lot frustration tied to the topic for me, as i’ve time and time again seen people use innocuous-sounding statements about the importance of not being judgmental wrt:kinks as a fig leaf for their habitual pushing of survivors’ boundaries on topics like rape and things like “consent play,” “raceplay,” “ageplay,” etc. as a survivor myself i find much of this stuff extremely triggering, and i’m tired of seeing people whose blogs are plastered with things like simulated SA and CSAM take advantage of others’ good faith when they say things like “don’t judge people for taboo kinks,” knowing that most will assume they mean stuff like vore or inflation or whatever. i’m trying to imply that you are one of those people, but i don’t think people realize how generally positive statements like “don’t judge others’ kinks” can be co-opted by those with harmful intentions.

So first I want to say that it's understandable for these subjects to be emotionally taxing (and yeah, triggering), and also that it's kind of a lot to deal with in the space of a Tumblr post. I'm going to try to be both careful and somewhat concise - and sometimes those things can be read as condescending and curt. I appreciate your clarification, I'm trying to answer sincerely, and it is not my intention to come across as either of those things.

Also, we live in the worst timeline where when people say "CSA" they can mean anything on the gamut from horrible crimes such as actual children being assaulted, to ~horrible crimes~ such as having sex ed books in the library or, you know, gay people existing in public. I'm going to assume that you are neither asking me about irl child abuse nor about some cute picture book where two ladies hold hands. My impression from everything you've said here and in the other ask is that your frustrations are centered around people having kinks or sexual fantasies that have something to do with pain/violence/consent/age/etc, and also artistic depictions of sexual violence and/or of underaged characters in sexual situations (again, I'm not certain how broadly you define this; I've seen people object vehemently to coming of age novels that include teenagers having sex, or to eroticized fan art of grown-up versions of young characters). If that general outline of your concerns is off-base somehow, I apologize for misunderstanding.

With those caveats out of the way, there are basically three points I want to touch on:

Point #1 is that all kinds of good/true/useful statements can be and often are co-opted by people with harmful ideas and/or intentions, and that this is not a reflection on the validity of the original statement. It's unsettlingly common for people to advance violently racist arguments about population control on the basis that climate change is happening. This doesn't mean that climate change isn't happening, or that anybody who says "climate change is happening" is responsible for every conceivable way that someone could twist that statement for their own ends. Russian war propaganda (and I am singling out Russia because it's a very current example, but arguments in this vein are a staple of war propaganda generally) says that because neo-nazis exist and are bad (true!), invading Ukraine is good (no). Obviously I'm sketching very quick and broad outlines here because neither of those topics is what we're actually discussing, but I think you can see the point I'm making. It's totally understandable to be frustrated when people twist good arguments for bad ends, but that's not a reason to reject those arguments out of hand.

Point #2 is that "triggering" is a morally neutral descriptor. A lot of people - for fairly obvious and sympathetic reasons - find this hard to swallow. But if you reflect on specific scenarios it comes into focus pretty quickly; someone who was badly bitten by a neighbor's pet may find dogs triggering, but this doesn't make you a bad person for posting pictures of your puppy. A lot of people are triggered by really mundane and innocuous things that - at least to a casual observer - have no clear connection to the trauma itself. Plenty of people are triggered by stuff that's not just innocuous but generally agreed upon to be nice: birthdays, a kiss on the forehead, the smell of a certain food cooking. That's just how trauma works. We put trigger warnings on things so that people can make informed decisions about whether to avoid them or to brace themselves, not to mark those things as inherently immoral and tainted.

What I'm driving at here is that people can have every valid reason for being upset by something without it automatically following that the thing which upset them shouldn't exist. It is 100% understandable for survivors (or anyone else for that matter) to be disturbed by a rape scene in a film/show/book/whatever. That doesn't mean that it's morally wrong to write a rape scene; art is a means of discussing the human experience, some people writing those scenes have experienced rape, and all of us live with rape culture and have thoughts and emotions and experiences pertaining to it. That also doesn't mean that tasteless or exploitative or just plain bad art does not exist, or cannot be criticized as such. It means these things have to be judged on a case by case basis - how art handles sensitive subjects, not just the fact that it chooses to explore them - and that sometimes people are going to disagree about those judgments. That in itself can be scary and upsetting to come to terms with, and I get it. It's comforting to have hard and fast rules. It is so much easier to just say "nobody should ever write a rape scene" and be done with it. But imo that would hurt at least as many people as it helped - and most likely far more. If anything is shaming and silencing and soul-crushing to trauma survivors, in my experience, it is the insistence that to speak openly about violence is itself a form of violence.

Crucially, none of that means that you can't have boundaries. Anyone who insists on pushing those boundaries is absolutely and unequivocally in the wrong. At the same time, it's important to recognize that a boundary is a fence that you place around yourself, not a cage that you can order everybody else to stay inside. You're well within your rights to (eg) not read or discuss Lolita, but you can't ban other people from reading Lolita or discussing it in a public space like Tumblr.

Finally, Point #3: you are far from alone in being (at best) grossed out by certain kinks. You are not wrong that people can be pressured and coerced into things that they don't really want to do (which is equally true of the most vanilla of vanilla sex; in fact, if I had to guess, I'd wager that far more people have been pressured into sex acts that are commonly viewed as '''normal,''' specifically because they're viewed as normal - and thus mandatory, or at least weird to quibble about). And you are also not wrong that we live in a society. Of course kink does not exist in a vacuum. In the aforementioned rape culture, for example, it would be genuinely astonishing if a lot of people DIDN'T ever get their wires crossed between fear-arousal and sex-arousal and then fantasize about coercive or violent scenarios. To use a less loaded example, I think if you took a poll you could probably find a good number of people who at a formative age watched some film or other in which a sweaty handsome action hero got tied to a chair, and found that it Awakened Something in them. For that matter I don't even think something as simple as the number of people who get completely undone about boobs (as opposed to some other body part or erogenous zone) is entirely uninfluenced by the way women's bodies - and sexuality in general - are represented in pop culture.

And with all that said...human brains are individualized and complex and frequently pretty strange. Of course kink is influenced by the society we live in...but how exactly that influence plays out, how logical or 1:1 it is, is also individualized and complex and often strange. The primal monkeybrain is sometimes MUCH better at distinguishing different intensities of sensation/emotion than distinguishing different types of sensation/emotion (people cry when they're sad but also when they're furious, or frightened, or delighted, or deeply moved - or sometimes after really good sex, for that matter). Libido often operates very much in the realm of metaphor. Plenty of people do not literally want to fuck monsters, but are really into the rush of danger or the recognition of self in the other or just the idea of desire existing outside the limits of what is '''supposed''' to be desirable. Plenty of people do not literally want to be eaten, but really like the idea of being consumed.

All of which is to say that the reason people are reluctant to be judgmental about kink isn't that it's some magical zone where the rules of critical thinking don't apply. It's that you can't critically evaluate something when you're missing a ton of context, if you haven't been invited into somebody's bedroom you often are missing a ton of context on the whys and hows of what they're into, and there's no way you can demand someone explain all the fine details of their sex life to you without being the bad guy (that's, y'know, sexual harassment). I think it'd be pretty naive to say that nobody has ever kinked on something for cruel or dehumanizing reasons. I also think that cruelty and dehumanization are bad independent of how they're expressed. Abuse is wrong whether the perpetrator is as vanilla as a bottle of extract or the kinkiest person on the planet.

Does that make sense? What I'm saying is that all the potential ins and out of individual human sexuality between enthusiastically consenting adults are way above my pay grade, and what matters is that someone treats their partners (and also people they aren't sleeping with) respectfully and kindly. I don't think there's a world where somebody is into something specifically as a tool to mistreat people that doesn't lead to anyone being mistreated. And I think that sort of thing - actions, end results - is what's most feasible to judge if you don't want to be in the business of prosecuting thoughtcrimes.

Which I recognize is probably not the answer you were after, and like I said I think it's fully understandable to wish for a much more clean-cut and comforting answer when grappling with pretty fraught subjects. But I do think that even if you disagree with EVERYTHING else that I've said here, the basic stance that you're asking me about remains true: normal ≠ moral. Weirdness ≠ violence. Even in your ask above, you've drawn a distinction between non-normative behavior that you see as basically harmless and non-normative behavior that you see as harmful. Which says that we're in agreement that the fundamental question is whether someone's behavior is harmful, not whether someone's behavior is transgressive of social norms.

