#cw genocide

[directactionforhope]

U.S. Free Palestine Protests this Weekend: 2/17 through 2/19

2/17 Denver, Colorado Indianapolis, Indiana San Diego, California Seattle, Washington

2/18 Boone, North Carolina Milwaukee, Wisconsin New Orleans, Louisiana

2/19 Aransas Pass, Texas Chicago, Illinois Los Angeles, California - Jews for Ceasefire All-Day Shiva

And there are many more! Check out the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, Code Pink, and your local Palestinian and/or Muslim groups for protests in your area!

#free palestine #palestine #israel #cw genocide #gaza #palestinian genocide #direct action #protests #colonialism #military industrial complex #genocide #free gaza #ceasefire #i stand with palestine #stop the genocide #palestine genocide #anti zionisim #anti war #united states #us politics #joe biden #biden administration #biden is a war criminal #palestine protest #denver #colorado #indiana #indianapolis #san diego #california

[palipunk]

The massacre in Jenin is horrific but just the sight of bodies being left on the street because no ambulances/paramedics can get to them since Israel has been blocking them from reaching areas of the refugee camp…yeah there aren’t any words. Literally what can you even say

#palestine #free palestine #if you are on Twitter and following Palestinian news be careful #there are images circulating of the dead and wounded being left in these conditions #cw death #cw murder #cw settler violence #cw genocide

[reasonsforhope]

Where can I find Free Palestine protests and Ceasefire protests?

A super international and continually updated list of actions can be found at Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network's:

Calendar of Resistance for Palestine 2024

They list events by date, then alphabetically by country, then by city - and it's common for them to have dozens of actions listed for a single date, especially on the weekends.

The United States especially often has 40+ events on a single day, especially on the weekends.

Events are posted with links to the event info posted by whoever's hosting the vast majority of the time.

Look blow the read-more for a list of many of the countries that have been on this protest calendar, in alphabetical order, since I know so many websites/lists of actions are country-specific

*Obviously this isn't the only good source of listings for protest events - there are many others. This is by far the biggest/most international roundup I've found, though, so I started with this. If you know another good place for finding ceasefire protests/events, please feel free to add it in the notes, bc I'm planning to put a bigger roundup together once I find enough other sites

Countries that Samidoun has listed/does list protests for include (in alphabetical order):

North America:

United States

Canada

Mexico

Puerto Rico (listed separately in anti-colonial solidarity)

Hawai'i (listed separately in anti-colonial solidarity)

Europe:

Austria

Belgium

Bulgaria

Denmark

England

Finland

France

Germany

Greece

Hungary

Iceland

Ireland

Italy

Netherlands

Norway

Portugal

Romania

Scotland

Serbia

Spain

Sweden

Switzerland

Wales

SWANA Region (Southwest Asia/North Africa)*:

Bahrain

Iraq

Jordan

Kuwait

Lebanon

Palestine

Tunisia

Turkiye (Turkey)

*Samidoun notes that "We know that these events are mainly international and that the Arab people are marching everywhere for Palestine – we will be honored to add more Arab events whenever we are informed!"

Asia:

Bangladesh

India

Indonesia

Japan

Malaysia

Maldives

Pakistan

South Korea

Africa:

Kenya

Mauritius

Nigeria

South Africa

Tanzania

Tunisia

*Duplicating North African countries (well, Tunisia) here from the SWANA list btw

South America:

Brazil

Colombia

Chile

Peru

Venezuela

Australia and Oceania:

Aotearoa (New Zealand)

Australia

#reminder that “palestine” and “cw war” are the tags for all of my posts related to palestine #and that I only post relatively positive news about progress toward peace and resistance actions and the like #btw do NOT mess around in the notes with islamophobia OR antisemitism #neither are even remotely acceptable #palestine #cw war #free palestine #free gaza #israel #middle east #gaza #palestinian genocide #genocide #cw genocide #nakba #second nakba #ceasefire #palestine genocide #ceasefire now #palestine protest #gaza protests #gaza strip #gaza genocide #war crimes #ethnic cleansing #colonialism #anti zionisim

[z0mb1e-sl1me]

shitty piece i did. genocide is never justified, and if you can sit idly by and grimace at this doodle, you can also click these links / reblog them because if you cannot help, show this to someone who CAN. liking a post doesn’t do jack shit, and reblogging is the least you can do to help relieve the thousands of mothers, sons, aunts, uncles, nephews, husbands, children, wives suffering and dying as you go about your every day life .

every single person Israel has slaughtered was someone else’s everything. Palestinians will NOT be reduced to nothing.

https://www.pcrf.net

🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉

there is no excuse. free Palestine and establish a permanent ceasefire NOW !!!!!!

