#its a difficult situation especially in the world we live in where depression is an epidemic

[vampvelvet]

I've been thinking a lot lately about how I've been doing better mentally these past few weeks and a lot of it boiled down to things people have been telling me my whole life. I mean, I had gone through traumatic events some years ago which caused depression. then I fell into a codependent friendship which has worsened my mental state. only now that I have backed out of that friendship and started to think more about myself and how I feel, did I figure out how to keep myself going well.

I found hobbies im interested in, I've been using music I adore to keep my spirits up, I've been getting outside more, getting more exercise, using my phone less, living more in the moment, diversifying my friendships, taking time for myself, etc etc etc

and seeing myself improving in these ways makes me feel optimistic, thinking, these are the things that helped me, they can help you too! it's easy to get excited about that.

but none of those things were the solution to my problem. those were parts of healing, ways to keep my rhythm, ways to give me energy when I feel like going back to what I typically do when I'm depressed.

but they weren't *the solution*. and that made me realize why only now I'm following all this advice that I had been given to me for years and years. why people get so cynical and annoyed when others try to motivate them into getting out of their depression. because staying inside, staying sedentary, overusing phones, avoiding socializing, etc- those things aren't the cause of issues, they're the *symptoms*. and when someone is in a terrible mental state they're not going to realize/notice/care about the things that they're using to cope with their lives.

I don't know what the solution is. everyone's lives are different. for me, it was getting out of a codependent friendship. I don't have the answers. but it's going to be something bigger than just 'getting out more'.

people have to see the future on their own. there are moments when people realize that they have to take their life into their own hands. nothing is easy, but things can get better.

long rant in the tags if you're interested. take care <3

[starastrologyy]

Astrology Observations 🪶

Hi everyone, this is another compilation of random Astro observations!

I will be closing my chart readings at the end of August for a few weeks, as I do have a full-time job on top of doing Readings but for now they are still open 🤍 The link to my website is in my bio if you are interested in purchasing a reading.

Please do not repost any of my work on other social media platforms🤍

Having a Sagittarius Rising in a composite chart can suggest that the two people met abroad! Alternatively, there could be significant cultural or religious differences between the two. Sometimes it could just mean that these two enjoy traveling together, and other people see them as a very open-minded and free-spirited couple.

People who have Lilith (black moon) In the 3rd house often fear that people are talking about them, or creating false narratives about them.

People who have Uranus Retrograde in their charts might often feel like the “odd one out”. They may struggle to find their community, or place in the world. Alternatively, they may feel as if they don’t have control over the area of life in which their Uranus is situated in. For example, someone with Uranus Retrograde placed in their 10th house, may feel as if they cannot control their reputation, or they experience frequent/uncontrollable changes in their careers or career path. Their relationships with the Authority figures in their lives (bosses, fathers, mentors) are also very unpredictable and constantly changing. Remember that retrogrades in our charts, show us the area of life where we will constantly need to go back and revise/make the necessary changes in order for us to move forward.

TW:Mental Illness:

To be very honest I try shy away from associating astrological placements/aspects with certain illnesses or conditions. For two reasons, one, it can be harmful to people who have that placement, and two, its a very controversial topic in the astrological community, as some people believe that astrology cannot show any kind of illness (I am not one of those people). However, I will say I have seen two aspects in peoples charts that frequently have manifested as certain mental difficulties. A close conjunction between the Moon and Saturn can cause someone to feel melancholic, as it often manifests as Depression . Whereas, Mercury square Neptune is very common in the charts of people who have been diagnosed with BPD (an orb of 2 degrees or less). Please don’t make this apply to you if it doesn’t, and my intention isn’t to offend or upset anybody, I just thought it would be interesting to share this observation.

People who have their Saturn placed in the 5th house often struggle when it comes to “letting loose” and having fun. These people often need to work on healing their inner child, as they fear being judged and ridiculed by others. In some cases, they may have experienced rejection or harsh criticism from others at an early age. There’s also insecurities related to their ability to attract romantic partners with this placement.

Water mercuries often communicate from a place of emotion, and they often take criticism from others very personally. Not EVERY water mercury is going to be sensitive, but they tend to favor emotion/intuition over rationality and logic most of the time.

In synastry, having 2nd, 7th, 8th, or 11th house overlays with someone can be very beneficial to you financially. The 7th house more in a business sense, as you have the potential to enter into a business partnership with this person.

It’s not uncommon to adopt an entirely new aesthetic/make drastic changes to your personality during a 1st house profection year.

I’ve mentioned this in one of my very first posts but, Transit Pluto or Saturn squaring your Sun or Moon is one of the most difficult transits that you will face. I don’t think astrology should be used to fearmonger, but these transits are really difficult (especially if they are occurring simultaneously) . However, once it’s passed you will become an incredibly strong person, and you will find that you more equipped to deal with life’s challenges moving forward.

Major Jupiter transits occurring alongside positive Venus transits are likely to be a very good time in your life. For example, let’s say you have transit Jupiter making a conjunction to your Natal Moon, and it is making a trine to your natal Venus. This is likely to be a very positive time in your life, and you are inclined to be in good spirits. If transit Venus is also making positive aspects to your luminaries or other personal planets the affects of the positive Jupiter transits are likely to be magnified.

Saturn transiting your 1st house is often associated with weight loss, and I can confirm that weight-loss is very likely during this transit. But I will say, that it’s not always the result of a great exercise and diet regimen, some people feel very stressed or isolated during this transit and thus they may lose weight as a result.

In synastry, I’ve noticed that couples who have Hard aspects (squares, oppositions, conjunctions) to each other’s Venus and Mars, often have very steamy/active sex lives. This is especially true with Mars opposite Mars, Venus square Mars, and Mars square Mars.

Sagittarius Venus & Mars individuals are very experimental when it comes to sex. These people are quite open-minded and they bore very easily in relationships. So, they tend to gravitate towards friends with benefits or relationships with people who are also open-minded. This doesn’t mean they can’t be monogamous, because most of them are, contrary to popular belief. They just need adventure and fun in their relationships.

Couples who have significant 3H synastry are usually vocal with each other about sex. They often discuss what they like or don’t like ahead of time. Alternatively, this can also show a couple who enjoy talking DURING sex!

[hitaka5ever]

I haven't been on social media much for months and I'll explain why here and how I plan on finishing the rest of the year and what my goals for next year are (I will probs forget to do it later, hence why I'm doing it now)

Anywho, my main reason for being away is for my mental health that has gotten much worse since the end of summer, mainly of course to do with the genocide of Palestinians and the amount of information that has been shared by millions. I've kept my eye on the atrocities on and off since it started, getting some info from family, who I visited recently, but for the most part I've avoided minute-by-minute coverage

I'm a very empathetic person. This means I have a strong sense of noticing others' emotions that become a part of me after enough exposure to them. So for example, if someone I know is extremely sad or cries, even though I'm not experiencing their sadness or pain, I get emotional along with them (since I spend 99% of my time with mum, we feed off each others' feelings and physical attributes the most)

So my depression and anxiety are the main reasons for my absence on everything but YouTube and email. I ultimately have to take care of myself before I can worry about anyone or anything else

I'm back to seeing a therapist every other week on Thursdays via Zoom. She's the first therapist I've ever had that's asked me what my main goals with therapy are and what I'm looking for. My last therapist asked the same thing, but we never actually went over anything practical. Right now, my severe anxiety is what's ruining my life the most, so I wanted to focus strictly on that for now. I want to know what I need to do to combat my anxiety in specific situations, like being out in public places

I've brought up before that I have severe hearing sensory overload. If too many physical noises (meaning stuff not on a screen or through speakers) surround me, I get very jittery and weird feeling in my head and body. I have to leave the room when it gets really bad. Normally I can calm down within 5 minutes of leaving the situation, but that's only if I'm in between 2 people talking with each other. It's a lot worse when they're talking over one another. My worst experience was having sound inside and outside my house that surrounded me on all sides. It took ~30 minutes to return to normal after I went into a secluded area to listen to music with headphones on. As you can imagine this is way too much stimulation for my broken brain to handle, so finding jobs out in the real world are very hard on me

That comes to my next bit of information: I'm still unemployed and looking into temporary disability through my therapist while I learn to take control of my anxiety. I have severe PTSD from being bullied in middle school, living with a mentally abusive parent, and having experienced a terrible car accident almost a year after I graduated high school (this was in 2009) So trusting people on and offline (less so online) has made my adult life very difficult. Riding in vehicles to reach a certain destination was the absolute worst symptom of my mental illness from 2009-2021, and even now I get very subtle anxiety knowing when I have places to get to. I'm obviously loads better than I was back then thanks to meds, but now I have employment to think about, which brings on its own problems

Finding jobs that don't include retail, fast food, or talking to people face-to-face or via phone, especially in my shitty small town, is a nightmare. I've tried finding work remotely at home, but there's always at least 1 requirement that makes me ineligible for the job. I want to make money making digital art, but I lack the skills and exposure in a world where even the most experienced freelancers are struggling to make ends meet (bc of artificial images (AI) taking over the community) As you can tell, this gives me very limited job opportunities and I don't know if I qualify for disability on a normal basis rather than a temporary one, so either way I have less than $150 left in my bank and unable to pay my parents rent bc of all of this

But things here aren't all bad. I enjoyed going to stay with my sisters for all of November where they live, getting to spend time with 4 cats and a foster baby (I did get a bad cold the last week of vacation, but that was the only bad thing about the trip) and coming home to have something I haven't had since 2020

We are fostering a purebred Pitbull girl named Stella for the rest of the year. She's 8 years old but still in her prime and we have become best buds (and napping pals) since day 1. This was a trial run to see if she would be the right fit for the family, and so far everything's been going great, minus her ear infections that we're taking care of. Stella has basically become my dog and we're likely keeping her for the remainder of her life. She's the sweetest and most chill dog I have ever met and I fell in love with her immediately. It took her 2 days of coaxing to be used to getting on my bed, with and without me, and she follows me everywhere I go, so we're bonded for life lol

So that's the most exciting news I have to share about what's been happening with me. I get to go into the new year owning my very own dog and learning how to cope with my anxiety before and after it starts, so I'm looking forward to the new year

Speaking of the new year (I'm almost done, promise!) I have a few goals for 2024 that I really want to stick to my guns about

Run a successful Kickstarter making and selling fire-breathing insect and bug stickers

Making extensive reference sheets of my OCs and fan fiction characters (eg my werewolf au and LoZ stories)

Learning (digital) art restoration. When I visited my sisters, my oldest was gathering foster kid stuff when she became a foster parent, and she got a set of Mega Building Blocks that had significant wear and tear. Some of the pieces with stickers on them were faded and peeling off, so I want to remake those stickers, get them printed, and give them to my sister so she can restore the broken pieces for her future foster kids. This gave me the idea of restoring art that has worn down or ruined over time. I like taking electronics apart and putting them back together again and I enjoy the assembly and design of things, so I think restoring physical items could become a potential art job

Learn basic idle animations of characters and objects. A Clip Studio Paint user makes tutorial videos on the official English CSP YouTube channel, and their latest is simplistic animations in CSP, so I want to try it out and offer it as a commission option if I'm comfortable with the process

Cartoonify famous or interesting places from real life, such as cool cities/towns, schools/colleges, or the Seven Wonders of the World, etc

Visit my friends at our homes or going out to restaurants and into town. My anxiety has made being around the friends I've grown up with really hard as well, not just with employment, so I want that to change a lot too

Legally change my name and gender after wanting to for the last few years (Rocky Dean (dad's middle name) Fuller (mum's maiden name))

Look into getting top surgery in the next 3+ years. I'm finally to the point where having breasts is ruining my life physically (back pain) and mentally (dysphoria) so I need to find a surgeon that doesn't require weight loss or hormone therapy to do the procedure

Just do art in general

That's all for now!

[embracingdiversityy]

Mental Health: Unraveling the Impact of Gender Discrimination

Let’s talk about what’s going on in our minds lately. Have any of us ever thought about the implications of gender inequality on the mental stability of each individual? Its impact on the people persists, creating countless problems in our society. The mental toll that gender discrimination has brought to an individual is often overlooked and not addressed, resulting in major consequences to the subject of gender equity. With the rollercoaster of emotions that the effects of gender discrimination on our mental health, you may need to buckle up and be ready as we dive deeper into the emotional and psychological aspects of this issue!

Did you know that women are twice more likely to have mental disorders such as anxiety or depression but men are less likely not to seek help for it? The biological nature between males and females plays a part in the identification of mental illnesses within a population, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that a certain gender isn’t susceptible to mental disorders. Gender discrimination can affect anyone, so we must be careful of our actions and take precautions against the signs of mental instability.

Discrimination has been shown to have a clear link with the progression of mental illnesses. Now, it’s probably a wonder as to what kinds of examples discrimination can do that can severely affect a person’s psychological well-being, so here we are with the following:

1. Gender Dysmorphia / LGBTQ+

When a certain gender that strays away from the known two genders (male and female) is brought into topic, such as non-binary people or people within the LGBTQ+ community, discrimination can be spotted in various ways. To see the unconventional genders and stereotype these people into conforming to their ‘biological’ nature affects their ability to participate in society, as well as their self-identity.

2. Stress and Anxiety

Ever feel like you’re walking on eggshells while living your life in a society? That’s what the fear of being discriminated or harassed for your gender identity brings. To feel anxious or scared whenever a situation arises, second-guessing yourself if you’re really what people describe of you just because of what your biological nature is. Many individuals experience this kind of stress in various when facing gender inequality.

3. Depression and feeling the blues

When an individual faces the harsh discrimination of genders, they may feel the loneliness and sadness creeping in. Feeling sad or hurt when a person is excluded makes them even more susceptible to mental issues, being alone in dark thoughts can increase the risk of having multiple levels of depression and serious mental health problems.

When facing the mental effects of gender bias can be pretty tricky to navigate. It has a lot of aspects that can become confusing or difficult to understand, especially for individuals who are susceptible to mental instabilities. What should we do in this situation when we encounter individuals experiencing this kind of issue? We talk about it. Yes, it’s difficult, and easier said than done, but having a great support system and good communication with the people you trust and believe in can alleviate the risks of developing worse mental issues and deteriorating an individual’s health.

The worst thing you can do is not to do anything at all. Let us all stand where discrimination and oppression cannot be fostered in our society, creating a healthy mind and a healthy environment that we all deserve. Let us lead the path of equality and inclusivity to better our world’s future!

Written by: Charlyn Robles

Pubmat by: Charlyn Robles

[embracingdiversity]

Mental Health: Unravelling the Impact of Gender Discrimination

Let’s talk about what’s going on in our minds lately. Have any of us ever thought about the implications of gender inequality on the mental stability of each individual? Its impact on the people persists, creating countless problems in our society. The mental toll that gender discrimination has brought to an individual is often overlooked and not addressed, resulting in major consequences to the subject of gender equity. With the rollercoaster of emotions that the effects of gender discrimination on our mental health, you may need to buckle up and be ready as we dive deeper into the emotional and psychological aspects of this issue!

Did you know that women are twice more likely to have mental disorders such as anxiety or depression but men are less likely not to seek help for it? The biological nature between males and females plays a part in the identification of mental illnesses within a population, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that a certain gender isn’t susceptible to mental disorders. Gender discrimination can affect anyone, so we must be careful of our actions and take precautions against the signs of mental instability.

Discrimination has been shown to have a clear link with the progression of mental illnesses. Now, it’s probably a wonder as to what kinds of examples discrimination can do that can severely affect a person’s psychological well-being, so here we are with the following:

1. Gender Dysmorphia / LGBTQ+

When a certain gender that strays away from the known two genders (male and female) is brought into topic, such as non-binary people or people within the LGBTQ+ community, discrimination can be spotted in various ways. To see the unconventional genders and stereotype these people into conforming to their ‘biological’ nature affects their ability to participate in society, as well as their self-identity.

2. Stress and Anxiety

Ever feel like you’re walking on eggshells while living your life in a society? That’s what the fear of being discriminated or harassed for your gender identity brings. To feel anxious or scared whenever a situation arises, second-guessing yourself if you’re really what people describe of you just because of what your biological nature is. Many individuals experience this kind of stress in various when facing gender inequality.

