#To be fair America also has like four “Easts”

[thecurioustale]

The "Middle West"

I was recently watching Trump speak (not something I typically do 🤢), and the most interesting thing he said had nothing to do with anything he was actually talking about: It was that he used the term Middle West to refer to that generally north-central part of the United States, centered on the Mississippi River, that is neither the South nor the Northeast (nor the Mid-Atlantic, but that's really just a subcategory of the Northeast that Northeasterns use to not get lumped in with each other).

We all know it today as the Midwest. But in times past it was much more commonly known as the Middle West.

(Tangent: It is also one of many geographical region-name reminders of our national East Coast beginnings, as America has like six different kinds of "West": the Midwest, the Southwest, the (Pacific) Northwest, the Mountain West / Interior West, the West Coast / Pacific West—and that's not counting the deprecated terms (such as "Far West," i.e. distinguished from the Midwest) or the old Northwest (which would've referred to places like Ohio and (what we know as) West Virginia)!)

Over the course of the 20th century, "Midwest" became an increasingly common form of the term, eventually overtaking "Middle West" in popularity and, by our lifetimes, completely replacing it. The only people who still use "Middle West" today are very old. I'm only aware of the term's existence because I'm a fan of midcentury media and if you go watch (for example) old Dragnet episodes from the 1950s you'll hear the term used.

I was looking at the Google Ngram Viewer to get a sense of the relative usage frequencies of these terms, and I noticed something interesting: Not only has "Middle West" been driven almost extinct from active usage, but "Midwest" itself has also declined precipitously in the 21st century. People today are not calling the Midwest the "Midwest," at least not with the frequency and relevancy they once did. I was curious if this was another permutation of the usage, so I also looked up "Midwestern" (which I included in the link above), thinking that maybe people nowadays are calling it the clunkier "the Midwestern states" / "the Midwestern US," but the adjectival has declined in step with "Midwest." It really does seem to be that people are just using this geographical category less often.

Perhaps unsurprisingly: the sociopolitical cohesiveness of the Midwest has significantly diminished over time. I think most Midwesterners would still recognize and affiliate with the term if you applied it of them to their faces, but increasingly I think many of them do not think of it in their daily lives as a personal or cultural identifier. Which has many fascinating implications that I'm not going to get into.

(Another Tangent: I feel like I've talked about specifically this "Middle West / Midwest" thing on Tumblr before, but I feel that way about half of everything because after all I've been writing down my thoughts for over 20 years and I've been having thoughts for considerably longer than that, and it's often not clear to me what I've talked about publicly and where.)

Anyway, this entire post is really just me scratching the itch of verbal brain noise about the orange guy using a term in a public address that I never hear people use in the present day. A little piece of lost language, hearkening back to a completely different era and world.

[bookgeekgrrl]

My media this week (16-22 Jun 2024)

fuck this heat dome for reals

📚 STUFF I READ 📚

🥰 The Settler (charlesdk) - Stucky Book Club pick - 52K, shrunkyclunks, Steve retires & buys a farm, Bucky's the local baker. I really enjoyed this fic - though it is unrealistic fantasy about both small towns and owning a farm so YMMV. As I said in book club, I didn't have any problems doing the hand-wavey "escapist unbelievable small town/farm fantasy of it all" bc Steve's feelings & character were more my (and the author's) focus than his occupation & location. You could really feel Steve's exhaustion and emotions, and I loved the way Sam & Natasha were shown-not-just-told as his family. But also I don't have any deep personal resonance with this setting, other than recognizing it's unrealistic.

🥰 The Marlow Murder Club (The Marlow Murder Club #1) (Robert Thorogood, author; Nicolette McKenzie, narrator) - really entertaining small British village cozy mystery with very enjoyable characters. Had such a blast reading it! The mystery puzzle wasn't difficult to guess but that's not why I read cozies, and it was satisfactory in its twists & turns & fair play.

🥰 Civilians, GDI (relenafanel) - I love it when an author writes an AU of their own fic! AU of The Steve Rogers Problem with SHIELD agent!Bucky & actor!Steve except this time it's a meet ugly and Bucky's a dumbass about his own feelings

😊 The Theory Of Attraction (Delphine Dryden) - novella - good femsub D/s rec'd by the discord. Very satisfactory.

😊 Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age (Annalee Newitz, author; Chloe Cannon, narrator) - nonfiction; "explores the rise and fall of four ancient abandoned cities, each the center of a sophisticated civilization: the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Central Turkey, the Roman vacation town of Pompeii on Italy’s southern coast, the medieval megacity of Angkor in Cambodia, and the indigenous metropolis Cahokia that stood beside the Mississippi River where East St. Louis is today." really interesting and well told (although tbh the narrator sounded a bit AI (but definitely wasn't))

🙂 The Pure and Simple Truth (lettered) - 65K, ostensibly drarry (but in the way that lacroix is ostensibly fruit flavored) - really about all the friendships & how people, the world, and redemption are all complicated - another discord server rec

🥰 Death Comes to Marlow (The Marlow Murder Club #2) (Robert Thorogood, author; Nicolette McKenzie, narrator) - enjoyed Judith & her 'gang' so much I went back for more ASAP!

💖💖 +127K of shorter fic so shout out to these I really loved 💖💖

Like herding cats (JehBeeEh) - Rachel Reid's Game Changers series: Troy/Harris, Ilya/Shane, 1.5K - short but very cute; perfect character voices - love a well done text fic like this

My Heart Comes Tumbling Down (DevilDoll) - TW: Sterek, 5K - reread, forever fave - peak oblivious Stiles who almost fucks everything up

All that I know is I don't know a thing (emjee (MerryHeart)) - TOG: Kaysanova, 10K - "In which Nicky's at seminary because he likes to argue, not because he's becoming a priest, and Joe has missed this essential fact and can't figure out why this future-priest-slash-bartender is flirting with him." SO GOOD!

Beltane (DevilDoll) - TW: Sterek, 8K - reread, forever fave - always-magical-Stiles AU

📺 STUFF I WATCHED 📺

Doctor Who - s1 (series 14), e7

Game Changer - s6, e9

Um, Actually - s9, e9

Smartypants - s1, e5

🎧 PODCASTS 🎧

What Next: TBD - The FBI Made a Phone Network. It Was A Trap.

NPR's Book of the Day - Questlove maps a cultural revolution in 'Hip-Hop is History'

Re: Dracula - June 17: Die Away in the Distance

Consider This - 25 years on, 'Boys Don't Cry' remains a milestone in trans cinema

⭐ Working - How a Colonial Williamsburg Actor Humanizes History

⭐ The Atlas Obscura Podcast - America’s First Celebrity Bartender And The Book That Changed Bars Forever

Pop Culture Happy Hour - It's getting hot. So what's sweatiest movie ever made?

WikiHole - Bay Area Music (with W. Kamau Bell, Guy Branum and Aparna Nancherla)

Re: Dracula - June 18: Turned his Mind

Short Wave - What 'Inside Out 2' Got Right About Anxiety, Per A Psychologist

The Atlas Obscura Podcast - The Last Baldwin House

Vibe Check - Yesterday’s Price Isn���t Today’s Price featuring Lena Waithe

⭐ Switched on Pop - Bootsy Collins is gonna funk you up (with Bootsy Collins)

Here & Now Anytime - How jazz icon Duke Ellington helped change America

⭐ Storylines - What The Puck? The strange story of a decades-old hockey rumour

99% Invisible #586 - Category 6

Wild Card - Taylor Tomlinson is fine with being 'perpetually afraid'

Shedunnit - Murder in the Library

Shedunnit - Bonus: Harriet Evans Interview

The Atlas Obscura Podcast - The Start of a Language

⭐ It's Been a Minute - Fouling Caitlin Clark; plus, a shoplifting panic!

🎶 MUSIC 🎶

Fleetwood Mac Radio • Upbeat

Stereophonic (Original Cast Recording)

We Are Lady Parts (Music From The Original Series - Seasons 1 & 2)

Meet Me @ the Altar

Bootsy Collins radio

Duke Ellington

Dance Party Hits

Survivor Radio • Deep cuts

No Vocals EDM

Bass Haven

[possuminabathtub]

15 Questions for 15 Friends

Thanks for tagging me, @tessabennet 💚

1. Are you named after anyone?

I never know how to answer this, because for all intents and purposes yes but my mother is adamant that she did not name me after the actress (she did).

2. When was the last time you cried?

Yesterday (it's been a weird, exhausting week)

3. Do you have kids?

Nope

4. What sports do you play / have you played?

Most recent sport was Swim, but I've done gymnastics, soccer (briefly, it was horrendous, do not make me run), and martial arts

5. Do you use sarcasm?

Yeah, it's a staple

6. What’s the first thing you notice about people?

Vibes (I wish), no it's Hair now that I think about it, I don't make eye contact so it's something to look at, and I think it's pretty.

7. What’s your eye colour

Legally? Blue. On a color wheel? Couldn't tell you if you stuck a mirror in my face

8. Scary movies or happy endings?

Happy endings all the way, I can't watch scary movies unless they're so badly written or acted that I can laugh my way through them

9. Any talents?

I certainly like to think so, I write a fair amount so I sure hope I'm making a talent of it, and I've been told my singing voice is nice, I also have hyperflexible joints in my legs and some leftover flexibility from gymnastics, which makes for some cool tricks

10. Where were you born?

America (the east coast actually, although I'm southern through and through)

11. What are your hobbies?

Writing, painting (not particularly good at it, but it's certainly fun), reading, a handful of video games, and many more, my ADHD has me jumping from hobby to hobby like it's a competitive sport

12. Do you have any pets?

Yes, well, shared custody of all our darlings, but two dogs, three cats, seven chickens, five ducks, two horses, and four cows if you like to count livestock. (I adore all of them and I'm going to miss my rude darlings when I move away)

13. How tall are you?

5'2"

14. Favourite subject in school

Math, easily, give me the numbers, the formulas, and the steadfast rules and I'll thrive.

15. Dream job

Not a clue, shall cross that bridge when we get to it

[uc1wa]

Ok, so, it's the middle of the night and I have some thoughts about the beauty of accents that I need to share, this is probably be ranty and unnecessarily long so bear with me (or don't it's your blog, right!)

I'm Canadian but i listen to this band from Japan and I have for 17ish years, the lead singer sometimes sings in English and I love his accent. Most of the time he sings clearly and I can understand what he is saying even if he pronounced something incorrectly and sometimes I can't because it's a metal band and I probably wouldn't fully understand without reading the lyrics even if he didn't have an accent.

So, while listening to them tonight it got me thinking about accents, like jjk happens in Japan so obviously they would speak Japanese, I watch in English because I don't know Japanese, but I was wondering what Geto, gojo, and the rest of them actually speaking English would sound like. Obviously they wouldn't sound like the English VAs.

Accents tell you so much about a person that most people don't even realize. More than just where they are from. Accents come from languages having different sounds and different cadence in speaking. For example, there is no "L" or "th" sound in most Asian languages. So those are difficult sounds to make when learning english. Like, the singer in the band I listen to sings a line in English "gasp for breath" but it sounds like "gasp for bress." If you pay attention to where your tongue is in your mouth when you make a "th" sound compared to a "ss" sound it's not very different but if you didn't grow up moving your tongue that way or haven't specifically been told where to put your tongue you're not going to make the sound like a native speaker. Same with the "L" sound coming out as an "R" sound, very minor differences in tongue position. And to be fair even if you know where to put your tongue and have a minimal accent, if you speak too quickly you'll naturally go back to moving your tongue the way your muscles are used to and your accent will come back. On the flip side Swedish uses almost the exact same set of sounds as English so while learning either language is still a difficult task, pronunciation isn't and when most Swedish people speak English they have very minor accents. (I'm one of your hockey anons and my team has had a LOT of Swedish players over the years so I looked into why they didn't sound like Swedish people you see in movies, it's because Swedish people don't actually talk like that at all 😂) So the language(s) you grew up speaking affect the way your muscles move.

Language also affects the way you perceive the world. For example, the Inuit have between 40 and 70 words for snow! Imagine knowing the difference between that many types of snow! Like I said, I'm Canadian and I can only think of snow with adjectives in front of it (packy snow, frozen snow, fluffy snow) but it's still all the word snow. But it goes deeper than that. There is a stereotype that Asian people are amazing at math so "they," I don't remember who at the moment, ( the moment being 1:38 am) did I study on it, and they found that students in Eastern Asia consistently could remember more numbers when given a list of numbers than north American students could. But Asian students in North America were a mixed bag. They realized the Asian students in North America whose numbers were comparable to the east Asian scores weren't native English speakers, their first language was an East Asian language. Whereas the Asian students whose first language was English had numbers comparable to the rest of the English speakers. Most east Asian languages have a very simple way of counting, like Japanese, from my minimal understanding, the number 84 would be spoken as eight ten four, whereas in English each set of ten has it's own name which causes a longer processing time in your mind. (84 in french is 4 20 4, you have to do math just to count! I assume that would make french speakers even slower at math than English speakers, insert that video of the new York cabby going off about french numbers) also the individual numbers tend to be a single short syllable and that also quickens processing time. This allows east Asian native speakers to remember more numbers than native English speakers. Being Asian doesn't make you better at math, being a native Asian language speaker does. It's not race, it's language.

If you think about it the laws of the universe are defined by physics, and what is physics but math in motion. So, your language literally affects the wiring in your brain and your perception of the world around you.

