#i do not fucking endorse genocide ok

[did-we-imagine]

Hi never “both sides” a genocide again please and thank you

I'm not sure what you mean to say, but I feel compelled to show empathy to all civilian victims in general because all lives are equal, and it is not to whitewash Israel or to minimize their war crimes (aka actual genocide/ethnic cleansing to further their colonial agenda).

One can feel bad for all civilian victims without buying into the criminal doctrine of zionism or being an israel/IDF apologist.

Dehumanizing civilians on either side is never good as it allows for racist/fanatic/murderous/extremist ideas to fester, which can lead to terrible tragedies. (This is exactly what is happening to the Palestinians in particular right now, they are being vilified through malicious propaganda. Jewish people went through the same during WWII with the nazis. It also happened to the Germans after during the final parts of WWII. Many women were raped by the Allies' soldiers...) . Here is an example of a mixed family.

I believe that the previous point is very important because there have been various extremists thinking that they were avenging the wronged party in their eyes through hate crimes against muslims / jews (the american 71 years old dude who killed that poor palestinian child and severely attacked his mother, and many others, which you can read about in this link).

I do not believe one bit that Israel's repeated attacks on hapless civilians in churches/hospitals are justifiable or defendable at all.

In conclusion, I would like to add a few very important points, especially for the people who defend Israel & think that pro-palestine people are antisemitic/racists/whatever:

-> This is not a religious war between jews and muslims. This is a colonizer entity attacking/exiling the colonized party. There is no reason to hate followers of either religion. In fact, palestine is a multi-religious country. There are muslim, christian and even jewish palestinians.

-> The palestinians are also semitic.

-> Right now, Israel is using Hamas' action as a justification to dish out full on genocide. However, as per international law, collective punishment of a people can never be justified by any means. Friendly reminder that Hamas =/= Palestinians and Zionism =/= Judaism:

https://www.aaiusa.org/library/debunking-all-palestinians-are-hamas

-> There are much more complex politics at play( FYI, other countries are using this conflict as a proxy war, esp USA/Iran ), considering that Hamas was financed by Iran, Hezbollah, and even Netanyahou/far right politicians from Israel who want to implement a one-state (Israel only) solution. The last category wanted to destabilize the Palestinian Authority & avoid the formation of a palestinian state through this.

Sources :

https://www.liberation.fr/checknews/netanyahou-a-t-il-dit-que-transferer-de-largent-au-hamas-etait-la-bonne-strategie-pour-contrecarrer-la-creation-dun-etat-palestinien-20231011_F5AKUAMMNVENDLJ6WBXLFPJETE/%3foutputType=amp

It's all the more jarring that this is french media saying this since the majority of their media is pro-israel.

https://archive.ph/H8LSL

-> Last but not least, this is not an equal war (for those who think that Israel is in their right). The infamous statistics of casualties. Pre-7th october 2023 :

https://www.statista.com/chart/16516/israeli-palestinian-casualties-by-in-gaza-and-the-west-bank/

Yeah, more people are dying on the Palestinian side...Because the genocide/colonization project has been ongoing for 75 years. This is proof on its own that Israel is a criminal state. Who woulda thunk?

Current stats:

Http://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-tracker

->Israel is using this attack as an excuse to further its expansionist agenda, it's not quite bothered by the hostages' actual fates 🤡 :

[koutenko]

why are you so horny for genocide joe? why are you so desperate to endorse his political mandate and confer his filthy zionist rotting self with even more power? how dare you speak on Palestinians and Palestine. Just because you're too fucking idiotic to understand how politics works doesn't mean you get to say jack shit to others. I hope the people around you will one day hold you accountable for your part in the genocide.

lol ok i miss when anons used to come at me swinging about shipping but aight

it's like this:

we live under a busted two party system and it's probably not going away in the next four months

and under the current system a vote for anyone else is an empty gesture AT BEST despite anyone's terminally online wishful thinking

i too wish we lived in a world where we voted according to our principles and not for who is less likely to do more war crimes but unfortunately we live in a society

one side has told us very openly that they're intending to install fascism on day 1

so as i've said elsewhere i don't really care if they have to prop up joe biden's corpse like it's weekend at bernie's while someone else is driving the bus as long as it keeps trump out of power

the good news is that you can vote for biden without condoning 100% of his policies because idk politics is a complex and nuanced topic best approached with logic and compassion with a lot of moving parts to consider beyond this one dusty fart

but what do i know

like lol i respect the passion but you're mad at the wrong guy

[pinktwingirl]

Hamas actually does represent most of Palestinians in Gaza. They won the elections there, in recent events you can see videos of people cheering on viachles entering Gaza, carrying dead bodies of Israeli civilians and soldiers as well as giving out candy in celebration. This was posted on Arab social media btw, by private people. So it can’t be Israeli propaganda. The day I woke up and saw the war in the first few hours, Arab and Israeli twitter was literally flooded with these videos. Also if you watched some of these videos you will see a lot of the people crossing the border and attacking seem to not carry any weapons and are in civilian clothing. These are Gaza citizens which decided to join on their own accord to the massacre, meaning they are not employed by Hamas. Hamas actually went ahead and said they originally intended to only kidnap and fight men but non Hamas members joined and they were the ones who mostly harmed civilians. Which is probably not entirely true, but either way it shows a large civilian involvement and endorsement from Palestinians.

What do you think about this?