3. Depression and feeling the blues

When an individual faces the harsh discrimination of genders, they may feel the loneliness and sadness creeping in. Feeling sad or hurt when a person is excluded makes them even more susceptible to mental issues, being alone in dark thoughts can increase the risk of having multiple levels of depression and serious mental health problems.

When facing the mental effects of gender bias can be pretty tricky to navigate. It has a lot of aspects that can become confusing or difficult to understand, especially for individuals who are susceptible to mental instabilities. What should we do in this situation when we encounter individuals experiencing this kind of issue? We talk about it. Yes, it’s difficult, and easier said than done, but having a great support system and good communication with the people you trust and believe in can alleviate the risks of developing worse mental issues and deteriorating an individual’s health.

The worst thing you can do is not to do anything at all. Let us all stand where discrimination and oppression cannot be fostered in our society, creating a healthy mind and a healthy environment that we all deserve. Let us lead the path of equality and inclusivity to better our world’s future!

Written by: Charlyn Robles

Pubmat by: Charlyn Robles

References

Gender inequality affects everyone. (2023, October 4). vic.gov.au. https://www.vic.gov.au/gender-inequality-affects-everyone

Leonard, J. (2021, July 1). What are the psychological effects of gender inequality?https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/psychological-effects-of-gender-inequality

[filaantrocrowdfunding]

Helping The Elder Citizens. You Can Make Their Golden Years Brighter!

As per World Health Organization reports, India has 104 million people aged 60 or over, representing 8.6% of the country's total population where females outnumber males (Census 2011). 

Loneliness, depression, financial insecurity, narrowed social life, and health problems; ageing comes with several life problems. Right from childhood to adulthood, the time they become parents to their senior years, older folks' life experiences make them wise and learned. 

However, when they become older, elder individuals encounter situations where they have little choice but to deal with what life throws at them. Elders at home are not respected or their wise advice is misjudged as interfering. They are asked to leave the house while on the other hand, a few of the older ones do not have family or children to take care of them in sickness. 

Challenges Faced By The Elderly In India

India lacks the fundamental resources and knowledge necessary to promote the health and welfare of our elders. 

Physical infrastructure is a major barrier to providing elderly people with the comfort they need. When on the streets, wheelchair users have no designated path to follow.

The nation is ill-equipped to handle the rising prevalence of dementia, Alzheimer's disease, and depression among the elderly. Problems with mental health are rarely discussed.

The scarcity of public and private financial support for those older people who do not have a family is another major challenge they face.

Contrary to other developed nations, there is a lack of emergency response infrastructure for senior citizens, including access to public ambulances for hospitalisation. How to go to an emergency facility, if necessary, is one of the top concerns for most elderly people living alone, especially at night.

These are a few problems out of many that the older individuals in India face on a daily basis. Some of them are sick, lonely, unattended, and abandoned too. 

Do You Feel Bad About Them? Want To Do Something For Them?

Swanthanam Old Age Home in Pathanamthitta, Kerala, looks after 63 elderly women who don't have a home, family, or place to stay. The ages of these participants range from 45 to 98. The old age home relies on donations from numerous people, which makes management challenging for the proprietors.

Members of this old age home were either forced to leave their own houses or were left there because they had no one to look after. They only have this old age home that they can call their own. Out of the total, 23 of its members are currently bedridden because of serious illnesses. Since they are unable to move on their own, the staff must feed and clean them. 

Since they are unable to help themselves, these members must wear adult diapers all day. 70 adult diapers are needed each day for these 23 people who are bedridden. It is difficult for the proprietors to manage all the costs of upkeep, medications, staff salaries, and other expenses because the old age home runs solely on contributions.

They urgently require money to cover the expense of adult diapers, which is:

They require 26,000 adult diapers each year, which may rise in the future given the current daily requirement. This will cost Rs. 7,20,000/- (Rupees Seven Lakhs Twenty Thousand Only) per year based on wholesale costs.

The caretaker at the old age home has initiated a fundraising campaign on Filaantro. The sum of money required to afford the required number of adult diapers every day is huge and they need your help with it. While stating the situation at the old age home the caretaker said:

“I am here all the time looking after the needs and requirements of the senior citizens. There are times when I cannot even look at the mental and physical state they are in. They break down so many times because of the void that they have no family. We are their only family and we have to take care of them in their declining years. I need your support so that my members can spend the final years of their life in comfort. Please help!”

With your generous donations, senior citizens at the Swanthanam Old Age Home will have a better life spending their lonely, golden years. Together we need to show them that they are not alone; we care for them like a family and we are here for them.

Show your love and support for the Swanthanam Old Age Home at:

Author: Anjali Patel

[miu-miiu]

⚡ astrobservations p.2 ⚡♌

🌟 houses

*this is a new theory i came up with but we might experience the energy of the opposite of our houses. for example, as a 1h venus person you may act more like a 7h venus where you avoid confrontation and value keeping the peace. as a 7h venus, you may act more like a 1h venus where you give more appericiation to your appearance and be more aggressive and argumentative.

as a 6h sun, you may find it more difficult to accomplish tasks at hand and be productive and it may feel like a burden to you, but you may easily get in contact with the astral realm and embrace your higher self.as a 12h sun, you may easily be productive and finish tasks and chores but struggle with surrendering to the divine, diving deep into spirituality or struggle to accept your gifts.

*mercury in 7h love to debate other people and share their ideas with other people

*jupiter in 5th gives excellent stage presence and abundance of creativity, its the ultimate performer and creator placement. people with chart ruler in 5h jupiter are often destined to become a creator/performer which can even mean being a tourist guide or a youtuber

*mercury in 5th people are never boring and they are extremely pleasant people who will make everything 5x more fun than it is. school work, chores, everything is funner with them!

🌟 synastry

*be VERY careful when getting into a relationship with 8th house synastry, especially if you are the planet person because you will most likely form an extreme attachment and obsession to the house person that will last for a very long time and can go into unhealthy lenghts. because you are the planet person and this is 8th house synastry we are talking about, the house person has immense power over you and they know it. they can see right through you. as the planet person, you want to be their one and only and feel they empower you, which makes you crave to be with them more because they give you power and their presence helps you get through anything. you will never forget about them and they become embeded in your subconscious. the house person will feel disturbed and triggered by you psychologically. but they become fascinated with the planet person. this makes an extremely transformative relationship. they bring out your true personality (especially if your sun is in their 8th house) to the surface and you trigger the heck out of them.   the planet person usually finds the house person when the house person is at their rock bottom and sometimes vice versa. 

 *venus conjunct sun synastry has an effect where the venus person is widely known as the sun person’s sweetheart. the venus person becomes a magnefied and known person in the sun persons life, almost like a celebrity couple/duo while the sun person is known by the venus persons’ favorite people and inner circle mostly.

*12th house synastry is a BITCH i fucking hate it because it makes everything so blurry and unknown you have no idea wtf is going on but you also cant make your way out and you idealise the person a lot

6th house synastry is EXCELLENT because you’re involved in each others lives so much. more often than not, you spend majority of your time in a day together whether by hanging out or texting and the planet person usually reports the house person what are they doing during the day (like a random text of “im repairing a bike rn” or “im going to x, i’ll be back in awhile” etc) and you care about each other A LOT. the planet person can take a director role in the house persons life and they help each other a lot

mars conjunctions are wonderful synastries for sticking through thick and thin, it makes a very dynamic and sexy couple

with mercury in 7th house synastry, it’s IMPOSSIBLE for the love to remain as a secret if it’s a romance relationship. it will come out. one of you will admit it sooner or later

🌟 other

*wherever your mars is placed in, is where you’re not scared to take action or assert yourself. example: my pisces mars friends are not afraid of getting in dangerous waters likecliff diving, swimming in wild waves, going too deep in water etc. i, as a leo mars am not afraid of putting myself out there and performing

*sagittarius suns love to eat, while sagittarius moons have less appetite and desire to eat

*aries moons love themes of war, they have a warrior-like approach to most things

*aries-pisces people turn war and warriorhood into fantasy and make it dreamlike. (example: grimes’ (a pisces sun aries moon) WarNymph persona)

*i didnt observe this myself but read that mars opposite uranus people have deranges pasts with knives and it’s SO true.

*fire moons enjoy energetic and upbeat music, earth moons love chill music (like indie, lofi, can be r&b too maybe), air moons can enjoy techno music&rap, and i’m not sure about water moons cause i don’t have many water moons in my life but i’m thinking they would enjoy songs with lyrics or beats that make them feel something and songs with stories. i’ve seen that they tend to listen to music of all kinds. earth moons openly discriminate amongst genres and dgaf

*pisces placements have divine intelligence and are revolutionaries. this is rarely mentioned and pisces are often described as “airheads” which they are because of their giant imaginations and unique thought process but it’s a sign of intelligence. pisces people pick up on ANYTHING so quickly, absorb information like a sponge and analyze it themselves to form an opinion and understand it. their thoughts and opinions often dont make to other people or shock them. they will bring revolution and newness into whatever area they are working with. (example: einstein, rihanna, grimes (she’s literally trying to make the “ethereal techno” an official genre and creating avatars. revolution), billie eilish, kurt cobain (helllooo  grunge king), paul mccartney, copernicus, aamir khan, steve jobs are all either pisces suns or risings

*sagittarians are similar in the sense that they like to discover new paths. they have the star quality (walt disney, britney spears, brad pitt, nicki minaj)

*it makes sense that the world’s most famous celebrity right now is a leo (kylie jenner)

*sagittarius and gemini risings have thick and pretty hair. it’s well styled and you want to run your hand through it. they’re physically advantaged

*aries suns and moons will just create trouble if they cant find it cause they love to throw themselves in tricky and dangerous situation as they feed off of it

*cancer moons get fucking poetic and dramatic at the slightest conflict, argument or emotional moment like they fucking channel the spirit of shakespeare. shhtoppp

*air sun, moon, mercury & venus dont like sadness, depression or traumatic memories so they will often program themselves to forget about heartbreaks or traumatic events and move on like they never happened or change the story and tell people different stories about what happened to convince themselves and twist reality.

*moon-saturn often naturally restricts food intake

most socialists/communists have taurus and sagittarius placements it’s INCREDIBLE

leo ic people are inherently and naturally charming af, thats because they are usually SHOWERED with love and affection as a child, they are often the only child and the golden child which obviously feeds someone with confidence for their life later on

libra moons will judge you on the inside if you are ugly sjdljsdf they dont like to be in aesthetically unpleasent spaces

[beardedmrbean]

"I'm scared that there will be a nuclear war," said Henry, 13 in the town of Sarstedt in northern Germany.

He is not alone. Young Germans are increasingly worried about the war in Ukraine, specifically the idea that the conflict may spill into other countries, or that Russia might make use of its nuclear weapons. This is according to a survey of 206 13- to 17-year-olds polled on March 2 and 3 by theInternational Central Institute for Youth and Educational Television (IZI) in Munich, a think-tank funded by Bavarian public broadcaster BR.

"Nine out of ten teens are anxious and worried about the situation in Ukraine," the study found.

They have two specific concerns: First "that other countries will be attacked because one country is not enough for [Russian President Vladimir] Putin." This could specifically be a NATO or EU nation like Poland, thus bringing about "World War III."And secondly: "Russia will threaten us with nuclear bombs" and the German authorities wouldnˈt be able to warn people about an imminent attack in time to reach safety.

'Where should I flee to?'

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has made young Europeans think what only three weeks ago was unthinkable: that war could come to the European Union.

"The possibility of World War III, or even worse, nuclear war, terrifies me and many of my friends," said Gül, 17, who lives in Rheinfelden, near Germany's border with Switzerland. "My parents came to Germany from Turkey in search of a better life. And now I ask myself what we will do if there really is a world war. Where should I flee to? What will my life look like? Will I even get out of this country alive?"

German teenagers were born after the wars in the Balkans that saw NATO involvement and German participation in the late 1990s. Fears of Russian aggression are even more a thing of the past — not only for the youngest in society.

"For my parentsˈ generation, growing up during the Cold War, nuclear conflict felt like a real possibility," said Julia, a 35-year-old high school teacher in southern Germany.

"And even after the fall of the Soviet Union, they continued to be skeptical of Russia and didn't see it as changing very much. They say they feel prepared for this moment, though the large scope of the attack surprised them. But for my generation and the generation I teach, war, especially nuclear war, in Europe felt like the most remote thing imaginable … until three weeks ago."

German TikTok and Instagram are flooded with videos about how to prepare emergency rations, as well as speculation on how likely an attack on Germany may be. They are attracting hundreds of thousands of likes.

Google searches for potassium iodide tablets, which help prevent radiation poisoning, have skyrocketed across Germany following reports of an attack on Ukraine's largest nuclear power station.

Depressing and difficult

"It is difficult listening to the news because what is happening right now in Ukraine is scary, even for us German teens," said Erin, 17, in Frankfurt.

"It is depressing because we have sympathy with the teenagers in Ukraine. Seeing daughters and fathers having to say goodbye and not knowing when they will see each other again is very hard for me," she said. She added that the subject was barely discussed in school, but she was divided on whether or not it should be, since the topic weighed so heavily on her.

The IZI study found that despite what adults might assume, most German teens were still getting the bulk of their information about the war from their parents, public television, and the website of mainstream news services — sources they considered more likely to be accurate.

13-year-old Henry said that he was "worried about the people in Ukraine" and that students in his class quickly began collecting donations for refugees.

According to IZI, after news on the ground, the thing teens most wanted most was to know how to assist people their own age who had to flee their homes.

Not only was social media filled with "how you can help" posts, but interest groups like sports clubs and the environmentalist movement Fridays for Future have temporarily shifted focus to collecting donations and organizing solidarity marches in support of Ukraine.

Sociologist Klaus Hurrelmann with the Hertie School in Berlin believes this might turn out to be part of a real shift in young Germans' priorities: "Fear of war could replace concerns about climate and the environment, which have always been ahead in surveys over the past ten years," he told the daily Die Welt.

IZI study leader Maya Göth calls on parents and teachers to allow teens to "express their thoughts and concerns," in a constructive way, instead of downplaying them.

[greengrungeemo]

“I accept what Rena did. I accept that she had no choice other than to do this, and that this was her last resort after thinking it through many times. So... I’m going to side with her..! If she’s guilty of anything, she’s only guilty for not talking to us about it beforehand. But I forgive her for that too! I forgive her for coming to this point!!! So!! I beg you all! Please forgive me for not noticing Rena’s situation and for letting her go through it alone.” - Keiichi Maebara, Higurashi When They Cry Hou - Ch.6 Tsumihoroboshi.

This was the most difficult part to get through in the entire series for me. You know, for such a brash and bold guy, Keiichi has a whole hidden layer of maturity and empathy built in him. Reading through all of this, you can feel the regret, the sorrow, the shame, the pain, the despondence, the longing for forgiveness and happier days... You feel that in each character.

More importantly, you can especially feel the empathy that friendships should always have! They all affirm feeling ashamed and truly put themselves in each other’s shoes. Standing in a circle and holding each other was symbolic in that they were putting all of their emotions in one big cross to carry, and feeling through the emotions together as friends. How powerful is that?! They all cried because they genuinely felt what the others were feeling. As Keiichi stated himself, “So now, we finally became true friends!!” after reminding Rena the importance of communication for things like this. It would be the trial to test their friendship and transcend them into the closest friends in the whole world. Rena believes that friends should exist to help each other, and in this failure to help her, they pledge to stand by her now and forever. It’s the sweetest and most heartfelt scene in any series I’ve experienced.

I think this is the attitude that the world needs.

Genuine understanding. Taking the “love thy neighbor” law of life to a sincere and supportive way. A real, caring connection.

“B-but Rena ******** someone! That’s the biggest sin there is! She’s evil and she doesn’t deserve forgiveness!”