#rotz #reblog #super bowl #february 2024 #emmys 2024 #superbowl sunday #superbowl 2024 #kansas city chiefs #kc chiefs #taylor swift #49ers #san fransisco 49ers #news #gaza #save palestine #cw genocide #🍉 #🇵🇸 #free palestine #ceasefire #end the genocide

[gatheringbones]

[“The Nazis’ adoption of the US pseudoscience of eugenics has been well documented. They borrowed US race laws and also the US strategy of continental imperialism, ethnically cleansing the land in order to populate it with white settlers, what the Nazis called Lebensraum. Less well known is Nazi officials’ interest in US racially determined immigration laws and citizenship requirements.

Writing four years after the 1924 immigration act, Adolf Hitler, in the unpublished 1928 sequel to Mein Kampf, admiringly characterized the United States as “a race-state,” referring to the US racist immigration measures that began with Chinese exclusion in 1882 and expanded to other nationalities in 1924. Hitler wrote, “American immigration policies provide confirmation that the previous ‘melting pot’ approach presupposes humans of a certain similar racial basis,” and that approach “immediately fails as soon as fundamentally different types of humans are involved.”

When the Nazi lawyers began studying US race laws in depth in 1936, they were surprised that racial exclusion dated to the founding, one remarking that such was not common at the time. Yale law professor James Q. Whitman writes in his important book Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, “The two new Nazi anti-Jewish measures that we remember today as the Nuremberg Laws . . . were the product of many months of Nazi discussion and debate that included regular, studious, and often admiring engagement with the race law of the United States.”

In a global history for German readers published in 1934, Nazi historian Albrecht Wirth hailed the founding of the United States: “The most important event in the history of the states of the Second Millennium . . . was the founding of the United States of America. The struggle of the Aryans for world domination received thereby its strongest prop.” Another Nazi-era book in 1936, the translated title of which was The Supremacy of the White Race, characterized the US founding as “the first fateful turning point” in the worldwide rise of white supremacy, informing readers that the United States had assumed “the leadership of the white peoples” after World War I, without which “a conscious unity of the white race would never have emerged.”]

roxanne dunbar-ortiz, from not a nation of immigrants: settler colonialism, white supremacy, and a history of erasure and exclusion, 2021

#roxanne dunbar ortiz #lesbian literature #history stuff #cw genocide #currently reading

[enbycrip]

I’ve just learned of a whole new act of genocide against the Navajo people during the Great Depression from this book I’m reading, “A Short History of the World According To Sheep”.

Around half a century after the majority of the Navajo had originally been forced off their land, with millions dying in a forced trek known as “the Long Walk”, and then *finally* allowed to return, the US Government basically declared “they were keeping too many sheep on their land” (which they were *not*; the Navajo bred a stunning variant of the churro sheep breed despite mass slaughter of their animals at the time of the original 19th century genocidal acts, and their husbandry of the land and their animals was reportedly superb, despite it being pretty arid even then) and, despite ongoing legal challenges, enacted a mass slaughter of these churro herds that had been revived with such love, not to mention 10,000 horses.

This destroyed the economy in the area, left the people on the brink of starvation, and broke the hearts of the Navajo.

The Navajo churro breed of sheep was on the edge of extinction until the 1970s. There are apparently still giant heaps of sheep and horse bones lying in ravines where these poor creatures were slaughtered by federal agents. The Navajo still sing mourning songs about it and all the human deaths that followed.

I’ve never even heard of this before. Not even a whisper of it.

The pointless brutality of doing that during a global economic disaster seems cartoonishly evil. And yet, of course, we know that the cruelty was the *point*.

There have been so many acts of genocide against indigenous Americans that something like this as recently as the 1920s can literally disappear. And now, of course, they are threatened just as fatally, if less directly, by climate change threatening to make the Navajo lands uninhabitable.

I cant help drawing comparisons with the IDF burning Palestinian olive groves. Wanton, pointless destruction of the living beings a culture reveres, nurtures, husbands and depends on is not one of the better-known acts of genocide, but it is both materially and spiritually a very real one.

#indigenous people #indigenous rights #navajo #navajo people #cw mass animal death #navajo churro sheep #sheep #cw genocide #palestine #palestinian olive trees #modern history #indigenous american history

[transrevolutions]

really fucked up that "genocide is bad" has become a controversial statement. you can't even make a post saying "committing systemic mass killings against an ethnic group is an atrocity" without the world's stupidest people commenting things like "it's okay to kill children if they're from a religion I don't like".

#for fuck's sake #free palestine #cw genocide #pigeon.txt

[dirichletttt]

I got to the memorial in celeste and I just. fucking broke down crying.

It's just. It's so normalized for terrible things to happen to us. Every fucking day I read on the news that some trans person got murdered. Or another anti-lgbt bill got passed. Or I see some horrible transphobic post with thousands of likes. And at this point I just sigh and scroll past. Because if I really dedicated a significant amount of emotional energy to each and every incident, I wouldn't be able to go on with my daily life.

