#i was into traditional tangible stuff before

[austerulous]

So I treated myself to a refurbished graphics tablet. 👀

[brittlebutch]

enough fic where Sarek refused to let Amanda raise Spock as Jewish; i want to see Sarek go apeshit on the noisemaker on Purim

[visceravalentines]

Fireworks

Dad's Best Friend!Dilf!Bo Sinclair x AFAB!Reader

3k words Part 2 here!

Smut for days, fluff for weeks. Age gap, dad's best friend, oral, dirty talk, praise, creampie, reader is referred to as darlin' and baby girl and pretty.

Yeah yeah, today's the 4th of July, cheesy title, whatever. THIS IS THE MOST FUN I'VE HAD IN A WHILE. In fact I loved living in this little tableau I've created so much I'm planning a sequel?? Fuck dude, I am down so stupid bad for this dumb idiot man.

Tagging a few people who I think might enjoy this as much as I did. @vincent-sinclair-deserved-better, @slutforguts, @brandnewhuman, @fluffy-little-demon

If there was one thing your parents did right every time, it was their big summer bash. 

Every year, when the temperature really started to ramp up, they invited the whole neighborhood over for barbecue, drinks, ice cream, and yard games.  Their backyard pool was filled with kids bobbing like apples.  There was often a waterslide, a water balloon toss, and sometimes fireworks once it got dark. 

You had missed it the last few years, busy with summer semester at school.  This year, however, you found yourself longing for a familiar setting and comfortable traditions.  Even the incessant questions from neighbors you barely remembered would be worth the opportunity to be somewhere stable.  Your parents, of course, were delighted, and swiftly roped you in to helping plan the menu, buy food and supplies, and set up the morning of the big day. 

Wearing a new bikini underneath a band tee, you helped your mom arrange watermelon slices on a large platter, nestled soda and beer into coolers full of ice, and walked up and down the deck steps innumerable times carrying everything outside. 

Although the party didn’t officially start until noon, people always began trickling in early, especially people close with your folks.  The Swensons next door with their four boys arrived at 10:30.  Two women from your mom’s book club arrived around 11.  And when you made yet another trip down the deck stairs, you saw your dad on a ladder hanging decorations with the help of a tall, sandy-haired man you immediately recognized. 

“Hey Dad, Mom wants to know if you want the stuff for the grill outside now or if you want to wait.”  The man looked over his shoulder with a curious expression on his handsome face.  “Hi, Mr. Sinclair.” 

He broke into a grin.  “Y/N, is that you?  I’ll be damned.” 

“It’s me.”  You smiled sheepishly.  His Southern accent had been the source of much conversation between you and your high school friends.  You’d even dated some asshole from Mississippi for a while just to hear that honey-sweet drawl. 

Mr. Sinclair handed your dad the other end of the banner he was hanging and turned to you.  Were you imagining his ice-blue eyes flicking down to your bare legs and back up to your face?  “You look good, darlin’.  How’s college?” 

Oh, you had forgotten that.  How had you forgotten the way he called you darlin’?  “Can’t complain,” you said.  “I’ll graduate in another year.” 

“Y’got big plans after that?”  God, those eyes.  Had they always been so piercing?  You felt seen in a way that was intense, but not unpleasant. 

“Not really.  I’m waiting to see what opportunities open up, I guess.” 

“Well, you’re a smart one, you’ll figure it out.” 

Your mom yelled your name from the back door.  You excused yourself and walked across the patio.  The weight of a stare on your ass was tangible. 

Just before you reached the deck stairs, you turned and looked back.  He did not even try to hide the fact that yes, he had indeed been checking you out seconds before.  His gaze swept up to your face at the most leisurely pace possible and he flashed you a subtle smirk.  You felt the heat of a blush and tried not to race up the stairs. 

 The backyard filled up quickly as people began to arrive.  Music wafted from the speakers mounted beneath the deck.  The shriek of neighborhood kids and the splashing of pool water rounded out the suburbia soundtrack. 

You answered the same questions over and over from friendly neighbors, helped your mom stave off several low-stakes emergencies, finally managed to extricate yourself from all party business long enough to shed your t-shirt and slip into the pool. 

The shallow end was for splash fights.  The deep end was for the older crowd.  The water was cool but not cold, washing the sweat from your skin as you let yourself sink all the way down to the bottom.  The muffling of sound and the sensation of even pressure on your skin helped you relax, clear your mind, until all that was left was the thought of a mechanic’s rough hands. 

You had bet on a lot of things, coming home for this event.  Mr. Sinclair’s killer jawline was not one of them. 

In one burst, you launched yourself back up to the surface.  Wiping the water from your eyes and nose, you kicked to the wall, hauled yourself up and out of the pool.  As you toweled off your face and arms, you scanned the crowd.  Sure enough, you found him, barely a participant in the conversation at hand, gaze locked on you as he drained the dregs from his beer bottle. 

He was going to need another, wasn’t he?  You were sort of the host of this party too, right? 

You wrapped the towel around your hips and snagged two beers from a cooler.  You pretended you couldn’t quite hear Mrs. Swenson flagging you down and made a beeline for the tall man breaking away from the conversation. 

“Hey, Mr. Sinclair,” you said, darting in front of him.  The way he lit up upon seeing you made your stomach flip.  “I grabbed you a beer.” 

“Well ain’t you the sweetest thing.”  He accepted the bottle from you and this time, there was no mistaking the way his eyes drank in your exposed skin.  “Call me Bo, darlin’.”  He took a swig.  You tried and failed at not staring at his lips.  “You enjoyin’ yourself?” 

“Yeah, it’s good to be back.  Summer on campus is boring.” 

“Can’t help but notice you didn’t bring anyone home with you.” 

You raised an eyebrow.  “Yeah…not a lot of luck in that department.” 

He grinned at you.  “What, a pretty thing like you?  Now that’s a cryin’ shame.” 

“Oh, believe me, there has been crying.” 

His smile cooled, just a little.  “Any o’ them kids hurt your feelings, darlin’, you give me a call.  I’ll teach ‘em a lesson for you.” 

Something told you he wasn’t joking.  “Well, if you ever come across Bradley from Gulfport, you have my permission to kick his ass.” 

He laughed.  “Duly noted.  What did Bradley from Gulfport have goin’ for him?” 

You pinched your tongue between your teeth.  “…a Southern accent.” 

The smile this triggered sent a heatwave rolling beneath your skin.  “That’s all it takes, huh?”  You bit your lip and could not look at him.  “You gotta watch out for those Southern boys, there’s only two kinds.  They’re either gentlemen or scoundrels, every one of ‘em.” 

You boosted your courage with a mouthful of beer.  “Which one are you, Bo?” 

He studied you for a long time before answering.  “The kind who doesn’t want your daddy noticin’ the way I’m lookin’ at his daughter.” 

You were wet, and it was not from the pool. 

Clearing your throat, you said, “I think I’m…going to go change.  Probably not getting back in the water.” 

He nodded once.  “Fair enough.” 

You took two steps before adding, “I’ll be upstairs, if you need anything.”  Again, shocked at your own brazenness, it took everything in you not to run up the steps. 

The house was cold and quiet.  You made your way down the hall, hung the towel over the shower curtain rod, nudged your bedroom door almost completely closed.  Slowly, you undid your bikini, practically tingling with anticipation.  Would he actually follow you up here?  What if he did?  You took your sweet time picking out a pair of underwear and a new t-shirt.  You held off on the shorts and the bra.  How long should you wait before you went back out there? 

Just as you were about to give up and pull on the rest of your clothes, there came a soft rap on the door.  You took hold of the handle and opened it just a little further, peeking into the hallway. 

There stood Bo Sinclair, bold as brass, looking somehow both smug and earnest.  “I missed you,” he said. 

You reached out, grabbed his hand, tugged him into your bedroom and shut the door.  With fluid grace, he spun you around, pushed you against the door, set his hands lightly on your waist.  You were breathing hard already.  “D’you want this, darlin’?” he whispered. 

You nodded.  “Yes.” 

“Are you sure?” 

“Yes.” 

He tilted your chin up with his thumb, kissed you with those lips.  He tasted like beer and cigarettes and some indescribable sweetness.  Your hands found his chest, still broad and muscular, and he felt hot beneath the fabric of his shirt.  He broke the kiss, met your eyes, then kissed you again, deeper this time, his tongue playing at the edge of your teeth.  A soft moan rose to your lips. 

He pulled away again, looked at you seriously.  “If you want me to stop, I’ll stop,” he said. 

You shook your head.  “No.  I want more.”  Your hand slid down his front, palmed at him through his jeans. 

He cocked his head, a smile creeping across his face.  “You’re a little minx, ain’t you.”  He thrust his hips against you, pushed his knee in between your thighs.  “Lemme show you a good time, baby girl.”  He kissed down your neck, into the hollow of your throat, his fingertips brushing the skin just underneath the hem of your shirt.  You arched your back, pressing against him, still caught up in a measure of disbelief that this was actually happening. 

Bo took your hands and pulled you toward your bed.  It was a full, barely bigger than a twin, hopefully big enough for two – you’d never tried it before.  He sat on the edge, guided you onto his lap with your legs wrapped around his waist, showered you with kisses while he ran his hands over your legs, your ass. 

You took hold of his shirt, worked it up his torso and off of him.  His shoulders were dusted with freckles, soft blonde hair on his chest.  His eyes gleamed.  “Fair is fair, darlin’.” 

You stripped off your own shirt, tossed it to the floor.  Bo muttered an expletive under his breath.  He traced his thumb over your nipple and it hardened instantly, sending a jolt of pleasure straight to your core.  “You’re too pretty, baby,” he murmured.  “I wanna wreck you.” 

Wrapping your arms around him, you pulled yourself against his body, kissed his collarbones, his shoulders.  You could feel him getting hard underneath you and you rolled your hips experimentally once, twice.  He made a delightful sound in his throat, his grip tightening on your love handles. 

“Let me worship you, darlin’,” he said against your temple. 

“Please,” you breathed. 

He twisted, laid you down on the bed, kissed you sweetly and then wandered his mouth down your body, little by little, until his fingers were tucked in the waistband of your underwear and his breath was warm on your lower stomach.  His baby blue eyes, alight with mischief, locked on yours. 

“Now, you gotta be quiet.  Wouldn’t wanna get you in trouble.” 

You nodded quickly, the blanket already balled up in your fists. 

Bo eased your panties down your thighs slowly.  You squeezed your eyes shut, trying to steady your breathing, and when his tongue first slipped through your lips you let out an involuntary ohh. 

“Ah-ah, what did I say?”  You could hear the grin in his voice.  “Be good for me or I might have to give you a spankin’, and it won’t be like the kind your daddy used to give you.” 

You writhed.  You disheveled the sheets.  You bit your lip hard as he worked you over, sucking your clit, teasing your entrance.  These were not the bewildered ministrations of a reluctant frat boy.  This man was indeed worshipping you and doing it well, and the pleasure building steadily deep inside you was enough to make you want to scream. 

Finally, when you truly could not take it anymore, you choked out his name, grabbed at his hair.  He looked up, licked you off his lips, kissed the inside of your thigh.  “What d’you need, baby girl?” 

“I-I….” 

“God, you look good.”  He crept up the length of your body, cradled your head to bring your lips up to his.  “Such a mess for me.” 

You ran your hands through his chest hair.  “Bo,” you whimpered. 

“Yes, darlin’?” 

“I need you.” 

“You need me where?” 

“I need you…to fuck me…please?” 

He exhaled sharply.  “You are hellbent on gettin’ me in trouble, ain’t you.”  He trailed a finger down your breastbone.  “Teasin’ me with that beautiful body…askin’ me so nicely.” 

“Please, Bo.” 

He pressed his lips to your forehead, nuzzled your ear.  “Has anyone ever made you cum in this bed?” he whispered. 

“No,” you whispered back. 

“Mmm.”  He cupped your breast, squeezed firmly.  “I bet you’d look mighty fine on top of me.”  He slipped away from you, pulled off his jeans and boxers.  You made room for him on the bed, straddled his hips, eyeing his length.  He folded his arms above his head and stretched languidly.  “Take it slow, darlin’.  I like the view.” 

You rubbed yourself against him, your already-sensitive clit dangerously tender.  The two of you moaned in concert, the friction between you intoxicating.  He felt good between your folds, beneath your hands, his stomach firm under a cushion of fat.  You canted your hips in a steady rhythm until he was slick with your arousal.  With his tip at your entrance, you pressed down carefully, not quite enough to push him into you, and smiled at him, held him there. 

“Wicked,” he scolded.  “You bet your ass I’ll remember this for next time.” 

“Next time?” 

“Oh, there will most assuredly be a next time.” 

This lit up your insides more than you expected and you lowered yourself onto him all the way in one smooth motion.  You gasped.  He groaned.  His hands left their place on the pillow to take hold of your hips.  He rocked you back and forth at an easy pace and you felt him flex inside you. 

“Oh, Bo.” 

“Quit.”  He slapped the side of your ass.  “My stamina ain’t what it used to be and if you throw that in the mix we are in for a short ride.” 

You giggled, leaned back for a better angle, and sighed contentedly.  When you opened your eyes, you found him staring at you with open admiration.  Bending over his chest, you kissed him deeply, your skin alight with his touch.  You rode him methodically for what could have been hours, hands on your breasts, biting back the little sounds he drew out of you. 

At last he took your jaw in his hand, commanded your attention.  “Now, darlin’.  You’re gonna cum for me hard and you’re gonna look me in the eyes while you do it.  Y’understand?” 

Your breath caught in your throat.  “Yes sir.” 

He gave you a look.  “I’m gonna remember that for next time too.” 

He took a firm grasp on your thighs, adjusted his hips, and began to thrust into you with unexpected force.  Your mouth fell open in an O and your eyes rolled back in your head.  “Look at me, darlin’, look at me.”  You refocused, teeth pinning your lip, his expression positively sinful.  You felt yourself begin to come apart and clawed at his chest.  “That’s it, baby, so pretty.” 

You couldn’t keep back the whine bubbling up in your lungs any longer, keening helplessly, whole body a mass of snapping nerves.  His long, soft lashes fluttered as he finished inside you with a low grunt, clenching your flesh hard enough to leave marks. 

Panting, you sank onto his shoulder and he wove his arms around you.  “You did so well for me,” he mumbled, kissing your brow.  “Such a sweet thing.” 

You curled into his side while he stroked your back, traced the lines your nails left in his skin.  “You know…I’ve never….” 

He grew immediately serious.  “You’ve never what?” 

“I’ve never had sex in this bed at all.” 

Bo huffed out a sigh of relief.  “Jesus Christ, Y/N, you’re gonna give an old fuck like me a heart attack.” 

You giggled.  “Sorry.” 

“I can’t be goin’ around deflowerin’ young women, they’d kill me in the streets.”  He gave you a tender kiss.  “Probably kill me for this anyway.” 

“Too bad, I’ll miss you.” 

He gave your ass an affectionate smack.  “Speakin’ of missin’, we’d both better get back out there before they send a search party.” 

“When can I see you again?” 

“In about five minutes when you put your clothes back on and get out there and pretend like you weren’t just fucked stupid by your daddy’s best friend.” 

“That is not what I meant.” 

“Oh, what’d y’mean?” 

“When can I see you again like this?”  You ran your thumb along his jaw. 

“Well, how long are you in town for?” 

“The rest of the summer.” 

He let out a low whistle.  “Is that so?  Y’know, I’ve been meanin’ to hire some help at the shop.  How ‘bout I pay you and let you fuck me?” 

“Would that be weird?” 

“You tell me, baby girl.” 

“Nah, I don’t think so.” 

“Well then I don’t neither.”  He kissed you one last time.  “Consider yourself hired.  Great interview.  Put your clothes on.” 

You socked his ribs and wiggled away.  He watched you dress and you slipped out of the room, sneaking back to the party well before he did.  No one seemed to have noticed either of your absence, and you managed to play it cool for the rest of the afternoon. 

When the sun fell at last and the streetlights turned on, everyone congregated on the front lawn for a fireworks show.  Your dad always went for the ones that were technically illegal and to this day no one gave him grief about it. 

With everyone’s eyes on the sky, you sidled up beside Bo, standing behind the crowd near the house.  You didn’t dare take his hand, but you leaned against his arm, and a smile appeared on his lips, and that was enough. 

[dailyanarchistposts]

TFSR: Could you introduce yourself for the listeners? Your name and pronouns and any other information that you’d like people to know about you?

Cindy Milstein: First, I really want to thank you for having me on the Final Straw and preparing so well ahead of time for this. My name is Cindy Milstein. And I use they or he for pronouns. And yeah… prior to the pandemic, I was doing a lot of anarchist organizing, including anarchist summer school, and was part of the Montreal Bookfair Collective. And I focus a lot on doing care, solidarity and grief projects. And I also do books! So I’m on the show today about the latest anthology I just did.

TFSR: Yeah, I was really excited about this book: “Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart – Mending the World as a Jewish Anarchist” which is out with AK Press. Particularly for me as like a queer anarchist Jew to see all this writing that you put together by people who are navigating those things being queer, anarchist, and Jewish. And I think the book provides a really beautiful take on all the kinds of feelings that I’ve tried to work through for myself, and my relationship to Jewishness, and the book as a whole makes a case for how Jewishness fits into queerness and anarchism… As an ethical, political way of living in this world, which is also the way that I’ve heard you define anarchism before that I find really helpful. But before we dive into some of the stuff in the book, I want to just talk… mention, you know, the recent widespread attention given to Israel’s violent occupation of Palestine. It always comes up now and again, in the mainstream media, but we know that this is an ongoing thing… the state’s genocidal treatment of Palestinians. So I wanted to ask for your thoughts on how Jewish anarchist specifically can speak out and respond to the ongoing Palestinian struggle for liberation.

CM: Yeah, I also wanted to start off and saying that my heart is really heavy with all the Palestinians who are having to deal with… yet again, massive amounts of death and destruction. It’s too bad this keeps happening. And I was thinking about how as Jewish anarchists, you know… maybe this plays into, in a way, why the anthology came out too… And why there’s a resurgence of sort of Jewish anarchism… I was thinking about a lot of people that were anarchists or anarchistic who did something called the International Solidarity Movement. Was that like 20 years ago or something? Mostly? And people would go to the occupied territories and help with olive harvests and be there as, you know, bodies in solidarity doing both contributing through to helping Palestinians with things they needed, also being bodies against the Israeli state.

