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in-tua-deep · 4 years

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Umbrella academy hogwarts au? I feel like 5 would be a slytherin. Would he be in a younger year than everyone else, kinda like in your pride and prejudice AU?

HMMM i think if i was ever to go for a real hogwarts au and not just gently dumping all the characters into the hp world for a laugh (they make it so easy with five’s mystery jump at the end of s1 lmao) then it would have to start from like. the very beginning and together. as Actual Kids.

(p&p au is a bit different bc it’s a no-powers-period-drama type au)

we’re not going to explain why hogwarts is getting some american kids bc i don’t have the brainpower rn to think of why. maybe reginald trained them in the US in this au and then moved them to the UK in the months preceding their debut for whatever reason which officially makes them a Hogwarts Problem now idk

lemme put this under a read more

so instead you have Five at like, ten-and-three-quarters years old. They’re scheduled to debut in front of the entire world very soon. Five has bruises on his skin and anger in his heart, even as young as he is.

(He’s not the worst off. Klaus has screaming nightmares and bags under his eyes so dark he looks like a raccoon. Ben hasn’t spoken a word in two weeks after his last special training session with their dad. Diego’s arm is in a cast where sparring with Luther went wrong a week or so ago.)

And Five is the curious child, the challenging child. He’s a constant buzz of need to know, have to know, have to move move move and part of that is knowing everything that’s going on in the house. With his power to jump, he knows all the good spying spots. He knows which rooms are above the others, knows which vents have sound that carry, knows the spots he can prop himself in and see but not be seen.

So when there’s someone knocking on the front door, Five sneaks into one such spot and looks - because no one knocks on their door, ever. Reginald’s door is never knocked upon by girl scouts or friendly neighbors or salesmen. It’s like, a rule. So he’s curious who it is, and he crouches down to watch and to listen.

Grace is the one who answers the door (Pogo tends to keep out of sight of guests, when he can) and offers the severe looking woman a dazzling smile. Five thinks she’ll be turned away, but Grace nods and gestures her inside and tells her to wait right there as she fetches Mr. Hargreeves -

His dad comes, looking just as severe as the woman does and twice as intimidating. And then the woman opens her mouth to speak and -

Magic?

Them?

A boarding school?

And Five doesn’t really think they’re magic. Yeah, unexplained things happen around them all the time (Klaus’s lightbulbs were constantly being replaced when he bolted out of a nightmare screaming and they blew or shattered or whatever) but that’s just part of their powers, right?

But a boarding school. That’s promising. Even if they aren’t magic or whatever, even if this school is for insane people - anything is better than here. And it’s not foster care, right? If it’s a school then there’s no issue of them being split up, being torn apart. They’re a family, and Five has been trying desperately to think of a plan to get them out since he was seven-and-a-half

Of course, Reginald says no. Denies everything. Refuses to acknowledge the woman and sends her out.

And Five has about three seconds for his quicksilver mind to run back over the conversation, to pick up on the woman’s bristling and comments about control and community and you can’t hide magic forever and -

Five jumps, in a flash of blue, and pops out in front of the woman outside. She startles with wide eyes. “What on earth - ”

“What happens if a magical child wants to attend but their non-magical guardians do not.” Five asks the woman, hands clenched into fists by his sides.

The woman stares at him for a long time, “It would depend on the circumstances - ”

That’s a bullshit answer if Five’s ever heard one, and he cuts her off. “If a magical child needs to be trained, could they achieve that going around a guardian? What are the laws concerning education?”

The woman looks over her shoulder, back towards the manor. She looks bemused that this tiny slip of a child is confronting her like this outside of the knowledge of his parents.

Five grits his teeth, because this is a low risk high reward situation. If the woman leaves - whatever, no skin off his back or however that saying goes. If she can get them out and going to this fancy boarding school so that they’re only within Reginald’s sphere of influence during the break times - well.

Five has a hunch, and plays it without mercy.

“He’s not our biological father. He bought us. We have - we do things no else can do. Magic? He wants us to be superheroes. He’s got something planned, to show us off to the whole world. Us and our powers.”

If the woman’s face had gotten tight at the beginning of Five’s words, it’s aghast at the end of it. So Five is correct - if magic was real, then Five should have already heard about it. If it is and he hasn’t, that means that the magic people are exceptionally good at keeping secrets.

Which means Reginald and his planned publicity works in Five’s favor.

“I’ll see what can be done.” The woman says grimly.

But there’s something Five needs confirmation of, because it’s important. “If one of us goes, we all go.” He tells the woman, feet planted shoulder width apart and hands curled into fists with the thumbs on the outside. Ready for a fight. “We stay together.”

