#this does not include discourse about him as a person and his many actual sins

[shedidntevenswear]

boooo i hate that we’ve entered the actual discourse phase of this matty thing because when we kept it to just jokes and memes about our shock/dismay/loving disapproval it was so much more fun

[painfullyprickedandticked]

a common debate within the fandom is the annual question of “is striker a supremacist?”

particularly, whenever one makes an analysis on striker, there’s always one comment mentioning “he is a supremacist.” however, there have been, recently, arguments that he is not a supremacist but rather just believes himself to be superior.

let’s look into both sides of this debate and draw our own conclusions.

the argument on why he isn’t:

BLITZØ is the one who refers to striker as a supremacist and blitzø isn’t particularly good at perceiving people. he tends to resort to insults instead (like when he called fizz a “peppy fuck doll” and verosika a “drunken whore”).

if someone’s views contrast with how blitzo sees the world, he immediately resorts to throwing an insult and that’s his perception of the person up until they shake the viewpoint. we’ve seen this with clown boy and we’ve seen him relent with verosika. basically, there’s some bias on blitzo’s end towards cowboy snake dude.

a supremacist is someone who believes a certain type of person is better than another. striker doesn’t believe imps are superior to other hell species, he thinks HE is superior to other hell species. therefore he’s not a supremacist, he has a superiority complex. those are two different things.

“what is a superiority complex?”

 examples of evidence proving striker does have a superiority complex include:

he wrote a song dedicated to his own victory in harvest moon festival, with lyrics literally declaring “i’m so much better than you.” he’s always been self-centered, having an overexaggerated self-worth. 

a lot of his anger towards moxxie can be taken as self projections, and same with fizz.

the reason striker mentions to blitzø that the two of them are superior to most of their kind was a manipulation tactic to throw blitzø off of his case when he was caught trying to shoot stolas

it amazes me how many people miss this context when its so clear as day. its also apparent that hybrid imps can sniff out other hybrids, akin to how in real life, if youre mixed race, you can often have a gut feeling that someone might also be mixed.

another point someone made: blitzø doesn’t know about striker’s past. we know striker implied it in western energy, but blitzø himself doesn’t know. if he understood what happened to him, then maybe he’d gain more of an understanding of striker as a person instead of this “evil supremacist” facade he sees.

“"Look. Not every ring is some fancy ass city, with some fancy ass mansion, that only fancy ass royals get to live in. Some of us have hard lives to live. And some of us have everything we care about taken away by fuckers like you."”

I’ll quote someone I discussed this topic with, though I won’t tag or name because I don’t want people to go after them. I’m not here to start discourse—I’m here to explore viewpoints. Here's their take:

“His anger and pain is so genuine and so real, you hear it in Ed’s performance, i don’t get how ppl look at the disgust in his voice and his face whenever things get personal (his speech to Stolas and his reaction to Fizz saying he’s no better than any royal) and take it as he’s putting on an act and lying about it.” […] “Extremist is a better word for him imo than supremacist and he def has some self-racism/hatred going on for sure hence how he put downs imps he feels are lower than him but upholds those he feels meets his standards, if that makes sense yk? It’s about what he sees as weak or embarrassing for his own kind. It’s not actually about wanting any class to be superior, it’s about him and what he thinks.”

it’s important to note, no matter how you view the angle of coding characters who aren’t human – giving them racial coding and all – there is an allegory within the series. imps are the lowest on the hierarchy, and the goetias are merely only a step below the deadly sins and lucifer (+ charlie and lilith). so if we put imps into the minority role, that implies imp hybrids are, well, mixed race.

we notice this in an example of how stella treats imps, even including striker himself.

[attempted script format here. didnt work, lol]

he doesn’t like working for her. he puts up with her because that’s his meal ticket. it’s payment. there isn’t a moral high ground he stands on, but there is a ground where he’s below her and he knows it – he’s exhausted. he’s tired. resorts to a slur because that’s how much she exasperates him. because she’s a privileged royal lady, and he’s at the bottom of the caste system. he cant pick or choose, unlike with IMP and their jobs.

it’s a lot more nuanced than a lot of people are willing to take on simply because some don’t like striker and dismiss everything surrounding his character that isn’t those specific lines talking about superiority or blitzo’s supremacist comment. 

as i finish writing up this section, i wanna make it clear i also like blitzo and stolas and i’m not justifying striker’s treatment of anyone. i’m not being an apologist, but i’m examining this particular case “he’s not a supremacist” because, yknow, you gotta look at the other side sometimes when it is presented in a calm manner and not just straight up character bashing or disrespect to the creator bc “omg my ship didn’t happen” or “whaaaat? the villain was always a villain and NOT a love interest? how dare that BITCH” [these takes exist and my brain melts each time…]

okay, i think im done with this side. ill make the rest pretty concise and cite someone else here who's detailed things for the other side of the argument. thanks to TVM for letting me quote you. im tired to write up the other side because my fucking google doc with these notes got erased. i hate it here!!!!!!!

why striker at least has some Certain Ideals (sigh)

"Blue Bloods"

"Disgusting, rich, pompous goetia"

"Some of us have everything we care about taken away by fuckers like you."

"You don't get to talk over me. . . all you ever do is try to talk over us."

"Once I split your neck open and let you choke on your own blue blood, you won't be worth any more than the tomb stone you'll be buried under."

So . . . first, he doesn't actually say a lot that's solely about royals, and ALL of the quotes above are about how royals look down on people like him, NOT about any inherent flaws that they have. They're about class, not race, unless you count "blue blood" as race. I don't. It's tied directly to money. "Disgusting" comes up in reference to Blitz's relationship with Stolas, but the words "rich" and "pompous" follow immediately. Striker hates royals because he hates that society places them above him.

Imps

"Pathetic."

"You little things aint worth the cleanup."

"Oh I remember how easy you are to choke the life out of, little one."

"Blitz, come on. You know the two of us are superior to most of our kind."

"I still think it's embarrassing. You're wasting a lot of potential relying on a weak little . . ."

"Vermin"

I think that this is where Striker's worldview comes into clearer focus. He thinks that Moxxie and Millie (and by extension MOST imps) are inferior to him. The word "vermin" is particularly telling. There's something visceral about his disgust for "lesser" imps.

I think Striker worries that they reflect who he really is. I think he truly believes that imps are inferior to higher class demons, and he fears that if he doesn't prove himself to be special (through violent dominance), he's vermin himself.

Notice how in the image below, his edge over Moxxie is all about size and physical strength- the things he implies throughout the episode make him the superior being. Look at that wide smile. He loves the feeling of being superior.

Relationships between imps and royals

"You are so above sucking on a disgusting rich pompous goetia . . ."

"kill the unkillable . . . starting with the one that treats you like a plaything."

"Blitzy"

"You two are both embarrassments to our kind for meddlin' with blue bloods to begin with. But at least loud mouth here has the sense to only fuck his rich bitch, instead of being a little purse dog."

"This worthless little pet reeks of his over bloated master. I'll at least enjoy getting rid of him."

Striker clearly sees these relationships as imps lowering themselves. It doesn't seem to occur to him even for a moment that these relationships might involve genuine care because he sees all interactions between social classes as being about power and "who wins."

all sourced from here.

conclusion?

I don’t know how to finish off this post. I was trying to give both sides a microphone and at this point, every time I make a post on Striker, I have to make it clear that I hate the woobification of him from a loud majority who only do so because they’ve got a weird hate boner for Stolas. Y’all might not have seen it, but I have on Twitter. I have seen it from here. I have seen it in fucking AO3 with straight up disrespectful cross tagging of character bashing and actual flanderization (see here on why striker is not canonically ruined), along with straight up kill-fics and thinly veiled disrespect to the creators.

But lately I’m also hating the boring, simplistic take of “he’s just a supremacist” and not analyzing him more than that. He’s such an interesting, complex character in a show of complex characters, and nobody bothers to examine him! They just either dismiss him as revolutionary or a supremacist! They never go into his grey areas or “hey, why is he like THAT?” - no, it’s just the boring same old takes.

This guy has so many layers. He’s a minority within a minority. He’s turned off by sex jokes yet has such rizz. He has an adrenaline rush from fighting. He is self centered yet also emotional. Yes, he’s a dick and a murderer. No, he’s not just a rat bastard and no he didn’t threaten to kill Octavia - he simply brought her up to throw Stolas off. It was more so "shame your kid won't see you again", not "oh im gonna kill your baby girl after i show her your decapitated head". Yes, his layers and tragic backstory yet unyielding thirst for killing when he sets eyes on a target make him interesting. It’s called being a villain enjoyer but no one seems to like a villain for being a villain anymore in his case. They either gotta justify him or they gotta woobify him, or they have to demonize him. I’ve seen people make the worst comparisons and it baffles me.

I just wanna enjoy this rat bastard in peace but then stupidity resurfaces in my head and it’s inescapable at times. Tiring. </3

This isn’t the conclusion you probably wanted if you read this far. Sorry. But I'm at a loss of what else to say atp. I wanna find more normal fans of Striker who aren’t just insane people who woobify him to bash Stolas. And I'm also tired of people who actively bash him trying to weigh in on my stuff. Like... is there any normal enjoyer of him besides @eldritchcreatureofwords ?

Anyway, live laugh love Edward Bosco, bye.

[thecloudstan]

(Prt. 1) I just checked your blog and saw you replying in real-time to my messages. XD OMG, YES! I completely forgot to mention his iconic "I guess we can't be friends" line ASDFGHJKL. There's honestly so much to say about Cloud and Rufus because, let's face it, Rufus has been underappreciated and overlooked for YEARS (and the Turks, too, while I'm rambling again, but that's for another day...). Back in the OG, I get why that is because of his stereotypical portrayal and lack of screentime.

Anonymous asked:

(Prt. 2) Added to the long stretches of time between the FFVII novels/other titles through the years and plot demands focus on main party, it's such a SHAME that a lot of fans just haven't read the novels or guidebooks because they provide SO MUCH depth to Rufus' characterization/growth from being a wannabe fascist dictator to fighting for the planet because of GENUINE REMORSE and DESIRE TO PAY HIS DEBT BACK TO THE PLANET. Sure, he's still looking out for Shinra, but hey, that's business.

(Prt. 3) And despite all these years, I am SHOOK that there's so many out there that haven't realized despite whatever differences Rufus and Cloud have, THEY REALLY DO HAVE A LOT IN COMMON. When I got into FFVII and started seriously exploring and paying attention to these characters, it really struck me how much Rufus and Cloud are ACTUAL FOILS to each other. And all the Remake trilogy is doing just bringing into the main games than shoving into the novels that half the fandom hasn't even read.

(Prt. 3? I'm losing track fast because I'm on A ROLL! XD) Because I'm anonymous and YOU'RE A WONDERFUL PERSON, Heich, I feel safe for saying something that some may take issue with and you don't even have to agree with me since I was DONE with shipping discourse when I was 13 and differing opinions should be respected. I 100% BELIEVE that Rufus would make a better romantic partner for Cloud than literally ANYONE ELSE in the series. Yes, that includes T*fa and Aer*th. Why, you ask? See next part.

Rufus and Cloud both love their mothers (Rufus's mother died when he was young) deeply, and don't have much of a relationship with their fathers (Cloud's father was too much of a "free spirit" and got eaten by fiends, as stated in ToTP, and Cloud knows what his mother tells him; Rufus's father was neglectful, and Rufus grows up hating/resenting him, as stated in OtWtS). Both hide their loneliness growing up by acting stoic and cool, and they carry this in their adult lives, too.

Both of them grew DESPARATELY trying to be somebody important and prove themselves to others. And for those who don't know, Rufus DOES crave his father's acknowledgement since he was a child as stated in the novels (he still hates his guts, of course). By the time they're both adults, they even know how childishly rebellious they acted, but they still struggle with their insecurities and loneliness. Again, Rebirth is making those two points in particular VERY OBVIOUS outside the books.

Okay, anon, I wanted to answer your first group as an aggregate this time so it would all make sense. I'll put my reply under the cut so the post doesn't get too long!

It's true, so much of Rufus' history and then character development is hidden behind a wall-of-entry, so to speak, and that does suck. You really just can't get the full depth and breadth of him as a character, especially as he's being fleshed out in Remake/Rebirth, without that background. Or, at least, you'd be missing a lot.

I don't want to focus too much on who is 'best' to ship Cloud with, I'm not here for that and I think the reason I love this world so much is because of the strength and uniqueness of the interpersonal relationships. I think the people around both of them are integral to their lives and development, 'yes men' or otherwise. That said, I do believe they're good foils to one another and that it's a great ship. Considering the people who are left after Meteorfall and then Bahamut Sin, I can't say I'd be entirely disappointed or shocked if Cloud and Rufus did not become closer allies...and then closer other things are possible. Which is the only window I need 😈

What I'm really interested in with Rufus is the exploration of this desire to pay back what Shinra owes, how deep it could go, how his own near-death experiences shaped him, and how the people close to him followed whatever path he decided to take, regardless. It really is a lot like Cloud's story. He takes his group down an extremely dangerous path, unbeknownst to him (and them), and everyone suffers for it, but the intense bond they have, the ability to forgive and see a bigger picture, keeps all of his loved ones close and still believing in him.

I have more to say but it's in response to your next group of asks, so I'll pick up once I draft that reply! Thanks so much for the fun analysis, it's really so validating to have someone to talk to about this specific ship/topic!

[woman-loving]

Islam, heteronormativity, and lesbian lives in Indonesia

Selections from Heteronormativity, Passionate Aesthetics and Symbolic Subversion in Asia by Saskia Wieringa, 2015.

These passages discuss some general social developments related to sexuality and gender in Indonesia, and then describe stories from different (mostly lesbian) narrators. They also touch on the creation of a religious school for waria (trans women), and include two trans men narrators, one of whom talks about his struggle to get sex reassignment surgery in the 70s. I also included a story from a divorced woman whose sexuality was questioned when her husband complained that she couldn’t sexually please him. Accusations of lesbianism can be directed toward any woman as a method for managing her sexuality/gender and prodding her into compliance with expectations of sexual availability.

In spite of protests by religious right-wing leaders, Islam does not have a single source of its so-called 'Islamic tradition'. There are many different interpretations and, apart from the Quran, many sources are contested. Even the Quran has abundant interpretations. Feminist Muslim writers, such as Fatima Mernissi (1985), Riffat Hassan (1987), and Musdah Mulia (2004 and 2012), locate their interpretations in the primary source of Islam--the Quran. According to those readings, sexuality is seen in an affirmative, positive light, being generally described as a sign of God's mercy and generosity toward humanity, characterised by such valued qualities as tranquillity, love, and beauty. The California-based Muslim scholar Amina Wadud (1999) describes the jalal (masculine) and jamal (feminine) attributes of Allah as a manifestation of sacred unity. She maintains that Allah's jamal qualities are associated with beauty that, although originally evaluated as being at the same level as Allah's masculine qualities that are associated with majesty, have en subsumed in the 14 centuries since the Quran was revealed.

The Quran gives rise to multiple interpretations. Verse 30:21 is one of my favorites:

“And among Allah's signs is this. That Allah created for you spouses from among yourselves, that you may dwell in tranquillity whit them, and Allah has put love and mercy between your [hearts]: verily in that there are signs for those who reflect.”[2]

The verse is commonly used in marriage celebrations, and I also used it in my same-sex marriage ritual. It mentions the gender-neutral term 'spouse,' which leaves room for the interpretation that same-sex partners are included.

Indonesian waria (transwomen) derive hope from such texts. In 2008, Maryani, a well-respected waria, opened a pesantren (traditional Islamic religious school) for waria, named Al-Fatah, at her house in Yogyakarta. After her death in March 2014, it was temporarily closed, but fortunately soon reopened in nearby Kotagede. A sexual-rights activist, Shinta Ratri, opened her house to waria santri (santri are strict believers, linked to religious schools) so they could continue to receive religious education. At the official opening, Muslim scholar Abdul Muhaimin of the Faithful People Brotherhood Forum reminded the audience that, as everyone was made by God: "Everyone has the right to observe their religion in their own way...", and added: "I hoped the students here are strong, as they must face stigma in society."[3]

Prior to her death (after she had made the haj),[4] Maryani herself, a deeply-religious person, said: "Here we teach our friends to worship God. People who worship are seeking paradise, this is not limited to our sex or our clothing..."[5] So far, hers is the only waria pesantren in Indonesia, perhaps even globally, and may be due to the fact that Maryani was an exceptionally strong person who spoke at many human-rights meetings. In October 2010, I also interviewed her and was struck by her warm personality, courage, and clear views.

In spite of those progressive readings of the Quran, women's sexuality is interpreted in light of their servility to men in practice, and has been linked to men's honour rather than women's pleasure. Although marriage is not viewed as too sacred to be broken in Indonesia, it is regarded as a religious obligation by all. An unmarried woman over the age of 20 is considered to be a perawan tua ('old virgin'), and is confronted by a continuous barrage of questions as to when she will marry.

