#FUCK ALL modern day whitewashed histories

[pyaasa]

I feel like there is this weird desire to flatten history and make England the only bad guy ever. When no…Scotland and Wales were equally responsible for every single crime of the British empire (and I’m only willing to cut Wales a tiny bit of slack for being invaded and colonised themselves by England), all of Europe was was involved in colonising Africa and the americas and the trans-Altantic slave trade, and modern day colonialism is spearheaded by the US. I see this all the time when it comes to the topic of not just imperialism and Scottish independence, but also the EU and even fucking football racism. I feel like reaching thru my screen, grabbing people by the shoulders and shaking them and asking “why are you willing to whitewash how evil Europe is or Scotland’s role in the British empire? Just say ‘England bad’ you don’t have to pretend Germany and france and Italy are fucking progressive anti racist uptopias to make that point💀💀💀

Everyone telling me that this topic is complicated and I need to have more nuance when talking about colonialism seems to want to present a very flat and simplistic version instead where England is the only country that did bad things and everyone one else was poor innocent uwu babies like come on now 😭😭😭

[peridot-tears]

I think a lot about how US-centrism is a really big thing, and something we USians commit whether we are conscious of it or not -- because, quite frankly, no matter how much we proclaim to dislike our country or want it to change, or straight up just want to leave it behind, it's already been deeply intertwined into our personalities.

But there's also that other factor where when it comes to fandom, we end up writing AUs set in the USA, because, well...that's still our home? That's what we're familiar with? So of course I want to play around and reimagine WangXian as diaspora Chinese growing up in New York, just like me. I think it'd be really funny to reimagine Arno as an exchange student who has to deal with NYU kids out here (I pity the man, NYU is an elitist nightmare). And if Tumblr is a US-based site, where most of us end up gathering, that's just math, right? There are going to be a lot of USians here writing about our experiences in this country, because they're the things that immediately affect us the most.

I don't think it's inherently bad to want to reimagine characters in the world we personally live in, but we do have to ask ourselves some hard questions about why we want to take these characters and put them in a setting that we are comfortable with. Would we appreciate them all the same if they were in a setting unfamiliar to us?

And if we were on a non-American site doing the same thing, and the people on that site got mad at us, how would we react? We have to be honest with ourselves.

Also, HUGE disclaimer:

This is not permission to whitewash characters.

If you're writing an AU with characters of non-American origin, do your research on their cultural norms.

Also, the USA is the "melting pot" or whatever the fuck you wanna call it, right. So is this character going to be an immigrant, a tourist, a tenth-generation American, or a second-generation American from another country's diaspora?

*Or are they Indigenous? In which case, what nation are they from, did they grow up on the rez, elsewhere, and what relationship do they have with their family and identity?

We should still think outside of our country. Realizing and acknowledging that we are raised to be ignorant of the world, and that our country holds a cultural Monopoly (i.e. our fucking media and entertainment are EVERYWHERE, and my roommate from Vietnam knows iCarly as well as I do, and I know someone from Nigeria who grew up on Johnny Bravo, just to name a few examples) are only the first step. We need to deprogram and see the rest of the world as a place that exists outside of us while still being affected by just how sprawling our influence is.

My personal experience:

I'm an immigrants' kid who grew up among other immigrants' kids in New York (note, I say "immigrants' kid," meaning I am explicitly not saying we immigrated, only that our parents did. People assume I came here just because I'm not white, which is some racist bullshit).

I have lived on other continents.

MDZS is easy for me because it's my culture. I've written them as diaspora Gen Z kids, Chinese people who grew up in mainland cities I'm familiar with, and in the canon Ye Olde China (Tang-dynasty-ish, but also a Ming-dynasty AU) setting.

I write French Frye in modern-day Paris and London very easily because as a USian, we're taught that "world history" is just "Western and Central European history." We're a Eurocentric society. Also, I've been in those cities and know people from there.

I struggle with writing Ratohnhaké:ton even though he is literally Indigenous to the land I grew up on (Kanien'kéha:ka were from upstate New York, just a day's drive from me, before colonization forced them to move further north). As a USian, that means I was taught the colonizers' attitude towards Indigenous folks, and despite all my research and talks with Indigenous folks to learn to be better, I will eventually trip up and accidentally say something racist or culturally offensive.

This isn't going to stop me from writing fanfic about him, but I'm gonna do my due diligence and consider the circumstances he would be in in a modern AU.

Yes, I want to write a modern-day AU where he goes to China and trains with Shao Jun, because I'm Chinese and I think that would be neat.

When I read modern AU MDZS fanfiction, I can tell who's not Chinese when I read about WangXian living in a house in China. I cannot emphasize how different the apartment-to-house ratio in most major Chinese cities is from the USA. I don't find it offensive, it's just a really strong tell.

If you're writing an AU set in NYC and there isn't a single "yerrrr" in it, you've already outed yourself (this is a joke).

[rcmndedlisten]

Landowner - “Witch Mountain”

Photo by Edwin Cubillos

Though it comes out blue on the political heatmap and typically is at the forefront of equal rights for all, Massachusetts’ history is seeded in old blood money and a privileged hub of power that still has a heavy sway over the narrative of the Commonwealth, whitewashing away its darker history with touristy monuments and calculated press campaigns to keep that rep in check. Landowner are the alternative to all of that. Based out of Holyoke, a depressed industrial city out in Western Mass doing its best at the moment to rebuild itself as the lower cost solution to the opposite side of the state’s increasingly steep cost of living, vocalist Dan Shaw, guitarists Elliot Hughes and Jeff Gilmartin, bassist Josh Owsley, and drummer Josh Daniel are an apt reaction to the state’s front of high end professional veneer and scholasticism in their inflation-fucked post-punk discharge. “A farmer’s market is held to commemorate / A sign is erected in place to commemorate / A traffic median is named Memorial Square In memory of Gail, first name only,” Shaw’s quips sardonically over its hyper-nervous energy. They’re all such wholesome and honorable things, but they’re also built distract you from the reality that the sins of the forefathers continue to lurk over modern times ‘til this day.

Escape the Compound by Landowner

Landowner’s Escape the Compound will be released July 21st on Born Yesterday Records.

[harrelltut]

卍 JEHOVAH Occult Witness Me [ME = U.S. Michael Harrell = TUT = JAH] ALL [JA = YAHWEH] UP [YU = YORUBA] IN:side My Biblically Black [Ancient] Ancestral HURRIAN Indian [HI = HITTITE] City of Luz Atlantis [L.A.] on HARRELLTV® as I Ancestrally ILLUMINATE [A.I.] My Mythically URBAN [MU] Nubian [MOON] American Roots of SATURN'S [MARS] Underworld [MU] Families who BEE So HIGHLY ADVANCED [HA = HARRELL] + WELL HIDDEN from present day humanity of basic ass artificial intelligence 卍

[hoodoobarbie]

The mythology of the Siren, Mermaid, Water Spirits & Mami Wata and it’s origins within black feminity.

Today I had to listen to other another black woman rant about how mermaids/sirens/mami wata are evil low key. So this educational post was born in response. 

Did you really think the divine essence of the black feminine wouldn’t protect itself ? That energy exists for a reason.  Suddenly it’s evil, to have teeth and protect yourself from predators. Water is a precious resource. You will be tested to see if you are deserving of it or not. Also these spirits will defend natural resources so they don’t get fucked up by human greed. 

It’s common for some places in Africa for people to offer the Sirens/Mami Wata/Water spirits or make an offerings/contracts with them in order to use the resources on their land. It also keeps the white ppl away too because they cause so much trouble.

Sirens are also associated with being the killers of children and men, but often this is completely misrepresented intentionally.

Men fear the power of the siren because she can override the patriarchy at core and can completely unravel them. The orgins of many water spirits lie in matriachal societies, temples divine feminine and motherhood. This is why temples and sacred magikal knowledge was intentionally destroyed and stolen, especially to empower the white patriarch.

Sirens are also described as thiefs of children and child killers. Sirens have been known to kidnap kids who were being abused or have were murdered near water and take them to their kingdom to restore them.

Sometimes the child returns, sometimes they are not. However in general they are big on kidnapping people, mostly women and giving them powers, if they decide to return. The idea of them eating and killing children, was a lie perpetuated by Greeks to cover up some truly horrific acts. Unfortunate these false accusations have been allowed to continue to perpetuate.

If a siren is acting in a predatory way, there is a reason why as their energy as been disturbed. Sirens are natural guardians. 

So the real question is . . . what did you do ? Did you destroy their habitat ? Abuse a child or a person ? Commit an egregious act against a woman ie rape/murder etc ? Disrespect a sacred place, the land, the seas or rivers ? Steal precious resources that weren’t yours to take ?

These sacred traditions are more than just deities, spirits and our ancestors. All forms of ATR are access to our spiritual mind state as an entire community. When you move in Vodou, you can sense the whole of black consciousness and all of our problem spots, specifically  areas that need healing. 

Oxum-Oshun, Olokun, Yemaya, the Mami Wata, La Baliene, La Siren, Met Agwe, The Simbi - these are all spirits with a connection to waters. Water is life and has always been inherently associated feminine energy. I’m not going into detail about all these cross connections but let’s chat about La Sirene, specifically.

La Sirene, Queen of all Mermaids is more than just a powerful sorceress and queen of song/music and dreams, she is also a keeper of secrets an a guardian of sacred memories & knowledge.

Many of the souls of slaves, from the Transatlantic slave trade that were thrown off the boats into the ocean are her children, citizens and warriors now. She comforts them eternally & they live in paradise. That doesn’t mean all of these souls are at rest, plenty continuously ask their mother if they will be avenged, especially the young children. She also has a close connection with the Indigenous Taino. The isle of Hispaniola also known as Haiti (Ayiti) & the Dominican Republic is her most known domain. 

Let’s not act like slavery and colonization was a cake walk. Rape was common place and mermaids, water spirits offered African and Indigenous women protection and power over men. They became demonized overtime for their hypnotic powers and killing men, who often overstepped their boundaries. Women could leave offerings to these spirits, work or commune with them and be quickly avenged or gain great power and wealth. All of this was threatening to the white patriarchal standard.

La Sirene’s presence in Haiti and other merfolk tales that float around the Caribbean/West Indies, is not without purpose. She has ties to many people and many different cultures. Her sacred symbols are global. This is why I speculate she is much older than people think. La Sirene, is a fairly young evolution. She clearly has ties to much older things. Her older names might have been lost but she has evolved, to save her self and also document other forgotten elements of history in the process. There are those who speculate that La Sirene is the embodiment of a cross mixed culture, the evolution of Indigenous & African water spirits combined, due to the excess trauma of colonization and so the Mermaid Queen was born. Others will argue that she is the Orisha Yemaya but a newer avatar of her.  I hate to argue semantics but I will say this, she exists and her presence is felt to this day, all around the world. 

La Sirene is often depicted as a mulatto woman with eyes like the sea but if you have been blessed to see her in dream state, she does appear sometimes as a brown or dark skinned skinned woman of possibly mixed Indigenous/African ancestry with glowing hypnotic eyes.  Alot of her older depictions, deal with colorism and slavery, but as things have grown in the modern world this imagery has begun to change. However mermaids, are known for their shapeshifting powers - to truly behold her true form, is a gift reserved for the rare few. 

