#we as white people NEED to figure out how to talk about various oppressions that some of us face without acting like we are nonwhite

[asterroth]

Every single white bitch who mocks the pro-palestine movement by separating themselves from whiteness needs to die immediately

[wolfstar-in-color]

June Creator Spotlight: BigBlackDog

Hello, colorful cuties, and welcome to our first creator spotlight!!

Each month, we will highlight a different creator in our lovely fandom who features diverse characterizations. We will invite you to get to know them better through questions and answers, Fandom Discourse(tm), and a featured prompt created by our guest!!!

For our first spotlight, we are more than pleased to highlight the incredible work of bigblackdog!!! See a little snippet of this wonderful interview below, along with bigblackdog’s prompt! Look below the cut for our complete interview. Don’t forget to share and interact with this post, and if you have anyone you’d like to recommend for a spotlight, shoot us an ask! You can find our first guest’s Tumblr here.

“I've experienced ups and downs in the wolfstar fandom. It often feels like the wolfstar fandom is willing to engage in discussion about every political issue but race. And the few people who are trying to talk about race consistently encounter this silence.”

bigblackdog’s prompt: I want to see more latino characters who are not impoverished or criminalized. Give me a joyful latino/e remus!

Hello, I'm bigblackdog! I'm almost 30, and I've been active in fandom on various platforms for about seven years now. I'm latina/e and live in the u.s. with a small white dog.

Q: How did you start creating in the fandom? What did you wish to bring into the fandom? 

A: Like a lot of fans I started with self insert fic as a middle schooler. Sometimes the practice of self-insert gets ragged on in fandom, as if you're not doing real character work, but I think it's really cool. And if you're an under represented identity in the traditional western canon of literature, self insert is a radical practice. Making space for yourself in a story that refuses or ignores your identities is a radical act. And that's what i want to bring to fandom-- disruption and self care.

Q: What things about s/r as characters or in their relationship inspire you to create around them? 

A: Wolfstar was the first queer ship I was introduced to. I wasn't someone who arrived in fandom with my own robust queer reading skills, I needed other queers to hold my hand and introduce me to queer ships and how to find them and build them. My interest in r/s was simply a clinging to queerness I wasn't finding in other places. I really think it could have been any characters, as long as they were queer.

Q: What things would you like to highlight about the Wolfstar fandom and your experience in it? 

A: I've experienced ups and downs in the wolfstar fandom. It often feels like the wolfstar fandom is willing to engage in discussion about every political issue but race. And the few people who are trying to talk about race consistently encounter this silence. It's hard not to feel bitter. But i've also met some amazing people and overall feel that fans really are trying their best to be welcoming and inclusive.

Q: What type of content do you wish you saw more in the fandom? 

A: I want to see more discourse that aims at amplifying underrepresented voices like wolfstar-in-color. I want to see more fans of color joyfully and irreverently writing themselves into the magical world!

Q: What is your favourite wolfstar fancontent (fic/fanart/gifset/etc) and how does it inspire you? 

A: I love dontthinkonithermione's rp. Not only does she do an amazing nerdy know it all Hermione, she envisions Black characters in every corner of the hp world. Have you seen her Hogwarts p.e. professor rps? i love the space she creates for herself, and the joy she does it with.

Q: Which of your own identities inform your creative processes? How has that process been for you? 

A: I started out in fandom really trying to feel out the nooks and crannies of being queer. As i've spent more time in fandom and become more confident in my queerness I've started looking closer at some of my other identities-- Latina, mixed, adhd-- and how i can squeeze them into the hp world. For a long time it was hard, especially with being Latine and mixed, to envision how that identity could belong in a 90s British boarding school in the Scottish wilderness. I also really struggled with the feeling that i would get "diversity" wrong. I’ve also struggled with feeling like I have to write diversity because i'm an underrepresented voice. Brown people are often pressured to do the work of educating white people about racism and in fandom spaces that often means pressure to write the reality of racism instead of the fantasy that white writers get to play with. And sometimes i just want to write a pwp without worrying about the revolution, you know? But i really love fandom for its refusal to play by the rules of capitalism and canon, eventually i started to feel like putting more of myself into my writing was another rule i could break.

Q: What advice do you have for other content creators with diverse backgrounds in the fandom? What would you say to people that might feel they don’t have the “right” history/experience/characteristics to participate in the creation of content related to Wolfstar? 

First, there's a lot of content on tumblr that aims to silence your voice, learn how to recognize the difference between cancel culture and encouragement. Sometimes content that seems well meaning still presents writing diversity as a list of black and white rules (and virtue signaling) instead of encouragement for underrepresented voices to share their own messy experience. Set those rules gently aside. Second, fandom is built on the idea that the author isn't the only person who gets to play. we all get to play. It doesn't always feel like we were invited, but the great thing about fandom is there is no barrier to entry, no prior experience or publishing hoops to jump through. This is our playground too. If canon is dead then why can't our stories be brown and queer and neurodivergent? Third, find your people. i've found that having just one other person to talk about race with has made the whole space feel more welcoming.

Q: How could we build a more diverse fandom? 

A: We have to stop prioritizing white and cis male voices. We recognize that policing irl is a problem inextricable from whiteness and maleness, but we don't see that fandom policing online is also a problem deeply embedded in whiteness and maleness. White and cis male people frequently use their discomfort with difficult topics to change the subject from a critical discussion to one that prioritizes their white and/or male feelings. The same thing happens online when personal discomfort is used to cancel or undermine content that's challenging to a white or male voice. White and cis male voices are used to having their needs met above others. And we still cater to that in fandom spaces when we privilege 'fetishization' discourse over racial discourse. When we lift up bipoc and women/trans/nb voices and the issues they're concerned with we'll make fandom a more welcoming place for underrepresented voices.

Q: What’s your favourite thing to modify in Sirius’s or Remus’s characterizations to bring new perspectives to them? 

A: It really depends on the story i'm writing and what issue i'm trying to figure out. Sometimes i need Sirius to be Adhd to come to terms with my brain, sometimes i need two brown boys to fall in love and be happy against all odds.

Q: What does diversity mean to you? What does that encompass in fannish spaces? 

A: This is a hard question! I tend to think of diversity as those voices that are disenfranchised or pushed to the margins. And fannish spaces have all the same hierarchies and blind spots as other spaces. In fannish spaces there's the idea that you can curate your experience to some extent, but for marginalized voices, at least in my experience, no matter how much you curate the marginalization is still there.

Q: What are your ideas about the notions of culture and ethnicity? How do you relate to those notions? 

A: There was a time in my life where relating to my ethnicity was largely a process of recognizing larger systems of oppression and how they worked against my various identities. And for a while it was a really helpful way to frame my experiences. Now I feel a little less attached to ethnicity as like, a monolithic concept threaded through my whole life and more attached to the small things that I enjoy about my ethnicity and culture-- making a really good pot of beans, for example.

Q: Leave us with a quote or work of art that always inspires you. 

A: "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare." Audre Lorde

[c-is-for-circinate]

Thinking today about viruses, allergies, oppression, and anti culture.

(under a cut because WHOOOPS this got long)

Racism is a virus. Homophobia, transphobia, sexism, antisemitism, ableism, etc etc etc, they are all viruses--a topic that many of us have learned a great deal about in the past year. They are ideas, yes, not literal physical diseases, but the analogy holds up. They are infectious, and often spread from person to person without anyone involved realizing they have it. They can sit latent for years, never showing up because the carrier never finds themselves in a situation where the issue comes up, only to flare up and take over when you least expect it. And they mutate, just like the flu, just like the common cold; they put on a new jacket every year and slide in undetected yet again, slip past our internal sensors and bury themselves in our brains until we go in and deal with them as best as we can.

One more thing we've learned about viruses this year is how we can fight them. The viruses of oppression are a little different because they tend to hurt the people around their carriers even more than the people they've infected (although let's talk about internalized anything-ism sometime), but in a lot of ways the attack is the same. You treat the symptoms even when you don't know how to cure the disease: we invest in respirators, antiviral treatments, hospitals; we create and sponsor programs to help those who've been hurt by various oppressions, we uplift our neighbors, we try to keep people safe from violences both big and small. You work to stop the spread: we wear our goddamn masks, we stay home when we can; we train ourselves not to say racist shit that might foster a culture of hate, we stop that guy in our office from making rape jokes, we make slurs unacceptable. You pay attention to your immune system: we seek medical attention when we experience symptoms, we get COVID tests, we talk to our doctors before the symptoms get deadly; we protest and we pay attention to the people who do, we take them seriously when they tell us that something is wrong.

You vaccinate. We train ourselves and our immune systems to recognize the thing that infects us, the thing that we fear. We try to teach our children about history, bit by little bit, on fragments of dead violence the same way we train our bodies on dead virus shells, so that someday they'll recognize the live disease when they see it. We learn about slavery and Jim Crow and the Holocaust. We tell kids bedtime stories about why hitting and bullying is bad, before we ever start teaching them the specific shapes that violence so often takes. As we get older, as we get stronger, we learn about the living stuff, all the new forms that same old virus has mutated into; we educate ourselves, we listen, we read. Just like vaccines, of course, there are anti-vaxxers and denialists shouting about how racism and sexism are already dead and they don't need any propoganda besides Fox News. Hell, just like anti-maskers, there are plenty of people screaming about how political correctness is ruining the world and they demand their right to spread their virus to anyone they can. Often these are the same people.

But we try. And make no mistake, we all of us are already infected, and just like a real virus, once you've caught it once it probably won't ever go away again--but we can prepare, and we can try to lessen the severity of our cases, and we can support our immune systems of activists and protesters and our own internal sense of this is wrong, and we can work, bit by bit, if not towards eradication (not yet, not in this world, but maybe someday in another), then at least towards control.

And then there's allergies.

An allergy is what happens when a human body's own immune system freaks out over an enemy that wasn't particularly harmful in the first place. All our immune defenses--those precious immune defenses, which work so hard to protect us against all those viral, deadly ideas--go screaming into high gear. All of that fear and fury and attack power gets brought to bear all at once, against a bit of pollen or bee venom or cat dander or peanuts, and your body is left itchy and runny-nosed and gasping--sometimes literally--as it tries to keep up. Allergies are miserable. Sometimes they're life-threatening. And the biggest danger isn't the foreign agent that triggers the allergic reaction; it's the immune system trying to fight it in the first place.

Which, yes, brings us to anti culture--but not JUST anti culture. It's a good example, a little internet-centric microcosm of the same force that drives progressives to tear bloody shreds out of moderate liberal politicians. Hell, it's the same force that enables both TERFs and the Capitol rioters. It's a combination of an immune system that points in the wrong direction, flagging the wrong thing as bad, terrifying, danger, NO, and a freaked-out response that can manifest as anything from mildly irritating to absolutely deadly.

To be clear, I am not by any means equating the scale or even the source of these things, any more than hayfever is the same as anaphylactic shock. Likewise, the sources are different. Sometimes, a disease can infect an immune system and point it in the wrong direction. (Terror of the other is the absolute cornerstone of white nationalism, and when that terror gets triggered by a harmless environmental condition like, god forbid, other people asking for rights, the allergy response can be deadly.) Other times, it's the other way around. Our internal immune systems, so well trained to protect ourselves and those around us from the insidious viral ravages of prejudice and oppression, start seeing traces of it everywhere.

And they freak out. And we suffer for it.

We talk a lot of well-deserved shit about TERFs, but it's useful to remember how much their nastiness feels to them like activism. Their immune system, trained and primed and sensitized over years of exposure to misogyny and sexism, catches the tiniest whiff of something that might seem at some point to have possibly been taken for male, and freaks out, because why is that trying to get into our system. Never mind that they're wrong. An immune system that flips out over penicillin is wrong, too. It's still trying to help, and it's still doing more harm than good trying it.

So bringing this back around to anti culture, which was absolutely where I started thinking about all of this this morning: anti culture, the terror of porn and the attempt by antis to protect themselves an other people from sexual content, is an immune response. It is a trained immune response, in people who have been taught and re-taught again and again that rape culture is a dangerous insidious virus that should be fought at all costs. And, right, there's more than a bit of 'the sexism virus infected this immune system and reprogrammed it to fight itself' involved here, but look, we are all of us infected with all of the viruses at least a little bit everywhere. If we tried to direct our immune systems to rip every last shred of -ism out of every last bit of us, we'd rip ourselves apart. Which is exactly the problem.

Porn, in and of itself, is natural. As natural as environmental pollen, and living near dogs and cats, and eating wheat or nuts or citrus fruit. It's even healthy, for a whole host of reasons that belong in another essay. And citric acid and nut-based proteins and whole grains are nutritious, and pets are physically and psychologically helpful, and being exposed to lots of different environmental substances as a child can actually help train your immune system in the first place. Porn can help us figure out what we like. It can help us figure out what we don't like. And while the processes that create it are sometimes unethical and awful, we don't condemn all dogs because puppy mills and dogfighting rings exist, even if we do have dog allergies.

What we see in anti culture is often a good-faith attempt on the part of antis to attack and subdue an environmental trigger that they read as dangerous. It's a panic attack over something that is by nature harmless or mildly harmful, blown out of proportion by the very instincts that are supposed to keep us safe. It's the response of an immune system that's been taught over years and years, by everyone from parents to school systems to the activists they look up to, that negative stimulus is to be feared, avoided, and fought. Of COURSE they're going to freak out.

And of course, early exposure to controlled amounts of allergens can help prevent later allergies from developing. Of course when kids are raised with abstinence-only education, sheltered from the very concept of sex, they're going to grow up allergic to it. (Of course they're going to try to protect other kids from the same, like worried mothers who refuse to let peanuts or wheat products or dirt near their precious babies, whose kids grow up with a whole suite of allergic triggers because their bodies never learned what was okay in the first place.) And no, that doesn't mean we hand pornography to ten-year-olds any more than we should give raw honey to an infant--but of course if our culture refuses to introduce kids to the fact that sex and desire and the inside of their own brain can be messy and silly and kinky and downright weird, we're going to have a higher rate of allergic reaction to the entire concept in adults.

I wish I had a better answer for what to do with understanding that this is what's going through so many people's brains. The best I have is a prescription for allergy-sufferers, who probably haven't read this far through this wordspew of an essay in the first place--but we all get a little hayfever once in a while, and we all sometimes run into content that makes us angry. So some thoughts on how to deal with metaphorical allergic reactions, inspired by the ways we deal with literal ones?

First: we recognize that what is happening is an allergy. The thing we're reacting to might be gross, or irritating, or even unpleasant, but the danger is not and never has been the thing itself. Whether it's triggering a response because of its similarity to an actively dangerous pathogen, or our immune system just doesn't like it, our aversion to one kind of story or another universally says more about us than about it. Luckily, we have a lot more control over our social responses than our biological ones!!! If vocal activism is our sociocultural immune system firing itself up to fight an infection that may or may not exist, then we get to tell our metaphorical white blood cells to stand down. We get to decide.

Second: we get some space. The funny thing about allergies is, while early exposure to allergens can help prevent them, re-exposing yourself to dangerous allergens after you've already developed a reaction to them can make them worse. Anaphylaxis is always more likely after someone's experienced it the first time. Repeated exposure to triggers, whether biological or psychological, can make the effects worse. So stop exposing yourself.

If something makes your throat itch every time you eat it, stop eating it. If something makes you mad every time you read it, stop reading it. Obviously this can be easier said than done in a world that's a lot worse about warning labels on stories than ingredients labels on foods, but that's why fic tags exist. And: sometimes, the croissant is delicious enough that we decide we're willing to suffer through the way the almonds make us feel, just this once. Sometimes the ship or the characterization or, hell, those other kinks that we really like are tasty enough that we'll put up with the trope we hate. We're allowed to do that. But we do it knowing there will be consequences, and we don't blame the baker when they hit.

We also don't have to blame ourselves. It sucks to be allergic to shellfish when all your friends are raving about the new seafood place. But that's not our fault any more than it's theirs.

Third: sometimes, if we need one, we go to the doctor. Or a therapist. Yes, really.

Not because there's anything really wrong with an aversion or even mild breakouts of hives, annoyance, and bitching in your friends' DMs--but it sure isn't pleasant, and sometimes your doctor might have a better solution than 'avoid it and take a Benadryl' that makes you feel a little better in the long run. And sometimes, it's not a mild breakout. Sometimes it's the kind of story that lingers with you for days, makes your skin crawl; sometimes your throat swells up and it gets hard to breathe. Sometimes we get angry enough about something we've read that we can't stand down our immune system, don't want to stop ourselves from writing that angry comment, that tumblr post, that abuse report to the mods for something that didn't actually break any rules. And that's dangerous, because when our immune response can flare out of control like that, we don't always know where and when it will happen next, and the risk of what we'll do if it happens gets way, way higher.

Sometimes it really is worth getting a second opinion. Sometimes you need somebody to tell you, "actually, it is not normal to get tingly and sweaty every time you eat potatoes." There are ways to train your brain and leash your white blood cells that I sure as heck am not expert enough to address. There are, it turns out, ways to feel better. There are ways to mitigate the damage your own well-meaning defense mechanisms might do to yourself or other people along the way.

And: we can take a deep breath when someone with an allergy to something we've baked, something we've written, something we like, is lashing out trying to protect themselves and everyone around them from something they've registered as a threat. Of course they're wrong. Yes, we told them there were tree nuts in the brownies ahead of time; yes, they chose to eat them anyway. But it can be worth reminding them and ourselves that there's a difference between "this thing is toxic" and "this harmless thing has driven my own system into a defensive response that sure makes it feel like I've been poisoned." And it can be worth reminding ourselves as well as them that sometimes, that difference can be really hard to spot.

