#but those letters made a huge impact on how i perceive him

[iedistis]

It's a shame they changed the Franc letters so much tone-wise because they gave Gortash a lot more nuance in his methods than what's going on in the patched version. Sure, those may be more banite but I always liked how in the original, the tyranny was not in the relationship between both characters but rather their acts committed together.

I enjoy Gortash as a character so much because he subverted the expectation of what a Chosen of Bane would be. His approach is deeply Machiavellian. The idea of him working his way up through the ranks of aristocracy by both cultural impact that is unignorable thanks to his machinery and a force of personality that disarms his targets emotionally and turns them favourable towards him on an interpersonal level instead of forcing them into submission via fear and threats(as one would expect) made it compelling. It made way for tyranny harder to uproot than one built on aggression because it would not just subjugate people, but change them. A person who fears you is closer to betrayal than one who loves instead. It is an alternative way of subjugation and I like to think that's what may have differentiated him from other Banites so much it made him a Chosen.

And those letters showed how that could've played out. They were deeply manipulative. Threats, if there were any, were in the beginning and faded into the background with the overpowering charm that continued on. The newer version falls flat in comparison. They start and end with thinly veiled threats and that's just not as powerful.

It sucks because I considered them a potential window into how the past relationship of Gortash/Durge could've started out too (regardless of how you interpret the nature of it). I don't think they could've gotten so close as to prompt something like the prayer of forgiveness like this simply because I can't see a Dark Urge responding to threats, fearless avatar of murder and all that. But the first version? Shallow flattery to get the foot into the door and appealing to their wants (like some good old torture racks) to ultimately foster an emotional attachment so severe it borders on heresy for at least one of them? That's awful. I like it.

In the patched letters he's just…evil. A more open and diplomatic (and perhaps more in line with bane) version of it, but also one a lot more predictive. Shame.

[iamnightduchess]

SnK 139 (A personal thought on Reiner & Mikasa's ending)

We have finally reached the end. For those who began this fandom since 2010, it's been 11 years of happiness, tears and heartbreak, on top of character discourse with our respective favorites. This manga is rich with amazing life values that requires more than just a quick zip through of every chapter. It requires a thorough, repeat reading. Hajime Isayama weaved his universe in a way that never cease to blow all of his readers' minds away but still touched our hearts in an emotional way.

(Special thanks to @pethellhounds for the key pointers for this post!)

No doubt, I love all of the characters, each of their flaws, strengths and growth but my two favorites have always been Mikasa and Reiner, individually.

Upon the first two reads, I was saddened, I was devastated and I allowed my emotions to filter the absolute value of the final chapter; in particularly to my most favorites. All thanks to the discourse we had in our RK discord, my brethren offered me a different perspective on how we could truly perceive ch.139 for what it truly is: a bittersweet farewell which only leads to new beginnings.

Reiner Braun

Armin was destined to save humanity, Eren confided on that himself. Even if it was Mikasa's personal choice on ch.123 that is the ultimatum that had saved humanity by eradicating the power of the Titans from the world for good. As referenced on this post, it has been Mikasa that was destined to free Ymir all along through her selflessness.

Upon first read, the following panel seemed to portray the remaining alliance members in a different light. Everyone looked amazing, happy as they exchanged banter just like how old friends with shared traumatizing experiences do. After all they're all celebrated world heroes - living with possibly an upgraded lifestyle, fame and wealth even within those 3 years. But upon several more reads and deeper observation, one could not entirely disregard the rather dark and gloomy atmosphere beyond the bright surface. In particular Jean and Reiner, who seemed to be a bit more noticeable.

Jean somehow is putting on a front as a skirt-chaser (having preference for younger girls) while Reiner seemed to be simping over his old crush (who's already married & has a child in Paradis).

The above panel seemed comical because the actions & lines seemed a bit "out of nowhere", but beyond the surface - everyone's hurting secretly from within, some are masking their pain, though some remained unaffected because they all shared a heavy burden of guilt towards Eren's death & Mikasa's withdrawal from the group to lay their friend in his final resting place all the way in Paradis. Jean and Reiner both are putting on a front.

Do remember that during the Marley arc, not even once was Reiner shown to reminisce about Historia very specifically. Not even in a fleeting thought, thus why it could also be deduced that she did not actually have a huge impact on his memory or his genuine affections beyond just a fleeting crush to hide his tormented mental state from within. How could someone who has been shown to have tremendous emotional growth and a consistent, albeit shaky psychological regulation during his primary arc was reduced to a typical simp archetype in the final chapter? This is not, a "Reiner can finally be his real self who's free of his burdens & he is someone who's enjoying his new life" moment.

The last time he portrayed this "simping" behavior? When he was 17 years old during the 104th's first SC excursion and when his psyche was almost teetering on its edges as his Warrior!alter is wrestling control against his soldier personality in Utgard Castle.

Reiner's simping (which was an intended joke) was also an indicator of a bleak truth: his DID regressed, from his regulated state and his psyche was completely torn apart from that day. In Marley, he had been extremely depressed but he was a loyal, strong and steadfast soldier who had only his duties in mind. To see him do a complete 360 & reverted to a creepy old behaviour, is truly saddening. He's been masking his pain with this front. Even Pieck could be seen sending him a silent, understanding look of concern for his letter-sniffing action.

In 139, despite having a new chance at life, having his mother's genuine love and acceptance & achieved his original dream in becoming a respected hero who is recorded in history, one could not entirely rule out the possibility that Reiner's DID has regressed to the point that either he reverted back to his soldier persona as a facąde or he'd might have developed a new alter altogether after having to experience Survivor's Guilt for the second turn. Yet this time, with no known time limit since the Curse of Ymir had been eradicated. DID is a lifelong condition. It does not go away, it cannot be healed even with modern medicine but yes, could be managed. That letter, the mentioning of Eren's name and their impending arrival on Paradis - the place he felt the happiest of his life - could be his trigger to put on that front. He, (along with the rest of the alliance on that ship) had to live with the fact that his and his family's new life and future had been at the expense of two people's livelihood; Eren & Mikasa. Eren sacrificed his life. Mikasa chose to bury Eren at his final resting place in Shinganshina and remain there to honor his memories on her own, without anyone by her side despite having fought together & almost on the verge of dying together.

(Thank you @lancerofdarkness for pointing this out!) We can see the banter between Reiner and Jean is very reminiscent of Reiner and Bertolt, where the latter cautioned the former on "not getting too carried away". Where Bertolt had a filtered approach, Jean had a more direct, head-on snipe. This dynamic had been initially observed much earlier in this post.

The alliance members could possibly have made a silent pact between them on not mentioning either Eren or Mikasa's name out of respect for that 3 years. Or if they, as well as the others, were not divulged of the real truth by Armin. With or without this knowledge, Eren's death and Mikasa's silent departure from the alliance do affect everyone. Some are more obvious than the others.

Once again, I feel compelled to share an unpopular perception that Reiner's simping is not his true self's behavior. It is a mask. A fake persona. It is a front to hide the real pain from within.

He cared about both Eren and Mikasa respectively, as much as the others do.

Mikasa Ackerman

Upon first reading, I was initially devastated for Mikasa's conclusion. It was her decision and selfless act that had saved all of humanity and won Ymir over, which completely destroys the Paths as well as removing the titan powers together with its curse. The woman who had been at the frontlines, placing her life at stake, almost dying first to protect the men in the alliance; she who had sacrificed everything ended up with nothing but only memories of the one who could never be and loneliness.