As a keeper of the mysteries, La Sirene also access to many forgotten things in the black subconscious. The element of water is an intensely psychic sign.  Water is her domain, and what is the human body 80% of? WATER! The truth does not hide from her hypnotic eyes. This sacred connection to water and her essence, also means you can  track forgotten elements black history and connect to other deities/cultures who’ve had contact with her & her whole court or other black water spirits as a whole. So let’s take a short historical trip down memory lane.

The Greeks & Black women. Sirens, Aphrodite, Sibyls and other Children of Water 🧜🏾‍♀️

The deity Aphrodite/Venus is of Grecian and Roman legend.  

A little known magikal fact is that Aphrodite/Venus is half siren. She is a child of the water, she was literally birthed this way after Uranus got his balls cut off & thrown into the sea. Much of her Venusian influence and powers of love and beauty come from this element. Now my Mambo doesn’t like mentioning it but Aphrodite, is tolerated by the oceanic court of sirens/mermaids. Any child of water, falls under the domain of the queen. La Sirene has a sort of strange fondness for her and so does Aphrodite for her. However this doesn’t mean they are best friends.  It’s tentative friendship at best and comes with some perks. Aphrodite works quickly for children of water sirens and often will send mermaids to her devotees who misbehave. She has deliberately placed me around her people have pissed her off, to cause mischief. She’s quite petty but also  very generous. I won’t go as far to dare and say she is in the queen’s court, but she does curry favor with the queen. Being born of water, her half siren/mermaid influence has definitely attributed to legends of her beauty in myth but also her treachery with men 🧜🏾‍♀️😂. She clearly also has some sort of homesickness for the world underneath the water, because many of her offerings are gifts of pearls, kisses, sea shells, beauty products etc. Anyone who serves the Mermaid Queen knows the meaning behind those gifts. If you’re a black gyal with water or siren energy and decide to work with Aphrodite, do it!  If you ever irritate her, the least she’ll do is give you pimples and fuck up your skin, she won’t have the full power to completely fuck up your love life like she does with the white girls.  And let me tell you, she has completely ruined some white girls lives by giving them terrible lovers or men.  

The trident 🔱 is known for its connection in Greek and Hindu cultures.  However La Sirene or other African water spirits are depicted carrying it, which is largely ignored in the occult world.

You can track the trident in Hinduism, with the serpent spirits, the nagas or Lord Shiva but let’s focus on it’s Grecian connection. The usage of the trident and Poseidon, even in mainstream society today is associated with him.  This lets us know there is a connection between the mermaids, merfolk and La Sirene/African water spirits. Poseidon’s trident was rumored to made in Athens by the Cyclops - this is the city of Athena. So now we can track an element of black history all the way to Poseidon & Athena. Keep that in your thoughts we’ll come back to that later.

Tridents were also used ceremonially in Africa & India as well, as scepters, tribal weapons and religious symbols.

They were also associated with the sea faring people and fishing. It’s highly likely the origins of the trident are cross mixed between these two societies. Indo-African relations, go back to the Bronze age and the Indus Valley civilization. Which means traveling over by sea to reach each other was necessary. There is historical evidence of African millet being found in a Indian city Chanhudaro, including a cemetary or burial ground for African women.  Maritime relations between these two groups existed before Grecian & the Egyptian Ptolemaic dynasties.

Now of course there are some deranged historians that will try to whitewash history and say the trident has its origins from the labyrs but the Ancient Greeks & Africans/Indians interacted regularly. The trident also looks nothing like a labyrs, which is quite literally a double sided axe.  This is one of the more painful obvious pieces of white washing and historical revisionism. 

Regardless, the trident is associated with water, ceremonial/religious purposes, fishing, battling in the coliseum and the symbol of power for a few African,  Black diasporian an Hindu deities.

🧜🏾‍♀️ Oracles & Sibyls

Some sibyls/oracles were known to be African prophetesses/Mamissi to the Mami Wata/Sirens in Africa, some were stolen or captured by Greeks or Romans, sold into slavery and made to be oracles, some of whom became quite famous in legend. Their connection to these water spirits, is what gave them their gift of prophecy. Not every sibyl or oracle was African but SOME were.  This lead to the sharing and theft of sacred knowledge. It’s likely these women shared this sacred information, with their colleagues, some whom may or may not have been enslaved or kept in these temple and likely this information was traded, for their freedom, power or money etc. This gave way to the usage of sacred spirits and magick being used by men. A great example of this is the snake spirits of the genii, genius spirits (not to be mistaken with genies) and which then evolved into a diluted lesser energy in Greek society being known as daemons (not to be confused with goetic demons) Instead of a woman commanding these specific energies/spirits, the patriarchs decided that these specifics powers were only worthy of being used by men. These spirits were whitewashed, adopted into their religious practices and said to only be given to men at birth. No woman was allowed to possess them anymore.

🧜🏾‍♀️ The whitewashing of Medusa & Lamia. 

In mainstream society these two women stories have been white washed but also to hide a very shameful history and narrative. These two were beautiful women, in older stories of black black mythology were known to be black and they were children of water & daughters of the powerful water spirit/snake/siren divine mother/feminine goddess. 

Medusa was raped by the GREECIAN GOD OF THE SEA, POSEIDON  and Athena covered it up, refused to avenge her and punished her by making her ugly to everyone. It’s speculated in several magikal circles that the snakes in her hair were actually dreads, due to their lack of understanding of black hair and also allegorically might have been a reference to her devotion to the fish or water snake, great mother goddess. A child of the divine feminine, mother goddess was assaulted in a temple by a man and a woman covered it up & celebrated it.

Let’s start there ... cuz this story says a lot! It’s one of the first historical cases  in myth that really documents the issues that surround the black feminine specifically and it was intentionally whitewashed. Then to add insult to injury, Athena made her hideous to all men and her chopped off her head and used as a symbol of protection but also a subtle sign of disrespect to the fullest. This still goes on to this day.

In fact ALGOL, the demon star, which is considered to be strongest protective magick talisman in the occult world today is the HEAD OF MEDUSA. The child of water! BITCH! This energy is invoked constantly and the spirit of medusa is never allowed to rest.

However these egregious acts did not come without a price. Athena at time was a goddess of fertility. However desecrating a child of water or the sirens, is seen as an attack by the divine feminine and can will cause people to be afflicted with fertility and other mental health issues as well. This is speculative but it’s also likely that after this they were constantly visited by droughts, floods or repeating issues with water sanitation & purity after this. Lowered fertility rates and miscarriages might be more prominent, for Athenians and Athena devotees & likely continues to this day.

Devotees of Athena may also develop severe issues when it to their mental health because of this connection. They completely lose touch with their feminine energy and become extremely misogynistic after continued work with her.

Not only did Athena, cause Medusa to be seen as hideous throughout the land but she celebrated when she was murdered and proudly wore Medusa’s decapitated head on her shield. From the feminist eye this virgin deity/woman was extremely male identified and adhered to the patriarchal standard. She was tested by the divine feminine and failed.

Even more strange, Athena’s birth allegorically proclaims her essential character: her wisdom is drawn from the head of a male god; the bond of affection between father and daughter; her championship of heroes and male causes, born as she was from the male, and not from a mother’s womb. A dreaded goddess of war, she remained a virgin and a servant of the patriarchal society and remains so to this day. She is the misogynistic cool girl and very asexual at the core. In fact if you explore more of her mythos, it becomes very clear she hates women. I’m bewildered at how she has become associated with lesbians and the feminine at large, when it’s been very clear that she was intent on transcending her gender from the very beginning, but never managed to escape it.  

To top it off, I’ll leave you with this quote from Aeschylus’ Oresteia by Athena:

“There is no mother anywhere who gave me birth, and, but for marriage, I am always for the male with all my heart, and strongly on my father’s side. So, in a case where the wife has killed her husband, lord of the house, her death shall not mean most to me.”

Queen Lamia was a said to incredible beauty who seduced Zeus, (a literal man whore) which as made Hera jealous. Hera cursed Lamia with infertility and insomnia. She went insane and is said to have killed her own children and ate them. Zeus is said to be the one who gifted her prophecy and gave her the ability to take out her eyes, so she would not be irritated at the site of other happy mothers.

She became associated with a child eating monster who was half woman and half snake, which ties into the Libyan snake cults. She was associated with phantoms, the shapshifting laimai or empusai and the daemon spirits.

Medusa and Lamia were Libyan by heritage and came from a place in Africa where temples to the water snake mother goddess & divine feminine were common before they were destroyed by invaders intentionally. These women likely had extreme gifts of seduction, mind control and other abilities etc. It’s highly likely that Queen Lamia used her powers of seduction, at the behest of her people to save them from colonization and was demonized for it. Zeus’s temple was in Cyrene in Lybia, so this is far more than an allegorical story. This may be a real life story that was disguised in mythos. Unfortunately deeper research into this subject has turned up many dead ends for me. It’s highly likely Medusa was a priestess of the the matriarchal Mami Watas or water goddess/snake spirits and was likely raped intentionally in Athena’s temple, as a show loyalty to the rising patriarchy by descrating the symbolism of the great mother and the divine feminine. This was likely an attempt to lessen power and status of the matriachal societies that existed at the time. Rape was common war tactic amongst colonizers and news of such disgrace would likely spread like wildfire. This also solidified Athena’s place amongst the male gods and gaining her their respect. Athena and her devotees went a step further to show their allegiance to the patriarchy, by stripping Medusa of her beauty supposedly and exiling her, then parading her decapitated head on shields, when going into battle likely with Libyan enemies.

This is just a brief explanation of a few horrific acts in history, which were whitewashed & explain why the essence of the black feminine has evolved to become more protective, predatory and fierce. She learned to defend herself. Now she kills those who threaten her. 

Fun history tip: Usually anytime you see a snake in Grecian mythology, just know something got whitewashed, because the truth was really fucked up, made them look really bad & a black woman was there.

🧜🏾‍♀️ The black feminine is capable of more than you know.

Yes, mermaids/sirens/snakes & the mami watas can be scary at times but that’s what stepping into mysticism of deep waters is like. Water is capable of many things, it is one of the most powerful elements on earth. It can nourish you and kill you, and that’s the beauty of it really.

We should all be grateful the black feminine is so beautiful, fierce & scares the living daylights out of everyone.

You would be dead if it wasn’t.

[thequietmanno1]

Thelreads, MHA 259, Replies Part 1

1) “Oh its the the Todoroki`s new home? Or is it Natsuo`s house? If its the latter, well, I do wonder who that girl in the back is… My boy, that doesn`t look like a maid, are you dating or something?”-I think it was sorta brought up around the time the wonder trio were joining in on the Todoroki family dinner, but I Think Fuyumi mentioned that he has been dating somebody who was a potential girlfriend – it’s just that Natsuo’s reluctant to bring her or the topic of her anywhere near the same vicinity as his dad and the situation afterwards made it a forgotten topic, what with Natsuo’s near-death and Endeavour deciding to further extradite himself from his family’s life.