You can hear the way a brain is wired from the way someone's tongue moves, how cool is that? AND, it can change depending on where you grew up, even with the same language! I tongue from Scotland will move differently than a tongue in Oklahoma! And you can hear it and I love it! I love accents so much. 😩😩😩

Back to jjk, would Geto put in the effort to minimize his accent? I don't think so, honestly I don't think cult leader Geto would even attempt learning English since Jujutsu is mostly in Japan, why would he want to talk to monkeys? (Also, Naoya? Not learning English either, too proud of his family line and honestly not willing to be bad at something, like everyone is at the beginning) Gojo on the other hand, I think he would learn English (to annoy more people) and know lots of words but not necessarily speak clearly, he's the best at everything right? Why wouldn't he be the best at English? So he puts no effort into minimizing his accent, doesn't think he needs to, spoiler he does, haha. I think Yuuji might learn for fun or to understand Jennifer Lawrence interviews, I think he'd have a decent accent but speak clearly.

Anyways, do you have thoughts on this? This being accents in jjk (or any anime) Or am I deliriously tired and not making sense.

finally answering this now that i can give this the attention it deserves. beforehand note, this is such a coincidence bc i took an anthropological linguistic class last sem! also HELLO ONE OF MY HOCKEY ANONS!! MISSED U!

in terms of jjk! most (besides kyoto ppl) are from northern jp, miyagi i think!! i'm from the osaka-hyogo area so there is definitely a different dialect in comparison to miyagi! i do speak more similar to that of kyoto ofc since it is closer. but, just like any city, there are sayings that are foreign in one and the ssame in another.

Most east Asian languages have a very simple way of counting, like Japanese, from my minimal understanding, the number 84 would be spoken as eight ten four, whereas in English each set of ten has it's own name which causes a longer processing time in your mind.

this part was crazy^^ to me. honestly, as somebody who speaks japanese, i never thought of this on my own though it makes perfect sense. saying this as a data science major who grew up being trilingual HAHA

gojo... i honestly think he' grow up speaking english. coming from the most notorious clan in all of jujutsu, i feel like it would just come natural to him and his clan to speak both jp and english. yuuji w the jlaw interviews made me LOL btw.

so, something funny ab naoya (specifically naoya cuz he;s fucking crazy ofc) is he speaks the kansai dialect (this is what i speak as well so ab to clown myself in the process. yk how in english there is like a "valley girl" way of speaking? kansai is the jp version of that. so naoya the all and powerful speaks japanese like a socal valley girl would speak english.

anyways, i loved reading this! language and anthropology in general is so interesting to me. its so cool learned about different people and what makes them... them!! another silly to imagine, when i was little i would sometimes accidentally use an accent from one of my languages when speakig another. imagine a 5 year old xi speaking spanish in a japanese accent lol

[argyrocratie]

it's a whole ass "utopian" scheme (X):

"Published in Vienna a year after Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles, Die Unionisierung Mitteleuropas! (The Unionization of Central Europe!) anticipated not only the Second World War but also the coming European Union. “Does anyone really seriously believe that the current peace agreements have put an end to the idea of revenge [Revancheidee] of individual tribes?” asked the anonymous author, who wrote this twenty-four-page pamphlet under the initials P. A. M. The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empire had suffered the “death blow” (Todesstoß). The Habsburg dynasty, upon which the sun once never set, “disappeared from the throne overnight”. The Allies had won, but animosity and divisiveness were haunting Europe, festering away in fields scarred with trenches, bullet-pocked homes. If “world peace” was a possible horizon, it would have to be worked toward gradually, starting with economic and cultural unification.

According to P.A.M., war arose from nationalism, and nationalism could be overcome with a “Union”, consisting of a common flag, monetary system, time zone, postal service, and language. Upon forming the Union, Europe should immediately revise its school systems, allocating half of all teaching hours to Esperanto and the other half to a student’s mother tongue. After twenty-five years, there would be enough widespread command of Esperanto for it to serve as the language of the Union’s defense forces. After another twenty years, Esperanto was to become the language of politics. Eventually citizens will vote on whether their mother tongues are even needed anymore.

The most bizarre aspect of The Unionization of Central Europe! is P.A.M.’s proposed canton system, which almost makes the Berlin Conference and Sykes-Picot Agreement look like ethnically sensitive approaches to territory distribution in comparison. To visualize this system, P.A.M.’s pamphlet came with foldout maps: “The New Europe with Lasting Peace”, and a slightly smaller map proposing a unification of European colonies in Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia, “The Colonies of the Union.”

The center of the Union was to be Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral. From here, on the map, twenty-four cantons radiate out in all directions, named for their capital cities and overlaid with color that designates their residents’ ethnolinguistic identity: Roman, German, Slav, or Magyar. Kanton München runs from Vienna to the Bay of Biscay; Kanton Budapest fans out eastward to the Black Sea; Spain, Italy, the Nordics, and other nations outside of Central Europe were exempt from the plan. There are alternative arrangements, but P.A.M. assures his reader that he has chosen “the most advantageous and fair” division, which will instantly resolve the Balkan question and all other tensions.

In a kind of wonderful inversion of concerns, P.A.M. spends more time on the details — outlining, for instance, the design, denominations, and iconography of the Union’s currency — than he does explaining how, exactly, this might all work. Since most of Europe’s problems can be solved by cutting it up like an overshared pie, he turns instead toward future threats to the Union: the East. To prevent “cultural upheaval” and incursions by “Asian peoples”, soldiers would occupy a fifty-kilometer no man’s land, where, when not fending off invasion, they could freely farm and marry. The pamphlet’s politics run the gamut. “Gypsy” children will be placed under state protection, and if parents complain, they are to be “expelled from the Union forever”. Schools are to be placed in forests due to the aromatic air (würzigen Waldesluft); factories that emit heavy smoke or pollutive noise must be relocated away from the capital; and imperial colonies should be consolidated, for this is the only way the Union can obtain, at a good price, “the raw materials that it absolutely needs for processing and producing cultural products”.

The government of the Union is to be built on the tenets of consociationalist power sharing. At first, a Frenchman will be president, a Pole will serve as Minister of Agriculture, and a Hungarian will oversee transport and nutrition. Every three years, these departments are to be reallocated to a different canton. Swiss law is to rule the land, and citizens will be discouraged from marrying within their ethnic group. Every male must complete compulsory military service: two years of active duty — split into a year of state infrastructural labor and a year of military service — followed by eighteen years as a reservist. Land ownership will be capped at a thousand yokes (about 1400 acres, or 6000 square meters), and larger plots will be seized by the state. Wealthy individuals can opt out of the mandate for intermixed marriage, which was meant to encourage the dissolution of sociopolitical difference, but they must forfeit a significant percentage of their assets. While optional retirement begins at fifty-five, no one can work past sixty-five, as this creates youth unemployment, and those unfit for work will be provided for by the state. As everyone will have the ability to lead a life of “moderate prosperity” — due, in large part, to a massive network of colonies whose citizens reap none of the rewards offered to Central Europeans — “class struggle” and “the hatred of Capitalism” will naturally subside by itself. After a century, it is presumed that all divisions of nation and people will dissolve into a unified whole."

...

󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 The new Europe with lasting peace, plan of P.A.Mass from 1920.

by dodi_maps

[dragonstepp]

The Constitution of the United States of America

During the century that I was born into, the 40s and 50s, I got a great education. We studied the Constitution in classes called Civics in High School, and one semester was required in order to graduate in get a diploma.

When did this stop being a requirement? My sister graduated three years after I did, in 1961 (I graduated in 1958), but I don't know if it ws still a required study. I left home upon graduation and lived elsewhere (here my dad was).

In 1883, women had no legal rights. Blacks has no legal rights. God forbid anyone spoke about sexual aberrations. So it is understood through common sense that there needed to be changes in what is legal as America grew and transportation became easier and things had to change as changes came about in manufacturing and toldings and medicine and things we take for granted today.

Amendments came about when changes came along. Women got the right to vote. (these are not in order, they are just what came about). Blacks got the right to vote. Am amendment gave a limitation for how many years/serves a president or legislative senators and representatives came about. There are other amendments to give limitations to many abilities.

One must remember, though, that the Constitution separated church from state - that means nobody can be forced to believe any religion; that is left to the clergy/people, not he government. This country was founded against people escaping both religions, but also against Kings. The people are given the right to choose who should be our leaders.

The Civil War brought about two major changes. Women were given the right to own property, due to their husbands and sons going off to war and dying, and women got the right to keep their property. Blacks, of course, got their freedom, although it was done in a less than good way since nobody with good thoughts ever taught them how to be free, and caused some things to be bad about the freedom, until they learned how to be free.

Sexual aberrations really did not change much until the 1960s, when free love came about. But even then single women were not allowed to have birth control pills, and illegal abortions became a way of survival - except that survival was not easy with abortions by coat hangers, and evil doctors who had no idea what to do. I had a daughter in 1961, an abortion in 1963, then gave three more live births in 1964, 1967, and 1969. What can I say. I liked and enjoyed sex, and it was after the birth 1n 1969, I had a female doctor who gave me a prescription for birth control pills. All four of my chidren were given up to adoption.

But sex and birth and adoption, and right to choose, had, and have, no place in politics. These men who have taken over that right are trying to take us back to the days before the Civil War, and take the rights away from women, again.

I was taught in Civics about the three branches of Goverment - Executive, Legislative, and Judicial. East branch was supposed to be given to the people.

None of these were ever intended to be the right to govern by one sect over any other sect. That is why we the people are given the right to vote. Other than the Justice Department, which is not given by vote - EXCEPT by who we choose for president. And even then, it was never meant to be chosen by whichever party was in control over the legislative department.

And the legislative department(s) were meant to be chosen by vote, not by whichever party was in control. The Legislative Departments were intended to be for the good of the people, not a few people who lust for power over We the People.

What happened to fairness? What happened to what was good and kind and compassionate - and most important, what was right and legal, and what were wars fought for? Shall we be forced back to living in caves, hunting and gathering, and small groups of citizens in their own little enclaves. What happened to welcoming people trying to escape dictatorial governments, and then facing the dictators of the people of this, our fair (once upon a time) government that offered what this country was founded upon?

i despair over a group of people who apparently wanted citizenship to move backward. Perhaps it is time for another Civil War caused by people who want to get rid of the selfish, hateful, I-got-mine-to-hell-with-you and go back to being civilized as we were originally taught.

Get the government out of medical issues, out of religious issues, out of political issues, and get back to living by the Constitution, and the rights of laws.

Carol in Austin

[gildedmuse]

Imma ask a stupid ass question. Is Law black or POC? I know because of his past their skin was experiencing pigment loss due to the minerals and such of their island, but now that he’s older his melanin is there but I’m really bad at telling race in shows. So I was wondering what is his RACE? Not nationality or ethnicity. Also sorry for the dumb question

Hey, it's not a stupid question. I mean, "race" in One Piece is weird.

[In theory, these characters are said to represent someone of African decent, one who is Scandinavian, one of East Asian heritage, and one who more than likely would be considered mixed-race with European, African and Amerindian ancestry. And, yes, that is a game you would never ever play in real life.]

I would say this may be a strange blog to bring it up on. After all, there are a breadth of sites out there that discuss race as a concept, race and gender in One Piece, the importance AND problematic elements of group identity in fiction, and out of all those you've chosen the one whose main concern is really pointing at characters like, "you there, yes, you. You have a sword."

"I'm gonna write about you making out with *so many* people.... But mostly Zoro."

[I have my priorities. Pictured: My priorities.]

Which some may say is a strange tactic but to be fair... Law does have a sword, and I do enjoy making him lust after Zoro. So, sure, I will totally attempt to answer this.

Let's start with the obvious: there is no real or right answer to this question.

It's incredibly difficult to define our concept of race to begin with, because it various so widely through location, culture, usage and time, but even if you just consider it's common usage in the west, we're still talking about a concept that relies partially on physical similarities, but also relies on ancestry/geography.

[Oda has said that Franky's nationality would be American. Point to America on this map. Go on. I'll wait.]

In this sense, Law's ethnicity would be "Northerner" because while the show never really discusses the topic in an overt manner, I think it's safe to assume that the Four Blues function in much the same way our continents do, with individual islands functioning as everything from countries to single villages. And the broadest definitions of races tend to be divided roughly along continental lines. And I think if the world of One Piece did have a definition of race outside of "human", "fishman/merfolk", "giant", "mink", etc it would likely tie into both physical attributes but also, your Blue of origins.

I do understand, though, that the real question here is, "would Law be considered white/non-white by the standards of our reality".

And yet, the answer is still pretty fuzzy. Especially in the anime, which has a terrible habit of skin whitening.

[Actual Serious Caption Time: I got really, honestly upset seeing how much whiter these characters were post-time skip. Either @chromatic-lamina or my brother - who are both endless sources of canonical knowledge - informed me this change was very much endemic to the anime, and that in Oda's art the two characters have always been portrayed as with lighter skin. Like most facts, rather than help to clarify things, this only makes them more complex. On the one hand, the original source material didn't erase the only two main characters you would describe as "non-white", which the anime was under no obligation to do. After all, the shade of their skin has no major story factor, and the anime is already happy to diverge from the Canon source in other ways. Why was this issue the one they felt they absolutely had to fix? Then again, while it's horrible that they ended up whitening these characters, Oda just didn't bother with more than one skin tone for 90% of the human characters. Which, aside from everything else, considering the scope of the One Piece planet, just seems like lazy world building.]

