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there is truly nothing like being a black girl from certain parts of Maryland...this is really black american princess central
#second only to maybe Atlanta#and some parts of LA#its truly not rare to find black families that have been wealthy and college educated since the 1800s#and they will absolutely have their family history researched and compiled in a leather bound book in the living room#colorism and classism do be beating our asses though lmaoo
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NAME. Conan AGE & BIRTH DATE. 28 & April 21st, 2996 AC GENDER & PRONOUNS. Cismale & He/Him NATIONALITY. Iskaran SPECIES. Werewolf FACTION. The Harmonium OCCUPATION. Bard & Singer at Stumble Inn FACE CLAIM. Drew Ray Tanner
biography
i. BORDERREACH Conan was born in the rugged expanse of Borderreach, a land perpetually on edge due to its proximity to the Kingdom of Iskaldrik. His mother, Elara, was a humble seamstress in his earliest years, but after contracting the Blight she wasn’t anything. She was well, lively, and happy, then she was sickly and starving. The income they’d known ran dry and with her death, Conan had nowhere left to go. Even in his childhood, he could carry a tune, arguably besides basic needlework, it was the only marketable skill that Conan possessed. Still, he was barely seven years old, singing on street corners for bronze - and if he was fortunate - silver pieces.
One fateful night, as Conan sang in a dimly lit corner of Aventia, a stranger approached him. Wealthy, influential, and prideful, he offered to take Conan in. To nurture his talent, and to maybe even sponsor him someday. Weary of strangers but with no family or resources to turn to, Conan went home with him and began the accruement that would lead to the mountain of debt, inevitably putting the triggered werewolf into lifelong indentured servitude.
ii. THE HARMONIUM & THE DEAL Still young, when the good Lord offered to sponsor Conan’s education at The Harmonium, the prestigious College of Bards, Conan saw an opportunity that few rarely received. There were days that he still remembered his mother, pricking her fingers, talking about the sort of life they might have been able to lead for themselves if she’d only been able to find a sponsor. If she’d only been able to afford the College of Bards.
At The Harmonium, Conan excelled in the School of Performance. His voice was already a force of nature but he wasn’t the best and if he wanted to truly master the school, then he needed to suceed over everyone else. One night, while nursing the pride of his mounting debt in the Cisterns, a man sat next to him and talked about wishes and deals. The young werewolf had thought it was a joke, a sharp, toothy smirk and a roll of his eyes was the only thing Conan afforded him before saying those fated words; I wish I was the most talented bard in the world, then I’d never have to worry about coin again. The wish came true, Conan successfully sold his soul for talent, but with raw privilege came a lacking of the sort of discipline Conan had never earned - and talent did not necessarily denote fame.
Conan rose quickly from there, a natural Journeyman and a sought after performer, though there was a roughness to his edge that was not appealing to most. His most consistent gig was spent singing at the Stumble Inn, blacking out every night before last call and waking up somewhere that he didn’t recognize. Conan’s debt was more money than he’d see in the lifetime, or the next, so the good Lord came about having the bard pay off his worth in other ways.
iii. THE GREAT GAME The Great Game was a cornerstone in Lysaran politics, Conan learned all about it at The Harmonium and was further immersed in it by his patron. He attended parties, putting on his best performative charm - usually through the aid of some sort of substance to make sure that he was on and from there he’d lie, cheat, steal, and gather intel for his patron. The rich got richer and Conan barely put a dent in his debt - these parties had a cost of their own, new clothes, the drugs that Conan craved, and gleaming equipment for the bard to perform with.
Of the many things that Conan had been and what he’d become: liar, cheater, stealer, saboteur, thief, addict, and more. A killer wasn’t one of them, truthfully murder was rarely in the wheelhouse of a bard, they weren’t assassins, they specialized in gathering information and laying it on thick. One night he’d been hired to gather the letters from a trading merchant, while another had been hired by another party to do the same. The two fought at the top of the stairs and Conan watched as the other tipped backward and fell, down and down he fell. The masquerade had concealed their identities, but when Conan removed the other’s mask he saw a friend from his class of novices, a familiar face caked in blood and grey matter. He returned to the night, plastered on a smile, and then gasped in horror when the body was found.
personality
+ Friendly, Talented, Charming – Selfish, Nihilistic, Unreliable
played by shane. est. he/him.
