#So when I look back at the history of colonisation I do see a lot of patterns and a lot of the same justifications

[brick-van-dyke]

Gonna review all the sources I've been provided with (they're damning for the zio so rip to them but thanks for the sources lmao), and been searching through more sources from the time periods in question and, well, basically I started a thing.

(sorry for the blurriness) An overall essay going through the evidence and providing a small splash of input as someone noticing a lot of discord in said evidence, which isn't surprising but still it is telling how zionists cherry pick.

Anyway, the more I learn, the more I realise that there's a lot of political and nationalistic push to emit details in some papers, while pushing for certain conclusions based on the framing of the research for others. I think this is legitimately just unproductive when acknowledging the subjectivity of history as a study and the way certain overlap may point to a conclusion that isn't preferable by a variety of people, from researchers to the intuitions that may use or pay for the research to begin with. I find this in studies that delve into contentious topics in general. It's why it's so important to note the overlap and notice the inevitability of bias in understanding these topics.

As far as the history the Middle East goes and who colonised who, I think many disregard the simple theory that, perhaps, colonisation itself can be something inflicted by the post-colonised and equally be something done to a group with connections to conquest, ultimately making both the same in terms of land rights and the concept of legal ownership. Or, more specifically, that Zionists' attempts to become conquests have since reduced their claim, just as it would reduce a Babylonian, despite their deep links to the land and, arguably, being one of the first social groups before or at the same time as the Israelites.

History and Carbon Dating specifically become difficult to assign moral value of land rights to when cultures blossom and change in such extreme ways (to the point of being unrelated or unrecognisable with those from ancient eras) with the passing of time. The racial blame placed by Israel is thus shown to be one of mistaken vengeance and generally racial profiling of modern Arabs, just as the Persian, Turkish, Roman and British empires showed signs of racist attitudes to employ totalitarian tactics of rule over the peasantry. Being the colonised when one is willing to colonise with the same means reduces the ethical claims and, meanwhile, the history itself reflects greater nuance than political nationalists may desire of it.

Ultimately, as I search further and further, I find that the claim of nationalism and identity is a mere shared ideal of all empires formed through conquest and the desire for ownership of abundant resources. Meanwhile, I find that the idea of an ancient homeland to reclaim is obsolete when the people in question do not resemble those they wish to avenge. Culture evolves with geography and time, a constant for every country's history. Religion, culture and the concept of a homeland forms where the resources are abundant, rather than any legitimate greater or lesser claim from neighbouring tribes and civilisations. The wish of a Promised Land is a logical conclusion for any group seeking refuge from the elements; a moral argument filled with human necessity and a shared common ground if faced with an open mind and a willingness to review the past, while simultaneously moving on from it. The complexity becomes simple when it is understood that only the present can take responsibility for the present; and choose a better path than those who horde resources in the modern age of globalised colonialism.

[olderthannetfic]

https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/740412128006225920/my-fave-backwards-ass-thing-that-constantly#notes

There's this one joke I see often mentioned, this one is specific to white people, and honestly it was a bit funny the first time. "White people colonised the word to get spices, only to not do anything with them." Like I said, it was a bit funny the first time. But it kinda became more eyebrow raising when I noticed how many people unironically said it, and apparently have genuinely no clue why "white people" suddenly stopped focusing on spices. I mean, we better not look at any part of southern Europe, but moving on.

You know. Why did white people colonised the world for spices, but then people stopped using them? It's almost like there's a reason for it. A very specific reason. A very important HISTORICAL reason. An important reason why spices became less used, especially by the peasantry. A reason that could explain why food would suddenly be less about indulging in flavor, and more about just being able to eat at all. Something like a food scarcity suddenly reaching an all time high and trade becoming a lot more dangerous. A VERY significant thing that happened in WORLD history. Something that became even deadlier with the industrial revolution. Something that made it so that most modes of transportation which previously had been used to get food from one place to the other became a lot less accessible and also a lot more dangerous. Anyone? Got some answers? And honestly, I find that anyone who judges food in such a way to be incredibly obnoxious. Different countries, cultures, and people have different flavor profiles. Some rely on spices, some on herbs, some on fats, some on vegetables, or even just on bringing out each ingredients own flavor, some are even just more focused on survival. Food is dependent on geography and what's available, and some palates prefer certain tastes. The closer you get to the arctic circle the less you will be able to add to the food because the most available food is literary animal protein, with import prices being absolutely insane.

Making a bit of light fun of different foods isn't the issue, it's the stupid maliciousness about it that's obnoxious. Putting your culinary culture above others boorish and just insanely childish in a globalized world. I honestly have a huge dislike for anyone who needs to mock and act all snooty about other cultural foods. Just because you are too afraid to widen your culinary horizons, doesn't mean you have to show everyone what a little baby you are.

Signed -A foodie.

--

Frankly, people are also stupid af about the basic principles of aesthetics and showing off. The pendulum swings between "I can get bling and you can't" and "Everyone can get everything, but no one can buy taste"/"Quality of the materials is what matters, not fanciness of preparation".

On one end, we have Medieval European food and gem-encrusted things, on the other, the French culinary revolution and all beige homes.

Ancient Rome has aesthetics treatises on this. China has experienced this back and forth. Heian Japan was into modern tacky bling, while zen shit is firmly Team Greige.

It's a basic feature of how aesthetic trends work.

[crystalromana]

Apocryphia Bipedium- Ian Potter

[FIXED THE WONKY MOBILE EDITING. >.< IT LOOKED FINE ON DESKTOP]

[I am obsessed with this short trip so I had to bring it to Tumblr. Yes I did just copy and paste this page by page out of the pdf and formatted it. I think about it all the time. Anyway.

Apocrypha Bipedium takes place in the gap between Time of the Daleks and Neverland. Enjoy]

A Suggestive Correlation of The Cressida Manuscripts with other Anomalous Texts of the Pre-Animarian Era as proposed for Collective Consideration by Historiographic Speculator Anctloddoton.

In my selection and placement of the following extracts from the literature of the extinct worlds, I have attempted to draw suggestive parallels between some of the Problem Texts of the humanoid cultures. Obviously, the records of those times are now so fragmentary that any conclusions we draw from the surviving evidence must remain speculative. We cannot know what evidence we are missing, thus the linking of events posited by the presentation of these documents must remain a tentative hypothesis at best.

HS A From The Primary Cressida Document – Suppressed Texts of the Vatican Library, A Mysteria Press Original, 2973 CE.

The past is another country, the Doctor used to say. By which I suppose he meant it’s a nice place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there, and you can have real problems with customs when you arrive.

I grew up in the future myself, which makes living in the past tricky at times. Liverpool was a great place to grow up if you were into the past though. It was full of it; the Campus Manor theme park, the castle, the Beatles Memorial Theatre, The Saint Francis of Fazakerley Museum, the Carl Jung Dream Tour, Post-Industrial Land and all those cathedrals, you were tripping over history everywhere. Mummy’s parents came from there too, so it was practically like we knew reallife olden days people.

It was much better than Liddell Towers where we lived in New London – most of the history near there seemed to be about some silly girl who’d let a professor of sums take photos of her and fell down a rabbit hole, or about those awful Daleks wiping out Southern England with mines and things. Much duller and hardly any variety in the rides at all.

Here in the actual olden days there’s not much past anywhere, just loads of future, and the rides are even less fun, all carts and donkeys and hardly any roads. We’re moving again, you see, dear diary. Even though the conquering Greeks don’t really seem to want to colonise any of Asia Minor themselves they don’t seem to want any Trojans settling back down anywhere round here either. They’ve occupied what’s left of the city, I suspect mainly so Menelaus can find all the expensive bits of Helen’s jewellery she seems to have mislaid, and seem keen we don’t hang about too nearby. Mymiddon Hoplites apologetically move us on now and again, clearly wondering when they can decently be allowed back home to start fighting amongst themselves again, and so we pack up and move. Some of their chaps are still feeling rather tetchy for no good reason apparently. Troilus says there’s a silly rumour going around that some terrible woman, probably a goddess, went around whipping up aggression amongst the Greeks a few years ago by magic, leaving marks on their necks that mean they can’t calm down!

It doesn’t make any sense to me. I think I might just be getting the cleaned up version of a soldier’s tale actually. I think that happens with me a lot. People treat me like a silly little girl sometimes, which isn’t really fair when I come from the future and know all sorts of things they don’t. I’m an adult now, even if not being born yet does make me about minus four thousand officially.

I don’t think Agamemnon’s Greeks really know what to do now to be honest, and after a decade’s anticipation I don’t think the trade routes or the princess they were sacking Troy to get are quite as good as they were hoping. I think they’re just hanging around stopping us settling down and looking for lost costume jewellery until they can think of something better to do. Some of the Ithacans are moaning it’ll be another decade before any of them get home at this rate. Bless them.

Running out of room, dear diary. Will write more when I have some new goats’ hides.

From Not Necessarily the Way I Do It! The True Confessions of a Ka Faraq Gatri not just written for the money when trapped on a primitive planet and needing cash to buy parts by ‘Snail’, Boxwood Books, 300 AGB.

Of course the hairy kangaroo had been at the mind rubbers and didn’t even realise the sword was there! How we laughed. Terrible namedropper, Zodin, but worth her weight in soufflé all the same

Naturally enough, mention of name-dropping reminds me of another anecdote, this one relating to dear old Bill Shakespeare, one of the finest writers and most atrocious spellers of any age. I’ve met him several times now and hope to again if I ever get off this pre-warp- engineering dustball. The last time was during that sticky business with poor Kitty Marlowe and those Psionovores from Neddy Kelley’s old scrying glass that I related in Chapter 9, but perhaps our most awkward misadventure together was the time I introduced him to some of his own characters, who included, as it happened, a dear, dear friend of mine.

From The Dairy of an Edwardian Adventuress by Charlotte Elspeth Bollard, Library of Kar-Charrat. The work, having suffered some worm damage in the Great 2107 AD Cock Up, is presented here in the Elgin decorruption.

Travelling with Wilf and the Doctor was a curious experienced already felt somewhat out of sorts with time, having discovered my very existence was making history split in two, but sharing a home with a boy from the 16th Century and a man who seemed to come from nowhere so much as his own imagination, merely heightened my feeling that I no longer belonged to any era.

We three fellow time travellers had so very little in common beyond having all read the plays the boy had not yet written that the small talk had been small indeed, and, after a few days of the Doctor failing to get Wilf home, the atmosphere had become a little tense.

Wilf, it further transpired, had difficulty reading anything written in more modern Anglish than his own, which meant there had been little of a literary nature to distract him during his sojourn with us once he had read and re-read the Doctor’s picture books about Frinchs, Sneetches, Ooblecks and Cats in Hams.

Thankfully, towards the end of Wilf’s stay with us the Doctor had discovered a futuristic version of Lido called Peter Pan Pop-O-Matic Frustration that we could enjoy playing together and those last long hibiscus-scented afternoons in his music room passed pleasantly enough, without young Wilf having to constantly relate the escapades of besocked foxes to us.

The Doctor always won our games, usually coming from behind implausibly late in the day, and nearly always using some devious subterfuge to gain victory. Indeed, it was observing the childlike joy on the Doctor’s face at his underhand triumphs on the Peter Pan Pop-O-Matic Frustration board that I first realised just how much of Peter there was in his nature. Naturally, we loved him enough to pretend not to notice his cheating (I sometimes think the whole universe did) and at times towards the end we three had so much fun that I almost forgot I was a paradox, unpicking creation like Penelope at her tapestry in the heroic age we had just left.

From The Pseudo-Shackspur – works attributed to William Shakespeare collated by Heinrich Von Berlitz and Leopold Kettlecamp, Ampersand and Ampersand, 85 AH.

This passage from The Noble Troyan Woman of Troy – fragmentary foul papers of a naive work once attributed to the very young Shackspur, is worth quoting in full.

Act 2, Scene 1. A room within the box. Enter Mistress Charley, Doctor Shallow and Young Will.

Doct. Here at last! Our journey finally through. In fifteen hundred and seventy two. Young Will, regard the ceiling viewing dome – Stratford on Avon, the Hathaway home.

Will. But sir, on those bare hills, no swarths do roll. And no houses nestle ’twixt those craggy knolls – The sun burns with a fierce un-English light And that beach there is not a Warwick sight! That’s not Stratford displayed above us

Char. – Lest the Avon’s turn’d to sea, ’Od love us!

Many scholars have disputed the authenticity of this piece of alleged Shackspurian juvenilia, pointing out, fairly, that it does appear to be the only one of his extant works that the Bard biroed in a twentieth-century school jotter otherwise festooned in swirly ink blots and doodled hexagons. However, if Shackspur did travel in Time, as several scholars suggest, this objection falls away. A more compelling argument for its inauthenticity is the verse style, experimenting uniquely within the Shackspurian canon with strict iambic pentameter composed entirely in rhyming couplets. Whilst dreadful, it is nothing like as appalling as that in Shackspur’s earliest known adult writing

***

From Tales from the Matrix – True Stories from TARDIS Logs Retold for Time Tots by Loom Auntie Flavia, Panopticon Press, 6833.8 Rassilon Era. Part of the Wigner Heisenberg Collection, The Mobile Library, Talking Books Section. Location currently uncertain.

The Doctor flicked the temporal stabiliser off and pulled down the transitional element control rod taking him out of the Vortex. Quite the wrong way to actualise and quadro-anchor even a Type 40 Time Capsule, isn’t it? Exiting the interstitial continuum at the perihelion of a temporal ellipse can cause serious buffering in your harmonic wave packet transference and sever your main fluid links, can’t it?

‘Here we are, Stratford on Avon, 1572!’ announced the Doctor proudly and wrongly. If he’d ever bothered to use his Absolute Tesseractulator to pinpoint his dimensional locations he wouldn’t have made these kind of mistakes, of course, but the Tesseractulator had never come out of its box, had it?

Charlotte Pollard, the Doctor’s friend, came over to him and flicked on the ceiling scanner.

A friend’s an Earth thing. It’s a bit like having a colleague or fellow student you co-operate with, but without any exams or project targets at the end to make the co-operation meaningful. There was a fashion for having them on Gallifrey at one time, ask some of your older cousins about it, they might remember.

Charlotte squinted at the view outside. It didn’t look like the Stratford she’d visited, with neither alien enslavers nor half timbered tea shops anywhere in sight. ‘Are you sure?’ she asked.

‘Positive. Ish,’ replied the Doctor. William Shaxsberd, a young man they’d promised to drop off in 1572, put down his coloured crayons and came to join them.

‘It does not look much as it once did, Doctor,’ said William, looking at the ceiling and cricking his neck.

The Doctor followed suit. The dustbowl outside was certainly not Warwickshire in any era he’d visited, ‘No. Indeed not,’ he admitted. ‘I think the rift in the Vortex is introducing a random element into my calculations.’

Do you remember the rift in the Vortex, from last time? That’s right, the Doctor made that too! It was due to the paradoxical interaction of two paravertical chronostreams further complicated by three retro- temporal augmented causal feedback loops, wasn’t it?

‘Another random element?’ asked Charlotte, ‘More random than the way you play “eeny meeny miney mo” with the buttons?’

‘Ha, Charley,’ said the Doctor. ‘Tres amusent.’

Charlotte turned to William to explain, ‘That’s French, Will, for “I’ve been banged to rights, Miss Pollard”,’ she said.

‘I somehow knew,’ William replied.

‘Really?’ asked Charlotte. ‘How?’

‘It’s a Time Lord gift, Charley,’ said the Doctor, ‘and yes it would be awfully de trop to ask how it works.’ Or at least that’s whatCharlotte thought he said. William heard something quite different of course.

Well, let’s get out there then,’ said the Doctor, opening the doorswithout taking any proper readings.

‘Er, why?’ asked Charlotte.

‘Because until we know how far out the rift has shunted us in spaceand time we won’t know how to get to Stratford, 15 diddlydiddly...’explained the Doctor, waving his hand vaguely as he searched hismemory for the end of the four digit number he’d lost interest in.

‘Seventy-two,’ prompted William.

‘The very same.’ The Doctor beamed, ruffling the young man’s hair in a way that, thanks to the TARDIS telepathic circuits alone, seemed endearing rather than insufferable and over familiar.

