#From the Family of Reptiles

[thinkingimages]

Still from

A House for Us: The Island

The second of a two-part TV special directed by Wim Wenders for acclaimed series A House For Us. Ute's family attempt to further understand her strange behaviour and reptile obsession.

26 mins  Not rated

Director: Wim Wenders

[shihlun]

Wim Wenders

- A House for Us: From the Family of Reptiles / The Island

1974

[fatehbaz]

patience being tested. being forced by a bizarre unfortunate situation to adhere to university requirement technicality by taking this simple basic elementary "introduction to environmental history" class.

this class is from facilitators/program which do, like, "history of the American frontier" or "history of fishing and hunting" and still basically subscribe to that old-school twentieth-century idealization and celebration of characters like Teddy Roosevelt and reverence for a mythical arc-of-history-bent-towards-justice narrative of the often-clumsy but ultimately-benevolent US federal government and its mission to "save nature" through the miracle of "sustained yield," while heroic federal land management agencies and "heritage" institutions lead to way, staffed by exceptional individuals (appeals to nostalgia for the frontier and an imagined landscape of the American West; ego-stroking appeals to flattering self-image that center the environmentalist or academic). where they invoke, y'know, ideas like "ecology is important because don't you enjoy cross-country skiing in The Woods with your niece and nephew? don't you like hunting and fishing?" which makes it feel like a time capsule of appeals and discourses from the 1970s. and it invokes concept of "untouched wilderness" (while eliding scale of historical Indigenous environmental relationships and current ongoing colonial violence/extractivism). but just ever-so-slightly updated with a little bit of chic twenty-first-century flair like a superficial land acknowledgement or a reference to "labor histories" or "history from below," which is extra aggravating when the old ideologies/institutions are still in power but they're muddying the water and diluting the language/frameworks (it's been strange, watching words like "multispecies" and "Anthropocene" over the years slowly but surely show-up on the posters, fliers, course descriptions, by now even appearing adjacent to the agri-business and resource extraction feeder programs, like a recuperation or appropriation.) even from a humanities angle, it's still, they're talking at me like "You probably didn't know this, but environmental history is actually pretty entangled with political and social events. In fact, we can synthesize sources and glean environmental info from wacky places like workers' rolls in factories, ship's logs, and poetry from the era." and i'm nodding like YEP.

the first homework assignment is respond to this: "Define and describe 'the Anthropocene'. Do you think 'the Anthropocene' is a useful concept? Why or why not?" Respond in 300 words.

so for fun, right now in class, going to see how fast i can pull up discussion of Anthropocene-as-concept solely from my old posts on this microblogging site.

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ok, found some

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I think that the danger in any universal narrative or epoch or principle is exactly that it can itself become a colonizing force. [...] I’m suspicious of the Anthropocene as concept for the very reason that it subsumes so many peoples, nations, histories, geographies, political orders. For that reason, I think ideas like the Anthropocene can be a useful short-hand for a cluster of tangible things going on with the Earth at the moment, but we have to be very careful about how fluid and dynamic ideas become concretized into hegemonic principles in the hands of researchers, policymakers, and politicians. There’s so much diversity in histories and experiences and environmental realities even between relatively linked geographies here in Canada [...]. Imagine what happens when we try to do that on a global scale - and a lot of euro-western Anthropocene, climate change and resilience research risks doing that - eliding local specificities and appropriating knowledge to serve a broader euro-western narrative without attending to the inherent colonial and imperial realities of science and policy processes, or even attending to the ways that colonial capitalist expansion has created these environmental crises to begin with. While we, as a collective humanity, are struggling with the realities of the Anthropocene, it is dangerous to erase the specific histories, power-relations, political orders that created the crisis to begin with. So, I’m glad that a robust critique of the Anthropocene as a concept is emerging.

Text by: Words of Zoe Todd, as interviewed and transcribed by Caroline Picard. “The Future is Elastic (But it Depends): An Interview with Zoe Todd.” 23 August 2016.

