#WHAT KIND OF SYSTEM DOES THIS WOMAN HAVE TO ACHIEVE THIS

[dovahtomes]

Bethesda romance: Hello, dear. Welcome back. The store is doing well. Until next time.

Mod authors:

[spread-the-influence]

You can post that rant here, pookie. We'll listen 🤭

i've been resisting because i'm trying so hard to just keep this as a blog for the au and the comic itself but Wow it gets so difficult to Stfu with each passing day LMAO i feel like i should just go crazy like i did in the other blog and post my rambles without caring for The Blog's Theme

let me preface this by saying that i will do this without making references to external sources ( gooseworx's tumblr + interviews ) because i don't think you need to hear it from her to know how ridiculous it would be for ragatha to be 100% evil or 100% good .

___ So. a Theme in a story is the Central Idea . it's a concept woven throughout the narrative , and it comes up multiple times to give a Message . a Message in a story is a Lesson . it's what the writer wants to tell you through the story . essentially , think of theme as the Topic and message as The Details . the theme provides the foundation while the message provides the walls , easy peasy

let's apply this to tadc . the theme that jumps out the most , to me personally , is Community . through the fucked-upness of the circus , the thing that grounds the characters is their bonds . even though the episodes would get dark and existential , there's this underlying sense of hope because these characters have Each other .

this is where ragatha comes in ! this woman Craves a community , and that's why she's interesting . she's trying to make everyone like her — even the people whose opinions she Shouldn't care about — to the point that she would act insincerely to achieve that . but this only results in her unintentionally pushing everyone away . and well i've talked before about how her relationship with everyone has Tension .

if she was a villain ... it will Suck ! not just in a writing sense but in a narrative sense , like — if her evil plan was to get everybody on her side then she failed Spectacularly at that . but if her evil plan was to act so pathetic that no one would suspect her then move the fuck over mother gothel because THIS is the most manipulative animated villain of the 21st century

but seriously , it will suck because What Message Is There , and most importantly , how does it play to the Community theme ? oh boy oh boy the nice person is actually mean all along , guess i learned to never trust anybody — in the show about learning to trust people ????? also there's just zero buildup to it . any buildup ragatha has regarding her ' true self ' is just her being Insecure and Anxious , which very much doesn't give off villain energy if you ask me

if she's a pure angel that has done nothing wrong , however , then it's ... not going to be narratively satisfying . while i would prefer this over the reveal of her being a villain hypothetically , it will still Suck because it undermines the Tension and Buildup , if you get me . like wow cool we're getting hints that ragatha's not what she seems , only to find out that ... she is what she seems !

i'll say this setup isn't really building up to Oh she's a bad person ): or Oh she's good (: it's more like Oh this woman needs a fucking therapist we need to give her a support system asap so she wouldn't explode on us .

i'm not going to chalk this up to lack of media literacy ( because personally the phrase ' media literacy ' has kind of became a buzzword that doesn't mean anything beyond ' you're reading it the Wrong way ' which defeats the point of engaging with art ) . i just think people formed an image of ragatha from the pilot , and that was only cemented by her being the oldest woman in the circus + her fussing over pomni . she did seem like a kind caretaker looking out for everybody if you don't read into her dialogue too much . so of course when traits of her that aren't as Kind come out , it stands out .

and honestly ? i've stopped minding it as much — because if i wrote a character like ragatha i want this Exact thing to happen ! i would go HAHA you fell for the character's facade that was meant to be dismantled by the viewer !!!!

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

reading updates: april 2025

HI wow what a month! 2025 felt like it was going REAL FAST until about mid-March, and ever since then it's slowed to a sort of molasses. despite the seeming influx of extra time I read much less in April than I have in any of the previous months this year - this is the first month I haven't even cracked double digits! which is fine, of course, it's not a competition, but it is interesting to think about what slowed me down so drastically.

(just kidding, it's not a mystery. it's heaps and heaps of stress. oops!)

ANYWAY. fortunately April's book haul has largely been a case of quality of over quantity, introducing me to several books that I think are guaranteed to land on my year-end best-of list. without further ado:

what have I been reading?

Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation (Linda Villarosa, 2022) - I checked this book out last month alongside Dr. Uché Blackstock's memoir, Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons With Racism in Medicine, as kind of a mini-series on racial bias in the American medical system. while I feel like I broadly learned more overall from Villarosa, thanks to her taking a journalistic approach that allows for a broader scope than Blackstock can achieve by primarily focusing on her personal experiences, I found that the two books complemented each other extremely well and each served to bolster and deepen the other. one major advantage of Villarosa's work is the geographic variability and the ability to meet healthcare workers and patients from a much wider range of places than Blackstock's New York hospitals, with particular focus on poor communities in southern states. Villarosa's writing has a strong, compassionate, deeply curious voice that makes her subjects incredibly vivid, rendering them with dignity even as their medical nightmares are laid bare. it was an incredible read and one that had been languishing on my TBR for a while, and I'm very glad I finally made the time.

Earthlings (Sayaka Murata, 2018, trans. Ginny Tapley Takemori, 2020) - while I didn't love this novel quite as much as Murata's briefer wonder, Convenience Store Woman, it did cement Murata as an author whose work absolutely fascinates me. her grasp of trauma and alienation is incredible, and she has a way of depicting unconventional desire in a way that's unlike anything I've ever seen. I'm supremely excited to read more of her work.

The Love Hypothesis (Ali Hazelwood, 2021) - in case you haven't already heard the news: I read the alleged Reylo laboratory AU romance novel expecting to be a big hater and I ended up loving it. joke's on me! you win this round, Ali Hazelwood.

Crying in H Mart (Michelle Zauner, 2021) - listen: you never want to be the guy saying that a woman's memoir about losing her mother to a painful and sudden cancer isn't that sad. to be clear, it is an extremely sad book! Zauner does an incredible job rendering the all-consuming pain of nursing her mother through her final days, a pain devastatingly unique to everyone who experiences it. in this case, the biracial Zauner also has the daunting sense of losing not only her mother but also a core part of her identity, struggling to figure out how to be a Korean American woman without the connection her mother provided. it's a tragedy! it's several tragedies all in one place, make no mistake! but I also feel like I've spent YEARS hearing this book hyped up as The Saddest Book Ever, and perhaps I've just read too many sad memoirs but it was like. it was fine. it's just fine. solid B+, not mad I read it, but I have read sadder. probably I am going to hell for this.

Liquid: A Love Story (Mariam Rahmani, 2025) - I was super excited for Rahmani's debut novel, which has a compelling premise: stuck in a stagnating academic career and with her parents nagging her to wed, an unnamed queer Iranian-American woman decides to go on 100 dates across Los Angeles to find a likely candidate for a marriage that can bring her financial security. her plans inevitably go awry when a family tragedy requires her to travel to Iran, where her goals are brought more sharply into focus - and she ultimately resolves her romantic quandary. it's a stylish book, almost painfully so; I can't say I'd recommend this to anyone who dislikes literary fiction because GOD is this Literary Fiction, our protagonist deeply preoccupied with her own witty malaise and caustic observations. she's a little awful and I liked her a lot, but I also think that the resolution Rahmani brings her protagonist to was devastatingly expected - and unfortunately, no amount of self-aware lampshading actually makes it less predictable. I'm conflicted! it felt like a lot of building up to not a lot of payoff, but I'm compelled all the same and I'm hoping to see more of Rahmani in the future.

Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender (Kit Heyam, 2022) - god, what a delight of a book. Heyam takes a gorgeously open approach to what constitutes "trans history", casting their net wide to recognize gender nonconformity far beyond contemporary understandings of what it means to be transgender. Heyam advocates for a wide recognition of experiences throughout history: people whose gender identities were shaped by non-Western religions and cultures, those whose identities blurred between same-gender attraction and a desire to be recognized as a different gender than the one expected of them, those whose transgressions of gendered boundaries can't be proven to be align strictly with 21st century ideas of transness. Heyam's approach is one of radical inclusiveness, seeking not to "prove" any particular understandings of transness in historical figures but simply to point at a long, global history of people living outside of a gender binary and weave all of these instances together in the understanding that all of these experiences support and bolster each other in affirming that across time, language, and culture, people bucking gender norms have always existed. reading this book felt like holding a mug of hot chocolate.

Afterparties (Anthony Veasna So, 2021) - genuinely impossible for me to talk about this short story collection without acknowledging that it was published posthumously by So's mother and partner after he died very young. I will freely admit that the first story did not grab me, and since I'm fussy about short stories I might well have set down the book after that if not for the strange sense that I was holding a small representation of a man's life in my hands. I guess that's always the case with a book, but somehow it felt extra sharp here. in any case, I'm glad I stuck it out; So's stories about Cambodian immigrant communities in California are messy and loving and sorrowful and silly, delving deep into the sadness that can cling to a family for generations. I'd be absolutely remiss not to pay particular attention to the final story, "Generational Differences," in which So writes from the point of view of his own mother, talking to his child self and recounting a tragedy. it's a brave and vulnerable approach that I've never encountered before, and it's really something special.

an obligatory update on my book bingo sheets: as usual, the sheet that I'm filling in opportunistically is thriving, with the addition of Liquid completing another bingo and getting me very close to two more

and the list of books that I specifically planned out is LANGUISHING

finger crossed for May, when I'm hoping to cross at least two more off the list...

