#⸢ ☆ ⸥ once a soldier always a soldier | ❛ isms ❜

[phanfictioncatalogue]

Military AU Masterlist

A Bullet or Two for You (ao3) - orphan_account

Summary: “What else is a man our age good for in the middle of a war?”

Daniel Howell is conscripted into the British Army at 19. At 24, with the help of a little hot metal, he meets a man who changes his perspective. Maybe hospital isn't so bad after all.

Before Tomorrow Comes - lifee-scap-ism

Summary: As Phil volunteered to join the military, his days with Dan were numbered. But instead of spending time together, Dan hid away from Phil for fear of losing him. However, on Phil’s last night before he was sent away, Dan stood soaking wet at his door. “Stay,” was all he said. “I want you here with me, before tomorrow comes.”

Catch You Sleeping (ao3) - orphan_account

Summary: Dan meets the love of his life in an army training camp.

Christmas should be with family. - so-much-cherry-everywhere

Summary: Dan is away, Phil wishes he'd be home for Christmas...

Coming Home (ao3) - orphan_account

Phil’s away in the military and Dan is by himself with their young son, Mason. Phil promises Dan that one day he’s coming home.

Don't Go Looking For Goodbye (ao3) - AllusionToReality (orphan_account)

Summary: He wanted to do this, he wanted to be a soldier. He’d already gone through boot camp, graduating with some of the highest honors during AIT. He was strong, he was prepared, and once he got the order to be shipped out of the country on a tour, he took it immediately.

Based on Troye Sivan's, "Fun" from his EP, TRXYE

Flesh of the Church (ao3) - boffinhatwithapipeYuekagami

Summary: There is a war brewing. In the depths of a universe where every now and then, a war is rising up, young people with no military experiences shall be drafted and paint the earth's ground in red. History books list the painters. What about the people of the shadows, their eyes trained into the darkness, their dinner tables devoid of entities who once become a part of their world? What about those people who had to bear the pain of waiting, of praying and hoping? History books list the painters. But no one ever lists the writers.

I get lonely when I think about your smile (ao3) - AmazinGhoul

Summary: Dan left for a half of the year. He left his home and UK, but more importantly he left Phil. Luckily Phil found a way to communicate with his best friend.

--

Letters send by Dan and Phil while Dan is away on his mission as a medic.

i promise i'll never leave (ao3) - graylane

Summary: dan and phil reuniting at the airport after dan was gone for four years in the army.

I’m Coming Home - danalingphil-fics

Summary: Phil’s off at the war and Dan’s waiting for him to come home.

Katie's Graduation Present (ao3) - auroraphilealis (peachrayne)

Phil Lester has missed the majority of his daughter's high school years because he’s spent the last four years in the military. When Dan finds out he’s going to miss her graduation, too, he throws a fit, and doesn’t even say “I love you,” before hanging up on him. So who's the military guy in blue at the bottom of the bleachers?

Letters (ao3) - orphan_account

You always were going to come back, weren't you?

Letters to Dan. (ao3) - ily4never

Summary: Phil Lester has joined the Union army. The country is filled with war and death, but, in the midst of the pain, his love, Dan Howell, keeps him sane.

Or, alternatively, the fic where I make them American so that Phil can fight against slavery.

Letters To Phil. (ao3) - Mi_Munson

Summary: Dan Howell is a student.

Phil Lester is a soldier.

Dan enters a school project called "Letters to Soldiers".

or

The fanfic that Dan and Phil fall in love with each other through letters.

Love is for fallen men (ao3) - Nameless_ThankYous (SusanSketchesanddoodles)

Summary: When war was declared on August 4th 1914, Dan was ready. It would be a Great War. Desperate to prove himself a man, he joins the armed forces, against his mother’s every wish. He gets lotted in with the first draft. In the trenches, he meets Phil -- a handsome-faced 21-year-old with the same goal. But the realities of war set in quickly as the bombs keep dropping, the trenches get filthier and his letters stop arriving home.

Never Alone (ao3) - pasteldanhowells

Summary: Phil has always wanted to be in the army ever since he was a little kid. So now, he’s finally got the chance to go. Unfortunately, this means that he has to leave his family and his pregnant boyfriend behind.

Returning Home - dxnhowell

Summary: Dan returns home from being in the war and is reunited with Phil again, after being away for three years. 

Vanilla Twilight (ao3) - meggie_megs

Summary: Dan's staring at the stars missing Phil.

Welcome home, Danny (ao3) - AmazinGhoul

Summary: Dan is coming back home after spending a half of the year in military. He and Phil were sending letters to each other throughout this whole time and at some point decided to move in together and go on a date. Finally it's time to turn their plans into reality.

#phanfictioncatalogue #phan #phanfiction #au #military masterlist #military

[teachingmycattoread]

Things We’ve Yelled About This Episode #13

Much Ado About Nothing, William Shakespeare

Much Ado About Nothing (1993) (trailer, wiki)

Anti-Stratfordian-ism - refers to the theory that William Shakespeare (The Man From Stratford) did not write The Plays of William Shakespeare. For our opinions on this may I refer you to Exhibit A, Exhibit B and this gif:

"Beatrice: I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me", Act I Scene I

Kenneth Branagh (imdb)

Keanu Reeves (imdb)

Much Ado About Nothing (2011) - the David Tennant and Catherine Tate one (trailer)

Othello, William Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare

Minions (wiki)

"Claudio:What man was he talk’d with you yesternight

Out at your window betwixt twelve and one?

Now, if you are a maid, answer to this." Act IV Scene I

Much Ado About Nothing, BBC ShakespeaRe Told (2005) - this is the adaptation where Hero doesn't take Claudio back (wiki)

The difference between comedy and tragedy is listening to the women - we're referring to this tumblr post

"Beatrice:In our last

conflict four of his five wits went halting off, and

now is the whole man governed with one", Act I Scene I

"Messenger: And a good soldier too, lady.

Beatrice: And a good soldier to a lady: but what is he to a lord?" Act I Scene I

"Don Pedro: Come, lady, come; you have lost the heart of

Signior Benedick

Beatrice: Indeed, my lord, he lent it me awhile; and I gave

him use for it, a double heart for his single one:

marry, once before he won it of me with false dice,

therefore your grace may well say I have lost it." Act II Scene I

"The opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference"- Elie Wiesel (ref)

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

Drift compatibility (fanwiki)

"Beatrice: You always end with a jade's trick: I know you of old." Act I Scene I

Persuasion, Jane Austen

"Benedick: Come, bid me do any thing for thee.

Beatrice: Kill Claudio.

Benedick: Ha! Not for the wide world.

Beatrice: You kill me to deny it. Farewell." Act IV Scene I

"Benedick: Will your grace command me any service to the

world's end? I will go on the slightest errand now

to the Antipodes that you can devise to send me on;

I will fetch you a tooth-picker now from the

furthest inch of Asia, bring you the length of

Prester John's foot, fetch you a hair off the great

Cham's beard, do you any embassage to the Pigmies,

rather than hold three words' conference with this

harpy. You have no employment for me?" Act II Scene I

Emma Thompson (imdb)

"Leonato: Well, then, go you into hell?

Beatrice: No, but to the gate; and there will the devil meet

me like an old cuckold, with horns on his head, and

say 'Get you to heaven, Beatrice, get you to

heaven; here's no place for you maids" Act II Scene I

"I am no bird, and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you." Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte

There's only one bed trope (x)

Locked in an elevator trope (x)

"Claudio: When you went onward on this ended action,

I look’d upon her with a soldier’s eye,

That liked, but had a roughter task in hand

Than to drive liking to the name of love" Act I Scene I

"Don John:I had rather be a canker in a hedge than a rose in

his grace" Act I Scene III

"Don John: ..I cannot hide

what I am: I must be sad when I have cause and smile

at no man’s jests, eat when I have stomach and wait

for no man’s leisure, sleep when I am drowsy and

tend on no man’s business, laugh when I am merry and

claw no man in his humour" Act I Scene III

"Don Pedro: Your silence most offends me, and to be merry best

becomes you; for, out of question, you were born in

a merry hour.

Beatrice: No, sure, my lord, my mother cried; but then there

was a star danced, and under that was I born." Act II Scene I

"Leonato: Daughter, remember what I told you: if the prince

do solicit you in that kind, you know your answer." Act II Scene 1

"...it is by no means certain that another offer of marriage may ever be made to you" - Mr Collins, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

Kenneth Branagh falling through the deckchair (youtube)

The Paint Scene (youtube)

On the Road, Jack Kerouac - I couldn't find the gifset we mentioned, give us a shout if you find it!

"Beatrice:...O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart

in the marketplace" Act IV Scene I

RIP to X but I'm different (meme)

"Leonato: ...my brother hath a daughter,

Almost the copy of my child that’s dead." Act V Scene I

"Benedick: I do love nothing in the world so well as you: is

not that strange?" Act IV Scene I

What else are we reading/watching this week?

The Lord of the Rings films

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, Natasha Pulley

A Starless Sea, Erin Morgenstern

The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern

The Life-Changing Magic Of Tidying, Marie Kondo

Next Time On Teaching My Cat To Read

His Majesty’s Dragon (Temeraire), Naomi Novik

#tmctr #teaching my cat to read

[countrymusicandcher]

10 songs with critic that applies, now and then

10 songs discussing capitalism, racism, climate change, politics, lgbtq+ and history. All provided with quotes & year of release. The oldest song is from 1961, the youngest from May 2020. All 10 reflects sentiments, thoughts & feelings relevant to the issues of today. Most are applicable world-wide - there is a skewedness towards being America-centric because...well, people have had to write a lot of angry songs about you guys.

1. Ballad of Accounting - Ewan McColl & Peggy Seeger (1968)

"Did you stand there in the traces and let 'em feed you lies?

Did you trail along behind them wearing blinkers on your eyes?

Did you kiss the foot that kicked you, did you thank them for

Their scorn?

Did you ask for their forgiveness for the act of being born?"

2. Wasteland of the free - Iris DeMent (1996)

"We got CEO's making two hundred times the workers' pay

But they'll fight like hell against raising the minimum wage

And If you don't like it, mister, they'll ship your job

To some third-world country 'cross the sea

And it feels like I am living in the wasteland of the free"

3. The Peete Seeger Song - Karen James (1961)

"Left-wing they tell me smack of Socialism

And socialism they tell me is the same as communism

And any "ism" is un-American"

4. The Crooked Cross - Peggy Seeger (1960)

"They are free (they are free)

Nazi soldiers (they are free)

Nazi statesman (they are free)

In Germany (they are free)

Free to work among us still

Free to poison, lie and kill

Free to finish Hitler’s plans

Stop them now, while you can."

5. It's a hard life wherever you go - Nanci Griffith (1989)

"A cafeteria line in Chicago

The fat man in front of me

Is calling black people trash to his children

He's the only trash here I see

And I'm thinking this man wears a white hood

In the night when his children should sleep

But, they slip to their window and they see him

And they think that white hood's all they need"

6. Pride - Grace Petrie (2016)

"Well we're a long way from the Stonewall Inn

I'm standing on this platform, no one's stopping me to sing

But there's a multitude of sins

can hide behind your hashtag

Tell me again how love wins

Well there's nothing new about this rage

It's a war that's always waged"

7. Shut it down - Neil Young (2019)

Have to shut the whole system down

All around the planet

There's a blindness that just can't see

Have to shut the whole system down

They're all wearing climate change

As cool as they can be

8. Ohio - CSN&Y (1970)

Gotta get down to it

Soldiers are gunning us down

Should have been done long ago

What if you knew her and

Found her dead on the ground?

How can you run when you know?

9. Spotlight on Christmas - Rufus Wainwright (2005)

Don't forget Jesus Mary and Joseph

Once were a family, poor but rich in hope, yeah

Don't forget Jesus Mary and Joseph

Running from the law King Herod hath imposeth

And they were each one quite odd

A mench, a virgin, and a god but

Don't forget that what kept them afloat

Floatin' through the desert doesn't take a boat

Don't forget that what kept them above

Is unconditional love 

10. Unnamed (The Donald Trump Song) - Peggy Seeger (2020)

(This song is unrecorded and thus unnamed, but was performed by Peggy during one of her quarantine Live streams in May of this year)

What Donald doesn't want

Is getting buddy buddy with every friggin' country

That is muslim, or just down on it's luck

If anyone gets in his way he'll tell them all to

F - unny how we thought that he was going to loose?

But now he's in the white house, it's clear he's going to

Screw the people, screw the climate, screw the Earth and then

Make the world a safer place for Yankee business men

Lastly, I want to recommend the Antiwar Songs.org. It is a community built online archive for Anti-war songs from all over the world. It went online on 2003. 03. 20, the day the US launched it's attack on Iraque. Many of the songs from this post can be found there.

#peggy seeger #ewan maccoll #rufus wainwright #nanci griffith #neil young #csn&y #csny #iris dement #karen james

[him-e]

Honestly some of the “Why Kylo when FINN” arguments just sound like people not even paying attention to Finn or his canon story—not to mention Kylo’s story—but just using him as a vehicle to whine about the fact that Kylo wasn’t either the cool dark side villain OR the good Skywalker legacy that they wanted. Because it’s not even a critique of Finn’s arc in a “Here’s how it could’ve been better/what I personally wanted” way, it’s flipping the board because Finn isn’t Kylo

Have you ever heard anyone say “Why Finn when KYLO”? 

No, because that would be fucking stupid. These two characters are NOT interchangeable. They’re both lost boys who were abducted by evil and they both illustrate the point that evil—the dark side, the First Order—is never going to win because it wants to dehumanize people, so it never has real supporters, only slaves, and slavers; and at the end of the day, people will react against this dehumanization, because humanity always wins. 

But they illustrate this point in wildly different ways: Finn completely skipped the conflicted part, and went straight to choosing the right thing. He escapes the first order in the first half of the first movie, and his arc is about finding an identity and a new cause to believe in. Whatever crime he might have committed for the FO, if any, is never mentioned nor it is part of his narrative, because he doesn’t need that burden. That’s Kylo’s story. He is the one struggling with evil, he’s the one who had actual—if partial—agency and responsibility in the crimes he committed, he’s the one who arguably made a *choice* to join the dark side/an evil organization (as opposed to being abducted and brainwashed); and even if that choice is complicated by a series of factors (his being a problematic child, not feeling welcomed by his parents; his exceptional force sensitivity making him, like every male Skywalker, particularly sensitive to the dark side, Luke literally attacking him in the middle of the night, Snoke whispering in his ear and then emotionally and physically abusing him to break his will—see Snoke’s comic for receipts), he is the one who actually needs to process that choice and atone for it.

“why kylo when FINN” [could’ve had the redemption arc of the trilogy]? I’ve seen a lot of antis express this sentiment, but not a single soul criticize the fact that Finn’s turning point happens in the first 10 minutes of the story, that he’s never shown committing ANY crime he would need redemption from, that whatever happened during his time as a FO soldier doesn’t seem to have left permanent marks on his psyche whatsoever, or that he gets to effortlessly win the sympathy and loyalty of the female heroine in the first half of the movie and share a series of cutie-pie adventures with her—who “already adores” him after having spent exactly 15 minutes of screentime in his presence. Lol, I distinctly remember people falling over themselves to praise the “refreshing” lack of conflict and misunderstandings between Finn and Rey in TFA. Imagine these people handling a REAL redemption arc, and laugh. They don’t actually want Finn to be the antihero who is on this trilogy’s main redemption arc, because that would involve:

establishing Finn as a villain first, possibly for two entire thirds of the trilogy

make him actually responsible and accountable for at least some of the crimes he committed under the FO

show at least SOME of those crimes on screen, and make them unpalatable

have him fail at redemption, choose wrong when he had the chance to choose right, and double down on evil at least once (because that’s what happens in every redemption arc that’s worth reading)

have the main heroine struggle to accept him, or even like him at first (and make this phase last more than 1.5 minutes, lmao)

show that redemption is HARD, and not a path you choose because the other option simply horrifies you. Make it a real dilemma.

make him suffer. No, the villain slicing your back in a fair duel while you’re fighting bravely for a good cause doesn’t count. It has to be connected to what made you a villain in the first place. Redemption hurts.