To throw salt into the wound, we saw Eren uttering in Paths on how he refused to accept the notion of Mikasa being with another man, he wanted her to only love him and have him in her heart even 10 years after his death. It was indeed a last spur of the moment declaration that ironically contradicted his plea in 138.

Their relationship was never meant to take off by riding into the sunset together, they are not destined to be with each other, even if their feelings are mutual. Despite my personal observation of their relationship as a form of enslavement in itself: Mikasa still sees it as her devotion & commitment to Eren. I have to respect her perspective on this.

Ymir mistaken Stockholm Syndrome as love, she perceives enslavement as love. Being used as a tool of war and breeding, surrendering all her will to her captor, yearning for his validation - she saw those as love. Now the glaring parallel between Ymir and Mikasa are truly obvious. Because of love, Ymir tethered herself to Paths or purgatory for 2,000 years and in exchange of Mikasa's decision & action, Mikasa remained tethered to her love for Eren & his memories for at least another 10 years if not for the rest of her life on earth. That is truly heartbreaking.

I was devastated. I personally believe she deserves better. She too deserves to have her happy end, to be loved and have a family of her own.

When Armin had dreams of seeing the world beyond the walls, Mikasa has always been a simple girl with simple dreams: i) to go back home within that forest in Shinganshina and ii) to be by Eren's side forever. Once we realised this, Mikasa actually had everything she ever desired after all. She's back home in Shinganshina, living in solitude and in peace with no burden of world peace, diplomatic affairs on her shoulder and has no need to put on a facąde. She's been grieving and she still cried for her yearning to see Eren's face again even after 3 years that she might not stop shedding tears in the next 7 years just like Eren wanted. That is how psychologically and emotionally affected she is with Eren's words, actions and death. She chose to remember Eren and keep her in her heart that it is almost seen as an imprisonment but she's also free from other wordly responsibilities unlike the rest of the alliance members.

Did I wish she would have a better ending than this? Absolutely. This young woman has never been on her own ever since she was born, it's heartbreaking to see her having to process her grief alone without even a single companion by her side. She lost all of her incredible physical strength and had to learn how to fortify her emotional strength through her grieving process. She has only learn on how to love and be loved by Eren, which has major missing components left to be desired. Mikasa deserves to be loved, to receive that affection openly in return from someone who would be ideal, respectful, trustworthy, expressive, equally devoted, the raindrop to her seed, the sun to her cold days and loving towards her and maybe one day, eventually would be able to grow a real family from that genuine love.

The last two bottom panel above we can actually observe the innocent kid!Mikasa just like Isayama promised. She is ready and curious to once again, learn more about the beautiful but cruel world. She is ready to leave the forest upon realizing that no matter where she goes, Eren will always be inside her heart.

She is at peace. Even if she looks way thinner, fragile that she should be and could be seen collapsing as she was hit by another wave of strong grief. But since the members of the alliance are coming to Paradis for a potential negotiation, it is been stated by Mikasa that they are also coming to see Eren's final resting place to pay their respects. She will be meeting her friends after 3 years for the first time and I could really hope that they can be the support that each other needed for true healing. I am holding on to the possibility of her being ready to move on and start living again after putting the course of her life on hold by mourning for Eren the moment she is reunited again with Armin, Annie, Reiner, Jean and Connie.

The bird flew over the ship carrying the alliance as it is heading towards Paradis before heading towards Mikasa's location, giving his answer to her "You're happy right?" question by wrapping that scarf around her neck for one last time. He wanted her to be free after 3 years of grief. He wanted her to move on when she meets their friends again because she does not deserve to be consumed in her grief not even another day. Not even for another 7 years. Not even for the rest of her life.

Anything that we envision happening after 139 is valid in this universe. I believe Mikasa will begin living her life to the fullest as the end of the series is also the beginning of her next journey. But this time, she will be doing it in the company of her loved ones. Together.

[overheard-at-camp-half-blood]

A Rant About Heroes of Olympus Character Arcs.

Just as a warning most of this is negative, but I put the names in big bold letters, in case you want to skip. I do have some controversial opinions in here, specifically towards Percy and Annabeth, and their relationship, but I don’t think I’m negative towards their actual characters... I more so critique how it could have been written better.

I do still love the series, and even though I poke fun at Rick a bit, I still like him as a writer (though I recognize the problematic elements in this story). These are my own opinions on the books, and I’m sorry if I criticize your character in ways you don’t like.

Also, I may do another post about some other problematic elements, so be on the lookout for that.

Percy

Let’s start with Percy, shall we? After all, he is the one who started it all, and he was the one who introduced us to this world. If I’m being extremely honest, and I know I’m going to get hate for this, but I think Percy’s arc should have ended in the first series. He could have still remained a major character in this series, but I think as far as his main arc went, it wrapped up better in the first series, because I feel like this series added nothing to his arc.

I mean, he and Annabeth went through some majorly traumatic shit in The House of Hades, and then nothing was done about it, and I feel like it would just be better had it not happened. Besides I have some major issues with how his relationship with Annabeth played out.

Annabeth

I was really excited for Annabeth, and I did like her arc in MoA. It seemed like a good continuation of her arc in the first series, where Annabeth wanted to prove herself to everyone else, and now she wanted to prove herself to... well, herself. The arc had potential, and I really enjoyed seeing her arc in MoA, but as I said, I didn’t like how her and Percy’s relationship ship played out.

Now, let me preface this by saying that I am NOT anti-Percabeth, in fact, I do post a lot about it on this blog, but I am critical of how Rick writes established relationships. Perhaps it is because I’m older, so therefore my mind is more critical of these sorts of things.

I love Percabeth, but I really dislike their codependency.... I mean Annabeth’s arc in MoA was great because there was a focus on her relationship with Percy, but it was still about her. And yeah, I understand they’ve been through a lot together, but I really don’t like how their development was dependent on each other.

The reason why I put this under Annabeth and not Percy is because for me, it was much worse for Annabeth, because this was our first time getting this from her perspective. We got to see Percy develop through his own eyes, but we never really got the same for Annabeth. Most of Annabeth’s development was through Percy’s eyes, which was why I was so excited that Annabeth was getting her own POV.

And it was great in MoA! But after that, it honestly felt to me that her story was more about her relationship with Percy, than Annabeth herself.

Jason

Jason was doomed from the beginning.

That’s the main issue, is in the beginning, he was literally a blank slate, and while we were worried about the mystery of his character, there was really no way for us to know who he was as a person, because HE didn’t even know. So, as he was introduced at the same time as Piper and Leo, he didn’t get the same development as Piper and Leo. As we learned the other two’s backstories, and how those backstories represent who they are in the current story.

And the thing is, when we finally DID find out who he was, it was too late to do anything with it, because the story ended. I think by the time Blood of Olympus rolled around, and we did learn more about him... a lot of people had no interest in him.

That being said, I love fanon Jason, and I didn’t like how he was treated in the Trials of Apollo series.

Piper

Piper... I have a very complicated relationship with Piper. I kind of wrote this several times, because I couldn’t quite pinpoint my issues with Piper, and she is such a controversial character for whatever reason, and whatever I say will be perceived as me hating on her. That is not the case. I like the idea of Piper’s character, though I can agree she, as well as the other Aphrodite children, are written with sexist tropes, which is another post.

My main issue with Piper is that most of her development happens off the page. In the first few books, she her charmspeak is shown getting her in a lot of trouble, and she often lacks confidence when using it. My issue is the resolution for this happens mainly off the page.