2) “Oh- Wait a- What- Wait, did we knew that the doctor was quirkless? I don`t remember that detail- what the fuck- alright, the fact he`s so focused on developing new and powerful quirks seems… even more worrisome now. Also he served All for One and he didn`t even requested a single quirk for himself?”- Huh, you somehow have a copy of the translation that includes the doctor’s original name. Honestly, I’m quite disappointed that it had to be changed, because it not only really suited him, it was educational and informative, but since the topic it broached was one a lot of people in power aren’t happy about, they had to compromise and Horikoshi was forced to change it afterwards. "Shiga" was meant to indicate his admiration for and desire to be closer to All For One, whose real surname is Shigaraki, hence him taking part of his masters name for himself; "Maruta" supposedly refers to his appearance, with "maru" meaning "round" and "ta" meaning "fat." In addition, it's a phonetic reversal of his fake name, "Daruma". The ‘Maruta’ thing also more importantly referencees Unit 731, a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that engaged in lethal human experimentation and biological weapons manufacturing during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and World War II. It was responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes committed by the Japanese armed forces. Unit 731 routinely conducted tests on human beings who were dehumanized and internally referred to as "logs"- In Japanese, ‘Maruta’- to disguise what the reports about the facilities’ production were actually referring to. Though Horokoshi claims he really just meant the whole ‘he’s fat’ deal, it’s kinda obvious he was really aiming for a bit of historical accuracy here and drawing a parallel between the dehumanisation of what was done to those people in the experiments and what Shiga himself is doing to so many people- including literal orphaned children-  all for the sake of a monstrous master and to satisfy his own sick love of his ‘science’. But since that touched a sore spot the Japanese administration would rather forget about, Horikoshi had to cave and change the name down the line. Like, there are current Japanese generations who are completely ignorant this was ever a part of their nation’s history, because it’s been that thoroughly whitewashed and suppressed as a massive black mark in Japan

3) “What a fucking saint the good doctor here is, amiright? Don`t even look like he is creating a biological super soldier that will destroy humanity, right? And that`s not even getting started with the nomus.”- The deepest shadows exist under the candle. Nobody would suspect a modern-day mother Teresa like him of secretly being a pseudo-satanic worshiper behind closed door, but there’s nothing other than the word ‘hellish’ to describe what his work is doing, and his job allows him all the access and resources he needs to move undetected. On the other hand, because he’s such a well-known figure, he by necessity has to remain hidden and secretive even when dealing with Tomura and through him the PLF, despite all the aid he’s giving them, and his direct involvement with Tomura is a sign that AFO doesn’t have any other backup plans in place or surprise allies he can spring on the heroes like Gigantomachia. Take him down and AFO’s scheme get stopped cold, because Maruta was the one he trusted to run the game in his absence, and getting directly involved as he has means that he’s as risk now of being exposed, outmanoeuvred, and caught- not to mention, getting a very strong pummelling from two pissed-off friends of one of his many, many past victims.

4) “Oh- Oh no. Oh no… that isn`t good… Ohhhh noooooooo- oh god that`s terrifying as fuck dude. I remember that I thought he stole Midoriya`s quirk for AfO, one of the old school theories I had, but now- Well, now I know that wasn`t just a theory, I just got wrong who he stole quirks from.

…

): “-  All the access. All the resources, and no pesky family or friends to come looking for them afterwards. All it takes is a few doctored records here and there and the orphanages ‘officially’ introduce a lot of kids to new families and happier lives. No-one notices if a few hundred of them vanish every year or so- there are just so many poor lost children, orphaned by rampaging villain attacks, and happy to believe whatever they’re told if they’re promised he’ll make everything better… I recall that the winged friend of Deku’s apparently referred to the doctor as his actual grandpa, and now I’m wondering if there really was any blood relation between them, or if he was just a kid Maruta adopted amongst many and asked them to refer to him as ‘Grandpa’ as a term of affection. Not that it would have made a blind bit of difference in the end- biological family or not, the kid was nothing but a resource to Maruta in the end.

5) “I mean, who wouldn`t trust ol` Doc Eggman here? look at his smile and little song, he`s almost a disney princess. “- He’s the complete opposite of AFO- somebody who looks harmless as opposed to AFO’s ominous appearance, but it makes a kind of karmic balance that both of them are equally depraved sickos underneath the polite masks they put on for others. They even seem to have a twisted sort of friendship from what we saw of them in Tomura’s flashback, which further informs AFO’s trust in Maruta with overseeing this crucial stage of his plans unsupervised by him. Of all the subordinates we’ve seen AFO have, he’s the only one of them that seems to have truly equal billing with AFO himself, and that right there tells you all you need to know about what kind of man he is at his core.

6) “Oh- Alright, so that wasn`t just narration, it was Phelps giving the debriefing of the target, and now he`s getting into how they are sure its him: they got into his office and found a secret closet with a picture of him on a fishing trip with All for One.”- In a twisted fashion, that’s not entirely an inaccurate description, because from what we’ve seen, both men seem to genuinely enjoy Maruta’s experimentation and research into pushing the boundaries of quirks and their applications, AFO looking at it from a more pragmatic perspective towards benefiting him as well, but they both actually treat the Nomu research as a fascinating hobby of sorts, delighted at seeing their puppets in action and hearing how they performed, trying to figure out how to improve on the next batch and what worked well this time. The fact that this research is human experimentation doesn’t even factor in to both men, they’re only interested in the results and the ‘fun’ that comes from successfully creating monsters that can be used in AFO’s plans like the OG Nomu and the High-Ends. 7) “Oh sure, a locked down room in the morgue where only a single person goes in and out of is deeeeeefinitely not suspicions at all-“- Makes it super-easy to get the bodies straight to the lab. If there’s ever a useful quirk that the doctor gets alerted to during a medical check-up or surgery, then maybe there’s a ‘accident’ and the patient mysteriously passes away due to complications. Terrible shame, but people die every day, and doctors aren’t miracle workers you know, can’t save everybody. And if they walk out the hospital fine and dandy, then AFO and his minions know about them and where they live and can arrange an ‘accident’ when nobody suspects a thing. Being in the medical profession really does give AFO and the doctor free reign to peruse an entire category of quirk lists through everybody’s national medical records and select the ones they like or have an interest in. And if they’re DOA when brought in apparently that’s not an issue either, since they were somehow able to preserve and mutate Shirakumo’s base quirk into its current warp gate status despite him having been dead for a while before they could sneak the body away. I don’t know if even AFO knows how it works, but apparently quirks exists in some kind of metaphysical state and can still be used and extracted even if the wielder themselves has passed on and all that’s left is a cadaver. 8) “IT WAS THAT FUCKING THING

WHY WOULD YOU LET IT SO CLOSE TO THE DOOR, EVEN MORE CONSIDERING THERE`S A BIG FUCKING SEE-THROUGH GLASS ON THE DOOR LEADING INTO IT?!”-  Maruta might be super-cautious about exposing his identity, but he’s in his special room in the middle of his own hospital where he’s free to work and experiment as much as he likes-his own personal ‘happy place’- and that level of security and comfort will cause even the most justifiably paranoid man to relax their guard a little no matter how cautious they are, especially once he’s through the door. He was probably a lot more cautious beforehand as well, but it’s implied that his pre-occupation with completing his ‘masterpiece’ in Tomura has also provided an additional distraction that’s made him a bit sloppier with double-checking everything around him as Tomura’s upgrades demands all his focus to ensure everything goes perfectly. Plus, I think he just left Johnny waiting for him at the door for him to return back ‘home’ like a cat or a puppy excitedly awaiting their master returning through the front door after a long day’s work, so it probably wasn’t entirely within his control that Johnny was sitting by the entranceway for him to enter.

9) “Well, to be honest I think it will be, considering he`s at an hospital where he supposedly has a secret lab where he`s working with nomus, you can bet your ass that he has more of them around. Dammit Phelps, did Makoto taught you nothing?!”- In this case, Maruta’s protection as a respected public figure in the medical community backfired upon him, as no matter how much of a diabolical mad scientist he is behind closed doors, and wants to continue doing mad science all the time, the fact that he has to make a regular public appearance as the respected doctor means he has to voluntarily leave the security of his lab with all its stored Nomu in their holding tanks and walk around exposed in the open. All it requires for the heroes to arrest him is to quietly walk up behind him, tap him on the shoulder and go, ‘what’s up motherfucker, you ready to have a bad time!?”, before he can react or try to reach the emergency exits.

@thelreads

[ourimpavidheroine]

And here he is, guys, gals and nonbinary pals: His Majesty Hou-Ting LIV!

Wu

So listen, I can’t even begin to parse as to why I loved this smarmy, slangy, embarrassingly whiny little royal elbow leech. But I did. And then he rode in those badgermoles (a plot point that Bryan admitted he hated and didn’t want to do) and I was like I MUST WRITE ABOUT THIS LITTLE ASSHOLE.

I don’t know what to tell you. My brain is what it is.

Wu is so weird. He’s just weird. He’s 1000% clueless about normal life. He’s unimaginably rich - the Jeff Bezos of the Avatar world - and in Book 4 he has quite literally zero social skills.

After I had written Please Excuse My Penmanship Bryke came out and said they thought Wu was already in Republic City when the Earth Queen was assassinated, possibly going to boarding school or college. This never made much sense to me. I think it was one of those things they didn’t think through, they just put this very wealthy prince there in a hotel and didn’t worry about what got him there. (This was not the first time Bryke had done that.) I never bought that he was older; despite his sophisticated clothing and the fact that outside of Mako he’s on his own he screamed teenager to me. The Wu of Book 4 always seemed to me to be a kid who is trying very, very hard to act like what he thinks a sophisticated adult should be like. Which is why I put him at eighteen in Book 4. (I seem to be in the minority there, most other fanfic writers put him as older than Mako, even.)

It also never made any sense for me that this Crown Prince would speak as much slang as he did. I did a fair amount of research on Puyi, the last emperor of China (I saw the movie, The Last Emperor, when it came out in 1987 but I realize now it was a heavily whitewashed and historically inaccurate portrayal) and brought that into my Wu. True story: in 1921, when Puyi was fifteen, he had a telephone installed in the palace, under the mighty disapproval of his various advisors (and even his father). They didn’t want him having contact with the outside, modern world. Puyi was the emperor, however, so he got his own way in the end. And what did he do with this new phone, at first? He used it to make crank calls all around Beijing. Because he was the Emperor, yes, but also a fifteen year old boy. (A year or so later he used it to try and relocate imperial treasures outside of the palace for fear that he’d need an escape route outside of China, a fear that was absolutely justified.)

So I thought to myself, what would happen if you took an utterly and completely sheltered fifteen year old boy and threw him into the world, unsupervised? He’d cut off his queue, ditch his traditional clothing and start watching every single mover he could get his hands on, read every single cheap novel he could find, listen to every single sensational radio drama and base his personality on the heroes of those stories. And there he was, three years after being rescued out of the palace in Ba Sing Se, an eighteen year old refugee prince in Republic City, envisioning himself as one of the fictional heroes he was so fond of, halfway in love with his handsome bodyguard, in complete, terrified denial of the reality of what Kuvira is doing to his kingdom. 

Making him younger also serves to make him less of an asshole. We can forgive an eighteen year old twirling his walking stick and calling Mako his big tough guy and pretending he’s actually interested in the ladies (never mind being somehow good with them) far more easily than we can forgive a twenty-three year old doing it. Eighteen year old Wu doing what he did in Book 4 makes him a kid still figuring out his own way. Twenty-three year old Wu doing it makes him a clueless, uncaring creep. Those five years makes a difference at that age, for sure.

I made him smart; I made him politically astute. I gave him the kind of education a Crown Prince would have received with regards to politics, culture, history, international relations, etc. (Boarding school my ASS.) I created a backstory for him and the Hou-Ting family that heavily relied on the actual history of Imperial China. 

I had Huan tell him to knock off the slang because that shit was annoying and it needed to stop. You’re welcome.

