#the years of literal colonization they did and how

[genderqueerdykes]

Different anon, but can you explain what a bullydyke is? I figure asking someone who seems to know a lot about this stuff is better than getting 10 different conflicting answers off of google

that's a great question!

"bulldyke" is an even MORE aggressive form of dyke that is generally speaking weaponized against black people, but has in more recent years come to be weaponized against very masculine lesbians, trans women, trans men, or women interpreted this way. it has a similar history to the black lesbian term "stud" in that black people, queer or not, have been compared to and called animals in areas that have been colonized by white europeans with black slaves for centuries.

we have been compared to livestock such as horses- black men were called "studs" and black women were called "stallions" so it was only natural for colonizers to begin to start using even harsher terms. bulls, as in the animal, are viewed as hyper aggressive, dangerous, mean animals. ugly. unwanted. unlikeable. this is how white colonizers view black folk, so to them, comparing masculine black women to bulls was natural, as white colonizers view black women as too masculine, violent, angry, and aggressive.

part of it comes from how white europeans view the facial and body features of black women as "too masculine". white colonizers became absolutely disgusted at how women of color don't look like white women and began literally dehumanizing black women strictly because they do not find them attractive. language evolved over time, and while i can't tell you exactly when and where bulldyke first became a widely spread term, but i can tell you that even Leslie Feinberg was encountering this term in the 50s, 60s, 70s and so on.

"bulldykes" are seen as the most 'masculine' lesbians, women and people- it's often reserved for people who are so masculine (or perceived to be masculine) that it causes rage and disgust beyond the base level hatred for lesbians, masc women, trans women, trans men, and others who are affected by just the term "dyke". it is also generally targeted toward bigger people, fat or muscular, it doesn't really matter. nowadays it's been broadened to affect all "masculine women", regardless of race, though it still is heavily targeted against black women and people of color in general.

my own (white) mom weaponized this slur against me when i was a kid- and i know part of her reason for doing so is because i'm mixed (dad is black). she would get upset at how i dressed and presented myself, angrily calling me a bulldyke whenever i refused to dress feminine or act feminine. she hated how my face looked, how big my nose was, how strong my jaw was, my hooded, deep set eyes, my heavy brow. she hated that because i was intersex, i started growing a beard.

she would tell me not to look, act or dress the way i did because people would start assuming she was a lesbian, because she "let" me be a big ugly bulldyke. my mom was a closeted lesbian- she constantly told me about how she wished she could sleep with, date and marry women. she projected a lot of her trauma and fear on to me, especially her trauma with being called butch due to how masculine she looked and dressed.

it didn't help that my best friend was a feminine girl who spent most of her time with me. it was to the point where both of our families were calling us lesbos, dykes, and so on. my feminine friend never got called a bulldyke, though. it was only me. because i was mixed, big, fat, never wore makeup, didn't dress feminine, and acted "like a guy". i could not escape the terms bull/dyke and butch all throughout my childhood and teen years and as such these terms are all extremely important to me to reclaim.

especially bulldyke. it's a term that i never expected my own mother to weaponize against me- i was used to being called a dyke, a lesbo, and a butch at school, but not at home. i never really heard other kids call me a bulldyke- it was only my mother who used it against me. it stuck with me

i hope that helps! i know it's hard to find the roots of queer slurs, when they first started being used, and so on. if you have any more questions feel free to ask~

[bandzboy]

not me seeing this guy on the portuguese tv being like “we don’t know who is lying we would need a third party to tell us who is lying” and i’m just baffled because nobody said this about the russia-ukraine war everyone knows russia is the one doing propaganda but during a literal genocide you don’t know who to believe?? it’s obvious who you should believe! the civilians that have been bombed for years and years and are living in an open air prison and have no food and no water and have to see their families and others die on the daily THAT’S who you should believe there’s no way to stay neutral on this WHEN THE ANSWER IS RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF YOUR EYES just say you support the oppressor and just wrap this shit up because this is embarrassing

[rhaenin-time]

Seeing the bigoted discourse around HotD as an Indigenous woman from an interracial extended family, one full of 'illegitimate' circumstances of births that the Canadian government has always been SO eager to weaponize, and especially as the daughter of a 60s scoop survivor who found his way back to his birth family which means we navigate belonging to two families, of two different races, in two different ways... it's actually hurtful and a little scary to see all the vitriol levelled against fictional 'illegitimate' children by a MODERN audience.

This is a weird example but it's also the most famous. You know that saying about how you shouldn't insult Trump for his body because he'll never hear or be hurt by it, but the people around you who might share those traits will? How when you insult a powerful or abstract figure in a really low way, that insult is not just for them?

Well, when you express bigotry over fictional characters, obviously said fictional character isn't going to receive it. But real people who share those traits will.

I swear, I know I'm basically setting myself up for a never ending 'to write' list at the moment, but I do intend to someday dive into the subject and SHAME the bigots.

[swagging-back-to]

the most unrealistic part of steven universe is that the zoomans speak and understand modernized english.

[jvzebel-x]

🦋

[enobariasdistrict2]

adlfjaldjslkdfjsk tell me TELL ME that no one called zuko and katara a "colonizer/colonized" relationship i'm in so much fucking disbelief

[raeathnos]

.

[headspace-hotel]

So growing up I heard these kinds of statements: "X number of species goes extinct every year" and "Most species that go extinct are undescribed/undiscovered"

And I could never really picture what that looked like. What species were going extinct? Where? Why? If they're undiscovered, how do we know about it? It's only recently that I've been able to understand.

This is an example:

Since European colonization, 99% of old growth forest in the eastern United States was cut down.

In Eastern Kentucky, the coal industry led to waste and rubble being dumped in valleys, literally burying countless mountain streams in gravel and toxic sludge.

Colonialism and exploitation moved faster than leaf-sketching and bug-collecting European naturalists did. It's very simple, and very sad. When the coal mines polluted the streams, many species of fish that only lived in one specific stream must have gone extinct. When Native Americans were forced off their lands, we can presume that rare plant species found in meadows, canebrakes and oaks savannas dependent on particular anthropogenic disturbances went extinct. When old-growth tracts were logged, God only knows how many lichens, mosses, ferns and plants went extinct because the trees they lived on were chopped.

