#like even if that were true how are people NOT AWARE OF . MASS GENOCIDE

[matan4il]

My grandparents were all Holocaust survivors. A large part of my family was murdered in that genocide. I chose to deal with the family trauma by becoming an educator on this subject. I give tours, lectures and workshops on the Holocaust, on antisemitism and on Jewish history.

Intellectually, I'm perfectly aware of how the massacre that Hamas perpetrated is NOT like what the Nazis did. More Jews were murdered over the course of just two days in Babi Yar (33,771 men, women and children), which is just one Nazi shooting pit out of almost two thousand, than during the entire Israeli-Arab conflict. Even after the carnage brought on by Hamas, this is still true. The Nazis were far more systematic (which eventually made them turn industrial) in carrying out the genocide of the Jews than Hamas has been. There's no comparison in terms of scale and industrialization.

And yet emotionally, I can't help but be hit by the similarities in terms of the immediate brutality of the murderers and the experiences of the Jewish victims. Because I am listening to the testimonies and some are so eerily similar to my research, I simply can't process how these are from recent days, not 80 years ago.

Jewish kids hiding from their would be murderers, scared to make a sound for fear of being discovered and killed.

Jewish families completely wiped out.

Jews asking themselves how did they survive and the person next to them did not.

Jewish people executed in droves, their bodies piled up.

Jews begging to be spared, to no avail.

Jewish women raped, most of them then killed.

Jewish babies executed in barbaric ways.

Jews being burned, some after being murdered, some while alive.

Jewish communities devastated. Take kibbutz Be'eri for example. It was founded before the State of Israel. Despite many terrorist attacks, it has continued to thrive in Israel's south. A small, close knit agricultural community. Over 100 people (at least) have been slaughtered there. Homes were destroyed. Everything the kibbutz's economy was based on was laid to waste, too. Be'eri has become synonymous with the worst of the carnage. IDK how they'll build their lives again after the war is over. IDK if they can. A community of almost 80 years, quite likely gone.

Foreign reporters who had been to kibbutz Kfar Azza all talked about the eerie silence and the stench of death rising from the bodies. Eerie silence is exactly how visitors to the sites of the shooting pits describe those places, while the allied soldiers who liberated the Nazi camps talked about the stench of death there.

Some of the reactions to this massacre also remind me of the Holocaust. Even though the Nazis, the murderers themselves, documented their extermination of Jews, there are those who deny the Holocaust happened, painting the Jews as liars. Similarly, even though Hamas documented themselves, and released the footage themselves, there are people going around denying the atrocities, painting the Jews as liars.

Then there's the justification of the mass murder of Jews by insinuating they brought it on themselves... Back in 1943, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aware of the plight of Jews under the Nazis, told government officials in Allied-liberated North Africa that the number of local Jews in various professions “should be definitely limited” so as to “eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany.” Understandable complaints. Understandable complaints of Germans against Jews. Roosevelt, the liberal president, said that while Jews were being exterminated by the Germans. In the same manner, we're seeing people justifying the murder of Jews at the hands of Hamas, even though it's a known antisemitic terrorist organization which has repeatedly called for the murder of all Jews in the world. According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a reportedly Hamas affiliated Imam declared, "If the Zionist state were to move to the other end of the Mediterranean, our war would not be over, for the enemy is the Jew.

And while I stand by my statement that the scale is nothing alike, the carnage that took place in Israel IS the biggest massacre of Jews since the end of the Holocaust. Not even during Israel's Independence War and some of the massacres of Jews that happened during it (like the Kfar Etzion massacre) were this many Jews murdered during a single day.

Just like so many were silent back then as Jews were being both killed for being Jewish AND blamed for their own murder, many are silent now as well. Don't get me wrong, there are A LOT of amazing people who reached out to their Jewish friends, who showed they care, who took to the streets, who held vigils for the massacre's victims! Many heads of state also condemned this vicious attack. But I'm looking at Tumblr specifically, and it is FULL of posts justifying Hamas' slaughter of Jews. They're being reblogged everywhere, spread in every fandom. People who claim to stand for social justice feel absolutely no shame sharing such de-humanizing posts on their blogs. And what do we do? Are we calling them out? Do we make it clear that it is morally unacceptable to blame Jews for their own murder? Do we unfollow these bloggers, so that at least the dropping numbers send out the message that it is unacceptable to justify the massacre of innocent people?

TLDR:

This massacre is not like the Holocaust, but the cruel antisemitism that motivated it is the same. Let's not let antisemitism thrive here. Please do what you can (whatever that is) to stand for what's right.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

[anamericangirl]

Sorry if this has been asked before, but how do you determine which news are trustworthy? One side I hear Israel is commiting ethnic genocide against palestinians, the other side is saying that it's hamas' fault.

I'm fairly new to geopolitics so im sorry if this seems ignorant. I just dont know how to sort out which one is the truth and the lie.

It’s not always simple to make that determination and there's not any singular source I can think of off the top of my head that I would consider to be consistently trustworthy.

What I tend to do, especially with something as convoluted as the Israel and Palestine war, is make sure I look at sources from both sides of the issue. No source exists without a bias so when looking at each source you have to be aware of the bias and see which one most closely aligns with what we know to be true.

The main problem here is that news about this war has two main sources: the IDF and Hamas. The IDF is not 100% trustworthy and is always going to put Israel in a sympathetic light. Hamas is a terrorist organization that has a long history of lying so they are never trustworthy and they are always going to put Palestine in a sympathetic light. Now, I'm not saying everything Hamas says is a lie, but their habit and history of lying is so extensive that's it's best not to trust anything they say and see if you can verify it independently before taking it as fact.

One problem with that is our media tends to just parrot what Hamas says without verifying it or doing any journalism before publishing whatever it is they claimed. Most of the time when you read reports about what Israel may or may not have done it's always followed by "Hamas officials say." and if Hamas is their only source then I'm automatically skeptical of the report.

So both sides are accusing the other of genocide and to find if one or both are lying or telling the truth, you need to look at the facts surrounding the issue.

For example, we know the palestinian population has been steadily increasing over the years.

And if your population is seeing a continual and steady increase you're not being genocided. Period. That's just a fact.

We also know that Israel warns civilians and tells them to evacuate certain areas they are planning on bombing before doing anything and if they were trying to commit genocide it makes no sense to do that.

We know that Hamas uses their own citizens as human shields. Hamas has admitted that.

We know that Hamas targets Israeli civilians in their attacks. We've seen that.

We know that Hamas wants to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. They have admitted to that.

We know that Hamas brutally attacked innocent civilians on October 7 of 2023 killing 1400 people (the largest mass killing of Jews since the holocaust) raping and torturing even more.

Always go as close to the source as you can. If you read that someone said something, try to find the original video/interview or wherever it was said and read/listen to it yourself so you have the context because most "journalists" will leave context out to benefit their own narrative.

When you look at the situation yourself instead of just choosing one side to listen to then you can see that it does look like one side is attempting genocide but it's not Israel.

[morallygreyvigilante67]

thoughts on wyler?

Before I get into this, I'd like to say that people can ship what they want. This is purely my opinion on the ship based on what we've seen in canon.

Objectively, I don't see it happening.

A few arguments I see people bring up regarding the possibility of the ship happening mostly boil down to:

Wednesday (or the Addams family as a whole) likes murder

The Addams family have also killed people

Tyler actually liked Wednesday

Tyler was manipulated/it was the Hyde

So, lets go over these individually.

Wednesday (or the Addams family as a whole) likes murder

On a surface level that might seem true, however it's always felt like the family as a whole are more interested in the motive behind the murder as opposed to the killing itself.

Tyler didn't really seem to have any motives of his own besides carrying out Thornhill's orders. On his part, the killings were senseless.

Now, while all this is - admittedly - open to interpretation, the Addams family are shown to react very differently when the person being targeted is one of their own. They do not like it when someone in their family is in danger, and Wednesday was very much in danger.

And even if she wasn't one of his targets, Tyler was still killing people to help Thornhill resurrect Crackstone to commit mass genocide against the Outcasts, a group which Wednesday and her family are very much a part of.

I see a few people bring up the relationship between Fester and Debbie from the 90s movies in support of Wyler, but both cases are very different.

For one thing, Fester and Debbie were married. How is this important?

The Addams family are immune to a lot of things that should reasonably kill them and it's impossible for an Addams to kill another Addams (no, I'm not making that up) hence the fact they practice their more macabre hobbies on each other (but no one else). It didn't matter how many times Debbie tried to kill Fester, because at that point she'd never be able to.

Fester was in no real danger. Wednesday dying was a very real possibility.

Also consider how Wednesday reacted when she suspected Xavier was the killer, and then when she found out it was Tyler.

When she thought it was Xavier she was quick to get him arrested, and she didn't really show him much sympathy for - what she assumed to be - his actions.

When she found out it was Tyler, she was quick to capture him and then tried to torture him in an attempt to get him to admit to it. I highly doubt that was done with the same sentiment as the family hobby.

A few people like to reference her "I guess I have a type" line, but considering she was running away from him, the line comes across more sarcastic as opposed to a genuine statement.

The Addams family have also killed people

I'm not going to pretend that they haven't. But pretty much everyone killed by the Addams family was a person who had targeted them first.

I see people bring up the piranha scene at the start of the series in support of this argument, but Wednesday only did it because of what happened to her brother.

Was it an overreaction? Yes, I'm not trying to say that her actions were completely justified. But the fact of the matter is, she wouldn't have done it if her brother hadn't been targeted first.

Tyler actually liked Wednesday

Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. I can't claim that everything he did was just in the name of manipulating her.

But, regardless of whatever genuine feelings he might have had. It doesn't change that - from Wednesday's perspective - that's what he was doing. As far as she's probably aware, he was just doing it to manipulate her.

Tyler was manipulated/it was the Hyde

I'm not going to deny that he wasn't, but the fact of the matter is, he still killed people. "He was manipulated" is not a get out of jail free card, if this was a real court case, he would still receive some form of punishment for his actions.

Actions which included:

Attacking Eugene (someone who reminds Wednesday of her brother)

Attacking Enid (One of the few people Wednesday has been shown to care about)

Setting up a "date" as a distraction to allow Thornhill to steal the book and also almost resulted in Thing's death (Wednesday's family)

Granted, the "it was the Hyde" argument could be applied to what happened to Eugene. But considering he didn't seem at all remorseful for what he did when he was talking about it in the police station, I doubt it. And considering the fight with Enid happened afterwards (and he was also trying to kill Wednesday before that happened) it doesn't really apply there either.

And the "it was the Hyde" argument definitely can't be applied to what happened to Thing (a reminder that Wednesday actually cried because of this incident).

Wednesday released piranhas on the boys who shoved her brother in a locker. And people really think she'd just forgive Tyler for attacking three people who she cares about, one of which is a member of her family. Unlikely.

[mwagneto]

hope anyone treating the stranger things concentration camp as a fandom thing dies irl btw. goes double for the people who got fucking serial number tattoos????? are you all genuinely braindead?

[gch1995]

Not an ask but goddamn are your takes on sw good. Ty for contributing actual intelligence to this toxic ass fandom. Also more of an ask but what are some of your favourite things about Luke and least favourite things?

You’re welcome! I’m not saying that Anakin/Vader is an innocent, far from it. Nor do I think the entire Order and Republic deserved mass murder and genocide, especially not the kids.

However, I have a hard time believing that Qui Gonn Jinn, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda, and many of the other adults involved in the old Jedi Order and Republic who he grew up with were really that much better than him either because we constantly see evidence that supports the exact opposite of them being humble, kind, supportive, and selfless heroes in the OT and PT movies and TV show before Luke. In some ways, they’re actually worse than Anakin because they have even less self-awareness than him, and never learn anything at all from their bad choices and mistakes, just because they’re on the designated “right side.”

Much of what makes Vader so horrifying is just how much of an extreme version of the ideal Jedi Obi-Wan, Yoda, and the Council he is that they all tried to mold him into. Yeah, he’s more angry, impatient, self-loathing, and unstable on the high of the dark side than the average Jedi of his time. However, much like them, he’s also much more apathetic, much more duty-bound to his master, much more hostile and paranoid towards enemies and outside cultures, much better at manipulating others for his own ends, much better at pushing down his true feelings, and much more adept at using that “greater good” mantra to compartmentalize all of the atrocities and collateral damage he perpetuates to get revenge or serve Sidious by taking out anyone who gets in his or the Empire’s way.

Name one time when characters like Qui Gonn, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda, or even Bail Organa actually took an interest in Anakin, Ahsoka, Luke, Leia, their recruits, or anyone else for anything but their own ends of a desire to absolve themselves, a desire for external validation from their masters or the Council and Republic head, or a desire to hold on to power in canon?

You really can’t name any times when they had truly kind and selfless actions and motivations in regards to other people that Obi-Wan, Yoda, the Jedi Council, and many of the other adults involved with power in the oldJedi and Republic. For as dark, selfish, and villainous as Anakin becomes, even he has more moments of genuinely kind, heroic, and selfless actions and motivations for others in the series. What’s more, Obi-Wan and Yoda get away with trying to use Luke as a pawn for their own ends, while Anakin actually got consistently framed as morally wrong and selfish for doing the same, ultimately recognized that what he was doing to his son was selfish and wrong, and ultimately made a decision to atone for it by selflessly sacrificing his life to save him. He did it, even though he knew he’d probably be killed in process, might still very well never earn Luke’s forgiveness at all after all the trauma he put his son through, and may never become a force ghost.

When a supposed “good guy” character gets away with displaying many of the same negative traits and using many of the same fucked up tactics that the anti-villains/tragic heroes/tragic villains are framed as wrong for, have to pay negative consequences for, and even have to learn a lesson about being better from, then those “good guys” are not only objectively bad people but also badly written characters, which is the case with Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda.

As for Luke, my favorite traits of his are his kindness, open-mindedness, and the fact that he’s not too afraid to stick up for himself and call out Obi-Wan, Yoda, and his father on their bullshit.

My least favorite traits of his are probably the same ones that become Anakin’s worst traits over time, though they’re definitely a watered down version of his dad’s negative traits since he’s got a more healthy and stable personality and a stronger moral fortitude after being raised to be a normal kid by good guardians before getting involved with the fuckery of the old Jedi Order and Sith, which would be arrogance, impulsivity, a short-temper, and occasional selfishness.

Also, while it’s not really a negative trait, but something the writers failed to think about beforehand, I wanted to see more of him dealing with the traumatic fallout of Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru’s murder by the Empire, and I wanted to see more scenes of him dealing with the weight of having killed so many people for a war mission. Look, I get it. Luke was acting in perfectly reasonable self-defense when he blew up that Death Star and Jabba’s pleasure barge. However, he was a farm boy with absolutely no experience as a soldier in combat beforehand, and, even if it was in self-defense, he still took a lot of lives. To the average person who’s never done that before, taking a life is going to be traumatizing, even if it’s in perfectly reasonable self-defense.

[butwhatifidothis]

I'm honestly amazed how Cap managed to write the characters to be so dislikable. Cap and the characters themselves talk and talk about "how good and selfless they (specifically Edelgard) are". Yet all they actually think about is "me!me!me!".

Like "oh, you were victims of genocide and you live in fear that you daughter will be killed, well you did something that indirectly caused MY suffering so your just as bad as those who killed your literal family!!!". Meanwhile those who call out these jerks on how their actions are hurting others they go "wah! wah! these howwible pweople are lying and saying mean things about me that aren't truw because I suffered so these pwoeple must be bad! Bad!"

Like once I'd like these characters just to respond with "damn that sucks bro sorry that happened" without making it all about them and their suffering.

And reminder these are supposed to be the good guys.

Like, there's just. Such a baffling lacking amount of self-awareness to every single person on Woobiegard's side.

