#Black utopianism

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Exploring Ruins: This Week's Recommended Reads

Ruins: A Theme in This Week’s Recommended Reads This week, our recommended book list explores the theme of ruins in various contexts. From the downfall of the Victoria’s Secret lingerie empire to the haunting legacies of colonialism examined by Dionne Brand in classic British literature, these selections delve into the remnants of once-thriving narratives. Additionally, we highlight the…

[von-vom]

[ink-asunder]

God I get so offended at people calling me witchy. Like, I get it, we're in the deep dark south and anybody with double pierced ears is like a satanist here, but I'm NOT a witch, I NEVER identified as a witch, and I do NOT appreciate you calling/saying I'm "witchy" to another friend just because it's the best shorthand you have for "psychotic divine apostate with aesthetic taste."

I'm not a fucking witch. I'm self-deified, I'm delusional, and I have shitty tiktok aesthetics. That doesn't make me a fucking witch.

Furthermore, I'm just RURAL. I have fucking antlers and skulls everywhere cause I'm a country bumpkin. Just because I have porcelain and creepycute stuff everywhere doesn't mean I'm different than the cowboys around here with rusted tools and driftwood everywhere. Quit being fucking classist. Quit trying to separate me from my home and roots just so I can be more palatable for you!!!

[nellasbookplanet]

Book recs: black science fiction

As february and black history month nears its end, if you're a reader let's not forget to read and appreciate books by black authors the rest of the year as well! If you're a sci-fi fan like me, perhaps this list can help find some good books to sink your teeth into.

Bleak dystopias, high tech space adventures, alien monsters, alternate dimensions, mash-ups of sci-fi and fantasy - this list features a little bit of everything for genre fiction fans!

For more details on the books, continue under the readmore. Titles marked with * are my personal favorites. And as always, feel free to share your own recs in the notes!

If you want more book recs, check out my masterpost of rec lists!

Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor

Something massive and alien crashes into the ocean off the coast of Nigeria. Three people, a marine biologist, a rapper, and a soldier, find themselves at the center of this presence, attempting to shepherd an alien ambassador as chaos spreads in the city. A strange novel that mixes the supernatural with the alien, shifts between many different POVs, and gives a one of a kind look at a possible first contact.

Nubia: The Awakening (Nubia series) by Omar Epps & Clarence A. Hayes

Young adult. Three teens living in the slums of an enviromentally ravaged New York find that something powerful is awakening within them. They’re all children of refugees of Nubia, a utopian African island nation that sank as the climate worsened, and realize now that their parents have been hiding aspects of their heritage from them. But as they come into their own, someone seeks to use their abilities to his own ends, against their own people.

The Scourge Between Stars by Ness Brown

Novella. After having failed at establishing a new colony, starship Calypso fights to make it back to Earth. Acting captain Jacklyn Albright is already struggling against the threats of interstellar space and impending starvation when the ship throws her a new danger: something is hiding on the ship, picking off her crew one by one in bloody, gruesome ways. A quick, excellent read if you want some good Alien vibes.

Dawn (Xenogenesis trilogy) by Octavia E. Butler*

After a devestating war leaves humanity on the brink of extinction, survivor Lilith finds herself waking up naked and alone in a strange room. She’s been rescued by the Oankali, who have arrived just in time to save the human race. But there’s a price to survival, and it might be humanity itself. Absolutely fucked up I love it I once had to drop the book mid read to stare at the ceiling and exclaim in horror at what was going on. Includes darker examinations of agency and consent, so enter with caution.

Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson*

Utterly unique in world-building, story, and prose, Midnight Robber follows young Tan-Tan and her father, inhabitants of the Carribean-colonized planet of Toussaint. When her father commits a terrible crime, he’s exiled to a parallel version of the same planet, home to strange aliens and other human exiles. Tan-Tan, not wanting to lose her father, follows with him. Trapped on this new planet, he becomes her worst nightmare. Enter this book with caution, as it contains graphic child sexual abuse.

Rosewater (The Wormwood trilogy) by Tade Thompson

In Nigeria lies Rosewater, a city bordering on a strange, alien biodome. Its motives are unknown, but it’s having an undeniable effect on the surrounding life. Kaaro, former criminal and current psychic agent for the government, is one of the people changed by it. When other psychics like him begin getting killed, Kaaro must take it upon himself to find out the truth about the biodome and its intentions.

Do You Dream of Terra-Two? by Temi Oh

Young adult. A century ago, an astronomer discovered a possibly Earth-like planet. Now, a team of veteran astronauts and carefully chosen teenagers are preparing to embark on a twenty-three year trip to get there. But space is dangerous, and the team has no one to rely on but each other if - or when - something goes wrong. An introspective slowburn of a story, this focuses more on character work than action.

The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord

After the planet Sadira is left uninhabitable, its few survivors are forced to move to a new world. On Cygnus Beta, they work to rebuild their society alongside their distant relatives of the planet, while trying to preserve what remains of their culture. Focused less on hard science or action, The Best of All Possible Worlds is more about culture, romance and the ethics and practicalities of telepathy.

Mirage (Mirage duology) by Somaiya Daud

Young adult. Eighteen-year-old Amani lives on an isolated moon under the oppressive occupation of the Valthek empire. When Amani is abducted, she finds herself someplace wholly unexpected: the royal palace. As it turns out, she's nearly identical to the half-Valthek, and widely hated, princess Maram, who is in need of a body double. If Amani ever wants to make it back home or see her people freed from oppression, she will have to play her role as princess perfectly. While sci-fi, this one more has the vibe of a fantasy.

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

Life on the lower decks of the generation ship HSS Matilda is hard for Aster, an outcast even among outcasts, trying to survive in a system not dissimilar to the old antebellum South. The ship’s leaders have imposed harsh restrictions on their darker skinned people, using them as an oppressed work force as they travel toward their supposed Promised Land. But as Aster finds a link between the death of the ship’s sovereign and the suicide of her own mother, she realizes there may be a way off the ship.

Where It Rains in Color by Denise Crittendon

The planet Swazembi is a utopia of color and beauty, the most beautiful of all its citizens being the Rare Indigo. Lileala was just named Rare Indigo, but her strict yet pampered life gets upended when her beautiful skin is struck by a mysterious sickness, leaving it covered in scars and scabs. Meanwhile, voices start to whisper in Lileala's mind, bringing to the surface a past long forgotten involving her entire society.

Eacaping Exodus (Escaping Exodus duology) by Nicky Drayden

Seske is the heir to the leader of a clan living inside a gigantic, spacefaring beast, of which they frequently need to catch a new one to reside in as their presence slowly kills the beast from the inside. While I found the ending rushed with regards to plot and character, the worldbuilding is very fresh and the overall plot of survival and class struggle an interesting one. It’s also sapphic!

Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah*

In a near future America, inmates on death row or with life sentences in private prisons can choose to participate in death matches for entertainment. If they survive long enough - a rare case indeed - they regain their freedom. Among these prisoners are Loretta Thurwar and Hamara "Hurricane Staxxx" Stacker, partners behind the scenes and close to the deadline of a possible release - if only they can survive for long enough. As the game continues to be stacked against them and protests mount outside, two women fight for love, freedom, and their own humanity. Chain-Gang All-Stars is bleak and unflinching as well as genuinely hopeful in its portrayal of a dark but all to real possible future.

Parable of the Sower (Earthseed duology) by Octavia E. Butler*

In a bleak future, Lauren Olamina lives with her family in a gated community, one of few still safe places in a time of chaos. When her community falls, Lauren is forced on the run. As she makes her way toward possible safety, she picks up a following of other refugees, and sows the seeds of a new ideology which may one day be the saviour of mankind. Very bleak and scarily realistic, Parable of the Sower will make you both fear for mankind and regain your hope for humanity.

Binti (Binti trilogy) by Nnedi Okorafor

Young adult novella. Binti is the first of the Himba people to be accepted into the prestigious Oomza University, the finest place of higher learning in all the galaxy. But as she embarks on her interstellar journey, the unthinkable happens: her ship is attacked by the terrifying Meduse, an alien race at war with Oomza University.

War Girls (War Girls duology) by Tochi Onyebuchi

In an enviromentally fraught future, the Nigerian civil war has flared back up, utilizing cybernetics and mechs to enhance its soldiers. Two sisters, by bond if not by blood, are separated and end up on differing sides of the struggle. Brutal and dark, with themes of dehumanization of soldiers through cybernetics that turn them into weapons, and the effect and trauma this has on them.

The Space Between Worlds (The Space Between Worlds duology) by Micaiah Johnson

Multiverse travel is finally possible, but there’s a catch: No one can visit a world where their counterpart is still alive. Enter Cara, whose parallel selves happen to be exceptionally good at dying. As such she has a very special job in traveling to these worlds, hoping to keep her position long enough to gain citizenship in the walled-off Wiley City, away from the wastes where she grew up. But her job is dangerous, especially when she gets on the tracks of a secret that threatens the entire multiverse. Really cool worldbuilding and characters, also featuring a sapphic lead!

The Fifth Season (The Broken Eart trilogy) by N.K. Jemisin*

In a world regularly torn apart by natural disasters, a big one finally strikes and society as we know it falls, leaving people floundering to survive in a post apocalyptic world, its secrets and past to be slowly revealed. We get to follow a mother as she races through this world to find and save her missing daughter. While mostly fantasy in genre, this series does have some sci-fi flavor, and is genuinely some of the best books I've ever read, please read them.

The Women Could Fly by Megan Giddings*

In an alternate version of our present, the witch hunt never ended. Women are constantly watched and expected to marry young so their husbands can keep an eye on them. When she was fourteen, Josephine's mother disappeared, leveling suspicions at both mother and daughter of possible witchcraft. Now, nearly a decade and a half later, Jo, in trying to finally accept her missing mother as dead, decides to follow up on a set of seemingly nonsensical instructions left in her will. Features a bisexual lead!

The Prey of Gods by Nicky Drayden

South African-set scifi featuring gods ancient and new, robots finding sentience, dik-diks, and a gay teen with mind control abilities. An ancient goddess seeks to return to her true power no matter how many humans she has to sacrifice to get there. A little bit all over the place but very creative and fresh.

The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson*

Young adult. Young artist June Costa lives in Palmares Tres, a beautiful, matriarchal city relying heavily on tradition, one of which is the Summer King. The most recent Summer King is Enki, a bold boy and fellow artist. With him at her side, June seeks to finally find fame and recognition through her art, breaking through the generational divide of her home. But growing close to Enki is dangerous, because he, like all Summer Kings, is destined to die.