A huge internal conflict with Piper is her lack of self confidence, which is something that I personally can relate to, but we never see her develop that confidence, we’re just told that it happened. Like she worked with Hazel and Annabeth on xyz, so suddenly she is much better and confident in her abilities of xyz. This kind of made her hard for me to connect with her in general, because it seems like most of her struggles happened off page.

This isn’t even just with her overall character; it’s with her relationship with other characters. We do see her friendship with Leo develop to some extent, but that’s because they already had an established friendship before the series started. Her other relationships? Jason and Piper went from barely knowing each other to dating between books. We never saw her friendship with Annabeth develop. She apparently was friends with Hazel, but that happened off the page.

Now, this happened to each character to some degree, but I think Piper got hit the hardest with the “tell, don’t show,” thing. I do think that because a lot of people didn’t like Piper, and imo, most of the criticisms were bullshit, Rick tried to overcompensate by trying to force development on her, without doing the work of showing us her development.

Leo

To be honest, his wasn’t as bad as others, but I feel like more people were disappointed, because he was a relatable fan-favorite. His arc went wrong for the exact opposite reasons as Piper’s, as there was legitimately a lot of development on the page, and he had a good arc set up, but Rick literally forgot everything that initially made his character so likeable to the audience.

So, here’s my thing with Leo’s arc; it was really good for the first three books, as Rick did develop him while leaving room for more development in new books. He also had a consistent arc; in The Lost Hero his arc was about his inferiority complex, which was directly connected to his trauma. He never felt like he had a home, and never felt like he belonged.

This was the direction I was hoping they would go with the “seventh wheel” storyline; meaning, yeah, he’s the only one in the seven who’s not in a relationship, but why does this bother him so much? Because, I don’t think it was the fact that he was in a relationship, I think it was trauma.

I so badly wanted the seventh wheel plot line to be an extension of what happened in TLH, but it became ignored, and it just seemed like a reason to put him in a relationship.

I’m not going to sit here and say that Leo shouldn’t have been in a relationship (though I will say I had an issue with Caleo), but I will say that I hate how a relationship was supposed to solve his feelings of inferiority- when it’s clearly indicated that Leo had those feelings because of trauma. A relationship can’t reverse years of trauma.

I also thought it would be so much more impactful if Leo made his sacrifice because of his feelings of inferiority, then perhaps the resurrection happens through one of his friends.

Hazel

I fucking hate how little Hazel (and Frank) were written into the series, especially considering she was one of my favorite new characters introduced in HoO. I also think she had the most potential, and her backstory was the most intriguing of the seven.

Why the hell was she not in the books more? Rick literally wrote a whole ass book in the series that mostly centered around the two already developed characters of the series, but he couldn’t give Hazel and Frank more POVs?

I don’t have anything to say about Hazel’s arc, because she barely HAD one, at least not after her initial one in SoN. The Sammy arc was made about Leo, which I get to some extent, as they sort of have a connection through Sammy. That being said, Leo never actually knew Sammy, and I feel like the flashback scene would have been so much more impactful from Hazel’s POV.

The biggest issue with that is it didn’t really feel like a way to develop any of the characters, but it was used as a way to justify a love triangle... that was barely even a love triangle.

In conclusion, Hazel was screwed over.

Frank

Frank, oh I have some things to say about the writing of Frank’s character, because my issue with Frank’s writing is a combination of the off-the-page development that happened with Piper, and the lack of POVs issue with Hazel, but to different degrees. Most of my issues with this comes from between Heroes of Olympus and Trials of Apollo

See, I do think his lack of POVs contributing to his lack of character development, you know what pisses me off?

The fire stick thing was a HUGE part of his character arc. It caused him legitimate fear and partially affected his relationship to some of the others (coughLeocough). And the resolution? Happened between series, and it’s literally mentioned in passing. What the fuck, Rick?

I don’t know, to me, it just seemed like a betrayal to his whole character arc, because we saw him struggle so much because of this, and the resolution just happened off page? I can just rant about how annoyed I am by that, because it just felt like Rick realized he forgot about Frank, and resolved his whole internal conflict off the page.

Nico

I love Nico! But, of course, I do have my criticisms of his character.

First of all, I really enjoyed how we got his point of view in Heroes of Olympus, but I really just wish he was part of the seven to begin with, for a number of reasons. First of all, it just makes sense- it’s indicated that he is the only demigod who knows about both camps... so wouldn’t it make sense that he would be part of the plan to reunite them? Don’t get me wrong, he does play a big role in this anyways, but it’s kind of weird that he just knows, and nobody thinks, “Hey, maybe we should include Nico!”

Another huge issue I had, was Nico’s coming out scene was in Jason’s point of view... which I get, because I’m reality, he wasn’t one of the seven... but it just seems fucked up? I mean I like headcanons of Nico and Jason’s friendship, but the unfortunate truth is... they didn’t actually know each other.

In fact, Nico wasn’t really that close to any of the seven- he was probably closest to Percy, and even he didn’t know that much about him at times. It just felt weird, not only seeing Nico come out in someone else’s POV, but in a POV of someone he barely even knew.

Also the fact he was forced to come out... I see the intentions, but it’s just not a good look.

Reyna

Reyna... don’t have any issues against Reyna, other than I wish we had more time with her before the last book. She was such an interesting character and I needed more of her.

[hi-i-try-to-be-kind]

A letter to tumblrstake

When I first got a tumblr at 13 years old, I had no idea that there would one day be a CJCLDS community on this site. I didn’t find it until years later, if I remember correctly about the time that I made this specific account. Now, in my 20s, I’ve come to love this little community, even when the rest of this site has been so, so harmful to me and my growth as a person. I really love this community—I must stress this. Even though I’ve mostly been a viewer who didn’t interact, this community has meant a lot to me, especially as a late teenager, and has positively impacted the way I interact with people. I truly believe that everyone here is doing their best.

But now I’m leaving tumblr completely. And a huge reason for that is certain patterns that have started to encompass the tumblrstake community. And I believe that if I don’t say anything, no one else will.

Before I go on, I ask that you please try to listen. I know it’s hard—there’s even a Harvard (I think it’s Harvard?) study that shows that in the middle of an argument, someone cannot change their own mind. But while writing this, I practiced something that I hope you will too. I asked myself, ‘Lord, is it I?’ And while I certainly have plenty of responsibility for how I view the comments of others and how they affect me, I also believe that there are some serious problems that almost no one is addressing.

This community, especially at conference time, has become spiritually poisonous. Yes, part of that is how I look at comments, but I’ve come to believe that it’s not just me, but also that the comments are thought of and posted without any consultation with the Spirit. Today, I felt the Spirit during the talks given by Elder Cook, Elder Oaks, and Elder Rasband, up until I got on this site.

With Elder Cook, there was a lot of criticism of how he didn’t acknowledge that the church had a racist past—but he did. It was brief, but he said something that I don’t think could have applied to anything else. But this was ignored. From my perspective, his argument was using our spiritual ancestors (specifically our non-racist ones) as an example for how we should pattern our lives. But I’ve seen no one mention this interpretation. It seems clear to me that, in argumentation terms, he was not shown the ‘principle of charity’ (1). Maybe this is because he didn’t use the vocabulary that people on here associate with what he meant to say, I don’t know.