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The Great Acceleration is the latest in a series of human-driven planetary changes that constitute what a rising chorus of scientists, social scientists, and humanists have labeled the Anthropocene - a new Age of Humans. [...] But what the Anthropocene label masks, and what the litany of graphs documenting the Great Acceleration hide, is a history of racial oppression and violence, along with wealth inequality, that has built and sustained engines of economic growth and consumption over the last four centuries. [...] The plantation, Sidney Mintz long ago observed, was a “synthesis of field and factory,” an agro-industrial system of enterprise [...]. Plantation legacies, along with accompanying strategies of survival and resistance, dwell in the racialized geographies of the United States’ and Brazil’s prison systems. They surface in the inequitable toxic burdens experienced by impoverished communities of color in places like Cancer Alley, an industrial corridor of petrochemical plants running along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, where cotton was once king. And they appear in patterns of foreign direct investment and debt servitude that structure many land deals in the Caribbean, Brazil, and sub-Saharan Africa [...]. [C]limatologists and global change scientists from the University of London, propose instead 1610 as a date for the golden spike of the Anthropocene. The date marked a detectable global dip in carbon dioxide concentrations, precipitated, they argue, by the death of nearly 50 million indigenous human inhabitants [...]. The degradation of soils in the tobacco and cotton-growing regions in the American South, or in the sugarcane growing fields of many Caribbean islands, for example, was a consequence of an economic and social system that inflicted violence upon the land and the people enslaved to work it. Such violent histories are not so readily evident in genealogies that date the Anthropocene’s emergence to the Neolithic Revolution 12,000 years ago, the onset of Europe’s industrial revolution circa 1800, or the Trinity nuclear test of 1945. Sugarcane plantations were already prevalent throughout the Mediterranean basin during the late middle ages. But it was during the early modern era, and specifically in the Caribbean, where the intersection of emerging proto-capitalist economic models based on migratory forced labor (first indentured servitude, and later slavery), intensive land usage, globalized commerce, and colonial regimes sustained on the basis of relentless racialized violence, gave rise to the transformative models of plantations that reshaped the lives and livelihoods of human and non-human beings on a planetary scale. [...] We might, following the lead of science studies scholar Donna Haraway and anthropologist Anna Tsing, more aptly designate this era the Plantationocene. [...] It is also an invitation to see, in the words of geographer Laura Pulido, “the Anthropocene as a racial process,” one that has and will continue to produce “racially uneven vulnerability and death." [...] And how have such material transformations sustained global flows of knowledge and capital that continue to reproduce the plantation in enduring ways?

Text by: Sophie Sapp Moore, Monique Allewaert, Pablo F. Gomez, and Gregg Mitman. "Plantation Legacies." Edge Effects. 22 January 2019. Updated 15 May 2021. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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Geologists and other scientists will fight over [the definition of the beginning start-date of the Anthropocene] in scientific language, seeking traces of carbon dioxide that index the worst offenses of European empire which rent and violated the flesh, bodies, and governance structures of Indigenous and other sovereign peoples in the name of gold, lumber, trade, land, and power. [...] The stories we tell about the origins of the Anthropocene implicate how we understand the relations we have with our surrounds. In other words, the naming of the Anthropocene epoch and its start date have implications not just for how we understand the world, but this understanding will have material consequences, consequences that affect body and land.

Text by: Heather Davis and Zoe Todd. On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene. ACME An International Journal for Critical Geographies. December 2017. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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From Aime and Suzanne Cesaire, C. L. R. James, Claudia Jones, Eduoard Glissant, through Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, and so many others, critical anticolonial and race theory has been written from the specific histories that marked the Black Atlantic. [...] Glissant also reminds us, secondly, of how cunning the absorptive powers of [...] liberal capitalism are - how quickly specific relations are remade as relations-erasing universal abstractions. [...] This absorptive, relations-erasing universalism is especially apparent in some contemporary discourses of […] liberalism and climate collapse - what some call the Anthropocene - especially those that anchor the crisis in a general Human calamity which, as Sylvia Wynter has noted, is merely the name of an overdetermined and specific [White] European man. […] [T]he condition of creating this new common European world was the destruction of a multitude of existing black and brown worlds. The tsunami of colonialism was not seen as affecting humanity, but [...] these specific people. They were specific - what happened to them may have been necessary, regrettable, intentional, accidental - but it is always them. It is only when these ancestral histories became present for some, for those who had long benefitted from the dispossession [...], that suddenly the problem is all of us, as human catastrophe.

Text by: Elizabeth Povinelli. “The Ancestral Present of Oceanic Illusions: Connected and Differentiated in Late Toxic Liberalism.” e-flux Journal Issue #112. October 2020.

