#once again I am doing Discourse Analysis about the war

[chicago-geniza]

Ok I had some thoughts about this tweet so am putting them under a cut

read and respect Yuliya's work; she is advocating for precision in language

however what she identifies is, hm. A collapsing of the "post-Soviet prostranstvo," rhetorically, in the eye of the center; the center can't hold, geopolitically, but continues to be upheld rhetorically by its representative, fleeing as the violence of the periphery, breaking and shifting along the seismic faultines of a collapsing empire, implodes toward the imperial core, to use a familiar formula.

however! Since the Cold War, the elision of "Russian" and "Soviet" has, I would argue, been a rhetorical strategy of the "opposing side," indeed, one used to reinforce the narrative of "Evil Empire," the Soviet Union as a successor to Russian autocratic rule. That is to say: reinforcing national-essentialist explanations of 20th-century history that ascribe events to the "Russian character," the "Russian soul," the "Russian nature," according to which the 1917 revolution becomes not a political revolution at all, not a rupture, but merely a coup, another authoritarian regime seizing power in a long unbroken history of authoritarian regimes--the national-essentialist explanation of Soviet history, the "continuity" narrative, in fact demands nothing less than the conflation of Russia with the Soviet Union for its own internal cohesion

this was not just a rhetorical feature in English; it was ubiquitous in Polish emigré publications about the Soviet Union, and it persists as a rhetorical device when people discuss the war in Ukraine NOW! I have seen it in English, Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian, from Americans, Ukrainians, Poles, Russians abroad. Just the other day I shared a post by a Polish man lamenting the "Soviet rockets" decimating his beloved Lviv

don't even get me started on Timothy Snyder

tl;dr I don't know what language this Russian applicant was writing in, but I think it's interesting that Yuliya (lives and works in the US, from Soviet Ukraine, iirc spent formative years as an immigrant in Germany) defaults to this assumption-- subconscious irredentism, or implict erasure of Soviet linguistic/cultural diversity, Russian hegemony of the mind--rather than considering that the applicant, like many members of the Russian liberal intelligentsia, may be adopting a rhetorical device with roots in the Cold War, used explicitly by Anglophone public intellectuals and anticommunist Ostbloc emigrés to portray the USSR per the continuity model as an extension of the Russian "Evil Empire," which relies on a national-essentialist idea of Russian history that, at its most vulgar, is basically three Orientalist tropes and two Nazi propaganda slogans in a trench coat

[crazy-ache]

SJM is a Zutara Shipper? That sounds like Elucien....let me explain

It was recently brought to my attention that Sarah hinted in 2017 at being a Zuko/Katara shipper in the Avatar the Last Airbender series. This was exciting to hear as I was in the ATLA fandom over a decade ago and Zuko/Katara was my first OTP and introduction to fandom. I have loved them a long time and they will always hold a special place in my heart. I want to explore why Sarah shipping Zutara is really important when it comes to Elucien because there are a lot of great parallels.

Note: if you know anything about the ATLA shipping fandom/wars...you immediately know what she means by this. Zutara is a fanon ship that was often baited by the writers. Her disappointment is a shared, common reaction to the ship.

A very long, detailed analysis is below the cut. This NOT for ATLA discourse. This is intended to focus SOLELY on Elucien. Read below if you are a fan of Zutara/Elucien....

ATLA Characters vs ACOTAR Characters

Let's start with the characters themselves.

We have Prince Zuko, the exiled and scarred prince of the Fire Nation, who was banished after his evil, power-hungry father (the Fire Lord) horribly punished him for embarrassing him with his kindness (not wanting innocent soldiers to be used as bait in war), which he viewed as morally inferior and weak. It is implied his mother, a gentle-hearted woman, was abused in the marriage. She disappeared when he was young to maintain her husband's political power, only so that her children would live. The loss of his mother is his greatest trauma, along with his desire to go back home and gain his honor and father's acceptance.

Then we have Lucien Vanserra, exiled and scarred son of the Autumn Court, who had to flee after his evil, power-hungry father (the High Lord) horribly punished him for embarrassing him with his relationship with a lower-Fae female, which he viewed as repulsive and below their High Fae status. It is implied his mother, a gentle-hearted woman, was abused in the marriage. His lover was brutally murdered by the hands of his father/brothers and he had to flee, never having the chance to see his mother again. Losing Jesminda is his greatest trauma, likely along with losing his home, Court, and family.

Let's also not forget...they BOTH WEILD FIRE! I do think the Lucien/Zuko comparison is quite obvious and direct, where the Elain/Katara is a bit more symbolic.

For our ladies, we have Katara, master waterbender of the Southern Water Tribe. She is the youngest daughter of the Chief. She begins the journey as someone untrained and incapable of bending her own element, in a small, impoverished village due to the effects of war and destruction on their nation/culture by the Fire Nation. Her mother was tragically murdered by the Fire Nation in order to save her daughter's life. This is singularly her greatest trauma. Throughout the show, we see Katara become a powerful and master bender.

Finally, we have Elain Archeron, who was once human and is the middle sister in her family. She was the daughter of a once-successful merchant. She also loses her mother and is very close to her father, who she also tragically loses in the war. She loses her humanity and her fiance, Graysen, in one fell swoop when they put her in the Cauldron. This is singularly her greatest trauma, one that we see she has trouble letting go, even becoming practically comatose when it first happens. We later learn Elain possesses magic and is a seer.

A little less here, but I am not surprised. Katara and Elain, personality-wise, are very different. However, I will add that both Elain/Katara are often associated as symbols of HOPE in the narrative. But this brings me to my next point which is where I believe SJM was influenced by Zutara when writing Elucien....

Shared Grief as the Catalyst

Every Zuko/Katara shipper knows the crux of their relationship is from their shared trauma. Despite being on opposite ends of the war, they both carry an immense grief in losing their mothers to the war. It is the first thing they realize they have in common, the first moment they share a genuine, sincere connection, enough for them to reach out and open up to each other.

Elain and Lucien also have a shared trauma. They both lost their first loves/fiances. Lucien lost her tragically. Elain lost him in a brutal rejection. It broke both of their hearts, and they both carry grief and complicated emotions around it.

The hurt and pain brought Zutara together. As a result, they understand each other in ways others can't. I have no doubt that Elucien will spark from a similar place of understanding.

Complimentary Symbolism

One of the most beautiful parts of Zuko/Katara is the use of opposite/complimentary symbolism. Two halves of a whole. Balance and unity.

Zuko= Fire and Sun and Blue Spirit Katara= Water and Moon and Painted Lady

Lol can you believe we got the line below...I couldn't come up with a more romantic symbolic line if I tried and that's canon folks

Lucien = Day and Fox and Spring/Loss

Elain = Flowers and Fawns and Spring/Life

Elain, often associated with gardens and flowers and roses, was asked what she needed at her lowest point. She said "Sunshine." Enter Lucien, the secret heir to Day Court and Helion, whose name means Light. The Fox and the Fawn. Elain "Made for Spring" Archeron and Lucien "Spring Court Emissary and Courtier" Vanserra. I wrote Spring/Loss and Spring/Life because Lucien had to see Spring become ruined/flee the one place he called home. There is strong foreshadowing that Elain will help in some way to revive spring and possibly bring it back to life, hopefully with Lucien's help.

Let's also not forget that Elain was formerly human and now living as a High Fae in the Night Court. Lucien is a High Fae who looked down on humans and now lives in the mortal lands. It's an interesting dynamic!

Betrayal

Okay buckle up. This one is important. The feeling of betrayal is important to the development of both ships. Let me break this down.

Katara is a victim of the Fire Nation. Zuko is the prince of the Fire Nation who once hunted them down to retrieve the Avatar. She often conflated her feelings toward Zuko with her feelings regarding her mother's murder by the hands of the Fire Nation', as evidenced here.

Katara: I'm sorry I yelled at you before. Zuko: It doesn't matter. Katara: It's just that for so long now, whenever I would imagine the face of the enemy, it was your face.

We see these messy emotions come back when Zuko joins the team to teach Aang firebending.

Zuko: This isn't fair! Everyone else seems to trust me now! What is it with you? Katara: Oh, everyone trusts you now?! I was the first person to trust you! [Places her left hand on her heart.] Remember, back in Ba Sing Se. And you turned around and betrayed me, betrayed all of us! Zuko: What can I do to make it up to you? Katara: You really want to know? Hmm, maybe you could reconquer Ba Sing Se in the name of the Earth King. Or, I know! You could bring my mother back!

Now, at this point, we know she has not forgiven him for Ba Sing Se. Remember, this was the moment they shared their intimate connection over their shared Dead Mother trauma. (In an episode called The Crossroads of Destiny nonetheless). She offered to heal his scar, and later when given the chance to choose between what is right vs. what he wants....he chooses what he wants, which is to return home to his father for his acceptance. Katara took this as a personal betrayal and we see she still imagines his face as the enemy by demanding he bring her mother back (even though it isn't possible/he isn't responsible for it).

You know who else has mentioned betrayal?

For a long moment, Elain’s face did not shift, but those eyes seemed to focus a bit more. “Lucien,” she said at last, and he clenched his teacup to keep from shuddering at the sound of his name on her mouth. “From my sister’s stories. Her friend.” “Yes.” But Elain blinked slowly. “You were in Hybern.” “Yes.” It was all he could say. “You betrayed us.” He wished she’d shoved him out the window behind her. “It—it was a mistake.” Her eyes went frank and cold. “I was to be married in a few days.” He fought against the bristling rage, the irrational urge to find the male who’d claimed her and shred him apart. The words were a rasp as he instead said, “I know. I’m sorry.”

Elain associates Lucien's involvement with Ianthe/Hybern/The Cauldron as a personal betrayal. Lucien, much like Zuko, is sorry for his actions that have hurt her.

Both Zuko and Lucien don't argue about the anger/accusations of betrayal. They own it. They just want to make it right.

In the same episode of the snippet above ("You could bring my mother back!") Zuko and Katara go on their infamous "field trip" or journey together, just the two of them. Despite Katara's anger, the two of them are in perfect sync. They are the perfect team and pair, moving fluid in their elements, sneaking around enemy ships. Zuko defends her desire for closure (however dark it may be) against her friends and family wishes. He never questions her. He supports her emotionally. He yells at an enemy solider- "Don't lie! You look her in the eye and you tell me you don't remember what you did." (OH COME ON, what is hotter than that!?) In the end, she forgives him. Not because of what he did. But because he understands her and gives her space and places no expectations of who she is or what she should do. He accepts her. All the dark and pain and light inside.

Don't mind the romantic sunset in the background

Going on an adventure? Likely against the wishes of friends and family due to it being dangerous? Doing whatever is necessary to help the girl forgive you/trust you? Giving her the necessary space and support to do what she has set her mind to? Helping her find closure and healing along the way? Falling love? Sure sounds like an Elucien book......wonder where SJM got the inspiration?

Azriel vs Aang

I cannot write this post without mentioning Aang and Azriel. This is NOT an ATLA shipping discourse so please no comments regarding the Kataang/Zutara ship war. I am using this as a comparison to Elucien/E/riel.

I have a feeling that SJM has written Azriel (specifically in the Bonus Chapter) to serve as a foil to Aang's dynamic to Katara. Which is that both characters feel entitled to their crush.

Aang, the young hero and savior of the world, has a long-standing crush on Katara that is not really reciprocated romantically throughout the series.

When the group goes to watch a play based on themselves, there is scene where the actors on stage go:

Actor Zuko: Wait, I thought you were the Avatar's girl! [Aang in the audience nods in agreement.] Actress Katara: The Avatar? Why, he's like a little brother to me! I certainly don't think of him in a romantic way. [Aang in the audience grows concerned.] Besides, how could he ever find out about ... this? [Actress Katara and Actor Zuko embrace and hold hands while Actress Katara pops up one leg. Aang gets up from his seat to leave.]

It can be interpreted that his nodding and getting upset is attributed to feeling possessive of his crush on Katara. That she belongs to him, as he is the Hero and the Avatar, and should get the girl. He is jealous of something that didn't actually happen between the actors on stage (he is only 12 to be fair).

Further evidence here:

Aang: But it's true, isn't it? We kissed at the Invasion, and I thought we were gonna be together. But we're not. Katara: Aang, I don't know. Aang: Why don't you know? Katara: Because, we're in the middle of a war, and, we have other things to worry about. This isn't the right time.

...and then he kisses her, and she doesn't want it/isn't expecting it, and runs away back to the theater. We won't get into that here.

Hm, this story sounds familiar....

Azriel ignored the question. "The Cauldron chose three sisters. Tell me how it's possible that my two brothers are with two of those sisters, yet the third was given to another."

There is a similar sense of entitlement, that also ended with Elain running away from the scene, upset. The difference being he rejected her at the urging (and convincing) of Rhysand because he knew it was a mistake.

Tension & Healing & Growth (What's Next)

"There is a great deal of tension, growth, and healing to be found for both of them (together)." - from Sarah J Maas herself. If she was a Zutara shipper, I can totally see her inspiration in elements of Elucien.

In the end, many Zuko/Katara shippers really believed these two brought out the best in each other in the best possible ways. (I know I did). And I think that's a big reason a lot of Eluciens ship Elain/Lucien...the potential of how they'll complement each other is so huge.

Just as Katara and Zuko were once extremely tense in their relationship, they underwent an incredible and beautiful journey of healing and growth. One that ended in....Zuko sacrificing his life for her. Animated in slow motion with romantic/epic musical scores. For the girl who lost her mother (who sacrificed herself to save her daughter). An epic friendship but no romance....which Sarah herself agreed she wasn't a fan of....

So I imagine she is going to rectify that narrative for Elucien. I for one cannot wait to read their story in their book.

