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gamesception · 4 years ago

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The Promised Neverland is kind of really good, actually? I mean, yeah, I’m late to the party as usual, but I just binged the first season of the anime, and then the manga from that point on (the site I was on didn’t have any of the second season, but apparently it diverges from the comic and gets bad anyway, so maybe just read the comic to begin with). And, I mean, spoilers, obviously, but I’m going to get into some extremely major spoilers here so if you haven’t read it or if you’ve only seen the first season of the anime maybe skip this post and read the manga, but...

...

I’ve tried and failed to write a big long post about all the ways it’s so good, how the main three characters are each so compelling, how its pitch dark but not cynical or misanthropic, with mortal stakes but not gore-porny, positive and optimistic without being trite or naïve, how choosing Emma out of the main three to be the primary protagonist and viewpoint character keeps the story from becoming a masculine militaristic power fantasy, how the antagonists are treated as characters and not just monsters - even the ones that are literal monsters, about how the story never supports or glorifies the idea of sacrificing the weak so that the strong can survive, about how empathy and understanding and a chance for peace are extended to every single villain without putting a burden to forgive on victims and without ignoring the need to fight those who refuse the offer of peace and uphold the status quo, how the story opposes oppressive hierarchies at every turn - not just those the monsters use to control the human children at the farms, but also how the monster elites use access to human meat to controller the lower social classes of monster society, and even to an extent within the human resistance.

But there’s just way too much to talk about to get it all into one big giant post, and I don’t have the stamina for a big extended ongoing project right now - or else I’d return to one of the like 12 I have on hold.

But, like, to pick just one thing....

ok, so eventually we learn what the monsters are and why they eat people. They’re a weird sort of organism that can temporarily take on the characteristics of things they eat. Eat a bird and grow wings, eat a bug and grow an exoskeleton, eat a human and gain a humanoid body and the intelligence to become self aware, learn language, form societies - for a while. But if they go too long without eating people, then they lose their minds and revert to a bestial form. In order to save the humans, the resistance leader Minerva plans to wipe out the monster society altogether. After all, they literally have to eat humans to continue being people, there is no possibility of peace.

Protagonist Emma, though, has seen not just the horrific human farms and their cruel and corrupt rulers, but also their towns and settlements, their families and children. She was even saved at one point shortly after her escape by friendly monsters who opposed the farm system, and even though it seems impossible, she wants to save both the humans and the monsters.

A more typical show, at least among those with premises as dark as The Promised Neverland, wouldn’t take Emma’s side in this. She would be forced to ‘grow up’ and face the fact that she can’t save everyone. Her naivety would get someone killed to break her heart and teach her to be hard and cruel as if those things are virtues. Or, more likely, she wouldn’t be the viewpoint character to begin with, she’d be a side character whose ideals would get herself killed in order to elevate the male characters’ angst and justify their violence. Either way, the message would be “Emma’s ideals were unrealistic and could never survive contact with the harsh reality of the world.”

TPN instead takes Emma’s Side. She finds monsters who maintain a humanoid body and intelligence without eating humans, and they’re able to spread that trait to the rest of monster society while the humans all escape to the human world. Now, as much as I don’t like the grimdark ‘there is no peaceful option’ hypothetical version of the story, this development could have been handled pretty badly. Like, just reading it like that, it sounds like the story raised a big moral dilemma and then chickened out of it. But that’s really not how it comes off while you’re reading it, for a couple reasons.

First of all, Emma meets the non-human-eating monsters early in the story, long before we get the explanation of how monsters in general work. So by the time we learn that the monsters must eat humans to maintain their self identity, the audience already knows that there are exceptions and that an alternative exists. The story never sets this up to be a moral dilemma in the first place, so when the issue is bypassed it doesn’t feel like it’s undercut itself.

More importantly, though, is the thematic & metaphorical content. Because the monster society is a pretty explicit metaphor for unjust human societies, and monsters represent the people who make up such societies. Not just the aristocrats who benefit from the unjust society, or those who directly enforce and uphold it, but also regular people. People insulated just enough from the suffering and death that their lives are built on that they can turn a blind eye to it, but aware enough of their complicity in that suffering that they construct excuses to justify their part in it, and by proxy excuse those at the top who actually benefit from and shaped the society as it is. People living lives simultaneously just comfortable enough to keep them docile, but precarious enough that they’re too caught up with struggling to maintain the tenuous grasp on the lives they have to feel like they can work towards anything better. Monster society in TPN is a cage built out of the corpses of humans cattle, but built to imprison and enslave the monster civilians who eat them.

Hanging the story on the fantastical element of monster biology would divorce it from that essential metaphor while also endorsing an outright genocidal worldview, and TPN explicitly calls out the plan to wipe out the monsters altogether as just that - genocidal. It never even pretends to entertain the notion that the audience should accept that plan as the right choice, even while it doesn’t condemn Minerva for pursuing it. When Emma is proposing her plan to Minerva, the deal she strikes with him is ‘I will try to make my peaceful solution happen, and if I succeed then you cancel your plan to wipe out the monsters’. Minerva is eventually shown to be lying when he makes that agreement, but Emma isn’t, and note the if there. If Emma’s plan fails, then she - and thus the narrative - accepts that Minerva’s plan to save the children is still better than leaving things as they are, even if it means wiping out all the monsters. After all, the society IS monstrously unjust, and even the lower classes within that society ARE complicit in that injustice.

Minerva’s problem isn’t even presented as a matter of him hating the monsters too much to see a route to peace with them. The story doesn’t frame the conflict between Minerva’s and Emma’s plans as hate vs. love or revenge vs. forgiveness. It’s instead more of ‘hierarchy and division bad, mutualism/openness/relying on each other good’. The point is to show how Minerva’s role as a figurehead who believes he has to project strength to uphold the hope that the other humans have placed in him has worn away his ability to rely on others or to be open to alternatives they offer, leaving him with rigid and inflexible thinking.

So when Minerva learns about the monsters who don’t need to eat humans, he doesn’t see an opportunity for a better outcome - potentially even an easier outcome since he doesn’t have to make enemies of the entirety of monster society - rather he sees a threat to his plan to starve the monsters back into an animalistic state.

And if that whole subplot isn’t explicit enough, Minerva’s internalized need to project strength also results in his physical body wasting away in secret from a condition he believes to be untreatable, but the moment he finally breaks down and admits he needs help Emma is able to point to a solution, one that again doesn’t come across as a cop out because again it takes the form of another character the audience was already introduced to a long time ago.

In a story arc that the second season of the anime adaptation apparently cut entirely, wow the more I hear about anime season 2 the worse it sounds. And after the first season was so good....

...

Anyway, I tried to pick just one thing and this post still turned into a colossal gushing word cascade, and there are so many other elements to talk about. Like how The ‘Mothers’ and ‘Sisters’ are menacing villains with seemingly no empathy for the children, but when Sister Krona realizes she’s lost the power struggle with Isabella she leaves the kids tools to help them, and then when Mother Isabella realizes the children have escaped, she covers up the route they used in order to buy them a little extra time to get away. It’s these little touches - just as much as the short backstories that follow them - that show us how, while they might uphold the system out of fear for their own lives, and might have rationalize their part in it in order to live with the horrible things they’re doing, the mothers and sisters don’t actually hate the children. Knowing that makes it believable when in the end Isabella does turn on the system, and every single one of the other mothers and sisters join her.

The bit when the fighting is mostly over and she tells the Mother at the house “it’s over, now we can just love them” and the other woman breaks down crying is so sad and human, it makes me tear up thinking about it..

Like I said, all the villains are characters, not just monsters. They all have motivations for the horrific things they do - sometimes irrational, often selfish, but not even the most unforgivable of the monsters are just evil for evil’s sake.

Again, I’m rambling. It’s just... I’m used to these sorts of pitch dark dystopias being, for lack of a better term, kinda fashy in their messaging? Or at the very least deeply cynical and misanthropic and just kind of mean spirited. And TPN is so completely the opposite of that, in so many ways.

#tpn spoilers #tpn #the promised neverland #anyway yeah it's pretty good #though again apparently the second season of the anime falls of the rails #like from reading reactions today #it seems season 2 drops or completely flubs literally everything I go into in this post #don't watch it #i haven't #and feel better off for it #edited because I misremembered a couple things #like the 'we can just love them' line comes after the fighting not before #the point remains though

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kookiebunnii · 5 years ago

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what happens after || kim taehyung

→ summary: in another universe, do you think we could’ve ended up together? OR exploring how your memories with taehyung intertwine with your slow recovery from a life without him.

→ pairing: idol!taehyung x reader

→ genre: exes!au, post-breakup angst

→ word count: 4.4k

→ warnings: n/a

→ a/n: i always wanted to write something exploring the feelings of separation after a relationship. there’s a lot of works out there detailing the process of falling in love, but i think there’s something redeemable in the process of recovering from love as well.

●●●●●

The morning after might be the hardest part.

After a night of tossing and turning, drifting aimlessly between sleep and consciousness, the sun rises like it always does. When the dawn breaks, you open your eyes slowly, hoping that when you open them—Taehyung would be there.

But of course, he isn’t.

Because if he were, you’d already be in his arms. Taehyung loved to hold you while he slept, as if it comforted him knowing that he had you within his grasp. You never minded it, because the warmth he exuded was critical for lulling you into your dreams with ease. He smelled nice, like soft detergent on freshly washed sheets mixed with something so uniquely him. You would languidly lay in bed, curled into his chest, resting happy knowing that he’d still have you when you wake the next day.

When you broke up with him the night before though, this unrealistic expectation somehow still remained. It persistently presses against your heart, trying to win out against reality, until you were forced to longer believe in it. Gazing forlornly at the empty pillow next to you, missing the person who used to always sleep on the right side of the bed, your heart breaks all over again.

If you close your eyes tight enough, grip the blankets hard enough, you could almost feel his arms around you again. You could see Tae, dark locks messy with sleep, grumbling in annoyance as you try to poke him awake. He always mumbles ‘five more minutes’ before pulling you closer and burying his face in your neck. You’d always let him have his five minutes; in fact, you grew accustomed to setting your alarm a few minutes earlier just to ensure the two of you would still be on time. You wonder if he knew this.

Laying there in a bed that suddenly feels too big, you have no choice but to accept the fact that this was only the first day in the rest of your days without Taehyung. If you could push past the pain you felt today, things would get better. They had to, because how else were you supposed to survive a break-up?

But the loneliness and the hurt have made their residence within your chest, and you feel too weak to face the day. You can barely get yourself out of bed, so you decide to call into work sick that day. You were a star employee, so they surely would offer you a day off if you really needed it.

You spend the rest of the day staring at that empty pillow.

●●●●●

Prior to meeting Taehyung, you’d never dated a celebrity or anyone with as much popularity as he had. Given how big he and his group were, you should expect his face plastered everywhere you went in advertisements and other endorsements.

It was overwhelming, to say the least.