If anyone has that thought process, you missed the point of the story. The whole point is that there exists not bad people in this world, only bad choices. Sin is something to be overcome, not an energy to be absorbed in you forever. Earnest effort, and asking for this forgiveness is the key to escape the cage. As depicted in this chapter, Rena suffers through so much. Family divide, betrayal, paranoia, trust issues, delusions, self-doubt, depression, and more. There are factors at play, and these skew and cloud one’s mental awareness and acuity to an egregious degree. This choice was not consciously made by her, meaning that the sinful act psychologically infiltrated beyond rational thought or morality. Therefore, the act itself wasn’t performed by “Rena”, since what consists of “Rena” is all of the traits, morals, beliefs, and characteristics we already know and love. You are your consciousness. If you’re not conscious, you’re not experiencing, if you’re not experiencing, you’re not living, and if you’re not living, you’re not there as yourself. Please note there’s also a clear difference between “being alive” (biologically) and living (actually experiencing life as you). It’s difficult to explain, but as soon as you encountered any form of mental trauma, you’ll understand it precisely as it is. You’ll feel like what previously happened was another reality, or even an entirely separate existence. Since the experience did happen, she is still responsible for the crime, of course. Though, this doesn’t inherently mean her entire being is “evil”, only the act itself - given the circumstances. You may feel stained from it, but that’s only your inner moral compass doing its job (the “superego” in psychoanalytic theory).

The second point of the story is forgiveness, even the highest severity of sin. I know hands down that if I had a friend like Rena, and this exact scenario happened, I would stand by her in a heartbeat. Easier said than done, right? Well, that’s where the empathy comes in. If you sincerely love someone who you know suffered through a lot mentally, who committed a wrongdoing or sin, you’ll still see the goodness in them - since you loved them for a good reason to begin with! That is to say, that goodness may still dissipate if they don’t care about harming others or feel any remorse or regret, that’s when it’s then the right call to get away from them. Rena has enough goodness in her to go beyond her sin, and it’s clear she was trapped into a corner with no way out. She can atone and redeem herself, it’s possible - especially with the love and support of friends.

Those two points are what the Higurashi crew understood immediately, and that’s why they all chose to forgive each other and support one another through this dreadful event. They even recognized their own wrongdoings and self-reflected at that moment! The majority of people would point fingers, vilify, and condemn Rena immediately in the real world. It takes a massive amount of awareness and maturity to do what Keiichi, Rika, Mion, and Satoko did, and even some self-sacrifice, since the burden would infect them as well, but they all knew Rena was well-worth it, and that’s why they are all the best, most ideal friends.

You know, long ago there was a scene in Code Vein with a cute “friendship always wins and we can get through anything together” message between the characters... Back then, when I was in an evil and darkened fog, I scoffed at it. Crazy right? Who would laugh at such a sweet and sincere message? My friend at the time defended it and its importance, and clearly, I was a fool at failing to see its underlying value... I now love scenarios like those whenever I encounter them, and that sort of attitude is among the most prized things you can ever possess in your life.

If I was who I am now all those years ago and beyond, everything would be different. Just as if Rena was who she is at that moment in the story, she would not have committed such a sin, especially after knowing her friends would stand by her.

Overall, this is my favorite scene in the entire series so far. After experiencing it, I’m committing to be as forgiving and as good of a friend as they are. I’ll stand by you through thick and thin, and we’ll get through anything and everything together. Fervently, I’ll carry everyone in my heart as I go. As simply put as that.

[letterboxd]

Love Thy Neighbor.

With her nineteenth-century American romance, The World to Come—starring Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby—screening now, director Mona Fastvold talks to Ella Kemp about the need to create images, striving for ASMR storytelling, and just how much we owe Terrence Malick.

“We’ve seen a lot of movies during this time period in America about what the husbands were out doing… but they had wives who are at home, living their completely separate lives. What were they up to?” —Mona Fastvold

In the American Northeast in the nineteenth century, life for farmers’ wives is physical, lonely, subject to both the extremes of weather and their husbands’ moods. When Abigail (Katherine Waterston) and Tallie (Vanessa Kirby) become neighbors in The World To Come, their lives become infinitely more bearable.

What unfolds is a careful study of the ways affection and understanding can bloom in the most unlikely places. Based on Jim Shepard’s short story of the same name, Mona Fastvold’s desperately romantic film starts where Abigail’s diary also begins: with a new year, and new neighbors. Through lyrical voice-over and closely drawn scenes, Abigail tells of how, in the wake of unimaginable loss, her life is cracked wide open by the arrival of effervescent, free-spirited Tallie. She speaks of grief and exhaustion, but also of astonishment and joy.

Katherine Waterston as Abigail and Vanessa Kirby as Tallie in ‘The World to Come’. / Photo by Vlad Cioplea

It’s a story felt through whispers as much as kisses, framed by the blustery winds of the East-Coast frontier—and by the spectre of their husbands (Casey Affleck as the downcast Dyer, Christopher Abbott as the jealous, disturbing Finney) finding out about their new love. Fastvold gives each character just enough attention to let the relationships that matter most rise up all on their own. She does so with words, poetry that somehow feels alive, and with music—specifically, a stunningly passionate clarinet soundtrack.

The World to Come won the Queer Lion at Venice last August (where it miraculously had an in-person premiere), and won many more hearts at Sundance in January. It’s Fastvold’s second film as director, after 2014’s The Sleepwalker, which also starred Christopher Abbott, and was co-written by Fastvold’s partner (and Vox Lux director) Brady Corbet.

What did you feel when reading Jim’s story for the first time? Mona Fastvold: It was a home I wanted to move into. It was this feeling of thinking, ‘This belongs in my universe, and I belong in this universe.’ And I all of a sudden had a few images that I felt a very strong need to create. The first thing that I felt really compelled to do was creating this physical expression of joy after the first kiss. I had this image of Katherine in this wide shot, completely open and just exposed. And I was really compelled to shoot her in the snow by the grave as well.

I also wanted to frame her being tied to the house with a rope, working her way through the snowstorm. There was a lot of amazing text and maybe fewer images in the script, because it’s written by these two really wonderful writers and authors of novels, not so much screenplays. So it’s not a very technical screenplay, and there were a lot of things left to me to work out, which I enjoyed. But the foundation was this really good text.

Mona Fastvold on the set of ‘The World to Come’. / Photo by Toni Salabasev

The text is so striking, in the way it’s so verbose but never feels stiff. How did you keep the words intact while bringing these emotions to life? I cast some really good actors, so that helps! Then when you’re working with this kind of text, it’s not really a text that you can improvise or play around as much, you really just need to honor it. For me it’s really about finding the movement that will support the beats of the text. I like the edit to be motivated by a gesture, something that says, “I want you to look at this”. I’m trying to make the rhythm more exciting. Ping-ponging back and forth is less exciting to me.

When rehearsing, we’d create movement either physically, or find changes through long pauses already in the text, and then upon finding those organic beats I’d figure out with my DP how we can stay in one take for as long as possible, until we find that moment which motivates a change. I never like there to be a camera movement just for there to be something cool visually. And there’s all this subtext in the text, all these messages Abigail and Tallie are trying to send to each other. When are you being direct? When are you being understood? When are you not?

Particularly in recent years, we’ve been fortunate to have a number of films that reframe period pieces about forbidden lesbian romances. Why do you think we keep coming back to this kind of story? A lot of people feel compelled to say these stories have always been there, and to claim that part of history. It’s not modern, it’s not a new thing, but it’s just that these stories have not been told much. Especially a love story that takes place among farmers. We know a little bit about upper-class stories from some literature, but not that much from that time period. So part of the appeal for me was to say: this is a part of history. Even though it’s not a story about Napoleon, this story about these two quiet, introverted women is still worth exploring. And we’ve seen a lot of movies during this time period in America about what the husbands were out doing. I’ve grown up watching these movies, but they had wives who are at home, living their completely separate lives. What were they up to?

Finney (Christopher Abbott) reads Tallie’s mail. / Photo by Vlad Cioplea

You mention the husbands—I felt watching this film that it was set in a very different world to the likes of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which a lot of people loved precisely because of how few men were in the film. But here the husbands play a really important part within the story about these two women, helping to convey their frustration and limitations, without taking over. All characters in a story deserve equal counts of love and attention from the writers, directors and actors. It was incredibly important to portray the men with as much nuance as Abigail and Tallie. It makes for a more interesting story for them, that their relationships with their partners are complex—they’re not just these male archetypes who are terrible and awful. Dyer was an interesting character, in that he’s striving to understand even though he doesn’t quite. And he had different ambitions as well, but this is the situation he’s in, and he’s chosen a practical partner who he respects, and I guess loves and cares for. But they’re running a farm together, they’re business partners as well and depend on each other for survival. When he says “I’ll die without you” it’s quite literal, in a way. I wanted to break these characters open and make them more difficult to deal with, for themselves and for the women as well.

Your picture includes a beautiful, and really unexpected score by Daniel Blumberg—particularly in the use of the clarinet, which feels like its own kind of narrative. Can you talk me through the process of weaving that into the story? I brought in Daniel even when I was developing the script and working on casting early on. I kept listening to ‘Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet’ by Igor Stravinsky, and somehow the instrument felt really connected to Katherine’s voice-over. It was important that the voice-over was not slammed on top at the end. It’s there, I hope, to have a bit of an ASMR effect where you feel it draws you really close to Abigail in a hypnotic way. That you feel like you get this intimate experience of that character by having access to her life even if it doesn’t explain things too much.

So we wanted to have the score speaking to the voice-over, which we recorded long before we started shooting as well. We would play it on set and Daniel would come in and play music there. So constantly being in dialogue between the text being read and the music being played was an important part of the process.

It’s time for some Life in Film questions. What is your favorite ‘forbidden love’ story? A film I really love, which inspired The World to Come, is Olivia. It’s from 1951 and it’s directed by Jacqueline Audry, and it was one of the first lesbian on-screen kisses ever captured. It’s a great movie directed by a female director when that wasn’t so much of a thing. It was an important trailblazer for this film.

Marie-Claire Olivia and Simone Simon in Jacqueline Audry’s ‘Olivia’ (1951).

What’s your favourite “Dear Diary” movie, the one that best uses a confessional voice-over? Terrence Malick pretty much cornered that market with some beautiful, beautiful attempts at that. We definitely have to pay our respects! Particularly Days of Heaven is pretty amazing. The voice-over work there is extraordinary.

What is your go-to comfort movie? It’s funny because I was asked that a while ago and normally I would just be like, “Anything Nancy Meyers makes is just so lovely”. She makes these films that are just like candy. But during the pandemic, it’s just too hard to watch these cozy movies, because it just makes you feel depressed. So right now, the film I’ve watched the most in my lifetime is Eyes Wide Shut. I also find it to be a Christmas movie… If it’s on anywhere, I’ll always leave it on, or just watch a little piece of it.

What should Letterboxd members watch after The World to Come? First of all they should watch Olivia if they haven’t seen it, and then the other day I watched Martin Eden—it’s an incredible movie. So beautifully made.

What is the one film that first made you want to be a filmmaker? I grew up watching a lot of movies. My family are cinephiles and I’ve always loved films. I grew up on a steady diet of Ingmar Bergman’s films during my teenage years, and Tarkovsky too. Seeing those films made a really big impression me. But what really inspired me in many ways was seeing Claire Denis’ films. The way she approaches storytelling is so intuitive. It’s so exciting. That resonated with me, and later on I recognized some of that in Lucrecia Martel as well. I just love how she handles time and logic and character.

Related content

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Follow Bleecker Street on Letterboxd

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‘The World to Come’ is currently in select US theaters, and will be available on demand from March 2, via Bleecker Street.

[lit-in-thy-heart]

you know what, what's the point of being on this platform if you don't get to bellow into the void about your interests in the hope of finding someone with the same interest?

in light of this, let me inflict a lowdown of the victorian literature (mostly novels because poetry is difficult to collate) that i've read for my module this year upon my mutuals

i'll do a separate one for vampire novels and reblog with the link

because what are the victorians without vampires? straight

bleak house (dickens): what a ride that was! yes, it was nearly a thousand pages and, yes, some chapters i was like can we move on please, but that's dickens for you. honestly, i loved it. if you're looking for thinly-veiled lesbianism, this is the book for you (esda all the way, if they even have a ship name). unfortunately i already knew one of the plot twists due to watching dickensian five years before, but there are plenty more to go around! if you can get through the first chapter describing nothing but fog and the law courts, you're in for one hell of a treat -- just don't google anything about it until you've finished because you will get spoiled (or don't share a house with me, where i'll tell you the entire plot as i'm reading it). definitely recommend, but marking it down for the heteronormativity with allan. (9.5/10)

villette (c. brontë): where to fucking start. i, quite frankly, do not care for charlotte brontë, and when reading the earlier novel agnes grey by anne, i could see some more things that charlotte has filched for this travesty. no victorian novel is going to be without problems, but this one was xenophobic, ableist and, of course, racist. the protagonist doesn't really give anything away, which is meant to make her more mysterious, but it just renders her an empty vessel. oh, and she tells you stuff that she's figured out waaaaaay after she says she's figured it out, a bit like she's allowing you to feel smart for making a connection before going 'oh yeah i knew that like twelve chapters ago, keep up'. some of the passages are really striking and there's maybe one character who's likeable but that's about it. i'd say it's more a story of omission than repression tbh. (4/10)

janet's repentance (eliot): wait, have i even finished this? no, no, i have not. it's fine, i wasn't going to tell you the ending anyway. i did get hooked eventually, there were just a LOT of names thrown around in the first few chapters, and a word that i didn't know was used frequently (turns out it was a name for the followers of this guy). i did get strong hester prynne/arthur dimmesdale vibes from some of the main characters, but janet is a very sympathetic character which, after reading villette, was nice. slightly depressing in some places, but a good enough read if you're not cramming it in the day before your tutorial, because it is mildly dense. (7/10)

the wonderful adventures of mrs seacole in many lands (seacole): not what i'd been expecting to read on my module, what with it being a biography, but enjoyable nonetheless. horrible histories lied to me, though, she was in her 40s/50s when she treated people in the crimean war, not in her 20s, but that's minor. it was actually quite funny??? like she was very reluctant to give away to give away her age and almost slipped up a couple of times, and also made some very biting remarks about people who were passing comment on her skin colour. for a biography, it wasn't hugely biographical, in that she was married for what seemed all of five minutes before her husband died, when in fact they were married for several years, but if you want an in-depth depiction of war, this is for you. not what i'd usually read, but some of the descriptions are so vivid that it does read like a novel in places, though sometimes the descriptions were so detailed that i did tune out at odd intervals. (9/10)

the happy prince and other stories (wilde): if you're feeling low, don't read these. don't. especially not 'the nightingale and the rose', because that was honestly heartbreaking. really well-written, some passages were just beautiful, i just wasn't in the right headspace to fully appreciate it. it also has a lot of death, i should probably explicitly say that. (8/10)

agnes grey (a. brontë): chef's kiss, honestly. if i'd read this last year then i think it definitely would have hit a lot harder, what with agnes moving away from home for the first time and struggling with loneliness around people who she is different from. beautifully written, i'm irritated at myself for not reading it sooner, even though i've owned a copy for about four years or so. agnes does come across as a bit wet sometimes, but those moments are rare and far between, she's overall a resilient character who is trying to make her own way in the world. seeing as i managed to get through the whole thing and didn't lose focus on what i was reading, i rate it higher than jane eyre (which is a rip-off of this anyway). we stan anne. though i am marking it down for the underdeveloped romantic relationship that just pops up (9.5/10)

now for some old classics that weren't taught on my module, but i can't not mention them

a tale of two cities (dickens): this was my first dickens book and oh my word what a book. yeah, okay, lucie is a bit of a wet dishcloth and has basically no personality, but there is definitely something there between her and her maid. sydney is my baby and oh so gorgeously dramatic ("you have kindled me, heap of ashes that i am, into fire"), which was perfect for the pangs of unrequited love. the plot is slightly confusing, and you don't really understand everything until right near the end, but i loved finding parallels in the chapters set in france with the chapters set in britain. oh and the showdown between miss pross and madame defarge is wonderful. i had a tradition of reading it on the run-up to christmas, just because that was the period when i read it for the first time, but i haven't done that for the past two years just because of exams and stuff. now, bleak house just pips it at the post, but i still love it dearly. (9/10)

wuthering heights (e. brontë): i couldn't review victorian literature and not include this. there are very strong similarities between this and villette (seems charlotte really drew on her sisters' work), particularly in terms of me not liking a single one of the characters except hareton. everyone is called cathy. literally. and heathcliff/cathy one is a toxic ship that should not be boarded. it is obsession, not love. the second volume is basically a repeat of the first one, thus showing that humanity will never move past its vices and will be caught in a vicious cycle of self-destruction for the rest of time. again, though, beautifully and vividly written. the characters are the type that you love to hate. (8/10)

the tenant of wildfell hall (a. brontë): what. a. book. this was a book that was simultaneously loved and condemned as scandalous when it came out. there's mystery, there's a woman escaping a horrible situation and making her own living, and there's a well-developed relationship! and the characters are likeable (i love rose, she's great, completely goes off at her brother when she has to do things for him all the time), which always puts it onto a winner. there's one chapter with gilbert that i have to skip just because i hate what he does in it. there are quite a lot of religious references, with redemption playing a huge part in the novel, but even the religious views brontë expresses went against a lot of the teachings of the anglican church at the time. do i even need to say that it's beautifully written if it's anne? marking it down for gilbert's behaviour and arguable control of helen's narrative. (9.5/10)

far from the madding crowd (hardy): i love this book. a little more uplifting than tess but still with the drama and murder you'd expect from hardy. maybe my review is influenced by my tiny crush on bathsheba: she's not the best role model but damn what a woman. gabriel isn't quite bae but i love him all the same, i'm so glad he's happy in the end. (9/10)

[comrade-meow]

I.