"Yes Seteth, it is bad of you to not foretell a thousand years into the future and preemptively fight against the prejudice humans chose to hold against Marianne's family instead of looking after your comatose daughter, now if you would please ignore how not three months ago Marianne helped kill her supposed friend with a peaceful tranquility in her soul while doing nothing to try and appease said friend's remaining family afterwards despite knowing that they're still alive in the present day."

"Yes Flayn, it is very good of you to acknowledge that you were being selfish for feeling happy about being safe for the first time in many many years, now if you would please ignore how Woobiegard and her friends constantly go on about how they're eating sweets and drinking wine while the people of Adrestia literally starve."

"Actually Seteth, that you allowed yourself to be seen as a Saint ever in the first place just proves your own self-interest is greater than you want to admit, now if you would please ignore how Woobiegard and her friends let the kids they orphaned make them out to be heroes while making no attempts to stop them from doing this."

"Actually Seteth, the fact that you chased down those Rhodos Coast priests despite them running away because of the danger they posed to innocent people makes you an awful irredeemable person, now if you would please ignore how Woobiegard chased down Judith and had Ingrid's help in trapping her in a match to the death before brutally and horrifically shattering her entire body against the pavement after Woobiegard was the one to invade Judith's homeland in the first place."

And this leaves out the whole "Yeah nearly your entire family might have been wiped out for being the wrong race and that even to this day you feel the need to hide your true identities from humans lest they try to kill you for your blood - you know that thing that almost happened to your daughter five years ago - but didn't you know that humans don't tend to like me because my ancestor tried to benefit from your race's genocide and it backfired on him? That makes me the real victim here right now, not you." Which even isolated from all the other things that make Woobiegard's side out to be sanctimonious ass-wipes in regards to their treatment of Seteth and Flayn, is itself an incredibly self-centered and terrible thing of Marianne to say.

Cuz, like, there's a very clear hierarchy when it comes to this fic. Woobiegard is top dog when it comes to Being Sad: no one in this fic is allowed to be More Sad than Woobiegard, for she must be the one that suffers in place of the innocent masses, angel that she is. But after that, no one in this fic is allowed to be More Sad than the (female) Black Eagles: outsiders' suffering always makes them horrible/selfish/manipulative/(the non-cute) crazy/otherwise "bad people," while the suffering of the (female) Black Eagles always make them pitiable/sympathetic/correct/otherwise "good people."

What's that? The first ~15 years of your life was spent growing up in an environment where your heritage was used by others as an excuse to hurt you, and where trusting others could easily get you killed, which includes not trusting some of your own family members? Well, have you perhaps considered that Woobiegard Was Sad Once Too and felt Super Guilt about her actions unlike you who Totally Only Cares For Yourself, which therefore makes her an intrinsically better person than you an a fundamental level?

What's that? You had to survive the horrific and ghoulish murder of your father, step-mother (who you thought died), friends, and innocent knights, before being unable to do anything to stop the genocide of a completely innocent group of people afterwards? Well, have you considered that that made you Crazy In A Non-Cute Way, unlike Woobiegard whose trauma never actually inconveniences her and in fact bails her out of literally any wrongdoing, which therefore makes her an intrinsically better person than you on a fundamental level?

What's that? You literally barely survived a genocide and had to live in the land you called home while hiding who you truly are in fear of humans finishing the genocide they nearly completed? Well, have you perhaps considered that you not considering how the lives of humans that won't be born until almost a thousand years after that could be affected by the society humans created made Woobiegard Sad, which therefore makes her an intrinsically better person than you on a fundamental level?

And this does affect the Black Eagles too, never you worry. Bernadetta mourning the death of Alois? Can't forget to include her crying over the fact that Woobiegard is safe in the middle of that! Ingrid talking about how she felt after Glenn died? Gotta cut to Woobiegard Being Even Sadder! And actually, literally, genuinely, any time any other character (that aren't Duke Aegir, Thales, or Cornelia - she'll pop up real soon) is opening up about their suffering ever at any time? Welp, gotta hard-cut to Woobiegard Being Super DUPER Sad, way Sadder than them, so she Understands them on such a DEEP and PERSONAL level, always and without exception!

But then you get Bernadetta lamenting the fact that her home of Garreg Mach is being attacked by the zealots of the Church... without ever acknowledging that Garreg Mach was their home first, or that she was the one to help kick them out of their homes first. You have Petra anguishing oh so much about how her people betrayed her and see her as a traitor... before she goes on to prove them right when she makes them bow their heads to their oppressors under threat of death. "Monica"!! Oh, isn't she so sad? This poor brainwashed child soldier! Everything she did and said before she Learned Better was just a result of a horrific and terrible and tragic upbringing and wasn't her fault at all, and Dorothea cares about her oh so much... and not the other brainwashed child soldiers in Chapter 51, where she calls them demons and has no hesitation in trying to kill them, because they were Mean To "Monica".

It's that hierarchy comin' into play: Woobiegard, then female Black Eagles, then maybe male Black Eagles, than Miscellaneous Little Girls, etc. etc. before going under the hierarchy pyramid and finding Men crawling around as evil sexual deviants who all hate women. It affects so many things in this fic it's actually crazy, and all it does it showcase Woobiegard and her side to be some of the most despicable people to ever walk the earth in this fic

[smhalltheurlsaretaken]

Hey! I literally love your last post so much but I'm confused about the rebels bit (never watched it). How does Rebels criticize the jedi? Thanks!

Aw, thank you! (Lol, this is such an old ask I don’t remember what that post was, but here goes).

Well in s2 Ahsoka, Kanan (a survivor from Order 66) and Ezra (his Padawan) all go to an old Jedi Temple to talk to Yoda about Vader and his Inquisitors (Darksiders who hunt the few remaining Jedi and kidnap Force sensitive kids). Yoda is only there spiritually and the three of them get different visions. Ahsoka sees Anakin as Vader, and Kanan has to fight several enemies and eventually admit he can't protect his Padawan from the world, only guide him (which prompts the vision to finally make him a Jedi Knight, as he survived Order 66 as a Padawan.)

And Ezra... Ugh. Ezra had a previous encounter with Yoda, in which he got his lightsaber crystal. Basically Yoda asked him why he wanted to be a Jedi, and Ezra had to do some self-examination and eventually realized that helping and protecting people made him feel alive, which greatly pleased Yoda who told him he might become a Jedi after all. That's a really great exchange and I love the character development Ezra gets, as he starts by saying he wants never to feel powerless and eventually realizes that's not the right answer.

But in this second encounter, as Ezra asks how they can defeat the Inquisitors, Yoda basically says that fighting is rarely the right path. And to illustrate that, he says that line about the Jedi being arrogant and joining the war swiftly "in their arrogance," which really bothers me. He also says they were "consumed by the Dark Side", which is why they're now gone. In all fairness, he also mentions that they were motivated by fear, which is partially true. 

Now, I write analyses and I try to be intellectually honest about them, because ignoring contradicting stuff weakens your argument instead of helping you. Except this time, I really can't accept this quote. I have an excuse, Lucas wasn't involved in Rebels so it's not the highest canon in my opinion (the 6 movies + TCW are, here are the quotes justifying my position), and I feel like that assertion is out of character for Yoda, ignoring his ST ghost appearances, and also plainly factually incorrect.

I understand that Ezra really needed to be taught not to always seek to fight. At this point, he's still an emotional kid who occasionally struggles with the Dark Side. Not fighting is important to a Jedi's path, so I can understand Yoda's intention. But the example he uses? According to Lucas, the Jedi were drafted in the war. That's not jumping into a conflict out of arrogance, that's literally being dragged there against your will. And sure, there’s Geonosis, but how exactly is rescuing a bunch of your people that’s getting slaughtered by a Sith Lord the same thing as arrogantly jumping into a fight? Like, what’s the option here? Not go, and let an innocent Senator and a bunch of Jedi be murdered?

It's like Rebels!Yoda isn't acknowledging that the war was fake and that a Sith Lord engineered it as the perfect trap (which is recurring problem in Rebels; at one point Ezra, Kanan and Rex have to fight an old Separatist tactical droid and Ezra "solves" the Clone Wars by pointing out that nobody won except the Empire, so really they were on the same side all along, and he gets praised for doing what "a bunch of Jedi, senators and Clones couldn't do," ie getting both sides to talk to each other – except wtf??? setting aside that the Jedi and Rex were aware of the war being fake by the end of it, and that the Separatists were openly led by a Sith Lord and attempted to commit genocide several times in TCW and did commit mass murder, and reduced like several worlds to slavery or starvation and were backed by the worst big corporations you could imagine, the war would NOT have ended if the two sides had tried talking it out. 1) The Senate made it illegal 2) the big corporations arranged for terrorist attacks on both sides the one time they tried to negotiate so the war would drag on and they'd get more money out of it 3) Sidious. Was. Controlling. Everything. What. The. Heck. Would. Have. Been. Accomplished. By. Negotiating.)  Plus the question of whether or not the Jedi should even fight is like... constantly raised by the Jedi during TCW, so I really can’t see it as “oh wow we didn’t even take the time to think and we got killed because of it, we really sucked.” 

Seriously, there’s this S6 quote: 

MACE: Are you sure we are taking the right path? YODA: The right path, no. The only path, yes. Designed by the Dark Lord of the Sith, this web is. For now, play his game, we must.

Like yeah, totally rushing in and being eager to fight lol. Nothing to do with being boxed in and having no alternatives. 

So yeah that's bothers me and I don't think it jibes with the rest of canon. I don't remember Yoda telling Luke (who, in the beginning, is as eager to fight as Ezra is) that the Jedi "disappeared" because of some fault of their own, or because of an eagerness to fight. (Seriously, pussyfooting around the fact that the Jedi were slaughtered grates me.) The OT never, ever, ever implies that the destruction of the Jedi Order was their fault - and unless you assume that the OT is “pro-Jedi propaganda” (*laughs in dumb youtube comments*) then I don’t see Rebels weaving it into its narrative as legitimate.

Again, choosing alternatives to fighting is a great lesson on a personal level, but it doesn't work on the scale of the Rebels/Empire conflict - or the Jedi/Sith one. Ezra should often choose not to fight because of what it'll do to his soul. The Rebels should not stop fighting because there is no cohabitation with something as evil as the Empire. Imo Yoda is always presented as wise enough to know the difference. 

The last thing that makes me think it's out of character is Yoda's spiritual journey in TCW s6. He gets all of his flaws thrown into his face and has to conquer them – he has to face his literal Dark Side and he wins. And yet at no point during that arc is he ever made to conquer his ‘Jedi arrogance’ or whatever. He has to face his worst fear (first vision, all the Jedi dying), let go of his attachments (second vision, him having to accept that he can’t live in a perfect world where everything is beautiful and no one is dead), and reaffirm who he is as a Jedi (third vision, refusing to give up on Anakin and trying to save him rather than to kill Sidious) but at no point is he ever made to recognize that wow, the Jedi are the worst for fighting. 

I’d argue that the very purpose of the visions showing him Order 66 and Anakin falling are to make him accept that these things are completely beyond his control - and as such, not his fault. He doesn’t get to fix things, because the fate of the Order is not in their own hands. It is, in fact, in Anakin’s (from a thematical/narrative standpoint). Yoda has a hard time with it (actually he almost shuts down when he first sees everybody dead and his first reaction is to say that he failed them, so I can’t accept Yoda blaming his grandkids for dying) but he accepts it in the end, when he tells Mace and Obi-Wan he’s not certain one ever wins a war, but they might still find ‘victory for all time’ (referring to balance aka Sidious’ death in RotJ). 

So anyway that’s my beef with Rebels!Yoda. Not hate on Rebels though, there are many parts of it that I really, really love - but some of them kinda infuriate me, and this is one of them. 

[cherubcow]

“Invincible”, Season 1 (2021) Review

Somehow both very cool and very fucking stupid :D

About Created and written primarily by Robert Kirkman (principle writer for The Walking Dead comic and TV show), this Young Adult cartoon basically synthesizes a number of comic book characters (e.g., Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Hellboy, Wonder Woman, Gambit) and tries to balance their heroism with cynical twists and dark realities. It's an exercise like Brightburn (2019) in that it mirrors existing comic writing all too closely in order to make violent twists. The cool stuff arrives pretty much immediately. You can tell right away that the physics have some level of realism, and it quickly gets serious because of this. The easy comparison would be to The Boys (also by Amazon, also about violent heroes, and also very well-produced). So, if you like The Boys (2019–), you'll probably like Invincible only a little less.

(( Some spoilers but nothing too specific ))

Wrong Focus But, the stupid stuff comes from the same error that the Kick-Ass movie (2010) made: it focuses on the wrong person(s). In Kick-Ass, the error was focusing on.. well.. "Kick-Ass", an irredeemable loser and waste of screen time. Invincible makes the same mistake, focusing on.. well.. "Invincible", a (so far) irredeemable loser and waste of screen time. So, despite its virtues, this show cannot escape that it made the decision to go for the Young Adult viewing demographic. It reminds me of Alita: Battle Angel (2019) in that way too: some very cool adult concepts ruined by the dramatic devices of unrepentant teenage stupidity and irrelevance. I didn't even like that stuff when I was a teenager, though Jordan Catalano gets a pass.

Main Cast and Characters The supporting characters were also very stupid. The most annoying was definitely Amber Bennett (voiced by the otherwise cool Zazie Beetz from Deadpool 2 (2018) and Joker (2019)), 

who is supposed to be attractive somehow to Mark Grayson ("Invincible", voiced by Steven Yeun, who played Glenn on The Walking Dead) 

despite the fact that she constantly judges him, fails to understand him, often fails to give him any kind of benefit of the doubt, and continues to scowl at him and be hurtful towards him even when she has information that should change her outlook towards him. And because she is part of the love triangle shared between herself, Invincible/Mark, and "Atom Eve"/Samantha (voiced by the awesome Gillian Jacobs from Community (2009–2014)), 

audiences simply have to bear with it that Amber's annoying character will be present and wasting time until Mark can realize that Amber is in fact toxic and that Eve actually understands him and can improve him in more positive directions. That love triangle should have been a 20-minute distraction, but I'm guessing that it will eat up a season or two more, especially if the writers become cowardly and fail to change things for fear of messing up a perceived "winning" formula. In my ideal story line, they would skip ahead 10 years, drop the teen drama, the love triangle, and the stupid jokes and have Invincible and Eve paired in defense of Earth, with the main tension being from their worry that the other would be horribly gored in front of them during lethal fights against cosmic enemies ;)

Aside, I am aware of Amber’s motivation for being a bad person, I just think her justification is not based in understanding, empathy, and a regard for the gravity of Invincible’s situation. In a strict political sense, Invincible should not commit a lie of omission by keeping her in the dark about his identity — even if for the “noble lie” reason of protecting her — but in a real sense, he is a fucking teenager who just developed his super powers. For her to pretend that he should reveal his entire identity to her — a potentially transformative and even dangerous decision — after a few months of teenage romance paints an absurd portrait of her mind. It does, however, align her with Omni-Man, because where Omni-Man forces Invincible to become an adult in the fighting sense (pushing with full force early on), Amber forces Invincible to become an emotional adult by getting him to understand that toxic people such as herself need to be given boundaries — and he needs to learn to clearly delineate and communicate his real desires. By knowing that he does not want Amber, people who regiment his free time, or people who do not suit him, for instance, he can realize why Eve was an obvious decision: Eve understands, can make time when they have time, and will let him find his decisions. Part of a coming-of-age story tends to be realizing what one actually wants, and Invincible’s hesitation in telling Amber his identity shows that he does not truly want her. This separates Invincible from, say, Spider-Man, who avoided telling Mary Jane his identity not because he did not want her but because he wanted at all costs to protect her.

The next most annoying character has to be Debbie Grayson (voiced by TV-cancer Sandra Oh and who luckily was not animated to look like the real Sandra Oh and who should have been voiced instead by Bobby Lee due to Lee's successful MadTV parody of Sandra Oh). 

