#both in terms of the people living in it and its machinations

[coredrill]

xabungle is making me Fucking insane

xabungle is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOO fucking good !!!!!!!!!!!!!

[resplendent-ragamuffin]

I have encountered issues with JVP in the past in regards to not accommodating kashrut/shabbat observance (and wheelchairs), but previously hasn’t heard about the Mikvah thing. Do you have any sources I can refer to?

Oh boy. Oh boy oh boy oh boy. The noise I made when I saw this ask.

You are probably unaware but I have literally been working on a post on this topic since February. Bless you for asking me about it and giving me a reason to share it. Genuinely. I'm delighted.

Without further ado, now that I've finally finished:

On the JVP Mikveh BS

Some of you are no doubt aware of the Jewish Voice for Peace Mikveh Guide (on JVP’s website here, and here on the Wayback Machine in case that link breaks). You may have seen the post I reblogged about it, you may have seen the post about JVP in general on @is-the-thing-actually-Jewish, or you may have heard about it elsewhere. Or maybe you’ve somehow managed to avoid all knowledge of its existence. (God I wish that were me.) Even if you know about it, even if you’ve scanned through it, you probably haven’t taken the time to read it through properly.

I have.

God help me.

I was originally looking through it to help draft the @is-the-thing-actually-Jewish post back in February, but some terrible combination of horror, indignation, and probably masochism compelled me to do a close reading, so that I could write this analysis and share it with you, dear readers. For those of you who’ve never heard of a mikvah, for those of you who’ve immersed in one, for those of you who’ve studied it intensely—I give you this, the fruit of my suffering, so you too can understand why “Mikveh: A Purification Ritual for Personal and Collective Transformation,” written by Zohar Lev Cunningham and Rebekah Erev for Jewish Voice for Peace has got so many people up in arms.

Brace yourselves. It’s going to be a long journey.

First off, a disclaimer: When I say something is “required in Jewish law” or whatnot, I’m talking about in traditional practice / Torah-observant communities; what is often called “Orthodox.” There’s a wide range of Jewish practice, and what is required in frum (observant) Judaism may not be required in Reform Judaism, etc. Don’t at me.

Second note: I myself am Modern Orthodox, and come from that perspective. I’m also very much more on the rationalist side than the mysticism side of things. I did run this past people from other communities. Still, if I’ve missed or misrepresented something, it was my error and was not meant maliciously.

Third: I am not a rabbi. I am a nerd who likes explaining things and doing deep dives. Again, I may have made errors–please let me know if you spot any, and I’d be happy to discuss them.

Now then. Before we get into the text itself, let’s give some background.

WHAT IS THIS MIKVEH THING ANYWAY?

A mikveh (or mikvah, both they and I switch between spellings; plural mikva’ot) is a Jewish ritual bath, sometimes translated as an immersion pool. Some communities or organizations that run mikva’ot will have a single all-purpose all-purpose, some have separate human- and utensil-pools, and some have separate women’s and men’s pools. The majority of the water in a mikvah has to be “living waters,” i.e. naturally collected rather than from a tap or a bucket. Some natural bodies of water can also be used, such as the ocean and some rivers (ask your local rabbi). The construction is complicated and has extremely detailed requirements. Here’s an example of a modern mikvah:

(By Wikimedia Commons (ויקיגמדון) - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17373540)

Whoever is being dunked (the scientific term) has to be entirely immersed, and the water has to be in direct contact with all of them. That means no clothes, no makeup, no hair floating on the top of the water, no feet touching the floor, no clenched fists. You have to be completely clean as well, so no dirt is obstructing you from the water.

In essence, a person or thing is immersed in a mikvah to change their/its state from tameh (ritually “impure”) to tahor (ritually “pure”). I use quotes because “pure/impure” aren’t really good translations—they have value judgments that tameh/tahor don’t. There’s nothing wrong with being tameh, you aren’t lesser because you are tameh—it’s just a state one enters when one comes into contact with death and related concepts. (There are also different levels of both.) As a matter of fact, technically speaking even after going to a mikvah basically all people are tameh now—the tum’ah (“impurity,” sort of) that comes from contact with dead humans can only be removed by the Red Heifer offering (see Numbers 19), which we can’t do without the Temple. (Why I say “all” even if you’ve never been to a funeral is a much much longer tangent that I’ll spare you for now.) To quote one of my editors on this, mikvah is “about the natural oscillation between states of ritual purity and impurity. Men go to mikveh after having seminal emissions. Menstruating women go to mikveh on a monthly basis (emphasis added).” It’s just states of life.

In the days of the Temple, one had to be tahor to enter it (the Temple). Archaeologists have found a ton of ancient mikva’ot in Jerusalem that were presumably used by people visiting the Temple, which personally I think is extremely cool.

Nowadays, there are three main traditionally required uses for a mikvah. First, and most importantly, observant married women will go about once a month as part of their niddah (menstrual) cycle, part of practice known as Taharat HaMishpacha, or “Family ‘Purity,’” which at its root is a way to sanctify the relationship between spouses. Until she immerses, a wife and husband cannot resume relations. And not just sex—in some communities, they can’t sleep in the same bed or even have any physical contact at all.

The second use is for conversion—immersion is a central part of the conversion ceremony. One enters the water a gentile, and emerges a Jew.

The third usage is a bit different as it’s not for people. Tableware—plates, cups, etc.—made of certain materials have to be immersed before they can be used. This isn’t what the Guide is about, so I’m not going to go into that as much, but felt remiss if I didn’t mention it was a thing. If you want to know more, Chabad has an article on it here.

Aside from uses required by Jewish law, there is a strong tradition in some communities for men to go to the mikveh just before Yom Kippur, or sometimes every week before the Sabbath, to enter the holiday in as “pure” a state as possible these days. (The things they’re “purifying” from still made them tameh, it just matters less without the Temple.) There is also a strong custom to immerse before one’s wedding. Less traditional communities have also started using mikvah for other transitional moments, such as significant birthdays or remission from cancer. There has recently been an “open mikvah” movement, which “is committed to making mikveh accessible to Jews of all denominations, ages, genders, sexual orientations, and abilities (Rising Tide Network old website, “Why Open Mikvah”).”

To quote others:

No other religious establishment, structure or rite can affect the Jew in this way and, indeed, on such an essential level. —Rebbetzen Rivkah Slonim, Total Immersion, as quoted on Chabad.org

The mikveh is one of the most important parts of a Jewish community. —Kylie Ora Lobell, “What Is a Mikveh?” on Aish.com

How important? According to Rav Moshe Feinstein, one of the great American rabbis of the 20th century, one should build a mikveh before building a synagogue in a town that has neither, and even in a town where there is a mikveh but it’s an inconvenient distance away from the community (Igros Moshe: Choshen Mishpat Chelek 1 Siman 42).

A mikveh is more important than a synagogue.

I’d say that’s pretty important.

Tl;dr: A mikveh is the conduit through which a convert becomes a part of the Jewish people. It is traditionally used to sanctify the relationship between spouses. It was required for people to go to the Temple, back when we still had it. It is extremely central to Jewish practice.

So. What does JVP have to say about it?

THE JVP MIKVEH GUIDE

The document in question is titled “Mikveh: A Purification Ritual for Personal and Collective Transformation,” by Zohar Lev Cunningham and Rebekah Erev. I am largely going to quote directly from the text and then analyze and explain it.

Now let me be clear. I’m not trying to say the authors aren’t Jewish. I’m not saying they’re bad people, or that you should attack them. I am not intending any of this as an ad hominem attack. But given the contents of this document, I do think it is fair to call this appropriative, even if it is of their own culture—in the same way someone can have internalized racism, or twist feminism into being a TERF, I would argue that this is twisting Judaism into paganism. In fact, while I use “appropriation” throughout this document, an extremely useful term that’s been coined recently is “cultural expropriation”--essentially, appropriative actions done by rogue members of the community in question. One example of this would be the Kabbalah Centre in Los Angeles, which is the source of a lot of the Madonna-style “pop Kabbalah.” It was founded by an Orthodox Jewish couple, but it and its followers are widely criticized by most Jewish communities. In much the same way, the Guide is expropriation. 

We start off with a note from the authors.

Hello, Welcome to the Simple Mikveh Guide. This work comes out of many years of reclaiming and re-visioning mikveh. The intention of this guide is to acknowledge and give some context to what mikveh is, provide resources related to mainstream understanding of mikveh and also provide alternative mikveh ideas. Blessings for enjoyment of this wonderful, simple Jewish ritual! Zohar Lev Cunningham & Rebekah Erev

This is fairly normal, though “alternative mikveh ideas” is a bit odd to say. I also find “blessings for enjoyment” to be odd phrasing, somewhat reminiscent of the Wiccan “Blessed Be,” but it could be a typo.

The first main section is titled “Intro to Mikveh,” and begins as follows:

Mikveh is an ancient Jewish ritual practice of water immersion, traditionally used for cleansing, purification, and transformation. It's been conventionally used for conversion to Judaism, for brides, and for niddah, the practice of cleansing after menstruation.

This is relatively accurate, and credit where credit is due avoids making niddah out to be patriarchal BS. I do object slightly to “purify” as a translation without further explanation, as I went into above, and “cleansing” for similar reasons—it implies “dirtiness,’ which isn’t really what tum’ah is about. Also, though this is pretty minor, a bride going to the mikveh before her wedding is actually a part of the laws of niddah. I’d also note that they entirely leave out that it was important for going to the Temple in ancient times, though given this is published by JVP I’m not terribly surprised.

For Jews, water signifies the transformative moment from slavery in Egypt, through the parted Red Sea, and into freedom.

On the one hand, I suppose it’s not unreasonable to connect the Red Sea and mikveh, though I think I’d be more likely to hear it the other way around (i.e. “going through the sea was like the people immersing in a mikveh and being ‘cleansed,’ so to speak”). Though they were, rather importantly, not actually immersed in the water. However I don’t think I’d say water as a whole signifies the Splitting of the Sea. In fact, water imagery is more often used to signify the Torah, see for instance Bava Kamma 82a.

There is also a mystical connection to mikveh as a metaphor for the womb of the divine.

A mikveh being like a womb is also not uncommon. It’s found in the Reishis Chochmah (Shia’ar HaAhavah 11,58) and the writing of Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan (The Aryeh Kaplan Anthology, vol 2., p. 382; both as quoted in 50 Mikvahs That Shaped History, by Rabbi Ephraim Meth), see also “The Mikveh’s Significance in Traditional Conversion” by Rabbi Maurice Lamm on myjewishlearning. Filled with water, you float in it, you emerge a new being (at least for conversion); it’s not an absurd comparison to draw. I’m not sure I’ve found anything for the Womb of the Divine specifically, though. (Also, Divine should definitely be capitalized.)

Entering a mikveh is a transformative and healing experience and we have long wondered why it is not available to more people, including the significant trans and queer populations in Jewish communities.

So. I am NOT going to say there’s no problem with homophobia and/or transphobia in Jewish communities. It’s definitely a community issue, and many communities are grappling with it in various ways as we speak. And I’m certainly not going to say the authors didn’t have the experience of not having a mikveh available to them—I don’t know their lives, I’m not going to police their experiences.

However, while Orthodox mikvahs are often still restricted to married women (who by virtue of the community will generally be cis and married to men) and potentially adult men (given the resources and customs, as mentioned above), there are plenty of more liberal mikva’ot these days. Some even explicitly offer rituals for queer events! The list of reasons to go to the mikvah linked up above, for instance, includes:

(Mayyim Hayyim, “Immersion Ceremonies”)

Again, that’s not to say there aren’t issues of queerphobia in the Jewish community, but if you are queer and want to go to the mikvah, there are options out there. If you’re looking, I’ve included some links at the end.

When we make ritual, we are working with the divine forces of presence and intention. The magic of mikveh comes in making contact with water. Contact with water marks a threshold and functions as a portal to bring closer our ritual intention/the world to come.

This is…a weird way to put things. I would say this is the start of the red flags. “When we make ritual,” first of all, is, to quote @the-library-alcove (who helped edit this), “a turn of phrase that is not typically associated with any branch of Jewish practice; we have a lot--a LOT--of rituals, and while it's certainly not completely outside of the realm of Jewish vernacular, the tone here, especially in light of the later sections, starts veering towards the vernacular of neo-paganism.” One might say “make kiddush” (the blessing over wine on Shabbos and holidays) or “make motzi” (the blessing over bread), but not generally “make ritual.”

The next section is titled “Who Gets to Do Mikveh?” Their answer:

Everyone! Mikveh practice is available to all of us as a healing tool at any time.

The healing tool part isn’t the original purpose of mikveh, but there are some who have used it as a part of emotional recovery from something traumatic, by marking a new state of being free from whatever caused it, see for instance Mayyim Hayyim’s list linked above.

The “everyone” bit is a little more complicated. To explain why, we’re going to skip ahead a little. (Some of these quotes will also be analyzed in full later.)

We want to make mikveh practice available as a tool to all Jews and non-Jews who want to heal wounds caused by white supremacy and colonialism. [..] To us, a queer mikveh welcomes anyone, regardless of spiritual background or not. […] Queer mikveh is accessible physically and spiritually to any and all people who are curious about it. You don't have to be a practicing Jew to enter queer mikveh. You don't have to be Jewish. (pg. 2, emphasis added)

Now, I am told there are mikva’ot that allow non-Jews to immerse. I have yet to find them, so I don’t know what rituals they allow non-Jews to do. I also haven’t been able to find any resources on non-Jews being allowed to immerse. I have found quite a few that explicitly prohibit it. If there are any sources you know of, please send them to me! I’d love to see them! But so far everything I have come across has said that mikvah immersion is a closed practice that only Jews can participate in. (Technically, to quote the lovely @etz-ashashiot, any non-Jew can do mikvah…once. And they won’t be non-Jews when they emerge. There is also one very extreme edge-case, which is absolutely not mainstream knowledge or practice, and basically isn’t actually done. You can message me if you’re curious, but it’s really not relevant to this–and even in that case, it is preferable to use a natural mikvah rather than a man-made one.)

If there are any legitimate sources that allow non-Jews to do a mikvah ritual, I would assume said non-Jews would be required to be respectful about it. Unfortunately, this is how the paragraph we began with continues:

Who Gets to Do Mikveh? Everyone! Mikveh practice is available to all of us as a healing tool at any time. You don't need any credentials. Your own wisdom is all the power you need to be a Jewish ritual leader. (emphasis added)

This is where we really go off the rails. First of all, you need more than “wisdom” to lead a Jewish ritual. You need to actually know what you’re doing. You can’t just say “oh you know what I feel like the right thing to do for morning prayers is to pray to the sun, because God created the sun so the sun is worth worshiping, and this is a Jewish ritual I’m doing.” That’s just idolatry. Like straight up I stole that from a midrash (oral tradition) about how humanity went from speaking with God in the Garden of Eden to worshiping idols in the time of Noah (given here by Maimonides; note that it continues for a few paragraphs after the one this link sends you to).

Second of all, this is particularly bad given this guide is explicitly to Jews and non-Jews. As @daughter-of-stories put it when she was going over an earlier draft of this analysis, “they are saying that non-Jews can just declare themselves Jewish ritual leaders based on nothing but their own ‘wisdom.’”

I hope I don’t need to explain why that’s extremely bad and gross?

While we’re on the topic of non-Jews using a mikvah, let’s take a moment to address an accusation commonly mentioned alongside the mikvah guide: that JVP also encourages (or encouraged) self-conversion.

I have been unable to find a separate document where they explicitly said so, or an older version of this document that does. This leads me to believe that either a) the accusation came from a misreading of this document, or b) there was a previous document that contained it which has since been deleted but was not archived in the Wayback Machine. EITHER is possible.

Even in the case that there was no such document, however, I would point out that such a suggestion can be read–intentionally or not–as implicit in this document. This is a guide for mikvah use by both Jews and non-Jews, and includes an idea that non-Jews can perform Jewish rituals on their own without any guidance or even background knowledge, as quoted above. Why would a non-Jew, coming into Jewish practice with very little knowledge, go looking to perform a mikvah ritual?

I would wager that the most well-known purpose of immersing in a mikvah is for the purpose of conversion.

Nowhere in this guide is there any explicit statement that you can do a self-conversion, but it also doesn’t say anywhere that you can’t, or that doing so is an exception to “you don’t need any credentials” or “your own wisdom is all the power you need to be a Jewish ritual leader.” It may not be their intention, but the phrasing clearly leaves it as an option.

Even if this were from a source that one otherwise loved, this would be upsetting and disappointing. The amount of exposure this document is getting may be at least in part because it comes from JVP, but the distress and dismay would be there regardless. If there is further vitriol, it’s only because JVP is often considered a legitimate source by outsiders, if no one else–in other words, by the very people least likely to have the background to know that this document isn’t trustworthy. It’s like the difference between your cousin telling you “the Aztecs were abducted by aliens” versus a mainstream news program like Fox reporting it. Both are frustrating and wrong, but one has significantly more potential harm than the other, and therefore is more likely to get widespread criticism (even if you complain about your cousin online).

On the other hand, as one of my editors pointed out in a moment of dark humor, they do say you don’t have to be Jewish to lead a Jewish ritual, so perhaps that mitigates this issue slightly by taking away a motivation to convert in the first place.

Returning to our document:

We do mikvahs in lakes, rivers, bathtubs, showers, outside in the rain, from teacups, and in our imaginations.

At this point the rails are but a distant memory.

In case you’ve forgotten what I said about this at the beginning of this post (and honestly I wouldn’t blame you, we’re on pg. 9 in my draft of this), there are extremely strict rules about what qualifies as a mikvah. Maimonides’s Mishnah Torah, just about the most comprehensive codex of Jewish law, has eleven chapters on the topic of the mikvah (though that includes immersion in it as well as construction of it). I’m not going to make you read through it, but let’s go through the list in this sentence:

Lakes and rivers: you might be able to use a river or lake as a mikvah, but you need to check with your local rabbinical authority, because not all of them qualify. In general, the waters must gather together naturally, from an underground spring or rainwater. In the latter case, the waters must be stationary rather than flowing. A river that dries up in a drought can’t be used, for instance. (The ocean counts as a spring, for this purpose.)

Bathtubs and showers: No. A man-made mikveh must be built into the ground or as an essential part of a building, unlike most bathtubs, and contain of a minimum of 200 gallons of rainwater, gathered and siphoned in a very particular way so as not to let it legally become “groundwater.” Also, it needs to be something you can immerse in, which a shower is not.

Outside in the rain: No? How would you even do that?? What??

Teacups: Even if you were Thumblina or K’tonton (Jewish Tom Thumb), and could actually immerse your entire body in a teacup, it wouldn’t be a kosher mikvah as a mivkah can’t be portable.

In your imagination: Obviously not, what the heck are you even talking about

We will (unfortunately) be coming back to the teacup thing, but for now suffice it to say most of these are extremely Not A Thing.

Mikveh has been continually practiced since ancient Judaism. It is an offering of unbroken Jewish lineage that we have claimed/reclaimed as our own.

I find the use of “claimed/reclaimed” fascinating here, given this guide is explicitly for non-Jews—who, whether or not they are permitted to use a mikvah, certainly shouldn’t be claiming it as their own—as well as Jews. I find it particularly interesting given the lack of clarity of how much of JVP’s membership is actually Jewish and JVP’s history of encouraging non-Jewish members to post “as Jews.” Kind of telling on yourselves a bit, there.

(Once again, I’m not commenting on the authors themselves, but the organization they represent here and the audience they are speaking to/for.)

We want to make mikveh practice available as a tool to all Jews and non-Jews who want to heal wounds caused by white supremacy and colonialism. We want to make mikveh practice available for healing our bodies, spirits, and the earth.

Setting aside the “Jews and non-Jews” thing, since I talked about that earlier and this is already extremely long, I do want to highlight the end of the paragraph. While there are some modern uses of the mikvah to (sort of) heal the spirit, I haven’t heard of anyone using a mikvah to heal the body—as a general rule Jews don’t tend to do faith healing, though of course some sects are the exception. Healing the earth, however, is absolutely not a use of a mikvah. Mikvah rituals, as we’ve now mentioned several times, are about tahara of a person or an object, and require immersion. You can’t immerse the earth in a mikvah. The earth contains mikva’ot. Healing the earth with a mikvah is a very strange worship (IYKYK).

We acknowledge that not all beings have consistent access to water, including Palestinians.

This is a tragedy, no question. I don't mean to minimize that. However, it is also unrelated to the matter at hand. The Guide also doesn’t give any recommendations on how we can help improve water access, so this lip service is all you get.

A lack of water does not make mikveh practice inaccessible.

Yes, in fact, it does. Without a kosher mikvah of one variety or another one cannot do anything that requires a mikvah. That’s why building a kosher one is so important. I haven’t gone looking for it, but while I’m sure there’s lots (and lots and lots and lots) of Rabbinic responsa out there of what to do in drought situations, you definitely do need water in all but the most extreme cases. If you do not have water, AYLR (Ask Your Local Rabbi)--don’t do whatever this is.

The spirit of water can be present with us if we choose to call for water, so even when water is not physically available to us we can engage in mikveh practice.

This is just straight up avodah zarah (“strange worship,” i.e. idolatry) as far as I can tell. The “spirit of the water”? What? We’re not Babylonians worshiping Tiamat. What source is there for this? Is there a source??

Like all material resources, the ways water is or is not available to us is shaped by our geographic and social locations. The ways we relate to water, what we decide is clean, treyf (dirty), drinkable, bathable, how much we use, how much we save, varies depending on our experiences. We invite you to decide what is clean and holy for your own body and spiritual practice.

This is going to require some breaking down.

To start with, let’s define “treyf.” To quote myjewishlearning, “Treyf (sometimes spelled treif or treyfe) is a Yiddish word used for something that is not kosher [lit. "fit"]. The word treyf is derived from the Hebrew word treifah, which appears several times in the Bible and means 'flesh torn by beasts.' The Torah prohibits eating flesh torn by beasts, and so the word treifah came to stand in for all forbidden foods.”

You may note the lack of the word “dirty” in this definition, or any other value judgments. Myjewishlearning continues, “over time, the words kosher and treyf have been used colloquially beyond the world of food to describe anything that Jews deem fit or unfit.” While this does have something of a value judgment, it’s still not “dirty.” I can’t say why the authors chose to translate the word this way, but…I don’t like it.

Now, when it comes to what is kosher or treyf, food and drink are most certainly not based on “our experiences.” There are entire books on the rules of kashrut; it generally takes years of study to understand all the minutiae. Even as someone who was raised in a kosher household, when I worked as a mashgicha (kosher certification inspector) I needed special training. What is considered kadosh (“sacred” or “holy,”  though again that’s not a perfect translation) or tahor is also determined by very strict rules. We don’t just decide things based on “vibes.” That’s not how anything in Jewish practice works.