He’s also ADHD as fuck. My Betareader says that reading his run-on sentences, heavily seasoned with obscure vocabulary, jumping from subject to subject is like listening to me speak. I do not deny this. I do not even try.

Is he still the guy that danced around Beyoncé-style at his truncated first coronation? Oh he is, he really is. Does he write himself that way in his diaries? Please. Of course not. Some of the fun of writing Wu is writing about him from other POVs; he’s the most unreliable narrator of ever. He’s vain, self-centered, prone to giving orders and expecting them to be obeyed (he’ll always be a King, let’s get this clear right now) but he’s also generous to a fault and, because he won’t have nannies (he’s afraid of having in-house staff because of the betrayal of his own personal staff when the palace was overrun) ends up doing the lion’s share of raising his four children, which does a lot to mature him and ground him in reality. He’s never going to be an average Joe, however. He’s never going to be normal. He’s an abdicated King. That does not equal normal in any universe, including ours.

Wu is a refugee. He lives in a country that is not his own. While he speaks the same language as those in Republic City, I’ve made sure to note that his accent/dialect are completely different. His culture and customs are different. His entire family is dead and the only person he has left from his childhood is the former Grand Secretariat Gun. (There’s another character I completely rewrote.) Wu is a profoundly lonely man, even in the middle of his noisy, loving family. He knows he is different; he’s aware that he will never really fit in, not really. As an immigrant myself, I know exactly how this feels and I have certainly brought that into his character.

Which leads us to this song, which to me is the ultimate Wu song. Retitle it “An Earth King in Republic City” and there you have it. (Not to mention I’m pretty sure Wu in his eighties would channel more than a little of Quentin Crisp.) This song has been his ever since I wrote Penmanship. He is the gentleman in this song.

I don't drink coffee I take tea my dear I like my toast done on one side And you can hear it in my accent when I talk I'm an Englishman in New York See me walking down Fifth Avenue A walking cane here at my side I take it everywhere I walk I'm an Englishman in New York I'm an alien, I'm a legal alien I'm an Englishman in New York I'm an alien, I'm a legal alien I'm an Englishman in New York If "Manners maketh man" as someone said Then he's the hero of the day It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile Be yourself no matter what they say I'm an alien, I'm a legal alien I'm an Englishman in New York I'm an alien, I'm a legal alien I'm an Englishman in New York Modesty, propriety can lead to notoriety You could end up as the only one Gentleness, sobriety are rare in this society At night a candle's brighter than the sun Takes more than combat gear to make a man Takes more than a license for a gun Confront your enemies, avoid them when you can A gentleman will walk but never run If "Manners maketh man" as someone said Then he's the hero of the day It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile Be yourself no matter what they say Be yourself no matter what they say Be yourself no matter what they say Be yourself no matter what they say Be yourself no matter what they say... I'm an alien, I'm a legal alien I'm an Englishman in New York I'm an alien, I'm a legal alien I'm an Englishman in New York

[kingbuckley]

First of all: fuck you for making me do this. Second: Hamilton is historical fiction written by a moc and designed to make space for performers of color and use the history of the revolution to make commentary about and draw parallels to the lasting, and indeed damaging for many populations, legacies left by the founders. The biggest themes are literally about legacy and historical memory/the idea that it matters how stories are told/what stories are being told/who is doing the telling (1/?)

ALL of which is directly relevant to all the surface level bs criticism it gets about "glorifying" the founders. It doesn't glorify the founders, it in fact explicitly acknowledges that they were flawed people who did horrible things, what it DOES on a meta level is acknowledge that the founders HAVE been glorified BY HISTORY/by the whitewashed narratives spread and taught to us and we should DECONSTRUCT their legacies by listening to the voices of those who aren't listened to (2/?)

It also draws direct parallels to the modern day and the fact that it has people of color reflecting on the revolution with lines like "if we win our independence/is that a guarantee of freedom for our descendants/or will the blood we shed begin an endless cycle of vengeance and death with new defendants" and many others is designed to spark reflection on the current state of our nation and the fact that independence =/= freedom for MANY people (which is also acknowledges by discussing slavery)

(4/4) Also the performers have talked extensively about their feelings on playing historical figures who were slaveowners as black people living in the US today with the legacy of slavery. Basically people need to recognize that representing something =/= glorifying it and that expecting audiences to critically engage with art instead of being spoonfed every message and the backlash is part of a wider trend of anti-intellectualism and b&w absolutism that thinks all nuance is Bad.

[feygana2]

done with permission from @tharanduil​ / inspired by them, i decided to make a post about fanon tropes present on this site vs my own original portrayal.   /  TRIGGER WARNING:  topics include historic xenophobia, intolerance and brief mentions of sexual assault.   

DO NOT REBLOG. DO NOT !!!   THIS IS A ROLEPLAY BLOG AND MY HEADCANONS ARE NOT UP FOR DEBATE.

popular fanon concept:    morg.ana is evil, and only wants to kill arthur pendragon for the throne. 

okay, so i cannot even begin to dissect why this is wrong without first pointing out that the bbc version of events can walk off a cliff.   you have to understand that in my portrayal,  i pay very close attention to the fact that pagans in briton at the time were being driven out by the new christian doctrine, and morgana herself (in original written canon) actually grew up in a convent after the deaths of her parents, one of whom was literally raped by the christian king uther pendragon in order to conceive her half-brother, and the other who was killed by the same king so that he could assume his form to sleep with his wife.   morgana has harbored a blistering hatred for uther ever since she finds out what truly happened; which is done through sleep-induced visions once she comes into contact with the lady of the lake and awakens into her true abilities as the future priestess of avalon.   it is her spite that drives her forward, and yes she does let herself become consumed by this hatred.   especially after this same prince, her half-brother, becomes the center of a plot (where she is partially at fault) that finds not only most of her extended family, but also her lover, accolon, dead.   she is the first born to to gorlois and viviane, and with uther’s crimes having left her bereft of any family, she stakes her claim to the throne of camelot through her sister’s sons,  gwaine, mordred, agravaine and others, who are heirs to the throne of loth in modern-day scotland.    if you decide to ignore the fact that non-christians and non-britons were being slaughtered during this time and to therefore whitewash the history of where this story came from and its main protagonist, it’s safe to say you should not be following me.  

popular fanon concept:   mor.dred is morg.ana’s son through an incestual relationship with her brother. 

sorry, i don’t subscribe to the weird la morte de arthur obsession with creepy incest. mordred, like the rest of his brothers, was a son of morgawse and the king of loth. arthur did not conceive a son, & while gwaine and mordred were the last of his nephews left alive, morgana did align herself with mordred as he was a powerful druid that she assisted in teaching and training.  after the death of her sister and brother-in-law, morgana did take on a matronly figure (especially with her namesake coming from the goddess, matrona) to both Agravaine and Mordred, though she was only ten to twelve years their senior.   Both of them became part of her own immediate family, and she plotted with them thoroughly to see the youngest on the throne, and therefore forestalling the coming genocide to the northern tribes of what is now great britain and keep free the old religions.  morgan.a loved mordred like her son, and when finally all brothers but gwaine had fallen, and mord.red was killed at camlann, she gave up the fight for the throne all together and withdrew into votadini lands to hide in the hills and wallow in her grief. she buried mordred alone. 

popular fanon concept:    morgana worships the old celtic deities in the ulster cycle

morgana was actually born at a time when the ‘’old’’ deities of the britons and saxons were still at large despite the onset of catholicism. she worshipped deities like wodan, thunor, tiw, freyja, lopt and others, this was after she threw away her education in a convent.  the ulster cycle wasn’t introduced to arthurian legend until almost 800 AD, which is 400 or so years after morgana’s conception as a character.

popular fanon concept:   morg.ana helped to kill arthur and left him to die with no remorse.  

nope. in fact, in most instances in the actual legend, morgana finds herself feeling pity for him;  she has stolen excalibur’s sheath from him, and in doing so he cannot use its magic to heal himself back to full health.   mordred was also given a sword just as powerful as excalibur to slay a king, made by the fused hatred and magic of morgana herself.   however, once mor.dred is dead and buried, she cannot bring herself to let her only remaining family member die sorry gwaine.    she puts his body atop a boat of reeds and brings him to the isle of avalon, which is a portal between the physical and metaphysical world.  while it is known he left the world of the living, it is under speculation in several versions of the story if he truly ‘’died’, or if he was put into a cycle of reincarnation.

popular fanon concept:    morg.ana just used accolon. she never loved him.

get the fuck out of here with this.  she loved accolon.  and she used him. she was angry that she could not seduce lancelot to bend him to her will so easily, and she did use accolon as her first champion. she stole the excalibur and replaced it with a simple blade, and so during the duel between king and knight, when accolon came at him with a magic sword his own combat skills were not up to par.   it was only after the sword was returned to arthur mid-battle that he stabbed through accolon’s silver armor with a fatal blow.  his body was actually brought to morgana, and she mourned over him for several years. this was, in la morte d’arthur,  the beginning of her plot to ruin arthur’s relationship with Guinevere, and when she really started to plot revenge with loth’s sons.  (another small point is that while morgana did use her sexuality and femininity to manipulate others, it was never done through ‘sex magic’ or as a means to her own enjoyment, and was instead used as a means to get cis men to listen to her in 400 AD. something that is still impossible to do in 2020.)

[raspberryjones]

At This Time...

Sitting here paralyzed for days, trying to figure out what more I can do. Quarantined, distracted from grading these final papers by the fires in my feed, knowing that donating to activist organizations and RT’ing, on top of crying, shaking and cursing, is not nearly enough. Plus, just about anything I say/do on the socials feels like a f*cking performance. All of it — except the anger and the stream of information that continues to reassert the utter disdain that this country’s White supremacy (not just Tr*mp, but the whole friggin’ establishment) has for Black and Brown people, here and throughout the world. The insidiousness. 

Even wallowing in my own exhaustion — jobless, hope on a tattered string, watching the powers that be f*ck the populace over in every way imaginable… All of it feels self-pitying, when I can recognize my privilege and be struck by the existential sorrow that, even before this week’s events, or the racial disparity of the pandemic’s victims, surrounds most Black American lives. When I hear my Black and Brown friends and colleagues express their own exhaustion, as so many have over the past five days, it has the weight not just of the moment, or a political term, but of history. Personal, familial, written in volumes, reaffirmed constantly — and running contrary to America’s dip-shit self-mythologizing. 

And yet... Despite this horror-show past, with white supremacy’s attempts to subjugate them for generations, Black America’s ability to move society forward has been beyond fucking remarkable. The creation of culture, the strength of moral character, the depth of communal compassion. It is no overstatement that the moral and creative compass of not just Black excellence but of the African-American community I’ve known, has been among primary lodestars of my life in this country. And while I do not expect all other folks to feel the same way I do, I most certainly judge those who feel contrary — or those who dismiss the notion that, if anyone’s ever made this hard land great in the past, it’s been Black Americans.    

And that in the struggle to understand the fullness of this account, you will find pretty much all contemporary crises. It’s incredible that, in 2020, a majority of people still don’t comprehend the connections between systemic white privilege and Black death in the headlines, between colonization culture and the overwhelming inequality rampant in American society, between the contemporary malaise of the Western imagination and the whitewashing of the media. For a person who does not simply work in/with culture founded on the Black experience, but gets their very lifeblood form it, this is a hard fucking pill to swallow. The big “YOU don’t get it!” 