We can extrapolate from the diversity in the fragments that remain, and the number of rare endemic species in especially isolated areas, and guess what probably existed in areas that were obliterated early on.

Keep in mind: All is not lost. New species are still being discovered.

The Bluegrass region of Kentucky was once called one of the most peculiar plant communities of the South—an eastern island of oak savanna with an understory of Arundinaria bamboo and legumes. Early European settlers reported that the ground was incredibly rich and covered with knee-high clover and dense thickets of "cane" (bamboo) that made navigation next to impossible.

Some people say the Bluegrass was always a forest and the savanna theory is wrong. Bullshit! I know this because of several reasons:

The earliest records don't mention any sycamores at all in the Bluegrass, whereas river cane (bamboo) was everywhere. Arundinaria bamboos are fire dependent species, whereas sycamore is HIGHLY intolerant of fire. From this we can infer that the area had a history of frequent burning.

Everyone in the Bluegrass knows about the Old Trees. In horse and cattle pastures in the Bluegrass region, you will sometimes see gigantic, twisted old oaks, with great spreading crowns. Nowadays you hardly see an oak that properly merits the term "gnarled," but the gnarl of the Old Trees is crazy. Just look up google images for Kentucky tourism and you'll see one of those huge trees in the background of several of the photos, I bet. Hardly anyone consciously thinks about it, but these are pre-colonization trees. And they are all obviously open-grown—their growth habit over the centuries has spread out, rather than grown straight up as in a forest.

Early colonizers' records report big walnut and cherry trees in the area. Most of the old houses in the area are made of walnut wood. Those are mid-successional species—you wouldn't find them dominating in an area that was heavily disturbed regularly and recently, they're trees, but you wouldn't find them in a forest that had been minimally disturbed forest for centuries either. The fact that they got huge suggests that a regular disturbance pattern of the Bluegrass region was abruptly interrupted and mostly ceased.

It was a pretty special place, a savanna environment with a mix of giant twisted oaks, rolling prairie hills and bamboo thickets, with deep sinkholes connecting the surface to subterranean cave ecosystems. In places the limestone bedrock reached the surface, creating limestone glades—unique desert-like habitats with many rare plants including Opuntia cactus.

It was also one of the first ecosystems west of the Appalachians to be destroyed by settlers.

BUT! Just a few years ago, we discovered Trifolium kentuckiense—Kentucky clover. A unique species of clover that has only been found in two spots in Central Kentucky.

This means the Bluegrass species that probably went extinct because their habitat was ignorantly logged, plowed and grazed before they were studied by European science may not be entirely gone.

We have been able to fund exhaustive inventories of potential holdouts for big flashy animals like the ivory-billed woodpecker, but so many people view the place they live as "boring" and thoroughly explored, when there could be surviving plants hanging out just about anywhere.

But...I don't think most people realize how much of the Holocene extinction has already happened. Most of the losses are plants and bugs that you never knew existed in the first place.

I feel like lots of people are anxiously waiting for the mass extinction to "start" hitting, but that's not quite right. European colonization of the globe WAS and *is* the mass extinction (combined with climate change which is very related). It's actively ongoing in the Global South. In eastern North America, the major wave of extinctions hit between 100 and 300 years ago.

I feel so much grief for all that was almost certainly lost forever, but I also recognize that I live in a unique period of time where the future can still be changed, and in particular, the heavily damaged ecosystems of the Southeast can be restored and used to absorb carbon from the atmosphere and provide resilience to the entire globe. And I strongly suspect at least a few mysterious new plants will start popping up once that happens...because a lot of plants stick around in the soil seed bank for a long, long time, and seeds can happen to be preserved by freak accident and then sprout later.

we (researchers, scientists, people who work in this field) will desperately need to consult tribal nations for this though because from my reading into it, we don't know what the fuck we're doing. The most basic things like controlled burns are still struggling to catch on and in some places just, spraying herbicides willy-nilly on invasive plants without understanding what makes them invasive.

[siderealcity]

More Dawntrail narrative thoughts, this time about the Golden City. Spoilers below.

There are several layers to the Golden City as a plot device in Dawntrail, and I think they're interesting enough to just unpack them all and look at them.

The first time we hear the term, it's from Hades in Endwalker:

"Tell me, have you been to the ruins beneath the waters of the Bounty? Or the treasure islands beyond the frozen waters of Blindfrost, in Othard's north? The fabled golden cities of the New World? The sacred sites of the forgotten people of the south sea isles?"

It's telling that he groups that with the sacred sites of the south sea isles. The plot later tells us that they are explicitly connected to one another, but why does it call them "citiies," plural? Where's the other one, Hades?

(Also, we haven't yet been to the treasure islands in the north, but every one of those locations in the quote above has to do with cross-rift travel. Every. One. So, that may be something we see again later.)

But apart from their lore and plot significance (and potential foreshadowing), the Golden City is, from the first time we hear of it, a lure. Bait, dangled before an explorer, enticing them to go onward. It is, for lack of a better word, a promise of things to come. In the specific case in Endwalker, it's a promise that your story isn't over yet, there's still more to come. Even though you are, at that moment, standing in front of the amassed dead of countless worlds. Death is not the end, it's the beginning of new life.

The second time we hear the term, it's from Wuk Lamat. Who is, again, using it to entice us to join her. We don't know at that point that her actual title is, in fact, Promise. And that is significant.

It is, likewise, the bait for Krile's involvement in the story. The thing she knew her grandfather had been asked to study, the secret he'd kept out of the records of the Students, the promise of a connection. To the past, to someone she loved who is now gone.

But then there's the Rite of Succession. And it changes the meaning of the plot device entirely.

The Rite is structured to follow the Tulliyolal saga--the journey Gulool Ja Ja undertook, over the course of who knows how many years, to unify the peoples of Tural into a single nation. A journey which notably has nothing to do with the Golden City. To the Turali, it's a fairy tale. It is so detached from the story of Gulool Ja Ja that Koana immediately has to ask if the city being the final goal means his father actually has some proof it exists.

