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Why? The Jacobins burned themselves out by ghoulish savagery to anyone they didn't like so hard they got first the Thermidor and then the Bonapartes. It would have literally been your head if you'd been there. Incidentally the Nazis loved the guillotine as their preferred method of capital punishment, which is one *real* god reason not to be beholden to 18th Century French dictatorships. Not that mass murderers in imagination who whine about oppression waddling to the fridge would know either way.

It's worth noting with the Jacobins that they're one of the reasons why revolution easily became a dirty word

They created the first modern exemplar of the dynamics of radicalism where people create a cycle of bloodshed that devours almost all of its known authors. There's a famous motif of 'Cronus devouring his children' and it really does repeat itself in France, in Mexico, in Russia, in China, in Iran.

To people in the 1790s who were accustomed to the usual suspects doing the usual brutality, the spectacle of ideological murder and its vicious turn of the screw that escalates ever upward but never downward was a horrifying novelty.

A century later it would come to be seen as 'a revolution without executions is not a revolution at all.'

One can question both the irony and the hypocrisy of the people who relished the brutality of the Ancien Regime but hated the new brutality AND the idea that the French introducing the idea of progress over a bridge of severed heads didn't store up a whole lot of trouble for later generations.

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Someone's a Vendee counterrevolutionary needing a Sans Culottes haircut if he thinks Mr. Robespierre and his other executioners didn't rely on military means to fight their revolution. The Vendee absolutely was a case of glorious revolutionary morality slaughtering in the Biblical sense down to the dogs and cats, but today's sociopaths online not only dismiss that but fail to see this leaves you identical in aspiration if not in wealth to Elon 'Let them die without their HIV medication' Musk.

Did you just not hear about the stupid poster in Britain to celebrate the Jubilee they had, with that icon of Cosette celebrating it as if that wasn't wildly antithetical to the point of Les Mis? Because that's what this meme was in response to. So yeah it kind of feels like you wildly missed the actual point of the joke.

No, I did not hear about it, and yes, it is stupid and anti-Les Miserables. I think she’s misused in both the rebuttal and original but I do understand the context better now. I’m still not a fan of glorifying the guillotine, knowing that children were killed.

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And honestly, re: Family AU:

I do 100% think there'd be room for a Monkey's Paw scenario there, and that it was Alyson Hannigan's out of universe plot armor that essentially meant that a scenario ripe for that didn't go wrong. Tara wanted to be sure that none of the people she cared about most did see, and if thanks to everything with dear cousin Beth she's a few minutes later Willow might easily have died even if everything else was the same.

I do not think for a second the Scoobies would let her go, and that given Tara was originally 'replacement Willow' she would 100% have been even more fully slotted into that than I did things with that Witches and Slayers AU (which was a big part of doing it, and playing with the expectations that the equivalent of canon Willow in that AU *was* Tara to explore that arc through the entire series). I can also see a grieving Tara who is angry at herself waiting until the Glory arc is done and resurrecting Willow who would have been dead for at least six months or more by that point, longer than canon Buffy.

And I do think that Tara bringing Willow back in the ways she does would go.....explosively, and that's without Warren and his band of goons hanging around doing something like their canonical roles. And I also do think if Willow *had* died that Oz would have returned to Sunnydale, in a way, so that would become its own complicated factor here.

An AU kind of like this one gets a small cameo in the Firebell AU, this just shifts things slightly further up in the time table and plays with the various twists of ethics and magic. It'd also hinge much more firmly on the timeframe of the show with only the last 2 or 3 chapters set post-series.

There's a lot of little moments like this all through the series where a tiny margin of error leads to very big butterflies. Any or all of the Scoobies could have died multiple times and having that happen in different seasons and go beyond Jenny Calendar could have and would have had a major impact.

There will always be the irony that the person in-universe who came closest to killing every one of the main characters in-universe was none other than Anyanka herself.

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Remember, everyone, we still have a system in place and the Constitution still exists. We are not in a full dictatorship, yet. We can not give in to despair at every single thing this new administration does, because those checks still exist.

And until they don't - and that's a big if - we must keep our heads about us. Do not panic. Do not fall into apathy. Do not do anything irreversible.

The system will not save us, but it can protect us from the worst possible outcome for now.

And we will continue to fight even once it can't or won't.

