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sevlawless · 2 years ago

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okay so the n route has been bothering me ever since i played it and i needed to air my frustrations out as a way to cope i suppose

for reference my main detective who i use for n is felicity, but sometimes i also use arabella to test out some options i wouldn't normally pick and just to see how the romance works with a detective that isn't exactly that compatible with n. so when i first played, i used felicity and then later on when i was doing a deep dive into the romance and the plot, i was using arabella just to see if certain things held up yk! and lord how i wish it did LMFAO

just a little disclaimer that this is all just my opinion and i'm willing to listen to other points of view about this! and i do not mean any of what i say as a dig or to be hateful toward n, they are my favorite li in twc and the fact that i love their romance and their character so much is probably most if not all of the reason why their route in book 3 was so weird to me, and why i make the critiques that i do.

under the cut because this is a doozy and also book 3 spoilers

first of all the main thing in the demo chapters is that n gets mad if you try and fight the trappers bc they are so scared of losing you and like i GUESS i get it but this is literally our life now you're just gonna have to get used to it. and this wouldn't have even been an big issue for me if it was properly addressed! when i played using arabella i tried being mad, i tried staying mad, and it kept getting swept under the rug by the plot. like are we seriously not going to talk about this??? at all?????? and it seems very ooc for n NOT to say anything about it when you get a moment alone because why would they not address it, ESPECIALLY if your mc was still upset over it. AND ESPECIALLY IF YOU’RE IN A RELATIONSHIP LIKE- these things need to be discussed in order to grow as a couple and there needs to be healthy communication or else this is not going to work. like you're telling me we were living with unit bravo for WEEKS and this shit just never got brought up again?

this also ties into my next gripe- n's backstory. so, if you snooped in the demo they won't tell you anything, which okay. mc shouldn't have done that, sure, but n doesn't even give a reason as to why they're upset by that. obviously you can be like "well i think anyone would be upset if you delved into their past without their knowledge or permission" but YOU ARE IN A RELATIONSHIP WITH THIS PERSON WHY IS THERE NO COMMUNICATION OF FEELINGS. i would have appreciated that scene a hell of a lot more if n sat you down and was like "i'm upset that you did this, here's why," but all they do is get sad and then that's it. when i played as arabella i had her snoop AND get upset over the argument during the trapper fight, and n said something along the lines of "i know sometimes we regret doing things" as a reference to snooping AND the argument which??? just does NOT hold up at all and had me irritated as hell.

if you didn't snoop in the demo, n takes you to their room and shows you a picture of their family and talks about them and how his brother joined the navy and didn't come back (their brother was killed by vampires) and that's why they decided to join the navy, as a way to try and figure out what actually happened. this scene started off great, but it's cut short way too quickly because n drops the photo and the frame breaks. and then they basically just shoo you out. there's really not any option to comfort them, and the option that is there is not good enough. and it's not that n had to tell us EVERYTHING in that one scene, but it's more so the fact that it NEVER gets brought up again. your mc can't take a moment to bring it up and n sure as hell doesn't say anything else about it. which is so ?????? im sorry you supposedly love this person (im saying this for both mc and n) and yet neither of you address it again??? it makes no sense at all.

onto the research/combat scene… i've done the combat scene once so i can't really speak on that as much as the research one so. most of the research scene is fine aside from the fact if you're not in a relationship (which i did for one playthrough with felicity) n brings up bobby if you dated them which felt so bizarre but anyways. the option to realize you love n… i would love this IF the option where you tell n you love them actually mattered. LMFAO if you tell n you love them they literally just stare at you and then the sex scene pops up. like are you kidding me??? n would not just leave you hanging like that even if it was just to say that they don't feel that way yet. and the sex scene itself is… fine i suppose but it doesn't feel as intimate as it should be. there's little to no dialogue and it just feels so weird to read. like why would neither of you be saying anything?? not to mention the fact that you're literally OUTSIDE of the warehouse where any of ub could see you at any point it just feels wrong to have sex at that point at least in my opinion. and the talk after feels so short and weird i feel like both the detective and n would have more to say. and that moment is quickly brushed away by the plot.

i guess the next plot line is whether u told tina or verda or nobody about the supernatural. going into book 3 this was probably what i looked forward to the most and ofc it barely delivered. i liked seeing tina and n interact but that quickly turned sour for me, not because tina started rightfully bringing up how much mc has been through, but because n really does not do anything with that pov being voiced to them, which is so fucking ooc it pains me. when they go to talk to mc after their conversation there's no discussion just "i wanted to see you" okay but WHY did you? i would have taken a li pov of what tina relayed to them literally anything! and it's just another thing that gets swept under the rug because of the stupid ass plot.

another thing about the dinner that gets lost in the plot of book 3: tina/verda bringing up your li possibly drinking your blood and mc can react a number of different ways and i wish it had been talked about more than just in that moment 😭

the only scene that i genuinely enjoyed in all of n's route was after that building caves in on mc and you're back at the warehouse traumatized and bruised and defeated. n runs you a bath and if you pick that option helps you out of your clothes and then helps you settle into bed. i wish there had been more discussion of anything in that scene but mc was so out of it i was okay with no talking. and then redacted petname <3 the other thing i was most looking forward to! one thing i did dislike about this scene though was that we didn't really get a glimpse on how n was feeling yk usually mishka offers the li's pov on a scene and not having that made that moment not feel as rounded out.

the pool scene… first of all why did n get this one. like it would have made sense for m, hell even a! and again the scene felt so shallow and then the option to have sex. you're telling me your first time with n can be on a fucking pool table???? that is so not their vibe AT ALL and it feels so weird to even have that there. it was unnecessary as well as the other opportunity to have sex and i feel like mishka just put them in there as like fan service when who (in my opinion) genuinely wants this if they romance n and have them as their main route. i had hoped the first time n and mc have the opportunity to have sex it would be a more intimate setting because that's more fitting for them and my nate mc, felicity. but nope! and then the scene gets cut short because n has to go on patrol??? and again the sex scene itself … neither of them feel personable it's like a "one size fits all" type of approach and that just does not work if this is supposed to be interactive fiction where we create a personality for our mc's that cannot fit this specific mold mishka wants to put everyone in.

being invited to what might as well just be a fucking slave trade (i have many thoughts about this auction plotline as well but for now im discussing n's route) had me so confused because why would mishka even do that and then n's comment about the stationary? i need you to be fucking for real. the scene before you leave for the mission with n just felt so weird like we get it n is protective of mc but at this point it just felt like a hinderance which sucks because one of the things i love most about n is their deep care for mc and they just sounded like a broken record and it annoyed me so bad.

after all that, the scene when you come back and n is in tears confessing their love for mc i wanted to enjoy it i really did and i just could not upon replaying because it feels so unbelievably hollow. we have not discussed anything pertaining our relationship and when there are things that need to be discussed they are so underwhelming it's hard to even care. there are a handful of things n and mc both need to work on in order for this relationship to work and the fact that they're not being addressed makes it difficult for me to enjoy anything about this route. you can't even tell n you love them back for fuck's sake like hello.

a theme that i did not think was going to be as prominent as it was in this book but n contemplating mc turning into a vampire and AGAIN there wasn't ever really a discussion about this between mc and n and i feel like this will come to a head as the books progress but i don't think it fit into book 3 considering so many other things were being thrown at us.

all in all i truly desperately wanted to enjoy book 3 and enjoy being with n but i cannot when there are so many things ignored, sidelined, or just completely forgotten in order to push the plot forward.

#n sewell #twc book 3 #twc book 3 spoilers #again this is in no way an attack on n i love them sm it's embarrassing at times #i just wanted better for their route and for this book and it sucks bc these are such minor tweaks in the grand scheme of things -#but when they pile up like this it becomes hard to ignore and just feels like the amount of discrepancies is overwhelming #it has been a horrible couple of days being natesewell . LMFAO #anyway if u made it this far thanks for reading <3 #i seriously was debating even making this post as well but my brain needed to do SOMETHING like #ugh .#twc is such a comfort to me and so is n it's just hard to not take this so hard #and i know that probably sounds ridiculous to say since this is literally just fiction #but yea !#feel free to send me asks/dms abt this i would love to discuss this more

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chasseurdeloup · 1 year ago

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Describe an NPC who is important to your character's story. Is this person still a part of your character's life? What are your character's feelings towards them? Have those feelings shifted, or have they always been constant?

META

MEET THE LANGLEYS

Claire Langley: Kaden's mom Faceclaim: Robin Wright Things are complicated between them. There's love underneath all of it, but there is a lot of resentment from Kaden and just hurt. After her husband died, Claire was determined to make sure that her family remained a singular unit, undivided. At any cost. She didn't care if that meant her children didn't always like her, she was trying to keep them safe and prepared them for the world. Because he was the oldest, Claire always pushed Kaden to be the best and then be better than that, always raising the bar just out of reach. She thought she was showing love that way, that pushing him in training would make him a better hunter and ensure his survival as well as that of the family.

She also pushed him to grow up faster than he should have had to, partially because he was a hunter, but partially because his father died. There was definitely some parentification happening here where he was expected to look out for his sister. And he was expected to do that while his mother put the two siblings on an uneven playing field and Keira gained the favor where Kaden gained the critique. She knew that Kaden had compassionate heart and did her best to try and harden it, which she thought was for the best for him. That didn't mean she wouldn't occasionally use it against him, manipulating his desire to help to push him in the direction she thought best.

Her view on the supernatural is very black and white. She sees the supernatural on the whole as a scourge that needs to be eradicated. In her eyes, it all only brings danger and destruction. Her family (and her late husband's family) have believed for generations that it is their duty to help protect humanity. Their codes are strict and Claire follows them -- That's how you ensure survival. There's a reason why the Langley and Durand names have survived while others haven't. She made sure to pass down the tradition to her children, to be as harsh and strict as she needed to in order to make them into hunters worthy of their legacy.

Keira Langley: Kaden's Sister Faceclaim: Rachel Keller Another extremely complicated relationship. Despite what she did and despite the fact that she disowned him, Kaden still loves his little sister a lot. That doesn't mean he trusts or likes her right now. He's honestly not sure if he'll be able to handle seeing her again.

Keira grew up in Kaden's shadow and constantly strived to be just as good as her big brother. He might have been taller and older and stronger, but that didn't matter. All she wanted was his approval and their mother's attention. Kaden got so much of it, even though it was mostly criticism and negative, that didn't matter to Keira. She wanted their mother to care about making her the best as much as she did Kaden. It was never easy for her to see that she was more or less placed on a pedestal and held above Kaden by Claire. It never felt like that on her side of the coin.

For a lot of their lives, the two siblings were the most consistent relationship they could rely on. They trained together, they went to hunter camps in the months off from school, and went on hunts with their mother. The two did have friends growing up but, for the most part, they were encouraged to only spend time with other hunters. They could go to other kid's houses, but any friends who weren't hunters weren't allowed in the Langley house. Claire never wanted to explain all the weaponry and strange old books filled with pages and pages about various monsters to any other nosey child's parents.

A lot of the time, Kaden would make breakfast for the both of them on school day mornings and made sure Keira had a lunch to take with her. Claire had plenty of work to do on top of her duties as a hunter and it wasn't easy supporting a household as a single parent. It left Kaden in a bit of a parentified position with his sister while they were also the only friends each other had sometimes. Claire didn't talk much about their father after he died, expect in context of training and Langley legacy, so the siblings took it upon themselves to keep the memory of their father alive. Observing some of the Jewish holiday traditions he taught them in his short time with them was one way they did that.

As much as Kaden tried to bring his sister along with him on his own journey to finding the shades of grey within their world of hunting and the supernatural, Keira wouldn't hop on board. She was too busy trying to win her mother's favor to question anything. Plus, she believes Claire, she believes the rest of their family around them. She believes what she's been taught her entire life and she's seen the destruction caused by the supernatural. She barely remembers her father because of the supernatural. She's put blinders on and has thrown herself in to being a carbon copy of their mother.

Kaden puts a lot of the blame for how she is now on his own shoulders for a lot of reasons. For one, he was told that he should look out for her and help take care of her and should make sure the family stays together. He's the reason the family is split, but some part of him thought that maybe he could open Keira's eyes a little and he could keep the chain from breaking. He worries that his approach is the reason why she couldn't see things for herself, that maybe if he had opened his own eyes sooner, that she could have been different, too. And maybe if he hadn't fallen into the trap his mother set for them, the one that kept them competing against one another, maybe then he'd have her trust. Maybe then she wouldn't have killed the one bright spot in his life just before telling him that he wasn't her brother and he sure as hell wasn't a Langley.

So yeah, absolutely zero family trauma and baggage. None.

#ooc #meta #about #c: claire #c: keira #i was gonna write about damien too but i will save that for later #long post

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mixotrophics · 3 months ago

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book: historical materialism 31.4

https://brill.com/display/serial/HM <-- a book from the Historical Materialism series. Not my usual fare ... I got it for free though. This is a very recent issue. The front cover is of Gaza on Oct 10, 2023. the works within don't talk about Palestine much. not a great feeling from that juxtaposition but I don't know who made this choice & why, doubtfully the authors featured within. As a collection of essays/research, I'll cover them briefly & separately:

Editorial Perspective When Monopsony Power Wanes , Ashok Kumar dissecting the ways in which supplier-firms and buyer-firms interact. How in capitalism, buyer-firms will consolidate towards monopsony (like a monopoly but for "buyers" instead of "sellers") as one company gets more and more powerful, and that monopsony will mean they can choose the suppliers of their goods & eventually drive the suppliers towards monopoly (by only buying from their favored suppliers). When suppliers have monopoly, they can begin to strong-arm the monopsony firm. Neither of these necessarily lead to good conditions for workers, since the monopoly-supplier refers to the companies here ... the sweatshop-owners who make the things sold in the USA, for example. "Capitalistic competition therefore produces oligopolies at either end of the value chain, leading to crises of profitability and attempts at new 'fixes'" (fixes like finding suppliers in a country with poorer workers' rights, or inventing a New Thing like AI, or manipulating the government and remaking political structures)

Articles Latin American Development in Historical Perspective , Nicolás Grinberg an in-depth following of Latin America's development, and how it has been a site of continuous exploitation ... Grinberg posits that many countries are not self-contained capitalist systems, but held perpetually in debt to the world system, US-authoritarian governments driving policy towards extracting rent from the businesses in their country to pay off these debts. I think. I think I understood it then forgot.

On the Distribution of Wealth and Capital Ownership , Geert Reuten "capital ownership" refers to what a family owns that gives it capacity to shape the behaviors of companies ... so not things like houses you own, etc. When capital ownership is used (as opposed to wealth in general), the world only becomes vastly more unequal. 94% of capital ownership is in the hands of the top 10%. for example. I am so mad

The Planning Daemon , Max Grünberg Asks if a communist AI would be a good idea, or at least, better than other ideas for running a communist system. Even if you don't care about AI it does talk about some issues in non-automated/algorithmic approaches to "finding out who needs what materials, where, when, why" which are worth picking through even if you think AI would be a shitty fix. ...Grünberg brings up the fact AI is a "black box" is a pretty big problem, but doesn't address it further, which is. ? I guess that's a job for a programmer?