So, when thinking about WTF else I can do, as a writer who deeply supports Black American communities in the struggle against white supremacy, I thought it worthwhile to reiterate some of this historical record’s personal and social importance. Having just spent a semester teaching NYU sophomores about how we got here — while re-reading classic texts by LeRoi Jones and Ralph Ellison and Isabel Wilkerson, Nikole Hannah Jones’s massive new one, and discussing the contemporary settings of these ideas with DeForrest Brown Jr. and Angel Bat Dawid — what I believe should be our collective mission is fresh and clear in my mind. 

This is where music comes in. It’s especially important that anyone who listens to contemporary music in the 21st century, also participates in reappraising these whitewashed texts, restoring Blackness back to the center of this culture. Not only to acknowledge the proper origins of the forms and ideas that are so important to it — and thus, acknowledge the people who developed these forms and ideas —  but act accordingly in times of crisis, requiring us to use our white privilege to support pro-Black and anti-colonialist positions in a way that could actually lead to structural change. To “see something, say something” when companies belligerently monetize the (Black) people’s culture and do not recompense the community, or when cops act like overseers that treat Black lives as wanton boys do flies.

Because… Here’s the thing: blues and jazz are the basis of all great new music of the last 100 years — paving the way for the post-modern Black electronic music (hip-hop, house and techno and electro) which is the core of pretty much all popular sounds of the 21st century. And the Black experience is the DNA of these musics — meaning, in the clearest terms, that we don’t get to have this music without the burden that preceded it. This is at the core of the accusation that “loving Black culture more than Black people.” You do NOT get to do one without the other, and still call it “love.” 

Unlike European art, that original Black music is not the product of some art-school- and conservatory-learned experiments. Or of commissions from a royal court. Or of direct updates on thousand-year folk forms. Oral traditional and molecular memory aside, Black American music’s past was almost completely — genocidally, is also a word — wiped away in the Middle Passage. So when it came to fruition in the years during and after Reconstruction, it did so as a personal Black expression of what to do and how to live in this new, foreign here-and-now, far from “home.” This music is, simultaneously, a lament and celebration, complaint and utopia, art and evidence, personal diary and modernist work. Nothing like that had been conceived before, and it was so revolutionary that almost no one’s been able to build a next-level to it since.

It was also the first musical art-form original to the United States. Now imagine: the engine of this art-form’s motivation was a desire to express oneself within a society that did not want to hear any of what you had to say. A society that, in many cases, did not regard you as fully human. And yet think of how Black music expresses the full spectrum of humane truths and emotions. Actually, fuck it, don’t read me telling you about it. Go listen to the Wesley Morris episode of the 1619 Project podcast, who does a far better job than I of narrating Black American music’s wonders. This is why remaining on the sidelines, or providing only cursory support to the uprising, does not sit well.    

It is crucial that people around the world know this history when they hear a variation of these musics being described as “global phenomena” or “universal,” or divided into “genres.” Such terms might seem neutral, or even complementary to its creators; but at their core, they move to dilute the role that the Black experience played in its birth. And distancing the music from the people who made it (and why), mitigates the music’s values. What was once specific becomes conditional — out goes the particularity of its expressions (feelings, words, citations), and in come market-democratizing generalities, like capitalization and trends, elements that tend to be elevated by whoever controls mass communication. This is how a local culture becomes a global genre, and how some people who make “techno” or “jazz” music in [insert European city here] can’t comprehend why “neutrality” towards George Floyd’s death is a betrayal of their creative work.

But... They will do as they will do. And, as I said before, we will judge them - because it is on these very decisions and proclamations that the intention of the art-work (a crucial aspect in the value of the art-work — its contemporary “aura” some might say), that artists and their audiences are judged. And when I mis-step, my Black friends and colleagues will also judge me, and the humility and self-reflection with which I handle this will say volumes about what my cultural intentions are. Because for the rest of us, there never has been nor will continue to be a disconnection between the culture we have sworn allegiance to, and the need to change society’s norms, to speak about the need for social justice, and to continually reassert that #BlackLivesMatter and #BrownLivesMatter. 

And that if you continue to engage with the words and ideas that I hope to continue putting out into the world, this is their starting point. That music — for all its glory and hope and joy and wrenching feeling and fuck-you energy and let’s-love energy and all that — is neither the beginning nor the end. It is one narrative of history’s arc. That chapters of this history are being written all the time, some quietly and some in push-notifications, and that what’s going on outside our windows at this moment, is a major scene of the permanent record. To be quiet is to be complicit. I choose not to be complicit. I hope that you make that choice as well.  

[theliterateape]

History is a Puzzle Box of Rashomon

by Don Hall

I’ve often said that the scariest thing to ever come out of my mother’s mouth was the declaration “Let’s go on an adventure!”

For my mother an adventure must include a lack of preparation, potential for danger, and a sense of I can’t believe we just survived that! She once decided she wanted to do a charcoal sketching of a gravestone from the grave of one of our Appalachian Baptist fire-and-brimstone preacher ancestors. My dad drove her up into the mountains and they started seeing patches of purple paint on trees and rocks.

Turned out that was the locals’ way of telling outsiders they'd get shot if they trespassed. My dad clutched his pistol the rest of the way.

Mom got her charcoal sketch. I can’t believe we just survived that!

When I was a kid and we lived in Arizona, mom decided we were going on adventure. My little sister, mom, and I loaded up in her brown Gremlin, a bag of sandwiches, some sodas, and all of our swimming gear and headed out for an afternoon at Lake Pleasant.

All was copacetic until she thought she saw a shortcut to he lake. It was not a shortcut. It was simply desert. It started out as a bit of a dirt path that sort of petered out about an hour into the drive. We were driving in the open desert in the vehicle equivalent to a Pinto.

Of course we blew a tire. Of course we didn't have a spare.

Being a melodramatic kid, I went into a full-blown faux-survivalist panic. After a few minutes of wailing about our imminent demise I set out to figure how to get water out of cactus, the thorny testaments to the heartiness of desert foliage fending off my un-callused hands and delivering exactly no water.

This being decades before smartphones, we were stuck. We had no clue where we were in terms of the comforts of civilization and while mom put on a brave face (and occasionally got the giggles at my histrionics) our fate was sealed. Unless someone miraculously drove into the middle of the desert to save us, we were doomed.

And then the miracle occurred. A beat-up red Ford pickup truck coming from the other direction popped up on the horizon. I shrieked in relief; mom flagged the truck down.

We were about a mile from a highway but we couldn't know that. The driver of the pickup was taking a shortcut from the highway.

Here's where the story gets odd. To this day, my mother's version of this adventure and mine are identical. Word for word the same until we get to the driver of the Ford. On my life, I swear it was an older Native American man who stopped, hitched up the Gremlin to his vehicle, and towed us the mile to the highway and on to a gas station. 

My mother will go to her grave insisting it was a family of four Mormons.

What?!

We’ve had family arguments about this story. Both my mother and I are intractable in our insistence of our specific endings of either Native American man or family of Mormons. We both were there. We both can see ourselves in the tale. The endings are as different as could be.

There is conclusive scientific research that demonstrates how the memory of an event subtly changes the actual memory as it is retold. The more you tell the story, the more it transforms into something similar but wholly different in the margins.

If my mother and I can have such divergent differences within a memory of an event we both shared, how many splinters are there in a collective re-telling of a larger event encompassing many more tellers? How many completely incompatible versions of the attacks on New York on September 11, 2001 are there? How many versions that don’t quite line up with one another are there of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941?

Moving forward and backward in history, if we are to accept (and I do) that our memories are more Silly Putty than Lego Bricks, how much does film, television, books, and social media come into play in the constant morphing of objective truth to the collection of subjective memories and finally commonly accepted reality?

There is conclusive scientific research that demonstrates how the memory of an event subtly changes the actual memory as it is retold.

Back in the olden days when one could watch something horribly incorrect in the political sense without it becoming a ringing endorsement of your personal "brand" or a scathing indictment on who you are as a fellow human, I went to a screening of Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. It was at an esoteric video shop/screening theater on Fullerton Avenue in Chicago called Facets Multimedia and there were six or seven others in attendance. I was the only white person in the room.

Historically, Griffith's opus is significant in several ways. 

First, it was among the earliest epic uses of film. Released in 1915, it was the first blockbuster Hollywood hit. It was the longest and most-profitable film then produced and the most artistically advanced film of its day. It secured both the future of feature-length films and the reception of film as a serious medium.

Second, it was the first modern popular culture example of an artistic achievement attempting to force a certain perspective on the larger culture (the idea that the KKK were the heroes of the Civil War) it was initially released with the title "The Clansmen" and reframed the war, Reconstruction, and white hooded sheets in tandem with lynchings as the preferred story of American history.

Third, while propaganda has been around since men could talk and write, it was the most pervasive use of a medium that communicated on a newfound mass level to promote a horrifying ideology and was embraced by President Woodrow Wilson as a personal favorite.

Following the three-hour screening, there was a sense of discomfort as the lights came back up. My guess at the time it was the other viewers in the room wondering if I, the sole white person in the room, was as offended by the revised perspective the film espoused as the rest in the small cadre. I suppose I wasn't as offended because I wasn't black and I knew what I was getting into when buying my ticket. I can imagine seeing the film without some context would be like a slap in the face.

One of the things I learned doing stage combat around the same time was that a slap in the face never hurt as much as you'd think. It wasn't the pain of the blow but the surprise of it that gave it impact. Going in cold to see the KKK presented as the true patriots wouldn't hurt but the surprise might be a shock.

In a very different way but in the same vein, I remember being the only white face in a crowded theater in Fayetteville, Arkansas at the opening night of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. The looks of inquisition for my reaction to the film from the predominantly black faces followed me out into the lobby and into the parking lot.

I read recently that one of the reasons the scars of that Civil War in America have never fully healed is that we’ve never, as a nation, agreed on a single narrative of why we fought the goddamned thing. The subjectivity of truth in the re-telling of that dark period is confounding and subsequent attempts to force one perspective or the other or multiple angles on the causes of the War of the States has only confused the issue. Thus the recent beheadings of statues glorifying Southern generals and the re-naming parties of public schools to eliminate anyone associated with slavery.

I understand and empathize with this impulse to reverse the whitewash of history from our streets and schools. So much of our literature and symbols in real life have been created with, maybe not a D. W. Griffith subjectivity, a revisionist historical perspective that paints over the ugliest parts of our history to re-tell the narrative and erase those most subjugated by it. I expect over-correction (like the New York Times 1619 Project which casts our history as steeped in nothing but racism and slavery without acknowledging the contributions set apart from those stains) and, after reading that San Francisco schools are eliminating Abraham Lincoln's name, I decided to re-watch Spielberg's Lincoln.

I don't know if it was actually Lincoln or screenwriter Tony Kushner who came up with the following analogy but I found it instructive in the push to reframe the story today.

A compass, I learnt when I was surveying, it'll... it'll point you True North from where you're standing, but it's got no advice about the swamps and deserts and chasms that you'll encounter along the way.

If in pursuit of your destination, you plunge ahead, heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp... What's the use of knowing True North?

The film paints the fight for the 13th Amendment as a dark political game, cajoling and persuading the legislators of the day to codify in the Constitution a formal revocation and rebuke to the forced enslavement of other human beings. It also portrays Lincoln as a deeply pragmatic leader. The speech is one he gives to Thaddeus Stevens, a zealous abolitionist, who rightly sees true north but, up to that point, would rather be righteous than successful in abolishing slavery.

