#hes the unproblematic fave hes killed only one person like 5 times.

[re-alku]

who put this very tall gay Russian boy from 1812 in space hell and who let him become emo

#room of swords #oh look its kodya. before he was a bitch #hes the unproblematic fave hes killed only one person like 5 times. #it was the same person #he killed the same person 5 times..... #and it was his boyfriend #rip that ig #then he got a scar on his face. and gave himself the worlds worst ponytail #good for him king #most sane ros character </3 #alku art

[darkacademiadiaries]

Rating the characters in the secret history based entirely on my own biases

Henry winter

10/10

Henry. Henry fucking Marchbanks Winter. You pretentious sociopath. Also I never stop thinking about him there’s something so incredibly charismatic about his character even after *everything* he’s responsible for. Didn’t know about the moon landing and you have to respect him for that. Well over 6 foot, square jawed and mysterious as hell, I have a type and my god I wish it wasn’t Henry. This is probably the basis of my rating

Francis Abernathy

10/10

Where to even start with our red haired icon. Cubitum eamus. Asparagus is in season. My god, I just adore him. Arguably the most unproblematic of the entire Greek class, but that’s not exactly a chart of morality. Deserved someone that loved him back romantically, and deserved better generally. Lest we forget the iconic pince nez.

Camilla Macaulay

9/10

Even with Richard’s every attempt to rob her of a personality and only be the pretty one with her dusty boy feet and boyish haircut, she’s an icon. Low-key a mastermind and up there with the best of them for smarts and her wit. It gets a bit dicey with the incest goings on, but tbh I don’t really feel that it was entirely consentual on her part so I’m giving her the benefit of the doubt. Definitely the superior twin. It’s quite easy to make a case for why she’s the true genius of the book and we have to stan.

Charles Macaulay

6/10

Oh Charles. I had such high hopes for you. He’s one of the best characters in the first half of the book, and then it goes downhill very quickly. The incest. The drinking. He can be so charming when he wants to be and so terrible too. Running off with the married woman and leaving Camilla to take care of their aging, ill grandmother was also pretty awful behaviour, he lost his good graces and never got them back.

Richard Papen

1/10

He’s a discount Nick Carraway if we’re being honest. The OG incel, would definitely be on an incel forum if he was around in 2020. Found out his classmates killed a man violently and was more concerned about the sexual aspect of the bacchanal. Can’t forgive him for the scene where he wanted to r*pe Camilla. Gross character all around, not much about Richard that can really redeem him.

Bunny Corcoran

0/10

This one speaks for itself. The homophobia, the sexism, the antisemitism. The only one in the Greek class to take part in no murder and still ends up being the most dislikable character. No love lost when he ended up at the bottom of the ravine

Julian Morrow

5/10

None of this would have been possible if Julian was a more responsible professor. Took vulnerable young adults and isolated them from any other adult figure, approved of the bacchanal and was delighted to hear that it worked. Charismatic as hell at the same time, to be honest if he was my teacher I’d probably be as taken with him as the others were. He starts the whole chain of events and leaves like a coward when he thinks he might face consequences for what happened, not cool Julian.

Judy Poovey

15/10

Judy gets extra points just for existing and not killing anyone. The true unproblematic fave of the book, just wanted to do cocaine in the Burger King parking lot and take care of Richard. There’s a true lightheartedness to her character especially in contrast to everything going on with the Greek class. The only reason Donna didn’t make Camilla and Judy friends is because she knew they’d be too powerful

#dark academia #light academia #the secret history #dark acadamia aesthetic #henry winter #camilla macaulay #francis abernathy #academia #charles macaulay #bunny corcoran #richard papen #julian morrow #judy poovey #tsh #tsh memes #tw:rape

[rotationalsymmetry]

Re:

J. R. R. Tolkien: I will write about the horrors of war.

K. A. Applegate: lol what if Gandalf gotten eaten alive in front of them like immediately

OK, so I’m not going to fuck around on this person’s actual post, because while I’m a joyless pedant I’m at least a joyless pedant capable of recognizing when someone’s trying to make a joke and not serious literary analysis. (and ok, the joke is pretty funny.) At the same time.

