#Renegade Rhetoric

[renegade-rhetoric]

you're a fake Cy-kill fan because you're drawing attention to your death, dismembering, and to your suicide.

I had no intention of doing so. I am so angry that many versions of me is getting killed! How you like it if multiple versions of you kept getting killed over and over again

[zenosanalytic]

Watching This Video from Renegade Cut, and there's a certain extent to which I feel "neoliberalism" and "classical liberalism" are primarily propaganda terms.

Like: all those words mean in practical terms is "Conservative". "Classical liberal" subtly implies that markets, property, and hierarchy(disguised as "competition") -NOT egalitarianism, human rights, and rule of law- are the oldest and most fundamental aspects of liberalism, and Neoliberalism presents itself as a "New" form of liberalism... where markets, property, and hierarchy-under-the-mask-of-"competition" are given primacy over egalitarianism, human rights, and the rule of law. Conservatism, meanwhile, is a political movement which broke away from liberalism during the French Revolution because... they saw it as an example of how egalitarianism and democracy could threaten property, hierarchy, and markets, and they didn't like that. Like: when someone calls themselves a "classical liberal", what they typically mean is that they'd rather see a corporation make 1% extra profit than see the shared humanity of those it employs respected by the State, and that's just a statement of conservative principles.

Anyway just something I started thinking watching this essay that I wanted to share. This essay does a great job of expressing how ~Competition~ acted as a stalking-horse for private-tyranny via labor-abuse and monopoly in 1990s United States political discourse.

[diamond-dangeresque]

The mess hall was the busiest room in the Grothmar citadel today, soldiers pouring in and out to dine on meals in comfort and privacy. Far away from strangers to the land, further still even from the Charr of other Legions. Conversations held from the earshot of overly observant centurions. Whispers and murmurs held in the sanctity of a room without any Ashen spooks.

Which makes Chihiro's presence all the more unwelcome in the hall.

Some of the Charr in the room break from their meals to look at the Human. They stare. The skinned warhound acting as a mantle draws attention, brings alight bad memories of "old Ascalon relics" found in the ruins of the former capital. They whisper amongst themselves, the absurdity of a mouse watching them through a blindfold, arms crossed with a selfsure grin. Many chuckle. Some grumble. A few perform something akin to a self-ward with their hands, the performers chided by compatriots around them for their superstitious behavior. He's just a mouse in a blindfold, they'd say in a manner of paraphrase, we're not dealing with a Flame shaman here. A few humor the idea aloud of throwing a dagger or firing a pistol at the mouse, see if he reacts at all. (Chihiro would love to see them try. Even if any claims of "self-defense" or "fuck around and find out" would fall flat in a place like this.)

Standing at his left is the presence of Kalla Scorchrazor, her gaze scanning over the room just as Chihiro's is through the cloth. She had previously admired the statue of her likeness just behind the Herald, noted its composition of "Searing Cauldron bronze," approved of the good use of metal. But this place was a shitshow, and this mess hall was a pretty little microcosm of that. Blood soldiers purposefully, willingly, kept separate from other Charr. Non-Charr "encouraged" to stay in more public areas, outside of the Keep and especially away from "Charr common rooms". Corralled outside, in the open, where others can watch from afar and with scrutiny. In the open: nothing but respect and honor and tact. Behind closed doors: about three steps from belting out slurs and hateful rhetoric, because it's "safe" over here. No judging eyes. No ethics violations.

Chihiro had respect for the ways the Legions trained their Charr. He was now reconsidering such a notion.

She had seen through the Herald's eyes what fruit the seeds of this Human-Charr peace treaty had wrought, what peace it had allowed the Charr to experience. It was a peace she envied dearly for her living years, something to gift to her cubs if only she had it. And to imagine someone willingly tossing that all away, to cling to old self-destructive ideas and memories of long-gone days, to fan flames that long should have been doused...it was the Flame shamans and their uprising all over again. She could already smell the burning fur as she thought of it.

As for Chihiro, he's fought Renegades before: the large, disparate warband started by those who didn't believe in the treaty of peace between the Kingdom of Kryta and the High Legions of the Charr. They broke off in droves over decades. Entire families raised and trained in the life of killing humans to hold up a war rapidly losing its last legs. Brainwashed into blind hatred, ignorant malice, fearful paranoia. Renegades kill some Humans, they make some Separatists out of the survivors; in turn they kill some Charr, they make some Renegades out of their survivors. A pair of snakes each devouring the other's tail. It wasn't going to end for them unless one side was just a mountain of corpses. These Renegades, they didn't seem to care. The bodies were the point of their exclamation mark: better dead than in league with mice.

