#and people in latin america are still affected by this

[skarabrae-stone]

The spokesperson clarified that while the rules are still applicable, it's only for select countries: "For a brief time yesterday, a help center article containing information that is only applicable to Chile, Costa Rica, and Peru, went live in other countries. We have since updated it." Netflix is also testing anti-password sharing measures in Latin America, charging subscribers who share passwords outside their household $3. The spokesperson confirmed that the company wouldn't roll out the measures elsewhere or on such a wide scale before communicating with subscribers ahead of time.

[mochinomnoms]

You know how in Latin America people will kiss each other on the cheek sometimes as a greeting? What if yuus really tired or just has a "eh, why not ™?" Moment and just does it to ptm jade. But then, cause their still just fucking brain dead. They just read his mind and just. Don't stop 😀. Oh, you want some more kisses bro? Ok. Happy to see you too man.

Meanwhile bros thoughts are just getting straight up disrespectful. Just straight into the softcore bdsm, lingerie, fucking through aftercare fantasies

🦩

Omg I remember when first meeting my college roommate I went to greet them with a cheek kiss/hug combo, as one does, and learned that it was not a universal greeting the hard way. At least not an Irish American one? Not sure, but yes!!!

They go to greet Jade, tired as they gesture him to lean down, and kiss his cheek as they say hello. It takes all of two seconds for them to hear the cheering from Jade's brain, who is currently losing it as he stares wide-eyed at them. Assuming this is around the time they're starting to reciprocate his feelings, they'll indulge him with more soft kisses to his cheeks.

That's when Jade is grabbing onto them, new thoughts of him taking them to the nearest closet and getting down right unholy with them flooding their mind. Try as they might, Jade's grip is too tight now to run off as he beams in their affection, pressing many quick kisses to their cheeks, forehead, neck, shoulders, hair, etc. Even if they manage to wriggle out of his grip, Jade's still trying to get and give more kisses. He even gives them a rare pout and whines.

Don't give in, y/n! (They do.) Tell him no! (They don't.) Tell him to keep it in his pants! (It doesn't work). You still need your walking abilities! (They lose those very quickly, Jade's happy to provide aftercare though :) ).

[anonymous-dentist]

I firmly believe that, if we have to deal with egg lives on the server, then deaths that happened due to lag shouldn't count. If an egg lags and dies, it shouldn't count. If an egg's parent dies due to lag while on an adventure with the egg and then the egg dies because their parent couldn't pick them up, that shouldn't count unless there were multiple other people there to pick the egg up.

Lag is uncontrollable. It affects the players from Latin America disproportionately- both eggs and ccs- and they can't do anything about it. Even the people with the best internet they can buy have incredible lag on the server, so like?

This especially applies to dungeons because there is always so much lag there because of the sheer number of mobs spawning + the various mods like the fancy biomes and the whole 'individualized chest loot' thing and the Everything. Like, when even the guys with good ping and zero lag go to a dungeon and say there's lag, it's bad and it's a server problem and not a player problem.

Add in the server's general lag problems related to item frames and the Create mod, and you've got a really difficult situation going on for egg parents who just want to have fun on the server without worrying about their kids dying.

Why punish the players for something they can't control??

With as much lag as players like Roier and eggs like Leo and Richarlyson have, it's borderline impossible for them to go do dungeons or go exploring because there will inevitably be a lag spike that kills them whether they like it or not. They can't complete certain bounties or egg quests if they can't do dungeons or adventures, so them staying out of 'danger' punishes them both by making them stay away from parts of the server experience that they enjoy and by making it harder to do basic Server Things that have to do with money and egg cookies.

The first week of QSMP2024 had everybody running around doing dungeons with their eggs and having a great time regardless of lag. Since that first week or two, though? Not too many egg-parent dungeon raids, partially because of the mob difficulty plus the ridiculous dungeon lag.

So maybe lag just shouldn't count with egg deaths at all. Sure, there can be restrictions like still counting a lag death if there were multiple people there to pick the egg up if the lagging parent dies, but it's ridiculous that parents are being punished here for things literally and entirely out of their control.

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Five years after the Brazil oil spill, fishing workers deal with losses and hopelessness

The state's failure to take measures, climate change and real estate speculation are exacerbating the situation

Five years on from the oil spill that devastated 11 of Brazil's coastal states, especially parts of the northeastern area of the country, the consequences of the disaster continue to affect fisherpeople, shellfish gatherers and other workers who depend on coastal fauna. The impacts can be seen in the income and hearts of coastal populations. That is what artisanal fisherman Erivan Bezerra de Medeiros, who has spent almost 50 years fishing and five years frustrated by Brazil’s lack of measures, says.

“This is the fifth year we've come here to Brasilia to demand our rights [in the face of] this absurd crime that happened in the country – one of the worst in Latin America so far. There has still been no reparation, either for the fisherpeople who were affected or for the riverside communities, traditional communities, Indigenous peoples and quilombolas,” laments the fisherman, who lives in a community on the southern coast of the state of Rio Grande do Norte where around 200 workers were left out of the aid announced by the then Bolsonaro government. Medeiros says it is no longer possible to measure the personal and professional damage caused by oil.

The fisherman's statement tallies with the figures: at the time of the oil spill, the Bolsonaro administration promised financial aid for 300,000 coastal workers, but the benefit only covered an average of 60,000 to 80,000 people, according to the Fishing Workers's Pastoral Council (CPP, in Portuguese). In northeastern Brazil, from the state of Bahia to Maranhão, the Ministry of Fisheries and Aquaculture counts 460,000 fisherpeople. Formally, the category of artisanal fisherpeople includes shellfish gatherers, rafters, riverside dwellers, quilombola fisherpeople, Indigenous people and other workers.

The spill, which began on August 30, 2019, and lasted until March 2020, affected all nine states of northeastern Brazil and also extended to the states of Espírito Santo and Rio de Janeiro. More than 3,000 square kilometers were affected, according to projections by the federal executive branch's environmental technical staff. Today, Erivan Medeiros is involved in the “Sea of Struggle” campaign, which seeks compensation for the population affected by the spill. He says the lack of justice in the case has caused a series of problems for the sector. “Many people have fallen ill because of oil. Some are getting blind, others have committed suicide because they haven't been compensated, and so on. This is our fight,” he says.

Continue reading.

[fancylala4]

Saying that Brazilian people are giving Latin America a bad name for… being upset that Taylor didn’t acknowledge the fan that died at her concert or at least put some of her money towards her afterwards is wild.

And saying that someone who is affected by a tragedy won’t mention in person is also fucking stupid. If Taylor is so affected by it, why didn’t she reach out to the family or pay for the fan’s body to be taken back? Also, that stupid stan can’t say Ana’s name because she doesn’t give a fuck about her death and she wasn’t there when Ana’s death, unlike Taylor. Swifties are the dumbest people on the face of the earth.

Oh and they are not being performative about Ana’s death, they are being decent people! If anything, these stupid stans are doing just for Taylor and hoping that Taylor would acknowledge them.

Btw, that stupid stan is still being xenophobic towards people in Brazil. It doesn’t matter if you have the same ethnicity as them, you can still be xenophobic towards them.

[atefingersdagger]

Very curious about your wedding headcanons! We only get to see D4’s traditions and a little bit of D12, so I want to hear your ideas for the others (D2 especially haha)

thank you!!!

Okay, so I actually have talked extensively about District 2 weddings in the sequel to my main series (Of the Fitest, which is on ao3), and it's the only district I've thought about deeply in terms of wedding headcanons. I'll go into them here!

District 2 weddings are one of the only, if not singular, exceptions to socially acceptable public displays of affection (this plays a role in Cato and Clove having to play up their dynamic for cameras). Traditions include the vows and officiating.

However, what makes them stand out is pebbles! Instead of a flower girl and the petals being laid ahead of the bride, people lay pebbles down own the walk way as the bride and groom exit the building. Many people even see collecting those pebbles as good luck for their own loves, or will save them for their own or their family members' weddings. It's a symbol of stability.

Here's an exerpt from Of the Fitest (doesn't spoil the story):

"The exception to the rule would be wedding ceremonies, a type of event she’s been to a few times for family members or family friends. Traditions require the usual vows and officiating before pebbles are placed behind the couple as they walk upon the aisle. It’s common for people to collect tiny rocks throughout their lives for the occasion. Some pick them up after for good luck, pocketing them once the partying portion begins. Clove picked off plenty from the aisles as a kid, the little things of all different colors and sizes still in a small pouch in her bedroom."

Another District 2 wedding headcanon is that people will carve names or initials into rocks and leave them out in the world as another form of good luck- symbolizing their love in something that is harder to destroy than flesh. Sometimes, those rocks will be placed in areas only the couple know or the place where they met.

One of the other traditions in 2 is a lesser one or mainly phased out in the years of Clove and Cato; blood mixing. The old "slice the hand open and hold hands," adage. It's not common as many people don't want blood on their wedding garments. However, some still do it.

Here's another exerpt from Of the Fitest (spoiler free!) that explains:

"There’s plenty of different traditions for marriages in 2. Once the couple gets their papers filled, they may celebrate how they wish. There’s the pebbles down the isle, the slicing of hands and mixing blood – that’s a rare one if the bride is wearing white – some carve their names in delicate rocks, either to keep or to throw back into nature as good luck. Traditions were always arbitrary to her, and..."

Funny enough, in the last chapter of my main series I completed, Clove talks with someone about District 2 weddings. She thinks about how bridesmaids aren't a big thing, although they are there at many weddings. Usually, it's just a maid of honor or a few others. She also thinks of having bouquets of knives.