[vigilskeep]

You're my favorite Viago poster & it's my birday so I would love to get your thoughts on that lil datamined bit from Viago's vo notes where it says "he won't be happy until he sits on a throne" (or something like that), would love to get your thoughts on 1- how true that feels to you, 2- what Viago going after the throne could look like if he really decided to make that move, & 3- how the rest of the Crows (esp Teia & House Dellamorte too I guess) would realistically react. Would also love if you include any thoughts on how Sol would handle/react to this because I love them 💖

well if it’s your BIRTHDAY i suppose i have no choice but to viago post... i do this against my will...

okay. first of all the datamined files are vastly out of date information so i don’t consider it as dismantling canon to disagree with them as much as it would be dismissing canon to, like, express that canonically a certain piece of concept art did not happen. that being said, here it is: “Calm, ambitious, and ruthless, Viago is the bastard son of the late King of Antiva. As a high-ranking member of the Crows, Viago has just as much influence as the Monarchy, but he still resents the fact that he is not a legitimate heir and feels his birthright was stolen from him. Beneath his cool exterior is a lot of anger and frustration. He will not be satisfied until he sits upon a throne.” (you can already tell this is directly not canon because viago’s dad is still alive in veilguard lmao)

here’s what viago thinks about the subject in eight little talons: “Rising to the rank of Talon should’ve been enough. With a small army of assassins at his beck and call, Viago was more powerful than the king. But the harder he worked, the more resentful he became of his half-siblings, who knew nothing of ruling or tactics. The knowledge that, given the chance, he could restore strength to the Crown dogged him—leaving a hole that no contract or coin could fill.”

one thing we should say is that the entire system where bastards are put into the crows is to prevent them from entering the line of succession. it would shake up the whole of antiva and how things have worked for centuries to abandon all pretense and put a crow on the throne for real. but that’s small fry because viago is saying he would do even more than that. what viago is talking about here is not just taking the crown—it’s restoring the crown to STRENGTH. he is fairly explicitly not talking about a future in which “the crows rule antiva.” it’s really an incredibly, incredibly audacious, hubristic thing to think, and his confidence in it takes me aback every time. it’s not the idea that he could restore strength to the crown, or the thought that he could do that. the knowledge he could do it. viago you’re insane.

does he really want that, even if he could achieve it? would it really satisfy him? i don’t know. i know that viago’s underlying self-superior beliefs about his ‘birthright’ did probably hold him together at his worst, but are also the root of, like, all his worst instincts. i know that crowns almost always make people worse! i also know that he only thinks through the entire above spiel because he is distressed that teia immediately devastated him with one line, and that the very next paragraph after the spiel is him immediately getting distracted by wanting teia so bad it makes him look stupid (again). would teia take these risks with him, or, even if he won the throne, condescend to be a king’s mistress? between the throne and the woman he loves, which is likely to satisfy the empty void in his chest, if he can only have one or the other? are we likely to enjoy the kind of king we would end up with, if viago loses one of the like two to three humanising connections he has that make him not a complete tyrant? (said with love.)

on the other hand, it’s not as if, right now, viago is holding a normal job down with supreme mental health support and a long life expectancy, let’s be real. and let’s be clear: if restoring strength to the crown does really mean going up against the crows, god, i can’t say i don’t want to see it. i can’t say the thought of viago-josephine-zevran triumvirate finally taking the crows out of power has never crossed my mind, okay. i’m a predictable person with simple wants. but you had best believe caterina will fight to the death on that, and many other talons with her. teia—to whom the crows are a family, however much they fight—could be lost here, which is nigh unbearable.

i don’t think viago is actively, seriously planning doing any of this, to be clear. in eight little talons he’s just thinking he could do it “given the chance”, i.e. if he was one of his legitimate siblings. not, this is my end goal i’m actually working towards for real! but i knowww he’s thinking it. and god knows what fighting for and winning treviso did to his ego. if he and teia break up again we are so in danger 😭😭

(for sol, my dearest rook de riva, the reaction is mostly Extreme Distress because they do not actually care about the fate of the crown or whatever, they just want viago to stay alive. this is not the Safely Staying Alive route, actually, viago. i don’t think they would really grab that skinny man by the lapels and yell, “i don’t think before i act? I DON’T THINK BEFORE I ACT?” and then shake him until he makes a laminated paper wobble sound. but it’s a close call. emotionally, it’s where they’re at. also, god knows what their dellamorte boyfriend, currently at least nominally first talon, is going to feel obligated to do about this. real mess!)

[tawked]

You gotta realize that Catholic superheroes are all exclusively the kind of Catholic that would fight the Pope, which is actually most Catholics.

I think secular people mistakenly believe anybody outside of Rome likes or cares about the Pope? Maybe this is actually a bias I have because I'm from the place where the guy who designed the practice of priest shuffling and out-of-court settlements to avoid embarrassing the church was Cardinal, but Catholic culture as I've experienced it is far more local parish-based. Mistrust of the big church structure is phenomenally common and every Catholic I've ever met has a strict "don't let your son become an altar boy" social policy lol.

Anyway, hear me out,

Hellboy: vocally and violently antifascist. Would fight Benedict and most post-Benedict Popes. Would roll with Pius XII on the whole anti-Aktion T4 vibe. The Mystici Corporis Christi? Banger. Could use some of that these days with the the whole, y'know, governments across the world working to roll back disability rights and protections type beat we have going on. Hellboy would not be a fan of Pius XII weird "anti-Bolshevism" views because "hey pal, some of my best friends are Jews." He's such a dinosaur he is not aware who Leo is and probably still thinks Benedict is Pope.

Daredevil: does understand the potential of systemic power. Does understand the realities of the law and its enforcement. Does understand what the Pope, as the monarch head of a legalistic culture, could potentially achieve with policy, ie. making it compulsory for priests to disclose what their peers are up to to the police with all evidence under threat of excommunication. Does not like child abusers.

Would not vibe with Cardinal Pell's Melbourne Response or its adoption throughout foreign western governments, or the relocation of priests to places like Papua New Guinea. Would fight the Pope for that much alone, but especially because Leo directly participated in priest shuffling and suppressed investigations while he was a Cardinal. He'd demand the Pope confess to him, listen to that man's heart race as the fear of consequences set in, devote time to a legal case, realize the futility after the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse and its French equivalent both achieved nothing, and proceed to roundhouse kick his fucking teeth out in a never-ending and futile war against shuffled priests. The Pope in this context becomes like a child abuse version of Wilson Fisk.

Helena Bertinelli: famously not a fan of big patriarchal organizations. Famously aware of how corruptible such institutions can be. Extremely aware, as someone who was raised rich, lost that, and now lives on a teacher's salary, how much money is moving through the church and how much of it is going to Pope thrones and art installations instead of homeless shelters. Not someone who likes being made less because she's a woman, and would not respond well to Leo's whole "allowing women to be equals within the church wouldn't solve anything but might create 'another problem.'" What other problem, Leo? she loads he silly wrist crossbow thing. What other problem, Leo? What problem are you alluding to that giving women equal access to the pulpit would create, Leo?

Like, you gotta understand guys, Catholics don't really worship the Pope. Most Catholic publications are basically anti-Pope and the people running defense for dumb shit Popes say are usually just people who agree with whatever that dumb shit was, trying to use him to make it look like a powerful institution is on their side. It is extremely normal for them to immediately flip to opposing the Pope when he says something they don't like, ie. gay people might have souls and perhaps throwing them in prison is bad.

[gulfiya007]

On lukola fandom

Here’s some venting about the lukola fandom, and its ways, and consequences, from an ordinary polin, Bridgerton and Luke fan.

Starting from the way Luke’s loved ones and friends are treated by its adherents. Especially his girlfriend. The hate towards her is visceral. The whole phenomenon of bullying and stalking someone just for existing and posting on their SM account from time to time probably needs to be studied by social studies scholars and parasocial relationship specialists, cause it’s new heights apparently.

So, what if she’s proud of Luke as her boyfriend and wants to show it? What if she wants to mark her territory sometimes, to which she has a right btw? What if she trolls haters and delusional IRL shippers occasionally? Hers is probably the most relatable behavior. I myself, as an introvert millennial who doesn’t run one single SM account and cringe from the exhibitionist nature of current SM posting practices, still recognize that there’s nothing unusual about that kind of posting per se. Why was Luke’s former gf, Jade, allowed to post him all the time (which is totally alright btw), but Antonia hinting at having, say, a dinner with Luke is shady, attention-seeking, desperate, needy and despicable?