Anarchists Against The Wall was another project. Again, not everyone was anarchists in it, but it was Israeli, including anarchist Jews. So there has been a tradition of Jewish anarchists engaging in really tangible direct action and solidarity in Palestine, and the State of Israel. And then you kind of flash forward and the past few years… I was thinking about this a lot. It’s not, again, by at all anarchists but some Jewish anarchists have been really involved in groups like “If Not Now”, and “Jewish voices for Peace” and other groups like that. And that have been doing a lot of work within Jewish institutional structures in larger Jewish communities on Turtle Island, and other places to try to switch away from this conflation of Judaism with Zionism and there’s been a lot of groundwork.

So then we come to this moment. I don’t know, it’s just felt really powerful to watch! It’s been really moving. The solidarity demonstrations are massive. They were instantaneous and in so many places. But just the one I went to, which wasn’t huge, in Pittsburgh. I felt this even there with a few 100 people. It was, you know… Muslims, Jews, Palestinians, Christians, anarchists. And it felt so much a deeper form of solidarity, where it wasn’t as unusual in a way for there to be people coming there with the fullness of who they were in a solidarity. It just felt really moving. And myself included in that I and a couple other queer Jewish anarchist decided to make some banners and one of them we made there was “Solidarity With Palestine. Abolish the State.” We had lots of kind of debate about that. How do.. should we be bringing a perspective? I thought we should. But I was really struck ahead of time and when we brought it to the solidarity demo people were really receptive to having Jews there naming that they were Jews bringing their views. There were other signs that other Jews had brought there weren’t anarchists that were… you know, “Judaism Does Not Equal Zionism” and all these things! But that would make it clear that they were Jews and I think and… as many people by listening have seen images of the solidarity demos, there’s so many demonstrations in which Jewish anarchists and also radical Jews were being really clear about who they were at the solidarity demonstrations.

Now, why is that? It’s not to be like “Hey, look! Here I am.” But I think that’s because Jews are told we should have an extra responsibility to that struggle. For us to be contesting the way the State of Israel is instrumentally using what we understand to be the beauty of Jewishness and Judaism to uphold the state and occupation and colonialism. I think it’s really powerful to say “No”. This is not this hegemony of a viewpoint. And I think the other thing a lot of Jewish anarchists have been doing is holding spaces for the grief of people being killed.

Again, I was part of a… I didn’t organize this, but some Jewish anarchists in Pittsburgh organized a really beautiful Kaddish a mourning prayer for a half hour in the Jewish neighborhood on Shabbat. Which means a lot of Jews are walking around seeing us do this, and it was a half mile from the Tree of Life Synagogue. It was the same corner where they had done many different vigils, grief rituals, and other things around the white supremacist murders at the Tree of Life only a little over two years ago. So it just felt really powerful to be there and say that we understand because of our own traditions of mourning, why those traditions actually compel us to be in solidarity with other people and their pain. When they’re sick, or dying or after death. And it actually… it isn’t just those traditions don’t just apply to us, they compel us to be here for other people. It was very beautiful.

So I want to say just to wrap this up with Jewish anarchists… because I’ve just been watching around I think it’s like a lot of anarchists, but Jewish anarchists have been really throwing themselves for Palestinian solidarity forms of direct mutual aid, and doing a lot of really beautiful speaking and writing and organizing. Again, very visibly. And I think that’s a change. It’s a real palpable change this time. Not just Jewish anarchists. But there’s a sea change in the kind of incredible attachment to Zionism, among Jews, and I feel like Jewish anarchists… I’m proud in a way that we’re at the forefront, because we’re anti-statists. So I guess the last thing to say is… I think the difference of what Jewish anarchists bring to this moment is that we bring the things we’re speaking like it isn’t just the State of Israel, it’s all states! It isn’t just colonialism in this region, It’s colonialism everywhere! It’s not just occupation here, et cetera, et cetera.

And the last thing I want to say is a form of critical solidarity that said, “we will be in solidarity with the Palestinians to become liberated. And when people are liberated, we understand how liberation has often gets perverted into states and ends up doing exactly what people want it to liberate themselves from. And we will be in solidarity and when people liberate themselves, we will be in solidarity with those who are then looking for forms of autonomous self determination that are outside states.”

TFSR: Yeah, that seems so important because in addition to the way that people talk about the responsibility of Jews to speak out against Israeli state violence against Palestinians, then you add the responsibility of anarchists to provide a take on these situations, that’s also anti-state. That was solidarity… but not saying “well, we need to support anything that’s going to be against that state.” Some leftists or state communist type people will like just take whatever side is against the US or Israel. So it’s a more nuanced approach. And I think that’s… I’m really glad you brought that up. To think about those two things kind of overlapping and the Jewish anarchist response.

CM: You know, there’s also anarchists who aren’t Jewish, who are doing profoundly beautiful work right now. In terms of creating all sorts of actions, beautiful actions, direct actions and other forms of organizing. But I’ve really appreciated at this moment, where in a way maybe the responsibility… The mosque that was being targeted during Ramadan. I was breaking my heart for my Muslim anarchist friends and Muslims in general that were having to have the Ramadan hurt. But some of my friends were Muslim anarchists. I understood the meaning of them trying to do Ramadan in different ways that are outside often the normative ways that get done in Muslim communities. Doing it in anarchistic ways. And also the pain of that during a pandemic. And then to have that sacred space be turned into a war zone.

But I really… that mosque just really touched me as an anarchist. Because I’m like, “here is a space. That’s a sacred site.” It was a sacred site for all different peoples. Centuries and centuries ago. And it’s because of a state and colonialism, it’s been turned into this horrible battleground, right? So in a way as Jews, for us to say Jewish anarchists have a special relationship to say “could we envision a time when we could come to different forms of solidarity again?” Across our various understandings of our of who we are and stop essentializing it.

So I guess that’s my last thing I think Jewish anarchists bring really to this moment is looking at people is deeply, fully human and messy and flawed. And instead of just going “The Palestinians” being like, “there’s a range of viewpoints within the Palestinians!” There’s a range of viewpoints… and there’s no category that is some essential… pure… right? I feel like Jewish Anarchists have been helping against this sort of essentialist politics. Which leads more toward fascistic forms of thinking when you just flatten people out to one category, instead of seeing the fullness of people and being in solidarity with them through moments and then through other moments being again, in critical solidarity. I think that’s a much more respectful way to look at each other as full human beings and see the pain.

Even the solidarity demo I went to was just so beautiful because I was just watching… it was kind of… the people hosting it were more liberal… you know? I’m still glad we went. But they were so sweet about anyone that came up and wanted to talk and I was really struck by people just wanting to come tell their stories of their relationship to that place called Jerusalem. It was a very moving to listen to people’s histories and personal stories of their connection. And then not wanting it to be both an occupation, a battleground, and a state. A place where the state and settlers are engaging in it… you know?! Human is a flawed term. But anyway, from a very experiential thing where it broke across these kind of barriers. Anarchists seem often good at doing that, in a way where we’re able to see kind of the messy fullness. And Jews are definitely good at that. So combine Jewish anarchist and wrestling with all the complexities in the questions.

TFSR: Yeah, what you said really struck something in me to think about why it would be that Jewish people, specifically Jewish anarchists, who would be positioned in a good way to kind of take apart those essentializing identities. There’s something particular about how the history of Jews in all these different places they’ve been let in and kicked out and harmed and I don’t know… used for things, that allows them to think about identity… for us I guess… to think about identity differently than we get told to from our dominant culture. That that’s really exciting idea. I don’t know if you have any other thoughts about that, like why we’re as Jews and Jewish anarchists in such a good place to kind of articulate identity not as flat or singular thing, a decentralized thing?

CM: Yeah, I mean the more I’ve come back to my own as part of what this Anthology, this sort of resurgence of Jewish anarchism, which just feels so beautiful and moving. I think we’re all in this incredible “we’re so glad to find each other! and we’re so glad to all be like learning so much from each other and challenging!” I like feel so challenged, and in a good generative way, of myself. like “Wait! I never understood that. I understood this!” You know? And so some of it for me is a lot of: “Well, this is who I am” or “This is the culture I was raised in.” And then the generosity of so many people right now who are Jewish anarchists, who … it’s a range of experiences.

But a lot of Jewish anarchists are really going back to Torah, and teaching it in ways often, almost all overwhelmingly, well, maybe it’s the people I hang out with. They’re trans and queer Jewish anarchists. And I think there’s something to this, like when you go back and you start looking at the text. I’m no scholar in this yet, but I’m really enjoying going and scrutinizing. The whole structure is intended to be a communal, educational, ongoing investigation and you have all these things written down, but then it’s this living… it’s intended to be argued with and interpreted and debated and questions are elevated. It intends for you to question.

I keep going back to this word, but I think it’s a really prominent within Judaism is “we wrestle”, you know? We wrestle with everything. And even a friend of mine who does believe in God. I don’t. At one point I said, “I don’t believe in God” and they’re like, “but there isn’t that notion of belief in God.” In Judaism. There’s like a wrestling with what God is in what context, and where, and how that plays itself out because it’s different depending on… there’s a bunch of different names or time periods or context.

But it’s also… “Do you do trust in it?” Like if you start translating some of the words that are originally connected? Do you trust and in some kind of thing that’s greater than us? And I go… “I don’t know?” It’s like all these, it just raises these different questions. There wasn’t, there wasn’t an answer. I don’t know. I just… somehow you combine things that we think are just our cultural things and you say, “well actually even if I’m not religious” let’s say or “I didn’t come through that training. I don’t believe in God, I’m a product of the culture of 1000’s of years of people that have used those tools to keep together.” So I don’t know, somehow that you bring that to anarchism, which is also about questioning everything and not believing in authority.

I think that the two together work really well because there are plenty of Jews that will still believe in authority and will wrestle with and debate and raise all these questions in order to solidify authority whether it’s justified or not. But there’s very conservative and hierarchal forms of Judaism. But then anarchism is questioning hierarchy, and you bring those two together, and it’… Yeah. I don’t know. I think there’s something. I still don’t even know what the answer is to it. But there’s so many stories within Judaism and the Jewish experience and Jews throughout history that have had to rebel and had to figure out ways, it’s just, it’s also just so prevalent.

So many Jews have had to become, or desire to become rebels or resist the dominant culture, because the dominant culture mostly did not, and still doesn’t in a lot of ways accept. Whatever the rationale for why you need the state is because we’ve been pushed out across the world, most Jews have never had citizenship or been parts of states or been protected by them, or before that empires! We’ve all we’ve been our own autonomous communities for most of our history until the very recent history. The State of Israel is so young. It’s such a baby, right? And it’s not the whole, it’s such a minor part of Jewish understanding of how you stay together. And in a very anarchistic way before that.

TFSR: The state is a relatively new invention anyway.

CM: I mean, I guess maybe for even for this idea that Jews connecting, I was saying protection. Okay. Yeah. So, I understand at some point most people that face enslavement and displacement, and genocide, and destruction of all their institutions, their languages, etc. At some point we’ll turn to trying to figure out ways to protect themselves. And Jews have engaged in a variety of ways to protect themselves. Some Jews thought that the state would protect them. Others of us like anarchist Jews understand that states do not protect us. But I get how…you know. I think one thing that gives us stuff specially positioned to understand that states don’t… we understand that almost nothing has protected us. And that we have to protect ourselves. And other communities have experienced that too, not specifically just Jewish. If you’re Black and Jewish. If you’re Black, other communities…indigenous, or indigenous and Jewish, a whole bunch of other categories of people have experienced that.

When you combine that again: Jewish with anarchism, there’s a special … we’ve been pushed across all borders. We don’t really belong to any nation states. Whenever there’s been moments of mass antagonism toward us. It’s turned into violence. We’ve only pretty much… sometimes other people protect us, but they’ve been people, not states. Communities, not states. And that, in a way, is beautiful, too, right? It’s like we figured out how to protect our community. Self defense and community resilience. And now you have this moment. I think that our Jewish anarchists, feel such affinity with people who are like…. the Palestinians that are like… we were having to figure out how to protect ourselves, and we know how to protect ourselves, and we know how to resist and we’ve been doing this now for a while. And in a way, there’s this recognition of like “we get that that’s what you have to do to keep your community together.” Yeah, because most Palestinians are in diaspora now, too, right?

TFSR: Yeah. Yeah. That’s a good point. And it’s interesting because that main narrative of the necessity of the State of Israel to protect the people often blinds people to the fact of what’s going on between Israel and the Palestinians, where it has such a reminiscence to the things that the Jews have experienced from violent states in the past. I really would like also, just to go back… One thing I heard and what you were saying was like the idea of… instead of belief in God,like wrestling with God made me think about, committing to wrestling with God and committing to the question. Its also like the way to enter just sort of commit to the struggle as, like not an endpoint that we’re going to reach, but something that we have to keep doing and keep asking. So that we can always counter where power starts to collect and do its thing.

CM: Yeah, but you know in a way… I think why it’s been really increasingly powerful to me as, a like, non binary, queer, Jew and an anarchist is to bring all these things together. But within anarchism, we do wrestle as anarchists with things all the time. Constantly! Like, okay, there’s a pandemic, let’s wrestle with what this means now and how the world’s going to shift and what we should do to respond. But we don’t really have places that bring us together to do that regularly. I know a lot of us are, myself included, are grappling with… this has been a hellish or one of the most hellish 13 or 14 months, a lot of us are… collective trauma. A lot of us are doing really badly. As anarchists, I know, all of us need to be talking about it, and thinking about it. And working through wrestling with what just happened to us. And we’re not. There’s no place to go to do that. And as a Jew, who’s an anarchist, I know I have places to do that, because Judaism for 1000’s of years, Jews have survived.

Jews have been around almost 6000 years or 1000’s of years. Any diasporic peoples in a way that haven’t been protected by states or empires or, you know, church hierarchies, have figured out how to create community without states. Yeah, and have kept their culture together without a state. And part of that within Judaism is a really intricate amount of ritual and holidays and time and creating time for things. And so I was especially struck by it this year, maybe because this year has been so hard, but during Passover, eight days, you don’t necessarily celebrate every day, but that time period asks of us, and it has for 1000’s of years, to get together and for hours wrestle with the story of what it meant to be enslaved, what it meant to engage in forms of resistance and direct action to get out of that. And then to leave and not know where you’re going. To be liberated, but not free.

The first moment in this year, it really struck me, was to create this temporary space to start bringing people together. And that felt sacred, that we could begin to sort of process it and heal from it. Feel whatever! I’m not gonna describe it religiously, but some people might. This space that… like as anarchists I mean… here, we are in Asheville, and yesterday, you and I went to Firestorm: anarchist feminist queer collective bookstore, 13 years birthday party in a park. I’m visiting. For a lot of us it was the first time we’ve been with queer, feminist, anarchists together in this beautiful space of celebrating and gathering, which is what our spaces are usually. Right? And it just felt like “Okay, this is what all of us need!” Right?

Within Judaism there’s so many places like that. And so we set up these spaces really regularly in Judaism. During Pesach we come…. Passover, we constantly are debating “So what does it mean to liberate yourself? And then, how do you? In the story, you have 40 days where people are wandering around trying to figure out how to create freedom, or how to begin to understand that? But you really, every year, wrestle with it. Are we good enough to be free? How do we be free? How do we liberate ourselves? Do we do a good job of it? Blah, blah…

And this year, the conversation I went to online about it, someone pointed out because Jews like to go “Hey! But there’s another piece to the story. You can go a few more pages ahead in the Torah, it talks about how there’s this whole debate about how do you treat slaves well!” And they go “why would we have done that after we just liberated ourselves from slavery?” And it was like, “well, that is a part of wrestling.” If you become the person that suddenly is free, maybe you’re not as free as you think. And what if you start enslaving other people? Shouldn’t you start wrestling with why you’re doing it and how you’re treating them? And then maybe you’ll start thinking “Hey, this isn’t what we want to be doing.” So we have this really nice conversation about how does sometime liberation turned into the opposite? Which is exactly what’s happening right in the State of Israel.

And I’m just like, “Okay, this is why as a Jewish anarchist I’m just really appreciating spending more time within radical Jewish circles.” In one person’s conversation, [they] said “Why do we think even as radicals and queers…. “ (they weren’t anarchists in this space, but it was definitely a queer space, radical space…) “Why do we think what it’s telling us in this passage is that all humans have the capacity to enslave other people.” And if we don’t continually revisit that, remember that, and reject it. We’re prone to doing it again. More than if we forget to talk about each year. And I thought that, “I feel like anarchism needs more…” It needs grief rituals for when things happen our communities instead of maybe it happens sometimes maybe it doesn’t. It needs holidays outside of capitalist time. There’s such a richness within Judaism of ways to create community without states ways to create solidarity without states.

TFSR: Yeah. And also like practicing, almost like practicing conflict, in a way, like the arguments and the reinterpretations…. in a way that doesn’t divide s community up. Or tear everything apart or make you enemies. There’s so much arguing and disagreement that is actually a richness rather than a problem or something to run away from.

CM: A lot of Jewish anarchists are very generous people. It’s really interesting. It’s because Judaism, there’s such a compulsion, you need to be studying and teaching and learning all the time to whole your life that’s completely another value within Judaism. The reason there’s so much sacred out of capitalism time in Judaism is meant used to spend time studying and learning and teaching and sharing ideas. And so, I was mentored by and learned a lot from Murray Bookchin. And he was very generous. Another Jewish anarchist. Murray was such a lovable and such an intense… So Jewish! Eastern European Jewish. Ashkenazi Jew. But like when I first met him, he was like encyclopedic, his mind was just like, amazing. The first year I was like, “Okay, I know, there was critiques of his ideas, but I can’t [argue], like he’s just… I can’t figure out the way…” And then when I did and start arguing with him… he loved that.

And everyone was kind of scared because he really argued intensely. But then when I started we became … in a way…. I feel like that’s we broke through and had a loving relationship. when I would argue back… could finally argue back. He was teaching me to be able to argue back with him, even though it pissed him off. It’s kind of like, “I don’t want you to disagree with me, but I want you to argue with me. But that’s how all of us feel,” you know? Like, I want to argue things! But then I understood within, like Bookchin and a lot of his argumentative style, you could on the one hand find there’s a host of other reasons… his bitterness, blah, blah, toward the end of his life which I kind of understand the older I get… It’s like, how can we not be? Yeah, I’m not going to get bitter. But you can get tired being an anarchist for a long time, because people don’t stay anarchist for life or a whole bunch of other things.

