I love being fully unaware of YouTuber drama and which channels are "popular." My first reaction at the start of that section was "who the hell is James Somerton"
Pariah Dark paused, slowly looking the old (by human standards) butler up and down before slowly sheathing his sword and crossing his arms. He looked the butler up and down once more, before glancing at the mansion and back at him.
Hm.
Hm.
"May I come in?" The king asked calmly, voice kept carefully lower than he would usually speak with. He was aware that his normal tone of voice was 'loud' in human standards. The butler stared at him for a moment, before slowly stepping to the side. "Of course, sir. Though I am certain I have not yet gotten your name."
He pushed his foot forward, soon passing through the threshold as fire wrapped around his body as he shrunk. Armor being exchanged for more 'comfortable' clothing besides his cape as he stepped through the doorway and grunted. "You may refer to me as War."
The butler nodded, not batting an eye as the sudden shift in clothing or size. "You came at quite the convenient time. Would you like to join us for dinner, sir War?"
Him?
Eat mortal food?
Perposterous.
"If you would have me and it's no further effort on your part, I could make such an arrangement." He fell in step easily behind the butler, hands folding behind his back in a similar if not a bit more extra way as his cape and hair swayed behind him with his every step.
"I believe I can arrange something to your liking," There was a sliver of mischief in the butler's tone as he led the king to what he assumed to be the dining room. "So far, all of my guests had only good things to say about my hospitality. I do so hope you're among them as well, words of praise from one of your station is quite hard to come by."
"I trust that your hospitality be nothing but kind." The king said, coming to a stop at a door the butler soon held open.
"Please, make yourself comfortable while I go inform those who will join you and make something more..." There was a slight twinkle in the butler's eyes. "Attuned, to your pallet."
The king chuckled. "I look forward to it." Then stepped inside.
Hi! this is kinda an art request if u dont mind. And it's angst related, can you draw like where wanda and cosmo obvs have seen for a while how (human) timmy has been treated by his real parents. I just want to see like the "last straw" which lead Cosmo and Wanda wanting them to make Timmy as their own. (IM HAPPY THAT TIMMY HAS A FAMILY THAT LOVES AND CARES FOR HIM)
The "Last Straw"?
Cosmo and Wanda have seen humans at their best. They've seen humans at their worst. They've seen anything and everything that they've gone numb and used to what humans get up to.
But nothing's shaken them quite like Timmy's case did. Nothing has ever made a Fairy feel such strong human emotions than what Timmy made them feel, on that one particular night.
The thing that broke Cosmo and Wanda was Timmy himself.
I guess this might be why the UK seemed to go so antisemitic so quickly
I'm researching the 1947 pogroms in the UK. (Actually, I'm researching all the pogroms and massacres of Jews in the past 200 years. Which today led me to discover that there were pogroms in the UK in 1947.)
From an article on "The Postwar Revival of British Fascism," all emphasis mine:
Given the rising antisemitism and widespread ignorance about Zionism [in the UK in 1947], fascists were easily able to conflate Zionist paramilitary attacks with Judaism in their speeches, meaning British Jews came to be seen as complicit in violence in Palestine.
Bertrand Duke Pile, a key member of Hamm’s League, informed a cheering crowd that “the Jews have no right to Palestine and the Jews have no right to the power which they hold in this country of ours.” Denouncing Zionism as a way to introduce a wider domestic antisemitic stance was common to many speakers at fascist events and rallies. Fascists hid their ideology and ideological antisemitism behind the rhetorical facade of preaching against paramilitary violence in Palestine.
One of the league’s speakers called for retribution against “the Jews” for the death of British soldiers in Palestine. This was, he told his audience, hardly an antisemitic expression. “Is it antisemitism to denounce the murderers of your own flesh and blood in Palestine?” he asked his audience. Many audience members, fascist or not, may well have felt the speaker had a point.