The Blood Trials (The Blood Gifted duology) by N.E. Davenport

After Ikenna's grandfather is assasinated, she is convinced that only a member of the Praetorian guard, elite soldiers, could’ve killed him. Seeking to uncover his killer, Ikenna enrolls in a dangerous trial to join the Praetorians which only a quarter of applicants survive. For Ikenna, the stakes are even higher, as she's hiding forbidden blood magic which could cost her her life. Mix of fantasy and sci-fi. While I didn’t super vibe with this one, I suspect fans of action packed romantasy will enjoy it.

Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany

1960s classic. Rydra Wong is a space captain, linguist and poet who is set on learning to understand Babel-17, a language which is humanity's only clue at the enemy in an interstaller war. But Babel-17 is more than just a language, and studying it may change Rydra forever.

Pet (Pet duology) by Akwaeke Emezi

Young adult novella. Jam lives in a utopian future that has been freed of monsters and the systems which created and upheld them. But then she meets Pet, a dangerous creature claiming to be hunting a monster still among them, prepared to stop at nothing to find them. While I personally found the word-building in Pet lacking, it deftly handles dark subjects of what makes a human a monster.

Bonus AKA I haven’t read these yet but they seem really cool

Lion's Blood by Steven Barnes

Alternate history in which Africans colonized South America while vikings colonized the North. The vikings sell abducted Celts and Franks as slaves to the South, one of which is eleven-years-old Irish boy Aidan O'Dere, who was just bought by a Southern plantation owner.

The Sound of Stars by Alechia Dow

Young adult dystopia. Ellie lives in a future where humanity is under the control of the alien Ilori. All art is forbidden, but Ellie keeps a secret library; when one of her books disappears, she fears discovery and execution. M0Rr1S, born in a lab and raised to be emotionless, finds her library, and though he should deliver her for execution, he finds himself obsessed with human music. Together the two embark on a roadtrip which may save humanity.

Womb City by Tlotlo Tsamaase

Lelah lives in future Botswana, but despite money and fame she finds herself in an unhappy marriage, her body controlled via microchip by her husband. After burying the body of an accidental hit and run, Lelah's life gets worse when the ghost of her victim returns to enact bloody vengeance.

Orleans by Sherri L. Smith

Young adult. Fen de la Guerre, living in a quarantined Gulf Coast left devestated by storms and sickness, is forced on the run with a newborn after her tribe is attacked. Hoping to get the child to safety, Fen seeks to get to the other side of the wall, she teams up with a scientist from the outside the quarantine zone.

Everfair by Nisi Shawl

A neo-victorian alternate history, in which a part of Congo was kept safe from colonisation, becoming Everfair, a safe haven for both the people of Congo and former slaves returning from America. Here they must struggle to keep this home safe for them all.

The Splinter in the Sky by Kemi Ashing-Giwa

Space opera. Enitan just wants to live a quiet life in the aftermath of a failed war of conquest, but when her lover is killed and her sister kidnapped, she's forced to leave her plans behind to save her sister.

Honorary mentions AKA these didn't really work for me but maybe you guys will like them: The City We Became (Great Cities duology) by N.K. Jemisin, The Lesson by Cadwell Turnbull, The A.I. Who Loved Me by Alyssa Cole

[burningvelvet]

black sails created an 18th century legendary pirate captain who is canonically queer, ginger, depressed, repressed, polyamorous, murderous, morally gray, downright insane, thoughtful, contradictive, manipulative, funny, strong, idealistic, proto-feminist, utopian, kind, proto-anarchist, anti-colonization, controlling, obsessive, stoic, strategic, intelligent, quiet, delusional, traumatized, filled with uncontrollable rage, consumed by grief and shame, a literary nerd obsessed with greek mythology and classics, a proto-romantic in the philosophical sense - whose whole story is the prequel story of a character from a classic novel who was dead from the very beginning of said novel - and they expected us to be normal about all this and to get over all this and move on from all this?????????

[deftswerve]

some massive peer swarms for this property, given this is only week-7

[artistalley]

Girl You Really Got A Hold on Me

by @thecitybee

I was browsing Pinterest when I saw this and felt immediately that I had to paint my OTP in the exact pose. The people closest to me know I’m completely obsessed with Spock and Lt. Uhura and have been since I was a child. As someone raised on Star Trek (specifically the Original Series) who also happens to be a Black woman, Star Trek represents the promise of a utopian future that exists because of the inherent value of people of color. I have eight billion things to say about how important the original intention for Spock and Uhura to be a romantic couple is, but suffice it to say I love them. The title of this piece comes from a song I always associate with these two, Childish Gambino's "Me and Your Mama". Painted with Clip Studio Paint in one session because I have no impulse control.

Can't get enough of @thecitybee's gorgeous art commissions? Go ahead and place your own order. You won't regret it.

[txttletale]

niceys positive anon!! i don't agree with you on everything but you are so clearly like well read and well rounded that you've helped me think through a lot of my own inconsistencies and hypocrises in my own political and social thought, even if i do have slightly different conclusions at times then u (mainly because i believe there's more of a place for idealism and 'mind politics' than u do). anyway this is a preamble to ask if you have recommended reading in the past and if not if you had any recommended reading? there's some obvious like Read Marx but beyond that im always a little lost wading through theory and given you seem well read and i always admire your takes, i wondered about your recs

it's been a while since i've done a big reading list post so--bearing in mind that my specific areas of 'expertise' (i say that in huge quotation marks obvsies i'm just a girlblogger) are imperialism and media studies, here are some books and essays/pamphlets i recommend. the bolded ones are ones that i consider foundational to my politics

BASICS OF MARXISM

friedrich engels, principles of commmunism

friedrich engels, socialism: utopian & scientific

karl marx, the german ideology

karl marx, wage labour & capital

mao zedong, on contradiction

nikolai bukharin, anarchy and scientific communism

rosa luxemburg, reform or revolution?

v.i lenin, left-wing communism: an infantile disorder

v.i. lenin, the state & revolution

v.i. lenin, what is to be done?

IMPERIALISM

aijaz ahmed, iraq, afghanistan, and the imperialism of our time

albert memmi, the colonizer and the colonized

che guevara, on socialism and internationalism (ed. aijaz ahmad)

eduardo galeano, the open veins of latin america

edward said, orientalism

fernando cardoso, dependency and development in latin america

frantz fanon, black skin, white masks

frantz fanon, the wretched of the earth

greg grandin, empire's workshop

kwame nkrumah, neocolonialism, the last stage of imperialism

michael parenti, against empire

naomi klein, the shock doctrine

ruy mauro marini, the dialectics of dependency

v.i. lenin, imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism

vijay prashad, red star over the third world

vincent bevins, the jakarta method

walter rodney, how europe underdeveloped africa

william blum, killing hope

zak cope, divided world divided class

zak cope, the wealth of (some) nations

MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES

antonio gramsci, the prison notebooks

ed. mick gidley, representing others: white views of indigenous peoples

ed. stuart hall, representation: cultural representations and signifying pratices

gilles deleuze & felix guattari, capitalism & schizophrenia

jacques derrida, margins of philosophy

jacques derrida, speech and phenomena

michael parenti, inventing reality

michel foucault, disicipline and punish

michel foucault, the archeology of knowledge

natasha schull, addiction by design

nick snricek, platform capitalism

noam chomsky and edward herman, manufacturing consent

regis tove stella, imagining the other

richard sennett and jonathan cobb, the hidden injuries of class

safiya umoja noble, algoriths of oppression

stuart hall, cultural studies 1983: a theoretical history

theodor adorno and max horkheimer, the culture industry

walter benjamin, the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction

OTHER

angela davis, women, race, and class

anna louise strong, cash and violence in laos and vietnam

anna louise strong, the soviets expected it

anna louise strong, when serfs stood up in tibet

carrie hamilton, sexual revolutions in cuba

chris chitty, sexual hegemony

christian fuchs, theorizing and analysing digital labor

eds. jules joanne gleeson and elle o'rourke, transgender marxism

elaine scarry, the body in pain

jules joanne gleeson, this infamous proposal

michael parenti, blackshirts & reds

paulo freire, pedagogy of the oppressed

peter drucker, warped: gay normality and queer anticapitalism

rosemary hennessy, profit and pleasure

sophie lewis, abolish the family

suzy kim, everyday life in the north korean revolution

walter rodney, the russian revolution: a view from the third world

[buggachat]

To be clear, I goddamn hated the finale on first watch. I was withering in my seat. My heart had dropped to my stomach. I had no fucking idea what I was watching in that final scene lmao

and then Adrien said "when Ladybug gave me the rings—" and I was like— wait. LADYBUG? LADYBUG STILL EXISTS?

I THOUGHT THE ENTIRE TIMELINE HAD BEEN REWRITTEN 😭😭😭😭 I THOUGHT LADYBUG AND CHATN OIR DIDNT UFCKING EXIST uNTIL ADRIEN SAID THAT I WAS SO SO SO SCARED

and then I realized, oh wait. This isn't a complete utopian timeline rewrite. This is just a timeskip of a few months and Mme Bustier is just a kickass mayor. In fact, she's only mayor BECAUSE it's still the same timeline. And then I realized, hey, wait, if they didn't rewrite the timeline, then how tf is Emilie casually there with no questions?

And then I realized she was wearing black. And Félix was there. And I remembered Amelie exists.

Basically, I went into the finale chanting to myself "it's okay, it's okay... they probably wont bring Emilie back... they probably won't rewrite the entire timeline permanently.... right? please....", even though I didn't actually expect it to happen, but just because I was terrified that it could. And apparently that fear actually got to me so much that I misinterpreted the episode as being everything I didn't want it to be... when... it actually wasn't that at all

anyway, all of this is to say, everything in the episode happens so fast that it confused and terrified me at first. And when I realized what had happened, my opinion went from "my year is ruined" to "oh. well. okay. kind of disappointing, I guess". And then I kept thinking about it, and the ending, and all that is set up and rewatching the scenes and all the loose ends still in place and.... i realized I loved it?

like, every time I think about this finale, I love it more. every time i rewatch a scene, I get a little obsessed. this episode went from my nightmare to actually really really cool to me, and I'm still kind of reeling from it

Basically, this is why I've been kind of passionately defending the finale— not because I think people who don't like it are """dumb""" or anything, I don't blame people at all for that, and I totally get the confusion. I was confused too. And I know I'm not the only one who went in preparing themselves for the worst, or went in with very specific expectation on what will happen, because this finale has been long awaited for so long. I think everyone was shocked with how it ended. I think most people probably startled at Amelie's face (it's so easy to forget she exists....)