Water, in fact, is always kosher to drink unless it has bugs or something else treyf in it. And mikvehs aren’t even always what I’d consider “drinkable;” I always wash utensils I’ve brought to the mikvah before I use them.

We come to our next heading: What is Queer Mikveh?

What is Queer Mikveh? To us, a queer mikveh welcomes anyone, regardless of spiritual background or not.

As I’ve said above, I have yet to find a single source (seriously if you have one please send it to me) that says non-Jews can go to a mikvah. As one of my editors for this put it, “to spin appropriation of Jewish closed practices as ‘queer’ is not only icky but deeply disrespectful to actual queer Jews.”

Also, and this is not remotely the point, but “regardless of spiritual background or not” is almost incoherently poor writing.

As Jews in diaspora we want to share and use our ritual practices for healing the land and waters we are visitors on for the liberation of all beings.

I have tried to be semi-professional about this analysis, but. “Jews in the diaspora,” you say. Tell me, JVP, where are we in the diaspora from? Hm? Where are we in diaspora from? Which land do we come from? Which land are we indigenous to, JVP? Do tell.

Returning to the point, I would repeat that mikvah has nothing to do with “healing the land and waters.” It’s ritual purification of whatever is immersed in it. You want to heal the land and waters? Go to your local environmental group, and/or whoever maintains your local land and waters. Pick up trash. Start recycling. Weed invasive species. Call your government and tell them to support green energy. You want liberation for all beings? Fight bigotry—including antisemitism. Judaism believes in action—go act. Appropriating rituals from a closed religion doesn’t liberate anyone.

We have come up with this working definition and welcome feedback!

Oh good, maybe I won’t be yelled at for posting this (she said dubiously).

Queer mikveh is a ritual of Jews in diaspora. We believe the way we work for freedom for all beings is by using the gifts of our ancestors for the greatest good. We bring our rituals as gifts.

I have nothing in particular new to say about this, except that I find the idea of “bringing our rituals as gifts” for anyone to use deeply uncomfortable, given Judaism is a closed religion that strongly discourages non-Jews from joining us, and that has had literal millennia of people appropriating from us.

It acknowledges that our path is to live on lands that are not historically our peoples [sic] and we honor the Indigenous ancestors of the land we live on, doing mikveh as an anti-colonialist ritual for collective and personal liberation.

Again I would love so much for JVP to tell us which lands would historically be our people’s. What land do Jews come from, JVP? What land is it we do have a historical connection to? What land do our Indigenous ancestors come from??

And why does it have to be our path to live on lands other than that one?

Secondly, to quote the lovely @daughter-of-stories again when she was editing this, “Mikveh as anti-colonialism, aside from not being what Mikveh is, kinda implies that you can cleanse the land of the sins of colonialism. So (a) that’s just a weird bastardization of baptism since, mikveh isn’t about cleansing from sin, and (b) so does that mean the colonialism is erased? Now we don’t have to actually deal with how it affects actual indigenous people?”

I’m sure that (b) isn’t their intent, but I will say that once again they don’t give any material suggestions for how to actually liberate any collectives or persons from colonialism in this document, including any links to other pages on their own website*, which surely would have been easy enough. It comes across as very performative.

*I disagree strongly with most of their methods, but at least they are suggesting something.

Queer mikveh is a physical or spiritual space that uses the technologies of water and the Jewish practice of mikveh to mark transitions. Transition to be interpreted by individuals and individual ritual.

I have no idea what the “technologies of water” are. Also usage of a mikvah to mark transitions beyond ritual states is a fairly new innovation, as mentioned above.

Queer mikveh in it's [sic] essence honors the story of the water. The historical stories of the water we immerse in, the stories of our own bodies as water and the future story we vision [sic].

This just sounds like a pagan spinoff of baptism to me, if I’m being honest. Which would be non-Jewish in several ways.

Queer mikveh is accessible physically and spiritually to any and all people who are curious about it. You don't have to be a practicing Jew to enter queer mikveh. You don't have to be Jewish.

First off, once again whether or not non-Jews can use mikvah seems at best extremely iffy. Secondly, accessibility in mikva’ot is, as one of my editors put it, “a continual discussion.” We have records of discussions regarding access for those with physical disabilities going back at least to the 15th century (Shut Mahari Bruna, 106; as quoted in 50 Mikvahs That Shaped History by Rabbi Ephraim Meth), and in the modern era there are mikva’ot that have lifts or other accessibility aids. That said, many mikva’ot, especially older ones, are still not accessible–and many mikva’ot don’t have the money to retrofit or renovate. Mikvah.org’s directory listings (linked at the end of this) notes whether various mikva’ot are accessible, if you are looking for one in your area.  If you want to help make mikva’ot more accessible to the disabled, consider donating to an existing mikvah to help them pay for renovations or otherwise (respectfully) getting involved in the community. If you want to help make mikva’ot more accessible for non-Orthodox Jews, try donating to an open mikvah (see link to a map of Rising Tide members at the end of this essay) or other non-Orthodox mikvah.

Queer mikveh is an earth and water honoring ritual.

Not even a little. We do have (or had) rituals that honor the earth or water, at least to an extent–the Simchat Beit HaSho’evah (explanations here and here) was a celebration surrounding water; most of our holidays are harvest festivals to some extent or another; there are a large number of agricultural mitzvahs (though most can only be done in Israel, which I suppose wouldn’t work for JVP). (Note: mitzvahs are commandments and/or good deeds.) Even those, though, aren’t about the water or earth on their own, per se, but rather about honoring them as God’s gift to us. This description of mikvah sounds more Pagan or Wiccan–which is fine, but isn’t Jewish.

Queer mikveh exists whenever a queer person or queers gather to do mikveh. Every person is their own spiritual authority and has the power to create their own ritual for individual or collective healing.

Absolutely, anyone can create their own rituals for anything they want. But it probably won’t be a mikvah ritual, and it probably won’t be Jewish.

Do you know what it’s called when you make up your own ritual and claim that it’s actually a completely valid part of an established closed practice of which you aren’t part? (Remember—this document is aimed just as much at non-Jews as at Jews.)

It’s called appropriation.

With the next section, “Some Ideas for Mikveh Preparation,” we begin page three.

(Yes, we’re only on page three of seven. I’m so sorry.)

The most important part of mikveh preparation is setting an intention.

This isn’t entirely wrong, as you do have to have in mind the intention of fulfilling a mitzvah when you perform one.

Because mikveh is a ritual most used to mark transitions, you can frame your intention in that way.

To quote myself above, “usage of a mikvah to mark transitions beyond ritual states is a fairly new innovation.” I’d hardly say it is mostly used for marking transitions.

You can do journaling or talk with friends to connect with the Jewish month, Jewish holiday, Shabbat, the moon phase, and elements of the season that would support your intention.

If this were a guide for only Jews, or there was some sort of note saying this section was only for Jews, I would have less of a problem. But given neither is true, they are encouraging non-Jews to use the Jewish calendar for what is, from the rest of the descriptions in the Guide, a magical earth healing ritual.

This is 100% straight up appropriation.

The Jewish calendar is Jewish. Marking the new moon and creating a calendar was the first commandment given to us as a people, upon the exodus from Egypt. Nearly all our holidays are (aside from the harvest component, which is based on the Israeli agricultural seasons and required harvest offerings) based on specific parts of Jewish history. Passover celebrates the Exodus and our becoming a nation. Sukkot celebrates the Clouds of Glory that protected us in the desert. Shavuot celebrates being given the Torah.

According to some opinions, non-Jews literally aren’t allowed to keep Shabbat.

If you are a non-Jew and you are basing the collective earth healing ritual you have created under your own spiritual authority around Jewish holidays and calling it “mikvah,” you are appropriating Judaism.

Full stop.

This isn’t even taking into account the generally Pagan/witchy feel of the paragraph, with “moon phases” and “elements of the season.” Again, if you want to be a Pagan be a Pagan, but don’t call it Jewish.

Things only go further downhill with their next suggestion for preparation before you go to the mikvah.

Divination: A lot can be said about divination practices and Judaism.

There certainly is a lot to be said. First and foremost, there’s the fact that divination is forbidden in Judaism.

(Screenshot of Leviticus 19:26 from sefaria.org)

One method of divination they suggest is Tarot, which is a European method of cartomancy that seems to have begun somewhere in the 19th century, though the cards start showing up around the 15th. While early occultists tried to tie it to various older forms of mysticism, including Kabbalah, this was, to put it lightly, complete nonsense. (Disclaimer: this information comes from wikipedia; I’ve already spent so much time researching the mikvah stuff that I do not have the energy or interest to do a deep dive into the origin of Tarot. It isn’t Jewish, the rest is honestly just details.)

I have nothing against Tarot. I think it’s neat! The cards are often lovely! I have a couple of decks myself, and I use them for fun and card games. But divination via tarot is not Jewish. If I do any spreads, I make it very clear to anyone I’m doing it with that it is for fun and/or as a self-reflection tool, not as magic. Because that is extremely not allowed in Judaism.

The authors suggest a few decks to use, one of which is by one of the authors themselves. Another is “The Kabbalah Deck,” which—holy appropriation, Batman!

In case anyone is unaware, Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism) is an extremely closed Jewish practice, even within Judaism. Traditionally it shouldn’t be studied by anyone who hasn’t already studied every other Jewish text (of which there are, I remind you, a lot), because it’s so easy to misinterpret. I mentioned this above briefly when explaining cultural expropriation. Pop Kabbalah (what Madonna does, what you see when they talk about “Ancient Kabbalistic Texts” on shows like Supernatural, the nonsense occultists and New-Agers like to say is “ancient Kabbalistic” whatever, it’s a wide span of appropriative BS) is gross, combining Kabbalah with Tarot is extremely gross. I’m not 100% sure, as the link in the pdf doesn’t work, but I believe they are referring to this deck by Edward Hoffman. For those of you who don’t want to click through, the Amazon description includes this:

(Screenshot from Amazon)

Returning to our text:

Another practice that's been used in Judaism for centuries is bibliomancy. You can use a book you find meaningful (or the Torah) and ask a question. Then, close your eyes, open the book to a page and place your finger down. Interpret the word or sentence you pointed at to help guide you to answer your question.

Bibliomancy with a chumash (Pentateuch) or tanach (Bible) in Jewish magic is kind of a thing, but the tradition of Jewish magic as a whole is very complicated and could be its own entirely different post. This one is already long enough. This usage of bibliomancy is clearly just appropriative new-age BS, though, especially given you can use “[any] book you find meaningful.”

Also, if you aren’t Jewish, please don’t use the Torah for ritual purposes unless you are doing it under very specific circumstances under the laws for B’nei Noach (“Children of Noah,” also called Righteous Gentiles; non-Jews who follow the 7 Noachide Laws).

Sit with your general intention or if you aren't sure, pose a question to the divination tool you are using. "What should be my intention for this mikveh?" "What needs transforming in my life?" "How can I transform my relationship with my body?"

As I hope I’ve made clear, there are very specific times when one uses a mikvah, even with more modern Open Mikvah rituals. You always know what your intention is well before going—to make yourself tahor, or mark a specific event. I’m not here to police how someone prepares mentally before they immerse—meditation is fine, even encouraged. But magic? Like this? That’s not a thing. And given the fact that divination specifically is not only discouraged but forbidden, this section in particular upset a lot of Jews who read it.

Those of us already upset by everything we’ve already covered were not comforted by how the Guide continues.

How to Prepare Physically For Mikveh: Some people like to think about entering the mikveh in the way their body was when they were born. By this we mean naked, without jewelry, with clean fingernails and brushed hair. This framing can be meaningful for many people.

We went into this at the beginning of this essay (about 6500 words ago), but this is in fact how Jewish law mandates one is required to immerse. This is certainly the case in most communities, whether you are immersing due to an obligation (as a married woman or a bride about to be married) or due to custom (as men in post-Temple practice) or due to non-traditional immersion (as someone coming out); wherever on the spectrum of observance one falls (as far as I could find). A mikvah isn’t a bath, it’s not about physical cleanliness—you must first thoroughly clean yourself, clip your nails, and brush your teeth. Nail polish and makeup are removed. There can’t be any barriers between you and the water. Most mikva’ot these days, particularly women’s mikva’ot, have preparation rooms so you can prep on site. When you immerse, you have to submerge completely—your hair can’t be floating above the water, your mouth can’t be pursed tightly, your hands can’t be clenched so the water can’t get to your palms. If you do it wrong, it doesn’t count and you have to do it again. It’s not a “framing,” it’s a ritual practice governed by ritual law.

We suggest you do mikveh in the way you feel comfortable for you and your experience.

This isn’t how this works. If you have a particularly extreme case, you can talk to a rabbi to see if there are any workarounds—for example, if excessive embarrassment would distract you from the ritual, you may be able to wear clothes that are loose enough that the water still makes contact with every millimeter of skin. But you need to consult with someone who knows the minutiae of the laws and requirements so you know if any exceptions or workarounds apply to you. That’s what a rabbi is for. That’s why they need to go to rabbinical school and get ordination. They have to study. That’s why you need to find a rabbi whose knowledge and personality you trust. For someone calling themselves a religious authority in Judaism to say “you can do whatever, no biggie” with such a critical ritual is…I’m not sure what the word I want is.

The idea is to feel vulnerable but also to claim your body as a powerful site of change that has the power to move us close to our now unrecognizable futures.

The idea is to bathe in the living waters and enter a state of taharah. Though that could be an idea you have in mind while you are doing it, I suppose. I could see at least one writer I know of saying something like this to specifically menstrual married (presumably cis) women performing Taharat HaMishpacha (family taharah, see above).

For some people, doing mikveh in drag will feel most vulnerable, with all your make-up and best attire.

Absolutely not a thing. As I said last paragraph, the goal isn’t to feel vulnerable or powerful or anything. It may feel vulnerable or powerful, but that is entirely besides the actual purpose of the ritual. What you get out of it on a personal emotional level has nothing to do with the religious goal of the religious practice.

And if you are wondering how one would submerge oneself in water in full drag, don’t worry, we’ll get there soon.

For some, wearing a cloth around your body until just before you dip is meaningful.

This is just how it’s usually done. Generally one is provided with a bathrobe, and one removes it before entering. You don’t just wander around the building naked. Or the beach, if you’re using the ocean.

If you were born intersex and your genitalia was changed without your consent, thinking about your body as perfect, however you were born, can be loving.

I’m not intersex, so I’m not going to comment on the specifics here. If you are and that’s meaningful to you, more power to you.

We enter a new section, at the top of page 4.

Where To Do Mikveh: There is much midrash around what constitutes a mikveh.

“Midrash” is not the word they want here. The midrash is the non-legal side of the oral tradition, often taking the form of allegory or parable. This is as opposed to the mishna, which is the halachic (legal) side of the oral tradition. They were both written down around the same time, but most midrashim (plural) are in their own books, rather than incorporated in the mishna.

There is, however, a great deal of rabbinic discussion, in the form of mishna, gemara, teshuvot (responsa), legal codices, and various other genres of Jewish writing. More properly this could have just said “there is much discussion around what constitutes a mikveh.”

Most mikvot currently exist in Orthodox synagogues[—]

This is perhaps a minor quibble, but I don’t know that I’d say they’re generally in synagogues. They are frequently associated with a local congregation, but are often in a separate building.

[—]but there is a growing movement to create more diverse and inclusive spaces for mikveh. Mayyim Hayyim is a wonderful resource with a physical body of water mikveh space. Immerse NYC is a newer organization training people of all genders to be mikveh guides. They also work to find gender inclusive spaces for people to do mikveh in NYC.

This is true! Mayyim Hayyim is a wonderful organization I’ve never heard anything bad about, and ImmerseNYC also seems like an excellent organization. Both also only allow Jews (in which group I am including in-process converts) to immerse.

The mikveh guides thing I didn’t explain above, so I’ll take a moment to do so here. Because the rules of immersion are so strict, and because it’s hard to tell if you are completely immersed when you are underwater, most mikva’ot have a guide helping you. Depending on the circumstance and the mikvah, and depending on the patron’s comfort, who and how they do their jobs can differ somewhat. For a woman immersing after niddah, it will usually be another woman who will hold up the towel or bathrobe for you while you get in the water, and will only look from behind it once you are immersed to make sure you are completely submerged. If you are converting, customs vary. Some communities require men to witness the immersion regardless of the convert’s gender, which is very much an ongoing discussion in those communities. Even in those cases, to my knowledge they will only look once the convert is in the water, and there will likely still be a female attendant if the convert is a woman. While there are negative experiences people have had, it is very much an intra-community issue. We’re working on it.

Mikveh can be done in a natural body of water.

Again, this is true, though not all bodies of water work, so AYLR (Ask Your Local Rabbi).

Some people are also making swimming pools holy places of mikveh.

We’ve already explained above why this is nonsense.

In the Mishneh (the book that makes commentary on the torah [sic]) there are arguments as to what constitutes a mikveh and how much water from a spring or well or rainwater must be present.

The main issue in this section is their definition of the Mishneh. As I explained above, the Mishna (same thing, transliteration is not an exact science) is the major compilation of the Oral Torah, the oral tradition that was written down by Rabbi Judah Ha-Nasi so it wouldn’t be lost in the face of exile and assimilation. It’s not so much a commentary on the (Written) Torah as an expansion of it to extrapolate the religious laws we follow. It’s certainly not “the book that makes commentary on the Torah.” We have literally hundreds of books of commentary. That’s probably underestimating. Jews have been around for a long time, and we have been analyzing and discussing the Torah for nearly as long. There are so many commentaries on the Torah.

The second issue is that while there are arguments in the Mishna and Gemara (the oral discussion on the Mishna that was written down even later), they do generally result in a final decision of some sort. Usually whichever side has the majority wins. Variations between communities are still very much a thing, and I can explain why in another post if people are interested, but there usually is a base agreement.

We are of the school that says you decide for yourself what works.

The phrasing they use here makes it sound as though that’s a legitimate opinion in the Mishnah. I cannot emphasize how much that is not the case. While I myself have not finished learning the entire Mishnah, I would be willing to wager a great deal that “whatever works for you” isn’t a stance on any legal matter there. That’s just not how it works. While some modern branches of Judaism may have that as a position, it is definitely not Mishnaic.

If you are concerned about Jewish law, the ocean is always a good choice. There are no conflicting arguments about the ocean as a mikveh. As the wise maggid Jhos Singer says in reference to the ocean, "It's [sic] becomes a mikveh when we call it a mikveh." Done.

(To clarify, I don’t know if that typo was carried over from the source of the original quote or not.)

This is true. However if you are concerned about Jewish law I would very much urge you to look to other sources than this one—be that your local rabbi or rebbetzen, the staff at your local mikvah, or a reliable website that actually goes into the proper requirements. If you want to use a mikveh according to Jewish law, please do not use this document as your guide.

We recognize immersion in water does not work for every body. Therefore, a guiding principle for where to do a mikveh is: do a mikveh in a place that is sacred to you. Your body is always holy and your body is made of mostly water. Later in this guide there is more information on mikveh with no immersion required.

I cannot emphasize how much I have never once heard this before. This, to me, reads like New Age nonsense. If you are unable to immerse in a mikvah, talk to your rabbi. Don’t do…whatever this is.

Our next section is a short one.

Who To Do it With: Do mikveh with people you feel comfortable with and supported by.

This is fine, though many mikva’ot (perhaps even most) will only allow one person to immerse at a time.

Do a solo mikveh and ask the earth body to be your witness.

With this, we return to the strange smattering of neo-Paganism. The “earth body” is not a thing. Yes, the Earth is called as a witness in the Bible at least once. It’s poetic. You also, unless you are converting, don’t actually need a witness anyway. A mikvah attendant or guide is there to help you—if you were somewhere without one, you could still immerse for niddah or various customary purposes.

Do mikveh with people who share some of your vision for collective healing.

As I’ve said before in this essay, collective healing is not the point of a mikvah. If you are Jewish and want to pray for healing, there are plenty of legitimate places for this–the Shemonah Esrei has a prayer for healing and a prayer where you can insert any personal prayers you want; there’s a communal prayer for healing after the Torah reading. You can give charity or recite a psalm or do a mitzvah with the person in mind. You can also just do a personal private prayer with any words you like, a la Hannah, or if you want pre-written words find an appropriate techinah (not the sesame stuff). If you want to work towards collective liberation, volunteer. Learn the laws of interpersonal mitzvot, like lashon hara (literally “evil speech,” mostly gossip or libel). Connect fighting oppression to loving your neighbor or the Passover seder. We have tons of places for this–mikvah isn’t one of them.

Next segment.

What To Bring to A Mikveh: 1. Intentions for the ritual for yourself and/or the collective.

See previous points on intention.

2. Items for the altar from your cultural background[…] (emphasis mine)

If I wasn’t appalled by the “immersing in makeup” or the “do divination first,” this would be the place that got me. This is wrong on so many levels.

One is not allowed to have an altar outside of The Temple in Jerusalem, the one we currently do not have. It’s an extremely big deal. One is not allowed to make sacrifices outside of the Temple. Period. This is emphasized again and again in the Torah and other texts. Even when we had a Temple, there were no altars in a mikvah.

And you certainly couldn’t offer anything in the Temple while naked, as one is required to be when immersing in the mikvah.

Even when we did bring offerings to altars (the Bronze Altar or the Gold Altar, both of which were in the Temple and which only qualified priests in a state of tahara could perform offerings on), the offerings were very specifically mandated, as per the Torah and those other texts. Even when non-Jews gave offerings (as did happen) they were required to comply. You couldn’t just bring any item from your cultural background. This is paganism, plain and simple.

Now, again, let me be clear: if you’re pagan, I have no problem with you. My problem is when one tries to take a sacred practice from a closed religion and try to co-opt it as one’s own. It’s a problem when someone who isn’t Native American decides to smudge their room with white sage, and it’s a problem when someone who isn’t Jewish tries to turn a mikvah into a pagan cleansing rite. And even if the person doing it is Jewish--I have an issue when it’s Messianics who were born Jewish, and I have an issue when it’s pagans who were born the same. Either way, whether you intend to or not, you are participating in appropriation or expropriation.

Which makes the line that follows this point so deeply ironic I can’t decide if I’m furious or heartbroken.

After suggesting that the reader (who may or may not be Jewish) bring items for an altar to a mikvah, the Guide asks:

[…] (please do not bring appropriated items from cultures that are not yours).

Which is simply just... beyond parody. To quote one of my editors, “This is quickly approaching the level of being a new definition for the Yiddish word 'Chutzpah,' which is traditionally defined as 'absurdist audacity' in line with 'Chutzpah is a man who brutally murders both of his parents and then pleads with the judge for leniency because he is now an orphan bereft of parental guidance.' If not for the involved nature of explaining the full context, I would submit this as a potential new illustrative example.”