If you legitimately believe that most Palestinians are Islamic fundamentalists, then I don’t know what to tell you other than you’re wrong and also extremely racist. Palestinians are an extremely diverse group of people. There are Jewish and Christian Palestinians. The reason why many Palestinians are behind Hamas is because they see them as their only option of having any hope of freedom. What the fuck else are they supposed to do? Sit back and accept being murdered and terrorized while the rest of the world turns a blind eye? And don’t say peacefully protest because, newsflash, they’ve been doing that for decades and guess what? The IDF still killed them. Hamas only exists because of the Israeli occupation of Palestinians. That is the simple truth of the matter. What exactly are you trying to prove here? That all Palestinians are terrorists that deserve to die? That is textbook dehumanization as a justification for genocide. Keep in mind that 50% of the people living in Gaza are under the age of 18. They are literally CHILDREN. But sure, they clearly must all be Hamas operatives, so it’s ok to bomb them. /s

You are deflecting away from the cause of the problem because you don’t want to recognize that Israel and the western world is responsible for the violence that is happening right now. So many of y’all would’ve absolutely supported South African apartheid and it shows

[elizabro]

I know I say it every year but man I fucking hate july 4th, every year it gets more and more absurd to be indulging in this nationalist jingoistic bullshit like I just gotta forget for a day what nefarious evil shit our country has done and is doing. like oh we gotta go to a parade and watch fireworks and sing the praises of our glorious motherland while our government gleefully aids genocide? yeah? no one gonna address the elephant in the room? just gonna sing along to lee greenwood and act like we're not descending further into fascism with each passing day? ok yeah I'm the crazy one. I'm the humorless ideologue. sure I'd love to have some fun in the sun and enjoy a summer barbecue and watch fireworks, believe me, but standing in a crowd full of people wearing stars n stripes tank tops I always feel like I'm going fucking insane. hard enough going about my day to day pretending everything's peachy but having to endure everyone around me actively believing the opposite, actively praising what precise evils I spend all my time rallying against, like anyone can name anything about "american freedom" that doesn't come with an asterisk or isn't just naked endorsement of imperalism. I live in a fucking military town too. fucking awful

[silvaurum]

i am going to hold my nose and vote as much as the next person but if youre gonna make a post about the good things dems have done or the ways they are materially better than the gop, you can't go 'and if you dont want to vote you're a bot or a shill or a psyop' come on. there are very good reasons to hate the dems. there are very good reasons to doubt that voting blue accomplishes anything. obama expanded drone strikes and ICE massively, biden is funding genocide. the dems are also making strides in domestic policy while the republicans are either embracing fascism with great enthusiasm or cowing to fascism even as they sadly shake their heads about it. the democrats in many places are also cowing to fascism even as they sadly shake their heads about it. but not all of them - vote down the ballot, that's way more helpful than shilling for any one candidate - and keep in mind, a vote is not a full 100% approving endorsement. you don't vote for someone you think is perfect. it's not a marriage contract. you are choosing an adversary. you are choosing who you think can be more easily swayed or intimidated into not being AS big of a shithead. ok. so if you're trying to convince people to vote stop dismissing their VERY legitimate concerns with their "options" and stop pretending those lists of good things dems have done negate any of the bad shit in american empire. or that the voting system is basically fine actually, because at least we have a choice between evil 2.0 and evil classic lite. this is a yes and situation. yes the options are fucking bad AND, there are other ways to work on this. if voting is easy For You, do that, AND, raise awareness of how fucked it is overall. AND work outside the system. AND work on changing the system. any comfort or safety or communion we can bring to each other is worth it.

[hotsugarbyglassanimals]

god before this past month i was ok with voting cause in my mind i'd rather have there be -some- level of difficulty for repubs to do shit than full control, but the fact of the matter is biden is actively doing shit that doesn't even make things "less severe". he is functionally the same. This country is still authoritarian regardless of who is in the role of president, and it seems like tr-mp is willing to seize power in any way that he can whether or not its through official means. the gov showed they don't care if he incited a coup, he can still run. they don't care about stopping him from doing another one from what it looks like (or they're confident he won't try again... lol)

and not to mention how selfish it'd be to give biden votes based on hypotheticals when he is doing material harm to every marginalized community in this country AND the fact that he's an active zio/nist. and for fucks sake he's continuing trump's fucking wall! spitting in the faces of black voters by increasing the police budget more than any president, spitting in the face of undocumented immigrants by increasing ICE detentions and reach, spitting in the face of native voters by approving pipelines and the fucking wall, spitting in the face of LGBT voters by essentially high fiving the community and saying "keep being you!" instead of doing ANYTHING about the 400 + anti LGBT bills in the country. Man even if he was actively making positive changes for all of these demographics, I could not justify giving an incentive for someone justifying their participation in genocide by giving them an endorsement. that is too selfish. and honestly w/ how dems are so passive about losing, even if we directly threaten to not vote for them all they'll say is "ah darn!" if they lose because this shit doesn't effect them at all. fuck biden and democrats

[umanta]

when the posts about voting are like "you're not choosing your best friend, you're choosing the person who can get as close to what you want as possible!" "no candidate is going to be perfect we need to focus on what we can do"

no candidate is perfect was why i voted in 2020 after it became clear that biden was the dem candidate. no candidate is perfect, so its ok that he isn't bernie sanders or elizabeth warren or whoever else would have been my first picks. the point is that he's much better than trump. right?

there's a difference between "this person doesnt have perfect policies" and "this person is actively aiding a genocide and publicly endorsing the use of force on non violent protestors"

and if someone says 'well we have to focus on our country' to that i say -- why. are the people of gaza not my siblings as much as the people of the usa? no? why not? do tell

if the only thing we have to fight with is our vote. and the dems think our vote is guaranteed as long as they're slightly better than republicans (less than bare minimum). then the power of the vote no longer holds, because the point of voting is scaring politicians into doing what we want them to lest they lose their power.

this isnt to say i dont understand all the long-term arguments about voting. but the system is fucked up and shitty and its already hard to feel like an individual vote matters in the electoral college based on where u live and i cant bring myself to have more hope that this complicated process is going to bring about any sort of change. its a lose lose situation except in one i have a feeling more people might be angry about what happens

[tfw-no-tennis]

animorphssss.....2!

ok one L abt reading the series on my ereader is that the flipbook illustrations arent there ;_; those were my favvvvv

anyways I love animorphs still

I feel like I'll end up repeating myself a lot during these little liveblogs lmao but mannnn it’s so good. its so hardcore. like I know that that’s the whole Thing but I still get shocked by some of the stuff that happens 

like a big theme in the series centers around the morality of killing your enemies - and it’s so all over the place bc in book 6 you have jake boiling a bunch of yeerks alive, which is kinda gnarly if you think abt it, but the alternative would be to leave them there and let them infest people soo...? and that’s basically the point, that there are never any easy choices in war 

also I went on the animorphs wiki to look at trivia bc I love doing that and I cant BELIEVE (some of) the books were reissued in 2011 and they changed/removed some of the references to be more ‘modern’ omfg....talk about erasing 90s culture smh 

likeeee I was born in 97 so I didn't exactly grow up in the 90s and therefore some of the references go over my head but its so charming and fun to have them there! and it makes sense given that the books are SET in the 90s