Debbie basically fills the role of Skyler in Breaking Bad, except that Debbie's character tends to be slightly more understanding before her inevitable and toxic Skyler-resentment and undermining behavior. Despite having an 8-episode arc of change, Debbie's character flips too quickly and lacks the empathy and Omni-Man motive-justifying that would make her interesting (the comic's development may vary). For instance, if she refused to believe that Omni-Man meant his own words, that would make her empathetic and perhaps virtuous even if misled, but instead she dropped their "20 years" of understanding after viewing Omni-Man in action, which makes her appear shallow, easily manipulated, and unsympathetic. That was a definite "Young Adult" genre move because it shows immaturity by the writers to break apart a bond of 20 years so quickly. Mediocre teens might accept such a fissure because their lives have not yet seen or may not comprehend that level of time, but adults know that even long-standing and problematic relationships (which, beyond the lie, Omni-Man's and Debbie's was not shown to be) take a lot of time to break — even with lies exposed.

Omni-Man The biggest show strength for me was of course Omni-Man, who in a success of casting was voiced by J.K. Simmons in a kind of reprisal of Simmons' role as Fletcher from Whiplash (2014). 

The Fletcher/Omni-Man parallel shows through their being incredibly harsh but extremely disciplined and principled, forcing people to become beyond even their own ideal selves (this via Omni-Man's tough-love teaching of Invincible — comically, Omni-Man was actually psychologically easier on Invincible than Fletcher was on Whiplash's Andrew character). Despite the show's attempts to villainize Omni-Man, he, like Fletcher and also like Breaking Bad's Walter White, becomes progressively more awesome, eventually representing a Spartan will, an unconquerable drive, and a realistic and martial understanding of a hero's role.

To the show's credit, while it wrote Omni-Man to be outright genocidal and from a culture of eugenicists (again, Spartan), they could not help but admire him and his "violence" and "naked force" (for a Starship Troopers reference), giving him a path to redemption. That redemption comes in part because — despite the show's attempt to be often realistic and violent — its decision to be directed at young adults via dumb jokes, petty relationship drama, the characters’ reckless lack of anonymity and security in their neighborhood (loudly taking off and landing right at the doorstep), and light indy music also made the portrayed violence far less literal. With a less literal violence, the real statement becomes not that Omni-Man really did kill so many people (though he certainly did kill those people within the show's plot) but that he was symbolically capable of terrible violence but could be reformed for good. That's the shortcoming with putting violence under demographic limitations. If it's a PG-13 Godzilla knocking down cities, the deaths in the many fallen skyscrapers don't matter so much (the audience will even forgive Godzilla for mass death if it happens mostly in removed spectacle), whereas if it's Cormac McCarthy envisioning a very realistic fiction, every death rides the edge of true trauma.

By showing light between the real and the symbolic, it is much easier to identify and agree with Omni-Man. For instance, when Robot (voiced by Zachary Quinto of Heroes and the newer Star Trek movies) 

shows too much empathy for the revealed weakness of "Monster Girl" (voiced by Grey Griffin), the audience may have thought, "Pathetic," even before Omni-Man himself said it. And this because Omni-Man knows that true and powerful enemies (including himself) will not hesitate to use ultra-violence against these avenues of weakness. "Invincible" can make his Spider-Man quips while in lethal battles, but he does so while riding the edge of death — something that Omni-Man has to teach Invincible by riding him to the brink of his own.

Other Cast/Characters and Amazon's Hidden Budget It was impressive how many big-name actors were thrown into this — a true hemorrhage of producer funding. Amazon has so far hidden the budget numbers, perhaps because they don't want people to know that the show (like many of its shows) represents a kind of loss-leader to jump-start its entertainment brand.

Aside from those already mentioned, the show borrows a number of actors from The Walking Dead (WD), including.. • Chad L. Coleman ("Martian Man"; "Tyreese" on WD),

• Khary Payton ("Black Samson"; "Ezekiel" on WD),

• Ross Marquand (several characters; "Aaron" on WD)

• Lauren Cohan ("War Woman"; "Maggie" on WD)

• Michael Cudlitz ("Red Rush"; "Abraham" on WD)

• Lennie James ("Darkwing"; "Morgan" on WD)

• Sonequa Martin-Green ("Green Ghost"; "Sasha" on WD) 

There were also connections to Rick and Morty and Community, not just with Gillian Jacobs but also with... • Justin Roiland ("Doug Cheston"), who voices both Rick and Morty in Rick and Morty,

• Jason Mantzoukas ("Rex"),

• Walton Goggins ("Cecil"),

• Chris Diamantopoulos (several characters),

• Clancy Brown ("Damien Darkblood"),

• Kevin Michael Richardson ("Mauler Twins"), and

• Ryan Ridley (writing)

That's a lot of overlap. They even had Michael Dorn from Star Trek: TNG (1987–1994) (there he played Worf) and Reginald VelJohnson from Family Matters (1989–1998) and Die Hard (1988), and even Mark Hamill. Pretty much everyone in the voice cast was significant and known. Maybe Amazon got a discount for COVID since the actors could all do voice-work from home? ;)

Overall Bad that it was for the Young Adult target demo but good for the infrequent adult themes and ultra-violence. Very high production value and a good watch for those who like dark superhero stories. I have heard that the comic gets progressively darker, which fits for Robert Kirkman, so it will likely be worth keeping up with this show.

[joestarsecrettecnique]

I am so very sick and tired of the toxicity that’s been poisoning the snk fandom as of the last couple years. I gave myself time to digest the ending and my feelings on it, before embarking in a journey to debunk many misconceptions and critiques I’ve seen floating in the fandom.

By the way, by no means I think this ending is perfect. I think this is textbook execution by Isayama to tie together every loose end left behind in an orderly manner, and I think that it was a bit rushed and oversimplified. I would’ve wanted more of Eren and Armin’s conversation, more of the squad realizing what his true goal had been, and some narrative choices I don’t 100% agree with. But still, what I saw in other fans’ critiques post 139 frankly appalled me, so I feel the need to make this. Also, this obviously are my own interpretations, I am not Isayama himself lol

“Ew, so Eren did pull a Lelouch after all”

No, Eren did not pull a Lelouch. While his action and the final result may seem similar, I find very different nuances between the two. Lelouch wanted for the whole world to be united in fighting against him, and thus he made himself the world’s greatest enemy. His will to turn himself into a monster was selfless. Eren didn’t give a damn about the world, he had no noble intentions whatsoever. He said it in chapter 122, his goal was to protect Paradis and, more specifically, his closest friends. He turned himself into a monster, killed 80% of human population, and endangered the lives of those very friends he wanted to protect, so that by stopping him, those friends could be safe. Eren had no intentions to break out of the cycle of hatred or unite the world against himself, he just wanted to give his friends a chance to survive, and that is not selfless, it’s selfish. Eren’s goal was incredibly selfish, and biased, and driven by his feelings instead of rationality. Nothing like Lelouch!

Now this, this I myself am not the greatest fan of. I feel like it makes that great scene in chapter 122 loose a bit of its strength, Ymir obeying the king for 2000 years just because she loved him. Honestly, I always thought there was a bit of Stockholm Syndrome going on, but I didn’t think it would be the only reason. However, like it or not, it’s undeniable that it makes perfect sense in the narrative that aot has always strived to tell. Love has been a theme strongly woven in the story, and it also draws a great parallel between Karl Fritz/Ymir and Eren/Mikasa. Ymir was a slave to her love for King Fritz, just like Mikasa was a slave to her love for Eren, in that she struggled to accept reality until the very end despite the atrocities that Eren committed. Ymir stayed bound by her love for King Fritz, until she saw Mikasa break from her own poisoned love, aknwoledge it, and kill Eren despite of it, or maybe because of it. Only Ymir knows that one, heh. But the point is, Mikasa showed Ymir that she could break free of a toxic love, she was that someone that Ymir had been waiting for to finally free her of her burden.

“What? But that makes no sense!”

Now, on my first read, I simply thought that Eren had ordered Dina to avoid eating Berthold, and that he had made her walk down that road unaware that his mother was trapped (because we know that the Attack Titan’s future memories aren’t infallible, there are still gaps), killing her indirectly. I’ve since then read some theories stating that Eren willingly killed his own mum in orther to give kid himself a reason to feel enough hatred to kickstart the whole story. Honestly, I like this version maybe more! But let me explain to you why this is not a plothole, like many people think. In this same chapter, we have Eren explaining how the Founder’s power works in synergy with the Attack’s: “There’s no past or future, they all exist at once”. This means that time travel in aot doesn’t work in a manner where Eren extracts himself from time and space, and from a separate realm he operates on the past. The way I understood it, the mechanics works kind of like Tokyo Revengers’ time travel. MInd you, I only watched episode one, so my understanding might be jackshit.

Spoilers for Tokyo Revengers’ episode one. In the show, the main character loses consciousness and finds himself reliving his past. He interacts with someone in this “new” past, and when he wakes up again in the present, past events had been over-written by the changes he made. I think this is how aot timetravel works, with the exception that, since past and future (and present, of course) all happen at once, side by side, there is no old past to be rewritten, neither a future to return to, and present Eren wouldn’t be aware of the changes that his future self would make. It creates sort of a time paradox, yes, in the sense that there’s a loop where present Eren’s mom has been eaten because future Eren, in the future, operated on the past by causing past Eren’s mom to be eaten, but all these Erens are one and the same, as all timelines exist at once.

“Boo-hoo they ruined Eren’s character, he’s such a wimp!”

I have to confess (isn’t this appalling, that this is a thing that I have to confess, what the actual fuck), I am an Eren stan. I absolutely do not consider myself a Jaegerist, I think Eren’s option was better than Zeke’s, yes, but it was morally wrong and awful and he absolutely was not only in the wrong, but also if he wasn’t dead I’d want him to be punished for his crimes. I didn’t particularly enjoy him pre-timeskip, and I started to like him because I found his evolution fascinating. I wanted to understand his motives, what was going on in his head, he was a puzzle that I wanted to solve. Maybe because I’m a psychologist, who knows. Anyways, if you’re an Eren stan only because he acted like a chad and now you cry his character was ruined, I’m sorry to say, you never understood him. Eren was not a god, he was not a strategist playing 5d chess with perfect rationality, Eren was the same he has always been. He was a young man spun along by his passions. Eren feels things with burning intensity, he lets himself be driven by his emotions. He almost flattened the world because he was disappointed that he and his friends weren’t the only human beings inhabiting it, for fuck’s sake, he’s always been irrational, selfish, and immature. Of course he doesn’t wanna die, of course he want’s to live with all of them. You really expected a 15 year old hot-headed brat to become Thanos after he suddenly found out he killed his own mum and all his dreams had been crushed? Of course he felt conflicted, of course he suffered, of course he wanted to live, “because he was born in this world”. Honestly, when I read his meltdown, I felt relieved that his character hadn’t been turned on its head, it was heartbreaking to see that he really was the same brat he’d always been, that he’d tried to steel himself to do horrible shit for his friends’ sake and that he felt bad about it! It made me appreciate his character a lot more, I felt nostalgic towards the times when I was irritated by his screaming and pouting. Suffice to say, this is also my answer to all those people that believe his internal monologue to convince himself the Rumbling was what he really wanted were bullshit since he “pulled a Lelouch”. How can it be bullshit? Maybe he planned to be stopped, but he also said that he thought he would’ve still done it if they hadn’t. He also said that killing a majority of the population was something that he wanted to do, not a byproduct of the alliance not stopping him early enough, because with the world’s militaries in shambles Paradis would’ve had time to prepare accordingly. Anyways, of course he needed to convince himself to do this awful thing even if he knew he wasn’t gonna succeed completely, can you imagine how horrible it would be to know your only chance is to kill thousands?

I also maybe think it was because of the spine centipede thingy? When Eren says “I don’t know why I did it, I wanted to, I had to”, he gets this faraway look on his face and we get a zoom in on one of his eyes, which is drawn very interestingly and kinda looks like the Reiss’ eyes when they were bound by the War Renounce Pact? So maybe it was also the centipede’s drive to survive and multiplicate that forced Eren to do the Rumbling so that its life wouldn’t be endangered. I don’t know how much I like this, I feel like it takes some agency away from Eren and also makes it feel like he’s not as responsible for the genocide he committed that we initially though, which mhhh maybe not, let’s have him take full responsibility for this. As I said, I’m not defending Isayama blindly, I do have some issues myself with what went down.

“What the fuck, did he say thank you for the genocide?”

Guys c’mon, this is like,, reading comprehension. Yes, it was poorly worded and a bit rushed, but by now you should have full context to make an educated guess on the fact that no, he didn’t thank him for committing a genocide what the fuck you guys. Armin started bringing up the idea that maybe they should have Eren eaten because he was doing morally questionable things ever since the Marley Arc, which for manga readers was like what, 2018? Isayama has been showing for three years how not okay Armin was with Eren’s actions, how could it make sense for him to thank him for a genocide? You see some poorly worded stuff, and your first instinct is to ignore eleven years’ worth of consistent characterization to jump to the worst interpretation possible? Let’s go over this sentences and reconstruct what they mean.

“Eren, thank you. You became a mass murdere for our sake. I won’t let this error go to waste”. Armin recognizes that Eren had no other choice, but does not condone it. He clearly calls it an error, which feels like an euphemism but for all we know the japanese original term used could’ve been harsher. Point is, he clearly states he think what Eren did was wrong. But he recognizes that Eren’s awful doing opened up a path for Paradis to break out of the cycle of hatred. Not a certainty, but an opportunity. He thanks Eren for giving them this chance, and promises not to waste it, even if it was born out of an atrocity. He thanks Eren for sacrificing himself for their sake, even if he doesn’t agree with the fruit of his labor, so to speak. He’s thanking Eren for the opportunity that his actions gave them, not for the actions themselves! Where the hell do you read “thank you for the genocide” guys, sheesh. I’m mad at y’all.

“How could Eren send MIkasa memories if she’s an Ackerman and an Asian, and their memories can’t be manipulated by the Founder? I call plothole!”

Now, here we’re going into speculation territory, so you’ve been warned. I don’t think that that information they gave us was true, about Ackermans being immune to memory manipulation. We know at least that the clan is in some way subject to the Founder’s power, or Mikasa and Levi wouldn’t have been called in the Paths by Eren multiple times. Stories never being entirely true or false, or relativity, better said, has been a strong theme in the story, we know this by Marley’s and Eldia’s different accounts of history compared to the actual Ymir backstory we got. So who’s to say that the belief that Ackermans aren’t manipulable is the truth? Maybe they’re just hard to control, not impossible. We know that by the Founder’s ability Eren experienced past and future happening simultaneously, so he could’ve very well been trying to send those memories into Mikasa’s head ever since the beginning of the story, only just succeeding in chapter 138. It would at least explain Ackerman’s headaches as Eren trying to manipulate their memories and failing. Of course, we’d need Levi side of thing to know for certain, as he had headaches too and we weren’t shown in the chapter if Eren spoke to him in paths like he did with the rest of the squad. We know he didn’t talk to Pieck, but he even went and spoke to Annie who he basically hadn’t seen since Stohess, so I hope he spoke to Levi too. Who knows, maybe he even spoke with Hanji, but she died before she could remember. I wish we were shown that, honestly, I’m sad that it was skipped, especially after Levi said in an earlier chapter that “there was so much he wanted to tell Eren”. Fingers crossed for the anime to expand on it.

