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terriblygrimm · 3 years

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guys this article is FANTASTIC. talks brilliantly about everything that was mismanaged w bucky’s character and how they tried to rewrite him in tfatws.

some great bits:

“By and large this discussion focusses on his queer coding, ie that whether a deliberate call by the creators or not, it was reasonable to interpret his devotion to his best friend Steve as romantic. [.........] This is an incredibly rich storytelling stew, and maybe too rich for some. Because The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, while ostensibly offering a deep dive into two previously underserved characters, isn’t just uninterested in exploring any of this, it seems actively embarrassed by how much previous stories have unmanned Bucky, and seeks to reconstruct viewers’ sense of the character and mangle the reality of how trauma plays itself out in order to get around it. Again and again, the writing inadvertently replays toxic and inflexible masculine attitudes to weakness and emotional suffering and packages them as wisdom.”

“In fact there’s a strange emotional distancing from Bucky’s own anguish all the time. His experiences are described only in vague, indirect terms — “that time wasn’t exactly a picnic”, “you’ve been through a lot”, “the hell you’re in”. People tell him off when it comes up or jokingly call him a psychopath. In the one scene where he is offered unconditional support, Wakandan soldier Ayo (Florence Kasumba) recites the ‘trigger words’ used to control his mind, to prove he is now free of their power, then stands as a soldier to attention while he cries alone. This was likely a filmmaking decision — those are great looking shots, but it also implies an unbreachable masculine divide. To offer Bucky physical comfort would be to deny him his right as a man to get a hold of himself. And that’s Bucky’s arc all season: get a hold of yourself.”

“Leaning into the idea that Bucky’s job as a traumatised former slave is to atone for his enslaver’s crimes for some reason, he talks to Sam in episode 5 about why stopping the people Hydra enabled doesn’t seem to be making him feel better. Some have praised the exchange between Sam and Bucky as a golden example of men supporting other men and talking about their feelings:

“You were stopping all the wrongdoers you enabled as the Winter Soldier, because you thought it would bring you closure. You go to these people and say ‘sorry’, because you think it will make you feel better, right? But you gotta make them feel better. You gotta go to them and be of service.”

Yet the core message from Sam’s tough love, however kindly delivered, was “man up and take responsibility”. Far from being an example of men healthily discussing emotions, this is a fairly typically macho rejection of any suggestion of fragility or ambivalence. (He also talks about the ineffectiveness of Bucky telling people he’s sorry, seconds after mentioning he was doing the exact opposite, so the incoherence of this speech really has layers.) These might be the kind of well-meaning observations that a real male friend would make, but coming from the mouth of the next Captain America, we are also asked to take them as unimpeachably correct.”

“I have to ask, because when I’ve suggested to people this advice was, well, bad, it hasn’t gone down well: does it really seem a good idea for Bucky, an emotionally unstable man in the midst of an identity crisis, to go off on his own and talk to the loved ones of Hydra’s victims, who he was forced to murder, given the last time someone found out about this (ie Tony Stark) they tried to kill him? [....] The writers clearly didn’t buy any of this either, since they were so unable to authentically write a scene between Bucky and Yori (Ken Takemoto), the father of a man he murdered, that wouldn’t go disastrously wrong they cut it short after about three lines rather than suggest Sam might have oversimplified the problem. But, they needed their vehicle to get Bucky to his smiley happy ending, so the scene had to stay in. He declares at the end of it “I didn’t have a choice” and it‘s possible this was intended to sound like a breakthrough, but as a character beat it’s rather hollow, given that in six hours we’ve seen no depiction of him coming to this realisation.”

“In that certainty is another strikingly masculine point of view, as encapsulated in the physical object of Bucky’s list. In The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’s universe, the brain is a leaky pipe you can permanently fix if you just apply pressure in the right place, going down a checklist and ticking off the tasks. Not cured yet? Guess you’re just using the wrong list. This mechanical attitude to human psychology and growth is not only macho, it’s pretty convenient [....]”

and lastly, how this whole show felt disjointed and awkward w sam & bucky being paired up

“This all speaks to another fundamental problem, possibly the root of why this was all so hamfisted — the buddy element of the show hasn’t actually justified itself. I don’t question the actors’ chemistry, and loved the boat scenes, but that isn’t enough to carry a story. One of the big muddles is that Sam and Bucky aren’t just different people: it’s that their goals aren’t aligned, they don’t exist in the same universe, so their journeys are just taking up each other’s space. Really delving into much of this could have completely overwhelmed Sam’s story, and something had to give.”