[irithnova]

More aph Mongolia headcanons:

Nowadays he is pretty chill/nonchalant but can come off as a bit aloof to a lot of people.

Resting bitch face 😍 Nah but he isn't really one to smile often. He probably gives other nations the classic "awkward smile you give to your coworker" smile sometimes when walking past them but you really need to say/do something hilarious to get a smile out of him.

Whether he is more smiley or not depends on what nations he's interacting with though.

Despite seeming aloof to people he is genuinely quite warm and down to earth once you actually start talking to him. It's just that in large groups he's more of an observer during group conversations and only really speaks up when he feels like he needs to.

This might give people the impression that he's shy but really he's just taking all the information in.

He's pretty politically savvy and is good at managing his foreign relations well for the most part! (for example, the landlocked between Russia and China situation and Mongolia's special relationship with North Korea).

Actually takes pride in his long and healthy hair a lot but doesn't really bring it up, he waits for others to mention it before he starts talking about it and how he maintains it haha.

He can be quite charismatic when needed in certain situations (trust me he knows how far charisma can get someone)

Can act like a bit of a boomer (I consider him an ancient but he's kind of one of the babies in the ancient nation grouping) sometimes towards things like texting, for example he probably complains when people use shortforms of words because he doesn't fully know all the shortforms.

In addition I headcanon him to be a tiny bit of a boomer about religion. He's definitely not as religious as say, Tibet, but he probs is a tad disappointed about the younger generations turning away from Buddhism (one of my friends who's from Mongolia told me apparently halloween was banned in some schools because it was distracting kids from Buddhism or something??).

However he is all for religious freedom sooo if they don't wanna do that they shouldn't feel obligated to.

Despite what I've just said about his boomer shenanigans, I don't think Mongolia is totally adverse to/hates technology! He's not as technology crazy as China but come on its not like he doesn't know how to use a phone or computer lol. Plus many Mongolian nomads have adapted new technologies to their way of life anyways (like the use of solar panels and TVs, plus so many nomads are on tiktok?!)

So I like to think he is interested in new technologies actually but isn't really an enthusiast like other nations. He definitely likes/finds comfort in the traditional way of life but also isn't stuck in the past. Though he does ask for South Korea's help with some things sometimes hahah.

Probably sends good morning texts like this to nations he likes:

No he does not translate it for them

I don't headcanon him as super mega depressed about his current situation and to an extent he is grateful that he's still even around. But I think it's unrealistic to say that there are things which won't get him down y'know? A lot has happened since the 13th century and not of all it has been good.

So while he does have bad memories and there are the obvious struggles of being a nation, I think he has a lot of resilience. Some people think that resilience means that you aren't bothered by hard times at all, but to me it means despite the hard times affecting/hurting you, you keep pushing forward.

Umm he loves watermelon. I've heard Mongolians really like watermelon??

Best throat singer on this planet I will die on this hill

Gives performances at naadam and wrestling events

Probably gets into regular arguments with his government tbh

This sounds weird but I think he actually kind of enjoys bickering with China sometimes (and vice versa). He'd be like "well I'm bored, I'm gonna go and pick a fight with China now."

Russia + Mongolia = alcoholic pair 😍

Nah but on a more serious note, he's not scared of Russia but he just finds interacting with him awkward sometimes. Plus he catches himself doing things like using a cloth to wipe crumbs off of Russia's face, and only then realises afterwards that what he did was odd LMAO.

Is close to South Korea and they talk on the phone often, most of the time it's just him listening as South Korea babbles on about his day but he quite enjoys it.

Close to North Korea too and defends him whenever someone says something bad about him in a conversation. Really cares about him.

He and Japan are buddies!! Okay the invasions of Japan were embarrassing and there was also Khalkin Gol (World War 2) but honestly they have the same kind of interests? Wrestling for example. There are many Mongolians who go into sumo actually and two of the best sumo wrestlers/yokozunas (Asashoryu and Hakuho) are from Mongolia! So they probably watch sumo matches with each other.

Also Mongolian dominance in sumo is just funny as hell BYE

Mongolia + China = divorced as fuck 😍💅 and China took the kids

Most divorced mfs in Asia

Russia and China enjoy annoying him sometimes by taking his glasses off of his face or randomly grabbing his braid.

If he's not Tibet's husband then they're at least extremely close with one another. Bro the title "Dalai Lama" exists because of Mongolia😔✌️ they're each others confidants and tell each other their deepest darkest secrets 😍

He and India are pretty close too!! They have a long history with each other and have backed each other up in more modern history!

I think he and Vietnam actually get along tbh. I've said in my ship post that I ship him with her and yeah they both admire and recognise each others resilience plus Mongolia respects her for beating his ass 😍 plus I saw a really interesting picture of Mongolians protesting the war in Vietnam!

Some translations: "Americans, take your claws away from Vietnam!"

"People of Vietnam always win!" (hahah)

"American imperialists stop bombing Vietnam!"

Also apparently quite a few Mongolians studied in Vietnam back then and vice versa (socialist era). Sorry they're just so powerful together!

Isn't as close with the central Asian nations as he feels like he should be? Though officially he is classified as an East Asian country, Mongolian culture is very different compared to those in the Sinosphere and is more similar to the central Asians, especially Kazakhstan. There's just not enough trade and politics going on between them for him to interact with them much but he does like them.

However I do think he is friends with Kazakhstan. In Western Mongolia, there is the Bayan-Olgii province, and this is where many Kazakhs fleed to, to escape the Russians! Since then, Kazakhs who live in far west Mongolia have maintained their traditional/original Kazakh lifestyle while Kazakhstan itself became quite Russified. I think Kazakhstan likes to visit there every so often to see how they're doing and Mongolia accompanies him.

He's really good friends with Turkey but REFUSES to wrestle with him (he has seen those Turkish oil wrestling videos and is terrified)

There's literally a joint Mongolian-Turkish school in Mongolia called "MonTurk" (full version "Mongolian-Turkish highschool") omg their ship name 😍

I think he probably tells Turkey to tell Turks to stop spamming any video to do with Mongolian culture with Turkish flags tho (in a jokey way of course)

The meme that influenced this headcanon:

Plus I've seen it a lot anyways lol

I think, when he gets the opportunity to, he likes to visit the Dakha people. These are the reindeer herders of Mongolia and they have such a fascinating lifestyle!

When things are really bad with his government he probably just. Rides out into the steppe and stays with random families until he's mentally ready to return

About his bodytype. For one yes I headcanon him as tol and I will die on this hill😔 but also I don't think he'd be skinny? I don't think he'd be fat/overly chubby either (using those terms in a descriptive sense, not a derogatory one). I do think he'd have more bodyfat on him compared to the other East Asians but he also has muscle/muscle definition which balances it out nicely if that makes sense. He's not like, ripped hahah no but he does look physically strong.

I've said this before but face scars>> hot and yes he has a nice tan

He does have red cheeks but they're less apparent now that he's not a nomad 24/7 anymore, they become more apparent when he comes back from trips he goes on during his breaks when he goes out into the countryside.

Probs invites some nations over to celebrate tsagaan tsar (Mongolian New year) with him if they have the time like Tibet, India, South Korea etc.

South Korea probably tries to lecture him sometimes if he says something that's not very politically correct hahah

Pretends he doesn't know what Kpop is to annoy South Korea. Secretly actually enjoys some songs.

Loves loves loves tea like I was watching a video about Mongolian milk tea and the dude said that like, there's a Mongolian quote about how a man can go a few days without food but not one day without tea?? Hahah

Probably finds attending the Chinese New year parties that China hosts a bit awkward and usually just let's others do the talking/listens to others conversations.

