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kinkymagnus · 4 years

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Hey I've read a lot of your posts, where Magnus is a trans boy and I like that a lot, but I was wondering if you don't like the canon cis male Magnus? I'd ask you non-anonymously too, but I'm honestly scared of some people's hate messages for a question like this... sorry

long answer long answer lmao

hmgmgmnggg ok so i, hm. ok, i don’t think this was meant in a rude way at all, and i promise im in Education(TM) mode not Kill The Malicious Evil Transphobe(TM) mode like im not, accusing you of anything here, at all

but i do have a few Issues with like, the way this was asked i guess

i will answer your question just--give me a sec, im a little uncomfortable here

also like, ok, i get why you’re sending it anonymously, it’s cool--personally i’ve never seen anyone get hate on behalf of trans magnus headcanons (rather than against them) but i mean, hate can come in all shapes and sizes i guess? and anxiety, so. whatever, it’s fine, i get it

but anyway moving on: first, “canon” cis magnus. my dude... my guy... did at any point magnus say I Am Cisgender or pull out his dick.... like... neither trans or cis magnus is really “canon” just as like, you know, izzy isn’t confirmed straight or bi or pan. we know she likes dudes and personally i think the way she looks at clary indicates she sure do like girls, too, but that doesn’t seem to have been intended so it’s debatable, and that’s basically it.

also, in the context of just like... historical shit, realistically magnus isn’t cis. is he trans in the way i write about (like afab, “pre op”)? no, not necessarily in canon (although he isn’t... not that either i guess--we do see his flat chest, no scars, but HYPOTHETICALLY that could be a glamour, or the scars are magically healed. we know he has an adams apple, but there ways to do that without magic, let alone with magic. so like. i’m just saying.)

but like, he wouldn’t be cis how we understand it either by the simple virtue of being much older than the western gender binary as we know it. even if he was born with a penis and all of that and identified as a Man(TM) And Nothing Else that wouldn’t mean his idea of masculinity/manhood would be the same as ours, or that it wouldn’t at least be shaped by very different factors. so like. even if my version of trans magnus isn’t confirmed canon, cis magnus certainly isn’t either i think. that might be slicing hairs or getting finnicky with language, but it’s how i feel about it.

and just assuming that he’s canonically cis rubs me the wrong way, like, characters aren’t cishet by default, you know? obviously the writers probably weren’t intending to make him trans, and cc certainly wasn’t when she stole his character from dark hunters and made it “her own”, or else there’d be a bunch of transphobic tropes in there, but like, you know, death of the authors, we make sense of canon now. intentions arguably don’t matter, we do with the story what we will, especially when working within it.

again i don’t think you were necessarily being like “well magnus is canonically cis so :/” but it rubs me the wrong way and is something i’ve seen before so like, yeah

secondly, “trans boy” magnus versus “cis male” magnus. why boy, anon. why boy

(god why does “why boy” sound like a bizarre t-shirt slogan or a mbmbam segment--NO, BRAIN. WE ARE ON SERIOUS BUSINESS.)

but seriously tho like the sort of infantilization of trans men is really a thing (seeing them as “soft bois” and “uwu cute boys” and feminine/soft/small/delicate) and like, specifically calling magnus a trans boy versus when he’s cis he’s a “male” (which technically can refer to any age but has those like, Connotations) sits wrong with me. like, magnus isn’t a boy, you know? i mean i get making jokes like “aw my boys <3″ or whatever, but with this it’s not that say memey context AND specifically it concerns a trans man (not to mention him being asian) so like, it feels, yikes? like just. he isn’t a “trans boy”

im sorry i realize it seems like im just like harshly picking apart your answer and i really dont mean to sound like a bitch here but like, again. Education(TM) mode not Anon Hate(TM) mode. just for learning, it’s cool, i’m not angry at you, it’s chill.

to answer your question with the yikes language gently nudged to the trash chute: do i dislike cis magnus?

simple answer: yes.

complicated answer: not really. i already stated why i don’t like Cis(TM) magnus as it feels unrealistic and dumb and also he just doesn’t have cis energy lmao, but if you just mean like... well this isn’t really “cis” but kind of what people mean in this context, AMAB magnus (meaning he was “assigned male at birth” aka has a penis and all that) and he’s canonically gnc so like, he’s “cis” even if his understanding of masculinity might be different than ours and obviously we’ve seen him be gnc and all that.... i don’t really hate that, and objectively, i have no issues with it, but personal taste wise, i basically only read/write trans magnus as you see on my blog now. because i’ve kind of absorbed it as “canon” in my head (fanon, i guess, lmao)

plus, just generally trans magnus is really important to me because like, a) he is #goals i too want to be a muscular gnc hottie, b) he’s relatable and i project all my shit onto him lmao, c) it just feels very validating, in a lot of ways--with the sexual preferences i write about, his insecurities, just the way he looks, and him being trans is just kind of reassuring, you know? also d) i honestly think it fits him/his character/his backstory and he just has the vibes u kno

so basically, Cis(TM) magnus? no-go. cis magnus as in AMAB/identifies as a man full stop even if it’s wibbly wobbly compared to current times and lbr no one is going to really explore that much beyond him being outwardly gnc sometimes? fine, whatever. trans afab magnus still being gnc as hell? yessssssss

ldkgjfgh anyway im glad you like my posts!!! and hopefully ive Inducted Another Into The Trans Magnus Cult (thats a joke, but seriously, im just like,,,,,maam do u have time for ur lord and savior trans magnus?? maam blease)

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caltropspress · 4 years

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CROWD NOISE: The Aesthetics of the Riot

What should the aesthetic response to the riot be? Can there be an aesthetic response to the riot that doesn’t undermine its energy? How can the ephemeral nature of the riot be contained without becoming co-opted? Is it possible? Is it even worth the attempt?