[bloodbenderz]

Can I ask what your season 1 Lok reboot looks like?

this is about 3k words i checked lmfao dont say i didnt warn u

a key part of the whole thing is that korra gets way more perspectives and more experiences representative of like, normal people in republic city bc i think something that really defined what a good avatar aang was was how many people he met and got to know and how he didnt exclusively or even mostly associate w cops and bureaucrats and leaders. so mako and bolin. well first of all their backstories are a little more fleshed out and we get a less black and white view of the “triads” (lol) and mako and bolin’s experiences w them. cuz the show very much does the whole thing of like Criminals Bad but dont worry even tho mako and bolin did commit crimes theyre not Criminals!! so just a little more nuance on the alleged gang problem and the poverty in the city

korra does start out very naive w very black and white ideas (ex. “you guys are CRIMINALS?”) i think a really good way of developing her away from her sheltered naive worldview is putting her in whats clearly an incredibly complicated city w an absolute cesspool of political conflicts, ethnic tensions, the lasting effects of colonization, etc and having her try and understand the needs of “the people” in a more complicated way than “i have to save the good guys from the bad guys” ykwim? and i think the absolute WORST way to do that is what they did. bc we get mako and bolin who could contribute genuinely compelling thematic elements to the story: one parent who was indigenous and one who was from a colonizer background in the decades directly following the end of the war, kids who grew up in poverty apparently without any familial support, and who now are trying to be “respectable” members of society (especially mako). and then most of that is pretty much tossed aside bc asami swoops in w her capitalist dad and her piles of money and the class issue is just never talked about again.

so the way i’d fix all that is like. introducing more, like, normal people. some nonbenders, more workers, more immigrants, etc, to show what daily life is actually like for people. because. we dont know! we dont have any context about whether the nonbender oppression thing is actually an issue bc we dont KNOW any nonbenders with normal lives! and spoiler: the nonbender oppression thing is not an issue. bc it doesnt make historical sense. lok is set 7 decades after the end of the war. that is not by ANY stretch of the imagination long enough to heal from the scars of imperialism, ESPECIALLY not when lok is also set in a settler colonial state. like that fact should have featured PROMINENTLY in the political and social setting! realistically, nonbenders arent an oppressed class, earth and water nation people are, regardless of bending status! as in all settler colonial states, the colonizers and their descendants (in this case fire nation people) retain most of the financial and political capital, leaving the colonized and racialized immigrants (in this case earth kingdom and water tribe people respectively) generally impoverished and politically suppressed. like aside from the fact that theres no way toph would have become a cop, it’s so ridiculous to think that an established privileged class of fire nation colonizers would EVER accept being policed by earthbenders!

imagine how much more nuanced and interesting it would be to set republic city as a remnant of a colonial past still fraught w the violence and tension that colonialism and the associated ideology imposed?? instead of some vague ideas of criminal who wear 1920s outfits and harass shopkeepers think about why extralegal and violent groups like that might form! earth kingdom people trying to push for the reclamation of their land? ethnic groups protecting themselves against corrupt cops? ESPECIALLY w the history that the fire nation has of SPECIFICALLY jailing and killing earthbenders and waterbenders BECAUSE of the potential they have to resist against fire nation imperialism like it just makes no sense at all that earthbenders would be privileged on land that, 70 years ago, they would have been imprisoned on! like these various paramilitary groups falling along these different ideological or ethnic lines, fire nation or earth kingdom or water tribe, pro colonization or anti colonization, pro cop or anti cop, pro immigrant or anti immigrant, and then you juxtapose that w depictions of a govt thats failing to keep this all under control w tenzin trying desperately to keep it together despite the fact that it’s becoming increasingly obvious that the state has no interest in taking the conflicts seriously and would rather just point vague fingers at criminals and gangs? and THEN you bring in korra, who has no idea about any of this and thinks that all its gonna take is kicking some ass every couple days, meeting normal people who offer all kinds of different opinions abt the efficacy of the state and the different violent or nonviolent groups and ideologies clashing in the city and the way all this shit is affecting people’s lives and livelihoods and relationships w other citizens??

theres so much good shit there so many incredible things u could do w that like Where do we go after colonial atrocities? is it possible for a settler colonial state to take revolutionary or indigenous ideas seriously? is liberal reform enough in a state like this? and then all the growth that korra could do going from a simple black and white life about mastering the elements to this messy complicated sociopolitical knot of a city? and all the different kinds of characters u could introduce in this city? like why would u EVER think that the most interesting characters that this story has to offer is a police chief a congressman and a billionaire????

but anyways. that’s what the Setting of my idealized version of lok is. as for the actual plot, it is as follows

it starts out similarly as the show. republic city is MUCH more fraught w political tension and violence and korra knows this but assumes that it’s just a matter of throwing a few gang leaders and corrupt officials in jail. tenzin manages to come see them in the south pole and intends give korra real lessons while he’s there but they receive news of a terrorist attack in republic city only a few days after he gets there so his family has to pack up and leave again.

korra stows away to republic city (katara catches her leaving and gives her blessing im a SUCKER for that moment). she does have a hard time adjusting but she doesn’t do what she did in the show lol the first person she meets in the city is this older woman who works on the docks, directs her to a place where she can eat and gives her a roof to sleep under for the first night. so korra’s first exposure to republic city is just about forming connections w ordinary people like ship workers and a family owned restaurant and people practicing their bending in the park. and by the time she reaches air temple island a day or so later her head is spinning w all this new information and the way that nothing is really what she expected it to be. tenzin gives her his own perspective on everything and pema gives her her own perspective on everything and even those two seem wildly different from all the people she’s already met. and so korra starts to get a kind of outline of the conflicts plaguing the city as extremely complex and a lot more influenced by older ideas of fire nation imperialism and earth kingdom land reclamation than she had any idea about.

mako and bolin are still pro benders but not like. super famous like they are in the show. korra’s picked up a couple friends by now and one of them takes her to a gym where a lot of amateur pro bending (is that an oxymoron? lol) matches happen and thats how she meets mako and bolin and joins their pro bending team. Unfortunately for korra, this gym is run by lin beifong, and also has the distinction of being one of the most notoriously anti settler state organizations in the country. lin beifong is NOT a cop but she runs this gym (and the pro bending league) as a way to offer support to local earth kingdom/water tribe youth, teach self defense skills, a center of community organizing, and sometimes to act as a front to hide revolutionary/combat organizing against the pro fire nation paramilitaries/police force. tenzin is DISTRAUGHT that korra does this and this is where the friction btwn them comes from bc (from tenzin’s perspective) she does things like this without thinking or even fully understanding the context behind them and tenzin will have to deal w the political fallout of the avatar openly aligning herself w a very divisive figure in the community and (from korra’s perspective) tenzin is too unwilling to take sides in a conflict that’s claiming lives and when the state is clearly not taking sufficient steps to protect people well then why the hell shouldnt she align herself w lin beifong, who IS taking steps to protect and support people?

as korra more fully integrates herself into the city and learns more abt how different people think abt everything going on this is where the real exposition abt the equalists begins. they’re a paramilitary group w an ideology thats gaining increasing support among middle/upper class fire nation people, esp nonbenders. on the face theyre abt putting checks on “bender oppression” but really it’s an excuse to persecute and surveil earthbenders waterbenders and airbenders, bc fire nation people have all this leftover fear about benders who arent fire nation Rising Up Against them and these people who r using their Savage Excuse for Bending to terrorize good innocent (fire nation) people. theres all too frequent terrorist attacks that the equalists claim credit for mostly against monuments to earth/water/air nation people and earth/water nation community centers (one like it was the event that forced tenzin back to republic city) but also like the govt doesnt take a lot of these seriously or if they do only a couple people are charged without doing damage to the entire organization

this is also around the time that they meet asami and she becomes part of their friend group. asami likes pro bending but her dad HATES it so she sneaks out to watch matches at lin beifong’s gym (korra says ironically like don’t u know how ~divisive~ that is and asami answers that the only reason its Not divisive is that gyms like beifongs are the only place where nobody recognizes her). and asami alongside korra is also kind of developing a more nuanced perspective on the city that she lives in cuz obviously the only worldview she’s ever been exposed to is her father’s right? and she keeps pushing it off making excuses not to bring mako and bolin and korra around to her house or even not to be seen w them in certain neighborhoods until they call her on it and she’s like Well honestly my dad might do something awful to u! and i dont wanna risk it!

and as time goes on we see more abt asami’s home life like her father’s hyper conservative politics and asami keeps these secrets abt her hobbies and her friends from him but she’s still clearly under his influence and mako bolin and korra r getting increasingly worried abt it cuz like...asami seems to tend to make excuses for him so that she wont have to be drawn into conflict and originally they think its just her being privileged and thats def part of it but the more they find out abt it the more they realize what a tight fucking grip he has on her and the way that like. asami sneaking out once or twice a week is the Only thing she does for herself. and it really starts freaking them out how influential this billionaire is and all the information theyre getting from asami abt what a piece of shit he clearly is. and so that whole plot thing comes about and shows us how deeply embedded these “equalist” ideas are in conservative republic city politics and how much influence theyre actually having in policy making and law enforcement.

asami suffers in the aftermath of this like being forced to truly confront the harm her father is doing both to the city and to herself. and she ends up leaving home when this discovery really breaks. but bc of the deep corruption in govt and police sato isn’t really....dealt with? like this big story breaks and everyones like Oh, My God! Hiroshi Sato Is Funding An Illegal Paramilitary Group! and theres all kinds of inane political discourse about it and he’s arrested but he bails himself out immediately and his finances are examined but he maintains control over them and after a few weeks the gang (bc they Have become close among all this w much less interpersonal drama lol) has to admit that this news story hasnt done what they thought it was going to it hasn’t dealt the equalists a real hit its just given them a very high profile ally

and this is when things really start to ramp up in terms of action like up until now korra’s daily activities are mostly like hanging around in the city w her friends  (which in part entails doing little avatar stuff that people dont feel comfortable going to police with, like Can you help me my ex husband wont pay child support or Please help i got robbed and i really needed that money for rent next month or Help my son keeps skipping school can you talk to him cuz im worried abt him being safe and doing well in school) and pro bending and airbending lessons (which i know ive neglected this part of the story in terms of her whole spiritual/physical conflict but it’s more of a subtle thing like it’s one of tenzin and korra’s more frequent arguments like tenzin says she needs to focus on spirituality and korra asks why she even needs to bc republic city is a sociopolitical problem not a spiritual one) but now the equalist threat seems to really be looming on every level of society like the storyline of equalists preventing pro bending matches happens here and everyones just at a total loss of what to do next. plus increasing and scary rhetoric about tenzin and his family that destroying the last airbenders is necessary to preserving the integrity of the united republic

and so theres the equalist takeover of the city. the people who are mostly resisting this are lin and ragtag group of people who have been resisting colonial rule for a long time (including suyin, who is part of a communist anti colonial community outside the city, because i said so and i think it would be fun), people who have been visiting her gym for years, members of her amateur pro bending league, plus asami and korra and tenzin. korra and tenzin have a sweet moment (bc they do genuinely care abt each other a lot even if their relationship has been marked w a lot of tension and arguing) where tenzin says like you know i think that ive lost focus on the kind of spirituality that might actually help you. korra says what do you mean? and tenzin kind of gestures to where theyre sitting with people buzzing around organizing to take care of innocents and civilians and to fight the equalists and he says this is a kind of spiritual too, isnt it?

and something something plot plot blah blah i havent decided on the details of the plot climax yet but that’s the climax of korra’s character development and what helps her connect w her spiritual side in order to protect the city: the realization that community is its own kind of spirituality. and it kind of represents the real development that i want her to have going from somebody who thinks that the world is divided into criminals and victims and she has to save the victims Into the kind of avatar who understands the people that she’s bound to serve. she becomes an avatar of the people!

and then happy ending lol korra and asami get together lin and tenzin reconcile after years of being at odds the show ends on a hopeful note that the inhabitants of republic city and the united republic as a whole Can move on from the scars of colonialism by reckoning w the remnants of fire nation colonial ideology and reparations to the earth kingdom people whose land this is and destruction of colonial systems that have maintained and enforced colonial violence all these years

[rotationalsymmetry]

I was kinda joking with the "one ring of oppression" thing, but actually the idea that many people are looking for one type of person that is the source of all oppressive behavior -- rather than understanding abuse of power to be a multifaceted phenomenon with multiple sources and expressions; a 12 year old bully is socially disinfranchised as a child and is also a bully, and may or may not have white privilege or male privilege or any of the rest; a black airforce pilot drops bombs that are just as explosive as a white airforce pilot; a neurodivergent lesbian who calls the cops on a black guy walking around the neighborhood isn't going to have a different effect than a neurotypical straight woman who does the same thing -- explains A Lot. Radfems: the men

A certain kind of atheist: religion (grammatically speaking that's not a "type of people", but you cannot separate a person who has real faith from their faith, it's an identity thing and people can't just let it go because someone else thinks they should. Kind of like how with sexual orientation some people have a fluid orientation that changes over time, and goodness knows some people change religious beliefs, but you can't make it change.)

Intersectional social justice whatever: ok, this is going to be a little tricky, but we can figure out the exact demographic categories that are on each side of the oppressor/oppressed line. (Or the simple version: white cishet rich men who are abled and otherwise privileged on every axis, and everyone else is incapable of oppressing other people. That's not how any of this works.) (There's a big fight right now to make sure white women are put on the oppressor side of the line, and another big fight over whether trans men are on the oppressor side (and can't possibly experience gendered oppression) because they're men. Yeah. And there's the "what about Christians of color" like I don't care, you can both experience oppression as a person of color and find your church to be a source of resilience and strength and also be using the fact that your church is part of the dominant religion to make it harder for trans kids to get appropriate healthcare, OK? They don't cancel each other out!)

Eat The Rich: billionaires. (This is probably the least bad one tbh! Billionaires don't have to exist! Like cops, it's a role and not an identity. But this worldview can flatten how differently life is experienced by various levels of non-billionaires, including the difference between the affluent middle class and people who, y'know, can't just pay off a parking ticket like it's no big deal. And it's really hard to go from "billionaires are hording wealth" to "we need to talk about how slavery and colonialism fucked things up," there just isn't a direct line there, and indeed there are Bernie Sanders types who are great on class stuff and terrible at recognizing that it is in fact a problem if there's only white men in the room making the decisions. Colonialism oversimplified: indigenous people are intrinsically incapable of oppression, and all non-Western societies were perfectly just and egaletarian before the Europeans showed up. (This seems closely tied to me to the "we don't have to question whether a revolution might make things worse, even though armed revolutions historically often have" revolutionary mentality.)

Racism oversimplified: not recognizing that the way racism plays out in the 21st Century United States isn't universal, and that there can be different expressions of racism/colorism in other parts of the world that aren't a direct result of US or European racism.

People keep wanting to do this. It's reductive and harmful. There are more things in heaven and earth Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy.

[alexhandersen-marcoilsoe-fandom]

THE MASTERPIECE: CHAPTER 1/5

Modern!IVAR x Reader x Modern!HVITSERK

a/n: This MASTERPIECE was so much fun. It was such an honor to do this with you @deans-ch-ch-cherrypie, you are so talented! Every hour writing and editing was definitely worth it! Thank you!

Spotify playlist: here (only for those who like latin urban music)

Words: 1913

Warnings: strong language

Summary: Ivar and Hvitserk had always prided themselves in being the sons of Ragnar Lothbrok. They had a comfortable life full of everything they wanted: houses, cars, money, and the most beautiful women. And with all of that came the security of always having the upper hand. But what happens when a bewitching girl from Ragnar’s past arrives into their lives claiming his fortune?

~~·······~~

An appointment with a lawyer was pending. He refused to give any other information on the phone about the reasons, so she had to meet him in his office.

Y/N had a hunch it was going to be a waste of her time. So out of spite, she was the last one to arrive. Not that she was ever on time. Punctuality was never one of her strong suits, but she didn't care about what others thought. She was so over their meaningless gossip.

Y/N stepped into the room and all heads turned to look at her, yet nobody knew who she was and she didn’t recognize anyone either so she excused herself and went out again. She must have been given the wrong room number.

The lawyer got up from his desk and called her name. He intercepted her midway and accompanied her back inside.

She looked exasperated; she even refused to take her coat off or sit down. Instead, she gazed around the room and noticed two young men out of the four reunited whispering emphatically at each other.

The lawyer thanked everyone for their presence and began reading from a long document.

Ivar was staring at her, wondering who the fuck she was and what she was doing at the reading of his father’s last will and testament. He was so lost in his thoughts that he didn’t realize what the lawyer was saying.

"...and it is my last will that all of my houses, company shares, private artworks collection, and the entirety of my capital goes to Y/N Y/L/N.

To my sons, please, forgive me. I hope you will understand my decision and in time come to accept it. I love you all.

Signed,

Ragnar Lothbrok."

Her face froze in a gesture of confusion and old memories best left unstirred popped into her mind.

There was an oppressive stillness in the room. Everyone was twisting and turning in their seats but nobody dared to break the silence.

“That’s a mistake, right?” Y/N heard one of them say in a quiet voice after some time.

"Ma'am, could you come up to the front and sign the document, please? Ma’am?”

Yet Y/N could not move. She’d heard the lawyer’s words loud and clear but the gears in her head were still turning, in an effort to process their meaning. It couldn’t be true. Ragnar simply left after using her. Surely, he would never leave her in possession of all that he owned.

"No!" Hvitserk jumped up from the chair, shouting and banging his fist on the table.

The lawyer winced in fear. He knew of the infamous temper of all the sons of Ragnar.

"Who is she? What is she doing here?” Hvitserk turned to face Y/N. “Hey, you! How do you know my father?"

She stared blankly out of the window and didn’t answer.

He snarled his lip in disgust as his anger overtook him. “Hey, are you deaf, woman?! Who. Are. You?! Answer me!”

“Ma’am, please. The quicker you sign these documents, the quicker you can leave.” The lawyer urged her with his eyes as if he knew that a discussion like this could only end with one – or several – of them in jail.

She finally found it in her to separate her feet from their spot on the ground and move forward towards the big oak desk. As she walked in between a row of confused angry gazes, she couldn’t help but remember Ragnar’s smiling face.

These men gathered around looked as strong, proud, and reckless as he had been and it was at that moment that she understood who they were. They had to be his sons. They didn’t seem like the kind of people you would want to mess with.

And yet, she wasn’t exactly afraid of them. Fear was not what paralyzed her body; it was the realization that everything about her life was about to drastically change.

“Father... father would never do something like this,” Ivar stated in a harsh voice aimed at the lawyer. “Check that testament again!” Ivar was sure that if his mother, Aslaug, were alive, she would've threatened to take his license away and ruin his reputation if he didn’t find a way to revert Ragnar’s will.

In a split second, the room broke into protests, their contained displeasure bursting through at last.

Yet their angered voices only faded into the back of her ears as she came to understand that this could be her opportunity to get even. She slid the pen against the ivory-white sheet of paper and with a swish of her wrist she sealed all of their fates.

The brothers argued for long minutes with the lawyer but there was nothing he could do. It was beyond his power.

And as they complained, she slipped out of the room quietly.

Ivar noticed and tried to follow her in a haste, but she was already gone. He looked out the glass window of the lawyer’s office and saw her crossing the bustling street. If they didn’t hurry, they would lose her in the crowd forever.

"Come on, let's talk to her!" He urged the others.

Björn looked at his younger sibling and brooded his forehead. "No, let it be. Father wanted it this way, so we have to accept it.” He didn’t seem exactly happy about it but his tone still spoke of resignation.

Ubbe turned to Björn and nodded begrudgingly. "Yes, he’s right. It won't work, she already signed it. It’s a legitimate legal contract.”

"Hvitserk?! You know that's not fair!"

"You’re right, Ivar. She can’t get away with this! And you-” He pointed at Björn and Ubbe. “-if you don't want to fight, then we will. But don't expect us to give you back your part of the inheritance if we succeed.”

“It’s not like we need it, baby brother.” Björn shot back. “My business with Ubbe is thriving. If you want to keep living under our father’s shadow, that’s your problem.”

“As for us,” Ubbe continued his brother’s train of thought. “We’ll try to make our own path as father did once... and you two should do the same. Maybe this is for the best...”

Hvitserk and Ivar exchanged a glance, silently acknowledging that their brothers were crazy and that they were on their own on this one. They ran out of the office as fast as Ivar’s legs would allow them.

~~·······~~

“Hey! You! Hey, stop.” Y/N ignored Hvitserk’s yelling and picked up the pace but Hvitserk grabbed her arm very rudely.

"Touch me again and you’ll know just what I’m capable of, pretty boy.”

Her confidence intimidated him and he took a meek step back.

