#yafc au

[fandom-zoomer]

I think I may have come up with the best worst tma time travel “fix-it” au (imho)

Inspired by Ketakoshka's 'dread spawn' idea in their dread child jon series, Dribbledscribbles' origin story for the dread powers and extinction entity interpretation in their extinction!jon fic (and some more of the latter in their post-eyepocalypse fic too), as well as my own love for making unholy (aka fun) fusions of things and sandboxing eldritch interactions with the 'mundane' . . .

. . . I have created a post-canon, Somewhere Else, time travel ""fix-it"" story that I think might be unique (at least I've never seen any fics like it– but if I'm wrong then please please share the link!! or dm me if it's your own work hehe but no pressure!!)

(mag 160+ spoilers after this point!)

(i'm about to wax poetics here (hopefully coherently)—so you can read the story-ramble OR you can scroll to the TL;DR at the bottom to skip it & spoilers to read the nutshell & see if you're interested :3)

so get this...

The big Change happens right? But this time the Extinction is a bigger player in the game than canon, and ultimately deeply marks Jon throughout the eyepocalypse.

So when the finale happens, since Jon is now connected to the epicenter of the whole show, his 'death' and the panopticon's destruction has the simultaneous effect of baiting the Dread Powers into the Hole (via his voice in the spools of tape)– and also killing everyone trapped by the Dread Powers in the world via Jon the walking detonator thanks to being entrenched in the Extinction's influence. —Combining both his best and worst plans and realizing his worst nightmare: killing everyone and spreading the Powers to an unknown number of worlds to wreak even more havoc.

How did this happen?

Simple—but first some backstory for context.

The Extinction was more of a 'lurker', much less "outgoing" than its 'siblings'. And when it was "grandiose", well. . . it tended to leave no survivors. Thus its unrecognition by those like Robert Smirke or Jürgen Leitner.

To go back even further, the Dread entities were originally one cohesive entity with many faces and limbs. Its faces reflected the same developmental complexity as the sources of their manifestation. So those with the most diverse species feeding them held the widest capacities. Namely: the Hunt, End, and Extinction. But being a singular entity, it didn't mean much.

But as human species' family lines develop and grow more complex cognitive ability, more esoteric Dreads developed, and more faces become more complex. And the Extinction was right there from the beginning as more species died out one by one. Quietly. (...maybe? 👀)

Over time humans discovered the Powers and bonded with them, then started to classify them. From here, the Dread entity fragmented into Dread entities.

They developed their own 'consciousnesses' distinct from the hive 'mind' they once were. And, eventually, sapience. Self-awareness. Desires. Personalities. But they were still connected, part of the 'system'.

The Extinction and the Web (newer, but always sapient) are a quirky pair, the Web seeking control over everything and the Extinction seeking ultimate entropy and change upon its catastrophe.

It's hard to distinguish the Extinction exactly, its work misidentified for others with few under its own unique umbrella. Things 'unique' to it get missed due to being a misnomer and not getting clocked. (But that is the nature of the Dread Powers after all.. being a fragmentation of their original singular mass.)

...

The Extinction represents the fear of disaster that will bring about the end of everything—everything you know, love, need to survive. Everything you built, worked for, hoped for. The destruction of stories and of life, of the very history written by your land—your home.

Your community. Your society. Your species.

You.

Annihilated in totality.

The Extinction represents the fear of those that come after you to replace you—worse than you, different from you. Leaving you and your history and stories (the driver of your continued existence) forgotten forever. The fear of life moving on after you, ignorant and apathetic. Your story meaningless, irrelevant.

Your community's story. Your society's story. Your species' story.

Your story.

Erased and written over.

The Web represents the fear of being controlled, fate being out of your hands—by malevolent authorities out of reach, by abusive companions or relatives, by invisible forces far beyond the human comprehension. Spinning, winding, twisting, pulling each decision in your life made for you. Until destruction of the self by your own hand.

Your struggle for change futile. Your feet following the same path. Your fate determined for you.

You forfeit control—your feet march you to your bitter demise.

The Web represents the fear of being conspired against. Scheming, plotting, planning your downfall. The loss of everything you hold dear, worked for, bled for. Spinning, twisting, scripting lies about you. Your credibility falls to pieces, your world shatters, and your story distorts.

You are kept alive by the spreading of your story. And the people have decided to trust the manufactured tale.

You are forgotten—twisted into an image of something wrong.

...

Sometimes they're at odds. Where one seeks to manipulate the threads of everything endlessly, the other seeks to destroy it all so thoroughly, with such finality, as to mutate it– the schemes, the pawns, the gameboard itself.