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The narrative arc [of White "liberal humanism"] [...] is often told as a kind of European coming-of-age story. […] The Anthropocene discourse follows the same coming-of-age [...] script, searching for a material origin story that would explain the newly identified trajectory of the Anthropos […]. Sylvia Wynter, W.E.B. DuBois, and Achille Mbembe all showed how that genealogy of [White subjecthood] was [...] articulated through sixteenth- through nineteenth-century [historiographies and discourses] in the context of colonialism, [...] as well as forming the material praxis of their rearrangement (through mining, ecological rearrangements and extractions, and forms of geologic displacements such as plantations, dams, fertilizers, crops, and introduction of “alien” animals). […] As Wynter (2000) commented, “The degradation of concrete humans, that was/is the price of empire, of the kind of [Eurocentric epistemology] that underlies it” (154).

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. “The Inhumanities.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Volume 11, Issue 3. November 2020.

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As Yarimar Bonilla suggests in regard to post-Irma-and-Maria Puerto Rico, “vulnerability is not simply a product of natural conditions; it is a political state and a colonial condition.” Many in the Caribbean therefore speak about the coloniality of disaster, and the unnaturalness of these “natural” disasters [...]. Others describe this temporality by shifting [...] toward an idea of the Plantationocene [...]. As Moore and her colleagues write, “Plantation worlds, both past and present, offer a powerful reminder that environmental problems cannot be decoupled from histories of colonialism, capitalism, and racism that have made some human beings more vulnerable [...].” [W]e see that contemporary uneven socioecologies associated with the rise of the industrial world ["the Anthropocene"] are based [...] also on the racialized denial and foreshortening of life for the sacrificial majority of black, brown, and Indigenous people and their relegation to the “sacrifice zones” of extractive industry. [...] [A]ny appropriate response to the contemporary climate emergency must first appreciate its foundations in the past history of the violent, coercive, transatlantic system of plantation slavery; in the present global uneven development, antiblackness, and border regimes that shape human vulnerability [...] that continues to influence who has access to resources, safety, and preferable ecologies [...] and who will be relegated to the “plantation archipelagoes” (as Sylvia Wynter called them) [...].

Text by: Mimi Sheller. “Thinking Beyond Coloniality: Toward Radical Caribbean Futures.” Small Axe (2021), 25 (2 (65)), pages 169-170. Published 1 July 2021. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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Indigenous genocide and removal from land and enslavement are prerequisites for power becoming operationalized in premodernity [...]; it was/is a means to operationalize extraction (therefore race should be considered as foundational rather than as periphery to the production of those structures and of global space). [...] Wynter suggests that we […] consider 1452 as the beginning of the New World, as African slaves are put to work on the first plantations on the Portuguese island of Madeira, initiating the “sugar-slave” complex - a massive replantation of ecologies and forced relocation of people […]. Wynter argues that the invention of the figure of Man in 1492 as the Portuguese [and Spanish] travel to the Americas instigates at the same time “a refiguring of humanness” in the idea of race. [...] The natal moment of the 1800 Industrial Revolution, […] [apparently] locates Anthropocene origination in […] the "new" metabolisms of technology and matter enabled by the combination of fossil fuels, new engines, and the world as market. […] The racialization of epistemologies of life and nonlife is important to note here […]. While [this industrialization in the nineteenth century] […] undoubtedly transformed the atmosphere with […] coal, the creation of another kind of weather had already established its salient forms in the mine and on the plantation. Paying attention to the prehistory of capital and its bodily labor, both within coal cultures and on plantations that literally put “sugar in the bowl” (as Nina Simone sings) […]. The new modes of material accumulation and production in the Industrial Revolution are relational to and dependent on their preproductive forms in slavery […]. In 1833, Parliament finally abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, and the taxpayer payout of £20 million in “compensation” [paid by the government to slave owners for their lost "property"] built the material, geophysical (railways, mines, factories), and imperial infrastructures of Britain and its colonial enterprises and empire. [...] A significant proportion of funds were invested in the railway system connecting London and Birmingham (home of cotton production and […] manufacturing for plantations), Cambridge and Oxford, and Wales and the Midlands (for coal). Insurance companies flourished [...]. The slave-sugar-coal nexus both substantially enriched Britain and made it possible for it to transition into a colonial industrialized power […]. The slave trade […] fashioned the economic conditions (and institutions, such as the insurance and finance industries) for industrialization.