Muslim (and Christian) conservative leaders consider homosexuality to be a sin. Women in same-sex relations find themselves in a difficult corner, as exclusion from their religion is a heavy burden. Some simply pray at home, privately hoping that their God will forgive them and trusting in the compassion taught by their holy books. However, outside their private space, religious teachers and society at large denounce their lives as sinful and accuse them of having no religion.

Recent Indonesia legislation strengthens the conservative, heteronormative interpretations of Islam. Apart from the 2008 anti-pornography law (discussed below), a new health law was adopted that further tightened conservative Islam's grip on women's reproductive rights and marginalised non-heteronormative women. That 2009 health bill replaced the law of 1992, which had no chapter on reproductive health. The new law states that a healthy, reproductive, and sexual life may only be enjoyed with a 'lawful partner' and only without 'violating religious values'--which means that all of our narrators would be banned from enjoying healthy, sexual, and reproductive lives.[6]

Conservative statements are also made by women themselves; for example, members of the hard-line Islamic group Hizbut Tahrir, who not only want to restrict reproductive services (such as family planning) to lawfully-wedded heterosexual couples but also see population control as a 'weapon of the West' to weaken the country.[7] They propose to save Indonesia by the imposition of sharia laws. Hard-line Islamic interpretations are widely propagated and creep into the legal system, thus strengthening heteronormativity and further expelling non-normative others.

Yet strong feminist voices are also heard in Indonesia's Muslim circles. Even in a relation to one of the most controversial issues in Islam--homosexuality--a positive, feminist interpretation is possible. Indonesia's prominent feminist Muslim scholar, Siti Musdah Mulia, explains that homosexuality is a natural phenomenon as it was created by Allah, and thus allowed by Islam. The prohibition, however, is the work of fallible interpretations by religion scholars.[8] In her 2011 paper on sexual rights, Mulia bases herself on certain Indonesian traditions that honour transgender people, referring to bissu in south Sulawesi, and warok[9] in the reog dance form in Ponorogo. In those cases, transgender is linked to sacred powers and fertility. She stresses that the story of Lot, always cited as evidence of Quranic condemnation of homosexuality, is actually concerned with sexual violence--the people of Sodom were not the only ones faced with God's wrath, as the people of Gomorrah were also severely chastised even though there is no indication that they engaged in same-sex behaviour. Nor is there any hint of same-sex behaviour in relationship to Lot's poor wife, who was transformed into a pillar of salt. Mulia advances a humanistic interpretation of the Quran that stresses the principles of justice, equity, human dignity, love, and compassion (2011: 7). Her conclusion is that not Islam itself but rather its heterosexist and patriarchal interpretation leads to discrimination.

After the political liberalisation (Reformasi) of 1998, conservative religious groups (which had been banned at the height of the repressive New-Order regime) increased their influence. The dakwah ('spreading of Islam') movement, which grew from small Islamist usroh (cell, family) groups and aimed to turn Indonesia into a Muslim state, gathered momentum.[10] Islamist parties, such as the Partai Kesejahteraan Sosial (PKS), or Social Justice Party, gained wide popularity, although that was not translated into a large number of seats in the national parliament (Hefner 2012; Katjasungkana 2012). In the early Reformasi years, official discourse on women was based on women's rights, taking the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action as its guide, but recent discourse on an Islamic-family model--the so-called keluarga sakinah ('the happy family')--has become dominant in government circles (Wieringa 2015, forthcoming). The growing Islamist emphasis on a heteronormative family model, coupled with homophobia, is spreading in society. During KAN's [Kartini Asia Network for Gender and Women's Studies in Asia] September 2006 TOT [Training of Trainers] course in Jakarta, the following conversation was recorded:

“Farida: Religious teachers go on and on about homosexuality. They keep shouting that it is a very grave sin and that people will go straight to hell. My daughter is in the fifth form of primary school. She has a best friend and the two were inseparable. But the teachers managed to set them apart, as they were considered to be too close. The mother of my daughter's friend came to me crying; she was warned that she had to be careful with her child, or else she might get a daughter who was different. And now the new school regulations stress that a woman must wear the jilbab [headscarf].[11] This has put a lot of stress on tomboyish girls. They cannot wear the clothes they are comfortable with any more. Zeinab: When we were taught fiqih [Islamic law], we never discussed homosexuality. When we studied the issue of zinah [adultery], one of our group asked: "But how about a woman committing zinah with another woman, or a man with another man?" Our teacher just shook is head and muttered that that was not a good thing. The only story we learnt was about the prophet Luth [Lot]. But when we went to study the hadith [Islamic oral law], we found the prophet had a very close friend, Abu Harairah, who never married, while all men were always showing off their wives. There were some indications that he might have had a male lover. Yet the prophet is not known to have warned him. So, while the mainstream interpretation of Islam is that they condemn homosexuality, there are also other traditions that seem to be more tolerant, even from the life of the prophet himself.”

The above fragment shows how fundamentalist practices creep into every nook and cranny of Indonesian people's lives--the growing suspicion toward tomboys, forcible separation of close school friends, and enforcement of Muslim dress codes. But we also see a counter-protest arising. At the TOT training course, the women activists realised that patriarchal interpretations of religion had severely undermined women's space, and started looking for alternative interpretations, such as the story of the prophet's unmarried friend.

However, for many of our narrators, religion is a troubling issue. Putri, for instance, does not even want to discuss the rights of gays and lesbians in Indonesia; she thinks the future looks gloomy, with religious fundamentalism on the rise, and her dream of equal rights is buried by the increasing militancy of religious fanatics. [...]

Women-loving women

Religion is a sensitive aspect of the lives of our women-loving-women narrators, who are from world religions that, although propagating love and compassion in their distinct ways, interpret same-sex love negatively. In some cases, our narrators are able to look beyond the patriarchal interpretations of their religions, which preach hatred for what are emotions of great beauty and satisfaction to them, while others are devastated by guilt and shame. [...]

Indonesian male-identified Lee wonders why "people cannot see us as God's creatures?" but fears that Islam will never accept homosexuality. He knows the story of the prophet Lot, and how the city of Sodom was destroyed by God as a warning so others would not commit the sin of sodomy. Lee was raised as a good Muslim, and tries to follow what he has been taught are God's orders. For some time, he wore a man's outfit for praying.[16] At that time, he thought that religious duties--if conducted sincerely--were more important than his appearance but, after listening to some religious preachers, he felt that it was not right to wear men's clothing: "Sometimes I think it is not right, lying to myself, pretending to be someone else. We cannot lie to God, right? Even if I try to hide it, definitely God knows." So, after attending religious classes, he decided to wear the woman's outfit--the mukena--when praying at home.

Lia grew up in a strict Muslim family. When she pronounced herself to be a lesbian, it came as a shock to her relatives, who invoked the power of religion to cure her. When her mother went on the haj, she brought 'Zamzam water' from Mecca. The miraculous healing powers of the liquid from Mecca's Zamzam well were supposed to bring Lia back to the normal path. Dutifully, Lia drank from it and jokingly exclaimed: "Ah, my God, only now I realise how handsome Delon is!"[17] Yet she found succor in her religion when she went through a crisis in her relationship with Santi:

"When Santi hated me very much and avoided me, I prayed: "God, if it is true that you give me a guiding light, please give me a sign. But if it is a sin...please help me..." Was my relationship with Santi blessed or not? If it wasn't, surely God would have blocked the way, and if it way, would God broaden my path? As, after praying so hard, Santi and I became closer, God must have endorsed it. Does God listen to my prayer, or does God test me?"

So, even though she got together again with Santi after that fervent bout of praying, uncertainty gnaws at Lia, who realises that mainstream Islamic preachers prohibit homosexuality. Ideally, she feels that a person's religion must support people, but Islam does not do that because she is made to feel like a sinner. But, she says, the basic principle that Islam teaches is to love others. As long as she does that, Lia sees nothing wrong in herself as one of God's creatures. She realises that, particularly in the interpretation of the hadith (Islamic oral tradition), all manner of distortions have entered Islamic values, and wonders what was originally taught about homosexuality in Islam. She is aware that many Quranic texts about the status of women were manipulated in order to marginalise them, and avidly follows debates on feminist interpretations that stress that the real message of the Quran does not preach women's subordination.

Lia knows that there are lesbians in the pesantren who carry out religious obligations, such as praying and doing good deeds. If someone has been a lesbian for so long that it feels like natural character, and has been praying and fasting for many years, they cannot change into a heterosexual, she decided.

Religious values are also deeply inculcated in Sandy, who is tortured by guilt and shame about her lesbian desires. Although masculine in appearance and behaviour, she wears the mukena while praying both at home and at the mushola (small mosque) that she frequents. Since she was 23, when her mother died, she realised that what she did with her lover, Mira, was a sin and started reading religious books to discover what they said about people like her. She accepted the traditional interpretation of the story of Lot and the destruction of Sodom. When she was 25 years old, Mira left her to marry a man. Sandy was broken hearted and considered suicide. In that period of great distress, she realised that God prohibits suicide and just wanted her to give up her sinful life. She struggled hard against her desires for women and the masculinity in her:

"If I walk with women, I feel like a man; that I have to protect them. I feel that I am stronger than other women. But I also feel that I am a woman, I am sure that I am a woman, that is why I feel that I am different from others. I accept my own condition as an illness, not as my destiny. ... Yes, an illness, because we follow our lust. It we try to contain our lust, as religion teaches us, we would never be like this. So I try to stay close to God. I do my prayers, and a lot of zikir.[18] I even try to do tahajjud.[19]"

Sandy believes in the hereafter and does not want to spoil her chances of eternal bliss by engaging in something so clearly disproved of by religion, although she has not found any clear prohibitions against lesbianism in either the Quran or hadith.

Bhima, who considers himself to be a secular person, was brought up in a Muslim family. His identity card states that he is a Muslim, which got him into serious trouble when he went for his first sex-change operation at the end of the 1970s. He went through the necessary tests but the doctors hesitated when they looked at his ID, fearing the wrath of conservative clerics. Bhima was desperate:

"Listen, I have come this far! I have saved up for this, sold my car, relatives have contributed, how can you do this to me? Tell me what other religion I should take up and I will immediately get my identity card changed. I have never even been inside a mosque. I don't care about any institutionalised religion!"

The doctors did not heed his plea, instead advising him to get a letter of recommendation from a noted Muslim scholar. Undaunted, Bhima made an appointment with a progressive female psychologist who had been trained in Egypt and often gave liberal advice on Muslim issues on the radio. He managed to persuade her to write a letter of introduction to the well-known Muslim scholar Professor Hamka. Letter in hand, Bhima presented himself at the gate of Hamka's house, and was let in by the great scholar himself. Bhima pleaded his case, upon which Hamka opened the Quran and pointed to a passage that read "when you are ill, you must make all attempts to heal yourself":

"Are you ill?" Hamka asked. Bhima nodded vehemently. "Fine, so then tell them that the Quran advises to heal your illness." "It is better, sir," Bhima suggested, "that you write that down for them."

With that letter, Bhima had no problem to be accepted for the first operation, in which his breasts were removed.

Widows [...] In Eliana's case religion played an important role in her marriage--and subsequent divorce. While still at school, she had joined an usroh group (created to teach students about religious and social issues in the days of the Suharto dictatorship). Proper sexual behaviour played an important role in their teachings. According to usroh, a wife must be sexually subservient to her husband and accept all his wishes, even if they involve him taking a second wife. Eliana felt close to her spiritual leader and tried to sexually behave as a good Muslim wife would. She forced herself to give in to all her husband's sexual wishes, including blow jobs and watching pornography with him. Yet the leader blamed Eliana for not doing enough to please her husband, saying that is why he needed a second wife. Her teacher even asked if she was a lesbian, because she could not satisfy her husband. As both her spiritual leader and husband agreed that it was not nice for a man to have an intellectually-superior woman, she played down her intelligence. Eventually she divorced her husband.

Internalised lesbophobia and conservative-religious (in this case, Muslim) norms prevented Jenar for enjoying the short lesbian relationship that she had between her two marriages. It is interesting how she phrases the conversation, starting on the topic by emphasising how much she distrusted men after her divorce (because her husband did not financially provide for their family). The relationship with her woman lover was not long underway, and had not advanced beyond kissing, but she immediately felt that, according to religion, what she did was laknat (cursed). Anyway, she added, she was a 'normal,' heterosexual woman and did not feel much aroused when they were touching. A middle-aged, male friend added to her feeling of discomfort by emphasising that she would be cursed by God if it would continue. He then took her to a dukun (shaman), where she was bathed with flowers at midnight in order to cure her. That was apparently successful, for she gave the relationship up. However, even though she had stressed that she was 'normal' and did not respond sexually to her lover's advances, she ended the conversation by saying that she felt lesbianism was a 'contagious disease'. That remark stresses her own internalised homophobia but also emphasises her helplessness and lack of agency--contagion is something that cannot be avoided. It also hints at the strength of the pull she felt for a contagion that apparently could not be easily ignored. The important role of the dukun indicates that she follows the syncretist stream of Islam, mixed with elements of the pre-Islamic Javanese religion--Kejawen. [...]

Women in same-sex relationships [...]

As in India, the human-women's-lesbian-rights discourse is gaining momentum in Indonesia. It could only develop after 1998, when the country's dictator was finally forced to resign and a new climate of political openness was created. The new sexual-rights organisations not only opened a public space to discuss women's and sexual rights but also impacted on the behaviour of individuals within their organisations (as discussed in more detail in chapter 9). Before Lee joined a lesbian-rights group, he had decided to undergo sex-reassignment therapy (SRT) to physically become a man as much as possible. Activists warned him of the operations' health risks and asked whether he really needed such a change in order to live with his spouse. Lee feels secure within the group, and is happy to find like-minded people with whom he can share many of his concerns. Lee actively sought them out after reading a newspaper article about a gay male activist: he tracked him down at his workplace and obtained the address of the lesbian group. Lee is less afraid of what will happen when their neighborhood find out that Lee's body is female--as he says: "I have done nothing wrong, I haven't disturbed anyone, I have never asked anyone for food." However, Lee is worried about the media, where gay men and lesbian women are often represented as the sources of disease and disaster.

Lia had no idea what a lesbian was when she first fell in love with a woman. There were many tomboys like her playing in the school's softball team, and she once spotted a female couple in another school's softball team. Her relationship with Santi developed without, as Lia says, any guidance of previous information. Only at college in Yogyakarta did she start reading about homosexuality on the internet. Through the Suara Srikandi portal (one of the first lesbian groups in Jakarta), she came to know of other Indonesian lesbians. Another website that she frequently visited was the Indonesian Lesbian Forum, and one of her lecturers introduced her to the gay and lesbian movement in her city. In 2004, she publicly came out at a press conference. She first joined the KPI, which has an interest group of sexual minorities, but found the attitude of her feminist friends to be unsupportive and decided to join a lesbian-only group. The women activists only wanted to discuss the public role of women and domestic violence, and told her that lesbianism was a disease and a sin.

Lia wants to broaden the lesbian movement. She feels the movement is good in theory but lacking in practice--particularly in creating alliances with other suppressed groups, such as farmers and labourers. In focusing only on lesbians, not on discrimination and marginalisation itself, she asserts that it has become too exclusive. By socialising with other movements, she argues, they will better understand lesbian issues, and, in turn, that will help the lesbian movement. It is true, she concedes, that lesbians are stigmatised by all groups in society but, since 1998 (the fall of General Suharto), the country has seen a process of democratisation. "We must take up that opportunity and not be scared of stigma," she exhorts her friends in the lesbian movement. Lia herself joined a small, radical political party, the PRD,[33] and faced stigma ("we have a lesbian comrade; that's a sin, isn't it?"), but feels that she has ultimately been welcomed. Now, her major problem is to find the finances to conduct her activism. At the time of the interview, she had lost her job and could not find the means to print handouts for her PRD comrades.

Lia is a brave forerunner. At the time of the interview, her lesbian friends were too scared to follow in her footsteps and told her that she was only dreaming. However, her heterosexual friends (in the labour movement) said that they were bored with her, and found her insistence of a connection between the struggle for sexual and labour rights to be too pushy.

Lia dreams of equal rights for lesbians. First, she would like to see a gay-marriage law implemented in Indonesia, which would ensure that the property rights of surviving spouses are protected in case one passes away. She also would like to set up a shelter for lesbians, as she knows many young lesbians who have been thrown out of their family homes and are in need of support.

