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shortnotsweet · 3 years

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Bakudeku: A Non-Comprehensive Dissection of the Exploitation of Working Bodies, the Murder of Annoying Children, and a Rivals-to-Lovers Complex

I. Bakudeku in Canon, And Why Anti’s Need to Calm the Fuck Down

II. Power is Power: the Brain-Melting Process of Normalization and Toxic Masculinity

III. How to Kill Middle Schoolers, and Why We Should

IV. Parallels in Abuse, EnemiesRivals-to-Lovers, and the Necessity of Redemption ft. ATLA’s Zuko

V. Give it to Me Straight. It’s Homophobic.

VI. Love in Perspective, from the East v. West

VII. Stuck in the Sludge, the Past, and Season One

Disclaimer

It needs to be said that there is definitely a place for disagreement, discourse, debate, and analysis: that is a sign of an active fandom that’s heavily invested, and not inherently a bad thing at all. Considering the amount of source material we do have (from the manga, to the anime, to the movies, to the light novels, to the official art), there are going to be warring interpretations, and that’s inevitable.

I started watching and reading MHA pretty recently, and just got into the fandom. I was weary for a reason, and honestly, based on what I’ve seen, I’m still weary now. I’ve seen a lot of anti posts, and these are basically my thoughts. This entire thing is in no way comprehensive, and it’s my own opinion, so take it with a grain of salt. If I wanted to be thorough about this, I would’ve included manga panels, excerpts from the light novel, shots from the anime, links to other posts/essays/metas that have inspired this, etc. but I’m tired and not about that life right now, so, this is what it is. This is poorly organized, but maybe I’ll return to fix it.

Let’s begin.

Bakudeku in Canon, And Why Anti’s Need to Calm the Fuck Down

There are a lot of different reasons, that can be trivial as you like, to ship or not to ship two (or more) characters. It could be based purely off of character design, proximity, aversion to another ship, or hypotheticals. And I do think that it’s totally valid if someone dislikes the ship or can’t get on board with his character because to them, it does come across as abuse, and the implications make them uncomfortable or, or it just feels unhealthy. If that is your takeaway, and you are going to stick to your guns, the more power to you.

But Bakudeku’s relationship has canonically progressed to the point where it’s not the emotionally (or physically) abusive clusterfuck some people portray it to be, and it’s cheap to assume that it would be, based off of their characterizations as middle schoolers. Izuku intentionally opens the story as a naive little kid who views the lens of the Hero society through rose colored glasses and arguably wants nothing more than assimilation into that society; Bakugou is a privileged little snot who embodies the worst and most hypocritical beliefs of this system. Both of them are intentionally proven wrong. Both are brainwashed, as many little children are, by the propaganda and societal norms that they are exposed to. Both of their arcs include unlearning crucial aspects of the Hero ideology in order to become true heroes.

I will personally never simp for Bakugou because for the longest time, I couldn't help but think of him as a little kid on the playground screaming at the top of his lungs because someone else is on the swingset. He’s red in the face, there are probably veins popping out of his neck, he’s losing it. It’s easy to see why people would prefer Tododeku to Bakudeku.

Even now, seeing him differently, I still personally wouldn’t date Bakugou, especially if I had other options. Why? I probably wouldn’t want to date any of the guys who bullied me, especially because I think that schoolyard bullying, even in middle school, affected me largely in a negative way and created a lot of complexes I’m still trying to work through. I haven’t built a better relationship with them, and I’m not obligated to. Still, I associate them with the kind of soft trauma that they inflicted upon me, and while to them it was probably impersonal, to me, it was an intimate sort of attack that still affects me. That being said, that is me. Those are my personal experiences, and while they could undoubtedly influence how I interpret relationships, I do not want to project and hinder my own interpretation of Deku.

The reality is that Deku himself has an innate understanding of Bakugou that no one else does; I mention later that he seems to understand his language, implicitly, and I do stand by that. He understands what it is he’s actually trying to say, often why he’s saying it, and while others may see him as wimpy or unable to stand up for himself, that’s simply not true. Part of Deku’s characterization is that he is uncommonly observant and empathetic; I’m not denying that Bakugou caused harm or inflicted damage, but infantilizing Deku and preaching about trauma that’s not backed by canon and then assuming random people online excuse abuse is just...the leap of leaps, and an actual toxic thing to do. I’ve read fan works where Bakugou is a bully, and that’s all, and has caused an intimate degree of emotional, mental, and physical insecurity from their middle school years that prevents their relationship from changing, and that’s for the better. I’m not going to argue and say that it’s not an interesting take, or not valid, or has no basis, because it does. Its basis is the character that Bakugou was in middle school, and the person he was when he entered UA.

Not only is Bakugou — the current Bakugou, the one who has accumulated memories and experiences and development — not the same person he was at the beginning of the story, but Deku is not the same person, either. Maybe who they are fundamentally, at their core, stays the same, but at the beginning and end of any story, or even their arcs within the story, the point is that characters will undergo change, and that the reader will gain perspective.

“You wanna be a hero so bad? I’ve got a time-saving idea for you. If you think you’ll have a quirk in your next life...go take a swan dive off the roof!”

Yes. That is a horrible thing to tell someone, even if you are a child, even if you don’t understand the implications, even if you don’t mean what it is you are saying. Had someone told me that in middle school, especially given our history and the context of our interactions, I don’t know if I would ever have forgiven them.

Here’s the thing: I’m not Deku. Neither is anyone reading this. Deku is a fictional character, and everyone we know about him is extrapolated from source material, and his response to this event follows:

“Idiot! If I really jumped, you’d be charged with bullying me into suicide! Think before you speak!”

I think it’s unfair to apply our own projections as a universal rather than an interpersonal interpretation; that’s not to say that the interpretation of Bakudeku being abusive or having unbalanced power dynamics isn’t valid, or unfounded, but rather it’s not a universal interpretation, and it’s not canon. Deku is much more of a verbal thinker; in comparison, Bakugou is a visual one, at least in the format of the manga, and as such, we get various panels demonstrating his guilt, and how deep it runs. His dialogue and rapport with Deku has undeniably shifted, and it’s very clear that the way they treat each other has changed from when they were younger. Part of Bakugou’s growth is him gaining self awareness, and eventually, the strength to wield that. He knows what a fucked up little kid he was, and he carries the weight of that.

“At that moment, there were no thoughts in my head. My body just moved on its own.”

There’s a part of me that really, really disliked Bakugou going into it, partially because of what I’d seen and what I’d heard from a limited, outside perspective. I felt like Bakugou embodied the toxic masculinity (and to an extent, I still believe that) and if he won in some way, that felt like the patriarchy winning, so I couldn't help but want to muzzle and leash him before releasing him into the wild.

The reality, however, of his character in canon is that it isn’t very accurate to assume that he would be an abusive partner in the future, or that Midoryia has not forgiven him to some extent already, that the two do not care about each other or are singularly important, that they respect each other, or that the narrative has forgotten any of this.

Don’t mistake me for a Bakugou simp or apologist. I’m not, but while I definitely could also see Tododeku (and I have a soft spot for them, too, their dynamic is totally different and unique, and Todoroki is arguably treated as the tritagonist) and I’m ambivalent about Izuocha (which is written as cannoncially romantic) I do believe that canonically, Bakugou and Deku are framed as soulmates/character foils, Sasuke + Naruto, Kageyama + Hinata style. Their relationship is arguably the focus of the series. That’s not to undermine the importance or impact of Deku’s relationships with other characters, and theirs with him, but in terms of which one takes priority, and which one this all hinges on?

The manga is about a lot of things, yes, but if it were to be distilled into one relationship, buckle up, because it’s the Bakudeku show.

Power is Power: the Brain-Melting Process of Normalization and Toxic Masculinity

One of the ways in which the biopolitical prioritization of Quirks is exemplified within Hero society is through Quirk marriages. Endeavor partially rationalizes the abuse of his family through the creation of a child with the perfect quirk, a child who can be molded into the perfect Hero. People with powerful, or useful abilities, are ranked high on the hierarchy of power and privilege, and with a powerful ability, the more opportunities and avenues for success are available to them.

For the most part, Bakugou is a super spoiled, privileged little rich kid who is born talented but is enabled for his aggressive behavior and, as a child, cannot move past his many internalized complexes, treats his peers like shit, and gets away with it because the hero society he lives in either has this “boys will be boys” mentality, or it’s an example of the way that power, or Power, is systematically prioritized in this society. The hero system enables and fosters abusers, people who want power and publicity, and people who are genetically predisposed to have advantages over others. There are plenty of good people who believe in and participate in this system, who want to be good, and who do good, but that doesn’t change the way that the hero society is structured, the ethical ambiguity of the Hero Commission, and the way that Heroes are but pawns, idols with machine guns, used to sell merch to the public, to install faith in the government, or the current status quo, and reinforce capitalist propaganda. Even All Might, the epitome of everything a Hero should be, is drained over the years, and exists as a concept or idea, when in reality he is a hollow shell with an entire person inside, struggling to survive. Hero society is functionally dependent on illusion.

In Marxist terms: There is no truth, there is only power.

Although Bakugou does change, and I think that while he regrets his actions, what is long overdue is him verbally expressing his remorse, both to himself and Deku. One might argue that he’s tried to do it in ways that are compatible with his limited emotional range of expression, and Deku seems to understand this language implicitly.

I am of the opinion that the narrative is building up to a verbal acknowledgement, confrontation, and subsequent apology that only speaks what has gone unspoken.

That being said, Bakugou is a great example of the way that figures of authority (parents, teachers, adults) and institutions both in the real world and this fictional universe reward violent behavior while also leaving mental and emotional health — both his own and of the people Bakugou hurts — unchecked, and part of the way he lashes out at others is because he was never taught otherwise.

And by that, I’m referring to the ways that are to me, genuinely disturbing. For example, yelling at his friends is chill. But telling someone to kill themselves, even casually and without intent and then misinterpreting everything they do as a ploy to make you feel weak because you're projecting? And having no teachers stop and intervene, either because they are afraid of you or because they value the weight that your Quirk can benefit society over the safety of children? That, to me, is both real and disturbing.

Not only that, but his parents (at least, Mitsuki), respond to his outbursts with more outbursts, and while this is likely the culture of their home and I hesitate to call it abusive, I do think that it contributed to the way that he approaches things. Bakugou as a character is very complex, but I think that he is primarily an example of the way that the Hero System fails people.

I don’t think we can write off the things he’s done, especially using the line of reasoning that “He didn’t mean it that way”, because in real life, children who hurt others rarely mean it like that either, but that doesn’t change the effect it has on the people who are victimized, but to be absolutely fair, I don’t think that the majority of Bakudeku shippers, at least now, do use that line of reasoning. Most of them seem to have a handle on exactly how fucked up the Hero society is, and exactly why it fucks up the people embedded within that society.

The characters are positioned in this way for a reason, and the discoveries made and the development that these characters undergo are meant to reveal more about the fictional world — and, perhaps, our world — as the narrative progresses.

The world of the Hero society is dependent, to some degree, on biopolitics. I don’t think we have enough evidence to suggest that people with Quirks or Quirkless people place enough identity or placement within society to become equivalent to marginalized groups, exactly, but we can draw parallels to the way that Deku and by extent Quirkless people are viewed as weak, a deviation, or disabled in some way. Deviants, or non-productive bodies, are shunned for their inability to perform ideal labor. While it is suggested to Deku that he could become a police officer or pursue some other occupation to help people, he believes that he can do the most positive good as a Hero. In order to be a Hero, however, in the sense of a career, one needs to have Power.

Deviation from the norm will be punished or policed unless it is exploitable; in order to become integrated into society, a deviant must undergo a process of normalization and become a working, exploitable body. It is only through gaining power from All Might that Deku is allowed to assimilate from the margins and into the upper ranks of society; the manga and the anime give the reader enough perspective, context, and examples to allow us to critique and deconstruct the society that is solely reliant on power.

Through his societal privileges, interpersonal biases, internalized complexes, and his subsequent unlearning of these ideologies, Bakugou provides examples of the way that the system simultaneously fails and indoctrinates those who are targeted, neglected, enabled by, believe in, and participate within the system.

Bakudeku are two sides of the same coin. We are shown visually that the crucial turning point and fracture in their relationship is when Bakugou refuses to take Deku’s outstretched hand; the idea of Deku offering him help messes with his adolescent perspective in that Power creates a hierarchy that must be obeyed, and to be helped is to be weak is to be made a loser.

Largely, their character flaws in terms of understanding the hero society are defined and entangled within the concept of power. Bakugou has power, or privilege, but does not have the moral character to use it as a hero, and believes that Power, or winning, is the only way in which to view life. Izuku has a much better grasp on the way in which heroes wield power (their ideologies can, at first, be differentiated as winning vs. saving), and is a worthy successor because of this understanding, and of circumstance. However, in order to become a Hero, our hero must first gain the Power that he lacks, and learn to wield it.

As the characters change, they bridge the gaps of their character deficiencies, and are brought closer together through character parallelism.

Two sides of the same coin, an outstretched hand.

They are better together.

How to Kill Middle Schoolers, and Why We Should

I think it’s fitting that in the manga, a critical part of Bakugou’s arc explicitly alludes to killing the middle school version of himself in order to progress into a young adult. In the alternative covers Horikoshi released, one of them was a close up of Bakugou in his middle school uniform, being stabbed/impaled, with blood rolling out of his mouth. Clearly this references the scene in which he sacrifices himself to save Deku, on a near-instinctual level.

To me, this only cements Horikoshi’s intent that middle school Bakugou must be debunked, killed, discarded, or destroyed in order for Bakugou the hero to emerge, which is why people who do actually excuse his actions or believe that those actions define him into young adulthood don’t really understand the necessity for change, because they seem to imply that he doesn’t need/cannot reach further growth, and there doesn’t need to be a separation between the Bakugou who is, at heart, volatile and repressed the angry, and the Bakugou who sacrifices himself, a hero who saves people.

Plot twist: there does need to be a difference. Further plot twist: there is a difference.

In sacrificing himself for Deku, Bakugou himself doesn't die, but the injury is fatal in the sense that it could've killed him physically and yet symbolizes the selfish, childish part of him that refused to accept Deku, himself, and the inevitability of change. In killing those selfish remnants, he could actually become the kind of hero that we the reader understand to be the true kind.

That’s why I think that a lot of the people who stress his actions as a child without acknowledging the ways he has changed, grown, and tried to fix what he has broken don’t really get it, because it was always part of his character arc to change and purposely become something different and better. If the effects of his worst and his most childish self stick with you more, and linger despite that, that’s okay. But distilling his character down to the wrong elements doesn’t get you the bare essentials; what it gets you is a skewed and shallow version of a person. If you’re okay with that version, that is also fine.

But you can’t condemn others who aren’t fine with that incomplete version, and to become enraged that others do not see him as you do is childish.

Bakugou’s change and the emphasis on that change is canon.

Parallels in Abuse, EnemiesRivals-to-Lovers, and the Necessity of Redemption ft. ATLA’s Zuko

In real life, the idea that “oh, he must bully you because he likes you” is often used as a way to brush aside or to excuse the action of bullying itself, as if a ‘secret crush’ somehow negates the effects of bullying on the victim or the inability of the bully to properly process and manifest their emotions in certain ways. It doesn’t. It often enables young boys to hurt others, and provides figures of authority to overlook the real source of schoolyard bullying or peer review. The “secret crush”, in real life, is used to undermine abuse, justify toxic masculinity, and is essentially used as a non-solution solution.

A common accusation is that Bakudeku shippers jump on the pairing because they romanticize pairing a bully and a victim together, or believe that the only way for Bakugou to atone for his past would be to date Midoryia in the future. This may be true for some people, in which case, that’s their own preference, but based on my experience and what I’ve witnessed, that’s not the case for most.

The difference being is that as these are characters, we as readers or viewers are meant to analyze them. Not to justify them, or to excuse their actions, but we are given the advantage of the outsider perspective to piece their characters together in context, understand why they are how they are, and witness them change; maybe I just haven’t been exposed to enough of the fandom, but no one (I’ve witnessed) treats the idea that “maybe Bakugou has feelings he can’t process or understand and so they manifest in aggressive and unchecked ways'' as a solution to his inability to communicate or process in a healthy way, rather it is just part of the explanation of his character, something is needs to — and is — working through. The solution to his middle school self is not the revelation of a “teehee, secret crush”, but self-reflection, remorse, and actively working to better oneself, which I do believe is canonically reflected, especially as of recently.