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. "White Utopia/Black Inferno: Life on a Geologic Spike". e-flux Journal Issue #97. February 2019. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

[duskythesomething]

I MAY... HAVE BROUGHT HOME A NEW CHILD..........

this is Snickers Pie the One-eyed Guy! poor lad was so on sale it was ridiculous and i couldn't help it, so Cheesecake Banana Snake gets a new sibling.

[scalproie]

[whatudottu]

Presently going insane rn:

Anyway let me talk about the one question that I have been contemplating ever since I began rotating petrosapiens in my mind. How the fuck do babies?

If you caught the reblog before this post, you might have noticed that a post about fat in aliens brought me to think about petrosapien fat, which contradicts a lot of what I've already established for them being an exoskeletal species, let alone being a hard sell in the sci-fantasy of rock crystal people of canon. Turning to one of my two animal inspirations of petrosapiens - bugs and more specifically in this case insects - I found out that insects can't build up fat, not in the way mammals or reptiles can, BUT they store the most of it in a very significant stage;

Larvae!

Then it fucking hit me, I already made some early headcanons about child development in petrosapiens (though I can't remember if I posted them or had a post ready to send) where they were already in a metamorphosing stage, though the responsibility fell solely to the layer who would use crystallokinesis to feed an 'egg'. I didn't fully like the idea though mostly in retrospect, because it felt strange in the 'pulled out of my ass' kinda way, a method of child rearing that felt more obligated to use crystallokinesis as a primary source for feeding to sorta justify at the time the inherent power petrosapiens have towards crystallokinesis.

Instead, between then and now I fully connected the idea that crystallokinesis is less of a power and more of an extension of a petrosapien's nervous system, compression of quartz through the use of a more electrical based nerve network that happens to not distinguish between person crystals and the similar crystalline structures of Petropia. With this in mind and the new idea that petrosapiens have larvae, wouldn't it be so cool if the larvae had the typical Earth-like electrochemical nervous system of humans (or I suppose bugs here) that adapts to an electrical focused nervous system through the process of metamorphosis? Where the larvae creates it's petrosapien crystal skin by building a chrysalis and melting within it to create their new body?

Unlike my old headcanon where the layer had to remain with the egg and constantly feeding them with crystallokinesis, this larvae version can feed itself when provided and so long as the chrysalis is well protected, the moment metamorphosis stage takes place the parent(s) can have momentary reprieve from child rearing and better prepare themselves for the toddler/adolescent stage for their child. The little grub probably doesn't even eat crystals in the early stages of their larvaehood since eating crystals initially marks as the materials for chrysalis building before it becomes a nutritional food source. Instead the little grub might be feed plants and potentially animal products in order for it to inherit and develop the chemicals required to build a crystallovorous stomach and the acids used to break silica down into digestible nutrition.

That does mean that early child rearing is a little bit more functionally deadly towards the very crystalline parents, who have to legitimately watch so that their fingers aren't bitten off, but holding the little grub is easy when it's covered in silicone membrane. The larvae at this stage is a little bit more resistant to any crystallovorous plant secretions due to the polymers of it's membrane, as well as the higher diversity of oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon in it's body it has in comparison to adults or adolescents who've undergone metamorphosis, their innards becoming a more uniform silicone and their skin being the crystalline silicon many crystallovorous stomachs have adapted to eat.

It also means that the shape of a grub is also considered to be cute to a petrosapien. Things from caterpillars to maggots look so much more charming to a petrosapien's eyes that back on Petropia there would be a large proportion of pet owners having what would considered on Earth to have bugs for pets. In fact, a rather common form of pet Petrosapiens might have would be a large millipede/centipede like animal that would be the size approximate of a feather boa and often held that way too, because while they do not undergo metamorphosis, they look like a larval grub well into adulthood and are considered to be very cute for it. Pet owners with these pets who are also parents love to see their little larvae and their 'dog' getting along and would love telling their adolescent all the cute stories of the little grubs curled up against each other. Petrosapiens in the age of the Surface Craze might have had the opportunity to get a few baby pictures like that, and it would be considered very cute unless you were a human afraid of bugs or not personally a fan.

