#i've made it clear do not fucking follow me if you stand with genocide

[yelenapines]

seeing that i just had to block one of my mutuals for standing with litteral genocide and saying extremely racist things i'm gonna say this right now:

if you support genocide or think that Palestine deserves what is happening or call Arabs inhuman and violent or stand with colonialism get the FUCK out of my page .you will not be welcome. i will not stand with a litteral genocide or allow people who follow me to be saying things like literal fucking children and innocent citizens deserve to be murdered and have their whole past/legacy erased. hope this helps.

[toychest321]

I cannot stress enough that this might be the most important doll I've posted about.

Meet Jafra, the Palestinian fashion doll.

Information on her took a bit of digging, but as far as I can tell she debuted in either December 2015 or January 2016. She was initially available for purchase through her website, and after a year began to be (and still is as) sold at Hamleys in Jordan, UAE, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi. In 2021 the Palestine Museum began selling her for $49.99 each, and is now completely sold out.

Each doll wears a detailed thobe, the longer one in front for their bridal collection. The thobe is a traditional Palestinian dress with tatreez (embroidery) which uses color to indicate what region the wearer is from. During the First Intifada in the 80s, it became a symbol of resistance against Israeli Apartheid, and of Palestinians' connection to their land. (Credit to Handmade Palestine and @nickysfacts for this information)

As far as I can tell based on discrepancy in stock photos, the dolls with embroidered thobes were considered collectors items with a higher price. Meanwhile the details might have been printed for playline/budget releases, likely to lower the price for better availability.

Jafra's dream is to "empower all the beautiful girls from the Middle East". She lives away from her homeland, but hopes to design and build her own house in Palestine. She grows Chamomile and Thyme in her garden, studies architectural design in college, and always tries to volunteer and help others. Her thobe binds her to her home country, passed down from her ancestors.

"Jafra is beyond a doll... beyond an idea. It's a deep-rooted tradition mixed with history and memories"

I hope I have made it abundantly clear that I do and always will support Palestine, and encourage anyone who considers this genocide a "war against Hamas" to unfollow and block me immediately. You have been given every opportunity to educate yourself and sympathize with the innocent Palestinians suffering at the hands of Israel, and your ignorance does not deserve a listening ear over them.

To my followers, I implore you to do your daily click. Contact your representatives. Attend protests. Donate or buy an e-sim if you can. We need to let our government know we are not going to fucking stand for this, and support Palestinians however remotely possible.

A ceasefire WILL be reached. Palestine WILL be free. No matter what actions Israel and its disgusting supporters commit Palestine WILL NEVER DIE.

Ramadan Kareem, and Free Palestine.

[jupiter-va]

To Clarify:

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free and if you disagree with that statement in any capacity fuck you, I will block you. Matter of fact, unfollow me! I haven't really gotten the chance to make a full statement about this on this platform because I've been busy, and I apologize for that, but I had the time to go through my following today and I realized that I definitely needed to block some motherfuckers.

While I'm here, fuck Neil Drunkmann and everything he stands for. I enjoy TLOU, and while I can't take back any purchases that I made in regard to the game before I knew he was a fucking Zionist, I will not be buying anything else. Fuck that remaster. I'm glad that multiplayer got canceled. I won't stop making the audios that I do, but I just wanted to make it clear that while I still enjoy the fan content and the community that enjoying the game has given me access to, I in no way plan to support literally anything that man does, now or in the future. Anyone supporting the literal genocide of a people is a horrible fucking person and I'm atheist, but I strongly believe that you will rot in the pits of Hell if you think that any of what the Israeli government/the IDF is doing is okay.

And please don't come to me with that "Oh why are you being political" bullshit. This is a straight up violation of humans rights. And if you expected a black lesbian sex worker to be anything but political/socially aware, I don't know what to tell you. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

[hidden-snow]

Just wanted to put this out there for anyone who might think otherwise; I will not apologize for who I am.

I have been accused so many times by people I thought I could trust. I've been taken advantage of, spit on, and treated like shit all my life. So if I come back with a nasty bite, just know its because I'm not a fucking dog. I've not been raised to lay down and roll over to expose my belly to motherfuckers who think they can dictate my life.

I don't give a shit whose feelings I hurt. Because you obviously didn't give a shit when you trampled over mine. So let's get one thing fucking straight right here and now:

Hello people.

I'm the one and only Hidden Snow. I had a writing account before with over 400 followers. I was in an amazing discord server. I loved the people in it. I was happy and I'd just started to grow comfortable with the people around me.

And then one day? I talked about my obsession over Hazbin Hotel. Yes. That show that a certain creator had made.