But Murray had a really great mind about wrestling with ideas. Some phenomena would happen and he would want to debate, and argue it, and think about it, and really intensly! And we’d be almost nose to nose, almost screaming at each other about an idea. And then we would stop I would go “I love you” and hug each other. And that’s so…. at least culturally, how I understand Judaism to me. Yeah. So I never took it as he was upset with me. And I get that I do that sometimes when arguing. And I’m like, I’m not being intense because I’m angry. I’m just enjoying, like, so enjoying that our minds are moving so intensely, because none of us know the answer. And I did appreciate this about Murray. He was like if I teach you nothing else, I want to teach you to think critically, and always imagine something else. Even if he ended up disagreeing with me, that really is what he wanted. That’s such a Jewish thing. I want you to learn to think for yourself. And then I want us to continue to argue and none of us know the answer. And we’re not going to…. always based on the context.

If you look at his body of his work… let’s stick with Murray for a bit. His work is mostly very dynamic. You can disagree with different periods of different shifts. But he’s this… he’s constantly trying to reinterpret his own ideas through lens of society and reinterpret society through the lens of new ideas, bringing in other theorists. Because he’s only one person he didn’t… there’s a whole host of things he ignored and didn’t bring in right? Queer theory, colonialism… you know but what he did was so similar to a Jewish practice of continuing to push yourself and challenge yourself, wrestle and, you know?

As anarchist, I think we could stand to bring in, whether they are Jewish or not, a more generous sense of wrestling with ideas. I create a lot of anarchist spaces where I’m like, let’s all come into the room and pretend none of us know the answer, because none of us do! And have a big conversation about it. I’ve been so perplexed, I’ve tried that experiment so many times. It is really hard to get a roomful of anarchists to set aside with their preconceived notion of the answer they think is right to solving capitalism. I’m like… if any of us knew we would have done… or whatever the question is. And I think it’s so much more interesting to me, and I really am coming to understand this be more than my Judaism and my anarchism is: that it’s actually okay for us to come in with questions, not answers and then together, question the questions and wrestle with them and come out with more questions and maybe a little bit better understanding, that’s probably the best we can hope for. I don’t know. I guess I’m wandering around on different topics, which is another very Jewish trait, you wander around and you come back to somewhere, but a very diasporic trait, you wander around, but you know, kind of where you’re going.

TFSR: No, I love that. I mean, that’s something I share too. And it’s an experience I’ve had to with people that are close to me being like “my wanting to argue about that is love!” It’s not, like anger or anything. And my intensity sometimes can read that way. But I am always wanting that and I love just like having to face the conflict, rather than let it sit. Because that’s when we like get silenced and don’t work together. And I don’t know, it’s much better to work those things through. So I can see that, you know the opening this line of like Jewish anarchism… trying to bring some of that Jewishness into anarchism, too. And it does seem, again, I said this in the beginning of our conversation, but this book seems timely in a way to me because I’ve been part of communities doing the same kind of thing that this book represents. And then, through my conversations with you around the book and meeting more and more people, who are all like “this is a moment to rethink it all.” And so actually a question kind of along that line and going back also to how you’re saying there’s a sea change in terms of like the way that people are starting to distinguish Jewishness from the State of Israel from Zionism… Your book also shows how there’s different forms of Judaism. And like, even what you’re talking about, it’s not a uniform thing is not a one centralized hierarchy of like thought and beliefs. And new book contains all of these counter narratives to those stories. So I was just wondering if there’s more of these kinds of perspectives that you might want to share here. Things that get left out, when we think about what a Jew is, what Judaism is, what being Jewish means… the diversity of the practices that go to make up Judaism?

CM: Yeah, yeah. I’m not sure I can answer that whole question. Because Judaism is… again is so enormous. And there’s so many different understandings of it. I’ll speak to … maybe within the like radical anarchist Judaism that has led to this anthology is like, me generally. Especially before the pandemic, which made it harder, but finally me being like “Hey, I’m just I’m so much more comfortable in the diaspora, being diasporic. Both maybe from my own trauma and ancestral trauma, just this compulsion to move.” I’m realizing that’s part of how I protect myself and safety in a way. But also this way in which diaspora is like making connections and being really intentional about community and scattering seeds. And I don’t know… I like doing that. So for a few years I was just going. When I was in all of these different communities across Turtle Island, and a little bit of other places. It was so striking to me. Suddenly, everywhere I go, people go “Hey, you happen to be staying tonight in a house where everyone’s queer Jewish anarchists! We’re also going to have a Shabbat dinner!” And then you’d sit down, people would start talking about how they’re doing language… Latino and Yiddish language classes or they did a demonstration together as anarchist Jews, or blah, blah. I was “What is going on?!” There’s suddenly… and then I started being looped into friends going, “Hey, we’re gonna start every month meeting up some of us who are queer and trans for Rosh Chodesh.” Which is like the new month and do conversations and rituals around that. Which I’m still doing! And so I thought “okay, something’s going on.” I think that’s one reason I logged in diasporic.

Two is, I really like seeing the bigger picture about trends that are happening. And I was like “something’s going on.” And so then this Anthology… between putting out a call and asking people to write. It’s actually been surprising to me since it’s come out. Almost some things I was intentionally trying to do. Other things have been like this beautiful surprise! So there’re about 40 contributions to it, magical stories, really heartbreaking. A lot of vulnerable, really moving, poignant stories, very honest and open, poems are at work.

And I mean, I definitely had a viewpoint in things that I like. I wanted pieces that were not assimilationist not Zionist, not statist. I want people, all the pieces to be challenging white supremacy, to be anti-colonial. There were things that I without saying that… anti fascism is like a big theme, that are threads through it. But I really wanted people to speak from their own experience and their own trauma. And I think one thing going into this anthology that really struck me is, and maybe it’s because for me, I’m just like, “well, I don’t know what else to do but say the truth of what I see in the world in myself.” Which also feels like I understand coming a lot of my cultural Jewish experience kind of a directness because we put out what we want and we start wrestling with it.

I just realized how many people that are kind of coming in new to both their Jewishness and their anarchism and saying “well, maybe I can do both, and my queerness!” Not everyone in the anthology is queer or trans, but a lot of people are. And a lot of people were like “Who am I to say?” Because, within the wider anarchist and left and radical progressive circles… people see Jews as like, “What do you guys have to complain about? You’re not facing any difficulties. You’re not, you know… you’re fine! There’s no antisemitism, there’s nothing going on. You don’t have any trauma. You don’t have this.” And I was like “I know that’s wrong.” I don’t want our whole story to be one of trauma, but we have profound amounts of trauma ancestrally and contemporarily. From how we’re treated, including as Jews, and there’s still globally but it also in United States, there’s antisemitism is not going away and it shifts and it changes, but it’s not gone. And it can be deadly as we found out as expressed in the anthology. There’s a lot of pieces on the Tree of Life, because that was kind of a pivotal moment that happened during the anthology being produced.

So the differences that struck me in this was I really wanted people to speak to their experiences with a forcefulness and a boldness and not hide that, because I understand that it isn’t a contest. We have just as much stake in fighting white supremacy and fascism. Because white supremacy and fascism are fundamentally anti-Semitic. See Jews as other. See us as a threat to white supremacy. A threat to states. And we are! I want them to. But I also understand that they target us as people they want to kill. Right? I’m not saying it’s all the same. The history of anti blackness is not the same as a history of antisemitism, or anti indigenous understandings, or anti… all the other anti’s that are part of the founding of… let’s just say, the United States. But there’s a pretty serious connection between them all, there is a very powerful and real connection between them all. And our fights, our fates are linked, our liberation is linked, our pain is linked.

And so to come back to your question on the differences. I want people to be like “it’s okay to say that. It’s okay to say that.” Because, I really felt the pain of a lot of Asians lately. A very flattened out category, because I know that does not encompass all the diversity within that phrase. So my apologies for using that as a shorthand for Muslims or other people that go “why don’t we get named as often?” Or “why don’t people see us?” Or “Why do people buy into the stupid stereotypes that make it seem like we’re not in the bullseye of fascism or the state or hate or all these other things.” Right? And that pain of like, I know, we can’t just have a laundry list of things. So I wanted this anthology to humanize. I feel like when people see pain, each other’s pain, they understand colonialism has stolen a lot from all of us. Capitalism has stolen, the state has. That pain feels similar even if the histories are different and through that pain, we can understand that the way to lessen those losses and create liberation. Freedom is going to be a shared struggle.

But the experience in this anthology, to come back to that question, really surprised me after reading. So many people want to write about their relationship to coming to spiritual practices. Whether that was going to Rabbinical school, or embracing trusts in God or understandings of God. There’s that which in another Jewish anarchist book wouldn’t have gotten there. And there’s a profound amount of sort of wrestling with spirituality and rituals and other huge… people engaging in a lot of ritual. Different understandings of how you can use it as a personal practice or a political practice or combination there of. I think it also shows the spectrum of people coming in through, and what their relationship to Judaism was, whether they were raised to be religious or not religious or Zionist or not Zionist. Or whether they were Jewish or converted or not. How they came to it. I really wanted people stories to be their own unique stories to really show that it isn’t there isn’t this one path there never is.

But I really wanted that to be like… the differentiation of our experience is a strength. Not just Jews. In any understand whether we’re queers or feminists or indigenous. But there’s something I think I like showing in anthology is like a dialog that shows you know how difference can not end up meaning that people have to be antagonistic to each other. I don’t know. I’m trying to think of what your question about, like different kinds of Judaism? I don’t know. I think I’m not answering the question as well as like, what different types of Judaism there were in it, because I think a lot of them it’s more an emphasis on how they choose to approach their Jewishness or their Judaism or their political practice.

TFSR: I think you answered again, in a way that I wasn’t expecting. But it’s by having every contributor be forcefully, vulnerably sharing their experience, you show that each person’s experience of Jewishness is different. And yet also kind of is Jewishness right? Or Judaism. So then it’s like, that becomes the kind of multifaceted version. In a way, my question kind of would leave, like, “there’s these different kinds of Judaism and like a, and b, and c” but actually you’re telling me through the book that what we see is that there’s all these different ways. They’re all these strategies, rituals, practices, struggles. And for me reading, it was so helpful as almost like, therapeutically because it’s something that I mean, maybe as you’ve said, my Jewishness is something I’m constantly struggling with. Actually, that made me think some of the stuff you were saying that maybe, in a way, I feel like Israel as the focus, and then the kind of history of the legacy of the Shoah, as a kind of defensive of why Israel needs to be. The same way that we see identities get flattened out, antisemitism, I feel like gets flattened out into this one thing. I could relate to the book a lot of the ways that I’ve been brought back into Judaism beyond just sort of a cultural identity has been through trans Jews and seeing how they … because I’m always like, “I can’t be Jewish and be queer, and be a feminist” and now I’m seeing all of these trans Jews finding ways to do ritual, and in the book there’s one piece that I thought was so beautiful about hormones, like a ritual, a Jewish ritual around having your hormone shot. So for me I was wrestling with that my own internalized antisemitism of the fact that I couldn’t be like anarchist and Jewish or queer and Jewish. And one of your pieces in the book that I found really important and beautiful was heartbreaking is you kind of going through all this sort of everyday antisemitism. I think non-Jewish people don’t realize that like we as Jews face … all the time. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that, the experience of sort of mundane antisemitism, not like the big violence, but even in like left spaces that should be on the side of Jews. If you have some thoughts about that you would like to share.

CM: Maybe it speaks to all the different experiences like… or what I was saying about wanting people to be able to speak directly to their experiences, because I’ve had so many experiences where in general, people do not see antisemitism or take it seriously. Like the January 6th Capitol assault being very recently… the far right, we have explicitly a whole bunch of symbols, explicitly antisemetic symbols and words and practices. Because white Christian supremacists, evangelical prayer as part of it, which I feel like is an assault against all sorts of things that aren’t white, that aren’t Christians supremacist. But there was very little conversation about antisemitism or Q Anon, or all these recent phenomena. A lot has shifted, where abolition is being named, or anti Blackness is being named, or white supremacy. And that’s a phenomenal leap, because those things were not being named. But antisemitism still, it’s almost never spoken.

And for years being in radical spaces, it’s almost like… antisemitism-lite in this sort of sense. “Antisemitism isn’t real because you all have power.” And that’s at the heart of a lot of the conspiracy theories, right? The Jews are behind the scenes pulling the strings. So when you’re in leftist or anarchist spaces and people are basically saying, “We don’t need to hear from you because you have all the benefits of society.” And I’m like “we’re also anarchist for a reason!” And we’re talking about the liberation of freedom of everyone and hierarchy. I mean we can look in every category of people that are seen as oppressed or targeted people and find some people that have better off situations. So I think it’s this mythology that Jews are somehow both all fine and have lots of power.

I just kept thinking how much that hurts is when you needed people to come to your aid because you were being targeted for antisemitism. And nobody… people just got angry at you or laughed at you, or went on with what they’re doing and ignored it. The pain of how that feels no matter what our identities are, right? And the peril to me as I understand is you can keep ignoring it until something awful happens. So one of the stories that I talked about that is [when] we happen to be in Pittsburgh, and some swastikas were painted on anarchic spaces a week or so before the Tree of Life synagogue murders. It’s not a direct relationship but you know, those two spaces made a choice not to tell anybody it happened and to buff it over. To not publicize it. To not take it seriously. To not warn even the people that use that space, some of whom are Jewish, and they know that! Or queer! So this way in which “Oh, that doesn’t mean anything and we’re not gonna take it seriously.” And then a few days later, white supremacists walks into a clearly labeled Jewish space.

As Jewish anarchists we get that it’s all these things are dangerous, right? I used a quote at the beginning from a piece I really like called Feminism Hurts by Sarah Ahmed She talks about how patriarchy hurts because it’s still happening, you know? And so I really liked that piece. It’s feminism hurts or feminist hurts. I can’t really remember the exact title. But she talks about all these little moments that happen in your daily life if you’re treated as female or treated as hetero-normative. That the patriarchy just makes all these assumptions and you keep trying to tell people about them. People don’t take them seriously because they’re like, “Oh, that’s just someone…” There’s just all these little things you can almost not get words to.

And I was trying to show in a way with antisemitism. A lot of us who are Jews have just had so many experiences. I’m like questioning, thinking we eat odd foods, to joking about practices, to not taking seriously when people like are treating us with antisemitism. And then now I think another reason why there’s a resurgence of Jewish anarchism is because there’s a resurgence of fascism around the world and we viscerally understand. So many of us have parents or grandparents or know people that survived Pogroms or Shoah or other attacks more contemporaneously. And I think people think it’s like the some far off distant thing and I think it’s not… I don’t know if to call it antisemitism but this way and not taking seriously. The pain is when people kind of go “You don’t understand what it means to have your people tried to be killed off by structures” and I was like, “I mean it’s horrible that the Holocaust industry, whatever you want to call it, turned it into almost a parody.” I don’t know where.

In the State of Israel was using it. But that was like a massive genocide and it wasn’t just Jews. It was Roma peoples, and queers, and people with disabilities, and all the anarchists pretty much. It wiped out so many people. But underpinning that was antisemitism. So you can’t understand especially in German forms of fascism, national socialism, you can’t de-link antisemitism from it. But even contemporarily now, in the last four years, the number of like, all the neo-Nazis in the swastikas you still don’t hear people talk, like suddenly that’s completely de-linked from this history of antisemitism. And as someone who’s Jewish that feels so disturbing. I don’t understand how you can stop saying Nazis have anything to do with an anti semitic logic and they have it in the room. I mean, we can go into the analysis of like “what does it mean theoretically, antisemitism” or “what does it mean historically?” But there’s just a pain in which people not taking it seriously when not that long ago, they were trying to annihilate every single Jew in the entire world, including every single space and every single book and every single grave, and there was going to be one museum left that had pieces of Jews… so you could go look and see to show how weird Jews were. That was the end result of it, you know.

It’s like, even if that didn’t happen, which it didn’t. I don’t understand why that pain doesn’t…. Of course we have pain, you know?! I was thinking I saw this thing the other day (I copy edit books for a living) it was in a book. Totally unrelated… Just a little tidbit about the schools in New York when there was a wave of immigration or a lot of Jews trying to get away from Pogroms before Shoah and poured into New York City especially, and had really huge Jewish communities. A lot of them spoke Yiddish and the public schools in New York were like “we will not allow Yiddish to be spoken in the public schools.” And so they would wash the kids mouth out with soap if they spoke Yiddish. They would punish them. And it’s not equivalent history. There’s the pain of being like “I lost Yiddish.” My Great Grandparents spoke Yiddish. And my dad spoke it, and he wanted to teach me. He was really young. And I was like “why do I want to learn this language?” Because they screamed at each other all the time in it so I wouldn’t understand what they were yelling at each other. But now I’m like “that language was intentionally killed off by the State of Israel officially, and the Nazis were trying to destroy it.” And then you have a contemporary history in New York and I think about the residential school history. It’s not the same history. I’m not but where we’re going to take indigenous children away, and we’re going to beat their languages out of them, like, quite literally.

And the pain of people losing their languages. That’s a pain. And there’s so much more that happened in those residential schools that is horrible and painful that continues to this day. And for us to understand that, again, I really want to come back to that the pain I feel over loss of language. And a lot of this research as a queer Jewish anarchist. It’s like “let’s relearn languages.” There’s many different kinds of Jewish languages. And same with indigenous languages. And the beauty of relearning them is, you tell different stories about the world, you understand the world differently, you reconnect to the natural world. Because language has all, diasporic and indigenous languages have a connection to the natural world in a way that a lot of dominant colonial languages don’t. And you understand that we come from a pluralism of people that didn’t know borders, that knew sharing space together in different ways….

I don’t want to romanticize indigenous peoples or Jewish peoples or any diasporic peoples. Peoples had conflict. People had asocial behaviors, people have things that… community riffs, etc. But they had all sorts of rituals and structures and ways without carceral logics. Without states without colonizers. To deal with them in a totally different ways. And if we bring back even those languages, let’s say we will have different words for understanding how to deal with things, conflict in our community, that isn’t about prison industrial complexes, for instance.