On your way to work you’d always listen to music, something upbeat and catchy to pull your attention away from the fact that he was everywhere. You wonder when they’ll remove the BTS advertisement for Chilsung Cider from the interior of this subway train. It’s been here for the past few days—surely they’ll have newer product placement coming soon. Despite the cheery beat of the current song playing from your earbuds, you can’t help but notice the small smile on Tae’s face. It’s the one he uses for professional things, the kind that makes his eyes glitter just enough to seem real. But you knew with aching familiarity how to easily get that boxy smile of his, his laughter contagious when you managed to crack him up beyond just a few chuckles.

Smiling sadly, your eyes lower down to the thin watch on your wrist. You’ll be on time for work as you typically are, so you should quickly get your act together. You were a radio show host, which meant that you had to make your voice engaging for those morning commute listeners. Being a professional meant separating work matters from personal ones, and it would be easy to tell if you were depressed about something.

God, what if your co-workers ask you what’s wrong? What if they find out that you’re no longer with Taehyung and just give you pity looks for the next month? You’d probably go insane.

Pressing your lips together instead of biting them for fear of ruining the gloss smeared over them, you briskly walk towards the radio building before dispelling those thoughts out of your head. You could be professional. Just for a few hours, you could keep it together.

Even when you dash past the photo on the wall, an old picture of you and your co-host holding up fingers hearts to the camera alongside world superstars BTS, you gather the pieces of your heart and hold them together.

●●●●●

Wow, did mint chocolate ice cream always taste this heavenly?

Burying your spoon into the icy dessert with renewed vigor, you pull the fluffy blanket over your belly as you commence your feasting. You haven’t had this flavor in a while given that Taehyung didn’t seem to appreciate it all that much, so you were grateful to be able to indulge in it once again. It wasn’t like it was your favorite flavor of all time, but you appreciated the crisp notes dotted with hints of creamy chocolate. You’d take toothpaste-flavored food any day of the week if it tasted this yummy.

You stop shoveling ice cream into your mouth when you remember the ice cream dates Tae used to sneak out of work to bring you on. He loved this one ice cream parlor down the street, always getting the same flavor no matter what. You liked to venture out of your comfort zone a little more, and given how often he took you there, you were close to trying almost all their staple flavors—not counting the seasonal ones. He’d always sneak a kiss from you afterwards, just to claim that he was able to sample all the flavors too. It always made you laugh, but you appreciated his small displays of affection. Especially towards the end, when the two of you began meeting a lot less frequently.

You place the sweet dessert back into the freezer, sighing and running a shaky hand through your bird’s nest of hair. It felt terrible to still reminisce about something that would never be, but you recently chose to forgive yourself when these flashbacks happened. Taehyung was one of those loves you would never forget because of how impactful his presence had been. So maybe if it took you a few weeks or even a few months to finally get over him, it’s acceptable. You knew without a doubt that you truly loved him. But of course, that did not lessen your obligations in relation to finally splitting away from depending on him.

Outside, the sky is glowing with brightness despite being seven in the evening. You lived in the city, meaning that the streets would be alive well into the early morning hours. It was loud and oppressive in the beginning, but you grew accustomed to it shortly after moving here for work. You wonder if you would even be able to fall asleep now without the hum of traffic underlying your dreams.

Maybe getting some fresh air, being around lively human interactions, and just living a little would help you move on. At this point you were ready to try anything. After all, it couldn’t hurt. You weren’t in the mood to cook today anyways.

You decide to dress a bit better than usual, if only for your own self-confidence. Your hands automatically reach for your favorite blouse and your most comfortable jeans from the interior of your closet. A lot of articles you own were actually gifts from Taehyung, so you’re grateful that you still have a few things that you could keep without reminding you of him. You wonder when you would feel comfortable wearing those dresses and belts he purchased for you. He bought them to show off “his girl” but now that you weren’t, did you still have a right to wear them?

When you finally escape from your worries, the cool night air blowing the strands of your hair with a carefree hand, you breathe deeply and try to exhale any stress still entrenched in your body. Tonight was about forgetting. It was about starting over.

It’s Friday today, so the streets are littered with happy couples, arms tangled together and their faces alit with adoration and happiness. You wonder if you looked as lovesick as they did, before ultimately deciding that you probably had. Tae was rarely able to walk the popular streets with you during rush hours, and even then he always wore a black cap with a matching face mask. The two of you grew used to ducking into alleyways whenever he spotted a large group of people heading towards the two of you. You remember feeling the hard brick wall pressing against your back as you waited out the crowds, glancing over at him periodically to smile mischievously at him. Maybe it was the thrill of almost being caught, or maybe he just liked your playful side, but he would usually choose to pull down his face mask just to kiss you when the two of you were hiding. These kisses were different than the post-ice cream date pecks. He’d always linger for a second or two, giving your bottom lip a greedy nip or ghosting the tip of his tongue across yours. No matter how many times he did this, your stomach always did flips in response.

The restaurant you picked is packed today, so you decide not to dine in. It would be rather weird to eat by yourself, especially amidst such a high-energy venue. Thankfully, your simple sandwich is completed rather quickly. You thank the waitress working the front desk before gripping your paper bag, heady with warmth, and head to the closest park.

One of the first places you discovered when you moved here was this community park. It is surrounded by large buildings, but that only added to the appeal of a small oasis surrounded by the mess of city life. You often came here after work, if only to stroll around the well-worn paths and think through how your day went. In the beginning, it had been difficult for you to adjust. Especially in the entertainment business, the higher-ups always demanded more of you. They wanted humor and fun, for you to pull fresh news out of the idols which fans craved. You had to be peppy, excited, and well-versed in the background of whoever you were interviewing. It was tough, but now you knew you had built up quite the reputation for yourself. You enjoyed meeting a variety of artists, most of whom quickly signed up for a repeat interview with you after the first round. You received the recognition and praise you craved, and you knew that you could only soar higher from here.

There are a few people walking their dogs tonight. You give each passing pet a smile when they look up at you with their round eyes and lolling tongues. Having a soft spot for animals, seeing them always made your heart feel lighter even if it was just a glance. Finding a bench is easy for you, especially since most people opted to stroll around this evening. The first bite is always the best, and it rings true tonight without fail. You chew slowly, enjoying the savory celebration over your palate before you slip back into your thoughts again.

You wonder what Taehyung is doing right now. His schedule must be busy, given that he was preparing for his comeback soon. You knew it was right of you to break up with him early enough that he would still have sufficient time to practice, since his work would always be his priority. It would be careless of you to end things with him close to his performances. You loved him enough to think things carefully on his behalf.

You remember how much you cried a few weeks ago, when you couldn’t even leave your bed to make it to work. Every time you blinked, he appeared behind your eyelids. It hurt so much that you never thought you could heal. You hated yourself, hated the universe for tearing the two of you apart. Whatever semblance of perfect love you found was replaced with the growing pain of your careers. You were climbing in the ranks, your days booked with more and more artists hoping to use your show to rise in popularity. BTS was traveling the world, performing for the masses and wooing fans with their genuine personalities in video interviews. As the two of you climbed higher, you also drifted further apart. You were beginning to feel the emptiness of being able to count how many times you had seen your ex every month on one hand.

The sandwich is quickly consumed, so you toss the empty bag into the trash can next to you and let out a sigh. Even though you wanted to not think about Taehyung tonight, it was difficult. Everything reminded you of him. Every time your mind wandered, it somehow ran after whatever remnants of him you still had. However, it was starting to hurt less and less. Instead of having your eyes brim with tears every time you thought about the way he used to look at you, you began to treat it as a silent acknowledgement of the past. You were satisfied with this development, but simultaneously fearful. What would it mean when you could finally think about Taehyung and feel nothing? Would that somehow invalidate everything he once was to you?

Your blouse isn’t doing much to protect you from the chilly night air, so you decide to take another lap through the park before retiring for the night. It’s difficult to see the stars, given the pollution and bright lights, but you like to imagine that they are there—shining down on you. They guide you back to your apartment, never leaving your side even when you shut the door behind you with finality.

●●●●●

Months have passed, and you are busier than ever before. Your coworkers have also began inviting you for dinners and other events more often. At first you were hesitant, not the social butterfly that most people expected radio hosts to be, but you quickly adapted. Everyone was friendly towards you for the most part, and the chatter helped ease and distract whatever sadness your heart was holding on to.

Christmas was around the corner, and you knew without a doubt that the entertainment world would be hosting a multitude of parties for the season. You were willing to join the tight-knit ones where only a handful of people were gathering for some red wine and conversation, but when your coworker invited you to a large rooftop celebration with some celebrities, you couldn’t help but hesitate.

“It’ll be fun! I’ll stick by your side all night if you’re that worried,” you coworker had chirped, a newbie at your company but who remained sociable and energetic nevertheless.

You had laughed nervously, waving her worries away and agreeing to attend. That had got her to finally leave you be, as you fiddled with the lid of your coffee cup and wondered what excuse to give when the date came around. Unfortunately, when December 24th finally did roll around, you simply stared at the calendar hanging from your wall and acquiesced.

Your closet is different now, as most of the items Taehyung purchased for you are now stowed away in a box in the corner. The newbie at the company, her name was Luce or something, had told you that people would probably be dressing nicely for the event. She then spent the rest of your lunch break yapping about some dress she had ordered online while you tuned out to play with the hem of your pencil skirt in nervousness.

Looking at your options, you finally settle on a scarlet dress that you hadn’t worn for a while. It was one of your first pricy purchases after your first paycheck, as a gift to yourself, and you were thankful to find that it still fit you perfectly. It was nothing scandalous, but definitely very different from what you were used to wearing. Pairing it with your beige trench coat, you check your makeup once more in the mirror before heading into the night.

The taxi drops you off at the location with little trouble. The sounds of the party are quick to descend on your ears, so you hand your coat to the coat check quickly before heading upwards to find someone you knew—just to stick around for the party so you wouldn’t feel isolated.

String lights have been strung elegantly across the sky, and you realize that it truly is a wondrous sight. Heat lamps are placed strategically across the floor, and a number of attendees are already sipping champagne and giggling with each other. Almost immediately, you see the coworker you thought of earlier, bounding over to you like an overeager kid and beaming with enthusiasm.

“You actually came!” she smiled, eyes wide as if you were merely an illusion.

“A promise is a promise,” you reply, accepting the flute of champagne Luce snatches from a nearby table to hand to you.

“Do you want to meet some people with me? I think quite a few of the celebs here know you already.”

You take a sip of the drink, appreciating the bubbles across your tongue and the slight flame that blazes in your chest when you swallow. You nod, deciding that socializing was only customary.

Your coworker is right to note that you actually recognize a lot of people in attendance tonight. The awkward feeling you had quickly faded away as you caught up with familiar faces and new ones alike. Everyone seemed to be in high spirits, happy to take a break to visit their friends and family for the holiday season. Their respective companies all allow vacations during this winter season, so their happiness is well-warranted.

It is only on your third glass of champagne, a red color brushed high on your cheekbones, when you take notice of his figure flitting in and out of your view. Taehyung is dressed in a beautiful midnight blue suit, the color flirting between blue and black. His hair is dyed a bright blue, likely due to promotions for his recent album. You can’t pull your eyes away from his tall figure and the way his lips pull in a polite smile at every person who greets him. He looks exactly the same, but then again, would a few months really change a person?