The next suggestion of what to bring is

3. Warm clothes, towels, warm drinks

All these are reasonable enough, though most mikva’ot provide towels. Some also provide snacks, for while you are preparing. They may also not allow you to bring in outside food.

4. Your spirit of love, healing, and resistance

This, again, has nothing to do with mikvah. The only spirit of resistance in a mikvah is the fact that we continue to do it despite millennia of attempts to stop us. Additionally, to me at least “a spirit of love” feels very culturally-Christian.

Our next section is titled “How to Make Mikveh a Non-Zionist Ritual.”

Right off the bat, I have an issue with this concept. Putting aside for a moment whatever one may think of Zionism as a philosophy, my main problem here is that mikvah has nothing at all to do with Zionism. In Orthodoxy, at least, Jews who are against Zionism on religious grounds perform the mitzvah the same way passionately Zionist Jews do, with the same meanings and intentions behind it. It is performed the same way in Israel and out, and has been more or less the same for the last several thousand years. It is about ritual purification and sanctification of the mundane, no more and no less.

There is a word for saying anything and everything Jewish is actually about the modern Israel/Palestine conflict, simply because it’s Jewish.

That word is antisemitism.

How to Make Mikveh a Non-Zionist Ritual: Reject all colonial projects by learning about, naming & honoring, and materially supporting the communities indigenous to the land where you hold your mikveh. Name and thank the Indigenous people of the land you are going to do your mikveh on.

If you removed the “non-Zionist” description, this would be mostly unobjectionable. We should absolutely help indigenous communities. The framing of “reject all colonial projects” does seem to suggest that there is something colonial about the usual practice of going to the mikvah, though. I would argue that the mikvah is, in fact, anti-colonial if anything—it is the practice of a consistently oppressed minority ethno-religion which has kept it in practice despite the best efforts of multiple empires. Additionally, while Zionism means many different things to those who believe in it, at its root most Zionists (myself included) define it as “the belief that Jews have a right to self-determination in our indigenous homeland.” Our indigenous homeland being, of course, the land of Israel. (This is different from the State of Israel, which is the modern country on that land.) If you are a Jew in Israel, one of the indigenous peoples of the land your mikvah is on is your own. That’s not to say there aren’t others—but to claim Jews aren’t indigenous to the region is to be either misinformed or disingenuous.

Take the time to vision [sic] our world to come in which Palestine and all people are free.

I really, really dislike how they use the concept of The World To Come here. The Jewish idea of The World To Come (AKA the Messianic Age) is one where the Messiah has come, the Temple has been rebuilt, and the Davidic dynastic monarchy has been re-established in the land of Israel. Arguably that’s the most Zionist vision imaginable. This isn’t to say that all people, Palestinians included, won’t be free—true peace and harmony are also generally accepted features of the Messianic Age. But using the phrase in making something “non-Zionist” is, at the very least, in extremely poor taste. (As a side note, even religious non-Zionists believe in this–that’s actually why most of them are against the State of Israel, as they believe we can’t have sovereignty until the Messiah comes. They do generally believe we will eventually have sovereignty, just that now isn’t the time for it.)

Hold and explore this vision intimately as you prepare to immerse. What is one action you can take to bring this future world closer? Trust that your vision is collaborating with countless others doing this work.

Having a “vision” of a world where all are free isn’t doing any of the work to accomplish it. A “vision” can’t collaborate. At least not in Judaism. This sounds like one is trying to manifest the change through force of will, which is something directly out of the New Age faith movement, where it is known as “Creative Visualization.” Even when we do have a concept of bringing about something positive through an unrelated action–like saying psalms for someone who is sick–the idea is that you are doing a mitzvah on their behalf, to add to their merits counted in their favor. It’s not a form of magic or invocation of some mystical energy.

(Once again: I have nothing against pagans. But paganism is incompatible with Judaism. You can’t be both, any more than you can be Jewish and Christian.)

Use mikveh practice to ground into your contribution to the abundant work for liberation being done. We are many.

If you will once more pardon a brief switch to a casual tone:

Nothing says liberation like *checks notes* appropriating a minority cultural practice.

The next section of their document is titled “Ideas for Mikveh Ritual,” and this is where the Neo-Pagan and New Age influences of the authors truly shift from the background to the foreground.  

We start off deceptively reasonably.

Mikveh ritual is potentially very simple. Generally people consider a mikveh to be a full immersion in water, where you are floating in the water, not touching the bottom, with no part of the body above the surface (including the hair).

Technically, most people consider a mikveh to be a ritual bath (noun) in which one performs various Jewish ritual immersions. But if we set this aside as a typo, this is…fairly true. What they are describing is how one is supposed to perform the mitzvah of mikveh immersion. However, in much the same way I wouldn’t say “generally people consider baseball to be a game where you hit a ball with a bat and run around a diamond,” I wouldn’t say it’s a case of “generally people consider” so much as “this is what it is.”

This works for some people. It doesn't work for everyone and it doesn't work for all bodies. Because of this, mikveh ritual can be expanded outside of these traditional confines in exciting, creative ways.

Once again, if you are incapable of performing mikvah immersion in the proper manner, please go speak with a rabbi. Please do not follow this guide.

Before we continue, I would just like to assure you that. whatever “exciting, creative ways” you might be imagining the authors have come up with, this is so much worse.

Method One:

Sound Mikveh: One way that's felt very meaningful for many is a "sound mikveh." This can be a group of people toning, harmonizing, or chanting in a circle. One person at a time can be in the center of the circle and feel the vibrations of healing sound wash over their body. Another method of sound mikveh is to use a shofar or other instrument of your lineage to made [sic] sounds that reach a body of water and also wash over you.

This makes me so uncomfortable I barely have the words to describe it, and I know that I am not alone in this. This is not a mikvah. If someone wants to do some sort of sound-based healing ritual, by all means go ahead, but do not call it a mikvah. This is not Jewish. I don’t know what this is, aside from deeply offensive.

And leave that poor shofar out of this. That ram did not give his horn for this nonsense.

(I could go on about the actual sacred purpose of a shofar and all the rules and reasons behind it that expand upon this, but this is already over 9000 words.)

Method Two is, if anything, worse. This is the one, if you’ve seen social media posts about this topic, you have most likely seen people going nuts about.

Tea Cup Mikveh: Fill a special teacup. If you want, add flower essence, a small stone, or other special elements. Sing the teacup a sweet song, dance around it, cry in some tears, tell the cup a tender and hopeful story, hold the teacup above the body of your animal friend for extra blessing, balance it on your head to call in your highest self. Use the holy contents of this teacup to make contact with water.

This is absolutely 100% straight-up neo-pagan/New Age mysticism. Nothing about this is based on Jewish practice of any kind. Again, I’m at a loss for words of how to explain just how antithetical this is. If you want to be a witch, go ahead and be a witch. But do not call it Jewish. Leave Judaism out of this.

They end this suggestion with the cute comment,

Mikveh to go. We’ve always been people on the move.

Let me explain why this “fun” little comment fills me with rage. 

As you may recall, this document was published by Jewish Voice for Peace. Among their various other acts of promoting and justifying antisemitism, JVP has repeatedly engaged in historical revisionism regarding Jews and Jewish history. In this context, they have repeatedly ignored the numerous expulsions of Jews from various countries, and blaming sinister Zionist plots to explain any movement of expelled Jews to Israel (“In the early 1950s, starting two years after the Nakba, the Israeli government facilitated a mass immigration of Mizrahim,” from “Our Approach to Zionism” on the JVP website; see @is-the-thing-actually-jewish’s post on JVP and the posts linked from there).

So a document published by JVP framing Jewish movement as some form of free spirited 1970s-esque Bohemian lifestyle or the result of us being busy movers-and-shakers is a direct slap in the face to the persecution we’ve faced as a people and society.  No, we aren’t “on the move” because we’re hippies wandering where the wind takes us . We’re always on the move because we keep getting kicked out and/or hate-crimed until we leave.

But there is no Jew-hatred in Ba Sing Se.

Method three:

Fermentation Mikveh: Some food goes through natural changes by being immersed in water. If we eat that food, we can symbolically go through a change similar to the one the food went through.

Again, this has no basis anywhere in halacha. We do have concepts of “you are what you eat,” specifically with reference to what animals and birds are kosher, but there isn’t any food that makes you tahor if you eat it. In the Temple days there were, in fact, foods you couldn’t eat unless you were tahor.

Jews may like pickles, but that doesn’t mean we think they purify you.

Also, the change from fermentation is, if anything, the opposite of the change we would want. Leavening (rising in dough or batter, due to the fermentation of yeast) is compared in rabbinic writings to arrogance and ego, as opposed to the humility of matza, the “poor man’s bread” (see here, for example). Is the suggestion here to become more egotistical?

As we wrap up this section, I’d like to go back to their stated reason for using these “alternative” methods (“It doesn't work for everyone and it doesn't work for all bodies”), and ask: if these really were the only options for immersion, would these really fill that same spiritual need/niche? These obviously aren’t aimed at me, but from my perspective it seems almost condescending, almost worse. “You can’t do the real thing, so we’ll make up something to make you feel better.” If any of them had an actual basis in Jewish practice, that would be one thing, but this just feels…fake, to me. Even within more liberal / less traditional streams of Judaism, there is a connection to halacha: 

“We each (if we are knowledgeable about the tradition, if we confront it seriously and take its claims and its wisdom seriously) have the ability, the freedom, indeed the responsibility to come to a [potentially differing] personal understanding of what God wants us to do… [Halacha] is a record of how our people, in widely differing times, places and societal circumstances, experienced God's presence in their lives, and responded. Each aspect of halacha is a possible gateway to experience of the holy, the spiritual. Each aspect worked for some Jews, once upon a time, somewhere in our history. Each, therefore, has the potential to open up holiness for people in our time as well, and for me personally. However, each does not have equal claim on us, on me…Portions of the halacha whose main purpose seems to be to distance us from our surroundings no longer seem functional. Yet some parts of the halachic tradition seem perfect correctives to the imbalances of life in modernity…In those parts of tradition, we are sometimes blessed to experience a sense of God's closeness. In my personal life, I emphasize those areas. And other areas of halacha, I de-emphasize, or sometimes abandon. Reform Judaism affirms my right, our right, to make those kinds of choices.” – Rabbi Ramie Arian

“[Traditional Reconstructionist Jews] believe that moral and spiritual faculties are actualized best when the individual makes conscious choices…The individual’s choices, however, can and should not be made alone. Our ethical values and ritual propensities are shaped by the culture and community in which we live. Living a Jewish life, according to the Reconstructionist understanding, means belonging to the Jewish people as a whole and to a particular community of Jews, through which our views of life are shaped. Thus, while Reconstructionist communities are neither authoritarian nor coercive, they aspire to influence the individual’s ethical and ritual choices–through study of Jewish sources, through the sharing of values and experiences, and through the impact of the climate of communal opinion on the individual. …While we may share certain values and life situations, no two sets of circumstances are identical. We hope that the Reconstructionist process works to help people find the right answers for themselves, but we can only assist in helping individuals to ask the right questions so that their choices are made in an informed way within a Jewish context. To be true to ourselves we must understand the differences in perception between us and those who have gone before, while retaining a reverence for the traditions they fashioned. If we can juxtapose those things, we ensure that the past will have [in the phrase of Reconstructionism’s founder, Mordecai Kaplan,] a vote, but not a veto.” – Rabbi Jacob J. Straub (Note: the Reconstructionist movement was founded in the late 1920s, and has gone through a very large shift in the past decade or so. I use “Traditional” here to refer to the original version of the movement as opposed to those who have shifted. Both are still called Reconstructionist, so it’s a bit confusing. This is on the advice of one of my editors, who is themself Traditional Reconstructionist.)

You may note, neither of these talk about inventing things from whole cloth. To paraphrase one of my editors, “You don’t completely abandon [halacha], because if you did how would you have a cohesive community? Even in a ‘do what’s meaningful’ framework, you’re taking from the buffet, not bringing something to a potluck. Even if you don’t see halacha as binding, there are limits.”

(Again, disclaimer that the above knowledge of non-Orthodox movements comes from my editors, and any errors are mine.)

The next section is “Prayers for Mikveh.”

As a note, I’m going to censor the names of God when I quote actual blessings, as per traditional/Halachic practice. I’ll be putting brackets to indicate my alterations.

I’m not going to go much into detail here, because frankly my Hebrew isn’t good enough, and the six different people I asked for help gave me at least six different answers, but I will touch on it a bit.

First, the Guide gives a link to an article on Traditional Mikveh Blessings from Ritualwell (here is a link on the Wayback Machine, since the original requires you to make an account). Ritualwell is a Reconstructionist Jewish website, and accepts reviewed submissions. Here is their about page. The blessings on this page, as far as I know, are in fact exactly what it says on the tin. I’m not sure the first one, asher kidshanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu al ha-t’vilah, is said for non-obligatory immersions (i.e. not for niddah or conversion), as it is literally a blessing on the commandment. The second blessing at that link is Shehecheyanu, which the Guide also suggests as a good prayer. This is the traditional form of the blessing, given at Ritualwell:

Baruch Atah Ado[-]nai Elo[k]eynu Melech Ha-Olam shehekheyanu v’kiyimanu v’higiyanu lazman hazeh.

Blessed are You, [LORD] our God, Monarch of the universe, Who has kept us alive and sustained us, and brought us to this season.

(As a quick note, you may notice this is not quite how they translate it on Ritualwell–I have no idea why they say “kept me alive,” as it’s definitely “us” in the Hebrew. There’s a long tradition, in fact, of praying for the community rather than ourselves as an individual, but that’s not the point of this post.)

The Guide, however, gives an alternate form:

B’rucha At y[-]a Elo[k]eynu Ruakh haolam shehekheyatnu v’kiyimatnu v’higiyatnu lazman hazeh. You are Blessed, Our God, Spirit of the World, who has kept us in life and sustained us, enabling us to reach this season.

Under the assumption that most of you don’t know Hebrew, I’m going to break this down further. The main difference between these two is grammatical gender–the traditional blessing uses masculine forms, which is common when referring to God. However, while there are often masculine descriptions of God, it is worth noting that Hashem is very specifically not a “man”--God is genderless and beyond our comprehension, and masculine is also used in Hebrew for neutral or unspecified gender. A whole discussion of gender and language is also beyond the scope of this post, but for now let’s leave it at: changing the gender for God in prayer is pretty common among less traditional Jews, and that’s fine. Some of the changes they make (or don’t make) here are interesting, though. The two letter name of God they switch to is–despite ending in a hey (the “h” letter)–not feminine grammatically feminine. I’m told, however, that some progressive circles consider it neutral because it “sounds feminine.” “Elo-keynu” is also grammatically masculine, but a) that’s used for neuter in Hebrew and b) it’s also technically plural, so maybe they didn’t feel the need to change it. Though if that’s the case I would also have thought that Ado-nai (the tetragrammaton) would be fine, as it’s also technically male in the same way. I’m also not sure why they didn’t just change ”Melech HaOlam” to “Malkah HaOlam,” which would be the feminine form of the original words, but perhaps they were avoiding language of monarchy. It’s apparently a not uncommon thing to change.

One of the responses I got said the vowels in the verbs were slightly off, but I can’t say much above that, for the reasons given at the beginning of this section.

Also, and this is comparatively minor, the capitalization in the transliteration is bizarre. They capitalize “At” (you) and “Elo[k]eynu” (our God), but not “y[-]a…” which is the actual name of God in the blessing and should definitely be capitalized if you are capitalizing.

The Guide next gives a second blessing that can be used:

B’rucha at shekhinah eloteinu ruach ha-olam asher kid-shanu bi-tevilah b’mayyim hayyim. Blessed are You, Shekhinah, Source of Life, Who blesses us by embracing us in living waters. -Adapted by Dori Midnight 

The main thing I want to note about this is that…that’s not an accurate translation. It completely skips the word “eloteinu.” “Ruach ha-olam” means “spirit/breath of the universe/world,” not “Source of Life,” which would be “M’kor Ha-Olam,” as mentioned above. “Kid-shanu,” as she transliterates it, means “has sanctified us,” or “has made us holy,” not “blesses us”--both the tense and the word are wrong. “Bi-tevilah” doesn’t mean “embracing us,” either, it means “with immersing.” In full, the translation should be:

“Blessed are You, Shekhinah, our God, Spirit of the World, Who has sanctified us with immersion in living waters.”

The Shekhinah is an aspect/name of God(dess), though not a Name to the same level as the ones that can’t be taken in vain. It refers to the hidden Presence of God(dess) in our world, and is the feminine aspect of God(dess), inasmuch as God(dess) has gendered aspects–remember, our God(dess) is One. It’s not an unreasonable Name to use if you are trying to make a prayer specifically feminine.

(Though do be careful if you see it used in a blessing in the wild, because Messianics use it to mean the holy ghost.)

“Eloteinu” is, grammatically, the feminine form of Elokeinu (according to the fluent speakers I asked, though again I got several responses).

It is, again, odd that they don’t capitalize transliterated names of God, though here there is more of an argument that it’s a stylistic choice, Hebrew not having capital letters.

The Guide then repeats the link for Ritualwell.

Finally, we come to the last section, “Resources and Our Sources:”

First, they credit the Kohenet Institute and two of its founders. I do not want to go on a deepdive into the Kohenet Institute also, as this is already long enough, but I suppose I should say a bit.

The Kohenet Institute was a “clergy ordination program, a sisterhood / siblinghood, and an organization working to change the face of Judaism. For 18 years, Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institutes founders, graduates and students reclaimed and innovated embodied, earth-based feminist Judaism, drawing from ways that women and other marginalized people led Jewish ritual across time and space” (Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute Homepage). It closed in 2023.

I have difficulty explaining my feelings about the Kohenet Institute. On the one hand, the people who founded it and were involved in it, I’m sure, were very invested in Judaism and very passionate in their belief. As with the authors of the Guide, I do not mean to attack them–I’m sure they’re lovely people.

On the other, I have trouble finding a basis for any of their practices, and most of what practices I do find trouble me–again, with the caveat that I am very much not into mysticism, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

Of the three founders, only one (Rabbi Jill Hammer) seems to have much in the way of scholarly background. Rabbi Hammer, who was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary (a perfectly respectable school), has at least one article where she quotes the New Testament and a Roman satirist making fun of a Jewish begger who interpret dreams for money as proof “that Jewish prophetesses existed in Roman times,” which to me at least seems like saying that the Roma have a tradition of seeresses based on racist caricatures of what they had to do to survive, if you’ll pardon the comparison. In the same article, she says that Sarah and Abigail, who are listed in the Talmud as prophetesses “are not actually prophetesses as I conceptualize them here,” (pg 106) but that “abolitionist Ernestine Rose, anarchist Emma Goldman, and feminist Betty Friedan stand in the prophetic tradition.” Given God says explicitly in the text, “Regarding all that Sarah tells you, listen to her voice” (Genesis 21:12), I have no idea where she gets this.

The second founder, Taya Mâ Shere, describes the Institute on her website as “spiritual leadership training for women & genderqueer folk embracing the Goddess in a Jewish context,” which to me is blatantly what I and some of my editors have taken to calling Jews For Lilith. Now, it is possible this is a typo. However assuming it is not, and it would be a weird typo to have, this rather clearly reads as “the Goddess” being something one is adding a Jewish context to–which is exactly what I mean when I say this guide is taking Paganism and sprinkling a little Judaism on it. If it had said “embracing Goddess in a Jewish context,” I’d have no problem (aside from weird phrasing)--but “the Goddess” is very much a “divine feminine neo-pagan” kind of thing. We don’t say “the God” in Judaism, or at least I’ve never heard anyone do so. We just say God (or Goddess), because there’s only the one. In fact, according to this article, she returned to Judaism from neo-Paganism, and “began to combine the Goddess-centered practices she had co-created in Philadelphia with what she was learning from teachers in the Jewish Renewal movement, applying her use of the term Goddess to Judaism’s deity.” The “Goddess-centered practices” and commune in Philadelphia are described earlier in the article as “influenced by Wiccan and Native American traditions, in ways that Shere now considers appropriative (“After Kohenet, Who Will Lead the Priestesses?” by Noah Phillips).” I’m not sure how it suddenly isn’t appropriative now, but taking the Pagan practices you were doing and now doing those exact same rituals “but Jewish” is, in fact, still Pagan.

Shere also sells “Divining Pleasure: An Oracle for SephErotic Liberation,” created by her and Bekah Starr, which is a “divination card deck and an Omer counter inviting you more deeply into your body, your pleasure and your devotion to collective liberation.”

I hate this.

I hate this so much.

For those who don’t know, the Omer is the period between the second day of Passover and the holiday of Shavuot, 50 days later. It’s named for the Omer offering that was given on Passover, and which started the count of seven weeks (and a day, the day being Shavuot). The Omer, or at least part of it, is also traditionally a period of mourning, much like the Three Weeks between the fasts of the 17th of Tammuz and the 9th of Av–we don’t have weddings, we don’t listen to live music, we don’t cut our hair. It commemorates (primarily) the deaths of 24,000 students of Rabbi Akiva in a plague (possibly a metaphor for persecution or the defeat of the Bar Kochba revolt). It is often used as a time for introspection and self-improvement, using seven of the Kabbalistic Sephirot as guides (each day of the week is given a Sephira, as is each week, so each day of the 49 is x of y, see here). It’s not, as Shere’s class “Sex and the Sephirot: A Pleasure Journey Through the Omer” puts it, a time to “engage…toward experiencing greater erotic presence, deepening our commitment to nourishing eros, and embracing ritual practices of…pleasure.”

The final of the founders, Shoshana Jedwab, seems to be primarily a musician. In her bio on her website, scholarship and teaching are almost afterthoughts. I can find nothing about her background or classes. She’s also, from what I’ve found, the creator of the “sound mikvah.”

So all in all, while I’m sure they’re lovely people, I find it difficult to believe that they are basing their Institute on actual practices, particularly given they apparently include worship of Ashera as an “authentic” Jewish practice, see the above Phillips article and this tumblr post.

The institute also lists classes they offered, which “were open to those across faith practices - no background in Judaism necessary.” If you scroll down the page, you will see one of these courses was titled “Sefer Yetzirah: Meditation, Magic, & the Cosmic Architecture.” Sefer Yetzirah, for those of you unaware, “is an ancient and foundational work of Jewish mysticism.”

You may recall my saying something some 5700 (yikes) words ago about Jewish mysticism (i.e. Kabbalah) being a closed practice.

You may see why I find the Kohenet Institute problematic.

I will grant, however, that I have not listened to their podcasts nor read their books, so it is possible they do have a basis for what they teach. From articles I’ve read, and what I’ve found on their websites, I am unconvinced.

