#and its also marginally less harmful to use long term

[suppenzeit]

i was bored at work one day and started thinking of a new setting where people use different metals to do magic. they absorb it and it gives them different effects based on what it is. iron gives fire, copper gives lightning, etc. the metals also poison their bodies if they use too much, and usually more powerful metals poison the user more. most powerful metals in this universe are cobalt (neutralizes other magic) and lead (will just fucking kill people) and anyone who uses them (especially lead) regularly is fucking miserable.

not sure if ill do anything with this but i thought it was cool

[tirfpikachu]

as someone who has a complete distrust of anyone who labels themselves as radfems since they seem to be (at least a loud minority on every platform) straight up right-wing and racist, thank you for reminding me that some of yall are sane and normal. i don't consider myself a radical feminist by any means and i still dont want to touch the radfem community w a 10ft pole (im a transmasc lesbian of colour... i just cant trust it) but its cool to know theres some people who are normal over there. rock on

THAT MEANS THE WORLD TO MEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!! I RARELY GET SUPPORT FROM YOUR SIDE OF THE TUNGLR BORDER SO I TRULY REALLY APPRECIATE IT 🙏 this made me smile so much!

i really am trying very hard to build my lil corner of radblr and encourage nuance, as well as fighting bigotry and tradwife type shit within radfem spaces! i'm trying to make people realize that all marginalized folks can learn to be better allies to one another, while still acknowledging afab/female-specific oppression & celebrating all kinds of gayness, including exclusive same-sex (agab) attraction; aka what's traditionally been called homosexuality. i want to welcome everyone who directly faces or has faced misogyny irl into complex feminist discussions in good faith without aggression, without slurs or unnecessary personal attacks. i want radfem/nuancefem talks to involve terms like male/female as purely sex-based terms like amab/afab, and for trans men to not be any less of a man in society just bc they're female, and ofc for trans women to be as much my sisters as any cis/bio woman so long as they still recognize their male/amab upbringing, and show equal respect to me & my specific struggles as a female person. i have had incredible talks with all kinds of folks in my server! from transmasc radfems to the most wonderful transfem allies, and some folks who add intersex/DSD nuance to our conversations. i don't believe in misgendering, slurs, or anything of the sort to do anything other than harm ppl who struggle with a very debilitating disorder, dysphoria, one that i struggled with for years and years. that's not the way to help anyone! we do still need more open talks about detransition, and plans on how to prevent even more detransitioners, since there really is a higher number of detrans cases than ever before. people who now, like me, struggle with reverse dysphoria and often need expensive procedures. i also want us to talk about transfem experiences, and just gnc male experiences in general, not just to offer support but also learn more about the intricacies of the patriarchy which is essential for my specific brand of radical feminism. i've nicknamed it as tirfism, or me being a nuancefem - a feminist who is against the way mainstream feminism & qweer activism is currently handling female-specific and homosexual issues, and aims to foster nuance on complex topics!

there are more of us than you'd ever imagine, and we're finally managing to find eachother. i highly recommend reading through @pokegyns for more nuanced takes from my lovely server friends. i believe trans voices are essential to nuancefeminism and tirfism, and i'm very blessed to have lovely transmasc & transfem mods on my server. they provide fascinating insights that we really need right now. it's also very comforting to know that there are nuanced trans people in the modern world... sometimes it feels like the lgbt community is completely close-minded to discussions of female-specific oppression and homosexuality. but that actually isn't the case! i think there's a lot of discomfort going around feminist & lgbtq communities, and it's reaching the boiling point. so long as people like you anon are out there willing to research and learn more about non-transphobic, anti-conservative radical feminism and dispell myths about us, i know we will be alright in the end and a bridge between all the marginalized communities is still possible in the near future if we keep working on it. thank you so much for reaching out!!

[xoxovalerie-c]

Blog Post Week 3: Due 9/12

How does the government strategically utilize media to shape public opinion and influence decision-making processes?

Virginia Eubanks highlighted how marginalized groups, people of color, and those with lower socioeconomic class, are being impacted by automated systems that are government-funded. These groups are often easier targets because they lack the resources needed to navigate through challenges through these systems. Many public services today rely on these systems such as health insurance. When these automated programs flag individuals, marginalized individuals are less equipped to handle this problem. Eubanks discusses how programs like EBT were manipulated to reinforce negative stereotypes. For example, republican governor Paul Lepage used data from EBT transactions to claim that people in marginalized groups were misusing government aid on items like alcohol, cigars, lottery tickets, etc. Lawmakers and the professional middle-class public eagerly embraced the misleading tale he spun from a tenuous thread of data (Eubanks, 2019). This shows how government intervention could occur with automated programs causing harm to this community. 

How has the increasing use of facial recognition technology in law enforcement contributed to wrongful arrests?

The increasing use of facial recognition technology in law enforcement has contributed to wrongful arrests, as demonstrated by the case of Nijeer Parks. Parks was wrongfully arrested, and despite his awareness of the error, he hesitated to voice his concerns due to his prior legal history (Hill, 2020). Law enforcement officers often rely on computer systems to search for warrants when pulling someone over, which heavily impacts marginalized communities. Facial recognition algorithms have a documented history of flagging individuals from these groups. For example, a case discussed by Nicole Brown highlighted how officers exploited the technology by warning individuals of surveillance while using it to their advantage. Despite its increasing integration into law enforcement practices, facial recognition technology has a significant error rate, with a reported error rate of approximately 35% (Brown, 2020).

In what ways do healthcare algorithms perpetuate disparities by prioritizing white patients?

In healthcare settings, the increasing reliance on algorithms has introduced significant inequality by prioritizing white patients. Algorithms, which are designed to predict healthcare needs and outcomes, can perpetuate racial disparities even without using race (Brown, 2020). Brown discusses how these algorithms tend to identify white patients as more likely to experience severe health issues. This occurs because the algorithms are often trained on data that reflects existing healthcare utilization patterns, where white individuals are more frequently represented due to higher rates of health insurance coverage. As a result, the algorithms prioritize these patients, leading to a misallocation of resources and failing to adequately address the needs of underrepresented and marginalized groups who may have less access to healthcare services. This systemic issue impedes efforts to provide equitable care and address the needs of all patients effectively.

Why do people continue to embrace and rely on these applications despite growing concerns on privacy, data misuse, and more? 

People continue to embrace and rely on applications like for instance the Ring app which is very popular. This application allows their users with the ability to monitor their home in real-time through their phones, enhancing security and peace of mind. It contributes to also neighborhood watching. Additionally, the benefits of these applications outweigh the potential risks as users prioritize immediate convenience and functionality over long-term privacy concerns. 

Hill, K. 2020. Another arrest, and jail time, due to a bad facial recognition match. The New York Times

Eubanks, V. (2019). In automating inequality: how high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor.

Brown, N. (2020). Race and technology. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8uiAjigKy8

[tractorseva]

Climate Change and Its Effect on Indian Cultivation

Climate change is an urgent issue shaping not only the future of our planet but also transforming agriculture in India. As global temperatures rise, farmers face unpredictable challenges that threaten their livelihoods and the nation's food security. India, with its heavy reliance on agriculture, is particularly vulnerable to these changes. In this blog, we will explore how climate change affects crop cultivation in India, its impact on farmers, and potential solutions, including Tractor Seva’s role in supporting sustainable farming practices.

What is Climate Change?

Climate change refers to long-term changes in temperature, precipitation, and weather patterns. These changes are caused mainly by human activities, such as burning fossil fuels, deforestation, and industrial emissions, which increase the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The impact of climate change in India is profound, particularly in agriculture, a sector highly dependent on stable weather conditions.

Effects of Climate Change on Crop Cultivation

1. Unpredictable Rainfall

In India, crops such as rice and wheat depend heavily on the monsoon season for water. However, climate change has made the monsoons unpredictable. In some areas, there’s excessive rainfall, leading to flooding, while other regions face drought due to insufficient rain. Both extremes severely damage crops and reduce yields.

2. Rising Temperatures

An increase in temperature negatively affects crop production. For example, crops like wheat and rice are sensitive to even slight temperature changes. When temperatures rise, these crops mature faster, leading to reduced grain size and lower overall yields. The Indian subcontinent is already experiencing prolonged heatwaves, which further threaten crop productivity.

3. Increase in Pests and Diseases

Warmer climates create favorable conditions for pests and crop diseases. The rise in temperature allows pests to multiply rapidly, resulting in crop damage and higher pesticide use. Excessive pesticide use can harm the environment and reduce the soil's natural fertility.

Impact on Farmers

1. Economic Stress

With reduced crop yields, farmers face significant financial stress. Many small and marginal farmers in India rely on their seasonal crops for income. When crops fail or yields decrease, their earnings drop drastically, making it difficult for them to support their families.

2. Food Security

The decrease in crop production has far-reaching consequences on India’s food security. As crops fail, food shortages become more likely, leading to increased food prices. This directly impacts consumers, especially in rural areas where agriculture forms the backbone of the economy.

3. Difficulty Adapting

Farmers, especially those in rural areas, often struggle to adapt to the changing climate. Traditional farming practices are becoming less effective due to unpredictable weather. Farmers need access to new farming techniques, better seed varieties, and irrigation systems, but many lack the resources or training to implement these solutions.

Solutions and Adaptations

1. Sustainable Farming Practices

One of the most promising solutions for combating climate change in agriculture is adopting sustainable farming practices. Techniques like crop rotation, organic farming, and reducing chemical fertilizers can improve soil health and reduce environmental damage.

2. Water Management

Efficient water management systems like drip irrigation and rainwater harvesting can help farmers conserve water, especially during dry spells. These methods ensure that crops receive adequate water while minimizing wastage.

3. Climate-Resistant Crop Varieties

Developing and adopting climate-resistant crop varieties is essential for ensuring food security in the face of climate change. These crops are bred to withstand extreme heat, drought, and floods, ensuring that farmers can continue to grow food even in adverse conditions.

4. Government Support

Government intervention is crucial in helping farmers adapt to climate change. Financial aid, training programs, and access to advanced agricultural technologies can empower farmers to implement more effective farming practices and secure their livelihoods.

Tractor Seva’s Role in Supporting Farmers

As a leading tech-enabled tractor servicing company, Tractor Seva plays an important role in helping farmers maintain productivity in the face of climate change. Here’s how:

Regular Maintenance and Repairs: Climate change often forces tractors and agricultural machinery to work in extreme conditions. Tractor Seva provides reliable, on-site tractor servicing that helps farmers maintain their machinery in peak condition, ensuring they can work efficiently during critical planting and harvesting seasons.

Sustainable Solutions: Tractor Seva also advocates for sustainable farming by promoting eco-friendly repair techniques and ensuring that tractors use fuel efficiently, reducing their carbon footprint. Regular servicing helps minimize emissions and enhances fuel efficiency, contributing to more sustainable agricultural practices.

Support Through Tough Times: As farmers face economic stress due to climate change, Tractor Seva offers cost-effective services and affordable spare parts to ease the financial burden on farmers. Their franchise model also expands access to high-quality tractor servicing across rural India, ensuring that all farmers have the support they need to continue farming.

Conclusion

Climate change poses significant challenges to Indian agriculture, threatening both farmers’ livelihoods and the nation’s food security. However, by adopting sustainable practices, utilizing water efficiently, and investing in climate-resistant crops, we can mitigate these effects. Tractor Seva is committed to supporting farmers during these challenging times by providing affordable and reliable tractor servicing, ensuring that farming continues smoothly, even in the face of changing weather patterns.

With collective efforts from the government, agricultural organizations, and service providers like Tractor Seva, India can build a resilient agricultural sector capable of withstanding the impacts of climate change.

[magazinefood]

What are the benefits of vacuum-sealed food packaging?

Food packaging plays a vital role in preserving the quality and freshness of various food products. Among the many innovative packaging techniques, vacuum-sealed food packaging has gained immense popularity in recent years. This method involves removing air from the packaging before sealing it tightly, creating a vacuum environment inside. This article delves into the benefits of vacuum-sealed food packaging, highlighting its impact on food preservation, shelf life, and overall consumer experience.

1. Enhanced Shelf Life

One of the primary advantages of vacuum-sealed food packaging is its ability to extend the shelf life of perishable items significantly. By eliminating air and oxygen from the packaging, the growth of microorganisms and bacteria is inhibited, which are major contributors to food spoilage. As a result, vacuum-sealed packaging helps to preserve the freshness and quality of food products for an extended period. This is particularly beneficial for foods such as meats, cheese, and certain fruits and vegetables that are highly susceptible to spoilage.

To know more about : -

2. Preservation of Nutritional Value

When foods are exposed to air, they undergo a process known as oxidation, which can lead to the degradation of nutrients and the loss of flavors. Vacuum-sealed packaging minimizes the contact between food and oxygen, reducing the rate of oxidation and thus preserving the nutritional value of the contents. Consumers can enjoy products that are richer in vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants, promoting a healthier and more balanced diet.

3. Prevention of Freezer Burn

For those who use freezers as a means of long-term food storage, freezer burn is a common concern. Freezer burn occurs when air comes into contact with the food, causing dehydration and negatively impacting the texture and taste. Vacuum-sealed food packaging acts as a barrier against air, reducing the risk of freezer burn and maintaining the original quality of frozen items. This makes it an ideal choice for individuals who wish to stock up on seasonal produce or store leftovers for an extended period.

4. Enhanced Food Safety

Vacuum-sealed packaging not only extends shelf life but also enhances food safety. Without oxygen, the growth of harmful bacteria such as Salmonella and E. coli is significantly slowed down or eliminated. As a result, the risk of foodborne illnesses is greatly reduced, providing consumers with added peace of mind. This benefit is particularly valuable for products like raw meats, fish, and poultry, where food safety is of utmost importance.

5. Improved Flavor and Texture

Another advantage of vacuum-sealed food packaging is its positive impact on the flavor and texture of the enclosed food items. As the packaging preserves the natural juices and moisture within the food, it helps to retain the original taste and tenderness. Additionally, by preventing the entry of air, the texture of the food remains intact, ensuring a more enjoyable culinary experience for consumers.

6. Efficient Storage and Transportation

Vacuum-sealed packaging not only benefits consumers but also proves advantageous for producers, suppliers, and retailers. The compact and airtight nature of vacuum-sealed packages allows for efficient storage, reducing the need for bulky containers. Moreover, as the risk of leakage and spoilage is minimized, the transportation of goods becomes more reliable and cost-effective.

7. Environmentally Friendly

From an environmental standpoint, vacuum-sealed food packaging can be considered more sustainable compared to other packaging methods. Since it extends the shelf life of food products, it helps reduce food waste, which is a significant contributor to environmental degradation. Moreover, vacuum-sealed packaging often requires less material, leading to reduced waste generation and a smaller ecological footprint.

Conclusion

In conclusion, vacuum-sealed Food packaging offers a myriad of benefits for both consumers and the food industry. By extending shelf life, preserving nutritional value, preventing freezer burn, enhancing food safety, and maintaining flavor and texture, it ensures that consumers receive high-quality and fresh products. Additionally, the efficiency in storage and transportation, as well as its eco-friendly characteristics, make vacuum-sealed food packaging a promising solution for a more sustainable future in the food industry. As technology advances and packaging techniques evolve, we can expect to see even more innovative ways to preserve food and reduce waste, further enhancing the overall food packaging landscape.

Read more : -

[roobylavender]

what would you say are some of talia's flaws? or undealt with issues/mindsets/beliefs that harm her in the long run?

oh GOODY

self-worth the size of a raisin. obv this marginally improves with her decision to leave both ra's and bruce behind but it's not like her situation at lexcorp necessarily helps. for all of the hatred i can express towards death and the maidens i do think it gets the idea right that by the end of her stint talia is incredibly embittered and lonely to the point of extreme vulnerability bc she feels like she matters to no one. i honestly think the general premise of death and the maidens could have been a great way to finally explore the brunt of all of that self-inflicted inferiority if not for the fact that writers after its publication gave less than two fucks about addressing it (probably in line with the whole chasing every o'neil protégé out of bat editorial thing rucka and grayson talked about)

she would sacrifice herself at the drop of a hat. most of the time we tend to frame this as the cornerstone of her sense of duty but i also believe it stems from the fact that living under ra's has ultimately made her view herself as a cog in the machine. for however much she espouses an appreciation of the world around us and taking the time to truly live at the end of the day she will sacrifice her own long-term happiness if it means doing something for the greater good. again. lexcorp. she put herself in one of the most isolated and miserable positions a person could take with no other connections to reach out to for over a year bc she knew it was the right thing to do and she had the power to do it

infuriatingly stubborn. this is what factors more into her sense of duty imo like the self-sacrificial nature definitely stems from how she was raised but the stubbornness is purely a product of her personal moral code and yet again a catalyst to her progressive isolation and loneliness bc she's willing to let go how unhappy something might make her so long as the something is by her own choice and to some beneficial end. hence why lexcorp is an endeavor she sees through even though it makes her miserable

these are the big ones imo and they all kinda overlap with each other to paint this really interesting picture of a woman trapped within the narrative. which i think can actually present incredible storytelling opportunities (i discuss it a little re: carol here) so long as you as a writer are willing to contend with those circumstances in good faith and address them wholeheartedly rather than simply skirt past them as necessary elements to the story. not to bring up death and the maidens again but with some tweaks here and there i really do think it could have been an interesting direction to pursue with talia as a character. to me the problem with the comic is not so much that this relationship with nyssa was created (though let me clarify i absolutely wish the specific details of nyssa's background were different bc haphazardly using the holocaust as a plot point was fucked and weird) and carried out to that end rather the problem is we get no actual resolution to the comic in any narrative thereafter. and i think that stems not just from the way editorial priorities were shifting at the time but also bc of how bruce was framed to react to talia being "converted" to evil towards the end. like yeah i think you can reason bruce might have expected a rejection from her bc a good chunk of lexcorp era was about him recognizing how indirectly shitty he had been to her but at the same time that never meant he believed she was capable of being as evil and depraved as her father (and thereby nyssa) and ideally the follow-up to death and the maidens should have been about bruce trying to get to the root of what happened to her and trying to save her with the help of people who would also then grow to care about her so she could develop the support network she always needed to survive. and we all know that never happened bc editorial didn't care lol

[grison-in-space]

Hey, it's cool that you live in the Global South! You therefore have vastly reduced power to influence US policy decisions, and therefore you ain't my audience. It's also cool that you've declared that the people in your nation-state matter more than the people in mine, uniformly and across the board and regardless of class, ethnicity, background and all those little granular intersectional effects that marginalize other people. Love that for you. Great belief for you! Not my problem, though, because I actually don't accept your premise that the only people who matter are people who live in countries that aren't mine when I talk about voting as a form of harm reduction.

First: I do in fact think that harm done to vulnerable people globally matters—which includes vulnerable people who live in the US. Are you shitting me? Do you sincerely believe that domestic policy in the third-largest country in the world, a country with massive income equality, doesn't meaningfully contribute to global welfare? You genuinely believe that global nationality is more meaningful to outcomes and vulnerability? You are going to sit here and tell me as if butter wouldn't melt in your goddamn mouth that poor working folks in my regional South don't matter to you, that you think it's fine if poor working women of color die of lack of access to reproductive care? You think it doesn't matter if bad things happen to marginalized people if it happens within the borders of an entire fucking continent—because Mexico is part of the Global South and let me tell you our domestic decisions sure affect them—and you think I am misunderstanding the importance of my ability to guide the decisions of the nation I have some control over?