...[The photo of two British sergeants hanged by the Irgun in retaliation for the Brits hanging three of their members] promptly made numerous appearances at fascist meetings, often attached to the speaker’s platform. In at least one meeting, several British soldiers on leave from serving in Palestine attended Hamm’s speech, giving further legitimacy to his remarks. And with soldiers and policemen in Palestine showing increasing signs of overt antisemitism as a result of their experiences, the director of public prosecutions warned that the fascists might receive a steady stream of new recruits.
MI5, the U.K. domestic security service, noted with some alarm that “as a general rule, the crowd is now sympathetic and even spontaneously enthusiastic.” Opposition, it was noted in the same Home Office Bulletin of 1947, “is only met when there is an organized group of Jews or Communists in the audience.”
The major opposition came from the 43 Group, formed by the British-Jewish ex-paratrooper Gerry Flamberg and his friends in September 1946 to fight the fascists using the only language they felt fascists understood — violence.
The group disrupted fascist meetings for two purposes: to get them shut down by the police for disorder, and to discourage attendance in the future by doling out beatings with fists and blunt instruments. By the summer of 1947, the group had around 500 active members who took part in such activities. Among these was a young hairdresser by the name of Vidal Sassoon, who would often turn up armed with his hairdressing scissors.
The 43 Group had considerable success with these actions, but public anger was spreading faster than they could counter the hate that accompanied it. The deaths of Martin and Paice had touched a nerve with the populace.
On Aug. 1, 1947, the beginning of the bank holiday weekend and two days after the deaths of the sergeants, anti-Jewish rioting began in Liverpool. The violence lasted for five days. Across the country, the scene was repeated: London, Manchester, Hull, Brighton and Glasgow all saw widespread violence. Isolated instances were also recorded in Plymouth, Birmingham, Cardiff, Swansea, Newcastle and Davenport.
Elsewhere, antisemitic graffiti and threatening phone calls to Jewish places of worship stood in for physical violence. Jewish-owned shops had their windows smashed, Jewish homes were targeted, an attempt was made to burn down Liverpool Crown Street Synagogue while a wooden synagogue in Glasgow was set alight.
In a handful of cases, individuals were personally intimidated or assaulted. A Jewish man was threatened with a pistol in Northampton and an empty mine was placed in a Jewish-owned tailor shop in Davenport.
And an important addendum:
I've read a whole bunch of articles about the pogroms in Liverpool, Manchester, Salford, Eccles, Glasgow, etc.
Not one of them has mentioned that the Irgun, though clearly a terrorist group, was formed in response to 18 years of openly antisemitic terrorism, including multiple incredibly violent massacres. Or that it consistently acted in response to the murders of Jewish civilians, not on the offensive. Or that at this point, militant Arab Nationalist groups with volunteers and arms from the Arab League countries had been attacking Jewish and mixed Arab-Jewish neighborhoods for months.
I just think the "Jewish militants had been attacking the British occupiers" angle is incredibly Anglocentric.
Yeah, they were attacking the British occupiers. But also, that's barely the tip of the iceberg.
Everyone involved hated the Brits at this point. If only al-Husseini and his ilk had hated the Brits more than they hated the Jews, Britain could at least have united them by giving them a common enemy.
I love the fact that the Silvermane Guards are essentially just a very devoted "We Love Gepard Landau" fanclub, and I desperately need for all of them to get into ship wars about it behind their Captain's back. The soldiers are all split into several factions:
Some of them ship him with Sampo 🛡💣 (enemies to lovers/hateship enjoyers; this does not necessarily mean they like Sampo- in fact it's more like most of them want to sic their Captain on him skzjsmdm)
Some of them ship him with Bronya 👑🛡 (knight and princess trope enjoyers and also a sorta-kinda "that is our mom and dad" type of deal; this faction gets riled up and ridiculously hypes Gepard up to Bronya every time she comes down to the frontlines mskdkxmd)
Some of them ship him with the trailblazer 🛡💫 (the smallest and newest faction, but steadily gaining!)
