#story: liberation

[rosenongrata]

idk if i'll ever fully render this so pls just take it from me

[powerbottomblake]

dungeon meshi is soooo fucking great especially when it hits its stride and all characters have come into play bc it's just like

laios: I want to eat all the fucking monsters i want the monsters carnally

marcille: EATING MOSNTERS???? UNHOLY. UNCOUTH. DISGUSTING. anyway here's all the dark magic and necromancy i've got on the backburner to bring back my dragon-digested gf and also i plan to find a way for everyone to live forever at the cost of my very soul if need be

kabru, normally, in a normal tone he's rehearsed 42000 times in front of a mirror: I'M NORMAL. I'M SOOOO FUCKING NORMAL. I'M THE MOST NORMAL GUY AROUND AND I'M NOT CONSTANTLY PLOTTING ASSASSINATIONS FOR THE GREATER GOOD

senshi: I have all this trauma abt being the sole survivor of the fantasy equivalent of the franklin expedition but that's not important what really matters here is eat yer goddamn veggies or so help me

and the best part is that none of them are straight

[yusiyomogi]

if ryoko kui can write a complex disabled character AND make him funny without specifically making fun of his disability or depression, fandom should at least try to do so as well.

[ahaura]

im sure its been said already but as the election draws near more and more liberals will come out of the woodwork to shame people with a conscience to give away their vote to the democrats for free. i'm already seeing posts saying "why aren't people more concerned about a trump presidency?" you want to know why? it's because people already know he's bad. everyone already knows what he is and what he's done and what he'll do. there's nothing to discuss. he's a racist despotic worm of a man. there's nothing else to say.

biden is currently president. the genocide is happening under his watch. he's the one funding isra*l and arming them; he's sidestepped congress more than once to give them weapons. by oct. 27, the biden administration already knew that "Israel was regularly bombing buildings without solid intelligence that they were legitimate military targets." the state department/biden have engaged in atrocity propaganda, cast doubt on the legitimacy of the death toll recorded by the gaza health ministry, and so on. the united states is currently in the process of trying to pin the "war in gaza" on netanyahu (see sen. schumer's speech) after months of backing blatant genocide as a means to act as if they're "doing something" about the genocide (Instead of, say, threatening to cut off all aid to israel with the condition that all hostilities in gaza, the west bank, and occupied jerusalem are halted immediately and permanently, allowing palestinians freedom to travel, allowing aid into gaza, etc etc etc.)

the long and short of it is that liberals view their own lives as being worth more than palestinians'. that's it. they'll vote for another 4 years of the guy ushering in genocide and supporting apartheid + settler colonialism because he isn't outright attacking them (despite various laws and rulings happening both at the supreme court level and at the local level all over the country that will endanger people). they'll settle for the illusion of safety and security and shame anyone with a conscience and accuse them of "supporting the republicans" when in an actual democracy you would be able to use your vote as leverage to extract concessions from those who want to be elected. that's how it's supposed to fucking work.

democrats are not owed people's vote. if biden loses, it will be biden's fault; it will be his campaign's fault; it will be the democrats' fault. trump is bad; the republicans are bad. we already know this. this is not an endorsement of either. but if democrats are too cowardly and feckless and servile to the motivations of the american empire and never do anything for their constituents then why the fuck should anyone vote for them. you want to get mad at someone, why don't you do something useful and stop worrying about team-sports with a purely selfish basis and start hounding the people in power who are supposed to serve you, the voter.

[akiacia]

the sun shines after every storm (like clockwork, hope, and maybe fate too)

[mercifullymad]

i feel passionately about the need to enfold people experiencing (or diagnosed) with "just" depression or anxiety into the mad pride project. the more people who view themselves as mad, the better. much as the rhetorical move from "neurotypical" to "neuroconforming" emphasizes the artifice & social construction of "neurotypicality," so too will expanding identification as "mad" expose the sane/mad dichotomy as a false one.

it's true that (some) people with "just" depression and/or anxiety have an easier time navigating the psych system than people who have more stigmatized diagnoses. but this is not to say that they necessarily have an easy time — the carceral psych system is hostile to everyone subsumed by it, even the most "privileged" patients. we should of course critique & examine how our experiences are shaped by various intersections of privilege, but we cannot forget or ignore how someone with "just" a depression/anxiety diagnosis can still experience the full force of the carceral psych system brought down upon them (including but not limited to involuntary institutionalization, police intervention, & forced medication or other forced treatment).

we must encourage, if not insist, that those with the least-stigmatized diagnoses view their difficult experiences navigating the psych system as bound up with the liberation of people who have more stigmatized diagnoses &, often, a more violent experience of the psych system. we need more people to drop the "i have anxiety/depression but i'm not crazy" line and say loudly, "i have anxiety/depression & i am crazy. my access to just treatment is linked to the conditions of all other crazy people, who are my allies, peers, & friends. we are united in our cause & we all deserve a more liberating system of care."