Sohn-Rethel's Unity of the Critique of Society and the Critique of Epistemology, and his Theoretical Blind Spot: Measure , Frank Engster Engster draws on Marx & (lesser known?) Sohn-Rethel to figure out what the hell "value" is. Really interesting and long and Idk if I can do it justice here. A simplified idea of "value" is that it is a unit of measurement (like a mile, a gram, so on) that arises from subconscious understanding of society (not One Person) that, by virtue of being a Quantitative Measurement with No Clear Creator, it can "masquerade" as an objective thing, severing itself from the historical and social contexts that created & validated it.

Marx's Dissertation in Light of the Value-Form , Gabriele Schimmenti to put it bluntly, "individuality is bullshit" , goes about it in a pretty interesting way if you know Greek philosophy (Epicurus specifically), which I don't.

Abstract Labour and Socialism , Kamal Khosravi trans. Sam Salour an introduction to Khosravi, an Iranian Marxist that Salour wants to show the West. Khosravi heavily critiques the idea of quantitative value, capitalist or otherwise. A system must have room for qualitative nuance. And that the right to [x] is bourgeois, an outgrowth of capitalism towards socialism (as things would be), due to its Equality rather than accepting of qualitative difference/nuance ... e.g., "two producers with individual differences, for example the difference between one who is married or has children and a bachelor without children, receive equal shares for equal labour; therefore to overcome this injustice and 'to avoid all these defects, right would have to be unequal rather than equal.'" Khosravi asks: how might we approach just distribution of resources, of living interdependently, of collective ownership and access? We might shift as we can, exchanging worker-to-worker, buying from the artisan or trading one-to-one, decoupling money from necessities, maybe?

#miaow #books time #historical materialism #undescribed image

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4mjay · 7 months ago

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TRUE NARRATIVE AND TESTIMONIES

True narrative are statements that are based on real facts, actual events or encounters and aim to tell the real story about a particular subject or person. These narratives can take several forms, like documentaries and non-fiction novels, and develop by gathering evidence via investigation and firsthand account.

Ex. "Educated" by Tara Westover https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35133922-educated

https://youtu.be/q9S7tdz80wo?si=hZ6iDy6v-KV8vYep

Testimonies are personal narratives given by those who have physically witnessed or experienced an exact phenomenon. They provide personal information about an incident and are frequently utilised in legal proceedings, historical studies, and social causes to highlight divergent viewpoints

Ex. "I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban" by Malala Yousafzai https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17851885-i-am-malala

CRITIQUE

Introduction

The story about Tara Westover is a memoir about her journey from a strict childhood in rural Idaho to receiving a PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) at Cambridge University. The book explores the power of education and resilience as Tara breaks free from her past to create a new future.

Title: Educated

Author: Tara Westover (born on September 27, 1986. Growing up in Idaho, United States is an American memoirist, essayist and historian. She returned to Trinity College, Cambridge, where she earned a doctorate in intellectual history in 2014.)

Thesis Statement: The book "Educated" by Tara Westover demonstrates the life-changing impact of education in overcoming difficulty and gaining personal freedom.

Summary

The compelling memoir "Educated" by Tara Westover details her journey from a reclusive and violent childhood in rural Idaho to eventually receiving a PhD from Cambridge University. Growing up in a conservative, reclusive family that rejected both modern medicine and ordinary schooling, Westover encountered many obstacles in her quest for knowledge and self-reliance. She faced challenges including conflict within the family and self-doubt, but she overcome them with perseverance and determination to create her own route to independence and self-discovery. This is a gripping story about education, identity, familial ties, and the life-changing impact of knowledge.

Evaluation

This captivating book tells Tara's journey from a challenging childhood in an intimate and reclusive household to her eventual quest of education and self-discovery. Tara transmits to readers the value of resiliency, determination, and the life-changing effects of education through her own personal journeys.

1. Educate the people who have been struggling in life problems

This story gives those who are struggling in life a message of empowerment and a positive outlook. Tara's story demonstrates that people can overcome challenges and build a better future for themselves through determination and confidence in themselves, regardless of how challenging the circumstances may be.

2. Connecting this story to all individuals

Since Tara's book highlights common facts about human experiences, these themes are relatable to a broad variety of individuals. People with various backgrounds can relate to Tara's story since it portrays struggles, achievements, and personal development. Through her journey, Tara motivates individuals to consider their own lives, relationships, and goals, promoting understanding and empathy among individuals.

Conclusion

She beautifully wraps up her narrative by emphasizing the value of education in helping her to define her identity and move on from her past. Her message of self-belief and resilience uplifts people by demonstrating that everyone has the capacity to grow and overcome difficulties. All things considered, what comes next inspires and motivates us by reassuring us that self-discovery and knowledge may lead to empowerment and change.

1. The authors way of encouraging people through personal life

The author encouraging people to take on obstacles with perseverance and confidence by sharing her story of surviving a challenging life and achieving academics. Her experiences highlight the value of overcoming difficulties, pursuing goals, and embracing opportunities that arise for improving ourselves.

2. Back up your decisions on agreeing and disagreeing or state your reasons

Since the author's experience is motivating and accessible, I strongly agree with her point of view. People are able to emotionally relate with her path because of her honesty and openness in expressing both her challenges and her achievements. Many individuals may relate to her message of hope and resiliency since it emphasises the common themes of overcoming difficulty and finding strength in it.

3. Give your general opinion of the work

In simple terms the story, "Educated" by Tara Westover is a very interesting book about how education and determination can change someone's life. Tara shares her story about growing up in a strict and isolated family, and how she overcame many obstacles to pursue her education. From my perspective, the book shows us the importance of learning, discovering who we are, and overcoming obstacles. Overall, it's a powerful and inspiring read that many people can relate to.

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princetonuniversitypress · 1 year ago

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This #ConstitutionDay , enjoy this excerpt from the introduction to The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives by Brook Manville and Josiah Ober. September 1787.

In September 1787, Dr. Benjamin Franklin emerged from the Pennsylvania statehouse—today’s Independence Hall. The summerlong Constitutional Convention, at which the Constitution of the United States of America was drafted, had just ended. After Franklin exited the building, he was confronted by Mrs. Elizabeth Powel, a prominent member of Philadelphia’s intellectual and social elite. Eager for Franklin’s take on the closed-door deliberations, she asked, “Well Doctor what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?” That is, would it be self-government by citizens or the rule of a boss? Franklin famously replied, “A republic—if you can keep it.” It was both a promise and a warning. [1]

At first glance, this often-repeated story portrays the eighty-one-year-old scientist, diplomat, and constitutional framer as a stern grandparent, surrendering keys to an inexperienced and perhaps irresponsible child: “OK, the new red, white, and blue family car is now yours, but don’t crash it!” Franklin and his fellow “founding fathers” were leaving the convention, about to hand over a masterpiece of governmental design to American citizens, first for ratification and then making it work. They just hoped their fellow citizens would be up to those challenges.

But look again: Was it a masterpiece? The common answer has frequently been an unabashed “yes”: the US Constitution has been revered as both the source and most perfect embodiment of America’s democratic republic. But of the seventy delegates appointed by the thirteen states, only thirty-nine ultimately signed the document. Some of the most prominent of the founders had deep doubts about the viability of their collective enterprise. More recently, the landmark document has been a target of skeptical critique and source of disappointment. Many Americans now complain that the Constitution was fatally flawed from the beginning—in its vague and awkward language, elitist avoidance of majority rule, and authorship by slave-owning hypocrites. For these critics, it is no masterpiece that Franklin helped design; indeed, it is a mess.

Reframing Pessimism

Negativity about the Constitution is part of a current trend of democratic pessimism. A generation ago, the collapse of the Soviet Union led to a wave of enthusiasm for democracy, and launched the spread of free and liberal governments around the world. Yet today, democratic systems everywhere are under pressure, polarized, and struggling with both internal and external authoritarian challenges. The worry is that democracy is dying. Commentary across national and global media suggests that its demise may be inevitable.

History offers a corrective. Yes, some democracies are faltering today, and many others collapsed in the past. But four exceptionally well-documented and highly influential democratic experiments—classical Athens, republican Rome, British parliamentarianism, and US constitutionalism—endured, or continue to endure, for multiple centuries. What can be learned from these cases about how democracies can, at least sometimes, survive? Could historical insights be applied to help save today’s struggling democracies?

Those questions launched this book. We began by turning current pessimism on its head. Instead of inquiring into the causes of democracy’s death, we looked to history’s long survivors for clues to democracy’s emergence, evolution, and strategies for persistence. Ancient Athenian democracy lasted close to two hundred years; republican Rome twice that; and British parliamentary governance developed slowly, but it started early and ever since the seventeenth century has evolved toward a democratic system. The United States’ constitutional government has held on through sharp partisan dissension and a bloody civil war for over two centuries. We asked ourselves how these systems of citizen self-government survived (or still survive) for so long: Is there some general pattern, some adaptive strategy, that enabled and sustained (even if unevenly) democracy across multiple generations? Can insight from comparative political history be harnessed to help renew modern democracy?

Democracy’s Essence, Rise, and Survival

To tackle those issues, we posed two more basic questions. First, what is democracy? What essentially has it meant to those who created and sustained democratic societies? Second, how does it come into being?

Taking history as a guide to political theorizing, we concluded that democracy in its most basic sense means “no boss.” Democracy pertains when extensive, socially diverse bodies of citizens govern themselves, accepting no ruler except for one another. That is no mean feat, especially once societies grow beyond the tiny face-to-face communities that were the norm before the development of agriculture. Decision-making in any large organization is always difficult, but it is particularly complex when no individual or small group is in charge. A “bossless” community will always struggle to make decisions that are sufficiently pleasing to enough people to be supported with action. Because choices must be made, and because they cannot please everyone, the outcome will never be perfect. By its very nature, democratic governance is indeed messy—but not necessarily chaotic. Decisions can be made and followed if citizens devise the right procedures. But even the best procedures are useless unless citizens bring the right mindset and behaviors to the task: working together as political equals who prioritize finding common ground in spite of differing preferences and interests. That is to say, democracy can succeed if and when it is understood as a fundamental bargain among free and equal citizens—an agreement to work together to defend the things we the citizens hold in common.

Instead of viewing democracy as a static collection of laws and institutions, we reimagine it as an organic, living system—messy indeed, but also purposeful. It operates to include and bond many diverse people who choose the freedom to make their own decisions and live by what they, together, decide. Democracy as bossless self-governance survives when citizens keep constructively and peacefully interacting and learning from one another, and when they reach for the benefits of freedom and shoulder the burdens of defending them. When they don’t, democracy fails, and before long once free citizens find themselves answering to a boss.

On the second question—how democracy arises—we drew again on the rich historical record of our four cases. We sought to honor the best scholarly interpretations of political development in each case while going beyond a focus on democratic leaders and revolutions. Standard histories often underappreciate the process of negotiation that follows when the fighting stops—or that avoids fighting altogether. The centrality of bargaining to democracy, to its emergence and persistence, is the major theme of our book.

The Civic Bargain and Its Essential Conditions

Based on our analysis of historical cases, we contend that democracy is made possible and preserved over time by dealmaking and compromises. Democracy usually must be fought for (bosses like being bosses), but also requires bargaining. To consolidate and sustain self-government, citizens must agree to a civic bargain. Historically, civic bargains of different kinds have been struck and revised by democracies; we describe four of them in our case studies. Whether it is a written document like the US Constitution, coherent body of laws and legal precedents, or unwritten set of norms, the civic bargain specifies who is a citizen, how decisions are made, and what citizens owe one another. It determines how the “gives and gets”—the benefits and costs of ruling together for the common good—are distributed.

The civic bargain depends on and must in turn actively promote what we call the essential conditions of democracy—the conditions that are necessary for citizen self-governance. The seven conditions listed below are discussed in detail in chapter 1. They are elucidated in the historical case studies of chapters 2–5 and revisited in our summary of findings in chapter 6.

1. No Boss—except one another: citizens govern themselves, directly or through accountable representatives

2. Security and Welfare: ensure common safety, freedom from harm, and basic means of living as a common good for all

3. Citizenship Defined: formally specify who is a citizen, and what that means, including the extent of citizens’ equality, freedoms, and responsibilities

4. Citizen-Led Institutions: maintain institutions of decision-making and conflict resolution under the charge of members of the democracy

5. Good Faith Compromise: prefer common good compromise in political decisions over unilateral demands for perfection

6. Civic Friendship: act as “civic friends” with one another, not as enemies, smoothing the way to renegotiate bargains with one another and meet future challenges

7. Civic Education: provide civic learning and experiences for citizens, instilling the values and practices they need to keep bossless self-governance

Before those seven conditions are achieved, democracy remains at best an aspiration. The conditions come about, when they do, through a sequence of prior political bargains. When they are robustly sustained, democracy flourishes. When they start to break down, democracy struggles. When they are abandoned, democracy fails.

So what enabled long-enduring democracies to create the essential conditions, strike a durable civic bargain, and survive over time? Our answer echoes the evolutionary processes of a living system. The patterns of behavior that allow a system of self-government to take root also enable it to continue to grow and thrive. Democracy must adapt when threatened while still preserving its essential core. Threats may arise from internal dissension, foreign attempts at conquest, or both. Indeed, as we will see, existential threats have historically provided an incentive for citizens with competing interests to bargain with one another.

Democracies survive if and only if their citizens maintain a robust and adaptive civic bargain, making the necessary and necessarily imperfect deals to preserve security, welfare, and self-governance. Faced with new threats and opportunities, citizens must periodically reexamine and renegotiate the bargain, the terms on which they agreed to live together as a democratic community. For that, as we will emphasize throughout, the final condition—education of citizens, by citizens—is essential.

Back to Philadelphia

A less familiar story about Franklin at the 1787 Constitutional Convention is revealing of how a civic bargain is struck. As we detail in chapter 5, many state delegates had come to the convention with a shared assumption about what needed to be done, given the failure of the earlier and ineffective Articles of Confederation, which had failed to adequately ensure for the new nation’s security and welfare: a no-boss system of self-government must be capable of competing with autocratic rivals by promoting effective cooperation across a diverse constituency. Other delegates came to share that core assumption as the proceedings unfolded.

But deep disagreements remained about how to do it. Happily, many of the men had previously served in the local colonial and state assemblies, and several had also fought in the revolution. Many were deeply read in history and political philosophy. They brought their beliefs and priorities from those experiences to the bargaining table, and actively attended to and learned from one another’s arguments.

Most delegates had a sense of the goals and mechanics of self-governance that either needed to be affirmed or further developed: having just fought for liberation from the British king, they would tolerate no overarching boss. As a new free nation, they had to ensure their ability to defend themselves from external threats. In the aftermath of the recent farm debt rebellion of Daniel Shays and his Massachusetts armed mob, it was vital to secure the internal peace against domestic dissension. The chaos enabled by the earlier Articles of Confederation—multiple currencies, local taxes, and inconsistent trade regulations—was impeding collective welfare by hampering economic development. There must be a shared understanding of who would be a citizen in the new nation, and what would be their rights and responsibilities. There had to be a framework for how public decisions would be made and conflicts resolved in order to coordinate local, state, and central administration—without a king. And there needed to be mechanisms of enforcing collective decisions.