“Could we talk to you, maybe?” Ivar’s tone was much softer, and she seemed to be considering it.

“No.” She changed her mind in a split second and started walking hurriedly away from them again.

“We just want-“

“Wait!” Ivar was stopped by Hvitserk’s hand on his chest. “I have a better idea. Let’s go get the car.”

Ivar realized immediately that his brother was probably planning something insidious and he decided to give him a chance.

~~·······~~

They followed her to her home and parked at the end of the street, hoping that the massive tree in front of her house would camouflage them from her view.

“And what are we going to do now?” Ivar leaned his head on the headrest and looked beyond annoyed. They had been sitting in the car for at least two hours without making any progress.

“We’ll stay here until we find out who she is and what she wants. So, relax brother, and give it some time.”

“That doesn’t make any fucking sense and I’m hungry.” Ivar had run out of patience. “Let’s try to do this some other way.”

As they spoke, Y/N dimmed the lights inside of her house. The outline of her body was the only thing they could see. She went from one room to the next, until she sat down in one place – probably her living room – and stayed there for a while.

“She’s turning on the lights again. Look! She’s going out of the house. Duck!” They slipped down their seats and lowered their heads.

“I fucking hope you have a better plan than hiding in plain sight, Hvitserk.”

His brother frowned, his forehead creasing deeply and Ivar knew then that he had no actual plan. That was the face he made whenever he was trying to come up with something on the spot.

Ivar rolled his eyes and clenched his jaw.

“She must’ve left already... Let me go near the house. Maybe I can spot something through the windows that can help us figure out who she is.” Hvitserk muttered only half-convinced.

“Fine. But be careful! We don’t want her to find out we’re here.”

“Dude, of course.” He replied a little insulted.

Hvitserk walked up to her home with his back hunched over, trying his best to be invisible. He reached the walls of her house and slid flush to them until he reached the window. He peeped through it, trying to see what was inside.

Her home was small and humble but clean and neatly organized. She had an awful number of plants and herbs spread on various shelves as well as some lighters, smoking pipes, and what looked like a strange strain of weed, at least from that distance. So she wasn’t thatuptight after all, Hvitserk smirked cheekily.

There were dusty old books stacked on piles with weird unreadable symbols on their spine, and there were some regular documents on her kitchen table but he couldn’t make out the small letters.

Hvitserk narrowed his eyes, they probably contained a few answers. He took out his phone to snap a picture of the papers.

At that moment the front door opened and Y/N crossed her arms stiffly across her chest.

The flash of Hvitserk’s phone went off accidentally and blinded her momentarily which only made her look angrier.

“Well, wouldn’t you rather come in?” She challenged him in a sarcastic voice.

Hvitserk was pissed off and startled, but most of all, he was embarrassed, judging by the way his high cheeks flushed with blood.

“What? You thought you were being so stealthy? You guys aren’t exactly subtle...”

“We just, uh- we just want to get to know you better.” Hvitserk cleared his throat and gave her an improvised smile.

“Oh, is that so?” Y/N’s eyes twinkled for a second and her shoulders relaxed a little. “Well... If that’s the case, handsome... then you should ask me out.”

She sauntered forward to caress his chin with her index finger seductively. She flashed him a smile and Hvitserk, ever the ladies' man raised an eyebrow and smirked back, unable to help himself. All thoughts about his mission had left his head and were replaced with the signals his brain was giving him for him to notice the light caress of her fingers, her body inches away from his, and her tantalizing lips so close to his face.

“Or... you could just fuck off!” Y/N shoved him, sending him tumbling backward until his ass hit the grass, then she smacked the door on Hvitserk’s face with a smug smile. “Asshole.”

It’s this easy to fool a guy. She thought with amusement.

[beneaththetangles]

Reader’s Corner: Those Snow White Notes, Your Lie in April Revisited, and A Couple of Cuckoos

She’s My Knight, Vol. 1

The premise of this lovely little comic is simple: Ichinose has always been the popular kid, attracting attention from all the girls until cool, collected Mogami comes along, stealing not only Ichinose’s popularity, but also his heart. I’m a total sucker for the Mogami type in manga and anime—the tall, athletic, boyish girl—and she makes a perfect pairing with the pitiful Ichinose, who increasingly, as the volumes progresses, falls apart around her. There’s not much else here—just lots of gags and near-miss moments, so in that sense, She’s My Knight may end up being a forgettable series. But just as Ichinose is the damsel to Mogami’s knight, this series might be rescued, too, by hints that the girl is not as clueless as she seems. But even if that’s not true, even if the series means to simply tease us for endless chapters and results in a series that isn’t unique in any way, the manga would still hit the sweet spot of feel good romantic comedy so well that it doesn’t really matter—this is the perfect volume to open as you sit back, kick your feet up, and prepare to fall in love. ~ Twwk

She’s My Knight is published by Kodansha.*

A Couple of Cuckoos, Vol. 1

Nagi Umino learns quite the shocking truth: As an infant, he had accidentally been switched with another baby, and had essentially grown up his whole life as an adopted kid. To make matters worse, upon meeting his birth parents, and the girl, Erika Amano, that he had been switched with, he finds out that their parents had decided that the easiest way to resolve this whole matter is to have the two of them get married so that all the parents can officially consider both of them their children! With an anime adaptation announced recently, I figured I’d check out the first volume of the manga, and true to the name, it’s quite crazy. With a mess of family relations and some side romantic antics involving a smart girl Nagi has a crush on, this manga definitely has all the fun of a good romcom, and there’s not really too much that annoyed me about it, either, other than that the volume ended way too soon. I also liked how it touches on the awkwardness of trying to connect with a birth family you didn’t grow up with, and I hope future volumes do more with that along with the romance stuff.  ~ stardf29

A Couple of Cuckoos is published by Kodansha.

Street Fighter Gaiden: Vol. 1

Videogames have made the transition to manga many times, and some have even done it on multiple occasions, which is the case with Street Fighter. I picked up Street Fighter Gaiden, which has two volumes and focuses on various stories in the SF series, focusing on various characters. Ken and Ryu get their due, and so does Chun-Li, who is some nice panels participates in a drug bust in San Francisco. Other stories feature Fei Long desiring to do something more challenging than be a movie star, leading to travels to Japan and a tragic accident while stopping some criminals; T. Hawk protecting fellow natives from another tribe who are being harassed by Balrog; and the final story, where Guile becomes involved in underground fights while trying to prevent a friend from getting involved with Shadaloo, the secret evil organization of the series. The stories veer from the traditional backgrounds of some of the characters, like Fei Long and Guile, but it’s interesting to read how the author puts them together. Fans of Street Fighter should check this series out! The drawings in the manga looks dated and a little rough here and there, but I certainly enjoyed it and will be picking up volume two. ~ Samuru

Street Fighter Gaiden: Vol. 1 is published by Udon Entertainment.

The Dawn of the Witch, Vol. 1

Witches seem to be making a bit of comeback in manga lately. The Dawn of the Witch, one of the new entries, seems at first blush to add little that’s new to the canon, assembling a weak main character mage, overpowered but very young looking master witch, talented witch / love interest, and a beastman, as they undertake a special type of journey / course assigned by their magic school. However, tropes can be deceiving. Volume one tells a story at breakneck pace, developing relationships, adding backstory, providing action, and dumping a ton of information, which while it could become oppressive, in this manga, is captivating. The world and its history are fascinating, the way magic is used has some uniqueness (including a cursed, talking staff?), and the divisiveness between witches and the church shows depth. The world-building in just this one volume is extensive and engaging, and the story seems to be in good hands, while the art and character design, developed by two additional members of this three-person manga team, are just as extraordinary, bringing vividness to action scenes, boldness to the characters themselves, and lettering and paneling that add further dimension to goings-on. The frequent and obvious fanservice, unfortunately, can be quite distracting; it’s not a coincidence that it takes a back seat once the story ramps up, indicating how unimportant it is. By the last chapter or two, there’s no room for panty shots; we’re swept up into the lives of these characters, the choices they’ve made and are making, and the world they inhabit, which in terms of recent witch manga, is second to none. ~ Twwk

The Dawn of the Witch is published by Kodansha.*

Those Snow White Notes, Vol. 1

Moving to Tokyo after the death of his guardian, grandfather, and teacher, Setsu is a lost soul. Though he carries with him a shamisen, the ancient three-stringed instrument, Setsu is unable to play, haunted by the words of his grandfather which told him he was unworthy of it. But will this move to Tokyo and the people he meets there be just what Setsu needs to find his sound? The first half of this initial volume is one long chapter, and reads like a one-shot, an almost self-contained story of Setsu’s serendipitous meeting with a hopeful actress, Yuna, and the impact the two have on one another. However, this front half of volume one isn’t particularly distinct in any way, and despite a desire to connect emotionally with readers through the young protagonist and and his family, the panels fall flat in this aspect, as do they when depicting the sound of the shamisen, whose tone and rhythm I could feel but not the emotion it gives. The second half of volume, however, establishes the story and characters better. Setsu’s personality is better defined, as is his brother’s, and new supporting characters are introduced as Setsu begins to attend school, setting the stage for a club-centered drama, a la Kono Oto Tomare and Chihayafuru, two other anime centered on historic Japanese pastimes. And like those, there’s potential here, though it will be lost if Those Snow White Notes can’t find consistency and an emotional anchor, which would be a shame, as the first episode of currently-airing anime adaptation showed how a few adjustments could turn this story into something quite special. ~ Twwk

Those Snow White Notes is published by Kodansha.*

Your Lie in April, Vol. 4

I’m continuing my re-read of Your Lie in April and have reached Volume four, a part of this series which can be a tough read. Kousei has finally returned to the piano scene after two years away to find that his childhood rivals have only improved. Both of them were motivated by him to become better. Emi saw him when she was very little and it inspired her to play, believing in her heart to play for joy, while Takeshi is driven to perfection to reach what Kousei had always achieved. Then there’s Kousei himself. In these chapters, readers bear witness to the emotional and physical abuse Kousei underwent as a child and it’s hard to witness. But it does help present a complete picture of the person Kousei has become so far. This is a challenging volume because of what happens, but it’s important to the overall narrative. Beautiful artwork and emotional moments will keep me moving through this re-read.  ~ MDMRN

Your Lie in April is published by Kodansha.

Skip Beat, Vol. 17

The “Suddenly, a Love Story” arc is an oddity, a portion of Skip Beat that is quite long and cumbersome, with not enough Kyoko and perhaps too much of the unappealing side of Ren, full of insecurity and lacking much of his initial appeal. Volume 17 thankfully puts the arc to rest with a quick but exciting (and revealing) finale which pits Ren against no, not Shotaro, but Reino, the abusive and perhaps occultist musician. The next arc also begins in this volume, introducing Kuu, a movie star more famous, it seems, than any previous character in the series. Although we get to know him just a bit, he appears to be a rival who could threaten Ren. He also immediately challenges Kyoko, providing the potential for her to really chew up character interactions, something sorely missed in the previous arc. The final chapters of volume 17 feel like a breath of fresh air, hopefully pointing toward compelling chapters ahead—though I fear the problem of an unappealing Ren may be not be solved anytime soon. ~ Twwk

Skip Beat is published by Viz.*

=====

Reader’s Corner is our way of embracing the wonderful world of manga, light novels, and visual novels, creative works intimately related to anime but with a magic all their own. Each week, our writers provide their thoughts on the works their reading—both those recently released as we keep you informed of newly published works and older titles that you might find as magical (or in some cases, reprehensible) as we do.

[foodjusticeisus]

African Indigenous Agricultural Practices

Increasing Soil Fertility Using Raised Beds

Figure: Ovambo People.

The Ovambo people are indigenous to Namibia and Southern Angola. They hold the belief that soil quality is not necessarily an inherent quality of nature, but rather something acquired through careful nurture, such as mounding, digging, and application of OM. When their land was colonized, they were forced into other lands with less soil fertility than what they had cultivated in their soils over generations. As a result, the Ovambo people were forced to start afresh and apply the traditional techniques that nourished the soils that they originally owned. In doing so, they created raised beds by setting the desired boundaries, clearing the brush within those boundaries, and building raised rectangular mounds. The pathways between these mounds doubled as irrigation ditches. Within the mounds, farmers add all kinds of OM to increase fertility, such as cattle urine, muck from wetlands, termite earth, and manure; this aerates and concentrates fertile topsoil, as well as prevents water logging. The Ovambo farmers also integrate a rotating fallow after harvesting millet for a few seasons. During this fallow, livestock such as cattle and goats will graze the brush of the resting crop, excreting manure and urine that plant nutrients into the soil and increase fertilization. Additionally, the practice of crop rotation, in this instance, including a fallow on a rotational basis, is one that is practiced by Indigenous groups across the world, as was briefly mentioned in the post about American Indigenous subsistence practices.

Terracing

In addition to crop rotation, terracing is another agricultural practice that is done by Indigenous communities across the world. In East Africa, this practice is called fanya-juu, which means “throw it upward.” What these farmers “throw upward” is soil from the bottom of slopes, which is then thrown to create terraces and thus revive degraded lands. As a result, SOM levels can be increased by 35% or higher than is found on conventional farms. Additionally, this practice sequesters CO2 , which helps mitigate climate change.

The Benefit of Trees in Agriculture

Figure: Yacouba Sawadogo of Burkina Faso. 

Silvopasture is an agricultural method that uses the various benefits provided by trees on livestock farms. In Burkina Faso, this is called zai, or tassa. Traditionally, pits were dug before the growing season started to catch water and concentrate organic matter. This practice was revived and built upon by Yacouba Sawadogo, who sought to revive his family farm when others were fleeing the Sahel due to the severe drought. Sawadogo dug the pits, as traditionally done, and filled them with manure and compost in order to attract termites, which would create tunnels that helped to further decompose OM by exposing it to air. This led to an increase in grain yield, and native trees began growing out of his field, which anchored the soil, buffered the wind, and helped retain soil moisture (insert here, an ode to the ability of native plants to supply our ecosystems with all the features and resources they need. Thank you native plants!). The trees also provided mulch for crops, and fodder for livestock (in addition to wind protection, this is a reason why many agroecologists promote zai/tassa/silvopasture). Other folks who stayed in the Sahel employed the same techniques as Sawadogo, and as a consequence, water tables in the region began to rise for the first time in decades. Sawadogo’s work is steadily transforming the Sahel into a green landscape again.

Figure: Sahel Desert.

Market Susus and Their Benefit for Market Women

A traditional market system that is believed to have originated in Nigeria is the susu. This system is an alternative economic system that consists of 15-20 members on average, and is led by a trusted elder in the community, the susu ma, or susu mother. In a susu group, money is collected from each member on a periodic basis, whether it be daily, weekly, or monthly. After a specified amount of periods, the lump sum of collected cash, held on by the susu ma, is distributed to one person, and the cycle begins again. This occurs repeatedly until every member of the susu has received a disbursement. Members are also able to double or triple their input to receive a proportional return, and these collections, calculations and distributions are taken care of by the susu ma. How does this benefit market women specifically? Starting a business requires a large amount of capital at once, something that can be difficult for women to obtain in certain places due to economic customs or certain situations such as ones where women have to be the primary breadwinner for multiple people. A susu group is supportive to these women because it allows them to accumulate a large amount of capital at once, which can be used to jumpstart or upgrade their business. 

I wanted to highlight this African Indigenous market strategy because the United States’ main economic system is capitalism. This system seeks the endless accumulation of capital, that is, the acquisition of mass amounts of wealth achieved through minimized costs and thus maximization of profits. By minimizing profits, you are incentivized to engage in exploitation, of people for their labor, or the environment for its resources--and don’t even get me started on how advertisements are used to exploit people for their interests, pleasures, fears, dreams, ideologies, and financial ability. Capitalism was the driving force behind chattel slavery (which sought to maintain white supremacy), commodifying African bodies, wiping away their humanity to position them as property. After all, what greater way to minimize the cost of labor than by forcing hundreds of thousands of human beings to work for free, with minimal food, covering, and health care to barely keep them going? This exploitative economic system still hurts Black people, Indigenous Americans, People of Color, women, and poor people today. It also causes devastation to the environment, as is being increasingly talked about. The minerals used in our phones, tablets, and computers are often acquired through trafficked labor and blown off mountaintops, mainly in the Congo. Capitalism just can’t keep its hands off of the African continent, even 400 years later. As folks are coming to recognize the empty promises of economic tokenization of its most oppressed groups, the women and young girls cheated by cost cutting tactics, and the plants, animals, and resources that are impacted by direct and repeated environmental exploitation, reimaginations of our economic systems are happening. With the more recent attention on Indigenous practices, and Black people and POC seeking a veneration of their ancestral knowledge, we have the opportunity to take a page from the book of the Nigerian susu as a way to support small businesses, market women, and build community interdependence and connectedness.

Remediation of Eroded Hillsides Through Soil Fortifying Plants

*While not indigenous to Africa, I want to include this erosion remediation story to highlight its regenerative nature and the efforts and successes of Haitian farmers.*

Erosion occurs when water from storms or wave action comes into repeated contact with a substance, and, over time, diminishes the substance by breaking its components down to be washed into the water source. The country of Haiti, once a colonized nation by the Spanish and French, saw its hillsides experience such great erosion that much of it fell into the ocean. This occurred due to deforestation for sugar plantations and coffee, indigo, and tobacco crops, which caused the earth to give way, as there were no tree roots to hold the soil in place. As such, farmers in Haiti have organized to find solutions to this colonial issue. Their efforts have, thus far, resulted in forests covering 30% of land area, slowly replenishing these necessary oxygen-producing, carbon-sequestering, sometimes fruit-bearing organisms that are a vital component of our natural ecosystems and environment. The ways Haitian farmers have been able to remediate their eroded hillsides was by planting vetiver, a densely-rooted perennial grass, in contour strips along the hillside. Due to the dense branching of vetiver roots, soil was held in place so that farmers could plant trees with thinner stems such as cherry, moringa, or mango trees. This is a way that the farmers could progressively fortify their soil, first using the grass, vetiver, to make way for lighter trees like moringa trees, which then make way for larger trees with thicker and more extensive roots, which has even greater potential to hold soil in place. Haitian farmers also dug meter deep trenches at 20 foot intervals in order to catch soil and runoff that would wash down the hillside during heavy rains. The trenches were dug out repeatedly, and the soil caught would be returned to the hillsides to manage erosion. The combination of vegetation in contour strips along with trench digging worked to increase water infiltration and maintain soil health.

Figure: Vetiver Grass.

Figure: Contour Strips.

Figure: Moringa Tree.

Source: Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land by Leah Penniman

[fantasyinvader]

@fireemblems24

Since @teaveetamer already posted their document on the game, I figured I’m going to go ahead as well since I promised you I’d do this. Part of it is me being impatient and just want to get writing this over with, I’ll admit, but it’s better than something I scribble at the last minute.

Okay, let’s start off with something simple. The route split. There is a meaning behind this you might not be aware of. See, Byleth’s personal class isn’t the Enlightened One in the original text. It’s Nirvana.  While it does take some cues from Hindu tradition, namely fusing with the Creator God...dess, in Three Houses it’s tied to a more Buddhist outlook. Namely, the duality between enlightenment and ignorance.