With Elder Rasband, there was criticism that he was trying to make a legal process within the church into something spiritual. But when I was listening to the talk, as someone who has struggled with being worthy to hold a temple recommend, it meant a lot. It gave me a more thorough understanding of my goal. And it can also be applied to general temple worthiness—and my belief is that anyone who didn’t need the words about temple recommends and still gave his words the ‘principle of charity,’ would see past his plain words and to the spiritual meaning beneath. I didn’t even understand why people thought of his talk the way they did, until I realized that he came after Elder Cook—in other words, because people were already primed to take his words badly, they did.

Last of all was Elder Oaks, who stood up strongly for what he believes, and what he believes that God had told him to say during the months of preparation he spent for this conference—and when I listened to the talk, I heard equal condemnation of racism and violence. My friend heard a more direct message against racism. Yet in this community, people criticized him for it. Specifically, people criticized him for being America-centric when he opened the talk by acknowledging that it was going to be so. With Elder Oaks, of course it has a history. He’s very direct with what God tells him to say, and at times that has led to people, especially members of the LGBT+ community, being hurt. But when I went back and watched those talks about the LGBT+ community, without the angry comments of this community to distract me, I saw how much he spoke of loving the members of the LGBT+ community, those very same people that this community perceived him as only speaking of hating. And in this latest talk, I have no doubt that the difference between perceptions comes from the fact that people who believe his previous talks were harmful refuse to give him the ‘principle of charity.’ When he says that we should love our enemies, they see it as condemning only their side, while not realizing that if they truly listened, it would not only be a condemnation of both extremes, but also, and I don’t know how to say this more gently, a rebuke of their own unloving actions within this community.

I remember years ago (I’m sorry I don’t have the post saved so that I could show you proof of this), there was a post going around that many people took to be pro LGBT+, and included some sentiments that indicated that people shouldn’t listen to the prophet above what they personally believe to be true. A member of the community took issue with this, I believe voicing that it was extreme. They were jumped on by many other members of the community who took their comment to mean that they were anti-LGBT+. As I recall, the comments were not cruel, but they were certainly not understanding or kind. The member who was jumped on only said something in the tags along the lines of ‘Hmm. I believe I have been misunderstood,’ because if I recall correctly, they were pro-LGBT+. I believe they left tumblr, or at least tumblrstake, not long after that. (If I’d taken a screenshot, I could show you—let this be a lesson in keeping your sources lol)

After all of the things that I’ve outlined above—and these are only examples, not the whole story—I don’t know how to say this gently while still being direct. This community needs Elder Oaks’ talk. This community does not love its enemies. This community does not give anyone the benefit of the doubt. In some ways, what I just said is untrue—ex-members are not pushed away or mocked. People who have problems with the church are not dismissed. And what wonderful attributes these are! I adore this community for how universal these attitudes at least appear to be! But the very prophets and apostles that God directly tells us, in the scriptures, are to look out for our spiritual welfare—the very prophets and apostles that love and worry for all of us—are the people that this community has decided are its enemies. If they are your enemies, and you truly believe in the gospel of Christ, you need to treat them like Christ told you to treat your enemies, to love them by giving their words the benefit of the doubt, to show them the ‘principle of charity.’

When you dismiss the prophets and don’t treat them with the same civility that you justly would an ex-member, or dismiss members of the church that don’t treat the prophets the same way you do, you cannot expect to create a spiritual environment. Especially during conference time, when spiritual strength can be found in actually listening to what the prophets are saying, and not just straw-manning them and assuming that they say either exactly what you want them to say or exactly what you don’t want them to say.

I hope, even in this criticism, you’ve been able to feel the love that I have for this community. I believe that every member in it is a good person, who truly seeks the Spirit and to do what is right. But just as the church continues to grow and change to become more in line with God’s will, this community must change too—and with every year I’ve been here, there has only been a steady decline towards hatred and straw-manning. And this community can be so much more! I’ve seen it be a great place for people to grow spiritually together. I’ve seen it be a refuge for LGBT+ members of the church! But at conference time, whenever a speaker steps up and people perceive (sometimes objectively correctly) a disagreement with their own beliefs, it stops being that place.

I’m leaving now. Love you all.

TLDR; I love this community, but it is slowly becoming a spiritually poisonous place that does not give the prophets the benefit of the doubt or seek for spiritual meaning in talks they disagree with. I’m very bad at TLDRs, so please read the whole post.

(1) I’m using the term ‘principle of charity’ to mean the concept of listening to someone’s argument as the strongest version of their argument that it could possibly be—giving the benefit of the doubt, basically the opposite of straw-manning, etc.

P.S. I wanted to get this out before the second session but editing bled into the second session, so I delayed it so that people could have no interruption in their spirituality if nothing happened in the second session. That’s why I only addressed things in the first session.

P.P.S. Whoops I meant to schedule this. Sorry!

[thedogsled]

Castiel, the Tool

I’ve been reading Forgotten by Northern Sparrow for the past...well. A while. It’s a very long fic, and still only the prequel to Flight (or Broken, if you want to avoid the Destiel of it all) The story is also available as a podfic, so please do give it a go if you have the time. It will suck you in; it’s fantastic, and though I’m still not done reading atm I’m going to heartily recommend it.

Efforts at vagueness have been made, but there are spoilers for the fic below. Really, it’s probably not going to mess with your experience of reading the fic, but you’ve been warned. This is a subtext to text S13 meta talk.

This fic was published in February 2014, and finished in December of the same year, and it therefore deviates early season 9, retaining the events of I’m no Angel and using those and others as a huge trigger for the character’s interpersonal motivations.

Now this isn’t me explaining how this awesome fic works, I bring it up because this fic captures something, lifted right out of the text as inspiration after just a few episodes of season nine, which we have been beating around the bush over ever since, and it was very illuminating to me to see it there, because we’re dealing so much with the impact of it still, four going on five seasons later.

In Forgotten, the boys lose their memories of Castiel. I won’t say how or why, it’s not important, but the miscommunication between Dean and Cas over the years (remember, just the first half of our Destiel journey) leads to Castiel feeling like he’s not wanted, that - without his powers - he is only a tool to be discarded, useless. He believes his friends chose to forget him because he is no longer valuable to them, and because they never really liked him that much in the first place. As Dean experiences losing those memories, however (in a flashback), he faces the truth of all his experiences with Cas in what is written like a love letter to Destiel. There are thousands of little moments implied to pass between them. Dean experiences Castiel saving him at risk to his own life/place in Heaven again and again. Dean finds himself focusing on Castiel himself in moments that he didn’t pay attention to thoroughly the first time, witnessing the despair and pain in his expressions as though for the first time, and again--this is years ago. This is only as far as Gadreel, and doesn’t include the thousands of moments both in canon and off screen that we’ve had since (watching cowboy movies, fetching Dean coffee in the morning, presumably helping him build his batcave/fortress of solitude.)

So. To recap: Cas thinks he’s a tool, and Dean isn’t communicating well with him.

And here we are in Season 13. I don’t usually use fics as reference for meta, like it feels like there is probably some unwritten rule about that, but Forgotten crystalises, years ago, what Dean and Castiel’s issues are in the surface read right now. Castiel’s powers make him a tool, and he is using them as such, to promote Dean and Sam’s needs even if it means he has to cross his own lines in the sand, dive into human memories, and marry Djinn in Syria. Hell, even before he died, Cas practically rolled his eyes as he stepped forward to heal Dean, as though to say “right, that’s what I’m here for I guess.” He is mislead as to what Sam and Dean feel about him or want from him, because Dean doesn’t use his words, and because he is not human himself.

