They have since left four premature babies to decompose on their beds. They have since kidnapped, stripped, tortured civilians and tried to frame them as Hamas fighters for their propaganda. They have since shot people at refugee camps execution style. They have since targeted academics and poets and directors. They have since killed 86 journalists. Still no ceasefire.
psa: i know that many of us did NOT doubt this for a second, neither did i. this is targeted at the people who educated themselves for the first time about this genocide and discovered the absolute horrific things that Israel is capable of doing to Palestinians, with the unwavering support of its allies.
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A central element of the myth of [Eleanor of Aquitaine] is that of her exceptionalism. Historians and Eleanor biographers have tended to take literally Richard of Devizes’s conventional panegyric of her as ‘an incomparable woman’ [and] a woman out of her time. […] Amazement at Eleanor’s power and independence is born from a presentism that assumes generally that the Middle Ages were a backward age, and specifically that medieval women were all downtrodden and marginalized. Eleanor’s career can, from such a perspective, only be explained by assuming that she was an exception who rose by sheer force of personality above the restrictions placed upon twelfth-century women.
-Michael R. Evans, Inventing Eleanor: The Medieval and Post-Medieval Image of Eleanor of Aquitaine
"...The idea of Eleanor’s exceptionalism rests on an assumption that women of her age were powerless. On the contrary, in Western Europe before the twelfth century there were ‘no really effective barriers to the capacity of women to exercise power; they appear as military leaders, judges, castellans, controllers of property’. […] In an important article published in 1992, Jane Martindale sought to locate Eleanor in context, stripping away much of the conjecture that had grown up around her, and returning to primary sources, including her charters. Martindale also demonstrated how Eleanor was not out of the ordinary for a twelfth-century queen either in the extent of her power or in the criticisms levelled against her.
If we look at Eleanor’s predecessors as Anglo-Norman queens of England, we find many examples of women wielding political power. Matilda of Flanders (wife of William the Conqueror) acted as regent in Normandy during his frequent absences in England following the Conquest, and [the first wife of Henry I, Matilda of Scotland, played some role in governing England during her husband's absences], while during the civil war of Stephen’s reign Matilda of Boulogne led the fight for a time on behalf of her royal husband, who had been captured by the forces of the empress. And if we wish to seek a rebel woman, we need look no further than Juliana, illegitimate daughter of Henry I, who attempted to assassinate him with a crossbow, or Adèle of Champagne, the third wife of Louis VII, who ‘[a]t the moment when Henry II held Eleanor of Aquitaine in jail for her revolt … led a revolt with her brothers against her son, Philip II'.
Eleanor is, therefore, less the exception than the rule – albeit an extreme example of that rule. This can be illustrated by comparing her with a twelfth century woman who has attracted less literary and historical attention. Adela of Blois died in 1137, the year of Eleanor’s marriage to Louis VII. […] The chronicle and charter evidence reveals Adela to have ‘legitimately exercised the powers of comital lordship’ in the domains of Blois-Champagne, both in consort with her husband and alone during his absence on crusade and after his death. […] There was, however, nothing atypical about the nature of Adela’s power. In the words of her biographer Kimberley LoPrete, ‘while the extent of Adela’s powers and the political impact of her actions were exceptional for a woman of her day (and indeed for most men), the sources of her powers and the activities she engaged in were not fundamentally different from those of other women of lordly rank’. These words could equally apply to Eleanor; the extent of her power, as heiress to the richest lordship in France, wife of two kings and mother of two or three more, was remarkable, but the nature of her power was not exceptional. Other noble or royal women governed, arranged marriages and alliances, and were patrons of the church. Eleanor represents one end of a continuum, not an isolated outlier."
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constantly thinking about the PERFECT setup supergirl season 1 had to make kara queer;
"oh my god, you're a lesbian" – winn to kara, in the very FIRST episode.
"hell, i wanna date her" – kara, about lucy lane.
"she does kinda give off a sapphic vibe, with that big old butch S chestplate" – leslie willis (livewire) about supergirl.
there were so many other instances in s1 alone, let alone in later seasons when lena showed up (recounting every queer-coded supercorp interaction would require a whole podcast). it was the PERFECT pretext to make her even just a little bit fruity, but the cw just couldn't handle it i guess
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Thinking about Sephiroth's motivations in Rebirth and getting super emotional because fuck, man, I get it. I get it. It doesn't excuse anything, but I get it in a way I can't even describe.
The Gi establish that those who aren't native to Gaia can't join the Lifestream basically at all, they're held separate entirely; the Gi have never been in it directly, their ghosts wander in a little liminal space they crafted for themselves. This is because they're entirely foreign—the Gi appear to be interdimensional travelers that were somehow marooned on Gaia at some point in ancient history, where they died and were left as ghosts, lingering forever unable to move on.
Sephiroth is slightly different in that he was born on Gaia and he does have human parents as well as Jenova, so he can force his way into the Lifestream as we saw in Lifestream Black and Advent Children, but he can't disseminate into it. He's still conscious and cognizant in some capacity even as the Lifestream fights to strip away the parts of him that belong on the planet, the parts of him that were human. This is, presumably, why his memory is all fucked up postcanon, whether we're talking novels or spinoffs; the Lifestream has been trying to take him but it can't, because there's too much Jenova in him, so the parts of him that have survived are just the parts that are the son of Jenova. He hasn't been fully worn down by the time the Crisis rolls around, likely because his body is still partially intact in the Northern Crater. (Again, see Lifestream Black, as well as the OG.)
And here's where everything starts to hurt.
He's alone. No matter what Sephiroth does, he's entirely, completely alone. There is nothing in the world like him, the planet won't accept him—it's not death, it's a homecoming, and Sephiroth has nowhere to go home to.
And he's done this before, this is a repeating timeline, he's been through this before over and over and over. And he's always alone in the end. He's always there at the edge of creation, the end of all things, the kindling of a new universe, and he's still there. All alone.
So this time he's calling for the ultimate Reunion. He's not just calling his Clones home, he's pulling all of time and space together into a single planet, bolstered with the lingering Lifestream of hundreds, thousands of others, timelines where things fell apart and Gaia sat on the precipice of death before Sephiroth found her and tore the Lifestream loose to feed the timeline he's chosen as the most likely to survive.
Three friends go into battle. One is captured (Genesis, in Deepground), one flies away (Angeal, who chose his own death), and the one who remains becomes a hero.
Heroes save the world.
But it doesn't matter, does it? Because he's going to be alone. Zack asks how he could turn his back on everything, and he says "Easily." Aerith asks how he could possibly want an eternity alone—because she doesn't understand, that's what Sephiroth has waiting for him anyway. That's all he's ever had waiting for him.
Sephiroth is going to save a world that will never accept him, because that's what heroes do, and then he's going to be alone forever. But this time, for the first time in every timeline he's experienced, he's going to do it on his own terms. He knows what he is, he knows how this ends, he has no questions of that. But for once in his existence—and it's a long existence, unending, eternal in a way that neither human nor Cetra could never even comprehend—he's going to control exactly how that happens.
Sephiroth knows he can't control whether or not he ends up alone, but he can choose how it happens. He can do things right this time. Maybe if he saves the world it will be different. Maybe the planet will accept him. Maybe he won't be alone.
And if he is (and he knows he will be), at least it was on his own terms.
At least, for once in the whole of creation, Sephiroth had a single flicker of control over his own existence. For once in the entirety of existence, Sephiroth made a decision for himself.
He'll have to live with that decision, alone, for eternity—but it was his.
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