#season: mother's day

[starrymush]

Happy Mother’s Day to the most motherly of all

[renegadesstuff]

TIM LOOKING AT LUCY WHEN HE SHOULD BE LOOKING AT ASHLEY 😍🥹

[mustbebunnys]

Carina & Liam DeLuca-Bishop STATION 19 // s07e07

[geopsych]

Mother Earth Season

Earth Day is tomorrow so here is my annual post. It's long but I mean it with all my heart. Everything we are, everything we own, everything that makes up our family, our lovers, our pets, our houses, ships at sea, planes in the air, shopping centers, factories, cities, computers, and, of course, all of the diversity and glory of nature, comes from the Earth. We have Earth Day, when we talk about problems with the Earth and try to fix them, but it's time for us to celebrate the beauty, glory, and nurturing of the Earth and show our thanks for this source of everything. Let's celebrate the time between Earth Day and the day the U.S. celebrates as Mothers Day as Mother Earth Season, a time to look at, appreciate, and celebrate everything wonderful and amazing about the earth and the living things on it. Find wonderful things in nature and show them to other people. Take an older person out of the nursing home for a picnic or a drive through the woods. Tell children stories of remarkable and beautiful places, animals, plants, or events in nature that you saw before they were born. Give nature parties, play nature-related music, dance, paint pictures, write poems, share photographs about nature and, most of all, take walks. Get up early to see the sunrise light on everything and take pictures, or not, find out when and where to see the Pleiades rise and set. Look at the landscape from hills, take paths along streams and into glens. Sit in a beautiful place with someone you love or sit and remember deeply someone you loved. Take it all in and share it with others! Most of all, take time to feel happy to be alive on this beautiful earth and let yourself feel wonder. Feel the joy of being on this living planet. Tell the Earth how amazing she is and that you're glad she's given you this time here. If these were your last days, what would you want to say to this, your home and source that gave you everything you've ever known, including your self? As Mister Eckhart said, "If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough." And as Rumi is quoted, "Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground."

[kr-yoongi]

Happiest Colin Morgan character !!

[cajon-desastre]

Mothers and their children are in a category all their own. There's no bond so strong in the entire world. No love so instantaneous and forgiving.

Gail Tsukiyama. Dreaming Water

[simstraffikcone]

Happy Mother's Day to Pascal Curious 🫃🏽👽

(it is still just mothering Sunday for myself)

[twinsunstars]

the batch and omega would do a mother’s day special with gifts for echo after learning what the holiday is (mainly omega’s idea), and eva, jax, and sami (with baryn) would introduce emerie to what mother’s day is and make her some gifts with flowers as a thanks for helping to save them

edit: just wrote a fic on this :D

[letters-to-rosie]

The Silco Essay

Long post ahead, TDLR included.

Let's do a little thought experiment. We're trying to institute socialism, worker control and ownership of the means of production. This is currently far from our reality, so we have a lot of work to do. We get together and talk and strategize, but it's difficult with all the surveillance we're under as we work. Not only would seizing the means of production be met with a harsh backlash but even unionization, which doesn't automatically lead to worker control or ownership, is suppressed even though that suppression is illegal in certain countries like the US.

How does that suppression happen? There are a lot more workers than owners. If we worked together, we could take them, right? Well, the owners have the law and access to call upon the state to enact violence on us. We can't exactly own the means of production if we get killed. Even if we overcome other hierarchies keeping us from solidarity, such as miners in West Virginia did by organizing across racial divisions, we can still be beaten. Those miner had bombs dropped on them.

Okay, thought experiment over. What does this have to do with Silco? It's taken me ages to think about how to explain it, but my beef with him is that he has what are essentially perfect conditions for creating a mass movement and does not use them. He is uniquely in a position to protect any burgeoning mass revolt until it would be too late for Piltover to stop it. This is why his comments to Sevika that they can buy another police chief ring hollow. They both know how good they had it.

This is not to say that I think Silco is poorly written or a "bad character." Silco being the way he is all comes down to the entire conceit of the show: two cities against each other, with a sister on each side. However, this does lead me to want to critique some things about the show's premise that lead to my critiques about Silco.

For the cities to be meaningfully opposed, Zaun can't just be oppressed. It has to be "bad" to counter Piltover's bad. This, I think, causes the majority of things that make me sad about the show overall. While I still enjoy it, much of what I enjoyed was a fantasy setting that dealt with real-world issues in its own way. However, for all the realism in the setting, there are some distinctly "not real" parts that seem to blunt discussions of the depth of the oppression Zaunites are suffering. There's only fleeting mentions of labor oppression, even though it must have been key to organizing their society. The way Piltovans like Heimerdinger and great house members like the Kirammans must've had an active hand in organizing and benefiting from this oppression is mostly skipped over. Much of Piltover's evil is shown to us in the form of police brutality, but under any system of police brutality is one of hierarchy that is actively maintained and serves more of a purpose than just violence for its own sake. Even so, the police brutality we're shown is more than enough to have us sympathize with Zaunite characters if they were to have a massive rebellion and change the shape of Piltover forever. But Piltover's shape can only change so much. That's the conceit of the show. We can't completely root for Zaun and have them be entirely sympathetic because it would break the world. This is why I think Silco has to be the face of Zaun instead of Ekko and the Firelights, why Ekko has to befriend Heimerdinger to soften that antagonism, and why the Firelights never gain enough power to challenge Piltover at a systemic level. Even when Ekko wants to, he's thwarted and unable to cross the bridge.