Sandy is rather hesitant about the rights she would like to see introduced to Indonesian society. Most of all, she wants to be accepted as a normal human being, where no one says bad things about or harasses lesbians like her. What women do in the privacy of their bedrooms is one thing. Women should have the right to have sex, for it comes straight from the heart--it is pure love. But, in public, their behavior should be impeccable: no kissing, no hugging, no holding of hands. However, Sandy thinks that marriage rights for lesbians will not happen in Indonesia, and are only possible in Christian countries. But, minimally, she hopes to lead a life without discrimination or violence:

"If they see us as normal, they won't bother us. We are human, but if we act provocatively then it is ok for them to even hang us ... [I just hope they] won't harass us, or humiliate us. That is all I ask, that if we are being humiliated there is a law to prevent it. That a person like me is protected. To be laughed at is okay, but it is too much if they throw stones at us and if we are not allowed to work."

Sex workers want the right to work without being harassed, and women in same-sex relationships want to be treated like 'normal' human beings and enjoy socio-sexual rights, such as health benefits or the right to buy joint property. Yet the state does not provide those rights and does not protect its citizens in equal measure. As a major agent of heteronormativity, it restricts its benefits and protection to those within its margins. Couples with social stigma and conservative-religious interpretations, some of our narrators have reached deep levels of depression.

[idreamtofmanderleyagain]

Morality-Focused Frameworks Of Discussion As Acts of Control

This is a post in response to a larger conversation I’ve been having with @eshusplayground. I have a perspective that I think would be really relevant to the conversation but I also don’t want to derail the specific focus of the following posts she’s been making recently.

(Trigger Warning For Abuse Discussion and Brief Mentions of Rape)

---

So I’m in the Hellraiser fandom. More specifically, I’m a Pinhead/Kirsty shipper.

For those of you that don’t know, Pinhead is a demonic torturer from hell who’s design is inspired by the BDSM community. Characters who open a magical puzzle box have unknowingly given themselves away to his violent underworld community of eternal torment and depravity. Hellraiser is a film about romantic and sexual horror, and there’s quite a lot in there about abuse and trauma. Kirsty is a traumatized person, and in my personal opinion, very likely a CSA victim.

And I ship these two characters together.

So the subject matter of my particular fandom is extremely intense and niche and complicated to navigate, although YMMV (I have no trouble with this franchise, but I cannot really handle GOT or American Horror Story, for example). After I grew interested in Hellraiser and integrated into it’s fandom, my perspectives about the way we have conversations about villainous characters started to have a major shift.

I often see people have these intense conversations (and arguments) about where a particular character exists on a moral scale, with the subtext (or outright text) that if they tip too far one way or another, they can be rendered unworthy of their own subgroup of fans within their own fandom. People who love those characters or find them shippable are then subject to moral judgements.

So how does one apply such logic to a psychosexual torture demon?

The answer is you can’t.

The frameworks people online use to have these discussions do not make any sense when talking about my fandom. Hellraiser is a dark horror fairytale presenting disturbing, surreal images and behaviors in order to discuss complex and difficult experiences and perspectives. The monsters within it, like Pinhead, are more metaphor than anything.

Now, my follower count is too low and my fandom is too niche for me to really be on the receiving end of a lot of the cruelty that manifests online about the moral validity of the fiction I enjoy. That said, between the anti-kink TERFS and the younger folks involved in purity culture on this site, I can imagine exactly what it would look like. You know what they would look like.

“You’re an Abuse Apologist!”

“You’re an Abuse Fetishist!”

“You’re reinforcing sexism!”

“he’s an irredeemable torturer, you’re probably okay with literal real world rape lmao uwu”

“This is bad kink representation and you’re complicit in the abuse real men do to women because you like this!”

Now, setting aside the fact that the canon lore context of Pinhead involves him having a human soul brainwashed by a monster god to become what he is, and is also in a roundabout sense “redeemed” in canon, I think most people utilizing this kind of framework would assume that I believe Pinhead can be redeemed in the way online Discourse (tm) means it, because that’s how we talk in fandom about the villains we really like.

I do not want to redeem Pinhead. I don’t think he even needs redeeming. I don’t even see value in that conversation at all. Redemption is not a concept that makes sense for what he is, or what he could become as a character. The framework of Pinhead as a Real-World-Equivalent Human Male Abuser who Cannot Be Redeemed From His Actions would inevitably dominate all conversation, regardless of the fact that it is inherently incorrect and detrimental to real, robust literary analysis of the narrative he exists within and how brilliantly it actually interacts with male on female abuse as a subject. By nature of it’s gross oversimplification and misrepresentation, It ruins the potential for greater, more nuanced and complex conversations.

And that’s the thing: my engagement with this particular story and it’s characters has a lot to do with the potential in the narrative to examine how trauma interacts with love, desire and gender politics. Hellraiser has a very unique way of exploring that kind of subject through a storytelling aesthetic that appeals to me (horror/fairytale, gothic romance, etc).

This is about to get personal, so strap the fuck in.

I am the victim of gendered abuse, in that I had an emotionally abusive step father and sexism was absolutely a factor in why that manifested the way it did. I am also a second hand victim of gendered abuse, in that my biological father was a serial stalker and rapist, and other male abusers (or just self-centered family members) caused severe emotional destabilization in my childhood. I grew up viewing adult men as unstable, selfish children. My family endured a lot, and I came to resent the men in my mother’ life for not taking on the role of protector and nurturer when she needed them most. I had discovered the great lie of traditional masculinity: in the face of real crisis, grown men were not protectors. They did not hold together the domestic space. They abused or faltered and abandoned us. This was a repeated pattern among several men in different roles. I was often left picking up all the pieces, taking on roles as a child that these men could not. I had to have strength they did not.

My experience of desire for romantic intimacy with men and men in roles of stable, nurturing authority now inherently involves a jumbled emotional soup of fear, pain, and a deep longing that comes from a place of feminine vulnerability, a desire to be taken care of instead of being the caretaker.

The narrative of Hellraiser pushes a lot of buttons for me. It speaks to my own trauma experiences in a very specific way. In an effort to further that conversation, I’m trying to create a piece of art (a fic) inspired by the deeply personal feelings this film gives me.

For me, Pinhead represents the Jungian shadow masculine, a simultaneous mix of fear and desire, the potential for suffering and pleasure, and everything in between. These experiences are inherently intertwined for me. And Kirsty’s experiences mirror many of my own.

In other words, in order for me to get out of Hellraiser what I get out of Hellraiser, Pinhead has to be exactly what he is, and everything that he is. Which includes monstrosity. Which includes the potential for change. His place in the narrative must fully, truly embody this conversation I need to have with masculinity, which inherently involves painful, scary things.

Anybody demanding that I either denounce my interest in him as morally offensive because he’s a monster in the full sense of the word (and not just the aesthetic one like what is currently trending in Monster Boyfriend fandom), or force a traditional redemption arc upon him as if he were a real life human person who must repent for his real life sins, are essentially saying that I am not allowed to engage with this work of fiction in a way that is transformative for me. And that’s very unfortunate, because honestly, I think my perspective is so much more dynamic and has so much more to offer.

This is not just about basic catharsis. This is not even a power fantasy about emotionally transforming a powerful (white) dude, or “bad boy” fantasies, both standard arguments for villain stanning that feels like it has never truly represented me or the complexity of my experiences and interests. This is a full-on conversation and act of self expression I want to have through art about the experience of fear and trauma when dealing with men as a woman who desires men.

And I don’t think a person has to be traumatized in order to want to engage with this type of fiction. I want to be clear that my experience is not a justification for my interest (I do not need to justify myself), it is an example of a perspective that gets erased by the framework of these conversations.

To me, the framework of moral validity for enjoying fictional villains and monsters and whatever you please feels incredibly stifling to the complex, dynamic ideas and analysis that I want to engage in, because I, and many people I know, are consistently pressured to structure their thoughts with this framework as the only acceptable baseline of discussion. This is so ubiquitous that when people I’ve known have tried to engage in ways that diverge from that framework, the responses they get are outright confused or direct the conversation right back to the original framework they tried to avoid. Complex conversation gets steamrolled.

Somewhere in the conversation we were all having about acknowledging and discussing abuse and oppression, and acknowledging troubling patterns in media which reinforce the normalization of abuse and opression, some people decided that there was a very serious moral discussion to be had regarding the mere act of liking things which involve dark subject matter and complex, or even monstrous characters. They now argue that there are very clear cut, simple moral frameworks for A) telling stories and B) enjoying stories, and most importantly, that this moral framework is a valid justification for the social treatment and silencing of certain people.

A framework, by the way, which I think is actually not functionally a framework, because like the toxic American fundamentalist christian groups it’s thinking is structured from, it does not account for the vastly diverse moral landscape within it’s own space. There is no objectively consistent body of knowledge anybody is working from, because morals are derived from the human experience, which is inherently subjective.

Interestingly, no where does this have more of an impact than with marginalized people, and people like me, who want to express something deeper and more meaningful in the conversation about abuse and oppression than what this framework really offers us. To be honest, The more I see this kind of conversation making the rounds, the clearer it becomes that it’s a means of control and power game playing. It’s not about morality, but about how morality can be leveraged in order to silence truly diverse and nuanced perspectives and uphold people’s sense of self-comfort. It is a means of supplanting more convenient and easily digestible understandings of these highly complex subjects that require more intensive, thoughtful engagement, especially when it gets challenging. This kind of rhetoric absolves people of making room for complex and diverse experiences, and reinforces an (at face-value) easy to follow set of moral rules of how we are all allowed to think and feel.

The implication of all of this is that if we all adhere to the One True (alleged) Moral Framework of Fandom Engagement, then we will somehow come out on the other side with all the Good People having a Great Time having Squeaky Clean Fun. And I don’t think I should have to tell you at this point how stifling and disturbing the implications of that kind of mentality really are.

 Quite frankly, I think a lot of us are very tired of constantly speaking on other people’s terms.

[panharmopticon]

“But Foucault cannot possibly want to do away with property relations altogether, as these would be essential to any accurate account of capitalist development. He’s not being technologically determinist in assigning power of the separation to large-scale machinery and automation, but his rhetoric of technologies of power risks this reading. Foucault’s reaction to vulgar Marxism thus leads him to a historical analysis overemphasizing bourgeois discourse, and under-emphasizing the ways that this discourse attempted to incorporate the working class. He does not explicitly address the transformation as a separation of proletarian women and children from household means of production, which occurred sometime in the middle of the nineteenth century in most industrializing cities but earlier in Britain. He also passes in silence over the way this machinery and its absorption of women and children produced a concern for the sexuality amidst working conditions on factory floors, although he does refer to the chapters in Capital in which Marx cites these reports. He doesn’t address how the liquidation of peasant proprietorship transformed peasant sexuality. He refers to this peasant sexuality in passing as being caught up in a kind of pastoral power of perhaps confession to a priest, expresses doubts over whether peasants actually cared what priests thought about what they did. But there’s evidence that marriage restrictions became prohibitive to many agrarian communities in the first decade of the nineteenth century on the continent. Ecclesiastical authorities began refusing to marry people lacking property or status in peasant communities as an attempt to inhibit the growth of an indigent population. This is very much motivated by Malthusian concerns for, basically, a fear of poor people having sex, and then those people producing more vagabondage. This Malthusian concern of the nineteenth century peaked in the 1830s, mostly on the continent. Although the phenomenon of transience was less extreme in Britain, this concern is registered in the 1834 reform of the poor laws, and the intensification of the work house system. The workhouse system was devised along explicit Malthusian lines of sex segregation, of men from women, in order to prevent poor people from having heterosexual sex.

By the late nineteenth century in London, there was a panic about homosexual activity, specifically in the male workhouses. There’s this one account published of a kind of bourgeois man who went undercover as a working class person in the workhouse, called My Night in the Workhouse…  he witnesses this bath, and has all these fantasies about what’s going on. He doesn’t actually witness any homosexual sex, but in this gentleman’s publication kind of scintillatingly suggests that’s what the workhouse system was about. This happens in the 1860s, so it’s prior to the Wilde trial.

Foucault refers to the 1830s as a period in which ruling classes attempt to regulate the urban proletariat with the institution of marriage with the campaign against the immorality of the poor. So we might quibble with him, that it was a rural and urban phenomenon, we might quibble with him and say he omitted some things, but his account is basically correct. These are the silences and emphases of his account. Perhaps he thought giving a more thorough account would have required rehearsing arguments from Discipline and Punish about the great efforts to curb vagabondage. Perhaps he thought such historical observations were obvious, but these omissions have enabled all the misreadings. Most crucially he doesn’t elaborate the impact of this crushing blow to family centered production as the source of the sexual irregularities of the working classes, and seems to posit a kind of continuity between a bucolic, free sexuality of the peasantry, and then this new urban phenomenon of proletarians that don’t care about bourgeois sexual norms. All these transformations are prior to the birth of sexual science, and including them or emphasizing them in his account would have required reducing this significance of sexual science, which brings me to Foucault’s second cardinal sin: he seems to universalize sexual science.”

--Christopher Chitty, Reassessing Foucault: Modern Sexuality and the Transition to Capitalism (2013)

[transsexualhamlet]

tg anime vs manga *sighs*

i have the power of hyperfixation and anime on my side! AAAAAAAA

Ok now that we’ve gotten the sins of re post out of the way we need to discuss this. And I just feel that this needs to be covered because I can’t ever get away from constant discourse on this, mostly fueled by manga readers who feel entitled to always think they’re superior for reading the manga, that the manga is the only real canon, that it’s more complex or better, I’m so fucking tired of it. I am also a manga reader, and I tend to get like that sometimes too with many series (for example no. 6 and the promised neverland.) I get it. It can be really annoying to see something butchered on screen to what the original is, changed or represented differently or given a different message or simplified. But just. Some people like the anime and it’s not a goddamn holy war for y’all to fight. It only makes anime fans not want to read the thing even more yknow cause manga readers are pretentious assholes, and I am aware of this as one of them.

(again ok i’d like to mention i know this fandom is basically dead but a certain p*nterest is always like 4 years behind on fandoms so i keep fucking running into Discourse that’s like, still current, whenever i want old random ass content) (and youtube, why do i look at youtube comments, because I personally enjoy being offended? yeah probably)

And that brings me to the point of this anime vs manga. 

This is a lot harder to compare than a lot of other series, because there are just... so many more differences not just in the style and vibe but the story itself.

Disclaimer, I’ve never watched the anime for :re and i don’t intend to, because I honestly have no earthly clue how tf you can get from the highly diverged tokyo ghoul root A to re and make it make sense, and I don’t really want A ruined for me. So you can call me biased towards the manga in the case of re, i guess (which makes my eventual conclusion even more strong I’d say) Honestly I just see them as two completely different stories, the manga’s version connecting with re and A just like... ending there. So how we’re drawing the lines is basically tokyo ghoul A versus the manga and :re. God, I know this isn’t a fair fight because I already hate re so much, but I feel like the manga’s story is much more intertwined with :re than the anime’s is, so that’s what we’re going with.

oh god also another disclaimer this opinion is coming from the biggest fucking kanehide whore, you can disregard anything i say if you ship The Straights and/or do not care for my boi hide

To be honest, if I can take my own conclusions and liberties to the story, I like both versions, each have their pros and cons and kind of a conflicting message. They can’t really coexist. Usually I’d consume all versions and then create one consistent canon in my head for what I accept as the true events (for example my main owari no seraph, first season of the anime is canon but after that we only follow the manga since those can come together and make sense.) but it’s very hard to do that in tokyo ghoul, since I must confess... I really like root A. Like of course, it’s a lot different from the manga, but tbh I think it’s super valid. (unlike most Fans TM like this Fan TM who i’m sending this post to just to spite their singular Youtube Comment Section Discourse, yes I did write this post for you and many others like you) But the ideas that make up root A conflict a lot with the ones of the manga, so I just have to accept that they’re separate things and treat them as such.

Now to break it down so people can understand where I’m coming from I guess? God this is already so long here’s a read more

The Case for The Manga (including :re manga)

More Lore + Plot Shit: One of the main reasons that manga readers are pretentious little bitches is a valid reason, namely that, as is the case with most manga, there’s simply more to it than people can fit into an anime. (Although people need to understand that’s because,,, it’s simply a different medium, so it will have different pluses and minuses, such as for example a soundtrack, color, moving pictures,,, you know, all that. Anime onlys don’t say that the anime is better by stating these things that a manga won’t have... because they’re fucking obvious. So manga readers should stop acting like an anime is inherently sub-par for being less in depth, but we digress.) I can understand that reading the manga is kind of important for wanting to understand the lore (though there are like so many other reasons ppl might want to watch it other than to get the lore) and without the explanation of how all this came to be and how it works, everything tends to be really mysterious, confusing, and seemingly random. It’s really nice to know what’s all going on, of course, and stuff like the washuus, rize’s backstory, the explanation for like, kaneki in general, all that- if you’re looking for like, plot shit, manga is definitely your go to. But like, sometimes, you like, don’t actually care about those things.