[kacievvbbbb]

You do get the sense that the fallout of Roger's death and the Roger pirates disbanding not so much traumatized Buggy and Shanks indifferent ways but instead generated such drastically different reactions to the trauma.

While the trauma of everything seemed to push Shanks into the future, always constantly waiting for something, putting plans on hold and then later in place, for this great moment, this great coming that he sees on the Horizon. For Buggy it rooted him firmly in the past keeping him trapped in this grief masquerading as anger.

While Roger's death forced Shanks to grow up fast, it kind of arrested Buggy's development keeping him stuck in those same feelings, rooted int that same place.

You get the sense that Buggy's whole east blue schtick is just one long overdue rebellious phase one big fuck you to Roger and his ideals. He's rebelling against Roger's principles. One of their rules was don't steal from innocent people and Buggy was keeping a whole town in poverty. If Roger and Luffy's pirating styles are diametrically opposed to someone like Blackbeard, who might be the most literal pirate in the entire series, then buggy is the parody of that Blackbeard piratism. He is playing up cruelty, being the most piratey pirate possible, hell he's literally a clown on a stage. It's all a show! It's his own special way of trying to "get back at Roger" of trying to discard everything Roger taught him for this overacted, over exaggerated clownish cruelty. Mentally he never left that execution square. He is still 15, alone and scared.

Hell he literally never left either, while I'm pretty sure Shanks' booked it out of the east blue as fast as he could, Buggy never lef, might have never left, if not for Luffy. It's part of why Luffy bothers him so much, he's just like Roger everything that Buggy is trying hard to forget and here comes this kid, whose never even met the Captain but is wearing his hat, shoving it right back in his face.

It makes sense that he never leaves the east blue till Luffy literally forces him out of it (fucking with Luffy gets him captured and imprisoned) and it makes sense that it's Luffy that literally breaks him out of prison, literally sets him free, and on the path to greatness that maybe he was always meant to achieve (even if he trips his way into it). This boy that is tragically so much like his old captain but so beautifully unabashedly himself, is what Buggy needs to start letting go off the past, to start trying to move forward.

Maybe that's why Buggy, at what could arguably be described as his lowest moment, gets the strength to free himself from his own self imprisonment, realizing that even back then he was locking himself away and pinning his own dreams on Shanks. And, maybe for the first time ever, Buggy really own his dream. He declares to his tormentors and his crew and the entire world that; actually He wants to find the one piece, him, as captain of his own crew, this crew, not just a part of someone else's. That's his dream and he's willing to turn the world upside down to do it.

[trans-axolotl]

Image description: [Black text on lined paper. Text reads: Share your story with the Psych Survivor Archive. Hold the psychiatric system accountable for the violence and coercion we've survived. Make space for our anger. Grieve together. Celebrate our resistance. The Psych Survivor Archive is a forum for psych survivors to share about their experiences and be believed. You can share as much or as little as you want. Your story will be anonymously published on the website with writing from other psych survivors. The archive is open to anyone who identifies as a psych survivor, including people who survived inpatient hospitalization, rehab, troubled teen industry, partial hospitalization, outpatient programs, ABA, and any other form of coercion psych treatment. Check out the prompts, participant rights, and content guidelines. Share your story now: www.psychsurvivorarchive.com/submit-your-story]

Hey everyone. I wanted to share this here as well. The Psych Survivor Archive is looking for anyone who wants to share their story and have it anonymously published on the website, in order to create a collection of our experiences navigating the psych system. Your responses will be anonymous and can be as detailed or vague as you want. On the website, there are prompts, but you can feel free to share in whatever format makes sense to you.

This is a more informal way to participate in the Psych Survivor Archive if you are not interested in creating art for the zine, but still want your story to be heard and validated.

For me, it has felt very cathartic to write out my story, on my terms, in the way that I want to be known. I hope that the archive can offer that space to other psych survivors as well, and I can't wait to keep developing this project and offering even more. In the next couple weeks, submissions will open up for the second edition of the zine, so if you're interested in submitting creative art or writing keep an eye out!

love and solidarity always <3

[emberz7]

fell asleep in class again 🍇

[g0ldgauntlet]

Hilichurls and "Tribal" Portrayals.