Both men are long dead so the question of whether both men would tell the same story, in their re-telling of those pivotal moments leading up to the vote, or if their stories would radically diverge, is wholly academic. That’s where the trappings of art collide with authenticity. This is the version Spielberg and Kushner decided upon and it will be the version millions who watch the film and decide to simply accept it as the one true version.

This is not to say there is no objective truth. It is to suggest that our inability to separate fact from our subjective fictions makes us pretty fucking lousy arbiters of that fact.

On the other hand, we have celebrated author Mark Manson, whose book Everything is F•cked: A Book About Hope is being banned in Russia by Putin because it speaks directly to atrocities committed by Stalin. Putin is looking to re-write Stalin's history. 

There is a big difference between revising a history shown to diminish the effects of overt racists in one country and purging a country’s history of established monstrosities but the mechanism remains the same: reframe the story and tell it enough times that the meaning changes over time. Keep pushing the new narrative (right or wrong) until the soft memory of an entire nation bends to the will of the teller.

That’s all history is, after all. A slew of stories we tell over and over to indoctrinate a sense of national pride. It grows more perilous when those revising the stories weren’t present. The source of the tales becomes less reliable and the reframe more suspect. When the source is a film or video of an event, we feel as though we’ve experienced it but our perspective is entirely subverted by what the camera shows us and the narrative promoted when we watch it.

One of the techniques that Griffith practically invented was the camera’s use to tell the story from his view. Frame things in a certain way, in a certain order, and our very eyes are deceived, our minds accept the deception, and we believe.

In 1950, Akira Kurosawa gave the world the reigning example of individualized subjective point of view. Rashomon shows us three different perspectives on one specific event. The film makes the point so clearly that the term used popularly to label the he said/she said/they said dilemma is a rashomon.

This is not to say there is no objective truth. It is to suggest that our inability to separate fact from our subjective fictions makes us pretty fucking lousy arbiters of that fact. Show me someone absolutely 100% certain of the sort of events they've only seen on an iPhone video moderated by Faceborg and spun by both the media and some random stranger and I'll show you someone deluded and quite probably dead wrong.

Even when we're there to witness events in person we get it wrong so the concept of getting it right through the mediation and manipulation of amateur videographers and activist pushing a narrative is nothing short of lunatic fringe.

Bizarrely, we all know this to be true.

We know that social media is almost entirely unreliable. We know that film is a highly manipulative art form. We know that Robert Downey, Jr. never flew in a suit of armor, that Keanu Reeves is not Neo, that as much as he embodies who I hope Abraham Lincoln was like, Daniel Day Lewis is an actor and couldn't possibly know what the man was actually like in person.

We know this to be true but we need to be right. We need to believe and so we take that leap of faith, that gut level adherence to what makes some sort of sense in the story and run with it. More so, if the fiction supports things we already have chosen to believe in, we are adding it to the arsenal of defenses against any other sort of view of our story.

We know there's more to the story of the Antifa takeover of Seattle. We know there's more to the January 6th breach of the Capitol. We know there are more sides to the story of Michael Brown. We know that with everyone filmed in a Walmart screaming about her right to forego a mask there is something else before and after that moment that may demonize her just a bit less.

We know but we don't care. Context and considering the framing takes too much work. Too much time. In an existence flooded with too much information, too many stories, too much video, too many opinions, it's just fucking easier to settle on the story that suits you and roll with that.

That's why—no matter what my mother says—it was definitely not a family of Mormons and I'll go to my grave with that.

[dyscrasia-eucrasia]

Part 8

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Demie stared at the phone in his hand for a minute, utterly bewildered. The mentions of the Goatman had made him angry, but he hadn't expected Angel to just hang up on him, for a couple of reasons. 

First, if Angel had actually suspected him of being the Goatman, he would've thought Angel would ask more questions. He'd never actually talked to any of the cryptozoologists that came poking around the woods, but from what he could tell about them, they didn't give up easily. 

Second, even though he'd only known Angel for a few days, he could tell that Angel was talkative, and very interested in what Demie had to say. It didn't seem like him to just suddenly hang up. 

Which left Demie wondering if he'd said something wrong. He knew he didn't have the best of social graces - he could blame it on the isolation he'd grown up in, but Marius didn't have any problem with being social, so that couldn't be it - but he thought he'd been doing well with talking to Angel. He was angry, and a little nervous about being exposed as non-human, but not so much that he wanted to stop talking to Angel. But maybe he had sounded too angry? He couldn't tell - the only person he talked to on a regular basis was Elaine, and she was a complete asshole, so maybe she'd rubbed off on him. 

That was about as far as he got in that thought when Elaine started shouting for him. 

"DEMIE!" She called from her room on the other side of the trailer. 

"WHAT?" He shouted back. 

"DEMIE!" 

"FUCKING WHAT!?"

"COME HERE, JACKASS." 

He frowned. There she went, being an asshole. She could just tell him what she wanted, but no, she had to make him come to her. He got up off his couch, grumbling, and ambled out of his room and across the living room. 

"HURRY UP!" She yelled as she spotted him through her open door. She was sitting at her desk, in front of her computer. It and the TV in the living room were the most modern pieces of technology in the trailer, and even they were a few years out of date. 

"What?" He asked, stopping at the threshold of her room. He never went in there. There wasn't a rule against it or anything, he just didn't like going in there. She had a ton of anime posters all over the wall, and they gave him the heebie-jeebies. Something about the big glossy eyes were just so creepy and alien. 

"Come over here, there's something you need to watch." 

"What is it?" 

"Just get your ass over here!" 

Demie grumbled again, but walked over to the desk. As he did, Elaine got up from her chair and patted it. Demie took a seat. 

"Ugh, gross, it's all warm," he said. 

"Oh, I'm the gross one? You don't fucking wear pants." 

"It's not like I don't wash my ass or something," he shot back. 

"Shut up and watch this fucking video," she said, leaning over and moving the mouse, clicking play on the Youtube video she had pulled up. 

"WHAT'S UP, CLAYKIDS," an athletic white guy in his early 20s with perfectly coiffed hair shouted. "WE'RE IN WEST VIRGINIA, ON PART FIVE OF OUR QUEST FOR CRYPTIIIIIIIIDS!" 

"This guy is way too fucking loud," Demie mumbled. Elaine shushed him. 

The camera zoomed out of the guy's face to show him standing in some woods. "AND TODAY, WE'RE ON THE HUNT FOR THE GOATMAN!" 

A chill crawled up Demie's spine, and his blood went cold. He watched in horrified silence as the man continued to shout about the history of the Goatman and how it was said to shapeshift and terrorize campers. 

The camera cut and Demie gripped the arms of the chair. The man - joined by a crew of five other, almost identical white guys - now stood in the middle of a crumbling asphalt road. To either side of them were short brick buildings, only about eight in total. Demie recognized it instantly as Billy Brook, West Virginia - the town about twenty minutes from the trailer. 

The video spent a few minutes on the crew ambushing various townspeople, sticking microphones in their faces and asking them about the Goatman. 

"Oh yeah, that Goatman, he killed my dog," an old man said. 

"Everyone knows you stay out of the woods," said a middle-aged woman. 

"Yeah, I heard about the Goatman," a man in his twenties told the camera, "my buddy Mike at the video store has seen him." 

"WHOO!" One of the crew hooted, pulling the camera around to get an extreme close-up of himself. "Eye witness, baby!" 

Demie shivered. Please don't go to the video store, please don't go to the video store, he thought. 

Immediately, the video smash cut to a small, whitewashed building with a hand-painted sign that read: 'Video Store - VHS - DVD - XXX.'

"This video store has been in operation since 1985,' a sleepy-sounding voiceover said. "No movie theaters in town, most people don't have internet, so we stay in business pretty easily." 

The video cut to the inside of the store, the camera slowly sweeping over the shelves. 

"This place is LIT, fam," one of the crew said. "Yoooo, check it out, this place has porn!" The camera fixed on a shelf in the back of the building, though the covers of the videos had been pixelated out. 

"So tell us about the Goatman," the first white guy said, the video cutting to a strung-out young man in flannel with a name tag that read 'Mike' standing behind a counter. 

"Oh yeah, the Goatman, he comes in here like once a month," Mike said. 

"Does he buy any videos?" 

"Oh yeah." 

"What kind of videos does the Goatman buy?"

"Uh, y'know, splatter gore horror stuff. Sometimes he gets some musicals. Oh, and a lot of porn." 

"What kind of porn does the Goatman buy?" The guy asked, laughing. 

"GOAT PORN!" Someone shouted off screen. 

"Nah, man, he gets like… big titty blonde chicks." 

"What does the Goatman look like?" The main guy asked. 

"He's like… seven feet tall, man. He's got like really long hair and a beard, and these big ass curly horns." 

"That doesn't sound like any Goatman I've heard of," a different person said from off camera. 

"Nah man, he's real. He like, lives out in the woods and shit." 

Demie sank into the chair, lifting up his hands and covering his face, though keeping his fingers open to watch the video. "Shit," he murmured. 

"I told you going to the video store was a bad idea," Elaine said, words dripping with vitriol. 

"Mike is always high out of his fucking mind," Demie said, words muffled by his hands. "I didn't think he'd even remember that I was ever there." 

"Keep watching, it gets worse," she said. He moaned in horror. How could it possibly get worse? 

The video cut again, this time showing the crew out in the woods. The sun was beginning to set. 

"Check it out, no trespassing," one of the crew said, pointing to a piece of sheet metal nailed to a tree. The words had been hand-painted on. Demie sank lower into his chair. He'd made that sign himself. 

"Trespassing in the Goatman's woods, yeah boyyyy," another member of the crew said. 

"So, where's the Goatman?" Another asked. The main guy tried to shush them, but they kept talking as they stumbled through the woods, jumping and then laughing at every snap of a branch or rustle of leaves. 

And then, out of nowhere, a crack of gunfire interrupted their buffoonery. The entire crew became silent. A few moments passed, and another shot could be heard. 

"OH SHIT!" The main guy shouted, and the camera work became a dizzying blur as the crew began to run. 

They came out of the woods onto a dirt road, where they began to laugh. 

"Jesus, we almost got murdered by fuckin' hillbillies!" One of them shouted. The other hummed a few bars of 'Dueling Banjos'. 

"Alright, well, that was a bust, but we'll keep looking," the main guy said, grabbing the camera and pointing it in his face. "Be sure to like, comment, smash that subscribe button, and buy our merch, Claykids!"

The video ended and Demie sat there in silence, eyes glued to the computer screen. "We're so fucked," he mumbled.

[bigskydreaming]

Potentially really stupid question here, but how does Wanda’s powers actually work? I haven’t read a lot of comics, so I’m a little confused

You and everyone else, pretty much.

The thing is, there is no real set way, at this point. Her powers have been retconned more than her parentage, which says a lot. The most consistent description of them for the longest period of time, I’d say, is back in the 80s and 90s when it was basically like...she threw these energy bolts that were called her hex bolts, and whatever they hit, the result was like...an extreme probability fluctuation. So it wasn’t like she blasted things with energy bolts, though it sometimes looked like that....more accurately, she threw the hex bolt at a robot, and it exploded...because the hex bolt’s actual effect was randomly messing with the probability of that robot exploding because of a mechanical issue with like its core processor or whatever. 