Anyways, I started this post basically as an apology for if I seem too aggressive or defensive about the finale. Because I get it! I get hating it! I get being disappointed or frustrated or confused! Part of why I'm so defensive is because I have all the arguments so ready on the tip of my tongue because I had the very same argument with myself already 😭 So I'm sorry if any of my posts came off as too aggressive and in advance for any future posts that might. I promise promise promise I'm not trying to make anyone feel bad for having bad opinions on the finale! I just think this episode is really cool and the fact I related to a lot of the nay-sayers makes it easy to feel so impassioned about it.

But this post is getting off the rails and I'm just gonna let it, because some of my regrets w my participation in fandom is that I find myself chickening out of actually talking about my thoughts on episodes a lot. I get kind of overwhelmed and overthink everything after I've posted it and I'm a shy person. But my inbox is closed and this is the season 5 finale and I want to ramble and ramble so I will allow myself this

Basically, I went in with some very specific expectations for this episode. We all know about the Hawkmoth defeat story. Many of us have read it in fics over and over again, it was teased in Chat Blanc, we all know what we expect, we all know our favorite beats from it.

And what actually happened....... met virtually none of those beats. (For me, at least).

Like, Adrien wasn't there for the final episode. At all. He was completely absent from the confrontation. He never found out his father was Hawkmoth. He got his rings, but he never found out he was a sentimonster. He is living in the dark.

Ladybug confronted Monarch... alone. Which is sad, when so much of the series is dedicated to the partnership of her and Chat Noir. Them against the world....... and Monarch was "defeated" with nary a Chat Noir in sight.

The whole entire "Gabriel is known as a hero" thing. I don't think anybody was expecting that. Absolutely shocking.

The fact Marinette would lie to Adrien like that. The fact she's keeping so much from him. The fact everyone is. SO MANY people in Adrien's life (Marinette, Plagg, Nathalie, Felix, Amelie, Kagami, probably Alya, maybe more I'm not thinking of....) are just... lying to him, now. He is so in the dark. He knows nothing.

But.........

I kind of like that I didn't predict nearly any of this. I like that it caught me off guard. I love how this show just completely baffles me at every turn, how it will present concepts and ideas to me that I've never read a fic about.

In retrospect, Chat Noir being absent from the final battle... makes sense. It actually makes a lot of sense, if I think about it, because... there is only one possible way that could've gone, right? Chat Noir would not be allowed to have the emotional implosion that he would have to have. This is devastating. This is SO devastating. This is the entire shattering of Adrien's entire world we're talking about, and Chat Blanc is the only real way for that to end. Adrien has an emotional implosion in front of Monarch, he gets akumatized, it turns into an emotion explosion, extinction event. The end. We've already seen it.

And........ even if it didn't end that way, even if he managed to avoid akumatization...... how could the finale satisfyingly end on that note? How could it end in any semblance of a "wrapped up" way, at the very start of Adrien's emotional breakdown? It couldn't. I wouldn't WANT it to. In retrospect, Adrien finding out his dad is Monarch and then.... what? The season ends on a close-up of him crying? The season ends with a time-skip to the new school year where they skipped his entire grieving period!? I would HATE that, actually. I would hate that. I thought I wanted it, but I would hate it. I would hate it so so so much.

What's kind of amazing is that the finale ended with Monarch being defeated.... but Adrien still has those realizations to make. He still has those betrayals to come to terms with. There is time for him to make these realizations, for him to come to these conclusions, perhaps one at a time, perhaps in a more controlled environment.... and that gets me far, far more excited for the seasons to come than an episode that tried to wrap it all up in the last 5 minutes.

Also, the reason Adrien didn't go to the final battle was because he feared becoming Chat Blanc. He didn't know the truth to it, didn't understand that literally, yes, that's what would have happened if he was there, even if he hadn't been under a nightmare curse. But he still knew. He still expected it. He willingly chose to sit it out, no matter how much he hated it, because he knew. And there's something kind of powerful to that, I think, of Adrien making a choice that is so unequivocally the Correct choice, even more than he realized. And the strength it took for him to make that decision...... damn.

As for the lies and the Gabriel statue? I... it's upsetting, but it's supposed to be. And I believe it. I absolutely believe it. I 10000% believe Marinette would keep the secret of Monarch's identity to herself to try to save Adrien the pain. I 10000% believe that the population could easily be led to believe a famous billionaire is a hero. I 10000% believe that Adrien would WANT to believe it. I 10000% believe Tomoe would take advantage of it.

And I can't wait to see that illusion crumble.

Also.... this is the beginning of The Lila arc.

And the Lila arc begins on........ Marinette telling the biggest, boldest face lie she ever told. The Lila arc begins on the most extreme city-wide illusion we've ever seen. It begins on such a huge fabrication and....

..... it's Marinette's lie.

............ and Lila knows that it's a lie.

I'm

!!?!?!?!

This is so fucking cool???? The irony here??? the deceit???? All these loose ends, all the possible confrontations, all the ways this could GO. I don't know where the show is taking this, obviously, because nobody ever can predict where this show is going apparently (and I love it for that), but oh my god. I'm imagining all the fics I could read about this. all the fics I could write. all the thoughts and scenarios that this finale has provided me with to daydream about as I go to sleep.

Adrien, going through the motions of life. Looking up to his father as a hero, despite the fact the last time he saw him, Adrien was sobbing, in tears, and cursing his name. Adrien, after all the abuse he was subject to, having to look up at a statue of his father and...... be forced to think that maybe he was wrong about his father. But he's not wrong. He WASN'T wrong. He just THINKS that he is. His father is going to continue to loom over his life in ways I never expected post-hawkmoth. Adrien's relationship with Gabriel has not ended, a new and terrifying and horrible new chapter of it has simply begun, and Adrien is still as manipulated by his father's ghost as he was by his father himself.

THAT'S. WILD!!!

also, Adrien now believes that MONARCH MURDERED HIS FATHER. Chat Noir now believes that his greatest nemesis KILLED HIS FATHER. CHAT NOIR, resident self-sacrificer, believes that HIS FATHER was a HERO who DIED FIGHTING MONARCH. Adrien thinks that maybe he should be more like his father— more like his father who died in battle. This is. Not Good. For Adrien.

And it's Marinette that started this. Well intentioned Marinette, who doesn't really understand the extent of the horrors. Marinette, Adrien's girlfriend, the person he trusts most. She did this.

And, I mean.... god. I totally get how this sucks for a lot of people, because it's objectively upsetting.... but I LOVE lovesquare tension. Season 4 is probably my favorite season for that reason alone (still mulling over if season 5 beat it for me). I love the relationship drama, I love that it's in character drama, I love how it fits everything we know about them sososo well, I love that it's horrible and it's terrible and it's awful and it's all because Marinette loved Adrien too much to want to hurt him.

I was worried no reveal would mean that season 6 would just be... what? adrienette fluff? not that I don't love that, but where's the drama? well. there it is. that's the drama.

I need to stop typing this. I know this is abysmally long and ranty and if you read all of this then I'm sorry. But I wanted to get some of my thoughts out.

But basically, I was expecting a lot of things for the finale.

In my best case scenario, it would somehow, miraculously tie up and address all the loose ends with Adrien's angst and character arc in two episodes.... and then end with me totally satisfied, ready to only half-heartedly watch season 6 like it was just a small dessert after the main course.

And I already described my worst case scenario (my first impression of the episode lmao)

But it wasn't that. I was expecting a series finale, but I got a season finale. And I love season finales. I love how they keep me wanting more. I love how excited I am for season 6, because in both my best and worst case scenarios, I honestly didn't expect to be. I love all the new ideas and thoughts and scenarios swirling around in my brain. And even if season 6 doesn't address some of the things I want addressed, I'm so excited to see the creative content in this fandom that DOES

[your-highnessmarvel]

Repairs

Requested by @talesofreading : Would you write something where you're a close friend of Steve and one time as your Bike needs some repair, he tells you to bring it to Bucky as he's good in fixing it. You're hesitant first as you have a bad crush on him but you decide to do it. So when you get there he's wearing a muscle Shirt, is all dirty and Looks pretty hot with his metal arm. So after you watch him fix your bike you can't resist the way he also Looks at you, so it happens that you end up in his shower together with some passionate smut. Later then he asks you for a proper date? 🤭

AN: omg this was sooooo good to write omg

Warnings: SMUT SMUT SMUT, piv, oral (f receiving), fingering, language

*gif not mine

MASTERLIST

"Yep, totally busted," Steve said, looking back up at you from where he knelt next to your smoking bike.

You put a hand to your sweaty forehead. Both of you had been at this for the better part of the afternoon, trying to figure out what was wrong with your motorcycle. Steve was in his white wifebeater, stained black from oil and grim, nails coated in dirt. He'd sweated right through his shirt and even his jeans were full of mud and dirt.

You'd sweated your fair share as well, competing with dirt under your nails and sweat right into your hairline. you didn't look any better, but you didn't care; this was your best friend, after all, and you had no reason to try to impress him.

"You know what?" Steve said, putting his tools back into his box. "You should go see Bucky."

You immediately rolled your eyes.

"He's good with bikes, y/n," he commended, seeing the way you shook your head.

"Is this another ploy to set me up with your grumpy best friend?" you retorted, crossing your arms over your chest.

Steve got to his feet, dirt-stained hands going right into his pockets. "I mean it, y/n," he said, almost scolded. "I'm not as savvy with bikes as he is. He'd do it if you said I sent you."

"Then come with me!" you said. "Every time I'm alone with him, there's this awkward silence and all he does is grunt as a response."

Steve smiled. "I wish I could come, but I've got a date," he answered.

"Yeah, right," you grumbled. You watched him carefully, your best friend and mentor, and something along the edges of his eyes was curious.

He was shy.

"Who is she?" you asked.

He shrugged. "A girl that I saw at the library." He cut that off pretty short, picking up his tools, his towel, and throwing the keys back at you. "Now, get to Bucky's before it's nightfall."

Bucky lived way out of the city, into the utopian suburbs. You found it funny that this was the life that Bucky chose. After everything you'd heard from him, you'd pictured him in a dingy, half-lit, half-crumbling one-bedroom in Manhattan. Not in the outskirts of the city.