#stucky #long post

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my-bated-breath · 4 years

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Revenge for a Memory

An essay on Katara’s relationship with grief, resentment, and closure

_____

“So… the torturer of one’s imagination, the monstrous figure against whom one had struggled for so many years, dwindled to this pitiful wretch, whose obvious need was not for punishment, but for some kind of psychological treatment.”

- George Orwell, “Revenge is Sour”

_____

Her element answers her call - a hundred icicles hang suspended in the air, dagger-sharp and aimed to draw blood. On the other end, the man brings up his arms in a movement that’s quick yet still too slow, crossed over his head as if to protect himself. He trembles. He shakes.

His death would be so effortless. She could maneuver around his pathetic defense in half a second; she could kill him swiftly and painlessly if only she wishes it to be so. Looking upon his small and curled form, she knows he would offer little resistance. He is powerless.

Katara hesitates, something slipping inside of her, through her stance, through her fingers. Rain pours on. Ice becomes water. Yon Rha is spared.

_____

When considering Avatar: The Last Airbender in its entirety, “The Southern Raiders” stands out as one of the most mature and morally ambiguous episodes, one delving deep into Katara’s relationship with love and loss, present and past, and justice and revenge. Within it, the story does not outline any right or wrong path for Katara to choose. Rather, the most she can hope for is to choose the path of least regrets.

By the end of the episode, Katara has found closure. She returns from her confrontation with Yon Rha having let go of her resentment towards Zuko, who once represented everything she hated about the Fire Nation, and forgives him. The reason why she forgives him is clear - he has earned it by providing her with the means to find her mother’s killer. But the reason why she has found closure is less so.

_____

“This is a journey you need to take. You need to face this man. But when you do, please don't choose revenge. Let your anger out, and then let it go. Forgive him.”

_____

“But I didn't forgive him. I'll never forgive him.”

_____

To forgive is to let go of resentment. And for Katara - for someone who was eight-years-old when she last saw her mother, for someone whose entire childhood was ripped away in the same second her mother’s life was ripped away from her body, for someone who was forced to mature far too quickly to fill in that hollow space left behind by a ghost - that is too much to ask for. Although violence may not have been the answer, a lack of violence does not mean a lack of anger on Katara’s part. Her trauma has wounded her too much to prevent her grief from spilling into anger, and Katara can let neither her grief nor rage go.

No, forgiveness is not the reason why Katara found closure.

That grief and that rage, however, no longer overwhelm her in the way they used to. Something gives way during that confrontation with Yon Rha, but what is it? What is the realization that frees her from her hurt, that paves the foundation for her healing?

_____

“I always wondered what kind of person could do such a thing, but now that I see you, I think I understand. There's just nothing inside you, nothing at all. You're pathetic and sad and empty.”

_____

After she spares Yon Rha, Katara tells him that he’s “nothing.” For the individual who clings onto the nebulous concepts of “meaning” and “purpose” for their entire lifespan, to be “nothing” is to be faced with eternal damnation. Someone who is “pathetic and sad and empty” is someone who lives but is not alive, running through the motions of each day mechanically and without feeling.

Perhaps the reason why Katara finds closure without forgiveness or revenge is that she chooses the ground in-between. She has found justice without needing to serve it because life, in its cruel and karmic ways, had already reduced Yon Rha to a shell of the man he once was. Had Katara been any more merciless towards Yon Rha, it would still have been merciful compared to how he suffers in his present life. Ending Yon Rha would be a waste of Katara’s efforts.

So Katara says, “I think I understand.”

And so we, the audience, think we understand too. Only then we remember what Katara had said before:

“I always wondered what kind of person could do such a thing, but now that I see you…”

Katara is fourteen when she says “now that I see you.”

She was eight when she first saw Yon Rha.