William and the Doctor headed for the doors. Charlotte was troubled though.

‘Won’t my temporal instability cause untold problems to wherever we are?’ she asked, quite sensibly, all things considered.

‘Oh, very probably, I expect,’ replied the Doctor airily, ‘but if you spent your whole life worrying about the consequences of your actions you’d never get anything done and the consequences of that would be unthinkable, wouldn’t they? Faint heart never bowled a maiden over,you know.’

Charlotte scowled. ‘Mind,’ added the Doctor as he stepped out of the control room, ‘neither did Katie “the Beast” Davies, if I remember my22nd-century Wisden correctly.’

That was an allusion to the Earth game Cricket, wasn’t it? It was the Earth’s planetary sport, despite the fact that humans were the worst players of it in the galaxy if you remember.‘

Doctor, I find your words confusing,’ said William as he followed him out.‘It’s a Time Lord gift, Will,’ Charlotte whispered. ’You’ll get used to it.’

* * *

From The Primary Cressida document

New hides! This keeping a journal business is awfully tricky when you’ve no paper around, but before mummy died, she did make me promise I’d write one when I eventually settled down. It’s a family tradition that’s been handed down for generations apparently, not that I ever saw mummy’s.

Anyhow, Troilus is still very eager to settle soon, but where? I’ve ruled out going east to the Holy Land because from what I remember from history and my travels we’ll get no peace there and the rest of the Med and Adriatic has already been bagsied. Troilus reckons Aeneas will have already have set up somewhere by now and we should have gone off on his boat when we had the chance. I just nod, and try to explain wave particle duality to the little ones.

I have a vague feeling I learned something about Aeneas from the UK-201’s didactomat box way back in the future. I think he ended up with Dido in Carthage for a bit, which confuses me because I thought Dido’s music was Late Classical, which must be after this period, surely. I’m sketchy on the details to be honest. I only remember it was Dido and not Sister Bliss because the planet we crashed into on the way to Astra was named after her.

Funny thinking about Dido, that was the place I’ve called home longest in recent years. I’ve been a nomad a while really – split between London and Liverpool as a girl, never knowing whether to talk posh and southern or not, emigrating to off-Earth with daddy, hopping about through Time with the Doctor, and now traipsing around Turkey with Troilus and his mates before its even called that or has any tourist facilities to speak of. I think I must have ‘space travel in my blood’ as one of those Baroque composers put it!

I’ve been wondering when I should discover electricity and plumbing a bit recently, these fleeces don’t clean themselves like proper clothes, so the sooner we can invent the twin tub the better. Are we before or after that Monk who invented things too early here, I wonder? I don’t want to mess things up like he did, but I’m shocking on dates. I just paid attention to the stories in the history books really, not the order they happened in. If I’d known the way round history went was going to be important I would have had the machine teach me it. Of course, as a child you never expect all that history around you is going to run away into the future like it has, do you? I’ve decided I’ll probably start with a steam engine and see if that messes up my memory of the future. The way I see it, it’ll be impossible for me to invent anything that’ll stop me being born so I can’t do too much harm.

I casually suggested making things out of iron the other day, which I know is a big step forward but everyone just laughed. Too brittle and hard to work compared to bronze or tin, they said. I suppose they’re right. You have to do something to it to make it strong, I remember that. I just don’t remember what that something is. For all I know my quad physics equations and could still compose a cogent analygraphfor the fall of the Mallatratt Protectorate, I’m a bit rusty on a few of the basics. Going to take us years to get garlic bread and sound radio at this rate.

Of course, I had a bit of training for life without the mod cons on Dido, so I can cope, but what makes things really fiddly at the moment is that my future’s past is catching up with my present, which is complicated enough to write down, let alone experience.

We’ve just bumped into the Doctor as a young man, and I’m sure it’s really bad form for me to let on I recognise him when as far as he’s concerned he’s not met me yet.

From Not Necessarily the Way I Do It!

My plan was pretty much the usual one, to go out and see if we could find out the year and our whereabouts in a way that wouldn’t arouse any suspicions, and then hang around until nightfall to get a better fix from the position of the stars. It may sound dull but I’ve found if I do that I usually find something or other to get embroiled in before sunset.

We stepped circumspectly out of the Ship and set off in search of the nearest habitation, ready as ever to improvise any number of cover stories to explain our presence and strange garb. As luck would have it we soon ran into one of the locals, and were able to subtly winkle out the info we needed on route to his encampment.

From The Dairy of an Edwardian Adventuress

People say you should never look back of course, advice we’ve been ignoring since Orpheus and EuroDisney, but I can’t help thinking that if the Doctor hadn’t landed us in the aftermath of the Trajan War a lot of that beastly business with the Time Lords might have been avoided later.

As usual the Doctor rejoiced in dropping straight into the middle of things without a moment’s forethought. Impossible, exasperating man,I tried to protest but somehow he just brushed my complaints away with a smiled shouldn’t have let him, but he did have such a lovely smile.

* * *

From The Pseudo-Shackspur

The Noble Troyan Woman of Troy

Act 3, Scene 2. Another part of the hillside. Enter Mistress Charley, Doctor Shallow and Young Will.

Doct. Yoohoo! Mister Goatboy, excuse me please, Could you tell me what time and place is this? Char. Discreet as ever.

Enter a Goatherd.

Doct. Yes, but awfully brave. Young man, there is information we crave. What land is this and what year are we in? We’ve lost track of both in our travelling.

Char. Oh I give up, you’re so inconsistent.

Doct. Just smile prettily, act like an assistant.

Char. But I never know what trick you’ll pull next!

Doct. Just grit your teeth, smile and stick out your chest; Magic’s best tricks work by misdirection.

Char. So I’m just here to stir his –

Will. Affection?

Doct. Quite so Will, a pretty face inspires trust. True, I’m afraid, if not awfully just. This chap will tell us the time and the place And Presto well head straight back into Space!

Goat. Eleven eight three BC is the year This is Hisarlik in Anatolia. I expect you’re traders from Phoenicia To be garbed and garbling here so queer. You’ve been ship wreck’d and concuss’d I’ll be bound. Which’ll be why you have no goods around. We must offer you shelter at the least Pop back home with me and well have a feast.

Char. How can he know he lives before Our Lord?

Doct. It’s just a translation device that’s flaw’d. It’s an awfully clever mechanism But it causes the odd anachronism. Kind goatherd, we would love to share a meal And watch the evening stars above us wheel. For by such means we will precisely know Our station now and where we next must go. Exeunt Omnes.

From Tales from the Matrix

‘Do we really need to do this?’ asked Charlotte as the band trudged wearily after the herdsman in their impractical shoes, ‘Surely the date and location he’s given you is enough?’

‘Perhaps,’ the Doctor replied, ‘but studying the stars will allow me to be more accurate. Besides, I’m famished. We haven’t eaten for minus three thousand years, bear in mind.’

So the Doctor and his companions blithely headed off into further temporal confusion, unaware that the goatherd had seen the TARDIS arrive and knew full well who the Doctor was already.

There’s a lesson there for anyone who thinks it’s clever to keep their TARDIS in one form, don’t you think? The Ionic Column factory preset might look nice, for example, but when using it means every Grun, Za and Caius in the Cosmos knows who you are immediately, it rather defeats the point of a chameleon circuit.

From The Primary Cressida document

One of our herdsmen saw the TARDIS arrive in the next valley this afternoon and instantly recognised it as the mobile temple that had prefigured the city’s fall, and the Doctor as a younger version of the old man from my tales.

He sent his mate back to tell us so we all had time to prepare ourselves and could all pretend we believed the Doctor’s implausible story about being a trader from Phoenicia when he turned up an hour or so later.

It’s definitely him, probably about 40 years before we met. He dresses similarly, his hair is curlier and darker and his face looks a bit different, but the years are never kind, are they? Amazingly, he’s almost as vague as a young man as he was when old, if not quite so ummy and erry. I’d always assumed that was because he was getting on a bit.

Thankfully, no one here’s too thrown by the idea of time travellers after me relating all my adventures to them, though one of the boys did ask me why the Doctor didn’t walk and talk backwards when his past was in the future. I was very clear why not when I started explaining it, but I must admit I got a bit confused as I went along. He hasn’t recognised me of course, dear diary, and we’ve invited him and his friends to have tea tonight.

From Not Necessarily the Way I Do It!

Well, imagine my embarrassment when we arrived at the fellow’s encampment and who was in charge but my old friend Vicki (now calling herself Cressida of course) and her new husband Troilus, who I’d never actually met, due to quite heavy escaping commitments around the time they got together.

I realised with a start that young Bill Shakespeare was due to write a play about this couple in a few years, and that unless I was careful thismeeting would almost certainly be what inspired it, thus complicating Bill’s already tortuous history further and bringing yet another new paradox to mine. I’d only let Vicki go away with Troilus at Troy’s fall because once I heard she was calling herself Cressida I’d assumed it was predestined (well, I was young, I believed in that kind of thing), I knew there was a play about the couple by Shakespeare and thought I was helping history take its course by hitching them up. Now, if I’d only done that because my future actions would one day bring that play about, I’d accidentally made a big chunk of my past dependent on my future, which, as you know, isn’t really the accepted way of going about things.

I reasoned it was vital for the tidiness of the time line that I kept Bill from learning the background of Troilus and Cressida in any detail, ideally forgetting as much of their present as he could too.

To complicate matters further, Vicki had actually seen Bill as an adult on my time telly, the Time Space Visualiser. She was never the most historically careful of girls, and I feared that if she found out who he was, she’d probably tell him all about his future at the court of Elizabeth and getting the commission to write The Merry Wives of Windsor and the inspiration for Hamlet on the same day and how he’d sprained his wrist in his rush to write both.

All it might take, I thought, would be one slip from any one of us, accidentally mentioning the words TARDIS or Zeus Plug over dessert, say, and causality would be tangled up like President Pandak’s kittens in twine, quicker than you could explain what you pop in a Ganymede socket.

Luckily, it seemed Vicki hadn’t spotted how anachronistic our garb was and hadn’t realised I was her old friend, seeming to completely swallow my inventive tales of sea faring, despite Charley’s rather fanciful insertions about hook-handed pirates.

I had, of course, underestimated her, as a quick and entirely accidental glance at her diary before dinner proved. Not knowing I could regenerate, she had taken me for my young self in my first form and thought she was protecting me from foreknowledge!

This, of course, suited my purpose. All I reckoned I had to do now to save Time from chewing itself to bits was keep Will busy and make sure Vicki didn’t relate her history to any of us over dinner.

Oh what tangled webs we weave, when tidy temporal strands we try to leave.

From The Dairy of an Edwardian Adventuress

Mr and Mrs Troilus seemed a sweet couple, he a lanky chap with a curly beard and a well-meaning expression and she a rather enthusiastic young thing with big eyes, yet the Doctor had become rather shifty from the moment we met them. I knew he was preoccupied by something, but I had, at that time, no idea what. After some fun, improvising tales of derring-do on the high seas to prove our credentials as traders, he took me to one side and explained that I had to get Wilf as squiffy as possible at the feast that night for reasons it was simpler at that moment not to explain. He said history depended on me getting the boy so drunk he could neither speak nor remember his behaviour the next morning. I’m normally quite good at that kind of thing, it was hardly my fault the Bawd was a functioning alcoholic at the age of eight.

From The Pseudo-Shackspur

The Noble Troyan Woman of Troy

Act 4, Scene 1. An encampment in the mountains. Enter Mistress Charley, Doctor Shallow, Young Will, a goatherd, Troilus, Cressida, divers villagers and guards severally.

Doct. Hello. (Aside) Her! ’Tis Vicki, I should have guess’d. I never with good geography was bless’d Hisarlik is the modern name for Troy. Quite a temporal tangle, boy oh boy! (To Cress.) Ha ha, my hearties! We here are sailors three. (Aside) I can but hope she does not see ‘tis me.

Cress. (Aside) Deceit upon deception! Can this be The Doctor who I first took it to be? Is this him when young as I assumed? Or must deeper deceit be presumed? I’ll play along until the truth I know. (To Doct.) Good mariners, welcome and hello.

Will. (To Char.) What’s this strange accented charade about?

Char. (To Will) Who knows, we’ll be, I bet, last to find out.

From Tales from the Matrix

Yes Time Tots, exactly! The first thing any of us would have done would have been to get out of there quickly before we compromised the causal nexus. Staying for tea and imbibing too much ethanol, which you’ll recall the Doctor had a particular weakness for on his mother’s side, doesn’t strike any of us as sensible!

From The Secondary Cressida document (a transcribed fragment allegedly found at a Church of Rome jumble sale) – Even More Suppressed Texts of the Vatican Library, A Hatper-Mysteria- Ellerycorp Press Original, 2977 CE

My ruse worked, the robot’s read my carefully exposed diary and thinks I suspect nothing! He’s so obviously not really the Doctor it’s not true, but he doesn’t know I know that yet, so we have the advantage. He’s definitely a Dalek robot double like that other one they sent after us.

They’ve probably made him the young Doctor this time to make it less obvious. He does look a bit like he could be him sometimes if you’re not paying attention, but if you look closely his face is all wrong and his voice goes a bit funny sometimes like that other robot’s did, almost doing my accent at times! I think he’s probably feeding on my jumbled memories or something.

We’ll overpower him and his companions at dinner tonight and destroy them, they won’t expect me to know how to deactivate them.

From Not Necessarily the Way I Do It!

I’ve always been keen on wine, particularly the heavier oaky reds, though I find there is a rather tiresome tendency for them to be drugged by villainous blackguards sometimes, rather impairing the subtleties of the flavour, but wine in the Homeric era was quite a different proposition. What can I tell you about it except that it tasted awful but did the job?

It wasn’t the heavily resinated stuff the Greeks later went in for, thankfully, nor indeed that watered-down muck the ancient Romans used to dish out at parties, but I think it’s telling that the most flattering thing Homer had to say about it in the whole of The Iliad was how like the sea it was in hue. When you bear in mind he was blind, you can tell he’d had to ask around a bit to find anyone with something positive to say about it.

The food wasn’t much better either. It can be terribly hard eating out when you travel like I do. These days at home, I generally try to eat only things that don’t have a central nervous system, or that I’ve knocked up in the food machine, but sometimes, when you’re a guest, qualms like that have to go out of the window, particularly on worlds ruled by intelligent plants, where you’re best advised not to ask for a celery stick and to just stick your toes in damp soil like everyone else at the table.

Even then I try to stick to my principles and not eat anything with a sense of self, parliamentary democracy or sultanas in it.

This dinner was a particularly awkward affair; Charley acting like a slightly sloshed pirate queen, Vicki acting like she didn’t know me, Bill acting up, singing lewd madrigals that officially weren’t due for invention yet in his rather reedy girlish voice, and all the while me worrying about causality falling apart around me rather too much to fully enjoy the dolmades.

Suddenly, half way through the proceedings, the impossible happened: it took a turn for the worse. Vicki shouted out ‘Now!’, and lunged at my chest and started tearing at my waistcoat.

From The Dairy of an Edwardian Adventuress

My recollections of the ensuing events are somewhat hazy; I had been struggling to match young Wilt measure for measure, you might say, when I saw the Doctor being attacked. I launched myself at his assailant and missed, I’m told, briefly losing my dignity and consciousness in the process.

A shocking melee ensued by all accounts, with Trajans tearing at our clothes with cutlery and all the usual business with tables being turned and the like breaking out; I’m only glad I can’t remember the full details, because what little I do makes me blush quite enough.

It’s quite possible I told someone I loved them, and was sick later too. I’ve never been brave enough to ask. The next thing I remember clearly was being in the main tent with the Doctor explaining a lot and me apologising a bit, just in case.

From The Pseudo-Shackspur

The Noble Troyan Woman of Troy

Act 5, Scene 2. At dinner beneath the stars.

Cress. Take that, false Doctor! But where are your wires? In sparks and puffs of smoke you should expire. Could it be that you are the Doctor true?

Char. Get your claws off him, he’s mine, you wild shrew!

Will. Oh, Pillicock sat on pillicock

Char. Will you stop that terrible singing, Will? The Doctor and I are under attack From this Troyan host, while you’re supping sack. Join in the scrap and cease your carousel Lewd songs, anyhow, douse all arousal.