Nah, this isn’t the story they’d want for Finn. They’d hate this Finn. They’d make up excuses for why this Finn is bad rep and villainizes black people. They don’t want a redemption arc for Finn, because they aren’t willing to sacrifice his good guy privilege---simply put, all the easily likeable stuff that makes him a perfect cinnamon roll in a fluffy relationship with the heroine. They just want Lucasfilm to write more stories about him, make him the focus. Which is fair. But it’s not a redemption arc they want. They should be glad it’s Kylo who has it, because they wouldn’t be able to handle Finn having that sort of problematique complexity. They want their cake and eat it.

Last but not least, if you’re looking at the sequel trilogy through a romantic lens, Finn and Kylo embody TWO DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSITE ARCHETYPES. Finn is the childhood friend. Kylo is the tall, dark and brooding type à la Mr. Rochester, à la Phantom of the Opera. To act like fans of B not loving A is some kind of racially-motivated conspiracy theory or internalized -ism is completely bonkers. THESE CHARACTERS REPRESENT TWO DIFFERENT TROPES.

#anon #asks #sw asks #sw for ts #sw wank #hard to swallow pills #kylo vs finn bs #anti kylo bs #anti sequel trilogy bs #sw discourse #kylo ren #redemption #finn for ts #finn

[thank-you-phipps]

Review: The Hating Game by Sally Thorne

So, I’m on my third of fourth reread, and it’s held up well over time. I was in a pretty shitty mood today, so it’s had its work cut out for it, battling all my negativity, which tends to manifest in intense distrust of this sort of book. I’m thinking the cynical mood will help to balance out the blinding heart eyes and give an objective perspective. 

When I first read this book I thought I’d found the holy grail, and though there have been a few books after that that have taken the cake, I still think it’s wonderfully written and it has basically none of my usual rom-com pet-peeves, which makes it easy to like.

That being said, this book doesn’t try hard enough. I know this isn’t literature. I don’t expect to be tossed about so much as by Jane Eyre wandering the moors, putting her faith in nothing but God Himself; but the sheen has worn off rather quickly for a book that once held pride of place in my heart. I mean, Red, White, and Royal Blue is a rom-com through and through, but I can hardly read the emails for how heart-wrenching and raw they are, so it’s not the genre’s fault. 

My main problem, which wasn’t immediately clear to me after I’d read it again, is that there’s not much of a plot or any kind of conflict at all. It’s pretty up-hill the whole ride, and even though they are “mean” to each other for a lot of the book (I’d classify this enemies-to-lovers), there is no real threat of any meaningful harm being done to there relationship, however caustic it may seem on the surface. You know they’re just flirting, albeit kinda antagonistic flirting. Of course you root for them, but at some point banter isn’t enough. As I’ve said, there’s basically no plot, and though I’m a decided rom-com light-skirt, when, for all intents and purposes, the whole book is the hooey gooey precious cuddles, the soft stares, the love words, or the antagonistic sexual tension, then the quality of the romance takes a hit. From what I can tell, the “climax” was Lucy finding out that Josh and Mindy were together a long time ago, and she feels insecure. That is quickly gotten over, though, and a hot sex scene is queued up ready to go. No big deal. Well, if the author doesn’t want too much conflict stemming directly from the romantic pair themselves, fine, but they’ve got to make up for it with conflict elsewhere, or else what am I here for? You can’t keep me on the hook if you just keep feeding me sweets. Now that the novelty has worn off, I had to shoulder all the work, trying to imbue myself with some sense that there are stakes involved and some reason to get attached to the story when there wasn’t really a whole lot to keep me invested besides her feminine wiles and his cutting whit. You gotta make me suffer a bit. You can’t rely on the characters alone to carry the romance. It always helps to develop a romantic pairing when they are forced to play with the world the author has created (e.g. The Soldier’s Scoundrel, and The Lawrence Brown Affair, both by my lady love, Cat Sebastian, to whom I’ve sold my immortal soul.) and that’s what I found most lacking

This is all thrown into unflattering relief by the holy undeserved overabundance of sap. Now that I’m looking at it with more objective familiarity (not a good mindset if you’re wanting to actually enjoy a  romantic comedy) Josh’s ministrations at the end of the book especially felt over the top. Don’t get me wrong, I still go a little starry-eyed. Sally does a superb job at love talk, making it original to boot, and I was emotionally masturbating to this emotion porno of epic proportions. But if you’re going to serve me that good, you’d better make your characters suffer to balance the scale. I’m more likely to let myself enjoy that kind of over the top confessional stuff if it’s in some historical romance a la Lisa Kleypas, where I’ve already thrown out my dignity with the bathwater. But this is a real life rom-com (…oxymoron…) where the romance takes place in world whose inhabitants should be self aware enough to call bullshit. I mean, come on. There is literally a sepia-filter road trip montage scene. It’s jarring when you’re trying to enjoy something good (despite my critiques), but you’ve put it in this gaudy picture frame and you can’t help questioning it’s value. Couldn’t you have at least tried to make it seem a little more down to earth, so the negligible chance of this ever happening in the real world aren’t rubbed in my face with quite so much heartless glee? You could have made it just as poignant and also made it feel realistic. Would have pack more of a punch that way. 

Anyway, one huge point in her favor: Sally does a fine job of making Josh masculine without resorting to alpha male-ism, which I suppose many authors find difficult (Looking at you, Kleypas). Lucy is cute and actually has a personality, but it irritated my that she objectified Josh as much as she did. It’s something I noticed in 99 Percent Mine, Sally’s second book, in which the objectification of the male love interest made me feel a bit ill. It started out so promising and then the romantic pair were together for a few pages and I had to stop. I’m all for the main characters taking pleasure in each other’s bodies, but the way Lucy was practically drooling over him when it came time for that, turned me off. It sounded as though she wasn’t really paying Josh himself any attention, and there was a literal scene in which she's squeezing and weighing is muscles in her hand. Gross. I’m hyper sensitive to this particular quirk in romance, and I think Sally does a good job overall of cancelling those blips out with comments on the other end of the spectrum, but it still rankles.I will say that it’s not nearly as pronounced as in 99 Percent mine. 

I know this review is negative on the whole, but keep in mind, I’ve read this book four or five times, so it must being doing something right. It’s one of the better rom-coms by a long shot, and I’m sure I’ll read it again in another few months and eat it up shamelessly. Just didn’t have much patience today.

#book review #review #romance #romantic comedy #ship #book blog #book #booklr #the hating game #sally thorne #99 percent mine #book nerd

[shieldedsouls]

tag dump ten ft. isms, verses, and aesthetic tags !!

#( policing brass | tag dump ) #( words are one step | isms ) #( start to start | verses ) #( starring role | verses | angie ) #( want the world | verses | bucky ) #( new adventures | verses | dugan ) #( new steps | verses | james ) #( million ways to live | verses | sam ) #( a different page | verses | sharon ) #( how the story goes | verses | steve ) #( what could be | verses | peggy ) #( leaves of yggdrasil | verses | thor ) #( could be | verses | maria ) #( through the cosmos | verses | tony ) #( soft sunshine | aesthetic | angie ) #( buy up all the stars | aesthetic | bucky ) #( dreaming a marvellous dream | aesthetic | dugan ) #( hands so bloody taste like honey | aesthetic | james ) #( won't feel ashamed | aesthetic | maria ) #( won't smile but I'll show you my teeth | aesthetic | peggy )

[pigtailedgirl]

The problem with Steve’s arc is that for all the talk about always doing the unselfish thing Steve has never done anything he didn’t want to do, and that matters, as context. Steve is never conflicted about fighting, Steve is never shown wanting things other than the things he chooses

https://tmblr.co/ZmeOeu2iH9G4k

This is a crux for me. Yes, Steve has always made the choice to fight. But to say he's never conflicted about it? I present you Bucky Barnes.

Steve in all three Cap films, weighs continuing the fight versus his relationship, however you define it, with Bucky.  

Bucky goes to war, and doesn't want to. Steve wants to but is blocked by his health. A big point of their argument is Steve has to fight exactly like other able-bodied men, like Bucky, instead of choosing another way or positives of missing this fight. The little red wagon scene.

Steve Rogers: Look, I know you don’t think I can do this.

James Barnes: This isn’t a back alley, Steve. It’s war!

Steve Rogers: I know it’s a war. You don’t have to tell me.

James Barnes: Why are you so keen to fight? There are so many important jobs.

Steve Rogers: What am I gonna do? Collect scrap metal…

James Barnes: Yes!

Steve Rogers: …in my little red wagon.

James Barnes: Why not?

Then Steve is sidelined by his public role as Captain America. Again, Bucky is actually the impetus for Steve's decision to become himself once more, go be the hero he is, and rescue the AWOL soldiers.

When they get back, in the first bar scene, we see that Steve questions Bucky's desire to join the fight with him, even if he needs that support system to encourage himself. Through Bucky's loss, we see Steve's biggest break in both wanting to fight, as he's literally hid away in the bar, and for right reasons. I don't like bullies changes to avenging.

In CATWS Steve is fighting without a personal sense of purpose or rightness. He's following Peggy's legacy. Following along but hating it and considering giving up the fight. Trying to start over, but struggling.

Who again comes with a reason and purpose for Steve? Bucky.

Who is also the one person that causes Steve to surrender fighting both on the causeway and on the Helicarriers? Bucky. The one person he won't fight against, verbally begs don't make me, unless it was to save millions of lives, and only until necessary. He doesn't want to fight, even for his life, if it's against Bucky's.

Then you have Civil War. Steve is taken out of a fight emotionally by Rumlow mentioning Bucky.

Steve is retiring from the Avengers, is not signing the Accords, which I think is fine and right, but he's also not fighting them until Bucky.

Bucky's treatment as a suspect, as a parallel victim of no choice or responsibility, of getting the burden of guilt re: collateral, is the main emotional representation of Steve’s reason to fight this fight against the Accords.

Steve comes to value Bucky's safety in this film over the fight in subtle ways as well. Steve is forced to run from engaging Tony and those enforcing the Accords in anyway other than what devolves into a shit show physical conflict because otherwise he could lose Bucky. Steve's biggest moral sin is he withheld his belief of Bucky's involvement in Howard and Maria's deaths from Tony and himself, because it could and did lead to a fight involving Bucky.

And then Steve picks Bucky. Over fighting with Tony as an Avenger. It now becomes fighting for Bucky, against Tony. Over the symbolism and representation of Captain America that people have made of Steve, aka the shield. Steve drops it, and carries himself and Bucky out of the film.

If Civil War wasn't a shit-show in other ways it'd have been great. I really hate it most cause there is something in it that rings true to a Captain America story for me. Steve is not out of character, he is muted, because the movie is so invested in giving into both side-isms, in no-homo panic, in not letting Tony be wrong, it can't fully show Steve's side of the fight. As it is written that would blow up the conceit of putting two heroes against each other, when their interpersonal conflict has never in MCU had them closely emotionally linked to each other, and because guess what? Every comic book hero, MCU hero, is a vigilante by design.

And if they hadn't fridged Bucky in the end-credits! Even with that heinous take on trauma and recovery and Bucky's worth as an individual and to Steve, the movie left Steve well. Still connected to a group of people, and wanting to reconcile with Tony. Still caring about the fight, but no longer bound to it by the constraints of the Captain America mantle. Balanced with stories for the future with the drawbacks of this putting him and others on the outskirts of country and law.

So where could all of this have led to in Steve's final arc, in Endgame?

We have the set up. Steve is a nomad, the Nomad, his friends with him in the fight, but it's physical and in the shadows. He's tired. So is his team. Homesick for the place that held them as heroes. His bright spot is connected to Bucky, who does not have the burden of carrying that fight at all. Bucky is building a recovery in Wakanda, with good reason and no seeming desire to fight, to battle, unless it's absolutely needed.

Then Steve is forced to bring that fight to that home and Bucky dies again and whoa does Steve and everyone lose.

They could of let Steve's failure change him in many ways. Instead they went regression and Endgame's bad writing.

I would have loved to see Steve not wanna fight. Put him instead of Tony into the role of just saying no to the idea they can fix this amount of loss. Reluctantly hero-ing up for the fight instead of active choice for the first time. 

Then however they bring the snapped back...well, Steve ends a couple ways to me. He is force-ably taken out of a right fight. Inspiring others he dies a hero, which is a tragic end for him personally but can be both true to character and like I said inspirational as fitting his heroic type. Or he's de-serumed or aged or injured. Again, not sunshine and rainbows for Steve physically, not a choice, but still leaving his character's heroism type intact.

Or he changes how he fights. This I like. Essentially let him fucking retire! Let him choose to say, I don't have to physically battle to fight for my beliefs. I can instead pass that to other heroes I respect and trust. Like Sam. I can be old man Steve or regular Steve or de-serumed Steve and say work in support of SHIELD, like Commander Cap in comics. I can advocate for my beliefs, by say public service. God, Steve running a VA for superheroes. Or OMG Trial of the Winter Soldier, a third Cap movie. Civil advocate to over-turn the accords Steve. Steve giving speeches. Plenty of ways to show he still is heroic, even not on the front lines, and still having his beliefs, his desire to do the right thing.

And then let him be happy not fighting. Show that instead. Go date and develop Sharon if you gotta no homo. Go find himself in the non-fight joys of the world. Not the past. Not pretending 1950's America is an ideal or would have zero for Steve to fight. Recover, not regress. Like Bucky. *coughs* WITH BUCKY

A Steve who ends his story by admitting and embracing wanting more than to fight, a Steve even just on the cusp of that, would be a perfect call-back. Two soldiers fought, and won, and find a way to go forward, find what makes them happy. 

Steve Rogers: Why? Where are we going?

James Barnes: The future. 

#steve rogers #anti-endgame #stevebucky #meta #CACW #cap trilogy #steve rogers meta #stucky

[rederiswrites]

Well, @mysdrym says they want to hear how I would “fix” iZombie and I have got to get this nonsense out of my head so I can focus on stuff I actually mean to write, so that’s all I need to hear.

Standard disclaimer [initial here], but I wouldn’t care about the show at all if the creators hadn’t done some really great stuff, created fantastic characters, etc. So yeah it’s a critical post, but it’s also an opinion post, and I for one am a firm defender of creators, including professional creators, to create what THEY imagine. This is stuff I would do.

Right, first things first: OMG stop with the “how can we be together when we can’t fuck, woe is us”. Just stop. There is nothing redeeming about that, it is gross and it needs to go. There’s plenty of problems without more “a sexless relationship is untenable people have Neeeeeeeds Jan” bullshit.

Second, guys, you created two absolutely fantastic, three-dimentional antagonists in Blaine and Vaughn. Watching Blaine grow and Vaughn  fall apart was terrific, Blaine is the perfect combination of definitely absolutely a horrible person and very relatable, whereas Vaughn is an excellent contrast of so divorced from reality that he eventually comes completely unmoored. Also kudos on Fillmore-Graves (har dee har, btw) and Mr. Boss. Great stuff. But like...please. Focus the story. You put in too much, and let too little go. Stuff has to move on.

Mr. Boss needs to be dead, not just shelved until he shows up to bite Blaine in the ass again. Angus McDonough needs to be dead for real, and never come out of that well. And I don’t just mean because they’ve fulfilled their narrative roles already, which they have. I mean because they are now distracting from the bigger fish this show is ignoring in favor of more villains. We’ve still GOT good villains, good antagonists, and scads of conflict, and THOSE should be the priority.