Sometimes they're complementary. Where you watch as you lose everyone you cared for one by one, spiraling down a path darker into entropy, the irreversible nightmare, and wondering if you ever really had free will in the first place– if anyone did.

What if the end for you really was just another game to them? What if this wasn't their first round? What if you're just the next step in the grand scheme, larger than even your own universe?

Alright, now with that out of the way, let's bring back the question.

How did the Extinction change Jon, and how did this cause the altered result of the finale?

The Web has been there since the near beginning, pulling Jon along and guiding him to his next milestone in the plot. She had known the world would come to an end one way or another, and wanted to bring it about on her own terms so that she—they all—could escape it.

So when the Web saw what the Eye was doing, she had an idea. So she aided their acolytes, seeing her sibling as the perfect way to bring all of them together for the final step. And the Web set her own card onto the board: Jon.

Jon had a natural disposition for the Eye; from stubborn curiosity to the reckless pursuit for answers to even the coldest cases. Whether he knows it or not, his mind is a gaping maw for horrible knowledge—chasing after experiences disguised as answers to his burning questions so dreadful they leave scars on him like sigils of a looming doom.

While he has no affinity for the Web's machinations, he is still hers. She has no issue with guiding agents from across the court, she knows how to share. Especially when it benefits her. Jon archives each event, every little detail, with such care and readiness that he makes the perfect vessel to pull them in—to guide them out. He'd flourish best as her tool in the Watcher's sphere.

After the Watcher's Crown and the Dread Powers came into the world, the Extinction started to make its presence known. It seeped into other Domains and fed on the people's dread for permanent catastrophic change, on their fear of ruin and total desctruction. And as Jon traversed them and lived through their fear, so was he marked by the Extinction.

It seeped into his skin like oil and burned through his veins like acid. It tainted his trails with the radioactivity of human hubris and greed, twisting and mutating both the mundane and Dreadful as he passed. It closed its grasp on him with the tightness plastic rings and infected his Perceived routes with the stench of mountainous landfill and the thickness of city smog.

The Web and the Extinction had a complex relationship, but in this moment they guided the Archivist in synchronous song like a soldier being led to his final mission: dropping the nuclear bomb.

Did Jon know?

...

No.

The twines of manipulation layer labyrinthine over everything, above and below and through every angle and dimension. Even the Nigh-Omniscient Antichrist and his All-Knowing God will never fathom its depths.

He might never know that he helped start the Extinction's ritual: Raze the Earth.

Or that both the Web and the Eye knew and did nothing. (honestly, the latter's only there for the show)

So when Martin stabbed Jon and Melanie lit the gas mainline, the threads around the world snapped and the glowing light of humanity's greatest sins exploded over everything—

—and they prayed—

—and they wept—

—and the Dreads rushed out torrentially. (pulling a few strays with them)

Now for the part you were all waiting for (well I was)—the Heart of this AU

The Dread Powers and the ones who were dragged with them were transported Somewhere Else– a parallel world in a parallel universe. But they were. . . Changed from their previous/original selves.

The tag-alongs—Martin & Jon of course, but also Annabelle Cane, Oliver Banks, Simon Fairchild, and Arthur Nolan—replaced their parallels at birth, and gained partial or full amnesia to their past lives. But their personalities are altered, reflecting some aspects of their pre-finale personalities.

Except for Jon. Jon, the Pupil of the Eye, the Warhead of the Extinction, the Spools of the Web, the Archive of the Dreads and linchpin to their escape. . . was significantly destroyed in the center of the storm. He got it and so much worse—a stick so short its existence was inverted.

While they did get reach the new universe, they had to reconstruct their linchpin/Archive that they're still connected to so that his total destruction doesn't tear them apart as well (being an Extinction avatar that's now deeply connected with them, he's capable of "taking them down with him").

When Jon was reborn, he was literally thrown into the world like a meteorite, landing with an explosive blast that rendered the surrounding area a lifeless wasteland in moments. High radioactivity and a deathly curse left few flora or fauna returning before wasting away soon after. Those that 'survived' did so by being infected by the Extinction or Corruption.

It would permanently remain uninhabitable, and it would take months before the withered stillborn spawn of the sapient eldritch Dread Entities would crawl out of the jagged crater on its own, none the wiser to its tragedies.

TL;DR

The Web manipulated Jon's attempt to put a stop to the Entities' reign, utilizing the Eye's easy influence to help the Dreads escape the world and into a fresh new one before they were also destroyed in the Extinction's "Raze the Earth" ritual (set up by using Jon to weave toxic-filled veins throughout the world he was traversing that'll explode at once 'grand finale' style).

