#Miraculous Mandela Effect

[plumsaffron]

Everytime I watch this,

it makes me think of the Miraculous Ladybug Fandom’s accursed bamboozlers and self bamboozlers and bandwagoning trites who inadvertently betrayed themselves and went beyond the very ones they bamboozled many or self bamboozled to be specifically always offended upon and wish reason to be validated of their chaos against certain ones for years.

[ozzo-the-wozzo]

Gabriel dead and not one frame in the show that parallels Ivan the Terrible and his Son Ivan with him and Adrien alright sure miraculous writers waste this opportunity to kill me why don’t you

[meowtus]

Adding to my past headcanon regarding Hush’s mishaps with historical objects and artifacts of importance… similarly, there’s been a handful of… incidents with historical landmarks.

Namely in recent events: the time the Leaning Tower of Pisa wasn’t exactly leaning. It was straight up. People freaked out (naturally) until peculiarly—it returned to normal the exact same day.

There’s patterns of originally broken, offset, worn human spectacles being miraculously fixed, and then returned to normal in 24 hours. The Sphinx with a nose, a welded fix in the Liberty Bell—the list goes on. You can imagine the Department had a field day trying to control the hysteria. But they whittled it down to just a “Mandela Effect” or whatnot for the uninformed masses.

(Though…conspiracy theorists and YouTube shorts farm channels love to talk about these instances. But y’know.)

[neonshadows9000]

Jason comes back into the public eye not after a miraculous recovery or anything. No, he was never hurt in the first place.

After the Waynes release a statement about the publics 'disproportionate uproar' over Jason's first appearance at a gale since his teens, people try searching up the records of his death, pictures of the public funeral, anything to prove that there wasn't a mass hallucination of something terrible happening to Bruce Wayne's second son, but they find nothing.

After a while people accredit the common confusion as some sort of Mandela effect. If there's absolutely no records of a kidnapping ending in death to be found, but there are flight logs and pictures of exotic locations that every software insists are not tampered with, then that has to be the truth, right?

Behind the scenes Jason decided to cause chaos and with Tim and Babs' help he erased all records of his demise, figured out the story of how he was actually travelling the whole time, just like Bruce when he was young, and staged and doctored all the proof to be found. Not telling Bruce about it beforehand he waltzes into the gala and cackles with his siblings at Bruce desperately trying to pretend like all is normal and well. Of course Jason is here, where else would he be? Dead?! Oh dear, are you feeling well Mr. Morris?

Bruce doesn't talk to them for several days, both because he's pissed at them but also because he's busy handling the media fallout and figuring out how to combine their efforts and his damage controlling explanations.

[wipbigbang]

Round One Of The WIPBB 2023 Art Claims Is Open!

We currently have 174 fic summaries ready to choose from! More information is at https://wipbigbang.dreamwidth.org/171689.html.

Claims are open until June 24th, then we start a new round of claims. A partial list of the fandom is as follows:

9-1-1 (TV)

A Song of Ice and Fire

American Idol RPF

Arcane: League of Legends

Avatar: Legend of Korra

Batman/Harry Potter

BBC Sherlock

Bleach

Buffyverse

Bungou Stray Dogs

Bustafellows

Criminal Minds

Criminal Minds/X-Men

Critical Role (Mighty Nein)

DC Comics

Dead Poets Society

Disney Fairies (Pixie Hollow)

Dragon Age 2

El Goonish Shive

Elementary (TV 2012)

Emma (2009)

Encanto

ER

ER/Star Trek: The Next Generation

Final Fantasy

Generation Kill (TV)

Good Omens (TV)

Grand Theft Auto

Harry Potter

Harry Potter/CSI: LV/Hocus Pocus

Hermitcraft

Hockey RPF

How to Get Away with Murder

It

Jujutsu Kaisen

Keeping Up with the Joneses (2016 film)

Knives Out

Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko’s Basketball

Law & Order

Lord of the Rings

Mandela Catalogue

Marvel Cinematic Universe

Mass Effect

Merlin (TV)

Miraculous Ladybug

Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries

Nope (2022)

[angelic-writer]

The Mandela Effect - I'm Here

Day 23 of @augusnippets

Prompts: Massage/gentle touch/wiping away tears

Uses characters from FOTD and Cut Down the Altar by @moonlightsmasquerade and @missr3n3

CW: Nightmare, Referenced drowning, referenced medical whump

Sean comforts his friend June after she has a nightmare about his near death.

-------

It was unmistakable. Sean was right there, lifeless, on the floor of the boat. The others were desperately trying to revive him, shouting at him to wake up. They did everything they possibly could to keep him alive from chest compressions to shocking him. Nothing seemed to be working. He was as still as death.

The world around June was warping. She could barely see Leah and Maddie trying to comfort a soaking wet Joshua, could barely hear Dylan speaking on the radio for the rescue team to get there as soon as they could. The roaring thunder, the waves crashing against the boat, the mechanical beeps of the defibrillator - Everything blended together to make a chaotic symphony.