But with the backdrop of the proverbial smiling devil, there was little shared agreement about how to accomplish such things. And there remained the burning issue of slavery, thought by many southern delegates to be essential to their state economies, and despised by others as contrary to the natural rights of all people, as proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence of 1776. The delegates tackled all of those questions as best as they could through three long months of heated argument, punctuated by negotiation, compromise, and renegotiation.

On the afternoon of September 17, a final draft of a new constitution lay before them. Most delegates saw it as an improvement over the old Articles of Confederation, but the level of support to approve it, and seek ratification and implementation, was unclear. Franklin came to the front of the room to signal his assent to the draft, hoping to encourage others to also vote “yea.” To add to his plea, he offered his personal reflections about what it had taken, from all of them working together, to reach this moment. In his aged frailty, he was seated beside his fellow Pennsylvania delegate, John Wilson, who read the speech aloud on Franklin’s behalf.

The Perfect Is the Enemy of the Common Good

The speech conveyed a tone humbler than Franklin would display the next day, when he blurted out his answer about “keeping the republic.” This day, still behind closed doors, he signaled more painful practicality, an eighty-one-year-old man chastened by the experience of a long and eventful career.

The speech began by asserting his agreement “to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such,” but conceding as well that “there are several parts which I do not at present approve.” He then commented on the ego and irrationality of human nature, which he acknowledged no less for himself than others now listening: “Most men . . . think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them it is for error.” Franklin next suggested the disputes arising from such assumptions often in fact worsen when many are gathered together for “joint wisdom” because they also bring to their tasks “their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views.” With all of that, Franklin expressed astonishment at how close to perfection the delegates had come with this draft of the Constitution—close, but not 100 percent, because perfection, he further implied, was not attainable in human endeavor. With still some lingering doubt, the speech nonetheless concluded with Franklin’s approval, as he acknowledged that important practical matters now hung in the balance: “I consent because I am not sure, that this [Constitution] is not the best. The opinions I have had of its errors, I sacrifice to the public good.” [2]

As the delegates mulled Franklin’s words, they knew all too well the specific controversies his carefully chosen philosophical language alluded to without naming. They had hammered out an agreement through disputes about the branches of government, central versus local financial authority, voting rights, and the fraught issue of slavery. Franklin was congratulating them for finding the compromise that was the best available while acknowledging its imperfections.

The delegates had agreed on a system that ensured no overall boss: the specific authority of the new president was critically constrained to minimize that risk, and the “balance of powers” would similarly limit any domineering attempts by the court or legislatures. They had provided for the citizens’ collective security and basic welfare by strengthening the financial and military authority of a national federal government over the local states—not too much, but enough, a majority believed, to remedy the weakness of the Articles of Confederation. They had defined who would be a citizen and what that meant, with rules and requirements about voting, immigration, and certain responsibilities and freedoms (albeit with, among other limits, a painful compromise about slaves). And they had designed institutions of governance led wholly by citizens, with a careful detail about the requirements and selection of officeholders and representatives for the presidency, legislature, and courts. They were able to negotiate in good faith because they treated each other as civic friends rather than enemies, and because they had been educated by formal learning, experience, and one another in the essentials of civic life.

Of course, there were still loopholes and loose ends, but the draft was overall good enough to move forward to the still-uncertain process of ratification. And Franklin reminded them of that. His speech emphasized what it took to strike a civic bargain among ambitious and opinionated human beings—to prefer a common good compromise in political decisions over unilateral demands for perfection.

Franklin and his fellow delegates recognized that the agreement was not a timeless masterpiece; they knew that it would be revised. It was an imperfect but living civic bargain for a living democracy; the search for a “more perfect union” (in the words of the Constitution’s famous prologue) would continue. The founding document set out a framework of self-governance that had the capacity to evolve, and it would have to do so if it were to survive. The challenges, tragedies, and successes of America in doing that are the subject of chapter 5.

In the aftermath of the convention, the thirty-nine delegates who signed the new Constitution were indeed eager to sell it to the citizens of the new nation; the Constitution was only a proposal until it was ratified by the states. Ratification was achieved through a public process of education—through reasoned arguments presented by citizens to citizens in newspapers and pamphlets about the nature of the governance proposed, and the rationale for the choices that were made in its design. Other forms and forums of the education of citizens have since been essential in sustaining American democracy. Civic education, both formal and informal, was also basic to striking and keeping the civic bargains of our other three historical cases. It was and is crucial to sustaining democracy.

With history as our guide, this book explains the fundamentals of democracy as collective self-governance. Our goal is to help you understand the key assumptions and imperatives that enable self-governance by citizens, and how democracy survives. It is a book not only about imperfection, compromise, and dealmaking, and how imminent and existential threats are an incentive to negotiation, but also about civic virtue and friendship. Bargaining must be pursued in a climate of goodwill if it is to meet inevitable steep challenges. We hope that having read this book, you will think differently about democracy’s future—and about your own role as a citizen or would-be citizen in helping it to survive or letting it die.

This essay is an excerpt from the introduction to The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives by Brook Manville and Josiah Ober.

Brook Manville is an independent consultant who writes about politics, democracy, technology, and business. Previously a partner with McKinsey & Co. and an award-winning professor at Northwestern University, he is the author of The Origins of Citizenship in Ancient Athens (Princeton) and A Company of Citizens: What the World’s First Democracy Teaches Leaders About Creating Great Organizations (with Josiah Ober).

Josiah Ober is the Constantine Mitsotakis Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author of The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece, Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens (both Princeton), The Greeks and the Rational: The Discovery of Practical Reason, and other books.

Notes

[1] Powel had hosted delegates to the convention at her Philadelphia home, and later became a friend and confidante of Washington. The interchange between Franklin and Powel is briefly recorded in the diary of James McHenry, September 18, 1787, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Willing_Powel (section 3). The incident had a convoluted later history, in which McHenry’s original report was edited and elaborated to make Franklin contrast an orderly republic to unruly democratic self-government (rather than to monarchy). On the false dichotomy between a republic and democracy, see chapter 1. [2] On Franklin’s speech and its setting, see Rasmussen 2021, 1–2; “Constitutional Convention,” Benjamin Franklin Historical Society, http://www.benjamin-franklin-history.org/constitutional-convention/; “Speech of Benjamin Franklin,” U.S. Constitution, https://www.usconstitution.net/franklin.html.

#constitution day #constitution #US History #history #books

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obsidiancreates · 2 years ago

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-petpet- Hope you’re getting good rest and feeling a bit better today! 😴👍

Descendants of the Trio AU:

For your comical entertainment, consider if the sibling squad (Space, Illinois, Heist, Date + Yancy) ried to prepare an elegant dinner at the Manor. Together. It could’ve been for a holiday or just something done on the fly. “Brotherly bonding.”

Oh, how about for Eric’s birthday? If anyone could unite for a cause, it would be for Eric.

Picture Heist and Illinois competitively cooking but getting nowhere in putting anything on the table. They often forget about the food, because they’re too busy criticizing and critiquing the other’s technique. (Heist did make a pretty decent breakfast in HWM, but Illinois exploring the world may have made him feel a bit educated in terms of cuisine. On Illy’s own, he feels like a Kraft Mac ‘N Cheese kinda guy, but you can’t tell me that the man doesn’t know fine spices from all the mummy tombs he’s explored.)—Everything’s debated: Salt-pepper ratios, what to season your pan with, which ingredients are acceptable in a dish, etc.

Space has to take charge by giving Heist and Illinois a recipe book of various things (per Eric’s preferences) to stop their bickering if they were to get anything done.

Date is in charge of decor. Maybe that ability to make romantic items appear becomes useful…Maybe it doesn’t. If he has to go to the store, it’ll be with borrowed money. Of course. (I wonder if Dark gave the boys specialized ‘Markiplier Inc.’ credit cards in case of an emergency.)

Yancy inherits Wilford’s ability and fondness for baking, so he’s got it covered for the birthday cake and desserts. Something about the camaraderie makes him feel nostalgic for doing these sorts of things for his prison fam, so he’s having a blast! (I like to picture Yancy would always be a little awed to work with /actual/ fresh ingredients—like fruit.) Just hopefully, he’s well-versed with /modern/ kitchen appliances, you know? I’d think he’d be more comfortable with gasoline stoves and ovens than the electric ones.

Space is busy making sure the Manor doesn’t burn down and ensures everything is put together in time. He hadn’t felt this much urge to have his fire extinguisher ready in a very, very long time. Definitely feeling the stress of his father to keep the boys on task without property damage.

No, Dark doesn’t know a thing about anything of this. So, when he enters the Manor with Eric—It’s a bit of a surprise for him too.

—Melody anon

*bumps head into the pets like a cat* :D Thank you! I do feel better, got a little sleep last night this time XD

THIS IS SUCH A CUTE IDEAAAAAAA

I think Ego Manor has older appliances honestly, because half the people there still struggle with what a Flip-phone is sometimes. So Yancy should be very comfortable!

Date's ability helps a little bit, probably. Eric likes flowers, so those are easy, and he can probably get tablecloths and napkins folded into animals and stuff like that. But for streamer and such, has to go to the store (he does indeed have a Family Credit Card, most of the money comes from Bim's shows and The Googles getting money in in various ways, from Stock Market to straight-up hacking banks)

Space has a new respect for The Captain after this XD He had already respected them anyway but now it's tripled.

Heist and Illinois for sure burn everything before Space takes over XD Burn or undercooked trying to get done faster than the other. Probably they both somehow curse a dish by accident too. Stop playing with mysterious ancient items, boys!

Dark doesn't know how to react at first, and then hears Space organized it all and the next day gives Space a pair of his old cufflinks from when he was mayor. "I noticed you needed them when you wore that suit last night," is all he says about it.

He's very proud.

#markiplier #descendants of the trio au #engineer mark #darkiplier #eric derekson #yancy markiplier #ahwm yancy #yancy #markiplier yancy #ahwm mark #adwm mark #ahwm illinois #markiplier egos

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cle-guy · 3 years ago

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Rowling is Missing the Point of Fantastic Beasts

What follows is a critique of the Fantastic Beasts series. It contains spoilers of both the films and the Harry Potter book series. I will assume all readers have at least read the seven novels published by J.K. Rowling without which this article may not make much sense.

When J.K. Rowling began work on “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” I thoroughly enjoyed the romp through the United States. The exploration of my own country’s magical community and watching Newt scramble to recollect the magical creatures he flippantly brought across the pond. Overall the story was relatively lean, the main arc being Newt bringing his creatures back home, and falling in love with Tina Goldstein, and eventually uncovering that “Dark Wizard” Gellert Grindelwald was investigating obscurials in America.

Yes there were some convoluted aspects to the movie but what story about magic and wizards isn’t going to bring in some strange and unexplainable phenomena? It’s simply part of the genre. The problem in the new series of “Wizarding World” movies is not Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them the problem is the two sequels and how Rowling has attempted to weave Newt into the true crux of the series: the conflict between Albus Dumbledore and Gellert Grindelwald.

If there’s a reason why fans would tune into the series it was seeing how Albus struggled against Grindelwald, who the books hinted (and the films confirmed) was Dumbledore’s love interest in their youth. The problem is neither film did a good job exploring this dynamic, and instead focused on a dumb plot contrivance instead which infuriatingly does not mesh well with the text Rowling wrote in The Deathly Hallows.

It’s helpful to start with what we learned about Dumbeldore’s past in the 7th book, which neatly sets up the conflicts we could have seen in Fantastic Beasts. In the book it is revealed through the character Rita Skeeter’s book: “The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore” that Dumbledore struck a relationship in his youth with Grindelwald, generally considered the second worst dark wizard of all time behind Voldemort. Worse it appears Dumbledore became entranced with the dark ideas of his love interest writing in a letter:

Gellert --

Your point about Wizard dominance being FOR THE MUGGLE’S OWN GOOD -- this, I think, is the crucial point. Yes, we have been given power and yes, that power gives us the right to rule, but it also gives us responsibilities over the ruled. We must stress this point, it will be the foundation stone upon which we build. Where we are opposed, as we surely will be, this must be the basis of all our counterarguments. We seize control FOR THE GREATER GOOD. And from this it follows that where we meet resistance, we must use only the force that is necessary and no more (This was your mistake at Durmstrang! But I do not complain, because if you had not been expelled, we would never have met.)

-Albus

The emphasis is mine, and we will return to this later. After we learn Albus was at least interested in dark magic at a young age we are given an argument between Hermoine and Harry about the nature of Albus’s infatuation. This acts as a minor thread in the novels until we learn more about Albus’s full story. It also acts as a source of uncertainty on the nature of Harry’s mission and forces Harry to choose to continue his mission in spite of the clouds surrounding his mentor’s judgment and moral center.

Later in the novel we meet Alberforth Dumbledore, Albus’s brother, who explains the full, sad story, which I will not quote here but I encourage you to read Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows chapter 28 for the full story. Dumbledore’s sister was unbalanced due to childhood bullying by muggles, as a result: she could not control her magic and her family had to keep her hidden otherwise the wizarding world would imprison her to keep their world secret. Albus’s father went to prison when he sought revenge, and as a result Albus felt trapped by a family broken by the needs of secrecy & the consequences of hatred. When Grindelwald showed up: it was natural for Albus to be intrigued: the muggle world had done his family wrong, and more importantly forced “Mr. Brilliant” as Alberforth called his brother to dumb down his expectations. After a conflict brought on by Alberforth: Albus saw the consequences of his lover’s actions, and changed his mind.

In the end Harry meets Dumbledore in the point where the worlds of the livng and the dead meet and Albus explains himself. He confirms that Grindelwald’s ideas interested him:

You cannot imagine how his ideas caught me, Harry, inflamed me. Muggles forced into subservience. We wizards triumphant. Grindelwald and I, the glorious young leaders of the revolution.

However, I think the text suggests that there was more than just an infatuation of ideas. As the highlighted text above show: Dumbledore was primarily attracted to Grindelwald the man. You see this again when Albus talks about the Hallows themselves.

And at the heart of our schemes, the Deathly Hallows!...The Resurrection Stone - to him, though I pretended not to know it, it meant an army of Inferi!

Albus knew that the Hallows were not all that Gellert believed, but went along with it because he wanted to work closely with his love interest. This is not a defense, but simply more context. More evidence comes when Aberforth forces a conflict, breaking open the dream Albus had of a life shared with Gellert. Stating simply that “Gellert fled, as anyone but I could have predicted” which suggests to me that Albus was in denial and felt his feelings for Gellert would keep him tied to Godric’s Hollow.

The final crucial piece of backstory comes from Albus’s brief recounting of Grindelwald’s rise and how Albus reacted to it:

While I busied mysefl with the training of young wizards, Gridnelwald was raising an army. They say he feared me, and perhaps he did, but less, I think, than I feared him...It was the truth I feared. You see, I never knew which of us, in that las, horrific fight, had actually cast the curse that killed my sister. You may call me cowardly: You would be right. Harry, I dreaded beyond all things the knowledge that it had been I who brought about her death, not merely through my arrogance and stupidity, but that I actually struck the blow that snuffed out her life.