We have a lot more fantasy imagination than political imagination. Silco is very realistic. Authoritarians do tend to rise up and stop movements that are closer in practice to socialism. If there were a mass movement in Zaun, as there seems to be potential for around episode 3, Silco would want to redirect that energy so he can control it, and I wouldn't be surprised if that is, in some form or fashion, what he did while consolidating power in the wake of Vander's death. While I appreciate the realism, it does make me sad that many times we put so much more energy into imagining magic systems and mystical creatures than we do imagining ways people could live freely with each other. It's like we have to keep capitalist realism alive even if we have hoverboards (also, if it wasn't already clear, I think the greatest potential for socialism/other lefty schools of thought is seen in the Firelights; so we could totally have political imagination AND hoverboards if Riot weren't cowards).

Silco's strong individualism works well for his relationship with Jinx and allows him to serve and Vi's primary antagonist. Even as Vi goes on a path that leads her to become more and more morally questionable as the plot goes on (like her sister lol), the sheer horror of what Silco inflicted on her makes Vi's story easy to digest. For Silco and Jinx, Silco's individualist outlook allows him to see her separated from the conditions that he is exacerbating outside. There are probably at least a hundred kids who could be as smart if given the right conditions (which makes Jinx and Ekko foils, for instance), but Silco doesn't care because he doesn't have a personal connection with them. He sees Jinx not as a child among many but as the child. I think this is part of why it's so hard for him to even think of giving her up and why he really never would have. However, I think it would be wrong to suggest that we'd have to sacrifice a great storyline for Silco to be more class conscious. It's possible to hold the tension between seeing greatness in individuals you love and knowing there is similar greatness in every individual that is being stomped on by the various oppressions we face, including the ones we share.

Because of these factors (Piltover being written to be the oppressor but Zaun needing to be equally bad so the show can "both sides" the conflict; a general lack of political imagination, which is also hemmed in by the source material and keeps us from fun fictional socialism except in small doses; and the general individualism baked into Silco's character that leads him to not even consider that a mass movement is the best way to achieve his aim of independence), I find Silco's politics very boring, lol. If we're to think about what his revolution might bring about, I'd find it much easier to compare to a bourgeois revolution (such as the US one) than to a socialist revolution that devolved into state capitalism (such as the USSR). One thing that characterized the US revolution was its unwillingness to include all the potential actors who might've fought in the war, particularly enslaved people. More enslaved people actually fought on the British side, as they were promised independence (even though Britain had not abolished slavery, so this was probably a scam). By desiring to maintain the system of chattel slavery and the hierarchies it created, the US revolutionaries missed out on the possibility to create a mass movement and jeopardized the success of their movement in the process.

This all reminds me of the distinction Kwame Ture (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael) draws between the Black Revolutionary and the Black Militant:

Now, there are a number of groups functioning in the black liberation movement in this country. I will not give the philosophy of those groups. I will not speak for them because I wouldn’t want their representatives to speak for us. There are, of course, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Congress for Racial Equality, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Black Panther Party. Most of these groups have basically been fighting for a share of the American pie, at least until recently. That is to say, they were kept out of the American dream, and many of them thought that if they were to adopt the manners, the mode, the culture of the oppressor, they would be accepted and they too could enjoy the fruits of American imperialism. But today, among the young generation of blacks in this country, an ideology is developing that says we cannot, in fact, accept the system. This differentiates the black militant from the black revolutionary. The black militant is one who yells and screams about the evils of the American system, himself trying to become a part of that system. The black revolutionary’s cry is not that he is excluded, but that he wants to destroy, overturn, and completely demolish the American system and start with a new one that allows humanity to flow. I stand, then, on the side of the black revolutionary and not on the side of the black militant. (From Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism)

Silco's demands to Jayce, along with his exclusion of most of the people from Zaun in the process of transforming society and his exploitation of them via shimmer, place him firmly on the side of the militant in this equation. Silco wants access to the fruits of Piltover's progress while only upsetting the structure where it negatively affects him. Again, while there's a lot I can enjoy in his character, I get frustrated with his insistence at being counter-revolutionary at every turn. I have a long reading list for him, and since he's in the afterlife now, he'll have time to get to it.

TLDR: Silco says he doesn't have to beat Piltover, just scare them. You know what's really scary, Silco? The masses of the people standing up and demanding that their oppression end, for fuck's sake.

[soft-girl-musings]

good news: ren faire dress has been delivered!!

bad news: the friends waited until this week to share that our may schedules likely do not line up for a trip :(

[morgodrawings]

Happy (late) Mother’s Day! To one amazing mom Joyce Byers

[renegadesstuff]

FAVORITE PARALLEL 🥹❤️

[vaggieslefteye]

Appreciating Hazbin Hotel's Character Expressions ↳ ᴄᴀʀᴍɪʟʟᴀ ᴄᴀʀᴍɪɴᴇ in 1x03 - "Scrambled Eggs"

[church-of-lilith]

i’m just saying deciding to go to drag brunch on mother’s day is very much giving queer people and their found family (even tho ava would never admit to being anything close to friends with any of them)

[isitwrongtotrytopickup---dragons]

Was that first glance truly a gay little moment between Mizu and Akemi, or was she actually surprised (maybe even a little jealous?) that femininity could even look like that? Lavish, spoiled, seemingly loved or at least, something to be desired. I think it's pretty sure that she does not grasp how Akemi's life is a prison just as much as hers. That much is clear in their dialogues and her behavior towards her.

What if that dialogue (you, magical forest creature spoiling your good chances at a good life etc etc) was actually lowkey jealousy? of a life she herself would never get to experience as a woman? of being allowed to be a woman AND have a chance at happiness?

[cajon-desastre]

A mother is the truest friend we have, when trials heavy and sudden fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends desert us; when trouble thickens around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts.

Washington Irving