While we're talking about Natlan, I also want to mention how awful it is that a section of the fandom tried to make us all out to be crazy years ago for pointing out how racist the portrayal of the Hilichurls are.

Quick content warning for mentions of slavery, colonization, genocide, and anti-Indigenous racism. (Image description is in alt text)

Hoyo used Indigenous people as references for these in-game enemies, which we literally have video proof of, provided by the company itself (Timestamp: 1:30).

The Hilichurls were constantly belittled by Teyvat's people, with an Inazuma npc likening them to demons. I remember Paimon acting like the items they collected were meaningless or pieces of junk during the earlier parts of the game.

They become a lot more sympathetic later due to their actual origins in-game (which I'm sure @phoenix-creates can confirm for me because I know you're farther ahead in Genshin than I am right now), sure, but I always found it strange that Hoyo used Indigenous cultures to portray these "monsters" who have lost their sense of selves (meanwhile their human forms are white), as if to imply that Indigenous cultures are more "wild" or "savage."

Genshin fans of color, since 2020, have pointed out the racist undertones that Teyvat's people were perpetuating against the Hilichurls due to them acting the same way that racists irl act towards non-White cultures, but they were told that they were overreacting and this was swept under the rug as a result. The very next year, it's brought up again with more people finding out about it, and we were still being told that we're overreacting.

So now that we're at Natlan, is it seriously that hard to believe that Hoyo straight up just doesn't respect Indigenous cultures? Black (and many brown) cultures too, because it's very telling that Iansan, the Natlan character with the darkest skin so far, is given a more stereotypically "tribal" look on her design with a bunch of bones used as her accessories despite that not being what her actual inspiration looks like.

(Artist for picture on the right: vieirapx on Instagram)

Sucrose has confirmed in her "Something to Share" voiceline that she collects Hilichurl bones, which is similar to colonizers taking the bones of dead Indigenous people with this added context.

Also, please read or reread the Teyvat Travel Guide Vol. 1. Alice basically confirms that she wants to enslave the Hilichurls for labor and also feed the weaker ones to the stronger ones.

That latter point is cannibalism. I know that many people are fans of Alice, but a lot of what she talks about in the first guide is why I don't like her.

Yes, it can be argued that Indigenous cultures are not the only inspiration for the Hilichurls, as it's been said that they may take inspiration from goblins, Bokoblins from the Zelda franchise, and the Amanojuku from Japanese mythology. Answer me this question, though.

Why is Hoyo capable of referencing a creature and not a human being when it comes to the Japanese inspiration for the Hilichurls, but this does not apply to the Indigenous references? It's dehumanizing, and it feels like another double-standard that needs to be addressed.

Hoyo has casually made black and brown cultures in Genshin appear to be less civilized and more "tribal" compared to our White and East Asian peers, both with the human characters and the non-human ones. Sumeru's quests and enemy npcs had multiple examples of this, with the Traveler and Jeht even destroying almost the entire Tanit tribe with the narrative justification being that, conveniently, most or all of them were selfish, bloodthirsty, and manipulative (Jeht's profile on the wiki page goes into what happened with more depth). They had to die because the tribe was dangerous - even though the main problem seems to be Babel - and Jeht's white, blonde companion needed to help save everyone from these evil, power-hungry savages.

(Sidenote: I think this is the second time overall that Hoyo has come up with an excuse to justify Traveler committing genocide on an entire group of people, with the first being the Iwakura Clan.)

I'm sure that the same thing is going to happen with Natlan's quests and npcs because Hoyo has always been weird about the portrayal of black and brown-inspired characters. The question is not whether any of the creatures or humans from specific groups are bad, suspicious, or designed to fit a specific image. We know the answer to that. The real question is why they are portrayed like this, and why it keeps happening more commonly to the black and brown cast members compared to our lighter peers.

[jewish-microwave-laser]

A majority of Israelis supported the Oslo Accords. Partly the changing mood was a result of the intifada: a growing number of Israelis had concluded that the price for absorbing the territories was too high, that occupation undermined Israel's Jewish and democratic values, that the Jewish people hadn't returned home to deprive another people of its sense of home. And so if the right's policies had led to the intifada, then the left's policies ought to be given a try. The 1970s and '80s had been the decades of Greater Israel, and the '90s seemed about to become the decade of Peace Now.