Which, when we tie all of this together, would have made for a fascinating story to tell over several movies.

Had Rowling told a story of the conflict between Dumbledore and Grindelwald: how Albus eventually changed his mind or (as he said) “I had a few scruples.” Or at least how Albus had come to see that his personal feelings towards the muggles who harmed his family must change, and how Grindelwald’s visions were ultimately wrong, but how Albus’s shame towards his own actions drove him away from conflict: it would have been a fantastic movie series.

Instead we got the perfect Albus Dumbledore who formed “a blood pact” with Grindelwald, and how Grindelwald was trying to deceive the wizards using a magical creature. None of this makes sense on its own merits: if Grindelwald had already neutralized Dumbledore with a blood pact, why would he try so hard to kill him? Where was this loving relationship, which clearly had gone more than sour a long time ago? How does this mesh with the story Rowling wrote years ago?

At the end of the day Rowling wrote a plot driven story with characters doing things to suit the needs of the plot. Rowling should have wrote a story where characters perform character actions for reasons that make sense. The most brilliant move in the entire series was when she had secondary character Queenie join Grindelwald, not because she hated muggles, but because wizarding law prevented her from marrying Jacob (a muggle). A character doing something for character reasons, not for reasons of plot. It should go without saying it’s a poor sign of the series that Queenie walked back this decisions because...well, that’s never really explained.

#secrets of dumbledore #harry potter #rowling

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philliamwrites · 4 years ago

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The Dawn Will Come [Chpt.3]

Fandom: Fire Emblem Three Houses

Pairing: Dimitri x Reader, Claude x Reader, Edelgard x Reader, Yuri x Reader, Edelgard x Byleth, lots of minor pairings

Tags: #gn reader, # platonic love byleth & reader, #reader is a tactical unit, #angst, #slow burn, #subplots, #unreliable narrator, #pining, #remporary amnesia, #reluctant herp, #canon divergence, #lost twin au, #many chapters, #original content

Words: 7.7k

Summary: Waking up in a forest without any knowledge of your past and who you are, you join the house leaders of the Officers Academy to search for a way to return your memories. Unfortunately, the church has different plans for you, and Fate places you in the centre of a cruel game with deadly stakes. It certainly doesn’t help to fall in love with a house leader who is doomed to be your demise.

Notes: Chapter 2 | Chapter 4

Chapter 03: Ties That Bind

Where war, and joy, and terror Have all at times held away; Where both delight and horror Have had their fitful day.

The happiest under heaven A king of powerful mind; A company so proven Would now be hard to find

Gawain put on a good cheer. ‘Why should I hesitate?’ He said. ‘Kind or severe, We must engage our Fate.’

[Sir Gawain and the Green Knight]

�� „Breathe,“ Hanneman says for the third time. At every tap of his pen against the table, you flinch as if someone is knocking right against the inside of your skull. “You have to feel the Crest, become one with it. Don’t think of it as an addition; see it as an extension of your very self.”

You exhale but it’s hard to focus after you’ve been sitting in the same position for nearly two hours and your legs keep falling asleep.

“Focus on it,” Hanneman continues. He starts to gesture with his free hand, an indicator that he’s just as frustrated with your lack of progress as you are. “Focus on the feeling that took hold of you when you fought the bandits. Imagine what you want. Ask yourself what it is you really want, and take hold of that picture.”

Well, first of all, you really want a sandwich.

For the past few weeks, you’ve been waking up before sunrise to attend private lessons with Hanneman to get a hold of your Crest’s power. Now the end of the month approaches, and still your body refuses to get accustomed to work at such an early hour, and more importantly without eating first. An hour ago, your stomach started growling, but Professor Hanneman has proved again and again to be very successful in ignoring factors that disturb his lessons. You continue breathing through what you consider hunger pains instead of the raise of new powers, but with the sound of screaming students outside and the occasional flapping of wings as Pegasus Knights fly by on their patrol, it’s anything but successful.

“Focus!” Hanneman chides again as if he can read your mind and knows exactly you’re thinking of the pheasant roast with berry sauce on the menu today.

“I’m trying,” you groan and slump into the chair, defeated. “But I don’t feel anything.”

“Hmm hmmm,” Hanneman hums and looks at you like you were supposed to understand what he’s conveying with that sound. “Maybe we’re looking at it the wrong way,” he says once you don’t follow up on his inexplicable sound. “Maybe we should stop thinking of it as a common Crest, but approach it like it is something entirely different.” He quickly notes something on his paper, then proceeds to flip through the open books he’s splayed out on his desk. “There is so little we know about the Crest of the Herald. I am much frustrated no one thought of studying it a thousand years ago!”

“I don’t understand. How can it be different?” Your first lesson solely focused on Crests. How they are thought to be power incarnate, bestowed upon humans by the Goddess countless ages ago. Today those who are descendants of Fódlan’s Ten Elites and Four Saints, who fought during the War of Heroes beside Saint Seiros, wear Crests, a sign of wealth and nobility.

“Well, one possible explanation could be that for whatever reason, the first Herald was different from his fellow warriors, the Ten Elites,” Hanneman offers, leaning back into his chair and looking a lot more interested in the conversation now. “The Goddess must have found him worthy of her power just as she found Saint Seiros worthy.”

“Then why wasn’t he a Saint?” you wonder. From your understanding, the Four Saints were special comrades of Saint Seiros, just as guided by the Goddess as their leader. What had made the Herald from back then different? “According to everything you told me, he sounds a lot like this Macuil person. Focusing on strategy and all that.”

“Saint Macuil,” Hanneman corrects you, but there’s no bite in his voice. “And yes, perhaps he was akin to the Saints, but that clearly wasn’t what determined the final decision to name him Herald.”

“Well, that’s just my kind of luck,” you mumble, but when Hanneman makes a puzzled sound, you ask instead, “And you’re sure I’m a descendant of him?”

“Most likely! You bear a Major Crest, which means the Herald’s blood runs strong in your body. After he disappeared, he might have settled down and started a family. Unfortunately, nothing is recorded about him after the War of Heroes concluded.”

“Then how come there was no one else in a thousand years who bore the same Crest?” You aren’t sure you fully understand how they work. Apparently, Crests grant special powers to those who hold them such as high aptitude for magic or enhanced strength. But you know better than anyone that the Crest of the Herald is special. It doesn’t simply give you a boon, it allows you to command the flow of battle. But is it really a blessing bestowed by the Goddess? You don’t remember a divine revelation or talking to a Goddess. Or did that maybe occur even before you were found by the Officers Academy’s students? Before your memory loss? You certainly don’t feel chosen by a deity.

“Trying to explain the Goddess’ whims would wield about the same result as asking this question,” Hanneman says. “Sometimes a Crest may skip generations. No one can say with certainty who will be chosen. If it will be the first or third born. That is why we must further study Crests! For example, why, unlike other Crests, has your appeared physically visible?” Hanneman mutters more questions under his breath and notes them quickly on his paper. It’s remarkable how enthusiastic he approaches the topic if it only didn’t make you feel like an experiment lying on a dissection table.

“I want to know so much more about the first Herald,” you mumble. “What was his name? Where was he from?” Why did he disappear and what were the costs he had paid for such a title. Only one month in and Lady Rhea already granted you an impressive room to reside. People treat you with respect and admiration even though you aren’t doing much besides wave at them on the streets or hold some conversations. If being the Herald only encompasses these tasks, you’ll gladly take on the role and speak to people. But that would be a dream too good to be true.

“We can only speculate,” Hanneman says. “Some believe the Herald came when Seiros needed him most. Our Goddess’ answer to her cry of help. Others believe he was simply a general who originated form a farmer’s family. Other, smaller sources talk about a prince from a far off land who passed through Fódlan and decided to stay. But in all cases, the Herald was a great asset to win the War of Heroes and save Fódlan from the tyranny of the Fell King.”

“Yeah, no pressure there,” you mumble, sinking further into your seat. Hopefully no one expects you to save Fódlan from evil monarchs. If yes, it certainly won’t happen on an empty stomach. When Hanneman releases you, there’s only one place for you to be. The Dining Hall is crowded at this time of hour. Students and faculty bustle everywhere, eager to get their favourite meal on a plate. Just like them, you are drawn in by the amazing smell of roasted meet and freshly baked pastries.

The only thing you can live without is how once you enter the room several heads turn in your direction, and a ripple of “Look, it’s the Herald” goes through the crowd, spreading like a wave. Or a disease, you think with a sour taste in your mouth as you move through the parting sea. They want you to acknowledge them but Goddess forbid you actually engage in conversation with them and they flee like you’re the Herald of Pest.

“Herald!” Well, not everyone escapes. Some seem to like living dangerous.

Edelgard looks straight at you from between the other students from the Eagle class sitting at a table, removing any doubt she means anyone else but you. Running from her would be a sign of defeat, so you drag yourself over to the Eagle table and give the round an uncertain smile. “Hello.”

“Herald, if you have time, please sit with us,” Edelgard offers but the look she pins on you doesn't give you any choice. The silence of her classmates speaks louder than words, and a quick glance to Hubert tells you that he very much would like for you to notsit with them.

“Sure,” you say lamely and sit opposite from her where Bernadetta quickly shuffles to the side to make room, and then further down the bench until she jumps to her feet and flees from the hall. It’s a miracle she’s out of her chambers in the first place, undoubtedly Byleth’s work.

“Did you manage any progress with Professor Hanneman?” Edelgard asks, carefully cutting her pheasant roast into small bite-sized pieces. She looks the complete opposite from someone capable of hacking away their enemies but you wouldn’t dare to underestimate her.

“It’s slow,” you admit, solely focusing on shoving potatoes from one side of your plate to the other so you don’t have to look at anyone. “I’ve only grasped the basics of how Crests work and the Herald’s is so different.”

“Research might prove more fruitful if you’d be called into action,” she says, and it’s difficult to determine if that statement is a simple observation or underlying critique towards Rhea’s decision to leave you out of the major education system. At least that’s something you’re sure of. Edelgard is difficult.

“Maybe. But chances are higher I get myself killed somehow on the battlefield.” You’re already dreading the approaching noon hours. Byleth has worked out a special training programme for you and the house leaders. So far there hasn’t been a day without aching muscles and bruises for you. Thinking of Byleth, you can’t help but ask, “So how’s Byleth as a Professor?”

Edelgard considers her plate with mild interest, but her index fingers start tapping against her cutlery. She has small, delicate hands. Cute hands. You gawk at them for two seconds before noticing Hubert starring daggers at you, and quickly avert your eyes to your cup of ginger tea like it’s the most fascinating thing in the world.

“Our professor shows knowledge in the most curious things,” he says, surprising you by joining the conversation. “I think the Adrestian Empire will benefit greatly from that.”

You aren’t sure how leading the class correlates directly to joining the Empire, but you don’t want to point that out. Hubert is still too much of a puzzle you’re adamant on not piecing together because whatever picture waits for you after the assembly might be one of horror.

“She really is one to look up to,” Edelgard agrees, but she isn’t looking at anyone, so it seems she’s saying it more to herself. You want to try and read more out of her expression, but distraction comes quickly in form of more students from the Eagle class. Caspar is the first bouncing excitedly towards the table, and still he somehow miraculously manages to keep his food from flying everywhere. “Herald!” he calls and slides right on the seat right next to you. “How’s the head situation going?”

“Caspar,” Linhardt chides and gives his friend the disappointed look of a parent that can’t bring his child to use a fork to eat. “Would you stop pestering the Herald with the same question every day?”

Linhardt hits the mark. It was nice in the beginning to have someone show so much interest in your wellbeing, but now you don’t know if the daily reminder how you fail to regain pieces of your past is rude or just Caspar’s naive politeness.

“Yeah well.” You try to stuff as much potatoes in your mouth as possible just to avoid talking about it. “Nothin’ yeff.”

“Herald, please try to keep your manners in check, will you?” Ferdinand comments because of course he catches you with your mouth full and sauce dripping from the corners. Unlucky for him, you don’t really care.

“Well, sorry.” Caspar frowns and scratches the remains from his plate. The two minutes you needed to finish your potatoes, he’s cleared his whole plate. “I just thought it might help.”

“Help to be reminded what’s missing?” Linhardt doesn’t look convinced. “I think the Herald knows so better than anyone.”

“Guys, drop the subject,” Edelgard intervenes. “Let us finish our meals now. Classes resume presently and I don’t want to hear any stomachs growling, understood?” The last part goes with a pointed look towards Linhardt, who answers with a lazy shrug while continuing to poke at his food, looking bored out of his mind. It lasts about three seconds before he brightens up and turns towards you while rummaging through his school bag. From that, he pulls out notes and a pen, and unceremoniously shoves them into your hands. “I have a question, Herald. Would you be so kind and look over these strategic proposals I’ve developed from the last lesson? I understand what you taught us were basics as we find them in the library. I simply took the time and applied those to the strengths and abilities of my classmates.”

You raise your eyebrows. “You did?” Up until now, you didn’t know Linhardt was paying attention whenever you gave the students your sorry excuses of lessons. You feel like you’ve seen him asleep far more than actually looking at the board or writing, so him presenting his notes to you now is more than a surprise. He has a clean handwriting, small letters that curl into themselves and forget to take a break between words. You squint at the sentences, trying to make them out. It sure doesn’t help that half of it is crossed out by what looks like a strategy sketch with little circles and everyone’s names filling out the space.

“This looks … elaborate,” you comment, unsure if you’ll ever be able to solve this enigma.

“No worries.” Linhardt gives a little smile. “Please give me your answer report until tomorrow. And feel free to correct me on anything I’ve done wrong.”

He’s probably done a much better job than you on your lesson notes, but you nod with a lopsided smile. “I will.”

“Oh, and while we’re at strategy talk,” Caspar jumps right in, “any good ideas how to take on a taller opponent?”

“A good kick to their shins?” you suggest.

“A dagger to their liver?” Edelgard says.

“Poison in their cup?” Hubert offers.

“You’re all animals,” Ferdinand says.

Linhardt groans. “I toldyou how to win in a fight like that, Caspar. Why won’t you listen to me?”

You don’t want to be part of the argument breaking out between them, so you turn away and try to see what the other students are doing in the dining hall. At the opposite end, Claude catches your eyes and waves like he’s been waiting way too long to finally get your attention. He points at Edelgard and flaps his arms like a chicken. He points at you and spreads his hands behind his head, forming antlers with his fingers. When Edelgard follows your eyes, his head whips around and he pretends to agree with whatever Lysithea just said.

“I hope you forgive Caspar’s enquiries,” she says, steering your focus back to her. She’s gently tapping the corners of her mouth with an embroidered napkin, and oh there they are again, her delicate fingers. You look away before Hubert catches you staring again and decides to put poison in your cup7. “I speak on behalf of everyone in the Black Eagle House when I say we wish for your full recovery to be soon.”

“If wishing would only get the job done, I might have something to work with by now.”

Edelgard doesn’t blink, her expression frozen. “Meaning?”

“I thought I'd come here and one of the Church's healers would just wave their hands to return my memories,” you mumble, scribbling a tiny Claude with little, evil horns on his head in the corner of Linhardt’s notes.