Go fuck yourself. People who aren't far away from me matter, too, and they are absolutely part of my calculus about whose harm matters.

Second: take foreign aid. You do know that the foreign policies of the United States are also shaped by the makeup of our political leadership, right? For example, the United States contributes the most absolute money to foreign aid of any nation on the planet. Do you sincerely think that the quantity of that aid and the direction it is sent are equivalent between political parties? Consider Ukraine: do you know how hard Republicans are trying to throttle the military aid and assistance the US has contributed to that situation? Do you genuinely think that American political parties are the same when it comes to foreign intervention and support?

For fuck's sake, you absolute imbecile, the last time Trump specifically was in office he cut the CDC's infectious disease response team's funding. That meant that when China's own infectious disease team shat the bed because officials were afraid to report the reality of the situation up the chain, there was no one to intervene and help contain the situation as happened with SARS a decade earlier.

Do you sincerely think that COVID is helping anyone in the Global South? Do you think that a new endemic disease notorious for leaving long term disability and morbidity in its wake is helpful to anyone? Even speaking globally, voting and making sure that the government of a truly massive and wealthy state is not asleep at the fucking wheel is a huge factor when it comes to steering the way that that government behaves in foreign affairs, even if the same fucking government is complicit in other interventions that are decidedly less positive.

from the number of asinine complaints about how "voting is NOT a form of harm reduction" because harm reduction is for ADDICTS! ONLY! I'm seeing around... all coming from OP blogs I don't recognize and which otherwise don't have much presence... well, that coordination alongside the timing of US politics sure feels like the Russian troll bots agitating again. (Yes, they absolutely infested Tumblr; I think @ms-demeanor had a great post about what the bots looked and felt like somewhere that I will have to try and track down tomorrow.)

The thing is, if you actually do know harm reduction well, the complaint makes no sense. It's not as if the origin of harm reduction is a secret or especially hard to find out more about. I am not exactly an expert in the field: I have a educated layperson's interest in public health and infectious disease, I'm a queer feminist of a certain age and therefore have a certain degree of familiarity with AIDS-driven safer sex campaigns, and I'm interested in disability history and self advocacy (and I would in fact clarify harm reduction as a philosophy under this umbrella). So I have about twenty years of experience with harm reduction as a philosophy basically by existing in communities whose history is intertwined with harm reduction, which means I know it well from many different angles, and I know how the story of the philosophy is generally taught.

See, this is a story that starts, as so many stories do, in the 1980s with something monstrous President Reagan was doing. In this case, it was the AIDS epidemic, and Reagan refusing to devote any money or time to what eventually became called AIDS (rather than the original GRIDS, which came with its own baked in homophobia). Knowing themselves abandoned by society in this as in all things, and watching as friends and loved ones died in droves, queers and addicts are two communities who see that they are the only resources that they collectively have to save each other's lives. Queers know that sex, even casual sex, is an important part of people's lives and culture... and people aren't going to stop doing it even if there's a disease, so how can it happen safely? Condoms. Condoms every time, freely available, easy and shameless, shower them on people in the street if you have to. (And other things: this is the origin of the concept of "fluid bonding", for example... both of which were concepts that were immediately adopted in response to COVID, like outdoor socially distsnced greetings and masks and "bubbles." That wasn't an accident. Normalizing sexual health tests and seeing hard results on paper before sex was a thing, too.)

Addicts, too, knew that using was going to happen no matter how earnestly people tried to stop. If it was that easy, addiction wouldn't exist. So: how do you make using safer for longer? If you could stop someone getting HIV before they could bring themselves to get clean, that's a whole life right there. If you could stop someone overdosing once, twice, a dozen times, that's more time you're buying them to claw themselves out of addiction and into a better place. Addicts see, right, needle sharing is getting the diseases spread, so cut down on needle sharing. Well, needles aren't easy to get hold of. Their supply is controlled because people who aren't prescribed needles are theoretically junkies, so taking the needles away makes it harder to use, right— and no one is complicit, and also you see fewer discarded needles lying around where they're unsanitary and unsafe, right? Except that people want to do a buddy a good turn, so they share if there's no other option, and they'll keep a needle going until it's literally too blunt to keep using if need be. So fighting needle sharing means making it easier to get needles to shoot up with: finding a place to discard used ones and get as many fresh ones as you need to use safely!

Making free needles available to junkies and free condoms for the bathhouses was not a popular solution with politicians, for perhaps obvious reasons. Nor was routine testing of the blood supply, because that cost money too. But these things work to stop the spread of disease. Thus the principle of harm reduction: policy interventions in response to communities that frequently engage in risky behavior should focus on whatever reduces aggregate harm by reducing the risk rather than by trying to reduce the behavior. The homos and junkies say look, all your societal judgement in the world hasn't stopped us being homos and junkies yet. You ain't going to look after us? We'll look after our own. And this is the form that takes. Not increasing the pressure to act like people who aren't is, but making it safer to be the people we are while we try to be the happiest versions of ourselves. Even if that means being morally complicit in a whole lot of casual sex and drug abuse.

The thing is, harm reduction is a philosophy rooted in the defiance of people who knew that their society thought they deserved to die painfully, young, invisible and alone. This is not the kind of thing that people come up with and get mad if you adapt it and share it, especially if you tell the story of where it came from. And importantly, harm reduction is not purely the child of addiction: that philosophy, from the get go, was cooked up to apply both to substance abuse and casual sex. It didn't just spread from addiction care; it was born straddling addiction care and queer & feminist health care.

So it doesn't make sense to see actual activists who know harm reduction well complaining that this is a term exhibiting semantic drift when we talk about voting as harm reduction. It's actually a good metaphor: you're reducing the overall risk of the worst case scenario metaphors by voting Democrat, at least until future votes can install a system where multiple parties can flourish on the political scheme. (Democrats and Republicans are essentially coalitions of a pack of arguing factions anyway, and those factions are essentially what would be classed elsewhere as a party in its own right; the US essentially just lumps political granularity rather than splitting it in our political system.) And anyone who understands harm reduction itself knows that.

So it's this wildly inorganic complaint being voiced repeatedly by different sources. Sounds like a pretty good flag for a potential psyop to me.

If you want to learn more about harm reduction and its history, especially from an addiction perspective, I cannot recommend Maia Szalavitz's Undoing Drugs: How Harm Reduction is Changing the Future of Drugs and Addiction (2022) highly enough. Szalavitz has a history of addiction of her own as well as being a clear and accessible writer with an excellent grasp of neuroscience and history. I have a lot of respect for her work.

[random-thought-depository]

Something I originally intended as part of my previous post but it was getting so long I decided to do it separately. It's pretty tangential to the Dorley thing but does connect to some of my ideas. Have a literal 25,000 year old vampire OC! Also some nuancing of Elle; she's such an obvious symbol of woke capitalism I initially gravitated toward writing her as super-evil and the sort of abuser who manipulates and uses marginalized people by pretending to be their friend, and I still kind of want that characterization for her, but lately I've been trying to nuance her somewhat.

Under read-more for length, and also content warnings for slavery, mind control, sexual/reproductive coercion, incest, child-killing, cannibalism, characters being approximately '60/'70s expected level of politically incorrect, and, uh, extremely long-term imprisonment is the best way I can think of to describe it. This was heavily inspired by me finding the idea of a 25,000 year old vampire fun and by the vague statements in Glow, Worm that vampires do age, just very slowly, but also by the rather awful thoughts "how do you make a 25,000 year old vampire relatable? You deprive them of the opportunity to have 25,000 years worth of experiences" and "What if: Dorley but instead of force-fem it's about patriarchy and kingship and what James C. Scott talks about and taking the vampire thrall thing to its ultimate logical nightmare fuel conclusions, and it's much worse because that's appropriate because it's more closely adjacent to the long terror in the gender as coercive political project room?"

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

A little after she'd finished thrall-conditioning Annaliese, Elle found another vampire she thought might be useful in setting up her 'programme.' Her name was Jarna, and she was a thrall-brainwashed vampire slave like Annaliese, and she was being sold by her previous master, who said he didn't need her anymore. Jarna has a super-thrall "bullshit vampire power," similar to Annaliese's. Jarna's blood is actually much more potent than Annaliese's in terms of being able to thrall lots of people at once, but it keeps less well; Jarna's thrall factor doesn't survive her blood being frozen, and has a shorter shelf-life than Annaliese's under refrigeration. For a while Elle had an idea that she might be able to use Jarna for the 'programme' just like Annaliese, and/or that Jarna's super-thrall might be useful to her elsewhere.

Jarna was... strange. She looked like an old woman. She was very tall; more than six feet tall. She had brown skin and a combination of features that didn't really fit into any ethnic group Elle or Annaliese or anyone else could think of; she looked... different from anyone on Earth. Annaliese noticed she smelled different too. Jarna being a vampire was a big confounder there, of course, vampires and humans smell different, but... Jarna's scent was noticeably unique in a way that went beyond the way almost everyone's body odor is unique.

From Jarna's descriptions of her earlier life, as near as they could tell, she'd been born into some primitive tribe, and then she'd been abducted and taken to a place ruled by her previous master, who Jarna called Tatasi (that was not the name Elle knew him by). Tatasi had transitioned and thrall-brainwashed Jarna and during the thrall-brainwashing process he'd discovered her super-thrall ability. With appropriate control techniques Jarna could control thousands of people at once through blood thrall, and that was what Tatasi used her for; he used her blood to mentally enslave the people who worked for him. Her ability made her very useful to Tatasi, and it didn't seem to pass to childe vampires, so she'd been precious to him - not as a person, but as a tool. Frightened of the possibility that harm might come to her, he kept her confined to apartments in guarded compounds for a very long time. At first she'd spent a very long time mostly confined to three inner chambers in his house, and then later she'd been moved around more, but always she was kept inside and in seclusion. Elle thought Jarna's lifestyle during her thralldom to Tatasi sounded a lot like the life of a woman in purdah. And then one day Tatasi told Jarna that he didn't need her anymore, and Tatasi sold her to Elle.

Much as Jarna herself didn't seem to fit into any race Elle or Annaliese knew, Jarna's descriptions of her homeland didn't seem to quite fit any place on Earth. At first they'd thought it might be somewhere in Africa: it was a savannah, or something that sounded like one, and Jarna made vague references to animals that sounded like they might be elephants. But Jarna didn't look African, she looked more Indian than anything else, but that didn't seem quite right either... And her homeland had very cold winters, winters of deep snow, winters when rivers and ponds and lakes froze over - the descriptions reminded Annaliese of her miserable two months of freedom in a Russian winter, but maybe worse; Jarna talked about powerful winter winds, there were few trees to get in their way so they would blow unimpeded across the open plains and they were so forceful and so cold and they would blow things around; she seemed to remember it vividly. They thought maybe the high Arctic or the Eurasian steppe, but Jarna didn't look like an Inuit or a Mongolian or a Kazakh or a Turk. And Jarna's description of her abduction suggested relatively close proximity to a sea to the west, and it didn't sound like the Black Sea or the Caspian Sea, it was a cold and wild sea with crashing, pounding waves and icebergs, it sounded like the north Atlantic, and then they'd sailed through a straight that sounded like maybe Gibraltar but that couldn't possibly be right... None of it fit together, none of it made sense! It was like she was describing an alien planet! No, more confusing than that - it felt like she was describing Earth but the picture just didn't fit together right!

Elle had thralled Jarna almost as soon as she'd gotten her off the airplane, not even really for brainwashing at that point but simply so Jarna would obey Elle instead of being loyal to her old master. If Elle and Jarna had the sort of intimate thrall connection Annaliese tends to form while thralling people they would have been saved a lot of guessing; Elle getting access to a single memory-image of the 'elephants' of Jarna's homeland would have clarified everything. But thrall is idiosyncratic. It's a relationship. A relationship of domination, but still, a relationship; its shape depends on the people involved and the circumstances. Elle and Jarna didn't form the sort of mind-link through which they could easily share mental images. Their thrall connection mostly just made Jarna obedient. Elle could have looked directly into Jarna's memories, but that would have required pushing in a way she didn't want to do yet.

Jarna claimed that she'd been transitioned from human to vampire and put into seclusion by Tatasi as a young woman. And if that was true it was horrifying. Because Jarna looked like an old woman, and if she was transitioned young that could only mean that she became old as a vampire, and that was something theoretically possible, but it would require an immense span of time. Vampires do age, but it's very slow. The very old vampires, the ones who've lived thousands of years, have just barely perceptibly aged; if they had solid jet black hair when they transitioned they might have some barely noticeable grey hairs around their temples now, or something like that. You need to look at the very oldest vampires, the ones almost as old as civilization, to really see it, and even then, they haven't aged very much, assuming their recollections of their youth are reliable. If Jarna became old as a vampire, how old was Jarna?

The answer to that question came by accident. Elle had a large library in her mansion, and Jarna could not read English at this point (in fact, Jarna couldn't read any language at this point; Tatasi had never bothered to teach her to read and write), but sometimes she liked to look at books with pictures, and sometimes she'd ask Annaliese what the pictures were of. And one day Jarna came to Annaliese and Elle very excited, holding a children's illustrated book about the Ice Age.

Jarna showed Annaliese and Elle an illustration of a herd of woolly mammoths moving across the ice age tundra, with a single mammoth foregrounded. And Jarna pointed at the foregrounded mammoth and said, "I know this animal! We hunted them! My people hunted them!"

Jarna flipped excitedly through the picture book, and pointed to illustration after illustration of extinct animals that she knew, that she recognized. Oh, but she thought the artist hadn't gotten them quite right! And at some point in her long boring captivity Jarna had taught herself to draw quite well, and she started making drawings of what those animals really looked like. And her drawings did indeed look a little different, and somehow more real and alive. As if she had seen living woolly mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, cave lions, cave bears, and so on, and the artist who made the illustrations in the book only had bones to work with.

Elle said in quiet awe and horror, "Jarna, those animals have all been extinct for ten thousand years."

Jarna smiled and said triumphantly, "I told you he kept me shut up in rooms for a long time!"

Elle started thinking about some things Jarna had said, about being marched to the shore of a cold and wild sea to the west and it not taking many days, about a cave, and about... And she started pulling books down from the shelf of her great library and showing Jarna pictures inside them, pictures of cave paintings and the entrances of some of the caves the paintings were found in, thinking just maybe...

Eventually Jarna pressed her finger against one picture, a picture of a cave painting in a cave in France that Elle and Annaliese guessed depicted an auroch, and Jarna said, "I think this is my home!" After a few moments Jarna said, "It is! I know this painting! My mother and grandmother made this! They let me watch - they were teaching me... I watched this being made!"

Elle said in awe and quiet horror, "Jarna, that painting is over twenty-five thousand years old."

Jarna had a big smile on her face and she tapped the photo again and said, "I watched this being made!" And then after a few moments she added, still cheerfully and still with a big smile on her face, "I told you he kept me shut up in rooms for a long time!"

There was a pregnant silence and Elle seemed to just sort of look at Jarna for a while, and then Elle reached out and caressed Jarna's face and said softly, "That's why I couldn't figure out what race you belong to. You belong to a race that doesn't exist anymore. You're a Cro-Magnon woman."

Of course! No wonder Jarna's descriptions of her homeland and her enslavement sounded like descriptions of an alien planet, yet tantalizingly familiar! They were descriptions of an alien yet familiar planet! The world of the Ice Age! Jarna's homeland was Europe! But not Europe as modern people knew it! The strange Serengeti-like but cold in winter homeland she described was the Europe of the Ice Age, a land of open grasslands full of Pleistocene megafauna! The cold and wild sea the slave-catchers had taken her across really was the Atlantic, specifically the Bay of Biscay! And the slave ship really had carried her through the Straight of Gibraltar!

Elle gathers around her... Lieutenants? Assistants? Thralls? Companions? The trans women she vampirized and then thrall-brainwashed as an experiment. She wasn't satisfied with the way they turned out. They'd been too independent, being the kind of person who transitions in the '60s or '70s selects pretty strongly for that, and of course she'd been able to use the thrall brainwashing to break that, but in the process she'd had to break too much. Thus her exploration of other options for solving her bloodline problem. But they're people she trusts. They have their uses.

Elle has Jarna tell her story again, and this time really go through it systematically and thoroughly while they pass bounce inferences off each other and her, and they all listen to it with new ears.

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

Jarna's people were not nomads. There were nomads in Jarna's world, but Jarna's people looked down on them a little and pitied them a little, the way agricultural people later would. Jarna's people were fortunate to occupy a place that herds of animals funneled through on their spring and autumn migrations. Jarna's people were not farmers, but they'd invested in their land; built structures that funneled the herds further, diverted them like water, funneled them into killing places. They used fire to shape the landscape too, improving its value as a hunting ground and encouraging the growth of edible and otherwise useful plants.

The diet of Jarna's people was rich in meat and rather poor in just about everything else. When the herds migrated through their valley there were great hunts, slaughters, in which they killed many big animals. This was a time of feasting on fresh meat, but also a time of much work. The men - mostly the men - had the work of actually killing the animals, of course; it was almost like a military operation. And the women - mostly the women - had the work of smoking and otherwise preserving most of the meat of these animals. Jarna's people had become so good at killing animals in these hunts that a primary driver of their cultural evolution had been managing all the meat the hunts yielded, finding ways to preserve and store it. The great hunts provided the bulk of the food Jarna's tribe ate all year; they lived on preserved meat more than anything else.

Jarna's people were fortunate in another way; they occupied a cave, which's thermal mass insulated them in winter, and which provided them with perpetually cool, dry places where preserved meat stored well. The neighboring tribes to the south and southeast were similarly fortunate, and had their own caves. The neighboring tribes to the north, west, northwest, and northeast were not so fortunate; they had to winter in huts on open ground beneath open sky. And the nomads had to make do with tents that they could take apart and carry on their backs.

Jarna's people lived in and around their cave, and it was like a village; hundreds of people lived there, there were hundreds of people in Jarna's tribe. By the standards of Jarna's world, this was a large settlement and a mighty people; Jarna's tribe was the most numerous and therefore the strongest tribe in the area. Jarna had considered herself a fortunate person, to be born among such a tribe.

This was the rhythm of life for Jarna's people: in spring and autumn the great hunts, and all the work of preserving the meat. In summer, groups of mostly men would fan out across the country to hunt still-abundant big game and bring fresh meat back to the main body of the tribe at the cave, and groups of mostly women and children would fan out across the country to gather edible plants and shellfish and bird eggs and useful non-food materials and catch fish and birds and small animals, and some of that was brought back to the tribe too; the edible plants the women gathered were important for nutrients if not for calories, and some of them were preserved for the winter in various ways. In winter the whole tribe would retreat back into the cave, and live on stored food, and wait out the cold. Second to food, acquiring and processing fuel for fires in the winter was the great pre-occupation; the cave, fortunately, had some openings near the tops of the biggest chambers that allowed some smoke to escape, prevented excessive accumulation of smoke; Jarna's people had expanded them and even dug and carved out a few new ones over the generations.

