#and my familial experiences are very much shaped by my mixed race

[5-htagonist]

the boondocks is so good. i dont know what black american archetypal character is missing from that show other than ahhh favorable portrayals of black queerness but 2005 (presumably) cishet man creation so you know how that goes.

[byunpum]

Experiment 56

Neteyam x Human reader ( like a mix of human and Navi )

and sullyFAM x human reader, why not? <3

Tw: mmm neteyam baby, reader being mutant, neytiri being a sweetheart, nothing really out of the ordinary (until now ), all the characters are aged up 20's.

POV: Y/N is surprised that it is an indispensable piece for the human race. But for her family…

PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 | PART 4 | PART 5 | PART 6 | PART 7

Experiment 56 masterlist | Experiment 56 sequel Masterlist

Note: I had that story in my head for some days, and since nobody published something similar, I decided to create my own reading. From now on I warn you that I am not very expert in this Navi culture, but I did my best. And I'll be using events that happened in the movie, but they won't be exactly the same. And sorry for the spelling. English is not my mother tongue.

Document #456 “experiment 56” [human-navi] southern area:

“The experiment is making progress. After 30 attempts, we can finally say that the first embryo is taking shape. If this embryo grows as we all hope. This will be a huge turnaround for the human race."

Dr. Herdenson signs.

Yes, that was you… an experiment. Or better said “experiment 56”. A perfect mix of navi and human. You had your human body, but in your hair you were accompanied by the distinguished queue of the navis (tsaheylu) and the ability to breathe the air of pandora without any problem. You were a beautiful baby. Or that's what Jake said when he saw you in norm's arms. After the great battle, and after the humans were sent to earth, the peaceful scientists were the only ones who stayed, and that was when the investigations of the facilities that the military had in Pandora began. And that's where they found you. A newborn baby. Norm didn't know what to do and neither did any of the scientists, you were a whole new species, but you were still human. They had enough with spider, who was still a baby. So when Neytiri and Jake were picking up Kiri in the lab, Norm didn't hesitate to introduce him to this baby.

"what kind of baby is this?" Jake asks as he holds you in his arms.

“It's an experiment, I'm terrified to know what else they did, but… this is some kind of mix between human and navi. From what I could investigate they wanted to create a new race of humans.” said norm.

Neytiri didn't take her eyes off you, she couldn't believe that a human could have some navi characteristics. You were physically like the people in the sky, but you had your little braid. For neytiri you were a great miracle, eywa would not let any creature be created, if it had no meaning for life.

"I thought… since you guys are going to take Kiri, why don't you take Y/N" Norm said.

"Y / N" neytiri has taken you from Jake's arms and placed you on his chest. She felt something special…she didn't understand why she felt compassion and love for something created by humans.

"Well… I don't have a problem, but neytiri…" Jake looked at neytiri, who was already mesmerized by the baby she was holding in her arms.

“I will help you, I will also teach her about human culture. But I think it's only right that you take care of her these first days of her life. I know you guys will do a better job than me." Norm kept talking to Jake, and explaining how they found you. While neytiri, he was holding kiri and you in his arms. You wouldn't be her daughter, but she would take care of you like one.

Arriving home, neytiri quickly introduced the new babies, to her already born son, neteyam. She placed the three babies together, and looked at them for a while. Until the warm silence was interrupted by Jake. He placed his head on Neytiri's shoulder.

"Are you comfortable with all this? It's not much… ”Jake said, while Neytiri turned to see her mate now. “We have to introduce you to the clan, kiri and y/n…. they must be presented to eywa”. She said as she smiled.

And that's how you grew up in the sully family, you pretty much lived with them 24/7, occasionally going with norm and the other scientists to learn about your other culture. But your home was in the forest. Over time more members arrived, loak and tuk. And sometimes they were accompanied by a boy named spider, which neytiri did not like. You didn't understand why she didn't like the child, he was just like you, the only thing different was an oxygen mask and that she didn't have the queue. But otherwise he was just like you.

"why don't you love spider?" you asked as neytiri traced your hair. You were only about 10 years old at this time, and you already noticed the differences in treatment. “He's not like us,” Neytiri said, her voice serious. "But he looks like me" you raised your head higher, to make eye contact with the woman who was lovingly combing your hair. "Yes, but you're not like him… you're a navi." Neytiri did not want to delve too much into the subject. To her you were special, her special gift from her just like Kiri. She didn't like discussing these topics with you, plus they were difficult topics to understand.

The years passed 15, 16 then 19 and now 20 years. You were quite a woman, and it was not to brag, but you were very beautiful. Even mo'at she said it "for a mix, you are very beautiful" she always said this while you helped her with the medicines. And this is also not overlooked by the eldest son of the sully, neteyam.

You grew up with him, literally together. As children, you did everything in each other's company. Since you were smaller than normal navis children. Jake gave neteyam the task of taking care of you and always being by your side. Even when it came time to choose your ikran, neteyam made sure it was one you could master, but this turned out to be a disaster as your size prevented you from riding your ikran easily, to which neteyam promised you that his ikran was also yours. You were able to bond with smaller animals, but Jake was always afraid you'd get hurt. Therefore, you and neteyam always accompanied each other in hunting and exploring pandora. You were inseparable. You were attached to the other brothers, but with neteyam it was different, it seemed that you were meant for each other. Or so loak and spider said, while he made fun of you two for looking like gumballs.

“Jake is going to kill you…you know that” you said while Kiri was at your side. You referred to Jake by his name, but eywa knew that you loved him as your father.

"Well, if you keep quiet no one will find out" loak, trying to see what was left of a ruined laboratory. area that Jake had forbidden them to go to.

"I think we have to go, that's enough… kiri, spider, tuk y/n let's get out of here" neteyam got up from the grass while he took y/n's hand.

“hey, wait… we just started. Nothing will happen. We're just going to look and we'll go quickly” Spider said taking your other hand and pulling you closer to him. Neteyam did not find this gesture comfortable. He was in charge of you. Neteyam knew that if something happened to loak or spider the punishment would be light. But if you, kiri or tuk got hurt, he had to disappear from the peace of pandora. Because his parents were going to kill him. And, on the other hand, he didn't really like the physical contact that spider had with you. He felt intimidated, in the end spider and you shared more physical similarities. That you with him and that broke his heart.

"Come on, just for a while" tuk yelled as she made little faces at her older brother. “Don't be a party pooper…come on!!!” loak came out of the undergrowth and behind was spider going both to the laboratory. Kiri sighed and followed them and behind her was a tuk.

“We are going to get in trouble” said neteyam as he looked at you. “Well yes… but it is better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Come on…and I swear I'll stay by your side.” You look at neteyam, while he gives you an approving smile and chases after the others.

Upon entering the laboratory, they noticed that everything was consumed by nature. There were abandoned paperwork, among other things. Something was very noticeable, there was a very bad smell. "ahhhh disgusting" tuk shouted, while kiri covered his mouth. "Shut up, we have to be quiet" Kiri replies, as he continues further into the offices. Everything seemed taken from a movie, one of those you'd seen with norm. Everyone was investigating random things that were found, neteyam was by your side. His tail flicked back and forth alertly and would occasionally curl around your leg. "Neteyam I'm fine… calm down" you told him as you passed your hand through his arms. "You know I feel like this is not right, we should go." Before you could respond to neteyam, loak called you to go look at some documents he had found.

As you approached, you noticed that they were in an old desk, and this was in front of a capsule that was already broken. And these papers were in a folder, which had written on the front "experiment 56" and in small letters "new species (mutated humans)". Neteyam stood behind you, loak was on your right side and kiri and spider were on your left side, all of them were surrounding you. And they looked at you with great intrigue.

You knew you were different, but you had never seen yourself as a human, since neytiri always said that you were equal to a navi. And no one ever said anything about your appearance, or you never heard anything. So you didn't care much about your appearance, but you weren't unaware that you were different. So when you saw a title that could be related to you, you were shocked.

"Give me I open it for you!!!" spider took the documents and began to read them. You all knew how to read without any problem because norm had taught you as children. “experiment 56, we want…blah blah blah improving the human race, uniting the genes of the navis with the human. The purpose is to create a new race of super humans. So they can live in pandora and blah blah blah.” Spider kept talking, while the others just listened intently. Neteyam noticed how you were moving towards the capsule that was further on, I accompanied you "y/n…" he started to speak, but you interrupted him "I'm a damn experiment… a thing. I am a monster” Your eyes began to fill with tears, neteyam knelt down and made you look into his eyes “spider shut up… y/n look at me!!! You're not a thing, much less a monster. You are a navi, you are our family" Kiri approached and hugged you from behind "it's true, ignore what those papers say. Maybe they have nothing to do with you” you looked at neteyam and kiri with so much love. You loved them both so much. “but… the only person here with a tail and is human is y/n. So this talks about you” said loak while everyone looked at them with angry faces. And of course, you also loved that idiot.

You approached the papers, you took them and kept them in a small bag that you had on your waist. "How about we continue investigating?" They all started, but not even 5 minutes passed when a voice came out of the choker "y/n, where the hell are you?" It was Jake's voice. You pressed the button on the right to answer. "I'm with the boys for a walk?" You hear Jake's ragged breathing into the microphone, you know very well you're lying, "Is everyone there with you?" "Yes" they all respond at the same time "Listen, get out of wherever you are and go back home. Now!!!" the voice was stern "I hope you guys aren't in the abandoned lab or else" Jake's voice was interrupted when tuk replies that she's sorry, and that loak forced them to go.