Edelgard looks at you like you've just insulted her whole noble lineage. “That isn't how magic works.”

You throw your arms up in frustration to emphasise that yes, that's the point. You don't know how anything works in this place, and you doubt Byleth's four pages of lesson plans are going to help.

“If no one comes to your aid, maybe it is time you take matters into your own hands.” You flinch at the scornful sound in Edelgard’s voice. Judging the expression on her face, she seems just as surprised about her outburst. She gets up abruptly and bids farewell with a curt nod, followed closely by Hubert as always. Her classmates look after her, each more puzzled than the next.

“Didn’t she seem … angry to you?” Linhardt thinks aloud, blinking into the empty space.

Ferdinand harrumphes. “She’s always like this. Please excuse her, Herald.”

You don’t think she’s done anything wrong, and yet she certainly doesn’t appear as always. Something about her last words strikes you as especially sharp; reproachful. Those weren’t meaningless words, but you don’t have any ways to decipher the message. A little voice tells you she isn’t wrong either. So far nothing has helped returning your memories—Manuela’s medicine, herbs from the Greenhouse, Hanneman’s spells. It seems like your brain has built defencive walls to repel any probing, which begs the answer to the question what is hiding in secret even more. But can you really do it on your own, like Edelgard suggests? It seems impossible.

With newfound doubt you finish your meal, saying your goodbyes to the now scattering Eagle students as they scurry off to their next lesson. Two hours are left before you’re meeting with Byleth and the house leaders, and since you agreed to look over Linhardt’s notes, the library seems a good next stop. You still want to go over the seven classical manoeuvres of war, especially since the students didn’t really grasp the remaining two last time, and it gives you a good excuse to look over them again as well. At the beginning, you thought there was nothing you could teach those children, not with experienced colleagues at your side who have participated in countless battles themselves. Who could have thought that talking about tactics and strategies came as natural to you as breathing. Well, Rhea did for certain, and even the students drink up your every word like it is a message from the Goddess herself and you her chosen herald. The irony of it.

But it isn’t only the students accepting your guidance. Something inside you changed in the last couple of weeks as well. When you started going through the books in the library, it was more stumbling and slipping on foreign terrain, but just in a couple of days, you moved through the matter like a fish following smoothly the currents of its native waters. It felt like home. Like building the foundation of a house from thousand variables, the result different each time but still the same: art. You build the art of battle, the last decision that will bring victory or death. You love every second of it. Which opens the possibility that it really isn’t your first time, but also more questions: Who taught you? What battles have you fought? How many of them did you win? Since those aren’t as simple to answer, you focus on fulfilling the first purpose, and hope that it will some day be enough for the students to survive battles.

If only it would end there. Your second duty isn’t as easy or pleasant, and it lies in wait for you everywhere, stalking you like a dark shadow with monstrous fangs.

“Herald.” A soldier gives a courteous bow, intercepting you in the Great Hall on your way to the library. “Pilgrims ask for you near the Entrance Hall. Please allow me to escort you.”

Immediately, your nerves tingle with nervous anticipation. This is the scary part. Meeting the people, seeing the hope in their eyes. You’d gladly send them back where they’ve come from, but some have travelled for multiple days, and denying them audience would be cruel.

“Don’t let me stop you from your duties,” you say, unconsciously tugging your clothes in order to appear presentable. “I will welcome them on my own.”

The soldier nods and bows again, his expression barely readable under the helmet before he disappears as quickly as he came.

Planning lessons is easy. You can find whatever you need in the library and work out the flow with the students. But nothing can prepare or teach you how to act like the Herald people wish for. Nowhere is anything written on the old Herald, how he talked to them and what promises he’d whispered when day broke. That is where you are on your own. Not even Rhea could answer that question. She only instructed that you see them, and remind them about their devotion to the Goddess—for she was the one who made it possible in the first place.

The Entrance Hall is emptier than usual. Most of the students are in class, and a handful of knights and soldiers might be at the advanced training camp Jeralt and Alois hold in honour of the Blade Breaker’s return. So spotting the pilgrims isn’t difficult. Especially with the Gatekeeper waving his arms in wide arcs as if fearing you might overlook him.

“Greetings, Herald!” His grin is blinding. “The pilgrims are waiting for you just at the at the foot of the stairs.”

“Yeah,” you say. “I can see them.”

“Oh, yes, of course! If anyone causes problems, count on me to help!”

“Thanks.” You answer his thumbs up with one of your own before moving downstairs. What a refreshing young man. Certainly good looking under his helmet. Byleth seems to like talking to him a lot as well.

Today’s pilgrims aren’t much different from other days. Old people are supported by their family members, who have brought baskets with sweets and flowers, presenting them at your feet.

“Herald,” they breathe in awe, bowing. No matter how often you’ve seen it by now, it still feels incredibly wrong.

“Raise your heads,” you tell them, helping an elderly woman up to hrer feet. She gasps at your touch, then clings to your hands. You try to swallow past the lump in your throat. “The Archbishop and I bid you welcome. The Goddess will smile upon your devotion.” Your cringe slightly when echoing Rhea’s words and wonder if any second the goddess might punish you by throwing lightning your way.

“We are blessed to finally meet you,” a younger woman says, taking the old woman from your hands—mother and daughter maybe? “Please accept our gifts, and may the Goddess guide you on your path to light.”

“She will answer your prayers and guide me so I can bring you peace,” you reply just so you can say something they might want to hear. Judging their delighted expressions this wasn’t the worst you could have said. Dorothea would probably be proud looking at your acting skills. Or point out your bad posture and how you’re avoiding their eyes. Dorothea would probably tell you how much you have to polish your acting skills.

“Bring us peace?” someone from the last row spits, pushing to the front. “You know nothing, the Herald will bring chaos and ruin!” A man in his forties looms above you, an ugly, padded scar crossing his face from one temple to his chin. A war veteran? They way he holds himself looks like he’s been beaten up once too much to get up again.

“You heathen, don’t you dare speak to our Herald like that,” the old woman barks, immediately doubling over in a coughing fit. Her daughter supports her, glaring at the man. “Go in peace, but go if you only came to talk ill about our Herald,” she says, clearly upset. "Doubting them is doubting our Goddess. How dare you."

“First I want to see the Herald do something! What if … if this one is an impostor.” The man turns towards the others, throwing his arms in the air. “Bring forward proof that you are not here to ruin our lands, but to actually serve in the Goddess’ name!”

This time his demand meets less resistance. Until now people were fine with seeing you and the Crest, but to want actual prove? You could easily threaten them and ask if they doubt the Goddess’ decision, but you’d rather leave that method to Rhea. You don’t want to sound like her. You don’t want to scare people. Yet admitting that you don’t really have a clue how to really use the Crest would surely support the man’s accusation. Diminishing the people’s trust in the Herald is the last thing you want, especially if it means facing Rhea’s scorn.

“I—”

“Herald!” A voice calls from the top of the stairs. When you turn around, Sylvain waves and jogs downstairs, looking like he’s been running for some time. “There you are. The Archbishop wants to see you.”

Oh no, has she heard of your failure already? Giving the choice of facing a group of doubting people or Rhea, you’d immediately go to the people. You give him a curt nod, unable to speak because you don’t trust your voice.

“I apologise,” you say to the pilgrims, clearing your throat when it comes out as a croak. “I will have something prepared for another time.”

“No, you do not need to prove anything to us,” the elderly woman says. “We will always believe in you. Please tell Her Grace we are constantly praying to our Goddess and thank her for sending you to us.”

“I will.” You squeeze her hand a last time. “Save travels.”

The man still glares at you, but without a chance to keep you present any longer, he turns away and follows the rest. You can’t wait to leave all that behind, and as you steel your nerves for what’s waiting for you in the Audience Chambers, you look up to Sylvain and ask, “Did Lady Rhea say what it is about?”

He looks over at you and blinks a couple of times, then seems to remember. “Ah ... yeah, about that. I lied.”

You stop dead in your tracks. “You lied?”

“Yup. I don’t know what Lady Rhea’s doing. But you looked like you were about to puke at those poor pilgrim’s shoes. As hilarious as that would have been, I wanted to spare you the embarrassment.” He stops now as well and smiles a boyish crooked grin. Sylvain knows exactly what to do with his face so girls fall over themselves to do him a favour, and boys grow jealous of all the attention he gets. Two weeks in, and you’ve figured out his game, keeping a respectable distance that wouldn’t birth the thought you’re avoiding him. In fact, this could be the very first time you’re actually holding a real conversation.

“Well, I … thank you? But I had everything under control.”

He looks like he doesn’t believe you. The gatekeeper you’re just passing looks like he doesn’t believe you. You press your lips into a thin line and dare any of them to disagree.

“Okay.” Sylvain shrugs. “But now we’re here.”

“Sylvain, what do you want?”

“Cutting to the chase, huh?” He crosses his arms behind his head. “Why do you think I want something?” Your raised eyebrows seem to be answer enough. Sylvain laughs a little helplessly and returns his hands back to his front, raised as an offer of peace. “I promise, I want nothing. Just a little talking. A little talking hasn’t hurt anyone.”

Something inside you wants to argue against it, but without a solid argument in hand, you follow him silently, wondering where his destination and intention lies. He belongs to the many students you can’t really read, nothing about his ambitions or goals. Sometimes he gives you this strange look through half lidded eyes, his gaze focused on your right eye—his interest in your Crest undeniable, and yet he’s been one of the few not to talk about it with you. It’s strange because whenever you come together, he looks like there’s something he’s dying to say. This time is no different.

He leads you to the wooden pavilion in the gardens, but instead of offering you a seat, Sylvain leans his slim hips against the table, half sitting on it. Seteth would be furious seeing this.

“How’s the Herald business doing for you?” he asks the one question you wouldn't expect from him. “Other than you having ‘everything under control.’” He has the audacity to air-quote. This isn’t a conversation you want to hold right now, leastwise with him. Sylvain must discern that you’re ready to bold from whatever your body is showing. With a quick step, he’s standing between you and the escape route, lazily leaning one arm against a column to uphold the illusion that you’re only having a pleasant talk when in reality his body stands between you and your freedom.

“Do you talk to the other faculty members like that as well?” you say through gritted teeth, crossing your arms. Sylvain blinks like he doesn’t understand, but you’ve seen this act before, followed by an eerily precise repetition of a subject to one of his classmates when he thinks none of the teachers pay attention. Sylvain is playing dumb and deliberately hiding a sharp mind.

“Oh, I didn’t mean to offend,” he quickly says, nothing about this crooked smile appearing apologetic whatsoever. “I’m generously curious. You’re holding up really good.”

“In comparison to what?” you demand, your heartbeat picking up. Is he trying to call you out on something? That you aren’t heraldy enough? But to your surprise, Sylvain looks genuinely surprised by your reaction.

“To nothing. In general?” He shrugs. “Back on the ceremony day, you didn’t look so good standing up there, and His Highness told us everything happened really uh … ‘suddenly.’’ More air-quotes, whatever they mean this time.

“If you mean I wasn’t really asked to become the Herald, then yes.” Your arms drop back to your side. “It was suddenly.”

Sylvain watches you for a moment, and again, there’s this look in his eyes; the need to say something he can’t. He kneads the back of his nape, avoiding your eyes. “All I’m trying to say is … having that Crest out of nothing is cool. Probably. And maybe terrifying? And just—”

You grow impatient. “Come on, get the words out, Sylvain.”

“A Crest isn’t just this nice letter of invitation to a privileged life. Just take care, is all I’m saying.”

And there’s another page to the book of surprises with Sylvain’s name on it. The immediate lack of response catches him off guard; it’s like he only notices now that the vital part to understand this conversation is missing: The source of his doubt towards Crests.

Sylvain’s body turns in a split second, his feet facing the direction he’s ready to bold towards, but this time you stand in his way and block him off. “Sylvain, are you okay?”

He blinks in confusion, then furrows his eyebrows in deep thought like you demanded he recites the Ten Heroes from memory or else fails classes. His face contorts with the effort of looking fine. “Why, yes! Just peachy. Why would you think something is off?”

“Because I have eyes in my skull.”

“Very pretty eyes, if I dare say.” His answer comes out like a fire spell, hard and fast, seemingly more instinct than anything else. He clears his throat and scratches his chin, loosing momentum. “Goddess, I am bad at this.”

“You are.” No need to sugar coat it. “If something happened, just say it.”

“Nothing really happened, I just—” He exhales audibly and stares into space for a long minute, before side stepping you without difficulty. “Actually, I remembered Professor wanted to see me after class. Something about extra lessons about eh. Horse riding. Yeah. I’ll catch you later, Herald.” He winks and bolds away, darting under your outstretched arm before you can catch him. For someone this tall, he’s surprisingly agile and fast, already disappearing behind a tall hedge towards the main building.

If that wasn’t the strangest conversation you’ve held with anyone, you don’t know what might excel that. Maybe it’s time you stop avoiding Sylvain.

The Training Grounds smells of sweat and oil. Many students and knights train, which is surprising at this kind of hour, the short break between afternoon and evening classes. You’d like to know what they’re working on, but Byleth doesn’t tolerate inattention in a classroom or on the battle field, and demands you do push-ups each time your eyes wander somewhere off. You hate her a little for that. For whatever reason, Claude has taken on the role of your partner in crime, and does whatever necessary to make Byleth punish him as well.

“What can I say, I like a good workout,” he said when you asked. He didn’t even try to hide his lie, looking as miserable as you felt. Probably hating Byleth a little as well.

It’s the fourth week of private training with her and the house leaders, and so far you can definitely say that you were not meant to fight on the field. You see how your opponent moves, you can somehow predict what they’re going to do next—but your body simply protests to act accordingly. You stumble, you fall, you need a second too long to get up and before you can do anything, a training sword is at your throat. Byleth always looks like she wants to facepalm her fist through her forehead. Or yours.

“Herald, this is not how you disarm someone,” she says, as always, and demonstrates it in one smooth, swift movement, as always. You blow hair out of your eyes, knowing you’re about to fail again. At least that gave Claude a reason to give you a new nickname, though if it’s better than the last is debatable.

“You gotta twist your wrist, duckling!” he calls from the other side of the hall, immediately drawing Byleth’s attention to him. He and Dimitri are facing off, both wielding a spear which should give Dimitri the upper hand. So far, he hasn’t landed a single hit on Claude.

“Keep your elbows in!” Byleth berates Claude. “Stop flapping them like some kind of chicken.”

Claude lets out a disturbingly convincing cluck.

You raise an eyebrow. “At least someone’s having fun.”

Byleth sighs. “He’s going to get himself killed sooner than later.”

“I don’t know. He’s managed so far, hasn’t he?”

“I’m not sure if it’s a talent or a fault.” She turns back to you and nods her chin towards the side. “Take a break. I’m going to see how the boys are doing.”

You nod, tensing all over because that’s where Edelgard is currently standing and picking out a training axe. You haven’t talked to her since lunch, and you can do without it for a couple more hours. She barely glances at you when you walk over, and instead checks out the edge of the wooden blade, turning it left and right.

“Is she as strict in the classroom as in here?” you ask, unable to go on in awkward silence. Edelgard hums, throwing a quick glance towards Byleth from under her long, white lashes. “She’s systematic and consistent. Capable in both fields. I have no reason to raise any kind of complaint.”