The riot, at its core, is pop. It must be populated enough to qualify as “unrest,” or “bedlam,” or “insurrection,” or “uprising.” An individual can protest alone, but—short of self-immolation—it often takes a crowd to shut down freeways, ransack public offices, interlock arms and beat back the batons at the barricades.

In Equipment for Living, poet Michael Robbins writes, “A pop song is a popular song, one that some ideal ‘everybody’ knows or could know. Its form lends itself to communal participation. Or, stronger, it depends upon the possibility of communal participation for its full effect.”

In this way, the Macarena blaring over the loudspeakers at Yankee Stadium, or “Sweet Caroline” blasting at a wedding, or “Living on a Prayer” playing on the jukebox in a Jersey bar harnesses more people power than “Bulls on Parade” ever could. We can’t bother with applying aesthetic judgment to—what many fair-minded listeners would agree—are such loathsome songs. Recontextualized as shared, communal phenomena, they don’t stand to be scrutinized according to any standard metric for “good” or “bad” music. We need to acknowledge the power of the moments these songs engender, not the songs themselves.

There are exceptions. The aforementioned “Bulls on Parade” certainly functioned in the spirit of the riot when it was performed on a stage outside the Democratic National Convention in 2000 and led to mass arrests. The filming of the music video for “Sleep Now in the Fire” forced the New York Stock Exchange to shutdown. The most recent example is the spontaneous cultural force of Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” at demonstrations.

As reported by NPR, Kendrick’s 2015 “Alright” has become, if not a fixture, then an act of faith at rallies and ruptures in the fight for racial justice. It incants when the police are arresting young, Black boys in Cleveland and when protestors gather outside LAPD headquarters. Where This is what democracy looks like! and Whose streets? Our streets! can lose its luster as the masses are kettled, dispersed, and splintered by the State, We gon’ be alright functions as both palliative and rebel yell.

I’ve heard some say pop music is escapism—the same for ambient. It’s a salve for the post-march sore feet, an Adderall for the after-party. For when you realize you have work in the morning and the revolution hasn’t—despite the thrum you felt hours ago—arrived.

I’ve heard people call pop music a distraction, an opium. Pop music as a blissfully ignorant soundscape for shoppers who rely on mall escalators for their scenic overlooks.

But what if pop music is evidence of a world on the brink of true, unutterable, as-yet-unseen solidarity? Pop music as devotional hymns.

You can hear cops barking dispersal orders through megaphones. Sirens are wailing. There’s the low rumble of crowd noise—a din for the dispossessed. Acapellas of pop music rise from this chaos, like a balm over the shrieks and chaos. A bed for bedlam to rest its battered head on.

Could there be any better form than the acapella for the occasion? Save for the militaristic thumps of drum circles, our voices are what carry us through collective action. Shouts, hollers, and hip hip hoorays. A capella—with its origins “in the manner of the chapel”—raises those hectic voices to the level of saintliness. Voices doing the work of gods.

The echoes that have been added, the calm and comfort of reverb, contribute to a sense of containment. Not in the way the cops kettle crowds of protestors. The containment is in how the effects act to interiorize the ecstatic, open-air uprising. Riots are out there. They are rehearsals for the revolution, as they say. By their very nature, they refuse containment. But on Side A of CELL, Issue 5: ACAPELLA - Riot In Versace—a tape release from PTP—the sounds of insurrection are captured, contained, and packaged into a Norelco case, offered up to the masses.

Hearing Busta Rhymes’ abyss-deep voice sing If you give it to me, I’ll give it to you. I know what you want is like a concussed slumber. His voice is the one you hear when you’re coming to. Maybe you took a tear-gas canister to the temple. Riot In Versace is the Maalox running down your face to counter the agent.

Pop music and protest truly makes for strange bedfellows. Nothing seems to work just right. Always contrived, or a cloak of co-optation, or a conspicuously raised consciousness. We soak in the suggestions of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On only to have Sly Stone raucously respond with There’s A Riot Goin’ On. It’s difficult to take finger-pointing songs serious when—so often—they sell so well. The intent is belied by the result. Songs don’t change the world, but they do earn profitable acclaim.

The slurry of pop vocals sampled on Riot In Versace seems to tease this idea, toy with it sadistically. The first voice we hear that isn’t culled from a field recording of the Ferguson streets is M.I.A.’s. For all her sociopolitical pop (the vocals are from “Borders”) and guerrilla decolonizer imagery, she gave birth to a Lehman brother. The pop/protest conundrum is most apparent in her appearance beside Madonna at the Super Bowl halftime show where she breached her contract by flashing a middle finger whilst lip-syncing—the rebel equivalent of sticking your tongue out at a teacher with her back turned.

The other multi-platinum pop artists who appear on the tape are Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, Mariah Carey, and Madonna. All “edited,” according to self-proclaimed “Editor-in-chief” Geng (employing a decidedly non-musical title on this occasion), so as to foreground the People, the masses: “The youth want a better America but the battle will continue if the people remain unheard."