It's not that I care particularly about her. In fact, I couldn’t care less if she’s replaced by Luke with some other woman in a couple of months or if she is his future wife and mother to his kids. I still believe, regardless of her status in the relationship, she deserves basic respect and decent treatment as a human being that we know pretty much nothing about. She does not deserve the vilification and demonization that she gets.

Luke too, has a right to privacy and respect for his personal choices that are nobody’s business. He owes no one anything in terms of disclosing his dating life and confirming his relationships. If for someone, Luke bringing the girl to almost all his travels and events with himself, is not a proof or statement in and of itself about her being his girlfriend, then that’s on them. No amount of intentional misreading and skewed takes on photos will trump this simple fact.

Also please don’t bring up virtue signaling and other cancel culture stupidities, such as moral judgements passed on Luke and his close ones for political or other values purportedly held by them, of which we in fact know zilch. It’s clear that this is just another useful tool in a shipping crusade.

Nicola too, deserves, for a change, to have her numerous statements taken seriously. Let alone, privacy. She’s being stalked by her so-called fans to insanity. I am sure she, to put it mildly, is uncomfortable about her “queen” and “goddess” status among the cultists, and being a projection vessel for a myriad of sad women. Cause she knows very well this type of passionate idolatry is an inch away from hate, and the plus sign switches to a minus sign the minute she does something not to their liking, a wrong brand or person supported, or not enough disciplining of Luke is exercised. The most delusional thing about lukolas is them truly believing themselves to be Nic’s or Luke’s fans.

Which brings us to the crux of the matter. That IRL shipping is bad, period. Some lukola bloggers on tumblr, TT and IG half-heartedly try to reign in and admonish the more unhinged segment of the fandom by telling them to behave and not bring their bul..t to the actors' feet. However, this is what the lukola discourse platforms, by simply existing, still do - breed crazy fan behavior. Because the problem lies in the belief system itself. No amount of reservations, house-keeping and discipline by lukola discourse 'leaders' will do away with the tenets and premises of this religion that seep through and twist every discussion and speculation about the figures involved (Luke, Nic, etc). Since every reasoning should work towards a certain end goal, all means and distortions are good to achieve it. Finding faults with Luke's character and behavior and demanding a 'redemption' from him, hating and criticizing Luke's friends and family, attributing motivations to the actors and their loved ones that best suit theories, online stalking etc. A myth about Luke ever publicly stating he was single during promo, a ridiculous myth about Bridgerton cast and showrunners shipping lukola (news flash – nobody in the cast cares about their co-stars’ private lives, stop the kindergarten), or the “papgate” affecting in any way Luke’s job prospects. Myths upon myths that build the house of cards of the lukola dogma. I myself wouldn’t care a damn about this fandom if it really contained itself to its close corners and group chats, however, unsurprisingly, they spill over in a grand fashion and permeate all discourse.

You really believe the innocent delulu fangirling has no by-products? These are the staple manifestations of the lukola and of any IRL shipping fandom, and popular lukola theorists are pretty successful in justifying and reinforcing them. And it should not be surprising that some followers, the most zealous and stupid ones, take it too far and actually harass people and be annoying in SM.

As a Luke and polin fan, I am annoyed by this, but I am 100% sure this sh*t is affecting the actors, and you all can kiss goodbye to the chemistry between Luke and Nic naturally displayed during promo. I am sure polin will not be affected, for L and N are excellent actors and friends, but you all soon will look sadly back to S3 promo tour as magic that will never come back.

[fivewantscoffee]

So, Five x Lila. I need to get this out of my system so I can maybe finally move on:

I don't like the ship.

I don't like the characters together. I find the pairing a baffling one, and I don't like what it does to the show (and characters) either.

First of all, that wasn't Lila. I don't know who it was, but it wasn't the woman we saw off at the end of S3, or even the one we started off S4 with.

It just wasn't her.

You can blame trauma, or six years of being on the move. That's going to change a person, for sure, but this wasn't about giving Lila any character development.

It was about giving Five a love interest.

Because that life? Yeah. I could see it for Five. I could see him deciding to settle down and take life slow, I could see him being sweet and domestic with a partner should he have one. After he's had some time to heal, now that he's finally free of the apocalypse, I could see that for Five.

But Lila? She was unhappy in her marriage, at least partly because the domestic, stay-at-home-mum life has proven to be something that doesn't fulfil her. She wants more out of life, which is why "bookclub" happened, which is why she ended up in the subway with Five in the first place.

And okay. For the sake of argument, let's go with this. Let's say Five x Lila happened so they could cope with their situation. It was survival, like Lila said. If we were going to have to endure this bad, messy plot point anyway, (which we didn't, we really, really didn't), it should at least have been treated with the seriousness it deserves.

Because, Five? The complete, callous lack of remorse on his part? What the fuck was that?

Even if you pick through the crumbs and try to make it make sense, this wasn't a romance. At best it was survival, and coping, and kind of a tragedy all at once. Five shouldn't be picking fights with Diego. He shouldn't be acting like a spurned twenty-something-year-old.

And yeah, characters can be flawed and in the wrong, but why like this? This didn't feel like Five to me. He is brusque and, when looked at it from a certain angle, I can see why some would call him selfish (which I don't necessarily agree with, but that's a different conversation), but under all his layers, he does love his family. To me, that's the core of his character and has been since S1. Everything he's done, he's done to ensure their survival, then when he agreed to give up in S3, he was content to simply die by their sides.

So, you're telling that this Five, the one we've known and followed for three seasons, had a fling with Lila and didn't even feel guilty or conflicted about it? You're telling me loved this woman, yet was willing to keep her from her family, her children?

"Five is selfish" "Five is tired" "Five is finally moving on"

No. Not like that. To me, the Five from previous seasons (S2 specifically, because that's where a lot of it goes wrong) is only "selfish" in that he wants his family to survive and is willing to go to any lengths to achieve that. He's not exactly compassionate about Allison and Viktor having to leave Ray and Sissy behind. And yeah, he leaves Diego in the asylum because he doesn't want him messing with the timeline.

Is he in the wrong for that? Answer this any way you want, but I don't think it matters to Five. Does he want his siblings to be happy? In my opinion, of course he does, but they're not going to be happy if they're dead.

That's not the same as what S4 does. Not by a long shot. Five cares deeply about those he loves, and granted, he is pretty bad at showing it, but he does care.

He nearly worked himself into the grave trying to solve the first two apocalypses, with little regard for his own well-being. When he realised a third apocalypse was happening, he didn't say fuck it and continue his Pennsylvania retirement road trip... he immediately dropped everything to try and fix it.

So how did we get to S4 Five, who got with his brother's wife, found a way home, didn't tell Lila, AND THEN, after he finally gave her the notebook and they went back, he acts like that?

Yeah, no. That's not my Five.

Also, five x lila happening isn't Five moving on. If anything, it's how he copes with the situation they're in. That's just his Delores 2.0.

Anyway, all of this is moot because the fact of the matter is, they chose to make this happen. Five and Lila getting stuck in the subway together for seven years didn't have to happen.

I don't know.

This used to be a show about family. It also used to be a show about the effects of child abuse on this group of siblings. This started to fall to the wayside after S1, but the family aspect of it still remained.

At its core, tua has always been about family, so what was the point of making S4 at all if this is what they were going to give us?

It's not just Five x Lila. They messed this up across the board, with how flippantly the absence of Sloane and Ray was treated, how shallow and surface-level all of the rest was. They gave us some crumbs with Klaus and Allison, but they couldn't even do that without retconning their entire relationship. That's not even mentioning the ending. The Hargreeves all sacrificing themselves in the end could have worked, but this was not the way to do it.

Anyway, this rant is over. S1 Five, you'll always be famous to me.

[gazelles-gazelles]

Adora and perfection

Perfection has been demanded of women for ages, not just as an adjunct, but as a price we pay for existing. We’re supposed to fill our predetermined roles to the fullest, with no hesitation and no error. It can take many forms across history (e.g. the angle in the house) but they all echo the same idea: a woman’s value must be tied to unattainable ideals. A perpetual feeling of worthlessness. It’s a tool of oppression, a mechanism of power.

before we connect all that with Adora, let’s settle on a specific definition of what perfection is, according to aristotle:

1. which is complete — which contains all the requisite parts.

2. which is so good that nothing of the kind could be better.

3. which has attained its purpose.

Adora embodies every single one of these. (1) She’s been conditioned through childhood to always be complete, competent, flawless, errorless, perfect. (2) And not just that, not just to be good, not to be better, but to be the best, no one should come before her, the first place is the only place where she can reside, losing is simply unimaginable. (3) And finally, she had always been used to attain a purpose, or in the show’s language, a destiny. Whether as a horde soldier or as she-ra, whether by shadow weaver or by light hope.

Adora is perfection incarnate! Or rather, supposed to be, in every facet.