Doct. Vicki, Will, Charley, all, put down those knives! You’re all making the mistakes of your lives.

Cress. Vicki, you say? You should not know that yet. If you’re the young Doctor, we’ve not yet met.

Doct. Vicki, the reason that I know your name Is that inwardly I am still the same Man who left you at Troy some years ago, I can change my looks, if you didn’t know. Char. Doctor, do you mean that you know this wench?

Doct. We travelled together many years hence. I think it’s time I explain’d the full truth Of why I’ve deceived you all, forsooth.

Will. If she’s an old friend then tell me why You did keep that fact from Charley and I?

Doct. This is an old friend, Will, but, what is worse, She features, in decasyllabic verse, In a drama that you shall one day pen That means I shall leave her with this Troyan, If you only write it because you’re here Chronological conundra appear. Effects and causes whirl and spin about, Go through the wringer and turn inside out. The egg that hatches out your chicken Does in that self same chicken thicken.

From Tales from the Matrix

Then in direct contravention of fifteen universal laws of Time and two local statutes, the Doctor sat down and explained everything that had happened, and, in explaining it, he brought all the things he was worried about happening that hadn’t into the open, didn’t he?

Of course, it turned out that some of the things he was worried about were of no concern at all, but as a result of relating them he brought worse problems about.

I expect most of you have read stories about the Doctor in other books, and I expect some of you think he’s quite clever, even though he breaks a lot of rules, don’t you? Well, you’re right! In a crisis, he’s just the kind of person you need around, he can come up with ideas almost no one else could. The only problem is, when you’re not having a crisis, he’s just the kind of person to cause one.

From The Primary Cressida document

How embarrassing. It turns out the Doctor was the Doctor after all, only older and with a new face for some strange reason. The girl who drinks too much is his latest companion and the little boy with the dirty songs and the voice like a girl is William Shakespeare! Nice enough lad, no wonder he ends up in the theatre with that voice though, perfect for all those drag roles they gave boys. We had a lovely chat about Dido and Aeneas and told each other about our scrapes with the Daleks, and I let slip the odd thing I knew about his future.

He’s told me we should go and settle in England. Apparently there’s an old book he’s read by a chap called Geoffrey that says relatives of Aeneas were the first Britons I think it’s a super idea, ’ I know Troilus will like it in England, and I think we’ve persuaded the Doctor too! Just think! could be one of my own ancestors passing on my secret diaries for years and years, a bit like mummy’s family did! How smashing would that be?

From Not Necessarily the Way I Do It!

Of course I decided in the end that honesty would be the best policy and that as long as everyone knew the full facts, and swore not to be influenced by them, we could probably darn the hole in causality in such a way that it wouldn’t show. I sat everyone down in the central tent and explained. Well, what a Charlie I looked!

*** From The Dairy of an Edwardian Adventuress

Ridiculously, the Doctor had been worried about Wilf getting inspiration for the play Troilus and Cressida from meeting the real Troilus and Cressida! I protested that Wilf had already read his own plays in the future anyhow, but the Doctor countered that they’d have been corrupted playing texts and in a court of law it would be hard to prove that was down to him, whereas if Will had got any of the plot or characterisation directly through his adventures with us that was a bit more serious.

That was when Will started laughing.

From The Pseudo-Shackspur

The Noble Troyan Woman of Tray Act 5, Scene 4. A tent in the camp.

Will. But Doctor, I did not invent the tale Of Troilus and Cressida’s love that fail’d. Why, Geoffrey Chaucer told it years ago! I cannot believe that you did not know. Have you read even half of what you claim Or do you just like dropping well-known names? Cressida’s tale is part of tradition Not the result of my precognition Of future perfect past present events, If you will forgive me my mangled tense, And my quondumque futures version Should have put you off this girl’s desertion.

Char. You should have read your Brodie’s Notes on Will. The phantom threat you feared from his quill Was nothing but an insubstantial shade, And there’s a real spectre here I’m afraid. I’m half a ghost of Christmas yet to come, Remember, I’ve made history come undone. You’ve got paradoxes enough to be Getting on with, as far as I can see, So why do you search for new ones instead That only exist inside of your head?

Doct. If I had known the work of me laddo Would I have found menace in my shadow? I here resolve to watch much less TV And be the reader I do claim to be. For half my erudite orations Come straight from books of quotations.

From Tales from the Matrix

‘What was Helen of Troy actually like then?’ asked William Shaxberd as he helped himself to more wine.

‘Is,’ corrected the Doctor, prissily.

‘She’s a good egg by all accounts,’ said Vicki, politely not mentioning the fact she thought her looks had gone, ‘and Menelaus was happy enough to have her back, even after all the bother, so she must be quite nice when you get to know her, I suppose.’

‘Well, she would have to be a good egg really,’ said William, ‘Her father was a swan supposedly.’ Like most young human men of his generation, he knew the salacious bits of Greek Mythology surprisingly well.

‘Half human on his mother’s side?’ smiled the Doctor, thinking himself clever. ‘Aren’t we all?’

‘No, just men,’ said Charlotte through a falafel.

‘She has two birthdays they say, one when the egg came out of her mother and another when it hatched,’ Troilus revealed, leaning forward over the table and whispering in that conspiratorial manner people sometimes do when divulging well known but dubious trivia.

‘It would have been an easy birth if she was born an egg,’ said Vicki ruefully, one hand on her stomach.

‘An easy lay, you mean,’ William corrected.

‘So Paris said –’Troilus began, his eyes a twinkle.

He was shouted down by his wife seconds later, barrack room tale untold, and one of those awkward silences ensued that dinner party guests in all cultures and times know only too well.

‘Have you actually read Troilus and Cressida, Doctor?’ asked Charlotte a little later.

‘You ask me, who had a hand in some of Shakespeare’s finest work – who put the mixed metaphor in the “To be or not to be” soliloquy, who hired the bear for The Winter’s Tale, and who really shouldn’t have passed on the story of A Midsummer’s Night Dream, if I’ve read Troilus and Cressida?’ replied the Doctor, rather over-egging it in that way he usually did when he was on the defensive.

‘Yes!’ they cried as one.

‘Well, no,’ admitted the Doctor. ‘It’s supposed to be one of the better ones, and well, you know, I’ve been busy. I’ve still not managed to tune the Time Space Visualiser in to catch all of The Golden Girls and I’ve been trying for decades.’

‘She doesn’t end up with Troilus in it, she ends up with Diomede, andit’s set during the war not after it!’ said Charlotte patiently.

‘Diomede! That was Steven!’ Vicki laughed.The Doctor looked confused. ‘Vicki and Steven were just friends,weren’t you? Just the odd haircut and getting locked up together, Ithought.’

‘Yes, that’s right, how many times do we have to go through that?’Vicki explained, giving a petulant Troilus a peck on the cheek.

‘Well the legend must have got a bit confused by the time it gotwritten down I think Chaucer got it from a foreign book,’ said William,draining his goblet.

The Doctor beamed, thinking he’d got away with his tinkering again.‘So Troilus and Cressida weren’t predestined after all!’ he said

‘Well, only because of your lack of reading,’ snorted Charlotte.

‘Oh that is a relief,’ said the Doctor taking the wine jug from William and helping himself without asking.

‘Now what about this business of giving us charts to help us reach this Britain young Will spoke of?’ asked Troilus, passing the Doctor a goat’s cheese nibble.

‘I really shouldn’t,’ explained the Doctor. ‘If you go there, on the basis of the frankly dubious history of Geoffrey of Monmouth then Vicki is in danger of becoming one of her own descendants, which is at least as badas the things I’ve been trying to prevent all day.’

‘Oh go on Doctor, please!’ begged Vicki. ‘We could mine tin in Cornwall and I’d promise not to invent anything I shouldn’t as long as I lived, not even roller skates!’

‘I don’t think I should. I’ve made enough of a mess looking after young Charley here, the repercussions of me sending you to Britain because the unborn Shakespeare suggested it could be horrendous,’ said the Doctor, finally being responsible for once in his lives.

‘Oh go on Doctor, I’m unborn too, remember, so that shouldn’t matte rmuch,’ said Vicki.

‘And I’m only half here,’ said Charlotte grimly ‘Why stop messing about now? You should have stayed at home watching these Golden Girls of yours if you weren’t prepared to get involved in real people’s lives. They’re messy and not always in the order you’d like and sometimes too short, and they’re not always better for having you in them, but you either face that or hide away somewhere, don’t you?

’The Doctor kissed her.

‘What was that for?’ asked Charlotte.

‘To shut you up,’ he said. He tapped Vicki on the nose and smiled,’Come on, let’s carry on the party, and in the morning, when rosy-fingered Dawn has done her bit, we’ll sort out a good map of Europe for the Trojans and get them started on their boats. Any consequences which haven’t happened yet we can worry about later!’

Some of you will be shocked at just how naughty the Doctor was in this story: jeopardising the stability of all those will-have-might-have-been futures out there depending on him by interweaving all those strands of destiny connected to the Dalek race and all on the basis of a whim.

The Doctor already knew Dalek causality was partially snagged in a loop in Time and his friend was the focus of a temporal anomaly, but of course he had spent a jolly long time in the Vortex, hadn’t he? That meant his causal connections to events future, past and maybe- somehow were a great deal more jumbled up than most people’s and he was quite good at judging just how likely to snaggle the Web of Time his whims might be.

Or so he thought.

The Doctor believed in two very wrong things you see; firstly, in something he called personal morality that he thought was more important than doing the things simply everyone knows are right, and secondly, that he was cleverer than everyone else and could always sort things out.

He deserved what happened to him next, didn’t he?

Document from the Braxiatel Collection Shakespearean Ephemera wing, a note found in the effects of William Shakespeare by literary assessor Porlock. It is not believed to be in Shakespeare’s hand though it bears some graphological similarities to the disputed Scarlioni Hamlet manuscript.

List of things not to mention

The Daleks,

That you’ve met me before when we meet next (because you didn’t mention it last time, you know),

That you’ve read half your plays already

That I wrote all the good bits in Hamlet, [‘good bits’ later amended to ‘rubbish bits’ in a different hand]

The idea of cigars (until Raleigh gets back from abroad),

That cigars will end up named after some of your characters,

That someone called Raleigh will go abroad,

That Troilus and Cressida had a lovely marriage and lived happily ever after in Mousehole, no matter how the story goes in Chaucer,

Oh, the places you’ve gone and the things that you’ve seen

[irithnova]

Finally I found my people, these types of ocs either show how little the creators know about real Philippine history or they simped for the characters so much they romantacized it.

Like (oc) Piri in love with America? Bullsh*t he was a literal backstabber, if anything it should be the other way around. America was the one who wanted to keep her, a literal war happened between these two nations.

I was searching so badly for a fic where Piri would call him out for it, especially when he failed terribly to protect the country from Japan when protection from Japan was the entire "reason" Piri was annexed in the first place.

I'm glad Hima never gave these people the satisfaction of a canon fem Piri, and made him a he. And he looks nothing like Spain and is not doormat nice like what everyone assumed he would be since from what I've read he's kind of a jerk to his friends.

❤️

Yeah I'm personally less vexxed when other Filipinos see Philippines as a woman even if I don't really like it myself but red flags go up when non Filipinos do it. And obviously a lot of these "Philippines is a cute submissive uwu maid for Spain and America" are made by non Filipinos who see the Philippines as a cheap way to project their weird, almost dom/sub ship preferences onto a character, who just so happens to the rep for a nation who's been through centuries of colonisation and oppression. Insensitive to say the least lol.

My country is more than just a way to project your weird little fantasies on.

Of course there are Filipinos who do this too and that makes me more sad than angry.

I have no issues with Fem Piri if its well researched and nuanced but unfortunately a lot of Fem Piri ocs have lowkey traumatised me LMAOOO and again a lot of them are made by people with no real interest in Filipino history, culture, or people. If Hima made a Fem piri it would probably only validate these weirdos and I'd. Have to take a step back from the fandom for a bit lol so I'm glad piri is a dude purely because a lot of the fandom aren't interested enough to be tactful about the Philippines so a Fem Piri would make them run wild.

[frozen-fountain]

It's ten years today since I made a pilgrimage down to Brighton to see Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds live in concert. My purpose today isn't to get into the circumstances that preceded this or the specific reasons why being there meant so very much to me; maybe some day I'll do that under this name as well. For now, suffice to say it was the best show I've been to, and one I doubt will ever be surpassed. I think the Bad Seeds were on stage for the better part of three hours, with two encores and everyone clearly having a great time, reflected just as strongly in the audience. I really hope I get to go again eventually, though it'll be a more sombre affair now. And that's fine. I've always looked on his music as a big congregation that plumbs the depths of human existence without ever denying or shutting out the light, and it's this that's struck such a resonant chord with me across the years and made him one of the most key pillars in my musical journey.

One of my most vivid memories of the night doesn't even concern what was happening on stage. The whole time, I was fascinated by the two ageing punks sitting in front of us. I love ageing punks; I was raised by one, and they're my favourite people at shows because of their sheer enthusiasm for the music and utter disregard for what's generally considered age-appropriate dress and behaviour. Deeply inspiring stuff. But I remember one of them lifting both fists in a cheer when this song (from 1986) started playing – and he did the same for Higgs Boson Blues, a track from the contemporaneous album. And I was struck by what a gift it must have been to watch this wonderful group evolve and shift over the years, to meet new songs at different stages in life, and to remain no less excited for their new creations even decades later.

It was many things, but to me, it was a thick, bold line under what I'd spent the previous year working to convince myself of as I left my youth behind me, and that this band's congregational music helped so much in drilling through my obstinate, oblivion-seeking skull: there are and always will be things worth sticking around for.

I don't know anything about this man besides what the back of his head looks like and his enthusiasm for Bad Seeds old and new. He never even turned around to look at me in turn. I highly doubt we'll ever meet again, and if we do, I'll have no way of knowing it. But I still smile every now and then when I listen to Sad Waters, or simply when my mind wanders back to the show from time to time. When I need to remember the future is unwritten and the world has a capacity for many things, and one is endless surprise. Regular readers of whatever it is I'm doing here will know my young life was not the happiest, and I expended a lot of time and energy wrestling with the desire to end it. As I write this I'm closing in on the eight-year anniversary of the last time I seriously contemplated suicide – which is something I couldn't have even dreamed about saying back in 2013. It's these experiences, these moments of connection between strangers through the shared appreciation of another stranger's artistic expression, that go along way to making this so, and I'll never forget it.

This last decade has intensified a cultural shift that was gathering steam around the time of the concert. And one of many reasons I feel conversation can be so divisive and contentious is that we're rapidly becoming more aware to how badly we can hurt one another through simply existing as we are. Whether it's the descendants of colonisers reckoning with the ways we continue to benefit from that bloody history, or men being pushed to evaluate the allowances they are granted to take up space persistently denied women, or any of us learning the benefits of initiating awkward conversations about boundaries in our interpersonal lives, what is bit by bit rising to the surface of our awareness is how easy it is to become a bad story in someone's life just by being people. It's a very difficult thing to come to terms with no matter who you are.

And I wanted to write this memory down and share it because, at least to me, it's a reminder that we can help one another, too, and often without trying or knowing. You don't know what you might have done for a stranger you had no idea was watching. A simple, unguarded gesture that I doubt this man thought about for so much of a second has stayed with me, cheered me, and reminded me of several crucial lessons when I most needed them. If I've learned anything in the years since it's that, simply by being you and being open with your joys, I can guarantee you're someone's good story, too. Even if you'll never know about it.

In the meantime, if you're so inclined... maybe tell me a story about a time a stranger helped you in a similar way?

[lightofthedarkdarkofthelight]

# the nature of what it is to be trans is just that: natural

It’s been around for as long as us human animals have been around.

We need to be careful in acknowledging it as inherently queer not cis mandated it should adhere to the queer spirit for queer bodies not the cis hets perspective that was born from brutal colonisation

An issue I don’t see getting the light it deserves is how the cis normative world, propagated by colonialism, and by this I mean how colonialism was excused and executed under the title of ‘the civilisation mission’. A mission that was to forcibly indoctrinate the entire globe to take on the culture of Europe aka Eurocentric values. Such values included their two way gender system.