Geng referring to himself as an editor-in-chief of Riot In Versace signals an awareness about the limits of pop music in an insurrectionary context. The tape is more of a text (a codex) than a record.

The nods to textuality remind me of another text. Where Riot In Versace documents and archives the Ferguson uprising, The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary is a zine that captures Baltimore in the wake of the murder of Freddie Gray. It’s a text worth considering through Nicholas Thoburn’s insights, which he shares in an article titled “Twitter, Book, Riot: Post-Digital Publishing against Race.” Thoburn calls the zine an “experimental, small-press book whose content consists entirely of some 650 screen-grabbed tweets….[a] book [that] courses with crisis.”

Thoburn accurately describes the role text-based documents have played in the concatenating struggle for racial justice, but he also identifies the pitfalls and problematics of giving primacy to the written word over that which is uttered:

…consider the role of Abolitionist tracts, the publishing genre of ‘slave narratives’, or anti-colonial works like Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth in galvanising struggles against racial violence. This is not to suggest that resistance to racism has taken shape through publishing without complication. In slave narratives, for instance, enslaved people sought to ‘represent themselves as “speaking subjects”’ toward ‘destroy[ing] their status as objects, as commodities, within Western culture’ (Gates 1988, 129). But these narratives succeeded, Ronald Judy (1993, 88, 97) argues, only insofar as they confirmed Western modernity’s principle that ‘writing [is] the sole avenue to humanity’. They hence fashioned ‘Negro’ subjectivity on the interdiction and invalidation of the ‘African’, voided of which the achieved subjectivity was ‘nothing so much as an investment in the terms of philosophical reflection: writing.’

The field recordings on Riot In Versace prioritize the voice, not the transcript. The primacy of the voices rebuffs these Western conceptions of “humanity.” It’s reminiscent of how Alan Lomax pointed a microphone at Lead Belly in Angola and implored, Now sing. Lead Belly was singing even without Lomax there to capture it (re-creating Lead Belly’s captivity in another sense, one beyond prison bars). Lead Belly’s voice was taken captive—like a haint—and [o]pressed as 78 rpm vinyl records, generating wealth that would be distributed unequally. It was no fair deal going down.

10.

All this being the case, The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary is a curious item, seeing as how it reproduces authentic voices—albeit filtered through the trappings of social media—onto the printed page. Thoburn writes:

Publishing, then, is at once a significant terrain of black resistance to racial violence and one that is fraught and ill-fitting, such that Cornel West writes, ‘the “ur-text” of black culture is neither a word nor a book, not an architectural monument or a legal brief. Instead, it is a guttural cry and a wrenching moan’ (cited in Wilderson 2010, 109).

Thoburn quotes West who is quoted in Wilderson, all of which is now quoted by me. Case in point: we are x times removed from the immediacy of bodies in the streets. Same goes for the evidence of these extempore “Alright” celebrations. Where do I see them? YouTube and Twitter. That is, social media platforms, which are nominally “social.” Re-watching these moments on the internet might be sufficient for a shot of dopamine, but you’ll still be somewhere the rupture is not. You don’t have your ear to the street, so to speak, to hear the guttural cry.

11.

The tweets that comprise The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary are examples of what we often call screaming into the void, as social media is echo-chamber or hellscape or vacuous pit—take your pick. But when those tweets are aggregated and collated into the pages of a physical book, they gain validity: the cries are heard and documented beyond the living, breathing, ephemeral moment.

12.

Pop music often appears as a polished, manufactured perfection of sound. It’s frequently auto-tuned, edited, punched-in: overproduced. It’s what gives so much pop music its sheen. Despite all these efforts, it’s a decidedly low art, vulgar even. It stands it stark contrast to the epistolary form. Thoburn meditates on the inclusion of that term in the book title: “But it is a surprise indeed to see it [the term ‘epistolary’] naming a contemporary book on uprising, and, given its elevated cultural associations, to find it attached to the ‘low’, commercial term of the ‘teen.’”

The same high/low register play can be found on Riot In Versace, where its title, too, reflects the dichotomy—“riot” representing the low, street politics; “Versace” representing high luxury and corporatization. Thoburn provides a physical description of how Baltimore Uprising further deconstructs the traditional connotations of “epistolary.” The zine, he writes, “is a pocketsize codex, monochrome throughout, with a tape-covered spine, comprising 272 staple-bound pages, and has non-standard dimensions of 11x14x1cm.” He describes the “flimsy paper covers” and how “the degraded monochrome of its photocopies pages convey a feeling that its coherence as a complete and integrated artefact is barely achieved.”

Therefore, the humble, DIY assembly and production of this material book subverts the “classical, eighteenth-century guise” so often associated with the epistolary form.

This isn’t the works of Samuel Richardson.

The book, most simply, amplifies (or signal boosts) the voices of teen rebels—voices which are typically, historically, muted, ignored, censored, or belittled.

13.

Furthermore, Riot In Versace is a document, with all the finalization that term connotes. That particular uprising is over, done with. But is that the case? Thoburn invokes Maurice Blanchot’s claim that “political publishing require[s]…media that [can] prolong [the] ‘arrest of history’, that [can] bear and extend its rupture through their material forms.” This tape from PTP is one such material form. It is an example of “ruptural media” whose “critical adequacy to the uprising resides above all in [its] fragmentary, fleeting, and incomplete nature, in [its] ruination of totalizing, encyclopaedic enclosure.” These pop voices appear and dissipate. They mesh and layer over crowd noise and blaring-cum-bleary sonics. They’re peeled from their instrumental foundations, hovering in a no-man’s land of unruly noise.