Returning to our original document, the Guide next gives several links from Ritualwell, which I’ve already discussed above. After those, they give links to two actual mikvah organizations: Mayyim Hayyim and Immerse NYC. Both are reputable organizations, and are Open Mikvahs. Neither (at least based on their websites) seem to recommend any of the nonsense in this Guide. In fact, Mayyim Hayyim explicitly does not allow non-Jews to immerse (unless it’s to convert). ImmerseNYC has advice to create a ritual in an actually Jewish way. I would say the link to these two groups are, perhaps, the only worthwhile information in this Guide.

They then list a few “mikveh related projects,” two of which are by the writers. The first, Queer Mikveh Project, is by one of the authors, Rebekah Erev. The link they give is old and no longer works, but on Erev’s website there is information about the project. Much of the language is similar to that in this guide. The page also mentions a “mikvah” ritual done to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline, in which “the mikveh…[was] completely optional.” And, of course, there was an altar. The second project, the “Gay Bathhouse” by (I believe) the other author and Shelby Handler, is explicitly an art installation.

The final link is to this website (thanks to the tumblr anon who found it), which is the only source we’ve been able to find on Shekinah Ministries (aside from a LOT of Messianic BS from unrelated organizations of the same name). So good news–this isn’t a Messianic. Bad news, it also seems to have a shaky basis in actual Jewish practice at best. It is run by artist Reena Katz, aka Radiodress, whose MKV ritual is, like “Gay Bathhouse,” a performance project. As you can see from the pictures on Radiodress’s website (cw for non-sexual nudity and mention of bodily fluids), it is done in a clearly portable tub in a gallery. As part of the process, participants are invited to “add any material from their body,” including “spit, urine, ejaculate, menstrual blood,” “any medication, any hormones they might be taking,” and supplies Radiodress offers including something called “Malakh Shmundie,” “a healing tincture that translates to “angel pussy” made by performance artist Nomy Lamm” (quotes from “An Artist’s Ritual Bath for Trans and Queer Communities” by Caoimhe Morgan-Feir). The bath is also filled by hand, which is very much not in line with halacha. Which, if you’re doing performance art, is fine.

But this Guide is ostensibly for authentic Jewish religious practice.

And with that (aside from the acknowledgements, which I don’t feel the need to analyze), we are done. At last.

Thank you for reading this monster of a post. If you have made it this far, you and I are now Family. Grab a snack on your way out, you deserve it.

Further Reading and Resources:

https://www.mayyimhayyim.org/risingtide/members/

https://www.mikvah.org/directory

https://www.mayyimhayyim.org/

http://www.immersenyc.org/

https://aish.com/what-is-a-mikveh/

https://www.chabad.org/theJewishWoman/article_cdo/aid/1541/jewish/The-Mikvah.htm

https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1230791/jewish/Immersion-of-Vessels-Tevilat-Keilim.htm

https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/why-immerse-in-the-mikveh/

Meth, Rabbi Ephraim. 50 Mikvahs That Shaped History. Feldheim Publishers, 2023.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How to shatter the class solidarity of the ruling class

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me WEDNESDAY (Apr 11) at UCLA, then Chicago (Apr 17), Torino (Apr 21) Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

Audre Lorde counsels us that "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," while MLK said "the law cannot make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me." Somewhere between replacing the system and using the system lies a pragmatic – if easily derailed – course.

Lorde is telling us that a rotten system can't be redeemed by using its own chosen reform mechanisms. King's telling us that unless we live, we can't fight – so anything within the system that makes it easier for your comrades to fight on can hasten the end of the system.

Take the problems of journalism. One old model of journalism funding involved wealthy newspaper families profiting handsomely by selling local appliance store owners the right to reach the townspeople who wanted to read sports-scores. These families expressed their patrician love of their town by peeling off some of those profits to pay reporters to sit through municipal council meetings or even travel overseas and get shot at.

In retrospect, this wasn't ever going to be a stable arrangement. It relied on both the inconstant generosity of newspaper barons and the absence of a superior way to show washing-machine ads to people who might want to buy washing machines. Neither of these were good long-term bets. Not only were newspaper barons easily distracted from their sense of patrician duty (especially when their own power was called into question), but there were lots of better ways to connect buyers and sellers lurking in potentia.

All of this was grossly exacerbated by tech monopolies. Tech barons aren't smarter or more evil than newspaper barons, but they have better tools, and so now they take 51 cents out of every ad dollar and 30 cents out of ever subscriber dollar and they refuse to deliver the news to users who explicitly requested it, unless the news company pays them a bribe to "boost" their posts:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

The news is important, and people sign up to make, digest, and discuss the news for many non-economic reasons, which means that the news continues to struggle along, despite all the economic impediments and the vulture capitalists and tech monopolists who fight one another for which one will get to take the biggest bite out of the press. We've got outstanding nonprofit news outlets like Propublica, journalist-owned outlets like 404 Media, and crowdfunded reporters like Molly White (and winner-take-all outlets like the New York Times).

But as Hamilton Nolan points out, "that pot of money…is only large enough to produce a small fraction of the journalism that was being produced in past generations":

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/what-will-replace-advertising-revenue

For Nolan, "public funding of journalism is the only way to fix this…If we accept that journalism is not just a business or a form of entertainment but a public good, then funding it with public money makes perfect sense":

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/public-funding-of-journalism-is-the

Having grown up in Canada – under the CBC – and then lived for a quarter of my life in the UK – under the BBC – I am very enthusiastic about Nolan's solution. There are obvious problems with publicly funded journalism, like the politicization of news coverage:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/jan/24/panel-approving-richard-sharp-as-bbc-chair-included-tory-party-donor

And the transformation of the funding into a cheap political football:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/poilievre-defund-cbc-change-law-1.6810434

But the worst version of those problems is still better than the best version of the private-equity-funded model of news production.

But Nolan notes the emergence of a new form of hedge fund news, one that is awfully promising, and also terribly fraught: Hunterbrook Media, an investigative news outlet owned by short-sellers who pay journalists to research and publish damning reports on companies they hold a short position on:

https://hntrbrk.com/

For those of you who are blissfully distant from the machinations of the financial markets, "short selling" is a wager that a company's stock price will go down. A gambler who takes a short position on a company's stock can make a lot of money if the company stumbles or fails altogether (but if the company does well, the short can suffer literally unlimited losses).

Shorts have historically paid analysts to dig into companies and uncover the sins hidden on their balance-sheets, but as Matt Levine points out, journalists work for a fraction of the price of analysts and are at least as good at uncovering dirt as MBAs are:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-04-02/a-hedge-fund-that-s-also-a-newspaper

What's more, shorts who discover dirt on a company still need to convince journalists to publicize their findings and trigger the sell-off that makes their short position pay off. Shorts who own a muckraking journalistic operation can skip this step: they are the journalists.

There's a way in which this is sheer genius. Well-funded shorts who don't care about the news per se can still be motivated into funding freely available, high-quality investigative journalism about corporate malfeasance (notoriously, one of the least attractive forms of journalism for advertisers). They can pay journalists top dollar – even bid against each other for the most talented journalists – and supply them with all the tools they need to ply their trade. A short won't ever try the kind of bullshit the owners of Vice pulled, paying themselves millions while their journalists lose access to Lexisnexis or the PACER database:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/24/anti-posse/#when-you-absolutely-positively-dont-give-a-solitary-single-fuck

The shorts whose journalists are best equipped stand to make the most money. What's not to like?

Well, the issue here is whether the ruling class's sense of solidarity is stronger than its greed. The wealthy have historically oscillated between real solidarity (think of the ultrawealthy lobbying to support bipartisan votes for tax cuts and bailouts) and "war of all against all" (as when wealthy colonizers dragged their countries into WWI after the supply of countries to steal ran out).

After all, the reason companies engage in the scams that shorts reveal is that they are profitable. "Behind every great fortune is a great crime," and that's just great. You don't win the game when you get into heaven, you win it when you get into the Forbes Rich List.

Take monopolies: investors like the upside of backing an upstart company that gobbles up some staid industry's margins – Amazon vs publishing, say, or Uber vs taxis. But while there's a lot of upside in that move, there's also a lot of risk: most companies that set out to "disrupt" an industry sink, taking their investors' capital down with them.

Contrast that with monopolies: backing a company that merges with its rivals and buys every small company that might someday grow large is a sure thing. Shriven of "wasteful competition," a company can lower quality, raise prices, capture its regulators, screw its workers and suppliers and laugh all the way to Davos. A big enough company can ignore the complaints of those workers, customers and regulators. They're not just too big to fail. They're not just too big to jail. They're too big to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Would-be monopolists are stuck in a high-stakes Prisoner's Dilemma. If they cooperate, they can screw over everyone else and get unimaginably rich. But if one party defects, they can raid the monopolist's margins, short its stock, and snitch to its regulators.

It's true that there's a clear incentive for hedge-fund managers to fund investigative journalism into other hedge-fund managers' portfolio companies. But it would be even more profitable for both of those hedgies to join forces and collude to screw the rest of us over. So long as they mistrust each other, we might see some benefit from that adversarial relationship. But the point of the 0.1% is that there aren't very many of them. The Aspen Institute can rent a hall that will hold an appreciable fraction of that crowd. They buy their private jets and bespoke suits and powdered rhino horn from the same exclusive sellers. Their kids go to the same elite schools. They know each other, and they have every opportunity to get drunk together at a charity ball or a society wedding and cook up a plan to join forces.

This is the problem at the core of "mechanism design" grounded in "rational self-interest." If you try to create a system where people do the right thing because they're selfish assholes, you normalize being a selfish asshole. Eventually, the selfish assholes form a cozy little League of Selfish Assholes and turn on the rest of us.

Appeals to morality don't work on unethical people, but appeals to immorality crowds out ethics. Take the ancient split between "free software" (software that is designed to maximize the freedom of the people who use it) and "open source software" (identical to free software, but promoted as a better way to make robust code through transparency and peer review).

Over the years, open source – an appeal to your own selfish need for better code – triumphed over free software, and its appeal to the ethics of a world of "software freedom." But it turns out that while the difference between "open" and "free" was once mere semantics, it's fully possible to decouple the two. Today, we have lots of "open source": you can see the code that Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook uses, and even contribute your labor to it for free. But you can't actually decide how the software you write works, because it all takes a loop through Google, Microsoft, Apple or Facebook's servers, and only those trillion-dollar tech monopolists have the software freedom to determine how those servers work:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/04/which-side-are-you-on/#tivoization-and-beyond

That's ruling class solidarity. The Big Tech firms have hidden a myriad of sins beneath their bafflegab and balance-sheets. These (as yet) undiscovered scams constitute a "bezzle," which JK Galbraith defined as "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it."

The purpose of Hunterbrook is to discover and destroy bezzles, hastening the moment of realization that the wealth we all feel in a world of seemingly orderly technology is really an illusion. Hunterbrook certainly has its pick of bezzles to choose from, because we are living in a Golden Age of the Bezzle.

Which is why I titled my new novel The Bezzle. It's a tale of high-tech finance scams, starring my two-fisted forensic accountant Marty Hench, and in this volume, Hench is called upon to unwind a predatory prison-tech scam that victimizes the most vulnerable people in America – our army of prisoners – and their families:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

The scheme I fictionalize in The Bezzle is very real. Prison-tech monopolists like Securus and Viapath bribe prison officials to abolish calls, in-person visits, mail and parcels, then they supply prisoners with "free" tablets where they pay hugely inflated rates to receive mail, speak to their families, and access ebooks, distance education and other electronic media:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

But a group of activists have cornered these high-tech predators, run them to ground and driven them to the brink of extinction, and they've done it using "the master's tools" – with appeals to regulators and the finance sector itself.

Writing for The Appeal, Dana Floberg and Morgan Duckett describe the campaign they waged with Worth Rises to bankrupt the prison-tech sector:

https://theappeal.org/securus-bankruptcy-prison-telecom-industry/

Here's the headline figure: Securus is $1.8 billion in debt, and it has eight months to find a financier or it will go bust. What's more, all the creditors it might reasonably approach have rejected its overtures, and its bonds have been downrated to junk status. It's a dead duck.

Even better is how this happened. Securus's debt problems started with its acquisition, a leveraged buyout by Platinum Equity, who borrowed heavily against the firm and then looted it with bogus "management fees" that meant that the debt continued to grow, despite Securus's $700m in annual revenue from America's prisoners. Platinum was just the last in a long line of PE companies that loaded up Securus with debt and merged it with its competitors, who were also mortgaged to make profits for other private equity funds.

For years, Securus and Platinum were able to service their debt and roll it over when it came due. But after Worth Rises got NYC to pass a law making jail calls free, creditors started to back away from Securus. It's one thing for Securus to charge $18 for a local call from a prison when it's splitting the money with the city jail system. But when that $18 needs to be paid by the city, they're going to demand much lower prices. To make things worse for Securus, prison reformers got similar laws passed in San Francisco and in Connecticut.

Securus tried to outrun its problems by gobbling up one of its major rivals, Icsolutions, but Worth Rises and its coalition convinced regulators at the FCC to block the merger. Securus abandoned the deal:

https://worthrises.org/blogpost/securusmerger

Then, Worth Rises targeted Platinum Equity, going after the pension funds and other investors whose capital Platinum used to keep Securus going. The massive negative press campaign led to eight-figure disinvestments:

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-09-05/la-fi-tom-gores-securus-prison-phone-mass-incarceration

Now, Securus's debt became "distressed," trading at $0.47 on the dollar. A brief, covid-fueled reprieve gave Securus a temporary lifeline, as prisoners' families were barred from in-person visits and had to pay Securus's rates to talk to their incarcerated loved ones. But after lockdown, Securus's troubles picked up right where they left off.

They targeted Platinum's founder, Tom Gores, who papered over his bloody fortune by styling himself as a philanthropist and sports-team owner. After a campaign by Worth Rises and Color of Change, Gores was kicked off the Los Angeles County Museum of Art board. When Gores tried to flip Securus to a SPAC – the same scam Trump pulled with Truth Social – the negative publicity about Securus's unsound morals and financials killed the deal:

https://twitter.com/WorthRises/status/1578034977828384769

Meanwhile, more states and cities are making prisoners' communications free, further worsening Securus's finances:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/14/minnesota-nice/#shitty-technology-adoption-curve

Congress passed the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, giving the FCC the power to regulate the price of federal prisoners' communications. Securus's debt prices tumbled further:

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/117/s1541

Securus's debts were coming due: it owes $1.3b in 2024, and hundreds of millions more in 2025. Platinum has promised a $400m cash infusion, but that didn't sway S&P Global, a bond-rating agency that re-rated Securus's bonds as "CCC" (compare with "AAA"). Moody's concurred. Now, Securus is stuck selling junk-bonds:

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/117/s1541

The company's creditors have given Securus an eight-month runway to find a new lender before they force it into bankruptcy. The company's debt is trading at $0.08 on the dollar.

Securus's major competitor is Viapath (prison tech is a duopoly). Viapath is also debt-burdened and desperate, thanks to a parallel campaign by Worth Rises, and has tried all of Securus's tricks, and failed:

https://pestakeholder.org/news/american-securities-fails-to-sell-prison-telecom-company-viapath/

Viapath's debts are due next year, and if Securus tanks, no one in their right mind will give Viapath a dime. They're the walking dead.

Worth Rise's brilliant guerrilla warfare against prison-tech and its private equity backers are a master class in using the master's tools to dismantle the master's house. The finance sector isn't a friend of justice or working people, but sometimes it can be used tactically against financialization itself. To paraphrase MLK, "finance can't make a corporation love you, but it can stop a corporation from destroying you."

Yes, the ruling class finds solidarity at the most unexpected moments, and yes, it's easy for appeals to greed to institutionalize greediness. But whether it's funding unbezzling journalism through short selling, or freeing prisons by brandishing their cooked balance-sheets in the faces of bond-rating agencies, there's a lot of good we can do on the way to dismantling the system.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/08/money-talks/#bullshit-walks

Image: KMJ (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boerse_01_KMJ.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[fumifooms]

The Nakamoto household - facts & theories masterpost

Table of contents:

the hierarchy & general situation

The parents

The Maizuru situation

The siblings

The other retainers

Izutsumi

Toshiro

Conclusion

I also made tldr summary charts here. This post is about collecting facts about the setting and characters, but it’s gonna be a lot of analysis on what it means through the lens of Toshiro as well, his relationship and place in everything etc etc. They have entangled drama the scale of Daltian Clan. Things are so interwoven it’s hard to keep topics neatly in their own section, because of this pictures may be relevant at several point of this but I mostly won’t be putting them in twice, you might have to do some scrolling up while reading if you want the visual proof to accompany statements. Unlike with Chilchuck’s family there’s less ambiguousness and more intricate details and implications so it’s less theorizing & headcanoning and more stringing together all the crumbs canon gave us. I also dig into some cultural parallels, especially since characters from Wa are the most culturally coded in the series. Also disclaimer that I’ll be calling Shuro Toshiro through this whole thing because that’s his actual name & Shuro isn’t even a nickname he’s shown to like, for accuracy’s sake. The servant girls have real names but are always called by their code names so I’ll call them as such, except for Izutsumi who was named Asebi which I won’t be using.

The general situation

To start off, what’s the situation in canon? All three kids of the head of the house, the three sons (Toshiro and his two younger brothers), are sent out on a vague mission to find something interesting for his father to pick the heir. Each son is thus on their own journey, out with their own group of retainers for an unsure length of time, during canon it’s been 2 years that Toshiro left the house for this mission, and they seemingly all drifted towards dungeons. It’s important to remember that this state of things is the exception and not the rule, and before this the sons lived at home and had different uses of their time, and the retainers had other jobs than care after them. See the next paragraph.

The household offers ninja services, no exaggeration or misuse of the term, mostly spyint but also "covert maneuvers" which could include anything including assassination of people high up. That’s the job of their servants/retainers at least, the heads themselves are more like managers probably, possibly samurais themselves though especially since as we see with the heirs (besides the samurai armor) they also got trained in fighting as their skills showcase. I need to dig into the history of samurais more before I can draw the parallel confidently though. The Nakamoto household is noble/wealthy, distinguished as the Adventurer’s Bible puts it, but it works for and puts its service at use for "their local lord". It buys servants, but also has families who have served it for generations like with Hien. The comic shows that there aren’t only women servants, it’s just the ones we see all happen to be because Toshiro’s retainers are only a small team of all of Nakamoto’s servants.

Above, in a page showcasing characters’ relationships with their party leader: 父親の部下を借りている状態なので、 距離がある。Doubtlessly there must be a translation of this already somewhere but I’m lazy and impatient so I turned to machine translation instead, this translates into: "Since he is borrowing his father's subordinates, there is a distance between him and them". Calling the servants retainers is what most of the fandom does and it’s accurate so I’ll be calling them this.

Hien and Toshiro were childhood friends which means the servants do have some degree of contact not even just together but with the heirs too, or maybe just specifically Hien, since both their parents were ninjas for the Nakamotos she ended up getting raised there and they let her play with him as an exception? They did end up drifting away as adults as their relationship got more professional, so it’s possible. The servants eat and sleep in shared spaces, separate from the masters, though Maizuru has her own bedroom, if the room configuration at the in is to be believed + it’d make sense since she’s governess/head servant. I’m hesitant wether to say it’s implied that this group of 4 retainers was always a bit of a team or it wasn’t and got formed for Toshiro specifically. We know that Benichidori had little contact with Toshiro before they were sent out together for example, but we do see all three girls with Izutsumi in Inutade’s extra when they were younger, and them eating in the same japanese styled room etc. The inn they stay at on The Island is western styled though they do have futons rather than beds (there’s only one bed in their shared room and Hien has it because of her rank).

From Izutsumi’s Adventurer’s Bible profile: "Maizuru, who was also Shuro's governess, is the one thing Izutsumi fears. After Izutsumi was taken in by the Nakamoto family, Maizuru forced her through a harsh training regimen of speech, common sense, and fighting skills. Since Izutsumi refused to listen to her, Maizuru set a curse on her that would activate if Maizuru didn't touch her within a set time frame: "Ninja Art: Babysitter." "

Maizuru, called a governess, is the one training the girls, at least some of them, we know for a fact she was the one to train Izutsumi for example, and in general she’s the one in charge of the ninja girls we see. She was a ninja herself but retired from frontline missions, but has a central role managing the servants instead. Inutade for example is strong but not stealthy, and it’s said that it’s Maizuru’s job to choose how to train her and what role to give her in consequence. Her training includes manners but fighting as well, notably kunais and martial arts. Hien is shown to use bombs and Benichidori is implied to be good at disguises, Inutade uses a bold weapon like a club but it’s implied with "ogres and clubs just go together" and Maizuru not knowing where to put her to use that it’s uncommon for Nakamoto servants to use those. Their board game artworks also show their specialties neatly. When brought into the household, the servants are given new names and their whole lives become devotion to the house and their duties. The names might be intended to act as code names due to them being ninjas? It’s implied that they never use their non-code names anymore once they start serving the household. Maizuru’s training also contains language and "common sense"… Critical thinking? As well as implied etiquette. This isn’t surprising, as she was the one put in charge of raising not only Toshiro but his brothers as well.

Oh yes I want to mention that all the retainers’ "first deaths" are in the dungeon during canon, considering our main cast we’re used to death being permissible because dungeons make resurrections possible, but it’s relevant to remember that these people never died before. Never. These girls are professionals, ninjas with a sometimes very dangerous job. Messing up means death, permanently.

From what we see and with who we see, the hierarchy is:

Father (head of house, his word goes)

Mother (has status which puts her wishes above others’ and give her some control over the house, it’s unsure how much though, but hierarchy wise she’s very much above the rest but below the father)

Maizuru (governess, in charge of (at least some) servants and raising Toshiro. Two dots)

Hien (leader of their squad, trained servant from a family devoted to the Nakamotos. Two dots)

Benichidori (trained bought servant. Two dots)

Inutade and Izutsumi (bought servants. Power wise from their rank it’s unsure just how much the difference between Inutade (who has one dot), Izutsumi (who has none) and Benichidori (who has two) is, since Hien is team leader between the four servants at least that’s measurable. Inutade gets some janitor duties, and Izutsumi has a curse put on her so she doesn’t run away I suppose. Power wise it’s unsure, but socially/role wise Inutade and especially Asebi are treated worse.)

I didn’t add the sons because I’m talking more generally about the power structure and it’d depend on each sibling, like Toshiro’s wants and directives during canon trump Maizuru’s, but Maizuru is also his nanny and manages the girls so she has a lot of importance and sway even on the final decisions.