Where I am--halfway through season four--we are ignoring major issues to the serious detriment of not only logical plot continuity but established character development. You cannot tell me that you think it makes ANY sense that, once zombi-ism is exposed to the world, publicizing his data and his work on the cure/vaccine wouldn’t be one of the first things on Ravi’s mind. Oh, there might be reasons not to, SURE. And those reasons 100% should be explored. That would be great drama, and it’s also a wild injustice to the characters of Liv and Ravi to do otherwise. They’re both doctors, and this is SPECIFICALLY what Ravi is passionate about. But the show was so busy with sixteen new plot lines of dubious value that it just sorta--forgot. Just like when Blaine took the cures, they like....what, shook Blaine and Don E by the scruff of the neck, no syringes fell out, and they gave up?! No.

Things that should absolutely have happened after Discovery Day and the vaccine thing:

really truly riots, flames, I get that it’s a PG 14 show but there should have been a lot of death, even if it was just off-camera.

The US military shows up and does not leave. Lots of great tension to be had between opposing patrols of US soldiers and Fillmore-Graves troops. What should not have happened: a private military contractor, staffed entirely by KNOWN ZOMBIES, declares martial law and state and federal gov’ts shrug and back off.

Lots of boarded windows, people not traveling alone, improvised armor

lots more people who are visibly zombies, either because they are too broke/depressed to cover up, or because they are not suddenly beauticians.

Basically, I guess I’m saying I don’t buy that the zombie apocalypse, despite a coup in the only group remotely prepared to handle it, went off with minimal loss of life and then life just went on. Also, again, there should have been immediate urgent discussion between Liv and Ravi on the subject of the cure and vaccine. But nah, they only bring those things up from time to time when they have a cool idea, and the rest of the time they don’t exist.

And then there’s what SHOULD be the central tension of the whole show, which they occasionally poke in passing and which I would like to believe they eventually actually deal with: how we, ultimately, should feel about zombieism.

On the one hand, there’s what we could reasonably call the Fillmore-Graves attitude, which is pretty completely pro-zombie. Not just pro-zombie in the sense that zombies are pretty obviously still people and still feel pain and have rights and so on. More pro-zombie in the “what we are is a good thing and being superhuman is pretty rad because it makes us better at doing what our entire thing was anyway” sense. 

On the opposite side we have “zombieism is a highly infectious disease which has the potential to turn people into mindless killers and will eventually inevitably spread until zombies and humans cannot safely coexist, and humans will lose and then zombies will lose”. Which is pretty obviously true.

And then, right where they put her, there’s Liv in the middle. A zombie who would like not to be a zombie, but then also has done a lot of good work that she’s proud of, as a direct result of being a zombie. And all her friends, spread across the line--Ravi, sometimes a zombie but always pro-cure, Major, now committed to the zombie cause as it were but still invested in her and in his human friends, Peyton, who works for zombies but still stands on the human side of the dance-off...

Now THAT is a very interesting story and I wish they’d focus and tell it.

TL;DR: 

Cut back on the damn subplots and stop bring back used up villains and generally stop getting distracted with shit that’s not adding.

Instead, focus on actual continuity and remembering the plot elements you already set up.

Do justice to the conflicts inherent in your cool premise.

[wits-writing]

Captain Marvel (Movie Review)

Captain Marvel, directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck with a screenplay co-written by themselves and Geneva Robertson-Dworet, follows the story of Vers (Brie Larson), a noble warrior hero of the intergalactic Kree Empire with the power to project photonic energy blasts. After a routine mission goes wrong and she’s captured by the enemy, she escapes only to find herself stranded on the planet Earth. While seeking a way to contact her superior officers and protect the planet she’s on from her enemies, Vers starts finding evidence that her life wasn’t what she assumed.  She discovers hints towards a past as Air Force Pilot Carol Danvers, leaving her to struggle with what that means for her mission and whether she’s fighting for a just cause. It’s a personal journey in the form of an unfolding mystery that makes a compelling origin for the newest hero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

[Full Review Under the Cut]

Everything in Carol’s story gets imbued with the idea of the purpose behind her power. Kree society tells her the photon energy she’s able to channel was a gift they gave her, but always couched in the reminder that they can take it away. While she still believes herself to be what they made her as “Vers”, she gets told repeatedly that her emotions and interest in rediscovering her past are weaknesses she must overcome. Her superiors assume that discovering her best self means making her the best soldier possible. When she arrives on Earth and more memories start returning, we see that people in her life trying to limit her didn’t start with the Kree. Since she can only remember them as the people that gave her a life after her amnesia, she doesn’t question what they think is best for her at the start of the movie. The difference in her old life came down to the how she had a real support network of people that cared about her in her past, acknowledging her strength without couching it in any backhanded compliments about where her strength “really comes from.”

Seeing her reconnect with that support network in her journey into the past makes the best material in the movie. After discovering some files on Earth about who she was in the past, Carol goes to meet Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch), her best friend and fellow Air Force pilot in her old life. The time spent on Maria’s farm in Louisiana stands as where the movie brings Carol’s humanity back to her as more comes to her. Her interactions with Maria’s daughter, Monica (Akira Akbar), deserve special mention. While Maria is near devastated that her old friend has returned after six years with no memory of who she is, Monica takes it as a chance to bond with “Aunt Carol” all over again. The kid excitedly brings out all the photos and mementos of Carol they kept since her disappearance and explains each in an adorable sequence. Maria and Monica happily refer to Carol as part of their family and support her even though she can’t remember her old life. Since Maria and Carol always supported each other, they take each other’s skills and strengths being their own as a given.

Carol manages to tap into her full power for the first time by going against everything the Kree taught her about how they’re meant to be used. She embraces the emotional bonds of her life on Earth and stops doubting where the source of her power lies. Larson’s performance in the scenes where Carol gets to cut loose on her enemies displays the exuberance of someone finally understanding themselves and putting it to good use. She glows, literally and metaphorically, as she kicks ass left, right, and center through the movie’s third act. Accepting that she has nothing to prove to anyone makes her a force to be reckoned with willing to protect the innocent.

The science fiction trappings surrounding Carol’s development are centered on the conflict between the Kree Empire and the shapeshifting Skrulls. What we see of Kree society from Carol’s perspective as “Vers” consist of the militaristic side of their culture, a hierarchical, hard-edge environment focused on locating and eliminating Skrull infiltrators on Kree planets. Carol takes on this task as a member of the Starforce, a Kree black-ops team, under the command of her mentor, Yon-Rogg (Jude Law). In contrast to the tightly structured Kree society, the Skrulls are presented with an affable mannerism. Skrull commander Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) gets some of the movie’s funnier moments thanks to the way he reacts to certain situations. Carol’s rediscovery of her past and revelations concerning the mission she’s on in the present makes her humanity the key to bringing this conflict to an end.

Alongside Carol for the ride to finding Skrulls, why they came to Earth and her role in it is young Agent Fury (Samuel L Jackson, digitally de-aged). This movie details the first time he encounters anything extraterrestrial, making him the reaction point for all the bizarre happenings in this movie. While he gets some amusing bits in that capacity and in interacting with Goose the Cat, his part of the story also ties into one of my problems with Captain Marvel. Fury meeting his first superhero turning his arc into a prequel to his role in the Phase 1 MCU makes sense, but occasionally the awkwardness of the nods to the future feel forced to the point of annoyance. However, Jackson and Larson’s chemistry as they both start off navigating the rules of their respective agencies to get information before developing into true friends works in both characters’ favors, keeping the prequel-isms from dragging this part of the movie down.

The gradual build to Carol’s rediscovery of herself and paying that off with the themes of accepting her power as her own makes Captain Marvel a strong origin story to serve as her introduction. Boden and Fleck using that as the movie’s core makes it something I can see heavily resonating with people. The Earth-based bonding moments are the strongest parts of the movie, since those character interactions have the most warmth to them. The 90s set dressing and shout-outs are fine mostly for what they are, with one on-the-nose song insert in the climax that I won’t give away as a highlight. This is a solid movie with some standout moments once it gets going and I look forward to seeing what else is in store for Carol Danvers in the MCU.

If you like what you’ve read here, please like/reblog or share elsewhere online, follow me on Twitter (@WC_WIT), and consider throwing some support my way at either Ko-Fi.com or Patreon.com at the extension “/witswriting”

#Captain Marvel #Carol Danvers #Brie Larson #Wit's Writing #Movie Review #Marvel Studios #MCU #Marvel Comics #Marvel #superhero movies #Anna Boden #Ryan Fleck #Geneva Robertson Dworet #comics

[duhragonball]

Dragon Ball Movie 3: Mystical Adventure

Mystical Adventure premiered on July 9, 1988 at that year’s Toei Cartoon Festival.   This is the third of the original Dragon Ball movies, and the last one before the movies were released under the Dragon Ball Z brand.  

Just to clear this up, there was a fourth movie, Path to Power, but it was produced in 1996 in honor of the tenth anniversary of the TV series.  Since I’m trying to do these in chronological order, it’ll be a while before I get to that one.

The title “Mystical Adventure” isn’t very descriptive, especially since it’s just the name of the opening theme song.    Personally, I think of this one as “The Emperor Chiaotzu Movie”, since that’s what I consider to be the most distinctive plot element.

I’ve always found this movie fascinating, because it follows a very different formula from the others.   Blood Rubies and Sleeping Princess basically took different parts of the original story and changed the antagonists and pacing, but never the main characters.   Launch does different things in Sleeping Princess than she does in the TV series, but she’s basically the same person, and she ends up living with Master Roshi in either version.   The DBZ movies abandon all pretense of retelling the original story, and ended up doing short, intense conflicts with little regard for continuity.   But this movie takes a number of major characters, mainly villains, and casts them in entirely new roles. 

I’m thinking that the reason for this was that Toei really didn’t have a lot of other choices.   The first film sought to retell the original Dragon Ball hunt, showing how Goku met Bulma and Roshi and the others and became a hero.   The second movie picked up where the first left off, adapting the story of how Goku and Krilin were accepted as students of Master Roshi.   So the plan was probably for this third movie to continue on that path and show the boys competing in their first World Tournament, only I’m not sure how you could retell that story and insert a new villain into that scenario.   Also, a lot of new characters had been introduced since the 21st Budokai arc, and I think Toei wanted to feature some of them, but how do you fit all of that into one movie?

The solution, it seems, was to set the Tournament in a whole new country, the Mifan Empire, and establish a bunch of palace intrigue involving the Dragon Balls.    With that, Toei had the means to make a movie that borrows ideas from the 21st Budokai, the Red Ribbon Army sagas, and even the 22nd Budokai while we’re at it.  

The plus side of this is that we’re treated to a much more original story than what we got in the first two movies.   What bugged me about those features was that the bad guys, King Gurumes and Lucifer, were the most notable aspects of their respective movies, but they barely did anything except stand back and let the Dragon Ball cast run through all their signature quips and moves.   Movie 3 makes a lot of callbacks to the TV series, but it has to do it differently because so many of these ideas have been smooshed together in one place.   Also, this movie moves really fast.   There’s never a dull moment, because there’s so many things it has to cover in a very short run time.   It’s probably the fastest 45-and-a-half minutes you’ll ever see.

The downside of all this is that it’s a little too fast and too complicated for its own good.   There’s a scene where Goku meets Bulma, and he asks if Yamcha came with her, and before he can wave hello to the guy, she goes “Never mind that, look at this!”   That’s kind of the movie in a nutshell.  

Goku and Yamcha don’t even get to talk to each other in this movie because there’s so much stuff going on all at once.   I’m tempted to say that they crammed too many things into the movie, but it’s probably more accurate to say that the movie should have been longer.   I’m pleased with all these moving parts, but it would have been nice to give it all a chance to breathe. 

The story begins with Emperor Pilaf and his crew putting the finishing touches on a big-screen Dragon Radar for the Crane Hermit, Mercenary Tao, and Tien Shinhan.    They’re pleased with the work, and Tao steps forward to give them their reward.

We don’t actually get to see what Tao does to them, because the whole scene fades to white and gets sucked into the Phantom Zone, but it’s strongly implied that he killed them, or at least didn’t pay them for their work.    So there’s even some elements from the King Piccolo Saga in this movie along with the rest.

As the opening theme song plays, we see a montage of Goku and Krillin training under the Turtle Hermit.   This is the first time I’ve watched all three of these movies in order, and I never fully appreciated how they fit together to make a nice little trilogy.  

No pain, no gain, boys.

Hooray, the opening credits!  It’s fun!

Roshi does the whole bit where he explains that he doesn’t have anything else to teach the boys, since their training regimen included all the fundamentals of the Turtle School.   As a reward for their progress, he plans to take them to a big martial arts Tournament, but it’s not the Tenkaichi Budokai in Papaya Island.   No, instead he’s taking them to the imperial tournament hosted by the Mifan Empire.

Meanwhile, things are not well in the Mifan Empire, as the Emperor has lost his bride, Ran Ran, and the military has been searching high and low for her.

They stop a truck and search it, and when the driver gets upset about it, the leader of the soldiers, Blue, paralyzes him with his psychic powers and kicks his ass.   I’m not sure if Blue is a General in this story, but he’s part of the Mifan Army, not the Red Ribbon.  

Likewise, the Mifan Empire is run by characters from the Crane Hermit School.    Chiaotzu is the Emperor, and apparently a child in this story.   Tien is... well, I’m not sure exactly.   I want to say he’s a high-ranking security guard or something, but it’s never spelled out.

The Crane Hermit is called “Minister”, and since he seems to be the most important one, I assume he’s the Prime Minister.   I’ll be calling him “Minister Shen” from here on, since I don’t think they ever gave him a name in this movie, and he’s definitely not a Hermit.  “Shen” is a dub-ism, I’m pretty sure, but I’ll run with it.

Shen reveals the Dragon Radar to the Emperor, which looks a whole lot fancier since Pilaf last worked on it.    Also, how did he install that monstrosity in the ceiling without the Emperor knowing about it?    Anyway, he explains that if they collect the seven Dragon Balls, Chiaotzu can ask Shenron to find Ran Ran, and that’ll solve everything.   All Shen needs is the Emperor’s permission to devote imperial resources to the task.

But then Blue walks in, and suggests that Shen may have other plans for the Dragon Balls.   His men have searched the whole city for Ran Ran, except Minister Shen’s room, which seems awful fishy to him.  

At this point, Tao enters the scene and says that any accusation against Shen must be an accusation against him as well.Then they fight, and Tao kills Blue with his tongue, just like he did in the Commander Red Saga.

Okay, so this is a good time to talk about the double-edged sword of this movie’s concept.   This whole scene in the throne room, from the Dragon Radar to Blue’s death, is like two and a half minutes, tops.   Tao killing Blue with his tongue is awesome, sure, but in this movie it doesn’t really hold up as well because:

We’ve seen it before.

We barely got to know Blue before this happened.   Is he a good guy in this story?   I’m not sure.

Why is Tao only using his tongue?  In the TV series he did it to prove a point.   Here, there’s no context.   He just does it because he did it in the TV series and it was cool there.

Why is Chiaotzu just letting these guys fight in the middle of his court?  A minute ago Shen seemed to think it was important to get the Emperor’s permission to carry out his plan, but now they’re just doing whatever they want right in front of him.

I don’t want to complain too much, because this is a really cool scene, but I feel like it would have been helped if it had been expanded a little, or  maybe if Blue hadn’t been involved.   I think it would have been sufficient to have Tao and Shen share a sinister chuckle when Chiaotzu approved their plan.   We didn’t need Blue to run in and blurt out “HEY I THINK THESE GUYS ARE EVIL OH CRAP I’M DEAD!”    It’s like they really wanted Blue in the movie, but only so he could die to Tao.  

Meanwhile, Bulma’s out hunting Dragon Balls with Oolong, Puar, and Yamcha.  She told them that it was to find Goku, and I’m not really sure why that would work, since he doesn’t have any of the Dragon Balls at this time.   Turns out, she just wants to make a wish.   Unfortunately, some Mifan aircraft shoot at her when she gets too close to the Dragon Ball, and she has to shoot back.