She could see the search and rescue officers on the boat now. Llweylyn trying his best to keep the kid alive, but his body was stubborn, not even taking a single breath.

"Time of death: 4:31 A.M."

No.

No, this can't be right.

She can't let Sean die.

She was at his side now, desperately pumping his chest, begging him to wake up. The others gathered around her, creating a barrier that no one can get through. They barely knew each other yet they displayed a camaraderie that left her speechless. She kept on trying, trying trying trying trying her hardest to get him to breathe, open his eyes, anything!!

"June..."

A voice spoke through the crowd. She can't bear to look at who spoke. If she did, it would be all over.

"June!"

The voice was getting louder now. It was becoming more recognizable.

"June!!"

June's eyes snapped open, shooting up in bed like a rocket. She looked around frantically, her voice jumbled. "W-Wha?! What the-"

A soft hand touched her arm, making her flinch. Looking to see who touched her, her fears instantly melted away. It was Sean, sitting beside her in bed, looking at her with a concerned expression. "Hey, it's okay. It's just a dream. I'm here. I'm okay."

The next thing she knew, she was hugging him tightly, burying her face in his shoulder. He's here. He's here. The nightmare is over.

Sean rubbed her back, whispering comforting words into her ear. "Shh... It's okay. I'm fine now. Everything's gonna be okay." He ran his hand through her hair, humming a gentle tune. Once she had calmed down slightly, Sean wiped away her tears.

"I... I can't get that image out of my mind. Y-You were dead. The officers called it. I thought you actually..."

"I didn't, okay? I'm here now. I won't let anything come between us, okay?"

June rested her head on his chest, hearing his steady heartbeat. It was hard to believe that there was nothing last time she checked. When Joshua pulled him out, there was no pulse. Nothing that indicated life. She still shuddered at the image of the bruises dotting his chest.

Sean glided his hands on her shoulders and starting massaging them, his thumbs working to relax her tense muscles. June hummed in content as she smiled. Despite how long he was under for, he was still the same Sean she knew. Everyone called it a miracle with how fast he recovered. She wondered if someone else had a hand in his miraculous recovery.

Sean's right hand stroked her hair. "Your hair's getting a bit long. Do you want me to braid it?"

June nodded.

[the-golden-ghost]

What, if any, were the formative books of your childhood? (once you were old enough to be reading independently ie not picture books, but before high school)

My book of Illustrated Fairy Tales that pretty much included any public domain kid's work at the time (it also had stuff like Peter Pan and the Velveteen Rabbit which aren't really fairy tales). I think I still have it but I'm not 100% sure of the publisher

My abridged 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea copy. Read when I was 7, LOVED that thing. Reading as an adult is extremely funny though. Aronnax buddy why so many exclamation points. Why does Nemo have a gun etc.

A Series Of Unfortunate Events: Yeah Bay Bee but no seriously it was good and shaped my childhood and my writing

Warrior cats: Another formative series but this one was NOT good. Entertaining though? Absolutely. Do I have Opinions on it still? Hell yes

Calvin and Hobbes collections (i.e. There's Treasure Everywhere, Yukon Ho, Something Under the Bed Is Drooling, Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons et al. I don't think I had EVERY one but I did have a lot of them and they were masterful)

The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane: Filed under Kid's Books That Went Really Fucking Hard (emotionally) For No Good Reason (but we're happy they did)

Bailey School Kids: Books about kids and their teachers are like. folklore monsters and they just have to put up with that. Kinda Scooby-Doo but it was fun and got me started on cryptids as a young'un. Source of a Mandela Effect for me cause I remember one of the covers scaring the everloving shit out of me but when I look for it now it's not remotely how I remember.

Goosebumps: I liked children's horror a lot when I was young and Goosebumps was THE series for it.

The Underneath: Another one of the Emotionally Fucked Up But Dear God Did it Hit extraction, highkey recommended

[tomster1274]

I can't keep this in longer anymore. I made ANOTHA mandela au, that's like a thousand now. Anygoo.

SO SO SO.

WHat if. Whatt if. What if the Gabriel and alternate happenings weren't actually real?

You see. In this AU, neither of them exist, only the actual biblical figure of the angel Gabriel and not the Satan version lol. Instead, it's regular murders being covered by lies and delusions.

We are focusing on about FOUR events that are loosely connected together, not really, but shhh.

The FIRST is the murder of Mark Heathcliff. Him and Cesar Torres got into a fight where Mark proclaimed he was no longer Cesar's friend, and Cesar got so heartbroken over it, he went to Mark's house and stabbed him to death, but unfortunately, he persuaded himself he didn't murder Mark, it was An Intruder of some kind. And he's kept up the story so well, he believes that's what truly happened, most likely because of his heartbreak and the stress of murdering another person, even though evidence shows he killed Mark, and he was sent to a mental hospital for his obvious delusions in thinking he didn't kill Mark and that it was a home intruder.