[sarahjtv]

BNHA Chapter 325 Spoiler Analysis: United As One

The week has passed and so has summer.  Damn...  At least Shonen Jump’s got my back.  And Deku is finally welcome home thank god.  Now, give this kid a damn good meal, sleep, and a motherfreaking bath already.  NGL, this week has been busy for me and I’m tired AF, so I think I’ll only go over the parts that stuck out to me:

Man, god bless Kota for running up to Izuku to help him!  This kid has been through so much yet he still decided to run up to Izuku to help him.  He’s sobbing his eyes out too 😭.  I’m pretty sure he’s apologizing for not moving during the Muscular fight (in Kota’s defense, Izuku would’ve probably died if not for Kota) and he’s telling Izuku that “I am here” (OF COURSE HE SAYS THOSE WORDS) so Izuku doesn’t need to cry anymore.  And to top it all off, Kota calls Izuku “Nii-chan” which I’m pretty sure means older brother 😭❤️ If Horikoshi brings Eri in next week, I’m going to cry waterfalls dammit

The Fox Lady is so kind and pretty dammit Horikoshi give her a name already!  She’s so happy to see Deku again and thanks him for saving her. ��Even calls him “Mr. Crybaby Hero” 😭  The way she picks him up like a small child is both sweet and funny too ☺️ I await the fanart!

A-AND THEN SHE AND KOTA HUG DEKU 😭💚💚💚💚

On a more serious note, the Fox Lady mentions that she got rejected from a lot of evacuation centers because they don’t accept mutant types like her.  Of course discrimination still exists in this world.  Of freakin’ course.  Just like in the real world...  And considering that Horikoshi mentioned that Shoji would have a role in the future and also show his face finally in some interviews (Horikoshi also teased that he wanted to give Shoji a bigger story YEARS ago), I have a feeling this subject will be brought up again in the future.

The Old Star Man from the first chapter/episode who encourages Deku to be a hero returns this chapter to give a big speech to the crowd.  This guy is a real one ✊.  Basically, he says that the crowd needs to shut up and understand what’s going on for a hot minute.  That everyone projected All Might’s “Perfect Heroness” onto the every other hero that they all forgot that Heroes are just people at the end of the day.  If the people don’t support the heroes still fighting now, they’re screwed.  Ultimately, it’s the civilians who have to save the heroes when they’re hurting.  Not just other heroes.  Horikoshi, please give this man a name too, he’s long deserved it.

Then the boy in the All Might shirt who’s been protesting for the past 2 chapters says something reasonable for once.  His views on Deku have been mixed around thanks to all the things that have been rumored about Deku on the internet and word of mouth.  Which kinda justifies his anger and doubt, but he still should’ve have been a jerk to Deku and Ochako.  

Deku finally speaks a full sentence declaring that he and his friends and mentors will make everything ok again.  I can’t wait to see that promise be fulfilled, my son 💚

We change focus to Shoto, Endeavor, and Hawks (who are confirmed to have been outside the barrier for the past few chapters; I was wondering about that).  They’re finally being allowed into UA for now.  Unfortunately the 3 of them probably would’ve caused more discourse if they entered while the civilians were rioting.  Endeavor and Hawks from the press release and just Shoto existing really.  Please let them stay there permanently.  

Gotta say that Endeavor looks so freaking tired throughout this whole thing.  The Toya thing + The Deku thing must be weighing extremely heavy on him.  I do feel bad for him honestly.  

Hawks tells Endeavor how OFA has, in a way, connected everyone together.  All Might to Deku to Class 1-A back to Deku to Ochako to the people.  And if the people can truly care for others, then the future will be bright and heroes will have all the time in the world just like Hawks wanted at the very beginning of his story.

There’s this really beautiful double page spread (teased in one of Vol. 31′s extras) of the civilians offering their umbrellas to the kids.  Kirishima’s crying happy tears, Kota and Mineta are running up to Deku, the All Might Shirt dude is offering Deku his umbrella, Kaminari is smacking Bakugo over the head 😂, Iida’s holding Deku’s hand to guide him, and INKO FINALLY GETS TO BE WITH HER SON THANK THE LORD 💚😭 

Shoto 💙 Our resident pretty boy is looking at this scene and ultimately decides that he and Endeavor are going to stop Dabi together.  He decided this before back in the hospital, but I think his decision is more final here.  I really need him to properly reunite with Deku though and I’m sure they have A LOT to talk about.

AND WE FINALLY GET TO PROPERLY SEE AIZAWA AFTER GOD KNOWS HOW LONG AND HE’S SO HANDSOME 🖤 MY MAN IS LOOKING GOOD WITH AN EYEPATCH?!?  And he does have a prosthetic robot leg and apparently Mirko does too.  God, he looks so tired, but he’s so proud of his kids Imma cry again 😭

Anyway, it’s looks like he’s still recovering from the war in the hospital and apparently also there to help with the whole Kurogiri situation, who’s been transferred to a research lab.  It seems like Aizawa’s trying to bring back Shirakumo somehow.  If they do, I wonder if Shirakumo will even still be alive.  We can assume that he might still be alive since he did tell the Heroes about the hospital, but it’s uncertain.  It would be nice to have that sweet soul back 🌤

Also, the Heroes are aware that Himiko Toga’s still out there and they’re taking extra persuasions to make sure she isn’t one of the refugees.  They also know her limits too, so that’s good.

The last panel is of All Might standing outside of UA, but his back is turned against them.  He has this uncertain look on his face too.  I honestly can’t read it for the life of me.  I gotta wonder why he isn’t walking in there now that everything seems to be ok.  Maybe he doesn’t want to accidentally cause more problems?  The public did start to hate him with the whole “I Am Not Here” sign on his statue in Kamino...  Deku does need him though.  Ugh, I’m so worried for this man.

And I do have a theory.  It’s a long shot and a dark one: What if Toga found Stain while running off and they teamed up together.  Then Stain found and took All Might captive and Toga took some of All Might’s blood to transform into him and now she’s the one outside of UA.  I can’t say if All Might is dead or not.  I really, really, REALLY, don’t want him to be dead.  Stain says that All Might is the only one truly worthy of being a Hero, so I doubt he would actively kill All Might.  But, god there’s so many death flags surrounding this man.  I don’t even know if he’s going to make it through the entire series tbh.

The end chapter teaser says “The rain continues on...” so I doubt this pain is over.  We have a bit of a calm, but I am so anticipating the next storm.

Me waiting for even more pain:     

[mayfriend-archive]

Totally understand if you're not up for it and fully recognize the ronald mcdonald dom/sub anon vibes which is an AMAZING post btw but like...now i'm curious, what the hell did Lord of the Flies anon DO that got him blocked for the discourse? like...i just can't wrap my head around high school lit being...uh...that inflammatory i guess?

Okay so, I'll start by saying I've had a new anon from apparently the same anon saying they are NOT the person I blocked, just a rando making the same points, but I'll answer your question anyway just to set out why this person in particular got blocked, out of the several thousand who reblogged/commented on that very successful addition to the LoTF post I made.

First off, I added the 'real life Lord of the Flies' story because I thought it was a good story. I had read about it only a couple days beforehand in Humankind and, after reading out the entire chapter to my parents who weren't very interested, I was excited that there was not only a post where it would be relevant to post, but that I wouldn't be hijacking it, as it was already rejecting the widespread interpretation taught in many schools, that humanity is inherently savage.

When making the addition, I a) did not think it would get more than a couple reblogs, because the post was already at 50k notes and I figured anyone that might be interested would already have seen it, and b) I did not know the very specific context that prompted William Golding to write the book; all I knew was that he had been a teacher at a public school (basically, the poshest schools in the country - think Eton, Harrow, very 'old money' places that pump out Conservative politicians by the bucket-load 🤢) who hated his job and the boys he taught (which, valid), and new information I'd been given in Humankind - that Golding had said to his wife one day, "Wouldn't it be a good idea to write a story about some boys on an island, showing how they would really behave?" - which had no mention of The Coral Island by R. M. Ballantyne, which I have since learned was the text that Golding loathed enough to write an entire novel in refutation of - and included what I considered a very telling letter from Golding to his publisher, in which Golding wrote of his belief that 'even if we start with a clean slate, our nature compels us to make a muck of it.' Another Golding quote that I believe portrays his belief in humanity's 'innate savagery' is that "man produces evil as a bee produces honey."

Obviously, the author of a book putting forward the case for humanity's inherent goodness was going to oppose Golding's hypothesis; Bregman not only noted Golding's literary accomplishments and beliefs, but his personal life.

When I began delving into the author's life, I learned what an unhappy individual he'd been. An alcoholic. Prone to depression. A man who, as a teacher, once divided his pupils into gangs and encouraged them to attack each other. "I have always understood the Nazis," Golding confessed, "because I am of that sort by nature." (Humankind by Rutger Bregman, p. 24-25)

I have bolded the part about him as a teacher, because it is incredibly relevant to the original post that I commented on, which begins with a comic of a teacher locking her class in to see them 'recreate' Lord of the Flies, something which the follow up comments before mine staunchly reject as both misunderstanding the point of the book, and the fact that it took the kids in Lord of the Flies a significant amount of time without adult supervision to go 'savage'. This misreading of the text is widespread enough that when Golding won the Nobel Prize for Lord of the Flies, the Swedish Nobel committee wrote that his book 'illuminate[s] the human condition in the world of today'. Whether or not they misread it is beyond my expertise - they do at least mention the factors of the outside world neglected by many when analysing the book, but still seem to believe it says something about human nature as a whole rather than just, to quote thedarkbutbeige 'British kids being rat bastards' - but Golding quite happily took his Nobel prize on this basis. Which, in fairness, I would too. It's a fucking Nobel prize.

It was with this knowledge, and this knowledge alone, that I stated in my now very, very widely read comment that Golding 'wrote the book to be a dick', in response to the tags of the person I reblogged from. As I said, I now know that Golding did not write the book (solely) because he hated the kids he taught, but as a response to The Coral Island and the general idea that clearly the British were inherently civilsed, whilst the people they colonised and enslaved were inherently savage. So. That's the background.

The anon - or rather, the person I thought was anon - was the sole exception out of dozens of replies, who instead of telling me about The Coral Island politely decided it was time to go ALL CAPS and regurgitate points already made by thespaceshipoftheseus, and implied that the only reason that the real life Tongan castaways didn't go all Lord of the Flies was because they weren't British. Not because they weren't surrounded by violence like the boys in Lord of the Flies, or there wasn't a World War ongoing, or that they weren't the upper, upper, upper crust of a class-obsessed society like Britain - but because they weren't British. A complete inversion of the concept that Golding was trying to get across - now, instead of all of humanity being equally prone to savagery in the right conditions, it was solely nationality that determined it. As in, the British were inherently savage, but nobody else was.

I, trying for humour, made the terrible mistake of replying to them.

I won't lie, I was absolutely blown away that this was real life. What I think they were trying to do was be that Cool Tumblr Person who, after somebody's been shitty on a post, goes to their blog and sees something Damning in their about/description. In an ideal world, I imagine I'd have gone nuts or done something Unforgiveable. In what I can only call the rant that followed, they stated several times that I needed to go back to high school to get some 'proper literary analysis' skills and that the story of the Tongan castaways was completely unrelated to the point at hand which. I mean, I disagree, considering that I made the addition, but I couldn't get my head around how commenting on a post that was already rejecting the thesis that the 'point' of Lord of the Flies was that humanity was inherently savage and was, in fact, about how kids - British or otherwise - learn how to function from the adults around them, and that traumatised, terrified children aren't going to create a mini-Utopia, and put forward a real life example of how without the key additions of an ongoing world war, a colonial Empire and the subsequent mindset of thinking you are 'inherently civilised' and therefore can't do anything wrong, actually, people just want to take care of each other.

A friend has since asked me why I even have 'england' in my description. To be honest, it's a timezone thing - I talk to a lot of people online who don't share my timezone, and it generally makes me feel like if I don't reply immediately because it's 3am, they have the tools to see that I'm not in their timezone and not just ignoring them. I did consider changing it to 'british' or 'uk' after it was... 'used against me', I guess, simply because I didn't want to deal with it, but you know what. No. Not gonna do that. I am from England, and I have never hid that fact. I have a tag called 'uk politics', during Eurovision I refer to the UK's act as 'us' (even if I really, really don't want to. Because James Newman slaughtered that song and it was downright embarrassing), I regularly post stuff in my personal tag about where I live (and mostly complain about this piece of shit government). If people really think my nationality makes every point I make null and void, then they don't have to follow me or interact with my posts; tumblr is big, and I am one medium-small blog very easily passed over.

I did reply to them, trying to explain the above, but their next response really just doubled down. Because I used the word British instead of English - foolishly because the posts above mine focused on Britishness, and also because although Golding was English and taught English kids, the pro-Imperialism author of The Coral Island, R. M. Bannatyne was actually Scottish so, ding ding ding, falls into the 'British' category - they then decided that I was somehow trying to pretend I wasn't English and made all the same points, before ending with this doozy:

At this point, I knew there was nothing to be gained from replying, because if we're whipping out conditions like they're pokemon cards then there's no actual conversation anymore, and I'm not going to start mudslinging like an identity politician. They made up their mind, and I figured there could be no harm in letting them think that they 'won' by blocking them instead of replying.

Until the ask. INNATE ENGLISH SAVAGERY did, I'll admit, make me think it was them, back again. I even thought up a really good response approximately 12 hours after I replied, I was that sure. Until the second message came in, and said they were just someone who came from the post and made the same point by chance. So the saga draws to a close... for now.

It may have been them, it may not have been - the anon feature makes it impossible to be sure, but as the second message I got said, we're in a heatwave. It's too hot to argue. And I've just written a goddamn essay about a book I dislike anyway.

My pasty English ass is going to go melt. If there's Disk Horse, do not tell me. I am Done™

[soranis-sunshadow]

A SPOP Masterpost

A list of links to all of my own ramblings in the SPOP fandom for the sake of being organized.. well sort of..ish... I guess.

click it!