This isn't helped by Oda assigning characters real nationalities (I wouldn't consider that Canon, of course, since it was done based on an ask, but also.... Don't assign people ethnicities based almost solely on stereotype your own characters and not expect people to comment) that either seem to have little impact on their appearance, or inform it in the worst possible way.... (Thank goodness Ussop is actually one of the best characters in the show. Seriously, would watch him and Nami forced to fight outside their weight class all day, any day.)

I have heard it repeated, though I don't think it's in anyway verified, that Law's "non-fictional" nationality is German, though, personally, the name of his home town, Flevance always makes me think "Florence", and I've got to say I feel that is backed up by his olive complexion.

[I was originally hoping for a screenshot of him standing close to someone so that you could compare, but, you know, it's Law. The last person he was close to bleed out in the snow leaving Law to face this cruel world alone so....]

There is a lot of study and debate about whether Italians, especially Southern Italians and Sicilians, have historically be considered "white", but they have definitely been considered a different racial group. Keep in mind at this time, there were a lot more racial groups than what we would think of today, and almost all of them were deeply flawed and incredibly insulting. A lot of that was based, yes, on traits such as skin color and facial features, but also on language groups and cultural differences.

Which, again, sort of don't exist in an obvious way in the world of One Piece outside of a handful of Grand Line islands (which is utterly ridiculous; like of course the four Blues have distinct cultures, likely with deeply held stereotypes and biases against the other Blues. We see hints of this, like how the East is widely considered the "weakest" of the Blues, or how the West seems to have wide spread criminal syndicates while the North apparently has a higher number of marine than other seas).

I would say that, if you simply showed a picture of Law to someone with no other context, a fair amount of people would guess white, maybe mixed-race or asian. However, if you showed him beside another One Piece character, I think more people would assume him to be of some none north european background.

[Oh, look, I did find a picture of Law standing close to someone.... So he could mock them.]

For what little it is worth, I tend to imagine Law as having either an olive complexion, as mentioned above, or else being from what I imagine is the equivalent of an indigenous artic/northern people such as the many peoples of Siberia or Canada or Greenland. There are a lot of artist who tend to draw him with a darker complexion, and I have a preference for that art. On the other hand, I have friends who think of him as very pale (though pale is not a quality that at all correlates to race, so I couldn't comment on their opinion on that), and some who think of him as being very North European precisely because, well, he's from the North and he's named Trafalgar. None of those opinions are any more right or wrong than the others, just as fan artists may choose to depict Ussop (who, according to Oda, is from the "country of Africa.....) As black while others draw him closer to the colors used in the show. I think you could argue for both depictions, and since they're neither real people nor does the story take place in the real world, it's difficult to identify characters by racial groups that are constructed based on our own history as a species.

So if you want to depict Law as a person of color, you know, go for it. If you don't see him that way, that's also fine and valid. It's a fantasy cartoon that pays little attention to race unless it's being embarrassingly bad about it, so I'm actually happier if they leave characters ambiguous.

Except Zoro. Zoro should be tan, like a golden sacrifice to the God Of Sun, Sand and Steel. This is not up for debate.

[nnugatoryextravagance]

Thats it, my friends gave me the slightest crumb of validation im ffucjing posting the massive pile of bullshit oc worldbuilding summaries I mentioned before, none of this is in order by the way (its almost midnight) I tried color coding it though if that helps in any regard (also sorry if anythings phrased weird im so tired)

Every living thing is made of four relatively enigmatic elements (Meat, Magic, Color, and Sugar) that are related to all kinds of bullshit with some having the potential to bend reality itself in large enough quantity

Earth does not exist and rather its been replaced by a planet named Phonia thats inhabited by Humans and Monsters

Clowns are an alien species that live for centuries (at MINIMUM)

The majority of america is uninhabitable nuclear wasteland with only the east coast remaining

Phonia in general has been so thoroughly mined out of resources that only a few landmasses and "Oceanbowls" remain and are being held up by large near-indestructable cave systems known as the Nov'ish caverns

Inanimate objects have the tendancy to just sometimes gain sentience and come to life because of magic (like, literally)

Trolls also exist dont forget that either, and their planet is Returnia instead

The planet that Clowns live on (J-Sibler) has become so unlivable to biological life aside from them that the planet is now populated by almost exclusively living balloon animals

Speaking of the sentient objects thing a landfill in one of Phonia's oceans has become an island home to living objects after centuries of garbage had been dumped there and just kinda made it their home

Those caves I mentioned too are home to unbelievably powerful and weird as fuck looking monsters and to some kingdom thats been in dissaray for like the past 5000 years because the three kings ruling it wont get along

Theres literally so many subtypes of "Monster" That I'd be here even longer listing them off, I think right now theres like, eight I think ??? fuck me dude

Other space fairing races are implied to exist as well I just havent gone too far into that yet (if you can beleive that)

Phonia is in a dual star system alongside J-Sibler, rather than one little yellow sun they both orbit two Blue Giant stars, that are also orbiting eachother (and one is somewhat smaller than the other, and as a result it sorta orbits like the planets do)

The suns are also not exactly REGULAR suns neither (in fact none of them are, anywhere) the ones Phonia and J-Sibler orbit are a lightbulb (larger star) and a whale nightlight (smaller star), The "star" that Returnia orbits appears more like a massive fucking firefly (hashtag just bug alien things, yknow)

If im gonna be honest a lot about Trolls is relatively the same I just developed the world with more bullshit but thats for later too theres a lot there

Speaking of h*mestuck related things, all those concepts from the comic are just, every day real shit, including class and aspect alignments- although those tend to have the most cultural relevance to Trolls, Cherubs, and Carapacians specifically, to other races they're mostly written off as just silly fairy tales

And just like a shitty infomercial once told me: "but wait, theres more!"- But also its getting late and im exhausted so you'll have to wait on that a bit probably, I could keep going like this all day under any other circumstance but hbbhhghg sleepy

[rosiewitchescottage]

I'm with you here. 👍👍👍👍👍👍👍

If they'd done live action versions as totally different to the originals.

Then we'd have better ground to work on.

Look at the fairy tales that some of these movies are based on, and how many versions are to be found across cultures!

If they want a Hispanic Snow White, then there are parts of South America, with their own versions, Portugal has a couple. And you can also find inspiration in The Middle East.

So why have a Hispanic actress playing the same Grimm version of 'Schneewittschen'

The Hans Anderson 'Little Mermaid' story has been used in films many times. I can think of three or four others, beside the Disney cartoon.

So. Disney are doing a live action and want a black mermaid, for change.

That's fine by me.

But why, why, why the same old story, again?

Don't get me wrong, it's a great story. But there are limits.

Where's the magical Disney imagination?

OK, start with the basic of the mermaid who wants to go and explore the land.

That's fair enough. Once she gets to land. You could take her anywhere you like, on any new adventure.

The antagonist didn't have to be sea witch Ursula again.

Eric didn't have be the Prince that Ariel saves from drowning. He also could be anybody.

We could have had two completely different mermaid characters, each with her own story. One the pale, red headed animated Ariel and the other Halle Bailey's version.

That would suit me down to the ground (or the sea bottom, in this case).

I love mermaids.

One more thing and then I am logging off.

I don’t hate Live Action Remakes because I like to hate things, or because I need to prove that they’re bad. Nobody needs to prove that. They’re bad. Everyone knows that. It’s obvious.

What I actually hate, and the reason for long ranting posts, is when people demonstrate that they don’t understand or fully appreciate the originals by the way they talk about Live Action Remakes.

And honestly, that’s the problem with remakes in general. If you re-do something, at best it’s redundant and pretentious, and at worst it’s insulting to the original. Movies are stories. Stories are communication. If you feel the need to remake a movie, you’re saying the original story didn’t communicate perfectly, and it needs to be fixed. That, or you’re just making money off of something that was already inherently timeless and fine on it’s own—it was never a grave you needed to dance on.

[tiarnanabhfainni]

i wrote another fic about generational trauma and the winchesters, this time featuring deadbeat mom extraordinaire mary née campbell, displacement, emigration, the american wake and just really missing your mom.

gonna quickly tag a few mutuals who might be interested but also you can find the fic under the cut

@uhuraha @myaimistrue @nonsensegnomes

American Wake

On a mild summer’s day in 1950, a wedding took place in Normal, Illinois. Dressed in a simple white dress that she had inherited from her mother, Millie Walsh looked up at the man who was to be her husband in daze of transcendent happiness. She had good reason to be besotted. His name was Henry Winchester and he was a dashing young academic of the supernatural with a fascinating air of mystery that surrounded him. They had met the previous year when he had come to her home in New York on a fact-finding mission. Millie fell in love after only two minutes of conversation.

With such a buoyant adoration to carry her through, Millie was perfectly happy to relocate to a state far from her family and friends to build a new life with charming debonair Henry. She knew about the supernatural elements of his life. How could she not? But it was a trade she was perfectly willing to make for the opportunity to create a family with him.

And she paid dearly for that decision. Millie lost a husband and was left to raise her four year old son alone.

It was all entirely avoidable of course. The Winchester name was not her inheritance by birth. No Cupid had ever marked her name for Henry. It was by no means a match made in heaven. If not for love, Millie could have lived a life completely divorced from the less-than-natural.

After her husband’s disappearance her heart hardened and she abandoned the Winchester name and any association with the supernatural. Packing her bags for Kansas, she returned instead to the ways of her own people. For Millie’s family had a long history of leaving their pasts behind them.

--------------------------------

Millie’s maternal line can be traced back to a small town in Limerick, Ireland now known by the name of Patrickswell. The farm where her grandmother was reared would likely have been a fair few miles from the town itself but it’s difficult to be precise about these things since many of the records of the era were destroyed in an explosion during the Civil War of the 1920’s.

Bridget Ó Laochdha lived in a hard place surrounded by tough people. There was no work in the surrounding towns and villages and her family was forced to eke out a living on rented land. Most of the local community spoke little to no English and spent most of their day-to-day lives conversing and working through the medium of the Irish language.

The Ó Laochdha family was no exception to this rule. Bridget - as the sole member of the family with more than a rudimentary grasp on the foreign tongue - had been translating for her father at the market for most of her young life.

The rugged countryside that surrounded them was austere and beautiful but there was darkness around every corner. Violence engulfed the region as the Land War raged around them. The threat of eviction was a constant sword of Damocles over their heads and the precarity of the political situation left a permanent mark on Bridget’s development.

Bridget loved her family, of course she did. She loved the language she spoke with them and the easy rhythm of her life. But she knew that there was a brighter future out there somewhere on the other side of an ocean. Somewhere she wouldn’t hear constant news of Whiteboys, Invincibles and their clashes with the police. Somewhere that was safer, where she might get a job and support her family from afar. All she needed was the means to get there.

------------------------------------

Mary idolises her dad when she’s young as children are prone to do. Her family are heroes who straddle the line between the known and the unknown and keep the world safe from the evil lurking in the shadows.

As a teenager, she joins the family business and she’s a natural. She excels particularly at getting information out of young witnesses. She sits amongst small groups of girls, nodding along to conversations about music, miniskirts and make-up and nudging the topic of discussion slowly around to the subject of her father’s latest hunt. Mary’s good with the guys too, she finds that a well-placed laugh or look can get her most of what she needs.

But intel is not the only area where she excels. Mary’s a sharpshooter and she’s not afraid to get her hands dirty. Hand her a shovel and she can dig a grave just as fast as the boys. She even knows the best technique for washing blood off her hands.

She’s on a path to be one of the best in the business. And she hates it.

-------------------------------

Although many people left Ireland to try their luck in the United States in those days, it was still a difficult path to tread. Tickets to get to New York were expensive and hard to come by. Buying a ticket at the harbour was as likely to get you scammed as to get you a place on the boat.

Bridget was fortunate in that her local parish priest was looking to sponsor a few young hopefuls on the trip across the Atlantic and offered her a place. That decision might have been the hardest any in her family had ever had to make. To leave behind everything she knew and understood for the small chance that her life could be better. She made that choice nonetheless.

The tradition of The American Wake was one that dated back to the famine years in Ireland to mourn the departure of a loved one to that far off place across the ocean. There would be no real way to send letters home consistently and economic conditions meant that the emigrants would likely never be able to return home. What do you do when you are setting up to grieve someone who is still alive? You hold a funeral.

On Bridget’s last day in Limerick she cried until her tear ducts ran dry. She sat in the centre of the room and listened to the keening women wail around her. Her father could not speak his sadness but he stood beside her and rested his hand on her shoulder, bowing his head in silent prayer. Her mother held her face in her hands and whispered one last goodbye.

Yet amidst all of the tears and the heartache, a sense of relief made its way into Bridget’s bones and settled in her spine. There was death and loss but a future there too. A brand new life in a brand new land. And while they’d never say it, her family was relieved too, she could see it in their eyes. This was one less mouth to feed, one less person to clothe. The money she will send home in remittances would lighten her father’s load by a considerable degree.

As she boarded the boat in Cobh, she stared at the ticket clutched tightly in her hand and thought not of what it had taken from her but of the life it stood to grant her.

---------------------------------

When Mary meets John for that second date outside his mother’s house, she knows that this is it. That he is her ticket out.

She clutches his body in her lap and cries and she doesn’t know what to do. With death and destruction all around her, Mary makes the only choice she can.

Deanna’s body still lies abandoned on the kitchen tiles. But isn't it better, in a way, that she never had to face her daughter leaving her behind?