Umm feeds stray cats/dogs in Ulaanbaatars ger district (apparently there's more strays in this area) he just can't help himself 😔❤️

[eccentrickleptomaniac]

im gonna ask you to share your poland headcanons :]

WAHAHAHA ANNOOOOOOON THANK YOUUUU IVE WANTED TO TALK ABOUT HER FOREVER

ohwhere do i start... i suppose i'll talk about her personality first?

ok so let me set the record straight. she is a bitch. she's incredibly stubborn and once her mind is on something it's incredibly difficult to get her to change it, even if she knows its wrong. she enables the worst in people and rewards them for it. you know that one scene in angels in america where roy and belize are arguing about azt and roy starts hurling slurs at belieze and once belize does the same roy gives him the azt? yeah poland would do that. she will start fighting with anyone to bring them to their breaking point. it's a skill she learned while still in the same house with the bastard known as the ussr.

speaking of, she hates russia more than anyone. genuinely. it's actually kind of scary how far it goes. she pretty much allout refuses to speak with his friends and if she seems him, hoo boy you better be ready to hold her down. the hatred, i suppose its justified considering the.. how do i put this Hostile and imperial history between the two. i genuinely believe the last time the two ever had a positive interaction was during smolensk and even that was only because at first russia was the only one around to comfort her.

ok lets talk about her with closer friends.. while yes she fucking loves to push people's buttons when alone with someone she likes shes actually a very understanding and loyal person. she will actually listen to you rant about something you're passionate about for hours. if you are in trouble she will be the first to help you. however, if you look at her funny please know you've made an enemy for life. she holds long and petty grudges unapologetically.

speaking of pettyness, lets talk about the ussr and her relationship with him. i think about them a lot just because they hate eachother so much. completely genuinely i believe she only stayed in the warsaw pact for two reasons: to somehow destroy the ussr oh and also taking care of eg since shes still a teenager. im like, 99% sure the two got into arguments daily. they genuinely hate eachother more than anyone, and whatever the fuck perestroika didn't help. at best she was tolerant of him, at worst she was actively trying to kill him. she hates him for everything he stands for as well as his treatment of eg. despite her thing for long and petty grudges, she could tell that that girl could do no wrong from the start. the two have a very mother-daughter like relationship

she has both of her wings and they work just fine! although for a long time they didnt lol. i believe during ww2 they got fucked up during the destruction of warsaw (since that was pretty much the moment that armie krawoja lost its footing and poland became a guaranteed soviet puppet state after the war) and it took until her eventual leaving of the warsaw pact for them to be fully functional again. it's a fun little metaphor for freedom, i guess.

the cross she wears on her neck isn't actually because she's super religious. it was originally a small postwar act of spite against the soviet union, but eventually it kinda just became part of her outfit. she still isn't super religious, most countries arent due to their inherent personification of a whole ass landmass. unless it's like, the vatican or something JAJA

she is a hardcore alcoholic. it's, uh, not good, but it has quite literally been going on since pre-interwar. although she has gotten better with not downing like, 3 bottles of vodka in 1 sitting. she mostly just drinks beer at this point, unless she's like, really stressed for whatever reason. hey, old habits die hard. if i were being constantly harassed and assaulted by my neighbors i too would probably have some sort of addiction to a substance at this point. a random poland fun fact, the national drink is vodka.

her signature item (an item of which a country has associated themselves with and can now summon at will) is a hussar sabre as gifted to her by her father (the polish-lithuanian commonwealth). she cherishes it greatly and can use the sword quite well in combat. 10/10 would bring it to a gunfight.

due to her time spent in annexation for like, 100 years, she's pretty good at playing piano. on her spare time she'll play it rather leniently. admittedly, she doesn't have many hobbies. she sort of reads most of the day when not out with people.

wait how have i got this far without talking about her friends. she's good friends with the folk in the lublin triangle (lithuania (whos also her sister lol) and ukraine) and the visegrad group (czechia, slovakia, hungary) as well as all formerly in the eastern bloc. she would die for them and genuinely wishes nothing but the best for them. theyre also one of the few people who can actually tolerate her for long periods of time.

while it doesn't tend to show, she is very wary of france and britain specifically due to ww2. france especially, actually, considering the whole duchy of warsaw situation. for a long time she genuinely believed france was going to help her get her freedom. as you can see, that did not turn out, and nowadays the relationship between the two tends to be strained, only amplified by the russo-ukrainian war. she tends to interject on anything france is saying in an eu meeting with a sarcastic remark, especially if it's about war. she doesn't forget and she doesn't forgive.

uhhh i hope this suffices? i felt like this basically the entire time i was writing this

edit nope nvm im adding more i forgot to talk about interwar poland

ok so. interwar and postwar poland are basically two seperate people at this point. like, not literally, poland didnt fucking die in the war lol but personality and appearancewise they're completely different. as opposed to current poland's rather brash, loud, and belligerent personality, interwar poland was very quiet. he's much closer to that "fanon" poland. while, yeah he still was pretty fierce. it was much harder to get him to that point than it is now. he was pretty pacifistic all things considered.. he also at the time worked at a library doing archival things.. nowadays her job primarily consists of doing paperwork, which she doesn't mind all that much all things considered.

edit 08/08/23: her """"government assigned"""" username is probableLiability.

[questioningalllifechoices]

i was thinking about s5 and now i’ve got too many things in my head that i need to get out. so without further ado, this is a list of things im excited/worried to see play out next season…

1. wills connection with the upside down and vecna. we know it’s a hive mind and it’s all connected so with will being in that connection, what’s gonna happen when the UD dies? is the connection just gonna wither away? is will gonna become the ruler of the UD? is will gonna die??? are they gonna somehow sever the connection before killing vecna? is the UD always going to exist therefore the connection is always going to exist? like i’m genuinely worried about all of these possibilities, I NEED ANSWERS!!!

2. the painting. i could truly see an argument happening about it but i could also see mike breaking down over it. let me explain, he trusts will more than anyone with his vulnerability. he could possibly see it as will was lying to him about everything rather than just who the feelings are actually from. if they go this route, mikes gonna question hisself and his relationship with will but in possibly the worst way. they made amends before the whole painting confession thing so mike more than likely thinks they were doing good! but then will turns around and lies about el’s feelings for mike to hide his own. meaning when he finds out the truth, mike might see it as will doesn’t trust him or doesn’t see him as worthy enough to be vulnerable around when in all actuality will was just scared which could also be used for mike to put himself down, unfortunately. (this one isn’t as articulate as the former but i tried my best to explain it properly)

3. el’s storyline. they’ve basically taken everything from her besides the fact that they’ve given her hopper back and an actual family. i want more than anything for her to find her independence and i truly hope that she has a happy ending. she deserves it just as much as will does.

4. max. as someone who is partially blind im kind of anxious but excited to see how they go about showing her with that type of disability if they decide to go that route.

5. dustin’s trauma. they’ve yet to address it so i’m a bit worried they might not even think of doing so in the last season. i mean the poor kid is the only one besides el who has actually directly killed a person. he watch one of the men he looked up to die and actually held him as he did along with that, they’re probably going to kill steve off(god, i hope not but still). he has an absent father. i mean we know little to nothing about his life outside of the party whereas we know about wills life as well as mikes, lucas’ max’s and el’s. all we know is he doesn’t have a dad present and he lives with his mother and their cat…it truly feels like they’ve neglected his character at least a little bit so i hope we get to see more of his backstory or an exploration of his character in s5.

5. i have a feeling steve and possibly robin are going to die. i stg if they kill them i’ll burn netflix to the ground!

6. ms. kelley. im convinced she’s got something to do with everything. going by her being connected to everyone that was targeted by vecna and the fact she’s also got a clock thingy around her neck the theory of her working with vecna or something isn’t too far fetched!

7. mike being targeted or something because he’s been in vecnas way for the past 4 seasons. he always messes up his plans in some kind of way wether intentional or not.

8. im excited to see how lonnie is going to play into all this going from that picture from the set. hopefully it’s a form of revenge for will(not that i think he’s capable of doing something that “evil” but why not?) and not because of will getting vecna’d.

9. the russia plot. there’s no way in hell the russian government is going to let the russia group get away with what an all they did.

10. i swear if they bring stancy back i hate to say it but i actually do hope they kill steve off. if they put him through all of that character development just to put him back with nancy then what was really the point?? like seriously he’s better off by himself than with her considering how she hurt him. it would be a disservice to both of their characters and jonathan’s to make them endgame.

11. this should probably be higher up on the list but oh well, im concerned about how they’re going to go through with byler. i have no doubt in my mind that there’s going to be byler endgame BUT i hope they make mike make the first move for the simple fact that the homophobic portion of the GA would completely rip will to shreds if he were to do something first. they’d say he forced mike or made him uncomfortable or that mike just went along with it to be nice or some shit and i really don’t wanna hear that.

that’s all for now. this is honestly a complete mess but i think it’s coherent enough to be understood lmao.

[coldgoldlazarus]

So... I don't agree with Lilith Farren on a lot of things but she's spot on about the RWDE being full of it. I mean, they want to make her out as the real bigot while not once looking at the company they keep. Even if Lilith holds these secret prejudices... she's got the real receipts on them.

