#and I don’t identify with that anymore. she is more of a caricature of who I used to be and not who I am now

[the-dalseum-duet]

@svwhssftr

oh god satis is making bad plot AND life decisions again

she’s referring to herself in third person too!! in her pen name to dodge all responsibility! scary scary shit

look. @svwhssftr I’m going to need you to read this entire post like i am a sinking my nails into your shoulders and staring deep into your eyes. this is my evil scientist monologue. i have been method acting for The Sharpest Lives of Shiver and Murder for too long. Wearing my vans and baggy pants and dark eyeliner when I can. Listening to nothing but music pre-2009 with the exception of a random song here and there. I am in every sense becoming a true #emo. how else am i supposed to explain that I’m unironically listening to cobra starship.

idk if other writers do this but i do method act. for my projects. like i will dress slightly different and change my behavior depending on which character/scene I’m focused on for usually around week at a time. this might be autism this might be commitment we may never know

but i am holding myself back. i haven’t been writing because… forced to lock in… but also I need a silly distraction right now so bad. I’m losing my shit as you have seen. I need a savior and my savior is in the form of a trashy 2000s au.

I need your permission to fuck these bitches up. I did this before and it ended in sheer utter fucking disaster. We already have one plot line inspired by Pretty Little Liars but I need to fully commit to the WHAT THE FUCKery that is about to ensue. You’ve already seen some fucked shit (shoutout to Kai stating that he would watch Noeul rape Charlie’s dead body just for the fun of it. really loved writing that) but that’s like… so outlandish that it’s stupid. He’s a government official of course he’s going to be immoral. But I know you’re fine with me fucking around w Kai because he’s kinda written to be that way. He’s a bitchass fucker (affectionate). But Mako is our sweet angel baby. I see a darkness in him though. I see things I never wanted to see. And I have to unleash it diva I need to free him. I have no evil plans at the moment (outside of the next chapter which is really predictable despite one ridiculous thing he says that is quickly turned around) but I can’t guarantee that it won’t spiral after that.

I need you to know that I do not condone any of what is about to happen. But damn it. Trashy 2000s teen drama plots are so fun to write and consume because they’re so absurd. I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about rn but I just felt the need to let you know. And get your blessing to put these little guys in some Situations. If you want a sneak peek at some of the things I have in mind. Don’t worry. I have a time period accurate playlist completed for Shiver n Murder. Interpret the songs and their placements however you wish

this is the link: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1TRXqUGa4xaa5d0EQqfyYP?si=rEfYrUY6R8mGL3pBjDHtpw&pi=DayKmpzrQiy2Q

[crossedtheline]

Character Inspiration

Since Jinx is an original character, I’d like to talk a bit about how I went about creating him and my interpretation of Cassandra from Tangled The Series. 

From the wikipedia;

“Cassandra is a major character in the Tangled franchise. She is the deuteragonist of the Disney Channel film, Tangled: Before Ever After, and the tritagonist of its follow-up series. She is the biological daughter of Mother Gothel who was abandoned as a child when Gothel kidnapped Princess Rapunzel and hid away from the world.”

As she wasn’t a villain for the whole series, pre-NRU I wanted Jinx to already go on an arc that would put him in the same headspace while he was actually at school. By season 3, Cassandra’s major motivation for turning to the darkside was (besides manipulation from the series main antagonist) her relationship to Rapunzel and how she was underestimated and overlooked by so many others in the main cast. From her perspective, she spent a very long time watching Rapunzel get rewarded for the very fact of her existence, while she fought for every scrap of respect and power. When she found out her mother was Gothel and she abandoned her to be with Rapunzel, she reached her breaking point. She was neglected by her birth mother, abandoned, raised to be a servant for the royal family, and when she tried to pursue her happiness, she was repeatedly held back by the same princess she was a servant of and who had “stolen” her mother. So naturally, she chose to lash out. 

Her story is so deeply intertwined with Rapunzel’s that I decided to give Jinx someone to compete with, his twin brother. They also embody the duality that Cass and Rapunzel represent, the moonstone and the sundrop, destruction and creation. If they were to be raised as brothers, however, there had to be a reason Jinx was treated as less than. 

The Curse

This event is derived directly from Cassandra’s feelings of being denied some great destiny and eventually coming to seize power for herself. From S3E1 “Rapunzel’s Return” Song: Crossing the Line:

“And that line between the beggars and the choosers Is a line you've never let me quite ignore How I've tried to jump that great divide But I've never got the chances you were given

You don't know how much I've been denied Well, I'm not being patient anymore”

From a young age he was denied something so fundamental for his ability to live and thrive in the world, and is probably one of the first divisions placed between him and his brother. The talented one and the cursed one. 

His lack of magic becomes a driving reason for him to take his leave later and contact the elder witch of the wood (based on Zhan Tiri in my head) to break his curse. Over years of being overlooked, insulted, manipulated, he becomes pressured to find a solution rather than stay trapped. So like Cassandra, he chooses the villain’s path (attending Night Raven) to try and change his circumstances. He desperately wanted to become more powerful because for far too long he wasn’t given his due. 

An Orphan

Both Cassandra and Rapunzel’s stories hinge on the absence of parents and them being raised by other people. However, I don’t really enjoy stories where the evil guardian is totally unrelated to the children*. It is rarer, in my experience, to see stories where the biological family is bad, so I killed off the parents and sent them to live with their grandmother.

*This is also a set-up in the Tangled movie that plays into antisemitic tropes. Whether intentional or not, Mother Gothel has some features people have identified as Jewish (dark curly hair, dark eyes, hooked nose, etc.) in direct contrast to a blonde haired, green eyed protagonist. Her stealing a baby for her own selfish gain seems like an interpretation of the blood libel stereotype. I seek to amend this in my lore by making them blood related, not portraying their grandmother’s appearance as a caricature, and giving Jinx and Lucian some of the same features. 

Part 2 coming soon

[diarrheaworldstarhiphop]

Five years ago, while a student at Columbia, Sulkowicz lugged a dorm-issue, extra-long twin mattress around campus for as long as she had to attend school with her alleged rapist. This was Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight), a globally viral art piece that made visible the weight of campus sexual assault. It transformed Sulkowicz into an icon. Since then, her artworks have regularly roused the internet: a video of her reenacting her assault, a bondage performance at the Whitney that doubled as institutional critique. This past spring, she tweeted an image that was perhaps even more provocative: a photo of her grinning alongside two of her libertarian critics — not performance art, she insists, but a byproduct of her new curiosity about other views.

“All my clothes are in boxes,” she tells me, gesturing apologetically to her oversize charcoal hoodie. She’s in the midst of moving from a sublet owned by a tantra instructor (mirrors surrounding the bed to create an infinite regression — that kind of thing) to an apartment in lower Manhattan whose location she asks me not to reveal, since “there’s some really scary people who are obsessed with me.” Her hair is short-cropped and coffee black, its natural color after years of bright dyes, and her voice is buoyant, laughter always bubbling underneath. Since 2016, Sulkowicz has identified as gender fluid, and she sometimes uses they/them pronouns. When I ask what to use for this article, she texts me, “Lol I’m not clear about it either,” before settling on she/her.

During the summer of 2018, Sulkowicz tells me, she was single for the first time in years. Swiping through Tinder, a man she found “distasteful” super-liked her. “It smelled like Connecticut,” she says of his profile. “He was very blond, law school, cut jawline, trapezoidal body figure, tweed suit kind of vibe, but something inside of me made me swipe right, I don’t know.” They began messaging, and she found him witty. “He was actually way more fun to talk to than any other person I matched with.”

Eventually, Sulkowicz stalked him on Twitter and realized that he was conservative — “like, very conservative.” At first, she was repulsed and considered breaking it off. But then she thought, “Wait, actually, that’s kind of fucked up because he’s the most interesting person I’ve come across, shouldn’t I be open to talking to him?” After dispelling her initial fear, she texted him that it would be “interesting (progressive? Powerful?) for two people who might be the antithesis of each other to go on a Tinder date.”

Ahead of this date, they traded reading assignments: Sulkowicz gave him the password to protected areas of her website, and he sent pieces he’d written for conservative magazines, which she printed, annotated with her critiques, and brought to their date. This man expected Sulkowicz to be “the patron saint of wokeness,” but when he met her, he found that she wasn’t actually trying to litigate the issues — she was mostly just “curious about this different perspective that she had not been as familiar with.” The two “sort of dated” for a while and then realized that their chemistry was more conversational. They became “amazing friends.”

Not having known conservatives before, Sulkowicz had to play catch up. Early in their friendship, she asked him to recommend one book to help her understand him, and he picked Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. It’s a book that explains, in evolutionary terms, the human tendency toward political tribalism and the importance, in light of that, of learning from one another’s beliefs. She calls the book “mind-opening.” Its resonance with her new friendship did not escape her.

Shortly after, Sulkowicz attended a book talk of Haidt’s. This was for The Coddling of the American Mind, which diagnoses the campus left with the kinds of cognitive distortions that addle the chronically anxious and depressed: a tendency to blow everyday problems out of proportion, or to believe that one’s negative feelings reflect reality. This book kicked a hornet’s nest on the left, and when Haidt learned that Sulkowicz was at his talk, he didn’t assume she was a fan. “I expected her to be the sort of person who sometimes asks the angry question when I give lectures on campuses,” Haidt tells me. “And when I first saw her and she had blue hair, that fed my assumptions and expectations about what her views and values would be.” But Sulkowicz surprised him. “It changed the way I think about politics,” she said about The Righteous Mind, “and I wanted to thank you for it.” The two became friends.

Soon, she began attending house parties and happy hours with conservative and libertarian intellectuals, reading Jordan Peterson and articles from the National Review. In the past, Sulkowicz dismissed opposing views without understanding them, but now she sees intellectual curiosity as intertwined with respect: she wants to disagree with people on their own terms. This is an ethical position, but one with personal resonance. “I’ve always been upset,” she admits, “that there are people out there who assume that I’m a bad or mean person without ever having met me.” When she describes her political journey, she fixates on the experience of surprising people, of walking into a group who might otherwise dislike her and “disrupting their expectations.” At these parties, she reflects, “I can become fuller to certain people rather than staying the same caricature. I’m going from flat to round.”

- - -

A couple weeks after our lunch, Sulkowicz brings me to a book party at a dark bar on Bleecker Street. Here, she introduces me to her friend from Tinder, who asks that I not use his real name for this article. (It might be a distraction at his white-shoe law firm and, besides, “Emma is inured to online hate, but I am not.”) When he asks if he can choose his own pseudonym, I tell him sure. He picks Chad. It’s a reference to the incel term for men who, due to serendipitous genetics, are attractive enough to have oodles of sex. All of us laugh, but Sulkowicz laughs loudest, her voice tinkling, bell-like, and leaping between octaves.

Chad is a Chad, by the way, and he does “smell like Connecticut”: he has cornsilk hair, a shieldlike chest, and a jawline that an incel might show his surgeon for inspiration. But Chad is also a different kind of conservative than I imagined. Rather than a bowtie-sporting William F. Buckley type thumbing his nose at populism, he finds Reaganism laughably passé and aligns himself with Tucker Carlson’s anti-elite drive to regulate markets. He says that he would support some of Trump’s policy agenda, if only the president were competent enough to achieve it.

This party is for Robby Soave, a libertarian reporter on the snowflake beat whose new book, Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump, is — per Soave’s own description — “a book that is extremely critical of [Sulkowicz] and that I don’t wish her to read.” Soave met Sulkowicz a month or so before at another libertarian happy hour. Initially bewildered, he warmed to her, finding her to be inquisitive and even fun to talk to. “We exchanged contact information,” he tells me later, “and talked about maybe becoming, I guess, friends or something?” He laughs incredulously as he says this, sounding a bit on edge.