With that being said, as a gnc brown skin individual, right from as early as pre school I’ve been subject to how this European cultural view of gender confuses the cis.

Are you a boy or a girl? What are you? A child I would think to myself, but the aggression of their confusion made my little empathetic self unable to speak up.

Since growing up and finding my way into the trans community in my early teens I have also experienced cis strangers telling me it is obvious I was born male and trying to be female when I never could. I have also been told by cis strangers it’s obvious I was born female and trying to be male when I never could.

What I have learnt from this is:

Cis hets: we are allowed to tell you in an array of ways how you do not fit our two way gender system, but don’t you dare ever declare this yourself, do not find your own label to be defined as, as we will tell you it does not exist.

To the cis I cannot exist as their female nor their male but I MUST try to and accept their criticism as never being able to. To them it is obvious I can not fit in either box but I am not allowed to declare this I am not allowed to make my own space I just have to be victim to their standards and European ideologies harming my body and identity.

It is frustrating how their own self admitted confusion to them is not confusion but proof of their own egotistical righteousness over all the bodies that do not fit what they feel theirs do.

I have learned that a large body of the medical community related to the care of trans bodies will push for you to fit into the European two way gender system. Creating guidelines such as presenting as one particular gender a year before being prescribed hrt or obtaining surgery. To have surgeries that fall in line with how a cis body would look. That to fight these things means being pushed back, being labelled as not ready or mentally able and so on.

I have found that in contrast to the history of the what it meant to be transgender now the focus more revolves around the ability or at least intent to pass as a cis body to cis eyes. To pass in the Eurocentric ideals of a gender identity. This has been one of the hardest realisations (don’t get me wrong there’s been many) to know that for the longest time the state that is being transgender was about acknowledging the vast array of NATURAL states that exist outside of the Eurocentric two way gender ideals. To know that I missed out on that and came to be in a time where it was catered to the Eurocentric gender ideals. Sort of feels like “fine fine, we acknowledge this trans thing but only if it adheres to Eurocentric gender ideals as much as possible and we will mercifully push for this as much as possible”. It’s sad. It makes me mourn for the little me, being heavily attacked by the eyes of Eurocentric ideals (in virtually all ways) and having my birth right (humans as social animals are communal animals, the first of us lived nomadic lifestyles in ‘family-bands’ aka little communities and I believe we are all born to have this as is our birth right) - my community being invaded and remoulded by Eurocentric values before I even had a chance to take my first steps within it.

I believe it wasted a lot of my time and created unnecessary amounts of confusion which makes it so much more infuriating when they accuse the state of being trans as WHY there is confusion. It also blocked me from learning and honouring my natural states (always more than one state to every body I won’t argue on this) for far too long when it existed to be the opposite. Our communities exist as natural formations of natural connections to natural states of being that align and harmonise in ways that become a safe space and type of home.

I think it’s exciting now in my late twenties seeing more of my community using terms such as ‘he him lesbian’ ‘girl cock’ ‘dick clit’ ‘girlfriendboyfriend’ ‘butch boys’ and the like. The queer and trans community stem from the space that existed to permit those terms. The space that existed to acknowledge and provide a home and voice to the incredible amounts of variance within any one body. So make up words if you find yourself indoctrinated into a language that does not describe you enough to be able to speak your truths. Remember that one thing colonisation left us with is European languages dominate the globe still. Remember that in order for this to happen many languages were brutally changed and eradicated (books and educational spaces burnt to ash). It makes sense to have to create your own language to survive in the post colonial world. Remember that although once the USA was colonised it successfully and lawfully divorced itself from Europe so whites could be recognised as American only, they still all come from Europe and so mainly speak English (most successfully globalised European language) .

So don’t be embarrassed and don’t sweat how much the Eurocentric world will throw fits at your neo pronouns or how you rearrange and reconstruct and disable and reinvent the words they assign to you with languages that our ancestors were beaten into submission of. Of course it will rattle them. It’s living breathing proof that despite how well colonisation globalised European culture to take over ALL cultures and their beliefs/languages/paradigms aka sense of reality, bodies, souls, minds, hormones, biology continue to grow unable to fit their space. It’s proof that having one culture dominate ALL cultures is what is actually unnatural. That even with generations and generations of nations swearing to raise everyone to submit into European culture, it still cannot hold us all. That there are still an immeasurable amount of us that can not, that will not, that would rather die, that those who well fit european culture even acknowledge- we can not be held by - their cultural ideals. That there are natural forces that can not be reckoned with no matter how many generations you try to beat it from us.

I cuddle younger me with this knowledge and by seeing all of you exist as yourselves even when having to fight daily to be able to do so because the world around you continually tries to reconstruct what your words, feelings, bodies, minds and souls natural states are.

Please keep fighting. Be unapologetic. Keep showing up as you. Even though I’m not a little butch gnc child anymore I still benefit wholeheartedly from seeing it just as you do. We all do. Our community has existed for eons, expressed in all cultures. Remember that it was only one culture that has had so much self hate for who we are and that it was through the brutalities of colonialism and globalising their culture that we even have to fight to be seen or heard. Do not give up. The only weird thing is telling a whole globe of souls to adhere to one culture that was so out of sync with all the other cultures. It is weird to see a thing and say it does not exist and weird still to see another of that thing and another and another and deny it’s existence and weirder still to see it go further back than whoever first said it does not exist and still persist IT DOES NOT EXIST. That’s weird. Not you. Thank you for existing in a world that constantly tried to erase, you, your community and our rich history. Remember that those against you are slaves to a culture that harmed their own people too, there’s no real power in that but there ir is sadness and sickness and they will try to project this onto you. Don’t let them.

-Tahari Spirt

[cantotallyeven]

OK look, I'm not reblogging that Trump Tirade of wild, frequently off-topic, entirely uncited claims. But I want to say that if you are interested in understanding a bit better why people like me feel the way they do about Israel - that is, that it's fair to label it an ethnostate and that is something that needs to change, NOT that it should cease to exist - you should look at the history of colonisation in Rhodesia or the USA. All of these arguments - "we want X group to have their own country too, on this land we've chosen for them", "actually we have people from X group who we've integrated", "they would do worse to us" - they've been run before.

I don't personally agree with the slogan "from the river to the sea, palestine [must/will] be free" because of how imprecise it is, the fact that it can be read as calling for a reverse ethnic cleansing (which would be just as bad as what is happening now). However, I know that a lot of people who do use it and agree with it envisage a South Africa style one-state solution. That's personally what I'd want to see as well.

I appreciate that if you're an Israeli Jew this is a very difficult time. I live in the UK and find it horrifying that my country is acting as a passive enabler of Netanyahu's agenda. If you wholeheartedly support a free Palestinian country, it must be awful seeing it reduced to rubble and feeling there's nothing you can personally do to stop it.

I'll just breeze past your opinion insult there. So you say I should look into the history of colonization in the US. But here's the thing. Israel is actually a decolonization project. it was literally the indigenous people going home. And those indigenous people didn't want to kick the current occupants out, they wanted to live there in peace with them. But those current occupants didn't like that. They refused to give the Jews equal rights. And when Britain and the UN left, they went and tried to ethnically cleanse all of the Jews. They failed. So what were the Jews to do? Simply say "no worries' and let all of the Palestinians back in?

You say you envision a one state solution South Africa style but how would that work? Cuz like, the population of Gaza + the West Bank is around 5 million. The population of Israel is 9 million. Isn't that equivalent to Israel just taking control of Palestine? Like, even if the 2 million Arabs form a voting block with the incoming Palestinians, it would still be the current Israeli government in control until all of the new citizens are integrated. And again, this assumes that Hamas would not have an issue living in peace with Jews, they've shown time and again that they don't want that. Like yes, in an ideal world that would happen, but I don't think it could in the real world.

And yes, seeing all of that death and destruction sucks. I guess where we differ is I feel Hamas is more to blame for that than the IDF.

[hjellacott]

OK So I'm finishing up the spectacle that is the Harry and Meghan documentary purely out of boredom and a need to see with my own eyes that they really are this massively clueless. I won't say stupid, but come on, it's like they don't know anything. Like, I'm not even an expert, but you study history, study the UK, study the monarchy a bit, study the press and the media a bit, and BAM you can make better decisions.

So one thing that has struck me now is that apparently Prince Harry's reasoning was that if he moved out of the UK, if they worked for the royal family for free, with no taxpayer money, then it'd all be OK. The press wouldn't go after them, they wouldn't have a right to put their private lives out there, and they could lead a private life while still do the good work. And he was sincerely baffled when the Royal Family said no, which I truly am stunned about, because OF COURSE THEY SAID NO. Because Harry was, essentially, delluding himself. So let me explain why Harry's plan could NEVER work.

1- Harry is a British Prince, set to one day be the brother of the king, and he's a british citizen. Therefore, when he goes out and about, he's not just representing the sovereign and doing work in her or his name, he's representing THE COUNTRY. He's the face of the UK, people look at him and his family and based on that judge the ENTIRETY of the country they represent. When he goes and does royal duties, it's not Harry doing charitable work, Harry helping the poor, Harry meeting a country leader... IT'S THE UK THAT DOES IT.

2. Therefore, the Commonwealth citizens have every fucking right in the world to know absolutely everything of what their representatives are doing. Think about it. You don't get to choose to be born in a monarchy, you don't get to choose your royal family, so the very least you get is knowing exactly what the leaders are doing in the name of your country, even in their private lives, because their private decisions also affect the way people will perceive your country, such as when Harry decided to dress as a nazi. And when you see your royal prince goes out to basically have all of the pros without none of the cons, to basically say fuck off to your own country, and go elsewhere, how would you feel? I mean, it's as if a member of your parliament or your congress decides to permanently live in another country but still represent yours. So you have to stay and bite the dust, but he can leave because he's rich?

3. And why is he so rich? because he's inheriting money FROM THE ROYAL FAMILY, from titles, from aristocracy, from the taxpayer, from the colonisation. Or where the fuck do you think the millions that Charles, and also Diana, have at times given him, come from? The whole family shares a fortune nobody is too clear where it comes from, part of it from investments, and it dates back to the colonisation of half the world, you don't get to take it, go, and call it your private money and intend to be left alone.

4. The citizens of the UK have a right to information about anybody that wishes to act in representation of them, doesn't matter if they're paid by the taxpayer or not, because at the end of the day, they're the family, and the business, that leads the country. They are called the Duke and Duchess of SUSSEX, for god fucking sakes. The monarchy is a massive institution of the united KINGDOM. It's its essence. It's super important, of course people have the right to be informed about them, after having to stand having a monarchy imposed on them. And Prince Harry's great uncle Edward VIII abdicated and stopped doing royal duties only to then befriend Hitler, which of course you can imagine the dismay this caused in the UK, so of course the country has learned the lesson and now really wants to know what Harry, who has traditionally been quite a rebel and quite impulsive and caused a lot of fuckery in his teens, is exactly up to, and what his children are up to, anywhere and whenever.

5. Besides Prince Harry also represents the entirety of the Commonwealth Realms, as do any of his royal relatives, and since those are many territories spread out around the world it is super important for the press to publish and spread royal news. The day the royal family becomes invisible and irrelevant, the way Harry wants, even if it's just one member of it, the monarchy will begin to die.

6. Therefore, the ONLY way in the world Harry could defend a desire to never be in the press and get everyone to back him and have the press leave him alone and people not have a right any more to ask about his private life, would be to leave the monarchy, leave the country, renounce every title and privilege, no longer represent the country or the royal family, get a normal job and live an entirely private life wherever he wants.

SO UNTIL HARRY AND MEGHAN DO THAT, THEY'RE NEVER GOING TO HAVE A NORMAL LIFE AWAY FROM THE PRESS, AND I DO NOT BELIEVE THEY DON'T KNOW THIS (they're just not willing to do that and happier playing victims).

[deutoplasmic]

AWWW SHY SUKAI,,, i dont trust ruki with hot objects but maybe hes well practiced,,, and shion with a pencil scares me LMAODJDKDJS

yup we’ve got tons of languages!! i only know filipino though bc im from the capital city 😭 but yea we’ve been colonized by spain, the US, and japan its been rough for us. most of our precolonial history is gone and we’re still lowkey a US military asset so we’re real screwed if the US and china go to war

YEA CHINESE NETIZENS DID THE MATH ITS CRAZY the ones who allegedly got rigged in tend to differ depending on who does the math but pick i have who got rigged out is hiroto (who was in jo1’s season and also boys planet and will be debuting soon in nxd) but concerning age,,, cpop isnt too strict on that compared to kpop and jpop. theres still that age pressure ofc but cpop tends to praise people who actively go against the status quo (ie masculine female idols, lolita girls, idols like 胡烨韬 who are as androgynous as you can get) there was even a trainee in 创造营2019 who was born in 1985 and he made it to the finale. there was some criticism ofc but he was mostly praised for being brave enough to keep trying

PLSSS the only was i can justify kyosuke’s strength is that he used to sell wheelchairs lmao im sure lifting wheelchairs into cars takes some strength

junmin!! hes the oldest member of xikers (and one of the shortest lmao) hes so cute tbh hes a bit like a yorkie,,, yappy,,, tiny,,, agile,,, he sings the first chorus of do or die. his voice always sounds like that

yea unis is crazy lmao a lot of filipinos like them because they have filipinos but. other than hyeonju theyre all just so young to me

HFNDJDJDJ HONESTLY I GET YOU if i mess up that far down a project. thats between me and god now 😭 but thanks for the compliment hdnsjsjshsjs

and i gotchu if u ever need to either yap or listen!! i can do both 💪

LMAO our politicians do the same thing dw 😔

also unrelated but someone said rihi looks like wolfgang from animal crossing and now i cant unsee

listen. you can never know how old ruki actually is in this au. tbh he probably says he doesn't know but he damn well does, down to the day and all.... but ok fair :rofl: i cant remember can anyone in jo1 draw????? i can only think of rihito and hes not in jo1 LOL

that's still impressive as hell....!!!!!!!! not the colonising bit the knowing filipino bit :sweatdrop: i hear just about all that's left of old filipino mythos are just scraps which is super super sad.... and yeah no you guys are absolutely done for if that ever happens. prolly become cannon fodder or smth. yikes

DID THE MATHS LOOOOOOOL the one benefit to have been a victim of one of the world's most demanding academic systems :rofl: RIGHT i'm pretty sure china was all over 刘逸云 back in the day. but it's cool to see things like that! most of my knowledge with chinese girls in the entertainment industry are conventionally pretty feminine girls like angelababy and like 白鹿, so the more you know! also 胡烨韬 is SO PRETTY wOW??????? 1985 omg good for him :handshake: nice to see especially when the other parts of east asia think that youth is paramount lmfao.....

OFC and his history as a baseball club member. or hes just built like that. who knows. its his redemption for being in bottom 3 ini quiz score LOL

love a short king lmao and youre so right he DOES look like a mini dog. he's got a set of pipes LOL but i admit i can't really hear much about his voice bc of the distortion :sweatdrop:

wait omg i forgot about that LOL there's like 2 filipino members right. and speaking of the philippines. what is a jollibees ive heard of it but never known what it is

OFC if you cant tell its wrong that closely then theres nothing wrong at all full stop!!! average crocheting experience!!!!!

thank you !!!!!!!!!! multitalented fr !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and wow i think its a trend to have incompetent politicians thats crazy :rofl:

oh my GOD actually theyre so right............. wait..................... no way.................. its actualyl him omg

[meichenxi]

Ooh anything about linguistics and/or Chinese linguistics that interests you- what do you find most interesting?

Ooooo thank you! First let me apologise for the lack of rigour i.e. sources - I am ILL.

HMMMMM ok...let me talk a little bit about one thing I find fascinating - the idea of 'linguistic complexity'. It's an interesting topic that a) demonstrates the failures of linguistics that only takes Indo-European languages into account; b) demonstrates how a conflation of linguistic and moral judgements leads to absolute chaos; and c) proves that sometimes the purpose of all models and hypotheses is to be a useful aid in description, and not to be 100% accurate. Which means that multiple models can exist at the same time. Also, it shows just how cool Classical Chinese is.

I'm going to make this into two posts because I have been asked to wax lyrical on this stuff twice...this one will be a general overview of what linguistic complexity is and some of the issues around it, and the other post (@karolincki 's ask) will be an overview of these issues as pertaining to Modern and Classical Chinese.