My own Fanfiction - I’m on AO3 too

Through a mirror, Darkly  - ongoing fic about horde clones dealing with the aftermath of Horde Prime’s death seen through the eyes of Yudi - the disaster clone from episode Launch. The road to healing is long and not always straight and Yudi is terrible at following the straight and narrow.

Catra and Hordak - on redemption

Looking back - Glimmer and Hordak talk after the war

With you I am complete - Hordak and Entrapta are having a very bad, no good day.

One out of five isn’t that bad - The four times Entrapta couldn't share her enthusiasm and the one time she could.

Coming home - Baker, Crypto Castle's grandmotherly castellan has a lot of cleaning to do because of the new inhabitants into her home, this ends up bothering her a lot less than she thought it would. (post s5 tooth rotting fluff where Imp makes sure Hordak makes a friend.)

Spop Discourse and headcanons

Why free will isn’t synonymous with the ability to make a choice free of influence or bias. 

12 unpopular headcanons on Horde Prime

On Hordak’s “redemption”, or rather lack thereof. 

SPOP Chronology

My Headcanon on how The Etherian Horde thing started

Hordak the ‘top general’

The Catra vs Hordak thing... again? ... :sighs: 

Why Entrapdak is canon even in the early seasons

The one time these two dorks were unenthusiastic about science. 

 Horde Prime’s large shadow.

It’s called “religious trauma”, not “daddy issues”

Is Horde Prime ableist - a philosophical discussion

Idea for a Galactic horde AMV - The sound of silence

Not sameface syndrome

Hordak is anorexic.

Solitary Confinement on Etheria

The power of friendship - is only for cool friends

Why his stans relate to Hordak

Hordak: The “power-hungry” warmonger

Entrapta needs better friends 

How Entrapta is treated within the show by both her friends and Hordak

About Entrapta’s amorality and “weirdness”

Entrapta and Catra - a complicated relationship

Horde Clones are  Schrödinger’s individuals: both adults and children at the same time. 

Debunking the Hordak = fascist colonizer thing again... bleh

An observation on Hordak’s choice of clothing

Horde Prime’s pupils

Why it’s not ok to compare Wrong Hordak to his defective brother.

A link to the extended scene with Hordak and Entapta

I don’t think Hordak is that old

Why Hordak didn’t become a good law abiding citizen once he got stranded on Etheria

Someone else’s words on the whole clone slave thing

The Evil Horde vs The Rebel Alliance: A question of morality.

An argument about the Hordak is cis het thing...

more on alien sexuality

shitpost about alien sexuality

Hordak’s skin discoloration - an extensive analysis,  an addendum

How indoctrination works

Spacebats need anger management part 1

Spacebats need anger management part 2

HC about horde clone maturation and aging processes.

Horde clones’ eye anatomy

Horde Clones are immune to Etherian Pathogens

Yet more disturbing horde clone headcanon

The clones are Horde Prime’s foremost victims

Arguments against the Entrapdak abuse thing

shitpost about the colonization, genocide and child soldiers thing

Horde clones biology - they have glowing blood (a headcanon)

Light Spinner said the Horde was a big threat...

Shadow Weaver vs Hordak - on the nature of personal agency

Imp doesn’t have a neck-port... huh

I love Catra but S5 did her dirty  

Why Prime kept Hordak around in S5

Shadow Weaver tells us a story.

Hordak’s nose  and lips - a reference 

On why this fandom can’t have nice things

The length of Hordak’s thigh (and width of his hips) for .. uh ..science.

Why Hordak’s a dictator, but not a fascist one. 

Hordak’s Eyeliner

Fandom favoritism and double standards

Hordak didn’t kidnap Catra, he didn’t abuse her as a child but he was gaslit by her (aka - augmenting with the antis) 

What’s the deal with all of the SPOP fandom drama?

Fun speculation about how The Etherian Horde came to be

SPOP is not a war drama

Stupid memes (of which there are MANY) masterpost link. Give it a go, lots of lovely shitposts!

NonSpop shitpost

Other shitposts and “art”

Imp is an evil little toddler

Photorealistic Hordak painting

E& H Lazy morning snuggle 

Yudi (Horde Clone OC)

Glum (Horde Clone OC)

Joy (Horde Clone OC)

Welcome to Crypto Castle

Portal of Desire

A Whole New Light

The version of She-Ra the virulent antis are watching

Perfect Pretty Princess Hordak

C & A Peaceful 

Interesting Meta from other people

Horde Prime is a sexy bastard and that’s the point

On Hordak and worthiness 

“top” “general”

Ableism towards Entrapta

Entrapta’s ‘friendship’ with the Rebel Alliance

The horde clones are slaves

The sound of Silence by  @solcaeruleus

What that scene at the end meant- the one with baby Adora. 

“very serious war drama” 

On why we like Entrapdak this much

On worthiness

There’s plenty of things to hate Hordak for, you don’t need to HC more of them.

Horde clone reactions post Prime

The Galactic Horde and The Etherian Horde are not comparable

More on Entrapta and her relationship with the Alliance

Horde Prime vs Hordak and the topic of anger management 

How much control does Hordak have over The Etherian Horde

On judgment and punishment

Why Adora forgave Hordak in the end

On Hordak missing Entrapta in S4

Shadow Weaver’s “redemption” arc

Hordak and Catra similarities 

The Horde Soldiers are are Etherians after all...  

[izzyizumi]

Digimon Adventure vs Digimon Adventure: [2020 Reboot] ~ vs. Digimon Adventure tri. Movie 3 [Kokuhaku (Confession)] (Autistic Headcanon!)Koushiro Izumi Character Analysis + ~ Comparisons / Parallels (Japanese version) + Displaying Common Neurodivergent {+Autistic} Traits {In General} + "Without” Accessibility/Accomodations vs "With” {or, the difference of a 90s era laptop and a 2020 high performing tablet} (compare Adventure Episode 10 with Adventure 2020, above) + {Incorrectly} often Perceived as “ Cold ” (by Others) + Unintentionally Missing Social Cues “Well, it’s true that Koushiro {“lacks charm”}...” “But {Koushiro}’s not a {“bad” child}.” “I think {Koushiro}’s a REALLY GOOD {Child}/{Person}.”

(notably with Mimi, + relevant in his early interactions with Meiko) {to a lesser extent, this is ALSO NOTABLE in Koushiro’s interactions with Taichi, [ later Adventure + Our War Game (2nd Adventure Movie in Japan) ] arguably his closest friend }

“{ WHEN HE GETS CAUGHT UP IN SOMETHING },” ″HE JUST DOESN’T { NOTICE } { ANYTHING ELSE }.” - Tentomon explaining to Mimi, Adv Ep 10

+ “Koushiro IS DOING EVERYTHING HE CAN TO HELP YOU !”:

“ABOUT KOUSHIRO...” “He’s  INVESTIGATING THIS WITH ALL HIS HEART...”

“ HE SAYS IT’S ALL HE CAN DO . ”

( after a long moment, Taichi sounds tense and insistent as he’s asking Meiko to FORGIVE KOUSHIRO after Koushiro was interrogating her earlier, missing more cues. Mimi had once again herself been slightly upset with Koushiro, and for Meiko’s sake. ) [ SO ... ] ”

- Digimon Adventure tri.: SOUSHITSU [‘LOSS’] ( Japanese version ) ~ When Tentomon is stuck together with Mimi in a familiar past location, { familiar to Mimi as well } Mimi, who was previously frustrated with Koushiro, {due to instances of him missing her + Meikos social cues} then ends up saying the above, encouraging Tentomon and recognizing Koushiro’s helpfulness. ( COMPARE to all of the above scenes with them all. ) “KOUSHIRO-KUN, HUH? HE’D BE A GREAT HELP IF HE WERE HERE.” - Mimi to Tentomon, about Koushiro

- Digimon Adventure: [2020 Reboot] Episode 03 ~ Koushiro babbling on, completely missing Taichis’ social cue {standing stock still & shocked} until the last moment; Koushiro then glances away, avoiding eye contact / looking at Taichi.

DIGIMON ADVENTURE EPISODE 38 (Japanese version):

“ THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH BEING INTO COMPUTERS ! ”

{“THAT TRAIT OF YOURS IS WHAT MAKES YOU WHO YOU ARE.”}

“ YOU DON’T HAVE TO CHANGE YOURSELF FOR US . ”

BONUS:

{ I try to keep in mind "Our War Game”, the 2nd released Adventure movie in Japan, was not directly written by Hiroyuki Kakudou, the head director of Adventure + 02, but considering various things such as Omegamon’s debut from it is still often referenced and recognized by the staff ... }:

[ note: “This is no time for fights!” is being said by YAMATO. ]

[ and not much later on, during a highly dramatic battle moment... ]

Taichi: (after a long silence; apologizing to Koushiro) ... Sorry. Koushiro: It’s fine. (COMPARE to the above; later scene of Tri!Taichi blatantly defending Koushiro to Meiko.) {*NOTES: THIS IS A FAN META POST. This is also my particular headcanon / analysis of Koushiro Please keep this in mind before you comment.}

gifs by @izzyizumi , { DO NOT REPOST } { DO NOT REMOVE CAPTION } { DO NOT USE MY POSTS FOR ARGUING/DISCOURSE } { DO NOT USE MY POSTS FOR SPREADING CANON HATE } { OTHERWISE YOU WILL BE BLOCKED } { THIS ALSO APPLIES TO TAGGING/TAGS ON THIS POST. }

{usage of gifs may be allowed if permission is asked / or if credit is given. However, read my about & FAQ pages first. Please do NOT use / ask if you match anything in my “Do Not Interact” sections.} [ NOTES: This post was made with the intention of pointing out CANONICAL character traits of Koushiro in the various media. There is a bit further commentary in the tags of the original post in regards to headcanons. If you choose to read this commentary, please be respectful. Please be aware I am making this post and speaking as someone who is Neuro divergent MYSELF. ]

( FINAL NOTE: This and this are also very good posts. }

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[vierafication]

Last night around 4 am, I reblogged a certain post about "villainous rp" and added my own two cents to what had been discussed within it- mostly just venting about behavior I'd seen in the past. I didn't think much of it until I saw the next day it had been reblogged, and reblogged again, and again, by some folks who seemed pretty unhappy about what I'd said. I was told I needed to get a life, that I clearly can't separate IC and OOC, that maybe I shouldn't be writing at all. That hurt. I was irritated, then, feeling like I'd had words shoved in my mouth, like I was being purposefully misinterpreted. I typed up a clarification post explaining my previous points and pressed send, but it was seemingly ignored.

I talked with @damankjol about it later. He's the best, if you didn't know. And he rp's villains! I don't think he's a sociopath! He's very empathic and honest and understanding and cool, and he helped me realize that people weren't just angry at me, they were genuinely hurt by what I'd written. I went back and reread what I posted, as well as the responses, with a more critical eye. And... yeah. What I typed up wasn't clean, organized, or coordinated. I was venting and the tone that came off was irritated and rude. While not my intention, what I wrote sounded pretty fucking disrespectful and downright mean. And, frankly, my intentions don't matter, anyway, since I wasn't able to convey them properly. I just put some angry bullshit up on tumblr way too late at night, and I didn't expect anybody to even look at it, let alone reblog it- but I should have. Tumblr is a public platform and I should have approached my post the same way I'd approach any other one during the normal hours of the day. Thinking critically is always key, but audience is too- a vent post is a vent post, but I should have thought before I vented about a topic other people were sensitive to, and properly indicate specifics instead of vague generalizations. So, yes, I really wanted to apologize to anyone who that post hurt. I’m genuinely sorry. I should not have generalized like that. It wasn't even my intention in the first place. I was disrespectful and now that I think about it, incredibly hypocritical to boot. So yeah. I really am sorry. I respect @damankjol and @miqojak a lot as writers, and it would never be my intention to tear them down. Or anybody else, for that matter- rp only works when you rp with others, after all.

Once again, I'm sorry, and I hope you won't hate me for eternity or anything. Storytime and critical analysis under the cut.

One of my first, and worst, experiences in the ffxiv rp community was a good couple years ago. I was describing my character to a “friend,” and that character happened to be Lionnet Blodoint, my Ishgardian chirurgeon. Lionnet was not a good person by a long shot, to begin with, and from his time serving during the Dragonsong War, he’d developed quite a bit of PTSD relating to any and all things draconic. He hated dragons. He didn’t even like Au Ra. “Wow,” said the so-called friend at the time. “Your character is a nazi.”

“What? No!” I exclaimed. I tried to explain that he was NOT a nazi, he was just a traditionalist Ishgardian who hated dragons because they had been, at one point in time, absolutely hell-bent on destroying his home and everything he knew. I thought it was a pretty reasonable character trait to hate, or at least fear, dragons after serving in the Dragonsong War. The core of how I’d planned to develop him would be overcoming or at least coming to terms with his trauma, and no longer seeing it in every dragon or Au Ra he met. “No,” they said. “Your character is terribly written. They’re awful and nobody would ever want to rp with them. They’re boring because they’re so full of negative traits. They’re racist and thus, a nazi. And you are just as bad, because you’re defending them! You’re a nazi too!”

So yeah, they are NOT my friend anymore. But that whole convo really stuck with me, and I was afraid to bring out Lio afterwards- it took me another year before I actually began to use him in rp. And he turned out wonderful! His story became one of my favorite rp character stories of all time, and he had great relationship development and a happy ending. He’s still around, canonically, but I have a different main toon now.

So it shocks me that what that person told me about Lio is more or less the same as what I wrote in that post. I’m honestly dumbfounded at how I could just casually type that up and post it, when it draws so many parallels to the way I was bullied back then. So yeah. Huge hypocrisy right there. I swore to never act like that. And to an extent, I suppose I have. But that post I made was pretty fucking close- just directed at a vaguely generalized audience instead of a singular person and character. Maybe that’s actually worse. And I am sorry. I guess because it wasn’t directed at anyone but the void (even the op’s url doesn’t exist anymore), I just didn’t think about it. Which sounds like a lame-ass excuse, but... it’s true. I just wasn’t thinking. I was just venting. It’s really fucking with me that I could’ve hurt somebody so much completely unintentionally, to be honest.