While Jake began to scold loak, you and Kiri looked at each other in shock as they heard some voices coming from outside. You guys quickly left the back of the lab, making as little noise as possible. all of you ran silently into the forest, "I think voices are no longer heard here" said tuk, until a hand grabbed your hair and placed you on the ground. More people came out and took them all. Between screams and whimpers. A tall avatar came out of some corner of the forest, he had an authoritarian and evil appearance. He approached you and looked at your features "So you are the guinea pig they were looking for, you are beautiful" Your teary eyes could only look at the sinister look of that man, while you heard the screams of your family in the background.

p.s: This is a pilot, if you like it let me know, I have the whole story in my head.

[bluetortoist]

Showing off another Batman OC. This time, its my own Alice. I know. So original 🙄 but I can't help myself. She's a very accomplished chemist who crossed paths with Mad Hatter and later on became his lover.

(More info of her down below! History kind of dubious, be warned)

Name: Alice (real name: Eleanor Carole)

Nickname: Alias "Dear Alice"

Age: 30

Gender: Cis Female

Identifies: Demisexual

Race: Human

Ethnicity: White

Nationality: American

Birth town: Lansing, Michigan

Current Living: Gotham City

Allegiance: Chaotic Neutral-Lawful Evil

Powers/Abilites:

• Being a chemist, she has experimented and perfected two different formulas to mutate one's body to grow bigger or smaller. They can be ingested as is, or injected/mixed in with various ingredients. She uses this as both a defense (Bigger) and stealth (Smaller) strategy. However, she can't use it too much or else has negative effects on the body.

• She has a few versions of long armed, Horse's Hammer formed in the shape of a pink flamingo, one heavy, the other light; It, no doubt, causes pretty hefty damage.

• Even though she has become more physically strong since working with Tetch, she still only knows basic self defense and fist-fight combat, but has always (and always will), kept a knife on her body since moving to Gotham.

History: Eleanor was born into a family of domestic abuse but doesn't remember too much from that time other than that they were clearly unhappy together. Luckily, she didnt get to experience that environment for long because both her parents died in a car accident when she was 4. She was sent to live in an orphanage until she was 10 and was adopted to a family of doctors and physicians. It was through them she found her interest/obsession with chemistry. Even though they try, Eleanor rarely get to see both her parents at the same time since both had conflicting work schedules at the time, and spent a good chunk of her school years making and losing friends and putting more effort in her hobbies. This was about the time (10-13) her emotional detachment problems for people started to develop. Graduated top of her class with her Chemist degree, no friends, but got a boyfriend in a one-sided relationship. They started living together once they moved to Gotham. Got a job at a chemical reasearch facility that was a branch of Wayne Labs, but wasnt that well liked; was considered a "cold genius" among other coworkers. Decided to go see a therapist to help with herself as well (much to her boyfriends chagrin). Both those took all of her time that it was putting a strain on her relationship with her boyfriend. Somewhere around this time was when she was feeling at her lowest and also when she met Jervis and soon became friends (whom she already knew was the Mad Hatter). She begun seeing him a lot more after venting her personal and emotional troubles to him (quite literally saying that she wishes she was born as someone else) and he suggests his own kind of hypnosis therapy to help bring feelings up to the surface, all while conditioning her into a version of Alice. She consented to this kind of therapy, desperate to feeling anything like any sort of person at this point. (Basically: delusional man teaches girl how to manifest a new persona to actively dissociate 💀). This continues on and eventually (and quickly) start to form a relationship. The boyfriend, already pissed enough, already suspects she is seeing someone else. Confronts her one night about it, says hes kicking her out and almost turns into a fight, but she manages to beat him unconscious in self defense. In a panic, she runs right back to Jervis, and he offers to let her stay. He goes out and kills the boyfriend himself before finding out the boyfriend had made a report on her to the police. She stays in hiding for a couple of weeks afterwards. In that time, she and her Alice persona has become one in the same and doesn't even remember her old name anymore and only small bits of her early life. Alice finally felt like a person, regardless of whether those feelings were in the right place or not. They were at least real and her own now, Jervis/Hatter was real, and she can finally say, without faking, that she loves both of them for it. It wasn't until later on in the future that Hatter and her got involved in a criminal incident that she decided that she would need to protect herself and her precious Hatter (much to his dismay, not wanting her to get involved at all, but was pushed to believing its for the best). She started learning how to use weapons and self defense and creating more of her own chemical formulas inspired by Alice in Wonderland. She eventually started gaining a name for herself as Hatter's lover, right hand, and mad genius chemist, "Dear Alice"

Notes/Quirks:

• She has two snaggletooth upper-canines and a small birthmark on her upper right cheek.

• She used to have a therapist she would go to to help with her apathy and general difficulty with forming attachments with other people, due to some emotional damage back in childhood.

• She used to volunteer to read to children at her local bookstore. It was something for the community that her therapist encouraged her to do to help interact with other people. It was the one thing she missed before going to crime.

• She has never read a lot of classic children's books as a child, including Alice in Wonderland until it was suggested to her for her next book reading. Thus, how she will soon meet Jervis Tetch.

[stirringwinds]

Can I ask what Maria & Antonio’s relationship has been like through the ages? Like, Al & Arthur have Crown Prince vs Old King, but what’s the vibe with Maria & Antonio? She was Crown Jewel of Spanish Empire. Do Spain & Cuba view each other as Father-Son? What about the rest of Central & South America? Also, Brazil & Portugal? Sorry for so many questions.

hey! thanks for the question—i will focus just on Maria (Mexico) and Antonio here, whom i have the clearest headcanons for.

how i personally headcanon it: Antonio and Maria are somewhat similar, but also different from Arthur and Alfred— so, a father/daughter dynamic. he is her "father"—in the usual, loaded nation sense of 'his actions caused her to come into being' and/or 'he has shaped her culturally'. just as in human families, not all fathers are good ones: so father-daughter here doesn't mean 'this is a healthy, cosy domestic dynamic'. after all, imperialism also shapes people and families intimately; Antonio is her "father" similarly to how Arthur is to Alfred—it's the dynamic of imperial power, authority and lineage. from the POV of humans who saw them both in 16th century Mexico City, they read them as 'oh, a spanish lord and his mestiza daughter.' he does have her officially legitimised (as some conquistadores historically did with their multiracial children).

nonetheless, like all nations, she isn’t born the human way. and in reality, she has more than two "parents"— at the very least, from a young age she'd been aware also of her connection to Mexica (who headed the powerful Triple Alliance commonly referred to as the "Aztec Empire") and Tlaxcala (another Nahuatl-speaking state and Mexica's long-time enemy, who made an alliance with the Spanish and furnished most of the soldiers during the siege of Tenochtitlan, the Mexica seat of power. Antonio's actions contributed to her being born—but so did Mexica and Tlaxcala's. thus, while Antonio tries to assert cultural dominance (speaking Spanish and religion for example), Maria always navigated it differently, rather than him being able to transplant his culture wholesale (such as with how cultural syncretism occurred re: religion in Mexico) because it was simply impossible for her not to be unaware of her non-European heritage. as i see it, from young, she was always fluent in Nahuatl (the language of both Mexica and Tlaxcala), not just Spanish.

much like Arthur did for Alfred, I see him being the one who picked the name 'Maria' for her. for Antonio, on some messed-up level, he sees himself in her and that’s one thing that underlies his willingness to legitimise her as his daughter: he understands himself as being born in the conquest and bloodshed inflicted by Rome and Carthage— and many others who came subsequently (your birth being someone else's misfortune or even death, is one thing that is understandably jarring from our point of view, but taken for granted by older nations). as I see it, “Antonio��� came from Rome naming him “Antonius”. Hispania was fought over by Rome and Carthage in part for its rich silver mines, after all—and while history doesn't repeat, sometimes it rhymes. as it was with Alfred, while she was seen as the prestigious 'jewel' in the spanish crown, her relationship with her father was always riven by the contradictions imposed by imperialism.

Antonio claims her as his daughter, and his name and authority gives her access to certain things—but that acceptance and privilege was often conditional and inconsistent (as was the experience of many real mixed-race people during that time who had powerful fathers—or as in my own family re: the context of British and French imperialism in the 20th century), and there was no ignoring the imperial hierarchy in place in the wider colony-empire dynamic, even if Antonio was at times personally affectionate or indulgent towards her. so, while she was well-educated and had many social opportunities, she did feel the imperial hierarchy quite keenly. i feel that sometimes, she felt similarly to Alfred (and maybe even more so, given the richness of Mexico's silver mines and dramatic stories being told about the "Aztec" Empire/Mexica in Europe) in that she was being shown off for her father's status rather than being understood as a person. i will leave it here for this ask, for now, but overall, it was a relationship similar in some ways to Arthur and Alfred, in the sense of paternal authority and imperial hierarchy—but of course, also different due to the ways British and Spanish colonial policies in the Americas diverged.