(Vanya doesn’t have powers, like the rest of them. But Five will be damned before he leaves her behind in this house by herself, not when Reginald hardly cares if she lives or dies.)

The woman blinks, waves her hand like that was never the problem. “There are seven children at this address, yes? If that’s all of you, you all have places at Hogwarts.”

Five, who was geared up to defend his position and smuggle Vanya with him in a suitcase if necessary, melts back. “There are seven of us.” Five says, cautious and careful, “But - yes. There are seven of us.”

(He almost tells her that Vanya isn’t magic, but if they think she is then he’s not going to try and persuade them otherwise. He’ll figure something out for later, when they realize she’s ordinary. He’ll find a way to fake magical powers for her or something.)

“I’ll be back.” The woman tells him, looking serious. Then she raises a stick in the air (what?) and something happens and she just - warps in place and vanishes. It makes Five jump back, startled.

What was that? That wasn’t - that wasn’t jumping. Not the way he does it. But - she vanished? There’s no blue light but it looks so much like what he does that he can’t help but doubt. Are there variations of his power? Are there lots of people who can jump?

Suddenly this whole ‘magic school’ thing is looking more like something exciting to look forward to instead of just a convenient escape route.

Five hovers for a few seconds, before jumping himself. It wouldn’t do to be found lurking outside of the manor when he isn’t supposed to be permitted outside at all, after all.

He waits with baited breath until a week later he wakes up to yelling and scrambles for the door. He can see his other siblings coming out as well in the pajamas, all of them exchanging looks and agreeing as one to creep quietly to figure out what’s going on.

What’s going on isn’t quiet at all. There’s a dozen men and women downstairs, including the woman that Five spoke to the week before. They all looks very official, and they all have sticks like the woman did. Does.

Reginald looks furious.

They’re all crouched in Five’s spot, the good one where if you stay still no one would notice you between the banisters but you get an unobstructed view. The key is if you stay still. One of them moves, or makes a noise, or whatever and one of the people’s eyes snap up to look directly at them.

They all freeze.

“You might as well come down here, children.” One woman says, looking distinctly unimpressed. “This involves you, after all.”

They look to Reginald, but he says nothing. He doesn’t even look at them at all, though they can see the muscle in his jaw tightening.

The travel carefully down the stairs, single file, in order. Klaus and Ben hold hands as they go down, and Five looks back frequently to make sure that everyone is present, including Vanya.

“I’m afraid,” The woman from the week before speaks up in her Scottish brogue, “That is has come to our attention that… your guardian can no longer provide you with the necessary education you require by law.”

She keeps going, explaining to them about magic. Five can see Vanya at the end of their little like, getting more and more pale by the second. Five heard most of this speech the day before, so it’s easy for him to duck out of their little line and bump Klaus and Ben over so that he can stand by her side.

He takes her hand in his, not caring about how Luther and Allison are shooting him looks. He squeezes tightly and, after a second, she squeezes back.

They’re in language classes with Grace together, so it’s easy to him to tap against her hand.

n-o g-o w-o u

Not going without you. Vanya is still pale, but she squeezes Five’s hand and stops looking like she’s going to pass out on the floor.

“As such,” The woman is continuing, “You will be attending Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. You will be staying with me until the start of the term, during which time we will sort out permanent living arrangements.”

“We’re not coming back?” Luther demands loudly, looking frightened. Five would almost feel bad if he didn’t remember the fact that Luther was still recovering from a concussion from private training that he still would talk about. “But - what about dad?”

“Your father is not equipped to deal with magical children.” The woman tells them, actually quite diplomatically. Five can read between the lines though to where she’s actually saying this man is an abusive fuck who shouldn’t have been permitted to care for a cactus let alone seven entire human beings.

“We stay together?” Five pipes up, staring holes into the strangers in his house. “No matter what, we stay together, right?”

The woman inclines her head, “We will do our utmost to ensure it, Mr. - ”

She pauses for him to fill in his name, and he can feel the panicked look Luther is shooting him. He’s the worst one to ask for his name, because he gave up his chance for a name so Vanya could have one.

Luther is shaking his head, trying to get Five’s attention to signal him to not answer, but Five lifts his chin up high. He is not ashamed as he puts the final nail in Reginald’s coffin.

“Number Five. I’m Number Five.”

The expressions on every adults face are priceless and drive home just how not ordinary that is. Just how terrible it is to have a number instead of a name. Five doesn’t understand it - he likes his name, thank you - but that doesn’t mean he’s not willing to use it as a weapon to put another knife in Reginald’s back.