Petrosapiens on Earth might see the miniature bugs and explode with cuteness overload, others might fuck around and find out that they can make human-petrosapien hybrids Makarat you chupacabra you're lucky petrosapien kids aren't born with crystals pay child support to your human wife who birthed a grub-!

And that's the post send tweet-

[emile-hides]

Again, I don’t know what’s happening in my brain, but I’m sorting all the Koopas by Shell Type (both canon and headcanon for diversity sake) and I’ve decided these guys are all part of the same genus

[gelastocoridae]

Convergent evolution does not relatedness make. But! If you know what to look for beyond skin deep a lot of morphological traits, especially in combination, can be great indicators (helpful in IDing species that outwardly look the same) of their place in the family tree!

E.g.

The shape of the angular process of a mammal jaw bone tells you if it's a marsupial without fail. (Between that and the teeth, you can spot a piece of opossum skull from miles away in a pile of countless other bones. I sure have.)

The shape of auditory bulbs in the skull helps tell orders of Carnívora apart.

The shape of teeth and the number of toes help tell groups of ungulates apart.

The cusps of teeth, number of teeth, and spacing of teeth will help categorize entire Genuses, Families and Orders!

The pre-maxilla and nasal opening in the skull tells you if it's a bat. Gotta echolocate somehow.

Beak and foot shape combined, or posture, voice, or diet - while not always rules - really do help you tell families of birds apart! Falcons have less powerful talons and longer toes than other raptors, plus a notched beak, and often hold their food in one foot like it's a candy bar a parrot would. The feet will tell you if it's related to a hummingbird and not a swallow (*cough* swifts *cough*). From a distance a dove on the ground is definitely a dove, a quail/gamebird is definitely a quail/gamebird. A corvid definitely sounds like a corvid (especially as babies being fed), including jays.

The gut type and incisor teeth will tell a pig relative from another "hooved" animal (quotations bc elephant/rhino/hippo feet are hooves too).

All sharks lack a swim bladder; they stay afloat with a huge fatty liver instead.

All salmon/trout have a tiny dorsal lobe/boneless fin in some way. (Plus different "fish" groups can be distinguished by scale type, mouth placement, fin and tail shape/placement, etc)

Does it produce milk from a mammary gland? It's a mammal. Does this mammal lay eggs? Cool technically so do the rest of us if you wanna get into it but also congrats now you know it's an echidna/platypus.

Does it have a cell wall? Yes. Does it have chloroplasts and make its own food? No. It's a fungus.

When it is a cluster of cells just developing, is it bilaterally symmetric? No? Wait, yes and then no? Ok that's a starfish.

Does it form its butt hole before its mouth hole or the other way around? Well that's what makes us more similar to starfish and sea anemones than to octopi, and arthropods

And that's just for starters! You start with the general traits and narrow it down. That's how it works without genetically sequencing every single thing on the planet.

That rabbit/hare post is messing me up. I’d thought they were synonyms. Their development and social behavior are all different. They can’t even interbreed. They don’t have the same number of chromosomes. Dogs, wolves, jackals, and coyotes can mate with each other and have fertile offspring but rabbits and hares cant even make infertile ones bc they just die in the womb. Wack.

[eye-of-yelough]

hmm. scorpius farscape coded half qunari shadow dragon rook…

[chokulit]

I have been asked to highlight another campaign from someone who reached out to me. I'll keep it brief: 6 people trapped in Gaza need money to evacuate.

Their campaign has been up since April and they STILL have not raised enough money.

As of now, they are at €62,492/70,000, less than €8,000 away from their goal.

If you donate, you can message me to draw a character of your choice: x

I will post updates when I can.

tags under the cut (dm to remove tag):

@vakarians-babe @sar-soor @plomegranate @nabulsi @sayruq

@palipunk-blog @communistkenobi @queerstudiesnatural  @bluebellsinthedells @rizzyluke

@kordeliiius @self-hating-zionist  @raelyn-dreams @unfortunatelyuncreative @licencetokrill-blog

@jezebelgoldstone @ramelcandy @labutansa @sammywo  @autistwizard

@tortiefrancis @sparklinpixiedust @revcuse @golvio @leftismsideblog

@star-and-space-ace @rainbowywitch @marscodes @annoyingloudmicrowavecultist @boyvander the-bastard-king

@ammonitetheseaserpent @girlinafairytale  @timetravellingkitty @appsa @applejupiter