[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

I know your life isn't perfect, you speak explicitly about your struggles that you face day-to-day, but you've also lived a lot of life? Like I read your blog, and you've survived a fuck ton of shit. I don't know many older leftists--my family members certainly aren't ones, and talking to people around my age about the state of the world/lived experiences is wonderful, but it can also become so very sad, because we're not sure what to do. I'm a fresh 18-year-old, and I'm terrified of the future. Logically I know that I'm not obligated to complete the world's work, but I can't abandon it either. And that your loved ones, your community is what gives your life meaning under systemic oppression (Experiencing that firsthand where I'm finally making a few friends, and they fill my soul with life). But emotionally, I get so utterly sad, hyperfixating on what's bad when I'm away from my friends. Do you have any advice for living life while you're building that network of friends, figuring out your values, and carving out the life you want in whatever niches you can? Things you wish you could tell your younger self? I hope I'm not putting you on a pedestal, or stressing you out with this ask. I honestly would just like some words of comfort from someone older than me, who's POC, an activist, and also cares about a lot of the same things as me.

I absolutely don't think it's putting someone on a pedastal to ask questions like this! We all have different ways of surviving in this big wild world, and surviving often means different things for different people.

I do want to go ahead and speak to one piece of what you said though, just to make sure I don't wind up appearing to say something I'm not. I'm not a person of color, at least, I have never experienced myself that way. I am many things, including a person in a mixed race family, a person for whom older generations of my family were not considered white during their lifetimes (that doesn't mean that I'm not considered white now though, or even that some of those relatives aren't considered white now), and a person who has a lot of loved ones in a lot of different iterations of global politics. I try to talk about the things that impact people that I love in ways that I have come to understand over a lifetime they often speak of it themselves. If you want to hear from an actual person of color on these topics, you may want to reach out to my wife, @loreofthejungle, who has lived through all of my last ten years or so with me, and has her own experiences with activism and survival politics outside of me.

Something I have learned about carving out space though, you have to really and truly look at that space as if you have every right to inhabit it. Not just that you *should* have every right, or that people generally should have the right to space as needed. You, personally, have the right to inhabit space simply because you have the desire to do so.

Does that mean you will always be able to succeed in occupying that space? No. But the reality of inhabiting it really isn't fathomable until you believe that your desire to exist in whatever manifestations please you is your birthright. How you might navigate inhabiting as much space as you wish while still reasonably allowing space for others requires first knowing what space you want to occupy and not immediately compromising it before ever negotiating that space with someone else. If no one else has given reason to believe that you occupation of that space is a problem, why are you pre-emptively making yourself small?

This is easier said than done obviously, lol, but learning how to ask yourself what you want for your life and understanding what shape you and your world would need to take in order to achieve it are skills that serve us well in life. Some of this is learning to stop acting on assumptions I've made that people haven't communicated, even if I am absolutely sure the assumption is correct. Subtext is one thing (and I still have plenty to say about that on my best days lol) but frankly if someone isn't willing or able to communicate their thoughts and needs to me, it cannot be my job to predict those thoughts and needs on their behalf. Not a fun dynamic, just breeds resentment on all sides.

I have been my most secure, in life, in activism, in community work, when I am able to meet my basic needs, when I acknowledge that caring for myself the way I care for my loved ones is itself a basic need, and when I take the time to think about what is reasonably within my control and what isn't.

Sometimes that looks like prioritizing what issues I get deeply invested in (e.g. dedicating personal time and resources to organizing and understanding it as opposed to making efforts to support other people doing that work). Sometimes that looks like taking space away from the internet and social media because frankly......ugh. I just don't always have the energy to both communicate effective organization strategies and also have literally any time to not be "on" during the day. Sometimes it means taking space from organizing almost entirely because my work itself is community and care oriented, and there are times that is all I have in me. Sometimes it means learning new skills and support strategies in order to continue organizing despite changes in my circumstances. Sometimes it means focusing down to a small local region and not worrying about the whole wide world for a while because my neighborhood or my town is all I can navigate for a bit.

I realize it's frustrating to hear over and over again "connect in person" or "get offline" but like.

The reason for that often has less to do with "oh online activism is worthless" and more to do with "radical organization does not occur online even if its PRODUCTS occur online, because there is no way for us to reasonably protect our members that way. You need to show up to video calls or in person meetings so we can talk with some measure of InfoSec." You're just not going to get a step by step/comprehensive guide of how to organize or how to get involved effectively online because doing so would innately make those access points unsafe and insecure. Beyond that, there simply aren't univeral strategies. There are historic or common methods used within organizing, but every situation calls for tailoring by those doing the work, because organizing will never be one size fits all. You don't get buy in from people when you impose structure top down, but organization is much more effective when those doing the work co-create it together.

The good news is, there are so many groups running organization trainings and groups, and the whole point is to help you cultivate your personal skills in an organizing capacity so you can apply them in ways that work for you. Thus the eternal call to join a union or other organizing body.

I think people forget that the act of community building IS the act of organizing, in many ways. When you make the time to be attuned with the people in your sphere, and talk with them openly and honestly about your needs and the needs of those in your community, you can make great strides, even without the weight of a full campaign behind you. It's amazing what the community is willing to come together and create once they find they pathways and cohesion to do so.

This got rambly, and covered a lot of different versions of my answer to your question. In the end, I think what I mean with all this is just....we're all human, and we're all figuring out this whole "being a person" thing together and regardless of what anyone tells you, no one really has it down. There aren't right answers to the problems that have plagued society for generations, but there can always be the very human intention to help each other figure out a better answer than we had before.

[calowlmitygoddess]

Tanza lore drop hell yea

Tanza is the name of my main headworld, it's a fantasy/sci-fi mix with two main races of people the Drakin and the Humans, aside from them there are also the Spirits and Demons, not necesssaily supernatural beings since their existence is very real, with demons often attacking mortal settlements, and while spirits are unable to interact directly to the realm due to limitations, they have granted mortals the skills needed to defend themselves. The main magical energy source is called Neautra and it works like Mana/Aether in classic rpgs, its the source of life/essence of the soul/magic what gives.

Main Locations

Tanza only has two main continents, a large land mass that irl would be equivalent to the whole of Eurasia + few small islands, called Yiver and a smaller one equivalent to Australia that known as Draki.

In Yiver is located the Iseriath Empire, the most powerful nation, it controls the entirety of Yiver, due to its enourmous size, its divided in many sub-divisions that are semi-autonomous. The capital Izeriath City is located at the very center of the Empire. It has been ruled by the Izeriath Imperial Family since its founding 10000 years ago, the current ruler being Emperor Eidon XI. The majority of the empire population are Humans. People from the Empire are called Izerianthi.

Draki unlike Yiver doesnt have one government, instead its filled with many Drakin clans all competing for control. In their past the Arigon clan has managed to consolidate the continent into one unified kingdom but it did not lasted for long. Some clans have closer relationships with the Empire than others. Drakins are the main workforce behind the Demon Hunters, with the metal needed to produce the special weaponry and armor for killing demons being found only in Draki.

Demons and Spirits

Demons and Spirits shape the course of history in Tanza. With the creations of Demons by the God Akila altering the very fabric of the universe. Demons unlike spirits are not bound to their realm of origin, and can transverse between planes with no consequences. They are creatures of pure Neautra but do not posess cores to stabilize it and thus must always consume more to maintain their form, hence their destructive nature. While Spirits are also beings of pure neautra, they have a solid core that stabilizes them and works basicly producing and recycling its own energy constantly forever. Spirits are meant to be guardians of the mortal realm, against what not even they themselves remeber. Whatever enemy they were supposed to protect the mortals against is no longuer a treat, and so Spirits have become...unruly, trying to interact with the mortal realm, often causing as much trouble as demons.

The Gods

This Tanza is not the first of its iteration, The Archivist recalls infinite worlds before this one, an ancient experiment created by the first gods, with the objective of creating the Perfect World, but gods are finite in their lifespan as well, and the experiment must go on. So after each iteration of the Tanza experiment, the most powerful, benevolent souls of this era are tested and three of them will be chosen as the next gods to continue until one world succeds.

Akila, Daimos and Shadlan are the three gods of this current world.

Akila: The eldest, Mother of Demons, The Spider, Being of Fire. Somehow she became a god, maybe in her previous life as a mortal she was indeed a good person but that is long gone. Controling, cruel and egotistical are some of the kinder words used to describe the Mother of Demons. Bound to the demon realm, had her core semi-broken and greatly weakened.

Daimos: The middle one, Traitor, Being of Water, also known as Ryu. When Akila created the first demon, it was with the help of Daimos. He believed that her plan would work and they would come out victorious and change the fabric of the universe. The plan obviously failed, but Shadlan is a benevolent god, and thus spared her sibling. Instead binding his godly form away and ordering him to walk the world as a mortal, and atone for his crimes by helping the people he doomed, once he understood the value of the world he could ascend again. This in turn turned him into a Doomer, he thinks himself way too far gone for any form of redemption and has not bothered to do any major breaktrought in his character development for the past millenia or so.