Because Jarna was a girl, it had initially been expected that as an adult she'd preserve food, and she'd make and repair clothing and nets and carrier bags and baskets, and she'd go out with the gathering parties of mostly women and children to gather plants and catch small animals and gather wood and other things that could be fuel for fires, and she'd go into the deep part of the cave and paint things there. That was what most women in Jarna's tribe did. By the time Jarna was pubescent her older female relatives were already regularly taking her with them on gathering expeditions. And they sometimes took her with them into a big, deep chamber of the cave that had no natural light, and let Jarna watch while they painted by lights of flickering lamps, and started to teach her how to do what they were doing. The making of images in this deep chamber of the cave was a responsibility and a privilege of a few matrilineages of the women of Jarna's tribe, and Jarna understood that being taught how to do this was a responsibility and a privilege, was something special.

But Jarna was a... the best English translation of the word is tomboy. She seemed to relate better to boys than to girls, to prefer doing the things boys did, to more easily make friends with boys than with girls. And Jarna grew to be very tall and strong for a woman. So she joined the hunters, like a boy. At first she learned with the small boys from the old men who were too old and feeble to hunt themselves now but knew a lot about how to do it, and then as a teenager she started actually participating in big game hunts.

Many years after this conversation with Elle, Jarna sometimes visited the graduate school, the other institution, and that place being what it is, some of the girls there wondered if Jarna might be a trans man or at least kind of transmasculine. Jarna told them she doesn't think so. She never had a problem with her female body, never had any desire to change it. She just seemed to... relate better to boys and men, somehow. It's a bit hard to tell, though, because... would changing your body like that even be an idea that occurs to you if you live in a world where it's totally impossible? Testosterone shots would have been an outside context concept to the young Jarna, like a jet engine! And after that... well, her cognitive binding enslavement to Tatasi didn't leave much room for exploring her gender.

As a young woman Jarna fell in love with another woman. Her lover was a... regular woman? A woman who did women's work and had a more female-typical for their society social life. It was normative for women in Jarna's tribe to marry and have kids sooner or later, but lesbian relationships were accepted as long as they didn't interfere with that; lots of women were openly poly (though it wasn't called that) with a husband and a female lover; Jarna just openly had a romantic and sexual relationship with this woman and nobody had a problem with that. It felt like the relationship in Jarna's life that was best described as romantic. At this age Jarna also pretty frequently had sex with some of her similar-age male friends, but that was more of a friends-with-benefits thing. She didn't feel she was ready for marriage, and she didn't let them have the kind of sex with her that might have gotten her pregnant. She thinks her human self had a pretty good deal sexually, in a sort of "she was kind of like a straight boy but also androphilic but also she had a woman's body and was OK with that, it's super-easy to get sex from boys and enjoy it if you're like that" way. When she told the girls at the other institution heard this it sparked a discussion about how firmly this put her in the "yeah, definitely queer" category.

One of Elle's trans women thralls was curious about whether Jarna's people had anything like a social institution of transgenderism. They did! They had one of those transfeminine castrati shaman classes! Her tribe had four people like that! And there was the tomboy thing, and... that's probably the best translation, but it distorts some of the nuances, it was understood as kind of... fourth gender-ish? Though it was pretty tangential to trans, people like that were understood as women, just... kind of masculine women?

One day, when Jarna was out hunting with a party of herself and four men, they were attacked. Two of the men were killed, and Jarna and two of the men, including her brother, were subdued and their arms bound and made to march.

Some of the neighboring tribes in Jarna's region practiced something halfway between bride kidnapping and slavery. Jarna's tribe didn't do that, and were proud that they did not; they thought it an evil custom. If a captive woman escaped and made it to Jarna's tribe, Jarna's tribe would give her refuge, and some strong men to escort her back to her own tribe if she wished to return to them. This had provoked more than one war against a neighboring tribe (Jarna's people and their neighboring sedentary hunter tribes did fight wars against each other, mostly over disputed hunting grounds or blood feuds - the battles could get quite bloody). Jarna's tribe did not fear the wrath of their neighbors; Jarna's tribe was the most numerous and strongest tribe in the region. This was the only reference Jarna had at this time for slavery. She thought it strange that her captors had taken some of the men as well; if they were doing the sort of slave raid that she was familiar with, they would have killed all the men, and taken only her.

The captors were strange. They were very tall, taller than Jarna, and heavily built, they looked strong - they were strong, she knew because she'd fought them! But their faces were strangely fine and child-like, like the faces of young pubescent boys who had not yet fully entered into manhood.

They tied her and the other two hunters of her tribe together, and they made them walk forward in a line, tied to each other with ropes. They made them walk to the west for more than a few days. Sometimes they gave Jarna and the other captives a little of some strange, hard food; it was the first time Jarna had tasted something a little like bread. They carried packs of this food; they didn't give the captives much of it, mostly kept it for themselves, mostly Jarna and the other captives just got water, from waterskins refilled from whatever stream or river was convenient.

After some days of walking to the west, they came to the shore of what people in a much later age would call the Bay of Biscay.

Jarna had never seen the sea before, but she'd heard of it. She'd heard of the sea. And she'd heard of the mountains to the south of her homeland, and the lands of mild winters beyond them. And she'd heard of the steppe-tundra to the north and east of her homeland, where the winters were longer and colder than in her homeland, and where people lived in huts of mammoth skin and mammoth tusks and mammoth bones, because there was very little wood.

It was a frightening sea. This was the Ice Age, and it was a colder and wilder sea than the Bay of Biscay the humans of historic times knew; more like the North Atlantic. It was a sea of crashing, pounding waves, and a forceful icy wind blew from it, and Jarna suspected looking at it that she would not survive in it for long.

The captors set up a camp of sorts, in a place terribly exposed to the forceful cold wind from the sea. They tied Jarna and the others to the stump of an old dead tree, and tied their legs together, so they were quite helpless. Two of them remained with the captives while the others went away. Every once in a while they would untie one of the captives and let them walk a little way away and relieve themselves, and then they would tie them back up again. Only one at a time. And every once in a while they gave the captives some water, and less frequently a little of the strange, hard food.

A few days later, the others returned, bringing with them another marching line of captives; four captives on this one. And they untied Jarna and her brother and the other hunter from the tree stump, and untied their legs, and tied the two lines of captives together, and made them walk for a while, until they came to the ship.

Jarna at this time had no concept of a sailing ship, but she had some familiarity with small river boats, so she looked at the ship and correctly extrapolated its function. And now she looked at the sea with true fear. They were going to try to cross that in a boat? With her and her brother and her cousin stuck on it? That... that had to be dangerous!

Jarna wished she could hold her brother's hand, but that was impossible; their hands were bound behind their backs.

The other four captives were from the shoreline people of this area, who often entered the ocean in boats, for fishing and whaling and trading. One of them knew the language of Jarna's people, for the shoreline people sometimes sailed up the rivers to trade with the inland hunters, and that woman saw the fear on the faces of Jarna and the other hunters, and explained to them as best she could that her people often moved across the sea in boats, and... it wasn't exactly safe, but it was no worse than the hunting the men of Jarna's people did. Of course, the sea was rough today, her people would not put out to sea on a day like this, but that big boat was much bigger than anything her people built, and was probably more stable than anything her people built.

The captors walked Jarna and the other captives to near the ship, to where the icy waters were almost touching their shoes. There were more of the big but strangely child-faced men on the boat, and they lowered a long plank of wood to near where the captives were standing, and the captors made the captives walk up to the plank and onto the ship with them. The thing that had most struck Jarna about the sailing ship was the sail. She'd watched women weaving with fibers taken from wild plants as a child, even helped them and done a little herself, and she boggled at the work that must have gone in to making such a huge piece of cloth. By pantomime one of the captors indicated to the captives that they should relieve themselves over the side of the ship, which they did, knowing this probably meant they would be restrained for a long time now. And when that was done the captors gave the captives a little water and then marched the captives down into the hold of the ship and tied them down there.

The ship soon departed the shore and put out to sea. During the journey the captives were mostly kept tied down in the hold. Every few hours they were, one at a time, allowed up into the open air so they could relieve themselves over the side of the ship, so the waste went into the ocean. And twice a day food and water would be brought down into the hold and given to them, and when they had eaten the containers would be removed. A few of the big child-faced people would check on them frequently, to make sure they hadn't begun to work their bindings loose.

The hold had some little windows up near the ceiling to let in air and light, and the rope arrangement Jarna was restrained with gave her enough freedom of movement to stand and look out one of those little windows. The hardest part staying on her feet while the ship rolled about in the waves. So when the ship put out to sea Jarna was able to see the coast recede, and then she was able to track its journey somewhat, or at least to watch the coast pass by. The slave ship rarely moved out of sight of the coast ("That makes sense," Elle commented, "Ancient sailers usually stuck close to the coast, they were afraid of the open ocean"). Sometimes Jarna saw distant icebergs - she'd asked the shoreline people woman what they were, and the woman had known and explained it. The boat had gone south at first, then turned to the west ("Makes sense if they were going from France to Gibraltar by the Atlantic route and following the coast, they'd have to turn west to follow the Spanish coast!"). They stopped at a spot on what must have been the northern coast of Spain for some days, and then three more captives were loaded on and tied down in the hold - Jarna and the other hunters and shoreline folk couldn't talk to these new ones at all, they had no language in common. And then the boat set out again, and it sailed a little more west, and then turned south, and then southeast, following the coast ("My God, I can just follow it on the map! She must have had a great sense of direction too! Of course she did, she was a hunter!"). And then it passed a mountain Jarna remembered, and Elle ordered her to draw the mountain to the best of her memory ("That's the goddamn Rock of Gibraltar! That's goddamn Tariq's Mountain! It... looks a little different... It's probably eroded a little in the last twenty-five thousand years! And the shoreline looks different... Of course it looks different, the sea level was a lot lower then! My God, that she remembers it so well after all this time! She must have an absolutely photographic memory! God, that whole trip must have really been burned into her mind!").

Elle showed Jarna modern pictures of the Rock of Gibraltar, and yes, that is the mountain she saw, though it looks a little different now.

And having passed through what must have been the Straight of Gibraltar, the slave ship crossed what must have been the Mediterranean Sea, though it was a colder and wilder sea then. And it came to shore in a place where there was a...

An outpost! Jarna had no concept of such a thing at the time, but it's obvious in retrospect. A satellite settlement, from which ships were built and launched, where expeditions could be resupplied. More of the strange child-faced people there, and the vampiric lieutenant who controlled them (apparent as that in retrospect, but Jarna recognized him as a man with a strange authority over the other child-faced people). And from there the captives were made to walk overland, tied together with rope in a line (in a coffle, though Jarna had no word for such a concept at the time). They were walked to what must have been a place in the inland reaches of the Euphrates, and on its banks there was another outpost, and a river boat waiting to take them down the river. And the boat took them far down the river, to a place that's now somewhere under the waters of the Persian Gulf, to a place where...

To a place where there were fields.

Ten or fifteen thousand years before the known historic beginning of farming, there were cultivated fields of grain, and irrigation works, and thralls working the fields. Jarna had never seen cultivated fields before. Very few people in her world had.

And in the middle of the fields there was a town. A town! Not a big town. Maybe better described as a big village. It had maybe a thousand inhabitants, maybe not even that. But by the standards of Jarna's world, this was a mighty city. It might even have been the biggest permanent human settlement in the world at the time. There were three to five times as many people here as at the cave of Jarna's tribe when the whole tribe was gathered together, and Jarna thought of her tribe as a big tribe. And there were large buildings! Most of the people here lived in barracks of a sort. And there was something she in retrospect thinks of as Tatasi's palace, though even he didn't have that concept at the time; he called it his house. Jarna had never before seen or imagined such a thing as a settlement with large buildings constructed of bricks.

Most of the workers she saw toiling in the fields were the strange big child-faced people, but not all. Tatasi's slave-catching expeditions ranged widely. To the south, they reached South Africa. To the east, they regularly reached India, and sometimes went as far afield as Indonesia, Australia, and East Asia. To the west, they reached Spain and Morocco and... well, Jarna's journey gives a glimpse of how far they sometimes ranged. He even sent slave-catchers into inner Eurasia. Tatasi had reasons to be acquisitive of thralls from far-away lands who might have interesting new genes.

Jarna and the other new captives were offered water to drink and a kind of soup to eat. And they were hungry and thirsty, and the soup actually smelled kind of good. And when they ate it, it actually wasn't bad. And then it did something to them.

Tatasi has a super-thrall ability, like Annaliese and Jarna. The soup was laced with Tatasi's blood, and eating it put Jarna and the other captives under blood thrall to him, made them his slaves.

That day, Jarna and the other new captives met Tatasi. And Tatasi sent the rest of them to the barracks and the fields, to be new workers for him. But with Jarna, Tatasi decided to try a little experiment. Tatasi transitioned Jarna.

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

Jarna saw things in Tatasi's mind through her thrall connection to him. Tatasi is old. From the hints that can be gathered second-hand through Jarna, it seems likely that Tatasi was born and transitioned during the early warm phase of the Eemian interglacial, the interglacial period before the present one. Which would mean Tatasi is around 125,000 years old. Which suggests he ages much more slowly than Jarna. Maybe because, if Jarna's second-hand account of Tatasi's life is to be believed, Tatasi was the first vampire.

Certain clues suggest Tatasi was born somewhere in the area that's now Israel, Lebanon, or Syria, before the onset of the most recent Ice Age, before what he remembers as the great cooling and drying of the world. Embedded in Tatasi's mind were images of the homeland he was born into. And it was a land with cultivated fields and towns.

Conventional human histories put the first emergence of agriculture in the hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent around 10-15,000 years ago. Conventional vampire (mostly) oral histories roughly agree with and enrich this picture. According to ancient vampire legend, the first vampires started out as human witches and sorcerers who called something from the darkness between the spaces into them to live in them and give them power and unnaturally long life. Embedded in this origin story is an actually pretty historically interesting description of the society of the sedentary acorn-wheat proto-agricultural complex that existed in the hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent during the global warming that preceded the Younger Dryas Cold Snap. According to the legend, it was from that society that the first vampires emerged. In that society agriculture was young enough that people remembered that it was women who'd begun to cultivate wheat, as an extension of their gathering activities, and that farming only gradually became the occupation of both genders as population increased and hunting became increasingly marginal as a food source.

If Jarna's impressions of Tatasi's memories were to be believed, 125,000 years ago Tatasi had been human, and something like a prince, and as he surveyed his father's domains he walked through cultivated fields of wheat.

Jarna said there was no contradiction. She'd also seen in Tatasi's memories that the civilization of his people had ultimately been a failure. It had endured for 25,000 years, but it hadn't progressed much. It never invented moon rockets or guns or even iron-working. It never expanded beyond the western flank of the Fertile Crescent. It never achieved any unity; from its origins to its end it was a constellation of hundreds of tiny city-states (dwindling at the end to dozens and then to a few and then to just one), if you could call its major settlements cities. It never even created a real city. Its greatest settlements were tiny by modern standards; not much more than twenty thousand people (and a few thousand people was a more typical population for one of its "cities"). In truth many of its "cities" might be more accurately described as big agricultural villages; most of their residents were agricultural laborers who walked out to the fields each day and returned to the central settlement each evening. And when the Ice Age set in and the world cooled and dried, its people had abandoned their cities and their cultivated fields, and dispersed into the wilderness, and gone back to being hunter-gatherers. Its cultivated fields of wheat had become choked with wild grass, and its cultivated gardens had become choked with weeds, and over the hundred thousand year winter of the Ice Age its cultivars had thoroughly reverted to wild type, and it was left for the women of the same region a hundred thousand years later to re-invent agriculture all over again from scratch.

It seems... maybe not unbelievable. It's the same region agriculture first emerged in immediately before the Holocene, so it probably has favorable conditions for it; if an agricultural society did arise in the Eemian, it would be a plausible place for it. And the Eemian had a nice climate, maybe nicer than the present interglacial, and agriculture got started multiple times independently during the present interglacial; if anything it seems weird if it never got started during any of the previous interglacials.

Tatasi wasn't a name. It was a title. It literally translated as Grandfather. Among Tatasi's people, it was the title of the ruler of a city-state, and thus the title of the most powerful people in the world Tatasi inhabited when he was a human. It was not a particularly grandiose title; the headman of a village or the leader of a minor clan or even just a literal grandfather was called the same thing. If Grandfather's people had invented titles equivalent in grandiosity to lord or king, he would have called himself that. But his people had never done that. Grandfather was the most important-sounding thing he could think of to call himself, so that was what he called himself, and that was what he made his thralls call him.

If Jarna was to be believed, Grandfather had no sire. Nor had he been born from a vampire mother. He was a younger son of his city-state's previous human Tatasi, and his older brothers were the ones being groomed for the title and the power, and he was jealous of his older brothers, so he sought and found a witch, and he persuaded her to teach him magic. And using the knowledge she taught him, he called something from the darkness between the spaces to live in him and give him power.

Elle was skeptical. That's just mythology! Vampirism isn't some spiritual possession! Vampirism is an infection! They're called Vand symbiotes. You can see them in a microscope! They invade your cells and take up residence in the cytoplasm. They function a little like a second set of mitochondria, but interacting with the host in much more complex ways. Your vampire bloodline is just the genetic profile of your Vand symbiotes; it's like your mitochondrial DNA lineage except you don't necessarily get all your Vand symbiotes from one sire. Sure, there's some weird thaumativory stuff going on in them, but it's basically a physical infection, no more mystical than the common cold! He probably fried his own brain with all that time he spent stroking his own ego! It happens sometimes to really old vampires! Memories can be notoriously unreliable even over just a human lifetime, now imagine what can happen to the brain of a narcissist who spends thousands of years surrounding himself with thralls and making them validate his grandiosity!

Using the powers the thing he'd called into him had given him, Grandfather defeated his father and his brothers and took control of his city-state. He killed his father and his brothers. And he put the people of his city-state under blood thrall to him and enslaved them that way. All of them. Grandfather has a powerful super-thrall ability; when he was a young vampire, with the right control techniques he could use it to control more than ten thousand people at once.

After that he... mostly didn't seem to do very much. He simply ruled his city-state, for the next 15,000 years, until the world began to dry and cool and the civilization that produced him began to die around him. If she were in his place, Elle would have tried to create a bigger empire, but Grandfather was apparently uninterested in that. Perhaps he simply lacked the imagination to conceive of such a thing. His civilization had never produced an empire, and Grandfather was... strangely unimaginative in some ways.

110,000 years ago, the great cooling and drying of the world began. The cold itself was not much of a problem for the civilization of Grandfather's time, even in the Ice Age their land stayed warm, but as the world cooled it was also mostly becoming drier, and that was a big problem for them. There was less rain to water the fields, so food production shrank, so the people became hungrier and the population of the towns shrank.