In Katara’s flashback, the “kind of person [who] could do such a thing” is someone ominous, terrifying, and inhuman, a portrayal exemplified by the low-angle in which Yon Rha is framed in contrast to the high-angle looking down on Katara. In this shot, Yon Rha towers over Katara both in height and in authority. Thus, she has always imagined her mother’s killer to be the same way he has appeared to her when she was a helpless, vulnerable child - he appears as a militaristic man, an arrogant man, a powerful man.

The man Katara finds behind the door in the Fire Nation telecommunications tower is just that. As the captain of an elite Fire Nation scouting group, he embodies everything Katara would expect from the monster of her childhood, someone with a capacity for immense ruin and cruelty. So, lost in a memory where she is completely powerless, Katara’s grief and anger compel her to cling onto every iota of power she had gained through the years. Pushing her skills to the limits and past the limits, she inadvertently pushes herself to use the power she swore she’d never use - bloodbending.

“It's not him. He's not the man.”

Stricken, Katara walks away. Whether she is silent because of disappointment or shock is left up to interpretation, but no interpretation can deny the poisonous effects Katara’s hatred had on her. It consumed her body and mind, driving her to reach into someone’s veins and into their blood, tempting her beyond the one line she promised she’d never crossed. Stemming from hurt, grief, and rage, her loathing is intoxicating in the same way her memories of her mother’s death is so haunting. Because there was no humanity in the way Kya was killed, and so Katara dehumanizes her mother’s murderer in the same manner.

Maybe monsters deserve to die. Maybe monsters deserve to be bloodbended.

But monsters can only exist in memory.

_____

“Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.”

- George Orwell, “Revenge is Sour”

____

Before, when Katara and Zuko fly on Appa with Whaletail Island in their sights, Zuko awakes to the sight of Katara looking forward to the horizon, back straight and eyes hardened with determination. In response to his request for her to rest, she tells Zuko, “oh, don't you worry about my strength. I have plenty.”

Later, in her encounter with the captain of the Southern Raiders, her strength is affirmed by her ability to bloodbend-

-yet this is the experience that plants that first seed of doubt into her mind.

These doubts are in full bloom by the time Katara and Zuko reach the small Fire Nation village that Yon Rha, now a humble farmer, calls home. They hide in the shadows, trailing behind him as he walks back home, and then, they wait.

And then, they strike.

_____

“That was him. That was the monster.”

- Katara

_____

Katara says that Yon Rha is the monster, but their roles are now reversed - Katara is the aggressor and Yon Rha is the victim; Katara looms over Yon Rha at a low-angle while Yon Rha is looked down upon from a high-angle. Ultimately, a monster is more than their cruelty and vileness; a monster has power; a monster has control over a nightmare.

Only now it is not Yon Rha in control, but Katara.

_____

“I'm not the helpless little girl I was when they came.”

- Katara

_____

In the end, the issue had never been about Katara’s strength - instead, it was about her weakness. As a child, she was vulnerable while Yon Rha was infallible, and so the image of Yon Rha looming over her is the one that persisted for years, plaguing her even as she grew up and grew stronger. Hence, the Yon Rha Katara saw as an eight-year-old is the Yon Rha she would have no qualms about killing.

But that Yon Rha belongs to another time. He belongs to a time in which Katara was weak and Yon Rha was strong, and that time is the past and the past is unbreachable. Thus, revenge can only exist in the ghost of a memory; revenge can only exist in fantasies.

Perhaps the childish fantasy aspect of revenge is why the platitudes “revenge is empty” and “revenge is meaningless” are thrown around so carelessly today, so much so that they no longer hold any weight. Of course, these statements are true in many ways, but they also oversimplify complex emotional responses to trauma. For Katara, revenge is empty because it is not what she needs.

Consciously or subconsciously, Katara recognizes her needs the moment when they’re met - with her suspending shards of ice in the air, all pointed towards Yon Rha. Then, fantasies and illusions shatter, falling away like ice turning back to water and splashing on the ground, unused. Katara now has power, not only through waterbending and bloodbending, but through the present over the past. Stripped of all his height and authority, the monster that was the Yon Rha of six years ago had already been killed. Now all that is left is her, standing over the humble-villager Yon Rha, over her fear and grief and rage, over the past that once haunted her. Over her memories.