Shadlan: The Younguest, Patron of the Arcane, Being of Wind, also known as Aria. One god was never meant to rule alone. Shadlan tried to bear the immense burden alone but in the end even she broke and sought to avoid it. She had an immense love for the mortal realm, having died quite young in her previous life, she sought to learn, to see, to experience everything the mortal realm could offer, and so often took undercover trips, breaking the rules she so often tried to enforce, this would end up being her doom, as in one of these visits, while pretending to be a nun, she met a young priest named Rune and fell in love. The two had a pair of twins named Imay and Hiraki, and for a few years Shadlan managed to keep up this double life, but somehow, she was found out and then killed...by a mortal.

[flameohotwife]

What is one fic you’ve been wanting to write/been thinking a lot abt?

OMG HELLO!!! I have too many of these, lol. The biggest one that I've talked about the most/longest is the mixed-race cloudbabies fic where they each experience different events that shape their identity and their relationship with their mixed heritage as they grow up. Your fic made me realize that I (as a mixed-race person) needed more fics that explore the complicated identities of the cloudbabies, and maybe need to process some of that myself, haha.

However, there have been a few new ideas nagging at the back of my brain for a while. I literally just typed this idea in discord this morning bc I wanted to chat about it with someone--

This is just speculation but… I had a thought (after thinking about Aang and zuko as “work husbands” and that during the establishment of republic city that must have been really true and they would have had lots of long days/months/years? with council meetings and the like)—Aang and katara were probably starting their family around the time RC was established (either with bumi or kya, who is significantly younger than bumi). And that would be HARD bc I imagine katara would want to be both places; with her infant/children and making a difference in those meetings. I imagine that it may have even been a source of contention. Aang would feel that same pull, but if katara is breastfeeding it makes more sense for her to stay with the baby, and she WANTS that, but she can want more than one thing. And it may lead to her resenting his relationship with zuko a little (and maybe even Sokka) because they spend so much time together while she puts in so much work at home. As someone who has been a SAHM by choice (and a working mom at times too), it creates a lot of complicated emotions and you can feel surprisingly isolated, and thinking of someone like katara who feels those emotions very strongly… idk it just seems interesting to me to explore

but I'm also wary of the antis who think being a stay-at-home-mom (even by choice, and even for a chosen period of time like when kids are small) is "anti-feminist" coming at me.

Another thing I've wanted to write about is the Air Acolytes and Katara's evolving relationship with them. We see her kind of resent their exuberance over her boyfriend in The Promise, then she feels guilty when Aang tells her how it felt like being home. In the later comics, both Katara and the Acolytes are present but they don't really interact much, like she's accepted their presence but still isn't sure about them. We know there are many, many more acolytes by Tenzin's time, so I think that would be an interesting thing to look into and write about as well.

ANYWAY this got really long I'm sorry. I know you only asked for one idea but I got carried away... I was so excited to see you in my inbox!! I'm also sorry I'm still a few chapters behind in Beautiful Boy but I'm hoping to have some reading time soon now that the kids are back in school and life is slowing down a bit. Thank you so much for writing that fic, and for sending the ask!!! Happy Friday <3

[emmaduerrewatson]

‘‘Growing up, as a mixed-race person, I rarely saw anyone who looked like me, let alone Asian people, generally. And if they were on screen they were always a fairly two-dimensional role, a lot of times, especially in western TV shows and films. So I was so thrilled that they made this decision, and yeah, I was able to bring my own experiences. I think, for lots of people [who are] mixed-race or first-generation immigrants, you spend so much of your life not feeling like you belong anywhere. I certainly grew up in a predominantly white area, and I was always ‘the Chinese one’ to my white friends, but to my Asian friends and family, I was very English and you never really feel like you belong anywhere. And that is essentially Alina’s problem where we meet her. She doesn’t know where she belongs. She doesn’t know how important she is. It really shapes who she is, [in] the same way it does for me. My race is a big part of my life, but it’s not everything that I am, and they’ve done such a good job of making Alina’s background important to her as a character and important to shaping who she is, but it’s not everything that she is.’’

- JESSIE MEI LI about her character Alina Starkov in Shadow & Bone.

[random-thought-depository]

Idea for a story I should write someday: a story kind of like the Babylon 5 episode Believers, but it’s obliquely referencing the continuity of consciousness arguments about uploading and teleportation.

The story’s equivalent of Shon is an alien from an intelligent species for whom unconsciousness is naturally super-rare; they don’t sleep, and they have a highly redundant nervous system that makes them very resistant to being “knocked out” by blunt force trauma or drugs. As a result, this species has developed philosophical arguments that a continuous stream of consciousness is constitutive of identity, and hence to lose consciousness is to die, and if somebody loses consciousness and then wakes up later that person has died and a new person who happens to have their memories has awakened in their body. This perspective is intuitive to them, in the same way “if somebody creates a perfect copy of you and then immediately kills the original you, you have died” is intuitive to us, and it’s the view of multiple mainstream religions and philosophies on their world. Their equivalents of the words awake and alive are more-or-less synonyms, their word for being born roughly translates as “awaken,” and their word for death roughly translates as “the cessation of movement and thought” (maybe they classify sessile organisms like plants and fungi as not alive, in the same way we classify viruses as not alive?).

Obviously, one consequence of this is that most surgeries in their society are done with local anesthetic, with the patient being carefully kept awake (”alive”) the whole time. But in this case a child of this species has an illness or injury that will definitely kill them (in the uncontroversial sense of the concept) if it isn’t remedied with an operation that definitely will result in a period of unconsciousness. And the story centers on a human doctor trying to convince the child and their parents that what they’re proposing will save the child’s life instead of just killing them and replacing them with a different person.

The take a third option happy ending would be that the doctor manages to find a way to do the operation while keeping the child conscious the whole time, but I think I prefer something a bit more bittersweet. So I’m thinking maybe they try something like that, and it works in the sense that the child physically survives and is fine, but it fails in that the child loses consciousness for a few minutes during the operation so the parents see them as having died.

Oh, they don’t filicide their own child like in the B5 episode or anything like that. They don’t think they’re an abomination or anything like that. They just think their child has died and been replaced with something like an identical twin. While unconsciousness is very rare among them, there have been cases throughout their history, and their culture has developed procedures for it. When a person dies and a new person awakens in their body, the new person is given a name (different from that of the original inhabitant of their body) and their equivalent of a baptism. The family of body’s previous inhabitant may adopt them. If they’re married, the spouse of their body’s previous inhabitant may marry them. They may adopt the children of their body’s previous inhabitant. They inherent the personal property of their body’s previous inhabitant, but they are not responsible for any debts and crimes of the previous inhabitant of their body, which are considered to belong to the dead person. The “dead” inhabitant of their body is given a funeral, with a small effigy of wood or wax buried or burned as a corpse would be. The “dead” inhabitant of their body is then given the same daily prayers for the dead as other dead immediate family members.

So, before the operation the child prepares for the possibility that they might lose consciousness by writing a letter to the inheritor of their body saying something like “Please don’t feel bad about inheriting my body, you didn’t ask for this, it isn’t your fault.” After the operation the child is given a new name and their equivalent of a new baptism and adopted into the family, as a foundling would be, and is introduced to their sibling as a new member of the family who happens to look like the dead sibling. The child inherits the personal property of the “dead” child, in this case a few toys and video games and the like. The parents arrange for their “new” child’s education to continue where the “dead” child’s left off, as they share the same memories (when they go back to their school - which is a small “neighborhood” school run by and for the community of their species on the space station the story takes place on - they are introduced to their classmates as a new student). The “new” child participates in the funeral of the “dead” child and before every evening meal participates in the daily prayers for the dead, in which the “dead” child is mentioned by name as other dead immediate family members are. The “new” child will celebrate their birthday on the anniversary of the operation, and the day of the operation will be counted as the day of their birth (“awakening”). Basically, the parents are as nice about the whole thing as they can be, but they really believe that they’ve lost a child and gained a new one (through no fault of the new child!), and they and the rest of their immediate community act accordingly.

Some time later the human doctors gets invited to participate in some sort of ceremony for the “new” child, formal acknowledgment of them having finished memorizing some sacred scripture in their school or something like that. They give the human doctor the role in the ceremony that the midwife who assisted in the child’s birth would normally have.

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

Some peripheral notes for this concept:

In the setting of this story, humans are a relatively minor race; Earth is an unusually densely populated world, but on the periphery of known space and relatively backward, humans only developed a high-tech civilization recently and haven’t spread out much and are a small percentage of known space’s population. The human doctor is one of the few humans on a trade hub space station, or at least one of the few humans who’s part of the official staff; most of the humans there are part of the station’s working/lower class, a mix of low-level maintenance and dock workers, small-time shopkeepers, entertainers and service workers of various sorts, homeless people, and petty criminals (with a fair amount of fluidity between those classes).

Sleep is a weird thing humans do in this setting; it’s unique to humans (and other Earth animals), other intelligent species don’t need it or do it. However, most intelligent species don’t have the “unconsciousness = death” belief, because while most intelligent species don’t sleep they are more familiar with unconsciousness as a semi-normal thing from people passing out drunk, getting knocked out in a brawl, etc.. Maybe there’s even one or two intelligent species who don’t sleep regularly but can hibernate in periods of resource scarcity like bears or go into torpor if the temperature gets too low (common alien words for human sleep might translate to things like “micro-hibernation” and “false thermocoma”). It’s just this one species for whom unconsciousness is naturally super-rare so their culture developed in a context where it was some extraordinary, freakish, even eldritch-seeming thing.

