#both refugees from two different cultures

[lidoshka]

night fishing

+

Elwing and Earendil doing some teenager errands

[tovaicas]

anyways my friends activated my conlang brain and I've made smth insane as usual

red is influences, blue is Elezen-family languages, green is like a mix bc I see the Alliance cities as having a trade language (that critically is limited to them).

I see Duskwight as a separate language from Black Shroud Elezen (but sharing a lot - easy enough to learn for those speakers). Coerthan and all its derivatives are a whole different language under the Elezen umbrella and isn't mutually intelligible with BSE. Because they split so early, they probably don't share much more than root words and etymologies; within the same family so not difficult to learn for other speakers of Elezen languages, but very distinctly different.

(also I'm not listing them but the branches extend to include other diaspora Elezen languages)

[mavcancees]

how to adapt into dtblr culture for twitter refugees

so you've decided to move here from twitter. welcome and congratulations. this post is basically a big warning that goes THIS ISN'T TWITTER, DON'T BEHAVE LIKE IT IS, LEAVE THAT AT THE DOOR

i'll be teaching you two things, how the site works, and how to adapt your behavior to tumblr ( and really, normal human being ) culture. believe me, it's not that hard and it will actually feel very productive

let's start with the basics and frequent questions

your username can be anything, don't stress about it

your picture can be anything. a lot of us don't even have dteam related stuff up on our profile

your display name doesn't have to be your name. nobody is going to see it when you post, only usernames are visible

check your settings. do it. get familiar with them. turning on and off asks, turning anon off, turning submissions off. click on your blog, go to blog settings, check things there, go to account, your muted things will be there, go to dashboard and customize that. use your settings !!!

yes, pinned posts are fairly important and they tend to be pretty extensive. name age what you post about ( a lot of people here are multifandom !), just don't overshare ( no locations no trigger lists i beg you ). they also usually have a breakdown of your tags at the end

tags

it's a whole thing. some are actually useful. some are just passive commentary

the tags you put on posts ( both when you made the post and when you're reblogging something ) are both global and hosted on your profile. it's why you'll see things like "nameofperson art" rather than just "art". using just "art" will put you in the promoted tag, in this case

you can use spaces on your tags

usually you will tag what type of post you're making ( art, text post, ask post ), and then the contents keep in mind this is how people often mute things, some people tag the current situation, people use and mute ship tags. but this is also how people find things, like the specific asks from one person to another, so "username ask" is commonly used, "irl person ( dream, dnf, etc )" is also seen a lot just watch how others tag things and copy them. nobody will get offended you took their tag formatting, most of us will appreciate properly tagged posts

you do tag when you reblog people. you use tags to comment on things. don't really use replies unless you're, saying thank you to someone or pointing out a spell mistake or asking to add an option to a poll, etc. we don't do replies, just rb your reply

quick reblog and like deets

post popularity is measured in "notes" which is the sum of replies, reblogs and likes. we don't really care much about numbers here and if you start getting crazy about it people will not like it. this is more of a talking and showing site

you can reblog without tags, feel free to

you can hide your likes. you can and should like as many things as you want. they don't alter any algorithm, since there's none. a like is a "i saw this post" notification to the poster

actually posting

people talk a lot. a fucking lot, and it's something you will have to get used to, because it's very different from twitter

there are no qrts. callouts are looked down upon. breathe. if you don't like something MUTE IT DON'T POST ABOUT IT, because no one is going to listen to any callouts. you will have to learn to live with the fact people like things you don't. this will, with time, make you feel very free

the bulk of posting here is asks, as you might notice soon. asks are fun and encouraged. just don't name drop if you're talking about drama please ?

don't be scared to send asks off anon, this is how people will find you and get to know you really. people are also more likely to reply to you

block bait anons. yes you can block anons. yes it will block every blog they make

culture time

i've said this. tumblr is unserious. drama here is approached very differently and with several less layers of panic. you will see death threats. you will see slurs ( said in non derogatory ways ). you will see jokes about serious topics. you will see people say "i didn't like this" and nobody will care

tumblr is a community of individualism. you will like your own things within the thing we share we like. you might not like dream's music, you might not find irl streams entertaining, as long as you're fucking normal about it ? nobody will care and you're free to express your opinions. people will even come ask you about it and just have a chat. we're here for the same content to some degree

tumblr is also a bunch of people who understand they like another bunch of people. that none of the streamers have stopped being human. so you might see people defend things that, maybe, you'd not have thought to defend before. maybe you're even uncomfortable seeing them defending it. this is something you will experience a lot, and you'll learn to properly deal with it as time passes

because again. no one does callouts here unless it is extremely bad. no one cares if you don't really like them. and they also accept people might and will not like them. and that is fine. and that doesn't make either person horrible. you're just different people. and you don't even have to interact

you want to make friends ? ask people things, compliment people's work, genuinely attempt to make conversation. this is not an impersonal website the way twitter is. people don't care about your opinions because they care about you, and you are more than what you don't like

the more positive and jokey and interactive you are the more people will talk to you. there's no "hitting the algorithm", there's no "engagement", it's just people talking to people. so don't be a neg posting bot, and be a person

you will learn to be less miserable. you learn to stop giving a shit and just do what makes you happy. they cannot get you here. there's no qrts. the few antis you'll find can be blocked and you'll never have to directly interact with one. don't be mean to the people in your own community, even if you disagree

again, you are more than what you don't like. learn to be what you like instead. and leave the dooming at the door

[autistichalsin]

Two questions because I like hearing your thoughts:

What do you think Halsin's biggest flaw is?

And

Is there anything in his writing that you just don't vibe with / would like to see changed?

So, I am going to put two here for his flaws, just because what I perceive to be Halsin's biggest flaw is something a lot of people don't like being stated as such, because it's an extension of something that can actually be a good thing.

Halsin's biggest overall flaw: he is self-sacrificing to his own detriment, which also results in him brushing off his own pain/trauma. As a result of this, he also has a habit of developing hero-worship for those care for him the way he cares for others, I.E. the player.

Halsin's biggest flaw that can't be seen as an extension of a good trait: He can't control his basal instincts/urges very well. Not only can he not control his bear (the transformation into it and his actions in that shape) very well, but he also has lines in combat that rival the Dark Urge's in bloodlust; "let our enemies' corpses nourish the ground!" "May the carrion birds grow fat on you!"

Things I would change about his writing:

So... Most of the things I would change, I would not because I have a problem with them, but because I'm tired of others complaining about them (I.E. make his flirting banter with SH in act 3 only trigger if you're polymanced, make the Drow orgy start only at your invitation instead of his suggestion, etc). The highest on this list for me is the Minthara ultimatum (which still hasn't been implemented). I would like to see them make Halsin's case stronger; point out the Absolute still hunts him, make it clear how much Minthara triggers his trauma, let him talk more about things that happened to him in the goblin camp because of her- with her continued lack of remorse (she never even as much as says she sympathizes with what happened to the Grove) helping make his case. Also, make it more clear that what happened to the Tieflings was the result of this (because this scene was written to only trigger if the Rite of Thorns happened); show how haunted by their deaths Halsin is. People wrongly think Halsin had no stakes in this argument, when the truth is that they just didn't remind the audience what they were.

For things I actually would want changed... well, I'll put that in two categories, the things that could be changed while keeping the game mostly the same, and then my "pie in the sky" things.

Realistic changes:

-Halsin's post-Drow dialogue is tweaked just a bit more to fix a line from Tav that comes off as condescending, and to clarify some things (did Halsin's captors' house fall out of favor, or were they attacked by a lower house that wanted to unseat them? Halsin says both, but these are two different things in Drow culture). Maybe the house and the house that wiped them out get named, as well.

-While Halsin's act 3 arc was good considering how little time there was, I feel that there needed to be more highlighting his transition from nature-focused to people-focused. We see his anguish at the failures of the city, and the early stages of him dreaming for better, but I wish we could have had more of a bridge to him deciding his commune is the answer. I'd like to see a scene with Halsin adopting Yenna/inviting her to the commune once he starts it, a scene with Halsin's decision to found his commune and inviting the first group of refugees, that sort of thing.

-Make a quick tweak to That infamous party banter that makes it clear chimeras pass the Harkness Test in this setting so that people stop using it as justification to claim Halsin fucked the boar at the Grove (yes this is a thing). Or cut it entirely, I guess.

-Go back to the planned concept where Halsin's scar was in fact from a battle. It being from a shebear doesn't inherently bother me, but I liked the idea of it being a reminder of how badass Halsin is.

-I wish we had more lines reminding us what an amazing healer Halsin is past act 1.

-Fix a few of Halsin's lines so that he sounds as concerned about the Shadow Druids' influence as he should. He brushes them off a bit too easily, especially in the line patch 6 added where you could show him the note sent to Kagha.

-For the love of God, let Halsin get pissed off if you as a Drow Tav/Durge threaten to sell him back into slavery. Make him break up with you on the spot, maybe even leave the party- and if not, lose a huge chunk of approval at least. Players who make Astarion bite Araj rightfully get chewed out- Halsin deserves the same. It doesn't have to be rage, either; it could be hurt, or fear, or some combination of the above. But please, a line that evil deserves something more. They would never pull that on any other character.

Pie in the sky things that would probably never happen but I wish they would:

-After Halsin's Drow confession, we get a chance to suggest to him he might want a turn as a consensual submissive, complete with a sex scene of the player dominating Halsin.

-A scene with Astarion and Halsin bonding over their shared trauma.

-Reintroduce parts of the original concept for the Shadow Curse plot. I don't have to have the Halsin accidentally killing Isobel bit, but I liked the plot with the Promise dagger and him using you as a beacon to find you once he goes in the portal. It was so romance-coded; I'd argue it was even more romantic than Halsin's actual romance plot!

-Let us watch Halsin win over the orphans going to his commune. For pure self-indulgence reasons, make at least one of them a baby.

-A resist scene for Durges. I don't care if it would always be platonic, and yes, go ahead and give Minthara one too. Just please?

-MOST OF ALL, Origin Halsin.

[fandom-susceptible]

Moonshadow Culture and Values

So, I've seen a few posts going around that made me wanna do this to sort of explain my interpretation of the choices made by the Moonfam in the context of their culture. I'm just making my own post to avoid starting drama with the people who dislike or hate Ruthari as a result of their behavior, or think that they're poorly written.