As Sulkowicz swirls around the party, her presence stirs an obvious question: whether this is performance art. Soave brings it up twice when we speak on the phone afterward, acknowledging the possibility that he’s being set up. While he’s inclined to believe that Sulkowicz is moved by earnest curiosity, he’s aware of her background in “elaborately planned performance art” and her reputation as a provocateur. Since graduating from Columbia in 2015, Sulkowicz has done around a dozen performances touching on issues like consent, anti-institutionalism, climate change, trauma, wellness, and female sexual desire. It’s natural to wonder if she’s currently breaking bread with this crowd to lampoon civility politics or to expose views she hates. Honestly, it might be harder to believe that she’s simply trying to learn.

But Sulkowicz is adamant that this isn’t performance. In fact, she insists that she’s quitting art altogether. After one of our lunches, she bikes off to return the keys to her studio, which she’s emptied and swept clean. “For many years,” she explains, “I wasn’t interested in listening to other points of view. I was very emotional and making performance-art pieces that were very reactionary and fiery.” Without disowning them, she describes these artworks as something she “got out of her system.”

Having found the art world humorless, narrow-minded, and grotesquely competitive, Sulkowicz says she stopped making art about a year ago. She quit a fellowship at a museum, ceased teaching art classes, and was essentially unemployed for a time, drawing income from occasional speaking gigs, mostly about campus sexual assault. (Her remarks on Me Too have been fewer; she supports it, but wants a clearer path to forgiveness.) She has been working on a memoir that draws on her diaries from Mattress Performance, and last month, she started a full-time, four-year master’s program in traditional Chinese medicine. There, she’ll learn skills from acupuncture to herbalism, which have been her “personal healing modality” for years. Sulkowicz has parried assumptions that this is performance art, too. It grates on her. “I’m a human and humans can change,” she says, insistently. “I’m telling you that I don’t want to make art anymore.”

But in some ways, it’s easier to assume that Sulkowicz’s political posture is performance art: this provides a clear motive, one that’s politically straightforward. If Sulkowicz is not making art, then it’s much harder to grasp why she’s doing this and what it means. Part of the confusion, Sulkowicz assumes, springs from a pervasive misunderstanding about who she is, rooted in the dissonance between her public image and private consciousness. While many assume she’s at Soave’s book party for some admixture of art and progressive politics, Sulkowicz says she’s mostly there for fun.

[suhmayzooka]

cursed child broadway, December 28, 2019

my sister (S) and i were fortunate enough to get tickets for the third row, right by the aisle, making us right in the center.  I was a bit worried about the seats being so close to the stage, but it was absolutely amazing to be so close to the action. it was immersive, and i felt like i was part of the action.

S is my polar opposite.  she’s not a potterhead, for starters, and likes to call me (and everyone else in the theater, especially those in cosplay) a loser.  she’s heavily involved with her school’s theater -- acting and stage crew -- and i call her a theater nerd.  she’s an aspiring actress, and almost gave my mom a heart attack when she announced her plan to study acting in college (they compromised, and now S intends to major in psychology in addition to acting).  i didn’t know she was interested in cursed child since she eschews all ‘nerdy’ things, but she said that she ‘wanted to see how bad it was.’

she’s been the only extrovert in our family since she was born. she’s a hatstall between gryffindor and slytherin (although she identifies with the lion).  if you’re reading this, i’m assuming you like cursed child and perhaps are involved with the fandom.  ever read the tea time series on ao3? S is lily luna.  she’s the embodiment of how everyone writes lily luna.  she cursed out our dad a few days ago.  she made me spend the equivalent of two hours of work on fucking soda and popcorn because she didn’t listen to me when i told her to pack a clif bar.  this is what i put up with.

she actually enjoyed the show!  i was shocked.  she loved the effects.

after part one, she turned to me and went, “please just tell me one thing: do albus or scorpius die?”

i was surprised by her question.

she explained: “because at this point all i care about is their romance, and if they don’t get together or if they die i’m leaving the theater.”

this is coming from someone who ranted to me about how she doesn’t understand why people ship non-canon pairings since ‘not every friendship has to be romance.’ and here she was genuinely invested in scorbus? my heart…

i’m a good big sister, so i told her really vague statements like “our heroes will find themselves in danger several times during this act...” “one person’s pain is used to inflict pain on the other” and similar things.  eventually, she became convinced that scorpius would be revealed to be voldemort’s son and harry would accidentally kill him. not sure how she came up with that.

i guess everyone caught the plague? the coughing would Not stop.  S started making fun of them. and it’s like...everyone was a-okay during wand dance.  there were no coughs in the opening choreography for part two.  no, everyone had to succumb to coughing fits during the quiet, emotional moments.

“i always wanted a best mate to get up to mayhem with--”

COUGHCOUGHPHLEGMCOUGHHACKHACKHACKPHLEGMPHELGMCOUGHCOUGH

“--you’re my best friend--”

COUGHCOUGHPHLEGMCOUGHHACKHACKHACKPHLEGMPHELGMCOUGHCOUGH

for every. emotional. scene. maybe they were choked up on their tears.

at the last minute we decided to do stage door.  as in, we had already left the theater, saw the line outside, and were like, “sure.” unfortunately we had left our playbills in the theater since my hands were occupied holding her soda and popcorn since apparently she’s incapable of doing so…

i’m using google and my shitty facial recognition to remember who was who.  we (she) spoke to zell steele morrow (young harry), karen janes woditsch (mcgonagall), nadia brown (rose), james snyder (harry), and nicholas podany (albus).  unfortunately, we had to catch our train and left just as jonno roberts (draco) came out :( i think he was S’s favorite.

anyway here are my (our) thoughts:

1. Characters

~nicholas podany is a really good albus! he’s very mischievous, and you can see the wheels in his head turning as he comes up with his (increasingly more ridiculous) plans.  whenever he comes up with an idea he looks at scorpius like :O and it gets funnier as the play goes on.

~bubba weiler is a lot of fun. he’s very physical actor, and he really hams it up.  his scorpius is meant to be seen rather than read.  most of the comic relief is written for scorpius, and there seemed to be roars of laughter after every other line.  he shook his hips at “MALFOOYYYY THE UNAANXIOUSSS” and (exaggeratedly) pretended to march in place for “MY GEEKNESS IS A-QUIVERING!!” he purred at rose.  he flailed his entire body around when he was crucio-d :( one thing i noticed was how he carried himself.  scorpius spent a lot of time sitting hunched over, rocking slightly back and forth (most noticeable when he was introduced, but he hunched over and rocked on the staircase several times as well). when he stands he’s rubbing his thumbs or the hems of his robes.  his leg was bouncing nonstop in the library scene.  anyway what i’m trying to say is scorpius malfoy is neurodivergent. ableists don’t interact.

~for some reason S says that both scorpius and albus are unlikeable, but they’re cute together.  she was very proud when scorpius yelled at albus for being “the most terrible friend.”

~the chemistry between scorbus is There. it’s clear podany and weiler are close friends irl; they’re extremely comfortable together and play off each other really well.  

~matt mueller is great as ron. he works well with what he’s been given...not his fault thorne/tiffany decided to make ron a caricature with very little resemblance to canon ron...but that’s a rant for another day :] he’s delightful on stage.  he’s funny and charming.

~i’ll admit i wasn’t really feeling jenny jules as hermione, at least in part one.  she’s really playful, especially in the scene in her office where she offers harry a “to~fee~!” she was really great in the dark timeline, however.

~my romione heart

~the man himself, james snyder as harry potter!  was um, very shouty? very angry all the time.  he’s under a lot of stress.  his son disappeared in time.  i’ll let it slide.

~jonno roberts was literally draco malfoy.  his sneer, his swagger, everything was absolutely as i imagined draco 20 years in the future would be.  he’s so protective of scorpius...when the adults travel back to 1981 to find their sons, he picks scorpius up as they hug? and then instead of breaking apart, he sort of...put one arm around scorpius’s neck? like a backwards neck travel pillow thing. scorpius held his arm as draco looked around behind him for any danger.  it was really cute.

~diane davis was a really protective ginny.  all the fiery ginny from the books that was absent from the films made its way into her.  

2. Scenes

~one criticism i have is the fact that everyone speaks really quickly.  it’s a five hour play and i get that they’re trying to contain all the dialogue within that time but like...it’s a dialogue-heavy show.  i knew what was going on since i’m familiar with the script and the story, but there were parts when S and other members of the audience were confused. this was especially noticeable during the trolley witch scene.  literally nothing could be heard over the music and the sound effects, and several people around us were audibly confused and asking each other what was happening.  i mean, it doesn’t make a lot more sense with the dialogue, but at least let us hear what the characters are saying!

~podany, snyder, and (at times) weiler were the worst offenders.  weiler’s good at physical comedy, punctuating his iconic lines with clownlike movements for laughs since no one would know what he’s saying otherwise.  e.g. “we stand over the baby and scream” was almost inaudible, so we just heard “HEEELLLPPP HEEEEELLLP!” it was effective since the whole theater laughed, i guess. take this with a grain of salt; we were only a few feet away from the stage, so maybe our audio wasn’t the best.  

~roberts was crystal clear at all times

~S fell in love with scorbus during the staircase ballet.  if you’ve seen that one clip from this cast you know why.  the YEARNING.

~the LIBRARY scene! i reblogged audio of this a few months ago. oh my god, it’s perfect.  it hits the emotional highs and lows.  when albus said, “i wasn’t a loser before i met you,” there was a collective gasp and we all “OOOOOOOOOOH”-ed.  everyone was invested in this. weiler’s performance is really emotional, he’s holding back tears, i’m holding back tears. podany’s gets so soft when he talks about how kind he is.  i actually clenched my heart. “friends?” “always.” audience: “OOOOOOOOOH!”

~i can confirm that myrtle’s “girls...AND BOYS” is directed straight at albus.  his eyes widen, and he sheepishly shrugs his shoulders and is very excited to change the topic.

~scorpius’s imaginary friend was named hector.  idk if he improvises it every time, or if he decided to change it to hector from flurry, but his delivery was great.  sweetly: “oh, i had one of those too!” scathing hiss: “HECTOR.”

~the biggest jumpscare of the play was when scorpius emerged from the lake at the end of part one.  it was all dark, and then he shoots out of the water, gasping. i jumped.

~voldemort walked down the aisle right next to us.  S was terrified that he’s jump or touch her, so she curled up next to me.

~i was interested in how the penultimate scene would play out, since i heard that weiler and podany really play up their relationship, but scorpius had spent every scene with rose purring at her.  she came and imitated a scorpion when she said “scorpion king,” curving her hand and making a hissing noise, which elicited a few “oohs” from the audience.  then the Hug...the “new version of us” line is said as they hug, and they just. stood there for a few moments, hugging.  when albus goes “you better ask rose” scorpius looks up at him and blinks, goes, “.........uh oh yeah, rose….” and goes off stage.  right before he exits he looks at albus, and albus keeps watching him after he leaves. uhh anyway scorbus is canon and so is pollyrose

~“dad...i don’t want to be a wizard anymore.” (dead silence) “i want to go into pigeon racing” *breaks into the biggest shit-eating grin and cracks up*.  the last shot is harry holding albus as he silently weeps.  Ookay.

~due to several instances of childhood trauma, my sister’s biggest fear is birds (especially chickens, ostriches, and...pigeons).  she didn’t know why people laughed at harry’s confession that he was afraid of pigeons, because to her that’s a valid fear.  we saw a pigeon in the train station and she almost cried.