One District 2 wedding headcanon that is recent so not mentioned in my fanfics (yet) is the flowers used often being Gladiolus. A flower that is named after the Latin term for sword (very District 2) and is also known as a "sword lily" for its shape. They aren't native to America, but they were grown in Panem regardless, and their seeds carried on.

I headcanon District 2's music as being full of hurdy gurdys, lyres, and flutes. Very medieval-esq music and some viking-like traditions in addition (as I like to compare 2 to vikings as much as ancient Romans), and those intrustments would be used at the celebrations!

I think goats milk would also be drank during celebrations as Sejanus Plinth mentioned in tbosas that goats milk reminds him of 2, implying that it was a popular drink there.

For other districts; I imagine District 8 would have a new cloth woven for the bride that is placed over her shoulders to symbolize protection and comfort in the marriage as they are the textile district.

I think 12, 4, and 2 are districts we know about the most via the novels, so it's much easier to think of headcanons that are built upon the characteristics of the preexisting cultures. I have a small headcanon that District 1 will make beautiful necklaces for the bride and groom. As of the other districts, I need to think on more, but since I'm so focused on Clove, it's all District 2, baby!

Thank you so, so much for asking cause I get to yap and word vomit all of this useless info into one place and wrap it up in a nice bow!

[eddiedefender]

“eddie is a bad father"

Since 7x09 aired, I've been seeing a lot of people saying that Eddie is a bad father, and it's just so ????????????? Have you even watched the show???????

I'm not denying the mistakes Eddie has made regarding Chris, especially during the first years of his life, but making mistakes does not automatically make him a bad parent. The important thing is that after making those mistakes, he has done everything in his power to correct them. He has always tried to shield him of whatever disasters or tragedies life has thrown at Chris.

So for those people, now I'm going to do a rundown of Eddie's and Chris' relationship, but I'm also going to be focusing on Eddie as a person and not only as a father. i tried to keep it in a chronological order. (I'm so sorry for any inconsistencies :( )

El Paso, TX.

Shannon and Eddie begin

Eddie and Shannon were never a healthy relationship. They are high school sweethearts who had to get married due to her getting pregnant accidentally at 19. High school relationships, especially the first ones, are almost never meant to last. Eddie forced himself to get married to her bc he felt it was the “right” thing, due to his catholic upbringing and subsequent catholic guilt. He automatically assumed his role, not bc he wanted, but because he felt like he Had to. This caused his marriage to be extremely dysfunctional.

Catholic guilt and his identity Eddie's catholic guilt is likely closely related to his identity as the son of Mexican immigrants. Catholicism in Latin America was introduced in a very traumatic and forced way by Spanish colonizers. Thousands of Native Americans were killed for refusing to converse to Catholicism, therefore causing Catholicism to become really intense in Latin America, a way in which it remains until now. Entire Latino countries values and laws circle back to catholic traditions, there is virtually no way to escape religion. This is then mixed with the innate sexism that is common in those countries, leaving a pretty extreme view of gender roles. When a kid is raised in these environments or, in eddies case, by people raised in these countries, their life will always be dictated by Catholicism rules, especially when the family is especially (extra) religious, as is implied in Eddie's case. Coming back to how people's life is dictated by Catholicism… this is especially true regarding matters of sexuality and gender. As we all know, Latino Catholicism has strict views regarding gender roles. A man should be the “provider” and “strong” and the woman should “take care of the family” and be “gentle”. That is basically what Eddie is. He always paints himself as the strong one, bottling up his emotions; and also thinks of himself as only the provider for the family. This heavily affected his relationship with Shannon. When he got her pregnant, he automatically assumed that role by marrying her.

Newfound “family”

His marriage and new “family” life caused to be so overwhelming that the only out he saw, was enlisting and going to war, leaving his newborn son and wife alone. All of this was done under the pretence of being the “provider” for his family, because he thought that was what they required from him. He didn't comprehend that his wife and kid also needed him emotionally. Sadly, that was never going to happen due to the very circumstances in which the family was created. He never loved Shannon enough to make things work between them; but he still tried, for the sake of Chris' and to give him a chance to have a proper family.

Shannon leaving

after coming back from war, Eddie and Shannon tried to live the “family life” but that came to be impossible and overwhelming for both of them. This time it was Shannon that left. When she left, Eddie ended up alone with his son, fresh out of the army and with a family that wanted to take away his kid. He instantly knew that Christopher could not go through the trauma of losing another parent. That's why he decided to fight his toxic family for Chris' custody and took him away to L.A., so that they could live and navigate their new family dynamic far away.

Los Angeles, California

Eddie begins again

When Eddie moved out to L.A. he was still discovering how to raise a kid with a disability and also fighting his parents for Chris' custody. He did everything he could to ensure his kid was well taken care of, shielding him from his own struggles. When he got the job at the 118, he still did his best to keep him in a sort of normal environment. Due to Chris' disability, this came to be more of a challenge, but Eddie never stopped trying to get him the extra help he needed by every means.

When he joined the 118 he met buck who then introduced them to Carla, the social worker. Then, Carla and Eddie started to work together, so that they could improve Chris' quality of life, always looking out for his happiness.

L.A. life

Besides Carla, Eddie also found his support system on the 118. These people always helped him in everything he required and became his friends; especially Buck, as his best friend. Eddie found in Buck a person very similar to him, one that had Chris' best interests at heart and someone that would fight tooth and nail for him. Seeing the positive impact buck made, he decided to make him a constant presence in Chris's life. This made nothing but improve both Chris' and Eddie's family life.

Nevertheless, life in L.A. was not so happy for Eddie. Although he had found a support system and strong friendships, he was still processing Shannon's absence. He always blamed her for leaving him and her son. However, he never made these concerns known to his son, as he didn't want Chris' to grow to hate his mother. The only people who knew about this were the 118, although he was always reluctant to be open about any feelings he experienced.

Shannon

All this came to a halt when Shannon came back to their already settled lives. At the beginning, Eddie tried to navigate his issues with Shannon, without letting Chris know that she had come back. He was afraid that Shannon would leave and therefore scar Chris again. He wanted to shield him from that pain.

After a while, Eddie decided that it was OK for Shannon to come back to Chris' life and for them to try to be a family again. During this time, Eddie and Shannon were still figuring out what they were and how they wanted their future to look like, while also living the family life for Chris' sake.

After navigating their family life and personal conflicts for a while, Shannon asked Eddie for a divorce. She died days after. This was a very big hit for both Eddie and Chris. They both navigated their grief together. It was not a perfect journey, but Eddie never stopped having Chris' best interests at heart.

(natural) Disasters

Soon after Shannon died, another tragedy hit Chris' life: the tsunami. Both tragedies resulted in Chris having recurring nightmares, sometimes blending the lines between his mother's death and the tsunami. Eddie was constantly worried about the state of his son, even though the latter was not opening up to him. He took him to the psychologist to see what he could do to make him feel better and process his emotions.

Mothers or girlfriends?

After Shannon's death, Eddie, maybe involuntarily, leaned back into the “provider” role, and he looked for someone to fill the “mother” role for Chris. His next relationships were solely based on how much Christopher liked his girlfriends. He was focused, perhaps too much, on what he thought was best for Chris. He never noticed that Chris' didn't need another maternal figure, he already had everything he needed in Buck, Carla, and the rest of the 118.

The only relationship he had, prior to L.A. was the one with Shannon. The outcome of that relationship left him severely traumatized and unable to form emotional bonds with women. And anxiety when thinking of a future or marriage with them. He only valued his girlfriends regarding on how much Chris' liked them, removing himself completely from his own relationship.

Grief

since Shannon died, Eddie has never got the chance, or given himself the chance, to grieve her properly. He has constantly bottled up his emotions, until he couldn't anymore, resulting in extreme reactions. Or, on the other hand, completely gaslighting himself into believing something that wasn't true.

First, soon after she died, while dealing with the aftermath of the tsunami and its impact on Chris' he stated to develop feelings of anger towards her. To try and “process” his rage, he turned to illegal fight clubs, only stopping when he almost killed a man. Eddie then confessed to bobby he did that so that he could keep his anger under control as to not let Chris down, seeing he was the only parent Chris had left.

Second, during the subsequent seasons, Eddie started to completely morph the mental image he had of Shannon and their relationship. Shannon suddenly became the epitome of motherhood and the perfect wife. He completely stripped her out of her humanity, putting her on a pedestal or an example he should seek to obtain. All of a sudden, they never had any marriage problems, and he even forgot that she asked him for a divorce. Their marriage was only perfect since the day she died.

His delusions have reached their breaking point in s7. He quickly fell down into a hole after seeing a girl similar to his wife. He started pursuing her, even though he already has a girlfriend. Also, leading this woman into a situationship without her knowing about the wife.

It was only after buck said something, that he realized that he wasn't even sure of what he wanted from Kim. He soon after came clean to her, and tried to stop their relationship. (then she matched his 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓴 and actually got bangs and got into a weird role-play as shannon, to “try” to get Eddie to get over her, is suppose.... I don't even know what she was trying to do there😭😭😭😭). That is when Chris caught them. Eddie never intended for his son to see him in this broken state, and he had actually done a great job at hiding it until now.

This mistake does not erase how much Chris means to Eddie and all the things he has done to maintain Chris' wellbeing.

This is simply an example of a very broken man.

i wanted to clarify that when i refer to "catholicism" in the text im not talking about what the scriptures (Bible) say, i talk about how people interpret them in latam context. also im probably forgetting some things but I think this gets my point across.