So, what did I say- or, to be more clear, what was I attempting to say? What was my intention, and what wasn’t? I’m going to go over that now, more for my benefit than anyone else’s. Please note that I am not trying to make excuses or shove any blame elsewhere. I am just trying to clarify what I meant and address the issues that made my post so negative, for my own sake.

To begin, I’m gonna link this post by @lilac-memorials. It goes into detail about the trouble with “villain” discourse, and addresses a number of issues from a much more unbiased standpoint, far more eloquently than I could. Also, it seems to reference (the worse) parts of my posts at some points, or maybe I’m just paranoid. Regardless, it’s a much better post than the trainwreck that was the original one, and I agree with every bit of it. It also addresses the difference between a “villain” and an “antagonist,” which is something I attempted to go into but failed miserably.

Anyhoo. My post began with this paragraph:

Seriously. I do not trust anyone who refers to themselves as a “villain” rper. A character can take an antagonistic role in another character’s story arc, that’s fine, that works. It goes back to the “everyone is the hero of their own story” sorta thing. But playing a villain, only as a villain… what’s the point in that? It’s just someone roleplaying as an evil asshole that expects to be treated as stronger than other characters, expects to be feared. It reads like some twisted power fantasy. It doesn’t sound fun and it sure isn’t fun for the people rping with you. Like dude, calm down.

To begin with, yes, I am indeed a little distrustful of people who label their characters first and foremost as villains, before anything else. I am more suspicious of engaging in rp with them than I am with other types of characters, because I have seen some pretty crappy villains out and about and I just don’t wanna deal with that. Next, I go on to try to draw the line between a villain and an antagonist, and how I am much less suspicious of “antagonistic” characters than straight-up “villain” characters. “But playing a villain, only as a villain... what’s the point in that?” I ask. Very rudely. Insinuating that their is no point whatsoever in playing a villain. Which I didn’t intend to. But honestly, I don’t know how else that would’ve translated- I don’t know what I was thinking. I go on to describe this “villain” as somebody who is an evil asshole with a power fantasy, and how it ruins fun for anybody. Which can be read very easily as saying “all villains are like this.” No, they are not! I was describing the bad type of villain rper. The rper who “plays a villain, only as a villain,” and not as a character. Do you get what I mean now? The controlling, toxic, power-hungry rper that plays a villain as an outlet to be further controlling, toxic, and power-hungry, moreso than they ever could in reality. We all know that type of person exists. We’ve met them, somewhere. Sometimes they aren’t playing the villain at all, anyway. They’re playing the hero, or somebody else entirely. But here, I am just venting about that type of person. They are what my post is about. The key line should’ve been “playing a villain, only as a villain,” but it was shoved into a passive-aggressive question addressing self-worth instead of a proper sentence describing the difference between a well-written villain and a badly-written villain. And thus the post begins as if it had been rudely addressed to all villain rpers everywhere, labeling them as the evil asshole with a power fantasy, instead.

Next is: Anyway hot take but maybe the reason people kept trying to “redeem” and “change” OP’s character is because their character is boring af!

Yeahhhh, that one’s just mean. And, given the first paragraph, easily able to seen as an attack saying that if you are a villain rper, your character is boring af. They’re not! The op’s post is a little much, to be honest, and I guess I thought I was feeling spicy at 4 am. Now I think I must’ve just been being mean. Aurelia explains what’s wrong with the initial post here, though, instead of trying and failing to poke fun at it in that special pseudo-mean tumblr way like I did.

Lastly, Like, honestly! Play a character as a foil to another, play to fucked up ideas about morality, play an antagonist arc to a protagonist character, play a character who makes bad decisions. But don’t play a “villain.” Don’t play a character whose core personality traits are simply being cruel/evil. Don’t play a character whose sole focus is to kill npcs, be scary, and lord over other players’ characters. Don’t play a character who never develops or changes, and doesn’t facilitate change in other characters. Just don’t be an asshole edgelord. Don’t be flat and one dimensional. Don’t use rp to live out your fucked up power fantasy. Get therapy instead.

Honestly, I think this is the most clear part of my entire post, and also the worst, at the end there. I just am listing off behaviors that this figurative “bad villain rper” exhibits, and what offsets them. Play a villain that’s complex, had depth, nuance! I’m saying don’t play the “villain,” and then listing off what this specific hypothetical villain is. The opposite of deep and nuanced. The “bad villain rper” type the whole post is a vent about.

Then comes the dreaded “ Don’t use rp to live out your fucked up power fantasy. Get therapy instead. “ The villainous power fantasy. No, I do not think everyone who rp’s villains is like this. Yes, I believe there are people like this, who are INCREDIBLY few and far between, and if they solely use rp as an outlet to harass others both ICly and OOCly, that is bad! And maybe they should get help! And even, then, that was only half-serious! But therapy is a serious subject and I should have known better, and done better. Did all of that come off as intended? Hell no! Instead, it was the final nail in the coffin.

So! That’s what I was trying to say. Badly-written villains are a pain. If I had written up a post like I am now, with this long-ass thing, actually trying to be eloquent and clear. Not 4 am word vomit. This 4 am word vomit instead has gotten me to be read and interpreted as:

-being completely unable to separate character and player to the point where i think every villain’s player is a Real Life Bad Person and/or needs mental help

-saying all villains are boring because they’re not heroes, and thus are incapable of being complex and nuanced

-saying people who play dark/antagonistic characters are, in general, living out their fucked up power fantasy through them

-thinking that villainous characters are incredibly boring and just plain terrible

No! None of that is what I think! Absolutely none! I’m not going to go in and refute each of those claims, because, like I said, I’m not trying to make excuses here. But I WILL end this thing with what I do think of villainous characters and their players:

They’re fucking great, okay? A good story is made a gazillion times better by having a good villain in it, be the story a book, a movie, or an rp scenario. Well-written villain rpers are a TREASURE, and need to be appreciated! It is often harder to find rp with antagonistic toons, to begin with, and their players may find themselves getting shit on more often than others, which should absolutely not be the case. Characters that are complex and deep and nuanced are great no matter what their alignment is.

There ARE some pretty shitty villain rpers out there, too. And, in my own personal experience, they tend to be much more obnoxious than shitty hero rpers. A badly written hero will ruin a villain’s rp. A badly written villain may well try to ruin everybody around them’s rp.

Badly written villains suck. They’re the worst. And they make things worse for those that dedicate a lot of time and effort to crafting complex and cleverly written, compelling villains! Badly written villains are something I can and will complain about, just as well-written villains are something that I can and will praise. But I’ll try not to complain or vent on this platform anymore, to start.

And I do NOT blend IC and OOC. That’s the rper’s taboo! I will critique others who do it, though, which ironically is what I was sort of trying to do- complain about those specific villain players who do that. But anyway. If you’ve read this far, good for you! This has been way too long.

And. Please. If I do say or do something that hurts you in the future, regardless of what type of post it is, talk to me! Tell me what’s up! Thank you!

[kitsoa]

KHuX- Three Prong Speculation

I am gonna like level so hard into speculation it’s not even gonna be funny. Because I have three interlocking theories on KHuX that I have speculated about before but never gone over the interconnected nature. A lot of this is re-summarizing the speculation posts but it runs on THREE MAIN IDEAS.

Kingdom Hearts is a self-aware story and MoM is the creator of that story. He is not seeing into the future more so as dictating it. 

Ava, understanding some level of malicious manipulation in her master kills Strelitzia and plants an impostor (to be determined who) to thwart the carefully laid plans of MoM.

Ventus, a victim of the system, grows an immensely suppressed darkness that manifests as a split personality that would later be christened Vanitas. This darkness is a Darkling hybrid that then serves to create discord in the Union Leaders and is the intended spark of the rebirth cycle. 

Okay that’s a lot. Let’s dive in.

This story all about traveling around Disney movies and connecting with characters isn’t all that deep. The face value of the plot kinda explains what I see as it’s underlying plot twist. That it seeks to discuss the merits of stories and characters in our lives. Making friends seems to be the premise but it’s not so much making friends as it is understanding and feeling the impact of fictional entities (all of Sora’s friends are characters we’ve met in other fictional contexts)-- but we are observing it through an inside lens: through fictional denizen Sora and his subsidiaries.

The rising conflict within this shadow premise of Kingdom Hearts then ends up being about the regard of fiction and the impact stories have. Their nature. What they are capable of doing and the reason we should or shouldn’t value their creation. 

Enter. The Master of Masters. 

The Author

The theory goes like this. The Book of Prophecies, depicting the story of the entire KH franchise is written by the Master of Masters. A true claim. The Master of Masters is able to do this through a stable time loop device he plants into the narrative known as the Gazing Eye. Everything that keyblade baring the eye witnesses is view by him temporally jam-packed into his understanding to allow him to write the book in his time. 

...A harder claim to verify. 

See we kinda have to take MoM’s word for it here. Sure eyeballs are used for witnessing things and the breadth of his abilities could very well enchant some eye to transmit that view back into the past but… knowing the limitations of the universe with time travel and how seemingly limited an arbitrary eye in a key view would give him… this plot doesn’t actually make any sense. He either is powerful enough not to need an elaborate proxy, or the proxy isn’t expansive enough to warrant the knowledge he knows. 

So let’s call MoM on his bluff. Let’s say he told a half-truth to Luxu. The Gazing Eye is his eye. But it’s simply a live-feed security camera. It’s his viewpoint of events of kingdom hearts outside of the written word.

Leaving us with the question: How did MoM write the Book of Prophecies?

The short answer: The world they live in is fictional and MoM is the actual author. The Book of Prophecies is a book of predictions but a roadmap, a plan. It is the story of the entire multi-verse. It doesn’t happen because MoM saw it happen. It happened because MoM willed it to happen. 

Alright cool. What’s he trying to do? 

Well, let’s do a quick personality analysis of MoM. Quirky and eccentric. He likes to have fun. He pokes fun at serious people and taunts them. He’s a planner, scheming together elaborate roles and procedures for his Foretellers. And he’s inquisitive. He creates the dream eaters and the keyblades. His study is full of notes and beakers and scientific paraphernalia suggesting that there’s a hunger for knowledge and understanding. 

And he dwells in a fictitious world of his creation?

I turn to the flashbacks from the Cornerstones of Rebirth to re-contextualize this scenario. He paints the Keyblade War as a continuous, endless, conflict that cycles-- but I’m convinced he’s speaking figuratively. What he describes in that scene is the premise of all conflict. What he does, is explain his origin story. A boy surrounded by monsters in human guise. Real evil. The real world. And when he realized that evil he ‘created’ the Keyblade War. He saw it and all conflict as this great battle between good and evil. He formed a lens of understanding through this story. The world of Kingdom Hearts was created to rationalize the existence of real evil. 

Of course, as he matures he grows more aware of this process but the disdain for that real evil still exists. He still wants to stop the cycle he’s perceived as evil’s destruction and good’s unrelenting return. He wants to do this… by emulating the process in his own story. He wants to see if it can be done. It’s his curiosity, and perhaps a sick sense of cynicism that it’s even possible. I get serious, jaded-by-humanity evil god vibes. 

So he creates this story and it’s doomed to fall to darkness. It’s fated to fall to darkness not because he saw its fate but because he said so. And he’s gonna rig the resurrection process perhaps to inspire enough gumption in his creations to fight the inevitable fate that he is putting them in, to see if it can be done at all. He wants to learn from them or have his point proven. 

The plan: make the war happen over and over and over again in this little world he created. Set it up so that all the players in-fight and turn to darkness and betray and lose their way and then make it so there are always designated survivors to repeat the process over again. Then sit back and watch. See if they can defy him. See if their actions can change their fate. 

The Pawn

Ava is his pawn. As I state in this speculation post, Ava goes through the motions following the Master’s orders to orchestrate his designated survivors-- the Dandelions. But it’s in her encounter with Luxu that he tells her ‘there is no traitor.’ He reveals that the conflict between the Foretellers is by the Master’s very design meant to sow the tensions of war and trigger the inevitable destruction they so want to avoid. Her denial causes her to strike and ring the bell, therefore becoming the fictitious traitor and making real the inciting lost page. The Master of Master’s point is proven. Ava, performs her role and brings about the destruction. 

But knowing that the Master has orchestrated the Dandelions, she foresees the cycles repeat. The tension sowed in the very structure of the separate unions, in the recreational battles, in the wiped memories. She sees that if there is nothing done, the union leaders will grow wary of each other, the presence of the Book of Prophecy will behave like the lost page, competition and resentment will form and darkness will grow in the hearts of the Dandelions resulting in the same fate. So Ava sets to change this.

She grants the Book of Prophecies to someone other than the Master’s intended recipient. But it doesn’t stop there. Changing the BoP recipient wouldn’t change the fact that the presence of the imbalance of knowledge would incite tension between unions.

No, she plants an impostor as well. And she does this by killing Strelitzia for the greater good. 

She then hides as Darkness and orchestrates their escape from the dataworld. 

Now we must ask. Is this enough to change the fate of this story? 

Short answer: No. 

Long answer: It doesn’t actually matter because it is human nature to destroy. The Darkness will always exist.

The Plot-device

Because I think there was always going to be a planted element of discourse in the leaders. Something intended to destroy the peace of the Dandelion’s world in a different way. And that-- is the Darklings. The creatures of Darkness behave in a 3rd party way when they are symptoms of the story’s context. Keykids falling to their dark jealousy and rage. The competition and fear of their situation. Darkness is inherent. And the darkness of a powerful chosen (keyblade wielders) is an even greater threat. It is the darkness of humanity that drove MoM to this experiment and ultimately the thing that will keep rearing its head should he not meddle. 

And that is why he chose Ventus as a Union Leader.