But this video game memorial, whose text doesn't explicitly mention trans people at all but the message is clear as day, briefly broke that emotional barrier for me. And I cried.

People are dying.

People are being tortured.

Children are being taken from their parents.

People are fucking dying.

And for fucking what? What in that stupid two thousand year old book makes people think this is justified, invites such vitriol against people who just. want. to. fucking. exist. How do American "leftists" have such apathy, so vocal yet so cowardly when people demand real change? How can they not cry at all of this?????

I don't mean to doompost, but I think we're all pretty aware that a genocide is coming. Hell, it's already happening. And it'll be done legally, just like last time. And this time, the nation doing it has essentially a global monopoly on violence. When that happens, I don't know how we're going to make it stop.

#trans #transgender #lgbtq+ #celeste #celeste game #196 #cw transphobia #cw death #cw genocide

[directactionforhope]

By the way, even if you fully plan to vote for Biden in November (because Trump would be worse and has declared that if elected he would ban Palestinians from entering the US x, x, x, x)...

You can and I would argue should call or email Biden or whatever other Democrats represent you and just straight up lie about it. Tell them "I'm a constituent, and I've voted for you in x number of elections, and thanks to your support for the genocide of the Palestinian people, I will never, ever vote for you again."

Politicians, Democrats, and especially Biden need a fire lit under their asses, because the vast majority of them clearly aren't going to do shit without one. Or, worse, be like Biden and actively be the reason that Israel can continue its genocide on a political, monetary, and military level.

Tell Biden and other politicians that you will never vote for them again. It doesn't matter if it's true. It will help pressure US politicians to stop this genocide, and therefore it's the right thing to do.

Obviously this also applies to other countries where politicians are supporting Israel's genocide, especially countries that have cut funding to UNRWA (list here).

#dafh action post #action post #palestine #free palestine #gaza #israel #cw genocide #dafh potentially triggering #dafh very heavy topic #united states #gaza genocide #palestinian genocide #cw war #biden #biden administration #us politics #international politics #democrats #2024 elections #joe biden #president biden #election 2024 #vote biden #voting #vote blue #vote democrat

[palipunk]

The images and videos of Palestinians leaving Duma and standing in the rubble their destroyed homes to shield themselves from a storm will stay with me for a long time, the Nakba never ended and I fear it is only going to get worse.

ID: Twitter user Adrian De Leon (@aadeleon) “when Israel demolishes Palestinian homes, understand that they're demolishing Palestinian lives, entire generations, *genealogies* of Indigenous life.”

#palestine #free palestine #saif talks #the images from duma remind many of us of the Nakba #it’s hard to look at them and not see my family in them #cw ethnic cleansing #cw genocide #settler colonialism

[reasonsforhope]

"Palestinian plaintiffs and their legal representatives on Friday [January 26, 2024] presented a powerful case in federal court accusing President Joe Biden and other top US officials of complicity in Israel's genocide in Gaza.

People around the world tuned in for the long-awaited hearing in Oakland, with plaintiffs appearing in person and over Zoom in an unprecedented effort to hold the Biden administration accountable for its actions in Gaza.

The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed the lawsuit in November 2023 on behalf of Defense for Children International–Palestine, Al-Haq, and eight Palestinians in the US and Palestine. The complaint accuses President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin of failing to live up to their legal responsibilities under the 1948 Genocide Convention and the 1988 Genocide Convention Implementation Act.

The United Nations convention classifies complicity in genocide, or the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part, as a crime under international law and requires that states take measures to prevent such atrocities.

[Note: This is a big reason why politicians almost never call it a genocide, btw. Because if a country recognizes that it's a genocide, then they actually are legally required to do a bunch of things to stop it, under international law.]

The historic lawsuit contends that the Biden administration has failed to uphold its obligations by continuing to provide diplomatic and military support for Israel's brutal campaign in Gaza. Plaintiffs are asking the court to stop Biden from sending more weapons and munitions to Israel that are being used to kill Palestinians en masse.

The hearing before the US District Court for the Northern District of California took place just hours after the International Court of Justice issued provisional measures against Israel in a landmark case brought by South Africa.

-via TAG24, January 26, 2024. Article continues below.

Court contends with questions of jurisdiction and responsibility

In evaluating the allegations, questioning in Friday's hearing revolved around the so-called political question doctrine, by which federal courts regularly refrain from ruling on political matters seen as best resolved by the president and Congress.

The Department of Justice argued that according to the doctrine, the court has no jurisdiction to rule in the case.

"If the court condemns United States foreign policy toward Israel, it could cause international embarrassment and undermine foreign policy decisions in the sensitive context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," defense counsel Jean Lin told Senior District Judge Jeffrey S. White.

Katherine Gallagher of the CCR countered that the court does, indeed, have a responsibility to step in: "Here, the question is a legal one, whether the actions undertaken by the United States failed to uphold the obligation to prevent genocide, and that is an active obligation that requires that the United States not provide the means by which a genocide is being furthered."