"What do you think?" Chihiro asks Kalla, head turning to further scan the room. "Any of these fellas seem...backstabby to you?"

"Not particularly," Kalla answers, snout twitching and dragging part of her upper lip with it. Her ears twitch, trying to hone in on any interesting conversations held within the aisles of the mess hall. "Talks of recruiting cubs and greenhorns into traitorous ranks so casually held in this room don't give me any confidence, all being said."

"They think I can't do jack about what they're saying." Chihiro chuckles. Some of the Charr nearest to him turn their heads slightly. "That it's their word, their superior's word, versus mine and the Pact's. We'll see about that." He begins to walk towards the doorway, some of those nearest-to-him Charr spooked at the sudden peep he had let out after who-knows-how long he had held his tongue up until now. "Oh. Whoops~✨"

"That wasn't a slip," Kalla chides.

"Can't prove or disprove it either way," Chihiro chuckles, shrugging as he passes Brokenstone at the door. "But we've got good intel. We can rejoin Kasmeer and Efram at–" He notices the warband general's shoulders tense up. Tail stiffened and swishing. "...You good?" Brokenstone leans forward a touch, eyeing the Human talking to himself. Weirdo.

No. Frankly, never. It was bad enough seeing the Flame Legion persist centuries after their fall from power and grace. To see them grovelling back to the Legions? To plead for acceptance, forgiveness, after everything they've done to the Charr as a whole? Nigh unforgivable! "Let's move on, Herald." But that wasn't her choice to make. And it wasn't her place to judge the actions of modern Charr by antiquated standards; the so-called Renegades do enough of that as it is.

"Roger, ma'am." Chihiro kept tabs on Kalla's touchiness towards Flame Legion; he knows of the Scorch warband's history well enough, yeah, but he didn't anticipate a response as undisciplined as this. Then again, this whole "party" had been one conga line of surprises after another. He didn't expect Aurene to crash the party the way she did. He didn't expect the Blood Legion Imperator to be a snobby politician with fascistic goals in his horned head. He definitely didn't expect the party to be a cover for a mass levy attempt, and he absolutely didn't anticipate Rytlock's boy to be in the center of this spiked web.

But, despite being deprived of his precious and rare alcohol, the flavor of this mission's intrigue kept him going. He wanted to see this through to its end, in whatever shape that took. "I'll call in Kasmeer; I think we need to go undercover for this."

[mmmmalo]

Trying to find more invocations of stoning, following meteors-from-the-Veil and Dave's glass house metaphor. First hit came from Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff #34, entitled "if this guy any more stoned then that, he's belong in the holy fucking buble" -- biblical lapidation becomes a weed joke. The title's structure is repeated in the comic itself: SB says its Monday, HJ corrects him and says it Tuesday, the word "stooned" appears and SB is bombarded with 420 gifs. Structurally, SB contradicts authority and gets Punished, capitally.

From here we go in several directions:

In the context of the story's Islamic motifs, I suspect the line from SBaHJ #8 "I need to know what ANGEL to use" uses its religious misspelling of "angle" to invoke Qiblah, the orientation of self towards Mecca that Muslims apply in prayer. SB needing to "get his pour on" (he is angling milk) may in turn become a pun on prayer. We get some possible affirmation of this from Karkat on pg 4350, when he remarks that they are within "a stone's throw" of perhaps the brightest sun in existence, and requests protective shades. As with Epilogue Karkat's sun-curtains (which permit throwing stones in a glass house) and the stone-throwing Veil, this invokes the hijab. Karkat follows with a sarcastic plea to know who the leader is, saying "I NEED TO KNOW IN WHOSE DIRECTION I MUST BEHAVE AS THE MOST PATHETICALLY USELESS SUBORDINATE I CAN BE." This is another sly reference to Qiblah.

Emphasis on stoning as capital punishment draws me toward the Aimless Renegade, who IS THE LAW. I'm not sure if bullets count as stones within these strained allegories, but its interesting that we transition from the mummy-shrouded AR accosting illegal iconography of the amphibious, to Grandpa shooting a butterfly with the colors of the trans pride flag, to Jade deciding to wear clothes she received from John (trans coded in the same way a John receiving outfits from Vriska?) whereupon WHOP we cut to Dad punching someone in a ridiculous hat. "You bear the vicious brunt of this story transition directly in the face." If the invocation of stoning holds, this is perhaps a rhetorical situation akin to Porrim's: just as her critiques of misogyny must be tempered by acknowledgement of the racist paradigm in which she subsists, here the depiction of transphobia becomes implicitly Islamophobic, justifying aggression towards the Orient. I have witnessed that genre of rhetoric in relation to Gaza