3. Stage door

~S did most of the talking.  she told everyone “so sorry we don’t have our playbill! you did such a great job!” and then struck up mini conversations.  i stood nodding like “good job!” looking like this :]

~first up was (i believe) zell steele morrow! he’s so cute and was really upbeat.  S finally found someone shorter than her…

~karen janes woditsch asked what houses we’re in.  S was like “gryffindor!” and she smiled, i told her “ravenclaw” and she was like, “well...i love all my students equally….”

~i didn’t recognize james snyder since he was dressed like he was in the arctic.  neither did S.

~nadia brown was so sweet!  you could tell she really loved seeing fans.  there was a group behind us in line who apparently were here for their third viewing, and they conversed like they were old friends.

~nicholas podany came out wearing a t shirt. in december.  i was cold because i forgot to wear gloves and he came out in a t shirt.  the group behind us asked if he was cold and he said that he was hot from running around the stage.  S told him that he did great, she asked how long he was performing (ten months since february) and her response was “oh, that makes sense, you were good!” he went on about how he loves performing, how each night is different based on the crowd and how we were such a great crowd, and i could feel S like. sinking into the sidewalk. i just nodded at him and went “good job.”

~he’s my height, maybe slightly shorter (i’m 5’6/167 cm) and very pale.  i think S has a crush on him since she wants to go back to “apologize for being so awkward.” growing up she had a crush on daniel radcliffe, too, so i guess she has a thing for potters.

~the group behind us went on about how much they loved harry potter, had been fans their whole lives, etc. podany’s apparently a huge potterhead, but not the biggest in the cast: they all came together to see who was the biggest potterhead, and the answer is the actor who plays cedric (forgot his name and the internet isn’t helping, sorry!) -- his tv (?) remote is in the shape of a wand! the rest of them are nerdy enough to fact-check the director lmao

~we didn’t get to actually speak with jonno roberts, but we saw him interacting with other fans.  he seems like a cool guy.

[valehirvas]

Hi! I need help understanding what Is gender dysphoria from a transsexual perspective because I'm confuse at my own experiences and the doctors I've seen viewerd dysphoria as only wanting to/believing you are the opposite sex and nothing more

I’m not an expert on this obviously, all I’ve got is just my own experience.

For me, it’s primarily a strong desire and a feeling of “should be” about male sex characteristics. As a child, I would often cry in my bed looking forwards in my life thinking it was already over because I wasn’t a boy, not because being a girl to me was bad in itself - I didn’t view it as limitating or see myself as lesser in any shape or form, I just didn’t feel like my body was as it should have been and the thought of never physically becoming a boy was crushing to me. This came along with various stupid childish misadventures like trying to learn to pee like a boy to feel more comfortable: let’s just say that one ended up in a disaster. I also quite classically tried to explain to my mother how I felt - that I wasn’t like a “girl girl”, I was more a boy girl. Something like that.

I didn’t have social dysphoria at this stage, because I’m very privileged in the sense that my parents and most adults around me allowed me to be exactly who I was, and those who found me disagreeable and too boyish never explicitly made it a gender issue, so I was blissfully unaware of the idea that girls weren’t supposed to act the way I was acting. I was very much a tomboy, but I was never made to feel like this was a bad thing, it was just who I was. I was in a lot of minor trouble often because of how active and curious I was as a kid, but nothing worse than doing what other adventurous kids were getting up to. For example, we liked breaking into the sewer system to chase frogs. Our parents HATED it, for obvious reasons. Things like that. But these were hardly things that only boys got into, and my friend group was rather equally split between the sexes at the time, so yeah, no, my social dysphoria did not exist at this time.

With puberty, things got a lot rougher. It’s tough to tell how much of it was because of dysphoria and how much of it was because of abuse in my life; I was targeted by a school teacher who made my life hell and triggered my depression at the ripe old age of 11, and ever since things were just really difficult for me.

I was still struggling with wanting to be a boy; I only had male role models, only male ideals of what I wanted to grow up to be, in terms of media and idols. I desperately wanted facial hair. Meanwhile, I was being raised by a single mother, and my experience with men was dreadful, and puberty chased off my male friends so I was left living in an all-female bubble, pretty much. I didn’t feel separate from it, but I was certainly different. My friends went down a more traditionally feminine path while I was a clusterfuck of alternative fashion and obscure interests.

My biggest “oh” moment was when I was about 12 years old and for the first time approached my mom to buy my own set of clothes - I’d secretly wanted to dress up as one of the boys for a long time, but this was the first time I really got to try it out. Being a skater was in because this was the early 2000s, so I bought a large t-shirt and a pair of skate shoes, and yes, a skateboard, and when I looked into the mirror like that, I felt like I was in heaven. I felt like things were finally going right and that this was who I wanted to be, that this was who I was supposed to be.

When I was 14, I met my first trans person. I had a terrible crush on him, he was a couple years older than me and identified as an FtM. The year was, what, 2005? I knew instantly that I was the same as him, but it scared me so badly I swore off ever thinking about it again, and that I’d just live as a woman like I was meant to be, because he was extremely suicidal and abused alcohol and drugs, and I didn’t want to die like that. It just seemed like the worst outcome - I knew I was like that, too, but I didn’t want that future. I was afraid if I’d accept how I felt, I’d end up killing myself like he’d tried to do so many times already. So I went DEEP into the closet.

I struggled a lot with relationships, being viewed as a girlfriend and treated as such, like my partners telling me they loved how I looked, touching my body, appreciating it as a female body. I told my first love that I wanted to go by the name of Gabriel, and that I felt like a boy inside, but that was as far as I went. I was 15 at the time. Around the same age I got sent to a group home because the social services were struggling with me (I wasn’t attending school due to my depression and various other mental disorders, and they needed to get me off their books asap). There, I was assigned men’s deodorant because they were out of women’s, and I never went back from there. Little things like that just made me feel so much better in my own skin. Now I at least smelled like a guy. It felt heavenly. In this same place, my supervisor was a nice young woman who borrowed me movies to watch. One of them was Boys Don’t Cry. Let’s just say I was pretty badly traumatized by that, and went ever deeper in the closet, because once more I knew that I was exactly what was portrayed on the screen but the reality of it was... well, I’d either kill myself or be murdered. Nobody wants that. So yeah, there.

Afterwards I went hyperfeminine but also became incredibly toxic because of how bad I felt in my own skin - I was extremely unstable, but at least I was playing my role right, right? I was suppressing how I really felt and trying to force myself into some weird caricature of a woman to spare myself from a painful death.

I used to do a lot of larping as an older teen and a young adult. When I was 18, one of my girlfriend’s characters was transsexual, and I went looking for information about the condition, you know, having the excuse of just “doing research”. That was the turning point. It was so comforting to know that I wasn’t alone, that this was something other people had gone through, too. That I didn’t have to live like this forever.

The things that bothered me most were the fact that I couldn’t grow facial hair, and my chest, which has always been very large. I’ve never had particularly bad dysphoria about the shape and size of my body, and I coped with genital dysphoria by packing, but the fact that I couldn’t grow a beard was the worst thing in the world to me. I went through a year of self-searching and research, during which my girlfriend left me because, duh, she’s a lesbian and I’d just come out as a trans man and it just wasn’t working out anymore, but she stuck by my side to help me become who I wanted to be, and fuck if it wasn’t working. Embracing the way I’d felt and doing the things that helped me feel better - like wearing the kinds of clothes that gave me that sense of comfort and rightness, and binding my chest - helped me to such a big degree that I stopped being completely fucking awful as a person. I stopped flipping out at the smallest of triggers and slamming doors and shouting and being an absolutely unbearable piece of shit, and my ex has repeatedly told me how good it felt seeing me become so much happier before her eyes. I practically changed as a person when I started my transition, first socially and then eventually medically, I became a very calm and difficult to irritate kind of an individual instead of the mess I’d been the years before. And I don’t mean “changed as a person” like I adopted a different personality, just that I stopped being blinded with anger and self-hatred at all hours of the day and lashing out at anyone who dared to love me as I was because I couldn’t.

Starting medical transition scared the shit out of me, because I’ve always been afraid of permanent changes. I nearly ran out of my tattoo appointment last minute because the idea of being marked forever killed me, and I only have one piercing that I can take out without leaving a visible scar for that reason. So obviously, taking that step was horrifying to me, but after doing my time looking into my soul and reflecting on my needs and desires for a year, attending some councelling and in general looking into what I really wanted from my life, I finally entered the diagnostic process, which here took at the time six months at the very least and included a lot of more thorough examinations like a psychological evaluation, chromosomal check and even an IQ test to make sure I was capable of consenting to the treatments.

Testosterone was a gift from gods in how much it eased my dysphoria. I ended up quitting it eventually because of how much it messed with my mental disorders like anxiety, and worsened my psychosis, but in terms of how much more at ease I became with my body, I can’t thank it enough. Seeing my body grow more hair on it, even some of that facial hair I’d always wanted, was blissful. Having my voice drop was comforting and comfortable, and I was excited to practice it and get back my range for singing and speaking, and that whole period of changes was just so good to me. I can’t describe it any other way. My dysphoria’s never come back since I stopped, because the changes that happened were those that I’d so desperately needed the whole time. I never got top surgery because of weight limitations placed on it, and this was an enormous source of pain for me for a long time, but I’ve learned to cope with it now. I’m getting along with my boobs because they’re just a part of my body, that is, unless they start growing cancer which does run in the family, and I’m never not suspicious of them for that reason.

It’s just, it’s hard to describe the story of my dysphoria without telling you all of this. It’s not just one or two things, it’s a history of a lifetime, little things that are good and this grand shadow that follows you around and makes everything more painful and difficult to endure because it’s already weighting you down. The terror of realisations and going back in the closet, but also the unmatched comfort and feeling of finally being how you were meant to be when you see yourself more akin to the picture in your head.

There’s a lot that I’ve left out, and not much of this is probably very helpful, but it is what it is.

[homosexualprude]

I’m rewatching ContraPoints like I said, and...

[/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pTPuoGjQsI&t=29s&ab_channel=ContraPoints “Gender Critical | ContraPoints”

Oh, shit! 

*Before we get into it: I’ll be using she/her to talk about Natalie. I want the focus to be on the ideas, not her own identity.*

“In the past on this channel, I’ve always caricatured TERFs as being like angry, man-hating bigots, whose only real tactic is accusing trans women of being creepy men. And there definitely are some people who are really like that, but I want to be fair, I want to be balanced, so in preparation to make this video, I posted an invitation on Twitter asking people who used to be gender critical feminists to share their stories with me.

And I got hundreds of responses, a lot of them from women who have had traumatic experiences with men and who at one time found comfort in a rigid view of gender where women and men are completely separate species, where women are safe and men are dangerous. And for a lot of those women, allowing trans people into their picture of the world at first challenged their sense of stability and comfort. It was difficult emotional work, work that they needed to do, but still difficult. And that makes total sense to me, like it’s very easy for me to understand why someone would feel that way.” Starting off here, she’s way more invested than ~feminist man-hating~ than transphobia. 

[...]

“You know it’s like you’re not even allowed to ask questions anymore or you’re accused of transphobia. We’re all just expected to conform to this gender ideology that we the public never got a chance to debate. We didn’t vote for trans orthodoxy, yet here we are permitting biological males to run rampant in women’s spaces, foisting penises on lesbians, and indoctrinating our children with the ludicrous dogma that girls can become boys with a change of costume. Oh, it rattles my chromosomes.” Her caricature of gender critical people. The “foisting penises on lesbians” comment bothers me because there’s a very real problem with this in online spaces. I know because I’ve experienced it when I identified as a lesbian. In some online spaces, especially those meant for lesbians, have discourse about genital preferences and whether or not they’re okay. It typically results in shaming and guilt-tripping towards women who aren’t comfortable with penises. 