I've generally avoided talking about this, but here we go, I guess.

I'm so fucking tired of receipts, and discourse, and debating whether or not RWBY is good, (it's not perfect, neither is it the animated spawn of satan or whatever) or debating whether or not Rooster Teeth is evil, (they are, but they ain't special) or the suspecting everyone and their mother of secretly being a bigot or creep over their opinions on fiction, and just the endless pointless fighting over shit that really doesn't matter at the end of the day.

The world is burning down around us, queer people are under constant fucking attack, racism and antisemitism are having a resurgence, (not that they ever really went away in the first place,) the politics of imperial countries like Britain and America and Russia still have outsized ability to ruin the lives of people all over the rest of the world, and neoliberal capitalism is slowly killing us all with the constant monetization of basic survival. And yet, some people apparently have nothing better to do with their lives than either bitch about a show, or bitch about the people bitching about a show. It's so. Fucking. Asinine.

I will be honest, I do not particularly like or respect Lilith Fairen, any more or less than the 'rwde' people she's constantly picking fights with. I did follow her for a while at the start of 2021, because I was in a different headspace back then and that stuff felt like it mattered more, but honestly? Even when I was following her and considered her 'cool', something didn't sit right with me about the way she talked.

Whenever she was dunking on rwde takes, there was an even mix of really strong points she made, and arguments made purely using in-universe information without considering the OOU reasons for those things, then needlessly hostile assumptions being made about the other party. Sometimes they were retroactively validated, but not always, and either way they were usually completely insane things you would't just assume of someone out of the fucking blue.

It's really only since the big RT controversy that the why has come into focus. Because at the end of the day, with her response to that it's become clear to me that she cares about RWBY and defending everything about it, even the genuinely bad stuff, more than she cares about real people. She talks the social justice talk, but does not walk the walk.

I don't completely agree with the people who have gone the other extreme as a result of the controversy and insist continued engagement with the show makes you just as bad, (because like I said, RT are awful, but they aren't special in this) but I do still get where they're coming from and agree with them on not supporting RT financially in any way anymore. (Whether V10 should or shouldn't be greenlit, I'm still conflicted on, but also that's ultimately out of my hands to decide, so I plan to just roll with whatever does or does not happen there.)

LF's response, from what I saw, (for better or worse, I wanted to see how she was faring after the news broke and still offer some kindness if needed, hoping to see better of her I guess, so I logged out to go check her blog since I was blocked by that point) was to wring her hands a bit about how this would impact the show, then insist rwde were to blame somehow and go right back to her usual behavior.

Do I think she's secretly bigoted or something? Not really. (And the recent claim by someone that she was totes a neo-nazi definitely raised some eyebrows as a result, that's a very serious claim to make.) I don't think she has the capacity to care enough about real-world issues to have those kinds of beliefs, honestly. And on the flipside, I don't think she cares about social justice as much as she claims to; it's all props for her to justify harassing people over a show.

Which brings me to the other big reason I don't particularly care for her, which is her behavior in the magical girl community. I won't belabor the point, since I really don't want to make this some big callout post, (deserved or not, those have already been made about her, and I don't like the concept either way) but between her awful takes on PMMM and fans thereof, and actual harassment campaign against the creators of Sleepless Domain, she's been consistently pretty unpleasant-at-best over here.

I don't disagree with everything she's ever said, and I do agree that a lot of the post-Madoka grimdark Magical Girl trend has been pretty bad on the whole, (though at least some good stuff has come of it, like Symphogear) but her hardline refusal to see anything good in it, along with her sometimes completely insane bad-faith readings of Madoka in particular, is such an ironic echo of the same sort of behavior she claims to hate about rwde. And even then, it would be fine, if annoying, if she didn't then also go and mistreat people over it. It really boils down to the same thing as with RWBY, just in the opposite direction; "I like this show, show is good, people who don't like the show are bad and evil" and "I hate this show, show is bad, people who like the show are bad and evil", and then using social justice language to justify and prop up her arguments.

It was all that stuff, not so much the RWBY discourse, that led to my disillusionment with her, and her eventually blocking me. I guess if one good thing came of it, was spite powering me to work on my own magical girl stuff again, and the resurrection of a friend's dormant story that I proofread for. But on the whole, that period of life where I was really paying attention to what she had to say, just feels now like a waste of time.

I don't hate her, and I don't think she's secretly evil or whatever like that one person suggested, and I definitely don't think she should be harassed, despite her own behavior. I just think she's a kinda mediocre human being who really needs to get her priorities straight, and probably work through some insecurity issues or something. (It's not my place to diagnose, but like, therapy could probably help with whatever she has going on, if she ever becomes receptive enough for it to work.) As much as rwde people can annoy me too, her whole moral crusade against them feels like a waste of time and energy that could better go to other, bigger things, and her moral crusade against dark (or even moderately-toned like Sleepless Domain) Magical Girl stuff, her response to the RT controversy, and how she ignores or speaks for other marginalized people, shows it all to be ultimately hollow and shallow, more about opinions on some shows she likes or hates, than anything meaningful.

In the end, she's just not worth my time.

[yesterdayiwrote]

What are your thoughts if you don't mind, on the whole debate going around Lando being a cleaner driver than George? Yes, George has had various incidents this year, some leading to the other driver retiring. I can't help but maybe think that George hasn't any experience fighting in the f1 midfield yet? so he is overdoing and just needs to learn? Where Lando has had 4 years and has managed no incidents in that time.

I do not mind at all although I don’t know that I have a particularly clear answer for it!

I think you’re partly right, whilst George and Lando have been in F1 for the same amount of time, their experiences have vastly differed during that time.

George always was an incredibly clean racer. Like there’s genuinely very few examples of any actual collisions in his career (especially big ones) up until Imola last year, and even that was a one off last year.

This year he’s fighting at the front for the first time, and yeah he’s made some scrappy moves because that Williams taught him nothing about wheel to wheel racing and it’s the one area where Mercedes is going to be his first opportunity to hone it, but I also think it’s fair to say the handful of incidents he’s had this year have been a) relatively minor and b) never entirely his fault (I’m discounting the Singapore stuff because the wet was a factor in those). There’s a definite argument that he’s been unlucky in some penalties as other drivers have come out after both Austria and COTA and said they felt they should have been racing incidents. It doesn’t really help his situation that that W13 sounds like a dog of a car to handle.

Lando may have less incidents to speak of, but George now has more podiums in one year than Lando has in his whole career. George is very strong on strategy calls, Lando… well we all saw Russia last year 😬

Unfortunately, being a ‘clean’ racer doesn’t really end up counting for much so it’s something of a moot point. They all have different areas that they’re strong in. I’m not really sure why everyone is so desperate to pit George and Lando against each other constantly. They all have bad races or bad seasons or bad moments. Alex had some horrific moments back in RB, but I wouldn’t class him as a dirty racer. Lewis has had some scrappy seasons but again he’s not overwhelming seen as dirty (by anyone rational at least). It just amazes me that George has had a genuinely amazing season and people are suddenly turning the narrative 180 off the back of a dodgy double header and a couple of really marginal minor collisions.

I think social media has a lot to answer for (and Christian Horner running his mouth last year). People have absolutely lost the plot where collisions are concerned, and rather than accepting that they are a part of racing, there’s this hunger to assign blame for all of them and view them all through a clear cut, black and white lens of good guy and bad guy. Fans on Twitter have absolutely no ability to find nuance in these things and it’s part of why the discourse around f1 is so overwhelmingly toxic these days.

[nicklloydnow]

“Josef Stalin oversaw the death of thousands of Georgians. Of the 38,679 named in Stalin’s lists who were to be shot or imprisoned from 1937-1938, 3,485 were from Georgia. That was more than any other Soviet republic, aside from the Russian and Ukrainian republics (both of which had millions more than the tiny Caucasian nation). And that purge was primarily of political personas; we do not know how many others were killed in Georgia throughout his reign. He destroyed both the Georgian intelligentsia and the traditional Georgian peasantry, replacing the former with elites permitted by the government and the latter with industry. He wanted to bring Georgia—the country in which he was born—to heel. And so he did.

And yet, sixty years ago this week, Georgians took to the street to protest Nikita Khrushchev’s policy of moving away from Stalin’s cult of personality—of disentangling the Soviet Union from the man who was synonymous with it. Sixty years ago today, tanks and troops bloodily dispersed the crowd. To this day, nobody knows exactly how many were killed.