14.

Thoburn expresses an appreciation for how the book—like any zine worth the stolen materials it’s constructed from—was originally published free from the authenticating adornments books are known for. There weren’t any credits, and there were no signs of consumerism. No ISBN. No Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data. No bar code.

The absence of interpretative text, editor’s name, and publisher details again plays a role, for Baltimore Uprising in this way blocks the passage readers would otherwise be offered away from the uprising to an anchoring authority or interpretive summation external to its tumult.

In other words, this compilation of tweets from young, Black voices on the ground arrives unfiltered by white institutional power. The same can be said for CELL, Issue 5: ACAPELLA - Riot In Versace—there is little explanation as to the sounds presented, no official production credits, etc. We assume Geng’s credit as “Editor-in-chief” means he’s the human responsible, but there’s a clear attempt to eschew authorship/ownership. (Baltimore Uprising has no official or unofficial author—no names attributed to it at all.) Geng seems to be suggesting he’s merely the arranger of the sounds, unwilling to stake a claim to this autonomous and cacophonous chorus of voices. He’s only functioning in the role of archivist. Much like whoever combed Twitter for the tweets that would comprise the pages of 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary.

15.

The aesthetics of the zine are also a focus for Thoburn. He considers it an “anti-book” (Thoburn is also the author of a book called Anti-Book: On the Art and Politics of Radical Publishing) full of degraded images of screen-grabs—xeroxed to death, martyred for the purpose of reproduction and illicit redistribution. This decision is anathema to traditional publishing and marketability. The book (or anti-book) seems positively gleeful in its form and posture:

The book’s poor-image tweets have a mocking or menacing effect on the perfect image of Twitter’s clean, unifying, and innocuous interface, that visual scene epitomized by the infantilizing baby-blue dove that is Twitter’s corporate logo. They also trouble the value paradigm of Twitter. The tweets have been appropriated, without permission or license, and, in contrast to the adtech economy of social media, the attention they attract in this book has no payoff for commercial data-capture and audience brokerage.

Thoburn also notes the pop culture references scattered throughout the tweets, one of which reads “Told Yall . . .GTA 6: Baltimore Trenches!,” while another reads “This better than the actual Purge Movie” which, again, speak to a communal participation, a shared understanding, a [raised] collective unconscious. As if to say, We played your video games. We watched your films. We listened to your music. Now witness us exemplify what actually matters to us.

16.

Which brings me back, once again, to Riot In Versace.

Like the degraded images in Baltimore Uprising, the pop songs on Riot In Versace are degraded, or at least appear so, as they’ve been buried in the mix under field noise and crowd static. Not to mention the songs have likely been lifted from vinyl, tape, CD, or mp3 recordings—it doesn’t matter which, really. The fact is they weren’t reproduced from the masters, the industry standard. It’s safe to say the makers of the tape also didn’t license these songs or contact publishing companies. To paraphrase Thoburn, CELL, Issue 5: ACAPELLA - Riot In Versace is less a tape about the uprising than of it.

Images:

Interior page image from The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary | Protestors gather outside LAPD headquarters (screenshot) | CELL, Issue 5: ACAPELLA - Riot In Versace cassette | M.I.A. performing at the Super Bowl with Madonna (screenshot) | Robert Johnson’s “Last Fair Deal Gone Down” 78 | Exterior images of The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary courtesy of Nicholas Thoburn | CELL, Issue 5: ACAPELLA - Riot In Versace cassette [2] | Interior image of The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary courtesy of Nicholas Thoburn

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violetren · 7 years

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I’ve got this weird semi formed au that I’ll probably never get around to writing, but enjoy imagining from time to time anyways.

Rough description: Siobhan fought against the Silver Banshee’s influence and after a lot of therapy and experimental medication it was decided she could be let back into the world but under strict probation conditions. Eg living with someone who could physically prevent her from causing havoc.

Basically it is a vague complicated way of making Siobhan and Kara roommates.

It’s hard in the beginning. Siobhan/the banshee is ready to kill Kara at the slightest provocation but knows that’d be game over for her so she just acts really fucking bitchy instead. Kara is a nice person, but Rao be damned if Siobhan doesn’t push her buttons. And really. How nice can people expect her to be when she’s grudgingly living with a woman that wants her dead just to prove that people can change for the better?

But slowly they fall into an equilibrium. Cohabitation giving each of them an understanding and respect for the shit the other goes through each day.

Things get better. Siobhan is never nice but her bitchiness and Kara’s reactions to it become teasing camaraderie. Over their time together they have learned where the lines are and have stopped trying to harm one another by crossing them. If you called them friends they’d both be offended but yeah. They’re friends.

And I have great fun playing around with the unapologetic bitch and the ray of sunshine. Siobhan being exasperated by people pining after Kara or Kara pining after people makes for some great “go fuck the ___ already” type conversations for any and all of my Kara ships. It’s easy enough to adjust the circumstances of their living together to allow for each new prospective relationship that canon/fanon introduces to me.

The reason I’m telling you all of this because I think there are some people out there that’d enjoy my latest little adventure down this rabbit hole.

They’ve been living together for a while now. Siobhan has been doing pretty damn well at not threatening to murder people. Even Kara the main focus of her ire hasn’t had a threat in the past week.

The only times she’s really come close to slipping have been when Kara has had that daxamite around, trying to help him adjust to life on earth. Mon-el was a fuckboy and Siobhan had said as much to his face.

