#to be clear i respect the activists who had to go through the shit not the federal government

[catgirltoes]

The funniest thing on Wikipedia is the timeline for the legalization of gay marriage, because the rest of the world is coloured in terms of individual countries but North America has separate dates for every Canadian province, US State, and Mexican State.

#well the canadian provinces all legalized gay marriage within like a year of each other before the feds legalized it countrywide #and dragged alberta and pei kicking and screaming into the 21st century #and about half the us states had it legalized at the same time a decade later by the us supreme court #but mexico it was done state by state with minimal federal involvement which i respect a lot #to be clear i respect the activists who had to go through the shit not the federal government #catgirltxt

[weaver-z]

I think a lot of the hostility in the discourse surrounding The Q-Slur™ is bc of the conflation between social spaces and political movements

for instance, I initially had a bad reaction to your take on the issue (although I took some time to think about it bc I'm not an animal tyvm) bc I value The Q-Slur™ as effective political rhetoric--a rejection of respectability politics, inclusive to everyone in a way that an unwieldy acronym can't be, simple and concise, etc.

however, I would never call someone The Q-Slur™ if they didn't want to be called that, bc that's rude? like really fucking rude? I'm even avoiding saying it here bc I don't want to stir shit for no good reason

there's a very big difference between how a movement should behave and how a social group should behave. a social group is made up of individuals with individual histories and feelings, but an effective movement can't be made up of individuals; it can only be statistics and icons, because it has to cover as many people as possible

imo, both things are true: it's not okay to demand people use it for themselves, and it's not okay to demand activists stop using it. the pain that The Q-Slur™ brings that makes it so inappropriate for so many social spaces is the exact reason why it's such a good political tool: it's confrontational and unyielding. it makes it clear (1) what we are, (2) what we want, and (3) what we will not concede ("our otherness is based actually" in a single-syllable word!) without making anything softer or cleaner

here's an example of how I personally approach stuff like this: I don't like the lesbian flag all that much (specifically the more-orange one made to replace the lipstick lesbian flag). I think it could be a lot more rooted in lesbian history/symbols instead of just being a pretty collection of colors that looks nice next to the other flags. but, no matter my personal feelings, I would never try to get people to replace it, bc dear lord we need some flag to unite under

(that obviously isn't the same exact situation, I just like allegories)

the Pride+ thing actually felt like a really good compromise to me. as it's a blog on an already p pro-LGBT website, it's a mix of both interpersonal connection and online activism, and wanting it to be as comfy for as many people as possible is entirely valid! go staff go!!

ig my main point in a nutshell is that it's v important to have manners in the vast majority of situations, with one of the main exceptions being when you're fighting for human rights. yeah I think that's it

anyway, I need to log off for a while. go lay down in a field and feel the rain soaking through my clothing. cleanse myself of the internet brainworms. remember that I'm human. hope you have a good one!

Thanks! This is probably the last ask I'll answer about this issue, because for a bunch of people claiming to be super trans-positive and inclusive, some of the people in my inbox really want me to play in traffic.

I also think that the political origins of the reclamation of "queer" are a good point to bring up. "We're here, we're queer" was deliberately chosen because it was a startling, incendiary declaration in the 70s and 80s. And it still is! It's a great rallying cry and wake-up call.

That being said, in a more personal space, yeah, I avoid being called queer for... well, basically every reason I've outlined in these ask answers. Having "THE QUEEREST PLACE ON THE NET" plastered on my blog was, while not triggering, rather uncomfortable for me last pride due to my associations with the word. There is nothing wrong with renaming the blog to "Pride" and using "LGBTQ+" instead of "queer" to describe the userbase, as it includes both queer (Q) people and people who might not identify with that word (LGBT*).

Thanks for taking the time to consider my position! Have a good day.

#ask #cotyledonal #q slur #q word

[scavengedluxury]

The police have been desperate to build a narrative of valiant officers defending Bristol from dangerous thugs, but the truth is very different, and they have started to trip over their own lies.

In our report of Bristol's first #KillTheBill protest we spoke about how the police lie in order to build a false narrative. We described how the corporate media facilitates this by printing their lies as undisputed fact, and how the police's cheerleaders both professional and amateur will take these lies and run with them. The past week has proven us right. Here is a run down of just a some of the lies police and their supporters have been caught out on.

7. Protesters Attacked The Cars Of Bystanders & Other Emergency Workers This was an early quote put out to portray the protesters as hell bent on mindless destruction. Reports were that vehicles that had nothing to do with the police, and were just unfortunate enough to be in a neighbouring multi-storey car park had their windscreens smashed. In later media coverage the police admitted these were unmarked police cars, the video footage shows that this was made clear by the ‘reserved for police use’ parking bays.

6. My Poor Bones! Following a police statement this story was repeated everywhere. The police said, as if a confirmed fact, that one officer had a broken arm, and another a punctured lung. Other people would elaborate further, the punctured lung was due to a police officer being knocked to the ground and repeatedly stamped on was a common story. Can you imagine who could possibly attack someone already on the ground like that? Suspicious at the number of alleged ‘injuries’ the police had suffered, activists submitted a Freedom of Information request for details on them. Shortly after this Avon & Somerset Police quietly retracted the claim, and confirming no bones were broken or lungs punctured. It was only after a lot of noise on social media, and articles in the radical press, that some mainstream outlets reported this change in story. Many original articles quoting it as fact remain online and unchanged.

5. Protesters Are Responsible For Hurting Horses And Dogs If someone told me there was a riot, and I said ‘ok, I’ll bring my dog’, and then I took my dog to a riot; I would be rightly accused of animal abuse. Yet for some reason the police expect a free pass. Let’s get one thing straight, the police don’t bring animals to protests because they love and value them. They bring them because they view them as weapons and want to use them to hurt people. At all three protests this week, police repeatedly deployed dogs and horses for hours, without caring about the risks. Luckily they also reported none were hurt. The most violence we saw towards the dogs was officers dragging them by the collar to keep them away from dropped food. Yes animals are spooked by fireworks, but better spooked and taken away than kept on the front lines as a risk to themselves and others.

4. The Protesters Struck First! An important part of any narrative, as any Star Wars fan will tell you, is who struck first. This is because few people would randomly hit someone in the street, but many of us would hit back in self defence. Early police statements in the press on Sunday night said that officers had ‘stood back’ until a police van was set on fire. These were clearly fabrications right from the start. There was footage of the police using batons to strike protesters whilst it was still day light, where as the burning van was pictured after dusk. In even clearer evidence there was footage of police hitting protesters next to the van that would later be burned, while it was very much not on fire.

3. They Made Us Do It In an echo of the language of abusers the world over, the cops insisted that they were ‘forced’ to violently attack the protest. According to them nothing else would work, as the crowd was so volatile, dangerous and aggressive. Even if the police had ‘started it’ (which they would never admit) they insisted it only escalated due to protesters. Were that true then, the expectation would be that a crowd that remained passive and peaceful would have been treated with a far lighter touch. Tuesday proved this to be yet another lie. Hours of people being hit by batons , horse charges, dog attacks, and people dragged by their hair. All whilst the most violent resistance put up was the laying of daffodils.

2. If You Don’t Do Anything Wrong, You Have Nothing To Fear A statement older than policing itself. The people who are attacked are, if not ‘yobs’ or ‘thugs’ at the very least ‘trouble makers’ and ‘criminals’. No Law abiding citizen need fear police violence. Well unless they decide something currently legal, such as protest, is a crime. So, then the police used violence on law abiding citizens. In chilling scenes on Tuesday they assaulted two journalists from The Cable, despite them showing press passes. They then detained the editor of Bristol 24/7, only releasing him thanks to the support of a near by photo journalist. On Friday they attacked a reporter from The Mirror, and ‘confronted’ a photographer. A short time after they arrested a ‘citizen journalist’ who had been streaming the protest on YouTube, first coaxing him over for a chat before grabbing him. They didn’t stop at journalists either, they attacked medics and the people they were treating, forcing them to relocate repeatedly.

1. I’m A Postman Yes, you read that right. We’ll let the victim of this particular incident speak for themselves by quoting from their social media post, which we have independent confirmation of. “This morning… I got out under arrest and handcuffed by 5 undercover police who barged into the house no masks initially claiming to my flatmate I needed to sign for a parcel (dressed as a postman) but followed her up yo my room. They told me I had been disorderly / violent which I knew I hadn’t. I was partially undressed and they were all big men and they wouldn’t let me call anyone and told my housemate to go to her room whole I was having actual panic attack and shrieking. They told me I was going to be out in a cell at keynsham police station but they needed to get a female officer over to help me dress first. I was clearly so distressed and confused BC I wasn’t even where they had placed me. Eventually they brought up a photo of a girl who clearly wasn’t me and then eventually dropped the arrest and left me but its so incompetent they could mistake me for this girl and actually get a warrant for my arrest when they can’t even catch real criminals My mental health has been pretty shit lately, especially anxiety so now this has happened and the police are responsible through treating me like a criminal and giving me no respect when I wasn’t even the person in their photo.So no I don’t have faith in the police or British justice system“

These are just the most easily provable lies that the police have told. There are many more, nearly everything they say has been an attempt to deceive. We hope both readers and writers, of the news will continue to remember that the police are not trustworthy sources.

As one commentator on twitter put it, Police statements are a lot less mystifying when you read them as what they are – propaganda by violent agents of the state.

#bristol #kill the bill #police brutality #uk politics

[yekistraight]

Hey, could you explain what being a feminist means? I’ve heard all these terms before, and there’s this huge stigma around it. So do you think there’s a way you could clarify at least what your beliefs are, and what you believe it to be? I’m simply trying to study stuff and see what it’s become or is. Thank you.

Sorry I wrote so much i just wanted to make it comprehensive:

General definition of feminist is someone who believes in the socio-economic equality of the sexes. In the beginning this was a straightforward ideology to follow. Women needed to be equal to men. It’s only fair, there’s no reason not to be. But sharing power is not something the ruling majority particularly enjoys so there’s been some bumps in the road. Decades and decades of bumps.

The feminists of the past started this push a long time ago with one message: “we want to be taken seriously, we are humans too and we need rights that benefit us and protect us from you[men]” and they were right. Sex based crimes against women were happening at an alarming rate. So much so that it had become part of some cultures and traditions, meaning it would be defended and men would be protected while women basically died, physically and socially. Women lived in fear and helplessness, being sold a dream of subservience promoted by religion and ego in exchange for protection from men. What about the women that still, despite the odds, wanted to choose a different path? Well, they were brave enough to step out of line and others followed. They exist throughout history, inspiring other women will their bravery and confidence, proving that it was possible to have the power and authority that men had. Now imagine giving every woman that access to power? They’d have everything right? Well feminism didn’t start like that (it was racially exclusive actually) but fortunately the ideologies spread out through cities, across oceans and into continents where women wanted, no, NEEDED such power; the power to change their destinies that had been set upon them by another mere human being.

So feminism is like a sisterhood, where we’re only related by a common goal to protect each other while trying to defeat our common enemy. Here’s where the simplistic ideology begins to mutate based on strategy and cultural progression.

Feminism is a sisterhood, but not a monolith. There’s been different waves (eras) of feminism where each sisterhood used different tactics to achieve their goals for equality. Its like making a new checklist after the old one gets checked off. However there’s been one item that still needs a lot of work before ticking off and that’s dismantling gender roles. Gender roles are the root cause of every.single.thing. Toxic masculinity, performative femininity. Gender roles were created to control humans and keep them in their place. For a feminist to push her way into male dominated spaces, she must first acknowledge that gender roles have been constructed to work against her and break through it. So take note, everything is the way it is because of gender roles.

In this era, the sisterhood has been split into two major groups, two warring tribes if you will: libfems and radfems.

Liberal Feminists accept everyone. They use the tactic of assimilation, where they water down feminist ideologies to make it inclusive for everyone. They follow the lead of oppressed minorities who reclaimed slurs and instead reclaim methods tused to oppress women that past waves of feminists fought to dismantle. Remember what I said about gender roles? These women are bringing it back and think they’re reclaiming it. How do you reclaim something that hasn’t been dismantled yet?The only power they’re concerned with is the feeling of superiority that comes from thinking bowing down to the patriarchy is their idea. Their feminism tackles issues like rape, victim blaming and misogyny, things that affect them personally, while taking on the burden of other marginalised groups as their own, pushing their own goals to the backseat while feeling a self-righteous high. Basically, they’re activists who have lost the plot but would keep pushing blindly than admit it. The second group was born from libfems that wanted more than a feel good pat on the back from the patriarchy for not being too interfering.

Radical feminists are still following the original objective of their predecessors. They still have their eyes open to sex-based oppression and are aware there’s still a lot of work to be done. They don’t put the opposite sex’s needs above their own or let other group’s ideologies influence theirs and because of this, other groups as well as libfems have dubbed them as enemies to progress. Ironic isn’t it? The group that still fights for sexual equality has been silenced by none other than their own. Of course hatred for this group of feminists didn’t come out of nowhere. Radfems and their female-only values are presumed to hurt trans women, as trans women are biologically male and don’t have the same sex based experiences as biological women. Trans activists took these as transphobic fighting words and ostracised radfems, silencing them and their ideologies, claiming that everything they fought for was an attack against the trans community. Conservative americans also share some radfem values, basically the one on keeping the movement focused on female only issues, and because the right is notoriously bigoted (ironic because conservatives are the ones who uphold the gender roles feminists fight against so a conservative feminist is paradoxical) this is enough to tell people that radfems can’t be trusted. That they’re all racist, transphobic white supremacists. Because all groups that share similar ideologies are bad. The public, not wanting to be on the Unpopular Opinion side of history, shifted away and further pushed radfems into the background while libfems and their blind acceptance values were hailed as the patron saints of feminism.

So what feminism was and what it is now are vastly different. It started as a movement in different countries with different goals, then it graduated and took on more serious topics. It was like a game where every level gets tougher to prepare you for that last boss, the one who holds all the power you need to physically change your reality.