Buckle up, because this is a whole essay I should probably clean up and put in a google doc.

(also, while a lot of this is pulled from canon, I've also extrapolated quite a bit. I've tried to make it clear where the line is, and my sources will be at the end to check if you're unsure. If you dislike or disagree with any of the extrapolation, that's your prerogative - it's a fictional show! Have fun with it however you have fun! But I do ask that you have the same courtesy as I've had in making this post, and either keep it to your own blog or respond constructively. Let's keep this a safe space, yeah?)

(Now with important map edit!)

First of all, the thing I see overlooked the most in every post, positive or negative, about the Moonfam is that they aren't human. They are not human and are not coming into this situation with human values or viewpoints. We as a fandom need to stop applying human standards of behavior to non human characters (this is a problem in a lot of fandoms with non humans, honestly). It's something that even comes up in the show, with Callum and Ezran (as they're the ones most often with Rayla) forgetting her cultural background is wildly different from theirs.

So to address some of those cultural values I think it's important to take a look at what we know about Moonshadow elves' history. Some of the furthest history back that we know about is from the Mage Wars, when the continent was split. Humans weren't the only ones displaced by that breach. Moonshadow elves specifically were also forced to leave their native lands, to the point of actively destroying their own settlements and holy places to keep their magic from being tapped and twisted by the humans who would take the land. We don't really talk about it in the show because it's a kids' show (or it was when they introduced this information), but realistically, a shit ton of both humans and Moonshadow elves died in these forced migrations.

Then, looking at a map of Xadia leads us to another point. See where Moonshadow Forest is?

It's right there next to the border with the human kingdoms.

They barely made it into Xadia. Plus look at the geography and ecology of the land they left compared to where they settled. This doesn't seem like an ideal location given where they lived before. Plus, Bloodmoon Huntress informs us that Moonshadow Forest is dangerous even to those who live there. It's not a safe place to live, and yet all of them live there.

There's also something to be said about how the Moonshadow elves have a whole path through lava called the Moonstone Path from their ancestral lands to the Silvergrove, when the military focus of both sides of the Mage Wars are focused further north up the Breach. My guess is that the Moonstone path isn't for assassins sneaking back over the border, especially given how the narrative talks about the violence between the human kingdoms and Xadia until recently. It's mostly been open battles. I'm guessing the Moonstone Path was for the refugees fleeing the Moon Nexus and their old home in the mountains, south of the worst of the fighting, and that's why most elves don't know about it now either.

Also, look at the sheer scale of the other elves' range in comparison to theirs.

Dark blue: Tidebound, which is every coastline in Xadia and out into the ocean

Edit: I'm slightly color blind and just looked at this map on a screen with different color settings. The "gold" I refer to in a minute is the darker of the two yellows. The other yellow appeared green to me. Sorry about that 😅 you can also just look for Lux Aurea in the north and Umber Tor/the Drakewood in the east for context of which is which.

Gold: Sunfire Empire minimum boundaries, they seem to imply its reaches are very large

Green: Earthblood elves that we know of; there's also a population of crystal-connected ones that we don't even know where they live for sure, though my guess would be the mountains beside the Uncharted Forest and the Tidebound Archipelago.

Light blue: Skywing, who have at least two distinct cultures (the Celestials in the north and the nomads who range everywhere) in Xadia

White: Moonshadow, whose society is comprised of a scattered group of villages inside the smallest forest in Xadia.

In addition, Bloodmoon Huntress tells us that those stories that humans tell about elves being blood drinking monsters that eat people are also told in Xadia about Moonshadow elves. Moonshadow elves tell them about The Bloodmoon Huntress. All of this is rooted back to Kim'dael and her Cult of the Blood Moon, a sect of Moonshadow elves from about 300 years ago who did absolutely do that.

(300 years ago is a guess because she was eventually captured by Queen Aditi, but we don't actually have a date that I know of, and Aditi reigned for over a century)

When we think about that in context, it gets a bit dark, doesn't it? To this day, other elves believe that all Moonshadow elves are like that, or at least tell stories about it. Do we really think that they were making exceptions when there actually was substance behind the stories, on a larger scale? Or do we think that when the Sunfire Empire and the dragons hunted down the Cult, they were just hunting whatever Moonshadow elves they could find, because they didn't know or didn't care that there was a difference? And that's not even touching on the decades or perhaps centuries of predation by the Cult on their own kind before they turned towards the rest of Xadia and caught Aditi and Avizandum's attention.

There was also the Shadow-Eater incident, which we only know about through Zubeia's recollection, which consisted of a creature called a Shadow-Eater hunting down the Moonshadow elves of the southern forest and their being unable to protect themselves from it. Avizandum was the one who eventually eliminated it. In the same short story where Zubeia remembers it, though, she refers to the Moonshadow elves as tribes, which is only really interesting because it's not a word we really see used elsewhere in the franchise, even for the nomadic Skywing or the similarly brutal Riders of the Drakewood.

So, the political situation on Xadia's side of the border amongst the elves seems to be as follows:

The mighty Sunfire Empire, which sprawls across much of Xadia and is widely considered to be the most powerful military force on their side of the border. They have multiple cities, though Lux Aurea was the main one and the only one we see on the map (we also only see the Silvergrove on the map because it's the only Moonshadow settlement that matters to the narrative, it's not because others don't exist). They also have outlying villages and variance within their cultures, and are known for their advanced engineering.

The Tidebound, who don't seem to have a unifying government, but do have a couple of overlying cultures. They have several coastline cities and settlements and a thriving maritime civilization, including some who live entirely underwater, and may have been the most chill with humans during the war (they are the source of humans' stories about mermaids and sirens, implying a mix of benevolent and malevolent ones). A significant portion of their population lives entirely out at sea, similarly to their Archdragon Domina Profundis.

The Earthblood elves, who have not one, not two, but at least three different populations. There are the more violently-dispositioned Riders of the Drakewood, another less-explored forest Earthblood population (Terry may be from that one, as he mentions being from the Uncharted Forest but lacks some characteristics typical of the Riders, but we don't know for sure), and the crystal-based Earthblood whose location we haven't been shown yet. They're also said to have the largest population of any type of elf, even more than Sunfire elves, and range the farthest other than the Skywing.

The Skywing nomads can be found anywhere in Xadia at different times, and they have a subculture of the Celestial elves that live in a singular place. The Skywing also are known for some of the most impressive architectural feats in all of Xadia, ranging from the stairs of the Storm Spire, to the Celestial Spire, to the floating city of Innea.

Finally, the Moonshadow tribes, which are isolated to a handful of villages in the smallest forest in Xadia, all of which share an overarching culture and are mere days apart on foot.

So let's think about this for a second.

Moonshadow elves were forced to emigrate from their homeland during the Mage Wars, and likely lost a significant percentage of their population then.

They arrive in Xadia, and they barely make it past the border and they stop. All the other land in Xadia appears to be already largely taken up by other elven civilizations or is somehow inhospitable (i.e. the Midnight Desert), but this particular forest is so afflicted with the dark side of their own arcanum that the Earthblood elves have said "fuck it" and left it alone. It's dangerous. One night every year it's so dangerous even their most skilled warriors could be lost if they make one mistake - and that's in the modern day, with well established villages and safe zones (per Runaan's warning in Bloodmoon Huntress). It was likely worse before they had those.

At some point after this, the Cult of the Blood Moon was founded and began preying on others to extend their own lives. My personal pet theory is that Kim'dael did this because she realized their people were dying out, and she turned to immortality rather than mixing with other elves or just encouraging new generations, but we don't have canon for her reasons really.

The Cult's activities eventually catch the attention of Queen Aditi's Sunfire Empire and the dragons, who turn on the Cult. Stories pin the blame on all of the Moonshadow elves, so it's likely that they were all blamed even then, and the war was launched on the entire Moonshadow Forest until Kim'dael turned herself over to Aditi in hopes of tricking her (and was herself tricked).

And in the modern day, Moonshadow elves are by far the fewest and most isolated elven society, comprised of a few tribes whose settlements are all described as villages - they don't have cities or towns or an overarching government. They're villages that operate on democracy.

After that history, it starts to make perfect sense why abandoning their duty or their companions is the gravest sin they can commit culturally, doesn't it? Especially for a people so deeply connected to the afterlife. They told us in season 1 that Moonshadow elves do not fear death; by season 7, they've elaborated on that to explain that they don't fear death because they know for a fact that death isn't an end. Spirits move on to the next phase of existence, and their magic is so connected to that afterlife that they can summon those spirits back temporarily to conclude unfinished business (such as the Ritual of the New Moon, but Lujanne mentions it used to be done far more commonly when they had access to the Moonhenge). So they'd have no reason to be afraid of dying individually.

But with their numbers so drastically decimated, sacrificing other lives in favor of yours, forcing their families to live with a loss because you were a coward about facing the death that you already know isn't an end for you -

Yeah, it makes sense that's worse in their eyes than personally dying.

It's also likely that Kim'dael surrendering to Aditi didn't fully cool tensions between other elves and the Moonshadow. Assassins came into existence at some point between the Mage Wars and the modern day, and my hunch is that they were the remaining Moonshadow's attempt at containing the Cult. So after Aditi captured Kim'dael, the rest of the Moonshadow were left in a position where everyone considers them bloodthirsty savages and the only warriors they have left are built for precision violence against much stronger enemies that they cannot fight outright. Hence, later service to the dragons and other elves' leaders as assassins. If they don't go along with the more powerful elves and dragons' instructions, if they abandon their obligations to Aditi or Avizandum or Zubeia, what happens to the rest of them? They can't afford to betray or fail their much more powerful neighbors. There's nowhere left for them to retreat to. The humans would kill them, the Earthblood could kill them, the Sunfire or dragons could burn their entire forest to the ground and kill them all too. So they commit. The rest of Xadia believes them to be killers, so they send their killers to serve the rest of Xadia - on pain of death to save the rest of them.

To be very clear, I'm not saying that Moonshadow culture is just okay and we shouldn't criticize it. Their focus on duty and family and the good of the many prioritizes those things to such a degree that suicide is culturally preferable to making mistakes sometimes. That's fucked up! It's harsh! It's flawed! However, given the history we have of them, I can follow the logic of how they got there.