For a long time, academic feminism in America has been closely allied to the practical struggle to achieve justice and equality for women. Feminist theory has been understood by theorists as not just fancy words on paper; theory is connected to proposals for social change. Thus feminist scholars have engaged in many concrete projects: the reform of rape law; winning attention and legal redress for the problems of domestic violence and sexual harassment; improving women’s economic opportunities, working conditions, and education; winning pregnancy benefits for female workers; campaigning against the trafficking of women and girls in prostitution; working for the social and political equality of lesbians and gay men.

Indeed, some theorists have left the academy altogether, feeling more comfortable in the world of practical politics, where they can address these urgent problems directly. Those who remain in the academy have frequently made it a point of honor to be academics of a committed practical sort, eyes always on the material conditions of real women, writing always in a way that acknowledges those real bodies and those real struggles. One cannot read a page of Catharine MacKinnon, for example, without being engaged with a real issue of legal and institutional change. If one disagrees with her proposals--and many feminists disagree with them--the challenge posed by her writing is to find some other way of solving the problem that has been vividly delineated.

Feminists have differed in some cases about what is bad, and about what is needed to make things better; but all have agreed that the circumstances of women are often unjust and that law and political action can make them more nearly just. MacKinnon, who portrays hierarchy and subordination as endemic to our entire culture, is also committed to, and cautiously optimistic about, change through law--the domestic law of rape and sexual harassment and international human rights law. Even Nancy Chodorow, who, in The Reproduction of Mothering, offered a depressing account of the replication of oppressive gender categories in child-rearing, argued that this situation could change. Men and women could decide, understanding the unhappy consequences of these habits, that they will henceforth do things differently; and changes in laws and institutions can assist in such decisions.

Feminist theory still looks like this in many parts of the world. In India, for example, academic feminists have thrown themselves into practical struggles, and feminist theorizing is closely tethered to practical commitments such as female literacy, the reform of unequal land laws, changes in rape law (which, in India today, has most of the flaws that the first generation of American feminists targeted), the effort to get social recognition for problems of sexual harassment and domestic violence. These feminists know that they live in the middle of a fiercely unjust reality; they cannot live with themselves without addressing it more or less daily, in their theoretical writing and in their activities outside the seminar room.

In the United States, however, things have been changing. One observes a new, disquieting trend. It is not only that feminist theory pays relatively little attention to the struggles of women outside the United States. (This was always a dispiriting feature even of much of the best work of the earlier period.) Something more insidious than provincialism has come to prominence in the American academy. It is the virtually complete turning from the material side of life, toward a type of verbal and symbolic politics that makes only the flimsiest of connections with the real situation of real women.

Feminist thinkers of the new symbolic type would appear to believe that the way to do feminist politics is to use words in a subversive way, in academic publications of lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness. These symbolic gestures, it is believed, are themselves a form of political resistance; and so one need not engage with messy things such as legislatures and movements in order to act daringly. The new feminism, moreover, instructs its members that there is little room for large-scale social change, and maybe no room at all. We are all, more or less, prisoners of the structures of power that have defined our identity as women; we can never change those structures in a large-scale way, and we can never escape from them. All that we can hope to do is to find spaces within the structures of power in which to parody them, to poke fun at them, to transgress them in speech. And so symbolic verbal politics, in addition to being offered as a type of real politics, is held to be the only politics that is really possible.

These developments owe much to the recent prominence of French postmodernist thought. Many young feminists, whatever their concrete affiliations with this or that French thinker, have been influenced by the extremely French idea that the intellectual does politics by speaking seditiously, and that this is a significant type of political action. Many have also derived from the writings of Michel Foucault (rightly or wrongly) the fatalistic idea that we are prisoners of an all-enveloping structure of power, and that real-life reform movements usually end up serving power in new and insidious ways. Such feminists therefore find comfort in the idea that the subversive use of words is still available to feminist intellectuals. Deprived of the hope of larger or more lasting changes, we can still perform our resistance by the reworking of verbal categories, and thus, at the margins, of the selves who are constituted by them.

One American feminist has shaped these developments more than any other. Judith Butler seems to many young scholars to define what feminism is now. Trained as a philosopher, she is frequently seen (more by people in literature than by philosophers) as a major thinker about gender, power, and the body. As we wonder what has become of old-style feminist politics and the material realities to which it was committed, it seems necessary to reckon with Butler’s work and influence, and to scrutinize the arguments that have led so many to adopt a stance that looks very much like quietism and retreat.

II.

It is difficult to come to grips with Butler’s ideas, because it is difficult to figure out what they are. Butler is a very smart person. In public discussions, she proves that she can speak clearly and has a quick grasp of what is said to her. Her written style, however, is ponderous and obscure. It is dense with allusions to other theorists, drawn from a wide range of different theoretical traditions. In addition to Foucault, and to a more recent focus on Freud, Butler’s work relies heavily on the thought of Louis Althusser, the French lesbian theorist Monique Wittig, the American anthropologist Gayle Rubin, Jacques Lacan, J.L. Austin, and the American philosopher of language Saul Kripke. These figures do not all agree with one another, to say the least; so an initial problem in reading Butler is that one is bewildered to find her arguments buttressed by appeal to so many contradictory concepts and doctrines, usually without any account of how the apparent contradictions will be resolved.

A further problem lies in Butler’s casual mode of allusion. The ideas of these thinkers are never described in enough detail to include the uninitiated (if you are not familiar with the Althusserian concept of “interpellation,” you are lost for chapters) or to explain to the initiated how, precisely, the difficult ideas are being understood. Of course, much academic writing is allusive in some way: it presupposes prior knowledge of certain doctrines and positions. But in both the continental and the Anglo-American philosophical traditions, academic writers for a specialist audience standardly acknowledge that the figures they mention are complicated, and the object of many different interpretations. They therefore typically assume the responsibility of advancing a definite interpretation among the contested ones, and of showing by argument why they have interpreted the figure as they have, and why their own interpretation is better than others.

We find none of this in Butler. Divergent interpretations are simply not considered--even where, as in the cases of Foucault and Freud, she is advancing highly contestable interpretations that would not be accepted by many scholars. Thus one is led to the conclusion that the allusiveness of the writing cannot be explained in the usual way, by positing an audience of specialists eager to debate the details of an esoteric academic position. The writing is simply too thin to satisfy any such audience. It is also obvious that Butler’s work is not directed at a non-academic audience eager to grapple with actual injustices. Such an audience would simply be baffled by the thick soup of Butler’s prose, by its air of in-group knowingness, by its extremely high ratio of names to explanations.

To whom, then, is Butler speaking? It would seem that she is addressing a group of young feminist theorists in the academy who are neither students of philosophy, caring about what Althusser and Freud and Kripke really said, nor outsiders, needing to be informed about the nature of their projects and persuaded of their worth. This implied audience is imagined as remarkably docile. Subservient to the oracular voice of Butler’s text, and dazzled by its patina of high-concept abstractness, the imagined reader poses few questions, requests no arguments and no clear definitions of terms.

Still more strangely, the implied reader is expected not to care greatly about Butler’s own final view on many matters. For a large proportion of the sentences in any book by Butler--especially sentences near the end of chapters--are questions. Sometimes the answer that the question expects is evident. But often things are much more indeterminate. Among the non-interrogative sentences, many begin with “Consider…” or “One could suggest…”--in such a way that Butler never quite tells the reader whether she approves of the view described. Mystification as well as hierarchy are the tools of her practice, a mystification that eludes criticism because it makes few definite claims.

Take two representative examples:

What does it mean for the agency of a subject to presuppose its own subordination? Is the act of presupposing the same as the act of reinstating, or is there a discontinuity between the power presupposed and the power reinstated? Consider that in the very act by which the subject reproduces the conditions of its own subordination, the subject exemplifies a temporally based vulnerability that belongs to those conditions, specifically, to the exigencies of their renewal.

And:

Such questions cannot be answered here, but they indicate a direction for thinking that is perhaps prior to the question of conscience, namely, the question that preoccupied Spinoza, Nietzsche, and most recently, Giorgio Agamben: How are we to understand the desire to be as a constitutive desire? Resituating conscience and interpellation within such an account, we might then add to this question another: How is such a desire exploited not only by a law in the singular, but by laws of various kinds such that we yield to subordination in order to maintain some sense of social “being”?

Why does Butler prefer to write in this teasing, exasperating way? The style is certainly not unprecedented. Some precincts of the continental philosophical tradition, though surely not all of them, have an unfortunate tendency to regard the philosopher as a star who fascinates, and frequently by obscurity, rather than as an arguer among equals. When ideas are stated clearly, after all, they may be detached from their author: one can take them away and pursue them on one’s own. When they remain mysterious (indeed, when they are not quite asserted), one remains dependent on the originating authority. The thinker is heeded only for his or her turgid charisma. One hangs in suspense, eager for the next move. When Butler does follow that “direction for thinking,” what will she say? What does it mean, tell us please, for the agency of a subject to presuppose its own subordination? (No clear answer to this question, so far as I can see, is forthcoming.) One is given the impression of a mind so profoundly cogitative that it will not pronounce on anything lightly: so one waits, in awe of its depth, for it finally to do so.

In this way obscurity creates an aura of importance. It also serves another related purpose. It bullies the reader into granting that, since one cannot figure out what is going on, there must be something significant going on, some complexity of thought, where in reality there are often familiar or even shopworn notions, addressed too simply and too casually to add any new dimension of understanding. When the bullied readers of Butler’s books muster the daring to think thus, they will see that the ideas in these books are thin. When Butler’s notions are stated clearly and succinctly, one sees that, without a lot more distinctions and arguments, they don’t go far, and they are not especially new. Thus obscurity fills the void left by an absence of a real complexity of thought and argument.

Last year Butler won the first prize in the annual Bad Writing Contest sponsored by the journal Philosophy and Literature, for the following sentence:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Now, Butler might have written: “Marxist accounts, focusing on capital as the central force structuring social relations, depicted the operations of that force as everywhere uniform. By contrast, Althusserian accounts, focusing on power, see the operations of that force as variegated and as shifting over time.” Instead, she prefers a verbosity that causes the reader to expend so much effort in deciphering her prose that little energy is left for assessing the truth of the claims. Announcing the award, the journal’s editor remarked that “it’s possibly the anxiety-inducing obscurity of such writing that has led Professor Warren Hedges of Southern Oregon University to praise Judith Butler as `probably one of the ten smartest people on the planet.’” (Such bad writing, incidentally, is by no means ubiquitous in the “queer theory” group of theorists with which Butler is associated. David Halperin, for example, writes about the relationship between Foucault and Kant, and about Greek homosexuality, with philosophical clarity and historical precision.)

Butler gains prestige in the literary world by being a philosopher; many admirers associate her manner of writing with philosophical profundity. But one should ask whether it belongs to the philosophical tradition at all, rather than to the closely related but adversarial traditions of sophistry and rhetoric. Ever since Socrates distinguished philosophy from what the sophists and the rhetoricians were doing, it has been a discourse of equals who trade arguments and counter-arguments without any obscurantist sleight-of-hand. In that way, he claimed, philosophy showed respect for the soul, while the others’ manipulative methods showed only disrespect. One afternoon, fatigued by Butler on a long plane trip, I turned to a draft of a student’s dissertation on Hume’s views of personal identity. I quickly felt my spirits reviving. Doesn’t she write clearly, I thought with pleasure, and a tiny bit of pride. And Hume, what a fine, what a gracious spirit: how kindly he respects the reader’s intelligence, even at the cost of exposing his own uncertainty.

III.

Butler’s main idea, first introduced in Gender Trouble in 1989 and repeated throughout her books, is that gender is a social artifice. Our ideas of what women and men are reflect nothing that exists eternally in nature. Instead they derive from customs that embed social relations of power.

This notion, of course, is nothing new. The denaturalizing of gender was present already in Plato, and it received a great boost from John Stuart Mill, who claimed in The Subjection of Women that “what is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing.” Mill saw that claims about “women’s nature” derive from, and shore up, hierarchies of power: womanliness is made to be whatever would serve the cause of keeping women in subjection, or, as he put it, “enslav[ing] their minds.” With the family as with feudalism, the rhetoric of nature itself serves the cause of slavery. “The subjection of women to men being a universal custom, any departure from it quite naturally appears unnatural…. But was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it?”

Mill was hardly the first social constructionist. Similar ideas about anger, greed, envy, and other prominent features of our lives had been commonplace in the history of philosophy since ancient Greece. And Mill’s application of familiar notions of social-construction to gender needed, and still needs, much fuller development; his suggestive remarks did not yet amount to a theory of gender. Long before Butler came on the scene, many feminists contributed to the articulation of such an account.

In work published in the 1970s and 1980s, Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin argued that the conventional understanding of gender roles is a way of ensuring continued male domination in sexual relations, as well as in the public sphere. They took the core of Mill’s insight into a sphere of life concerning which the Victorian philosopher had said little. (Not nothing, though: in 1869 Mill already understood that the failure to criminalize rape within marriage defined woman as a tool for male use and negated her human dignity.) Before Butler, MacKinnon and Dworkin addressed the feminist fantasy of an idyllic natural sexuality of women that only needed to be “liberated”; and argued that social forces go so deep that we should not suppose we have access to such a notion of “nature.” Before Butler, they stressed the ways in which male-dominated power structures marginalize and subordinate not only women, but also people who would like to choose a same-sex relationship. They understood that discrimination against gays and lesbians is a way of enforcing the familiar hierarchically ordered gender roles; and so they saw discrimination against gays and lesbians as a form of sex discrimination.

Before Butler, the psychologist Nancy Chodorow gave a detailed and compelling account of how gender differences replicate themselves across the generations: she argued that the ubiquity of these mechanisms of replication enables us to understand how what is artificial can nonetheless be nearly ubiquitous. Before Butler, the biologist Anne Fausto Sterling, through her painstaking criticism of experimental work allegedly supporting the naturalness of conventional gender distinctions, showed how deeply social power-relations had compromised the objectivity of scientists: Myths of Gender (1985) was an apt title for what she found in the biology of the time. (Other biologists and primatologists also contributed to this enterprise.) Before Butler, the political theorist Susan Moller Okin explored the role of law and political thought in constructing a gendered destiny for women in the family; and this project, too, was pursued further by a number of feminists in law and political philosophy. Before Butler, Gayle Rubin’s important anthropological account of subordination, The Traffic in Women (1975), provided a valuable analysis of the relationship between the social organization of gender and the asymmetries of power.

So what does Butler’s work add to this copious body of writing? Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter contain no detailed argument against biological claims of “natural” difference, no account of mechanisms of gender replication, and no account of the legal shaping of the family; nor do they contain any detailed focus on possibilities for legal change. What, then, does Butler offer that we might not find more fully done in earlier feminist writings? One relatively original claim is that when we recognize the artificiality of gender distinctions, and refrain from thinking of them as expressing an independent natural reality, we will also understand that there is no compelling reason why the gender types should have been two (correlated with the two biological sexes), rather than three or five or indefinitely many. “When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice,” she writes.