The second was a mother, Lynn Murray, who was undergoing stress from her recent divorce with her husband Jude, and couldn't handle the crying of her baby Adam and so strangled him with a pillow and buried him in her backyard, where she then took plenty of pills and called the police, claiming her baby was taken by a man she saw on the TV. Her dead baby was easily found buried by dogs, and the cause of death was easily found, though she also stuck to her story of a man on TV taking her baby most likely from delusions from the overdose of pills. She also was sent to a mental hospital where she unfortunately killed herself from falling off a high place to seemingly join her missing infant from notes she wrote.

The third is O'Brian, who was heavily a man of God and a priest, and started to hear voices telling him they were from the angel Gabriel, and told him to do things like harass his friend Dave into trying to cone to church, before it finally told him to force Dave to come to the church so Brian could blind him for his sins against God, which he did convince Dave to come when it was all closed up and stabbed him in the eyes, killing him from blood loss. The body was found days later when church resumed just sitting on one of the bench, and O'Brian told police what he did but said that it was because Gabriel told him to and how could he say no? He was sent to prison.

Lastly, there's the case of Jonah Marshall and his friend Adam Mullay. Adam and Jonah were best friends, and were in a club of their own they called "BPS", where they went out to usually abandoned places to see if they could catch ghosts. One day, they got into an argument where Jonah mentioned Adam's dead mother and effectively angered Adam enough to crash the car and kill Jonah but not himself miraculously, and he called for 911. He made up the story that they saw something inhuman on the road and he accidentally crashed them, which unfortunately the public had to believe because even if the inhuman part is kinda silly, the whole seeing something on the road and crashing was believable. He's the only one not in any kind of prison or etc.

What connects two of these cases is Cesar described this intruder and police publicly showed the sketch before finding the evidence Cesar killed Mark, which the mother took inspiration from the sketch when describing the man. The other two aren't exactly related to any of the others though.

What's the kicker about them though is the cases got popular in Mandela County, sparking panic about men on TVs or home intruders who don't look exactly human, but eventually the panic died down and these stories become somewhat of living myths, even if some people believe still thete WAS that home intruder or etc.

[amethysthollis]

i've been seeing the miraculous ladybug (?) fandom on my dash since day 1 and this the first time is see that cat noir is a 'he'???? i've always thought that character was a she? o.o

am i having an actual mandela effect drop?

[this-world-of-beautiful-monsters]

Links to Latine authors I’ve found on AO3 for Latine Heritage Month!

I’ve listed the fandoms each author has been involved in, and I’m might add more as the month progresses. If you want yourself removed from or added to this list, let me know!

Floozdooz @floozdooz (TMNT)

braeburns @inceldonnie (TMNT, Voltron, Free!)

DG_DarkFantasy @dg-darkfantasy (Rapunzel's Tangled Adventures)

Debz_Baumaus (Módào Zǔshī, The Untamed, Persona 5, Haikyuu!!, Zelda, Encanto, Fire Emblem, Oh! My Emperor, Castlevania)

BloodNotInk (Fallen London, Tolkien, The Witcher, Star Wars, Star Trek, Discworld, ASOIAF, X-Men, Dragon Age, Gor Chronicles)

earthseraph (Captain America, Supernatural, 9-1-1, Raven Cycle, X-Men, The Song of Achilles, Red White & Royal Blue, Dante’s Inferno)

nuka_cherries (Assassin’s Creed, MCU, Star Wars, Mass Effect, Fallout, Metal Gear, Zelda, Jurassic Park, Dragon Age, Constantine, Justified)

taniaterror (Shameless, Shadowhunters, The Magicians, Legends of Tomorrow, IT, The Gifted [Thailand], Friend Zone, True Blood, KinnPorsche, Secret Love: Puppy Honey)

Snickerdickles (Voltron, BNHA, Good Omens)

DaybreakKing (Friday Night Funkin', Fire Emblem, Original Works,Spooky Month, Super Smash Brothers, Pokemon, Splatoon, A Hat In Time, Amphibia, Among Us, Undertale, Pico’s School, Codename: Kids Next Door, Hatsune Miku)

This orphaned work called (Mirabel) Madrigal's One-Shots (Encanto)

Icesicleman (SCP Foundation, The Mandela Catalogue, Cuphead, The Binding of Isaac, Deltarune, OMORI, South Park)

waitinbythephone (Hunter X Hunter, Dead Poets Society, Minecraft RPF)

kaoxin (Project SEKAI COLORFUL STAGE!, Homestuck)

This orphaned work called The Right Way Home (Voltron)

enjolrasstaire (Encanto, IT, Stranger Things, Gravity Falls, Harry Potter)

toluca (Encanto, Black Mirror, The Walking Dead video game, Night In The Woods)