“That’s impressive.” You sure as heck still wouldn’t want her as a teacher. “Even though she’s been pushed into all this, she handles it like she’s never done anything else.”

“I think as a mercenary, she is used to changing approaches depending on the employer.” Edelgard is still looking at Byleth. Reading her expression is impossible, and you don’t want to point out that sticking a sword into thieves and bandits is not the same as teaching kids how to fight in a battle. Her head whips to you suddenly, and she considers the training sword in your hand. “Speaking of different approaches,” she continues, “have you considered that your field of combat might be magic?”

You have, so the answer comes immediately. “Chances are higher I set myself on fire.” You stare at her. “I didn’t mean it to rhyme.”

Edelgard ignores your last comment. “But you haven’t really tried it out, have you?” Your lack of response is answer enough for her, and she nods like that proves a point.

It’s complicated. You haven’t really tried it out because … the simple answer is, you’re afraid. It gets tricky once you try to search for the answer to that. There’s just a strange sensation when you try to use magic, like there’s a vast sea of possibilities and one step inside is enough to get you lost. It isn’t as bad with wind spells or white magic. You haven’t touched Fire spells because a crippling fear chills you to the bones every time you manage to nourish a small flame inside your palm—the complete opposite to Dark magic. When you tried a MiasmaΔ for the first time it felt strangely … secure. The rope tying you to a shore, it had felt like—

There’s a loud crash when the spears collide and Claude knocks Dimitri off his feet. The whole room is silent as everyone watches how Claude taps the blunt end of his practice spear against Dimitri’s chin. “Steady on there, darling,” he says with a smug grin. Dimitri flushes bright red, and pushes with more force than necessary the spear away, quickly climbing to his feet.

“That wasn’t bad.” Byleth quickly steps in before Dimitri can throttle Claude. “Dimitri, you rely too much on your brute strength. That’s a big disadvantage against someone like Claude. And you, young man,” she turns to Claude who’s been smiling victoriously, “are scheming too much and lose time to take action. In a serious battle, you won’t be as lucky as today.”

“Noted.” Claude whirls his spear from left to right, almost dropping it when Dimitri drills his elbow into his side. “But in a serious battle, I won’t be upfront. I’ll be hanging back nicely, and skewing my enemies with a myriad of arrows.”

“You can barely shoot three at the same time,” Dimitri grumbles, his cheeks still splotched with red specks.

“You wanna bet—”

“That’s enough, guys, save it for then next round.” Byleth ignores their sulky expressions and turns to you, raising a single eyebrow. The message is clear. What are you waiting for?

Your feet feel like they’re glued to the ground. Edelgard doesn’t hesitate at all. “Let’s go.”

She strides in the middle, training axe raised. It’s made out of wood, but you don’t doubt that she’s able to severe a limb from your body if she only tries hard enough—and what you know of Edelgard is that she alwaysexceeds even her own expectations. You grip your sword tighter. It’s a clear disadvantage, but better than anything else you can handle. Maybe it won’t be as bad.

The fight lasts for about seven seconds. The moment you raise the blade, Edelgard is on you and unleashes fierce strike after strike, the power behind each hit forcing you back. She doesn’t bat an eyelash when she easily disarms you, the wooden sword flying over your heads and the edge of her axe on your throat. Somewhere behind her, you hear Byleth sigh. “Again.”

The next hour is torture. Edelgard throws you to the ground, again and again. Byleth keeps telling you to get up, again and again. One might think they would cut you some slack, being the Herald and all, but it feels like Edelgard is so much more aggressive today because you’re the Herald. Or maybe it’s personal. Maybe she’s appointed you to be her sworn enemy, and won’t miss out any chance to make it as hard as possible for you.

This isn’t fun. Being watched by Dimitri and Claude, who whisper conspiratorially to each other isn’t fun. Luckily, Byleth notices them gawking and bellows them to focus on working on their stances. Right now, you’re thankful nothing escapes her eyes and she calls her students out on their bullshit. It doesn’t make your current situation easier though. Every muscle burns, just raising the sword is exhausting and your feet feel like they’re about to give out any second. This must be hell.

When Byleth finally ends lessons, you ignore everything and crumble to the ground, splaying your limbs out in all directions. Surely they can clean up without you, two hands less will barely make any difference.

A shadow settles over you. You know who it is, and don’t bother to open your eyes. “Go away, Byleth. I don’t want to hear how bad I am.”

“Personally, I think you have improved, Herald.” Your eyes snap open. Dimitri looks down at you, his forehead still glistening from perspiration. “But facing Edelgard as an opponent usually wields those results. Don’t let it bother you.”

You want to point out that he and Claude don’t seem to have as much problems as you, even though yes, none of them have defeated her yet in practice. He goes down to your level and sits beside you, and you hate how this all barely made him breath hard, like it’s just a stroll around the monastery whereas you’re trying to climb the mountains surrounding it.

“I think she hates me,” you blurt out. Luckily, most students have already left the hall, Edelgard included. Dimitri considers this a moment, and you don’t know what to make of his lack of immediate response.

“I doubt she hates you,” he finally says.

“But?”

“But she has a hard time warming up to people. Give her time. Once the ice is broken, you will see that her personality is one you’d like to have around.”

“Oh?” You watch him for a moment, but Dimitri doesn’t blush or look away. It was a heartfelt, sincere statement, which flusters you for some reason. No one should be that honest.

“Talking about breaking ice. Do you know if something happened to Sylvain?”

“Sylvain?” Dimitri raises both eyebrows. “Please don’t tell me he harassed you in some kind of way.”

“No, no, he just—” You finally get up from lying on your back, and try to explain it by frantically moving your hands. Dimitri still looks puzzled. “He said some weird things about Crests in general?”

“Hm.” Dimitri stares at your hands for a moment, then quickly raises his eyes back to your face. “It’s complicated.” Well, that answer is as good as none. “And I won’t go into details without his consent. I can only say that if he talked about Crests, in whichever way, his brother must have upset him again.”

“He has a brother?” Now you’re wide awake. Many students have siblings. You know of Hilda’s brother and Raphael’s sister. It shouldn’t surprise you Sylvain has one as well even though he’s never mentioned it before.

“Do you have siblings?” you ask, generously curious. As heir to a kingdom, it’s hard to imagine his parents would have settled with one child. But he hasn’t mentioned any sisters or brothers as well.

“Hmm, I have a step-sister,” he says, although very hesitant and you can see if someone doesn’t want to talk about a specific topic. He doesn’t return the question, which is kind of him and makes you wonder … maybe you have a sibling as well. Somewhere. Maybe somewhere in Adrestia or Leicester a younger brother or an older sister is currently looking for you, unrelenting in their journey to be reunited at last. The thought alone brings a flicker of hope alive. Maybe they'll come once word of the Herald’s return travels far enough.

“I guess as long as Sylvain doesn’t disturb classes or acts out of order, I would leave him to his brooding. I can tell out of experience, only Felix is capable of cheering him up.”

“Felix?” Your eyebrows rise to your hairline. “Are we talking about the same Felix?”

A smile forms on Dimitri’s mouth. “I understand why imagining that might prove difficult, but I assure you, Felix is one of the view exceeding in handling the mess Sylvain is from time to time.”

“Felix and Ingrid?” you guess, earning a nod from Dimitri. “Ingrid is a very nice girl,” you continue, picking at a loose thread from your uniform. “But Felix seems detests me. Every time he sees me, he looks like he wants to throw his sword at me.”

“That is—” Dimitri stops mid-sentence. “That might be not so far off from his true intentions.”

You groan.

“But I assure you it is for a different reason than you think. Felix is simply … difficult with people holding a commanding position.”

“He doesn’t seem to have the same problem with Byleth,” you point out. No, whenever he trains with her, he manages something close to a smile and accepts her guidance. Then again, she isn’t his teacher.

“I’m sure you’ll be able to make him consider his opinion on you during the Mock Battle. I as well am looking forward to how you will guide us.” Dimitri beams. You stare at him like he’s just lost his head.

“What?”

“The Mock Battle three nights from today?” Dimitri’s smile falters a little. “Have the Professor and Lady Rhea not told you yet? You are to participate in the Mock Battle as the commanding unit of the Blue Lions.” Now he’s pulling his eyebrows together in worry. “Herald?”

“I—” You jump to your feet. “I have to go.” Go far far away. Just yesterday you introduced the students to the tactic called Feigned Withdrawal, which involves staging a retreat in order to induce the enemy to abandon its position and plunge ahead in an attack. Dimitri abandons his position, getting up to go after you, but instead of turning back to surprise him with an ambush, you flee the battle and hope the enemy doesn’t pursue.

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kuramirocket · 3 years ago

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Imagine having a songwriter accompany you through life — follow you from one country to the next — and sing of your trials and victories, your history. That’s what Jesus “Chuy” Negrete did for Mexican immigrants and their children.

Negrete is being remembered this weekend at the National Museum of Mexican Art. He died May 27 at the age of 72.

The treasured folk singer was dubbed “the Chicano Woody Guthrie,” and for decades the troubadour of Chicago’s barrios and the Chicano movement sang his heart out at protests and picket lines, festivals and Latino studies conferences nationwide.

People who met Negrete never forgot him. His guitar and harmonica were like extensions of his body. He was full of jokes and stories — in Spanish, English and Spanglish — all set to song. His specialty was the corrido, Mexican folk ballads he used to document the Chicano experience and highlight social and political causes.

Negrete frequently talked about the role of the corrido in the Mexican Revolution, how it functioned like a newspaper.

"They used this oral tradition to keep alive their history, and to make political commentary. It was their story, their history books. … The corrido then is to the Chicano — the Mexican American — what the blues is to the Black man" said Negrete.

Negrete’s lyrics were full of Mexican humor and frequently involved foibles around learning English. He poked fun at the powerful and always gave the little guy the last laugh. He could have crowds laughing hysterically, and at the same time deliver biting critiques of cultural imperialism, exploitation of farmworkers or the state of education for Latino youth.

In one of his songs, Negrete tells the story of how teachers changed Mexican students’ names:

If your name was Felipe? Phil! Humberto? Bert. Domingo? Sunday. If your name was Domingo Nieves — Ice Cream Sunday!

Later in the song, Negrete says the nun at “Our Lady of Perpetual Racism” school decides not to shorten his cousin Facundo’s name. “I think we’re going to have to call you Joe,” she says.

Wherever there was a protest, Chuy was there

Negrete lived the experience he sang about. He was born in Mexico. He spent his early years in Texas, where his parents were migrant workers. When he was seven, his family moved to South Chicago for work in the steel mills.

Labor issues — in particular farmworker issues — remained a motivation and theme in his music throughout his life.

“Wherever there was a protest, Chuy would be found there,” said Congressman Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, who knew Negrete for decades. “Whether it was in the back of a pickup truck, in a parking lot. He would be there and he would play his heart out.”

Negrete was brilliantly spontaneous. If he was singing on a picket line, his lyrics would mention strikers right there walking the line. At the Fiesta del Sol, he’d incorporate the señoras making enchiladas into the song. If a kid toddled by, he’d work him in too.

“He would say, ‘Hey mocosito, how are we doing?’” remembered Garcia. “[He’d] play with the kid and then get back to the story that he was telling. He was just able to just pluck people out of their situation, bring them into the song and then go back to the larger storytelling. That was one of his gifts and he was so good and so comfortable at it.”

Negrete grew up hearing the classic Mexican music his dad played when he came home from work at Republic Steel.

And by his early 20s, he was organizing other young people — including his three younger sisters — into theater and singing troupes that toured the country and highlighted Chicano culture and history.

One of Negrete’s presentations went through 500 years of Chicano history, starting in pre-Hispanic times and running through Mexican independence and the Mexican Revolution.

Using music to educate

Negrete viewed himself as a scholar and an educator. He lectured at universities across the country and was often invited by Latino student groups hungry to learn more about their history and culture.

He believed folk music was integral to political struggle.

“Music is one of the elements that is most utilized by our people,” Negrete told host Linda Fregoso in 1980 on a University of Texas at Austin radio program. “We listen to it, we sing our children to bed with it. Music is a very important element in our cultural world, in our folklore world. So … you utilize the element that is most utilized by the people. … You educate people, they educate themselves. You mix the political with the cultural.”

Negrete was a key part of the Chicano movement nationwide. He worked with Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers and the national Farm Labor Organizing Committee.

Negrete’s family saw him straddle two worlds. “Important to a large population, inspiring to a large population — completely unknown to a larger Anglo society,” said Rita Rousseau, Negrete’s wife, who met him in 1988 at the National Museum of Mexican Art’s annual Day of the Dead show, where Negrete was crooning to the crowds looking at the art.

“He’s so beloved within his community and part of so many cultural touchstones and points in history in the United States,” said Negrete’s older son, Joaquin. “He’s the most famous unfamous person.”

Negrete loved to perform. As his health declined over the past few years — and then during the pandemic — he turned to his radio show, Radio Rebelde, which aired on Loyola University’s small station. He broadcast from his dining room table, and of course he wrote corridos about the coronavirus, memorializing essential workers who were disproportionately dying from COVID-19. (Negrete died of congestive heart failure.)

Chicago’s City Council is expected to honor Negrete with a resolution later this month. Negrete’s family is organizing a community celebration of Chuy Negrete this Sunday at the National Museum of Mexican Art. And they’ve been pulling together his many songs, which together document a half century of political struggle and cultural pride for Mexican Americans in Chicago and beyond.

#🇲🇽#music #Jesus “Chuy” Negrete #jesus negrete #mexican #mexican history #history #chicano history #chicano movement #racism #mexico #coronavirus #covid-19

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aion-rsa · 3 years ago

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From Bridgerton to Sanditon—Putting Island Queen in a Period Drama Context

https://ift.tt/3dpMXo9

This article contains book spoilers for Island Queen and a trigger warning for racism and sexual assault.

Caribbean history is often ignored in US discussions of the era, despite myself and many other Americans having ancestry from this part of the world. Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park has extended references to Caribbean slavery but many adaptations sidestep these implications or briefly address them before moving back to the white main characters. In addition, the focus is often on male leaders of rebellions such as Toussaint L’Overture leading the Haitian rebellion, or on women with island ancestry such as Dido Elizabeth from the movie Belle living in England. All are written by white novelists and screenwriters who miss cultural nuances and are unaware of subconscious bias. Island Queen, Vanessa Riley’s latest foray into Black historical fiction reveals a hidden figure of Caribbean history. Dorothy Kirwan was born into slavery in Montserrat, but secured her own freedom by becoming an astute businesswoman.

Riley’s novel takes readers on a complex but emotionally fufilling journey which brings up serious historical questions on slavery, class, gender, and business ethics during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Riley’s novel is the answer for fans who feel recent historical dramas prioritize varying levels of whitewashing or escapism over featuring real Black history.