"There is no discretion for any state to evade its obligations, its legal obligations. These are not policy decisions," she said.

Palestinian plaintiffs share powerful testimonies before the court

After legal arguments in the case, Judge White heard two hours of gut-wrenching testimony from Palestinian plaintiffs and a renowned Holocaust and genocide expert.

Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History at Wake Forest University Dr. Barry Trachtenberg shared his remarks before the court in spite of vehement US government opposition.

"To have an event fall under the 1948 Convention on Genocide requires both action and intent, and here we see that very, very clearly in a way that seems really quite unique in history," he stated, noting that there is now an opportunity to stop Israel's unfolding genocide in real time to prevent further loss of lives...

Judge White said he would take the testimonies to heart as he evaluates his constitutional responsibilities, describing the case as "the most difficult judicial decision" he has ever had to make."

-via TAG24, January 26, 2024

-

Note: I know a lot of people are really not gonna appreciate that last line. I'm not thrilled with it either. But it is worth noting that having a federal court overrule the US president's huge foreign policy and military decisions would be an absolutely massive deal/precedent

This is a case that deserves to be ruled on with an incredible amount of seriousness, if only because if you're a federal judge who's going to make that call, your written decision/legal justification needs to be unimpeachable

That said, if the judge uses jurisdiction to pass the buck here and avoid his legal and human responsibility to do what he can to stop a genocide, I'm gonna be pissed

#palestine #cw war #free palestine #united states #us politics #oakland #california #legal system #foreign policy #war crimes #cw genocide #anti zionisim #isreal #current events #good news #hope #also this decision runs right up against the fact that #if US citizens can sue the US for war crimes/violating international law #and actually force change #then suddenly the gates will open to similar lawsuits for EVERY future war #which btw they SHOULD and international humanitarian law SHOULD be enforceablle #and it will also be a major step forward for something the US is trying really really hard to stave off #which is being investigated/sued by the International Criminal Court for war crimes during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars #or you know be held accountable for those war crimes in any way #which again I AM ALL FOR #genuinely how do you stop rich white countries from committing war crimes without an actual way to hold them accountable #and actually enforce international law #reminder that all posts related to the war are tagged palestine and cw war

[extremesocialoutcast]

Please stop and read; this is a very important post, especially if you're a fan of My Little Pony, Powerpuff Girls, Teen Titans, or any other animated work(s) involving VA Tara Strong

Tara Strong is a really fucked up person and you shouldn't support her

(TW: Genocide in Palestine)

Reposting this whole thing as an image because reblogs don't seem to make onto people's public feeds

[Link featured from original blog post]

[Link to reblog should be tied to the image]

[I normally don't make posts like this, nor do I plan to do so again anytime soon; I'm only doing this to warn people]

#fuck tara strong #tara strong #tw genocide #cw genocide #genocide #islamophobia #fuck israel #palestine #free palestine #my little pony #mlp #mlp fim #twilight sparkle #mlp twilight sparkle #twilight sparkle mlp #powerpuff girls #ppg #ppg bubbles #bubbles ppg #bubbles #teen titans #teen titans go #ttg #raven #teen titans raven #ttg raven #fairly oddparents #timmy turner

[fernsnailz]

i love reading your sonic loreposts i was wondering if you could please explain archie charmy to me, i have heard stuff and i am so curious but i am not a comics in general kinda person. the lsd poisoned friend or the brain damage literally just anything that happens to him your pick

hi anon i’m just going to go over everything that happens to archie charmy pre-reboot so i hopefully never have to talk about it after this. i'm sorry i'm so so sorry

Archie Charmy is subject to a lot of controversy and discussion because despite his limited role in the comics, he goes through some of the most batshit insane character and plot beats in the whole series (and that you’ve already mentioned). I’ll be skimming over some of the more boring parts, but the wild stuff I'll go pretty in-depth with.

I’ll also be attempting to explain WHY all of this happens to Charmy Bee of all characters, taking into account the context of the story, what was happening behind the scenes in the writer’s room, and even comic trends in general. I want to try and keep away from the very reactionary “wow archie sonic is sooooo crazy” discussion that happens around this stuff and hopefully provide a little more useful analysis. i talk about comic PSAs for a while so be warned

There are some very, very important content warnings that are coming with Archie Charmy lore: warning for non-consensual drug use and overdose (specifically LSD), child death, genocide, implied ableism, memory loss, implied age regression, breif homophobia mention (not related to charmy)

this is going to be a very long one. charmy lore under the cut

INTRODUCTION - CHAOTIX

Charmy Bee’s first appearance in Archie Sonic is in the Knuckles’ Chaotix special, which adapts the first game he appeared in. This issue introduces the entire Chaotix cast (six new characters) in a mere four pages, so Charmy doesn’t make much of an impression other than “bee who likes to explore and adventure.” He lacks that annoying little brother personality that he has in most Sonic media, and he’ll often speak with language that feels extremely out of character for the Charmy that most people know.