I don't remember ever being confused by any of the references as a kid (tho for sure a lot of them went over my head), but then again I read the books in like 2008 sooo

also some of the stuff that they change - like changing ‘recorded w/a vcr’ to ‘recorded w/the TV’ or ‘floppy disc’ to ‘flash drive’ may make more sense to modern audiences, but doesn't make sense in the context of the story still being set in the 90s

tho it is funny that the books use the phrase ‘hook up’ to mean ‘meet up’ a lot bc that is a phrase that definitely has a different meaning nowadays

alsooooo as it turns out I'm p sure I only read a couple of the spinoffs - the hork-bajir chronicles and the ellimist chronicles (which was confusing lmao), bc my library didn’t have the others :( 2007/2008 woes....

but now I get to read the spinoffs woooooooo so I read the first megamorphs and the andalite chronicles 

I'm reading them in the chronological order (I think?) which is good bc part of the problem was that I read the ellimist book at a completely weird time and it confused me more lmao

megamorphs 1 basically felt like a regular animorphs book except longer, but the plot didn't feel like it needed all that extra page space tbh? even so it was an entertaining adventure

and rachel having amnesia was great, amnesia is one of my fav tropes lmao. and it was a lot of fun here, though a bit underutilized 

another favorite trope of mine is time travel, so I'm gonna have a really fun time here w/that

as for the andalite chronicles, I really enjoyed that one. I thought it was a well done story about the horrors of war (which is a theme animorphs does excellently), kind of similar to the overarching story of the whole series, but fit into one book without feeling rushed

the way the story starts out with elfangor wanting to be a hero, not understanding what that entails, to the end where he IS going to be a hero, and he knows now that this is a burden rather than a reward 

the horror elements are also really strong, with the taxxon morph being horrifying of course

and mannnn I loved that we got to see more of the taxxons as a species, and see that not all taxxons submitted to the yeerks - which breaks the previous theme of ‘all the taxxons are evil just because’ 

this book also establishes that the taxxons gave themselves over to the yeerks due to their constant hunger being unbearable, so it isn’t just that they’re evil for fun 

animorphs does such an excellent job showing that each ‘side’ of a war will have good and bad (or at least sympathetic and unsympathetic) people 

also loren was awesome, what a cool character. though I didn't realize she was literally like 13 until the very end of the book, holy shit. that's crazy. i thought she was 16 at the youngest....geez. her throwing a rock at visser 3 is even more iconic knowing she's a middle schooler at the time

and chapman was here! I'm assuming this must be the same chapman as the assistant principal controller... I thought it was a little strange to put chapman in that role, bc in this book he was a huge asshole basically the entire time, but in the previous (’future’) book it was revealed that he became a controller willingly only to spare his daughter, which is pretty far from this book where he’s actively trying to sell humanity out to the yeerks...people change I guess? (also he got his memory erased so I guess there's that)

alloran was a really interesting character. horrors of war again - we hear from his old buddy that he used to be a fun, witty guy, but war changed him into somebody who would do horrible things 

and him becoming a controller was horrifying, obviously, but I like that alloran wasn't portrayed as some perfect, holy guy in order to make it all the more tragic when he got infested. its already fucked up enough as it is, and making him flawed was a lot more meaningful 

and him wanting to flush all the yeerks out into space....oooooof the (later) parallels hurt 

plus the fact that elfangor refusing to commit genocide against the helpless yeerks (even though they’re the enemy) directly contributing to alloran becoming a controller.....oof. I love that it shows that even making the morally correct decisions during war can lead to awful things happening, but not in a way that endorses evil actions - the story isn’t saying that elfangor should have killed the yeerks, it’s saying that there are no good choices in war 

arbron being trapped as a taxxon was fucked up. but also really intriguing, especially how he found purpose and led a free taxxon uprising. I don't remember if we hear from him/the free taxxons again but I hope so

also the plot twist of tobias being elfangors SON...bruh. I do remember that despite not having read this book so it must come up in the main story later but my memory of that is vauge so I’m excited to see how that plays out. it’s always gonna be hilarious to me that ax is technically tobias’s uncle 

and then the ellimist drops in and wacks up the time stream even more. classic. I love the crazy time travel stuff in animorphs

omfg and the bits where elfangor is a human tech guy and talked about his friends bill and steve LMAOOOOO

also the scene where elfangor drives the yellow mustang while blasting '(I cant get no) satisfaction’ by the rolling stones was one of the most iconic things I've ever read

basically I loved all the angles of war fucking people up. from loren’s dad, to alloran, to elfangor himself learning about the true horrors of war...v well done imo

ok back to the main series - so my pick for the most fucked up scene SO FAR (in my own personal opinion) - the scene where they're in the jungle and rachel passes out in bear morph and a bunch of rainforest ants start EATING HER ALIVE and like crawling into her ears and mouth and HGGGGGG that was genuinely so fucking disturbing

its a good thing that the time travel made it so rachel couldn't remember that bc that was fuuuuucked

another contender is a scene we don't actually see - erek having his capacity for violence instated and then slaughtering a ton of human and hork-bajir controllers 

like damn, you know its fucked up when its too fucked up for ANIMORPHS to even ‘show.’ this is a series that doesn't pull punches but evidentially that would've been Too Much to actually portray (understandably). also i feel like seeing the aftermath/everyone’s reactions had more of an impact than describing erek killing a bunch of people would have

also I forgot that marco Literally Fucking Dies during that scene and that's why he doesn't get to see the slaughter. wow

and then in the very next book JAKE dies too. jesus

oh it was also so sad and fucked up when marco’s dad told him that he and his wife used to fight sometimes, but then all of a sudden they stopped fighting, and their relationship was basically entirely peaceful and perfect - and this is how marco knows exactly when his mom was made into a controller, bc of course a yeerk wouldn't care enough to get into petty arguments like that....ooooof

Okay and book 15 really got me...that was fucking heavy man. Geeeez. Everything w/Marco and his mom is so fucked uppppp

Like he literally has to deal with so much awful traumatizing shit. The scene where he pretends to be a controller and is face to face w/visser one and THAT HIS MOM but he can’t even do anything, and he just sees the evil in her eyes and thinks about how there’s no way she had been controlled by a yeerk that long before bc he’s never seen her look like that...that was so fucking sad.