The Rite itself, as Gulool Ja Ja later admits to us, is meant to be instructional for his children. They are not meant to simply find and cross the finish line, they're supposed to be learning how to be the rulers of Tural.

As we complete feats in the rite, we are awarded stories of the Golden City by each of the races in Yok Tural. And they all follow a significant pattern: The Golden City was the literal dream of the Yok Huy. The conquerers of every single people in southern Tural. The stories we are given are the stories shared by colonized people of their oppressors.

The conquest of Yok Tural is mentioned repeatedly. Every group we meet was displaced and enslaved by the giants during their empire, and the ultimate goal of that empire was to find the Golden City--a paradise of eternal life without pain or suffering. It is at this point that the Golden City becomes a warning. It is the promise of self-destruction. Searching for it ultimately toppled the Yok Huy empire and changed the giants forever. It displaced and disrupted numerous cultures and started centuries of war.

It is, ultimately, the reason why Gulool Ja Ja ever had to play the role of peacemaker and unifier in the first place. The divide-and-conquer tactics employed by the Yok Huy created every problem he set out to solve.

Why did he choose to make it the final goal of the Rite of Succession? A place he famously did not find before becoming Dawnservant? Was it, perhaps, as a lesson to his children, his Promises? Especially his son Zoraal Ja who had dreams of empire?

But interestingly, the Golden City was also set forth as the specific goal for Erenville to find by his mother. Cahciua wasn't present in the flashbacks to Galuf and Gulool Ja Ja and Kettenram viewing the gate, but we know that she met them afterward, and had Erenville with her. Was she with them the first time they'd found the gate? I have to think she was. The only people who seem to have known for sure about it, among Gulool Ja Ja's circle of friends and allies, were the explorers. The ones who would have been interested in searching for it purely for the joy of discovery.

I think it's safe to say that for Cahciua, at least at the time that she gives her son his quest, the Golden City is the Almost Impossible Dream. One that can, in fact, be found, but crucially, not alone. The Yok Huy, who searched for it for generations, and crushed everyone around them trying to get inside, had it in their possession all along. But they never even saw the gate. It took Gulool Ja Ja, who had friends to help him, who actually discovered the way in. It is the promise of discovery through love and fellowship, for her only son who was withdrawn and antisocial.

And then we actually find it.

It is not an accident that the way to reach the Golden City is through a cenotaph of lost hope. We literally pass through waters littered with the bodies of children who were never born--promises never fulfilled--to get to its gate.

And it's eating the Yok Huy ruin. The electrope spreads out from the gate like an infection, over-writing the Yok Huy stonework, erasing their culture.

And it's still... oddly beautiful? But in the way a poisonous mushroom is beautiful.

And it's closed. We don't go through it at this point, though we walk right up to the seal on the doorway. Because we're alive.

We're told by Erenville that many people have sought the Golden City, never to return. And of course they didn't.

Because this is the gateway to death.

Zoraal Ja is the first person we actually see go through it. The False Promise. Just to reinforce that this is, in fact, Zoraal Ja's role, Sareel Ja leads him to the gate and hands him the key with a speech that is wholly constructed of the same false platitudes about Zoraal Ja's magical birthright that have driven Zoraal Ja to be this self-destructive and miserable in the first place. And we can see how much the speech upsets Zoraal Ja, who just lost the contest to both his siblings. He knows every word of his inherent greatness and destiny is a lie. Sareel Ja hands him the key, and he grips it like it might be a bludgeon without even looking at it. And the second time Sareel Ja makes a "Resilient Son" speech, Zoraal Ja literally stabs him in the back.

Having skipped all the lessons and warnings about the danger of pursuing death and destruction, Zoraal Ja walks through its front door.

And I don't think it's accidental that the dome appears in Xak Tural, even though the gate itself is located in Yak T'el, far to the south. Xak Tural is the land that defeated the Yok Huy advance without a single battle. The unconquerable land. This is the part of Tulliyolal that Gulool Ja Ja didn't have to fix because it was never broken in the first place. They very notably do not live in the segregated societies the people of the south do, because nobody imposed that on them. The towns we see are a mix of races living together, and probably served as the inspiration for Gulool Ja Ja to build Tulliyolal in the first place, differing people pursuing communal and sometimes conflicting interests together. These are the people Zoraal Ja has been rambling about nonsensically, "teaching the value of peace by the misery of war." The ones who don't need Tulliyolal, but merely want to be part of it.

He can make his mark here because his father never did.

When the dome appears over Yyasulani, we, the players, know it's Zoraal Ja's passage through the gate that caused it, but the characters don't learn this until after he's brutally slaughtered people. We players see the sequence of events as: Zoraal Ja, the Promise of Death, walks into the land of death and carries it out with him. But the characters are instead following the trail of death back to the land of the dead. We don't enter Alexandria through the Golden City. Not at first. We enter it through a swathe of destruction and desolation and a storm that never ends. That's our first view of it. The promise of ruin. We do not see the paradise that led the Yok Huy to their doom until after we know that Sphene, like the Yok Huy, is willing to lay waste to the lives around her to have her Golden City.

And then we have the vision.

I don't think it's an accident that the only people who have ever seen anything come out of the gate to the Golden City are the Warrior of Light, Gulool Ja Ja, Kettenram, Galuf, and indirectly Cahciua. All characters who inherently understand that life comes from death and the balance between them is vital. And it's symbolically significant that it's a child who is delivered from the land of the dead. Her parents don't come with her. The dead don't get to return, we get new life instead.

And then we go there. And it looks like Amaurot.

We call it Living Memory, but the resemblance to Amaurot, and the knowledge of what's actually here means that we immediately understand the lie. The Golden City, the cloud, the twelfth level of Everkeep, all of it has always been a false promise. Zoraal Ja, the False Promise, walked into the land of False Promises and became its king.

And Sphene, the Queen of False Promises, has always had the impossible task of keeping the dead alive.