Let me explain. In Buddhist tradition, when he was attempting to reach Nirvana, a being called Mara tried to tempt Buddha away from that using his daughters. In their mythology, Mara represents spiritual death and among other things making bad things look good. However, the story goes that Buddha did not fall for the trap and in order to celebrate this a flag is used as the symbol. This is known as the Banner of Victory.

In Silver Snow, Byleth is presented with a flag. Not only does this flag appear as the route’s save icon, it’s also confirmed to be the game’s Fire Emblem. In addition, the developers have also said that the worldbuilding of Three Houses was done to support Silver Snow. Silver Snow is supposed to represent truth.

But what does that mean for Crimson Flower? It’s meant to be this path of temptation. Even the Japanese name for the route reflects this, as Safflowers don’t represent love like the red rose mentioned in the opening theme but rather attraction. Attraction and used in bouquets to say “I’m trying to attract you.” Even in the game itself, the choices that unlock CF are presented as changing the story.

What’s more, there’s implications.After joining Edelgard’s army, a NPC will talk about how he doesn’t think he should believe everything she says. This is way after Kostas dying, saying he should never have listened to her. There’s another NPC who, in the Japanese, heavily implies Edelgard is using propaganda to try and sway the unsupportive public to her side. We have the aftermath of Arianrhod, with her lying to the Black Eagles. Hell, the full version of the game’s theme song reveals she lied to Byleth during the events of White Clouds. Likewise, there’s a lot of little tidbits hidden in the route that imply it is far less heroic than it initially appears. Stuff like how Edelgard is starving her people to wage this war, how she abandoned the war she started for five years to search for Byleth, how she’s still using Crest Beasts, the fact the troops you liberated at Brigid were Imperial troops rather than Brigid militia like in the other routes (and notice how Catherine says “we just asked Brigid to not support the Empire” in contrast to Petra saying they’re forcing Brigid to join them? Other routes reveal that Brigid would join Rhea in a heartbeat if Petra wasn’t under Edelgard’s control), all optional but they’re there. Just like how her route has endings that contradict each other all over the place, talking about giving the people liberty while Hubert’s imply it’s a police state killing those who don’t accept their new overlord. Or how the Church is still around post-war, just under Edelgard’s control. Or how Byleth’s solo ending makes it still sound like they can use the Sword of the Creator, while the Jeritza ending shows them using the Sword of Seiros. Various bits of information floating around the game also debunk her narrative, if you know where to look. Crests and the Church don’t have as much power as she makes them out to, the Empire was founded on meritocracy but those in charge used their power to oppress the masses, and the Empire’s split with the Church happened because the Southern Church rebelled against their leadership and was crushed by the emperor at the time.

There’s so much evidence that things are changing in Fodlan, with new power structures and attempted reforms, while the Japanese text makes it clear Edelgard wants to put things back to how they used to be. She’s not a reformer, she seeking restoration of the Empire.

Even Byleth’s romance with Edelgard is suspect in the Japanese text. Ferdinand and Hubert’s paired ending makes it clear that Edelgard is jealous of how close they are, while her supports with Byleth flat out say Byleth has become more distant (and likely undoing their development during White Clouds). In addition, Japanese Hubert and Byleth’s support ends with Hubert saying they can be two particular birds flying alongside the eagle that is Edelgard. This bird is from Chinese mythology, representing eternal love...and bringing death, destruction and misery. It has very negative implications, hence why using the mandarin duck is seen as more appropriate since it also means love without any of the other stuff.

CF is the path of ignorance. Hell, the Japanese script says as much when Dimitri calls you out on walking the path of the beast. Nirvana is meant to be extinguishing the flames of hatred, greed and ignorance within yourself, while the path of the beast is one of hatred, greed and ignorance. CF is the antithesis of what Byleth’s story is supposed to be, hence why they lose their powers in it’s ending and aren’t a leader in Fodlan despite having proven themselves capable of the task. Instead, various endings show Edelgard restoring the nobility, albeit with far more control over them. Hell, the Japanese script uses the words conquest a lot more than the English one, the devs even referring to it as such while Silver Snow is the Empire Route and that part of the meaning behind CF is simply getting rid of those who stand in your way. Nothing about liberty or humanity, just Edelgard taking all power for herself.

Or in other words, she’s the hegemon that’s referred to in Byleth’s CF title. This was actually confirmed to be a reference to China’s Mandate of Heaven, and is meant to stand in contrast to Azure Moon. The gist is that unlike the Divine Right of Kings, where a leader has a right to rule given to them by God and everyone else can just suck it up, the Mandate treats their rule as a privilege. If you’re a cruel leader, corrupt,you put yourself ahead of your subjects, or just simply an oppressive tyrant, then you’re walking the path of the Hegemon. The Heavens will then give signs to the people, telling them they need to overthrow you and install a new leader. That’s what Edelgard is supposed to represent, and her route has confirmed rebellions against her. Ironically, her portrait at the end of CF is based off of Napoleon’s coronation portrait, which was meant to emphasize his own divine right to rule. That hand staff is supposed to represent being given God’s approval to rule, it’s call the Staff of Justice...except what we see in the game is inverted from the real thing.

Meanwhile, Dimitri’s path is that of the Righteous Kings. He’s a benevolent leader, one who puts the people first, giving them power and by overthrowing Edelgard he enacted justice. Dimitri at the end of AM and during CF is meant to be the good king, while Edelgard is always the tyrant. Hell, the terms for these in Japanese are used as expressions. Hegemon has very negative implications, like a power-tripping middle manager, while Righteous King has positive ones and can even be used to say a particular way of doing things is the proper way to do things.

Also worth noting that Azure Moon is the only route where you can pretty much save everyone sans Edelgard, Hubert and Jeritza. It seems to be the route that most emphasizes compassion over learning the full truth (hence, it doesn’t feature the flag like SS/VW).

Hell, the same final boss theme plays at the end of CF and AM. It’s Edelgard’s theme, using her own musical cues and stuff. Rhea might be the final boss of CF, but the music makes Edelgard the bad guy. Likewise, there’s many cues in the game linking Rhea with light/dawn and Edelgard with shadows/darkness, even Rhea’s lilies represent purity compared to Edelgard’s safflower.

Claude also has light based symbolism, and the devs confirmed he’s a good guy. He’s supposed to be Fodlan’s new guiding light after Rhea dies and the collapse of Fodlan’s institutions. In essence, he’s a direct contrast to Edelgard. While Edelgard thinks she knows everything and won’t change her mind, Claude learns the real truth and his views change with the route (mostly implied due to his supports). Claude reveals said truth, while Edelgard will keep pushing lies that suit her. The endings were Edelgard loyalists and TWSITD rise up to try and retake Fodlan are less hidden than the rebellions against Edelgard. Claude treats Byleth as an equal, whereas Edelgard pulls rank and says she can only see them as an equal when they propose. Claude doesn’t fall for attempts by TWSITD to turn him against the Church in VW, which creates the impression that they were the ones responsible for turning Edelgard against Rhea for simply being not human.

Claude is legit, especially considering the fraud that is Edelgard. You can’t save everyone as Claude, since the story prioritizes the truth (with SS being in the middle) but there’s a case to be made that it’s meant to be Claude’s path to his own form of enlightenment so he can be your true equal and partner.

So, that’s kinda it. Each of the three main routes are meant to contrast CF in some way. AM is more focused on compassion and saving Dimitri from himself, at the cost of learning the full truth. VW pushes the truth more, but you’re not able to save those you could in other routes. SS is somewhere in the middle, where you can save everyone you take into your class, Rhea if you have supports with her, and Dedue if you can keep him alive. The language the devs used makes them all out to be hero routes, whereas CF is the villain route once you dig under the surface. It’s the route of lies, it leads to tyranny, it lacks sincere compassion, but it doesn’t tell you that because you’re meant to be ignorant because you decided to join her. You put Edelgard ahead of the good of Fodlan, leaving it in darkness while she talks about being it’s light.

The main thrust of the game is SS vs. CF, but VW and AM serve to further illustrate why CF is the wrong way of doing things.

The devs took it a step further in the Nintendo Dream interview. Take all of what I just said, and consider the fact they wanted the players to immerse themselves in Fodlan. They want people to see all the evidence against Edelgard, hence why fighting her = Enlightenment. BUT they also talked about wanting to play a trick on players, and when people complained about how hard it was to “walk with Edelgard” during testing they made it easier to access CF. CF is the trick my friend, it’s the player thinking they’re the good guy when in reality they’re playing the game’s villain route.

[revlyncox]

Superhero Values (2021)

Whether we have great powers or simply great responsibilities, we return to our values to guide our actions. This talk was revised and expanded for the Washington Ethical Society, February 21, 2021. 

Earlier, you gave some advice to “Human Person” (a fictional superhero who “visited” earlier in the Platform) about compassion, understanding, and commitment, which are easier words to say than to practice. It helps to have role models, even if their stories didn’t happen exactly in the way they are told. It seems to me that mythology, fiction, and maybe even history can supply us with examples of values we can agree on. Stories that have captured our imaginations in the past may remind us of the people we hope to become.

When I was a kid, Batman was the lead character in some of those stories. He showed up in comic books and Pez dispensers, but the most influential form of Batman from my childhood was the Adam West character on television. When I was six or seven years old, the other kids who went to my babysitter and I used to run around the yard chasing super villains, pretending the basement steps were the Bat Cave, and generally doing our part for the good of Gotham City. We all traded roles as the heroes, heroines, and the various arch-nemeses.

I learned a couple of things from the Bat-team. I learned that superheroes have origin stories, events that changed the direction of their lives. You might not be able to tell from looking at them, especially in their secret identities, but every superhero has a past. The Bat-team also taught me that superheroes struggle with power. Whether the super skills come from hard work, cool gadgets, or another planet, heroes have to figure out the most effective and responsible way to use those skills. Finally, I learned that superheroes form coalitions. Batman and Robin and Batgirl worked together, not to mention Commissioner Gordon and Chief O’Hara. Even an independent vigilante needs other people for the toughest problems.

Come to think of it, those same things are true for all of us. Each of us has to decide how to respond to the past. Individually and as a group, we are faced with questions of power and responsibility. Teaming up with other people is a source of strength, in spite of and perhaps because of our differences. I think these characteristics of superheroes call attention to WES’s future as a community.

Heroes Have Origins

First, superheroes have origin stories. Some event from the past sparked the character’s discovery of talents and passions, leading to a new sense of identity and purpose. Those events might be associated with death or separation from a loved one, or with the loss of the character’s pre-heroic dreams.

Superman’s powers come from his extra-planetary birth, but his ideas about truth, justice, and the American way come from Martha and Jonathan Kent. There is some speculation that Superman’s creators (Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster) modeled him after Moses, a baby whose people faced destruction, and was carried in a small vessel to a land where his birth identity had to be concealed.

There is a category of stories in which the characters have qualities that were typical in their place of origin, but something called them to help people in a world similar to our own, where their profound difference turned out to be a gift. Wonder Woman, Black Panther, AquaMan, and Valkyrie fall into this category.

On the other hand, some superheroes start off with an event of pain or trauma, like Peter Parker’s radioactive spider bite to become Spiderman. Batman’s path is a response to trauma. In the Watchmen mini-series on HBO, one of the characters’ commitment to justice came from being a survivor of the 1921 white supremacist attack on Tulsa, Oklahoma. Ms. Marvel’s Kamala Khan is mainly in this category, having gained her powers during an unusual event.

Whatever the story, most extra-human comic book characters have faced a life-changing event that seems to isolate them from important people in their lives. Often, the character will acquire or discover or place new value on a gift or a talent they have during that experience. Picking up these pieces of loss, loneliness, and strength, the character eventually forges a new sense of purpose.

Michael Servetus (Miguel Serveto) is someone from history whose story follows this pattern a bit. He wasn’t always brave, and he wasn’t known for being kind, but he did set himself apart and commit his life to the truth as he saw it. I wouldn’t necessarily call him a Humanist, but he was a free thinker in that he defied the orthodoxy of his time, and his sacrifices made it possible for the people who came after him to do even more questioning of creeds, dogmas, and oppressive religious organizations.

When Servetus read the Bible for himself for the first time as a young student in the 1520s, he was shocked to discover no evidence for the doctrine of the Trinity. In 1531, he published a tract, De Trinitatis Erroribus (On the Errors of the Trinity), seemingly convinced that people would see it his way if only they would listen. That’s not what happened. He was run out of town, his books were confiscated, and the Supreme Council of the Inquisition started looking for him.

This is where the secret identity comes in. Servetus fled to Paris and assumed the name of Michel de Villeneuve. He had a varied career as de Villeneuve, first as an editor and publisher, then as a doctor. He worked on a seven-volume edition of the Bible, adding insightful footnotes. He was the first European to publish about the link between the pulmonary and respiratory systems.

During his time as the personal physician for the Archbishop of Vienne, he secretly worked on his next theological treatise, Christianismi Restitutio (The Restoration of Christianity). He also struck up a correspondence with his old classmate, John Calvin. Servetus was not diplomatic in his criticisms of Calvin’s writing, and Calvin broke off correspondence. Servetus seemed to think that their exchange was illuminating, because he included copies of the letters when he sent an advance copy of the Restitutio to Geneva.  

The publication of the Restitutio in 1553 marked the end of Servetus’ secret identity. Both Protestant and Catholic authorities pursued him as a dangerous heretic. He was burned at the stake on October 27, 1553, by the order of The Council of Geneva. Reportedly, he maintained his beliefs until the end, shouting heretical prayers from the flames. The Catholic Inquisition in France burned Servetus in effigy a few months later. There were a lot of people who didn’t want his ideas to be heard. Luckily for us, a few copies of his books were preserved, and went on to generate new ideas among religious reformers for over 450 years.

Now, I’m not saying Michael Servetus was a superhero. It might be hard to identify with him in some ways. Though he had ideas that were called Unitarian at the time, Unitarian Universalists oday would disagree with most of what he wrote, as would most Ethical Culturists. His creeds don’t match most of our beliefs; though some of his deeds, such as challenging authority and being a medical provider, might resonate. Nevertheless, we can see how a turning point in someone’s life can bring isolation, energy, purpose, abilities, and vulnerabilities, all at the same time. His origins were more like Spiderman than Superman: Being in the right place at the right time, Servetus was bitten by the free thinking bug. He had to adopt an alter ego, but the bug also afforded him the drive and the insight to make great contributions to scholarship and religious freedom.

How often is it the same for those of us who are regular folks? The events that make us who we are may bring a sense of loss or loneliness. These same events may bring a chance for us to develop new talents, or personal connection to the work we aspire to do. Passion and vulnerability can come from a single point in time.

The thing that sets a superhero origin story apart from a villain origin story is how the character translates their past into a future of meaning and purpose. Most of us are not consistently villains or heroes; we have to choose in every moment how to draw from our past to make choices in the present. We can’t control the historical facts of our origin stories. Even if our own choices led to the turning points in our lives, they are in the past now. What we can do is bring our values to the way we understand those turning points, and to our decisions about what to do with the gifts we have now. Let’s do our best to choose to use our origins well.

Heroes Form Coalitions

The very first appearance of Spiderman (in Amazing Fantasy #15 in 1962) saw the teenage Peter Parker misusing his new powers, only to have his negligence contribute to the death of his Uncle Ben, one of his adoptive parents. Peter’s understanding of Ben’s teaching that “With great power there must also come—great responsibility!” shaped his character from then on. The spider counterparts from other universes, heroes like Gwen Stacy and Miles Morales, also have turning points on that theme.

Superhero characters struggling with power and responsibility would have benefitted from reading about James Luther Adams, who was a professor at Harvard during the 1950s and 1960s. Adams had a great deal to say about power and what that meant for the responsibilities of movements for liberation.

Between 1927 and the late 1930s, Adams made several trips to Germany, a country that was renowned for philosophical scholarship. He spoke with religious and academic leaders, was detained for questioning by the Gestapo, and developed a sense of urgency about the political, cultural, moral, and spiritual crisis that went along with the rise of the Nazi party. While Adams developed great respect for the anti-Nazi Confessing Church movement, he noticed that Germany’s churches as a whole were not pushing back against the crisis.

Adams said that individual and organized philosophy should be “examined.” There must be a path for critique, self-correction, and development. Adams wrote, “the achievement of freedom in community requires the power of organization and the organization of power.”

In that same period when Adams was noticing trends of power, organization, and responsibility in Germany, Humanists in the United States were also teaming up. The roots of some of these relationships went back to the Free Religious Association, which was the group where Felix Adler hung around with Ralph Waldo Emerson and the other Transcendentalists. The FRA led to another trend called the “Ethical Basis” group within Unitarianism.

I’m drawing here from The Humanist Way: An Introduction to Ethical Humanist Religion, a book by former WES Senior Leader Ed Ericson. Ericson writes that, by the end of the nineteenth century, the Ethical Basis bloc had successfully advocated that inclusion as either a member or a clergy person in Unitarian congregations be purely on an ethical basis rather than having any doctrinal basis. Ericson continues:

They resisted all attempts to impose any theological requirement, however broadly such a test might be construed. Like Felix Adler’s Ethical Culture, the Ethical Basis Unitarians regarded the dedicated ethical life to be inherently religious without any necessary underpinning of theological belief. This concurrence of views resulted in a close working relationship between the leaders of the Ethical Societies of Chicago and St. Louis and their ministerial counterparts in the Western Unitarian Conference.

(Ericson, The Humanist Way, p. 46-47)

Ericson goes on to say that, while this cohort was concentrated in the midwest, Octavius Brooks Frothingham in New York also largely shared Adler’s philosophy. Ericson also points out that the Ethical Basis cohort provided “a seedbed where organized religious Humanism, under that name, would first put down roots in American soil,” making this development of interest to Ethical Humanism. So, already at the turn of the century, there is some superhero teaming up going on. It gets better!

In 1913, the Unitarian minister John H. Dietrich began using the term “Humanism” to identify his non-theistic philosophy of religion. Dietrich said that he first encountered the term as a religious designation in the text of a lecture delivered to the London Ethical Society (Ericson, p. 61). Ericson writes that “the Ethical Union in Britain had described their movement by the turn of the century.” Ethical Culture in the United States started identifying more closely as a unique expression within the broader Humanist movement a little later, not until after Adler’s death in 1933. At that point, they found a whole league’s worth of Humanists to team up with.

But back to Dietrich, who discovered that his colleague Curtis Reese in Chicago was writing about the same kind of philosophy. Having found each other, they attracted others to the growing Humanist movement. By 1927, they had connected with scientists, philosophers, and journalists, who collectively were turning out what Ericson describes as “a torrent of books, articles, sermons and lectures” (p. 67) that established Humanism as a significant force in American society. In 1933, thirty-four of these prominent figures signed on to The Humanist Manifesto.

Later groups wrote the Humanist Manifesto II of 1973 and the Humanist Manifesto III of 2003. The original 1933 document set a historic precedent, bringing together people from a variety of perspectives and settings. Unitarian and Universalist ministers were well represented, along with V.T. Thayer, Director of the Ethical Culture Schools of New York, plus A. Eustace Haydon and Lester Mondale, who later became Ethical leaders (Ericson, p. 70).