What I think it shows is that the idea that the subtext-into-text of Destiel (or Dean and Castiel’s relationship, since Forgotten is a by the skin of its teeth a TFW story and not a Destiel one) is not something meta writers are pulling out of their ass. We’re not barking up the wrong tree. This is long overdue, development that we need, and frankly the longest hanging thread of outright failure to communicate that Supernatural has ever had. When Sam and Dean misunderstand each other, they end up arguing about it. We have not yet reached that point with Cas and Dean--and it has been actual years.

I thought it might interest people to see it in the context of fandom output, at how DeanCas was perceived then and how it’s being shown to us now. It is an achingly slow progression, and change on that front is pressing and urgent. We still, years later, need them to just talk.

[pagesaplenty]

10 Books to Read if You Want to Date Pete

I have had a few conversations lately surrounding dating, books, and intelligence as an intimidating roadblock. Before I get started on this fun little feature, let’s shed some clarity first. One, I am fine with my status as a single lady. It isn’t a burden, nor is this post a cry for help (matchmakers *wink*). Secondly, I do not believe our passions should so cloister us from any type of relationship that we can’t socialize with someone if they don’t have or share our passions or have any future chance of sharing them. I have friends and family I have meaningful conversations with and take joy in our relationship…and they are not readers. It can be done!

While I’m naming this feature “books to read to date me”, to me this list serves more as a window into who I am and how books have (and do) impact me as a person. Perhaps none of these appeal to you, but maybe you want to know or connect more with me? These titles, while huge favorites, each carry a story of their own and a story that can spark meaningful relationships. By no means do I expect someone to change who they are and suddenly read books that are not their cup of tea or try reading at all. I have learned, the hard way, you should never read a book to impress someone. Chances are they won’t be paying attention anyways (hello bookstore boy I read ‘On the Road’ for and wanted nothing to do with the Beat Generation, save beating my brains out, after I finished).

In no particular order…

Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell – When I was a teenager in the homeschool world, it was a difficult world to gain footing in. It felt a little like the people obsessed with being Purebloods in Harry Potter. I had not been homeschooled my whole life and had left public education; we were in between. Classics were not my forte. They intimidated me, bored me, and even made me feel stupid. Then at a gathering with more down to earth homeschoolers, a girl a few years older than me mentioned reading Elizabeth Gaskell and how much she liked her writing (better than Austen). I think it was the way she talked about books that made it seem possible for me to try reading this classic author, even if she was a contemporary of Dickens. The next trip to Barnes and Noble I was shocked to discover the monstrous size of this book. Queue intimidation all over again. However, I managed to muster my determination and read the book. It was a magical moment to read a classic and not feel bored or overwhelmed by lack of understanding for language and time.

 Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig – A few years ago TWLOHA’s Suicide Prevention Week Theme was based around this book. I was familiar with Matt’s work, but had never read any of it. It was the first time I have ever read a book and felt understood surrounding my own mental health. This is a book I want more of my friends and family to read. I wish more people with loved ones coping with mental health would read this. In my opinion it is a source of hope to see, on the page, so clearly the things I live with and I believe more people need to understand in order to be sources of hope, understanding, and strength for each other. Matt’s honesty, while heavy at times, is very refreshing and clarity amid the chaos that can be my thought process.

 Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples – My siblings have been graphic novel readers for many years. In all those years I know they tried on numerous occasions to convince me to read them too. In my fear of not reading a “real book” and reading something “childish” I deprived myself of many years’ worth of fun and engaging reading in the world of comics. Saga was the first graphic novel I read, and it ignited my imagination and joy for the medium. I love fantasy and sci-fi. I love art. I love reading. I love Saga. Saga is all of those plus it’s cheeky and filled with humor. I haven’t finished the series yet because I read them slowly… I don’t want the series to be over too soon! Don’t let outside influences fool you…reading comics is reading.

 I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith – I was tricked into reading this! When I was a teenager I didn’t read very widely or diversely. I read fantasy and more fantasy. Then the occasional school assigned book that landed me more in the historical fiction genre as a secondary comfort zone. One summertime visit to my Gran’s in Ohio and a stop at our favorite local shop there, had me picking up this book. The green and yellow wallpaper design drew me in, but even more so was the shout out on the cover from J.K. Rowling. (By the way, I rarely read what books are about because I think summaries are written in such a spoiling fashion. I count on good covers, I know terrible, and Freddy to help me find out if I’ll like something.) Well a J.K. Rowling quote on the cover and the word ‘Castle’ in the title definitely sets this story up to be a fantastical one! Not so much, but nonetheless I persisted and fell in love. Dodie Smith writes a strong voice for a coming of age story. I love her word usage and the book is filled with quotable wisdoms. The quirkiness of Cassandra’s family is something to warm your heart to and find kindred spirits on many levels. I once had a friend compare me to Cassandra after I gifted him with the book and I thought I would squeal of said honor.

 C.S. Lewis Biography – This biography stands out for me for a number of reasons. I don’t typical like or read Christian Fiction of Non-Fiction. When I was a Sophomore my Mum’s curriculum for literature was a biography and a book by the author. This specific biography really impacted the way I perceived my own faith at the time. Reading about Lewis’ turning points and his fascination with heaven were very grounding for my teenage years. The fear of the unknown has always been a trigger for me, but to read how at peace he was with heaven will be something I never forget. Also as someone raised in a faith based home, I believe it is important to read testimonies/backgrounds that are not similar (and ‘perfect’ at first sight) to your own. Diversity of all types is imperative for growth.

 The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova – This is another book that made me feel like I was a grown-up and had arrived because I picked it up when I was younger, and it wasn’t my normal reading. My friend had brought it back from a trip and I was instantly intrigued by the cover. This book is dense. I know that turns some people off, so much so the audiobook is abridged to cut out ‘unnecessary’ elements (which personally annoys the hell out of me). As you can see from my own writing, I love detail. I enjoy immersive stories and elements that you know were researched to the gills all for the delight of a story, a fictional one at that. I cannot say too much without spoiling this story, but I can say it is a more mature ‘National Treasure’ paired with folklore/history of ‘Dracula’.

 A Long Fatal Love Chase by Louisa May Alcott – It may surprise many who know me to see this Alcott book on my list instead of ‘Little Women’. Alcott is my favorite author. Almost 60% of one my bookcases in dedicated to books by and about her. While I love ‘Little Women’ and all the memories it holds for me, I know ultimately it was not what Alcott wanted to write. Years ago the copy of ‘A Long Fatal Love Chase’ that Freddy and I came across looked more like a mix between a thriller and sizzling mass market romance. Freddy read it first and we still to this day talk about how we didn’t believe it could possibly be by Alcott.  While the story itself isn’t earth shattering, for me it is the idea behind it. The idea that Louisa still found a way to write what she wanted to write. This book still found a way to survive in the shadow of ‘Little Women’ all these years later. It is a story I enjoyed and Louisa’s influence continues to be in my life. That I may write, write what I NEED to write, and for it to endure in one form or another.

 Stay with Me by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ -

"I was armed with millions of smiles. Apologetic smiles, pity-me smiles, I-look-unto-God smiles---name all the fake smiles needed to get through an afternoon with a group of people who claim to want the best for you while poking at your open sore with a stick---and I had them ready."

From it’s ‘simple’ orange cover to quotes like the above, this story’s subtlety and ability to shock grasped at my heart and held on. The story could have go on and on and I would not have shied away from reading it. While heavy with thought (and subject matter) and intention, Ayọ̀bámi writes so masterfully. I’m writing this right now and thinking I need to read it again. I am so struck by her writing. I also am indebted to her because after finishing I wanted more and it sent me on a path to find more Nigerian writers, whom I love too.

 Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh – When my grandmother was dying, we read this book out loud together. We would discuss and talk about her life after each chapter. We would talk about the shape of the shell we were living in right at that moment. I did not love everything about this book because many instances Anne spoke from a level of privilege I have never experienced and that can leave a taste not so pleasant. However, for the memories it has for me and its ability to have so much to ponder, I find this book a very valuable one. The way she writes about nature feels like my childhood and how my Mum taught us to look at the world around us.

 Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke – I probably talk about this book too much. For such a little book it certainly houses much wisdom. I recently read the letters on my Instagram and was struck anew by things I hadn’t been the first time. I know because this is the first book I have ever allowed myself to write in (aside from my Bible). There were parts that brought me to tears anew that I hadn’t underlined previously. I imagine Rilke calmly sitting in a corner as he observes the world and embraces his failures and struggles as growth. This book of letters holds something different for each reader and therein lies its value.

[kelseybock]

A Few Lessons Learned: Summer 2019

I was flipping through a holiday magazine today and got so excited for all of the things associated with my favorite season and time of the year: cooler weather, pumpkin patches, cider, football, scarves, holidays... and I started reflecting on how great this summer has been as well. I have truly enjoyed this summer with friends and family. I’ve experienced so many events that I was unable to be a part of when I was in school due to lack of time, etc. and that I really felt that I had missed out on after getting married so young. I traveled to Mexico for my sister’s wedding and a family vacation, saw Cody Johnson (& Brett Young tomorrow!), visited with lots of family and friends, and met new co-workers and people from all over the world as I began my job. Colton would agree that we have both learned a lot about who we are and what we both want as a couple. 

I have personally been doing some serious soul-searching and that has been good, but also difficult. I’ve reached out to friends and family with my fears, doubts, and thoughts and have tried to make sense of things that I know have impacted my life greatly growing up. I’ve been trying to make sense of it all. 

Like I said, I have learned a few things this summer as I haven’t had the anxiety of schoolwork deadlines, exams, etc. on my mind to fret over and as I’ve actually been able to be where I’m at with the people that I love. Last summer Colton and I took a vacation to Colorado and I loved being with family in the mountains where we hiked, relaxed, and just took in the beauty of the nature surrounding us. This summer sticks out in my mind though as I have learned and been reminded of some valuable lessons as I traveled and was able to actually relax a little and have fun with so many people that I love. Below are a few of the things that I have learned or been reminded of:

1) Intentionality

It truly does make a difference to be intentional about being present, and scheduling in the time to do that. Our schedules these last few years have been crazy and difficult and we’ve tried so hard to just make it work however we could. I was working full time and was also a full-time student, while trying to juggle being a wife, a sister, a daughter, a friend, etc. Colton was doing the same and it was extremely difficult, especially when peak season hit every year at his job. I’m sure many couples may be able to relate to just in general, the stress of life and a packed schedule, and the pressure to have the quality time needed in marriage. Anyways, I am pretty darn real with people about my struggles and I am not usually one to sweep things under the rug, so when I say it was a difficult few years for us, it is not because I am trying to complain a lot, it is because it truly was.

People who know me well know that as a student, I stressed over my grades and know that I didn’t prioritize having a vibrant social life. I definitely sacrificed that often, but it was all worth it because I still have my man by my side and a family that has cheered me on through some pretty dark times. And a degree too, which helps in some respects I suppose. 

Friends have come and gone, but I am so thankful for our life group and the relationships Colton and I both have made here in KC. 

Lastly, I’ve had the thought that if others were to describe me as I pushed my way through life during those semesters, they would possibly say that I was anxious, boring, and probably grumpy. 

I’m glad to say that those long and dark days are a part of my past. My anxiety levels have gone down SO much and I’ve recently been putting way more effort into my health, relationships, marriage, home, and seeing and exploring our city. I have also recently started being more intentional about waking up every day to do something positive, something that brings me peace and joy before I start my day off by heading out the door into the world.

2) Facing Reality

I know from experience that just because one difficult season or period of life is over, it doesn’t mean that another will not arrive. I have had my fair share of bad experiences this summer alongside the good ones, but I’ve also had a lot that has happened in my life, just things that are part of my life story and have shaped me, that have come to the surface this summer. 

I try to stay positive and I don’t expect everyone to understand, but I do think that most people are surprised by my story when they take the time to listen to it. 

Having my past experiences rise to the surface happened often when I was in high school and college, but I was always too busy to really focus on them and the baggage that they entailed. As I’ve talked with others and have had the time this summer to seek out wise and certified people who have directed me to other intelligent and certified people, I’ve been humbled. And scared. Facing things from our pasts, our childhoods, our fears... those are things that most people never want to really deal with or relive. 

With the degree that I have, I should know that it’s more than necessary to take care of myself. People who have a passion and heart for taking care of others also have to take care of themselves, sometimes before they can even go out and help others. Reaching out and seeking out my options has been a huge step for me as I had talked to people in the past about it several times but didn’t end up following through. I made excuses because I was fearful. 

Kind of ironic... but has anyone else felt that way too? Fearful when it’s time to take a necessary and healthy step to help yourself? I think it’s important to have a good support system willing to follow up with you to see if you are taking those steps, growing, healing, etc.

3) Oversharing

A couple of semesters ago in my counseling classes, other students would say their first impression of me was that I appeared to “have it all together”, of which I laughed and explained how much of a mess my life really was. 

When people started telling me that they thought I had my life together often, I went a little extreme and made it a goal of mine to be as honest as I could with people, even at the expense of their comfortability, which is kind of embarrassing looking back, but I’ll own it shamelessly, or at least I’ll try to... haha...

However, I’ve learned to not share so much with people that I think may care. If people don’t ask, they probably don’t care too much. And if they do ask, I’ve learned that you also have to be careful because sometimes people are just vicious and want to use the information that you give them to gossip or hurt you somehow. I’ve learned that you can’t force who you truly are onto someone just because you want them to perceive you correctly. It is also other people’s responsibilities to get to know you, and you have to just trust that they will be gracious and kind in that process as you hope to be with others as well.

4) Investing

Colton and I are making more life changes and deciding what all of the next steps look like for us financially, with family, plans, etc. There are exciting changes ahead and we are serious about the next few years as far as how we handle our time and resources. 

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned, it’s to invest. 

Invest your time, invest in your relationships, and invest your money. Invest in the right relationships and friendships. 

Not everyone is cheering for me as an individual, cheering on Colton, my marriage, my family, or even my well being in general and I have found that everyone is definitely not my friend or interested in being one. I’ve learned to be wiser in recognizing those that aren’t. 

The reality is that everyone does not have my best interest at heart and that’s why being alert and aware is important as well. Not paranoid, but aware.

As far as investing money, we have been meeting together with a man that teaches courses over finances. He has helped us get on the same page with our finances, which has been such a healthy thing for us to experience!

5) Forgiveness

I sat down for the first time this summer and wrote out apology letters and also letters expressing how I felt about the things that they did to me or I to them. That might sound really strange, but I was advised to do it last year and never did until now. 

