#quasi-rebellious

[w23p3t93ox]

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[blacknedsoul-blog]

Lenore Vandernatch: the rogue, the gothic heroine and the courtly knight. A review of archetypes

Okay, after going over my notes, here we are again. In case you don't know what this is all about, here is the first of these posts where I'm doing a review of some of the archetypes that Annabel and Lenore seem to be taking notes on.

Just so this doesn't end up being another 3000 word post, let's get started.

The Rogue

In 1554, the first written version of "El Lazarillo de Tormes" was published, the foundational work of what would become known in Spain as the "picaresque novel": stories centered on the rogue, a poor rascal who uses trickery to ensure his survival.

At this stage of the game, we have rogues in a variety of flavors and colors. It would be difficult to make a comprehensive list, so let's talk about these characters in general.

The first thing to note is that rogues are, by definition, outsiders. In the traditional picaresque, the rogue is simply someone from the lower classes, but as this archetype has grown, it has become less about class and more about criminality.

Yes. Rogues are criminals: thieves like Robin Hood, swindlers like the Lazarillo...

Fraud, arson. You name it.

Getting back to the issue of the rogue as an outsider, they may have been one from the start, or they may have become one after attaining their criminal status. Regardless of the reason, these people operate outside of the law, the authorities generally give a shit, and, depending on your rogue flavor, may even actively fight against it.

One thing to note here: this goes a bit beyond Lenore's rebellious attitude. Like a good rogue, she derives enormous personal satisfaction from the thought of getting her way. The world has turned its back on the rogue, so the rogue will not hesitate to turn her back on the world.

In Lenore's case, this attitude of throwing all authority to the wind and actively ignoring any rules imposed on her is a mixture of personality and trauma. In the flashbacks, we see that Lenore has always had a certain disdain for protocol and formalities, but of course, after being locked up for at least a year because the rules of the society she lives in have decided to make her an outcast for her brother 's death, she no longer finds any reason to listen to what they have to say to her. The rules will never go beyond the feeling that she has agency over her life.

From this follows the methods of the rogues: opportunism is one of their hallmarks. Ingenuity, cunning, and creativity are common traits among these characters, something that is usually tied to their status as outsiders and criminals; they don't care about rules, so they think outside the box, either because they are highly intelligent or because they lack common sense.

Maybe both.

So, yes, when Annabel tells her dashing rogue, she's not wrong in the least. But there are more interesting things to look at here

The Gothic Heroine

When some theorists say that Gothic heroines are bland and uninteresting characters, it's...true. But there's a reason for that, so let me get that out of the way for a moment: the image of the maiden in this period is used as a symbol of purity, chastity, goodness, and her corruption, death, or disease works on both a literal and metaphorical level. It is like when you see grotesque religious images in horror movies, there is a powerful and disturbing charge in the idea of seeing something "pure" destroyed.

So the thing about gothic heroines is that, at worst, they are not characters who contribute to the story they are in, but tokens, quasi-sacred representations who are there to die, get sick, or fall victim to a villain who might sexually harass them. Yes, unpleasant.

But good gothic heroines (besides possibly having tuberculosis) are characters with arcs related to corruption, especially mental corruption. And this is where it gets interesting.

But we go from less to more. In her flashbacks, Lenore's physical appearance is almost exactly that of a gothic novel protagonist: pale, almost cadaverous, slender, languid in her movements (because, in this case, she's drugged a significant percentage of the time), and long hair.

Her background in this part of the story, like that of the best gothic heroines, is one of mental corruption: she is here, imprisoned, withering and losing her mind, giving in to despair. There are those who point out a rather strong resemblance between the scene where Lenore tears the flowered wallpaper from her room and the short story The Yellow Wallpaper by the writer Charlotte Perkins. And although this story is not gothic, it definitely retains the most important trope of the genre.

Another element in which we can find Lenore is in the Gothic ballad of the same name, written by Gottfried Bürger in 1773. This poem tells the story of Lenore, a girl condemned by narrative for blaspheming against heaven after the death of her beloved, who is later visited by the Grim Reaper himself to take her to him.

A heartbroken woman committing blasphemy in the name of a lost love? I wonder if that sounds familiar.

And if I had to point out one particular gothic heroine with whom Lenore shares important similarities, it would be Laura from Carmilla.

With the first, she shares two very important things: isolation and a penchant for women who can murder her, a complicated relationship with a gothic vampire.

Laura lives in complete isolation from the world, with the only company of maids and her father; within the first few chapters, we know that she can barely remember the last time she had the company of a woman her own age. Like Lenore in the flashbacks, Laura is something of a secret, hidden from the world (though for less horrific reasons).

And that isolation is broken by the arrival of an elegant, almost supernaturally beautiful upper-class lady who almost kicks in her door with a "Hi, I want to be friends. You'll like me."

Both Laura and Lenore are not afraid of the vampire, though they are not unaware of her strange behavior and will raise a puzzled eyebrow at her promises of affection, as well as her obvious tendency to insist on a fucked-up secret that they are in the middle of and can't share. Another important detail is that both characters have a certain difficulty in describing their feelings as romantic: both are very obviously obsessed with this mysterious lady who has come to interrupt their loneliness, but Laura never fails to refer to Carmilla as her "friend" (a behavior that the modern reader may interpret, with more than fair reason, as comphet), and Lenore is little more than that, at least until the mansion arch where the shingle falls on her.

Last but not least, just as Lenore is treated as "crazy," there are several events in Laura's life (such as her first encounter with Carmilla when she was a child) or that occur throughout the novel that are dismissed by those around her as her being a little touched in the head.

The courtly knight

Here it is necessary to make a distinction: knights are a far-reaching figure, but before and during the Middle Ages they mainly starred in two types of stories: the canta de gesta (which was intended to tell great deeds of inspiration for certain peoples, such as the Song of Mio Cid in Spain or the Song of the Nibelungs in Germany. This last one is the best Canto de gesta in history, I do not accept arguments) and the Novel of chivalry or courtly (focused on the individual story of the knight and introduces elements of the court).

What is the main difference between the knight of the canto de gesta and the knight of the court? Well... the latter is much more horny. And we are talking about Lenore, so you have until the end of this paragraph to imagine which of these knights we are talking about.

The first thing to keep in mind is that the Courtly Knight has a pretty strong moral compass: nobility, mercy, loyalty, and honor are values they firmly believe in; these characters are heroes, and that means that while they are not perfect, they represent ideals that are considered important in this time. And we're talking about vassalage, so you get it.

This is the first thing Lenore has in common with the knights of the court: her strong sense of morality. Yes, she's not afraid to play dirty like a rogue, but she's pretty clear about what things are important to her in that regard, and she's willing to uphold those ideals even in the context of Nevermore, which actively encourages its students to kill and betray each other.

However, the personal agendas of these knights have one important thing in common: the conflict between their own desires and their duty.

What are those desires? Well...

Good courtly knights usually have to choose between their love/sexual interests and where their personal loyalties lie, which, due to the era in which these stories take place, are usually their feudal lords or even kings.

We already established that Lenore doesn't give a shit about authority, but her personal loyalty is to her friends. And this is where it gets tricky for her: So far in the comic, Lenore has kept her relationship with Annabel a secret from her friends, and she has kept the fact that she wants to save her friends a secret from Annabel. A conflict that may eventually blow up in her face, and on the face of it, really befits a courtly knight (though if she were a real one, the Misfits might ask her to kill the Deans or something in exchange for accepting her relationship with Annabel).

To continue with this, we need to stop for a moment and talk about another little thing: courtly love. There are many definitions of it, but my favorite is the one that defines it as an attempt to reconcile mystical love with eroticism. Fun fact: these stories were written in the Provençal language, something that would associate romantic tropes with "vulgar language".

In any case, courtly love usually speaks of the beloved maiden as an idealized object, a figure who inspires an almost religious devotion. And the most recurrent theme within courtly love is what is called "love from afar": it focuses more on the journey in search of the beloved than on the couple's relationship as such (this journey can be literal or metaphorical), the knight has symbols associated with the pilgrim, there is a certain hatred of the image, the maiden is seen as an almost religious figure, and...

Yes, the color associated with the so-called "love from afar", specifically with the beloved maiden, is damn blue.

Now that we've got all that out of the way, it's time to break down why Lenore fulfills some of these things and why she doesn't.

Going with the tropes that are fulfilled, we can say that Lenore is on a more or less metaphorical journey. A journey to recover her memories and her identity. One at the end of which her lover waits for her "until the abyss claims them both".

Like a knight, Lenore is willing to make great personal sacrifices in pursuit of the things she cares about: she is willing to die for the people she cares about (the misfits) and for her lover (Annabel). The Living Long Thing is something the Knight don't know about, and since Lenore is in Nevermore, apparently neither does she.

With all that said, it's worth noting the biggest difference: courtly love features relationships based on vassalage and a huge power differential. Something that does not happen here. No, Lenore calling Annabel "my liege" doesn't count.