Watching Sunny D stammer out an explanation to the insult when he’d cocked his head in confusion and asked her what it meant still made Siobhan smile even days later. Oddly enough it was made even better by the fact that while Kara had complained about being put in such an awkward position after he’d left, she had never actually disagreed with Siobhan’s observation.

Unfortunately their shared opinion on Mon-el’s status as a fuckboy did nothing to lessen just how involved he became in their daily lives.

He was everywhere.

At the DEO when she went in for her check up/reports, he’d be monopolizing HER boyfriend.

At the one bar in the city where she could get a drink in peace, he’d be trying to hook up with anything or anyone with any vaguely feminine traits. She’d taken great joy in following his targets into the ladies to offhandedly mention he had some alien STD. Whether it was true or not wasn’t her concern but chances were, right?

Worst of all he was in her living space. Pretending to listen to Kara’s advice on adjusting to Earth (which might not have been stellar but was more than Kara had ever received) and then twisting whatever she had been saying into a way to blame Kara for HIS behaviour.

Even Silver Banshee, constantly whispering in the depths of her mind for Kara’s destruction and demise, seemed to consider his existence in their lives too low a tactic to achieve her desired ends.

Siobhan had been doing pretty damn well at keeping her alter ego in line. Damn great if you factored in the fuckboys incessant presence.

But she’s only human. Mostly.

So when she arrives home from a few too many drinks at the bar with Winn and walks in just in time to hear the fuckboy comparing her friend not-friend to Kryptonite? It’s really not her fault when she screams him through a wall and down onto the street.

It takes Kara a second to process the ringing in her ears, and brick dust swirling around her. It takes her another second to realise she wasn’t the one who had gone flying. Siobhan feels those two seconds as if they were eternity, fully expecting Kara to go full Supergirl on her.

Those two seconds pass. And then another two as Kara looks down to the street where Mon-el is slowly sitting up in a daze. Kara is still and quiet in a way Siobhan hasn’t ever seen her the entire time they’ve been living together.

Finally Kara looks at Siobhan, and Siobhan thinks she could never have imagined Sunny D looking so exhausted.

“How are we supposed to explain a man shaped hole in the wall to the landlord Siobhan? Rao. Did you even think about that?” Kara asks, pinching her brow.

Siobhan just blinks in response.

“There’s an open window right next to it! You couldn’t have taken like a half step to the right to aim for it?”

She can’t believe it.

“That’s what you’re worried about?” she asks, a hint of hysteria in her voice. “I just used my evil metahuman powers to throw someone out a window and your complaint is that I didn’t aim for the window!?”

“Do you know how much it’s going to cost to fix that wall?” Kara asks in retort. “How many potstickers I’m not gonna get to order because I had to spend the money on fixing the mess your unemployed ass just made?”

“You’re choosing now to get on my back about not having a job? Have you ever tried getting a job as an ex-supervillain in a city practically owned by the woman you tried to kill?”

“Oh please. You were hardly a super-villain. Villain of the week at best.”

“EXCUSE YOU?!”

They’re still bickering when Alex and J’onn arrive with a DEO TAC team after picking up a signal from Siobhan’s anklet monitor that she had used her powers. They stop just long enough for Kara to tell J’onn that Siobhan doesn’t need to get locked in some DEO blacksite in the middle of nowhere before they continue arguing. The topic of the argument having moved on to whether they should use the repair as an opportunity to repaint the common area, and what colour they should paint it.

The exhaustion Siobhan had seen in Kara seems to have evaporated the longer they’ve been arguing. The normalcy of it rejuvinating her not-friend.

Down in the street Mon-el is still propped up against a lamp post, bleeding from the ears, having been completely ignored by the swarm of agents that had rushed up to Kara’s apartment.

#supergirl #anti-karamel #anti-mon-el #siobhan smythe #kara danvers #silver banshee #siobhan and kara brotp #lil bit cracked #chirping wren #fictions

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justjimedits · 4 years

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“Scott violated Derek’s agency, bodily autonomy and consent because he is a true hero! Scott did it for the greater good, really! Derek took it well”

https://princeescaluswords.tumblr.com/post/190965018335/gee-why-wont-scott-just-submit-to-derek#notes

@liliaeth:

I was going through some older pro-scott posts, and of course a Scott hater had to come on the post to whine about it.

One of the things that hit me, was their claim that they ‘liked Scott in s1, but that in s2 ‘Scott didn’t ask for help’, and ‘helped everyone except for Derek’

And it made me remember that when they say that, what they actually meant was ‘Scott didn’t submit to Derek’

See, in s1, Scott despite Derek’s bad behavior, was desperate enough to accept Derek’s ‘help’, put up with Derek’s abuse, and despite Stiles advising it against him, let Derek ‘train’ him. Which basically came down to letting Derek beat him up in a way that was in no way helpful to actually teaching Scott how to control his shift.

But what these people forget, is that by the end of s1, Derek betrayed Scott. not just in Code Breaker, which if you stretch canon, can be claimed to be for Scott’s own good. (you know if you ignore the lying, manipulation and so on…)

But no, Code Breaker wasn’t the real problem. ‘Co-Captain’ was. Derek went with Stiles to the clinic to find out who’d sent that text to Allison to lure her to the school, and found out that Peter was the alpha.

At that point Derek had a choice, to keep standing up to Peter, but he didn’t.