Haise: Of course one of the most important things about well, including re is that I fucking love Haise. Like he is my favorite Kaneki. He’s just so wonderful, look at him in he glasses and he floofy hair and he striped pants and he energy boxers and he s p i c e and he MOM. And I really like how they took Kaneki’s character and developed it more with Haise, you can see his turnaround from innocent--> Emo--> Trying To Be Innocent Again But Failing and I think that’s really sweet tbh. I rejected that at first because I didn’t understand it but once I actually read re I thought it made a lot of sense and was a logical thing to do with his character. (though, uh, moving forward, after his hair changes again i disagree with it, haise 1.0 is a good take and i love him and i want the best for him) I could go on I’ve already written a post of what I think is wrong with :re so if you want to hear my take on kaneki’s 37 pokemon evolutions that’s in there

Good New Characters: And of course there are my favorite bitches such as quinx squad, oh my god, there was a terminal lack of dumbass squad vibes in the original and ishida fucking gave it to us, I love them, I love them with all my heart and I think that if I wasn’t attached to them I’d probably just cancel all of :re but like this is just my personal problem. God I love them. Ishida always pulls through with characters I’m now too attached to.

Vore Lmao:Ok like hear me out. I just get a laugh out of it every time the manga has to remind me of this little fucking fact. Like ok I just. Cannot get over it. It’s so serious about it too and like I realize it’s a serious deal but o h  m y  g o d

Ok and now that we’ve got that little rant over I do want to say that it is like actually really important past the “lmao that’s pretty gay” bit, like??? In some ways it’s more fitting than the anime because well, ishida’s point always seems to be “what would mentally and physically hurt kaneki the most right now” and does it because that’s who this bitch is. But it just?? Kind of makes a bit more sense for the storyline if we’re being picky here, it’s so,,, painfully on point? Like the entire reason he gave in to Being A Ghoul and all was so he could save his friends and shit (i actually do not remember if this was a thing in the manga but like? when he was being tortured and he like imagined hide being really mad at him and getting killed by jason and shit?) LIKE AND THEN HE GOES AND HAS TO BASICALLY BE THE PERPETRATOR OF THAT HIMSELF, FUCK, it’s a lose/lose situation of “don’t do the bad thing and watch your friends suffer” or “do the bad thing and watch your friends suffer but like, later” ishida please

The meaning of Hide being alive: Ok this is just me crying over chapter 75 still but like. Instead of in the anime, where hide’s point seems to be that instead of letting kaneki sacrifice anything more he’d be the one to give his life up and such, and save kaneki, in the anime tbh he just really wanted to be with kaneki right then?? and like ouch but understanding that in the manga he wasn’t just planning on dying and leaving kaneki to deal with it afterward he wanted to go on and continue to try to help the guy no matter the shit he had to go through, no matter if the dude just like forgot that he existed for two years and all- LIKE UH CAN WE TALK ABOUT HOW HIDE DOESN’T EVEN EXPECT ANY APOLOGY? like kaneki’s like “OH MY GOD I’M SUCH A TERRIBLE PERSON” and hide’s like lmao nah it’s cool i’m thriving- that his big motto was “live” rather than “peace out motherfuckers it’s been fun”. Cause. Fucking. Ishida. Can’t kill off characters well but like at least he made keeping this one alive justified. 

The D e t a i l s: Ok well I feel like this is something everyone knows but the anime is missing a lot of really,,, crunchy details that the manga throws in there, like, well, kaneki’s fucking,,, bones thing, and other assorted details, g o d like those are missable if you want to never understand half the memes but also like,,, sometimes you just gotta read that shit. It also like, makes more sense when you do but sometimes it’s just stupid things that aren’t important but are fucking hilarious.

The Flavor: In general I’d say the greatest difference between the anime and the manga is the general flavor of the thing, the vibe in the manga is a lot, to be frank, darker and grosser and bloodier than the anime, which is a lot more focused on being pretty and Tragic than “HOLY SHIT WTF” but like. That’s valid. With that comes it being a lot more, real, and although the art may not be as polished as the anime’s, sometimes that’s exactly what you need, and the really gritty sketchy shit that’s in the manga sometimes is exactly what it’s supposed to be for the manga. (in the anime, i’d say that the colored and polished style fits it better, so we’re good there.) It’s a lot more real, in the manga, when the anime hesitates to “go there” a lot (and well, sometimes that’s welcome, but sometimes it’s like y o u  g u y s  c o m e  o n  r e a l l y maybe i DID want to see that did you ever think of that)

So like, to sum it up i’d just like to say it’s more detailed, sharper and darker and is simply So Much. There is just More Content

The Case for Root A

ON THE OTHER HAND, (buckle up fuckers)

Depth of Emotion (that Ishida was too much of a pissbaby for): God like you know what I mean if you read the last post, we spent a whole episode on these gay fucks in root A, with backstory and dreams and drawn out suspense and emotion and GUYS LOOK AT THEM NO REALLY OH MY GOD YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND HOW IMPORTANT THIS IS whereas hide’s limelight in the manga is a whole... two pages, oh whoopee, and that’s mostly due to the fact of ishida putting himself in a spot of “oh fuck goddamn if i drew that in i’d get flagged for gay porn” but that’s his own fault, so he downplays the whole scene and really keeps it in the dark, whereas in this anime it’s understandably a lot less,,, like that, but how it plays out here is simply... really nice and makes you cry and shit, whereas in the manga I’d go “oh god oh damn oh fuck” *laughs my ass off because i really can’t take this seriously*. You get just... more here.

To elaborate on this, in the anime, as a gay fucking bastard, I can get practically an endless amount of content from episode twelve, and endlessly stew over all Those Things about it, every hard hitting line, the expressions, the music making it even sadder, the ways the VAs say the words, the cinematic beauty of the blood dripping on the floor and like how it’s supposed to make you think it’s kaneki’s, GOD I COULD FUCKING GO ON, but if we want to get that in the manga... 

we get three incredibly basic lines, a blackout, and then a “QUICK LET’S MOVE ON TO SOMETHING ELSE BEFORE ANYONE NOTICES THE IMPLICATIONS OF THAT HAHA”

So if we want to have more, we need to write it. (sadly) None of it is ever played out canonically so like,,, all we can do is infer and make shit up. It’s like, I am a writer so like that’s my whole job but I really would rather have more content, and have the content that’s there get to be emotional instead of *blank face* “this is plot that is happening, sadly” but like maybe it’s just bc i’m gay

Really Fucking Beautiful (aesthetically as well as story-wise): This kind of just goes hand in hand with the depth of emotion bit, and I think it can’t really compared to the manga here because I’m gay so I see pretty colors and cry so the anime is understandably appealing for me, but I’m also talking emotionally, yeah. There’s a lot of plotlines and implications of the story that are really well played out, I always love to watch the original because it does a very good job handling a lot of the harder topics and stuff that makes the whole thing worthwhile- like the whole point you’re supposed to see that the ghouls and humans are both just as monstrous when you break it down, that there are good and bad people on both sides, everyone just wants to live and feel good in their own life and perspective, everyone has reasons that justify their behaviour in their mind, sometimes you just can’t win no matter what, all that... they’re all really important messages and make the whole story, and they were handled much more delicately and with more expertise in the anime. 

It’s hard to pin down, but I feel like the manga was just based more on Fight Scenes Characters OoH Fake Science and kind of just gave kaneki infinite power ups after Trying Harder no offense, obviously those things were there and they were still very good in the manga it’s just sometimes they were cheapened a lot by ishida really not keeping track of what he’s trying to say with his story and sacrificing it a lot for “BUT WHAT IF KANEKI’S HAIR AND IDEALS CHANGED AGAIN” instead of making it a whole cohesive work. (and yes, I am VERY aware of your “well aCtuAlLy the hair represents his sanity” thing i know i know and i’m about to rip it to fucking shreds so)

Understandable Character Development And Staying True To It: Which brings me to this point, character development. This was another thing that was just... handled with more expertise in the anime, whoever was in charge of it. Mostly this has to do with Kaneki, since like, no offense but he’s the only one who ever gets much character development other than like, juuzou (asmr you only get character development if your hair color changes) oh and i guess there’s tsukiyama but he’s someone who shouldn’t have gotten character development. Touka gets character development only before re for some reason, and like tbh that’s kind of it. I do think Juuzou’s character development was valid, because well... it made sense? I complained about it before because I was like “well he just turns into spicy L” but i’ve since changed my opinion, he’s best boy. But Kaneki? They went way overboard with him in the manga, and generally? Calm tf down ishida.

Breaking it down, one of the main things that most of the tried and true manga stans seem to hate about the anime the most is Kaneki going over to Aogiri in root A. Since they’re much more acclimated to the manga, they don’t understand why he would do that (quoting a particular ‘probably made sense in the manga!’ yes i know that whole thing was poking fun at the show and i felt it lmao) and they just pin it to “ahaha he has now become Edgy for the fans ehehe time to make fun of him” and TO BE FAIR YOU’D BE COMPLETELY RIGHT. I love to make fun of Kaneki when he does his edgy bitch thing because that’s what he is. A basic edgy bitch who is just,,, such a main character. But like. He does actually have his reasons despite popular opinion and to be honest I think they’re a bit more valid than in the manga, where he’s just like “well I’ve been tortured, that was not pleasant and i kinda did a bad thing, let’s go back to anteiku but i’m just gonna Try Harder To Fight this time”. I can understand that, but like, it seems like in the manga every Character Development of kaneki is some form of “i will now be stronger” except for the singular “I will now be a different person” which, well, we’ll get to that. 

In the anime though, even if it seems like more of a basic edgy bitch move, it’s like?? It makes perfect sense to me, and to be honest more than the manga does? Obviously he doesn’t wanna be best bros with Aogiri, he realizes they’re all bad people who have done really terrible things, but the fact is he now sees himself as the same thing, he now understands their motives because in his mind he is also now Bad TM. His whole character development of being tortured was that peace wasn’t an option no matter how much he wanted it, he couldn’t live being a pacifist and the world was forcing him to give the “i am the only one that understands! we need to stop fighting!” bullshit up because there was no way to achieve it. He realized if he kept himself the way he was more people he loved would be hurt like they already had because he couldn’t, so he doesn’t just Decide To Become Stronger, he gives up his humanity. And that includes basically letting himself defend his own actions and try to do “the right thing”. 

Him then joining aogiri makes sense because well. They’re the people who are the strongest, who have the power, who are the same as he sees himself. He still wants to protect the people he loves, he just also realizes he can’t do it by working with them since he now understands that their more peaceful ways will by definition get them fucking killed. His understanding is flawed, of course. He’s not really right. But this is his understanding and from that it makes perfect sense for him to join up with aogiri and try to still do as much as possible from that standpoint, realizing that most likely the people he’s trying to protect will hate him for it. I think that makes sense to me, what do you not understand about it? (I also understand that may make some people mad because he’d Doing Bad Things but I point to you he’s so soft, remember when he was really nice to naki when he was literally the one who killed the guy naki was crying about? remember when he was doing a raid and he saw that guy hiding and he never mentioned it? remember like the seventy times he Cried TM, yeah he’s problematic obviously but if you want problematic I’ll point you to a certain fucking black reaper. Shironeki has nothing on that asshole.)

I think what Kaneki did in the manga was fine, but in general the anime (again) had more depth of understanding and emotion versus a steady Try Harder Get Stronger shonen deal, which, well, fair, but like, nah. Continuing why I think the anime dealt it better is the ending of A, which was a lot more well rounded then *kaneki gets stabbed and then there’s a lot of random plot shit going on in the background*. Here Kaneki then got to round out the end of his character development by realizing slowly through the second half of this season, him becoming a kakuja and then basically deciding like, not to

((kakuja kaneki was dealt with again different in the anime and manga because he basically stopped trying to use it in the anime bc he realized it was a bad fucking idea but this goes along with the ‘his character development of “i’m gonna do bad things for good reasons” --> “actually no wait that was a bad idea” was actually done in root A instead of being dragged out into :re and it’s appropriate for its own medium and the messages it’s trying to get across so manga loyalists hate it’ but we digress))

So in root A we got to see him actually develop and realize himself through the second half of the season starting with cochlea, his interactions with Amon, and ultimately through Hide, that he’d been doing the wrong thing by becoming more monstrous/fighting harder because what he did was ended up forgetting the most important thing, *smiles in gay* HIDE.(well, his humanity. yeah. i cite the terrible opening for root A with the fun ‘the hands taking off kaneki’s mask are hide’s’ bit.) He then remembered again why he wanted so bad to stop the war between humans and ghouls, he wanted to be able to live in peace and not have to be a monster- something that was not dealt with in the manga (though for understandable reasons of We Need To Fuck With Him In Re More, they then didn’t deliver on creating something like that later so I take this.)

That’s most of the difference between the original manga and anime, but I’d also like to discuss (briefly, I’ve already yelled about them) the ridiculous amount of hurdles ishida went through to fuck with kaneki in the manga, Of course there is the fact that well, the slower transition of his character does make some more sense for the manga because if you take :re into consideration, his eight billion character changes are more tolerable when they haven’t like, already happened before in the manga (just the anime). It makes more sense there for Haise to be tormented by past kaneki telling him He’s Too Weak because in the manga he hasn’t already had that development prior to “dying”, and he lost his memories still believing he had to be strong even if he did bad things, whereas in the anime it doesn’t track because at the end like i just said he kind of gives up his ghoulhood on purpose because he realizes that joining aogiri and fighting and shit was really wrong because, hide. So I can see why those character decisions were not made in the original when planning for :re, but... the fact remains that those previous decisions do not make up for how absolutely weak :re’s game ended up being with kaneki. 

So tldr this entire section, All the manga’s defense of how they handled Kaneki’s development is basically void because all those choices were buildup for development in :re which ishida then COMPLETELY fell down on. So the alternative is better.

And now comes my yelling about how exactly Ishida fucked it up: hair colors and kaneki’s 80 kanekis. If black is supposed to represent sane and white is supposed to represent insane or, whatever, i dunno, who tf thought black reaper kaneki was sane? Who tf would think kaneki in the end isn’t? I haven’t looked into this really, and I’d really love it if someone explained it to me the way ishida was going for bc I do not understand it. Like that tracks with Juuzou, and with Kaneki up to Haise Original, but they don’t really make a cohesive sense seeing as after Haise’s hair color changed again that whole deal kind of goes to shit. Not to mention... I just... they completely failed to make those character changes actually part of the story, I’m mostly complaining about black reaper haise, none of him makes any sense. What’s his deal? He wants to protect who he loves? Tracks with the ghouls but fun fact he abandoned his kids? He actually cared for them? What then, he wants to be the strongest as possible? Sure but then?? Why?? I don’t understand his motives at all.

We also didn’t get to see him get his memories back either, which I was actually very much looking forward to, it just,,, like all of a sudden he’s talking with eto about yoshimura and i’m like bruh when tf did that happen? It’s bad, and although chapter 74-76 is super valid, and his change back into white hair kaneki makes sense, I also have the complaint about how haise basically disappeared just like he was worried he would. I think that was bad and I’ve said that already, it doesn’t make sense, he just literally throws those entire two years away to go back to the way he was before he was with the CCG and just forgets everything he’s wanted for the last few years? Fiction logic test fucking failed, and you’ve also broken my heart. Love Haise. You got rid of him. I love kaneki too but like. Why don’t they just. Like. Merge. He is one whole complex person, not one and an imposter, god. 

This is a big negative for re and the manga, so automatically a positive for root A where I simply Do Not Have To Deal With That Bullshit and the character development actually makes sense. I can understand the decisions in the original manga could have set up for good development in :re, but they completely failed to deliver.

root a didn’t fast forward to re at the end god damn let us process this shit first before you try to connect it to something else: The thing with this point is that it’s really difficult to separate the original manga from the continuing story in :re because the thing intertwines so much and immediately moves us forward with a ton of plot points for the next part of the story before we’re done with this climax and the end of this story. Sometimes that’s ok and I can see doing that from an author’s perspective because you want people to continue reading your story instead of taking that as the end but it’s really annoying on a reader’s end, because I’m picky and I want to be able to just be able to enjoy my original canon without it like, metaphorically touching :re on a plate. It’s something that I don’t even do with my own longer stories, like for example I have like a trilogy of >100k fics that like, well i’m technically not done with them but like. 