As I stated in this post, I think there is circumstantial evidence to suggest that Ven’s personality and the hardships of Daybreak Town’s system have caused him to suppress his Darkness and create what is essentially a split personality. Schrodinger's Darkling. I believe Ven was chosen by MoM to ensure the destruction of the Dandelion’s world. 

His capacity for darkness is foreshadowed and eventually spawns a later series antagonist. Ven is used to talk about that duality and the exclusive factors of both natures so it is fitting that he is capitalizes on that poetic message. Darkness is in every heart, even the kindest. The situation and context of the Daybreak town story created him so he is an unavoidable force. The Darklings serve as a plot device to serve in conflict with the key bearers and play the role of fodder in the Master’s grand experiment. 

Conclusion 

So Ava’s actions continue to make her a pawn to fate as her killing of Strelitzia drives a wedge in the Union Leaders. With his darkness suppressed to the point of bursting, the tension will send Ven over the edge and cause him to incite the Keyblade war with his Darkling split personality. This war will reflect the dark versus light fables of old that we hear the Keyblade War described as. Vanitas-- through Ven will toll the bell to start the war again. Fate will be unavoidable. In that struggle, Ava’s actions will have prompted Brain to seek out the next world. The cycle of rebirth will once again happen because of her plot. It was all orchestrated and the Master of Master’s experiment yields no new results. This god will from this have lost hope in the power of fiction to overcome the constant cycle. 

That is until Sora comes to meet him.

[divagonzo]

why do you hate Hermione so much everything i read from you is so rude about her what gives

Well ‘ello to you too Nonnie.

So do I hate Hermione? Heavens no. As weird as it sounds, I treat the character like one of my nearest and dearest - gonna call them out when they act wrong and expect them to do the same for me when I fuck up. I was doing this when I was that age, being an arrogant arse (and somewhat one still to this day.) (There are reasons why I go by Dragon and it’s not always my award-winning wisdom.)

Does it come across as brusque and rude? Sure. I’ve never been accused of sugar coating anything, unfortunately. Another of my bad traits, I reckon.

But after this, I’ll delve into this bit for you, nonnie.

(and I’m repeating myself by going into this again but since I can’t scare up the previous discourse for Hermione positive narrative from me…)

Positive Hermione discourse….

For me, personally, I think her world turns right side up the moment Ron walks back into the tent, having saved Harry, destroyed the locket, and keeping the sword of Gryffindor.

While she was rightfully beastly over what had happened (not understanding maybe how deep that abyss went for Ron in those moments he was being pushed away) she shouldn’t have hit him - but her anger otherwise was justified. And like Ron (which seem to be two sides of the same complimentary coin) she needed time and distance to eventually quell her anger.

I’ve been Ron at that moment with someone I deeply love, having hurt them. The palatable fear over losing them for your stupid shit is very scary. I had to do what Ron did - giving them space and time. Unlike a story which can be remedied in 100 pages, mine took years.

But unlike when Ron and Hermione were even a year younger, Ron has grown to where he respects her space and will take what he can get, having betrayed her and Harry. Harry pushed him away but he was the one who got shirty and walked off, to disastrous consequences.

So they are off hunting clues again, with Ron helping out immensely. The debacle at Xeno Lovegood’s house and then being caught out by the snatchers showed everyone how the others are important to each other. There was no perceived weak link anymore. Everyone knew their value. All three were vital and necessary to the others.

So when Ron’s being beaten to a pulp and Harry’s gotten a stinger to the face to try and hide his identity, the only one left standing whole is Hermione. And she’s terrified.

I can’t blame her in the least.

Viv and I disagree on this point, but I personally think that this was a geometric growth moment for Hermione. Ron’s offered himself up to Bellatrix, knowing what is coming (or so he thinks) but instead she picks Hermione. (Once again reinforcing the theme that villains pick out the one most dangerous to them.)

You can’t sway me from thinking that Hermione and that iditic and iconic memory of hers didn’t flashback for a moment to Ron’s courage to come back to them, willing to face her wrath for walking out. I can’t be dissuaded that she had that thought in her head that “Ron came back. Ron faced down acromantulas for me. I can do this, too.”

Hermione knows that what is coming is gonna suck dragon’s talons. And it’s going to hurt, especially since she got yanked by her hair when separated from the guys. I can tell you that hurts horribly. She’s using every bit of Gryffindor courage to keep her wits for what is going to happen. She was going to protect her friends if it was the last thing she would ever do.

Now that’s love, everyone. That’s a fireworks explosion demonstration right there where even oblivious people can recognize it. That’s a demonstration that a Dragon respects writ large.

For me, this is her defining moment - facing down a worst case scenario and facing it with courage. It’s facing possible death and not cowering from it but buying them time and praying that they can find a way out, with or without her.

I honestly don’t think she expected to survive it.

She had a good 30 seconds to consider what was going to happen. Anticipation was probably at the forefront of her thinking because she knew what Lestrange was capable of achieving.

The guys are downstairs and Ron’s frantic. He doesn’t know what is happening except that Hermione is screaming bloody murder. And since it’s off-screen (gives stink eyes to Uncle Steve and Uncle David) the reader’s imagination is used to consider how bad it really is. All the reader - and the guys - can hear is her screaming.

She’s there for minutes - more than five, less than 20 total. It’s fast and dirty and roughshod - unlike what the Longbottoms went through, potentially. But she’s being tormented for information - a Shrodinger’s moment in betraying how important the vault actually is.

But Hermione’s holding up and holding her own, lying while in unspeakable pain.

While I hate to broach such a thing, there’s a huge reason why the Geneva Convention has enacted rules and laws of warfare, including torture. There are reasons why prisoners of war, fighting under flag and uniform, are protected. Why?

Because under pain, a prisoner will say anything to make the pain cease. And with anything like such, it’s not a question of breaking but of when.

But Hermione? She’s keeping her wits under torture. She’s able to withstand such pain to keep Bellatrix from going after the others. (Yes, I know it’s the Author but I also think that some of it was scrubbed by the editors because you can’t go too dark on it, at least not that way.)

Cut to Dobby’s rescue and the guys escaping courtesy of Wormtail and they finally get to see - Griphook lying for them, Hermione barely stirring.

Like many a hero in books I grew up on (and media, too) Hermione gave them the one thing they needed: time. So many of the fallen heroes I’ve loved in stories are the ones who face down their demise with courage, standing in the breach to give the survivors a better chance.

While the book makes light of it and the movie, even more, something like that isn’t shaken off like you caught a volleyball to the face. (That stings, lemme tell you, double if you wear glasses.) Going through something so traumatic changes a person.

I liken what she went through as a baptism by fire - where it burned away all of the bollocks and bullshit, all of the petty games and bad communications, and made all of them realize how important each one of them is to the others.

This doesn’t mean that Hermione now has empathy and support for Ron the way he needs immediately. I personally think that the communication lines are completely open at this point and all of the words said that don’t quite mean what they say boil away to where what they do say to one another is what they mean. Nothing is hidden, everything on the table for the other to see - complete vulnerability.

While I do wish some problematic things were handled differently (*and I can’t advocate abuse for anyone*) My critical analysis of the character shows geometric growth after that situation in MM - and beyond. I do wish there had been more shown but more couldn’t have been shoehorned in into the last 1/3 of the book. There was too much else that had to happen in the narrative to give Hermione any more arc than she had.

But damn this is why I love fic that explores it afterward, warts and all.

So nonnie, I love Hermione, even if I am critical on some things. I don’t give a pass but I do understand the whys and hows of it. If I were a written character, I’d hope someone would say how fucked up I was at times in my life and also see how much growth happened between 15 and 40-something.

I try to live my life as a lesson on how to not fuck up - and how to survive it and grow from it when I do.

[bulletandsophia]

Some Meta (Tinfoil?) Because Episode 4 Had Me All Shook. Spoilers Included, Beware.

Okay, so I’ve few more thoughts about what can happen to the show moving forward. I think I’ve seen enough material from the past four episodes to create this somewhat long assumption on the endgame ship.

First and foremost, I am a fan of a good piece of literature (defined from here on, as I’ve studied in the university, as a piece of text or material from whichever medium or channel) and a well-thought literary criticism. I am keeping an open mind on this one so I hope you do too so we can create a healthy, substantial, and fascinating discourse. To keep it clear, this is mostly show-based analysis. 😊

And so, here we go. Read below the cut.

After seeing episode four that just for some reason blew me away not only on the execution and craftsmanship but even more so on the emotional depth that almost all of the characters in that episode have conveyed. I’ve already written a short recap on this particular episode in a previous post but in summary, I thought the episode gave us all what we wanted and rightfully, in GoT style. It was confusing, terrifying, and most definitely opened to A LOT MORE to interpretation.

The episode is both plot and character(s) driven that for me, it moved so much of the story in all characters’ respective playing field. Just a quick recap of the instances that has inspired me so to think of this meta:

1. Jon and D*ny finally have a semblance of a real conversation that made us see where their priorities still lie. Jon in the North, D*ny of conquering all of Westeros. Emphasis on “still” because this scene can inspire even more shifts in their dynamic. To where? That is the most exciting part.

2. Stark children Sansa, Arya, and Bran are finally all together in Winterfell surrounded by both angels (Brienne/Pod) and demons (Littlefinger) that could potentially put them in a tug-of-war. But ultimately, House Stark is back.

3. Jon and Theon dealing with past issues rekindled in a short but very tension-filled reunion. Might seem random. But I believe, it’s not (initially because of Dadvos’ reaction) but you can see why later on.

4. Tyrion and Jamie having some sort of similar realizations (of fear and disbelief) after witnessing D*ny’s fury and destruction on the battlefield.

With all these impressions and material to work on, a huge question has run rampart after this episode leak. Is the endgame Jonsa or J*nerys? This episode was filled with moments for both ships to shine and sail and I say they are both sailing very well. But again, in consideration of ALL that is happening (cue here LF’s words of wisdom: everything is happening all at the same time), we cannot simply disregard characterization, context, AND the other characters in order to make a ship happen.

First, Jon and D*ny are definitely going somewhere. I cannot entirely say yet that it will be full-on romantic or tragic or chaotic for episode four left this (too deliciously) vague for me. But they are intertwined both in the aspects of claiming the Iron Throne and in defeating the White Walkers. What I love is how blatant this knowledge is that I don’t even have to explain why. For anyone with the right senses, matched with the aforementioned knowledge of their intertwined fates, the simpler and almost only logical thing to do is to place Jon and D side by side as the power couple. It is a good picture. It is an efficient picture. But of course, this is GoT and as I see it, showrunners are putting in as much tension between the two to deny the audience the quick and convenient union of “ice and fire”, creating an even more plausible chemistry a la the usual love-hate relationship trope. But as of now, Jon and D*ny are sure of their intentions and priorities in defeating the Walkers and getting the Iron Throne respectively. It is then in these contrasting goals that their true dilemma lies. At this point, they are not agreeable with each other. While some may argue that there is also a clear attraction, this mere reasoning cannot reconcile their beliefs and allowing it to be is a disservice to both characters. And so, as I can see it, and mentioned in my previous post, something drastic will have to occur to make this partnership believably happen.

With episode four, I can now fully understand those supposed “leaks” comparing J/D with Lyanna and Rhaeger later on. It actually makes sense. And if it does happen, I will be so glad for it. Because for Jon and D to get together, it will have to be some sort of an epic “betrayal” not only for the realm, but to their current disposition and beliefs now. The look Jon had in the cave scene where D mentioned his pride and of sacrificing his people because of it, is a look of a person conflicted. D*ny’s words are challenging Jon’s honor and loyalty to the North/Starks. This creates an internal dilemma for Jon. He does not want to betray his people and yet we also know how he is so desperate for help. So how then can Jon get the queen’s support? This question has opened up tons of interpretation in which I conclude will make J*nerys actually happen—but not without its bitterness. Because first and foremost, I believe, for that ship to happen, both J and D have to sacrifice and shed some parts of who they are now.

For Jon, it will be his biggest gesture and by far, his biggest character shift yet because the possibility of J/D happening first lies in the notion and acts of Jon Snow falling in love with D. Like truly falling in love with her. He has to admire her truthfully, honestly and with a passion despite everything that has happened and despite everything D has already done. This choice that Jon will make will also be despite the North, his beliefs, and despite his siblings. Jon will choose D and evidently, not his honor (cue here Maester Aemon’s words: what is honor compared to a woman’s love, etc.) This then makes the J/D-L/R parallel sensible. This is a version of J/D against the rest of the world, against all the odds.

BUT THEN, we were also bombarded in the past few episodes of how Jon should be smarter than Robb and Eddard—both of whom died because of honor and love. So, another way to read this (and probably the most intriguing) is for Jon to perhaps do the other way around. Jon—loyal to a core to the North and his family—will shed his honor (unlike Ned) and will be unburdened by love (unlike Robb) for ironically, planned and with selfish intent, he has to make D fall in love with him and earn her trust.

Ultimately, as King, this is Jon Snow finally playing the game of thrones.

The only silver lining here is for D to be the one to change, and not Jon. For J/D to make sense, she needs to clear up her issues and questionable judgements on leadership, morality, and power. That is then her big gesture, to fall into Jon’s ideals and principles and of the people he cares for. This will be her paradigm shift from all that she’s worked for and believed in since so many seasons ago; accepting that she is not fit to rule (and not born to rule, once Jon’s identity is finally revealed) and finally shedding off the madness and ruthlessness in her (madness that episode 4 can attest to). She has to see Westeros the way Jon sees it too. She has to be remorseful with her past (and future?) horrific actions (again, once she finds out Jon’s parentage). So, for as long as D’s hunger for the IT won’t recede, J/D is the narrative and the tragedy of Jon losing a core of his self for it, emulating the same mistakes his parents did before him, embodying and solidifying that he is indeed both ice and fire, and starting an unnecessary war, betrayal, and conflict between the kingdoms (and perhaps, even within his siblings)—only this time, it’s much worse, what with the bigger threat of the undead that still looms.