Linguistic complexity: an introduction

What is linguistic complexity? Basically what it says on the tin: how 'simple' or 'complex' is one language in relation to another. If you automatically think that sounds dodgy - aren't all languages equally complex? what is a simple language? etc - just hold on. We'll get there.

A very important starting point: complexity here only refers to linguistic complexity. There are many ways to measure this, but broadly speaking it refers to the amount of stuff in a language a learner has to deal with. Are there genders? Well, that's more complex than not having any, because it's an extra thing to remember. Do you have to express whether the information you're conveying is something you personally experienced or hearsay? Again, more complex than not. Different tenses? Essentially, you can look at complexity like this: if you were describing this language or putting it into a computer program, what is the minimum length of description you would need? The longer the description, the more complex the language. In a standard understanding of complexity, a language like English is more complex than a language like Vietnamese (English has more tenses, moods, conjugations, irregularity...), and a language like Georgian is more complex than a language like English (Google a single verb table of Georgian and you will see what I mean).

(this will be long)

What complexity does not mean is anything to do with the cognitive abilities of the people who speak it. It doesn't mean that people who speak English are unable to conceive of the difference between a dual and a plural (2 apples and 3 apples), just because the language doesn't mark it. It doesn't mean people who speak Chinese are unable to conceive of the past conditional ('I should have gone...') just because they don't have a separate tense for it. It doesn't mean Italian speakers don't know whether they experienced the thing themselves, or heard about it from someone else, just because they don't have a set verb ending for it. All linguistic complexity means is what the language requires you to express.

I'm putting this out there very clearly because this sort of thinking is bound up in a lot of racist ideas and ideology. You'll have heard of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? Unfortunately named, since they never really worked together, and Edward Sapir was actually a relatively cool dude for the time who argued against linguistic relativity - i.e. the language you speak determines how you think. Yes, in the 19th (and much of the 20th) century, when certain linguists referred to 'simple' and 'complex' languages that is what many of them meant: speakers of a simple language are 'simple', and a complex one are 'complex'. But there was a huge backlash against these racist ideas, and that backlash was hugely influential is shaping the direction of typology (the branch of linguistics which is broadly concerned with these sorts of questions). More on that later, but for now: please understand that when I say linguistic complexity, I am not implying a single thing about the people that speak it.

Back to complexity. Of course language, like any system, is made up of moving parts: you don't just need to consider how many parts it has, but also how interdependent they are, whether they interact with each other in a predictable way, how likely they are to change. You might also want to consider how easy the system is to learn for somebody who has never used it before. And then, of course, languages are more complex still because they are not machines, but ever-changing things: do you count a rule like the conditional inversion in English, which only applies to a total of three verbs? Is that less complex because fewer verbs use it - and therefore you need to think about it less - or does that make the system more complex because you need another, meta-rule to say when you need to use it and when not? What about irregularity? Is a language like English that doesn't have many rules but has a sizeable amount of 'irregular' verbs more or less complicated than a language like Swahili which has a lot more rules, but follows them assiduously? And what happens when some people use one rule and others don't - do you count those as the same language (lumping), which may render the grand overview less accurate, or do you count them as totally separate languages (splitting), in which case when do you stop?

Hmm. Complexity. Is. Complex.

Those are a lot of factors that need to be considered here. Even saying something is 'irregular' doesn't mean very much without further quantification. For example, if I say that the 'irregular' verb ring goes to ring, rang, rung in English, you can very easily find other verbs which conjugate similarly: sing, sang, sung etc. So is that really irregular? Or is it just another, less productive rule? But then if it's a rule, why do we say fling, flung, flung and not yesterday I flang the ball? What's going on???

And what about 'total' irregularity, so called 'suppletion', where (and this is a very scientific explanation) a random non-related word just seems to appear in a paradigm, like it's got lost on the way home? Like I go, I went; like to be, I am, he is, I were; like good, better, best. Ok, so is the irregularity in I go and I went somehow....more irregular than irregularity in I sing and I sang? Uhh. Ok. And then is the irregularity in bad, worse, worst somehow more irregular than better and best, because at least for better and best you can see the -er and -st endings?? Finally, what about a 'spoken' but very predictable irregularity, such as the way we have a reduced vowel in 'says'? Where do we count that? Is that more irregular, or less irregular? Is it maybe 33% irregular?

I think you get the point. And of course all of this becomes more complex when you start to consider the interaction of lots of different systems at once. What about tone? If you have regular tone like Chinese, most people would agree that it's more complex because it's an added thing. But tone probably only developed in part as a response to losing some really important sound contrasts that other languages have kept...and also there is no possibilities of 'irregularities' in tone the way there are in something like verb conjugation...you can't just have a random sixth tone. And then what about syntax? If you have lots of very complex word ordering rules, is that more or less complex than a language where you have to rely on the human being to use pragmatics to infer what the ever loving fuck is going on?

Yeah. This is sort of just one of those things where every year a new linguist comes up with a spicy new matrix to 'measure' complexity and then everyone shits on them in journals and then comes up with their own idea which is promptly shat on. I don't know either.

Ok, so how is this relevant to Chinese?

To answer that question we need to circle round a bit to the history of typology that I vaguely alluded to earlier. At various points - depending on how racist the linguist in question was - people in the 20th century were starting to realise that all of this stuff about 'complex language = complex civilisation / complex thought' wasn't quite as water-tight as they'd hoped. Perhaps it was their better judgement, but it's also likely to have been influenced by a lot of contact suddenly with Native American languages - many of which are vastly complex by literally any metric you could possibly imagine, but the people speaking them were not colonising other countries and building amphitheatres and all of those necessarily, comfortingly European ideas of 'civilisation'. This movement away from such racist ideology, even if it was fuelled in part by a different type of racism, meant that suddenly everyone was very wary about making statements about linguistic complexity at all. It smacked of all the things they were trying not to be associated with.

I'm going to quote some Edward Sapir here for no other reason than I think it's really unfortunate that he's most famous for something that has the potential for incredibly racist ideology that he literally never said:

'Intermingled with this scientific prejudice and largely anticipating it was another, a more human one. The vast majority of linguistic theorists themselves spoke languages of a certain type, of which the most fully developed varieties were the Latin and Greek that they had learned in their childhood. It was not difficult for them to be persuaded that these familiar languages represented the “highest” development that speech had yet attained and that all other types were but steps on the way to this beloved “inflective” type. Whatever conformed to the pattern of Sanskrit and Greek and Latin and German was accepted as expressive of the “highest,” whatever departed from it was frowned upon as a shortcoming or was at best an interesting aberration. Now any classification that starts with preconceived values or that works up to sentimental satisfactions is self-condemned as unscientific. A linguist that insists on talking about the Latin type of morphology as though it were necessarily the high-water mark of linguistic development is like the zoölogist that sees in the organic world a huge conspiracy to evolve the race-horse or the Jersey cow.'

People generally began to get the hang of it after this, and stepped away from linguistic classification at all. There was a broad consensus that that sort of thing was done with, a thing of the past. It's kind of funny, because of course people's unwillingness to look at the complexity of language because 'all people are the same' shows that they still think language and culture/cognition are intimately linked! It was done out of a desire to not be racist, but you can't even reach that conclusion unless you have a sneaky secret bit of bioessentialism going on in your sneaky little brain. Because if the complexity of language doesn't reflect the complexity of your thought, why would it matter whether some systems are bigger than others? That they had more parts?

It literally wouldn't matter at all..

So what happened next? Linguists started to revisit these old linguistic classifications and ideas of complexity, but in the hope of proving, instead, that actually all languages were equal. You can definitely see the theoretical aims here: not only is a good from an ideological point of view (again, if you still equate linguistic complexity to complexity of thought), but it's also quite handy if you believe that all human babies approach language learning with the same biological apparatus ('Universal Grammar', if you believe in that, and other cognitive principles). If all babies have the same built-in gear, you sort of want the task they are given to be of roughly the same magnitude. That's one of those things linguists like to call theoretically desirable - which just means it would be neat if it did.

We're getting to Chinese. I promise.

So how you could make systems so vastly different as English and Georgian and Chinese roughly the 'same' level of complexity? One answer is irregularity: languages with huuuuuge verb and noun declensions like Georgian tend to have very little irregularity, where languages with less extensive systems like English tend to keep it around for longer. There are lots of reasons for this I won't go into, but it's a general trend. Irregular systems are more work for the brain to remember, which, predictably, is more 'complex' for a learner to acquire. Compare a language like English and German: German may have more cases and declensions and rules, but once you learn them...that's it. Compare that to English, where you'll be learning phrasal verbs and prepositions as a second language learner until the day you die (and possibly beyond). It's a different type of 'complex', but it's still deserving of the title.

That obviously doesn't work for a language like Chinese. Chinese has no conjugations, and so can't possibly have any irregularity in the same way. But fear not: there are lots and lots and lots of ways in which languages often exhibit what might be called 'complexity tradeoffs': languages with complex tone, for example, almost always have simpler sound systems elsewhere, and many languages with complex case arrangements tend to have free word order. One thing is complex, another...simplex (a word unfortunately genuinely in use).

This seems nice. We like this. It means that the different parts of the same system may be differently sized, but the whole system in total is about the same as any of other language. There’s just one problem: this isn’t how languages seem to work.

For every example of a complexity trade-off you can find, there are other languages which don’t have any such ‘trade off’ at all. There are plenty of languages where grammar is complex and the sound system is complex; or languages like Icelandic and German where there are cases but fairly rigid and fixed word order; or other cases where there is a huge amount of irregularity but also crazy verb systems, and so on. A language like Abkhaz has supposedly 58 consonants in the literary dialect: but it also has insanely complicated grammar. No trade-off there. Finally, it has long been presumed that whilst verb morphology etc is simpler in languages like Chinese, syntax would be more complicated: recently, a number of studies have proved exactly the opposite. Both, in fact, are simpler.

In conclusion, where does this leave us? Whilst the idea behind complexity trade-offs is well-motivated but not totally sound, and whilst these do not always seem to be present in the way you might hope, what this does do is force us as linguists to question whether we have spent enough time considering the types of complexity that are present in languages like Chinese, and how we reconcile that with more ‘familiar’ complexity. It’s interesting to think about because it shows what happens when you fail to consider these things.

That’s all for the overview on linguistic complexity today!! I’ll talk specifically about complexity in Chinese in the next ask, because this is already very long. Be aware, I’m not going to give you any answers necessarily - these questions are way above my pay grade - but boy can I give you some thoughts.

[kiunlo]

anyways i been thinking about that dumbass post made by that white man literally all fucking day.

like I sent an ask to that person but perhaps tumblr ate it (like it usually does because this website was designed by fucking single celled bacteria) or maybe they just deleted it and couldn't be bothered to respond, but I said some pretty interesting and important things so I'm just gonna make a post here about it because it's important to me and I wanna add on to the stuff that I remember saying.

If you have a look at that post and you read the notes....half of them are people literally telling that guy that the information he posted was wrong. Like straight up outright wrong, and asking him to fix it. Granted, he actually went back and fixed the information so like...props for that I guess. And he did the same for using the outdated and racist term for Australian Aboriginal people "aborigine" (trust me no one uses that word anymore and the people who do are....ignorant lmfao) so it was good that he fixed that stuff.

But the whole problem is that if you as a white person are making a post about Indigenous people, and right off the bat of you making that post you've already gotten half of your information wrong AND you're using racist terminology as well (even if it is completely unintentional and you didn’t realise it was racist), perhaps you are not as well equipped to be handling these subjects in the first place. Perhaps more education is needed before you talk about stuff like that.

The biggest problem with the whole post is that the stuff this person is talking about LITERALLY doesn't happen. It doesn't. No one tries to fetishise Indigenous cultures in the very specific way this person is claiming. Myself and literally every other Indigenous person replying to that post has not seen a single white person fetishise Indigenous culture by saying that we never did anything wrong ever and that we worked in perfect harmony with the environment and we never caused anything to go extinct ever.

No one white person has ever said that, and if they did....they were probably a lot less racist than the person who made that post. You know what they do say, though? That we're savages, that we don't know how to take care of the land, that we caused so many animals to go extinct, that we completely re-did the entire ecosystem with man made bushfires for the worse etc. (and I'm specifically talking about what white people say about Australian Aboriginal people as I myself am Aboriginal)

The only times people ever say the stuff this person is claiming, the MAJORITY OF THE TIME, is when Indigenous people are trying to dispel racist myths about their own cultures, history, religions etc. That's literally the only time it ever happens. And regardless of what the original intent of the post was, every single Indigenous person who saw that post interpreted it in the same way: That this person was complaining about Indigenous people trying to spread the truths about their culture, and decided to make a massive post displaying all the horrible fucked up shit some Indigenous cultures did in history (half of which was outright wrong or just racist myths that were spread by colonisers).

The problem is that when you make a post on the internet that gets a little bit popular (7000 notes now) and the people who are seeing it are majority white people who genuinely don't know shit about Indigenous culture and history, and your post is filled with misinformation and racist myths and you're making a post about something that white people LITERALLY DON'T DO that resembles something that Indigenous people ACTUALLY DO and you shit on that specific thing that happens? You're pretty much telling every single white person who interacts with that post that the thing that Indigenous people ACTUALLY do is wrong. And so anytime an Indigenous person tries to say "hey maybe don't say that we're all savages! we were able to be relatively peaceful in the thousands of years that we existed on our land" that little white person who saw that post is going to say "well uhm actually Indigenous people were pretty fucked up throughout history"...because guess what. Regardless of how nuanced you think your post was or how nuanced your thinking is, most people who read shit on the internet take the information they read at fucking face value and don't give a shit about nuance.

The worst thing is that literally every single Indigenous person on that post is telling them "hey this is kinda racist" and "buddy no one does this" and "you are white you shouldn't be talking about this" and they are all correct, but because us as Indigenous people are pissed off and angry and have harsh tones and refuse to be polite we are not being listened to. And because like 2 fucking idiots decided to tell this person to drink bleach it has given this man the perfect opportunity to play the victim so he doesn't have to listen to the rest of us who have genuine concerns about this post and about who should be having these conversations about the misrepresentation of Indigenous history (newsflash, not white people). No one's genuine concerns are actually being listened to because it's being said in a harsh tone or they decided to use a swear word here or there, and when we ask this person to not speak over Indigenous people's voices, he just says that he's not doing that. At all. When he quite literally is speaking over every single Indigenous person in his post that refuses to be ultra polite to him.

White people do not get to dictate what is racist and what is not. So many people of different races have fucking said this a million times over, and it's because it's true. And here I am, saying it again because apparently white people refuse to get the memo. If the majority of Indigenous people who see your post about Indigenous people and say "hey this is kinda racist" perhaps the thing you should be doing instead of fighting against the community is taking a step back and asking yourself why all these Indigenous people are saying that in the first place. Trust me when I say that Indigenous people and POC know what racism looks like, and white people will never know those intricacies in the way that we do. They will miss the things we know to be racist, because they do not experience racism themselves. And it's important to listen to the Indigenous people and POC in your communities when we say that something is racist, because while you might try to fight the whole thing, you're likely missing something that you can't see because of your privilege.

There are a lot more things I could say about this, and I think I intended on saying more but I've got the worst memory in the world so thoughts tend to be fleeting if I don't write them down immediately, but please for the love of god just listen to Indigenous people when we tell you something isn't okay. Admitting you were wrong about something isn't the end of the world, but the more you drag it out and the more you fight it, the harder it is to ask for forgiveness in the end.

Anyways I’d appreciate anyone, especially white people to reblog this and share it, I think something like this should be shared. Please let Indigenous people have these types conversations in our own spaces. They are subjects we are more educated on and have more personal experience in and we truly do not need the imput from white people to help fix these issues.

[evanescentjasmine]

Writing Egypt and Egyptian Characters: Rusty Quill Gaming Edition

I’ve finally caught up with the Cairo arc of Rusty Quill Gaming, which I was anticipating and dreading both. Fiction set in my country usually reduces it to a caricature of itself, especially when it takes place in the Victorian era, but considering everything they’ve said in their metacasts I was hoping Rusty Quill Gaming was the exception.

It wasn’t. 