Plus Marcos mom now thinking that Marco is a controller...aughh...and then later Marco knows he can’t even think-speak to her bc he’ll just talk about everything he’s wanted to talk about to his mom this whole time... ;_;

And the parts where Marcos humor slips and the utter rage he feels towards the situation comes through...man

Plus everything about him being understandably afraid of sharks after being nearly torn in half by one back during their first dolphin adventure

Augh oh and jake telling Marco that everyone can tell something is up bc Marco isn’t joking around and talking about how insane their plan is like usual, so Marco fakes it sand does all that even tho he’s terrified and conflicted...aughhhh

Ok and the last scene where Marco is thinking about a future where he and his parents can talk plainly about how awful and traumatizing everything is, and then eventually they’ll feel okay enough to joke about it, bc Marcos mom is the one who taught him to look at the funny side of life...Oh The Pain

There were a lot of great fucked up individual lines in this book too. I’m just so sad about these poor middle schoolers jfc

Also I do distinctly remember the scene where they collapse the shark tank at Ocean World or w/e, it was weird af reading it bc I remembered none of the rest of the book but got weird deja vu reading that scene and remembering having read it like 13+ years ago

if it’s not clear by now I have a pretty terrible memory for media which is honestly good bc then I can reread things and it’s like new

Also jake...man...I said it previously but I was kinda eh about jake when I first read these bc he’s kinda the ‘basic’ character, but now I find his story much more interesting

His conflict over being leader is really good. KAA does a fantastic job capturing the pressure he’s under bc he was chosen by his friends to be the leader, so he REALLY can’t back out, and he doesn’t necessarily feel up to it, but feels he has no choice in the matter...

And constantly having to make really difficult decisions that could get his friends killed...geez. It’s so much pressure. And he talks about wanting to go back to being a normal kid when this is all over, and it kinda strikes me as him being in denial - like, there’s no way things can ever be ‘normal’ again, but that’s his way of coping.

Especially with Tom and all that. That conflict is so compelling...jake having to play all these different roles - as leader, as a son/student, as a regular brother to Tom - he’s constantly having to act a certain way and rarely gets to be Himself

It’s actually kinda relatable in a way - that feeling of being In Charge, but in a somewhat abstract and informal way, so you feel like regular old you, but you have to carefully regulate how you act bc the people around you expect a certain standard of behavior from you...

And all the morally grey situations they’re put in are fucked up, but especially for jake who has the final say on what they do, even when knowing it could lead to his friends being killed or made into controllers

Like in the book with the cannibal yeerk guy - there’s basically no good choices there. Jake lets the cannibal live, and (at first) implies that it’s for the best that he’s cannibalizing other yeerks and therefore helping get rid of some yeerks - except that he kills their hosts too

but the alternative would be to directly kill another human being who isn't actively fighting/resisting you, which is a fucked up thing for a middle schooler to have to do 

And the conflict between jake and Cassie is really excellent bc jake has to make these awful decisions, and Cassie is the type of person who can’t stand that sort of thing, so it gets left up to jake a lot, but then she’s upset with jake for doing something awful, even while knowing that there were no better options

like, her asking jake to kill the cannibal guy for her was really fucked up, but also entirely understandable for cassie as a character to ask. it was an emotionally charged situation, and cassie is an emotional person. she’s also somebody who like to Act, to do concrete good, and getting rid of an Evil Bad Guy in front of her would be a definite action

But Cassie is a great source of morality to the group - most of them are pretty jaded, but Cassie is able to hope in a way none of the rest are. It creates a really compelling dynamic between jake and Cassie that I kinda dismissed when I was like 10 or w/e

Also the scene where jake as a fly gets crushed and starts dying? Seriously fucked. And then after when he’s nearly breaking down in the airport and Cassie comforts him...that was a really good scene. Cassie is so good  

And the continuity is so excellent - I love how in book 17, Cassie (and jake to an extent) doesn’t really weigh in on the moral debate abt the oatmeal bc she’s still shaken up by asking jake to murder a guy for her, and then (presumably) going ahead and lighting his house on fire when jake doesn’t kill him

And augh jake and Marco have such a good and interesting dynamic - the entire group kinda pushes each other into their respective ‘roles’ in the group, but for a few books that’s really true for jake and marco

I don't remember what book it was but at some point marco (I think) mentions that jake understands what marco is dealing with w/his mom being a controller bc of tom, but that they don’t talk about it bc they ‘don't talk about stuff like that’ or something and I'm just like noooo talk to each other :( 

but at this point jake feels like he can’t really express doubt and fear and stuff like that bc he’s the Leader and they look to him to be strong (which is ironically very similar to how rachel feels), and marco feels like he can’t be serious bc he’s the funny guy. 

Basically I love all the different dynamics in the group. How Cassie and Rachel are such opposites but are best friends and get along well, while Marco and Cassie are more directly opposed - as jake says, Marco is ruthless, and Cassie definitely isn’t. Rachel and Marco are also pretty different which is interesting, bc they have a lot in common, and actually agree on a lot (even if they disagree out loud) but their commonalities combined with their circumstances make them react very differently to the same situations

I also love seeing the differences between characters from each other’s POV - like, p much all the characters think that Rachel is completely fearless, but when the book is from her POV, we get to see that that isn’t true at all - she feels plenty of fear, but she recognizes that her role in the group is to be the fearless one, so she pushes aside her fear to fit into that role (which inadvertently pushes her more and more into that ‘fearless warrior’ box - something that happens to all the characters more and more as the story goes on, like jake as ‘the leader’ and Marco as ‘the jokester’).