What usually finished off the process was not direct starvation but a one-two punch of malnutrition and infectious disease. Disease had always been a big problem for the civilization of Grandfather's age, the dense and sedentary populations of their villages and towns was an environment where infectious diseases could easily spread, and they were less well-adapted to living in dense populations than even the humans of the early Holocene (let alone of the humans of the modern age, who are mostly the products of thousands of years of brutal selection pressure for resistance to crowd diseases). It was probably one of the reasons they never got very far; epidemics and endemic infectious diseases greatly sapped the vitality of their society. Malnourished people are vulnerable to infectious diseases. As the food supply contracted and malnutrition increased, the death rate from infectious disease increased; people would die, and the proximate cause was some endemic disease, but the ultimate cause was the malnutrition that weakened them enough for the disease to finish them off. In a way worse, the increasingly malnourished populations of the towns and villages were increasingly vulnerable to epidemic diseases, to plagues. Terrible plagues swept through the land and, Grandfather's people being smart enough to recognize the correlation between plagues and crowding, people tended to react by fleeing the towns and villages and dispersing into the wilderness. As the subject populations under their control declined, both by death and by flight, the rulers of the city-states tried to compensate by squeezing their remaining subjects harder, increasing taxes and labor duties, which provoked more of their subjects to flee and created a failure cycle. Sometimes there were even revolutions in which a city-state's subjects would kill their rulers, demolish their own city, and disperse into the wilderness, into freedom (the technology of the civilization of Grandfather's time never got good enough to make being a typical subject of their society unambiguously better than being a hunter-gatherer). Sometimes a weakened and vulnerable city-state would be targeted by the rulers of neighboring city-states, who would raze it and march its population back to their own city-states to now be workers for their own city-states, in an inevitably negative-sum process that killed many and destroyed much and weakened the society as a whole. Sometimes tax collectors would come to a village and find it had simply been abandoned at some point, that its inhabitants had simply all fled into the wilderness, into freedom. Sometimes a town or a village would simply be slowly and quietly abandoned over time, its population shrinking and shrinking until there was nothing left but empty collapsing ruins being slowly reclaimed by nature.

As the fimbulwinter of the Ice Age deepened, the towns and villages of Grandfather's civilization were destroyed or abandoned one by one, like lights being turned off at night. At the beginning of the process there were hundreds of city-states. Then there were dozens. Then only a few. And then, finally, there was only one: Grandfather's city. Grandfather's blood protected his thralls from the diseases. And Grandfather's people alone did not abandon him; they could not; the blood thrall he kept them all under from childhood to death insured that.

Grandfather had to shrink the population of his little kingdom, to fit it within the tightening limits imposed by the drying climate. That was easy for him. He had almost total control over how many children his thralls made; abstinence-only birth control works fine if you're dealing with people who basically literally can't disobey you. And if he wanted to thin the numbers of his thralls in a hurry, he simply killed some pre-pubescent girls by drinking up their blood.

His more usual predilection was to drink to death pre-pubescent boys. For the same reason farmers often slaughter male animals young but keep the female ones. Women were necessary to replenish the stock, but now that he didn't need armies to defend his kingdom from rival lords all those boys were a bit surplus to requirements; reproductively, he only really needed a handful of males around to serve as studs. Oh, he kept a lot of them around for heavy labor on the farms and irrigation canals and construction and building repair projects and for genetic diversity (Grandfather didn't know about genes, but he knew inbreeding could kill small communities), but... he really didn't need all of them. Which left food for himself and his vampiric lieutenants as the obvious use for the surplus. When Jarna saw Grandfather's city, she noticed that she saw more women than men there. And no really old people. He drank to death all the thralls who were too old or too maimed or too disabled to work, too. Technically he didn't need to drink anyone to death, the ratio of human thralls to vampires he maintained was plenty to allow Grandfather and his lieutenants to live entirely by donations small enough to not permanently harm the donor and that was how they got most of the blood they drank, but the normal patterns of human life inevitably generated people who Grandfather saw as more-or-less useless to him, and drinking them up seemed to him the obvious efficient method of disposing of them.

One of the reasons the Eemian civilization never got very far might be that, compared to Holocene civilizations, it suffered from a cruel disadvantage: it had no domestic animals. When Grandfather was born, even the domestication of the dog was tens of thousands of years in the future. Maybe that was why: between the Eemian and the Holocene humans had made friends with the dog, and that might have served as a template to allow them to make friends or slaves (depending on how you looked at it) of the goat and the auroch. To Grandfather's people, an animal as a partner was an alien concept. Their agriculture was entirely about the production of plant-derived foods. All their meat had to come from hunting, fishing, whaling, and the gathering of shellfish, insects, and other small animals. And no domestic animals meant no milk (aside from the human breast milk drunk by babies and small children), no cheese, no reliable access to eggs. It may have greatly restrained the size of their population, with all the downstream effects of that (fewer people to come up with new ideas, fewer workers, less dense social networks...). At the very least, it no doubt made them less well-nourished, less healthy, less resilient against infectious diseases... Grandfather came up with his own ghastly solution for that. When he killed a human thrall who wasn't useful to him, after he or his vampiric lieutenants drank the blood, he ordered other human thralls to eat the flesh. He considered it efficient, and his blood protected them from prion diseases and other infectious diseases associated with cannibalism.

Grandfather's city was able to endure through the Ice Age because he could impose conditions of survival and community continuity on his thralls that free humans would never have accepted. He got his little kingdom through the Toba Catastrophe by making his thralls kill and cannibalize every one of their own under the age of seventeen, and every one of their own over the age of forty, and nine out of ten of the men of their own remaining after that. After the supervolcano winter ended, he got his kingdom back to something close to its pre-Catastrophe population within two generations.

A few centuries after Toba, Grandfather decided it was time for a big move. Grandfather was, for all his power, a fearful creature. Grandfather didn't understand the Ice Age, he only knew that the world was cooling and drying and the process was continuing, unevenly and with reverses but in the grand scale consistently, for thousands and thousands of years. He was worried that the world was dying, that eventually the oceans would freeze and all the land would become a desert. And that frightened him, because if the world died Grandfather would die. How old was the world? How long would the world last? Grandfather didn't know! And that scared him, because it meant that perhaps it was old in the way a seventy year old human is old, perhaps it was dying, and he did not know if it was possible to escape it before it died. And Toba shook him up, scared him. So Grandfather sent out scouts to survey the world a little. And then he abandoned the city he had ruled for so long, and moved his thralls in a great trek to the south, to a place on the banks of the great river that flowed through the valley that had become dry land as the Persian Gulf receded, and there his thralls built a new city, and they lived in the new city and he dwelled in it and ruled it. He hoped that if the cooling and drying of the world continued, this new city far to the south would remain viable for some time after his original homeland had become uninhabitable. And if the cooling and drying of the world in time threatened even this new city, from this new city it would be easy to move his people again, by boat this time, to somewhere on the coast of Africa, where it was warmer.

Then the other problem started. Not the decay of the world. The decay of Grandfather's own body. It seemed that he did age, very slowly, and specifically as he aged his super-thrall ability was losing its potency.

Grandfather had the ability to sire new vampires, and he had sired some; in the age when human kingdoms still existed they had been useful as superweapons against his rival human "Grandfathers," and he'd since killed most of those because he didn't need them anymore but he still kept a few vampire lieutenants around and even made a new one every once in a while when one of the old ones got killed by something or died of old age (he'd lived long enough that this was starting to happen to his oldest vampire lieutenants). But the new vampires he sired always turned out much weaker than him. And none of them inherited his super-thrall ability. He figured that was probably because he was the first, the original host, and that gave him a special relationship with the thing that lived inside vampires and made them vampires. So a hierarchy of thralldom (some of his humans thralled to his lieutenants who were thralled to him) wasn't going to fix this problem.

There was thrall-brainwashing, of course. He used it on his vampire lieutenants, and on humans who performed duties for them that made it impractical to supply them regularly with his blood. The slave-catchers Jarna encountered were thrall-brainwashed, and so were the personnel at the outposts she passed through, and so were the loggers he sent out to lands with an abundance of trees to bring wood back to his city by boat, and so were the traders he sent out on trading expeditions, and so were the foraging parties and fishermen he sent out to bring fish and meat back to his city to provide some supplementary meat and fish for his thralls and rich food for his own table. But thrall-brainwashing isn't perfectly reliable. See what seems to be happening to Harriet in Glow, Worm. Oh, done well it's mostly pretty reliable, but when a person lives as long as Grandfather they start to worry about even low-probability events. Grandfather didn't completely trust thrall-brainwashing. He preferred the certainty of the blood thrall, which bound his slaves directly to his will.

The most straightforward solution was to shrink the population of his kingdom to fit into the new limits of his thrall ability. And he did that. As Grandfather's thrall ability gradually weakened his city gradually shrank and shrank. By Jarna's time, Grandfather's city was a fraction of the size it had been when he first set up shop in the low valley that's now the Persian Gulf.

He pursued another mitigation strategy too. He started selectively breeding his thralls for susceptibility to blood thrall. Much of this was simply breeding them to be docile and submissive and weak-willed. Much of what he did with them was actually an artificial acceleration of trends that had already been playing themselves out in human evolution for millions of years. There was a lot of overlap between the traits that would make a person compliant to the social order of a place like an ancient Sumerian royal cloth-manufacture workshop or a Medieval manorial estate or a modern public school and the traits that would make a person compliant to the social order of Grandfather's city. A lot of Grandfather's breeding program was accelerating the self-domestication humans were doing to themselves. The strange big but child-faced people Jarna was captured by were humans with extreme domestication syndrome, more extreme than that of modern people. Grandfather also started to breed his thralls for increased size and strength and reduced sexual dimorphism; since the population limit of his city was the limit of his thrall ability rather than food production, the increased value big strong people had as workers for him was worth the increase in the amount of food they needed. The big child-faced people Jarna saw were the result of tens of thousands of years of Grandfather's breeding program; bred to have strong backs but weak minds. The slave-catching expeditions were partially about giving Grandfather interesting new genes to work with for his breeding program (Grandfather didn't know about genes, but he knew about heredity).

Still, Grandfather was not satisfied with these solutions. Grandfather was a fearful and paranoid person, he worried about even small risks, perhaps because he lived so long; over tens of thousands of years even small risks added up. Grandfather knew the dangers associated with having a small and isolated community: Tasmania syndrome, genetic homogeneity creating vulnerability to disease, inbreeding, the fragility inherent to having all your eggs in one basket. The more his city shrank, the less safe Grandfather felt. A big community is a safe community, and a safe community would have meant a safe Grandfather. But the blood thrall was the only method of social control Grandfather really trusted. By Jarna's time Grandfather had stripped the social hierarchy of his city down to a dreadfully simplified form. Grandfather's city had no bureaucrats, no priests, no propagandists. Grandfather's city had only one form of social control: thrall. And that meant the size of Grandfather's city was strictly bounded by the limits of his thrall ability. Grandfather's city could not grow.

Grandfather was tantalized by the idea of somehow siring a vampire who inherited his super-thrall ability. That was perhaps the central point of his slave-catching expeditions; he'd discovered the "bullshit vampire powers" effect and was hopeful that if he started with the right kind of human he might be able to sire a vampire with a super-thrall ability. He had diverse potential subjects to choose from. This was after the final out-of-Africa migration, but not that long after it, and before farmers spent ten thousand years displacing and assimilating everyone else; humans were considerably more physically diverse in this period than they are now. Many of the captives Grandfather's slave-catching expeditions brought back weren't Homo sapiens sapiens. Some of them weren't even Homo sapiens. Until Jarna, all those experiments were failures. He almost always killed the vampires produced in these failed experiments (while they were under blood thrall to him, so they didn't fight back). Grandfather was a fearful and paranoid person; even with blood thrall and thrall-brainwashing to control them, Grandfather didn't like having too many other vampires around.

With Jarna, Grandfather finally hit the jackpot. When Jarna transitioned, she developed a super-thrall ability, similar to Grandfather's but three times stronger than the one he had at the time. Grandfather thrall-brainwashed Jarna, resculpted her into a person who would be completely obedient to him, and then used her to control the rest of his thralls, and Grandfather kept Jarna secluded inside his house and near him, partly to keep her safe, but also partly so he could monitor her intensely to make sure the thrall-brainwashing wasn't decaying and reinforce it if it was.

One of the first things Grandfather did when he felt secure in the new arrangement was to send many slave-takers out to bring captives to his city in much larger than usual numbers. With Jarna's super-thrall, Grandfather would be able to triple the size of his kingdom, and he wanted to make that happen faster than natural increase of his existing thralls would allow. To capture more thralls, Grandfather sent out men with weapons, but he also sent out boats full of cloth woven by the women thralls in his workshops, and parties carrying big packs full of cloth and jewelry: trade goods. There were places in Jarna's world where nature was rich enough that even without agriculture there could be societies with villages and chiefs and slaves, where slaves could simply be bought. Grandfather ordered the slave-takers to, as much as possible, bring back mostly fertile women. Fertile women were the new thralls he was particularly desirous of acquiring now: he planned to bind them with Jarna's blood thrall and then make her order them to make many children with the men of the big child-faced people, and by doing so rapidly increase the numbers of his thralls without diluting the results of all the hard work that went into his breeding program too much. And when the slave-takers returned, bringing back mostly young women captives, that was what he did.

It took a generation or two to triple the size of Grandfather's kingdom, bringing its size toward the limit of what Jarna could control with her super-thrall. Grandfather was pleased with the result. A big community was a safe community, and a safe community meant a safe Grandfather.

After that, Grandfather didn't do very much for the next ten thousand years or so. He simply dwelled in his city, and gave orders, and existed, and his city did not change much. For the next ten thousand years or so life for Jarna mostly continued in a long-running routine, day after day, year after year, century after century, millennia after millennia.

In truth, Grandfather's "city" was really more of a big agricultural village. Most of his thralls worked the fields; walked out to them in the morning and walked back from them in the evening. Long before, there had been satellite villages, with arrangements for regular deliveries of Grandfather's blood to them, but they'd been abandoned as Grandfather's super-thrall ability waned and he shrunk his kingdom to conform to its tightening limits. After agriculture, the next biggest pre-occupations of Grandfather's city were textile manufacture and firewood acquisition. He had a huge workshop in his house where hundreds of thralled human women made cloth and clothing and rope; it was almost like a factory. It produced clothing for his thralls, and cloth for the sails of his ships, and so on, but it also produced cloth for trade. Cloth was the primary export of Grandfather's city; Grandfather used it to buy things from human communities. More than anything else, the resource Grandfather had in abundance was labor, and his trading practices reflected that.

Jarna's job was simple. Every morning and every evening most of Grandfather's thralls would eat together in a huge communal dining hall. And during the evening meal Jarna would be there. And Jarna would be bled by a few of Grandfather's thralls, using a technique similar to the one the Maasai use to bleed cattle. And there would be a huge pot of soup, and Jarna's blood would be added to the soup and mixed into it, and then the soup would be served out to the thralls, and the thralls would eat it. And Jarna's blood would put them in blood thrall to her until their next dose the next evening, which would be given to them the same way. It wasn't a very intimate kind of thrall; Jarna's brain wouldn't have been able to handle all the input if it was. It mostly manifested as the thralls simply being obedient. While most of the humans ate, Jarna was given a series of humans to drink from to restore the blood and strength she'd lost (her donors got a special dose of her blood beforehand). After the meal Jarna would give the thralls broad instructions for the rest of the night and the next day, and tell them to obey Grandfather and his lieutenants and the humans Grandfather had selected as supervisors. And while she did that she'd press into their minds certain attitudes and ideas; Grandfather was their god, they existed to be instruments of his will and to satisfy his desires, other authority figures were legitimate insofar as they were extensions of his will and sought to satisfy his desires, and so on.

A petty reason Grandfather was pleased to have Jarna was it meant he wouldn't have to be bled regularly. He disliked being bled regularly, and he was happy that now being bled regularly was outsourced to Jarna. Jarna understood why he disliked it. She disliked it too. She could feel that losing all that blood every day wasn't healthy for her, took a lot of out of her. It was survivable, it was sustainable, her resilient vampire body could heal the wound in a few hours and with appropriate feeding replace the blood before more was taken from her, she endured having it done to her almost every day for millennia after millennia, but she could feel that it wasn't good for her, that her body didn't like it. It felt bad.

At one point, one of Elle's trans women thralls was curious about whether Jarna had seen anything in Grandfather's mind that might indicate whether there had been an accepted social role for crossgender people in the Eemian civilization. Jarna said she'd seen some things that suggested the Eemian civilization might have had a transfem castrati shaman class, like her own people did, but the memories were patchy and not very informative. It wasn't a subject Grandfather had ever been particularly interested in.

She supposes there probably were some people in Grandfather's city who had the internal experience of gender dysphoria and other crossgender impulses, but Grandfather's thralls were so controlled that there would have been very little room for crossgender behavior. Grandfather's thralls ate, slept, tended the other basic needs of their bodies, reproduced, tended to the basic needs of their children, taught their children what they needed to know to be useful workers for Grandfather, and did very little else. They weren't given time to do much else. They lived in barracks. Most of their meals were communal. They wore a sort of uniform, turned out by the thousands in the great textile workshop in Grandfather's house. Their lives were very regimented; the best modern analogies Jarna and the others could think of were a gulag, a prison, an army base, and a very strict boarding school. The thralls who'd been captured by the slave-takers retained more recognizable humanity. They'd sometimes sing in spare moments or while they worked, when they had a little spare time and energy they'd sometimes play games with each other, they had friendships with each other. But...

But the big child-faced thralls, the ones who'd been born in Grandfather's city, bred for Grandfather's city... They'd never known freedom even in their own heads since the age of two. In Grandfather's city, children were put under blood thrall as soon as they were weaned from their mother's milk, and they were weaned early by the standards of Jarna's people, within the first two years of life. They were kept under blood thrall from then until death, unless they were chosen for thrall-brainwashing. Their minds formed under blood thrall. To Jarna, the big child-faced thralls often hardly seemed human. They played no games. They sang no songs and made no music. They had no festivals, no celebrations. The only rituals they had were utilitarian ones, like the communal meal in which they were fed Jarna's blood. The only art they made was for Grandfather's pleasure, or was made to be traded away to humans Grandfather didn't control as part of Grandfather's designs. They weren't mindless or stupid, they could think, Jarna guessed they were about as clever as a normal person, but they were like... Jarna didn't have access to this concept at the time, but they seemed very much like robots.

But sometimes she'd see poignant glimpses of humanity in them. One time she saw one of them become briefly enraptured by the beauty of a butterfly that landed near him. Mothers would show affection to babies that were still nursing and not yet under blood thrall; would coo over them, rock them, try to entertain them by moving fingers around in funny ways, smile at them.

There had been an incident while the slave-catchers were leading her to the Bay of Biscay that she remembers vividly even now. While she was being force-marched, she'd started to sing, to take her mind off what was happening. And she'd noticed one of the slave-catchers watching her. He had a strange expression of wonder on his face, and his eyes were wet. And then a strange look of embarrassment came over him, and he slapped her hard across the face and made a gesture of using two fingers to press his lips together that she interpreted as a gesture for silence. She suspects in retrospect that her singing began to make him feel emotions he suspected Grandfather would not approve of, and the slap and demand for silence was the thrall-brainwashing asserting itself, protecting itself.