Now thinking about this in the context of the show -

Tiadrin and Lain appeared to abandon their duty, sacrificing a child that isn't their own and not even coming back home to explain themselves (they never show a lotus being connected to the Dragonguard, I'm inclined to believe that's an assassin-specific tradition and they just got the news from Zubeia about what happened). They didn't get a choice about becoming Dragonguard; they were selected by the dragons. So they've left their own child in the care of someone else, only to abandon the other child they were sent to protect, and it wasn't even to come back for their own.

Now we know as viewers that's not what happened, but within the world and their cultural context, that's what their community knows. So they've committed the gravest sin in their culture twice - they've left their child behind, but that was forgivable because they didn't have a choice. But then, they sacrifice another's child, and they didn't even do it for the sake of their own. So they get Ghosted. (I have a whole other post about my theories on Ghosting, but this is getting too long to get into it here).

Runaan and Ethari, who they entrusted their daughter to, take Rayla further into their home as a result. Rayla has already asked to train with Runaan because he's rescued her from her first brush with death, and she's got a bit of hero worship going on. Runaan cautions her about it, and visibly has doubts about his own path in life, but he commits to it because it's what she wants, and his husband reassures him. When Zubeia calls on him as leader of the assassins to take vengeance for her mate and son, he's left with a choice of bringing Rayla along even though he doubts if she's mentally and emotionally ready (he knows she physically is), in order to restore her honor that was stained by her parents' cowardice, or forcing her to stay behind and suffer with their shame for the rest of her life. This is a no-win scenario. Either he brings her on a mission he knows she isn't ready for, and risks her failing and suffering with that, or he forcibly condemns her to living with failures that aren't her own. So either she suffers from Tiadrin and Lain's failures, or from his. So he chooses to bring her, against his husband's advice, and to take on responsibility for it.

And then he fucks up. He tests her by sending her after the guard that witnesses them, and he doesn't follow her. He doesn't make sure she gets the job done. When she comes back and lies about it, and they discover the truth, the rest of their team - their whole cultural view, really - demands that he kill her for this failure, for condemning them all, and he doesn't. They respect him enough not to kill her without his permission, either, even though by lying to them and dooming the mission she has committed the worst crime she possibly could. And I think this choice on Runaan's part is partially the fact that he cares about her as a daughter, but also guilt, because he knows he's the one who backed her into that corner. He put her in that position knowing she wasn't ready for it. It's his fault she failed, not hers. So he just tells her to sit it out, sacrifice her hand if they fail but survive, because she doesn't deserve to die for his sins. She may have to live with the guilt of their deaths, but if he succeeds in this, she will at least get to live longer and go home.

Rayla throws a wrench in this by showing up anyway, and she betrays the mission again by not only holding him up, but insisting on rescuing one of their targets. He still doesn't kill her. He threatens to, but when it comes down to it, he's the one that turns away from the fight, not her, to focus on the mission - which again, if he succeeds in it, means she can go home, she can live with his honor and not her parents' shame, even if he can't.

It doesn't happen that way, obviously, but here's where things get interesting - and complicated - with Ethari.

So from Ethari's perspective, all he knows in the end of season 1 is that the mission isn't done, the other assassins are dead, and Rayla is alive. I think it's a disservice to his character and the rest of the Silvergrove to assume they just didn't notice that Runaan's lotus didn't fully sink; more likely is that a sunk lotus means the assassin is as good as dead. They're in a position like Runaan's where they've been captured and declared themselves dead because they know there's no other way out, there will be no rescue and they're not likely to escape on their own. So Runaan's been captured and will die there, and Rayla escaped but has not completed the mission or gone back for him, nor does he expect her to.

So what is Ethari supposed to believe? That she's somehow done the impossible, and found a third way out that will lead to a new era of peace for all of Xadia?

Or, is he to believe that he was right the whole time, she wasn't ready, but instead of committing like she swore she would, she fled, like her other parents did? She sacrificed everyone, including her other father, and ran?

Which one of those seems like the more likely option from his perspective?

Then she comes home, and he learns the truth, but there's nothing he can do about it, because the Ghost spell is permanent. He doesn't even know it can be broken - Runaan has to tell them that's a thing three years later in season 7. So he's left with this horrible knowledge that while on a small scale, it looks like Rayla sacrificed five lives for one (or three, her own with Ez and Zym), with a wider perspective, she was actually doing the most Moonshadow thing possible and focusing on saving more lives than anyone knew could be saved. And there's nothing he can do to reverse his vote, to make up for what he's done to her, so he gives her what he can and lives with that guilt for two years.

The moment she comes back and he sees her again, and finds out there is something he can do, he's willing to throw his entire life away to mitigate the harm their community caused her. I don't think that was demonstrative of his solidarity with Runaan; I think it was driven by spending the last two years knowing that their society is flawed and living with the harm their community did to Rayla.

Also, backing up a bit to season 3 to touch on an example of humans applying their cultural context to Moonshadow things, is Callum accusing Rayla of staying at the Storm Spire out of pride.

He's misunderstanding her dedication here. It's not about personal pride for her. At this point, from her perspective, her parents have committed the gravest sin in their native culture in abandoning Zym's egg. She's been living in the shadow of that shame for a year. She's also abandoned her original duty - sure it was for a good reason, but it doesn't change the fact that she sacrificed the lives of her friends and father. She made a choice for them that ended their lives. The only thing she can do now, culturally, to make up for those crimes is to sacrifice herself in the name of duty and saving who she can; and there's still a chance her spirit won't be welcomed into their afterlife when it's over.

That's why this moment matters. "Just - remember me, okay?" It's not about personal pride, it's about deeply ingrained cultural values. Her name is banned at home. She's asking him to remember her because no one else will (or in Ethari's case, will be permitted to acknowledge they do). I'm not trying to bash Callum here, because he genuinely does not understand this and in the end he works with her and ends up staying just as she does. It's just an example of how even characters in the narrative make the mistake of forgetting that there's cultural divides here.

All in all, within what we know for sure and can extrapolate about Moonshadow elves' culture and history, I think our three main Moonshadows' choices do all make sense. It also makes sense how they're all willing to forgive each other in the end, because while they've all fucked each other up, it was heavily influenced by a culture that, while attempting to preserve as much as they can, has turned harsh and unforgiving about it. It's not as simple as "Runaan and Ethari are abusive fathers because Runaan took a child to a murder and Ethari ghosted her after". (On that point it's also worth noting that no one questions Rayla being on a high-profile assassination anyways. She's treated as an adult within her own society, just as Soren was at only a year older than her. This one's a spot where we're applying modern day values about adulthood to a medieval world in which being treated as an adult at 15-16 was not unusual.) Runaan and Rayla both fucked up, culturally, and fucked each other up doing so. Ethari did everything right, culturally, and harmed both Rayla and himself in doing so, and then was just alone with that for three years. He couldn't even lean on the rest of the Silvergrove for support because of the Ghost spell and its rules (Lyrennus refuses to even say Rayla's name until she's restored, and Rayla never mentions her parents' names; it's likely all discussion of them is banned).

Anyway, I really hope we get Arc 3 and I hope they expand upon how this experience has challenged the Moonfam's cultural views, and what ripple effects that will have on Moonshadow society as a whole. Runaan and Ethari are both well-respected members of the community, and Rayla is very likely to become a significant figure in their histories too now that she's returned.

TL;DR we need to stop putting human values on inhuman characters. Stop putting inappropriate cultural values onto characters in general.

Sources:

Contents of the show

Through The Moon (graphic novel)

Book One (referenced via This Page on the official wiki)

Bloodmoon Huntress (graphic novel)

The Queen's Mercy short story (found here)

All Storms End short story (found here)

Hot Brown Morning Potion podcast interview with creators (here)

[gatheringbones]

[“In the old ideographic language of Vietnam, the word xa, which Westerners translate as “village” or “village community,” had as its roots the Chinese characters signifying “land,” “people,” and “sacred.” These three ideas were joined inseparably, for the Vietnamese religion rested at every point on the particular social and economic system of the village.

Confucian philosophy taught that the sacred bond of the society lay with the mandarin-genie, the representative of the emperor. But the villagers knew that it lay with the spirits of the particular earth of their village. They believed that if a man moved off his land and out of the gates of the village, he left his soul behind him, buried in the earth with the bones of his ancestors. The belief was no mere superstition, but a reflection of the fact that the land formed a complete picture of the village: all of a man’s social and economic relationships appeared there in visual terms, as if inscribed on a map. If a man left his land, he left his own “face,” the social position on which his “personality” depended.

In the nineteenth century the French came, and with their abstraction of money they took away men’s souls — men’s “faces” — and put them in banks.1 They destituted the villages, and though they thought to develop the economy and to put the landless to work for wages in their factories and plantations, their efforts made no impression upon the villagers. What assets the French actually contributed to the country in the form of capital and industrial plants were quite as invisible to the villagers as the villagers’ souls were to the French. At a certain point, therefore, the villagers went into revolt.

Ngo Dinh Diem and his American advisers, however, did not, or could not, learn from the French example. Following the same centralized strategy for modernization, they continued to develop the cities, the army, and the bureaucracy, while leaving the villages to rot. As it merely permitted a few more rural people to come into the modern sector in search of their souls, this new national development constituted little more than a refugee program. For those peasants with enough money and initiative to leave their doomed villages it meant a final, traumatic break with their past. For the nation as a whole it meant the gradual division of the South Vietnamese into two distinct classes or cultures.

Of necessity, the guerrillas began their program of development from the opposite direction. Rather than build an elaborate superstructure of factories and banks (for which they did not have the capital), they built from the base of the country up, beginning among the ruins of the villages and with the dispossessed masses of people. Because the landlords and the soldiers with their foreign airplanes owned the surface of the earth, the guerrillas went underground in both the literal and the metaphorical sense. Settling down among people who lived, like an Orwellian proletariat, outside the sphere of modern technology, they dug tunnels beneath the villages, giving the people a new defensive distance from the powers which reigned outside the village. The earth itself became their protection — the Confucian “face” which the village had lost when, for the last time, its hedges had been torn down. From an economic point of view, their struggle against the Diem regime with its American finances was just as much of an anticolonial war as that fought by the Viet Minh against the French — the difference being that now other Vietnamese had taken up the colonial role.”]

frances fitzgerald, from fire in the lake: the vietnamese and the americans in vietnam, 1972

[phantazesthai]

Shokra toh ebra: communal collectivism vs individualism

You know, at first, I felt a bit underwhelmed by Taash's story in DATV. But then I realized this underwhelm was because their story is the most realistic of all the companions. Griffons, demons, titans, lichdom - these are all very compelling allegories, sure, but are ultimately not as easy to relate to as Taash's multicultural identity is. Their story is not executed as well as it could be, but it is trying to communicate some fascinating concepts.