Why would a people that had been crushed by a man risk their lives to defend his memory? There are several theories. Some say that Georgians were (and are) proud that Stalin had been one of them. Others argue that the protest was less for Stalin and more against Soviet rule—who, exactly, was Nikita Khrushchev to tell Georgians in whom to believe?

Here is another: Georgians took to the streets in part because a cult of personality is just that. A cult. And cults are not so easy to leave. They protested for the same reason that people across the Soviet Union wept openly and wondered how they would live without their leader on news of his death.

(…)

And it is perhaps also worth remembering that the reverse is true, too: that cults of personality of individuals cannot exist without the support of millions who watch the news uncritically and choose not to think of the people unlike (or, perhaps, like) themselves who are hurt by those in power. That even people who take power do not simply take power. It is always, to some extent, given to them. Or at least left to them.” - Why Georgians Protested for Stalin

“Inspired by historian Simon Sebag Montefiore’s theory of there being “two Stalins” – the “Koba” of his Georgian youth and the larger-than-life Soviet dictator – Japaridze defines a third Stalin, a fluid figure existing in the minds of post-Soviet generations, viewed through the prism of nostalgia. This third iteration of Stalin continues to hinder efforts by those living in the post-Soviet space to reckon with the dictator’s record of repression, in particular his use of terror to advance his policy priorities.

(…)

TJ: Once the Soviet Union collapsed, the legacies continued to live on unaddressed and some continued to take pride in certain aspects that are extremely problematic. …

I think it was very easy for many in the Soviet era to position themselves as victims, because they did not want to deal with the notion of guilt and what their role had been, even as bystanders. And I think we are seeing that in Russia today, where many people continue to be quiet because they say, “I’m going to end up in jail and my family is going to end up in trouble.” I genuinely wonder if 30 years from now, those arguments are going to stand the test of time.

I feel more empathy for those who were silent (during the Soviet Union) because they also did not have the same platforms that exist today. I have struggled to maintain some friendships in Russia with people that I know are wonderful people, and I do understand to a degree why they are silent. But it is very difficult for me to understand when I see their social media feeds. They were partying it up in the weeks and months following the start of the war.

How are those relationships we once had going to survive the war? What about those (Ukrainian) civilians who went to bed at night and never woke up? And meanwhile, we are talking about the hottest restaurant in Moscow. I am not trying to say that I am a better person, but I think there is just a certain level of morality that is completely out of whack. And yes, we can put the blame on the Russian authorities. But this is not just Putin’s war. It is also about many of the Russian people who continue to be silent.

When all is said and done on the battlefield, Ukrainians and Russians will have to coexist, to live with that trauma, for decades to come. It is been over 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and we still have not even touched the tip of the iceberg in terms of repairing the damage that was done. So, if we do not start addressing the current issues soon, I do not know if we will be able to engage with each other.

The Russians’ trauma is going to pale next to what Ukrainians are going through. Their children will have to deal with what their parents did or did not do. Russia is going to wake up to a very difficult reality one day.

(…)

We will have to re-engage with them probably sooner than many would like to think. If nothing else, because of the sheer size of the country, its natural resources. … I think numbers will eventually speak louder than words. It is difficult to ignore Russia, the Russian authorities know it and have taken advantage of it. But the timeline for Russian isolation turned out to be a lot longer than the Russian authorities thought. And we can wean Western countries off Russian commodities to a certain degree, but at some point, those conversations will need to happen. It will take decades.

(…)

The majority of Georgians are siding with Ukrainians and condemning Russia, because they remember what it was like being invaded by Russia in 2008. But even back then, there was a certain polarization among the people that has persisted. As for the Georgian government, it has been sending very mixed signals. I admire the Ukrainians for having come together. One of the goals of the Putin regime was to break the Ukrainian identity and weaken the nation at its core. I think the Georgian people have been weakened much more than the Ukrainians over the years by disinformation, polarization. Russia can then take advantage of it. We are still in this process of trying to unify as a nation. I was very glad to see how the country came together [to oppose] the Russian [-style] foreign agent law in March. Fortunately, people stood up, young people stood up. I hope that we will be able to learn from our Ukrainian friends.

(…)

I was one of the Georgians that initially said, “We cannot turn the Russians away. They escaped the Putin regime.” I am, by the way, a Georgian that went to Russia in 1993 as a kid with my family during the Civil War in Georgia, and Russians welcomed me. So, yes, on the one hand, I am grateful and I have not forgotten the good and the kindness and the warmth that I got from Russians when I moved there and escaped the war in Georgia. But on the other hand, I think it is the behavior that many Georgians find very problematic. Many Russians act like Georgia is still one of their provinces and Georgians should make them feel at home because at the end of the day, they are kind of still at home. And that is very, very difficult for Georgians to deal with. They do not act as guests. And I think that will change Georgia as a country that was often applauded for being a fantastic host. Hospitality has been one of our national sources of pride. … I think a host nation should be treated as a host, and guests should remember, even if they are there for a long time, that they are guests and not occupiers.” - Q&A with Georgian author Tinatin Japaridze

[mewlabu]

I just want to talk about how dehumanizing it is when Western Leftists do shit like insist Holodomor was fake and propaganda as some sort of defence of communism every time Ukrainians try to talk about their personal history with it. Now they do the same shit with the this war.

Their narrative of Ukrainians as a nation of Nazis or Ukrainians as pawns of the UN/US/NATO isn't just wilfully ignorant of any real context or history, but posits that my people are such absolute monsters that we would kill millions of our own just to make the USSR look bad. While at the same time, suggests we are also child like idiots, who have no will of their own and can't possible have a national consciousness, goals, or a dream of a future that isn't fully manipulated by the west or NATO.

They cry about Western Capitalist Hegemony but can't even imagine that nations have history and politics and events that can and should be considered and understood without constant reference to Western Capitalist History.

They only seem to be able to accept us as either benign idiots or absolute monsters. All so they don't have to actually examine their own blind ideology, or wrestle with the reality that the world isn't a black and white, and villains aren't clean and easy to spot, and you framing every conflict and every nation's attempts at self actualization in terms of West vs East, Capitalism vs Communism is immensely dehumanizing and reductive and ignorant.

It's a convenient way to remain both ideologically pure and feel morally superior.

With every denial of Soviet violence, with every defence of what Russia is doing (and here's a challenge, try to defend it without relying on ' but America bad' argument), they reinforce the idea that all the victims of Soviet or Russian aggression are infantile, servile, monsters with little will of their own.

They act like we can't possibly know or tell our own history, or know what's good for us. And how is that different from the paternalistic bullshit of colonialism? Of the civilizing ideology that led to so much death and subjugation of indigenous cultures and peoples?

How is the USSR repression of the distinct cultures of it's various republics for the sake of the communist dream any different when it includes cultural erasure, genocide, repression, and racism?

Every social, or cultural, or political flaw of our people is used to argue we deserve what we're getting or how we'd be better off from it while even massive crimes by communist regimes and now Russia or China are dismissed, discounted, explained away, justified, or just painted as irrelevant and unworthy of genuine criticism because "capitalism is bad!" and what is being done is for some abstract greater good.

They contort in new and surprising ways in justifying Russian imperialism, both then and now, Soviet repression and brutality, but won't spare two moments to listen to a single Ukrainian talk about their family's losses, or look at any historical sources by Ukrainians or other former republics desperate to stay out of Russias grasp.

That's what you do when you don't think the people matter, when their humanity doesn't count as much as your own ideology.

Meanwhile they risk nothing. Not one thing.

Ukraine was under Soviet rule and has been doing its own work and struggle to reclaim what was lost, to grapple with the contradictory way of thinking that was the main way to survive in that regime. But we don't get any fucking credit for it from western leftists who think Gulag jokes are funny. They've raised their ideological bar impossibly high for Ukrainians before any consideration or sympathy is granted, before we can be even seen as worthy of being heard, of our lives mattering while the bar for Russia is 6 feet below the ground.

They erase and diminish and demonize individual stories to keep worshipping at the altar of ideology. This is by far the most disappointing thing about my experience with this kind of western leftists.

That they grant vast leeway for so many other peoples to do and be flawed, but not to us. Never to us, because we look to the west for help in surviving a war we didn't start, because we shine a light on the atrocities of the utopia they want to believe in, because it doesn't let them sit there and be smug about how much they hate capitalism while in relative safety, where all this remains abstracts to them and writ in blood for us.