Today in the year 2021, young girls are being told that it’s feminist to enjoy selling their bodies for money. That it’s the same as working in a mine (a common comparative statement). That it’s feminist to look as womanly as the gender roles men created dictate. That it’s feminist to watch porn and be happy your romantic partner watches it to; this means you’re sexually liberated. Grown women go to Tiktok full of minors in the style of pimps to show off stacks of money they’ve made from pleasing men. They say “i did it because i wanted to and so should you”. Minors are all over twitter trying to lure men with financial dominatrix tags. They can’t wait till they become legal to start selling their nude bodies to men. They were told it would make them feel powerful. People who are skeptical are shamed into silence, because the popular crowd is always in control and no one wants to be the odd one out.

Now compare that to women who spend time researching horrifying news of sexual violence still happening today. Women still having to sell themselves to survive in 2021 is a clear indicator that we’re still not taken seriously. Sex buying, pimping and displaying women as commodities is the reason little girls are being stolen off the streets and shipped off to a disgusting dreg who think he’s owed sexual satisfaction.

Radfems want to end child sex trafficking, sex slavery, wedding night virginity checks, honour killings, femicide, sewing up little girls vaginas to avoid them exploring their sexuality before their wedding night and bring attention to way more hardcore shit being run by top dogs who are cooperating with the old powers that influence the governments.

Whose side do you think the media will be on? Whose side is worth not risking ruffling feathers?

Feminism has become many things now. You can choose the one that reminds you of the cruelty of man or the one that creates a comfortable fantasy of false empowerment while women’s violence continues. Both get stigmatised anyway.

If it wasn’t obvious already, I’m a radical feminist.

I’m an autistic radfem living in a backwards country where the lgbt community can’t thrive so there’s no pride parades, no trans movement, nothing that can be publicised anyway. I can’t create a fantasy where everything works because nothing works. Women are dying around me everyday for being female, my best friend is trapped with an abusive father who hates her for being a female firstborn (something babies get killed for), I’m not worthy of basic respect without a husband, a poor woman from a muslim state gets death threats from her fellow muslims for wearing a backless top while a rich married one gets praised and women can’t apply for anything important without a man’s permission.

Now why on earth would i want to pamper the gender that made and uphold those laws? The battle here is still greatly a battle of the sexes. Despite this stale level of progress, our movement, like many others have allies. Male allies are great, allies are great, we need them to push buttons yes but also remember they can never fully understand what we feel. All they can do is try their best to help and in return we give them acknowledgement and support; so no we’re not supposed to be misandrists or transphobes. We just hate anyone who uplifts what we and our ancestors have been fighting to destroy.

That’s all

#radfems do interact #radical feminism #feminism #terf

[kingbennyboyyy]

benny’s RWBY rewrite: the white fang

so this is something that’s been on my mind for a while, and i’ve been trying to formulate my thoughts about it. the white fang in RWBY, as it stands now, is a really poorly thought-out approximation of the black panther party, an actual organization that fought for the equal rights and the equal treatment of black people in the united states. the black panther party’s actions have been long pathologized by white society and academia at large, and have been falsely contrasted with the ideals and teachings of MLK. the false dichotomy of violent and non-violent action is reductive at best, and blatantly racist at worst. while there is a whole fuckton to be said about the real-life consequences of these discourses, i’d like to focus on their impact on the writing of RWBY. i’d also like to talk about how i’d change how the white fang looks in order to make things a little less uncomfortable.

content warning for real and fictional racism, antiblackness, violence against marginalized people, and discussions of white supremacy under the cut.

so, the white fang. the RWBY wiki describes the group as “ a Faunus organization in Remnant. Founded following the Faunus Rights Revolution, the White Fang was initially a peaceful activist organization created to improve relations between Humans and Faunus and improve the civil rights of the latter.” more concisely, i would describe the white fang as a faunus rights activist group, whose modes of operation have changed over time. within the story, after the peaceful leader ghira stepped down, the faction as a whole took a notable nose-dive into violence. but why did this happen? why was the white fang written like this?

first of all, all of the following talk comes from the subjective opinion of one black genderqueer writer. i am not the voice of the entirety of my community, and i can bet that there are people who disagree with me. i’m just here to say my piece.

that said, i think that the white fang’s writing grossly misunderstands what oppression looks like to marginalized people. the RWBY writing team obviously wanted to handle racism in some kind of way- they wrote racism into the story. however, it’s incredibly clear that most of the writers don’t really understand how deeply racism runs in given societies. the oppression of the faunus is clearly mirroring the oppression of black people in the united states, and yet there’s little to this oppression other than surface-level discrimitation. ghira’s direction of the white fang doesn’t seem to understand that personal prejudice is a very small aspect of the continued oppression of the faunus. alarmingly, it’s only when “radicals” such as sienna khan and adam taurus take control that actual, structural avenues of racism are acknowledged. this has several issues.

- whether the RWBY writers intended this or not, attributing the acknowledgement of actual systemic issues to violent radicals is inherently a really bad call. the dismantling and destruction of racist structures is the baseline of most avenues of anti-racist thought, but by only assigning these beliefs to people like adam “kill all humans” taurus, you’re telling the audience that only people like adam “i’m gonna kill all my ex’s loved ones b/c she hurt my feelings” taurus think that these things are a reality. make no mistake, institutional racism and structural violence against marginalized people is a thing. by giving these ideas to violent actors, you’re sending a really shitty message. 

- another thing to note is the role of fear in the white fang’s activity. blake is quoted as saying that under adam taurus, people only pretend to respect the faunus because they’re afraid of the white fang. this is also bad. there is an actual line of racist thought that thinks that people who just want equality are a bunch of thugs using intimidation tactics to get special treatment, and by affirming this in-canon, you’re giving credence to these beliefs. in addition, adam’s literal desire to put humans in cages and make them go extinct is also an actual white supremacist talking point. actual fucking white supremacists go on about how the white race is going extinct as a means to manipulate otherwise well-meaning people into committing acts of violence against marginalized people. but RWBY says, “no, the white fang actually wants humans to be wiped off the face of the earth.” i shouldn’t have to tell you how buck fucking wild this is. 

- there’s also the role of violence in activism. the black panther party has long been attributed with senseless and anger-fueled violence against white people, but this assessment of the party is completely false. in truth, the arming of black panthers was a direct response to overpolicing and police violence against black people. the black panther party advocated self-defense, and acted as its own protective force for black americans. they had guns so that they could protect themselves from the cops, who were assaulting and killing them in absurd numbers. if the RWBY writers wanted to draw parallels between the white fang and the black panther party, they could have very easily done so by actually doing their research.

the question becomes, is it at all possible to have members of the white fang as actual villains within the RWBY universe? i’d say that it is possible, but it has to be done very carefully. there’s several things that have to be kept in mind here, and the entire understanding of faunus oppression has be to restructured in order for this to work. i’ll outline what i would change below:

- firstly, there needs to be more evidence of faunus marginalization past the surface level. this could be evident in a phethora of ways, anywhere from the trend of faunus hiding their animal traits being more common (an important thing to note is how accessible passing as a human is to the faunus), to beacon actually having much more bias than humans are aware of. blake highlighting these biases would be extremely helpful in establishing how deeply anti-faunus sentiments run. the only racists being cartoon bullies and shady billionaires rings too closely to the sentiments that white people have about racism. this is also a comparatively minor gripe, but the whole “becoming the monster people think they are” mask thing is just so... dumb. there are legitimate reasons for faunus to hide their identities during protests, and pathologizing this is just such a shitty thing to do.

- next, the white fang as a whole cannot be a terrorist organization in actuality. people can believe that the white fang are a bunch of terrorists, sure, but this can’t be the truth. for example, it would make perfect sense for weiss to think such things. her being the heiress to the schnee dust company, being fed stories about scary faunus with weapons trying to hurt her and her family would make sense. but the stereotypes humans have about faunus activism can’t be true. in addition, there should at the very least be more than one faunus activist party. the fact that there’s only one in the entire continent of remnant is so fucking stupid. you don’t think that some group of people would be dissatisfied and go and do something else?

- adam and sienna cannot be the leaders of the entire white fang. i’m sorry, but it’s just way too fucking easy for racists to say “oh, the entire thing’s just an excuse for (insert minority here) to ransack property and hurt people!” ilia could have been promoted after ghira stepped down. it would be interesting to see how she uses her ability to pass as human to actually make some changes for the people of menagerie, and the power structures that led to its creation. sienna has the potential to be someone disillusioned by strictly pacifist ideals of ghira, but she can act more in accordance to the actual black panther party, advocating for self-defense and knowing one’s rights. the arming and training of faunus, as frightening as it may be to the humans in power, cannot and should not be depicted at the beginnings of terrorism. there’s potential for actual discussion of the effectiveness of pacifism and respectability politics in activism, but all of that was overshadowed by the gross villification and oversimplification of the white fang.

- finally, adam. i think that adam is able to remain mostly the same, with a few adjustments to the environment around him (along with the previously discussed changes). i don’t think that adam should be the only person whose violent oppression is readily visible. the trope of the oppressed person going “mad with vengeance” is just adding fuel to the fire of the belief that those who speak out against their oppression should be put down. as satisfying an arc blake and yang beating the shit out of blake’s abusive ex was, it did just kind of feel like two people being like “yeah! violence wrong! pacifism good!” the unification of faunus SDC workers shouldn’t be attributed to adam. the advocacy for faunus to be able to defend themselves shouldn’t be attributed to adam. adam needs to be labled extremely clearly as an outlier, and even then this is risky. i think that adam’s group should be miniscule in comparison to the other sects of the white fang, and i think it would be interesting for his dealings with roman and company to be based on the distribution of android soldiers. adam shouldn’t come from a good place. yes, he suffered atrociously at the hands of his oppressors, but as a character and as an element of the story, he should be uniquely evil. for the few actual people in his group, he should rule through fear and violence, and defectors should be common. his brand of violence should be unique: rather than actually aiming to make changes to help the faunus, he should be solely focused on revenge. blake’s leaving him makes more sense in this way: rather than her leaving because of the inherent evil of violence, she should leave him because of his twisting the good intentions of the white fang into a self-serving cruelty. this all has to be contrasted against the well-intentioned actions of the actual white fang. the terrorist logo that appears universally on white fang regalia should either be solely adam’s, or his group should have a different name entirely.

so there. there’s my thoughts on the white fang and the stuff that the RWBY writers were trying to do. what should be taken away from this discussion is this: it is possible to write racism into a fantasy story without it being an absolute garbage fire, but it takes work. it takes understanding racism, the fact that it’s not just cruel people, but people complicit in the structures that uphold it. it takes being mindful of actual racist talking points, and making sure that your work doesn’t play into them. finally, if you’re going to make a main antagonist a member of the fucking civil rights movement, please for the love of god make it abundantly clear that they aren’t the villain because they want equal rights.

i’ve read so many stories where this defanged, platitude-ridden form of activism is treated as the only valid form of activism. in reality, it’s the form that people in power are most comfortable with. people approve of the idealized version of MLK because his activism was one that made white people feel good. the MLK we read about in schools is an illusory one. the real man kept a gun on him because he knew that as much as white media would have you believe that people liked him, he knew that people still wanted him dead. 

#benny's RWBY rewrite #RWBY #story #adam taurus #the white fang

[selenityshiroi]

FFVII REMAKE SPOILERS

Okay, I’ve given it a few days since the official launch. I have to give my thoughts on this game. Don’t read if you are still playing through, as I WILL be talking about the ending and some things that diverged from the original game.

First off, this game was so good in so many ways.

I was worried about the gameplay, because I’m not really an Action RPG gamer. But the gameplay was smooth, fun and well planned. I played the game on easy, so I could focus on getting through the story, but I WANT to play the next difficulty because I feel like I will enjoy the challange.

Then there was the graphics. Oh. My. God. This game is SO BEAUTIFUL. The scenery (even though it’s not always supposed to be beautiful, it’s so intricate and detailed and has such a scale and world building to it), the characters, the battle animations, the attacks...even the grotesque monsters look so well done. We KNOW the FF series is always known for it’s stunning visuals, but they really outdid themselves. And, yeah, there are a few texture bugs that’ll probably be patched at some point, but even things like the lighting and the facial expressions and body language...it’s all SO GOOD. If this was a movie they would be fighting for art direction awards.

But the part they totally blew my expectations away on, everyone’s expectations, is the character and story development.

When they said they expanded Midgar they really, really did. But not by senselessly bloating it out. Everything they did led to making you more and more invested in the events. Spending more time with Team Avalanche meant that you cared about Biggs, Wedge and Jessie. Spending time talking to the NPCs in Sector 7 meant that you really, really wanted to stop that plate from coming down. And every time you spent time with one of the main characters, you felt like you knew and understood them better than you ever did.

By the time we got to the plate collapse I actually felt GUILTY for doing side quests and looking for treasure etc. Because it felt like I’d failed the people in the slums (even though, obviously, taking your time doesn’t change the story). And they’d done SUCH A GREAT JOB in making the slums feel real.

Now...before I go into characters and relationships, let me be clear and upfront. I always have and always will ship Cloti. But I don’t hate Aerith. I never actually played her much in the original game (I was spoiled for her death and was very pragmatic in not wanting to waste my EXP). This game is my first real taste of Aerith as a character and not a lost friend, so I’ve loved getting to know her.

Let me get the Cloti talk out of the way, first.

HOLY SHIT.

I’m sure there are fans of other pairings who won’t agree, but most people are in agreement. Cloud and Tifa got a LOT of ship fuel in this game.

From the start, Tifa is the one person Cloud isn’t standoffish around. He tries but within a few minutes of them teamed up in Sector 7 they are gently teasing each other in banter, and he is SOFT AS HELL towards her. Since this comes directly after the opening mission (where he and Barret are openly antagonistic to each other and he barely tolerates the rest of the team) it’s very obvious. As the chapter goes on he also listens to her and offers support and encouragement, which is completely different to the rest of his interactions thus far.

As the game goes on this difference continues, even when he starts to open up to others. Despite the fact that he has encouraging and impressed battle dialogue with Tifa and seems to respect her ability to take care of herself, the game has him constantly protective of her. They also touch each other A LOT (both initiated by Tifa and Cloud) and far more so than anyone else. There are some super charged moments between them, too (the train jump scene alone has enough sexual tension to start a baby boom) and there are several gratuituous scenes of them grabbing at each other in danger and showing extreme concern both physically and emotionally (and more of Cloud being SOFT AS HELL when it comes to Tifa). Plus their optional scene is super romantically suggestive (with the hug and his concern for her emotions and the hints at their shared history).