To explain this further -and to summarize, because it's a subject that bloody books have been written about-t he relationships in courtly love have two different levels of power: the knight must perform feats to be worthy of affection, and the maiden is little more than a prize to be won.

This unbalanced power dynamic is something that simply does not exist in the White Raven: an important part of their relationship is that both are equal in charisma, intelligence, and resourcefulness. The unstoppable force and the immovable object. Annabel is as willing to die for Lenore as she is for herself, and Lenore would probably go into berserker mode if anyone dared to treat Annabel as a prize.

Yes, you could argue that the balance of power is a bit weighted toward Lenore because Annabel is willing to make sacrifices for her that Lenore wouldn't make because she has some, you know, morals. But I think that has more to do with Annabel's character than her relationship with Lenore (that's another analysis I have a pin for when the season is over).

Conclusions

If the archetypes that Annabel seems to take note of are all quite related, Lenore, on the contrary, is much more like a mosaic: these characters have little in common and some (like the Rogue and the Knight) directly contradict each other. This woman is chaotic in her conception: opportunistic and rebellious as a rogue, pious and with strong values as a knight, and condemned by the narrative as a gothic heroine.

Another thing that stands out is that two of these three archetypes are traditionally male characters. Personally, I don't think Lenore is "like a man": her entire background and personal history is meant to work in terms of her status as a woman in the time period she lives in. She can do all the shit these male heroes do and better (though the hc that Lenore is somewhere on the non-binary spectrum is not a reading that conflicts with that).

And I use the word "hero" because another detail stands out here as well: yes, many of these characters are not only often the protagonists of the stories they are in, they are heroes within their historical periods and literary movements.

I'm going to do a third part of this comparing Lenore's archetypes to Annabel's because, believe me, there's some really crazy stuff to unpack there.

[racefortheironthrone]

Why was queens pardoning prisoners seen as good? Like murders and sexual assaulter ect? Wouldn’t the public be against that?

This is an area where I think Foucault was actually right:

"...The public execution is to be understood not only as a judicial, but also as a political ritual. It belongs, even in minor cases, to the ceremonies by which power is manifested.... The public execution, then, has a juridico-political function. It is a ceremonial by which a momentarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted. It restores that sovereignty by manifesting it at its most spectacular. The public execution, however hasty and everyday, belongs to a whole series of great rituals in which power is eclipsed and restored (coronation, entry of the king into a conquered city, the submission of rebellious subjects); over and above the crime that has placed the sovereign in contempt, it deploys before all eyes an invincible force. Its aim is not so much to re-establish a balance as to bring into play, as its extreme point, the dissymmetry between the subject who has dared to violate the law and the all-powerful sovereign who displays his strength. Although redress of the private injury occasioned by the offence must be proportionate, although the sentence must be equitable, the punishment is carried out in such a way as to give a spectacle not of measure, but of imbalance and excess; in this liturgy of punishment, there must be an emphatic affirmation of power and of its intrinsic superiority. And this superiority is not simply that of right, but that of the physical strength of the sovereign beating down upon the body of his adversary and mastering it by breaking the law, the offender has touched the very person of the prince; and it is the prince - or at least those to whom he has delegated his force - who seizes upon the body of the condemned man and displays it marked, beaten, broken. The ceremony of punishment, then, is an exercise of 'terror'... The sovereign power that enjoined him to kill, and which through him did kill, was not present in him; it was not identified with his own ruthlessness. And it never appeared with more spectacular effect than when it interrupted the executioner's gesture with a letter of pardon...The sovereign was present at the execution not only as the power exacting the vengeance of the law, but as the power that could suspend both law and vengeance. He alone must remain master, he alone could wash away the offences committed on his person; although it is true that he delegated to the courts the task of exercising his power to dispense justice, he had not transfered it; he retained it in its entirety and he could suspend the sentence or increase it at will." (emphasis mine) Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, ch. 2

Unlike a modern conception of criminal justice, which is premised as an objective, rational, truth-seeking process in which precise identification of the right suspect and their level of guilt and the appropriate nature of their punishment, criminal justice systems in premodern Europe (although not necessarily limited to the same) were meant to emphasize the terrifying arbitrariness of royal power. With rituals put in place in order to ensure guilt through public (often coerced) confessions, the point wasn't whether the sheriff and the judge had "got the right man" or whether "the punishment fits the crime," but that the king could either enact public displays of bodily obliteration or public displays of mercy at their sole discretion.

In a sense, the pardoning of the guilty was a necessary justification for the deliberately disproportionate brutality of a pre-carceral system of punishment. This promoted the logic of submission to the guilty and innocent alike: if the king could sentence you to the ultimate physical dehumanization whether or not you were guilty, the only hope was either the mountain and forest refuge of the outlaw or the hope of a pardon as a quasi-divine act of unearned grace.

[aimmyarrowshigh]

My dearest, darling Aim, do you happen any thoughts and/or comments about that new Velma show that just came out, because it just sounds horrific and I made the fatal error of watching about a minute of some cisgender white dude's critic of it on youtube and I'm more than a LITTLE FROTHY about how he was basically 'Welp, that's what happens when you try to shoehorn the remake of a classic show into being more ethnically diverse and it's like that because Mindy Kaling is dumpy and unattractive.'

::THE HEAVIEST OF SIGHS::

As a disclaimer before my comments: I have not watched it and I don't plan to watch it. Basically as soon as I saw the first trailer, I said, "This was not made for me, a person who loves Velma and Scooby-Doo."

Because that's the thing -- it was not made for people who love Velma and Scooby-Doo. It was made for people who don't think loving anything is cool, and specifically, who think "nostalgia poisoning" is a thing and want to "ruin your childhoods" because "it's time to grow up" or whatever. It exists in the same vein of humor as the last ten years of South Park, or Seth Macfarlane's whole career, where the only comedy thesis is, "If you care about anything, you're a rube."

Because it's not just Velma and Scooby-Doo that the new show takes potshots at. It's also true crime fans (who are pretty much only women), it's Other Girls (shown to be vapid "bitches" AKA Daphne), it's people with mental illness, it's adult cartoon watchers as a whole, it's people who genuinely want diversified television, it's the idea of friendship. And it's ALSO people who hate true crime fans, and people who hate Other Girls, and people who hate diversified television. Because there is no "right way" to watch the show. There's no underlying person you can be as an audience member and NOT be shit on by the show.

If you hate that they made Velma Desi, then the show is going to shit on you for it, but not because you're a bigoted loser -- but because you care about something.

If you hate that they made Velma an odious quasi-fascist with a serious streak of internalized misogyny, the show is going to shit on you -- because you care about something.

The only way to be "cool," in the vein of comedy that HBO Velma exists within, is to aggressively not care about anything. But don't Not Care too aggressively! Because that circles back around to caring about seeming cool, and that's not cool!

And I'm gonna be honest:

Mindy Kaling has always had a problem with desperately, desperately wanting to be seen as cool. (See title of autobiography, 'Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?')

In the 2000s, when she was in Hasty Pudding (iirc) and the youngest writer on The Office -- a show which DOES NOT HOLD UP in 2023; if you still think The Office is hilarious in 2023 I find you a DEEPLY suspicious person -- it seemed revolutionary and rebellious to openly be a non-thin, nerdy girl and say, "I really wish I were cool." And it was, for the time! That WAS revolutionary and rebellious! It's what built Mindy Kaling's career (and also Tina Fey's, another writer whose work Does Not Hold Up in 2023).

And in the 2010s, with The Mindy Project, being an adult woman who wrote frankly about desperately wanting to be cool was kind of fresh-ish, and the ways that Mindy's character undermined herself to try to get what she wanted felt if not relevant, then unfortunately relatable for a lot of people. But she also ends up with a dude character who, in the FIRST EPISODE, calls her fat. To her face. Many times. It's never addressed again, and it's not played as a dealbreaker... obviously. Because she ends up with someone who fundamentally doesn't respect or like her. But she ends up with somebody! And that's what matters! Because it's cool to have a boyfriend!

In the 2020s, Mindy's shtick is extremely outdated, at best, and is an active choice by Mindy to be harmful, at worst (and frankly, with Velma, most likely). Mindy's shtick is not, "Some girls aren't cool, and that's okay." It's literally, "If you're a girl who isn't cool, that's not okay."

And that's THE FUCKING OPPOSITE OF THE POINT OF VELMA DINKLEY.

I've seen a lot of posts that are either comparisons or contrasts with Netflix's Wednesday, and I don't really have a dog in that fight because like, I enjoyed the unintentional sapphic vibes of Wednesday a lot and I thought Jenna Ortega was great, but the show as a whole fundamentally misunderstands The Addams Family, so I'm overall like, "eh." BUT. What both the comparisons and the contrasts of Wednesday and Velma hinge on is this:

Neither show understands, or cares, why the characters they're based on are beloved in the first place. They don't actually want to interact with the source material, and they don't actually want to court fans of the source material. If anything, they want fans of the source material to avoid the show so that the streaming service they're on can have a young, hip demo tuning in.