“So Historia’s pregnancy was useless”

What? No, it wasn’t useless! Eren told her to get pregnant to save her life, so that she wouldn’t be turned into the Beast Titan. If she became the Beast Titan, then Eren would’ve had to enact the plan with her instead of Zeke, and yeah, Ymir brought the power of the titans with her, so theoretically Titan Shifter Historia would’ve had her time limit removed, but we saw that the only way for the Alliance to stop the Rumbling was killing Zeke, so Historia would’ve had to die. Useless to say, when Eren talked to her about his plan, she was very vocally against it, so I don’t think she would’ve helped Eren with his plan. It was Zeke or nothing, and the only way for Zeke to keep his titan was for Historia to be unable to be turned, hence the pregnancy. Did y’all read the same thing I read? Anyways, she could’ve definitely been handled better, but she wasn’t necessary to the plot anymore, and her being removed from it in such a way was sad, yes, but it made sense.

“They massacred Reiner!”

Yeah, can’t really say anything about this. I definitely understand the sentiment behind this scene, which I appreciate. It’s to show that thanks to his Titan being removed and the times of peace approaching, Reiner was finally able to shed the weight he bore on his shoulders and “regress” to his more carefree persona he had when he thought he was a soldier, instead of a warrior. I am very happy for him, and I think it’s a nice conclusion to his arc, that he’s finally happy, but it could’ve been portrayed in a less comic relief-y way. It just sledgehammers all his characterization. Feels surreal that we saw him attempt suicide a couple month ago in the anime and now he’s sniffing Historia’s handwriting.

Guys, this absolutely sends me. There are people who unironically believe Eren actually reincarnated in a bird? Guys. It makes no sense, it violates every rule that Isayama established for his universe’s power system. How could he even reincarnate in a bird? Guys, c’mon, this is symbolical! Birds have been heavily used in aot to portray freedom, and this is a nice, poetic, symbolic way to show that Eren who lived his whole life chasing freedom and never actually got it, is finally free, like a bird, now that he’s dead. It’s also a pretty explicit nod to Odin, I think. Aot is heavily inspired by Norse Mithology, and I think there were some pretty clear parallels between Eren and Odin/Loki in the later arcs of the story. Eren has been shown to “communicate” through birds like with Falco in chapter 81, or with Armin in chapter 131. Emphasis on “communicate” because again, this is symbolic, I don’t think he actually spoke through the birds, he simply talked to them via paths, but birds are associated with Eren’s character (see also the wings of freedom, y’know?) and the shots were framed so to give the impression that he was talking through the birds, but he wasn’t. Symbolism. Anyway, I really think they were supposed to be a nod to Odin’s crows.

Aaaaand that should be it! Even though I most definitely forgot some other criticism on the chapter, it’s crazy the amount of negativity floating around. Hope I didn’t bore you!

[rivahisu107]

The Unresolved Baby Subplot Chapter 6: Of Marriage and Mikasa- And Maybe Some Chapter 69 Hints as Well

Our story has come to an end, and three years later, the world is recovering from the Rumbling, and the nation of Eldia (Paradis) has risen again as a dangerous power in the battle for survival, only without Titan powers this time. Hizuru is a strong ally, yet as for how all this happened and why Historia made her choice to keep quiet... we may never know. But she does want peace negotiations with the Alliance, so that’s a good sign she didn’t completely agree or side with Eren.

And Historia is married. But if the farmer is the father, why didn't she marry him in the first place? And why isn't he allowed a consistent face? Also on the island is a grieving Mikasa Ackerman, possibly under the protection of Hizuru. It seems that everybody in the Alliance is going back to Paradis to negotiate save for Onyonkopon, Falco, and Gabi- who had few to no ties to the island or are too young- and Levi as well, who is with them for unspecified reasons and in an unidentified region. How does all of this tie into this (conspiracy) theory of an unresolved plotline? And how does this tie back to the most important chapter to Levi and Historia’s characters?

Surprisingly, once again, the key to this all is Mikasa Ackerman.

To review, Mikasa has a scar on her arm that her mother of Azumabito heritage passed on to her as a young girl to keep secret and show to the one whom she will marry and have children with. At the time, this was a mystery, but when Hizuru pays a visit for exploitation of natural resources diplomacy, this is all revealed. 

When Hizuru arrives, there is a nice panel with these words and the two Ackermans together.

Then cut to when Kiyomi is asking if Mikasa recognizes the marking, and then this happens:

Yes. In a scene all about marriage, children, and heritage, guess who appears right next to Historia? Levi, of course! The odd thing about this is that this is the only time Levi shows up in the manga in this scene. Check out the rest of the page if you don’t believe me. He just appears... then disappears. Huh? What was that all about?

Some may criticize me for reading too much into this, but remember, even the smallest of details can turn out to be big. When Eren was talking about the Armored Titan, there was a brief cut to Reiner at the table. It’s very suspicious that this detail here was included. And the anime kept this in but with more shots of Levi watching in the background, next to Historia the whole time.

Afterwards, Historia is even more curious and gets super happy that Mikasa is her “perfect match”. This is reminding me of the whole thing with Reiner and Eren “being the same”. It’s just too bad that neither of these got properly concluded. Anyways, I find it funny that Historia is getting all chummy with the Ackerman with royal blood. 

What’s the story with Mikasa being royal? In the past, the shogun of Hizuru was an ally with the royal family on the island, and his son was friends of the family. But as the story goes after the Great Titan War:

What a tragedy! It’s awful when families are divided up in great worldwide disasters. 

I can’t help but see some of the similarities here between the shogun’s relationship with the royal family and the Ackerman clan’s history with the royal family. Both clans were on close terms with the king but unfortunately, when they spoke out again Karl Fritz’ ideology and could not be mindwiped, they were persecuted heavily and almost driven to die out completely on the island. But then by some miracle descendants of both clans came together to have Mikasa, who would be the one to end Eren. 

Now, after this chapter, Historia is stuck in the worst possible situation due to her royal blood, but she is willing to take on the Beast Titan to save her people... but then her unresolved, frustrating pregnancy happens. And with all these bits and pieces that I have put together, it would seem that Levi would be coming home to be with the woman he has been linked to and his child and marry. Unfortunately, due to the political climate on the island, the Alliance is not welcomed at home, and it has taken Historia to give protection to Jean and Connie’s families to ensure that they are welcome for peace talks. 

You see, dear readers, Mikasa’s heritage may have given us a hidden clue this whole time about why Levi and Historia are where they are. 

1. The Ackerman-Reiss connection. Kenny and Uri became friends by a miracle despite the history of the Reiss family persecuting the Ackerman clan, and despite their rough start, Levi and Historia became close enough to set up an Orphanage, and based on what I have posted here, they seem to have become very close by all evidence. 

2. Great Titan War- The Rumbling was catastrophic with 80% of the human population in the world killed. Things are a total mess outside of Paradis. In all of this, there is no way for the Alliance, including Levi, to get back home. In all of this, he has a child back on the island, just like how the shogun had a child left on the island after the Great Titan War. 

3. Secret Heritage- The child, a little girl, may not know who her true father is. The Jaeger Faction is powerful, and if they find out that the Queen has a child with a traitor who stopped the Rumbling and contributed to wiping out Titan powers, she may as well be killed off, and things in the world could become far, far worse than what they are now. 

...

At this point, you may be scratching your head and frustrated with me and how I can’t just accept that the farmer is the father because Historia is mentioned to be married. Really? Just because she marries the man doesn’t mean he’s the biological father of the child. See above for why Historia may have entered a political marriage with him. After all, he’s a former bully who redeemed himself. He may not be the man she really loves or wants to be with, but he partook in this coverup and still cared for her since the real father is trapped faraway due to the political climate. It’s a real tragedy since this pregnancy was not according to any plan but a complete accident too, so Historia probably had to make some tough decisions. The Jaeger Faction would probably grow suspicious over the puppet Queen, just as much as the MPs, for having a child and not marrying.

Besides, do you really expect me to believe that a man who doesn’t even have a consistent face to count as a character? Image created by @pas-de-deux84​. 

Slightly off topic, but another suspicious thing is that whenever Historia brought up in conversation, it’s always about “Historia and her children”, not “Historia and Jake’s children”. They can’t even name the man? Really? Are they aware of something they aren’t allowed to say out loud? Do they know or think that she got pregnant to save her skin? It’s only been the MPs, a third party, who recount anything about this whole situation directly. 

The royal family on the island has a long history of coverups: the truth about humanity outside the walls, the true king of the Walls, Historia herself at one point. Why is it impossible to believe that Historia has orchestrated a mass coverup for her own and her child’s sake? Again, this is not helped by the fact that we got no real conclusion or answers to her actions. 

And at the end of the manga, we don’t know why Levi is with Onyonkopon, Gabi, and Falco in an unspecified location either. Maybe he’s recovering from his injuries or something in a place where he and the others have been granted immunity for stopping the Rumbling. I highly doubt that it would be realistic that they are traveling the world together for fun three years after a mass genocide happens and world peace is but an idealistic illusion or even opening a tea shop. 

Here’s the best thing somebody else pointed out not related to the ship in the first place: Levi and Historia have the exact same facial expressions. Levi’s is the last one he has in the manga, and Historia’s is from when the pregnancy was revealed. For some context to Levi, to be fair, he is looking up at a plane, which likely reminds him of Hange and his other fallen comrades whom he has given meaning to in their sacrifices. But what exactly is he doing after the Rumbling? We have no idea. Does he have goals? Does he want to get back to his family? 

That’s the frustrating thing for me. Neither of them really had proper depth explicitly given to their final arcs, and neither do they have any moments where they reflect on their actions afterwards. Am I reading too much into this all? I may never know, but it’s the best I can think of. 

...

Now, I want to talk a bit about Chapter 69, the colored chapter that was released with Chapter 139. You know, the chapter where Kenny and Uri reconcile and become friends and also where Levi and Historia have their iconic moments of the punch and becoming the next Ackerman-Reiss pair. Surprisingly, whether these two were meant to be a pair or not, they both had callbacks to moments in Chapter 69. 

Levi is in the same position that Kenny was in when dying against the tree and Kenny gives his whole speech on everyone being a slave to something and how he himself was unfit to be a parent. 

But Levi has “surpassed the father”. Why? Unlike Kenny, he stopped his slavery to being the hero. He gave up on his vow. He gave true meaning to his comrades’ deaths by ending the Rumbling and ending Eren. He may not have his Ackerman strength anymore, but he truly embodied at the end what the Survey Corps stood for. He dedicated all his heart. Oh, and he smiles again.

As for Historia, in Chapter 69, she became the True Queen of the Walls, a member of the real royal family. 

Unfortunately, she has been a puppet queen for some time- until now- when the Jaeger faction has taken over the island, and she must use all her mind, strength, and resources to negotiate peace, or Eldians and the rest of the world are going to fight forever now. 

By the way, Historia isn’t present on the podium when the Jaeger Faction is rallying the support of the crowd. She’s present here, awaiting her old friends to negotiate peace. Tell me what that says about her character.

It’s all these subtle details that just make you wonder. Could Isayama have given us all the answers we need, just in secret? It’s quite the conspiracy if you ask me!

...

Bonus round. I highly recommend reading this post about some features that the child shares with Levi’s side of the Ackerman clan. 

I just love how this one image of Historia being pregnant in the anime with ridiculously long hair makes her resemble Levi’s own mother, Kuchel, who had long hair as well. And Kuchel has dark eyes here.

[thedreadvampy]

like I am not trying to be unreasonable or excessively defensive when I say ‘oh my god shut up about Britishness’ or at least, not to talk the talk without walking the walk

I definitely have had a lot of unlearning to do from those heady far-off Bush administration days where we here in the UK all turbocharged our superiority complex about how America was a pit of fools led by an idiot and that made it not just ok but Noble and Politically Justified to rip the piss out of like. the McDonalds eating Walmart shopping mass media consuming oil chugging school shooting flagwaving white trailer park hyper-Christian anti-abortion racist ignorant American that lived in our heads and Spoke Weird and Thought They Were Real People and ate freedom fries and thought Iraq and Afghanistan were the same country and couldn’t do basic maths and barged around European cities in shorts and sunglasses yelling to each other about how cute it was and thought they were the only people in the world who mattered. and that’s not imo any different to the way American conceptions of Britishness tend to be framed 

(not to say that that image of Americans is a thing of the past At All and it’s something I often notice myself slipping into)

and this was viewed as a moral position, particularly among the hard left, for a lot of the reasons that ragging on Britain is also often seen as a moral stance. America was (and is) powerful and imperialistic, culturally hegemonic, politically far to the right of where Europe tended to see itself. America was the architect of the Iraq War, and a whole string of imperialist invasions before that, and the “special relationship” with America was seen as emblematic of how far right the Labour government had swung. I knew old communists of my dad’s generation who took as a point of deep pride that they wouldn’t interact with American exports and were actively hostile to Americans. America was seen through the lens of Bush (and is now often seen through the lens of Trump). It felt good to shit on America and, by extension, Americans. 

America represented imperialism and racist, exploitative global policy, filtered through a lens of glossy TV and film, stars-and-stripes-forever military glorification, Disney, loud tourists and a whole heap of shitty ideas about Things That Signified Americanness And Were Therefore Bad like

Talking funny

Simplified/differing spelling

Liking different sports

Being fat

Eating weird food

Using unfamiliar idioms

Seeing the world through a very culturally American lens

A lot of class signifiers that don’t exist to the same degree/don’t mean the same thing here (living in trailer parks, shopping at Walmart)

now you may have noticed that these aren’t.......super cool things to rag on? and also that there are a lot of parallels between that and the stuff I get pissy about when people make jokes about Britishness.

because the justification is that This Country Is Bad. It’s a Global Force For Evil. And that is, in both Britain and America’s case, definitely not wrong. Both Britain and America are violently imperial, culturally hegemonic, white supremacist world powers with a strong vested interest in considering themselves the Only Ones Who Are Really Normal People. It’s totally reasonable to hate Britain (I sure do!!!!!!). It’s also totally reasonable to hate America.

What I take issue with is the conflation of hating America with hating Americans. The conflation of hating Britain with hating the British. A country is not its people. A government is not its people. As I’m sure most of us have noticed, governments that fuck over the world are often simultaneously fucking over the poor, marginalised and vulnerable within their own borders (this is something as well that a lot of North Korean, Russian and Chinese people have brought up - that they’re held personally responsible for the shitty things their governments do even though they’re the people those things are targetted at)

That isn’t to say that people in both these countries (and indeed Canada, France, etc) shouldn’t think critically about the ways in which they benefit from their countries’ hegemonic power, or the ways in which they’re complicit in the imperialistic attitudes. But a lot of this mocking, both ways, boils down to

a) your government/country is bad and you should feel ashamed (like ‘you suck because the British Empire was a genocidal monolith’ or ‘Donald Trump just goes to show what America’s really like’) b) your country sucks to live in, haha, more fool you for living in it!!!!!! (Brexit! School shootings!) c) you are Foreign and that’s Weird (often coupled with ‘haha can you believe people in that stupid country do [thing that is generally associated with poverty]? GROSS’) d) you look/sound funny (British people all have bad teeth and are ugly, Americans are all fat and/or have had 20000 tons of plastic surgery and dental work)

and idk I just think perhaps that’s not...productive or good #praxis. like. not everything has to be Good Praxis it can just be a lazy joke about national stereotypes. but it’s not a Strong Moral Stance to hate (white) Brits or (white) Americans (and another thing is: these types of stereotypes very rarely include the racial diversity and multiculturalism of both Britain and America, choosing instead to only bring up non-white Brits/Americans as faceless Victims Of Bigotry). it’s not Good Leftist Praxis and people are, in fact, justified in getting annoyed about it even if they ARE white people from an imperialist country. because it is personal. it’s made personal.

and of course everything I and others have said in the past about classism holds true. in both the American and the British cases, a lot of the most commonly raised stereotypes other than language differences are about class (in that the things framed as gross/weird are overwhelmingly things which are looked down on within the culture because they’re associated with poverty - the Gross British Food, the People of Walmart, the lack of education, the slang, fatness, etc). 