I could spend so much time going over all of their interactions and little moments because WOW. But I wanna go over the other relationships.

Cloud and Barret have such amazing development through the game. They start out as super antagonistic to each other. Barret doesn’t trust him and Cloud doesn’t care. But Barret is a softy at heart and he can’t help but soften up a little. By the time of the second reactor mission they start to tolerate and appreciate each other a little. But by the time they are fighting to save the plate? At that point Cloud is invested in the Team and Barret knows he’s a good fighter and maybe a good guy. The optional scene (I haven’t triggered it but was linked to a video) they have is such a good one where is shows how far they’ve come (Barret unloading his thoughts and emotions onto Cloud and feeling comforted by having spoken with him and Cloud willing to listen patiently and willing to be part of the Team).

Barret and Tifa have a rather familial relationship (Barret is super protective of his team and you can see this really early on) and their mutual respect and care for each other is wonderful. They know each other so well and are so emotionally open to each other.

Cloud and Aerith start out with him being pretty standoffish and barely tolerating her. But when she encourages him to save Tifa from Don Corneo they start to bond and their friendship starts to develop.

The slow build to Cloud finally sharing a high five (a few ‘how do you human’ moments with Avalanche, Tifa and Aerith and then misqueing one with Aerith before finally getting one right) was so damned adorable and is one of my fav moments!

I mean, I don’t ship them (and with the SHEER VOLUME of Cloti moments plus the increased hints towards Aerith’s relationship with Zack I don’t feel like I’m supposed to) but I am 100% behind their friendship. Also...Aerith knows how to flirt with Cloud and then back off when he’s uncomfortable...unlike Jessie who was well out of order several times. She is cool.

But talking about friendships I am 100% behind and very much grateful to Squeenix for giving us?

Hello Aerti!

DAMN these girls got a lot of moments together and plenty of chance to interact and develop a bond and I LOVED IT. Cloud was totally a third wheel to them, most of the time, and so he should be. Thank you for giving us girls being friends and not letting a man get between them. Tifa and Aerith protecting and defending each other felt so good after seeing so much toxicity spread around by the less stable parts of both ship fandoms.

Between letting Tifa and Aerith spend time together and having Barret help Aerith out of Shinra Tower it felt like Squeenix are trying to spend more time on developing Aerith’s relationships with the whole team. And I LOVE that because it’s needed before we get to THAT moment in future games. Nanaki doesn’t get much time with the others but it’s nice to see the starts of the bonds forming.

As much as I love shipping I love one thing just as much. FOUND FAMILY TROPES. And I want the next game to definitely go down this route for the entire Squad.

As for the characters individually...thank god we finally have the (not quite) real Cloud back. The emo fanon contruction is gone and we have our awkward, dorky, snarky boy back. I love him. He tries his best to be cool and all, but he’s a good boy at heart and it leaks out all over the place.

Same with Barret. Soft Team Dad hidden under a gruff guy who tries to come off as all tough and deadly. His moments regarding Marlene were super sweet and, like before, are such a contrast to his ‘big bad activist’ self that it’s great to see him in both stages and the inbetween.

Tifa was ~chef’s kiss~. A little playful but also a little shy. Full of compassion but not a pushover. Tough as nails, when needed, but also emotionally open.

Aerith was super playful and fun. But there is an undercurrent of sadness and insecurity around her and there is a lot of speculation that she may Know Things. Possibly even her future death.

We don’t get much of Nanaki or Reeve but I can’t wait for more from them (in Reeve’s case, through Cait Sith who got a small cameo during the plate collapse) in the next game. It looks like we might get Nanaki being a proper teenage wolf kitty which is gonna be great!

Team Avalanche were all pretty great, except for Jessie’s outrageous flirting going totally over the line...Cloud was very clear with his refusals but she still didn’t back off and was a step over the borderline of harrassment. That being said, other than the flirting, the team had some great moments. Jessie’s concern over how much of Reactor 1 was her fault and her GUILT was amazing. Biggs and Wedge, too, felt real and dimensional. Cloud building a small bond with the three of them (THEY GOT HIS FIRST TRUE AND BRIGHT SMILE) was so good and made the plate fall EVEN WORSE (despite the possibility of survival for them).

But now...the ending.

Oh boy.

There is a lot of talk and speculation about the ending and I’m sure it’ll be a hot topic until the next game comes out.

There are a few things it could mean on a scale of ‘barely anything will change but this means that Squeenix have given themselves some wiggle room with future events’ all the way up to ‘everything is gonna be totally different to the original game from here on out’.

Everyone is mad at the thought of the next game going in the latter direction and it’s the biggest drawback of the game to most. The one thing holding them back from thinking this game a perfect adaptation of the original game.

Personally, I think that the game is not going to change that much. I DON’T think Zack is still alive (the game was very clear to show us that Cloud still had the buster sword...so much so as to equip it on him during the cut scene after Zack’s appearance, even if it wasn’t his equiped weapon...Cloud probably wouldn’t have the sword if Zack was alive). I do think the Sephiroth we saw could be from the future. I do think the game will mostly keep to the same beats and events but that certain things will change in execution in order to keep some element of surprise and suspense. The biggest of things being that I think Aerith will still die, but not in the same set of events.

Overall, this game was utterly fantastic in almost every way. As a fan of the original I was so, so happy with what they did. The production team should be so very proud of the effort and detail they put into this game. The love they have for the original was obvious in the presentation.

10/10 would and will play again!

#final fantasy vii remake spoilers #ffviir spoilers #spoilers

[mysticandskepticmuses]

MEET Rori LuAnne* Dearing.   ( Altered Carbon based original character. )

                *Please note.  Any use of her middle name in character will result in her losing her shit because who the fuck names their child LuAnne in the 25th century it’s so 400 years ago….

                 First things first, OOC, yes, this is the same face claim as I use for Saori; it’s intentional / for plot purposes w/ certain characters where that holy shit it’s like looking at a ghost trope is lots of fun so…  Also, I think it’s particularly interesting in a world where bodies can be custom made and DNA is literally just a playground for scientists for there to be this freak natural repetition / recreation after 250 years.  It is something that family members remark on from time to time, but it’s not something that a lot of them really pay that much attention to, it’s the oh you look so much like so and so, but since none of the living family members even met Saori they don’t realize just how identical the resemblance is.  And most people that meet her wouldn’t know enough about her history / lineage to know though so.  She’s just a pretty, long-legged, pierced and tattooed cutie pie.    [ Any of those rare survivors from Envoy era that were at Stronghold or on Harlan’s World, or any that might have VR’ed in to a conference or something w/ Saori are totally free / encouraged to notice and react of course !!! ]

                  Yes, Rori is the great-great-great …. whatever many great-granddaughter of my other / latest original character, SAORI DEARING, an uprising sympathizer who lived on Harlan’s World during the Envoy war / during the time of the destruction of Stronghold.  [ the battle of stronghold is widely known as the battle where the Protectorate finally defeated the evil Envoys, murderers of children and women and whole families, terrorists who used sabotage, infiltration, mass murder, torture, bombings, wide spread terror attacks, etc. etc. etc. to try and overthrow the protectorate who wanted to do nothing more than keep the peace in known space etc. ] Rori and her older sister, CLAIRE DEARING, currently know nothing about their ancestor’s involvement with / support of the Uprising – which is probably for the best because Claire would probably die of mortification and Rori would loudly and proudly blast the news from the rooftops.  

                   Claire, written by Liz @magicandsciencemuses, is a (mostly) upstanding citizen who works earnestly to better her way of life and has a great amount of respect for the law and a more than healthy respect / knowledge of what the Meths are capable of; she is one of the directors of the Bay City branch of Psychasec as well as being a well renowned scientist in the field of genetics and body mods, cloning, synth, etc. etc.  She is very much the model child, works hard, works long hours, pays her taxes, follows the rules, tries very hard to keep out of trouble and avoid drama.    ADDITIONAL NOTE:  CLAIRE IS 200+ YEARS OLD.  Rori is in her forties (even though she appears in her early twenties) – in Meth years, Rori is practically a BABY.  

                   Rori, on the other hand, is pretty much the exact opposite.  While she is also intelligent and well educated, she was the wild child from the get go and was always the one that came home with the scraped knees and the bloody noses and the torn clothes, whether it was from actually just falling the frack over her own feet or getting into a fight with someone twice her size in defense of someone else or because they offended her with some smart ass / ill thought out comment that provoked her short-fused (but typically short-lived) temper.  She was almost always involved in some form of protests, some form of protect the planet, protect the species, protect the people, protect the sleeves movement, and became more and more focused on protecting the equality (or what is left of it) as she got ‘older’.  

                   She believes that a lot of what is acceptable and norm when it comes to the treatment of sleeves when it comes to the prison system and victim restitution as a whole is beyond fucked up   She believes that the whole essence of the prison system, stacks in storage, etc. is a huge step backwards and one that just does no good to anyone except those profiting financially from the system.  Ripping someone out of their sleeve and sticking them into storage seems entirely opposite of helpful to her.  There is no longer any opportunity for reform in the penal system.  Being on ice doesn’t give you time to think.  It doesn’t give you time to reflect on your life choices and realize what you’re missing.  It doesn’t give you time for soul searching or to learn methods in which to cope, it doesn’t allow you to better yourself in any way – literally the only thing that it does it rip you out of one time and then toss you back out into the world in what was just a blink of an eye to you.  Nothing changes.  Worst case scenario, you’re in a stranger’s body, a hundred years later, maybe you’ve got a family member or someone that was told about you enough to show up and give you a place to crash for a few days while you get your shit sorted but.  

                   Now you’re a stranger, with no working knowledge of the world, the politics or laws that have changed, the events in history that might have been world shatteringly important that you missed, no relevant job history, no contacts, no resources, and depending on what field of study or what kind of job you had, you might be entirely irrelevant plus - you’re a convict so what does that do for your likelihood of finding gainful employment - especially while in whatever broken down sleeve they give you on release ???  It pretty much guarantees the only life the newly released have to go back to is – crime.  

                And that’s not even getting onto the topic of renting out people’s bodies and how that just feels inherently wrong to her – they don’t even bother to try and use it as a deterrent tactics, it’s just a WAY OF LIFE and it just seems cruel and unusual to her.  There have always been accrued costs of prison, one way or another, sticking a body on ice / suspending it / cryogenic storage or whatever is WAY cheaper than actually housing criminals used to be.  And how easy is it for someone that’s corrupt to play that system ???? Want a particular sleeve for yourself or your partner but they won’t sleep with you?  Get them convicted and rent it for a week.  Have a Neo-C that you need out of the way at your job or that’s married to someone you want to pursue or that you have a grudge against and want to see them suffer / their family suffer?  Set them up for even the smallest crime, because once they’re yanked out of their sleeve that’s it, bye-bye.  

                   And it’s not just punishing the criminals! Seeing someone else walking and talking in the sleeve of your lover, your brother, your mother, your best friend and knowing it’s not them - it doesn’t matter how tough you are or act like you are, that hurts – knowing that that body is being used for god knows what and you can’t keep it safe / protect it ???  Knowing that the person’s sleeve is out and about because you couldn’t afford the mortgage payments to keep it hanging out empty until the person’s time was up and they can get put back in it ? That is brutal and cruel and unusual punishment to people that did nothing wrong but care.  

                   So… yeah.  Human rights / sleeves’ rights activist.  Has had the occasional brush with the law in terms of protesting, the occasional riot or act of vandalism, threats against particular organizations or Meths or whomever it is that she’s up in arms against at the time but, generally low level stuff that hasn’t gotten her in a ton of hot water legally speaking.  She actually does have a semi decent relationship with some of the beat cops or a detective here or there, she’s happy to turn over intel and information she finds about acts of actual violence or terrorism that she catches wind of and is especially happy to turn over anything she hears that deals with corrupt cops, politicians, Meths influence on anything with policy or wrangling positions of power for their chess pieces in law enforcement or political circles etc.  

                   She does dabble in some drug use, she drinks, she smokes, she swears, she sleeps around, she has tattoo and piercings that fluctuate a lot - she is still in her birth sleeve (though second clone after an airtram derailment a few years back).  She gambles, she shoots pool, she gets into the occasional fist fight, she has no problem calling anyone out on their bullshit but – she has a good heart and does her best to help out people in trouble around her whenever she can.  She drifts through a lot of circles; she has friends in all manner of walks of life in the underworld and legit circles, she makes it pretty clear she doesn’t have any interest in being involved in drama outside of her choosing and tends to usually manage to keep from pissing off the wrong people (she’s way more likely to have enemies among the politicians, the Meths, the policy makers than get caught up in a turf war etc).  

                   She has a loft apartment in Licktown, but she also has four or five other roommates and it’s very crowded and busy so she tends to prefer to crash at her hookup’s place when an option and also makes a semi regular habit of showing up at Claire’s in the middle of the night and crashing on her couch for a few days.  Despite their glaring differences, the sisters are actually pretty close and as much as they rib on each other, they would not hesitate to come to the defense of the other if necessary, in a heartbeat.  

                     Rori does come from a family of Meths.  Her lifestyle choices, her behaviour, the fact she lives on the Ground and in Licktown are all huge sources of embarrassment for the majority of her family.  The only reason she isn’t actually just cut loose and written off as the black sheep of the family is because Claire wouldn’t stand for it.  Rori does have access to a large stipend, which she does live off of at times but in general she prefers to make her own way - she works as a bartender, a tattoo artist, odd jobs here and there.  Whatever she doesn’t use of her monthly allowance, though, she does pull out every month and donate to a number of different activist groups, shelters, etc. - wherever needs it the most at that time.

#BIOGRAPHY. #BIOGRAPHY. ( rori dearing. ) #DO NOT REBLOG.