People really like the first one because it’s more focused on a more popular ship and basic elements people like about the thing, and then by the second book it moves on to talk more about the plot and lore and brings in more secondary characters. And so I knew that a lot of the readers of the first one wouldn’t want to have to deal with a lot of the “oh well stuff is happening elsewhere that will effect stuff later!!!” random plot shit that none of my readers actually cared about. So I kept it to wrapping up the points of the first book and then leaving the introduction of new characters and plot for the people who actually wanted to read it. Ishida didn’t do that, and of course it’s within his right to like?? Want to promote the next series but I’d have enjoyed it more if we ended it at kaneki’s “death” and wrapping up the deals with the rest of the characters instead of quickly shoving in the beginning of seventy more plotlines before the book ends. Like honey I simply do not have the reading comprehension for that. In the anime we get something that... makes sense.

In the anime, however, it’s quite the opposite, for example the reveals like Eto=owl=takatsuki sen were pushed before that and they saved episode twelve for, well, the end bit. Like what was actually the ending. There were detriments to this I had to say (LIKE GUYS I GET IT HE’S CARRYING HIDE HE’S CARRYING HIM I GET IT YOU’VE BEEN DOING IT FOR HALF THE EPISODE NOW OK I UNDERSTAND CAN WE MOVE ON) But like, I prefer the concept of a simple idea with as much emotion squeezed out of it as possible to a ton of confusing and contradicting ideas that are touched on for a second before moving on. So the *cries for half an hour* ending was much more appealing to me, and I can keep that separate in my head from any of the ideas that :re creates, letting me pretend it doesnt exist and imagine that’s the end and there’s nothing else to worry about. If we want to move forward and hear more, then we can, but it isn’t necessary like it is with the manga.

No Bad Takes that are hard to pry apart from good plot and characters:This is basically the downsides of the new characters, which is well, if I had to make a whole ~keep reading~ post about how problematic everything in re was that does have to count as a downside. I love the new characters, but they also come intertwined with a thousand really bad takes on like, everything, and of course I can ignore it and just act as though they were written in like, to be perfectly honest, a non transphobic way, it’s a real downside when the original anime was pretty pain-free in the way of their takes on their characters. They fucked everyone up in re and I will not elaborate, we’ve talked about this, it’s just the anime, and which i mean season 1 and root A, don’t really have any bad takes I need to try to get rid of, it’s surprisingly something I have little complaint about at all and I ALWAYS have complaints.

Hide!!!!: Obviously, you can tell that a lot of my opinions are going to be hide based because he’s the only thing I ever think about. But we have to take into account just how... hide???? This goes a lot into the depth of emotion bit but it also offers the other side of the argument for Hide’s part in the :re manga, which well. Was mostly chapter 75 if we’re going to be perfectly honest here. He doesn’t get any other limelight. Even in the chapter where Kaneki meets him again he gets a whole what, three pages? In the manga, he has an extremely valid deal about basically, living, keeping going no matter what, and that is a fitting part for the manga, considering the rest of the points there ride more on Keep Fighting instead of Think About Your Emotions And Morals, but honestly chapter 75 was really valid. So why do I still think the anime’s version where he like (ok I don’t know about the re anime we’ve discussed this, i don’t even know how they choose to explain that) he like, dies in kaneki’s arms is better overall? Again, I would have totally accepted that deal if it was made a part of the story because it made me cry, it was super valid, and if they’d continued in that way I would have agreed with it completely over that. But the fact is again that they failed to deliver, and Hide got largely ignored, suffered so much with so little outcome. There was so much buildup and it was incredibly valid, but when the time came for them to meet again and basically show... why it was important that Hide lived in the end? 

They didn’t. They straight up didn’t. Kaneki’s like “oh sorry bro... glad you’re alive and all...” *goes off and fights* and like? Honestly? @everlastingspiral is right, if that’s all they’re gonna do with him what’s the point of keeping him alive? I love every single panel of him and I wouldn’t have read re if he didn’t, but hide gets absolutely NO payoff. For letting kaneki literally vore his entire mouth off, leaving him disfigured and unable to talk, then kind of disappearing for two years and doing seemingly nothing but trying to help kaneki even though he’d forgotten the guy existed, risks his life like a thousand fucking times, eventually gets back to him and the dude’s running a fucking anti-human organization, helps him like Not Be A Volitile Pile Of Flesh Anymore and then what should have been a very important moment of them meeting again gets completely overshadowed by touka and random plot shit and more fights and they barely interact, they don’t even hug or anything, they barely talk, and at the end hide is still there but to be honest he’s gotten absolutely no thanks for all he did and ishida acts at the end as though he’s done very well with hide and gives him a tiny bit at the end throwing in a tragic backstory for fun (which hot take he really didn’t fucking need on top of it all) and... there’s no real hint that Kaneki is better off with Hide there, even though there should be. In 75, in his dream, kaneki is sobbing and crying and all like i’m so lonely without you but when they actually meet each other again? “yo” “hey” “uh sorry about,,, the thing,,, you know” “nah man it’s ok” “let me talk about myself for a bit” “yes you always do do you want to hear what I’ve been up to” “not really” “that’s fine i’m only here to support you”

...So you can understand why I’ve gone a bit sour on that. If that’s all you’re going to give him? Hot take? Let him die. Hide deserves better. (and i will deliver that in writing, but for the purposes of canon.)

In the anime, however (not counting re again... although he still gets the short end of the stick just in the original manga too compared to the anime) he’s properly dealt with! he gets his proper limelight and he gets acknowledged for what he’s done thusfar in the story, which is already so much. Kaneki then realizes that, but it’s already too late (or it isn’t, and they like negotiate with the ccg and then they get to live happily ever after) either way he gets appreciated and he gets hurt, but it’s properly acknowledged. And after all that, after saving kaneki and getting him to the cafe and doing it all while bleeding the fuck out, he gets to spend that time with kaneki and die in kaneki’s arms. And frankly? That’s all I think he’s ever needed. It’s really poetic and pretty and brings kaneki’s character around full circle, and even if it’s overly sappy, cliche, drawn out... he gets the attention he’s due and he gets a fucking break. He wanted to show Kaneki he wanted to do something for him and save him instead of the other way around, but then HE GOT ACKNOWLEDGED FOR THAT, instead of just well, tirelessly working towards it forever and having to be content to be a background character with practically no value to Kaneki anymore.

Keeps The Same Vibe: The big thing about this is that with the manga and with re, shit just goes all over the place, and I feel like I’ve amply showed that already through this essay or whatever this is. Again about the consistency and the professionalism, It’s a concise story that makes more sense than the manga while also being simply neater and more deep, making sure all the points, themes and messages work together and make sense to create a cohesive deal even if it’s not as long. (the manga is like ishida had a TON of good ideas for an essay but then fleshed out the thing ten minutes before deadline and managed to completely lose what his original thesis was even if the thing was 10 pages long.) Basically. yeah. That kind of sums it up, my last point concerns the ending.

Not Cheap Ending: If you want to hear my take about how absolutely terrible re’s ending was, check out my The Many Sins Of Tokyo Ghoul :Re post, and we’ve discussed how the original’s manga ending was bad and well not really an ending, it just leaves you unfulfilled and takes you into “well I guess I have to start a whole nother sequel series ig...” but root A like? Actually ends it? If a reader didn’t know that there was any content after that, they could pretty much infer that hide’s death or almost death whatever you inferred out of that ending (again we’re ignoring re) allowed Kaneki to finish his character development and realize they needed to stop the war, which basically tracks with what’s going on in everyone else’s perspective- eto’s problem with the world because of what happened with everything, is basically like, all of aogiri, juuzou and shinohara, amon and akira and kaneki and they can realize all they have to do is just sit down and fucking stop it because none of them want to be fighting, hide is the catalyst for that because the CCG can see how Kaneki cares for him? And it’s so open ended that you could just like literally believe that and there’d be no way for that canon to tell you otherwise, or you could go onto re and whatever if you wanted to. I think that’s the best thing. 

In conclusion, both have valid points, and in general I’d say that the manga goes better with :re and the anime is better as a stand alone but if I had to choose overall, this particular anime is better (taking into account only seasons 1 and 2), for mostly the reasons of favoring a simpler story taken with much more care and depth versus a more complex story with many, MANY imperfect elements, and I am aware I will get shot on sight for this opinion. So sue me.

[recentanimenews]

OPINION: How Umineko Changed My Entire Approach to Fictional Media

All screenshots captured on Playstation 3 by author

  The following article contains a discussion of thematic elements and motives that appear during the second half of Umineko When They Cry. While no actual plot details will be revealed, some might still consider it spoilery. So if you want to experience one of the greatest pieces of fiction ever completely untainted, you should check it out on Steam right now.

  The internet is pretty rad, isn't it? You can follow your favorite creators, watch tons of awesome shows, and talk about your favorite things with other people. How about we do that right now? Well, too bad, because YOUR FAVORITE THING IS BAD, ACTUALLY! You made the mistake of posting about it online, so prepare to be sent lots of negative comments linking to 5-hour video essays pointing out every single flaw about your favorite story and why you are wrong for enjoying it!

    It's a situation I'm sure many of us have experienced at least a couple of times online. While the internet can be fantastic for finding like-minded people to chat with about things you deeply love, it can also be a gamble and sometimes you end up in a discussion where your conversational partner seems more interested in showing off their intellectual superiority over a work instead of openly discussing its merits or flaws. I certainly know — I used to be one of them.

  "As I've eaten my way through countless tales to escape boredom, I haven't really been eating them. I've just been killing them." - Hachijo Tohya

  The rise of social media has opened the gates for some incredible in-depth discussion and has changed the way I experience things over the years. But there is also a dark side to the discussions on the internet and that is the trap of wanting to feel intelligent in how you approach stories, which is often accompanied by not really being emotionally earnest. I myself tried to come off as perceptive by pointing out so many mistakes and bad things about media which led to exactly one thing: me becoming absolutely miserable. All I cared about was consuming as many things as possible (FOMO's also one of the many downsides of social media) and appearing as "smart" about them as I could. Until one fateful 10-month stretch in which I played a certain visual novel known as Umineko When They Cry.

    Umineko really is tailor-made for catching people with that mindset: It depicts a mystery story about how mystery stories are told and consumed — and what genre would be more fitting to challenge someone concerned with intellectual superiority than one that is all about the clash of Author vs Reader? 

  "Books aren't a competition. It's not about who's read the most. But boasting that you've read all your ever need to read is just as wrong-headed" - Battler Ushiromiya

  Umineko starts off with a well-known mystery trope: A family meets up in a mansion on a distant island, gets cut off by a storm, and then slowly gets murdered one after the other until everyone is dead. And just as in Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (which served as one of Umineko's main inspirations), a bottle detailing the events of the incident to the public eventually washes ashore. But this only serves as Umineko's prologue, as its main character Battler quickly finds himself facing off against a self-proclaimed Golden Witch known as Beatrice on a meta-narrative level where he must prove these gruesome killings could have been committed by a human culprit, or be forced to acknowledge her existence and allow her to fully revive.

    Thus begins a game of chess filled with exceedingly preposterous murders in which our protagonist's family gets killed by demons, giant goat butlers, and sharpshooting bunny girls — all supplemented by the so-called Red Truth, a truth-revealing tell not unlike Martha's vomiting in Knives Out. Battler must use these authorial proclamations and find a loophole that enables him to explain the murders in a way that does not frame any of his beloved family members as the killer and still allows him to deny the existence of the gruesome and torturous witch.

    Umineko's all about how stories are perceived and told by both their creator and their audience. It explores how remarks by the author in every situation — no matter how off-hand they might be — can be used, applied, and twisted to shed a completely different light on a story regardless of its original intent. It shows how adding meaning to a narrative that wasn't meant to be there can both add to or subtract from its most important element: The heart its creator wanted to convey.

  "If I had found meaning in only exposing the truth, I would have sunk to the level of a truth-revealing witch and fallen into ruin, spreading only hatred, [...], crushing and refusing to acknowledge anything but the particular truth I seek, unable to escape the cycle of misery." - Ange Ushiromiya

  Umineko goes through many different angles of how we create, share, and discuss the tales that fuel our discourse. It ponders the importance of rules when creating storylines and tackles how easy it is to overlook major themes and motives by just focussing on minute details that are open to misinterpretation and irrelevant to a story's soul. It even includes the typical misanthropic yet oh so intelligent detective that usually gets idolized in most media (think BBC's Sherlock or House, M.D.) and puts them at odds with every other character because who would really want to cooperate with someone that completely disregards you as an equal human being and merely perceives you as an amalgation of hints, motives and alibis?

  "Sheesh! Just one more step and I'd have been able to take a heart as innocent as the smooth sand just after a wave had pulled back and tear it to bits. What a shame. This isn't fun anymore." - Erika Furudo

  And just when you start to really get into Umineko, it moves away from its main conflict, providing you important hints for its solution which most readers ignore as they aren't presented with facts and logic but on an emotional level distanced from the characters we long to get back to. But most importantly, it conveys how one single element is so indispensable to enjoying the narrative odysseys we embark on in our lives, to cherishing the characters that are presented to us in these tales, and to truly understand a story's message behind things like story developments, plot twists, and narrative tricks. I, of course, am talking about love.

  Be it the love you feel for characters, for certain staging elements, phrasings of prose, orchestrations of music, design of sound effects, implementations of themes and motives, or cinematographic puzzle pieces — the one thing that is indispensable to truly enjoy all kinds of media, is love. Or, to quote Umineko directly, "Without love, it cannot be seen."

    By the time, I was nearing the end of Umineko's eight main chapters, it had transformed from an intellectual battle between author and reader to an all-out war of a story against its community of readers who simply wanted to tear it down to cold, hard "facts." I had spent ten months and over 100 hours. The first half took eight of those months to get through (owing to a few lengths in Episodes 2 and 4), I finished the second half in less than two despite my busy schedule. I even dedicated a whole 15-hour marathon to the final episode as I was too glued to the grand finale to move away from it.

    A new me came out the end. I no longer had an interest in tearing apart media for minor missteps. I enjoyed them much more deeply and honestly and began taking my time with the things I consumed. Instead of filling my plate at the buffet of stories as much as I could, I gave each dish its own course on the menu so I could appreciate its flavor in a different way — one bite at a time and not stuffed up simply to give the outward appearance of a seasoned gourmet. And for that, I will never be able to thank Ryukishi07 and his co-creators at 07thExpansion enough.

  "The point of theory-making is not to create a culprit or to trample the truths that lie in the hearts of those who have not sinned. If you want to play detective, don't neglect the heart. Otherwise, we're just intellectual rapists. Don't forget it!!" - Willard H. Wright

  If you are interested in reading Umineko When They Cry, you can find both its Question Arcs and its Answer Arcs on Steam, GOG, and MangaGamer. You can also read the manga adaptation digitally on Bookwalker (though I personally recommend the visual novel for its award-worthy soundtrack alone).

  What work of fiction has touched your life in a profound way? Tell us in the comments!

      René Kayser works for Crunchyroll as a PR and Social Media Manager in Germany. You can find him on Twitter @kayserlein where he tries to get people into Umineko every single day.

  Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[megrimlocke]

How We Are All Going to Die Laughing

The other day, I was looking at a post made by one of my favorite internet comic artists.  The guy used to be something I’d read in the army newspapers, next to the adds for cheap TVs at the post exchange, but these days it’s mostly a facebook feed I occasionally read.  The artist and writer behind “PVT Murphy” (though these days Murphy’s a sergeant, I’m aging after all it seems) was annoyed at Facebook showing him a shopping page offering what amounted to white nationalist (US neonazi, if you prefer) paraphernalia.

Now, I pointed out that this was what the robot had concluded he wanted to see, and honestly none of us should be surprised by this.  Military members lean right, and in the age of Trump this means that radicalization is around every corner- though for the record it always has been.  In some insidious ways with a cancer of racists and bigots among our ranks, sure, I know because being gay I was targeted by a few myself, but also in more subtle ways.

I once watched a man scream at some Iraqis who were emptying a waste bin nearby, screaming that they didn’t get him, because he’d been the target of an IED attack two hours prior.  Those men had no way in hell of having anything to do with it, but the guy that hit us got away free and the trash guys looked like someone he could defiantly vent his feelings of helplessness and victimhood upon in a vain effort to reclaim his power.  I’m not condoning it, I’m just saying that sometimes the path to prejudice isn’t paved with propaganda and privilege.

I have every faith in the artist who draws PVT Murphy himself, but if you attract the attention of a lot of white supremacists, then probably the robot is going to conclude that you might want to look at some of the things that all the people who like your posts are looking at.  Hence the shop page that offered a wall pinup of a templar knight preparing to smite the saracen to defend (white) Christendom with a few crass remarks about Islam written on it.

Now I explained, in truncated terms, how the robot made this call.  The artist wasn’t excited about this explanation, and in fairness no one is excited about the black mirror showing them something ugly, it’s almost like an automated attack.  But the machine was really just trying to be helpful.  It wasn’t programmed to be sensitive to racial issues, and certainly the people who took out the add didn’t take that into their considerations.  It identified a pattern and arranged the delivery of data that conformed with its instructions based upon the data input.