“And the same goes for people telling me, you sure do like wearing nails and makeup, is that all you think there is to being a woman? Could you define womanhood for me? Like they don’t actually care, they’re just trying to make my life worse for 20 minutes.” Though I understand why she feels like this is invasive of people, it doesn’t mean they’re trying to make her life worse. That’s assigning some intent that simply isn’t there. 

“Listen, sweaty, first of all, my girly voice is very f*cking real. Second, my clothes, makeup, voice, none of this makes me a woman. No trans woman thinks that femininity and womanhood are the same. Rather, we’re using a cultural language of feminine signifiers to prompt others to see us for what we are.” To the bolded: Are you sure? You may not, but there are several people who align with gender on the feminine / masculine spectrum and treat *that* as gender. 

“I think butch or gender non-conforming cis women sometimes side-eye hyper-feminine trans women because they don’t identify with this vision of womanhood at all and they’ve had to struggle since childhood against a society that’s told them they have to be feminine. And I completely sympathize with that. I think there should be more gender freedom, less coercion, less restriction. But also, I’ve had to fight against the same society that told me I should really, really, really, not be this, so, I feel like we should be able to form some kind of solidarity here.” I get what you’re saying but you do realize that you turned it around on those women, right? By going, “Yeah, but what about my pain?” This is starting to go in the direction of “cis women are just JEALOUS.” 

“Like you’re targeting the people who are the most vulnerable under the present system and the leveraging that system against them under the pretense of abolishing it. You know, you don’t see gender critical feminists in Kim Kardashian’s Instagram comments like, why are you wearing a dress, Kim, you creepy misogynist.” Natalie, gendercrits critique celebrities ALL THE TIME. Where have you been? So many people online hold her up as THEE example of patriarchal conditioning. And for you to call trans women “the most vulnerable under the present system” is tone deaf, considering that gendered scrutiny is very much a thing for women who were born female. We just lost a big legal protection of abortion. And back when the video was uploaded (in 2019), it was a hot button issue in politics. 

“It’s almost like when they say abolish gender, what they really mean is abolish trans people. It’s almost like this is a hate movement hiding behind a handful of pseudo-feminist platitudes. But surely, I must be missing something.” No. In the most anti-trans spaces, being anti-trans and wanting gender to be gone for everyone as well is a common perspective.

“But I’ve had cis feminists of my race and class tell me that I have no idea what it’s like to be talked over and interrupted by men. – [Man] Actually, Kropotkin. – Or to experience street harassment or to have to treat every first date like a potentially life-threatening situation and it’s just bizarre to me that they think that. Like, what do you think my experience in the world is? You think men treat me as their equal? You think street harassers are gonna treat me with dignity and respect because I have a Y chromosome?” Only when you navigated society as a man. Don’t play dumb. You were literally a philosophical scholar pre-transition. You were definitely “the mansplainer” more than once in your life. 

“Come on, people, use your heads. When you have Germaine Greer calling trans women it, what do you think the guy on the steps of the liquor store is gonna say? When a trans woman doesn’t pass, it’s not like society simply treats her like a man. No, you get treated as monster gender, pronouns it and spit, and male privilege is not a good description of that experience at all.

Once you start passing as a woman, it’s really a step up, even though women get treated bad, because it’s still better to be a she than an it. Now gender critical feminists are really skeptical of the whole notion of passing. They think they can always clock a tran and they assume everyone else can, too. But that’s just not reality. I mean, I’m only a year and a half into my transition and at this point, I’ve had zero surgeries and it’s been like six months since I was last misgendered offline. I mean, a person with a good eye for it will probably clock me and maybe a lot of people have just been indoctrinated into politically correct gender ideology, but like, you really think the gas station attendant and the nail technicians and the heating and plumbing guy are all calling me miss and ma’am because of postmodernism?”

Gender nonconforming women also experience this. And Natalie, you do realize you were an internet star by this point, right? Your experience with being misgendered isn’t going to be like any random trans woman. 

“I know some of you are gonna sneak off to your shitty little RadFem forums and obsess over how manly and clockable I am, but like at the end of the day, what am I gonna trust, the deranged hate-posting of 25 frothing anons or every social interaction I’ve had for months? I’m so sorry you can’t handle that I’m natural fish. I’m ahi tuna and you’re mackerel sweaty. Take a f*cking sip, babes.” Very strange comment, considering that you’ve never had a vagina. What’s the point of making stigmatizing jokes about a set of genitals you don’t have? 

“Many trans women are feminine and queer before they transition, and have basically always experienced a kind of femmephobia that is rooted in misogyny. Some trans women also identified as women years before transitioning and internalized society’s messaging about women more than society’s messaging about men. Now that’s still not the same as living in society as a girl from birth, but it’s also pretty different from the socialization of masculine cis men.” Femmephobia? 🙄 It’s not a hatred of femininity, but homophobia. They clock pre-trans tw as gay men. Femininity in gay men is hated because it’s viewed as a mark of their gayness. There’s definitely misogyny in it because gay men are viewed by homophobes as dollar store women, and the name brand is hated to begin with.

[...] 

“It reminds me of what in the trans community are called transmedicalists, people who insist the only real trans people are those who experience agonizing dysphoria. In both cases, there is a sense that the essential thing that confirms your identity is pain. What it is to be trans is to despise your body, what it is to be a woman is to be brutalized by men. ‘You didn’t suffer like I’ve suffered. You don’t know what it’s like!’” Not quite. Gendercrits view biological femaleness as the only prerequisite to womanhood. They believe trans identity is a way of appropriating the pain that comes with femaleness, not that pain is an inherent function of femaleness. 

[...]

“But of course, no individual woman experiences all the things women experience and individual women understand the meaning of womanhood in drastically different ways. For some women, having babies is the most essentially womanly experience. For others, maybe it’s having an abortion. I mean, not actually, but you know, TERFs pretend it is to own the tr*nnies.” No, love, they think having a vagina is the most essentially womanly experience. 

[...]

“But in fact, medical language that assumes that everyone with a uterus is a woman erases trans men and non-binary people who menstruate and get pregnant. So saying pregnant women in this context erases them, whereas saying pregnant people includes them and cis women and doesn’t erase anyone except for Cincinnatians because we all know they’re not people. Take your shitty chili elsewhere.” You do realize medical care pertaining to the female sex is a women’s health issue, right? That the lack of maternity and menstrual considerations for women, the lack of research, and medical misogyny are dependent on articulating the issue as a women’s health issue because the state is oppressing female people for their status as female? If we count all of the trans men and nonbinary people with vaginas, most people who get pregnant will still be women. 

Okay, I’m done here. There’s more in the video, but I’m covered the big issues I’ve had with her talking points. “Inclusivity” is erasure if it co-opts the movements of existing marginalized groups. It’s like saying “All Lives Matter” in response to BLM.

[postguiltypleasures]

Goodbye to Younger

Unfortunate to say, I don’t think I have ever seen Sutton Foster on Broadway. I watched her previous show, the one season wonder, Bunheads, and felt obliged to follow her to Younger. I don’t have particularly strong feelings about Sex and the City, show runner Darren Star’s previous hit. There are huge gaps in the episodes I’ve seen, and I haven’t seen any since the first movie came out. I enjoyed watching it with friends, but never tried it alone. I bring this up, because I have mostly watched Younger all alone. The series about a recently divorced forty year old woman named Liza who lies about her age to get a job in publishing after years of being a stay at home mom. She lives with an artist friend her real age (Maggie), befriends a colleague her fake age (Kelsey) and quickly get in a love triangle with men from each age group (Charles and Josh, respectively). The first season wasn’t that well received. There were times while watching it that if felt cringeworthy. Criticism of being out of touch with the publishing industry was definitely warranted. I remember reading a review that called out an early plot involving Joyce Carol Oates not having a Twitter account when she really does have one and frequently trends for not great reasons. I cringed while watching that episode. (The reviewer, Miriam Krule was wrong about the long term treatment of the character of Diana. Younger would have been unwatchable if she were right long term.) After the first season Breanne L Heldman published an interesting interview on Yahoo! News with Darren Star and Marti Noxon about having buzzy shows on unexpected networks. But also Kate Dries at Jezebel also wrote an item about Hilary Duff, who plays Kelsey, covering Fleetwood Mac’s “Little Lies” that doubles as a “who’s actually watching Duff’s new show?” bit.

With the second season the press got immediately better. New Yorker critic (and long time SATC fan) Emily Nussbaum wrote a positive review about how the show mixes froth with more serious subjects like agism and difficult divorces. And from then on the critical response was generally good-but inclined to dismiss as fluff.

(I have to interject, the episodes that Liza’s ex-husband showed up seem to dampen the real reasons for their divorce and I am torn between seeing this as a sign of him actually being charming, and the show needing to move on quickly from exploring too dark topics.)

The ensemble gelled and I wanted to highlight this charming interview Molly Bernard, who played Lauren, did an

interview with Maria Elena Fernandez back in 2016. I liked this interview. She talks a lot about what her grandfather meant to her, as a person and acting coach. It covers too many of her gigs to be really insightful for Younger, but that is part of the charm. It’s interesting to focus on Lauren as a character representing the spirit of the series. My first impression was an impersonal, crass caricature of a millennial, what Liza had to work against to convince people that she is a millennial. At the end of the first season she threw herself a “Hot-Mitzvah”, like a Bat Mitzvah for when the awkward years the celebration normally occurs during are over a. The first episode of the final season includes a party for her thirtieth birthday, making something of a full circle moment. The first party definitely worked more for the show’s dramatic purposes, which is related to a theme in this good bye.

During the penultimate season, while the show was was at its peak of being loved by the people, Alissa Wilkinson dedicated one of Vox’s (now defunct) Episode of the Week columns to her changing thoughts on the series’s central love triangle. wrote about. I chose to include this article while I started drafting this, before the season actually aired, in the hopes that I would finish writing by the end of the season. (Obviously, it really didn’t work out.) The article covers Wilkinson’s impression of the show from the beginning. She was Team Charles in the love triangle, but plot points within the first four episodes of the sixth season made her rethink that. As the final season disappointed some of the show’s biggest supporters were disappointed, I thought of it as insightful on how the show could make terrible missteps, and that the love triangle was not as well weighted as viewers hoped earlier on.

The first article I saw going into the final season was on the AV Club written by Innes Bellina. The headline promised that the new episode would remind fans why they love it. Interestingly, it seems positive to optimistic about some aspects of the plot that others would later said made the season terrible, such as Maggie’s plot. It’s even warm towards a plot involving a Greta Thuneberg stand in, that I watched wondering, “will people who like this show more than me love this?” Based on Twitter anecdotes, they mostly didn’t.

At TVLine there were a couple of interviews with the cast. The first, written by Andy Swift is filled with assurances that despite the extended hiatus things will be exactly as intended and as the viewers have always loved. The second is also by Andy Swift and focuses on the Josh/Liza/Charles love triangle. Interestingly they insist that the Love Triangle was never that big a deal, it was always about Team Liza. There is a certain amount of sense to this, but it might also be related to one of the bigger problems fans had with the final season, which is how isolated Josh felt from the rest of cast, especially if they were going to have (spoiler) the implied rekindling of his relationship with Liza that the final scene suggests.

Before the season premiered, Scarlet Harris published an essay in Bitch praising the female friendships, in particular between Liza and Kelsey and Liza and Diana. The essay clearly loves this aspect of the show, but also highlights how dissappointing the the men and the cis hit romantic relationships with them are frustrating. It comes with the hope and the final season would have Liza choosing herself and focusing on her and Kelsey’s friendship and professional goals. It’s an interesting pice to look back on and consider why the final season didn’t satisfy many fans. Ultimately the show was attempting to spin off Kelsey, (in the final episode she announces plans to move to Los Angeles) and it spent a lot the season with her trying to make her job after demotion better, but ultimately deciding that she had to move on. I did kind of like how Kelsey being demoted and Charles returning to his position as publisher wasn’t treated as a reset. That there were lingering frustrations all around. It’s just that some of these frustrations led to real non starters of plots.