So how does Jonsa play in all of these? Were we all just delusional in seeing those parallels? Were we overanalyzing Jon’s protectiveness? No, I’d beg to differ. I think all these Jonsa hints are even more deliberate as we are also now (assumed) to go canon with the J/D ship. I actually love how these two ships are playing side by side. Because even if small, short, and unseen by the casual viewers, Jonsa hints are scattered all over the episodes since season 6. I’d like to believe that this has a specific and special reason in the narrative. Because while J/D might be the epic, tragic, right-in-your face love story, Jonsa is not. Or I think will it ever be.

I think it’s never supposed to be that anyway because as I see it now, again considering all of the things that is happening, Jonsa is the story that has to creep up with melancholy realization for both Jon, Sansa, and us, the audience, as soon as the dust of war has settled. And if I were to believe that D will find her demise beyond the wall fighting the walkers, then this leaves Jon with only one option: to go home. I still couldn’t fathom him wanting the throne. And before anyone can even raise this, Sansa in this scenario is NOT and NEVER will be a second option. Not when, as I said, she has been creeping up since season 6. She is then, as we’ve seen, already a part of Jon. His reactions in anything that concerns Sansa is a reflex; they now share a quiet natural bond.

As what we have witnessed, listed, and gif-ed (lol!), these Jonsa moments are already too many to be disregarded as simple accidents. I think these moments are planted for posterity and to serve as a reminder for us as soon as the war ends of their certain dynamic building and buried in the middle of all the magic and the spectacle. For all the parallels showrunners have made for Jonsa, Ned/Cat is the most evident. And what else do they perhaps want to make us remember but of that sheer joy, love, and relative peace Ned and Cat had and portrayed in season one?

Jon and Sansa IS Ned and Cat reincarnate. With all these parallels and hints, with Sansa’s competency in ruling, her undying belief in goodness (‘If I’m to be queen, I will make them love me.’), Jon’s stil intact honor, bravery, and love for family, hugely echo Ned/Cat’s ideal courtly, familial life that we have not seen for so long. Jon and Sansa, relieving this scenario again one moment at a time, only affirms that they are or can be, the dream of spring, the two people who can rebuild a home again (vs. J/D’s partnership that saves). And at this point of where we are now in the story, it is literally a wishful thinking. It cannot be realized. Yet.

But, as soon as the WW are defeated and Jon comes home, we can have this. We can finally have this. And no one—any character who had the privilege of witnessing Jon’s protectiveness with anything that concerns Sansa and what with Sansa’s constant talk of Jon—can argue that they did not see this coming. Always, even if just a hunch (LF and Davos’ suspicions), it has always been there. Then on the other hand we, as the audience, both casual and in-depth, have the power to look back on the literature and surprise ourselves with the ingenuity of it all.

It has always been there.

But the best pay-off for this ending is perhaps the fulfillment of Jon and Sansa’s dreams. A loving household they can finally live in. Together. And with the restoration of peace, Jon can also then redeem and revive the honor, the loyalty, and the love he had probably lost along the way in fulfilling his prophecy.

BUT if indeed, it comes to an end where Jon had changed and transformed (to a half-dead, the Night King, D’s husband if she survives, or ultimately shedding the remaining Starkness in him), the bittersweet truth still lies so glaringly. Because we can look back to all these moments and realize that Sansa is Jon’s what could have been. She is his once dream fulfilled before all the chaos, the prophecies, and the truth changed, possessed, and occupied him so. She is the other reality he could have had. As the audience, our power again to revisit each and every episode since the reunion can realize how they could have also worked so, so well; the quiet parallel to the more dramatic, glamorized, and epically soap-opera way J/D has or can happen.

The last three episodes of this season will surely change (or add) more to this thought but at this point, with the promise of bitterness, blood, and eventual spring, this is where I can see the end game going. And so while J/D can become canon, I believe that this does not make Jonsa any less true. Both endgames are a realization and a contrast of the dreams (Jonsa) and the destiny (J*nerys) of the song of ice and fire himself, Jon Snow.

Whew! What do you think? :)

[montagnarde1793]

changed their mind on robespierre, never denied that they were acting out of self- preservation and fear of the supposed dictatorial ambitions of the robespierrist faction. . how do you explain the collapse in solidarity within the committee of public safety?. i am sorry for having sent in the previous message before i actually finished it but i have asd\nonverbal learning disorder, i am not a native english speaker( i am italian) and also computer illiterate.

No worries, anon, I’ll just start by copy/pasting the first part of your question:

i am the same person who wrote the last question; i am a left communist so i am  neither pro or against robespierre. what puzzles me is that this belief that robespierre aspired to dictatorship was so widespread at the time and that barere and billaud varennes, even though they regretted their role in the coup and [see above]

I’m afraid I can’t give your question as full an answer as I would like, anon: both intrinsically, in the sense that our sources are incomplete and unreliable and in the sense that I don’t have a whole lot of time.

Since you just mention the breakdown of solidarity within the CSP, I won’t get into possible broader causes for Thermidor. I’ll also leave aside the conflict between Robespierre and Saint-Just and Carnot on the subject of defensive war vs war of conquest, about which there is a very suggestive discussion in M. Belissa, Fraternité universelle et intérêt national.

Mathiez makes a good case for one of the sources of conflict stemming from the ventôse decrees and their (lack of) application, but I think it’s fair to say that Barère and especially Billaud were not the major obstructionists on that point. Françoise Brunel has pretty well demonstrated that there were no major divergences in policy between Billaud and Robespierre (see her Thermidor and her introduction to Billaud’s Principes régénérateurs du système social).

Which brings us to your question of specifically why Billaud or Barère would claim fear that Robespierre “aspired to the dictatorship” was their principle motive for participating in Thermidor. As this became a standard trope of thermidorian discourse, I want to start with the caveat that we should be careful regarding the sincerity of such affirmations as a general rule. Barère had shown himself to be a fairly versatile figure throughout the Revolution, so while I’m not sure I would take the anecdote according to which he supposedly had two speeches in his pocket on 9 Thermidor (one in case of Robespierre’s victory of his adversaries and one in case of his adversaries’ victory over him), I don’t think we can rule out a case of simple opportunism on his part. In that supposition, he sided with the Thermidorians because they were winning and made up a justification after the fact.

Assuming, to the contrary, that Barère was sincere, then we can apply the same logic to him as to Billaud, at least to a certain extent. As far as Billaud is concerned, I would once again tend to follow Brunel’s analysis. Billaud had repeatedly shown himself, from the beginning of the Revolution, to have an extreme mistrust of the influence conferred on individuals by popularity. I think he genuinely feared Robespierre’s popularity and the influence it gave him and that this fear, combined with Robespierre’s own distrust and isolation probably did lead Billaud to fear that Robespierre might try to make himself dictator. There is no serious evidence to suggest that this was anything more than a phantasm on Billaud’s part, but that doesn’t make his fear any less of a real motive.

To what extent such a motive might have applied to other actors remains unclear, as far as I’m concerned, but I think we can fairly attribute it to Billaud.

[makingscipub]

Metaphors in the time of coronavirus

On Sunday, 15th March, Kenan Malik wrote an article on metaphors for The Observer. This was inspired by Matthew Cobb’s new book on The Idea of the Brain which delves into the many metaphors of and for the brain that have been used over time. I have just started to read that book – a good way of distracting myself from the ever-present thought of the novel coronavirus or Covid-19!

In his article, which all students of metaphor should read, Malik also mentions the virus: “The coronavirus is both a physical threat and a metaphor for everything from the failures of globalisation to the menace of foreigners.”

For a while now I have been oying with the idea of writing something on metaphors in the time of coronavirus, but instead I have been sitting on Twitter staring at Covid-tweets like a rabbit caught in the headlights. Anyway, Malik’s article and some tweets relating to it, woke me from my digital slumber.

Before I display my random collection of metaphors caught on the fly, a quick overview of metaphors and metaphor analysis.

And, of course, the situation is complex, fast changing and fluid, so this is just a snap-shot!

Metaphors and meaning

Why look at metaphors in the time of coronavirus? Metaphors create meaning. They have been tools for meaning-making as long as humans have been able to talk to each other. They are essential for the development of language, cognition and culture. They also play an important role in how we think and talk about health, illness and medicine and they shape how we act, individually and collectively.

The impact of metaphors in particular and social representations in general on thinking, talking and acting in the context of emerging infectious diseases, has been studied systematically by social scientists and communication scholars from Susan Sontag’s work on cancer and tuberculosis (1978) and AIDS (1989) onwards, starting with Ebola in the 1990s (Ungar, 1998; Joffe, 2002), followed by BSE or mad cow disease (Washer, 2006), foot and mouth disease (Nerlich et al., 2002; Nerlich, 2004), SARS (Washer, 2004; Wallis and Nerlich, 2005), avian/bird flu/influenza (Nerlich and Halliday, 2007; Ungar, 2008; Brown et al., 2009), swine flu (Nerlich and Koteyko, 2012), MRSA (Washer and Joffe, 2006; Koteyko et al., 2007), Zika (Ribeiro et al., 2018) and many more…..

Peter Washer published a book on emerging infectious diseases and society in 2010. There is even a special issue on pandemics published by Sociology of Health and Illness in 2012 and edited by Robert Dingwall, Lily Hoffman and Karen Staniland.

So, what about metaphors and Covid-19? Obviously, there are war metaphors, the go-to metaphors used in almost all reporting on infectious diseases, epidemics and pandemics, but, I thought, that cannot be all. So, I started rummaging around quite unsystematically, I have to confess, and here is what I found.

I would however like to invite you, dear reader, to let me know about any other metaphors, and there must be thousands, that I have overlooked.

War metaphors

War metaphors (fight, battle, combat, attack, defend etc.) came out in force when the outbreak of Covid-19 started in China. Somebody will have to study how war changed from metaphor to daily reality, just as it is happening now in Italy, France and beyond.

Here is only one example: “President Xi Jinping has vowed to wage a ‘people’s war’ against the COVID-19 epidemic. Judging by the draconian measures that have been introduced to quarantine tens of millions of people, restrict the return to work after the Chinese New Year, and shutter much of the Chinese economy, he was certainly not understating his determination.” There are thousands more…

War metaphors also marched into the UK discourse, once the government announced its action or battle plan. Here again somebody should study the rise and fall and change of war metaphors quite systematically. One headline in The Sun brought many aspects of the war metaphor together when it declared: “Army on standby as Boris declares war on coronavirus with battle plan to kill the deadly virus”.

Some people opposed the war metaphor. Simon Jenkins wrote in The Guardian: “ “Never, ever, should a government use war as a metaphor in a time of peace. Britain is not at war with coronavirus. The phrase and its cognates should be banned. Those who exploit them to heighten panic and win obedience to authority should be dismissed from public office.”

Some people argued quite convincingly that we are ‘at war’ and that the war metaphor was quite appropriate. See this video which is extremely clear about what’s at stake.

Some took it further and explained why we are at war by looking at issues of science and politics: “A war is always a political choice. It is a last resort for many but in recent times some ‘wars’ have been perceived by many to also be of choice. The policy to combat a virus […] needs to be guided by science but is ultimately a political decision. Unlike traditional wars, we do not have a choice: COVID19 is here and we need to fight it. It is a different foe. It knows no borders.” So we enter the politics of war… a dangerous field.

I’ll come back to different ways of framing disease management with metaphors other than war in a moment, after a little detour into disaster metaphors and very few explanatory metaphors.

Disaster metaphors

Alongside war metaphors, which frame what we are doing in a pandemic, there are, of course, also a lot of disaster metaphors, which picture what the epidemic does to us, such as

epicentre

meltdown

and also Chernobyl – China’s Chernobyl, Trump’s Chernobyl etc.

plague (killer plague) – that would deserve its own analysis

house on fire

This last metaphor was nicely exploited in a recent article by the epidemiologist William Hanage reacting to the UK government’s plans to manage the pandemic. He said: “Your house is on fire, and the people whom you have trusted with your care are not trying to put it out. Even though they knew it was coming, and could see what happened to the neighbours as they were overwhelmed with terrifying speed, the UK government has inexplicably chosen to encourage the flames, in the misguided notion that somehow they will be able to control them.”

This has changed just now while I am writing, as social distancing is now strongly encouraged in the third press conference. But there are still some changes needed, such as more systematic testing, as recommended by the WHO….

Metaphors to explain the virus and its spread

Strangely, explanatory metaphors were quite rare. By this I mean metaphors trying to explain or make visceral the nature of the virus and the way the virus operates. But perhaps I am wrong. If there are other examples, please let me know.

The domino effect

The one, really great, example I found was this mixed metaphor where New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo tried to explain the dynamics of virus transmission by saying: “It’s these large gatherings where you can expose a number of people in a very short period of time and then it’s like dominoes, right, then the tree continues to expand with branches.” (The Guardian, 9 March 2020, p. 7, also here)

Why was this metaphor not used more widely when people discussed cancelling or not cancelling large gatherings of people?!

Now we come back to what to do to stop this domino effect not only in crowds but more generally… that is, to disease management and its metaphors.

Metaphors to explain what to do about the virus

Flattening the curve

The ‘flattening the curve’ metaphor (see my blog post here) has become big and has many variations, off-shoots and cousins, such as this

take the heat out transmission

breaking chains of infection

controlled burn

starving the virus of fuel

There are also more creative versions of the metaphor.

Squash the sombrero

Referring to the hat-shaped curve of the now famous flatting-the-curve graph, Boris Johnson introduced the metaphor of ‘squash this sombrero’ at the second press conference about the virus which actually used a representation of the flatten the curve graph in the background in order to make it more understandable.