Beauty: to me, the original first-ones-made she-ra form can be used as a metaphor for the impossibly unrealistic beauty standards that had always shackled women. She’s warrior, yes, but she must also be beautiful. (1) She’s in gold, the most precious of metals, and too heavy for armour to ever be made purely out of it, she wears white, the color of pure and clean, even when she’s in battlefield, even when there’s dirt and blood to stain, her hair is free and unbound and desirable, she glows, inhumanly so, like a star, not a person. (2) And even with all that, the worst thing is that she’s so clearly not Adora, not a reflection of Adora’s authentic self, but an exaggerated contortists image of what she must look like, she’s not Adora.

Skill: women have to be great to be good, in every room, and Adora was always expected to be great. Since she’s a soldier, it translates into military settings: she’s supposed to be the strongest in the room, the smartest in the room, the simple undoubtable best. Every attack must be calculated to the point, devoid of error or mistakes, every plan must work, every hit must land, every simulation must be won, every enemy defeated, every power mastered, every lesson, every training, everything she does, must be perfect.

Behaviour: double binds. A woman must be pretty but not too pretty, nice but not too nice (sound familiar?). Adora spent the entire show being squashed by dualities that contradict each other, she must be powerful to defeat her enemies but not powerful enough to usurp her superiors, smart to be successful but not smart enough to realise her abuse, kind to save the world but not kind enough to foster her own relationship, she must be strong but obedient, a leader but also a follower, a weapon and a shield.

Of course this is all horrifying. No one can live like this, Adora tried, but the mental and physical damage she suffered from would’ve destroyed her if it weren’t for her support system.

Adora’s story is cautionary tale about the horrors of perfection. No human is perfect, so the demand of perfection is literally dehumanisation. Adora is dehumanised, objectified, used as a tool(s) to achieve other people’s goals. And for the longest time, she didn’t even realise it, she has been abused and conditioned into truly believing that perfection is the price she must pay to exist, until she doesn’t! Until the unconditional love of catra and glimmer and bow allows her simply just exist.

[garlandgerard]

(Promising Young Woman big spoiler in this ask)

i've been reading some more of your posts and one by diamantdog too, and thinking a bit more about why hdh ended Squid Game the way he did. i think i agree that it makes thematic sense, and is likely also informed by his own experiences, and maybe also the desire to avoid having gi-hun be included in further spin-offs by Netflix.

i've still been wondering though about why the ending felt powerless in some way, and why it felt so set up that gi-hun had to die to achieve (some of) his ideals. and i have had a couple of thoughts:

1) maybe it felt emotionally dishonest in some way to hdh if he allowed gi-hun to live, or he wanted to evoke those feelings of injustice and anger in the audience that gi-hun ultimately was not allowed to. maybe it wasn't executed completely effectively since some people have felt that it was still feasible/appropriate for gi-hun to survive, and so blame hdh for it, but the reaction also reminds me of people's reactions to the ending of Promising Young Woman. the main character, Cassie, dies, but similarly, maybe as part of doing so, gets to achieve (some of) her goals: to take revenge on the man who harmed her friend, and bring him to justice. lots of people felt angry and down because it was supposed to be a revenge story, and Cassie deserved to get to have her revenge and live, but it's likely that the creator wanted to express that Cassie's death, in our current society, was somewhat inevitable. and that is supposed to make you angry. it's not fair, at all, but it unfortunately rings true.

i don't blame people for wanting to have a more hopeful and satisfying ending for our beloved protagonist, i want(ed) the same thing SO BADLY. but putting it this way does kind of help me - the VIPs and runners of the game, including the Frontman, get to choose the rules which demands that gi-hun must die for the baby to live. and it sucks so so much that especially considering the people he ended up with at the end, that's what he ended up having to do. but he still got to make that choice to achieve what he could, with what was available to him.

2) another way i've thought about it is whether hdh was reluctant to give gi-hun and other characters who theoretically could have made a change, too much agency, too much of an impact on the overall existence of the games, especially considering how capitalism continues on outside the games - i imagine that to hdh, it might not make sense to assume that if the VIPs and runners of the games are killed, the games would not continue on, by different people, since it's already been created now so what is to prevent it happening again if the same system which produced it is still in effect. additionally, if he let the protagonists "win", it might have appeared too comfortable of an ending, for him. he wants to inspire people to take action in the real world, but he also i imagine would want to avoid the capitalisation of those ideals and those actions by Netflix - if gi-hun won, and/or the other potential allies, maybe Netflix would make some kind of video game based on the story, or something similar would be done, given what's already been done to just the concept of the games. people could feel somewhat satisfied that in this fictional version of our world, this small group of individuals were able to enact significant change. and that does sound appealing, and the route he chose does risk encouraging a cynical or pessimistic view in people, to believe that trying to enact significant change will only result in ultimate self-sacrifice and maybe you shouldn't do it for your own sake. but maybe he is trying to say that it is still worth fighting for even if you can't see your ideals ultimately be achieved, before you die? or he wants to avoid people escaping the real world into this story where people somehow managed it, despite everything? not sure.

sorry, this turned out very long, haha. hope this makes sense. i don't mean to invalidate other people’s feelings about the ending, i think mine are still somewhat conflicted. but trying to understand why it was done that way has helped soothe me a bit. and it was interesting to think about :)

ohh, i remember promising young woman, that movie fucked me up so bad. but i remember feeling the catharsis when cassie's plan unfolded, even if she didn't live to see it come to fruition. that bastard thought he had the last laugh because he killed her, only to very quickly learn that he, in fact, didn't

further squid game 3 spoilers below

i understand why people might feel like the ending is utterly hopeless, and that there is a risk of feeling like the only way to make change is through self-sacrifice. i won't pretend that it isn't bleak as hell, but i figured that was the point, too. @diamantdog's defense of squid game season 3 puts it really well, in my opinion:

So, if we ask HDH: How do you solve a problem like capitalism? I think he doesn't know either. I don't think he has a solution. [...] [...] instead, he hopes to change at least one person for the better. And he's said something like this several times, that he wants viewers to seek the solution for themselves. He wants us to fill in the blanks ("Humans are ___"). He wants us to start from ourselves by not letting go of our humanity. [...] I think he wants us to be Gi-hun for ourselves and then for everyone else. Because only when there are enough Gi-huns in the world can "we" win against "them".

i agree that hwang dong-hyuk probably killed gi-hun partially because he wanted to protect his self-insert, the character closest to his heart, from further exploitation

while i personally don't think hwang dong-hyuk no longer wants to change the whole world (given that he still sees film as a way to bring his political ideas out there - with relative success too!), i do believe that, rather than trying to do it by offering a clear-cut solution, he's going about it in a more efficient way by trying to inspire people to look inside of themselves

ultimately, hwang dong-hyuk felt that this was the best way to convey the idea that, fundamentally and inherently, human beings are capable of good things. gi-hun's sacrifice is a beautiful tragedy, but it is also a triumph. obviously, this shouldn't mean that we should all sacrifice ourselves for every little thing. rather, i think it means that we should strive to make the most humane possible choice, even when everything is stacked against us

i'm very glad that my posts make people feel more hopeful - that was the intention, afterall. i've said before that i depend on others to keep my own head up. maybe that's a weakness of mine, the result of being a follower rather than a leader. but it makes me more secure, more confident, to know that my words have impact

[soisaidfine]

Michelangelo Antonioni to Jean-Luc Godard: 'My intention was to translate the beauty of this world. The lines, the curves of factories and their chimneys may be more beautiful than a row of trees, which the eye has already seen too often'

Ethel Cain: Amber Waves

Michelangelo Antonioni to Jean-Luc Godard:

"It is too simplistic, as many have done, to say that I accuse this industrialized, inhuman world, where the individual is crushed and driven to neurosis. My intention, on the contrary (even though one often knows very well where one starts, but not at all where one will end up), was to translate the beauty of this world, where even factories can be very beautiful… The lines, the curves of factories and their chimneys may be more beautiful than a row of trees, which the eye has already seen too often. It is a rich, vibrant, useful world.

For me, I want to make it clear, the kind of neurosis seen in Red Desert is above all a question of adaptation. There are people who adapt, and others who have not yet done so because they are too attached to structures or rhythms of life that are now outdated. This is the case with Giuliana. The violence of the gap, the discrepancy between her sensitivity, her intelligence, her psychology, and the pace imposed on her provokes the character’s crisis. It is a crisis that does not only concern her surface-level relationship with the world—her perception of noises, colors, the cold characters around her—but also her value system (education, morality, faith), which are no longer valid and no longer support her. She thus finds herself in the necessity of completely renewing herself as a woman. This is what the doctors advise her to do, and what she strives to achieve. The film is, in a certain sense, the story of this effort."

(La nuit, l’éclipse, l’aurore, Interview with Michelangelo Antonioni by Jean-Luc Godard, Cahiers du cinéma no. 160, November 1964)

Photo: Monica Vitti, Red Desert, a film by Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964.