[yaqamole]

Talk about Cuba to me

CUBAAAA

Oh many I love Elian so much. Do note, most of my headcanons and thoughts on Cuba come from @ask-hws-cuba. They are based and the CEO of writing Cuba imo

But yes. Things about him

Loves chickens so much. Birds in general. But especially chickens. Catch him sending all his loved ones chicken pictures and calling them "cock pics"

Is friends with Romano and the two often tattoo each other

Does NAWT like Antonio and enjoys annoying tf out of him

Historically has been screwed over a lot so he has very few people he trusts. But Jamaica and Haiti are on the top of the list of close friends he has

Has teeth jewelry and rocks it

Used to bang Russia

Overall as a character, he is a passionate man who is full of life and energy. He loves very strongly and does not fall in love easily. Even more so because he deals with a lot of internalized homophobia that he was given thanks to Antonio. He feels he is not allowed to love men and it affects his ability to let himself be vulnerable with them. Unfortunately for him, he seems to keep attracting other men mainly in his love life. So he is forced to face that but is still hesitant because of the machismo culture in Latin America. I personally headcanon that Romano was the first man he allowed himself to be open about his feelings with but that didn't end well due to Romano having his own internalized transphobia. So the two of them ended up being "the one that got away" for each other.

[laninasinamor]

this post is an analysis of a passage in Tenoch's book . it's a lil long. contains sensitive topics. tw: racism, colorism, SA. you have been warned but if you wish to continue, feel free 😊

A PASSAGE FROM TENOCH HUERTA’S “ORGULLO PRIETO” - “BROWN PRIDE” ✊🏾🤎

Translated:

On the other hand, racist acts are not exclusive to white people or the dominant group. We brown people have assimilated the problem and have become victims and perpetrators at the same time.

In fact, when the members of Poder Prieto - a movement that seeks to raise awareness about the influence of racist practices in people's lives - have spoken about the subject, we discovered that many racist attacks that we have suffered throughout our lives they have arisen from our families, from ourselves or from other people also with brown skin.

These are daily micro-discriminations that, when accumulated, affect our moods and the way we live together and understand the world and our society, but also strengthen the monster that we seek to bring down.

Since we were children, our grandparents told us that the goal is to "mejorar la raza"*, our parents reminded us that "they treat you how they see you", our sisters confessed to us "how ugly, your girlfriend looks like a servant", or we blamed her for "look out for the güero* or the güera* from the neighborhood" and we thought that was why they were the most attractive.

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

"güero" refers to someone with lighter complexion, white boy

"güera" = white girl

"Mejorar la raza" is a phrase traced back to the early years of colonization in Mexico by the Spanish.

Many Latino families still hear it today.

In English, it translates to "improve the race."

To add context, the Spanish implemented a caste system, a hierarchy of socio-racial classes, in order to keep status and power, centering the social structure around them and their culture on the top.

The highest in the system were Spanish people born in Spain. The lowest in the system were typically those of Indigenous as well as African blood. If you born either or both (Indigenous and/or African), chances are you were probably born in poor conditions and are not considered a full human being with rights.

This is where "improving the race" comes in. It centers around breeding.

The only way to elevate one's social status in the eyes of the caste system was to get married and/or bare children with someone richer in the eyes of society, in this case most commonly white/Spanish men or women. As a result, Mestizos (children with an Indigenous & Spanish parent) or Mulatos (children with an African & Spanish parent) would reap the benefits of having elevated their status by having more Spanish blood.

"Improving the race" has been used by many as an excuse for the rape of Indigenous woman by European colonizers!

These children were also considered more handsome because it erased their Indigenous or African features, replacing them with Eurocentric ones that were considered the epitome of beauty.

This would lead to HUGE resentment over black and brown people and their features.

The Result in Latin America: Harsh colorism!

Bad skin, bad hair, being ugly were associated with African features.

Being a maid, being short, being a hard worker are stereotypes, associated with Indigenous people

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

They pit us against each other. That is why if you ask a Mexican who is their greatest enemy, they will respond with "another Mexican."

We have been taught to hate our black/brown skin. The colorist system implemented by our colonizers is what we must try our best in no longer partaking.

We must be okay with not worrying about tanning in the sun, or getting married with someone who is not white.

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

shoutout to the Nashuri fam because we strongly are against colorist and racist rhetoric with our pro Indigenous man/Black woman ship! Love you guys! ✊🏾💙

thank you for reading my long ass post :)

[abirdie]

Gael García Bernal photographed by Craig McDean for AnOther Man in 2006.

Accompanying interview text (it's a really good interview) after the jump.

Interview by Dave Calhoun

(source but I can never get AnOther Man articles to display properly)

He played Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries. He made a stunning drag queen in Bad Education. Now he’s a confused young Parisian who can’t distinguish between dreams and waking-life in The Science of Sleep, Michel Gondry’s latest mind-warp of a movie. He’s worked for some of the world’s top directors, from Pedro Almodóvar to Walter Salles. He’s fiercely political, a true film lover, and an actor who genuinely puts his art before his bank balance. He’s also a powerful force behind the new wave of filmmaking in Latin America. And Gael Garcia Bernal is still only 27.

Last night, Bernal was knocking back drinks and dancing late into the night at a house party in Greenwich Village. The morning after, he’s sitting in a small diner in downtown Manhattan, talking spiritedly about the disastrous effects that globalisation is having on rural farmers in his home country of Mexico.

“It’s getting to the point where it’s going to implode,” Bernal warns, knocking back a coffee. “The people who will be affected will be the poor. The countries who are going to get fucked up are the poor ones. It’s going to lead to civil wars.”

The more you speak to Bernal, the more time you spend in his company, and the more of his friends and collaborators that you speak to, the more you begin to understand that there’s something unusual about this young actor. There’s a refreshing, even old-fashioned, seriousness to the way he approaches his life and work. He’s unusually engaged – politically, culturally and socially – in a way that isn’t awkward or mannered. He’s hungry to learn, to work with the right people, to do the right thing, to make a difference. There’s a natural, confident ease in his commitment to cinema, politics and the world around him. If all this makes him sound too earnest, it shouldn’t; he’s as comfortable sniggering about beach parties in Brazil as he is dissecting politics. It’s all one life to him.

Bernal first grabbed the attention of the art-house crowd in 2000 in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores Perros, an extreme story of three lives that collide in one car crash amid the chaos of Mexico City. He was 21. In the following year, he filmed the sexually charged road movie Y tu mamá también, which made him, alongside good friend and co-star Diego Luna, Mexico’s most in-demand young actor.

“We had finally discovered a new face,” remembers Carlos Cuarón, writer of Y tu mamá también and brother of the film’s director, Alfonso Cuarón.

“Here was a new young actor who could sustain emotion in a very different way. After seeing Gael in a short film a year or two before Amores Perros came out, I remember calling my brother and saying to him, ‘Man, you have to see this guy.’ He was like, ‘Yeah, thanks, I’m busy right now.’”

A year or two passed before Alfonso saw Gael in action. “Alejandro González Iñárritu is a friend of ours and he showed Alfonso an early cut of Amores Perros,” continues Carlos. “That was the moment when Alfonso said, ‘I want that guy!’ I was on the telephone saying, ‘I told you so!’”

Since then, Bernal has played a youthful Che Guevara in an award-winning performance for Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles in The Motorcycle Diaries, a fox of a transvestite (and according to one critic a “dead ringer for Julia Roberts”) for the Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar in Bad Education, and opposite Charlotte Gainsbourg in French director Michel Gondry’s latest movie, The Science of Sleep. It’s an impressive roll-call of collaborators. And still not one Hollywood movie in sight.

“I think Tijuana is the closest I’ve ever got to Hollywood,” Bernal jokes as we talk about the three months he recently spent on location in the notorious Mexican border town for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s latest film, Babel. “It sounds like a really bad tragedy, doesn’t it? The Closest I Ever Got to Hollywood Was Tijuana!”

Carlos Cuarón agrees that Bernal’s acting path has been remarkable. “The really crazy thing about Gael is that he’s probably the most famous Mexican actor nowadays, but he still hasn’t done a Hollywood movie. He chooses his projects very intelligently. He picks them because he likes the director or because he thinks the script is amazing or because there are other interesting actors in the film. Usually, people become famous across the world because of Hollywood movies, he hasn’t had to go that route.”

Bernal’s commitment is thrown into sharp relief when he talks about his move to London to go to drama school at the age of 17 a decade ago. He was shocked by the country’s apathy to politics and culture. He expected the Rolling Stones, the Marquee Club and arthouse cinema. Instead what he found were the Spice Girls, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and students who would rather sit drinking in pubs or subject themselves to pharmaceutical testing than attend a political rally.

“I found it difficult coming from Mexico,” Bernal explains. “In Mexico, there’s this feeling that everything you do has a political complexity. Which it does. Whatever you do, whoever you say hello to, whichever part of the neighbourhood you go to... Everything has this huge political complexity, as well as social, emotional and sexual.

“I think my attitude also has something to do with my family. They work in the theatre, underground theatre, so maybe I was pretentious, or snobbish perhaps.”

Bernal’s teenage years coincided with a tumultuous time in Mexico. The country was emerging from what he labels “an old tyrant democracy”, and the Zapatista movement in Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas was rising up against the government. Street demonstrations were part of everyday life. Bernal and his family lived comfortably in Mexico City – his mother is an actor, his father an actor and director – but like many kids of his age he was swept up by the energy and sheer excitement of the capital’s mass support for the Zapatistas.