For instance, Taash's constant referencing of shokra toh ebra may seem a bit excessive, but of course it is! It's a phrase that haunts Taash, colours their sense of self and influences their behaviour. It serves to highlight how Taash's story is just as much about their understanding of the cultural perspectives they grew up between as much as it is about their gender identity. The two concepts are inextricably linked for Taash.

The Qun has the potential to be such a complex fantasy sociopolitical structure. It's rigidly practical yet oddly poetic in it's religiosity. Each role is connected to the "whole" creature that is society: the priesthood (scholars, Ben-Hassrath, Tamassrans) is its soul, labourers and workers (those who keep society ticking over as artisans, farmers, and so on) are its mind, and the Antaam (soldiers) is its body. The Qun is profoundly communally oriented: under the Qun you sacrifice individuality (a source of chaos) for order (stability and supposedly, equality). The health of the entire creature (society) is the priority - individuals are just drops of blood in its veins.

The constant refrain of shokra toh ebra from both Shathann and Taash, and how differently both characters understand the phrase, is a compelling way to illustrate how this communal ideology can be either beneficial or harmful, depending on a person's cultural upbringing, what they value, and their personality.

Taash translates shokra toh ebra to mean "you must struggle against what you are." Whereas Shathann translates it to mean "through struggle, you find what you are."

For Taash, shokra toh ebra means they're destined to struggle because they are chaotic in a way the Qun dictates must be tamed. They will struggle against themself until they make a black and white choice: man or woman, Qunari or Rivaini. But they fundamentally cannot choose because they are neither and both, they are vashoth ("grey"). When Shathann references this phrase, Taash feels like her acceptance of them is conditional upon them rejecting their greyness in favor of living in denial inside a neatly labelled box... which Taash is brave enough to refuse to do. Taash also grew up in a culture more individualistically minded than the Qun, so their need to define themself as a "unique" person is driven by this. Rivainis are free-spirited, individual freedom of choice is a core value for them. Taash admires this and wants to live "freely," like a Rivaini.

For Shathann, shokra toh ebra means that struggle is how someone accepts who they are: struggling is an essential part of bringing order to chaos. Making peace with one's lot in life is a struggle, but that struggle of acceptance is worthwhile if it helps you find your place within your community. Shathann sees that Taash is struggling to understand themself, and attempts to help by using a cultural moral she likely also used to comfort herself once too, as a refugee in a new, unfamiliar culture where she no longer "fit in." For someone who seems to prefer orderliness, who grew up being taught that everything has a role and a purpose in life, even things that cause pain, this idea that struggle is necessary and beneficial to the "whole," would be comforting to Shathann.

Shathann didn't intend to make Taash feel dismissed by using binary terms like aqun-athlok, or the phrase shokra toh ebra. She was trying to help her child with the ideological tools available to her, it just fell flat because their cultural perspectives are different. Exacerbating their cultural misunderstanding is the fact that they're both strong-willed, stubborn people (like mother like child!) Who aren't good at being vulnerable enough to meet each other halfway. Isn't all that very familiar? How many of us have been in the same position with our own parents and family members? Be it because of generational, cultural or socio-economic differences, we've all had experiences where we found ourselves incapable of reaching understanding with someone in our family.

That being said, however... the Qun is not at all an ideal reflection of real world (non-Western) collectivistic cultures that value community over the individual. And Taash's story ends up being so disappointing because the Qun remains (as it has been throughout the series) a maligned ideology in Veilguard because the player has to push them to "embrace" being either Rivaini or Qunari. The implicit suggestion being that if Taash were to embrace more Qun-aligned (less individualistic) beliefs, that they would be less "free," felt, well, problematic to say the least (especially considering how each game ascribes its qunari characters "animalistic" traits which is... yikes, just, deeply racist.) Positioning one culture as a "healthier" choice for Taash than the other felt simplistic, even a little cruel, and is likely the result of the limited cultural perspective of their writer.

In reality, there isn't a right or wrong cultural mindset to have. Taash is both Qunari and Rivaini! They didn't need to choose. Neither option is necessarily better or worse, they're just different, and are equally flawed in different ways. I get that the choice mechanic is baked into the gameplay element of giving the player input in Taash's narrative, but making Taash choose at all undermines the whole point of them learning to accept their greyness - and aren't we all, in reality, grey? Both in what we believe and in how we act?

While this insistence that the individualism that plagues Western cultures is the more freeing ("superior") ideology is not at all limited to Western media like DATV, the presence of the Qun within the world of Thedas, a fantasy culture that so clearly references the communalism inherent to non-Western cultures, makes this bias much more egregious. The Qun offers an allegorical opportunity to uplift a different, chronically vilified cultural perspective: a chance to underscore how both individualistic and communal viewpoints can coexist. But they squandered this chance with Taash. Which is such a shame because their story is so human at its core.

[eahtheramblings]

in reference to ur post about how u would rewrite a character from eah, what would you do with Courtly jester?

Courtly as a character has a fascinating amount of potential if you take into consideration that there is no Jester in the original stories of Alice in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass. There are two things that i would want to do with her character that i feel would really make this potential shine: 

I wrote up a list of rules in this post for how the destiny system in the rambles au works a while ago, and in that post I mentioned that on paper everyone *technically* has a destiny as commoners are expected to carry on family trades to support their kingdoms, but in practice they’re barely treated as if they are a part of the exclusive destined group. In this au, Wonderland wasn’t just left alone and then suddenly quickly cursed and quarantined, it has a history of many different Ever After kingdoms attempting to and semi succeeding in colonizing it at random intervals in history, hence how you get Ever After stories like Humpty Dumpty taking place in Wonderland. The unspoken caste system of Ever Afters destined/non destined was one such unfortunate and unwanted cultural import that came over a while ago, but not too long ago to have been completely accepted as being “the way it's always been”. I once read somewhere that Jesters were actually respected members of a royal court as they could break news to the king that would get others banished or executed, and while I’m not sure of the validity of that statement, i do think it would be very interesting to employ this concept in the case of Courtly. Imagine this; the Jester’s of the Wonderland courts once held an esteemed position, acting as both entertainment and trusted advisors. They may not have had a role in the main wonderland stories, but they were respected all the same, as well as all others living in wonderland. However, sometime when Courtly’s grandmother held the position, this changed. Foreign rulers brought great trade to wonderland, but also great calamity as they sucked up the fringes of the land for themselves and imposed odd cultural practices. And through this, the Jesters lose their prestige. They become laughing stocks, but not in a good way, and worse, they lose the position of advisor that they’ve held for generations. Courtly was raised by her grandmother, and grew up hearing tales about how the Jesters used to act as the bridge between the common folk of wonderland and the rulers, holding the power of keeping it all in balance. Now they have no power, and it’s cost them their world and way of life as one of these foreign rulers, the Evil Queen, weaseled her way into the role of the Queen of Hearts advisor using one of her many disguises, thus ultimately dooming wonderland. Courtly wants power, not just for power's sake, but because she sees the removal of the Jesters from power as a key domino in the cursing of wonderland. And since the only way to get power under the new rules of the world is to have a destiny, she will do anything to get her hands on one that will give her the power she deserves. 

Courtly could be a great foil for Lizzie. Lizzie was forced to flee wonderland; she hasn’t been back in roughly eight years at this point in the au, but has been ruling the refugees of wonderland in ever after. Meanwhile, Courtly has been holding it down, inheriting the leadership of what is essentially a commune of wonderland citizens back home from her grandmother. They're both deeply loyal to Wonderland and want to fix it, and both take to trying to do this through following the destiny system, but they clash in the worst of ways. Lizzie is playing everything to the rule, both in terms of destiny and in terms of her mother's cards, but ends up constantly breaking the rules of ever after’s culture by accident. Meanwhile Courtly is playing within the rules, but with malicious compliance. Courtly believes the current line of Hearts rulers got Wonderland cursed? Steal the destiny of the Princess of Hearts! Now she wins the game while only bending the rules. Courtly gets what she wants through manipulation, acting, and flattery, while Lizzie is a stalwart believer in always having her statements and emotions reflect the truth as she understands it. They are both scared, lonely individuals with the weight of their world on their shoulders but find themselves in fundamental conflict due to past sins of the previous generations that neither were at fault for.

[fairuzfan]

i’ve seen so many people simply claim that jewish palestinians point blank do not exist and it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of judaism/jewish history to claim they do… 🫥 deeply exhausting takes on this website

That's the thing is that it's just a blatant rewrite of history. And I'm not saying this to tokenize Jewish Palestinians or anything or make them a construct, it's just as someone who wonders at what point "Palestinian" ends and what point "Jewish" begins or vise versa. Like it's a question of identity. If I decide, myself, that I want to convert to judiasm... well right now, I can't as Palestinians aren't allowed to convert which is weird as hell, but if I could and wanted to — am I giving up a part of identity and switching it out for another one? Am I allowed to keep both identities together? If so, how do I fit into my community at large? What decides me, a 3rd generation refugee who has never been to Palestine, as "Palestinian" enough? Someone can deny my Palestinian heritage because there are arbitrary definitions being put in place without the consultation of all community members.

Like what's the point of this separation? I genuinely don't see a reason beyond segregation purposes. Some people say that it's to keep Jewish people safe (which I don't believe but to go along with this argument), But that safety relies on segregation and division of a society. Which obviously no real safety can occur, but also like you can't lie and say that it's something it's not. You can't say a society that makes distinctions based on identity legally is in any way democratic or just for all people for that matter. Because even if there are efforts to make people equal, when you have to say "Palestinians and Jews are equal..." Well you just straight up named the two groups you think have a difference between each other. That implicitly requires the reader to perceive a divide.