...

...

[tragantia]

I've been thinking about the 2nd part to my 'Severen during your period' headcanons, aaand the gremlin man himself has taken possession of my mind and won't leave me alone until I write this. Will I succeed at purging Severen from my system? I don't think so.

Also, I know people normally post warnings and stuff, but Severen is his own warning imo.

Severen Van Sickle – NSFW headcanons

As a bi woman, I have the authoritas to say: yes, he´s a bi king. Big bi energy. Doesn´t actually care about what's what, if he likes it, he's gonna get it. Does it have a penis? Great. A vagina? Cute. Both? Fangggtastic. Count him in, darlin'.

That being said, he loves tits. Could spend hours biting, licking, sucking. Play with his too, he likes it and can cum just from that if you're good.

In the same line as Lestat during TVL, I do think in the past he would have found men to be more appealing than women, simply because he would have had more of a common ground with them, and would have found them more interesting. He would still have had sex with women and gone to brothels regularly. But a real emotional and sexual connection? It would have taken a really unusual lady to achieve that.

Which brings me to... Being from the Wild West, he most likely lost his virginity in a brothel, or at least with a prostitute. Unless you count those times when he was still on his early teens and he and another guy would play with each other, almost innocently, trying to see what's what and how it feels, but knowing very well they can't get caught.

He's got a nice dick, not massive but long and thick. Definitely knows how to use it. Has nice big balls too, loves it if you play with them, he himself will caress them if you're giving him head.

He's hairy, it's sexy, and he knows it. Doesn't wash himself much, he likes his natural smell, and likes to smell himself on his partners as a way of showing ownership. He prefers his partners soft and freshly shaved – may even shave you himself and then eat you out.

He knows what he's doing. He's a pro. Even before being turned, he was nothing but an hedonist, and pretty much lived to do risky shit, drink, gamble and fuck. He's easy to sleep with, but difficult to keep. He can fuck you so hard and good that you'll cry, both from pain and pleasure.

He has no shame. I can think of very few things he wouldn't do when it comes to sex, and even then he may try them once to see what it's like. Also he has like, 1000 kinks. I think if he likes you, everything has the potential of becoming a kink. Pretty feet? He's suddenly into feet.

Also really into dirty talking: if he's so crude on a regular basis, you can imagine the kind of filth that comes out of his mouth in the bedroom. Also LOUD.

BLOOD KINK. I don't think I need to explain. He loves to bite his partners, but this leads to them turning... so he is sure to kill all of them afterwards. The other ones have susprised him in more than one occasion naked and completely covered in blood after his last date got out of hand – again.

If he's turned you, this escalates to a whole new level. He's constantly biting you and drinking from you, even when you're not having sex. He loves it too much, and it makes him feel close to you. It's also a sign of ownership – no one else can bite you like he does. So, sadistic: pain is pleasure.

Also a masochist. If you drink from him, get ready for the most pornographic moan you've ever heard – he's gonna cum hard.

PERIOD KINK. Again, no comments needed, but how can he resist when he catches the sweet smell coming from your pussy? Smells like delicious Christmas dinner to him.

He's a dom through and through. He likes to chase, flirt and seduce, and once he's got you trapped between his body and the mattress (or in the nearest surface) he's gonna let you know who's calling the shots.

Saying this, he does have a very playful side, and you could easily seduce him into letting you do all sorts of naughty things to him. If it feels good and it's depraved, he's all for it.

He will be his asshole self and taint you, mock you and bully you through the entire thing though. It's part of his charm. If you manage to shut him up and make him a moaning mess, he would find it sooo hot.

Will fuck you everywhere and anywhere. If there's an itch to scratch, there's a way.

If you don't have a penis, he may let you use a strap on him. Plus points if he rides you making cowboy noises. You know he would make yeehaw noises during sex. C'mon. You ride him? Yee. He rides you? Haw. 100% would refer to himself as a bronco, and to his partner as a mare etc as if already seen in other fics.

He's very dominant, but I think he has the ability of being very silly during sex and still make it really fucking hot. He would make you laugh and two seconds later you're crying and screaming from how hard he's ruining you. The only time when he'll be completely serious is if he's hate-fucking you or marking territory. Also, spanking? Yes, please?

Why can I see him fucking with his sunglasses on?

Loves to eat you out: he eats pussy, dick and ass like a boss. It's not just how experienced he is, he genuinely likes it so much he's simply really good. The way he moves his mouth and tongue is absolutely sinful. 69? Say no more.

Adores it when you give him head. Easily his favourite thing alongside with drinking blood. He will let you get comfortable and then grab your head and face-fuck you. Will take his dick out and slap your face with it, then spit on you, calling you names and making you carry on. Please swallow his cum and kiss him, he loves to taste himself in your mouth.

Filthy. Loves cum swapping. Will make you squirt if you can, then cum inside you, then lick it all up as he eats you out, moaning like the sex crazed maniac that he is. Loves to cum all over you, and doesn't like it when you wipe it off.

A bit of a breeding kink, even if he's unable to get you pregnant. Loves to cum deep inside you and tell you how he's filling you up, how good your pussy or asshole is milking him, what a good girl/boy you are for him.

Won't. Leave you. Alone. Always trying to rile you up for another round. If he's not having sex, he's thinking about it most of the time (like that Buffy episode when she reads Xander's mind lol).

Unashamedly likes porn. He's mostly into dark BDSM material, the kind of thing that was hard to come across in the 80s. Still, if one day you're in a city with an adult cinema, he's dragging you in and you end up giving each other a handjob as you watch the film. He loves it if you're shy about it, he's gonna ruin that innocence.

Exhibitionist. He loves people to see him having sex. He's good and he's hot, he likes to put on a good show. He would also like to take pictures and make short films with you if you're up for it. He once took a video of his partner jerking him off from behind until he came all over his chest and balls, he genuinely thinks it's the hottest thing ever and would soooo post it online if he could.

I think he had a threesome with the pick-up truck ladies before killing them. So yeah, into threesomes and orgies, and will love giving orders to his partners and having them horny for him, answering to whatever he wants them to do. It's all about the power dynamics. Very territorial with his partner if he has one, though. Won't like anyone else to touch them.

But, nothing beats the blood. Vampires are of course sexual creatures, but Severen legit gets hard every single time he feeds.

Loves to watch you being aggressive and brutal. If he watches you feed, get ready because he's gonna show you just how much he's enjoyed the show.

Very touchy and cuddly. If there is an emotional connection, he will pull you to his chest and cuddle you as he smokes until you fall asleep. Can get very soft after sex, but ooonly if he has a partner. If that's not the case, it's feeding time.

He's basically terrible and so much fun. Would be the best sex in your life – if you survive, of course.

I need Holy Water after this. Was this too long? It probably was too long. Now I'm gonna go and cry myself to sleep because I can't have him in this life 😌

[g-zilpha]

Okay, so let’s talk about the secondary characters, because honestly, the show was never about them. It was never about anyone except June. Everyone else? They were there to orbit around her, to provide emotional weight and plot devices.

Moira—man, Moira deserved so much more. She was a great friend to June. She was strong, she was defiant, and she had her own struggles, but the show never lets her shine beyond June’s sidekick. Moira didn’t get a partner to share her burdens. She didn’t get to confront her trauma. She just carried it and bore it alone. Not once did we see her heal or find a space to grow as a person outside of June’s narrative. She’s just a shadow, and that’s a damn shame, because Moira could’ve represented every woman who doesn’t fit neatly into a story but still deserves their own arc, their own power.

Rita—what the hell happened with her? She cared about her sister, and in the end, she ends up fighting in a war? Why couldn’t she just get a chance to escape? Rita deserved peace. After all she went through, why couldn’t she tenderly care for the people she loved and retire, like June’s mom? Instead, she’s dragged into the army, and we’re left wondering why.

Speaking of June’s mom, Holly—she was a symbol, not a person. A representation of Motherhood and intellect, but completely sidelined in the plot. She was there to shame June, sure, but that’s about it. She had no influence in the larger story, no agency. It was the men—Lawrence, Nick, Mark—who had all the power. Where’s the agency for June’s mom? Where’s the depth of her character?

Emily—oh, Emily. She could’ve been with her wife and son, but instead, she’s thrown back into the war, and what do we get? A few scattered, disconnected moments that barely show what she contributed. She could’ve been dead for all the impact it had. She was a great character, full of complexity, earnestness, and a coldness that made her feel like a spiritual grim reaper of sorts. Instead, she fades into the background like a forgotten soldier.

Janine—I’m exhausted. The only thing Janine does is suffer. That’s it. She’s defined by her trauma, and I get it, trauma is real. But Janine was so much more than just a victim. She had intelligence, empathy, love—she was capable of so much. But the show didn’t give her a way to channel that. She’s stuck in a trauma response forever. She could have been so much more, but instead, she’s reduced to nothing but her suffering.