Bulma takes out like four of these Mifanese planes.   I seem to remember she shot at some Gurumesian soldiers in Curse of the Blood Rubies, but I’m not sure that she hit any of them.   At any rate, this is probably the most kills by Bulma in any Dragon Ball media. 

She converts her aircraft into a submarine and goes after the Dragon Ball, but the Mifan Empire has a submarine of their own, and Bulma finds herself outgunned, so she has to withdraw.

Meanwhile, Roshi’s group is on their way to the Mifan for the tournament.   Launch wants to hijack the plane.   Okay, but what would she do if she did hijack it?   “Take this plane to Mifan, if ya know what’s good for ya!”  “Um, ma’am, that’s where we were already going.”   “Yeah, but take us there while I got a gun on ya.   It helps me relax!”

In the Land of Korin, the Mifan Empire has forced a bunch of locals to dig up the countryside in search of the Dragon Ball they detected in the region.   Turns out that Bora and Upa have it with them, but they don’t dare turn it over becaue they’ve heard that the Mifan soldiers will kill all the workers once they find it.   So this is all kind of a callback to Android 8 hiding the Dragon Ball from General White to save Jingle Village.  

Instead, Bora decides to travel to Mifan in the hopes of straightening things out there.   That’s surprisingly proactive of Bora.    I wouldn’t say it’s out of character for him, but I’m used to seeing him as a defender of this particular land.   It’s weird that the Mifan army has invaded and the first thing he’s gonna do is leave and take the fight to their backyard.

As it turns out, the Mifan Empire has already gathered six of the Dragon Balls, so the one in Korin is the only one they need.   For some reason, Shen keeps them all in this statue-looking thing.

As he and Tao discuss their plans, they get word that the 7th Dragon Ball is moving towards Mifan as they speak.   That doesn’t make sense, though, because their men in Korin haven’t found it yet.   Uh-oh.

What they’re actually detecting, of course, is Bora trying to sneak into Mifan with the Dragon Ball, but he didn’t know about their radar, so by taking the Dragon Ball along, he’s basically announcing his presence.

As they consider this, they notice a robot drone spying on them from the window.   Maybe I’m just getting old, but its weird how robot drones are a real thing you can buy at the store.   The only thing science-fictiony about Bulma spying on them like this is that she built a Dragon Radar into the drone to find them, and she doesn’t have to worry about pesky FAA regulations.   So yeah, even Droney makes a cameo in this movie.  They really went nuts stacking this film with stuff from the anime.

So now Bulma wants to go to Mifan and steal the Dragon Balls from Shen and Tao to get back at them for attacking her earlier.  Yamcha’s up for it because there’s a cool tournament there.  Oolong’s out, until Bulma tells him there’s pretty girls in Mifan.    Okay, yeah, but aren’t there pretty girls in West City, where they currently are?   Hell, there’s a pretty girl in the same room as Oolong, and he’s just playing cards like she isn’t even there.   But Oolong’s all excited to see hotttt Mifan babes anyway.

Roshi’s group arrives in Mifan and has dinner in a restaurant, when Bora moonwalks into the same place.  Okay, so first of all, he looks awesome in that poncho and hat.   Second, why is he sneaking around?    As far as he knows, no one would suspect him of anything.   Well, it’s a cool screencap, however we got there.    I’m just enjoying it, like that guy in the green shirt on the right.  

He pays for his and Upa’s meal with a nugget of gold he has with him.   I’m not used to seeing Bora spending money either.    This is a very different side of the character.   I don’t know that they’re really taking liberties with the guy, it’s just that he’s doing things that he never got the chance to do in the original story.

Suddenly there’s a bunch of sirens.   Launch panics until she remembers that she hasn’t done any crimes here...............................yet.  

Turns out they’re here for Bora, although I’m not quite sure how they knew to look for him in particular.   Mifan’s Dragon Radar wouldn’t be precise enough to pinpoint his location, or they would have found Bora’s Dragon Ball back in Korin a long time ago.   Maybe they knew to look for someone dressed like a resident of Korin, but I don’t know if Bora really stands out in that regard.    Anyway, there’s a struggle, and one of the soldiers bumps into Goku, so he gets rowdy.

So Sergeant Metallic shows up to straighten things out.   They fight for a while, and then Tao shows up.

Things look pretty dicey here, since this looks exactly like the moment when Tao killed Bora in the TV show, but...

Roshi intervenes by explaining that they’re all special guests of the Mifan Emperor, a status bestowed upon anyone who enters the tournament.   I’m pretty sure Bora had no intention of entering the tourney, but he does now, since it gives him diplomatic immunity, at least for a little while longer.   Too bad Blue didn’t enter this year...

Here’s a cool shot of Launch.

They all compare notes, and Roshi explains that if you win the tournament, you get to ask a favor from the Emperor.   So the plan is for one of the guys in this room to win, and ask Chiaotzu to put a stop to whatever Shen is up to.   I’m not sure that would work, and if it would work, I’m not sure they need to go to that much trouble to get an audience, but okay.

That night, Emperor Chiatozu has a nightmare, and his best pal Tien comforts him.   Note that Tien was in the opening scene of the movie, so he’s definitely in cahoots with Shen and Tao.   I feel like that sort of got lost in the shuffle with everything else that’s been happening.

Tien even taught him how to do telepathy, so that just proves that he has a soft spot for the Emperor.

The next day, Bulma’s group runs into Roshi’s group.   She’s learned that all seven Dragon Balls are together in Mifan, and she plans to steal the six that are held in the palace.   This is awful brave of Bulma, considerng how she didn’t want any part of the Red Ribbon Army, but all right.

What does she even plan to wish for?   Anyway, she recruits Launch to help her in the caper.

Also Yamcha’s here.

When the tournament finally starts, Yamcha is the first contestant, and his first opponent is Anton the Great, one of the jobbers from the preliminary matches in the 22nd Budokai arc.  

Yamcha clearly busts out the Wolf Fang Fist to beat him...

Except he ends up kicking the guy instead.   I feel like someone doesn’t understand what the Wolf Fang Fist is supposed to be.    It might be be, I’ll admit it, but it sure seems like there’s no rule to the move.   Yamcha just shouts “Roga fu-fu-ken!” and there’s some wolf images and then he just does whatever he was doing before, only it’s supposed to work better.   In the video games, it’s always rapid-fire strikes.

We don’t get a lot of time to learn how this Mifan Tournament works, but it seems to be a gauntlet-style match.   As soon as Anton is eliminated, Bora jumps in the ring and Yamcha has to fight him next.

Yamcha seems to do okay...

Until Master Roshi distracts him, costing Yamcha the match.   This is so Bora can win and receive his favor from the emperor.  

Apparently, the other fighters are so impressed with Bora’s performance that they run away rather than face him.   This just leaves Goku and Krillin, which works out great, since they all want the same thing from Chiaotzu.   But then...

Tao decides to enter himself, and when Bora refuses to tell where he’s hidden the Dragon Ball, he kills him.

Ouch.   I’m not sure why they would build a statue so big and sharp, but there it is.   

Now, while all of this is going on, Bulma is making her move to get the other six Dragon Balls.   First, she has Puar shape-shift into Emperor CHiaotzu.   Ha ha, that’s adorable!  

Then she has Oolong tun into Minister Shen.   Pretty close, but needs improvement.

The idea is to just stroll right into the palace, since know one would dare stop the Emperor, but then a couple of nobles ask a few too many innocent questions, so Launch mugs them.

Was this one of the pretty girls Oolong came to see?   I think this is the only woman we’ve seen in town since they got here. 

Goku tries to avenge Bora, but he gets clobbered.   Even the Kamehameha is useless against Tao, who responds with a Dodon Ray.  Unlike the TV version of this fight, Goku gets carried away by the blast, which sends him out of the city.

And into... Korin Tower?   Hell of a coincidence.

Back at the arena, Shen decides that there’s no longer any need to conceal his motives, and explains to Chiaotzu that he’s taking over the Empire and using the Dragon Balls to conquer the rest of the world too.  

Unfortunately, they still can’t find the seventh ball, because Goku was carryng it when Tao shot him with the Dodon Ray.  

Also, Bulma’s trying to steal the other six...

At Korin Tower, Korin doesn’t have time to teach Goku all the stuff that helped him beat Tao in the TV show, so we get a condensed lesson instead.   He drops Goku’s Dragon Ball in a pot of water, and Goku can’t see it at first because the water is moving.    When it settles, he can see the bottom clearly.   Similarly, Goku failed against Tao because he was blinded by his own anger at Bora’s death.    The key to beating his enemy is to calm his heart, which will allow him to see his enemy clearly.    

Turns out that Tao is already on his way to find Goku, so he’d better calm his heart quickly if he wants to stand a chance.

So Goku hops on Kinto Un to face him.   This is the first time we’ve seen Kinto Un in this movie, so I feel kind of bad for anyone who started watching Dragon Ball with this movie.   It’s just not a good introduction at all.   Launch never sneezes, and there’s just way too much stuff happening all at once.   You’ll get to see a lot of characters, but you don’t get to fully experience all of them, or learn about why they do what they do.  

Back in Mifan, Shen thwarts Bulma’s Dragon Ball heist, and Launch actually manages to shoot some bad guys and actually kill them for once.   Unfortunately, her bullets still don’t work on Shen.

And they end up losing the Dragon Balls in a fissue at the bottom of the ocean.   Whoops.

Roshi and Krillin try to fight, but Tien knocks out Roshi with that knee strike he used on Jackie Chun at the 22nd Budokai.  

So that about wraps things up.    The Dragon Balls may be lost, but Shen can stil take over Mifan, so he orders Tien to kill Emperor Chiaotzu so he can cement his power.

Meanwhile, in Penguin Village, Arale intercepts Tao and messes with him until Goku shows up.

Tao shoots a Dodon Ray at Arale,but it doesn’t hurt her at all, much to Goku’s amazement.

Also the Ga-chan’s zap him, but I don’t know enough about Dr. Slump to know what that would do to him.

This whole part of the movie is nuuuuuuuuuuts.   I don’t mind seeing Arale pop in, but pitting Tao against her and the Ga-chans and Goku is a bit much.   I think it’s safe to call Tao the main villain of the movie, but he can’t even get any traction in this final battle.   At one point, the Ga-chans tie his hair to a tree as a prank.   They just make him look like a total chump, which is humorous, but I’m not sure it was the best thing to do with this movie.

So Tao tries the ol’ fake apology trick, except he can’t quite do what he did in the TV show because he needs to get the Dragon Ball and escape to Mifan.   So instead of a grenade, he whips out a little hovercraft, grabs the Dragon Ball, and shoots missiles when he’s far enough away.   But the result is the same.

Back at Mifan, Tien tries to explain to Chiaotzu that he’s betraying him, but Chiaotzu just can’t accept that.

He starts crying, and Tien just can’t resist those beady eyes.

Shen is livid, so he tries to kill the Emperor himself.    Also around here, Master Roshi wakes up from Tien’s kick and gives him that line about how his abilities are crying out for Tien to do the right thing.   Okay, but that line worked better in the original story because we had seen Tien’s abilities.    In this movie, all he’s done so far is kick Roshi in the back of the head, and Roshi got up from it almost immediately. 

Likewise, it’s not really clear what Tien’s obligation to Shen is supposed to be.   In the original version, Shen taught him how to fight.   Here, I don’t even known what Tien’s position is.     

Really, all we need is what we’ve gotten from the movie itself.    Tien was shown to be in league with Shen and Tao’s plot, but he’s also very close to Emperor Chiaotzu, and when push comes to shove his friendship with Chiaotzu is more important than his political ambitions.    We don’t need callbacks to his dilemma from the 22nd Budokai, because this is a completely different dilemma.  

So Shen tries to use a Dodon Ray on Chiaotzu, but Tien whips out the Ki Ko Ho first and blows Shen away.

In the movie, the Ki Ko Ho is blue for some reason.  

So that fixes everything except for Sergeant Metallic, who had been trying to hold Upa hostage, except everyone kept ignoring him.   Now that he has no other cards to play, he tries to kill Upa, but then Goku returns and dives right through his body, which shuts him down once and for all. 

The guards who were helping Shen immediately bow before Chiaotzu, and he forgives them.   That’s nice and all, but I can’t help but wonder if this lax attitude is how the first coup got rolling.

Then Tien hands Chiaotzu a doll, which is apparently Ran Ran.   Tien admits that he had been hiding it this whole time, in order to get Chiaotzu to agree to the Dragon Ball search.   So Chiaotzu’s “bride” was a doll the whole time?   How old is Chiaotzu supposed to be in this movie?  Five?  Anyway, he forgives Tien too, so that takes care of that.

Oh, hey, Bulma and Yamcha survived falling into the ocean.   Good for them.

The only loose end now is Bora’s death.   Goku plans to revive him with the Dragon Balls, except six of them are now out of reach. 

So Goku tosses the seventh ball in with the rest of them, and summons Shenron that way.   Okay, but we’re kind of running short on time, aren’t we?

And, yeah, this movie was so jam packed with content that they had to wish Bora back to life during the end credits.   I can’t really complain, since making wishes on the Dragon Balls has gotten pretty routine by now, so all we really need is a shot of Shenron and a shot of Bora waking up.   Still, it just goes to show that they really loaded this movie up for bear, and sometimes that works against it.  

I’d say this is definitely the best of the original Dragon Ball movies.   They’re all well animated, but Mystical Adventure is an even bigger visual feast, what with all the ancient Chinese architecture and the costumes and so on.   It’s got more action, with a number of fights besides the main battle, and it’s the first movie where Goku actually gets to throw down with the lead villain instead of just having a brief skirmish.   It gets a little convoluted in places, but it’s never dull, and that’s always a positive.

#dragon ball #2019dbliveblog #dbmovieliveblog #mystical adventure #goku #krillin #master roshi #launch #turtle #bulma #yamcha #oolong #puar #tien #chiaotzu #shenron #crane hermit #mercenary tao #general blue #sergeant metallic #bora #upa #korin #arale #ga-chan #phew #i think i got everybody #cast of thousands in this thing #also dr slump was in it but this post was long enough already

[feijuan]

Fist of the Blue Sky: Regenesis, Am I Right?

This review contains a lot of spoilers -- I do not know how much of the anime is congruent with the manga, and as such there may be manga spoilers in this review as well. 

Click here to read on Wordpress!

On one hand, as we all ought to know very well,  

But on the other hand, I think I liked season 2 of Fist of the North Star: Regenesis more than the first, somehow. I also hate to admit there were parts of season 2 I liked completely unironically, as ridiculous and contrived as most of it was. Such is often my experience with every Fist of the North Star anime, game, etc, that I watch -- though I expected it much less from this, on account of it being maligned by pretty much everyone I know who knows anything about Fist of the North Star, for

Being made entirely in CGI (though I still think it’s the designs that are awful, and not necessarily the fact that it’s CGI, but to each their own I suppose when it comes to visuals)

Apparently not following canon much at all, but that doesn’t matter to me because I don’t know anything about Fist of the Blue Sky canon anyway, which makes my viewing experience… interesting… because I just had to accept whatever nutso bonkers lunacy I saw on the screen as truth.

I berated the first season quite a lot, not just for issues in adaptation, but for issues that are almost certainly in the source material as well. I thought the setting was a ridiculously contrary backdrop for the kind of martial arts antics happening on screen, in a literary and in a visual sense. The martial arts themselves, while always ludicrous in the franchise as a whole, were especially so in Fist of the Blue Sky - and in Regenesis their visual presentation was frankly awful, managing to be both tacky beyond imagining and super underwhelming. The writing had serious problems that required -- I'm not kidding and wish I was -- a Magical Jewel That Showed The Antagonist The Truth to resolve the finale, and the backstory we saw through this Plot Orb was complete and utter nonsense, the likes of which I haven't quite seen in a very long time. This really doesn't even cover all of the issues in the first season of Fist of the Blue Sky: Regenesis alone, because the majority of the characters aren't great either, including the protagonist whose value largely seems reliant on being an allusion to the already beloved Kenshiro, and the abundance of small contrivances throughout to fuel completely unnecessary conflicts.