And that’s how, against some of their protests (mainly Luther, who protests leaving Reginald, and Diego, who protests leaving Grace) all of the kids end up in the house of “Professor McGonagall” who at this point is just. resigned to these kids being weird as fuck

(to be valid she first met Five apparently apparating with a) 0 training and b) without even a wand what the fuck)

They’re all just. Really confused? They all report for breakfast bright and early and McGonagall hasn’t even had her morning coffee yet and she’s just kind of like “yeah you kids do whatever, settle in and all that. we’ll go to diagon alley and pick up school supplies and all that later”

and it is bizarre. The kids stick close to one another, watch all the weird magic shit going down with careful eyes, and then they get their wands. Five almost has a fit because what if they find out Vanya isn’t magical and he’s about two seconds away from using his own shiny new wand (that had let out a bright blue light reminiscent of the one that came with his powers) when Vanya picks one up and waves it and manages to blast through three shelves.

The wand maker looks absolutely delighted at this destruction of the shop and all of them gape at Vanya because they were not expecting her to be magical. And clearly Vanya wasn’t expecting to be magical either, because she’s pale and shocked as the wand maker plucks the destructive wand from her hand and pops another one in.

All seven of them walk out with their brand new wands, and Vanya and Five hold hands tightly. Half in relief and half in alarm.

When they talk later, hushed whispers camped out in freshly transfigured beds, they come to the conclusion that some witches and wizards just need the stick to do things and that the rest of the Umbrella Academy is kind of weird. (McGonagall lectured Five at length about apparating and not doing it while he made various faces)

The kids survive until term starts and Professor McGonagall takes the to a train station and drops them off and tells them that she’ll see them at the school. They take up an entire compartment by themselves and talk at length about what magic school is going to be like.

Luther is still withdrawn and sullen over being taken away from Reginald, Diego is still sad about Grace, Allison has her head held high and is determined to make a good impression and finally meet some new people outside of her siblings, and Klaus is loud but in the way that means he’s anxious, Ben is speaking again but is still far too quiet, Five has read all of their schoolbooks already and is practically vibrating in place with the need to know everything and Vanya -

Vanya is off her meds. She didn’t want Professor McGonagall to decide she was broken or not good enough or anything because she was on anxiety medication. Any mishaps within the McGonagall house have so far been chalked up to accidental magic (and some of it actually had been). This is important for later.

They change into their robes (just another uniform) and disembark and get to Hogwarts and stand in the Great Hall and listen to the Sorting Hat sing and then - it’s their turn to be sorted.

Luther is all Gryffindor bullheaded stubbornness and an insistence on what he thinks is right, proud and strong. Allison is Slytherin ambition and drive to her bones, clawing her way to the top and making sure she will stay there. Diego is Gryffindor impatience and need to prove himself, doing what is right even if it is outside the law. Klaus is Slytherin cunning and resourcefulness, sneaking out and getting what he needed under the nose of a tyrant (though since leaving the house, drugs have been noticeably absent from his possessions). Ben is Ravenclaw knowledge and hiding behind books, quiet words and hungry eyes. Vanya is Ravenclaw hard work and well gained knowledge, passion for her difficult art and determination to be good at something.

Five gets up there, and the Sorting Hat hums.

Five is made of loyalty that could weather an apocalypse. He is a boy who had a power perfect for running away and keeping away, but who stayed because he couldn’t bear to leave his siblings. Five is a child who, every time he got knocked down, he got back up again. Five is a child who has hard work pressed into the marrow of his bones, who never gives up and never gives in.

Five is driven by knowledge and a need to know. His hunger consumes him, always pushing at boundaries that perhaps would be safer for his health to leave untouched. Always testing and twisting and seeking more. He is bright and smart and one of his very first words was why.

Five is cunning and careful, twisting words and bending rules and scraping everything he can from a bad situation. He is the boy who had a split second to think, who jumped outside and confronted a stranger and went off of a hunch and won it all. The boy who had so few resources to work with, but twisted and pulled at them until they were enough. If getting his entire family out of Reginald’s house intact was not the very definition of ambitious, then nothing is.

Hufflepuff. Ravenclaw. Slytherin.

Choose your own adventure, choose your fighter.

Five would probably prefer Ravenclaw, in a house with two of his favorite siblings. Perhaps he would choose Slytherin, because Klaus is fragile and he doubts Allison will protect him and Five has always been protective of his family.

(Klaus is stronger than the family thinks, away from the mausoleum and the memories. He’ll have Slytherin house wrapped around his finger before they know what hit them, will eventually fall in love with a Hufflepuff transfer student named Dave, will eventually be happy.)