Bakz (Encanto, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, Little Witch Academia, Ace Attorney)

Akaunkel (Encanto)

Nyx93 (Minecraft, Video Blogging RPF, Dream SMP, BNHA, Encanto, Good Omens, Among Us, Voltron)

daiyamante (Joker Game, Dangan Ronpa, Girls' Generation | SNSD, EXO, Encanto, Yandere Simulator)

Danaeka (The Umbrella Academy, Encanto, The Untamed, Módào Zǔshī, SPY x FAMILY, The Dragon Prince, Bridgerton, A Whisker Away, Heaven Official's Blessing, The Mentalist, Fruits Basket)

bookienerd2 (Genshin Impact, Your Boyfriend, Original Works, Hazbin Hotel, Encanto, BNHA, FNAF)

Anime_Lesbian_12 (Descendants, DC, Marvel, Miraculous Ladybug, Encanto, BNHA, Assassination Classroom)

AMC1892 (Encanto, ENHYPEN, TWICE)

Feu_Eau (Original Works, Bungou Stray Dogs, Módào Zǔshī, The Untamed, Link Click, Bleach, Tiān Guān Cì Fú, Haikyuu!!, Moriarty the Patriot, Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle)

SokkaWithHisHairDown (ATLA, Julie and The Phantoms, The Queer Principles of Kit Webb, Merlin, Encanto, Luca)

ZaltMKrel (WWDITS, Moomin)

vulcanarmr (Marvel, Good Omens, 9-1-1, Encanto, Les Misérables)

ConfettiHedonism (South Park)

ClaraLaClarividente (RWBY, Marvel)

Not_gret (Voltron)

probablywrittenat5am (Stranger Things, Harry Potter, IT, B99, A Series of Unfortunate Events)

beforupml (Phandom)

LionDuckling (One Piece, Final Fantasy XV, Ao no Exorcist, InuYasha)

Sleepytimeho9es (Harry Potter, Powerpuff Girls, ATLA)

Bowieee (LEGO Monkie Kid)

voireki (BNHA)

maryly_ever_after (Dream SMP, Hermitcraft SMP, Encanto, )

EeveeTheSquid (BNHA, Merlin, Encanto)

dismalatbest (Encanto)

bellonaz (BNHA, Descendants, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Coco)

[plumsaffron]

Whenever some character in a franchise is stronger than others thought.

Whenever someone is able to do something that disrupts their threshold (usually when some character shatters the “coded assignment" others marked upon them to feel content for strange simplification assertion).

Whenever such is able to not stay down like the rest want.

Whenever something is able to stand on their own

A lot of people for some reason, have this desperate urge to go out their way to assign things upon- well… against them (usually to put down or make things less interesting) because strange want excruciating answer thirst.

Desperate fiending or nitpicking to find or reduce them or make realistic out of everything instead of acknowledging because they are they them, they are just that good at it (OR IT’S A CARTOON, FOOL).

Funny thing is people that are actually that good at something(s) are a flat out real thing that exists and can’t simply give an explaination or way to teach others. They just have a unique flow that is hard to imitate or may not be able to duplicate.

Seems like assimilating to other masses interests template trash is a huge trend.

The inability to simply accept one is able to because they just are.

Ah that reminds me of those in The K-PAX movie.

[ao3feed-ladynoir]

MW Spinoff 1: Mandela's Effect

MW Spinoff 1: Mandela's Effect by CipherWrites

Based upon the power of Mandela, Mariposa and Vanta Noir have to travel through countless alternate realities- the issue is, it takes a lot of power for Vanta Noir to rip a safe hole in dimensions, even for his idolized self. Therefore, they decide that they'll spend about a week in each world they travel to...they deserve a bit of a vacation, after all!

Takes place after Mandela, but before the very end when they return home, in the fic "Broken Heroes".

Words: 791, Chapters: 1/?, Language: English

Series: Part 3 of Miraculous War [Rewritten]

Fandoms: Miraculous Ladybug

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Categories: F/F, F/M, M/M, Multi

Characters: Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug, Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir, Gabriel Agreste | Papillon | Hawk Moth, Alya Césaire, Lila Rossi, Nino Lahiffe, Original Akumatized Character(s)

Relationships: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug

Additional Tags: Butterfly Marinette Dupain-Cheng, BAMF Adrien Agreste, Akuma Class, Akumatized Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir, Feralnette AU, BAMF Marinette Dupain-Cheng, Badass Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir, Badass Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug

Read Here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/36737020

[reachexceedinggrasp]

Would love to hear about your beefs with Lucas because I have beefs with Lucas

(Sorry it took me three thousand years to answer this, anon.)