As objectively bad as Regenesis was though, there were some things I enjoyed about it, namely a few of the characters. I loved Fei Yan and Erika, and as much as I hated Yasaka at first, he grew on me – though that was born from the absurdity of his redemption that made it impossible for me to take any of his crimes seriously. On that line of thought though, what I often enjoyed about season 1 was the spectacle of it, and I think that’s pretty clearly evidenced by my liveblog where I was either losing my mind and frantically posting screencaps to try and even begin to understand what I was looking at and how it was possible, or posting about Fei Yan Being Great. And sometimes complaining when I had the energy to think about the awful writing, instead of laugh it off…

So that was season 1. But what did season 2 have to offer, and could it redeem the anime, even a little bit? Well, short answers: A bit more, and not particularly. So let's get to the list making:

Things I decidedly didn’t like at all about Season 2

Need I even say anything about how the CG model proportions are still awful... looking Yu Ling's model makes me ache all over. But not only are the models in general still grotesque, but there were a few too many instances of flashbacks where characters were supposed to be teens, but they either had a kid model, or an adult model. There's no inbetween.  It's extremely weird and jarring when in one flashback Simeon looks like a 12 year old with similarly young looking Himuka, and then "a few years later" Simeon still has the 12 year old boy model, while Himuka has evolved into a 30 year old buff martial artist.

Fei Yan is Still Dead and Yasaka is good but he's not that good. This is admittedly a petty complaint but try to understand... Fei Yan was really good. And I miss him. Thank you for listening.

Fei He was wildly under-utilized, under-developed, and usually just a woman for male characters to make fun of or infantalize -- which is a crying shame (and unfortunately par the course for the franchise, ahem) because she was a link back to Fei Yan and his legacy. Having been partially brought up by him and idolizing him in her youth, she arrives near the end of season 1 to track down Kasumi, who she is pointlessly misled into believing killed Fei Yan for a few episodes. Later in season 2 when she does discover it was Yasaka who killed Fei Yan, nothing… happens, because by that time she has already come to respect Kasumi, so it’s trivially easy for Kasumi to convince her to forgive Yasaka just like he did. Once her initial motivation is snuffed out, she just becomes a detached ally of our secondary protagonist group, which consists of Yu Ling, minor members of the Green Gang, and the worst characters of the entire show!

The comedy duo. Far and away the worst aspect of both seasons of the whole show. The CG? The ugly art style in general? The casual misogyny? The non-canon mismatched cult planning world domination with nuclear weapons? That all pales in comparison to the damage these freaks wreck on every episode they are in.

Their horrendous “bits” are where like 80% of the misogyny this show displays actually occurs. Their boorish fantasies are used as vehicles for the only fanservice scenes in the entire run, and they make up ridiculous plans for Fei He to carry out that degrade her and make her a joke.Their bits are tone-shatteringly out of place and usually shoehorned into every episode since their introduction in the middle of season 1 at the worst time possible. I’m still seething about their prolonged scene in the finale where Yu Ling inexplicably rubs the metal-haired one’s head while her fiancee fights for his doomed life, and he pretty much c*ms and his metal wig falls off to reveal a single disgusting hair on his head -- we literally cut away from the final fight in the whole series so we can see THAT. LIKE WHAT? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

This show is already so far-fetched and often unintentionally hilarious that it doesn’t benefit in any way from having gag characters in the first place. It’s a net loss in entertainment value, really, because all the gag characters did was ruin serious scenes and interrupt outrageous scenes that were actually funny.

Fei Yan died, Yasaka died, Kasumi died, but THESE CHUCKLEFUCKS LIVED? #JUSTICEFORFEIYAN #GOTHRIGHTS

The whole thing with the vampire cyborg mad scientist soldier making pseudo-zombies. That was a lot even for Fist of the Blue Sky: Regenesis.

Oh, and another quick note about Fei He being poorly utilized: I also didn't like at all how she is revealed to have fallen in love with Kasumi in the finale... like c'mon. Was that necessary? They barely ever spoke! A woman can care about a man dying without being A Thing, Fist of the North Star...

Things I unexpectedly didn’t hate and even sort of liked to varying degrees about Season 2

Speaking of Kasumi, he was a lot more likable in this season and I don't know if it's because we naturally got to know him better as we spent more time with him, or if it's because he just Did More Good Stuff than before, but I'm leaning towards the latter. I really liked his tender moments with Erika going up to the finale and his fight with Himuka was leagues above any of his fights previously in terms of giving us some actual meaningful insight into his personality and beliefs. It's a shame these moments happened in the last two episodes of the series... But I am willing to concede that they were fairly successful in making me like him just in time for him to honourably wander off into the desert and die. Thanks.

As much as I heckled the literally religious cult composed of men in black, mysterious worshippers with pointed hoods sitting around a table plotting world domination, mad scientist soldiers, and assorted martial artists, I ended up kind of liking where the story went with it and the themes that were developed in the last stretch. The second arc had a very on the nose stance on war and weapons of mass destruction as the worst of humanity's creations, and we see it in a lot of places in the story. The narrative unfolding at a time when World War II was on the horizon, the nuclear bomb schematics that had been causing all of the strife in the story being erased from Erika's (a little Jewish girl, as well) mind in the end, and how Himuka was driven to villainy by war and became convinced the only way to create a future without it, was to hit the Hard Reset Button on the earth's population. For all its shortcomings with dealing with the -isms, Fist of the North Star has at least always had anti-war themes, but I especially liked how they were more focused and rooted in history in this season of Regenesis.

I actually... liked?! The villains?!

Simeon had a motivation that was irrational and pathetic, but made sense because of his background. Instead of the story trying to redeem or sympathize with him, he is simply pitied by Himuka who usurps him and puts him out of his misery, which is very rare for Fist of the North Star as a whole. It shouldn't be as rare as it is.

While I liked the anti-war themes, Himuka's motivation felt a lot less organic than Simeon's in my opinion and required a whole episode to be dedicated to explaining it to us, which I'm not a huge fan of unless it's really compelling -- and I don't think it was. Nevertheless I did enjoy his final fight with Kasumi and the philosophy of it, which made it harder than usual not to bend to the narrative's will and mourn him.

They weren’t glorified misogynists or cartoonishly evil goons! 👍

Himuka betraying Simeon and becoming The Real Big Bad was also rather fresh for Fist of the North Star, and it's a shame that it was spoiled in the opening, because if it wasn't I think I might have been surprised. Regardless, shifting gears like that was a good move in my opinion -- even though, yeah, The Villain Is Your Brother, Again.

When Kasumi wins his final battle against Himuka, and Himuka says "I have always been a vessel of nothingness. There is nothing to spill from inside of me" and he like, turns to stone in the rising sun, instead of dying from his wounds? Did it make any sense? No. Was it was raw as fuck and did I love it? Yes.

Erika... her arc in season 2 is very bittersweet, but it is undeniable that I was relieved when Kasumi erased her memories. It's probably not kosher, but when I was watching it I agreed with the narrative's claim that her only way to be free of her immense suffering and live like a little girl should was to clean the slate, and months later when I think back to it, I'm still okay with it. A little girl watching her parents die and being burdened with knowledge that can destroy the world, and everything that happens to her and her guardians because of wicked men trying to get that knowledge from her... I can't really fault the idea of taking that away from her and letting her finally rest. Go play in a sandbox dearest Erika... run along...

Every episode felt like 5 minutes long!

So that's the final impressions of Fist of the Blue Sky: Regenesis -- I ended up having more to say about it than I thought I would, considering how I was speechless most of the time I was watching it... with a list of Positive Points that long, you might be tricked into thinking it's unexpectedly good; but despite everything I liked about it, I can say with confidence that Fist of the Blue Sky: Regenesis is not good. All of the issues from the first season do carry over into this one -- the contrived story-telling and egregious tonal dissonance, lackluster characterization and poor handling of character drama, and just plain absurdity of most things happening on the screen remain intact. Had it not been for a small hand full of likable characters and some good themes trying to pierce through the hideous hide of this story, it would be thoroughly unremarkable, perhaps not even worth touting as a hilarious spectacle of out of context screenshots.

I can't be too sour though, because then I would be dishonest. It's clear as day that while understanding why it is so maligned, I enjoyed many parts of it far more than expected, and the experience of watching it with my partner was fun and at times even emotional. And as much as I can say with confidence that Fist of the Blue Sky: Regensis isn't a good anime, I can also say with confidence, that Fist of the Blue Sky: Regenesis was not even remotely the Worst Anime Of 2018. I think it's very telling that in the anime community, being completely mediocre with bad aesthetics and bad story adaptation are worse sins than that of, say, The Master of Ragnarok & Blesser of Einherjar and Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody which are both "escapism" series that aired in 2018 and were rampant with pedophilia and slave fetishization that were popular on Crunchyroll when they were airing. Front Page Popular.

Needless to say, watching lots of airing anime every season gives me a sense of perspective and I use it, and so I am content with admitting that I happily watched Fist of the Blue Sky: Regenesis every Monday that it aired and often had a great time, oftentimes because it was an absolute riot to see, and sometimes because despite everything, it could be... decent!

[Happy very belated New Years everyone! I finally finished writing something, so hopefully this bodes well for my productivity in 2019! Enjoy and thanks for sticking with the blog!]

#fotns #fotbs #fist of the north star #fist of the blue sky #Someone Had To Watch It And That Someone Was Me.

[snkpolls]

SnK S3E07 Poll Results (Anime Only Version)

The poll closed with 118 responses. Thank you to everyone who participated! 

Please note this is the anime only viewer version of the poll. Manga readers, please click here for the results of the manga reader poll!

RATE THE EPISODE 110 Responses

Another episode with an overwhelming amount of positive feedback and high ratings!

20 minutes of everything that makes the series great

Best episode of the season by far. Rod is a poor guy. Historia did Destroya.

Best so far!! This season is truly getting better with every episode. Idk how I'm going to survive to the end of it tbh, I'm already dead!!!!

WE FINALLY GOT TO HEAR THE TWO NEW VOCAL TRACKS. YOUR REACTIONS?

Out of the new tracks, Kenny’s remix had its fans, but Historia’s headstrong theme got the most love!  Anyone excited for the OST’s release?

WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING WERE YOUR FAVORITE SCENES? 107 Responses

The rematch between Levi and Kenny was most compelling, closely followed by Historia remembering Ymir’s and stand-up against her father.  Viewers also seemed to enjoy Mikasa slicing some MPs and Eren’s emotional breakdown.

Eren's emotional monologue broke me. I teared up even on the second watch. Maybe I'm just too invested in this show lol.

Mikasa's pose when she kicked a bitch in the face

HOW EMOTIONAL DID SPRINGLESTEIN’S FIRST KILLS MAKE YOU? 105 Responses

For the most part, viewers more or less had some feelings toward Springlestein’s first human kills. They grow up so fast!

jean best boi

TRAUTE HAS A LOT TO SAY ABOUT HER LOYALTY AND KENNY’S DREAM. WHAT’RE YOUR FEELINGS ABOUT HER AS A CHARACTER? 108 Responses

Almost half of you believe Kenny’s right-hand woman to be bright and rational, while there is nearly an even split between not having much of an opinion and thinking she’s being manipulated by Kenny. Two of you compared her to Annie: “bootleg Annie”/ “grumpier Annie”

She just has a different ideology than Erwin and co. and is prepared to fight to death for it.

Honestly there was just so much going on I didn't really think about her

I am open to more of her.

I’m loving her just as much as Kenny, she’s a fun villain.

HOW HEARTBREAKING WAS EREN’S BREAKDOWN? 108 Resposnes

There were a variety of responses for this one, though overall people found Eren’s breakdown to be a bit of a tearjerker.

It's traumatizing right now, but he will get through this.

Now's not the time Eren. You can do this at any other time just not right now.

HOW BADASS WAS HISTORIA YEETING HER DAD? 108 Responses

A vast majority of viewers are applauding Historia throwing her father on the ground and calling him on his bullshit!

Damn that girl always gets the best music whenever she does something awesome

Good for her:) She took a stand on her own.

I liked the reminder that she is actually a fuckin' soldier, when she tossed her pops and threw his spine out.

FAVORITE KENNY-ISM SO FAR: 108 Responses

Kenny has quite a few quotable moments, but people find his introduction line to be most favorable.

HOW’RE YOU FEELING ABOUT EREN RIGHT NOW? 107 Responses

72% of the voters sympathize with Eren’s despair and want people to cut him some slack, while a fair amount believe this is not the time or place for him to fall apart.

It's nice to see him actually consider the consequences of his actions for the first time basically ever.

Always been a cry baby and spoiled brat

I mean... they've all been through a lot.

WHAT DO YOU EXPECT FOR EREN’S EMOTIONAL STABILITY AFTER HIS HEAVIEST BREAKDOWN YET? 104 Responses

Despite his breakdown, a majority of voters believe this is just another bump in the road for Eren.  There are some that think this is just the beginning of his stability worsening.

It'll take some time but with the help of his friends they'll level him out. Needs a good talking to from Mikasa

He’ll pick himself, but it will take a while.

I'm expecting a change in his demeanor. I've been reading that he sheds his hot-headed persona, so I'm looking forward to that.

He's gonna be a cooler, wiser and more mature character.

WHAT WAS YOUR REACTION TO HISTORIA TOSSING THE SERUM? 106 Responses

Again, the support for Historia’s actions and words is overwhelming!

DID YOU EXPECT KENNY’S (NOW-ABANDONED) PLAN WAS TO HARNESS THE POWER OF THE TITANS? 106 Responses

While a decent amount of viewers suspected Kenny wanted to ultimately take the Reiss’s titan power for himself, a majority did not expect his confession.

HANGE: DOWN OR OUT? 106 Responses

Despite being grappled and thrown against a pilar, 79.2% are confident Hange will pull themself together!

My theory: Hange will be in a coma from her injuries, but wakes up upon Moblit coming back to give her a kiss :)

They foreshadowed Hange going down masterfully

HOW MUCH DO YOU TRUST ROD’S EXPLANATIONS? 106 Responses

Rod did a lot of infodumping about Grisha’s sins and his family’s secrets the past couple episodes.  What’s the truth and what’s a lie?  Most believe there is some truth to what he is saying along with a few lies purposely placed.

He is telling the truth. At the same time he's a selfish, manipulative villain hellbent on using Historia.

I trust Rod about as much as I trust the old tub of sour cream in the back of my fridge dated "12/04/2011".

The very first thing he did in the episode was manipulating Historia's emotions with her dead sister. Fuck that guy.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS ON THE EPISODE?

And the oscar for best performance goes to... YUKI KAJI!

First legitimately great episode of Season 3. Not hindered by the breakneck pacing and/or infodumps.

I hate Rod. I feel bad for Eren. I'm excited by Kenny. Historia is doing better for herself.

I don't think anyone is getting eaten so either Rod's dumb titan form will be a threat some other way or we will finally know how people can can turn into shifters without eating another shifter.

Was It Armin who figured out Kenny's troupe maneuver gear weaknesses? Because the anime kinda implies that... And this is awesome.. he os brilliant

Fights are awesome

This was the weakest episode so far. On paper, it should be one hell of an episode, but regrettably the the way it was executed left a lot to be desired. In particular, I found Historia's and Eren's scenes to be quite disappointing. The storyboards and direction for those scenes were the most insipid and uninspired so far in the anime's entire run. The VAs did all they could, but the directors let them down. The scenes paled in comparison to Reiner+Berthold's reveal and Eren's breakdown from S2. Lastly, the art was pretty awful at various instances throughout the episode. From what I read about the production on Twitter, it seems WIT has already started to experience difficulties managing the production for this season, which probably means the art will keep on getting worse. I'm now deliberating on whether to go ahead and read the manga and watch the anime once the Blu-rays are out.

Shits getting good now.