“That movement polarised the country, but it also united a lot of people,” Bernals recalls. “We helped to stop the war. Because of that, it felt like what we did counted. Something like a million and a half people demonstrated every day when the war between the government and the guerrillas started. I was very involved. I was writing and reading about the situation, helping to send food, and demonstrating on the marches. It was great. I was young, and it was fun. And, I’ve got to say, I met my first girlfriend – my first real girlfriend – there as well. It was a great place to meet girls!”

Sex and politics. There’s nothing po-faced about Bernal’s political engagement. It’s wrapped up in movies, fun, friendships, music, travel, theatre and family. There’s something pleasing and traditionally bohemian about all this. There is often a sense in Europe and North America, that we are too comfortable, cynical even, and few people believe that protest – let alone art – can make a difference. Bernal would get along just fine in Paris circa 1968.

All of which helps to explain why he spent the past ten days at the World Trade Organisation summit in Hong Kong. His world doesn’t end with himself and his films. In Hollywood, political engagement, more often than not, means rash gestures and red faces all round. Bernal’s engagement is more steady, more regular, more constant. He quietly attended the protests at the G8 summit in Edinburgh last year on the same weekend that Madonna, Elton et al performed at the Live 8 concert in Hyde Park. In Hong Kong, he sat in meeting after meeting, discussing ideas, presenting case studies and assisting delegates such as Mary Robinson, the former Irish president (“La Presidenta!” as Bernal calls her, laughing). Before travelling to Hong Kong, he spent some time in Chiapas, discovering for himself the effect that free trade is having on local maize and coffee producers.

He’s fully aware that his profile as an actor is a selling point for organisations such as Oxfam, but still he makes sure – indeed demands – that he’s fully informed. He’s not interested in being an intelligent pretty face. He wants to get stuck in. He arrived at the Hong Kong summit with an undefined role, but was soon speaking out at meetings.

“Little by little, I started to get into it and became really interested in everything,” he explains. “Oxfam asked me if I wanted to be in the talks and negotiations.”

He jokes about something else that he picked up at the summit, after some Germans he met fell about laughing when they heard his name. “Gael” it turns out, means “horny” in German. You can already see the pin-up poster tag-line in the German equivalent of Teen Vogue: “Ich bin Gael”, it would read, pasted across a brooding portrait of the actor. It wouldn’t be anything new. “Mexican heart-throb”, “Sex Mex”, “The sexiest thing to come out of Latin America since Ricky Martin” are just some of the tacky headlines – often in upmarket publications – that have been written recently about Bernal.

The conversation turns to Live 8. Bernal admits that he feels a strong sense of unease towards events like these.

“I was a bit critical of Live 8. The people that organised it act as if they are there to safeguard our souls, and present it as a civil action, as if it’s our civil duty to go to a concert. Many of the people who took part made no more effort to do this concert than they would to make a Pepsi commercial. Some of these artists are the same people who advertise Coca Cola. People in Mexico don’t have clean water, yet they’ve drunk Coca Cola all their lives. It’s cheaper to get a Coke than to get clean drinking water. That in itself is a strong image of how much power such companies wield across the world.”

Such independent thinking is present too in Bernal’s attitude to films and filmmaking. He’s happier on the margins, where the ideas and imagination lie. It’s interesting to contrast his career with the young American actors of a similar stature – those who, one minute are hailed as the new saviours of independent cinema, and the next, are dressing up as Spiderman or nestling happily in King Kong’s computer-generated fur. It’s easier to say yes than it is to say no, as Bernal has consistently replied to all approaches from Hollywood.

The screenwriter Milo Addica (Monster’s Ball and Birth) tells a good story about how Bernal accepted the lead role in The King, which he wrote and produced. It’s an independent American movie that British director James Marsh shot in late 2004. When the film was still in the casting stage, many young American actors read the script and liked it, but, as Addica recalls, backed off for what he calls “moral reasons”. They didn’t like the film’s violence or the ambiguity of a lead character who starts out as a hero, but commits an horrific act in the film’s closing moments. Bernal, on the other hand, leapt at the chance. He plays Elvis Valderez, a young American with a Mexican mother, who leaves the navy and goes in search of his father (William Hurt), a popular Baptist preacher who never knew his illegitimate son. It’s a search that ultimately has terrible consequences. Bernal does a good job in his first American film.

“We went to a number of young actors, all of who you know but I won’t name names,” Addica explains. “They all liked the script but were concerned with the audience’s perception. They wanted changes made to accommodate that. Of course, when you pay an actor $20 million he will do an Irish jig on the table for you. He doesn’t give a flying fuck.” Needless to say, $20 million was not on offer for The King.

Bernal is not easily tempted by a pay cheque. “A film with no point of view is such a waste of money,” he considers. “So much money is spent on films. Oh man, spend that money somewhere else!”

Bernal’s attitude to cinema is rooted in Mexico – rooted in the struggle to get films made – personal stories, real storytelling, strong ideas. He says that making The Motorcycle Diaries, for which he travelled through Argentina, Peru and Mexico, reaffirmed his commitment to Latin America and Latin American cinema. Last month, his production company in Mexico City opened for business in partnership with Diego Luna. They’ve already launched a travelling documentary festival that began in Mexico City and is due to visit 16 towns across the country.

As an actor, Bernal is drawn to the filmmakers he has worked with. He wants to learn more, and says unashamedly that he usually wants to be friends with his directors.

“That was the best thing about all these films, on a very personal level, getting to know these people,” he says. “To be their friends, actually. That’s the best thing, and I really get emotional about that. Many people have explained what cinema is, but so far, to me, the best appreciation is that cinema is further proof, further affirmation that fiction can move people more than reality, more than the facts. Also that in the process of making films you get to travel and make friends.”

This isn’t just talk. Michel Gondry, who last year directed Bernal in his latest film, is effusive about the actor who he now counts as a good friend. In The Science of Sleep, Bernal plays Stephane, a half-Mexican, half-French young man whose colourful dreams have a bizarre effect on his waking-life. On the phone from New York, Gondry mentions that he has borrowed Bernal’s old apartment in the city while he works on the post-production of his film in time for Sundance. The two became close both before and during the shoot. When they first met, Gondry hadn’t quite completed his script, so he and Bernal discussed ideas together. Gondry is happy to credit Bernal with offering crucial input to the finished screenplay.

“He’s a great person on top of being a great actor,” Gondry says warmly. “He’s very caring and we’ve become very, very close. He’s very committed. The character he was playing in my film is close to me, so we had to find out what we both had in common. That takes time, and he was really pleased to spend time getting to know me. He’s also just a machine of happiness. During the shoot, he would always make everybody happy and entertain them.”

We walk around the corner and head back to the hotel, still talking about films, Mexico, London and New York, before saying goodbye in the lift. Bernal still has places to go today. The first is the local cinema, where he plans to catch the Tommy Lee Jones-directed Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, a superb film written by his fellow countryman Guillermo Arriaga, the writer of Amores Perros and 21 Grams. The second is with a TV set in a bar somewhere. His local football team in Mexico are playing in a cup final tonight. He wouldn’t miss it for the world. The revolution rolls on.

[justforbooks]

César Aira

He has published more than 100 novels, gives his work away, and his surrealist books have a massive cult following. Now Argentina’s favourite rule-breaker is tipped for the Nobel prize

Afew years ago when Patti Smith played at a cultural festival in Denmark, she told the crowd that she was happy to be playing in the presence of one of her favourite authors. It was said she had only agreed to play the festival because the author, César Aira, would be in the audience. Aira, although celebrated in his home country, Argentina, was little known outside Latin America until he was discovered in 2002 by the Berlin-based literary agent Michael Gaeb, who was enchanted by his unconventional, surrealist books, which shift atmosphere, and even genre, from one page to another.

At first it proved difficult to sell Aira’s novels to a wider audience. “The fundamental problem when promoting César’s work is that the editor always asks: ‘What is the novel about?’” Gaeb told me. “And in the case of César, it’s not easy to answer that question.”

Gaeb has since sold Aira’s books in 37 languages. At the start of October last year, the English betting site Nicer Odds named Aira as a favourite for the Nobel prize in literature, slightly ahead of candidates such as Haruki Murakami and Salman Rushdie, who have appeared more regularly on such lists.

“I already know that every October, until my death, I’m going to have to put up with that.” Said by any other writer, this would come across as a humble brag. But Aira doesn’t seem to be the kind of person who appreciates disrupting events. “Sometimes the candidacy is useful to me,” he said, laughing. “For instance, now we live in a more luxurious apartment, one a little beyond my circumstances. And they rent to me because they see that I am a candidate for the Nobel.”

His apartment is located just five blocks from his office, which in its turn was the house where he lived for more than 40 years with his two children and his wife, Liliana Ponce, a poet and a scholar of Japanese literature. The recent move took place because Ponce has an illness that affects her mobility, and the new building has an elevator.

Aira, who does not speak to the local press and whose interviews with foreign media are usually short and conducted via email, rarely leaves Flores, a lower-middle-class neighbourhood that’s best known today as a textile hub for the clothing stores in wealthier areas of the city. Early in his career, Aira developed a method called the fuga hacia adelante (something like “forward flight”), which consists of writing a few hours a day and never looking back to edit until he reaches the end of a tale. “I revise much more than I did before,” casually demystifying what is perhaps the fact most repeated about his work. “I think that I’ve become more demanding. Or else I’m writing worse than before.”