And you can argue, "let's just call everyone Israeli and make no distinctions between Palestinian and Jewish people," but Palestinians in Israel would never agree to that unilaterally, even if we are operating on a two state solution (which will never happen but for arguments sake). They'd rather not abandon their cultural identification. And even then, when the society is built of Jewish supremacy with the express purpose of erasing Palestinians codified in their founding documents, is that equality, knowing an indigenous population had to give up their identity to subscribe to perceived peace? Isn't that inherently violent and anti-equality?

Indiginiety, in Palestine, as i dont feel confident to speak on other peoples cultures and struggles, has to do with your relationship to colonialism as well as the land. For me, an indigenous person who has suffered the effects of displacement of colonialism and who regularly watches from afar as their land gets tormented, to hear that the only way I can go back to visit that land is to deny my centuries worth of ancestors buried on PALESTINIAN land, then I'd be incredibly heartbroken. This is even from my own perspective, which I consider the least important in my family line. My grandmother should be able to see her father's burial place without worrying about whether or not she's considered Palestinian or fully colonized as Israeli. My mother should be able to stroll the lands she's always heard stories about without worrying that the very essense of her personhood, the thing shes been denied her entire life having to grow up in refugee camp, as a palestinian is being denied in totality at the end of her struggle. People in refugee camps should be able to go back without worrying about where they fall in the world hierarchies of weirdly defined terms.

So like what's the real purpose with this distinction, exactly?? Any sort of society which operates on some basis of understanding that it is "for" a specific group of people and not anyone else is inherently flawed.

And like, again, Jewish Palestinians are a demographic that exist, I'm not saying this as a gotcha or construct, I am asking this for myself who has stakes in the matter of how this question is answered and dealt with in this larger framework. Would I stop being Palestinian if I decide one day to convert to judiasm? Am I "Palestinian enough" to receive the right of return based on the definitions of Palestinians you come up with in an Israeli society? If I'm excluded in any way, then yeah, I'm going to be angry about it. Most people would be. The issue is that I don't see a way to go about answering these questions without inevitably excluding someone or some group, if not in the definition, in the ways we form our communities after the fact.

[anagatajavanese]

Bali OC with Barong and Rangda

Xiao Wen, my 🇨🇳 friend drew Bali OC(typical hetalia), that kind of unbelievable and made me so moved🗿 The OC name is I Gede Arnawa (In Balinese culture, an "I" is placed before a name to indicate a male, Gede means firstborn boy and Arnawa means sea) We knew each other from my two Hetalia chibi artwork about American 'TikTok Refugees' migrate to another Chinese app called Xiahongshu as ban looms, which the artwork got a lot of attention, so that lead me al luck to know her. Then I gave her this :) She has ever visited in Bali, and this artwork I also want to introduce more Balinese cultures, which I actually miss watching the fight between Barong and Rangda🗿The battle between Barong and Rangda is a dance drama that symbolizes the eternal struggle between good and evil in Balinese culture, which essentially coexist. Both are given immortality, so the fight between them never ends. Their equally powers trigger an endless fight, where there s no winner. Both good and evil can't be removed from human life, in the spiritual beliefs of the Balinese Hindu, there s a concept "Rwa Bhineda" which literally means two differences that work harmoniously, human life depends on the balance between two opposing forces. Welcome to Bali🪷

[intothestacks]

Tips for Children's Librarians 8/?

Regardless of the demographics of your patrons, make a conscious effort to read books with diverse characters.

That doesn’t mean the books need to have a diverse cast every time, but rather that you don’t always pick books with characters (especially main characters) from the same race.

Let every race have their turn at being represented. Not necessarily every time, but enough that the kids see themselves as well as others on a regular basis. Seeing oneself being represented and seeing people different from yourself represented are both wildly important.

This also means that you should make an effort to read stories with characters with different disabilities when possible too. You might have to look around for lists of books with disabled characters, but if you manage to slip in even a single disabled character book it’s a start. One book is better than none. You can work on expanding over time.

Make a conscious effort to also read books that question stereotypes.

Here's a starter list of books to add to your storytelling repertoire:

Red: A Crayon's Story by Michael Hall - Though it was probably intended to be an explanation about what being transgender is like, it also serves well for talking about invisible disabilities like dyslexia and autism, which means you can adapt the same story to talk about two different minorities. The gist of the story is that a crayon, called Red, can only draw blue things, no matter how hard they try and none of the other crayons can understand why Red can only draw blue, until another crayon recognizes that there's nothing wrong with Red but rather that they were mislabelled all along.

Families, Families, Families! by Suzanne Lang - A book about how families come in all shapes and sizes. It features a pretty extensive display of different family combinations, such as: gay and lesbian parents, parents that are divorced vs married, families with many kids vs single children, families with single parents (both male and female), families with stepsiblings, kids that live with their grandparents or aunts/uncles, and adopted kids to name a few. They even have the example of kids who have many pets vs kids with no pets!

Prince & Knight by Daniel Haack - A cute story about a prince trying to find a spouse to help him rule; it turns out he's gay and marries a knight instead of a princess.

Think Big! and Boo! by Robert Munsch - Both have Black main characters. While it's important to have stories that focus on the unique experiences and struggles of minorities, it's also important to feature books that have stories where the fact that a character is a minority is incidental and not what the focus of the story is about. These two picture books are great examples of this kind of book.

Lost and Found Cat: The True Story of Kunkush's Incredible Journey by Doug Kuntz and Amy Shrodes - The story of a lost cat's journey to be reunited with his Iraqi refugee family.

Dreamers by Yuyi Morales - The memoir of a Mexican refugee who moved to the United States with her infant son in 1994 and about how even though she left nearly everything she owned behind, she, like all refugees and immigrants, didn’t come empty-handed as they carry their culture, skills, and strengths with them.

Room on Our Rock by Jol Temple and Kate Temple – Three seals are perched on a rock. When others need shelter, do they share it? When read from front to back, the group of seals firmly believe there is no room on their rock for the parent and child seal who are seeking a place to rest. Readers are then encouraged to read the story again, from back to front, revealing a welcoming message where the seals make room for others and share their rock.

My Name Is Yoon by Helen Recorvits – Yoon's name means "shining wisdom," and when she writes it in Korean, it looks happy, like dancing figures. But her father tells her that she must learn to write it in English. In English, all the lines and circles stand alone, which is just how Yoon feels in the United States. Yoon isn't sure that she wants to be YOON. At her new school, she tries out different names.

The Name Jar by Yangsook Choi – Being the new kid in school is hard enough, but what about when nobody can pronounce your name? Having just moved from Korea, Unhei is anxious that American kids will like her. So instead of introducing herself on the first day of school, she tells the class that she will choose a name by the following week. Her new classmates are fascinated by this no-name girl and decide to help out by filling a glass jar with names for her to pick from.

[erikaogrady]

Just watched the premiere of My Adventures with Superman and I have some thoughts.

I enjoyed the first season a lot when I watched it initially but I’ve soured on it since reading a lot more Superman comics and reading JESNCIN’s posts critiquing it (which you should all definitely check out, they explain all of their points much better than I could).

The first big issue I have is them having Jor-El reveal that Krypton was a conquering empire. The first season hinted towards that interpretation but I assumed/hoped that was just going to be a misunderstanding to make Clark conflicted about his heritage, but having Jor-El come out and confirm it means that’s just what Kryton was like. There’ve been a lot of interpretations of Krypton, some of which portray it as sort of a dystopian society, but it’s always been isolationist rather than a conquering empire. And if Krypton is a colonialist entity then you cannot effectively portray Clark as a refugee which this show really wants to do. Sure, they make it clear that Jor-El and Lara Lor-Van didn’t send Kal-El to Earth to invade it, but Krypton is dying due to the their own colonialist actions. Clark isn’t the survivor of climate disaster or genocide trying to find safety in a new world, he’s the last of a conquering people trying desperately to distance himself from Krypton’s legacy.

Another big concern I have is in making Kara Zor-El a baby when she leaves Krypton. One of the most notable and interesting things about Supergirl is that she, unlike Clark, remembers Krypton and lived through its destruction. While Krypton and its culture are all theoretical to Clark they are Kara’s lived experiences. Removing that history from Kara feels like a huge missed opportunity to explore more immigrant experiences, which this show is trying to do. If Kara had retained her history we could have seen a different side of Krypton from her perspective that could have served to flesh out the planet’s culture and perhaps shown that there are people on the planet who don’t agree with the planet’s colonialist history. But the show seems entirely disinterested in portraying Krypton as anything other than unsympathetic, which just doesn’t work if Kara and Clark are meant to be refugees misunderstood by Earth.

My third issue is Jimmy’s exchange with Lex about finding his own path. This could have been worked if Jimmy didn’t know anything about Lex and just saw a guy looking down and wanted to help him, but Jimmy knows that Lex is actively against Superman simply for being an alien, so why would Jimmy want to help someone he knows is actively publicly racist towards his best friend? That in addition to Lois telling Clark she’s not sure if they should find his cousin because she doesn’t trust Kryptonians other than Clark, feels like another example of these versions of Lois and Jimmy being weirdly insensitive of Clark’s experiences of allegorical racism. Which is weird when they’re both supposed to be people of color.

Overall it feels like the people behind this show did not think about the implications of any of the changes they made to Superman lore. In general I’m not somebody who cares to much about changes made in adaptation, I just want a good story, but every change made here actively works against what they’re trying to do thematically. There are so many comics that handle Clark’s status as a refugee and an immigrant in really compelling and effective ways (like Superman Smashes the Klan) but My Adventure of Superman feels like it’s working against itself.

Anyway, go check out @jesncin ‘s tumblr, they have a lot of great analysis of the show, and also go read Superman Smashes the Klan if you want a modern Superman story that handles immigrant themes better.

-https://www.tumblr.com/jesncin/737954867195314176/a-failure-of-asian-lois-lane-pt-2-my-adventures

-https://www.tumblr.com/jesncin/747518315382063104/i-hope-superman-fandom-as-a-whole-will-one-day

-https://www.tumblr.com/jesncin/749324579544186880/my-response-to-the-potential-of-exploring-an

[oxygenbefore1775]

Beset with Mikasa cutting her hair short has a deeper symbolic meaning delulu

So, previously I never treated this as anything more than a comic scene with Jean’s chagrin being the punchline of it. Jean complimenting an element of Mikasa’s appearance → cue Jean’s compliment being immediately undermined by her willingness to get rid of the very element he’s expressed fascination towards mere moments ago only because Eren said so. That’s how I saw it.