The parents

I am so pissed I forgot that we know Toshiro’s father’s name, Toshitsugu, from these panels showing the progression of the family tree. I am so pissed I’m adding this halfway into writing this whole thing, I am not gonna go back and replace every "the father" by his name atm.

The father is the part of this puzzle most important yet most shrouded in mystery, or rather a lack of details. What we do know paints a pretty full and vivid portrait: impulsive and cares mainly about his own entertainment. Maizuru calls him a fool, his sons are exasperated and go "This again?" when he summons them saying that they’re boring/dull, everyone knows he’s having an affair and he often has undignified demeanor, but what he says goes so yes Maizuru will take Izutsumi under her wing, yes the sons will be going out right away into the world to find you the 8th world wonder, yes whatever you want lord. He seems to have little care for how his action affects others, like crashing into Maizuru’s room at night and asking she take care of a catgirl, or sending out his sons suddenly with kicks to the butts. He does what he wants hen he wants and others have to comply.

Like we see with Izutsumi and Inutade, he tends to take a liking to slaves here and there and buy them on the spot, usually at entertainment places, like sumo wrestling matches for Inutade and a freakshow for Izutsumi. The Adventurer’s Bible states him acquiring Inutade as "By coincidence, Shuro's father came to see her first match; he liked her and bought her for the Nakamoto family." and Izutsumi as "She was on display as a "cat-girl" in a sideshow when Shuro's father took an interest in her and bought her." In Maizuru’s extra, he calls Izutsumi a "souvenir" he got for her, and he’s drunk so it could well be assumed that buying Izutsumi was a drunken whim, and that he mitht be alcoholic. You can’t really say that he picks them out because he sees potential in them to be a ninja or would be useful, since with Izutsumi she had no fighting training and Inutade doesn’t fit the skills they seek like stealth and she has trouble fitting in. You could assign noble goals to him like maybe wanting to help or relating to the misfits, but I think with what we see of him it’s more likely that he likes to pick up "oddities", like a catgirl at a freakshow or an ogre, especially since one of the only things we know of him is he wants his sons to bring back interesting trophies from their travels. Toshiro, about his father buying Inutade, says: "People in power desire ogre as servants, and ogres are chosen as opponents in tests of strengths or military exploits. My father bought her for similar reasons."

Also from this we can infer that he goes out to events often, like circus and sumo wrestling, again mostly for entertainment from what we see. I like to think it’s implied that he used to travell maybe still does, due to his own liking for it as a test and because he visits various places like the sideshow, plus his forearm scars in Toshiro’s extra… But him being a samurai in service of a lord could definitely explain that.

This all paints an interesting picture doesn’t it… The Nakamoto’s lifestyle is super encased in rules and social propriety, duty and hierarchy. Old noble man who’s been surrounded by propriety all his life and just wants some spark of interesting stuff happening amongst the humdrum of his lavish cushioned life at home, and is shitty to people around him in consequence and due to his privilege allowing him to. He’s despicable, but from his 3 appearances he becomes an interesting well-fleshed character, at least proportionally to the screentime he gets…

We also know that the affair with Maizuru is well known at least inside the household, so there’s no genuine secrecy around the topic. Makes sense that the wife would hate her guts.

Ahh yes the mother. Little is known about the mother, except that from Maizuru’s profile "Shuro’s mother can’t stand the sight of her, to the point where there are areas on the property Maizuru is forbidden to enter. Maizuru, however, is impressed by his wife’s strength of character." From this I glean that she does have enough power/respect in the house that she can make rules like where Maizuru is allowed to go. Also the implication that otherwise Mazuru would have access to EVERYWHERE in the house despite being only a (high-ranking) servant is a bit interesting. Wether the mother’s "strength of character" is overt and hot-headed or understated and cool-headed is unsure, but I imagine the latter more. I could see Maizuru’s angle in many ways, from being able to tolerate "that fool" aka the father both just in general and with knowing that he’s cheating on her, to knowing how hard it is to be respected as a woman and admiring her putting up with it all and still being able to have sway in the household. This is I think the only mention of the mother anywhere. Doesn’t seem like she is an important figure to Toshiro at all: in fact we hear about her on Maizuru’s profile, and seeing all of this we can see the importance of her in Maizuru’s backstory and life, moreso than Toshiro’s. I imagine she’s a bit of a recluse, which is part of why Maizuru not being allowed to roam the full house is important, because them running into each other at the house is high.

It’s unsure how much contact the parents have with their kids. What we know is that they left the principal tasks of raising the kids, or at least Toshiro, to servants. Toshiro’s profile says that he’s more attached to Maizuru than his parents, and that’s the phrasing. From the comic where their father summons the sons, it does seem like they’re more or less used to interacting, with the sons’ "This again?". So it’s not that they’ve only interacted with them few times enough to count on fingers, but how meaningful were those interactions? From Toshiro’s profile we know he has a complex where he thinks he’ll never get recognition from his father or be able to measure up to him… But is that more born out of secondhand gossip and expectations, or from direct interactions with him that made him feel that way? Likely a mix of both, especially since the father does seem to be very dismissive, uncaring and insulting with his sons. Oh, but it’s definitely notable that in the Hag monster tidbit (below in Maizuru’s section) six years old Toshiro runs to his father scared shitless for help against the shikigami, and his father casually helps him without batting an eye. Toshitsugu knows how to deal with Maizuru’s shikigamis, and he does so efficiently and without any sense of worry or urgency. Although the event traumatized Toshiro and he was very scared, it doesn’t seem like his father offered any comfort, beyond just helping getting rid of it and letting him cower behind him without comment. Toshitsugu gives hungover vibes in that one imo haha. It’s shown he was already training as a ninja, perhaps this event only reinforced Toshiro’s complex, seeing his father, the samurai the achieved man who has expectations for him, so unfazed and uncaring like that.

The Maizuru situation

Let’s establish a timeline first. It’s left vague how much time she’s served the Nakamoto family for, or how she came to be in their service. The central point is that "She was put in charge of raising their children at a young age". If straight from his birth, Maizuru started taking care of Toshiro when she was 15 years old. If from toddler age, then 16. It’s uncertain if when she stopped getting front-line espionage missions, but we know it’s late rather than early despite having kid raising duties. But well, since she’s also in charge of the ninjas she’s definitely has a multitasking role even now.

The dad prob has around 5-10 years more than Maizuru, I’d say. We only see half of his face and only a good few years in the past, around ~3 years ago probably with the shuro quest and a good 7 years with Izutsumi as a kid, but visually those are the vibes I’m getting. From Toshiro’s birth, it’s possible that the father was 15 when the baby was born too? But conception would have been closer to 14 years old then, and yeah I don’t think they marry and have kids that young. Toshiro is 26 years old in canon and is unmarried, and the heir hasn’t been officially picked, so marriage and kids don’t seem to be in the family’s priorities. Even if Maizuru do say that the father would love if Toshiro brought back a wife.

Now the elephant in the room: she has an on-and-off affair with the father and it has been si for many many years, at LEAST 7 years since that’s when we see that comic of him going into her chambers about Izutsumi, and in the comic above, Hien in that panel has an ambiguous age. Regardless it’s definitely implied that it’s a long, long-standing thing. Hien’s phrasing above makes it sound as if it’s not purely physical, as if feelings are involved, "he’s head over heels for his confidante", and who knows if this relationship is part of why Maizuru was chosen to be the governess, or even hired at all.

It’s in the feud with his father that we learn about maizuru’s affair and how after learning it he started shutting her out emotionally. It’s left vague when Toshiro learned about it, Hien made it sound as if everybody always more or less knew but I don’t think Toshiro started shutting her out when he was still pretty young. Regardless, the two are implied to be linked, his dislike of his father/complex and how he stopped getting along well with Maizuru/being emotionally open with her. Is it that he now feels as though Maizuru is actually on his father’s side and not his own, that after all if she had to choose she’d pick him over Toshiro too? Or is it that, because his father’s known to be a self-centered frivolous jerk, that knowing she lets it happen, "can’t seem to shake it", he respects her less? He has an irresponsible reputation and she does give off the vibe of needing to clean up his messes, so that wouldn’t be unplausible either.

On the flipside from her perspective, since he learned she was his dad’s mistress he emotionally shut her out, which can partly explain why she’s SO fussy with him and happy at the slightest hint of happiness or compliance, like when he listens to her and eats, or maybe even being happy that he lets her help him dress and keep tidy (imo this is supported by how they interact in the page showing him interacting with all his party members). She wants to regain that closeness they once had and for her baby chick to be alright as he’s slipping through her fingers. Man so sad to think about him rejecting her when he’s the only thing in her life. She’s raised him for 26 years, no wonder she’s so attached to him, the only thing in her life she feels true unconditional attachment for. Maizuru says that she thinks Toshiro’ll be a better head of the house than the father, too. The respect and care is somewhat onesided, given freely from her side but repressed from his end. When she cares for Toshiro is when her demeanor immediately and drastically softens. She gets easily carried away when it comes to him, rambling enthusiastically or smiling widely or tearing up. Her tendency to ramble or tell anecdotes about Toshiro is shown making Hien and Benichidori go "Here she goes again…" twice through canon.

With Izutsumi’s timeline we see Izutsumi was taken into the Nakamoto household at 10 yo, and since in the comic with Maizuru and the dad she’s shown as stinky and all I imagine she arrived there the same day, so Maizuru was in charge of her since she was first here. In fact if we assumed that it’s the same day as when he bought her at the circus show, then we could assume that buying her was a drunken whim like mentioned.

Since Izutsumi was taken in at 10 and she’s 17, this would mean that Maizuru is 34 years old here. She looks younger without makeup, but lower than that is mathematically impossible besides maybe 33 if Maizuru and Izutsumi’s birthdays line up just right.

Time for the second elephant in the room!!

Maizuru’s magic

Maizuru is the only person in the Nakamoto household, anyone from Wa really, who we see using magic, I doubt she’d be the only one who can use magic in the household but as the governess it wouldn’t be unplausible I suppose. From what we see, the magic is estimated by Marcille to be an "appropriation of gnomic magic" with an eastern script. For my analysis of written magic (though with only a brief glance over Maizuru’s magic), see this post.

If you scroll up and read the little section on Maizuru’s profile, Ninja art: babysitter: "One of the curses put on Izutsumi is Ninja Art: Babysitter, which manifests as a terrifying hag shikigami. Unless Maizuru touches the victim within a set time frame, this terrible curse makes a hag appear and chase them around with a carving knife. Maizuru originally created it in an attempt to keep Shuro from getting lost, but it ended up traumatizing him…"

From Izutsumi’s profile: "Maizuru, who was Shuro’s governess, is the one thing Izutsumi fears. […] Since Izutsumi refused to listen to her, Maizuru set a curse on her that would activate if Maizuru didn’t touch her within a set time frame: "Ninja Art: Babysitter." It was put on her when she was 12. Since Toshiro had it as a kid, presumably the curse can be lifted off rather easily, Marcille was confident on reverse engineering it as well. It’s unsaid what the time frame is, it’s kept vague everywhere and Izutsumi herself says "who knows" how long it is. Izutsumi ran away despite the very real risk of it killing her. Essentially, Maizuru can put people in a timebomb collar

… MAIZURU WHAT THE HELL

As we might have expected, Maizuru being given the task of rasing a child at 15 did not go perfectly. This, a babysitting technique??! This comic happens when Toshiro was 6 and so Maizuru was 21. Interesting to note that Toshiro didn’t even know it was Maizuru’s doing before this conversation during canon, and he doesn’t know how to bring it up or deal with it how it affected him. Maizuru seems surprisingly uncaring of Toshiro’s feelings on the matter here, oblivious to his conflict her and fondly recalling it all.

This curse is a shikigami. From her profile: "A shikigami user, Maizuru has a variety of shikigami that have been sealed in paper as her servants. Her favorite seems to be Gyuki, a bull ogre." Now don’t ask me when Gyuki appears, I do not remember it. But before we go into the cultural/historical basis for this practice, let’s take a second to recognize the parallel that Maizuru has servants she keeps sealed unless useful in the moment, even despite having enough "attachment" to have a favorite. She’s the governess in charge of the other servants, and she has shikigamis, which she has used on the heir and the runt at the bottom of the hierarchy alike.

Shikigami, in traditional japanese folklore, are conjured to exercise risky orders for their masters, such as spying, stealing and enemy tracking. Shikigami are said to be invisible most of the time, but they can be made visible by binding them into small, folded and artfully cut paper manikins.

Shikigamis are from onmyodo, onmyoji is a profession-legal title historically but it’s what you call a practitioner of onmyodo, and so I feel content in saying that Maizuru is an onmyoji, or based on it. Her outfit reminds me of a shinto priest. It’s interestingly closer to a shinto priest outfit than a miko/shrine maiden’s (in picture below, 2 instead of 5), and I feel like red being chosen for the inner sleeve is a very charged decision since the white & red color combo is the shinto clothes color combo. Especially white clothes with red inner sleeve. Shinto priests can be women nowadays but they’re rare, and onmyojis can be considered shinto priests though it’s a more complex than that. Image below as example, source. Now I don’t think Maizuru has the role or prestige of a priest at all- But the association with onmyodo and spirituality is definitely meant to be made I think. Onmyojis are usually clothed similarly to this.

The babysitter ninja art seems to be based off of the hannya yokai. "They were once human women who were consumed by jealousy and transformed into demonesses", twisted by anger and resentment. Interesting considering her being a mistress to a man whose wife hates her. Hannyas are associated with wisdom because of its name, but there is nothing positive about them. At its highest level of "demonic corruption" if I can call it that, their body tend to become serpentine, fun link to make with her name being from the snakeberry plant.

Other cultural ties or symbolism on Maizuru’s character could be found in the motif of cranes due to her sleeves, in the tales of the crane wife, origami cranes (called orizuru, from deformation of 鶴 "tsuru" aka "crane". All names are written in katakanas in Dungeon Meshi, but thus if we had had the kanjis it’s possible her name would have been written with the kanji for crane), tennyos, and japanese crane symbolism in general. I thought cranes might have been associated with motherhood, but seemingly not in japanese culture at least, I was thinking of storks haha.

Ok speaking of her name. Maizuru is the name of an existing japanese city (舞鶴), meaning "dancing crane". From @room-surprise’s work in progress research paper on Dungeon Meshi characters’ names: "Maizuru is her ninja code name, and comes from “maizurusou”, which is maianthemum dilatatum, the snakeberry plant/two-leaved Solomon's seal/false lily of the valley. Lily of the Valley is a plant associated with motherhood and virtue… So Maizuru being a false Lily of the Valley implies that she is a false, replacement mother, and also hints at the way that Toshiro became cold towards her when he realized she was his father’s mistress, and not a pure, virtuous mother-like figure that he thought she was. Also, lilies are toxic to cats, which makes sense since Maizuru and Izutsumi have an extremely bad relationship." For more details I’ll leave it up to Room when the paper is ready to be released. Edit: It’s out!! Click here! Incredible meta that goes into a ton of details not only about Maizuru.

So some big themes of her character are: (false) motherhood, spirituality/magic, control, cranes, woman’s jealousy.

The siblings

Alriight so besides Toshiro the eldest at 26 years old, there is Toshiyuki (Toshitsuge in one fantranslation) the middle son and Toshizane the youngest (Toshikage in one fantranslation). They were all said to be raised by Maizuru. "A strange level of distance" is interesting. Why strange? I feel like this implies they do interact regularly, and that they’re all rather civil wirh each other, but they still have little bond to speak of. That wouldn’t surprise me, especially since even inside the family etiquette and propriety and rules are enforced, the summoning by his father feels very formal and they all listen to him standing in silence despite having snappy inner thoughts. It’s unsure if they were largely raised together or apart, but since Maizuru was their (at least main) caretaker/governess it implies that they were imo. They were put in competition with each other for the title of heir to the house, though it’s unsure to what degree. It’s examplified by their family all having names that start with "Toshi" that the legacy is very important and thrust upon them, cogs in a machine almost. They all think the same thing when their father summons them and has a spiel, so they’re used to the same sort of treatment and they are indeed brothers for being on similar wavelengths haha.

Toshiyuki, as seen in the comic about his retainers, the poor soul sent into Darkest Dungeon, is brattish. Rude, selfish and rather lecherous, does not hesitate to be mean to his retainers and complain he wasn’t given women retainers. Visually he looks what, 14 years old top. I wonder if Maizuru stopped using her babysitter ninja art on the heirs after it traumatized Toshiro, and if so maybe that explains why Toshiyuki Knows No Fear In His Heart™️ and that’s why he can spout off stuff like that.

The retainers for the youngest brother, Toshizane, don’t seem to be as clad in ninja gear as the other two, seems like the priority is to take care of the very young young master there? Rather than truly go adventuring and dungeoneering, perhaps. Not that it’s ever said by anyone that their quest is to go into dungeons specifically, only to find something "interesting" to bring back, but both Toshiro and Toshiyuki are shown to have ended up drifting into dungeons. Toshizane looks young, I’d clock him 8 years old personally. He’s drawn looking rather innocent, especially the headshot doodle above and in the Toshitsuge complaining about his retainers comic. ALTHOUGH on the latter, interestingly as we see with Toshiro having a smug smirk in that same panel (or alternatively a smug indifferent/uncomfortable "i don’t care about this, even though you want it so much" look which at the very least is very exaggerated from how he emotes in reality), it’s Toshiyuki’s unreliable/exaggerated vision of his brothers and it doesn’t necessaeily reflect reality, though it’s still interesting to note that that’s the vision Toshiyuki has of his brothers/the impression Toshizane gives off. That can imply juicy dynamics for the brothers, for example if Toshiyuki feels as though he’s in competition with his brothers, feels superior to them, that instead of pushing the shitty family dynamic angst onto his father he puts the blame for it all onto Toshiro. Toshizane seems maybe too young to notice the tensions and seriousness around him, maybe more coddled… IS WHAT I WOULD SAY BUT in the comic where their father send them away he’s as well-behaved and serious as the others, so clearly he has a grasp on his role.

When talking about which retainers go with who, it’s said it was the father’s choice. I’d like to assume it wasn’t an airheaded/random choice. Maybe he knew that Toshiyuki would be weird about having women in his team of retainers? And wants to forge their character or protect them in the way they need. Though how Toshiro’s party only has women isn’t only pointed out and commented on by the comic with Toshitsuge but also in the main Dungeon Meshi story, both Marcille and Chilchuck going "his party is fully made up of women", one more loudly than the other haha. So it does feel like a somewhat pointed/purposeful decision, if not that the 4 girls were already a team like I mentioned.

The other retainers

Already made an analysis of Hien and Benichidori’s relationship (+ moment compilation) here. Honestly my juices are exhausted so quick rundown:

Hien’s parents both serve the Nakamotos, so she grew up with the family and was even a childhood friend of Toshiro. She assumed he and her might end up in a Maizuru-Toshitsugu situation ‘just because that’s how things are’/‘it’d be a natural development’ if we’re to believe Hien, ahh what growing up at the Nakamotos’ with those role models will make you believe is normal hah, and was surprised when it ended up not in that way at all. They grew more distant with time, in good part because of the professional nature of their roles in relation to each other (truly a reversal of the Maizuru-Toshitsugu situation). She’s the leader of their lil squad, under Maizuru, she’s very confident and she gets the perks, like getting the bedframe in the shared inn room. For all the details just read her page. She has two dots, showing her rank as a full fledged ninja. I made a more in depth more speculative reading of her in this post.

Benichidori was bought, by "the Nakamotos" so we don’t know who made the final decision. She’s perceptive and submissive, her specialty is implied to be disguise. She never had much contact with Toshiro before she became part of his party. She has facial dysmorphia where she fears the judgement of others if she doesn’t wear makeup and highly values beauty, in her extra her anxiety really shows and she ends up angrily snapping at Hien. Benichidori ends up taking a big liking to Hien and from there on they’re implied to be inseparable. She has two dots, showing her rank as a full fledged ninja.

Inutade is said to worship Toshitsugu because he "saved her" from her horrible life conditions, buying her personally from the sumo matches, she’s extremely grateful to the family and is happy to do any work they give her and is highly satisfied with her current living conditions. She seems to find Toshiro intimidating, though. She was separated from her parents from before she can remember and raised as a sumo wrestler in inhumane betting matches, where her front tooth broke. It seems she has very littke ambitions and dreams besides obeying orders day to day, but after Izutsumi fled away she was happy for her and mused that she’d love to go out and find her one day. They’re so besties Izutsumi gave her a dream of her own I’m sobbing… </3 She has one dot, showing she still has to be attributed her role and earn her stripes.

Their approval rating of their leader. The highest total score from all the parties.

Izutsumi

Sighh where to even begin. Her timeline was put in Maizuru’s section of this post but the rundown is "taken away from parents and turned into a beastkin" at 6 yo (the human half of her soul), "sent to a sideshow on the island of Wa" at 7 yo and bought by Toshitsugu at 10 yo when he took an interest in her when he visited the sideshow. Maizuru put the curse on Izutsumi at age 12, so from then on she always had to not stray much far from Maizuru or risk death, it’s unsure if Inutade’s extra is from before that time, before she was 12, so she could still attempt many many tries to run away. If that’s the case, then Maizuru’s curse was very much treated as a last resort, honestly beyond everything else I can see it being a pain that Maizuru would need to touch her every so often on Maizuru’s schedule as well. The alternative is that, not unlike Kabru who had no regrets dying in a dungeon rather than staying with Milsiril, she’d risk her life to get a taste of freedom. Besides, you know, being a slave and having a timebomb collar with Maizuru’s curse, her frustrations with her life with the Nakamotos is most concisely put in the comic just up above, Inutade’s extra.

She has no dot tattoo, meaning she’s at rock bottom of the hierarchy. It makes sense, since unlike Inutade she’s rebellious and needs threats to obey orders, and even then might try shifty business.

This last part where Izutsumi tries sleeping with Toshiro is most interesting to me. So she’s sought out contact with Toshiro before, she considers him "the stuck-up guy" but she doesn’t exactly hate him. I wonder if this comic is set in the inn on The Island or back at the Nakamoto household, because if that’s the latter it implies that she could get access to his room if she’s sneaky.

Oh oh also, this is fanon but since Toshiro’s weapon is one used usually on horseback, and with the steadfast and upright character of horses I associate Toshiro with horses a bit, though this is wild fanon. What’s interesting is that the plant Asebi was named after is a plant infamous for being toxic to horses. Hehe hehehe he wears a ponytail… Hm now that I think of it hairdos have importance for samurais, should look into that.

Toshiro

God. Ok. Everything was leading up to this guy. Need to split open his head like a geode and vibecheck his brain crystals. Let’s get some interesting details out of the way first.