So when Scott next faced Derek, he was shocked to find out that not only was Peter the Alpha, but to see Derek stand there and side with Peter. To have Derek stand by and do nothing as Peter violated Scott, and forced his memories of the fire into Scott’s mind. And even worse… they then left this half naked sixteen year old boy writhing on the floor after this assault, abandoning him to anyone who might have found him there.

Could you imagine how many fics there would be about that utter horrifying betrayal, if it had happened to Derek? Or hell, to Stiles? Or Isaac?

But because it happened to Scott, most people seem to utterly forget it, and then they wonder why in s2, Scott didn’t trust Derek, and wouldn’t accept him as his Alpha?

And to go back to Codebreaker. I’m saying that the betrayal in Code Breaker wasn’t as bad as the one in Co-Captain, but it came on top of the first one. Especially since it happened after Scott was still willing to save Derek, despite Stiles trying to get in the way of it. Scott risked himself, knowing the Argents were already after him, to go save Derek from them.

And to then find out that either Derek had lied to him about a cure all along, or he really didn’t know it wasn’t a cure, and then took Scott’s only hope of a cure away from him. Either option is just as horrifyingly bad. Yet at no point did Derek try to explain himself, or apologize in anyway..

So then we come to s2.

Derek has betrayed Scott, he has basically made it clear he can’t be trusted in any real way. And on top of that in s201 Gerard makes it clear that he’s throwing out the Code. That he’ll kill any werewolf in town, regardless of age, regardless of how or why they got the bite. Scott knows that Derek heard this threat, since Derek was holding him back from saving that Omega.

And to then find out that, regardless of this clear threat to any werewolf in town, Derek decided to manipulate three other teens into taking the bite, directly risking their lives. (and as we find out later from Boyd, he didn’t fully explain this threat to them) To not even start on Derek’s treatment of Jackson, or Derek’s attempted murder of Lydia.

Yet somehow, all of that, still isn’t seen as reason enough for Scott to not just submit to Derek, and do whatever Derek tells him to? Scott is supposed to just submit to this violent abusive white man, who has done nothing to Scott, but betray him, endanger other kids Scott knows as classmates and make stupid mistake after stupid mistake, with no plan whatsoever to deal with Gerard?

People complain that Scott trusted Theo in 5a, yet based on the information Scott actually had, Theo did more to earn Scott’s trust in 5a, than Derek ever did in s1-s3a.

And this is where fanon becomes the problem. because most fanfics don’t deal with canon Derek; They don’t deal with creepy violent abusive anti-hero Derek of s1 or full on villain Derek of s2. They try and paint him as this sweet stoic guy who meant well, ignoring his actual behavior. And showing more sympathy for the full grown white man, than they do for the Latino teenager who has to put up with Derek’s horrible treatment of him.

Because of this, they also ignore that the easiest solution for Scott, to get rid of both Derek and Gerard, and the threat they both posed to him, would have been to use them against one another.

All Scott had to do, was tell Gerard where Derek was hiding. Simple solution, hand Derek over to Gerard; hell, in Battlefield, Gerard was threatening not just Scott’s Mom, Scott’s best friend, and everyone else on or around the field. And Scott had already been told by Isaac that Boyd and Erica had already run off, so as far as he knew they’d have been safe. All Scott had to do was tell Gerard the location of Derek’s hide out, and send Gerard after Derek.

Scott already knew that the moment Gerard managed to get the bite from Derek, that he’d be taken down.

Easy fix, easy sollution.

But did Scott do so? No. Despite the threat, Scott still refused to give up and/or betray derek.

Because despite everything Derek had done to him and others, Scott still cared about him, and wanted to protect him.

But I guess that doesn’t matter, does it?

@brydeswhale:

I sort of worry about, like, what do these people treat the people in their lives like and how do those people treat them?

We’re talking people who think that a high school kid should just give in to the every whim and demand of an abusive older man, and about people who think said abusive older man shoving a kid’s head into a dashboard is the height of romance.

Something is very wrong here.

@liliaeth:

It becomes especially noticeable when you start looking at the s1 or s2 fixit tags on ao3.

Because in their ‘fix its’ what needs to be fixed, isn’t Derek’s bad behavior.

Derek’s behavior is glossed over, or it’s treated as the right way to treat betas, or ‘Derek is just being a harsh drill sergeant to ‘protect’ his betas’

In their fix its, Scott ‘ happily’ submits to Derek (and then fades into the background, where in their opinion he belongs as one of the Greek chorus of betas who are just there to show how important and leaderly Derek is.)

Their fix its have Scott, and/or Boyd and Erica grovelling to Derek for forgiveness for not just doing what the oh so great white man tells them to. And then utterly ignores their concerns, because Boyd, Scott’s or Erica’s concerns about Derek don’t matter. All that matters is poor woobie Derek’s feelings.

I’ve seen several fics where Melissa makes Scott apologize to Derek and just makes him do what Derek tells him to. And fics like that make me scared of what kind of parents they have. Because if at age 16 my Mom had ever found out that a full grown man treated me the way Derek did Scott, she’d have called the cops on him, and possibly beaten the crap out of him if she wouldn’t have full on killed him herself.

@princeescaluswords:

Some of the blame for the pervasive idea that Scott was unfair to Derek lies with the production itself. The writers and producers thought it was self-evident that Derek had gone full-on villain in Season 2 – that he was one of the people that Scott had to overcome.