------------------------------------

The first impression America made on Bridget was not a positive one. No sooner than she arrived at Ellis Island, did they take the last vestiges of her home away from her. Bridget Leahy took her first step onto foreign soil without even her name to console her.

Her first job in New York was that of a kitchen worker in a large airy home in the employ of a family belonging to the upper echelons of East Coast society. Her hours were long and her fingers near scrubbed to the bone. Since her food and board were covered, every penny that she earned was sent home to Patrickswell.

While her English had served her well in local markets of Limerick, she found that they were quite inadequate here among native speakers. She sat around the table in the servants’ quarters with the others who worked in the home and listened as conversations happened all around her. They all spoke so fast and the topic of conversation switched so quickly that she couldn't quite keep track. Bridget simply did not have the vocabulary to contribute and so she stopped speaking entirely.

The longing for home was like a physical wound lodged just under her ribs and sometimes she wondered how she continued to breathe through the pain.

The only times that she could recognise herself was on her rare evenings off when she made her way down to the local Irish dance hall. There she could allow young men from Inchicore, Kilrush and Listowel to spin her around a room to the music of home and forget where she was for just a few hours.

--------------------------------------

It is impossible to overemphasise how little the role of a housewife suits Mary Winchester. The sundresses feel awkward on her form and the kitchen still feels like a foreign land.

The other mothers in the neighbourhood all seem to speak the same language as they switch tracks fluently between complaining good-naturedly about their husbands and swapping recipe cards. Mary has never felt more out of place.

She doesn’t know where she fits or how to contribute. The loss of her mother is like a crater in her chest and she doesn’t know where to lay down all of the grief she holds in her hands. She thinks she would be better at holding her children without it.

When it all gets too much, she sheds the skin of Mary Winchester and leaves her small family behind to retrace the Campbell path. She might not be able to get her family back but she can pretend to be home for just a small while when on a hunt.

-----------------------------------

In a small catholic church on an intersection, Bridget Leahy married Mick Walsh of Tyrone in a small, private ceremony. As a married woman, she left the world of employment behind and started the task of homemaking in their small Manhattan apartment. She did her best to keep the rooms aired out and clean but the grime of the city was ever present.

When she looked out of the window and saw grey dusty streets she couldn't help but compare the view to green fields and the fresh air of the Limerick countryside. Her husband worked in construction, building monuments of steel to the sky that looked towards an American future while she remained stuck in an Irish past.

When Bridget’s pregnancy first became obvious to the couple, they were delighted. This was their chance to build something of their own on American soil. A family.

When her waters broke, the women of the neighbourhood rushed into her room to oversee the birth and refused to let her husband in so he could hold her hand.

In another life maybe Bridget stayed at home and married a local boy in Patrickswell. Maybe she gave birth at home next to her parents’ fireplace with all of the women of her family around her and her mother stroking her hair.

Maybe she was destined to die in childbirth no matter where she was but at least at home the last voice in her ears would have been in a tongue that was her own.

-------------------------------

Just like Millie Winchester née Walsh before her, Mary Winchester let the supernatural into her home in a desperate grab for the life that she wanted to build.

And just like her mother-in-law before her, a demon crashed through the walls and destroyed every semblance of a family that she had found.

[gameofdrarry]

Wizards Hearts Recs: Holiday Fic

Wizards Hearts was a four-month-long Drarry reading fest. Players were given a playing deck of 52 tropes, and were asked to find 52 different fics to read and comment on to fill their decks. To prevent the same few fics from being read, fics were restricted to only being used for the game three times before being considered ineligible for further points. The tropes and submissions list can be found here.

Check out the masterlist of fics for this trope below the cut!

📜 East of Eden by  WriteSprite Rated:  Explicit Words:  41,122 Tags:  Explicit Sexual Content, Explicit Language, Parseltongue, Dirty Talk, Rimming, Biting, Drinking Games Summary:  When Harry receives a dodgy brochure for an island vacation, he isn't sure he should attend. After a bit of a push, he decides to go for it and winds up spending the week in paradise. At least it would be, if it weren't for that pesky blond git. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 Take My Hand by daisymondays Rated:  Explicit Words:  12814 Tags: Summer, Summer Romance, Pining, Mutual Pining, Getting Together, First Kiss, Drinking Games, Harry Potter Has Dimples, Draco Malfoy Can't Cope, Fluff, Sharing a Bed, Auror Partners, Draco Has Feels To Spare, Anal Sex, Blow Jobs, Flirting, Friends to Lovers, Meddling Friends, Touching, Soooo Much Touching, HP: EWE Summary:  Draco has long resigned himself to pining after Harry... that is until an invite on the annual Ministry holiday gives him a chance to change everything. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 December Never Felt So Wrong by MaesterChill Rated:  Explicit Words:  50001 Tags: Post-Hogwarts, Angst, Mystery, time skip, 00's Music Sung Badly, Fluff, Amnesia, A niffler, 25 Days of Draco and Harry 2018, curse magic, Knitting, Sex, Cuddles, Blow Jobs, First Time Sex, wanking, Advent Fic, Christmas, Magical Artifacts, Falling In Love, Magical Theory, drarry dads, Rimming, Memory Loss, A tiny bell, Sharing a Bed, Dad Jokes, Cursed objects Summary:  'Twas the month before Christmas and sixteen year old Draco Malfoy had never felt worse. His attempts to kill Dumbledore were failing and, as usual, Harry Fucking Potter was a constant thorn in his side. All that suddenly changed when Draco woke up 15 years in the future and discovered that not only was he allegedly shagging Harry Fucking Potter, he also had thinning hair and a five year old son, and no fucking clue how he got there. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 Tell Me the End at the Beginning by harryromper Rated:  Teen and Up Words:  36591 Tags: Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Post-Hogwarts, St Mungo's Hospital, Healer Draco Malfoy, Auror Harry Potter, Auror Hermione Granger, Christmas, Christmas Tree, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Christmas Presents, Christmas Decorations, 25 Days of Harry and Draco, Food Hall Turkeys, Advent Calendar, Healer Luna Lovegood, Kreacher, Minor Neville Longbottom/Ginny Weasley, Yule Logs, Misheard Christmas carols Summary:  St Mungo’s is the last place anyone wants to spend the festive season. Harry finds himself there anyway. Or: Harry's an Auror suspended from duty, Malfoy's wearing the hell out of three-piece suits, Hermione is entirely over everything, and Kreacher just wants to be left alone to decorate for Christmas. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 Too Cold Outside (For Angels to Fly) by gracerene Rated:  Explicit Words:  62688 Tags: Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Post-Second War with Voldemort, Post-Hogwarts, Creature Fic, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Veela Draco Malfoy, Veela (Harry Potter), Auror Partners, Auror Harry Potter, Auror Draco Malfoy, Aurors, Case Fic, Murder Mystery, Mild Gore, Advent Calendar, Christmas, Drinking, Scotland, United Kingdom, Muggle London, POV Alternating, Coffee Shops, Past Character Death, Past Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley, Minor Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley, Minor Dean Thomas/Ginny Weasley, Crime Fighting, Duelling, Burns, Blood and Injury, Bars and Pubs, Getting Together, Romance, Light Angst, Happy Ending, Bisexual Harry Potter, Gay Draco Malfoy, Anal Sex, Riding, Shower Sex, Hand Jobs, 25 Days of Harry and Draco, 25 Days of Harry and Draco 2019, Switching, Wings, Wing Kink, Veela Mates, Mating Bond, Anal Fingering, Bonding, Dirty Talk Summary:  The Auror Department and the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures are working to create a new division partnering human wizards and Magical Beings in order to more effectively police crime involving any and all classifications of Magical Creature. Auror Harry Potter jumps at the chance to join the pilot programme, but he starts to regret his rashness when he discovers who he's to be partnered with: Draco Malfoy. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 If the Fates Allow by Saras_Girl Rated:  Mature Words:  80957 Tags: N/A Summary:  What's that crackling in the walls? Harry has no clue at all. He'll eat some cake and drink some wine Because he is completely FINE. --A story about life's disregard for our plans. [2017 advent story] ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 A New Peace by MalenkayaCherepakha Rated:  Explicit Words:  5566 Tags: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Anal Sex, Oral Sex, Semi-Public Sex Summary:  Of all the people Draco expected to walk into his cafe in Muggle London, Harry Potter was not one of them. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 flashback, warm nights by warmfoothills Rated:  Mature Words:  13068 Tags: Deathly Hallows AU, or more specifically, the godric’s hollow christmas shitshow of 1997, but with ron and draco!, and no snake-animated corpses!, instead:, Grand theft auto, a lot of blood, teenage fugitives, a time loop, Horcrux Hunting, one psychopathic quinquagenarian, Bodily Injuries, the ~power of love, Breaking and Entering, hospital food, questionable headwear, kissing in the backseat, kissing in the freezer aisle, Kissing in the Snow Summary:  “What’s killing me is that I actually quite fucking like Christmas, festival-for-a-personally-irrelevant-religion-turned-commercialised-garbage-holiday though it may be, and now I’m stuck in the perpetual almost-there of it all with an idiot who gets himself cut up every time no matter how differently I try and do things!” “Killing you?” Potter asks. “I thought I was the one who’s about to get my torso sliced into?” ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 All Must Draw Near by Saras_Girl Rated:  Mature Words:  61080 Tags: N/A Summary:  Harry doesn't have time for rumours; he has a shop to run. Which is just as well, really. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 With A Little Help From Hermione by naarna Rated:  Teen and Up Words:  6983 Tags: N/A Summary:  Secret Santa at Hogwarts with every House participating in the name of unity... And Hermione suddenly finds herself in the position of a matchmaker. ❤️ Read on Fanfiction.net

📜 Faint Indirections  by ignatiustrout Rated:  Teen and Up Words:  29793 Tags: University, Wizarding World of the United States of America, Americans, Post-Second War with Voldemort, Librarian Harry Potter, Harry Potter Has a Pet Snake, Parselmouth Harry Potter, College Student Draco Malfoy, Redeemed Draco Malfoy, Anxious Harry Potter, Baby Gay Draco Malfoy, Bisexual Harry Potter, Friendship, Family Dinners, Halloween parties, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Romance, Misunderstandings, Internalized Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, H/D Fan Fair 2019, Secondary Theme: Book Fair Summary: Draco Malfoy is the last person Harry expects to turn up in Boston, Massachussetts. But now he's here, and he won't stop requesting books from the library where Harry works. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 The 12 Dates of Draco  by Drarryismymuse (Hatchersn) Rated:  Explicit Words:  16808 Tags: 12 Days of Christmas, Light Angst, Christmas Smut, Anal Sex Summary:  Holiday dialing, desperate attempts at reconciliation, and 12 blind dates with Draco Malfoy... oh my! OR The day Harry just can't seem to get past. But what is the universe trying to tell him? And when did Draco Malfoy get so bloody fit? He's got 12 days to figure it out. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 Christmas Is For Sex (and Love), So Give It To Me by GoldenTruth813 Rated:  Explicit Words:  53218 Tags: PWP, Established Relationship, Christmas, Bondage, misuse of frosting, making gingerbread houses, coming without touching, Blowjobs, Fingering, anal penetration, Rimming, misuse of fairy lights, Praise Kink, Nipple Clamps, erotic massages, Lingerie, Harry in Lingerie, Butt Plugs, Masterbation, Dirty Talk, Overstimulation, Topping from the Bottom, Ice Play, misuse of snowballs, misuse of brandy custard, veritasium, Public Sex, misuse of christmas candles, Wax Play, floating blow jobs, bubble baths, Candy Canes, misuse of candy canes, sex with feelings, Clubbing, naughty letters, babysitting teddy, Edging, healing past trauma, really so much more than sex, but lots of sex too, spiked hot cocoa, Drunk confessions, Anal penetration with a foreign object, french!draco, Switching Summary:  Draco buys Harry an Advent House, intent on helping Harry create all new holiday memories, and have a lot of great sex in the process. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 As it Should Be by leo_draconis Rated:  Mature Words:  5670 Tags: N/A Summary:  It's Christmas Eve, and Draco's world has just shattered around him. Will a Christmas miracle give him a second chance? ❤️ Read on LJ

📜 Dream by the Fire  by GallifreyisBurning Rated:  Mature Words:  11431 Tags: Fluff, Christmas Fluff, Non-Explicit Sex, No Angst, seriously no angst whatsoever, Getting to Know Each Other, Getting Together, Coffee Shop Owner Harry Potter, Writer Draco Malfoy, Tattooed Draco Malfoy, Magical Tattoos, Memory Magic, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Wizarding History (Harry Potter), Friends to Lovers Summary:  When Draco Malfoy resurfaces in England after eight years abroad—tattooed, pierced, and wanting to take over a corner of Harry's coffee shop to work on a writing project—Harry can't help but be intrigued. Where has he been? What is he working on? Why here? And why does he have to look so stupidly hot with all those tattoos? ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 The best Christmas he ever had by gnarf Rated:  Teen And Up Words:  1965 Tags: Christmas, Christmas Fluff, Christmas Party, Post-War, Fred Weasley Lives, Christmas at the Burrow (Harry Potter), Mutual Pining, Drinking, Dancing, Family Feels Summary:  Christmas had never been less appealing to him than this year. That was until Arthur Weasley showed up at his door, dressed as Santa, inviting him to the Burrow. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 The One Where Ginny Keeps a Secret, Sort of  by Theartfulldodger Rated:  Teen And Up Words:  4039 Tags:  Fluff, Christmas, Established Relationship, Non-Linear Narrative, Group Vacation Summary:  Harry is determined to have a good time with Ginny and Pansy for a trip to NYC over the winter holidays, even if Draco can't join them. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 Adventures in Truth and Texting by fluxweed Rated:  Explicit Words:  7981 Tags: Texting, Drunk Texting, Sexting, Veritaserum, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Internalized Homophobia, Auror Harry Potter, Drinking, Christmas, Advent Fic, Awkwardness, everyone has phones, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE Summary:  Former Death Eaters are being targeted with a Veritaserum curse – it’s permanent, and makes victims speak aloud their every thought. Luckily, it’s easier to control when writing – and Hermione is trying to introduce Muggle technology to the wizarding world. An advent fic featuring texting, identity struggles, and a Draco Malfoy who will literally not stop talking. ❤️ Read on AO3

[qqueenofhades]

If/when they make a Joe/Nicky prequel movie, what are some of the Dos and Don’ts for them, with regards to historical accuracy. Like, what do you think they should include, and what do you think they should avoid?