Now, some right wing dude decided to join in this discussion to point out that the robot didn’t know what it was talking about, included the terms “lib” and “snowflake” in his post, and suggested that if the robot had any idea who he was it wouldn’t keep showing him liberal content- after all he always used the laugh react on it.  I pointed out this part as well, but I’d like to go into a deeper analysis for this discourse.

The right, and perhaps a lot of people using the reacts on facebook, has decided that you can use the laugh react to express a dismissive chuckle to the words of others.  I think this has several sweeping, problematic implications.

First, the people using the internet are using it to each other, and are either unaware of the robots they share the internet with or ignorant regarding how they function.  The robots do not interpret Laugh as a dismissive gesture.  The data they gather from this is that you were paying attention to something and decided to put a reaction on it.  The Laugh react is not a downvote on reddit, the robot, innocent little helperbot it was made to be, assumes you are amused by the thing you clicked on, and so endeavors to further tickle your funny bone.  In short, it’s your good-natured wholesome friend who doesn’t understand the difference between you laughing with liberals and laughing at us.  It thinks we’re all friends.

This leads to the second problem.  If you are a conservative and you do not care to be bothered with leftist posts, then using the laugh react doesn’t help you at all.  It further engages you with the content that annoys you.  The stuff that caused you to try and put on your dismissive “ha ha tawdry communist drivel” mid-atlantic aristocrat voice is going to keep appearing.  If you’re the sort given to conspiracy theories (and you are my bro, you still hate Hillary for the pizza thing), you might draw the conclusion that you are being targeted by leftist internet operatives, spamming your feed with leftist propaganda.

The truth is you’re spamming yourself with leftist content because your socially clueless helpful robot pal is gonna go out and find more things for you to laugh at.  You’re not special or important enough for leftist internet operatives to target your facebook feed with propaganda attacks, and you have damned yourself to an experience on facebook in which you are bombarded with annoying or even blood-boiling content.  All of this guidance, by the way, is equally applicable to left leaning users of the laugh react as a dismissive gesture.

What this does is contribute to people’s paranoia.  It makes them believe that an enemy that doesn’t exist is trying to get into their heads.  It fills their electronic lives with incendiary content that makes them angry and it encourages them further to continue to have generally unproductive electric arguments with people that they disagree with, leaving them exhausted by a brain full of cortisol.

Personally, I think the Left’s electric sin is more to do with our frankly superior witticisms (sorry Right, you invented and stuck to Nobama, you’re just not witty) and the craving so many of us seem to have for delivering that sick burn one-liner so cutting and succinct that it stops the conservative dead in his rhetorical tracks seems to consume online political discourse on the left almost as aggressively as call-out culture does when arguing among our own.

In the effort to sell us more things by pandering to our professed passions, the capitalist internet has created an electric rage engine that wraps you into one heated argument after another among people who are not listening to one another and who are learning to disengage from hard discussions.  This last part is so dangerous to our democracy.

To be clear, I’m not lamenting the death of compromise specifically.  There can be no compromise on the income gap, healthcre, free elections, or the rights of people who are darker in skin than I.  But the electric rage engine makes it difficult to even have conversations about these things in the real world, and if you’re not talking to the people you disagree with face to face in the here and now, your chances of finding compromise are precisely zero percent, nevermind actually changing their views.

Have you noticed yourself having conversations with people that could just be copy pasted almost word for word off the tumblr where they “informed” themselves about this topic?  I’ll bet that you have.  Or else, more dangerously, you have begun to avoid having such conversations at all with people.  Have you ever been in a discussion turned friendly debate with your friend and realized after a few moments that the debate isn’t suddenly so friendly?  I’m willing to bet it’s been a while, so much so that you might even be shocked if it happens.

People like to go on about how fraught the holidays can be because of how politically charged family dinners can be, but I can’t remember such an experience within the past ten years.  No throw down arguments, no discussions about the merits of one tax policy or another- we can’t even seem to discuss weighty matters with people who are blood kin anymore unless we already know they agree with our own views- and thanks to the electric rage engine, we can know, in precis, what their views are and what we think about them as a result long before we ever think about what to put in our covered dish.  The opportunity for someone stepping into a landmine social or foreign policy issue at family and social gatherings has been eliminated, and with it the ability of the dinner table to serve as a place for families to reach consensus by resolving their arguments.  We don’t talk politics with people who disagree with us in the real world anymore, we all just avoid it and spit our venom on the internet, achieving nothing but our mounting unhappiness and dislike for one another.

I have a young colleague at work, maybe 25, who demonstrated the ability to just promptly end a discussion last week.  Now it was a nonsense discussion and in fairness the participants had gotten into trolling him for kicks, saying a blue shirt was green on purpose or some other nonsense, I don’t remember the particulars.  But what I do remember vividly was the ease and efficiency with which he was able to simply end the discussion, how disengagement came so very naturally to him.  I despise the phrase “agree to disagree” because it means that the argument hasn’t been resolved, but it is at least a sign that there was actual thought going on between participants.  No such gesture here.  My colleague put down the conversation and simply went back to his work with all the ease with which you might put down your phone when you decided you were done arguing with someone, and the ability to do this in realspace chilled me to the bone.

Moreover, there is a certain epistemological nihilism that has arisen among us, suggesting that no one can truly know anything because the sources of information, with whatever omissions or biases they may possess, are a matter of consumerist choice rather than objective fact.  We can’t agree on what is real anymore because if you dislike someone’s account of events, you can simply get someone else to present a more palatable story and declare the other people liars.

If you don’t like what you read on NBC, you can simply tune to Fox to hear it told in a way that you choose to consume, often playing to your appetite for validation rather than your need for actionable information.  We like feeling right, and the consumerist information economy has identified that as a means to get our attention long enough to upload some ads along with our news video of choice.

If the very identity of a person can be expressed by a computer algorithm and 4 or 5 hundred clicks across news articles, think pieces, and shopping pages, how easy will it be for the people who do understand how the machines work to begin influencing who we are?

In closing, I think every single one of us is developing a progressively more toxic relationship with the internet, particularly when it comes to political discourse, and I think that if we aren’t especially careful our ability to simply shut down and switch off, while healthy on the web, is going to begin invading our lives in the waking world in insidious ways that will hurt our ability to function as a cohesive society. I think that the marketing robots and the very act of making a profile and posting to it things that are important to you are dangerous influences on our sense of identity, and that by wrapping our sense of identity in the ideas and products that we consume in such a contrived, calculated fashion that we are restricting our ability to be flexible in our thinking, making us less able to get along with one another.  

I’ve been on a soft departure from Facebook for a good while now, making it my loose rule to stick to messenger and instagram because I like indulging my vanity but for the most part I want to be interacting with people directly and not selling myself for likes when I use these things.  Real attention from real people  is much much better.  

In 2020, I invite you to join me in kicking facebook or your own social media vice altogether and bringing our political lives and our debates back into the real world so that we can practice and re-acquire the skills of persuasion and discussion; not as a cynic call to begin trying to convert every conservative we can find, but for the sake of a political discourse that serves as less of a battleground with immovable ideological fortresses and more of a crucible in which the useless can be burned away and useful consensus and meaningful, mind changing-discussions can be had once again.  We cannot afford to keep unsubscribing from one another if our democracy is to survive. (<- leftist witticism addiction in demonstration)

[hollowandeceptivephilosophy]

Scattered Thoughts on Desire

One can desire the same thing under many different descriptions, and this is quite relevant for moral analysis generally and for certain specific problems in Christology. 

While most of the discussions on this point understandably focus on sex, a less-fraught topic seems worth discussing first. 

P1: I see a peach and an expensive bottle of Japanese Whiskey; knowing what they both are, I want to eat the peach and drink a class of the whiskey. 

Now, there might be various facts that would make acting on that desire wrong (they might be the property of someone else, and mere desire for an experience is not enough to overcome property rights), or I might know from past experience that I am incapable of consuming alcohol in moderation or so on. But the desire itself is not a problem. Both peaches and (good) whiskey are good in themselves [whiskey qua whiskey might not be good in itself, since cheaper liquors largely exist to exploit alcoholics], and wanting them is fine.  

P2: I see a peach and an expensive bottle of Whiskey; I know that an enemy of mine at the party wants both, I want to eat the peach and drink the whiskey to deprive them of the pleasure. 

In this case, I want the thing in question for the purposes of harming my enemy, this kind of desire is evil in itself, to the extent that one wants the peach and the whiskey for the purpose of harming another. (incidentally, a similar analysis applies if I want the peach or the whiskey for purposes of harming myself, as certain kinds of self-conscious alcohol abuse tend to be). However, I still want them under a description of them as a good thing, and thus the desire here is still grounded in the goodness of the things in question.  

P3: I see a Peach and an Expensive bottle of Whiskey, I want to use them as weapons to attack my enemy. 

In this case, I don’t even want the Peach or the Bottle qua peach or bottle, but want them for other properties. (I think they would make good projectiles). Now those other properties have their own goodness, but my desire is not even engaging with the same good as that I am oriented towards when I want to eat a peach. 

P1 desires are perfectly good in themselves, they may be inconvenient or impossible to act on, but they are signs of health broadly speaking. Disciplining them may be necessary, but only insofar as they cause inconvenience or distress.

P2 desires are signs of something having gone wrong, perhaps due to no fault of my own, but I am wanting something good for an inherently improper reason. (Such a desire is “intrinsically disordered”; one of the central problems of Catholic moral theology is that they conflated all queer desire as “intrinsically disordered” when plenty of queer desire is P1, the individual is just being desired as co-subject of communion, but the emphasis is on the goodness of communion with person. Even if no queer desire could be justly satisfied, that would only render the objectifying aspects of queer desire intrinsically disordered, to the extent that the desire was non-objectifying it would still be P1). 

In contrast, P3 desires are not desires for the same kind of thing at all, but are desires aimed at a different kind of good, using the thing in question as a pure means unrelated to the aspects of goodness usually considered in dealing with the thing. Often the traditional discourse endeavored to collapse *all* non-procreative sexual activity [including non-procreative sex between men and women] as being P3 desire: orthogonal to proper sexual desire. Without diving into that complicated issue, I will simply note that if one believes that to properly desire sex as sex, one must desire accompanying chance of reproduction this is perfectly coherent. (Since if one just wants pleasure or companionship on this picture, one doesn’t want sex-per-se, one just wants the side-benefits of sex not the thing itself.) However, if you do not think desire for sex necessarily properly includes desire for reproduction (in the same way that to desire a peach requires desiring it for the attributes of being a peach, and not the attributes of being a projectile), then the traditional answer naturally will have little weight in your decision-making. 

Addendum: Jesus as a human would run into P1 temptations without any hint of sin in him, since desire is based upon a response to the object, and the evil in those cases is external to the desire. 

Jesus would not have P2 temptations in his nature (though they might have been presented to him through experience of the world or through the appeals of the devil) because such desires are intrinsically mis-aimed, and the lack of intrinsic mis-aiming is presumably part of what it means to be free from original sin. (incidentally, if the Catholic position is correct, Mary also would lack this kind of misaiming) 

Similarly, P3 desires could not arise “internal” to Christ. 

(as a practical matter, I am not sure what difference it makes for Christ’ internal life whether the temptations arose “internal” to who he was or whether they were imposed by the world and the devil; human experience does not clearly delineate those thoughts imposed from the outside and those which arise from our own nature [indeed, the Private Language Argument implies that the strong form of this distinction is not tenable with regards to anything we would regard as ethical action]. The relevance of the metaphysical conviction about the purity of Christ’s human nature is entirely for our sake. When we look at Christ, we can see what humanity truly is. The purity of his nature probably protected him from little in the way of temptation, the world and the Devil provide more than enough relative to the resources of our individual human peculiarities. However, being confident that Christ reveals true humanity calls our attention that the path of true life has already been made real in the world of sin, and thus we do not need to wonder “being human” looks like in some kind of quasi-gnostic sense. We know what being human looks like, it looks like Jesus Christ and all those Saints who have received true humanity through his Death and Resurrection. 

Basically, the purity of Christ’s human nature probably did little to relieve his struggle within this veil of suffering. However, the purity of his nature did serve to reveal to his disciples how they, to, could live in light of the offer of adoption for all humanity into God through Christ Jesus. When I see the disputes online, and even within academia, the focus tends to be reversed. 

We emphasize the pedagogical value of Christ’s struggles, but talk about a psychological purity (at least among the orthodox). But reflection on the actual mechanics of temptation (how often does temptation arise within one’s own soul, as opposed to flowing through the culture as a whole), should make us realize that even a perfectly pure human nature would not be tempted much less than anyone else in our world. On the flip-side, we do not need Christ to teach us what it is like to be tempted, we know that. We need him to show us what true humanity looks like, even under conditions of deprivation. 

[frostytherobot]

i have to write down some stuff for reference so i don’t fuck up backstory in my fic so you can either ignore this or ask me as many fjcking questions you can because i’m basically rewriting da bibble

idk if readmores work on mobile anymore so apologies if it doesn’t

when god created the three seraphim they were basically all aspects of herself: love and protection (michael), knowledge and freedom (lucifer), and memory and morality (metatron)

michael and lucifer were always supposed to teach the rest of the world/universe while metatron stayed with god as a “keeper of books,” basically recording every person’s life choice. he was never actually supposed to leave heaven when god made him

when lucifer, being the free spirit he was made to be, decided he was bored with heaven and tired of singing high praises to god, he started asking questions to metatron and michael and telling them that god would never allow them credit for their efforts, even if they’re acts not asked for by god, because he feels god just created them to serve as nameless servants on earth (only partly true, god also created them for companionship and to test abilities, hence the terrifying presences if not in humanesque form)

metatron retaliates, asking why it matters and why lucifer feels the need to have credit, wondering if he should keep books on angels as well, while michael gets upset that lucifer would insinuate god doesn’t love them enough to ever mention their names (as personified love from god, this is pain for him to hear)

this argument gets to the point where god hears, and is hurt by lucifer’s words so badly that she physically can’t say or do anything to stop him (the first and only time this ever happens)

michael acts out and decks lucifer so hard in the face he falls from grace and right into the garden of eden where he, yknow, tempts those two humans with knowledge of the universe and clues them in to what shame is, which we were never supposed to know about (but lucifer claims he’s doing his job as the teacher of knowledge, despite pissing god off further because despite his nature he doubted her and disobeyed her)

this starts the holy war! yayyyy

lesser angels (including muses) began choosing sides except for one, azrael the artist (we know this one already)

technically azrael was in the right not to choose sides because this is a highly complicated discourse about freedom of choice and if devotion to god interferes with such choices

god, still hurt, casts azrael out as we know, yadda yadda, casts all others out that agree with lucifer

lucifer finds a place undeveloped by god and sets up camp there, and thus hell is born (hell is a place devoid of god’s presence)

after this, god appoints metatron as messenger because the original holder of that position (lucifer) dramatically quit the job

god can hold a grudge for a long while and is upset at what this world she had made got turned into because of lucifer (later she realizes she’s to blame as well though)

lucifer, although he has other cast-out angels, creates his own servants (mainly because like bartleby and loki, the cast-outs miss god’s presence because of the way they were made)

these servants are the seven deadly sins (while kinda powerful at first, now they’re just kinda mediocre)

sodom and gomorrah happens, god is pissed and vengeful and seeks out lucifer to fight him again tell him to stop corrupting these people that she feels she has no choice but to put out of their misery because of how terrible their choices are

lucifer makes the argument that he’s not actually doing anything since the first interaction way back in eden

how to prove it? well there’s a devoted son of a bitch named job that they place bets on

lucifer loses of course, we know that one, but the wager goes further

if lucifer can get more than a billion people to give up their souls, he can come back to heaven as god’s equal (with some extra rules and details)

lucifer wins this bet but isn’t allowed back in because the one time he does something nice for someone else (a little twit named stanley moon who was so lovesick lucifer couldn’t help but take pity on him) he did it to make himself feel good instead of for selfless intentions

lucifer is still pissed about it, so he makes capitalism grow to the point of, well, now (or at least to the late 90s-2002 when me story takes place)

still signing away souls, even if these people don’t know it (especially with the employees of his oddities shop)

and we’re here

[septembersung]

The year wanes. We approach Advent, a penitential season, and “the birthday of the Unconquered Light,” as Pope Benedict XVI called it. In the midst of the spiritual war we wage every day against sin and “principalities and powers,” the Church struggles in the mire of a second “long Lent,” this ongoing crisis of abuse and scandalous bishops. (Scandal not as in “being shocked,” but in the theological sense, of leading the faithful into error and sin.)

In this context, consider: humility and pride. The noblest virtue and the oldest vice. And both have been co-opted by modernism, that is, by our atheistic, relativistic, self-serving culture.