His weapon is a tachi, not a katana. The wikipedia on tachis is more in depth if you want, but I consider the article I linked to be in deoth and digestible. Tachis are heavier and longer blades than katanas, and make for better horseback weapons than close combat. The way Toshiro uses one instead of a katakana shows that he’s extra strong… And does make sense, since most monsters won’t fight in as close quarters as human fighters. If katanas aren’t a thing in the world yet could make a difference, since tachis were invented first, and once the katana was invented and spread tachis became something more common in higher-ranking samurais. In the monster tidbit of the Hag, it’s shown that even at 6 years old Toshiro was training and learning ninja skills, his first instinct to the shikigami besides running being to fight.

Toshiro knew that Izutsumi wanted to leave, for sure. He may have been sympathetic, if his cryptic look back at her in the ‘Toshiro interacting with his party members’ page means anything. As seen below though, him being sympathetic doesn’t necessarily mean that much. Also, Toshiro had to have known about the curse on Izutsumi, where if Maizuru doesn’t touch her once in a while she’d die. "Asebi must have ran away, leave her" can be seen as subtle support for her to gain her freedom, but it could just as easily be seen as him leaving her behind to die. Because the outcome options are 1) she gets killed by Maizuru's curse, 2) she finds a way to break the spell, 3) she finds a way back to them.

He’s very conflict averse. Wether it be in relationships like with Laios or the status quo. Will not stand up for 99% things including himself. He obeys his father quietly despite his anger and dislike. This is the same guy who can't even get himself to speak up to correct the butchering of his name, the slippery slope that got him tangled in the Laios party seemingly without resistance. It’s very japanese etiquette from even nowadays, never saying a direct no to not be rude. ALSO THAT PANEL, has Toshiro beaten an ogre before?? Is that a brother of his?? Does seem in character for Toshiyuki the most, unless Toshiro was desperate to earn his father’s attention with feats. On the right I’d say the ones in the foreground are two of the brothers, maybe the third being the one to gesture to the ogre. It’s worth noting that inheritance laws during the Edo period often made the heir the son with "the most merit".

When with a goal that’s important to him he’s fine with even starving for it. Although what we see him be like that about in canon is Falin, aka self-admittedly in the post-canon proposal comic "the first person he has liked this much", which for him I feel is like admitting she’s one of the first things he has truly wanted for himself and fought for, soo… It’s more like an exceptional freaking out moment than something that would be recurring, most likely. How disheveled he got is a testament to how much he would forego propriety and rules for people of his status for the person he cares about most. Maizuru says the first personal request he’s (ever?) made was for them to help him rescue Falin.

Which ahh yes, his crush on Falin. I do think idealization plays into it, he doesn’t know Falin that well for sure, but it’s more complex than that too. Falin is pretty and can have an ethereal energy to her, she’s caring and gentle kinda motherly which Toshiro would find soothing I imagine, BUT MOST OF ALL. She’s weird!! She’s just weird enough to allow and be charmed by!! Shuro was fully shaped by his upbringing and environment of nobility, social etiquette and whatnot. Yeah she’s weird and quirky, but still quiet and sweet-mannered enough that he’s like "Yes, she wouldn’t bring shame on my family name". And why would he be charmed by her weirdness? Because all he’s ever known is rules!! Conformity, fitting in!! Unlike the others he knows, she is weird without being overbearing as well. "Woah she’s so different… She’s kind and soft and doesn’t care about fitting in… She is out of this world, she’s free, she shows me a world where tenderness and authenticity is possible…" She’s like his comfort character. MOREOVERRR I had totally forgotten about it, but Toshiro was shown watching a snail behind a bush and losing sight of everything else (like Maizuru calling him) as a kid in the Hag monster tidbit, the moment he fell in love with Falin it was when she looked enthralled at a caterpillar and he mentions how "most girls would have screamed or recoiled in disgust", and in the beach chibis page he’s crouching and collecting shells thinking about Falin… He likes bugs and crawly critters guys, he wishes he could be cottagecore too… It’s a genuine shared interest… . Someone pointed out that Toshiro & Falin’s relationship probaboy references this japanese folk tale, and I think that’s very interesting to note.

And Maizuru is like his mom but it’s a Thistle situation where they can’t just be a normal family and normal affectionate either- and when he learns about his father having a thing with her he feels weirded out. And like. Who knows how much he even got out of the mansion. He got homeschooled. He’s distant with his brothers. The family is in shambles

Shuro’s issue is that he was taught to be perfect and have the upmost respectable behavior, so if something annoys him he has to be righteous about it and that it’s the annoying thing’s fault or moral failing. Bro just let yourself be petty sometimes it’s healthier. With the feud with his father it’s explicitly stated that the pressure and expectations of the family name weigh on him a lot.

But then, that makes his beef with Laios so understandable doesn’t it. Not justified, but explained certainly.

Laios & Shuro and the whole mess coming to a head

I’ve made an analysis of the Laios-Shuro fight from Laios’ pov before, here. This is the Shuro pov analysis. Yes yes in The Fight, Shuro is dehydrated sleep-deprived and underate, he’s majorly off his rocker, BUT his frustration and the underlying issues are still things he felt on any day and it’s interesting to note.

Toshiro has been raised from his birth with the priority of propriety, nobility, etiquette, rules, conforming elegantly, appareances and reputation are everything. He’s modest, humble, quiet, stays in his lane and bottles all his feelings up. Wait who is this loud guy coming up to me being inconsiderate and loud af?? Does he not see me blinking in morse code that I’m not enjoying this and want him to leave?? Was he raised in a barn?? He’s overbearing and rude and way too friendly- He’s weird wtf! Not conforming to basic etiquette is illegal??! And people just… Let him do whateve he wants?? He lives well, no one stops him or kills him?? What the fuck, I’ve followed rules and etiquette thoroughly all my life, and it’s thankless work I get no recognition for, meanwhile he gets to be oblivious af and do whatever he wants without getting clapped?? Resentment, frustration, dislike, anger anger anger, jealousy.

Laios might even remind Toshuro of his dad in a way, because he SEEMS impulsive and like he does whatever he wants without a care to people around him, without thinking of how it might affect them. Doing things without thinking through the Implications. And interestingly this is a bit paralleled to to how Shuro is serious, strict, and big on the duties that come with having a leader role and the family dynamic it brings, like Laios’ own father, who Laios also dislikes… Dealing with his anger towards Laios, especially knowing that Laios doesn’t mean anything bad by it like Toshiro admits, is probably very healing to him. He stops repressing and thinks through his issues a bit, realizes what parts of his life he’s unhappy with and where all the negative feelings come from. I do think he bottles up his dislike for his father a bit, he has to at least for appearances. His beef with Laios is repackaged internalized anger for his father, but it’s ALSO repackaged frustration from his etiquette-bound lifestyle. He says it himself, when Laios is like "You never told Falin how you feel…? Alright, when I can I’ll tell her for you buddy!!", "that’s the part of you that I envy". Laios’ ability to just come out and say what he wants to, what he means. He wishes he could be free of all the rules more, that he had te courage to speak out, like with Inutade, or talking things out with Maizuru, or nit having to act like he’s not angry with his father. This narrative point of Toshiro envying Laios’ ability to say things freely and being frustrated by not being able to himself is ESPECIALLY examplified by their first interactions, the basis of their relationship: Laios enthusiastically befriending him, giving him a bad nickname and roping him into joining his party, with Toshiro never turning it all down despite wanting to, too hesitant to act possibly rude.

And now is time for the laishuro addendum… Because of personal experiences it’s a bit of a sensitive spot to me so while I see timelines in which I enjoy it I’m very picky… This is all further theorizing from me btw I’m not pushing my view here onto ppl as facts, but I think there’s more interesting bits and scenarios to bite into here. Laishuro has very cute and sweet potential. I personally don’t see the "Oh wait Laios is just girl Falin… 😳" angle because to me if anything that’d just make Shuro disillusioned with Falin lol, but like yes make Shuro learn that it’s ok to be weird with Laios 🥺 They DO have differences first of all, important ones, especially from Toshiro’s perspective. Laios is overwhelming, whereas Falin is soothing. Laios is loud and asks things of him where Falin is a calm, quiet presence. Laios pushes himself onto Toshiro, whereas Falin is content on just doing her own thing in her corner alone.

Hot take but the ultimate laishuro timeline is the one where he DOESN’T bring Laios back home, because he knows he’ll be seen as an oddity and clown by his father, and he doesn’t want Laios to be treated like the tapdancing monkey there to please and entertain his father the way he himself has always kind of been. Wouldn’t inflict that onto someone he loves. He can recognize when people are taken advantage of (mostly) like Inutade, and it doesn’t settle right with him. He might be especially sensitive to it in Inutade’s case because it’s about seeing his dad in a better light than he deserves, though. His father is his weak spot, THE weak spot.

It gets me so emotional thinking about it actually because seeing Laios played like a fiddle by his father, Laios so happy to find someone who’s enthusiastically listening to him ramble and engaging, would destroy Shuro emotionally I think. Like. On one hand being like "Oh of course my dad would find Laios fun, unlike me his boring son", super angry as coping mechanism for his intense sadness of not having positive parental attention, and then on the other he’d see Laios being treated as a clown and identify with it and that would remind him of how he gets treated similarly which he’s in denial about (more or less, but since he puts up with the family rules and follows along he hasn’t given up on getting recognition. He wants his father’s approval, and he couldn’t blame Laios for being happy with it despite how hurtful that attention truly is without Laios’ knowledge), which would be such an overwhelming conflicted mess of emotions and his worldview would shatter a bit because he has to repress it all even now, and he’d have a breakdown.

And similar deal but if he brought Falin home… Bc ok yes he idealizes her and doesn’t even know her all that well, but like I said imo what he sees in her is that "Woah she’s so different… She’s kind and soft and doesn’t care about fitting in… She is out of this world, she’s free, she shows me a world where tenderness and authenticity is possible…" So meanwhile with Laios he’d have mixed feelings on him getting treated like a clown and identify with it, bringing Falin home and having her be demeaned would be like having his perfect comfort character dunked on and he gets reminded that the world can’t have anything good actually. With both Toudens it’d make his resentment towards his father even worse, he might snap. I’m not the biggest on gendered analysis tbh but Kui evidently does like to do it to some degree, with the genderbending changing their life considerably and different fantasy cultures having different gender roles and all, but Shuro idealizing the Touden sister as something perfect he cannot attain while being jealous and frustrated at Laios for being something he cannot attain is like. So compelling actually. With Maizuru’s hannya of female rage weaponized there could be a theme of pushing the blame and responsibilities of things onto women too, the responsibility to raise and to manage and to dish out the work and to clean after mens’ reckless decisions. Anyways just a tangent.

Shuro on a bad family angst day is everything I love in a blorbo… He can be a lil shitty as a treat to make his healing arc more fulfilling. Toshiro snapping after he sees how they treat Laios/Falin and he gives up the family headship to LEAVE. Maizuru arc where she has to choose between loyalty to the clan and loyalty to Toshiro, will she stay with the boy she raised or go home… To me Maizuru is much less sympathetic than Shuro, but she is pretty tragic and her selfless love for Shuro is her one redeeming quality. Babygirl take no shit no more, but also better yourself and turn your life around please and thank you… She is so evidently taken advantage of but like. What else does she have? So she just takes care of and loves the boy she raised like her own kid and goes about her daily life in servitude and doesn’t think too much about it all.

Shuro is awful a nickname but also, I think Shiro would be a good nickname for Toshiro, because it gets rid of that ‘Toshi’ first part of his name that all the male members of his family share. It severes the link to his father and the tied pressure from his family.

Laishuro brotp turning slow burn romance would be so lovely. I think college au for laishuro would be peak actually… Shuro so is the repressed "I am so normal" guy who has a furry liberation identity crisis arc… I also quite like the potential he’d have with Namari, as both work-oriented misfit foreigners cast out of their homes, and she’s also bolder so it’d be good for him, and he could bring her stability… That’s a topic for another day tho. Even he and falin are sweet tbh, they could have traveled around together even if just as friends… Bc yeah she does value him as a friend at least somewhat, she says she’ll visit him~! Mostly I want Izutsumi-Toshiro brotp fancontent.

Conclusion

The household is very hierarchy oriented, and honestly the system doesn’t seem to make anyone happy, or at least not healthily so. Sighh feudalism.

Obviously their situation are very different, but still Toshiro and Izutsumi react to the same conflict in opposite ways: when a hierarchy and lifestyle of rules and duty is thrust upon them, Toshiro obeys and believes that it’s how things simply are, always having it been drilled into him since being a baby and being privileged enough to live ok with things as they are, meanwhile Izutsumi rages and eventually breaks free and never wants to submit herself to rules or hierarchy ever again, even if that perceived hierarchy is a mutually beneficial professional party dynamic or having a role inside a well-meaning team, like Laios’ party. WHICH IS WHY THEY SHOULD HANG OUT AND HAVE AN ARC TOGETHER. LET HER INFLUENCE HIM TO GET WILDER AND THINK OF HIMSELF MORE. FUCK INHERITING THE HEADSHIP. THE SIBLINGS NARRATIVE.

As always if I find more stuff to add i’ll edit it in. Rn I’m thinking that I’ll look into ninja & samurai feudal history and try to find specific terms that might fit their roles and situations more. I should reread try to cover Izutsumi’s end of the Toshiro-Izu dynamic as well.

I greatly recommend this paper for more excellent meta on all named Dunmeshi characters and their culture!

Ah yes yes, I forgot to talk about it but we don’t know what Toshiro’s retainers have been doing with their time on The Island, especially while he was dungeon diving with Laios and co. Although in the anime’s ed in this shot we see them "stealthily" follow him around, so presumably when he’s not in dungeons they’re tailing his moves.

Afterword here, it has summary charts about the power structure & relationships and complementary pages and artworks, couldn’t put them in here because SIGH 30 pictures per post limit.

[canmom]

Animation Night 189: Nonphotorealistic

There is a funny trend in animation-related terminology to define things by what they aren't. Animation is any technique for creating film that isn't live action. Limited animation is any style of 2D animation that doesn't follow the conventions of Disney's 'full animation' on 1s and 2s - a category that includes a wildly diverse range of approaches and techniques, as this wonderful history by Animation Obsessive describes.

In 3DCG circles, there is a similar term: nonphotorealistic. Which describes, naturally, anything that isn't trying to look like a photograph of a real scene. There has been a real boom in this of late, and just like the other terms, it really doesn't narrow it down very much. Other terms like 'hybrid animation' add a bit more hints.

Of course, if you've been anywhere near animation in the last few years, you'll probably know another term: 'Spiderverse style'.

There is no denying that Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse (2018) by Sony Pictures Animation was an absolute landmark for animation. (I wrote about it way back on AN21, focusing more on the cultural angle.) The ludicrously stylish film pretty much set the direction for animation in the 2020s - making a bunch of money and awards and thus finally throwing open the door to 3DCG animation that doesn't look like the style set by Pixar/Dreamworks in the 2000s. Its sequel, Across the Spiderverse (2023), was even more ambitious and successful (despite a troubled production involving a lot of needless crunch). We'll be showing that soon in a Spiderverse double bill so look forward to it!

So perhaps not surprising that when people see the use of graphical styles, 2D elements, limited framerates and the like in 3DCG these days, Spiderverse comes to mind. In its wake have come various films and series that apply these and related techniques: 3DCG animation is more varied than ever, and it's cool.

It isn't really a style, tho.

Here I'm indebted to youtuber Camwing who has made a nice video overview breaking down the animation of recent movies in this vaguely defined paradigm. Among them we have The Mitchells vs the Machines (2021, also Sony), Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022, Dreamworks), and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023, animated at the French/Canadian studio Mikros animation), and of course over on Netflix you got the wildly popular League of Legends spinoff series Arcane (2021, Fortiche Productions), and the romance film Entergalactic (2022, DNEG), tying in with an album of the same name.

None of these films has exactly the same style, but they all pull from a related bag of tricks. The core techniques are animating on reduced framerates for a 'snappy', high-clarity feeling, the combination of 2D and 3D elements in some fashion, and taking inspiration from traditional media such as paintings or comic books.

For example, Arcane and Entergalactic both use the trick of 2D backgrounds/projecting paintings onto 3D geometry, inhabited by 3D characters with a stylised shader. Arcane is dripping with 2D visual effects. Puss in Boots drops the framerate during its action scenes - the opposite of the old paradigm of full animation, where fast actions would get more frames. Spiderverse draws 2D expressions onto its 3D models to push them further, and is full of all kinds of colourful stylised rendering - screentone effects, kirby dots, outlines, the works.

It's tempting to link this to 2D-in-3D animation, and certainly many of these films apply this technique - this is the major niche where Blender has found its way into industry pipelines. But using 2D isn't mandatory to count here. For example, TMNT Mutant Mayhem has an incredibly striking storybook-painting style, accomplished largely by clever shader work and a strong sense of graphic design. Genndy Tartakovsky's canned 2014 Popeye project was planning to use a ton of 2D-style posing and squash-and-stretch, accomplished largely with rigged 3D models. There are many paths to take!

And mind you, I haven't even covered one of the biggest angles here. Search for nonphotorealistic 3DCG on Youtube and what you'll probably find most is information about cel-shading - aka 'anime style'. This has also advanced considerably in the last few years, with the techniques pioneered by Arc System Works in Guilty Gear such as editing the normals of characters for more precise control over shading, and minute adjustments to break up the mechanical feeling of 3D, becoming widely copied in both games and films. (And particularly, animated porn.)

Vtubers in particular have really run with this technique, generally speaking using cel-shaded models with edited normals, inverted eyes, etc. etc. to try and get the feeling of an anime character come to life. [You can see a lot of these state of the art techniques if you download Pixiv's free VRoid Studio software and import the model into Blender using the VRM plugin.]

Naturally this kind of cel-shaded approach has found a particular home in Japan. In anime, the biggest champions of it are certainly Studio Orange, whose hybrid approach involves planning out shots with 2D animation before matching them with the rigs. We've covered their adaptation of Houseki no Kuni in great detail on Animation Night 97; their Trigun reboot was perhaps even more popular. But cel-shaded techniques, 3D previs and the like have also made their way into big films like Eva 3.0+1.0 (AN66).

Although this type of rendering aims to recreate the look and feel of 2D animation as much as possible, it always ends up being something new: character models that would be too complex to draw, an ease to 3D movements and camerawork that would be challenging in 2D, and generally a new hybrid style. This is good! 2D animation is already very good at being 2D animation - it's fascinating to see what 3DCG becomes with that inspiration.

So with that brief overview, where does that take us tonight?

I'm not quite ready to do a Spiderverse double bill tonight, so instead the plan is to check out a couple of recent American franchise films that are taking on the new suite of techniques. I've mentioned them up above, but let me introduce them more fully here.

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is a sequel to a fairly unpopular spinoff about a side character of the Shrek franchise (AN75). Not, on its face, very promising - which is why it is all the more striking that I was told on all sorts of sides that I must watch this movie. I'm finally going to make good on that.

The title character is a kind of feline musketeer type, now facing the end of his swashbuckling career as he's lost 8 of his 9 lives. Not wanting to hang up his hat, he goes on a quest to restore them. What makes it stand out its the action scenes, which go all in on the anime-influenced, extreme perspective and lighting, limited framerate style that we're discussing above. Apparently it looks sick as shit.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is a fresh reboot of the venerable TMNT franchise, which pretty much describes itself in the title: four turtles (named after Renaissance painters, of course!) live in a sewer as ninjas, led by their aging master who is a rat. Starting as a comic book, it became one of the iconic toyline-driven TV shows of the 80s - but it's still going! Indeed, Turtles has been on a roll of late (at least going by animator scuttlebutt), with Australian studio Flying Bark Productions turning a lot of heads with their neo-Kanada School style (and for really stretching the definition of 'storyboard').

This new film takes a different approach to the bombastic action of Rise. It focuses on a new origin story for the turtles, telling a kind of coming of age story - but what makes it unique is the animation style and cinematography. Cinéma vérité is not a phrase you really expect to be associated with ninja turtles, but the film seems to really go all out in a way you wouldn't really expect from a franchise movie, shooting the young turtles in a handheld style and focus heavily on character. Marcel Reinhard's shader work, allowing the animators to isolate lights to specific objects and characters and introducing graphical elements of cross-hatching, stippling, etc. etc. to the lighting, gives it a uniquely painting-like feeling, augmented by a lot of 2D creativity in lighting and effects.

Turtles has never really been my thing, but this film looks unique enough that I really want to see it - and I hear it's a good film too.

So that's our bill for tonight! Puss and Turtles. Let's see what the big studios have been cooking of late...

Animation Night 189 will be starting around 10pm UK time (roughly three hours hence) and carrying on til about 2-3am same! We'll be on twitch.tv/canmom as usual. Hope to see you there!

[max1461]

Here is an observation of common attitudes I see in tech-adjacent spaces (mostly online).

The thing about programming/tech is, at its base, it's historically and culturally contingent. There are of course many fundamental (physical and mathematical) limitations on what a computer can and cannot do, how fast it can do things, and so on. But at least as much of the modern tech landscape is the product of choices made by people about how these machines will work, choices that very much could have been made differently. And modern computing technology is a huge tower of these choices, each resting on and grappling with the ones below it. If you're, say, a web developer writing a web app, the sheer height of this tower of contingent human decisions that your work rests on is almost incomprehensible. And by and large, programmers know this.

I am not dispensing some secret wisdom that I think tech workers don't have. On the contrary, I think the vast contingency of it all is blindingly obvious to anyone who has tried to make a computer do anything. But tech is also, well, technical, and do you know what else is technical? Science. I think this has lead to a sort of cultural false affinity, where tech is perceived, both from within and without, as more similar to science than it is to the humanities. Certainly, there are certain kinds of intellectual labor that tech shares with the sciences. But there are also, as described above, certain kinds of intellectual labor that tech shares to a much greater degree with the humanities, namely (in the broadest terms): grappling with other people's choices.

From without, I think this misplaced affinity leads people to believe that technology is less contingent than it actually is. But I think this belief would be completely untenable from within; it just cannot contend with reality. I've never met a tech worker or enthusiast who seems to think this way. Rather, I feel there is a persistent perception among tech-inclined people that science is more contingent than it actually is. I don't think this misperception rises to the level of a belief, rather I think it is more of an intuition. I think tech people have very much trained themselves (rightly, in their native context) to look at complex systems and go "how could this be reworked, improved, done differently?" I think this impulse is very sensible in computing but very out of place in, say, biology. And I suppose my conjecture (this whole post is purely conjectural, based on a gut sense that might not be worth anything) is that this is one of the main reasons for the popularity of transhumanism in, you know, the Bay. And whatnot.