They mainly fall under a few headings, with the third being the most serious and the thing that I am genuinely irl furious about at least biannually (and feeling unable to adequately sum up The Problem with it after yelling about it so often is a huge part of why this post has been in my drafts for such a long time):

1. His self-mythologising and the subsequent uncritical repetition of his bullshit in the fandom. Obvious lies like that he had some master plan for 10 films when it’s clear he did not have anything like a plot outline at any point. We all know the thing was written at the seat of various people’s pants, it’s blatantly self-evident that’s the case. There’s also plenty of public record about how the OT was written. Even dumber, more obvious lies, like that Anakin was ‘always the protagonist’ and the entire 6 films were his story from the beginning. This is preposterous and every time someone brings it up (usually with palpable smugness) as fanboys ‘not understanding star wars’ because they don't get that ‘the OT is not Luke's story’... Yeah, I just... I cannot.

Vader wasn’t Anakin Skywalker until ESB, it’s a retcon. It’s a brilliant retcon and it works perfectly, it elevated SW into something timeless and special it otherwise would not have been, but you can tell it wasn’t the original plan and there’s proof it wasn’t the original plan. Let’s not pretend. And Luke is the protagonist. No amount of waffling about such esoteric flights of theory as ‘ring structure’ is going to get away from the rigidly orthodox narrative and the indisputable fact that it is Luke’s hero’s journey. Vader’s redemption isn’t about his character development (he has almost none) and has no basis in any kind of convincing psychological reality for his character, but it doesn’t need to be because it’s part of Luke’s arc, because Vader is entirely a foil in Luke’s story. It’s a coming-of-age myth about confronting and growing beyond the father.

All attempts to de-centre Luke in RotJ just break the OT’s narrative logic. It’s a character-driven story and the character driving is Luke. Trying to read it as Anakin’s victory, the moral culmination of his choices rather than Luke’s and putting all the agency into Anakin’s hands just destroys the trilogy’s coherence and ignores most of its content in favour of appropriating a handful of scenes into an arc existing only in the prequels. The dilemma of RotJ is how Luke will define ethical adulthood after learning and growing through two previous films worth of challenge, education, failure, and triumph; it’s his choice to love his father and throw down his sword which answers the question the entire story has been asking. Vader’s redemption and the restoration of the galaxy are the consequences of that choice which tell us what kind of world we’re in, but the major dramatic conflict was resolved by Luke’s decision not the response to it.

And, just all over, the idea of Lucas as an infallible auteur is inaccurate and annoying to me. Obviously he’s a tremendous creative force and we wouldn’t have sw without him, but he didn’t create it alone or out of whole cloth. The OT was a very collaborative effort and that’s why it’s what it is and the prequels are what they are. Speaking of which.

2. The hubris of the prequels in general and all the damage their many terrible, protected-from-editors choices do to the symbolic fabric of the sw universe. Midicholrians, Yoda fighting with a lightsabre, Obi-wan as Anakin's surrogate father instead of his peer, incoherent and unmotivated character arcs, the laundry list of serious and meaningful continuity errors, the bad storytelling, the bad direction, the bad characterisation, the shallowness of the parallels which undermine the OT’s imagery, the very clumsy and contradictory way the A/P romance was handled, the weird attitude to romance in general, it goeth on. I don’t want to re-litigate the entire PT here and I’m not going to, but they are both bad as films and bad as prequels. The main idea of them, to add Anakin’s pov and create an actual arc for him as well as to flesh out the themes of compassion and redemption, was totally appropriate. The concept works as a narrative unit, there are lots of powerful thematic elements they introduce, they have a lot of cool building blocks, it’s only in execution and detail that they do a bunch of irreparable harm.

But the constant refrain that only ageing fanboys don’t like them and they only don’t like them because of their themes or because they humanise Anakin... can we not. The shoddy film making in the prequels is an objective fact. If you want to overlook the bad parts for the good or prioritise ideas over technique, that’s fine, but don’t sit here and tell me they’re masterworks of cinema there can be no valid reason to criticise. I was the exact right age for them when I saw them, I am fully on board with the fairy tale nature of sw, I am fully on board with humanising Anakin- the prequels just have a lot of very big problems with a) their scripts and b) their direction, especially of dialogue scenes. If Lucas had acknowledged his limitations like he did back in the day instead of believing his own press, he could have again had the help he obviously needed instead of embarrassing himself.

3. Killing and suppressing the original original trilogy. I consider the fact that the actual original films are not currently available in any form, have never been available in an archival format, and have not been presented in acceptable quality since the VHS release a very troubling case study in the problems of corporate-owned art. LF seizing prints of the films whenever they are shown, destroying the in-camera negatives to make the special editions with no plans to restore them, and doing all in the company’s considerable power to suppress the original versions is something I consider an act of cultural vandalism. The OT defined a whole generation of Hollywood. It had a global impact on popular entertainment. ANH is considered so historically significant it was one of the first films added to the US Library of Congress (Lucas refused to provide even them with a print of the theatrical release, so they made their own viewable scan from the 70s copyright submission).