So she could do a ton of different things with her hex bolts, but they were all basically rooted in probability manipulation....NOT reality warps, like she was later changed to be capable of. Like, there had to be at least some initial basis for the end result her hex bolts produced. Say she was underground in a cave fighting someone...she couldn’t throw a hex bolt that resulted in lightning somehow striking them even though they were deep underground, because there was no probability that would result in that, you know? Whereas if she was outside, she could theoretically hurl a hex bolt at someone that resulted in them being struck by lightning, even if it was a mostly clear sky...because even though that was an extreme unlikelihood, there was some base probability to work off of. Especially if say like, Thor was around or there was some other source of potential lightning that her probability manipulations basically...hacked, or hijacked.

Depending on the writer, sometimes she had a lot of control over generating specific results with her hex bolts, while with other writers, it was completely random....like, there was no real guarantee of what would happen if she threw one at something, though it generally was always a positive outcome for her. 

The Ultimate comics version of her, which was like, a rebooted more modern version of the whole Marvel universe that ran at the same time as the main Marvel universe comics, back around 2000 for a number of years....basically her powers worked similar to that in that version, but with a little more control. Like, it was the same basic principle, but it was stated that this version of her kinda viewed probabilities like equations that her powers let her tweak and manipulate to consciously achieve certain end results.

Back in the main Marvel universe though, at other times her powers were considerably more magic based....her origin story is super hella confusing, even without the latest retcons, but the gist is that when she and Pietro were born, it was at a place in Europe called Mt. Wundagore, that was on top of like, the ancient resting site or tomb or prison or whatever of some Elder God of chaos from thousands of years ago, named Cthon. Basically, at various points its been stated that Cthon did something to potentially gain some influence over Wanda, at her birth, or just more generally like, his mere presence altered the powers she would have had, like if she’d been born somewhere else she would have had energy powers similar to Magneto’s (since he was still their dad at the time of these backstory retellings), but because of Cthon’s presence/influence, she ended up with her probability powers...as well as some ability to work magic, specifically something called chaos magic. 

So at various points in Marvel history, Wanda’s delved into the magic side of her powers as much as if not moreso than her mutant probability powers. There have been periods where she didn’t really have her mutant powers for a variety of reasons so she was wholly using magic, there have been periods where she uses both or switches between them, and more commonly in later years where her powers were some vaguely defined fusion of magic and probability manipulation.

This led to Bendis eventually retconning her powers as basically just being able to rewrite or warp reality in whatever way she chose...with his hot take being that this ‘drove her crazy’ because there was no stability she could latch onto when her powers were constantly reordering reality according to her subconscious wishes or desires, rather than letting her perceive reality the way everyone else was. Basically the idea that ‘if you can do or even undo anything, does anything you do really matter’ taken to the nth degree.

Then ultimately that was retconned too, because it was terrible and bad, and it was ‘revealed’ that she was only capable of the reality warps that caused Avengers Disassembled and House of M, because she’d been possessed or come into possession of something called the Life Force, which was like, a kinda similar thing to the Phoenix Force that way amped up her powers and blah blah blah. So once she didn’t have the Life Force anymore, her powers went back to being that kinda vaguely defined ‘whatever a writer wanted them to be’ sorta fusion of probability manipulation and mumble mumble chaos magic which is basically also whatever a writer wants it to be, and not really a defined thing in the Marvel Universe or something any of the other mystical characters use...in fact, none of them can ever seem to agree on whether or not chaos magick is even a real thing, or if its just what people call the shit Wanda does that nobody else can come up with a good explanation for, even within the Marvel U itself.

And then of course, the MCU version of Wanda is completely nothing like comic book Wanda in ANY way, shape or form, in any version of her....and not just because she’s whitewashed and not Romani and Jewish like in the comics, and not just because its gross to make the twin children of two Holocaust survivors in the comics be volunteers for Nazi/HYDRA experiments to get their powers in the MCU, BUT I DIGRESS. But yeah, Wanda’s powers in the MCU are just.....not remotely anything to do with anything Wanda’s ever actually done power wise, which is actually a pretty impressive miss, lmfao, considering just how wide-reaching Wanda’s powers have been at times in the comics. 

But basically, as far as the movies have ever shown and Whedon said in interviews and such, the MCU Wanda has basically unlimited telepathic and telekinetic abilities, lol, which is kinda like...bwuh...when he described that he chose her as one of the characters he wanted to introduce in Age of Ultron because she had those abilities....because of all the ways Wanda’s powers have been described in the comics, she has literally never been described as being telepathic or telekinetic, at any point in time. To this day I have no idea where he pulled that from, because like. That’s literally just not anything to do with her powers. That’s Jean Grey’s powerset, and multiple other characters, sure. But Wanda ain’t one of them.

The only place she’s remotely been shown using powers that could potentially be viewed that way is in the X-Men: Evolution cartoon where like...she basically zapped things with energy and bad shit happened. So like, there it was nominally the same idea as her hex bolts....there was no real rhyme or reason to anything that happened as a result of her blasting at it, so I think it was intended to be the same basic principle...buuuut admittedly, the cartoon just didn’t really seem to care what her powers were because occasionally she used them to levitate someone or hold them in the air like in a way that pretty much only telekinesis can accomplish, and she made inanimate stuff like escalators kinda come to life in a way that really is more like what a telekinetic does as well...

So I mean, I guess someone could argue that Evo Wanda was a telekinetic and that was what Whedon decided to go off of, for some bizarre reason. But again, Evo Wanda’s powers were never truly defined at all, and ultimately just seemed to be “she can do anything that we feel like putting in that looks bad-ass, and we’ll justify it by saying nobody really understands her powers.” And they still don’t account for where the fuck Whedon got telepathy from, lol, because no Wanda ever anywhere has been in any way telepathic.

*Shrugs*

Tbh, I have no idea what her powers are being described as these days in the comics, as they’ve pretty  much kept her in the Avengers sandbox ever since their latest retcon about her and Pietro not being Magneto’s kids after all, or even mutants. And I generally have no interest in reading anything Avengers and pretty much only read X-Franchise related stuff lol, so, I don’t have the faintest clue what she’s up to at the moment.

[harrelltut]

卍 JEHOVAH Occult Witness Me [ME = U.S. Michael Harrell = TUT = JAH] from Egypt [JE = JESUS] since Mama Hathor [MH = Queen Hatshepsut] Ancestrally [HA = HARRELL] Predicted My HIGHLY Sophisticated Underworld Nubian [SUN] RISE on Our NEW… West Coast of California [CA] as I Linguistically Articulate [L.A.] My HIGHLY Complex Cosmic Algorithmic [CA] Computation [Compton] Writes of Biblically Black [Ancient] Egyptian [BAE = COSMIC] ATLANTEAN [CA] Hieroglyphic Birthrights on Egyptian HARRELLTV® 卍

[tepkunset]

Rawhide Kid: Slap Leather was surprising (in both good and bad ways)

The Western Genre and I have never mixed, save with a very few exceptions. That statement should come to no surprise, considering I’m an Indigenous person and Westerns are typically nothing but power fantasies for American white male colonialists. I was browsing through Comixology previews of 1960′s Rawhide Kid as part of a thing I’m very slowly working on, taking about Marvel Comics history with Native characters... and realized I actually kind of liked the sheer goofiness. However, the racism is so strong it’s hard to enjoy anything past it, which is why I decided to try a modern take on the character, to see if it was maybe the same goofy but at least with less racism. Thus, to no one’s more surprise than my own, I started to read Rawhide Kid: Slap Leather. And it is. It is very goofy and exaggerated and extremely campy.

TL;DR Synopsis:

Your typical gang rides into a small town and starts causing all kinds of trouble for the sheriff, much to the disappointment of his son who has extravagant notions about what a good Wild West Hero should be. Cue the Rawhide Kid who offers himself up as temporary deputy, because he might as well save the day while he’s passing through. Because he’s the best he is at what he does, and he probably should’ve copyrighted that while he had the chance.

Of note: I have no idea why this comic is marked explicit. There is no sexual content, and there is no violence beyond what you see in pretty much any Wolverine-centric comic… Which pisses me off, because the only conclusion I’m left to make is it’s because he is very openly gay. So if you’re concerned with that warning, don’t be.

The Good:

The biggest takeaway from this series is the way it plays up genre tropes to the extreme… then defies expectations by turning them on their heads. My favourite example of this is in the last issue when the Kid asks the Mayor to gather up everyone in the town, and the townspeople grumble about him going to ask them to ban together against the gang… only for the Kid to tell them to get the fuck out so he can do his job without them in the way. 

There is also a lot of lampshading. The Rawhide Kid himself is no exception this, with characters often commenting on how he’s “not what you’d expect from a gunfighter.” I thought this was a cute nod to the fact that the Western Genre is so often just as straightwashed, for lack of a better term, as much as it is whitewashed from actual history. Cowboys be gay, ya’ll, and the Kid doesn’t give a fuck if people think he’s ‘unmanly,’ because he’s the best gunfighter around and if anyone has an issue they can take it up with him. (But hold this thought, because there are things to be said about this in The Bad section as well.)

The goofiness is well complimented with moments of solemnity that keeps the series grounded. What’s more is I did not experience tonal whiplash like you sometimes do with series that bounce between these two opposite moods; the transitions between them flow quite naturally, with only a few exceptions of misplaced comments. The heaviest case of seriousness is easily the flashback of the Kid as an actual kid: We see a group of other children tie him to a tree and beat on him, and when he calls to his father for him, his father instead joins in the assault and pejorative name-calling, saying he has to fight his own fights. It colours the whole series with why the hell he’s so concerned with this random father and son, and I suppose why he learned to fight. Because sometimes there are homophobes that need punching.

Red Duck: Well ain’t this some hen party we got goin’ on here. Next thing ya’ll be swappin’ recipes an’ playin’ with dolls. You ain’t nuthin’ but a big sissy! Har! Har! Har!

(Rawhide Kid punches him in the face with a ‘Klop!’)

Duck: You broke muh nose! You broke muh nose!

Rawhide: I warned you about name-calling!

The fight scenes are fun and sometimes played for laughs, which is a good way to go when you have a hero whose stock in trade is being the best around, rather than any genuine risk of harm—this is also something that made for a twist I admit I was taken back by in the end.

The art works very well for the genre; it’s scratchy yet clean. I also want to give a special shout-out to the women being drawn with the same scratchiness as the men, which is not something you can always say in fear of them not looking like anime models. But no, they look just as in place as all the men.

The humour is hit and miss, but I mostly found it entertaining. The fact that cheesy humour has entered something of a renaissance works in its favour.

I’m going to finish this section with my favourite part of this series… Young kids often annoy me in comic books. They’re written as props or plot devices rather than actual characters. Children are not objects or extensions of their parents / guardians. They are people. Being young doesn’t make them not people. However, in some ways this series is centred around Toby just as much as it is the Rawhide Kid, and Toby is not a prop. He is a fully used character with his own story arc and development. He also reads like an actual kid, too, with the way his mind works. I really enjoyed this and found it to be the most refreshing thing in the whole story.

The Bad

While I don’t think there was any malicious intent with the Rawhide Kid’s gayness, there are faults that I’m going to attribute to plain old fashion heteronormative ignorance. The Rawhide Kid is depicted with a lot of stereotypical qualities, and that in itself is not a problem. Some gay men are what is considered effeminate and so what? Fuck gender norms and live your damn life. I’m a walking lesbian stereotype some days myself. The problem is as far as I’m aware, this writer is not gay himself, and so while I think I get what he was going for, there are times when the Kid comes off as a gay caricature rather than feeling real, you know? The biggest flaw is the way the Kid talks. He talks like a modern day stereotypical gay man, and it really takes you out of the setting. I assume this is because the writer didn’t know how to write him any other way. Like I said, heteronormative ignorance. I’ve seen way more insulting things in Deadpool, where I really have read him being attracted to men as the punchline before.