If anything prepared me for the change in temperature for this season when the New York Times ran an article by Alexis Soloski pondering if Younger and The Bold Type ending this season meant that this was the end of portraying media jobs as glamorous, well paying and aspirational. It focuses more on The Bold Type, but the general idea that Younger was out of step with the now.

Then came some surprise tweets from Emily Nussbaum:

Man, Younger is bad this season The Maggie plot feels ripped from Californication, of all bad influences A full-on bummer-wish they found a way to just tie things up & end it. It’s not even parodying publishing anymore (and avoiding subjects like race entirely.)

Also, I’m happy to suspend belief, but in what universe would Kelssey [sic], a hardened, trend-spotting Millenial publisher, and Lauren, an influencer publicist, credulously join a reality show & non imagine a bad edit? C’mon.

It’s so bizarre that Younder has shriveled into full hate-watchability in a single season. I can’t remember a steeper quality decline! What the hell happened over there.

So the things that I thought of as quirks of the series that I learned to leave on a curve, were actually things that made people who loved the series deeply dislike the season. This confused me. How to make sense of it?

I'm going to look at a couple of final season interviews and try and make sense from that side.

Laura Benanti, who played the Billionaire (and Liza’s romantic rival) Quinn, was interviewed by Vulture Devon Ivie. She discusses her character’s Sound of Music speech in which she identifies as the Baroness and identifies Liza as Maria. Benanti relates to this speech as she has played both roles. They discuss how the fans frustration with the love triangle directs most of the anger towards Charles, instead of Quinn. While they praise this as an enlightened response, it might also be fans turning on the show. Why invest in a story about Liza’s relationship with Charles when he doesn’t seem worth ending up with?

After the season ended, Sutton Foster gave an interview to Elizabeth Wagmeister at Variety. Foster is very enthusiastic about the final season. She loves how open ended it is about Liza’s love life, (she and Josh reenact their meet cute in the final scene) and that Liza is in a good place professionally. The various frustrating steps getting there aren’t addressed. I like that she and Charles realize they aren’t going to work out and ending things. That might have played better if so much of the season wasn’t about pining for him while he got in a bad relationship with Quinn. The possibility of rekindling things with Josh might have played better if they interacted more in the season. (That said, Josh was always closer to the spirit of the show than Charles. Also this is at least the third show I’ve watched in which the solution to a cis-het couple disagreeing about having children, where the man wants one and the woman doesn’t is resolved by him having a child with another woman. Individually I’m fine with the stories, but I hate that it’s a trend.) Foster also discusses how the show is escapist, and a fantasy while talking about how the show didn’t address COVID-19.

Earlier, I wondered how the show would address the Trump administration, and ultimately, they didn’t. Part of me thinks the thing that went wrong for former fans is related to the attempt to stay light and fantasy like in the face of so many painful changes. For most of the show’s existence I wanted someone to talk to about it in comparison to Sex and the City. It had a more regular plots about not having money and gentrification. Its take on its main four female leads romantic lives ended up differently, but they may have had similar problems with the romantic relationships. Somehow, trying to stay a light fantasy seems to turn into not really learning. I’m not sure if the final season was disappointing because of a decline in quality, or circumstances highlighting its worst tendencies. In any case, it was the show ending I was most ready to say good bye to, and now I have.

[jyushimatsu-falls-in-love]

s2ep10: a little respect

♪ So-o-oul, I hear you call-iiiiiing Oh baby, pleeeease... Give a little respe-ect, toooooo meeeeee! ♪ - “A Little Respect” by Erasure, which seems to be this week’s theme song :P

[SPOILERS UNDER THE CUT!]

The first of this week’s three skits is “Karamatsu and Brothers”, which I know nearly everyone was looking forward to. After all, Kara’s the fan favorite both here and in the Japanese fandom, where recently he’s won the top spot in a recent magazine’s favorite characters poll; does it live up to everyone’s standards?!

The skit opens with Totty asking Choro to buy him a soda, which Choro refuses to do in a very aggressive manner. I like how Totty described Choro here - “You act like an honor student, but you’re really just a delinquent!”; it succinctly summarizes Choro’s character well enough :P 

Luckily for Totty, Kara comes to the rescue and offers to buy his soda for him! And after Totty gets his soda, he calls Kara “nice” and “reliable”, which makes Kara feel very happy and sparkly :P

Then everyone else starts asking Kara to do things for them: Starting with Oso, who asks Kara to do his chores in his stead; then Jyushi asks the same thing, then Ichi, then all of a sudden everyone except Choro is asking Kara to do something for him. And Kara says yes, he’ll do them! He’ll do anything his brothers ask him, they can rely on him!!

At this point Choro steps in, and scolds the others for putting so much on Kara. He even scolds Kara a bit for not standing up for himself. Honestly these little moments of Choro stepping in for his family members’ sakes (approaching Matsuzo about his problem in S2Ep4, now telling the others to lay off Kara in this ep.) are very nice; he really can be a good son and brother, after all ;v; And to the other brothers’ credit, they do feel bad for piling so much on Kara after realizing it - but then Kara protests and assures them no, it’s okay, he likes it when the brothers ask him to do stuff, it’s perfectly fine!! And with that assurance, the others go back to treating him like a work horse :P

Later, up on the rooftop, Kara confesses to Choro the truth - he actually hates it when the others ask him to do so much for them, so much that he could either die or kill them. When asked about why can’t just say “no” to them, Kara puts on the cool act and says that it’s because he’s such a nice guy~ But Choro quickly gets that the real reason Kara can’t say “no” is because beneath the painful guy act, he’s really just a timid wimp who can’t stand up for himself :P

Honesty Tidbit # 1: I never thought I’d actually say this, but... Kara’s situation was oddly relatable to me in some aspects. My family members - especially my sister - ask me to do things for them, get things for them, etc. all the time. And even when I don’t want to do them, I do them anyway orz (The difference between me and Kara is that unlike him, I usually complain first before doing them :P) To be fair, since I’m a NEET and no one else is, I guess it makes sense that I’m asked to do things for everyone while they’re doing work or resting from work. But still, it’s annoying...

Honesty Tidbit # 2: I can already see the annoying part of the fandom latching onto the fact that Kara’s a bit of a pushover and using that to further push the “pwecious sad woobie” fanon interpretation orz I’m really not looking forward to it...

So Choro tries to be a good brother again and offers to help Kara practice saying “no” to his brothers. However, he ends up getting sidetracked haha :P I find it interesting that Kara actually can’t recognize Choro’s caricatures of the others, even with each one’s more obvious attributes (”horse races” and “boobs” for Oso, “cats” and “killing you all” for Ichi, “baseball” and “BOEH” for Jyushi) mentioned. It makes me wonder, does Kara view and identify his brothers differently from how Choro (and the audience) does? If that’s the case, then how does he view and identify them? ...Or maybe Choro’s caricatures just too exaggerated for him haha

In the end, though, they go and tell the brothers Kara’s true feelings on the matter. And in a very nice moment, the brothers actually backed off once they knew that Kara didn’t actually like being asked what to do (they even said, “Why didn’t you tell us that you wanted us to stop?”), recognized that they really did keep asking him because they knew he wouldn’t say no, and sincerely apologized for it and promised not to do it anymore. Despite what fanon tends to say, the brothers really do care for Kara after all. I’m very glad that’s the case ;v;

...and then the others proceed to make Choro take Kara’s place as the errand boy :P Choro angrily protests, asks for Kara’s help... and Kara refuses and leaves him to fend for himself with a “Good luck~” PFFFFFFFFFFFFFF. Of all times for Kara to decide to say “no”... I guess no good deed goes unpunished when your name’s Matsuno Choromatsu :P

This was a good skit! A good Choro, good Suiriku interaction, the brothers proving fanon wrong... What’s not to love? :’)

The second skit, “New Employee Totoko”, is exactly what it says on the tin - in an office AU, Totoko is the newly hired employee, with Totty being her superior. The skit is already interesting to me because of Totty having the role of the boss/leader/department head in this skit; he doesn’t usually take on these roles IIRC. It fits the ambitious side of his personality though, so I’m not complaining :) He’s also taking his job really seriously in this skit, and certainly acts like how you’d expect a boss/leader/department head to act. It ends up making him a pretty good tsukkomi to Totoko’s antics :P

Speaking of Totoko, she was pretty neat here too! For one thing, her hairstyle as a newbie employee is really nice ;v; It’s her first day working in Akatsuka Tradings, but already she’s causing problems for her superior - first off, she won’t come over when Totty calls her over to his desk. Her excuse is that nobody told her that that’s what she had to do, so she didn’t do it :P Then Totty gives her a document to work on, which he tells her should be finished before lunch - but she doesn’t finish it at all by then, her excuse being that she hasn’t used the programs before, hasn’t done this sort of computing before, etc. Totty ends up having to do the work himself. Then, since Totty did her work for her, Totoko ended up spending her office time updating her social media and sleeping on the job... Again she uses her inexperience as an excuse... Yeah, Totoko’s not exactly the ideal employee for anyone working as a department head :P

I wonder if I can say that I’d be like Totoko if I were in an office setting? :P Again I’m a NEET so I don’t have any job experience... But if my memories of school, college, the two-week internship I had when I was in college, etc. are anything to go by, I know I’d be utterly useless when left to my devices and would always have to ask for help and instructions before I could be set on doing anything orz That, and I get distracted easily, I lose motivation easily, I stay up late... Yeah, Totoko is rather relatable here as well and I’m not proud to admit it orz

Totty ends up having to give Totoko a stern talking to, saying that since she’s new he’ll do his best to help her, but she’s still gotta put in the work herself. They agree to work hard, their conversation ends on a good note, Totty shows off his own version of Kara’s bishie eyes...

...and at the end of the day, Totoko quits her job :P Though Totty begs her to stay, and after his begging she says she’ll stay and even starts saying these cheesy, so-cliche-that-they’re-clearly-bullshit lines about how she’ll do a good job from now on... And then she ditches her job without saying goodbye :P Totty’s very upset about this. Ichiko and Jyushiko (?!) showing up and proving to be better employees doesn’t really help matters either, and it proves at the end that Totty won’t accept “uggos” and wants to work with a cute girl like Yowai-kun :P Ah, classic Totty

And finally, the last skit, “Dubbingmatsu-san”. A couple of unknown people who do unknown work in the Osomatsu-san anime enter a lavishly decorated room filled with food, comfy sofas, and pretty girls in bikinis. What’s all this for? It’s to receive the sextuplets, who are coming in to dub the anime of course! The sextuplets enter wearing various things to conceal their identities to the public - each one increasingly ridiculous than the last - and after a few minutes’ rest, they start to read and practice their lines before they start recording. And during practice, it never seems to be good enough...!!

It becomes clear that this skit actually isn’t about the boys at all - it’s a meta piece about their seiyuu, with the boys kinda-sorta acting as the main six seiyuu’s avatars instead of being themselves. Or at least, that’s how I like to think of this skit :P There are references to seiyuu having to take care of their voices - the boys have humidifiers with them to keep their vocal chords working, and even have back-up surgery implants for their throats in case the worst happens! 