Maybe Five is alone in Hufflepuff, a house too kind and too soft for the sort of jagged edges he has. But maybe that’s what he needs. Maybe he doesn’t need a house to sharpen his claws against, to sharpen his words or his mind. Maybe he needs somewhere safe, where people take his hand and show him how to tickle the pear to get into the kitchens and teach him how to play exploding snap and who look the other way when he sneaks out to visit his siblings at night.

(Whatever they can do outside of their wand waving, they discover, it isn’t magic. Or at least, not what the magical world seems to consider magic. They figure this out because apparently Hogwarts is warded against apparating within the grounds.

This doesn’t seem to stop Five.)

There’s so much that needs to be done. The wizarding world is still rebuilding. It’s 2000, scarcely three years after everything went down.

Vanya’s “magic” seems to act up and no one can figure out why (even the family doesn’t realize it’s because she has non-magical powers like the rest of them. how could they? their entire lives Vanya had been ordinary.)

(when the revelation comes, Allison remembers her orders, remembers a small quiet room she was brought and told to say terrible things. They all weather the storm of Vanya’s fury together, magical shield summoned in a technique probably too advanced for their age but Ben is a natural until they finally managed to stun her.

later, they all sit together in the hufflepuff common room, curled up on the sofas with mugs of hot chocolate stolen from the kitchens, regardless of if any of them are even in the house. at the very least Five has a talent for wriggling his way into areas he isn’t supposed to be in. they drink the hot chocolate, and contemplate their lives living with a man who would order something like that.

they are grateful, even luther, of the turn their lives had taken. it would have been so very easy for McGonagall to walk away, to trust that they would be homeschooled or sent abroad or whatever. they are free, and they are thankful)

there is, of course, still the issue of what to do with the seven magical children once their first year comes to an end. they could stay with professor mcgonagall again, perhaps. despite being generally no nonsense, she’s always had a soft spot for the troublemakers (and the Hargreeves, despite best efforts, fall soundly into that category)

maybe they end up staying with some empty nesters. Molly and Arthur Weasely have no children left staying at home since Ginny moved out, and they’re used to dealing with large numbers of magical children. Diego would thrive under Mrs. Weasley’s attention even as he would feel guilty for loving anyone but Grace.

maybe McGonagall calls in a favor, maybe she contacts her old students. She knows a boy who was an orphan himself, who knows what it means to be too skinny and too wary and to not want to go home at the summers. An orphan boy with wealth enough to take care of seven orphans with no problems, who would be glad to take on several wards if it was a favor to his old professor.

(Harry Potter is only 20, but the war aged him. Aged all of his generation, really. There are lots of orphans in the wizarding world, and he is one of them.)

or maybe their arrangements are something else entirely.

The important thing though, is that despite everything they stay together. They might not have the Academy anymore, they might not belong to Reginald, but they are family and they stick by one another.

They protect one another, through means both magical and not.

(If you think Diego is giving up his knives, you are very incorrect about that.)

#anonymous #ask me #tua #tua au #the umbrella academy #hogwarts au #hp au #tua/hp crossover #tua crossover #i will defend slytherin klaus with my life #anyone who says he's too soft to be slytherin wasn't paying attention #but also!! who says slytherin can't be soft!#fight me #i kind of stan hufflepuff five for this au actually even though i usually mentally sort him into slytherin #but this is pre running away five and i think the real slytherin 'ends justify the means' mentality really happened after the commission #he's characterized by loyalty and hard work and i love him okay and he needs soft things sometimes let me have this #luther hargreeves #diego hargreeves #allison hargreeves #klaus hargreeves #five hargreeves #number five #ben hargreeves #vanya hargreeves #i also usually stan hufflepuff ben #but that's after ghost ben has been loyally by klaus's side for eons so he gets ravenclaw #wow @ the umbrella academy how come ur mom lets u have magic AND superpowers???

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fluffairy · 5 years

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school starts next week and i’m starting to get really, really anxious about it. god only knows why; i had a good month “off” (see also, my profs sending me my thesis feedback exactly halfway through august leading me to keep having it in the back of my mind since) and i traveled a lot and saw a bunch of new places and ate pasta with my best friend. but i also spent a lot of weird and hazy and sweaty days alone, thinking and reading about Michelangelo FOR FUN.

i think part of it is that this new semester is.... my last of university. probably ever. (if i ever say on here that i want to apply for a PhD i would like EVERY ONE of my mutuals to message me saying “please think about this deeply” lmaoooo. maybe if i ever had a really, really good dissertation idea, but never before that. it’d destroy me, simple as that.) and for someone who has been running at this goal for what’s now five whole years, it doesn’t.... feel real that soon, it’ll be over. i have hated academia, i have sobbed over it, i have met such horrible people in my two universities, both profs and students, and i know, I KNOW, academia is not my destiny or my future. doesn’t mean i can’t and won’t feel weird about a phase of my life ending with what is currently a hazy wavy mess of a working future to look forward to, though.