The racism is nothing compared to the 60’s comic, but boy howdy is it there. You’ve got some typical native slurs, talk about indian dream interpretations and magic, there’s one side character named Thundercloud who is only there to be a joke that I won’t even start on… There’s Catastrophe Jen, who is going to get her own section… And some of it is just plain weird, too. There are these random two Chinese ninjas? No, I’m serious. (I guess they’re no more out of place as the random French Zorro looking fucker.)

I didn’t bother fact-checking everything, but there were some things that I am quite suspicious about historical accuracy. And honestly, it wouldn’t bother me so much if it wasn’t for the fact that in the same way as how the Kid talks, it does take you out of the setting.

The Ugly

Catastrophe Jen... where do I begin.

There is a character in this series by the name of Catastrophe Jen, and when she is first introduced, I was so on board.

Catastrophe Jen: What if it’s me that gets him?

Cisco Pike: What’d I just say, Jen?

Jen: You said, “for the man who kills the Rawhide Kid.” I’m a girl.

Red Duck: Not from what I heard! Haw! Haw! Haw!

(Jen throws a knife and it hits Duck’s leg with a ‘thuk!’)

Cisco: Uhhhhhhh... Okay, sixty if Catastrophe Jen gets him.

We got ourselves a beautiful butch Black cowgirl who outguns the men around her... and everything goes very downhill fast. The running joke with Jen is that she keeps killing all of Cisco’s men. She also has lines like “okay, penis-owner” and wanting to rape women. She’s also insulted not just by the other villains but the Kid, the protagonist himself, calling her “horribly butch” because for a man who claims to have taste, apparently he didn’t drink his Respect Butches juice… Jen is probably the biggest insult in this series. It’s racist and I would argue even more homophobic than Rawhide Kid; imagine if he was portrayed as a killer predator like this, walking around killing women and raping men.

In the end, Jen is shown attending the sheriff’s wedding with a girlfriend and deputy badge, suggesting she takes over the job now that the Rawhide Kid is leaving. Under any other circumstances I would call this cute, but you can’t spend a whole series writing a character like this and then expecting me to go “aww.” It doesn’t work like that.

Catastrophe Jen could have been a really cool, but instead, we have this. Now, fortunately she is still only minor character, and so I was able to move past her, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t unnerve the hell out of me.

Ya'll Take'r Easy Now

In the end, I would genuinely love to see another miniseries with Rawhide Kid written by someone who has personal investment and experience, and who you can trust to handle stereotypes well. I think the best thing that could happen to the Rawhide Kid is falling into the hands of a gay writer. I would also trust there’d be no Catastrophe Jen characters. There is potential still there!

As far as this series goes, despite the many problems I did overall mostly enjoy it, to be honest. At least enough that I’m going to check out The Sensational Seven as well.

[megatentious]

My lengthy defense of the most hated Persona game

Here’s my grand defense for the most hated game in the series: Persona 1, AKA Revelations: Persona. I know it’s too late to try and rehabilitate the game’s reputation on the internet, but I’m hoping that by rambling in modestly structured form for a bit, at least some folks might be able to look at Persona with a fresh perspective. It would be cool if everyone could try to understand what the game did so well and why it resonated so strongly with me and 2 or so other people. If you are the kind of person that thinks games age and become archaic, then I probably don’t have any hope of reaching you, but still, try to put yourself in the right mindset and approach the game on its own terms, and maybe you’ll discover something quite special.

So, Persona. Persona does very interesting things with choice. As the first Megaten rpg released in America, the negotiation system was a revelation (har har), providing the choice to talk your way out of battles and into rewards is a natural D&D element that never got a foothold in countless videogame conversions of the game, and in the first Persona these elements are at their peak. With every demon having four moods, four series of animation and four sets of voiced sound effects, the expanded options really let you get into the headspace of the demons you’re conversing with, unlike traditional SMT’s more spare binary system. Getting into the thick of things with complex sets of reactions (Joy + Interest, that’s what’s up) makes for a fun simulation.

The theme of choice is also really built into the game’s fabric, it’s the reason why in old usenet postings, Persona was recommended to folks who were fans of Gold Box games, during a time when RPG labels were more porous and that sneaky “J” hadn’t yet latched itself omnipresently to the term. Choice here also extends to the fifth character in your party, a friendly way to promote replay value without new game plus, and certain choices locking you out of giant chunks of the game, an unfriendly way of getting you through the game again. In a world though where developers are desperate to ensure that gamers experience all content (so many buzzwords!), the chutzpah of Persona being willing to lock you out of huge swathes of the game is something I actually admire.

It’s easy to underestimate the impact of the modern day setting in a post Persona 3/TWEWY/Alpha Protocol world, but dungeons that were hospitals and police stations and high school students snarling “EAT THIS” with MIGs in pitched street battles felt revelatory. Exploring the comically low-rent polygonal city (is this another reference to the abstracted icons of SMT1 and 2 world maps?) was actually fun, as ridiculous as waiting for traffic to pass might seem. There are also many complaints about the first person perspective dungeons, even though the rest of the game is third person, but the setting variety is nice and many of the wall patterns are quite evocative (Deva Yuga looks like Persepolis!)

The game also does PSX-era philosophizing in a tasteful and generally thoughtful way, while contemporaries were drawing from Evangelion, Persona looked to Zhuangzi and Jung. Not very high-falutin, true, but at least middle brow enough such that my 14 year old Sophie’s World reading self was entranced. The game has something neat to say about loneliness and identity and the way we construct the world around ourselves (all hinted at in the moody intro. The story is very nice and very Kaneko, even if he’s overestimating the literary quality in this interview, I’m very fond of it and it is my franchise favorite.

Here’s where I alienate the remaining people who might have been on board with me so far: if you ignore the loss of the Snow Queen Quest, a 20 hour alternate version of the story that takes place in a series of SMT:If... like towers, Revelations: Persona is actually the superior game. “Lunarvale,” a hodgepodge of America and Japan cobbled together by localizers attempting to mask the game’s origins, is actually more weird and interesting than the Mikage-cho that appears in Persona PSP. This bizarre mashup, combined with a nonsense translation attempt, somehow manages to better fit the lurid dreamscape vibe the original developers were going for. I can’t undersell how one-of-a-kind and wonderfully unsettling the game’s atmosphere is in the PSX version, and this is helped along of course by the sound.

Here are excerpts from some things I wrote on the music in this game:

Revelations: Persona has the best soundtrack in the franchise, possibly the best soundtrack ever made. In raw quantitative terms it's ridiculous, 113 songs and 3 hours of music without being looped, and all without doing Persona 2's trick of repeated (but still awesome!) remixes. Two majorly sweet leitmotifs for the two major quests, employed creatively and thoughtfully, four fantastic composers on four discs, cohesive and thematically coherent when by all rights it should feel disjointed as fuck, this is a generous OST!

Hidehito Aoki (R.I.P.) composed the dungeon music, which is exquisite. Lengthy songs that are moody, elegant, just plain beautiful and get you PUMPED! The iconic Deva Yuga Monochrome: School Revisited Dream-like, synthy, catchy, beautiful, quintessential Persona sound. Pandora's Den (Deepmost Area): The climax at 1:12! Ice Castle/Black Snow The twists and turns in this one, so effing good. Sebek Music, Karma Palace 90's music is the best!!! Misaki Okibe's range is ridiculous, she composed some of the most memorable, interesting tracks in the whole game. Reverse Dream World: You think you have this song figured out in the first few seconds, but stick around to see where it suddenly veers off to around :30, hilarious and awesome. Theme of Nemurin's Love: The intro! The power of a simple lovely melody, a little Uematsu-esque. Augustia's Wood: The save music, so memorable, I love the grumbling. City 2 Accident: Do you remember wandering the streets in the town, disoriented, listening to this gorgeousness, thinking about how Lunarvale suddenly seemed so scary, like an unsettling dream? Bar Attacked by Harem Queen: A bit of jazzy beauty. And most important of all of course, Misaki Okibe is the composer of the Pharmacy Music, featuring vocals by one Hidehito Aoki of all people. Satomi Tadashi Drugstore Song In our heads forever, teaching us about item use since 1996. 

More alienating for readers who have gotten this far: the “whitewashing” character designs were all improvements, Kazuma Kaneko redrew everything himself and it’s easy to tell that a lot of thought was put into the redesigns. Finally, Mark is also >>>> Masao, everyone’s always yelling about the jive-talking but to me he came across as quite smart and savvy. I dunno, maybe this is just a Flavor of Love/Outsourced minorities just wanna see themselves effect operating here, leave me alone you guys! So yes, the franchise’s current fanbase might not be fond of them, but the cast is comprised of characters that are meant to be iconic and not friends you wish you had in real life, a cast that, FFVI-like, is meant to evoke broader themes and not follow the typical arcs of many RPGs these days. Check out the classiness of Yuki’s design, and allow me to quote some more stuff on how Tsuchiya, master of the character theme, nails it for each party member.

The sign of a good character theme is when you can extrapolate from instrument choice and melody to personality. Here Tsuchiya is the man, no one does it better this side of Uematsu. I hear these songs and I've got a perfect picture in my mind of each cast member. It's what I think of when I think of "videogame music" ha, here are my personal favorites, I could listen to these endlessly. Mary/Maki: Cheerful, just a hint of melancholy in the notes, love that slap bass. Yuki: Starts a bit slow, but soon we learn that Yuki's cool but determined. Alana: The song tells me she's brassy, energetic, fun. Chris/Reiji: Dangerous, exciting, a bad-ass delinquent. Ellen/Elly: Classy, elegant, confident.

Some also rag on the dungeon design, but it seems unfair to expect centerpiece labyrinths along the lines of Strange Journey or Etrian Odyssey in a game going for something completely different. Nevertheless, you’ve got tricky mazes with dead ends that test resource allocation skills and provide a sense of accomplishment. Encounters are tough and require thought, careful consideration of when to flee and negotiate is imperative for dungeon survival. This is something that gets lost a bit in the PSP remake as the encounter rate is increased but battles are a bit easier. Exploiting elemental weaknesses isn’t as elegant as in later games, but with a ludicrously high 14 damage types breadth supersedes depth. And there’s even a positioning system to consider that the developers decided to drop from later games rather than refine. In the end, surviving the dungeon and beating the boss is an RPG staple that just plain works, although yes you will probably grit your teeth at some of the loading times.

And finally, you don’t have to take my random word for it. Parish really liked it too! How’s that for an appeal to authority?

For series buffs, it’s fun to trace this game’s historical lineage, as one of the earlier spinoffs of Shin Megami Tensei, it's easy to spot the mainline series influence: the occultism of the opening ritual, the hospital as first dungeon, the first person perspective for dungeon travel, BLUE POINTER MAN, and the omnipresent danger of demons in town and dungeon alike. Revelations: Persona is drawing from a rich and storied history, but manages to recast SMT traditions in interesting new directions. Again, the atmosphere is really unbelievable and something I haven’t come across in other games. It’s more than a simple curiosity and it doesn’t deserve dumb dismissal or sneering derision for its flaws. Revelations: Persona is a real marvel, modern games ought to draw more inspiration from its lessons, and the game belongs in the RPG canon, there I said it!