The smokescreen was fucking awesome. And I had a laugh with a friend after we repeatedly said we would never go on an assault if it meant attacking through a narrow door.

Moar Squad Levi plz now and for forever

WHERE DO YOU PRIMARILY DISCUSS THE SERIES? 102 Responses

Thank you again to everyone who took the poll. See you back on Tuesday!

#snk poll #snk polls #snk spoilers #snk s3 #poll results

[shystoryrebel]

LOST WITH THE WAVES

(1)

It happens only with dreamy Indians. Children are the happy dreams of their parents. To fulfill their dreams, I had obtained B.Tech., degree in Computer Engineering, from I.I.T... After B.Tech. I acquired masters’ degree in Management from I.I.M... After working for few years in India, like any other Indian, I joined a multinational company in USA.

America is now treated as a dream country especially in India. It is the cherished dream of every Indian to touch the soil of that dreamy land, the land of braves, patriots and vast opportunities. Americans are born with three Ts in their mind; TRY---for better future; TRUE---To your nation, religion and work; TRUST---in God and self. So in my case also that long cherished dream had come true. My parents were very happy on this achievement.

Every entry point has an exit point, so I resolved to make my exit from my dear motherland to enter into the land of dreams as a wonderful experience, with lots of joys and graceful achievements. Here at last I reached a place where I truly deserved and where my merit and talent has got respect. Here I saw a beautiful world, waiting for me. I decided to walk with an aim. Bubbling with happiness and confidence I planned to stay in this country for about five years in which time I hoped to earn enough money to settle down

comfortably back home in India.

We belong to a Brahman priestly family. But my father did not have any interest in our traditional profession because in our country it was almost a

(2)

secular and intellectual fashion to abuse and curse Brahmans and Brahman priests. In some states like Jammu & Kashmir and Tamilnadu, Brahmans are treated worse than slaves and animals. He generally used to recite this poem;

BRAND NAME

God send me on the earth, an innocent being,

Untouched by the black and white doing,

But the world branded me as a Brahmin,

And a curse fallen on this urchin,

A child of lesser God,

The entire honor was forbidden to this pod.

Education, help, livelihood;

All was snatched by Robin Hood,

Some branded it as social equality,

But it was state cruelty,

Others’ called it secular passion,

But it was ugly repression,

All the isms kill human rights,

They are the Janus face of racial might.

As a result of this scenario my father preferred to be a teacher. As honesty, hard work, patriotism and Sanskars were in his blood which he inherited from his parents. He could not do much for his family and his economic condition remained grim through out his life. Only after his retirement he could purchase an ordinary one bedroom flat in a slum type locality. More over he had to pay hefty bribe to government babus to get his day today work done in government offices. Even still he has to pay bribe to get his PF and other dues cleared and get his monthly pension from the same department which he served for thirty five years. But ambitions could not touch him. He believed in,” When nails are growing, we cut nails, when ambition is growing; we cut ambition but maintains relations and character.

I wanted to do much more than my nationalist father. I wanted to earn and earn like secular leaders of the country. But in AmericaI could not adjust comfortably and started homesick and lonely as the time passed. My patriotism and love to my roots always troubled me there on the foreign soil. Moreover in America, Indians were not treated respectfully. As upper castes Hindus are insulted and abused in India, in the same manner Indians are treated in America as a community who are there only to mint fast bucks only,

come what way. There too I saw each heart had pain, only the way of

expressions were different; some hide it in tears in their eyes while others’ hide it behind their beguiling smile.

(3)

I used to call my parents almost once a week using low cost international phone sim cards. In this manner three years passed and my contract with my employer was over but my employer extended my contract for another three

years as in Americaperson is recognized by merit, talent and work where as in India quota castes, minority religion, language and region are recognized and not the merit, talent and work.

Another one year passed on burgers, pizzas, chowmin, potato chilies etc... Years and months passed, watching foreign currency rates and getting happier whenever the value of Indian rupee went down. One thing I learnt from Americans that getting upset would not help. Always getting up, to set the things right.

The problem of marriage always was a big issue for my aging parents. Finally I decided to get married and gave nod and told my parents that I had

only ten days of holidays and everything must have to be settled down within these ten, very important ten days of my life. I got my ticket booked to Indiain the cheapest economic class. I was on seventh cloud and was actually trying to purchase gifts from the cheap duty free shops, for all my relatives and friends back home. If I fail to do follow this custom, there will be talks because in India it is believed, if one is in America, he must be rolling in money. Right from the babu at the airport to the dancing terror eunuchs, this great Indialoot is a part of life.

After reaching India, I spent some time at home with my parents. All the time we all were involved scanning photographs of girls and as the time was very short I was almost forced to select a girl as my future life partner. Bride’s side was in much more hurry as they did not want to let out this America settled son-in-law. They told that I had to get married within three-four days. After the marriage, my departure time to U.S.A.was very close. After giving some money to my parents I again had to leave Indiaand requesting my relatives and neighbor friends to look after my parents. We both returned to U.S.A.

In the beginning my wife was very happy in America and she enjoyed her stay here. But after some time she started feeling lonely. Her frequency of calling her parents, back home in Indiaincreased and sometimes almost everyday. As a result of her extravagant nature my savings started vanishing rapidly. I tried to get some job for her but I failed and could not arrange a job for her. She used to receive wise upbraiding from her parents especially from

her mother every day. In my case it was very true, “If the first button of your shirt is wrongly stitched, all the rest will definitely be crooked. So always be careful on your first step, success will automatically follow you”.

(4)

Although she was Ph.D from Gazab Singh University, India, but to my horror I came to know that she was not capable even to write a letter. All her degrees were almost manipulated through corrupt methods. Her father was a judge and her mother was a professor in Gazab Singh University, India. She boosts of guiding forty five, Ph.D.s to her credit, through lifting, scissoring and pasting methods. This university was notoriously famous for selling fake degrees.

In this way two more years passed, and we were blessed with two lovely kids, a daughter Ganga and a son Brahmputra. Every time I rung to my parents, they asked me to come to Indiaso that they could see their grand children before their eyes are closed for ever. But work pressure coupled with difficult monetary conditions, I could not visit India. Months and years passed and visiting India to see my aging parents was a distant dream.

Then one day at around mid-night, my phone rang and I got a message that my father was seriously ill. I tried to get leaves but failed to get the leaves sanctioned, to go to India. The next message I got was the death of my father. As there was no one to perform the last rites, the close relatives helped by the neighbors performed the last rites.

The death of my father shattered me and I was badly depressed. My father passed away without had a glimpse of his grand children.

One day he came to me to meet me in my dream and cried at me:

MY FATHER AND THE CURSE OF MY NATION

I

I heard my heavenly father, last night,

What is your dear nation’s curse? Write

And throw it beyond Himalayas, high,

I trembled, collecting my father’s sigh.

I can’t do, my dear father!

There are many curse but ask my brother.

I am pressed by love and patriotism.

The voice shouted to shun hypnotism.

My father’s word in mind,

Generated radiant and vigor in side.

(5)

II

Tender little hands of children begging in streets,

Brutal and intoxicated fathers musing in fleets.

Donors giving through misty doors,

This is unknown to fair floors.

For right of freedom, this crowns,

The rogues as lords in Parliament frown.

Tears in eyes, I cried, patriotism means,

Self interest, corruption and rotten dreams.

As honest and intelligent have lost their claim,

Corrupt touching glory and nation in drain.

III

Secular cry breeding fanatic name,

Social justice prospering caste chain,

Tainted rulers dance while enemy conspire,

Brave soldiers are fried on crying pyre,

Jihadi killers dance while innocent cry,

Bloody red hidden in white to rob every pie,

Alter decorated with anarchic laws,

To strangulate the weak and just with claws,

There my father cried in terse,

Shall thou write my nation’s curse?

IV

Now modern women have only know,

To cheat hearts with tears false below

And swap bed every day and night,

Every right is wrong and wrong right.

Framed racial and communal laws,

To bestow trump powers to our foes,

Here wise man choose to silence,

And fools throw tantrums on their glance,

Where unmerited groups laugh at your gate,

Merit is scorned and measured without weight.

V

As you turn your body to side,

Met with foul tradition and conscience tide,

Power shines with mirth deadlier best,

All this I wrote to mourn the test.

This is the curse, open to all to read,

Go with ill doers, my father cried

And furl your flag with sick brewers,

Now cannot be changed a new,

Six decades of ill governance,

Has dried and sucked all fragrance.

(6)

VI

With heart sinking and tears in eyes,

Death can change this entire fry,

Otherwise rot will go on,

With all my blessings to you to worn,

Saddened to leave you alone here,

As I cannot be no more with you there,

Left crying in a cruel winter evening,

Twenty years have passed by mourning,

His sudden march to the kingdom of death,

Left we orphaned as a traveler without sheath.

VII

That mighty soul, sober, cool and austere,

Must be shining in some unknown sphere,

Enjoyed his shadow as wise banyan keeps boughs under,

Here he was to beat the storms and not to flounder,

Helping and guiding the masses in need,

With a happy and honest hand indeed,

True servant of Almighty in this world wild,

Goddess Saraswati seated on tongue with message mild,

Such souls loved and needed in ages all abound,

Pray to Master to reincarnate him again around.

Three, four years passed. I decided to return to Indiaand to settle down there. This decision was not appreciated by my children but my wife was very happy on this decision. I started to look for a good and affordable property. But now here Dr. Man Mohan Singh was the Prime Minister and to my shock my savings and pocket were much short and the price of property gone up very high during all these years. I had to again return to the USA.

But this time my wife was very intelligently tutored by her mother. She was not ready to come back to USAwith me nor was ready to live with my aged mother. On the other hand I and my children were not ready to live in India under these circumstances. I, with my two children returned to USA after promising my mother and wife to come back within three years. Every thing about our future was uncertain but God has arranged every thing for our tomorrow. You just have to trust Him. He grants us the power to accept things you cannot change.

Time passed by and my daughter decided to get married to an American on her own. Neither due to financial constrains, my wife nor could my mother join us to bless our daughter. My son was happy living in USA because he was very comfortable with American life style. Suddenly I received the news of the death of my mother due to heart failure.

(7)

Now I was fed up with this type of life. It was enough and decided to wound up every thing and returned to India. Relationship is like fragrance, you can never touch it but you feel it. Now I had just enough money to buy a decent three room flat in a posh colony in India.

With this vagabond type of life I became sixty years old. Beaten from all sides I became highly religious and a regular visitor to the near by temple. My faithful wife was still living with her parents. She was not ready to leave me nor was ready to leave her parents. I was a cash card to her and her family. As her father was a judge he knew the hazards of filing and settling divorce cases. So my wife was happy living as a married lady but her parents’ daughter, financing her rogue brother by the money I used to send

her as a peace package. She was like Stephen Blackpool’s wife in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times:

TRUANT DAUGHTER IN LAW

Always play truant and abhors all in laws,

A knotty bride, slamming doors,

A perverse father’s tricky daughter,

Floats in muddy and shallow water.

Guided and guarded by,

Inhuman Taliban laws,

Branding man’s race,

As savage and subhuman.

Men in khaki and gown black,

Are suitors dear?

But never gave respect to,

Her elder in laws.

Rude and twisted to caring in laws,

Direct from honeymoon cracked

Whips on these helpless fellows.

At school her report card noted as spoiled child.

Decked and jacked in false glitters,

Children she mothered,

Narrate tales awful and deadly,

Never taught children with milky hymns.

Children never impressed by her dear mother,

But never learnt to slam the door.

Her funeral was performed sacredly,

Mentioned her virtues in tone false.

(8)

But all and sundry present there,

Dwelled her vices in hushed detail,

She was a bandit queen,

In garb of bridal make up.

Again another mishap happened in my life. Papa’s daughter, but my faithful wife also left me high and dry and gone to the last abode from where no body returns. Now I started wondering the meaning of life. Is it worth all this? My father, even after staying in this country as a poor teacher, had a house to his name but he never was alone. I too have the same, nothing more. But I have lost every thing, my parents, my wife, my children, my mental peace and near and dear ones. Life is like onion which has many layers of relationships. If you do not cut it adds taste to life but if you cut it, you will get tears only.

Looking out from the balcony I see a lot of boys and girls riding on bikes and dancing. This modernization and liberty has spoiled our new generation and these children have no values in life. I get occasional greeting cards from my children on different days. I wanted to cry, I wanted to hug some one dear, but no dear ones were around. You cannot hug yourself, you cannot cry on your own shoulder; perhaps life is all about for living others. So live with those who love you, not with those whom you love. World’s happiest relations never have the same nature. They just have the best understanding of their difference, which we missed in our life.

Now perhaps I will also die and my neighbors again will be performing my last rites. God bless them. At least this one thing is still there that at least last rites are performed with full honors. But again the question remained unanswered, is life all this worth? A failed son, who could not serve his parents, when they need him most, a failed husband, who could not be with his wife, a failed father, who could not continue the legacy of a family…and a failed Indian who could not serve his nation. Whatever life throws at us: it will be easier to comfort if we feel loved.

My children and the grand children will not realize this pain and pain of losing my culture for ever and for ever-----is it really worth so many souls alienated. On a one fateful morning I was reading the divine Bhagavad Gita. My phone rang. From the other side I was overwhelmed to listen the sweet voice of my dear son, hello papa, can you give me an appointment to bless your grand child, mothered by a close friend of mine, means born out of wed lock.

Shocked, I sank into the chair on which my father used to sit and teach. Slowly and slowly darkness gripped me, perhaps I shall never be able to give an appointment to bless my grand child and its mother. But my question remained unanswered; was life worth this? With this I lost somewhere and sagged down.

📷

etad yonīni bhūtāni sarvānī’ty upadhāraya

aham krtsnasya jagatab prabhavah pralayas tathā

Know that all beings have their birth in this. I am the origin of all in this world and its dissolution as well. All things are dissolved in me.

(The Bhagavad Gita, Ch.VII. Sl.-6 (Trans.))

[pepperstrawberry]

Fuck you and your anti-Americanism, God bless America you filthy commie

I debated for a few minutes when I woke whether I would just delete this or not… But really I feel like, just this once, I’m going to address the garbage fire of an ‘ask’ that this is.

NOTE: any further I get like this will be auto erased. I will do this only once.

Lets start simple, shall we? “Anti-American. No wait ‘AmericanISM’. Something right there tips me toward beliving your are some alt-right little shit coward that doesn’t grasp the difference between what a country could be and the mess it currently is (and to some extent has always been).

Look, I’m not going to go into every little detail of how screwed up this country is. First, I’m not a historian. Nor am I an economist. And further, I’m not much of a freedom fighter.

What I do know is that Capitalism is garbage. EA is a great example of that, how we use undocumented immigrants and prisoners for what is effectively slave labor is an example of that. How no one can afford to live on their own on minimum wage is an example of that. Capitalism allows for lobbyist to work for corporations, for those corporations to be considered ‘people’, literally buying votes.

Capitalism is what made it so that instead of adding to what the government is giving schools, allows officials to move around monies when a corporation actually does give, like in the example of the Lotto giving a rather decent chunk of it’s money to schools. It’s a big deal always talked about here in California… but even that was just a way to make it so that the lotto was seen as a good thing, rather then a predatory practice of gambling it is.

But Capitalism isn’t the only evil in America. It just helps to feed and give power to the other issues here. Racism, Fascism, literal Nazis. America has had a horrible history, if we are being honest. From giving any sense of ‘heroism’ to actual traitors in the form of Confederates getting statues made in their honor AFTER the civil war (which is the truely anti-american thing if you really actually think about it. And no ‘fighting for states rights’ and ‘heritage’ are bullshit if you don’t know WHAT rights they were fighting for or what the heritage was. It was racism and slavery. yes, the north had it’s own problems, but rather then say ‘hey, they have slaves too’ it’s ‘we what to keep ours’. Wrong fight. Not something I respect at all) to actually creating our own enemies (you do realize we CREATED Saddam Hussein, right?)