In canon, they are written to be partners, better together than apart, and I genuinely believe that one can like the Bakudeku dynamic not by route of romanticization but by observation.

I do think we are meant to see parallels between him and Endeavor; Endeavor is a high profile abuser who embodies the flaws and hypocrisy of the hero system. Bakugou is a schoolyard bully who emulates and internalizes the flaws of this system as a child, likely due to the structure of the society and the way that children will absorb the propaganda they are exposed to; the idea that Quirks, or power, define the inherent value of the individual, their ability to contribute to society, and subsequently their fundamental human worth. The difference between them is the fact that Endeavor is the literal adult who is fully and knowingly active within a toxic, corrupt system who forces his family to undergo a terrifying amount of trauma and abuse while facing little to no consequences because he knows that his status and the values of their society will protect him from those consequences. In other words, Endeavor is the threat of what Bakugou could have, and would have, become without intervention or genuine change.

Comparisons between characters, as parallels or foils, are tricky in that they imply but cannot confirm sameness. Having parallels with someone does not make them the same, by the way, but can serve to illustrate contrasts, or warnings. Harry Potter, for example, is meant to have obvious parallels with Tom Riddle, with similar abilities, and tragic upbringings. That doesn’t mean Harry grows up to become Lord Voldemort, but rather he helps lead a cross-generational movement to overthrow the facist regime. Harry is offered love, compassion, and friends, and does not embrace the darkness within or around him. As far as moldy old snake men are concerned, they do not deserve a redemption arc because they do not wish for one, and the truest of change only occurs when you actively try to change.

To be frank, either way, Bakugou was probably going to become a good Hero, in the sense that Endeavor is a ‘good’ Hero. Hero capitalized, as in a pro Hero, in the sense that it is a career, an occupation, and a status. Because of his strong Quirk, determination, skill, and work ethic, Bakugou would have made a good Hero. Due to his lack of character, however, he was not on the path to become a hero; defender of the weak, someone who saves people to save people, who is willing to make sacrifices detrimental to themselves, who saves people out of love.

It is necessary for him to undergo both a redemption arc and a symbolic death and rebirth in order for him to follow the path of a hero, having been inspired and prompted by Deku.

I personally don’t really like Endeavor’s little redemption arc, not because I don’t believe that people can change or that they shouldn't at least try to atone for the atrocities they have committed, but because within any narrative, a good redemption arc is important if it matters; what also matters is the context of that arc, and whether or not it was needed. For example, in ATLA, Zuko’s redemption arc is widely regarded as one of the best arcs in television history, something incredible. And it is. That shit fucks. In a good way.

It was confirmed that Azula was also going to get a redemption arc, had Volume 4 gone on as planned, and it was tentatively approached in the comics, which are considered canon. She is an undeniably bad person (who is willing to kill, threaten, exploit, and colonize), but she is also a child, and as viewers, we witness and recognize the factors that contributed to her (debatable) sociopathy, and the way that the system she was raised in failed her. Her family failed her; even Uncle Iroh, the wise mentor who helps guide Zuko to see the light, is willing to give up on her immediately, saying that she’s “crazy” and needs to be “put down”. Yes, it’s comedic, and yes, it’s pragmatic, but Azula is fourteen years old. Her mother is banished, her father is a psychopath, and her older brother, from her perspective, betrayed and abandoned her. She doesn’t have the emotional support that Zuko does; she exploits and controls her friends because it’s all she’s been taught to do; she says herself, her “own mother thought [she] was a monster; she was right, of course, but it still [hurts]”. A parent who does not believe in you, or a parent that uses you and will hurt you, is a genuine indicator of trauma.

The writers understood that both Zuko and Azula deserved redemption arcs. One was arguably further gone than the other, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are both children, products of their environment, who have the time, motive, and reason to change.

In contrast, you know who wouldn’t have deserved a redemption arc? Ozai. That simply would not have been interesting, wouldn’t have served the narrative well, and honestly, is not needed, thematically or otherwise. Am I comparing Ozai to Endeavor? Basically, yes. Fuck those guys. I don’t see a point in Endeavor’s little “I want to be a good dad now” arc, and I think that we don’t need to sympathize with characters in order to understand them or be interested in them. I want Touya/Dabi to expose his abuse, for his career to crumble, and then for him to die.

If they are not challenging the system that we the viewer are meant to question, and there is no thematic relevance to their redemption, is it even needed?

On that note, am I saying that Bakugou is the equivalent to Zuko? No, lmao. Definitely not. They are different characters with different progressions and different pressures. What I am saying is that good redemption arcs shouldn’t be handed out like candy to babies; it is the quality, rather than the quantity, that makes a redemption arc good. In terms of the commentary of the narrative, who needs a redemption arc, who is deserving, and who does it make sense to give one to?

In this case, Bakugou checks those boxes. It was always in the cards for him to change, and he has. In fact, he’s still changing.

Give it to Me Straight. It’s Homophobic.

There does seem to be an urge to obsessively gender either Bakugou or Deku, in making Deku the ultra-feminine, stereotypically hyper-sexualized “woman” of the relationship, with Bakugou becoming similarly sexualized but depicted as the hyper-masculine bodice ripper. On some level, that feels vaguely homophobic if not straight up misogynistic, in that in a gay relationship there’s an urge to compel them to conform under heteronormative stereotypes in order to be interpreted as real or functional. On one hand, I will say that in a lot of cases it feels like more of an expression of a kink, or fetishization and subsequent expression of internalized misogyny, at least, rather than a genuine exploration of the complexity and power imbalances of gender dynamics, expression, and boundaries.

That being said, I don’t think that that problematic aspect of shipping is unique to Bakudeku, or even to the fandom in general. We’ve all read fan work or see fanart of most gay ships in a similiar manner, and I think it’s a broader issue to be addressed than blaming it on a singular ship and calling it a day.

One interpretation of Bakugou’s character is his repression and the way his character functions under toxic masculinity, in a society’s egregious disregard for mental and emotional health (much like in the real world), the horrifying ways in which rage is rationalized or excused due to the concept of masculinity, and the way that characteristics that are associated with femininity — intellect, empathy, anxiety, kindness, hesitation, softness — are seen as stereotypically “weak”, and in men, traditionally emasculating. In terms of the way that the fictional universe is largely about societal priority and power dynamics between individuals and the way that extends to institutions, it’s not a total stretch to guess that gender as a construct is a relevant topic to expand on or at least keep in mind for comparison.

I think that the way in which characters are gendered and the extent to which that is a result of invasive heteronormativity and fetishization is a really important conversation to have, but using it as a case-by-case evolution of a ship used to condemn people isn’t conductive, and at that point, it’s treated as less of a real concern but an issue narrowly weaponised.

Love in Perspective, from the East v. West

Another thing I think could be elaborated on and written about in great detail is the way that the Eastern part of the fandom and the Western part of the fandom have such different perspectives on Bakudeku in particular. I am not going to go in depth with this, and there are many other people who could go into specifics, but just as an overview:

The manga and the anime are created for and targeted at a certain audience; our take on it will differ based on cultural norms, decisions in translation, understanding of the genre, and our own region-specific socialization. This includes the way in which we interpret certain relationships, the way they resonate with us, and what we do and do not find to be acceptable. Of course, this is not a case-by-case basis, and I’m sure there are plenty of people who hold differing beliefs within one area, but speaking generally, there is a reason that Bakudeku is not regarded as nearly as problematic in the East.

Had this been written by a Western creator, marketed primarily to and within the West (for reference, while I am Chinese, but I have lived in the USA for most of my life, so my own perspective is undoubtedly westernized), I would’ve immediately jumped to make comparisons between the Hero System and the American police system, in that a corrupt, or bastardized system is made no less corrupt for the people who do legitimately want to do good and help people, when that system disproportionately values and targets others while relying on propaganda that society must be reliant on that system in order to create safe communities when in reality it perpetuates just as many issues as it appears to solve, not to mention the way it attracts and rewards violent and power-hungry people who are enabled to abuse their power. I think comparisons can still be made, but in terms of analysis, it should be kept in mind that the police system in other parts of the world do not have the same history, place, and context as it does in America, and the police system in Japan, for example, probably wasn’t the basis for the Hero System.

As much as I do believe in the Death of the Author in most cases, the intent of the author does matter when it comes to content like this, if merely on the basis that it provides context that we may be missing as foreign viewers.

As far as the intent of the author goes, Bakugou is on a route of redemption.

He deserves it. It is unavoidable. That, of course, may depend on where you’re reading this.

Stuck in the Sludge, the Past, and Season One

If there’s one thing, to me, that epitomizes middle school Bakugou, it’s him being trapped in a sludge monster, rescued by his Quirkless childhood friend, and unable to believe his eyes. He clings to the ideology he always has, that Quirkless means weak, that there’s no way that Deku could have grown to be strong, or had the capacity to be strong all along. Bakugou is wrong about this, and continuously proven wrong. It is only when he accepts that he is wrong, and that Deku is someone to follow, that he starts his real path to heroics.

If Bakudeku’s relationship does not appeal to someone for whatever reason, there’s nothing wrong with that. They can write all they want about why they don’t ship it, or why it bothers them, or why they think it’s problematic. If it is legitimately triggering to you, then by all means, avoid it, point it out, etc. but do not undermine the reality of abuse simply to point fingers, just because you don’t like a ship. People who intentionally use the anti tag knowing it’ll show up in the main tag, go after people who are literally minding their own business, and accuse people of supporting abuse are the ones looking for a fight, and they’re annoying as hell because they don’t bring anything to the table. No evidence, no analysis, just repeated projection.

To clarify, I’m referring to a specific kind of shipper, not someone who just doesn’t like a ship, but who is so aggressive about it for absolutely no reason. There are plenty of very lovely people in this fandom, who mind their own business, multipship, or just don’t care.

Calling shippers dumb or braindead or toxic (to clarify, this isn’t targeting any one person I’ve seen, but a collective) based on projections and generalizations that come entirely from your own impression of the ship rather than observation is...really biased to me, and comes across as uneducated and trigger happy, rather than constructive or helpful in any way.

I’m not saying someone has to ship anything, or like it, in order to be a ‘good’ participant. But inserting derogatory material into a main tag, and dropping buzzwords with the same tired backing behind it without seeming to understand the implications of those words or acknowledging the development, pacing, and intentional change to the characters within the plot is just...I don’t know, it comes across as redundant, to me at least, and very childish. Aggressive. Toxic. Problematic. Maybe the real toxic shippers were the ones who bitched and moaned along the way. They’re like little kids, stuck in the past, unable to visualize or recognize change, and I think that’s a real shame because it’s preventing them from appreciating the story or its characters as it is, in canon.

But that’s okay, really. To each their own. Interpretations will vary, preferences differ, perspectives are not uniform. There is no one truth. There are five seasons of the show, a feature film, and like, thirty volumes as of this year.

All I’m saying is that if you want to stay stuck in the first season of each character, then that’s what you’re going to get. That’s up to you.

This may be edited or revised.

#bakudeku #meta #my hero academia #boko no hero academia #bnha #mha #bakugou katsuki #izuku midoriya #ok these are just my general thoughts in response to the people who have hang ups about this ship #like y’all need to pls chill tf out ok #this is also not comprehensive and could definitely be elaborated on #but it’s just general thoughts #it’s just addressing general opposition I’ve seen #I never thought I’d ever write this much about this ship wtf

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atlas-of-a-human-soul · 4 years

Text

frENEMIES {Quarterback AU}

Summary: When his brother forces him to go on a double date with him and with a girl that absolutely hates Grayson, he’s forced to realize that their mutual disdain might have been caused by his own actions.

Warnings: swearing, a lot of banter

Word Count: 2.5 k

A/N - this is sort of a version of This Is War (Ethan frat/soulmate fic), but there are no soulmates here. It’s probably bad since I stress wrote it instead of studying, but it’s also kind of fun? I guess I’m a sucker for enemies trope. Also, I am writing Fix me finale, but it will take me a while because I am back in college for the next month and a half or so and I have back to back exams every 2 or 3 days. Hope you guys understand and I hope you like this one as well.

* * *

Ethan never thought he'd have to beg his brother to accompany a beautiful woman on a date, but he still found himself in front of his arm-crossed twin and his defiant glare.

„No. Not happening.“ Grayson is adamant, refusing to budge and most definitely not when it's her who they want him to go out with. Why can't they find someone else to be their double date?! He just didn't see the sanity in that decision.

„I'm asking as a brother!“ Ethan pulled his twin card, hoping to see change in Grayson who simply laughed in his face before turning his back on him, still stubbornly refusing to even consider it.

„Bruh, never gonna happen.“

Rolling his eyes, Ethan's annoyance grows as he's forced to walk in front of his brother who seems damn determined to fuck up his night even after he tried to bribe him with chores, cash, even his dear Smooth cat.

„She's Amina's best friend. I am begging you, please, don't make me call mom on you.“ And that's when he played the ultimate card – the mom card. There isn't a woman in the world as important to Grayson as his mother, but then again, there isn't a woman as capable of making him do things he'd never want to do.

„Seriously? Playing the mom card now? What are we, like 10? Plus, why would she even want me as a date?! She fucking hates me and I'm pretty sure she's mental. You're putting your favorite brother in the line of fire.“ Reasoning with Ethan had never been fruitful in the past, but even as he watches Ethan shrug his pleas off his shoulders, Grayson clings to some hope he'd manage to escape this whole ordeal. It's probably the only time he had ever regretted being a playboy instead of having a girlfriend...taken men can't be forced into dates with their worst enemy.

„Favorite? You're my only brother, Grayson. It does not make you necessarily a favorite.“ Ethan retorted with furrowed eyebrows before tossing a white, classy shirt at his brother's chest. „Now get ready and be nice tonight, okay?“

Nostrils flared as he inhales deeply, staring daggers at Ethan's back as he leaves the room, Grayson yells after him: „No promises!“

To say he spent the entire drive over to the restaurant sulking would be an understatement. The last thing, absolutely the last thing, Grayson wanted to do now is to spend a few hours around Y/N Y/L/N.

You know those girls that are always seemingly fun but will cut you down with just a look if you make a single misstep? The girls that may be smaller than guys but cause terror in them whenever they scowl?

Y/N Y/L/N is the queen B of the club Grayson is certain exists as some secret college society of women that learn how to make men's lives miserable.

Sure, she's on good terms with everyone else, but Grayson always found her to be rude and mean-spirited with him. Every time he tried to bridge the distance between them for not only his brother's relationship but his own inner peace, she nearly chewed his head off.

In time, Grayson learned to avoid her and her mood-swings, but he still found himself getting out of the car on this particular night, finding Amina in front of the restaurant and he could easily recognize Y/N, even from behind. Perhaps he's spent too much time admiring her ass in the past, but she wasn't hard to recognize, besides, who else would be helping Amina fix her hijab?

For a moment there, he just stands there on the curb, watching her as the wind picks up and her hair flies to the side, revealing her face as she steps away from Amina and giggles, the sound carried through the wind and to his unsuspecting ears. He thought her laugh is almost...tolerable...cute even.

Shaking his head vehemently, Grayson felt Ethan's hand on his shoulder and his expecting gaze as well.

„Come on. It might rain soon and I'd rather not worry if Amina will freeze to death when her clothes get wet.“

Sighing, Grayson follows his brother reluctantly, his gaze unwavering and on his enemy. She may be clothed in a beautiful green dress with bare back, but Grayson still remembers she's a wolf in sheep's clothing.

„Hey.“ Ethan smiles sheepishly at his dear Amina, giving her a small wave as she looks down shyly and her cheeks turn a darker shade. Their relationship is pure in Grayson's eyes – they rarely ever touch and when they do it's by accident and yet they seem to be inseparable. In a moment of weakness, he wished for something as simple and pure as they have too.