Tolkien was absolutely not writing a story about the horrors of war. There is no way that’s a credible reading of Lord of the Rings.

It does have psychological suffering as a major theme. But that suffering does not come from war, and indeed is often ameliorated by fighting.

I am going to put forth arguments for this, please keep in mind that I’m still not an anti and “this book has a message I disagree with” is not “omg you’re a terrible person if you like this book” for crying out loud. You can be against war, and understand LOTR to not be anti-war, and also like LOTR. I would argue it is necessary to allow for the possibility of works that are “problematic” or that have messages that you don’t personally agree with, but are still ok to read, because if you don’t you end up pretending that books are saying different things than what they actually are. Your faves do not have to be unproblematic, any more than you and your friends should be categorically incapable of causing harm. People fuck up, books are problematic, it is how things are, and denying problems that exist is strictly worse than recognizing problems as problems.

I am aware there’s a popular fan theory that LOTR sprang out of Tolkien’s WWI experience, but I don’t think Tolkien would have endorsed that (given what he said in the forward about people suggesting the story was an allegory for WWII: I mean I guess it’s only human for people to speculate about whether a writer was influenced by personal experiences or world events, but at any rate Tolkien explicitly denies doing it on purpose) and also, even if the story was connected to his personal experience, a reading of the actual texts in no way supports a “war is harmful” message, definitely not a “war is useless/unambiguously harmful period” message (which, by the way, is a message media can have? Howl’s Moving Castle does, Terry Pratchett‘s Jingo and Small Gods do — in general, stories where the protagonist‘s side isn’t justified in fighting and that don’t end with the protagonist taking up arms for the other side) but also not even a ”war is sometimes a necessary evil, one that should be engaged in as little as possible becuade it causes tremendous harm even when it is the least bad option“ (iirc, the TV show Hercules takes this approach, but it’s been a while so I could be wrong; some episodes of DS9 go with it too.)

1. Frodo: not harmed by war either directly or symbolically. He‘s harmed by the Ring, by a physical manifestation of evil. He is harmed by evil itself, not by warfare -- he doesn’t even fight, except incidentally and occasionally (eg against the Balrog.) The character who’s physiologically destroyed the most in the book does almost no fighting.

2. Theoden: I don’t remember how the movie handles this, but in the book, Theoden is harmed by Wormtonge’s malicious council, again, being harmed by evil itself, and taking his sword up makes him better. There is no conceivable way a scene that involves lines like “As his fingers took the hilt, it seemed to the watchers that firmness and strength returned to his thin arm” is meant to be critical of warfare, in any regard. (This scene is also profoundly ableist, which is not surprising, since ableism and glorification of war tend to go together, for some reason (sarcasm).)

3. Sauruman: corrupted by greed and/or fear, not harmed by war.

4. Denethor: i’m not pulling together a case here, but I’m pretty sure whatever is going on with Denethor does not support a war is bad message.

5. Gimli and Legolas with their kill count competition. And in general, just…how the battle scenes are described, there’s suspense in “what if the good guys lose?” but the act of killing is presented as something that does not harm the killer. The danger is in being killed or conquered, not in inflicting violence or in witnessing violence.

6. The scouring of the Shire could potentially be seen as a ”war is bad” point — I don’t think it’s meant as war itself is bad, but that evil is bad and has to be fought. Very different message. also with some “wrecking the land is bad” and maybe “technological change is bad.” In our world, those things are very much connected to war, but apparently in Tolkien’s world the good guys are perfectly capable of fighting while still coexisting peacefully with the natural status quo as it were, or even embodying nature (the Ents.)