I wrote a letter to each person who I’ve been hurt by. I wrote out why I felt hurt by them, how their words and actions affected me, and lastly how I could have handled things differently in the relationships/friendships as well. I realized my own mistakes as I reflected. (Apology letters can be written for anyone obviously: family members, friends, anyone that you hold a grudge against or struggle to forgive) 

Writing the letters was more difficult than I thought it would be. Tears were shed and a lot of reflecting occurred. I realized while writing to these people that are no longer in my life or aren’t that involved how much I’ve grown as a person over the years and months, weeks even... and also how much I really was holding in all these years. I would encourage friends and family members to do this exercise as well because it’s incredibly freeing. You do not have to actually mail the letters or deliver them if you don’t feel comfortable with that. The act of writing them and putting them in a sealed envelope alone is enough for some. 

I think marriage makes you stretch and grow in this area at all times, but I have been reminded over and over about forgiveness and grace as I’ve been given it and have given it to others as well. I have been reminded that when I mess up and make mistakes, I can have some grace for myself. 

I’ve always been really hard on myself, but I’ve really tried to work on being more forgiving as well as remembering to take the time to reflect on my decisions. If my spouse makes bad decisions, I can always have more grace with him too. 

The forgiveness concept applies to all of my relationships though. I’m learning more about it overall and trying to give it out more than what sometimes feels comfortable. Because if I have been forgiven over and over, why shouldn’t I forgive others as well?

6) Boundaries

I’ve learned more about boundaries and having discipline after talking with people who have put their own boundaries in place. I’ve also read a couple of books about boundaries and people skills. 

Throughout my life, setting boundaries has been something that I’ve always struggled with. As a natural people-pleaser, I’ve struggled with saying “no”. This summer specifically, I got so fed up with allowing people to walk all over me and treat me like absolute garbage for being what they may perceive as a nice and quote-unquote weak person. Some of the kindest people have been through some of the most difficult experiences and events that some could not even begin to imagine. Those kind people are humans too. The difference between the people that are 90% of the time kind and the perpetually hateful ones is that the kind person has possibly experienced the pain from some of the most awful people and has possibly lived through some of the most horrifying experiences and are still able to treat others with kindness, respect, and love. I have learned that genuinely kind people have learned how to turn their storms and ugly life experiences into stories of hope for others. They have learned to love others wherever they are at in life. The perpetually hateful people, on the other hand, seem incapable of seeing the world beyond themselves and appear to have trouble with having empathy and truly caring for others. Que the conflict between the two and the relational disasters that often take place...

I will say that the kind people that some would never expect to lose their cool can get angry too if poked at too often for too long or if they perceive that they or their family are threatened... 

bears may be cuddly and warm looking, but poke a sleeping one, and you’re asking for it. I’ve learned to not be surprised if you provoke another to anger. I’ve learned from my own experiences, if you’re going to play with fire, then be willing to face the consequences if you end up getting burned. A tough, but good lesson to learn. 

With that said, I’ve learned to start telling people when they’re going too far with me. When they’re crossing the lines. When they’re inconsiderate and when they’re just downright being hateful and rude. I don’t do this every time because I am trying to choose my battles, but I definitely have grown in this area. 

I used to think that I had to just be extremely patient when people decided to resort to screaming or yelling as a way to get a message across, but I’ve learned that letting others think that it’s OK to treat people with hatred, disrespect, and unkindness isn’t helping anyone because if they’re not doing it to you, they will move on and do it to someone else that they can take their stress and anger out on. Sometimes it is your place to call someone out, especially if they’re hurting you and others. 

Setting boundaries with certain people is necessary and that’s ok too. I’ve learned to not feel bad about choosing to protect myself and my family from negative people and influences. You can still love people but say “no” at the same time. If those people can’t respect the boundaries you have chosen to put in place, then frankly, it is their own issue to work through. 

7) Grief

Grief comes in waves and it comes hard. This summer I was hit hard in dealing with grief and loss. I really missed people that I’ve loved dearly and lost. When I broke down at work one day, I quickly found that people are actually willing to meet you where you are and relate to you with their own experiences. In the past, I’ve tried to hold it all in out of fear that people would not understand. That’s sad because then you’re not giving people the opportunity to love you and comfort you with sweet words or hugs when you might need it.

I was also reminded that everyone grieves differently. As I’ve struggled through anger at times with peoples insensitive comments, it’s taught me what not to say to others. The saying is true that you truly don’t know what someone else is going through.

       . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

There’s definitely more that I could write, but I think this list wraps up a good amount of lessons and reminders from this summer. Hope you all have a great and productive rest of your week! 

If you ever want to chat about life, I love coffee, food, and conversation. I’m not afraid to talk about real and hard things either. (Future posts are going to get very real. I’m challenging myself with this blog.)

Kelsey Bock

[kennothythebard]

Things I’ve learned about writing DEH characters

THIS IS NOT A GUIDE BY ANY MEANS THIS IS JUST SOME OBSERVATIONS AND THINGS I DO.

So while researching for and writing “A Worthy Explanation” (pls read i crave validation) I’ve noticed a lot of little things that I don’t always see mentioned in writing guides for these characters so I thought I’d point some of these out. Idk how love this is going to be so I’ll prolly put a cut here.

General

I like to create kind of a “loneliness chart” and graph the kids on it (looks kinda like those political alignment things). On one axis theres introverted vs. extroverted, and on the other theres like polite vs. rude I guess? But in summary: Evan is introverted polite, Jared is extroverted rude, Alana is extroverted polite, Connor is introverted rude, and Zoe... is just kinda generally lonely. Where she falls really depends on what’s going on with her (but she typically is a less extreme introverted rude than Connor).

Obviously each character has their own faults, but I often see these faults viewed quite selectively, see “cinnamon roll evan” and “fucking larry” for two very different examples of this phenomenon. Evan is not perfect and always trying to be nice, and Larry is not a super abusive parent who deserves no happiness in this life. They’re both complex and it’s hard to let go of our misconceptions to write truer to the characters (e.g. I really, Really don’t like Larry. I see him as a lousy father who just kind of chose to be “the strict one” but does nothing but criticize and dole out punishment, ignoring his kids any other time), but that’s an important part of deh, is that people aren’t always what we perceive them to be.

Evan

Evan is often viewed as like a cinnamon roll, but in act 2 especially Evan gets mean. Like, he���s dismissive and rude and angry and just a jerk. Evan can be just as bad if not worse than some of the “angrier” characters

Ppl often talk about his lying as his biggest character flaw, but I’d argue that most of the lying we see in the show just stems from the one lie which he was kinda forced to make bc he was in a bad place (i mean, thats pretty much the entire point of awe).

The character flaw that I don’t see discussed enough is that he’s ashamed of his mental illness. He’d rather pretend it’s not there, even when it impacts every part of his life. He doesn’t do the letters the way his therapist assigned them, he’s apprehensive towards medication and stops taking it, and basically feeds into his self-destructive tendencies, arguing his mother sees his as “broke” or something to be fixed.

Jared

I love writing Jared

There’s already a lot about what a complex character he is and stage directions, but one thing that most people notice is his actions frequently contradict his words. Take the sincerely me reprise at the start of act 2. Why would he try to insert himself into the narrative at this point? What good would that do at this point? When evan dismisses him he gets annoyed and defensive. He says that he can’t do anything until Monday because he’s hanging with his camp friends (whom he claims are his “real friends,” a term he will later ascribe to himself regarding Evan in Good For You), and when Evan dismisses him again he tries to offer to help with the kickstarter, but is quickly shot down once more by Evan. Despite what seems to be a natural ending place in the conversation, he insists on continuing to talk with Evan, and when Evan cuts him off again he becomes rude and slightly threatening. This happens over the course of maybe three minutes and it’s one of the most insightful scenes to jared’s character

When writing a canon-compliant Jared, his actions and thoughts should conflict with his words. He cares about Evan but he’d never say that out loud (in more canon-compliant fics), and it hurts when he’s pushed away, which he responds to with anger.