And then the boys start practicing their lines and beating themselves up for not meeting their own high standards - the part I really lost it was when Totty yelled, “What did I go study abroad for?!”, which is a reference to Miyu Irino going abroad earlier this year to pursue his theatre studies. It makes me wonder now if the stuff the others were saying while they were beating themselves up were references to their own seiyuu themselves?? Meanwhile Ichi’s/Jun’s just practicing his stabbing skills. Good job Ichi/Jun Also can we please exploit Miyu Irino’s English skills in S2 already

Then recording’s about to begin - with the boys completely naked of course, can’t risk any clothes ruffling making any noise! - and after some chants, they start dubbing over the provided images. And apparently, they’re so good that they can ad-lib and almost change the script entirely, and it’d be okay! They didn’t even need to do any retakes - the boys/seiyuu are just that good!! They’re professionals!!!

It’s interesting to see Ososan’s (fictionalized and exaggerated for comedy’s sake) take on the recording process of anime. It certainly matches up with some of the things I remember reading in interviews with the seiyuu before. In the end, this skit is a silly and irreverent but affectionate love letter to the guys who bring our loveable six same shitheads to life. I can’t help but wonder how Sakurai/Nakamura/Kamiya/Fukuyama/Ono/Irino all felt while recording this skit. Were they embarrassed? Happy? A little proud? I hope someone asks about that skit either in an interview or in a post-Cour 1 commentary reel, like last season’s.

Finally recording ends, and the boys head home - each going home with a hefty sum of yen in one hand, a pretty bikini girl on one arm, and in each one’s personal private helicopter. I... am pretty sure this bit is an exaggeration, there’s no way anyone would actually go home in a private helicopter unless they’re that stinkin’ rich and famous :P But hey, the boys did a good job, they’re happy, the anime staff is happy, we get a quality anime because of everyone’s hard work, therefore everyone’s happy.

“Who would’ve thought such professionals were behind those shitty episodes that air on TV?” “Makes you respect them even more.”

So in conclusion, thank you to Sakurai & Nakamura & Kamiya & Fukuyama & Ono & Irino (& don’t forget Suzumura & Kokuryu & Endo & Saito & Ueda & Tobita & Inoue & Kujira & Yamashita &...) for everything that you do for this shitty anime!! \( ; v ; )/ It wouldn’t be the same without you, thank you for your hard work! ♥♥♥♥♥♥

All in all, this week’s episode was pretty great! I enjoyed it thoroughly and was invested all throughout. I think my favorites would be a tie between “Karamatsu and Brother” (surprisingly!) and “Dubbingmatsu-san” - on one hand, we have solid Suiriku and brotherly care on many sides; on the other we have meta and a silly but sweet nod to the professionals who make the anime come to life. But even “New Employee Totoko” is solid for the roles the characters play alone! So yes, all in all, this week was a good week, and I’m greatly looking forward to next week’s fare ^^

I’m actually really, really excited for next week because - HORROR(HOUSE)MATSU!!! While I’m not really big on the horror genre as a whole, I like the idea of throwing out favorite NEETs into scary situations. And a haunted house is perfect for it >:) The title is “Chibita’s Revenge”, so Chibita's definitely gonna have some sort of hand in all of the spooky shenanigans... Does he have friends on the other side?! :0

Aaaaah, next Matsu Monday can’t come soon enough! ♥

[leftpress]

'It’s Hard to Show the World I Exist': Chelsea Manning's Final Plea to Be Seen

In 2010, Chelsea Manning leaked thousands of classified documents in an attempt to shed light on the "true cost of war" in the Middle East. But while other whistleblowers continue to attract media attention and concern, Manning is locked in a maximum-security prison, six years into a 35-year sentence. On the heels of a last appeal to President Obama for clemency, Manning tells Broadly about her struggle for visibility and justice.

by Diana Tourjee | DEC 29 2016

Chelsea Manning is currently incarcerated in a maximum-security facility in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. She's been in United States custody for six years, and spent months in solitary confinement. For that entire time, she has been forced to dress like a man, with her hair cropped close to her head. Her connection with the outside world is limited: There are extremely strict rules about who can visit her, and media isn't allowed to speak with her directly, though she can correspond with journalists by mail. At times, her situation seems hopeless, but she has tried to persevere.

"Courage is not fearlessness," she wrote in a letter to Broadly this December. "Courage is the ability to keep going, even when you are unsure of yourself, even when you are nervous, and even when you are terrified. If you can still fight when the odds appear to be against you, and when it looks like you might be fighting it alone, then you are genuinely brave."

In May of 2013, Chelsea Manning was convicted of six counts of espionage and sentenced to 35 years in prison. The former military specialist is responsible for what is considered the largest leak of classified government documents in American history—they include the Iraq War Logs and the Afghan War Diary, two data troves that she believed would shed light on the "true cost of war" in the Middle East, such as the United States' failure to investigate thousands of claims of torture in Iraq, the detainment of innocent or low-threat-level individuals at Guantanamo Bay, and thousands of civilian deaths.

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Manning's sentence is extreme by any metric. Other convicted whistleblowers have had to serve far less time, often in the range of one to three-and-a-half years—though Manning is just a sixth of the way through her sentence, she has already been incarcerated twice as long as most other convicted whistleblowers. Earlier this year, she made a plea to President Obama to alter her sentence from 35 years to time served, which would free her immediately while recognizing her guilt. Last month, over 100,000 people signed a White House petition making the same demand. The President's second term will end in January, meaning he has less than a month to take action.

Though some people celebrate Manning as a whistleblower—she was the 2013 recipient of the Sean MacBride Peace Prize—others see her actions as treasonous and damaging to the state. "Let's charge [her] and try [her] for treason," a FOX news national security expert, KT MacFarland, wrote of Manning in 2010. "If [she's] found guilty, [she] should be executed." President-elect Donald Trump has selected MacFarland to be his deputy national security adviser, according to CNN.

And even among people who prize government transparency, Manning is often overlooked. The world seems to have rallied behind other, more visible whistleblowers, such as Edward Snowden, who has become something of a celebrity from his recluse in Russia. One of the main reasons for this, according to Evan Greer, one of Manning's biggest advocates and the campaign director of Fight for the Future, is that Manning is hidden from sight in prison, denied the right to speak for herself.

"Prisons are designed to dehumanize and hide people from the public. No one can see Chelsea, and very few people can actually hear her voice," she explains. (I conducted my interview with Manning through one of her lawyers at the ACLU, Chase Strangio, who had one of Manning's contacts dictate my questions to her over the phone.)

Manning agrees with this characterization. "I have been disconnected from the world for what's becoming close to a decade now. There isn't even a good photograph taken of me since 2013—and these were taken during my court martial," she said in her letter to Broadly. "It's hard to show the world I exist anymore."

Throughout her life—and certainly her life as a public figure—Manning has struggled against forces that would silence her. She grew up in a society that rejected her womanhood; she later joined the military, a hyper-masculine institution that has been described as "openly hostile" towards gay and trans soldiers; while serving in the armed forces, she witnessed injustices that were classified by the state; she was subjected to "cruel and inhuman" treatment in the custody of the United States government, according to a UN investigator; when she finally came out as transgender in 2013, she was frequently and intentionally misgendered in the press; and now, incarcerated in a high-security facility in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, she must fight against a system that may soon destroy her.

"Chelsea has a huge amount of support," adds Greer, "but we are fighting an uphill battle against the US government's attempts to silence her important voice through incarceration."

During Manning's childhood, "it was like trans people didn't exist at all," she told Broadly. She remembers the difficulty growing up as a young, feminine person. She had never heard about real people who had changed their sex, or escaped its strictures; the only representation of transgender people that she remembers from back then were characters from horror stories, like Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs, and caricatures on sensational crime dramas, like Law & Order.

Today, Manning reflects on her coming of age with the understanding that she was "shoved into the social role of a male." She believes her attempt "to meet other people's expectations of what a 'man' should be like" influenced the choices she made throughout her life. She once said she was bullied for being a "girly boy" when she was young. Hoping to curb discrimination in school, she tried to disappear among the boys by playing sports. Later, as an adult, Manning was encouraged by her father to join the army, and she enlisted in what is perhaps the most aggressively masculine institution imaginable in the summer of 2007—three years before she was arrested, and six years before she came out as transgender.

Before she was deployed to Iraq in October of 2009, Manning was stationed at Fort Drum in upstate New York. For the six months she was there—between February and August—she corresponded via AOL Instant Messenger with atheist vlogger Zinnia Jones. Jones was a young queer person with a relatively large audience. At the time, neither she nor Manning had come out as transgender or begun transitioning. Manning was presumably drawn to Jones because they both identified as gay men at that time, and they were both atheists who were interested in computers and mathematical theory.

Jones' videos, which she still makes today, had titles like "The Meaningless Death of Jesus," and "It Doesn't Matter if Being Gay is a Choice." Manning quickly opened up to her, telling Jones about her life and discussing her experience in the military. "It took them awhile," Manning wrote, referring to her fellow soldiers, "but they started figuring me out, making fun of me, mocking me, harassing me, heating up with one or two physical attacks."

While other soldiers succeeded in completing basic training in the standard 10 weeks, Manning—who is slender and stands 5'2" tall—said that it took her six months. Eventually she got through the program, despite her small size, and entered the army as an intelligence analyst. The broad, dark green military uniform sat heavily on her slight frame; she had officially become Private First Class Manning, someone her father had wanted her to be. In 2009, she was deployed to a remote location outside of Baghdad.

In the writing she produced during her service—correspondence with people such as Jones—Manning says that she feels an immense sense of responsibility to the men and women that she worked with. Though she took her work seriously, and she was good at it, that did not reconcile the deep anguish she experienced because of her gender identity. While Manning was working hard, she was also coping with worsening gender dysphoria. No one knew her as a woman, and she was alone in that way.

In November of 2009, one month following her deployment, Manning was reportedly in contact with a "gender counselor" back in the United States who specialized in treating military personnel with gender identity issues. She told him she felt "like a monster." According to the American Medical Association, if left untreated, gender identity disorder "can result in clinically significant psychological distress... debilitating depression and, for some people without access to appropriate medical care and treatment, suicidality and death."

On April 24, 2010, Manning confessed her gender identity issues to her superior, master sergeant Paul Adkins, in an email. A few days later, she sent a similar email to military psychologist, Capt. Michael Worsley. Manning attached a grainy black and white photograph of herself wearing a wig to the email and wrote, "This is my problem. I've had signs of it for a very long time. I've been trying very, very hard to get rid of it. It is not going away." In the email, she told Adkins that these issues were the cause of her "pain and confusion" and that they made "the most basic things in my life very difficult."

"It is difficult to sleep and impossible to have conversations. It makes my entire life feel like a bad dream that won't end. I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do," she continued. "I don't know what will happen to me. But at this point I feel like I am not here anymore. Everyone is concerned about me, and everyone is afraid of me. I am sorry." Adkins later testified that he didn't pass the message onto military commanders because "I really didn't think at the time that having a picture floating around of one of my soldiers in drag was in the best interests of the intel mission."

On May 8, 2010, Manning was found curled in the fetal position, having carved the words "I want" into the back of an office chair. "[She] felt that [she] was not there; was not a person," master sergeant Adkins wrote in a memorandum read at trial.

"They treated all of this with deliberate ignorance, assuming the situation would simply go away," Jones claims. "Gender dysphoria does not go away. I am very certain that this deliberate medical neglect and intentional withholding of necessary mental health treatment contributed heavily to her ongoing distress at that time. The Army failed her on this front."

There were other reports of unstable behavior during Manning's service: She lashed out at her colleagues and allegedly displayed "erratic" conduct. But those who knew Manning personally caution against conflating her deteriorating psychological state with her decision to leak classified materials, as if the former wholly explains the latter. "I trust that her decisions hold more significance than some random event emerging from processes of pathology," says Jones. "I would be very hesitant to describe her disclosure of materials as being the byproduct of a mental health condition."