7. Evil. I’ve elsewhere argued that having an unambiguously evil opponent that can’t be defeated, pacified, or otherwise prevented from causing harm except through violence, is an intrinsically pro-war position, even if the writer is otherwise presenting a ”horrors of war” storyline. (Humans are very capable of going “look at this horrible thing that I find thoroughly horrifying” when…they’re actually kind of into the thing but don’t want to admit it? A lot of “look at this gross sex thing these other people do” is more rooted in fascination than revulsion, and that can happen with things other than sex too.) It’s possible that’s overly simplistic, and in any case, if you can have fundamentally anti-war stories that also focus on scenarios where war is according to the story’s logic necessary, LOTR is still not that kind of story. There are horrors in LOTR, and there is war, but the war is not the horror.

8. Side note, since I’m primarily arguing what war isn’t in LOTR rather than what it is (it isn’t presented as horrible, psychologically damaging, etc) but one could also make a case that battle in LOTR is symbolic of the internal struggle against despair. Fighting evil externally, orcs and Nazgûl and so on, is symbolic of fighting the internal evil of despair.

#Disagreement welcome

[putris-et-mulier]

so do you appporve the new arc of captain america, or you find it 'offensive"?

I agree with it, it makes perfect sense and I’m kind of disappointed in how so few people understand what they are trying to do

I’m not defending Marvel, I’m defending Nick Spencer. I believe wholeheartedly in his premise and I want him to get a chance to finish the story, whether he will do a good job or not remains to be seen.

It’s really convenient that everyone remembers when Captain America punched Nazis but not the multiple times he was a Nazi. Which even occurred when the creators were writing his book.

Captain America is not Jewish, he’s America. What he really represents is America as a nation and at his best has been used as a personification of America. He was punching Nazis before real American soldiers ever did and when we look back his creation, along with many others, encouraged Americans to actively take a place in World War II. He was a propaganda tool of social dissent. Sometimes the best way to tell his stories, to put them in perspective to its readers (which were not children, comic books are something everyone read regardless of age and gender and they were up until the Comics Code Authority) is to make him sympathize and work with Nazis. If your protagonist can’t understand something then neither will you and avoiding issues isn’t going to help anyone. If your protagonist doesn’t work things out to the core of the issue it’s a book in an ongoing series and I don’t want this world to get a sequel, I want to just wrap this one up with the best ending possible.

America just elected Trump as president. I could list a bunch of other things but that should sum everything up. In the last few years it’s become clear how infested our nation and government is with white supremacist eugenics and to all of us it seems like everyone who has any humanity left lost and a lot of us, a lot of marginalized groups, can see more clearly how close we are to becoming victims of World War III.

I get it, that’s why you don’t want Captain America to be a Nazi. He’s your unproblematic fave, if you ignore 90% of his cannon, and if he’s going to represent America then he damn sure represent what America was meant to be, what those white able-bodied racist social elites meant for it to be. 

I would be so disappointed if Marvel didn’t allow this pitch to go through. Captain America being a nice guy and punching out people you demonize is not going to teach you anything. And Americans have things to learn. As a nation we need to be taken to school.

It feels like everyone complaining about this has never read anything or has ever seen a movie or TV show or have any grasp on critical thinking… This is art. This is what art is meant to do. If art doesn’t make you mad or sad or furious it’s pointless and un-motivational, especially when it’s sociopolitical. If you aren’t mad enough about the way the world is enough to do something, you need something to put a fire under your ass. Nick Spencer might not be a good enough writer to take this on but we won’t know until he tries and people definitely need to tell this story in as many ways as possible.

Captain America is becoming a Nazi because America is a fascist country and the personification of American propaganda being a Nazi only makes sense. No one actually believes this is permanent, do they? Captain America is going to fix everything in the end and that’s the point. To show him not just grandstanding, as America is want to do, but to show Nazis as actual people with love and fears, they aren’t monsters.

It would be easier if they were monsters because we could eradicate them with no lingering guilt about mass murder. It would be easier if they were monsters because that would mean none of us can turn into one. That’s the lesson that needs to be learned.