This is because this version of Charmy is based off of his character description from the Knuckles’ Chaotix game manual. Despite the series being based off of the video game franchise, the Archie Sonic writers were often given very little information about upcoming game releases from SEGA when they were asked to adapt them into the comics. Often they had to go digging for the canonical materials themselves - for example, the only way they were able to adapt Sonic Adventure into the comics is because Patrick Spaziante (one of the comic’s artists) had a Japanese version of the game that he bought himself. They had no English translation and zero guidance from SEGA, so they had to attempt to piece the story together without SEGA's help. This was the case with most of the game adaptations, and it was honestly a miracle that they had access to the manual for Knuckles’ Chaotix at all.

There’s just one problem: the manual for Knuckles’ Chaotix describes a version of Charmy that is very, very different from the one we know of today. It describes a 16-year old that is… sophisticated?

(sorry for the low quality, there aren't many images of the manual. also fun fact, there was no age for Charmy listed in the original Japanese manual)

Charmy's differing age and personality will lead to many, many problems, as the writers decided to give the “sophisticated” Charmy darker stories. This brings us to the Knuckles the Echidna mini-series.

The Knuckles mini-series is. Bad. Charmy Bee is certainly there for the first few issues (as are most of the Chaotix), but he doesn’t get much focus until issue 13.

I don’t know how to put this in a way that doesn’t sound extremely blunt: This is the issue where Charmy’s best friend overdoses on LSD and dies.

PART 1 - MELLO

Charmy's best friend is named Mello Bee. This is his first and last appearance in the series.

Mello started feeling strange on their return trip from Happyland, a sketchy theme park that recently reopened under new management. Charmy isn't sure why Mello died, but Constable Reminton (essentially the sheriff of Echidnopolis) reveals that there have been a series of cases similar to Mello's - cases where people were suffering from… Lemon Sundrop Dandelion poisoning.

The Chaotix go to Happyland to see if they can find the source of the poisoning, but what they don't know is that it's actually laced into the food. The manager of Happyland, Renfield T. Rodent, has been lacing the park's chili dogs with LSD in hopes of making everyone addicted to them. However, the amount of LSD he's been putting into the food is too much for most people to handle. This is probably the most insane paragraph I've had to write for one of these loreposts

Unknown to the Chaotix, they all start eating the chili dogs during their investigation (except for Julie-Su and Knuckles, who is absent) and start tripping balls.

Continuing the story into issue 14, Charmy’s LSD trip reveals that he’s actually the prince of a bee colony and has been running away from his responsibilities as a member of the royal family.

Charmy is knocked out for the rest of this arc as he goes through his trip - they have to operate on him and some other stuff happens I guess (Julie-Su gets thrown off of a roof, Knuckles fights some guys in a desert, Vector is a misogynist, stuff like that). At the end of issue 15, Charmy learns from his trip and returns to his family, temporarily leaving the Chaotix to return to his royal duties. Mello's family and his all mourn Mello's death and bury him back at their home.

So. What was the fucking point of all that

In the long-term, Charmy returning home to his family essentially writes him out of the story for a while. Knuckles the Echidna issue 15 released in 1998, and Charmy doesn't really return until 2001. While I'm not entirely sure what the reason for this was, there were so many members of the Chaotix that I honestly think this was an okay decision.

However, there's one very important question left to answer: Why was LSD and a drug overdose included in this arc at all?

When I first read this arc, I had a burning thought that I couldn't get out of my mind:

PART 1.5 - wait is this an anti-drug PSA?

(if you want to avoid me talking in-depth about the abilities of LSD and my ramble about comic PSAs for a while, you can skip to PART 2 where I continue the Charmy lore)

Comic PSAs (Public Service Announcements) and propaganda are a fundamental part of the medium’s history, whether it be to aid their country’s war efforts, give health information to their readers, or warn kids about the dangers of drug abuse. While a comic being used as a PSA isn’t inherently a bad thing, it’s usually VERY obvious. One of the most interesting ones I've found is a PSA that features Green Lantern debunking misinformation about the AIDS crisis. The image quality isn’t great, but the comic doesn’t hold back when talking about how the AIDS crisis is spreading homophobic ideology - if you read this, you know it’s a PSA and you know what message it’s trying to send. Sometimes propaganda can be subtle, but PSAs are usually loud.

(cw: homophobia)

This is why anti-drug PSAs are so common and so remembered - they’re over the top, they’re blunt (lol), and they have a very specific message they’re trying to send. For example, there’s an issue of New Teen Titans from 1983 that introduce a character called the Protector to teach kids about drug awareness where the issue literally starts with the Teen Titans in an auditorium telling kids about a dangerous drug. This issue also includes some bad trip imagery, and it’s uh… honestly i kinda love this

Anti-drug PSAs usually don’t work for this very reason - showing how a drug affects fictional characters can increase interest in the substance, and a single superhero telling someone to stop smoking is not going to break someone’s addiction.