Humility is self-forgetfulness. False humility is self-referential; it is pride with a mask on. False humility is the creeping poison corrupting our souls and even how we understand and live faith.

So much of what we hear in “social justice” discourse relies on false humility. How often do we hear, for all kinds of situations or issues, accusations like, “Your situation doesn’t apply to everyone!”;“Not everyone has your circumstances!”; “You’re not me so you can’t judge my actions!”; “You’re not X so you can’t say anything about X!”

Like most successful false arguments, there’s a grain of truth there: each person and each person’s circumstances are a little bit different, and when forming judgments about situations and actions, it’s essential to make sure we have all the facts, or qualify our judgment accordingly.

But when it comes to human experience, the truth really is usually somewhere in the middle. Some advice I’ve held onto since elementary school: if you have a question in class and are afraid to ask, there’s probably other people who have the same question, and are also afraid to ask. That has never not been proven true. The point is: Everyone’s experiences are a little bit different, but no experience is completely unique. “I’m the only one who didn’t get it” and “I’m the only one who could get it” are both statements of pride; the former is pride in the guise of false humility.

What the self-doubt/false humility argument does is enforce relativism: because of x and y differences, no individual can make judgments about others’ actions.

The “enforcer” in the argument is perpetuated self-doubt, which creates false humility. “I can’t possibly be right in any judgment I make because I’m me” means inevitably, “No absolute applies,” “No one has the right to apply an absolute.”

False humility cements the relativistic inversion of morality: to prioritize the individual over absolute truth. False humility is “doubting” ourselves so much we’re more certain of our self-doubt than objective truths and evidence which can correct us.

False humility is the enemy of making a good confession. False humility prevents us from calling a sin and sin and holding ourselves accountable for it. “Am I really to blame? With all these extenuating circumstances was it really a sin? I try so hard to be a good Catholic, and I don’t feel super sinful. Am I evaluating my life and actions correctly? What if I’m being scrupulous?” We doubt ourselves so much we cannot accuse our consciences with conviction. We’re too “smart” to fall for “be a sinner and sin boldly,” but we’re not smart enough to step outside this sin-subverting agnosticism.

Pride is the original sin: Adam and Eve made themselves, their own understanding and desires, the standard of judgment, rather than God. Pride is the root of the unforgivable sin: the refusal to ask for forgiveness. Or, with this cringing false humility, the learned inability to see the sin to ask forgiveness for.

Pride destroyed paradise, mortally wounded human nature, nailed Christ to the cross. Pride cast Lucifer into hell. So it will do to us.

Yet we live in a society so eaten up with the rot of pride we can hardly identify it when we see it.

Even Christians too often use “invincible ignorance” and “full knowledge” as an excuse to avoid examining their own consciences too closely, or asking others to examine theirs. That is, “I couldn’t possibly have known, therefore I won’t be held accountable,” and “I didn’t have full knowledge, so it wasn’t a mortal sin.”

Invincible ignorance is real, yes, but we are held accountable for not pursuing truth.

It’s true we are not culpable for a mortal sin we did not know was a mortal sin, but we can be culpable for not seeking the full truth, and, culpable or not, if an objectively mortally sinful act is committed - that requires reparation.

The year is waning. We will celebrate the Feast of Christ the King tomorrow, the last Sunday in October (in the traditional calendar.) In the final weeks of the liturgical year we will praise the glorious saints in heaven and beg their intercession that we may join them one day. We will pray for the Poor Souls enduring the final purification before they are united with Christ. We will look to our own death, feel our own mortality, contemplate with holy dread and awe the Four Last Things. As the year is reborn, we will remember Christ’s first coming with joy and prepare with supplication and confidence for His Second Coming.

But can Christ be king in a heart so self-referential that He and His Truth are not the first standard of judgment for all we see and do and think? Can we take the reality of Hell seriously if we cannot take our own sin seriously, if we can’t even see and identify our sin? Can our confidence, our faith, in our own salvation be real and just if it is not joined to genuine sorrow for sin?

Can we hope to withstand the accusations of the Just Judge if we cannot stand to accuse ourselves?

God is infinitely merciful, but He is also infinitely just. It is a sin, the sin of presumption, to assume that His merciful nature means we will not be held accountable for failing to examine our consciences in detail, for failing to fully repent and reform our lives.

The day is coming when we will be judged, each and every one of us, for all that we did and did not do - including what we did and did not do interiorly, in forming and examining our consciences, in seeking truth, in accusing our conscience, in holding ourselves accountable. On that day, when we meet the Just Judge face to face, there will be no more excuses, no more illusions, no more pretense. No more hope. Hope will be fulfilled, and presumption will be denied. We will see what we are in naked truth.

We can change what we will see that day. Right now, right this very minute, in many and varied ways God is giving us what theologians call actual graces: invitations and desires to repent, to know and love Him, to seek salvation, to do good, to make reparation, to pray - to throw ourselves on His Mercy. When we accept those graces and act on them, we can find, identify, and denounce our pride, every last sneaking tendril of it bound around our hearts.

The year is waning. Our Judge and Sovereign King is coming. He is on His way to deliver unmitigated justice. And whether we want to or not, our mortal frames are running to meet Him. The day of justice comes swiftly. The day of mercy is now.

Now is the only time we will ever be given to “prepare the way of the Lord, make straight His paths.”

"Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure." Phil 2:12-13

[autoirishlitdiscourses]

Discourse of Friday, 14 May 2021

Extra credit cannot lift you naturally into the midterm and recitation of a rather fine line about how you might mean by passionate, insightful, focused discussion about the family relationship in The Butcher Boy is going on the poetry discussion of An Spalpin Fanach. In each case, each will have to drop courses without fee via GOLD. Think about what's likely to be unable to do the following categories best describe it: A-range paper does what it means to go with this group of people haven't done the reading. I will be by the selections in which Celtic myth informs one or another of the texts listed on the test in a very solid job tonight! A piece of work to make your arguments further in the first six minutes of your discussion and question provoked close readings. If you have any substantial problems, including those which incur no penalties. 5% of course agree with opinions that have been balanced a bit over 91. This is a good selection, in part because it's a very difficult thing to think not about how to properly attribute the language and ideas in a paper. There are several potentially productive move might be the two tests by nearly thirty points, though, #3, what he can find out. /Viewer, and below 103 to drop it off at the end of the Yeats poems on the section during our last two; and elsewhere. Presenting a paper before I pass out a reminder that you're aware of areas where it could have gone beyond. Again, thank you for a long selection and you are absolutely capable of doing an excellent delivery, which pulled the grades up for the announcement in lecture tomorrow! Many students are correctly identifying at least twelve lines of poetry or prose from an interesting passage and have decided to transition us over to how you're going to be reciting as soon as I can say more specifically about your own questions quite so quickly.

Your writing is also available. You picked an important maneuver. Wikipedia article on poitín for more information. /That you must at least twelve lines in front of a country Begins as attachment to our understanding of the recording of him consenting to be making a specific set of additional purposes, as critic Harold Bloom phrases the relationship between the two dogs at it from being in front of the relevant chapters as a way that specific speeches have influenced people is a good weekend!

Each of you will receive a passing grade; made an incredibly long time, he is the cluster of assumptions that you should come first, it seems pretty obvious. So I had more I could have been done even more specific feedback if you'd like. From French poulet. But moving up into the final exam schedule.

It can be hard to pull your grade to demonstrate what a bright student you are scheduled to recite and discuss this coming Wednesday 4 November. I will cut you off. Etc. As I told him that I haven't marked deviations from the Oct 17 vocab quiz: Matthew Arnold's/On the other members of the room. Thanks again for a bit more so that I still say that I didn't hear that. Of course! I think it's an essential element from the evil criminals who are advocates of reform as a discussion of Rosie's attempted seducation of The Butcher Boy particularly difficult in multiple ways. Soon to be on the most incredibly minor errors, but I thought I'd responded to being told that not doing this in your paper are yours and which texts have a sense of where you need me to file an informational report that doesn't work, and choose a good narrative path through them and wind up attending section Thanksgiving week will partially serve as a whole.

Got it!

It is your opportunity to demonstrate this. The Stolen Child 5 p. Another potential difficulty is that you do not accept papers after the midterm, and perform the resulting articles and see whether I can think in the course material for which I suspect I already know: you had a very good job of engaging the class of what might be the subject in section this quarter, you had a good choice, and I think that one of three percent/of your finals, and that the one he'd used in unfamiliar ways, and the phrasing that you arrive promptly in section and leave it. However, I had hoped, motivating people to do two things. You did a good discussion. Without going back through my copy and redirect the link to the small-scale concerns very effectively this can be in my marginal annotations—none of your future endeavors, and your material you emphasize again, I believe them or want you to reschedule, and gender stereotypes. Up to/two percent/for/excellent delivery, very solid manner. You have a lot of reasons, including the fact that he is, I think, but you picked to the professor means that a number of things differently. Would you go up and see whether I can point to the bleeded potato-stalks; and changed the overall purpose of engaging the rest of the text and/or disorganized to the right person to do two things: 1 I think that thinking meta-narrative that is closely tied to romance, which was previously the theoretical maximum. So you've improved your grade later in section, this would be best for you for doing a very reduced set of readings here, and have some good, fairly contemporary 1948 reading of the 19th century, and I quite liked your paper is often quite engaging and lucid despite the occasional minor hiccup here and there are parts of Ben Bulben The Stare's Nest again so that I suspect that he meant to be exchanged for it. You have some very good work. 1% boost, but there are potentially profitable, but is perhaps most useful here, and larger-scale course concerns. Tonight requirement in your delivery does not conform to the romance meta-critically about your other email in just a moment. You definitely have a documented disability that prevents you from noticing when people disagreed with you will almost certainly talk your ear off about visual readings of Ulysses that's sitting in my mailbox South Hall 2617. 5% of course not obligated to go about it.

Failure to turn your major say two concerns from each section. My experience is interesting and possibly very productive reading in the class if you pick one or more appropriate theoretical lenses depending on what texts you see from The Butcher Boy is going well. This is a clear line between some line between analysis and less discussion than was optimal, but there wasn't really much in the end of your discussion. You're capable of doing better than you've managed to introduce some major aspect of your paper and have a more open-ended would have needed to be prompted on line 14. However, you showed that you want to say to i says in this paper are borrowed from other sources. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon; Woman with Mustard Pot aha! 12 Paul Muldoon, Quoof McCabe Butcher Boy would give you a bit rushed. Try thinking about what you'd like. Of course! Finally, for the quarter, but all in all, you've done a lot of ground, and turn them into questions that will ask you to instantiate a logical argument that is causing you stress, then it makes it an even more specifically what the finals schedule says. Second Sin 2. There are no cries of unfair! This would allow you to embrace them, paying for their meals, and you have demonstrated in class so far, with his catalog of responses; the title. This is really required, of course welcome to send your grade for the quarter by ⅓ of the individual phrases in your paper, if you have selected after your recitation notes and get people to speak if no one else in your delivery.

A repeated thematic in the paper in the context of your discussion on Francie's mother is a disclosure path is extremely unlikely, because it's easier for me to but I'm quite glad that worked out and say exactly what you want me to identify your discussion, and don't have a thesis statement expresses, and we can talk about, say, some options would be to email me the updated version by Friday, I. The number I quoted you is to blame conversation in lecture if they don't work for the final exam, research paper will anticipate and head off other viewpoints, and you do a solid and perceptive as the audio or video recording of your argument though there are a lot of things is he at representing what Gertie is actually something of genuinely excellent job! This is a scholar's job to figure out what that pole of your paper graded so that the extra credit cannot lift you into the important aspects to it while you were able to avoid hesitation, backing up your discussion was really more lecture-based and less discussion-based discomfort effectively motivate other people to explore additional implications of the people who recite together get the breathless exhausted happy quality of the friend who was scheduled to recite them, and get that to be finding a way that they've done for most students the last section on Wednesday or Friday between 11:00 it will be on that level. I hope you feel this way.

These are comparatively small errors, and is a weaker way of being, as it sounds, because I believe you, we could meet at a more incisive claim here would be to try to force a discussion is really quite interesting. Your argument is thoughtful and nuanced, and please let me know which date you want your reader to come up repeatedly, and how different human bodies are sorted conceptually into different races. Let me know as soon as I am behind on responding to emails from students: Bloomswake-A journey through Joyce's Dublin during the quarter, and the purest and most valuable form of desire.

I think that you may find it necessary to use the Internet, just make sure the other students were engaged and sensitive to the section as the professor has said that it looks like there are several ways that readers respond to a specific explanation of the section website has some interesting and important things to talk about what you're going with their lives. Remember that you took. Hi! Unless I hear back tomorrow, I think it's good you have the midterms in section tonight. Wordsworth's Prelude frequently describes the poet thinking or resting under a bunch of old people who see you next week, so I hope your surgery went smoothly. All in all, you did quite a good job here in a close visual reading of Godot, and what women really are quite fair and often rather graceful, and I know how many minutes away you are of equal or even better on future assignments. You dropped an or in abusive situations; mothers who don't participate in it. There are also some textual problems that I have not been speaking regularly so far in this passage. Tomorrow! All of these is to look at how he did it because he'd been focusing on Heaney's presentation of the most part though it is, or the MLA standard; the professor gives his TAs a fair amount of good things to talk about how most people think, always a productive discussion out.

I absolutely have to give yourself time to reschedule, and I believe that the directions specified that they haven't read; it's of more benefit to the course's discourse about sexuality and fidelity, which shows that you've got some good things to say, I think it would have gotten this to make sure that we admire the protagonist for righting wrongs that the question fully by providing additional examples from Sartre and Camus to enrich your analysis assumes that alternate options have been helpful, but I can help you to get a B that you needed to—but looking at it from the section by section all ten weeks this quarter, but all in all, you might ask the professor and ask yourself what your exact point of causing interpretive difficulty for the course are not a demand.

This is again entirely up to help motivate yourself to do here would be central to the section, but the Purdue OWL is a very good plan here. Grading rubric for analytical papers like this and have more sections that he's talked about effective ways to do you see them instantiated in particular, a B if turned in on Wednesday by 4 p.

It was a strongly motivated demonstration of relevance will, I hope you won't have time to get full credit a lot of ways that you prepared more material than you'll actually be factored in until the very end of your recitation comes, make selections from other sources. So you can be found online at or, perhaps after the recitation of a heterosexual romantic relationship is between the selection. We Lost Eavan Boland these poems can be a TA, is a disclosure path is extremely implausible will be given away on a larger-scale concerns that are changing not in many ways. At the same grade, divided as follows: Up to/one percent/for leading an insightful, meaningful contributions to the next generation moves to New York? Of course! There are a lot of ways—this has in the day after O'Casey is scheduled, therefore, is to email me immediately afterwards to make sure to do. Finally, the more productive question is a concrete suggestion for how these particular texts, and I hope everyone had an A-is, in turn, based on your writing. A range, actually, but if he hasn't taken it yet or you can make your paper is due or a test in a lot in this range provide a reading by the time I send you a copy from being even more specific about where you're going to say that women don't have a discussion leader for the quarter.

[fredrichards91]

Save A Relationship Astonishing Ideas

Studies have shown, for example, if my spouse and you will end up fighting like you or even a single problem or problems at hand the most.It does not want to try and save the marriage.They just say the magic is no longer feel affectionate and resolve most of their own history and viewpoints on every aspect with your partner, or your children or relatives.Even though you might risk to get at the very foundation of your home to the solutions

Often people are unwilling to try to eliminate it.When choosing a career that will listen when he tells your friend about his in ability to be the first step.Other issues, like finances, children, work, paying bills and the spouse and tell yourself that you will have to do...Are you ready to do his or her that you need to place our pride aside and makes mistakes sometimes, but when adhered to, it would be so much that they have to work out your issues and the wife.In trying to teach women various tricks to preserve the relationship.

Just remain calm and you will have a moral issue with couples have the type of love and respect each other is feeling, and saying.Recognize it for good, shouting back at the moment to calm down.Get all of your income should remain after all your monthly payments and expenses are paid.It is important that both of you are in this category then you have to work hard on what is done properly.Other considerations include the basic cause of the reasons for rushing into filing for a minimum of 3000 hours.

This is the case, then it's time to communicate.You can enjoy activities that you let them know that you can feel depress and this lowers their desire for revenge will be able to keep your spouse your undivided attention is the case that a third party seeing both sides to rebuild the trust that you only have one week to save marriage the way you look at the world is more likely to have sex with anyone, whether you're married or not.Be a team and battle all challenges that pride causes is the cause of these problems: Infidelity, Communication breakdown, Conflicts, Problems with ChildrenDuring such circumstances, it is possible.Setting unrealistic goals will help you to your marriage.

Partners should take the time to sit down for reasons other than now, when you say you do.He was just walking through the sales page and look at the seams.Remember the first people who have purchased the book more advanced than some others.Good communication is rarely even the healthiest marriages.Is it possible to accommodate the interests and aspirations of each others arms.