Indeed, Manning believes in government transparency and has been vocal and passionate about her politics since before she deployed to Iraq. In her correspondence with Jones in 2009, she fiercely critiqued the military's Don't Ask Don't Tell policy. When she was stationed at Fort Drum in Upstate New York prior to her deployment to Iraq, Manning participated in a rally protesting Proposition 8.

During Manning's trial, her ACLU lawyer, David Coombs, called on Jones to testify, speaking to the defendant's character. "He felt my story would provide information that would be helpful to Chelsea," Jones says, "by showing that she understood the importance of national and global peace and security and that she did not intend to harm the United States."

Manning has said that she wanted to help people in this nation to be informed and to have a say in the actions of their government, and still, after everything, she believes in this country. "It is so important that we continue to fight, even when we are cornered, even when we are desperate, and even when we are afraid," she wrote in her letter to Broadly, referring to LGBT Americans who may feel hopeless during these difficult political times. "There is a tendency in certain parts of our community to take a step back during a crisis, to wait and see what happens, and hope for the best. We absolutely cannot afford to do that."

Illustration by Julia Kuo

On February 3—almost three months before she emailed Adkins about her struggles with gender identity—Manning uploaded the Iraq War Logs and the Afghan War Diary to WikiLeaks, a media organization that accepts anonymously submitted classified documents in the interest of transparency. Manning had first tried to bring the files to the Washington Post and the New York Times, but she felt the former didn't take her seriously, and the latter did not return her phone call. She then turned to WikiLeaks, which she had previously become aware of after seeing the site publish a collection of pager messages from 9/11 that she immediately recognized as authentic documents from the NSA. When Manning leaked the Iraq War Log and the Afghan War Diary, she was in the US on leave from her deployment in Iraq.

Manning returned to Iraq on February 11. During that timeframe, she overheard some of her colleagues discussing footage in an Army server that showed an American Apache helicopter firing on a group of men on the street in Baghdad in 2007. She researched the time and date of its occurrence, and what she found shocked her: The footage shows soldiers in the US military aircraft opening fire on a Reuters photographer, Namir Noor-Eldeen, mistaking the telephoto lens in his hand for an rocket-propelled grenade (RPG). Noor-Eldeen appears to die immediately, though the helicopters spray the area back and forth with heavy artillery, killing several Iraqi men in the crossfire. Saeed Chmagh, Noor-Eldeen's assistant, begins to crawl away from the dead bodies, pulling himself onto the sidewalk in an effort to find safety, and the soldiers beg for an excuse to kill him; they say they hope he'll reach for a weapon, any weapon, apparently so that they will be allowed to shoot him.

When a van of good Samaritans appears and tries to help Chmagh into their vehicle, the soldiers in the helicopter beg again for, and are granted, permission to fire. They were unaware at the time that children were inside the van; a US military ground unit would later find the kids alive but injured. In all, 12 people were killed in the air strike.

Manning eventually uploaded the video to WikiLeaks on February 21 of 2010, and the organization published it on April 5, 2010, dubbing the footage "Collateral Murder." (At this point, the Iraq War Logs and the Afghan War Diary had not yet been published.) The "Collateral Murder" footage directly, and damningly, contradicted the US military's official account of what had taken place that day: In response to a Freedom of Information Act filed by Reuters in 2007, the military had claimed it could not estimate when, or if, the footage could be produced, saying in a statement released after the shooting that both Noor-Eldeen and Chmagh died as the result of an attack following insurgent fire, including RPGs.

"The most alarming aspect of the video to me," Manning later testified, "was the seemingly delightful bloodlust [the US soldiers] appeared to have. They dehumanized the individuals they were engaging, and seemed to not value human life by referring to them as 'dead bastards' and congratulating each other on the ability to kill in large numbers." She also likened one soldier's behavior to "a child torturing ants with a magnifying glass." 

The release of the footage was met with outrage toward the army's apparently indiscriminate killings, both by the American public as well as people in Iraq. "At last the truth has been revealed," said Noor-Eldeen's father after the footage was leaked, according to the New York Times. "I would have sold my house and all that I own in order to show this tape to the world."

Manning had a reasoned explanation of her motivation for the leaks, which she told to a hacker named Adrian Lamo in May of 2010. "I want people to see the truth, regardless of who they are, because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public," she wrote.

When Manning uploaded the Iraq War Logs and the Afghan War Diary to WikiLeaks in February she added a note, which ended this way: "This is possibly one of the most significant documents of our time, removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of 21st century asymmetric warfare."

In May of 2010, Adrian Lamo, the hacker with whom Manning had corresponded after uploading massive amounts of data to WikiLeaks, turned her over to the Department of Justice. She had sought out Lamo a week earlier, apparently lonely and trying to make some human connection. Lamo was publicly connected to WikiLeaks, which may have made Manning see him as a relevant contact.

On May 27, Chelsea Manning was arrested. She was put in an "8' x 8' x 8' wire mesh cage in Kuwait," according to VICE, and held for two months before being transferred to the United States, where she was put in an even smaller cage at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia. Here, Manning was kept in solitary confinement for nine months, frequently stripped and left naked, and awoken when she fell asleep. A dentist provided mental health evaluations.

During this period, WikiLeaks was actively publishing the rest of the documents that Manning sent to them, including the Afghan War Diaries, the Iraq War Logs, and a massive collection of US diplomatic cables. (Manning's leaks clarified previously opaque international affairs and embarrassed US state officials, but their impact on our nation's relationship with foreign powers were "fairly modest," according to former Defense Secretary Robert Gates.)

While Manning's actions as a whistleblower sent shockwaves around the globe, the American government's treatment of her in state custody has become a human rights crisis in itself. In 2011, PJ Crowley, then the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, resigned from his position following public remarks that he made about Manning. "What is being done to [Chelsea] Manning is ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid on the part of the Department of Defense," Crowley had said. His statement prompted President Obama to speak on Manning's experience at Quantico. At a press conference in 2011, Obama appeared satisfied with the Pentagon's assurance that the treatment of Manning was "appropriate."

A month after Obama was forced to confront Manning's treatment at Quantico, he publicly stated that she "broke the law," despite the fact she had not yet been convicted of any crime. Manning's defense attorney would later cite this statement by Obama as an example of the way that the US government affected public perception of Manning's guilt prior to her trial. In January of 2013, the pretrial imprisonment of Manning was indeed deemed illegal in a court ruling.

Photo via Flickr User Matthew Lippincott

When her trial finally came, Manning pled guilty to lesser charges in hopes that the judge would be lenient in sentencing. She did not plead guilty to the charge of aiding the enemy. As the prosecution prepared to argue that Manning had aided an enemy of the state, Crowley spoke out again, this time in a column for the Guardian in which he lambasted the US government for "making a martyr" of Manning.

Manning was ultimately acquitted of the aiding the enemy charge, but she did not receive the leniency she had counted on.

The conditions Manning faces in prison are brutal, and some of her advocates say they're tantamount to state-sponsored harassment. "The US military has kept her in a constant state of stress by continually harassing her with frivolous prison infractions," said Greer, the advocate who helped Manning to petition President Obama. Like Manning's lawyers and other supporters, Greer believes that Manning is "being denied the mental health support and gender-related health care that she desperately needs."

Until 2015, Manning was denied hormones to help her transition, and she's still required to wear her hair cropped closely to her head, in line with the military's standards for male inmates. In 2015, she was threatened with indefinite solitary confinement for possessing "contraband"—toothpaste and LGBTQ reading materials. This summer she was placed in solitary, as punishment for attempting to take her own life. In September, after Manning staged a hunger strike, the military guaranteed in writing that it will provide her with gender reassignment surgery, though she has yet to receive that treatment.

To some, Manning's treatment at the hands of the US military and her prolonged suffering is justification enough to commute her sentence. "Chelsea's mistreatment by the military and in their custody has been so protracted and indefensibly cruel that she should certainly be released immediately," insists Jones. Others, like Greer, note that Manning's continued incarceration essentially deprives the world of a vocal advocate for freedom and transparency. "She is an incredibly strong person with a brilliant and strategic mind, and she wants to use her talent and passion to make positive change in the world," Greer says. "The fact that she is kept away from us, locked behind bars, is truly a tragedy for our whole society."

Manning's lawyers at the ACLU, conversely, argue that her sentence should be overturned because her First Amendment rights were violated during her prosecution. In a brief filed earlier this year, the organization argues that the fact that she was prosecuted under the Espionage Act—a law first introduced during World War I that targets spies and traitors but has been used against whistleblowers and government officials who have communicated with the press in recent years—was unconstitutional.

One thing most of Manning's advocates unequivocally agree on is the fact that she will suffer immensely if she's not freed soon—and, with a looming Trump presidency, that her future may be frighteningly uncertain. While conditions have been brutal, Manning has at least finally been able to access healthcare. Many fear that such treatment could be threatened under Trump, who has been openly dismissive of the rights of trans people serving in the military.

Manning told Broadly that she suffers from feelings of desperation at times. "Sure, I have been surviving, and I plan on fighting to survive and move forward in the years to come," she said. "But I have no idea what challenges lie ahead."

Many advocates acknowledge that the present situation isn't very encouraging: President Obama has been notoriously tough on the prosecution of whistleblowers, and it doesn't help that many in the government still see Manning's actions as harmful to national security. "I will be surprised if President Obama commutes her sentence," PJ Crowley tells Broadly, adding that he does not consider Manning to be a whistleblower and considers her actions irresponsible and dangerous: "While serving in a war zone, she forwarded intelligence information and other sensitive material to someone not authorized to possess it," he says.

But even an establishment figure like Crowely, who believes that Manning's sentencing was just, recognizes that she should not have to spend 35 years in prison. "Chelsea Manning should be paroled at the first opportunity and allowed to go home and reconstruct her life," Crowley said.

According to Manning's lawyer, Chase Strangio, she "is seeking clemency and relief from her egregiously long sentence precisely so that she can, as Crowley suggests, 'go home and reconstruct her life', and so that she can, as Manning explains, finally live as the woman she was always meant to be." Strangio reiterates that Manning pled guilty, that she's not asking to be pardoned, and that she understands that she will "continue to face the consequences of her actions." Those actions, Strangio emphasizes, were motivated by a sense of duty to the American people.

"Chelsea acted in the service of the public interest to disclose information she believed imperative to inform people of harms perpetrated in the government's name around the world," Strangio explains. This is something that President Obama could consider when deciding whether or not to commute Manning's sentence to time served before he leaves office in January. According to Strangio, "her chances of surviving in prison much longer are slim, and action now will prevent the government from overseeing her unnecessary and untimely death."

Due to her belief that the American people have a right to know what their representative government is doing, and at whose expense, a woman is now locked in a prison in Kansas, where, among other injustices, she has been forced to fight legal battles to be given healthcare, punished for attempting suicide, and required to cut her hair because the state considers her to be a man. With incoming President Donald Trump's expansive military and surveillance powers, his apparent disinterest in truth, and cavalier attitude toward potential Russian interference in American politics, transparency in government is more important than ever before, as is the informed participation of the public in the sometimes disturbing behavior of the state.

Though there are platforms that share her writing, Manning, who risked her life and liberty to advocate for transparency, is now barely visible. Other than a digital black and white photograph taken during the first time that she dressed as a woman, the world has never even seen her. "I often worry that I have become more of a symbol than human," Manning wrote in her letter. If people forget that she is more than a whistleblower or a hero, then they'll never really know her, or understand the urgency and the severity of her situation.

"The truth is that I am just as vulnerable, and lonely at times, as everyone else," Manning continued. "I have my flaws. I have strengths. I have weaknesses. I also have talents. I have faults. There are a lot of things I can do. But there are also a lot of things I cannot do. I am only human."