I realize this was a bit of a rant but I am genuinely hurt, let down, and broken at the way i've been spoken to by this group and their whole position in this whole thing.

P.S. If you're basic argument to justify your support for a ruthless, violent, repressive regime is that you think America is even worse, how is that even remotely a good defence? When you literally can't actually point to the good in your idealized Russia/USSR apart from "it's against the US" then what are you actually standing up for?

[klaus-is-the-real-number-1]

I honestly cannot even begin to explain how much the siblings actually messed up the 1960s man but im going to break it down maybe:

Allison will most likely earn a place in history books around the civil rights movement, first she started protests and then was linked to the assassination of JFK, she’ll definitely be in there (all of them most likely but I imagine allison the most)

Klaus started a cult using many famous song names, song lyrics and more which means some of the artists in the future will not actually use the phrases/songs/band names or will be confirmed to be members of his cult

he probably earned a really large following after his cult basically got advertised on TV, which would leave a lot of people looking into his cult and subsequently joining

and how much tax did he evade please i would like to know

they probably caused the biggest conspiracy theory ever:

-They appear to have not existed at all before the year 1960, there will be no record of any of them

-Probably the most unusual mix of people, a black rights activist, an escapee from an asylum, a cult leader, a russian spy, a boxer who works for a gang and a child that they are keeping ‘hostage’

-Their pictures would be aired all over television, newspapers, posters, everywhere and probably became the most well known faces in the world

- and then theyre gone, never seen again 

I think Elliot dying also would of caused a massive scene that they were once again linked to, someone would stumble across his body that was never buried or realise the tv shop owner hadn’t been seen in days? weeks? months?

and when they go in they would find öga för öga written in blood on the floor

the frankel footage of a completely different assassination of JFK

photos of all the academy on his wall along with all his other conspiracy theories

so now theyre all linked to JFK, elliots death and aliens probably

lets not forget the media said they were holding Five hostage, a child hostage, thats some serious business for a group that will probably be called a terrorist group as they are a group plotting against the american government and they just kidnapped some random kid

Vanya being called a russian spy having connections with the assassination would probably cause some h u g e tension between countries with arguments where russia would probably be like ‘listen america we genuinely never seen this random woman before’

Jack Rubys gang would be getting a lot of attention because of Luther, they would basically have to drop out of sight for a while because of their connections 

Diego being an asylum escapee probably changed completely how asylums are ran, which is obviously i guess a minor thing but still a change

at the end of the day no wonder Reginald didnt adopt the siblings, it wasnt because of the meal it was most likely because of being the most wanted people in america

what would people say if reginald raised the og siblings, baring in mind reginald is basically a famous inventor and billionaire who publicly shows the academy to the media, and his adopted children look identical to the most wanted criminals in american history and also a child that was held hostage and then was never found

it would cause quite a stir

they really did the most in their power to change history

[1p2p-heta-imagines]

OMG!! Thanks for answering my previous question!! <3 <3 Now I want to ask: how would the 2p allies react to their parents (or if it's too much just their mom) not liking their girlfriend? Saying things like: "She's not for you" "You could get someone much better" "I was hoping you'd have better tastes" "She's going to hurt you" "Your relationship won't last long" and the most forceful... "I don't want you to see her ever again."

2p America doesn’t care what they say, especially not his father. He does love his mother, he could never say a bad word about her, but he took after her in not caring what other people say about his life. With his father, he’d stay with them just to spite him, he does anything he can to get on his nerves. His father wasn’t there, he wants to have an opinion NOW? As far as Allen’s concerned, he can choke.

2p England would sob if his mother said anything like that. She’s known for being extremely kind to everyone, not uttering a bad word about also anyone (the only exception really being Remus) so he is borderline horrified. However, his father is very much asocial so he didn’t expect much different from that, knowing he’ll likely warm up to them eventually, if given time.

2p Canada doesn’t listen unless his mother has some kind of genuine criticism like they’re a bad person, he knows her views on love is a little skewed so he always expects something of that nature because she doesn’t want him to hurt like she did. His father can’t exactly say anything, being that he’s dead, so he doesn’t have to worry about that.

2p France would rather die than ever let his parents meet his S/O, he knew that this would be the immediate reaction from them and it will spiral into some kind of argument. He wanted to cut them off as soon as possible and now he has an excuse to do so, they’ve seemingly always been obsessed with criticising everything he did - he didn’t know what else to expect.

2p China holds his parent’s opinion very highly, for them to hate his S/O would be absolutely heartbreaking for him. He doesn’t want to disappoint them, he doesn’t want to leave the person he loves and he is very confused on what he’s meant to do. He’d likely try to set something up so they can get to know each other better, thinking they just got off on the wrong foot.

2p Russia never really cared what his father had to say, he’s more surprised at the fact his father decided to talk to him than the contents of what he said. However, his mother is a very different story, he cares for her opinion more than his own and he would be extremely confused on what he’s meant to do. He’d likely end up isolating himself rather than talking it out with either than them, he’s horrible with communicating.

[dorevenge]

where ignorance is bliss - chapter 9: although you know

SUMMARY: Anton shows his true colors when the arc reactor development isn't going as smoothly as planned. [AO3 LINK]

CHAPTERS: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 [9] 10 11 12 13 14 15 ☆

June 14, 1967 – Los Angeles, California, Stark Industries Headquarters

“I’ve told you already, Anton, we don’t need Roxxon’s help!”

“It’s been four years; the Unity Project isn’t going anywhere!” Anton fires back at Howard. They’ve been fighting the same fight over and over, and everyone else in the lab is used to tuning it out by now. They haven’t agreed on anything all summer, like a couple of rams constantly butting heads.

“Rome wasn’t built in a day, Red, and it sure wasn’t built in four years. Hell, only five years ago Kennedy said we were gonna get man on the moon, and it’s gonna happen, it’s just gonna take time.”

“We choose to go to the moon, but you haven’t yet!” Anton replies sarcastically. I slink back further in my chair, watching the two of them go at it again in the laboratory. Howard and I were going to go out to lunch together before the two of them picked up the same argument again. “The Lunik 9 did it last year, but we Russians also know when to give up. We proved it’s possible. You can’t prove the arc reactor is possible. Americans don’t know how to stop fighting.”

Howard shakes his head, laughing, but not out of humor. “I’ve been at this for over two decades, and inventing since I was 6. I know when something’s not gonna work, and when it’s gonna work and just needs some time. You think the Stark Industries empire happened on accident? No! It took time. If I gave up on it like you did, no one in this room would be here.”

“It’s taking time we don’t have. There’s so many other things we can be focusing on, more pressing issues, more profitable projects.”

“We? Get that word out of your mouth, Anton. You haven’t been a team player. Since day one, you were only looking out for yourself, even when we fought tooth and nail for you, defending your name that you weren’t a Commie, protecting you from the Feds, and for what?” Howard stops to catch his breath; he is about to turn 50 in a couple months, and the years have crept up on him. “For you to give up because it’s hard? Life’s hard, buttercup, so put on your big boy pants and strap in.”

Anton sets his work down forcefully. “That’s it, Stark. I’ve had enough.” He grabs his briefcase and packs it hastily, snapping it shut with a tone of finality. “Consider this my two weeks’ notice, and I’ll be taking two weeks of vacation starting tomorrow.” Anton makes for the door with a hurry.

“Like hell you are. Open your briefcase, Anton,” Howard stalks towards him. Obadiah runs to catch up to Howard.

“Act rationally, Howard,” Obadiah warns.

“In the years you’ve known me, have I ever acted rationally once, Obadiah? Anton, your briefcase.” Howard sticks his hand out, like a petulant child expecting a treat. With his other hand, he motions to the security guards, who place themselves between Anton and the door silently.

Anton stands indignantly, insulted. “I will not be treated like a criminal. I gave up everything to move to the United States, to work with the Scientific Strategic Reserve, to work with S.H.I.E.LD., and this is what I get? Back home, I was a genius, and I was treated like one. The disrespect in this facility is preposterous.”

“What are you hiding, Anton?” Obadiah steps forward, in front of Howard. “Show us your briefcase. If you have nothing to hide, you’d show us, and we’ll let you leave. No hard feelings.”