[lokis-lady-death]

Interview with a God Pt 11

Tom Hiddleston/Loki x reader

Prompt: I have always heard  people joke that Tom Hiddleston is actually Loki playing Tom playing Loki. So, let’s write about it XD

Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 , Part 4 , Part 5 , Part 6 , Part 7, Part 8 , Part 9, Part 10

Interview with a God Part 11

Your nerves were on edge during the entire meeting. You tried your damnedest to keep from thinking his name, knowing that if you summoned him right now he would cause some sort of scene.

You tried to only focus on Tom Hiddleston, the celebrity. Not Loki, the god of mischief.

But every time you looked up you saw Elliot watching you, chewing on his cheek while he lost himself in his own thoughts.

Without looking away, he cleared his voice to get everyone’s attention. “I would like to make one last suggestion before we close this down.”

“What?” Mrs. Lynn urged, “It’s perfect, everything’s lined up perfectly. What could you possibly want to change?”

“Not change. Add.” Elliot reached into his briefcase and removed the Star magazine that captured your infamous kiss with Tom Hiddleston on your date a few days ago.

You narrowed your eyes at Elliot, but kept your tone respectful as you clarrified, “You want to add another magazine’s content to my work, Mr. Stringer?”

“Just address the elephant in the room,” he sold the idea, painting it as a mixed love story. “It doesn’t have to be anything risque to get attention, but I think ignoring the obvious story of Tom Hiddleston having a relationship with a writer from our magazine is the wrong move. Obviously you can see the opportunity.”

“No one else was able to come up with a story on the two of them other than y/n is a writer for us,” Mrs. Lynn had to admit. Your jaw dropped.

“Are you actually considering this? We're not some gossip column!” you asked, feeling your chest tighten. You thought that Elliot was supposed to leave your story alone? Hadn’t Loki influenced him to keep the article intact?

Your eye caught the clock on the wall. Ten til noon. “Shit,” you gasped, “It’s almost lunch time, I have to go.”

“Lunch with Hiddleston again?” Elliot sneered. You cut your eyes at him, the two of you trying to understand the other’s motives. “Go on, I’d hate to see what he’d do if you were late.”

You bit your lip and grabbed your things. “I’ll be back after lunch, don’t make any decisions without me. Please.” Aggravated and defeated, you left.

Downstairs, you saw Tom standing beside his usual escalade,  but you were surprised to see a black Audi behind it. You could tell by Tom’s less than thrilled expression that something was amiss. You were about to ask him what was wrong when you heard, “Y/n!” from behind the Audi.

Chris Hemsworth came around to you with his iconic toothy grin and the concern on Tom’s face became apparent.

“Hi, Mr. Hemsworth, “ you said, doing your best to maintain a professional tone. “I see you caught up with Mr. Hiddleston.” You smiled at Tom, hoping he would relax but it did nothing.

Instead, he told you, “Chris will be… joining us for lunch.”

“Oh.” You tried to keep the smile up, stepping towards Tom. “Excellent. So where are we going?”

“I was thinking Asian. That place on Hillcrest? It’s only a few minutes down the road.” Chris said as he unexpectedly opened his passenger car door. “And I thought we could ride together.”

Tom cut a look at Chris that told you they hadn’t previously discussed this idea. You kept smiling, feeling a little on edge but still sure everything was alright. “Okay, it makes more sense to take one car…”

“No. You and I will ride together. Tom will take his car.”

You didn’t mean to, it was a reflex really, but you looked to Tom for confirmation. His jaw was clenched but he nodded. “I’ll meet you there, don’t worry.” He took your hand and pulled you to him, planting a kiss on your cheek. He quickly whispered, “I promise he means no harm.”

You met his eyes before turning back to Chris. “Alright,” you said, halfway trying to normalize the situation that you were sure went above your head. “Let’s get going, I’m ready to eat!” You slid into the passenger seat feeling your chest tighten.  

Chris met your enthusiasm, “Atta girl, let’s get out’a here.” He shut your door and passed one last glance to Tom. “Don’t worry, brother. She will be returned to you in the same condition in which I borrowed her.”

“This isn’t a joke,” Tom snapped. “Whatever you’re playing at…”

“I’m the guardian of the people of this realm,” Chris cut him off as he slipped on a pair of sunglasses. “I’m not playing. I’m guarding. We’ll see you in a minute.” And got into the driver’s seat.

You could see Tom’s aggravation as he got into his own car, but was brought back to your situation when Chris closed his door. “So, what do you think about cars?” Offering only a nervous laugh and shrug, you had to admit nothing. “I like cars,” he went on. “They’re simple. In the most general sense, every car runs the same. Works the same. Nothing complicated. But people,” he let out a short scoff. “People are complicated.” His eyes went over to you, sparking and making you turn away to stare at the road. “Tom, in particular, is complicated.”

There was an awkward silence before you agreed, “Yes, but I think that’s something to appreciate about him. Most people nowadays are so two dimensional, while Tom just… passes every plane in existence. It seems like I’m learning something new about him every day.”

“Hmmm... “ Chris seemed to be considering your words. “That’s actually what I wanted to speak to you about, Ms. y/n.” He sped up.

Passing a quick glance at Chris, you tried to hide the concern in your tone when you pointed out, “That was… Hillcrest Avenue.”

“We’re taking the scenic route,” he assured you with a  sideways grin. “Now, tell me what you know about Tom?”

“He’s an actor, on stage and on screen, he’s a philanthropist, he’s an activist….” But you knew by the look on Chris’s face that he was looking for more. Your heart began to pound, an uncomfortable feeling pulling at you. “He.... appreciates good art. Loves literature with a passion.” Still the same solomon look. Tom had not told you what to do in this situation. What was the right answer?

“What else?”

“I’m not sure what you what me to say?” you admitted.

Chris sped the car up a little more and you felt yourself grab hold of the seat beneath you. “I think you know exactly what I want you to say.”

“I don’t…” It felt like the car was going faster, flying through green light after green light. “Mr. Hemsworth, you need to slow down.”

“Are you telling me what to do?” Chris’s voice wasn’t threatening but it held that same hint of a warning that Tom’s did. The realization that you had never expected Tom to react the way he did to certain situations made you suddenly extremely aware that Chris being Thor meant just as much as Tom being Loki. That behind the fun loving family man and a-list actor was a god that demanded fear and respect.

The god of thunder.

“No,” you answered simply, choosing to close your eyes instead. Your heart was beating harder and harder in your chest, but you tried not to look scared.

“Let’s try this a different way,” Chris finally said, slamming his breaks at a stop sign before turning his body to look at you. “Y/n. Tell me exactly what you know about Loki.”

You would have cursed if you hadn’t already began word vomiting, “Tom Hiddleston is really Loki, he is really an Asgardian, a Norse god, he hides here as a person, I don’t really know why, but I know Loki was sent here by his father because he thinks he had something to do with his mother’s death, but I don’t really know anything else about that either. Oh, and he can do this thing called influence and hearing prayers, which is probably the weirdest power I have ever heard of…”

“Quiet, okay, you can stop, I think I’ve heard enough.” He thought for a moment, saying to himself, “He called Frigga mother, hmm?” You saw a hint of a smile on his face. “She would have liked that.”   

You gasped, feeling like the air had been sucked out of your very lungs. “What the fuck?” you yelled before you realized what you said. Your hand slapped over your mouth. What had you just told Chris?

He look at you out of the corner of his eye. “You’re alright, y/n. You’re not in any trouble. Though I can see that he never instructed you to keep that information to yourself.”

“What do you mean?”

Chris’s eyes cut at you again, before deciding to answer, “If he had told you not to tell anyone who he was, then you would most likely be in pain. Breaking the word of a god is not a wise thing to do.” Turning onto another road, he asked, “And what do you know about me?” You hesitated until he added, “Or I can just make you?”

Swallowing hard, your eyes finally going towards him to gage his reaction. “You’re Thor. Norse god of thunder.”

“What do you know about Asgard?”

“Nothing?”

“Y/n?” He pressed, sure you wouldn’t be foolish enough to try his patience twice.

“Nothing outside of your movies, I swear. I rarely speak to him as Loki and Tom isn’t exactly chatty about the whole situation.”

He let out a calm breath. “Good. I hope you don't misunderstand. I care deeply for Tom. I think very highly of him. But…” he trailed off, shrugging his shoulders in a way that you could tell he meant to he his answer. What he meant was he didn't trust Loki. “Now, Tom told me you were attacked.”

“Yes. I don’t know who it was. All I remember was…”

“Loki killing you?”

You hung your head, shifting uncomfortably in your seat. “Yes.”

“One last thing then,” Chris assured as he turned onto Hillcrest. “Did Tom ask you before making you his oracle?”

“Oracle?”

Cursing under his breath, he asked instead, “Did Tom ask you to give yourself to him?”

Your brow furrowed and your curiosity squashed any fear you had. “Yes? Why?”

“It means you subsequently became his oracle.” You could see him roll his eyes as he let out a short scoff. “Do you even know what an oracle is?”

“No…? Well I mean, I know that they talk to gods, right? In old mythologies they were like priests and priestesses?”

“That’s sort of right.” The car came to a stop and Chris finally turned to face you. “An oracle is important to a god for a number of reasons. One is that they anchor them to this realm, meaning, if they were in another realm, they could track their oracle. Another is that they keep a god’s secrets and interests.” His eyes scanned you up and down while he flashed a half cocked smile. “And sometimes, very specific… intimate duties…” It felt like being struck by thunder when Chris’s hand came over your thigh, giving you an ever so slight squeeze. “Definitely the most common use of an oracle is for pleasure.”

“Come again?” you retorted as you felt the heat rise in your face.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Chris told you, his hand running ever so slightly up your skirt. “Surely you’ve heard myths about god’s taking up the beds of mortals? This isn’t new. Why, even having a harem is considered normal...”

Without even thinking, purly on reflex, you removed Chris’s hand from your lap. “I assure you, I wouldn’t have agreed to such a position with Loki. If he asked me to be his, it must have been a mistake because he never once mentioned anything about being his oracle. And he certainly doesn’t tell me any secrets.”

“Then let’s ask him now.” Just as he said that, you heard a knock on the glass. You squealed and saw Tom as he reached to open your door.

“I have been waiting for nearly ten minutes on you to drive three minutes down the road,” he snapped over you at Chris.

You and Chris both left the car, standing on the sidewalk with Tom who looked less than pleased. “You know she is on a schedule,” he told Chris, who offered little more than a shrug.

“I believe y/n actually has a question for you, brother.”

Loki’s lip twitched hearing the word as he looked from Chris to you. “I…”

“Go ahead,” Chris urged, crossing his arms and smiling. “Ask.”

“Am I your oracle?” you felt slip from your lips.

Tom’s face went white as his eyes widened. “He told you?”

Your eyes narrowed and you asked, “I’m your oracle? Just some part of a harem, then?” Before you could stop it, your hand came up and you slapped Tom across his face. Locking eyes with Chris, who inhaled sharply and covered his mouth- to hide a laugh or grimace you weren’t sure.

You slapped the god of mischief across the face.  

What had you done?

Tom took a deep breath before looking down at you. “Darling, what did you just say? Harem?” You didn’t answer, frozen in utter terror at yourself. He turned to Chris. “A harem, Hemsworth? You told her it meant harem? I should call Elsa and tell her you’re telling people she’s a part of your harem!”

“Oh, it was just a bit of fun,” Chris laughed, bringing his hand down on your shoulder to lightly shake you back into reality before walking ahead. “Come, I’m starving!”

“I’m confused,” you had to admit as Tom reached down to take your hand. “Then what exactly does it mean if I’m your oracle?”

Letting out a soft sigh, Tom let his thumb rub circles over the palm of your hand. “There’s a lot of different things it can mean,” he half-heartedly explained. His eyes looked up to yours, that flash of green always present under the surface to remind you who you were dealing with. “But I assure you, it’s not that you’re a part of a harem.”

It didn’t feel like a full answer but you didn’t press anymore. You had enough to think on.

*****

Mrs. Lynn had dismissed the meeting until after lunch time, realizing she herself had a lunch date with one of the magazine’s investors. She headed out, followed by the photographer. But Elliot stayed behind, looking out at the papers in front of him.

“Everything just keeps going,” he mumbled to himself, his hand fumbling through the Star magazine with your picture with Tom. “Everyone thinks he’s just another famous face… They don’t know that he could kill us all if he wanted...”

“Well, you’re not wrong,” he heard at the doorway. A woman dressed in all black slipped into the council room, closing the door behind her.

Elliot’s hands came up to his head, shielding his ears. “No,” he growled. “No, Hella, please, go away... I have nothing left to tell you!”

“Oh, don’t worry, I’m not going to hurt you anymore, sweet one.” She moved beside him, running her fingers back over his hair, getting pulling to make him look up at her. “But I do need a date tomorrow night.”

Part 12 is UP!

Like my garbage? Read more of it! Master List

If you would like to be added to a tag list, Just let me know via Message or Comment on the latest chapter posted! Thank you guys for reading!

IWAG:  @krystynespider @imeannooffensebabybut @tardis-is-mine@m4shtyx @m4shtyx@intransittosomewhere  @marvelc00kie35 @youveseen--thebutcher–thebutcher–thebutcher@sherlokiantheatrenerd @sherlokiantheatrenerd @kinghiddlestonanddixon @lykaonimagines @laeticafe03 @avenging-blackwidow @hiddlestonstansworld    @casuallyobsessivewitchcraft   @writing-for-a-chance @hisxblackxqueen @dangertoozmanykids101  @bambamwolf87 @godhateskyleigh   @sortaathief  @li-ssu   @wrappedinlokisarms    @canoodlincanary

ALL TAGS: @socialheartbreak @kcd15 @maladaptive-ninja-returns @nephalem67 @jessiejunebug @woodyandbuzz20-01 @lokislilslut

#tom hiddleston #tom hiddleston x reader #tom hiddleston x oc #loki #loki fanfic #loki x reader #loki x you #loki x oc #marvel fanfiction #marvel smutt #marvel #loki (marvel) #thor

[headlesssamurai]

why u uploading nazis u faggot u just ruined this whole blog ooo myy goddd

I assume you’re referring to that flammenwerfer gif, which might be one of the only overtly Nazi things I’ve ever posted. Either that, or you meant something from the Helghast future space Nazis from the Killzone games, since I really like their visualization as badguys. Or, perhaps you were referring to the various Kerberos saga art I’ve shared, which again has some great visuals in addition to its weirdly attractive storytelling. Or! Maybe, just maybe, you were really, rrrrreeeeallly reaching and are referring, erroneously, to a quote I once shared by Professor Jordan Peterson (certain alarmist groups of fanatic activists seem to refer to him with shameless puerility and unimaginative regularity as a Nazi).