Some of them ship him with Pela ❄🛡 (workplace romance enjoyers; Gepard once charged out into the Fragmentum alone to save Pela from an expedition gone horribly wrong, and when this faction saw Gepard carrying Pela back princess style they threw a whole party)
Some of them ship him with Dunn 🛡🗡 (also workplace romance; Dunn is very flattered by this because yeah wrong Landau, but wow, the troops really think he's good enough to woo the Captain, what an honor)
And some of them ship themselves with the Captain 🛡❤ (yumejoshi enjoyers; this faction throws a massive group effort every Valentine's Day and are also all very supportive of each other)
The final faction is an odd one, because they're defined not by who they ship their beloved Captain Gepard with, but rather by who they don't ship him with. Their name is generally shortened to the A.B.S. Group- Anybody BUT Sampo 🚫💣 DKSZJJSMSOZ
So long as the political and economic system remains intact, voter enfranchisement, though perhaps resisted by overt white supremacists, is still welcomed so long as nothing about the overall political arrangement fundamentally changes. The facade of political equality can occur under violent occupation, but liberation cannot be found in the occupier’s ballot box. In the context of settler colonialism voting is the “civic duty” of maintaining our own oppression. It is intrinsically bound to a strategy of extinguishing our cultural identities and autonomy.
[...]
Since we cannot expect those selected to rule in this system to make decisions that benefit our lands and peoples, we have to do it ourselves. Direct action, or the unmediated expression of individual or collective desire, has always been the most effective means by which we change the conditions of our communities.
What do we get out of voting that we cannot directly provide for ourselves and our people? What ways can we organize and make decisions that are in harmony with our diverse lifeways? What ways can the immense amount of material resources and energy focused on persuading people to vote be redirected into services and support that we actually need? What ways can we direct our energy, individually and collectively, into efforts that have immediate impact in our lives and the lives of those around us?
This is not only a moral but a practical position and so we embrace our contradictions. We’re not rallying for a perfect prescription for “decolonization” or a multitude of Indigenous Nationalisms, but for a great undoing of the settler colonial project that comprises the United States of America so that we may restore healthy and just relations with Mother Earth and all her beings. Our tendency is towards autonomous anti-colonial struggles that intervene and attack the critical infrastructure that the U.S. and its institutions rest on. Interestingly enough, these are the areas of our homelands under greatest threat by resource colonialism. This is where the system is most prone to rupture, it’s the fragility of colonial power. Our enemies are only as powerful as the infrastructure that sustains them. The brutal result of forced assimilation is that we know our enemies better than they know themselves. What strategies and actions can we devise to make it impossible for this system to govern on stolen land?
We aren’t advocating for a state-based solution, redwashed European politic, or some other colonial fantasy of “utopia.” In our rejection of the abstraction of settler colonialism, we don’t aim to seize colonial state power but to abolish it.
We seek nothing but total liberation.
Voting Is Not Harm Reduction - An Indigenous Perspective
It's kinda shocking to me how few people seem to know how prevalent the 'my great grandmother was cherokee' myth is and how it's almost never actually true, especially when it comes with things like 'never signed up' or 'fell off the trail' or 'courthouse burned down destorying the documentation' etc etc.
People just don't even seem to know the history like.. when the Trail happened. My great great great grandfather was 2 years old during Removal in 1838, so peoples 'my great grandmother hid in the mountains!' is so clearly wrong. And we have rolls. From before and after removal, rolls done by cherokee nation and others by the government, rolls that were not stored in one random flammable courthouse. It's not difficult to find the actual evidence of ancestry.
And just.. there are lots of ways those family stories get started. It was a practice during the confederacy to claim cherokee ancestry to show one's family had 'deep roots in the south' that they were there before the cherokee were removed. Many people pretended to be cherokee and applied for the Guion-Miller payout just to try to steal money meant for cherokees - 2/3rds of the applicants were denied for having 0 proof of actual cherokee ancestry. [We even see lawyers advertising signing up for the Miller roll just to try to get free money.] And the myth even started in some families in the cherokee land lotteries, where the land stolen from us was raffled off, including the house and everything that was left behind when the cherokees were removed. We have seen people whose families just take these things stolen from the cherokee family and adopt them into their own family story, saying that they were cherokee themselves.