Trump didn’t win the popular vote but he got a lot of votes and demonizing the people who voted for him isn’t going to solve anything. We are in this together, they are our neighbors and a part of our American family, even if we fucking hate them. Until everyone stops treating bigotry as a foreign object that can be taken on and off at will nothing is going to improve.

As a disabled person I’m relieved a story like this is being told and that they are pressing forward despite the backlash because a lot of the people complaining have time, but we don’t.

The Nazi party didn’t just spring out of nowhere with the power of political and social support to just get to work on concentration camps. It takes time.

Let’s ask the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum what the initial steps to the Holocaust were:

1. Nazi Germany sterilized 300,000 to 400,000 people under their Sterilization Law (1934) who targeted the “abnormal” (a.k.a., disabled people) as apposed to the “asocials” (non-aryan races) citizens2. The Marriage Law (1935) required all people to provide proof that they could not produce children with disabling heredity diseases3. 1939 Hitler made it legal to give disabled people “mercy deaths” by their physicians as the government saw fit4. Systematic killings of disabled people in government, church, and nursing homes were done under the secret operation called “Operation T4” in reference to Tiergartenstrasse 4.  Patients targeted were identified by a red cross on their papers (hilarious irony)5. In 1940 the preferred method of killing these patients became gas chambers. 70,273 victims were recorded between 1940 and 1941, 5,000 of these disabled people were also Jewish6. In 1941 Operation T-4 ended the killings went public with the slogan “useless eaters” to justify the murders7. It is estimated that between 200,000 and 250,000 people were murdered under Operation T-4

8. Many of the gas chambers used in the infamous Nazi camps were originally built for the T-4 victims and physicians trained through this operation went on to work at the camps and run the chambers.

These were social acceptable things that gained the Nazi party popularity and directly, and literally, created concentration camps. If you compare that time to what’s going on now it should be obvious why people like me have no patience for babying anyone.

Right now in North America more and more states/provinces are making assisted medical suicide legal and although it is still the disabled person’s choice whether or not to go through with it insurance companies are beginning to only cover the assisted suicide because it’s cheaper than covering all the costs it takes to be a disabled person. So disabled people are given the choice of slowly dying or just letting someone killed them now. To put it in perspective, it’s a very simple process that you do yourself at home by taking 9g of secobarbital or 10g of pentobarbital. Pentobarbital is disgusting so I doubt that will be the preferred poison but it would’ve been fun to be referred to as a P–10 patient, it’s more fun to say then S–9 patient.

So, given all that and the fact that there was a massive genocide of disabled people last year, a manifesto calling for our eradication and everything, in a first world country and no one talked about it, just like no one talked about any of these things, makes me pro Nazi Captain America. Fuck, it wasn’t even just a genocide, it was very efficiently done because of segregation, the names of the victims weren’t released because outing people as having disabled relatives, even freshly dead ones, would have been embarrassing to the families,  and tokens like flowers/candles/gifts from citizens weren’t allowed to even be put outside the facility on city property.

Give me Nazi Captain America.

I didn’t mention where the genocide happened or what it was named for a reason. If you guys reading this can  tell me off the top of your head at least what country it took place in I don’t give a shit what you think about Captain America being a Nazi. If America isn’t a place where people at least knew when one of our major allies had and honest to God genocide then that’s the Captain America they deserve.

If you’ve heard about Chechnya’s gay concentration camps but haven’t heard about this try thinking about why that is.

No one is learning from history so I hope to God at least a few people can learn through literature and art.

Boycott the company if you like, I’m actually glad people are because I believe boycotts are one of the most effective protests in a capitalist country so the more common the better, but don’t tell me Captain America isn’t a fucking Nazi.

#crowley-crow #abelism #actually disabled #disability #spoonie #Signal Boost™ disability #nazi #captain america #Nazi Captain America #racism #eugenics #world war ii #Genocide #Info