There was also, as Rabin noted, the changing international atmosphere. During the Sebastia showdown of 1975, much of the public had supported Gush Emunim as an expression of its contempt for the UN's Zionism-racism solution. But Israel was no longer being instantly demonized, and Israelis responded with a readiness to take risks for peace.

from "Part Five: End of the Six-Day War (1992–2004)" in Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation by Yossi Klein Halevi, p. 481

[rosenongrata]

the main character—GJ—for a game i want to make :3

[averlym]

fairest of the fair

[rustchild]

one of the wild things about people’s stubborn insistence on misunderstanding The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas is that the narrator anticipates an audience that won’t engage with the text, just in the opposite direction. Throughout the story are little asides asking what the reader is willing to believe in. Can you believe in a utopia? What if I told you this? What about this? Can you believe in the festivals? The towers by the sea? Can we believe that they have no king? Can we believe that they are joyful? Does your utopia have technology, luxury, sex, temples, drugs? The story is consulting you as it’s being told, framed as a dialogue. It literally asks you directly: do you only believe joy is possible with suffering? And, implicitly, why?

the question isn’t just “what would you personally do about the kid.” It isn’t just an intricate trolley problem. It’s an interrogation of the limits of imagination. How do we make suffering compulsory? Why? What futures (or pasts) are we capable of imagining? How do we rationalize suffering as necessary? And so on. In all of the conversations I’ve seen or had about this story, no one has mentioned the fact that it’s actively breaking the fourth wall. The narrator is building a world in front of your eyes and challenging you to participate. “I would free the kid” and then what? What does the Omelas you’ve constructed look like, and why? And what does that say about the worlds you’re building in real life?

[hussyknee]

[Video description: Dated black and white video of an interview between a man off-screen who speaks in an upper-crust English accent and a handsome brown man in his thirties seated at a table. He is lean with short curly dark hair, a very sixties moustache, and wearing a casual shirt with an open collar. The camera is zoomed in on him, leaning forward on his elbows, head low and tilted towards the interviewer, brow furrowed, and an intense gaze that flicks down at the table after each question in careful contemplation. He speaks with an Arab accent. The timer of the video recording ticks away at the top left of the frame.

Transcript:

Interviewer: "Why won't your organisation engage in peace talks with the Israelis?"

Ghassan Kanafani: "You don't mean exactly peace talks. You mean capitulation. Surrendering."

Interviewer: "Why not just talk?"

Ghassan: "Talk to whom?"

Interviewer: "Talk to the Israeli leaders."

Ghassan: "That's the kind of conversation between the sword and the neck, you mean."

Interviewer: "Well, if there's no swords or guns in the room you could still talk."

Ghassan: "No. I have never seen any talk between a colonialist case and a national liberation movement."

Interviewer: "But despite this, why not talk?"

Ghassan: "Talk about what?"

Interviewer: "Talk about the possibility of not fighting."

Ghassan: "Not fighting for what?"

Interviewer: "Not fighting at all, no matter what for."

Ghassan: "People usually fight for something, and they stop fighting for something so you can't even tell me speak about what—"

Interviewer: "—Stop fighting—"

Ghassan: "—Talk about stop fighting why?"

Interviewer: "Talk to stop fighting to stop the death and the misery, the destruction, the pain."

Ghassan: "The misery and the pain and the destruction and the death for whom?"

Interviewer: "Of Palestinians, of Israelis, of Arabs."

Ghassan: "Of the Palestinian people who are uprooted, thrown in the camps, living in starvation, killed for twenty years and forbidden to use even the name Palestinian?"

Interviewer: "Better that way than dead though."

Ghassan: "Maybe to you, but to us, it's not. To us, to liberate our country, to have dignity, to have respect, to have our mere human rights is something as essential as life itself."

Ghassan Kanafani is one of the heroes of the Palestinian liberation and celebrated in the canon of modern Arab literature. Forced out of his home with his family during the Nakba in 1948 at the age of ten, the shame of their surrender to Zionists moved him to devote his life to Arab nationalism, Marxist movements and Palestinian liberation through his career as a newspaper editor, journalist, novellist and non-combatant member of the armed resistance group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He coined the term "resistance literature" for the genre of his writing, that came to be instrumental in shaping the Palestinian national identity and ideology of its resistance. In 1972, he and his 17 year old niece were murdered in a car bomb by Mossad.

His obituary read:

"He was a commando who never fired a gun, whose weapon was a ball-point pen, and his arena the newspaper pages."

[cirrus-draws]

nearl utena paletteswap. is this anything

......wait, hold on...