Thank God your car could pull a trailer, or else you'd have had to ask Bucky to meet you at your place, and that just wasn't happening. The thousand-year-old soviet asset was known to be a judger of literally everything.

You pulled into Bucky's parking space, the garage to his tiny little house open, like a black mouth ready to swallow you in. By this time, it was nearing four in the afternoon, and the sun was searing, hot and humid, and with just a foot out of your car, you were already sweating.

You closed the door loudly, maybe trying to announce your presence so you didn't have to knock on the door.

"Hey." It was Bucky, coming out of the shadows of his garage. It took you a second to get the hinges in your jaw to work because, damn.

You'd always thought of Bucky as a man who passed as good looking. Well, when you met him, he was still in heavy therapy and on government surveillance. He still had long, matted brown hair and a face dragged down by sorrow.

But now. Now he'd taken to cleanly shave his hair, leaving a few inches of thick, curling locks on top of his hair, not totally covering his ears. And even though he was slimmer than the last time you'd seen him - he hadn't been working out as much - he still looked... better. Real better.

"Hey," you said, awkwardly waving at him. He was carrying a white rag, cleaning his hands from oil or dirt or whatever else he'd been doing. "Steve said I could come to you if I had problems with my bike?"

He pursed his lips. He came closer, out of the shadows and into the mid-afternoon sun, and you got a good glimpse at him. Golden skin, scars matting his hand, his knuckles. He was wearing a muscle shirt, the kind that was maybe a bit too small for him, molding to his muscles, straining across his metal bicep.

You'd never really seen the arm before. Only flickers of his hands or fingers, but never the entire machine.

You licked your lips, something squeezing in your lower belly.

"What's wrong with it?" he asked.

you shrugged. "Dunno."

He glazed his eyes, rolled them. "Alright, take it down and bring it into the garage."

With a tiny sigh of resentment - he wasn't helping you - you unlatched the ties of your bike and rolled it into the garage. it was darker, a little cooler, inside. As you settled your bike in the dead center of the room, Bucky brought two stools, effortlessly carrying them around.

He sat on his and motioned with a wrench for you to sit beside him. Even though you'd sweated all day in your black t-shirt, and God knows whatever he'd down today, there was something terrific about sitting this close to Bucky.

His tanned fingers worked to open up the bike, his metal hand working the wrench.

"Ah," he said, poking around the engine. "I see what's wrong."

"Is it fixable?" you asked.

He chuckled. "Don't worry, darling," he whispered.

You swallowed the heat climbing up your throat, watching him get to work in silence. Unlike Steve, Bucky didn't tell you what he was doing or why; he just did it.

It took longer than expected. And the more he worked, straining against your bike, the sweatier he got, the more figetting you did.

His flesh arm was glistening with a thin layer of sweat. His hand was veined, strained against the metal piece he was holding aside. His fingers were dirty with grime and dust. Even that God damned muscle shirt was stained with dirt and sweat and grime.

By the time he was done, a light sheet of rain was coating the ground outside. It was pitter-pattering against the cement, a slow drone of rain against the tin roof. Almost comforting.

"You can't take your bike out in the rain," he said, putting everything back in its place, stowing his tools and his rags.

You gulped. "Yeah, I'm sure the rain will let off soon." You dragged your sweaty palms onto your jeans nervously. It caught Bucky's eye.

He stood, dragging your eyes up to his figure. He was so tall, so wide at the shoulders, sweating in his shirt, hair a mess.

"I've got beer inside," he said, throwing the rag in the corner of the garage, placing his tools on his self-made wooden desk. Then he turned to you and gestured to the front door. "Come on."

You followed him out into the rain, walking quickly up the steps and into his home, which smelled of him, something woodsy, and air freshener.

You were humid, rain dotting your skin as you took off your sneakers and followed him into the kitchen. The air conditioning was making you cold.

his home was cozy but so boyish. No decorations but a huge TV. A grey couch with not pillows or blankets. Empty liquor bottles as props over the refrigerator, which droned on and on. There was only one magnet on his fridge, and it read "I love NY!" Which was ironic because Bucky didn't love anything.

"Here," he said, offering you an ice cold beer, but it did nothing to warm you up. You leaned back against his kitchen counter, sipping on your beer, watching him poke around the inside of his fridge. The yellow light cast on his face like a glow, and he hummed when he found what he wanted.

By the time he took out the rolled up cheese, he saw you shivering by the sink.

"I'm sorry," you said, settling the beer down. "I'm just a bit cold from the rain."

He hummed, slamming the cheese rolls on the kitchen table.

"We ought to warm you up," he said, diving back into the fridge to get a beer, which he opened and took a five good gulps before he wiped his wet mouth.

"Yeah," you chuckled, pressing your hands against your arms, searching for heat.

The super soldier, immune to any heat or cold or anything really, stood before you with his sticky muscle shirt molding to every nook in his muscles. His arms, his chest, down to his abs. Water had made it almost see-through, and you felt like a perv watching as he breathed, watching his muscles contract beneath the fabric.

"You should take a shower, y/n," he said, tone low.

You startled, eyes dragging from his abs to his face in a split second. Did you smell? Was that why he'd said that?

"You're shivering, poor thing," he said, clucking his tongue, taking another wild swing of his beer. And you noticed that he was eyeing you took, at your jeans sticking to your thighs, your hips. At your wet shirt glueing to the curve of your waist and breasts.

He set his beer down and offered his hand. "Come."

On some instinct you'd never registered before, you took his hand, flesh fingers warm and calloused.

He led you into a small bathroom with no windows. where various male paraphernalia was strewn across the sink. He pulled the shower curtian back and started the shower and you just stood there like a fish out of water; mouth slightly agape, your hand still loosely holding on to his.

"Bucky?"

He hummed.

"I don't get it," you said.

He returned his gaze to yours, satisfied with the steam rising from the shower. He gave you a small, tight smile. "Get undressed," he said, gesturing his chin at you, dropping your hand.

You stood there like a statue, examining him; from the hard jawline, the seriousness in his eyes, the way his skin pulled back when he moved his mouth.

Then, harder this time, "Get undressed or freeze, sweetheart."

The nickname, the pet name, sent a wave of fresh heat right into your face.

He watched, then slowly, he smiled. Like a rpedator trying to win its prey without having to sink teeth into flesh.

He took a tiny step towards you, watching your breath hitch, and he slid metal fingers under your shirt, pulling it up until it came right off your head. Your hair flopped back down over your shoulders, covering your bra.

He bit his lip. You watched, entranced as he moved to unbutton your jeans and slide them down your legs. He was agile because he took your panties off with it.

He came back to his full towering height, and he brushed your hair behidn your shoulders, exposing your chest, your full flesh to him.

He snaked an arm around your waist, and you gulped, the feel of his hands, burning metal fingers, was like a lightning bolt had erupted under your skin.

"You're so beautiful," he whispered, close to your ear, his breath in your hair. "So fucking gorgeous." He slid his metal hand up and then your bra was sliding off your arms.

"Let me touch you, y/n," he whispered in your ear. You gulped, nodded. "Use your words, sweetheart," and his voice was rugged, wretched, as both his hands slid careful fingertips up on your ribcage.

"Yes, Bucky," you whispered.

He huffed against you. And then his metal hand engulfed your breast, knead it the way he wanted, and his lips found your neck. You whimpered, taken by surprise by his sudden act of devotion. His tender fingers pulling your nipple, drumming against your ribs, lips leaving a wet trail of kisses up your jugular.

When he kissed you, his mouth was warm and wet, and he molded his lips to yours carefully, like he didn't want to scare you off.

You kissed him back just as carefully, confused and distraught, unaware that for years, Bucky had been yearning for this opportunity. For this moment where he finally had you alone.

Quickly, the kiss became rougher. Your hands pulled at the soft, thick strands of his hair and he pulled you aainst his with his metal arm around your waist. He nipped at you, teeth sinking into your bottom lip, groaning as his flesh finger felt you.

He skimmed along your navel, until he could cup you in his palm. You squeaked, taken by surprise. "Easy there, princess," he whispered against your mouth. "Just wanna make you feel good."

He dove right back for a kiss, delving his tongue behidn your teeth while his fingers started working circles around your clit.

You had realized how riled up he'd gotten you, like a hardwire ready to snap.

You bent like a bow in his arms, moaning against his mouth as his fingers continued to circle your clit in slow, languid circles. And when he prodded farther, where you most ached for him, he moaned against your mouth when he felt just how soaked you were.

"Fuck, y/n," he groaned, pulling his mouth from yours.

You almost whimpered at the lost of contact, but he picked you up so effortlessly, so quickly, that you hadn't registered that you were now sitting on the edge of the sink until you couldn't see him anymore. All you could see was the steam rising from the shower, clogging the bathroom, settling on your skin in dotted water drops.

And Bucky, on his knees, pulling your knees apart. His eyes, hooded and so blue, looked up at you as he kissed the inside of your thigh.

"One leg on my shoulder, baby," he ordered, his metal hand under your thigh, helped you move until you were almost straddling his face. "That's it, good girl," he groaned, biting into the plush of your thighs.

The angle sent you backward, back against the cold mirror, and one hand hanging onto the edge. Ready to plummet or fly, you couldn't tell.

His mouth teetered around your pussy, kissing along your thighs, until he settled over your clit and gave you one long swipe of his tongue.

Your head fell backwards, eyes closing, hips searching for his mouth.

"You taste so sweet," he cooed, pressing another long lick from your hole to your clit.

A strangled moan escaped your clenched teeth when he sucked on your clit, one of your hands digging into his hair and pulling him where you wanted him.

The room was filled with the filthy sound of Bucky getting his fill, lapping you up and sucking in your clit like a man starved. Both hands leaving ink-blue marks in your hips.

He worshipped your clit, flicking and sucking to a rhythm that had your thighs shaking against his face, with you pulling his hair by the roots. He sucked and fucked your hole with his tongue until a knot formed right under your belly button and exploded in white hot lightning.

As your orgasm washed through you in waves, rocking against his face, a moan hitched in your throat.

Bucky held your thighs open, refusing to let them close, and lapped up his fill.

When you were but a trembling, babbling mess, Bucky it into your thigh, kissing up your knee until he was standing between your legs. His eyes were hooded, pupils blown, mouth red and glittering, swollen from the kisses he'd lain on your clit.

"Come 'ere," he groaned, grabbing you by the back of the neck, bringing you upright on the counter. He brought his mouth to yours in a feverish, harsh kiss that left you dizzy and scrambling to keep up with him.