Either way, it’s a smidge unusual to me, given your use of the word “faggot” as a pejorative while simultaneously accusing someone of some sort of fascist affinity. Does that not seem even a trite bit hypocritical to you? Regardless, it would have been extremely easy for me to just report you for harassment and sending your juvenile message onto the proper authorities so they can decide whether or not your Adderall dosing ass deserves to be banned for hate speech. But aside from the fact that I’m not a narc and believe in free speech, even the hateful sort, I reasoned it would be more productive to use this as an object lesson regarding the social overuse of the term “Nazi” in today’s media culture.

I’m certain even a low-synapse, sloped-foreheaded junkie who breathes heavily through his mouth, like you, is able to grapple with the fact that the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (a group we refer to today with the German-coined colloquialism Nazi), was an extremist political organization which was active between the period of approximately 1920 to 1945, give or take a few months. The Nazi Party rose to power largely beginning as a massive overreaction of the renewed Freikorps culture to the growing threat of the German Communist Party in its Soviet-supported attempts to dissolve and replace the Weimar Republic, which at that time was the current government of Germany following Kaisar Wilhelm II’s abdication of the Prussian throne after World War I. The Nazi Party exploited the free German people’s fear of external threats by the Soviets, effectively transforming the Freikorps movement into a well-supported nationalist ideology which began to rapidly grow in power and influence under their Nazi banner. This first began as a sort of manifest destiny ideology, referred to as völkisch nationalism, very anti-corporate and not so dissimilar from communism, again exploiting the German people’s belief in their natural right to their own land with an almost mystic significance, but the Nazi Party began to absorb industries for its own gain and subsequently began to focus on anti-Semitic ideals since many large businesses and land owners in Germany at that time were Jews. This rapid growth shifted the balance of power within Germany from parliamentary to a more despotic rule occurred in just over ten years, and by 1933 the parliament of the Weimar Republic was a majority of Nazi officials (or those in their employ), losing power in all but name, as the ruling officials in Adolf Hitler and Ernst Röhm were now legally able to both pass laws and take military action without the permission of parliament.

What followed was an increasingly oppressive series of political, cultural, and military reforms in which the Nazi Party suppressed individual rights, enslaved and murdered thousands of “undesirable” or “corrupt” German citizens, and began a bloody, devastating invasion of almost all neighboring nations of Europe to inflict identical atrocities against the citizens of these states, shocking the world into one of the most costly global conflicts in human history. Much has been written about this period so I’ll not go into intense detail, but I will say that though most appear to be aware that this horrific series of atrocities ultimately led to the European theatre of the Second World War, few seem to be aware of the fact that the Nazi Party was heretofore considered by other nations to be a legitimate political organization.

Allow me to repeat that for posterity: other nations of the world, for the majority of its existence, regarded the Nazi Party as a legitimate government. Up until some of the invasion phases of their regime, other nations of the word including the U.S. and Great Britain met with Nazi officials, negotiated with them, had trade talks, and so on while all the while the Nazi Party was gutting and torturing its own people into submission. The Nazi Party had ambassadors to foreign embassies, a military with several branches and weapons development projects, a cultural oversight committee, a public services branch, a goddamn Olympic sports team.

The point I am attempting to drive home here is that Nazi Party were a very real, even recognized and respected government of Germany, for fucking years. They were fucking slaughtering people in their own country and none of us gave a shit about those poor free-thinking German citizens at that time. It was only after they started invading and oppressing other nations, and not even immediately so, that other states and nations began to maybe think the Nazis were a bunch of assholes who needed to be unilaterally opposed.

I want to be very, very clear about this so you understand. The Nazi Party was utterly despicable, not enough negative words exist to describe the potency of the evil they represented, and they serve as an example of the worst possible potential for humanity when extremism takes hold of us. But what’s most terrifying about their existence is that they were not some feared boogeyman terrorist organization in their time, they were a recognized government of a nation, with all the power and resources any nation has to offer. That’s what’s most shocking and baffling, not that such evil existed but that it was so casually allowed to happen and the public face of it was legitimized in the Nazi party, with a powerful military to defend its actions. I thus wish to articulate to you and anyone, anyone at all who would so freely and casually throw around the term “Nazi” in describing the cosplayer racists who attend skinhead Cub Scout meetings in their uncle’s basement, or using that term to describe anyone else ESPECIALLY if you’re just being dramatic and using that term to ignorantly describe someone who disagrees with your political position, I wish to articulate to you how irresponsible and extremely idiotic it is for you to use that term as some sort of shock-value buzzword.

Nazis, the ones with real power and influence, actually existed at one time and the world ultimately defeated them. Are Nazis the only assholes of their level of evil to exist? Fuck no. But that doesn’t make it any less irresponsible of you to pretend the the people you want to call Nazis today are anything close to the sort of threat these vile motherfuckers once presented to the free world.

I would thus encourage all of you to stop using that word, since it no longer applies in today’s world, not even to the dudes who claim to be “Nazis”. Have some fucking imagination. If you think someone’s evil, call them evil. If you think someone’s racist, call them racist. If you think someone should agree with you, figure out a way to actually argue your position properly instead of deciding to insult them. There’s a great deal of more accurate terms to describe whatever it is you feel the need to oppose but (aside from a notable exception which doesn’t apply here) Nazis, real Nazis are gone. There are thousands of books, movies, and video games about how gone they are, and how we got rid of them. Not to disappoint all of the alarmists. You’d think even extremist political idealogues could understand it’s better to find common ground than invent more reasons to hate and slander one another.

And, as Ellen Degeneres says, be kind to one another.

               侍    headless                                         

#and don't be a dickhead #stop saying nazi so much #for real #and read a history book from time to time #cultural appropriation #social commentary #thoughts #rants #bleh #meh #cut-rate journalism

[neverwatchedonepiece]

536-537: "The Battle in the Ryugu Palace! Zoro vs Hordy!" and "Keep Shirahoshi Safe! Decken Close Behind!"

GLORIOUS JUSTICE. THANK YOU, ODA!

I swear when this happened, a ray of light shone down upon my laptop and a celestial chorus sang.

Of course, Decken is not down and out yet. 

This might sound strange, but I’m oddly glad. For all the crap he’s put Shirahoshi through for ten years - ten years! - he needs to suffer a bit more. A decade’s worth of suffering in one go should do the trick.

Also, poor little Megalo is having a rough time right now. Give the shark a break, Luffy. He’s doing his best. 

(Oh, and thanks to the person who gave me my first ever Ko-fi donation. Set one up on advice of a NWOP reader. Donations are absolutely **not essential**. I am doing this because I like One Piece and want to see this through, so entries will keep coming no matter what, but I did appreciate it. Thanks! ^_^)

No Such Thing As Bad Publicity?

And it was all going so well!

Luffy’s plan was ticking along smoothly. He was drifting along with Megalo and Shirahoshi. Some clouds passed. In their shapes, Luffy saw various meats. Shirahoshi saw fish-based lifeforms. Megalo was frantically suppressing his gag-reflex. Life was good.

Unbeknownst to Luffy, just below him, Sanji and Chopper had found Hachi washed up on shore, horribly injured. Local Fishmen and Merfolk crowded round them and it seems news spreads fast on Fishman Island because the locals were not pleased to see them. They were armed and they had not come to have a quiet chat.

They accused Sanji and Chopper of kidnapping three young mermaids while the rest of the crew had taken over Ryugu Palace. Sanji, who had been bed-bound the entire time, had no idea what was going on. “It’s true that I love mermaids so much that I wanna take them away but we did not kidnap them.” Chopper, the oblivious, dedicated doctor, asked for quiet so he could concentrate, even when it was clear the crowd was hostile. (I bet he was confident enough in Sanji’s crowd control skills to let him work on Hachi.)

Just at the point when the locals started pelting objects at Sanji and Chopper (which could have degenerated into a rolling cartoon ball of limbs), Luffy passed overhead, noticed them and jumped down. He was horrified when he saw the state Hachi was in.

“How did this happen? Who did this to you?” I swear, post Sabaody, Luffy is now almost as protective of Hachi as he is of his crew. No one will able to ever touch Hachi again for fear of Luffy’s wrath. Just goes to show you how loyal Luffy is to his friends.

The locals who had gathered round were also gathering their courage and their outrage. They muttered to each other. The Strawhats had been kidnapping mermaids. They were holding Ryugu Palace. Why? Were they after the princess too? No. Surely not! She had been in hiding for ten years. Impossible! She was guarded day and night by Neptune’s army. The princess, at least, would be safe, right?

With perfect comic timing, Megalo crashed to the ground and his gag reflex finally kicked in. 

Everyone just stared in shock at the princess. Even Luffy realised things were not quite going to plan, which was one of the things I liked about this scene, to be honest.

When the local Fishfolk were ready to lay down their lives defending Shirahoshi from the Evil Pirate Who Made Her Cry, Luffy did not lift a hand to them. Maybe he realised they were innocent people who’d just got the wrong end of the stick. He did not fight back or hurt a single one of them. Sanji and Chopper must have known that too because they also let themselves be captured. (I swear those Fishfolk will be telling that story for years to come: about how they captured Strawhat Luffy, Black Leg Sanji and Dr Chopper of the Strawhats.)

Well, Sanji didn’t do much because he had an out-of-body experience when he turned round and saw Shirahoshi. xD

While the locals crowed over their victory, Luffy said, “Um.... there’s something flying towards us.”

Just Casually Using This Again Because I Like Seeing It

Of course, it was Captain Sex-Pest. Armed with an axe, he shrieked his hundred-millionth proposal to Shirahoshi and demanded an immediate answer. “Death or marriage! Will you marry me? WHAT IS YOUR ANSWER?”

Her answer?

“Y---- YOU’RE NOT MY TYPE!”

Yes. Stick it to him, Shirahoshi.

I wish I could say he left her alone after that, but Decken is a total incel. “You trampled on my feelings of ten years! If you don’t love me, your very existence irritates me!”

Hence the reason Luffy gave Decken an ass-whooping. 

“ARE YOU THE ONE WHO HAS BEEN THROWING THINGS AT COWARD?”

You do not throw things at Coward. Not on Luffy’s watch. 

That beautiful Gear 2nd smackdown with his hands and legs tied was poetry in motion. (Also like that he can use Haki for protecting innocent people: knocking them out for a while until he gets the job done. Useful for civilian crowd control.) 

I loved it when Decken tried to call his Sea Bonze flunky only to see Luffy knock his front tooth out in one punch.

Ha ha, Decken. Must be hard realising your crew are fodder level.

Just as well you have Hordy Jones to back you up, otherwise you’d be up shit creek.

Meanwhile, At The Palace...

When I saw the way the Fishmen reacted towards Luffy, Sanji and Chopper, I thought right away about Hordy Jones and Arlong and their ideology. Then I heard how Hachi described him: “strong” with “dangerous thoughts” and I’m thinking maybe one of the most dangerous things - maybe the most dangerous thing - about Hordy Jones is his ideas.

I can already see the local Fishmen latching on to his hatred for humans. Now the Strawhats have accidentally given the Fishmen a focus for their hatred, maybe they’ll start to think, “Hordy Jones and Arlong were right all along. These humans come here, they kidnap Merfolk and sell them as slaves, we are oppressed by humans... why should we tolerate this?”

What was it that that American Civil Rights activist said? Something like, “You can kill a man, but you can’t kill an idea.”

Ideas are difficult things. Maybe once the idea is out there, when Fishmen see what Hordy Jones describes actually happening before their eyes, that idea grows arms and legs and all a sudden everyone thinks, “This guy is right. Humans are scum.”

It happens all the time in real life.

I might be wrong but maybe Hordy Jones might be one of those villains where he latches onto that sentiment and uses it to push his ideology. And it’s one he truly believes in because he saw one of his friends almost kidnapped by a pirate. Arlong saved him. But others weren’t so lucky.

At least now some of the stuff I picked up on from the last episodes has been explained. Hordy only entered the Royal Army to learn combat. He had designs on becoming Arlong’s right-hand man all along. (Does that explain the tattoo Nami spotted? Or is a tribute?) He has always hated the ruling class of Fishman Island. He accused Neptune of failing to notice what had been going on for years, the mistreatment of Fishmen and Merfolk on their own territory by humans. 

Now, Hordy Jones wants to restore Arlong’s dream.

Now, Nami is clever and I wonder if she understands the Fishman mindset more than most humans, as she had been with the Arlong Pirates for so long? She knows something is up, anyway. That maybe there is something more to this than just a tribute act. While Hordy was powering up, crushing a hole in the palace wall to deliberately flood the room, Nami asked Camie to take her to the Sea Forest to meet Jimbei. She is wondering why Jimbei told Luffy not to fight Hordy.

To be honest, so am I. What is your game, Jimbei? Are you trying to protect Hordy Jones? Because Luffy sure as hell doesn’t need protected. 

Fishman Shield No-Jutsu

Hordy’s fight with Zoro was pretty cool. He was strong enough to crush the wall without Fish Roids, and was smart enough to flood the room and give himself the advantage. After all, this was the crew who ruined Arlong’s grand vision. He is also as ruthless as Arlong, breaking out the water arrows pretty quickly.

Zoro, who had seen them before, deflected them (and Neptune became a shield for his men, how nice is that? I’ve decided. He is a good guy, really.) Hordy was impressed Zoro had lived to see them twice. Usopp recognised that Hordy was stronger than Arlong, but Zoro is on another level now. Wasting no time, Zoro pulled out a Bird Slash Dance and went in for the kill.

Buuuuuuuuuut, Hordy is more ruthless. He grabbed one of his goons and turned said goon into a meat shield. Would Arlong have done that to his crew? I doubt it. Arlong even respected Nami, a human member of his crew, though he treated her terribly. Hordy treats everyone like crap.