The novels were – and sometimes still are – written in neighbourhood bars, cafes and even fast-food joints, such as McDonald’s or Pumper Nic, a now-extinct Buenos Aires chain. “It began when my children were small,” he said. “If I had a bit of time, I escaped, and I went to write. But after the pandemic, the bars and cafes started to fill up a lot. And there’s the issue of the telephones. If at a neighbouring table two people are conversing, it’s possible to ignore them. But if there’s just one person talking on the phone, it’s as if they’re speaking with you. It’s horrible!”

Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, in a small town in the south of the province, 300 miles from the capital. “I was thinking just now of my first memories of childhood because they are of the revolution of 1955,” he said – the year Juan Perón was removed from power by a coup for the first time. There was only one cinema, and television had not yet caught on. But the town had two well-stocked public libraries. “When I was still a teenager, I was already reading Joyce, Proust and Kafka,” Aira said. His precocity was also stimulated by an amateur public education in which classes were taught not by specialised professors but by volunteers with gigantic private collections of books. There were doctors who taught philosophy classes (“in those days, doctors were humanists”) and lawyers who taught history. “I didn’t have that kind of bureaucratic education where the teacher knows more,” he said. “It was something a lot freer.”

When he was about 14 years old, Aira met Arturo Carrera, a friend who, like him, would become a nationally recognised writer. Aira dedicated himself to prose; Carrera, poetry. The friends tried to stay up to date with the literary world by getting hold of magazines that were based in the capital. One of those publications, Testigo (Witness), held a contest. Carrera sent a few poems, and Aira sent a story. They both came out winners.

At the time, the majority of promising secondary school students in Coronel Pringles continued their university studies in Bahía Blanca, a city 75 miles away. “Law was the only graduate course they didn’t have,” Aira said. He told his parents he was interested in a law degree and moved to the capital. “I wanted to come for the art galleries, the cinemas,” he said. For two years, he studied law at the University of Buenos Aires, and then he transferred to the department of literature.

Testigo folded before it could publish Aira’s winning story. But one of the judges of the award, the novelist Abelardo Arias, wrote to congratulate him. Aira and Arias began a correspondence, and soon Aira showed Arias a manuscript. Arias loved it and passed it on to the publisher Galerna, which agreed to print it.

“It was a big thing, even more so for a young person of that age,” Aira said.

One day, walking aimlessly through the streets of the city with a friend, he came across a building he knew. “Here, in this building, an editor wants to publish a novel of mine,” he told her. “Let’s go up.” When he arrived, he asked to speak with the person responsible for his book. Then he asked for the manuscript back: “I don’t want to publish it any more.” The editor was astonished.

I asked Aira why he’d acted like that. “Just because,” he said. He shrugged and laughed. “I wanted to impress her.”

To write all day long without revising until you reach the end of a story produces an obscene quantity of books. Nobody I met in Buenos Aires ventured to pin down exactly how many volumes Aira has published. César Aira, un catálogo (César Aira: A Catalogue), organised by the writer and lawyer Ricardo Strafacce, is the most notable effort to itemise his work. Launched in 2018 with the aim of helping the uninitiated, the catalogue reprints one page from each of Aira’s books. The catalogue was commissioned by his publisher in part to commemorate his 100th book (Aira likes round numbers), but in the time the catalogue took to reach the printer, Aira had already written two more.

When I sat with Strafacce in the Varela-Varelita bar in Buenos Aires at the end of a November afternoon, he was still indignant with the catalogue’s publisher, who he said had made changes without telling him. For instance, the publisher had edited the date of publication for the Aira story El hornero (The Ovenbird). “I’m furious,” he said. “You can talk to [the editor]. I don’t give a shit.” He complained about another small modification: in the biographical information for one of the titles, to his mention of Madrid, the editor had added “Spain”. In Strafacce’s eyes, the detail made him seem like an idiot, a “boludo”.

“Don’t writers get worked up about the most incredible minutiae?” said Francisco Garamona, the editor in question. With a cigarette in one hand and a glass of soda in the other, he explained that he’d merely used the version of El hornero that Aira himself had authorised, rather than the one in circulation, which was pirated. He was sitting on a sofa in La Internacional Argentina, his bookshop, where he also operates his publishing house, Mansalva. Today, Mansalva probably publishes the most titles by Aira. “There he is, and here are more, here’s another, and here,” Garamona said as he counted the shelves in the bookshop. “One, two, three … seven. Seven niches of just Aira.”

In a way, the decor reflected Garamona’s multifaceted career; in addition to being an editor and a bookshop owner, he is a musician, a film-maker, a poet and the former owner of an art gallery. Today he is also one of two editors whom Aira defined for me as “official”. The other is Damián Ríos, from the publisher Blatt & Ríos.

The honour of “official” editors must inspire some pride in Ríos and Garamona, because Aira has worked with more than a few. His extensive body of work is decentralised in dozens of editorial houses, the vast majority of them tiny, which makes him an author at once ubiquitous and elusive. In this context, it’s not difficult to understand how a controversy like the one with El hornero came about. Aira must be one of the few writers in the world, maybe the only one, to sell 25,000 copies of one title and at the same time launch other titles in much smaller print runs. He has never charged royalties or advances for the small publishing houses in Argentina. “That was the agreement I made with Michael [Gaeb],” Aira said. “I don’t meddle with the world. And he doesn’t meddle with Argentina. In Argentina, everything is free.”

Aira’s strong cultural presence today conceals the stuttering start of his career. “For many years, this was the only proof I was a writer,” he said, showing a handful of yellowing pages, the nucleus of a book without a cover. His voice shook, this time, emotion had truly moved him. In his hands was a copy of Moreira, considered by some to be his first published novel. In the background, an atmospheric combination of dissonant chords and piano notes faded away. “I only listen to Morton Feldman these days,” Aira said. He added that he’d recently made an exception to listen to Now and Then, a “new” song by the Beatles completed thanks to help from artificial intelligence.

After going up to the office of the publishing house Galerna in 1969, in that half-impulsive gesture to ask for his manuscript back, some years went by before Aira had a chance to publish again. Moreira was supposed to come out in 1975, but was delayed. The editor of the book was Aira’s friend Horacio Achával, owner of the publishing house Achával Solo. In 1976, there was another military coup in Argentina. “Horacio was a political militant and had to go away,” Aira said. “He took off. He went to Uruguay.” The copies of Moreira, still without a cover, were left stranded in a warehouse. Years later, Achával returned to the country and finalised the cover. The book was officially launched in December 1981, just weeks after Ema, la cautiva (Ema, the Captive), which came out from another publishing house in November 1981 and today disputes with Moreira the title of Aira’s official debut.

Strafacce told a different story. “Moreira was printed in June 1975,” he said. “The money ran out, and there wasn’t enough to print the cover because in the same month, there was a financial crisis and a bank run here in Argentina.”

Aira published a few books in the 80s, but according to Sandra Contreras, who founded a small publishing house that published him throughout the 90s and 2000s, it was not until 1990’s Los fantasmas (Ghosts) that he accelerated his production. At the time, she said, he also spoke more explicitly of a new phase, “the beginning of the regular publication of his novelas and novelitas”. Aira was the first author to be published not only by Contreras’s publishing house but also by Mansalva and Blatt & Ríos in the early 00s.

In the 90s, small publishers like these were rare. Garamona said that this began to change in 2001, when after almost a decade of one-to-one parity between the Argentine peso and the US dollar, the local economy went through one of the worst recessions in Latin American history. Importing books became expensive. And so, after spending years favouring authors from Spain, local bookshop owners finally had eyes for Argentine literature.

When Gaeb first encountered Aira’s work in Guadalajara, in 2002, Aira had already begun to occupy his paradoxical central position at the margins of the culture. “He is a writer who exists in different fields, at different levels,” the fiction writer and critic Alan Pauls says, from his Berlin study, in a conversation over Zoom. “On the one hand, he has quite a lot of popularity. And on the other, he remains a niche writer, a cult writer. We still think of him as a writer of the avant garde, a manufacturer of very sophisticated objects. He’s someone who occupies the centre to his regret, not because he looked for it.”

To get hold of Moreira today isn’t easy – on the site Mercado Libre Argentina, in mid-December, there was a copy going for about $1,200 (£950). On the cover that for years remained unfinished, there is a monstrous, saturnine figure riding a yellow horse. Beneath the image, the first sentence of the novel prominently appears: Un día, de madrugada, por las lomas inmóviles del Pensamiento bajaba montado en potro amarillo un horrible gaucho (“One day at dawn, through the unmoving hills of Thought, mounted upon a yellow colt, there descended a horrible gaucho”).

In Spanish, El Pensamiento can refer to both the abstract noun, and the village close to where Aira was born and spent his childhood. The phrase gives a taste of the kind of mixture harboured within the novel. Evoking Juan Moreira, a folkloric knife-fighting hero of the Argentine Pampas, the book narrates a gaucho-esque pantomime, shot through with philosophical allusions and images from dreams. In Moreira, one can already recognise the multifaceted and frenetically imaginative style for which Aira would later be known. But the Airean machine still seems to just be getting started: there is a heavy self-consciousness that is absent from the books that follow. In these later works, his prose is limpid and inviting. Here is the start of El mago (The Magician), published almost exactly 20 years after Moreira:

In March this year, the Argentine magician Hans Chans (his real name was Pedro María Gregorini) participated in a convention of illusionists in Panamá; the event, just as the invitation and promotional leaflet described, was a regional meeting of prestigious professionals, a preparation for the great world congress the following year, which was celebrated every 10 years and this time would take place in Hong Kong. The previous one had been in Chicago, and he had not gone. Now he planned not only to participate, but also to establish himself as Best Magician in the World. The idea was not crazy or megalomaniacal. It had a foundation as reasonable as it was curious: Hans Chans was a genuine magician.