Perhaps my initial blindness towards the actual depth of this gesture (and all the future transformations Mikasa’s haircut goes through) was rooted in the way I’ve been culturally hardwired to perceive hair. Like in the West there’s a strong correlation between hair length and gender - women have long hair and men have short hair (stereotypically) - so in the Western media whenever a woman’s hair is cut it’s either seen as her being devalued or her abandoning her feminine nature for something masculine. In the East, this difference is less pronounced - both men&women, barring the westernization, historically tend to have longer hair, with short hair being an outlier. And AoT’s relative uninvolvement with things like gender + obviously not offering a Western perspective on narrative elements kinda made me gloss over the true symbolism of Mikasa’s decision and its implications. 

But, it turns out to be much more interesting if you take another delulu angle on it.

From what I gather, in Eastern culture, hair is more closely tied to identity than to gender. Cutting one’s hair often symbolizes leaving a former life behind. For instance, Ghibli’s Ashitaka cuts his hair after being exiled from his village, and Buddhist monks and nuns shave their heads as a ritual to signify detachment from their previous lives in the material world. There’s also a connection between hair and one’s relationship to their parents. In Confucian thought, it’s believed that your body is a gift from your parents, and altering it - whether by cutting your hair or nails - is a form of disrespect. While this is rooted in Chinese culture, it’s worth considering how much of this belief has influenced Japanese traditions and media.

Ultimately, the act of cutting hair retains its core symbolism: starting anew. That’s why Mikasa’s decision to cut her hair is such a pivotal moment in her "hair arc." It takes place on the very day the EMA trio joins the Cadet Corps, marking the beginning of her new life.

But why now? Mikasa has experienced profound changes before this point. Her hair could have been cut short on two earlier occasions: after the death of her biological family or the fall of Shiganshina. Yet, it didn’t happen. The reason, I believe, lies in the nature of her life before joining the Cadets. Until then, her life, though traumatic, had been relatively non-violent. It wasn’t devoid of hardship - her parents were brutally murdered, and she spent two years toiling in the fields to survive - but Mikasa herself never inflicted violence unless it was in direct self-defense.

Mikasa's “new life”, which led her to finally cut her hair short, could only begin with her becoming a soldier - an violent vocation and something she never wanted for herself. She would have been content to live her life as a refugee, had it not been for Eren's decision to join the Cadet Corps, which compelled her to follow him. That’s why it’s kinda poignant that it is Eren that suggested she cut her hair.

Suffice to say, Eren and Mikasa’s dynamic is largely unsustainable as they both strive for opposite things in life and thus weigh each other down. But, because Mikasa is attached to Eren more than he is to her, she is more willing to let go of her own wishes to follow Eren. And dare I say this is what Mikasa’s “hair arc” represents - choosing to fight only because Eren follows this path.

Not to sound completely delusional, but even Eren’s wording highlights the violence Mikasa is now tying her life to. "Your hair’s too long; you could get into an accident using ODM gear, which you’ll be doing a lot starting today". ODM gear exists solely for killing Titans - a necessary but inherently violent act, and one that Mikasa never cared about before. Her willingness to embrace this path is less about personal conviction and more about following Eren’s lead.

So yeah, this is my thesis: Eren’s choice to fight and Mikasa following his lead results in her having short hair. And the unfolding events in the plot only feed into my delulu.

Mikasa’s hair grows shorter the further she distances herself from the life she knew before cutting it at age 12, and the deeper she becomes entrenched in her new role as a soldier. An obvious example of it is the start of the Marleyan arc, with Mikasa’s hair getting shorter than ever. This reflects the violent lengths Mikasa is now willing to go for Eren. Before, she primarily fought Titans (with rare exceptions during the Uprising arc), but now she’s waging war against an entire nation. Previously, she protected Eren as he killed creatures once considered inhuman; now, she defends him as he takes the lives of countless innocents. Mikasa’s increasingly shorter hair symbolizes how far she’s strayed from her initial self and how deeply she’s tied her identity to following Eren's path - no matter how destructive it becomes.

This is why it’s poignant (I think) that in the cabin sequence, Mikasa’s hair is long again. Though Eren is still in her life, in this dream he abandons his pursuit of violence, and Mikasa’s life returns to what it was before becoming a Cadet. This suggests that Eren’s presence isn’t what determines Mikasa’s hair length in her 'hair arc'; it’s only when he chooses the path of destruction that her hair shortens. Think of it like an Euler diagram: short hair happens when the two elements - "Eren" and "Eren choosing violence" - intersect.

Similarly, in 857, Mikasa’s long hair symbolizes her return to her past life, even without Eren in it.

Another point could be made about Mikasa’s long hair in Jean’s fantasy - it's consistent with the peaceful life she imagines for herself. However, this doesn’t necessarily reflect Mikasa’s character arc; it’s more about Jean’s vision of her, as he’s long admired her long hair. (Don't really want to make this about Jeankasa, this is more about my girlie alone)

That’s all I have to say, this is my Mikasa hair delulu

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Alta Ifland

Published: Mar 25, 2024

Most of us have had at least once in a lifetime the experience of paradise when a place seems suddenly transfigured and elevated to an otherworldly realm. I experienced paradise in Iceland’s Reykjavik Airport in September 1991, where the plane that took me as a political refugee from Romania to the United States stopped for a couple of hours for a layover. It was the first time I had left my country of birth, and Reykjavik’s airport was my first contact with the West. I remember entering spaces that made me think of Aladdin’s cave of wonders, where under transparent glass lay mesmerizing diamond necklaces, and gorgeous saleswomen with seducing smiles inviting me to try them on; and I remember the impeccable marble-white restrooms like an alien spaceship with curious buttons I had no idea how to maneuver. Everything was clean, as if under the care of a doting fairy, and everybody smiled quietly as if life was a streak of uninterrupted joy.

I went back to Reykjavik for a literary conference twenty years later, but I could no longer find paradise. The diamond necklaces had no sparkle, Aladdin’s cave turned out to be a banal store, the women were like everywhere else, and the toilets nothing to write home about. The gap between the two experiences paralleled my first encounter with JFK Airport in New York, where—having to wait for my connecting flight to Jacksonville, Florida—I wandered for several hours among a hustle and bustle of people, stores, restaurants, buses and taxis, convinced that I was exploring the city itself. I mean, who in their right mind would imagine that they could find all of the above in an airport? It was only years later when I returned to New York that I realized that all I had seen of the city was, in fact, the airport.

These two primal encounters have left me with a lifelong love of airports, although life post-9/11 has considerably altered the experience. But the impression that our existence is made of two irreconcilable universes remained for a long time until, roughly, the advent of social media, which managed to unite the two into one indistinguishable blur and a chorus of mingled, screaming voices. Having spent my life between different worlds, I’m fascinated by the different frameworks people can place around the same events, according to the point of view given to them by their location in time and space.

As newly-arrived immigrants, my then-husband and I naturally gravitated toward other immigrants from Eastern Europe, and since they often went to church—which was, anyhow, the only socializing venue in Jacksonville (a city immortalized by Henry Miller in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare as a soul-killing locale)—we found ourselves for two years in the strange company of puritan evangelicals. After this edifying experience, my admission to an M.A. program at the University of Florida threw me into an environment that seemed completely opposite to the previous one, as if America were made of two separate worlds with two different types of people. Both types were a shock because they didn’t resemble the Americans I had known from the movies I’d seen—neither the neighbors who asked our Romanian friends to cover the non-existent breasts of their five-year-old daughter at the pool, nor my professors from the English department who joyfully professed their Communist and Marxist convictions to a roomful of sympathetic ears.

I cannot forget one professor who praised Mao’s “cultural revolution”—to this day I have no idea whether he was aware that millions had died as a result of this “revolution,” and that many Chinese in rural areas were so starved that they ate their own children.

It was clear to me that these academics knew nothing about the world I came from, which was, again, shocking, given that I knew a lot more about their world even though the country I grew up in was so isolated from the West that we used to refer to it as “outside.” I was the one who grew up in a prison, yet it was American academics who were the ignorant ones.

Growing up in Communist Romania, I read many American classics (the first book I read at eight years old was Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer) and watched countless American movies. On the other hand, my American counterparts never read any books by Romanians (though I am not arrogant enough to demand that) or by Eastern Europeans generally, and rarely watched any European movies, let alone Eastern European movies. Yet these people who were clearly ignorant about my world were not shy about letting me know that what I experienced was not “real” Communism and that they—who had never set foot in a Communist country—were much better positioned to define Communism. How was that possible?

Let me tell you what nobody teaches Americans about the part of the world I come from.

--

For years, whenever I drove on one of America’s ten-lane highways, it felt impossible that this world existed in the same historical era as the world of my grandparents. I don’t have any photos of my paternal grandparents because in Communist Romania very few of us owned cameras. But they have remained etched in my mind in a way that makes them immortal, eternally old, as if their dark faces had always been crossed by deep ridges—the kind of faces only Indians (as we called them back then) had in black and white Hollywood movies, their feet always bare and so thick with calluses that when they washed them at night you could see the solidified dirt like mortar between brick-like layers of skin. They never used soap yet they had a drawer full of it, every single piece sent or brought by my father from the city. For them, soap was the equivalent of expensive jewelry, which Grandmother occasionally showed me, opening the drawer with pride: “See? Your father sent them. I keep them all.”

My grandparents lived in a world in which there was no money—I mean, there was no exchange of money, save for the rare occasions when Father gave them a few coins to buy bread. I remember walking with Grandfather unending kilometers through a sea of yellow corn until we reemerged in the world of the living, and Grandfather took out a handkerchief with a complicated knot that he untied to free the coins in exchange for the loaf of bread handed to him by the store clerk at the edge of the cornfield. But this type of exchange happened rarely. Usually, we ate hard polenta, the default everyday meal of Romanian peasants. We ate it either as a substitute for bread, which my grandparents usually couldn’t afford, or else as a meal immersed in a bowl of milk, one bowl for the entire table, inside of which our spoons often met, clanking.