I'm not saying transhumanism is actually, physically impossible. Of course it's not! The technology will, I strongly suspect, exist some day. But if you're living in 2024, I think the engineering mindset is more-or-less unambiguously the wrong one to bring to biology, at least macrobiology. This post is not about the limits of what is physically possible, it's about the attitudes that I sometimes see tech people bring to other endeavors that I think sometimes lead them to fall on their face. If you come to biology thinking about it as this contingent thing that you must grapple with, as you grapple with a novel or a codebase or anything else made by humans, I think it will make you like biology less and understand it less well.

When I was younger and a lot more naive, as a young teenager who knew a little bit about programming and nothing about linguistics, I wanted to create a "logical language" that could replace natural languages (with all their irregularities and perceived inefficiencies) for the purpose of human communication. This is part of how I initially got into conlanging. Now, with an actual linguistics background, I view this as... again, perhaps not per se impossible, but extremely unlikely to work or even to be desirable to attempt in any foreseeable future, for a whole host of rather fundamental reasons. I don't feel that this desire can survive very well upon confrontation with what we actually know (and crucially also, what we don't know) about human language.

I mean, if you want to try, you can try. I won't stop you.

Anyway, I feel that holding onto this sort of mindset too intensely does not really permit engagement with nature and the sciences. It's the same way I think a lot of per se humanities people fudge engagement with the sciences, where they insist on mounting some kind of social critique even when it is not appropriate (to be clear, I think critique of scientific practices/institutions are sometimes appropriate, but I think people whose professional training gives them an instinct to critique often take it too far).

So like, I guess that's my thesis. Coding is a humanity in disguise, and I wish that people who are used to dealing with human-made things would adopt a more native scientific or naturalist mindset when dealing with science and nature.

[nanomooselet]

Stampede Plant Talk

#if you want to add the rest of your points please do!

Do you realise what you've unleashed.

Not to ruin the magic, but when I write my analyses it's often inspired by visuals. So I figured the best place to start would be with this visual. Like... that's simple, isn't it?

I thought, obviously blue is Knives's colour while Vash's is red. Healthy Plants glow blue, dying ones dim to red. It would seem blue is for Plants and red is for humans. And so clearly Knives is aligned with the Plants, and embracing his Plantness, while Vash is more human and thus aligned with humanity… right?

Yeah, no.

Truthfully if there's a definitive visual motif for the twins, it's not expressed in terms of something that dualistic. But that's a little outside the scope of this post.

A dependent, Vash says, needs a human to take care of it, or the Plant just uses its energy up all at once and dies. I'm guessing that means: what a Plant will produce, when and in what quantity is in the hands of the technician programming it. Being Independent means a Plant has all that under personal control. They all produce different kinds of energy and matter (which are, in a complicated scientific way, the same thing in different states). They are essentially living generators - machines.

They're still made out of meat, though. For some reason. (They do look like sea creatures, and the higher plane is very oceanic in appearance.)

Having the Plant produce more than its Gate can withstand producing means it's left only with the energy reserves of its body to sustain it. The Last Run harvests that energy. Resembles very very rapidly developing dehydration - eyes bulging, skin blackening, skin tightening. It's a very ugly way to die. Their bulbs go red, and then go dark, because the fluid they're in is clouded with blood. The same is true of when they're cut off from the higher plane because they're been overworked.

Dr. Conrad said to Knives that these Plants couldn't be healed in the way Knives demanded of him, and I think he's being truthful. Because Vash also didn't heal the Plant at Jeneora Rock.

In the pictures above, they're at the "terminal stage"; using them any more would push it into a Last Run. Note the colour. Red as blood.

These are the ones Vash does heal. More pink than red, lighter - brighter.

Vash isn't donating energy to a Plant when he heals it; the ones aboard Ship 3 weren't dying because they were overworked or injured. The SEEDS fleet didn't make use of the Last Run, nor did they have to rely on a dwindling number of Plants to survive. They were in deep space on a journey taking hundreds of years, with all those people whose cryosleep had to be maintained. They weren't in crisis. They were planning for a long journey to build a better world at their destination, not a crash. Plants that glow blue/white are healthy. It was paradise; no one had to struggle to survive.

Luida says the problem with these Plants is that they aren't compatible with the environment they're in, and she is a geo-Plant specialist. I believe her.

Vash's super special healing power? The job only he can do? Vash is not being made to act like a battery, giving up his lifeforce to keep everyone else alive. He's not sacrificing himself. That's what Knives assumed, because that's all he sees humans do. (A whole one time before he started killing people.)

Plants do communicate with sound, but not in a frequency humans seem capable of hearing and I suspect it's because they use their Gates. Dependent Plants - and Knives - can only produce a sound. Their Gates are one-way.

Vash's Gate is two-way. He can both produce and receive. He can exchange.

He can have a dialogue.

He's hearing the Plants when they cry out for help then just... going to talk with them. Understanding them. Helping them feel more comfortable. Keeping them company. When Luida asked him so kindly to be a counsellor for the Plants, she said what she meant and she meant what she said.

Vash is a Plant therapist. And he's a good one! He travelled everywhere accompanied by his stepdad just… being kind to humans and Plants, looking after them, teaching them how to take care of each other. And he loves doing it. It's the happiest he looks after the Fall. Brad even tells him, in a very Brad kind of way, that he's done a great job; travelling with this brat beats what it was like just after the crash. And then he gives Vash water and Vash tells him he's a nice guy (and Brad gets offended lmao).

The one who assumes the humans were hurting or using him was as per fucking usual Millions Knives! Because that gives him an excuse to take bloody revenge! And everybody fell for his bullshit! Man, I'm beginning to think when Studio Orange directed Austin Tindle to make Knives sound villainous, they made the right decision.

Now, if you want to be sad?

Vash is doing so much good. He loves doing it. He's the only one who can.

But Rem wanted to see Plants and humans understand each other and she's gone. Vash is fulfilling her dream, but he's doing it alone.

Now compare the colour of his coat to the colour of the Plants. Which matches more closely? The ones who are forced to work beyond their capacity, their bodies gruesomely and horribly used without their consent for the benefit of humans?

Or the ones in emotional distress?

[weirdowithaquill]

ok question how and why was the scrapping of sentence vhecials even allowed in the first place I mean sure irl this isn't that bad but in ttte the mass scrapping of steam engines in the 60s in Britain might as well be considered a genocide did Brittish railways use every loophole and excuse in the book to do this and every other country for that matter

Thank you for your ask! And wow does it open up some cans of worms...

But before we get to in-canon reasons for why BR was able to mass-scrap steam engines, we should probably consider the author's intent behind writing this in - after all, the Reverend W. Awdry was writing a children's book series and went "ah yes, I want this to be a picture children see":

So why does Awdry allow for scrap to happen? Because it happened in real life. Awdry was a massive steam engine fan - he grew up on the Great Western mainline near Box Tunnel listening to engines working up and down the grade, his father was a steam fan, and he himself volunteered on various heritage railways (most notably the Talyllyn in Wales) - this is a man who loves his railways and his steam engines. But in the era he was writing - the 1950s and 1960s - the engines were rapidly withdrawn and scrapped as part of BR's Modernisation Plan. Awdry hated this - Britain was scrapping completely useful engines who had served the country through two global wars for untested, faulty diesels that smelt. If you read through the Forewards from Four Little Engines onwards, you can sometimes find that he is quietly advertising heritage railways by crediting them and telling his audience where the real-live versions of the steam engines in his books are. He does this for the Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway, the Dartmouth Railway, the Ffestiniog Railway and of course: the Talyllyn and Bluebell Railways.

Awdry's books were as much a love letter to steam as they were a series of children's stories, and he wanted to make a real point about how he disagreed with BR and try to promote heritage railways to help keep steam alive.

Rev. W. Awdry was also a notorious perfectionist. Remember, this is a man who said that Dalby's illustrations of Percy looked like "a green caterpillar with red stripes" (ouch!).

This perfectionism carried over to the books: Awdry is very famous for his views on realism in Thomas - he quite famously disliked the Season 3 episode 'Henry's Forest' because it both broke Rule 55 - which states that engineers need to notify the signalman that their trains are at a stand in order to avoid an accident - and the fact that the trees were too close to the line, which could have caused a fire from sparks from the engine in real life. He placed real railway practice and its constraints at the forefront of his stories, and it shows.

Mixed together, these two parts of Awdry created the situation where he wrote about the scrapping of engines and the existential danger that it posed to steam engines and their livelihoods. This is the authorial reasoning behind scrap and the mass-scrapping of steam engines being so prevalent in his works - and it is prevalent, from as early as the first story where Edward is bullied by the bigger engines for being used so little and the implicit likelihood that he could be withdrawn and cut up.

With the authorial reasons for the mass-scrapping of steam engines having been answered, it is now a question of how to drill down into canon and explain what these views and decisions made by Awdry translate into.

Firstly, we need to separate two things: sentience, and human. Vehicles are not people in this series - they are very much the closest thing in terms of intelligence and speech ability, but they are not human. They are built out of minerals pulled from in the ground and powered by more rocks dug up from underground. Whether or not you see this as making this a society that enslaves the engines or not, the reality is that they are machines and the property of their human owners. This is a lot like horses - horses love us, even though we own them, and we often love them back. But not always. Horses were and are, after all, animals used for jobs - in their heyday, they were the car, bus, tram and train of society. We bought and sold them, and when they were no longer useful, people often put them down. Which is extremely morbid, yes - but it's an unfortunately necessary fact of that era and their lives.

Now translate it over to locomotives - the iron horses.

Locomotives are built to serve a purpose, and they must be capable of fulfilling their role. They are taking on the position of the horse from the above analogy - and when they are no longer useful, they can either be sold or scrapped. Worse yet, they are the industrial evolution to the horse - the capitalist's beast of burden.

And now I can finally move to answer the question of why the mass-scrapping of engines was legal: there was never any laws to stop them. From the moment the first engine rolled out of the shop, their owners argued loudly and publicly that they were simply an evolution of the horse. If people didn't give horses rights, why give engines rights? They are not human; they are iron beasts of burden. And in the rigid and very xenophobic society of the Victorian era, this worked incredibly well. Engines were trained using the Railway Rulebook to fulfill their job in much the same way you trained anyone and anything to be good at their job, and their culture was dismissed in the same way that Victorians dismissed any non-European culture.

Now, don't misunderstand me - this is not a good thing. This is a laissez-faire system of caring for vehicle rights developed by capitalism to make it cheaper, easier and less objectionable to discard old stock when needed. The government never intervened because doing so would place all the vehicles under their control under scrutiny. Can't have military lorries and tanks suddenly wondering whether or not their roles in war are legal, after all. And it's that worry that led to no nation really looking into vehicle laws until after World War Two - and even then, it was haphazard at best and downright discriminatory at worst. Even today, there are still no solid laws in place to cover the vast majority of vehicles - only those held in museums owned by the government or 'considered to be of cultural or historic importance' are afforded any rights at all - Thomas, Flying Scotsman, Stephenson's Rocket - those engines.

It's not because the engines themselves don't care, but because they simply have no real option to change this. Engines cannot move themselves - the worst they can do is force themselves to break down, and there will almost always be another engine to take their place.

Sorry for how morbid that got, but I hope it helped explain why I think engines were allowed to be mass-scrapped by BR!

[5five5five5five5five5five]

thinking about five and Delores.... do you think baby five always wanted a girlfriend? do you think he would secretly read romance books when no one was watching? he is such a romantic. i wonder where it all came from. viktor and him watching music man and wishing to sweep a small town librarian off her feet. a smart girl.... (him also finding robert preston attractive but baby him didn't have enough time to think that over.) him opening up to Viktor about all this, feeling like a dumb fool for caring so much about something so pointless. he has better things to focus on like practicing his jumps, school work and his cool robot Lego machines....but god. being a preteen sucks lmao. he only got a taste of that normality before being thrown into hell. many people have said it before me but Delores is his heart, his sanity, him projecting the good he knows he has in himself onto another to bond with and keep himself going.

God and the fact that they just ignored all Five laws and rules to make him kiss his sister in law instead of exploring that, yeah....he really CAN'T comfortably date anymore. he cant just get out there bc he knows that they are too young and he'd be INSANELY uncomfortable. and he wouldn't feel right dating someone in his age range bc he would be seen as a sugar baby / gold digger. he cant win either way so he is stuck being a secret romantic that cant love romantically. Dolores is the only one that makes sense and yet she's gone....and wasn't real. him having to come to terms with that is going to be so hard for him. maybe he never will. maybe everyone just lets him have that. he had so much taken from him both by the apocalypse and the events. he has lost the ability to comfortably date. i wonder if he feels jealous of viktor going out on so many dates, a new girl every night almost and he just has to suck it up because he is glad viktor is so happy and finding himself. Lila and Diego , ray and Allison, maybe even at the wedding....he just gets a pit in his chest. he hates feeling it. he hates knowing its there. the yearning for the same. the yearning for his one and only. edit: or maybe he realizes that Dolores wasn't real and comes to terms with the fact that real romance isn't for him. learns about being aroace. he finds comfort in fictional depictions again as a way to cope with what his marriage was and still has fond memories. letting her go., understanding who she was but not disrespecting her image. so what if she was imaginary? she was still the closet friend and partner he ever had and he would never truly say she was anything less. maybe he looks down a bit on his siblings because their marriages and dating lives look so complicated and messy. he doesn't have time or want all that. THIS is the trauma talk i want. THIS is the shit the show should have covered.

[subway-boss-jericho]

Queuing posts for most of my AUs! Check out this Masterpost! ᵈᶦˢᶜˡᵃᶦᵐᵉʳ ⁻ ᵖˡᵉᵃˢᵉ ᵈᵒⁿ'ᵗ ᶜᵒᵐᵐᵉⁿᵗ ᵃᵇᵒᵘᵗ ᵗʰᵉᶦʳ ᶦᶜᵒⁿᶦᶜ ᵏⁿᶦᶠᵉ ᵇᵃⁿᵍˢ! ᴵ ˡᵉᶠᵗ ᵗʰᵉᵐ ᵒᶠᶠ ᵒᶠ ᵗʰᶦˢ ʳᵉᶠᵉʳᵉⁿᶜᵉ ᵗᵒ ᵏᵉᵉᵖ ᵗʰᵉᶦʳ ᶠᵃᶜᵉˢ ᶠᵘˡˡʸ ᵛᶦˢᶦᵇˡᵉ.

Mechanical Dreams (can you hear the cogs clicking?)

-Premise- Alright. Bear with me, this one is very, very different. To give you the elevator pitch summary, I had a dream involving my version of Ingo from Steady Tracks except instead he was a hundreds-feet-tall mecha robot trapped under the ocean. Everything else is stuff I have worldbuilt around this concept in order to make the timeline of events make sense. Cool? Cool.

If that sounds interesting enough to read the less summarized version (LONG), get ready for one hell of a canon divergent crack AU:

Ingo and Emmet are both native-born Hisuian and proud members of the Pearl Clan. Unlike most members of their clan, they do not fear most pokemon. For a reason neither of them can place, they've always gotten along with them a little better than they did with other people. They've spent a lot of time getting to know pokemon, learning to battle alongside them, and bonding with them.

One night changes everything they've ever known. Young and bright, no older than 19, the two of them share a foreboding and brilliant dream.

Mighty Sinnoh approaches them face to face, speaking of an unknowable calamity on the horizon. Pokemon overflowing with incredible power- interfering with their natural ability to shrink, forcing them to grow taller than the mountains. In a blind rage of unbearable, uncontainable energy, they will ravage the lands of all living things. These will be known as the Darkest Days, when rifts in time and space bring Dynamax Energy down on Hisui.

Sinnoh has waited patiently to interfere with this disaster, observing each candidate and deliberating over who to designate as its heroes. After all this, the twins are Sinnoh's first choice. Should they choose to accept this duty, they may take the power to prevent this crisis into their own hands. Should they choose to deny it, it will continue to the next candidates it has selected until someone agrees to its terms.

It has chosen them because of their synchronicity, their bond, and their compassion for the pokemon of the region. If they bear this duty, one of them will become an overwhelming force- As powerful, if not more so, than the pokemon that will rise to challenge them. He will become a work of machinery so beautiful and so complex that he will rival work made in centuries to come- So impossibly grand that he will take on life incomparable to any creature or mechanism that has or ever will walk the earth.

In order to sustain such a life, this is what will become of the other: A being overflowing with energy and will. The ability to command metal with only the thought of desire, the knowledge and dominion over electricity to know and understand all things made of them. With these he can repair and protect the other, just as the other defends and protects all the region. He will be made brilliant just as his brother, but will remain of flesh and blood to ensure both are separate in the restrictions of their capability.

Their lives will entwine, ensuring the safety of both so long as both desire the safety of the other. The machine will power the soul, a fortress of steel defending the lives of both. So long as the machine does not perish, the engineer will never be susceptible to his own mortality. Neither age nor injury will prevent him from returning to the other's side.

With this overwhelming duty, impossibly vast opportunity laid out in full before them, the twins need to talk. More than anything, they need to decide. Will they? Yes. Absolutely. They could pass this on to someone else, but both of them would rather be able to ensure the safety of their brother with their own power.

It is decided that Ingo will become the Grand Machine, and Emmet will take the mantle of the Engineer. Ingo has always been in awe of strong moves, but more than this, it gives him the chance to take direct action in preventing any harm from ever coming to Emmet. As the (slightly) older of the two, he feels strongly about taking responsibility. Emmet has made his choice for the very same reason. Whoever is the Engineer can take direct action to ensure the safety of the Machine. He can protect his brother and keep him safe, and he will always be the first at his side in the line of fire.

With this, their shared vision comes to an end. They provide whatever explanation they can to the clans, to their family, before they set off together to the peak of Mount Coronet.

Emmet steps forward first, to receive the blessing that will change him. With the touch of their maker, his hair is shifted to a brilliant snowy tone- Eyes a bold and electric blue as a flowing coat of white and gold rests over his shoulders. He shines like a man of royalty- change arriving in another wave of light as he finds himself remarkably taller. The two brothers share a moment to revel and celebrate all of these verrry cool blessings!! Younger swinging older into the air in an expression of joy, hugs shared fiercely at the same size again as Emmet discovers his choice between old and new.

They share quieter words of comfort, of assurance. Ingo steps forward to receive his blessing. He turns with a smile on his face, a last look to his brother with the touch of his maker as Emmet sees his eyes glow vibrant blue- Before a torrent of metal sprouts from his back, encircling him completely. It warps and twists like the stem of a growing tree, walls of steel rising into the sky like a tower, faster than human hands could ever build.

When they return from the mountain, they are changed. They are twins, they are brothers, they are Ingo and Emmet. But they are impossible, they are changed to unknowable depths. They are not the same as when they left.

The Giant of Steel and The Engineer alter the fate of the region in more tales than can be catalogued here alone, preventing the deaths of many and earning the respect of every faction. Members of each walk of life vow to join them, becoming a part of Ingo's Crew.

When all is finally over, the final battle comes long after the danger has passed. None were expecting a last straggler, and none were prepared for the inky tendrils of the siren's grasp. The water was never Ingo's ally, but he would never let it be his crew's grave. He forces them to evacuate, the crew taking The Engineer with them to escape the soul-stealing songs of Gigantamax Jellicent. At the cost of his own safety, he brings down the final Dynamax threat once and for all. Consciousness fading, he crashes into the ocean- tsunamic shockwaves sending escape pods tumbling to shore.

Emmet, with all his abilities and tools, does not have the resources alone to craft something with the strength to rescue Ingo from the ocean floor. As days pass, he finds himself fading- He knows what this is, he must always know. Emergency hibernation. In his last days awake, he begs the people of Hisui, his friends, his Crew, to save his brother's life. To save him, when he cannot.

Emmet falls into an indominable slumber, kept safe from the elements in a case of wood and glass he assembled himself. The ocean is quiet, the threat is gone. The Dynamax War is over.

The crew which had endeared themselves to these strange, dedicated, charming, and incomprehensible yet so human twins, vow to repay their dutiful protection by rescuing Ingo from the water's depths.

And so time begins to pass.

-Noteworthy Points- I can't believe I'm posting this online where people can see it haha. Please be nice to me 😂 This is the longest post I've ever made. I hope that summary is to your liking because I am (grinding teeth) not kidding. that's the best way I know how to summarize this ENTIRE plot I made. Based on a dream I had one time two years ago!

Things to note! Ingo and Emmet are both capable of size-shifting but to very different degrees. Ingo is 120ft tall in his Off-Duty form, but can assume an Active Threat mode which allows him to scale up to 400ft tall. Emmet can shift between on/off duty forms also, but the difference is 8ft (Extremely Tall) to his former height somewhere around 5'10" (Above Average)

To re-say what arceus blessed them with in a way that is less cryptic: Ingo is a Mecha. He is bio-mechanical, sort of like a cyborg? In essence, he is an otherwise impossible combination of man, pokemon, and machine. He has a pokemon type and can use various moves. He also operates using a hell of a lot of complex machinery, but retains his humanity and thought. There is nothing else like him! Also he's fucking huge as I mentioned a second ago. He's made to be manned by a crew and has lots of hollow space, rooms, and other things required for life onboard. He also has an internal computer that helps him micromanage everything he needs to know about himself, who is onboard, what he is doing, and what other people are doing. Essentially, he has multiple trains of thought he can use simultaneously in order to help him keep up with everything. Because of this, he also can process information at a speed faster than a normal person is capable of by a significant margin.

Emmet has Technokinesis, and is capable of understanding how any machine works by observing it. He is capable of inventing or assembling machines that are far beyond his time, and can disassemble anything and put it back together with no issue. He has some amount of heightened/super speed, but not on a 'speedster' level of crazy, just unnaturally fast. He has a bigger reserve of energy as well than any normal person would have, and can think/process things at an unnatural speed. This helps him keep up with Ingo, although his processing ability is still a bit slower than his. Emmet also has hammer space with his coat pockets and can magically equip/unequip his coat at any time.

I have so much world building that I genuinely can't put it all in the notes here. There is so much shit to unpack, please understand I've basically made this entire goddamn narrative from scratch in my head and with the help of a close friend. This is me being turbo mentally ill

If I had less self control I would keep writing but I think I've given you all enough to understand the concept and I need to shove this in the queue before I miss the posting time <3 have fun

-Links- Currently none! I will update this post with links to comics/art/writing if/when I post any!

[betterbemeta]

I think something interesting about the star trek world is its combination of both replicator and holodeck technology. I understand these are literal 'plot devices' to explain the availability of food, materials, and the ability to visit locations for sci-fi premises that can't be found on an alien planet. However, they are worth thinking about in terms of how they change the world.

(Let's assume 'ideal' circumstances where we have a stable renewable non-polluting source of lots and lots of energy and aren't rationing it like on Voyager or something)

Replicators can use energy and raw materials to configure items, and presumably dis-configure items. While the potential for '3D printing' basically anything so long as its materials aren't too rare is really cool, it is also a near-perfect recycling machine. Beyond making sure your replicated dishes and cups don't infinitely pile up, that's SO IMPORTANT. Not only does that mean many items are 'temporary' that otherwise would be 'forever', you can instantly refresh the wear on many items without having to replace them and generate trash.