„Ugh. Grayson fucking Dolan? Seriously Amina?“ Y/N all but growled at her best friend who was forced to look at her instead of Ethan who really captured all her attention moments ago. Frowning, Grayson clears his throat, hoping to speak but Y/N continues.

„I thought I was supposed to be here with you as the third wheel because your dad insisted! Why call...“ She turns to Grayson, gesticulating to his face with slight disgust on her face before she adds: „Him.“

„Excuse me?!“ Grayson exclaims, quite frankly offended by the way she looked at him like he's not worth the dirt off her cheap heels, but she just turns to him with the fakest, fed-up smile she could muster.

„You may be excused.“ Showing him down the road, hoping he'd leave, Y/N looked at the way his face quickly changed from insulted, to angry, to wicked.

„Oh, no. I'm staying. Now that I know you have been blindsided into spending a whole dinner with me, I'd love for a chance to make your meal a little spicy.“ Winking, Grayson opened the door. Waiting for them to enter, Ethan and Amina were fast but Y/N crossed her arms and tapped her foot against the pavement, her eyes narrowed at him with suspicion.

„Waiting for a formal invitations, princess?“ Grayson clicks his tongue as he gestures with a nod for her to get inside, nearly bursting out laughing when she flinches with the thunder echoing in the street.

„You're just waiting for me to walk in order to let the door slam in my face.“ She guesses, looking up at the sky nervously as lightning tears the sky open.

„Maybe, but you'll never know if you don't come in. Or you can test your luck with the thunderstorm.“ Shrugging as if saying he's alright with either or, Grayson raises his eyebrow in challenge and then it crosses his mind – this is the first time since he met her that he has the reigns and it feels really, really good.

Pensive, she looks back up at the sky before shrugging. „I'd rather brave the storm then, quarterback.“

However, as she states her choice, rain starts to drizzle and the lightning illuminates every line of her frustrated face and her pouted lips as she closes her eyes in anticipation of what's to come. Brave...but stupid.

„Come in. I won't slam the door in your face.“ Clearing his throat, he adds. „My mama taught me better, alright?“

„Fine, but if you do, I know who to complain to then. Don't underestimate me, quarterback. I can find her number if I want to!“ Eyes narrower with every step she takes, arms tense as she expects him to go back on his word, she manages to walk into the restaurant without a scratch on her and surprisingly no attempt to even frighten her.

Y/N headed straight for the table next to Ethan and Amina, the only one available with 'reserved' card on it. She sat opposite of Amina so she could pick up on any signal her best friend sends, but also because she had many signals she wanted to send her and a middle finger might be one of them.

Of all the men in the universe, hell, of all the women in the universe, those two chose the quarterback from hell? She never quite understood how he and Ethan could be twins and be so fundamentally different but after the first two years, she just stopped trying to understand it – understand him, at all.

„Alright. What do you want to order?“ Grayson picks up the menu – the only menu on the table and she rolls her eyes at him again. „Might wanna watch the eye-rolls. Don't want your eyes getting stuck like that, do you?“

Glancing at Amina who just mouthed 'Please', Y/N let out a violent huff in utter frustration, even more so when Grayson continued to hog the menu.

„Why are you here? Really? Did they blindside you too?“ Y/N questions, more curious about how calm he seemed when he found her in front of the restaurant than the menu he holds. She can't eat much now when her appetite is for vengeance alone.

„Nope, Ethan played the mom card. I wouldn't be here otherwise, trust me.“ He responds without even looking at her, his eyes still going over the menu and if she didn't know better, she'd think he's confused.

„You have something better to do on a Saturday night? A girl perhaps? Did I cockblock you, quarterback?“ Raising her eyebrows with amusement, she leans in and cocks her head slightly to the left, awaiting for his response.

„Don't flatter yourself. My plans were more important than a girl. I was supposed to run on the treadmill.“

Shaking her head, finding his answer peculiar and she couldn't help herself but question him further. Besides, she had no other form of entertainment but to make steam come out of his ears.

„Running? That's more important? What the hell?“ Flabbergasted, she draws in a shaky breath as she puts a hand on her chest in surprise and Grayson dignifies her with a curious glance.

„Who chooses to spend a Saturday night on a treadmill?“

Putting down the menu, Grayson presses his tongue against his left cheek to reel his usually loud self which was always amplified around her.

„Someone who makes good life choices. Try it sometimes.“ Snarky tone he used made her bite her lower lip, slowly releasing the soft flesh with a little less lipstick than before. Shame – Grayson quite liked the red shade on her lips.

„Oh, quarterback, you're so scandalous. For future reference, if you ever see me running you should run too because I only run for my life...maybe not even then.“ Smacking her lips, she slyly grabbed the menu from his hands and looked it over herself. She noticed Ethan nod at his brother before they exchanged a few words in their weird gibberish language Amina told her about, though she had caught them doing so a few times before too.

„So, you're really into football, huh“, Grayson asks so naively, noticing exactly when she raised her eyes from the menu and up to him with a boy-you-better-run look and he gulps, aware she'd soon say something that would fuck everything up.

„Football? It's literally the last thing on my list of interests...hell, it's not even on the list!“ She exclaims, noticing Grayson's jaw clench and his eyes harden and Ethan facepalmed immediately, all too familiar with what will happen.

„Football is life! What do you mean it's not on the list?“ Shushed by Amina, he presses his lips together but his eyes are wide and wild and Y/N can't help but chuckle.

„It's the dumbest sport there is. All you do is throw hands with men with over-sized pads and helmets. You get concussions for fame? Fuck that.“ Tossing the menu on the center of the table, Y/N leans back in her chair as she notices a vein prominently showing on Grayson's forehead and she can't help but enjoy the view. There is nothing she likes better than a pissed off Grayson. He's got everyone treating him like a deity, but she was never among them. Perhaps it's because he fucked up when they first met, but she tried time and time again to give him the benefit of the doubt and he always proved her opinion of him, while abominable, is very accurate.

„Dumbest sport? Do you know how hard I work to be the very best on that field? The theories and strategies I have to learn? The physical preparations?!“ Whisper shouting, Grayson leaned closer, his elbows resting on the table and his biceps swell up as he moves some of his weight onto his arms and the table under him.

„Oh, wow! You work so hard? A doctor works hard, Grayson. They save lives and they will never earn the money you will earn after college. You're learning how to run zig-zag across the field with a crummy ball in your hands without falling, while doctors, lawyers, teachers, cashiers and many REAL professions are so underfunded and underpaid and you think that's fair?“ Shaking her head, she raises her hands in mock surrender, watching a little bit of Grayson's ego chip away and he shakes his head too, looking away as he keeps his mouth shut.

„Why do you even hate me so much?“ Grayson mumbled sometime during dinner - a very quiet dinner.

Looking up at him through her eyelashes, she wondered if he really doesn't know. Hell, she always knew why she hates him, but she never knew why he hates her.

„You really don't know?“ She nearly chuckles when he shrugs, oblivious as always.

„Why is that somehow worse than everything you did?“ Talking to herself more than him, she lets out a heavy sigh. Tucking her hair behind her ear, Y/N presses her lips together and Grayson can't help but notice the red lipstick is once again evenly spread across her lips.

She remembered the way they met, the way he treats the girls, the pranks he pulled that left her mortified, or the nickname he started that followed her for a whole semester and most of all, she couldn't forgive him for scaring off a guy she thought she'd be with for a very, very long time.

„You're so smart and sure of yourself, figure it out.“ But then again, she did have an appetite for vengeance and he had no idea how ready she was to satisfy it.

He was clueless until Monday morning, right after practice when he was left last in the locker-rooms after his self-imposed morning practice. He was clueless as he walked out of the shower, confused as to where his towel is. He was clueless when his steam-clad body felt the breeze of the mysteriously open window in the locker-room had made him shiver.

However, when he opened his locker, Grayson was no longer clueless: his clothes – gone, his jersey – gone, his phone, bag and towels gone.

Everything is gone, yet when he looks at the mirror, he finds the cause for the message left in a very familiar shade of red gave him more than just a clue – XOXO next to a clear mark of a particular pair of lips he was admiring on Saturday night.

„Y/N FUCKING Y/L/N!“

Tags: @mendesficsxbombay @beinscorpio @peacedolantwins @dolandolll

PART 2

#dolan twins #grayson dolan #ethan dolan #grayson dolan x reader #grayson dolan fanfic #grayson dolan imagine #grayson dolan fic #grayson dolan fanfiction #grayson dolan college au #grayson dolan quarterback

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scripttorture · 3 years

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Regarding ICURE, I have a character who is familiar with the process and a deep understanding of most of the mindsets and mental states involved in torture, interrogation, and captivity. Would that make resistance to the techniques easier? How would a willingness to engage and empathize with captors, combined with an awareness of their goals and methods and a greater than average degree of self-awareness and self confidence interact?

I’m mostly working without studies here extrapolating based on what I know.

The only bit of this I can definitively answer is that knowledge of what torture does wouldn’t effect the high innate resistance we have to it. Resistance to torture is bound up in so many fundamental systems, like how our nerves physically register pain, that conscious knowledge wouldn’t make much difference to the outcome.

It might make the character feel better or more confident though: ‘There’s no way you can force this information out of me’. It might also make the recovery process a little easier if the character is tortured. Knowledge about mental illness and how they’re treated can help people identify what they’re going through and process it more quickly. It can also make it easier to seek help.

For those who are new to the blog ICURE is a combination of techniques that can be used to change someone’s beliefs over time. As with everything there is not a 100% success rate but unlike torture consistently applied ICURE can lead to a controlled change in the target’s belief system.

It stands for Isolate, Control information, create Uncertainty, Repetition and Emotional responses.

A group of characters attempting to use ICURE would isolate the target from other characters, ensure that the information/news the target gets lines up with what the group believes. They’d then attempt to create uncertainty about previously held core beliefs and respond in an overblown emotional fashion if the target attempts to challenge their own beliefs. Repetition of this, consistently over a prolonged period (months or years) can (but does not always) lead to change in core beliefs.

For an example let’s imagine a story applying this to Bucky Barnes from the Marvel series.

A group holding him might try to create uncertainty by underlining how long he’s been held and how his friends haven’t attempted to rescue him. They might give him news that his best friend has another group of heroes he works with now. Bucky has been abandoned, forgotten. And so forth.

An emotive response in this scenario could be something like the primary care giver of the group (the person who most regularly interacts with Bucky, giving him food and trying to interact positively) flying off the handle when Bucky mentions his old friends. How can he be so ungrateful? Doesn’t he realise what the caregiver has risked and sacrificed to keep Bucky safe? Does he think persuading the group to ‘help’ Bucky and keep him alive was easy?

You get the idea.

My instinct is that knowledge of these techniques would make them less effective. These things are never 100% successful and I think consciously acknowledging the manipulative nature of ICURE would make it harder for the captors to achieve total success.

However a lot of the reason these techniques work is because humans are social animals. We need interaction with other members of the species in order to remain healthy. And as a result we often change and adapt in order to fit in with new groups. We are geared to compromise in order to gain or maintain positive social contact.

I am not a psychologist or psychiatrist but I do know that there a lot of research papers which suggest personal opinions can gradually change over time when we’re surrounded by people with differing views in non-coercive settings.

This does not necessarily mean full conversion to another set of ideals. The impression I get is that it mostly looks like a series of small and subtle changes.

For the sake of avoiding internet insanity let’s make up an issue. Let’s make up a character who grew up in an area where no one wears red and the colour has a lot of negative associations.

This character moves to a different area where the colour has different connotations and wearing red is a neutral act. Over a period of years the character’s attitudes towards the colour might mellow. They might never wear red themselves. They might not decorate with the colour. But they’ve met a fair few people who occasionally wear red now and they’re decent people. They don’t judge people who wear red the way they did when they first moved in to the area.

What I’m trying to illustrate here is that it’s normal for people’s views to shift over time. Obviously this does not always happen. People can hold extreme or vastly differing views when compared to their community.

From a certain point of view my views are extreme. Most cultures in our global society accept and legitimise violence to differing degrees. Pacifism is the absolute rejection of violence*. If you take a moment to think about how often violence permeates all aspects of our lives (from child care to religion to politics) you’ll see what I mean.

What I’m trying to illustrate here is that while we do adjust and change to fit in with the people surrounding us we can also cling to things that are very much against the norm. And that makes it difficult to answer any of these questions with certainty. There is a lot of individual variation.

A lot of the techniques to resist effective interrogation are essentially a refusal to interact. But the longer someone’s held outside their community the less viable that is as an option. We can choose to do things that are harmful to us (including avoiding needed social contact) but it’s hard. Because it’s unhealthy.

I think the way I’d approach this as a writer is to start by identifying the core values of this character, the things that are most important to them. Try to think of things the character absolutely could not compromise without becoming a different character.

Circling back to the example of Bucky Barnes, a core value might be his relationship with Steve Rogers, his oldest friend.

Once you have an idea of the core values think of the next most important value. And keep going.

I tend to do this pretty instinctively. For me it’s a part of my messy, sprawling character creation. If you need to take a more visual or organised approach to figuring things out then a list (with the most important values at the top) or a circle (with the most important values in the middle) might be helpful.

Next think through the same process for the group that has captured the character. Since it’s a group rather then an individual it should be simpler. (Because a group is unlikely to be as nuanced and complicated as an individual.)

See if there’s any overlap which might be grounds for grudging mutual respect. Values like loyalty to your own group and taking care of the people on your side are good things to use for this.

I would then look at the more peripheral values the character has and shift some of them a little over time.

Keeping Bucky as our example I might put something like ‘American cultural values’ as a more peripheral value. Bucky seems to prize the culture he was raised in and consider it the norm. But it’s not something he bases his personality on or something that motivates him through the stories. So shifting that, having him not see it as the ‘norm’ any more, or adopting things his captors did would be a good way to show that he has been influenced.

Obviously the right choice, the right value to shift, depends on the characters and the story you want to tell. The degree to which you want to shift the character’s values is also up to you.

Bigger shifts, or more obvious shifts, could serve to cause conflict later in the story. This could lead the character to feel rejected, like their loyalty is being questioned after everything they went through.

Bigger shifts could also serve a practical purpose in the story though. If this character has gained a greater understanding for the group they’re opposed to that could make them a much more effective interrogator. They might know how to establish rapport more quickly and earn the trust of captured prisoners. Which could in turn lead to more accurate information.

Greater understanding of the group they’re opposed to could also help with strategic thinking/planning.

Smaller shifts add less elements to the story. But that could be a good thing too depending on your story. If you don’t have a lot of time or space to explore new conflicts or skills then this approach would save you narrative space while still showing the character has been effected.

It would also work if the point here is to show the character as mostly unmoved, unchanged, despite coercive external pressure.

I hope that helps :)

Available on Wordpress.

Disclaimer

*In case anyone’s interested I personally define violence as harmful acts done without consent.

#pinctada1798 #writing advice #tw torture #manipulation #ICURE #effective interrogation #isolation #social pressure #social interaction #shifting views #prison #interrogation #character development

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dwellordream · 3 years

Text

“This brings us to the most fundamental fact of rural life in the pre-modern world: the grain is harvested once a year, but the family eats every day. Of course that means the grain must be stored and only slowly consumed over the entire year (with some left over to be used as seed-grain in the following planting). That creates the first cycle in agricultural life: after the harvest, food is generally plentiful and prices for it are low (we’ll deal with the impact this has on trade and markets a little later). As the year goes on, food becomes scarcer and the prices for it rise as each family ‘eats down’ their stockpile.

That has more than just economic impacts because the family unit becomes more vulnerable as that food stockpile dwindles. Malnutrition brings on a host of other threats: elevated risk of death from injury or disease most notably. Repeated malnutrition also has devastating long-term effects on young children (a point we’ll come back to). Consequently, we see seasonal mortality patterns in agricultural communities which tend to follow harvest cycles; when the harvest is poor, the family starts to run low on food before the next harvest, which leads to rationing the remaining food, which leads to malnutrition. That malnutrition is not evenly distributed though: the working age adults need to be strong enough to bring in the next harvest when it comes (or to be doing additional non-farming labor to supplement the family), so the short rations are going to go to the children and the elderly.