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Actually going to be doing another couple of short Tillow fics:

The first will be a twenty-chapter story reliant on 'Tara undoes spell in Family.....after Lei-Ach demon kills Willow' which due to the butterfly effect means Glory sees herself out and Buffy's actually alive and well at the end of Season 5. Meanwhile since in my Buffyverse Willow is fated to resurrect magic whether or not she wants to, she was destined for a resurrection anyway, but Tara beats the Powers to the punch to bring Willow back after the Glory business, doing this in complete secret which is where this one'd start.

And the impact of the first story will include both glimpses of the AU Season 5 post Willow's death and how deeply and profoundly awkward and dangerous it was for Tara to do Willow's job of magic woman on her own, as well as the impact of Willow's death and Dark Willow in this AU, kind of like in Witches and Slayers, is a result of the same dark magic spell used by canon Willow used to resurrect her and her own mental state, due to being different to Buffy's, sees her power growing exponentially but in a state that creates a vicious circle of sliding down the slippery slope to Dark Phoenix territory.

I do think that if Willow had died instead of Buffy and been resurrected that Dark Willow was fixed by that path instead of by another because great power + great emotional turmoil = Buffyverse version of Jean Grey eating a star and killing a planet.

The other one an eighteen chapter story based on 'Willow chooses Oz in New Moon Rising, Oz gets a bullet in the heart.....and Tara swoops in in Season 7 to pick up the ashes of Willow Osbourne and gets her girl after being her friend for both Seasons 5 and 6.' There's one fic like this on Fanfiction.net I've found that has Tara getting amnesia, which I'm just skipping here and I intend to rather mercilessly enjoy having Tara essentially go for Kennedy's canonical role and timing.

People really do forget that at one point the fandom actively hated Tara at the start in the same way it still hates Kennedy. I also think that if Tara had stuck around the Scoobies for an extended period of time without dating Willow that she and Xander would 100% have bonded over the physically abusive families things + complicated feelings with and around Willow thing and that this would have been the 'make each other worse' kind of bonding. Amplified by Tara and Anya also getting along.

This was a big part of her characterization in Witches and Slayers and it would be a big part of shaping her in both of these stories, and since the first one, like Firebell, has no such stories for it and the third one only has the one, I guess it falls to me to blaze the trail of finally writing these specific what-ifs.

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Scarlett Pavlovich is a very brave woman, who was failed by people for years until she was able to make her case, and her voice heard. That is where views of what happened with Gaiman and Palmer should begin and end, it's not about the monsters who did wrong, it's about justice for the women they hurt.

Every warning you see about how horrific this is is 100% correct, and I hope she squeezes Gaiman and Palmer until the stones bleed.

Looks like Scarlett Pavlovich, one of the women who accused Gaiman of sexual assault, has started the process to sue his ass and Amanda Palmer's ass, and get some justice.

There are 28 pages of court filing here, but, as one of Scarlett's lawyers said on Bsky, "DO NOT READ THIS unless you can handle details of some truly vile sexual abuse by Neil Gaiman."

There are 9 causes of action, in the filing, some against both Gaiman and Palmer, some against only one of them, ranging from human traficking to negligence to sexual assault.

This just to say, sue their asses, Scarlett! Sue these fuckers' asses!

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I mean at the more grimdark possibility to really do balls to the wall with this season, have Buffy turn to Willow after wrecked as she did with Spike in canon in that 'make each other worse' way that contributes both to Dark Willow's emergence and to the rough patch with Tillow getting astronomically worse. It would also estrange Buffy from Tara just a bit as I can't see her going 'wait they're doing WHAT' very easily, and this would replace the whole mess with 'magic crack analogue' with 'self destructive streak for everyone.'

And then yesterday's buffoon with the glorified sex doll guns Buffy down as Willow's powers are continuing to accelerate and the shit hits the fan and everything goes from bad to worse.

S6 Summersberg anyone?

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There's a whole set of things to be written about how the show is Buffy's show, from Buffy's POV but even from that POV Willow Rosenberg has the more dynamic narrative, the more classical superhero one in the superhero show (the Johnny Bates-Jean Grey arc but that's still a classic), goes from being damsel in distress to most powerful being on the planet....and this is why i will unapologetically admit to liking Willow more than Buffy. Willow grows more grandly on a grander scale.