You pushed him away, grappling at his shirt, pulling it over his head. You gorged on the sight, on the tanned skin exposed, the scar where his metal shoulder meshed with his flesh. You touched the tips of your fingers to his metal shoulder, skimming down to his hand.

He took your mouth again, pressing you back into the mirror, hands in your hair, on your breast, skimming down back to your dripping hole.

He entered one flesh finger, pressing against your walls, so slippery and warm. He hummed, feeling your breasts against his chest as you bowed your back at the sensation.

You patted him through his pants, feeling him warm and hard against your touch. He hissed at the sensation, nipping at your mouth.

He continued to move his digit in and out of you, pressing his palm to your clit. You continued palming him, pressing against the impressive length of him until he groaned and took himself out of his pants, dropping them at his ankles and kicking them away.

Your mouth opened in a small 'o' at the sight of him, hard and thick, tip dripping precum.

"Too much for you sweetheart?" he asked, pressing his forehead to yours, thumbs on each side of your jaw.

You shook your head, gulped, saw the faint smile that crossed his face. He watched you with keen eyes as he lined himself with your soaked heat.

He pressed his thumb against your mouth, kissing you, as he slowly inched in. He watched you take it, watched as your mouth opened, brows curving upward.

"Don't give up on me baby," he whispered, nipping at your mouth, pressing open-mouthed kisses to your jaw.

He slid himself to the hilt, grabbing your hip in a bruising grip, metal hand pressed against the foggy mirror over your head.

You gasped, latching onto his shoulders for dear life as he pulled back and thrust back into you, feeling you clench and flitter around him.

You whimpered, body pressing up against the mirror with one harsh thrust from his hips.

"That feel good, huh?" he asked, boring his eyes into yours, keeping a slow, languid pace with his hips. "Tell me, y/n, that feel good when I fuck you?"

You nodded, feeling him slick, sliding into you with ease, stretching your walls and hitting that spot deep in you that made you writhe.

"Yes, Bucky," you answered, breathlessly, scratching at his flesh shoulder.

He groaned, taking your mouth with his, speeding up his thrusts, making your head catch on the mirror. You moaned against his mouth, giving up full control of your body to his, at the mercy of every thrust, every change in rhythm.

"Taking me so well," he grunted, hiding his face in your shoulder, bruising grip on your hip helping him thrust himself deeper into you. Then he pulled himself up, face hovering over yours, searching your gaze wildly. "You like it when I fucked this tight little hole?" he asked, and again, his tone was scratching the surface of something wilder.

You nodded, feeling a knot form in your belly, your thighs closing around his hips. His mouth stretched into a smile, pounding deeper and faster into you. "Yeah, you do," he said, almost mockingly, pressing a sweaty forehead to yours. "I see the way you always look at me," he grunted, kissing your mouth, humming at the moan that left your lips.

"Bucky, please," you whispered, eyes falling shut, your orgasm on the brink of breaking.

"I feel you, y/n, come on," he grunted, keeping a harsh, pounding pace until your legs shook and your orgasm broke through you in waves. "Fuck, that's so tight," he breathed, chasing his own end, pounding into your tightening hole.

A stuttered moan left your lips as you clung to Bucky, rocking into your orgasm with every thrust, feeling the wave of pleasure reach your toes. His metal hand came slamming onto the mirror beside your ear, cracking into the glass as he pounded into you, breathless and wordless until he gave you a few sloppy thrusts and he was spending himself in you.

He stayed there a few moments, breathing with you, kissing you softly until he pulled out of you. You stuttered, a breath hitched in your throat, as you felt him leaking out of you.

He met your gaze, leaning back to examine his work, and then he slowly helped you to your feet. You giggled at your loss of coordination, hearing Bucky chuckle too as he helped you into the shower.

You let the warm spray wash his seed from the inside of your thighs, soak into your hair.

"Warm enough?" he asked, chin on your shoulder.

You chuckled. "I've been warm enough for a little while."

He hummed, placing both hands along your waist. He helped you wash up, lathering your skin and hair, helping you wash out the suds.

"Are you okay?" he asked, pressing tender kisses to your shoulder. "You're quiet."

"Yes," you answered, looking over your shoulder at him. "Are you?"

He smiled, eyes low. He raised his brows. "I am now," he whispered.

When you were done with the shower and you were both drying up, Bucky tied his towel around his waist and watched you put your hair up in a towel.

"What?" you asked.

He snorted. "It isn't like me to do...this," he said, leaning against the sink. His chest was wet, glistening spots lingering down to his abs. It was enough to make you want to do this again.

You smiled but didn't answer, focused on getting your towel around your torso.

"Do you want to go out to dinner sometime?" he asked, and you looked up, met his eyes across the steamy bathroom, and smiled.

"Yeah, of course."

[quasi-normalcy]

Actually, you know what? Ever since I learned that Ira Steven Behr signed that grossly unfair letter against Jonathan Glazer, I've been forced to kind of reevaluate some of my interpretations of things in Deep Space Nine.

Like Section 31. I was willing to suppose that it was always and only intended to be villainous. But knowing as I do now that the showrunner who included it is perfectly willing to turn a blind eye to genocide, I'm forced to wonder...was it critical? Was it?

Like, let's consider canon here. In "Statistical Probabilities", Bashir and the other augments calculate, in no uncertain terms, that the Federation can't win its war with the Dominion. Their model even accurately forecasts things that happen later in the series: the Romulans declaring war on the Dominion; a full-scale revolt on Cardassia Prime. The end of the episode kind of pooh-poohs their model, like, "Well you couldn't even forecast what Serena would do in this room" but like...(1) the premise is basically lifted from Asimov's psychohistory concept, which works on populations rather than individuals, and (2) there's even a line of dialogue in the episode saying that the models become *less* uncertain the further you go in time. And indeed, the Federation ultimately wins the war not because any of their assumptions were wrong, but because there was another factor that they weren't aware of: the Changeling plague. The plague that had, of course, been engineered by Section 31 to exterminate the Changelings.

So again you have to ask: *was* this critical? Or was the real message that a black ops division willing to commit genocide is necessary to preserve a "utopian" society, no matter how squeamish it makes a naïve idealist like Bashir? And yeah, the war is ultimately won by an act of compassion, but only *after* Bashir sinks to S31's level by kidnapping Sloane and invading his mind with illicit technology. So...is this really a win for idealism?

And then we have the Jem'Hadar. They're a race of slave soldiers, genetically engineered to require a compound that only the Changelings can give them. By any reasonable standard, they're victims. And yet, the series goes out of its way, especially in "The Abandoned", to establish that they're irredeemable. You can't save them. Victims of colonialism they may be, but your only choice is to kill them, or else they--preternaturally violent almost from the moment that they're born--*will* kill you. And of course, I've long assumed that this was just a really unfortunate attempt to subvert what had become the standard "I, Borg" style Star Trek trope where your enemies become less scary once you get to know them, but like. I would say that there's pretty close to a one-to-one correspondence between this premise and the ideology excusing the mass murder of children in Gaza.

Or the Maquis. There's this line at the start of "For the Uniform" where Sisko tells Eddington that he regards the refugees in the Demilitarized Zone as being "Victims of the Maquis", because they've kept alive the forlorn hope that they would ever be allowed to return to their homes and...Jesus, when I write it out like that, Hello, Palestinian Right of Return. [The episode of course ends with Sisko bombing a Maquis colony with chemical weapons, though it is somewhat less objectionable in practice than I'm making it sound here].

And you know what...I get that DS9 is a show that's intended to have moral complexity, and to be kind of ambiguous in a lot places, and not to give you simple answers and so on. And I'm *not* trying to do the standard JK Rowling/ Joss Whedon/ Justin Roiland thing where a creator falls from grace for whatever reason and people comb through their oeuvre to show that they were always wicked and fans were stupid for not seeing it earlier or whatever. But I will say that these things hit different when you know that the series was show-run for five seasons, comprising every episode that I've just named, by a man who would go on to sign his name to a letter maliciously quoting Jonathan Glazer out of context to drag him for condemning an active genocide. And given that I've been a fan of DS9 for basically my entire life, this is deeply unsettling to me.

[soleminisanction]

I've always really liked DC's in-house choice of referring to their various superhero groupings as "families," but it has gotten a little frustrating recently with people both in canon and in fandom seeming to forget that families aren't just a parental-unit-and-kids formation. They're complicated, and a lot of the DC families are too messy to fit into that neat little nuclear family mode.

Which is to say... here's some scattered thoughts/summaries about how these families are actually structured in canon, because I think it's interesting:

Supers -- The smaller, more traditional Superfamily (Clark, Lois, Kara, Kon, etc.) is a pretty traditional Midwestern nuclear family, with Jimmy Olsen filling the role of close family friend/goofy neighbor sidekick (in the Silver Age, he was Kara's would-be suitor) and Steel feeling more like part of Clark's personal circle of friends. The recent line up, though, with Jon, the twins, Kong and Nat? Starts to feel more like some old dynasty or noble house, complete with fostered foundlings and the Steels acting almost like knights under a noble's banner, possibly reflective of what the House of El would have been on Krypton.

Arrows -- Might currently be the closet to a traditional nuclear family structure. You've got Ollie and Dinah, their younger sisters, Ollie's adopted and biological children, and Ollie's granddaughter through Roy, plus by some counts Roy's co-parent and her sister as "in-laws." Bonnie and Cissie King-Jones are adjacent to but not technically "part" of the family, though I believe it's implied at one point that Ollie might also be Cissie's bio-dad. Pretty straightforward, these guys are actually family and they act like it, for good and ill.

Shazam Family -- Also a literal, actual family. Not originally, the original golden age "Marvel Family" was considerably more complicated and only Billy and Mary were full siblings, but nowadays the whole point of the modern Shazam family is that they're foster siblings united by familial love and that's fantastic. Meanwhile your average Black Adam story is 75% angsty family drama, 25% Egyptian mythology references.

Flashes -- Technically closer to three nuclear families (the Allens, the Wests and the Garricks; four if you include the Quicks), two of whom are united by marriage and all of whom are bound by the Speedforce, which, given its semi-spiritual connections to things like Speedster afterlives, can act almost like a religious force that connects them to the additional members like Avery, Circuit Breaker and Max as Bart's foster-dad. They're a big, sprawling tree with more cousins than siblings, the kind of family that functionally has a reunion every Christmas and Thanksgiving.