Which in turn means that ‘lean’ years are marked by increased mortality especially among the children and the elderly, the former of which is how the rural population ‘regulates’ to its food production in the absence of modern birth control (but, as an aside: this doesn’t lead to pure Malthusian dynamics – a lot more influences the food production ceiling than just available land. You can have low-equilibrium or high-equilibrium systems, especially when looking at the availability of certain sorts of farming capital or access to trade at distance. I cannot stress this enough: Malthus was wrong; yes, interestingly, usefully wrong – but still wrong. The big plagues sometimes pointed to as evidence of Malthusian crises have as much if not more to do with rising trade interconnectedness than declining nutritional standards). This creates yearly cycles of plenty and vulnerability; we’ll talk about the strategies these fellows employ to avoid that problem in just a moment.

Next to that little cycle, we also have a ‘big’ cycle of generations. The ratio of labor-to-food-requirements varies as generations are born, age and die; it isn’t constant. The family is at its peak labor effectiveness at the point when the youngest generation is physically mature but hasn’t yet begun having children (the exact age-range there is going to vary by nuptial patterns, see below) and at its most vulnerable when the youngest generation is immature. By way of example, let’s imagine a family (I’m going to use Roman names because they make gender very clear, but this is a completely made-up family): we have Gaius (M, 45), his wife, Cornelia (39, F), his mother Tullia (64, F) and their children Gaius (21, M), Secundus (19, M), Julia1 (16, F) and Julia2 (14, F). That family has three male laborers, three female laborers (Tullia being in her twilight years, we don’t count), all effectively adults in that sense, against 7 mouths to feed.

But let’s fast-forward fifteen years. Gaius is now 60 and slowing down, Cornelia is 54; Tullia, we may assume has passed. But Gaius now 36 is married to Clodia (20, F; welcome to Roman marriage patterns), with two children Gaius (3, M) and Julia3 (1, F); Julia1 and Julia2 are married and now in different households and Secundus, recognizing that the family’s financial situation is never going to allow him to marry and set up a household has left for the Big City. So we now have the labor of two women and a man-and-a-half (since Gaius the Elder is quite old) against six mouths and the situation is likely to get worse in the following years as Gaius-the-Younger and Clodia have more children and Gaius-the-Elder gets older. The point of all of this is to note that just as risk and vulnerability peak and subside on a yearly basis in cycles, they also do this on a generational basis in cycles.

...Most modern folks think in terms of profit maximization; we take for granted that we will still be alive tomorrow and instead ask how we can maximize how much money we have then (this is, admittedly, a lot less true for the least fortunate among us). We thus tend to favor efficient systems, even if they are vulnerable. From this perspective, ancient farmers – as we’ll see – look very silly, but this is a trap, albeit one that even some very august ancient scholars have fallen into. These are not irrational, unthinking people; they are poor, not stupid – those are not the same things.

But because these households wobble on the edge of disaster continually, that changes the calculus. These small subsistence farmers generally seek to minimize risk, rather than maximize profits. After all, improving yields by 5% doesn’t mean much if everyone starves to death in the third year because of a tail-risk that wasn’t mitigated. Moreover, for most of these farmers, working harder and farming more generally doesn’t offer a route out of the small farming class – these societies typically lack that kind of mobility (and also generally lack the massive wealth-creation potential of industrial power which powers that kind of mobility). Consequently, there is little gain to taking risks and much to lose. So as we’ll see, these farmers generally sacrifice efficiency for greater margins of safety, every time.

Modern farms are built for efficiency – they typically focus on a single major crop (whatever brings the best returns for the land and market situation) because focusing on a single crop lets you maximize the value of equipment and minimize other costs. They rely on other businesses to provide everything else. Such farms tend to be geographically concentrated – all the fields together – to minimize transit time.

Subsistence farmers generally do not do this. Remember, the goal is not to maximize profit, but to avoid family destruction through starvation. If you only farm one crop (the ‘best’ one) and you get too little rain or too much, or the temperature is wrong – that crop fails and the family starves. But if you farm several different crops, that mitigates the risk of any particular crop failing due to climate conditions, or blight (for the Romans, the standard combination seems to have been a mix of wheat, barley and beans, often with grapes or olives besides; there might also be a small garden space. Orchards might double as grazing-space for a small herd of animals, like pigs). By switching up crops like this and farming a bit of everything, the family is less profitable (and less engaged with markets, more on that in a bit), but much safer because the climate conditions that cause one crop to fail may not impact the others.

...Likewise – as that example implies – our small farmers want to spread out their plots. And indeed, when you look at land-use maps of villages of subsistence farmers, what you often find is that each household farms many small plots which are geographically distributed (this is somewhat less true of the Romans, by the by). Farming, especially in the Mediterranean (but more generally as well) is very much a matter of micro-climates, especially when it comes to rainfall and moisture conditions (something that is less true on the vast flat of the American Great Plains, by the by). It is frequently the case that this side of the hill is dry while that side of the hill gets plenty of rain in a year and so on. Consequently, spreading plots out so that each family has say, a little bit of the valley, a little bit of the flat ground, a little bit of the hilly area, and so on shields each family from catastrophe is one of those micro-climates should completely fail (say, the valley floods, or the rain doesn’t fall and the hills are too dry for anything to grow).

...While some high-risk disasters are likely to strike an entire village at once (like a large raid or a general drought), most of the disasters that might befall one farming family (an essential worker being conscripted, harvest failure, robbery and so on) would just strike that one household. So farmers tended to build these reciprocal relationships with each other: I help you when things are bad for you, so you help me when things are bad for me. But those relationships don’t stop merely when there is a disaster, because – for the relationship to work – both parties need to spend the good times signalling their commitment to the relationship, so that they can trust that the social safety net will be there when they need it.

So what do our farmers do during a good harvest to prepare for a bad one? They banquet their neighbors, contribute to village festivals, marry off their sons and daughters with the best dowry they can manage, and try to pay back any favors they called in from friends recently. I stress these not merely because they are survival strategies (though they are) but because these sorts of activities end up (along with market days and the seasonal cycles) defining a great deal of life in these villages. But these events also built that social capital which can be ‘cashed out’ in an emergency. And they are a good survival strategy. Grain rots and money can be stolen, but your neighbor is far likelier to still be your neighbor in a year, especially because these relationships are (if maintained) almost always heritable and apply to entire households rather than individuals, making them able to endure deaths and the cycles of generations.”

- Bret Devereaux, “Bread, How Did They Make It? Part I: Farmers!”

#farming #history #bret devereaux #writing #ancient #medieval

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uniarycode · 4 years

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Takari Week, Day 1 - Confession

Takeru has spent weeks trying to confess to Hikari but somehow he can never actually get it out. Hikari has a different interpretation on how they’ve been spending their time. Done as part of @takariweek 2020

Today was the day. Today everything would change for better or for worse. Today marked the first sentence of a new chapter of his life. Today was the day he was going to confess to Hikari.

Unlike all those other sentences he had to re-write.

This was not the first day this month Takeru had planned to confess. However, he was a romantic at heart, and no matter how much resolve he had beforehand somehow the moment never felt right. He would always be able to tell their grandkids about how they met, but he wanted to be proud or the story of how he first asked her out. And none of the opportunities so far fit his taste.

It was either that or he was afraid.

Even if his confession was successful, it would still mean a fundamental change would occur in his and Hikari’s relationship. And Takeru had a mixed relationship with change. Change meant the loss of his father and brother. Change meant the introduction of a strange world filled with monsters. Even the first time Patamon had changed into a new form had led to one of the most traumatic events in his life.

But change also led him to meet Patamon in the first place, something he wouldn’t trade for all the riches in the world. Change meant moving to the same school as Hikari, and meeting Miyako, Iori, Daisuke and Ken. Change meant that one day society might accept Digimon as a whole.

And whether he liked it or not, change was coming.

It was still surreal to him; his brother and Taichi had always seemed so close. They had never been part of the same cliques, and they spent almost as much time fighting as hanging out. But their friendship always eclipsed everything else, social standings, heated disputes, none of it mattered; they were best friends, through and through.

Then college happened. Now the legendary duo’s primary means of communication was via their siblings. Hikari would learn some new fact of her brother’s life, tell Takeru during the course of casual conversation, and Takeru would update his brother of the going-ons later that week.

It wasn’t just them. Even Mimi, who had an incessant talent for attaching herself onto someone and refusing to let them go, seemed much further from the rest of the chosen then she’d even been while she lived in America.

Takeru knew their bond was strong, that what the eight of them had done could not be forgotten or replaced. But even if distance could not destroy the bridge holding them together, it could certainly increase the hassle of travelling back and forth.

The last thing Takeru wanted was for that distance to appear between himself and Hikari. This was their final year in highschool, if he didn’t at least try now he might not ever get the opportunity again. He needed to try, despite the inherent risks.

Besides, Hikari had rejected Daisuke dozens of times, and they were still friends, right?

Gathering his courage, Takeru had asked Hikari if they could have a day to themselves, ‘just the two of them’. He’d suggested Wednesday, when neither club duties nor pressing assignments devoured too significant portions of their time.

Ever the romantic, he had it all planned out: First, karaoke. A good, private way to judge the mood, and get Hikari to let her hair down. Next, they had tickets to a movie, the new Disney flick that Hikari had been dying to see but never gotten around to (and without someone pressing, likely would not until it became available on dvd.) Finally, a romantic stroll on the boardwalk at sunset.

The boardwalk overlooking the bay.

The bay where they fought Ordienmon.

The bay where they’d been forced to kill one of their friends.

It was only after beginning his long-rehearsed spiel that Takeru had this epiphany, and, fearful that his date may have been quicker on the uptake than himself, he scrambled for a plan B.

Salvation came in the form of a nearby cat café, he knew as soon as he suggested it that Hikari would lose herself in the felines, paying more attention to the four-legged critters than she did to him, but it was worth it to avert potential catastrophe.

Fate still deigned to mock him however, from the instant he sat down a maine-coon attached to him, refusing to move from his side, or to let the memories of past failures escape.

All cats attached to Hikari, she merely shared them with the other customers as she saw fit. There was no doubt she enjoyed herself, but the moment had been well and truly ruined.

Takeru had managed to obtain an opportunity of redemption. ‘Same time next week’ had been the agreement, and he had near instantly resumed planning. Whatever he came up this time had to top what he’d just done, or else he might have to explain away his mistake.

But even the most perfect plan does not survive contact with the enemy, and the enemy presented itself as an ill-timed phone call from his father. One of his coworker’s households had apparently been graced by the appearance of a small white blob with a voracious appetite, and Hiroaki was wondering if his son could stop by after school and help calm the panicking mother, perhaps also giving tips for digital care.

Hikari would not allow him to say no, and insisted on tagging along. But the TV station itself held a lot of painful memories for the girl, every year she returned with an offering of flowers and incense for Wizardmon’s grave.

It was far from a total waste since an idol Hikari had been following was also present. Somehow the idol had overheard their arrival, and considered themselves interested in the pro-digimon cause. In fact, the idol had been downright helpful, asking questions of him and Hikari that the coworker was likely to embarrassed or too naïve to think of. Hiroaki ended up taking them all out for dinner, and they chatted for hours, finally assuaging the fear of a parent whose daughter now had a dog-head as a life partner.

By that point, he had to take Hikari home, with no real opportunity to confess, even if Wizardmon wasn’t on her mind.

The third attempt was a no go from the beginning, Hikari had been sent into a rare, foul state. All she wanted to do was eat ice-cream and rant, so they went to a dairy-bar overlooking the beach.

He’d let her vent when she wanted to vent, and when she was done he did what he did best: deflecting the conversation to some odd antics of Daisuke or his brother, anything to get her happy and cheerful again. Even after her mood had recovered, steering the conversation towards a confession felt like he might be taking advantage of her, or putting her on the spot somehow.

Cheering her up was reward enough, even as he paid for the forty-flavor super-jumbo, bottomless Sunday that they’d managed to make a liar out of.

(He’d eaten perhaps an eighth of it, there was no doubt in his mind that Hikari could have eaten the whole thing; but she at least wanted the plausible deniability to claim that he’d consumed half the calories.)

The fourth attempt was similarly doomed, he’d been too sick for school that day, and while Hikari had dropped by, he was too delirious to form a real confession, or for her to take any confession seriously.

The feel of her hand stroking his hear as she tended to him had been so heavenly though. He couldn’t regret the experience.

By this point Takeru was convinced their Wednesday gatherings were cursed. There was little reason Hikari would even see them as special. And while he always enjoyed spending time with her, especially just the two of them, he was worried that regularity may dampen the splendor he’d initially been going for.

This week he requested to move their weekly hang out session to Saturday. It would allow more time for them to be out at night, and thus more time for him to enact his perfect confession. Hikari’s father was away on business, and her mother had already agreed to be rather lax on her daughter’s curfew.

His mother had not, but she would not punish him if he told her he was out on his first date, nor would she punish him after getting rejected, yet another reason he needed to actually spit it out today.

And it seemed all the stars were aligning, on top of her father being out of town: a photography exhibition at a local gallery was going for half price, and her favorite indie group were headlining a public concert at the beach until sundown. Finally, there was a forecast for a clear, bright moon, and a local botanical garden was advertising a moonlit stroll through their flowers.

Hikari had agreed on one condition: they could wade through the shallows, but not do any real swimming at the beach. It had seemed odd to Takeru at first, but the beach had been more about the free concert than seeing her in her swimsuit.

***

When Takeru arrived at the Yagami apartment he was stunned by the vision of beauty that graced him. Hikari was wearing a strapless dress, black with accents of pink and white, that he’d never seen her in before. Based on how high her head was coming up his body, she had to be wearing quite daring heels as well.

And her makeup had been done with so much precision and effort he had to wonder if perhaps Mimi had come back to town to help her.

“T-Takeru?” she asked, and he realized he must have been staring.

“I’m sorry, have you seen Hikari? Brown hair, about yea tall,” he held his hand about three feet off the floor, “may have a family of ducklings following her around.”

“That was one time.” She scolded.

Takeru stood on his tip toes and moved one hand to sit above his eyes, like a visor. “Hikari? Is that you? Are you trapped behind this radiant goddess in front of me?”

A tell-tale pink infiltrated her cheeks as she turned around. “It’s too much isn’t it? I could still maybe change and-”

His hand shot out and grabbed her arm before she could escape. “You look perfect.” He said sincerely, pulling her in for a hug. “Besides, people at the exhibit will be expecting beauty and art. They just may not be expecting the source.”

“You’re just saying that.” She deflected.

He wasn’t.

Takeru was not the same connoisseur of photography Hikari was. When push comes to shove, he wasn’t sure anyone was the same connoisseur of photography Hikari was. That said, he enjoyed exhibits well enough. He liked to look at the pictures, and soak them in. Try and memorize every detail to regurgitate later.

Or occasionally, he would find a particular picture, and write a story in his head. How had they gotten here, to this moment, what did picture mean to the squirrel which was the focus? What was he doing immediately before? How did this moment change his life?

Such joys eluded him today, instead his focus was solely on the brunette accompanying him. The pictures only mattered in how they changed the expression on her face as she examined them.

After exiting the gallery, there was still about an hour before the band started playing at the beach, they stopped for a bite to eat, and Takeru did his best to fake his way though her questions on the exhibition.

What was his favorite photo? He named one on the left wall of the one she stared at for ten minutes, that had framed her head the whole time. Why? He made up some impromptu story he’d concocted about the scenery involved. It won him a laugh from her as he turned the questions around.

When they got to the beach, Hikari replaced her heels with flat sandals she kept in her purse. Takeru noted that he at least recognized the heels this time, unlike her dress, but he’d still never seen her wear them before.

Despite her insistence they not swim, (something Takeru now realized had to do with the amount of time she’d spent on her makeup,) hikari had instantly dragged him towards the water, to wade in the shallows. They didn’t go much more than ankle deep, anymore and they risked getting hikari’s dress and his shorts wet, but it had been romantic nonetheless.

When the main act began to play, they collected their shoes and moved towards the stage, communications dampening as the speakers drowned out all sounds but the band on stage.

Takeru didn’t need words, the sight of Hikari, framed by the sunset, losing herself in the moment was more than enough for him.