It was an even bolder thing 20 years ago to have the most powerful being in the show be an out and proud Jewish lesbian, let alone the supporting character/really the deuteragonist, but there it is.

thinking about the implications of willow glowing bright white instead of becoming Dark Willow™️ while casting the slayer power dispersion spell in chosen. it's as if the slayer's power was rooted in goodness all along, or at the very least isn't as close to demonic as buffy once felt she was. or perhaps it's about the intentions behind the use of power mattering more than the power itself! could be something about willow, who has craved power from the start, finally releasing her shame for this desire when she HAS to embrace her power to save the world, realizing in execution that she can be powerful without it consuming her. maybe it's about how things get dark when when we're so caught up in our own grief or despair that we fold inside ourselves and can't see a way out, which makes it equally about how things get light when we share our burdens with people who love us. it could even be about how the only path to true self acceptance AND true love for another requires accepting that there is darkness curled up next to the light in all of us, that we are not uniquely bad for having it, that we do not need to be controlled by it or afraid of it. or it could have been just a vibe i guess!

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The other side is I'm honestly astonished at the ease Republicans have in rolling with 'Elon Musk is capable of giving the wrong order at the wrong time and hitting 'delete country and world financial order' button.' That happens, they're out of a job, their goose is cooked, and it's end of the USSR on bath salts time but in English.

like absolutely we should be putting pressure on democrats to use their (lbr, quite limited) power to stop or get in the way of as much of this bullshit as possible. but I’m going to lose my mind at the “why aren’t the democrats stopping this” cries from people who spent the entirely of last year actively minimizing the importance of ELECTING democrats to positions where they could have more easily prevented any of this. fall in line and vote against fascism with a smile next time maybe, idk.

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The entire world's about to be because Elon Musk is within weeks of completely wrecking the global financial system that's been around for 80+ years and doing an apocalyptic change that really has no analogue except the end of the Han Dynasty or the Western Roman Empire. You Palestine mononamiacs were some of the people most eager for that to happen.

Choke on it.

like absolutely we should be putting pressure on democrats to use their (lbr, quite limited) power to stop or get in the way of as much of this bullshit as possible. but I’m going to lose my mind at the “why aren’t the democrats stopping this” cries from people who spent the entirely of last year actively minimizing the importance of ELECTING democrats to positions where they could have more easily prevented any of this. fall in line and vote against fascism with a smile next time maybe, idk.

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Tara... look at me. I, I trusted you more than anyone in my life. Was all that just a lie? No!

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER | 5.06

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Me Watching the 'Socialists' go into meltdown mode over losing a fucking corporate app:

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It established one of the surprisingly underused elements of Tara as a witch, which to be fair since it seldom came up in the show after that is one thing but still that she's almost impossible to lie to with that aura-sight of hers. If nothing else at a purely amoral level that'd mean you'd almost be contractually obligated to use the Bramble to actually do it as if Tara can see a body-switch then she'd easily be able to pick up a lie.

She's also human and depending on the liar might not accept that the lie in fact was one or be willing to process this as what it was even if she did see it, to allow for creative tension, but still. Willow is never shown to have interest in this ability nor necessarily able to do it, so it's one way to keep Tara and Willow both separate and to leverage that Tara doesn't need to match Willow in raw power to be potentially a more dangerous person to face.

Willow is very gullible at multiple levels, Tara would be that only if she wanted to deceive herself.

okay hi btvs fans can we pls talk abt the fact that when faith and buffy switched bodies, the only one who cld tell it wasnt buffy was tara, who didnt even know buffy at the time ??? like not even willow knew what was going on. wtf dude

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The comics establish that there was an equivalent exchange there, and Willow ultimately said she had no regrets, which is 100% true to Willow's character in that moment. One of my favorite ideas in a fic is that Willow finds this out in real time and with a more neutral or positive or the most 'I hate Willow Rosenberg for existing' take she'd 100% do this in all three ways. She opts to have neither Tara nor Buffy die and to let her own life be the price for the exchange, while in finest Willow fashion she tells no-one this and perpetuates the same toxic dynamics as canon but in a more morally grey fashion that'd almost be heroic if not for callously taking a nailbat to people;s feelings.

Warren 100% deserved things, and I tend to think that the Hellmouth was fully influencing her decision-making process, even if not her fully going Dark Willow, and tempting her to extend things from the first person who deserves it, to another, to letting the entire world burn in a suicidal fit of refusing to live in a world without Tara. And not caring even if it meant that the entire world and all of humanity went with her.