So, to come back to emphasize antisemitism hurts on this really personal level. And I want people to take it seriously because the more… when the Tree of Life happened, I went to this beautiful solidarity rally, but I know a lot of, almost all, the solidarity rallies that happened made this huge connection to white supremacists are coming into Jewish spaces and killing people that they can clearly see are Jewish. They’re coming into black churches, they’re going into mosques. They’re going into places where they can find the people that they think are who needs to be eradicated.

I think the resurgence of this new Jewish anarchism is like a lot of people are starting to wear visible signs of being Jewish, Kippahs and embracing how they look and embracing practices in public spaces that clearly signal. Holding up a sign that says “I’m a Jew at a demonstration.” Two years ago, I know a lot of my friends were scared to do that because of the fear of being targeted by white supremacists. And now, we should be able to do that, right? I don’t want us to have to hide any more than anyone else should have to hide who they are. So people not seeing the antisemitism within…

To come back to that lastly it really has been painful to me. I expect antisemitism is in the world. And I know most people don’t see it or take it seriously. But what’s painful is when your own community doesn’t. In the same way when my own anarchist community doesn’t take patriarchy seriously, or doesn’t take forms of hierarchy seriously. It pains us extra because we’re like, “but we should know better.” It’s not any worse, I would say, but it’s more painful. And I think the last thing I learned is that a lot of Jewish anarchists have this really weird fear of when push comes to shove… who’s going to protect us? We are going to protect everyone else. Like anarchists are really good at protecting each other and other communities… mutual aid and solidarity.

But I think part of the trauma of being a Jew is history has not been on our side. We have had by and large to protect ourselves way too many times. And whether that’s a false narrative or just a feeling or trauma… but you know, it brings that up for me in my anarchist communities, if you don’t take antisemitism seriously now and it’s just someone being a jerk to me about it in a public space. What happens when, you know, they come into our Jewish spaces and kill…. People say “Okay, yeah, fine, still, it’s only a synagogue. It’s only Jews.” I don’t know, I think even to some degree, the Tree of Life… there’s a couple really poignant pieces in the book. There’s a bunch about the Tree of Life. But there’s some about Charlottesville and other moments where, you know, fascist were yelling, blatantly antisemetic phrases, or targeting synagogues. And no one was thinking to protect those spaces or taking seriously again, those slogans.

The hurts! Of course it hurts. But it just doesn’t hurt it has consequences in terms of who’s going to ultimately get killed or targeted when it gets worse. And I think unfortunately, it’s going to get worse again. Like that Capital assault was just the beginning of a euphoria from what they know their capable of… White supremacy, and White nationalism, Christian evangelicalism, White supremacists know what they’re capable of and I feel like the reorganizing. It has not gone away.

So in this moment if we could take more seriously anti-Asian, anti-brown people, anti-Black people, anti-indigenous, the anti-queer, anti-disabled, anti-Jew, anti-Muslim, and say “Okay, this isn’t just a fucking laundry list. This is our lives.” And that “We care a lot about each other and that we have shared pain, and that we have marvelous…” I guess that’s what I want to say with the anthology is a lot of stories of pain. In the Shoah, I think that’s also the other problem is like “Oh, this whole stupid narrative. The Jews went to their death, like sheeps!” Total crap. There’s so much resistance. You know, it wasn’t just the Warsaw Ghetto, which is an amazing story. If you read the story, it’s a gripping story, because there was a lot of socialists and anarchists organizing that went into that. But there was all sorts of acts of resistance by Jews and non Jews, but especially including Jews during that time period that has gotten erased.

A beautiful book, I just remembered the other day again is Blessed is the Flame – about what resistance looks like. When you’re at the last moment when you’re about to be, you know, shoved into the crematorium or something. I read about 100 autobiographies of people who barely survived Shoah and each of them talked about what resistance is possible when almost no resistance seems possible. And that’s what the Blessed is the Flame is about. And yet people still resisted. And we still are. But we resist in ways that also are about resilience and joy and beauty and creating life. So a lot of the forms of resistance that happened, as why I point to this book Blessed Flame, but also looking at a lot of these autobiographies and what people did was they wanted to have a Shabbat before they knew they would be killed in a concentration camp, or they wanted to write down their name to keep or some or things they wanted to keep alive. The spark of the beauty of how they understood their Jewishness or their Judaism or their rituals. It wasn’t, you know, just trying to pick up arms or trying to do other forms of direct action or blowing up a crematory – which were good, incredible forms of resistance that happened too. But yeah, just the way in which even in the worst moments people want to create life. Because that’s what we do… and beauty.

So this anthology is full of all these Jewish anarchists. “Okay, the world’s really bad right now we’re facing fascism and ecological ecocide and now this pandemic, and capitalism…” There’s so many things that are so overwhelming, and we’re going to do it as joyfully and beautifully and lovingly and resiliently and queerly as we can till the last, very last moment, and that is resistance. You know? That is resistance because they don’t want us to live. Us living is resistance. But us living… I don’t mean just like surviving, I mean, trying to thrive, to love. There’s a lot of really beautiful pieces like that.

I am diverging off the antisemitism part. But maybe coming back to the queerness and the trans-ness, I think I wanted people with this anthology to see both the pain and the beauty. And so with antisemitism, you can see here’s the pain, but the beauty of it is, there’s a lot of Jewish anarchists that are doing beautiful anti fascist resistance. And they’re using their rituals as part of that, or their wisdom and their queerness and trans-ness. Part of that I’ve been really struck by is that there’s another thing have been stolen from us and indigenous people and Black people and a whole bunch of other people who have been made diasporic and colonized and destroyed by states… we’ve had a lot of things stolen from us, like elasticity and dynamism in gender.

Within Judaism from the beginning, there’s all sorts of ways, there’s stories of people without pronouns, and there’s five or six different ways of understanding gender, and there’s a lot of spaces. A friend of mine was talking me recently about how trans-ness, or non binary people, non conforming people are often associated with Twilight. Within Jewish writings… with liminal spaces, with in between spaces, and they are considered the most holy and the closest… if you believe again in some kind of holiness framework. Because they have the most ability to see in a way.

In a way, bringing Judaism, and queerness, and anarchism, and trans-ness together creates a wider frame to see more. You know? Non-binary people, you’re not stuck in this box. You see a spectrum that so much more beautiful and offers so much more possibility. And so we see antisemitism, we see anti-Blackness, and we bring those together… we’ll see a better way to struggle against it. But we’ll also see all the practices we share. They’re so beautiful. How we’ve kept communities together without states, and how we’ve done community self defense without police. How we resolve conflict without cops. We’re not going to have to expropriate from each other steal from each other. We can learn and borrow from each other. We can share land together without having to be a state.

There’s plenty of diasporic people of all different genders and colors, and indigenous or non indigenous, that had all sorts of ecological and harmonious relationships with land and using it for different seasonal harvesting or gleaning or commons.. We’ll have so much more wideness of a lens, and I think that’s why I want people to see both how much we’ve lost as Jews. How much has been stolen from us, and how much we’ve been devastated over the centuries. It just widens the lens with each moment in history and there’s more.

I just learned this thing recently about the witch trials, I love Silvia Federici’s book – as a lot of people do – about the witch hunts been this massive way to kill off healing arts, and mending arts, and queers, and non binary and feminists in a way to rein in massive amounts of queer women, healer people murdered in the name of being witches. And then I overlaid that recently by learning about how much of that was tainted with antisemitism and potentially why some of the understandings of what witches look like because people equated them with Jews. A lot of antisemitism that led into who got killed during that time period. That only broadens the horror of that moment. And gives us more understanding, especially as queer anarchist Jews to be like “Wow, of course, we’re going to fight against those things with other people.” And we’re going to try now. There’s a whole bunch of Jews that are doing healing arts, grief rituals, and mending rituals. Because we’re reclaiming this beautiful thing that was killed off at this moment. 500 whatever years ago.

TFSR: You bring up a lot of really, really interesting, important parallels, in listening to you. Thinking about how… this is making connections in my brain. I connect like the kind of State based thinking with the kind of like universalism of Christianity in ways that tries to narrow our…. make our narratives uniform. That’s what cuts out the histories of resistance both with like Jews or Black resistance during the time of slavery. It makes it seem like this like simple thing. In a way I connect that with “leftist spaces” where they’re, like “look like your particular problem as a Jew – with like antisemitism that can come later. We’ll deal with that later. Because there’s more pressing issues right now.” I’m not saying that we should be playing the oppression Olympics, but to secondarize whatever kinds of experiences of oppression that we have based on like embodiment, or like perception. I think there’s the history of antisemitism going back. You know, it’s completely entwined with the development and the subtilization of oppression that comes with like the formation of the state and the development of capitalism and markets. I don’t think we can disconnect that from all the other things. Again, there’s always like, risk in analogizing. You’ve been very careful to say “it’s not the same what happens to different groups of people, but…” And I really like the connection you made with feminism because like with Sarah Ahmed too, like she talks about being like a kill-joy. My internalized antisemitism… sometimes I’m like, even just bringing up antisemitism is like “Oh, that’s like an annoying Jewish thing to do.” You know what I mean? And it’s so prevalent because people are ignorant of how much antisemitism is just basically woven into… implicit antisemitism is woven into our lives. Even just thinking Jews are powerful and therefore can’t be experiencing kinds of oppression because there’s been some kind of assimilation. That was really helpful to me to kind of tie these things together and I thought you did a really…. just bringing those parallels up was important and kind of building off the resistance and ritual…that’s something else that really struck me from your book from various writers. You have mentioned a few times how the kind of horrors of the Tree of Life massacre kind of shadow the book and there’s a lot of responses to that. Your previous collection of Rebellious Mourning is about grief and mourning. So I was wondering if you wanted to talk a little bit about like Jewish rituals as forms of resistance or even direct action. One of the things that gets talked about in the book is particularly mourning and sitting Shiva as a kind of communal thing. So I don’t know if you have more that you want to say about that. But I would really love to hear more of the kind of Jewish resistance.

CM: Yeah, I think for variety personal reasons have been really drawn to loss, grief and mourning, but also because it’s a part of life, you know? And as queers, anarchists, and Jews, and other identities, they’re probably listening to this. We know, we are gonna experience a lot of loss. And so how do we handle that? We want to lessen unnecessary loss. And we want to… I don’t know, skipping over it doesn’t make it go away. And not using it as a form of instrumentalness, but to both allow us to fully begin the journey of processing it so we don’t…. people need each other to do that. Otherwise it is almost impossible to ever kind of integrate. Grief doesn’t go away, you just have to integrate it in ways that allow me to journey forward with your grief in a better way.

What I love about Jewish grief traditions, just to focus on those. Traditions around sick, dying, and post death… I think they all pretty much ask of you to do it in community. And so you’re not supposed to leave a body alone that is dead, until it is properly buried. Is that possible? I think that’s why the grief of when police murder people and the bodies are left in the street… The horror of that! It is horrifying. It’s horrifying for the people that know that person and love them. It’s horrifying for those…

I’ve been around many of those, unfortunately, watching those bodies for hours in the street, and the indignity. There’s so many levels, it feels horrible. Then denying people the capacity to be with that body and stay with that body. Right? And do it in community so they can process it. And I think why those moments when the police do that. That felt horrible and powerful to people is that you stand there for hours together and you create your own sort of communal space of helping, I’m gonna just wash the time again, you can see the pain and people instinctively want to be with other people. To be there for the friends and the family to help them process the horror of this for that moment and not skip ahead.

And Daunte Wright… I was just struck by that, because I love Unicorn Riot when they’re right at the scene at the very beginning and some other live streamers right when he was first murdered. I would just watch for hours where people were like “Before we go to the police station, we have to sing songs to the ancestors” which they did. “We have to circle the body and be here with it, we have to write.” And so what I appreciate within Judaism, is it’s understood for 1000’s of years we need… we don’t want people to be murdered by police. There’s also a long history of Jewish songs and tradition. Jews have not liked police for a long time. We want to get back to a time when we can stay. It gives you things that are already there to turn to that makes sense, right?

It’s like you should be with a body, but also sitting Shiva is 7. Shiva means 7. It’s like when someone you have a loss or someone dies, you’re supposed to, as a community, stay together for seven days and talk and laugh and cry and eat and sing and be there. And if anyone has experienced someone who they love dying, you know, especially, I mean, there’s so many different things that happen with grief. But that first week, especially, it’s almost just… it’s so unreal and you just don’t know what to do. And the capitalist industry tells you to start worrying about buying things – coffins or arranging funerals. But the beauty in just being with other people is really profound. And knowing that that’s the beginning of the journey.

And then there’s a lot of different traditions, but how do you come out of that week? There’s a lot of intentionality. One thing I’ve heard was like, with people, you walk outside and you walk around a block together to help you transition back into the world. Okay, so these are such beautiful moments, right? And so a lot of Jews and there’s a whole bunch of other traditions I could go into. But a lot of Jews have been doing a lot, as Jewish anarchists and others, like with the Tree of Life. You know, again, I think it was just because that was people’s practice. It’s like that happened and people started sitting Shiva in the street around where it happened because this is what they do as their practice as the ritual.

And because the community was in pain, and because it’s in a extremely long term Jewish neighborhood. It’s everywhere you walk. Like, it feels powerful to me, because I don’t really ever experience being around lots of things, where there’s so many Jews, you know, even if they’re not all my type of Jews! You see yourself in a way, you know, but yet here they are completely feeling like everyone sort of been a target. And in this neighborhood that’s clearly a target, you can easily find Jews in this neighborhood, and people chose to sit in the street again and be visible and do this grief ritual. Then it became a direct action blockade in a sense too. But I’m not even sure that was, who knows whether that was the intentionality. But who cares! It doesn’t really matter? Right? How do we use these rituals, not in the sense of “We are going to do the Shiva so we can have a blockade!” But be like “We need to be together now, we can’t go home.” We have to be here together.

And then over in Pittsburgh, there was a lot of intentionality for that first year. In Jewish rituals every month you’re supposed to do something, then after the first 11 months, and the 12, then there’s every year, it never ends, if you have someone that dies within Judaism, there are moments to remember that person, because remembering is keeping them alive, and the love alive, and the honoring. So that Jewish anarchist queer community in Pittsburgh was doing like, a lot of monthly and weekly rituals and ceremonies and on the one year did a really beautiful -which I end up coming to – a really beautiful Shabbat, that combined grief rituals, but also, were doing political organizing at the same time. I don’t think they could have if they didn’t have the community to be processing. They don’t have to also happen in the same place.

But when we seen how profound it is… a lot of direct actions lately where people are like “You’re destroying sacred land with pipelines. You’re killing off sacred bodies with your cops.” I think people are creating grief spaces around them, whether they’re doing it explicitly or not, and bringing them because a lot of Jews are going “It’s okay to be both anarchist and Jewish now.” Which is a new thing again, and this is what’s really distinct about this moment. And if you read the anthology it’s so different than any other Jewish anarchism before… and to be spiritual.

That’s been challenging for me, because I’ve never understood myself as religious or even believing in God, or even believing faith or having even spirituality. It’s been really recent. “Oh, that’s just that’s like, you know, higher… That’s something I don’t know.” I just always felt like it’s something outside myself. And then I’m like “No! How can we do we do it ourselves?” Spiritualities, the non-hierarchical ways we are taking these rituals and making them queer, or bringing out the queerness in them or bringing our politics to them and making them anarchist.

Just a couple weeks ago, I was sitting under a beautiful stars with a bunch of queer anarchists in a backyard and we sang for like two or three hours: these beautiful songs about healing and solidarity and resistance and anti cops and under the moon. That’s been Shabbat. We’re waving to the sky change. And then it’s just like “what are we doing?” We’re having an anarchist hang out in the backyard! But we did the Shabbat. Which was lighting candles and every Friday (you’re supposed to for 24 hours, slow down, stop, be with each other, be in community) you know? And again, politically, you’re also with your buddies who are anarchist, and you’re talking about other things. In fact, three days later, we’re making banners to go to the Palestinian solidarity demo.

And because you see each other regularly and you build relationships, and you’re like when things happen, okay, we need to be there. Right? So I don’t know. There is an interrelationship with them. But I think there’s something especially profound this moment where so much of what we’re experiencing is loss and death. And that’s what our resistance is responding to: loss of beautiful forests that we love, loss of human beings to pandemics, loss of, you know, fentanyl, or whatever. We can go on and on about the horrors of what’s happening. And as queer as queers, and as Jews and as anarchists… When you bring all those three identities together, that are all about having to make our own families, or on practices own on communities, each has its own lens, but I think you bring them together and you end up having this like “greater than the sum of their parts” way of understanding how do we create.

I was not able to be integrate my Judaism and my anarchism as much. Both my biological parents, I helped them die. What could have been horrible death and beautiful death. But I inadvertently sat Shiva with in both cases. Because they were both in hospice II type situations, a lot of other people were around. I just hung out there for a week and it was beautiful. But I went, I had to leave the anarchist world because I know the anarchists understood. They’re like, come back when you’re done. I’m like, I don’t understand that I’m gonna be done with grief. And then when I came back I was like “Okay, this isn’t enough.”

As an anarchist, it’s not going to be enough to keep me. I had such a lack of faith in anarchism at that moment. And I think that’s what led me to think “faith is a promise”. It’s not a belief in a god, it’s a faith that you will be there for me when someone’s dying. It’s a faith that we will be there for each other when a pandemic is really hard. We did sort of okay during this pandemic, we also did woefully inadequate as anarchists. As Jews, I think we did better. I think Jewish space that got created was what helped. This has been a horrendous year.

And the spaces that a lot of queer, radical, and anarchist Jews…. there’s a space called Pink Peacock and in Glasgow – this Trans and Queer Yiddish thing. Yiddish anarchist, Jewish anarchist, and they’ve been doing on online Havdalah. It’s very intimate and small. And we have these lovely conversations. I started doing that in a moment when I was unbelievably depressed and didn’t even know if I wanted to live. Just waking up every morning and going “why am I still on this earth” and was at one of the lowest points. And I started going, and the first time I got on the phone, they said “it’s okay to be wherever you’re at,” and I just almost started crying on the phone. And no one, you know… it was in held in a ritual Havdalah, which is another Shabbat and I’ve been going to that for months. I’m like, “okay, they created that space, the ritual to grieve and to find joy again, and to process what was going on”. And anarchists have not been as good at doing that.