The announcements made at the press conference has provoked a lot of unease and criticism though, one of them being that the scientific models on which the political decisions were based were not made public. In an article in The Guardian one can therefore read “There is clearly no consensus on how to respond to the pandemic even among the scientific community. Prof Neil Gershenfeld of Massachusetts Institute of Technology put it best when he said that ‘building models is very different from proclaiming truths’. All anyone wants to know is how our particular model was built, and then we can all squash the sombrero together.” Again, his now seems to be happening.

The subway car

“[Drew]HARRIS [population health expert at Thomas Jefferson University]: The red curve is showing us that we are seeing a significant number of cases in a very short period of time. If you think of the – our health care system as a subway car – and it’s rush hour, and everybody wants to get on the car once, so they start piling up at the door. They pile up on the platform. There’s just not enough room in the car to take care of everybody, to accommodate everybody. That’s the first curve, if you will. That’s the system that is overwhelmed. It just can’t handle it, and people wind up not getting services that they need. If we, instead, spread out those cases so that everybody on that subway car doesn’t show up at the same time but, instead, shows up at different times, then that car can accommodate the right number of people but over a longer period of time. So the whole idea is to flatten that curve, make sure that not everybody shows up at an emergency department door at the same time.

CHANG: OK. But to take your metaphor of the subway one step further, you’re assuming with this flatter curve that people will still need to get on the subway. In other words, you’re assuming that we’re not going to see a quick end to the spread of the coronavirus, that people will still continue to get infected.”

Skate not to where the puck is but to where the puck is going to be

Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, often seen standing beside President Trump, urges people to, in a way, be always ahead of the curve, which means going where the infection is going to be, as well as where it is.

“FAUCI: It’s the old metaphor that – the Wayne Gretzky approach. You know, you skate not to where the puck is but to where the puck is going to be. If we don’t do very serious mitigation now, what’s going to happen is that we’re going to be weeks behind, and the horse is going to be out of the barn.”

The issue here is how to ‘control’ the spread of the virus – proactively. Governments want to be seen to take control and bring the virus under control. Government actions can help in this. However, in the US the government was slow in ‘blunting the pandemic’, all the while pretending it was in control. Here is an example and there are many more.

“America’s top infectious diseases expert [Fauci] is warning that hundreds of thousands of Americans could die unless every citizen joins an effort to blunt the coronavirus pandemic — only to be contradicted by President Donald Trump, who insists the virus is under ‘tremendous’ control.”

So far, we have looked at some metaphors for the virus, the spread of the virus and the control of the virus. There are also metaphors who take the virus and turn it into a metaphor. Instead of mapping familiar knowledge, for example of a volcanic eruption, onto an unfamiliar phenomenon, such as a new virus, the now familiar (new) virus is mapped onto intractable societal problems, for example.

The virus as metaphor

As quoted at the beginning of the post, Kenan Malik used the virus as a metaphor and said: “The coronavirus is both a physical threat and a metaphor for everything from the failures of globalisation to the menace of foreigners.” How have others used the virus?

Covid as one more wall

“Covid is the disease of stoppage, of ‘social distancing’, of ‘self-isolating’ (all these new terms that will no doubt find their way in the Oxford Dictionary very soon), of no-handshakes-no-hugs, no flights, no passing through. It’s the perfect metaphor for our time, where sovereign walls are being erected, armies are being called upon to defend whole continents against the oncoming humanity, officials visit spaces of unspeakable violence and congratulate the efforts of the defender, and neo-colonising attitudes reinforcing the moral predominance of the origin are springing up everywhere across the globe. We all have this disease, even if our bodies try to resist its full development. We are victims of our complying complicity. Covid is simply spreading itself on top of our acquiescing bodies, a thin layer of sanitiser and fear.”

Stress test for the species

The coronavirus is a stress test for the species. It’s a dry run for the disasters to come. Well, a moist run. It’s a test of our capacity to cope with planet-scale disasters, and this time we are probably going to pass. Just about. Not with flying colors, especially given how long it took us to close the airports, and not without a lot of grief, stress, and loss—but civilization is not about to collapse this year.

As a metaphor for the damages of climate change

“If you imagine reducing the planet to the size of a large balloon, a thin layer of paint on the surface would represent the entire biosphere. It may be wrapped around the entire planet, but it is fragile indeed. This thin, coronal layer of plants, trees, and atmosphere, is everything that gives us life. And it’s currently infected by an overreach of “flesh-eating bacteria” — namely humans that are over-consuming their resources. Climate change is the fever, but the underlying disease is the unbridled consumption of Nature.”

This brings us to a rather strange metaphor, where both the virus and climate change are ‘gray rhinos’.

Gray rhino

“Forget black swans. We’re getting run over by two gray rhinos: coronavirus and climate change. The intrigue: A gray rhino is a metaphor coined by risk expert Michele Wucker to describe ‘highly obvious, highly probable, but still neglected’ dangers, as opposed to unforeseeable or highly improbable risks — the kind in the black swan metaphor.”

Conclusion

We knew it was coming and we still were not prepared, medically, scientifically, and culturally, despite all the dystopian pandemic novels that have been circulating for ages and all the real epidemics and pandemics that have happened in recent times. To use an old metaphor. The virus exploited that weakness in the global body politic. As Laurie Penny said in a Wired article: “Infections don’t just attack weaknesses in the human body. They also exploit weaknesses in human society.” And:

“A bug or a virus will exploit any weakness in the body politic. Cholera became a huge problem when human beings started moving to cities in huge numbers. It stayed a problem until we worked out new ways of building large-scale public sewage systems, which involved a lot of money and manpower. Because of diseases like cholera, we literally figured out how to handle our shit.”

Let’s see whether the Covid-19 outbreak makes us figure out how to handle living together in an interconnected global world threatened by climate change.

Image: by Sumanley xulx from Pixabay

                                    The post Metaphors in the time of coronavirus appeared first on Making Science Public.

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[nedsecondline]

Jenna Abrams, Russia’s Clown Troll Princess, Duped the Mainstream Media and the World

Jenna Abrams had a lot of enemies on Twitter, but she was a very good friend to viral content writers across the world.

Her opinions about everything from manspreading on the subway to Rachel Dolezal to ballistic missiles still linger on news sites all over the web.

One website devoted an entire article to Abrams’ tweet about Kim Kardashian’s clothes. The story was titled “This Tweeter’s PERFECT Response to Kim K’s Naked Selfie Will Crack You Up.”

“Thank goodness, then, that there are people like Twitter user Jenna Abrams to come to the celebrity’s wardrobe-lacking aide,” reads a Brit & Co. article from March of 2016.

Those same users who followed @Jenn_Abrams for her perfect Kim Kardashian jokes would be blasted with her shoddily punctuated ideas on slavery and segregation just one month later.

“To those people, who hate the Confederate flag. Did you know that the flag and the war wasn’t about slavery, it was all about money,” Abrams’ account tweeted in April of last year.

The tweet went viral, earning heaps of ridicule from journalists, historians, and celebrities alike, then calls for support from far-right users coming to her defense.

That was the plan all along.

Congressional investigators working with social-media companies have since confirmed that Abrams wasn’t who she said she was.

Her account was the creation of employees at the Internet Research Agency, or the Russian government-funded “troll farm,” in St. Petersburg.

Jenna Abrams, the freewheeling American blogger who believed in a return to segregation and said that many of America’s problems stemmed from PC culture run amok, did not exist.

But Abrams got very real attention from almost any national news outlet you can think of, according to a Daily Beast analysis of her online footprint.

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Abrams, who at one point boasted nearly 70,000 Twitter followers, was featured in articles written by Bustle, U.S. News and World Report, USA Today, several local Fox affiliates, InfoWars, BET, Yahoo Sports, Sky News, IJR, Breitbart, The Washington Post, Mashable, New York Daily News, Quartz, Dallas News, France24, HuffPost, The Daily Caller, The Telegraph, CNN, the BBC, Gizmodo, The Independent, The Daily Dot, The Observer, Business Insider, The National Post, Refinery29, The Times of India, BuzzFeed, The Daily Mail, The New York Times, and, of course, Russia Today and Sputnik.

Many of these stories had nothing to do with Russia—or politics at all. Instead, stretching back to 2014, Abrams’ account built up an image of a straight-talking, no-nonsense, viral-tweet-writing young American woman. She was featured in articles as diverse as “the 15 funniest tweets this week” to “#FeministAMovie Proves Why Twitter Can’t Have Nice Things.” Then, once she built her following, she would push divisive views on immigration, segregation, and Donald Trump, especially as the 2016 election loomed.

Abrams’ pervasiveness in American news outlets shows just how much impact Russia’s troll farm had on American discourse in the run-up to the 2016 election—and illustrates how Russian talking points can seep into American mainstream media without even a single dollar spent on advertising.

***

Remnants from some of Abrams’ most elaborate conspiracies and xenophobic opinions still remain in replies from celebrities sparring with—or agreeing with—her account.

Roseanne Barr responded to one of Abrams’ tweets on Feb. 2, 2016, to call a common enemy “pro-pedophile.” Abrams’ tweet earlier in the day about a Saudi Arabian Starbucks went viral, meriting pickup from The Telegraph and Russia Today, and even a response from Starbucks’ corporate Twitter account.

Barr elaborated in a tweet later in the month, saying “dems repubs libertarians indies greens, black white yellow red-all religions” are “#PEDOPHILES.”

Even Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia and an expert in Russian propaganda, got into a number of Twitter spats with Abrams. McFaul responded to Abrams’ posts in 10 separate months between February of 2015 and August of 2016.

Before they knew the account was run by paid disinformation agents, Abrams’ ahistorical slavery revisionism irked journalists and historians alike.

Al Letson, the host of the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal podcast, received over 65,000 retweets and 153,000 likes when he refuted Abrams’ incorrect Civil War claim.

“It’s much easier to say the Civil War was about money, when your ancestors weren’t the currency,” said Letson, whose tweet is still pinned to the top of his Twitter page.

Historian Kevin Kruse’s quote-tweet of Abrams accrued over 41,000 retweets.

“No, the Civil War was about slavery,” he wrote. “Sincerely, Historians.”

“I responded to the tweet because it echoed an argument I’ve heard many times: that the Civil War was somehow not about slavery, even when the seceding states and the Confederate government made it quite clear, in their own words at the time, that it was entirely about slavery,” Kruse told The Daily Beast.

That argument was echoed once again just this past week, as White House Chief of Staff John Kelly claimed the Civil War was only fought because of “the lack of an ability to compromise.”

Kruse said both Kelly’s thoughts, and the Kremlin-funded viral tweet that preceded it on Abrams’ account, “are deeply at odds with the historical record.”

“The Confederate statues across the South that [Kelly] and others in this administration now defend were a vital part of the ‘Lost Cause’ myth constructed in the early 20th century to obscure the basic truths about the Civil War,” he said.

***

While the the typical image of a Russian troll may be a hastily put together Twitter account blaring out non-stop political messages, Abrams’ account went to great lengths to simulate a real, American person who existed outside of Twitter fights and amplifying racist disinformation.

Her Twitter account was created back in 2014. She had a personal website, a Medium page, her own Gmail, and even a GoFundMe page.

When The Daily Beast attempted to email Jenna’s email address, [email protected] (“Yes, there are 3 Ns,” her Twitter bio read), an automatic reply from Google stated that the “account that you tried to reach is disabled.” Google refused to comment when asked if the company had pulled the account for its ties to the Kremlin troll farm.

One of Abrams’ earliest media mentions came well before the 2016 election, in a June 2015 BBC article that aggregated Twitter users’ feelings about women choosing not to shave their armpits. Later that year, British newspaper The Telegraph picked up one of her Twitter jokes about punctuation.

But in the run-up to Election Day, Abrams’ account, and the people who were in control of it, became much more political.

In September 2016, Abrams wrote a now-removed Medium post titled “Why do we need to get back to segregation.”

“Humanity has gone full circle. Never mind how many activists of any color died to get rid of segregation, and fought for inclusion, black people want it back. 100% free people made their choice, and their choice is segregation,” Abrams wrote.

She also posted a summary of former FBI Director James Comey’s public testimony, writing “Comey admitted Hillary is a liar,” plus a picture of black and green olives, mocking the Black Lives Matter movement. CNN subsequently picked up the photo.

This sort of content seemed to become Abrams’ niche, and it tended to accrue the most replies and shares.

Abrams’ Confederate flag tweet was one of her most viewed posts, with a slew of journalists, commentators, and other high-profile Twitter users catapulting Abrams’ rhetoric to new heights. Even if those users were attempting to engage or argue against Abrams’ views, they likely did not know that, in fact, these were manufactured opinions of a Russian manipulation factory.

When Abrams joined in with an anti-Clinton hashtag, The Washington Post included her tweet in its own coverage. One outlet used an image of a terrorist attack sourced from Abrams’ Twitter feed.

As The Daily Beast reported on Wednesday, Michael Flynn Jr. retweeted Abrams at least once to his 30,000+ followers shortly before the election.

Still, Abrams went to great lengths to tell most people that she was not a Trump supporter, just a real person with an email address who wanted Americans to send her a message.

“Calm down, I’m not pro-Trump. I am pro-common sense,” Abrams’ biography read on Twitter. “Any offers/ideas/questions?”

***

The Twitter user Ironghazi couldn’t remember what Jenna Abrams wrote in April that made him pose as a news reporter so he could call her a “dumbass moron,” but he knows whoever wrote it was pretty vacant.

“If she got the ‘Hi, I’m Ironghazi from (CBS News)’ treatment, she must’ve been [a moron],” he told The Daily Beast.

It was Abrams’ Civil War tweet that prompted this reply from Ironghazi, which racked up over 1,000 retweets and 5,600 likes:

“Hi Jenn, I’m a reporter with CBS News and I’m doing a story on dumbass morons,” it reads. “Do you mind if I feature your tweet and avatar?”

Ironghazi, who declined to give his real name for this story because “when you make people mad online, they tend to try to find you for some reason,” is a notorious Twitter troll in his own right. In his most viral tweet, he shrank every continent with Photoshop to make them fit inside a map of the USA so he could illustrate “just how vast our great nation is.”