And what they don't understand about Wednesday and Velma... is that the reason they're beloved... is that they like who they are.

Wednesday is macabre, but she's a happy kid. She likes what she likes. She gleefully electrocutes Pugsley not because she likes causing pain, but because it's fascinating to see what electrocution does. She beheads her dolls and then sleeps with both pieces in her arms. She studies the Bermuda Triangle because it's fucking interesting that whole-ass ships and planes disappear! She likes the things she likes. She likes who she is. She LIKES THINGS. She's not miserable or misanthropic or nihilist. The line that Wednesday most got right of Wednesday's dialogue was "no one gets to torture [Pugsley] except me," because she's a fierce protector and an Addams, first and foremost.

(Insert 96-paragraph rant here about how The Addams Family (2019) and The Addams Family: The Musical also fundamentally misunderstand this about Wednesday, the musical perhaps worst of all. Wednesday does not want to be normal. She just doesn't want to be perky.)

Velma is a nerd and a dork and a geek, and she could not be happier about it! She's gonna kick your ass at the science fair! She will correct the grammar of your 'kick me' sign on her back and return it with red pen! She's a skeptic not because she hates caring about things or hates belief, but because she loves learning and she loves evidence. The only girl that Velma has ever had any negative relationship with that I can recall is that she and Marcie Fleach had some tension because they were equally smart and smart people sometimes compete to be The Smartest, but then in the end THEY WERE IN LOVE AND GIANT LESBIANS. And then Marcie got murdered by a paranormally enhanced parrot, but whatever.

There's a REASON why there's never been -- until this HBO show -- a whiff of jealousy that Daphne is traditionally beautiful or that Fred adores her. (I mean, part of that is that Velma is a lesbian, but also VELMA DOESN'T WANT TO BE DAPHNE, SHE WANTS TO BE VELMA.) The only "love triangle" that the Scooby gang has ever had was literally INCLUDING THE DOG, because Velma does not hate anything about Daphne or who Daphne is. She celebrates who Daphne is. She loves who Daphne is. She would never, ever, ever call Daphne a bitch.

But here's the thing: I genuinely don't think that Mindy Kaling can conceive of a weird girl being happy with who they are.

I don't know if it's a generational, grew-up-in-the-80s thing, or an effect of racism she experienced as a Desi girl, or because she's frequently been the only woman in a comedy writers' room, or if she just as a defective personality.

But I think she looked at Velma and said, "This girl makes no sense unless she's miserable, angry, and maladjusted."

And I think Tim Burton looked at Wednesday and said the same thing. But I also think Tim Burton looks at literally all women always and says that, so whatever.

I think Mindy Kaling deeply, deeply hates herself. And she can't write female characters who don't also deeply hate themselves.

But that's not Velma.

[remidyal]

Bad Ideas of the Day, Part 7: The Continuing Bad Adventures of the Bad Kids

As usual, my quasi-monthly roundup of my bad ideas of the day from the D20 Fic discord! In this case, about half of these were written before FHJY started airing; I've put in a note at the point where that aired. (Oldest ideas are first on these lists. Part 6 is available here and then links to older lists are available from there!)

Bad idea of the day, making canon even messier edition: At the party, Aelwyn senses the one link in Adaine's friend group even weaker to a somewhat crazy girl kissing them and doing fantasy coke off their chest: Kristen Applebees, whose brain is borderline broken for the subsequent fight. (And who, in the months to follow, is somehow even LESS respectful of how much Adaine does not want to hear about her sister being hot)

Bad idea of the day, we go now to an interview of the deceased edition: A true crime crystalcast starts a series discussing the group of teens involved in the murders and other deaths of their school's lunchlady, guidance councilor, vice principal, and principal and the mysterious circumstances around their arrest and escape from prison. Oh, and bloodrush coach. Forgot one.

Bad idea of the day, 2023 memorial collectable retrospective vintage edition: On the first day of school, Aguefort comes demanding Riz run for the position he was destined to meet: Student Body President, a role that has gone unfilled since a great tragedy turned all the members of the then-student government to stone seventy five years before. Can Riz ascend to the ultimate form of every briefcase kid, or will he become another trophy president?

Bad idea of the day, pact of the tome edition: It's the end of their senior year and all the graduates to be have a period on the bloodrush field in which they're expected to sign one another's yearbooks! Will they fall for this scam, or will they realize that the teacher running this is the warlock instructor, trying to drum up business for his patron by slipping an infernal contract into the pages of one of the student's yearbooks?

Bad idea of the day, a horse is a home edition: Fabian is a rebellious kid early and decides that he must master what his father never could. Since his father was the master of the sea, he must become the true master of the land! Yes, he must become a horse boy! (Katja and Fabian as childhood friends, obviously)

Bad idea of the day, unhelpful parenting advice edition: The bad kids are faced with that classic nonsense assignment of protecting an egg for a week without letting it get damaged; they are not informed in advance that Arthur Aguefort himself will be testing them, making the 'week' rather flexible, nor that no student has ever passed.

Bad idea of the day, niche goods and services edition: Adaine, in her search for a Job and some cash, ends up getting paid by a casino not only to not play but to help them catch other diviners who might try cheating at the games with their ability to see the future, and then ends up caught up in a dramatic Ocean's 11 style heist

Bad idea of the day, unfortunate belief patterns edition: It turns out that Porter is actually a demigod, born of an affair Sol had with a mortal woman long ago, who historically has mostly wanted to chill out and do nice things and ignore all his more powerful side outside of his rages. Unfortunately, it also means his character is vulnerable to changing if someone starts believing in him hard enough, and nobody believes anything about him nearly as hard as Figueroth Faeth believes he is evil…

Bad idea of the day, lost and found edition: Riz finds, to his slight annoyance, that he's been voted in as the student government treasurer against his will (because he was out the day elections were held and Fig thought it would be funny) and thus he is now responsible for returning any treasures the student body accidentally loses over the course of the school year, a responsibility he is the first person to take seriously in three hundred years

Bad idea of the day, final countdown edition: The Bad Kids are forced into the annual Aguefort talent show; Fig and Gorgug have it easy with their band, and Fabian dances of course, but Kristen, Riz, and Adaine are forced to scramble for something. Riz and Adaine end up doing a stage magic show together; Kristen does a ribbon dance and manages to break her leg again in spite of the stage only being four feet off the ground. (Adaine gets talked out of her original plan by Riz of just going on stage and holding out Boggy for everyone to admire.)

(This is where FHJY started airing)

Bad idea of the day, Margaret's bad day edition: After the run-in with the art squad, Margaret jumps to some incorrect conclusions about what her 'friend' is looking for in a 'friend' and begins to take up bad poetry and nihilistic philosophy. Can the rest of the gunner channel snap her out of it before they all reach their limits of free verse in their lives?

Bad idea of the day, jury duty edition: We're shown in Unsleeping City that the unsleeping city side of new york has its own judicial system. The pool of potential jurors in these cases is very, very low; how does Mister Civic Duty himself Ricky handle getting Magical Jury Duty for the eighth time this year?

Bad idea of the day, romance is hatred right? edition: Plinth/Null slashfic fusion of ASO and TUC

Bad idea of the day, a (Basketball) Court of Fae and Flowers edition: BINX would like to reclaim the Court of Craft's lost magic from Apollo and Suntar. Can she do this in the one way that fae tradition allows, a 2-on-2 basketball game where the winner takes all and the first to 21 wins? Can she really trust Suntar's brother to play with all his might, and can they somehow claim victory with all the eyes of all the fae watching and cheering and charging way too much for concessions?

Bad idea of the day, Figueroth Faeth's wild ride edition: The first day of freshman year, Fig isn't in school because she successfully talked Gilear into a quest to look for her real dad instead, sending the two of them to go look into court records in Bastion City and leaving the bad kids down Fig for the corn fight.

Bad idea of the day, talking magical weapons edition: The Sword of Truth from Never After turns up and falls straight into the hands of the most truthful person with sword proficiencies in the party, one Figueroth Faeth. It does not approve of this carrier.

Bad idea of the day, FHJY spoiler edition: Riz handles Fabian making a romaence partner out of a mirror in front of him a lot worse, and sets out to find out if Ecaf is really on their side or is in fact two-faced. Can he deal with seven years of the misfortune of Fabian bitching at him if he need to shatter this mirror and his best friend's heart at the same time? (edited)

Bad idea of the day, Once Upon a Time edition: Instead of cutting through the woods and kind of accidentally murdering somebody, our intrepid fairy tale creatures end up deciding to ride the story of the lost Prince of Shoeburg into the ground in a blaze of glory. This definitely works out for them.

Bad idea of the day, grandfather paradox edition: Ayda, curious about her family beyond Arthur and her phoenix mother, tries to find out what happened to Arthur's parents. The quest eventually reveals that her grandparents haven't been born yet, and in fact Arthur won't actually be born for several hundred more years; he's travelled back in time a thousand years in his very young days, and much of his attention at all times is on making certain he doesn't accidentally do anything that will cause himself to not exist.