Oof. This is a GREAT question, and also designed to give me a chance to ramble on in a deeply, deeply self-indulgent fashion. That is now what will proceed to happen. Consider yourself warned. So if they were miraculously to be like “well that qqueenofhades person on tumblr seems like she knows what she’s talking about, let’s hire her to consult on this production!”, here are some of the things I would tell them.

First off, a question I have in fact asked my students when teaching the crusades in class is whether you could actually show the sack of Jerusalem on screen. Like... if you’re making a film about the First Crusade, what kind of choices are you going to make? What narrative viewpoint are you going to uphold throughout the story? Are you actually going to show a slaughter of Muslim and Jewish inhabitants that some chroniclers described as causing enough blood to reach up to the knees of horses? (Whether it actually did this is beside the point; the point is that the sack went far beyond the accepted conventions of warfare and struck everybody involved in it as particularly horrific.) Because when you’re making a film about the crusades, you are also making it by nature for a modern audience that has particular understandings of Christian/Muslim conflict, religious warfare and/or tolerance, the War on Terror, the modern clash over ISIS, Trump’s Muslim ban, and so forth. The list goes on and on. So you’re never making a straight, unbiased historical adaptation, even if you’re going off the text of primary sources. You’re still constructing it and presenting it in a deliberate and curated fashion, and you can bet that whichever way you come down, your audience will pick up on that.

Let’s take the most recent example of a high-profile crusades film: Kingdom of Heaven from 2005. I’ve written a book chapter on how the narrative choices of KoH, aside from its extensive fictionalization of its subject matter to start with, make it crystal clear that it is a film made by a well-meaning Western liberal filmmaker (Ridley Scott) four years after 9/11 and two years after the invasion of Iraq, when the sympathy from 9/11 was wearing off and everyone saw America/Great Britain and the Bush/Blair coalition overreaching itself in yet another arrogant imperial adventure into the Middle East. Depending on how old you are, you may or may not remember the fact that Bush explicitly called the War on Terror a “crusade” at the start, and then was quickly forced to walk it back once it alarmed his European allies (yes, back then, as bad as America was, it still did have those) with its intellectual baggage. They KNEW exactly what images and tropes they were invoking. It is also partly why medieval crusade studies EXPLODED in popularity after 9/11. Everyone recognized that these two things had something to do with each other, or they made the connection somehow. So anyone watching KoH in 2005 wasn’t really watching a crusades film (it is set in the late 1180s and dramatizes the surrender of Jerusalem to Saladin) so much as a fictional film about the crusades made for an audience explicitly IN 2005. I have TONS to say on this subject (indeed, if you want a copy of my book chapter, DM me and I’ll be happy to send it.)

Ridley Scott basically sets it up as the Christian and Muslim secular leaders themselves aren’t evil, it’s all the religious fanatics (who are all made Templars, including Guy de Lusignan, going back to the “evil Templar” trope started by Sir Walter Scott and which we are all so very familiar with from Dan Brown and company). Orlando Bloom’s character shares a name (Balian de Ibelin) but very little else with the eponymous real-life crusader baron. One thing Scott did do very well was casting an actual and well-respected Syrian actor (Ghassan Massoud) to play Saladin and depicting him in essential fidelity to the historical figure’s reputed traits of justice, fairness, and mercy (there’s some article by a journalist who watched the film in Beirut with a Muslim audience and they LOVED the KoH Saladin). I do give him props for this, rather than making the Evil Muslim into the stock antagonist. However, Orlando Bloom’s Balian is redeemed from the religious extremist violence of the Templars (shorthand for all genuinely religious crusaders) by essentially being an atheistic/agnostic secular humanist who wants everyone to get along. As I said, this is a film about the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq made three years after 9/11 more than anything else, and you can really see that.

That said, enough about KoH, back to this presumable Joe/Nicky backstory. You would obviously run into the fact that it’s SUPER difficult to make a film about the crusades without offending SOMEBODY. The urge to paint in broad strokes and make it all about the evil Westerners invading is one route, but it would weaken the moral complexity of the story and would probably make it come off as pandering to guilty white liberal consciences. Are we gonna touch on the many decades of proto-crusading ventures in Iberia, Sicily, North Africa, and other places, and how the eleventh century, especially under Pope Gregory VII, made it even thinkable for a Christian to be a holy warrior in the first place? (It was NOT normal beforehand.) How are we going to avoid the “lololol all religion sucks and makes people do crazy things” axe to grind favoured by So Very Smart (tm) internet atheists? Yes, we have to demonstrate the ultimate horror of the crusade and the flawed premises it was based on, but we can’t do that by just showing the dirty, religiously zealot medieval people doing that because they don’t know any better and are being cynically manipulated in God’s Name. In other words (and the original TOG film did this very well) we can’t position ourselves to laugh at or mock the crusader characters or feel confident in looking down on them for being Dumb Zealots. They have to be relatable enough that we realize we could BE (and in fact already ARE) them, and THEN you slide into the horror and what compels them to do those kinds of things, and THAT’S when it hits. Because take a look at the news. This is happening around us right now.

Obviously, as I was doing in my First Crusade chapter in DVLA, a lot of this also has to spend time centering the Muslim point of view, the way they reacted to the crusade, the ways in which Yusuf as an Isma’ili Shia Muslim (Kaysani is the name of a branch of Isma’ili Shi’ites, he has a definite historical context and family lineage, and hence is almost surely, as I wrote him, a Fatimid from Egypt) is likewise not just A Stock Muslim. In this case, obviously: Get actual Muslims on the set to advise about the details. Don’t make stupid and/or obvious mistakes. Don’t necessarily make the Muslims less faithful or less virtuous than the Christians (even if this is supposed to praise them as being “less fanatic” than those bad religious Catholics). Don’t tokenize or trivialize their reaction to something as horrific as the sack of Jerusalem, and don’t just use dead brown bodies as graphic visual porn for cheap emotional points. Likewise, it goes without saying, and I don’t think they would anyway, but OH MY GOD DON’T MAKE THIS INTO GAME OF THRONES GRIMDARK!!!! OH MY GOD!!! THERE IS BEAUTY AND THERE IS LIGHT AND THERE IS POETRY AND THAT’S WHY IT HURTS SO MUCH WHEN IT’S DESTROYED! AND THE CHOICES THAT PEOPLE MAKE TO DESTROY THOSE THINGS HAVE TO BE TERRIFYINGLY PLAUSIBLE AND FAMILIAR, BECAUSE OH MY GOD!!

Next, re: Nicolo. Evidently he is a priest or a former priest or something of the sort in the graphic novel, which becomes a bit of a problem if we want him to actually FIGHT in the crusades for important and/or shallow and/or OTP purposes. (I don’t know if they address this somehow or Greg Rucka is not a medieval historian or whatever, but never mind.) It was a Major Thing that priests could not carry weapons, at least and especially bladed weapons. (In the Bayeux Tapestry, we have Odo, the bishop of Bayeux, fighting at the battle of Hastings with a truncheon because he’s a clergyman and can’t have a sword). They were super not supposed to shed blood, and a broadsword (such as the type that Nicky has and carries and is clearly very familiar with) is a knight’s weapon, not a clergyman’s. The thing about priests was that they were not supposed to get their hands dirty with physical warfare; they could (and often did) accompany crusade armies, bishops were secular overlords and important landholders, monks and hermits and other religious preachers were obviously part of a religious expedition, and yes, occasionally some priests would break the rules and fight in battle. But this was an exception FAR more than the rule. So if we’re going by accuracy, we have Nicky as a priest who doesn’t actively fight and doesn’t have a sword, we have him as a rule-breaking priest with a sword (which would have to be addressed, and the Templars, who were basically armed monks, weren’t founded until 1119 so he can’t be one of those yet if this is still 1099) or we just skip the priest part and have him as a crusader with a sword like any other soldier. If he was in fact a priest, he also wouldn’t be up to the same standard of sending into battle. Boys, especially younger sons of the nobility, often entered the church at relatively early ages (12 or 13), where it was treated as a career, and hence they stopped training in arms. So if Nicky is actually out there fighting and/or getting killed by Yusuf several times for Important Purposes, he’s... almost surely not a priest.

Iirc, they’ve already changed a few things from the graphic novel (I haven’t read it, but this is what I’ve heard) so they can also tweak things to make a new backstory or a hybrid-new backstory in film-verse. So once we’ve done all the above, we still have to decide how to handle the actual sack of Jerusalem and massacre of its inhabitants, the balance between violence comparable to the original TOG film and stopping short of being exploitative (which I think they would do well), and the aftermath of that and the founding of the new Latin Christian kingdom. It would have to, as again the original film does very well, avoid prioritizing the usual players and viewpoints in these events, and dig into presenting the experiences of the marginalized and way in which ordinary people are brought to the point of doing these things. It doesn’t (and frankly shouldn’t) preach at us that U.S. Invasions Of The Middle East Are Bad (especially since obviously none of the characters/people/places/events here are American at all). And as I said already but bears repeating: my god, don’t even THINK about making it GOT and marketing it as Gritty Dramatic Medieval History, You Know It’s Real Because They’re Dirty, Violent, and Bigoted!

Also, a couple tags I saw pop up were things like “Period-Typical Racism” and “Period-Typical Homophobia” and mmm okay obviously yes there are these elements, but what exactly is “period typical?” Does it mean “using these terms just because you figure everyone was less tolerant back then?” We know that I, with my endless pages of meta on medieval queer history, would definitely side-eye any attempts to paint these things as Worse Than Us, and the setting alone would convey a sense of the conflict without having to add on gratuitous microaggressions. I basically think the film needs to be made exactly like the original: centering the gay/queer perspectives of marginalized people and people of color, resisting the urge for crass jokes at the expense of the identity of its characters, and approaching it with an awareness of the deep complexity and personal meaning of these things to people in terms of the historical moment we’re in, while not making a film that ONLY prizes our response and our current crises. Because if we’re thinking about these historical genealogies, the least we can do (although we so often aren’t) is to be honest.

Thanks! I LOVED this question.

[giftofshewbread]

Growing Worse by the Day (Prophecy Update)

 By Daymond Duck     Published on: September 5, 2021

Things seem to be growing worse by the day, and many students of Bible prophecy believe that is exactly what will happen at the end of the age.

It is bittersweet: Bitter because it signifies that the world is approaching the Tribulation Period, and sweet because it signifies that Jesus is coming soon to straighten things out.

Here are some of the events that recently got this writer’s attention:

One, when the U.S. started withdrawing its troops from Afghanistan, the U.S. turned over some of its military bases to the Afghan government, the Afghan government collapsed, the Taliban took over the nation, and the Taliban freed thousands of captured ISIS troops from Afghan prisons (confirmed by the Pentagon on Aug. 27, 2021).

On Aug. 25, 2021, a group of Islamic State terrorists (called ISIS-K) exploded bombs at the airport in Kabul that killed 12 U.S. Marines, 1 U.S. Navy officer, 169 Afghan citizens, and injured more than 200 other people (U.S. troops, women, children, etc.).

On Aug. 26, prophecy teacher Amir Tsarfati said the U.S. and U.K. were warned several hours before the attack that one was coming.

Tsarfati said Biden sent the CIA to strike a deal with the Taliban to pay tens of millions of dollars (they would call it international aid or something like that instead of a ransom) to allow U.S. citizens passage to the airport.

According to Tsarfati, some officials believe the Taliban then started obstructing those trying to get to the airport because the Taliban would get more international aid/ransom for many hostages than they would get for a few hostages.

The Biden administration then said it had credible information that there would be more terrorist attacks, and it started warning U.S. citizens not to go to the airport (even though they had just 3 days to get there before the Aug. 31 deadline).

Think about this: the Biden administration was relying on a terrorist organization called the Taliban (that released thousands of ISIS terrorists from prison) to protect our troops and citizens from a terrorist attack.

When a U.S. Marine battalion commander created and posted a video criticizing our leaders and demanding accountability for the death of the Marines and Navy officer, he was relieved of his command.

Our leaders (under the influence of the shadow government) are:

The ones that gave the names, addresses and biometric I.D. information on U.S. citizens and our Afghan allies to the Taliban terrorists.

The ones that abandoned billions of dollars of weapons to the terrorist Taliban and won’t protect our border with Mexico.

The ones that turned hundreds of thousands of guns over to the terrorist Taliban and want to take guns away from U.S. citizens (don’t forget that former Pres. Obama also gave guns to the Mexican drug cartels).