_____

“I wanted to do it. I wanted to take out all my anger at him, but I couldn't. I don't know if it's because I'm too weak to do it or because I'm strong enough not to.”

- Katara

_____

By the end of her journey, the ideologies at conflict during the beginning of the episode are still at war within Katara. Katara holds power over her memories, but she is not at peace with them. Katara is able to forgive some, but she is not able to forgive all. The loss of her mother still hurts, but the loss of Katara’s innocence is replaced by the affirmation of her maturity. She has not let go of her rage, but she is no longer blinded by it.

Still, no matter how bittersweet the ending to this story is, it is also full of hope and new beginnings: The hold old memories had over Katara is broken. Six years’ worth of hurt and damage, though it cannot be smoothed over the course of a few days, can finally begin to heal. The wounds have been cleansed; the ghosts have been chased away. Now, Katara is strong where she was once weak. Now, Katara has found closure.

Now, Katara is free.

_____

Works Cited

Revenge is Sour by George Orwell

As seen by how much I quote George Orwell throughout this meta, my philosophy on the meaning of revenge draws a lot of inspiration from this essay, a piece on how a shift in dynamics in the post-World War II world can lead to the oppressed becoming the oppressors.

The Cycle of War by HelloFutureMe

My analysis on low-angle vs high-angle shots and the role-reversal of victim and aggressor comes from this video essay, a piece on how the cycle of persecution and victimization perpetuates war.

Companion Pieces (metas) by yours truly

Rage, Compassion, and the Bridge in Between

An essay on Katara’s emotions and the reciprocatory relationship between her kindness and anger

Ideals and Idealization

My interpretation of Aang and Katara’s relationship in The Southern Raiders and an extensive study on how Aang idealizes Katara

selfish

A fanfiction that takes my analysis on Katara’s grief + the concept of revenge and explores it in story form (OR: a post-TSR conversation written from Zuko’s POV; implied Zutara)

Summary: Revenge is a fantasy.

#atla #atla meta #katara #katara meta #The Southern Raiders #my bated breath analyzes #my bated breath's posts #on revenge and memory #george orwell #revenge is sour #hellofutureme #likes and reblogs always appreciated :)

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tros-for-dinner · 4 years

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Like, okay, I need to talk about trauma a second

I’m reading The Body Keeps the Score right now - it’s a pretty comprehensive book about PTSD and trauma, and treatment of trauma-related mental illnesses and, like, I just keep thinking about Kylo (Ben)

In one sentence: Kylo is a deeply traumatized man and I can’t stop thinking about it.

As a general rule I don’t care about the ancillary materials, but “absentee parents” and “being left with droid caretakers that tried to kill him” is trauma - he didn’t have someone to comfort him and his usual caretakers weren’t safe. He probably started acting out, as what happens to kids that go through that. He was also deeply empathetic (metaphorically represented by being strong in the Force) so every lie that was told to him, every time someone feared him because of his ancestors, every time someone tried to use him because of his family - those are all wounds, too. Then, maybe because he was acting out, maybe because he was a deeply religious kid, he goes to live the ascetic life with his beloved Uncle Luke.

And I know this is my own headcanon, but knowing what I now know about trauma: he was still suffering the emotional effects of trauma. The fear, the mistrust, the anxiety, the anger - his fellow Force-sensitive students (and Luke) could feel those emotions. In the Jedi tradition, you either shut that shit down or you’re assumed to be on the road to the Dark Side.

Here’s the problem: the fear, the anxiety, the anger triggered by the pain of trauma can’t just be meditated away. It’s fight/flight instinct; it’s literally the oldest, most sub-conscious part of the brain reacting to the memory of pain and trying to prevent future pain. You can’t control it. You can’t reason with it. You either heal it or it controls you.