On the other hand, I suppose it's ambiguous whether Dad punishing the clown hat is in service of the transphobia or the Islamophobia, since headgear is regular fodder for cultural jabs. Mituna falling and hitting his helmet served as occasion to belittle men praying with their turbans to the ground, which is turn marks the skateboard as a prayer rug, which is slurred into a flying carpet. We see this in two SBaHJ strips: #25 in which SB rides his skateboard up into clouds mis-labelled as "cloun" (meaning ridiculous hats) and #33 in which SB concludes his epic grinds by leaning on a ledge misspelled as "ledger" (as in Heath, the guy who played the Joker in the Dark Knight). The association with transphobia continues when Egbert flies a car through a clown/cloud on page 3414: Egbert, who is quietly contemplating deviance from gender norms, offers a teasing reproach to religious strictures around sex with the line "i think we can both agree that it would be reckless to look at a crappy shipping diagram made by an alien, and ignore its message altogether." After this, Karkat calls in a panic over intensified honking, and John anxiously curbs the honking in the car. Then we get Seek the Highblood, in which Equius and Nepeta (a boy and girl who have been trying on each other's clothes) march to their deaths at the hands of a clown... who is wearing a girl's glasses! Just to keep everything nice and confusing

Attempts to find more stoning-inflected references to weed were not fruitful. It occurred to me though that Qiblah sounds like Keebler, so I went back to page 630 to revisit that odd joke in Wise Guy about elves baking cookies in trees. The playing cards in the illustration appear to have a Rub el Hizb on the back

[docholligay]

On Doc Watching Renegade Nell

Hello friends! This was tact's pick for our draw liveblog, which you enter by commenting on whatever I wrote last month.

I do not know ANYTHING about this show, other than that Disney made it and that this is the premise:

A quick-witted and courageous young woman framed for murder unexpectedly becomes the most notorious outlaw in 18th-century England.

I KNOW NOTHING ELSE, AND IT IS MUCH MORE FUN FOR ALL OF US WHEN WE KEEP IT THAT WAY. It allows me to guess, it allows me to be wrong, to be right, to have contempt for those who don't deserve it, and mercy for those who also, don't deserve it. THis is the fun of a liveblog. I react based on only what I know.

So! Please don't spoil me with anything in the show, and please remember that you have information I do not! So, if I hate Nell, the one character whose name I know, because she...is a coward, or whatever, this is not a good time to tell me that "she's reacting to the murder of her entire family by churchmice" or something, or even, "She has a good reason to hate mice! keep watching!"

I will also add I am BY NO MEANS a scholar on the time and place this takes place. I'm pretty sure this is Highwayman times, which I only know because it's around the Golden Age of Piracy, which I've read some books about. ANYWAY, all that to say that I may make a historical blunder, but, mostly, let me make it. If you have historical context to lend, PLEASE ask me first. This is probably the toughest needle for me to thread, because I love love to learn shit, but, history can, in fact, sometimes be a spoiler.

Don't get me wrong. Totally get the compulsion. I am God's most irritating soldier on anything about the American West.

I am always very clear when I ask for answer, so no worries! It'll look something like: THIS IS A QUESTION I ACTUALLY WANT AN ANSWER TO. Otherwise assume it's rhetorical.

Uhhhh...as always, I am free to think what I think, and if it is REALLY gonna twist your nipples to have me feel any kind of a way, let's us both not engage with it.

The tag to follow or block is #Doc Watches Renegade Nell!

[swedebeast]

'Are you so dumb that you answer rhetorical questions?' 'I don't know, do you?'

Xavier, Renegade Angel and Xavier, Renegade Angel

[minusgangtime]

(She nodded,before jumping into the pipe,she looked at him again.)

Blue,stay safe,Kay?

(She then jumped into the pipe-)

WEEEEEEEEEE-

-Shelby

On top of a ledge, a demon and a bird bat hybrid were looking down at the scene.

"Look! She's fast, powerful and hates the council as much as we do! We have to get her to join us!~"

"I dunno, Rebel. What if it's a trap?"

"Come on, Renegade. Have I ever been wrong?~"

"..."

"Uh... Rhetorical question..~"

[tanadrin]

1. Yay you’re reading DoE!

2. I think the Davids love to rhetorically position themselves as renegade badboy contrarians for a lot of things where other anth/arch scholars agree with them.