So. Is Knuckles the Echidna issues 13-15 an anti-drug PSA?

Probably not, but if it is it’s doing a fucking terrible job of it

Some of the main factors of a PSA are the information it's presenting, the opinion it wants the consumer to develop, and the bluntness of its presentation. While this part of the Knuckles series is certainly over the top, the rest of these factors are really muddy. First, anti-drug PSAs usually don’t create a fake drug to replace the one they’re advising against. An anti-weed campaign will just tell you that weed is bad because that’s the opinion it wants you to walk away with. So when Knuckles issue 13 introduces a substance called “Lemon Sundrop Dandelion” and never actually refers to it as LSD, it’s less of a message about “drug bad” and more just a sly nudge and wink that goes “hey you see that? yeah, that’s drug.”

Then there’s the problem that there isn’t really much of a lesson to be had from these issues regarding drug use. Yes, Mello dies horrifically of an overdose, but most of the cast is able to walk off the trip like it’s nothing. Charmy needs to be operated on, but the doctors literally treat it like it’s fucking NOTHING

he's literally talking about how he told a patient that couldn't afford surgery to go to the butcher like HUH?????

In fact, Charmy’s trip seems to help him in the long run - he’s forced to face his past, and eventually returns to his family because of the literal guilt trip he has. It’s a fundamental part of his character arc.

This isn’t to say that I wish these issues were explicitly drug PSAs - I bring all of this up because these issues were released in 1998, in an era where the anti-drug movement was arguably at its peak. The people working on these comics would KNOW its content is similar to and even promotes the anti-drug movement. While I don't consider these issues to be an anti-drug PSA, they can definitely serve as anti-drug propaganda.

With this in mind, considering Knuckles the Echidna as a form of propaganda really opens up how utterly terrible these issues are. These comics can be genuinely harmful pieces of anti-drug propaganda because the way they use LSD to advance they plot is untrue to how the drug actually works and relies entirely on fear mongering. While LSD can be laced into other substances like drinks, it probably wouldn't last long in cooked meat - LSD usually degrades at higher temperatures, and telling comic readers that they need to be afraid of LSD-laced fair food is fucking stupid and likely based on false urban legends. Not only that, but Renfield T. Rodent’s plot to addict everyone to his LSD chili dogs is also fucking stupid because LSD is not considered an addictive substance. It can be extremely dangerous at high or multiple doses, but LSD does not normally lead to compulsive use.

I don’t talk about all of this to be a cinemasins guy or to nitpick a comic from 1998, and I also don't want to imply that PSAs can't spread lies and misinformation (anti-drug PSAs famously over-exaggerate things). I bring all of this up to show an ineffective and possibly dangerous use of something that could be considered anti-drug propaganda. Spreading blatantly untrue information and placing false fears into a reader’s mind is truly incompetent on the writer’s behalf, especially considering that this comic was targeted at kids. And that’s not even mentioning that there’s barely any moral to all of this. There’s no lesson and they never talk about this again.

Do I think this was all intentional on the behalf of the writers? I have no idea. I have no goddamn idea what they were thinking with this one, and I honestly don't think much thought was put into this arc at all. Maybe this was a strange attempt to make a Sonic-themed anti-drug PSA, maybe they were just inspired by the drug PSAs of their time when writing this, or maybe they just did not care. I don't know man. Anti-drug propaganda is stupid and it doesn't work and these comics drive me crazy

alright enough of that. let's talk about genocide

PART 2 - SAFFRON

don’t worry this part will be shorter (cheering and clapping)

Like I mentioned a while back, Charmy is essentially written out of the story for a while after the Mello incident. While living in the Golden Hive Colony, he reunites with another friend, Saffron Bee. Saffron becomes Charmy’s girlfriend, and they’re together for basically the rest of the comic. Usually if Charmy shows up, Saffron is there too.

(image of Charmy and Saffron I stole from... the Shipping Wiki??)

They eventually return to help Chaos Knuckles, a green version of Knuckles who is uh. Kinda going through it. Not much important Charmy lore needs to be discussed here, but some of his actions do eventually lead to him creating a genocidal villain that will cause many problems later. Don’t worry about it.

Things are quiet for a while for Charmy and Saffron. That is, until Eggman attacks their colony and wipes out most of its population.

Charmy and Saffron are the only survivors we see from the Golden Hive Colony. Eggman transforms the colony into a new base and traps its residents in an invention of his called the Egg Grapes - basically, he puts Mobians in these little pods that sap all of their life force, powering his empire. Most people do not survive the Egg Grapes.

The two bees return to join the Chaotix for a little while, and the rest of the Chaotix confirm that the Golden Hive Colony and its residents are truly gone. Espio destroys what’s left of the colony so Eggman can’t use it as a base, and no other survivors from the colony are found.