Grandfather confined Jarna to three rooms in the great building he called his house. One was the great communal dining hall, where she was bled and the thralls ate her blood with their soup. And then two other rooms, separated from the dining hall by a heavy barred door; Elle thought Jarna's description of them reminded her a little of a harem or a zenana. They were comfortable enough rooms, and in them she was attended by human servants. She was forbidden to ever leave the two rooms, except to go into the dining hall in the evenings, and sometimes Grandfather allowed her to walk around in a small inner courtyard or on the roof of his house. She wasn't exactly imprisoned in the conventional sense, the bars and locks were in her mind - Grandfather simply ordered her to stay within the boundaries of that space, and his orders made it almost as sure a prison as any physical cage could be. Grandfather frequently used blood thrall to look into Jarna's mind to make sure the thrall-brainwashing he'd done to her was holding firm, and re-enforce it if it showed signs of deterioration; she was very valuable to him, and he went to considerable effort to keep her both safe and firmly under his control.

Grandfather wanted to make more vampires like Jarna, to allow him to expand his kingdom further. He had her sire hundreds of vampires, transitioning every kind of exotic human the slave-catchers could bring back. It never worked. None of the vampires she sired inherited her super-thrall ability. When he realized they were failures, Grandfather killed the vampires Jarna had sired, while they were under blood thrall to her and she was under orders to keep them compliant, so they did not fight back. Grandfather did not have his thralls cannibalize their corpses; Grandfather didn't know if eating the cooked flesh of a vampire could transition a human, but if the answer was "yes," he didn't want to find out by having transitions happen outside his control within his city. Their corpses were taken to a place outside the city and burned until there was nothing left but ash and bone. Grandfather also didn't know what eating the flesh of a dead vampire might do to an animal, and he wasn't taking any chances on what the answer to that question was either.

When it became clear that Jarna couldn't sire a vampire with super-thrall, Grandfather experimented with getting Jarna pregnant.

Vampire reproduction is... complicated. There's the bloodline thing, but that's just a transmission chain of Vand symbiotes. In terms of conventional human reproduction, male vampires are sterile (yes, this implies Elanor in Glow, Worm is poly, or used a human sperm donor). Female vampires are almost sterile. They still have and release viable ova, but transition changes how the menstruation-ovulation cycle works, a lot. It gets subtler, there's no menstrual bleeding anymore, no noticeable periods, and it gets... not exactly straightforwardly slowed down, but something like that, a bit like their aging. Human women ovulate about once per month and are fertile about six days per month. Vampire women ovulate about once per year and are fertile about six days per year. But vampire women technically can get pregnant and give birth to vampire children, as Elanor did in Glow, Worm. They just usually choose not to. If they can't tell how close they are to ovulation by smell like Annaliese, a quick taste of a drop of their own blood will tell them approximately how close they are to ovulation, so it's easy for them to choose not to get pregnant (that trick is definitely a vampire sex ed 101 thing). And vampire children are hard to manage (imagine dealing with a toddler who has superstrength and a thirst for human blood!), and why bother with pregnancy and decades of child-rearing when transitioning an adult human is much quicker and easier? And lots of vampire women grew up before modern birth control and in much more sexist societies; lots of them have emotional baggage around pregnancy left over from experiences they had when they were human women.

But vampire women can get pregnant, and Grandfather made Jarna get pregnant, again and again, because he hoped he could get another prodigy vampire with a super-thrall ability that way. He used male human thralls to impregnate her. The first time he tried crossing her with one of the men of his strange big but child-faced thralls, and when that didn't give him the result he wanted he tried crossing her with every exotic male captive his slave-catchers could bring him.

It never worked. None of the children born from Jarna inherited her super-thrall ability. Elle suspects Jarna's super-thrall ability was the result of an interaction between Jarna's Vand symbiotes and her highly specific genetic profile; with cloning, Grandfather could have got himself another Jarna, but that was far beyond the crude technology available to him, or maybe he could have gotten what he wanted by crossing her own son back to her, to produce an inbred vampire with 75% of her DNA... Jarna clarified that he actually tried that a few times! He made her get pregnant by her own son, and then he made her get pregnant again by a son from that union, but it hadn't worked either. He'd tried that multiple times, starting off with a different thrall as the initial father each time, but none of these attempts worked, and eventually he'd concluded it was another dead end. Eventually Grandfather gave up on trying to use Jarna to create more super-thrall vampires.

Grandfather actually kept one of the vampire children he made Jarna produce this way. Grandfather made Jarna keep this son she'd produced under blood thrall until he grew up, so he'd stay docile and out of the way, and then Grandfather put her son under direct blood thrall to him and thrall-brainwashed him and made him one of his lieutenants. Jarna's other children weren't so lucky. When Grandfather realized that one of her children hadn't inherited her super-thrall ability, or when they ceased to be otherwise useful to him, he'd have Jarna put her own child under blood thrall to keep them compliant, and he'd kill them, and he'd have the corpse taken to a place outside his city and burned until there was nothing left of it but ash and bone. Grandfather killed all the vampires Jarna gave birth to, except for the one he kept as a lieutenant.

Elle has a habit of playing with pencils when she's angry and trying not to show it; it's a tell people who work for her often learn to recognize. Elle is usually good at controlling her emotions and good at controlling her vampire strength. While Jarna described Grandfather's attempts to use her to produce another vampire like her, Elle snapped several pencils in quiet rage.

Elle asked, gently, if Grandfather had ever made Jarna have sex with him.

He had, sometimes, when she was younger, but he didn't do it often, and he lost interest when she stopped looking like a young woman. He mostly used thralled human women for sex. As far as she could tell, he was straight (or, as she thought it at the time, only interested in women that way). He had a sort of harem in his big house where he kept thralled human women he used for sex. Some of them were women of the big child-faced people, but many were captives caught by his slave-catchers; one of the purposes of those expeditions was bringing back exotic women for his harem. He couldn't make children with them, of course; male vampires are sterile. Usually when they got too old for him he killed them by drinking up their blood, but he had a few favorites whose beauty he'd preserved through the ages by transitioning them.

Over the next ten thousand years or so, the deep winter of the Last Glacial Maximum passed, and then came the global spring of the pre-Holocene great warming. Jarna suspects that Grandfather would have been content to keep doing things the same way for a million years, but the great warming was the beginning of the world emphatically not letting him do that anymore. The sea level rose and rose, and soon the sea was threatening Grandfather's city, and he had to move it.

Grandfather didn't understand the Ice Ages. He remembered that the world had been warm before, but he was afraid of each great change, because he had no assurance that its end result would be survivable. For a while he was worried that the world might keep getting hotter and the sea level would keep rising until the ocean covered the tops of the highest mountains or the world became like the inside of an oven. Just like, during the great cooling, he'd worried that the world might keep getting colder and drier until all the seas froze and all the land became cold desert. He sent out scouts to find the highest places where something like his city could conceivably survive, so he would know a place he could move his city to if the ocean rose mountain-high above its present level.

For now, he chose a less drastic move; he abandoned his city and moved himself and his thralls to the hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent, to a place high and north enough that it might still be habitable if the southern lowlands became too hot and high enough that it would still be above water if the oceans rose considerably. And in that place he made his thralls build for him a new city and clear and plant new fields. And the rising waters of the Persian Gulf closed over the abandoned and decaying remains of his old city. And in his new city he spent more millennia doing not all that much. In his new city, as in his old one, Grandfather kept Jarna confined to the space of three rooms and an inner courtyard and a roof.

The world was changing in other ways that would ultimately have much more drastic consequences for Grandfather. If the Holocene summer had passed like the Eemian summer, he would have happily whiled it away, staying in and presiding over his little city and not doing all that much. But the Holocene summer would be different from the Eemian summer, though it was not so obvious at the time. Already the Fertile Crescent hilly flanks sedentary acorn-wheat proto-agricultural society was emerging, and the agricultural societies and civilizations of the Holocene would not struggle and stagnate and ultimately wither and disappear (aside from one tiny strange remnant) like the agricultural societies and civilizations of the Eemian. The agricultural societies and civilizations of the Holocene would be strong, and thrive, and eventually swallow the world.

Elle and her thralls digress a little, discuss a little what might have made the difference, a little curious about that. It doesn't seem to have been a simple increase in intelligence, at least not if Jarna's testimony is to be believed. Grandfather was strangely unimaginative in some ways, but Jarna doesn't think he was stupid, and she knew him intimately for twenty-five millennia. Forget was, is - the bastard's still alive! - and seems to have adapted OK to modern society. Grandfather's people cultivated wheat, tended gardens, built towns, had government; from Jarna's impressions of Grandfather's memories, they were as clever as modern people, or at least they were not obviously less clever than modern people. Neanderthal brains were, if anything, a bit bigger than ours.

Domestic animals is one obvious big difference. And maybe it's disease/immunity related? There may have been a very broad slow uneven two-steps-forward-one-step-back long-term trend toward bigger human communities over the last few hundred millennia (greatly accelerated in the Holocene), which would have created a selection pressure for better immunity to crowd diseases - maybe Grandfather's people just weren't as far along in that process as early Holocene people? And population movements after the Eemian might have spread useful disease-resistance genes around. Jarna said disease was a big problem for Grandfather's people! That by itself might explain everything!

Or maybe it is some sort of cognitive and behavioral difference, not intelligence but something subtler, mindset.

One of the things that most outrages Elle about Grandfather's city is the waste of it. What a first mover advantage he had! He controlled the only agricultural society in a world of hunter-gatherers! And he spent a hundred thousand years doing nothing with it except inflicting misery and slavery on others!

She wouldn't have acted like that! She knows it! Even if she had only the knowledge he had then! She knows herself, and she knows that if you put her in Grandfather's place in Jarna's time, with his abilities and only the knowledge he had, the smallness and fragility of her little city and the vast empty raw potential of the world beyond it would have called to her, spoken to her, suggested things to her.

She'd have built a proper society, held together by more than thrall; a society that could grow. And then she'd have started expanding. She'd send out farmer-settlers, and construction workers to build roads. She'd expand to the limits of her logistics and institutions of social control, and then she'd start looking for ways to improve those things. She'd find smart people and recruit them to help her with that; she's sure she could find some, the Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals had big brains. The really smart and useful ones she'd transition, so their intelligence and knowledge wouldn't be lost after a single human lifetime. With the unity that a functionally unaging thrall-brainwashed leadership class would create, and with a functionally unaging scholar class (imagine getting to have Newton and Einstein around for centuries and bouncing ideas off each other!), she thinks progress would be rapid. Even without her modern knowledge, a society like that would feel its way toward modern science like a plant growing toward the light without knowing what the sun is. Even without having the memory of our society as a goal, she thinks probably within a few millennia tops she would have...

... She would have given the big child-faced people and Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons and all the rest a world with cities with running water and flush toilets and electricity. A world with modern hospitals with antibiotics and X-ray machines. A world with supermarkets filled with food. A world where mothers hold their newborn babies and think with assurance, "this baby will live long enough to become an old person with wrinkles and grey hair." A moon that has known the kiss of an astronaut's booted feet. A world where quirky young men look up at the stars at night and tell each other, "Just think, soon we'll be exploring the galaxy!" A world that has skipped twenty millennia of poverty and fear and pain!

Maybe a world where, a few decades or centuries after that, they find a way to artificially synthesize whatever it is vampires need from human blood. So everyone can transition. So everyone can live as long as Jarna has.

She wouldn't spend a hundred millennia masturbating to her mastery of a village of slaves! She knows it! She feels it!

Jarna's impression of Grandfather's physical appearance was that he was strangely ugly. That his features were strangely heavy and crude, as if indifferently sculpted from dense clay that resisted a sculptor's attempt at fine shaping. One of Grandfather's people would have said that this was because Grandfather looked like a real man, an adult man. Compared to Grandfather's people, modern humans or even most of the humans of Jarna's time were neotenous. One of Grandfather's people might have thought that modern humans looked strangely child-like, like people with adult bodies but faces like young teenage boys and young teenage girls. Jarna glimpsed some hints this in Grandfather's mind.

Neoteny is a symptom of domestication. In the case of humans, self-domestication (Grandfather's hyper-domesticated thralls aside). If Grandfather's people were less self-domesticated than modern humans, then plausibly they would have been less social, more aggressive, more fearful, less docile, less cooperative, not as good at playing well with others. All features that would have made them less well-suited to living in towns. All features that might have made their civilization less functional and more fragile in a thousand subtle ways. That might certainly explain why their civilization did not thrive. But let's pull on another angle too...

What do children do more of than adults? They play. They explore. They are curious about things. They daydream. They imagine. They fantasize. They construct elaborate imaginary worlds. A little like what Elle just did, when she imagined how she'd act if she was in Grandfather's place.

Jarna says Grandfather didn't daydream much. Grandfather didn't fantasize much. Grandfather's mind was very focused on relatively concrete, practical issues. Grandfather's thoughts and desires were very focused on the needs of his body and on "monkey brain" social desires like his desire to be important and respected. Grandfather wasn't stupid, but he did have a certain strange incuriosity. Grandfather wasn't stupid, he could come up with new ideas, but he was strangely unimaginative; he could extrapolate relatively straightforwardly from things he'd done before or things he'd been told or things he'd seen others do, but he wasn't good at making imaginative leaps.

Isn't it interesting that Grandfather's people had kings and palaces, but never invented special words for them? They used the same word for a palace and an ordinary house, and they used the same word for a king and a village headman and a literal grandfather. That does suggest a certain lack of imagination, maybe? Annaliese responded to that by suggesting that maybe that wasn't because of lack of imagination, maybe Grandfather's people didn't think in words as much as typical modern humans do, and words weren't very emotionally alive to them. It was the only time in the discussion that she said something on her own initiative, instead of as a response to somebody else directly addressing her. It might have been the only time in the discussion that she talked at all; she didn't talk much during it.

Grandfather was a strange person. Selfish. Fearful. Closed-off. Untrusting. Strangely conservative. Strangely unimaginative. Some of that might be idiosyncrasies of his individual personality. Some of that might be habits of mind that any extremely long-lived person tended to develop. Some of that might be the result of tens of millennia of what, in its own way, must have been profound emotional isolation. But Elle wonders if Grandfather's strange personality is to some extent a glimpse of what his people were like. Maybe that's why the Eemian civilizations stagnated and withered, while the Holocene civilizations were strong and thrived and grew and swallowed the world. And maybe that's why Homo sapiens outcompeted Neanderthals and the rest; because those extinct hominids had brains that worked like the brains of Grandfather's people.

Grandfather's selective breeding of this thralls may even have accelerated human self-domestication. Every once in a while a few of his human thralls would escape his control and escape into the wilderness, go feral. He sent hunting parties after them to bring them back to him so he could re-thrall them, but the hunting parties didn't always catch such escapees. It was a trickle, but over tens of millennia, and into the low population densities of the Pleistocene, it might have been significant. And Grandfather had been breeding his thralls for domestication, docility... Wouldn't it be something if that was part of what made the civilizations of the Holocene so dramatically more successful? It was maybe notable in this context that the location of Grandfather's original city had been close to the bottleneck point of the out-of-Africa migration and it had been inhabited while that migration was happening, and Grandfather's city had always stayed within the general region that the first agricultural societies and the first civilizations emerged in.

Jarna wondered sometimes what it was like for those escaped thralls when the blood thrall wore off and, for the first time since they were two years old, their minds were free.

Author's aside: remember that this is the '60s or '70s and Elle got a lot of her socialization in old vampire culture and in Victorian Britain. It'd be more surprising if she didn't have a strong tendency toward racialist thinking at this point!

It was during the pre-Holocene warming that Grandfather first learned of the emergence of other, rival vampires. In the hilly flanks sedentary acorn-wheat proto-agricultural society other witches and sorcerers had independently invented the vampirization ritual, had called something from the darkness between the shapes to live in them and give them power and unnaturally long life. The ritual is latent in magic, as the atomic bomb is latent in physics. Once...

Jarna had seen an idea in Grandfather's mind that vampirism is somehow inherently magically connected to hierarchy, that the vampirization ritual only works if it's done in the context of a society that has rich and poor, privileged people and people who are treated as disposable. During the warming immediately before the Holocene the hilly flanks acorn-wheat sedentary proto-agricultural society crossed a threshold, just as Grandfather's civilization had crossed a threshold all those millennia before, and when it did it became possible and inevitable that ambitious magic-users would call something from the darkness between the spaces to live in them and give them power and unnaturally long life. Elle is skeptical. Skeptical about the whole possession angle, but especially skeptical about that. If there is any truth to that, she thinks it's more likely that hierarchical high-surplus societies produce vampires in the same way they produce novelists; surplus allows specialization allows a large class of full-time magicians allows vampires.

It could also be... Over the tens of millennia, Grandfather had several bad experiences with thrall-brainwashed vampire lieutenants who developed a capacity for independent thought when away leading expeditions and tried to kill him when they returned to his city. That was a big part of the reason he didn't completely trust thrall-brainwashing. There had also been cases of vampire lieutenants who left his city leading expeditions and simply never returned to it. Grandfather suspected that in some of those cases their thrall-brainwashing had broken down too, but instead of returning and trying to kill him they had simply disappeared into the wilderness, into freedom. Some of those might have sired other vampires after escaping his control. Jarna said in this period Grandfather had a vampire thrall who had the "bullshit vampire power" of being able to look deeply into people's minds without a blood thrall connection to them, and that thrall had been present at some of Grandfather's meetings with his new rivals and had looked into their minds and confirmed that they had vampirized themselves in the same way Grandfather did.

The hard centuries of the Younger Dryas Cold Snap came and went, and while they were a tremendous blow to the hilly flanks agricultural society, they did not destroy it. And within a millennia, the warmth returned, and the great warming resumed.

As potential military threats to his little kingdom proliferated, Grandfather started keeping more of the boys born to his thralls alive. He needed armies again.

Grandfather's little city survived into historic times. But in the end an enemy came along that could not be held off, and Grandfather's little city was destroyed. But Grandfather adapted. He developed alternate strategies for keeping himself alive and safe. He changed his organization into something like a more typical vampire clan.

Jarna was moved around a lot more now. But wherever Grandfather took her, he kept her in a secure, secluded, guarded place. He still had uses for her super-thrall ability, and she was still precious to him, as a possession, not as a person. And therefore she was heavily guarded, and she spent most of her time confined to the inner chambers of some palace or complex or other, mostly interacting only with servants and Grandfather and his lieutenants, almost never going outside except into an inner courtyard or sometimes onto a roof. It was rather like being a woman in purdah. She spent more millennia that way.

Until one day, Grandfather found and thralled and thrall-brainwashed another vampire who had a super-thrall ability more potent than Jarna's. And he went to Jarna, and he told her that he didn't need her anymore, and he'd found a vampire lady named Elle who offered him a good price for her, so he was selling Jarna to Elle. And so, after Jarna had served Grandfather for twenty-five thousand years, that was that, Grandfather put Jarna on an airplane and sent her to Elle. And almost as soon as Jarna got off the plane Elle put Jarna in blood thrall to her. And thus, after twenty-five thousand years of servitude, Grandfather's control of Jarna ended, though, of course, Jarna was not free, Jarna simply had a new mistress now.