One of the server members made a comment that they hoped the creator would lose the show. And I responded. I stated that I hoped Vivziepop wouldn't lose the show. ONLY because I knew different people would change it. They'd change the characters, the plot line, everything. I didn't want the show to be changed.

And then, somehow, I got accused of supporting Vivziepop and genocide, despite me simply wanting the show to stay the same. Then, my amazing lovely @strongheartneteyam got accused of being racist when she attempted to stop the fighting and to control the situation so things would become peaceful again. The accuser claimed that they were going to go on Tumblr and accuse her publicly. So of course, to support my lovely pookie, I went on Tumblr and warned the people so that they'd be prepared for it.

In response, the accuser posted a "call out" post, claiming that I'd bullied them and that I was racist and "scared of them" because they were black. I CANNOT express how many times this same person, during the argument in the server, showed blatant racism against white women in particular.

To top it off, I never spoke to this person. Not a single time. I was mainly a lurker in the server, but the people I interacted with, I was familiar with them. This person, I didn't even know existed until they popped into the argument. And by that point? I had left the discussion to keep from saying something I might've regretted.

So tell me. Tell me how I was a bully and a racist when I never interacted with that person. Not even once. I have no idea why but I guess a lot of people nowadays only listen to half the story and then judge.

I lost many mutuals. I felt lost and alone, shunned by my "friends" despite me not actually having done anything wrong. I got tired. So I deleted my account. I took a week for my mental health. And I got angry. So fucking angry.

So here I am. And I will tell the truth, blatant or not. You can see it as bullying. You can see it as me being a horrible asshole. But I don't care anymore. Because I'm not going to let some petty big shots attempt to ruin my fight anymore. I'm not going to let them turn off my voice, just because it makes them upset or uncomfortable.

I'm done being a doormat, appealing to the bigger accounts in an attempt to win their hearts over. If you want to try and ruin me, fucking do it. Do your best. Because whether I lose followers or gain followers, whether I receive death threats or not, I'm still going to stand by my word and the truth of what I'm saying.

When I needed a shoulder to lean on? When I needed someone to hear out my side of the story so that I could clear my name, they shunned me instead. They ignored me and chose sides by ignoring my pleas for the truth to be revealed. They say they were "remaining neutral" in the matter, but when you listen to one side claiming something and then turn a blind eye to the other side, you're not staying neutral. You're picking sides. So yeah.

That's all I have to say on the matter. If you've found me through some of the bigger accounts complaining about me? Congratulations. You've found the asshole speaking their side of everything that has happened.

Because of these people, I wanted to end it all. Not just my career on Tumblr, but my life as well. I've never had my name drug through the mud unjustly before and I had no idea how to react. But now, I'm reacting. And I'm going to come back with a vengeance. I'm going to fight tooth and nail to show the sides of these accounts that have been shown to me. The sides that are hidden from their followers.

[deniigi]

Why are you upset that you have fans that have stuck with you throughout several fandoms? Is it not enough that they love what you produce so much to the point where they aren't bothered that something they aren't interested shows up in their feed? Do you expect all of your fans to consume the same thing that you do in order to be a 'true fan'? You may have written something personal to you, but it isn't personal at all to your fans from other fandoms.

What a fascinating response that has so little to do with that actual post I wrote and that so embodies the many reasons that I no longer write for my previous fandom.

That you think that I consider the people who follow me my 'fans' and not just people who have, for their own reasons and decisions, followed me on multiple platforms is what does it for me.

It really drives home how so many people involved in Marvel (but not just Marvel! Really in any fandom) have the tendency to imagine people who create transformative works as somehow the same as say, Youtube content creators or hosts of television shows.

It's like you expect me to put my humanity and frustrations in little boxes that are funny and enjoyable for you to read and if I don't do that, then I'm not fulfilling the 'service' that you signed up for.

When I don't produce enough content often enough, there comes to be a demand:

'when is this updating?'

'is this updating?'

'So sad this is discontinued!'

'Are you still working on this?'

'I miss your works.'

'I miss when you posted stuff like this.'

'This is such crack.'

'You got this character wrong.'

'Tell me how this character would react to X'

I very VERY rarely post about my experiences with other fandom folks on tumblr or any social media platforms outside a handful of discord servers. But those who are on those servers will understand how fucking terrible I felt when I began to lose interest in writing Team Red material. How I agonized over writing material outside of that group because I felt like I was letting people down.

These stories have been read by thousands of people and people tell me all the time that the work brightens their day or helped them through X suicidal moment or made them realize Y about themselves, and to be fully clear: that is exactly why I wrote those stories. I wanted to help people and I was in a position where I didn't feel that I was giving back to other people enough, so I helped them in the way that was available to me.