Muslim anarchists that I talked to have also profound rituals, and Black anarchists and indigenous anarchists. And I guess I want to ramble on about lots of topics. Part of the pandemic is I like “how do we keep our minds on… I feel so scattered!” What about the pandemic side effects? There’s also a resurgence of Black anarchism and indigenous anarchism. And what I like to think of all in a way is all diasporic anarchism might be a next Anthology. Anarchists that have been people that have been displaced repeatedly and disenfranchised, seen as disposable, are understanding that their own… they’re reclaiming. They’re saying, “Hey, we’re not going to let you take away things from us. And in fact, we’re going to bring those things back in and use them as our power and as our resilience and our as our playbooks and as our way of being this for life.” But it’s making anarchism so much more beautifully complex and sustainable.

I’m more an anarchist each passing year the older. I’m like “Why are anarchists always in their early 20s?” The vast majority of them! Where do all the other anarchist go? It is hard, because there are not the things that keep you in it. But when you’re a Black anarchist, or an indigenous anarchist, or Jewish or Black Jewish anarchist, all the overlapping [identities] where you can go and you can say “Hey, we have traditions! We have rituals!” More and more people bringing those into the spaces of resistance. And we’re bringing our multiple prayers into those spaces of resistance, or multiple grieving rituals.

I’ve been at things where people want to do several of those from different traditions. They all are so similar in a certain way. I’ve used this example before, a lot of diasporic peoples have used different things to make noise because you have to gather people. Jews use Shofar – a ram’s horn. Things you can find in the ecosystems where people were. In Mexico or that part of the world, I just learned, people use big snail shells to call people together. There’s the conch shell! A friend of mine yesterday said… I think it’s in the Gulf region, some indigenous folks and other peoples. Black and indigenous communities use drums…. Indigenous peoples, we’re all in different places. We’re all experienced our own displacements and pains, but we have these rituals and we have these things we do. And when we get together, we’re like, “Oh, that’s cool! We all have these different ways of gathering each other!” We can return to those things together.

But especially I think the sense of what’s sacred at this time on earth is so imperiled. In a way, I think that’s why, weirdly, I think it isn’t just me coming back to the sense of spiritual. Not in a hierarchical way. But a sense of if we don’t understand the beauty and the mystery of the earth and that we’re part of it, and that we actually can’t even explain that. It’s just beautiful. Why do we have to explain it? You know, you’re sitting in a forest with some friends and you’re like “why do you have to explain why this feels powerful?” I’ve done some Jewish anarchist grief rituals in the woods and it’s absurdly beautiful and moving and healing. Why? Because I feel so connected to the ground and we’ve done things, the burning, and rocks, and blah, blah. We need that right now because humanity is destroying the earth and we have to remember our connections. And part of that is remembering this mystery.

The little anecdote about that Shabbat I was telling when we were under the stars? It was almost transcendent where you start singing… If you have ever done that? Just acapella. Your voices start… It’s like so anarchistic… you all kind of know what song you’re gonna do next and which words. Your voices rise and fall, when to start and when to stop. Like how is this organization without hierarchy? Whoo! Your bodies are just feeling really good! All of a sudden I was looking at the stars and was just in this beautiful “I just feel so good! And I haven’t so much of the time!” And then I see this line of lights across the sky and they’re moving and I almost scream and broke the beautiful space we created. Everyone looked up and someone’s like, “Elon Musk, that’s Elon Musk’s satellites!” We all stood for five minutes watching him destroy the sky. I thought, “Oh my god. Jewish ritual asks you to look for three stars at the end of Shabbat to end the sacred 24 hours of a non capitalist time” Time and community time, and here’s Elon Musk that’s taking away the sky.

It’s good to do rituals to remember that we have things to fight for. Things that are beyond us to even understand that we shouldn’t be doing that to, right? Rituals have meaning. They’re not just like woo woo looking at stars, they’re like those are ours to destroy and they aren’t Elon Musk’s to desecrate in capitalism in the name of money and all this other shitty stuff. It makes you want to be radical and resist even more and not have it be that. So they’re interconnected, not an instrumental way.

TFSR: I love how you’re talking about that. One way I think about anarchism… or like, the way I want to talk to people about it who maybe aren’t anarchists yet is to think about all the ways in our lives that the state doesn’t touch us and doesn’t reach us. And really what the history of the state and the capital is like, kind of tearing people away from their life ways from the land and making them dependent on the state (or seemingly dependent on it). But really, there’s all these moments that we don’t have the state in our lives. The way that you’re describing the rituals for all the kinds of cultures, not just Jewish culture is creating a different time in space that isn’t the state that isn’t capitalism. It changes that and that, and the more we do that, we would be making our lives more outside of the state. Doing something else than what we’re expected to do or asked to do. So I think that’s a really powerful way that you describe that.

CM: I watched someone during the “Chinese New Year” this year, they did this really beautiful series of posts about how this is actually not the Chinese New Year. It’s the Lunar New Year. It’s actually not one day, it’s… I don’t remember… I’m going to not say how many days it is because I don’t remember, but it’s multiple days. They said each day has a very specific thing and it’s not, you know… you think about New Year’s. New Year’s has become this ridiculous go get fucking drunk and just have a horrible time. But you’re supposed to pretend you’re happy! That’s not a ritual. That’s like an unthinking, commodified… like Christmas or whatever, all these things!!!

But these rituals that you make your own. The Jewish New Year is also extends over multiple days, and you’re supposed to spend a lot of time reflecting on harm you’ve done to others and harm. You’re supposed to actually gather with the community, if you’re part of one. Jewish anarchists could stand to do this, and other anarchists, once a year, to get together and think about harms that have happened in the community and whether it’s possible… how we dealt with them, how better could we have dealt with them? Should some things be forgiven or not be forgiven? There’s all these moments that are structured into ritual to help us do things that we want to be doing in our anarchist world. What does an abolitionist future look like? Well, we practice it through rituals. We’re going to get better at doing that! Cleaning our space.

These there’s all these rituals that people do there outside of the hegemonic ones. Christmas makes me so agitated and angry, because, you know, what? It’s three months long and it’s nothing but buying things. It’s so dominant. Everybody assumes everyone’s Christian. There’s so many reasons, but it’s even beyond that. It’s like this deadening. It’s not even a holiday or ritual. And when you come back to all these other traditions you realize people did them around harvest times to celebrate the harvest. Around moments to celebrate! There’s a day, the highest day of sorrow, where Jews spend the day thinking about mourning, and then there’s highest days of joy.

A few years ago, before the pandemic, I spent a lot of time in Montreal and some friends and I went to the day when you’re supposed to unroll the Torah scrolls and start again, and I’d never done that before! You take them and dance with them. People were dancing it was really fun. And then when someone said “Oh, let’s go outside and dance!” And my queer Jewish anarchists friends and I were like “Hey! Let’s dance in the street!” Because not everyone was a radical. And then people were all moving in the street and then we’re kind of creating a little blockade. But we were also just dancing, right? It was really fun, you know? And so you were kind of teaching people “Hey, you could actually take over streets.” We weren’t intentionally doing that. It wasn’t like a lesson, but it was just like… “Hey, we’re anarchists, we’re gonna we’re gonna go in the streets.”

There’s a joy in remembering these moments. We can do this on this day. I think this year has been really hard for a lot of us because our little teeny rituals… I realize how beautiful and precious they are and how flimsy they are, you know? Anarchist bookfairs are our sort of like dancing together. I don’t know, we’ve lost those. And I think we need to come back into this time and think more about it. I really want to encourage Muslim anarchist, Jewish anarchists and other Black anarchists, indigenous, brown, all the anarchists that are coming to try to say, “No, I want to be the whole of who I am with this!” And not have to keep those in separate spaces.

Of course, there’s some beautiful about just being with indigenous anarchists to do your thing, or just be with Jewish anarchists. I get the value the power of that too. But if we can all start saying, “Hey!” If we all start reclaiming all the beautiful rituals and holidays and practices and playbooks and trading them, I just think it’s gonna look so different. It’s gonna make our resistance better and our anarchism better too. Our anarchism needs probably more refreshing. It’s actually a much younger tradition than most of those other things I’m pointing to, which have actually had to go through…. much, much longer they have had to be rebellious and exist outside the states. Yeah, much, much longer.

TFSR: Yeah, we’ve been talking for a while. But one question. My questions is in a light hearted spirit, but maybe I don’t know where we’ll go with the answer. One thing that struck me reading this book talking to my people – my queer trans Jewish anarchists, the way that all those things being queer, being Jewish are being anarchists individually often we are like “am I queer enough? I’m not queer enough, I’m not Jewish enough, I don’t know enough about Torah. Am I anarchist enough? Am I committed enough to the struggle? And I just wondered if you hadn’t any thoughts about how these three things? I mean, the book gives us a different image of that for sure. But why do we internalize… or how do we internalize these like… this impossible measurement of like what we should be to really be that?

CM: Yeah, it was funny when you said that. I was like “That’s so true!” Like, almost. I don’t know, almost everybody, especially Jews. There’s something about Jews always going around, “I’m not a good enough Jew!” I don’t know, I feel it. Maybe all of them. Maybe less so with anarchism. I think there’s something nice about that. I don’t know. It’s like, to flip it around. There’s something nice about being humble. We have to always be striving to be good enough to be these things. You know? It’s an honor to be all of them to me. Will I ever be a good enough anarchist? Probably not. But I should aspire to be a better and better one all the time. Especially all three of those, in their own way, have really profoundly beautiful (this is not a universal, because some people say “they are not always welcoming”).

But I think in general, they’re very generous and welcoming and mutualistic and reciprocal. You know, if you say you’re interested in anarchism, people start handing you zines or whatever it is. People really do want to share and borrow. Maybe to flip it around, maybe it’s comes out of humility. It also maybe comes out of… it is really hard to feel enough. Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe I’m just gonna flip it around. Because I think it’s nice think about humility, which I think maybe we need, and just be like “let’s aspire to be better and better at all of them” you know, maybe more… the “not good enough” comes from: it’s hard enough to be all these things in a world that says those things aren’t. Especially like radical versions of Judaism, and anarchism, queerness, that they’re all seen as is not enough. They’re outside of the… so it’s too bad that we have to take on that sort of self doubt about ourselves.

It does become hard to sustain them sometimes. I really hope with this Anthology, and almost everything I do to really emphasize, like, all we really have is each other in the solidarity more than anything to me is… if we don’t stick by each other, we don’t have anything else with each other. Maybe we’ll feel more of enough if we try harder to be there for each other in ways in the fullness of who we are. I don’t know. For me, I want to hear other people point out antisemitism, so it isn’t just Jews. I want to hear people that are not queer. I want everyone to not have to be their own advocate, as it were. So maybe that’s another way we don’t feel enough because we all just feel sort of invisibilized by each other, which I think is sad, you know?

If we were more acknowledged, like, celebratory of each other. But I think it’s really going in that direction. I really do. I feel like the last few years there’s been so much collective trauma, so quickly, targeting so many people. Like every day now almost. The past few years if you think how many white supremacist murders, assaults on people. They pretty much have killed now every category of humanity except themselves.. I think we’re all starting to go into spaces, each time, unfortunately. I don’t want that to happen, for us to see that. Then I start realizing we’re like, “Oh, we are enough because we start seeing each other. We are enough because we’re there for each other.” So, yeah, maybe we’ll start getting past that. When we all try to be more of ourselves to each other too.

TFSR: Well, I’m grateful for you giving me your time to talk for the Final Straw and also it was really exciting to be in an actual space with you, physically together. But also for putting this book together because it did, for me, made me see that I’m not alone and that there’s other people struggling with the same questions and having answers that I would never have thought of. That confirm things that I feel. So the book creates this community too. I think is really important work, so I’m really grateful to you for that. I really like the idea: may we be queerer and more Jewish and more anarchist!

CM: I know! I want to be! May we be more. We have to be more of all of them. Again, what I said I wanted this anthology to be liberatory. Queer liberation. Jewish liberation sounds weird. But I do want like a liberatory-ness within our Judaism and our Jewishness as radicals and anarchists and queers, you know? I wanted it to be bold and beautiful, and assertive in a way of beauty. But not just for Jews, I really, I hope. I’ve been really happy. Because one thing I was trying to do with this was to not just have this be something for Jews, to have the anthology really show interconnections of struggles and identities. Jews are all colors, all languages, all places, there are no borders within Judaism. If we don’t see that enough, we push ourselves harder. I’m not saying that it’s perfect at all. But there is no homogeneous Jew. And that points to this beauty of “we are all things across all borders.” And including beyond just Judaism. So I hope… I feel like it touches people on this other level outside of being a Jewish anarchist.

But I’m also really, really appreciative. I feel the same way. I really want to acknowledge and thank all the 40 or more people that contributed to it. I’ve been really touched by how many people are reading it and saying “Oh wow. I feel. I feel seen for what I’ve been struggling with as a queer, feminist, non binary Jewish anarchists.” Who is trying to be part of this resurgent, beautiful, bold new thing that’s been coming out and creating this of anarchism with other anarchists that are coming to their senses of who they are together. And it’s just really touching to see people. That’s what I want. I want us all to see ourselves. The fullness of ourselves more. That’s the title. There’s Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart. We’re all so brokenhearted by this world because we should be. But I want us to be whole in that too. So I’m loving that you and other people are responding to it that way.

TFSR: Well, thank you so much.

CM: Thank you so much for having me on this.

[fecto-forgo]

Not sure if its a genuine question but if it is oh boy oh boy i get to be the one to tell you :D yeah american schools have been phasing out pencils since i was in high school (i graduated 10 years ago) in stores and stuff the stationary sections are just getting smaller to the point where if you want materials you almost have to go to a specialty store. even before covid it was causing problems where poor families who couldnt afford computers were struggling and its basically keeping some of our libraries afloat (im sure this has nothing at all to do with why rich folks in power want to destroy all libraries /sarcasm) but also because kids are assumed to have grown up with modern tech they also dont teach kids how to use them anymore. leading to slow typing speed and poor online safety skills among others. also because its all online schools and teachers feel justified to make more homework (busy work) because its not a tangible physical thing to keep them in check anymore, theres no "stacks" just digital "files" (although that part has always been not great anyway). i dont know HOW bad its gotten specifically (there arent any kids in my family that im close to) but even then the end results are pretty obvious

what the fuck bc i literally found ppl talking abt this in that post abt linux everyones using to ego rub they know more than literal children.the fact ppls reactions to "kids now struggle with typing so much they cant write their papers fast enough" wasnt "why are computers mandatory if poor kids cant afford decent ones if any at all? why arent they being taught how to properly type by any adults in their lives? why has traditional writing been phased out?" but "oh my god these DUMB new children cant do anything 🙄 (unlike me)(im so smart)(i know more than a child does!)" is so.is actually very typical for this website actually that makes sense anyways WHAT THE FUCK

[yukipri]

The Bad Batch Season 2 Wrap Up Thoughts

I never ended up sharing my thoughts on the Bad Batch S2 finale. Since we're hopefully getting news of S3 tomorrow, this seemed like a good time?

First, to be clear, I love so much about the show. This is not meant to be a complaint thread. But I'm also critical of certain aspects. You're warned.

This is also a compiled Twitter thread!

Spoilers through the end of Season 2!

First off, I can't understate how beautiful the show was, just as an experience. The cinematography, the visual designs, the music. The unique worlds and unique characters. There were so many shots that were breathtaking, haunting. When a scene hits, it HITS.

I love both TCW & Rebels dearly, but cumulative skills + experience as well as new technology clearly shows. TBB, TotJ (and of course TCW S7) are just so captivating to watch as works of art. These shows are, frankly, worth it for that alone. But of course that's not all.

One of TBB's strengths is the depth it gives the worlds the characters visit, as well as the side/guest characters. Perhaps due to the nature of many of the episodes being more of an exploration than straight up war like TCW, but we can see more of these places. TCW also had so many neat planets/aliens/cultures, but due to the constantly pressing war, we were only ever allowed a glimpse and I constantly wished there was more. TBB really scratched that itch. I'm thinking specifically of Kashyyyk, with its fauna and wookiee traditions.

The same with side/guest characters. They all had such great flavor, with fun designs and motives. Phee was a standout among the non-clones. I also loved how it gave us such a personal exploration of characters we knew and loved before, like Riyo.

The thing about TBB is that it's set in such a fascinating time period that we don't have too much media of, at least in new canon. The formation of the Empire is a time where we know all these other characters must be alive and working hard, but we haven't seen it before.

This leads me to the writing. Oh, the writing...

How do I say this. The writing in this show gave me whiplash. Some of the episodes were beyond brilliant, giving us deeply personal character moments, layered metaphors, and context in how it affects the greater SW universe.

Others...not so much.

I understand this is not the case for everyone, but for me personally to enjoy a story, when there are any stakes involved, I need the characters to show some awareness of them, and for these to affect their actions. There are a limited number of episodes and that time must be spent wisely. I don't mean this at all to say that I didn't enjoy the lighter fun adventure missions with the Batch, nor do I think these episodes can't be used productively.

But TBB S1 started off with Crosshair siding with the Empire.

I kept waiting for them to *show* that the others cared. It could be they were troubled, it could be they missed him, it could have been shown in so many ways. I kept expecting these brief moments in the Fun Times episodes, which would have given me some emotional continuity.

The writers are absolutely capable of it! After Plan 99, when Echo glances at the co-pilot seat—stuff like that, I was personally expecting it through all of S1 and S2. I get that the Batch feel they have to do other things and Crosshair made his own choice, but I thought the point was they care about their brother regardless.

Mind you, I'm not the biggest fan of Crosshair, but I do find him interesting. And I felt that in the two episodes most centered around him, he had such tangible growth that was depicted so well. He went from stating that the Batch are superior to regs in S1 finale, to having clear doubts after working with Cody, to shooting a natborn officer because he didn't help a "reg" he'd just met. We see Crosshair being included by the clones he disdains, we see how it compares to the Empire he thought he wanted to be a part of. The writing in Crosshair's episodes were tight, and he went far within them, few as they were.

In comparison, the rest of the Batch...with their far greater number of episodes...what were they doing??

I love character-centric eps, but even on a personal level, I wasn't sure what the charas gained. Tech is the sole exception; he was given many introspective moments, from Sorenno, to Phee, to the cave talk with Omega. Not sure how much he changed, but he expressed himself.