another part is that after all of this schooling, this whole insane Dante’s Inferno of an MA degree, it still.... doesn’t mean much. no one other than my cohort will ever truly understand what i went through to do this. and this weirdly specific degree only really trains you for a PhD, which as i said, i am not fucking doing. i know no education is ever wasted, and i am glad to spend this year in florence, and i have learned (and will learn) a lot, and i will come out of this a stronger person. i just don’t want my MA to be a weird out of place thing on my resume that people will have to ask me about when i inevitably go down an extremely different route for work.

speaking of which! have no fucking idea what i’m doing once i finish in december and go back to the US, short of reading a shit ton of books on my grandma’s couch in NJ and applying for jobs (???). i know that the most sane and respectful thing to do, for my own benefit, is to only worry about finishing out my MA right and well, and enjoying my time here while I have it. but another part of me thinks that i need to prove something to LITERALLY NOBODY and start a job right after i graduate, even though that depends on a lot of factors and i will need time to rest and recover anyway.

my thesis is giving me headaches and i’m soooo fucking stressed about it. i really need to talk to my profs about it, instead of making my brain run in insane circles, but that doesn’t happen until next week, and until then it feels like i have soooo much to do and fix that i can’t even think clearly about it. this paper feels at once so much bigger than me and yet like it exists entirely in my head and is not even worthwhile to anyone. what’s possibly worst is that i don’t even know what i’m arguing anymore :-) so that’s FUCKING GREAT that i can’t determine what the THESIS OF MY THESIS IS. i’m so tired of even thinking about it which doesn’t bode well when i HAVE TO keep thinking about it for four more months. and i’m so worried it won’t be good enough, i’m so worried it won’t be accepted to the research symposium, i’m so worried i’ll disappoint everyone. i keep hearing my prof’s voice echoing in my head that “this thesis is currently not adequate masters quality work” :( it would be so much easier to just give up but i can’t do that, i’m so close to the finish line, but i’m so worried that it’ll be impossible for me to do what the profs want me to do with this project.

i’ve felt ACHINGLY lonely since my best friend left Florence, and it fucking sucks. i can’t keep living each day in a haze, lying in bed until noon for absolutely no reason. i don’t want school to start yet i desperately NEED it to start. this degree has taught me a lot of things: one of those is that i’m a people person. that’s ok, and not something to run from. but also, that makes it so hard when you spend every day.... fucking alone.

but. here are some resolutions going forward with my last semester / end of my degree:

go out and get fresh air if you’re feeling stuck or confused or upset or in a daze! eat fruit and spinach. take your vitamins. drink lots of water! sleep at a normal time and with the LIGHTS OFF (my worst habit lmao)

make a work schedule and STICK TO IT.

try your damndest to read for fun / watch a show on netflix at night

thesis will WORK OUT. it has to. no one’s going to let it be anything less than perfect (either myself or my profs), i just have to believe that.

maybe i’m lonely here. but that’s ok. i’m lonely everywhere. it’s fine. (no, it’s not fine, but i can live with it, i shown that over and over so far.)

enjoy your brilliant and gorgeous city while you’re here bc the next 4 months are going to fly by. i can barely even fucking think about this and i’m ALREADY feeling prematurely nostalgic for things that haven’t even happened yet. i need to live in the moment and enjoy what i have, right now, the good and the bad!!

#hmm #grad #should i have spilled all of this on the internet? prob not

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goneontherun · 4 years

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notes on graeber’s bullshit jobs

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the value of work and about the work I’m going to (have to) be doing — what makes it useful, how can i make it useful, and what does it mean to do valuable work? How can I know if the work I do creates negative social value? I’ve been afraid of coming back, not because I’m afraid of starting work, but because of what that is suppoed to signify. And about all the shit I’m going to have to swallow on account of “this is just how things are.” Graeber talks about:

The dummy jobs that pass for real work – he lists five categories whose common denominator is that, basically, nothing would happen if the worker (within a company) decides one day not to show up to work anymore or if all the workers (at the level of industry — this is levied against the FIRE industry), life won’t grind to a halt. He talks about “managerial feudalism” and the rise of the manager roles and people who are literally paid to “look busy.”

The myth of being “on somebody else’s time” which says that since you’re being paid for your time, you shouldn’t be doing anything else, even if you have nothing to do. And the absence of real work as quite literally de-humanizing and contravenes/contradicts the human need for purpose.