The Meat Shield moment was a nice visual callback to the Arlong and Bellemere scene (though not as powerful as the emotional connection wasn’t there).

I was more impressed by Zoro, who was able to fight a Fishman under water.

Maybe not a good idea to rush head on at a Master Swordsman trained by Dracule Mihawk, Hordy. Just a thought.

You know, I feel a bit sorry for Brook, who joined the crew late and has absolutely no clue what the hell is going on. He has no idea who Arlong is and why everyone is so angry, just that he’s neck deep in water and is slowly losing the will to live. xD

Oh, and Robin has wandered off into the Sea Forest. She’s not strictly allowed to go in, but when has that ever stopped her?

Your feedback is important to us. Please hold.

#one piece #neverwatchedonepiece #nwop #never watched one piece #monkey d. luffy #roronoa zoro #hordy jones #sanji #usopp #nami #tony tony chopper #nico robin #franky #brook #captain vander decken #vander decken #princess shirahoshi #king neptune #arlong #jimbei #fishman island #megalo

[jamesnelsonart]

Batman: White Knight Review

Folks, I can’t always let you know when a comic is bad. I don’t have the energy. A lot of bad comics are created every day, and to catalogue the reasons why Action comics issue 724342 didn’t appeal to me would be an exercise in futility and pain. No, when I see a bad comic usually the most it’s guilty of is being boring or not making a lot of sense and maybe the art isn’t put together very well. So I just ignore said media if I don’t like it. Maybe I’ll joke about it a bit with friends, but why spend my life on such things? You already know where this shit is going-- I’m about to break my code here. Every now and then, I discover something uniquely bad. It’s bad in a way I never could have even considered. It’s bad in a way that demands my attention, and I simply have to think about it, and then share my pain with others. That comic book is Batman: White Knight, and boy does it blow.

It’s honestly hard to tell where to begin with this review because if you think about any bad part of this book for more than one minute you’ll immediately be reminded of another bad part that relates to the first bad part, and so on and so on. It’s an interconnected network of bad. A true spider web of shit, full of parts all intersecting into an intricately dumb design. A painstakingly-made pyramid of poop, with each brick being laid as the foundation for something even worse than what came before it. I suppose I should start with the premise and work my way down from there.

What if, and hear me out here, what if the Joker became a good guy? And Batman… get this… was a bad guy??????? That’s the whole gist of Batman: White Knight. The white knight in the title is Joker, because he is a very pale dude from that chemical bath he took in his origin story. So that’s the premise. You understand the title. Now usually in superhero comics a shake-up like this might last for about a year before a return to the status quo, but White Knight takes place in an alternate universe, so write/artist Sean Gordon Murphy has the opportunity to make some big changes that will stick since there’s no worry about it impacting the main DC universe. Characters have the potential to die for good or change permanently here, and with the idea of the Joker becoming good you could get a pretty wild story here with some twists and turns. So why the fuck does nothing happen in this story!? Oh sure, this is a comic so actions do indeed occur. Events take place across a series of panels as they do in all sequential storytelling… But damn, this comic is a whole lot of nothing! It positions itself as a big shakeup, Batman as you’ve never seen him before! Only, it isn’t. This story is the safest fucking thing I’ve read disguised as an edgy, you-didn’t-see-that-coming, no-one-is-safe story. In some ways it’s funny, kind of like that Joker. But the only joke here is that I wasted my time reading this shit.

The story starts with Batman pursuing the Joker in his Batmobile, causing tons of property damage and hurting some innocent bystanders. Nightwing and Barbara are with Batman and are upset that they can’t reel in his dangerous impulses. Batman chases the Joker into a pharmaceutical factory where the Joker does his Joker speech. You know the one. The speech every writer ever feels that they have to write for the Joker, as if it adds something to his character. The Joker speech basically has the Joker go on about how he and Batman are polar opposites blah blah blah and how the Joker, in his own twisted way, has some affection for Batman and then Batman will be like NO and punch him or something. Hey, subtext works a lot better when it, y’know, remains subtext and not outright actual text. So Batman gets real riled up here and force-feeds the Joker a ton of pills while someone films him doing this and posts it on the internet. This combination of pills makes the Joker not be psychotic anymore (this is dumb as hell, but the rest of the comic is way dumber so you’d be surprised how the lowered standards allowed me to just roll with this) So this Batman is a pretty rude guy, being down with needless violence, and about as smart as a sack or bricks, but it’s an alternate universe, right? Characters are supposed to be different. Yeah… about that-- when doing an alternate universe it helps to have your universe be well-defined. This is especially important if it’s already similar to the main DC universe. The reader is left unsure as to what has or hasn’t happened in the past. Did the Joker ever commit any mass murder in this timeline? We don’t really know. The Joker has had a lot of incarnations so it’s kind of important to know how evil he is if he’s gonna become a good guy. If he’s committed numerous atrocities then I can understand a lot of peoples’ skepticism to him being good guy. Or was he some guy throwing pies at peoples’ faces and defacing property? Already none of this shit makes any sense if you stop to think about it but I have to keep going or this review will never get around to bashing the important stuff, like everything else about this book.

So the Joker’s mental stability is restored (which somehow also changes his bleached-white skin and green hair back to normal, those pills must have been wild) and he becomes a super-genius and decides to fight Batman’s brutality, and by extension the Gotham Police Department’s brutality. He’s done telling jokes now, he’s now the Woker(ok he never gets called that, but it would’ve been funny if that happened). And with his genius intellect unrestricted by his unstable personality he is now free to… sue the city. Damn, that’s exciting. I feel I should stop here and say there’s a reason the Joker is a fairly static character, and that’s because he works perfectly fine as a clown with a Batman obsession who does crimes and has some good zingers. Those are the interesting things about him, so when you remove all of those traits you’re left with a pretty boring character. What is the Joker without any of his personality or Joker-ness? Just some guy. And that guy is the protagonist of the story now… great. The other characters don’t fare much better. They all act extremely stupid, wildly out-of-character, or perform actions that conflict with prior information the reader has been given about them. Batman does no detective work, largely having the plot fed to him by other characters and falling into every trap imaginable. He can only ever react to situations. Harvey Bullock is deriding Batman for brutalizing the Joker and seems very anti-police brutality, yet later is arresting a black activist, blatantly escalating a situation where there was no violence. Barbara Gordon is hanging out chatting with Mr. Freeze (who appears to be a nicer guy in this continuity) and spills the beans about her secret identity, then is shocked to realize that she’s been wearing her Batgirl costume, thus revealing her name! Why is she so dumb!? Why on earth would she want to talk to Mr. Freeze in her civilian identity, huh? They were in the Bat Cave when this happened, so suit or not, it’d be pretty obvious that the girl in the Bat Cave is Batgirl. What the fuck? See what I mean when I say it’s hard to know where to start and end with bashing this shit? I mean this was like a 2-panel thing. Everything leads into everything else because nothing was thought through or considered while writing this comic so events happen just because they have to in order to move events along, character motivation or personality be dammed. And what happens is… not much if you really analyze the sequence of events in the story. Joker gets better, sues the city, participates in a march against Police corruption/brutality and decides to run for mayor. Batman gets mad about this. Joker then discovers a slush fund that is used to repair all the damage Batman does to the city and exposes it to the public. As a mayoral candidate, Joker proposes using this slush fund to instead heavily arm the police. Doesn’t this kind of contradict his anti-police brutality sentiments by offering the department numerous tanks to drive around in? Ah, fuck it. I doubt any part of this is thought through or any narrative dissonance considered so I’ll just keep going. And that’s… all the Joker does. Well, he does do one more thing. He decides to start dating Harley Quinn. And if I’m gonna talk about the characters, I mean REALLY talk about the characters, I’m gonna have to talk about Harley Quinn. Or rather, the Harley Quinn…s. Plural.

I should preface this by saying it’s pretty clear Sean Gordon Murphy is a fan of Batman the Animated Series. It is good, so who can blame him? What gets weird is he inserts a ton of TAS-centric stuff into White Knight in a way that feels arrogant. He knows what is best for Batman, no one else. So why do I feel this way about his writing here? Because the Joker goes home and is greeted by a Harley Quinn who is like “Wow, can’t wait to have tons of sex and kill a ton of people with you again! My favorite hobbies are not wearing a lot of clothes, staying evil, and being an unpopular New 52 redesign!” Then the revelation comes, the OLD Harley Quinn shows up in her TAS jester outfit and derides the new one as a big tiddy bimbo (not joking about that, her dialogue is actually deriding her for having large breasts and not being a good role model lmao) and says that she will resume her relationship with the Joker now, because he respects women (you really gonna do Poison Ivy like that? Smh). As we all know, when you think an abusive partner has changed, you should definitely restart your relationship with them. This has never, ever backfired in the history of the universe. But back to the point-- in fairness the New 52 Harley did suck, but I don’t know why this whole thing is even in the story. Haha, I’m joking! I know why! It’s because Sean Gordon Murphy probably realized that he needed an antagonist to make some action happen because the story was clearly going nowhere! So the new, unpopular Harley goes off and swears she will return the Joker to his bad self, calling herself “Neo Joker”.  So how does someone with no resources or notable skills become the antagonist? Well don’t worry, the entire cast is very, very stupid and their agency is null and void, so if something needs to happen for this story to move along, it just happens.

Earlier in the story for the Joker to discover the slush fund he had to get the rest of the Batman rogues gallery to do it for him by stealing documents on it out of some building. How does he get every criminal in Gotham to do this for him? By inviting them all over and serving them drinks with bits of Clayface mixed in. You see, Joker used the Mad Hatter’s mind control tech on Clayface so it stands to reason that if you ate some of Clayface’s clay then the mind control would work on you by extension! It only sounds stupid because it IS stupid. I also gotta ask why the entire rogues gallery would accept drinks from the Joker… he’s kind of known for not playing well with others and, uh, frequently poisoning people. But again, these characters need to be dumb for the plot to happen. So Neo Joker discovers the control module thingy because the Joker just left it around (I assume the mind-controlled villains were just shitting their pants in the days leading up to this since they were all stored in a warehouse) so now she gets a villain army. And then she gets a giant freeze gun to use on Gotham City because in this universe Mr. Freeze’s dad was an ex-Nazi who came to America and built that and left it underground. No maintenance required after sitting around for decades, this baby’s ready to blast! So while all that was happening Batman went to jail, Joker let him out to help him with dealing with Neo Joker, and Alfred died. That might sound like things that happened, but let me be clear: nothing happened. Nothing happens this whole comic. Things appear to happen, but that is not the case, that is camouflage. Sure, Alfred dies, but Mr. Freeze starts helping Bruce, so one old man is replaced with another. Actually this is an upgrade, Mr. Freeze knows way more science shit so this new model is great! Batman is finally jailed for flaunting the law but then Joker releases him and reveals that he found out that Batman had been paying for the property damage fund, not the taxpayers! So Batman was a good guy all along! He was just being a brutal dick because Alfred was dying so it’s all in the past now. So if Batman was good all along then what was the fucking point of this comic? The premise is good Joker vs. evil Batman, until it isn’t. What was the point of ANY of the first part of this dumb ass book? But the reader isn’t supposed to think about that. To distract from the fact that there was apparently no conflict at all the Neo Joker starts making threats with her big freeze gun and villain army. So Good Batman and Good Joker gotta team up with the militarized police force to take her down! Yeehaw! But. There is a catch. The Joker’s mixture of meds is wearing off and he will revert soon! The classic ticking clock scenario—as bad as everything is, this should at least inject some tension into the story, right? Wrong. Joker reverts while he’s in the Batmobile with Batman, and then he’s like “I still wanna defeat Neo Joker for stealing my shtick.” So don’t worry, he’s still on your side, Batman. I’m kind of impressed that Sean Gordon Murphy took such an easy opportunity to add some stakes to this bland comic and was like NAHHH, FUCK THAT, I LIKE MY COMICS BAD. So the police ram the villain army with their tanks and uhhh not all of Batman’s villains have super powers you know… some are just regular-ass people. The Penguin gets fucking hit head-on with one of the tanks, how the hell did HE not die? Plus they’re all mind-controlled in the first place so that raises ethical questions as to how they’re being treated since they’re not willfully being evil right now but BATMAN IS GOOD OKAY? HE PAID FOR THE PROPERTY DAMAGE FUND SO IF HE SPLITS SOME FUCKIN SKULLS THAT’S JUST WHAT HE’S GOTTA DO YOU LITTLE BIIIIIIIIIITCH. DUE PROCESS… IS FOR CUCKS. YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO DIE at this point in the comic I guess. Yawn… so at this point I think they all win or whatever. The freeze ray is stopped or something. Look, this part is kind of a blur. All you gotta know is Harley marries the Joker before he totally, totally reverts for real this time and gets sent back to Arkham. Then the dumbest thing Sean Gordon Murphy has ever written happens. And I read this book, so know that I do not say that lightly.

Near the start of the comic when Batman force-feeds Joker the pills it’s stated that this was all part of Joker’s master plan to get Batman to feed him pills that he just somehow knew would cure him and this would trigger Joker’s ultimate plan of… revealing the misallocation of taxpayer dollars? And he came up with this when he was still a bad guy, right? Huh? Well guess what, fuckos? It’s time for a fucking twist. Turns out the original Harley Quinn, who is Good and Pure and Keeps Her Clothes on except when I, Sean Gordon Murphy, draw her and the Joker fucking, is the one who planted the pills at that scene, as she reveals to Batman. Mind. Blown. No, really, my mind is blown as to why Sean thought this would add anything to his comic aside from more questions regarding the logistics of how she did that. How did she know which factory Batman would chase the Joker into at the start? How did she know Batman would force-feed the pills to the Joker? You’re not really a master planner if your plan relies on a ton of variables way out of your control. Then Batman is then like “wow that’s cool that you did that. this is why I always liked you more than the rest of my rogues gallery because I know you can do good things.” Yeah that’s right FUCK YOU Two-Face. Burned-ass bitch. You think YOU were the friend-turned-enemy who Batman hopes will one day turn good again? Wrong. It’s Harley. It’s ALWAYS been Harley. Then Batman reveals his secret identity to Commissioner Gordon and says he’s gonna be a cop in a blatant sequel hook. The threat of a sequel to this is scarier than any cliffhanger. Brr!