To also be clear, I'm also not including Echo in any of this. He has been the voice of trying to get the Batch to do things, to *change*, since S1. I felt his frustration keenly. Which is why I felt that when he left to go with Rex...I sort of left the Batch with him.

I mean this in the sense that Echo didn't *want* to leave the Batch, not necessarily. He wanted, and he *did* try to get Hunter to care about what their brothers are suffering, and he has been since S1. Echo can't stand to leave them chipped when he could do something.

He wanted the Batch to feel the same. *I* wanted the Batch to feel the same. But they didn't. I see Echo breaking with them less as him leaving, and more as they (or at least Hunter) firmly telling him that that's not their fight, and they're not going to do it.

This isn't the Batch going out of their way to help, or not knowing how. Echo and Rex have given them an open invitation. The Batch know how to help, who needs it, and why. They know their "reg" brothers don't have many if any others fighting for them. The Batch (Hunter) have these opportunities to help and know they are among the few positioned to offer it...and they still walk away.

The Batch (Hunter) sees the other clones fates as none of their business. On one hand, I get that they never fit in, were called names and weren't allowed to sit with the cool kids at lunch. On the other, "they were mean" and "therefore they should be mind-controlled slaves" is grossly disproportional. Likewise it's not as though this fight doesn't concern them. Even if they can't find it in themselves to care about "regs," it's Rex who told them to remove their chips and went out of his way to make sure they did based on info that Fives gathered, without which Wrecker would have killed Omega. Perhaps I wouldn't go as far as to say they *owe* other clones, but my opinion of them certainly continued to drop as they made explicitly clear that they're fine with this being the fate of other clones.

So okay, fine. TBB isn't a story about the Batch discovering they have more alike with other clones than they first thought (other than Crosshair, who actually does get that story). That's what I wanted, alright, I know I'm not getting that at this point.

But then, where does that leave them? What do they care about, what do they fight for?

Their brother...right?

Except...they don't really do that either??? (points at earlier in this rant) At least, until the very last episodes, where an opportunity presents itself, and most of the Batch jumps on it...except Hunter.

The way he's written just *baffles* me. I can't say anything about his personality other than "he cares about Omega," but even that, when at the expense of his other brothers, is tiring. Immediately after Tech gives his life on a mission he wanted to go on to try to save Crosshair, he suggests they all hide away on Pabu (even with the knowledge that Omega is wanted and they're being hunted). I get that he wanted to hide from the pain, but in that context?? Even then, he can't care about Cross??

And then when Omega is kidnapped, the difference in his reaction between that and what happened with Crosshair...it was, frankly, painful.

I feel like by the end of the series, Tech would have been more open to joining Echo/the clones' fight. Wrecker will just go along. Echo has already plunged headfirst into helping others, Crosshair got character growth and defected from the Empire. And Omega has always wanted to help even strangers, but only doesn't when Hunter tells her no.

I feel that Hunter's the one dragging his heels for the Batch to progress, and he's supposed to be the leader.

All of this to say, I've been trying so hard to like the Batch since S1, and they didn't really click for me (other than Echo, who I don't count since I loved him from long before, and still consistently have). But by the end of S2, I think I've concluded that I'd like the others perfectly fine if they were under different leadership that encouraged them to care, to act.

I don't want to say I *dislike* him, but man...I'm super disappointed in Hunter, and I'm not sure if/how that might change.

This leads me to my final thought, which is: I would strongly prefer if "the Clone Story" be told from a different lens than Hunter-centric TBB.

What I mean is, throughout the show, there have been multiple pivotal events that affect all clones, not just the Batch.

The fall of Kamino, the failure of the clones' rights bill are the big ones. But even without those, through the glimpses of the "regs" like Howzer, Gregor, Wilco, Cody, Slip, Cade, and Mayday, we see how the Empire is treating the rest of them as a group.

I'm deeply invested in these boys and their stories, and frankly, all of these boys instantly became my faves in their few moments of screen time. I want more of these, and it feels deeply unfair that they've done so much to tell compelling stories but have so little time.

They are an extension of the clones I love from TCW in a way that the Batch just aren't, and don't seem to be interested in becoming.

Not even that, but we know from Hunter's rejection of Echo that the Batch (Hunter) don't *care.*

Fine, they don't care. But I'm admittedly deeply concerned about how S3 will go, because even if the Batch doesn't care about the Clone Story, they (Hunter) don't seem to be doing a great job progressing their internal story either (Crosshair).

I understand Omega has some crucial background we're *finally* getting to. I want to know why she's special, why she's unaltered. I want to know what she has that Boba doesn't, or if she's just Nala Se's favorite. Maybe that's relevant to the Clone Story.

But frankly, personally, I would prefer if TBB S3 goes full in focussing on building Hunter and Wrecker up emotionally, and just going full in on what it means for them as a Batch to be there for each other. They need that, desperately, without distractions.

I would prefer if the Clone Story (frankly, the story I'm far more invested in) is told through Rex and other clones, who passionately care and are in the fight. If Echo jumps between the 2 groups and links them, great! I think the Batch would make excellent guest characters. But NOT protagonists of a story where they don't care while everyone else does.

I guess all of this to say, it's sad that I think I liked the Batch the most in TCW S7, and my impression of them as a group (which I recognize is largely due to Hunter) has only gone downhill since.

Again, to be clear, I did enjoy the show.

I LOVED eps 3, 7, 8, 12, 14, to the point I'd say they're possibly my favorite eps of any SW show. These eps are conspicuously non Batch-centric. I loved many *parts* of other episodes.

The *show* has given me so much to love. Unfortunately, none of those things are Hunter.

[blueskittlesart]

okay so i’ve never done an ask before but what’s your opinion on link (botw) and religion? i think he is religious because he does pray to hylia but that could just be like because he’s her hero or something. we also don’t really know about religion in botw except that there are temple ruins, statues, and hylia so it’s kinda hard to say for me. you are such an analytical person when it comes to zelda so i wanted to ask you about your thoughts!

yes i can talk about this but this turned into kind of a deep dive into the concept of religion in botw so sorry lol. i promise the stuff about link is in there

religion in loz is very interesting because like. in pretty much every game except botw i hesitate to even call it religion because the goddesses are like, tangibly, provably real entities. people have seen them. there is no believing vs not believing because the goddesses are so obviously real.

botw, however, is an interesting deviation from this because it takes place over ten thousand years since the last calamity and, by extension, the last appearance of a goddess/godly power in hyrule. this seems to have allowed for several different denominations of hylia-worship to spring up around hyrule. there's the standard worship of the goddess herself, which seems to be the most common in hylian cities and structures and is seen through the goddess statues and the temple of time/similar structures. then there are the ancient shiekah priests and temples, which could be considered a more pious sect of that same hylia-worshipping denomination, but they could also be a different denomination entirely considering how much their architecture and technology seems to vary from the modern hylian stuff we see. (i consider it to be a near-dead religion personally, and i think the modern hylia-worshipping denomination was once a less-pious version that got extra watered-down over the years.) then of course there's the dragon-worshipping denomination in the jungle, which we know very little about but their architecture and proximity to one of the 3 dragons makes it pretty obvious that they worshipped the lesser goddesses/their dragons moreso than hylia. the final denomination that i think needs to be considered is the yiga. because we know that they existed long before ganon's return was even prophesized, meaning they are a denomination that worships the spirit of DEMISE, in whatever form it may take. Their architecture's similarity to shiekah structures suggests to me that they were a breakaway or perhaps open rebellion against the ancient shiekah religion seen in the shrines, and the existence of the "evil god" statue in hateno village suggests to me that there may be a watered-down version of the demise-worshipping religion as well. important to note, though, is that with the exception of the dragon-worshippers, in modern hyrule pre-calamity almost NO ONE would have thought of these dieties as real, tangible beings. there would have been exceptionally pious worshippers, obviously, but your average hylian would probably pray to a goddess statue for good health because it was a tradition, not out of a ton of deeply-held belief in hylia. it would have been decades since any normal person had received a response from the goddess herself. there were probably some people who didn't really believe in hylia at all.

onto the actual question of link. Assuming he grew up in a regular hylian village, it's likely there was a communal goddess statue that people prayed or left offerings to out of tradition or obligation, but it's unlikely he believed very strongly in the goddess or even knew any of the myth of creation as it exists in hyrule. when he lived at home, the goddess hylia was probably not much more than a statue to him, something that he could leave an offering to or ask for help or guidance, but not a real, tangible entity that had any control over his life. basically, i think pre-sword he would have been a part of that sort of casual denomination of hylia-worshippers who honored her with statues but didn't think of her as much more than a symbol.

after the sword link obviously has to reevaluate his worldview a little bit. it's unclear how much of the myth of creation or really any of hylia's actions have survived the test of time in botw, but i think it's safe to say that the triforce has been lost beyond the symbol itself, since it's never mentioned by name and is only referred to vaguely as a "sacred power" in regards to zelda. they know the power has some connection to the goddess, but the triforce seems to have been lost somewhere along the way. So i think after link pulls this sword and everyone starts telling him that he's been chosen by the goddess, he would probably do a little more research into what the hell that actually means. And we don't have any real way of knowing what he might have found, since so much of the myths of hyrule seem to be lost knowledge by the time botw takes place. but it's safe to say that he now understands as much of the myth surrounding hylia as a pious believer in her might.

whether or not he believes that she's REAL, though, is a different story. There's no real way to know if he ever heard her voice pre-calamity. it's entirely possible that her closest contact to him before ganon's return was when he claimed that sword, and he never heard from her again until he woke up post-hundred-year-gap. (i think this is fairly likely, actually, because the goddess statues only speak to link post-calamity when offering him power-ups, which he ALREADY HAD pre-calamity. if you interact with the goddess statue on the plateau before completing the first 4 shrines, all you get is "the goddess statue smiles upon you." which is probably what link felt pre-calamity when interacting with symbols of hylia, since he was doing well for himself and wasn't necessarily in need of her help or guidance at the time.) What this means is that the only evidence he had as to her existence was the split-second moment when he pulled sword from stone. with that in mind, I think he probably believed in her passively, as a diety watching over hyrule, but not necessarily as a tangible power over his life. as far as he was concerned, his destiny was set in place by the circumstances he was born into and the actions he took, not some higher power pulling the strings. and that's kind of why he had an easier time reconciling with the goddess than zelda might have, because he never really resented HER for forcing him into a hero's destiny, he belived that ganon and the people around him placed that weight on his shoulders.

post-calamity is, again, another story entirely, since he literally hears her voice when interacting with her statues. I don't think there's any way he doesn't understand the influence she has over his life post-calamity. He definitely believes in her, he's not really given a choice. she is real. he knows this for a fact. which actually kind of puts him at odds with the majority of hyrule who see her only as a myth to be passively worshipped or respected. like. can you imagine if you knew for a fact that god was real and was forcing you to fight monsters but everyone around you was like "we use that statue during weddings and literally never touch it otherwise." like. its almost a percy jackson situation. The Gods Are Real And No One Knows But Me. which is a REALLY interesting departure from earlier games where EVERYONE knew for a fact that hylia was real and religion and worship of her was totally integral to society. most people can't even see KOROKS in botw, which are essentially lesser mythical creatures of hyrule--forest spirits. it's never really explained why link can see them when most people can't but i think it would be really cool if it was because he is one of the few people left in hyrule who knows the hylia myth as absolute fact. like. seeing them requires absolute belief in the myths u know? anyways WOW this was long sorry religion in botw is such an interesting topic lmao

[victorian-gay]

New Words and Old Memories

*TRIGGER WARNINGS*

-Blood

-Death

-Descriptions of a controlling and toxic relationship

-Grief

-Murder

-Brief mention of a cut to the arm

-If I have missed any relevant warnings let me know and I will add to this list as soon as I am able to.

*PLEASE READ THE TRIGGER WARNINGS IF YOU HAVE NOT ALREADY*

Please enjoy

April 29th 2023

Finally, I've come back to my old diarist ways. It's been maybe something like 20 years since I've written anything down by hand like this. The feeling is essentially foreign to me, which feels silly to say. At the same time though, there's this small part of me saying that maybe just maybe there might be something about putting an unassuming ballpoint pen to classic lined paper that might make me feel better. I don't know in all honesty. That being said, I know with absolute certainty that I've got myself half convinced that I've stumbled into the single longest spiral known to man since Maisey died. Maybe that's an unconscious exaggeration I concocted but I miss her so much and my grief won't let me clearly remember her last words to me. Anything beyond a vague feeling is largely made fuzzy by the bleary eyes of my memory. I can vividly remember how she just glowed with life that day though. It was nearly blinding. Every inch of her was brimming, beating with the stuff. It was wonderful, and so warm. Age could not and had not touched her in my eyes. This isn't to say I was blind to it. While she showed years I didn't, she was just as beautiful and her smile just as soft as it ever was. I want so badly to be able to remember the last of the music that was her voice. For a painfully short time, I did. But now? Nothing. Today is simply a day that is cursed to be drowning helplessly in death. Drenched in a thick black cloud of sulfurous lethal air lying right beneath the surface waiting to coat my lungs in their entirety. Coagulating in every crevasse so that I might fight just to gasp for air.

I read that back, it's a little dramatic. Possibly more than a little. Maisey died in late June of 1993. The 24th actually. I still remember the phone call from her stepson that day, the way his voice was breaking along with my heart as he spoke. The tears he fought back as mine rolled silently down my face. The sound of my phone falling on the counter and smacking against the cabinets with the force that had been stored in its cord. She had been in a car crash he said. She had a feeling that it was her time and told him to tell me before she went into surgery. She didn't make it out. Maisey and I hadn't been in a relationship in the most traditional sense by maybe seven years at that point, it hurt like I lost a lover anyway. I would swear now that I had known in April that year that it was going to be the beginning of the "new" end, but that's probably hindsight tainting my memories. It's been almost 30 years though, and I've had time to heal from that. Progress crawls at a snail's pace, but forward movement happens nonetheless. Days have grown slowly more bearable, some worse than others. Based on what I've read that's pretty normal, so there's that at least. Today happens to be especially difficult for whatever reason.

Spring is just generally a particularly hard time for me I would say. Seeing something as small as flowers is more difficult for example. Also, it's not as though I can make a trip to the seaside for some sort of springtime holiday on a whim. More to the point what I consider to be my more tangible death did happen 212 years ago exactly, so if we're being honest with ourselves when thinking about it that's part of it. At least half maybe. It isn't a "special" anniversary though, the bicentennial was far far worse. This is also the 30th anniversary of the last time I heard Maisey's voice, comparatively happier in it's own way. Just more proof of anniversaries having a neutral connotation, but that's beside the point. I hate, rather I loathe, the mere prospect of thinking about what that god-awful, beyond horrible woman did to me. She doesn't deserve the dignity of a name any longer for her actions. It haunts me as if it happened a day or two ago at times. I can hardly bear that my thoughts are torn between what I refer to, among other things, as "hellfire being extinguished" and one of if not the great love of my life. The last time I heard her beautiful voice anyway. If I had known she would be gone just two months later I like to think I would have savored it more than I did, given how my brain likes to omit things when I become upset.

So here I am at the admittedly semi-desperate conclusion that somehow writing things down could help me at the very least understand my now centuries of feelings better. I did try doing this in the somewhat immediate aftermath of being killed all those years ago. The thinking was that if I wrote everything I could recall down in my diary as soon as I was able and then immediately ripped the page out and destroyed it, I would get some sense of closure. Recalling the whole affair made my hands shake so badly when I wrote. It's honestly surprising that I wasn't concerned that they would fall right off. I often have wishes that amount to the desire that I should have burned that page back then when I might've been able to muster the nerve. Now my brain has taken the task upon itself to mangle and twist itself into feeling guilty about any sort of closure. Symbolic or otherwise. It's almost funny in a messed-up sort of way. If I still believed in him, I would have to question why God created brains that are perfectly suited to torture and hate themselves. I do in some ways anyway one could argue I suppose. In any case, it seems like a really bad business decision that has led me personally to wonder if I live despite my killer and what she wanted, in spite of it all, or for myself somehow at times. If you can call what I'm doing living.

I find myself thinking that it should feel like ancient history what happened to me. What I did that night. It happened two centuries ago, and yet the unusual depth of the darkness of that night still feels so fresh to me. The woman had been slowly becoming more horrible than what she started as. Inching towards the evil I remember the most. She was the type that had to control everything and everyone she could manage to fully sink her claws into, and by that point had firmly settled into that ornate throne she had fashioned to rule over me. Comfortably sitting there whilst she smirked and looked down upon me and somehow, at the same time, she claimed to do nothing but show me untold amounts of gentle love. I had come to know what she was beyond her human exterior and, while it most certainly terrified me at the time, a small part of me found it sickly exhilarating. I was completely intoxicated by her. She was like a spiked hot chocolate, sweet and warm with a bitter burn finish. By the time she decided that she would murder me, we had very much settled into the burn. Little if any of the old sweetness remained. That notion only existed in old diaries. Even still, I felt compelled even wanted to take another sip. I couldn't leave. Why? Couldn't begin to know. I didn't want to? She wouldn't let me? I hoped for change? I can't tell or remember now.

She could spit venom from her mouth in one breath and the next, would soothe me and make me whole. That had become the pattern of our interactions for some time. I often felt as though I was a child being reprimanded for something I didn't understand. Sometimes there wasn't even a reason. Not one I was privy to anyway. Closer to a plaything than an equal and lover. Even now though, sitting and stewing in the memories of how much I hate everything that happened and the confines of the existence I find myself in I find it hard to call everything bad. She was enchanting in short. I was utterly enamored with her right from the very start. No point in denying it now. There was no hope of escaping the grinding, crushing, pulverizing wheels of fate that started to turn the moment I met her. It feels disgusting almost to admit it in writing, but I loved her. All that I was loved her. I really really wish I didn't, and I genuinely think I probably shouldn't ever have entertained the mere prospect of loving her. Regardless of the wonderful benefits of hindsight, I did entertain the thought of loving that woman. Willingly and with a smile on my face. The naivety of youth and the inability to know oneself. It's a struggle to think that she ever loved me, but I did love her once. With every last little thing that I had. I owe myself to be gentle with that truth.