And that is where I come back to “AmericanISM”. That word right there tells me potentially a lot of this nonny. You are very likely the ‘don’t like it, leave’ type of ‘american’. The kid that believes so much in the military without considering the many, many, many terrible things our military has done (i respect individual soldiers, NOT the military at large, just for the record). While I wouldn’t be surprised if you are a woman, or of color, I could easly bet money you are a white dude that doesn’t think critically of the world around you, lapping up the kind of garbage fed to us since childhood from terrible, lowest bidder learning materials, government agendas, and corporate news bullshit. You likely have pride in your love of this country -as is- and the twisted history you have been led to believe, or maybe even the real history and the belief that you are somehow better then everyone else then any actual love for what American CAN BE.

Even our forefathers knew America wasn’t perfect, that their own views were skewed to at least some extent. Where they all good folk, not really, but they understood that. That is why the constitution can be amended, fixed, rebuilt and made to change with the times. But folks into ‘americanISM’ don’t want change unless it specifically benifits their pathetic world view.

America is not the best country. But we have a dream.America is not the safest country, but we can learnAmerica is not the healthiest country, and that needs to change.

I believe in the potential that was created when America was founded. I believe in the idea, the dream of place where humanity can work together and be proud of what they accomplished together.

I believe in the potential that America can be. I am not Anti-American.

I am Anti-AmericanISM. I am anti-capitalist, anti-alt-right, anti-corporate, I am against racism, ableism, discrimination, and intolerance. I am also pro-consumer, and that means being against getting nickle and dimed to death, both on the micro level (micro transactions in full priced games) and in the macro level (the bullshit of how much rent can be just charged. like seriously, the housing in america sucks)

But don’t take that to mean I am tolerant of assholes and shitstains like the garbage fire of a waste of human flesh we have to call our ‘president’.

AmericanISM is nationalism. And nationalism doesn’t care for the people.Capitalism doesn’t care for the people either. It cares for the bottom line.

And I don’t care to believe that what we were force fed in schools and through propaganda is correct. Is Communism the answer? Well, the more I learn about it, the more surprising the history seems to be. But Communism itself may not be the answer, but some form of socialism IS.

And no, we already have some in America. Public schools, infrastructure, police, firefighters, and several other things are already paid for by our tax money. That IS socialism. Us, all together, pitching our cash to make a place better. I am anti-privatizing is some cases. Hospitals shouldn’t be privatized, and our officials shouldn’t be paid so damn much for doing so fucking little for the american people.

This is who I am. God Bless America indeed. But if you think America, as is, should be some how sanctified and raised on some fucking pedestal, you are not paying any attention and IN FACT hate what America can actually be.

I want you, for a second to consider the statue of liberty. Consider what she represents. Who made her, why, what does she have to say, and how that attitude is completely ignored by people like our president.

===========

Okay. Got that out of my system a bit. So a little cleaning up before I move on to better things.

First: NO, I will not entertain any more asks like this. Every single one I get from here on out will be on my auto delete list. More so when on Nonny. I won’t entertain this attitude normally (debating politics is one thing, but starting with ‘fuck you’ and mudslinging out the gate, fuck off) off nonny, I have zero respect for cowards like this guy.

Second: I’m not here to debate my beliefs or views. I’m trying to move more and more of my more politically charged posts to my political blog. Mind you, anything that deals with LGBT will still be reblogged here rather often when it comes up.

Third, I’m much like America in my examples. If I say anything racist, ablist, or in anyway discriminatory, let me know. I want to learn to be a better person. (oh yeah, and if you think ‘you are discrimiating against alt-right/nazis’ is something to discuss with me, sorry, but I don’t argue with nazis. AT ALL. History has already proven there is no discussion to be had. Go fuck off.)

Fourth, I will not be responding to anything from this post. Not because there isn’t a good debate here. I’m sure there is, but because I am really no the one to have a debate. I rarely can speak that well, and am absolutely terrible with reaction posts in this aspect. Anytime you saw me speak well and with any clarity was a rare moment of solid confidence from me. Often I, like many others, will devolve, get off track, and over all just make the argument worse. So feel free to do whatever, just realize that I will likely not respond to this post, or at least not give you the answers you hope to have.

This post was me just clarifying things based on a garbage person’s attempt to get some rise out of me. Well, I indulged you once. and just this once. Hope you liked it.

#pepper politics #Anonymous #garbage fire #i really hate to make posts like this

[hotelconcierge]

HYPOCRISY IS BAD, BUT YOU’RE WORSE

“I like the Walrus best," said Alice, "because you see he was a little sorry for the poor oysters.” “He ate more than the Carpenter, though,” said Tweedledee. “You see he held his handkerchief in front, so that the Carpenter couldn't count how many he took: contrariwise.” “That was mean!” Alice said indignantly. “Then I like the Carpenter best—if he didn't eat so many as the Walrus.” “But he ate as many as he could get,” said Tweedledum. This was a puzzler. After a pause, Alice began, “Well! They were both very unpleasant characters—” (Through the Looking-Glass)

This is a moviepost—extensive spoilers follow for Death Proof, Jackie Brown, and Inglourious Basterds—and I wrote it mostly because I wanted to talk about some movies. But first, a topical tie-in:

There is always an outside that a person considers unworthy of life...The individual progressive or racist may never say that the outside is unworthy of rights, but they feel it. This is what is meant by that line from Inglorious Bastards when the character of Lt. Aldo Raine says; the "Nazi ain't got no humanity. They're the foot soldiers of a jew-hating, mass-murdering maniac and they need to be de-stroyed!"

Here we have a thirst to destroy the perceived inferior, except instead of a racist seeking the end of Jews it is the progressive liberal seeking the genocide of racists. That's irony.

And understand what is happening here. Aldo Raine is really a proxy for Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino is the one speaking, not Brad Pitt. The man is very left-wing and he wrote the script. That move is essentially an exposition of the directors [sic] politics.

The above quote is taken from The Anti-Puritan. Exactly what it sounds like: dude read three Moldbug posts and now thinks he can write. The specifics of this guy’s bad opinions are not that interesting—would you believe that even the videogame industry has been corrupted by cultural Marxism?—but perhaps something can be learned from the framing:

A climate scientist drives to an important summit on global warming. On the way there, he fills up his tank with gas. The only reason oil companies are in business and climate change is occurring is because of people like him who fill up their tanks with gas. Their payments make climate change possible. The payments are the reason Exxon, Shell and BP exist.

A feminist complains about the cis het patriarchy. Her boyfriend, whom she spreads her legs for, is tall, strong, confident, manly, and "dominant" in every way. Fucking dominant men is the reason they exist, the reason they will continue to exist, and the cultural incentive to become dominant...She and billions of other women perpetuate "the patriarchy" with their sexual choices. Patriarchy exists because of them.

A college professor complains about McDonald's. She has eaten fast food from a burger restaurant recently. She, and millions [of] others, are the reason McDonald's exists. (Source)

Let’s accept that there’s a lot to unpack here and move on. Focus instead on the form of the argument: tu quoque, again and again. The feebler the discourse the more accusations of hypocrisy (Bush Lied, Barack Hussein’d) because hypocrisy doesn’t require knowledge of anything but pre-algebra logic. Even a child can identify a contradiction: “But mom! You said—!”

This is precisely the skull malformation that has constricted discussion of the protestors who identify as “Antifascist Action” and are derided as the “alt-left.” Antifa has already become a perennial non-issue where all opinions are based on anecdote and there are plenty of anecdotes to go around; no one has skin in the game, anyone can upvote, and measurable achievements are dwarfed by spikes of indignation like hypertensive hemorrhages into America’s brain. If you don’t believe me, you haven’t been watching the stock prices of PP, NRA, PETA, and BLM.

Antifa now faces the two attacks that were long ago formulated against other activist groups. One: antifa is composed of violent morons who carry upon them body and pubic lice species yet to be classified by science. Two: antifa is counterproductive to their stated goal, e.g. getting to whack-a-mole pamphleteers is actually a powerful incentive to suffer for fashion.

I suspect both criticisms are true, but whatever—does the first imply the second? Is violence bad even when it is effective? Because if it isn’t, then claiming that “antifa are thugs too!” is worse than useless. Your opponent can simply reply, “So what? Nazi ain't got no humanity.” And now that you’ve cried wolf, that guy won’t listen when you claim that, in this instance, violence might not work. So you better be damn sure about your answer: what price should be paid for the sin of hypocrisy?

There is always an outside that a person considers unworthy of life...

Quentin Tarantino has dedicated his career to answering this question. 

QT has seen too many movies for it to be any other way. If you consume enough art across epoch and genre, you can’t help arrive at the Susan Sontag #redpill that content doesn’t matter all that much. All art is genre fiction no matter the pretensions and our lizard brain judges accordingly. Sure, thematic analysis is fun to play with after the fact, but if a movie has the right tropes in the right places—femme fatales, tough muchachos, pretty pictures, happy ending—well, you can convince yourself of just about anything.

Take, for example, Death Proof. Genre: exploitation/slasher. Synopsis: hot babes go for a night out, ex-stuntman stalks and runs ‘em down in a death-proof car; stuntman rinses and repeats with another girl gang except they turn the tables and Mortal Kombat his thoracic spine. Rating: extremely badass, you should check it out, anyone who tells you different is a pleb.

Namely: some people complain that the movie has too many scenes of girls talking and that their QT-isms are an unrealistic depiction of an actual group chat. The characters bicker lewdly, if that’s a thing, alternating between weirdly masculine sex-as-status teasing and pledges of undying affection, the verbal equivalent of a catfight, which is maybe how a creepy foot fetishist would imagine female dialogue, but...

Nope, still pleb. Tarantino wasn’t the first guy to invoke this trope, it’s part of the DNA of the slasher genre, as old as Jamie Lee Curtis getting razzed for her virginity in Halloween. Misogyny, maybe, but also content is a spook. Slasher movies have to fill 70 minutes before the eponymous slashing, and they also have to make you care about the outcome of said slashing without humanizing the characters so much that you get all Marley and Me when they die. 

What’s the secret? Status games, the less nuance the better. Boys would watch paint dry if you said it was a grudge match. Catfighting is no different than the elaboration of powers in a shonen manga or the suspicious glares exchanged between heist movie protagonists: it creates tension. Different value systems have been described, there can only be one, now you’re rooting for process of elimination to reveal the truth. No—you identify with that process. Hail Gnon. You could make a movie with men playing status games and being killed off by women and men would still find it hot; I know this because of female horrorcore rappers but also because this movie is called Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and it’s 10/10. Incidentally:

This is referenced again in the final scene of the film, in which the viewer cheers on our group of heroines as they beat to death a pleading, injured man.

Here’s the hot take: tote bag feminists are wrong to think that drawing boobs on Powergirl is a male attempt to diminish her power. On the contrary, the more vampire slaying the better. Sexualization is an attempt to gain access to female power: if she wants The Phallus badly enough, she might just lend her power to you. Obverse: men are idiots for thinking that the existence of rape fantasies means that women secretly want to be raped. There’s an image floating around the manosphere about that terrorist with a heart of gold, Ted Kaczynski, who was gauche with ladies in the free world but deluged in love letters upon his incarceration. Before you can say medium = message, someone tragically rendered celibate by their 23andMe results will point to this as proof that women “only want serial killers.” Newsflash: Kaczynski is serving eight life sentences without possibility of parole. Do you think the fangirls didn’t know that? Rape fantasies (theoretically “hot”) are qualitatively different than being raped (“unimaginably horrific”) because you construct the former, can turn it off at any time. The fantasy victim is assaulted by a terrible power, but the person who selects and controls that power is...

Of course it is, cough, problematic, that slasher movie girls display power through HPV vaccinations while male zombie apocalypse survivors soliloquize on whether suicide is inevitable in the absence of God. But once you sexistly set up that women should be valued by their sin, the wages = death equation is not in and of itself misogynistic. No, it’s just inevitable: sex-as-status tension can only be relieved in two ways and one of them is frowned upon in theaters. Film crit cliché and Kraftwerk song, I know, but: watching a movie renders you impotent—you can’t interact with the sexy image on the screen—except through what the camera will allow.

That’s why you are complicit in the murders that occur in the first half of Death Proof. The ex-stuntman—old, a teetotaler, star of TV shows long forgotten (and played by once-famous Kurt Russell)—is as impotent as you are, capable of getting a deleted scene lap dance but zero penetration, and when he gets in his car to commit vehicular homicide x4, he looks at the camera and smiles. Because you’re right there with him, waiting for the money shot. It would be nice to fuck, but you’ll settle for a murder. Except when it actually happens, played four times for your amusement, it’s horrible—a face melted off by a tire, a wet leg flapping in the street. Throw in a Wilhelm scream. Wasn’t that what you wanted? Are you not entertained?

It’s all perspective, my man. For all the short shorts and naughty words, the girls plan and backup plan ways to prevent unwanted sexual advances; two of them have boyfriends and one is texting a crush trying to seal the deal; they discuss and decide against inviting the opposite sex to their lakeside vacation. But that’s not what you see from the outside. That’s not where your attention is drawn, wandering the club and editing your .jpg of grievances. For you, dancefloor means sex, choker necklace means slut, and being a slut means she would never sleep with you. That’s a personal insult. And that means that nothing else matters.

Which is insane. This isn’t an argument for or against promiscuity, the point is you don’t even know promiscuity looks like. You know symbols, and for that matter, why those symbols, where did you learn those? Brazzers? If you’re gonna be mad at a thing you should at least be mad at the thing itself, not at whatever fucked up fetish you’ve imposed on reality.

There’s a scene midway through the movie where QT tips his hand. The second girl gang is lounging in a car, one of them dangling her feet out the window. The ex-stuntman approaches, you assume his perspective, and maybe because it’s an old grindhouse film...

...but the color goes out, and everything is black and white.

Which, speaking of:

Jackie Brown is first and foremost a movie about being extremely cool all the time (you should watch it). The plot is an excuse: briefly, Pam Grier (airline stewardess), Robert Forster (bail bondsman), Samuel L Jackson (arms dealer), Robert De Niro (ex-convict), Bridget Fonda (stoner surfer chick) and a couple Feds each try to nab a briefcase holding $500K.

Jackie Brown is secondarily a movie about how race shapes each and every human interaction, but that description makes it sound like a Very Special Episode, and that couldn’t be more wrong. The movie is gleefully amoral, in fact lapses from pure MacGuffinism are treated as intolerable weakness, e.g. Jackson to De Niro:

ORDELL: You know what your problem is, Louis?

Louis doesn't say anything, he just puts his hands in his pockets.

ORDELL: You think you're a good guy. When you go into a deal you don't go in prepared to take that motherfucker all the way. You go in looking for a way out. And it ain't cause you're scared neither. It's cause you think you're a good guy, and you think there's certain things a good guy won't do. That's where we're different, me and you. Cause me, once I decide I want something, ain’t a goddam motherfuckin' thing gonna stop me from gittin' it. I gotta use a gun get what I want, I'm gonna use a gun. Nigga gets in my way, nigga gonna get removed. Understand what I'm saying?

Apparently not, because De Niro later makes this mistake and gets popped.

For these characters, race is just another weapon. When Jackson meets Forster for the first time, he lights a cigarette, puts his feet up on the desk, and taps out the ash in a partly full coffee cup. Then he points out a photo of Forster with a black employee. “Y’all tight?” “Yeah.” “But you his boss though, right?” “Yeah.” “Bet it was your idea to take that picture too, wasn’t it...?” In their second encounter, Jackson, trying to get bail for Grier, pulls the same trick:

ORDELL: Man, you know I'm good for it. Thousand bucks ain't shit. 

MAX: If I don't see it in front of me, you're right. It ain't shit. 

ORDELL: Man, you need to look at this with a little compassion. Jackie ain't no criminal. She ain't used to this kinda treatment. I mean, gangsters don't give a fuck - but for the average citizen, coupla nights in County fuck with your mind. 