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[emotionalterrorism]

She's insecure as hell and lashing out to protect herself. It doesn't matter who I am, what I do, or what I'm like, because she's projecting on to me the things that she's insecure about. I knew what I was doing when I did this and I never took my insecurities out on her.

She's bad at boundaries and will let other people take over her space and life in a way that harms those around her, the consequences for them aren't enough to have her be willing to put an end to being taken advantage of. Perhaps T was right in that the word girlfriend was never going to be used. Him in a relationship like that would lead to a lot of him overthinking everything and taking more responsibility for her than is his to take. She had to be warned not to take advantage of him. Most people don't need a warning, they're perceptive and kind enough to respect other people's space and time.

I wonder how much of it was a body confidence thing. She saw me in my glory wearing no makeup, in a revealing outfit in my unadorned body, 15 pounds lighter and confident for it because I earned it by being in shape, that being in shape makes me feel fast, strong, powerful. It's not just that I accept my body the way it is, I've pushed my body to be better and it has responded by rewarding me with more than I ever thought possible. I'm proud of the work I've done, of my grit, of the athlete I've become. I earned this. I didn't get it by accident. For someone who's insecure in their own body, who never leaves the house without putting on a face, being around someone who's comfortable and confident in their body and who exists in the world as who they are must be terrifyingly intimidating.

She never feels more like herself than when she's her drag persona, literally a caricature of all of the hyperfeminine sex object stereotypes. Her drag persona isn't a real person but that's who she identifies most with. Stereotypes, other people's standards of femininity, external perceptions, and the contest of who puts on a better show, who is the best at being publically available for consumption. The drag isn't a problem by itself, it can be fun to thumb your nose at those externally imposed standards of who a woman is supposed to be. It's another thing entirely to embrace them as who you should be, to get in them and lie down.

I don't think she knows who she is or what she wants. I don't think she knows how to get what she wants when she does know what that is. She lacks the confidence and self assuredness to have a frank conversation with another adult about compatibility. She had a relationship with someone without them or their input. She talked more with Rosie about her relationship needs with T than she ever did with T. She allowed a DADT relationship, where she had to hide who she is from her primary partner. Bad boundaries. She can't get her shit together to have the life she wants to have. She's running from one thing to another to fill her time, to be incredibly busy, to never be alone, to do 9 things at once (nobody is this good at multi-tasking) and maintain an illusion. Really good at putting on a face, literally. A heavy social media presence, overextended in employment, booked solid in her off hours, rarely initiating social contact with her friends, these are not the actions of someone who likes themselves very much.

When my self confidence wavered, I knew I couldn't depend on other people to give me what should have come from within. My choice was to go do things I could be proud of, that were all mine. For the most part I don't even really want or seek out external validation, even when it's something other people could be proud of. Depending on others for my self confidence is an unstable and unsustainable way to feel good about myself. What happens when those people aren't there? How do I build myself in to a self actualized individual? If I lack body confidence, I do something about it. I find things under my control to feel better about my body. I don't put myself in a position where I am fishing for other people to tell me I am good at being a sex object, that I am beautiful, that I can check the boxes of what a woman is supposed to be: sexually available to everyone, harming my body to maintain the appearance of conformity to sex stereotypes, boundaryless with strangers, spending my money on clothes and shoes for when I put myself on display.

I spent too long thinking my value was contingent on how well I met other people's standards. I've grown up since then.

It's been an adventure walking through the garden of my insecurities, but we pulled some weeds and discovered some real beauty in there. If I nurture it, it'll continue to favour the good things, the things that make me strong and sustain me, the things that come from within.

I am myself, a person. I know who I am, but she doesn't know me. She has her ideas, but she has no idea who I really am. She can think what she wants, but all the people in her life who know me know better. Even the ones I barely talk to anymore will never forget me and remember me as someone admirable. I am going to hold on to that, because the people who love me know me better than some stranger and it's their opinions I value. Her ideas are informed by who she is, and as much as it drives me nuts to have someone pull the same shit my mom pulled, where they evaluate my personhood based on how good they feel after using me as a placeholder for something bigger, it's not a thing that has to hurt me. She doesn't control who I am, and I refuse to smush myself into a shape because the info she got about me (filtered through someone else's perceptions, which were distorted by their own mental state) led her to some hare-brained conclusions.

I have deep and long lasting comfortable love, strong resilient relationships, happiness that I've forged myself, security and confidence in my career, a work-life balance, and the ability to love myself in the absence of external validation. That last one is a work in progress, but it's coming along and I can tap in to it, it's growing and will come easier as it grows. I'm proud of myself, and I think that's well deserved. I don't need her to like me. It's her loss to be so spun by her own brain that she can't get to know me for real. I don't have to be a person she likes. I'll just be myself. Either she'll figure out she underestimated me or she won't. But my self worth is not contingent on her approval.

[chavalahh]

My BookTube Top Tens Tag List!

Too long for the description box in my video! :P (found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dz99uxvKbkc&t=5s)

#1: DAPHNE'S BOOK by Mary Downing Hahn: Yes, a book that I first read when I was eleven probably shouldn't be in first place anymore. :P  But screw it.  The author is a prolific children's writer and Maryland librarian, and she wrote this one the year that I was born.  I named the protagonist in my second published short story as an adult (plus took the general struggling-with-relationships-and-big-questions theme) from this protagonist and book.  Also, do you remember that "You've Got Mail" joke about how "The Godfather" movies answer all of life's questions?  This is that book for me. :P

#2: MOCKINGJAY by Suzanne Collins: Yes, I read this popular YA novel when I was well into my adulthood.  In many ways, it was a case of reading it at the right place/time.  I was struggling with how to deal with the trauma of war, and understanding how people who start off as the underdog/oppressed "good guys" don't always stay there.  In fact, war makes sure that they don't.  The author meant for this series to be a commentary on war, and the final installment, and the least liked by most fans, covers it most directly.  This series has duped a lot of people, but I stand firm--Katniss is NOT a superhero.  A critical reading shows how "The Mockingjay"(also "The Girl on Fire" and "The Star-Crossed Lovers")  is not real--it's propaganda used by adults to sidle into or fortify their own power.  This is the book that covers post-traumatic stress, (what I call) "angry young man syndrome," and the importance of fostering real, empathetic human relationships to survive.

#3: STATION ELEVEN by Emily St. John Mandel: My attempt at being less cynical about the impending apocalypse. :P  Yes, most of the planet is wiped out by a vicious disease, but society remakes itself--and it embraces art! :D  I love the artistry in the author's story construction--the enclosed feel of performing "King Lear" as the virus hits vs the open-air production 20 years later.  I love the parralels between the comic book, "Station Eleven," vs the aftermath in the novel.  I love the tribute to our wonderful, technological world, and also to the spirit of survival in the wilderness.  Finally, I love the characters and what they show us about humanity as humanity moves into a new age.  Metaphorically speaking. :P

#4: WUTHERING HEIGHTS by Emily Bronte:  For awhile, I worried that loving this book would be akin to loving a Victorian version of TWILIGHT. :/  I remember, as a teenager, reading to classmates from the section where Cathy professes her undying love for Heathcliff over her changeable love for Linton--entranced, I tell you! :P  But something else I've always felt since secretly reading this book in Spanish class--I identify most with Nelly.  I suppose that she offers a safe, if still involved, distance from passion and its pitfalls.  I can fall for these characters, and hate them sometimes, and also realize that they're doomed. :P  (Maybe the kids a little less so, save for dearly departed Linton Heathcliff.)  Emily Bronte weaves such a spell!  I can't not be drawn in.

#5: PLANETFALL by Emma Newman: My most recent read on this list, I believe!  Science fiction about civilians in space, unreliable narrators with mental illness, traumatic backstories, falling in love with charismatic leaders who turn into prophets scaling a proverbial mount sinai, communal sins of the past that sneak up slowly for revenge, finally grasping the mechanics of 3-D printing, sorta...this book has "me" written all over it. :P  But what made me listen to it twice in a row was the protagonist's relationships (with herself and others) and that balancing act between science and faith.  The author made me feeeeel.

#6: ANNE FRANK: THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL by Anne Frank: When I first read this for school when I was about Anne's age, I was blown away by her insights.  She dug into all of my secret and not-so-secret thoughts about my relationships and my body. Of course, discussing this in class with a bunch of awkward 14-year-old girls meant that their commentary was mostly a bunch of "eeeew, she's gross!"  As a hypersensitive gal myself, I was crushed.  Now that we're in our thirties, I wanna take my old classmates aside and say, ADMIT IT, ANNE WAS RIGHT!  She was my first role model.  She was wise beyond her years.  Her loss isn't more tragic than anything else that happened in the Holocaust, but I truly believe that she would have been one of literature's foremost thinkers as an adult.  I long to know what she would have made of the Jewish religious and cultural future, to start.  She'd run circles around the men who put stupid caricatures of her in their books, that's for sure.

#7: EMPEROR MAGE by Tamora Pierce: My favorite childhood fantasy novel--aka my street cred in this genre. :P  Right now I'm eagerly awaiting new installments in the prequel series!  Man, YA fantasy writing has changed since I was a kid (it's grown a looooot longer.)  But this book still had enough meat on the bones to draw me in.  I loved the colorfully described world, the Tortall delegation who were fish out of water in Carthak, hints about Numair's backstory (see prequels), the magic, mystery and action.  But mostly, I loved Daine and saw her as my type of gal superhero.  Not a fighter, but someone connected by magic to animals.  Behold, the power of empathy!  So much this author did to draw me in.

#8: INTUITION by Allegra Goodman: I think this one has to bump KAATERSKILL FALLS by the same author from its pedestal! :o  Still love that book, but don't remember all of it nearly as well.  This novel, like that one, is the author's signature of studying a small, enclosed community of people.  A bunch of postdocs in a science lab!  Plus a small handful of familiars.  What do I know about science: nothing!  But I do get the stresses of having to prove yourself, communally and as an individual.  I get that people and their motivations are complicated, and they can take you down paths not intended.  I loooove well done interior monologue--the author excels at that, and is one of my favorites in the literary genre.

#9: THE CASUAL VACANCY by JK Rowling: I belieeeve that Katie from Books and Things put to words what is so great about this novel--it has well developed characters AND a plot!  And I don't usually get behind plot! :P  This one drew me in with the death of a parish councilor leading to political infighting about an impoverished suburb.  Themes include classism, drug abuse, and lines between personal responsibility and systematic victimization.  I really loved the middle-aged female characters and their personal struggles--such an underrepresented group!  The ending for one of the teen characters stabbed me in the gut after getting so embroiled in this world.  Kind of like the ins and outs of a magical school, the author brought this small, English community alive. :P  It's strange, really--the HARRY POTTER series influenced my life, maybe more than most anything I've read.  I've made friends, I've had experiences and am now writing a novella because of them.  But this book re-ignited my love for literary fiction, now my most-read genre.

#10: THE LOWLAND by Jhumpa Lahiri: Perhaps this author is the most accomplished lyricist on the list.  She's another of my favorite literary writers.  Her writing floooows.  Her characters and their world are a lurid, swirling soup of realism and deep emotional output.  She can even do it in short stories, but I admit that novels are easier to remember!  I love her second in particular for the Indian history that it entails, and because of characters who make complicated choices that engender a lifetime of consequences.  The female protagonist, in particular, eschews the suffocating role of "the good Indian mother/wife," and abandons her family to embrace her own happiness.  Makes me want to cheer for AND shake her!  Lahiri's writing is so relateable that I've always felt a (not completely deserved, I think) correlation between her Indian characters and my sense of Jewish characters. :P  What's great about this book is that no one stays in their lane.  So yes, there is a universal theme to human experiences, buried amidst specific people and happenings.