Also I loooove the grey morality of literally everything. Like the book where ax discovers an andalite traitor - not a controller, just an andalite who betrayed them to the yeerks. This leads to the deaths of like a hundred other andalites, and that whole scene you really just feel for ax, bc he feels so awful about everyone else dying while he escapes, yet he’s also so grateful to be alive, which he in turn feels bad about...

And ax’s conflict about being torn between his home w/his fellow andalites and his new home on earth w/his friends is great

And oh man I fucking love book 19. Any of the books where it goes more into the yeerks and their side of things are so good, just like the book where jake was made into a controller.

And book 19, where we meet a sympathetic yeerk, comes right after 18, where we meet an andalite traitor - again, I love how we clearly see that no one side is completely good or completely bad

So yeah book 19 fucking slapped. That shit was so compelling. I love how Cassie made a bunch of foolish decisions based on naïve hope, but it worked out!! Things aren’t always bleak and awful!

Except there were plenty bleak and awful parts of this book. It had a great balance of moods tbh, even though a lot of the situations were extremely contrived lmao. I love the stuff that aftran says, which is basically what I was thinking when I started my reread - being a yeerk fucking sucks, you’re literally a blind slug but also completely and fully sentient, on the same level as humans and andalites - and as afran pointed out this book, the yeerks are born as parasites, just as humans are born as predators - why is it okay for the humans to kill countless animals to eat, but not for the yeerks to enslave races to act as hosts? Well, the situation isn’t totally comparable, which Cassie and Marco both point out when aftran makes that comparison - the yeerks are enslaving sentient species, and cows and chickens are not the same as the humans and hork-bajir (though the story understandably doesn’t fall too deeply into the ‘who deserves what right/animal sentience’ rabbit hole).

And I like that aftran points out that the yeerks basically have 2 options currently - stay helpless and blind in a yeerk pool, or enslave a host. It’s interesting to hear that a lot of yeerks don’t like doing this but see it as the only options, as opposed to complete sensory deprivation. It makes me wonder if there are yeerks who are so staunchly against it that they elect to stay as pool-bound slugs forever

Also maybe it’s the shounen anime fan in me but I don’t even care that much that Cassie’s entire plan was completely off the rails and hinged on only the slightest chance of success - with failure being much more likely and completely catastrophic, with the animorphs and their loved ones all being wiped out, vs success being unlikely and also achieving...a moral victory? Peace between two enemy combatants in a huge war? nothing all that concrete...anyways it was a bunch of good-faith horrible decisions on Cassie’s part, but I don’t even care? I love stories where hope and love save the day against all odds, especially when they’re wielded like weapons by a character and make everything end nicely

This is especially true here bc animorphs is generally a series that leans very far away from that type of thing, so when it does happen, it feels like a victory. Plus the David trilogy is next so we kinda need a happy ending while we can

also bc I compared animorphs to hxh last time, I now have to compare it to the other series I've (partially) liveblogged, transformers mtmte.

this is gonna be more abstract and brief but basically. mtmte is all about after the war, and everyone has so much trauma and everything just sucks, so they all go on a space cruise and work on themselves. basically.

but the series does a lot of exploration of how war fucks people up - same as animorphs, tho animorphs spans the beginning of the war (for the main characters at least) until the end, whereas mtmte starts when the war ends.

but the point is. both series do an excellent job showcasing the wide range of reactions people have to being put in unthinkable situations during wartime. all the major characters in mtmte go through arcs where they heal/change from the war, some more subtle than others

basically the animorphs needs to go on a wacky space cruise adventure with a bunch of other fucked up people and figure their shit out, mtmte style

ok this is wicked long already so I’m gonna end it here. also I feel like I should start the next liveblog w/the david triology bc I’m for sure gonna have a lot to say abt that

[nbapprentice]

You said a while back that while Supergiant games (Bastion, Transistor, Hades) was mostly okay, you had some words about them. I was curious as to what those words were, since Hades' full release is soon.

okay. alright. ive been playing hades lately so i definitely want to give my two cents (or dollars by the size this is gonna get). but let’s go Step by Step

the good: i want to throw a whole Endorsement over supergiant games with the art direction and its characters, which is what keeps me coming back again and again, and what i can assume is that most people are attracted to. 

gameplaywise, they have a Format they stick to which has become their staple, not to their detriment but to their advantage, like... gameplay tropes, so to speak, that they stick to (such as the addition of special conditions that give a disadvantage in exchange for more long-term rewards)

i fucking adore that they take one concept per game, go for it, and when they’re done they are Done; they don’t bother with sequels, they don’t want to run things to the ground and i fucking respect that. They have their themes, and they stick to them (to various degrees of success).

that said, like every piece of media, they are not perfect and this has to be analysed and spoken about

CONTENT WARNINGS: genocide and ethnic cleansing, antisemitism, misogyny, homophobia, suicide, and mentions of incest, and a general Spoilers warning

bastion: touches on ethnic cleansing, and not in a way i’d say is satisfactory. our narrator and one of our Sympathetic characters is one of the men who worked on a world-ending weapon meant to use against the Ura (a group of people coded as East Asian) which after a bit of googling is literally called “the final solution” if there was ever a war between the Ura and the Cael (who feel like rly tan white people to me). jesus fucking CHRIST.

we also meet more Ura other than our two named characters and we have to kill most of them. so that fucking blows.

the game tries for “being a genocidal monster will get you fucked up and blown up” which duh, but i feel we shouldn’t have had a person responsible for war crimes be one of our friends no matter how bad he feels about the whole thing, or the people victim of war crimes become villains in the latter half of the game. zia’s father could’ve taken ruck’s role ez pz.

transistor: the weakest of their games, imo; the lore and writing are fairly flimsy and i did not come out feeling Satisfied, especially because it had this rly good build-up that did not pay off. not to mention... their villains? 3/4 were gay people. lol. two married guys (not even explicit, you only realize by their shared last names) and the ps*cho lesbian trope (iirc she wanted to kill the protagonist’s lover or something). the female protagonist also ends up killing herself to live forever in a digital paradise with her dead lover. it’s. god. 

very Aesthetic, GORGEOUS music, interesting gameplay; had potential, i do not feel like it lived up to it at least as far as the story goes.