It started with the death of Peter at the end of Season 1. That entire scene wasn’t shot as Derek killing his uncle out of necessity or as a way to protect others. Peter was helpless on the ground, and Scott was begging Derek in the background. Derek hesitated in the face of Scott’s begging, but neither did he explain why he couldn’t let Scott do it. There was no urgency. Derek was angry and vengeful, which is what Peter meant when he said “You’ve already decided. I can smell it on you.” It’s an interesting choice of words unless you take them at their connotation – Derek had always intended to kill Peter since Scott’s revelation of Peter’s culpability.

And then there’s the two shots – Derek’s ominous “I’m the Alpha Now” and his wordless biting of Jackson. We’re meant to believe that Derek’s going to be a villain in Season 2. I mean, they even had the Argents lay it out:

Victoria: “What about Scott?”

Chris: “I’m not the only one he has to worry about now.”

In Season 2, Derek doesn’t get any better. He screws up with Isaac in Shape Shifted (2x02). His skeevy seduction of Erica in Ice Pick (2x03). His brutal beating of Scott (including using claws and stepping on his neck) after he sends teenagers to beat up other teenagers in Ice Pick. His abandonment of Jackson when he thinks he’s going to die in Omega (2x01). His shattering Isaac’s bones and his callous pimping of Erica in Abomination (2x04). His mafia-boss impression during the kidnapping of Stiles in Abomination and Jackson in Venomous (2x05). His insistence on killing Lydia and his assault on the McCall house in Venomous. His attempted execution of Jackson in Frenemy (2x06). His embrace of his uncle – AGAIN – after being warned not to. His lying to his pack in both Battlefield (2x11) and Master Plan (2x12).

When Scott said “You might be an alpha, but you’re not mine,” the production believed that it was a comeuppance – a consequence of Derek’s behavior ever since he declared himself alpha. It went hand-in-hand with the theme that being hurt by others doesn’t justify you hurting others, same as with Peter, Deucalion, Gerard, Jennifer, etc. Derek took it well, which is why Derek and Scott were allies in Season 3 and beyond.

The production simply didn’t comprehend how far fandom would go to champion a good-looking white man with a sad backstory. It doesn’t matter that he got Boyd, Erica, and Isaac into a middle of a war they had nothing to do with. It doesn’t matter if Derek was just as brutal and manipulative (only far less successful) than Gerard. All that mattered was that Derek was attractive and that his scenes with Stiles were funny.

And when they say “Scott didn’t care about Derek!” they just ignore all the scenes where Scott tries to talk to Derek – in Episodes 201, 202, 203, 204, and 205. Five straight episodes where Scott tried to get Derek to stop doing this, and five episodes where Derek told Scott to fuck off.

It was all about submission of a hero of color to a white male villain, even as the hero embodied the themes of the show (all life has value and vengeance is pointless) and the villain rejected them.

#submission #not adding anything to it #too tired to think #Teen Wolf discussion

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fughtopia · 7 years

Photo

September 26, 2017

by Paul Street

excerpt

The dutiful “good Black” who knows his place and avoids revolutionary politics while helping whites get by and feel better about themselves is a disturbing Hollywood staple. Examples include movies like The Green Mile (where Michael Clarke Duncan played John Coffey, a massive Black Death Row inmate who miraculously restored the physical and spiritual health of a white prison warden played by Tom Hanks); the “racist fantasy buddy flick” (in the words of Kirsten West-Savali) Driving Miss Daisy ( Morgan Freeman played a dutiful white driver who sassily befriended and boosted the ego of his white lady employer in the Jim Crow South); An Unfinished Life (where Freeman served as the one-man Black life-adjunct to a bitter white rancher played by Robert Redford); The Shawshank Redemption (where Freeman was prison pal, escape partner, and psychological support for a wrongfully convicted white banker played by Tim Robbins); Million Dollar Baby (good old Morgan Freeman as trainer of a white female boxer played by Hillary Swank; and (sharing the same white director as Driving Miss Daisy) Mr. Church (Eddie Murphy is hired by a single white women dying of cancer to raise her little girl and ends up giving the rest of his life to being the narcissistic daughter’s de facto father). As the Black commentator Kirsten West-Savali wrote in a properly biting review of Mr. Church on The Root last year:

“White Hollywood is nothing if not a microcosm of white America, a place where shucking and jiving, bucking and jumping, ‘Yes, suh; no, ma’am’ Negroes are more readily accepted than their revolutionary counterparts. This country has a fetish with subservient black men that translates into adoration on-screen…This is about liberal white fantasies of saving black people from themselves even as white people are served and saved by those very same black people. It is also in keeping with the constant barrage of imagery that reinforces the power dynamic that black people are a perpetual servant class with conditional access to society. Rule No. 1: Appear as nonthreatening as possible. This is what springs from the minds of white creatives far too often—the idea of black men as invisible men used for protection, under no assumptions or expectations of equity.”

Notice the repeated reference to Morgan Freeman in the above filmography. In Lean On Me (1989), Freeman played Joe Clarke, the Black New Jersey high school principal who won white praise by using a baseball bat to whip inner-city Black students into personally responsible shape with the “only language they understand – brute force.” That’s the other side of the coin of obediently serving white masters in the formula for Black success: punching down on lesser and improperly socialized members of your own race. That’s Reverend Jackson ripping on Black inmates while running interference for the mass-incarceration-ist Clintons.