“I will show you nothing.” Anton is tense, every muscle in his body engaged, ready to decide in a split second whether to fight or flee. I can almost see his pulse rising, his nostrils flare and eyebrows settle deeper into his face. Before Howard can move closer, Anton turns and sprints, right into the arms of the two guards. His speed connects with their strength and knocks Anton flat on his back, his briefcase crashing from his grip and falling open on the floor. Papers fly out across the lab, some landing at my feet. Anton tries to get to his feet and is kept down by the guards. The first paper I pick up has a familiar name.

“Why are you sending telegrams to Giulietta Nefaria?” I ask. “Are you working with Roxxon?”

“I worked there for a short while before working with you,” Anton stammers.

I look down at the telegram.

RECEIVED

June 12, 1967

To: Vanko, A.

A., Thank you for the updated plans. Our recreations are coming along well, but we’ll need your help in the lab soon. Are you free next week?

NEFARIA, G.

“I don’t believe that for a second. Look at the date.” I hand Howard the telegram, then go to his desk to phone the S.H.I.E.L.D. office. I quickly relay the situation to the agent on the other end while keeping an eye on the situation.

Howard reads the telegram, then looks up, heartbroken. I watch the realization hit him, the tiniest movements of his muscles showing how devastated he is. “Updated plans? June twelfth? Roxxon was the one who hit our house that Christmas, weren’t they? Anton, you were working with them while you’re working with us.” Kneeling, Howard sifts through the rest of the papers on the floor, Obadiah helping him, and they find copies of blueprints and sketches of models, with detailed notes, all of their research of the arc reactor and the Unity Project ready to be handed off to the enemy.

“You son of a bitch,” Obadiah says under his breath, taking in the evidence.

The S.H.I.E.L.D. agents arrive at the Stark Industries office a few moments later, Colonel Chester Phillips leading the charge. Being a founder of the organization helps with speed and urgency, making Howard a high priority. Phillips takes our stories as Anton is further restrained, ready to be taken in for questioning. Agents collect the papers and briefcase, as well as anything else on Anton’s desk.

“Anton… What have you done?” I ask softly.

“How much?” Howard asks Anton, still laying on the ground, seething. “How much did you sell us out for? How could you do this?”

“I did what any man would do in my position. Don’t act so shocked, Howard. You should know better than anyone. It’s all about money.” Anton struggles against the arms of the guards. He has a bruise just starting to form under his right eye, and his lip is split and bleeding. “It’s always about money.”

“We’re rounding up Vanko’s family in town now,” says Phillips. “Don’t worry, Howard. We’ll take care of things from here.”

“What are you going to do with him?” I ask Phillips.

“Most likely send him back to Russia. Depending on what he’s done with these blueprints, he could be tried for treason, espionage, aiding and abetting. At the very minimum, he’s looking at a handful of charges and a lifetime of misery,” Phillips says, finishing his report. “He got his shot at the American dream and blew it to hell.”

Anton is escorted out of the building, spitting curses in Russian all the way out, and Howard dismisses the other inventors in the office, calling it a day. His shoulders slump with defeat, staring out the window, and Obadiah tries his best to turn the situation around.

“I know that must’ve been tough, Howard,” Obadiah says genuinely. “But that guy was a crook. What choice did you have? You took that commie under your wing, you let him into your home.”

“Obadiah…” I say quietly, I’m not sure he hears me. The lesson has been learned, and enough is enough.

“I know this cuts closer to the bone because of your belief in the arc reactor and your plans for the expo. I’m just saying, maybe you should take this incident as some sort of sign. Maybe we’re too far ahead of our time, and everyone else needs to catch up to us.” He places a hand on Howard’s shoulder. “I’m here for you. Just like I’ve always been. But let’s just get back to doing what we do best, huh? Let’s change the world, Howard.”

The next week, Stark Industries holds a press conference, led by Obadiah, announcing they are doubling down on the fight against Communism, promising their aid will turn the tide for the Vietnam War and the Cold War, and that their weapons division will more than triple their production output as a testament to their patriotism. Howard’s words from three years ago ring in my head, “Think about the children we’ll have someday, the legacies we’ll leave them with, the world they’ll be born into – that’s our priority,” and I feel sick to my stomach, unable to picture what that world will look like.

[writingsfromstarfleet]

Oblivious - Pavel Chekov X Reader

A/N: This is a request for @dancingwith-thesunflowers who’s just a lovely lil human, I hope you enjoy this!! You lot as always are included, I hope you enjoy too :) x

also known as mal can’t actually write endings

You weren't unfamiliar with the concept of being the youngest; most of your life you were at the bottom of the age scale wherever you went. Joining Starfleet, you were relieved somewhat to discover that you were not the only one. Pavel Chekov had joined you, a Russian lad with a talkative streak, and the the two of you quickly became friends.

Pavel was kind, and he was very funny, telling you stories of his childhood back home in Russia, and he had so many to tell. They never got boring. You had made a habit of meeting together every evening for a drink, the talks however drawing long into the night. Talks of this, talks of that, both everything and nothing in particular.

You had come slowly to love the feral little Russian, though you weren't about to tell him that for fear of him not feeling the same. A friendship was formed and the last thing you wanted to do was scare him away. So instead, you sat by and watched him chase after others. Pavel had met a girl, Irina, and he seemed to really love her. You laughed with him through the good times, and sat with him through the tears after arguments. They decided to call it quits after discovering they were too different.

Assigned to the Enterprise, though in separate departments, you were still as close as ever. You spent all the free time you had together, though now you were joined by newer friends, too. Sulu, Uhura, Scotty to name a few. Your new life on the Enterprise only pushed you closer, and to your dismay, your feelings resurfaced for him.

"You know," Uhura started, whilst the two of you were sat in the mess hall. "You should probably just tell him."

You looked up at her, pulling yourself from the daydream you were having.

"Huh?" you asked, feigning innocence.

Uhura had none of it, smirking at you over the top of her glass, the knowing look she sent you saying everything. Raising your eyebrows, you sighed.

"Am I that obvious?"

"Oh, Y/N, of course not, not to Chekov at least" she laughed, and you airily joined in. She was right, and you weren't about to deny it.

Things were going well with Pavel, though you still hadn't mentioned how you felt to him. You got all the more close, and it didn't seem as though that was going to change. That was, until, Irina came back. Almost immediately, he seemed infatuated, spending most of the next couple of days with her; he even missed your evening drinks. The most you saw of him was a quick passing in the halls, or at dinner, where he only spoke about things Irina had said or done. You grew tired of it, beginning to distance yourself slightly.

Why were you being like this? You asked yourself this daily. You weren't sure, it wasn't as though he was your boyfriend, nor did he like you back like that, something you and convinced yourself was true.

Sitting on your own in the mess hall, you were joined by the Captain, a change welcomed, but left you a little confused.

"Captain, an honour to have you join me." He laughed a little, not unkindly.

"Please, it's Jim, Y/N, you know that by now."

"Old habits and all, Jim, apologies." He shook his head dismissively, smiling as he sat.

He was formal during the day, however, but come the night he relaxed a little more. Kirk saw his crew as his family, and there was nothing he wouldn't do to ensure they were safe and happy. It was important to him, and to have a captain who cared so much, you considered yourself grateful.

"Now what's this I hear about you and Mr. Chekov, then?" Jim's question caught you off guard, and you lowered your glass and looked at him, confused.

"I'm sure I don't know what you mean, Jim."

"You can't kid a kidder, Y/N. I'm not as stupid as I may look, y'know? I know how close you two are, and here you are, on your own, looking sad. I also happen to have noticed the absence of my ensign, and putting two and two together, well, it became obvious."

Realising he was right, you shot him an incredulous look and he chuckled. Sighing, you opened up.

"He's been spending time with his ex from the academy, Irina. I barely see him anymore.."

"Then tell him how you feel about him."

"Not you, too. Is there anyone who doesn't already know?"

Jim smiled at you. "Apparently, just the two of you, now."

You put your head in your hands and sighed. Placing a hand on your shoulder, Jim spoke one last time.

"For what it's worth, Y/N, you haven't seen the way he looks at you."

With that statement, he cleared his tray and left you be. Mulling over his words, you wondered if what he said was true. Did Chekov like you, too? No, there was no way. You weren't exactly his usual type. You were friends, nothing more.

Down the hall, Chekov was making his way to the mess hall with Sulu, Irina having left that morning. They were deep in conversation as they walked.