As we make our way through Living Memory, it's notable that what we actually do is remove the beautiful, golden veneer from the land of the dead. The city is still there when we're done with it. We walk back outside through its gate. We do not have the power to remove death any more than we could destroy despair. But we take the lie out of it, we free the stolen life force to become life again. It's now just dead. No more promises of paradise or ruin to fulfill.

[lem0nademouth]

thinking about how fucking resilient Jews are.

thinking about my great grandparents in romania, raised in a land colonized by the same empire that sent them to the balkans, still working as tailors and butchers like their ancestors had for generations.

thinking about them stowing away on ships to america so their children could live to see adulthood.

thinking about how many other five foot two bookworms have been in my family. i know i’m not the first, and i certainly hope i won’t be the last.

thinking about how many seders my family has held throughout history, how many “next year in jerusalem”s were shouted. it hasn’t happened yet, but maybe it will.

thinking about the women who passed down kabbalah to their children while witches burned in the next village over. how many mothers kept literal magic alive.

thinking about how every single person that lived before me, every branch of my family tree, had to choose to survive. living has always been in the present progressive for Jews; every breath they took was a choice to fight just a little longer.

i come from people who survived the spanish inquisition, the soviet union, the Shoah, the judeo-roman wars, ottoman imperialism, the rise and fall of so many empires i cannot name them all, and the only uniting factor is them. they taught their toddlers the sh’ma and lit candles and read books and sewed clothes and spun linen and cured meat and davened and smiled and laughed and they did that for two thousand years. ten years ago i became the first bat mitzvah in my family line. the first woman in my family to read from the torah.

i hope they’re proud. i hope i was worth it for them.

[victoriadallonfan]

Let's Talk About the Alien vs Predator Films

Talk about wasted potential, am I right?

I'm struggling to format this in an interesting way, since so much has been covered over the past 20 years since the first film was released. You can read my thoughts on Aliens Franchise and the Predator Franchise as well.

Note that it doesn't include Alien: Romulus, but suffice to say it was a good movie!

I think the best place to start is with covering the themes of Alien and Predator, and the history before these films were created (and the failure of Fox).

My fellow AvP enjoyer @agendergorgon has already posted some thoughts on the topic, giving me a lot to think about, so check out their blog too!

For the purposes of this review, I am not going to include Alien 3, Alien: Resurrection, Prometheus, nor Alien: Covenant.... mostly. The AvP films really don't take much of anything beyond the first two films, though I will touch on Prometheus when it comes to religion.

Ditto for the Predator films, but that's because Predator wouldn't get a third film until 2010, 3 years after the AvP duo.

The themes of Alien Franchise:

I'm sure the first thing to come to mind is that the Alien series is about sexual assault, and you'd be correct. The xenomorph is designed to be extremely phallic, the facehuggers quite literally rape their victims, Burke locks his victims (including a child) in a room to be raped, Ash tries to murder Ripley by thrusting a rolled up porn magazine down her throat etc etc.

Some of you might also remember how Aliens was noted by James Cameron to be a criticism of the Vietnam War, Corporate Greed, and the callous arrogance of the US Military. The xenomorphs represented the innumerable "faceless" soldiers that could overwhelm more advanced enemies with ambush tactics and numbers, Burke thinks only in "goddamn percentages" and how this could benefit himself and the company, and the Colonial Marines are not only woefully mismanaged a newly brought on commander but also completely delusional with their own sense of invulnerability, only to break and panic under pressure once they meet a foe who is determined to fight to the death.

(I will NOT be tackling the fucked-upness of comparing people fighting for their independence vs a fucking Xenomorph, because holy fucking shit, it is literally the opposite AND worse counterpart to having the Predators be colonizers)

But, in the broader scope of the series, Alien - and the xenomorph - represent the uncontrollable, unfathomable, unknown. What are they? Why were they there? What are their motives? How did they end up in that ship? Were they built? How do they 'see'? Why did the xenomorph spare Jonesy the Cat? Are they intelligent life? How on earth do they function with their bizarre biology?

We don't get any real answers to these questions in the original films. The whole point of these movies is that there are things that mankind does not understand, and the horrors of space are vast. And equally terrifying is the arrogance of man (and synth kind) to think they can harness this horror for profit at the expense of human lives.

The themes of the Predator Franchise:

There's been tons of articles on how Predator is either a reconstruction or deconstruction (depending on who you ask) of the 80's action hero flick. A team of muscle laden, big gun toting, sweaty men spouting off one-liners as they mow down their enemies in a secret CIA led operation during the Cold War, interrupted by the presence of an intergalactic hunter than treats these badasses like mere toys. The massive Arnold Schwarzenegger is smacked out like a mouse facing off against a particularly cruel cat, needing to rely on tricks - not his brawns or guns - to stay alive and eventually defeat the Predator.

Others might point to its related take down of machismo. The opening scene is rife with characters testing each other's physical strength against each other such as with Dillon and Dutch, Ventura and Dutch have a small face-off in the helicopter as they try to make a pecking order, Ventura makes a whole speech about being a "sexual tyrannosaurus" and then mocked about sticking a gun up his "sore-ass", Hawkins repeatedly tries to make pussy and sex jokes, and they end up with a single woman in the group who is treated more like an object and baggage than a person for much of the movie. All of these men are emasculated by the Predator, some of them not even lasting a single second to its predations (both in tech and physicality), all of them losing any sense of quips and confidence, and the sole woman of the group survives because she didn't fit the movie's (and Predator's) mold of "tough as nails". When Arnold/Dutch is rescued by helicopter, it's not a cheerful one; he's haunted by what he endured and remains silent as the film pans into his thousand-yard stare.

All of this applies to Predator 2 as well, amping up the violence, dick measuring, and rules of the Predator targeting anyone who thinks they are tough shit for carrying a gun or knife. Even Danny Glover's victory is bittersweet, because he is now left in the middle of dozens of officer deaths, and entire subway car filled with corpses, and an antique flintlock pistol that promises the return of the Predators to Earth.