Now Freeman has doubled down on his service to white power by appearing in a short video put out by the preposterous white “liberal,” NeoCon, and neo-McCartrhyite “Committee to Investigate Russia.” In this ridiculous message, Freeman plays along with the Clinton Democrats’ blaming of the racist “Goldwater Girl” Hillary Clinton’s defeat by Donald Trump on “Russian interference,” not her depressing and demobilizing racial, socioeconomic, and imperial conservativism.

Barack Obama and his handlers understood white America’s “good Black, bad Black” distinction very well. They made sure to sell Obama as “Black but not like Jesse.” Obama played by the white-supremacist rules. He callously threw his classically “bad Black” preacher – the angry anti-racist and anti-imperialist pulpit master Rev, Jeremiah Wright – under the bus on his path to power. As president, Obama was careful not to push sensitive white racial buttons. He knew those buttons were already depressed and activated by the simple fact of his technically Black identity. President Obama steered respectfully clear of specifically Black issues and spoke in consistently color-blind words – this while protecting the power and wealth of white Wall Street overlords and advancing the white imperial project around the world, with a special new level of expansion into Black Africa.

Along the way, Obama kept alive the longstanding Black-bourgeois and white-pleasing, neo-Urban League habit of lecturing poor and working-class Blacks (“cousin Pookie” and the rest) on how to be more respectable and white. He hectored Black Americans on their need to think and act in personally responsible and culturally appropriate, Caucasian-comforting ways so that they could avail themselves of all the great “opportunity” supposedly afforded by America’s purportedly color-blind capitalist system – a system that candidate Obama absurdly described in his deeply conservative 2006 campaign book The Audacity of Hope (its title crassly stolen from the forsaken Reverend Wright) as the source of “a prosperity that’s unmatched in human history.”

Back to sports. Behold the hot white ugliness of the openly racist U.S President Donald Trump’s recent statements on the National Football League (NFL). Speaking to the heart of his racist white base in Alabama last week, Trump went off against Black professional football players who have been kneeling during the U.S. National Anthem to protest the nation’s murderous racist police state. Trump also railed against some of the NFL’s mild efforts to curb deadly concussions – this despite the overwhelming evidence that the sport is producing a generation of men with CTE and other brain illnesses:

“Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. He is fired. He’s fired! [Applause]. You know, some owner is going to do that. He’s gonna say ‘that guy disrespects our flag, he’s fired.’ …They’ll be the most popular person in this country….”

“The NFL ratings are down, massively…Because, if you hit too hard: Fifteen yards [penalty]! Throw him out of the game! They are ruining the game. Look, that’s what they want to do. They want to hit. They want to hit. It is hurting the game!”

“But you know what’s hurting the game more than that? When people like yourselves turn on television and you see those people taking the knee when they are playing our great national anthem…If you see it, even if it’s just one player, leave the stadium…Just pick up and leave. Pick up and leave. Not the same game anymore, anyway.”

F: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA! Amerikkkkans are idiots

This was quite a remarkable little racist tirade. What’s it all about? Here’s my basic breakdown of Trump’s football comments on social media yesterday:

Black males are like 6% of the U.S. and 70% of the NFL rosters.

The big plantation Boss and open racist and white-nationalist Donald Trump wants them to STFU and the league to drop any concerns it might have been forced to have about the brain damage that all too naturally and obviously results from repeated high-speed collisions on the nation’s holy gridirons.

Much of the white-nationalist NFL’s disproportionately affluent and very disproportionately white (I’m guessing 85% plus in the stands) and Trumpian (pre-fascist) fan base froths along. Basically they want their good Black athletes to just blood-sport each-other to death without complaint.

“Entertain us and shut up. This is your role. Hike! Oooh, did you see that hit? Wow. Hit him again harder, harder… Here come the stretchers…okay get that son of a bitch [Trump’s actual term for Black players who kneel to protest the murderous U.S. racist police state] off the field and a new one in. Let’s go.”

Basically they want racist dog and cock-fighting. How badly Trump wanted to insert the word “Black” before “son of a bitch” into his Alabama football rant! If anything, the applause he got would have been amplified if he had.

The militantly and viciously white president and his fellow white nationalist Amerikaner football fans want the players to be “good Blacks,” the types who just obediently damage themselves while dutifully serving the white majority and their direct white masters.

Colin Kaepernick, a highly skilled quarterback who has been Black-listed by the white nationalist NFL’s owners, is another in a long line of public Black personalities who crossed the line from “good” and entertaining Black to “bad Black” when he dared to make a modest public statement against racism – in his case against the murder of Black people by white police officers across the U.S.

Personally, I say screw the orange-tinted beast and the NFL’s racist white fans. Let them suit up and go bash each-other’s white nationalist brains out in the stadium parking lots.

These privileged Caucasian Coliseum crowds belong in giant Re-Education camps with posters of Frantz Fanon, W.E.B DuBois, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X staring down on them while they manufacture wind turbines and solar panels from sunup to sundown. Their big planet-cooking and mind-numbing SUVs and flat screen televisions should be seized from coliseum parking lots and suburban McMansions to be melted down and recycled into water, wind, and solar technology.

The task of guarding them and directing their efforts on behalf of livable ecology could be a big “ex-offender re-entry jobs program” for millions of Black Americans previously marked for life with newly expunged felony records by the New Jim Crow.

That would be some change I could really believe in.

Full story: Counterpunch

#amerikkka #nation of lawless nazi psychopaths #donald trump #colin kaepernick #nfl #white supremacy #war propaganda

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