The ones that are bussing and flying unvaccinated immigrants with Covid-19 into our nation and want to force U.S. citizens to be vaccinated or lose their job.

The ones that we are trusting to defend our homeland from terrorists, a North Korea EMP attack, a sneak attack by China, etc.

Who will protect America from the Shadow government and their Antichrist?

If the Biden administration would give the names, addresses and biometric I.D. information of U.S. citizens to Taliban terrorists, why wouldn’t they give that, or vaccination records, or any other information to the head of a world government?

Two, concerning deceit: Biden said, “It is unlikely the Taliban will take over Afghanistan.” (The Taliban took over Afghanistan.)

Biden said, “No Americans will be left behind.” (Americans have been left behind). On Aug. 30, 2021, Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of the U.S. Central Command, said hundreds (perhaps in the low hundreds) of Americans have been left behind, but others said it could be thousands.

Biden’s campaign slogan was “Build Back Better.” (Afghanistan has been destroyed, and the women in a nation of 35 million people have been enslaved).

Biden also said the election was fair, the vaccinations work, etc.?

This reminds me of the king that wore no clothes and no one would tell him.

Update One: On Aug. 31, 2021, it was reported that the Taliban is already going from house to house and executing people.

Update Two: On Aug. 31, 2021, a video was posted of the Taliban flying a U.S. Blackhawk helicopter over Kandahar with a body hanging below it.

Update Three: On Aug. 31, 2021, it was reported that 90 U.S. Generals and Admirals have signed a letter calling for the resignation of Sec. of State Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Milley for botching the Afghanistan pull out. (Biden calls it a great success.)

Three, it is being reported that the shadow government and their Democrat puppets are between a rock and a hard place with Pres. Biden.

With 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans, the U.S. Senate is split, and Vice-Pres. Kamala Harris can break ties by casting the deciding vote.

If Biden dies or is removed, Harris will replace Biden, and the power to break tie votes (including a vote on anyone that is nominated to replace Harris) will switch from Harris to Mitch McConnell (and control of the U.S. Senate will switch from Harris and the Democrats to McConnell and the Republicans).

This could threaten the Democrats’ entire agenda, so the shadow government must keep Biden in office if they can.

Four, concerning the Battle of Gog and Magog, on Aug. 25, 2021, the head of Israel’s Defense Forces said Israel has speeded up its plans to deal with Iran’s nuclear program, and money has been budgeted to address the issue.

He added that a team has been assembled to prepare for a strike should one be ordered by the Israeli government.

Five, also concerning the Battle of Gog and Magog: on Aug. 27, 2021, Israeli Prime Min. Naftali Bennett met with Pres. Biden at the White House.

Advance reporting indicated that Biden would ask Bennett for two things: 1) A freeze on all settlement construction, and 2) A promise not to attack Iran without U.S. permission.

Said reporting indicated that Bennett would tell Biden the U.S. must immediately deal with Iran’s efforts to build nuclear weapons, or Israel will.

It is obvious that Israel is preparing to strike Iran in the coming weeks if the U.S. and others fail to act.

It is also obvious that Biden hasn’t been told what the Bible says about this, or he doesn’t remember it, or he doesn’t believe it.

This doesn’t bode well for the U.S.

Update One: Following the meeting, it was reported that Bennett told reporters:

“These very days (a reference to what is happening in Afghanistan) illustrate what the world would look like if a radical Islamic regime acquired a nuclear weapon; that marriage would be a nuclear nightmare for the entire world.”

“We (Israel) will never outsource our security” (never turn control of Israel’s security over to the U.S.).”

Update Two: On Aug. 30, 2021, Israel 365News reported that Biden nodded off to sleep while Bennett was talking during their meeting (it is on video).

These are perilous times, and anyone that says Pres. Biden is qualified to lead the U.S./free world is lying or uninformed.

It is likely that the calls to revise or reset global governance (replace Biden with leaders from a handful of nations; ten) will soon grow louder.

Update Three: On Aug. 30, prophecy teacher Amir Tsarfati reported that Iran has decided that America is weak and will now go “full-blown nuclear.”

He added that Iran is now “openly enriching uranium to 90%.”

Six, concerning war between Israel and her neighbors: on Aug. 29, 2021, the head of Israel’s Defense Forces said, “The IDF is preparing, with a concerted effort, for the possibility of another operation (war) in Gaza.”

His statement followed the launching of several incendiary balloons and rockets into Israel and two weeks of violent protests.

Another war in Gaza could lead to several prophesied wars.

Seven, concerning perilous times (also the Kings of the East): on Aug. 30, 2021, prophecy teacher Amir Tsarfati noted that “China just announced that any vessel, whether it is above the water or under the water, that is entering into Chinese territorial waters or the disputed waters in the South China Sea with Japan and the Philippines must report to the Chinese.”

Many officials believe the disputed waters that China is claiming are international waters, meaning China’s claim is illegal.

Tsarfati added, “While everybody is watching the incompetence of America, (Russia, Turkey, Iran, China and No. Korea) are willing to make a move.”

Eight, concerning the Mark of the Beast and a global tracking system, on Aug. 30, 2021, it was reported that the World Health Organization (WHO) is urging its member nations to “roll out a global digital information system to check if people are vaccinated against Covid-19.”

The WHO wants its member nations to force this system on all other nations, and it wants people that have been vaccinated (and are in this global system) to have benefits that others that are not in it won’t have.

This would be a major step toward a global medical dictatorship.

Nine, concerning a falling away in the Church: Harvard University was founded under Church sponsorship in 1636 to train Puritan pastors. On Aug. 26, 2021, it was reported that the president of Harvard’s organization of Chaplains is an atheist, meaning Harvard has a Chaplain that doesn’t believe in the existence of God.

If the elite that control a prestigious, once-Christian university are willing to allow a Chaplain that doesn’t believe in the existence of God, why is it so difficult to believe that other elite want to establish a godless world government and religion?

If their Chaplain doesn’t believe what the Bible says about God, why should he believe what the Bible says about Satan, the Antichrist, or anything else, and why should any true Church want a pastor that was educated at that institution?

By the way, it is being reported that, as things now stand, universities cannot force student organizations on campus to have pro-LGBTQ officers, pro-abortion officers, etc., but the Biden administration is considering ways to change that.

Ten, on Aug. 27, 2021, LifeSiteNews reported that the head of the Tokyo Medical Association announced that Ivermectin “seems to be effective at stopping COVID-19 and publicly recommended that all doctors in Japan immediately begin using Ivermectin to treat COVID.”

Currently, America’s shadow government, in collusion with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), World Health Organization (WHO), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), big pharma, the social media, and others, is suppressing the use of Ivermectin.

Why would these groups suppress the use of an inexpensive, effective drug that will stop Covid and save lives?

Could the belief that Covid is a created crisis that has been designed to reduce the population of the earth, control people, bring in a world government, make the rich richer, etc., be true?

Eleven, on Aug. 21, 2021, it was reported that less than one-third of the people that have died from the Delta variant in the U.K. (Feb. 1, 2021, to Aug. 2021) have been people that were unvaccinated. (Two-thirds of the people that have died from the Delta Variant in the U.K. are people that have been vaccinated).

Put another way, the U.K. data is showing that vaccinated people are more likely to die from the Delta Variant than unvaccinated people.

Twelve, concerning deceit: on Aug. 30, 2021, it was reported that about two dozen nurses told people at a town hall meeting in Minnesota that adverse reactions to the Covid-19 vaccination are being underreported, and one nurse said her friends at other hospitals are saying the same thing.

Thirteen, according to the Bible, the Euphrates River will dry up during the Tribulation Period to prepare the way for the Kings of the East (Rev. 16:12).

On Aug. 31, 2021, it was reported that the Euphrates River is drying up fast and barely running for a distance of about 1,700 miles.

Different officials are blaming Climate Change, drought, and Turkey for building dams on the river and holding back too much water.

Finally, are you Rapture Ready?

If you want to be rapture ready and go to heaven, you must be born again (John 3:3). God loves you, and if you have not done so, sincerely admit that you are a sinner; believe that Jesus is the virgin-born, sinless Son of God who died for the sins of the world, was buried, and raised from the dead; ask Him to forgive your sins, cleanse you, come into your heart and be your Saviour; then tell someone that you have done this.

[xtruss]

Recounting 'Seven Sins' of the US' Alliance System

— Bu Wuwen | June 4, 2021 | Global Times

Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

Alliance is the evil weapon of hegemony. This is a common consensus reached among most countries, and one of the founding missions of the United States of America.

George Washington, the founding father of the United States of America, had repeatedly warned the American people to prevent the country from copying its European allies' pursuit of hegemony. In his farewell address in September 1796, Washington reinforced the idea that it was their 'true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world."

The US, driven by its irresistible greed for power, is now ironically what its founding father forewarned of and the world abominates. American geostrategist Zbigniew Brzezinski declared that the supremacy of the US in the world is supported by a fine system of alliances that covers the whole world.

The US is now desperate to find its few remaining nickles, being the over-spender it is, after being struck by financial crises and the COVID-19 pandemic. As an incurable addict of hegemony, the US cast its eyes on its allies. The US has created a gang out of the alliance system, whose trail is full of partisanship and fratricide.

We shall now recount the seven sins of this gang. '7 sins' of the US' Alliance System Infographic: Wu Tiantong — Global Times

1. Concealment

Those who chase profits are often entangled together — Old Chinese saying

Japan has recently declared that it would directly discharge the radioactive wastewater from Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant into the Pacific Ocean, which has raised worldwide concern. Surprisingly, the US, a self-proclaimed shining beacon of environmental protection, human rights, and justice, betrayed Asian-Pacific countries and the Earth, and expressed "appreciation" in response to Japan's decision, exposing its hypocrisy.

None of this comes as a surprise. The US was always known for its double standards, where fairness and justice are nothing more than arbitrary fig leaves.

In Sharpeville of South Africa, during the apartheid era, the government opened fire on black demonstrators, killing 69 of them in the Sharpeville Massacre. In order to contain the former Soviet Union's influence in the Third World, the US could not accept losing an anti-communist ally. In the end, the "leader of the free world" cravenly defended the all-white government in South Africa without hesitation.

In fact, the standard criteria for the US' decision-making process are ideological confrontation and geopolitical interests. To serve its purpose, it stages nasty Faustian deals at any cost; it sells its soul to the devil in exchange for its gains.

2. Lying

We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment. - Michael Pompeo

In the past two decades alone, the US-led Multinational Coalition and Coalition of the Willing caused countless tragedies by fabricating lies.

Using a tube of detergent as evidence of weapons of mass destruction, the US launched the Iraq War that killed 250,000 civilians in the Gulf country. Jessica Lynch, a female private in the US Army was injured in the war and saved by Iraqi medics. CNN, however, falsified the story and said that Lynch was tortured as a prisoner in Iraq, and was a witness for human rights abuses. In 2007, Lynch testified in a congressional hearing that the US Army made false claims about her capture.

A decade later, the US replicated the Iraq lie. It fabricated footages of Syria using chemical weapons on civilians, which was a convenient excuse for the US to launch air raids on another country. From 2016 to 2019, the recorded number of civilian deaths in Syria was 33,584. Half of the 3,833 victims killed by bombs dropped by the US-led coalition were women and children.

Fortunately, the truth is beginning to reveal itself. Recently Vice President Kamala Harris blurted out: "You know for years and generations wars have been fought over oil." This matches the American magazine Foreign Policy's comment that "safeguarding human rights" isn't the driving force for US' external warfare, but a means to seek interests.

Hegemony monopolizes absolute power and dehumanizes the US into moral bankruptcy. The historically flaunted promised land of progression and idealism has now fallen. All is lost.

— Wu Tiantong | June 4, 2021

3. Violence

The Americans of the United States have achieved this double result with a marvelous ease, calmly, legally, philanthropically, without shedding blood, without violating a single one of the great principles of morality in the eyes of the world. You cannot destroy men while better respecting the laws of humanity. - Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville

Hegemony is by nature coldblooded. Throughout its 245 years of history, the Americans enjoyed as few as 16 years without war. From the end of WWII to 2001, the world had seen 248 armed conflicts in 153 regions, and 201 of them were started by the US.

In 1989, the US invaded Panama to depose the de facto Panamanian leader. In 1999, the US-led NATO forces, without authorization from the United Nations Security Council, bombarded the former Yugoslavia and "accidentally" bombed the Chinese embassy, killing three Chinese journalists. Since 2001, the US has started wars or military actions in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, leaving more than 800,000 dead and tens of millions of refugees.

The US military dragged its allies to wars that caused unprecedented refugee crises. Statistically, the number of refugees reached 11 million in Afghanistan, 380,000 in Pakistan, 3.25 million in Iraq and 12.59 million in Syria. About 1.3 million Afghans went to Pakistan and 900,000 to Iran. Of the Iraqi and Syrian refugees, about 3.5 million fled to Turkey and 1 million to Iran.

The US military always hit the headlines for its ruthless prisoner abuses. In addition, Australia proved to be a reliable lackey, allowing its soldiers to slaughter civilians in Afghanistan.

4. Plunder

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do. - Samuel P. Huntington

In the US' alliance system, war is the most immediate way to plunder. The US, the world's top war machine, writes the word "plunder" on every page of its history of more than 200 years.