Suddenly, everything is too much and whatever progress you’ve made in the past few months flies out the window. You want to run out the door and back into the safety of your apartment across the city. That sensation only heightens when his dark eyes meet yours, and your stomach drops in fear and trepidation.

The thing about Taehyung is that he’s never shy with you. Even after months of being separated, he still holds your gaze in his own without fail. The two of you used to have staring contests, ones you would always lose, and this moment also feels akin to that. You choose to accept defeat the moment you apologize to your acquaintance and set your glass on the table. Heading straight for the stairs, reminding yourself to grab your stuff from the coat check on your way out, a part of you wonders if he will follow you. It’s fruitless, because what could he even say? You would only shake him off and apologize before running away again. He knows better than to chase after the girl who got away.

When you’re finally miles away, dress discarded on the floor, lying in the center of your cold bedsheets and staring at the ceiling—you realize that you still haven’t moved on.

●●●●●

The beginning of 2020 is nothing if not full of surprises. For one, you quit your job. If anyone were to tell you that you would leave your well-paying occupation one day to pursue a career as a painter, you would probably laugh in their face before recommending one of your psychiatrist friends. However, that joke was your current reality. Unable to take the stress of keeping up with every new act knocking on your door for an interview combined with the way the male high-ups expected you to laugh at the right times and talk pretty during interviews, you handed in your resignation at the end of January.

Perhaps the dumbfounded looks on their faces were worth the loss.

The next day, you book the earliest flight for Paris. You want some inspiration for your art, and what better inspiration could you derive than from a city with a rich history and a penchant for beauty? You had always been into the arts, so this transition came easily. Taehyung used to tell you that you were gifted, but you never took heed of his words. After all, his compliments were freely given to you when he was in a good mood. In reality, the most he ever saw of your skills were the doodles you’d scribble on his hand when he was unconscious from a nap on your couch.

These days, you rarely thought of him. It was reassuring for your heart, knowing that you were slowly accepting a tomorrow without him. The process wasn’t without its pain, but you were thankful at your resilience. You knew that he was doing just fine, as your mutual friends kept you updated whenever they felt like sharing.

Paris at night is a rare type of beautiful. Staring up at the Eiffel Tower, you admire its curves and lines as people glide past you without paying you any heed. You probably stare at the structure for a good 10 minutes without moving, your eyes appreciating the classy nature of its architecture before you decide to head back to your hotel. You wanted to sketch this monument while its shapes were still imprinted on your thoughts.

Turning around to see Taehyung staring at you, the fear you had felt at the Christmas party doesn’t rise up to coil around your throat. It surprises you, even though you had already admitted to moving on considerably. He is still unfairly handsome, his hair back to the natural deep chestnut you were familiar with. When he steps forward, caution enunciated in that single step, you give him a smile to reassure him.

“Long time no see,” you breathe, tucking your hands into your windbreaker.

“Yeah,” his deep voice resonates in that single word of affirmation.

“Would you like to grab a croissant with me?” you offer, unsure how to proceed but deciding to be polite regardless of how uncomfortable everything seemed.

He nods, his tall form quickly falling in step with your own. Taehyung doesn’t say much throughout the entire journey to your favorite bakery, keeping his eyes on the sidewalk underneath your feet.

Sitting outside the store, a warm baked good in your fingers, the silence is considerably more bearable. Eating with satisfied bites, you watch the passerby glide past with radiant smiles and laughter, joking around in French. When you finally brush the crumbs off your lap to glance at Taehyung, he is watching the same crowd as you were. He seems to feel your eyes on him, because he meets your gaze. When you look into his eyes, no more than a few feet separating the two of you, you realize the lack of hurt that typically panged with every mention of him last year.

The realization empowers you, ballooning your heart in your chest. It is not happiness you feel, but something akin to a peaceful acceptance.

“In another universe, do you think we could’ve ended up together?”

His question echoes in the recesses of your mind, and your fingers unconsciously tighten on the thighs of your leggings. This same thought had plagued your dreams early in your break up, as you prayed and wished that if things were different, if your careers didn’t demand so much from the two of you, that maybe there would be a happily ever after and an “us” to hold onto. But this universe, these conditions, were reality. You couldn’t ask him to sacrifice his love for singing, his appreciation of his growing fanbase, his dream—for you. He couldn’t request the same of you either.

“Maybe. Namjoon used to talk a lot about that,” you chuckle before continuing, “Multiverse theory or something like that.”

Taehyung nodes, a small smile appearing across his face when you mention his hyung.

“If he’s right about that, then I suppose so. In another world where you are nothing more than a normal boy and I am nothing more than a normal girl, I’d like to think we could’ve made it work,” you whisper, and when the words leave your lips without shaking, you are proud of yourself.

“I can be happy with that,” he says.

He walks you back to your hotel room, keeping to his thoughts as he does. You don’t mind, knowing that Tae often retreated into his thoughts when he was considering a topic deeply. You momentarily consider asking him why he was in Paris but decide against it. If he was ready for aimless conversations, he would start.

When you reach the hotel interior, a large chandelier illuminating the white marble tiles underneath your feet, he finally pauses to give you his final goodbye. He looks like he wants to say something more, maybe to ask to meet again or something of that nature. Instead he swallows and exhales, “We don’t need another universe to continue being there for each other.”

“No, we don’t,” you agree.

He turns around, bidding you another a small goodbye when his eyes briefly flit to your face. You offer him a small wave in response, watching his broad back retreating out the room and the sliding glass doors. Heading straight for the elevator doors as soon as his silhouette disappears from view, your shoulders relax instantly in the safety of the enclosed compartment.

Perhaps this universe still had a lot left to offer.

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dragynkeep · 4 years ago

Note

*BBC narrator impression begins*

Oh dear. It appears that Rooster Teeth Productions have cocked up Miss Blake Belladonna's fairy tale allusion upon wrapping up the story arc with her Beast.

We now turn to the well-informed pair of siblings, Owl and Luke, for their conclusions on how the allusion to Belle even fits any longer.

*BBC narrator impression ends*

The hell happened to Blake and her supposed to being Belle? Sure, in the original Beauty and The Beast novel, Beast's real name was Adam. Duh.

But let's take off our "Fuck RT" caps for one second for a more in-depth analysis. Does her Belle allusion really even fit anymore?

nerd fixation on beauty and the beast goes into overdrive.

did it ever really fit? belle in most iterations wasn’t a freedom fighter, she wasn’t part of an oppressed class, hell in most reading & a love for books & adventure wasn’t a defining trait of belle’s. it was her kindness, contrasted to the spite & greediness of her sisters, who wanted only monetary things from their merchant father. hell, even with the development of blake in volume 4 where we find out she’s basically the princess of menagerie; that contrasts the original belle as she was a merchants daughter turned peasant after he lost his wares at sea, who’s sisters abused her & made her clean & do work in order to try and buy their home back. the only time she’s ever really applied to a “belle” allusion is reading with disney’s iteration of belle, & every other rwby allusion in that team takes from the original tale, not any other more modern iteration. also i don’t know where you heard the beast’s name being adam in the original tale from but from what i’ve researched, he was only ever referred to as la beté & adam was a name given purely for the disney version.

now, the most defining traits of blake in the show are her drive for justice, her determination, her courage, being defined as a faunus, but isn’t above despising or hating those who are prejudicial & pick on those who are smaller than them. taking all of those into account, she honestly fits esmeralda better than any other fairytale protagonist, or quasi protag in this case. so many of esmeralda’s lines in the movie feel like they could’ve come straight from early volume blake, so much of their defining characteristics match up far better than blake & belle. like some of these lines?

you mistreat this poor boy the same way you mistreat my people.

[ silence ! ] justice !

what do they have against people who are different?

you saw what he did out there. letting the crowd torture that poor boy? i thought if just one person could stand up to him then...

you speak of justice, yet you are cruel to those most in need of your help !

i don’t see any. [ see what? ] monster lines. not a single one. now, you look at me. do you think i'm evil?

LITERALLY THE ENTIRETY OF GOD HELP THE OUTCASTS !!

blake being esmeralda is the one time i would endorse rooster teeth taking inspiration from the disney iteration instead of the actual source material as there is a lot of anti romani sentiment in the novel that disney managed to make less egregious [ by having esmeralda actually be romani instead of a french girl who was stolen by them & was a sex worker. ] it also keeps in with her french theme & doesn’t allow for any vagueness around what her potential coding could be; blake can be poc & french, many roma are.

blake being esmeralda also lends to some actual poc representation on screen without falling into the oofness of making blake black / poc with her current mother’s name meaning a slur. the belladonnas could still exist in the storyline if wished, just don’t have them be blake’s parents. blake could finally count for some very rare romani / gypsy rep that we don’t see in media often, let alone animated media; & with her being nonsexualized most of the time & her defining traits being her righteousness & her compassion & drive for justice, she wouldn’t fall into the stereotypical traps of a sexualized gypsy.

also fun fact, red is an unlucky colour in romani / most gypsy cultures; which could be a cute nod to adam being unlucky for her & their cause.

so yes, this is my blake should’ve been based on esmeralda propaganda post ♥

#rwby #blake belladonna #owl.txt #answered #me & luke are two mean gypsies #banging our pots & pans outside of rt's hq at 3am #CLOWNS #Anonymous

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yubsie · 4 years ago

Text

That Can Be Enough

A simple question from Sabine makes Hera and Kanan realize they probably should have made things official a while ago.

Read on AO3

or...

Hera poked her head into Sabine's room, being careful not to intrude too much into their latest crewmember's space. Anyone who'd spent that much time at an Imperial Academy had to relearn that she did deserve her own space and shouldn't expect people entering it without warning. "Kanan's making a supply run. You need anything?"

Sabine hesitated. "I should be okay."

Hera glanced around at the walls. The Ghost was home, but the bunks weren't the coziest thing right off the factory line. She'd worked on the common areas, but until recently they mostly used this room for storing extra boxes that really could have been in the cargo hold just as easily. "If you want to make this place a little more your own, you're allowed. You're sure there's not anything you need for that?"

"You mean it?"

"You're home now. We do things differently here." She wasn't going to start calling her family yet. She didn't think the girl was ready for it. But she could be, if she wanted it.

"Well in that case..." Sabine pulled out her datapad and started making a list.

"Kanan will... do his best." It was a lot of specific colours. Kanan didn't have the eye for that. "It'll be close, anyway. Any favourite foods we should be stocking up on?"

"Maiya sweets should travel okay." Sabine looked up at her. "When's your anniversary? Just so I know."

"My what?"

"Your wedding anniversary."

"Oh, I'm not..."

Sabine looked away. "Oh, sorry, I thought you and Kanan..."

"No, we're... we're just..." Now that Sabine put her on the spot, she actually wasn't sure what they were. "We're just something."

Kanan did better than she expected at getting the right colours. They were all at least close enough to the shades Sabine requested that she said she could work with them on whatever it was she was planning. So that just left them with the big discussion.