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The past few years have witnessed the inception of a new genre of affluent lament — a kind of marriage of our disparate cultural obsessions with the misery memoir and the university. The progeny of this union is the memoir of the elite university education that confers status but destroys souls. The plot of such memoirs almost always begins with a young scholar thirsting for wisdom who encounters our meritocratic educational apparatus, excels by its standards but is morally disfigured by them, wins admission to an Ivy League school, discovers that the place overlooks his secret cravenness and grants him success with professors and attractive women anyway, and is driven to the extremes of existential angst for a brief period by this discovery. When our wiser and more cynical scholar finally recovers, he concludes that elite education is rotten, graduates from the school, and proceeds to a brilliantly successful career as a writer, abetted by the publication of his memoir decrying the rottenness of his elite education. If these books don’t make obvious the devastating costs of an Ivy League education, what could?
The genre seems to have taken off after the publication in 2005 of Ross Douthat’s Privilege, a memoir of his undergraduate years at Harvard. It was followed by David Samuels’s memoir-disguised-as-reportage, The Runner, in 2008; the most recent contributor to the cause is Walter Kirn, whose Lost in the Meritocracy indicts Princeton. If one were inclined to include former Yale professor William Deresiewicz’s partially autobiographical 2008 essay, “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education,” among these laments, then all three bulwarks of American status-lust — Harvard, Yale, and Princeton — will have come in for a beating. It may be a partially or, if you’re really cynical, wholly deserved beating, and our clever meritocracy lamenters unfurl their verbal whips in so many directions that they do hit some of the truly rotten parts of our elaborate educational mechanism, but the requirements of memoir always direct their thoughts back to crafting narratives of their innocence and corruption.
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All remark on the class disparities and the snobbery among the student bodies. Douthat and Kirn register the now-ubiquitous complaint against radicalism and obscurantism in the humanities, Kirn and Samuels home in on the arbitrariness of the system of standardized tests and melodramatic personal essays that selects Ivy League admits and condemns the rejects to a life of dullness and obscurity with state-school diplomas, and so on. But there remains something implausible in these authors’ combination of purported naïveté about the meritocratic game and their canny manipulation of it. They manage the impressive feat of becoming unwitting victims of the same system they so cynically and effectively exploited, and then they ask us to sympathize with the raw deal they’ve gotten.
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This precocious knowingness is essential to the genre. Unless one has been cursed with the kind of crippling cultural deprivation associated with backwoods religious homeschooling and a name like Jedediah Purdy, it’s nearly impossible to make an unironic claim to childhood innocence. So these writers admit to knowing all along that meritocracy is an elaborate status game, that college admissions is about faking the appearance of achievement and intellectual seriousness. But even as they concede that their outsized lust for admission to elite schools deformed their character, these writers insist that they seriously believed that attending these schools would make them whole again. As Douthat puts it, after the trials of being unpopular and overlooked in high school, Harvard “became a beacon of hope to my semi-alienated teenage mind.... At Harvard, athleticism and good looks and popularity would count far less than the things that really mattered: native brilliance, and intellectual curiosity, and academic achievement.” College would transport them away from the craven striving of their high schools to a world of integrity, refinement, truth, and beauty. How such an idyll would be created out of a class of craven strivers exactly like themselves seems not to have come under their consideration.
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Unsurprisingly, once they arrive on campus and confront a place full of perfect reflections of themselves, all their pleasant illusions are shattered, and they indict their classmates as phonies. The rich — targets we love to hate because all Americans, and particularly the readers of such Ivy League laments, are supposedly part of the long-suffering middle class — come in for the harshest attacks. Douthat’s formative Harvard experience consists in being rejected from a club so exclusive that no nonmember has glimpsed its interior for two centuries. Samuels is tyrannized at Harvard by his roommate’s vast collection of neckties. But it is Kirn’s account of the cruelty of the wealthy that most absurdly plays to popular resentments — he alleges that during his junior year, he was led into a car by “a handsome blond campus prince — the descendant of a legendary industrialist,” blindfolded, and driven for hours out into the country. When he removed the blindfold, he found himself in front of “an actual castle, with countless tall windows, pediments, and columns.” In the middle of New Jersey. “My family’s estate. Behold, poor serf! Behold a power you will never know!” the scion told him, and drove off leaving him stranded.