Kirwan’s story has incredible relevance today as many look to understand the enduring legacies of British colonialism and the slave trade in the late 18th and early 19th Century. Her diary does not exist but Riley assembled birth records and other primary sources to trace her life. This is in contrast to sources such as the anonymously published novel The Woman Of Colour which historians are still looking to corroborate authorship and connections to real Caribbean figures. Kirwan at times the mirror image of the fictionalized story of July from The Long Song, but there are also flash points of difference along class and timeframe context. July was born roughly 50 years later than Kirwan in Jamaica. In addition, Dorothy’s life journey takes the reader from Montserrat to Demerara (off the coast of modern day Guyana), Grenada, and Dominica. Most importantly, Riley is an Caribbean-American writer while Andrea Levy wrote The Long Song for Black British readers.

Dorothy’s in-character first person narration is the glue that holds the story together through frequent flashbacks to her childhood and young adulthood to her life in 1824 as a grandmother. The main theme of self-determination in a world where rich white men decide the rules everyone must play keeps the reader engaged even when it is not clear where the plot is heading. In the present plot, Dorothy has returned to London after many years away to petition colonial leaders to retain hard-won rights for Black and biracial women in Demerara. These unequal laws threaten Dorothy’s children and grandchildren and could even take away the freedom and inheritance she has spent her whole life to build.

Bridgerton’s critics will find solace in Island Queen. Those who wanted the Black aristocracy of Haiti and other Caribbean islands featured in the series will find this history at the center. Kirwan navigates a world with inherent inequality, despite how much she has achieved in property ownership and savings. When she interacts with British and colonial elites, they never treat her as if she has power over them. The racial caste system in existence influences all of her interactions. After a breakup, she takes up an offer from Prince William (Queen Victoria’s uncle who died with no legitimate heirs) to travel with him on his ship. In Dorothy’s story, he provides a temporary emotional distraction but also a recognition that she would never fit into the British elite because of her skin color and island background. Unlike Queen Charlotte in Bridgerton, the real prejudices of the era held Dorothy back from ascending completely into the highest levels of royal society. Riley’s narrative, especially, ignores what could have been and shows readers the truth.

These rich white men who placed artificial limits on Dorothy were also the source for young Alexander Hamilton’s childhood poverty. However, his solution as featured in the opening song of Hamilton was to leave the islands to pursue his education in America. This was an option steeped in male and to an extent white privilege as women at this point in history were not allowed to attend college. In addition, American society had already enacted severe restrictions in the rights of free people of color. Hamilton also was an orphan. Dorothy’s parents and her children kept her rooted to the Caribbean.

The road to Dorothy acquiring a thriving business and heirs was lengthy and arduous, and Riley does not sugar coat the dynamics at play in her life. Kirwan’s mother was a slave and her father owned a plantation. The more percentage of white ancestry you have in your blood, the more freedom and rights you have. In her teenage years, Dorothy’s white half-brother Nicholas rapes her and she ends up giving birth to a daughter. Dorothy is forced to run away with a trusted friend to another island and has to leave her daughter behind. This is the beginning of many sacrifices she makes in order to protect her family.

Although many readers may object to Riley portraying incest and sexual assault, the historical research makes this clear that this was the reality for women in slave societies. Dorothy’s narration is carefully crafted to show not only the trauma of the event, but her processing the trauma. For Dorothy, healing comes in the form of survival. The objective isn’t exploitation or the male gaze, but to illuminate ignored history and the intersection of race and gender in sexual power dynamics. Dorothy has to repeatedly establish consent and trust in a world where her partners can and will refuse to agree to those terms. The debate over rape culture in historical fiction revolves around characters that are fictional facing fictionalized situations, especially in the TV adaptations of Outlander and Bridgerton. Additionally, Outlander has sidestepped any serious contemplation of exploitation dynamics in slave societies despite plots featuring 8th Century Jamaica and North Carolina. It is difficult to apply this same critique to Riley’s novel as her intention is historical recreation and reconstruction of Kirwan’s life story.

Riley’s explanation and contextualization of race and gender dynamics is something many viewers wanted the first season of British historical drama Sanditon to address, past the show alluding to Georgiana’s ancestry and £100,000 inheritance. In fact, Riley explains in the Author’s Note that the journey to finding Dorothy Kirwan began with figuring out who the real Miss Lambe could have been over a decade ago. For Georgiana to have that kind of wealth, she would have had to have a white male ancestor willing and able to use the law to secure her freedom. Sidney’s connection to Georgiana as her legal ward isn’t clear, representing a missed opportunity that erodes the story’s worldbuilding. Dorothy’s explanation of social rankings and her own background means it is highly likely Georgiana is the product of a relationship between a white planter and an enslaved or indentured woman. Georgiana isn’t the only example of an fictional heir from the islands around this time period. Rhoda Swartz from Vanity Fair has Black and Jewish ancestry along with thousands of pounds. Island Queen has the space and interest to completely center the story of women like Georgiana and Rhoda position from the perspective of a Black writer and historian.

Dorothy also reveals through her life experiences that interracial relationships with unequal power dynamics were often one of the only ways enslaved Black and biracial women could gain their freedom. In stark contrast to America during the late 18th Century, interracial relationships were never officially outlawed, but it was very rare for white men to officially marry women of color. More often, these women were mistresses and concubines, and any children from these relationships legally belonged to the father. Any relationship an enslaved woman undertook carried the risk of losing her children, with her past often used as a weapon of misogynoir, or simultaneous racist and sexist discrimination.

One plot line unites Island Queen and The Long Song: both July and Dorothy lose a daughter to their white slave holding father who wanted to raise them in England. This trauma drives July to poverty while Dorothy had to wrestle the trauma alongside her mission to to fight to secure manumission papers for her children and also to develop a source of income that cannot be controlled by the men in her life.

How The Long Song Spotlights Ignored Black Caribbean History

By Amanda-Rae Prescott

Books

How Bridgerton Season 2 Can Improve On Season 1

By Amanda-Rae Prescott

At one point, she engages in survival sex work, then finds work as a housekeeper. Eventually, she is able to start her own housekeeping and domestic worker agency. She was well aware that some of her employees would choose to have relations with their bosses, but she made sure that she was not seen as a brothel owner for legal reasons. This is in stark contrast to some of the characters from Harlots on Hulu where brothel ownership or their sex worker status was an open secret.This is another area where Black women would suffer worse consequences for perceived immorality in society compared to white women. In fact, rumors of sex work follow her Dorothy doesn’t intefere if her housekeepers decide to engage in sex work but she insists on mutual consent. Riley does not apply any modern notions of slut-shaming or anti-sex-worker rhetoric. The reader understands that options for women’s employment outside of domestic service in these island colonies were severely limited.

Dorothy’s narrative exposes both vulnerability in her relationships with her children and her significant others and also in her resolve to maintain her status. Far too often, Black women in historical fiction are reduced to tropes such as the “strong Black woman” that are not realistic to historical or modern readers. Or even worse, authors who completely erase the presence of Black women in the late Georgian and Regency Era by only featuring white women.

The challenge in reading Island Queen for those uninitiated in Caribbean history of this era is to separate our modern historical knowledge from the reality Dorothy faces. Although Riley’s narrative does not make excuses for her questionable decisions, the narration makes clear that Dortothy is navigating a racist, sexist and classist society. Part of Dorothy’s later wealth comes from owning slaves. This was not a decision based on wanting to inflict cruelty, but due to the power dynamics in colonial society which punished those who refused to participate in the slave trade. Dorothy opposes slavery but also realize that open rebellion will cost her life or the lives of those around her. She is not isolated from the violence of slave rebellions and of the consequences of suppression. Riley in the Author’s Note says Kirwan freed all of her slaves in 1833 when slavery in Demerara was officially outlawed.

Dorothy’s narrative may have the background makings of a tragedy, but Riley reveals that her life was ultimately a success. Kirwan built her business and eventually reunited most members of her family. She even saw her children marry successfully and met several of her grandchildren. None of her children lived in poverty and she prevented all of them from working as slaves. While some may wish her various relationships could have created a permanent happy ever after, the real satisfaction comes from seeing Kirwan preserve her legacy for the next generation. Real Black historical stories such as Kirwan’s are incredibly rare in US and UK media as wholly fictional composite characters dominate existing period dramas and historical fiction novels. Island Queen, if enough people read it, could become a TV or movie adaptation that would give viewers the real truths of late 18th Century/Regency Era Caribbean history. The genre is overdue for a biography adaptation led by Black writers without the white gaze.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Island Queen will be available in bookstores July 6th. You can order the book here.

The post From Bridgerton to Sanditon—Putting Island Queen in a Period Drama Context appeared first on Den of Geek.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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tthael · 4 years ago

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Dude your writing is so stunning. I was gonna ask if you took any creative writing courses or something and saw you majored in literature so like no wonder lol. I wish to write as good as you but as someone who wants to drop out of college I dont see that happening. Anyway you're awesome and I hope you have a good day 💙💙

I am going to tell you a secret.

I did not learn how to write like this in college.

Most of my creative writing classes (and I only took 4) taught me to read. They were all workshops, and collaborative, and I learned how to read a piece of writing and identify what it was about--and that’s very different from identifying what the writer intended to write. It taught me to read a story about an adult whose divorced mother is remarrying and say, “Okay, but I don’t think that this story is about the capitalist recompartmentalization of families the way that the title seems to indicate. I think that the questions posed by the premise are ‘where are my roots? where does my identity come from? what dynamics do I retreat to when I need to feel safe, and what do I do when that refuge is taken away?’“ And identifying what a story is actually about is a very important part of the writing and revision process. Workshops also taught me to take critique without taking it personally, and to assess what was a critique worth taking, and whether the giver knew what they were talking about and what their opinion is worth.

Most of my literature courses taught me to think critically--in the sense of “identify this and examine what it means.” What does it mean, in Parable of the Sower, that empathy can be weaponized and used to incapacitate others? What does it mean, in RENT, that Benny is offering the protagonists jobs in their fields and they’re eschewing in favor of authenticity and integrity? What does Watership Down have to say about the nature-vs.-nurture argument and its limitations?

But I did not learn how to write like this in college. I learned how to write like this from fandom.

Some things came pre-loaded. I like writing dialogue, and I’ve been told I’m good at it, and I think it’s because eventually I worked out that nobody ever manages to say exactly what they mean and communication is frequently less like an arrow aiming for a target and more like a small boat bumping up against a dock while the people onboard try to tie their ropes to secure it. I like characters over action, and that’s reflected in the stories I tell--all very heavy character-driven stories, where the ratio of introspection to actual events is very high.

Z. Z. Packer’s “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” taught me to appreciate the way that characterization leads to action; but I never put that into practice until I went on (forgive me) tumblr and started reading meta. dear-wormwoods is one of my biggest sources of Eddie characterization meta, and that has influenced my fics more than anything else in fandom, though we’ve never spoken. When I was reading bagginshield, I read avelera’s meta for them.

But I’ve also found that many of the best meta writers (that I’ve found anyway) are also the best writers I’ve read. I went straight from avelera’s bagginshield literary analysis to their Pacific Rim fanfiction “the only way out is down” and reading their commentary on how they shaped the work during revision. I read amarguerite’s “Some Friendlier Sky” (Les Miserables fanfiction) and then “An Ever-Fixed Mark” (Pride and Prejudice) and I started asking her questions--”you compare Courfeyrac to a cat, and then Mr. Darcy to a cat, even though they’re very different characters. What’s the thought process there?” and she told me and we talked about it. I read chrononautical’s “A Road from the Garden” (The Hobbit) and went line by line picking out the things I liked in the comment, and I had this sudden epiphany about how Tolkien shows the dwarves as sets of brothers, which means that they are technically a race of brothers in their presentation, so it was GENIUS to play around with the brother dynamic in a work like that and reflect on how frequently an individual will tolerate mistreatment of themselves that they would never permit to happen to someone they loved--like, say, a brother.

I learned the basics of literary criticism and critical analysis from college, and from reading the western canon and trying to pick apart things that were useful to me. But it’s so much easier when everything is written in vernacular instead of faux-detached academic writing, and when everyone involved is genuinely excited about and dedicated to the work instead of being forced to dwell on The Old Man and the Sea yet again, and when there’s space for people to go back and forth analyzing and agreeing or saying “but what if” or rejecting and are just united by this love of the content or the characters or the book or the history.

You can learn to write like--well, you would write like you, not like me, that’s how style is. But you don’t have to go to college to do it. My current style is not the product of the institution that gave me my degree--it’s the product of more recent years’ immersion in fanfiction (and more recently some traditionally published original work) and music and content I get for free online. And you can also get a circle of people who are happy to write together, read each other’s work, comment on each other’s strengths and the things they like, make suggestions as to how to improve things. You don’t have to do that in college. You just have to read and write a lot, and the things that you read will influence what writing you produce, and in identifying what you like about the things you read and how they do the things they do, you will be able to look at your own work critically and shape it more towards your satisfaction.

The work I’m writing for IT is some of the best work of my life. TTHAEL is the first long work I’ve completed to my satisfaction. Indelicate is the first thing I’ve written that I feel is really exemplary of my style. Margot’s Room is the first self-contained short work I’ve completed to my satisfaction--and the first explicit sexual content I’ve written that I’m happy with both level of detail and atmosphere. Even Automatic-Mechanical-Pneumatic--which I wrote and posted in the same day, so it’s more of a draft--I look at it and recognize it has pacing issues (you can tell I was racing a clock to get the words out), some of the symbolism is too overt because the characters are too self-aware of it, at one point I tripped up and referred to a character by the real-world inspiration--but that’s a solid draft and it has good parts.

You don’t have to go to college to learn to write. Writing is a skill, and writing is work. And there are advantages that people in colleges have re: networking and libraries and available resources and professors who are being paid to give you feedback. But no institution is going to put you through a four-year program and at the end you’ll come out a “finished” writer, with no more room to improve. That’s something you have to do on your own.

#anon #ask #writing advice #my fic #indelicate #tthael #automatic-mechanical-pneumatic #a-m-p

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mychildrenneedwine · 3 years ago

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I’ve been wanting to read more film-philosophy this summer, especially articles. I want to feel out how this approach gets applied on a smaller and more concrete scale, close conversations with particular films or particular images. I find my ideas get lost in their generality and have a hard time coming back down to specific encounters with film. Reading the latest volume of Film-Philosophy, I seemed to hear an echo of this concern.

There are three featured articles, and the first two are heavy hitters: Jeff Fort’s essay attempts to re-read Bazin’s entire ontology (I’ve only read the abstract on this one, but it sounds very promising), and Jiri Anger develops an elegant account of ‘accidental aesthetics’ within the context of new digital technologies interacting with the materiality of filmstock. Both are grappling with film’s ontology, and both are trying to develop new ideas in relation to old traditions. Then, there’s the third article, by Silvia Angeli and Francesco Sticchi. At first glance, it seems far humbler in scope, simply applying concepts form the good old Deleuze/Guattari toolbox to a couple of European arthouse films. But there’s a germ of an idea nestled in this seemingly simple textual analysis, which might too easily be dismissed as a mere application of philosophical concepts to some films, and this idea interests me.

The idea has to do with how we experience a film, and, while it gets expressed succinctly at a few points within the article, it never seems to move to the foreground and become the point of what we’re reading. Textual analysis always occupies this centrality, and the notion of experience merely hovers around this analysis. Maybe the idea isn’t foregrounded because it’s been developed elsewhere, or maybe its significance is meant to be obvious. Whatever the reason, I want to foreground the idea for myself, if only to get a better grasp on it, to work through what it might mean for the film-philosophy relation.