In this context, the human doctor experiences some of the limitations of humans as something a lot like a disability. She can’t regularly work the 20+ hour shifts that are normal for her colleagues, because she needs to sleep. She needs more time off than most of her colleagues, because normal alien schedules are made around the assumption of effectively having an extra eight hours every day to get stuff done. Because the aliens are active 24 hours, most intelligent species have much better night vision than humans, so to save on energy and burned out light bulb equivalents the common area and default lighting on the space station is what a human experiences as semi-darkness. She wears basically night vision goggles most of the time to be able to easily work in what the aliens consider normal indoor lighting conditions. A lot of the alien tools and furniture are the wrong size and shape for her, and she gets a friend in the station’s machine shop to recut and otherwise modify a lot of the medical tools for her. Humans are relatively unusual in the wider galaxy and kind of funny looking even by the standards of a relatively cosmopolitan multi-species society (the more typical body plans for an intelligent species are “six-limbed quadruped with four legs and two arms” and “kind of like a theropod dinosaur”), so common alien furniture is really not built for her (the human sitting posture is super-weird and freaky by alien standards, they tend to get uncomfortable just looking at it), and she gets kind of a lot of people (especially children) staring at her and wanting to touch various parts of her and so on, but it’s mostly benign curiosity. She’s uncomfortably aware that she’s a “diversity hire” (the alien polity that runs the station likes to hire members of their various allied and subject races to give them a sense of inclusion) and that a lot of people kind of resent having to do all these accommodations for her instead of just hiring a normal person.

The family of the sick child actually have a kind of parallel experience. Their world is even more marginal and peripheral than Earth and they’re a small minority in the galactic population, and the space station was built by and primarily for beings smaller than them so they have to deal with a lot of uncomfortably small tools and furniture and spaces or stick to special areas and facilities for bigger beings. This is a universe where big alien theory is true, so they’re actually more-or-less average size for an intelligent species, but the most numerous races are around human size so around human size is what gets treated as normal size for a person to be. Note: around human size with quadrupedal or theropod-like body plans translates to the human doctor has to stoop to fit inside a lot of small corridors built for beings substantially shorter than humans, but thankfully the station is designed for a cosmopolitan crowd so at least the bigger public spaces are sized to be accessible to beings up to approximately the size of large sauropod dinosaurs (and the water-filled sections for water/ocean-dwellers are designed to be accessible to even bigger beings).

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

Rough draft/outline for some lines in a conversation that would happen in this story:

Human doctor: I sleep every day. Well, almost every day, anyway. <Laughs a little, then turns serious> Do you think I die every time I go to sleep? Do you think the version of me you talked to yesterday is dead, and I’m... What, the latest in a line of thousands of doppelganger-clones of [her name]?

Alien parent: I... <uncomfortable pause> My partner holds it as a matter of faith that is works differently for Humans, because the Makers would not be so cruel as to create a race that is born in the morning, lives one day, dies that night, passes their body on to a new person who continues their errands and then dies in turn the next night. But I’m a rationalist, and... <uncomfortable pause and squirming> ... If you really look at nature, you see a multitude of horrors. The buzzer-fly’s young tear it apart from inside and eat its corpse. Nature is amoral. I can believe nature would create such a thing as an intelligent race that lives one day. I... Honestly, I try to not think about it much, to preserve my sanity.

Human doctor: I slept last night. I don’t feel like I died. I feel like I’m the same person I was yesterday.

Alien parent: Suppose this question had an objective and testable answer, and it was that I was right. Suppose I could show you I was right, as I could show my ancestors the Red Thirst with a microscope and say “See, it is not a curse, it is a thing like a tiny plant, that gets inside you and grows inside you like a strangling vine.” What would you do? How would you react to knowing that you have hours to live, that you were born this morning and will die tonight and are but one in a long chain of inhabitants of your body who lived only one day, and your whole race is like that?”

Human doctor: <thinks about it for a moment> “I think I’d find some way to tell myself that it wasn’t true, that you were wrong, and then I wouldn’t think about it much, to preserve my sanity.”

Alien parent: “For what it’s worth, I really hope it doesn’t actually work like that. But I’m not willing to gamble my child’s life on ‘I really hope it doesn’t actually work like that.’”

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

On that note: at some point the parents see the human doctor while she’s dozing at work and it’s intensely disturbing and creepy to them. An unconscious person is disturbing to them in the same way fantasy undead would be disturbing to humans: they’re simultaneously dead and alive in a way that seems unnatural in the sense people use when they use that term to refer to something horrible. I think I might have some fun describing human sleep in a way that channels a Lovecraft protagonist: “Alive, yet not alive. Clearly dead, but stirred by inward motion.”

It’s more logical when you remember that their language uses a lot of the same or similar words for life and consciousness and for death and unconsciousness. Like, yes, she is indeed [alive/awake] but not [alive/awake], clearly [unawake] but moving a little, those are totally factual observations, I’m just translating the emotional charge they’d have for these people.

One of these poor people would probably have a breakdown when they see their own child in that state on the operating table. :(

On a lighter note, there’d be comic relief potential in this too:

Alien child: “Are they dead?”

Alien parent: “Kind of, but it’s not as big a problem for them as it is for us.”

And also tragicomedy potential: at one point the alien child asks the human doctor what death is like, saying she should know since she dies every day.

Tangential note: I’m thinking the alien child’s race is hermaphroditic, in which case it’d be appropriate to use gender-neutral pronouns for them ... and they probably wouldn’t have a concept of gender (except insofar as they might have learned that some other species have such concepts), so it would make sense for them to use gender-neutral language when they talk about humans among themselves too; their language wouldn’t have gendered pronouns except maybe specifically as a device adopted for being polite to certain aliens when you talk to them. Not sure how I’d handle pronouns for hermaphroditic aliens in a story.

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

Other character concepts for this story:

When it comes to having to deal with a station built by and for beings that have rather different bodies than you, the human doctor is lucky compared to her colleague and best friend, a giant whale-like being who does most of their work through teleoperation while sitting in basically a giant swimming pool.

This person’s homeworld is a cold planet almost entirely covered by ocean; only a few almost totally barren tiny islands rise above an otherwise uninterrupted sea so deep it drowns all but the very highest mountain peaks (with so little land, multicellular life on this world has never left the sea). Their species (which is hermaphroditic, hence the choice of pronoun) is very much like the filter-feeding whales of Earth. Evolution of their intelligence probably was driven more by social selection than intrinsic stimulation of their watery world; they live their life by The Game, a complex and ever-shifting web of relationships that determines social status, access to resources, and mating opportunities, and that contributes to their survival. They are highly intelligent (their brain probably weighs more than you do!), and they might have tentacles or a manipulatory tongue or something, but before known space society found them and offered them access to space travel their watery world offered them little opportunity to develop technology. It’s unknown how long they’ve been sapient, but their oral history includes accounts of an asteroid impact that happened several million years ago.

This character thinks most of their people are good-natured but provincial. They’re good folks, but once you’ve gotten through the latest permutations of The Game and last year’s migrations and the plan for next year’s migrations and what the krill tastes like in various places these days the conversation tends to just kind of drift there like a sea-plant. They remember the 74th year of their life; the most interesting thing that happened that year was their pod passed close to an island. Why, on Earth, that was the year humans sent their first crewed expedition to Mars! They left their world to find a more interesting life.

They can use their powerful sonar to “see” inside their patients and still swear by this vs. the more advanced high-tech instruments.

--

The case of the sick child ends up involving a lawyer. He’s a member of another minor species of known space society, an arboreal intelligent species that originally inhabited the forests of a humid world. The evolution of intelligence in his species was driven mostly by social and sexual selection, like the whale people but moreso. His species is highly intelligent, but mostly uninterested in physical problems; in their original society most of their intelligence was focused on socialization, mating strategies, and art (the art was part of the socialization and mating strategies). When wider known space society found them, they were living as hunter-gatherers with a rich artistic tradition but a Stone Age level of technology. Examination of their world’s fossil record indicated that they had existed at that level for over a hundred million years. However, once integrated into a high-tech interstellar society, they became very successful as artists, lawyers, politicians, and business people, and can be found in those professions in numbers greatly disproportionate to their percentage of known space’s population. He is colorful and beautiful, like a peacock, and for the same reason.

[tropicannafeels]

Diversity, Representation and Other Themes of Crescent City (Book 2 SPOILERS)

I think that SJM actually does a really great job of incorporating diversity into her books. Especially Crescent City. But it has nothing to do with a characters hair colour or skin tone.

Bryce Quinlain, our main character, is not only mixed race, but she's someone who has grown up her entire life trying to fit into two very contradicting cultures, and feeling like she doesn't belong in either. She's too Fae to fit in with the humans around her, but not Fae enough to have the respect of her father or his people. Bryce may be described as white, but within the world of Crescent City, that's not the feature that matters. Its not the colour of her skin that prevents her from being respected by society, but the pointed tips of her ears.

As someone who is mixed race, and has grown up walking the line between different cultures, I believe that a character like Bryce is the kind of representation that matters. It's not just a character's description that impacts a reader, it's their lived experience. Seeing Bryce's confidence and self-assurance despite the world's views of her existence, is empowering.