Lanterns -- Now these guys are the exception that proves my point about the whole 'family' thing not being straightforward. The lanterns aren't a family, they're a corps. Soldiers. Space cops. Comrades-in-arms. They respect each other, have each other's backs, might even like or care about each other, but those last two are optional, and they don't have the same kind of assumed obligations towards each other that a family would have. They're friends and co-workers, not family, but that doesn't mean their relationships are less significant, they're just different.

Wonders -- Roughly half of them are either one of Hippolyta's daughters (Diana, Donna, Nubia pre-Crisis) or related to them through the gods (Cassie), and the other half (Artemis, Yara, modern-age Nubia) use sister as a term of endearment more in a utopian lesbian commune kind of way. I think they brought Steve Trevor back recently? He's basically the Ken in this equation and perfectly fine with that role. None of which should be surprising if you've seen Professor Marston and the Wonder Women.

Bats -- This is the one that people get really wrong when they try to force it into a traditional family structure. Don't let WFA fool you, the Bats are and have always been way more a snarled mess of tangled interpersonal relationships than they've ever been a cohesive family. Whether Dick is Bruce's son or his brother depends on what era you're talking about, and the former reading is much more recent than you think -- as in "started cropping up in the early 2000s" recent. Barbara is both Cassandra's sister and her mother. Duke and Steph both have living parents and neither of them want or would ever dream of treating Bruce like their dad; Tim was the same way until his dad died. None of the Robins ever lived in the mansion together, nor did Cass. Babs considered Jean-Paul Valley her brother and Huntress is so close to Tim she once hallucinated him calling her Big Sister. They're a beautiful mess of people finding places where their broken edges fit together into something that works for them and trying to reduce it down to a cozy nuclear family is just so goddamn reductive and lazy.

Blue Beetles -- Are only tangentially related to each other. Seriously, they never even get direct mentoring, each one just takes over when the previous one dies and works on completely different rules from the other two. They're complete strangers bound by a legacy and that's honestly pretty fun.

Zataras -- There's only three of them and they're literally a father, daughter and cousin.

Martians -- Not really a family because there's only the two of them, but an interesting case where the two survivors of what was functionally a war of mutually assured destruction came together in an attempt to find some peace in the aftermath of what they'd lost.

Titans -- The JLA and JSA aren't really in the "family" category, but the Titans lean into it hard, mostly because they're a textbook found family. They don't mirror a nuclear family structure, they're simply a group of people who came together to form a mutual support network. They're the idealized college friends you grew into your own with, some of them childhood companions and others you only met once you leave home for the first time, but all of them friends that you manage to maintain contact with for life, with everyone coming back together even as you scatter and do your own things.

Young Justice -- Meanwhile, this team is the chaotic group of misfits you hung out with when you were a teenager, especially when you were just starting to be allowed to act without adult supervision. You drive each other crazy, none of you know you're all queer as fuck, and you'd fight a bear for any of them even if they asked you not to. They'd probably be insulted if you tried to call them a family. They come out here to get away from their families, thank you very much.

[thoughtportal]

A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears)

PublicAffairs, 288 pp., $28.00

But don’t worry—it almost never comes to this. As one park service PSA noted this summer, bears “usually just want to be left alone. Don’t we all?” In other words, if you encounter a black bear, try to look big, back slowly away, and trust in the creature’s inner libertarian. Unless, that is, the bear in question hails from certain wilds of western New Hampshire. Because, as Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling’s new book suggests, that unfortunate animal may have a far more aggressive disposition, and relate to libertarianism first and foremost as a flavor of human cuisine.

Hongoltz-Hetling is an accomplished journalist based in Vermont, a Pulitzer nominee and George Polk Award winner. A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears) sees him traversing rural New England as he reconstructs a remarkable, and remarkably strange, episode in recent history. This is the so-called Free Town Project, a venture wherein a group of libertarian activists attempted to take over a tiny New Hampshire town, Grafton, and transform it into a haven for libertarian ideals—part social experiment, part beacon to the faithful, Galt’s Gulch meets the New Jerusalem. These people had found one another largely over the internet, posting manifestos and engaging in utopian daydreaming on online message boards. While their various platforms and bugbears were inevitably idiosyncratic, certain beliefs united them: that the radical freedom of markets and the marketplace of ideas was an unalloyed good; that “statism” in the form of government interference (above all, taxes) was irredeemably bad. Left alone, they believed, free individuals would thrive and self-regulate, thanks to the sheer force of “logic,” “reason,” and efficiency. For inspirations, they drew upon precedents from fiction (Ayn Rand loomed large) as well as from real life, most notably a series of micro-nation projects ventured in the Pacific and Caribbean during the 1970s and 1980s.

None of those micro-nations, it should be observed, panned out, and things in New Hampshire don’t bode well either—especially when the humans collide with a newly brazen population of bears, themselves just “working to create their own utopia,” property lines and market logic be damned. The resulting narrative is simultaneously hilarious, poignant, and deeply unsettling. Sigmund Freud once described the value of civilization, with all its “discontents,” as a compromise product, the best that can be expected from mitigating human vulnerability to “indifferent nature” on one hand and our vulnerability to one another on the other. Hongoltz-Hetling presents, in microcosm, a case study in how a politics that fetishizes the pursuit of “freedom,” both individual and economic, is in fact a recipe for impoverishment and supercharged vulnerability on both fronts at once. In a United States wracked by virus, mounting climate change, and ruthless corporate pillaging and governmental deregulation, the lessons from one tiny New Hampshire town are stark indeed.

“In a country known for fussy states with streaks of independence,” Hongoltz-Hetling observes, “New Hampshire is among the fussiest and the streakiest.” New Hampshire is, after all, the Live Free or Die state, imposing neither an income nor a sales tax, and boasting, among other things, the highest per capita rate of machine gun ownership. In the case of Grafton, the history of Living Free—so to speak—has deep roots. The town’s Colonial-era settlers started out by ignoring “centuries of traditional Abenaki law by purchasing land from founding father John Hancock and other speculators.” Next, they ran off Royalist law enforcement, come to collect lumber for the king, and soon discovered their most enduring pursuit: the avoidance of taxes. As early as 1777, Grafton’s citizens were asking their government to be spared taxes and, when they were not, just stopped paying them.

Nearly two and a half centuries later, Grafton has become something of a magnet for seekers and quirky types, from adherents of the Unification Church of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon to hippie burnouts and more. Particularly important for the story is one John Babiarz, a software designer with a Krusty the Klown laugh, who decamped from Big-Government-Friendly Connecticut in the 1990s to homestead in New Hampshire with his equally freedom-loving wife, Rosalie. Entering a sylvan world that was, Hongoltz-Hetling writes, “almost as if they had driven through a time warp and into New England’s revolutionary days, when freedom outweighed fealty and trees outnumbered taxes,” the two built a new life for themselves, with John eventually coming to head Grafton’s volunteer fire department (which he describes as a “mutual aid” venture) and running for governor on the libertarian ticket.

Although John’s bids for high office failed, his ambitions remained undimmed, and in 2004 he and Rosalie connected with a small group of libertarian activists. Might not Grafton, with its lack of zoning laws and low levels of civic participation, be the perfect place to create an intentional community based on Logic and Free Market Principles? After all, in a town with fewer than 800 registered voters, and plenty of property for sale, it would not take much for a committed group of transplants to establish a foothold, and then win dominance of municipal governance. And so the Free Town Project began. The libertarians expected to be greeted as liberators, but from the first town meeting, they faced the inconvenient reality that many of Grafton’s presumably freedom-loving citizens saw them as outsiders first, and compatriots second—if at all. Tensions flared further when a little Googling revealed what “freedom” entailed for some of the new colonists. One of the original masterminds of the plan, a certain Larry Pendarvis, had written of his intention to create a space honoring the freedom to “traffic organs, the right to hold duels, and the God-given, underappreciated right to organize so-called bum fights.” He had also bemoaned the persecution of the “victimless crime” that is “consensual cannibalism.” (“Logic is a strange thing,” observes Hongoltz-Hetling.)

While Pendarvis eventually had to take his mail-order Filipina bride business and dreams of municipal takeovers elsewhere (read: Texas), his comrades in the Free Town Project remained undeterred. Soon, they convinced themselves that, evidence and reactions to Pendarvis notwithstanding, the Project must actually enjoy the support of a silent majority of freedom-loving Graftonites. How could it not? This was Freedom, after all. And so the libertarians keep coming, even as Babiarz himself soon came to rue the fact that “the libertarians were operating under vampire rules—the invitation to enter, once offered, could not be rescinded.” The precise numbers are hard to pin down, but ultimately the town’s population of a little more than 1,100 swelled with 200 new residents, overwhelmingly men, with very strong opinions and plenty of guns.

Hongoltz-Hetling profiles many newcomers, all of them larger-than-life, yet quite real. The people who joined the Free Town Project in its first five years were, as he describes, “free radicals”—men with “either too much money or not enough,” with either capital to burn or nothing to lose. There’s John Connell of Massachusetts, who arrived on a mission from God, liquidated his savings, and bought the historic Grafton Center Meetinghouse, transforming it into the “Peaceful Assembly Church,” an endeavor that mixed garish folk art, strange rants from its new pastor (Connell himself), and a quixotic quest to secure tax exemption while refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of the IRS to grant it. There’s Adam Franz, a self-described anti-capitalist who set up a tent city to serve as “a planned community of survivalists,” even though no one who joined it had any real bushcraft skills. There’s Richard Angell, an anti-circumcision activist known as “Dick Angel.” And so on. As Hongoltz-Hetling makes clear, libertarianism can indeed have a certain big-tent character, especially when the scene is a new landscape of freedom-lovers making “homes out of yurts and RVs, trailers and tents, geodesic domes and shipping containers.”

If the Libertarian vision of Freedom can take many shapes and sizes, one thing is bedrock: “Busybodies” and “statists” need to stay out of the way. And so the Free Towners spent years pursuing an aggressive program of governmental takeover and delegitimation, their appetite for litigation matched only by their enthusiasm for cutting public services. They slashed the town’s already tiny yearly budget of $1 million by 30 percent, obliged the town to fight legal test case after test case, and staged absurd, standoffish encounters with the sheriff to rack up YouTube hits. Grafton was a poor town to begin with, but with tax revenue dropping even as its population expanded, things got steadily worse. Potholes multiplied, domestic disputes proliferated, violent crime spiked, and town workers started going without heat. “Despite several promising efforts,” Hongoltz-Hetling dryly notes, “a robust Randian private sector failed to emerge to replace public services.” Instead, Grafton, “a haven for miserable people,” became a town gone “feral.” Enter the bears, stage right.