The article looks at two films with explicitly Christian themes, Moretti’s We Have a Pope and Rohrwacher’s exquisite debut Corpo Celeste. It applies the concept of a ‘line of flight’ to these two films in order to argue that each film ruptures with itself, opening up a line of flight that allows it to produce change and move in new directions. Because of each film’s theological themes, these lines of flight are seen as challenges to established traditions of understanding reality. So far so good. We have films that play with thematic preoccupations, and they seem to be leveling critiques or advancing a worldview. Good for them. But the idea of experience that the article wraps around this account seems to push these films past merely representing a pattern of thought. These films also provide viewers with the experience of these ideas, they “allow the audience to experience a major problematization of the institutions surrounding the two main characters” (4). This emphasis on experience seems to link the lines of flight that exist within each film’s formal construction with the viewer, putting that viewer through the very process of these lines of flight.

This idea might sound trivial, but it strikes me as a fundamental part of the film-philosophy relation. We experience films; they are objects of sensation that carry us through an (often-times) allotted unit of experience. This motivates some of my interest in the connections between viewership and ritual, but here I’m more interested in how this frames film as a specific kind of object, one that does things and takes us places.

At this point, my mind jumps to Sarah Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, which I read recently and will doubtlessly misremember here. But what brings me back to this text is her interest in objects that can take us places, specifically ones that can pull us into new directions. She talks about how queer objects can manage such a pull. What makes these objects queer isn’t so much the objects themselves. Rather, it’s about our reaction to an encounter with these objects, which itself has to do with how we’re oriented toward them, and how this can give them a queer quality. Basically, a queer object is one that manages to pull us off the ‘straight line’ at the moment of encounter. In a simple sense, this is a process of estrangement, of suddenly noticing how everything we take for granted is in fact ordered in a specific way, rather than simply being given naturally. When something, an object, is out of place, we tend to rearrange it into place, to pull it in-line. But the out-of-place object also has the ability to reverse this process, pulling us off-line by making us suddenly aware of the strangeness within the order we intuitively maintain. Now, none of this sounds very queer, not yet. But, for Ahmed, these seemingly natural arrangements of objects in space are often constructed around heteronormative assumptions, which subtly reinforce the naturalness of such heteronormativity through arranging our bodies in particular ways around such objects.

As the title of her book evokes, Ahmed gets the notion of a ‘straight line’ from phenomenology, specifically Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. This line actually starts out as an issue of perception, with Merleau-Ponty’s observations about how we tend to straighten our perception along a vertical axis in order to bring order to that perception. From there, Ahmed develops an entire analysis of how this process of alignment continues throughout other facets of experience. The family unit, with its basis in an assumed heterosexual line of procreation and continuance, structures much of this cultural alignment process. So, we’re in-line when we’re experiencing reality from the starting point of – and moving along the trajectory of – heteronormative reproduction. Anything that takes us off this trajectory, even for a moment, pulls us off-line.

Film can be such a queer object, without a doubt. I still remember noticing Steve McQueen’s ass, in pristine white pants, from The Sand Pebbles. That was a sudden encounter, somewhere in the nebulous mire of middle school, that could be said to have pulled me off-line, if only briefly. The pull of desire is just that, a pull. It opens up new trajectories, sometimes followed and sometimes not. However, this would be an account of film as a kind of brute queer object, something that evokes a sudden response to singular moment of encounter. But the way that films take us through an experience with their structure, as touched upon by Angeli and Sticchi, is more complex than this. It takes into account the formal properties of the film and, more importantly, how they interact to create a more prolonged experience. When I think of films that could be thought of as queer objects in this way, my mind turns to Claire Denis and Beau Travail.

The main conflict is between Galoup, a French Legionnaire of some mid-range stature, and one of his soldiers, Sentain. The nature of the conflict remains ambiguous throughout the entire film, but it’s interesting that Galoup feels this conflict immediately after his first encounter with Sentain. Sentain sticks out to him, and Galoup then talks about a ‘vague and menacing’ feeling that takes hold, which will drive his obsessive resistance to Sentain for the rest of film. But what’s really at the root of this feeling, so suddenly evoked? Given the way Denis films the sensual rhythms of male bodies, a homoerotic tension is clearly foregrounded, but there appears to be something more to it than that.

Ahmed’s notion of being pulled off-line comes with the complementary idea of being maintained on-line. She talks of ‘straightening devices’ that function somewhat in opposition to queer objects. Such devices work to keep us on the straight line by both maintaining our on-line position and erasing off-line alternatives. In Beau Travail, Galoup seems to take on the function of an ever-active straightening device. His role is to train the troops and keep them ready for combat. As such, he is constantly ordering and structuring their bodies according to his regiment. He leads them through single file runs across the deserts, and he makes sure the pleated lines of their uniforms are ironed to perfection. In one particularly intense scene, he leads his men in a push-up routine that repeatedly maintains their bodily alignment to a simple up/down momentum. So, Galoup literally keeps his men in line. While this process seems to serve a merely military function, the film works to infuse this military context with a constant sexual tension. This tension reimagines the military apparatus as a sexual one, and Galoup’s functional straightening begins to be seen in a different light.

Sentain’s arrival seems to pull Galoup off-line, creating the vague and menacing feeling. But instead of becoming a story about a man who can’t handle his homosexual desire, the film’s form makes it more of an investigation into the failure of the straightening process. Ahmed stresses that the process of maintaining straightness comes at a cost, the cost of systematic denial (some big and some small). Here, it’s helpful to remember that the film is told retrospectively, from Galoup’s memory. What’s interesting to me is how the film differs so much from the rigid linearity of Galoup as straightening device. Denis films male bodies from every angle imaginable, constantly adopting new orientations of vision that work to create potentially threatening positions. The film is always looking through new angles to see what might pull things off the straight line, while Galoup is fighting to maintain this very same line. It’s as if we’re seeing Galoup’s work in the state of orientational flux that Sentain’s pull of desire causes, a state that he distinctly remembers. This is the tension of the film, and it constantly works to pull us off-line, while producing a narrative about the failure of the straightening process.

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So, along our initial lines, Beau Travail gives us an experience of being pulled off-line. This isn’t the kind of accidental experience that The Sand Pebbles gave me, but rather an experience designed into the form of the film. The question then becomes: what does this experience amount to? Is Beau Travail just a handy example of ideas articulated by Sarah Ahmed? It seems to me that focusing on experience takes the film in a different direction than this reduction. There’s a difference between reading and understanding the logic of Ahmed’s idea of being pulled off-line, on the one hand, and actually being pulled off-line, on the other hand. Beau Travail gives us the experience of Ahmed’s idea, rather than trying to articulate it. How significant is this observation? I’m not sure yet, but it does highlight one of film’s interesting philosophical capabilities. What I like is that it takes us away from ideas of ‘cinematic thought,’ pulling us instead toward an understanding of the thoughtfulness of cinematic experience.

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keplercryptids · 5 years ago

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nonfiction LGBTQ+ books i read this year

i read a lot this year, and a good chunk of it was LGBTQ+ nonfiction. so i thought it might be nice to list what i read. as a note, many of these books deal with LGBTQ history in the United States. too often, mainstream US-centric LGBTQ texts focus on white middle-class cisgender folks, though I’ve done my best to balance that as much as possible with other perspectives. (that being said, if you got ‘em, i would LOVE book recommendations that tackle worldwide/non-white LGBTQ issues!)

Accessibility notes: Given the nature of the genre, there’s a lot of intense discussion re: homophobia and transphobia. Basically every book listed covers those things to some extent, and I’ve specified where there’s additional potentially triggering content. (If you have specific questions about triggers, please let me know!) also, some of these books are on the academic side. I’ve done my best to note when a book was very academic or when I found it to be more readable. (full disclosure on that note: I’m a college grad and voracious reader without any reading-specific learning disabilities, so my opinion may be different than yours!) as a final note, I was able to access most of these as e-books/audiobooks through my local library. I live in a major metropolitan area, if that gives you any idea of how easy it’ll be for you to find these books. I’ve noted when a book was more difficult to get my hands on.

History

Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940 by George Chauncey. As the title suggests, this book focuses on gay male communities in NYC pre-World War 2. Even with that limited scope, this is an important read to better understand gay male history in the early 20th century. Gay communities thrived in the early 1900s and this snapshot of that is really wonderful. This is definitely more of an academic read, but I highly recommend it. while it definitely focuses on white middle-class gay men, there was more discussion of poor and/or gay men of color than i had actually expected, so that’s nice. (CW for rape and sexual assault, homophobic violence and medicalization of homosexuality.)

Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture by Siobhan B. Somerville. Finally, a book about queer history that actually talks about black people! I was expecting more of a history book, whereas this was more of a critique of specific novels, plays and movies of the early 1900s and was way more focused than i was expecting. don’t get me wrong, I majored in English lit so i’m super into that kind of analysis as well, it just wasn’t as far-reaching as I would have liked. Also, it’s very academic. (Only the print version was available at my library.) (CW for racism, mentions of slavery.)

Transgender History by Susan Striker. This book describes itself as an “approachable introductory text” to transgender history in the US, which I agree with. It’s a pretty short read given the enormity of the topic, so it doesn’t go into much detail about specific groups or events, but imo it’s a good introduction. Especially interesting to me was the information about where and when TERF ideology began. Academic but on the easier-to-read side. (CW for transphobia, gross TERF rhetoric, brief mentions of the AIDS crisis, police violence.)

Gay Revolution by Lillian Faderman. okay so, I gave this 1 star. it’s probably a good book if you know absolutely nothing about US LGBTQ history and want an intro, but a review on goodreads said that it should be called Gay Assimilation instead and i completely agree. Faderman focuses on white middle-to-upper class gay and lesbian assimilationists, often at the expense of radical queer and trans people of color. The latter is hardly mentioned at all, which is ridiculous given trans folks’ contributions to the LGBTQ movement. When radical people ARE mentioned, it’s often in a disparaging way, or in a way that positions the radicals as too extreme. Faderman constantly repeats the refrain that the fight for LGBT rights was “just like what black people did for their rights” without any addendum about why that is...not a good take. There’s no meaningful discussion of race, class or intersectionality. She lauds Obama as a hero for the gays and there’s a ton (I mean a TON) of content about how military acceptance + gay marriage = we won, or whatever. anyway, i wasn’t a fan, although many of the events and organizations discussed in this book are important to know just from a factual basis. (CW for all the stuff I mentioned, plus police violence, medicalization of homosexuality. it’s also fucking LONG so i recommend the audiobook, lol.)

Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States by Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock. This is “a searing examination of queer experiences--as ‘suspects,’ defendants, prisoners, and survivors of crime.” A frequently upsetting but super important read about how LGBTQ identities have been policed in the past, and currently are policed today. i wish there was more focus on trans folks, but other than that it’s a solid read. (CW for all the things you’d expect a book about policing and imprisoning LGBTQ folks to include: police and institutionalized violence, sexual assault, transphobia, homophobia.)

Stonewall by Martin Duberman. This book follows the lives and activism of six LGBTQ folks before, during and after the Stonewall riots. Note: Stonewall itself is only discussed in one chapter about 2/3 of the way through, the rest of the book dedicated to the six individuals’ lives and activism up to and after that point. It’s a history book with a strong narrative focus that I found to be a fairly accessible read. (CW for minors engaging in sex work and sexual predation by adults, sexual and domestic violence, police violence, drug and alcohol abuse, mentions of suicide.)

And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts. This is a HEAVY but really important read about the AIDS epidemic in the US, tracking the disease and the political/cultural response from about 1980-1985. It’s journalistic nonfiction, so although it’s a very long book I found it easier to read than more academic-y books. the only thing i really disliked was how the book demonized “Patient Zero” in quite unfair ways, but it was originally published in ‘87 so that explains part of it. I want to stress again that it’s heavy, as you’d expect a book about thousands of deaths to be. (CW: oh boy where to start. Graphic descriptions of disease/death, graphic descriptions of sex, medical neglect, republican nonsense.)

Memoirs, essays, etc

Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme edited by Ivan E. Coyote. i felt mixed about this one! i appreciated the different perspectives regarding gender and desire, especially since this anthology contains a lot of essays by people who came of age in the 60s-80s (so there’s a historical bent too). but some of the essays feel dated, at best, and offensive at worst. there was more than one instance of TERF-y ideology thrown in. probably 1/4 of the essays were really really great, and i’d still recommend reading it in order to form your own opinions--also, imo it’s useful to see where TERF ideology comes from. this book was harder to find, and i had to order a print version through interlibrary loan. (CW for a few TERFy essays. i read this earlier in the year so it’s possible i’m forgetting some other triggers, sorry!)

Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation by (editors) Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman. Serving as a follow-up of sorts to Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw, this is a collection of narratives by transgender and gender-nonconforming folks. While not “history” in a technical sense, many of the writers are 30+ and give a wide array of LGBTQ+ experiences, past and present, that are important. I didn’t agree with every single viewpoint, of course, duh! But some of the essays were really powerful and overall it’s a good read. (CW for one essay about eating disorders, some outdated language/reclaimed slurs as to be expected--language is one of the main themes of the collection actually so the “outdatedness” is important.)

S/He by Minnie Bruce Pratt. A memoir published in 1995, focusing on Minnie’s life, marriage, gender identity, eventual coming out and relationship with Leslie Feinberg. i really enjoyed this one. it was beautifully written. there are many erotic elements to this memoir so keep that in mind. also was a little harder to get, and i had to order a print version via interlibrary loan. (i read this awhile ago and can’t remember specific triggers, sorry! if anyone knows of some, please let me know.)

I’m Afraid of Men by Vivek Shraya. A memoir by a trans woman ruminating on masculinity. it’s beautiful and very short (truly more of a longform essay), so it’s a good one if you don’t have the attention span/time for longer books. (CW for sexism, harassment, transphobia.)

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde. god, this memoir is gorgeous and is one of my favorite books of the year. it chronicles Audre’s childhood in Harlem and her coming-of-age in the 1950s as a lesbian. ultimately, this is a book about love and that resonates throughout every page. idk can you tell i loved this book so much??? (CW for child abuse, sexual assault, a friend’s suicide, racism.)

We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir by Samra Habib. suuuuch a good book! Samra writes about her life as she and her family arrive in Canada as refugees from Pakistan in her early childhood, onto her life today as a queer Muslim woman of color, photographer and activist. beautifully written and just such an important perspective. Only the print version was available at my library. (CW for child sexual assault, a suicide attempt and suicidal ideation, non-graphic mentions of domestic violence, racism and sexism.)

Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kababe. this is a beautifully illustrated graphic novel memoir about the author’s journey of discovering eir identity as queer. i related to a lot of it, which was great on a personal level, but i also think it could be a great educational tool for those wanting to know more about gender queerness (especially for those who prefer graphic novels!) (CW for gender dysphoria, descriptions of gynecological exams, imagery of blood and a couple pages depicting being impaled, some nudity, vomit.)

#lgbtq history #lgbtq #book recs #lgbtq books #lgbtq nonfiction #booktalk #queer history #queer

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