The myth of needing to seem busy and value as appearing productive: “My mind keeps going back to the pressure to value ourselves and others on the basis of how hard we work at something we’d rather not being doing. I believe this attitude exists in the air around us. We sniff it into our noses and exhale it as a social reflex in small-talk; it is one of the guiding principles of social relations here: if you’re not destroying your mind and body via paid work, you’re not living right.” (198)

The difficulty that people in such jobs have of even expressing their displeasure without being told to fuck off and be grateful they even have a job. [Very familiar]

How we got here and the history of production, e.g. puritan work ethic, hard work = character formation and the theological (judeo-christian – i mean just look at genesis lmao) roots of work, how this continued into the industiral revo – e.g. carlyle’s gospel of work. Specifically, work/labour as self-abnegation, something that is deliberately supposed to be punishing and not pleasurable – i.e. very Carlyle – “Workers, in other words, gain feelings of dignity and self-worth because they hate their jobs.” (221) And how “life” [think about the whole bs about work-life balance] as something that has to be “eked out” in the temporal spaces between periods of work.

And also how seeing labor as The Male Factory Worker – “both the words “production” and “reproduction” are based on the same core metaphor: in the one case, objects seem to jump, fully formed, out of factories; in the other, babies seem to jump, fully formed, out of women’s bodies.” (203) He sees the original labor theory of value as gendered bc it focused on production and so erased women’s work.

Or more specifically, work that women are expected/typically thought to do, e.g. “looking after people, seeing to their wants and needs, explaining, reassuring, anticipating what the boss wants or is thinking, not to mention caring for, monitoring, and maintaining plants, animals, machines, and other objects, than it involves hammering, carving, hoisting or harvesting things.” (215)

The gap between work that creates social value and how they are valued ($$), resulting in “carping labor” or “interpretive labor” being un/undervalued and which markets don’t pick up on because markets are always looking for things being produced, being made and being put out into the world. i.e. “caring labor” has been not just undervalued but completely overlooked because “values […] are valuable [exactly] because can’t be reduced to numbers.” (241)

The difficulty of organizing movements around “bullshit jobs” and also the contradiction between care and stability: even if, logically, we can wake up one day and decided to change things, to stop “producing capitalism,” which is not something abstract and impersonal but something we create everyday, “love for others — people, animals, landscapes — regularly requires the maintenance of institutional structures one might otherwise despite.” (219)

And what can be done about it: He points to a “crisscrossing of resentment” that proliferates within the world of work, and also acknowledges an inertia for change and also to barrier to actually admitting your job is bullshit, that it’d be better if robots just took over etc.

He makes an interesting point on the division between the workplace as the “domain of production” and the home as the “domain of consumption” and “the domain of values (which means that what work people do engage in, in this domain, they largely do for free)”, and which obviously has a gendered dimension too! Graeber published in 2018 but it’ll be interesting to relook this idea within the context of the pandemic, in which work and home are so thoroughly meshed.

#5 was particularly painful for me to read because it put in another way what I’d already known – or rather what took me all these years away from singapore recovering from how much i’d let the education system fuck me up to realise. There was a time when I glorified hard work and self-punishment and I was so fixated on the idea of academic rigour and challenge that I went all out and lost any idea of what actually made / could make me happy. Somehow convinced myself that enjoyment = slaving over something and overcoming that challenge, i.e. econ. Something had to be difficult to be worth it — to be real work — because if i didn’t have to slave over it, if i didn’t have to work myself to death for it, AND if i had fun doing it (i.e. literature), then it wasn’t real work. There was a belief that value could only come by sacrificing a part of myself — in high school, it was a real, visceral happiness. I believed that i could postpone being happy to after those final exams. And the hard work had to be painful and self-effacing, and which in turn ought to be worn as some sort of a badge of honor on my identity and sense of self-worth (Graeber: “sadomasochistic dialectic”).

#11: I wonder if the way things are panning out in this pandemic is (the beginning of? the conditions for?) the “revolt of the caring classes” (242) that Graeber wonders about towards the end of the chapter? We see nurses asking for more pay and I’m reminded of this article in The Atlantic. The pandemic has shifted the nature of work by opening up options for remote work and more improtantly drawing into sharp relief the work that cannot be done from home — the work that requires care and contact — and which has so conveniently been overlooked. People whose workplaces were never closed.