@brutaliakhoa @malcriada @retvolution @deansmultitudes @devilofthepit

@heritageposts @wellwaterhysteria @dykesbat @gorbling  @half-empty-orbitals

@seasnipper @90-ghost @el-shab-hussein @fairuzfan @neptunerings

@marnota @flower-tea-fairies @tsaricides @riding-with-the-wild-hunt @vivisection-gf

@belleandsaintsebastian @ear-motif @animentality @raelyn-dreams @troythecatfish

@violetlyra @the-bastard-king @tamaytka @northgazaupdates2  @skatehan

@awetistic-things @nightowlssleep @baby-girl-aaron-dessner @friendshapedplant

@mangocheesecakes  @commissions4aid-international @rwuffles @mogai-sunflowers 

@a-shade-of-blue @ibtisams @paper-mario-wiki @dlxxv-vetted-donations @writerqueenofjewels

@the-ballerina-battle @khanger @maoistyuri @acepumpkinpatrick @thetownwecallhome

@aria-ashryver  @bat-luun @staretes @yokohama-crackhouse @omiteo777 

@rhubarbspring @schoolhater @pcktknife @transmutationist @sawasawako

@aristotels @watermotif @stuckinapril @mavigator @lacecap

@deepspaceboytoy @kibumkim @socalchops @chilewithcarnage @ghelgheli

@swagvo1d  @himejoshikaoru @rooh-tawaka-blog @deathlonging @briarhips

@mahoushojoe @mazzikah @bixlasagna @anetteva @timetravellingkitty

@battleofthegarys @nillabean @fromjannah  @ankle-beez @spindlesx

@squidie-tittie @shiskabubble @oursapphirestars @fitzfunnymoments @jonpertwee 

@buttercuparry @bloglikeanegyptian @visoremi  @olovelymoon-read-pinned-post @pinkhit-s

@purple-splattered-soul @papasmoke @one-time-i-dreamt  @operationladybug @undertastic-dork

@imjustheretotrytohelp @isa-ah @yesterdaysprint @tamarrud @themazziah

@resourcesmasterposts @raccoon-in-a-hoodie @ezrazone @emathyst9 @wolfythewitch

@queerdocumentary-blog @quecksilvereyes @anneemay @angelslough @averagenotnormal

@sleevesareforlosers @sinnamontrash @determinate-negation @dormimi-zzz

@fuckyeahanarchistposters @gerbildine  @generallyjl @good-old-gossip @heydreamchild

@jezior0 @komsomolka  @lesbianmaxevans

[thinkingimages]

Still from

A House for Us: The Island

The second of a two-part TV special directed by Wim Wenders for acclaimed series A House For Us. Ute's family attempt to further understand her strange behaviour and reptile obsession.

26 mins  Not rated

Director: Wim Wenders

[bunjywunjy]

are humans the only mammals that can eat chocolat? what about reptiles (birds included)?

in general, mammals are the only vertebrate family that has even a few members that can safely process the toxin theobromine and eat chocolate!

these species are basically just humans and a large chunk of the rodent family tree and its relatives (one of these things is not like the others). nothing else can have chocolate though, not fish or birds or turtles or lizards. just these specific mammals.

and here they are together! awwww.

birds are even extra-susceptible to the toxin, meaning that even a very small amount will kill them stone dead!

theobromine is absolutely not messing around. it's a very potent explode-your-heart chemical and it evolved to PREVENT vertebrates from eating cacao seeds, because those are the cacao tree's children and plants show parental love through chemical warfare.

humans don't care, though. humans will eat your children.

so, yeah. this is just another case of humans specifically being very weird.

and that's wonderful.

[herpsandbirds]

Blotched Blue-tongue Skink (Tiliqua nigrolutea), defensive tongue display, family Scincidae, from SE Australia

photograph by JJ Reptiles

[mide404]

One day, we were growing and maturing, dreaming and aspiring. We lived moments of joy and endured pain. We chased our desires and ventured into the fields of work. But now… our dreams have stopped, our aspirations have faded. Our world, once vast and open, has shrunk to a small, narrow space. From boundless skies to an unknown realm… This is what happened to my family after the devastating war uprooted their dreams, buried their ambitions, and obliterated their memories.