MAX: Ordell, this isn't a bar, an you don't have a tab. 

ORDELL: Just listen for a second. We got a forty-year-old, gainfully employed black woman, falsely accused - 

MAX: Falsely accused? She didn't come back from Mexico with cocaine on her?

ORDELL: Falsely accused of Intent. If she had that shit - and mind you, I said "if" - it was just her shit to get high with. 

MAX: Is white guilt supposed to make me forget I'm running a business?

But Forster—male lead, the “good guy”—plays his version of the race card and flips the script.

Example 2: Bridget Fonda, surfer gal, plots to betray Jackson, who “moves his lips when he reads,” "let's say he's streetwise, I'll give him that.” But Jackson knows that she sees him that way, it makes her predictable, which is why he can keep her around: “You can’t trust Melanie, but you can always trust Melanie to be Melanie.”

That’s not the half of it. Jackson talks a soon-dead man into getting in the trunk of an Oldsmobile, houses a homeless addict in Compton and tells her it’s Hollywood; he lies effortlessly, and when drafting your fantasy friend group you should be aware that people who lie effortlessly do it because it’s fun. Threatening someone gets you an automaton who will system 2 your demands and nothing more. Deceiving someone gives you control over that person’s soul. So Fonda’s stoned delusions of manipulating him—which in fact make her easier to manipulate—are part of her appeal. Translated: “She ain't as pretty as she used to be, and she bitch a whole lot more than she used to...But she white.”

Except Fonda is manipulating him. She’s spent her adulthood as the side piece for Dubai businessmen and Japanese industrialists who—though she doesn’t even speak the language—get off on the fact that she’s a haughty blonde who thinks she’s better than them, thinks she can manipulate them. But since they’re paying for rent and weed, doesn’t that mean...?

Example 3: Pam Grier as Jackie Brown.

From more Sam Jackson than Sam Jackson to mumblecore for Medicare, Jackie outsmarts everyone and it’s not even close. The Feds lean into their uniforms but she doesn’t miss a beat: urbane dinner guest in one scene, “panicked, defensive, unreasonable black woman” in another. Of course the movie ends the way it does, of course. Jackson steps into a dark room. Jackie screams “he’s got a gun!” And a cop pulls the trigger. You can’t always beat the system, but if you try sometimes, it just might beat who you need.

Why does Jackie win? The canon explanation is that she’s an airline stewardess: her job is to tell people of all origins what they want to hear. The meta explanation is she’s played by blaxploitation star Pam Grier. The gimmick of Grier movies like Coffy and Foxy Brown is their exaggeration of the audience’s favored tropes re: sex and race—say, hypersexuality and fashionable/wearable blackness. But the punchline of these films is that on-screen, Pam Grier with an afro is disguising herself as an high-class escort to fool the baddies: “The gentlemen you’ll be meeting this evening have a preference for…your type.” And then she kills them.

So it’s true that these films let you "exploit” a caricature, but the flip side is that anyone who can turn that caricature on and off gets to exploit you. And that seems to be Jackie Brown’s realist take: not that racism is the Original Sin for which Thou Must Atone—because everyone sees race and is selfish besides—but rather that it makes you a sucker. And the flip side: by capitalism or by meme magic, the world will always conspire to show you what you want to see. Choose wisely.

If Jackie Brown accepts that racism is inevitable, Inglourious Basterds sets out to prove that it’s also kind of fun.

It’s telling that Inglourious Basterds posters are push-pinned on the walls of fraternity houses right next to Scarface and The Wolf of Wall Street. Three movies, three sets of protagonists who happen to be amoral, masculine, and white. Sounds like a diss, but who are creatine-chugging white boys supposed to look up to? Chris Pratt? You can just tell that guy was grown in a test tube. There’s a reason Tarantino movies are popular and there’s a reason I’m talking about them instead of Buñuel or Tarkovsky and it has something to do with “making intensive use of a major language” and the twenty-somethings desperate to identify with a character named “Bear Jew.” And the above scene is indeed, “sick af.” Goes off without a hitch except when the Nazi says that he got his medals for bravery, and then there’s a split-second of—what, annoyance? Like, stick to the script, asshole. You’re sure as hell gonna get it now.

But I’m sure you’re aware that’s the joke, that once you got Ennio Morricone in the background you can justify anything. The Basterds “ain’t in the prisoner taking business”; they scalp the dead and maim the witnesses they leave alive. There’s no panorama of concentration camp horrors, no humanizing backstory, no evidence of any softness save boyish joy in the art of cruelty. Halfway through the film a young man celebrating the birth of his son is shot dead after surrendering in a Mexican standoff; the Basterds shrug and move on. At the climax of the film, a movie theatre full of Germans is exploded, shot, and burned to death. The modern viewer can’t help but cheer.

The opening chapter, Colonel Hans Landa vs. the outgroup under the floorboards, sways your sympathies in the opposite direction. No, it doesn’t make you hate the French or the Jews. But the tension—the silence and the ticking and the mounting requests and insinuations—is so unbearable that you can’t help but wish for someone to pull the Band-Aid. And the camera can’t do that. Only characters can. Only the character driving the action, and Landa drives the action in his every appearance. Something has to happen—and like the man onscreen, you cave.

Hans Landa alone seems to understand that he’s in a movie, which is perhaps why he’s so polite, so witty, so manically overacted. Perhaps this is how he sees through the Allies’ tricks and disguises: he assumes everyone else is an actor as well. And perhaps this is the apologia for his crimes: he’s just playing a role. The Basterds loathe the Nazis, but Landa bears no animosity towards the Jews, can empathize with them quite easily—it’s just, he likes to play detective and the Nazis were hiring. Is that really worse? Didn’t both the Walrus and the Carpenter eat as many as they could get?

And so, near the end of the film, when Landa cuts a deal to exchange his Hugo Boss for Levi Strauss, he asks of his prisoners the one question that would matter to a character in a period piece: “What shall the history books read?”

Landa’s argument, of course, is a load of shit.

In Inglourious Basterds, every disguise fails. The British film critic-turned-agent is unable to play the Nazi he’s seen on-screen. The German actress is revealed to be an Allied spy. The vengeful Shosanna is revealed as a sweet Jewish girl; the baby-faced Nazi lusting after her is shown to be a monster. The propaganda film burns. Only Lieutenant Aldo Raine and one Basterd make it out alive, and that’s because they’re American, i.e. monolingual.

Perception is a slave to narrative, but narrative has zip zero zilch nada to do with reality. The author is dead. Was Triumph of the Will a “good movie,” technically proficient and even emotionally moving? Absolutely. Could the director’s intentions have been “good,” apolitical, an attempt at beauty but nothing more? Unlikely in this case, but possible. But was Triumph of the Will “good”?

This is the obvious yet unswallowable truth: sometimes good people do bad things. “Nazi ain't got no humanity”? How many films have Nazis with wives, mistresses, children, pub games, medals for bravery? And yet Lieutenant Raine’s opening polemic is correct: the foot soldiers of the Third Reich worked for a Jew-hating, mass-murdering maniac: they needed to be destroyed. Reality isn’t Disney, where internal beauty works its way external. Reality isn’t even so kind as to match intentions with consequences. The American (Union) soldiers fighting against the Nazis (Confederacy) may have been motivated by every bit as much hatred and bloodlust, and yet they were necessary, they were the good guys. FYI—that’s irony.

“So you’re saying we should punch the alt-right?” Are you an idiot? The Nazis weren’t bad because they were Nazis, they were bad because of the things they did. If you actually think that punching a teenage Kekistani is going to bring down the New World Order, go ahead, but stop pushing the pillow of identity over the mouth of reality.

The goal of the System, the sum of vectors going both left and right, is to keep people arguing about abstractions of violence so they won’t deign to consider the ugliness of pragmatism. The radical left will asseverate that violence is justified, refusing to question whether their particular brand of protest is effective; the alt-right will keep rallying against cropped image lunatics, the finest examples of white genocide the media has to offer, never seriously considering that sometimes people lie on the internet; and “““centrists””” will deduce that since violence is never okay, since everyone is so irrational, nothing can be done. But that’s still a perspective: it’s the perspective of the camera.

Fuck that. This essay is a condemnation of anyone who thinks that the hypocrisy of the outgroup disproves their complaint, of anyone who thinks that good intentions are enough to absolve you from sin:

You don’t get to forget what you are.

[wearyewe]

I’m once again completely unable to sleep. Whatever follows, and I’m hoping it’s somewhat lucid, comes from living as a Jewish person in America with white-skin who is not Black or African American. They’re thoughts as a Jewish American who only recently found out that I am directly related to Jews who were slaughtered and thrown into a ravine in Babi Yar because my (great-)uncle never told anyone his family didn’t just stay in Ukraine. We didn’t find out until after he died. I’m not even sure if he told his wife. I’m sure I’m not the only Jewish person who owns this story. It isn’t shocking to me that someone who lost all their relatives and friends but somehow escaped just didn’t talk about it after they survived. I’m still struggling with this. I feel like I’m claiming something that I shouldn’t claim.

I’ve always been someone who has to figure out why people believe what they do. It led me to study philosophy, it led me to law school, it’s led me study more about Jewish history (yes that includes Nazism, yes that includes Israel) and religion, and it’s me to learn about white supremacy, racism, anti-Blackness, America’s original sin of slavery and African American bondage, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and so many other -isms and phobias that I can’t begin to list here. Do I know everything? No. Anyone who ever claims they do is lying to you. But I make it my business to figure out why to learn why people hate my people so much that they tried to burn us from the earth over and over and over again. Why they gathered up my cousins, ordered them to bring their money, valuables, clothes, and linen on pain of death, drove them to a ravine, made them unpack their belongings and valuables into separate piles, undress, ordered them into a ravine, made them lie down on top of other Jews who had already been shot and then kill them one by one by one. The soldiers walked over their dead bodies to get to the next Jew to kill them. 

I’m still struggling with this.

This is now my personal story, and it’s made it that much harder to study what happened and to live around people who ignore antisemitism except when it’s to use it as a comparison or to frame as incidental. It’s made it that much harder to deal with non-Black Jews who excuse what is currently going on because they are deluded to think that they’ll be safe. That non-Black Jews are safe even as we hear the President use antisemitic dog whistles like “the liberal media,” “the elites,” and “globalists.” The Jews working in the White House are even more delusional to think that they’re safe because they “know what’s in his heart.” I could not care less what’s in someone’s heart. It matters to me what someone’s actions and words show. 

Jews, we will never be completely safe if we don’t stand up against anti Blackness. That includes within our communities. That includes acknowledging that while antisemitism still exists, it operates fundamentally differently than anti Black racism in the U.S. Jews are not thrown into jail at an exponentially higher rate because they’re Jewish for the same crimes as non-Jews. African Americans (Jewish and not) are though. Jews are not followed around stores because we’re stereotyped as being criminals. African Americans (Jewish and not) are though. Jews are not afraid of being shot in the street or while driving a car by a police officer because we are Jewish. African Americans (Jewish and not) are though. Jews are not forced to see statues and monuments and schools in recognition of people who started an armed rebellion because they didn’t want to give up owning our ancestors and family. African Americans (Jewish and not) are. This isn’t necessarily because Jews are privileged over African Americans, it’s because we function differently within white supremacist ideology (and again, African American Jews exist at the crossroads).

We Jews are parroting what white supremacists say and believe when we are anti Black. I do not say this to claim that the Jewish community would not be anti Black but for our exposure to White supremacist culture and assimilation. That would be asinine and would allow us unaccountability for any personal responsibility. I know that part of being Jewish in the diaspora is to keep our heads down and not rock the boat because we know what could happen. I grew up playing the “which gentile would help hide me” game too. We stay silent out of fear of the inevitable mobs and pogroms. But if we continue to remain silent? It’s just going to get worse. Being silent and hoping for the best is not an option anymore.

Those people who are marching against statues of Confederate “heroes” are being removed and taken down? They don’t just hate African Americans. They explicitly hate Jews. To my African American friends? White supremacy will never be fully eradicated if antisemitism is not entirely eradicated. Antisemitism is the cornerstone belief of white supremacy; without it, their ideology falls apart. And to my African American Jewish friends? Please know I’m here for you, to listen, and to be whatever you need me to be.

White supremacists believe that Jews make up an international conspiracy that controls the government. That’s not hyperbole. White supremacists literally believe this to the point they don’t have to state they’re talking about Jews. Instead, they use “the New World Order,“ communists, Marxists, or other euphemisms. When they use these words, they only mean Jews. Eric K. Ward explains this better than I ever could:

White nationalists in the United States perceive the country as having plunged into unending crisis since the social ruptures of the 1960s supposedly dispossessed White people of their very nation. The successes of the civil rights movement created a terrible problem for White supremacist ideology. White supremacism—inscribed de jure by the Jim Crow regime and upheld de facto outside the South—had been the law of the land, and a Black-led social movement had toppled the political regime that supported it. How could a race of inferiors have unseated this power structure through organizing alone? For that matter, how could feminists and LGBTQ people have upended traditional gender relations, leftists mounted a challenge to global capitalism, Muslims won billions of converts to Islam? How do you explain the boundary-crossing allure of hip hop? The election of a Black president? Some secret cabal, some mythological power, must be manipulating the social order behind the scenes. This diabolical evil must control television, banking, entertainment, education, and even Washington, D.C. It must be brainwashing White people, rendering them racially unconscious.

What is this arch-nemesis of the White race, whose machinations have prevented the natural and inevitable imposition of white supremacy? It is, of course, the Jews. Jews function for today’s White nationalists as they often have for antisemites through the centuries: as the demons stirring an otherwise changing and heterogeneous pot of lesser evils. At the turn of the twentieth century, “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion”—a forgery, first circulated by Czarist secret police in Russia in 1903, that purports to represent the minutes of a meeting of the international Jewish conspiracy—established the blueprint of antisemitic ideology in its modern form. It did this by recasting the shape-shifting, money-grubbing caricature of the Jew from a religious caricature to a racialized one. Upper-class Jews in Europe might have been assimilating and changing their names, but under the new regime of antisemitic thought, even a Jew who converted to Christianity would still be a Jew.

The antisemitic slogans the marchers in Charlottesville were using was not incidental. Not only are Jews placed as being this invisible supernatural power that is controlling the levers of power, but also that when we are read as being the same as White gentiles, it’s further “evidence” of us infiltrating and destroying White culture. When Trump said “rewriting history,” whether he meant to or not, he was referencing Jewish control and power "subjugating” and erasing White culture. When the white supremacists were shouting “Jews will not replace us,” “You will not replace us” (NB these two phrases mean literally the same thing to them), “Heebs will not divide us,” and “the goyim know,” they meant that Jews are actively controlling PoC and Muslims to replace them in what they believe is only their country. When they call it “Fake News” or “the liberal media” they mean the Jewish media. 

When non-Jewish PoC and other minorities say that the Jews are a group of overlords who are actually responsible for or behind any number of social ills, they are parroting white supremacy. And they are shielding white supremacists from any sort of responsibility. After all, how can they be responsible when it’s the Jews and not them who are truly behind it? When non-Jewish PoC and other minorities ignore that antisemitism is at the center of white supremacy, they ignore that white supremacists hate us the same, if not more in some cases, than them. White supremacists have attempted to create alliances with non-Jewish PoC to solve “the Jewish problem,” (look for Jack McLamb) but they would never work with Jewish people to solve anything unless it was murdering us to stop the NWO.

White supremacy is dependent upon not only portraying African Americans as lesser and inferior to Whites but also portraying Jews as foreign interlopers who are at once subhuman and supernatural such that they control everything. You can’t have one without the other. You can’t have white supremacy without both, and we can’t eradicate white supremacy without fighting against antisemitism and anti Black racism.

#4:15 and i think i may be able to fall asleep #long post #white supremacy #okay to reblog #antisemitism #anti black racism #Babi Yar #Eric K. Ward