I wrote 150 stories to help people.

And I've been purposefully misinterpreted for writing those stories, I've been pressured by people to write things about CSA, told that my interpretations of characters are insufficient, told that I, a 28yo adult, am most definitely a teenager playing at writing--the list goes on and on.

And you come here and tell me that I should be grateful for the pressure, the insensitive comments, and the fact that I have 'fans' who support me in multiple fandoms.

Please do listen to yourself and think about how you would feel to be commodified.

How would you feel if you wrote something as a one-off, a bad day you had at the office, and you received 20 comments in a handful of hours while a story that you wrote about the ramifications of genocide and your relationship with objects of genocide received maybe 5?

These are not real numbers because I'm not that bitch, but the point that I'm making stands here.

I am not a 'content creator.' I don't have 'fans.' My audience, to me, are people who are 75% likely to be working through something that I too, am working through or that I have worked through.

They are people, unilaterally. And I try to give even those who treat me like ass the benefit of the doubt, like they're having bad days, like they're feeling powerless, like they don't want the escapism to end because life is just so fucking hard sometimes.

But I'm not going to let you tell me that my experience in fandom and online spaces can be reduced to this weird idea you've got in your head about dashboards and feeds and user experience.

I should be grateful? That people tolerate my other interests and my humanity?

Listen to yourself.

Nowhere in that post did I say that people have to have the same interests as me and me only. I said that I'm upset for being treated like me writing for another fandom is the equivalent of me abandoning a group of people or vanishing into the ether like some kind of weird Auntie remembered fondly by the smell of cigarette ash.

I'm disappointed to be treated like I'm missed when I'm standing right in front of you, honing my craft and deeply enjoying it.

All it would take to banish that feeling is for people to just modify their language and yet they do not. Because, again, Anon, like I am to you, I am apparently nothing more than a fucking service to them.

Anyways, to wrap this up before I get too angry: I don't do parasocial relationships. Please unfollow and block me if this is how you're going to engage with me and the works that I create and the occasional statement I make about my personal fucking experience with the world.

[lightrises]

"Only in allowing her to pass..." — Hornet, The Radiance, and the means by which Hallownest turned its victims against each other

A quick note: I read Hollow Knight as an anti-colonialist text. As such I'll be touching on topics related to colonialism as it's depicted in the world of the game, and said analysis will reflect both a sympathetic take on The Radiance and a critique of The Pale King that won't pull its punches. If this sounds up your alley, hello and thank you for the read! Let us be sad about these bugs together.

———

So!! A while back I realized something about pre-canon that felt rather... "curious" is one way to put it, I think. To wit: for all the effort and scheming and determination The Pale King poured into trying to get rid of The Radiance, neither of his plans involved directly killing her.

Was that his long game? Well, sure, that seems clear enough. His tack changed from luring the moths away from their god and creator to a more literal form of incarceration once the infection became a factor, but at its core the end goal never really changed—The Pale King very sincerely wished to destroy Radiance via obsolescence. The Seer lends us foreshadowing to confirm as much:

[Image descriptions: Two screenshots from Hollow Knight, showing the Seer and Ghost in the Seer's alcove at the Resting Grounds. Across both screenshots, the Seer tells Ghost the following: "None of us can live forever, and so we ask those who survive to remember us. Hold something in your mind and it lives on with you, but forget it and you seal it away forever. That is the only death that matters." End description.]

(Which, by the way and given the context, talk about an extremely unsubtle allusion to cultural genocide huh!!! Whew.)

In any case, we're left with a whole bunch of machinations which build up to... well, two very roundabout attempts at committing deicide. That's kind of weird, all things considered! Why not just do the deed in one fell swoop and get it over with?

This could be for any number of reasons. Maybe the king was devoid of the means to instantly kill another higher being. Maybe his personal sense of scruples stopped him short of signing off on MURDER murder (although, y'know, the aforementioned genocide + eternal imprisonment = still cool and copasectic apparently!). Maybe the long drawn-out cruelty was the point. Maybe the idea of playing fuckign 4D chess with the circumstances was too delicious for him to pass up—that man did love to tinker and stick his claws where they sure as hell didn't belong—or maybe it was a little bit of All The Things. Who knows!!

But interrogating The Pale King's methodology on this count isn't what I'm here for, at least not really. The main reason I raise this question at all is that in her own way, Hornet did too.