It's hard to not let myself feel stupid about my falling for her at times. I keep finding myself thinking, "What if our eyes didn't meet that night?", "What if I listened to my fear?", "What if I looked closer at my affections?" as if such things would change the here and now. It feels like she cursed me with this life and like I'll continuously be far away from everyone I have ever and will ever love. Cursed to be functionally alone for all eternity, aside from the occasional 50 years or so when I muster the emotional strength to form a connection with a human. The more I think about it I have to wonder if she left me with only the possibly unethical. That feeling has only grown since I've started to take my old diaries out of their dark dusty storage place. The strange thing was that they weren't all together. It's very out of character for me. Usually, I'm a lot better about keeping my arguably four but it's closer to three, centuries of belongings carefully sorted, organized, and in their proper places. I suppose places is a more accurate descriptor. The first one I found was actually wrapped delicately in a dress Maisey had left for me along with a letter she had written. It's the only thing I have left of her that I can actually hold in my hands, so I took an insane amount of care to gingerly unwrap it. Treating the cloth as though it would turn to dust if I touched it in the wrong way.

That diary in particular is stained with my tears and smeared with the various colors of her, now vintage, lipstick. Every mark contains just a drop of a spark. Just an ounce of affection. With so many small spur-of-the-moment tokens of love, it's almost sad to think how little I've looked at it in the past 40-some-odd years. In the early days, Maisey made it a point to place a kiss on one of the first pages of it and then on every page in every diary she caught me writing in after that. It's an absolutely adorable habit that always makes me smile and mentally gush about her when I think about it. Even with the knowledge that the amount of those lipstick stains slowly becomes less and less over time. Very much welcome all the same, especially in stark contrast to the other grimmer reason I felt the need to buy a humble college rule composition notebook and a pack of new rainbow-colored ball-point pens. The notebook is yellow and has rhinoceroses on it. The pens were just for fun, it'll be decades before I need pens again with my collection. Seemed appropriate at the time.

Maybe it's silly, just a case of my brain concocting fear, but I can feel myself choking on the giant lump in my throat thinking about the way it all ended. My heart beats so fast it begins to feel so obvious to me that it moves nothing red and lifegiving anymore. It goes on like that as if it has a purpose, but we both know it doesn't. Not anymore. The poor thing was simply built to beat. It's only doing what its instincts dictate it must. My instinct however is still to fight, even just over 200 years later it all feels so viscerally real. I want to call it crisp but that feels like I'm talking about an apple or something of the like, which isn't right. She moved faster than I could see that night. I couldn't blink, much less move or defend myself before anything happened. We were arguing loudly, it had become commonplace. She must have decided whatever I said was the last straw because she took it upon herself to remove any autonomy I had at that moment and make my choice for me. I didn't have time before her fangs pierced my neck and sunk into me. I had admittedly allowed something like it before under different contexts. Maybe that was foolish of me. I was young and in love and what else are you to do with your life at that stage if not to be foolish?

There is a defense to be made for my short-lived youth I feel. Those other times were about intimacy, about being tender. It had been soft and safe before. I know how contradictory that sounds. It's a hard feeling to put into words. This time however the bite came with a horrid unnatural pain that was difficult to bear. Even others admit that pain is strange. I had tried running, but it was all for not. My escape attempt was met by her holding me so tightly I had to struggle for little more than a wheeze of a breath. My lungs felt squished flat, and again, truly I had to fight tooth and nail to even gasp for breath or scream. I was lifted and swung around like a ragdoll. She did so with what felt like inhuman strength. Inhuman care. When being perfectly pedantic one has to admit that inhuman is exactly what it probably was. How far was she from the cradle of humanity by then? I remember the start of realizing that I truly meant nothing to her. I was simply a toy that had broken as soon as I wanted something for myself in her eyes. The only reason I can think of for her to do this though was to disorient me.

I scarcely remember anything that was said before, during, or in the most immediate aftermath. I've tried to a couple of times over the years, but nothing came of it. The ripped page does have those words, but I'm not reading them. I've blacked it all out, and the will to read it back does not and will not exist. Not in the modern age. What I do remember, as clear as crystal, is her hastily slicing open her arm and forcing my mouth open so she could get her blood inside. It was thick and bitter. I wouldn't have guessed that blood was what it was if I didn't know better. There was little that was familiar about it. It was thick like I said, but the texture was more than that. I couldn't help but choke. It was coagulated, lightly curdled even. It was so beyond strange. Like licking an old metal pipe you pulled from the lake, with something else in there. I'd go so far as to say it tasted rotten actually. Well, more accurately it tasted like actively rotting decomposing rust. That fits pretty well actually. She then violently flung me to the ground as if I was little more than trash, and I finally knew for a fact, without a notion of a doubt, that I meant nothing to her. I let myself let go of the hope for her changing. I noticed the somewhat unbearable sting of a rapidly healing wound on my legs and stray carved wooden scraps strewn about. She had swung and smacked me into the stair railing so hard that it shattered like a mirror. There was now a hole where perfect and elegantly carved wood had once been.

The next thing I knew she was screaming in my face. Everything had gone full tilt into a pace so quick there was scarcely a moment to process one moment before moving on to the next. Spit flew from her mouth like missiles. She shook so much and got so red that for a moment there I wondered if she would explode. This wasn't the only time she had screamed at me like this, but for the very first time, I didn't cower beneath her. I stared right back whilst I swallowed the blood still in my mouth and wiped the rest from my face. It didn't feel so strange and vile on my hand. I remember that contradiction too. I also finally didn't feel like I needed to stay. In the middle of all this, I can recall this small, short wave of liberation. A whiplash of glory. It was a split-second shock to my system. She took no notice when I reached for a piece of railing and rammed it through her chest. It spoke to how involved she was with her own mind and world. That cry she let out, which in reality was closer to a shrill shriek or screech that would make a banshee blush, still makes me shudder. She died like a coward. Desperately reaching out as if she hadn't just murdered me herself and trying to profess something that would save her. I think. All I remember is her panicked blubbering.

After that, I had a sort of "post-murder clarity" when the unholy amount of adrenaline started to subside. My mind raced, and the both of us panicked. She fell to her knees and on her back a few seconds later. My eyes darted around, my ears took in her subsiding voice, and my feet fumbled around in search of a solid place to plant. I didn't stop for a moment to think that what I had done had felt like the only option I had at that moment to save myself. I had started backing away from her body, horrified by it all. Sickened by the blood staining my freshly laundered bed gown. I don't remember it being red, but for what its worth candlelight was all I had to see with. I assume that I started dry heaving, I'm dry heaving thinking about it now. In all of this, I gave no thought as to where I died. I flew for just one moment, and then a ghastly crack broke through the noise. That would have been my head, I think. My spine? My brain feels as though it's begun to run in circles I can't form a coherent thought without significant effort. The last thing my living ears heard was my body thudding down the stairs, as I had fallen through the hole in the railing she had created. Slipping on the thick, essentially snot-like blood that had begun to cover the floor.

When I awoke later it was to "agreeable enough" peers of hers who had been, according to her, "scandalized for completely false and unfounded reasons" by her treatment of me. My initial view of them that night was blurred and hazy, thanks at least partly to my inability to open my eyes fully at the time. They told me later that the intention was to return me to my family if they could get me away from her. The one woman among them spoke softly and she sounded just...so sad. Strangely knowing, but largely heartbroken whilst she helped clean me up at what is best described as their manor house. All four of them continuously apologized for not being able to save me. Looks of pity and sorrow graced their faces for at least as long as I was battered and bruised. Then and now I wish that they did save me and those looks were never because of my life. I wonder though...is it wrong to wish they had, given all the wonderful things I've been able to see? Everything that my purgatory has allowed me to experience? I suppose I'm grateful for the kindness they've shown me. None of that care was mandatory. I think I would have long since truly died without them. I'm already dead I guess. It gets very fuzzy that. Deciding when exactly I died. There's an argument for me "dying" in 1811 or 1814. Either way though, it was today.

I'm trying to calm myself down and my eyes independently keep looking at the dress Maisey left me. Frantically on the hunt for comfort I guess. I had laid it out around sunset so I could follow the intent to hang it up with the rest of my clothes. Earlier I found myself running my hands along the faded velvet ribbon around the empire waist, recalling how befuddling I found it when the fashion from when I was alive came back around. The memory of doing that is kind of soothing, even though it was mere hours ago. She'd want me to wear it I think. Looking at it now, putting the dress back in its acid-free box feels wrong. She'd want it to be out and about, enjoying it's life. That would be in the spirit of Maisey, especially the Maisey that wore this dress the most. The funny thing about it is that in the letter that came with the dress, she'd written that I'd find love again. That I'd be happy without her someday. Something nice, something hopeful. Her last words ended up being just how Maisey tried her best to be. Maybe when I do get the nerve to wear it again she will posthumously prove herself right. She always had a way of doing such things.

[theeshamrocktattoo]

the *brief* biblical breakdown of dtamhd

*cracks knuckles* okay, let's get into it. and, before i start off: I'm a theology student who works as a youth pastor. that does not mean that I am right in any way, or aim to change people's opinions. this is just hella interesting to me.

strap in, cause this is gonna be a long post...

Featured in the apex of the episode we are presented with some very obvious imagery. The raw cannibalistic-like nature of the sequence itself, could allude to a multitude of things that many other people on here have talked about. But I specifically want to talk about this scene and the biblical link that I personally made. We are all aware that this occurred:

Which is, in my interpretation of the scene, dennis consuming and overcoming his trauma so he is able to continue to help the gang. He is reborn, or renewed. But what the hell does this have to do with a biblical reading of this scene?

Well, John 6: 53-54 says that: "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day"

Communion is a christian tradition that has withstood the test of time and involves engaging in the consumption of bread and wine in a church-like setting. And there are a ton of bible verses that talk about communion, because of how integral it is to the christian faith:

"Then he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, 'Drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins'" (Matthew 26:27-28)

Sunny actually makes quite a few references to communion, one of my favourites being from 8x06 Charlie's Mom Has Cancer:

Anyway, at its core, as briefly stated in the bible verses above, communion is the act of "feeding" on Christ's body and blood as a tangible, visible reminder of what occured before, during and after, Jesus' crucifixion. And, the crucifixion itself is a symbol for many things, one of them being a victory over death and that "the world might be saved through [Christ]" (John 3: 17).

BUT! How does any of this stuff about communion relate to dennis takes a mental health day, you ask?

Well, when looking at the episode as a whole, it becomes clear that dennis utilises a fantasy to lower his blood pressure to a normal level. There are many debates currently about which avenue dennis' delusions fall under - whether it is actually a hallucination he's having, or a calming technique - but, in order to function better as a person dennis needs his blood pressure to be a stable number. And to do this he envisions himself eating another man's heart. And only then, after consuming the flesh of the Son of man (The CEO of tsuma), is dennis truly able to feel calm. Which means he is able to help the gang once again and can save them from whatever crisis they have gotten themselves into.

Christ urges his disciples to celebrate with him, despite knowing that he is going to die on the cross. Because when Christ is being sent to be crucified unwillingly, he presents a reminder of his love and protection through the figurative consumption of his flesh and blood. Christ's blood is then poured out and in return a new covenant (commonly used in theological terminology to mean an agreement or the creation of a new bond) is formed when he is resurrected, or reborn.

Dennis utilising the explicit imagery of eating a man's flesh just seems very poignant to me. dennis as a character views himself very much in the light of Christ, and is constantly referring to his physical and mental state to be akin to God - he is the Golden God after all. Therefore, his obsession with feeling in control and Godly, can be fed into with the motif of communion, crucifixion and renewal. So, i think it's interesting linking dtamhd to a biblical context, because of the layers and imagery.

BUT i need to stop rambling before my head explodes. So, I hope this was informative and I'm not well. (if you've read this far, thank you so much <3)

[gascon-en-exil]

In your opionion is there things that Engage did better than 3 Houses or things they did worse than 3 Houses ? if that is the case, which one and why ?

Those are two different questions, and ones that people have been bandying about online for months now. I thought for about five minutes about turning this into a video prompt, but there's already plenty exactly like this on YouTube - plus I'm currently working on way too much as it is.

What FE16 does better than FE17:

In general, character work - I say in general because there are characters I like in Engage and characters I very much don't in Houses, but the more substantive supports and other side interactions in the latter help the cast stand out more. They're also broken up more, so it's easier to focus on the groups you enjoy.

Non-Avatar queerness - So much lovely subtext, so many paired endings. I've done multiple videos centering around them, even. I said in a video a few months back that I dislike how so many of Engage's non-Avatar supports end with bland affirmations of friendship, which in combination with the lack of endings really kills the potential of pairings like Fogado/Bunet and Timerra/Merrin. Dimidue though? When their A support pivots around the word "friend" you just know that it's a euphemism, and that they'll be calling each other that mid-coitus that evening. Throw in around a dozen other pairings who've gotten big based on subtext and you've got a bunch to choose from.

Cozy life sim elements - The Somniel may be more streamlined and its loading screens slightly less agonizing, but the monastery better nails the feel of a persistent hub area - even if its coziness kind of undercuts the tone of the game's second half. This isn't something I'm really into, but I know a lot of fans get into stuff like gardening and fishing and tea time, and the calendar system and (weird) time progression does make Houses feel more like a life sim in contrast to the Somniel and its randomized character loadouts. Also, Engage has way more to grind for if you want to see everything, which is annoying. This is in contrast to...

100% Completion - It may be something only I care about, but Houses goes above and beyond any other mainline FE if you're a completionist. Of course there's the support logs and event gallery and such (features Engage doesn't even manage correctly), but there's also the in-game journal which provides a ludicrous but still doable 100% target in the form of watching a whole bunch of bars fill up very slowly over dozens of playthroughs. This requires so many spreadsheets to keep organized - love it!

What FE17 does better than FE16:

Story originality - Yes, really. Houses's story is three variations on the series standard plot, plus one other option - side with the conqueror -that Fates came up with first. Engage is the least politically-interested game in the series, and it barely even teases at a mundane war between nation before it's back to fighting zombies and collecting rings. Original doesn't necessarily mean good, but at least Engage knows exactly what kind of story it's trying to tell and what it can feasibly expect to do.

Tangible, linear worldbuilding - Engage isn't as ambitious, but it's more successful thanks to more traditional FE worldbuilding tools like talking to NPCs around the world as opposed to gathering them all in hub. The single story also helps keeps everything orderly and easy to understand, rather than going for an unreliable narrator + mystery box approach across multiple routes and half-assing the execution.

The Avatar - No contest here. Alear is an actual character with an identifiable arc, and while it's not the most compelling thing in the world it's leagues ahead of anything Byleth can claim. Byleth is a blank vessel for the player (and also Sothis for a while, lending them some facsimile of a character in the form of her reactions) with a ludicrously contrived backstory to justify why they are the way they are; Alear has fears and development and a backstory that's coherent even if it relies on a fair amount of cliché. Also, even in localization Alear as a god complex fantasy is undeniable, whereas Houses bends over backwards to act like a main source of its appeal isn't teacher-student sex. Speaking of -

Avatar queerness - Again, no contest - not that I especially care. Byleth's same-sex S rank options are limited, while Alear can give their not!engagement ring to every character regardless of gender, a huge step up in open-ended self-insert romance that gets mostly overlooked because they can also give the ring to preteens.

Understanding of FE's camp appeal - The above only underlines how much better Engage can be when it comes to the campy and the tasteless. From the ridiculous outfits to the Emblem stuff being compared to Saturday morning cartoons or Power Rangers or such to Zephia/Zelestia to the AU dragon incest wank nonsense, Engage wears its silliness on its sleeve. Houses doesn't totally lack that element, with stuff like the Proper Conduct Tournament and Manuela's...everything, basically, but like the teacher-student fetish it's hidden beneath this veneer of respectability that begins to grate after a while. Most of that is probably just overcorrection for the poor response to that sort of content in Fates, but it obviously didn't stick...not even for Fódlan content in Heroes. Look at the new duo Cathmir, and tell me these characters still aren't being sold on sex appeal aimed primarily at straight men.

Handling of characters of color - Not something I discuss often, but it has to be said. Solm is as developed of any of the other main four nations of Elyos, with just about as much of a role in the story and a presence in gameplay (i.e. you spend around half a dozen chapters there). There are still some oddities, like how the royals and NPCs are all dark-skinned but the retainer characters aren't, but compared to the various periphery nations of Fódlan it's a real standout and actually feels like a part of the world. Sreng is a plot device in Hopes, and even less than that in Houses. Duscur, Brigid, and Dagda basically only exist in relation to Dedue, Petra, and Shamir respectively. Even Almyra, from which we get two playable characters including one of the lords, barely appears at all, and most of Claude's Almyran heritage is left out of his writing because he spends the whole game disguising his identity.

Standard gameplay - I play on Normal and freely abuse time rewinding so my opinion here isn't going to be held in any regard, but go check out anywhere Engage is being discussed online and you'll see tons of tier lists and comparisons of builds and chapters and Emblems and whatever else. You know, the things that people ordinarily talk about when it comes to FE, and not -

Less enabling of toxic fandom elements - The inbuilt faction drama in a faux-serious war story, the continued growth of the anti phenomenon first seen when Fates was current, and a years-long global pandemic fostered endless division and conflict that persists to this day. It somehow even continues a year after the release of Hopes, now in the form of bashing Engage because it didn't sell as much (while still talking about its gameplay way more than I could ever bother, go figure) and IS is being more conservative with its Heroes appearances. There's still pointless nonsense to argue about here - like the aforementioned incest wank - but there's far less of it in a linear story that doesn't encourage players to latch as hard onto their favorites.

Non-100% replay value - Related to the gameplay, if you're not going for all the supports/bonds/achievements there's much more variety you can pull out of repeat playthroughs of Engage via the standard ways to mix up your runs in FE: using different characters, allocating resources differently, limiting yourself in certain ways etc. Houses's gameplay is so freeform and has such clear best options that for replays you're relying on the story...and there's exactly four stories. Worse, White Clouds is almost the same regardless of house, and there's a bunch of crossover content among the Part II routes as well, even Crimson Flower, which leads to it all feeling quite repetitive even if the narratives technically go to different places.

Nostalgic throwbacks - Not only the Emblems, but also the many legacy paralogues. These were a fun element of Awakening and Fates's DLC, and it's nice to see them brought back here with a bunch of callbacks for fans of those older games. Houses has...its batch of DLC classes all coming from Awakening, and the Archanean regalia appearing as random drops. Oh, and probably the least notable playable version of Anna ever.