My grandparents lived in the same way their ancestors had for generations in that part of the world: the province of Oltenia in Southern Romania. The only thing that had changed was that they were no longer periodically invaded by the Turks. The stove Grandmother used for cooking was like none other I’d seen except in films about remote indigenous populations—an oval-shaped structure of whitewashed clay set on the ground, with an opening through which one could glimpse the burning twigs, and atop, simmering pots full of aromatic dishes. In front of the stove, wearing her long Gypsy-like dress and stirring the pots, was seated Grandmother on a tiny chair, it too from a different world—about twenty inches high, with only three legs.

My grandparents’ village is where I spent my summers until I finished high school. During the school year, I lived with my parents in a small town in Transylvania in one of the countless intensely ugly Soviet-style flats. The grade school I went to was five minutes away on foot—since first grade, we all went on foot everywhere, unsupervised, and had the apartment key tied on a cord around our neck (apparently, today’s Romanians call us “the generation with the key by the neck”). Needless to say, we came back home on our own, warmed up the food prepared by our mothers, and were responsible for the supervision of our younger siblings until our parents came home from work.

My classmates were mostly children of factory workers and public office clerks; many of these parents had never finished high school and those with university diplomas were rare. Under Communism there was almost no middle class, and for a simple reason: the majority of people who had been part of it (university professors, politicians, economists, sociologists, priests, artists, writers, journalists, etc.) had been imprisoned, tortured and murdered.

Their guilt? They were all “enemies of the people,” the “people” being defined as dirt-poor peasants and what Marx called “the “proletariat.” Neither of my parents had college degrees. My father, whose parents were illiterate, never read a book; my mother, whose father was a chiabur (a farmer who paid for the sin of once owning land by spending a year in prison and having his eldest daughter refused admission to high school), used to read and over the years acquired a small library of Romanian, French, and English classics which I read dozens of times. After I finished reading our library, I began to explore the local libraries. With my best friend, whose parents were construction workers and morbid alcoholics, we took weekly trips to a library where the books were so yellowed and old they fell apart, and returned with a huge travel bag full of books. Without any guidance, we discovered many of the great classics: Sartre, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Cervantes, Gide, Flaubert, Zweig, Twain, Dickens—we read them all, entirely unaware that they were “great writers,” because no one had lectured us on their greatness. In our isolated world, we had a great advantage over children growing up in Western countries: we could discover the world with our own minds and in our own words.

When I say we had an “advantage,” don’t imagine that I'm glorifying the “system” in which we grew up. The world in which we were reading these books had the following characteristics: long lines to buy anything, major food items (sugar, oil, coffee, flour, butter) rationed and hard to find, hygiene products (soap, feminine products, toothpaste) entirely absent, winters without heat spent with our coats on inside our homes, electricity two hours a day, a single TV channel with most of its programs being delirious political propaganda, water cut off for days and sometimes weeks. In order to survive most city dwellers had to use the black market, where you could buy a pair of jeans for the cost of a monthly salary. For reference, my parents’ incomes combined totaled about eighty dollars per month.

In school we studied French. Without anyone’s exhortation and only the help of a dictionary, I soon began to read French classics for my own pleasure: Mérimée, Gide, Zola, Martin du Gard, Dumas, everything I could find. I was the best student in my grade in French, so I decided to major in it. In order to be admitted to college one needed to pass a very difficult exam in one’s specialty, and there were only about twenty positions for French students per university with just a handful of universities in the entire country. The majority of applicants able to pass the exam were either children of university professors or students from preparatory high schools. Given these circumstances, my teachers, neighbors, and parents all insisted that I should study engineering like everybody else and told me I was crazy to even consider French. Yet I persisted and passed the exam with the highest possible grade. While in college, during an internship where I worked as an assistant French teacher in a high school, I attended a class where the lead teacher introduced French food to the students, and after several minutes of hearing descriptions of baguettes, brie, camembert, and the like, one of them fainted. For us, this food was like fiction—not only had we never tasted it, we couldn’t even imagine that we would ever see it outside of a book. We were hungry and cold all the time, yet whenever we’d turn on the TV all we'd hear was that we lived in a “golden era”—the regime’s official language—for which we’d have to thank the Communist Party and its General Secretary, Comrade Nicolae Ceaușescu. All the country’s institutions held regular meetings where everybody, using a language of thought-terminating clichés which we called “wooden language,” had to massage the ego of the “Dear Leader” who made such an era possible. In this language, Ceaușescu was a “skilled helmsman,” a “beloved parent,” and “the exploitation of man by man” had been forever abolished.

During this "golden era” of Communism, when I was barely twenty-one, I got blacklisted as a “person very dangerous for the security of the state” because I had married a dissident. You see, in Communism, the entire family paid for the deeds of any of its members, including those of the dead ones. My husband’s main guilt was that he was the brother of a famous Romanian journalist who worked abroad for one of the Western radio stations that condemned the injustices of Communism. To understand why this was considered a crime, you need to know that the first thing Ceaușescu did every day was read a report on what had been said about him the previous day.

Since his fate was already sealed and he wasn’t even allowed to go to college, my husband and a few friends tried to create a political party that would have been an alternative to the only official one. Needless to say in a country where one in four citizens was an informant, they were quickly apprehended and subjected to harsh interrogations. This happened before my husband and I met; him being too traumatized to talk about it, I found out from his parents how he had been imprisoned and cruelly beaten. After we got married, he signed a petition demanding that the regime stop the demolition of villages and churches, a project Ceaușescu had started because he realized that the traditional rural lifestyle still gave people some independence. Consequently, Ceaușescu put us under 24-hour surveillance, with a car constantly parked in front of our building. We were young and foolish, and so we made fun of the unending series of spies who were struggling to remain inconspicuous every time we went out and they followed us. Sometimes we mocked them overtly, laughing out loud as we hopped on a bus, while they remained outside, but it was a dangerous game: you never knew when an “accident” could happen.

One afternoon, an individual in a black leather jacket got out of the car parked in front of our building while holding an envelope in his hand, entered for a few seconds, then returned with his hand empty. We didn’t keep the letter that my husband had retrieved from our mailbox because it made him so furious he tore it to pieces. The letter warned that “some people” might want to hurt me badly. The police summoned me a few days later to their headquarters for an undisclosed matter, with my husband forced to wait outside. Nothing horrible happened to me that day, save for the fact that I was asked to wait for several hours while my husband remained outside, not knowing when—or if—I was going to come out. When I was finally brought into an office, the officer informed me in a performatively worried tone that “some people” wanted to hurt me, and he wanted to make me aware of this danger.

This is how we lived for about two years until the anti-Communist Revolution from December 1989 swept the dictator and his clique away.

In the first week after the dictator was killed a member of the newly formed Front of the National Salute—the revolutionary organization that replaced the Communist Party and of which my husband was briefly a member—came to our home to uninstall a microphone that the Securitate (the Secret Police) had hidden behind our bed.

It took another quarter of a century until my husband was allowed to see the file the Secret Police had on us. It contained two thousand pages of content produced through the coordinated efforts of dozens of individuals and tens of thousands of dollars spent every month on our surveillance—in a country in which the average income was forty dollars. It also included the names of the “friends" who had informed on us—some of which we’d already guessed, others, a surprise. Our Secret Police file remained open until December 1991, that is, two years after the regime had fallen, and three months after we had left the country for America.

--

I left the building where my parents lived almost forty years ago, but when I last visited, some of the neighbors I had growing up were still there. Imagine passing by an old man who looks twenty years older than you, and then remembering that you had a crush on him when you were twelve and he was fourteen. The grey Soviet flats have remained unchanged, but in a certain way give you the reassuring feeling that time stands still and there's a continuity between generations—something absent in ever-changing American society.

While the memory of life in the small town of my childhood is ambivalently hazy, when I remember the rural world of my grandparents a wave of nostalgia washes over me. The three-legged wobbling chairs, the haystack above the cow barn where I used to read, even the short-lived doll made of rags that a friend from across the street had taught me how to make, ephemeral as she was, is now bathed in a golden aura of longing for a lost world.

[ Photos of Alta's grandparent's home, taken during a recent visit to Romania. On the left is the cow barn where Alta used to read. ]

I sometimes look at the children of my American friends, with their room full of toys, and I know that their toys don’t make them any happier than my rag doll had made me. And I know that my American female friends, emancipated as they are from the “patriarchy,” aren’t happier than Grandmother. In all traditional societies, labor is organized according to the existence of the two sexes and this has nothing to do with anyone’s “oppression.” Men do some things, women do other things—it's simply a division of labor based on physical differences between the two, and it’s a division that can be observed across cultures and millennia. According to all statistics and their own statements, it’s obvious that many American women are in profound disharmony with themselves and the world in which they live. And this is certainly not because the world in which Grandmother lived was better—although I am wondering more and more whether it was much worse.

The first thing you need to be unhappy is to ask yourself whether you are happy or not—Unlike American women, I am convinced that this is a question Grandmother never asked herself.

Grandmother, just like her mother and her mother’s mother, lived in a way that imitated the lives of previous generations, in an entanglement with “tradition”—the dirty word that American feminists and progressives utter with so much disdain and which they translate as “oppression” and “victimization.” I often try to imagine what Grandmother would have answered had I told her that she was “oppressed” by the patriarchy in particular and society in general. I think she would have had a hard time understanding the concept. You see, it’s hard to feel “oppressed” when you have inner freedom. Aside from this, nobody in the world of my grandparents thought in these terms because in traditional societies it is shameful to be a victim. Only in a world of privilege can victimhood acquire a desirable status. I call this the law of subliminal contradiction, something I discovered by observing how Americans behave. Another example: only in a society of excess can the richest people dress in a way that imitates the homeless. In the society of poverty in which I grew up, it was shameful to wear torn-apart clothes; on the other hand, if you look at the way most well-to-do Americans are dressed today, you’d think they live on the street. Consider high fashion clothing that gives the illusion of poverty and manual labor, like mud-splashes and rips on jeans.