"And I just don't know why Y/N is ignoring me." Chekov's voice was strained and had hints of sadness in it, and Sulu smiled at him.

"It might be because Y/N is jealous, did you ever stop and think that?"

"Jealous? Of what? We're friends, nothing more. I mean, I'd love to be with Y/N, but the feelings definitely are not returned."

Sulu raised his eyebrows. "I wouldn't be so sure, have you seen the looks you get?"

Chekov paused to consider the words from his friend. Did you like him back? No, you only saw him as a friend, surely.

Entering the mess hall, Chekov caught sight of you leaving, and decided to follow. Sulu nodded, joining some other crewmembers as he watched his friend leave.

Taking off down the hall, you knew he was following you, and you willed your legs to just keep walking. Your brain, however, told you to slow down and speak to him. There was nothing you wanted more in that moment than to avoid a confrontation, you didn't know how to word the thoughts in your head.

"Y/N!" His voice called for you; you walked on. "Wait, please, I want to talk to you."

"I don't!" You called back, nonchalantly. You thought you had out-walked him, given that it went very quiet. Feeling a hand on your arm confirmed you were incorrect.

"Why are you avoiding me, Y/N?" Refusing to face him, you looked away, trying to continue your walk. "Please?"

The tone of his voice made you feel guilty; truth be told, you didn't know why you were avoiding him. Your jealousy wasn't necessary, there was nothing to be jealous of, really. It's not like he was yours to be jealous of. All of these thoughts raced through your mind in that minute, so much so that you failed to answer him.

"Y/N? Y/N?"

"Because I love you!"

His eyes widened, and so did yours. You couldn't believe you said that out loud, and you backed away slowly.

"I- uh, well, I-uh.." Failing to find any words, you looked down at the floor. Pavel smiled, his eyes now looking at you with such adoration.

"Oh, you precious thing."

Before you could look up to question his statement, he lifted your chin up so he could look you in the eye. With as much gentleness you'd ever felt, Chekov placed his lips on yours. Shocked at first, you slowly melted into the kiss and cupped his face with your hands. He placed his arms around your waist, pulling you closer. Sadly, it had to end at some point, and you pulled back to look at him.

"You.. do like me. I thought they were just joking" you laughed out, resting your forehead against his.

"They? Oh, the crew told you the same as they told me."

You stared at one another, and laughed. Genuine, true laughs, stood in each others arms.

"How could we have been so.. oblivious?" You asked between laughs, and he smiled down at you and shrugged.

"I really do not know."

While you may have been oblivious before, now, you were not. You loved him, he loved you, and that was all that mattered.

[ms-demeanor]

thank you for posting more about how much you hate that idiot fucking book I fucking live for this

I have, no joke, probably read Atlas Shrugged a hundred times. I’m on my twelfth copy. I won one of those copies for entering one of the Ayn Rand scholarship essay contests. I once helped a communist friend of mine write an objectivist essay in order to apply for financial aid because “I don’t think like those people, you do”

(full disclosure y’all, I was a libertarian raised by libertarians and i stayed that way until my mid twenties)

I don’t know that I hate it so much as I’m completely fascinated by it.

I actually consider it a REALLY interesting piece of dystopian literature that I enjoy as a dystopia but it is so hyperbolic that it almost reaches the level of magic realism.

Atlas Shrugged (along with most of Rand’s other work) is so fundamentally broken in its assumptions about what motivates people to do what they do that it has always struck me as a weird dreamy fantasy novel. Like, imagine describing the construction of New York’s skyscrapers in a Lana Del Rey music video but all the characters are Fae and have impenetrable social rules about what is acceptable behavior.

And I know I’m in the minority here but I genuinely enjoy her prose, with the obvious caveats that the John Galt speech is terrible and the clear power exchange fetish works better if it’s addressed as a fetish instead of a weird recurring rape fantasy.

I don’t want to make excuses for Rand; her philosophy is ghoulish and her real-life attitudes about imperialism and capitalism and, just like, human rights and interpersonal relationships are repugnant. But if you want to get some insight into *why* she’s like this I’d recommend reading We the Living; it may not be accurate and when it was published it was controversial and frequently considered anticommunist propaganda (how fucking strange is it that a book published in the united states would be controversial for being anticommunist; that really hammers home how successful mccarthyism was) but I get the sense that it’s very much what *she* believed to be true in her experience and since I didn’t grow up in Soviet Russia and defect to the US I can’t exactly say she wasn’t, to a certain extent, justified in her views.

But, god, the way you see that exploded out in later work is just farcical. It’s so dramatic and overwrought - it’s not enough that politicians make mistakes or are self-interested, no, they’re moochers who are out to hasten the end of the world, bloodsucking parasites looking to enslave anybody with the audacity to be productive. It’s not enough that Lillian Rearden married for money, no, she’s out to destroy the soul of the productive man, only capable of measuring her worth by how far she’s able to make her husband fall. It’s not enough that Jim Taggart is an inept company president put in place by nepotism instead of skill, he’s also working to tear down everything his sister built because he wants her reputation but also wants to destroy her for having the gall to accomplish the things that built that reputation.

It’s fascinating. It’s bizarre. It’s looking through a glass darkly, examining the private fears of petty, bitter people. It’s not true, but there’s a truthiness to it to the people who buy into it; they haven’t experienced the world the way that Rand has written it but that’s how they believe the world works and they’re taking her writing as the evidence for it.

AND WHAT DRIVES ME UP THE WALL IS THAT IT’S SO CLOSE TO BEING RADICAL.

Like, okay, look at The Fountainhead - the climax of the book is about a dude who’s frustrated that his art is being perverted by bureaucracy and who wants equal access to fair housing. Crooked contractors and bloated budgets fueled by favoritism and scope creep are all legitimate problems with state building projects and the idea of working on one of those and wanting to blow it up is SUPER relatable. Yeah, dudes, I don’t want the DeVos family getting any more contracts from the government, I don’t want contractors who have worked with Trump bidding on housing projects. That DOES seem fucked up.

But I mean come on, you’ve got a journalist right there in your storyline; the way you make a hero isn’t to blow up a housing project it’s to report on the corruption. But the journalist is one of the craven lesser men Dominique fucks to get back at Roark to punish him for working with statists. So an exposé is out and an explosion is in.

And I know that seems radical but the thing is it’s not a call to fix a corrupt system, it’s not looking to replace a flawed method with a better method - it’s saying “my way or not at all” and that’s just. Petty. Petulant and wasteful.

Childish.

Same for Galt’s Gulch and the “Strike of the Mind” - in Galt’s Gulch there’s a fucking *doctor* who bitches that he was made to heal people who he thought didn’t contribute to enough to society. Dude. DUDE. Keep your mobile xray technology, and your cure for strokes; I’d prefer a doctor who isn’t basically a eugenicist.

FUCK.

It’s so frustrating that she creates this world where everything can be abundant and everything can be accessible and instead of going “luxury gay space communist post-scarcity society” she goes “what if everything COULD be free but instead we had the gold standard and let children with the “wrong” parents starve to death?”

(uh, in case it’s not clear: I’ve had something of a strong ideological shift away from the libertarian party)

And oh god the way she writes and thinks about women.

You know what, I’ve had arguments with some people about the “I’m not like other girls” trope and if/how it exists and Ayn Rand’s protagonists are the perfect example. Dominique only hosts tea parties in order to crush the soul of the man who won’t live up to her exacting standards, not because she likes them or wants friends or anything. Dagny has a long straight neck and an imperious profile and the short hair of an American woman; she saw a bunch of socialists once and put her middle finger up at them. She didn’t want to come out in society at a ball (and be flirted with by boring boys like some kind of silly GIRL), she wanted to go back to the trains (and also maybe get fucked rough against a wall by a man who knew what she deserved and was bold enough to give it to her) like a serious person. Ayn Rand is the queen of Not Like Those Other Girls.

Goddamnit.

Also everybody talks about how awful the John Galt Speech is but the John Galt torture scene? Hot. Great. 10/10 whump. Please skip the rest of the book and instead read about Galt’s friends/admirers rescuing him and tenderly wrapping his shaking shoulders before they carry him to safety, silently brimming with emotion and pride at how well he resisted the torture. (I maintain that if Rand had stuck to just writing actual porn she’d be much better thought-on and more widely beloved because her fetishy stuff only sucks in context; pull it out of her screeds against altruism and you’ve got something that it at least five orders of magnitude better than 50 Shades)