From this claim it does not follow, for Butler, that we can freely reinvent the genders as we like: she holds, indeed, that there are severe limits to our freedom. She insists that we should not naively imagine that there is a pristine self that stands behind society, ready to emerge all pure and liberated: “There is no self that is prior to the convergence or who maintains `integrity’ prior to its entrance into this conflicted cultural field. There is only a taking up of the tools where they lie, where the very `taking up’ is enabled by the tool lying there.” Butler does claim, though, that we can create categories that are in some sense new ones, by means of the artful parody of the old ones. Thus her best known idea, her conception of politics as a parodic performance, is born out of the sense of a (strictly limited) freedom that comes from the recognition that one’s ideas of gender have been shaped by forces that are social rather than biological. We are doomed to repetition of the power structures into which we are born, but we can at least make fun of them; and some ways of making fun are subversive assaults on the original norms.

The idea of gender as performance is Butler’s most famous idea, and so it is worth pausing to scrutinize it more closely. She introduced the notion intuitively, in Gender Trouble, without invoking theoretical precedent. Later she denied that she was referring to quasi-theatrical performance, and associated her notion instead with Austin’s account of speech acts in How to Do Things with Words. Austin’s linguistic category of “performatives” is a category of linguistic utterances that function, in and of themselves, as actions rather than as assertions. When (in appropriate social circumstances) I say “I bet ten dollars,” or “I’m sorry,” or “I do” (in a marriage ceremony), or “I name this ship…,” I am not reporting on a bet or an apology or a marriage or a naming ceremony, I am conducting one.

Butler’s analogous claim about gender is not obvious, since the “performances” in question involve gesture, dress, movement, and action, as well as language. Austin’s thesis, which is restricted to a rather technical analysis of a certain class of sentences, is in fact not especially helpful to Butler in developing her ideas. Indeed, though she vehemently repudiates readings of her work that associate her view with theater, thinking about the Living Theater’s subversive work with gender seems to illuminate her ideas far more than thinking about Austin.

Nor is Butler’s treatment of Austin very plausible. She makes the bizarre claim that the fact that the marriage ceremony is one of dozens of examples of performatives in Austin’s text suggests “that the heterosexualization of the social bond is the paradigmatic form for those speech acts which bring about what they name.” Hardly. Marriage is no more paradigmatic for Austin than betting or ship-naming or promising or apologizing. He is interested in a formal feature of certain utterances, and we are given no reason to suppose that their content has any significance for his argument. It is usually a mistake to read earth-shaking significance into a philosopher’s pedestrian choice of examples. Should we say that Aristotle’s use of a low-fat diet to illustrate the practical syllogism suggests that chicken is at the heart of Aristotelian virtue? Or that Rawls’s use of travel plans to illustrate practical reasoning shows that A Theory of Justice aims at giving us all a vacation?

Leaving these oddities to one side, Butler’s point is presumably this: when we act and speak in a gendered way, we are not simply reporting on something that is already fixed in the world, we are actively constituting it, replicating it, and reinforcing it. By behaving as if there were male and female “natures,” we co-create the social fiction that these natures exist. They are never there apart from our deeds; we are always making them be there. At the same time, by carrying out these performances in a slightly different manner, a parodic manner, we can perhaps unmake them just a little.

Thus the one place for agency in a world constrained by hierarchy is in the small opportunities we have to oppose gender roles every time they take shape. When I find myself doing femaleness, I can turn it around, poke fun at it, do it a little bit differently. Such reactive and parodic performances, in Butler’s view, never destabilize the larger system. She doesn’t envisage mass movements of resistance or campaigns for political reform; only personal acts carried out by a small number of knowing actors. Just as actors with a bad script can subvert it by delivering the bad lines oddly, so too with gender: the script remains bad, but the actors have a tiny bit of freedom. Thus we have the basis for what, in Excitable Speech, Butler calls “an ironic hopefulness.”

Up to this point, Butler’s contentions, though relatively familiar, are plausible and even interesting, though one is already unsettled by her narrow vision of the possibilities for change. Yet Butler adds to these plausible claims about gender two other claims that are stronger and more contentious. The first is that there is no agent behind or prior to the social forces that produce the self. If this means only that babies are born into a gendered world that begins to replicate males and females almost immediately, the claim is plausible, but not surprising: experiments have for some time demonstrated that the way babies are held and talked to, the way their emotions are described, are profoundly shaped by the sex the adults in question believe the child to have. (The same baby will be bounced if the adults think it is a boy, cuddled if they think it is a girl; its crying will be labeled as fear if the adults think it is a girl, as anger if they think it is a boy.) Butler shows no interest in these empirical facts, but they do support her contention.

If she means, however, that babies enter the world completely inert, with no tendencies and no abilities that are in some sense prior to their experience in a gendered society, this is far less plausible, and difficult to support empirically. Butler offers no such support, preferring to remain on the high plane of metaphysical abstraction. (Indeed, her recent Freudian work may even repudiate this idea: it suggests, with Freud, that there are at least some presocial impulses and tendencies, although, typically, this line is not clearly developed.) Moreover, such an exaggerated denial of pre-cultural agency takes away some of the resources that Chodorow and others use when they try to account for cultural change in the direction of the better.

Butler does in the end want to say that we have a kind of agency, an ability to undertake change and resistance. But where does this ability come from, if there is no structure in the personality that is not thoroughly power’s creation? It is not impossible for Butler to answer this question, but she certainly has not answered it yet, in a way that would convince those who believe that human beings have at least some pre-cultural desires--for food, for comfort, for cognitive mastery, for survival--and that this structure in the personality is crucial in the explanation of our development as moral and political agents. One would like to see her engage with the strongest forms of such a view, and to say, clearly and without jargon, exactly why and where she rejects them. One would also like to hear her speak about real infants, who do appear to manifest a structure of striving that influences from the start their reception of cultural forms.

Butler’s second strong claim is that the body itself, and especially the distinction between the two sexes, is also a social construction. She means not only that the body is shaped in many ways by social norms of how men and women should be; she means also that the fact that a binary division of sexes is taken as fundamental, as a key to arranging society, is itself a social idea that is not given in bodily reality. What exactly does this claim mean, and how plausible is it?

Butler’s brief exploration of Foucault on hermaphrodites does show us society’s anxious insistence to classify every human being in one box or another, whether or not the individual fits a box; but of course it does not show that there are many such indeterminate cases. She is right to insist that we might have made many different classifications of body types, not necessarily focusing on the binary division as the most salient; and she is also right to insist that, to a large extent, claims of bodily sex difference allegedly based upon scientific research have been projections of cultural prejudice--though Butler offers nothing here that is nearly as compelling as Fausto Sterling’s painstaking biological analysis.

And yet it is much too simple to say that power is all that the body is. We might have had the bodies of birds or dinosaurs or lions, but we do not; and this reality shapes our choices. Culture can shape and reshape some aspects of our bodily existence, but it does not shape all the aspects of it. “In the man burdened by hunger and thirst,” as Sextus Empiricus observed long ago, “it is impossible to produce by argument the conviction that he is not so burdened.” This is an important fact also for feminism, since women’s nutritional needs (and their special needs when pregnant or lactating) are an important feminist topic. Even where sex difference is concerned, it is surely too simple to write it all off as culture; nor should feminists be eager to make such a sweeping gesture. Women who run or play basketball, for example, were right to welcome the demolition of myths about women’s athletic performance that were the product of male-dominated assumptions; but they were also right to demand the specialized research on women’s bodies that has fostered a better understanding of women’s training needs and women’s injuries. In short: what feminism needs, and sometimes gets, is a subtle study of the interplay of bodily difference and cultural construction. And Butler’s abstract pronouncements, floating high above all matter, give us none of what we need.

IV.

Suppose we grant Butler her most interesting claims up to this point: that the social structure of gender is ubiquitous, but we can resist it by subversive and parodic acts. Two significant questions remain. What should be resisted, and on what basis? What would the acts of resistance be like, and what would we expect them to accomplish?

Butler uses several words for what she takes to be bad and therefore worthy of resistance: the “repressive,” the “subordinating,” the “oppressive.” But she provides no empirical discussion of resistance of the sort that we find, say, in Barry Adam’s fascinating sociological study The Survival of Domination (1978), which studies the subordination of blacks, Jews, women, and gays and lesbians, and their ways of wrestling with the forms of social power that have oppressed them. Nor does Butler provide any account of the concepts of resistance and oppression that would help us, were we really in doubt about what we ought to be resisting.

Butler departs in this regard from earlier social-constructionist feminists, all of whom used ideas such as non-hierarchy, equality, dignity, autonomy, and treating as an end rather than a means, to indicate a direction for actual politics. Still less is she willing to elaborate any positive normative notion. Indeed, it is clear that Butler, like Foucault, is adamantly opposed to normative notions such as human dignity, or treating humanity as an end, on the grounds that they are inherently dictatorial. In her view, we ought to wait to see what the political struggle itself throws up, rather than prescribe in advance to its participants. Universal normative notions, she says, “colonize under the sign of the same.”

This idea of waiting to see what we get--in a word, this moral passivity--seems plausible in Butler because she tacitly assumes an audience of like-minded readers who agree (sort of) about what the bad things are--discrimination against gays and lesbians, the unequal and hierarchical treatment of women--and who even agree (sort of) about why they are bad (they subordinate some people to others, they deny people freedoms that they ought to have). But take that assumption away, and the absence of a normative dimension becomes a severe problem.

Try teaching Foucault at a contemporary law school, as I have, and you will quickly find that subversion takes many forms, not all of them congenial to Butler and her allies. As a perceptive libertarian student said to me, Why can’t I use these ideas to resist the tax structure, or the antidiscrimination laws, or perhaps even to join the militias? Others, less fond of liberty, might engage in the subversive performances of making fun of feminist remarks in class, or ripping down the posters of the lesbian and gay law students’ association. These things happen. They are parodic and subversive. Why, then, aren’t they daring and good?

Well, there are good answers to those questions, but you won’t find them in Foucault, or in Butler. Answering them requires discussing which liberties and opportunities human beings ought to have, and what it is for social institutions to treat human beings as ends rather than as means--in short, a normative theory of social justice and human dignity. It is one thing to say that we should be humble about our universal norms, and willing to learn from the experience of oppressed people. It is quite another thing to say that we don’t need any norms at all. Foucault, unlike Butler, at least showed signs in his late work of grappling with this problem; and all his writing is animated by a fierce sense of the texture of social oppression and the harm that it does.

Come to think of it, justice, understood as a personal virtue, has exactly the structure of gender in the Butlerian analysis: it is not innate or “natural,” it is produced by repeated performances (or as Aristotle said, we learn it by doing it), it shapes our inclinations and forces the repression of some of them. These ritual performances, and their associated repressions, are enforced by arrangements of social power, as children who won’t share on the playground quickly discover. Moreover, the parodic subversion of justice is ubiquitous in politics, as in personal life. But there is an important difference. Generally we dislike these subversive performances, and we think that young people should be strongly discouraged from seeing norms of justice in such a cynical light. Butler cannot explain in any purely structural or procedural way why the subversion of gender norms is a social good while the subversion of justice norms is a social bad. Foucault, we should remember, cheered for the Ayatollah, and why not? That, too, was resistance, and there was indeed nothing in the text to tell us that that struggle was less worthy than a struggle for civil rights and civil liberties.

There is a void, then, at the heart of Butler’s notion of politics. This void can look liberating, because the reader fills it implicitly with a normative theory of human equality or dignity. But let there be no mistake: for Butler, as for Foucault, subversion is subversion, and it can in principle go in any direction. Indeed, Butler’s naively empty politics is especially dangerous for the very causes she holds dear. For every friend of Butler, eager to engage in subversive performances that proclaim the repressiveness of heterosexual gender norms, there are dozens who would like to engage in subversive performances that flout the norms of tax compliance, of non-discrimination, of decent treatment of one’s fellow students. To such people we should say, you cannot simply resist as you please, for there are norms of fairness, decency, and dignity that entail that this is bad behavior. But then we have to articulate those norms--and this Butler refuses to do.

V.

What precisely does Butler offer when she counsels subversion? She tells us to engage in parodic performances, but she warns us that the dream of escaping altogether from the oppressive structures is just a dream: it is within the oppressive structures that we must find little spaces for resistance, and this resistance cannot hope to change the overall situation. And here lies a dangerous quietism.

If Butler means only to warn us against the dangers of fantasizing an idyllic world in which sex raises no serious problems, she is wise to do so. Yet frequently she goes much further. She suggests that the institutional structures that ensure the marginalization of lesbians and gay men in our society, and the continued inequality of women, will never be changed in a deep way; and so our best hope is to thumb our noses at them, and to find pockets of personal freedom within them. “Called by an injurious name, I come into social being, and because I have a certain inevitable attachment to my existence, because a certain narcissism takes hold of any term that confers existence, I am led to embrace the terms that injure me because they constitute me socially.” In other words: I cannot escape the humiliating structures without ceasing to be, so the best I can do is mock, and use the language of subordination stingingly. In Butler, resistance is always imagined as personal, more or less private, involving no unironic, organized public action for legal or institutional change.

Isn’t this like saying to a slave that the institution of slavery will never change, but you can find ways of mocking it and subverting it, finding your personal freedom within those acts of carefully limited defiance? Yet it is a fact that the institution of slavery can be changed, and was changed--but not by people who took a Butler-like view of the possibilities. It was changed because people did not rest content with parodic performance: they demanded, and to some extent they got, social upheaval. It is also a fact that the institutional structures that shape women’s lives have changed. The law of rape, still defective, has at least improved; the law of sexual harassment exists, where it did not exist before; marriage is no longer regarded as giving men monarchical control over women’s bodies. These things were changed by feminists who would not take parodic performance as their answer, who thought that power, where bad, should, and would, yield before justice.

Butler not only eschews such a hope, she takes pleasure in its impossibility. She finds it exciting to contemplate the alleged immovability of power, and to envisage the ritual subversions of the slave who is convinced that she must remain such. She tells us--this is the central thesis of The Psychic Life of Power--that we all eroticize the power structures that oppress us, and can thus find sexual pleasure only within their confines. It seems to be for that reason that she prefers the sexy acts of parodic subversion to any lasting material or institutional change. Real change would so uproot our psyches that it would make sexual satisfaction impossible. Our libidos are the creation of the bad enslaving forces, and thus necessarily sadomasochistic in structure.

Well, parodic performance is not so bad when you are a powerful tenured academic in a liberal university. But here is where Butler’s focus on the symbolic, her proud neglect of the material side of life, becomes a fatal blindness. For women who are hungry, illiterate, disenfranchised, beaten, raped, it is not sexy or liberating to reenact, however parodically, the conditions of hunger, illiteracy, disenfranchisement, beating, and rape. Such women prefer food, schools, votes, and the integrity of their bodies. I see no reason to believe that they long sadomasochistically for a return to the bad state. If some individuals cannot live without the sexiness of domination, that seems sad, but it is not really our business. But when a major theorist tells women in desperate conditions that life offers them only bondage, she purveys a cruel lie, and a lie that flatters evil by giving it much more power than it actually has.

Excitable Speech, Butler’s most recent book, which provides her analysis of legal controversies involving pornography and hate speech, shows us exactly how far her quietism extends. For she is now willing to say that even where legal change is possible, even where it has already happened, we should wish it away, so as to preserve the space within which the oppressed may enact their sadomasochistic rituals of parody.

As a work on the law of free speech, Excitable Speech is an unconscionably bad book. Butler shows no awareness of the major theoretical accounts of the First Amendment, and no awareness of the wide range of cases such a theory will need to take into consideration. She makes absurd legal claims: for example, she says that the only type of speech that has been held to be unprotected is speech that has been previously defined as conduct rather than speech. (In fact, there are many types of speech, from false or misleading advertising to libelous statements to obscenity as currently defined, which have never been claimed to be action rather than speech, and which are nonetheless denied First Amendment protection.) Butler even claims, mistakenly, that obscenity has been judged to be the equivalent of “fighting words.” It is not that Butler has an argument to back up her novel readings of the wide range of cases of unprotected speech that an account of the First Amendment would need to cover. She just has not noticed that there is this wide range of cases, or that her view is not a widely accepted legal view. Nobody interested in law can take her argument seriously.

But let us extract from Butler’s thin discussion of hate speech and pornography the core of her position. It is this: legal prohibitions of hate speech and pornography are problematic (though in the end she does not clearly oppose them) because they close the space within which the parties injured by that speech can perform their resistance. By this Butler appears to mean that if the offense is dealt with through the legal system, there will be fewer occasions for informal protest; and also, perhaps, that if the offense becomes rarer because of its illegality we will have fewer opportunities to protest its presence.