While I have lived in Canada my whole life, I grew up in a fully Russian household. I am technically half Korean and only half Russian, but both my parents grew up in Russia, so they both speak Russian. No one in my family knows how to speak Korean, so I never got the opportunity to learn. Even tho there was no way that I could have learned Korean, that did nothing to stop the inevitable shame I would feel when Korean people came up to me, recognizing me as Korean, and automatically speaking to me in Korean. I felt like a fraud for not understanding them. When I got a bit older, I started to try and learn Korean, in order to feel closer to this culture that I was supposed to be a part of.

Bryce experiences something similar, where she starts to learn the old language of the Fae in order to feel closer to her heritage. I think that if you've never had the experience of trying to fit into something you were supposed to fit into naturally, this small detail wouldn't necessarily strike you as bi-racial representation, but it is. It connected me to Bryce in a much deeper way than if she had just been described with "Dark black hair and angular eyes".

BOOK 2 SPOILERS STARTING!

The Asteri barged into a world they had no claim to, made life miserable for the humans who were already living their, and then proceeded to take full control of the world in the form of an oppressive government, as well as filling it with even more new citizens who also had zero respect for the native population. Sound familiar?

Crescent City is FILLED with representation. It's a story about people who have been oppressed for centuries, fighting to uncover truths that have been buried and rewritten by their government. It's a story about recognizing your privilege, and the freedom it grants you. It's a story about using what you got, and trying to make the most of it.

When you are in a position of privilege, like being white and straight in a world where that's been deeded the "norm", sometimes it's difficult to understand that there's more to representation than just outward appearance. While it's important to be able to physically see yourself in the stories that shape us, it's equally important to see the experiences that have shaped us represented as well. SJM does that really well. Maybe even too well, considering the amount of criticism she's received for her lack of "diversity". I think that one of the most important roles of fiction is to help people understand different points of view through characters like Bryce. Reading a book is like living a new life, and what better way understand someone's life experience than by reading about a character in a mirror world, and walking beside them through their journey.

[thedreadvampy]

Ok like I'm sorry for all the Elias discourse but stepping off from OGlias for a moment I legit saw someone saying it was a mischaracterisation to assume Jonah Magnus was himself a rich white dude which

uh

Let's leave aside for the moment that Jonah Magnus not being wealthy and privileged utterly sucks the meaning of of a lot of what the podcast has to say about class and exploration because hey, that's a matter of interpretation

What do we know about Jonah Magnus (from all statements mentioning his original incarnation)?

1816: Interacts as at least an equal with Albrecht von Closen, who has at least one family estate and an aristocratic pedigree and thus could be expected to be at least middle class if not wealthy. This is relevant because Georgian class was very stratified and cross-class mixing heavily discouraged, 1816 is probably fairly early in Magnus' career, and Albrecht doesn't address him as one would a social inferior.

1818: Established the Magnus Institute, apparently without external funding partners because he's the only one ever mentioned in connection with its organisation and his friends talk about it as his own project; it certainly isn't associated with an existing university or academy as far as we can tell.

1824: not a lot of additional information, except that again Magnus' friends are all moving in wealthy, upper class circles

1831: In a position to hire professionals for Millbank under good terms. We learn more about Albrecht, he's definitely painted as wealthy old money, which continues to speak to this association

1841: reasonably close friends with Sampson Kempthorne, workhouse designer, who expresses the expectation of Magnus agreeing with him about workhouses and the treatment of the poor through work. At this time, Magnus is living in an Edinburgh townhouse, by which I'm guessing we're talking about one of the New Town Georgian 4-floors-plus-servant's-quarters which that name implies. Those aren't mansions, but they weren't where a clerk or shopkeeper would live - they were built for ship owners, lawyers, doctors, the upper-middle and upper classes, and as the name townhouse implies they were generally occupied as one of several estates, with the usual occupants being likely to also have a country place.

Beyond specific statement letters, Magnus largely crops up via his association with his wee gang, all of whom are wealthy upper-middle or aristocracy (Smirke, Rayner, Lukas)

He has the resources and social clout to devote his time to pursuing what is, effectively, a hobby; his interest in the supernatural doesn't bring in much income and, conversely, often costs him to chase up. He doesn't appear to have a full-time job at any point; he works on Millbank with Smirke but he doesn't appear on the records, meaning this is unlikely to be a paid management role. His friends refer to his supernatural work as a hobby or interest, not a job, and make it clear that at least by the 1830s-40s this is his whole life (he's "rattling around with his books and letters") - ergo he does not have a need to support himself beyond that.

He had the resources and funds to, by himself and for his own purposes, not only shape the building of Millbank but also to set up an independent academic institution which is still running 200 years later

Like, is it explicit that he's a rich white man? Not per se. Would all of this information make sense if he wasn't? I suppose it's possible but it's a reach, and one that I'm not sure why you as a writer would make without making pretty clear. To be able to move comfortably in moneyed Georgian circles without being born to money, and to be able to do the things Magnus does without having substantial disposable income - that would be exceptional, and would surely merit some sort of comment.

(I've talked about the race politics of Georgian Britain as relates to Jonah Magnus before, but just to sum up: in a time before the abolition of the slave trade and during massive colonial expansion into Asia, being a British man of wealth and not being white was pretty unusual. We can see this in the description of Rayner; he's very specifically described as Black, but also his Blackness is notable to a contemporary narrator. so again, not impossible for Jonah to be a person of colour, but definitely unexpected and it would be an interesting choice to write that unremarked)

just by way of historical context, as I say, class was very structured and immobile in Georgian Britain for the most part. It was also, as I understand it, much more discrete. Whereas now, the lines between working class, middle class and upper class are pretty fuzzy, in the 1800s they were a lot more clear-cut - the working class worked for little money, had little to no education past basic literacy and numeracy, and the entire household would work; the newly developing middle class made a living through highly-skilled jobs (artists, doctors, lawyers, clerks, shopkeepers, factory owners, shop owners and pub landlords, for example) and would have enough disposable income to buy property; and the upper class/gentry may work (but only appropriate to their station; academia, law or the church, largely, and of course a lot of them in the 1810s made bank from Caribbean plantations and their imports) but substantially they lived off the profits of investments, ownership and estate management, built off heritable wealth. 

There’s a big range of middle class though, although it was a small segment of society. At the bottom end, you have your grocers, pub landlords, shopkeepers, clerks and so on - they probably own their homes and business and have money to buy things outright rather than renting. At the top end, we have some really pretty substantial wealth - we’re talking multiple houses and estates, large-scale business concerns, tens of permanent staff, and only one person in the family needing to work. The difference between upper middle and aristocracy isn’t necessarily in quality of life, aside from blood it’s really just a question of whether the majority of your income comes from work or from investment and property management. So for example, Smirke is upper middle, but very wealthy - he has a career in a high-profile trade, he’s notable and welcome in high society, but ultimately his wealth is dependent on him continuing to get work. Von Closen may have more or less material wealth than Smirke, but his money is old money and he does not work; he’s very much a gentleman of the upper crust. Particularly with Industrial Revolution and the profit that the slave trade and the expansion of the Empire were bringing in for traders, the middle class was abruptly getting a lot richer in at the start of the 19th century and if anything class was getting a lot more discrete - urbanisation and industrialisation meant the poor were getting poorer (and less able to exist outside a monetary economy) and the working rich were getting a lot richer (until of course after a couple of hundred years the upper middle class almost eclipsed the idle class as the Rich and Powerful)

So the gentry/nobles/old money/upper class were the only class whose wealth wasn’t to a high degree reliant on them working, and so honestly being a Georgian gentleman was stultifyingly boring. That’s why so many comedies of manners crop up from the lower end of the upper class - you have to find something to keep you busy and social politicking is something. But it also meant a lot of gentlemen scholars - men with time on their hands and nothing they desperately needed to be doing, who got really into eccentric hobbies and niche interests (like social engineering, or art theory, or the occult, or unpicking weirdly specific theological concepts, or a bit earlier experimenting with light and lenses, or a bit later investigating the origins of species, or getting super into a specific aspect of the classics). The idle rich weren’t the only ones doing academia or research, but they had the time, money and resources to devote to really deep dives into things without much financial use.

So my personal take is that, given that by 1818 Jonah Magnus had the capital, the social heft and the time to found and run an independent academic institution focused on his relatively niche interests, and to do so with enough resourcing that it still runs 200 years later, the safest bet is that he was born a gentleman. At the very least, all the people he socialises with are securely upper-middle or gentry; he has a visible disdain for the poor; he owned substantial personal property by at least middle age (the Edinburgh townhouse); he had the social clout to get involved behind the scenes in a major social architecture project - it seems like the lowest this could possibly place him is mid-to-upper middle class at birth (he could have made that much money from working and lucky investments, but to get into a position where by middle age you can afford to become the Idle Rich, spending all your money and time on an obsessive personal interest, you would need to have started off with at least the capital and clout to get a high-level education and/or make significant business investments (say, buy a series of factories or build a shipping empire). You could make a case that he could work his way up from being born to a middling-middle-class family - maybe a country vicar or a shopkeeper - but friends can I show you some numbers I googled?