I’m aware the game world plays fast and loose with history and setting, but the problems in this case are more than just inaccuracies. However, because I want to help fic writers and artists be able to portray Hamid and his family well, this resource will be split into two parts. The first part will tackle details I’ve been asked about with regard to the setting; it may touch on things RQG went wrong, but I’m writing it primarily as a resource for artists and writers. The second part will be my criticism of RQG, and why I found the Cairo arc actively harmful. This includes discussions of Orientalism and some racist text.

I should also preface this by saying I’m not a historian. Everything I say in this resource is a combination of what I grew up with and what I remember from school, supplemented by Google and guesswork. I’ll be explaining my thought process throughout, which can help you see what’s actual history and what’s my extrapolation.

Part One: On Egypt

Historical Context:

Figuring out the history of Egypt in RQG terms is a bit complicated, so bear with me because this will take a while. 

In real-world history, Egypt was a Roman then Byzantine province from 30 BC to around the mid 600s AD, at which point the Arab conquest swept through and Egypt became Muslim. 

What this means is that when the Meritocrats took down Rome and took over the world, Egypt was still a Roman province. That gives us a several hundred year gap before the Arabs that may have maintained the same culture? Or morphed a little back to some pre-Ptolemaic Ancient Egyptian, given their Meritocrat, Apophis, is named after a great Pharaonic serpent?

Either way, given Hamid’s name and the fact they live in Cairo, the city built by the Arabs, we can assume the Arab conquest still happened somehow, despite having a Meritocrat in Egypt. Maybe a Meritocrat out there is Arab and settled in Egypt for a bit with or before Apophis? Maybe it took a couple-hundred years for the Meritocrats to get all the previous Roman areas under control? Maybe there was a whole war and the Arabs won and settled and eventually they got to a truce or got absorbed into Meritocratic lands?

Many Muslim dynasties ruled throughout the period from the mid 600s to the 1500s. Given the lack of Islam in this world, probably the Arabs were unified by some Pre-Islamic deity/deities and brought them over as well, because I refuse to just sweep everything under the broad Greek God rug. 

In the 1500s, another Muslim dynasty took over--this time, from outside of the country, which is why it’s considered separate from all the rest. At this point, Egypt became part of the Ottoman Empire until the 1800s, which is when the Mohammed Ali dynasty started to try and secede and rule independently. And there was a brief blip of the French occupation for two years around then as well.

And, of course, we can’t forget about British colonisation, which started in the late 1800s with a veiled protectorate.

Presumably, since France and Britain are also Meritocratic and it seems like Apophis is currently ruling, we can disregard everything from the Ottomans onward. This changes, or should change, a ton, because Ottoman rule informed a lot of things from fashion to slang to nobility and so on. 

What we’re left with is most likely a Cairo that is still Arab but with much more Pharaonic influence, as Apophis is in charge, as well as continuing Greek influence due to the Gods. I am not a Coptic Christian, so I cannot speak to how these changes in history and religions would affect the Coptic language and culture, but no doubt it would still be around.

There would also be a bigger, more long-standing connection to other Meritocratic countries. This explains why Hamid was British-educated and so many people speak such good English without a British occupation to create the power disparity that would make that necessary to rise in Egypt and such a mark of status. 

However, this presents several confusing and contradictory aspects of the world building:

Why doesn’t this go both ways? Why aren’t there people in England and France who know Arabic or are influenced by Egypt? All we get is that the Tahan family are big. That’s it. If these countries are equals, it sure doesn’t look like it.

If Apophis is pharaonic and Ancient Egyptian culture and knowledge are so ubiquitous...why would they hollow out a pyramid to put a bank inside? It’s a tomb. It’s made to bury dead kings in a way that follows possibly still-existing cultural and religious beliefs. It’s the equivalent of someone building a bank inside a mausoleum. It’s bizarre.

Relatedly, if Ancient Egyptian culture and knowledge are so ubiquitous, why is Carter mentioning the Rosetta Stone? Why would the knowledge necessary to translate hieroglyphics have been lost? 

I mention these questions so fic writers can keep them in mind while writing and, of course, it’s entirely possible to create a workaround. For example, maybe the Rosetta Stone is supposed to be translating something else, like an ancient hidden magic?

Describing Cairo:

I want to make one thing very clear: Cairo is not, despite Alex’s description, like Vegas. While we do certainly have hotels and casinos, to reduce the city to only that is very harmful for reasons I’ll go into at the end of this resource.

Cairo is a very old city with a mix of architectural styles and is very heavily Muslim in real life. In Arabic, its tagline is often “city of a thousand minarets,” so clearly RQG Cairo will be fairly different. Given Apophis’ influence, Ancient Egyptian styles might be more prevalent in Cairo, but very likely not in the form of pyramids unless those pyramids were for the dead. In real life, some buildings do incorporate Ancient Egyptian flavour, usually just in the form of lotus columns or hieroglyphs. These would only be found in public institutions, however,  or, frankly, tourist-bait. 

Residential buildings tend to be clustered very close together and, since it’s an old city, streets are crowded and winding as the city keeps building on itself and spilling out of its previous bounds. Estates do, of course, exist, but I’d suggest against using Bryn’s example of Alhambra as a setting for the Tahan home. Alhambra is a palace fortress in Spain and, although it’s Andalusian and therefore influenced by Muslim architecture, it’s very different than anything in Egypt. It’s as absurd as saying a posh British character lives in a house that’s basically Versailles and leaving it there. I’ve included images of some Egyptian residential estates below, all from the 1800s to early 1900s.

And here are some photos of Cairo in the 1800s:

As you can see, not quite Vegas.

A fic set in Cairo can certainly still have the Cairo strip with all the casinos, since that’s an aspect of canon, but a place like that would probably be geared more to tourists and foreigners than locals. So long you’re aware of this while writing, and that Cairo would exist beyond it, you should be fine. It might also be worth having characters explore the actual city.

Weather:

The stereotype is that Egypt is just hot and sand year-round. It isn’t. The further south you go, the hotter it will get, so that Upper Egypt (which is in the south, yeah), is hotter than Lower Egypt, which is where Cairo and Alexandria are. Alexandria, by virtue of being on the Mediterranean, has fairly cold (for us) and rainy winters and mild, humid summers. Cairo gets very occasional rain and has harsher summers but is also dryer.

And, of course, a thing to remember is that even in the depths of the desert, the morning might be quite warm but the night will be quite cold as well.

Sandstorm season (called khamaseen) takes place from April - May but in the middle of Cairo it’s more of an annoyance than anything else.

Language:

Since they speak Arabic, it’s important to note that spoken Egyptian Arabic is very different from written Classical Arabic. Egyptian is a mishmash of Arabic, Coptic, a bit of Greek, and a bit of French (and, in the real world, some Turkish too) all smashed together. Accents differ from city to city, and Cairene Arabic is best known for the fact we pronounce the letter jeem as geem (so all soft Gs are turned into hard Gs) and tend to replace the letter qaf with a glottal stop.

This means that a Cairene wouldn’t be called Jamal, they’d be Gamal. A Cairene would pronounce burqa as bur’a.

Since religion plays a big part in language, RQG Egyptian Arabic may be a bit different. For instance, the greeting most people associate with Arabic is “Assalam alaykum” but that’s very specifically Muslim or at least associated with Islam, and might not have been as wide-spread given...y’know, that Islam doesn’t exist. I’m not saying it’s incorrect to use, just explaining the context.

Alternatives could include “Sabah/masa’ el-kheir” which means “Good morning/evening,” and “Naharak/Naharik saeed” which is, “May you have a good day.”

Fashion:

Although this didn’t really feature in RQG, I’ve received a lot of questions about the period’s fashion and honestly it’s my favourite thing ever so I probably would have touched on it anyway. I’ll only go into broad strokes, as there are plenty of regional variations and, again, I’m no expert 

Women

Egyptian women covered their heads and sometimes their faces not out of religiosity but out of a cultural expectation of modesty. This may well have come about as a result of the Arab/Muslim cultural majority, as to my knowledge this wasn’t the case in the Greek and Roman periods, but women of all religions covered their heads so that would likely still be the case in RQG’s Arab Egypt.

This isn’t with the hijab we know today. It may have been a cloth or kerchief tied over their heads and then the melaya laf (which is larger cloth, almost a sheet) that they wrap around themselves and over their head, as follows: 

The black face-covering was called a burqa or bur’a (not the same as a Muslim burqa, which serves similar modesty functions but is a separate thing) or a yashmak and may have been opaque black, white, or netted, such as in this picture:

Underneath the melaya they would be wearing a long, loose, patterned dress:

Upper class Egyptian women tended to wear Western dresses with a white yashmak that covered their faces and heads. A yashmak is Turkish, however, and without Ottoman influence this style and name might not have caught on in Egypt.

Men

While the melaya laf and yashmak have disappeared from Egypt, the traditional men’s gallabeya and ammama, or turban, are still seen widely today. The gallabeya (or jellabiya, outside of Cairene Arabic) is a long, loose garment with wide sleeves and no collar. It’s in muted, neutral colours, usually lighter ones like white or beige in the summer and navy blue or grey in the winter. You’ll have seen examples of it in the pictures of Cairo above, and here’s another one: 

Middle to upper class men and civil servants, however, tended to wear English suits with a tarboosh, or fez. Since fezzes were also a result of Ottoman rule, RQG Egyptians might not wear them.

And yes, impressive moustaches were also very much the fashion.

Names:

The running joke is that Hamid’s name is unnecessarily long, but my name is longer, and I don’t think that’s particularly unusual. We don’t usually go around introducing ourselves with all of them, admittedly, and I’m not sure whether Hamid does this as a way to indicate he’s overly fancy or because Bryn doesn’t realise it, but four names is not long. My ID boasts five, and I know of at least one more.

Arabic naming conventions use patronymics for all children, regardless of gender. What this means is that my name and my brother’s name is identical except for our first. 

Mine is Jasmine + Dad’s name + his dad’s name + his dad’s name + his dad’s name

And my brother is also First name + Dad’s name + his dad’s name + his dad’s name + his dad’s name.

Egyptians do not typically have last names, but an important family may all choose to identify under a name and use that as their last, such as the Tahans. In my case, I use my fifth name as my last name and introduce myself in everyday life as Jasmine Fifth Name. Notably, my brother does not, and goes by First name + Dad’s name instead. This isn’t unusual. On paperwork, however, we still have the same name.

Additionally, Egyptian women do not take their husbands’ last names in marriage, nor do children take any of her names. 

I’m not sure why, according to the wiki, Hamid’s sisters seem to have taken their mother’s name. Following Arabic naming conventions, they would all be First Name Saleh Haroun al Tahan, and their father would be Saleh Haroun al Tahan. A possible workaround might be that halflings have their own naming conventions that mean daughters have matronymics and sons patronymics. 

A note to podficcers: please google name pronunciations beforehand because Alex and Bryn’s are actually often wrong. Ishak, for instance, is not pronounced Ee-shak. It’s Iss-haaq or Iss-haa’, because of quirks of the Egyptian accent I mentioned earlier.

Part Two: Criticism

I understand it can be difficult to portray a country different from yours with accuracy. I understand the RQG crew will not have had the perspective on Egypt and Cairo that I do by virtue of living here. I do also acknowledge that I’m sure none of this was actively malicious or on purpose.

But it doesn’t have to be on purpose to hurt, frankly, and given how often the RQG crew have talked about their responsibility with a game that’s intended for an audience, I expected better. Bryn has spoken about not wanting to fall into stereotypes for Hamid and, to be fair, by being a non-religious fancyboy Hamid does neatly avoid the religious zealot and the noble (or ignoble) savage routes. Unfortunately, he falls into another, which was hammered home by the portrayal of Cairo and the Tahans as a whole.

Our first glimpse of Cairo, after the sandstorm clears, describes it as “basically Vegas,” with hotels and garish casinos catering to the rich all along the “Cairo strip.” From then on, our only other images of Cairo are vast estates and a pyramid in the desert. 

The only named Egyptians we meet are the Tahan family, who are introduced through an absurdly lavish estate compared to the palace fortress of Alhambra, a gambling problem that apparently runs in the family, murder, and corruption, as the head of the family who has already covered up a crime for one son then turns himself in to protect the other.

Then, to top it all off, Hamid is apparently utterly incapable of understanding why letting his brother get away with murder is an issue until the paladins point it out.

Do you see the pattern, here?

I understand this was aiming to be a criticism of the rich and powerful, but the fact remains that the Tahans are the only representation of Egyptians we get. While this may not be harems and hand-chopping levels of Orientalism, the image presented is of Cairo as a den of excessive wealth and vice, and Egyptians as corrupt and immoral.

This isn’t new.

The Middle East and North Africa (as well as India and China and everywhere else considered “the Orient”) has often been tied to images of wealth and overt splendour, usually hand-in-hand with the Oriental despot and corruption. This view went beyond just fiction and influenced the policies with which we were ruled. 

Cromer, Consul-General of Egypt, wrote books called Modern Egypt. He had this to say about us:

“The mind of the Oriental, on the other hand, like his picturesque streets, is eminently wanting in symmetry. His reasoning is of the most slipshod description. . . . They are often incapable of drawing the most obvious conclusions from any simple premises of which they may admit the truth.”

In his opinion, our inability to follow logical reason led to us being inherently untruthful and, therefore, immoral. Similarly, British statesman Balfour was of the belief that:

 “Lord Cromer’s services during the past quarter of a century have raised Egypt from the lowest pitch of social and economic degradation until it now stands among Oriental nations, I believe, absolutely alone in its prosperity, financial and moral.”

Egypt was under British colonial rule from 1882 - 1952.

You can see, I hope, why a storyline focused on an Egyptian family’s corruption in an Egypt characterised almost entirely by its casinos and one lavish mansion was very uncomfortable. The fact Azu was one of the people trying to explain morality to Hamid keeps it from sliding into a clear East vs West dichotomy, but the fact remains this is a British show featuring British players and this is the story they chose to tell. 

The rest was just salt in the wound, really. 

I expect mispronounced names and pyramids and jokes about camels in most media, but rarely do the makers of said media then go on to pat themselves on the back for doing their “due diligence” on a metacast about sensitivity.

I see weird naming conventions and mispronounced names and “basically Vegas” and “crocodile steak” and “camel’s milk froyo” and I do not see due diligence.  

I see a setting that barely looked past Cleopatra and I do not see due diligence.

I see a storyline that shows only excess and immorality and corruption and I do not see due diligence.

I see a disregard for me and mine, and I do not appreciate it. 

Literature I’ve referred to in writing this criticism:

Orientalism (1978), by Edward W. Said

Orientalism in the Victorian Era (2017), a paper by Valerie Kennedy

Orientalism in American Cinema: Providing an Historical and Geographical Context for PostColonial Theory (2010), a thesis by Samuel Scurry 

Popular Culture, Orientalism, and Edward Said (2012), an article by Robert Irwin

[momo-de-avis]

Actually I'm going to do that right now since todya I'll be buried in work and later on I'll just say "don't have time".

There's two things that must be understood when we talk about Jewish history in Portugal:

Number one: Portuguese Jews enjoyed a relative freedom, especially compared to Eastern Europe, throughout the middle ages, right until more or less 1492. This does not mean there weren't oppressive instruments put into place, or that antisemitism did not exist. It did. Jews lived in ghettos, called "judiarias", and they were forced to be back inside by sundown. They had one way in and one way out. They had, occasionally, to wear something in their clothing to let others know they were jews. They could not mix with Christians. They were barred from certain jobs (NOT A LOT! there were some, and I genuinely don't remember which, but as you'll see, not a lot).

But they were also protected by the king. Of course, when you really look at it, it all comes down to possession and to economy. The jewish population of Portugal was so significant they pretty much held our economy together (this will help you understand the 1496 expulsion). The kings of portugal often referred to the jewsih population as "my jews" and conceded them protection. Every king had a jewish doctor/surgeon, and many other Jewish families served the royal family. By the late 1300s, early 1400s, the richest families were the Guedelhas and the Negros--both jewish. The Palanço were so rich, they owned half of Sintra.

There's documentation that attest to jewish people's professions: they were artisans, and cobblers, and surgeons and doctors. The permeated jobs related to knowledge and literacy -- like astronomy and astrology and medicine -- because they were considerably far more educated than Christians. Queen Philippa of Lancaster had her own astrologer. King Duarte also had his own astrologuer, and often contacted him before heading off to battle.