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

Elle took Jarna to see the cave in France where she grew up. They went with Annaliese and one of Elle's trans women thralls. Maybe Elle did it out of curiosity. Maybe it was her idea of a kind of treat.

The four of them walked and drove around the area a little first, like tourists. Well, they were tourists, in a strange way... Elle wanted to see if Jarna would recognize familiar features in the landscape.

And she did! It had changed a lot, of course. Much of it was now full of cultivated fields and towns and roads with cars driving on them and all the things associated with modern human civilization, all that was new. And it was now full of people who were not her people; they didn't even look like her people (when they saw her, they often assumed she was a foreigner from a distant land, and they were right in a way; in a way she was a foreigner from a distant land - distant in time!). Even the nature had changed radically: there were a lot more trees now, the undeveloped areas were now covered by forest instead of the grasslands Jarna remembered, and the big animals were all gone, except for cattle in the fields, which... were recognizably relatives of the aurochs, but different. And during Jarna's youth the place probably wouldn't have been so warm at that time of year.

But the bones of the land were the same. The same valleys, the same hills. They'd changed a little, twenty-five thousand years of erosion has changed them, but they were recognizable, they were familiar. Jarna recognized many landmarks from the landscape she knew as a human, often they were a little distorted, but they were recognizable. She knew them so well, they were so familiar, they were associated with meaningful memories, she could not forget them, she recognized them when she saw them despite everything twenty-five thousand years has done to them. That hill! That's... And that's the valley where...!

In the landscape of Jarna's youth there were big boulders, and places where erosion had rubbed the hills down to bare rock, and she found many of them were still there. They were different now, twenty-five thousand years of wind and rain had eroded them, but she could recognize many of them.

It was a strange, bittersweet homecoming for Jarna. It made some deep part of her brain truly feel that she was truly old. While she'd languished in inner rooms the homeland she remembered had become this place. The landscape was familiar enough for her to really see how it had changed. She'd long ago accepted and processed that she would never truly return home, because the home she remembered didn't exist anymore, but this pulled at that old mental scar. She was home. She was home, and her home had turned into this place. The experience she was having now was the closest she could ever get to coming home.

But... She hadn't expected to ever get to go home. Not even in this limited sense. It was an unexpected gift to be taken home, to be allowed to see her home, to be allowed to see what her home had become. To get to wander through the landscape of her childhood and her young womanhood, and see things that had been so familiar to her then, and have the memories associated with those things evoked.

The four of them went to the cave, and on their way... That boulder! How well Jarna remembered that boulder! She'd been wondering if it was still there, and if so what it would look like after all this time! She often played around it with other children when she was a little girl. And she and her mother and the other women and girls often rested around it when they went gathering. Often when the women and girls rested there during gathering they would eat something together, and the women would talk to each other, and the girls would play with each other. It looked different now, twenty-five thousand years of wind and rain had changed its shape, whole meters of stone must have eroded away from it in places, but part of it are still recognizable, enough for it to be recognized, and Jarna also knows it by its place in the landscape.

It was a warm and pleasant spring day, eye-hurtingly sunny for vampires so they all took sunglasses but otherwise pleasant, and they'd taken a couple of picnic baskets, and Jarna suggested they eat near the boulder, as she had done so many times when she was human, and that sounded fine to the others, so they did that. Jarna took her sunglasses off; she wanted to experience the sunny day more like her human self would have, even if that meant putting up with sun-pain. The others took off their sunglasses too; it's not too bad if the eyes aren't exposed to it for too long.

The food was sandwiches and things, it did not taste of blood, it was human food, farmer food, very unlike the things Jarna had eaten near this boulder when she was human. Although they had taken some...

Some weeks prior, Jarna had tried to replicate a favorite dish of her human self, something her mother and aunts had often prepared for her when she was a little girl, a sort of mix of animal fat and fruit, one of Elle's trans women thralls said it was a little like something called "Eskimo ice cream." Annaliese had sampled some, and then Elle and her trans women thralls. One of the trans women thralls - the same one who was going to the cave with Jarna - thought it was really cool that they were getting to taste Cro-Magnon cuisine. Jarna had cautioned that what she'd produced was different from the original dish, it was all substitutions, she'd made it with stuff she'd dug out of Elle's refrigerator, the fat was from a different animal and the fruits were different, it tasted different from the dish in her memories, the authentic dish of twenty-five millennia ago would have tasted different. Besides, the vampire palette perceived tastes differently than the human palette, and she'd only tasted the original dish as a human, so...

Jarna had experimented with trying to recreate other dishes of her people, with the encouragement of the same thrall, who thought trying to recreate Cro-Magnon cuisine was a really cool project and who often helped Jarna in the kitchen with this. That woman seemed to have an interest in how people lived very long ago, and was full of questions for Jarna about how her people had done things. Elle allowed her thralls more independence than Grandfather did, Jarna liked that. The dishes Jarna had been able to cook were not particularly authentic, they were mostly substitutions, the meat was from different animals, the plants were different - in many cases an authentic recreation would be impossible because the original used meat from an animal that was now extinct. The thrall who kept encouraging her thought it was really cool anyway. She said it was a pity about the vampire thing, because publishing a Cro-Magnon cookbook would be really cool. Maybe some vampires would be interested in such a thing?

The day before they went to the cave Elle had paid the staff at the hotel they were staying at a hefty amount of money, and in exchange they'd given Jarna the right to use the hotel kitchen for a few hours during off-hours that day and raid the hotel fridge. Jarna had packed some of the results of that session into the picnic baskets. She'd anticipated the possibility of passing by that boulder on their way to the cave, and... And sitting near it, and eating something that tasted at least a little like the foods of her people, was an idea that had appealed to her profoundly.

Elle was astonished by how well and how vividly Jarna seemed to remember her life as a human. Of course, it made sense that she had an excellent eye and memory for terrain - she'd been a hunter! But this was more than that. Her human life couldn't have been much more than a thousandth of her lifetime, and it was so long ago, but she seemed to remember it as if it was only a human lifetime or so ago.

"I think it's cause that was the last time she was happy and felt really alive," Elle's trans woman thrall who'd come on the trip to the cave with them said, "Tatasi basically buried her alive. He basically kept her buried alive for twenty-five thousand years. How did she put it? He kept her shut up in rooms for a long time. He profoundly starved her of experiences. She hasn't had a long life, she's had maybe twenty-five years of life as a human followed by a whole lot of profound mental deprivation with some ghastly horrors thrown in. Of course most of her vivid memories and emotions are about her real life! Of course she remembers her real life like it was fifty years ago; your brain keeps the memories that are important to you!"

When Annaliese's first master explained to her that she would live a long life, in terms her wordless human self could understand, he'd shown her the slowness of the decay of stone. Elle too knew the slowness of the decay of stone; knew what it meant that whole meters of stone eroded off that boulder while Grandfather kept Jarna shut up in rooms.

After their picnic at the boulder, it was a not very long walk to the cave. Elle was rich enough to buy herself privileges like a private unsupervised self-guided tour of the cave for herself and three associates in which they would be allowed to descend into the chambers where the cave paintings were. They didn't have to share the cave with tourists or a guide or a minder. This was an intimate time.

There were electric lights in the cave now, bright enough to make the cave painting chambers well-lit even to human eyes. Elle's trans woman thrall guessed that without artificial light this chamber of the cave would be totally dark even to a vampire. Elle's trans woman thrall said it was amazing that the cave painters of Jarna's people had been able to do such work in a dark place, with only primitive open flame lamps for light and only human eyes. Jarna said the trick was to let your eyes adjust for a while before you started to work, her mother had told her that. And the paintings had been made to be seen with the dim, flickering light of animal tallow oil lamps. They'd been made for ceremonies where they served as a focus for symbolic magic to control the movement of the herds and insure the great seasonal hunts were a success. The pictures of herbivores were used to exert influence over the real animals, while the pictures of predators were used to invoke patron spirits of the hunters. The painters and the hunters each had their own roles in these ceremonies - as a child, Jarna had participated a few times as a learning painter, and then after she'd joined the hunters she'd participated as a hunter. It was in the context of one of those rituals, in the dim flickering light of animal tallow lamps, that you could have seen the paintings as they were made to be seen. The dim flickering light gave them a feeling of aliveness.

Elle's trans woman thrall said she wishes she could have seen one of those rituals. Jarna said she might remember enough that, with a few dozen cooperative people, she could recreate one.

Jarna looked for familiar paintings. The cave hadn't been anywhere near so well-lit when she'd been in it as a girl, and many of the paintings had been added after her abduction, and her memories of the cave were old...

Those horses! They'd been there when she was a little girl! They were older than her! Her mother had shown them to her!

That lion! Her grandmother painted that one!

And her mother and one of her aunts had painted that mammoth together! They'd pointed it out to her as their creation, while they were teaching her!

And there was the auroch in the book Elle showed her, the one her mother and grandmother made! Jarna watched it being made!

That woolly rhinoceros! Jarna had actually helped with that one! Her mother and aunt had done most of the work, but a few times her mother sat beneath it, and her aunt helped Jarna climb onto her mother's shoulders, and then her aunt held the lamp and her mother handed Jarna the tools and the materials and Jarna applied the paint.

Those hand prints! One of them was a print of Jarna's hand! Her mother had put Jarna on her shoulders, and lifted her high enough to put her hand on the wall in that place, and while Jarna's hand was pressed against the cave wall her mother had given Jarna pigment to take into her mouth and then spit onto and around her hand, so when she pulled her hand away there was an imprint of her hand outlined in red pigment. Every painter made at least one print like that; it was a little like a signature, a way to leave a little of their individuality on the cave wall.

Jarna wondered if she could find her old handprint, looked for it... There! That was it! That was the print of her hand! She was sure of it!

Jarna was tall enough now that she could simply raise her hand and hold it near the ancient handprint she'd made as a little girl. She did that, and compared the ancient handprint to the hand she had now. The hand she had now was bigger. And the hand she had now was an old woman's hand, wrinkled. In the time since the handprint was made she'd become an adult, and then she'd become old.

While this was happening Jarna had been talking, sharing her thoughts, and Elle had been listening. And Elle knew what it meant that Jarna's hand was now an old woman's hand, because Jarna had been transitioned young.

"I am going to kill him!" Elle almost shouted, "He took an intelligent being that lives longer than the redwoods, and he burned out her life in the space of three rooms! He kept her like a woman in purdah for twenty-five thousand years!" And Elle was crying, her eyes were wet and tears were running from them, and that was astonishing because it was the first time anyone present had ever seen her cry. And Elle said, "I am going to kill him! I am going to end the hundred and twenty-five thousand year waste he called a life! I'm going to inflict on him what he's spent a hundred and twenty-five millennia being afraid of! I am going to kill him!"

Elle rushed up to Jarna and grabbed her hand, held it between her own two hands, put pressure on it so she could really feel the contact, and said, "And Jarna, I'm going to do it while you're still alive! I promise you! Tatasi will not outlive you! You will see him die! Maybe not directly, but someday I'm going to come to you and I'm going to - I'm going to show you his severed head or something, you will have the experience of being alive and knowing that he's dead! I'm going to give you the experience of living in a world that doesn't contain him anymore, of knowing you've outlived him! I'm going to give you that gift! I promise it to you! That's my promise to you!"

"Do you want me to swear by the old gods of our people? By the gods of my clan, the gods of my sire's sire?" Elle asked, and she let go of Jarna's hand and began making motions across her chest while she spoke, sketching out invisible symbols in the air, like a Christian making the sign of the cross across their chest, "I feel stupid doing it, cause I don't believe in that stuff, but if you want me to, I will! I swear by Ilkar-Na, the war god worshipped at Gobekli Tepe, I swear by Orodros, who marched across Europe with the Yamnaya under the sign of the crushing wagon wheel..."

"Grandfather is older than those gods," Jarna said, "Much older."

Elle smiled, a smile that had a little self-deprecating humor in it, but also a smile that was fierce, a smile that showed teeth, a smile that showed fangs, and Elle said, "Then I swear by my own will and my own strength and my own self-ness, which I take much more seriously anyway. I swear to you this: I am going to kill Tatasi, and I am going to do it while you are still alive, and I'm going to give you proof that I've killed him, and I am going to do it soon, you won't have to wait long! This is my gift to you, my promise to you, my vow to you, my oath to you, and a Sister's oath to a Sister is binding, on it I stake my self-respect and my honor among my Sisters and my Brothers."

And then Elle said, "And I'm going to make another oath. All of you witness this oath! I swear by my own will and my own strength and my own self-ness that I will never do to a Sister or a Brother what Tatasi did to you! Any Sister or Brother who is my thrall and who does not die to violence or accident will have freedom eventually, will have freedom long before their lifespan is burned out! Even if I live to be as old as Jarna is now, even if I live to be as old as Tatasi is now, even if I live a million years, no matter how long I live, no-one will spend twenty millennia as my thrall!"

And then Elle said, "And I'm going to make a third oath! And I want all of you to witness this oath too! I swear by my own will and my own strength and my own self-ness that I will never be a waste like Tatasi! I will never be a selfish, negative-sum weight on the world like him! I will never grab a little power and then content myself with masturbating to my mastery of some tiny corner of creation while I accomplish nothing but making the world a little bit worse for everyone else!"

And then Elle grasped Jarna's hands firmly and told her "And I have another gift for you. I'm going to set you free. And I don't mean eventually. I'm going to start the process right now." Elle explained that while Annaliese's super-thrall is much less potent than Jarna's in terms of controlling or influencing many people at once, Annaliese's super-thrall would better fit the needs of the 'programme,' so Elle didn't really need Jarna. Certainly Jarna could be very useful to Elle elsewhere, but Elle had decided that, for the first time in a long time, she was going to do something both costly and altruistic. She was going to use blood thrall to undo the thrall-brainwashing Grandfather had done to Jarna, and then she was going to set Jarna free. And present Jarna to the Directorate. The Directorate would probably give Jarna some sort of position of privilege and influence, or at the very least would make sure she was more than comfortable for the foreseeable future. The old vampires in the Directorate have an aristocratic and gerontocratic mindset, they respect other old vampires, and Jarna is very, very old indeed, there are very few people older than Jarna. And Elle gave Jarna this encouragement: Jarna may be nearing the end of her lifespan by vampire standards, but in absolute terms, she probably still has long to live. She looks like maybe a woman in her sixties, or maybe like a healthy, fit, vigorous seventy-something. If it works anything at all like a vastly stretched out version of human aging, that suggests she could easily still be alive thousands of years from now. She likely still has enough time left to become truly old, experience old.

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

Vampire manumission of the sort Elle gave Jarna is tricky. It contains an inherent contradiction. It involves using blood thrall to undo thrall-brainwashing. It involves the same basic process as thrall-brainwashing, but directed toward creating a free-thinking mind. It involves using the tools of cognitive binding to set someone's mind free. It involves commanding someone to become free. It's as awkward as it sounds.

Annaliese was better at it than Elle. At least with Jarna. Elle's thrall power over Jarna was very verbal. Elle could say "You are your own person. You do what you want or what you think is right, and you decide for yourself what is right. You do not have to obey Tatasi. You have no loyalty to Tatasi," but that would fall into Jarna's mind as a series of commands. It was hard to make someone truly free that way.

A person who mostly thought without words, Annaliese experienced thrall connection very differently, much more intimately. She could reach into Jarna's mind and feel the blocks and channels Grandfather had put inside her. He'd been lazy! That would be very helpful! He'd mostly just put a series of blocks and compulsions into Jarna's mind, he'd left huge swathes of her brain relatively untouched. She had a lot of anger toward him! And a lot of thoughts and emotions that neither he nor Elle had put in her!

Elle and Annaliese did thrall-sharing with Jarna. The way Annaliese explained it years later to the graduate school girls was that it was "kind of like kinky poly with a domme, a sub, and a switch who was domming the sub and subbing for the domme." Elle ordered Annaliese to drink from Elle and ordered Jarna to drink from both Elle and Annaliese, so a triangular network of thrall connections was established. And Elle and Annaliese worked on Jarna together.

Annaliese found the parts of Jarna that were basically already free and encouraged them to grow. She found the blocks Grandfather put in Jarna's mind and weakened them. She encouraged connections to form and strengthen, dissolved the partitions Grandfather put in Jarna's brain. She found the channels Grandfather had carved in Jarna's brain and encouraged other parts of Jarna to grow into those channels and recruit parts of those networks, cannibalize them, tear those networks apart by appropriating parts of them.

Annaliese would find emotions in Jarna and enflame them, and then Annaliese and Jarna would feel Jarna's emotions together while Annaliese encouraged them, and by doing this Annaliese strengthened the neural pathways in Jarna that created those emotions. These emotion-sharing sessions were mostly wordless; when Jarna and Annaliese did them they would...

Sometimes they would cry together, bawl together, often hugging each other tightly.

Sometimes they would go to a training/exercise room and take out Jarna's anger on a boxer's punching bag, punching and kicking it and screaming together. Elle found it a little funny to watch; Annaliese and Jarna were not physically strong for vampires, for a strong vampire like Elle it was a little like watching the furious anger of small children. If Elle had been that angry she'd have vented her rage on cinderblocks and bricks and reduced them to debris and dust! But Jarna and Annaliese were comparatively feeble vampires, which was to say they were about as strong as very strong human men, so they just punched and kicked the stuffing out of a boxer's punching bag. Often literally beat the stuffing out of it; they did go through a lot of punching bags!

Sometimes Jarna would pace and talk to herself angrily in the ancient, dead language of her tribe. Usually while Jarna did that Annaliese would play energetically with some object, using hand movements to distract herself from the emotions and give herself an outlet for the desire to do something the emotions created. Every once in a while, when Jarna's emotions during these sessions got particularly hard for Annaliese to deal with, Annaliese would self-regulate by banging her head repetitively against a wall.

One time, while Jarna was pacing and talking angrily in the ancient, dead language of her tribe, Elle asked Annaliese what Jarna was saying. Annaliese said gently, "Mistress, she's talking in that language because she doesn't want the rest of us to understand what she's saying."

Elle's first reaction was annoyance, but then she realized: in this context this was actually seemed like a very good sign! She said to Annaliese, "Please don't call me that."

Annaliese said, "Sorry, Sister! Sometimes I forget!"

"Better," Elle said. And then she gestured vaguely at Jarna and said, "But... She's expressing anger at Tatasi, isn't she?"

Annaliese nodded slightly, more of a single slow bowing and unbowing of the head (she did that often), and said, "Yes, she is."

A very good sign! She was expressing anger at Tatasi, and even while under blood thrall to Elle she was developing a desire to keep secrets from Elle, to have privacy from her! A very good sign in this context!

A day came when Jarna developed enough independence of mind to make a request of Elle, an important request, to ask her something, to ask her for another promise, to swear another oath.