I would suggest that the Washington Ethical Society, by affiliating with both the Unitarian Universalist Association and the American Ethical Union, is living out the spirit of cooperation that has powered the Humanist movement in the United States from its inception. Ethical Humanism is a unique expression and tradition within the larger Humanist movement, and yet that larger movement remains important for understanding who we are and what we are here to do. We come to a deeper understanding of identity and mission when we team up.

In fiction, superheroes seem to gravitate to one another. From the X-Men to the Avengers to the Teen Titans, collections of lead characters become ensembles. They have very different abilities and outlooks. Teaming up isn’t always easy, and it can be risky. Household squabbles may become epic battles if super abilities get out of hand. However, when they combine their gifts in the same direction, they can tackle complex problems that none of them would be able to handle alone.

This is why we form coalitions, too. WES is a community of people who have many differences in your individual lives. Diversity in creed and unity in deed, WES members are able to learn together, make music together, serve the community, and witness for justice, without worrying too much about who is an atheist or an agnostic or a theist or a polytheist. Whether among members, or in coalition with our neighbors across religious or geographic lines, we are able to put differences aside as we work for the benefit of our shared community. It does happen, though, that human beings forget, or retreat into what we think is a bubble of sameness, or narrow our scope of what seems possible.

Let’s build on what is already going well as we resist the shrinking of our horizons. There may be partners in our community that we have yet to meet. There may be institutes for exceptional heroes, or halls of justice, that we have to overcome our internalized hurdles of classism and racism before we can join.

At the very least, we can ensure that we’re making the most of our super team here at WES. Like the superheroes, we can do more and support each other when we come together.

Conclusion

There is a lot that WES has in common with an assembly of superheroes. Each one of us has an origin story, a set of events that shaped our talents, passions, and vulnerabilities. Each one of us has the opportunity to shape that story into a life of meaning and purpose. Like superheroes, it is incumbent on us to come to terms with power. Our collective abilities and assets make us a force to be reckoned with, and it is up to us to do the moral discernment to make sure we’re doing a good job wielding that power. Our honesty with each other and practicing all of our shared values and commitments will help. Like the best superheroes, we form alliances. Within the WES community, we share our specialized powers and support one another to accomplish goals none of us could handle alone. In our coalitions with other groups, we build bridges that support compassion. May all that has been divided be made whole.

May it be so.

[zwiezraczek]

6 + 1 Underground [Four x OC/reader] Chapter 1

SUMMARY: Sasha is a Polish girl, with a strange past. She has various skills, driving amongst others. So she becomes Eight. And you know that Four plus Four is Eight...

CHAPTER 1: Eight is Born - CHAPTER 2

WORDS: 2.3k

Sasha instantly opened her eyes, taking the gun from under her pillow and pointing it at the black figure that stood in front of the window of her apartment. Her blond messy hair was all over her face as she tried to focus on the intruder, waiting for them to move, to put their arms up, to surrender. But they didn't. They stood immobile, there, in between the airy curtains moved by the breeze.

“Got me,” the man said with a warm tone, just as if he was smiling, “you're quick as hell.”

“Shut the fuck up and turn on the lights motherfucker,” she barked still pointing at him. Her eyes were focused on the man moving slowly towards the little lamp in the right corner, as she moved herself on her bed. But he took his time, and she didn't like it. “Don't you fucking play with me or I'll fucking kill you.”

“So many swear words coming from the mouth of a young and delicate lady,” the stranger teased just before switching on the light.

The scene could have been embarrassing if Sasha was the shy type of girl, but she wasn't. Her large white t-shirt barely covered her panties as she was on her knees over her sheets, eyes focused on her target. Her blue pearly eyes looked at him, she had the face of an angel. This was why they chose her.

When her mother died, she lost everything, even her father, who spiraled down into immorality more than he did before. So she decided to go all illegal, no strings attached in this Polish city, Sasha and her pretty face coming right into the Polish mafia. They told her that the best she could be was a whore for them, maybe even the boss if she was lucky enough, but Sasha was so much more than she looked. She was Kubica. That was how her mother used to call her when she was behind the steering wheel. She was reckless, she was bold, she could be a danger for the people driving around her and to tone this down, her mother made her take some ballet classes. Discipline and recklessness, everything Sasha was made of. From pseudo whore to mafia's chef, Piotr's, driver.

“Fuck you, don't you dare telling me what I should be or not, you fucker,” she dangerously whispered as the man casually stood next to the lamp, arms crossed. “What do you want from me?”

“Why don't you run from me?” the stranger continued still looking at her. She felt disoriented, making a small head tilt as he said these words. “Fucking millennials, when you try to be like them they go “No, I don't get you old man, tbh sorry”,” he continued, a little bit deceived by what he just witnessed. “Billie Eilish, or whatever? Doesn't ring a bell?”

“I won't repeat myself,” she warned, her index ready to pull the trigger. “You don't talk, you won't live.”

“Okay, okay, let's chill a bit. I'm not here to kill you or whatever, but more to... Allow you to be free?” She rose an eyebrow, not putting down her gun. This man was stranger than she had expected, it would have been easier if he just wanted to kill her. She would have pulled the trigger. Boom, no problem. “Well, you know, I know you very well Sasha.”

“Ho the fuck do you know my name?” her words were sharper than a blade. Nobody in the mafia world knew her by her real name, she was Kubica. No Sasha, just Kubica, the driver.

“I know many things about you Sasha... Damn, that's so uncomfortable to stand, I'll sit if you don't mind,” he concluded before sitting on a small stool near the lamp. “So, I was saying. I know many things about you, that you're a ballerina...”

“Was,” she corrected angrily.

“Yeah, dancing stays dancing,” he brushed the subject off as soon as he spoke about it, “you work for that mafia for a long time because your father is an asshole that let you down when your mother died...”

“Don't you dare talking about my mother, understood?”

“Wow, relax. Promise. Wow, taboo. Okay, I'll remember that. So,” he pursued after a small pause, “your dad does some bad shit, you didn't like that shit so you started to do your own shit and your ways are parted now, Kubica.”

“My mom used to call me like that,” she whispered, body slowly becoming less and less tense. “Who are you?”

“Guardian angel, wanker, asshole billionaire... Names are countless, depends of the people you're asking. But mostly, I'm a ghost.”

“You fucking kidding me,” she erected while looking at him from head to toe.

“Well, technically, in the records, I'm dead. But, really, I'm not. Can you believe how simple it is to fake your own death?”

“Yeah, no shit.”

“Exactly,” he said as if she cared. “And then comes the fun part of being dead: you can do whatever you want. Heard about the big Coup, Murat Alimov, Rovach Alimov?” She only nodded. “Our job. We did it.”

“We? I thought you were alone.”

“We'll make the introductions later if you don't mind Sasha. But, well, we have another touchy touchy mission and we'd need a good driver so...”

“I'm working for Piotr,” she interrupted him harshly. “I'm loyal.”

“I know, discipline and shit but like... We really need you? Pretty please?”

“You have plenty of drivers in the sea, go and fish for them.”

“No many drivers are Kubica and look like an angel.”

“I said I'm loyal. Now leave or I'll blow your head.”

“Wouldn't you like to piss your father off even a tiny bit little more? Imagine him learning that you're dead, and you know, he's a motherfucker basically, he fucks around now... You'll be able to do some nasty things to that immoral motherfucker without being punished for it. Total freedom. Piotr can't guarantee that, but I can.”

He got her.

“I'll listen to you.”

She became Eight. She died in a car accident, suicide as the media said. She drove directly into the Odra, from the golden bridge right into it. Big scandal for the media, as they found the big Polish billionaire's daughter dead – in fact they never found her body, only the car – after years of searching for her. Daddy was very concerned, he cried his eyes out during the funeral. From afar, she saw Piotr attending the funeral, along with some of her mafia's friends. Magda stood next to Piotr, holding his hand, while she sobbed with puffy eyes. Sasha's heart was ready to stop as she saw this girl crying for her, she would cry for her too if it was her funeral. But now, Sasha was dead. Eight was born.

“No shit, your dad's a fucking actor,” One commented, standing next to her in the snow.

Already January. Snow fell during Christmas Eve, the day she spent with Maga watching stupid Polish movies and drinking cheap wine from the shop around the corner. Her last Christmas. The bare trees carried now a large amount of snow on their branches, sometimes falling off. Anna liked snow, she would miss it in California. She would miss her country, she would miss the food, she would miss everything. She would miss her language. But she should be able to make it, for her mom right?

“My father's a fucking asshole who knows how to cover up his fucking deeds,” she replied. “I don't wanna see this masquerade or whatever, we should go.”

“Wow, the last time somebody told me that they wanted to go and not watch their own funeral was... Right now,” he admitted. “Even Two wanted to watch it until the end. But fine, we'll have plenty of time to discuss our next move with the Ghosts.”

“Let's go then. I hope you have nice cars in the US.”

He smiled, not answering. That was a yes.

She slept during half of the flight, they arrived around noon, time to sleep in Poland, still early in the morning. She rubbed her eyes, siting next to One in the pilot's cabin. The engine was still roaring as they landed safely on the yellowish sand. This was too early for any shit like this, she thought as she grabbed her sport bag in which all her belongings were stuffed. Some comfy clothes, the keys of the cars that died with her and a picture of her mom and her, hidden between all these matters. One forbid taking too personal stuff, he agreed for the keys though, but she needed her mother with her. Just to feel like home.

She instantly regretted putting on a sweater when she stepped outside the engine. She felt drops of sweat run on her back, she knew she was absolutely sweaty right now; the only thing that reassured her was that she put a tank top under all of this. Life saver. She followed One's steps in the sand, sleepy as hell, wishing for a bed and a shower just to function properly. They landed in the middle of abandoned planes, in the middle of nowhere, in a Californian desert. Great, she was dead and lost. Was it all worth it, she asked herself as she followed one into one of the planes with a large ghost imprinted on it.

There were the others, the five others. They didn't even flinch when she entered the room with One, doing what they had to do. She looked all around her, the atmosphere was oppressive because of the lack of lighting, some neon green lights escaped from the monitors some of them worked on, stale smell spread all around the “room”. One clapped and all their heads rose, all eyes on Sasha, Eight, now. They scrutinized her, and she scrutinized them as they all gathered around them. It was like a cult welcoming a new member. She got shivers down her spine, tightening her grip around her bag. A short brunette holding folders against her chest was now standing in front of them, next to her a black man with a gun in his hand; a cold blonde looked at them and slowly made her way up to them, next to a man sitting on a chair in front of a computer. And the last one,a  blond man with a hoodie jumped over the table to find himself near, standing now next to the brunette. Great picture, the Power Rangers, she thought.

“Please welcome Eight, our new driver,” One said the group as they all looked at her. “No hugs, no kisses, she's a Kubica, no paparazzi or whatever.”

“Kubica,” the blond man whispered, catching Sasha's attention before the man sitting stood up and interrupted him.

“Welcome Eight, I'm Three. Was a hitman, now I'm a good hitman,” he precised with a finger up as the blonde who was standing next to him rolled her eyes.

“Shut up”, she cut him off as he looked offended.

“Ay, mami why are you so nasty with me?”

“I'm Two, former French FBI agent,” she pursued ignoring the man's whining.

“Clear and precise,” Sasha commented under her breath, already amazed by the woman. “Nice to meet you.”

“Five, former doctor in a Mexican hospital,” the brunette said with a welcoming smile. “It will always be a pleasure to heal your wound. Hope you won't move as much as Two when I try to do my magic.”

“Shut up,” Two groaned.

“Seven, sniper,” the black man introduced himself after putting the gun on the table and coming to shake her hand. “Hope you drive smoothly so I can give head shots from the car window.”

“I'll try my best,” she shyly answered while knowing she could do it. She actually did it sometimes as Piotr's men were having a hard time.

“Four, skywalker,” the hooded man said looking at her with his green eyes. “If you wanna watch a movie or something like that, just hit me up,” he continued as he ran his hand through his hair after putting down his hoodie. His curly blond hair was all messy, was he trying to comb it with his fingers?

“Thanks,” Sasha replied with a little smile. “So, I'm Eight, mafia's driver.”

“Liar,” Three commented, “not with this pretty face of yours.”

“You'd be surprised,” One interrupted as he patted Three's shoulder. “That girl has exceptional skills.”

“Six had exceptional skills too,” Two remarked, arms crossed now. “Didn't prevent his death.”

“Will we wallow for a long time, mourn and stuff like this,” One asked while looking at her. “He died a hero, that's it. We all knew what the mission was about and accepted possible death. Period as millennials say.”

“Period,” Two asked. “That's not the women's thing?”

“Dot if you prefer,” Sasha could hear One's sigh as he answered, but Two wasn't convinced. “Whatever, Eight's our new driver and that's it.”

“He promised some nice cars,” Sasha tried to say, but only Five seemed to listen to her.

“He's a liar, we had a horrible car in Hong Kong, not practical at all,” the brunette told her, as she seemed to bite her lip.

“Not practical,” Three added almost yelling.

“Whose fault? Whose,” One reproached him. “Okay, now we're finished with our complaints, Five, take Eight to her trailer please, it's the one next to yours. And Eight, make yourself at home.”

[twistedapple]

Bianca Bosconero - Snow White stayed in the wild (part 2)

The second part is here and will contain the Bosconero twins’ background from Bianca’s point of view. I’m honestly tempted to say that her general profile is an overview and this post is more relevant in regard to the sort of person she is, how she evolved and where she personally is at the time of Yuu’s arrival. It’ll certainly provide more in-depth informations than her profile (though I’ll try to keep it at a reasonable length for an easier read - and because I have a good amount of things to cover).

Links to Bianca’s profile and the twins’ overview post (which has been swallowed by goddamn Tumblr so if that site could stop bullying us #twisted wonderland users, that’d be great thx). Now I’m taking a short break before doing a post regarding her magic and her sister’s full profile and backstory. I’m also considering rewriting a part of Bianca’s backstory from another character’s point of view as well (you’ll understand when you’ll read this post)... 

Without further ado...

On a cold winter morning, a woman pricked her finger while spindling. As a drop of blood fell on the floor, she found herself wishing for a girl with hair dark as night, skin white as snow and lips red as blood to the honored ancestor of the family, commonly known as the Green Man rather than an actual name. Nobody really knows who - or what - the Green Man really is, but through the Bosconero family he provided a lineage strong with sorcerers and alchemists, and sometimes his passed down powers would surge in a family member as an uncommon magical ability. Because of the Green Man’s ties to the land and the seasons, it was common in the family to develop magical abilities tied to earthen powers - and it didn’t spare the current generation when, nine months later, on a foggy first day of November, twin girls made their entrance to the world right on time for the yearly Autumn celebrations customary to the Valley of Thorns, when it was said the Green Man would end a cycle of life for it to start anew in the following months.

----------

- Bianca, Neve, you did an excellent work with that charm. 

- Beauty and talent, with those, you will be able to properly carry the name of our house! Now try again, to make sure you have mastered it.

- Yes mother, father...

- No! How are you supposed to represent us if you cannot repeat such a simple task? 

- Failure is not an option with our name on the line. 

- Sorry, mother, father...

- We will try again.

---------- 

While there was a widely known reputation for the inhabitants of the Valley of Thorns to remain fairly isolated, partly due to the fear their overlords, House Draconia, would inspire, it didn’t mean none of them were socially active. The Bosconero household was a prime example of it, with a historically strong tie to the magical community as a whole, as well as a fairly large social network that would cover both the Valley and other places. One of the most well-known figure of the family was the great sorceress Margherita Bosconero who, during her time at the head of the Magic Council, had pushed revolutionary reforms regarding the regulations and teachings of magic. She was also the one who had taught Crimilde Bosconero everything she knew and in turn, Crimilde was determined to raise her daughters to a level fitting their rank - and possibly reach new heights as well. 

As such, Bianca and Neve’s chilhood was filled with a variety of lessons and acitivities to meet familial expectations at every level. They were taught everything there was to know about etiquette, learned about history, science and literature in order to develop their ability to discuss about anything with anyone, They learned about the importance of an impeccable presentation - the first impression always mattered, after all -, which involved many details, such as a proper posture, a sensible sense of fashion, the many ways one could use their body language to convey or hide thoughts and feelings. They were taught about all the proper activities a lady was expected to master, such as spinning wool, creating embroideries, weaving delicate patterns, singing and playing instruments beautifully, writing and drawing with an elegant precision. 

And then, there was the study of magic. If Crimilde was generally strict in the way her daughters were being educated, she was exceptionally so when it came to that side of their lessons. The family had a reputation and the two girls had to uphold it in the best way possible. Adding to that was the pressure to see if one of them hopefully had the family’s Gift - not having it was not an issue in itself, however it was deemed an incredibly valuable element for the sake of added prestige. For that reason, Crimilde would show a worryingly increasing degree of ruthlessness while overseeing the education of her daughters over time. The girls would be praised when they executed their exercises in a satisfactory manner, and put down when a failure happened. They would be subtly pitted against each other, in the hope this competition would push them to go further in their study. 

Then, the Gift showed itself during a lesson of defensive magic, revealing at the same time Bianca’s unique magic. Twisted branches appeared from the ground and envelopped Bianca, its long thorns piercing her clothes and skin in many places. Then pitch black started writhing and Bianca has no recollection of what happened next. She woke up two days later, bandages here and there and an elated Crimilde by her side. The Gift had sprung up again, and in a spectacular manner! As a proof of its power, Bianca had entered a state of overblot - which had been swiftly stopped by Crimilde. From this point onward, Bianca became the center of attention of the family and had to meet even higher expectations. 

It’s around this time that the sisters were introduced to social life in the magical world, participating in various gatherings, meeting people from various regions of the world and discovering new places as well. After all, one of the strong points regarding the Bosconero family’s standing was their ability to curate their network and generally be part of the socialites. And there was no better publicity than the announcement of the Gift surging yet again. Yet, a dissonance started growing. Promised child only when success was met, promised child only when smiling to other people was required. Again and again, to appease her mother she started taking it out on herself and unconsciously compromised her own sense of self everytime. Worst of all, she was on her own, the entire situation having caused a rift to grow between her and Neve, who was left behind in her shadow the whole time. 

However, the situation went in the opposite direction when it came to light that Bianca, for all of her abilities and best efforts, had an issue that was deemed unsolvable. Contrary to her sister’s not-as-impressive magical powers, yet steady growth, her own was irregular and more and more punctuated with times off magic to reduce a blotting that happened faster than it should have. A point was reached, during which Crimilde simply expressed her immeasurable disappointment by deeming Bianca as defectuous, and then proceeded to report all the attention to Neve instead, certain that she was the one who should have had the Gift instead. Then, everything became incredibly obvious, and Bianca started realising with horror the dissonance she’d been putting herself through in order to keep going.

---------- 

- Neve... Neve! 

-... It’s the middle of the night, go away!

- We need to talk. 

- Wha-... Now?

- Yes, it’s the only moment when we’re left alone.

- What do you want?

-... Are you ok with that entire situation we’re in?

---------- 

Bianca tossed, again and again. Every night, for days, she tossed in her bed as she was carefully pondering her situation and the action she should take to get out of it - to save herself. 