Black bears, it should be stressed, are generally a pretty chill bunch. The woods of North America are home to some three-quarters of a million of them; on average, there is at most one human fatality from a black bear attack per year, even as bears and humans increasingly come into contact in expanding suburbs and on hiking trails. But tracking headlines on human-bear encounters in New England in his capacity as a regional journalist in the 2000s, Hongoltz-Hetling noticed something distressing: The black bears in Grafton were not like other black bears. Singularly “bold,” they started hanging out in yards and on patios in broad daylight. Most bears avoid loud noises; these casually ignored the efforts of Graftonites to run them off. Chickens and sheep began to disappear at alarming rates. Household pets went missing, too. One Graftonite was playing with her kittens on her lawn when a bear bounded out of the woods, grabbed two of them, and scarfed them down. Soon enough, the bears were hanging out on porches and trying to enter homes.

Combining wry description with evocative bits of scientific fact, Hongoltz-Hetling’s portrayal of the bears moves from comical if foreboding to downright terrifying. These are animals that can scent food seven times farther than a trained bloodhound, that can flip 300-pound stones with ease, and that can, when necessary, run in bursts of speed rivaling a deer’s. When the bears finally start mauling humans—attacking two women in their homes—Hongoltz-Hetling’s relation of the scenes is nightmarish. “If you look at their eyes, you understand,” one survivor tells him, “that they are completely alien to us.”

What was the deal with Grafton’s bears? Hongoltz-Hetling investigates the question at length, probing numerous hypotheses for why the creatures have become so uncharacteristically aggressive, indifferent, intelligent, and unafraid. Is it the lack of zoning, the resulting incursion into bear habitats, and the reluctance of Graftonites to pay for, let alone mandate, bear-proof garbage bins? Might the bears be deranged somehow, perhaps even disinhibited and emboldened by toxoplasmosis infections, picked up from eating trash and pet waste from said unsecured bins? There can be no definitive answer to these questions, but one thing is clear: The libertarian social experiment underway in Grafton was uniquely incapable of dealing with the problem. “Free Towners were finding that the situations that had been so easy to problem-solve in the abstract medium of message boards were difficult to resolve in person.”

Grappling with what to do about the bears, the Graftonites also wrestled with the arguments of certain libertarians who questioned whether they should do anything at all—especially since several of the town residents had taken to feeding the bears, more or less just because they could. One woman, who prudently chose to remain anonymous save for the sobriquet “Doughnut Lady,” revealed to Hongoltz-Hetling that she had taken to welcoming bears on her property for regular feasts of grain topped with sugared doughnuts. If those same bears showed up on someone else’s lawn expecting similar treatment, that wasn’t her problem. The bears, for their part, were left to navigate the mixed messages sent by humans who alternately threw firecrackers and pastries at them. Such are the paradoxes of Freedom. Some people just “don’t get the responsibility side of being libertarians,” Rosalie Babiarz tells Hongoltz-Hetling, which is certainly one way of framing the problem.

Pressed by bears from without and internecine conflicts from within, the Free Town Project began to come apart. Caught up in “pitched battles over who was living free, but free in the right way,” the libertarians descended into accusing one another of statism, leaving individuals and groups to do the best (or worst) they could. Some kept feeding the bears, some built traps, others holed up in their homes, and still others went everywhere toting increasingly larger-caliber handguns. After one particularly vicious attack, a shadowy posse formed and shot more than a dozen bears in their dens. This effort, which was thoroughly illegal, merely put a dent in the population; soon enough, the bears were back in force.

Meanwhile, the dreams of numerous libertarians came to ends variously dramatic and quiet. A real estate development venture known as Grafton Gulch, in homage to the dissident enclave in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, went belly-up. After losing a last-ditch effort to secure tax exemption, a financially ruined Connell found himself unable to keep the heat on at the Meetinghouse; in the midst of a brutal winter, he waxed apocalyptic and then died in a fire. Franz quit his survivalist commune, which soon walled itself off into a prisonlike compound, the better to enjoy freedom. And John Babiarz, the erstwhile inaugurator of the Project, became the target of relentless vilification by his former ideological cohorts, who did not appreciate his refusal to let them enjoy unsecured blazes on high-wildfire–risk afternoons. When another, higher-profile libertarian social engineering enterprise, the Free State Project, received national attention by promoting a mass influx to New Hampshire in general (as opposed to just Grafton), the Free Town Project’s fate was sealed. Grafton became “just another town in a state with many options,” options that did not have the same problem with bears.

Or at least—not yet. Statewide, a perverse synergy between conservationist and austerity impulses in New Hampshire governance has translated into an approach to “bear management” policy that could accurately be described as laissez-faire. When Graftonites sought help from New Hampshire Fish and Game officials, they received little more than reminders that killing bears without a license is illegal, and plenty of highly dubious victim-blaming to boot. Had not the woman savaged by a bear been cooking a pot roast at the time? No? Well, nevertheless. Even when the state has tried to rein in the population with culls, it has been too late. Between 1998 and 2013, the number of bears doubled in the wildlife management region that includes Grafton. “Something’s Bruin in New Hampshire—Learn to Live with Bears,” the state’s literature advises.

The bear problem, in other words, is much bigger than individual libertarian cranks refusing to secure their garbage. It is a problem born of years of neglect and mismanagement by legislators, and, arguably, indifference from New Hampshire taxpayers in general, who have proved reluctant to step up and allocate resources to Fish and Game, even as the agency’s traditional source of funding—income from hunting licenses—has dwindled. Exceptions like Doughnut Lady aside, no one wants bears in their backyard, but apparently no one wants to invest sustainably in institutions doing the unglamorous work to keep them out either. Whether such indifference and complacency gets laundered into rhetoric of fiscal prudence, half-baked environmentalism, or individual responsibility, the end result is the same: The bears abide—and multiply.

Their prosperity also appears to be linked to man-made disasters that have played out on a national and global scale—patterns of unsustainable construction and land use, and the climate crisis. More than once, Hongoltz-Hetling flags the fact that upticks in bear activity unfold alongside apparently ever more frequent droughts. Drier summers may well be robbing bears of traditional plant and animal sources of food, even as hotter winters are disrupting or even ending their capacity to hibernate. Meanwhile, human garbage, replete with high-calorie artificial ingredients, piles up, offering especially enticing treats, even in the dead of winter—particularly in places with zoning and waste management practices as chaotic as those in Grafton, but also in areas where suburban sprawl is reaching farther into the habitats of wild animals. The result may be a new kind of bear, one “torn between the unique dangers and caloric payloads that humans provide—they are more sleep-deprived, more anxious, more desperate, and more twitchy than the bear that nature produced.” Ever-hungry for new frontiers in personal autonomy and market emancipation, human beings have altered the environment with the unintended result of empowering newly ravenous bears to boot.

Ignoring institutional failure and mounting crises does not make them go away. But some may take refuge in confidence that, when the metaphorical chickens (or, rather, bears) finally come home to roost, the effects are never felt equally. When bears show up in higher-income communities like Hanover (home to Dartmouth College), Hongoltz-Hetling notes, they get parody Twitter accounts and are promptly evacuated to wildernesses in the north; poorer rural locales are left to fend for themselves, and the residents blamed for doing what they can. In other words, the “unintended natural selection of the bears that are trying to survive alongside modern humans” is unfolding along with competition among human beings amid failing infrastructure and scarce resources, a struggle with Social Darwinist dynamics of its own.

The distinction between a municipality of eccentric libertarians and a state whose response to crisis is, in so many words, “Learn to Live With It” may well be a matter of degree rather than kind. Whether it be assaults by bears, imperceptible toxoplasmosis parasites, or a way of life where the freedom of markets ultimately trumps individual freedom, even the most cocksure of Grafton’s inhabitants must inevitably face something beyond and bigger than them. In that, they are hardly alone. Clearly, when it comes to certain kinds of problems, the response must be collective, supported by public effort, and dominated by something other than too-tidy-by-half invocations of market rationality and the maximization of individual personal freedom. If not, well, then we had all best get some practice in learning when and how to play dead, and hope for the best.

[themousefromfantasyland]

Megalopolis Review, or, Why Nobody Seems to Realize the King is Naked

Brace yourselves, this will be a long post @ariel-seagull-wings @thealmightyemprex @the-blue-fairie @mask131 @tamisdava2

Today I watched Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis and never has a movie made me so frustrated and irritated as I’m now. 

The film is absolutely awful. Not in a so bad it’s good but in a so awful it’s awful. Pardon the language but not even if Coppola broke into my house and shit on my face I would be as angry as I am for him having made this movie. 

But let’s go in parts.

The Premise

The film is a mixture between soft sci-fi and magical realism. We are in an alternate universe where the United States is a direct continuation of the Roman Empire and New York city is instead the capital of the empire, New Rome. 

Cesar Catilina is a brilliant architect and scientist that gained a Nobel Prize for inventing the Megalon, a miraculous substance capable of doing anything. Cesar is a mysterious and lonely genius, with a mysterious past involving an accusation of murdering his own wife and the power to stop time itself. 

He wants to use the metal to rebuild New Rome into a utopia, Megalopolis. Because of that he wages a political battle against the mayor of New Rome, Franklyn Cicero, who wants things to stay the way they have always been. The Mayor has a daughter called Julia, and she falls in love with Cesar. Meanwhile a gossip reporter called Wow Platinum has her eyes on both Cesar and his rich uncle, while Cesar’s cousin, Clodio, a decadent playboy wants to destroy Cesar once and for all.

The Problems

Now that we went into the premise of the movie, let’s see in all the ways this premise falls apart

1 - The Film as a whole makes no sense

Film is art, and art doesn’t need to fit in traditional plot structures or pacing styles. 

But art is about communication. An artist has to communicate ideas, feelings, and impressions to their public. A piece of art that can only be understood by its creator is a bad piece of art.  

A good film, as a good piece of art, has to have the minimum of coherence and cohesion to express the ideas, feelings, and impressions of the filmmaker to their public. If the movie is unable to do that, then the movie is a bad piece of art. 

A good film has to either have coherent story, characters, or at least themes.

Megalopolis doesn’t have either of those.

Megalopolis has a complicated plot filled to the brim with pointless characters and it goes nowhere. Some of the characters are killed off in cut-way jokes and the climax happens in the last twelve minutes of the film. The film lasts more than two hours, and still feels rushed, with scenes that feel missing and scenes that seem superfluous.