(also don’t get it twisted. a lot of people thought the last time I mentioned how class affects British stereotypes people thought I was making some class reductionist Working Class People Are Exempt From Racism And Benefitting From Imperialism argument which. no. but you’re not criticising racism or imperialism you’re criticising Poverty Food, just like you’re not criticising lack of global political awareness or a culture of rampant neoliberal capitalism when you laugh at Americans for being fat. you’re just shitting on people for things they’re already being shat on for.)

this is obfuscated by the fact that these stereotypes slap together high and low class signifiers at random, but the high class signifiers that get mocked, at least in the American stereotype, are mocked because in a British  context they are low class signifiers. like a lot of what gets mocked in Britain about Americans is the high-capitalist Conspicuous Consumption of the Trump and McMansion types, and the plastic surgery and glow-in-the-dark Hollywood smile. but it’s mocked because it’s, at its heart, seen as gauche and tasteless and Not Classy, whereas the British rich know how to be Tastefully Rich (boke)

like I’m not saying people outside a country shouldn’t criticise that country. both Britain and America deserve to be criticised roundly, not just on a political level but on a societal level. yeah man I do benefit from power and I am very able to slip into cultural supremacist ways of thinking. but ‘har har they talk funny’ isn’t criticism, it’s bigotry. To Be Clear: it may be bigotry but it’s not oppression. It’s not a matter of ‘oh woe the Americans are Bullying Us From A Position Of Power.’ Neither side of this holds hegemonic power over the other, realistically (Americans are not oppressed by Britons for being American; Britons are not oppressed by Americans for being British) But what it is is round after round of the same sneering cultural supremacist oneupmanship that’s characterised the relationships between powerful imperial nations (and particularly between Britain and America) for centuries. we’re both, nationally speaking, desperately pitching the argument that We’re The Good And Civilised Ones and They’re The Stupid Weird Embarrassing Ones.

we’re BOTH weird embarrassing countries with sordid, racist, imperialist political structures. we’re both horrendously shitty nations it’s not a competition about which country is shittier because the answer is always Who Cares They’re Both A Nexus Of Awful Global Consequences.

also nations are not real. we should criticise nations as they exist but people? bully people about something real you cowards. “britishness” or “americanness” is only as real as you make it

[impressivepress]

What Charlie Chaplin Got Right About Satirizing Hitler

The Great Dictator—Charlie Chaplin’s masterful satire of Adolf Hitler—began filming in September 1939, right at the start of World War II. By the time it was released in 1940, the Axis had been formed, and Nazis were already occupying much of France.

The threat was not at all abstract: critic Michael Wood notes that the movie premiered that December, in London, amid German air raids. The following December, of 1941, would yield its own devastating threats from the air—this time on American soil, which would clarify for Americans the realness of this war by bringing it home.

It was, in other words, a strange moment to be making a comedy about Adolf Hitler—even a satire holding him to account, and even one in which Chaplin himself, who was at that point one of the most famous movie stars in the world, famous for playing the ambling, lovable Little Tramp, took on the role of Hitler. In 1940, Germany and the US had yet to become enemies; feathers, it was worried, would be ruffled by a movie like this. But Chaplin was already unwittingly bound up in the era’s iconographies of evil. His likeness, the Little Tramp, with that curt mustache and oddly compact face of his, had already become a visual reference for cartoonists lampooning Hitler in the press. And he was already on the Nazis’ radar: the 1934 Nazi volume The Jews Are Looking At You referred to him as "a disgusting Jewish acrobat." Chaplin wasn’t Jewish. But he was frequently rumored to be. And when he visited Berlin in 1931, he was mobbed by German fans, proving that his popularity could surpass even the growing ideological boundaries of a nascent Nazi Germany—hence their hatred.

Chaplin was aware of all of this—and of the fact that he and Hitler were born only four days apart, in April of 1889, that they had both risen out of poverty, and that they had enough points of biographical comparison, overall, to spook any sane person. Let’s not overstate their similarities: One of these men would go on to make the world laugh, and the other would go on to start a world war and facilitate the Holocaust. Humorously, that split would come to be echoed in The Great Dictator. Chaplin does double duty, playing the movie's two central roles. One, the character of Adenoid Hynkel, is a Hitler spoof by way of a short-tempered and preposterously powerful personality, a dictator of the fictional country Tomainia. And in the opposing corner, Chaplin offers us a variation on his classic Little Tramp, a Jewish barber who saves a high-ranking officer’s life in World War I and, after a plane accident and years of recovery in the hospital, wakes up to the seeds of World War II being sewn in his country.

The Great Dictator is a classic for a reason. It's startling in its depictions of violence, which stand out less for their outright brutality than for how memorably they depict the Nazis’ betrayal of everyday humanity. And it's renowned as well as for its resourceful and original humor, which combines Chaplin at his most incisive and balletic with raucous displays of verbal wit. This was Chaplin’s first sound film; his previous feature, the 1936 masterpiece Modern Times, was by the time of its release considered almost anachronistic for being a silent film in a sound era. Dictator avails itself of this technological progress, making perhaps its most successful bit out of the way Hitler speaks, the melange of rough sounds and brutish insinuations that have long made footage from his rallies as fascinating as they are frightening.

The Great Dictator understands Hitler as a performer, as an orator wielding language like the unifying, galvanizing power that it is. But it also understands him as a psyche. This of course means it’s full of what feel like sophomoric jokes, gags in which Hitler’s insecurities, his thirst for influence, his ideological inconsistencies (an Aryan revolution led by a brunette?) and zealous dependency on loyalty come under fire. It isn’t a psychological portrait, but nor is it so simple as a funhouse treatment of the coming war, all punchline and distortion.

It’s all a bit richer than that, which might be why The Great Dictator is on my mind this week, as we greet the release of Taiki Waititi’sJojo Rabbit, a movie in which Waititi himself plays Adolf Hitler, not quite in the flesh, but rather as imagined by a little Nazi boy who’s fashioned him into an imaginary friend. I’m not crazy about Waititi’s movie, which is less a satire than a vehicle for unchallenged moral goodness in the face of only barely-confronted evil. But it does, like Chaplin’s film, nosedive into the same problems of representation and comedy that have plagued movies since early in Hitler’s reign. Should we satirize genocidal maniacs? Can we laugh at that? And if so, can the line we usually toe between comedic pleasure and moral outrage—a mix that comes easily to comedy, in the best of cases—withstand something so inconceivable a mass atrocity?

That Chaplin’s movie succeeds where Waititi’s fails is a fair enough point, but comparing most comedians’ work to Chaplin’s more often than not results in an unfair fight. What matters are the things we can all still learn from Chaplin’s work, down to the fact that it so completely and unabashedly honors and toys with the public’s sense of who he is. This wouldn’t be nearly as interesting a movie if the Jewish barber hadn’t so readily recalled the Little Tramp. But because of this familiarity, The Great Dictator feels much the way movies like Modern Times did: like a story about the travails of an every-man who’s suddenly, with no preparation, launched headlong into machinery too great, too complex, too utterly beyond him, for it not to result in comic hi-jinks.

That’s the how barber’s first scenes out of the hospital, as beautifully staged and timed by Chaplin, feel: like watching the Little Tramp turn a corner and walk, completely unaware, into a world war. He sees "Jew" written on his barbershop, for example, but because he’s an amnesiac just released from the hospital, he has no idea why it’s there, and starts to wash it away. This is illegal, of course, and when the Nazis try to tell them so, he, thinking they’re run-of-the-mill brutish anti-Semites, douses them with paint and runs away. Much of the humor, at least in the clearly-marked "Ghetto," where the Barber lives, plays out this way: a terrifying game of comic irony in which what the Barber doesn’t know both empowers and threatens to kill him.

The Hitler scenes, by contrast, are a ballet—at times almost literally—of alliances and petty tasks. The highlight must of course be a scene of Hitler alone, having just renewed his faith in his plan to take over the world, dancing with an inflated globe of the planet, bouncing it off his bum, posing like a pin-up on his desk as the globe floats airlessly skyward. You can’t help but laugh. But that laughter doesn’t mute the brooding danger of it. You see the globe, the ease with which he lifts it up, manipulates it, makes a game of it, and realize that this is precisely what a dictator wants. It's a guileless and child-like vision, from his perspective, of his own power.

The Great Dictator’s famous climax finds these two men merging, somewhat, into one. It’s a rousing speech ostensibly delivered by the Jewish barber, who (for reasons best left to the movie to explain) has been confused for Hynkel by the Nazis and is called upon to speak to the masses. And then he opens his mouth—and the man that emerges is Chaplin himself, creeping beyond the boundaries of character, satire, or even the artificial construct of a "movie," as such.

The speech makes a case for humanity in the face of grave evil. "We think too much and feel too little," Chaplin says. "More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness." You’ll recognize this theme—"more than machinery we need humanity"—throughout Chaplin’s work, and it rings especially true here. Chaplin emerges, fully human, as himself, breaking free of the film’s satirical trappings, to deliver one from the heart.

It’s a scene that plays well on its own, as a standalone speech. For a long while, it was hard to find a version online that hadn’t been modified with dramatic "movie speech" music by way of Hans Zimmer. Youtube comments imply a recent upswing in activity, of people finding the speech anew in the Trump era, and that makes sense. But the scene plays even more strangely, more powerfully, in context, where it’s less easily lent to meme-able political messaging, where it has to brush up against everything else in the movie that’s come before.

It’s startling, frankly. The Great Dictator’s tone to this point never feels so earnest. How could it, what with its balletic Hitler and its foreign dictatorships with names like Bacteria. From the vantage of 1940, Chaplin couldn’t quite see where the war would take us, and it remains the case that some of the film plays oddly—but all the more insightfully for it—today. What’s clear from its final moments, to say nothing of much of the rest, is the power in this tension. Insofar as it can sense but not see the future, you could say that The Great Dictator is a film made in a cloud of relative ignorance. Yet look at how much it says, how far it goes. It makes it hard to make excuses for films made since, which often have the benefit of hindsight yet little of substance to say about what they see in the rear view. We know more, much more, about Hitler today than we did in 1940. Why should we let anyone get away with saying less?

~

K. Austin Collins · October 18, 2019.

[johannstutt413]

(requested by anonymous)

“Alright, that’s all for today.” The Doctor stretched in his chair. “Made pretty good time, too.”

“Mmhmm.” Schwarz acknowledged his comment.

He stood up, throwing on his jacket. “You wanna grab a drink? I’ll buy.”

“You’re still trying?” She shook her head. “I won’t say no to a drink.”

“Before you fully agree, though, one condition: you tell me how you got to where you are today. I’ve heard something about you taking out an entire clan, and I want to know how much of what the rumor mill fed me is true.”

Schwarz thought for a moment. “You’ll buy the whole night?”

“The whole night,” he agreed. “Get whatever strikes your fancy, I’ll foot the bill.”

“Alright. You, me, two bottles of good whiskey, and I’ll tell you my story.”

The Doctor nodded. “Sounds like a fair trade to me. To the bar.”

-

“So, yeah...that’s my story.” They were at a table in the bar, several bottles of whiskey in front of them (one half-empty, the others fully drained). “Like I said, it’ll keep you up at night - took awhile for me to get over it, I know.”

“That is a nasty one...I wonder if the old me would’ve batted an eye, though. From what I’ve heard, I’ve been a part of similar events, both the winning and losing sides. Did you get the clean break you’d wanted?”

Schwarz thought for a moment. “Mostly. I don’t have any guilt about what I did, but...I still carry that training, those scars, the pit in my heart covered over with others’ blood and Ceylon. That poor girl - she still thinks I can be saved. Imagine that.”

“She’s not the only one,” the Doctor smirked. “This might be a bit rich coming from me, but I bet there’s still hope for you.”

“You really mean that, Doctor?”

He nodded. “I do. There’s your connection with Ceylon, which you might laugh at me considering, but...honestly, if you were truly heartless, you couldn’t even have forged that bond, and for it to have become this strong over the years since? You still have a sense of right and wrong - a rather precise one, even. Look at Lappland, look at Spectre, look at Skadi; the truly far-gone don’t have an understanding like that. And then, there’s...eh, maybe that’s too far a stretch, even if it matters to me.”

“While we’re in a spilling mood, Doctor,” Schwarz replied, “I’d prefer you do your fair share.”

“Alright, then. Well, Schwarz, the fact that you were willing to come and talk to me like this. I know you go out to drinks with the other mercenaries and whatnot every now and again, but the fact that you were willing to go into this with me, it...it made me happy.”

She shrugged. “I make Ceylon happy as well. Usually by accident.”

“Fair, but...” He was drunk enough he knew he had to be more careful about his choice of words, but also drunk enough for that definition to slip. “Is she attracted to you? Like, romantically?”

“I...I’ve never asked.”

The Doctor smirked. “That’s one big difference, then. I certainly am.”

“Hmm.” Schwarz poured another glass for herself. “Another glass, Doctor?”

“Sure.” He went to grab the bottle, but she still had her hand on it, and they ended up touching as she poured into his glass.

The Doctor pulled his hand back even as she was unfazed. Schwarz set the bottle down and gave him a look. “What is it about me you find attractive?”

“Oh boy, where do I start...” He drained his glass faster than it’d been poured. “Well, let’s be frank - you’re beautiful. I’m sure you’re more than aware of that.”

“...” Dead silence.

The Doctor responded with a disbelieving look. “Surely, someone has told you that by now. Ceylon, the Mayor, some trashy mercenary - I’m not the first person to tell you that your combat outfit leaves very little to the imagination but still leaves me fantasizing, or that your hair shines like silver and your eyes like gold, or that-”

“Doctor.” Schwarz waved her hand to tell him to stop, brightly blushing. “Please.”

“You wanted to know,” he shrugged, grabbing the bottle for himself and pouring another glass.

She sighed. “I didn’t expect you to have so much to say...”

“Have you really not been told?” The Doctor shook his head. “That’s a real shame. Besides, I didn’t even get to the harder stuff.”

“The harder stuff?”

He smirked, leaning forward. “Your faraway expressions as you fight your demons, the ones that remind me of my own at times despite the attached memories being long lost; your glare, that go-to-hell expression that doesn’t really mean malice so much as a warning to keep your distance, because everyone around you gets hurt and everything around you burns; your naturally stoic face that demands someone spend substantial time by your side to read your true emotions, something I wish I was better at...Sorry, I got lost in your eyes again.”

“Again...” Schwarz truly couldn’t believe him. “Is that why you lose your train of thought when talking to me?”

“They strike me to my core, as if they’re baring my entire soul to you...even though they clearly aren’t if you didn’t know all of this already.”

She crossed her arms and set them on the table, resting her chin on them to stare at the now-empty bottle with her ‘stoic face.’ “We’re out of alcohol.”

“I can get us more,” he shrugged. “Unless that was simply an observation?”

“...We’ve probably had enough by now.”

The Doctor nodded. “Much more and I won’t be able to work tomorrow. Can I tell you something else?”

“While we’re on the subject.”

“I’m really trying to not bring up every little thing, I promise,” he blushed. “It’s just...there’s so much about you to love.”

That seemed to be the final straw. “So much to love? Doctor, I am a shell of a person after the life I’ve led; I am a monster, bound to the shadows of the battlefield where I can mete out a life as a professional killer, a bodyguard and contract assassin who found her way to RI because of the person who freed me from my worst servitude in exchange for a lighter-than-deserved sentence. What is there to love about a person-shaped dark patch, hmm?”

“...Do you really think you’re the only monster here?”

“They’re children,” she retorted. “Children, misguided idealists, people with hope and life in their eyes-”

The Doctor’s voice picked up volume. “-Veterans.”

“...Excuse me?”

“Veterans,” he repeated. “Child soldiers, experiments in Originum compatibility gone wrong, revolutionaries, outcasts, vagabonds, warriors who should have been able to put down their swords long before now. There are Operators who have been abused, brainwashed, cut apart and sown back together, betrayed, bought and sold, cast out from their homes, stabbed, backstabbed - and that doesn’t just go for the Infected, like you and me.”