This includes those done by foreign workers in singapore. There’s one strand of rhetoric about the foreign worker situation in Singapore that goes something like, their working and living conditions are far worse at home, so they already have it good. Some activists have discussed the false premises of this argument, e.g. the assumption that workers “know” what they are getting into. Implicit in that logic is the assumption that giving them less than ideal work/living/wage conditions (read: exploitation) is normal — in Graeber’s words, “such is the nature of the sacrifice” they are making by coming here to eke out a better living for their families back home. One group that I’m also thinking about is foreign domestic workers, for whom the boundary between workplace and home was always absent. Foreign domestic workers take over the “caring labor” that usually done for free by those in the home, but they are severely unpaid for the work that they do. There are all these stories about how they can’t even rest and relax because of the logic that they’re on the employer’s time and occupying the employer’s space. Is it about paying them more? Maybe, but it’s also a question of why aren’t we already paying them more? This is caught up again with exploitation and class, and within Singapore with our reliance on low-wage workers to fill labor-intensive jobs so the rest of us can go on with the sort of bullshit ones that Graeber talks about. And becuase they are not paid highly, the work they do is not valued ($$).

Anyway in may 2020, I’m less interested in how the pandemic lets me work from home in my pjs as how it challenges the inertia for redressing power imbalances.

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oadara · 7 years

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my point about lyanna is that we don't know. maybe she was manipulated. we have no idea. concretely blaming her is unlike blaming dany for her white saviorism in slaver's bay. lyyanna was selfish but to act like she was definitely not caring for her fam based on circumstantial evidence, because that's what the evidence is, is wild when y'all excuse dany for things we see her do because her motives are good lmao I can't. blame Rhaegar all you want. he deserves it.

mentioning that we don’t have lyanna’s pov or that what we have is circumstantial evidence on what/when lyanna knew is excuses? I wonder what the yt people dany defense essays of her actions in slavers bay are. I was softening towards dany and her yt savior nonsense that got brown people killed bc of her mismanagement and had slaves sell themselves back into slavery. but if we’re taking an hardline position, then wonder what a defense of dany/slavers bay (book) is but an excuse of the outcome

Anon,

These are two separate asks but I because clearly you are the same anon and by the way you write I’m pretty sure I know who you are. Why don’t we get a few things straight and then you can leave my mailbox alone for all eternity

I see that you mentioned the books, which is fantastic because I can finally set you straight on your delusion that the Slaver’s Bay was only populated by people of color, which is untrue, it was mixed race. Slaves from the Free Cities, Qarth Lhazareen, Dothraki, etc. populated Slaver’s Bay.

Here, why don’t you read this, it’s straight from the horse’s (GRRM’s) mouth:

“And meanwhile, you’ve got Daenerys visiting more Eurasian and Middle Eastern cultures.

And that has generated its controversy too. I answer that one to in my blog. I know some of the people who are coming at this from a political or racial angle just seem to completely disregard the logistics of the thing here. I talk about what’s in the books. The books are what I write. What I’m responsible for.

Slavery in the ancient world, and slavery in the medieval world, was not race-based. You could lose a war if you were a Spartan, and if you lost a war you could end up a slave in Athens, or vice versa. You could get in debt, and wind up a slave. And that’s what I tried to depict, in my books, that kind of slavery.

So the people that Dany frees in the slaver cities are of many different ethnicities, and that’s been fairly explicit in the books. But of course when David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] and his crew are filming that scene [of Daenerys being carried by freed slaves], they are filming it in Morocco, and they put out a call for 800 extras. That’s a lot of extras. They hired the people who turned up. Extras don’t get paid very much. I did an extra gig once, and got like $40 a day.”

Finally, I can get that off my chest. Now, let’s address your other points, that I give Dany a pass because but won’t give Lyanna a pass because of her you. Let me say this for what it feels like the one thousandth time, Daenerys Targaryen has made many mistakes. This has never been a problem for me, it’s one of the reasons I love her so much.

Having said that, I have a hard time equating Dany’s mistakes with Lyanna’s mistakes. If you look at their upbringing, the education, the values they were thought, and the impetus behind their actions you see why this comparison falls short. So let’s look at the background for both Lyanna and Dany to see where these two young women are coming from.

Lyanna as the Lord Paramount’s daughter would have had an excellent education, training as a lady, as well as a very stable upbringing. She was clearly allowed to indulge in the things she liked, such as riding and learning how to fight. Her father might not have approved of the fighting but he wasn’t against it enough to stop her from doing it. I think it’s safe to say that there was very little that Lyanna would have gone without while growing up at Winterfell.