Aunt Lydia—ugh. Aunt Lydia is the ultimate fascist aunt with dementia. She’s barely a human being at this point, and her “redemption arc”? Please. I wasn’t buying it. If anything, it felt like they were giving her a pass because she was a victim of the same system she helped create. She’s the kind of person who dies and you think, “Good riddance.” There’s no real closure there, no growth. Just the same old, tired narrative of a person who was horrible and is now getting to coast on some half-hearted repentance. She's just lonely, dependent and delusional.

Naomi—you know what I wanted for Naomi? I wanted her to be a glorious mess. I wanted her to be blissfully apathetic, vile, hypocritical, the kind of person who could laugh at the disaster she’d caused. Instead, she gets reduced to this miserable, nagging wife to Lawrence, and a wicked stepmother to Charlotte when she could have just enabled Janine to have someone to bully and escape the ills of motherhood. The whole vibe was wasted potential. She could’ve been a symbol of unrepentant nihilism, someone who was evil because that’s what life handed her. But no—she had to fall into the tragedy of a woman who is always second to her male counterpart. Ugh.

Lawrence—seriously, why did he have to suffer like this? He validated Nazis to achieve good political goals. Gilead didn’t need a genuine scientist to back up their unscientific nonsense; they had the ideological framework already. Lawrence just hopped on the train, didn’t anticipate the wreckage, and then gets punished for it. And what happens? His poor wife kills herself in a misguided attempt to redeem him. A woman's death was the price for his redemption and he doesn't even get to live after honouring her sacrifice.

Now I'm done. I got it out of my system— and can't help but recognise that even if this show has frustrated me to unprecedented depths, it really did give me something to think about. So, I genuinely appreciated it despite my criticisms.

[mswyrr]

reasons i genuinely enjoy criston as a character

-deconstruction of ideas of the nobility of warfare: he was all amped up to fight! he'd trained his entire life for battle. of any man drawn into this civil war, he should have been the most able to meet that challenge... and one battle breaks him - as happens irl to so many people, not because they are "weak," but because war is inherently destructive and traumatizing. the glory is all a lie.

-the deconstruction of chivalric love. he wanted a lady to be his chaste beacon and he got... a seemingly exclusively homoromantic woman lol. so for decades he thought they had THAT, the thing his culture valorizes in stories and song, love held in check by vows and honor. but it was actually because she's just not that into you man. (i think she has love for him, but not romantic). and once her husband kicked it she was like "actually, i need to work out some issues and find out what an orgasm is, so let's fuck." a thing which he (because he buys all this shit) feels deep shame over. the rules of the system just don't work.

(not only does the lady he's devoted to not like him back the same way but he knows it and his culture has given him no tools to understand sexuality so he tries to tell himself--and HER SON, because her obvious homoromantic love for their enemy is so obvious he and HER SON have whole conversations about it!--that somehow Rhaenyra "intoxicated" her, like a siren singing Alicent to the shores of the Isle of Lesbos lol.)

(and let's not even go into all the complexities of power, class, and gender at play in what went down with Rhaenyra and him that's a whole essay itself)

-shining a light on this corrupt class hierarchy. he thought he was rising in the world but this system, at core, is all about using people up for a very small few to have ultimate power (not even all the nobles! not even all the royal family - it's a damn pyramid scheme at every level). that is IT. no matter how high he rises, that's all it ever is or will be.

no matter how high he climbs, it's a layer cake of shit. through him the story shows what becomes of believing in all the lies this society tells itself (when you're not born at the top; the Targ kids show us what believing does to people at the top: it's a pyramid scheme, through and through). and it's gorgeous. it's ugly and heartbreaking. he's not an original thinker, he just wants to achieve within what his society tells him, he works so hard at it!! he wakes up every morning trying to live up to the lies. and that makes him the perfect man through whom to dismantle how these things work: he's just trying to do what he's told is honorable and just. and it's all shit.

his whole story came together for me in his despairing speech to gwayne in the s2 finale and it hit so well for me. particularly the touch where the high born man, gwayne, cannot contradict what criston has just said and so lowers his sword and sits beside him as an equal. made me like the whole character arc in retrospect, knowing where they were headed.

i love it. he reminds me of film noir and hardboiled detective novels i've loved, where you draw out the corruption and brokenness of a system through characters who relate to it in different ways. and the most agonizing way for someone to relate to a broken system is truly *believing* in it. they keep trying desperately to love it. but it doesn't love them back.

and major credit to fabian frankel who knows the kind of character he's playing and fully commits to it - he doesn't try to make the character look cool or undercut the deeper themes. he goes with it, and that is great, "story is king" acting.

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #2 – He Who Drowned the World by Shelley Parker-Chan

I’ve had this sitting on my bookshelf since it came out but, as so often happens, having it just laying around meant it faded to the background whenever I was deciding what to read next. Not the worst case of that (there’s a lovely of Cyteen that’s been sitting on my dresser and shaming me for at least a year now), but certainly long enough for me to regret it.

The story is a direct sequel to She Who Became The Sun, a low fantasy retelling of the fall of the Yuan Dynasty and the ascension of Zhu Yuanzhang to the imperial throne – though in this universe the ‘real’ Zhu Yuanzhang died a starving peasant child, and his sister assumed his identity and his destiny of greatness, willing to do anything and everything it takes to force the world into alignment with it. The book starts with her having lost her right hand, and only gets more emphatic about making her prove it from there.

Aside from Zhu, the narration’s split between several different points of view that fill out the struggle for the future of China. The book honestly does a better job with multiple POVs than the vast majority of epic fantasy I’ve read – every one is a thematic mirror of Zhu on one level or another, and every one has an arc dedicated to the book’s twin fascinations of what it means to be willing to do anything to achieve what you want on one hand, and gender nonconformity and queerness in an intensely patriarchal traditional society on the other.

The actual plot of the story is almost episodic – Zhu encounters some new obstacle on her way to victoriously marching to the Mongol capital at Dadu that can’t be defeated with the blunt force she has available, and she and some collection of the supporting cast goes on an insane adventure to snatch victory regardless. Then every so often there’s a cutaway to Wang Baoxiang (who, among all the other POVs, is easily the one that comes closest to deuteragonist status) scheming his way through imperial court politics in Dadu in his incredibly operatic and self-degrading scheme for revenge on his dead brother. The plots start affecting each other quite early, but I’m pretty sure it’s only in the last twenty pages or so that the two of them actually meet face to face (it is in fact a minor plot point that Wang can’t recognize Zhu when he sees her). It all manages to feel like it’s capturing a whole swathe of political intrigue beyond any one person’s understanding and feel fairly well plotted and cohesive as it comes together. Not that there aren’t plenty of points where you have to just run with it and not push back at what the book’s telling you but nowhere where it’s serious or blatant enough to actually be an issue.

I’m not sure it’s a complaint per se, but one thing that did take some adjusting to is just how, melodramatic I suppose? All the POVs in the book feel very profoundly and effusively, and also have absolutely zero awareness or understanding of their own emotions. This is particularly acute with Wang and Madame Zhang, but in every case there’s just a lot of characters being driven by emotions too large to be contained within them. It kind of feels like a musical, in that respect (but absolutely no other, to be clear).

Anyways, this is a book with absolutely massive amounts of Gender in it. With like, literally one exception, every POV is to some great extent defined by struggling against their position in the gender system of medieval China, and all the issues doing so their entire lives has left them with (Zhu is far and away the most healthy and well-adjusted about this.) Importantly, being oppressed and marginalized for being a woman/effeminate man/eunuch is in no way edifying or ennobling – it’s mostly left everyone involved deeply damaged and full of coping mechanisms that serve them poorly and everyone around them far worse. There’s basically no mention of even the idea of solidarity among the oppressed here – Madame Zhang tortures, mutilates and kills her own maids and her husbands’ consorts whenever necessary, Wang operatic revenge plot involves befriending and seducing a queer prince knowing it will get him killed in the end, Ouyang hates how effeminate his body is and deals with this by becoming a pathological misogynist – even Zhu doesn’t spare much to think about the cause of woman’s liberation beyond herself and her wife.Given the state of a lot of modern genre lit I honestly found this rather refreshing.

As both cause and consequence of the choice of POVs, the book has a rather interesting relationship with normative masculinity. There’s, as far as I can tell, exactly two examples of successful heroic/virtuous normative masculinity in the book – General Zhang and the Grand Councillor of the Yuan – and despite both being really incredibly competent and fearsome on the battlefield and legitimately selfless and honorable, both end up condemned as traitors to their respective lieges (both indolent, vicious, and generally contemptible men without anything in the way of redeeming features, themselves) and dying unpleasantly after being outmanoeuvred in court intrigue. Victory in the end goes not to those who are cherished by their society but the ones who are overlooked and brutalized by it but are willing and able to do whatever it takes and use anything and everything they can to claw their way to the top despite it.