Well, yes. Law does close those spaces. Hate speech and pornography are extremely complicated subjects on which feminists may reasonably differ. (Still, one should state the contending views precisely: Butler’s account of MacKinnon is less than careful, stating that MacKinnon supports “ordinances against pornography” and suggesting that, despite MacKinnon’s explicit denial, they involve a form of censorship. Nowhere does Butler mention that what MacKinnon actually supports is a civil damage action in which particular women harmed through pornography can sue its makers and its distributors.)

But Butler’s argument has implications well beyond the cases of hate speech and pornography. It would appear to support not just quietism in these areas, but a much more general legal quietism--or, indeed, a radical libertarianism. It goes like this: let us do away with everything from building codes to non-discrimination laws to rape laws, because they close the space within which the injured tenants, the victims of discrimination, the raped women, can perform their resistance. Now, this is not the same argument radical libertarians use to oppose building codes and anti-discrimination laws; even they draw the line at rape. But the conclusions converge.

If Butler should reply that her argument pertains only to speech (and there is no reason given in the text for such a limitation, given the assimilation of harmful speech to conduct), then we can reply in the domain of speech. Let us get rid of laws against false advertising and unlicensed medical advice, for they close the space within which poisoned consumers and mutilated patients can perform their resistance! Again, if Butler does not approve of these extensions, she needs to make an argument that divides her cases from these cases, and it is not clear that her position permits her to make such a distinction.

For Butler, the act of subversion is so riveting, so sexy, that it is a bad dream to think that the world will actually get better. What a bore equality is! No bondage, no delight. In this way, her pessimistic erotic anthropology offers support to an amoral anarchist politics.

VI.

When we consider the quietism inherent in Butler’s writing, we have some keys to understanding Butler’s influential fascination with drag and cross-dressing as paradigms of feminist resistance. Butler’s followers understand her account of drag to imply that such performances are ways for women to be daring and subversive. I am unaware of any attempt by Butler to repudiate such readings.

But what is going on here? The woman dressed mannishly is hardly a new figure. Indeed, even when she was relatively new, in the nineteenth century, she was in another way quite old, for she simply replicated in the lesbian world the existing stereotypes and hierarchies of male-female society. What, we may well ask, is parodic subversion in this area, and what a kind of prosperous middle-class acceptance? Isn’t hierarchy in drag still hierarchy? And is it really true (as The Psychic Life of Power would seem to conclude) that domination and subordination are the roles that women must play in every sphere, and if not subordination, then mannish domination?

In short, cross-dressing for women is a tired old script--as Butler herself informs us. Yet she would have us see the script as subverted, made new, by the cross-dresser’s knowing symbolic sartorial gestures; but again we must wonder about the newness, and even the subversiveness. Consider Andrea Dworkin’s parody (in her novel Mercy) of a Butlerish parodic feminist, who announces from her posture of secure academic comfort:

The notion that bad things happen is both propagandistic and inadequate…. To understand a woman’s life requires that we affirm the hidden or obscure dimensions of pleasure, often in pain, and choice, often under duress. One must develop an eye for secret signs--the clothes that are more than clothes or decoration in the contemporary dialogue, for instance, or the rebellion hidden behind apparent conformity. There is no victim. There is perhaps an insufficiency of signs, an obdurate appearance of conformity that simply masks the deeper level on which choice occurs.

In prose quite unlike Butler’s, this passage captures the ambivalence of the implied author of some of Butler’s writings, who delights in her violative practice while turning her theoretical eye resolutely away from the material suffering of women who are hungry, illiterate, violated, beaten. There is no victim. There is only an insufficiency of signs.

Butler suggests to her readers that this sly send-up of the status quo is the only script for resistance that life offers. Well, no. Besides offering many other ways to be human in one’s personal life, beyond traditional norms of domination and subservience, life also offers many scripts for resistance that do not focus narcissistically on personal self-presentation. Such scripts involve feminists (and others, of course) in building laws and institutions, without much concern for how a woman displays her own body and its gendered nature: in short, they involve working for others who are suffering.

The great tragedy in the new feminist theory in America is the loss of a sense of public commitment. In this sense, Butler’s self-involved feminism is extremely American, and it is not surprising that it has caught on here, where successful middle-class people prefer to focus on cultivating the self rather than thinking in a way that helps the material condition of others. Even in America, however, it is possible for theorists to be dedicated to the public good and to achieve something through that effort.

Many feminists in America are still theorizing in a way that supports material change and responds to the situation of the most oppressed. Increasingly, however, the academic and cultural trend is toward the pessimistic flirtatiousness represented by the theorizing of Butler and her followers. Butlerian feminism is in many ways easier than the old feminism. It tells scores of talented young women that they need not work on changing the law, or feeding the hungry, or assailing power through theory harnessed to material politics. They can do politics in safety of their campuses, remaining on the symbolic level, making subversive gestures at power through speech and gesture. This, the theory says, is pretty much all that is available to us anyway, by way of political action, and isn’t it exciting and sexy?

In its small way, of course, this is a hopeful politics. It instructs people that they can, right now, without compromising their security, do something bold. But the boldness is entirely gestural, and insofar as Butler’s ideal suggests that these symbolic gestures really are political change, it offers only a false hope. Hungry women are not fed by this, battered women are not sheltered by it, raped women do not find justice in it, gays and lesbians do not achieve legal protections through it.

Finally there is despair at the heart of the cheerful Butlerian enterprise. The big hope, the hope for a world of real justice, where laws and institutions protect the equality and the dignity of all citizens, has been banished, even perhaps mocked as sexually tedious. Judith Butler’s hip quietism is a comprehensible response to the difficulty of realizing justice in America. But it is a bad response. It collaborates with evil. Feminism demands more and women deserve better.

[the-courage-to-heal]

10 Common Reactions to Trauma:

This form describes some of the common reactions that people have after a trauma. Because everyone responds differently to traumatic events, you may have some of these reactions more than others, and some you may not have at all. Remember that many changes after a trauma are normal. In fact, most people who directly experience a traumatic event have severe problems in the immediate aftermath. Many people then feel much better within 3 months after the event, but others recover more slowly, and some continue to experience debilitating symptoms. The first step toward recovery is becoming more aware of the changes that you have undergone since the trauma. Some of the most common problems after a trauma include the following:

1. Anxiety and fear. Anxiety is a common and natural response to a dangerous situation. For many people it lasts long after the trauma ended. This happens when views of the world and a sense of safety have changed. You may become anxious when you remember the trauma. But sometimes anxiety may come from out of the blue. Triggers or cues that can cause anxiety may include places, times of day, certain smells or noises, or any situation that reminds you of the trauma. As you begin to pay more attention to the times when you feel anxious, you can discover the triggers for your anxiety. In this way, you may learn that some of the out-of-the-blue anxiety is really triggered by things that remind you of your trauma.

2. Re-experiencing of the trauma. People often “re-experience” the traumatic event. For example, you may have unwanted thoughts of the trauma and find yourself unable to get rid of them. Some people have flashbacks, or very vivid images, which can feel as if the trauma is occurring again. Nightmares are also common. These symptoms occur because a traumatic experience is so shocking and so different from everyday experiences that you can’t fit it into what you know about the world. So in order to understand what happened, your mind keeps bringing the memory back, as if to better digest it and fit it in with your experiences.

3. Increased vigilance is also a common response to trauma. This includes feeling “on guard,” jumpy, jittery, shaky, nervous, on edge, being easily startled, and having trouble concentrating or sleeping. Continuous vigilance can lead to impatience and irritability, especially if you’re not getting enough sleep. This reaction is due to the freeze (e.g., deer in the headlights), fight or flee response in your body, and is the way we protect ourselves against danger. Animals also have the freeze, fight or flee response when faced with danger. When we protect ourselves from real danger by freezing, fighting or fleeing, we need a lot more energy than usual, so our bodies pump out extra adrenaline to help us get the extra energy we need to survive.

People who have experienced a traumatic event may see the world as filled with danger, so their bodies are on constant alert, always ready to respond immediately to any attack. The problem is that increased vigilance is useful in truly dangerous situations, such as if you are in a war zone or you are being robbed. But increased vigilance becomes harmful, when it continues for a long time even in safe situations.

4. Avoidance is a common way of trying to manage PTSD symptoms. The most common is avoiding situations that remind you of the trauma, such as the place where it happened. Often, situations that are less directly related to the trauma are also avoided, such as going out in the evening if the trauma occurred at night, or going to crowded areas such as the grocery store, shopping mall or movie theatre.

Another common avoidance tactic is to try to push away painful thoughts and feelings. This can lead to feelings of numbness or emptiness, where you find it difficult to feel any emotions, even positive ones. Sometimes the painful thoughts or feelings may be so intense that your mind just blocks them out altogether, and you may not remember parts of the trauma.

5. Many people who have experienced a traumatic event feel angry. If you are not used to feeling angry, this may seem scary as well. It may be especially confusing to feel angry at those who are closest to you. People sometimes turn to substances to try and reduce these feelings of anger.

6. Trauma may lead to feelings of guilt and shame. Many people blame themselves for things they did or didn’t do to survive. For example, some assault survivors believe that they should have fought off an assailant, and blame themselves for the attack. Others who may have survived an event in which others perished feel that they should have been the one to die, or that they should have been able to somehow prevent the other person from dying. Sometimes, other people may blame you for the trauma.

Feeling guilty about the trauma means that you are taking responsibility for what occurred. While doing so may make you feel somewhat more in control, it is usually one-sided, inaccurate and can lead to feelings of depression.

7. Grief and depression are also common reactions to trauma. This can include feeling down, sad, or hopeless. You may cry more often. You may lose interest in people and activities that you used to enjoy. You may stay home and isolate yourself from friends. You may also feel that plans you had for the future don’t seem to matter anymore, or that life isn’t worth living. These feelings can lead to thoughts of wishing you were dead, or doing something to try to hurt or kill yourself. Because the trauma has changed so much of how you see the world and yourself, it makes sense to feel sad and to grieve for what you lost because of the traumatic experience. If you have these feelings or thoughts, it is very important that you talk to your (p. 140) therapist. Your therapist is trained in how to handle these thoughts and experiences and will help you get through this.

8. Self-image and views of the world often become more negative after a trauma. You may tell yourself, “If I hadn’t been so weak this wouldn’t have happened to me.” Many people see themselves in a more negative light in general after the trauma (“I am a bad person and I deserved this”).

It is also very common to see others more negatively, and to feel that you cannot trust anyone. If you used to think about the world as a safe place, the trauma may suddenly make you think that the world is very dangerous. If you had previous bad experiences, the trauma may convince you that the world is indeed dangerous and others are not to be trusted. These negative thoughts often make people feel they have been changed completely by the trauma. Relationships with others can become tense, and intimacy becomes more difficult as your trust decreases.

9. Sexual relationships may also suffer after a traumatic experience. Many people find it difficult to feel intimate or to have sexual relationships again. This is especially true for those who have been sexually assaulted, since in addition to the lack of trust, sex itself can be a reminder of the assault.

10. Many people increase their use of alcohol or other substances after a trauma. Often, they do this in an attempt to “self-medicate” or to block out painful memories, thoughts, or feelings related to the trauma. People with PTSD may have trouble sleeping or may have nightmares, and they may use alcohol or drugs to try to improve sleep or not remember their dreams. While it may seem to help in the short term, chronic use of alcohol or drugs will slow down (or prevent) your recovery from PTSD and will cause problems of its own. Fortunately, there are treatments, such as this one, that can help you recover from PTSD and experience long-term relief from symptoms without the use of alcohol or drugs.

Many of the reactions to trauma are connected to one another. For example, a flashback may make you feel out of control, and will therefore produce anxiety and fear, which may then result in your using alcohol or drugs to try to sleep at night. Many people think that their reactions to the trauma mean that they are “going crazy” or “losing it.” These thoughts can make them even more anxious. As you become aware of the changes you have gone through since the trauma, and as you process these experiences during treatment, the symptoms will become less distressing and you will regain control of your life.

source

[ryuichirou]

I saw one very stupid post on my dash about how snk is OBVIOUSLY nazi propaganda and trying to convert all of us into imperialists and white supremacists. tbh it’s not the first time I’ve seen that kind of stuff and probably won't be the last, but for some reason this time it gave me a lot of anxiety (I got wordy, I'mma need to send another ask, sorry)

(part 2) It's been more than half and hour and I still feel this awful sensation in my chest. It's just overall pretty fucked how to have something you hold dear being misinterpreted in the worst way possible, and I was just wondering what are your thoughts on this situation or how you deal with people claiming all sorts of awful shit.

(part 3) I imagine that as an artist some people probably direct their issues with snk towards you, 'cause I don't even post that much fanart and I've gotten anons "trying to educate me" on why this series is so wrong, after posting drawings. Of course, you don't have to reply, maybe the topic makes you anxious too and I don't want to bother you, so sorry for the depressing topic (｡•́︿•̀｡)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Tiiish, I want to hug you, I’m really sorry that this happened to you. I hope you’re feeling a little bit better now.

Like we already mentioned a while ago, when we were talking about that darn article, after we read through it and did a little fact checking (and I mean it when I say a little, because there weren’t many facts to check), we stopped caring about it. It’s not research at all, just a manipulatively written speculation on Yam’s motives and worldview, but sadly, people easily believe these accusations because they hate SnK and want to find a valid reason to hate it and shit on its fanbase. Because “I hate it because it’s nazi propaganda” sounds much cooler than “I hate it because it’s popular”, doesn’t it?

It’s easier to ignore the article itself though, and it’s much harder not to think about tumblr posts or those Twitter threads that get very popular (although there are a lot of bots on twitter, trust me…), and it’s especially difficult to ignore it when it’s specifically directed at you. But the only thing that these people deserve is a good ol’ block and (if they’re getting too offensive and abusive) a report for harassment. The thing is, their opinion doesn’t matter: it won’t change SnK’s story, it won’t affect its success and popularity, it doesn’t affect anything other than our mood (temporarily lol). Because they aren’t critics who actually give a flying fuck about the subject matter, they’re just random assholes with a hateboner for SnK, who sit in their echochamber and discuss the same shit over and over again. And if they’re “fans” of the SnK, it’s just them “consuming it critically” 🙄 such a convenient phrase and so easy to abuse.

If we think about these accusations again… they’re so damn nonsensical, it’s almost amazing. I’m not going to reread it or to make a proper counterpoint article out of this ask, so this is just based on how we remember these accusations.

Like, what part of SnK approves and pushes the idea of imperialism in any way? When the entire idea of the story is that war is bad? When people like Onyankopon, whose homeland was invaded by Marley, exist? And it’s never portrayed as a good thing? Having only one country dominating the world’s situation is literally the main reason why everyone’s suffering??

And come to think of it, Isayama is one of the few manga artists to kind of sort of openly critique Japan: he literally drew Kiyomi losing her cool and drooling while thinking about all the profit and wealth she would get from the deal with Paradis. Why do people never talk about that? What is it, if not a critique of greedy and two-faced nature of people from Azumabito clan, who are heavily implied to represent Japan? I don’t read a lot of manga in general, but do you know how many mangakas I’ve seen who directly talked shit about Japan while being Japanese? Two. Excluding Isayama.

Isayama is clearly invested in the Western culture and he understands the World’s History. He understands that political relationships are complex and that there are no “bad” or “good” countries. I don’t want to make assumptions about how much perspective of the world’s relationships the average person from Japan has, but I still feel like Yams has a pretty good understanding of it. He did his research for the subject matter, and while it’s obviously not perfect, it’s clearly there.

These people also claim that SnK is anti-Korean and anti-Semitic, but if Hetalia had taught me anything, it is that if the story has or used to have any anti-Korean undertones, the Korean readers wouldn’t want to have anything to do with it. They would be the first people to ditch the manga, they would be the first people to critique SnK, and rightfully so. They burnt Uniqlo clothes, their overall domestic policy is pretty anti-Japanese, so there’re literally zero reasons for them not to destroy SnK if they see it as anti-Korean. But the size of the Korean SnK fandom suggests otherwise, doesn’t it.

And the “big noses = Jewish caricature” argument, seriously? How anti-Semitic can you get? Who the fuck looks at people and goes “oh, those have big noses, bet they’re caricature of Jews”?? Sorry I’m getting heated lol The argument about “Asian artists portray Westerners with prominent noses because that’s what we look like to them” has been done a lot of times, I’m not going to go over than again.