For example, tennis balls. It's currently really hard to recycle tennis balls, and serious players wear them out extremely quickly. Every serve you make after the first will be with a slightly worn, degraded tennis ball until you replace it, which generates trash. The production facilities to make all those tennis balls have to exist, they have to be shipped, the space to store them exists, the space to store their waste exists, the waste must be transported to a tennis ball recycling facility or a landfill...

but with replicators, you could play tennis without owning/paying a club to access a single tennis ball, without wasting a tennis ball.

And then there's the possibility of holodeck sports where you don't even need to make ANY material items. You could program the tennis ball to never run out. As long as you have the power to run it, maybe the most you'd need to 'own' is a tennis outfit. I am not sure if it's consistent that holodecks can 'dress you' or if you always must bring in costumes from the outside. And the costume itself could be replicated and then recycled!

There's a vast amount of stuff that we retain as personal property that just has to do with accessing activities or amenities. It's not really property that has emotional significance to us, but we still have attachments to it as its a facilitator of our active identity. Our dishes and cookware. Sports equipment. Certain kinds of clothing items. Some types of personal care items. Non-heirloom/generic holiday decorations. Stuff that is usually sacrificed first when we become homeless, when losing access to what they enable is more devastating than the items themselves.

If we could basically conjure and dismiss these things at-will, or access them on a temporary basis for free, we wouldn't need to own them or keep them around in our homes. No supply chain would be dedicated to them. Their waste would be completely eliminated. Ideas of 'what stuff I need to have as a person, to have a dignified life' would change completely.

It wouldn't surprise me if there were people in the star trek universe running around on earth with basically nothing we consider permanent physical property. Not because they're homeless and have no place to put them, and not because they're rich and their assets are liquid-- because the only reason to 'keep' mundane items, even something as complex as a communication device or computer, might be because they are emotionally important to you. And not everybody has 'stuff' like that at every time in their lives.

[whencyclopedia]

Top 10 Inventions of the Industrial Revolution

The British Industrial Revolution transformed life at work and at home for practically everyone. Noise, pollution, social upheaval, and repetitive jobs were the price to pay for labour-saving machines, cheap and comfortable transportation, more affordable consumer goods, better lighting and heating, and faster ways of communication.

Any shortlist of inventions is bound to be far from complete, but the following have been chosen not only for what they could do but also for how they permitted other inventions to become possible and how they transformed working life and everyday living for millions of people. The period under consideration is also important and here is taken as 1750 to 1860. With these criteria in mind, the top 10 inventions of the Industrial Revolution were:

The Watt Steam Engine (1778)

The Power Loom (1785)

The Cotton Gin (1794)

Gas Street Lighting (1807)

The Electromagnet (1825)

The First Photograph (c. 1826)

Stephenson's Rocket (1829)

The Electrical Telegraph (1837)

The Steam Hammer (1839)

Mass Steel Production (1856)

The Watt Steam Engine

The steam engine, which harnessed power from the expansion of heated water, is often cited as the single most important invention of the Industrial Revolution, principally because so many other important subsequent inventions used it as their power source. The steam engine was born from the necessity to pump out flooded mine shafts and enable deeper mining. The first steam pump was invented by Thomas Savery (c. 1650-1715) in 1698. In 1712, Thomas Newcomen (1664-1729) perfected his more powerful steam pump to drain coal mines of water in Dudley in the Midlands.

To make the steam engine more useful for other purposes, it had to be made more efficient both in terms of fuel consumption and power. The Scottish instrument maker James Watt (1736-1819) and Matthew Boulton (1728-1809) kept tinkering with the workings of the steam engine until, in 1778, they had perfected a separate condenser to vastly increase the engine's efficiency. Power was also increased by the steam powering the piston down not just up (hence its name, a double-acting engine), increasing the 'horsepower', a term coined by Watt. The engine also had its power converted to a more versatile rotary motion using a flywheel. Using just one-quarter of the fuel of Newcomen's engine, Watt's engine was cheap enough to use almost anywhere. Steam engines kept on evolving, notably with the expansion steam engine, and they benefitted from ever-better tool machinery that could make stronger and better-fitting parts.

By 1800, Britain boasted over 2,500 steam engines, most of them used in mines, cotton mills, and manufacturing factories. 500 of these engines were made by the Watt and Boulton factory in Birmingham. Every walk of life was affected. Steam now powered fountains, threshing machines, sewage pumps, and printing presses. Essentially, any work that required pushing, pulling, lifting, or pressing could be made much more efficient using steam-powered machines. Steam engines were harnessed for trains and steamships, and, aptly, all these uses caused a boom in the coal mining industry, which had been the origin of the machine in the first place.

Continue reading...

[spottedsnake]

if i’m being totally honest, i didn’t initially like this part of chapter 39, but it’s really grown on me after some more thought and shrue’s expansion on the idea.

to me it felt like an unnecessary simplification of the complex ethical questions that the podcast asks about the practice of sacrifice and how it fits into the world it’s built. “sacrifice is bad because it doesn’t work” is a less interesting claim to explore than “sacrifice is bad because of the moral implications of having a system that is designed to kill you if you step outside of the preconceived societal boundaries, even though it is significantly beneficial in some aspects of life.”

but looking back on this scene, i don’t really think that’s a fair assessment. what the slag executive is pointing to in this instance is that the practices of sacrifice and sainthood in the silt verses world have created an economic environment based on dangerous and unsustainable shortcuts.

the police force uses the cloak in order to reduce personnel costs without reducing workload. instead of developing more robust energy infrastructure, both the peninsula and the linger straits rely on the saint electric for their energy. even in this same episode there’s a saint of creativity created and used by a university, a place supposed to be where people are taught to think critically for themselves! and there’s a lot more examples of companies and individuals taking shortcuts like this because, well, that’s what they’re incentivized to do.

who is going to spend the time and money to develop better skills and technology when all you have to do is throw a person into the killing machine and you get the same if not better outcome?

if we suppose that the linger straits and the peninsula follow our own world’s pattern of economic and demographic development, they experienced a population boom during a period of technological advancement, decreasing the negative consequences of repeated sacrifices and forced sainthoods. now that their economies have somewhat stabilized, it’s reasonable to assume they had a corresponding drop in birth rate, changing the broad cost-benefit analysis of having an economy that runs on literal flesh and blood.

not to mention that now, the companies are experiencing diminishing and even negative returns. and being that they have tossed out every other tool in the toolbox, they are going to hammer this problem until they force it to be a nail. will a sacrifice for every floor of a building help its stability? maybe not, but it’ll probably be profitable. more sacrifices might help in the short term, but it’s not going to change the fact that capitalism relies on exponential growth, and their society cannot support that. any business that stops their worship to focus on other methods is probably not only angering a now very powerful god, but also severely handicapping themselves in the competitive market. so every corporation keeps throwing more resources and lives into a growing sinkhole, just to try to survive.

“we don’t know how to stop” is a very apt description of the current state of the silt verses economy, and also the problem that shrue and paige are answering. kill your gods; learn what you have lost and what you have abandoned.

[archer-kacey]

Something I noticed is a lot of people who hated BATIM love BATDR and a lot of people fond of BATIM dislike BATDR. To me, this seems like a mechanics vs story issue. The actual game mechanics and aesthetic of BATDR disguise the lackluster characters and plot holes. However, BATIM still suffers those same issues.

This is a vague question, but what are your thoughts on BATIM vs BATDR story wise? Is either of them truly better? Or are they just flawed in different ways?

Sorry, this is long, but so are BATIM and BATDR :')

I think you hit the nail on the head in the sense that yes- BATDR has better gameplay and mechanics than BATIM, but BATIM by far has a much more compelling story that was able to capture and keep attention over the course of five chapter releases. And yes, BATIM is not without its flaws, for example it's mainly a walking simulator in terms of actual gameplay- the only thing saving it being the unique ability to suck the player in through the rich, stylistic environments.

In terms of story, here's my take for both of them-

BATIM is more solid overall, there are more connected plot points and there's a thread there to be followed from start to finish. It does suffer from some WTF plothole moments, the biggest one being Alice's 180 degree turn with suddenly using Boris as a killing machine rather than...what I can only assume was a plan to use his ink/body as some kind of reparative agent for the hole in her face (like thicc ink premium idk), or...some kind of spell...? It's honestly not very clear HOW she was going to use him, but bottom line she decided to entirely change her plan off-screen, which could have been remedied with something like a cutscene's worth of explanation, and more of a buildup to Brute Boris. The "reveal" in the haunted house didn't hold that much weight (at least to me,) just because we didn't even get a cookie crumb of a hint that Alice was going to mutilate him and use him as a drone instead of just axe him.

There are other nonsense details like Allison's ominous "I'm no Angel" line, which didn't make sense when Tom was the one to want to leave Henry. It was never explained WHY the Ink Demon walks around with a limp when he can shapeshift into a bigger and faster Beast version of himself (and apparently he was ALSO the hand in the ink river??? I guess???) And can we talk about how the cult Joey started was just never brought up again? Wally talks about how workers were encouraged (or mandated, idk) to put offerings in the break room to "appease the gods." What gods? Was Joey worshiping Bendy like a god? NONE OF THIS IS EXPLAINED EVER and honestly I think Micheal D. and Meatstick just Forgot that Joey was a cult leader in favor of Sammy's cult storyline.

But despite all of the plot holes, we still get a tale of a deteriorating studio, humans being used as literal skeletons for lifelike versions of cartoon characters, themes of life, death, cults, art, and more. Honestly, going deep into the plot of Bendy would take its own post to really do it justice.

I guess the main plot is this: Ex-co-founder of Joey Drew Studios, Henry, is trying to get the fuck home to his wife, learning along the way that through the power of a mysterious ink machine, his ex-business partner decided to coerce and persuade people to Literally Die so he could have the necessary materials to create living versions of his cartoons, thus making "his" characters (and more importantly, Bendy,) a reality. Once Henry does escape, he learns that Joey has sent him through this same hell before, still filled with hatred and spite, just in time for Joey to assumedly "reset" him and send him on a different version of the same journey, as we can guess from the storyboards on display in Joey's apartment. THAT on its own is an intriguing and layered tale, and that's not even including the other details, voices, and faces we run into in BATIM, AND the new info we learn in BATDR.

Now, BATDR...is something I've come to view as a mixed bag.

Story-wise, it weirdly wants to have its cake and eat it to. Henry's story is elaborated on, and part of Audrey's origins are also brought to light. This is helpful information concerning the plot of BATIM...but then we get assblasted with a ton of new characters and lore for a completely new Cycle under the reign of a completely new Random Old Man. I know he's Nathan's son, and he was mentioned in both Illusion and Fade to Black...but those were de-canonized, so it almost doesn't help context-wise...???? So...????

In a lot of ways, BATDR almost acts like it wants to be an AU branching from BATIM rather than a direct sequel, which it was marketed/confirmed as.

I think my biggest problem with BATDR is that some of the main characters are bafflingly like. Mishandled.

I'm gonna have the mildest take on earth and say I didn't like the new Ink Demon. Old design was better and more uncanny by far, the new design looks like Generic Satan or something straight out of Baldur's Gate. He was given a deep, guttural growling voice because....tumblr sexyman I guess. Even if they needed him to talk, it could've been something more breathy and raspy, true to the heavy breathing of the original Ink Demon. Also, his alternate form was made very childlike, and I'm just weirded out by the fact that you have this oddly "sexified" version of the Ink Demon on the flipside of Bendy the Child. I don't think any ill intent was meant by this, but it's more confusing than anything thematically. I'm also not sure why Bendy's abuse was brought up and then never touched on....? Like wasn't this guy locked up and called a monster his whole life? Are we going to...say something especially considering the moral of this story......?

Memory Joey is completely fine, but I just can't shake the feeling that the narrative is trying to paint IRL Joey as "UWU fixed now" when that's not the case. The most sympathy I can extend to IRL Joey is that he was a gay man who desired to have a family at a time when that was not only frowned upon but dangerous, not just socially speaking but in terms of his physical safety. But beyond that, this was a dude who locked people in a building to keep them working, coerced and possibly forced the deaths of many people to get what he wanted (the ink machine was a scientific advancement that could've had AMAZING implications for society but he Did Not Give a Shit about that), and was abusive towards Henry. If we trust the Bendy books, he also gaslit and killed his teenage staff. This motherfucker isn't a patron saint of anything, and even if Memory Joey can learn from IRL Joey's mistakes, IRL Joey was still a shitbag who just happened to raise a daughter.

Which leads me to Audrey. Some of Audrey's tale is explained- she was raised by Joey, forgot Joey was her father, and came to work at Archgate as an animator. Got to know Wilson, who works as a janitor at Archgate, and then he drags her into ink hell because....idk, she's his version of "A Perfect Boris" I guess. Fair enough. However, it's NEVER EXPLAINED how Audrey doesn't remember her father, or WHERE she went to live after his passing, or WHO she lived with. Remember, Joey was as old as a cave painting, so he clearly passed when she was very young. While you could argue she doesn't remember his name because she was little, SURELY she remembers his face or voice, or the fact that she HAD A FATHER??? Like, was there some huge trauma there? (Other than the fact that Joey was her dad?) It makes little sense to me that she would forget so easily. If I had to make a guess (and granted I'm no Mark Twain), I'd wager that Allison probably found Joey dead. Remember that Nathan hadn't talked to Joey in years, and Allison was the one who went out of her way in the first place to visit. At this point, Allison's gonna find a little girl running around by herself, and assumedly her and Thomas would've taken her in. If that's not the case, someone else found Joey dead, at which point Audrey would've possibly lived with Nathan and Tessa, considering how much Nathan cared about Joey. Either party has ties to Archgate. But all of that is just speculation, not confirmed, and even if any of that were true, Audrey makes no mention of it. And I'm sorry, Audrey's backstory makes me want to cry, because it's just NOT THERE and she has the personality of a depressed bucket.

Alice was alright...but she was kind of stupid? Which is like....the antithesis of everything cool about her? Instead of using traps and luring the main character from a distance, she knocks out Audrey (via unspecified drink), plays Diet Jigsaw with Audrey, and then gets pushed off a balcony. She was also a lot more...idk, suave and sultry in speech mannerisms in BATDR, which isn't bad, but her unhinged and clever nature seemed a bit watered down.

I don't really have notes on the rest of the main cast. Sammy was brought back to die immediately, which honestly was fine considering his death track record. We get some mentions of BATIM characters. Wilson and Betty were fine, and even some of the lore explaining how the timelines work made sense.

HOWEVER,

I've already said it a hundred times, but the old cast was shoved to the side for a bunch of new characters we had no time to connect with. A new butcher gang member was added when we still have Miss Twisted as a potential female-role filler (keep in mind the Projectionist is based on Camera Man and Brute Boris was based on The Brute.) The whole "Amok" thing was a REALLY roundabout way to get the Lost Ones to stop attacking Audrey.

Wilson's motivations are mostly consistent and I'd argue somewhat compelling, but I don't understand why he didn't do more to protect Audrey if he was going to need her for the endgame for Shipahoy Dudley? Like what's all this about letting her run around and get killed? Was he just aware that she'd revive?

The main message of BATDR was fine, but it didn't work super well for Audrey's character. She'd already forgotten Joey was her father, and was living in blissful ignorance of that fact until Memory Joey decided to infodump on her right away. Sure, the "just because you were born of darkness doesn't mean you have to be darkness" thing applies to her AFTER she learns Joey was her father, but...Audrey was never threatening to Become Evil, so it almost didn't need to be said and was kind of a flat message...? I would argue Memory Joey would benefit more from that message- as he's a literal copy of a Very Bad Dude. My guy was projecting this whole time.

I do think BATDR was worse story-wise, but I'm not going to sit here and pretend it didn't have certain disadvantages from the start. The Kindlybeast debacle happened, BADTR was trying to continue a story from an existing property, and there was a severe lack of Adrienne Kress. Okay, maybe the last one was a bit much, but still. That doesn't mean I hate BATDR overall, I can appreciate a lot of things about it, but strictly in the story department, it needs soooooo much work and makes me want to jump off a Minecraft cliff.

[communistkenobi]

people have brought up that andor has not treated its Black characters very well and like, the weird thing is that for a very long time Star Wars has not really grappled with the racial elements inherent to fascism, all the while drawing heavily from contemporary white supremacist fascist movements (Lucas stated that the rebels were inspired by the Vietcong, making the empire both an analogue of the United States and Nazi Germany, etc). and in general I think Star Wars has not really had a strong historical perspective about its own canon, presenting it almost like a history that came from nowhere - the empire rose to power because of a dissatisfaction with a declining republic and unnecessary war, sure, but like, the ideological bits that make up a fascistic empire have not really been well established, nor have they been situated in a proper historical context. I’m not saying this never happens, but in the mainline canon (ie movies and live action shows), this is not really a subject given any real thought.

and Andor seems to be explicitly trying to rectify that in some way by showing the course of history and how revolutions are started. It seems to correctly diagnose the base ideological components of the imperial machine, it explicitly deals with how history produces new forms of political thought - Cassian listens to Nemik’s manifesto right before going to Luthen and formally joining the rebellion. This is a story of a man being radicalised and that is a textually political one. It’s also a story that is impossible to divorce from the modern political climate in the real world. Tony Gilroy, the director of the show, has even mentioned that Andor is drawing from historical events like the Russian and Haitian Revolution. But where this falls a little flat is that, again, Andor is building from this haphazard history that lacks political dimension, and so like. I’m struggling to put this fully into words, but even when we see Star Wars canon framed in political terms, it doesn’t seem interested in including the racial elements of those politics. I’m not laying the blame solely at the feet of Andor because this is a wider issue in SW - this idea that fascism does not have a racial character to it, and further still, that humanity is post-racial and all racial antagonism is actually disputes between species. So you’re in this weird place where Star Wars sort of refuses to engage with race properly, doing it only in these coarse “what if aliens were racist to each other” kind of storylines, while still being narratively racist in casting and writing decisions. So again this history from nowhere appears, apparently agnostic to the racial elements of fascism while devaluing the Black characters they have in the story without that devaluation being a textual part of the story. So really you get this double whammy where racism is like, not a thing space Nazis care about but the writers creating the space Nazis are being racist.

Anyway I think that on the whole this does temper the story andor is telling, and it’s shitty because a story that seems to otherwise be fairly aware of the material it’s dealing with seems uncaring about, like, the role Black people play in modern antifascist movements in the west lol

[ppeonppeonhan]

Dead Friends Forever Q&A-Style Review

I listen to a movie podcast called The Rewatchables, and they have interesting categories that I want to examine this series through.

Most rewatchable scene: It has to be the last one, because we've been talking about it nonstop since it aired. Plus, it lives in my head, rent-free, like Non is haunting me. Like WE failed him. 😱

But since I'm a BL girlie, who loves a well-crafted sex scene, I also have to include both of Phee and Jin's high-heat moments when Phee's trying to seduce him on the balcony and when they have rough sex in Jin's room. I'm not gonna lie: That was some king shit on Ta's end.

Best quote: "No one could leave this abandoned house — not even one." Come on! It foretold the surreal ending and fulfilled the victim's wishes. Gold.

What aged the best? The way that even the bullies perceived teacher Keng as a groomer, who took advantage of a desperate child — that will most definitely make that subplot still bearable even a decade from now.

What's aged the worst? The unaliving and SA montage in the finale that some have said was insensitive/irresponsible to have included. It was like trigger after trigger after trigger — practically a machine gun of traumatic scenes. The fandom could sincerely organize a class action lawsuit against the writer and director for them to pay for our therapy bills.

Scene-stealing location: The lake. Such a beautiful setting for romance, betrayal, and revenge. 😈

Best shot: Definitely the one of Tan from above when he's successfully drugged all of his victims. Iconic.

Are we sure this person is good at their job? Tee's uncle. The fact that he has so much riding on two teenagers is ridiculous. He didn't just start being a con man / mob boss that week. How does he not have a more stable criminal infrastructure at this point?

Best use of food and drink: Obviously, Tan spiking the beverages, knowing it would be the easiest way to poison everyone.

Was there a better title? Absolutely not. The play on the phrase "Best Friends Forever," an archaic term popularized in the '90s that puts way too much pressure on kids to find their kindred spirit and hold on to them through adolescence and adulthood, was inspired. It truly encompassed the impossibility of it all. There are just so many obstacles ahead of you, like peer pressure, family obligations, love triangles, bullying, ego, insecurity, and cowardice, that it's a lofty promise to make when you've barely finished puberty. Plus, it kind of hints at the ending...

Overacting award: Some could argue Barcode, but part of his performance was meant to be surreal, because it was in the dream state. I, personally, vote Jet (Top). Sometimes I felt like his character was in an entirely different, far more slapstick genre.

The "That Guy" Award: This category is for the actor/famous person you see all the time, but don't know the name of. I noticed a lot of people were excited to see Perth, so I "saw him all the time" on my feed. When I Googled him, that's when I learned that he was on a reality show with other Be On Cloud stars. 

Scene-Stealer (with very few scenes): Honestly, whichever extra/stunt double they had wearing that mask, freaking us out. The most memorable of which was when its creepy hand groped Tee.

Recasting couch:

I think Nanon (Bad Buddy) could've been interesting as the tormented Tan, because we would've bought his innocence longer.

It could've added to the mystery if we had the BL twins, AJ and JJ, confuse the narrative. 

I would watch Neo in almost anything at this point, and he could've played the morally conflicted Tee as he showcased those skills already in Only Friends.

A younger Mark (Last Twilight) would've fit so well into this cast. He plays lost and guilty quite well.

Picking Nits: This category is for pointing out things that just don't add up.

Why didn't Phee's cop dad have more questions about his son's behavior and activities after he saw who his son was involved with?

What teenager is fine going somewhere that has no wifi or reception? Even I wouldn't do that and I've had wifi as long as these characters have been alive.

Why was Non, a teenager, being medicated for mental health issues, but not being monitored by a mental health professional?

If Tee's uncle didn't want to be at a loss if Non died unexpectedly, then why didn't he let him get his wounds treated and get some rest? Unless the plan was always to harvest his organs, which would still have merited rest. Nobody wants shitty organs.

Unanswerable Questions

If Jin and Phee survived, would they have got back together?

If Non were alive, would Phee have ditched Jin?

What did they do with Non's body?

And, of course, after succeeding: Does Tan recover from his grief and move on with his life? Does he successfully escape arrest? Does he leave behind evidence of what the boys did to his family to further persecute them in death? Is his revenge plot really over...?

That was fun! Tag me if you answer the same Qs.