Luke can feel that his methods aren’t working but he hasn’t been trained in psychology so he has no idea how to fix this problem. Luke is deeply afraid of the Dark Side, and he was taught that emotions - a deeply-rooted function of the brain - are inherently ‘evil’ and cause self-destruction for the Jedi. Luke has a “all or nothing” “either I do it all or I’m a failure” mindset so he starts feeling despair at the bitter taste of failure. One night, out of pure fear, he takes an uninhibited look into his nephew’s mind (notably, without his consent) and sees how bad things could be in the future. For an instant, he honestly considers killing Ben to prevent that future from happening.

Here’s a question: what would you do if you woke up to a trusted, beloved family member pointing a loaded, safety-off shotgun at you, and you could feel without a doubt that they were definitely ready to kill you?

You would feel abject terror. Wounds from trusted loved ones can be the most painful, and this was a wound that eclipsed every other in Ben’s life. He escapes, and then falls into the hands of Snoke.

(I hate how the ancillary materials totally erased Ben’s agency by making Snoke influence his mind even before he was born. Grooming from a young age? That would have been fine. But as it is, it’s a supernatural element that oversimplifies and makes unbelievable a story that could have been more powerful.)

In my mind, Snoke doesn’t even have to be Force-sensitive: his gift is that he can tell what people wants, and he controls those people by promising what they want (and getting his victims just close enough to what they want so they keep coming back for more).

So he sees Ben and sees the perfect mark: someone who believes they’re inherently a bad person (drowning in shame, an instinct that is extremely self-isolating), enraged with pain, who has been indoctrinated into black-and-white thinking by the culture/religion he grew up in.

Snoke promises Ben 1. respect (i.e. a form of connection in which you don’t have to be vulnerable) and 2. power (which appeals to Ben’s helplessness).

All of us wear different “hats” depending on the situation we’re in: at work, we wear Customer Service or Manager hats. At home, we wear Caregiver or Partner or Roommate hats. Walking out to our cars in the dark, or taking the bus in a bad neighborhood, we might swagger with a Don’t Fuck With Me attitude. We hide or reveal parts of our personality depending on the tools we need in the situation.

Ben creates a persona to hide his shame, protect himself from vulnerability, and deaden the part of his conscience that objects to being part of an organization that is hurting people like his family was hurt. This persona is named Kylo Ren, and it uses the mask and robes like a magic spell to summon the gravitas and influence of his ancestor. But most importantly, the mask and robes shield him from the outside world as protection, but also to hide his shame and any emotions that aren’t ‘acceptable’ (’acceptable’ being anger, mostly).

The thing about shame is that it separates us from the people around us, preventing us from making meaningful connections. This is devastating to the human mind, because humans survive in groups (and our brain evolved to seek groups out). Bringing shame out into the light in the presence of someone you trust is usually enough to exorcise it.

Kylo doesn’t have anyone he can trust, and he is drowning in shame. He is totally isolated and knows he’s nothing but a weapon in Snoke’s hand. Snoke cultivates his shame and isolation because it makes Kylo easy to control. But then, totally by happenstance, Kylo meets Rey.

I hear people talk about ‘the power of love’ and I used to think it was total bullshit. I realize now that’s because visual media usually simplifies ‘love’ into ‘physical attraction’. In reality, love contains a spectrum of elements that are essential to a healthy, functioning mind. Specifically: a place you feel safe (a place where you feel trust, where you feel genuine connection, where you feel wanted, where you feel heard and seen and understood). The entire spectrum of intimacy (emotional, physical, and sexual) spans this need for a place to feel safe and known.

So Kylo meets this girl and a couple of things happen. 1. he realizes he isn’t actually alone. There is someone in the whole of the galaxy who might be his equal. 2. Totally inadvertently, Rey exposes his deepest shame (that he can’t live up to the legacy, that he is hurting himself for nothing) and brings it out into the light.

And, like, all of that would be disrupting enough, but then something even more important happens. See, Snoke built the expectation in Kylo’s mind that if Kylo cut away everyone who loved him, Kylo would be stronger, would be more powerful. Kylo gets the opportunity to cut away his father in the most final way - to kill him - and he takes the opportunity.

As soon as he kills Han - the very second after he ignites his saber - he realizes that Snoke was lying. It didn’t make him more powerful, it just makes things worse.

So while he’s reeling from that realization, his mind instinctively reaches out for connection, for people who might understand. I once read a meta that the Force Skype scenes in TLJ are initiated when Rey feels lonely, which I totally 100% buy into, but I’d suggest the connection happens when both of them are feeling lonely or hurt.