Speaking of – the overriding throughline of the story is what it means to be willing to do anything to achieve your life’s ambition. Being willing to endure pain and suffering goes without saying, and while the book does put its leads through the physical ringer, that’s not really what it’s interested in. Are you willing to spend the lives of those who trust and rely upon you? Sacrifice those you love, or ask them to die for you? Betray those who have only ever shown you kindness? Are you willing to degrade and humiliate yourself, or lie and betray your own hard-won and precarious identity? And once you’ve done all that, and finally achieved your heart’s desire – well, are you really sure it was all worth it? Three cases out of four in the book, at least, ended up regretting it in the end.

This is a book that’s very concerned with sex and sexuality but, like, very nearly exclusively in offputting or unpleasant ways. There’s something like a dozen sex scenes (okay, ‘scenes with sex in them’ is probably the less misleading description. If you come looking for porn you’ll be disappointed) in the book and of them I believe exactly one that you could characterize as enthusiastically consensual and mutually enjoyable. Maybe three, if you count the incredibly toxic relationship which boils down to asking for help dong self-harm and it turns into a sadomasochist thing. Which never becomes/is never understood as sexual by the people engaging in it but describing it is definitely the closest the book gets to erotica. In any event, just somewhat surprising to see so much sex paired with so little romance, relative to most modern stuff I’ve read. Ties into how alienated literally everyone is from their bodies, I suppose.

Also I really don’t know enough about the historical memory of the early Ming dynasty to know whether all the stuff about how Zhu knows what it’s like to be nothing and how she’ll reorder the world to care for everyone is supposed to read as really darkly ironic or not.

[nicklloydnow]

“With Trump’s victory, the left reached its zero point.

Before we plunge into platitudes about “Trump’s triumph,” we should note some important details. First, that Trump didn’t get more votes than he did in the 2020 election—it was Kamala Harris who lost some 10 million votes compared to Joe Biden last time around. So it isn’t so much that “Trump won big” as it is Harris who lost big. It follows that all leftist critics of Trump should begin with radical self-criticism.

We must dispense with the racial-essentialist cant that came to dominate progressivism in recent decades. Trump’s victory should leave little room for the tendency to valorize certain groups based on their skin color. Among the points to be noted here, there is the unpleasant fact that immigrants, especially from Latin countries, are almost inherently conservative: They come to the United States not to change it, but to succeed in the system. Or as Todd McGowan has put it: “They want to create a better life for themselves and their family, not to better their social order.”

By the same token, we must reject the notion that Harris lost because she is a nonwhite woman. No, Harris lost because Trump stood for politics and political contestation, while she stood for nonpolitics or antipolitics. She took many progressive stances, on health care, abortion, and more. However, Trump and his partisans repeatedly made clear, “extreme” statements, while Harris exceeded in avoiding difficult choices, offering empty rhetoric. In this respect, Harris is similar to Britain’s Keir Starmer, who just happened to have the great good fortune of going up against an unpopular incumbent party that had been in power for a decade and a half. Like Starmer, Harris avoided taking a clear stance on the Gaza war, thus losing support not only from hard-line Zionists, but also Muslim imams and community leaders.

What Democrats failed to learn from Trump is that, in a political battle, “extremism” works. In her concession speech, Harris said: “To the young people who are watching, it is OK to feel sad and disappointed, but please know it’s going to be OK.” No, everything is not going to be OK. We should not trust that future history will somehow restore balance or harmony. With Trump’s victory, the trend that elevated the new populist right in many European countries reaches its climax.

(…)

Here again, we should begin with a critique of Trump’s opponents. The philosopher Boris Buden rejects the predominant interpretation that sees the rise of the new right-populism as a regression to quasi-religious fanaticism caused by the failure of modernization. For Buden, religion as a political force is instead an effect of the post-political disintegration of society, of the dissolution of traditional mechanisms that guaranteed stable communal links: Fundamentalist religion—of the kind that fuels part of Trump’s base (even as he abandons its social-conservative commitments)—is not only political, it is politics itself, i.e., it sustains the space for politics.

Even more poignantly, it is no longer just a social phenomenon, but the very texture of society, so that in a way society itself becomes a religious phenomenon. It is thus no longer possible to distinguish the purely spiritual aspect of religion from its politicization: In a post-political universe, religion is the predominant space in which antagonistic passions return. What happened recently in the guise of religious fundamentalism is thus not the return of religion in politics, but simply the return of the political as such. So the true question is: Why did the political—in the radical secular sense, the great achievement of European modernity—lose its formative power?

(…)

Here, ideology enters the scene—not just ideology in the sense of ideas and guiding principles, but ideology in a more basic sense of how political discourse functions as a social link. Aaron Schuster has observed that Trump is “an overpresent leader whose authority is based on his own will and who openly disdains knowledge—it is this rebellious, anti-systemic theater that serves as the point of identification for the people.” This is why Trump’s serial insults and outright lies—not to mention the fact that he is a convicted criminal—work for him: His ideological triumph resides in the fact that his followers experience their obedience to him as a form of subversive resistance.

Here we should mobilize the Freudian notion of the “theft of enjoyment”: an Other’s enjoyment inaccessible to us (as woman’s enjoyment is for men, or another ethnic group’s enjoyment is for our group), or our rightful enjoyment stolen from us by an Other or threatened by an Other. Russel Sbriglia noticed that the “theft of enjoyment” played a crucial role when Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021: What happened on Jan. 6 wasn’t a coup attempt, but a carnival, previously the model for progressive protest movements, suddenly appropriated by the right. The idea that carnivals represent a subversion of the status quo not only in their form and atmosphere (theatrical performances, humorous chants), but also in their non-centralized organization, is deeply problematic: Is capitalist social reality itself not already carnivalesque? Was the Kristallnacht of 1938 not a carnival if there ever was one? Furthermore, is “carnival” not also the name for the obscene underside of power, from gang rapes to mass lynchings? Let us not forget that Michail Bakhtin developed the notion of carnival in his book on Rabelais written in the 1930s, as a direct reply to the carnival of the Stalinist purges.

The contrast between Trump’s official ideological message (conservative values, of a kind) and the style of his public performance (saying more or less whatever pops up in his head, insulting others and violating all rules of good manners) says a great deal about our predicament. What kind of world do we live in in which bombarding the public with indecent vulgarities presents itself as the last barrier to protect traditional values from the triumph of total permissiveness? Or as Alenka Zupančič put it, Trump isn’t a relic of the old moral-majority conservativism—rather, he is the caricatural inverted image of postmodern “permissive society” itself, a product of this society’s own antagonisms, contradictions, and inner limitations.

Adrian Johnston has proposed “a complementary twist on Jacques Lacan’s dictum according to which ‘repression is always the return of the repressed’: The return of the repressed sometimes is the most effective repression.” Is this not also a concise definition of the figure of Trump? As Freud said about perversion, in it, everything that was repressed, all repressed content, comes out in all its obscenity. But this return of the repressed only strengthens the repression. And this is also why there is nothing liberating in Trump’s obscenities: They merely strengthen social oppression and mystification. Trump’s obscene performances thus express the falsity of his populism: To put it with brutal simplicity, while acting as if he cares for the ordinary people, he promotes big capital.

How to account for the strange fact that Trump, lewd and the very opposite of Christian decency, can function as the chosen hero of the Christian conservatives? The explanation one usually hears is that, while Christian conservatives are well aware of the problematic character of Trump’s personality, they have resolved to ignore his seedy dimension, since what really matters to them is Trump’s agenda, especially his anti-abortion stance (though he played it down this time around). But are things as simple as that? What if the very duality of Trump’s personality—his ostensible support for traditional morality accompanied by personal lewdness and vulgarities—is precisely what makes him attractive to Christian conservatives? What if they secretly identify with this very duality? This, however, doesn’t mean that we should take too seriously the images that abound in our media of a typical Trumpian as an obscene fanatic. No, the vast majority of Trump voters are ordinary people who appear decent and talk in a normal, rational way. It is as if they externalize their madness and obscenity in Trump.

(…)

This coming-open of the obscene background of our ideological space in no way means that the time of mystification is over, that now ideology openly displays its cards. On the contrary, when obscenity penetrates the public scene, ideological mystification is at its strongest: The true political, economic, and ideological stakes are more invisible than ever. Public obscenity is always sustained by a concealed moralism. Its practitioners secretly believe they are fighting for a cause, and it is at this level that they should be attacked.

Recall the sheer number of times that liberal media outlets crowed that Trump was finally caught with pants down, that he had finally committed a public suicide (mocking POWs, boasting about pussy-grabbing, etc.). Arrogant liberal commentators were shocked at how their continuous attacks on Trump’s vulgar outbursts didn’t hurt him at all, but maybe even enhanced his popular appeal. They missed how identification works: We as a rule identify with the other’s weaknesses, not only or even not principally with his strengths. So the more Trump’s limitations were mocked, the more ordinary people identified with him and perceived attacks on him as condescending attacks on themselves.