Aira takes this magical premise seriously, drawing from the dilemma a tale both comic and – in its exploration of the complex relations between being and seeming – densely philosophical. Hans Chans has the gift to be an illusionist, but not the vocation. He is too self-indulgent to dedicate himself to the profession. The narrator writes: “Maybe, paradoxically, the advantage he had played against him and condemned him to mediocrity.” Without patience for the theatre of magic, Chans limits himself to drawing handkerchiefs from wine glasses, and things of that sort.

It would not be unfair to read El mago as an allegory for the career of Aira himself: of someone who has the gift of writing but for whom the most deeply rooted conventions of the profession seem meaningless. Just like Hans Chans, the author is aware of his gift. Aira is affable and courteous, but he is far from being modest. (Modesty, faked or not, is another convention of the profession.) About the manuscript he asked to take back from Galerna in 1969, he said: “It was better than anything else that was published at the time.”

He has never been afraid to throw darts at other writers. When we spoke, he was disdainful of Roberto Bolaño, saying he had read only one novel by the Chilean author, which he found “terrible”. Aira also said that the great Argentine novelist Juan José Saer had once warmed to him, when he was young and starting out, but then became envious when Aira started getting more attention. In 1981, shortly before Moreira was finally published, Aira wrote an essay titled Novela argentina: nada más que una idea (The Argentine Novel: Nothing But an Idea), which mounts a general attack on literature of the period. The essay begins:

The current Argentine novel, beyond a doubt, is a stunted, ill-fated species. In general terms, what defines a poor novelistic product is the poor use, crude and opportunistic, of the available mythical-social material. In other words, the meanings that dictate how a society lives at a given historical moment. But the literary transposition of a reality demands the existence of a very exact passion: that of literature. And a rapid, provisional survey, not at all exhaustive, of Argentine novelists reveals that they have not read deeply, and show a complete absence of that passion along with its epiphenomenon, talent.

Aira, who had not even published a novel at that time, sticks his scalpel swiftly and mercilessly into a series of authors, most of whom have been more or less forgotten. The essay, though, is remembered these days for Aira’s attack on Ricardo Piglia, who, until his death in 2017, was a kind of public rival to Aira, at least in terms of the very different literary forms they espoused.

Pauls linked Aira’s attacks at the start of his career to his ambition to reconfigure the Argentine novel. “When he emerges in the literary environment, he knows perfectly well the writers he has to tussle with,” he said. For Pauls, Aira disturbed the paradigm of a certain progressive Argentinian literature, a literature of the left, very masculine and politically committed. “Something that literary school could not stand, for example, was a certain kind of work with frivolity, with the banal, with the superficial,” Pauls said.

Aira’s style crystallised very early on. Even if Moreira is not at the level of his next books, there is no clear sense of progression in Aira’s trajectory. Maybe for that reason, none of the readers could point to a favourite work.

Aira said he will have two new novelitas ready soon. He said he plans to give one to Ríos and the other to Garamona. “And now I’ve been thinking, because one of them came out better than the other, more imaginative – who will I give that one to?” he said, laughing.

Aira rejects great theorising about his decision to give away books free or publish the majority with small publishing houses. “His form of publishing is part of his poetics, his resistance to editorial capitalism, his punk attitude,” Gaeb said.

Contreras classified the hyperproduction of little books for small publishers as an aesthetic decision. “Something like: it’s enough for a tale to be imagined to make it necessary to publish,” she said. “There is also a fascination for the book as a unique object.”

Pauls said he interprets this decision as an avant garde way of thinking: “If the kind of literature I make is never going to have hundreds of thousands of readers, what happens if I inundate the market with books?”

When Aira was asked if he was edited nowadays, first he said that “nobody revises anything”. Then he conceded that Ríos sometimes makes one comment or another. Ríos corroborated this, but found it hard to define the exact nature of his comments, and he made it clear that they weren’t about anything structural. Contreras said that in her day, she at most corrected the odd typo.

Garamona laughed at the notion of editing or revising a text by Aira. “He has written since he was a teenager without stopping, and has such a mastery of form and content that in the end there isn’t much left to do,” he said. “You just have to pick it up, make a good cover with a pretty design, correct two or three errata.”

Los hombrecitos con sobretodo (The Little Men in Overcoats) is the title of the novel Aira defined as the most imaginative of the two he recently finished. “What happens is that here in the neighbourhood, two blocks away, where the fire station is located, men pop out at night,” he said. “At midnight they come popping out of the ceiling. Little men suddenly appear like that, really tiny men, they all wear overcoats. And at night, I go and watch them.”

He spoke as if he were beginning a fairytale. The low, tremulous voice transiting between fine irony and rapture; the sense of humour; the erudition; the sedentary life in a dark house in the neighbourhood where he’d lived for decades, from which he generates cosmopolitan, compact stories full of metafictional layers – all of it reminds us a bit of Jorge Luis Borges.

For an Argentinian, to say a great local writer seems like or is influenced by Borges must sound absurdly lazy. But both authors start their brief, densely packed books with literary anecdotes or memories written in crisp prose. In the works of both, there are frequent essayistic digressions. Both persistently turn to the literary technique of ekphrasis. There are metafictional and metaliterary games, references to other works.

The main difference is perhaps in the intensity and direction of the narrative swerves, and Aira’s greater comfort with pop culture and genre literature. Whereas a story by Borges might take up a lost 19th-century Persian manuscript, a novel by Aira might locate it behind the balcony of a McDonald’s in Flores, pored over by an adolescent with an acne problem.

Borges was almost infantile in his complete dedication as a reader, distant from the mundane hustle and bustle of the world. Nobody had anything substantial to say about Aira’s private life either. “He likes to drink coffee and talk about literature,” Ríos said. Gaeb said that Aira sometimes seems to get along better with children. (In fact, the person about whom Aira spoke with the greatest passion, albeit briefly, was Arturito, his only grandson.)

Strafacce, his friend for more than 20 years, said he found it easier to explain what Aira doesn’t talk about. “We’re used to not speaking about politics because I’m Trotskyist,” he said. “And César is not.”

It was the week of the second round of the presidential election. A few days later, the Peronist Sergio Massa, a member of the centre-left governing coalition at the time, would be defeated by the far-right Javier Milei. “Milei is worse than Bolsonaro,” said Aira, in his only comment about politics.

That day, before going to the cafe, Aira passed through the Museo Barrio de Flores. Earlier, he had been irritated at a package from one of his foreign publishers: a box containing copies of one of his novels in Dutch translation. “They keep sending me those here,” he complained, as if sending books to the author himself were a kind of gaffe. Aira handles books with the avidity of a collector. He was mesmerised for a good while that afternoon by an edition of the French author Raymond Roussel, one of his surrealist idols, and he showed us a little purple box the size of a pack of cigarettes: a tiny special edition the Biblioteca Nacional had made of El ilustre mago (The Famous Magician), another novel of his. But for some reason, he wanted to rid himself of the box with the Dutch edition.

The Museo Barrio de Flores does exactly what its name suggests, displaying all kinds of memorabilia – old calculators and radios, paintings, newspaper clippings, political propaganda – related in some way to famous inhabitants of the neighbourhood. The definition of “famous” is broad, ranging from Perón – who lived there with his first wife – to the two preteen nieces of the museum’s director, who created a children’s library during the pandemic and appeared on the front page of the newspaper Clarín. Aira seemed at ease there. His name occupies one of the steps on the staircase by the front door. On the step above is the name of the great writer Roberto Arlt; on the one below, an advertisement for a real-estate broker.

Aira left the box of books with an employee and continued through the museum. At one point he dwelt on a framed letter written by Pope Francis, another former inhabitant of the neighbourhood. “Did you see how pretty the pope’s handwriting is? They don’t teach that in school any more, no.” He went to another room, where there was a showcase with some of Aira’s books.

When he opened the door, there was a group of ladies sitting around a big table. A class was in session. They all smiled pleasantly, focusing their attention on the author. Only the instructor of the course seemed to be younger than 65.

“What is the name of the little plane that flies near the ground?” one of the ladies asked.

“The what?” said Aira.

“The little plane,” the lady repeated, with a certain impatience, lowering her open palm toward the floor. “The one that flies near the ground.”

For a while, everyone stared at Aira, waiting for an answer. “An unexpected question,” joked the instructor awkwardly.

Aira shrugged, and we went to the corner to look at his showcase.

✔ This is an edited version of César Aira’s Magic, published in the Dial. The article originally appeared in the Brazilian magazine Piauí

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Grist:

When Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office in January 2023, he inherited environmental protection agencies in shambles and deforestation at a 15-year high. His predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, had dismantled regulations and gutted institutions tasked with enforcing environmental laws. Lula set out to reverse these policies and to put Brazil on a path to end deforestation by 2030. 

Environmental protection agencies have been allowed to resume their work. Between January and November of 2023, the government issued 40 percent more infractions against illegal deforestation in the Amazon when compared to the same period in 2022, when Bolsonaro was still in office. Lula’s government has confiscated and destroyed heavy equipment used by illegal loggers and miners, and placed embargoes on production on illegally cleared land. Lula also reestablished the Amazon Fund, an international pool of money used to support conservation efforts in the rainforest. Just this week, at the G20 Summit, outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden pledged $50 million to the fund.  