It has long surreal sequences that don’t fit the characters, the themes or the story. It’s weirdness for weirdness’ sake. It means nothing. 

The characters are painfully shallow and have nothing to say but famous quotes and juvenile language filled with profanity. 

The film draws painfully long scenes quoting Shakespeare among other writers and philosophers, trying to say something deep about humanity, civilization, politics and the pursuit of utopia, but everything that comes out of it is shallow and contradictory.

In some points Cesar’s desire to build his utopian city is framed as almost an act of anti-consumerism and anti-materialism, vices that are endorsed by Mayor Franklyn Cicero. But then Cesar demolishes several apartment buildings, leaving hundreds homeless and hungry, and the movie almost becomes Atlas Shrugged, where the genius has to rise above the stupid masses that drag him down. 

Cesar’s jealous cousin, Clodio, is built as a Trump stand-in, but then his politics are about helping the immigrants and the poor against Cesar’s plans. And he openly dresses in drag. 

In some way, Clodio is a mixture of Trumpism, Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter in a single character, ignoring the obvious ways these ideologies are completely different from each other.

In the end Cesar gives a passionate speech to the crowds that Clodio aroused, and it’s no deeper than Facebook messages of “We can disagree politically and still be friends”.

The film has a lot to say about culture and politics, but with a simple glance you realize that Coppola doesn’t understand neither politics or culture. 

Megalopolis is a film that has a lot of things to say about humanity, culture, and politics, and almost everything is pure gibberish.

2 - The film is misogynistic, biphobic and a little bit transphobic.

It’s no wonder that Coppola took almost 30 years to finish this film, because the script has the trademarked sexual prejudices of the 1980’s. 

Only two female characters are really important in this story, and they role seem to reinforce the madonna x whore dichotomy that Coppola seems to believe in.

We have Julia, our madonna. She has a Mary Magdalene complex. She’s initially presented as a shallow, decadent socialite, who only knows how to party all day and kiss passionately her female friends. She is implied to be bisexual, but her bisexuality is presented as just another vice of the decadent elite of New Rome.

Then she meets and falls in love with Cesar and becomes nothing more than his love interest. She becomes the one responsible for his moral support. Her bisexuality is stripped away and she is resumed to nothing more than  a supportive wife.

Then we have Wow Platinum, a gossip reporter that marries Cesar's uncle, is interested in Cesar himself, and has sex with Clodio, Cesar's cousin. She is a shallow gold digger and the film uses every chance it has to slutshame her. She is a typical femme fatale without any nuance or complexity, a disgusting sexist and demeaning caricature without any depth. 

And then we have Clodio and his drag scene, and just like Julia, his crossdressing is presented as just another form of the decadence of New Rome.

3 - Vesta

There’s a plot point that comes out of nowhere and goes nowhere. 

New Rome has a pop star called Vesta, and she is meant to mirror the Vesta priestesses of Ancient Rome. She is clearly modeled after Taylor Swift. 

Clodio forges a video of Cesar and Vesta having sex, and since Vesta is a minor, he is arrested. But then Julia discovers that Vesta was lying about her age and is actually a 23-year old woman. After her true age is revealed and after the video is revealed as fake, Vesta reinvents herself as a provocative pop-rock star.

This whole plot point lasts ten minutes and has no bearing on the overall story.

I know for sure that it was written in the late 2000’s, because more than being inspired by Taylor Swift, Vesta is inspired by the transition that Miley Cyrus had from sweet Disney girl to provocative pop star. 

It’s very creepy and off-putting considering everything that we now know about how Coppola deals with young women.

Honestly it just feels like he wanted to fuck Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift back in 2010. 

4 - It’s just a giant ego trip

Only one thing is consistent in Megalopolis, how Cesar is portrayed as a genius that has to fight to have his vision of utopia come to life, and it’s obvious how he is an author self-insert.

It’s so annoying and irritating watching Coppola worship himself for over two hours.

He paints Cesar as this tragic figure that is misunderstood by society and how everyone should just listen to him. How he is a genius that has all the answers to solve humanity’s problems.

It’s the equivalent of watching Coppola masturbating while looking at himself in the mirror for two hours. 

The King is Naked

Listen, I too was at first excited about Megalopolis. I wanted this project to succeed. I wanted to see a creative and bold vision. I wanted to see more authoral cinema. 

But Coppola is just a rich creep with delirious visions of grandeur. 

He used this film to worship his obscene ego and to sexually exploit extras on his set.

And now I see people trying to find excuses for him, or trying to defend this thing.

Listen, if you found something positive about Megalopolis I respect your opinion, but this film is a huge piece of shit made by a more gigantic piece of shit, and his talent and past accomplishments can’t excuse this.

The film is awful, the director is awful, and the king is naked. He doesn’t need protection. 

Can we be totally sincere with this film? At least with ourselves?

I want to see films that are original and take risks, but I want from creators who aren’t megalomaniacs, sexual perverts or that at least can develop coherent ideas. 

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Monopoly is capitalism's gerrymander

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

You don't have to accept the arguments of capitalism's defenders to take those arguments seriously. When Adam Smith railed against rentiers and elevated the profit motive to a means of converting the intrinsic selfishness of the wealthy into an engine of production, he had a point:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Smith – like Marx and Engels in Chapter One of The Communist Manifesto – saw competition as a catalyst that could convert selfishness to the public good: a rich person who craves more riches still will treat their customers, suppliers and workers well, not out of the goodness of their heart, but out of fear of their defection to a rival:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/19/make-them-afraid/#fear-is-their-mind-killer

This starting point is imperfect, but it's not wrong. The pre-enshittified internet was run by the same people who later came to enshittify it. They didn't have a change of heart that caused them to wreck the thing they'd worked so hard to build: rather, as they became isolated from the consequences of their enshittificatory impulses, it was easier to yield to them.

Once Google captured its market, its regulators and its workforce, it no longer had to worry about being a good search-engine – it could sacrifice quality for profits, without consequence:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

It could focus on shifting value from its suppliers, its customers and its users to its shareholders:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/15/they-trust-me-dumb-fucks/#ai-search

The thing is, all of this is well understood and predicted by traditional capitalist orthodoxy. It was only after a gnostic cult of conspiratorialists hijacked the practice of antitrust law that capitalists started to view monopolies as compatible with capitalism:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

The argument goes like this: companies that attain monopolies might be cheating, but because markets are actually pretty excellent arbiters of quality, it's far more likely that if we discover that everyone is buying the same product from the same store, that this is the best store, selling the best products. How perverse would it be to shut down the very best stores and halt the sale of the very best products merely to satisfy some doctrinal reflex against big business!

To understand the problem with this argument, we should consider another doctrinal reflex: conservatives' insistence that governments just can't do anything well or efficiently. There's a low-information version of this that goes, "Governments are where stupid people who can't get private sector jobs go. They're lazy and entitled." (There's a racial dimension to this, since the federal government has historically led the private sector in hiring and promoting Black workers and workers of color more broadly.)

But beyond that racially tinged caricature, there's a more rigorous version of the argument: government officials are unlikely to face consequences for failure. Appointees and government employees – especially in the unionized federal workforce – are insulated from such consequences by overlapping layers of labor protection and deflection of blame.

Elected officials can in theory be fired in the next election, but if they keep their cheating or incompetence below a certain threshold, most of us won't punish them at the polls. Elected officials can further improve their odds of re-election by cheating some of us and sharing the loot with others, through handouts and programs. Elections themselves have a strong incumbency bias, meaning that once a cheater gets elected, they will likely get re-elected, even if their cheating becomes well-known:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/gold-bars-featured-bob-menendez-bribery-case-linked-2013-robbery-recor-rcna128006

What's more, electoral redistricting opens the doors to gerrymandering – designing districts to create safe seats where one party always wins. That way, the real election consists of the official choosing the voters, not the voters choosing the official:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDMAP

Inter-party elections – primaries and other nomination processes – have fundamental weaknesses that mean they're no substitute for well-run, democratic elections:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/30/weak-institutions/

Contrast this with the theory of competitive markets. For capitalism's "moral philosophers," the physics by which greedy desires led to altruistic outcomes was to be found in the swift retribution of markets. A capitalist, exposed to the possibility of worker and customers defecting to their rival, knows that their greed is best served by playing fair.

But just as importantly, capitalists who don't internalize this lesson are put out of business and superceded by better capitalists. The market's invisible hand can pat you on the head – but it can also choke you to death.

This is where monopoly comes in. Even if you accept the consumer welfare theory that says that monopolies are most often the result of excellence, we should still break up monopolies. Even if someone secures an advantage by being great, that greatness will soon regress to the mean. But if the monopolist can extinguish the possibility of competition, they can maintain their power even after they cease deserving it.

In other words, the monopolist is like a politician who wins power – whether through greatness or by deceit – and then gerrymanders their district so that they can do anything and gain re-election. Even the noblest politician, shorn of accountability, will be hard pressed to avoid yielding to temptation.

Capitalism's theory proceeds from the idea that we are driven by our self-interest, and that competition turns self-interest into communal sentiment. Take away the competition, and all that's left is the self-interest.

I think this is broadly true, even though it's not the main reason I oppose monopolies (I oppose monopolies because they corrupt our democracy and pauperize workers). But even if capitalism's ability to turn greed into public benefit isn't the principle that's uppermost in my mind, it's what capitalists claim to believe – and treasure.

I think that most of the right's defense of monopolies stems from cynical, bad-faith rationalizations – but there are people who've absorbed these rationalizations and find them superficially plausible. It's worth developing these critiques, for their sake.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/18/market-discipline/#too-big-to-care

[genderkoolaid]

I think feminism is the historic movement that seeks to reorganize care on a planetary scale, in a way that really meets people's needs, as opposed to the needs of the state and capital, wherein a private household becomes the factory manufacturing a binary between production and reproduction, between the waged and the unwaged spheres, and, by extension, what we think of as men and women. That division of labor is really foundational to how we define, for instance, sex workers and people who historically were ungendered and unmothered—for instance, black women in the plantation context, where they worked side by side with men. We are ongoingly incapable of treating the gender of people in those groups as commensurate with the gender of, you know, the unwaged middle-class white mother. This partitioning is what informs a phobic response to those who sell what we think of as sacred bodily labor. [...] The partitioning is actually doing the state's work for it by policing the boundary between dignified, uncontaminated womanhood and prostituted, victimized womanhood. That's a foundational contradiction internal to feminism that has been being worked out for over 150 years.

— Sophie Lewis in "A feminist utopianism" by Tracy Clark-Flory