Lately, she’d been having this oppressive feeling, something writhing and screaming deep inside. She’d been feeling wary too - a peculiar feeling considering how young she still was by the Valley’s standards. Getting up with the knowledge that it was yet another day during which she’d have to become her parents’ adorable and quiet girl was heavy. Getting up with the knowledge that another surge, another mistake, would lead to the reminder that her sister was doing much better than her despite her lacking the gift bestowed by the Green Man. Yet she had to tolerate it, for the love of her parents, the love of her sister, and the necessity for the family to appear united.

Yet as time passed, it was making her sick. She felt like a monkey repeating tricks for whoever would lie their eyes on her. But she had to give a good impression, right? And uphold the status of her family, both in the Valley and in the magical world, right? It was her duty as the newest generation of Bosconero, after all... And she didn’t want any of it any more. This made her feel like a spoiled child, and the guilt born from it only served to make everything feel even worse. The worst part was when her family would participate in social gatherings, unknowingly having her observe other people the same way she’d observe her parents; direct interactions meant a work of reading the situation at various levels: what was said, what was meant... And what remained hidden. Over time, Bianca’s attention to details had been honed to the point she was able to swiftly adjust to any reaction just so she could obtain the safest result. This very situation had also led her to bury herself.

Again and again.

Bury herself, always deeper, to just choke and decay in an abandoned corner of her mind. After all, her very being felt unwanted. Yet, she had recently realised there was still a door to open when she noticed a tight knot in her chest at the view of a son and his father, during a social gathering like all the ones before. Until that pang, she thought she’d grown accustomed to that fleeting feeling of longing she’d occasionally have; it seems she had misjudged herself, though. And since then, the thought of a flight across the night sky, on her broom and with a simple luggage for companion kept following her. It’d be foolish to think someone would come for her, if she wanted to get her life under control, she had to do it herself. And she did it, after having heavily pondered on her situation, after having tried to convince her twin sister to come with her - to no avail, Neve was completely bound to the family and deluding herself as her own mean of survival. 

So Bianca took off on her own one night, to fly as far as she could, disappear for a while and settle somewhere peaceful.

----------

- Back when we met, you talked about motivations, but there’s one you never told me. 

- Do you want the straight-to-the-point version or the flowery one?

- Whichever expresses best what you had in mind back then. 

- Alright. Then I’ll have you know, kings and princes become much less scary when you consider they sit on their ass the same way everybody else does. It’s easier to treat them as actual persons when one perceives titles as overrated.

-... Straight to the point, indeed. I’d almost be offended.

- That’s why I kept it to myself~ ♪

---------- 

The knowledge of fauna and flora imparted by her parents revealed itself useful for Bianca’s survival in the wild. At that point, she simply didn’t feel like dealing with more people, and wouldn’t risk it either - she had her own trail to clean up after in the first place, showing herself would be a liability for the time being. So she took the decision of going on a personal quest instead, momentarily abandoning all sort of connection to focus on herself instead. For the first time in her life, she had the possibility to do so and was in bad need of self-examination as well. Observing other people and comparing various situations to her own had made her realise something was off, and not just about her situation. Her very person had been moulded in a manner that would be sure to please other people, to do so she had sacrificed her will, thoughts and feelings again and again, until she found herself choking from self-loathing and incomprehension. She needed to find herself again, figure out where this Bianca had been buried. There was simply no room for others at that point in her life. 

That is how her life in the wild started. As she went on a personal quest to find herself, she wandered left and right across the Valley, most of the times lost in her own clouds. It... Was not the greatest moment of her life. A lot of poison to swallow, truths to realise and accept, and then her own magic surging and occasionally going out of control - as if it was reacting to her own struggle and taking out what had been internalised for so long. Fear, anger, slackness, euphoria, giddiness... All of these feelings either shut down by Bianca or unwanted by her parents would feed her summonings and twist the world around her. Parts of the Valley where she dwelt for a time ended up gaining a fairly dark reputation over time, while she was giving herself time to work things out. It was writhing inside and out, and worst of all was the guilt of her incapacity to get her sister out of here as well. Of having left her behind and alone. It’s a period of her life where time somehow lost its meaning, distorted by her constant fights against herself for the sake of mastery. It’s ugly, dirty, foggy, and she remains elusive about it, merely sharing her surprising experience with general survival - both physical and mental. The most important lesson of these dark times is, however, a surprising yet massively important one for Bianca: she learned not only to fight, but to let go as well as years of poison built up in her heart was being absorbed and transformed into something new.

Once she got back on her feet, with a stronger foundation, the second step of her plan started. As she decided to keep using her knowledge in botanic, Bianca decided to pass for a wise woman, the sort that lives isolated in the forest and that people go seek in secret to relieve all sorts of ailments. She changed her name to Hilda and kept wandering around, even though she opted to dwell in the same place for a longer period of time. The look of a maiden and the wisdom of a crone, as well as her elusive nature, gave birth to some strange stories that would feed the local folklore. A young woman stealing people’s soul, an old woman protecting the hearth, a dreadful witch leading a charge across the sky and the thick forests of the Valley of Thorns... It’s when they met, too. 

Under blue moon, she saw him, as she approached guided by Idle, her slythering summon which was acting as her watchful eyes that night. Hidden at first, Bianca silently skirted around the tall, horned man while keeping an eye on him. They had never met before, yet she was aware of how he looked because of who he was - as such, Malleus Draconia’s silhouette was unmistakeable and it had her worried. Her personal situation had nothing legal to it and getting caught would lead to troubles that could easily reach further the family circle. However, he seemed very much alone and was inspecting the area without showing any sign of alert - on the contrary, he was the one who put her in that state when he called out while giving a long look at his surroundings.

- This place isn’t abandoned anymore, there are traces of magic... Show yourself!

Bianca only had a few seconds to ponder on her decision. She could stay safe and hidden, and figure out how to keep him at bay. She could also comply to not push his patience - her luck - and maybe reduce the gravity of her situation by showing some good will. Either way, the risk was to make the situation worse and more political. So she took a deep breath to regain her composure and opted for the course of action she knew best, for she had been practicing it long enough to hone it: smile and stay light-hearted, gauge the situation in silence.  

- Now that’s a visit I certainly never saw coming. Not even a guard? 

Glowing green eyes fell on her as she came out of her hiding spot, cheeky half-smile plastered on her face. It felt pretty rude of her to conceal her intentions to the Crown Prince himself, but old habits die hard and she needed to see where she stood before making her next move. Though, having grown accustomed to dealing with a human population, she considered the fearsome reputation the Draconia household had while observing Malleus back. Why was he here, alone, in the middle of the night? There were these questions, and the fact that for everything the reputation stated about him, Malleus Draconia didn’t exactly feel like a terrifying being. If anything, he seemed oddly out of place, in Bianca’s opinion. Besides, nothing would be as anxiety inducing as her parents, in her eyes.

- Wasn’t this place supposed to be abandoned? It was, last time I strolled around.

- ... Strolled around? Well, I settled in fairly recently, was even planning to rearrange a part of the garden to grow some stuff for myself... Look, is there a part of the area you’d rather have me leave untouched? I don’t really care, I’m pretty much passing by anyway, and I’m all alone so I don’t need much room. 

Initially taken aback by his reply, Bianca was quick to get back on her feet and react in a decisive manner to try and distract from the fact she wasn’t even supposed to roam around and settle the way she’d been doing in the first place. In turn, Malleus’ composed expression changed to surprise as she stated her proposition. Then surprise left place to something more thoughtful, before settling for a visibly amused smile. 

- Negociating? Do you realise who you are talking to?

- ... Oh yes, I do, but my motivations for this negociation are better left for when we’re more hm acquainted with each other. So, is it a good enough reason for you to still feel comfortable hanging around? 

Under blue moon, they kept meeting up and grew to enjoy each other’s company. His strong interest for gargoyles amused her, but her own interest for anything historical made their escapades to the four corners of the Valley of Thorns all the more pleasant. As habits begun to settle, they learned to read each other and it slowly downed on Bianca that she was growing attached to Malleus and everything that made him who he was. She simply couldn’t help noting the smallest details and appreciating each of them. The way his eyes crinkled when he smiled, how accidentally stern and teacher-like he would feel when sharing his hobby in the most serious fashion, his pout revealing more of his feelings than he could hide... And then there were heavier topics, chief of them his sense of isolation. Granted, Bianca wasn’t the best person in that regard since she was enjoying being on her own for the moment. Still, she understood the feeling and its implications, and didn’t judge his occasional discreet awkwardness - translated into a rather forward way of expressing himself, to the point of being odd and somehow backed by a logic only people who lacked proper social interactions would demonstrate. 

In return, she made an effort to be more open in the way she expressed her thoughts and feelings. It wasn’t easy since hiding and using them as strategic cards had been ingrained in her - it was, in fact, one the toughest habits she had to get under control to feel like a functional person. It was even harder because she had taken the decision to keep her Hilda persona around Malleus as well. It hadn’t been a pleasant decision to make, but she kept fearing a potential escalation of her issues - besides, Bianca wasn’t one to wash her dirty clothes in public, and so she preferred keeping the full extent of her issues to herself out of a sense of privacy. After all, she had set out on her own, her alone had to deal with the consequences of this decision. Nobody else would be dragged in. Yet these secrets weighted on her shoulders and she couldn’t help feeling guilty as he was being so pleasantly open to her. A part of her felt like she didn’t deserve so much kindness from him. 

Yet, under blue moon their relationship took a new turn, on a night when Malleus was helping Bianca settle in yet another hiding place. If he had questions regarding her situation and her habit to hop from place to place after a while, he kept them to himself but didn’t hide the occasional long stares with a thoughtful look - a graceful gesture the hedge witch became aware of over time and appreciated. However, for all of her observations, she never foresaw that one night coming, mostly because she never expected such a thing to happen to her in the first place. The details of what led to this situation still escape her to this day, but the most important ones remain: a look exchanged and something in reaction that caused her breath to hitch, his discreet scent like tea, soft spices and winter fire, the warm feeling of skin against skin and a tingle spreading through her body, leaning into the sensation to get more of it. Soon, fingers found their way through hair and things started to heat up... Then stopped, as Malleus was holding a strand of her hair and looking at it, then at her, with a surprised look. 

- You did tell me about those magical surges of yours... But I had never seen that sort of thing happen before. Did you?

- What are you talking abo- blackthorns blossoms? No, that one is definitely new, though oddly specific. I wonder what could have caus-

Then it downed on her as she mentally considered the nature and properties of blackthorn tree. It seemed her own magic had a sense of humour and she was its victim, because the choice of plant was oddly appropriate, both in regard to the situation it decided to appear and mix in her hair, and in regard to the person that was involved in it. Bianca got redder by the second as she blurted out her explanation, eliciting the most charming reaction from Malleus in the process.

- To put it simply, I’d say you... You-made-me-bloom. Literally. 

- Pff... Hahahaha well at the very least, know that the blackthorn suits you perfectly. 

- You’re enjoying it all, aren’t you?

-Oh, I enjoy it a lot.

Shortly after this event, Bianca’s cover as Hilda the hedge witch was destroyed. As she lowered her guard more and more around Malleus, she became complacent as well, and that’s how she made the mistake of leaving traces for her mother’s assistant, Erico, to follow. Up until now, her parents had waited for her to come home, and her mother had sent the man when she realised her runaway of a daughter had no intention of coming back. Following her had proven difficult, between the erratic patterns she had either purposefully or accidentally created and her cautious nature, she’d proven more elusive than expected. Not surprising, considering the roots of her magic. The wild itself was her domain to rule over, the twisted magical left overs of some of her early rampages had proven so when he went and observed them. 

Under blue moon, Bianca found herself cornered and felt an anxiety she thought she had managed to overcome hold her in a metaphorical chokehold again. And when Erico called her name - her actual name -, it felt like the first of a series of slaps in her face as the new reality she had built for herself fell apart. A magical fight ensued, during which Bianca noticed for the first time how far she’d come with her small but steady, daily practice. Had she stayed home, she would never have been to reach that level of mastery - even though she still had to summon Folly, a large dog-like beast, as well as sets of thick blackthorn bushes to keep the assistant at bay. As they finally came to a standstill, Bianca holding him with bushes full of long thorns slowly getting tighter around him, negociations started and poison flowed.

- Lady Bianca, you have to come home, your parents are concerned about your safety!

- My safety? Or the fact that I may cause a smear on their good name? Unless it’s an interest for what I bear? Concerned about me as a person, I don’t think so. Tell me, what do you think of my current magical abilities?

-... You’ve grown, Lady Bianca, but you’re still young and -

- Do you think I owe that growth to them? The very persons who threw me away because of what they considered a defect? The only reason they want me back is because I carry our family’s Gift. It makes me no better than some broken tool, just because I blot too quickly. But here, outside, I managed to become a person again, and it’s all my work, I don’t owe the family a single thing! Do you think I will allow you, or anybody else to take that away from me? Do you really think that?

- My lady please, at least come back home to share your sister’s burden - ACK!

- Share her burden? She chose to be on her own. But please, keep spouting that sort of nonsense, see what my thorns think of it!... You’ll bring a proof back to my mother. Something to show her that it’s pointless to follow a dead trail. 

On these softly threatening words, Bianca went to her current hiding spot, leaving Folly to keep watch over the assistant. A dead trail it would be, as she ramaged through her stuff and got out to prepare a simple transforming charm. Quickly, animal bones got turned into humanoid bones, which she wrapped in a dark fabric. 

- Since you were following orders, I’ll let you go back to my family, but you’ll bring them these bones. Tell them this it what you found at the end of the trail. You’ll be freed from this cat and mouse game in the process, isn’t it nice? Your Lady Bianca Bosconero is dead.

After she released the assistant from her magical hold and saw him off with the fake bones, Bianca collapsed on herself. Even though she had clearly gotten better at handling her magic, pushing her limit and walking it like a tightrope, it was still exhausting. In bad need of a rest, she considered not using magic for a little while to be the safest option if she wanted to recover properly. What she didn’t consider was Malleus witnessing the end of that exchange as he refrained from joining her, seeing that she was very obviously in quite the situation. 

-... Bianca Bosconero? From the Bosconero household? Is it who you are?

---------- 

M., I think this will be the last letter between us for a while. I’m sorry things have come to that, but you know I don’t want you to be needlessly involved in my personal mess. I’ll try to figure a new way out, I’ll let you know as soon as it happens. In the mean time, please take good care of yourself. I love you.

---------- 

Malleus didn’t take her lie well and let it known through his scowl. However, he accepted to listen to her, and Bianca chose to talk about her situation, for the first time in years. It was clumsy and oddly unemotional in some parts, as she tried to be as detached from her recounting as possible. She remained afraid of letting to many things out, because she knew she’d break if she were to do it. Bianca wasn’t ready to break yet. Even though she had learned to let go, there were still things she desperately held onto to keep her head up. By the end of her explanations, Malleus’ scowl had left place to a more thoughtful expression. They spent the entire night together, and he kept coming back in the following days. His kindness went straight to her heart. 

Once she recovered from the encounter with her mother’s assistant, he offered to help her work on her magic by being her sparing partner. She decided to focus mostly on defensive magic, fully aware that once her mother would have realised she’d been tricked by the bones, there was a high chance that she’d make the next moves herself. She needed to be ready to deal with what was coming her way, especially when it would come the woman who’d been trained directly by Margherita Bosconero. As such, having a proper set of spells to defend and attack, as well as an increased mastery of her unique magic, was necessary. The latter, in particular, had the possibility to provide Bianca a control of the field as long as she paced herself properly and kept a clear, focused mind. 

Facing her mother was probably one of the hardest things Bianca ever had to do in her life. Not simply because of her power, but because of the terror she inspired her despite not having seen each other for a long time. Bianca held her ground for a surprisingly long time thanks to the preparations she had done with Malleus’ help, but in the end it prove to no avail. She was still too young and too swayed by her emotions. When the blot started to accumulate to much, when her mother’s onslaught of spells started getting past her defenses, Bianca felt herself fail and a sinking feeling, deep inside her, that she thought she had managed to keep under control, grew and made her crumble in the end. 

Bianca’s home became her golden cage. She found herself sitting inbetween parents who not only viewed her as a general failure, but as a disappointment as well, while her sister remained... Cold. Bianca never asked what had been happening during her absence, but the way her sister held herself - as if she was a new version of their mother, was disturbing to witness. With that in mind, she started isolating herself more and more, both in the house and in her own mind in order to escape the pain her new situation was giving her. Reading and writing became her hobbies to kill time in a pleasant way and express herself in a way that wouldn’t cause harm to anybody. She also sent letters to Malleus regularly with the help of Sly, her twisted bird-like summon, and kept his replies well hidden. Not being able to see him was painful and even worse was the news that her mother had caught on Sly’s flights and was preparing a spell to make sure it would stop. When Idle, ever the watchful eyes, had reported on that, Bianca’s heart sank and she immediately prepared her last letter to Malleus, not knowing when they’d be able to read or even see each other again. On a sentimental impulse she still wasn’t used to, she decided to bluntly state her feelings as a promise to find a way out of her current predicament. 

Then, her days slowly became awfully similar and a numbness started overtaking her with time. It felt like being back to square one, with no way out this time. Bianca silently despaired in a house that made it clear she was unwanted, yet had to remain to pay for the shame she had brought her family. It ate away at her will in an insidious manner, until an unexpected saving grace, in the form of an invitation, arrived for her. Bianca and Neve both received an invitation to study magic, but in different schools. While Neve was called by Royal Sword Academy, Bianca was meant to attend Night Raven College. It didn’t bother her, quite the contrary. She was elated at the idea of leaving the house for some years and the news alone was enough to help her find some energy back.  

On the day the carriage containing the coffin that led to Night Raven College arrived, Bianca’s surprise increased when she saw a familiar silhouette ready to pass through the coffin-like door. The only reason she kept her composure was because Malleus wasn’t alone - next to him stood a smaller man with a boyish face. Lilia Vanrouge. As she was about to break into a run, Bianca managed to stop at the last second and proceeded to politely salute the two fae before following them through the door. During the entrance ceremony, amidst the whispers caused by Malleus’ presence at the college - a surprising turn of event, considering he was already among the best sorcerers world-wide -, both were sorted into different dorms by the Mirror. While Malleus joined Lilia in Diasomnia, Bianca found herself in Pomefiore, and nearly lost it as soon as the name was uttered by the Mirror. Of course, she had to be sent to the place where the most ambitious ones tended to be found. 

A few days later, as they settled in their dorms, Malleus and Bianca met under blue moon. For the first time since they met, Bianca didn’t hide a thing - didn’t even try to. Tears gathered and rolled, taking away with them the exhaustion accumulated over time. Her head rested on his shoulder and she basked in the gentle blend of tea, soft spices and winter fire she’d missed more than she expected. Being in different dorms and in different classes meant they couldn’t see each other as often as they’d like, yet the occasional meeting was good enough for them. Besides, a single year didn’t mean that much.