The fact that the films which made that impact cannot be legally accessed by the public is offensive to me. The fact that Lucas has seen fit to dub over or composite out entire performances (deleting certain actors from the films), to dramatically alter the composition of shots chosen by the original directors, to radically change the entire stylistic tone by completely reinventing the films’ colour timing in attempt to make them match the plasticy palate of the prequels, to shoot new scenes for movies he DID NOT DIRECT, add entire sequences or re-edit existing sequences to the point of being unrecognisable etc. etc. is NOT OKAY WITH ME when he insists that his versions be the ONLY ones available.

I’m okay with the Special Editions existing, though I think they’re mostly... not good... but I’m not okay with them replacing the original films. And all people can say is ‘well, they’re his movies’.

Lucas may have clear legal ownership in the capitalistic sense, but in no way does he have clear artistic ownership. Forget the fans, I’m not one of those people who argue the fans are owed something: A film is always a collaborative exercise and almost never can it be said that the end product is the ultimate responsibility and possession of one person. Even the auteur directors aren't the sole creative vision, even a triple threat like Orson Welles still had cinematographers and production designers, etc. Hundreds of artists work on films. Neither a writer nor a director (nor one person who is both) is The Artist behind a film the way a novelist is The Artist behind a novel. And Lucas did NOT write the screenplays for or direct ESB or RotJ. So in what sense does he have a moral right to alter those films from what the people primarily involved in making them deemed the final product? In what sense would he have the right to make a years-later revision the ONLY version even if he WERE the director?

Then you get into the issue of the immeasurable cultural impact those films had in their original form and the imperative to preserve something that is defining to the history of film and the state of the zeitgeist. I don't think there is any ‘fan entitlement’ involved in saying the originals belonged to the world after being part of its consciousness for decades and it is doing violence to the artistic record to try to erase the films which actually occupied that space. It's exactly like trying to replace every copy of It's a Wonderful Life with a colourised version (well, it's worse but still), and that was something Lucas himself railed against. It’s like if Michaelangelo were miraculously resuscitated and he decided to repaint the Sistine Ceiling to add a gunfight and change his style to something contemporary.

I get genuinely very upset at the cold reality that generations of people are watching sw for the first time and it’s the fucking SE-except-worse they’re seeing. And as fewer people keep physical media and the US corporate oligarchy continues to perform censorship and rewrite history on its streaming services unchecked by any kind of public welfare concerns, you’ll see more and more ‘real Mandela effect’ type shit where the cultural record has suddenly ‘always’ been in line with whatever they want it to be just now. And US media continues to infect us all with its insidious ubiquity. I think misrepresenting and censoring the past is an objectively bad thing and we can’t learn from things we pretend never happened, but apparently not many people are worried about handing the keys to our collective experience to Disney and Amazon.

4. The ‘Jedi don’t marry’ thing and how he wanted this to continue with Luke post-RotJ, so it’s obviously not meant to be part of what was wrong with the order in the prequels. I find this... incoherent on a storytelling level. The moral of the anidala story then indeed becomes just plain ‘romantic love is bad and will make you crazy’, rather than the charitable reading of the prequels which I ascribe to, which is that the problem isn’t Anakin’s love for Padmé, it’s that he ceased to love her and began to covet her. And I can’t help but feel this attitude is maybe an expression of GL’s issues with women following his divorce. I don’t remember if there’s evidence to contradict that take, since it’s been some time since I read about this but yeah. ANH absolutely does sow seeds for possible Luke/Leia development and GL was still married while working on that film. Subsequently he was dead set against Luke ever having a relationship and decided Jedi could not marry. Coincidence?

There’s a lot of blinking red ‘issues with women’ warning signs all over Lucas’s work, but the prequels are really... egregious.

[queen-ofsunflowers]

Headcanon spawned from discord chats and shenanigans

The Rabbit Miraculous Users are the reason the Mandela Effect exists.

[doctor-hoolock]

THIS MOVIE DOESN’T EXIST

Recently the Mandela Effect regarding the supposed 1994 film “Shazaam” (or “Shazam”) starring Sinbad as a genie has been making its rounds again and I am here to remind everyone that this does not and never has existed!

Debunking the “proof”

I have seen dozens of people claim to have a physical VHS copy of this movie but miraculously not a single one has provided photo or video evidence that is undeniable. All have been proven to be fake. There are several photos of VHS boxes and a movie poster that get circulated as “proof”.

This photo uses the hand/main box from this photo (which itself is also homemade/photoshopped) and the torso of WWE wrestler Chavo Guerrero, as well as this 2 Day Rental sticker.

These images are almost always being connected to a $500 listing on the selling platform OfferUp. However, the image originated from the company ThinkGeek. Every year they post products on April Fools Day that don’t actually exist. This was one of the products in 2017 (the last time the conspiracy of this erased movie was really going full steam ahead. Several other places posted things on this same day, but more on that later). Here is a list of all the April Fools Day products from 2017, Shazam is number 4 on the list.