Bad idea of the day, you know I had to do it edition (JY spoilers!): Kristen, while having her little verbal pissing match with her competitor for student class president, is shocked when she's suddenly attacked from behind by an offended student who is actually four dogs in a trenchcoat.

Bad idea of the day, cosmic horror edition: There is a way in Spyre to detect those who might be infested with sometimes being possessed by eldritch beings of great impulse and power, those who can seem to reshape the world with their whims, those… 'player characters'

Bad idea of the day, no really this one's kind of bad edition: Fig, desperate to loop in the last bad kid who she's not in some weird way related to, decides to go all in on getting Gilear and Hallariel into some kind of poly swinger situation with the Thistlesprings, going so far as to set up a very awkward dinner party where she tries to prompt them to go for the binder, much to Gorgug's disconcertment

Bad idea of the day, this one's just canon but it was definitely a bad idea edition: The true love story of how Efink met and married Percival very very quickly for what definitely seemed like good reasons at the time.

Bad Idea of the Day, You Get What You Kill Edition, light JY ep4 spoiler: After killing her dad, Adaine is irritated to discover after they get back to Elmville that she is in fact now the official Fallinel envoy to Solace and that she's been fully Santa Claused into another elven position against her will.

Bad idea of the day, Adaine DID seem much more interested in this option edition: Adaine takes one of Aelwyn's suggestions and starts selling weapons in the forms of scrolls of fireball and the like

Bad idea of the day, the ultimate D20 party edition: Come up with an excuse to put Adaine, Fabian, Katja, Efink Murderdeath, and Colin Provolone in the same party to bring the ultimate fear to all parents everywhere. (I honestly might be forgetting somebody. There's been a lot of parent-killing in D20.)

[mo-2020ao3]

I’ve been re-bingeing the first three seasons of Shameless, and it hit me how the Gallagher family dynamics totally sync up with my headcanon for the batkids:

Dick is Fiona; battling EDS (eldest daughter syndrome), shouldering a quasi-parental role amid questionable paternal guidance. He’s responsible, resilient, and selfless, but has his own personal struggles (sometimes stemming from his own family… loves them to death tho)

Jason is Lip; the intellectually gifted but rebellious second eldest. Wrestling with demons, while trying to understand his place within the family. Acts a bit aloof to siblings but would stand ten toes down for them.

Tim is lan; fiercely loyal, a bit of a disaster bi, and mentally ill ((am i projecting…)).

Finally, Damian is Carl; 1/2 feral, 1/4 troublemaker, 1/4 smart🍑. Little to no respect for authority (except family(sometimes)), special interests are weapons, mischief, and instilling fear into those around him. Also Dick is his favorite.

[vague-humanoid]

On the morning of June 29, 1755, Phillis, a Black woman enslaved to Captain John Codman in Massachusetts, prepared Codman’s usual breakfast of oatmeal. It was one of the last meals he would have. Two days later he was dead.

Codman had been prone to painful stomach ailments over the years, but local officials soon learned that his sickness and death were the result of a conspiracy planned by three of his slaves: Phillis, Phoebe and Mark. For two years, the two women fed a number of poisons to the captain, including arsenic, rat poison and potter’s lead. Phoebe evaded conviction, though the reason why is unclear. Mark was convicted as an accessory to the poisoning plot and hanged; Phillis was sentenced to death by burning at the stake.

Their case was not an anomaly. Between 1681 and 1865 dozens of Black enslaved women were put to death for the murder or attempted murder of White people. Some, like Phoebe and Phillis, used poison, while others used arson or blunt force. Nikki M. Taylor, a historian and Howard University professor, tells the stories of enslaved women who took justice into their own hands and resorted to deadly measures against White slave owners and their families in her new book, “Brooding Over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women’s Lethal Resistance.”

These stories, while often gruesome, help to paint a more complete picture of women’s role in slave organizing and rebellion in what is now the United States. The history told about powerful slave revolts primarily centers men and minimizes or erases women’s presence, Taylor told The 19th. She uses a Black feminist framework to unravel the details of these rebellious women’s lives, and unpack the levels of institutional violence they faced and the philosophy of justice that drove them to kill.

@meanmisscharles @quasi-normalcy @beyonceisstraight @midians-world @el-shab-hussein

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Kristine Harley

Published: Sep 5, 2022

There’s a saying: “Don’t think of a pink elephant.” In other words, what one resists can dominate and even control one’s mind, making the action a person wishes not to do the action that person ultimately does. Religious believers often use this accusation against atheists. We allegedly “resist” or “deny” a belief in God, therefore “proving” His existence or at least His importance to us, because believers see atheists as spitting in the wind like rebellious adolescents.

Of course, we know atheism is akin to democracy in that it rejects any supreme being or cosmic authority. Atheists observe a decentralized universe in which physical, chemical, and biological processes interact to evolve, not impose, reality. Democracy did not elect a new king, and likewise the god-concept is not a “pink elephant” to atheists. But unfortunately today, something else threatens to be.

“Racism” is the new “pink elephant,” with woke apologists invoking “whiteness” and “white supremacy” in an absurd downward spiral of resentment and retribution that will benefit no one (certainly not people of color). It has the ironic effect of feeding a white narcissism that apologizes for “white privilege” in the abstract, while punching down on working-class whites and regarding people of color as children, without agency, needing intervention and rescue.

Many atheists have adopted this dualistic, simplistic self-righteousness that mimics the good/evil, virgin/whore scriptures of religion! This has misled otherwise intelligent people into paradoxically adopting quasi-religious concepts: utopianism (or what I call the Racial Rapture), a past Golden Age (especially before the year 1619), Original Sin, retribution to be visited upon the sons and daughters of the guilty, and a perpetual payment of indulgences and/or personal flagellation without any forgiveness, human or divine. James Lindsey has already made these points.

However, I see a more subtle problem here: wokeness, especially as it combats “racism,” is not only a secular religion, it is a secular religion without a god. There is only the Devil: white oppressors. Cis-gendered white men, suburban white Karens, white toddlers in school being told they oppress students of color, etc. There is only perpetual complaint, perpetual grievance, and a pound-of-flesh philosophy that no longer believes in equality, let alone strives for it. Rather, to quote Ibram X. Kendi in How to Be an Anti-Racist, “Like fighting an addiction, being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination.”

In other words, many atheists, seeking to fill a void that apparently did not disappear with their former belief in god(s) and religion, unfortunately embraced a radical 12-Step program of “anti-racism” without seeing the connections to the same religious dualism that characterizes the Twelve Steps for alcoholics.

(It’s interesting that Kendi describes the prioritizing of elderly people for the Covid-19 vaccine as a justification for racial discrimination, without also mentioning 1) being elderly is a biological realty, not a social construct or identity, 2) such a program would have been applied to all ethnicities, and 3) it was actually suggested that elderly people not get the vaccine, since they were largely “white” and not productive. Of course now we have the CDC’s recommendation that vaccinated and unvaccinated citizens be treated equally, showing why different treatment of demographics in the name of “social justice” becomes maladaptive over time.)

The Pound-of-Flesh Approach

This negative obsession with a manufactured Satan also characterized the inflammatory sermons of the Reverend Jerry Falwell, who denounced evil everywhere and focused on sin and biblical “inerrancy.” (Unfortunately, I had to listen to Falwell quite a bit while growing up.)

In contrast to other religious leaders, whose supernatural beliefs I also rejected but who at least focused on charity, forgiveness, repentance and growth, Falwell spread fear, accusation and paranoia even amongst his own flock and this same internal accusation, rather than a group effort toward positive change, has divided the atheist movement.

Internal accusation has spread throughout society. There is the Amanda Gorman affair, in which activists expressed hot outrage that a white Dutch woman would translate Gorman’s poems into, well, Dutch. A translator in Spain also had to step down as Gorman’s translator for having the wrong identity. (Apparently, only black people can translate black people’s poetry into European languages.)

The widely-publicized Minneapolis Teachers’ Union contract stipulates that if an “underrepresented” teacher of color is next in line to be laid off, that teacher should be retained and instead the next white teacher higher on the seniority list would be laid off instead.

Of course, this is completely illegal, a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but I have a question:

What benchmarks, if any, have been set for justice to be “restored” for these teachers from underrepresented groups, so that layoff decisions can revert to a seniority-only system that treats everyone equally under the U.S. Constitution? (In other words, how will the union know when it has succeeded?)

I doubt there are any metrics or even goals, because as with the Gorman debacle this just is more knee-jerk, irrational thinking justified by invoking “past harms” and real disparities. Yet even critics of the teachers’ contract miss a key point: the purpose is not really to achieve equality of outcome, undesirable as that is. The purpose of this stipulation, along with other gestures toward “equity,” is to satisfy an emotional, momentary need to “stick it to the man” (or in this case, the senior white colleague.) Setting workers against each other satisfies Kendi’s exhortation that we refrain from “being neutral” and turn away from equality as an ideal, instead resorting to petty squabbles over scraps in the name of making some supposedly “privileged” workers “uncomfortable.”