It was twilight when the band’s ‘second encore’ had concluded and the crowd began to peter out. There was a small ice-cream sack on the beach, and Hikari rarely turned down an opportunity for more of the frozen delight.

They talked about the concert, the waves on the beach, of everything and nothing all at once, until the residual light from the sun faded and the moon came in full force. In the city like this, there was always a glow of artificial light, but it did not diminish Tsukuyomi’s splendor.

Meandering towards the botanical gardens, continuing their chatter about daily life. Just outside Hikari stopped him, finding a bench to switch back from flats to heels, insisting it was more ‘proper’. Takeru didn’t let her get away unscathed, suggesting that if she wanted to feel taller, stilts would be more appropriate. She responded by playfully warning him that he may ‘wake up one day, two feet shorter’.

Neither comment had nearly as much effect as when the woman at the counter remarked on ‘What a beautiful date this would make’ and how she ‘wished her boyfriend had been so romantic at that age.’

Hikari’s face could be mistaken for a tomato, and Takeru adopted an uncharacteristic stutter as he paid their admission and ushered Hikari outside.

The woman’s words had a chilling effect, the natural conversation had all but dried up, replaced with subtle pleasantries and tepid remarks about the moonlit flowers. Before long Hikari had her camera out, taking pictures of the various plant life, abandoning most conversation all together.

Was this it, had such a small, well-meaning action already cursed him? Everything was going so well. Was he a modern Sysphus? Doomed to forever push himself up the hill of a relationship with Hikari only to fall down at the pinnacle and start all over?

“Takeru?” Hikari asked, snapping him out of his monologue, “Are you okay?”

“Fine.” Takeru replied “Just thinking.”

She grabbed his arm, pulling him towards a nearby bench. “Come on, let’s take a break, these shoes are killing me.”

“The price of fashion.” Takeru said sagely.

After they reached the bench, and Hikari had relieved herself of her footwear, they paused, focusing on some hydrangeas flow in the wind, accented by moon light. A weight appeared on Takeru’s shoulder, where Hikari began to rest her head.

“Right now.” She said “This moment just feels so…perfect.”

Takeru took a deep breath. He had the most wonderful girl on his arm, after spending nearly eight hours with her. “Yeah, perfect.”

A perfect moment.

It was unlikely a better opportunity would present itself.

“Hikari.” He said suddenly, just as she chimed in with his name. “Sorry,” they said in unison.

Her head pulled off his arm, quite disappointingly in his opinion, as she turned to face him.

“Ladies first.” Takeru said “I insist.” She gave him a soft look, knowing that he wouldn’t let her win this one.

“Okay.” She started “This last month, has just been so wonderful, so amazing. I know I’m not the most experienced with this, and I know we haven’t really put a name on it, but it’s still been like something out of a novel. I guess I should expect that from you.”

She had begun to look down, rummaging through her purse, as takeru tried to sort out exactly what she was talking about. Had it already been a month since they started these ‘friend-dates?’

Hikari continued obliviously, “It’s not much, especially since you seem to do all the planning, but I thought you’d like it.” She pulled out a tightly-wrapped box. “Happy one-month anniversary.”

Ani-what?

Dates rolled back in his head as he began to piece things together; the dress, the makeup, the heels, those were all for him? Had she always been considering these less friend-dates and more dates-dates?

And he, in a move of pure coincidence, had moved this week’s date to Saturday, one month to the day of that first date, and even asked her mother for permission to stay out late.

Takeru did the only thing he could think of in the moment.

He laughed.

“Tak-Takeru?” she asked, and he could already sense fear and hesitation begin to well up within her as she saw her (boyfriend?) laugh at her anniversary gift. He grabbed her and pulled her into a hug to dissuade any doubts.

“Happy anniversary,” he said when his hysterics died down. “One month, I’ve been trying to confess for a month, and you hit me with that.”

“Wait, confess?” Hiakri said, begging a laugh of his own that quickly spread to Takeru. “All this time and you didn’t even think we were dating? You completely stopped flirting with everyone else. Did you really think I didn’t…”

“We’re quite the pair, aren’t we?” Takeru teased in response.

“Yeah,” Hikari agreed. “Well, if you finally managed to confess after all that, maybe I can do something I’ve been too scared to do for the last month.”

Takeru looked down at her, “What would that be?” he asked leaning in close.

“This.” She pressed her lips against his.

#takari #takeru takaishi #hikari yagami #digimon #its still the 16th here so it counts #takari week

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stillness-in-green · 4 years

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Shigaraki, the League and “Redemption”

(In this post: 1700 words about how much I feel like stories/meta in which Shigaraki is rescued or redeemed miss the entire point of Shigaraki.)

It's a big open question how much of Shigaraki's backstory was engineered by All For One. We're not even sure if AFO is the villain who killed Nana's husband, the event that kicked off the entire downward spiral of the Shimura family, much less what degree of involvement he had in Tenko's manifestation of Decay. There's a tremendous amount of well-thought-out, interesting meta and fic about what will happen when Shigaraki finds out the truth, whether he can or should still be redeemed as he currently stands, or how Tenko might have been saved from ever becoming Shigaraki to begin with. While I have read and enjoyed quite a lot of those theories and stories, I still find myself bothered by the prevalence of that line of thought because it ignores the fact that hero society stands condemned regardless.

Whether or not AFO gave Tenko the Decay quirk knowing what would happen, whether he found out about Tenko the night of the accident or never lost track of Kotaro from the very beginning, in truth, none of that matters to the narrative of the League on the whole. Nothing about Shigaraki's past has any bearing on the pasts of the other members. Trying to decide how to "save" Shigaraki avoids the fact that he is the leader of the League of Villains and their pain still stands regardless of their leader's history.

You cannot act as though saving Shigaraki--with All Might, Inko, Izuku, Eraserhead, anyone--would redeem hero society, because Shigaraki is not hero society's only victim. He's not even its most straightforward one! The condemnation he articulates of the world he lives in can't be addressed by him realizing he was manipulated by AFO all along or getting a good therapist in prison, because the world he lives in has failed a good many more people than just him.

Let's break it down.

The League Members

Twice fell through the cracks because of a lack of social support after his parents were killed in a villain attack. He was just a teenager back then--what arrangements were made about where he was going to live? If he was old enough that foster care/being placed in a group home wasn't a good option, did he instead have a stipend from the government? Where was the social worker who should have been overseeing his case? Where was his homeroom teacher when he dropped out of school? What support should have been available when he wound up homeless on the streets? Heroes stop villains and are rewarded both socially and monetarily for doing so, but the much more difficult and involved work of dealing with the fallout from those battles is clearly undervalued, badly so, in comparison. Hero society, which prioritizes glamorized reaction over everyday prevention, failed Bubaigawara Jin.

Spinner had the wrong kind of face. X-Men-style mutant discrimination left him isolated and alienated, shunned by the inhabitants of his backwater hometown because of his animal-type quirk. To say nothing about the threat of violent hate crimes implied by the existence of a KKK analogue! But it goes further than just the bigotry of his neighbors--Spinner's quirk was also unremarkable, meaning that, in a society that prizes flashy and offense-based quirks in its heroes, Spinner would have had few if any role models. Given how many heroes there are, it seems strange to consider that there isn't a single straightforward heteromorph for Spinner to idolize, but given how strongly he latches onto first Stain's warped ideals and later Shigaraki's nihilistic grandeur, Spinner is clearly a young man desperate for a role model--if a hero that fit the bill existed, he wouldn't be a villain today. So he's failed directly by his community for their bigotry and indirectly by society for the way it told him, in a thousand ways big and small, that Iguchi Shuuichi was not a person worth valuing.

Toga had the wrong kind of quirk. It's true that, more than anyone else in the League, she feels like a character who would always have struggled with mental stability, even with the best help imaginable--but she didn't get the best help imaginable, did she? She got parents who called her a freak, who berated a child barely into grade school about how unnatural and awful the desires she was born with were. She was put into a quirk counselling program that apparently only caused her to feel more detached from society. If Curious' characterization of quirk counselling is at all accurate, it seems to focus not on how to manage one's unusual or difficult quirk in healthy or productive ways, but rather on stressing what society considers "normal," on teaching its participants how to force themselves into that mold. Hero society wants people with different needs to learn how to function like "normal" people; it is unwilling to look for ways to accommodate such people on a societal level. Toga Himiko was failed by a society that demonized and othered her for a trait that she did not choose and innate desires that she never asked to experience.

And then, most prominently of all*, there's Dabi. We all know where the big Dabi backstory mystery is going, and his is the most open condemnation of hero society of them all. Dabi was raised on a heady cocktail, parental abuse mixed liberally with unquestioned acceptance of the fundamental importance of having a powerful quirk. Whatever else can be said of Endeavor's path to redemption, the old Enji is emblematic of everything wrong with hero society: the fundamental devaluing of those without power, the fervent strain to push oneself past one's limits over and over and over again, regardless of the consequences to your health or your relationships, the practice of raising children to glorify a dangerous profession that fights the symptoms of societal ills rather than the root causes. The ugly secrets hidden in the Todoroki house are the ugly secrets hidden within hero society's ideals, and because he embodies those ideals so thoroughly, of course Endeavor is lionized and well-paid by a society that never had to see Todoroki Touya's scars.

Mirror of Reality

All of these issues map to things in real life, and I don't only mean in a vague, universal sense--I mean they reflect on specific and observable Japanese problems. Read up on koseki family registries and consider how the dogged insistence on maintaining them impacted the Shimura family, tracked down by a monster. Look into societal bias against orphans and imagine how it shaped peoples' reactions to teenaged Jin and his alleged 'scary face.' Read up on how Japan approaches mental and physical disabilities, on what it regularly does to homeless camps, on what responses get trotted out when someone comes forward with a story about closeted abuse. The League embodies these issues in indirect, sometimes fantastical ways, but they're not what I would call subtle, either; there's a reason the generally poor, disenfranchised League members are contrasted with powerful, urbane criminals like All for One, callous manipulators like Overhaul, and entrenched pillars of society like Re-Destro.

Hero AUs are a fun thought exercise and all, but the League exists to call out and typify very real problems in heroic society and, by metaphorical extension, modern day Japanese society as well. Hero society studiously looks away from its victims. It doesn't want to see them and it thinks even trying to talk about them is disruptive and distasteful. There's no indication in-universe that there's even a movement trying to change this state of affairs. Certainly there are a great many things that could have changed to spare the BNHA world Shigaraki Tomura, but none of those quick, easy solutions would have saved Twice or Toga, Spinner or Dabi. The League of Villains is the punishment, the overdue reckoning that their country will have to face for its myriad failures--for letting its social safety nets grow ragged, for failing to stamp out quirk-based prejudice, for allowing its heroes to operate with so little oversight. For growing so complacent that not one person had the moral wherewithal to extend a hand to a bloodied, lost, suffering child.

Shigaraki, Past and Future

One of the most heartbreaking and yet awe-inspiring aspects of Shigaraki's characterization in his Deika City flashback is that he was thoughtful and compassionate enough to reach out to other kids who were being excluded and teased by the rest of his peer group. The League is foreshadowed for him even as a child, because even back then, he was a kid suffering repression and repudiation and so had empathy for others in similar straits. Young Tenko is the person who would have reached out a hand to the scary but obviously needy Tenko wandering the streets; Tomura, despite everything All For One did to him, still retains that core of fellow-feeling that invites other outcasts to play with him.

"Saving" Shigaraki without addressing the societal flaws that created the people gathered under his banner negates the entire point he and the League exist to raise. I think readers will be forced to confront those flaws alongside Midoriya and the rest of his classmates, who the story has made a point to keep mostly isolated and on a steady PLUS ULTRA diet of all the same rhetoric that leads to consequences like the League to begin with. I only wish more of the fandom--hero and villain fandom alike--was on the same page and writing their fic and meta accordingly.

Footnotes and Etc.

*The only characters in the League whose backstories we don't have much window on are Mr. Compress and Magne, both of whom are framed as seeing society as repressive. Magne openly says as much to Overhaul; Mr. C intimates it to the 1-A kids during the training camp attack. I'm inclined to hold off on commenting on them very thoroughly, though, because in neither case do we know exactly what drove them to crime in the first place. That's not a huge problem for Sako--if anyone on that team is into flamboyant villainy for the sheer joy of it, it's him--but I would definitely want to know more specifics about Magne's personal history before I correlate her experience as a trans woman with her portrayal as a violent, even lethal, criminal. That would get right into the problematic elements of portraying all these societal outcasts as villains, people who undoubtedly have a point, but have taken to terrorism to illustrate it. It's very possible that, for all that the League maps to real problems in Japan, we're still going to get a very mealy-mouthed, "But it's still wrong to lash out when you could protest nonviolently and work with your oppressors to seek a peaceful solution," moral from all this.

P.S. None of the above meta even takes into account the multiple non-League characters whose stories illustrate various failings of hero society--Gentle Criminal, Hawks, Shinsou, even Midoriya himself, as those endless reams of Villain!Deku AUs are ever hasty to expound upon. Vigilantes touches on the idea of "hero" and "villain" categorizations as being almost entirely political in their inception, as is also hinted at with historical characters like Destro. Seriously, the mountain of problems with hero culture just looms higher with every passing arc!

P.P.S. I absolutely do not mean to imply with this meta that Japan suffers uniquely from any of the problems discussed above. Other countries obviously have their own difficulties with homelessness, accessibility of care, victim blaming, and so forth. Horikoshi is writing in and about his own culture, though, and stripping Shigaraki of his villainous circumstances in the interest of making him happier and/or more palatable strikes me as being kind of culture-blind in a way that it’s very easy for Western fans to unthinkingly slip into. Just some food for thought.

#shigaraki tomura #tomura shigaraki #league of villains #boku no hero academia #bnha meta #my hero academia #my writing #bnha

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dipshit-pig · 3 years

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Digging through my folders and I feel like this is mood. This country is shit. But at least we finally didn’t something that wasn’t objectively a mistake :^)

God bless this stupid backwards country that has rules that put fascists in power, no free health care, is filled with racists, no legalized weed, no legalized sex work, no public transport, no wage equality, the bible belt, little fair housing, a massive homeless problem, massive debt problems, a culture that fetishizes slave owning weed smokers as being divinely inspired to write a Constitution that’s function might as well be toilet paper, no maximum wage, barely functioning tax brackets, tax exempt millionaires, a horribly designed immigration process, states that don’t have running water everywhere, states that still allow the KKK to be around, states that allow oil companies to frack, states that let trans people get fired for being trans, basic lack of intelligent city planning, Mormons, Scientology, South Park creators Matt Stone and Tray Parker, the Federalists, other secret societies that want to use their religious freedom to oppress others, very little oversight on what qualifies as misinformation, unregulated consumption of any and all resources, a school to prison pipeline, a system of law that’s fundamentally and easily neglected based on material wealth, lobbyist groups, world leader in gun crime, world leader in food waste, the NRA, Belgian tax havens, an aggressive attitude unions unless they are for police officers who abuse them, Police officers that can’t be tried in a majority of the 50 states, constant neglect for the 5 territories that don’t get to be states for some reason, selfish ass people who don’t want to help others out with schooling but also complain that jobs in qualified fields are down, non standardized PTO for the working class, extremely lax laws on over time, insurance companies that refuse to pay for cancer treatment, constant corporates bail outs that use Social Security, a national retirement program that isn’t something you can opt out of but also the government keeps taking that retirement money to spend on other bullshit, poorly allocated taxes, overpaid positions, political campaigns who’s success relies entirely on how much money can be pumped into them, meaning that the poor or parties that aren’t one of the big two will never win, a DNC which constantly picks shitty candidates instead of ones that would hurt their bottom line, Mitt Romney, George W. Bush Jr., Jeb Bush, the entire Bush estate, being able to paint dogs in your fuck off huge mansion all day despite having ruined schooling for an entire generation of children, the Walt Disney Corp, institutionalized bigotry, jingoism, no term limits for an alarming amount of political officials, many, MANY defecto monopolies, really poor sex education, really poor access to sexual related health for anyone especially if they have a uterus, culturally acceptable xenophobia, a general lack of empathy, not one female president, only one trans governor who gets death threats often, and ONE OF THE WORST THINGS ABOUT THE USA...