"I'd urge you to take that harder path... "

See, going by The Pale King's actions and what The White Lady explicitly says, they both foresaw two outcomes wrt the infection: it can be allowed to spread, or it can be contained. At Teacher's Archives, Quirrel acknowledges the fact that Ghost is expected to do... something about this, but he doesn't elaborate on what HE thinks that's supposed to be apart from the obvious "Gotta bust into Black Egg Temple first". Hornet is the one person who presents to us—to Ghost—what's framed as a third option: confront and destroy the infection at its source.

And she doesn't bring it up like it's just another tactic for Ghost to consider, prim and indifferent to what they would do. She nudges them towards it, actively, up to the point where she throws herself into the fray against Hollow at a juncture that's uniquely dangerous to her and her alone just to make that option feasible.

Even when she's couching it in disclaimers that this is still Ghost's decision to make (and let's be fair, she's extremely not wrong about that lol), no one can pretend Hornet is unbiased. It's obvious in that buttoned-down Hornet kind of way that she is way the hell done with the increasingly tenuous stalemate that's kept Hallownest's desiccated corpse from collapsing in on itself. Personally it's hard for me not to read some Toriel Undertale-esque "My father was too entrenched in his own foolishness to pursue any course of action that would have DEFINITIVELY ended this" shade into her stance here, regardless of whether that's strictly true in canon.

And that bit—Hornet's hopes for an end to Hallownest's stasis, moreover her grim calculation of what needs to be done to get there—that's the bit I find super interesting but likewise tragic and depressing as shit, on multiple levels. In no small part because a) canon itself gestures towards Hornet feeling conflicted about the very plan she's pushing, and moreover b) she has at least two (2) damn good reasons to feel that way.

So, what do I mean by that? Let's look here first:

[Image description: A screenshot from Hollow Knight, of Hornet and Ghost inside the Temple of the Black Egg, standing in front of the unsealed egg itself. Hornet has been struck by the Dream Nail and her dialogue is displayed as follows: "... Could it achieve that impossible thing? Should it?" End description.]

As the curtain is about to drop on things one way or another, Hornet thinks,

... Could it achieve that impossible thing? Should it?

Now, looking at that last bit it's easy to go "Oh no, Hornet's worried that Ghost won't survive killing The Radiance!" And I do think that's part of it: Hornet is, categorically, not her father. By endgame it's clear she's not content to view her Void-borne siblings as tools to be used then disposed of. She's also well aware that as a healthy autonomous Vessel amongst the countless dead, Ghost is the only person left alive who has a fighting chance against The Radiance. Knowing someone is the only qualified candidate for the job doesn't make encouraging them to embrace a probable death sentence any less of a bitter pill to swallow, though. And odds are on that this sentiment extends to Hollow too, who IS going to die no matter what happens here. To put it bluntly, it's more than reasonable to conclude that Hornet hates the absolute fuck out of this.

But I don't think that's all there is to it either. Remember what I said earlier about The Pale King's bids for genocide? Well, it's not like the man deigned to limit his efforts to just the moth tribe.

"We do not choose our mothers... "

On top of everything else—an infected Hallownest being all she's ever known, the fact that she only exists because of the infection, the list goes on—Hornet has spent her life wedged into a position that's been uncomfortable and terminally unglamorous at best: she is both a daughter of her father's kingdom and of Deepnest.

Deepnest, which like the moths and many others was here long before the wyrm and his lady wife swanned onto the scene and the God Become Bug laid claim to everything the Light touched plus a considerable amount of change. THAT Deepnest, which has fought claw and thread to retain its sovereignty against same-said settler king, and for which Herrah not only surrendered her life but also agreed to bed her worst enemy, all in hopes of securing a viable future for her people (put a pin in that last part by the way, I'll come back to it soon).

Two Worlds, One Family (Ft. An Indigenous Woman Trying Her Damndest To Work With What She's Got Versus An Imperialist Who Only Signed Up For This Because He Needed The Political Favor THAT Badly, So It's The Height Of Dysfunctional Actually). Fun times!!!!

The baggage this entails for Hornet is gnarly enough without implications made by The White Lady and the pre-canon timeline of events and even Team Cherry's dev notes that the king may well have looked at baby Hornet, gone "YOINK", then ensured she spent the lion's share of her childhood reared within the pearly auspices of his Pale Court*. That would be rather advantageous for Him Specifically after all, the potential to mold a born foe into a future ally and even have her trained in combat under the same tutelage as her doomed sibling. And far be it from him to stop a grown Hornet—his own flesh and blood too!—from making Deepnest her forever home if she so pleased. He totally wouldn't be reneging on his "fair bargain made" by doing this one simple thing until Hornet came of age, not t e c h nic c a l l y.