During that same year, Bianca started working a new solution out to counter her family’s power over her. She managed to get hired as part-time library assistant and poured much of her free time into the study of legislation. Her grades suffered as a consequence, but she waved it away, considering it a lesser immediate priority. She also took it upon herself to approach Lilia at some point during the year, in order to get further advices regarding the details of certain laws and how they applied in the Valley of Thorns. Considering Lilia’s age and experience, she deemed him a reliable source of information on the subject. By the end of the year, she reached out to the school’s staff and decided to be open about her issues and how it would impact her life in the following year. Not certain about her capacity to deal with everything at the same time, she asked for an authorisation to sacrifice her second year. If the request was initially received with a certain reluctance, arguing that dealing with her personal issues as quickly as possible would allow her to concentrate on her studies later on seemed to convince her teachers and the headmaster. 

As a consequence, she was fairly inactive as a student during that second year, busy working at the library and figuring out a way to at least obtain legal emancipation with the help of a counsellor. If the magic way didn’t work, Bianca hoped the legal way would do the trick. And by the end of that second year, it did. It may have brought a debt and a repeat of the year, but Bianca considered it a worthy sacrifice for her peace of mind. 

This is where she is now, as her new second year starts. Sitting in front of a mirror, in her dorm uniform, she adds some subtle touches to a makeup of the dramatic sort, created solely to go with the outfit and meant to signal a turn in her life, an affirmation of who she is as a person. After all, considering how this year’s entrance ceremony went as a non-magic wielding human and a beast caused havoc in the Hall of the Mirror, this year certainly promised to be interesting.

[sweetsmellosuccess]

TIFF 2020: Days 1 & 2

Films: 5 Best Film of the Day(s): One Night in Miami

One Night in Miami…: I guess you could form an argument that basing a film on a pre-existing play would make the feature easier to put together, but that wouldn’t be taking into account the tremendous differences between the mediums, their relative strengths and weaknesses. For her feature debut, the Oscar-winning actress Regina King has cinematically adapted the stage play  by Kemp Powers about a fictionalized fateful night amongst four famous Black men in 1964. Those men, Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge), Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.), and Cassius Clay (Eli Goree), are all in town ostensibly to celebrate Clay’s beatdown of Sonny Liston to first become the heavyweight champion of the world at the tender age of 22. But the film puts them all together in Malcolm X’s modest hotel room, watched over by Nation of Islam security men, to spend a night, essentially, debating the merits of what they bring to the struggle for Black equality and economic emancipation, and arguing back and forth about their distinct positions. Here is precisely where many play adaptations falter, without the dramatic friction of a live performance to power the emotional core, such conventions generally fall flat on the screen, but King’s virtuoso acting instincts serve her able cast well, and her work with DP Tami Reiker allows the film to flow, seemingly organically between its few location movements. Working from a skilled script by Powers, the celebrated figures feel three dimensional, which gives even their more didactic diatribes (Malcolm), and pithy rebuttals (Cooke) enough weight to avoid sounding contrived. The cast work wonders on the material, granting a needed organic vibe to their nonfiction characters, echoing the essences without tipping into caricature. It’s a strong debut for King, and the film’s complex ruminations on the responsibility of successful Black people towards their community as a means of bringing attention to the country’s oppression couldn’t be more on point. At one point Clay tells Cooke the four of them will always remain friends, because they are among the few who can possibly understand what it’s like to be “young, Black, famous, righteous, and unapologetic.”

Shiva Baby: Danielle (Rachel Sennott) is in the midst of having a day. Turns out Max (Danny Deferrari), the sugar daddy with whom she has frequently been visiting as part of her regular prostitution gig, is somehow a friend or cousin of the deceased at the same Shiva she has come to attend with her well-meaning, but completely overwhelming parents (Polly Draper and Fred Melamed). If that weren’t enough in Emma Seligman’s spry comedy, Danielle is also horrified to find Maya (Molly Gordon), a successful young woman she’s known for years, and a recent ex, also there. Crammed into the Shiva house, full of cousins and aunts and uncles all kvetching about everyone else, and being physically grabbed and moved about by her mother, Danielle faces this house of horrors, with everyone commenting concernedly on her weight-loss (“You look like Gwyneth Paltrow  —  on food stamps!” her mother hisses at her), and her lack of job prospects when she graduates, and her parents telling scathingly embarrassing stories about her in front of Max and his shiksa wife (Dianna Argon), whose 18-month-old baby, her mom says is “freakishly pale  —  and no nose,” with no respite in sight. As a result of this sort of hyper-scrutiny, Danielle goes the only route that makes any sense: Lying to everybody about nearly everything, from her current major (“gender business”), to the many job interviews she has supposedly lined up. She’s just trying to get through the ordeal, one that Seligman, along with a continually spiraling score from Ariel Marx, ratchets up, until, near the end, poor Danielle is in a near fugue state, sweat glistening on her face, and the attendees, shot in unflattering slo-mo, and distorted lenses, take on the sheen of a waking nightmare. At a brisk 77 minutes, the film still doesn’t have quite enough to sustain its running time  —  at a certain point it begins doubling back on itself  —  but it’s still a lot of horrific fun, as Seligman expertly captures the absolute loss of agency one can feel, swallowed up in a claustrophobic family gathering, where escape feels futile.

Limbo: If Scotland has a cinematic identity, as such, it seems like the kind of place, desolate and unforgiving, where individuals come to exit regular society and come to a land filled with eccentric loners (stoic and unique in their oddities), in order to get better in touch with their souls. Ben Sharrock’s serio-comedy captures both the pitiless beauty of the land, and the lonely plight of a Syrian immigrant, Omar (Amir El-Masry), waiting with a group of other men from across the Middle East and Africa, on an island off the mainland, for word from the Immigration Office that his bid for political asylum has been accepted. Omar, sweet-faced and approachable, was a musician by trade in his native Syria, and walks around everywhere carrying his precious oud, bequeathed to him by his grandfather, also a musician, even though his right hand is locked in a cast from an unspecified injury. Even without the cast, however, you get the sense that his heart really isn’t into playing, despite the entreaties from Farhad (Vikash Bhai), his Afghani roomie and self-appointed “agent and manager,” who wants him to enter a local music contest. Omar is carrying a significant amount of weight beyond missing his mother’s fragrant home-cooking. Talking to her on the lone payphone on the island, where other immigrants-in-waiting stand in line for a chance to hear from home, she implores him to speak to his older brother, who chose to stay behind in Syria and fight in the Civil War that has plagued the region for years. Omar feels guilty for having left, and suffers from having disappointed his father in the process. It doesn’t help him that the culture he finds himself in seems so foreign to him, despite his speaking flawless English. Sharrock’s brand of deadpan perfectly suits the setting, but as funny as the film can be (when asked in a culture/language class to create a sentence using the “I used to” construction, one immigrant offers “I used to be happy before I came here”), it doesn’t paint a rosy affirmation for Omar and his ilk, stuck as they are, as the title suggests, between countries and lives. Omar’s pain is real, and for every positive step forward he takes, it’s one further away from his family and his beloved home country.

Enemies of the State: Sonia Kennebeck’s challenging and curious documentary seems at first to present a case for its protagonist, Matt DeHart, a young teen hacker interested in social justice, who through his work with Wikileaks runs afoul of the U.S. government, and his beleaguered parents, Paul and Leann, who vigorously defend their only child against the evil forces conspiring against him. Through a series of personal interviews with Paul and Leann, both retired Air Force intelligence officers, who believe their country has turned against them for what Matt had downloaded from his computer into secret thumbdrives shortly before the FBI arrived at their door and confiscated all his equipment, and various lawyers they employed, first to protect Matt from what they claim as utterly bogus child-porn charges, then, after they slip away to Canada in the middle of the night, the lawyers trying to earn them asylum. While in Canada, under close supervision and confined to his parents’ apartment, Matt uses his charms, his hackavist bonafides, and his skill at PR, to generate enough interest in his case to become a digital cause celebe, along the lines of Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. Protests are fronted, defense funds gathered, and pressure put on the government to come clean about why they seem so hard-driving against the young man. During a peculiar reenactment set in a Canadian immigration hearing  —  Kennebeck employs actors who apparently lip sync their lines in perfect time with the actual recorded audio  —  DeHart describes a harrowing ordeal earlier in the affair, after having moved to Canada to attend college, being abducted by the FBI shortly after crossing the border to renew his Visa, and tortured for days for information related to the material on the thumb-drives. Some documentation seems to corroborate his claims (even Paul and Leann, as fierce supporters as can be, were shocked to see just how ready the FBI were to snatch him), but as the film continues, and we hear more and more from the investigators and prosecuting attorneys about the original child-pornography crimes, it becomes clear that our sympathies are being played with by Kennebeck. By the end, the film itself becomes an indictment of our rapid-assumption culture, in which decisions of guilt and innocence are determined in seconds online and forever after based on the presentation of information before us.

The Way I See It: For non Trumpites, the switchover from eight years of the dignified, intelligent, and measured leadership of Barack Obama, to the perma-tanned tackiness of power-mad, narcissistic bloviating of Donald Trump, was like a double-feature that went from Citizen Kane to Kevin James’ Loudest Farts. One man better than most to measure Obama’s time in office against the subsequent regime is photojournalist Pete Souza, who served as the official White House photographer for both of Obama’s terms, and has gone on to become an outspoken critic of Trump by way of his devastating IG account, in which he juxtaposes stately Obama photos with Trumps scandal-du-jour. Lest you think he’s just another divisively partisan liberal, you have to take into account his previous turn in the White House, as one of the official photographers for Ronald Reagan’s presidency. In fact, Souza’s fly-on-the-wall quality was considered one of his strengths in the oval office. Documentarian Dawn Porter travels with Souza as he makes the media rounds promoting his newest book, Shade, a collection of those IG photos that have earned him millions of social media followers (a sort of companion piece to his previous book Obama: An Intimate Portrait). Hauling from far-off India (where he gets a standing ovation before he even takes the stage), to domestic conferences and speaking engagements, Souza emerges as a man becoming more used to being out from behind his ever-present Canon lens. Through that lens, as he displays to his rapturous audiences, he has taken many hundreds of indelible photos, showing Obama’s various interactions with foreign dignitaries, his council of cabinet members, and his more raucous time with his two daughters (one shot of Obama with his girls making snow angels on the rear lawn during a heavy snow storm remains his computer screensaver, Souza says with pride). As Porter moves from talking heads to public oratories, Souza’s remarkable photos  —  brilliantly composed, and inspiringly intimate, having been given nearly unlimited access to the president  —  play throughout, showing us a collection of images that capture the inspiring hope the president inspired and the agonizing rigors of the job he was elected to perform. The film spends little time on his Reagan years, except to note how media and image-savvy the former Hollywood actor and his wife were (Souza professes no political ill-will towards the Reagans, other than noting that while he didn’t always agree with him, he was a genuinely caring man, who at least understood the parameters of leadership). At first, the film trolls Trump by a sort of subtweet level of backhandedness: Without directly naming names, Souza makes it entirely clear who he finds failing in comparison to Obama’s empathetic, engaging deportment, but by the time the film comes around to his notorious IG account, there can be no doubt the subject of his ire. Souza maintains it has less to do with his partisan feelings (his political affiliation is never revealed), and more the way he finds the current president’s undignified manner and total disrespect for the office and the leadership it demands unacceptable. Trumpers will of course take great exception to the portrait the film portrays of the sitting president, but even the most hardcore GOP folks won’t be able to help noting the blatant differences between the loving, genuinely close Obamas; and the preening, viciously competitive Trumps, each trying to outdo the others in acting as their father’s primary sycophant.

In a year of bizarre happenings, and altered realities, TIFF has shifted its gears to a significantly paired down virtual festival. Thus, U.S. film critics are regulated to watching the international offerings from our own living room couches.

[xtruss]

In June, graffiti supporting calls for the Univeristy of Cambridge to remove a stained glass window memorializing statistician Ronald Fisher, a supporter of eugenics, appeared on a campus building. The university later removed the Fisher window. AP IMAGES

Amid Protests Against Racism, Scientists Move to Strip Offensive Names From Journals, Prizes, and More! “Dismantling White Supremacism in Science Has Taken on a New Urgency.”

— By Eli Cahan | July 2, 2020

*Update, 6 July: This story has been updated to include the American Society of Ichthyology and Herpetology’s decision to change the name of its flagship journal, Copeia, to Ichthyology and Herpetology beginning with the first issue of 2021. It also includes the Entomological Society of America’s decision to change the name of its student trivia competition.

*Update, 3 July: This story has been updated to include Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's decision to remove the name of biologist James Watson from its graduate program.

For Earyn McGee, terminology matters.

McGee, a herpetologist, studies the habitat and behavior of Yarrow’s spiny lizard, a reptile native to the southwestern United States. The University of Arizona graduate student and her colleagues regularly pack their things—boots, pens, notebooks, trail mix—and set off into the nearby Chiricahua Mountains. At their field site, they start an activity with a name that evokes a racist past: noosing.

“Noosing” is a long-standing term used by herpetologists for catching lizards. But for McGee, a Black scientist, the term is unnerving, calling to mind horrific lynchings of Black people by white people in the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. “Being the only Black person out in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of white people talking about noosing things is unsettling,” she says. McGee has urged her colleagues to change the parlance to “lassoing,” which she says also more accurately describes how herpetologists catch lizards with lengths of thread.

McGee isn’t alone in reconsidering scientific language. Researchers are pushing to rid science of words and names they see as offensive or glorifying people who held racist views.

This week alone, one scientific society is considering renaming a major journal that honors a renowned 19th century researcher who held racist views, and another is voting on changing the name of a trivia competition that canonizes a prominent eugenicist. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) decided to change the name of its graduate school because of Nobel laureate James Watson's past racial comments. And a prominent university has said it will remove from a campus building the name of a famous scientist who supported white supremacy. The moves come in the wake of last month’s decision to rename a major statistical prize—and in tandem with efforts to change the names of animals and plants that include ethnic slurs or honor researchers who were bigots.

Unifying these initiatives is reinvigorated resistance to institutional racism. Kory Evans, a marine biologist at Rice University, says, “Dismantling white supremacism in science has taken on a new urgency” amid the broader reckoning ignited by the killing of George Floyd, the Black man suffocated by a white police officer in Minneapolis in May. The buildings, journals, prizes, and organism names that have come under scrutiny “lionize figures … who specifically took actions to undermine the humanity of people of color … [and] who laid the academic foundation for actual discrimination, sterilization, and genocide,” says Brandon Ogbunu, an evolutionary biologist at Brown University.

The current movement isn’t the first to target scientists whose actions were judged unconscionable by subsequent generations. After the fall of Nazi Germany, apartheid in South Africa, and various communist nations, the names of scientists who supported oppressive policies were stripped from institutions and awards. And even before the recent demonstrations against systemic racism in the United States, many scientists had lobbied universities and science groups to stop honoring prominent researchers who had bigoted views. In 2018, for instance, years of activism prompted the University of Michigan (UM), Ann Arbor, to remove the name of Clarence Cook Little, an influential 20th century geneticist who supported eugenics, from a science building and a transit hub.

Universities concerned about creating diverse and empowering atmospheres are wise to reconsider whose names adorn their buildings, says UM historian Alexandra Minna Stern, who has chronicled the evolution of eugenics in the United States. The names, she says, “make visible the values and priorities and beliefs of an institution.”

This week, the University of Maine, Orono, followed UM’s lead, announcing on 29 June it would strip Little’s name from a building. “Little made an enduring positive contribution to science,” a university task force wrote. However, it added, “Major areas of his professional life violate the ideals that are central to the educational mission of the University of Maine and its commitment to the public good.” Drivers of the decision included Little’s high-profile support of eugenics and his work for the U.S. tobacco industry to dispute evidence linking smoking to cancer.

At the University of South Carolina, officials on 19 June moved to remove the name of physician J. Marion Sims from a women’s dormitory. He is known for inventing the Sims vaginal speculum, as well as for pioneering surgical techniques for vaginal fistula repair, both of which are still used in obstetrics today. Activists have noted that the tool and the surgery were developed through experimental surgeries on enslaved women conducted without anesthesia. The university’s move has been controversial in the state: “Changing the name of a stack of bricks and mortar is at the bottom of my to-do list,” tweeted Senator Harvey Peeler (R–SC).

On 1 July, according to a CSHL statement, its board of trustees "voted to restore the original name of the graduate program to the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory School of Biological Sciences." The move, which required 75% of the board to approve changing the institution's charter, came after 133 CSHL students and alumni sent a 21 June letter saying Watson's name was "inextricably linked with racism" given comments he had made since at least 2007, when a newspaper quoted him saying Black people were of inferior intelligence. CSHL removed him as chancellor then and in 2019, after he told PBS his views had not changed, the lab stripped his remaining honors except for the school's name.

U.K. universities are also taking a hard look at whom they honor. On 24 June, the University of Cambridge decided to remove a stained-glass window named after biostatistician Ronald Fisher, who has been celebrated as “the single most important figure in 20th century statistics” but was also a prominent supporter of eugenics. The university acknowledged Fisher’s “remarkable scientific discoveries,” including his application of mathematical theory to the process of natural selection, but decided to strip the name to “broaden and strengthen our community for all its members.”

At University College London, officials are evaluating whether to rename buildings celebrating geneticist Francis Galton (who coined the term “eugenics”) and mathematician Karl Pearson (founder of the Annals of Eugenics). Pearson derived the correlation that now bears his name—a commonly used statistical technique—through studies designed to demonstrate “[the] problem of alien immigration into Great Britain.” Joe Cain, a philosopher of science at the university, says, “The science behind these discoveries may be groundbreaking,” but institutions need to “consider the man and his data set, too.”

He adds, “Students should be able to look at a name and ask, ‘Who is that?’ and have their professors respond: ‘That’s a person you can aspire to.’”

The swell of support for inclusive placemaking has not been limited solely to campus grounds. Earlier this month in Geneva, residents submitted a motion to the municipality’s Grand Council to rename a street memorializing Karl Vogt. The 19th century German zoologist is known for his influence on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. But Vogt was also a vocal advocate of irreconcilable differences in cranial capacity between Black and white people, claiming in his Lectures on Man that Black people were closer anatomically to apes than humans.

Scientific societies that fail to similarly reflect on the spaces they construct contribute to “an extremely poisonous … ambiance for people of color,” Ogbunu says. At the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, an effort to change the name of its flagship journal—Copeia, named after Edward Cope, a scientist who held racist views—is nearing its end. Motivated in part by a June survey that found the society’s membership is 82% white and less than 1% Black, the society’s board voted on 3 July to remove the eponym. Beginning with its first issue of 2021, the journal will be known as Ichthyology and Herpetology.

Also under scrutiny: prizes and other accolades bestowed by societies, including those awarded to exceptional early-career scientists. This month, the Society for the Study of Evolution and the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies both renamed awards that honored Fisher, the statistician. Still, resistance to such name changes persists. “We can at once celebrate and benefit from scientific contributions while disagreeing wholeheartedly with the personal beliefs of the scientists responsible for them,” wrote three researchers—statisticians Harry Crane of Rutgers University, Joe Guinness of Cornell University, and Ryan Martin of North Carolina State University—in a public letter opposing the change. Stripping Fisher’s name, they write, would “damage public trust in science by signaling that the evaluation of scientific advances reflects not only scientific achievement but also social acceptance.