In other words, one of Twitter’s most infamous American trolls had been out-trolled by a state-sponsored Russian influence operation.

Now, over a year later, he says he didn’t suspect a thing. From one troll to another, Ironghazi thought Jenna Abrams, the sometimes funny, often stupid, always angry American, was a natural.

“The key to being a good troll is being just stupid enough to be believable, keeping in mind that the ultimate goal is making people mad online,” he said. “To that end, this Jed Abraham account succeeded.” He then clarified that the misspelling of Abrams’ name was intentional.

[clubofinfo]

Expert: The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. Let us not speak well of it either. Let us not speak of it at all. It is true the population has increased. — Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot At the rounded tune of $1.0 million each. Times 59 missiles shot from the belly of American beasts of war — that is, as of Saturday April 8. That’s the wonderful thing about parasitic, predatory, military-IT-prison-legal-punishment-media complex America. Stocks go up as missiles kill Syrian civilians. The replacement value of those racist missiles (Calling them Tomahawks? Do white Americans think a 600 mph, computer-guided, white supremacy manned projectile with flesh, brain, innards busting-burning-imploding explosives is akin to a hand-to-hand, look-in-the-eyes-of-your-enemy weapon of real warriors?)… think of a new Tomahawk 2.0, costing us  $1.5 million a piece! Think about this country’s 20 percent – the ones making it, in their Uber rich and Uber upper middle class bullshit ways. Working as engineers, software designers, paper-pushers, personnel middle men/women for Raytheon, or for one of the other thousands upon thousands of industries and high tech places that put screw and hard drive and turbine and pneumatics and shrouding and decals to these perversions of the modern USA-EU-Star-of-David-Aussie warring coalition of the dead! The 20 percent, oh, that bullshit meme of “We Are the 99,” gone into the wind of a Republican-Democrat sulfur-infused bellowing that has come to symbolize USA since before 1776. These are the directors of non-profits, the tenured faculty, the industrialists, the managerial-dean-admin society. The planners and doctors, the investor (sic) class, the money managers (thieves), the insurance sellers (rip-off artists), the mid-level hierarchies of   fortune 1000 companies. All big and little Eichmanns, for sure, and I can say I have met and spoken with so many in so many fields, who are bred from the libertarian, neo-liberal, faux humanitarian, fake intellectual class of white Americans who have always looked down on the OTHER(s). Yet, those missiles launched by the perverted-thinking/acting/living  president with the superstructure and management teams of the military and generals, they symbolize the death of this culture way beyond a Truman bombing Japan, or leveling Korea, or the chorus of others attempting bombing back to the Stone Age in Vietnam, or the parade of Yale-Harvard misanthropes like Bushes-Clinton-Obama who helped launch dozens of penetrating “wars” in Latin America, Middle East, Eastern Europe. Police actions, Reagan and his sick mind and war games, Trump and his frontal cortex atrophying before our eyes. The military are the mercenaries, guns for hire, vigilantes, from private up to Colonel, with their supreme commanders and retired triple-dipping generals colluding with the arms dealers, all those graduates of tech programs, colluding with the war inventors, all those chemicals and kill switches and job-stick hero-makers, the American scum rising to the top of the proverbial Capitalist barrel. Yet your everyday American gets teary eyed thinking about those mercenaries in Navy whites off-shore launching death to people missiles. American might and right and never a naysayer allowed to breathe in any position of power! So these scions of industry, these propagandists on TV, sketched in movies, scribing in print, gesticulating on airwaves, punishing in the HR departments, in the schools, in the courtrooms, & in the boardrooms, after decades of unfettered access to the hearts and minds of the masses (not all of us, mind you), we have come to a point where people daily just stick chin to sternum and go about their days as number pushers, scribes of structural violence, or call them “intellectual workers,” never lifting a finger or raising a voice in their overly PC-ed worlds of American business, blue-pink-white-camo-black collared, it doesn’t make a difference. The masses have sucked the high fructose corn syrup of the controllers, the great Doctor Jekyll-Mengele-Moreau-Frankenstein juice of our age: consumerism as gateway drug to insomnia, obesity, unhappiness, prescription abuse, disassociative behavior, ADD, on-the-spectrum birth, allergies, racism, hatred of the other, mis-education, functional illiteracy, exceptionalism, boredom, ennui, madness, insanity, delusion, walking dead-ness! I tried to fire up something, yesterday (April 7), just in our weekly meeting of so-called social workers. You know, ice breakers for thirty people supposedly in the game to not only assist the homeless, the drug-addled, the psychologically different, but to change the culture of hate toward the poor, criminally defined, homeless, displaced. Oh, so, one social worker, me, plays the ice breaker differently: “What’s your favorite movie, your dream vacation, your favorite band, your favorite hobby, etc.?” they ask us. “My hobby, my movie, my band, my vacation is about politics, and today, I am angry this country – us – have once again bombed another country with the power of yet another mis-elected, perverted LOTFW (sic): leader of the free world (sic).” No solidarity, no discussion, no support, not even rebuttal or nuancing: just sticking chins to sternums and moving on. This is the culture of the walking wounded, dead people, one paycheck away from hawking it all, one misstated thing in the workplace away from the two-hour-and-you-are-gone firing. My fellow social workers at this place I perform miracles, for the most part, go to college, get MA’s not for the love of inquiry, not for the robust nature of a social work graduate program, not for the heady stuff of revolutionary practice, not for the communicative skills needed to think outside the box or articulate through a wet paper bag. They go to school for a raise above the $18 an hour with paid time off. And they can’t mourn for the death we heap upon nations, can’t mourn for the bloated, perverted illegal, disgusting budgets of the militarists, and can’t rebel against the perversion of yet another rotten leader with golf blistered hands pushing the button for more ship-to-surface (human flesh and bone) launched madness. The USA has billions of dollars invested in, AKA, ripped off of the state-municipal-county coffers for those perversions called Tomahawks. And now the chorus of nobodies on TV and in the Press (sic) chant “war-war-war makes the shitty little casino-hotel magnate (bankruptcy queen, AKA, welfare king) look and sound and smell presidential.” Ahh, the smell of napalm, cordite, nitrogen soaked TNT, black powder, white phosphorus in the morning makes a TV pundit and White House stalker orgasmic. Here, from yet another perversion of American think-talk-discourse, Popular Mechanics, on the Tomahawk: While the basic design has been around for decades—they were used as far back as the 1991 Gulf War—the Tomahawk has seen numerous upgrades over the years. This new tweak could improve the Tomahawk’s striking power through the power of what you might call extreme mixology. It’s all about fuel-air explosions. Ordinary high explosives such as TNT do not require any oxygen. The big molecule simply breaks apart, releasing energy. By contrast, a fuel-air explosion is a form of combustion in which the fuel combines with oxygen in the air and burns more rapidly. As any gearhead will tell you, the fuel-air mixture is all-important for efficient combustion. If one reads on in the article —  that is, one  who is both anti-establishment/revolutionary and critical of this regime and the empire of illusion vis-à-vis the corporate war lens  – it’s an easy rhetorical analysis of how war and bombs and that shit-hole of vaunting military and explosive might (all channeled in youth through violent movies and video games) gets embedded in everything the mass media produces, even Popular Mechanics (or especially PM). Nary a word about civilians paying the price (their implosions) of USA-EU-Star-of-David perversions of war and war games. My own team would rather find out the favorite movie in an icebreaker than ask, as social workers, how we are taking yet another mass manufactured consent of illegal warring, whereupon every stitch in the safety net is unraveling not just by-because-for Trump, but because of the chin-to-the-sternum PC lobotomized ignorance the so-called educated  class has self-served for decades! The emotional and spiritual lobotomies occurred decades ago. Each muted mouth in the face of slavery, in rallying around Indian War campaigns, in the obscenity of that theft of lands here and abroad have created the state of the United States of Nothingness. That lingering perpetual stupidity of a collective consciousness in this cheating nation of Capitalists has reached its low water mark with the perversions of this man-sexual assaulter prez spewed from the belly of the beast we all know is unchecked casino capitalism and the narcissism of an eroded culture. There’s no mistaking these people I call fellow Americans—they have all been created through the gun-sights of the insane: generals, captains of industry, money leveragers, the big and small-time Media, cultural perversions and insignificance. Do we prols worry about anything other than which side the butter on the bread gets spread, about mortgages, about how to self-actualize with this or that perversion of hobby-past-time-distraction? ls this where we are now, an endless pipeline of heads in the sand “liberals,” great social cause followers who speak no evil, but who hear-see-feel all the evil that is the root of the cause – the white race’s perpetual supremacy, the white race’s busy-body brains wanting more land raped, more cultures smashed, more ideas outside the narrow business-techno mind meld quashed? Is this country and the other white countries —  monarchs ablaze on flags, Star of David handkerchiefs used to shine the holy cross of Christianity – destined for collective dementia because of the nanosecond of pain inflicted with both physical and structural assaults? I try and understand the chin to the sternum complacency and fear and perpetual non-involvement of people on the margins, including one might expect to know better: social workers, those with liberal arts educations, people who once were poor or are still struggling with marginality. I have to give it to Gandhi’s grandson, whereupon his basic premise is peace begins with our children – teaching them the light of what it means to be human outside the world of drug-addled consumerism and Predatory Capitalism: Once there was a great king and he wanted with all of his heart to know the meaning of peace. He called people from his kingdom from all walks of life, but no one could satisfy him with their explanation. One day, a man from another kingdom came to the king and told him that if he wanted to know what peace was, he would have to ask a very old sage who was no longer able to travel long distances, so the king would need to leave his kingdom and visit the sage in his own home. The king agreed and off he went on his journey. When he met the old sage, the king asked him to please, finally, give him the meaning of peace. The sage put something into the king’s hand. It was a grain of wheat. He took the grain back to his kingdom and put it in a box. He then called upon the man who told him to visit this sage in the first place. He gave me a grain of wheat. Now I need you to tell me what this has to do with the meaning of peace? The visiting king replied, Peace is like this grain of wheat. If you plant wheat, one day you will have a great field of it. If you keep it in a box, for yourself, it benefits no one. If you keep your peace locked up in yourself, it does not fulfill its purpose, it does no good, for you or for others. But when you nurture it, it grows and spreads, nourishing all who come by it. The folly of our age is ignorance – planned, coopted, codified. This self-glorified ignorance is manifested at the so-called top, from Trump to Tillerson, from  the pundits to the think tanks, from the managers to the CEOs, and from the controllers to the prols who have no time for smarts but are fully throttled for  just doing, scraping by and razing earth and systems of humaneness, bent on building, pushing brooms and pushing papers. This is a country with no time for thought, for discourse, for energized education, outside the parameters of work or doing something that makes the engines of capitalism and earth destruction hum and synchronize. So I am schooled everyday, aged 60, once more steeled to think of how corrupt and corrosive this society is, more ready to engage the acts of stopping physical violence and structural and systems assault by using the Molotov, the very thing Doctor King spoke of 50 years ago: how we are the most murderous nation on earth, and maybe King saw the deeper structural homicidal pathways of Capitalism as more deeply death-incurring than the blasting of lung cavities of the children of Vietnam with civilian-manufactured munitions and university-invented chemical weapons and corporate-sold biological arms. Here, his anti-America-the-military-punishment-psychopath speech: My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years–especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action; for they ask and write me, “So what about Vietnam?” They ask if our nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. Ahh, in the future, ever-approaching future, when I have time in between my hard-assed social work job, and the job of looking to move on from this agency to another, from the Seasonal Affective Disorder of living in Portland, Oregon, which is experiencing more rain and overcast days in 100 years, I plan a decent interview of John Steppling – playwright, ex-pat, intellectual of the uncommon kind – and posting it here at DV, but for now, I end this diatribe with his words just posted in his piece yesterday, The average white American, that educated thirty percent who cling, ever more tenuously, to what passes for middle class life, is seemingly motivated most by hatred. Propaganda works because it grants permission to hate. Now, Trump provides the perfect figure to hate right here at home. His appointments are horrible, no question. But as I’ve written before, Obama’s were horrible, too. Only just a bit less horrible. Tim Geithner? Rahm Emanuel? Hillary Clinton? Joe Biden? Scott O’Malia or William Lynn? I mean Hillary Clinton’s under secretary Victoria Nuland is married to arch neo con Robert Kagen. How can one hate Bush and the neo cons but heap praise on Hillary Clinton? But as much as Trump is hated, the figure of the Muslim terrorist is even more hated. And even more than Muslims, Vladimir Putin is hated. But where does this sense of entitlement to meddle in the affairs of other countries come from? It is remarkable how little questioned is the practice of involving the U.S. state in the matters of other countries. Russia elected Putin. Syria elected Assad. And even if, EVEN IF, the elections were fraudulent (they weren’t, but this is a thought experiment) what concern is that of the United States? (Not to mention U.S. elections were not exactly models of probity of late). The U.S. has 800 plus military bases around the world. There is no corner of the globe where you will not find the U.S. military. Do Americans think other countries WANT the U.S. military on their soil? I suppose some do, the fascistic current regime in Poland probably does. And even here in Norway, a nation of inestimable achievements and daily sanity, the general feeling is that having U.S. and NATO around serves as protection. But protection from what? This is really the question, or rather two questions. Who can possibly be thinking of invading Poland or Norway or Japan? The U.S. has bases in Italy, South Korea, Djibouti, Spain, Bahrain, Kuwait, Greece, it has 38 bases in Germany, and bases in the Bahamas, and in Brazil and Honduras and Singapore and Belgium. The list just goes on and on and on. Why does the U.S. have a base in Bulgaria? The answer is, global hegemony. Total and absolute control of the world. That is the goal. And yet this topic is never ever raised in electoral debates or in mainstream media. Never ever. Why did the U.S. go into Haiti to remove Aristide? Why was there a coup in Honduras? Why was Gadaffi murdered again? Does anyone care? http://clubof.info/