Schwarz had long since fallen silent. “Like you or me?”

“That’s right; at some point, I joined the Infected myself. If all the stories are to be believed, I’ve been a scholar, a tactician, but first and foremost a warlord cruel and unrelenting. I’ve led criminal enterprises, genocides, mass exterminations, and utterly despicable acts of sabotage and treachery in the name of some master I’ve long since forgotten my attachment to. It took losing my memory to start over, but you know what else it did? It left me a shell of a person as well, always minding my manners to not offend someone whose back has had my dagger in it once or a thousand times before, always looking for new tidbits about my past self so I can avoid being the disaster of a man I used to be, always wondering if the Operator I’m hiring on has suffered either at my hand or because of something I did in my past life. Reincarnation like this doesn’t mean my past is forgotten...it simply means I’ve forgotten it. Many of us, including yourself, don’t get that luxury...or that curse.”

“I’d...” She stared at him. “I’d never thought of it that way before.”

The Doctor sighed, standing up and donning his jacket. “I’ll walk you back to Ceylon’s.”

“I can’t let you do that; what if something happens to you on the way back?”

“I’ll say the same right back to you,” he retorted. “You know how I feel; imagine how terrible I will if you get hurt because I got you this deep into the bottles.”

Schwarz sighed. “I guess we’re spending the night together, then.”

“I guess we- what.”

“I can’t let you out of my sight,” she continued, “and you don’t want me out of yours for several reasons, so we’ll just have to spend the night together. I’m assuming your place, because Ceylon might learn something about you it’d be best for her not to figure out.”

The Doctor simply could not process this information properly. “Right, right...my room, then.”

“Let’s be on our way, then. Here - we should help each other stay on our feet.” Schwarz put an arm around his shoulder and pulled his arm around hers, and then they were off. It took some time, thanks to the staggering they were doing, but they made it to his room in one piece.

“Not that I’m ungrateful,” he managed, “but um...what’s happening tonight?”

She blinked, slowly. “You and me, sharing a room.”

“Right.” The Doctor shrugged it off, opening the door.

“Nice place.” Schwarz strolled in, a little shaky but still mostly in control. She collapsed onto his bed. “So.”

Still in the doorway, he steadied himself on the frame. “If you want the bed-”

“I want you in the bed with me.”

“Oh.” The Doctor stumbled forward, turning a fall into a tumble and standing afterwards. “Alright, then.” He shed his shoes and coat (which she had done while watching his display) and joined her.

For a few moments, nothing happened; eventually, she put a hand on his chest and gave him a probing stare. “Well?”

“...I dunno what I’m doing. One thing to dream about it, another-”

“I thought I was hopeless.” Schwarz’s statement wasn’t really a response to him. “I love Ceylon like a sister. Tonight, I want to know if I can love you like a woman.”

He collected himself - which took a moment. “Well, let’s give this a shot, then...”

He told himself he’d stop at a kiss; he was drunk, she was drunk, no guarantee if they’d remember any of what happened tonight afterwards. He told himself that would be enough, regardless of how much he wanted more. Take it slow, take it slow, take it-

Their lips met, and suddenly, the world was moving a thousand miles a minute.

[myfandomrambles]

Dhawan!Master Character Analysis

A look at Confused motivations, externalized anger, performance, self-destruction, boredom, and trauma

Confused Motivations:

Something I find interesting is that The Master’s motivations are not understood by himself. He professes it’s because he is angry that The Doctor is a key part of who he is and the “specialness” being The Timeless child gives her, but this is no way the whole story.

A more complete read of the motivations:

A biological concrete aspect has been added to the vacillations of feeling less than and better than The Doctor causing anger. 

A compulsive need to control The Doctor and make them the same by putting them on the same “level”

Anger at being even more of a tool and creation of the Time Lords and loss of autonomy & control thereof. 

Anger that they hurt The Doctor 

Boredom, apathy, impulse control deficits and general control issues informed by trauma. 

I doubt he is aware of all of these layers, and I believe The Doctor in the story and us as spectators will choose the one they believe is the “real” reason, but it was never just one. The Master flattens these motivations and explains it to The Doctor as almost all disdain for her, and blind rage, both actively in his emotions, and subconsciously to himself. 

We know The Master has been used by the Time Lords their whole life (longer if the child in the flashbacks is Baby!Master) and has their autonomy stripped to be used as a tool of the aristocracy. He is dealing with having the Time Lords who have taken his autonomy directly on a physical level via The Doctor’s DNA. Just like the drums and resurrection during The Time War, we have direct physical meddling by the high council. 

The Master has always felt that The Doctor and he are the same, that she is better than him, and that he is better than her in turn. This vacillating perception of her and their dynamic with each other is something we can see tracing through their relationship. This comes into play where they are used as foils and mirrors to each other. The Doctor Pointing this function of being the same while opposed to each other:

Twelve: “He's the only person that I've ever met who's even remotely like me.”

Bill: “So more than anything you want her to be good?

An interesting way we can see this change how they refer to each other sometimes using the present tense and past tense of the word friend. 

Ten: “A friend, At first” [Ten spends most of the time focused on them being ‘the last’ over a real relationship, but offer a hand]

Thirteen: “The Master was one of my oldest friends. We went very different ways.” [Thirteen is intensely emotional about the master, more so then we have seen her at almost any other point, but shows mostly anger and exhaustion]

Twelve: “Of course she's not dead. She's a friend of mine. I may have fiddled with your wiring a little bit.” [Both Missy and Twelve focus heavily on their friendship and fall heavily on their intimate history]

The Master also changes the description of their relationship 

Missy:“friendship older than your civilization, and infinitely more complex.”

Dhawan!Master: “I'm her best enemy.”

We see how the Fifth Doctor has an almost apathy to The Master, Seven takes the time to give him a proper burial, Ten and Twelve both seek out their respective Masters dreading the loss. The Master also does this being open about wanting attention, playing lower stakes dreams, being truly murderous, and abjectly cruel. The Master's self-perception shits as well; playing god on Gallifrey, making a personal army, putting her on a pedestal, dragging her down, and a suicidal streak. I think this helps illustrate the behaviour throughout the whole season. 

The Doctor and The Master compulsively try and get the other’s attention. The obsession is something pointed out by multiple other characters namely; The Brig, Jo Grant, and The Rani. We can see this in him taking the time to play at being O and in how even when he yells about wanting her dead he also always knows she will live why else would he leave a note for her that would show when she got to Gallifrey. The Master will get none of the sought after catharsis and compulsion to involve The Doctor if she actually died. In their Eiffel Tower confrontation;

Doctor: “When does all this stop for you? The games, the betrayals, the killing?”

Master: “Why would it stop? I mean, how else would I get your attention”

 His involvement this whole season is only about The Doctor, even the side operations of working with the baddie on earth, committing genocide and paling with the CyberMen are all about The Doctor and his need to exert control over both of their lives. 

The Master is angry that The Doctor was hurt. The Master has always had a kind of “Only I can hurt The Doctor” mentality. And considering he knows how it feels to be used and manipulated, I don’t think he wants The Doctor to suffer in that manner by the Time Lords. I don’t think it’s contradictory to want to hurt everyone else and also be angry The Doctor was hurt. Because of the obsessive thoughts around The Doctor, it would alter the thought patterns, The Master is not working based on logic. 

A real empathetic connection to The Doctor is present in the way someone who is in a toxic relationship will have. This goes both ways we can see this in the way they have all of these periods of differing extreme emotions, especially if you look at Simm->Missy->Dhawan. There is love there when they had a healthier relationship back when they were friends/crushes, but over time it’s been compromised through each hurting each other (whatever you pick/know of canon this still holds true) becoming toxic for most incarnations. I also don’t think this hot empathy for The Doctor would contradict not even having a cold empathy for the innocents slaughtered on Gallifrey (The at least 2.4 7 billion kids did nothing wrong) 

In general, I believe after going fishing in the matrix either on a whim or not the act of burning Gallifrey was likely an impulsive act. But after this, I think planning came into it, along with building the blocks for performance. He can formulate an elaborate game to play with The Doctor, The Matrix, live on earth, and The Cybermen to stave off boredom and attempt to integrate trauma and it will fulfil his rumination on The Doctor and the high council. I’ll talk more about trauma and boredom later. 

Externalized & Cyclical Anger:

When you are angry there are generally two ways people display these emotions: they put their pain into their own body and mind or put it on everyone else. Anger is healthy and The Master has every right to be angry at the high Gallifreyans who have treated him and his best friend like garbage from the very start. 

Dhawan!Master is a perfect example of someone taking their own pain and putting on everyone else. He is angry at so many things, some justified, some not but is dealing with this through externalization. He displays self-destructive anger but goes about the self-harm/suicidality by causing as much damage outwards as possible. A common Master trait, but very prevalent here, taking his own hurt and making others feel it, a stated goal more than once. 

He took this anger at a set number of people onto the entirety of the Gallifreyan people and stepped up the “flirting” and games he plays with The Doctor to one of the most painful versions they have. We can see The Master and The Doctor’s relationships take many different forms of the years but it has always been grounded in the need for the other's attention and anger from The Master at being left. With these added sources of anger they toss at each other it makes sense that we get different versions of tipping point moments when one of them “wins”. 

Another key here is that The Master shows a long history of serious anger rage that comes out in extreme ways. He suffers outbursts regularly and it’s something that worsens over time but even The Masters who were more in control we still see how anger is an undercurrent. And while The Doctor has a similar undercurrent The Master has this pattern of explosive outbursts that have slowly become more character-defining. 

Part of the cyclical anger is also the fear under there. The Master is afraid of so much, of not being enough, of being left behind, of not being who they thought they were, of dying (historically he has gone to crazy length to live), of continuing to live how he is, of being the worst of him, of being controlled and of the Time Lords. The Master runs from the Time Lords, using them yes, but never staying there. 

The Timeless Child revelation might have acted as a trigger for larger displays of anger, however, I think it’s key to The Master that this anger was there way before now. And it has caused mass suffering before now, this sympathetic grief and anger The Master shows in Timeless Children is compelling but it’s best understood a part of a cycle of outbursts of those emotions severely worsened by this latest re-traumatization. 

Performance:

The Master, like The Doctor, is a huge fan of performance art. This is something that has always been there with costumes, voice changes, dancing, and using this for both just plain fun and as a real tool. On a strictly meta-level, Sacha Dhawan was living for every moment and being able to meet and even surpass Whittaker for screen presence. It was his story almost anytime he was on screen. 

Narratively putting on a show was key, as O he is literally playing a part for The Doctor, and even keeping in contact as this persona. When in the past he is theatrical in his introduction in the science expo, in his character reveal in Ascension of the Cybermen his dialogue starts is:

Master: “Wow! Oh! Ah! That's a good entrance, right? Be afraid, Doctor. Because everything is about to change... forever.”

He literally asks if they liked his entrance, they liked how he presented himself. Then follows this up with this big pronouncement. Begging for the people on screen and us to pay attention to him. Which is generally one of the only moments in this episode that people really remember from the latter 1/2 of the episode. 

The entirety of the interactions with The Doctor on Gallifrey has a semi-planned performative aspect like he has a bit of script in his head and is using the environment as a stage, monologuing for the vast majority of the time. He critiques the performance as much as the substance of the Lone Cyberman’s plan. The body language and mannerisms are also very large and have a dancing aspect to it, or come across as severe and are trying to get a rise out of The Doctor or Cyberium. 

Another aspect to the performance is how he has these set pieces, of bringing her in, then trapping her, playing with the Death Particle and more than anything is the CyberMasters. He introduces them with a big speech, does the march with them and uses them to make a point more than to actually build an army. It’s also important to think he had to make the costumes and had this macabre point of putting the Time Lords into the Cyber Armour. 

The performance is more than anything just begging for attention. The Master loves to blow stuff up, watch the smoke of buildings, and fight with The Doctor, but it’s clear that they tried really hard to impact The Doctor more than anyone else. It’s clawing to be enough for The Doctor, prove himself, to win. Another way this performance is as a mask covering the fact The Master is falling apart. It's the duality of The Master always loved putting on the show but there is desperation undergirding it. We can see how The Master can start to jump in his speech mannerisms become more desperate and this facade of control drips to the anger and fear consuming him. 

By putting on a show, he is in control. He fears to be out of control, and the loss of identity both the Time War and the Timeless Children gave him. Controlling how he acts, how others view him and setting out a roadmap. Control through hurting others, hurting himself, through acting and of course just basic controlling others. 

Self-Destruction:

The Master is highly self-destructive here, something that is connected to a form of “anger in” and the aspects of control we talked about before. When the death particle fails to go off the first time he seems somewhat disappointed it didn’t just end right then:

Dhawan!Master: “Worried, were you? I thought if he was compressed, the Death Particle would activate and all this would be over. I would've been okay with that. I thought it was a nice little gamble. But no, here we are, all still alive.”

He is gambling with his life, I believe this to him would be a second-best ending to finishing the whole game and be face-to-face with The Doctor. More than anything though, it seems he wants to be able to end everything with The Doctor there as well. In this case that is the ultimate control he is seeking, to end the fear, grief, bitterness and pain. Suicidal thoughts don’t quite care if you complete your plan. 

The ultimate version of this plan puts The Doctor in the position of if she wants to save the world she must also join The Master in an act of extreme destruction. The interesting thing is it fails to put The Doctor on his level because instead of an act of anger, control and wanting harm this one is to prevent more death. If she had been able to do it it would have succeeded in making her die as a hero which is the opposite of the stated goal. The Doctor has taken cruel and pointlessly destructive steps before but this wouldn’t have been one of them. The Doctor has also been suicidal before this point, those moments would have been a lot closer to them being the same then this actions as well. 

Outside of the moral quandary, this is actually not that different from a murder-suicide in real life on a psychological level. Murder-suicide is also incidentally a highly male crime, which adds to an interesting pattern of invoking male violence. The Master wants to end his life but if this was the only goal he could have done it a million and one ways and send a note to The Doctor if he just wished her to know. But, like in real life part of it is wanting to control the other person too, he wants to control The Doctor and himself. The Master here has had his self-belief shattered, is depressed himself and feels The Doctor has become something less manageable with all this new information along with Thirteen being one of the least interested in The Master's games. This is interesting as I said before Dhawan!Master is the king of externalizing violence so even when his self-loathing drives him to suicidal urges the need to have The Doctor die with him and end anything that could possibly live on Gallifrey takes precedent. 

I think this is key because, for all the talk for pointing out that he is really suicidal, the murder-suicide aspect is really key to any honest reading of the situation. Because if the death particle plan had worked he would have just committed murder-suicide, even with The Doctor pulling the triggering. This act would have come after a psychological battering via The Matrix (which even if he has a real want for her to know it was done cruelly), threats to her friends, threats of mass violence, giving her the weapon it’s hard to say he wasn’t culpable in the death particle’s usage. Even the first plan would have killed her too. 

He is insistent that he broke her, she has nothing left, her world view is broken he finally brought her down. He needs The Doctor to be in the same headspace as he abjectly lost and searching for something worth living for. To feel understood and to be in control. Personally, I don’t think she has just accepted that none of this hurts and she is great because he gave her “gift of myself” and proved she “contain multitudes”, it feels more like her not wanting to give in to his control, to convince herself, but in the end, it doesn’t matter because he doesn’t win this time, and worse he dies without her. And interestingly she ends up taking the cowards route by making someone else fight her battle, this had nothing to do with ending the Cyber War it was ending a toxic relationship, a demolished culture and a Time War. 