Jon, now deeply binded to the Entities' purest forms and still an Extinction time-bomb, was mostly destroyed during the trip to Somewhere Else and the Entities had to reconstruct him so his death wouldn't destroy them too. This led to Jon being reborn a near completely different being (with some of him preserved) as functionally the direct spawn of the Dread Powers, replacing his parallel counterpart from the new world.

[constellations-soc]

protests and movements in the time of the pandemic

This episode delves deep into the ongoing revolutionary movements in Algeria and Lebanon. Ratiba Hadj-Moussa and Rana Sukarieh provide us with a rich and inspiring account of developments, offering social-economic background to the events of the last two years, outlining the main contours of the political struggles in the two countries and drawing comparative insights. In particular we gain: a clear sense of the geographies of the movements, the solidarities and tensions within them, the crucial place of women activists and gender as a focal point, and how the state is reacting to these diverse demands for justice and democracy. We also consider how Covid-19 has shaped developments.

Guests: Ratiba Hadj-Moussa is professor of Sociology at York University, Toronto. Her areas of specialization are the sociology of culture and political sociology. Her interests range from common cultural artefacts to art (cinema) and visual culture in general. My work is anchored within the scope of three major fields: 1. Mediascapes, principally new media, in relation to politics and shared spaces as they are constituted and evolve in non-Western contexts; 2. Marginalized forms of protest and new forms of the political; 3, Public Memory and its relations to alternatives and official memories. Her recent publications include La télévision par satellite au Maghreb et ses publics. Espace de résistance, espaces critiques (PUG-2015, English version Cambridge Scholars Publishing,2018). She is the editor of Terrains difficiles, Sujets sensibles, faire de la recherche au Maghreb et sur le Moyen-Orient (Du Croquant, 2019), and the co-editor of Protests and Generations, Legacies and Emergences in the Middle East , North African and the Mediterranean (Brill, 2017) ; Suffering , Arts and Aesthetics (2014), and of Les Mondes méditerranéens . L’émeute au coeur du politique (2013).

Rana Sukarieh is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at York University, Toronto, Canada. Her dissertation focuses on the (dis)continuity of political solidarity with the Palestinian Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and the process of transcending activists’ differences in order to build sustained solidarity. Rana's research interests are in the areas of transnational social movements, social movements and political economy in the Middle East, critical qualitative research, and post-colonial studies. She is a recipient of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council award (SSHRC), of Ontario Graduate Studies (OGS), and the Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime and Security award at York University. She is currently teaching at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon.

Links

Ouled El Bahdja 2018 | La Casa Del Mouradia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHZviPhZQxs

Ouled el bahdja LA CASA DEL MOURADIA match 06/05/2018 (USMA🆚YAFC)عودة المدرسة القديمة OLD SCHOOL

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tpAT2bZEVo

This is the translation in English http://lughat.blogspot.com/2019/03/some-algerian-protest-songs.html Jabal al-Lughat

Climbing the Mountain of Languages Thursday, March 07, 2019 Some Algerian protest songs

What's going on right now in Algeria is fascinating - and difficult to get a full sense of from abroad even if you speak Arabic and French, let alone if you're relying on English-language media. The lyrics of the protest movements - whether composed for the occasion or just reused for it - may offer some interesting perspectives. Unfortunately this brief selection can't claim any particular representativity; these are just a couple of apparently popular ones that have crossed my path.

Starting with what a Marxist might call the urban proletariat of Algiers, we have a USMA football fans' song which outlines the basic issue:

ساعات للفجر وماجاني نوم Hours to dawn and I still haven't slept, راني نكونصومي غير بالشوية I'm taking drugs, but only little by little; اشكون السبة واشكون نلوم Who's the cause, who should I blame? ملّينا المعيشة هاديّا We're fed up* with this life.

في الاّولى نقولوا جازت In the first [presidential term], we'd say it's fine; حشاوهالنا بالعشرية They filled our heads with the decade [of civil war]. في التانية الحكاية بانت In the second, the story became clear - لا كاسا دالمورادية La Casa d'El Mouradia [the Presidential residence]. في التالتة البلاد شيانت In the third, the country got thin بالمصالح الشخصية thanks to private interests… في الرابعة الپوپيّة ماتت In the fourth, the doll died [ie the president became too unwell to appear in public] ومازالت القضيّة And the situation continued.

[chorus again]

والخامسة راهي تسويڥي And the fifth is following on, بيناتهُم راي مبنية It's been set up between them; والپاصي راو آرشيڥي And the past is archived, لاڥوا تاع الحرُّيّة The voice of freedom. ڥيراجنا الهدرة پريڥي Our corner** is [a place for] private talk, يعرفوه كي يتقيّا They know it/him when he vomits; مدرسة ولازم سيڥي A school where you need a CV, بيرو محو الأمّيّة An anti-illiteracy office. [x2] [chorus]