pyre: now this one. this one’s BEEFY. where transistor felt flimsy, pyre is rich; lots to sink your teeth into, rich in lore and loveable characters, again w the beautiful music, themes of cooperation and togetherness. my favorite of the cast is volfred sandalwood, the only Black (or, well, Black-coded) revolutionary i’ve ever seen portrayed with this amount of sympathy.

onto the bad: they literally have a Class of character named “Savage”; there’s the “mystical mentally ill person” trope; there is an overwhelming amount of explicit m/f pairs (one of them being. a romance that formed in a single day and then both of the characters were somehow willing to risk it all for each other? PLEASE) while the only hints of gayness are... hints. especially when Jodariel (another of my favs) is teased to have feelings for the player regardless of gender then only gets an ending with a male character with whom she has nothing in common 🙃

hades: and now. this one. music: gorgeous. character designs: spectacular (aphrodite is straight up naked but it’s so... natural and casual, it doesn’t feel sexualized at all). voice acting amazing. character interactions charming and endearing. as a greek mythology nerd, it was nice to see them go for the obscure shit like Zagreus at all, NOT portray Persephone and Hades as a loving couple, AND portrayed the gods as the bunch of petty assholes (some more benevolent than others) that they are. imo they’re too generous with their portrayal of achilles but i’ll allow it.

and finally... it seems all those criticisms about having all the gay characters hidden in the shadows paid off, cuz we got (aside of patroclus and achilles) a bisexual polyamorous protag. Holy Shit! and it’s not even playersexual, romance whomever you want shit without the routes recognizing each other: he explicitly talks about how he’s thinking abt them both (though it’s like “yeah usually mortals take one lover but gods love many huh” polyamory is a human thing too bro!!!!!)

and this is where it all goes, well, at least vaguely downhill lol. ok so the incest warning i gave up there? well. it’s not... outright incestuous. but it has some ugly implications. i want to emphasize: the characters never refer to each other as siblings, nor do they treat each other as such (thanatos, in fact, only recognizes hypnos as his brother, and megaera only sees the other furies as her sisters), but they were all raised by the same woman, Nyx... zagreus and thanatos even grew up together (im assuming megaera didnt meet zagreus until he was fully grown).

this is complicated even worse by the fact that they tried to trick zagreus into believing Nyx was his mother. he realized pretty early on this was not true but like... adoptive mothers, anyone? granted i can believe that bc of the attempt at deception that probably ruptured any attempt at actual familial closeness, and it’s not like hypnos and thanatos saw zagreus as their brother at any point, so they were p much aware of the truth too. with the fact that thanatos even looks like goth miles edgeworth (im not kidding you can google him up right now its literally edgeworth in a cowl) i rly feel they were aiming for Childhood Friend Anime Rival Man than the “surprise kiss bc ur not actually related <3″ shit. zagreus never once refers to nyx as his mother in-game, and also refers to thanatos and hypnos as her sons, never his brothers.

so yeah, like. if one’s feeling generous, zagreus and thanatos are more of a “my father is emotionally closed off and neglects me so my best friend’s mother basically raised me” kind of situation... just pulled off in, perhaps, the worst way possible (why didnt they just say Zagreus was told Hekate was his mom, that’s such an easy fix? or that he was born of nobody other than Hades??? [gestures at athena])

but then, the gods. aaaaaaaahhhhahahahh the gods. demeter shows up! and she calls zeus, hades and poseidon... her foster-brothers. which somehow would make the persephone thing less fucking awful, apparently. they really. really really did not need to do that. she could’ve just said “my fellow gods” or whatever. or my “god-brothers” or something, to pretend it was just a weird god alliance thing??? i dont know but implying that foster family isn’t family is just... bro, the dynamics still exist.

Don’t Like That.

i even contacted supergiant games over this. they reassured me they were even trying to avoid the incest of the original myths bc they didn’t want to mess with such a heavy theme. i believe them... but i really think they didn’t think this through. compared to something like fire emblem fates this is nearly benign, but the implications don’t look good :/

tl;dr of the tl;drs: i admire their artistic philosophy and the heavy emphasis on fresh gameplay, characters and their relationships; i appreciate that it seems that they listen to criticism?; i don’t appreciate that they didn’t think to at LEAST talk to adoptees when making a game about family.

[stormsbourne]

the homestuck epilogue, summarized by me

edited after: I’m leaving this here for my own reference but there’s a decent amount of stuff I got wrong in these. I’ve tried to correct most of it. still please don’t bother with these if, for some reason, you’re still free of this dark knowledge in the post hell 2020 timeline

there’s doubtless parts of both sides (which are actually only one side, big spoilers there) that I’m going to forget so I apologize in advance for that but I read the entire thing very quickly and some parts are more memorable than others. this is also only slightly polished up from when I posted it on discord, which I did in a tremendous hurry. so pardon the grammar

please be wary that I literally CANNOT tag this with everything there are warnings for so if you’re not sure, check the actual epilogue tag list, because literally all of it is mentioned in some capacity.

letsa go

LET’S START WITH CANDY.

john decides not to go. immediately, things start going strangely well for literally everyone, who all get exactly what he thinks they want (or what SOMEONE thinks they want, more on that later. I think it's still john doing the influencing.) davejadekat hook up. john and roxy get married. etc. gamzee gets “redeemed” by which I mean john rescues him at calliope’s request and he goes around saying he’s good now. but as always there's trouble in paradise and the things that seem to be "good endings" end up being bad. jane becomes president of earth but this leads her to become a fascist dictator who may possibly be responsible for the future genocide of trollkind (this shit is full fascist racism shit. “troll camps” are a thing.). dave and karkat are in love with each other and jade getting in with them has actually just made it harder for them to be honest with one another. gamzee basically serves no purpose except to be annoying and gross. 

at some point literally all the trolls start getting resurrected because of timeline shenanigans where the black hole is spitting out their ghosts onto earth c (which is actually inside of the black hole in paradox space somehow. don’t think too hard about it). rose and kanaya adopt a grub they name vriska to honor her sacrifice and also because it looks like vriska. john and roxy have a kid named harry anderson. jane basically rapes jake (he's drunk and also the lollipop is invovled) and conveniently gets pregnant with a kid they later name tavros. AS TIME GOES ON, karkat breaks up from djk because he's sick of it and then goes on to lead a troll rebellion against jane. jane starts cucking jake with gamzee. roxy and john break up because john is depressed and also because john is way more interested in texting terezi than in his real-life spouse. dirk kills himself for reasons that have more to do witht the construct of the meat timeline than the candy one.

all of this is slightly out of order but I’m trying to be succinct so when things get crazy I can keep the relevant details close together.