Then there's the question that's so central to antisemitism: why were so many jews in banking? The explanation given is often that they were barred from literally everything, but that's not 100% true in Portugal. The reason is just because usury was a sin in Christianity, so charging a loan back with interest was something Christians couldn't do, but Jews could.

But not even half the population is in banking. Over time, these jewish families will create a massive network of connections across the globe. They will accrue wealth and connections in sugar cane trading, spices, silk... And these span from north africa, to the newly discovered and colonised Madeira islands, and the east. They have authority in many ports, they have the ability to move around so easily, John II will even hire one jewish spy to go to Africa and search for Prestes João (another can of worms).

And then, number 2: there's a common misconception that the Inquisition is based on witch hunts. But there isn't a single account of a single witch having been found in Portugal. We often couple it with the spanish inquisition and to be fair, I am not going to get into the Spanish Inquisition as I don't know shit about it, but in Portugal, the inquisition is 100% founded on antisemitism.

As I said, Jews lived with a relative degree of freedom when compared to other parts of Europe, and this is actually going to become an issue when the diaspora spreads through other countries, and these Sephardic Jews struggle to fit in with other communities because they just don't have the same struggle. To them, and especially the wealthy families, they lived a good life until, out of nowhere, Manuel I ruined everything. So there's even, to quote Esther Mucznick, "a feeling of superiority" when they become refugees and try to settle elsewhere. There's a story fo one who will try everything in his power to fit in with the community in Amsterdam (I believe Hasidic but I could be wrong) but in the end takes his own life because he just cannot fit in.

So we then get to 1492, which is the year Granada falls in Spain and Isabella the Catholic kicks out all Jews. In spain, jewish persecution had gotten worse since around 1391 I believe, and Jews had gradually lost their rights. That, as we saw, was not the case in Portugal.

Many of those jews run away to Portugal. John II, king at the time, welcomes the wealthy and does grant these refugees the ability to stay in the country, but gives them 8 months to sort out their problems, and after 8 months they must leave and pay an exorbitant amount of money per person in the family in order to leave. 8 cruzados, the price, was completely unachievable. The result is that, eight months later, the kings keeps his word. He kidnaps the children of these families and sends them to work in plantations in São Tomé, called Meninos de São Tomé.

The wealthy, however, manage to stay. This was John II's plan: make good use of the rich the spanish are kicking out to benefit his kingdom, and for that, he puts in place a series of laws that limit Jewish freedom exceptionally, including not allowing them to leave.

Manuel I rises to the throne right after John II dies in 1495, and the first thing Manuel I does is revoke all these discriminatory laws John II passed.

And this is what is so blogging about Manuel I.

I think that, to understand his actions, one has to understand the following:

He rose to the throne without having any blood ties to his predecessor, and was "elected" because there was no heir. However, he does have ties to the royal family.

He gets to the throne right as the Discoveries are about to generate a lot of profit. Yes, Vasco da Gama finds the sea route to India while he's on the throne, and Brazil is "found" 5 years after he's gotten there, but these are the result of long investigations, if you will, that Manuel did nothing about. He literally benefits from doing nothing. This is important

You put point one and two together, you have a king who wants to legitimate himself and especially be perceived as a Christian Emperor. One thing I tell people in all of my tours is this: to undertsand Portuguese colonialism, it must be seen through the eyes of Christianity. Christianity is a way to homogenise the Empire, but for Manuel I, it is a way of centralising power.

And that's his end goal: the centralisation of power around himself.

So, 1495 he writes to Isabella the Catholic and says he wants to marry her daughter. Isabella, the daughter in question, says she will only do so if he cleanses the country of heretics.

She means jews and moors (muslims).

Manuel, without much thought, does exaclty that. And to understand why he would bend the knee like a whimp to Spain, it must be understood that, within the scope of being crowned not just king, bu Emperor of Christianity, as he wished, Spain was a part of this. He wished to unite the Peninsula under this name. In fact, when he signes the marriage agreement with Isabella, he is sworn heir to the Spanish crown.

That's why hegemonising the country as a purely and fully Christian country, or empire, was so important.

Except, as we've seen, jews in Portugal aren't just any type of population. By 1496, they've enbiggened their riches and their trading businesses is even better. So this is the crucial point I hinted at above: if Manuel kicks them out, the ecnomy will collapse. DOn't listen to whatever some right wing fucker says about this, because the truth is literally every historian agrees on this: Jewish people held such power in Portugal's economy, they could have collapsed this all to shit. And many, many historians agree that what followed is the first of a series of steps that will lead to the collapse of the Portugese Empire.

So, now I'm going to circle back to your question: how is it that the jewish population in Lisbon is so small? What led to this?

It was Manuel's politics.

1496, the order of expulsion is issued in December. Manuel gives Jews until October next year. But he had no intention, never had, of letting them leave. His plan is not to kick anyone out, but to assimilate.

Thousands of people come to Lisbon, the only port where you're allowed to board a ship and leave. But when they get there, there are no ships. Instead, friars, priests and bishops perform mass baptism.

Now you might wonder, if people don't convert honestly -- and in Christianity, forced conversion is actually forbidden, which is why this episode and what follows will be controversial even to the vatican -- what's the point? The point was that, to the Portuguese Christian Church, they were now Christians. So any "jewish act" could be condemned. That's the goal.

Then, Manuel I kidnaps the children of all these families up to 14 years old and entrusts them to Christian families to be raised Christian. No one knows what happens to them. To this day. Historians have wondered and have come with theories, but they vanished. Remember, mandatory church records of baptisms, weddings and death don't become a thing until 1570 I believe, so there's no record of what happened to these children.

He then forbids every one of these "newly converted" families from leaving the country.

His politics are 100% of assimilation, and he wanted all of these newly convert, now called new christians (this is an important denomination) to be fully integrated into society. Which is he passes a bunch of laws protecting them. One of them states that New Christian Families CANNOT be persecuted or accused of mispracticing christianity (which the one law the Marquis of Pombal will use succesfully to banish the disctinction between new and old christians).

But from the Christian people's persepctive, this actually aggravates antisemitic feeling. Because the fact was, until then, Jewish families lived in their own judiarias, and they had their own separate practices. And like I said, antisemitism was very much present despite king's protection. John I actually stopped a pogrom from happening and punished everyone involved by sentencing them to death, for example. There are several accounts of christians' complaints regarding Jews holding the monopoly of whatever business they own.

But now, they're protected.

Which explains the Lisbon Pogrom of 1506.

It allegedly happened because a light fell on a cross of Christ inside the Chruch of St Dominick in Lisbon, and while everyone chanted it was a miracle, one New Christian man said "If God wnated to perform a miracle, he would not light up a piece fo stick". This was seen as such heresy he was beaten to death.

One thing Manuel failed to acknowledge was that the small clerical population -- friars -- was immense in Lisbon, and they are the main characters of antisemitism in the country. They are the ones who, since they're on the side of the people and lower folk themselves, will instigate not just this Pogrom, but attempts at others in the past. And its two friars from this church that will rile up the population, leading to a massacre that spans for 3 days, of somewhere between 2000 to 4000 victims.

The very next year, Manuel changes the law and allows New Christians to leave the country. It's the first big exodus of jewish families, people like Abraham Zacuto, a spanish-born jew who wrote the most important book in navigation the portuguese will use throughout the century, Almanach Perpetuum.

And then comes the Inquisition.

Manuel is the first to write the Pope to requets the inquistion in 1515, but is denied. His son, John III, who is arguably and in my opinion the most useless fucking king every produced, will raise such a fucking fight with the Vatican he at one point, as well as his counsellors, consider rejecting the Vatican as Henry VIII did (he's actually advised to do this).

He wants the inquisition, but by now, the Spanish Inquisition has earned a terrible name. It's actually considered savage by the Vatican, and the iberian peninsula, for how we treat new christians, is seen as a barbaric land. I'm not exaggerating and can give you the bibliography on this shit. John III wants an Inquisiton that: 1) has full control of every process of its won court, 2) has power above any Bishop, 3) allows investigation to happen without what we call due process, so via anonymous accusations and without solid proof of anything, 4) and finally, he wants an Inquisition that is allowed to take the properties of new christians and accumulate wealth for themselves, which is exactly what the Vatican refuses. This is the inquisition he wants, and he will fight for two decades tooth and nail to obtain it.

As we know, he will do it, to the detriment of the country. By now, most members of the royal family, especially male, are high positioned clerics, and he wants to accrue that wealth for himself. The Vatican, at one point, approves of an Inquisiton but to make sure John III follows what has been agreed, they send out clerics to perform the duty. This fucking guy comes up with situations, problems and such, that basically will ostracise these men. He literally pushes them out, which is what happens.

THe inquisition is officially brought into the country in 1530; 1536, it arrives in Lisbon. But its only in the 40s that the Inquisition John III wants is allowed, since the Vatican just fucking gives up.

In the mean time, these small friars I mentioned above have been performing their duty: they have riled the people to participate in a false inquisition, and have been burning people alive and hunting new christians.

That's how we get the inquisition, in its full brutality. Now, anonymous accusations can be made. The accused is not told of what his accusation is. THe accused faces 3 interrogations without knowing. The accused must also dennounce others like him, including their names and addresses. The accused is then subjected to torture. It's lose-lose situation: if you confess right away, the inquisition is perfectly allowed to not believe your confession, and thus torture you; if you deny the crime you're not aware of, then they will torture you still. While incarcerated, a guard must watch you at every hour, to spot any "judaism" you might show, and if you are released, the Inquisition has since confiscated all your belongings, and you are socially ostracised and with nothing, as well as your entire family.

The reason for John III's stubborn insistence was simple: he claimed, time and again, that judaism was a real, perverted threat. The Vatican insisted, quite surprisignly actually, that it is expected for new Christians to not fully adhere to all Christian practices, and to still practice old habits, because they're slowly adapting to Christianity. John III refuses this.

Our witch hunts are 100% focused on finding cryptojews and punishing them.

I remember reading a record of an accusation which consisted of: the person in question washed the clothes of the deceased and dressed them in a specific (forgot which) fabric. Which does relate to Jewish habits, but this is the extent of these accusations, which will prevail through centuries: minor habits Christians are suspicious of.

To this day, there are sayings born of this horrific moment. "He's thinking of the heifer's death" is something you say when someone looks sad. This was said of cryptojews who were caught by the inquistion. THe heifer refers to vellum, the type of "paper" used in the Torah. "Watching the ships pass" is something you say to someone who is left stood up. It refers to the people who awaited ships in 1497 that never came, and who would go to Santa Catarina hill to look at the river. And to this day, people still say "fazer judiarias" which translates to something like "performing jewish things" to mean he's misbehaving.

So, the answer to the question "what happened to the jews of Portugal" is not they were expelled. It's: they were assimilated through brutal force, torture and persecution. Yes, many left, but even more were lost to history. All those children that were taken to Christian families, and all the New Christians that were forced to convert. The inquistion made sure "judaism" was enough of a bad word that, whoever was left, was terrified into Christianity.

There are A LOT that survived through time, and let me just finish this off by leaving you with the incredible story of the Belmonte Jewish Community, which survived until 1917.

Ana I don't get something. In some government sources (not Portuguese tho, so maybe that's why) it says there's only 600 Jewish people in Portugal?? That has to be fake right? Because another sources states there are at least 30,000 Sephardic Jews in Portugal.

It's definitely closer to 600.

I know it was 600 around 2015, but the number has since risen to 1500 in recent years, according to the bbc.

The link above is in portuguese but it does state what I believe is the source of confusion.

There are 1500 practicing jews in portugal. Since around I believe 2015, there has been a law, same as Spain, that in order to seek forgiveness for the repression and persecution suffered, anyone who can prove sephardic portuguese ancestry can get portuguese citizenship.

So far around 30.000 people have applied for that. That's where I think the number comes from.

I'm typing this on my phone and was just about to get in the shower but there's actually very good and obvious reasons (or, they will become obvious) to why the jewish population of portugal is so small. If you want to understand more just let me know

[cruelsister-moved2]

I genuinely don't believe indigenous shld mean anything biological, its abt relationship to the land you're living on.

well hopefully no one is, in relation to human beings, intentionally using it to mean anything biological bc that would be very pre-1950s race science. but i think a lot of people (who are not indigenous) are still very uncritical about the romantic ideas they have about indigeneity & where they came from & what they imply. people seem to tolerate all kinds of ideas when cloaked in romanticism because theres a sense that it must be harmless, like most people would be unwilling to say that your personhood is defined by your genes or that people should all just go back to wherever their ancestors came from or that native white gentile europeans just Belong in europe more than anyone else does. but theyre very charmed by the idea that living in the same place your ancestors lived gives you some mystical relationship to the earth there and (especially for white colonisers in the US who crave a sense of identity) seek meaning in their genetic makeup or the lives of their great great grandparents on the basis that where they once lived conveys something meaningful to you (presumably in your genes), etc. but these ideas are still strongly implying the former things, just by people who dont really want to have to think about that because theyre enjoying a pastoral fantasy rather than intentionally trying to revive nazi ideology. and like for example, i get what youre trying to say and i 100% agree; but i think saying 'relationship to the land you're living on' is still potentially problematic to me, because like if an indigenous person is displaced from that land they have a relationship to, do they stop being indigenous? and whilst i think saying a relationship to the earth in general in preferable (e.g when african americans and native americans were displaced to new and unfamiliar lands, they retained the same non-exploitative relationship with the earth and developed new indigenous knowledge of this place they were new to), but when indigenous people's traditional ways of life are threatened by colonialism and poverty and cultural genocide etc they're still indigenous. if an indigenous person is forced to move into a city and get a 9-5 at starbucks, or the earth-honouring beliefs&spirituality of their ancestors are forcibly replaced with colonial xtianity and permanently lost to history, they're still indigenous. the way i've always seen it explained by indigenous people is as a relationship to colonialism & that is the one that's least romanticisable but creates the most coherent class of people: indigenous people are those whose right to live on the land they call home is threatened by a government which doesn't represent their community or respect the leadership it chooses for itself, whose language&religion&culture is being or has already been replaced by force, whose way of life is sanctioned or outright prohibited by a dominant culture that demands everyone live the same way, etc. if a group is experiencing these aspects of indigenous experience i see no reason to deny them resources and language on the basis that they dont have some kind of romantic noble savage mythology or something. lots of indigenous people are also dealing with huge loss & i think looking at a group whose language and traditions and way of life and so on HAVE been destroyed and then using a definition of indigenous that finishes the job and agrees they are no longer indigenous is very strange (this is not @ u though anon) & imo the fact of that loss IS a relationship to colonialism that makes one indigenous. never being able to learn the language your grandparents knew, specifically because it was taken from them against their will, is an indigenous experience regardless of what lifestyle or beliefs you as an individual practise.

i think we basically agree with eachother and im sure neither of us planned for my answer to be this long 😭 but i guess what im saying is that if u define indigeneity as a relationship to the land, but believe said relationship is inherited (and imagine vacuum from colonialism), is that not still in fact defining it biologically just without the discomfort of outright saying that

[dwellordream]

“…I should hardly need to say by now that the idea that there is an intellectual downturn in early medieval Europe (or indeed medieval Europe more broadly) is a part of a specific imperial colonialist historiography which seeks to argue that any point when Europe wasn’t violently subjugating the world around it was necessarily a bad time. To this way of thinking, when the Roman Empire goes around turning everyone into slaves and violently opposing anyone it can get its hands-on things are good, because also some amphorae are traded across the Mediterranean; but when there isn’t one giant state oppressing everyone things are bad because fewer amphorae.

This is obviously a stupid and racist position which presumes that the nice things which rich Romans enjoyed (slaves and hegemony) were available to everyone, and also requires us to just ignore the fact that slaves are people. Rome wasn’t a very nice time for the great majority of individuals, and the medieval period had plenty of nice things for the average person – you just got fooled by a later medieval advertising campaign for art and a bunch of people who wanted to do slavery in the modern period. Accepting the idea that Europe did suck in the medieval period is automatically ascribing to this racist and imperialist version of history. In order for a society to be good and have worthwhile things it doesn’t need to be constantly attacking other cultures and enslaving people. Look inside yourself if you think that is true.