In the 1810s, being mid- or upper middle class (fourth or above) meant you were richer than 94.5% of the civilian population. Upper middle and above (like literally every person we know of who had social ties to Magnus except maybe the architects)? Literally top 1%. (well. 1.25%).

The middle class in Georgian Britain was the elite. They weren’t the elite of the elite, but they had money, land, property, staff, clout and privilege. You can’t project the class politics of 2021 onto 1818 (that is, in fact, why pure Marxism still requires an updated reading, bc in even the last 150 years the specific distribution and attributes of class and wealth has changed substantially (although the same people do stay at the top and bottom)). 

I think our perceptions are altered by the worries and perspectives of popular contemporary authors. For example, Austen characters often bemoan their lack of wealth, and are firmly Middle Class, and compared to the upper middle and the gentry they are living frugally and on a budget, but with “cottages” that are often six- or seven bedroom houses with several parlours and one or two servants, plus a town house, and with only one breadwinner per family and enough invested wealth to live entirely off the interest (that’s what the incomes of these characters are), they are living in a degree of wealth that would be unthinkable to 95% of their contemporaries, and it would be fair to assess them as rich by modern standards.

You can argue that Jonah Magnus wasn’t aristocracy. You cannot argue realistically that he wasn’t rich. Not only does that make no thematic or character sense (again, that’s a matter of interpretation, but it seems to me to be Pretty Key to his character that he’s an examination of inborn privilege) but it also makes no contextual historical sense.

[l-e-i-n-t-h]

Pedro has tweeted before calling himself white - it's in his feed if you search. His sister Javiera is an exec at Amazon and she gave an interview a few months ago where she specifically described herself as white and wanted better diversity represented in front of and behind the screen. Sure they could probably still be mixed, but they personally identify publicly as white.

“I have a very particular experience as a Latina, one who is an immigrant, a native Spanish-speaker, and white"

https://www . aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/meet-hispanic-leaders-helping-shape-amazon

The thing is, they're still latinos, and as such, we Latinos feel represented by Pedro in a way a white-like-milk gringo couldn't feel. His family had to run away from a dictatorship installed by white people.

We are not one race or one culture, we're a melting pot, a crucible, where the sum of 1+1+1 is not 3, but... I don't know α.

A year ago we were all cheering him for representing POC as the most beloved Star Wars protagonist of the moment. Suddenly he doesn't represent POC anymore?

I wouldn't pin this on him, nor on his latino fans. We are not the ones who wrote a weirdly plotted show for another colored protagonist. And as much as I loved the episode with all my soul, I wish they didn't do it this way.

[soulvomit]

One of the things that happens with me looking back at my childhood...

There was simply a very very long time that I couldn’t put a lot together about experiences I had in my childhood, because I didn’t really know of a way to describe my interior experience and or when I did describe it, it got invalidated.

And this is where I have weird mixed feelings about my “from an ND family” narrative that I have, because... plenty of things my parents absolutely did well, like, they understood *how I needed to learn* and they also had an intuitive understanding of how I needed to learn *social* stuff. They didn’t ever assume I was going to pick that stuff up by osmosis and they recognized that I had issues with specific things. My dad taught me the “look at the bridge of their nose” trick because he used that trick. They absolutely supported me being intensely into some subject. I can’t find weird play habits early in my narrative because of how early my parents were already putting building toys and race tracks and educational toys in front of me. Etc.

But the flip side is that there are experiences I absolutely can’t talk about with my mom because she absolutely believes “oh, everyone does that.” 

Because of being a generation where she can still hide behind a husband, there are things I have to navigate that she hasn’t had to, and she can’t relate to. So nothing is ever going to get her into the diagnostic pipeline, either. Unlike me, who had to figure some shit out real fast after the dot-bomb, and had to do a whole surface personality makeover just to be employable, because of the employment outlook being very different for me in *my* 30s than it was for my mom in *her* 30s. 

It’s easier for her to see herself as normal because she’s never had to do the same degree of personality makeover, and what’s more is that there were just more jobs available in her earlier life. 

There was simply much more work. And yes, the different shape of marriage did conceal a lot for many women, but also many men. 

I have to navigate a very different world from my mom. She largely gets to just be herself, and it’s been painful at times for her but she simply was able to work as a secretary for a while (a job not available to many people anymore) between husbands then find a different man to attach herself to. She literally can’t wrap her mind around the fact that the reason I didn’t find a husband in my 20s, is because of a combination of being weird and growing man-cession, and that fewer men even being marriageable, means that the ones who were, had higher social standards. I was only *not* Too Weird for the very classically spergiest guy in any group. I literally have only ever made it work for very long with other weird people. (My partner doesn’t really scan as particularly weird; he scans as kind of a hipster to people. But he has CP and this is a significant part of early narrative that we bonded with each other over.)

My mom literally believes that a lot of my issues are just things where I couldn’t pull myself up by the bootstraps, or socially finagle myself into a higher class social group like she did.

We have the same exact issues - and yet she sees them as normal, and I can’t help but wonder if so much of it is because she gets to *be* more normal than I ever got to be. Even having been born and raised with less than I was. 

She also got to go to more schools that had natural lighting, and got to grow up wearing natural fibers despite being poor.

[photonflight]

🌺Caribbean Representation Through my Apprentice 🌺

Asks open for this article btw.

Why do this?

Growing up in the Caribbean, I never saw myself in media, nor did I see anyone representative of myself in popular media. I’m Trinidadian- but representation for Caribbean people has usually been limited to Jamaican. Jamaica has a beautiful culture, but like the other Caribbean islands, their culture is different.

This is why Dominique is Trinidadian coded, and mixed race (over 90% of Trinidadian people are BIPOC or mixed race). I wanted to feel seen and represented, and I wanted other Caribbean (especially Trinidadian BIPOC) women and girls like myself to feel properly represented by her. I wanted to show us that we CAN exist in fantasy worlds and be portrayed in a way that’s neither stereotypical nor offensive.

Many times in the media, whenever there’s a Caribbean character included (which is a very rare occurrence) they are given a Jamaican accent by default even when they’re not Jamaican, which has resulted in many people believing that there is one collective Caribbean accent (as a Trinidadian person I can’t begin to tell you how many non-Caribbean people have addressed me with “yea mon”.)

As a matter of fact the islands have their own different languages. Trinidadians speak Trinidad Creole, not Jamaican Patois.

A few examples I can think of would be

Ajay Chase- Apex Legends (Haitian, but has a Jamaican accent)

George- Metal Gear Rising (Guyanese, but has a poor Guyanese accent which sounds more Jamaican, and the vernacular he speaks with is more (stereotypically) Jamaican than Guyanese)

Sebastian- Disney’s adaptation of The Little Mermaid (Tobagonian (btw the country I’m from is called Trinidad and Tobago 🇹🇹) but has a stereotypical Jamaican accent)

Haitians speak Kweyol, not Jamaican Patois.

Guyanese people speak Guyanese Creole, not Jamaican Patois.

Tobagonians speak Trinidad and Tobago Creole, not Jamaican Patois.

These are all different languages entirely.

Additionally, no Caribbean people were included in the creation of OR the voicing of these “Caribbean” characters.

How is Domi different?

In short? Domi is a Caribbean, mixed WOC with a Caribbean mixed WOC Experience created by a Caribbean, mixed WOC

In long?🤣 read below

Origin

Domi is a Trinidadian-coded apprentice. While her country of origin, which isn’t Vesuvia, does not parallel the real Trinidad and Tobago, she has certain experiences that are common with Trinidadians who are like she is, is canonically confirmed to have an accurate and inoffensive Northwestern Trinidad accent, and her main outfit is colored after the national flag of Trinidad and Tobago 🇹🇹.

Experience

In BIPOC societies like Trinidad and Tobago, there are two interconnected experiences that stand out. Colorism, Featurism and Fetishization AND Identity Crisis

Colorism, Featurism and Fetishization

The term Colorism refers to prejudice or discrimination against individuals with a dark skin tone, typically among people of the same ethnic or racial group.

Naturally then, as a result of colorism those with lighter skin tones are elevated within that group. A group which in Domi’s case makes up the entire society.

Featurism refers to the elevation of somebody’s features due to their proximity to whiteness and then results in the Fetishization of people who do have said features within the same ethnic group.

Domi grew up in a society that praised features and skin complexions by their proximity to whiteness, with an older sister who encompasses everything the society praised.

While Domi resembles her father, her sister Scarlet (named after the Scarlet Ibis, the National bird of Trinidad and Tobago) looks like their mother.

While Domi and her sister are both mixed BIPOC (and of course we come in different colors, shapes and sizes), Domi has darker skin than her sister does (though she is still of a light complexion) darker eyes, and darker curlier hair.

Her sister has fairer skin, blue eyes and straight dark hair.

Therefore within a society like this, it is natural that it is her sister that would’ve been elevated and praised for her beauty over Domi.

This has impacted her in various ways from a very young age, pushing her to overwork herself to be perfect at everything to make up for her lack of beauty, and as a child would constantly use glamor to give herself “better hair” and “nice eyes” (terms that result from the fetishization of certain features within BIPOC societies.)

Domi and Scarlet ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Identity Crisis

As is the case with many BIPOC who belong to families where many different ethnicities combine, Domi experiences an identity crisis.