In a much broader sense, the Predator films are about the oversaturation of violence and lack of care for human life. Predator 1's main plot before he arrives is the CIA using Green Berets and then Dutch's special ops team to clean up their dirty work, giving them false information and not even reporting the Berets being MIA in furtherance of their Cold War goals (slaughtering guerrillas who were working with Soviet Russia). In Predator 2, the police are seen as being ineffective because they trample on each other's jurisdiction, with the Federal task force being willing to kill their own cops to keep the Predator existence a secret and letting it hunt people down for a better chance at capture and experimentation.

The Predator creatures are the epitome of such greed and arrogance. They are the General Zaroffs of The Most Dangerous Game, taken to a new height by showing that human lives literally mean nothing to them beyond a trophy hunt. They care nothing about our social lives, our politics, our loved ones, because for them this is nothing more than the equivalent of posh British Elite going on a Fox Hunt: cruel and sadistic, just to placate their egos. They will violate the corpses of the dead and taunt those in mourning, for the thrill of the game. And in that sense, the Predators are very human antagonists: they are not unfathomable nor are their goals beyond our understanding. The horror of the Predators is that they are creatures we can understand, communicate with, and even see similarities in their culture to ours... and that culture is putting us on a trophy rack alongside other skulls of creatures they felt a thrill to hunt.

So, did the Alien vs Predator films cover even half of these topics?

Well... kinda? Just... not well.

Not well at all.

The Build Up

Alien and Predator have a connected history dating back to the creation of the Predator itself. Stan Winston was on a flight with James Cameron some time after the famous director had finished with Aliens, and the director made a comment about wanting to see a monster with mandibles, which eventually led to the creature we know and love today.

Predator's debut on screen was also often compared to Aliens due to the superficially similar premise of a team of commandos going on a mission and fighting an unknown alien threat.

Despite what some people think, the AvP series wasn't started by the films.

Yes, there was a particularly memorable scene in Predator 2, where the City Hunter is admiring his trophy room and a xenomorph skull can be seen mounted on the wall (though, fun fact, it's actually an inaccurate depiction as xenomorph skulls look more humanoid facing), but that wasn't the first time the duo met in media.

And I'm not referring to the 1993 Arcade Game either (since that only came out a year after Predator 2).

The Alien vs Predator comic first appeared in 1989. And there were publications continuing ever since.

Think about that going forward. There was 25 years of content to choose from, storylines they could adapt, interesting forays into the cosmology and interactions between Yaujta, Xenomorphs, and Humanity.

The movies used exactly none of it (barring 1 thing: the Predalien).

Alien vs Predator (2004)

The plot of this movie is that Weyland-Yutani corporation detects a heat bloom under the ice in Antartica that reveals an underground pyramid, and in a race against his competitors, Weyland rounds up a team of elite experts led by Lex Woods to investigate the ruins (and find that the Predators have left them a convenient tunnel to enter the deep ice). Only to find out that this was a trap, as the pyramid comes to life activates a Xenomorph Queen, unleashing a brood of facehuggers on the helpless crew, all the while the Predators hunt them down. After a spectacular shitshow and release of the Xenomorph Queen, Lex and the last Predator (Scar) have to reluctantly team up to escape the pyramid and blow up the xenomorphs, ending in a final battle with the Xenomorph Queen. Scar perishes in the fight, but Lex manages to send the Queen into the depth of the artic ocean, and is rewarded by the watching Eldar Predator with a spear for her troubles. A post-credit scene reveals that Scar had a chest-burster inside of him, birthing the Predalien!

Rewatching this movie, I'm surprised at how good it looks. The opening scene of the satellite in space, several shots of the ship (and spaceship), the frozen tundra, the set pieces like the Xenomorph Queen Prison, and the CGI!

The CGI! Of 2004! I was shocked that they looked so good for something that is 20 years old now, but they did really well for themselves.

But it was the practical effects that blew me away the most. The shifting Pyramid is absolutely iconic and the abandoned whaling station is suitably creepy. The face-huggers look amazing and the xenomorphs are just *chefs kiss*. It's so funny seeing these Xenomorph effects compared to that of Alien:Covenant, and seeing how much work bodysuit and puppetry can do to make a monster look so much more terrifying than a CGI creature.

I know a lot of people didn't like the Predator's bulky appearance in this movie, but honestly... I dig it? It makes sense that not all Predators are literally built the same, and that the ones who would choose to go hunting in the artic would be the bigger ones who could hold more body heat. And the movie does a really great fucking job of making these Predators look badass and distinct from each other, with Celtic having the coolest mask of the whole group.

And the way the movie is shot is really fantastic! There are a lot of wide and tracking shots where the movie lets the atmosphere do the work instead of badgering us with words, taking its time to build up tension and soak up the visuals. One of my favorites shots they did was slow roam through the Predator ship as the systems come to life and we get to see holograms come on-line, feeding information directly into their masks. Equally good was when the Xenomorph Queen is awakened to cackling electricity and ominous lighting, showing us how vast this chamber is and how huge this Queen is in comparison to the one Ripley faces.

The same goes for most of the actions scenes, with a decent amount of cool slow-mo shots for things like Face-huggles launching themselves, Predators leaping across chasms, and showing Scar's impressive athleticism when he leaps 10 meters into the air and stabs a spear through the Queens skull.

And I can always rewatch the first time Alien Meets Predator Fight. God, that score! The music is just so damn good!!! You really feel like you are watching two massive horrors from space finally finding themselves sharing a space together.

Honestly, the Predators using the Xenomorphs as some kind of fucked up exotic pet for hunting trials and training fits the lore PERFECTLY. It’s actually a literal fox hunt not just metaphorical (and of course, in typical Alien fashion, it all went to shit).

Aliens vs Predator: Requiem (2007)

"Wait, Ridtom/VictoriaDallonFan, are you about to say something nice about AvP:R?!"

Well, after turning up the brightness and hanging blankets over my windows and then watching the movie underneath more blankets... yes!

For one thing, the Alien and Predator effects are spectacular! Some of the best work I've seen in the franchises! The fight scenes are creative and use really cool set-pieces like the sewer and power plant, where we get to see Wolf (the name of the Predator of this movie) absolutely kick ass and slaughter his way through hordes of Xenomorphs. Not that the xenos are left in the dust, as they get plenty of murders on screen and even outsmart Wolf on occasion.