We should all know Dany’s story by now but I’ll repeat for the benefit of those who constantly seem to forget it. A few days after she was born she had to be rescued because the new king of Westeros had sent his brother to her home in Dragonstone to assassinate her and her brother. They ended up in Braavos and for about four year’s she had a good life but then her care taker died and she and her brother were thrown out into the streets. They lived in the streets and on the kindness of strangers for the next nine years. Dany remembers sailing on ships at least 50 times in this time period, so there was a lot of moving around. She lived in nine of the Free Cities and can remember times when buying a sausage was a luxury. Throughout all this, she lived in fear because her brother believed that king Robert was sending assassins after them. Her training and education were handled exclusively by her brother and whatever she thought herself through books she would read while staying with some rich benefactor who would take them in for a few months. Whatever sense of right and wrong she learned she did so on her own because clearly, Viserys had a very skewed view on those.

Before we continue we should note that there is an age difference between the two, at this point in the series (the end of ADWD) Dany has just turned 16 year’s old and Lyanna, who died at 16, died close to her 17th birthday. But if we want to find a point of comparison, Lyanna was running away with Rhaegar around the same time Dany was conquering Slaver’s Bay. So, let’s look at these two events to see the difference in their actions.

Let’s start with Lyanna. We all know the general story and we are going to assume, given some information we have, that Lyanna ran away willingly with Rhaegar. She could have done it for a variety of reasons but whatever the reason it falls into one of three categories, she was in love with Rhaegar and wanted to be with him, she bought into the prophecy of TPTWP and thought she would save the world by doing whatever she needed to do to make that happen, or she was so against her upcoming wedding with Robert that she would rather run away. I know there is another theory of maybe Aerys finding out her identity and going after her, but that’s when you run home to Winterfell and have your dad and your betrothed sort that out.

Looking at Lyanna’s background and support system and what we are told about her she was a very strong-willed and clever girl. Even taking into account her being in love, or believing in a prophecy or not wanting to get married to Robert, I can’t imagine that the ramifications of her actions never crossed her mind. She was raised a noblewoman, she was around nobles her whole life, the actions that she decided to embark upon would have been considered disastrous by any standard. And if she was taking a calculated risk for say the good of the world, she must have known that her family was not just going to sit at Winterfell and do nothing.

I do take into consideration Lyanna’s age and that a person her age is also highly impulsive, but that still doesn’t absolve her of culpability. She is still responsible for her actions whether they were impulsive or not. In addition to all this is the amount of time she was gone, she didn’t get pregnant right away, at least 4 months had gone by before that happened. And of course I put most of the blame of Rhaegar, he was the adult in that situation, he had a wife and children, a father who he knew was mad, and it was his decision to run away with a young, unmarried girl, who happens to be the daughter of a Lord Paramount and she’s also engaged to another noble. Rhaegar being mainly responsible for what happens still doesn’t absolve Lyanna of her part in this mess and the destruction that took place because of her and Rhaegar’s actions.

If Lyanna’s actions are night, let’s go to the day and briefly review Dany’s actions. So you have this girl who’s recently lost her brother, husband, and child and has no more family and no support system at all. She’s 15 year’s old, on her own, and she actually finds herself responsible for other people. Because she has no family and her father and older brother almost extinct their House, she feels responsible for avenging her family and recovering what was theirs. She goes to Slaver’s Bay to get herself and army, but while she’s there she sees that she has landed in the pit of hell. Little boys being mutilated, babies being murdered in order to train the Unsullied, children slathered in honey and thrown at bears for the amusement of the Master and just general slavery disgustingness.

So, Dany having been sold herself and not appreciating the experience decides to do something about it, because “you know what? This ain’t right”. So she concocts a plan and voila Dracarys Motherfuckers. Now, a lot of Dany’s mistakes stem from how she left Astapor, which she left with a ruling council but without any defense and then the mistakes she made in Meereen. And while Dany’s actions did cause a great deal of death and destruction ultimately hundreds of thousands of people were freed from slavery and therefore free to chose their own choices. And in addition, her actions started a revolution in Volantis which will ultimately free hundreds of thousands of more people, if successful. Which means that in the long run millions of people would potentially be saved from continuing to be slaves or becoming slaves in the future.

Can you see the difference in their actions and the outcome of their actions? If Rhaegar and Lyanna did what they did because of a prophecy, their actions were based on a belief which neither of them could prove was real. And in the meantime thousands upon thousand of people died, lives were ruined, families destroyed. And while you can turn around and say thousands died in Dany’s revolution, I can then turn around and say but hundreds of thousands more lived and were saved from a life of slavery. At the end of the day, people had hope when they might not have had hope before.

Their actions are not comparable, no matter which way you cut it.

TTFN

#lyanna stark #daenerys targaryen #asoiaf #got #q&a

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