It’s a pity because popularizing a lot of the developments in anthropology and archeology for the last few decades still really needs to be done—I think by and large people do have a really outdated idea of the range of systems of social organization that can operate even in the absence of agriculture. Insofar as this book is doing that, I think it’s doing a pretty good job, though sometimes it’s a little overconfident—for instance, pre-Clovis people coming down the coast in small boats is, I understand, just one hypothesis for how they arrived in the americas, but it’s not one archeologists are super confident on bc sea level rise means there’s little available evidence to back it up. But G&W proclaim it the definitive version. It’s fine if they think it’s by far the most likely one, but hey, people used to say that about Clovis First!

[docgold13]

Don't worry, Cy-kill dying was just a meme in the 2000's since then Transformers has had a somewhat good relationship with Gobots, Mostly expanding on the old GB lore (stuff like how their universe was almost destroyed & sent sleeper agents into the TF universe to help), fun little letter columns from convention called "Renegades Rhetoric" & some characters getting new toys in recent years (hell we're apparently doing Rock lords next year).

coolness. wow, Rock Lords... hadn't thought of them in a dog's age.

...seems to me that many of the cartoons when I was a kid were essentially adds for toys (GI Joe, Transformers, He-Man, et cetera). This practice seems to have sort of died off. I'm guessing it because the child-age sales demographic has switched over so heavily toward video games. Or maybe it was something else. In any case, an interesting phenomenon.

[heliotropies]

Hi there!! I'm Katie/Kefli and this is my oc blog!!! this is where i infodump about my characters and stories, collate relevant posts, images, and art, amd occasionally post snippets of my writing 🤫

My Original Stories:

Demon Hunters (Fantasy)

Two teenagers must rebuild their lives after narrowly escaping the destruction of their village, while also trying to save the world from a monster invasion and a divine dictatorship - all while raising a baby.

Hell's Crossing (Horror, Comedy, Romance)

Two teenage girls from vastly different backgrounds must put aside their differences and work together in order to dig up the horrors of their respective family's pasts and figure out why the two are intertwined.

Hit The Road, Jackie (Vampires, Mystery)

A young bartender's life is thrown into upheaval when a renegade vampire decides to move in with her.

Human Error (Sci-Fi, Coming of Age)

A friend group of mutant teenagers must navigate the pitfalls of adolescence whilst also dealing with a rising wave of anti-mutant rhetoric threatening to tear their lives apart.

Journey To Eternity (Sci-Fi, Drama)

Three cosmic potentates find themselves stuck on earth while a war wages across their homeland and must learn to adapt to the human way of life.

Lay Me To Sleep (Supernatural, Mystery)

A group of witches investigate a string of grisly murders whilst trying to avoid the same fate for themselves.

Feel free to ask questions about my stories + characters!! 🥰

Main Blog

[nothingunrealistic]

WENDY: How many times have you seen The Hunt for Red October? TAYLOR: I don’t watch Alec — PHILIP: Yeah, and Connery had that interview back in — WENDY: Okay, I hear you, but let’s not with that, right now. I asked rhetorically. I’m sure you both know lines by heart. The point is: even Ramius, who had almost total discretion, couldn’t act alone. Someone had to give him the keys every time he took out that sub. PHILIP: Is Ramius…? WENDY: Two captains in this story. The point is, if you’re asking for total and complete control 24/7, you are wasting your time. And his.

7x05 the gulag archipelago. the hunt for red october follows marko ramius, a soviet submarine captain who defies orders and goes rogue in what’s interpreted as an imminent renegade nuclear attack on the united states, and jack ryan, a cia analyst who figures out that ramius is actually trying to defect to the united states. if philip ends up defecting to Team Kill Prince under the guise of attacking them, we’ll know exactly who ramius is.

[renegade-rhetoric]

Could you beat Vector Prime in a fight? With the superior physiology of the GoBots, surely even such a guardian (no pun intended) of time and space should fall before you

While I am mighty I dobut even I can beat Vec-Tor though with my new body I can do it nos

[the-rat-is-back]

(This is a screenshot from the episode 25 "Scooter Enhanced")

My man Fly Trap has a nice face. 😏

This is a character that is known to be in GoBots, and he so happens to be in Transformers to.

The comics he's in "Renegade Rhetoric" (when searching this up, there wasn't a lot to look at😅) and "Echoes and Fragments" (which again there wasn't a lot when looking into it).

[sleepyowlet]

I watched a great video by Renegade Cut last night, and a realisation dropped on me like a ton of bricks.

In it, he does an analysis of what kind of rhetoric the Far Right uses to defame queer people and how that works.