QUICK MEAT DETOUR (MEATOUR).

john decides to go. he makes a quick stop to grab the ring of life from aranea, then scoops up the other game over kids, who head off to face caliborn. the masterpiece goes down as you would expect it to with the beta kids getting stuck in the juju. the betas are later released from the juju by vriska but it doesn't actually kill english (dave does with his sword, then gets decapitated), and john gets nailed hard in the chest by caliborn's gold tooth, which begins to poison and kill him. davepeta appears for like two seconds and then vanishes into the black hole. jade's corpse is the only one of the kids that isn't fucking vaporized but it gets sucked into the black hole. we'll come back to this later. john runs into meenah, who steals the life ring and peaces out into the black hole. then he runs into terezi in the remains of paradox space and the two of them fuck. 

IN THE MEANTIME, on earth, karkat mounts an opposition run to jane's presidency, at dave's urging. dave and karkat are explicitly not together but also explicitly dancing around how they both know they love each other; jade keeps trying to start a threesome and both of them are like "UHHHHHH." roxy and calliope are together. jake and dirk have a stupid wrestle rap tv show but it is iterated on over and over again that dirk thinks jake is a useless idiot who he can't treat well and who deserves nothing and whom he needs to babysit and control so cool I guess. dirk goes to talk to rose and it becomes clear both of them are experiencing the same thing with their expansion of consciousness giving them awareness of other timelines and vague control over them (”ascending”) AT WHICH POINT it becomes clear that dirk is actually the narrator+controller of the entire meat timeline. the narration turns orange and dirk’s character voice (or what the epilogue says his character voice is) begins to leak into how it’s written.

BACK TO CANDY FOR A SECOND.

jade's corpse from the meat timeline crashes down into the candy earth c through a ghost black hole portal. nobody knows what the sweet christ is happening, but roxy proposes having another funeral since the kids only see one another at funerals (the last one being dirk’s) and aren't very close. they have the funeral but in the middle of it, jade sits up and has been possessed by the spirit of red calliope, who claims she is protecting this version of the planet and is keeping watch out for a bad actor who could destroy everything.

kid vriska is horrible to kid tavros. john and terezi talk a lot and it's routinely implied that john cares more about her than about roxy, and that john is the only person she talks to. jake eventually walks out on jane with their kid but only after she’s treated him horrendously and continued to cuck him with gamzee. meenah also comes down through a hole in the sky, where she meets karkat and they hook up romantically. dave and jade get married but it’s implied to be a very troubled marriage. kid vriska begins banging harry anderson once they are teens. also once they are teens, ACTUAL (alive) vriska comes crashing down onto the planet from being sucked into the black hole. she and kid vriska have some conversations about terezi, but only after vriska hatefucks gamzee. vriska sends terezi a message. we don't see how this pays off, which makes me think that more is probably coming. 

dave, while trying to help karkat with the troll rebellion, comes upon actual literal barack obama, has a conversation about sexuality with him and how he’s not really into jade (here he calls himself “gay” while in the meat timeline he is very explicit about being bisexual). obama tells him that ascension to one’s ultimate self is impossible for the normal human body to withstand and helps him turn into a robot so he can handle the transformatiin and help save another timeline. 

btw a war has started between jane’s fascist empire and the trolls, led by karkat, who has an eyepatch. john, having patched some things up a bit with roxy, reconciles with his son. this is basically how candy ends.

OK. LET’S GET BACK TO THE MEAT.

now that dirk's control over the narrative is firmly established he actually starts exerting some level of control over people through his narrative voice. he uses this to start making people do things he wants.

anyway jade falls into a coma at some point and when she wakes up, the spirit of red calliope is using her to "transmit" and dirk and red calliope start literally fighting over who gets to write the story. red calliope wins at first, and dirk's narration is reduced down to small font where he passive aggressively swipes at calliope. alive calliope takes one look at possessed jade and runs away almost literally screaming. oh also I forgot calliope and roxy both go by "they" at this point in time and dirk+calliope spar a bit over that as dirk also keeps calling roxy "her." fun times. 

anyway while calliope is running the narrative jake agrees to endorse karkat's presidential run as dirk makes plans involving a rifle and the phrase "jake english, your ass is mine." during the rally where jake is about to endorse karkat, dirk fools calliope into thinking he's trying to shoot jake, but wheels around and hits jade instead with a tranquilizer through a window. this makes red calliope's influence go away and dirk resumes control of the narrative. 

using his regained control of the narrative, dirk presses his thumb down on jake to remind jake how much he loves dirk, how he’s IN LOVE with dirk, and how "to love dirk is to obey him" and jake, obligingly, endorses jane in front of the entire crowd gathered there to watch his speech about karkat. 

dave and karkat, drinking together after jane handily wins the election, hook up though dave basically has to shout dirk out of his head because he wants to do it on his own terms instead of the way dirk keeps writing it, and dirk WILL NOT LET HIM because dirk knows best. eventually dirk leaves him alone but only after dave basically forcibly chases him out (without knowing what he’s really doing, sort of like Aimless Renegade in the comic). john and terezi come back to earth, where john dies and terezi captchalogues his body. dirk (as narrative) and terezi (as herself) spar a bit until he makes an offer to her to come see him about her dead boyfriend. this is the last we see of her. 

dirk then convinces kanaya (using the narrative) that he and rose are in love and he's better for rose than she is and she needs to let them go if she really loves rose. kanaya obligingly does this. dirk leaves kanaya some medicine that will wake jade up and goes to talk to jake, where he sex blackmails jake into lending him a spaceship. jake thinks he's coming along on the trip but dirk assures him this is not the case. jake breaks down literally sobbing and begging to go, dirk kisses him and tells him he'll never let jake break his heart again, and dirk leaves with rose (in a coma which dirk will resolve by putting her into a robot like dave).