Many Caribbean BIPOC ask themselves

-what am I?

-who am I?

-where do I fit in/belong?

-who do I identify with?

And I know that this is the case for many non-Caribbean mixed people as well. It’s not an isolated incident although this post deals specifically with the Caribbean experience.

Domi also deals with not feeling as though she fits in with either side, not being enough like her mother’s side (mixed Asian, dragon) and also not being enough like her father’s side (mixed Black and White, human).

Dealing with this causes her to question where she belongs, and second guess meeting new people for fear of what they’ll think of her.

Does Domi look like me?

Yes. The arcana IS a self insert game and people that look like us don’t appear very often regardless. Her appearance and specific ethnicity is inspired by me, as well as is the coding of her nationality (which of course is shared with 1.4M people)

However, her experiences, though loosely based on mine, are not isolated and were not based on my own so much as it was based on that of other mixed WOC I personally know and wanted them to feel heard.

Me vs My Apprentice 🌺 you can see where the inspiration starts and also stops🤣

[luckhissoul]

psychology + mental health deep dive !

general mental health related trigger warnings apply.  feel free to include more or exclude those facts / test results that take too much time or don’t apply, you can check out this list for more personality-related quizzes to include!

QUICK FACTS ,

diagnoses: n/a - not sure if he’d have anything considered professionally diagnosed as an mental illness.  i’d say he has some form of ptsd and an addictive personality ( gambling, drinking, sex, dangerous situations ) , which my two minute ( so correct me if i’m wrong ) google research told me that those are considered more disorders and not a mental illness.  triggers: n/a - although it’d take a certain level of trust for him not to get mad or low key freak if someone touches his throat. he keeps it covered though.  positive coping skills: naming the stars, spending time with olver (his boy his child *wipes tears* ), spending time alone ( is this a good coping mechanism or a bad one ? ) negative coping skills: drinking, gambling, casual sex, recklessness, there was a knife fight or two, spending time alone ( tossing this on the negative, too ) , making jokes about it, denial. attachment style: Disorganized / Fearful-Avoidant love language: physical touch myers briggs / mbti: ESTP-T

HISTORY EXPLORATION ,

are their diagnoses formal ( via a doctor, therapist, etc. ) or informal ( self diagnosis, a hunch, unrealized, etc. ) n/a - but i’d say any sort of thing that he does have would be unrealized.

have they ever been treated / medicated? no

have they ever been hospitalized or treated on an inpatient basis? no

how old were they when they first started experiencing / realizing symptoms? experiencing early 20s / realizing ? never. 

do they have a family history of mental illness? no

how was mental health handled / discussed in the family? no

what are their thoughts on mental health / their diagnosis? he wouldn’t have any ? 

in what ways has their diagnosis shaped their life or experiences? subtly, in a way he doesn’t notice. 

SYMPTOMS: note that all of the below are, on their own, normative and typical aspects of human functioning. they become “symptoms” when they last longer than “normal” or when they pose a significant impact on someone’s life / functioning.

BOLD  all that are present,  ITALICIZE  those that are resolved or in the history.

depression.    anxiety.    panic attacks.    dissociation.    derealization.    depersonalization.    suicidal ideation.    self harm.    homicidal ideation.    psychosis.    auditory hallucinations.    visual hallucinations.    delusions.    mania.    hypomania.    racing thoughts.    hyperactivity.    attention difficulty.    flashbacks.    nightmares.    hyperarousal.    hypoarousal.    hypersexuality.    hyposexuality.    psychopathy.  risky behavior.    catatonia.    somatic / bodily concerns.    mutism.    phobia.    agoraphobia.    hoarding.    obsessions.    compulsions.    body dysmorphia.    hair picking.    skin picking.     amnesia.    illness anxiety / hypochondria.    sensory loss.    speech difficulty.    comprehension difficulty.    communication difficulty.    tics.   defiant behavior.    irritable mood.    vindictiveness.     aggression.   pyromania.    kleptomania.    paranoia.    attention seeking.    narcissism.    avoidance.    dependency.    pica.    rumination.    food restriction.    food binging.    purging.    soiling the bed.    insomnia.    fatigue.    sexual dysfunction.    delirium.    developmental delays.

explanations / elaborations on any of the above symptoms: suicidal - was very brief period of a few months. hyperactivity is a constant. flashbacks are a mix of his own experiences and memories that aren’t his, like remembering literally dying dozens of times. nightmares - not nightly. low key hypersexuality - mostly just having fun but there’s a line or two where he’s i’m so sad now i’m going to get a woman and thats just -- compulsive gambling / drinking / casual sex. amnesia - he’s missing pieces of his memories, a lot of his childhood is just blurred. defiant behavior - constantly rebelling, would always do something to defy authority.  attention seeking - flashy, wants to stand out, likes to be noticed - guess it makes him feel seen in a way. avoidance - will avoid confronting literally everything he feels so. good or bad for the most part. 

tagged by: @caracarnn​ tagging : @ofimaginarybeings / @inprometheanfire​​ / 

[overheard-at-camp-half-blood]

Ok so I love everything in the PJO universe and I found your blog and was reading through it and I was wondering what you meant by the POC’s deserve better I know it’s true but I just got confused and was hoping you could help me understand this topic better. This is coming from a POC themselves thank you so much I love your blog and how you say how you feel on all topics

So, first of all, thank you. Also, I’m sorry for not getting back to you sooner, but as I said, I’ve been busy, and I really wanted to give myself the time to give you a good answer, because I myself am white, so there isn’t much I can tell you from personal experience that would give you an in depth explanation of what’s going on.

So here is a masterlist of information about this topic that I personally found helpful when learning abo these topics. Please read through this, because BIPOC voices are the voices that matter the most, but I will give you a brief summary of each of the issues.

Some of the main issues are;

Hazel’s adultifacation. The issue is that Hazel, a black woman was made younger than everyone else, when she really didn’t have to be. This contributes to an issue in media where black girls are forced to grow up faster than other people around them. Not to mention, making Pluto look like H*tler, and making him the father of a black girl during the time of segregation was a very bad choice.

Piper’s character apparently had a lot of issues, from her appearance to her backstory, but some of the big ones include; feathers, oversexualization, cornucopia and whitewashing of her character. First, I don’t think I need to explain the issues with the feathers and the stereotypes, but also it shows a lack of understanding of the culture. Eagles in particular are sacred and are usually only worn by leaders- and they are not to be worn casually. As for oversexualizing her, it’s problematic enough considering she’s a literal child, but as stated in the post I just linked, oversexualization of indigenous woman is a huge problem in native communities. The fact that she used a cornucopia, a literal Thanksgiving symbol as a weapon is self explanatory. As for whitewashing her character, she is the only character described as mixed race. Now there’s nothing wrong with being mixed race, but the fact that this choice was made for the indigenous character in particular... that’s a problem. This in particular is problematic considering the constant erasure of indigenous people irl.

Rick also responded to criticism about Piper’s character in particular in a very problematic way. His response to being criticized was to accuse people of bullying him, and telling people to move on from being misrepresented.

Also, Rick seems to have an issue with describing BIPOC characters as... BIPOC? He erased a lot of Hazel and Piper nonwhite features, giving Hazel gold eyes and cinnamon hair, and Piper kaleidoscope eyes. They should have both had brown eyes, and Hazel should have had darker hair.

Leo was written well in the beginning, but Rick developed him into being a Mexican stereotype. First of all, the constant flirting is quite obviously stereotypical of Latinx people in general, and there is issues with the “Mamacita” line- it was addressed, but not well.

Reyna isn’t included in this post, because whoever contributed to it deleted their blog, but I have seen criticism from Puerto Rican fans that say that Reyna’s disconnection with her shows that while Reyna is technically representation for them, she was written for white people.

Aside from individual criticism, general criticism includes;

Most of the black characters have died at some point in the series- even Hazel died and came back.

Most BIPOC characters were cheated out of an arc, and most of the big parts of their internal conflicts were fixed off the page (Frank’s stick) or in someone else’s point of view (Leo’s desire to find a family).

I’m sorry, but Rick was willing to make a book about Percy & Annabeth, the characters we know the most about, but couldn’t equal out the point of views of Frank & Hazel with the rest of the seven?

Most of the Latinx characters were bilingual, when it didn’t make sense for them to be. Leo had an unstable life from childhood to his teen years, and there is no way he spent time in enough Spanish-speaking homes to develop their vocabulary. Reyna had been away from her culture for so long too, the same applies to her.

In general, I’ve noticed that both the fandom and Rick’s standards for BIPOC characters are much higher than they are for white characters. I cannot name one character of color that hasn’t been held to a different standard than other characters at some point.

Essentially, no BIPOC character was done well, and every marginalized group that was represented in some shape or form was not done well. The link also points out issues with homophobia and ableism.

The thing is, I think the reason why Rick did get away with it for so long, is because for a lot of these people it was there first time feeling represented, and at the time, there wasn’t a lot of representation to go off- but that doesn’t make it good representation in anyway shape or form. For example

This doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy these books, or these characters, but it’s good to look at how these characters were treated by the narrative. There will be a tv show, which is a good chance for Rick to fix at least some of his mistakes.

Also, if there is anything my BIPOC followers would like to add on, please do. If my information is wrong, please call me out.