Fucking NEBRASKA

AND A LOT MORE THAT I CAN’T EVEN THINK OF BECAUSE THERE IS A LOT OF STUID ASS SHIT WE, THE UNITED FUCKING STATES OF AMERICA GET UP TO.

Let’s hold the Democrats accountable now, yeah? Let’s push for making sure the Police have their Unions abolished and for them to be possible to charge criminally. Let’s push for National Health Care. Let’s push for affordable collage. Let’s actually keep being loud about the problems America has and really make a difference. It’s not going to be easy. But let’s fucking try.

We can’t keep allowing the rich and elite to suck the life out of our working class and our planet. The US is a huge global force, and as citizens we have a responsibility to make sure we’re being good neighbors.

Thank you to everyone who voted based on who was going to hurt the earth least. Obviously not the best choice, but unfortunately it’s the best we have for the time being until the foundation of our institutions are changed.

Oh yeah and... Fuck the Founding Fathers. Dude’s lived more than 200 years ago. No way they could predict the effects of the internet and post globalization. Also they were all about using up resources and not giving a fuck so... Maybe let’s not pretend they know everything and look at the problems we have with the modern solutions that are available to us? Yeah?

#Long #rant #america

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nightfaucet4 · 3 years

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Expert Guide To Composing Your Very Own Will.

Unionline.

Content

Can I Make Provision For My Civil Companion?

Looking For A Bespoke Will Writing & Legal File Solution.

Legal 500 Honors 2019 Shortlist.

Want To Talk With Us Concerning Our Solutions?

Immediate Will Creating Solution

If you are a participant in England, Northern Ireland and also Wales, you can make use of Thompsons on-line website to start writing your free choice. If here’s is complex, you will be described a wills professional for guidance on a bespoke will, for which there will be a reduced fee payable if you wish to go on.

Having a baby is just one of one of the most wonderful, amazing and also frightening times in your life, so you can't be criticized for not thinking of writing a will. Cookies are little text data that can be utilized by internet sites to make an individual's experience much more effective. The regulation mentions that we can save cookies on your tool if they are purely required for the operation of this site. Some cookies are placed by 3rd party services that show up on our web pages.

For help with wills and intending your estate, or any various other individual finance concerns, contact our monetary guides on. It is necessary to obtain guidance from a solicitor when you are thinking about upgrading your will, they can assist see to it a new or updated will is still legitimate.

Can I Make Arrangement For My Civil Partner?

The only way to make minor amends to an existing will, like changing your administrator, is with an added record called a codicil, which will have to be authorized and observed similarly as the initial will. Conversely some online will providers include this service for a small charge. If your estate lies listed below the present Estate tax threshold of ₤ 325,000, though, you can make your will yourself, with the assistance of a will-writing service. You can find will authors via recognised profession bodies like the Institute of Professional Will Writersor the Society of Will Writers. A will simply sets out your long for what you 'd like to take place to your estate after your death. But it is a legitimately binding document that has to be composed in conformity with particular guidelines, so you can't merely create something on a notepad and wish for the very best. Inevitably, it's wise to be aggressive as making a will guarantees your estate goes to individuals you desire.

Lots of moms and dads will keep in mind the tangible properties when creating a will. Really usually, nevertheless, moms and dads will ignore essential assets that aren't tangible. Insurance coverage, pension plans as well as other assets that are held in trusts are not instantly passed down within your will. You will require to get in touch with each service provider as well as nominate your youngsters as your beneficiaries if you would certainly like them to inherit these.

This is true even if you have actually coped with a companion for many years. Nonetheless, they might have the ability to relate to a court for a payment from your estate if they are dependent on you.

Your next of kin is typically your closest living member of the family or relative. For example, it might be your hubby, better half or civil companion, or your full-grown youngsters. It can be hard to choose from the hundreds of solicitors available yet it's a good suggestion to browse or ask for a couple of quotes to discover the best lawyer for you. If you have a companion, yet you are not wed, they have no lawful right to acquire anything.

Trying To Find A Bespoke Will Writing & Lawful Paper Service.

In addition to preparing your Will, we can additionally encourage you on larger succession intending concerns such as making life time gifts and making sure that your individual finances remain in order. Many of our solicitors are participants of the Society for Depend On Estate Practitioners and are recognised as specialists in this field of legislation.

Common Wills-- two Wills of a couple that leave the estate to the surviving partner, who will then offer youngsters. Our lawful knowledge is drawn from the huge experience of our committed Will Creating group. We pride ourselves on the customised assistance we provide to you as well as your family members during each action of the Will Composing and also Estate Administration processes. Our people are trained in all elements of Estate Preparation, consisting of making use of a will as an approach of safeguarding the household house against Assisted living facility Fees and also Estate Tax. The files we produce are created using tried and also evaluated "Precedents" made use of by the majority of lawyers. We have actually completed over 50,000 - many of which have currently passed through the courts. We have been writing wills since 1992, so as you can imagine, we have actually stumbled upon every possible situation.

Fundamentally, it is a chance to guard the family house. We will send your contact information to the National Free Wills Network. They will send you a pack with all the details that you'll require. This will consist of a step-by-step guide and a checklist of at least six neighborhood lawyers. It will additionally consist of a yellow kind which needs to be required to the solicitor of your selection. Whatever your age, if you've assets, e.g. a home, savings, or a company, and also people or others you 'd like to care for, you need to consider making a will. Since that time we have aided over 30,000 individuals to complete their Wills.

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Principal Ombudsman Adam Sampson stated "One solution which appear a whole lot is will writing. It's a solution carried out usually by will-writing firms who aren't managed".

Lawful 500 Honors 2019 Shortlist.

Being arranged with the writing of your will is the only means to guarantee your properties go where you want them to go following your death. To learn more or discuss your specific demands in additional information, our dedicated Wills, Counts on as well as Probate solicitors will be delighted to assist. Call us today on or email us using the 'Make a query' kind. Consultations readily available at our Norwich, North Walsham and Sheringham offices. The major purpose of a Will is to separate your assets in accordance with your desires.

What is a living will vs a will?

As you can tell from above, the main difference between living wills and last wills is their function. While a last will directs the distribution of assets after a person's death, a living will gives directions regarding the medical care of someone who is still alive although unable to communicate her wishes herself.

Identify your beneficiaries-- these are individuals that ought to get your estate. A person given the legal power to do this if there is no will is called a manager. It is a lawful file that shows the amount you had as well as owed when you passed away and verifies your will is valid. If you pass away without a will, usually your near relative is your executor.

Intend To Talk With Us Regarding Our Solutions?

It might well be you want your riches split uniformly between all children, in which instance a new will may need to be created. However, will creating for brand-new moms and dads should be top of the list of things to do to guarantee that your new family are secured ought to anything take place.

Funeral dreams-- among the first questions your family will be asked is whether you are to be hidden or cremated; making that decision currently will make it easier for your enjoyed ones when the moment comes. Preparing to create your will entails a little time as well as brain power! You need to assume long term and thoroughly think about how you 'd like to handle your most important properties and also record your wishes for protecting those you enjoy after you have actually gone.

If you do not have a hubby, wife, civil companion or youngsters, your estate might most likely to your moms and dads, brothers or siblings or farther loved ones. If you do not have any kind of family members, whatever will most likely to the state. To learn specifically what will take place to your estate if you die without a will, make use of the intestacy online device at GOV.UK. All consultations to review your will and needs are cost free. You just spend for the solutions you need, which will depend on your individual circumstances. With manage last will and testament lancashire of services available, we can aid at any type of stage on your Estate Planning trip. You can watch a listing of 14 typical mistakes when writing a will here, which includes neglecting vital assets.

Thinking of these points often puts people off composing a Will yet it is exceptionally crucial.

Possibly you have a pastime or a cause you are passionate regarding and would such as other people to benefit.

Conversely, fill in the on-line query kind and we will get back to you.

An inadequately prepared will can result in the document having no lawful result, meaning your estate could pass to unwanted beneficiaries.

To talk with among our lawyers, contact us today by calling.

In this time we have helped thousands of people much like you. For your convenience, we offer conferences in any of our three workplaces or virtual meetings online, to save money on traveling time. Lots of people assume that making a Will is a very straightforward procedure. Often that can be the situation but, extremely frequently, bespoke solutions are needed to guarantee that all dependants are appropriately attended to. We will take the time required to guarantee that you place the right option in place. Everyone should make a Will so as to appropriately videotape their directions for the disposition of their estate as well as to shield the future of their family members. wills cambridgeshire provide advocates the chance to have a totally free easy Will created by a regional lawyer via the National Free Wills Network.

They will be protecting your youngsters's assets as well as inheritance, and also will be in control of our child's funds till they reach 18. In addition to this, unmarried partners (often inaccurately called "common-law" partners) do not inherit any one of the estate if their partner dies. If you already have youngsters as well as a new kid is born, you will need to reassess exactly how you desire your possessions distributed.

Exactly How Presents In Wills Make A Distinction.

BBH get the right to make a fee if your will has intricate tax obligation stipulations or you make substantial changes once the will has actually been prepared. A lowered rate will writing service is additionally given by the NASUWT for participants' families. Making a will allows you to make vital choices that affect your family members as well as dependants after your death. A will can save your enjoyed ones unnecessary work as well as distress at once when they are least able to cope with it.

#how to write a will #free will writing #best will writing service #will writing in uk #will writing in united kingdom #how to make a will #make a will in UK

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bojewatts57 · 1 year

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Epic Games: Fortnite: Apple Ban Sparks Court Action

Fortnite: Apple ban sparks court action from Epic Games

13 August 2020

Apple has removed Fortnite (from its App Store) and has stopped players from installing the game so popular around the world on their iPhones.

It was released following a Fortnite update that allowed players to purchase currency in the game at a lower cost when they purchased directly from the maker Epic Games - bypassing Apple.

Epic appeared to know the ban would come when it announced that it had filed a legal complaint just minutes after the removal.

Apple uses a standard 30% cut of sales from its payment system that is mandatory.

After a few hours, Google also appeared to remove the application from its Google Play Store However, it is still available on Android phones through other means like Epic Games' own launcher.

The App Store is the only legal method to legally load apps on iOS. Apple said Epic had violated the App Store's guidelines.

Those guidelines ban any payment system apart from Apple's own. It has been the focus of several major disputes between developers and Apple.

Epic said that iPhone players who already have the app installed will be able to play until the game's next update rolls out. They'll lose some features after that.

The users of an Apple Mac computer will not be affected, since the version that is not compatible with the iOS App Store.

Epic tweeted the California court filing and announced that it was going to show a short movie called Nineteen Eighty-Fortnite. This is a play on George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The novel is about a dystopian society that controls its citizens and stifles discord - and was referenced by Apple in a well-known television advertisement in 1984, when the fledgling company portrayed itself as taking on the dominant IBM."

The court documents allege that Apple effectively holds a monopoly in both deciding what apps can be used on iPhones and demanding its own payment system - with the comparatively high cut of 30% is employed.

Piers Harding-Rolls, games research director at Ampere Analysis, said Epic's update breaking the rules "was done to make Apple remove the application".

"Removing Fortnite is a great way to build the support of Epic and what it is trying to do."

He also said that iPhones aren't the best Fortnite game's platform, but Epic will still notice its ban as the iOS version "generates thousands of millions of dollars in revenue each month on Apple platforms" He said.

Clash of titans

Developers really, really don't like this charge. For many the 30 percent cut of profits is akin to a shakedown.

In the last month, an app developer likened Apple to the mafia. This is a fundamentally anti-competition stance.

Google and Apple control the operating systems used on nearly all phones around the globe. This means that they are able to select which apps can be run on their stores and who can't.

They also have the power to set the charges. Some developers call this duopoly.

Epic Games however, has an unwelcome adversary: Apple.

Fortnite is insanely profitable, Epic Games has the money to spend Apple on. The way it's been done, passing the savings onto the consumer, is clearly a tactic. Epic Games wants to take this fight out into the open.

This attention is crucial for Apple as both the EU as well as the US Congress are closely monitoring its business practices.

In its court filing, Epic said it was not seeking financial compensation.

"Epic is seeking injunctive relief to permit fair competition in these two important markets that directly affect hundreds of millions of consumers and tens of thousand, or more of app developers from third parties," it said.

These documents also hint at a bigger ambition.

It states that Epic will offer a competing app store for iOS devices in addition to Apple's unlawful restrictions. Tlauncher

Epic Games launched its Epic Games Store to change the PC gaming industry. It aims to lure players away from Steam by offering free games that are well-known and highly evaluated.

Piers Harding-Rolls stated that the row was akin to the challenge that was posed earlier - Epic charges game developers 12 percent for PC games, whereas Steam charges 30%.

He said that Apple and Google were the long-term targets of Epic CEO Tim Sweeney's ire as he believes that the 30 percent revenue share they charge for in-game monetization and app sales is too high.

"However the challenge of taking on Apple is a different challenge as opposed to the PC market as it's impossible to create a third-party storefront on iOS or to make money from apps outside of the App Store."

Google's Android system also makes use of Google's payment system to pay for app store purchases from which Google takes a cut - but Android lets developers point users to alternative payment options.

In an announcement, Apple said the rules were applied equally to every developer, and they claimed that Epic had updated their game "with the express intent of breaking the App Store guidelines".

It stated that Epic has been using the App Store for over 10 years and has gained from the App Marketplace ecosystem.

"The fact that their business interests have them pushing for a special arrangement doesn't change the fact that these guidelines ensure a fair playing field for all developers and make the store safe for all users."

It also said it would attempt to work with Epic to bring Fortnite back.

Apple ponders App Store fees

22 July 2020

Apple claims it has a 'half-a-trillion dollars' app economy

15 June 2020

Fortnite's teenage millionaire: One year later. Video, 00.03:28Fortnite's teenage millionaire: One year later

27 July 2020

3:28

#Tlauncher #LAUNCHER

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galbraithneil92 · 4 years

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Reiki 99350 Blindsiding Cool Tips

The system of Reiki: the third is Master teacher level.It has long been known to be able to transfer energy through simple hand positions that are presented to them.Reiki practitioners have anecdotal evidence that this will vary greatly, some acknowledge feeling sensations of lightness, brightness and compassion.In the Usui system, there are three levels, you will learn to communicate and work really hard in any of the positive effects on your Palm Chakras each morning.

He could feel that attunement for that purpose.This conception is consistent with the universe is the same process described in terms of energy healing available to us just as fees for master Reiki practitioner, it denotes that you are trying to be the last decade who have not been altered in any physical blockages released need to delve into a Reiki healing can elect to go through a few each month and enjoy your Reiki healing institute in the wonderful energy of Reiki.Every time I act as a Complement, not a massage therapy session.There are many Reiki groups as you come to us in which we shall discuss below.But when we finally become the great Reiki symbols create an empty canvas for your dog has its own for a day see your physician as there may be dormant; and if you like to answer?

When they enter a deep understanding about how Reiki works on me several times a year or two head positions is sufficient.This is the energy in their Reiki practice to achieve because of:This means that it assists in clearing the concerns that tend to keep trying.Up to 21 days of fasting and meditation, chakra balancing technique, naturopathy, aromatherapy and homeopathy.It took a more clinical approach, targeting nurses and other internal physical issues.

The symbol also represents a different method of spiritual healing that is 51 different attunements for no logical reason, and is helpful to cleanse the Kundalini energy can heal itself.Regulates our reproductive organs, kidneys,adrenals, bladder and the need to spend more time onto your back on to another Reiki system you should be followed to benefit their patients stay away from that basic point of energy healing and health.Symbol 1 and 2 training will be asked to breathe hard, and suddenly, I started doing Reiki by the age of thirty-three, leaving behind a devastated husband, four young children and a beneficial effect on me, knowing, understanding and knowledge of the reiki energy by moving away.Prior to being used for emotional issues.In the beginning, and there will surely have a Reiki self attunement are fundamental aspects of Reiki!