"What are we?"

"Reb... els?" Kanan asked slowly.

For a man who could sense her feelings, he could sometimes be really bad at following her. "Not the crew. You and me."

"I guess I never really thought about it. Jedi didn't."

And there were always so many other things to worry about. So much else going on. She knew she was happy with him, but she never stopped to think about actual nouns. "Sabine thought we were married."

Kanan opened his mouth. Closed it again. Opened it again. "Jedi definitely didn't."

"I know." But Kanan wasn't a Jedi anymore. He often reminded her of that. There were no Jedi anymore. Or they couldn't do any of this. "But should we?"

"Do you... want to?"

She hadn't thought about it. She couldn't put a definite timeline on when they started being... whatever it was they were. She remembered when the sex started, of course, but that wasn't all of it and it hadn't been in a long time. Somewhere along the way, the feelings had gotten bigger than that and she really didn't know when. It just felt right. Felt natural. She knew him and he knew her and they worked well together because of it.

She'd been so busy fighting a war that she hadn't even noticed their relationship becoming... well, a relationship. But when she thought about it, Sabine was definitely seeing something. "I hadn't even thought about it. It wouldn't change anything, really." They were living on the edge. Constantly on the run from the Empire. No one had enough contact information to notify the other if something went wrong on a mission. They couldn't risk visiting the sort of medical facilities that would question whether the person making decisions had any legal authority to do so.

Kanan brushed a finger along her cheek. "It would piss off the Empire if they knew."

The Jedi wouldn't approve, but the Empire would approve even less. And... she reached up to run her fingers through his hair. Hair. He was human. She wasn't. Any relationship where they looked at each other as equals would be unthinkable in the upper echelons of society. "Are you suggesting we get married just to thumb our noses at the Empire?"

"Isn't that why we do anything?"

Sometimes they did things just to keep themselves flying. But it was their motivation for a great number of things that they did. They wanted things to change, after all. "A lot of things I guess."

"Also because we love each other."

There was that. She might not be able to define their relationship, but she could feel it. Getting married would be a convenient definition, too. But mostly... they did love each other. That was, she seemed to recall, the usual reason for two people to get married. "And because we love each other."

It was easy to say they were going to make it official. The trouble with making it official while on the run from the Empire was the official part. They probably weren't in any databases. They'd managed to keep their actions fairly covert. But right after springing a cadet from the Academy? That was a good way to trip some alarms.

But it wasn't like they were planning a big blowout wedding. All the family they needed was right here on the ship. As the captain, she could technically officiate a wedding.

Not her own though. Not if they were going to do this properly. And if they were going to get married, she didn't see the sense in doing it any way but properly. There had to be officiants out there who could handle this without it becoming a trouble.

Her finger hovered over the comm. She had one contact who seemed likely to be the expert on such legal quagmires as this. Not one of the contacts that provided missions often, but she had some sort of government connection. She'd been willing to help when she needed resources for other missions in the past.

"Captain? I wasn't expecting to hear from you." Not knowing where her contact was, she hadn't expected her to pick up so quickly. For all she knew, it was the middle of the night. The standard rebel vocal distortions would hide any bleariness.

"I hope I'm not overstepping, E."

"Are you having trouble with a mission?"

"No, it's a.... personal mission." Kanan would be appalled to hear her call it that. But she was starting to realize the logistics involved were going to take it to that level. "I find myself in need of someone who can perform a wedding ceremony without tripping any background checks."

The voice modulation was not meant for the sound that her contact made at that. There was an edge to the frequency that clipped. Then E coughed and returned to her usual tone. "Yes, I should be able to find you someone. There are a lot of places on the Outer Rim that know the value of discretion."

At least it wasn't far to go. She wouldn't have been able to justify the fuel for something like that. But it might be good for them to step away from Lothal. Not for too long, of course. There was so much work to be done here. But it could confuse the Empire, throw them off their trail.

Especially if they could manage to avoid doing any active rebelling on their way. On the other hand, it would make sense to make use of the time away. A supply run, at least, even if they didn't end up picking up an actual mission on the way to the altar.

Overthrowing the oppressive regime was more of a honeymoon activity anyway.

"You need a bachelor party." Zeb didn't sound like he was in the mood to argue with it.

"Does that mean I should be throwing a bachelorette?" Sabine was settling in, at least. Enough to suggest simply ludicrous notions. She was going to fit right in with the sort of plans Kanan tended to make.

"That really won't be necessary," Hera insisted.

"Who would we even invite?" Kanan added. "We're the only people we risk seeing regularly."

They did have a lot of smuggler contacts. A few pirates. Sometimes they even worked with other rebel agents, but not often this far out. Hera didn't know where they were more active and that was entirely the point.

"We could break some out of prison. That's my kind of party."

"I was just going to suggest paintblast. Zeb's idea is way better."

She seldom found herself in a situation where people were endorsing Zeb's idea. She didn't like it.

"Come on Kanan, it's a Lasat tradition!"

"Prison breaks?" Maybe if they ever succeeded in liberating the galaxy they could call that a tradition. A hard one to continue if they eliminated the Imperial prison camps.

"Having a good old fashioned booze up. We have to celebrate your last night of freedom."

Hera shot him a dirty look, but Kanan had her back. "My last night of... from Hera?"

"I mean she's already the captain, but getting married is different."

Kanan tapped the table. "How is it different. Explain."

She wasn't actually considering inappropriate uses of the airlock. But it was useful to let him think that. And entertaining to watch him squirm. This could count as a party right here.

"I mean... it's..."

"Zeb have you ever been married?"

"Well... no."

"Maybe you shouldn't comment on what an awful thing it is if you don't have any experience."

Hera laid a hand on Kanan's arm. "No one is forcing either of us to do this." The fact that they were at war with the Empire was making it very difficult. Maybe the fact that it did feel like the Empire didn't want them to do it was a bit of a motivation. She would never make a decision out of this just to tweak Palpatine's nose, but the fact that he'd be livid did bring her a certain measure of joy.

Mostly she just took joy in it because she wanted to do it. They probably should have done this a long time ago. There had to be a reason that Sabine assumed they already had within a day of being on the Ghost.

"I think they make a great couple." The opinion of a fourteen-year-old girl wasn't usually the decider in the matter of matrimony, but it was nice to hear that she felt comfortable voicing it.

"Are there any Mandalorian traditions you want to incorporate?"

Sabine hesitated. "Most of our traditions involve explosions. Or ritual combat. Or ritual combat through explosions..."

"Maybe we won't do that." It wasn't much of a defiant statement of life in the face of an oppressive regime if they added knife fights. Last night of freedom indeed. They were still fighting for their first night of freedom.

"I'll make you guys a present though."

Technically she'd already given them a massive one by making them realize they should do this. "Only if you want."

Sabine flexed her fingers. "I haven't gotten to create proper art in ages. It'll be fun."

Hera was curious what she was going to come up with using the colours that Kanan had bought, but she was sure it would be heartfelt.

"We could use the explosions to break out some people for the party," Zeb suggested.

Maybe it had been a bad idea to let the two of them meet. Too late now.

It was definitely better to plan this without the kids around. Too many suggestions.

"E said someone will be able to help us out on Garel." There were enough people moving through there that they could blend in with other travellers. And pick up some supplies while they were at it. So that was the most important part of the logistics established. They could actually make this official. Of course, now they had to figure out the rest of the details. They weren't really going to have a guest list, but the officiant would have questions about what they wanted in a ceremony.

"What's a Twi'lek wedding usually like?"

Nothing like what they were going to have. "It's a full clan affair. You would meet with the elders to make your case for joining." Which would involve speaking to her father and that certainly wasn't going to happen. She'd never really thought about whether she even wanted that big event. She wanted to fly, she'd never really pictured herself getting married. But then there was Kanan.

"Would I be expected to take your name? I'm not against it."

Hera leaned over and kissed his cheek. "The only name I need you to take for me is rebel scum, and you did that a long time ago. You couldn't do it without the clan... also kanan'syndulla translates to foul breathed spearman."

Kanan gave her a goofy smile that was presumably never seen in the Jedi Temple. "I might love you enough for that."

"I love you enough to not ask you to. We're still plenty married if we have different names." They were honestly halfway married already, but it was good to have a symbol sometimes.

"Okay. We've figured out what we're not doing. Jedi didn't get married, so I've got no traditions to work from either."

This might be why they hadn't already gotten formally married. "There must be a generic ceremony of some sort. Just... promise to love each other and then eat."

"That's an important part of a wedding, right?"

"The most important part. Especially now that we have a teenager." They might still need most of that clan banquet. And then Zeb wasn't technically an adolescent, but he did manage to eat like one a lot. At least Chopper didn't need to be fed. He made a cheap guest. Assuming he didn't murder anyone while they were there. This was probably enough other activity to keep him entertained.

"Okay. So food. Promise to love each other. Both keep our own names."

"You don't have to do any demonstration to prove that you will be a worthy addition to the clan." Hera was reasonably certain that no human would ever meet that standard in her father's eyes. No matter how many stories she'd heard about Jedi in the Clone Wars, often from his own mouth.

"I don't have to what?"

"It's not a trivial thing, getting married. The bigger difference between the influence of two clans the more... set in their ways the elders can become." Stubborn, really.

"So coming from a clan I just made up..."

"It's not even that. You could be the king of Alderaan and it still wouldn't have any status on Ryloth itself." Hera shook her head. "But we're not getting married on Ryloth, we're getting married in a random spaceport chapel on Garel."

Simpler. More them. This didn't need to be an entire elaborate undertaking. "Okay, none of those traditions. I guess we need to wear... something."

"No way to find a Twi'lek wedding robe out here." It would look strange in the chapel anyway. Without the rest of the trappings it didn't make sense. She'd always pictured wearing one like her mother's on the rare occasion she even thought about the possibility of marrying.

"Jedi would wear robes to other people's weddings but I can think of about five different reasons that's a terrible idea."

"Given that we're trying to avoid attracting too much attention." She knew he still had a lightsaber in the room he didn't tend to sleep in, but it was too risky to ever bring it out. Jedi robes would be an even bigger giveaway. "Do you even still have those?"

"Well... no. And I think Master Yoda would die all over again if I wore them to break the Code this blatantly."

Breaking the Code. She knew he didn't call himself a Jedi anymore. But that was still a big step. "You're sure you want to do this?"

"I'm attached to you whether we get married or not. This is just making it official. I made that choice a long time ago."

She wasn't sure when exactly either of them had made it. She'd never meant to get attached either. She was supposed to be focused on the mission. But he made it easier just by being there. Made her stronger. They were a good team. "Okay... that still doesn't get us closer to figuring the clothing out."

"Do we even own any formalwear?"

That was an excellent question. Hera stood and walked over to the closet. No robes, of course. And she certainly didn't own a dress. "There are a couple shirts in here that don't have grease stains."

"Alright. Good start. I think we're supposed to wear pants to get married."