Today, my family endures the harsh experience of displacement, living in a tent for months on end. My younger sister describes the struggles of life in the tent: how it burns like an oven under the sun, suffocating and airless, with no means of cooling. The tent feels like a greenhouse during the day, leaving its residents to suffer from the extreme heat of summer without protection, and offering no shelter from the bitter cold of winter.

She mentions that our family’s tent is set up on a small plot of farmland, forcing us to live amid reptiles, rodents, insects, and venomous snakes, with no basic standards of cleanliness. She adds that life in the tent is especially harsh for women. It’s a place where even in the sweltering heat, they must stay fully dressed in outdoor clothes, with no freedom of movement. Everything happens inside the tent: lighting fires, cooking food, washing dishes, storing large containers of drinking water, and keeping water for bathing and daily cleaning. In essence, the tent means the loss of privacy—speaking in whispers inside your tent, only to hear a response from your neighbor in the next one.

She goes on to say, “Every time I moved with my family, I lost a thread of the privacy I hold dear as a woman. Displacement and homelessness became defining features of my life.”

I am Mahmoud Saleh, a young man appealing to you to look upon my torn and displaced family with mercy. Please grant them the chance to rebuild their lives in peace. I stand before your compassionate hearts, full of hope that you can help what remains of my family to secure a better life and to live in safety and security.

[unacknowledgeable]

Yan!batfam x Reader x TMNT (can you tell what I’ve just watched?)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I'm not really sure what this is i wanted a lil break from the overwhelming angst from my SK!Reader series, kinda just plot points for this idea that I wanna lay out and explore later more in depth, mostly based of 2018, loosely based off the 2012 Turts, the turtles aren't yandere in this, it’s just the general protectiveness of their family lol :p 

The typical neglected batsibling lol, shows up to the manor at age 5, after the disappearance of your mother, 2 years after Bruce adopted dick

Alfred had really put his foot down on you knowing about bruce's “nightly excursions”, citing the different backgrounds and skill sets as to why Dick was allowed and you weren't even told

So, there's already distance, such a huge secret and constant dangerous activities

Someone who didn't have that drive for justice, and two who needed it like air

That, and that bruce didn't really know how to deal with not just some kid, but his kid that wasn't really supposed to exist at all

You were a complete accident, bruce didn't even remember who your mother was without digging into decades old news articles of his past relationships, years after you had already left the manor

On a lighter note, you meet the turtles pretty early on, which definitely saved you in the long run, despite the rocky start

Three years after arriving at the manor, at the age of 8, you run into the turtles while playing (unsupervised, mind you) by gotham harbor

You heard them in one of the sewer drainage pipes, and after some talking, you asked them to play (you didn't actually expect them to say yes, no one ever did)

They were hesitant, they can't just show themselves willy nilly! They got so lucky with April, but that was April, who saw them first and had to ask questions later

But you had asked questions first, so you’ll get to see them later 

You saw their silent hesitation, and at the risk of looking desperate because you were  you offered to blindfold yourself, so you wouldn't see (don't ever do this, y/n’s dumb and 8)

And they agreed! They actually agreed! You’d been so excited! So excited you barely noticed just how many times you fallen, because the boys played a little rough but you were determined to keep up

So when the time came when you had to leave, you were covered in bruises and mud

Alfred wasn't exactly pleased, but you were smiling and happy, so he wouldn't look a gift horse on the mouth

After that you kept going back, day after day, to play by the waters edge, with people you couldn't see but saw you, instead of staying cooped up in the manor, where you saw everyone and were seen be none

Of course, being batman's kid, you were able to deduce that these kids where some type of mutants, you can only get get knocked over so many time before realizing what you're running into is a hard shell and the hands helping you up only having 3 fingers

So eventually, you find out just exactly what they look like, what kinds of turtles they are etc

This totally doesn't spark a near life long love of turtles, leading you to decorate your entire childhood room with the reptiles, nope no way

You meet April later, since she lives a lot further than the turtles do, and while you could get away with sneaking off to the harbor for 1-2 hours just fine, it was a bit difficult finding a time lapse of time long enough before Alfred grew wary of where you ran off too

The turtles think your dad is some kind of bat mutant or vampire, because you talked about overhearing Barbra and Dick talking about bruce being this “batman” once

No they don't realize they were talking about THE batman until they are way older lol

Otherwise they don't really think anything of it bc their dads a rat like, it’s normal for them