As far as I’m concerned, they bridged their own minds - Snoke took credit because he knew that would be devastating to Ben. Ben and Rey experience emotional intimacy and through their connection, they both start to heal a little from their individual traumas.

I went on a bit of a tangent there but here’s what I’m trying to get to: trauma doesn’t just go away. You don’t just flip a switch, forget about the past, and move on with your life. If you don’t heal, then that trauma and the damage to your brain persists. It takes time and an enduring safe place to heal. So I’m sitting here, trying to imagine what that healing could look like in-universe. And I’m just thinking about the fact that Episode 9 could have been about healing. They gave Rey the gift of healing. The moviemakers had a love story all wrapped up in a bow that could have been a metaphor for the healing power of love. They had all these traumatized characters that could have experienced healing. We, the audience, could have experienced the healing power of catharsis.

And in conclusion, I’m just thinking about Adam Driver performing this incredibly relatable character and TLJ’s Reylo and Luke&Rey plotlines being what they are - and just feeling deep gratitude.

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kinkyshoptea · 3 years

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Hi, anon with diagnosed DID here, and I am the Host. No, you shouldn't sell to a minor body, however, to that last anon who said "the point of alters is to protect the Host and body" is severely oversimplifying and also inadvertently hurting systems by promoting "Host privilege." DID is a result of severe repeated trauma at a young age, and the brain creates walls between consciousness to help survive it. Hosting is just a job one of the alters takes, and it's also (part one)

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thejakeformerlyknownasprince · 7 years

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“I’ll be sure to bear that in mind,” I said. “Uh, how did you say you knew Eva?”“From the world’s longest camping trip.” She rolled her eyes. “Four months of hork-bajir calling us all ‘cute’ and ‘fuzzy’ and giving us pitying looks every time we had to get food out of cans because we were too helpless even to digest bark properly.” She waved a hand as if dismissing the whole thing. “And don’t get me started on the excuse for plumbing.” “Gotcha,” I said, grinning.

DVD Commentary: There were a lot of different things I wanted to accomplish with this scene from Ghost in the Shell. For the record, setting Loren up as a red herring suspect in the murders was not one of them—that was entirely an accident on my part. A happy accident, since I never really intended this fic to be a murder mystery at all so much as a story of a guy learning to cope with trauma and also not to oversimplify his views of humans or aliens in the process of dealing with a series of murders, and that misdirection made the whole thing more mysterious. But an accident all the same, just like Rachel becoming an Animorph.

What I was actually trying to do with this scene was a couple things:

I wanted this fic to have as many light moments as possible amidst all the child murder and attempted fratricide and innocent-security-guard murder and revenge killing and… Okay, there’s a lot of murder in this story. I didn’t want it to get dreary or melodramatic, and ergo the desire for an aside where nothing truly bad happens.

It also occurred to me almost as soon as I realized I wanted Tom’s job to be personal-assistant-cum-aid-worker that Loren would be a natural place to go as a source of training and expertise. Hence, introducing her as another mentor for him as he becomes more dedicated to the role.

A part of me also really wanted to draw attention to the fact that Tom is really not a dog person. It’s one of my eeensy pet peeves in fan fiction (actually in internet culture in general) that being Not A Dog Person is often portrayed as anything from low moral fiber to an indicator of outright supervillainy.

I’ll save my rant on how dog obsession is a perfectly good thing that is also a(n upper) class indicator for another time, but I’ll settle for saying that I wanted to draw attention to the fact that Tom just… doesn’t like Homer. He doesn’t dislike Homer, he would never allow Homer to come to harm, he wants Homer to live forever because that would make Jake happy, he goes out of his way to avoid causing Homer even inadvertent distress, he’d probably dive in front of a car to save either Champ or Homer and not regret it for a second…

But he also doesn’t really see the point of keeping house for an animal that can’t be eaten, barks at the mail carrier, doesn’t contribute labor, occasionally chews up $200 pairs of Air Jordans, and sheds on the furniture. He’s just not a dog person. And he’s still a more-or-less decent person. And those two facts don’t correlate at all.