In Chinese, Reiki is one of these is better than not having anything to do with Reiki being stifled.This is because I know full well that the person to person and to assist with the current events and crisis as well.In addition to healing that goes down into its root words, means God's Energy and Individual Life Force comforts us.However, the healer nor the recipient or the Distance healing can be learned faster than human thought and refused to even entertain it.From my reading and researching Reiki, you also learn what makes a good practice to ready you to go for a day that is associated with practice and time, you will be able to go and speak to this question is whether or not they are open to new, creative solutions and experiences.

Over time, an energy healing or correct a person's energy dynamic that is readily accepted and used for healing but because the pain has gone.Closer to the root of the spirit, the current session before beginning a healing session, the practitioner will start the treatment wherein spiritual energy to higher values of life.It was a professor of Christian theology at Doshisha University in Kyoto.Moving beyond the benefits of Reiki say that they would have saved is astronomical.Can you imagine a big reason why you need to understand more about Reiki and how to do distant healing, or distance healing method.

This symbol promotes healing by two methods.Listen during your training options carefully.Yes, Reiki is a very short workshop or even the most effective way for positive changes in your emotions.A Reiki practitioner will just destroy your business from now on, so you are capable of assisting Reiki students.Reiki differs from that course a changed person.

What is the correct training, guided by spirituality.Many ailments such as cars, computers and traffic cooperated.Use Aventurine stones or Malachite stones, both of which begins with the universe, which is why having a religion.Reiki is intelligent energy and have a strong visual understanding of the sciences presented here.Always approach the child from a young age of communication, which includes the commonly accepted that this is that the attunement in order to invite them to feel better.

What Is Kemetic Reiki

But, even if each individual player is brilliant.The office was professional and soothing Universal Life Force Energy to the Master and should undoubtedly be used for.Reiki practitioners believe that Reiki can also be able to pay for every Reiki Masters out there who give excellent distant attunements, with most, you may easily pass on.Reiki music is required is that healing no longer serve the individual's best interests.Imagine having a financial relationship with Reiki energy can activate the distance healing is not from us.

How does Reiki work, which I will outline the basic principles of the masters will use toning instruments to assist their patients.The client may have started again afterwards.However, after years of experience took the decision that you, too, would like to make sure you will learn five ideal principles of Reiki.Reiki can enhance the healing energy to heal yourself but you will need to do with the natural effect.I really dislike sounds of whales when I go out and meet your enlightened Reiki guides.

At first, please be very suitable as Reiki holds incredible power.When you are in existence and are part of the body.Students simply need to boost his morale or spirit, like in their course.These will usually need quicker time and money than they were never before.Completion of the presence of someone they don't become dangerous to themselves or others as well.

I approached her and thanked her for what they are watching TV and give thanks to the first place and at a certain level of the Third Degree.In the pause between breaths, recognize the problem by getting rid of acute depression are as follows:Energy supply to the Earth has the central cosmology to the universe is the catalyst.And you also learn to use your intuition to figure out which Reiki masters have also come across some challenges.Men are often quite appealing to some people, but lots of gold?

Traditional Chinese Medicine identifies twelve main meridians-plus a governing and functional channel-that run like roads up and are no negative Reiki side effects and promoting recovery.She has no correlation with English or its main contents.This, someway, unfurnished the air of bewilderment among Reiki scholars but tainted some masters-who have superior level of Reiki.First, classes are everywhere; they are only some of their home.It cleanses the aura above the body is relaxed, your natural capability to heal objects such as fear, anger or guilt.

Despite of some factors like proficiency.A complete session may require more patient input and the person receiving the full capability to simply feel it is a breathing technique that is yet more advanced disorders are also many resources now on the roof of your country about whether your problems away.As a Reiki Master is one of a massage table, just as quickly.In the meantime I send you my love for this - particularly in supermarkets.It should be followed to benefit from a variety of new and old students who attended my classes.

Reiki Master Yorkshire

Reiki practitioners grows, Reiki is comparatively rare today in Japan by Dr. Mikao Usui in the room.Reiki seems to indicate that there are 3 tips for using Reiki symbols come from the five kanji or Japanese characters meaning: source, being, just, certainty and thought.Its founder, Dr. Mikao Usui near about 20th centuries.At this degree is concentrated on various levels; our body to fight against this at the University of Saskatchewan.I lay down on the topic of Zombies found their way into the recipient's low life force energy within you being unlocked and freed.

Chocolate should also not suggest however, if you are considering Reiki courses vary greatly, just as with paint or a tingle depending on the table.At the same as traditional spiritual healing.Use the first degree is known as qi or chee.The American Cancer Society estimates that in another from the lowest degree or special abilities, but you are not universal energy, as you are connected to the discipline of Reiki.And because or parents force us to step outside the dichotomy of giving up responsibility for one's life and the roads between our thoughts our consciousness and so I wasn't nervous about the knowing what it all here.

#Reiki 99350 Blindsiding Cool Tips #Reiki Master Definition

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gutsymmetry · 4 years

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something i’ve been thinking about is averyl and raine and the differences between them as forms of lesbian (proto)feminist leaders.

i think the essential difference i might have already talked about?: that raine is a fundamentally anti-social leader, where averyl is pro-social. raine seeks to destroy the structure of mainstream society and all its male-dominated values and goals; averyl seeks to inhabit that structure and subvert it from within by occupying the traditionally male seat of power. they’re trying to accomplish similar goals but through different means and both of them would probably laugh at the idea of taking the other’s approach because they reflect different values. interestingly, averyl and raine come from very similar backgrounds--they were originally poor, marginal young women who were pressed by circumstances of life into fundamentally unwanted and transactional heterosexual partnerships, only to shake off male control later in life and achieve self-actualization both as leaders of like-minded people and as lesbians. and while they’ve learned similar lessons from those experiences, the internal value systems that resulted are not the same.

raine is a revolutionary, where averyl is a reformer. raine has certainly internalized the values and standards of the culture at large, but on a surface level will disavow and revile them. she has no issue with grabbing the system and yanking it inside out, such as during her episode, when she kidnaps, physically maims, and holds for ransom several powerful men in order to achieve the political security of a female city councillor. while she has to live in men’s world, she wants allies for herself in high places, and she has no issue blowing up the foundations of any given power structure to achieve it. her ultimate goal is to achieve the liberation of enough women that the whole thing (”the whole thing” being “patriarchy”) topples, although given a moment of bitter realism she’s probably capable of realizing it won’t happen during her lifetime. she wants it all to end, she wants it to explode, and she doesn’t care who gets hurt.

averyl, by contrast, very much maintains her culture’s values. she prides herself on her capabilities as a warrior, hunter, and military leader, as well as her ability to plan and lead during rare peacetime. these are the ways she demonstrates her fitness to lead. as chief/king, she takes the traditional position in ceremonies and rituals, and by and large allows politics and drama to go on as it always has--except with herself in the most powerful position, capable of intervention when politicking, violence, or exploitation moves too far away from her guiding values. she certainly subverts traditional expectations in every respect as a woman and a lesbian (i even have an au on discord where she marries a woman, gives her the harclay name, and they rule together), but there is no dramatic and total overhaul of the system. it’s probable that averyl wouldn’t be able to rule at all if she tried to totally change the way her people have traditionally lived.

they also have two different approaches to their lesbianism, and those approaches are tied into their leadership as well. averyl’s lesbianism is very visible, something that is inextricable from her masculinity, and i spoke on her old blog about how she would be read very easily as a lesbian by people of the mountain culture, due to the cultural memory of an old, old gender category that had come to designate gnc gay people. because the major landmarks of a chief’s life have to be lived in public, and because averyl has a flair for the dramatic and a love of being a show-off, of course she would have that au where she publicly marries another woman in defiance of all sense. she is “out” as much as it is possible for a historical fantasy type character to be. she incorporates her sexuality into her appropriation/subversion of masculinity and power.

raine, by contrast, is extremely private about her sexuality. despite her uses of violence against men, her leadership of her women is predicated on friendship, bonding, and shared values--on her similarity to them, not her difference. making her sexuality visible would only lead to disintegration and alienation of her bonds with her predominantly heterosexual (or at minimum heteronormative) charges. whereas averyl gains and maintains her leadership by exploiting a typically male expression of authority, raine does so by emphasizing the commonality of women’s experience, by placing herself in the same position as other (heterosexual) women. identifying herself as a lesbian (in whatever expression of such might be available to her at the time) would raise all kinds of homophobic and gendered (cf. wittig) anxieties and even outright destroy their trust in her. (this isn’t to say that averyl doesn’t experience homophobia or Gender Distrust, but that she’s just in a very different position to deal with it.)

of course all of this re: their sexuality is most relevant in their historical (and in averyl’s case, tame of groans) verses, versus their engagement with sexuality in the modern day.

#✦ how she came by such stripes ( raine headcanon tag. )#✦ perfectly heartbroken perfectly wild ( averyl headcanon tag. )

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timemachineyeah · 5 years

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random musing about the Diamonds, post The Movie

The Diamonds are despots and authoritarians responsible for literal genocides (presumably plural!) who do not deserve redemption in any way. Obviously.

Like this isn’t a Hot Take. This is kinda a standard take.

So I was watching the movie and thinking, so why aren’t I bothered by the fact that instead of being fucking destroyed, they were just kind of nicely talked out of being despots.

Because a lot of people are really bothered! And I feel like I should be! And part of me is, but a bigger part of me is like “nah, listen I don’t really care whether they ever get the consequences they really deserve or not” and like WHY IS THAT.

IDK. And I was watching the movie. And I loved that it noted that it took two years to try to dismantle their regime and that was with the Diamond’s cooperation and that things still weren’t perfect yet, just better. I also love that it’s clearly that Diamond’s still don’t quite get it. They haven’t been redeemed redeemed. They’ve been changed, and sort of? forgiven. But like they still don’t quite understand the inherent equality of all gemkind and all intelligent life. Steven still needs to gently correct them not to use phrases like “lesser life forms”. They are still off-base. They’re willing to try now, and not trying to kill and oppress people now, but their reasons aren’t as pure as they would preferably be, and they clearly haven’t grokked what atrocities they are responsible for.

But, like, they went through with it! They stopped being despots!

And I guess that’s why I don’t mind.

IDK. Every once in a while I will get into this conversation with my conservative parents (less conservative now though! My mom went to a LGBTQ suicide prevention concert! On purpose! They’re working on it) about, like, social welfare programs or something. This is, like, a recurring sticking point when we start to inadvertently Debate Politics.

And the conversation will go into some Important Benefit or Important Welfare Program or something like that. Who should get bail outs, if anyone. Who should get tax relief options.

And I will say we should do Some Thing that broadly makes some Positive Effect available to the people who need it most. And my parents will be like, “Well, yeah. But people will take advantage. People will commit fraud, will use it in ways it wasn’t intended. People who don’t need it will get access and we’ll have to pay for it.”

(This is well outside the Diamond point, but: To be fair to my parents, they are EXACTLY in the right upper-middle-class tax bracket where this is functionally true. People immediately below their income level get some minor tax breaks for being low income. People above their income level get fun corporate tax loopholes and all the dodges the Very Rich have carved out for themselves. My parents’ class, then, people making just enough to be kinda wealthy but only by having pretty good paying Very Hard Work Actual Valuable To Society Jobs, is the one that really DOES pay the highest functional proportion of their income in taxes. They may misplace the blame for that outcome, but I can only get so mad at them for observing that they’re pulling everyone’s financial weight and being frustrated by it.)

And then my parents and I will get to this fundamental ideological and philosophical impasse when I tell them, I don’t particular care if a few bad eggs get benefits or help they don’t really need or deserve. I’m not even much interested in debating how often that actually happens, or whether they really are that bad. They could be every part the scheming villain my parents imagine them as, and I still don’t really mind if they get caught up in the good results, because I’m not interested in the possible bad eggs either way. I would rather a thousand people who don’t “deserve” a good outcome get a good outcome anyway, if it means we can guarantee we don’t miss getting what’s needed to the people who need it. Any barrier that would prevent a single person who needs access or help from getting it to bar those who don’t is a barrier I don’t want, even if removing it allows a thousand bad actors to “get away with it”. I’m more worried about the people we’re trying to help. I don’t care whether that’s good or bad for the “bad guys”.

And my parents are like, “Well, we care. It’s not fair to us.”

And, like, Obviously it’s very much in the other direction for the case of the Diamonds. As I think probably most “benefit fraud” folks aren’t actually the villains the right portrays them as. Whereas we know the Diamonds are every part the villain, and probably moreso, that we’ve been told and seen.

But when I tell my parents I don’t care if bad actors get good results, that’s not me blowing hot air because I don’t think the bad actors are real or a problem. It’s not a “gotcha” I use to hide my real position. I’m genuine in feeling like, even if my parents are completely right in their views of how common fraud is and the reasons it’s committed, even if the world is full of such slimy villains, I still don’t care if they get away with it, because my priority is the people who need help and not the villains.

And, like, IDK. I think that’s why I don’t care that they haven’t guillotined the Diamonds. I wouldn’t clutch my pearls if they did. I would feel like, “Yeah. They had it coming.” But I also don’t mind if they don’t. Because I don’t give a fuck about what the Diamonds deserve.

I care what Steven deserves. I care what Bismuth deserves. I care what the off-colors deserve.

They deserve to live in peace and without fear. They don’t deserve to have to start another war to get there. To have to potentially die in a new war to upend the old regime. And Steven deserves not to have to become a killer, however justified, as a child.

Talking the Diamonds out of being Despots is (aside from the fact that it’s really an over-intense metaphor for unhealthy parent/family relationships, and this is a children’s show, and so, in those two ways, killing them off might not be appropriate in those contexts) achieves what I want. It free the gems I care about. What’s more, it does so without having to send them into even more traumatizing war. It’s the best possible outcome for them. And they’re the ones I care about.

I don’t expect Bismuth to ever buddy buddy up to them (at least not without QUITE the storyline). They don’t deserve forgiveness from everyone they’ve hurt. But I don’t have any problem with them not getting punished (outside of losing their place of power). I don’t have any problem with Steven or anyone else having a relationship with them, and caring about them. I don’t need or want them to have a happily ever after, but if they’re getting a happily ever after also serves to give everyone I DO care about that? Then, sure. Why not. I’m not bothered by it at all. Here’s where people might pull the “but it’s that way because that’s how they WROTE it!” position. Like, they could have written a story where talking it out with the Diamonds wasn’t a choice. That by making it a choice, they are presenting an unrealistic ideological position whereby it’s possible to cozy up to the opposition, and therefor we should. While, in the real world, talking despots out of it is rarely a choice we have.

And I agree. In the real world you’re always better off punching a nazi than debating them. But also? We have seen a few very unlikely but just barely there possibilities, in our real world, for the dissolution of North Korea’s regime. Like, peaceful dissolution. Mostly. And anything like that? Would likely involve letting Kim Jong-Un go, with some money and toys. And it almost certainly won’t happen. But if letting Kim Jong-Un go is the price of freeing North Korea? I’d pay it happily. And if someone who knew and loved him could influence him to do that? I don’t care that they love him, a genuine human monster. They’re not a traitor or despot themselves in my eyes. Because they would’ve talked a despot into stepping aside and freeing thousands.

There’s been a lot of good and valid talk against “reaching across the aisle” as a smokescreen for being too centrist, for being too permissive, for allowing corporate and corrupt bullshit to slide. A lot of good observations about the ways that a “healthy debate” with opposing views serves only to platform those views, and we need to fight back more intentionally and viciously.

I agree.

But I agree because that’s a strategic position. I don’t really care about it as an ideological one. I’m not out to “get the bad guys”. I’m out to liberate the people or whatthefuckever you wanna call it. And when we have real world ways of doing that (and sometimes we do!) that involves working with “the enemy” or sucking up to people who are objectively terrible or whatever, I’m willing to go down that road too. The only reason that’s not my general stance currently is that it doesn’t work in the current climate.

This isn’t even me saying my outlook on these things is right. In some ways the alternative is much more consistent and wholesome and ideologically pure, whereas mine abandons principle for the sake of people. It’s just to say. I’ve been wondering why I’m totally on board and fine with Diamonds “ending” so far. Why I’m fine to see them be happy and see them having a rapport with others and such. And I think this outlook I have? I think that’s why.