Here is my prediction for the future of this dubious equity initiative: the Minneapolis teachers’ union contract will unintentionally create yet another racial disparity, with newly-laid off white teachers departing for private school positions or leaving the profession entirely, and young teachers of color laboring valiantly in an increasingly anachronistic public education system while parents pull out their children and find alternatives, like magnet schools or learning pods. In ten years, as with automobile line workers and other blue collars laborers in the 1980s, and more recently service industry workers during the Covid-19 pandemic, teaching will remain a high-stress, low-paid, and increasingly outsourced job largely dominated by people of color (as auto workers were and service jobs now are), while the issues of teacher burnout, low pay, social passing, a national teacher shortage, out-of-touch administrators and disruptive, large classrooms remain unaddressed.

“Equity,” like religion, offers static solutions to dynamic problems. This is, essentially, a new form of mysticism, even creationism. Woke atheists should reconsider their embrace of a utopian future that requires a belief in a reconstituted Fall of Man (and in a new-fangled human exceptionalism, or soul-concept, in the form of gender identity extremism which estranges people from the natural, biological, sexual world of limits and consequences, which we fought to teach in science class).

CRT Proponentsists

Meanwhile, in the material world, a siege-mentality has taken over that treats resources like pie: one person must sacrifice for another person to get a fair share. Such a zero-sum game is hardly necessary (and we were assured it was a lie) but the real agenda here is a Marxist one. Equality is outdated, flawed; there must be a transfer of power from the “white supremacists” to the “oppressed” members, this time based on race, not class and owners/laborers.

This appeals to white progressives because it reinforces their controlling tendencies to solve everything and rescue everyone (paradoxically giving them a sense of power over other people), and it appeals to young, radicalized teachers who believe their success only comes from wrestling “privilege” out of the hands of someone else, even if that privilege is minute or imaginary. It is the struggle that is the goal, because all proponents are externalizing their behaviors.

If Black Lives Matter, anti-racism, and the call for “equity” have any kernels of truth they’re wrapped in thick layers of nonsense. Whatever facts they possess are derailed in an incoherent cry to 1) dismantle “systems of oppression” and 2) sacrifice certain individuals on a sinking ship. The second statement negates the first, and the first is a red herring. This adds up to a circular argument in which a “system that was never set up for black people” depends on white people to “address” the problem which breeds only patronization and dependency, a shallow and immature philosophy in the name of resistance.

(This is akin to the breathtakingly inane fallacy that anyone can confront their “inherent biases” in an unbiased way, or that teachers, being adults, should be teaching “equity” (Critical Race Theory) to children, as if children were more likely to be racist than adults.)

The New Soviet Bread Line

Suppose instead the Minneapolis Teachers’ Union wrote the contract so that instead of laying off the white teacher with the next least seniority, the teacher with the highest seniority – vested, guaranteed a pension, and likely close to retirement or able to find another job – would be asked, for the good of the membership, to step down, thus shifting all other teachers up in seniority. This would have achieved a new seniority balance voluntarily, without mentioning race, and without leaving the union vulnerable to lawsuits while still retaining younger teachers of color. But instead, a myopic rush to make the contract All About Race – even claiming it did not go far enough – resulted in at least one court challenge while still protecting those teachers at the top (who might have voted for a race-based contract knowing full well it would never affect them). Equity, indeed!

Mentally this is like being Soviets in a bread line, waiting to wrest a crumb from the Cassocks. A crumb taken from someone else is more desirable than a goal striven for by one’s own efforts, since that would only affirm capitalism and the meritocracy. And it is this—the tit-for-tat hacking away at “whiteness” rather than addressing the real issues (such as teacher burnout, which also disproportionately affects teachers of color), which is the real goal.

Other examples abound. A church in Illinois announced it was giving up the music of “white composers” for Lent. Did the marquee say, “We are celebrating the music of black and brown composers”? No—the church in Illinois announced it was “fasting from whiteness,” therefore ensuring everyone would be talking and thinking about whiteness. Real good hypocritical job there, First United Church of Oak Park.

(I certainly hope the pastor did not assume Aram Khachaturian or Clara Schumann were “white men,” and I wonder if Tchaikovsky, who was gay, merited an exception.)

By contrast, my childhood church’s choir, led by a black director, performed his grandmother’s Spiritual hymns, which were recorded and sold on cassette tape (this was the 1970s) to pay for the new church organ. Our director could play almost any instrument but he relished that organ, and would perform classics by memory, including the famous Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D minor.” The emphasis was on us learning the story of his grandmother’s journey to freedom, not divisive concepts about our “whiteness.”

The New Prohibition

So how did atheists go from presenting a united front on the fight against Intelligent Design to a splintered community arguing about racism, misogyny, identities and “white tears”? Why would those who promote science fall into racial essentialism and side with #ShutDownSTEM?

I don’t have a simple answer. But I would like my fellow “woke” atheists to consider one more fact:

In the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries a lawyer from Illinois ran for President three times as a Democrat, representing the left-wing Populist Party. His second Presidential campaign specifically opposed American imperialism after the Spanish-American War. A gifted orator, he railed against the gold standard and eastern banking interests and won two elections to the House of Representatives. He became Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson but resigned to protest U.S. threats against Germany after the sinking of the Lusitania. He supported U.S. joining the League of Nations, the minimum wage and the eight-hour workday, the right of unions to strike, and women’s suffrage. He called for agricultural subsidies, a living wage, full public financing of political campaigns and government inspection of food, sanitation, and better housing conditions.

Sounds like a great guy, doesn’t he? And I’m sure he was if you knew him.

His name was William Jennings Bryan, and he was an ardent Prohibitionist. Of course, atheists mainly know him as the prosecutor in the case of The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, arguing against the teaching of evolution opposite Clarence Darrow, who defended John T. Scopes. Bryan took this stance against evolution because he feared it would lead to a tyranny of the strong against the weak and the destruction of his gentle, justice-oriented Christianity.

Bryan, an otherwise reasonable guy, found his devil and stood on the wrong side of history. Atheists should not.

[mega-ringsandthings-world]

Okay, no, but one thing about Peeta that always compelled me, was his quiet shift to quasi-revolutionary between the events of THG and Catching Fire. He doesn’t seem the type to question the Capitol, at least not enough for seditious leanings, being merchant class and significantly better off than most of District Twelve, he wouldn’t feel the sting of hardship so harshly, or would his family share in their worries as severely (i.e tessarae for one) His elder brothers made it to adulthood without being reaped, showing his position was one of relative safeness until his unfortunate draw at the Reaping. That is to say, I doubt he had much in the way of rebellion (no, the moment with the bread doesn’t count) in him, up until the point he became reacquainted with Katniss.   After the events of the first Games, he was stuck with Katniss in the role of pacifying the districts for better or worse, and for quite a while, that’s all it was to him, a high-stakes play, pacifying the districts was unquestionable. But, then it changed somewhere, and it most likely started in Eleven. His actions with the winnings and the the families of Thresh and Rue weren’t an inherently rebellious act, he was truly making a generous and selfless gesture at that time, and making a gift of it to Katniss in doing so, (Peeta is calculated in his diplomacy, though oblivious at times) he knew to some extent the effect Rue and Thresh had on her and what Rue meant to her, and figured it would be something she would appreciate, as well as not be able to do on her own, as it seemed he’d already prepared and rehearsed that speech gifting them the winnings. That’s all it was at first, until the crowd saluted Katniss, and the old man was shot, and things unraveled.  In Eleven, he finally confronts what he’s gotten himself into. He gets angry “there’s people I need to protect too” he tells Katniss and Haymitch, and here we see the mask slip. All this time, it’s been about Katniss, and how much he loves her, but faced up with danger, possible, real, danger, the veil pulls back to show his fear for his family, others that he loves. That is not to say he doesn’t love Katniss, because he does. But even he can’t deny that he has other priorities, other people that he does not want hurt, and to realize the the thim line he was treading on shocks and scares him. It’s a moment I really like, as it shows another inner depth to Peeta, and really throws into question how much, at all times, is it him talking, or his crafted diplomatic persona? Two things that are almost one and the same in him. (I don’t think he knows at times.) From then on, he has the awareness of the stakes, and awareness of plenty more too. What Katniss sees, realizes, he now starts to see. Then during the Capitol party, he tells Katniss that “maybe they were wrong about things in the districts” all that time on the rest of the Tour, he was watching, learning, evaluating. Weighing what the capitol wants against what the districts are feeling. At some point, separate from his love for Katniss and everything it led him to do, he decided that things are fucked. Maybe this isn’t right. And though his main motives continue to be, and are always mostly self-serving, he is still willing to participate in the movement to make things better. And knows that things should be.  And I just think that’s neat.

[coldforestnight]

REGRESSION SWEEEEEP 🔥🔥🔥 (sorry for being slow w this btw<3) i wanted to ask, what would be the best outcome for rnm s7 in your opinion?? do you have an ideal version of it in your head, anything you hope is gonna play out a certain way?