I actually like the Predalien design and the idea that it’s more intelligent than the average Xeno, including holding personal grudges and understanding Predator behavior.

And the Predator tech is really cool too! We got laser grids, land mines, power fists, converting the plasma caster into a plasma pistol And I love the moment where Wolf kidnaps one of the human protags to use as live bait. Such a dick thing to do but so in-character.

Even the bits we get of Wolf mourning his fellow dead hunters was a neat addition.

And to be honest, I didn’t mind the idea of seeing an actual xenomorph infestation in real time, in a small town. I think that sort of setting would be really fun for a one-shot story.

And… that’s it. That’s all the good stuff.

What Went Wrong?

I compiled a list of sources where I got a lot of information on the AvP production: Source 1, Source 2, Source 3, Source 4

Note that a lot of these are 20 years old so I apologize for the outdated and honestly abhorrent word use that some articles and videos may use. And another apology for using the Xenopedia wiki, it was just a good shorthand for other information.

In short: Fox fucking sucks. They will absolutely self-sabotage themselves in order to make a (perceived) profit. Tom Rothman is the most well known (and he’s gone to Sony as of now), but Fox has had a looong history of being stingy and terrified of any risks for their films.

The sheer amount of drama involving Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection is an insane rollercoaster.

AvP removed pretty much any sense of horror and purposely had the design of the Predators to be more “human” and “heroic” (hence the weird human eyes and bulky physique), with a PG-13 rating for more audience numbers. While the human characters aren’t bad, they are not unique or even memorable (barring the fandom romantic tension between Lexi and the final Predator). Also, it was very weird that the Predators couldn’t kill a single Xenomorph, meanwhile the Colonial Marines couldn’t trip without blasting apart swarms of them. It felt like they really wanted to save money on the film in that regard.

AvP:R was even worse, with it being filmed with such a lack of lighting that people could not actually see any of the movie, and even modern advancements in color grading make it a strain. The human characters are awful, just absolutely boring and unremarkable beyond being veiled callbacks to characters from Alien, and we get a bunch of stupid Dawson’s Creek drama involving teenagers who look like they are 30 years old fighting over a girl who has no personality because she was written to just be “hot girl”.

If the story had focused entirely on the wife coming home from the war and dealing with the fact that her own daughter doesn’t feel close or comfortable with her after years of being gone, there could have been focus and themes and yadda yadda yadda.

Also, while this movie at least has horror aspects, did we REALLY need to see the Xenomorphs eating the fetuses and belly bursting out of still screaming mothers? Like, there is horror and then there is just being gross.

Final Thoughts

I often wonder if AvP took the wind out of the sails of Prometheus. Both play with the idea of humans worshiping aliens as gods, because Ancient Aliens is fucking everywhere, but it’s really hard to take Prometheus seriously when you remember AvP did basically the same setup (with arguably smarter characters).

And these movies have really soiled the idea of the AvP franchise barring the video games and comics. There’s apparently an AvP anime locked up in Disney Vaults and so far, both franchises have kept their respectful distances from each other.

However, with the recent successes of Alien: Romulus and Prey, there’s been a bit of a stir with some comments hinting at a potential AvP future.

Who knows. It’s been 17 years, perhaps 3rd time is the charm.

[fuckyeahisawthat]

Biggest galaxy brain moment from visiting the Dune dunes is that it gave me a whole new perspective on why the terraforming of Arrakis is treated with such deep ambivalence by the text. Because the terraforming process that's described in great detail in the book? That's exactly what's happening to the Oregon dunes. And they're disappearing.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the open sand you see in this picture stretched all the way to the Pacific Ocean, which is visible here as a faint blue-gray line about halfway up the photo. The sea washed new sand ashore, and the seasonal wind cycles blew it into a constantly-shifting landscape of dunes, tree islands, ghost forests and both permanent and ephemeral lakes and rivers.

As European colonization of the Pacific Northwest grew, the new settlers and the logging and commercial fishing industries they brought with them wanted permanent towns and roads that weren't constantly being swallowed by the moving sand. Starting in the 1930s, European beachgrass and other non-native species were introduced to try to hold the dunes in place.

The invasive species did hold the dunes in place--too well. The deep roots of the beachgrass shaped the sand blowing in off the beach into a permanent dune parallel to the ocean, called the foredune.

As the foredune got taller, it blocked both wind and the movement of sand, which allowed the land behind it to become grassland...

then forest.

Walking through this area, you might never know there was a dune under your feet. You can be close enough to hear the ocean, but there is almost NO wind--the main force that shapes the dunes.

There are (slow, difficult) remediation efforts underway to control the European beachgrass and restore at least some of the area to the natural dune cycle that created the miles and miles of open sand. But the ecological feedback loop created by introducing the beachgrass is stubborn, and without any further intervention, the dunes could be completely covered with forest in as little as a few decades. (I've heard estimates from 50 to 150 years, both of which are a blink of an eye in geological timescales.) The Oregon dunes are at least 100,000 years old, and within the span of just a few human lifetimes the ecosystem could be irrevocably changed.

The dune stabilization project is what Frank Herbert came to Florence to research for a never-written magazine article. Herbert began writing Dune in the mid-1950s, but by the mid-60s when the book was published, his own politics had shifted as he was influenced by the growing environmental movement and by Native activism happening around him in the Pacific Northwest. Like the story of the Oregon dunes, the terraforming of Arrakis is initially promoted as triumph of science and human rationality over nature that will make people's lives easier. But it ends up destroying the native ecosystem and the way of life of the planet's indigenous people, as becomes clear in Dune Messiah when Paul actually implements the terraforming project. (In the book, Dr. Kynes, the main architect of the terraforming project, dies in a spice blow--literally swallowed whole by the planet he tried to control.) It's one of the many political/ideological tensions in the story that's presented but not resolved, and I'm super curious to see how this element of the story is handled in Villeneuve's Dune Messiah.