Another reason why this falls down as an argument is also that the whole “Europe as an isolated not trading enemy in opposition to the Arab world which had nice things and was gloriously well-connected” thing is not how things happened. If, for example, we look at trade routes in the earlier medieval period as a starting point we see that is in no way the case. We do see a drop off in international shipping when the Roman Empire collapses.

This is because the Empire itself used to ship goods along with moving troops in its fleets of tax-funded vessels. This existed alongside independent trading, which also moved stuff like olive oil from the Iberian peninsula or amphorae out of what is now Tunisia. Once there is no longer a state propped up by taxation doing shipping itself, shipping across the Mediterranean also slumps. That does not mean that it stops.

While we see a decline in movement, the key here is that we see a decline, not a total cessation. Movement very much continued throughout the early medieval period, and we have ample pot-shard based evidence to back that up. Yes certainly many people shifted to making their own pottery, but rich people could still get their hands on the good stuff if they wanted to.

You know when European shipping in the Mediterranean really slowed down? After the Muslim conquests. Where there had been a lively shipping economy suddenly there were a bunch of real bad ass guys who had carte blanche to intercept the ship of any infidel they could find. Oh and if you could take some of their land while you were at it, that would be great. All of this was made possible famously, the Umayyad conquest of Hispania went really well, felling the Visigothic kingdom on the Iberian Peninsula and turning all those olive orchards over to Muslim rule.

In quick succession, you then see the establishment of the Emirate of Ifriqiya on the North-African coast, as well as the Emirate of Sicily on, well, Sicily. In other words, a lot of the Western Mediterranean just wasn’t Christian any longer, so it’s kinda weird to blame Europeans for not maintaining trade routes there. You can’t simultaneously demand that Europeans trade more with the Muslim world while ignoring the fact that the Muslim world was also a part of Europe, and very much interested in dominating any extant trade routes.

This narrative also completely ignores the fact that there was thriving trade which existed all through this period. We have plenty of records on port tolls and taxes which tell the story of luxury goods crisscrossing the continent and across the Mediterranean, regardless of who was doing what. Walrus ivory and amber from the Baltic coast ends up at the Eastern Roman court in Constantinople.

Furs, honey, and elephant ivory popped up basically anywhere anyone had the gold to trade for it. Oh and gold, which largely came from Africa, was around the shop too. Indonesian spices like pepper and nutmeg featured happily in European cuisines, and lapis lazuli from Afghanistan was being ground into ultramarine. You want luxury goods? They were there, because trade was still happening. It just wasn’t happening on an imperial scale – an undertaking which I will again remind you takes a whole lot of slaves to maintain. The idea that Europeans were an unwashed and unrefined mass in opposition to the glories of life in the Arabic world just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

The backward post-Roman Europe versus glories of the East narrative also very helpfully ignores the fact that one of the glories of the East was the still extant Eastern Rome – with its afore-mentioned capital in Constantinople. (You may also know it as Byzantium, but we are trying to be precise here.) Of course, Eastern Rome was one of the big losers in the whole Muslim conquests thing, losing its extremely valuable territory in Egypt, which accounted for a huge amount of its tax revenue. It also very famously lost the near east more generally.

Having said all that, it was still a major maritime power, owning territory on the Italian Peninsula in what is now Calabria and Apulia. Constantinople was still very much about that Roman life in the medieval period, with a keen popular interest in Chariot racing, a lively trade with the near East and Western Christendom, and even what could be seen as a sort of pre-modern welfare state, ensuring that its citizens in cities always had enough grain to eat. If we want to pretend that everything was bad and gloomy in medieval Europe compared to the Arab world because Rome collapsed, how then do we account for the fact that it was actually still going at that time, and trading just fine?

Obviously then, narratives of trade stopping totally in medieval Europe are incorrect and overwrought, but why would I say that buying into them supports a colonialist narrative? The answer to that is saying that Europe didn’t have anything nice, as opposed to a flourishing Arab world is a way of justifying the violent incursions on the part of Europeans into the Middle East.

These arguments usually hinge on the idea that before the Crusades, Europe was a disgusting place full of people who didn’t bathe and nothing but unsalted porridge to eat. All of that changes, in theory, with increased contact to the Middle East with the establishment of the Crusader States in the middle east. The theory goes that it wasn’t until Europeans were able to carve their own ports out along the coast of the Levant that anything nice got into Europe at all. Without Europeans at Jaffa, there would be no spices, oranges, or rice in Europe. Hell, without all that religious violence maybe Europeans never would have anything nice ever!

That is not only factually incorrect, but it is a way of justifying what amounted to centuries of attempts to violently subjugate the Holy Land. Sure, all that violence was unseemly – but access to the Silk Road! It also amounts to a convenient justification for modern imperial and colonial violence. Well Europe was a terrible hell hole! What choice did they have other than to sail around the globe, enslave huge swathes of people, do a spot of genocide and begin to extract all possible value from any native people! After all, everything they had before they started in on the colonising in earnest was bad.

None of this is either historically correct, or acceptable. We can, and should, point out the major advancements that Mulsim society presented to the world. There is absolutely no doubt that there was a tonne of interesting stuff going on in the near East, and I in no way dispute that assertion. What is incorrect is the idea that medieval Europe was cut off from that brilliance, a backward hole where there was no trade, no spices, no intellectual culture.

Europe and South Western Asia have always been connected, and indeed the term “Arabic World” very much includes huge swathes of Europe at various points during the medieval period. If you want to say medieval Europe is a sad foil to the Muslim kingdoms, how do you account for the several European Caliphates? If you want to say that without the Roman Empire Europe lost everything bright and worthwhile, how do you explain the still up and running Eastern Roman Empire? If you want to say that without post-Crusades trade there never would have been meaningful trade in Europe how do you explain all the fucking trading?

The desire that many have to defend the medieval Arab world and its culture in the medieval period is laudable. I in no way am here to argue that it had a lot of good stuff going on. However, pretending that all of this had nothing to do with the European world and trade, or that the only place where intellectual advancement was happening was the Arab world is simply incorrect.

The medieval world was complex, interconnected, and very much a part of an on-going scholastic tradition. To argue that without violent force Europe would have languished as a dull afterthought it to argue for imperial colonialism. Medieval Europe was a vibrant and well-connected place, and it could have continued to be so without all of the slavery and genocide. Europeans didn’t need to rape and pillage their way through the world to learn and grow. They just did it because they could.

Pro-imperialist historiography is the air that we breath here in the decaying carcasses of the modern Imperium. I am extremely sympathetic to the urge to celebrate non-white cultures, and I spend quite a lot of time doing so myself. However, to argue that this was happening without any contact with Europe, and that Europeans cannot think or enjoy luxuries without also being involved in a violent imperial enterprise is extremely dangerous.

I know that the people who make this argument think they are being enlightened, but they are still making a pro-imperial argument when they trot out tired myths about the medieval period. We don’t undo the colonial historiography by agreeing with it. We need to write our own history which admits that every world culture has something useful and beautiful to offer us all, and that a better world can be achieved without the subjugation of others.”

- Eleanor Janega, “On colonial mindsets and the myth of medieval Europe in isolation from the Muslim world”

[e350tb]

The Owl House: A Blight on Gravesfield (Chapter One)

One

An uninvited guest arrives at the Noceda residence.

Right, settle down everyone, time for a history lesson.

No, no, please save the questions for the end of the class.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, English settlers - note the terminology there, English, not British, the Act of Union doesn’t happen for another hundred years. Anyway, English settlers started to cross the Atlantic in earnest to colonise what we now call the eastern seaboard of the United States. While Englishmen liked to claim they weren’t motivated by the same ‘base’ desires as the Spaniards in Central and South America, generally speaking, colonists were motivated by the same three things as the conquistadors.

There’s our key words - glory, God and gold.

Not literally gold - the hopes of gold nuggets on shores of Virginia didn’t bear fruit - but commodities. Beaver pelts and tobacco, things you couldn’t get in Europe at the time. The trade in rare goods and eventually humanity would enrich both colonists and their backers for the next two hundred years. They also served as breeding grounds for religious dissent.

Ah, dissenters. We’ll come back to them, because they’re much more interesting than they sound. 

By the 1630s, the colonies in Virginia and Massachusetts are fairly well established, and people are spreading out in search of more land. If you’re a settler in Massachusetts and you want to find a new patch of land away from everyone else, well, Connecticut’s right there.

There’s a lot of debate over which town is the oldest in Connecticut - traditionally, it’s Wethersfield. But a few academics have argued that that laurel belongs to a different township - the one in which we are gathered today.

Which brings us to 1635, and the establishment of Gravesfield by ten men who had wandered over from the Colony of Massachusetts Bay. Perhaps no town in the state has as much weird colonial lore as us.

And how much of it is true?

Well, that’s for historians to work out…

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

It all began on a dark and grey autumn day.

When something happens in a small town like Gravesfield, it gets everyone’s attention. About two weeks ago, for example, the curator of the local historical society had been arrested, fined and fired for trespassing, and it was still the talk of the town. They whispered about it in the cafes, shared articles in the offices, and presented wild, unsubstantiated theories about it on local talk radio.

“So you’re saying that we can’t trust historians?”

A few drops of rain rapped against the window - it was one of those days where it doesn’t rain, but it gusts heavily, and droplets are caught in the wind. The kitchen was dark; light shadows danced on the wall, and the illuminated numbers on the microwave seemed almost brilliant in the gloom. It very much matched the mood.

“Look, Kerry, I’m not sayin’ all historians are bad, but you gotta listen to some o’ these people; the things they say about Jefferson n’ Washington n’ all them folks. They get their kicks on bein’ right and tearin’ people down, this Hopkins fella probably wanted to prove something, and…”

Over the dim sound of the radio, one could hear the clock; tick, tick, tick, tick. Occasionally it was drowned out as a gust rattled the windows and doors, but the sound always returned, constant and ever present - tick, tick, tick, tick.

Time. Ever ticking, ever moment. Every moment, a moment stolen.

“And that was Marvin from Bridge Street. We’ll come back to that, but first the news on the hour. Brad?”

On the bench, next to the phone, stood a small picture frame, the glass slightly illuminated in the stormy afternoon light. To all the world, it showed a typical family - a man, a woman and a little girl. The man’s face was obscured by the light, but one could see the clear similarities in the faces of the mother and daughter.

Those that were here. Those that were now gone.

“The Los Angeles Police Department has announced an amber alert that was put into place several months ago has been withdrawn. In defiance of all expectations, a teenager, whose family has asked for anonymity, returned home over the weekend; two other missing girls, whose cases were connected to the teenager, remain missing at this-”

Camila Noceda turned off the radio.

She sat at the kitchen table, staring at the clock. It had been a long day. It had been a long few weeks.

Unlike those engaging in baseless speculation about the case of Jacob Hopkins, Camila knew exactly what had happened to the previously respected amateur historian. She could even tell you who the mysterious assailant who had beaten him up and left him for the police was; it was her.

She was quite happy to remain anonymous, too. She didn’t want any laurels, any radio interviews, anything like that. She didn’t want to be reminded of that day.

Not while Luz remained separated from her.

Everything about the situation boggled her mind. The Boiling Isles, the Owl House, Emperor Belos - they sounded like fantasy; even she’d thought they were fantasy to begin with. But the idea that they were real, and that her daughter was in such a dangerous world - willingly, no less - was absolutely terrifying.

The same words ran through her head, day in and day out.

“Staying here was the best decision I ever made…”

Had she really been that bad of a mother?

There was a strange thumping noise outside. For a moment, Camila ignored it, but then it came again, louder this time. 

THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.

It was like something was trying to break through a door.

Camila shot up - was it Vee? No, she was at school (where everyone still believed she was Luz - Camila swallowed the thought.) Was an animal trapped under the house - or had Hopkins started trapping them again? If he was, she was going to make their last encounter feel positively…

BANG!

Camila jumped. It was definitely coming from the front yard - this time it sounded a bit like a car backfiring, but much louder and much closer. The thumps were getting more frequent too, almost like a heartbeat - thump-thump thump-thump thump-thump!

She looked out the window.

There was… something swirling and morphing on the front lawn, trying and failing to manifest into a single unified shape. She could just about see the frame of a door, and a swirling landscape of… nothing behind. It almost hurt her eyes to look at. Yet she could just about swear she could see a silhouette through the shifting, swirling frame.

Luz!

She raced to the front door and threw it open, just in time for the door frame to settle - only a little, as the edges still twirled and twitched like a heart in cardiac arrest. The figure stepped forward, and Camila realised there was another held in her arms.

She stepped into the light, and Camila’s heart skipped a beat.

The figure was about Luz’ age, she reckoned - her hair was a bright purple, with edges of brown, and she wore what looked almost like a robe with purple sleeves and pants. Her eyes were a hazel brown, and her skin was pale - but more remarkable were her pointed ears.

And yet Camilia’s eyes focused on the limp form in her arms, her brown hair messy, her tan skin covered in cuts and bruises, and her breathing heavy and laboured.

The other girl spoke, her voice shaking.

“Are you Luz’s mom?”

Camila’s hands covered her mouth.

“Luz,” she whispered.

She was running before she knew it, sprinting over to the limp form of her daughter. She barely heard the other girl; she seemed to be babbling.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry! Emperor Belos, the golden guard, they-they came without warning a-a-and this was the only thing I could think of! Sh-she needs help but I don’t know…”

Camila took her from the girl’s arms, swiftly placing a finger on Luz’s wrist - a pulse, even and regular, if a bit shallow. Good sign, but she needed to get inside. She could go to pieces later; right now Luz needed her.

“It’s okay, mija, mami’s here,” she whispered. “We need to get you inside, come on…”

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t know how to…”

Camila looked back at the girl as she turned to run inside.

“You can tell me about it later,” she said. “We need to lie her down.”

She raced inside - she thought she heard the girl sprinting after her - and ran into the living room, laying Luz down on the couch. Quickly she checked her temperature - seemed okay, but her skin was a little clammy. More important were the cuts and bruises. She needed bandages, and probably a hospital. She needed to call an ambulance, now, and…

“M-Ms. Noceda?”

The girl had arrived behind her - she took a deep breath, trying to calm herself down.

“Can… can I try something?”

Camila opened her mouth to reply - what could she do? Luz needed a doctor! She needed a hospital, she needed…

Slowly, the girl stepped forward, standing over Luz’s unconscious form.

“Lilith said I wasn’t supposed to use this unless it was an emergency,” she said, “but I think this is an emergency, so…”

She touched her forehead to Luz’.

“With this spell declared… let the pain be shared.”

Camila stepped back, eyes wide, as both Luz and the girl glowed blue. The light intensified, and for a moment, she had to shield her eyes.

When she regained her vision, the girl was slumped next to the couch, sweating and breathing a little heavily; but Luz looked noticeably healthier, and many of the worst cuts and bruises were gone.

“What…”

“I shared the pain,” the girl said woosily.

“I… you could’ve hurt yourself!” exclaimed Camila. “Y-you have hurt yourself! I…”

“Yeah?” The girl chuckled humourlessly. “It’s worth it… as long as Luz is okay.”

CRASH! BANG! THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD!

Camila jumped and turned around. Outside the door, she could just about see the magical doorway violently twitch and swirl, thrashing like a trapped, wounded animal. For a moment, it seemed almost to be in a state of rage, as if it would lunge at Camila in a last, desperate effort; for help or to main, she could not say.

Then there was a loud pop, and it was gone. It was as if it had never been there.

“Your… portal?” Camila said, her throat dry. “It’s gone.”

“I…” The girl had hobbled to her feet and was gazing outside to where the door had been. She swayed on her feet.

“Oh,” she said softly. “Oh, Titan.”

Like a puppet with its strings cut, she swayed and dropped to the floor.

Camila looked down at the two unconscious girls; she mopped her brow, forcing herself not to panic or cry. She needed to keep herself together, to make sure Luz and her - friend, maybe? - were okay. Then she could cry all she liked.

There was a knock, and Camila turned back to the door. There was another girl, one eerily similar to Luz, standing there - she looked deeply confused.

“Camila?” she asked. “I-is everything okay?”

Camila swallowed, wondering how she was going to explain any of this.