I also don't think that Tara would have done this if Willow died, I can see her embracing the darker magic of resurrection to bring Willow back and fighting with the other Scoobies who would 100% rightly see this as putting things back to Square 1 but far more dangerous as it'd be Willow who might come back wrong with all that vast power at her disposal and not Buffy. She would under no circumstances have sought to burn the world down, nor had the power even if she wished. It was a specifically Willow Rosenberg thing to have the power to make the ideas and fantasies of others where living and dying are concerned real in their very harshest ways.

the real reason willow is able to bring buffy back from the dead but not tara is that willow never loved tara the way she loved buffy. and willow knows this, and that's why she's so hellbent on getting bloody revenge. she's hiding from the truth. she knows it's all her fault, but she can't face that, so she directs her rage toward more acceptable targets. it doesn't actually matter if warren and the other two are guilty - what matters is that willow is able to convince herself they are, so she doesn't have to face her own guilt.

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Depending on the timing they could make each other worse or Faith proves a wild card in Season 6 that throws things out of sync (and since fanfics are not obligated to simply retell the canon with minor differences, Buffy can fight a dragon for a treat instead of Dark Willow) and neatly scoops up post-breakup Willow and her idea of 'helping' technically is making worse in a different direction.

Less Kid Miracleman meets Mall Goth Sauron as per canon and more Faith channeling those same impulses away from magic and finding out a wee bit later that whatever Willow does she does excellently and to excess and that she kinda sorta found out a bit too late that when you've got the tiger by the ears that's a bit late to expect the angry kitty to be nice to you.

And I don't think Tara would take nicely if Faith just scooped her girlfriend up even when they were technically broken up and that she'd prove a bit myopic here mainly because this is the one situation she never had to confront, on the one hand, and I just can't see Tara taking well the fuller equivalent of what Willow thought happened in Normal Again. She was, after all, willing to forgive and forget things that crossed lines into outright supervillain territory at her expense.

She would 100% be likely to read what Faith and Hooligan!Willow get up to as 'hey she's not doing magic, so I won't have to worry that my memory is what she says it is, we're all good now' and ignore Willow sliding into casual violence at the side of a Faith who understood parts of what she did wrong but not nearly as much as the canon Faith who repented more fully later.

So basically a version of an idea I've had with the Season 7 timeframe where Willow and Tara start out re-broken up after Dark Willow, this time ironically because it's Willow who wanted it and not Tara, and Tara's just serene that the passage of time will fix things and enter Kennedy with the steel chair to disrupt that complacency and to do a version of Whedon's original idea of the Oz and Veruca storyline but gay.

Difference is with this one it'd be a lot more of a coin toss between "Willow the juvenile delinquent sticks with the bad girl or she goes back to the good girl" instead of 'Kennedy thinks she's going to scoop up the girl and reality has other plans but she has a lot better reason to think that than anyone except her would have had reasons to think at the time.'

willow and faith need to fuck nasty idk if it would fix them or make them worse but it needs to happen

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Related to my previous post:

One of the other reasons I have deeper issues, now, with the concept of Death of the Endless even as emotionally she remains a favorite comfort character in an abstract sense is realizing this old story from 2018 looks much worse now than it did then. And it didn't look real great then. Then, in 2018, it seemed a Finger/Kane case of the injustices of an industry that repeated themselves.

Hindsight shows both that this was much worse than it seemed and an illustration of 'why nobody said anything.' It was news, at the time, that Cinnamon Hadley died impoverished and in great pain and homeless from colon cancer. Her connection to Death of the Endless was also noted (this is a separate thing from people weaponizing her image to do a racism with the adaptations).

In reality Gaiman and Dringenberg raked in the big bucks using her image without any authorization, and never paid her a cent for being the visual inspiration for a character who overshadowed the nominal title character at the time and later. It is not lost on me that there is a certain irony in this, that a character who was famous for hiding modestly among the masses and dying because dying is what life does wound up having that mirrored in the most frightening ways with a woman who was, again, shamelessly exploited in a way that shows this is precisely who Neil Gaiman always was.

It is a further bit of reason to take these allegations seriously, because the same casual callous exploitation of a 'muse' and stiffing her from things that could quite literally have saved her life filters in very nicely to the obtuse defenses of evil that Gaiman wrote in his 'response' and into how he no doubt rationalizes things beyond his public statements. It unfortunately also means that even one of the least offensive creations he made as a part of his best-loved work cannot be separated from the man's deeds, or what he did with them.

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Very technically, yes, but in the 1840s a wave of political refugees caused by a politically motivated famine and a wave of failed revolutions touched off the first anti-immigration movement, the Know-Nothings, who were one of the vital wellsprings of today's Republican Party. "Immigrants good" from the Democratic Party and "Revere the President, Expel the Barbarians" from the Republicans is the one area where the lines actually haven't changed at all since the 1800s.