Thank you for asking my beloved Kata <3 <3 <3 I always want every single RNM episode to end in murder-suicide, but other than that, here are some things I'd like to see in the new season:

an episode in which the Smith family have to reckon with the twisted relationship R & M have, and not just in a funny-haha way. You already said that Morty's basically been relegated to the wifeson/punching bag/sidekick role, and they're supposed to be a more caring family now (barf), so why not explore that? Like you said, the grooming is continuing and just being explained away as a vague sort of "ahh well at least they're trying to be better" but can we just have one real examination of what that entails.

Rick diving headfirst into revenge-fueled alcoholism and isolation and hopefully another suicide attempt <3

give Beth some airtime and have her work out why she was so desperate for her dad's love and approval that she let her son be abused by him. I think Beth's quasi-emotionally incestuous relationship with Rick is fascinating, especially in the early seasons. Again that kind of got handwaved away in later seasons like "oh well she's empowered and confident now she doesn't need him" but clearly she still does and I need to get weird with that.

no more of that meta shit

I always wonder, has Rick ever tried to have other "Mortys," aka more vulnerable people he can exploit? Were there other people/children? Did he ever try to groom Beth in the same way? I'd love to see a former "protege" of his return (maybe President Morty?) so them and Morty can have a Mysterious Skin-esque moment together

an episode with just Morty meditating on who he's become due to his grandfather. Something pretty unexplored in this show is the emotional toll it must take on a perpetually 14-year-old boy to leave school, forgo normal teen experiences, and enter into a partnership with an abusive older man. His childhood is gone. How does he actually feel about that?

additionally it would be interesting to see how Summer feels about how her own adolescence has been drastically changed to serve her grandfather. I always like episodes where the power dynamic changes between her and Morty, where she's the more powerful/desireable one to Rick - but it's been established that Summer isn't "bred for forgiveness" the way her brother is, so how does she feel about that as well?

oh and WHAT HAPPENED TO MARTA... what happened to the rebellious side of Morty that Rick literally erased from existence??? I waited for two seasons to see that come back but it never did and I doubt it ever will but PLEASE can we get some closure on that

Of course I expect none of that to happen and we get 10 episodes of goofy meaningless adventures with a sprinkle of Rick going to therapy (barf) and maybe a wacky plotline with Rick Prime, but whatever, the show that exists inside my and your head is what really matters.

[greydaysandstarrynights]

Do you have any headcanons about Phoebus in the Descendants universe?

// My first thought is he probably disagreed with the decision to imprison all the villains on the Isle, except the dangerous ones. Once he found out they had children, and that the children were also stuck there, he sought an audience with the king in an effort to persuade him to release the kids. Probably definitely said something to the effect of, “punishing children for their parents crimes’ is something a villain does. Not a hero.” Everybody is horrified that Frollo has a kid, but Phoebus (and Esmeralda and Quasi) are even more so, because they know Frollo more deeply, Phoebus from working with him and being taken into his confidence. Frankly, he would doubt that Frollo is her biological dad, given everything he knows about the man. He loves Zephyr, but probably has trouble not accidentally going into soldier/captain of the guard mode. He isn’t abusive at all, and it’s not like he expects Zephyr to never misbehave, but Phoebus is perfectly happy to follow orders that are good and that make sense, so when Zephyr goes through his teenage rebellious phase, they probably clash a lot. In earlier stages where Phoebus asked him to do something perfectly reasonable and Zephyr refused for refusal’s sake, he probably left the room to calm down/think of a better way of approaching the situation,, precisely because he doesn’t want to risk damaging their relationship by going into, “I’m your father, and you’ll do as I say just because,” mode. In Phoebus’ mind, though, he’s making perfectly reasonable requests, and Zephyr is being ridiculous.

On the other hand. Claudine’s total, unquestioned compliance gives him the creeps, partly because he knows she does it out of fear and not realizing she can say no, and partly because, being a soldier, he knows how easy she’d be to take advantage of*, even in harmless ways—like when he asked her to tidy up the kitchen and came back to find her deep cleaning it, because she didn’t know the difference, and he didn’t realize she wouldn’t ask for clarification. (Because Frollo just assumed she was pretending to misunderstand on purpose to get out of her chores, and that never ended well.)

it’s Phoebus who actually sits her down and explains that most people don’t expect military like, robotic obedience from those around them, 24/7/365–and if she meets someone who does, she should run. Most people expect some degree of pushback, from their children or their colleagues or their friends, and while they might find it frustrating, they understand why it’s happening, and while they might wish it happened less often, they don’t actually want mindless robots, even if sometimes—especially with toddlers and teenagers, he tells her— they think they do.

He explains about how to weigh up any requests she’s given and decide if she really wants to do them or not, and assures her that she’s allowed to say no, and allowed to say she doesn’t want to, even if she might end up actually having to do the thing, and that no one will react to her doing those things the way her father did. They might get a bit impatient or shouty, if they’re stressed, and don’t see the request as a big deal, but they won’t hurt her.

Phoebus is actually the first person Claudine says ‘no’ to, after she’s been with them a while. They’re weeding the garden, and he asked her to throw some of the flowering weeds into the rubbish pile, and she looked right at him and said no. They were both pretty shocked—and, luckily, Phoebus had gotten good at helping her calm down when she started panicking, thanks to all his dealings with soldiers who had PTSD—and eventually she managed to tell him that she collected “weeds,” especially the flowering ones like dandelions, and kept them dried and pressed in an old book. He of course agrees, and starts just giving them to her after that.

I really like your fanfic where he’s the one to discover she self harms, so I’m adopting that—except I guess in my headcanon, he’s the second person, since Quasi knows first, but Quasi doesn’t know what to do about it, whereas Phoebus—once he’s gotten over the shock, and assures her he isn’t angry at her, but her father—manages to explain why Frollo’s wrong about her self harm being proper penance.

That’s all I have for now!

*medieval soldiers wrecked havoc on the peasantry, even in their own countries, by living off the land and requisitioning food from the peasants. They also had reputations for violence against conquered civilians, particularly sexual assault.

[kayleigh-83]

@persimmonsimmer posted about her ROS and mentioned mine, and I realized it had been a while since I posted my list. There’s been some changes and additions since I last posted it in 2020! And her list inspired me to add one or two more as well.

I compiled this list from various people as well as some of my own ideas. I just do one roll per household each round. Since Brightmaple is only a quasi-BACC and I don’t play with mayors or town funds, I leave out any scenarios involving those.

I don’t use a program for it either, I just keep a list on my iPad where I track all my round info too, and just ask Siri to pick a number for me.

Feel free to yoink any ideas you might like! There aren’t very many dramatic ones because I’m so soft with my Sims lol.

Full list under the cut!

1. Day out - all eligible Sims go to a community lot

2. Movie night - invite friends over for a movie and snacks

3. Picnic - make food and go to a park for a picnic

4. Family reunion - invite over any known family members

5. Movie night - invite friends over for a movie and snacks

6. Blind date - call matchmaker for a single Sim

7. New outfit - your Sim wants a new outfit, go shopping

8. Games night - no homework for kids, play games all night

9. Large pet adoption - get a cat or a dog, Roll dice to choose

10. Small pet adoption - a small caged animal will join the family

11. Grouchy - your Sim picks 1 to 3 arguments with another

12. Vacation time - spend a couple nights away at a vacation destination (or more!)

13. Fitness regime - your Sim wants to work out, get fit and eat healthy

14. Rebellious - child or teen stops doing homework, skips school and doesn’t do homework for 1 to 3 days

15. Date night - take a Sim couple out on a date

16. It’s a phase - a child will only wear a costume for 1 to 3 days and sleep in a tent, teens get a piercing

17. Get back to nature - your Sims spends 1-2 days camping in a tent, grilling out and fishing

18. Party time - throw a party!

19. Friendly neighbour - chat up the next 2 to 4 walk by’s

20. Bad influence - influence someone to do something stupid

21. Take advantage - influence someone to do them a favor

22. Exchange student - host a teenager from a foreign country

23. Tired of cooking - order delivery at least once a day for d4 days

24. Shopaholic - buy something from every business in town

25. Stray love - greet and interact with the next stray you see, try to adopt

26. Old pets, new tricks - teach a pet a new command

27. Lottery win - roll dice 1 to 10 and multiply by 1000

28. Worst fears realized - fulfill 2 to 5 fears in a rotation

29. Secondary aspiration - change the secondary aspiration for at least one round, you can keep it after if you want

(this round in Brightmaple I’ve decided all adults will get secondary aspirations based on @belladovah‘s calculator, so this ROS that used to be “get a secondary aspiration” is now changing to a changed one)

30. Barber shop - change your Sim’s hairstyle

31. Four eyes - your Sim needs to get glasses

32. Grilled cheese - your Sim gets the grilled cheese secondary aspiration

33. Witchy - become a witch for at least two rotations

34. Redecorate - choose a room or space in the home and give it a facelift

35. Self doubt - change aspiration for this round

36. Reconnect with friends - invite 1-3 friends for an outing

37. Make Your Move - try to initiate a romantic relationship with the Sim that you have a high relationship/chemistry with (family Sims can re-roll if they are already in a relationship, romance Sims can buy a love potion to aid them)

38. Scary dare - visit the cemetery at night

39. Dine out - go out to a restaurant to have a meal

40. Close Encounter - get abducted by aliens d2 times

41. Kitchen Renovations - no dishwasher or stove, just a sink and microwave or toaster oven, while you wait for the new appliances to arrive! (D4 days)

42. On the prowl - take a single (or romance) Sim out on the town to pick someone up for woohoo (or teen level activities if that is the chosen Sim)

43. Hobby Focus - Spend at least two hours every day doing an activity for your chosen hobby

44. Brace face - child or teen Sim must get braces for the round

(I downloaded CC braces for this one!)