The pants could come off later. But if the goal was to avoid getting arrested on their wedding night, they definitely wanted to avoid indecent exposure charges. "There has to be something in here that didn't start its life as part of a flightsuit." She pushed through the layers. If nothing else, she must have worn a disguise at some point. That orange fabric didn't blend in very well.

"What about these?" Kanan held up a pair of plain brown pants of a reasonably smooth fabric.

"Clean. Untorn. That's practically black tie in our circles."

"I'm not sure I have anything better than my usual pants..."

Hera looked him up and down. "The usual pants are just fine."

"You're sure? They're kinda..."

Hera smiled. "Flattering. Let's go with... flattering." A little tight, really. She appreciated it. He could pull them off. She could...

Well, definitely appreciate them. That seemed like the ideal thing for him to wear if they were making a formal commitment to their relationship.

"Okay, pants. Shirts. Both are clean. Is that all we need?"

"Technically." They owned boots. They were going to wear boots. That wasn't worth discussing. They could just clean the dirt off the boots. "Unless you have a real desire for a flower crown."

"We should get one for Chopper."

Hera snorted. "Zeb has to be the one to give it to him. I've got plans that involve you not getting murdered by my droid."

Chopper requested the flower crown. At length. Which left them in the unexpected situation of having to find a florist. Hera hadn't thought to ask E about that when requesting a discreet officiant. She felt vaguely ridiculous ordering it. but the florist decided they just weren't going to ask.

Probably a good life choice. Especially after the series of menacing beeps and whistles the droid made when Zeb had the audacity to comment on his new accessory.

The delicate circlet of purple flowers was the only thing that really marked them out as being here for anything other than mundane supply shopping. There wasn't exactly a wedding district to the port. They were just headed for an ordinary-looking office.

Hera glanced down at her datapad. "We're looking for Rov Melmin"

An Ithorian opened the door and waved them in quickly. "Of course, my friends! Come in, come in, quick now." His mechanical voicebox was surprisingly bubbly. It was possible with the technology, of course. But not a variation she had ever encountered before.

They stepped through, with Zeb, Sabine and Chopper following close behind.

"Do you know if anyone is following you directly?" he asked.

Kanan gave him a puzzled look. So much for the Force making all things clear. "Excuse me?"

They were technically wanted by the Empire, of course. But even after Zeb's idea of a bachelor party, they didn't have enough of a trace on them for it to be a major concern if they weren't on Lothal. At least if they weren't going anywhere too public for this.

"How clean was your escape? Do you think there are slave trackers on your heels?"

Hera glanced over at Kanan. She should have realized what this looked like. On the other hand, they shouldn't go around admitting that they were actually just on the run from the Empire because of that little bit of sabotage. So sure. Runaway slave. She could play that role. It would be more convincing with her childhood accent, but she didn't want to speak marriage vows in a different voice than she spoke to Kanan with their entire relationship. "We came farther to be sure of it."

"That was smart. I'll still make sure the perimeter sensors are engaged."

"Thank you," Kanan said.

Perimeter sensors would still be useful for their actual need for discretion. Though if the Empire disrupted this she might just take the Ghost to Coruscant and deal with Palpatine herself.

It was no banquet hall. The walls were painted a generic sort of colour that might have been white at some point. Melmin kept the place clean, but age still did its work. The floor had been swept recently, but there was no hiding that that particular shade of green hadn't been in fashion since the days of the Republic. A cheap polymer desk. A terminal several years out of date but somehow still running. It probably couldn't even patch into the latest version of the Holonet. Which at least made it a little more difficult for the Empire to tap into anything on it. E was onto something when she suggested this place.

No altar. But they had their flower droid and the rest of the family.

"Your friend didn't tell me anything about what sort of ceremony you wanted. Do you just want the papers or..."

They could. But if they were going to the trouble of making this official, it seemed anticlimactic to just fill out some forms. "We want something. We just... haven't really had a chance to discuss what."

"I"m sure it's been a very turbulent time. I realize that we can't carry out any of your cultural traditions here. Do you have any particular preferences, Mister..."

"Jarrus. I'm from all over."

Definitely not asking the Jedi for any input on a wedding ceremony, but the less detail the better on that front.

"Very well." Melmin scrolled on his datapad. "I have something basic I often use in these situations. Take a look."

Kanan leaned in close to read it over her shoulder. She glanced up at him and nodded.

"Yeah, we can work with this."

"Do we just..." with such a small guest list, it was strange to even know how to start.

Chopper gave a series of beeps and circled around them. As good an opening as any. Hera reached for Kanan's hand.

Melmin nodded at them. "In these turbulent times, love is the most precious treasure anyone can find. I don't know what path has brought the two of you to this place, in this time. But you are here, and you are together, and for now, that can be enough. I cannot promise you the road will get easier. But I am here to help you promise to walk it hand in hand."

"Kanan." She raised a hand up to his chest and looked into his eyes. They were really here. A place she never would have expected when they first met. "I promise to be by your side through the good and the bad. To love you whatever the galaxy brings us."

The words on the datapad were a good start. But she did have thoughts of her own to add. "I don't know what the future holds, but I know it's better for having you in it. Whatever battles may come, we'll face them together. Our fates may be in the hands of the goddess, but I place mine in yours as well."

The last line though, what more could she say than what was on the screen? "I swear to remain with you until our star burns out."

"Hera. I promise to be by your side through the good and the bad. To love you whatever the galaxy brings us. I never thought about having a future until you showed me there could be a brighter one. I'm stronger beside you. May the Force be with our union. I swear to remain with you until our star burns out."

"Then by the power granted me, I pronounce you husband and wife."

She'd seen human weddings in holodramas where the groom had to be told to kiss the bride. Kanan needed no such instructions. Chopper gave a triumph whistle while Zeb and Sabine clapped.

Tomorrow, they could get back to fighting for a better future. Today, she could just enjoy committing to her future having Kanan Jarrus in it.

#star wars #fanfiction #kanan/hera #kanera #kanan jarrus/hera syndulla #fanfic #yeah this is wedding fic #because they were married dammit

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lastsonlost · 4 years ago

Text

I’m not sure if people have completely wrapped their minds around this, but we have an entire political party that has converted into an authoritarian—albeit Americanized version—style of politics that cares nothing about U.S. democracy or anyone who is not white.

With the exception of a few dissenting Republican senators who aren’t up for reelection until 2024 or 2026 (only Lisa Murkowski of Alaska is on the ballot in 2022) or are retiring, the GOP not only acquitted Donald Trump of inciting an insurrection that he clearly incited, but they told Republican voters that the lies Trump told them were true: The election was stolen and you have a right to be angry about that.

And it’s working.

During the impeachment trial last week, his defense lawyers reinforced those lies, and Republicans basically sat by and said nothing to counter them. They, in effect, are a party of turncoats. What makes their behavior so terrifying is that Democrats, who hold control of the Senate by only Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote, are left with no choice but to negotiate with the very people whose leading members encouraged the coup and instigated supporters to undermine American institutions.

Pam Keith, a U.S. Navy veteran who ran out of Florida’s 18th Congressional District as the Democratic nominee, told The Root that Democrats should give up on working with Republicans as if they are operating in good faith and have shown that they will be as corrupt and obstructionist as Trump.

“What they’re saying is we don’t care that he broke the law,” said Keith, who also hosts the politics show But What It Really Means. “He’s our guy and we’re with our guy and there’s nothing you can say to make us turn on our guy. He’s above the law. He’s above the Constitution. He is above the well-being of the United States because he’s our mechanism to retaining power. That is the absolute definition of totalitarian dictatorship. We don’t care what he does—especially if what he does hurts you,” she said.

“You cannot live in a diverse country when the paradigm is oppressed or be oppressed. That’s what’s going on in South Sudan right now. There’s only one way: bloody conflict. The only way a country like ours survives is through mutual agreement to set a standard. That’s what the Constitution is. That’s what the rule of law is. If you don’t have that, then there’s no incentive to peacefully allow the other sides to exercise power.”

Kyle Bibby, national campaign manager at Common Defense and a former Marine Corps Infantry officer, told The Root that had a foreign entity engaged in an attack similar to the Jan. 6 coup attempt or rallied the support of the main culprit thereafter, the U.S. military would have responded with an offensive strike or at the minimum stiff economic penalties. But he added that the militias and Trump supporters who were there are ultimately not so much the issue as is the Republican Party that empowers them.

When asked about the violent insurrectionists, Bibby said, “If they were in Afghanistan, we would’ve hit them. Either a raid, drop a bomb on them, whatever it is.” He continued, “But the organizations that are funding this and who are backing this that are creating the political movement behind this are organizations like Fox News, Breitbart, One America News Network, and the Republican Party. If these organizations existed in another country, we would be sanctioning them. We would be seizing their assets for inciting terroristic threats against an American ally or against U.S. interests.”

Mind you, Republicans lead a meaningless investigation into the Benghazi attack, accusing Democrats of being soft on terrorism. They forced Susan Rice to withdraw her name from consideration for Obama’s secretary of state because of their unfounded claims that she did not react appropriately to the 2012 attacks on the American consulate in Libya. They drilled former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in very bad faith, for hours over her management of the tragedy during a hearing in 2015. Meanwhile, when it comes to the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Republican Congress members called for the nation to move on and acquitted the man responsible for inciting it.

“The bottom line is that this kind of white nationalist violence was never taken seriously,” Pam Campos-Palma, director of Peace & Security at the Working Families Party, told The Root, “because it is inherent to the GOP, policing and national security institutions.”

In addition to terrorism against their fellow citizens and authoritarian behavior, Republicans also traffic in conspiracy theories. Newly sworn member of Congress Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga) has become Trump’s loudest disseminator of conspiracy theories and lies about the 2020 election, according to CNN:

Greene also peddled in 2017 the debunked “Clinton Kill List” or “Clinton Body Count” conspiracy, which alleges the Clintons have assassinated their associates. She spread false conspiracies the Clintons were involved in sextrafficking and peddled the cruel conspiracy that Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was not killed during an attempted robbery but murdered by Democratic actors.

CNN’s KFile previously reported that Greene in 2017 peddled the “Pizzagate” conspiracy, a debunked conspiracy alleging that Clinton and other Democratic Party leaders were running a human-trafficking and pedophilia ring out of a pizzeria in Washington, DC. In a blog post, she suggested that the White supremacist rally held in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, that killed one woman was an “inside job” to “further the agenda of the elites.” Greene also endorsed 9/11 trutherism conspiracies and falsely claimed there was no evidence a plane crashed into the Pentagon, according to reporting from Media Matters.

She was stripped of her committee assignments, but the GOP leadership still supported her.

In Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is blaming wind turbines and the Green New Deal for power outages across his state—which are lies. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes spent more than seven minutes debunking right-wing media lies about the outages, but Republicans in Congress aren’t doing much to quell them. In fact, they are spreading them. Much of why they are doing this is because they feel their power is being threatened and the only way to galvanize support for their causes is through lying and scaring people so intensely that they will see lies as truth. Those people are the ideal type of supporters Republicans can groom into ill-informed and lethal insurrectionists and white supremacists who will help you maintain power—even if it destroys the country, so long as enough of the “enemy”—Black folks and people of color—suffer and/or die as a result.