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Here again, the conventions of memoir undermine the meritocracy lament’s broader argument against elite education. All these writers want to drive home the quite valid criticism of the hypocritical “diversity policy” at these schools, which Deresiewicz describes as “the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals.” The superficial diversity of race and ethnicity masks the underlying social homogeneity that arises from selecting a student body almost exclusively from America’s wealthy suburbs, its elite urban enclaves, and its top hundred high schools. The dominance of affluent culture at elite schools may be a real problem, but not for these authors, who are themselves the children of white businesspeople and professionals. But how else to demonstrate the problem in a memoir except to inflict it on your subject, who happens to be you? The results are barely believable claims of victimization of the rich at the hands of the really rich that do little more than provoke a pointless game of poorer-than-thou, in which the authors’ own claims to victimhood can be easily contested on the grounds that other students have it even worse.
The rich are just as corrupt as we’d like them to be in these stories, but, as blogger and English professor Margaret Soltan has pointed out, these caricatures can backfire: “One reasonable conclusion to draw from Lost in the Meritocracy is that only extremely rich people should go to schools like Princeton. Kirn describes a college culture in which the vast majority of the students — rolling-in-dough Percodan-snorters — are happy and well-adjusted, and the tiny minority of middle-class students like Kirn are miserable and alienated.” Indeed, Kirn himself points out that this is a problem inherent in the idea of meritocracy: “A pure meritocracy, we’d discovered, can only promote; it can’t legitimize. It can confer success but can’t grant knighthood. For that it needs a class beyond itself: the high-born genealogical peerage that aptitude testing was created to overthrow.” Possibly to ward against such a reactionary conclusion, Kirn and his fellow Ivy League-lamenters take aim at every other student type as well — the radical activists and the establishment politicos, the ethnic priders and the anglophiles, the prude and the prurient, the women and the men, the studious and the lazy — all phonies.
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This contradictory hatred forms the crux of the problem with the meritocracy lament — the authors urge us to save the elite university but describe no one in it as worth saving. The misery memoir makes a terrible platform for serious social commentary — it is too bound up with the author’s own ego and his effort to distinguish himself from the mass of his very similar peers to be able to offer much insight. What they seem to be aiming at is the authority and historical vision of Allan Bloom, but the result is something that rarely gets beyond the pint-sized resentment of Holden Caulfield. In reality, as their own logic inexorably leads us to conclude, the authors are really no better than their classmates, and if they want to expose the rottenness of elite education, they must either excuse themselves from the story and shine a light on these schools objectively, or they should do us the service of finding the kind of students who are what they wish they had been — sincere, honest, diligent, and intellectually independent — and figuring out how they got to be that way.
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Part of their difficulty lies in the fact that sincere, serious, and intellectually honest students persist beside them — a handful among their own classmates, but more often, at other schools — and their character proves difficult to fit into the meritocracy lament paradigm. Theoretically, no one should be able to pass through the system and remain whole, so how did these students manage to do so? One answer is that they sought after some purpose besides head-patting from adults and distinctions for their résumés.
For some, that purpose is salvation. Religious students are anathema to Samuels and Kirn, who share in common early repudiations of their own faiths. For Samuels, admission to Harvard was his ticket out of the repressive Orthodox Jewish world of his childhood, and Kirn claims to have discovered early on that the Mormon Church was just another branch of the meritocratic system, rewarding shallow displays of oratory with hot chicks to make out with in the parking lot after services.
But religious colleges in America have been sources of explicit opposition to the decadent, established elite ever since Yale was founded in 1701 to preserve Puritan orthodoxy against what some viewed as the increasing laxity of Harvard’s faculty. The social status of these schools seems to vary indirectly with their denominational orthodoxy — the Newman Guide to Catholic colleges, for example, heaps its praises on such schools as Christendom College and Franciscan University of Steubenville for their “vibrant and pervasive spiritual life,” but that’s not enough to sneak these schools into even those backhanded “best colleges you’ve never heard of” guides, not to mention the canonical U.S. News rankings. At the same time, the Newman Guide laments the decline of Notre Dame into degenerate secularism, and Georgetown University, perhaps the highest-status Catholic school in America, doesn’t even merit a mention on the Newman list.