This is often shared as being a poster for the movie. However, it is a compilation of various elements. The hat and ribbon both came from this photo - the hat was turned upside down and color edited whereas the ribbon was flipped horizontally. The gold vest came from here and was flipped horizontally. The genie lamp is from here, and the photo that Sinbad’s face is from can be found here.

I came across this screenshot from 2017 from someone saying they found information on the movie’s cast on a Hong Kong Movie Database, but after searching the site myself on the current page and via the wayback machine I was unable to find anything of the sort.

People often refer to this YouTube video as “proof”, but this is a skit created by the comedy channel College Humor and released on April Fools Day in 2017. Some say the video is archived/old footage of the real film, but if that were the case then the children in the movie would be around 40-years-old by now. The cast from the video is provided in the video description and you can easily look up the children and see they are both still children/young teens. In addition to that the entire video is littered with nods to other popular Mandela Effects such as Curious George having a tail, a newspaper reading “NELSON MANDELA DEAD”, A “Bearenstein Bears” book, and a KitKat wrapper with the name of the candy being spelled “Kit-Kat”. The entire video was made for comedic purposes and is NOT footage of a real 90s film.

A common question asked to those who vividly remember this movie’s existence is who else was in it or what specific scenes do they remember. The only answers I have personally seen answering these questions are either pulled from the ThinkGeek cover (people saying Jonathan Taylor Thomas was in it), that College Humor video, or they could conveniently only provide the names and scenes mentioned in this article posted by Culture Sonar on April 1, 2017. The Culture Sonar article states Ally Walker was in “Shazaam”, but this is a nod to her being in the actual film “Kazaam” starring Shaquille O’Neal - none of the other people mentioned in the article have been in a film called “Shazaam”, “Shazam”, OR “Kazaam”.

Many people also claim that Sinbad has confirmed he was in the movie but that he has denied it and buried it because he only did it for drug money when we was desperate. While he did confess this, it’s clear the people making that claim did not watch the entire video because he also makes clear comedic remarks about how he had to do lots of yoga and use Crisco to get in the lamp (injuring himself in the process) as well as using his connections to have the government help him retrieve every physical copy in existence and use mind-control. This is yet another video Sinbad was a part of to poke fun at the people who so continually and wholeheartedly believe that he was in this film that he himself has denied ever making. Doing the film for crack money became a running joke from Sinbad the year prior in this video.

I also just came across this movie review site that seemingly has a “Shazaam” review from May 20, 1994. But it’s obvious this was also created as a prank and to fuel the fire of those who think it was a real thing. Every review of theirs uses the same photo except that one, which uses the photo of the photoshopped gold VHS case (see above). There are thousands of reviews on this site and aside from “Shazaam” NONE of them are from before 1998. And when you search the website’s creation the domain name was not even acquired until June of 1999.

[allyinthekeyofx]

Dispelling the Thatcher myths

Alex Nunns offers an antidote to the media fawning over Thatcher – and argues her biggest victory was getting her opponents to buy into her mythology

When a political leader dies it becomes compulsory to lie about their record. While much of Britain openly rejoiced at the death of Margaret Thatcher, the media snapped into reverential mode, giving over hours of airtime and several thousand miles of column inches to representatives of the ruling class to solemnly recite myths about her achievements.

This wouldn’t matter so much if, like Thatcher, these myths were dead, and weren’t still shaping our politics. But they are. So here are some of them, debunked.

No ‘economic miracle’

It’s said that Thatcher ‘didn’t just lead our country, she saved our country’. She didn’t. David Cameron’s melodramatic claim was a reference to Thatcher’s supposed reversal of Britain’s economic decline, when her policies are said to have brought about an economic miracle. But the performance of Britain’s economy in the 1980s was not miraculous – in fact it was below par, even if the deep recession of 1980-1 is ignored. Economic growth was higher and lasted longer in the 1950s and 1960s. And when the economy did pick up speed in the late 80s, it was because of a credit bubble that promptly burst and threw Britain back into recession.

It’s said that Thatcher was a tax-cutter. She wasn’t. The overall tax burden (all taxes as a percentage of GDP) rose from 39 percent in 1979 to 43 percent in 1989. It’s true that Thatcher cut taxes massively for the rich – the top rate of tax was 83 percent when Thatcher came to power, and it was 40 percent when she left. But VAT, which hits the poor harder than the rich, was just 8 percent before Thatcher, and was put up to 15 percent as soon as she gained power.

It’s said that Thatcher made the British people richer. She didn’t. In 1979 the poorest fifth of the population accounted for around 10 percent of after-tax income. By 1989 their share had fallen to 7 percent. Over the same period, the amount of income taken by the richest fifth rose from 37 percent to 43 percent. The rich got richer; the poor got poorer.