45. Dye Job - dye hair a different colour for the round

46. Slumber Party - teen or child invites d3 friends over for a sleepover

47. Cool Parent - try to befriend d2 of your kid’s friends

48. Playing Matchmaker - encourage a friend to flirt with someone else

[mariacallous]

In August 1958, Charles de Gaulle, who had just returned to power in France, set off on a tour of his country’s sub-Saharan African colonies. His purpose was to present them with a plan to join France in a new kind of “community.” Paris would continue to control what it called “state services,” which included defense, monetary matters, customs, as well as media and communications. A new quasi-limited autonomy, meanwhile, would more or less allow African countries to manage their domestic affairs and to carry the costs, once largely borne, by France of doing so.

De Gaulle presented the novel scheme under a veneer of magnanimity. Via a planned referendum, its African possessions would be given the liberty to accept or reject his community. This offer did not come without a warning though. There would be no debate, only an up or down vote, and any colony that rejected the proposition would face secession from France “with all its consequences.”

It was not long before the world learned what this meant in practice. When de Gaulle visited Guinea the following month, that colony’s leader, Ahmed Sékou Touré, spoke defiantly to a crowd as the French statesman looked on. “We do not and never shall renounce our legitimate right to independence,” he said. This angered De Gaulle, who canceled a planned dinner with Touré that night and disinvited him to fly together on his presidential plane to nearby Senegal the next day. Yet these were but the merest hints of the consequences to come.

After de Gaulle had returned home to Paris, he ordered the immediate withdrawal of the thousands of the French civil servants who had made the colony’s bureaucracy run and staffed its clinics and schools. And before they flew home, many of the French workers engaged in an orgy of petty destructiveness, smashing furniture, trashing official records, breaking equipment, and even shattering lightbulbs.

What happened back then in Guinea is one of most famous episodes in an inglorious history of French colonial rule and domination over large parts of West and Central Africa, but it is only a single chapter in a very long story. Guinea is a better place than most to begin a discussion of this topic because in the 1880s and 1890s, the era of rapid French imperial expansion in the region, it was the site of a fierce campaign by Paris to subdue local political rulers, seize control over gold and other natural resources, and extend France’s authority over new territories.

The most famous of these leaders was a man named Samory Touré, who ruled over a polity called the Wassoulou Empire. Its core was in the Guinea highlands, and to France’s great frustration, it sometimes fielded armies numbering as many as 35,000 soldiers. When his empire was finally subdued just before the close of the century, Touré was exiled to an island in Gabon, a faraway equatorial colony (now country), where he died.

France is of course not the only European country to have ruled over Africans, but its history is unique for its persistence, its geographic spread, and its adaptability. A struggle for independence in Algeria, then a large North African French settler colony, brought down France’s Fourth Republic and threatened a civil war in the heart of Europe in 1958, the same year as de Gaulle’s sub-Saharan tour. That is because of the fantastical claim by the rebellious French general, Raoul Salan, that Algeria was actually a physical part, or geographical extension of France. “The Mediterranean traverses France the way the Seine traverses Paris,” Salan claimed.

In the wake of events in Guinea and Algeria, when other Black African figures began to push for more autonomy than de Gaulle had envisioned, or worse, for outright independence, bad things tended to happen to them. A little remembered anti-colonialist figure from Cameroon named Félix-Roland Moumié, for example, was assassinated by French agents whose actions anticipated the dark methods of Vladimir Putin. They poisoned him with radioactive thallium in Geneva in 1960.

More than 60 years later, there is a remarkable uprising against French influence underway in the Sahel, one of the African regions where French domination has been most thorough over the decades. One after another, the leaders of three states in this semi-arid region—Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali—have spoken out against French sway in West Africa and moved to reduce or eliminate the presence of French soldiers, corporations, and diplomats in their countries. In doing so, they have blamed Paris for a host of problems, ranging from a long-running but ineffective and often disruptive French-led campaign to contain the spread of Islamic insurgencies in the Sahel, to interference in their domestic politics, to profiteering from starkly unequal economic ties.

In stiff rebuffs of France, these three landlocked countries, which rank among the poorest in the world, have sometimes welcomed a larger role for Russia, both in helping bolster their internal security and in the extraction of mineral wealth like the gold and uranium in their soils. And with Russia (as with France for so long) these two things often go together.

They have also hinted at ending cooperation with France on controlling the northward flow of African migration across the Sahara toward Europe. And they have been discussing exiting a long-standing monetary union and currency, the CFA franc, which was created by France prior to independence mostly as a way of sustaining French exports in the region. African critics of the CFA franc have long said that it perpetuates French domination, in part through its historic requirement that member countries of the union deposit their foreign reserves with the French treasury. The three states are even discussing establishing a new Sahelian currency to replace the CFA.

The military president of Niger, Abdourahmane Tchiani, has called for France to pay damages to longtime African client states like his for years of what he has likened to looting. In Burkina Faso, next door, another military leader, Ibrahim Traoré, has vowed never to allow his country to be dominated by Europeans again.

In so strongly calling into question relations with France, these three Sahelian countries have captured the imagination of millions of Africans living in other former French colonies and beyond, including in wealthier coastal states, whose official relations with France so far have not been seriously disrupted. To the clear chagrin of French President Emmanuel Macron, though, this has come to feel increasingly like a major reckoning.

Some in France have long seen this coming. In an interview in 2007, his last year in power, former French President Jacques Chirac said as much. “Don’t forget one thing, and that is that a large portion of the money that we have in our purses comes precisely from the exploitation of Africa over the centuries … So we need a little measure of good sense, I didn’t say generosity, but good sense, and justice to render to Africans, I would say, what we took from them. This is necessary if we want to avoid the most severe turmoil and difficulty, with all of the political consequences that this will bring in the near future.”

In fairness to France, with all there is to criticize, its entire legacy in sub-Saharan Africa has not been uniformly abysmal. France once oversaw the construction of large infrastructure projects in its African colonies and clients—major ports, railroads, and highways. Part of the current anger toward this former colonial power is that it has largely exited this business, ceding the realm of big projects to China.

A few of France’s former colonies, Ivory Coast in particular, are well developed by the standards of the region. Even the much-criticized CFA franc has not been thoroughly bereft of benefits, hence its staying power. The relationship with France, and through Paris, with the European Union, has long kept the CFA convertible and relatively stable, if typically overvalued—affecting the balance of trade by making these countries exports expensive and imports, notably from the Eurozone, cheaper.

Surveying Africa below the Sahara in its entirety, though, it is hard to avoid the impression that France’s former colonies generally trail their former British colony counterparts in economic development, in democratic governance, and in political stability. And this is no paean to British colonial rule or influence, which gradually dissipated after independence.

But even if one wishes to take the most benign view of colonialism and capitalism in Africa, it is hard to argue that France has done nearly enough to help foster development in its former possessions or usher them more fully into the global economy. And to some extent, this stands to reason. France, at best, is a medium-size country with a matching economy. These attributes stand in disproportionate relation to Paris’s grand and long-standing ambition of buttressing its own stature in the world by clinging to the reins of neocolonial power in the continent to the south. Africa’s galloping demographic growth makes the absurdity of this mismatch more evident by the year.

On one level, the ongoing uprising against Paris in the Sahel can be understood as a cynical ploy using populism to sustain the political power of military elites in states that have been flirting with failure for years. But there is something much more interesting going on.

There is another challenge being posed by the leaders of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger that is likely to be far more impactful over time: they are challenging other African countries—both French and English speaking—to tear down the barriers that cripplingly divide them. More than a century ago, Europe “broke” the continent by subdividing it into cookie cutter-shaped countries, many of them small and landlocked.

Deeper African unity and federation is a dream with a surprisingly long pedigree. This was the cry of African intellectuals like J.E. Casely Hayford, in the former Gold Coast, now Ghana, early in the 20th century. More famously, it was also the obsession of Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah. Less well-remembered, this was also the cause of Barthélemy Boganda, the early leader of the Central African Republic, who hoped to federate French-speaking countries in that part of the continent under a proposed United States of Latin Africa.