So. yeah what the fuck

Archie Sonic is known to have a LOT of characters - I’ve talked about the sheer number of echidnas the series has before, but there are a lot of characters that have massive extended families. The arc where Mello died introduced like eight new bee characters, but most of them were background characters that didn’t need to stick around.

Most people cite writer Ian Flynn’s debut to the series as when a lot of these unneeded/background characters were written out or killed off, and I agree since one of his objectives as a writer was to tighten up the story. However, the trend of “Archie background characters getting killed off or written out” started a little bit before he joined the team. There’s the destruction of the Golden Hive, and many echidnas in this arc suffer from the horrors of war - a number die off after Charmy and Saffron rejoin the Chaotix. yeah it's kinda fucked up

This is the second major arc where Charmy has lost people close to him - first Mello, and now his entire family and kingdom. The same goes for Saffron - they only have each other left. I mean the Chaotix are also there but still, trauma is trauma

How could it get any worse?

PART 3 - CHARMY

Remember how Archie Charmy is based off of the Knuckles’ Chaotix manual? The one that said he was sophisticated and 16?

This is about to cause a few problems.

At this point, it’s around 2007. The Knuckles’ Chaotix manual is terribly outdated, and most versions of Charmy within canon are 6 year-old kids. Charmy is known to be the annoying comedic relief, which is the exact opposite from how he’s portrayed in Archie Sonic.

So when SEGA asked writer Ian Flynn to change Archie Sonic to be like his video game counterpart, the solution was uh. well. it could have been handled better

Like how he obliterated the Golden Hive Colony, Eggman’s next target to destroy is Knothole, the city where Sonic and the Freedom Fighters all live. It’s a surprise to all of the residents, and he manages to teleport most of the population into his Egg Grapes. Before Sonic can save them, Eggman singles out Charmy to be used as an example of how the Egg Grapes work.

Sonic and friends manage to get Charmy out, but not before the damage is already done. In the limited amount of time the Grape sapped his life force, Charmy’s memory was partially wiped and personality changed forever. After this, Charmy has very little memory of the Golden Hive Colony at all, only seeming to remember Saffron and his friends. His becomes much more child-like, similar to his game counterpart.

the fucking sigh i just sighed

For clarification, Charmy is still 16. The only thing that was altered was his mind, with the intention to make his personality more in-line with his goofy video game counterpart. The problem is that giving a character brain damage to turn them into a comedic relief character is fucked up and unintentionally ableist.

This is something that writer Ian Flynn identified pretty early and openly regrets (I’m not sure what the source of that statement is, I’m assuming an episode of Bumblekast but I’m don’t know which one. I’ll edit this if I find it). Because of this, he mostly kept Charmy out of any comedic situations for the rest of the series. Charmy has a very limited role in the series after this until the reboot, only appearing sporadically and in one Sonic Universe arc. When he does show up, his childish demeanor is usually met with the patience of the Chaotix and their sad expressions.

Although the intention was to make Archie Charmy more like his game counterpart, in practice I honestly think this action only made Archie Charmy even MORE distant from his game character. From the Egg Grape incident to the reboot, Archie Charmy’s trauma never leaves my mind and leaves me feeling strangely hollow.

CONCLUSION - WHAT THE FUCK

I find the Archie Sonic series unfathomably fascinating. While I love the series, I can’t deny that most of the events I went over are poorly handled by the writing team and leave the series with such a strange legacy. With Archie Sonic, it’s often incredibly easy to see the biases of the writers and how they affect the characters and stories, leading to some genuinely fucked up moments that could have easily been avoided in my opinion.

Archie Charmy was really one of the characters that got it the worst, but it's honestly so strange that all of this happened to him specifically. The fact that all of this shit happens to a silly little bee is so, so Archie Sonic to me. Charmy is such a simple character to understand - he's a funny kid who's kinda annoying and hard to handle. So when I look back and see the 3,000+ words I just wrote about Archie Charmy... fucking hell why did i do that

In conclusion. I am sorry and do not become a comics person

thanks for reading if you got this far. as always let me know if i need to tag any other content warnings or if there was anything i got wrong! alright good night tristate area

#PLEASE read all of the content warnings before opening the pandora's box of charmy lore #this one's a hell of a read i am so sorry #sonic loreposting #cw drug use #cw overdose #cw child death #cw genocide #cw ableism #cw memory loss #cw age regression #i actually really enjoyed talking about comic psas and propaganda its very interesting to me #long post

[gatheringbones]

[“Pressurized focus on forgiveness can be a very convenient way to reinscribe existing power structures. The employee should forgive the donor who sexually harassed her because that would be convenient for the people whose job it is to raise money. The adult child should forgive the sibling who abused them for the sake of keeping the peace over the holidays. The Latino scholar should forgive the white university trustees who publicly dragged out his tenure process because they didn’t like his research on for-profit immigration detention centers.