And I realized that antis are doing the exact same thing.

Leon says in the video, that (and I paraphrase) fascists link queerness to sexualisation and paedophilia and blatantly make shit up to get a reaction out of the queer community. And then you're damned if you do and damned if you don't; if you try to refute these allegations, they will frame it as you defending paedophilia, but if you don't say anything it's worse - they will take it as an admission of guilt.

And that's what antis are doing. That exact same thing right out of the fash playbook.

Antis link fiction to RL paedophilia and other kinds of abuse. And they blatantly make shit up (like the whole normalisation argument) that has no foot in reality and has been refuted by researchers multiple times. They harass and attack people just wanting to enjoy fiction, and if you do defend your right to engage with fiction any way you like, they will call you a secret paedophile or an abuser. They will say you defend paedophilia and abuse.

But if you don't defend yourself, it's worse. And that is why we need to push back against this bullshit.

I'm not claiming that antis are crypto-fascists. I think that most of them don't even know what the word means. But they do use the same rhetoric and they parrot fash ideological talking points ("wholesome" vs. "degenerate", sex and specifically kink negativity, mental "hygiene", and "think of the children") just like TERFs do. Because in the end, they don't give a shit about the actual well-being of actual children - they want to push their ideas of morality onto others and they want control over people. And if they don't get that control, they want everyone who doesn't fit their narrow standards to disappear. Preferably to die.

You know. Like fascists.

[echthr0s]

the worst thing about playing Mass Effect 2 is that Adrian Shepard definitely has those livid red marks on his face, the ones that get worse the more Renegade choices you make. but outside of gameplay rules, those marks are just part of him, to me -- evidence of what sort of creation he now is, no longer just a scrappy lad from the homeworld but an engineered weapon, Cerberus's hound, something that isn't even allowed to die without permission from his human overlords. he looks in the mirror every day and he sees the marks and he thinks, this is a mask. a poorly fitted mask. and he waits to find out what happens when it cracks--

bloody hell ANYWAY that's not the point, the point is that despite my best efforts to play him like the Renegade he is, I'm almost at full Paragon status because Bioware doesn't seem to understand that meathead ass hoorah shit isn't what makes Adrian a Renegade, what makes him a Renegade is being repulsed by human supremacy rhetoric, being emotionally driven instead of callously duty-bound, and threatening Mordin Solus with grievous bodily harm if he tells anyone even tangentially related to Cerberus about the fact that Adrian still has wet dreams about being flayed open by Harbinger,

[t4t4t]

The idyl is gone now. Nothing is left but the dirty realities. Leviathan is all there is. These very words, written words, are inventions of the Lugal’s scribes. They cannot convey dream time. Every meaning has been inverted.

“Central Africa,” “Australia,” “America” are not the names of places where free human beings ever lived. They are names of unprecedented holocausts, of gigantic colonies, of monstrous Leviathanic trophies. They are Leviathan’s “empty continents.”

From the vantage point of Death, all Life is an aberration. The languages of the two protagonists are mutually unintelligible. The very vocabularies are untranslatable. Leviathan’s world is a Wilderness to free living beings. The freedom of living beings is a Wilderness to Leviathan. Free human beings were able to encompass Leviathan in their horizon and still remain free.

The Leviathanized cannot encompass free beings in their horizon and still remain Leviathanized. Once they grasp freedom they become Renegades. And the stiff-necked spokesmen of Leviathan know it. The questions: Who would abandon the amenities of Civilization? and Who would go back to the digging stick? are rhetorical questions practiced in front of a looking glass. The Renegades from Civilization are notorious. They shed masks. They shed whole armors.

They separate from previously indispensable amenities and experience a shedding of an insupportable burden. Mere contact with a community of free human beings gives them insights no Leviathanic education can provide. Nurturing contact stimulates dreams and ultimately even visions. The Renegade is possessed, transformed, humanized. Psyche-manipulators aware of Civilization’s discontents will try to induce such transformations within Leviathan’s entrails, but their most vaunted successes will be miserable failures. Civilization does not nurture humanity. Communities were able to possess the Leviathanized.

But Leviathan cannot possess communities, it cannot possess living subjects. Leviathan can only possess things, dead things, objects. Communities could remove masks and armors. Leviathan removes the scalp, the skin and the flesh.

Communities could help the repressed recover their humanity. Leviathan dis-covers unrepressed humanity and consumes it. Dis-covery, the removal of Earth’s cover, the liquidation of free beings, is in fact Leviathan’s central project, and communities that nurture free beings are its greatest enemy.

AHAL