jade wakes up and, with memories of red calliope's goals, shouts that dirk has to be stopped, pointing out to various people (namely kanaya) how weird they’ve been acting because he’s been subtly influencing them using the narrative as lowkey mind control. they all make plans to go find dirk though none of them can figure out where the sweet fuck john is (terezi is awol). they ask jake who, sobbing, confirms that dirk took a spaceship, and then go plan to get one of their own and follow him using red calliope's instructions.

also this is impossible to get in anywhere else but roxy is going by “he” now and dirk has a whole paragraph about how suave and manly and cool and masculine he is

WOW THAT WAS HAIRY. THAT IT?

the actual ending of each consists of the following: candyverse davebot shows up on candy earth as red calliope opens a hole presumably back out to the furthest ring (after literally eating caliborn’s body). he and aradia (she was in candy for a while now but did pretty much nothing) are like cool let's go and vault into the hole. meanwhile, meatverse dirk and robot rose draw closer to a new unnamed planet as rose does dirk's laundry. they both know the planet is destined for a new sburb session in the future.

YIKES!

yeah yikes.

WHAT DO I DO WITH THIS?

if you’re like me you should ignore it and just keep doing what you want to do. have fun. the author is dead, long live the fanfic author.

[corvid-420]

Can you explain how fandom is fascist and how it is a prophylactic against other strains of fascism

Ok, you have to understand that what I’m about to do is basically puking a whole lot of theory into your mouth. this isn’t the final word on the matter, and you should probably do your own reading on the matter.

As always for this subject I recommend Adorno’s Stars Down to Earth, Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, and rubbing a different part of the same elephant is Felix Guattari’s Three Ecologies. A really good treatment of Nietzsche that isn’t the usual juvenilia from like Vox or whatever comes from Tracy Strong’s Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration. But Ecce Homo is a good quick read, and hilarious, too imho.

Again, this isn’t the final word on the matter, and no one should mistake my recommendation that you begin by trying to read these for an endorsement of everything these writers ever said about everything ever and always.

As for my take: When Nietzsche said that Europeans killed g*d and that in so doing, man (as Europeans conceived “man”) had to become worthy of the deed, perhaps become not just godlike but beyond godlike, he was saying a lot more than just presaging incendiary trolling in 280 characters or less. 

Glossing over a whole lot (because again, not the final word): G*d was thrown into the arena of discourse and everything that was holy, which once anchored us and our relationship to the world and each other, was lost. What took its place was humanism. “our” ancestors stopped believing in G*d for the same reason we’re all a bunch of liberal humanists: without really knowing why or how.

What does this have to do with fandom, fascism, etc.?

Well, with fandom we don’t even have to probe all that deep to see how fandom has taken the place of where G*d used to be. Fandom uses some of the same words (canon) to describe the same processes that beset Christianity throughout its history: different interpretations of texts begot legions of followers of varying piety. True, “we”’ve yet to start burning heretics of our ‘ships and headcanons, but it’s not for lack of will (see: the death threats fandoms trade in not just among themselves, but toward authors, actors, performers, producers, etc.).

[Again, not the final word; yes there’s lots of glossing over to keep an already long post from becoming too long; no i am not trying to cover every argument, counterargument, interpretation or facet of anything. that’s why i recommended you read some of the sources.]

This is where fascism comes in - again, not the final word, but in brief. Fascists have their own ships and canons, but unlike fandom, they actually strive to acquire the ships and cannons needed to effect their interpretations of the world into reality. No fandom is going to actually grab their wands, their tardises or whatever the fuck and try and take state power to force CW to let Destiel finally fuck. The liberal bourgeoisie’s culture industry has (for now) sufficiently satiated their hunger.

But fascists are (or rather have) taken state power to start genociding.

Considering the prophylactic phrase for a moment: absent g*d (again, that’s over), without mass culture, what do you think fandummers would be doing if they didn’t have drama over slashfics to preoccupy them? Where would all that libidinal energy go if the stream of slop from marvel or netflix were cut off?

If all this masscult weren’t dulling the swinery throughout fandom into accepting their miserable, alienated lives in exchange for another marvel movie or another pokemon game as late capitalism necrotizes around them, who do you think is waiting with a ready-made answer for why they can’t enjoy their precious shows, games or movies?

I didn’t even get to the “genius of the heart” that Nietzsche talks about in Ecce Homo as THE figure that will exemplify our times, so I’ll just leave with this quote and a defiance of Nietzsche’s request that you don’t try and guess who he’s talking about in this passage. Instead, consider all the faces that float into your imagination as you read this, whether they’re “real,” from a work of fiction or somewhere in between; or whether they’re self-help gurus, tv show characters, reality show characters, or politicians:

"The genius of the heart as is possessed by that great solitary, the divine tempter and born Pied Piper of consciences whose voice knows how to descend into the inmost depths of every soul, who neither utters a word nor casts a glance in which some seduction is not to be found, a part of whose mastery is that he understands the art of seeming—not what he is but that which will bind his followers to press ever more closely upon him, to follow him ever more enthusiastically and whole-heartedly. The genius of the heart who makes the loud and self-conceited hold their tongues and listen, who polishes all rough souls and gives them a new desire to savour—the desire to lie placid as a mirror that the deep heavens may be reflected in them. The genius of the heart which teaches the clumsy and too hasty hand to hesitate and grasp more tenderly; which scents the hidden and forgotten treasure, the pearl of goodness and sweet spirituality beneath thick black ice and is a divining rod for every grain of gold long buried and imprisoned in much mud and sand. The genius of the heart whose touch enriches all, not ‘blessed” and overcome, not as though favoured and crushed by the good of others; but richer in himself, fresher to himself than before, opened up, breathed upon and warmed by a thawing wind; more uncertain perhaps, more delicate, more fragile, more bruised, but full of hopes as yet unnamed, full of a new will and striving, full of a new unwillingness and resistance”.