All photos above taken by me at the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area in September 2024.

[chronicallylatetotheparty]

I think western media has relied on non-human races as shorthand for oppressed groups so much that audiences have been primed to look for that instead of actual imperialist ideology.

One of the criticisms I've repeated about the Dragon Prince is how the writers take the Aesthetics of fantasy imperialism/indigenous people and just switch them without bothering to change anything about their ideology or historical context.

Kenna on TikTok was right when she said that a franchise where the oppressor and oppressed were all the same species makes a better racism allegory.

The fact that the Four Nations were all human added to the themes of imperialism and genocide in ATLA. While on the opposite side of the coin, the Xadians all being different species undermines it.

You can say Fire Nation people were a bunch of imperialists without going into bioessentialism. You CAN'T say humans are a bunch of warmongering monsters without sounding like an eco fascist.

The Sunfire elves textually being the most fantasy racist group is fine because they're elves, therefore oppressed, and the white writers made them superficially based on African-French speakers.

Meanwhile Katolis is "obviously" a Fantasy European Imperialist nation and therefore the oppressor. Never mind that it's had a black, now mixed, ruling family for a thousand years. Or that it's citizens aren't just white.

I remember seeing a post comparing the taboo against Black Magic to Xtian fundamentalism. At first I thought that was a bit much but no. Season six revealed that TDP has a canonical Hierarchy of Beings so that guy was absolutely right.

In Xtian fundamentalism doing something good the "wrong" way is the same as doing something bad.

Save a kingdom from starving? Well you had to kill a rock monster so obviously the right thing to do was let hundreds of thousands of people starve to death. (I've had weirdos go onto my posts and literally say this.)

Break the chains preventing you from saving the people you love? Well it hurt you so the right thing to do was let your friends and loved ones drown I guess.

Your son is dying? Better protect some old man's sense of moral purity than save a child.

All of these actions are not considered bad because they had a negative effect. They're considered bad because they go against the dominant power's desired order.

They're inherently bad because "humans" are inherently bad. Because human ways are not as pure as a direct connection to an Arcanum.

Note: this^ is imperialist ideology.

The idea that a group of people fighting for their survival justifies ethnic cleansing and mass murder is imperialist ideology.

The idea that the scary, blasphemous practices of a people you don't understand makes them dangerous, and therefore justifies you "defending yourself", is imperialist ideology.

The Liberal focus on "cycles of violence" and "both sides are at fault". Instead of on reparations for the people they killed and the homes they destroyed is imperialist ideology.

But Katolis has a pseudo-medieval aesthetic and the elves do not.

I was so angry at the scene where Sol Regem burns Katolis because THIS is the poor helpless dragons the humans "colonized"!? This living air bomber is the "victim" of the big, bad humans? One Archdragon can destroy an entire city single handedly and you expect me to believe the elves and dragons ethnic cleansing of humanity was REASONABLE!?

No. We are past any doubt or rationalization. What Sol Regem did to Katolis was just a small glimpse of what the elves and dragons did during the Human Exile. Just a small glimpse into how imperialist powers treat those that they cannot exploit.

And then demonize them for daring to oppose/question/subvert the imperialist's god(s) given superiority.

[edenfenixblogs]

I think that I’ve realized one of the big reasons that antisemites are so anti-Israel—I mean, aside from it being a state where a lot of Jews are.

Israel is a state that protects Jews. It also does a lot of bad things under the Likud government. And it also harms Jews that get in the way of the Likud government. But none of that matters to antisemites.

Because a state is an institution. And the left has been very clear that it’s all about criticizing institutions.

And in the absence of a governing religious body to criticize, the Israeli state is all the leftist antisemites have to criticize.

They can’t seem to fathom that the leadership of Israel is not in anyway synonymous with a religious institution. They cannot seem to fathom that the Likud government isn’t in any way representative of Jewish people as a whole—and not even of Israelis as a whole! (Once again, Israel is a parliamentary system. It’s about who has the largest proportion of votes, not a majority) and that Jews in Israel as well as non-Jews in Israel have a say in who to vote for and often strongly oppose Likud and Netanyahu.

It’s like a whole chunk of otherwise progressive people have been waiting for a way to criticize all Jews by attacking some institution they think speaks for us.

They cannot fathom that we are literally just a small ethnic group with half of our number in one location and would very much like for us and for them to not be victims of violence. That’s the uniting principle.

They’ve continually demonstrated how little they know and understand about Judaism, Jewish culture, and Jewish history.

I genuinely do not know if they’re aware that there’s no supreme Jewish council or whatever. There’s no Jewish version of the Grand Imam, Grand Ayatollah, Dalai Lama, Celestial Master, or Head/President of the Church.

We don’t even have a main synagogue from which edicts or traditions flow. We did have one. The Wall in Israel was our main institution. But colonizers and invaders destroyed it. And other religions built their institutions on top of it. And the religious governing body of Jews fell apart thousands of years ago.

…so the only thing that holds us together is each other. Rabbis don’t answer to some central authority. We hold traditions together through culture and traditions and connection to our land of origin, like many our even most other indigenous cultures.

But, because there is one (1) place on the entire planet where Jews are a majority of the population and not a minority, suddenly vicious attacks on the character of Jews everywhere are fair game as long as antisemites pretend they are talking about “Israel.” But they aren’t talking about the State of Israel. Because they get mad whenever we tell them to please specify the current government and the Likud party, because they are the ones responsible for carrying out the needless violence.

But they won’t do that. They seem to believe that there is some uniting religious force that exists in the Israeli government. And they seem to think that we are all united by this religious directive of “Zionism.”

That’s the only way any of their criticisms make sense logically. They don’t see themselves as attacking actual humans. They see themselves as attacking institutions. And any Jew who disagrees with them? Well they are just bastards supporting the institution.

But…there is no supreme Jewish institution. It doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist because they destroyed those institutions.

They’re making themselves feel good by thinking attacking Jews is somehow helping free Palestine. But it’s just attacking Jews.

It’s like a weird continuation of supercessionism. They’re projecting their religious structure onto a religion that is fundamentally incompatible with that structure.