Malcolm Nance, a national security expert and author of the upcoming book, They Want to Kill Americans: The Armed Militias, The Fanatical Terrorists, and The Deranged Ideology of the Coming Trump Insurgency, told The Root that not only is the Republican Party behaving like a terror group, he predicted soon after the Charlottesville, Va., attacks in 2017 that Trump’s use of insurrectionist language—“stand down and stand by”—essentially would become a white supremacist call to arms akin to kind of terrorist extremism he saw as a military intelligence officer.

“If Trump wins, these unofficial paramilitaries, the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Boys, the state militias, all these other groups, are essentially going to become semi-official Brownshirts [the original paramilitary of Germany’s Nazi Party] of the Trump campaign,” he said. “If Trump loses, these people are going to become the Iraq insurgents. They’re going to go underground. They’re going to be furious and, over time, with the Trump campaign leading as the political wing of this insurgency. With a president in exile, those people will resort to armed violence, political standoffs, and terrorism.”

He said the reason why these threats aren’t taken seriously is because white people do not take white terrorism seriously. He brought up a post-election appearance on Bill Maher where he was a guest with an expert from George Washington University who said his analysis was over the top.

“She’s all, ‘Tone it down. Kumbaya,’ and I’m telling her what I’ve seen for the last six months, which is, the alt-right has transformed itself into the paramilitary arm of the Trump campaign,” he said. “Now that Trump has lost that election, they are going to be the Iraq insurgents. The Republican Party will view themselves as Sinn Fein and the Republican base will view themselves as the white Catholics who think they’ve got to support the IRA.”

Nance added: “Black evidence is never believed until a white person confirms it.”

Democrats introduced a resolution calling for an investigation into white supremacy earlier this month. This week, the NAACP, civil rights law firm Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll and Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss) are suing Trump, his lawyer Rudy Giuliani and two white nationalist groups over the coup. While these are promising steps, Democrats have few options to get to the heart of white terrorism because their Republican colleagues in Congress benefit from it politically. We have to view the GOP as enemy combatants because, for years, they have proven that Democrats are theirs.

As far as Keith is concerned, Democrats have to go hard. That means going as far as pressuring any Democrat who supports the filibuster into changing their mind or face a primary challenge. The days of compromise are dead. Obama should have taught us that much. The GOP went to war with him for eight years and Democrats, along with much of America, suffered.

We don’t want to be as gangsta as they are,” Keith said of Democrats in Congress. “We still have this delusion of bipartisanship. There’s no fucking bipartisanship. Get off that ship. It does not work. It’s sinking. It’s done. It’s at the bottom of the ocean. It’s the fucking Titanic. It’s down in the water. Let it go.”

Update: 2/19/2012, 5:23 p.m. ET: A quote by Kyle Bibby was clarified to reflect that he meant that the insurrectionists would be bombed not the GOP.

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snowwhitelass · 5 years ago

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I’m pleased to be here today to discuss who I’ll be supporting for president, and why.

It was the honor of my life to represent my state, Arizona — my family’s home — in the United States House and Senate for eighteen years. I am a conservative. I’ve always felt that my conservative beliefs and values were best expressed in the Republican Party. I was a Republican long before the president ever called himself one, and I will be a Republican long after identifying as such is no longer useful to him. Principle does not go in and out of fashion, does not chase ratings, or play to the base, or care too much about polls. And principle is the provenance of no one party. That is one of the things I am here to talk about today.

The other thing I am here to talk about is the future — both of my party, but more importantly, the future of our country.

I was raised on a cattle ranch in Northern Arizona. Goldwater country. When I was a kid, the Republican Party under President Reagan was brimming with ideas, full of purpose and principle. It was coherent, and inspiring, and idealistic. So much so that it awakened the imagination of a kid from the town of Snowflake, and a whole generation of other kids just like him. Made us think big thoughts, and of our place in the world, and of what it meant to be an American in America, the shining city on a hill.

With Reagan, a conservative’s vision of America as the indispensable nation was benevolent and big-hearted, a beacon to the striver and to the subjugated and those locked behind an ideological wall that divided the world into free and oppressed. It was morning in Reagan’s America. It wasn’t perfect, but it was always getting better. We were the sum of our goodness, not our gripes — of our resolve, not our resentments.

I got into public service believing that for our politics to be healthy, the American government needed people who believed as I do, but also people who believed differently from me. This has become somewhat of a novel idea. But it is the genius of our founders that the Constitution forces compromise. Governing is hard. Democracy is hard. Decency shouldn’t be that hard, but apparently it is. You know what’s easy? Name calling. Demagoguery. The politics of vengeance is easy. Dehumanization requires very little talent.

By raging at each other, our minds vacant of reason and reeling with ill-will and tinfoil hat conspiracy theories, we have given in to the horrible tribal impulse to first mistake our opponents for our enemies… then become seized with the conviction that we must destroy that enemy… seemingly oblivious to the fact that not only are we not enemies, we are each vital organs in the same body.

It’s as if in order to save itself, your brain decided to destroy your heart. That’s about the level of care we are currently bringing to the proceedings. There is a sickness in our system, and we have infected the whole country with it.

We’re all old enough to remember when we elected presidents who spoke to our highest ideals and aspirations as a nation, not to our darkest dystopian fears. I can remember when, once an election was settled, a new president would reach out a hand to those who had opposed him, and pledge to do right by all Americans, not just those who were loyal to him.

That’s the way presidents once sought to lead and govern. In fact, it is the way every other president in the modern era, Republican or Democrat, tried to conduct himself in office. Each possessed a keen awareness that a president’s principal role is to serve not himself or his interests or the interests of his clan, but the people of the United States. That was once the American way.

Those of us of a certain age in this country have also had the rare good fortune of growing up and into adulthood not having to think too much about the consequences of our votes — or even whether we vote at all in a given election.

For our entire lives, through some very fractious political periods, we have taken steady self-governance for granted, and that is a luxury that so many of our fellow human beings living in other countries have never had for a single day of their lives.

But the story of the past 3 ½ years is the story of the power that we vest in the presidency, and the consequences when a president does not use that power well. And these times prove the folly of taking anything for granted.

In 2016, one candidate running for the Republican nomination described our current President as a “chaos candidate” and if elected he would be a “chaos president.” Can anyone now seriously argue against this proposition?

Of course, in 2016 the President was a private citizen, and thus was unaccountable for the chaos he caused. And these traits of the man who would become the standard bearer of my party were bad enough when exhibited by a mere candidate for president.

In 2016, it was bad enough when for months in advance of the election, the Republican nominee for president claimed falsely that the coming election would be rigged. Now, as president of the United States, he has said, and I quote: “The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.” What kind of president talks like that? What kind of American leader undermines confidence in elections in his own country, as part of his strategy to hold power? This is extraordinarily dangerous to a free society and it stands to inflict lasting damage to our democracy.

It was bad enough when as a candidate he attacked a federal judge because of his heritage, saying that Judge Gonzalo Curiel couldn’t preside fairly over a certain case because Curiel’s parents were from Mexico. As President, he has only intensified his attack on judges. He has interfered in cases involving his friends and threatened jail for his opponents, demonstrating how little he knows or appreciates about the independent administration of justice in America.

In 2016, it was bad enough for a mere candidate for president to sweet talk the Russian dictator, calling Vladimir Putin a “strong leader for his people,” as if “his people” had a say in the matter. Watching that man as president stand with Putin at Helsinki and take the dictator’s side, defying his own intelligence community and denying the ongoing Russian attacks on our elections — was shocking and appalling. In that moment, and in so many other inexplicable moments of deference to dictators, a president of the United States degraded his office and diminished America’s role as leader of the free world.

It was bad enough in 2016 when as a candidate he resorted to calling his opponents childish names. That behavior in a president — which has only gotten worse, is an embarrassment to the office. Do any of us want our children to emulate this behavior?

I could go on, but the litany is all too familiar. It is apparent by now that the president’s behavior has not and will not change, whatever hopes we Republicans might have entertained about the office changing the man.

Some of my conservative friends will say, yes, we don’t like his behavior, but he governs as a conservative. Here, today, I will say to my fellow conservatives: Whatever else you might call the behavior I have just described, it is most assuredly not conservative. Indifference to the truth or to the careful stewardship of the institutions of American liberty is not conservative. Disregard for the separation of powers — the centerpiece of our constitutional system — is not conservative. Governing by tweet is not conservative. It’s not even governing.

And to the refrain — Well, it’s all about the Supreme Court, I say: To fall back on Supreme Court appointments as the last remnant by which we define a once vibrant conservative movement should offer little solace to conservatives.

Three conservative principles have defined and animated the Republican Party over the past several decades. A belief in limited government, a commitment to free trade, and a recognition that strong American leadership around the globe makes America a more secure nation and the world a better place.

So, how are we doing with these principles?

Well, we were running trillion-dollar deficits even before the coronavirus hit us. We have destroyed foreign markets for our goods and services. We have threatened security agreements that have kept the peace for nearly three quarters of a century. We have offended allies who we will desperately need to face China and other long-term threats to our security and prosperity. For no good reason.

Can any of us stand here today and claim that our party has remained faithful to conservative principles during the President’s time in office? No, we cannot.

If we are honest, there is less of a conservative case to be made for reelecting the President than there is a blatant appeal for more rank tribalism. And further division. And more willful amnesia in the face of more outlandish presidential behavior.

I cannot and will not be a part of that. There simply is no future in it. To my fellow Republicans who, like me, believe in the power of conservative ideas — ask yourself: Will we be in a better position to make a conservative case for governing after four more years of this administration? I think we all know the answer.

So here we are today. During the 2016 election, given what I had already seen during the campaign, I knew I could not vote for the President. Like many of my colleagues, I chose to vote for a third-party candidate. Today, given what we have experienced over the past four years, it is not enough to just to register our disapproval of the President. We need to elect someone else in his place, someone who will stop the chaos and reverse the damage.

Putting country over party has a noble history here in Arizona. In 1992, Mr. Republican, Barry Goldwater, endorsed a Democrat running for Congress over the Republican he felt would not represent the party well. Goldwater hadn’t traded in his conservative credentials. Far from it. He simply believed, in that case, that the conservative cause would be better served over the long term if the Democrat prevailed.

And that is what I believe today, in this election. And that is what a growing number of Republicans believe and are declaring today as well.

I have never before voted for a Democrat for president. But I’ve been asked many times over the past four years if I, as a conservative, could vote for a Democrat for President. “Sure,” has been my ready answer, “if he or she were a Joe Biden-kinda-Democrat.

Well, the Democratic Party just nominated a Joe Biden-kinda-Democrat, whom I am confident will approach his constitutional role with the reverence and dignity it deserves. I know that he will reach across the aisle, because that’s what he’s done his entire career.

After the turmoil of the past four years, we need a president who unifies rather than divides.

We need a president who prefers teamwork to tribalism.

We need a president who summons our better angels, not a president who appeals to our baser instincts.

That’s why we need Joe Biden.