If you had some family story about being cherokee and you wanna have proof one way or the other, check out this Facebook group run by expert cherokee genealogists that do research for free. Just please read the rules fully and respect the researchers. They run thousands of people's ancestries a year and their average is only around 0.7% of lines they run actually end up having true cherokee ancestry.
So, despite some faults, I really enjoyed totk, and on its anniversary I want to say something about it. Other people have said similar things before but it’s really important to me and actually a big part of why the story of totk was meaningful to me, so I want to also say it:
Zelda needed to come back from draconification. The story needed that. It wasn’t lazy and just ignoring “consequences” because (imo) that was the *point*
The point is to feel like there are going to be terrible consequences and then say actually, no. You can come back from this, with the help of other people.
To me at least, that was the theme of the whole story.
If botw was about how the world goes on past loss and grief and starts to heal (how flowers grow in the ruins and the world can be beautiful again, be worth saving, even if it has changed)…then totk was about a more personal kind of healing.
The weight of the world should not be on your shoulders alone…you, alone, should not have to fix everything…you should not have to sacrifice yourself, but when you do, someone will be there to save you from it.
This turned into a really long ramble so:
You (Link) gained so much and now it’s gone. It feels like you’re back to where you started and yet you know you have to do it all again…you were weak and you failed and you’re weaker now…but
You go down to the surface. Monsters swarm across it once again. Other people are fighting them too though. You help, but it’s not just you…
You go to the Rito, the Gorons, the Zora, the Gerudo…just like with the divine beasts, there are friends who help you save each region. But this time, part of them comes along with you when you leave. It’s nice, you realize, the first time one of them protects you from a monster you weren’t prepared for. You’re still weaker than you were before, but someone has your back…
When you go up to the sky you see a strange new dragon there. There’s something about them that feels familiar. You try not to think about it.
You go down to the depths too. It’s terrifying at first. You hate it. You only want to get what you came for and get out of the dark….but slowly, the light grows. You get stronger. The dark feels like a challenge you can face (and someone has your back).
There are spirits down there. You don’t know when they’re from, but some part of you wonders…are these all the people you let die in the Calamity? (You help them find rest from their wandering. The weight on your shoulders feels a little less heavy).
There’s so much gloom. The first few times the sky turns red and hands chase you (a reminder of what you’ve lost, how you failed) you just run. Eventually though, you have to fight. It feels like the (second) worst day of your life again. But you manage to get free of the grasping gloom and stand and fight, as wild and desperate as it is. Beneath the manifestation of your worst fears, there’s another thing to fight, but this time it has a face (a voice in the back of your head says…you know this isn’t all on you and your failure…it’s really Ganon’s fault right?). You get through it.
At every turn in your travels, it seems like something reminds you of Zelda. Her passion, her curiosity, her kindness. You miss her.
At first, the tears you find reassure you. She may be in the past, but she’s safe. She’ll come back somehow…but then you hear the word draconification for the first time. You want to believe she wouldn’t do it but you know her and the fear sits cold inside you. (Zelda is a lot of things. She’s been allowed to be more of them, since she was freed from her hundred year battle, without her father holding her back. But deep down inside her, there’s a vein of self-sacrifice that still runs strong. It’s what saved the world before, after all).
She did it. She really did it. She’s gone from you (from Hyrule) forever, and it’s all your fault. If only you hadn’t failed so utterly in the battle (you can hardly even call it that) under the castle. If only you’d caught her. If only you hadn’t let the sword break. You should have protected her you should have been better it’s all your fault and now she has to live with the consequences, forever. Everything really is on you, you should have been better.
(Zelda POV: you couldn’t call upon Hylia’s power in time, you were too content to let it wither and fade away from you, ready to be free of it. You shouldn’t have. He got hurt, the sword got hurt, it’s your fault…Sonia and Rauru help you channel it again, Sonia helps you learn how to turn back time…but you don’t save her. She dies because you couldn’t save her. Rauru dies not long after. There is no one left to guide you, once again. You could spend years trying to figure it out on your own. But you did that last time. It didn’t work. Self-sacrifice, stepping in front of someone you love, that worked. (You do what you can, to call upon the sages, to help Link in the future, first). And then you swallow the stone. You’ve come a long way, in the past five years, allowing yourself to exist. But in the end, self-sacrifice worked last time. It’ll work this time too.)