Ughhh, and you KNOW there’s gonna be a sequel, too. This can’t just end here. When I said I had to review this comic it was because most of the reviews say shit like “a bold new direction with a much-beloved property… DC, please don’t revoke my blog’s access.” This book demands a thrashing. It deserves to get laughed at, but everywhere I looked online people weren’t laughing. There was praise! Now look, Sean can draw a pretty picture so he has that going for him. And he’s also willing to kiss up to ComicsGate, a hate group populated by unskilled whiners, so that they’ll waste their money buying his bad book with pseudo-progressive politics. But I’m not here to insult Sean Gordon Murphy. This is a review, and I pledge to keep it focused on the comic. It would be unprofessional and rude to call Sean a gutless coward, or a worm, or a hack writer who just throws references around to create the illusion of lore, or a guy who condescends to trans writers and artist who get harassed daily about how they should just befriend their harassers, or a guy who thinks his inability to stick to a narrative theme makes his work deeper, or a guy who shits on indie creators in interviews because he works on Batman and they do not. No, that would all be mean to say, so you won’t hear me saying it.

I will give the comic this much, though. If you enjoyed All-Star Batman and Robin for how absolutely wacky it was, this book might be right up your alley. It fulfills that same feeling of viewing every panel and going “What the fuck? WHAT THE FUCK???” So if you like bad books, this book is for you.

#Batman:White Knight #DC comics #review #lol #The Woker

[violetsystems]

#personal

Yesterday I felt like I was baited into something by this city that has become way too familiar. It's like a neighborhood social experiment where everyone knows better but just enjoys causing me trouble. The snow is something I've been known to clear off on occasion. Nobody other than the maintenance guy seems to care about it. I have been made to feel forced to care about everyone's intricate nature of identity every day of my life. There is little respect for me personally or choices as a result. Especially when no one can seem to remember that it was a pretty drastic change I made five or so years ago. Everybody talks about me like they know me behind my back just the same. I quit drinking. I quit alone in the middle of Christmas which incidentally I spent alone. No therapy. No support group. Just a personal choice and a face I couldn't forget. I got through it without much support from friends. I ditched most of my friends to quit drinking. I had inspirations and goals for myself nobody cared to notice. To look better. To feel better. To be more confident without it. I played my first show in New York to reboot my music 'career' dead sober. Somebody from the cast of Empire was in the audience that show. And since then everything I was including a worker, an artist, a writer, a musician and an activist became lost. Buried unless I fell back into the pecking order of these bullshit scenes. Mostly because there was nowhere I felt comfortable. Is it queer to quit drinking? I identify as heterosexual but I'm aware of gender stereotypes just the same. I'm not man enough because I don't go out and crack open a cold one with the boys. I keep women company over glasses of wine on the internet enough for that not to matter. Swear to god honey I'd pour the glass for you myself naked. Is that BDSM enough for you? But around here if you don't do the same shit everyone else's does and offer up all the gossip about it, it causes suspicion. Don't brag about fucking your girlfriend to everyone in sight? You are a sexual pervert. Don't hang out with the rest of the people in the neighborhood and broadcast every little piece of your life on Facebook? You are obviously a communist. Buy a little too much Astroglide on Amazon dot com? You might find yourself entrapped in another rousing episode of to catch a predator. And yet the one thing everyone should know about me in this neighborhood is that I once stumbled around just like them. I was overweight. Bloated. Sad for myself. Overwhelmed too much to change it. So when I make a positive choice for myself who has a problem with it? Capitalism. On a weekend as suspicious for falling off the wagon as this, it is these friendly interactions that come with disrespectful intentions and embody the insipid nature of peer pressure in this town. "What kind of beer do you drink?" The maintenance guy said. I didn't have to clear the snow off. There was barely any of it on the ground. The neighbors next door passive aggressively cleared the front sidewalk of a dusting of snow. I had been punked into my civic duty like a trap. Thanks populism.

I've lived on this property over ten years now. The landlord remembers when I came home drunk and cracked my back window. He literally replaced it with a piece of plexiglass that still hangs there to this day. There is no excuse for the constant testing and yet it still happens. And I'm always the one who is the asshole for saying no. These people are nothing but passive aggressive bullies and I live the decades of PTSD knowing their behavior inside and out. I've torched the gaslighting by becoming completely isolated and exiled desperately trying to explain myself to my friends down here. The reason I have been promoting content like drinking and smoking is because I am an American. I believe fully in freedom. It's my choice to quit just like it's your choice to choose. That people have the right to do what they do. Furthermore, I should be strong enough to make my point known. Why I don't drink? I thought it was clear. And yet people don't like when you become better than them. Better than myself and who I used to be mainly. People hate the fact that I'm good on the inside and focused on applying that to the outside. People also don't understand the stress it takes to say no sandwiched in by a toxic wall of peer pressure every day of my life. My neighbors have become oppressively social much like socialism tends to get in the hands of utter fucking morons. They won't accept you until you are as mediocre as they are. They don't feel comfortable unless they have a kill switch. The ability to roast you and neg you into submission. It's a group mentality that doesn't respect or share my ethics enough to know why I suffer. And I do suffer. There are specifics I cannot write about anymore for fear someone in the neighborhood is reading and taking notes. This is why I've felt more inclined to research owning a gun. Not because I like guns. I'm a conscientious objector. But people will not stop violating my space and way of life. I can't even explain it anymore. We just accept that everyone around me has the best intentions. That it is my own fault that I have no professional network left to find a real job. That I'm supposed to go out drinking with the buddies and mainline myself back into the consumerist shit show. I have real skills that are ignored. Nobody wants to pay you unless they can siphon it back into their pool. It's a return to the coalminers economy. Where people pay their workers from their own pot. Double dipping into pension funds. Hustling people out of their wages to contribute to 401k's that perform well for the fund manager and not the participants. Meanwhile I am hanging on to whatever wealth I have in one of the worst financial crisises I have faced in my life. I have no debt at all. And I know this pisses people off. So much so that they'd rather see me become a drunk again than be out from under their green thumb. I am a warning sign of what happens when development favors monetary interests and not culture. I am the culture to be ripped off and reposted on twitter or some proud boy forum where people are looking for a scapegoat to beat into obscurity. And I survive just the same. I repressed a lot of sexual energy for years trying to dumb myself down to people's fears. Sexuality in America and how we express our sexual identity is queer in and of itself when it faces the judgement of capitalist and colonial ideals. I shouldn't have to explain or apologize for liking girls to people who only care about making me look bad. I should learn how to respectfully communicate that. I don't think drinking helps that.

You can't be gentle when you are fucked up all the time. Heterosexual men particularly. That shouldn't be up for debate with the way men historically act. Ask any girl on the internet how many times some guy has gone over the line. I'm not talking liking a sexy pic once and not getting a consensual response. I'm talking people losing all their inhibitions to a point where they barrel into somebody's DM's and flash their dick. There's a reason people do that consciously or unconsciously as it may seem. And that's not safe for a community at all. I have never done that. Even when I was drinking heavily by myself. I don't think I felt very sexy back then anyway. But being sober in whatever way it means to not drink alcohol or do hard drugs is an anomaly in this day and age that nobody really wants to acknowledge. If anybody had to ask, yes I consider myself in a relationship. I act accordingly online in that respect. I go to bed at nine pm on a Friday because that person isn't here to share it with me. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and hang out. I know when it's appropriate to flirt. And that's not exactly when my neighbor's are banging their coat hangers on my bedroom wall. I'm comfortable enough in my own sexuality to express it in a chair chugging on a water bottle on my own personal camera. Nobody fucking sees that shit but me and whoever hacked my phone to spy on me. I have to live with that in the back of my mind every time I touch myself. Is the state watching me cum? Can I maintain an erection while the government is taking notes? Yeah. I can. Because when I think about you I touch myself. And it comes naturally from a place that is so beautiful people are scared they can't manipulate it. The truth is people out here would rather fuck up somebody's life if it shines a light on how full of shit they are. I'm aware of it constantly. It is a stress in my life you couldn't possibly imagine. But there's enough love to shake off even the worst feelings I have about this entire thing. I don't drink because it was killing me. It was it's own personal suicide. It would have kept me from seeing how much you mean to me. And it's boring to me to think I would sacrifice you for some dumb shit like a fucking beer. I found something to live for. I found a way to express and write about it in a community that we carefully curate without many words beyond what we've written. And yet nobody out there knows shit. And they keep acting on my entire life like they do. They do not know shit about me if they can't respect that I put alcohol behind me. They know absolutely nothing. If they can't be bothered to understand why it never hits my tongue, they sure as fuck don't know who I share this tongue with. That's our little secret. Loose lips sink ships. And you know if I start drinking again, there would be a more than stock market dips. It would be an Apocalypse. One that these smiling bitch ass faces in this neighborhood actively want to see. That's not my community. This is. And I'm sure you all know by now how much I love you enough to stay sober and not judge anybody else for my own personal choices. If we could only teach these corny ass fucks out here the same. Without a FOID card I don't think that is possible sadly. <3 Tim

[daylflay]

He/She/Him/Her/Liberal/Conservative

All the Twitter’s a Stage

The performance of gender is typically engendered via societal/cultural inculcation. The gender archetypes germane to traditional Western culture are familiar to most of us: Men are supposed to be tough and stoic, whereas women are supposed to be compassionate and emotionally expressive. Online, though, gender performance takes on an additional dimension; as Sarah Banet-Weiser puts it in Mediated Girlhoods: New Explorations of Girls’ Media Culture: “The construction of the self is not an insular, isolated activity but is rather situated in a media and cultural context that involves a dynamic between the self and others, or…content and user feedback”. Due to Twitter’s focus on creating/growing a following, for example, gender performance for those with significant followings on the platform is arguably the result of their ideologies/audiences. On Twitter, in some cases, general societal expectations seem to take a backseat to one’s ideological leanings and the subsequent type of following that attracts. 

The Actors

All of the individuals I’m monitoring were raised within a Westernized cultural framework, so they no doubt are fully aware of the gender norms expected of them, which Rosalind Gill delineates in Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility: “A key feature of the postfeminist [era] has been the resurgence of natural sexual differences…[,] one arena in which this played out was the media debate about…an unashamed celebration of true or authentic masculinity”. Rick Wilson/@TheRickWilson and Mehdi Hasan/@mehdirhasan, the two men I’m tracking, are both heterosexual Westerners, but their gender performances are dichotomized based on their identification with conservatism and liberalism, respectively. 

Conservatism, as a social ideology, is concerned with conserving traditional Western values, and in Rick Wilson’s case that means performing as a tough, red-blooded, take-no-shit kind of man similar to what Gill described as “authentic masculinity” (though Wilson takes politically moderate positions on myriad issues, he still self-identifies as conservative). Perusing his tweets/replies, it’s clear that he takes a very aggressive posture on Twitter. Wilson seems to constantly be engaging in Twitter spats with a variety of users, and is crude and condescending towards his targets: Just today (2/20/20), in response to a Twitter user who said something that Wilson considered distasteful, Wilson sarcastically tweeted, “I am intrigued by your views and wish to subscribe to your news letter”; the Twitter user in question had a minimal following, and Wilson, with his formidable following and widely recognized body of online content, clearly delighted in mocking her and her nonexistent newsletter. Regarding the photos/videos he posts to Twitter, Wilson almost exclusively uses those forms of media to promote either his most recent book release, or his media appearances; it all revolves around self-advertisement, which is consistent with the typical capitalistic leanings of economic conservatism. There also seems to be a lack of emoji use by Wilson, which is basically a portrayal of the stoicism associated with the Western male archetype. 

Socially, liberalism, which Mehdi Hasan proudly identifies with, espouses an open-minded and empathetic mentality unlike Wilson’s display of “true masculinity”. Hasan’s tweets/replies can be aggressive at times, but he’s much more open to the use of humor and emojis than Wilson is, which sets a friendlier tone than Wilson does. In general, Hasan seems more interested in engaging with current events than with Twitter users; the majority of the photos/videos Hasan posts are germane to whatever current event is on his mind, whether it’s a screen-grab from the most recent Democratic debate or a video of Iranian activists protesting their current political regime. Hasan cultivates a Twitter identity that is focused on informing the public without the use of pontification/condescension, which jives with liberal precepts. One of Hasan’s most recent tweets simply stated, solemnly and without a trace of irony, “interesting argument”, in response to a tweet by New York Magazine writer Sarah Jones/@onesarahjones. 

    The Actresses

Kashana Cauley/@kashanacauley and Patti Harrison/@Party_Harderson are both liberals, and the general atmospheres they curate via their Twitter accounts are mostly friendly and overtly humorous. One of Cauley’s tweets following yesterday’s (2/19) Democratic debate humorously read: “Bloomberg’s going for the left vote by being publicly owned”; her tweet was jocular and tame in tone compared to the vast majority of political tweets and their vitriolic nature. Both women engage enthusiastically with other Twitter users, and their tones when engaging are supportive and optimistic; I wasn’t able to discern any recent instances of either woman sparring with other Twitter users, in fact.

Cauley and Harrison have a lot in common in terms of their Twitter use, but the latter is much more active in feminizing her tweets than the former, and it’s for a good reason: Harrison is a trans woman, and that typically entails the performance of some form of traditional femininity. Though being trans is obviously a major aspect of her identity, it’s also part of her brand. I’m not suggesting that Harrison is capitalizing on her identity in a reprehensible way, but being publicly trans is bound to attract a plethora of other trans and marginalized peoples to her, which is commensurate to what Patricia G. Lange touches upon in The Vulnerable Video Blogger: Promoting Social Change through Intimacy: “Years ago, exposing oneself through writing and art constitute[d] a kind of vulnerability”, and now that vulnerability is expressed and subsequently shared via social media, which has undoubtedly worked in Harrison’s favor. In comparison to Cauley, Harrison tweets many more selfies, as well as videos featuring her doing silly things, and also frequently uses emojis that invoke traditional femininity such as hearts, kissy faces, etc.: e.g., about a month ago (1/24/20), Harrison tweeted a photo of herself dressed up for a night out accompanied by text describing a hair-iron related debacle; the tweet concluded with a series of red heart emojis. 