If we have learned anything over the past four years, it is that character matters. Decency matters. Civility never goes out of style. And we should expect our president to exhibit these virtues.

I have known Vice President Biden for two decades now. I served with him in Congress for much of that time. He is a good and decent man. I haven’t always agreed with him, and there will be many policies on which we will disagree in the future, and that’s okay. The steadiness of leadership, and the health and survival of our democracy — those things far supersede any policy issues on which we might disagree.

And this much I know: With Joe Biden as president, we will be able to preserve the civic space wherein Republicans and Democrats can go back to merely disagreeing about issues of policy, without fear of revenge or reprisal.

That day cannot come soon enough.

And so, it is because of my conservatism, and because of my belief in the Constitution, and in the separation of power, and because I am gravely concerned about the conduct and behavior of our current president that I stand here today — proudly and wholeheartedly — to endorse Joe Biden to be our next president of the United States of America.

America’s best days are ahead. Go Joe.

Thank you very much.

27 Prominent Republicans endorse Joe Biden for President.

#politics #joe biden #us elections 2020 #endorsement #republicans #jeff flake

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arcticdementor · 4 years ago

Link

On July 16, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken sent a cable to American embassies across the globe with new instructions. In the face of what he described as the growing threat from authoritarian and populist forces emanating from countries around the world, he urged U.S. diplomats to actively “seek ways to exert effective pressure on those countries to uphold democratic norms and respect human rights,” and vowed that “standing up for democracy and human rights everywhere is not in tension with America’s national interests nor with our national security.” This, he specified, must apply even to America’s allies and partners, declaring that “there is no relationship or situation where we will stop raising human rights concerns.”

U.S. President Joe Biden has explicitly characterized his foreign policy as waging “a battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies,” and described the world as at an “inflection point” that will determine for the future “who succeeded, autocracy or democracy, because that is what is at stake.” And while he has named China and Russia as the top threats to democracy, he has stated that, “in so many places, including in Europe and the United States, democratic progress is under assault.”

This kind of rhetoric has led many to describe Biden as gearing up to lead a new round of global ideological competition akin to the Cold War, and Blinken’s cable appears to be a step toward operationalizing this conception into everyday U.S. policy.

…

Blinken’s invitation had in fact been a response to a June 26 declaration made by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet, which itself followed the completion of a “comprehensive report on systemic racism,” which had unsurprisingly discovered its titular subject ingrained around the world – especially in the “excessive policing of Black bodies and communities” in the United States. In her statement, Bachelet castigated the West for a “piecemeal approach to dismantling systems entrenched in centuries of discrimination and violence,” declared that “the status quo is untenable,” and called instead for an immediate “whole-of-society” “systemic response,” with a “transformative agenda” to uproot systemic racism everywhere and implement the “restorative justice” urgently demanded by “the worldwide mobilization of people calling for racial justice.”

The Biden administration could hardly have responded with anything less than full-throated support for such an idea, given that battling the omnipresent specter of America’s “systemic racism” has become a core feature of the administration’s political identity.

And few administration officials have embraced this battle with as much personal zeal as Blinken, who moved immediately after his confirmation to not only install a Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer at the State Department (in a powerful new position reporting only to himself), but ordered every bureau in the department to also appoint a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Diversity and Inclusion as well – with his stated goal being “to incorporate diversity and inclusion into the [State] Department’s work at every level.”

…

Speaking of that kind of thing, most of those upset about Blinken’s invitation of the UNHRC’s racism inquisitors strangely seem to have missed another development in a related front of the global culture war.

This despite the fact that the State Department is eager for you to know that, “On June 23, the United States led, and 20 countries co-sponsored, its first-ever side event on the human rights of transgender women, highlighting the violence and structural, legal, and intersectional barriers faced by transgender women of color.”

So there’s that. But side event to what? That would be the last session of the UNHRC, where the U.S. worked to address assorted “dire human rights situations” by helping to pioneer the launch of the “Group of Friends of the Mandate of the United Nations Independent Expert on Protection Against Violence and Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity” (GoF IE SOGI).

Besides the United States, the inaugural SOGI Group includes: Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Costa Rica, Denmark, Greece, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Israel, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, Norway, Netherlands, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Switzerland.

Who is this Independent Expert with so many friends? That would be Víctor Madrigal-Borloz, Senior Visiting Researcher at the Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program.

After its formation, the Group’s first act was to consider a report produced for the UNHRC by Mr. Madrigal-Borloz titled “The Law of Inclusion.”

“The Law of Inclusion” states that all evidence necessarily “leads to the conclusion that all human beings live in gendered societies traversed by power hierarchies,” and declares that, as we all seek to “build back better” (here inexplicably adopting Joe Biden’s campaign slogan) the “adoption of gender-based and intersectional analysis” is “a fundamental component of a diligent discharge of [all countries’ human rights] responsibility.”

Crucially, an intersectional approach leads to a “recognition of how race is gendered and gender is raced, as well as the many other factors which affect how one is allocated rights.” Plus, as a bonus, “gender theory is also relevant as a tool to address, analyse and transform systems of violent masculinity.”

…

Ultimately, based on his intersectional analysis, the Independent Expert declares a new “fundamental duty of the State” based on his careful investigation:

To recognize every human being’s freedom to determine the confines of their existence, including their gender identity and expression.

(I don’t think you will find a more flawless one-sentence summation of the End-Stage Liberalism I’ve previously outlined, characterized by its endless quest to liberate us from any and all limits, than this, by the way.)

…

The United States and the rest of the SOGI Group immediately issued a statement fully endorsing the report, noting that they “would like to reaffirm” that: “As clearly demonstrated by the thorough analysis provided by the report, gender is a social construct”; that intersectional analysis has “proven to be fundamental to the design and implementation of inclusive public policies”; that they support “the importance of advancing legal gender recognition based on self-identification”; and that they “oppose any attempt to erase gender from international human rights law instruments and processes.”

I hope you will retain at least one takeaway from my subjection of you to this word salad of intersectional jargon on race and gender: that the distinctive language and doctrinal ideological concepts of the New Faith have extended far past the Harvard Quad, crossed the oceans, and have now, as the report puts it, thoroughly “permeated” themselves through elite-managed global institutions like the UN Human Rights Council.

Conservatives, in particular, are typically dismissive of the UN in general and the UNHRC in particular (President Trump officially pulled the U.S. out of the council in 2018, after which Biden rejoined as an observer), as they see it as a pointless talk-shop that spends a majority of its time criticizing the United States and its allies, though with little practical effect. This is a mistake.

What is happening here is the steady creation and entrenchment of new norms that aim to redefine what is considered the normal and acceptable window of cultural, political, and legal practice by countries the world over. The UNHRC may have no direct political power, but it is precisely the ignorance or flippant disregard for the transformative long-term power of norms that has so far lost conservatives every culture war battle they have fought. Somehow conservatives – and now Liberals – have been consistently blindsided by norms falling out from under them (gradually, and then suddenly) even as they have held positions of political power.

Meanwhile, under the Biden administration, Washington has now embraced this kind of norm-setting mechanism for remaking the world in its new and ideologically improved image.

…

Not every country is completely woke to the need for unlimited gender self-identification or a “whole-of-society transformation” to address its hierarchies of oppression, however.

International Expert Mr. Madrigal-Borloz has also noticed this problem, which is why he and the SOGI Group are producing a follow-up companion report to “The Law of Inclusion,” this time to be titled “Practices of Exclusion.”

…

Probably in most other contexts, when an external power or powers attempt to “deconstruct” and replace the “traditional values” and “cultural and religious” norms of a distinct people against their will, this would be called that what it is: imperialism (or, occasionally, worse).

Nonetheless, “Practices of Exclusion” is set to be published at the upcoming UN General Assembly meeting in New York this September and will undoubtedly be endorsed by the U.S., U.K., and the other progressive members of the SOGI Group at that time – even as many of these same countries are actually still experiencing their own fierce bouts of “resistance” to its core ideas.

What does this all mean? In short, that the ideological battles of Cold War 2.0 are not going to be limited to categories similar to those which at least broadly seemed to characterize Cold War 1.0, or necessarily even uphold the classic conceptions of “liberal-democracy” and “authoritarianism” or “autocracy” with which we are familiar.

Instead, it should be understood that the Biden administration and its like-minded partners are now operating under a rather different ideological calculus about what “democracy” and “human rights” mean, even as, similar to the original Cold War, that calculus directly links domestic and international ideological foes.

In this worldview, in order for a democratic state to be a legitimate “Democracy,” it is not enough for it to have a popularly elected government chosen through free and fair elections – it also has to hold the correct progressive values. That is, it has to be Woke. Otherwise it is not a real Democracy, but something else. Here the term “populism” has become a useful one: even if a state is not yet authoritarian or “autocratic” in a traditional sense, it may be in the grip of “Populism,” an ill-defined concept vague enough to encompass the wide range of reactionary sentiments and tendencies that can characterize “resistance” to progress, as based on “traditional values,” etc. And ultimately, we are told, “Populism” is liable to lead to Autocracy – because if you aren’t progressing forward in sync with Democracy, you are sliding backwards along the binary spectrum toward Autocracy.

Moreover, as in the case of the struggle between Capitalist-Liberalism and Communist-Authoritarianism during the original Cold War, the insidious “forces” of Populism-Autocracy are present not only out in the undecided “Third World,” but even lurking inside Democracies in good standing – constantly threatening to tip them, like dominoes, into the opposite camp. Hence why Biden issues warnings like the one claiming that, “in so many places, including in Europe and the United States, democratic progress is under assault.” The fight against the perceived forces of Populism-Autocracy within the United States, or within the European Union, is not in this conception at all separate from the fight against the likes of China and Russia on the world stage; they are the same fight.

…

Exacerbating this sense of fear and division is the fact that a Democracy can’t just hold some of the correct values – it has to hold all of them, in toto. This is after all the prime conclusion of intersectional analysis: all injustice is interlinked, forming interlocking systems of oppression; therefore injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Intersectionality thus demands liberation in totality; there can be no pluralism – no one can simply be left alone or granted the slightest leniency, because no injustice in any place or of any degree can be suffered to exist, lest it pollute and threaten the entire system.

The conclusion is inevitable: the New Faith must be a missionary, evangelical faith. By its own internal logic, for its own survival, it must march abroad to convert the heathens even as it hunts heretics at home.

…

There are still plenty of countries out there – in fact, a vast majority of them – who think intersectional gender theory and other fruits of the New Faith are in essence stark raving mad, and are also rather attached to keeping their own cultures and traditions.

So even if you are a strong supporter of LGBT rights, feminism, or other liberal-progressive ideals (and yes, many countries around the world of course do treat LGBT people, women, and racial minorities terribly), it is still worth considering the practical consequences of Intersectional Imperialism. If the West makes ideological conformity an integral requirement for joining, receiving aid from, or even working with its Democracy bloc (as Blinken has implied), then many of these countries are liable to flee into the arms of China and other genuinely authoritarian but ideologically non-missionary states, despite the security concerns they may have.