What remains certain today is that a start toward the greater prosperity and well-being that all Africans yearn for will only come when these divides are eradicated, and outsiders can’t do this for them. Anger towards France is only useful if it becomes a catalyst for greater agency by Africans, who build their own regional currencies, construct their own regional rail and highways, and constitute political and economic unions that exist on more than paper.

[yr-obedt-cicero]

okay so i never fully remembered what my question was but!! i did remember that it had to do with philip’s social life or hobbies and so my new question is do we have any information on that? like if he had hobbies besides going to bars and not paying his bills or like who his friends were (besides price yk). i imagine there’s not much on this but anything helps!!! love you bestie <33

Philip seems to have taken notable interest in theater and literature. Both of his friends, Thomas Rathbone and Stephen Price had a considerable relation to theater. As Rathbone, one of Philip's old classmates, writes to his sister about his death;

At the theatre I was informed of it about 9 O'clock Monday evening - I immediately ran to the House near the State Prison from whence I was told they dare not remove him - Picture yourself my dear Girl my emotions which must have assailed me on my arrival at his room to which I was admitted as his old College classmate.

Source — Historical Magazine: And Notes and Queries Concerning the Antiquities, History, and Biography of America, Volume 1

Additionally, both Price and Philip were going to see the play, The West Indian by Cumberland, when they happened to encounter Eacker. [x] Stephen Price would also go on to be very influential to America's theater business, and became the founder of theater management.

Philip also enjoyed reading. At the young age of eight, he was already requesting books about geography;

I enclose for my little friend Philip a copy of the elements of Geography, which I mentioned.

Source — Tench Coxe to Alexander Hamilton, [10 July 1790]

He also seemed to have dabbled in poetry with Hamilton mentioning that Eliza would give him an Ovid, referring to the Roman poet, Publius Ovidius Naso, who is often ranked as one of the three canonical poets of Latin;

Your Mama has got an Ovid for you and is looking up your Mairs introduction.

Source — Alexander Hamilton to Philip Hamilton, [December 5, 1791]

Prior to his death he was also borrowing a book from the local library. [x] There is also the possibility of him being given his father's old books. [x]

When Philip was older, he was also part of a literature society. It was a Literature Society composed mainly of boys in their early twenties. It looks as though the members belonged to the same generational group, and were all rather acquainted with each other. A reappearing pattern being that; most of them were from New York, studied law, and graduated from Columbia in the 1790s.

About this time, Mr. Jones was a member of a literary society, (of which the late Peter A. Jay was president,) composed, among others, of Nathan Sandford, Charles Baldwin, John Ferguson, Jas. Alexander, Rudolph Bunner, Goveurneur Ogden, the first Philip Hamilton, William Bard, Wm. A. Duer, Philip Church, John Duer, and Beverley Robinson; of whom the last five are the only survivors.

Source — Memorial of the Late Honorable David S. Jones

Funny enough, there are a lot of familiar faces, and two of which would later assist Philip in his duel against George Eacker. David Samuel Jones, who was a 1796 graduate of Columbia College, would later help Philip convince his uncle John Barker Church to lend them his guns for the encounter and was one of his second's. Additionally, Philip's cousin also went there, Philip Church, who would also later be his second. Philip seems to have had a close relationship with his cousin Church, as Church was usually visiting the Hamiltons' and assisting his uncle Hamilton in Law or the Quasi-war.

Overall, Philip was quite “popular” and well-liked by many other boys his age, likely due to the importance of his surname. He was known for being very smart, gregarious, and handsome, with his charming rebellious side he appealed to plenty of adolescent men from his generation. The Evening Post considered him; “a young man of most amiable disposition and cultivated mind; much esteemed and affectionately beloved by all who had the pleasure of his acquaintance.” [x]

He seemed to make friends easily, other than just the previously mentioned Price and Rathbone, but also Washington's step-grandson; George Washington Parke Custis (Also known as Wash or Washy), who he attended school with for a period of time [x], they were also childhood playmates — as the Hamilton children visited the Washingtons' often when the two families lived in Philadelphia. Wash even wrote Hamilton a condolence letter after Philip's death, and in it he said; “We were brought up as it were, together in our earlier years and that mutual friendship which then existed between us, would I have no doubt have at a future time ripened into esteem.” [x]

There was also the small portion of time when Lafayette's son, Georges Washington de Lafayette, stayed with the Hamiltons' in 1795 while they awaited for conflict to die down so he could stay with Washington. [x] (Which actually brings up a funny story about Hamilton losing Lafayette's son) Georges and Philip were only three years apart in age, so it's imaginable they may have found each other's company agreeable. The only opposition being that Georges seemed in a state of despondency during his time with the Hamiltons' - likely missing his home country and parents - he was described as losing weight and being depressed, if not absent from their home and off with his tutor. [x] And later on he never wrote about his stay with them at all. So, I can't affirm it was a pleasurable experience for him, and there isn't any considerable evidence to suggest a friendship between the boys.

Another apparent interest of Philip's was traveling, and he traveled to Providence, Rhode island, and Philadelphia on his own during his youth. In a condolence letter, Rush says Philip was a charming guest at their residence during the last trip and says he made great friends with his son, who was likely Richard Rush since there was only two years difference between the boys;

It may perhaps help to sooth your grief when I add to that united expression of Sympathy, that your Son had made himself very dear to my family during his late visit to Philadelphia, by the most engaging deportment. His visits to us were daily, and after each of them he left us with fresh impressions of the correctness of his understanding and manners, and of the goodness of his disposition. To One of my Children he has endeared himself by an Act of friendship & benevolence that did great honor to his heart, and will be rememb[e]red with gratitude by Mrs. Rush, and myself as long as we live. My Son has preserved a record of it in an elegant and friendly letter which he received from him After his return to New York.

Source — Benjamin Rush to Alexander Hamilton, [November 26, 1801]

For even more options, there is a catalog of graduates at Columbia College which show the names of Philip's classmates. [x]

Hope this helps!

[somekindofadeviant]

Re Angel and the judge 1) I think its clear that Angelus changed over time (just think about his own introduction to the master in 1700s vs. his dislike of Spikes recklessness in the 1800s) 2) He killed Darla while he had the soul. With the soul he could tell himself that that lose was necessary for the greater good/ Buffy, but once the soul is gone? Then his sweet death's just gone. There's an argument to be made that he's purposely shoving away any human-y emotions he had left.

Aaaaaaa Yes! Angelus absolutely changes over time. There's this sorta evolution from rebellious boyfriend that daddy doesn't approve of, with him and Darla eloping together as the young lovers in contrast to The Master - to the 1880s through to the soul curse where the Whirlwind are this quasi-family unit. Now Angelus and Darla are the parental figures themselves, the authority figures - with Spike and Drusilla as the kids. And, hoo boy, I could just write whole essays on the familial dynamics of the whirlwind and Angelus' different father/son dynamics throughout his life.

YES!!! That's such an interesting point. Any purpose or reasoning that Angel could use to salve the pain and guilt of killing Darla whilst souled not only dissipates when he loses it, but actively makes the hurt more bitter. His soul's gone, finally, and he still can't return home because he murdered the woman who was home to him, and yes maybe rather than deal with any of the emotions related to anything to do with that, like you say, he's just purposefully shoving away feelings - maybe not even consciously, just still in the stage of a delayed-onset numbness - and what's left is, well, 'clean' in the eyes of The Judge, at least until those pushed-away emotions catch up with him.

[fearofahumanplanet]

Aquarius, Libra, and Taurus!

Who's your least favorite character to write? (Hey wait, Aquarius is my irl sign, nice!) I'm... not actually sure if this is harder to answer than "favorite", lol! I really love my characters generally, bc if I don't like them very much they don't tend to stay in the story to begin with! Okay, wait, no... there was a police captain, Lumis, in my first book, Karma Killer, that I absolutely despised writing. This probably stems from my real-life hatred of police, but I really could not find a way to make him likeable, even when I made his backstory and motivation sympathetic at least. I really tried with that guy, but I dunno, the only part of his story I enjoyed was killing him off lmao

Which relationship dynamic do you enjoy writing the most? Okay literally no one is going to be surprised by this answer but it's easily Jörmungandr x Wadjet x Badb from The Serpents They Stone - their whole quasi-polyamorous deal (does it count if two members are part of the same OSDD system? I'd assume so, but not sure) is so good it made me write a romance-focused story. Seriously, I never do that. Just the trials of a bunch of people who have all been through and been forced to do horrible things and seeing monsters of themselves yet simultaneously seeing in each other unfortunate pawns that had no choice in their actions... It's messy, they want to kill each other half the time, but they love each other so strongly that no amount of bickering and resentment ever really tears them apart, and they literally go to the ends of the earth for each other. Just... God.

Tell us why you hate your project. Serpents only ever gets amazing when I break all the rules I set prior to starting writing it :P Even in my own hobby, I can't help but be a rebellious bitch ig smh lmao

Thank you for the questions! Hope you're doing well (and hope the shack isn't too miserable)