Dwight D. Eisenhower concluded his presidential term by warning the US about the increasing power of the military-industry complex. Michael Brenes, professor of history at Yale University, in his To Defeat the Radical Right, End American Empire pointed out that the American military has long been fertile ground for the far right and they together built the warfare state.

After unpegging the US dollar from gold in 1971, the US shaped a USA-US military-US dollar trinity to support its hegemony. In collaboration with its allies, the US grabbed control over the oil resources in the Middle East to prevent its dollar hegemony from falling apart, and also opened the door to plunder the region's wealth.

The US profits from every global crisis, such as from the crises in Russia and Eastern Europe when the former Soviet Union collapsed; from the Balkan Peninsula when the former Yugoslavia broke up; from the Four Asian Tigers and Southeast Asia during the Asian Financial Crisis. During the 2008 financial crisis, the whole world had to pay the American debt. Now, the US has brought out a $1.9 trillion stimulus package which, in fact, means massive amounts of banknotes will be issued to tamp down the exchange rates of foreign currencies, and consequently take advantage of the rest of the world.

Relying on its financial hegemony, the US has robbed tens of trillions of dollars from other countries. The victims, though filled with anger, are so afraid of the American military alliance which is armed to the teeth, that most of them choose to keep silent.

5. Infringement

The judicial system leaves you no room to have faith in it. It's like peeling layers and layers of onion skin. Every layer that you peel, your eyes get more teary to the point where you can't peel anymore because your eyes are so watery. You're literally weeping, and the Bible talks about this, until you have no more strength to weep. - Emmett G. Price III, host of WGBH, a public radio station located in Boston

The American alliance system expertly manipulates international rules. Power trumps justice in the pursuit of self-interest. The US chooses which international laws to enforce based solely on its convenience. In recent years, the US pulled out of the Paris Agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Treaty on Open Skies, and the INF Treaty, revoked the signing of the Arms Trade Treaty, and handled the renewal of the New START Treaty passively. It is addicted to breaching treaties.

Moreover, it feels glorified instead of being ashamed, and starts to advocate the "rules-based international order" in which the "rules" refer to its alliance's own rules and unequal terms.

The US and its allies challenged the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea with the Freedom of Navigation. They attempted to prevent the International Criminal Court (ICC) from investigating its crimes committed in the Afghan War at all costs, which included threatening the ICC investigation staff that they would be subject to retribution.

In the information sphere, the US is a hackers' empire. Early in the Cold War, it organized the notorious Five Eyes alliance to monitor electronic communications worldwide. The US blames others for information theft and cyber-attacks while it covertly obstructs cyber security.

In 2013, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee Edward Snowden brought to light the PRISM program operated by the US, which was a surveillance program targeting both citizens and political figures on a global scale. Also in 2013, Der Spiegel disclosed that the National Security Agency (NSA) had installed spyware or modified hardware in the computers before they were delivered for foreign diplomats' use.

In 2017, WikiLeaks released thousands of confidential documents that exposed how the CIA was hacking the world. In 2020, it was revealed that since the end of WWII, the CIA has been controlling a Swiss encryption company to intercept top secrets of many countries, including its allies.

6. Destruction

Moral depravity defines US politics. The United States is regarded as the greatest threat to world peace. - Noam Chomsky, US philosopher

The US and its allies have long been the fallen angel that wreck foreign regimes and regional peace.

According to Covert Regime Change: America's Secret Cold War by Assistant Professor Lindsey O'Rourke at Boston College, in the 42 years between 1947 and 1989, the US had 64 covert subversions and six open operations. The US seems to show more excitement and enthusiasm for overthrowing foreign regimes than it does for celebrating Christmas.

After the Cold War, the US has turned into an even more unscrupulous interventionist. Its frequent attempts to export the Color Revolution brought the Arab Spring. Unfortunately, it only brought an Arab Winter and an Arab Disaster.

In his On Western Terrorism: From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare, Noam Chomsky sorrowfully wrote, "This relatively short period has arguably seen the greatest number of massacres in human history. Most of them were performed in the name of lofty slogans such as freedom and democracy."

The US boasts its grandiose offshore balance strategy with its soft power and smart power when in reality, it is merely thick black theory full of schemes. In contrast to the Eastern tradition of valuing harmony and peace, the Anglo-Saxon world (the US and the UK) believes that disagreements and conflicts equals opportunity.

The US manipulated NATO to squeeze Russia's geo-space, and undermined the EU-Russia reconciliation and oil pipeline program. It supported Brexit to cripple the EU and reinforce US' control over Europe. It sowed discord in the Middle East in order to control the oil resources and made Iran an enemy of the region.

When it comes to China, the US spares no effort. The US rocked the boat in the South China Sea and made provocations, which led to turbulence in regional stability. It casts controllable tension on the Korean Peninsula and the Taiwan Straits to hinder peace progresses. At the China-India border, it fanned the flames of conflicts and mediated in favor of India. It also used the Quad to lure India into confronting China, intending to cause a lose-lose fight between the two developing giants.

Recently, the US obstructed the passing of a joint statement on ceasefire and cessation of violence and the protection of civilians at the Security Council despite the ongoing escalation of the Palestine-Israel situation and the overwhelming majority of UNSC members' call for an immediate ceasefire. Rather than taking proactive measures to promote peace, the US stands ready to fuel tension.

Time and time again, history has proven that the US and its allies always bring with them trouble and turmoil.

7. Disunion

In a war, you can only be killed once, but in politics, many times. - Winston Churchill

Forty years ago, the US forced Japan to sign the Plaza Accord to secure its economic supremacy. The Japanese hi-tech industry was dismantled and the Japanese economy crippled for decades. Today, it turns to South Korea and Chinese Taiwan, threatening to relocate their semiconductor industries back to the US.

From 2009 to 2017, the US imposed its long-arm jurisdiction on Europe, whereby it collected US$190 billion in penalties, monopolized massive quantities of personal information, and forcefully took over European enterprises that were sanctioned. In an attempt to reap profits, the Wall Street recently tried to overturn the century-old European football world by forming an independent European Super League, which was widely resisted and disgracefully aborted.

The COVID-19 outbreak put the US in the spotlight. The egomaniac that it is, the US selfishly fed itself even at the cost of its allies. The mask war between the US and its allies is indeed an abomination.

Ever since they have developed the COVID-19 vaccines, the US has ranked its allies. It is generous to Anglo-Saxon purebreds like the UK and Australia, lukewarm to Europe and other common allies, but haggles over ounces with Japan and South Korea.

Japan, challenged by the upcoming Olympics and the worsening pandemic, received no vaccines from the US. The Japanese Prime Minister had to beg American vaccine companies. The vaccination rate is 1 percent in Japan, which is only one fiftieth of the US. The South Korean foreign minister also begged the US for help but heard a resolute no.

At the early stage of the pandemic, India offered the Trump administration large quantities of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ). Now that India is in the midst of a severe pandemic, it has received neither the vaccine raw materials that the US promised, nor any American oxygen or inhalators.

The US is an octopus and its allies are its tentacles. It uses them to try and rule the world but stay alert to prevent them from growing too strong. Once its interests are threatened, the octopus won't hesitate to cut off one or more of the tentacles or even feed on them.

So how could such an egoist and a corrupted alliance system take on global governance? How could they shamelessly claim to represent the international community?

After the Vietnam War, former Senator J. William Fulbright expressed his deep concern about the aggrandizement of the Arrogance of Power that would incur immeasurable destruction, and excessive expansion that would result in the nation's decline.

Recently, renowned American scholar Joseph Nye rang the alarm again: more and more countries are beyond the control of the US. It is extremely dangerous to believe the US is invincible.

What goes around comes around, and where vice is, vengeance follows. There will be severe penalties for the seven sins committed by the US. Justice may be served later, but it will never be absent.

[vitaliciouscreations]

Drop of Paradise - Part Three

First | Previous | Next

Note: Thanks to @dargeon-lissa for helping me with French in the last part.

Multicultural week was an annual thing at François-Dupont, Lila learned from Nino. Doing a presentation was optional, and since it happened every year, most of the kids their age who had a culture worth sharing and were interested in sharing it had done it already.

When Lila asked Ms. Bustier about it, she told Lila that there were going to be fifteen presentations this year. Four each on the first three days of the week, three on Thursday, and then on Friday they would all take a test on what they had learned to make sure they’d been paying attention. Not an important test, she reassured Lila; it was just to make sure the students had taken the week and the opportunity to learn seriously instead of goofing off. Surely someone as well-traveled as Lila would have no difficulty passing the test with flying colors.

From Alya, Lila learned that most of the presentations would be given by students in year six who had just started attending François-Dupont this year. Alya herself had thought about doing a presentation on Martinique, but had ultimately decided against giving herself more work to do when she already had all of her regular homework, her work on the Ladyblog, her babysitter duties with her younger sisters, and her dates with Nino. However, their very own class representative and Alya’s best friend was going to be giving the last presentation of the week after lunch on Thursday.

Apparently Marinette’s presentation was set to be the last one and the only one after lunch on Thursday because the school had decided it would generate much more interest than all of the other presentations. They didn’t want Marinette to accidentally upstage anyone, or rather, Marinette didn’t want to accidentally upstage anyone, and so she had offered to go last. And of course, her presentation was set to be longer than anyone else’s because the school wanted there to be enough time for as many questions as possible to be answered.

Lila would be infuriated about it all if she wasn’t so smart. Fortunately, though, Lila was nothing if not resourceful, intelligent, and clever, so she recognized the situation for the perfect opportunity that it was. Come lunchtime on Thursday, she found herself smirking as she watched Marinette bolt out of the classroom the very instant the bell rang.

She was in a hurry to get home and make sure everything was ready for her upcoming presentation, no doubt. Lila had been keeping an eye on her all week, and it was clear that Marinette had spent most of the time preparing. She was trying so hard to ensure that her presentation would be as close to perfect as it could possibly get. How sad, then, that all of her hard work would be for nothing, because by the time Marinette returned to school, all of her beloved friends would be exactly where Lila wanted them.

Lila carefully schooled her features to replace the smirk on her face with an innocent smile as she collected her lunch tray and headed over to the table where the rest of her classmates were gathered. The seat next to Alya, the place where Marinette usually sat, was vacant. Lila happily took it.

“Yeah, it’s been, like, two weeks,” Alix was saying. She nodded at Lila in acknowledgement when she sat down. “I don’t know why it’s taking so long.”

“I think her cousin is visiting,” Rose said. “We saw her enter the bakery on Saturday when we were getting snacks for our impromptu band practice. Maybe that’s why?”

“Are you guys talking about Marinette?” Lila asked.

“Yeah,” Alix replied. “She said she’d make me some pajama shorts since summer is coming up, but it’s been like two weeks since then. I should probably just buy some, but I don’t want to spend money if I don’t have to.”

“Ask her about it,” Alya suggested. “She could have forgotten about it. That girl is so forgetful. It’s ridiculous.” Alya rolled her eyes playfully.

“She’s also been working on her presentation for multicultural week,” Nino said. “And if her cousin is visiting, she might just be busy.”

“Still,” Lila interjected. “It isn’t fair for Marinette to keep Alix waiting when she promised she’d make her the shorts.”

“Mmph,” Alix grunted. “I’ll just ask her about it after lunch.”

“After her presentation, you mean,” Alya said. “I wonder what it’s about, anyway? The school has been strangely secretive about it, and Marinette’s been ‘too busy’ all week to give me any details.” Alya rolled her eyes again, significantly less playfully.

“I think they’re trying to surprise us with it,” Juleka mumbled, and Lila internally scowled at her. Ugh, mumbling.

“Surprise us?” Nathaniel repeated. “Why would they want to surprise us?”

“They probably want to make multicultural week as engaging as possible,” Lila said. “I mean, hearing about those places first hand is probably the best way to learn about what they’re like in real life. Excluding actually going there, of course.”

“So you’ll have absolutely no problem on the test, Lila,” Rose said.

Lila flipped her hair over her shoulder gracefully. “Of course not.”

“Mmh,” Alya hummed, frowning. “But what about Marinette’s presentation will surprise us?”

“Oh, I know the answer to that,” Lila said. Everyone’s attention focused on her, and she basked in it for a moment before getting back to the task at hand. “I accidentally overheard Ms. Bustier talking with another teacher this morning. Marinette’s presentation is going to be about Eden.”

Alya choked on the water she was drinking. “Eden?!”

Lila shrugged. “That’s what I heard, anyway.”

“Statistically, there’s a 91% chance Lila is correct,” Max said, and Lila had to stop herself from rolling her eyes. He was always rattling on and on about his stupid statistics. It was so annoying. “They’ve been working their way east, so to speak. From the Americas to Africa to Europe and today Asia. Additionally, Alya is correct. Ms. Bustier and the other teachers have been oddly close-lipped about the last presentation. It is quite likely that they’re trying to surprise us with something special. An opportunity to learn about the most reclusive city in the world certainly qualifies.”

“That’s awesome!” Kim exclaimed loudly.

“It’s definitely a lot cooler than what they did for last year’s multicultural week,” Nino agreed.

Alya, however, was frowning. “I didn’t know Marinette was from Eden. Why wouldn’t she tell me? Aren’t I her best friend?”

Lila took on a sympathetic look and reached out to pat Alya’s arm. “Oh, Alya. If it’s any consolation, I don’t think Marinette is actually from Eden.”

A pause. Alya blinked. “What?”

“I doubt Marinette herself is from Eden,” Lila reiterated. “I mean, think about it. Eden revealed itself a few weeks ago, and Marinette is suddenly doing a presentation on it? It seems pretty unlikely.”