It’s said that Thatcher restructured the economy and made British capitalism competitive. She didn’t restructure anything. Restructuring would have required a plan, which was anathema to her. Instead, she simply destroyed. Between 1980 and 1983, capacity in British industry fell by 24 percent. Unemployment shot up, eventually topping 3 million. Thatcher effectively shut down British manufacturing, much of it forever. In its place, she turned to the banks and the City, making their wildest dreams come true with the financial ‘Big Bang’. We know how that ended.

What conviction?

It’s said that Thatcher was a conviction politician, a ‘monetarist’ who stuck to her economic beliefs through tough times and was vindicated. She didn’t, and she wasn’t. Monetarism, the theory Thatcher adopted from American economist Milton Friedman, says the government should keep inflation low by restricting the money supply, and shouldn’t care about anything else, especially unemployment. Thatcher used monetarism as an intellectual cloak, but she never actually implemented pure Friedmanite monetarism. She quickly abandoned her looser British version when it crashed the economy in the early 80s. She was, however, radically successful at not caring about unemployment.

It’s said that Thatcher’s greatest free market legacy is privatisation. It isn’t. Thatcher’s privatisations did not create competitive free markets. Instead, the government went for as much money as it could get by selling off public assets in big, monopolistic lumps. The cash came in handy for the chancellor, Nigel Lawson, who used it to claim he had balanced the budget in 1988. But the legacy is one of parasitic cartels, like in the energy sector, where a few big companies are free to bleed customers dry.

It’s said Thatcher won the Cold War. She didn’t. The idea that the Soviet system collapsed because Thatcher and Reagan said mean things about communism deserves no more than one sentence.

It’s said Thatcher stood up for freedom and democracy in the world. She didn’t in South Africa, where she opposed sanctions against apartheid and called Nelson Mandela a ‘terrorist’. She didn’t in Chile, where she supported the murderer and torturer Augusto Pinochet. She didn’t in Cambodia, where she gave support to the Khmer Rouge, of all people. As for democracy, she espoused an ideology that valued market choices more highly than votes.

Rolling back the state?

It’s said that Thatcher ‘rolled back the state’. But, with the exception of the economy, where the state did retreat, Thatcher’s government intervened in areas of British society like none before it. It imposed draconian laws on one particular type of voluntary organisation – trade unions. It attacked local government, cut its funding and restricted its powers. It intervened directly in schools, setting a national curriculum for the first time.

It’s said that Thatcher restored law and order. She didn’t. Crime increased by a staggering 79 percent under Thatcher. There were riots in Brixton and Toxteth at the start of her reign, and riots and civil disobedience against the poll tax at the end of it.

It’s said that Thatcher created a ‘property-owning democracy’ through the sale of council houses. But this led to a chronic shortage of social housing which has pushed up house prices. Today, home ownership is falling and the private rental market is booming. The taxpayer is still subsidising housing to the tune of billions through housing benefit, but now the money goes to rich private landlords.

It’s said that Thatcher changed the class and gender profile of the Tory party. She didn’t. She made a big deal of being an outsider: a middle-class woman in a party of aristocrats. But she was an individual, an exception to the rule. She made no attempt to change party structures to help others like her. Today, the Tory leadership is dominated by Etonians and there are only four women in the cabinet. Thatcher always forgot to mention that her political career was financed by her millionaire husband. She expressed disdain for feminism and embraced patriarchal, male values.

It’s said that Thatcher was an electoral phenomenon. She wasn’t. She won three elections, each with a lower percentage of the vote than all previous post-war Tory victories. She never gained the support of more than a third of eligible voters. She won her second and third elections because a section of the Labour Party split off to form the SDP and the two squabbled over second place.

One claim that’s true

It’s claimed that Thatcher defeated the left. She did. This is the cliché that holds true. The big set-piece battle with the miners’ union was economically irrational – it cost the country £2.5 billion. But she was fighting more than the miners; she was fighting a class.

She told the truth later in life when she said that her legacy was New Labour. In so many of her other goals, she failed. Thatcherism has no institutional legacy because she put none in place. She left no cut and paste economic model because she didn’t apply the monetarism she espoused. All she left was her example, which had its most powerful effect on her erstwhile opponents.

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did more to institutionalise Thatcherism than the woman herself. Before New Labour, in the early 1990s, in the midst of a recession, it was a truism that Thatcherism had been an economic failure. The fact that many of the myths discussed here have been revived is in large part due to New Labour. When even Thatcher’s opponents accept Thatcherism’s success, why should the media challenge the record?

Blair responded to her death by admitting (although understating) what everyone already knew, that ‘some of the changes she made in Britain were, in certain respects at least, retained by the 1997 Labour government’. It is often said that Blair’s only legacy will be Iraq, but he will also feature in the epilogue of every biography of Margaret Thatcher.

Thatcher tore at the social fabric of Britain, destroyed swathes of its economy and inflicted vindictive harm on large sections of its population. But she built nothing. Her main success was in the minds of her opponents