Boredom:

Something I think I've not seen talked about a lot is that if The Master is displaying a show of chronic boredom this is something associated with a lot of people who are violent towards others and themselves. I think we can see this in his agitation, body language, speech patterns and just the sheer amount of what he accomplished during The Timeless Children. This is less visible in him being O as we don’t really know how much he was messing around or doing while in character, but the moment he stops the endless need to do something, anything shows up. 

If you think about it not everything he did is strictly necessary for the goals of destroying Gallifrey and then commit murder-suicide with The Doctor. But along with the need for a show, there is always something to do. And when each aspect of the plan finishes there is some joking and revealing but it also feels like “whoop that's done I'm bored again”. 

He’s compulsively doing something, anything, but as he mentions this isn't actually fully fixing anything. It’s something that really lends itself to both the outward and inward destruction. When nothing will ever calm the anger, nothing will help you regulate, no amount of stimulus can keep your attention, it leads to reckless and damaging behaviour. 

However, the game with The Doctor has to end, because this is the long game and now that we’re here she has to finish it too. The Doctor also has chronic boredom and he knows this, and that The Doctor has as little self-preservation as him. It tracks that when he makes the finale move he would assume The Doctor would be willing to act out too. 

Trauma:

I think it’s very clear this Master is dealing with trauma and we see a lot of signs, many of which I talked about but here is a list:

Agitation

Anger & rage

Chronic Boredom

Compromised empathy 

Compulsive behaviour

Depression

Destructive behaviours & suicidal actions

Dysregulated emotions

Enmeshment with The Doctor 

Identity issues 

Lashing out

Locus of control issues (Blaming everyone else while also needing to own it)

A need for control

Oscillating self-estimation

Preoccupation with those who traumatized them (with the timelords & The Doctor)

Reenacting trauma 

Ruminating thoughts

Sensory integration issues (stimming, could be linked to other conditions)

Trying to put on a show, (A trait associated with trauma linked PDS)

Thoughts of violence

Dysregulation of Emotions and Nervous System: The erratic emotions displayed by The Master overlaid with behaviours that some have identified as looking like stimming point to dysregulation. His feelings and affect jump around and are always at high levels. A point of interest, however, is that From Spyfall to Timeless Children the issue seems to worsen as the ability to put up a facade is gone. Now we know that it wasn’t really that long of a period where he was actively keeping it as we only saw him as O for a short time. But it tracks that after being exiled on earth and then into the Kassavian dimension his dysregulation would worsen. 

Preoccupation With Those who Traumatized Him: It’s so heavy in this story and even throughout the whole story The Master is locked on those who have hurt him, and the trauma thereof. The Master is used as a tool here the same way people manipulate The Doctor via their god and guilt complexes. The entire story is the Master having gone back to Gallifrey to try and enter the Matrix and then spend the whole time destroying Gallifrey and even then he can’t leave. New Who Masters specifically have their whole stories centred around the trauma Gallifrey did to them and their connection with The Doctor was changed by that event. And Dhawan!Master takes no action in this series that doesn’t involve this, even the plan with Kassavian is centred on getting the Doctor’s attention and setting up sending her to Galifrey. 

Replaying Trauma: This is a commonality between the master and The Doctor. They have been reliving the Time War, the same patterns of loss of their friends, being unable to turn off the training to be a soldier. The Doctor is often taking the same actions she did before, sometimes outside of her control, all of which were made during a trauma state or resulted in traumatic experiences. 

The Master replays the behaviours he learned during trauma as The Doctor does, but is a lot more likely to not only replay acts that they did that traumatized others, which The Doctor does too but also can replay what those who traumatized them did. 

The speeches we get from the master in Timeless Children is slightly off version of Rassilon's speech at The End of Time pt 1. 

Master: “Yes, it could! Behold your new CyberMasters, Doctor. All born from you, but led by me. How does that feel? Huh? Now, no time to lose. Don't move. Oh, that's right, you can't. Can you feel a new era dawning, Doctor? For Gallifrey.”

Cybermen: “For Gallifrey!”

Master: “For the Time Lords.”

Cybermen: “For the Time Lords!”

Master: “For the end of the universe itself!”

Cybermen: “For the end of the universe itself!”

Master: “Sweet dreams. This way, soldiers.”

Time Lords: “For Gallifrey!”

Rassilon: “For victory!”

Time Lords: “For victory!”

Rassilon: “For the end of time itself!”

Time Lords: “For the end of time itself!” 

The Master who destroyed Galifrey in the name of something Tecteun, and by extension the other founding fathers of Galifrey, is playing the same game Rassilon did and views himself as a god of Time Lords the same way Rasilon did. We also know The Master isn’t directly quoting them because he was not present when Rasilon made that speech, so this dialogue shows how he is in patterns of trauma. It also is important character and theme-wise because it plays on the ideas of autonomy and how the Master has essentially made himself the destruction and death god to Gaalifry in the way The Doctor was essential in its creation. While he is goading The Doctor to be both creator and destroyer. The Master and The Doctor are in fact these forces, even though I believe the Timeless Child is a victim of abuse and exploitation, but, it’s entirely true that The Doctor and The Master are playing at being gods. Something they have done on other planets before. 

This is also part of replaying trauma in the fact he has taken bodily autonomy and specifically regeneration from Time Lords to use as his own weapons. The CyberMasters are exactly what the worst version of Timeless Children are, complete manipulated weapons with no free will. 

Conclusion:

The story of Dhawan!Master is one that turned hard into both the idea of The Master being in pain themselves but also showing some of the worst cruelty the master has ever done in both their extreme assault of The Doctor and genocide. 

[badbookreviewclub]

Empress Theresa, Chapter 1

(This is a direct transcription of my tweets, so I apologize if it gets choppy at times) DISCLAIMER: Please read the preface before you continue on!  PAGE 1   This is a terrible start to the book. There's nothing here to gain the interest of the reader nor is there anything that could potentially give you a clue to who Theresa is. You get who her parents are, but nothing about her parents (e.g. If they're important people) "I was the Princess in the Sullivan clan of Framingham, Massachusetts because besides being cute I was a whiz in school and had a good disposition." This sentence makes me die inside every time I re-read it. What does it even mean to have a 'good disposition'? This is the first time I've ever read someone describing themselves as having a 'good disposition'. "All the relatives expected great things from me." And then not even a paragraph later it says; "Nobody could have dreamed of what I would do a few years later, and nobody would have believed it if they'd been told." This is a conflicting message here, Theresa. Did they expect great things from you or did nobody expect you to do anything big? "Prime Minister Blair said I'd still be remembered in a million years." Okay, so we know that you're doing something big now, but you just introduced a character who we don't know. At all. What's the context behind all of this? What kind of person is Prime Minister Blair? "Did you catch that?" Yes, I fucking caught that. You literally just said it. "Churchill, Hitler, and Lincoln..." I don't like the way that these are ordered. It's alphabetical, but going in historical context would sound nicer in my opinion. "Lincoln, Hitler, Churchill..." That's not even counting that she just compared herself to being greater than Hitler. There are so many other people who are better that could have been brought up here and not someone who committed mass genocide and traumatized humanity. Directly after that, Charles Martel is brought up in a long paragraph that sounds like someone who just watched a documentary and is eager to share everything they just learned with their friends who could not give less of a shit. It's pointless to have it there and adds nothing. "...but Prime Minister Blair said I'd be remembered for a million years." You said that not even a paragraph ago. I didn't forget, I promise. I may have the attention span of a peanut, but my short-term memory isn't completely dead. Though my last few brain cells may be dead after I finish all 465 pages of this monster. "I was the last person you'd expect to earn this accolade." Contradicting to what you said earlier of all your relatives expecting big things of you. Not to mention, I don't know who you or anyone else is yet Theresa. I can't fucking say if you would be the last person expected "When this story began I was a little girl who didn't have much of a clue about anything." Why not start the story here? It's far better than that big ramble you just had. This is far more interesting than "I'm Theresa, the younger daughter of blah blah blah." "My job as a kid was to figure out what the heck was going on and what to do about it. It's not easy when you're young and everything is brand new." No shit honey. Except the thing is, life is so much easier when you're younger. you don't have to worry about taxes. Or your employer forgetting to mail you your W-2. Or if your employer does mail you your W-2 but your mail-lady delivers it to the wrong house so some random person has your W-2 and social security number now. You don't have to worry about that as a kid. Life as a kid is easy. ide note: The text in this book is fucking huge. Like it was written so children could easily read it. PAGE 2 The way the first paragraph on this page starts out is jarring and throws the reader out of any flow that may have been there before (There wasn't one there before, but I digress). It then is quickly followed by her father making a comment to her about being the captain of her ship, without actually being a quote from him. It would have been more interesting if it was a direct quote from her father rather than just a passive memory with how she phrases it. What is says is, "He said I had to be the captain of my ship, but sometimes the seas would be rough." Which is poor phrasing in my opinion. There are far better ways to phrase this that give some more character and depth to the relationship between Theresa and her father. A better way to phrase it would be; "He said 'You have to be the captain of your own ship. Sometimes the seas will be rough, but you need to keep pushing through it until you find smooth seas again.'" However, it's not phrased like this or anything remotely close to this. It's then followed very quickly by saying "I had to learn all I could about the world." How does this relate to what your father told you in any way shape or form? I am so confused and feel like what your father told you was completely disregarded or misinterpreted. "I wondered why should I be worrying about it in the fourth grade? I'd soon find out." My Grammarly is kicking in and telling me that 'worrying' is used wrong here. This is a direct quote from the book, and I have to agree. Once again, this relates nothing to what was just said. I want to scratch this entire page out so far, but I've refrained from doing so. Then we come to the first paragraph I have completely scribbled out. I hate it so much. It is a shit paragraph in every way humanly possible. It relates nothing to the first sentence and could completely be ignored and taken out of the book without changing anything. “Everybody has pressures. There are two kinds. One is threats to your life and health. I had more than my share of that with a thousand assassins wanting to get me. The other kind is bearing responsibility for other people's lives and welfare. That's really tough if you care...  ...about them. I set new world records in that department. People were sure I'd crack under the pressure, but I didn't. It will take smarter heads than mine to figure out why not." There is so much I want to say about this paragraph that I can't express in words, just guttural, angry screams. I scribbled it out for a reason and that reason still stands true. It is complete and utter shit. Side note: "It will take smarter heads than mine to figure out why not." Thank you for the reassurance that you're a dumb shit, Theresa. I needed it. "I'll be telling my own story which is a good thing because nobody knows it as well as me." We are already all well aware this is an 'autobiography' at this point, Theresa. There's no need for you to tell us that. The fucking point of an autobiography is to tell your own story. More scribbled out sentences about her saying that there's stuff she can't know because she wasn't there. Then she comments on a conversation between Prime Minister Blair (who we still know nothing about) and President Stinson (a new character who we also know nothing about) and how they were talking to each other on the phone. Theresa then assumes that P.M. Blair and President Stinson were talking about how they would stop her if she got out of control. How pig-headed can she get? Not everything is about you. The entire world doesn't revolve around you, bitch. Except, oh wait, in this book, it does! Another scribbled out section I scribbled out so horribly I can barely read it. I will do my best to write it down here so you can suffer with me. "But remember you'll learn things in the same sequence I did. Somebody else telling my story could only say what I did... ... in the world. They couldn't get in my head like you will. You'll see what a horrible, worldwide mess I had to deal with." Ah. I remember why I scribbled it out so badly now. Because it's garbage. Even more so than the first paragraph that I tried to destroy. She's just repeating the fact that this is a fucking autobiography. I've read good autobiographies, where you actually get into the author's mind. So far, this shit isn't it. "My story began quietly with no hint of what was coming." All of that before was pointless. And I will tell you now, most of the details that come after are pointless. This book refuses to be clear and concise, which is a good thing a good majority of the time. The book started terribly and wrote the whole tone for the first few pages, and so far, I'm more upset than when I started. Sidenote #2: After this I'll try to do Chapters in these tweet chains, mentioning (for the most part) the stuff that stands out the most to me. Unless I run into a page that is truly the worst thing ever. The Rest of Chapter 1  Starting on page 3 Starting off strong, I scribbled out the entire first paragraph because it's all terrible. It's Theresa describing her older sister who has absolutely no importance to the story whatsoever and then stroking her own ego by boasting about how... ...she's a whiz in school and her sister isn't. "She's thinking of going to one of the many trade schools in Boston after high school Mom and Dad said I should go to college." These two really don't share any correlation to each other besides being education after highschool. Not to mention, I think Norman, the author, is strongly trying to suggest that trade school isn't nearly as good as university or college when that couldn't be less true. Trade school is just as valid as a university or a college. You gain new skills and can enter a career far... ...quicker than you could at a 4-year university and then some if you're going for a Masters or P.H.d. in your chosen field. Also, I really hate Twitter's character limit. It's fucking stupid and makes these reviews hard as hell to write out. Theresa drags things out more, shares a story that seems currently irrelevant about her mother seeing a fox that came and sat in front of her six months before she was born. (Keep this in mind. Six months before Theresa was born). Theresa even says that this strange... ...event seemed unimportant and that her parents forgot about it for 18 years. Fuck, if something like that happened to me, I'd forget about it too. I certainly wouldn't remember it 18 years later. I can barely remember what I had for breakfast last week. And then more than halfway down the page, Norman finally starts the fucking story. Theresa's doing some summer reading for school when she sees a fox walking along the edge of the woods. The fox ducks into the woods before walking back out, which is completely... ... irrelevant and yet for some reason, Norman felt it was important to include despite the fact it adds nothing and just feels like lazy writing and editing. Speaking of editing, I am dead convinced that Norman didn't have an editor for this book or even look over a chapter... ...after he wrote it. "In an instant, faster than you could blink an eye, a softball sized white light emerged from the fox and went straight into my stomach." Besides being poorly written, keep in mind the fact that she just said it was in the blink of an eye. Theresa goes inside and has a pointless as fuck conversation with her older sister about seeing the fox. Rather than like any rational person who might glance outside to look because apparently seeing "Foxes in the daylight never happens" as Norman puts it, she just says that... ... the fox won't hurt her before going back to the living room never to be mentioned again for another 12 pages or so. Theresa assumes that because she hasn't eaten yet she's hallucinating or having a vivid daydream, so she goes to eat and we get an unnecessary description of... ..what she makes. We also get this gem of a line; "At age ten I was already conscious of my weight and tried to stay skinny." There is so much wrong with this that I can't even put it into words. So. So. So much. Specifically the 'at age ten' part too. More weird phrasing and poor writing later and Theresa determines that yes, it must have been that she hadn't eaten anything because after eating she feels less worried about it. Then there's a HUGE fucking heat spike according to Norman. Enough so that the firemen have to get involved to see what the fuck is up. Theresa somehow has this meta-knowledge that this has to do with the white light that jumped into her stomach. Long story short, someone called the firemen because the heat spiked up so massively and they thought it might be a fire without going outside or looking around to see if it actually was a fire. We get an absurdly long and very dull section about how the firemen started poking around trying to figure out if it was underground or not, which is completely unnecessary and adds nothing to the story in my opinion. I have scribbled it all out because it's all shit. Then we get another fucking gem that Norman uses a total of one time and never brings up ever again. It gave me an idea that would have made this book far more interesting than it ended up being, but it's never mentioned again. Its sole purpose for existing was to give Norman... ... an excuse as to why Theresa didn't talk to anyone. "My Cousin Mary was diagnosed a schizophrenic and the whole Sullivan clan was biting their nails waiting for the gene to show up in some other family member. It wasn't going to be me! I resolved to never tell anybody... ... Not even my parents would know. They'd think I was ill like Cousin Mary. I didn't need it." This alone caused me so much anger I put down the book and didn't pick it up again for a good couple of hours. I honestly don't feel like I need to explain why this is so terrible. But as for the idea it gave me, the book could be far better if it turned out that Theresa was schizophrenic. That this was all a hallucination. It would explain a lot of her actions later on in the book, especially when she experiences extreme paranoia. Well, Norman doesn't call it paranoia. It's just Theresa being 'super smart and know just what's up'. We learn shortly after that there are government officials who turned up to watch 'someone' (spoilers: It's Theresa). Somehow everyone knows they're officials despite... ... never approaching them and instead trusting the word of a neighbor who said the police approached them, were shown badges by these officials, and then the police left them alone afterward. Theresa somehow knows that these people are here to watch her and for some reason... ... she calls the operator to see if they're spying on her or have her phones tapped. I guess this is just supposed to be common knowledge that if you call the operator and ask them for a number and if there's a delay they then you're being spied on? After all, it's not like the operator is human and they take time to look up numbers and whatnot. But this time around there's not a delay so Theresa concludes that they aren't listening to her. Not sure how this makes sense, but okay. Theresa and her mom decide to go shopping and Theresa spends the entire time thinking that men are following her everywhere. Despite the fact that it's a public space and they're different men. The first instance is at the parking garage, where someone parked close to them... ... and then followed them to the surface. Then they go to a very popular and big brand book store, Barnes and Noble, and Theresa sees a different man who she thinks is watching her as well. She goes to the second floor by herself because I guess her mom is okay with that. When I was ten, my mom wouldn't let me wander over to the next aisle to look at stuff no matter how much I insisted. So you know, not judging her mother's parenting skills, but I'm lowkey judging her mother's parenting skills. After that they go to McDonalds and another man gets in line behind them and leaves around the same time they do. Theresa thinks that this man is also following her. And then, a man who was on the corner started walking in their direction. For some reason, Theresa thinks all... ... these people are spying on her. Which is total bullshit in all honesty and is incredibly paranoid behavior. However, Norman doesn't write it that way and instead writes it as Theresa just knowing what the fuck is up. When she gets home, Theresa calls the operator again and this time, instead of taking half a minute to get the number, the operator takes a minute. Please tell me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty certain that doesn't mean that someone has tapped your phone. Aside from that, I've also started to realize just how much Norman really likes to be as precise as he can be with his numbers and it's super fucking annoying to read and I wish that I didn't have to read it. But I am. Blah, Blah, Blah, more boring stuff and then Theresa goes to a movie story with her mom. She gets 2001: A Space Odyssey and apparently that's super, super fucking important because that's how the officials know that Theresa has an alien inside of her. I don't see the... ... correlation but you know what, maybe it's just me who's a dumb shit and Norman was right all along. Besides that, the movie is also super important because Theresa names that white ball of light that flew into her that she dismissed because she thought she was hungry. However, that's just something Norman seems to have conveniently forgotten right now and Theresa has just accepted the fact that it really did happen. "Mom did most of the grocery shopping on Saturday and I usually went with her because Catherine wandered off with her friends." Someone, please tell me how the first part really relates to the second part because I can't make sense of how your sister not going... ... to hang out with her friends would keep you from going with your mom to go grocery shopping. Especially when there's a seven-year difference between you two. One of the gov't officials approaches Theresa when she's alone in the cereal aisle (once again, judging her mother's skills as a parent), and tells her to call her when she's alone. That seems vaguely pedophilic to me, but that might just be me. Either way, Theresa somehow knows that this woman is working for the officials who are watching her. We get another paragraph of a line; "The woman knew that I knew about my watchers. I had often stared at them. So this woman also knew I had to think she was one of them and I... ... had to be curious enough to talk to her." This is so convoluted and overthought. I hate it in every way shape and form. It's so damn repetitive and gets repeated several times throughout the next few paragraphs. But I digress. Theresa goes home and goes to her room and pulls out her cellphone and calls the woman. We found out her name is Jan and we get the most boring conversation in the history of conversations. Yet for some reason, Norman has the audacity to say that... ... it is the most important interview since Moses came down from the mountains. I don't read the Bible, but as far as I'm aware, Moses was never interviewed after he came down with the 10 commandments. Correct me if I'm wrong. Theresa describes the white ball of light in so much detail that you realize, there's no fucking way she could have been able to see all of it if it was "faster the blink of an eye." So I guess Norman conveniently overlooked that part.1 Theresa says she named the white ball of light HAL from the movie. I don't see why, but she did. More boring as fuck conversation giving us the information we already know. We know that the woman's name is Jan now. Jan tells Theresa that they're always watching and listening... ... to her. After reading this I am under the belief that Jan should never ever be allowed to handle any cases dealing with children ever again because she uses so many fear tactics that would absolutely terrify a child. Jan also tells Theresa that she can't talk to anybody or tell anyone about HAL. I don't know about you all, but when I was younger, and someone told me not to tell anybody about something that involved me, I really wanted to tell someone about that thing. More boring as shit exposition that's poorly written and then we jump forward a few days. This is where my suspicions about Norman loving being super precise with numbers were confirmed. He also goes into way too much detail about gardening and weed pulling. Anyways, this is where we learn that Theresa has an aimbot basically. She woke up with a small orange dot in the center of her vision and automatically assumed it had something to with HAL. But she learns it's an aimbot because she can throw rocks and hit a watering can no... ...matter how far away she is from it. She then says it has no use, but I think Norman means that it has no practical use. It has plenty of uses, just not many can be applied to everyday life. Pretty quickly after Theresa finds out she has an aimbot she wants to play baseball with a neighbor boy so she goes to his house and talks to his mom asking to play with him. Except Norman doesn't write 'his mom', no, Norman writes 'The mother.' The Mother. The one true mother of all mothers. The queen of mothers. The mother that all mothers descended from. She is THE Mother. Aside from calling her 'The Mother' over and over again, Theresa tosses the baseball back and forth and doesn't miss no matter what. She comments constantly on how bad Tommy (the neighbor kid) is at this. Eventually Tommy's dad (referred to as 'The dad')... The Dad. The one true dad. The one Dad to rule them all. The Dad that all Dad's descend from. He is the ultimate Dad. He is THE Dad. ... comes out and takes over for Tommy, playing baseball with Theresa. I don't know why, but this came off the wrong way when I was reading it and just didn't seem right. Norman becomes even more repetitive in his writing, "This was August and it was very hot. "Let's call it quits, Theresa" the father said. "It's getting hot."" More shit I scribbled out because it's fucking horrible. Basically so you don't have to live through the same hell I did, I'll summarize even more. Theresa gets super strength because of HAL. She knows this because she broke a steak sauce bottle white trying to open it... ... because she was eating a steak for lunch. Because ten-year-olds can cook steaks for lunch. When I was ten I could barely fucking cook macaroni and cheese for myself. This is all boring as shit but the super-strength makes Theresa want to go and talk to her priest. Father Richard, who is also referred to as Father Donoughty later on (which make me think of the name Father Dick Doughnut ngl). Anyways, Theresa doesn't think her mother could just ask Father Richard about what she didn't want to talk to her about, thinking that priests... ... are bound to secrecy. I don't think they are but I'm not religious so how the fuck would I know. Anyways, Theresa shows she has super strength and blatantly states that the priest probably thought she was possessed by a demon but after going out to talk to Jan he believes... ... otherwise. And with that conversation between Father Dick Doughnut, we get the worst dialogue of all time. So you can suffer with me this time, I'm typing it all out. "These men don't know everything. Only I do. What did Theresa say?" (Jan) "I'm not at liberty to say." (Father Dick) "It's not the usual stuff?" "It isn't." "It's critical you can tell no one. Theresa will be the first to suffer. People will come after her. They'll kidnap her, kill her, or worse." "Who are you?" "I work for the American government" "How many of you are there?" "Hundreds" "That's a lot of people." "Do you understand how important this is?" “I'm beginning to." First of all, boring as fuck. Second, what is worse than being killed? You're fucking dead. I don't think much can actually top that. Third, I don't know if he's asking how many are watching Theresa or how many are working for the gov't. Either way, stupid question. After that absolutely immersive conversation, Father Dick Doughnut says he needs to call the cardinal to have them come watch Theresa. This seems really extreme in my opinion. As far as I was aware, a cardinal has far more to take care of than one little girl... ...at one church in a town that I don't think is that big. Even a bishop probably wouldn't spend their time focusing on that and they're two steps down from a cardinal. But no, Theresa is just too fucking important. Why not just have the Pope get involved now? Or is that... ...too much for you to handle Norman? Ugh. This entire chapter just fucking sucks and it's only the first chapter. Blah, Blah, Blah, Theresa's story about an alien being inside of her is confirmed because Jan said so and she works for the 'government'. Then we get a huge fucking jump over her fifth-grade year where Theresa gets to jump from fifth grade to seventh grade because her hair started to grow in thick thanks to HAL. Apparently, this is a sign of her 'emotional maturity'. I don't see the correlation. At all. At the very end of the chapter Theresa makes the claim that there are "four hundred" people watching her and that's how many people it takes to watch someone 24/7 without being caught. That seems like bullshit to me. In fact, that seems like the fastest way to get caught. It takes maybe 4 to 8 people at most in my opinion to watch someone day and night. But no. Theresa is just too fucking important for only 4-8 people. She needs 400. I forgot to mention earlier, but only the high ranking officials know about why Theresa is being watched. As far as I'm aware, there are only about 20 high ranking officials who know why Theresa is being watched. That leaves 380 people who have no fucking clue just what the hell is going on or why they're watching an 11-year-old girl. That's absolutely absurd. Something I forgot to mention earlier is that Jan claims something came from space 7 years ago and they lost track of it. She assumes that thing is HAL. Keep that in mind 7 years ago. But the fox that Theresa's mother saw was almost 11 years ago. And the fox is what gave... ... Theresa that ball of light. Norman loves to be precise with numbers, but he can't even keep his own fucking storyline straight. This book is hell. But I will keep reading because I apparently love to torture myself.