Event names are also being re-evaluated. Some members of the Entomological Society of America (ESA) are calling for renaming the society’s annual Linnaean Games, a student trivia competition named after Carl Linnaeus. The 18th century botanist invented the system for classifying species, including Homo sapiens, which he categorized based on race, assigning negative social traits to nonwhite populations. “For those of us who have ever been called Black, brown, or yellow, Linnaeus’s legacy lives on every day,” says Taylor Tai, an entomology graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and co-author of a petition to rename the games.

On 3 July, ESA board members discussed renaming the event. “By today’s standards, there is no way to read [Linnaeus’s] classification of humans as anything other than racist,” Chris Stelzig, the society’s executive director, said before the session. But, he added, some members opposed to removing Linnaeus’s name wondered whether it was “right to judge our ancestors by today’s standards.” Today, the society announced the board’s decision to rename the Linnaen Games as the Entomology Games. Explaining the decision, ESA President Alvin Simmons said: “The loss of any student competitors who felt unwelcome because of the name of the Games went against ESA’s commitment to diversity, inclusion, and students as the future of entomology.”

Some researchers are also pushing to change species names they find objectionable. Graduate students around the world have contributed to a spreadsheet that lists potentially problematic common and scientific names of plants and animals. It includes a scorpion, a duck, and a buttonquail that carry the name hottentota, hottentotta, or hottentottus; colonialists in the 17th century used “Hottentot” as a derogatory term for Indigenous Black people in Africa. Researchers say other names—including those of the Nasutitermes corniger termite, the Orsotriaena medus butterfly, Speke’s weaver, McCown’s longspur, and the flowers, chives, and turtles named after Linnaeus’s apostles—also include slurs or glorify bigots.

“Nomenclature is in service to hierarchies,” says Harriet Washington, an ethicist who has written about structural racism in medicine. “Toppling these statues, so to speak, is not eroding history so much as issuing a correction to it.”

McGee, who co-organized last month’s #BlackBirdersWeek, favors such name changes. And she says she has been blindsided by the pervasiveness of racialized taxonomy, learning only recently that the lizard she studies is named for H. C. Yarrow, who “objectif[ied] the bodies of ‘others’ in order to explain and justify … [racial] dominance,” according to Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identities, a book by historian John MacKenzie. McGee was “disappointed but not surprised” by that history, she says.

McGee’s campaign to change her field’s term from “noosing” to “lassoing” has made limited headway, she says, but she is not discouraged. “What is customary or convenient to a previous generation [of scientists] is not a good excuse for retaining racism,” she says. “I’ve accepted I’m the type of person who will speak up so the next Black herpetologist doesn’t have to go through this.”

Posted in: Scientific Community

— Eli Cahan is an intern on the News staff of Science.

[rhythmic-idealist]

@dragonofyang reblogged your post and added: “rhythmic-idealist: I’ve talked about this before but I’m thinking...”

I think this is a really excellently-put analysis, because the ancestors as thematic devices is something I really wish Homestuck had expanded on if only to explore avenues such as this. I definitely feel like the text (intentionally or not on Hussie’s part) makes the point about hemophobia and bigotry, but then fails to properly bring it home the way it deserved, especially since one of the main themes of the comic itself is that challenging the status quo of arcs/destiny/etc. is something we can and should do because there is more to life than accepting your fate. In fact I’d even argue that fighting fate is what can really develop a character and a story.

Kankri grew up in a world of “niceness”. Where he’s coddled and cared for and the people are good to him, but he’s ultimately denied his own agency. Instead of overt oppression the way the Signless endured, he grew up in a world of microaggressions and a thousand cuts to his independence. People insisting he not do things or let others help him because it’s their job, regardless of whether he is physically capable or not. He’s not allowed to challenge himself because his destiny is to be cared for and kept in a gilded cage.

The Signless, meanwhile, grew up in a world where if you were off-spectrum, you’ll die and so will everyone you know, everyone you had contact with, and probably their neighbors for good measure and whatever passersby pissed off the subjuggulator doing you in. So in this world, kindness is a radical thing, and the Signless had this unique perspective of being able to remember a world where he, once upon a time, was taken care of and treated with (some) respect as an individual, even if not as an agent with his own free will. Anything is better than the overt violence of Alternia.

And with all the dialogue about free will and fate throughout (but especially toward the end), it would’ve been really beautiful to me to see this addressed more fully as well.

But it’s hard to figure out how to word it since Hussie and the text itself are very closely linked thanks to Homestuck’s unique history/creation, so I totally get your struggle there. I had a hard time figuring out how to respond to you partially because of that. I suppose you could arguably say that the canon text is given to us via an unreliable narration, given the general snark of the omniscient narration, and the deep character flaws that influence the story whenever we follow one specific character’s point of view. I don’t quite remember what character(s) we follow when we get that framing about how Beforus’ softness ruined Kankri, but given how he himself feels about his position in Beforan society, it’s entirely possible the framing is partially due to a character’s viewpoint, so arguing with the text itself is totally appropriate since it’s challenging specific biases characters hold thanks to their upbringing.

I appreciate your response SO much dragonofyang; I didn't say that enough below so I'm taking the time to again right now.

This is a really interesting comment to me and I appreciate it a lot. I think that in response to your point about what framed Kankri like that.... I had to stop and think about that. We get introduced to Kankri through Meenah, and interact with him as Karkat, Latula, and Porrim- and Meenah again, as he later jumps into a conversation she and Horuss are having (and Cro... nus.....? I think?). But I don’t think the framing.... is actually inherently in any of those characters, so what is it?

I think what frames Kankri that was is his existence as satire, and the fact that he’s being interjected into a conversation with context.

If Kankri was just a person, that would be one thing. But we know, immediately, that Kankri is a joke about Tumblr SJWs, in a broader joke about 1) Tumblr users (the nature of Bubblr), and 2) various internet-user tropes in general.

So there already is a joke about soft snowflake SJWs. There already is a perception that SJWs are sheltered from the real problems of the world, and that being less sheltered would help them- to the point that people think that things like trigger warnings, people asking that you use the proper language about their gender and orientation, and other things that are either accessibility tools or seeking a kinder but not fake, playing-pretend, or damaging world are bad.

There’s already this perception that softness creates sheltered people with no character development and trauma helps people build character, and with characters like Kankri and the Signless, they would fundamentally be inserted into that conversation whether Kankri was an intentional joke about it or not. And then, when deciding what to do about that- Kankri became a joke that targeted things that fundamentally upheld the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”/“not only are all SJWs actually bad and damaging, but the reason they’re bad and damaging is because they were too soft and sheltered in their safe spaces” mentality.

And I am trying to be fair to Homestuck. More than I have tried to give benefit of the doubt, in the past. If you left Openbound with that impression, it could have been to play along with your those preexisting statements just to pull the rug from under you- like how you thought for a while (I admit to the fact that I did) that Bro training Dave sucked, but was just cartoon logic, and then the rug was pulled from under you and it was actually just abuse because abuse is real in this universe because these are people.

Kankri could have been set up to surface level enforce the idea that soft places generate what actual flaws he has (inconsistent ideology, weaponizing the language of progressive ideology against people he has personal grudges against, expending more care on looking right and sounding right than how you’re actually impacting people, playing oppression olympics) and then subverted with a jump back to look at Beforus properly- oho, no, look at all these little seeds I’ve planted, it is actually a complex web of oppressive forces, emotional safeguards built against them, poor resources and influences, and propaganda that did this. This is actually what happens when you build a planet that tries to softly coddle someone to sleep every time a hint of non-logic-based emotion slips into their argument. This is actually what happens when you beat down someone’s ability to emotionally connect with the people who need them most. This is actually what happens when you take someone who is primed to be The Signless and make them more terrified of being wrong than of the fallout their actions have on their friends. (And more. I don’t want to make this way longer than it is but please please know I know I know it’s more.)

But it didn’t.

So I can stand here and know that the seeds were planted, but they didn’t even- it doesn’t even clarify at any point to me whether they were planted intentionally, and at the end of the day, in terms of which messages I would ever hold Homestuck responsible for- whether the seeds for this argument were planted intentionally or not doesn’t matter to me. Right now, if they were, it would just be plausible deniability, in a joke that punches down and laughs not only at the places Kankri was wrong but several of the ones in which he was right or trying in the right way.

So anyway, I hold canon responsible for laughing at trigger warnings and MOGAI/“unusual” LGBTQ+ identities and (arguably, I need to fact check this) activism that isn’t (White) Feminism First, Everything Else After, etc.

Whether it’s saying that Beforus’s softness made the Signless into Kankri is I guess not the same as that, so I got off topic for a second.

But that last long paragraph, “the seeds were planted but-,” is what explains why I feel like I’m arguing with the text instead of explaining its authorial intent. The lens you were talking about turns out to be the fact that Kankri is satire, in a world that already has one extremely common way to satirize this thing, which Kankri wound up matching- despite any other content about him, because that content hasn’t been used to subvert this or twist against this- beat for beat.

[skincarebeautymakeuptips]

How Indie Beauty Brands Practice Inclusivity

In this edition of Beauty Independent’s ongoing series posing questions to beauty entrepreneurs, we ask 17 brand founders and executives: What is your brand’s approach to inclusivity?

KETHLYN WHITE | COO, Coil Beauty

Our brand was created to give a face to beauty that has not always been considered beautiful. When we create graphics for our marketing, we strive to look for the nontraditional beauties because we know how important representation is to everyone, even on a subconscious level.  

One of my favorite things as an adult is to be able to watch a show like "Insecure" or "Black-ish," and say, “Oh, there’s my hairstyle for next week.” As a kid, I was trying to use the Topsy Tail and, if you remember what that is, then you, my friend, are aging gracefully. So, for me, my brand aims to be inclusive of the people who weren’t always included, and I think our website and social media pages do a good job of that. Of course, we are always trying to do more. For us, this is a marathon not a sprint.

ADA JURISTOVSKI | Co-Founder, Nala

We strive to be inclusive of forms of sexual identification, body types, cultures and race. To us, it means being mindful of representation in our brand, but also being open-minded to continually learning about how we can widen that representation. It can be something as detail-oriented as updating our copy from “women” to “womxn,” or deliberate decisions we make such as intentionally having our packaging represent body forms that are fluid, androgynous and ambiguous with the hope that anyone can identify with it and see a part of themselves within the art.

KAILEY BRADT | Founder and CEO, OWA Haircare

Inclusivity has to mean something personally to a founder and, therefore, a brand. I've always been mindful of inclusivity because I've always felt a bit on the outside. It's important to think of inclusivity with a holistic perspective. It's not just about appearance. Inclusivity goes beyond age, gender, ethnicity. I always felt judged without saying a word. As I got older, especially when I first got to college, I felt even more out of place because I was studying engineering and my appearance didn't say "engineer."

My approach to inclusivity is to look beyond the physical attributes of a person and take into consideration their experience, education, career, etc. My approach with our brand is to give real people a genuine voice. I really enjoy working with up-and-coming professionals and giving people opportunities they might not have been given otherwise. I know others who have done this for me in my career, and I wouldn't be where I am today if people didn't believe in me and present me those opportunities that challenged the norm.

RANAY ORTON | Owner, Glow by Daye

My approach of being mindful of inclusivity in my brand is to try and create multiple physical avatars of my customers. Many books and experts say to have one exact avatar, an icon or figure that represents your key demographic. Well, the reality is that, yes, you can have a go-to person in mind for key decision-making on your brand and it's positioning, but all your customers do not look alike.

People want to see some physical resemblance of themselves when they see your website, marketing and social media. As a company, we have to be conscious of that as we serve many different people with different ethnicities, hair types/textures and/or complexions, but all have the same goal of achieving healthy, thriving hair.

PAAYAL MAHAJAN | Founder, Essential Body

Inclusivity is not just a term for me. I am a brown woman who has faced a lot of discrimination while living and working in the U.S. I have faced assumptions around my background with no thought or interest in where I come from or what my heritage is. I have dealt with the blows of white privilege in the workplace and personally. I was also judged for my size for a majority of my life. I am someone who has fought and continues to fight for the rights of the marginalized and oppressed.

I am not interested in tokenism. I smell it from a mile away. You can’t fake your way into being inclusive. My authenticity and my voice are the most powerful ways for me to communicate that my brand is me, and it espouses my values and my perspective on the world. It never was, and is certainly not enough now, to do a rainbow of ethnicities in your imagery. I see brands appropriating cultures, not giving thought to messaging and imagery. None of that is for me. You can’t be mindful of inclusivity unless you fundamentally shift your mindset. This is not something businesses can phone in.

ADA POLLACEO, Alchimie Forever

We strive to be inclusive in everything we do. From the people we use in our marketing materials (fun fact: They’re all family members, team members or friends.) to the way we train our brand ambassadors, we focus on skincare concerns rather than gender, skin color or other identifiers. We don’t say, “Hey, we’re inclusive." Rather, we strive to behave in a way that makes everyone feel welcome and comfortable, and that our products were made for them.

KATONYA BREAUX | Founder, Unsun Cosmetics

As a black founder and consumer, I have firsthand knowledge of what it feels like to not be considered by companies providing skincare and makeup products. I wanted to make sure that not only women that looked like me, but women in general had the benefit and knowledge that there is a product that is made with them in mind, and not only as an afterthought. In this very inclusive environment, the companies that aren't getting on the bandwagon are the ones that are standing out.

NISHA DEARBORN | Founder and CEO, Fresh Chemistry

I teach my kids that the only difference between skin of different colors is the amount of melanin in it. As a daughter of a dermatologist, I can attest to this very simple, yet still profound truth. So, when it comes to my brand, I choose models or repost user-generated content that represents who the freshly activated serums are best suited for: all skin types and colors.

JULIE PEFFERMAN | Founder, The Lab and Co.

We have always thought about inclusivity from the customers perspective and our employee perspective. In the near future, inclusivity won't be a buzzword. Instead, it will be something every brand must do. It will be the authenticity that inclusivity is delivered that will distinguish us from the rest.  

On the employee internal side, since we are a lab, it makes sense that our one-word company philosophy is "mix," which guides us as we grow. Mix in kindness in everything you do. Mix with other kinds of people/thinkers to expand your mind and life. When something isn't working, mix it up with a new approach. There is always a way. Work hard, take pride in what you bring to the mix. Take the risk, failure is valued, speak up and mix in your ideas, and see what bubbles to the top.

On the customer side, we try to rethink target customers and find meaningful ways to include others. Our brand, Cleantan, was the first self-tanning brand to showcase full-figured models of various skin colors. We encourage people to be as tan as they want to be with our color controlling concentrate. Our brand Equal By Nature was birthed out of inclusivity, encouraging everyone to celebrate their differences. We aim to create luxurious hero products that fit into anyone's routine at a reasonable price. We call it inclusive luxury.

AMBER FAWSON | Co-Founder, Saalt

Inclusivity is a central and all-important topic in the world of period care. It is actually one of the reasons we love period care. There is something about period talk that brings people together regardless of background or belief. We all share struggles with period management. We all agree that no one should feel confused and alone about their period and their body. We all agree that we want students around the world to have period care that allows them to attend school when they are on their period.

At Saalt, we believe in being period positive and, by focusing on period positive topics, we can do some incredible things with the help of our audience. Our audience helps us break stigmas and also connects us with impact organizations who are doing incredible work around the world. Every part of our brand is about being welcoming and adding people to our tribe regardless of any variety of personal backgrounds or beliefs.

MELISSA REINKING | Chief Marketing Officer, BioClarity

We always try to stay grounded in knowing that the consumers who discover us all have different starting points and skin goals in mind. Step one to being inclusive is being individualized. If we can help people get to where they want to be by understanding their individual needs, desires and starting points, and if we can customize their experience around these attributes, not some idealized version of what we think a consumer might need, this helps us remain not only inclusive, but also very mindful of the evolving needs of those who become part of our brand.

BRANDON GARCIA | Co-Founder, Mira

My co-founder Jay Hack and I wanted to ensure that anyone, no matter who they are, what they look like or what their interests are is able to find what works best for them. The incredible diversity of beauty consumers has driven not only the increased fragmentation of beauty products and trends in the industry, but also the heightened demands for personalization.

Diversity and inclusivity are not only baked into our very core, but they are also the primary factors driving the need for a platform like this. We've worked hard to build an expansive data catalog of over 60,000 products and millions of reviews and videos that can be leveraged to help consumers from all walks of life find what works for them.

In the long term, we hope that it becomes a platform for beauty brands, content creators, and consumers to engage in authentic, meaningful conversation. By doing so, we seek to help advance the industry in co-developing products that best speak to the amazingly diverse individuals that comprise the beauty community.

RENAE MOOMJIAN | Founder and CEO, NipLips

We are vocal in all touch points with our community that everyone is welcome. Whether it is a photoshoot, new brand ambassador or activity, we are continually looking for ways to bring diversity in race, ethnic background, religion, sexual preference, sexual indentification, age, size (large to small and everything in between) into our brand.

Our company tag line is “Beautiful, Authentic You!” and our goal is to help people look within to define not only their unique beauty, but who they really are at their core. So, for example, by using our app, doing a color scan of your nipples, and matching to one of our vegan, organic, lip colors, you are using your body to define what looks good on you rather than social media or celebrities. True beauty and inclusivity starts with embracing your uniqueness and, then, sharing it with the world. We work very hard to promote that message.

FEISAL QURESHI | Founder, Raincry

My personal view is that beauty is not real, it doesn't exist. It's all perspective. That perspective evolves, changes and means different things to different people at different times in our lives. Just look at the 80s. We looked ridiculous, but were full of confidence.

So, beauty is not about the things we buy or how we look, but rather how that thing makes us feel when we wear it, use it or experience it. Therefore, beauty is about emotions and, as a beauty brand, you become a custodian of those emotions to help better people's lives.

KRISTEN BOWEN | Founder & CEO, Living The Good Life Naturally

My entire life I have been on a diet or searching for the perfect diet. I just wanted to be skinny and equated that with being healthy. I will never forget the day that I was sitting in my wheelchair feeling pretty sorry for myself and wondering if I would ever feel good again. A friend walked up and asked me how I was doing. Instead of the usual, “Oh, I am fine,” I answered her honestly. “I am so tired of being sick and having seizures and stressing my family out.”

She looked at me and said something that would shatter and change the course of what I was searching for when it came to my health. She patted my leg after I told her how tired I was and replied, “But Kristen, at least you are skinny.” I had achieved my lifelong dream of being skinny, but it was not what I wanted. I wanted vibrant energy.

Now, when clients start to work with me, I ask them to write out what healthy looks like to them. That way they have a specific goal in mind of what they are wanting to create. Because of that one exchange, we make sure to include all body types in our marketing. Being healthy is so much more than being skinny.

JEAN BAIK | Founder and Creative Chief Officer, Miss A

One of our biggest missions as a business is to #justhavefun with makeup and beauty. So, we always offer as many shades as possible and offer products that would work for a young teen all the way into late adulthood.

JASMIN EL KORDI | CEO, Bluelene

Cellular health is gender, age and ethnicity neutral, and our brand reflects that philosophy. We ensure that our packaging and messaging appeal to a wide human audience, and that we incorporate that variety into the imagery we use.

Source: Beauty Independent ��