The subliminal message to ordinary people of Trump’s vulgarities was: I am one of you! This, while ordinary Trump supporters felt constantly humiliated by the liberal elite’s patronizing attitude towards them. Or as Alenka Zupančič put it succinctly: “The extremely poor do the fighting for the extremely rich, as it was clear in the election of Trump. And the left does little else than scold and insult them.” Indeed, the left does what is even worse: It patronizingly “understands” the confusion and blindness of the poor. This left-liberal arrogance explodes at its purest in the political-comedy shows anchored by the likes of Jon Stewart and John Oliver.

(…)

The problem isn’t that Trump is a clown. The problem is that there is a program behind his provocations, a method in his madness. Trump’s (and others’) vulgar obscenities are part of their populist strategy to sell this program to ordinary people, a program that—in the long term, at least—works against ordinary people: lower taxes for the rich, shoddier health care and diminished bargaining power for workers. Unfortunately, people are ready to swallow many things if these are presented to them through obscene laughter and false solidarity.

The ultimate irony of Trump’s project is that MAGA effectively amounts to its opposite: Make the United States another local superpower interacting on equal footing with other new local superpowers (Russia, India, China). An EU diplomat was right to point out that, with Trump’s victory, Europe should no longer act as Washington’s “fragile little sister.” Will Europe find the strength to oppose MAGA with something that could be called MEGA—make Europe great again—by resuscitating its radical emancipatory legacy?

The lesson of Trump’s victory is the opposite of what many liberal leftists advocated: Whatever remains of the left should get rid of its fear that it will lose centrist voters if they are perceived as too “extreme.” The left should clearly distinguish itself from the “progressive” liberal center and its corporate-friendly woke-ism. To do this brings its own risks, of course: The state itself might be divided between three or more factions, with no big governing coalition capable of taking form. However, taking this risk is the only way forward.

Hegel wrote that through its repetition, a historical event asserts its necessity. When Napoleon lost in 1813 and was exiled to Elba, this defeat may have appeared as something contingent: With better military strategy, he might have won. But when he returned to power again and lost at Waterloo, it became clear that his time was over, that his defeat was grounded in a deeper historical necessity. The same goes for Trump: His first victory could still be attributed to tactical mistakes, but now that he has won again, it should become clear that Trumpian populism expresses a historical necessity.

A sad conclusion thus imposes itself. Many commentators expect that Trump’s reign will be marked by catastrophic events, but the worst option is that there will be no great shocks: Trump will try to finish the ongoing wars (not least by imposing a peace on Ukraine); the economy will remain stable and perhaps even thrive; tensions will be attenuated; life will go on…. However, a whole series of federal and local measures will continuously undermine the existing liberal-democratic social pact and change the basic texture that holds together the United States—unraveling what Hegel called Sittlichkeit, the set of unwritten customs and rules that underpin politeness, truthfulness, social solidarity, political rights, and so on. This new world will appear as a new normality, and in this sense, Trump’s second reign may well bring about the end of what was most precious in our civilization.”

“On Tuesday, American men showed that they weren’t buying what the Harris-Walz campaign was selling. Donald Trump, liberal America’s avatar of toxic masculinity, won male voters by a margin of 10 percentage points to 13 points, depending on the survey. Harris won women, but by a much smaller seven or eight points. Men without a college degree supported Trump by 22 points. White men supported him by 20 points to 23 points, again depending on the survey. And white men without a college degree, those the Harris campaign hoped would see themselves in “America’s coach,” favored Trump by an overwhelming 38 points to 40 points.

The most impressive gendered result of the election has to be the response of young men. According to The Wall Street Journal, men aged 18 to 29 supported Joe Biden in 2020 by 15 points. In 2024, they favored Donald Trump by 14 points, an astounding 29-point swing in a single election. CNN found a much smaller Trump lead among young men of two points, but even this is a significant transformation. Democrats long believed that young people were their electoral Superman, weakened only by the kryptonite of indifference. If they could get these young voters to the polls, victory would be assured. This election just cast those illusions onto the ash heap of history.

(…)

In the end, liberal women in the media had the better measure of Minnesota’s governor. Rebecca Traister lauded Walz as an example of the emergent “Democratic man newly confident in his equal-to-subsidiary status.” Karrin Vasby Andersen praised Walz for “stepping back” and playing “contented second fiddle.” Alyce Collins acclaimed his “positive masculinity” for “showing more traditionally feminine traits” and “letting women take center stage.” Judy Berman echoed this in complimenting Walz’s “gentle form of masculinity.” Joy Reid dubbed it downright “21st century.” American women seemed to admire Walz’s masculinity far more so than did American men. Like those in 2016 who described Donald Trump as a poor man’s idea of a rich man, Walz proved to be a professional-managerial-class woman’s idea of a working-class man.

Already by mid-October, Team Harris was running low on joy. Democrats started playing hardball to close the gender gap with men. Barack Obama scolded black men in Pennsylvania for their lack of enthusiasm for the Harris-Walz campaign, explicitly accusing “the brothers” of misogyny. In Michigan, Michelle Obama tried to shame men with abortion rights, rebuking those considering a vote for Trump for treating women as “just baby-making vessels” and turning them into “collateral damage to your rage.” In the waning days of the campaign, the Democratic super PAC Progress Action Fund targeted young men with ad buys on social media warning them—in graphic terms—that their consumption of pornography and emergency contraception was at stake. Democrats were right to be worried. White men increased their vote for Trump at most by one percentage point. Black men added around 12 points, doubling their support from 2020. Hispanic men shifted to the right by anywhere from nine points to a shocking 17 points.

(…)

Americans might be consoled by the fact that, on the female side, the gender gap has actually shrunk over the Trump era. According to Pew Research analysis of validated voters, Hillary Clinton enjoyed a 15-point advantage among women in 2016, compared to 11 points for Biden in 2020. As noted earlier, current surveys for the 2024 race show Harris’s advantage among women down to seven or eight points. Men were also becoming less polarized over time. In 2016, Trump enjoyed an 11-point advantage among them, compared to two points in 2020. Some Democrats interpret the 2024 election’s return to 2016 levels among men as an undoubtable sign of misogyny. They would do better to instead see it as a reaction against those same Democrats’ attempts to scold, shame, denigrate, and manipulate men on the grounds of being men. Democrats don’t get to decide who is allowed to play gender politics; sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Turning the temperature down—way down—on gender politics will not only help Democrats in the future. It will help America as a whole.”

[windwardstar]

i need people to start recognizing and including trans people beyond the transmasc transfemme binary. there are so many nonbinary people being misgendered or left out by this.

and if you think "I'm including nonbinary people i said transmasc/transfemme and not man/woman" I want you to realize. you are either denying someone's transness or misgendering them if you think that honestly includes everyone.

when you treat transmasc = trans afab and transfemme = trans amab it means either you are forcing everyone into one of the two binary alignments and misgendering them, or you're leaving them out entirely and denying their existence (because you don't think they're trans enough.)

transneutral enbies exist. transoutherine and transxenine and so many more alignments and unalignments both with labels and without exist. And their experiences overlap.

trandandrophobia doesn't just affect transmascs! That's true and not at all reason to discredit it (in fact in bolsters the existence of it, because a systemic issue is systemic and affects everyone in a system to one degree or another), but somehow the recognition of that goes to cis women, to intersex people, to trans women and femmes. And the alternatively and unaligned nonbinary people get ignored (erased because there's recognition of their existence).

forced detransitioning via forced pregnancy is something that happens to nonbinary people with uteruses too. treated like you're a gender traitor and betraying womanhood is something that happens to nonbinary people who aren't transmascs and also don't identify with womanhood. the demonization of "masculine" traits like beard and deep voices affects people who aren't just trans men and mascs. there are people who have issues accessing safe restrooms and gynecological care and shelters and queer spaces because they're deemed too masculine who aren't trans men or mascs.

There are nonbinary people on T and E and who are getting all kinds of surgeries who are getting misgendered when you refer to all of those things as transmasculine bottom surgery or feminine hrt.

TMA and TME is a shit dichotomy because it sorts people based on agab (which we all agreed was bad?) and then dictates other people's relationship to oppression and discrimination instead of being grounded in the reality that your actual identity doesn't prevent bigots from targeting you based on perceived violations of the gender binary.

is a demigirl transmasc or transfemme? (transneutral and other alignments exist, but what if this person feels the gender alignment is feminine and trans? Can she call herself transfemme? does it depend on agab? (i thought we were trying to avoid sorting people into binaries based on agab) does it depend on if they're intersex? (you're still sorting people based on agab, unless they get a special exemption for being intersex and revealing that personal medical information about themselves to prove they're worthy of violating the binary you're still trying to enforce).

just. stop trying to force everything into a binary. recognize that nonbinary people exist and that any experience you can think of is going to have people of all different kinds of identities experiencing it or relating to it and you cannot achieving meaningful breakdown of the gender binary by recreating it.