[raisingsupergirl]

A Straight, White, Midwestern Male’s Super-Official Stance Regarding ALM Vs BLM. Come At Me.

I participated in a rousing Facebook conversation the other day. And, for once, I actually stayed out of trouble. I took time to see all points of view and tried to keep the other heated participants civil. Basically, I played moderator and tried to keep most of my opinions out of it. That is, until the very end when one of my friends forcibly pulled my opinions out of me…

Black lives matter (notice the lack of capitalization). I believe the overwhelming majority of our country would agree with this when asked point blank. All lives matter. Again, no capitalization, and no argument from most Americans. But if you capitalize the second and third words in either of those statements, you'd better be prepared to defend yourself (philosophically and physically, unfortunately). Why? Because they're not just statements, anymore. They're movements. They're organizations made up of thousands of people, all with their own ideas, motivations, goals, temperaments, and limits. And that fact right there is why I thought I had stayed out of the conversation, thus far. I mean, how could I take a side if both sides had dirty hands? To put it another way, how could I vote for either candidate if both had cabinet members who had murdered people? Especially when I didn't have to vote for either one because I was (in my mind) doing a better job of spreading love and promoting equality in my own way than I ever could have by aligning myself with either group? And that was my response when my friend called me out and asked my real thoughts on the subject. And as I said, I whole-heartedly believed that those were my reasons for not taking a side. Turns out, there was another reason.

Does anyone remember the Congolese genocide in the late 90s and early 2000s? It was sparked by (among other things) the death of Rwanda's president. Since then, the Democratic Republic of Congo has reported somewhere around 6 million violence-related deaths. Any mention of the DRC still brings to my mind pictures of mass graves and orphaned children with amputated arms. It's the closest thing to hell on earth that I can imagine. And let me tell you, DRC lives matter.

Ouch. I felt the BLM judgment straight through my computer. Yes, I'm aware that saying any other lives matter right now effectively belittles the BLM's efforts. But you jumped to conclusions! What I was going to say was this: The atrocities that happened (and are still happening) in the DRC cannot be ignored. It's that kind of malignancy that can spread and destroy the world. And even if it remained contained, the very idea that it's allowed to perpetuate crushes even the most hopeful spirits. And yet… I did not and have not donated a single dollar toward improving that situation, and I've never made a single public proclamation (until now) voicing my opposition to said atrocities. Why?  Well, that's the question of the hour, isn't it?

First off, my family does make some charitable donations ("adoption" of a wonderful young African man, tithing to our local church, random monetary gifts and acts of service, yada, yada), but not enough. Not nearly enough. But it's not because we don't care (I like to think my wife and I have big hearts and that our children take after us).  It's that… wait for it…

We don't have the bandwidth. Yep, lamest excuse ever, I know. But it's true! Consider this. For the past month or two, thanks to corona and quarantine, the majority of US citizens have had more free time than normal (ranging from a little more to a LOT more) to sit and think and research and converse with other people, but I haven't (and yes, I'm just going to speak for myself here, but my wife is in the same boat, though her specifics are different). I've worked 40 hours per week at my normal day job (I'm a physical therapist, which requires pouring into hurting people all day long) every single week. I've also put in another 10-20 hours per week editing an anthology that's raising money to support a friend in need. And then there's the 10 hours per week for my publishing company, which supports authors and people in need in countless ways. Add to that my time with the benevolent Freemasons, the church worship team, and, oh yeah, my family, and, well, my life is pretty full. And I'm not just talking about hours in the day. I'm talking about thoughts, emotions, and overall energy. Yes, I have an hour or so at the end of most nights that I could dedicate to some deeply important cause. But that doesn't mean I have the mental and emotional capacity to do so. Maybe I'm weak-willed. Maybe I'm lazy. I don't know. But when it comes down to it, I can only pour myself into a certain amount of causes.

"But choosing a side doesn't take any energy at all!" Oh, you. Have you ever met me (though judging someone doesn't require actually knowing them these days)? If you have, you probably know that I'm never going to make a decision without knowing all (or most) of the facts first. To do so would be imprudent, at best. And because I haven't had the time and energy to fully research the complexities of the current civil rights conflicts in our country, I can't, with good conscience, align myself with BLM or ALM. And a part of me believes that even if I did the adequate research, I still wouldn't make that hard and fast affiliation because, as I said, I believe that my own efforts to affect positive change in our nation/world would be hindered by taking up the battle cry of either organization. But that belief doesn't matter because it doesn't change the reality: I've committed to changing the world for the better in the ways that I'm passionate about, and, at least for now, my cup overfloweth.

I know this explanation isn't satisfying. I know you believe I should choose a side. I know you believe that by saying nothing, I'm saying that I don't care about the cause. But what about my amazing friend in need, the one for whom I dedicate 10-20 hours per week editing a charitable anthology? Do you care about her? Well then, show it by donating money to support her. What about the DRC atrocities? Do you care about them? Then spend 20 hours this week spreading awareness and practical ways to help. What's that? You can't because you're too busy fighting for civil rights in our country? Dude, that's amazing! What a worthy cause! I wish I had the bandwidth to educate myself on that topic and fight on that front, as well! I mean, I know you care about the things I care about. I know you don't think black lives matter more than the lives I'm trying to save (though many of the lives I'm pouring into do happen to be black…). It's a shame we don't all have time to support every worthy cause. It's a shame our busy schedules force us to generalize and simplify incredibly complex topics. It's a shame that our world is so big and diverse that it's impossible for our little, human eyes to fully see and understand the importance of every topic. It's a shame that I, specifically, am not a better man—less selfish, less arrogant, more productive, more altruistic. But we work with what we've got, ya? And just because I've got passions for one worthy thing doesn't mean I don't support your passions for another worthy thing. Just because I don't wear your band's t-shirts doesn't mean I don't listen to the CDs (yes, I still listen to CDs).

So there you have it: My super-official stance regarding ALM vs BLM, my reasoning, my excuses, and my resignations. You don't have to support them. You don't have to agree with them. You don't have to like them. But the second you tell me I'm wrong for believing the way I do and for changing the world in the way that I do, well, then we're done. Adios, muchacho. In the meantime, keep fighting the good fight on as many fronts as you can manage, and I'll do the same. And with any luck, we’ll leave the earth a better place than when we started.