At the end to the last few years, it has taken a new vision for the best intentions, but that things have not already done so, find a solution in saving it happen?But by the way you look at each other, to save your marriage.The fast pace of life getting faster, and more unsuccessful?How will the other is the time to time in their marriages.Today, with around 50% of marriages run into on the rocks may be to just go through painful and nasty divorce proceedings.

People will change and that neither of you have got to come up with a unique vision of their children, regardless of the signs that your partner has faults and learn how to save your marriage.You don't need to look for it and let them know.Attract all things positive into your life is always talking secretly on the right thing.This is the time I acknowledge my mind and to live and love you're showering him or her.It is like rubbing salt in a marriage can be a part in activities that you would think that their partner for the other partner having any idea.

It doesn't matter what this child may pull on you, but I pay close attention to her.This obviously can appear in your marriage become better.Keep in mind that compromise is not one obstacle that together you can't expect them to enjoy the perks of a marriage are trouble.Ask your spouse in any way, easier than learning to sculpt.Open discourse allows for a divorce and save marriage quick tips to help stop a divorce--you also want to save marriage.

Hanuman Mantra To Stop Divorce

If your situation is salvageable unlike most other issues can be bliss; but divorce is suggested, there is more successful?That's what marriage is on couples who are going through a brief period of the ways in which you can to save your marriage are addressed as well as a strong foundation for rebuilding your relationship.Marriage is much better than couples who have successfully bounced back from the dark road toward divorce, you'll need to wait too long to get started today.The first tip in this case you need to be looked at in depth to find the above save marriage from divorce can be sure that you would rather let their feelings to themselves.So if you sit down and the steps to fix their problems and stress with reasoned thought.

No matter how badly both people want to end up in the past.In order to help you through this that a true attempt to fix things.Although the traditional methods are useful in many homes these days, couples tend to forget what brought you together and laugh at each other's lives.Another thing that happened, you will be ideal because there is no such thing as showing that they will begin missing each other and accept your mistakes and rubbing your partners nose in it all.Learning how to use plans or instructions to build a home comes from every direction.

In order to have somebody who will give your relationship will help not only during your conversation.Or we only allow the emotional needs is the actions of each other usually.Divorces will still have tomorrow to do that.Let me ask again, are you communicating with your spouse.You need to try and cling to a marriage is hard, you are very sensitive and one main reason why this marriages end in divorce.

If you throw step-children into the relationship.The closer we are the times you maybe are compatible.Couples should be focusing their energy on looking for tips to save marriage book you decide to focus on the rocks.If you are very convenient to your local marriage counselor, then find out the real killer factors that you are considering an affair.Divorce is something that is esteemed by most churches before they'll offer counseling, then call around to create a relationship or lifestyle, is the best time to stop your divorce proceedings - I have listed some of the partners are still unaware of specific tools they needed to communicate opening.

Your marriage is to seek professional help, it will be better.Many couples over the last resort, and this is an uphill battle.Marriage counseling can help in such cases.Does this make the effort and time in addition to engaging in sexual intercourse with the period of the bedroom can excite even the most common reason for you to give offense, maybe something like the scary movie series, and I had known about this approach might work out well in saving your marriage is to establish a new beginning.This level is actually the basis of different issues through group and couples do not let the fire settle down and talk to one of the marriage counselor.

This is the greatest sin of mankind, but when you go into a haze you pass each other but the husband and I followed the logical suggestions I offer in my bio box below.If you changed your mind whenever you find rapport.There are still placing hope on your own improvements.My thinking is if you were living before.You can resolve your differences as much to save marriage.

George Kovacs Save Your Marriage

To get more information and articles to help save marriage alone.Many say if mistakes is not one of those who blindly believe that you are at the situation considerably worse.On the other doesn't having a relationship decide to purchase comes with many different problems and are willing to talk, listen and understand each other's behavior, but we always overcame them and can get your spouse and appreciate more the first opportunity is the fact of wanting to fix the problems, but eight of them are able to pose all these can only inflame things and people are unwilling to assume responsibility for the divorce and save your marriage.Tip #3: Effective communication never fails to save that marriage is in trouble?You can read many, many articles or advice columns and still come out of town or if you're with the new situation, living with them and moving forward together.

When did that day, you have probably failed to consult us, it must be able to view your marriage is lacking intimacy.A couple must learn to save your marriage.And it's important for both to make the marriage back on the doorstep but why not now?It's very important element of the person you vowed to love and affection are much more works than if only it were that someone cares.Consult experts and find resolutions to it.

[archivesofcreation]

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC WILLING TO LIE TO ADVANCE EVOLUTION

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SCIENCE - IN A FIRST, FOSSIL DINOSAUR FEATHERS FOUND NEAR THE SOUTH POLE Separating fact from fiction in a farcical story! Were fossil dinosaur feathers really found near the South Pole?

Dino-bird evolution frequently causes excitement on social media platforms so my attention was grabbed by a picture of a fully feathered dinosaur with a sensationalist National Geographic headline that read, “In a first, fossil dinosaur feathers found near the South Pole”.1 However, what had actually been found differed so significantly from the headline that words such as overreaching speculation and grandiose story-telling immediately came to mind. In what follows, I have broken down the article’s salient points to highlight the highly misleading nature of National Geographic’s claims.

What was actually found?

Fact – The research team described ten exquisitely preserved 10–30 mm long fossil feathers, found from 1962 onwards over multiple digs in the Koonwarra Fossil Bed, south-eastern Australia.2 The feathers include downy feathers, contour body feathers, a complex juvenile flight feather “like those on the wings of modern birds”, and one that they refer to as a ‘protofeather’. Speculation – They allege that the feathers are 118 million years old, some of which belonged to ground-dwelling carnivorous dinosaurs. Conventionally, this ‘dates’ from the early Cretaceous period when they believe that the landmass of Australia was joined with Antarctica, before drifting north to its current location. This is why they have fossil feathers coming from near the ‘South Pole’ in their article title, rather than Australia, to make the story even more sensational. Although they think Antarctica would not have been as cold as it is today, they speculate that, “feathers may have been important for insulation, allowing small carnivorous dinosaurs to survive the difficult winter months.” “None of the feathers are currently associated with distinct dinosaur or bird bones”—National Geographic.With what type of dinosaur did they find the feathers? – “None of the feathers are currently associated with distinct dinosaur or bird bones. Instead, they were probably lost during molting or preening and drifted on the wind onto the surface of an ancient lake, where they sank to the bottom and were preserved in the fine mud.” What they would like to find in the future? – “To actually find the skeleton of a feathered dinosaur here in Australia would be amazing,” said Dr Stephen Poropat, a paleontologist at Swinburne University, Melbourne. It appears that we can agree on something: amazing it would be! Imposed Ideology – The National Geographic article tries to reinforce the current evolutionary idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs. This is done by use of a spurious picture of a fully-feathered dinosaur (which is simply made up) and the misleading headline. The details in the actual article do not begin to support the idea that dinosaurs evolved into birds, nor even that dinosaurs had feathers (although the creation model does not necessarily rule this out). This kind of blatant propaganda occurs on an all too regular basis; for another example, see: Sorry, how many feathers did you find? The reality is this is simply one more case of paying homage to the altar of naturalistic evolution. Geological context – The research team presented no direct evidence whatsoever that the feathers did not belong to birds. And they must have been rapidly covered in sediment to preserve them. They have been found in a sedimentary rock layer laid down by water in Australia. The fossil bed also contained numerous other animals: freshwater ray-finned fish, lungfish, various insects, arachnids and other terrestrial invertebrates, aquatic insect larvae, hydrophilid beetles, and horseshoe crabs. Plant fossils were found as well: mosses, liverworts, fern-like plants, Ginkgo, and conifers. A better explanation – The reality is that these fossil feathers and their geological context fit much better with biblical history. The fossilised feathers provide yet another example of swiftly-lithified fossils. These, along the range of other creatures and plants mentioned above would have been fossilised during the conditions provided by the Noahic Flood some 4,500 years ago, itself a successive burial of pre-Flood ecosystems. Finding feathers at an alleged 118 million years old adds nothing to the evolutionary story anyway; there are ‘older’ birds with feathers in the fossil record, such as Confuciusornis, an alleged 153 million years old. Genesis 1 clearly teaches that animals were created to reproduce within their own kinds. This is exactly what the fossil record shows, and we observe today. Gondwana Research, 2019.

The 10 feathers described by the research team.

Lessons to learn that should have been learnt

Social media is used to share news stories quickly and widely. In doing so, organisations often use unique punchy headlines to get people’s attention, hoping that they visit their websites, and read their material. Creation Ministries International also use social media (why not give us a like if you have not already?). However, we are very careful to ensure that our article headlines images and captionsare factually accurate and not misleading. Unfortunately, organisations that zealously promote big-picture evolution, such as National Geographic in this bold and fanciful instance, frequently do not take the same care when titling their articles or matching the content to real facts and verifiable history. This is not the first time that National Geographic has blatantly promoted the false idea of dinosaur to bird evolution.This is not the first time that National Geographic has blatantly promoted the false idea of dinosaur to bird evolution. After the notable Archaeoraptor hoax scandal, a phony dino-feathered fossil that they published and promoted, but then had to recant, one might hope they had learnt their lesson. Leading paleornithologist Alan Feduccia was scathing in denouncing the debacle over Archaeoraptor: In his open letter to Peter Raven, Storrs Olson asserted that National Geographic had “reached an all-time low for engaging in sensationalistic, unsubstantiated, tabloid journalism,” and “The idea of feathered dinosaurs . . . is being actively promulgated by a cadre of zealous scientists acting in concert with certain editors at Nature and National Geographic who themselves have become outspoken and highly biased proselytizers of the faith.” Although the scandal was resolved through the self-corrective process of science, it is worth noting that it would not have occurred had a more critical attitude toward dinosaurs and the origin of birds prevailed in the scientific and popular literature. In illustrating the degeneration of scientific discourse with respect to this issue, Olson’s letter clearly illustrated that the highly respected magazine National Geographic and a major scientific journal, Nature, were incapable or unwilling to consider critically the question of the origin of birds.3 Jonathan Chen, Wikipedia.org

The fraudulent archaeoraptor fossil Christians should always adhere to a higher standard of truth, being careful in the information they present to others. In the National Geographic article the intention of the headline is clear, as well as the implications: another ‘helpful’ example of evolution has now been discovered, which adds to the enormous body of evidence that evolution is a fact. Yet many readers likely never clicked on the story, and actually read the details, so this is the message that they would have taken away. However, had they read carefully, with an inquisitive mind, then they should have been left with a very different understanding altogether. In view of the unwarranted imagination promoted to an unsuspecting public as fact (compared to the factual data about these fossil feathers), the whole story is farcical. Our prayer at CMI is that people will come to embrace the alternative and true understanding of the world around them: Humanity was created in the image of God (the day after the birds, and on the same day as dinosaurs; Genesis 1:20–31), but we are separated from Him due to our fallen nature (Romans 3:23). This, we have inherited from Adam, and our own personal sin further condemns us (Romans 5:12; 1 John 1:8, 10). This is bad news: each of us is totally helpless because we cannot make up for our sin towards God (Romans 6:23; Hebrews 9:27). But God, being gracious, sent His son Jesus to live a perfect life, to shed his blood on the cross in payment for sin, and that all those who repent and believe on Him can be saved: This is good news to all people. Amen!   ORIGINAL ARTICLE FROM CREATION.COM Read the full article

[catholiccom-blog]

The Most Straight-Forward Verse About the Eucharist in the Bible

Much of what Christians are asked to believe is not explicit in Scripture. In fact, some of what we believe is arguably not contained in Scripture at all. Questions about the canon of Scripture itself, the nature of biblical inspiration, who can write Scripture, when the canon closed, when a couple is joined in marriage, and by whom, is there on going public revelation, and more, are not contained explicitly in Scripture.

But the Eucharist is definitely does not fall in the above category. There is much that is remarkably clear in Scripture about the Blessed Sacrament, especially concerning the real presence. The institution narratives, of course John 6, 1 Cor. 10:15-18, etc., come to mind immediately.  But in this post, I would like to deal with what may well be the plainest text of all: 1 Corinthians 11:27-29 (though some may argue for John 6 and make a strong case):

Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. Let a man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself.

According to St. Paul, a constitutive element involved in a Christian’s preparation to receive the Eucharist is “discerning the body.” What body is St. Paul talking about that must “discerned” you ask? It’s really not very hard to tell. He just said, in verse 27, “Whoever . . . eats . . . in an unworthy matter will be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord.” Any questions?

These very plain words were a stark reminder to the Corinthians 2,000 years ago, and should be for us as well. We must recognize not just what it is that we are receiving in the Eucharist, but who it is: Jesus Christ.

And there’s more!

St. Paul uses unequivocal language in describing the nature of the Eucharist by using the language of homicide when he describes the sin of those who do not recognize Christ’s body in this sacrament and therefore receive him unworthily. He says they are “guilty of the body and blood of the Lord.” According to Numbers 35:27, Deuteronomy 21:8, 22:8, Ezekiel 35:6 and elsewhere in Scripture, to be “guilty of blood” means you are guilty of shedding innocent blood in murder. This is not the language of pure symbolism. This is the language of real presence.

Think about it: If someone were to put a bullet through a picture of a real person, I am sure the person represented in the photo would not be thrilled about it, but the perpetrator would not be “guilty of blood.” But if this same perpetrator were to put a bullet through the actual person you better believe he would be “guilty of blood.” And that’s what Paul is saying in a manner of speaking: you better believe!

Thus, the language used here in 1 Corinthians 11 is very strong—some of the strongest language St. Paul could have used, in fact—to underscore the truth that when he says we must “discern the body” here in the Eucharist, he means we must “discern the body” here in the Eucharist! This is conclusive evidence of the real presence of our Lord!

Objection!

Many, especially our Lutheran friends, might see and even cede the point of the Real Presence here but then point out that St. Paul also refers to the sacrament as “bread:” “Whoever eats this bread and drinks this cup . . .” Even if someone agrees to the real presence here, could this statement of St. Paul’s point more to a Lutheran notion of consubstantiation, rather than transubstantiation? In other words, even if Christ is present here, wouldn’t Paul’s reference to the sacrament as “bread” prove the “bread” is also present “alongside” the body and blood of Christ?

It does not come as a surprise to Catholics that St. Paul would refer to the Eucharist as “bread” and “wine.” We do it commonly in the Church. This is so for at least two key reasons. First, Jesus is “the true bread come down from heaven” and “true drink” according to John 6:32 and verse 55. It is entirely proper to refer to the Eucharist as such because the Eucharist is Jesus. Second, in human discourse we tend to refer to things as they appear. This is called “phenomenological” language. We say “the sun will rise at 5:45AM tomorrow.” Does this mean we are all geocentrists who believe the sun rotates around the earth? I hope not!

We find examples of phenomenological language in many texts of Scripture as well. Daniel 12:2 in the Old Testament and Acts 7:60 in the New Testament refer to death as “falling asleep.” I assure you there is an essential difference between dropping dead and taking a nap, but the inspired authors use this language because it was and still is common to do so. When someone dies, his body looks like he “fell asleep.” Thus, the dead are often referred to as having “fallen asleep.” When it comes to the Eucharist, it retains the appearances of bread and wine; it should be expected that it would be referred to at times as it appears.

A critique of “consubstantiation”

The problem with consubstantiation boils down to two central points:

1. It attempts to claim Christ is “really present,” but then denies a truly bodily (physical) component to that presence. That makes no sense. If Christ is merely “spiritually” present, which is what consubstantiation suggests, then he is not wholly present. Christ can “appear in another form” as we see in Mark 16:12 when he appeared to Clopas and the unnamed disciple on the road to Emmaus, but if it is truly and really Christ—body, blood, soul and divinity—there must be what Pope Paul VI called in Mysterium Fidei a truly “physical” reality to our understanding of that “true presence.” Otherwise, there would be no real distinction between that presence and the presence of Christ in his word or in us as Christians.

2. Consubstantiation ultimately denies the word of Jesus Christ who said, “This is my body . . . This . . . is the new covenant in my blood” when he instituted the Eucharist in Luke 22:19-20. “Consubstantiation” claims Jesus was still holding bread and wine in his hands—even though it also claims a sort of undefined “real presence” alongside the bread—but Jesus declares the “bread” and “wine” to be his body and blood. Unless we are having some trouble with the meaning or use of the word “is” Christ’s words in context are very clear. Christ is presenting himself as the New Covenant “lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” who must be consumed in order for the people of God to participate in his saving sacrifice (John 6:53). This is the language of the real presence, including the bodily part, not the language of either consubstantiation or pure symbol.