Today I write these lines from France, in my second exile. And many things have changed! My husband is now my ex-husband; he has returned to Romania, and I to Europe. My best friend with whom I used to explore libraries and books, and who grew up in a one-bedroom apartment with two parents, a grandmother, an older sister, and her daughter, and who at ten years old was forced by circumstances to take care of the entire household while her father lay drunk in a ditch and her mother worked on construction sites, is now a doctor and owner of a major medical lab. Unlike my American acquaintances, she never saw herself as a “victim” of anything. When I came to this country as a political refugee over thirty years ago, the thing that most impressed me about Americans was that they were very responsible and resilient. Thirty years later this country has been turned upside-down. But the truth is that the signs and the seeds of this reversal were already present thirty years ago, mostly in one particular space: academia.

The rare Marxists from back then are now the norm (although many traditional Marxists point out that, unlike American academics, Marx was never concerned with “race and gender”). They are the people who call Putin “right-wing,” as if he'd been schooled by the Republican Party rather than the Communist Party, whose Secret Police he represented as an officer of the KGB. The reason Putin is “right-wing” is because he’s a nationalist and anti-LGBT—but if these academics had read any books from my part of the world, they’d know that every single Communist country was ultra-nationalist and homophobic. In Communist Romania you could go to prison for twenty years for being a homosexual. Putin may no longer be a “Communist” because the gifts of the Capital are way too sweet, but his authoritarianism is rooted in Communism nonetheless, and his homophobia has nothing to do with being “right-wing” unless you project a Western value system onto a completely different world in which the categories of Left and Right merge.

After you’ve experienced the clichés of Communist propaganda, you can easily spot the mental structures underlying the impulse to reduce the complexity of the world down to one huge power struggle in which everybody is either an oppressor or a victim. This is why having lived through Communism has become very useful in contemporary America, and it's why the few of us who denounced the insanity of Communism when it could have cost our lives won’t keep our mouths shut now that America is losing its mind. For instance, the concept of “reparations” based on inherited collective guilt is eerily similar to the Communist practice of punishing an entire family for the deeds of any of its members, including the dead. Just like the “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” activists who are being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to lecture you, the Communists created a privileged class called the “nomenklatura”—Party activists who did nothing but spread ideology and propaganda, making sure that the rest of us conformed to the official dogma. One trait of people who create dogmatic ideologies is that they never feel obligated to obey their own dogma—if they did, they would have to cancel their own privilege.

Because history is always written from one point of view, being an American academic often comes with the privilege of (re)writing history. And in an Americentric world, these academics look at everything through the lens of their own history, which they project onto everybody else. When have you ever heard academics from English departments and Women/Gender/Ethnic Studies—who have been teaching generations of students about the evils of European colonization—denounce the colonization of Eastern Europe by the Russians and by the Turks? It’s as if 500 years of history—the history of the Ottoman Empire—never existed. Or as if Russia started its colonial history with the invasion of Ukraine.

According to these academics, being European is equivalent to having a mysterious essence called “whiteness,” and I should repent for my “white privilege” and Europe’s colonial history, as if my “white” ancestors had colonized anyone and not the other way around, or as if they had enslaved “brown” Muslims and not the other way around.

Let me tell you an anecdote about how I was made to pay for my “white privilege.” You may remember the brouhaha after the poem performed by the young, black author, Amanda Gorman, at Biden’s inauguration, was commissioned to be translated into Dutch not by another black woman, but by a white person. This white person happened to be Marieke Lukas Rijneveld, who identifies as “non-binary” and is a few years older than Gorman. After a complaint that the chosen translator was not black, the translator withdrew from the project and the publisher issued a public apology—never mind that it was Gorman herself who had chosen the translator and that it’s quite likely that there aren’t many black translators who translate into Dutch and have Rijneveld’s literary skills. I know this because I had read Rijneveld’s award-winning book translated into English and recommended it on social media. When the scandal broke, many American translators—some of whom I was personally acquainted with through my work as a translator—commented on the affair online, supporting the decision to replace the white translator with a black translator. In response, I dared to share the comment of a French member of PEN, who believed that skin color should have nothing to do with who translates what. I accompanied this comment with my own: “I think that, this being a forum of translators, we should give a voice to different opinions from other languages.” I was subjected to a pile-on of virulent attacks, summoned to delete my “inflammatory” remarks, and it was made clear to me that my opinion could only be the result of my “white privilege” because I was (I'm not kidding you) a “cultural essentialist.” The cherry on top was that I was also called a “transphobe” because I had “misgendered” Rijneveld—the irony being that I was the only one in that group who had actually read and supported the “non-binary” author. I left these discussions after it was clear that I didn’t have the “revolutionary consciousness” to belong.

The fact is that nothing—and certainly not “white privilege” or any kind of “systemic” anything—is stopping anyone in America from learning languages and translating. When I was a graduate student in French at the University of Florida, my black classmate had spent time in France, just like everybody else in our program. I was the only one who had never been to France. Yet if I could learn French while believing that I would never see France because traveling to Western Europe was, for a Romanian of my station, as impossible as going to Mars, then any American—black, blue, or purple—can do it.

Privilege is a funny thing, especially in a society in which being a victim grants the highest social status. I for one prefer to assume the privilege of having experienced both Communism and life as an immigrant—a privilege America’s social justice warriors will never have—because it has taught me that you can be free under the worst dictatorship and a slave to groupthink in the freest of worlds.

==

#SmashCapitalism

🤡

[portuz]

Hi, I’m called protus (portuz as a nickname), 27 years old, Ugandan by nationality. Sometimes when I tell some LGBT folks about discovering my sexuality, many get left puzzled, I knew my sexuality at a young age. in Africa, most people we are groomed through culture, tradition and religion, so same sex companionship is totally prohibited, it was in 2009 (16 years old) that i had to move on to college school (independent hostel for boys only). Although fellow students could see it as crazy to be gay and if reported to administration with prove, definitely you will be expelled. I used to approach some guys who looked kinda gay ( I took chances), not many, some responded negativity and only two accepted (peter and Isaac) so I spent six years in college with relationships in two time intervals. After some good performance at college, I had to proceed to university, here everything is open (far away from parents), people could wear different types of clothing, things moved on smoothly and love was open to those who had their spouses.On the other side of us/LGBT, ALL schools, colleges and universities have no room for LGBT, sometimes they provided additional lessons of awareness to students as it’s WRONG to be LGBT. I got Roger and we loved each other, after spending a couple of months with him, I started showing those who were attracted to me that am gay, thisruined my life, I was chased out of school, chased out of my rentals, I returned home and my biological family tried to kill me, I couldn’t go to police because the law is against LGBT, I had to cross over to a neighboring country to seek protection in UNHCR (kakuma refugee camp), with over 310,000 refugees from different countries, still homophobia is too much both from some officials, doctors and fellow refugees at large, BUT that can’t change who I am, im gay, I’m portuz 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🌈🌈.

[rect-bibi]

Hi it's me again 👀 after reading the universes synopsis I'm interested in their respective mcs, how are they named? How do they react to the situations around them? ((How would they interact to each other in a crossover?))

THAT IS A VERY GOOD QUESTION THAT I AM VERY HAPPY TO GET and one that will have one hella long answer so uuuh enjoy the read below about my and my gf's OCs LMAO

"YET TO BE RENAMED UNIVERSE" (we will update it soon i promise)

AKARI - He, along with his younger sister - Nora - is a student at the Academy where they train people to either directly fight the monsters called "Alters" (majority of the cases) or help those at the front lines in different ways. He is also the son of a former teacher from the Academy, who was forced to retire due to extreme injuries. Much like practically everyone at the Academy, he has powers. His power is plasma creation and control. (appears in the form of those squiggles you see in plasma lamps) He is extremely hot headed, not patient at all. He naturally had anger issues and given he is the eldest, his parents sadly didn't figure out the discipline until it was a tad too late (the were young parents, give em a break theyre all good otherwise ToT). Either way he is quick to jump into action, more often than not for the worse rather than better. Very overconfident, but he gets CONSTANTLY humbled by his peers.

"BETROTHED"

LYRA & ORION - They are both the main characters, a "do not separate" deal. They are leaders of the Valley Kingdom and the Forest Kingdom respectively, who arranged a political marriage to form a stronger alliance for the sake of their regions Lyra was the King of the Valley, a non-gendered term for the highest ruler of the Valley Kingdom she gave away to Orion upon marriage. Given she inherited the throne at an extremely young age and had to be guided by her personal advisor as well as the Noble Council, she isn't as versed in politics as she would like to be, mostly in regards to being an assertive ruler. She is simply too polite for her own good most of the time. Orion is the opposite - born to a culture that values straight-forwardness and equality above all. He actively listens to people when he thinks them to be reliable, but quick to completely put down anyone who acts out of line. they may be a stereotypical shoujo-esque medieval fantasy couple but they are MY stereotypical shoujo-esque medieval fantasy couple thank you very much

"SALEM'S DISSONANCE"

NER & JODY - Technically two main characters, but they both share the same body. Jody was a normal human child, living his life as well as he could with humanity threatened by the Ilrah - aliens who both overtake human bodies and eat them. However, one day he was coerced by other children to go outside the Safe Zone, which resulted in him being attached by an Ilrah Hatchling. Normally that would result in the Ilrah killing his conscience, thus replacing him within his body, but instead it ended with him sharing the body with the Ilrah that tried to overtake him. Jody himself is a rather cowardly guy, shy and awkward and too afraid to speak up much. He is also more of a pacifist, straying away from violence if he can help it. Ner on the other hand is the exact opposite - brash and loud, not caring about anyone's opinion and more than happy to get involved in any form of brawl.

"ETHTERIA"

MAX - An Ethterian, a descendant of magic alien refugees from an utterly destroyed planet "Ethteria" (hence the title), as well as a soldier for special forces dealing with monsters called "Fiends" - the same ones behind the demise of their home planet who are now spreading disstress on Earth. Originally a member of a team of soldiers, forced to fully disband due to a tragic accident that had majority of the surviving members retire, Max being the only one to stay within the forces, fighting mostly solo. Or at the very least until 15 years later when she is forced to lead a group of newbies and teach them the basics. She is overall logical and stern, but also stubborn. While she values discipline a lot, she isn't above disobeying orders from her superiors if she sees it fit for the current situation.

As for crossover,,, i decided to make these silly things :3