You (Link) go down beneath the castle. You were supposed to bring the sages but you didn’t. It’s nice, for someone to have your back. But no one else should get hurt to fix your mistakes.
They follow you anyway. They fight with you, against the hordes, against the greatest enemies you defeated together, along the way. They’ll have your back, even if you don’t think you deserve it.
You fight Ganondorf, and then the demon king, in the hardest battle of your life. You think it’s over and then the demon king decides it’s better to lose himself completely than let you win. You’re exhausted and afraid of yet another battle, but up there in the sky, when you’re falling, the Light Dragon catches you (you wonder why she changed her path to catch you, you wonder if there’s still something of Zelda left in there to save). With her help, you win.
And then you’re in some other realm. The spirits of Sonia and Rauru are there. You remember how the two of them and Zelda channeled such incredible power together. You think about Recall. Turning something back to the memory of what it was before, like Sonia said. You stand with them and you allow yourself to hope. Maybe the Light Dragon can remember the form she took so long ago, the person that she was.
And then you’re falling, and Zelda is falling, but this time you catch her. You catch her. She’s back home with you, finally, finally.
And maybe, one mistake doesn’t have to be the end of the world. You don’t have to be perfect. Sometimes, someone else can stand with you, and it’ll all turn out alright. (You can put the weight of the world on your shoulders, you can sacrifice yourself, but someone will be there to catch you, someone will be there to pull you back to yourself, when all is said and done).
ghost stares at the ceiling, chest heaving in a harsh pant; sweat ice on his clammy flesh and soaked into the sheet he restlessly kicks away.
ears still ringing, his fingertips blindly drift down to trail along his vivisection scar. he half-expects blood to smear in their wake. his own line of solomon, who ordered him split in twain; half of him given to a grieving mother and half left with the grieving to be.
just for both his broken halves to be rejected.
what did it make him that his mother grieved him more than she loved him? that she begged to be relieved of him more adamantly than she begged to receive him? why did his worth spill out with his drawn blood? why was his pain lesser than hers?
his hand flexes, digging into the raised scar like it’ll part beneath his fingertips to plunge into his mangled insides. no one knows the cruelty of reforming the halved; his name, his being, not nearly as important as his body when he was stripped from himself. no one knows the pain of healing and understanding losing pieces of yourself means losing your value along with them.
how many more pieces did he have to lose before he was halved once more? before his very presence incurred grief so strong it was better to be rid of him than cradle his bloodied remains?
did the infant fight himself? did he age always at odds with himself; his halves never truly whole? he hopes he wasn’t, that he was spared the loss of self; the fear that one may be welcomed over the other.
who will he lose when the inevitable comes? when he’s ripped apart again? simon? or ghost? is it better to be cursed with choice just like his mother or live with an aftermath chosen for him? does it matter if in the end, he convinces himself there was nothing of him left to lose?
his head lolls to the side and the wild buck of his chest slows. he watches johnny beside him, his face lax with the rare peace of sleep; his cheek squished against the pillow, his lips pursed as long breaths escape him.
johnny. soap. never torn asunder but two all the same.
he carefully reaches out and ghosts his fingers along the jagged scar on his chin. even in sleep, he presses into his bloodied touch. he’s never fled his half-flesh, never shies away from his gore as it spills unbidden from his cleaved torso. he holds on where his mother let him go; cups his stomach to hold his insides in place and never minds the blood that drips through his fingers.
simon will never let him become his own solomon and cannibalise himself. he will never let him question which half of him has more value; which pieces he can afford to lose before he’s cast aside.
Stobiners don't want all of Robin's decisions to revolve around Steve - Stobiners want Robin to follow her dreams! And to pack Steve up in her carry on as her emotional support Himbo ❤️