Absurdly cute mascot factor - Could have talked about this under the camp factor, but some players get really into how adorable Sommie is. It's a fount of memes and goofy videos if nothing else. Is IS taking notes from Pokémon?

And yet I still prefer FE16 overall, because it better caters to my specific interests (gay stuff that doesn't involve Avatars, spreadsheets). The years of fandom toxicity are unfortunate, but I've grown accustomed to laughing at it when it amuses me and ignoring it when it doesn't.

[btsqualityy]

Blood On The Dance Floor: Chapter 3

Hoseok x Reader

Genre/Rate: 18+, established relationship, thriller, fatal attraction!AU (kind of, but with major changes), smut, angst, and fluff. 

Summary: Bora has a realization, you surprise Hobi at work, and you finally meet Bora.

Warnings: None to note.

WC: 1.1K

Author’s Note: Continuing my yearly tradition of posting something on my birthday lol! I know this part is kind of short but I hope you guys enjoy it!

“I need a fucking drink,” Hobi muttered to himself as he looked up onto the stage, where the members of HYBE’s most popular male and female group were standing. It was the first week in December now, and the year end shows were already beginning. In addition to working with HYBE’s newest boy group who were now freshly debuted, Hobi was put in charge of choregraphing a few unit stages as well. Hobi being Hobi, he loved the challenge but god damn it, he felt like he was going to lose his mind. 

“Hobi, what do you want to do?” Bora wondered from his side and Hobi glanced over at her before taking a deep breath. 

“I guess we’ll show it to them again,” he replied before walking up the steps to the stage with Bora following right behind him, and every member of the two respective groups settled their gazes on Hobi as he began to talk to them. 

“I know this can feel a little awkward, doing a dance as sensual as the one we’re having you guys do to Sway With Me, but you all have to loosen up a little bit,” Hobi told them. “Here, get together with your partner and we’ll go over the movements again. Bora, demonstrate for the women please.” 

“Yes Sir,” Bora nodded her head, moving to stand a few paces away from Hobi so that they were both visible to the groups. 

“And 5, 6, 7, 8,” Hobi counted them off, leading the groups through a medium paced version of the choreography. The couples were still too stuff with each other though, their arms not even completely around each other as they danced. 

“No, no, no, no,” Hobi groaned. “This just isn’t working.”

“Tell me about it,” one of the male idols mumbled. 

“Maybe we should take a short break,” Bora suggested. “Let the choreography marinate in their minds a little bit, you know?”

“We don’t have time for that. The show is tomorrow,” Hobi reminded her. After thinking for a few seconds, a lightbulb went off in Hobi’s head and he snapped his fingers in victory. “Bora, come here.”

“Ok,” she said confusedly before moving to stand right next to him. 

“Bora-ssi and I are going to demonstrate the choreography for you guys, so that you can have a tangible sense of what we need from you tomorrow night during the show,” Hobi explained. Turning to face her, Hobi held his hands out and Bora placed her own into them, letting him wrap her arms around his neck before he settled his hands on her waist and pulled her closer to his body. 

“And 5, 6, 7, 8,” Hobi counted off again, following the music that was still dancing as he led Bora in a tango. The two of them went through the movements effortlessly, their limbs seemingly an extension of each other’s as they did the entire song. 

As they danced, they also kept an intense eye contact with each other. For Hobi, this was just an example of how he wanted the idols to do it the next night; for Bora, however, it felt like the spark to something special. 

She had never realized how deep and beautiful his brown eyes were and now that she had looked into them, she didn’t know if she’d ever be able to look away from them again. 

“And that’s how it’s done!” Hobi smiled once the song ended, and the group of idols all applauded for their mini performance. “Now, let’s all try that again.” The music began again and the couples went through the choreography a few more times, getting better and better each time that the song restarted. 

Although she knew she should’ve been paying attention to the idols, Bora couldn’t help but to keep her gaze on Hobi. Watching him put such passion into his job impressed her, and she couldn’t help but to notice how his muscles bulged underneath his fitted sweatshirt.

“Alright, let’s break for today!” Hobi announced. “We meet here, bright and early, at 9am for rehearsals!” All of the idols bowed to both Hobi and Bora before beginning to filter off stage, and Hobi was about to do the same until he heard someone shout his name.

“Hey, Jung!” Hobi turned around then, a wide grin on his face when he saw you standing in front of the stage.

“Y/N, hi!” He greeted you happily, walking to the edge of the stage and bending down, pressing a firm kiss to your lips. “What are you doing here?”

“Well, I was bored at home so I decided to come visit you,” you responded. “I hope it’s not a bad time.”

“Not at all,” he assured you. “We actually just ended for the day. Here, I’ll introduce you to everyone.” Hobi grabbed you by your hand then, introducing you to all of the crew members, a few other choreographers, and even a few idols that were still sticking around for VCR shoots. 

“Ah, I almost forgot,” Hobi chuckled as he led you down the steps from the stage, where Bora was gathering up her things. “Y/N, this is my assistant choreographer Bora. Bora, this is my wife Y/N.”

“Nice to meet you,” you smiled as you extended your hand towards her and you noticed the slight hesitation she had in placing her hand in yours, as well as the small grimace that she was obviously trying to conceal with a smile. 

“Nice to meet you as well,” Bora replied. “Hobi showed me a photo of you but I have to say, it doesn’t do you justice.”

“Well, thank you,” you nodded towards her. “You’re quite the looker yourself. I hope Hobi hasn’t been working you too hard. I know he has a hard time knowing when to slow down. ”

“Oh no, he hasn’t thrown anything at me so far that I couldn’t handle,” Bora replied with a smile and you couldn’t help but to raise an eyebrow at her choice of words. 

“Hobi, we should get going now if we want to make it to our favorite restaurant for dinner,” you told him and he nodded his head. 

“You’re right. See you tomorrow Bora,” Hobi said. 

“Bright and early,” Bora grinned. 

“It was nice meeting you Bina,” you said. 

“It’s Bora.”

“Excuse me?”

“My name,” Bora deadpanned. “It’s Bora, not Bina.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” you bowed lightly towards her. “My honest mistake.”

“See you later Bora,” Hobi repeated before placing his hand on the small of your back and starting to lead you out of the building. “Bina? Really Y/N-ah?”

“Whatever,” you muttered. “You better keep an eye out for her.” Hobi just rolled his eyes, wrapping one arm around your waist as the two of you walked out of the building. Unbeknownst to the both of you, Bora watched the both of you the entire time, her stomach turning at the sight of Hobi’s arm around you. 

“Fucking bitch,” she muttered underneath her breath before gathering her own things and leaving the building. 

[annyankers]

Xander was not raised in a religious household, if pressed his parents would say they're cristian but not practicing

Xander has never had much of an interest in religion growing up, he prefers practical tangible things like sports and video games but once he reached teen years he get jealous of Willow's Jewish background, the traditions that bound her family together, the community that comes with believing in the same thing and having a shared past

For years he experiments with different religions quietly and subtly but they all demand too much of him and he doesn't feel welcomed

After meeting Anya he starts learning about her ancient beliefs and little by little she introduces him to her practices

Adult Xander who casually says things like "merciful Zeus" and "Gracious Athena" out loud and people think it's just a quirk and he can't possibly believe that, Xander who makes space in the living room for an altar dedicated to Hera and never forgets to light a candle and put flowers on it after Anya dies

hate to be That Guy but if anya is in any way an influencing part of his choice of pantheon then he would be making an altar to frigga in her honor, not hera. anya was from 800CE sweden, before christianity had made it to scandinavia in any noticable way. she was roughly alive and human around the same time as ragnar lothbrok and the great heathen army. so her gods were odin, thor, freya, freyr etc.

but i DO love the idea of xander exploring faith. it's fun to think about him just kinda skimming through some of willow's magicy books and learning stuff about different beliefs as he does. him thinking about it all more as he kind of acts as a soundboard for teen willow as she figures out how to merge her jewishness and more pagan/goddess centric concepts and beliefs as she learns magic stuff and her musings prompt him to think about it all more seriously. like willow dead ass calls on fucking osiris to raise buffy from the dead so clearly these gods are real in this universe.

xander joking about how he likes to cover his bases when he throws out exclamations to like 5 different gods from 5 different pantheons.

xander actually genuinely liking and feeling more comfortable with the idea of a pantheon of specialized gods. it's more a team effort and that's something he knows from his own life works best. also if one dude's busy or not great for the job ask another.

personally i think that xander would be big on thor both because there's a certain fondness having grown up reading the marvel comics and before thor is such a Dude in a good way and a god who's domain is the protection of all mankind (along with other stuff obvs). there's no real say "god of craftsmen" like say vulcan in norse myth but there is a lot of imagery and evidence of thor around the work spaces of craftsmen/"blue collar" types. it kinda tracks, his hammer is a war hammer full stop so it's not because of that, but he is the protector of mankind and forges and buildsites can be dangerous places to be.

[spidxrguin]

stacy family history stuff: going off the county meath lineage ( ireland ) for the stacys i kind of place them as having working-class origins in the north bronx ( particularly a neighborhood like woodland heights ) important to note is that irish-americans were typically recruited as police officers when arriving in the united states. generally because it was a job that those already living in the u.s. did not want to do in addition to the fact that irish immigrants already spoke english as a native language so public-facing jobs were open to them ( as they didn't have a language barrier )

this of course established family traditions of police officers in a lot of families like this. based on george being relatively high-ranking in the force before quitting i think it'd be fair to assume the stacy's have a tradition of being cops. i think there's also some thoughts to explore with george having grown up during the height of neoliberalism in the united states ( the reagan administration ) as well as the burning of the bronx in the late 70s. i dont have those thoughts all together but i imagine it would have caused him to do some major reevaluation of his previously held views after leaving the police force.

equally, i think being raised in this sort of family ( and with gwen's personality ) gwen would be critical and anti-authority to a degree but prior to becoming spider-gwen how tangible that criticism actually was is probably debatable. i think it wouldn't really be until she becomes spider-gwen that she kinda thinks a bit more deeply on any potential biases.

[cyberpunk-20xx]

So.

cw for drug usage mention.

Post Jackie's death, Misty starts reusing a lot, to try and connect back with him.

In my verse, there's no ofrenda, so she's left with nothing tangible from him, and with relationships with Mamá Welles strained at best, so she can't reach out that way.

She just does it on the side and it's really subtle because this is something she's used to.

It's nothing life-threatening, since she knows her stuff, but it's definitely a lot compared to before, and she's in a state of near constant dissociation, which nobody really notices because this is just Misty, she's airy and mysterious.

Vik probably could have noticed, but he's stressed with work and V's condition on top. So he doesn't.

She's just having a bad time she tried to make better with fumes, incent and weed. And maybe a little more sometimes, but in small, small portions

So everybody just sees how VD gets worse, including her, but she keeps quiet and deals with her thing on her own.

Johnny notices, when they come back after the meeting at Embers.

And he had inklings before, during tarot readings. VD's too caught up in their whole thing to catch up, hasn't dabble much in anything outside of alcohol, honestly.

It's not until much later, when VD's looking for a fix about their whole "Dying of Death" issue wtih Johnny back in a body that they notice

Vik has gotten on it by now because she's lost considerable weight, had caught her when she passed out, back when they both saw Arasaka Tower go up in flames on TV and she knew.

And mind you I do include occult in my verse so Jackie def does get easier to feel when she's high

But in part because his spirit is so upset she feels faint like that, when his little Misty woman used to be so vibrant

Once VD does realize, they feel like shit. It's around 2078.

And then they start meeting up with her regularly, because fuck they were friends, even just to watch her smoke, as she tells them about Jackie when she's unable to do much more than that.

Which she never did before, because he was so much, and they were so hurt, and she couldn't just add to that.

They bond over loving the same man. VD works on their grief to never acting on it, she does on never being connected with him again. She gets closure by being with his other half.

She tells VD what Jackie had wanted to one day, one day he had the courage.

Then at some point idk when Mama Welles catches wind of all thisMisty is now commandited to all family dinners on Sunday night

She better fuckin show up

One of Jackie's sisters had a baby. He's named Kuki Jack Hernandes Welles. VD is stupid over the baby and calls him Kooky Jackie and encourages him to be reckless.

Misty adores him

When Juanita asks her to be the baby's godmother because Jackie should have been godfather she about cries in happy tears. Instead she hugs the infant close to her, thank Juanita for her continued messages, and kiss the little forehead. She asks permission to conduct a blessing, and while Guadalupe arches an eyebrow, Juanita laughs out loud and claps excitedly. Yes, yes she can. Juanita believes in the spiritual, in all forms that the Lord will take, she knows He will not frown upon less traditional ways.

Then she asks VD to be his godfather and they agree! Imagine this bald skinny gangster with sunglasses always on just giving a thumb up and hoofing it out with their rockerboyfriend in tow. Very cool.

Once they're back on their Yaiba bike with their mengo, baklava and own pair of aviators on, with Johnny close behind on the Arch, they about bawl.

[fandomfluffandfuck]

Fuck it, I'M starting a new ask chain because I WANT TO 🧚‍♀️🔮💭this is the hobby fairy! 🧚‍♀️you've been visited and blessed with creative motivation and inspiration 💫poof💫 ! share with your followers a hobby/hobbies that aren't related to the main subject of your blog! then pass the love 💞 on to 5 of your favorite blogs!💭🔮🧚‍♀️

Aw, thank you, sweetheart! This is a really cute ask chain!

Other than the main subject of my blog, fandom and writing for fandom, I am a highly, highly creative guy that can always use more motivation lol!

I used to write a lot of poetry, back when I wasn't writing fanfic. I dont do it as often now, partly because I get my writing craving out elsewhere and partly because I'm in a much better place mentally now than I have been, like, ever. It's rough out here boys, let me tell you.

The best example I can give you of what my poetry is like - without digging through all the composition notebooks shashed away - is "Let Your Guard Down". It holds a bunch of the imagry I tend to use when I write poems. Additionally, I think it has that sort of poetic flow, and, of course, holds the theme of heavy angst that my poetry always has 🤣

Another hobby is ceramics. I play with it whenever possible (re: not as often as I'd like, but occasionally lol).

I can throw on the wheel but mostly I enjoy the sculptural shit. Throwing is meditative and sometimes I jump on and throw myself a set of mugs or bowls or something real quick but handbuilding makes me lose time like nothing else. It sucks me in. Probably because both it takes me forever to handbuild and because it feels a little like playing with mud, like when you're a kid.

I've put some of the progress photos of projects on here, this of my piece "chained to the bottom" and this of "burnt out" but here are some more-

Don't mind the aggressive watermarks. I've been burned by art thieves many, many, many times before. Click to enlarge/for better quality.

What I still do all the time though is draw!

Generally, if I'm not at school/doing adult shit I gotta do (ugh) and I'm not checking Tumblr for a few minutes or writing for an hour, I'm drawing. I draw, right now during the summer, for about six hours a day at least. Drawing has always been my escape. When I don't want to or didn't want to live in the real world, I went to art. I can make a new world there, or I can purge all of my thoughts to make the real world less heavy, y’know? Make yourself anew.

I draw in traditional mediums, lots of graphite and colored pencils, occasionally charcoal or watercolor or acrylic, usually striding for realism. It's the way my brain works, I like realism, romanticism, and surrealism. And I like traditional because, well, it's what I am most familiar with but also there's just something about the ability to touch and feel everything in it that I like. All the different tools *cough* for mark making from and the different paper weights and surface textures of different types of paper and the different erasers and- I could go on forever. I love the tangibility of working traditionally rather than digitally. I love it. Not just a stylist or two, a supportive glove, and a screen. To me, traditional just hits different. I totally respect digital though, the shit ya'll digital artists make is incredible and blows me away. I could never. Traditional simply scratches my brain the right way lol

And here are some Tumblr examples I've put out there already of my sketches/doodles: assorted Chris and Seb doodles for an ask, sub!Seb in a collar, Steve in panties and his shield harness, and Seb as Tommy Lee. And here are two examples of finished, fully rendered works (that tumblr is gonna eat the quality of, I just know it)-

(the left is done in graphite, the right in colored pencil)

Thank you for the ask!! I hope you didn't mind my information dumping about some of this stuff haha

[neverwritewhatyouknow]

In a see it to believe it world…

I found some photographic proof that Rachel was brought up Christian. Up until now there was 1 picture of her at a Christmas Eve dance (which is now suddenly missing from her Insta, luckily I thought that would happen and screenshotted it months ago), but the rest of what was known was from an interview where her mom mentions Rachel’s involvement with church. There was no tangible proof.

Until Rachel tagged her sister in her Insta story, and I like probably thousands of others, clicked on it out of curiosity. Her sister’s account is public.

One of the first pictures (seen without scrolling at all) is Rachel by their Christmas tree.

(Here’s where I start sounding like a stalker so feel free to stop now to keep your respect for me.)

That made me curious so I checked all Christmas posts where Rachel was visible, there are multiple. And multiple Easter pictures. Giving the benefit of the doubt I thought “Maybe they only started doing holiday stuff when the girls were teenagers.” Nope. Classic kids with Easter Bunny picture. I was only looking for Rachel, but did see a post where her sister refers to herself as a Christian and another that had a cross in the caption. I personally don’t think Rachel is religious one way or another, but it’s pretty clear that she was raised overwhelming Christian. The front door of their house had a wealth for Christmas and from what I could tell, no mezuzah (which isn’t obviously mandatory but it is traditional).

Hours before I saw any of this, I asked a Jewish page on Reddit what they thought. I didn’t name Rachel, just gave information that was public knowledge. “Actively involved in church into teenage years, father’s side Jewish heritage, Jewish name to honor heritage, devout Christian immediate family members” and asked if this person (based on info given) would be considered Jewish.

Every answer said no, since 1. Father side 2. Was actively raised Christian.

Her Jewish heritage is totally valid and nobody is disputing that. It’s just that as everything stands right now… RWRB definitely cast a (incredibly talented, literally gorgeous) Christian actor as Jewish Nora Holleran. They could have looked for Jewish actors and didn’t. Jews deserve to be able to play Jewish roles, especially when being Jewish isn’t the only thing the character is. What the casting people did was wrong, I hope more people can see that now. If Nora wasn’t Jewish this wouldn’t be an issue at all, I love the idea of Rachel playing a non-Jewish Nora. Butttt Nora is canonically Jewish, and Rachel (no fault of her own) is not.