And god forbid Isayama to use Germany and Europe to draw a story where his characters are (approximately) Germans and Europeans! Let’s go fetch our pitchforks to punish Isayama for using their aesthetic to make his story look more believable and authentic, right? “Oh, those areas where they hold Eldians resemble places from real life”, like no shit???? Ofc they would??? That’s what references for making the story more grounded are used for??? If I were to write a story about a fictional place based on a real one that I don’t live in, I’d use some visual references to help me to make it more believable??? Why do I even need to explain that?

In my previous post I talked about the armbands and ghetto and stuff, but I’ll reiterate: even if there are thematic similarities, it doesn’t mean that the story mirrors our history. And it doesn’t mean that there is an analogy, since Eldian’s situation is quiiiite different than what Jewish people had to go through. It’s just thematic similarities. And it still doesn’t plant any specific idea in the reader’s head, other than “having people shoved into ghettos with 0 civil rights is a horrible thing”, and I can’t comprehend what’s anti-Semitic or imperialistic about it. Also I’m sorry, but nazis are not the only people who genocided a bunch of people, breaking news. Nor did they invent armbands. Same goes for Japan in WWII.

And now for my favourite argument: Erwin is nazi because his name is Erwin and he was born on the same day than some nazi guy died… I won’t even talk about why this idea is hilariously stupid, I just want to appreciate the level of nitpicking that’s going on here.

So… yeah. People who have nothing else to do but to complain about the show they hate don’t matter. And people who consider themselves a part of the SnK fandom and still say this bs (yep, there are people who do that) are huge hypocrites. The heck are they doing in this fandom then?? Of course, any story is up to interpretation, but this is so backwards?

Sorry for rambling so much… anyways. We’re happy enough not to encounter any hate related to this topic, but we think it’s because we ship Ereri and people already hate us for that, so the majority of shit we get is related to that, I guess we’re a lost cause for them. We’ll see if anything happens after this post though.

But once again, I’m very sorry that you had to go through this. Please remember that this isn’t personal at all, and people who harass strangers on the internet just want to flex their high moral ground while acting like complete assholes. You don’t have to explain anything to them, you don’t have to talk to them, you don’t have to listen to them or give them any attention. I hope you’ll never stumble upon anything like this; but if you ever do, please block them, don’t even bother reading their attempts at “educate” you. Isn’t worth it.

Please have a good day, Tish. And everyone who’s reading this reply.

[filaantrocrowdfunding]

Helping The Elder Citizens. You Can Make Their Golden Years Brighter!

As per World Health Organization reports, India has 104 million people aged 60 or over, representing 8.6% of the country's total population where females outnumber males (Census 2011). 

Loneliness, depression, financial insecurity, narrowed social life, and health problems; ageing comes with several life problems. Right from childhood to adulthood, the time they become parents to their senior years, older folks' life experiences make them wise and learned. 

However, when they become older, elder individuals encounter situations where they have little choice but to deal with what life throws at them. Elders at home are not respected or their wise advice is misjudged as interfering. They are asked to leave the house while on the other hand, a few of the older ones do not have family or children to take care of them in sickness. 

Challenges Faced By The Elderly In India

India lacks the fundamental resources and knowledge necessary to promote the health and welfare of our elders. 

Physical infrastructure is a major barrier to providing elderly people with the comfort they need. When on the streets, wheelchair users have no designated path to follow.

The nation is ill-equipped to handle the rising prevalence of dementia, Alzheimer's disease, and depression among the elderly. Problems with mental health are rarely discussed.

The scarcity of public and private financial support for those older people who do not have a family is another major challenge they face.

Contrary to other developed nations, there is a lack of emergency response infrastructure for senior citizens, including access to public ambulances for hospitalisation. How to go to an emergency facility, if necessary, is one of the top concerns for most elderly people living alone, especially at night.

These are a few problems out of many that the older individuals in India face on a daily basis. Some of them are sick, lonely, unattended, and abandoned too. 

Do You Feel Bad About Them? Want To Do Something For Them?

Swanthanam Old Age Home in Pathanamthitta, Kerala, looks after 63 elderly women who don't have a home, family, or place to stay. The ages of these participants range from 45 to 98. The old age home relies on donations from numerous people, which makes management challenging for the proprietors.

Members of this old age home were either forced to leave their own houses or were left there because they had no one to look after. They only have this old age home that they can call their own. Out of the total, 23 of its members are currently bedridden because of serious illnesses. Since they are unable to move on their own, the staff must feed and clean them. 

Since they are unable to help themselves, these members must wear adult diapers all day. 70 adult diapers are needed each day for these 23 people who are bedridden. It is difficult for the proprietors to manage all the costs of upkeep, medications, staff salaries, and other expenses because the old age home runs solely on contributions.

They urgently require money to cover the expense of adult diapers, which is:

They require 26,000 adult diapers each year, which may rise in the future given the current daily requirement. This will cost Rs. 7,20,000/- (Rupees Seven Lakhs Twenty Thousand Only) per year based on wholesale costs.

The caretaker at the old age home has initiated a fundraising campaign on Filaantro. The sum of money required to afford the required number of adult diapers every day is huge and they need your help with it. While stating the situation at the old age home the caretaker said:

“I am here all the time looking after the needs and requirements of the senior citizens. There are times when I cannot even look at the mental and physical state they are in. They break down so many times because of the void that they have no family. We are their only family and we have to take care of them in their declining years. I need your support so that my members can spend the final years of their life in comfort. Please help!”

With your generous donations, senior citizens at the Swanthanam Old Age Home will have a better life spending their lonely, golden years. Together we need to show them that they are not alone; we care for them like a family and we are here for them.

Show your love and support for the Swanthanam Old Age Home at:

[welllpthisishappening]

Where the Love Light Gleams

Killian was going to kill his brother. 

Which wasn’t very festive, but neither was being away from his girlfriend on Christmas Eve and this was all Liam’s fault. Or so he would claim. While rationalizing his current tendency to wallow, and stare at his phone and he’d spent far too much time on his phone that night. 

Whatever, it was Christmas Eve. That was definitely a reasonable excuse. 

---

Rating: Teen, with banter and friendship and kissing Word Count: 5.1 K AN: It’s me! Someone who can’t seem to write an MC to save her present life, but loves few things more than Christmas-type fluff and is therefore filling Christmas-type prompts again. Today’s comes from @shireness-says​​ who is always wonderful about replying to these sort of things and requested: 

"you had a business trip and i missed you so much that i kind of tore up the house in your absence like a dog with separation anxiety… sorry?" and “we’ve become the clingy newlyweds you always complained about. "

Both of which I almost legitimately filled. Just kind of—twisted. As is tradition. If you are so inclined to send a prompt from this very long list, you can pick one here, and I’ll do my best to write it before Christmas. 

This one is also on Ao3 if that’s your jam, where I’ll be posting all of ‘em. 

---

“Are you moping? It kind of looks like you’re moping.”

“Wow, such unparalleled observational skills. You should become a private investigator.”

Sticking her tongue out, Ariel made some sort of objection-type noise in the back of her throat, which probably would have made Killian smile in any other situation. On any other day. A day that wasn’t Christmas Eve. 

When he was absolutely, positively moping. 

It was a miracle he hadn’t frozen like this. That would have done irreparable damage to his spine, he was sure. 

He wasn’t really sitting up very straight. 

“There can’t possibly still be private investigators in the world,” Ariel challenged, brushing a wayward strand of hair away from her face and it was far too windy on the docks. If Killian didn’t get off the docks soon, he was going to scream. 

Or mope for the rest of the holiday season. At least until the New Year. That seemed reasonable, honestly. 

He was going to strangle Liam. 

This was all his fault. 

“You’re kidding me, right? What—what kind of world do you think we’re living in?” Ariel shrugged. “One that’s progressed past the need for private investigators, obviously. And I object to the notion that I would require any sort of PI-type skills to know that you’re being an absolute and complete, although also kind of understandable, idiot.” 

“Those words don’t go together.” “What do people hire private investigators for, anyway?” “Loads of stuff.” “Give me one example.” He huffed, irritation rattling around his skull and mixing in with a begrudging appreciation because he knew Ariel felt bad and maybe he’d kick Liam too. “Missing kids.” “Yeesh, that’s awfully negative.” “What was that about accusing me of moping before? I’m playing to those accusations.” “Ok, but we already decided they were observations, so you don’t get to rename them now that you’re feeling particularly jerk-like.” “I’m here, aren’t I? Makes it seem less jerk-like.”

Another shrug. And a specific quirk of her lips that Killian was far too well-acquainted with. The muscles in his cheeks were almost starting to ache. 

Presumably from holding them in this position for so long. 

He was absolutely moping. 

But he’d already been in Boston two days longer than he planned on, and none of this was really going according to plan. He’d checked his phone no less than forty-seven times in the last forty-five minutes. He hated that. Staring at that screen made him feel like a clingy freak, who couldn’t go more than a few minutes without talking to his girlfriend, and Killian had complained about those people enough times that his current tendency to do it made him despise himself just a bit. 

And yet he couldn’t stop. 

His thumbs flew across the keys, sending complaints and updates and smiling in spite of his own situation. 

Like a psychopath. One who was quite obviously frustrated. 

With several thousand things, it seemed — the most pressing of which was his distinct lack of festive nature, caused almost entirely by the issues with the expansion in Boston and adding another ship in Boston was supposed to be easy. 

Until Eric got the flu, and it was understandably difficult to captain a sightseeing holiday cruise when you couldn’t actually stand up for more than two minutes at a time, and Killian couldn’t say no to his brother when they both had so much money tied up in this, and if Liam was going to fly in to make sure everything stayed the metaphorical course, then the least Killian could do was drive in from New York. 

Or so Liam had told him. In no uncertain terms. 

Except Liam had also brought Belle with him and that somehow seemed like cheating, and Killian should have asked Emma to come. 

She had to work. He’d missed Mary Margaret and David’s Christmas Eve party. 

Which normally wouldn’t have felt like the end of the world, partially because Mary Margaret’s fruitcake was notoriously awful, but this year it made Killian’s heart feel like it was fragmenting in his chest and Emma’s photos had gotten progressively more and more blurry as the night went on. Mary Margaret also notoriously bought a questionable number of Prosecco bottles for the Christmas Eve party. 

“You are,” Ariel agreed, a string of words that caught Killian off guard when he was so deep in his own wallowing. “Which is super nice, but—” “—How can there be a but in this situation?” “There are several, actually, except the biggest one is how three different people on tonight’s cruise wanted to know why the first mate was so obviously distracted.” “They called me first mate?” “People think it’s funny to use nautical terms in real life.”

Slumping forward did not do anything to help the state of Killian’s spine, only managed to make sure his hair fluttered in front of his eyes when a salt-tinged breeze blew off the Harbor and he briefly wondered how dramatic he could get. He needed to exhale some more. 

He needed to go home. “Anyway,” Ariel continued, “they wanted to know why the first mate was on his phone all the time, and if the first mate was available and—” “—I’m sorry, what?”

“You have a face, you know that right?” “Now you’re just saying words.”

If she kept sticking her tongue out at its current rate, it was going to get frost-bitten. “These are compliments, you’re an ass and I owe you just—a metric ton of rum, the good kind, for doing all of this.” “Giving me whiplash,” Killian muttered, but one side of his mouth tugged up despite his best efforts to remain as depressing as possible. Ariel’s eyes got brighter. Rivaled the lights still flickering along the railing of their very nice, very new, decidedly expensive multi-level ship, and it had only taken about fourteen seconds for Killian to make that one photo Emma had sent him his phone background. 

That probably wasn’t weird.

“So, people wanted to know about you,” Ariel said, “and your previously discussed face, and rather than employee a PI because it’s not 1947—” “—Oddly specific.” “I will kill you.” “God bless us, everyone.” “Your very helpful and exceedingly sure of his own obnoxious brand of humor brother was very quick to inform all the interested parties that the first mate was distracted because he unfortunately wasn’t with his wife for Christmas.”

Ariel’s murder threat was not only out of place considering the date, it was pointless because he was going to guarantee he died all on his own. Killian nearly fell off the edge of the dock. 

One of his knees buckled, gaping at his friend and business partner like she’d only recently grown a few extra heads. She didn’t shrug again. Smiled, in her best impression of a variety of fictional and overly confident cats, but her shoulders stayed frustratingly still and that was—

“Emma and I aren’t married,” Killian sputtered, not entirely stunned to find those particular words difficult to say in that order. Half a plan rattled around with the rest of the emotions circling his skull, and he hadn’t really acted on the plan, but he’d been pondering and considering for at least a few weeks before his phone had rung. 

And that was only kind of a lie. 

He’d been doing a lot more than pondering for much longer than a few weeks. Considering had flown out the imaginary window, like—as soon as he and Emma had moved in together. 

Liam didn’t know any of that, though. 

At least in theory. 

Maybe strangling his brother was something of an overreaction. 

He still wanted to go home, though. 

“Liam knows that,” Ariel reasoned, “and I know that. And obviously you know that, but none of your on-water admirers know that, and you were playing your part very well.” “What?” “Glued to your phone, all night. Like a clingy newlywed.” “That’s ridiculous.” “Is it? Because while not technically true—” “—Or true at all,” Killian interrupted, and he wondered if he was getting used to the feel of his heart doing whatever it was doing, or he was just growing more melodramatic by the second. At some point in the last twelve minutes the idea of walking back to New York had become rather appealing. 

“Well, whatever. It was a good excuse, and it’s not like it was one-sided texting and it’s kind of romantic. All things considered.” “What are all the things, exactly?” That shrug came with another smile — far too knowing for Killian’s liking, but he also knew Ariel wouldn’t go back on her rum-buying word, and he supposed there was something to be said for that. Especially if it was good rum. “If you’re going to play the part…” “Look who’s being a romantic now.” “I’ve spent most of the lead-up to Christmas trying to force-feed Pedialyte on my husband. Got to get my romance from somewhere and you’re like—Hallmark Channel ready.” “Probably couldn’t have as much alcohol, then.” “How many bottles of Prosecco do you think Mary Margaret bought this year?”

Tugging his phone out of his pocket, Killian scrolled back through the more than two dozen photos he’d been sent over the course of the night until he found the one he was looking for. Of a table covered in green-hued bottles with plastic champagne flutes that Mary Margaret must have bought in bulk and— 

Ariel’s laugh hung in the air around them, louder than it probably should have been considering the time, but they were also by themselves and he was still kind of moping. So. The world could cope with their collective volume. 

“Do you think she gets a discount for buying so many?” Killian shook his head. “If she doesn’t, she’s being robbed.” “Get the private investigators on the case.” “Challenge Liam to a comedic battle.” “Not if we’re calling it that,” Ariel argued, bumping her shoulder against Killian’s leg. And he wasn’t sure if he was actually smiling, but his lips were moving and his heart didn’t appear to be shattering quite as much anymore and he hoped Emma fell asleep. 

On Mary Margaret and David’s couch. 

They wouldn’t let her go home, he was sure. 

He hadn't gotten a text in awhile. 

He was less sure about the shadows moving towards them, though — because he’d been a little distracted when they docked, but he watched Liam and Belle get into their rental car and there was absolutely no reason for either one of them to be back on the docks, but anyone else showing up on the docks at eleven o’clock at night was probably a sign that Killian and Ariel were about to be robbed. In a far more literal sense than whatever happened with Mary Margaret and her plastic champagne flutes. 

“You guys good?” Ariel asked, sounding more aware of what was going on than she should have been. Killian’s eyes narrowed. 

That made it only slightly difficult to see the overall width of his brother’s answering smile. 

Plus, it was dark out.

“Better,” Liam said, “she's an absolute natural.”

Scrunching her nose, Belle waved off the compliment. “Please, all I have to do is stand there and be helpful.” “Yeah, but that’s more than Killian was able to do today, so…” “He was distracted.” “And standing right here,” Killian muttered, although standing was a little generous. His left knee was still awful bent. In an unnatural sort of way. “Doesn’t that hurt?” Liam asked. Gesturing towards Killian’s posture, he tilted his head and that was even more judgmental than any of the words Ariel hadn’t bothered saying. “Can’t be good for your ACL or whatever.” Belle clicked her tongue. “Adding the whatever makes it sound less official, really.” “And we’re trying to be official,” Ariel chipped in, clamoring to her feet. By using the side of Killian’s jacket for leverage, tugging on fabric until she threatened to tear it and that also would have been impressive if it didn’t feel suspiciously like he was about to pass out. 