Alya frowned again. “Yeah, it does seem pretty unlikely. But would Marinette lie about something like that?”

“Hmm,” Lila hummed, cocking her head. “She’s probably not lying, per say. Just stretching the truth. It’s probably something like her great, great, great, great grandfather is from Eden, and she’s taking advantage of the recent reveal to make her presentation exciting and relevant.”

Alya thought about that for a couple seconds, and then nodded decisively. “You’re right. Marinette would have told me she was from Eden if she really was.”

“Exactly,” Lila said, stifling an eye roll. For a self-described hard hitting investigative journalist, Alya was super easy to play. “And, honestly, that’s why I’m kind of worried.”

A pause. The class stared at her.

“Huh?” Myléne murmured. She was almost as bad as Juleka. “Why are you worried?”

“It’s just,” Lila cast her eyes down like she was feeling shy. “We’re going to take a test tomorrow about everything we’ve learned this week, right? But I doubt Marinette really knows very much about Eden, so I’m worried about you guys. If Marinette gives you all faulty information about Eden you could fail the test. That would be terrible!”

The class took a few moments to process that. Lila eyed Rose and Juleka rather impatiently, waiting for one of them to speak up.

After several seconds too long of silence, it was actually Max who spoke up first, not Rose or Juleka. “Failing one portion of the test would not cause instant failure, but it could severely affect our grades. However, I see no other alternative. Most of the information online is speculative or entirely made up. We currently have no better source of information on Eden than Marinette.”

Lila’s eyes drifted over to Rose and Juleka again, but again neither of them spoke up. Honestly, must she do everything herself?

“Actually,” Lila said. “I could help you guys out. I mean, if you want me to. I spent a whole year volunteering there some time ago, so I know all about Eden and its culture.”

“That’s right!” Rose finally exclaimed. “Lila even helped me start writing a song about Eden on Saturday!”

Juleka nodded. “Yeah.”

“Whoa, seriously?” Alix asked.

“Yup!” Rose chirped, saving Lila the effort of having to do it herself.

“That’s so cool,” Nathaniel said. “I can’t wait to hear it.”

“We can’t wait to play it!” Rose exclaimed, looping an arm around Juleka’s shoulders and putting her other hand on Ivan’s arm. Both Ivan and Juleka gave their versions of a smile, which were hardly worth the title in Lila’s opinion. Apparently “goth” and “socially adept” were mutually exclusive at François-Dupont.

“I want to hear it too!” Kim shouted, and Lila scowled before quickly wiping the expression from her face. They were getting off track.

“Right,” Lila said, loud enough for everyone at the table to hear her. “So if you guys need someone to teach you about Eden, I’d be happy to do it!”

“Really?” Myléne squeaked out.

“That’d be awesome!” Sabrina exclaimed, and Lila grinned viciously when she didn’t see Chloe anywhere in the area. “Please, oh please tell us about Eden, Lila!”

“Yeah, please tell us about it,” Nathaniel agreed.

Lila schooled her face into a hesitant look. She noticeably glanced at a nearby clock. “I really would love too, but I don’t know if I can tell you guys everything you might need to know before lunch is over. I have no idea what questions will be on the test, and there’s so much to say about Eden!” Lila paused for a moment, giving it time, before dramatically perking up. “Actually, I just thought of something!”

“What’s that?” Nino asked.

“They’re not actually taking attendance this week, right?” Lila pointed out. “The school just wants to make sure you know the material. That’s why there’s a test at the end of the week, right?”

“So we could skip for the rest of today and learn what we need to from you instead,” Alix said, saving Lila the effort.

“Exactly!” Lila chirped. “And we could all go out for ice cream while I tell you guys all about Eden. It would be much more fun than sticking around for another presentation, anyway.”

Kim nodded enthusiastically. “Totally!”

Max hesitated, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Getting information from a direct source is likely to be more educational.”

“And way less boring!” Kim shouted, slamming his hands down on the table and jostling everyone’s food. Lila hid her irritation with a well-practiced plastic smile.

Alya hummed loudly, drawing everyone’s attention. She tilted her head. “I can’t deny that a direct source is undoubtedly superior, but what about Marinette’s presentation? She’s been working pretty hard on it.”

Lila frowned. “Are you saying Marinette would want all of us to fail just so we’d see her presentation?”

Alya’s eyes widened. “No! Of course not.”

“Right.” Lila nodded. “Marinette isn’t that kind of person. She won’t care about a silly presentation if it means all of us will be better off. That’s just the kind of friend she is. She’s so helpful, even if she is clumsy and forgetful.”

“That’s right,” Alya agreed.

A grin overtook Lila’s face. “Yeah. So I’m sure she won’t mind you guys skipping out. It’s just a pity she won’t be able to come with us since she has to give her presentation. But maybe I can write up some notes later tonight and send them to her to make sure she doesn’t fail either.”

“That’s so nice of you, Lila!” Sabrina praised.

Lila preened. “Thanks Sabrina! It might hurt my wrists to type that much, but I don’t want Marinette to fail either.”

“What about Adrien?” Nino asked, adjusting his hat. “We can’t leave him out of the loop.”

Lila nodded. “Of course not! I was thinking that we should wait here and see if he arrives early for lunch, and if not, one of you could wait for him and lead him to the rest of us when he arrives. I don’t want to leave him out, and I’m sure Adrien will appreciate a day out with his friends. It’s a real shame his father restricts him to the house so much.”

“Oh yeah,” Nino muttered. “That dude needs to take a chill pill. Or a dozen.”

“But today Adrien might be able to spend a whole afternoon hanging out with his friends,” Lila said. “I’m sure he’ll appreciate it.”

“Totally,” Nino agreed. Lila could see he was completely on board now. They all were. She smiled gleefully.

All week long, Lila had kept an eye on Marinette. In between presentations, all she’d done was help her classmates or work on her own presentation. Both were clearly very important to her.

So for her classmates to miss the presentation she’d worked oh so hard on? That would definitely hurt her. And when she was hurt, she was volatile. Easily manipulated. Most people were.

Any way Marinette reacted, Lila had a plan. Angry? It would be child’s play to make Marinette look like a bully. Sad? How could she be upset at the class for wanting to get good grades? Distant? Being passive aggressive is so cruel and manipulative.

And if she got akumatized? Oh, if she got akumatized, Lila would hit the jackpot. Marinette would almost certainly come after her as an akuma, and Ladybug would surely protect her. Lila could reaffirm her claim to the class about being Ladybug’s best friend, and she could pretend to be scared of Marinette afterwards. Every interaction with Marinette from them on would end with Lila on top without her having to utter a single word. All she would have to do is look terrified and everyone would jump to her defense.

If Marinette was akumatized, Lila would be in the perfect position to eliminate Marinette as a problem. Her false trauma would mean she and Marinette needed to be kept apart. And that opened up a world of possibilities.

She and Marinette couldn’t possibly be in the same class anymore if Lila started trembling every time she set eyes on her. The school would be forced to separate them. The issue would be taken to the principal, and that money-grubbing suck up would obviously choose Lila over Marinette because Lila’s mother was actually important. At the least, Marinette would transfer to another class and away from all of her precious friends. At best, Marinette would be expelled from François-Dupont.

Their classmates would also be forced to choose between Marinette and Lila, and they would choose Lila. Who would side with the aggressor as opposed to the victim, after all? And when Lila had everyone else on her side, Adrien would be hers too. He valued his friendships too much to give the majority of them up for one girl who could barely get a sentence out around him, and he was terrified of rejection from his peers.

Yes, Lila wanted Marinette to get akumatized. She could make everything work out perfectly once she was. And she would be. Lila would make sure of that.

@miraculous-of-salt, @plushbookworm, @reyna-avila-ramirez-alreanaldo, @captainmac6, @unmaskedagain, @crazylittlemunchkin, @mochinek0, @diamondheart31, @schrodingers25, @northernbluetongue, @heaven428, @starberry-mina

Tell me if you want to be added or removed from the tag list.

[angrylizardjacket]

nostalgia {Ben Hardy/Reader/Joe Mazzello}

Anon asked: i would love to see a little story or like some headcanons about a lazy day with joe/ben/reader. i feel like that would be really cute.

A/N: 1141 words. Just a fluffy little thing, I hope you like it! I’ve missed them v much.

They love you, and that’s what matters. 

The days are long when they aren’t around, long and lonely and sometimes cold; it could be the middle of Summer, but there’s a chill in the air when they aren’t there. 

Of course they’re busy, they’re talented and successful, and you’d never begrudge them that, but you... you just like having them around, and that’s not a crime. Sometimes you’re the busy one, and you quietly ache to be in the comfort of their embrace. But such is life, we all do things we don’t want to do, we all learn to go without the ones we love when we must. 

Being spread to the far corners of the globe doesn’t feel fair, though. You’re at home, because you work from home, you can film your videos anywhere, but Ben’s on a cathedral roof in Italy judging by his most recent selfie, and Joe’s filming somewhere in the middle of America. There’s calls and video chats but it’s never the same.

Ben invests in some of those bracelets that let each of you feel when one is thinking about the others, a familiar pressure; I’m right here, no matter how far away. It helps.

Or one’s away, and you’re curled up with Ben in your living room and you don’t remember who suggested watching Jurassic Park, but now you just miss Joe more, and it’s four in the morning where he is, but he answers your video call, and sleepily chuckles when you explain what you’re watching. He asks to watch the last half hour, and so you obligingly turn the camera around so he can see the TV, and the phone is tucked neatly between where you’re tangled up with Ben, and something about the way seeing him fall asleep before he gets the chance to hang up is so damn endearing. He wants so badly to be with you both. You know he’s missing you just as much as you’re both missing him.

There’s endless selfies, and recordings that you send each other - Ben air drums when any Queen song comes on the radio, you do funny voices when washing up, making up a whole storyline for the cutlery, something about the mafia and needing to waterboard them for information - it’s kinda dark, but also funny, and it makes both Ben and Joe smile. Joe sends you guys a video of himself talking to a home made sock puppet, asking it if he should come home early, because he misses you both. The sock puppet reminds him that he’s under contract, and that it’s only for a few more weeks. The video still makes you cry.

When it’s you and Joe, there’s videos sent of the pair of you scouring the internet for Ben’s episodes of East Enders, and arguing about if the shady streaming site will give your laptop a virus. You kiss Joe to shut him up. Ben’s answering photo is of himself, on set, half blushing and covering his smile with his hand, captioned that there’s a USB in his desk drawer with a few episodes on it. He seems embarrassed but endeared. He also gets photos of you pouting with Cardboard Ben, ‘it’s just not the same’ you message, and he sends back ‘good, i don’t want him stealing you guys from me’. 

“Is it hard always being away from your... your partners?” The interviewers always flounder when they talk to any of you about your relationship, but you’ve all learned to navigate it. Joe flushes and ducks his gaze, smiling a little.

“It’s always hard, but we’re all in the same industry so we all kind of understand; we’ve got this thing we do, we watch old stuff that the others have been in, when we’re away, like the other day, Y/N and Ben sent me a video of them watching Undrafted, it was really sweet actually,” he admits, and the interviewer coos at that, asking him what he’d watched recently, “well,” Joe starts with an embarrassed little smile, “don’t tell her I do this, but I go back and I watch The Boyfriend Tag video on Y/N’s youtube channel that we did; I dunno, it just makes me all warm and fuzzy,” he flusters a little. 

You have that interview downloaded and saved onto your phone.

It’s hard being away from each other, but it makes it all the sweeter being back together. 

Ben and Joe surprise you at the airport after you get back from London Fashion Week, holding a sign with your name in big, block letters, and yeah it kind of attracts a crowd, but it’s the thought that counts. They’re peppering you with questions, asking you what your favourite outfit was, what your favourite moment was, if you stayed at a nice hotel.

“Can’t be better than our place,” Joe snorted, and he’s got his arm around your shoulders in the back of the Uber, and you smile, lean into him, press your nose to his cheek.

“Never.”

“Oi, don’t knock London, man,” Ben makes a point of seeming annoyed, but Joe rolls his eyes with a smile.

“Babe,” he tells Ben, “no hotel will ever compare to your flat either, okay? I’m saying that anywhere’s better when we’re together.” And Ben wears a little pleased grin, and presses a kiss to Joe’s knuckles, sitting on your other side.

And it’s warm, even though the air outside is cold, between them you are warm. Of course you are, wherever they are, you find comfort. 

Together, you watch everything and nothing, and you read scripts to help each other learn lines, and record auditions, and they record videos with you, and this is the best feeling in the world. Laughter, bright and loud and warm, fills the halls of your home.

Ben joins in when you interrogate the dishes now, drying them, pretending to threaten their family, just because it makes Joe cackle with laughter. 

Joe finally watched Jurassic Park with you both, providing dry commentary about the behind the scenes during the entire time, which has you and Ben in stitches half the time. 

And you come home from a walk, only to find Ben and Joe trying to copy one of your makeup tutorials from when you’d first started YouTube. The sight warms your heart and almost moves you to tears, right before you hear your own voice from your youth, and you almost screech trying to shut the laptop, while the boys shout that they’re halfway through.

“You’re killing me,” you give a fondly exasperated smile, only wincing a little at the jarring jump cut in the video, and they both beam in response.

“But you love us,” Ben practically sings, and you roll your eyes, even though you can’t help but grin.

Yeah, you really do.