Indeed, almost two years into Lula’s administration, the upward trend in deforestation has been reversed. In 2023, deforestation rates fell by 62 percent in the Amazon and 12 percent in Brazil overall (though deforestation in the Cerrado, Brazil’s tropical savannahs, increased). So far in 2024, deforestation in the Amazon has fallen by another 32 percent.      

Throughout this year, Brazilians also bore witness to the effects of climate change in a new way. In May, unprecedented floods in the south of the country impacted over 2 million people, displacing hundreds of thousands and leaving at least 183 dead. Other regions are now into their second year of extreme drought, which led to yet another intense wildfire season. In September, São Paulo and Brasília were shrouded in smoke coming from fires in the Amazon and the Cerrado.  

And yet, despite the government’s actions, environmental protections and Indigenous rights are still under threat. Lula is governing alongside the most pro-agribusiness congress in Brazilian history, which renders his ability to protect Brazil’s forests and Indigenous peoples in the long-term severely constrained. 

“I do believe that the Lula administration really cares about climate change,” said Belen Fernandez Milmanda, Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Trinity College and author of Agrarian Elites and Democracy in Latin America. “But on the other side, part of their governing coalition is also the agribusiness, and so far I feel like the agribusiness is winning.”

Agribusiness has long been one of the most powerful interest groups in Brazilian politics, but its influence has grown steadily over the past decade as the electorate shifted to the right and the sector developed more sophisticated strategies to affect politics. In Congress, agribusiness is represented by the bancada ruralista, or agrarian caucus, a well-organized, multi-party coalition of landowning and agribusiness-linked legislators that controls a majority in both houses of congress. Of the 513 representatives in the Chamber of Deputies, 290 are members of the agrarian caucus. In the senate, they make up 50 of 81 legislators. 

[courtofmatchups]

First of all, I apologize for my slightly weird English, google translate helps me to read what you guys post on Tumblr.

Could I get a matchup for Tokyo Debunker?

Pronouns: She/her Sexuality: Bisexual Zodiac/MBTI: Sagittarius, INTJ Appearance: Short curly dark brown hair. Dark skin, freckles on cheeks. I'm 1.65m tall, slim body, small bust and butt and wide waist. Brown eyes, slightly round nose, thin eyebrows and medium-sized lips. Personality: Introverted, occasionally moody, but when I get confident I'm playful/a bit childish and my social battery runs out very quickly. My sense of humor is broken, it's easy to make me laugh. I'm stubborn, I always try to avoid unnecessary conflicts. Sometimes I tend to procrastinate, I don't like asking others for favors/help, even less if I'm capable of getting it/doing it myself. Surprise displays of affection make me tense.

Likes and dislikes: I like desserts; watching movies, mainly horror/thriller/romantic comedy; I enjoy interactive stories and otomes; I like watching videos of people putting on/taking off makeup, trying on clothes and giving reviews, about hair and skin care products… Oh, I also like braiding. I don't like insects; noisy places; disloyal people, liars, and people who don't value their friends; alcoholic drinks and similar substances; I don't like spicy food. I don't like being helped without asking for it first, nor do I like being told that I'm not capable of doing something (the only person who decides whether I'm capable or not is myself). Hobbies: Listening to music, watching anime, playing cell phone games, lately I'm learning crochet, so I think I'd add that as a hobby too.

Extra information: I am agnostic; I'm not a big fan of physical contact, in any case, I prefer to be the one who initiates the contact and that it doesn't last so long; I think head caresses are very cute; I like to give gifts to my loved ones; I'm somewhat disorganized for some things and organized for others, I think it depends on my mood and motivation how organized I can be; if someone yells at me I get angry easily; according to the MBTI internet test I'm INTJ and to this day I still don't feel identified with the result; I don't know if it affects the answer in any way, but I'm from Latin America, although I don't fit the stereotype at all, I'll just say that there is no worse dancer than me LOL. People say I'm a delicate and laid-back person when I'm in a good mood, and somewhat sarcastic and passive-aggressive when I'm in a bad mood.

Thank you very much in advance, kisses and hugs.

It seems to me, you've capture the heart of...

Kaito Fuji!

Let's be real, he'd be down bad for you the minute you're in his vicinity, but if you give him a chance, you will not regret it.

Hear me out: even if he is a lot more energetic than you, he's still super attentive, so if you ever feel uncomfortable, he'll pull you aside for a breather. He will tease you about your broken humour, but he will also laugh at stupid things with you. And you'll also have to tell him about the things that make you uncomfortable, he will respect that.

Your likes align with his quite well. When you tell him you like sweets, he'll make you all the best treats he can make. And if you crochet him a sweater, or a plushie, he will burst into tears. Kaito puts a lot of work into his looks, and you learning about fashion and skincare through videos could really help him also. He'd absolutely love if you'd pick out an outfit for him.

As for your dislikes, he understands your discomfort with these things, though I can't guarantee he'll be able to fully overcome his own fear of insects for you. And he will apologize for involving you in some crazy plot to escape Romeo's wrath, especially since he had to lie in the process. He will try though to overcome his fears and anxiety. He doesn't mind you needing to initiate the physical touch or things of the sort. Even if he has read in magazines that girls would rather the guy initiate it, he'd rather the tables be turned on him. Heck, he'd be over the moon.

Overall, your calmer nature can balance out his more excitable and anxious energy, making for a well-rounded dynamic.

[deathsmallcaps]

Blue beetle spoilers. And spoilers for Macario (1960)

There’s plenty of articles out there already with this info but these are my thoughts.

Ok I just saw Blue Beetle and I’m in love with Xolo Maridueña!!! His character Jaime Reyes is so enthusiastic and loves his family and ultimately kind. And he has sweet eyes XD. It’s really cool he got the role because of his martial arts skills.

Harvey Guillén is in there! He plays another character with the same last name, de la Cruz, so maybe we can jokingly have crossovers in this universe with What we do in the Shadows. Blade (admittedly Marvel but still) is semi-canon already. (I didn’t catch the entirety of his real name sorry, just definitely the end.)(idk if Guillermo de la Cruz is his full name or if his name was shuffled around/inaccurately represented due to USian naming customs)

I loved George Lopez as Uncle Rudy. He rocks the kookiness!

Nana was hella cool. Between her implied revolutionary backstory (she hates Imperialists! The way she pulls out her braids when it’s time to attack makes me think that she was part of a pro-Mexico or maybe pro-Indigenous force back in the day) and Ignacio’s backstory (his mother, his only family, murdered in a ‘anti-communist’ attack in Guatemala, and then he was sent to ‘Escuela de las Americas’, a USA funded ‘school’ that basically churned out child soldiers and later adult destabilizers sent out to disrupt Latin America in the name of USian interests (its still in operation), and then he was experimented upon by the very people that ruined his life (a la the Tuskegee Airmen Experiment) really speaks to the racism and imperialism that affects the family in the movie and many people face today (preaching to the choir I know). The fight ain’t over.

(First link is in spanish, second link is the English Wikipedia page)

I appreciate that a good half of Jaime’s family were not in the US legally. The constant terror and unwillingness to seek help for fear of attention was quite palpable, and I think really adds to the idea that superheroes are supposed to make sure ALL people live safely and happily - legality should not contradict human rights. And hell, even though they were in the USA, their home was still threatened - by gentrification!

The poor Dad’s death is sadly not an uncommon phenomenon. Many immigrants, but especially undocumented ones, work themselves to the bone, both physically and emotionally. Poverty and instability kill more than any capitalist would ever like to acknowledge. And yet Alberto still found it in his heart to be kind whenever possible. I really respect that. And I think his kindness inspired Rocio (the mom, who is totally cool) and Milagro (sister) to keep on after his death.

The body horror aspects were interesting, for both Jaime and Ignacio Caripax. I hope they lean into that in later works.

But what really caught my eye was the cave of candles that appeared twice in the story. There’s a European story, Godfather Death, about a godchild of the personification of death who gets given the power to heal, and ultimately (in some people’s views) wastes it in greed and/or love. He gets to watch his life, represented as a candle, blow out. However, in Spanish, death is a feminine concept, and so Death is a godmother in that situation. Godmother Death* is thus a common story in Latin America too, but especially in Mexico and Guatemala, where Maya beliefs mixed with Catholic ones.

It turns out, the creators wanted to bring in some Latine magical realism and reference the classic Mexican film, **Macario, which is based on a novel based on a local legend that was likely based on La Madrina Muerte. I’ve ordered the book, lol, and will watch the movie soon. I’m quite excited to see it.

I found it quite interesting that Jaime’s acceptance of Khaji Da and the Macario/Madrina Muerte scene happened really close to each other. In a way, he chose compromise to continue with life, as opposed to Macario’s/the Godson’s stubbornness which lead to their deaths. His willingness to work with Khaji Da (scarabs are symbols of rebirth btw) shows a willingness to work with his place in the life and death cycle, and the Madrina Muerte themes showcase his interest in alleviating suffering***.

In any case, if you have money for a ticket, I highly suggest going to see Blue Beetle! It’s totally worth it.

*La Madrina Muerte, in Spanish. I’ve been somewhat obsessed with it since I was a preteen, as I came across the Spanish version translated to English first. My tumblr name is *somewhat* related lol.

I was somewhat inspired by La Calavera Catrina art, Santa Muerte and the Grim Reaper when I drew this.