Jarna said, "I ask that you save my son."

Her son. The one Grandfather made her to bear, all those millennia ago. He was still alive. Or, at least, he had been when Grandfather sold her and sent her off to Elle. He was still one of Grandfather's thralls. He was almost as old as Jarna now; she'd been less than two centuries old when she'd given birth to him. He looked like an old man now. He had never known freedom.

Elle swore an oath to save Jarna's son, and set him free, just like she'd set Jarna free. She swore that she'd do it when she fulfilled her first oath to Jarna and killed Grandfather.

A day came, sooner than Elle had expected, when she and Annaliese judged that Jarna was ready for the blood thrall to be withdrawn. And that day Jarna took no blood into her, and the thrall connections between her and Elle and Annaliese thinned and broke. And a little while after they broke, Jarna smiled and said she was experiencing her first hours of true freedom in twenty-five thousand years, and she liked being free, and she thanked Elle and Annaliese for freeing her.

Elle and Annaliese kept Jarna around for a little while, to make sure Grandfather's thrall-brainwashing was truly gone from her, and to make sure her mind was free in the way they intended. A few times they put her back under blood thrall for just an hour or so, just to look into her thoughts and see what was happening in her mind. And eventually Elle presented Jarna to the Directorate, and Jarna left Elle's estate, and went to make her own life.

Jarna is... almost free now. There was one bit of control Elle installed in her. Jarna will not betray Elle. Jarna will not do anything that would radically ruin Elle's plans, endanger Elle's life. Elle and Annaliese carved those mental pathways into Jarna deep. They may erode in a century or so; by then it won't matter, by then Elle will have succeeded or failed, and if she's succeeded she'll be too powerful for the Directorate to harm her, she'll be giving orders to the Directorate. Elle comforts herself with the notion that a century or so is trivial compared to the amount of lifespan Jarna probably has left. Elle felt putting this in was necessary, because Jarna does have some pretty serious kompromat on Elle, just knowing about her plans related to the 'programme.' It was either that or erase a good chunk of Jarna's memories of her time with Elle, and to Elle that seemed a worse violation.

Jarna visits the graduate school sometimes. Elle can trust her with that.

Jarna is... mostly free now. And seems to be happy, and living her best life. Elle is happy about that.

-----------

Author's note: I couldn't resist the Grandmother/Grandfather parallel.

[acersgenderhoard]

pinned post, please read!

EDIT - i havent updated most of this in ages. its outdated currently

★・・・・★my names/pronouns★・・・・★

[plain text: “my names/pronouns” end plain text.]

i go by castiel, strat, jack, avis, and ghoul currently (+ more), but i’m not picky abt what you call me! i’ll answer to most anything :)

i currently use he/★/rot/it/sun/lethe/day/it/lux/none/⚣, but it does change sometimes (i update the list in this post pretty regularly, and i do always use he/him, so when in doubt, default to that!)

★・・・・・・ ★ about me!★・・・・・・★

[plain text: “about me!” end plain text.]

i’m 17. i’m white, physically abled, autistic, and have adhd, depression and generalized anxiety. i’m professionally diagnosed w all but depression, but i’m pro informed self-dx

i’m an arospec ace bi gay guy

i support all good-faith identities, including “conflicting” labels like lesboys/turigirls or bi lesbians/gays.

★・・・・・★recoins/etc★・・・・・★

[plain text: “recoins/etc” end plain text.]

please don’t redesign flags for any of my terms without permission. you’re absolutely free to use my flags for picrews, pfps, etc as long as you credit me, though, and i’m fine with editing my flags to make them more accessible (eg making a flag less bright to avoid eyestrain)

also: if something is inadvertently offensive or harmful about a term i coin, please let me know and i’ll delete or edit any posts i have about it !!

this blog is a sideblog, and i can’t follow or send asks from it. @fagboybreakdowns is my main :)

also, i try to remember to put alt text and plain text in my posts but i sometimes forget (and sometimes it just glitches). if you’d like plain text or an id on a particular post of mine that doesn’t have it, ask and i can provide it (i also greatly appreciate other people adding ids and/or transcribing my posts, y’all are awesome)!

★・・・・★tagging system!★・・・・★

[plain text: “tagging system!” end plain text.]

#percys genders: things i’ve coined

#percys reblogs: things i’m reblogging

#percys tangents: anything off-topic i reblog or post/things not directly related to terms or flags. this includes stuff about me, about transness or mogai identities in general, or about this blog. Could end up with some stuff about politics etc too, although I try to keep that to my main blog

#percys hoard: all the terms i use, including ones i’ve coined and ones i’ve reblogged!

#percys asks: any reqs or other asks i get!

#not a gender: anything that’s a mogai term but not a gender - sexuality stuff, aldernic terms, etc.

★・・・・・・★requests!★・・・・・・★

[plain text: “requests!” end plain text.]

i will coin new terms and make flags and flag combos, and i’ll do name and pronoun validations and suggestions, as well as make term moodboards!

i won’t do recoins, new flags for existing terms (unless they’re flagless currently or the term creator is ok with it), etc. i won’t do term searches. i won’t coin attraction terms (sexualities, romantic identities, etc). i also won’t coin terms related to being part of a marginalized group i’m not part of (poc, physically disabled, etc).

★・・・・・・・★ dni★・・・・・・・★

[plain text: “dni” end plain text.]

-kink/nsfw/18+ blog

-exclus

-transphobes

-thinspo/pro-ana

-bad-faith label users (like “animesexual”, “attack helicopter”, “trans age” etc)

-anti self-dx

-anti otherkin/therian

-cringe culture supporters

-bigots of any kind

-aspie supremacy/autistic ableism

also, a note: if you’re on my dni, you can still use any of my terms. feel free to just screenshot my posts instead of reblogging them :)

[hussyknee]

Exactly! White supremacy is at the root of so much of these problems. Not the only one mind, but one of the most overarching.

Also I think Western individualism has induced a particular myopia in white people, and the West in general. It's harder for your marginalized to separate oppressive systems from individuals and individual responsibility. Probably because the scope of a systemic issue is a lot more crushing, but also because so much of your politics are informed by either socio-economically privileged white people, or constructed in opposition to them.

In the former case, it's very hard for people with white middle class privilege to understand the complex, intersecting, centuries-long colonial systems that crush you from birth to death, mostly because they have little communal and generational context for it. It's like they wake up one day, get mad and cast around for a scapegoat, instead of using it as a catalyst to self-reflect and learn from people who have long histories of dealing with oppression. In the latter case, communities of colour who're Othered and disenfranchised directly by white settler colonialism react to the possibility of cultural genocide with paranoia and isolationism. This is in many ways understandable, although harmful and oppressive to themselves.

So those are the two models y'all have, to deal with deeply entrenched problems that won't see a lot of solutions within our lifetimes. Which means the discourses around systemic issues keep being deflected onto the familiar, tried-and-true fear of the Other.

Another key factor is the white Protestant capitalism that drives the Global North (read up on Max Weber, kids). Everything is a matter of personal motivation. Whether you prosper or fail is down to your individual efforts that are judged and rewarded by the divine. This is less about religion and more dyed into the fabric of the Global North consumer culture. It follows then, that oppression too can be fought by individual moral arbitration and consuming only the Pure and Unproblematic, and associating with only those like you. It's all about a sense of control by identifying the enemy and creating a special clubhouse of the Chosen by excluding those who won't qualify. Also, oppression is seen purely through the lens of individual suffering, and suffering is a demonstration of virtue, and virtue is power. It's why purity culture is so protective of trauma and victimhood. It's the currency of the Chosen.

This Calvinist conditioning is similar to the wagon-circling of diaspora and racial minorities I mentioned before. Queer people of colour, especially queer kids of colour, suddenly finding themselves abandoned by the value systems of their own communities, gravitate to the familiarity of these white queer politics and its lure of acceptance and inclusion. White queer politics in turn latch onto the language and models of racial oppression, which is why they start appropriating race discourse terms like "colonizing spaces", and framing queerness also, like race, as a heritage of grief. That race is an external construct imposed purely by white supremacy, while gender and sexuality is an internal experience that simply asks to be normalised, is lost on all of them.

It's all just performative, angry demagoguery, more interested in the proving themselves worthy of the privilege denied to them than dismantling the systems of said privilege. Conflating individuals with systems just muddies the waters, creates divisions and perpetuates a narrative of perpetual victimhood that you end up having to cling to for dear life, instead of building solidarity and coalitions with other marginalized folks to fight back as a juggernaut against the institutions with actual power.

ngl sometimes the way white queer people talk sounds like you guys think you own the monopoly on being othered by society when that is very much not how the world works 

[aropinions]

So What Is Exclusionism, Anyway?

As I've looked through inclusionist circles, I've come to a startling realization that most of them have an extremely skewed understanding of what exclusionism is (along with its various offshoots, subtypes, and related beliefs). They equate it to hatred of whatever group is being excluded, and they don't think people part of the excluded group could ever support exclusionism.

So, I've decided to write a long post to clear up some of those misconceptions. This post is mainly targeted to inclusionists and people wondering where they stand on the inclus/exclus sides of various types of discourse, but if you're exclusionist already, please feel free to reblog or boost it. <3 Thanks in advance for reading!

I'll start by introducing myself. Hi, I'm Ivy, or at least that's what I go by on here. I am a heterosexual, aromantic female. I am neurodivergent (ADHD, so forgive me if I ramble or write in a scatterbrained way) and have several other mental illnesses that I don't wish to talk about online. I do not have gender dysphoria, but I do not "feel feminine," and my personality has been described as rather masculine. In fact, many people in the inclusionist trans community have tried to convince me that I'm nonbinary because I don't feel a strong connection to a female gender, and I'll talk about that more later in this post.

I'm going to put all my relevant discourse opinions on the table right now. (In the next paragraph, I'm going to explain what all these labels actually mean and why they don't automatically make someone a horrible person.) Contrary to popular belief, I am not a trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF), an aphobe, a transphobe, or a bigot. I am ace-exclusionist, aro-exclusionist, trans-exclusionist, transmedicalist, pro-LGB, and gender-critical.

Now here's the fun part. Bear with me -- we're about to debunk the myths about these opinions, explain each term's real definition, and talk about some of the reasoning behind the beliefs.

Exclusionism, as a blanket term, is the belief that gatekeeping is necessary to make any group or community meaningful and safe. Various types of exclusionists fight against the lumping together of various marginalized identities or groups, because they believe that letting different types of people into spaces meant for more specific groups will detract from the safety and functionality of those spaces. They do not hate the groups they are excluding, and they typically want to exclude both ways. For example, ace exclusionists don't want allosexual LGBT let into ace spaces any more than they want asexuals let into LGBT spaces. Many exclusionists in LGBT discourse support the exclusion of groups that they themselves are part of, because in addition to the idea that it's harmful to the main LGBT community to lump them into it, they also think their group deserves its own recognition as a separate thing from the LGBT community. Exclusionism is not hatred.

Time to get into more specific terms. Let's start pretty simple, with truscum and transmeds. Someone who is truscum believes that people must have dysphoria to be trans. Someone who is transmedicalist believes that gender dysphoria is a mental disorder, and that transness is a medical condition synonymous with gender dysphoria. All transmeds are truscum, but not all truscum are transmeds. Most truscums and transmeds are against MOGAI, neopronouns, gender microlabels (e.g. genderflux or demiboy), and xenogenders. Most truscums believe in nonbinary people. There are some transmeds who don't believe nonbinary dysphoria is real, but they're not the majority.

The direct opposite of truscum and transmed is "tucute," which denotes a belief that dysphoria is not required to be transgender and gender identity is completely unrelated to biological sex or medical disorders/conditions. Tucutes also generally support MOGAI, xenogenders, neurogenders, microlabels, and neopronouns.

Next, we have bio-essentialism. Bio-essentialism is the belief that oppression is based on biological sex, not gender identity, and that identifying as a different gender than your birth sex doesn't automatically mean you are oppressed. This doesn't necessarily mean bio-essentialists believe that gender doesn't exist or that you can't identify as whatever you want, just that your social oppression is based off your biological sex. Not all bio-essentialists are truscum or transmeds, but most are. Bio-essentialists prominently use the terms "male" and "female" to describe biological sex rather than gender identity, and non-radical ones will use "man" and "woman" as blanket terms that include transmen and transwomen while maintaining "male" and "female" as words for biological sex only.

Then, we have the big bad term, TERF. I've seen a lot of people misuse the TERF label, so I'm going to try to clarify its actual meaning. The acronym stands for "trans-exclusionary radical feminist." It's important to break that down into two main parts -- TE and RF -- because trans-exclusionists are often called TERFs when most of them don't fit the "RF" part of the acronym at all.

Trans-exclusionism (TE) means that you believe transgender issues/discourse/activism should be separated from LGB issues/discourse/activism because they are fundamentally different. L, G and B all have one thing in common: being attracted to people of the same sex as you. T is about someone's gender, not their sexual orientation, so trans-exclusionists believe that the LGB and the T should not be lumped into the same community. It doesn't mean they think trans people deserve less respect or are not real. Most trans-exclusionists are also truscum or transmedicalist, but not all are. Many trans-exclusionists who are also feminists are gender-critical, but not all are. Pro-LGB is a synonym of trans-exclusionist, but in my experience, people who describe themselves as "pro-LGB" are more likely to also be gender-critical than those who identify themselves as "trans-exclusionist."

Radical feminism (RF) is a subset of feminism that -- in addition to general feminist beliefs -- is anti-porn, anti-kink, against the makeup industry, and very often openly misandrist. Radical feminists are not always trans-exclusionist, and trans-exclusionists are not always radical feminists (in fact, most aren't). Most radfems are anti-capitalist, and all are against pink capitalism and rainbow capitalism (the commercialization of feminist ideas, gay rights, etc.) Most radfems are truscum or transmedicalist, but not all are.

All TERFs are also gender-critical. "Gender-critical" people are bio-essentialist, but they go a step further to say that gender identity is a meaningless term, and that biological sex is the sole basis of oppression. However, one can be gender-critical and still support trans people if one is a transmedicalist. GC transmeds believe that trans people are still oppressed in society according to their biological sex, not their gender identity, but that social/physical transitioning is acceptable as a treatment for the mental disorder known as gender dysphoria.

Neither trans-exclusionism nor radical feminism is inherently transphobic or hateful toward transgender people. To differentiate a regular trans-exclusionist from a TERF, ask yourself if the person fits the radfem beliefs outlined above. If not, they aren't a TERF.

Now that all of that is covered, we can talk about the last couple types of exclusionism I want to touch on -- asexual exclusionism and aromantic exclusionism. These almost always come together as a package called aro/ace-exclusionism or aspec-exclusionism, but it is technically possible to be ace-exclusionist and not aro-exclusionist (or vice versa), though I've never personally met someone with such beliefs. Aspec-exclusionists believe that aspec people should not be included in the LGBT community because the lack of sexual or romantic attraction is a completely separate struggle and involves separate experiences than having attractions that exist, but are not heterosexual. Some more extreme aro/ace exclusionists strongly gatekeep aromanticism and asexuality. These ones don't believe in microlabels on the "aro spectrum" or "ace spectrum" such as demisexual or grayromantic. They maintain the belief that if someone has sexual attraction (regardless of whether they actually pursue people sexually) then they are not asexual, and if someone feels romantic attraction at all (even if they don't pursue romantic relationships) they are not aromantic.

Aro/ace-exclusionists, regardless of their beliefs on aromantic and asexual spectrums or microlabels, are not inherently aphobic. They only want aromanticism and asexuality to be separated from the rest of the LGB or LGBT community, and treated as their own distinct identities.

I hope this post was informative, and if anyone has feedback on anything I should edit, they should let me know in replies. Regardless of your beliefs, if you actually read this whole post or even just scrolled to the bottom, I'd like to offer a sincere thanks for bearing with me thus far. If you are an inclusionist or otherwise disagree with the things in the post, but you read it anyway, I have a lot of respect for your willingness to hear opinions other than yours rather than blindly blocking out everything you disagree with.

No matter who you are, I hope you have a great day. <3

[cat-sapphics]

Hey!

I follow the" aroace lesbian" tag and your recent posts have come up in my feed so I just wanted to say that being arospec, acespec (demiromatic graysexual, both labels in the aromantic and asexual spectrums) & lesbian is completely OKAY and you should not let anyone tell you the contrary. Especially uneducated people so 😚🤍

Many aroaces use the term aroace to encompass being in both aromantic and asexual spectrums; this means you experience little to no romantic/sexual attraction and that's more than valid. You can be both arospec and aspec! 🔥 Or arospec and asexual. Aromantic and acespec 🥺🤝

The way YOU experience romantic and sexual attraction is just different to the average allo person, & that doesn't make it any less valid. Attraction is an abstract concept and we shouldn't be putting ourselves into boxes but letting feelings be that, feelings.