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Where the meritocracy lamenters come closest to getting at the source of the moral distortions perpetuated by meritocracy is where they put their personal grudges and ambitions aside to report on what is actually happening at these universities. From these accounts emerges a common thread of abdicated adult responsibility. In part, the theme arises out of the conventions of memoir as well — these are all coming-of-age stories, and coming of age is always to some degree a process undertaken alone. However, it is no coincidence that some of the most memorable absurdities described by Kirn and Douthat are moments in which adult authority is notably wanting.
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Who would leave this kind of money to the sole discretion of a bunch of nineteen-year-olds? It might be said that such responsibility is good practice for a future in which graduates of these clubs will go on to manage even larger sums in investment banking portfolios and national budgets, and perhaps that’s true, at least for those who aren’t caught pocketing the loose change first. But at bottom, the Suzanne Pomey incident illustrates the refusal of adults at Harvard — and, indeed, outside of it — to exercise not just punitive but moral authority over what Douthat calls “the high-IQ club.” Douthat describes the glee with which the campus derided her after the embezzlement was made public, and suggests that justice was served when she was sentenced to probation (the judge argued that “no purpose would be served by a sentence of incarceration”) and denied her Harvard diploma, a punishment that amounts to, as Douthat puts it, being “expelled from the paradise of the American overclass.”
Only that’s not quite how it worked out, or how it ever works out with the children of the meritocracy. Once one attains the requisite credentials — the GPA, SAT, and hours of tutoring underprivileged children — then it becomes increasingly difficult to justify exclusion from elite circles on the basis of mere character flaws. Pomey, like the more recent Harvard disgrace Kaavya Viswanathan, who was found to have plagiarized portions of her much-touted first novel in 2006, fled to the shelter of an elite law school to rebuild her respectability after the Harvard embezzlement flap. Gina Grant, whose admission to Harvard was famously rescinded in 1995 after it became known that she had murdered her mother (a fact she omitted from her application), graduated instead from Tufts. Moral considerations should not stand in the way of a person’s clearly demonstrated “potential,” which may be the only thing the adults in these books value in education and the only realm in which they are willing to exercise authority.
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In her essay “The Crisis in Education,” Arendt described education as the situation in which “authority in the widest sense has always been accepted as a natural necessity, obviously required as much by natural needs, the helplessness of the child, as by political necessity, the continuity of an established civilization which can be assured only if those who are newcomers by birth are guided through a pre-established world into which they are born as strangers.” And Kirn himself corroborates the value of such authority after he suffers a karmic bout of muteness caused by his lifetime of abusing language to get ahead: “What I learned from [Uncle Admiral], his master lesson — the one that would help me reconstitute my mind after it dissolved at Princeton, worn down by loneliness, drugs, and French philosophy — was that the world could indeed be grasped and navigated if one met it with a steady gaze. Matter wasn’t truly solid, no, but it was packed tightly enough to set our feet upon.”
This is essentially what the adults in these books have removed from the curriculum and from education more broadly. No longer certain of anything about the world, the adults of the last two generations have given up trying to pass it on — the culture, politics, and institutions that have constituted American civilization as a species of the West — but they have found nothing with which to fill the holes left behind. They have lost credibility, and, regrettably or happily depending on whom you ask, ceded authority so that succeeding generations can start from scratch and figure out how to fix things. One of the notable products of this abdication of responsibility has been the rise of the educational meritocracy that continually rewards “aptitude,” which seems like something everyone can still agree is good to have and adults are willing to reward, even when they cannot agree on the essential question of what is worth directing one’s aptitude towards. The result is a system that produces an elite that has no clear idea of its own purpose: “I’d been amassing momentum my whole life,” Kirn explains, “and I knew only one direction: forward.... No one ever told me what the point was, except to keep on accumulating points, and this struck me as sufficient.”
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