Reader definitely is like, super buff in this bc you've been roughhousing with 4 mutant superhuman turtles since childhood, OF COURSE your gonna be buff

Plus your older than them so losing is just a non option for you, your far too competitive for that

You bring Donnie whatever gadgets you can from the house for him to take apart and use

You’ll bring Mikey spray paints and tag the abandoned theme parks together

You get Raph high quality bedding to stop his spikes from ripping them

You taught Leo how to play chess, and you have a running score on whose won, going back yeaaars

You and April end up going to the same school, (you begged Alfred a lot) so you had a pretty active social life outside the manor and you help her with her job searches a lot

I can't decide if I want Gotham and New York to be sister cities, or just treating them as the same place, I'm still figuring that out lol. I just find the hijinxs of the turtles vs. the angst of the batfamily to be so funny and the worms agreed sooo.

~Masterlist~

[tubbytarchia]

Etho doodles in which I let my inner dinosaur nerd take over 😔 and also have no idea how to shade

Get it cause he's old and washed up haha... ok but actual raptor Etho hybrid justification below cut

To be honest the main reason was because I really wanted a hybrid in the mix who wasn't some furry creature and a reptile or amphibian or smth instead. Etho still ended up feathered but whatever it's close enough! But for ACTUAL reasoning:

He does feel damn ancient, like an old deity of the mcyt space that no one can dislike. Dinosaurs are the same!! They're old but still thought of with great fascination and fondness, everyone loves dinosaurs...

Dinosaurs are ever so mysterious, as many advancements as we make there's still so much we don't know. Just as we know jackshit about mister Kakashi skin man. Also, there are so many incomplete skeletons out there. I didn't have a particular species in mind for Etho, because where's the mystery in that? He can be one of those 5% skeleton 95% speculation dinosaurs like this guy!! Missing jaw and all

"I'm a runner, not a protector" - so, a raptor, or more specifically the Dromaeosauridae family, which literally has "running/runner" in its name

But! I'm always a fan of stuff going against its nature, especially in this case! Etho states he's not a runner yet protects his allies rather fiercely even in total silence. Eg refusing to kill Cleo in SL or to give away Tango's location during the LimL manhunt, same for Grian in SL. He was a bit flaky in 3L I think? And he only started to have genuine care for allies in LL with Bdubs? Though he is still very much a runner in many cases like during the LL Wither fight. Research also strongly suggests that most if not all raptors were solitary hunters, and the way I see Etho (through my shamefully limited watchtime of his POVs...) he feels a lot like someone who ultimately only trusts himself at the start even if he's pleasant and allying with others, and doesn't seem to think he can carry his weight in groups though he doesn't voice this a lot. That's just how Etho is, very composed, but it feels like there's an insecurity there, showcased especially in SL but again I haven't seen almost any of his POVs in full so maybe I'm talking out of my ass!! Sorry ethogirls I'm only a sidegig ethogirl myself... But yeah tldr to me he gives off the vibe of an otherwise solitary animal struggling to find 100% sure footing in a pack. In whichever ways he does go against his nature, its not usually made a show of

At the mention of a raptor, a lot of people will probably think of the glamourized Jurassic Park Velociraptors. But those awesome guys from the movies are actually the size of chickens. In general though, dinosaurs tend to be a bit.. exaggerated in media, despite how inherently fascinating they already are. And I think it fits Etho because we all know how the Lifers seem to fear and mancrush on him when he's just some dork with perfect capability to become pathetic at a moment's notice. Still, he's a clearly skilled player and still respected without question Etho's not some killer machine like some people make dinosaurs out to be. He's just a fellow creature fulfilling his role in the ecosystem 👍

dinosaurs are cool

The hook-like sickle claws on the feet... something something fishing rod

I swear I'm not turning all my Lifers into hybrids I'm not!! Still plenty normal humans in the mix I swear....... But Etho is such a radical dude, I really wanted to do something more for him. The whole Kitsune thing that I often see associated with him is really cool. I don't actually know the reasoning for it but I assume something something naruto, but also, him being this ancient mythical cryptid who people know so little about, you know? It makes SO much sense. So anyway I turned him into a dinosaur instead rawr

As a herbivore advocate I also considered stuff like the triceratops (known for how they protect themselves and their own) but nah the raptor symbolism...