Your experiences are necessary and important to our diverse & big aro/ace communities as an aroace lesbian! An aspec person is that who experiences little to no romantic attraction. That's it. THAT'S OKAY 🥰

And being an aspec lesbian is more than valid too, it's not a contradictory term because the little and fluctuating romantic & sexual attraction you DO experience, is ONLY towards women/nb so; I don't see why lesbian isn't a term you can't use. A lesbian is a women/nb female aligned person who experiences romantic, sexual and/or emotional attraction towards women/nb female aligned people. Check, check & check ✅

All in all, ace lesbians, aro lesbians and aroace lesbians are ALL part of the lesbian community & our unique experiences with romance and sex are necessary and valid for it 💓

Sorry if this got long, hope I made my point clear. Aroace lesbians have always been lesbians so don't let any exclusionists steal your peace 🧡🤍💖

thank you!! thank ya thank ya thank ya!! i really appreciate it <3

i will say, i think some of the anons i got did make some valid points (obviously not everywhere you look but they at least gave me something to think about in general) but it really took me by surprise how condescending and disapproving they all were. super uneducated too, i said i experience attraction differently or at least less frequently than average allo people and like ?? that doesn't mean i'm secretly a self-hating lesbophobe ?? you don't get to determine that for me if i'm genuinely happy even though i participate in lesbian discourse and am passionate about keeping the definition specific and closed ?? lol i didn't redefine lesbian or take away its initial meaning so it really had me peeved

i think most of their comments reflect on how they don't believe in aromanticism and asexuality being a spectrum, which i guess i invited by my own doing since i have some conservative and exclusionary views on the lgbt community and that affects my following/audience, but my response to that is that i use these labels because they bring me personal comfort. when i say i'm demiromantic i don't mean that alloromantics have zero standards when it comes to a potential partner or are completely mesmerized by the idea of hook-ups, just that the connection they need to start crushing comes within a decent time period with a personal connection, but not a super strong and deep and loving one that makes it exceptionally hard to fall in love despite however much we may desire to. the label doesn't exist to imply something bad about """normal""" people, it exists to name an experience many people have but to an intense degree. so, yes, it's a pointless social construct, it probably means nothing to you and that's fine, but it still means something to me. i'm not crying oppression or marginalization, and i'm not claiming that i'm lgbt on the basis of being demiromantic/greyasexual, but through being a nonbinary lesbian. that's the difference between mspec lesbians and aspec lesbians, is one is actively harmful to multiple groups and actually Does spawn from a place of internalized lesbophobia and/or biphobia, and the other is just "mmk this is just for me and affects nothing at all, it doesn't drag you into anything at all, i still qualify for lesbian the way you (should!) see it as technically even if you do believe it's redundant, so just... leave me alone" cause it reflects more on them than me when they make it their business by unfairly assuming things about me

same applies to me being greyasexual. still trying to figure out if it means that i experience sexual/physical attraction less frequently, less intensely, or both, but does that matter?? genuinely?? this is also redundant but i didn’t wanna leave it out of the paragraph about me being demiro fk;ljslkgbdvhbs. the aro disapproval part isn’t acceptable at all but i can at least see it since romance is so normalized and is a core part of, y’know, lgb relationships; the greyace disapproval however....... i don’t wanna label it as acephobia because i don’t really believe in aphobia being a thing, but it still kinda rubs me wrong to claim that sexual/physical attraction is a requirement ykyk... NOTHING WRONG WITH PEOPLE WHO HAVE SEX OF COURSE (i myself kinda wanna try someday if that works out) i just think frowning upon someone who doesn’t UNLESS they try to claim they’re lgbt on that basis is.................. not really cool. i really hope people who read this understand what i’m trying to say and don’t label me as an ace inclus who thinks aphobia and oppression are real, i was just trying to make a point about my personal experiences oops lmao

and then it became "aroace means NO ATTRACTION AT ALL" okay... so i'm angled aroace, that's a sub-term since aroace is literally an umbrella term, actually (unlike lesbian, shit's complicated ykyk). "YOU'RE NOT AROACE THEN"....... they don't even like the idea of oriented aroace now either, so like, what then, are aroace people just never allowed to feel love or positive feelings from other people ever? jesus christ. i'm not even getting into this, i consider aro/ace identities to be secondary to describe one's attraction so this debate should not be as important as, say, discourse centering the L, G, B, or T. it's just dumb all around tbh

hope i addressed all the arguments against it, but i can't really care at this point if i missed something :/ i'll probably get a mean anon about it so don't worry!! /s jslgjgjkshkj;lhfp

speaking of, i've had to delete so many anons and even turn off the option to ask anonymously because of this discourse. it's so pointless in my opinion, so i've just stopped giving them my time unless i think it's worth answering - but even then, i try to keep it fairly short. i genuinely was not expecting my take on (cishet) ace discourse to turn into myself failing to be seen as a "real lesbian" despite literally meeting its definitive qualifications and then it just kept building up ?? stan behavior tbh, especially since plenty of them obviously come from the same users

i apologize for the rant. i just never really felt like i'd be listened to if i tried to explain my identity, so i gave up and just tried to ignore my way out of it. so i really genuinely appreciate your ask, especially since i can identify you. it really feels like i actually have someone on my side now, so even if you ever disagree i'd know you wouldn't harass me about it. it really means a lot, i really needed this from you and i don't wanna dump more shit but i feel that you deserve to know. so thank you again <3

[grandhotelabyss]

“Economically conditioned” power is not, of course, identical with “power” as such. On the contrary, the emergence of economic power may be the consequence of power existing on other grounds. Man does not strive for power only in order to enrich himself economically. Power, including economic power, may be valued “for its own sake.” Very frequently the striving for power is also conditioned by the social “honor” it entails. Not all power, however, entails social honor: The typical American Boss, as well as the typical big speculator, deliberately relinquishes social honor. Quite generally, “mere economic” power, and especially “naked” money power, is by no means a recognized basis of social honor. Nor is power the only basis of social honor.

[...]

We have seen above that the market and its processes “knows no personal distinctions”: “functional” interests dominate it. It knows nothing of “honor.” The status order means precisely the reverse, viz.: stratification in terms of “honor” and of styles of life peculiar to status groups as such. If mere economic acquisition and naked economic power still bearing the stigma of its extra-status origin could bestow upon anyone who has won it the same honor as those who are interested in status by virtue of style of life claim for themselves, the status order would be threatened at its very root. This is the more so as, given equality of status honor, property per se represents an addition even if it is not overtly acknowledged to be such. Yet if such economic acquisition and power gave the agent any honor at all, his wealth would result in his attaining more honor than those who successfully claim honor by virtue of style of life. Therefore all groups having interests in the status order react with special sharpness precisely against the pretensions of purely economic acquisition.

—Max Weber, “Class, Status, Party”

The replies are full of left-liberals complaining that they have Ph.D.s but no money in the metropole, in marked contrast to the boat-dealership-owning MAGA CHUDS of the exurban and rural hinterland. But, if I may say as an only-semi-employed holder of a humanities doctorate, that’s just part of the story, and not the main part. 

The main part is this: the expert class, which has status with or without economic power, has allied itself to the higher-status wings of the economically dominant (tech, media) and to one of the major political parties (the Democrats). This might be unremarkable and unobjectionable, but it’s become an existential problem in the last two years as the expert class increasingly uses its communicative expertise to promote fear propaganda and panic porn (the pandemic, climate-as-the-real-pandemic, racism-as-the-real-pandemic) not to combat real social problems within liberal norms but rather to legitimate centralized corporate and governmental power, this to grant itself largesse and patronage out of the public weal: social workers in place of police, free college, an expanded human resource sector, the rise of the fact-checker as ideological censor—this is what they mean when they call everything “infrastructure”—not to mention ongoing conversations about banning those who lack status from medical care, banking, employment, and other necessities on the model of the “social credit score.” 

One doesn’t have to sympathize with the fabled boat dealer’s often phony and belligerent populism to see this expert arrogation as a—or maybe the—prime social irritant today, especially now that the resentful expert class of laptop workers has tasted the power to subject the lower classes to lockdownism without end and on any pretext, to include humanity’s being such a blight on the earth that the mass of us should never enjoy free exercise again and must instead live a permanently circumscribed, remedial life of bare state subsistence (to put it in online vernacular: the pod, the bugs). 

What can socialism mean in such an atmosphere other than the obliteration of civil rights and liberties for whatever pittance the state and the monopolies promise to give us? The celebrity example of Russell Brand tells the tale: anyone who had earnest left-wing convictions in the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and Occupy Wall Street will, if we’re being honest, oppose the aspiring behemoth the left has become. As Camus wrote in another moment of unprecedented centralization:

We must admit that today conformity is on the Left. To be sure, the Right is not brilliant. But the Left is in complete decadence, a prisoner of words, caught in its own vocabulary, capable merely of stereotyped replies, constantly at a loss when faced with the truth, from which it nevertheless claimed to derive its laws. The Left is schizophrenic and needs doctoring through pitiless self-criticism, exercise of the heart, close reasoning, and a little modesty. Until such an effort at re-examination is well under way, any rallying will be useless and even harmful. (“Socialism of the Gallows” [1957], Resistance, Rebellion, and Death)

Insofar as there is a racial subtext to this problem, as in America there always is, I do appreciate what we might in part take to be Coaston’s implied rebuke to old Reagan-era “welfare queen” rhetoric positioning poor African-Americans as in fact privileged by state intervention. It’s not the ’80s anymore, though. The chief ideologue of the Republicans in their current configuration, Steve Bannon, never says anything remotely resembling this and instead emphasizes how “working-class minorities” are abused and deprived by cultural and economic elites that hoard both class power and social status for themselves. Maybe he’s being cynical when he makes that argument—and I am conscious of his larger geopolitical goal, which is global dominance against China—but then again in politics it doesn’t matter what you really believe, only what you feel you have to say to attain power. 

Meanwhile, as the condition of the cities deteriorates further and further, the expert class tries harder and harder to convince the “marginalized people” of whom it has elected itself tribune that there is some transitivity to a MacArthur Fellowship: that Ibram X. Kendi’s being profitably consecrated a genius ennobles you, too, even if you’ve been shot dead by the side of the road. This brand of thinking is no less an imposture than anything Bannon says, and is in fact harder on its face to credit. How long can this go on? I fear we’ll soon find out.

[greenbergsays]

So, you're the closest thing I have to a "friend"* in fandom, and you seem to know your fandom history and have a level take on a lot of things, so I hoped I could bother you for your opinion on something. This is a long and kind of heavy/complicated question so if you don't have the mental space for it, please feel free to disregard it entirely.

So, I absolutely adore an anime (My Hero Academia), and I really want to write for it, but I personally headcanon my favorite character (Shoto Todoroki) as having DID. I've written a lot of personal snippets for myself about it and done lots of research because it sort of became a new special interest for me, and I really want to start writing proper fics and sharing them again. However, my problem is sort of twofold.

I don't want to insult people who actually live with DID by writing a character that is inaccurate, and I know research will only get me so far. I understand that stories don't have to be perfectly realistic in fanfiction contexts (eg, the difference between posting Master of the Universe vs Fifty Shades of Grey) but I don't want to cause more harm to an already marginalized community, even if unintentionally.

The other issue is that the fandom is kind of known for being incredibly toxic in some circles, especially on platforms like tiktok and twitter. I worry that even if I openly say I want criticism on my stories so I CAN do better, I'll just get flooded with hate comments about it not being canon, or arguing about basic shit like how I portray my characters vs how they perceive them from the show, rather than getting any actual feedback that could help.

I really love this fandom, and I really want to get back in to writing. It was one of the few things that gave me joy before my entire life turned upside down, and I want to get back to doing things that make me happy. But I've had so many bad experiences with harassing comments that I'm not sure how to move forward with wanting to continue, much less when I want to touch such a delicate topic.

*I use this term incredibly loosely, I just follow you and appreciate your content and you were the first person to pop in my mind when someone said ask a friend about it, I sincerely apologize if that upsets or offends you in any way

So here’s the thing, right.

I did once read a fic where Bucky Barnes had DID because of his lifelong trauma. I thought it was a well-thought-out fic, unique and memorable, and I don’t feel like it was toxic or harmful in its portrayal, but I also don’t have DID.

I don’t know how someone living with it experiences that fic or the one you would write.

I would recommend a sensitivity reader rather than declaring open season in the comments. I would recommend getting one before you even start the fic, actually, because you don’t know whether or not the idea/plot itself will be harmful to them as a whole and you don’t want to go through that much work only to figure out you have to scrap it all.

The other thing I will say is that you’ll have to prepare yourself for the harassing comments. I hate them, I don’t agree with them, I will do everything in my power to fight them and teach better etiquette, but this is the internet and people are NOTORIOUSLY ASSHOLES on the internet.

Even with a sensitivity reader that okays a story, people are gonna try to come at you that don’t experience the issues or even know someone who does, bc they like to be Performatively Woke In Public for the kudos or whatever.

So you really gotta weigh whether or not you wanna rock that boat or if you just want to share your story with a privileged few. It might be easier that way.

I hope this helps? Even a little bit?

And good luck!

EDIT: Actually, I thought about this as soon as I hit post, so lemme add

If your story ideas are about the DID experience itself, I wouldn’t recommend writing that. Having a story with a certain type of character with a completely separate plot is inclusive and I encourage that, but when it comes to stories that are “experiences with x” exclusively, it’s one of those “own voices” things. 

Allow queer people to write queer experiences, black people to write black experiences, etc. But absolutely include these kinds of characters in your fantasy/sci-fi story where that isn’t the plot itself.

[olderthannetfic]

Sorry if you’ve answered this question before but why do you, or your followers, think antis kind of exploded within these like 4-5 years? At least I feel like it did, I had to put hold on my fandom life to graduate and when I’ve come back not only they were much more visible they had much more influence over other people’s behaviour too. And it’s still increasing, at least I feel like that. I don’t really understand why now. Thanks for all the amazing history preservation efforts and take care.

Aww, thanks!

I’m not really sure why they’re “exploding”. I think it’s more about perception or critical mass than a sudden jump. The reality is probably a long, slow, steady progression, but the perception is “levels below the cutoff for unacceptable” and “now it’s awful”.

The seeds of this kind of radfem anti-kink crap have been around for ages, and fans have been increasingly repackaging standard wanks (like which ship is better or who should top) in terms of social justice for years.

At the same time, the world is going to shit and the kind of queer-friendly fandom that is eating its own right now is increasingly panicked about the state of things. Put a bunch of rats in a too-small cage, and the results are unpleasant.

I wouldn’t discount how much this kind of shit is going on everywhere, not just in fandom. It’s partly current events, but it’s also the long slow regressive slog from a relatively free internet to monetized corporate hell. We need to get the fuck off of cesspits like twitter and instagram that prioritize influencer bullshit, clickbait, and shoving people who hate each other together. Tumblr’s awful too, though at least it enables longer, more thoughtful responses... marginally. As I’ve said elsewhere, I have hopes for Bobaboard, and Dreamwidth still has many uses.

Antis and the alt right have opposite political stances for the most part, but you can track the crap-ification of social media by those racist fuckfaces ruining youtube and that kind of thing. The shitty, money-making design of social media that enables those pricks also enables antis. It seems like social media in general has become more of a shitshow of late.

I also can’t help but think that AO3 is a victim of its own success too and this is rippling through fandom.

I was just talking to someone young who commented that they used to hate AO3 for allowing “immoral” works before they realized why it looks how it does. In their fannish life, AO3 has always been there.

AO3 didn’t really get big till 2012, but that was 8 years ago, so people who were 13 then are now 21. People who were in college then are now in their late 20s. A huge chunk of anti-dom is fans who just don’t remember a fandom landscape pre-AO3. I’m talking fans who’ve spent a big chunk of their lives in fandom, fans who feel, with some justification, like they’re not n00bs and like they know shit.

Those fans have never known a world without AO3.

They have no concept of how embattled m/m content usually is outside of AO3 and certain tumblr bubbles.

They have no concept of how most purity wankers prior to this hated all m/m and painted queer people as child molesters and how sensitized a lot of us are to “purity” language.

They have no concept of how censorship hits queer content earliest and worst and jacks up the ratings on completely tame material.

They certainly have no concept of the feminist sex wars of the 80s, of queer activism in the 90s, or of queer, feminist, and fandom history in general.

Most “antis” aren’t the ones who engage in serious bullying. Most of them are fans who have values I more or less agree with. They’re just operating on the delusion that we can stop children from getting hurt by shutting down all the “bad” media or that there’s a magic bullet that will fix society’s ills. I’m sure these stupid ideas are comforting in an increasingly frightening world... But they’re also going to harm us in the long run and must be fought against.

The good news is that most fans are sick of fighting and being scared to speak their mind and get screamed at. Lots of people will de-escalate if given a chance to back down gracefully. And lots of people do change their minds with time and experience. But the platforms we inhabit try their hardest not to give us that chance.

[likecastle]

With all due respect, whenever I read posts about fandom racism, I can't help but think that while it's interesting, telling people that they should do some soul-searching instead of having fun is just not gonna be efficient. What exactly prevents you to just enjoy your corner of fandom whether white fans join in or not, and block the hate if you get some? (genuine question here) A lot of people have rarepairs or are in tiny fandoms and occasionally have to deal with drama, after all.

What prevents me from ‘just enjoying my corner of fandom’ is that I’m not comfortable looking the other way when people in my community say they feel unsafe or unwelcome. I am a white fan, and the assumption that I’m not white because I’ve reblogged some posts about fandom racism is telling, I think. But as a white fan, if I’m not listening to what people of color in this fandom have to say about their experiences, I’m failing them and I’m failing the fan community at large. Besides being concerned about the harm that’s being done to individual people, making any environment safe and welcoming for everyone only enriches it and makes it stronger. 

Comparing racism to fandom drama also misses the point. This isn’t a question of whether I ship Yennalt or Geraskier or Geraskefer or all or none of the above. Which characters we like -- or in the case of The Witcher, which version of the characters we like -- is certainly a matter of taste and of course we all have to accept that some people love things that are not of interest to us, and we love things that are not of interest to others. But feeling like you’re on the fringes of a fandom because you ship a rarepair or because you have a very specific headcanon others don’t share isn’t the same thing as getting harassed because of who you are, or being exposed to harmful discourse about people like you. That’s not just being in the minority, it’s being marginalized -- pushed out of the group not because of what you like, but because of who you are. Fans of color deserve to be accepted for who they are, and shouldn’t have to spend their time weathering personal attacks, as if that’s just the price they have to pay for existing in this space.

And, it’s worth pointing out, the idea that certain characters are people of color isn’t some fringe headcanon, either. The Netflix show is the version of the franchise that most people are familiar with at this point, not some small corner of the fandom. It’s OK if you love the version of Yennefer from the games, or if you’re attached to the version of Triss in the books, but that doesn’t change the fact that characters of color are part of the canon now. You don’t have to like the show, or how it handled certain characters. One of the beautiful things about a fandom with as many different iterations as The Witcher is that we can all pick and choose which bits of canon we want to adopt and which we want to discard. But if the fandom is consistently whitewashing characters of color, especially in contexts where nearly every other aspect of the show canon is retained, that ceases to be a matter of personal preference and becomes indicative of underlying biases that do real and palpable harm. 

And, yes, we’re all here to have fun, but what I hear when people of color talk about fandom racism is that they’re not able to enjoy the content in the same way I do because of the unconscious bias, explicit prejudice, and outright harassment they face. Staying silent about that puts my own comfort and enjoyment above theirs, and, frankly, it’s the same as condoning it. Racism isn’t just a problem for people of color to deal with, and as a white person, I’m not going to make anything better by looking the other way. That just sends the message that I believe it’s not my problem, but in reality it’s everyone’s problem, because not only does it do active harm to people of color, it weakens the fan community as a whole and makes it less rich and less interesting because we lose important perspectives and valuable voices.

If we really love a show and its fandom, we have a responsibility to take a hard look at the dynamics in the show itself, as well as the dynamics of the creative community that springs up around it. We owe it to one another to ask hard questions about the art we love and the fanart it inspires -- not because we don’t want people to enjoy it, but because we do. Being critical doesn’t mean I don’t love the franchise or the people in the fandom. It doesn’t mean we can’t have fun. But there’s no way to just enjoy something in a vacuum, and we owe it to one another to consider how our own experiences are interconnected, and what impact our behavior has on one another. This is especially true because, as others have said more eloquently than me, the biases that inform what we do or don’t like are not always conscious, and recognizing that our assumptions and unwitting behavior can have harmful effects -- and then trying to do better -- is a way of caring for one another, and for the long-term health of our community.

To suggest that fans of color who face harassment or discrimination should just ‘block the hate’ they get also ignores the very real toll that takes on someone emotionally and psychologically. I can’t in good conscience expect people to just rise above, when I have a chance to help, even if only in some small way, dismantle the behaviors that are hurting them. Once again, why would I prioritize my own comfort over someone else’s safety? If I care about the people whose fics I read and whose art and gifsets I reblog, who write insightful meta and delightful shitposts, why wouldn’t I do whatever I can to make sure they stick around and keep making more of the things I love? And even if their thing is not exactly my cup of tea, isn’t my fandom experience made richer because they’re part of it? Isn’t the chance that someone else might feel really seen and understood by their work worth the small amount of effort it takes me to stick up for them and make sure I’m not part of the reason they leave?