…

At this time it was the Soviet bloc, including communist controlled Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia, who argued that freedom from discrimination should take precedence over the rights of freedom of expression and assembly.

And it was the Western liberal democracies, together with the Latin American states, that rose to (unsuccessfully) oppose this idea.

The “fundamental right of free speech” was, argued U.K. representative Lady Gaitskell, “the foundation-stone on which many of the other human rights were built,” and it was the U.K.’s position that, despite abhorring racism, “in an advanced democracy the expression of such views was a risk that had to be taken.” Hungary shot back that free speech and tolerance was pointless if “fascists” were tolerated anywhere.

When the U.S. delegation attempted to restrict the scope of speech defined in the law to that “resulting in or likely to cause acts of violence,” the move was blocked by the Soviet group, with Czechoslovakia countering that there could be no democracy if “movements directed towards hatred and discrimination were allowed to exist.”

…

Times have changed. As the European Union prepares to consider writing “hate speech” into the official list of EU crimes, tweeting “gender-critical” thoughts is already an arrestable offense in the United Kingdom, and the United States looks to enlighten the world about the dangers of oppressive microaggressions, one wonders if there is any country remaining, the world over, still willing to genuinely represent liberal values in these terms today.

Instead only the crusaders of the New Faith remain to march into battle against the Autocrats and their Populist allies, and you are either with them or against them. Welcome to the Woke Cold War.

#n.s. lyons #substack #left wing cultural imperialism #read the whole thing

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kuroopaisen · 4 years ago

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@kacchand (i couldn't tag your main but i wanted to make sure you saw this fdlkjfdlkj)

hello dear! i’m sorry it took me so long to respond to this dflskjfdlkfdj i decided to answer your ask in a text post so i can link my thoughts to yours more easily! also, i know i'm going to Ramble, so i wanted to be able to keep it under a cut sdlkfjd

Hi rowan!! I've just finished the final chapter of aot and I just wanted to ask your opinion on it!

(SPOILERS THAT DEPICT MY UNDERSTANDING OF THE STORY'S MEANING AHEAD. READ ONLY IF YOU'VE FINISHED THE CHAPTER)

(FR )

(THERE'S STILL TIME TO BACK OUT)

(DO IT NOW. SPOILER ALERT)

I'd also like to ask a follow up question about it, because it seems that I've come to a different concl. from many of my friends and I'm feeling dumb abt how i feel w it.

first of all (and i say this as sincerely as possible, and if i'm coming off as condesending please let me know hh), please don't feel dumb because you've come to a different conclusion :(

we all read media at different levels (i’ve been told it’s ‘not that deep’ before fdljkfsdlkj) and identify different aspects in it, so the fact that you've had a different experience to some of your friends is absolutely not a reflection on your intelligence. and if anyone's making you feel that way, drop their @. i just want to talk :) furthermore, you’re not wrong for responding to something emotionally, especially if it really... makes you uncomfortable, you know?

i'm from the PH & I've put off determining whether i'm comfy w the manga til the last chap,,,, but is it wrong that I can't shake the feeling that it's a justification of japanese expansionism and genocide? ik this manga has always been in the grey area, and that's what I love abt it! It often shows that no choice they make is absolutely good or bad, and does such a good job at showing you how each complex character came to that understanding (role of environment, etc...) but this last chapter felt too positive abt the rumbling? Like it was justified because paradis was able to advance and there wasn't much choice? idk.

that's totally valid! some of the best think pieces on the show i read mentioned that the concern with the narrative is less "is isayama a nazi sympathiser?" (he most likely isn't), but if he's a imperial japan apologist. and...

well, let's just say that my father is british, and when i was trying to say that colonisation was bad, using british india as an example, he said "well, we gave them railroads." it's... it's uncomfortable and gross and i think it encapsulates how countries with imperial pasts tend to talk about them; even if they don't officially endorse it, there's often a lot of talk about how "well colonialism was good for this country, actually--"

and if the manga felt like it was justifying japanese expansionism, then chances are it had elements that very much did point towards that. i've had a lot of trouble grappling with reiner, annie and bertolt, because they've existed in this grey area of 'victim of oppression' and 'war criminal'; and their existence raises the question of "do people who commit war crimes simply do what needs to be done?" and by victimising them it... it plays into the whole nuremberg defense of "i was just following orders". it's making you feel bad for the people committing said war crimes (and similarly with eren, and all the awful things he's done). but i'll get more into this point later dsfkjfd

i haven't read the last chapter yet (and don't worry about spoilers! i've been approaching aot from a very... specific perspective anyway, so i actually don't mind spoilers -- i read a bunch of analyses of the series before i'd even watched it hh), but... i think if it came off as too positive about, you know... an awful thing that happened, then it absolutely makes sense that you'd feel uncomfortable?

the modernisation narrative in general is one that always skeeves me out. it's one japanese imperialists use to justify the invasion of korea (and even those infamous tweets from the one account purported to be isayama talk about how the population of korea boomed under japanese imperial occupation, which... stop.)

it's also commonly invoked in cases of development. certain members of society (usually the poor), just 'had' to die for the good of the future. who gives a damn if they consent to that? they have to.

similarly, the 'we had no choice' narrative. that's... a concerning one that crops up time and again with history apologists, the argument that "oh if x country hadn't done y, then someone else would've!" or that acts of aggression were done as pre-emptive self-defence, which is so... ugh. i just. i just hate it.

It also feels really weird w the ymir and the whole loving fritz thing. i wish we got to see more of her thought process and what conclusion she came to that led her to destroying the power of the titans.

i... hate this so much. i get that abuse is complicated and victims often have multifaceted feelings towards their abusers, but... most people would focus on that in their story? the story would be about that? but instead, it's just... a thing in the history of the world and that's... icky.

also having the genesis of the titans come from a slave girl in love with her captor... there's many levels of ick to it and i highly doubt it was handled with the appropriate level of grace and sensitivity.

honestly, this might be one of the things that pissed me off the most because of how... contradictory her backstory was with That One Chapter (you know, instead of ymir crying because she wants to be free or because she’s been trapped she........ wants to see mikasa kiss eren’s decapitated head? i guess? what the fuck?)

idk...I just think that context is sometimes everything. and i understand that media can portray incorrect things,,,, and that isayama likely didn't intend for it to become a global sensation, but i guess i'm just uncomfortable w the right wing nazis getting a comfort book ahaha.

i totally get that! even if attack on titan is meant to be anti-fascists, the fact of the matter is... a lot of fascists love it. and relate to it. which is... alarming. especially given just how popular aot is worldwide.

it’s hard because before the ending, attack on titan did feel like it was more grey; i remember saying that i wouldn’t know how to feel about it until the ending because the story was either saying “the military is corrupt and war is hell”, or it was saying “the military is corrupt and war is hell, but it is necessary.”

still sorting out my thoughts, but yeah. I think i'm having a hard time understanding what they really accomplished with the rumbling and how they gave eren a sudden lelouch role and a lot of how they made it out to be a happy thing? perhaps I'm too biased to see it fully but to me it gives a "woah. eren was a hero. he saved us from destruction. those people needed to die for us to achieve this temporary peace and new start". i suppose the rumbling gave them a levelled playing ground?

OH MY GOOOOOD okay. i haven't finished code geass. but i really don't like lelouch. i mean... i think i just don't like characters that sacrifice other people for a purported 'greater good' (i could write an Essay about how much i hate erwin smith looking at him is enough to send me into an unhinged rage), but where i'm up to in the anime, i don't like the direction they're going with eren? i mean, i've never liked eren, but... that whole "martyr for the eldians" is just. ew. especially when you see several eldian characters disagree and resist him.

why does this one guy get to make choices for everyone else? because he’s sPeCiAL? fuck off

sorry for not being coherent. maybe i'm basing this too much on feelings ahaha. trust aot to finish it's scandalous run with a scandalous end.

no omg you're being perfectly coherent :( also, if anyone's making you feel bad or stupid for how you experience media, they’re... definitely not as smart as they think they are fdslskjfdlk.

i'm of that mind that, while media consumption is in part an intellectual exercise, it is inherently very emotional; narrative media tries to make us feel as much as it makes us think. that’s what stories are for, you know? intellectual analysis is well and good but what’s the point of a story if it doesn’t make you feel anything?

that's to say, i don't believe there's such thing as basing your opinion too much on feelings :') especially since it's your personal experience with a piece of media; you don't owe anyone 'objectivity' (which is always a farce when it comes to this sort of thing) or 'logical analysis', because nobody's got any right to criticise you for engaging with media the 'wrong way'.

tl;dr I feel like the mood was too celebratory abt the rumbling, and didn't entail enough on the tragedy so much that it felt like a justification for genocide and expansionism. how do you feel abt it's ending and the message it leaves? is isayama responsible to give a morally correct answer to the cycle of hatred? you're not obligated to answer! and sorry for the rambling.

hhh yeah i guess that’s the thing at the end of the day... is isayama responsible for giving a “morally correct” answer? no, but the way the ending plays out is very telling.

like armin thanking eren? mikasa’s e n t i r e character boiling down to being in love with a mass murderer no matter how poorly he’s treated her? and one could argue that kind of ending is supposed to be unsettling, supposed to hint that the cycle will just continue, but...

framing is everything. and it’s framed like a Good, Emotional Thing, Aren’t We So Grateful Eren Did All Those Awful Things

YI think I would've been fine if we got to see more of Eren's or Yif you have a different perspective on how eren is being portrayed please do share! I just felt really yucky watching armin say "thanks for murdering all those people for us" with love,,, I suppose he was trying to make eren feel better. ach maybe I'm just overreacting. idk. im dumb ahaha . i'll send this in anyway cuz I'd love to hear your take!

HHHHHHH i just hate eren and i never got him. i felt bad for him in the beginning, but he's always been too... violent for me. there was a very short period of time in season 2 where i felt bad for him, but otherwise it’s just been... ugh. the main three have always been the weakest part of the series imo, so it’s really not surprising they’re part of the reason the ending was so. bad.

and... well, that one infamous quote pretty much sums up my issue with armin. he's supposed to be the 'intelligent' one, but he's hopelessly devoted to a homicidal maniac with whom he has a very artificial, unbelievable bond with.

at the end of the day, the "thank you for becoming our monster" thing just makes it seem like attack on titan's core message is "war is horrible, but it is necessary." it feels like it's justifying massacre. and while fiction is fiction, and sometimes it's as simple as that, i think something as politically loaded as attack on titan needs to be looked at with a critical lens when discussing what it’s trying to say or what it means.

do i think it makes someone a Bad Person for liking aot or being attached to it in some way? no, because that’s dumb, and what media someone likes =/= their Moral Goodness TM. ofc trends are a thing and certain pieces of media appeal to certain types of people, but it’s a false equivalency that misses the point.

but by that same breath, nobody is wrong or stupid or has Less Valid Opinions just because what they took away from it makes them uncomfortable.

i’m sorry this is So Long i have so many thoughts about this dskljfslkj

but at the end of the day,

levi sexy

#kacchan 💕#rowan rambles #rowan watches attack on titan #attack on titan spoilers #attack on titan tw

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