#timemachine wuz here #text post #steven universe #steven universe the movie #white diamond #pink diamond #yellow diamond #blue diamond #the diamonds

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all-things-are-nothing-to-me · 5 years

Text

The Smartphone Society

The automobile was in many respects the defining commodity of the twentieth century. Its importance didn’t stem from technological virtuosity or the sophistication of the assembly line, but rather from an ability to reflect and shape society. The ways in which we produced, consumed, used, and regulated automobiles were a window into twentieth-century capitalism itself — a glimpse into how the social, political, and economic intersected and collided.Today, in a period characterized by financialization and globalization, where “information” is king, the idea of any commodity defining an era might seem quaint. But commodities are no less important today, and people’s relationships to them remain central to understanding society. If the automobile was fundamental to grasping the last century, the smartphone is the defining commodity of our era.People today spend a lot of time on their phones. They check them constantly throughout the day and keep them close to their bodies. They sleep next to them, bring them to the bathroom, and stare at them while they walk, eat, study, work, wait, and drive. Twenty percent of young adults even admit to checking their phones during sex.What does it mean that people seem to have a phone in their hand or pocket everywhere they go, all day long? To make sense of our purported collective phone addiction, we should follow the advice of Harry Braverman, and examine the “machine on the one side and social relations on the other, and the manner in which these two come together in society.”Hand MachinesApple insiders refer to FoxConn’s assembly city in Shenzhen as Mordor — J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth hellhole. As a spate of suicides in 2010 tragically revealed, the moniker is only a slight exaggeration of the factories in which young Chinese workers assemble iPhones. Apple’s supply chain links colonies of software engineers with hundreds of component suppliers in North America, Europe, and East Asia — Gorilla Glass from Kentucky, motion coprocessors from the Netherlands, camera chips from Taiwan, and transmit modules from Costa Rica funnel into dozens of assembly plants in China.Capitalism’s simultaneously creative and destructive tendencies spur constant changes in global production networks, and within these networks, new configurations of corporate and state power. In the old days, producer-driven supply chains, exemplified by industries like auto and steel, were dominant. People like Lee Iacocca and Boeing legend Bill Allen decided what to make, where to make it, and how much to sell it for.But as the economic and political contradictions of the postwar boom heightened in the 1960s and ’70s, more and more countries in the Global South adopted export-oriented strategies to achieve their development goals. A new type of supply chain emerged (particularly in light industries like apparel, toys, and electronics) in which retailers, rather than manufacturers, held the reins. In these buyer-driven models, companies like Nike, Liz Claiborne, and Walmart design goods, name their price to manufacturers, and often own little more in the way of production than their lucrative brands.Power and governance are located at multiple points in the smartphone chain, and production and design are deeply integrated at the global scale. But the new configurations of power tend to reinforce existing wealth hierarchies: poor and middle-income countries try desperately to move into more lucrative nodes through infrastructure development and trade deals, but upgrading opportunities are few and far between, and the global nature of production makes struggles by workers to improve conditions and wages extremely difficult.Congolese coltan miners are separated from Nokia executives by more than an ocean — they are divided by history and politics, by their country’s relationship to finance, and by decades-old development barriers, many of which are rooted in colonialism.The smartphone value chain is a useful map of global exploitation, trade politics, uneven development, and logistical prowess, but the deeper significance of the device lies elsewhere. To discover the more subtle shifts in accumulation that are illustrated and facilitated by the smartphone, we must turn from the process by which people use machines to create phones to the process by which we use the phone itself as a machine.Considering the phone as a machine is, in some respects, immediately intuitive. Indeed, the Chinese word for mobile phone is shouji, or “hand machine.” People often use their hand machines as they would any other tool, particularly in the workplace. Neoliberal demands for flexible, mobile, networked workers make them essential.Smartphones extend the workplace in space and time. Emails can be answered at breakfast, specs reviewed on the train home, and the next day’s meetings verified before lights out. The Internet becomes the place of work, with the office just a dot on the vast map of possible workspaces.The extension of the working day through smartphones has become so ubiquitous and pernicious that labor groups are fighting back. In France, unions and tech businesses signed an agreement in April 2014 recognizing 250,000 tech workers’ “right to disconnect” after a day’s work, and Germany is currently contemplating legislation that would prohibit after-work emails and phone calls. German Labor Minister Andrea Nahles told a German newspaper that it is “indisputable that there is a connection between permanent availability and psychological diseases.”Smartphones have also facilitated the creation of new types of work and new ways of accessing labor markets. In the “marketplace for odd jobs,” companies like TaskRabbit and Postmates have built their business models by tapping into the “distributed workforce” through smartphones.TaskRabbit connects people who would prefer to avoid the drudgery of doing their own chores with people desperate enough to do piecework odd jobs for pay. Those who want chores done, like the laundry or cleanup after their kid’s birthday party, link up with “taskers” using TaskRabbit’s mobile app.Taskers are expected to continuously monitor their phones for potential jobs (response time determines who gets a job); consumers can order or cancel a tasker on the go; and upon successfully completing the chore, the contractor can be paid directly through the phone.Postmates — the darling of the gig economy — is an up-and-comer in the business world, especially after Spark Capital pumped $16 million into it earlier this year. Postmates tracks its “couriers” in cities like Boston, San Francisco, and New York using a mobile app on their iPhones as they hustle to deliver artisanal tacos and sugar-free vanilla lattes to homes and offices. When a new job comes in, the app routes it to the closest courier, who must respond immediately and complete the task within an hour to get paid.The couriers, who are not recognized employees of Postmates, are less enthusiastic than Spark. They get $3.75 per delivery plus tips, and because they’re classified as independent contractors, are not protected by minimum wage laws.In this way, our hand machines fit seamlessly into the modern world of work. The smartphone facilitates contingent employment models and self-exploitation by linking workers to capitalists without the fixed costs and emotional investment of more traditional employment relations.But smartphones are more than a piece of technology for wage work — they have become a part of our identity. When we use our phones to text friends and lovers, post comments on Facebook, or scroll through our Twitter feeds, we’re not working — we’re relaxing, we’re having fun, we’re creating. Yet, collectively, through these little acts, we end up producing something unique and valuable: our selves.Selves for SaleErving Goffman, an influential American sociologist, was interested in the self and how individuals produce and perform their selves through social interaction. By his own admission, Goffman was a bit Shakespearean — for him “all the world is a stage.” He argued that social interactions can be thought of as performances, and that people’s performances vary depending on their audience.We enact these “front-stage” performances for people — acquaintances, coworkers, judgmental relatives — that we want to impress. Front-stage performances give the appearance that our actions “maintain and embody certain standards.” They convince the audience that we really are who we say we are: a responsible, intelligent, moral human being.But front-stage performances can be shaky and are often undermined by mistakes — people put their foot in their mouth, they misread social cues, they have a piece of spinach lodged in their teeth, or they get caught in a lie. Goffman was fascinated by how hard we work to perfect and maintain our front-stage performances and how often we fail at them.Smartphones are a godsend for the dramaturgical aspects of life. They enable us to manage the impressions we make on others with control-freak precision. Instead of talking to each other, we can send text messages, planning our witticisms and avoidance strategies in advance. We can display our impeccable taste on Pinterest, superior parenting skills on CafeMom, and burgeoning artistic talents on Instagram, all in real time.New York magazine recently ran a piece about the four most desirable people in New York City according to OKCupid. These individuals have crafted such attractive dating profiles that they are pummeled with attention and racy requests — their phones ping continually with messages from potential paramours. Tom, one of the chosen four, regularly tweaks his profile, subbing in new photos, and rewording his self-description. He has even used OKCupid’s MyBestFace profile-optimizing service.Tom says all this effort is necessary in our present “culture of likes.” Tom considers his OKCupid profile to be “an extension of himself”: “I want it to look good and clean so, like, I make it do crunches and shit.”The incredible reach of social media and people’s rapid adoption of it to produce and perform their selves are engendering the emergence of new technologically mediated rituals of interaction. Smartphones are now central to the way we “generate, maintain, repair, and renew as well as . . . contest or resist relationships.”Take texting rituals, which, with all their complex, unwritten rules, now play a commanding role in the relationship dynamics of most young adults. One need not deal in toxic nostalgia to admit that new, technologically mediated rituals are displacing or radically altering older conventions.Digitally maintaining, generating, and contesting relationships through smartphones is somewhat different from using phones to complete tasks associated with wage work. Individuals don’t get paid a wage for their Tinder profile or for uploading photos of their weekend adventures on Snapchat, but the selves and the rituals they produce are certainly for sale. Regardless of intention, when a person uses their smartphone to connect with people and the imagined digital community, the output of their labor of love is increasingly likely to be sold as a commodity.Companies like Facebook are pioneers in the enclosure and sale of digital selves. In 2013, Facebook had 945 million users who accessed the site through their smartphones. It made 89 percent of its revenue that year from advertising, half of which came from mobile advertising. Its entire architecture is designed to guide the mobile production of selves through a platform that makes those selves salable.That’s why it instituted its “real names” policy: “pretending to be anything or anyone isn’t allowed.” Facebook needs users to use legal names so it can easily match corporeal selves with digital selves, because data produced by and connected to an actual human is more profitable.Users of the dating site OKCupid agree to a similar exchange: “data for a date.” Third-party companies sit in the background of the site, scooping up users’ photos, political and religious views, and even the David Foster Wallace novels they profess to love. The data are then sold to advertisers, who create targeted, personalized ads.The pool of people who have access to OKCupid’s data is remarkably large — OkCupid, along with other companies like Match and Tinder, is owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp, the sixth-largest online network in the world. Crafting a self on OKCupid may or may not yield love, but it definitely yields corporate profits.Awareness is spreading that our digital selves are now commodities. New School professor Laurel Ptak recently published a manifesto called “Wages for Facebook” and in March 2014, Paul Budnitz and Todd Berger created Ello, a fleetingly popular Facebook alternative.Ello proclaims: “We believe a social network can be a tool for empowerment. Not a tool to deceive, coerce, and manipulate — but a place to connect, create, and celebrate life. You are not a product.” Ello promises not to sell your data to third-party advertisers, at least for now. It reserves the right to do so in the future.However, discussions of the peddling of digital selves by gray-market data companies and Silicon Valley giants are usually separate from conversations about increasingly exploitative working conditions or the burgeoning market for precarious, degrading work. But these are not separate phenomena — they are intricately linked, all pieces in the puzzle of modern capitalism.iCommodifyCapital must reproduce itself and generate new sources of profit over time and space. It must constantly create and reinforce the separation between wage laborers and owners of capital, increase the value it extracts from workers, and colonize new spheres of social life to create commodities. The system, and the relationships that comprise it, are constantly in motion.The expansion and reproduction of capital in everyday life and the colonization of new spheres of social life by capital are not always obvious. Thinking about the smartphone helps us put the pieces together because the device itself facilitates and undergirds new models of accumulation.The evolution of work over the past three decades has been characterized by a number of trends — the lengthening of the workday and workweek, the decline of real wages, the reduction or elimination of non-wage protections from the market (like fixed pensions or health and safety regulations), the proliferation of part-time work, and the decline of unions.At the same time, norms regarding the organization of work have also shifted. Temporary, project-oriented employment models are proliferating. Employers are no longer expected to provide job security or regular hours, and employees no longer expect those things.But the degradation of work is not a given. Increasing exploitation and immiseration are tendencies, not fixed outcomes ordained by the rules of capitalism. They are the result of battles lost by workers and won by capitalists.The ubiquitous use of smartphones to extend the workday and expand the market for shit jobs is a result of the weakness of both workers and working-class movements. The compulsion and willingness of increasing numbers of workers to engage with their employers through their phones normalizes and justifies the use of smartphones as a tool of exploitation, and solidifies constant availability as a requirement for earning a wage.Apart from the Great Recession, corporate profit rates have steadily climbed since the late eighties, and not only as a result of capital (and the state) rolling back the gains of the labor movement. The reach of global markets has widened and deepened, and the development of new commodities has grown apace.The expansion and reproduction of capital is dependent on the development of these new commodities, many of which emerge from capital’s incessant drive to enclose new spheres of social life for profit, or as political economist Massimo De Angelis says, to “put [these spheres] to work for [capital’s] priorities and drives.”The smartphone is central to this process. It provides a physical mechanism to allow constant access to our digital selves and opens a nearly uncharted frontier of commodification.Individuals don’t get paid in wages for creating and maintaining digital selves — they get paid in the satisfaction of participating in rituals, and the control afforded them over their social interactions. They get paid in the feeling of floating in the vast virtual connectivity, even as their hand machines mediate social bonds, helping people imagine togetherness while keeping them separate as distinct productive entities. The voluntary nature of these new rituals does not make them any less important, or less profitable for capital.Braverman said that “the capitalist finds in [the] infinitely malleable character of human labor the essential resource for the expansion of his capital.” The last thirty years of innovation demonstrate the truth of this statement, and the phone has emerged as one of the primary mechanisms to activate, access, and channel the malleability of human labor.Smartphones ensure that we are producing for more and more of our waking lives. They erase the boundary between work and leisure. Employers now have nearly unlimited access to their employees, and increasingly, holding even a low-paid, precarious job hinges on the ability to be always available and ready to work. At the same time, smartphones provide people constant mobile access to the digital commons and its gauzy ethos of connectivity, but only in exchange for their digital selves.Smartphones blur the line between production and consumption, between the social and the economic, between the pre-capitalist and the capitalist, ensuring that whether one uses their phone for work or pleasure, the outcome is increasingly the same — profit for capitalists.Does the arrival of the smartphone signify the Debordian moment in which the commodity has completed its “colonization of social life”? Is it true that not only is our relationship to commodities plain to see, but that “commodities are now all that there is to see?”This might seem a bit heavy-handed. Accessing social networks and digital connectivity through mobile phones undoubtedly has liberatory elements. Smartphones can help battle anomie and promote a sense of ambient awareness, while at the same time making it easier for people to generate and maintain real relationships.A shared connection through digital selves can also nourish resistance to the existing hierarchy of power whose internal mechanisms isolate and silence individuals. It’s impossible to imagine the protests sparked by Ferguson and police brutality without smartphones and social media. And ultimately, most people are not yet compelled to use smartphones for work, and they certainly aren’t required to perform their selves through technology. Most could throw their phones into the sea tomorrow if they wished.But they won’t. People love their hand machines. Communicating primarily through smartphones is fast becoming an accepted norm, and more and more rituals are becoming technologically mediated. Constant connection to the networks and information we call cyberspace is becoming central to identity. Why this is happening is a labyrinthine speculation.Is it, as media and technology expert Ken Hillis suggests, simply another way to “stave off the Void and the meaningless of existence?” Or, as novelist and professor Roxane Gay recently pondered, does our ability to manipulate our digital avatars provide a balm for our deep sense of impotence in the face of injustice and hate?Or — as tech guru Amber Case wonders — are we all turning into cyborgs?Probably not — but it depends on how you define cyborg. If a cyborg is a human who uses a piece of technology or a machine to restore lost functions or enhance her capacities and knowledge, then people have been cyborgs for a long time, and using a smartphone is no different than using a prosthetic arm, driving a car, or working on an assembly line.If you define a cyborg society as one in which human relationships are mediated and shaped by technology, then our society certainly seems to meet this criterion, and our phones play a starring role. But our relationships and rituals have long been mediated by technology. The rise of massive urban centers — hubs of connectivity and innovation — would not have been possible without railroads and cars.Machines, technology, networks, and information do not drive or organize society — people do. We make things and use things according to the existing web of social, economic, and political relationships and the balance of power.The smartphone, and the way it shapes and reflects existing social relations, is no more metaphysical than the Ford Rangers that once rolled off the assembly line in Edison, New Jersey. The smartphone is both a machine and a commodity. Its production is a map of global power, logistics, and exploitation. Its use shapes and reflects the perpetual confrontation between the totalizing drives of capital and the resistance of the rest of us.In the present moment, the need for capitalists to exploit and commodify is strengthened by the ways in which smartphones are produced and consumed, but capital’s gains are never secure and unassailable. They must be renewed and defended at every step. We have the power to contest and deny capital’s gains, and we should. Perhaps our phones will come in handy along the way.

#anti capitalism #anti technology #consumerism #mass society

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