[thewiglesswonder]

You know the TFA Decepticons aren’t an oppressed minority right? DJW even said their Rise Up rhetoric was a jab at how conservatives preach about Protecting Freedoms, and in the Allspark Almanac it’s explained they wanted to colonize other planets and the Autobots objected to that. The Decepticons were exiled for being military fascists.

I'd really, really love to know where I've ever said that on this blog, but since you seem very convinced that I did, let's look at the lore again. I don't feel like trawling the internet for this specific tweet/whatever form this DJW evidence has, so if you have that, I'd love to see it.

This timeline from the Allspark Almanac II pretty clearly states that the entire crux of Cybertronian society as a whole has rested on colonization, very early on in their species' history. Their "Golden Age" 8 billion stellar cycles ago is characterized by expansion that led to the colonization (!!!) of their solar system, further colonization only prevented by isolationism.

The earliest indications of the factional split that mark their history exist within the ruling class Guardians and the Malignus, defined as a "military caste". This implies that Golden Age Cybertron existed as a caste system. Which I would take a guess as not being particularly great.

And when we get to the first (again, quoted from the text here,) "military coup", it's executed by the political ancestors of the Autobots. Not a peep about the Malignus while that was going on.

This faction eventually becomes the Protectobots, and the most notable thing about them is that their leader attempted a Great Purge of "undesirable elements" from their society. I'd be hard pressed to think I'm wrong in thinking that's kinda fucked up. We're not given explicit reasons for this 17 million year war, but wars don't happen without someone to oppose someone else, and we get this in the form of the Destrons.

As for the point about colonization: my point is not that the Decepticon's motivations are not what we see in canon. Not at all. My point is that the Autobots have the same fucking motivation.

The Age of Expansion literally begins when the Autobots take power! It only ends when they butt heads with the Quintessons! Colonization, militarism, and facism, as you put it, are not traits that are unique to Decepticons.

And, according to this timeline and historical reasoning given, there is no mention of either faction's position on further expansion. The formation of the Decepticons is rooted in the divide between labor and military aligned Cybertronians. Both sections are equally responsible for the imperialistic efforts of their Empire/Commonwealth/whatever you want to call it, and make no mistake, this does continue into the present day! From both factions!

Assuming you're referring to my hefty lean towards the Cons in terms of character/exploration interest in the gist of your message, my goal here is not to elevate them to the same Good Guy Status the Autobots have by virtue of being the protagonists. I am fully and completely aware that they are a group of insane zealots that have rallied under a guy who was described by his own VA as an "elegant bully". Rather, I think what you're picking up on is my focus on the fact that the Autobots in Animated have more than their fair share of insidious shit going on.

They retain what is essentially a military dictatorship, with the position of Magnus being only theoretically beholden to the will of the Council and Guilds, as seen when Sentinel was able to fire Fortress Maximus with no approval from the Council and got nothing more than a disapproving sentence from Alpha Trion. We have no word on how their schooling institutions work, but all of it seems heavily centered on their version of the military they've concocted in the absence of warbuilds. And, just in case we forgot about Sentinel's proposed budget...

And that's not even getting into how fucked up Autobot culture is! They're unspeakably xenophobic, throw around propagandistic phrases like they're nothing ("Cogs in the Great Autobot Machine", anyone?), have an incredibly questionable justice system if Wasp is anything to go by, and this only seems to be getting worse at the end of Season 3, if Sentinel's curfews and public service announcements are anything to go by.

I'm not trying to make the Decepticons look better. I'm trying to make the Autobots look worse.

[cosmicsevils]

Luis fascinates the HELL out of me - he's both a relic and a survivor !

As someone who studies European history from the Reformation to Italy to the Spanish Inquisition (which was awful T-T), Luis as a character fascinates me, just as much as Valdelobos. Luis is in a sense, a relic. A person whom, until he left Valdelobos, was connected to centuries of deep culture that had not changed for hundreds of years. Valdelobos was a Catholic town at first, and they still recognize their Castllians as leaders over that of the modern world. Again, as a history geek, Valdelobos was probably pre Vatican II, in short, Luis can probably speak Latin as well. Luis, was not a normal Catholic. Luis' catholicism was very much like what we saw in Medieval times. And also, his form of Spanish.

In Spain, they do not speak the same dialect of Spanish as they do in other places in Latin America. Luis probably speaks Castillian Spanish, which is the European dialect of Spanish, that is not mixed with Indigenous languages or anything of the sort. Because that Spanish existed pre colonization of the Americas. But it gets even CRAZIER with Luis, because even the dialect of Spanish spoken in Spain today, would probably be much different from the dialect spoke in Valdelobos because they are isolated. They probably speak a less modern version of Spanish, probably still tied to the 1600rds.

Meaning that, aside from knowing English and Latin, Luis probably also knows various dialects of Spanish. He knows various dialects of Castillian spanish, he also has to LEARN how to speak Spanish when he got to the states so that people, who are of Latin American origin could understand him.

Luis is a relic, because he exists in various time periods. He exists in a town that is probably stuck somewhere between the 1500rds - 1700rds, yes like Tudor times! A town that was probably very much involved in European events and a town that has not grown past that. He exists in a town where an ancient dialect of Spanish was spoken , and where a very different form of Catholicism existed so that Luis learned Latin growing up because he had to so he could say his prayers. But he left ALL of that behind and modernized himself.

And he did it so well to the point where he easily passed for someone stuck in Valdelobos that doesn't belong there. He literally just looks like some guy when we meet him. When Leon sees him, you can't tell that this man is not really different from the cattle farmers who still speak in ancient languages, or who might not even know what a cell phone is, or who are hundred years behind. You don't know that Luis was at a point, disconnected like they were. He is literally just some guy. We don't even learn about how hard it was for him to adjust to this new life, but how he mastered it!!

A whole game, no a whole nOVEL could be made off of him.

anyway i refuse to believe he is dead lol. this man didn't survive cultural shock, being a relic, being exposed to new cultures, new ideas, etc., just to be killed by krauser lmaoooo