**for some reason tumblr has decided that two links is quite enough for this post. Sometimes it just doesn’t let me add more links? Or copy/paste!!? Anyway if you’d like to read a more knowledgeable article about the relationship between the two films, look up ‘macario blue beetle’ & then an article by slashfilm will appear.

***In the legend, the godson is given a plant, a potion, or just the power to heal. But he must abide by Death’s position by the bed of the afflicted person. If death is at the foot of the bed, then they were meant to live, and he gets to take away their suffering and cure them entirely. But if Death stood by the head of the bed, then the person was meant to die soon, and so the Godson had to leave them be. In either case, Death prefers to end suffering - through complete healing or a cessation of life. However, Jaime makes sure (when he can) to help people live and be able to choose what to do with their life (like in the case of Ignacio). And Khaji Da respects that.

[eternalwritess]

Hiii <3

Could I get a matchup for JJK?

Pronouns: She/her Sexuality: Bisexual Zodiac/MBTI: Sagittarius, INTJ Appearance: Short curly dark brown hair. Dark skin, freckles on cheeks. I'm 1.65m tall, slim body, small bust and butt and wide waist. Brown eyes, slightly round nose, thin eyebrows and medium-sized lips.

Personality: Introverted, occasionally moody, but when I get confident I'm playful/a bit childish. Short-lived social battery, I prefer to do things on my own rather than ask for help (I only ask for help if I see that I can't solve a problem). I am impulsive when I get stressed. Some people think I'm usually angry, when in reality I'm just serious and I don't like pretending that I find their jokes funny.

Likes and dislikes: I like desserts; watching movies, mainly horror/thriller/romantic comedy; I enjoy interactive stories and otomes; I like watching videos of people putting on/taking off makeup, trying on clothes and giving reviews, about hair and skin care products… Oh, I also like braiding. I like true crime shows

I don't like insects; noisy places; disloyal people, liars, and people who don't value their friends; alcoholic drinks and similar substances; I don't like spicy food.

Hobbies: Listening to music, watching anime, playing cell phone games, lately I'm learning crochet, so I think I'd add that as a hobby too.

Extra information: I am agnostic; I'm not a big fan of physical contact, in any case, I prefer to be the one who initiates the contact and that it doesn't last so long; I think head caresses are very cute (my mom said I looked like a dog LOL); I like to give gifts to my loved ones; I'm somewhat disorganized for some things and organized for others, I think it depends on my mood and motivation how organized I can be; if someone yells at me I get angry easily; I sometimes lose interest in things quickly if they don't seem stimulating enough; I'm used to being alone, so I sometimes get bored of interacting with people; I don't know if it affects the answer in any way, but I'm from Latin America, although I don't fit the stereotype at all, I'll just say that there is no worse dancer than me LOL. I get tired very quickly, I don't like carrying heavy objects.

Thank you very much in advance, kisses and hugs.

i match you with... 𝓜𝓪𝓴𝓲 𝓩𝓮𝓷'𝓲𝓷 ██ 20% _ ████ 60% _ █████ 80% _ ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒ 100% ᴄᴏᴍᴘʟᴇᴛᴇ!

♛ You'd meet her at Jujutsu Tech, you're most likely a second year like her and the first time that you met she didn't think that much of you at first, she had a long ways to go at the time and still does to actually achieving her goal. The head of the Zen'in clan but she was the first person Gojo introduced you to. Why? Because you're both girls probably

♛ Before you could even train with your technique Maki demanded to fight you first, wanted to see where you and she stood on when it came to physical combat and it was safe to say that she was better than you. Panda cheered you up though the moment he saw it all go down and told Maki that she should've went easier on you

♛ In response she just said that she would teach you how to fight better next time... yeah you still got your ass kicked, but this time she actually helped you out through it entirely

♛ Soon enough as the two of you began to hang out more she realized just how hard she had fallen for you and soon enough wanted to ask you out. Problem was that she didn't know how and didn't know if you even liked her like that. Not to mention that she was worried that a relationship would affect her training in a negative way

♛ Soon after a long conversation with Panda and Inumaki, which went no where she confronted Yuta who said that she should just go for it, and she did. She asked you out one day when the two of you were in your room watching some sort of movie

♛ When you agreed she thought she had heard wrong

₍⸍⸌̣ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

♛ You bring out a more chill side of her, constantly getting you to relax and not overexert herself on something when it's clear that she's not going to get it for a while and just needs to take a break

♛ Movie nights in your room are a common occurrence and that's just a fact, you guys get all the junk food you can find and then turn on a long movie and then another and another. She likes enjoying your quiet company. She doesn't even really care if the movie itself is bad. She just loves you

♛ Your more 'girly' side definitely balances out her more masculine one. She loves watching you try new outfits and try on new makeup, she finds it entertaining and always wants to see what you come up with next

♛ When she first saw you confident and more childish and playful she got excited, immediately indulging in it and messing around with you. She loves seeing you excited and happy, she thinks its really cute

♛ You try to get her to crochet with you every now and then but it doesn't always work sadly but she does hang out with you while you do it, probably trying to train or something like that

[rootytootypie]

Damon Salvatore? 🫘😳💨🤢❤️🦸

(I read the original 90s series, and watched the CW show, but I assumed you were referring mostly to the latter.)

💨: Damon is a 4/10 as a human. He farts slightly less than average, and it’s usually silent and scentless. That said, if he feeds on more than five people in a night, he’s definitely not inviting himself over for naughty times with anyone. He absolutely cannot handle when things racket up to even a 6/10. He immediately secludes himself in that state.

It’s about the same as a vampire, except his trigger foods affect him way more. They can crank things up to a 9/10 stinkwise, since he’s an expert on putting on the silencer. It’s very noticeable, and Damon will frequently crop dust locations, or use his good looks to blame some human guy (honestly it’s usually Matt, because Jeremy and Elena will fly off the handle if he does that to them) (he tried claiming NewVamp!Elena had trouble adjusting to blood, and he had a very unsexy back scrape to prove it; that sucker took three days to fully heal).

🫘: Damon cannot handle most Asian or Latin cuisine, Italian being the obvious exception. It’s not just that he’s a white bread American, but that for most of his natural life, and the first two decades of vampirism, these foods were widely available in America outside of major cities, especially not in Civil War-era Mystic Falls. He’s adapted pretty well to Chinese food after a month or two of bad reactions, but even after nearly two centuries, he still cannot handle his spice. Indian and fast-food Mexican are particularly hard on Damon’s stomach.

😳: For all his modern hedonism and living in the moment, the 19th century gentleman in Damon will blush even imagining the thought of passing gas in public (and yes, home with Stefan counts as public). His embarrassment levels are definitely a 10/10, maybe even more like a 1000/10. And with a lady love or gentleman partner? Watch him disappear to another country for the next seventy years if they’re a human, and forever if they’re a vamp. After all, he could learn to love Japan. Sweden is also supposed to be lovely.

Part of his drama trauma stems from a moment he had with Katherine. After a rich meal of Chinese food Katherine had Emily prepare for her and the Salv brothers, the foreign food, particularly the egg rolls, had an effect on Damon. He was making love to Katherine at the time it hit, and as his thrusts grew got slower, he could tell she was already losing interest.

“Why the sudden gentle act,” Katherine asked. “It’s like you’re starting over before anyone finishes.”

As a human, Damon was so desperate to please her, to beat out not only Stefan, but 300 years of other lovers, that he immediately picked up the pace.

Her moans increased as he did so, and his trademark smirk came to his face. And then… *BRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrOOOOOOOObrrtbrrt!*

The smirk dropped from Damon’s face as Katherine stared up at him in blatant disgust.

“I apologize,” Damon said as his face reddened. “I did not know I would…”

“Release worse flatulence than a horse,” Katherine supplied.

Damon hung his head in shame as Katherine climbed out from under him and walked out of his chambers laughing, obviously heading to the rooms of his perfect brother.

And so, to this day, he associates gas with another time he lost to Stef.

❤️: He will hold it until he’s blue in the face, bloated, and possibly having the first vampiric heart attack. If he doesn’t want to draw such drastic attention to himself, he’ll let it out silently whenever his partner is out of the room. This was a fairly effective tactic until Elena became a vampire and could tell whenever she came back that, at the very least, there was something lingering under the strong Febreze. After that, she pretty frequently gets snarky about Damon’s little habits and his shyness with the topic of his gas, shocked she found the one thing to make Damon nervous (well, other than the constant world-shattering Mystic Falls danger of the week).

Some quotes over time include:

“So, we had Indian. Do you want to go to the bathroom now, or should I wait for you to tell me the only thing that smells is my upper lip?”

“Just because Jeremy’s human doesn’t mean you can blame your farts on him. You know, if you really think you can keep yourself from sucking its blood, we could get a dog.”

*BRRRVVVVRRRT!* “…So I’m gonna take that as either a request for some alone time or some Tums and cuddles? Where are we going with this?”

Like, she definitely proved she has nothing in common with Katherine other than snarkiness, but honestly Damon puts up with it, because it’s a strange kind of affection he’s grown used to.

🦸‍♂️: Vampirism actually means that, if he kept an all blood diet, Damon could theoretically have very little gas, but the necessity to pass a human is important and honestly, the expanding American palate leads to more tempting offerings in a small town like Mystic Falls. Anything that gives humans gas goes double for vampires, and the stomach takes longer to adjust to new foods than it would for a human. Hence, Damon’s inability to handle Taco Bell or even Chipotle, as Tex-Mex didn’t come in freezers and go into fryers when he was human. The same goes for a lot of international cuisine as done by Virginia.