In opposition to Cauley and Harrison, Candace Owens/@RealCandaceO is passionately conservative, and as such her gender performance has more in common with a traditional male archetype than a female one. Owens’ Twitter behavior has a lot in common with Rick Wilson, although their views in many instances, despite both being conservative, are polar opposites. Regarding their similarities, Owens, like Wilson, is highly aggressive on Twitter, probably more-so than Wilson, and her photo/video uploads primarily consist of self-advertisement; here’s a recent (2/17/20) Owens response to a Twitter user who tweeted at her: “This would be funny if it weren’t for the fact that you were too stupid to actually listen to the clip where I clearly said that Bernie Sanders would destroy Black America for the next 100 years.” Another commonality between the two conservatives is the lack of emoji-use and humor; Wilson is basically a comedian with a sunny disposition in comparison to Owens’ austerity. Owens basically bucks every trend of typical online female performativity in favor of a an extremely aggressive and traditionally male posture that appeals to conservatives. In Virtual Feminisms, Jessalynn Marie Keller states that “feminism has helped to redefine notions of…resistance and activism, with cultural and political action taking on new forms that ‘may be unrecognizable if interpreted through more traditional paradigms of activism’”; although Owens is vocally anti-feminist and would emphatically reject the feminist label being applied to her in any capacity, it can’t be denied that her Twitter activity falls in line with a conservative form of the neo-activism that Keller articulates in her article. 

As Shakespeare wrote in As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players…and one man in his time plays many parts”.

#liberal #conservative #Rick Wilson #Mehdi Hasan #kashanacauley #Patti Harrison #candace owens #sarah jones #michael bloomberg #bernie sanders #politics #feminism #masculinity #twitter #shakespeare #western #society #ideology

[thefabulousfulcrum]

You Are Not a Rebel

via The Baffler

by Laurie Penny

IN REAL LIFE, nobody has the decency to realize that they’re the bad guy until it’s too late. The worst thing about the historical record is that it is usually written after the fact. Just think, if we could only get our hands on advance copies of tomorrow’s historical bestsellers, we could work out once and for all how we fit into this cruel and anxious age we’re living through, and get a sneak peek at the ending to see who ends up dead, decked out with medals, or living incognito in South America. Sadly, that would hardly help those of us who are most dangerously confused. The people who most urgently need to consider which side of the moral ledger their story will be written on tend to read few books in which they are not the hero.

It’s hard realizing that you’re the bad guy, because then you have to do something about it. That’s why the most aggressive players on the gory stage of political melodrama act in such bad faith, hanging on to their own sense of persecution, mouthing the plagiarized playbook of an oppression they don’t comprehend because they don’t care to. These people have a way of fumbling through their self-set roles till the bloody final act, but if we can flip the script, we might yet stop the show.

Let us remember, then, that in the violent psychodrama going on in their own minds, modern reactionaries, almost to a man, think that they are the hero. They think they’re the plucky underdog. They continue to think this even with their tiny-fingered mascot bellowing over the White House lawns and their agenda ascendant around the world, and I know, I know it makes no sense. But dogma doesn’t have to. And one of the articles of faith uniting all our modern proto-fascists, crypto-fascists, baby-fascists, whining 4chan fascists, and the growing number of fascists for whom any sort of prefix is redundant is that they all think they are rebels. 

The new far right has recognized the enduring appeal of adventurism and appropriated its rhetoric for reactionary ends.  Propaganda hubs like The Rebel repackage far right ideas as edgy and avant-garde, reassuring recruits that they are hip outsiders in a mass of squares and normies. This is a time-worn trick. As George Orwell observed in a review of Mein Kampf, “whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger, and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.” 

This is what happens when we fetishize the romance of rebellion while making actual social change impossible.

Fighting for people who are less privileged than you to become even less privileged than you is hardly a revolutionary mission. CEOs do it all the time. Last year I was interviewed for a Vicedocumentary about the relationship between Gamergate and the new far right. I remember that to get the shot at the right level, I had to half-sit and half-stand on a fancy sideboard. While I was engaging my core muscles trying to balance, the affable hipster doing the interview asked, “But aren’t the guys a bit underground? Aren’t they a bit counter-culture?” I was so flabbergasted that I fell off my perch. Yes, I told him, they are underground, a bit. But even Vice magazine, which is woke enough as long as woke sells ads—another Viceeditor told me authoritatively a few years ago that “it’s not cool to be stupid anymore”—even they can surely see that simply being “underground” does not make something fit to dredge up. A lot of things run underground that would be better off staying there. Sewers, for instance.

This is what happens when we equate “anti-social” with “anti-establishment.” The far right think they’re the resistance. They think they’re Mel Gibson in Braveheart, when they’re actually just regular old Mel Gibson, screaming about bitches and whores and Jews and then wondering why no one answers their phone calls anymore. Well played, Rob Roy. 

The Shitler Youth come in many flavors of plausible deniability, but none are quite so woefully iconic as everyone’s favorite ship of fools: the fake pirates of Defend Europe. 

In case you hadn’t heard, a few months ago some white supremacists decided that the rescue boats trying to save desperate people from drowning in the Mediterranean were a threat to “European” way of life. (I will not dignify them with the term “activists,” because activists have meetings and have read things that aren’t spittle-flecked sexually paranoid internet retro-rants about white people being bred out of existence.) They decided to solve the problem by pursuing a merry life of adventure on the high seas. No, really. These rudderless twits went ahead and chartered a boat, with the initial, unabashedly evil intention of impeding the rescue ships, a plan which was quickly changed to “monitoring” said ships, as apparently nobody had any idea how to do actual sea battle, because whatever the copyright people told us, downloading a lot of free porn does not, by itself, make you a pirate.

They got a lot of press, of course, which was part of the idea—there’s no point being a rebel if you can’t get your picture in the paper. They even got Katie Hopkins, Britain’s own dollar-store Eva Braun, to come along for part of the ride, presumably as some sort of totem against shipwreck, because any self-respecting god of the ocean would spit Hopkins right back out again. Deliciously, before they had even managed to embark on their main voyage, they accidentally smuggled twenty-one Sri Lankan asylum seekers into Europe. Then their boat stalled in the middle of the Mediterranean sea. The founder of the Sea-Eye, the NGO ship that was sent to offer aid—the pouting stalwarts refused help—told the public that “to help a ship in distress is the duty of anyone who is at sea, without distinction to their origin, color, religion, or beliefs.” Hopefully the Sea-Eye was also stocked with burn cream.[*] 

The very worst part about this entire episode is that an actual rescue ship was diverted to help these cretins, a rescue ship that could have been saving people who are really fleeing for their lives, rather than simply fleeing reality. I’m not going to permit myself to wish the baby-fascists had fucking drowned, but I do hope the stalled vessel gave these quisling Quixotes time to check out their own reflection in the surface of the sea and wonder whether being “underground” was quite so much fun anymore. I also hope that when they make the movie of this, every single one of them is played by Nicolas Cage in a variety of unconvincing wigs.

Claiming that anti-fascists are morally equivalent to fascists is a little like claiming that, as both take a toll on the body, cancer and chemotherapy are basically the same.

In the United States, radicalized extremists on the far right are also due for a rebrand, having been embarrassed on the international stage in Charlottesville by fellow travelers who took the street-fighting-Nazi live-action roleplay too far, marched around screaming about being replaced by Jews, and murdered someone. The Shitler Youth are now going through desperate conniptions trying to claim that anti-fascists are morally equivalent to fascists, that “all sides” are aggressive and forthright, which is a little like claiming that, as both take a toll on the body, cancer and chemotherapy are basically the same.

Shit got real, eh? One minute you’re a nice normal boy with hobbies and internet friends, and the next, your picture’s all over the place holding a torch and doing the Nuremberg uglyface and your parents won’t talk to you because everyone thinks you’re a militant racist, and they’re right. If I may talk directly to these self-deluding subterraneans: I’m sorry to be the one to point this out, but you have been radicalized. There’s a reason people call you Vanilla ISIS. ISIS think they’re rebels, too. Have a good hard look at these Defend Europe twits with their rickety armada. These are your people. They’re your compadres. You are paddling beside them in the shallow end of political discourse, screaming when anything living nibbles your toes. 

This is what happens when we fetishize the romance of rebellion while making actual social change impossible. My guess is that the ruling class, the people whose agenda these people’s mean-spirited credulity serves, aren’t standing about with flaming torches screaming that they’re about to be replaced by Jews. They don’t spend their time harassing girls on the internet. They outsource that shit. To suckers. For free. Meanwhile, the ruling class is just writing the speeches and jerking the strings and watching gullible, self-anointed rebels make fools of themselves on television.

These are the very people whose names the Shitler Youth wear on their unbelievably ugly hats and t-shirts, which incidentally is exactly what happens when you let straight white guys who consider gold a neutral design your neo-fascist aesthetic. The one problem with calling these faux-rebels Nazis is that it suggests they know how to goddamned get dressed in the morning. The left are out-styling them as well as out-thinking them right now. The left! Some of us wear hemp! And t-shirts with weak science puns! And we let our flatmates cut our hair! And we spend half our time fighting each other over tiny ideological debates that started before we were born, and they still make us look good. They make us look good because they’ve swallowed the fake oppression story cooked up by propagandists on the right to recast their most reactionary opinions as risqué. 

So let’s be clear: getting fired because you hate women is not an equivalent hardship to getting fired because you happen to be one. People who have been disowned by their parents for being gay or transgender aren’t going to have sympathy when your mum and dad find your stash of homophobic murder fantasies and change the locks. Getting attacked for being a racist is not the same as getting attacked because you are black. The definition of oppression is not “failure to see your disgusting opinions about the relative human value of other living breathing people reflected in society at large.” Being shamed, including in public, for holding intolerant, bigoted opinions is not an infringement of your free speech. You are not fighting oppression. You are, at best, fighting criticism. If that’s the hill you really want to die on, fine, but don’t kid yourself it’s the moral high ground. I repeat: You cannot be a rebel for the status quo. It would be physically easier to go and fuck yourself, and I suggest you try.

The fact that some people—the women, people of color, immigrants and queer people you want put back in their proper place—disapprove of you does not make you edgy. A bag of cotton wool is edgier than you lot. Fighting for things to go back to the way they were twenty or thirty or fifty years ago does not constitute a bold resistance movement. It constitutes the militant arm of the Daily Mail comments section. Fighting real oppression involves risk, and before you start, I’m talking about real risk, not some girl on the internet calling you a cowardly subliterate waste of human skin, like I just did.  

This was gig-economy bigotry from the beginning, every bedroom hatemonger his own self-facilitating media node.

Of course, the fragile self-image of American nationalism has always been grounded in the idea of rebellion, in an aesthetic of protest and struggle for individual liberty powdering over the ugly worship of authoritarianism andhierarchy that was also baked in from the beginning. The United States has never truly stopped fighting its civil war, but the tropes and language of that war have been re-appropriated by net reactionaries in an effort to dress up their racism as rebellion, which by coincidence was part of what the war was about in the first place. That’s why there’s such attachment to the confederate or “rebel” flag among conservatives, even in states which fought for the Union; even in states which did not exist at the time. And this investment in maintaining a state of permanent rebellion is why net reactionaries have no idea what to do now they’re technically in power, like the confused golden retriever who finally catches that Ford Focus, except far less fluffy. 

Mewling subluminaries have, for years, approached backyard fascism as a growth industry—why stop now? These enterprising intellectual bantamweights did not wait for the mechanisms of state and party to show them how to goose-step or gather seed money—this was gig-economy bigotry from the beginning, every bedroom hatemonger his own self-facilitating media node, like a sort of fascist Nathan Barley. The millennials among them have merely done what the television told us all to do as kids: find your passion and make it your career. It’s just a shame that their passion happens to be the creation of a white ethnostate with a stack of sexually frustrated video rants as a transitional demand.

So propping up the establishment does not sit well with their sense of themselves as brave, entrepreneurial outsiders battling the forces of something-or-other. Perhaps it feels strange to be told you have won when nothing in your own actual, material life has changed. Perhaps winning didn’t taste as good as the picture on the package. They were promised thrills and spills and danger and adventure and instead they’re on the haunted teacup ride through the wreckage of civil society and they’re feeling a bit sick but they’ve given the man their money, so they can’t get off.

And in any case this is not the sort of game you just win or lose. Politics doesn’t work like that, although in fairness, the sense that it does is one of several delusions they share with the political elites they claim to despise. Playing by those rules is a great way to make sure that the house always wins. What’s changed in the world in the months since their team supposedly won? The rich are still running things, they’re just a lot less shy about it. Living standards have gone nowhere but down. The planet is still sizzling towards climate collapse, and I know they think that’s not real, but you don’t have to believe in a train to get run down by it with everyone you care about while you stand in the middle of the tracks screaming about cucks and Jews like a prize prick.

One major thing, however, has changed, and that is that an awful lot of people who happen to be foreign, or female, or members of a different race or faith from these fools are suddenly living in fear of violence, violence the Shitler Youth and their crewmates helped whip up to make themselves feel like big damn heroes. Because they wanted to feel like they were fighting the power without actually having to challenge anyone who had it.

If you’ve a niggling suspicion I might be talking about you here, it’s time to take a look at your own reflection in whatever screen you’re reading off. If you want to cosplay as a revolutionary from a made-up time before brown people and liberated women existed, go and drink mead at a Ren fair like a normal person. If you just want to be famous on the internet, go and make some porn. If you can’t get over your fetish for fake oppression, go and hang out in a club where people wear expensive black rubber and get yourself consensually flogged by someone with legitimate rage to work through. But don’t call yourself a revolutionary just because you can’t stop running in circles.

[*]  Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly suggested that the crew of the Defend Europe vessel had been rescued by the Sea-Eye. Although the Sea-Eye was temporarily diverted to travel toward the Defend Europe boat and offer aid, the latter crew refused help and the rescue ship carried on its operations. The fascists’ boat later restarted.