She wrapped her arms around Killian’s middle. 

That kind of helped, honestly. 

He’d never admit to it.   

“Official about what, exactly?” Killian asked. “What are you guys doing here?”

Liam’s smile got wider. “We could ask you the same question, but we’ve already claimed way too much of your time and—” “—Wait, what?” “Killian seriously,” Ariel sighed, “if you keep interrupting, we’re never going to get to the fun and passably romantic part of the plan.” “Oh, no it’s definitely more than passably romantic,” Belle argued. 

“Depends on him, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, but he was glued to his phone and I’ve got at least twenty bucks on this happening before New Year’s Eve, so—” “—New Year’s Eve would be really romantic, actually!” “No, no, no,” Liam objected, voice rising on every repeat, “I’ve got Christmas morning, and that means he’s got to go now.” Not having anything to drink made it impossible for Killian to claim intoxication as a reason for the current spin rate of his head. Metaphorically, at least. Even so, he felt a little dizzy and slightly out of breath, trying very hard not to topple into the water. 

There was no way he’d be able to disentangle himself from Ariel before he did that. 

And then she’d get annoyed. 

“What is going on?” Killian demanded, pausing between each word for emphasis. Liam’s lips disappeared. Behind his teeth. 

While he failed spectacularly at containing his laugh. “We’re kicking you out,” Belle said simply, like that made sense and they hadn’t all but required his presence in Boston less than seventy-two hours earlier. 

Killian blinked. Once, twice. Half a dozen times. Nothing changed. Ariel’s arms tightened, maybe — but Liam didn’t move, and Belle’s nose still had that scrunch-like effect, and the lights on their ship really did make it appropriately festive. 

“And apologizing,” Ariel added. “We should make that more obvious.”

Blinking more was stupid. 

Talking probably would have helped. But Killian’s tongue suddenly took up far too much space in his mouth, next to all the imaginary cotton balls that were impeding his ability to breathe and it could not have been healthy for so many body parts to consistently fail like that. 

“This is really my fault,” Liam admitted, taking a step forward to clap Killian on the shoulder. His right knee bent that time. At least his reactions were symmetrical. “And I—well, I...I was so worried about the money and the party and—” “—We didn’t really think about your plans,” Belle finished. Opening his mouth, Killian genuinely could not come up with a word to describe whatever sound he made. Something between a scoff and that huff he was trying to accomplish before, but also drifting dangerously close to laughter borne of disbelief and his back actually had the gall to pop when he leaned forward. 

“I don’t have plans.” “Please,” Ariel scoffed, “you have at least the hope for plans, and that’s nice in a way that deserves a better adjective and all that rum I promise.” Liam’s eyes widened. “How much rum are we talking?” “Enough that you stop spending so much time talking about the proper light to string ratio.” “What does that even mean?” Killian balked. 

Shaking her head, Belle moved into his space as well. Both her hands landed on the front of his jacket, and Killian wasn’t exactly cold per se, but there was something inherently comforting about his sister-in-law’s smile and the way she always smelled a bit like vanilla. 

As if she were just minutes away from baking something, at all times. 

“Telling you to come here was a dick move,” Belle announced, Ariel’s head finding Killian’s shoulder when she started to cackle once more. They were all standing too close to each other. Someone was going to step on someone else’s foot. “And,” she continued, “Liam was right. This is totally his fault, but he’s running on like...no sleep, because we’re—” She grit her teeth, another unfinished sentence that frustrated Killian for about eight and half seconds. Before it all clicked at nine. “No, shit.” “Shit,” Belle confirmed, another smile and her left foot landed on Killian’s right when he pulled into a far-too-tight hug. Ariel had to move her arms. “Babies are expensive you see,” Liam said, “and we’d already funneled so much money into this, the party had to happen and I wasn’t sure if Belle was going to be able to come with me because—” “—They don’t tell you morning sickness lasts all day,” she grumbled. Killian’s laugh had an almost manic edge to it, suddenly happier than he thought he could be and that was more appropriate for the time. Of both the day and season. 

“So,” Liam added, “I kind of lost my mind about Eric, and didn’t think about you or Emma or how stupid you’d be when you weren’t around Emma at Christmas because it’s so goddamn obvious what you’re planning.”

Heat rose in Killian’s cheeks, a questionably large inferno that suddenly flared to life in the pit of his stomach. “I haven’t totally decided.” “Yeah, well that’s dumb.” “Rife with opinions tonight, aren’t you?” “We’re kicking you out,” Belle repeated. “With our apologies that I wasn’t on the ship tonight because that shrimp appetizer smell made me want to die a little.” Ariel sighed. “Do all our statements have to be so violent? There should be more positivity to all of this.” “There will be if Killian can get me my twenty bucks.” “Why are you betting on this?” he asked, but the distinct lack of frustration in his voice was obvious even to him. Belle laughed. “Because calling you a newlywed was not nearly as unbelievable as it should have been, and if you get with the program you could probably have your rehearsal dinner on one of our very accommodating ships with an appetizer that does not include shrimp.” “I’m not really a huge fan of shellfish.” “See, the perfect plan.” An objection sat on the tip of Killian’s tongue — if only because he was decidedly stubborn and now a little worried about his brother’s expanding family, but his own family was not in Boston and he’d really like Emma to be his family. In an official sort of capacity. 

“But what about—” “—No, absolutely not,” Belle cut in before Killian could finish, “that’s what we were doing. Going over the plans for tomorrow’s lunch cruise, and everything you were supposed to do, which I’m pretty confident I can do now, mostly because my husband is here and I won’t be tempted to text him the entire time.” “At least not much,” Liam quipped. The pinch between Killian’s eyebrows was going to stay there forever. If not longer. “And then I’ll also text you, at an appropriate time tomorrow, to apologize for being a massive Christmas bastard.” Hair hit Killian’s cheek. Not his. Distinctly red and smelling like shampoo she’d definitely spent far too much money on, Ariel’s hair blew around her when she threw her head back. With laughter. The catching sort, spreading like wildfire through their tiny group, until Belle had to wrap her arm around her middle to stay up, and Killian’s stomach ached just a bit and it took him a moment to realize he’d made another fire pun. 

In his head. He needed to go home. 

“Was Ariel a distraction?”

She kicked his ankle. “Rude, and yeah obviously. Liam is so goddamn overprotective with his unborn child, it’s disgusting.” “And nice,” Belle grinned. 

Exhaling, Liam tugged on the back of his hair. A tell, and an apology without the words. Killian wanted the words. Even if it took a few extra minutes. “Seriously,” Liam said, “a Christmas bastard, which is not an excuse, but—I’m sorry. For the batard’ness, and bringing you here, and not explaining the reasons behind the bastard. And also for ruining your plans.” “I really have no plans,” Killian promised, but that fell a bit flat and he at least had rather specific wants. Of the desire-type variety. 

“So fix that. Like as soon as possible.” “For my twenty bucks,” Belle said with another yank on Killian’s jacket. The poor jacket was not going to last much longer. 

Ariel rolled her eyes. “She’s obsessed with the twenty bucks.” “Because your husband will have to pay it!” “Should you have bet with an invalid?” Killian asked, trying without much immediate success to take a step away from either one of them. “And what kind of Pedialyte flavor are you forcing?” “The purple kind.” “Blue’s definitely better.” Liam looked frustrated. 

That felt like something of a victory. “Were you going to go, Killian? Or—” Kissing the top of Ariel’s hair and pulling Belle into one more hug, Killian flipped off his brother, muttered Merry Christmas, don’t sink the boat, and would never admit to running back towards his car. Or how quickly he drove home. 

It took at least twenty-six minutes to find a parking spot. 

Four blocks away. 

Still, Killian assumed he was running on holiday-fueled adrenaline and something almost resembling romance and the distinct lack of anything in his pocket was a challenge he viewed as quirky more than anything else. 

He bounded up the steps, nearly dropping his keys more than once before he managed to unlock the door only to be immediately hit in the face. With what felt suspiciously like garland. 

And Killian hadn’t really planned on spending much time in their apartment, only thinking about a few hours of sleep before driving to Mary Margaret and David’s house on the Island because he might have come up with half a list of sweepingly romantic things to do, but he wasn’t a total jerk who would show up on someone else’s doorstep in the middle of the goddamn night, and it obviously did not make a single ounce of difference. 

While he was being strangled with garland. 

Blinking against the darkness of their living room, Killian’s brain couldn’t quite come to terms with what he was seeing. Like the ninth floor of the Herald Square Macy’s had exploded. Tinsel hung from what appeared to be actual ivy, pinned along the top of the wall with startling accuracy. Lights meant to resemble icicles reflected against every window pane, and there was an actual tree in the corner. 

Every one of his inhales had a distinct pine-like scent to it, like he was standing in the middle of a forest, and Killian did not think they owned that many ornaments when he left. 

They hadn’t owned any ornaments, so it was a rather easy number to remember. 

A star was balanced precariously at the top of the tree, paper snowflakes dropping from the ceiling and—

Emma curled in the corner of the couch. 

With at least four blankets covering her. She was a notorious blanket thief. 

Mary Margaret hadn’t woken up either, twisted into the other end of the cushions, and Killian couldn’t fathom how they were comfortable, but he was also admittedly a little distracted by the desire of his lungs to keep providing oxygen to the rest of his body and David’s eyes were alarmingly wide. 

“What are you doing here?” “I live here,” Killian hissed, swatting away the garland. Bits of it fell onto the top of his sneakers. “What are you doing here?” “Helping.” “What?” “Helping,” David said slowly, like Killian simply did not understand the word and not all the meaning behind it. “She—well, the decorations left something to be desired, and you know Mary Margaret. There’s a project, so she’s got to help and—” “—Wait, wait, wait, did Emma do all this?”

Waving both his hands in the air, David didn’t bother to say obviously when the movement made it so abundantly clear. Killian’s jaw dropped. 

Something popped there as well. Which probably wasn’t what woke Emma up, but thinking that was almost nice in another way that deserve a better adjective, and the overall force of her smile as soon as her eyes landed on him made every bit of splintered heart still lingering in his chest knit itself back together. 

Immediately. 

“Should I be concerned that you’re deserting?” she asked, hooking her chin over the back of the couch. As if she’d been expecting this exact situation. Killian shook his head. “Nah, this is a wholly authorized shore leave.” David’s groan very likely hurt the inside of his throat. 

“What happened here, Swan?” Pink immediately colored her expression, every one of her teeth obvious when she grit them. Mary Margaret must have been the soundest sleeper in the Universe. Or she’d had a questionable amount of Prosecco to drink that night. “Christmas?” That was as good a reason as any, honestly. Although that stubborn streak of his ran several nautical miles wide, and nearly tripping over the garland on his few steps towards the couch made Emma’s shoulders shake. 

Killian knelt in front of her.

Step one accomplished, then. 

“It’s super lame,” Emma warned, but Killian’s heart was doing more biologically impossible things and his eyes fluttered when she brushed his hair away from his forehead. “I just—well, you weren’t here, and that kind of ruined any of my festive-type feelings, which as we all know are shaky at best.” “Work in progress, love.” Her tongue sticking between her lips was not as annoying as Ariel’s had been. Killian figured that had something to do with the desire to kiss her. And not Ariel. Who would have smacked him at even the allusion to such a thing. “Well,” Emma mumbled, “the lack of appropriate holiday spirit reared its head like—as soon as you closed the door behind you, but then I went to the party and you kept texting me and—” “—I’m sorry, I was texting you? You were texting me!” “God,” David grumbled, dropping into the only chair left in the living room. There should have been more chairs in the living room. “It’s ridiculous, the pair of you.” Killian narrowed his eyes. Glaring was too difficult. “Why are you here?” “I told you, helping.” “He did,” Emma said. “Both him and Mary Margaret, really. I, ok—well, whoever was texting who, it doesn’t really matter. Just that Ruth thinks we’re married.” Of all the ways that sentence could have ended, Killian was loath to admit hearing that David’s mother believed the same lie Liam had been spouting to Boston tourists was not one of them. 

“She does,” Emma continued, rushing over the words, “for some reason. But she kept saying how nice it was that a young couple like us was able to keep in touch when we weren’t together for the holidays and I was really kind of drunk, and even more upset that you weren’t going to be here, so my mind just kind of latched onto things and—” Pulling in a deep breath made her shoulders shift again, Killian’s eyes taking in every moment so he could commit them all to memory and the question was out of his mouth before he realized Emma was still talking. “Will you marry me?” “Do you want to get married?”

David fell out of the chair. 

Slid, technically. Directly onto the floor and next to presents that were almost perfectly wrapped with color coordinated bows on each of them. 

“What?” Killian breathed, Emma’s hand flying to her mouth. Left one, so that helped too actually. None of his fingers shook when he reached up, pulling that same hand down and kissing the bend of her knuckles. Tears clouded Emma’s eyes, falling on her cheeks faster than he could brush them away. 

With his mouth. Killian tried all the same. 

While ignoring the increasing volume of David’s rather uproarious laugh. He was texting someone. Probably Ariel, who very likely was requiring play-by-play. And had timed Killian’s drive home. 

“That was kind of...this,” Emma explained, nodding towards the living room. “I—I wanted to decorate, and make it Christmas when you got back because...well, I blame the alcohol and your brother and—” “—That’s fair, honestly. Belle’s pregnant, by the way.” “No shit.” “Shit,” Killian confirmed, a repeat he’d share later. Once they got all this engagement business sorted out. “They’re pretty incredible decorations.” “Yeah, well flattery will get you everywhere.” Huffing out a breath, Emma’s head dropped to his, and that made it easier to get his fingers in her hair. “This made a lot of sense when I was drunker. But, uh—I needed to do something with all that energy and sudden holiday thoughts and I’ve got a lot of thoughts about your face, you know that?” Ariel was going to be insufferable. 

Killian would make her buy some Moscato, too. That was Emma’s favorite. “Gave me something to do,” Emma added, “and then I figured you’d get home and there’d be some sweeping and we could do something about Ruth’s assumptions and I think we’d be really good at being married.” Kissing her was the only reasonable option. Even as David sounded like he was in physical pain. 

Surging up, Killian’s mouth all but slammed into Emma’s, tilting his head so he got to that one, perfect angle that allowed his tongue to swipe across her lips and draw that even more perfect sound out of her, and he was only dimly aware of Mary Margaret waking up. The couch creaked when she moved. 

Killian didn’t. 

His fingers carded through Emma’s hair, only breaking apart to appease his lungs and the requirements of his body before kissing her again, and his knees kind of ached. Presumably from supporting most of their collective weight when Emma was kind of draped across him. “Don’t go in the bedroom, ok?” Humming against her only guaranteed David made another noise of protest, but it was nice that they’d helped decorate and Killian could only imagine how they’d gotten all that ivy on the wall. 

“That’s, uh—” Emma leaned back, one of her eyes squeezed closed. “Where we put all the extra non-holiday stuff, and it’s kind of a disaster.”

“Tore up the apartment, like she had separation anxiety,” Mary Margaret slurred, and Killian refused to be held accountable for whatever his face did at that. 

David rolled his whole head. Emma shrugged. He liked that one the best. “So, uh—” “Yeah,” Killian finished, before he could stop himself and any qualms either one of them had once had about clingy relationships or relationship qualifiers appeared to disappear before their eyes. Like frost on the window. Which was seasonally appropriate. “I think we’d be really good at marriage.” “Yeah?” “Yeah. Where’d you get the decorations from, though?” “You’re welcome,” Mary Margaret replied, sounding a bit more coherent and just as exhausted. That was fair. It was close to four in the morning. 

Emma nodded. “Definite separation anxiety. So we should probably not do this again, and then you can help decorate.” “Deal,” Killian promised, and they didn’t bother waiting for an appropriate time to call Liam. Or Ariel, who crowded into the video call because, as she claimed, it was her living room and her twenty bucks and her shriek probably affected the structural integrity of her house. 

The rum showed up two days later. 

And made for a very good toast, as soon Killian slipped the ring onto Emma’s finger. They picked it out together.