Part of what I wanted to do with Ghost in the Shell as a whole was establish relationships for Tom outside of his family. Almost every other fic in that series focuses on his relationships with his parents, his brother, and (eventually) his cousins. I wanted to give him meaningful relationships outside of his family. Ghost in the Shell obviously focuses primarily on his friendship with Eva and romance with Bonnie, but I wanted to establish that he also goes for beers with his former basketball team on a regular basis, that he has a decent degree of connection with literally hundreds of other former hosts… And that the AniPTA* includes him in its ranks, despite his not having been included in The World’s Longest Camping Trip.

*We don’t know for sure that Naomi and Loren and Eva and Peter and Nora and Michelle and Walter and Chapman all remain friends after the war. I’ve just seen this headcanon about the AniPTA (as I call it; if it has a different name I don’t know) a handful of times and I ABSOLUTELY LOVE IT.

We also never actually get to see much of the AniFamilies interacting with each other without the Animorphs present, mostly because the Animorphs narrate the books. However, we also see moments with Cassie’s and Rachel’s moms both looking to Marco’s mom as an authority figure, to the point where Eva seems to serve as an informal leader of a sub-group of the older generation.

Loren’s specific line about “the world’s longest camping trip” actually comes from my beta’s suggestion; she said that Loren should establish credibility with Eva right off the bat. I used that opportunity to sneak in one of my headcanons, that the hork-bajir as a whole tend to have this well-intentioned but semi-condescending view toward the humans. (You know, kind of like the humans have toward the hork-bajir? A fact which K.A. Applegate never really interrogates or problematizes?) Given that humans must look even more derpy and pathetic to hork-bajir than they do to andalites (and that andalites regularly express shock that humans can walk and chew gum at the same time), I headcanon the hork-bajir as pitying the poor stupid little aliens who—like infants—end up needing to rely on other members of their species to harvest food and mash it up because they’re too helpless to do it on their own. Given how well Loren handles being condescended to, which is to say not well at all, I have to imagine she was not the star player in interspecies relations during that whole time period.

#anifamilies #loren fangor #tom berenson #dvd commentary #gits #eleutherophobia #animorphs fic #light animorphs spoilers #i guess

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douglasacogan · 4 years

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"Please Tweet Responsibly: The Social and Professional Ethics of Public Defenders Using Client Information in Social Media Advocacy"

The title of this post is the title of this new short article just posted to SSRN authored by Nicole Smith Futrell. Here is its abstract:

Every day the criminal legal system hauls poor and marginalized individuals through a process wrought with trauma, indignity, and abuse. Public defenders representing the criminally accused view their clients and the system from a unique vantage point: they bear witness to the human costs of a system that falls far short of its purported norms and ideals. For the public defender who works within this reality day in and day out, fighting for each individual client might feel limited in its wider impact. Some public defenders have found that using online and social media platforms, such as Twitter, to provide insights and commentary on the human toll of the criminal legal system is one way to contribute to a deepened public awareness of the criminal legal system’s shortcomings. Indeed, while statistics about mass criminalization and mass incarceration provide powerful data points, narratives about the very real ways that clients experience being arrested, charged, processed and adjudicated can influence public debate and create momentum for both an individual case and more comprehensive systemic reform.

These online and social media narratives about clients can be powerful because they help to convey to unfamiliar audiences how the law is actually being experienced by those who have been marginalized because of their economic status, ability, race, sexual orientation, gender identity, or immigration status. While this can be a compelling and effective approach, public defenders need to consider what their ethical obligations are and also what a strong sense of social and professional responsibility requires. The deep racial disparities in the criminal legal system and the particularly unique vulnerabilities of the indigent criminal client necessitate that public defenders refrain from using client narratives in ways that may inadvertently oversimplify and exploit a client’s life experience. This article offers public defenders practical guidance on how to ethically and responsibly draw from their specialized knowledge and the experiences of their clients in order to expose systemic injustice.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8247011 https://sentencing.typepad.com/sentencing_law_and_policy/2020/02/please-tweet-responsibly-the-social-and-professional-ethics-of-public-defenders-using-client-informa.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

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