And this demand often comes in the form of a guilt trip—as though the perpetrator can’t possibly get free until the victim offers them blanket absolution. But we already know that this isn’t the case—the penitent must cross that bridge, must do the humbling, hard work of trying to make things right, and if they are willing to approach the victim enough times in a sincere enough way, they can be discharged of their obligation to continue doing so. None of this depends on the victim—that is to say, the penitent can free themselves of their obligations even if they are never forgiven.

And the withholding of forgiveness truly does have the potential to upend a status quo or two, especially in situations where there is reluctance to hold the perpetrator fully accountable for their actions. Over the course of 2014 and 2015, as the news media began to devote more coverage to the police killings of unarmed Black people, the white historian Sharrona Pearl was struck by how often, immediately following the death of a sibling, a spouse, a parent, or a child, reporters asked family members of the victim if they forgave their loved one’s killer. The question struck her as “grotesque,” so she decided to do some tracking. She created a database of 106 of the higher-profile police shootings that occurred from 2013 to 2016, and she found interviews of family members in 74 of those cases. In a whopping 25 percent of them, family members were asked if they forgave their beloved’s killer. And these questions were usually asked either immediately after the shooting, on the day that a grand jury chose not to indict the police officer responsible for the death, or immediately following another event that might prove very emotional for the family—times when they were in shock, grieving, taking in loss. And at that moment, the media put them on the spot.

In none of the cases that Pearl tracked did the killer apologize in direct and clear language to the family of the person whose life they took. The Black writer Chauncey DeVega, looking at this phenomenon, observed that questions like these were not asked of the families of those killed in mass shootings, like those at the Sandy Hook Elementary School and the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and they weren’t asked of the families of those killed in the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. When the victims are primarily white, the question simply doesn’t come up. As DeVega put it, “Forgiveness for racist violence is a given, an unearned expectation of White America.”

Our white supremacist society has conditioned itself to demand this forgiveness because it depends on it in order to proceed as it always has. According to Pearl, the families of those killed by police are “asked to grant forgiveness to someone who has not asked for it but [are] really being asked to absolve the system—the institution of the police, and maybe the state as a whole—that produced the individual shooter.”

The request for forgiveness is, functionally, a request to not name an injustice as an injustice; it is a request that the families of victims not demand amends, recourse, or the kind of systemic change that might prevent the same kind of harm in the future.”]

rabbi danya ruttenberg, from on repentance and repair: making amends in an unapologetic world, 2022

#danya ruttenberg #brainspace #currently reading #cw racism #cw genocide #cw police violence

[pocketsizedquasar]

i am too fucking exhausted and grieving to crop these properly / make them nice and neat / get individual links to all of these (quick search can find them) but in the past two weeks ALONE israeli settlers (civilians!! not IOF!!) have attacked palestinians, set their houses on fire, mocked palestinian women grieving their genocided children, & more.

in the past several DECADES israeli settlers (including civilians — who by the way do have mandatory military service) have been active and violent participants in israel’s settler colonialism. not just passive benefactors of it. active agents. destroying palestinian homes. violently removing palestinians from their homes. attacking palestinian ppl.

when people talk about hamas’ “unprovoked” attack on civilians, these are the people they’re referring to. “oh so you’re saying those civilians deserved to die?” no. i’m saying where the fuck do you think this violence came from? think for two seconds about why the fuck there might be violence targeting the same group of people that’s actively spent the last several decades invading their land and ethnic cleansing their ppl?

you don’t get to, as civilians, be active violent agents of ethnic cleansing and settler colonialism, and then act surprised when said civilians are targeted.

israel’s occupation started this. israel’s occupation caused all of this. israel’s occupation has always been violent and therefore created and actively cultivated the material conditions for violence. if we want no civilians to be targeted (which is good and correct! i agree with u!) then israel’s occupation must end.

end the fucking occupation. free palestine.

#quasartalks #israel #palestine #free palestine #end the occupation #cw death #cw genocide #death #genocide #undescribed #of course the ppl engaging in this kind of what aboutism over israeli citizens dying do not share the same care to the thousands of dead- #-palestinians. if they do it’s often an afterthought. #the deaths of the israeli civilians are thought of as justification or at the very least provocation for the current violence. when israel- #-has been murdering civilians for decades. #but the palestinians are expected to just take it. roll over and die. #bc brown blood spilled means fucking nothing to them. #if ppl clown on this post i will fucking block you i do not have the energy or patience for this shit

[rassilontdavros]

Why did Joe Biden lend military aid to a genocidal ethnostate (that a growing percentage of Democrat voters are opposed to) in a reelection year? Is he stupid?

#r/batmanarkham #palestine #free palestine #free gaza #free west bank #god dammit joe #cw genocide #tw genocide #stupid memes #cw joe biden #tw joe biden #venting #israel