If that is indeed the case, there's a non-zero chance Hornet's formative years were a hot mess of cultural alienation and being a good deal more privy than most to just how much of a bastard her father could be. There's an equally non-zero chance that at some point she stood or sat within earshot as The Pale King finally, finally dropped all pretense and euphemism to name the Light for precisely what (for who) it was.

See, in conjunction with the question that started this whole dang train of thought I've been asking this one too: Does Hornet know? When she speaks of confronting "the heart of [the] infection" does she know she's talking about not just a literal person but someone very specific? The Radiance, who god though she may be shares skin in the game alongside Hornet as a native woman screwed over by the same settler king, likewise deprived of her kin and saddled with a life gone horrendously pear-shaped?

I'll assume for the sake of exploring the possibility and because I think it's a likely one anyway that yes, Hornet does know. She knows, and despite everything can't help empathizing. She might even look at Radiance and see bits and pieces both reflected and slightly inversed in her own mother: Radiance was forced to the sidelines while her people—her children, the brood she was meant to lead and care for—died out under The Pale King's rule, and it's no stretch to assume she's at least as upset about that as she has been about everything else; Herrah too took drastic measures for her people's sake, trying to head off annihilation by relegating herself to the sidelines in an act that was as much calculated risk as an attempt to find wiggle room and leverage in the face of a nasty proposition.

A calculated risk that, if things continue as they are, might well amount to nothing as the rest of Deepnest gets eaten alive by the infection. It survived The Pale King's advances for so so long, only to fall here. Herrah's sacrifice would be for naught; the other tribes—themselves the king's victims—would keep succumbing to the infection too.

And this is where things fall apart.

"... or the circumstance into which we are born."

Let's be clear: I think Hornet is wise enough to know what's what here, that all the carnage and suffering falls on her father's head for starting this slow-motion trainwreck in the first place. Hallownest wasn't always Hallownest. This domain was Radiance's home first, along with many others. It was the worm-turned-king who rolled up on the scene unsolicited and decided this was a ""'problem""" that had to be """solved""".

But the fact of the matter is that he's gone and The Radiance is here, raging, seemingly inconsolable. Above and beyond being Deepnest's rightful heir, Hornet isn't in a position to countenance more splash damage even if the grief and fury fueling it makes perfect sense. She can understand without ever bringing herself to love Radiance, and she can bend her knee to practicality even if she hates the everloving shit out of it because the fact that it "has" to end this way isn't fair.

This lends itself to one last awful conclusion: that Hornet has probably considered and (rightly or wrongly) discarded the possibility that Radiance can be saved, at least not without dragging more collateral along for the ride. If even her mother and every other enemy to the king seemed to dismiss talking Radiance down as an option way back when... well. Why should Hornet hope for any better after things have escalated so far?

Again, it's practical. A practical net good is what Hornet strives for. And again, it fucking sucks.

For extra tragedy points, this makes Hornet's extended crypticness around Ghost followed by her last minute casting about for a reason to tell them "Wait, don't; not just yet" that she never voices even more of a gut punch. She can't bring herself to burden Ghost with the context that haunts her so, least of all when it might weaken their resolve to go through with what (she thinks) needs doing.

It's the "same song, different verse" which led to the mantis tribe and Deepnest being pitted against each other: Hallownest rigged the game so that two women who could have been powerful allies—who have a mutual vested interest in driving out settler rule—wound up poised as enemies instead. And how awful is that? The king for all his being extremely fucking dead still gets the last laugh, because outside of a miracle the game never manifests Hornet can salvage what her mother started and look forward to a future where Deepnest pulls itself back from the brink if and only if The Radiance dies.

Resolution comes at the price of a completed genocide. Add two more dead siblings to the unconscionable pile thereof, while we're at it. That's what it boils down to whether or not Hornet can bear to articulate it as such, and there's no grace or even a properly bittersweet ending to wring from this clusterfuck. And that is rough.

———

* This has been better explained elsewhere, but a quick rundown: The White Lady tells Ghost that Hornet and Herrah "were permitted little time together." On its surface this can be taken to mean that Hornet was still very young when Herrah was shipped off to Eternal Dreamland—except this doesn't jive with the fact that we meet Hornet as an adult. If the stasis kicked in once the Dreamers went to their rest, which in turn halted the aging process for every living bug in Hallownest, AND before all this Hornet experienced little by the way of quality time with her birth mother... I think you can see where I'm going with this.

To top it off we've got Team Cherry weighing in ominously from their dev notes on Herrah: "As part of the agreement for her alliance and her role as a dreamer, King gave her a child (Hornet). Was she allowed to keep this child or was she taken away?" This isn't confirmation by itself of course, but given additional canon details (see above): Can I get a "yikes" in the chat fellas.