Zoe

Zoe is one of the most difficult characters to write, imo.

She’s often portrayed in a slightly sweeter, saccharine way in fanon as just like a fun, silly girl who is just a tad sarcastic, but really you can tell that she’s Connor’s brother. She’s angry, blunt, unafraid of speaking her mind, etc. Yes, she is funny and kinda sarcastic, but her sarcasm isn’t always of the funny variety. She’s obviously angry at her parents, but this often comes across as a “doesn’t love them” variety of anger when her real feelings seem to be much more complex. 

Basically, I’m still learning a lot about writing her but I think just like the other kids she’s a little lonely, so Evan comes along and he’s there and that’s enough for her. She has such a wide range of emotions that I don’t feel are always accurately represented, even by me. (especially by me)

Alana

Hella, hella lonely. Covers it up by talking to people and doing extracurriculars. Sure, “college apps” is her excuse for why she does so much, but it’s not the real reason. If she keeps busy, she doesn’t have to be alone with her thoughts. But at the same time she has similar fears to Evan about people seeing the worst of her. “Close acquaintances” seems to be a statement about how little she makes friends, but I also see it as a defense mechanism. If she remains “close acquaintances” with people, she’ll never have to be their friend and they’ll never have to see the worst of her.

She’s cheerful and annoying, but in the way that pisses high schoolers off. Like, we all knew that one kid who was just way way too nice, and most of us were like “yeah ok they’re pretty cool i guess” but like some people just hated their positivity. It also doesn’t help that she tries to insert herself in situations she hasn’t been invited in, and does some questionable things to help her accomplish her goals. (Evan/Alana contrast: Evan does questionable things to accomplish internal goals, Alana does them to accomplish external goals)

Gets easily distracted. Forgets to sign Evan’s cast in scene 1. Her mind has a million different thoughts at any given moment. It wouldn’t be out of line to headcanon ADHD Alana (some of the things she does reminds me of the things I do when I forget my meds).

Connor

?????

We don’t see a lot to really get a huge insight into his personality. We know he was angry and had some serious mental illness.

We also know that he could recognize when he went too far and would go out of his way to make amends. (Why was he in the computer lab? Why did he sign Evan’s cast?) He may recognize a kindred spirit in Evan.

Clearly he doesnt hate his family (he goes to school despite not wanting to go, and seeing Zoe’s name is what sets him off showing possible concern), and it would not surprise me to learn that he thought his family would be better and happier without him. He clearly has intense emotions and reactions even to things that might seem minuscule or inconsequential. When writing him in canon, I think of a rubber band stretched too tight, and any characters action could loosen or tighten the pulling.

Heidi

Such an emotional character, I nearly break my own heart when I’m trying to writer her.

Theres two odd kind of paradoxes in a parent-child relationship like that between Heidi and Evan. For Heidi, the paradox is that the more she wants to do for Evan, the less she can actually be there for him. For Evan, he wants his mother to succeed and loves her so much that he might even encourage her to not worry about him or spend time with him, but then resents that she’s never there. Or at least when he meets a mother who can provide and be there.

Heidi pretty much worries herself sick over Evan. Evan comes before everything else in her life, and so it’s easy for her to feel like she failed him, which is a huge reason for her intense reaction in Good for you: evan has just confirmed her fears that she’s failed him.

Heidi tries so hard, but she isn’t perfect. She’s clearly very sensitive about money or about Evan’s father, and this sensitivity can easily change to anger or passive-aggressiveness. She has deep insecurities that we may never see or fully comprehend.

Cynthia

Mom. like shes completely a mom. like, “can i speak to your manager?” type mom.

Loves her kids and tries to be supportive but struggles communicating with two very headstrong, sarcastic kids

she probably wouldn’t say this, but takes connor’s death very personally. wonders why he would do this to her 

Is desperate for her children to listen and understand her. Which Evan is more than willing to do.

A little bit selfish? Like, thinks about what will make her better rather than accepting everybody grieves differently

Larry

Fucking larry. I don’t like him and he’s the hardest character for me to write.

Ok since I made such a big deal about it in the intro i’ll try to be nicer than id normally be

A masculine archetype. Sports dad, wants sports son, which Connor isn’t

He’s got some really ableist/misogynistic tendencies that causes the intense demonization of him in the fanon but I mean... he could be worse i guess? (that’s literally the best i can say about that so yeah i dont like him at all)

Really just oblivious. Completely ignored Connor’s need for help, does not know how to read a room, you could say he frequently has a foot in his mouth if it weren’t so intentional.

I mean...probably a good guy if you can get past all that stuff? just really, really self absorbed.

yikes that was long. Again, not really a guide, just some things I think about when writing these characters. if you read this far at all thank you for indulging me this much.

[msclaritea]

What Steven Moffat Doesn’t Understand About Grief, And Why It’s Killing Doctor Who

NOVEMBER 27, 2013 / TEA LEAVES AND DOG EARS

There’s a popular joke I’ve seen floating around on Tumblr for a while now. It goes like this:

“Joss Whedon, Steven Moffat and George R.R. Martin walk into a bar and everyone you’ve ever loved dies.”

Here’s the problem, though: George R. R. Martin and Joss Whedon are, of course, infamous for killing off the characters that they know are almost universally beloved by fans for precisely the reason that they are beloved and Martin and Whedon know it’ll have huge emotional impact. They pick the harmless bunny of the group and then give them some brutal offing — Tara on Buffy, Wash on Serenity, Ned Stark in A Game of Thrones being an easy handful of examples. But who has Steven Moffat actually killed off?

The two-parter that he wrote during the Christopher Eccleston/Russell T. Davies era literally ends with the Doctor blissfully proclaiming that “Just this once — everybody lives!” In fact, a woman who lost her leg years earlier is restored to bipedalism by space magic. It was an amazing, heartwarming scene specifically because of the first part of that sentence — “just this once.”

everybody lives

But apart from that two-part episode, the Davies era was plenty bloody. While Doctor Who is ostensibly a kid’s show, Davies made it clear that plenty of innocent people have been killed — often en masse — during especially high-stakes alien attacks despite the Doctor’s heroic intervention. And let’s not forget that Davies kicks off the entire reboot of the show by announcing that (nearly) all of the Time Lords and (nearly) all of the Daleks were wiped out by our genocidal and deeply guilt-ridden hero.

That was a hell of a way to re-introduce a popular kid’s show back to the airwaves, but it was perfect. It made the Doctor a new and mysterious character for people who’d never seen the show before, and it changed the way older fans looked at him. You couldn’t just continue down the same old lines and pick things up after all that time without some real change and expect it to work. And the change Davies employed worked beautifully. Until last week, of course — but we’ll touch on that later.

So let’s get back to the central question: who has Steven Moffat killed?

Well, on the last season of Sherlock, fans were reeling when Moffat had the show’s eponymous lead jump to his death, although with the promise that we’d find out how he faked it when the show resumed. So that doesn’t count.

sherlock

Well, what about Moffat’s next Who episode in Series 2, The Girl in the Fireplace? Reinette (Madame de Pompadour) dies, but she dies of old age because — and don’t even get me started on how annoying this concept is — the Doctor ditches her to go back in the fireplace one last time, apparently forgetting that it always results in a huge time jump. So that doesn’t quite count, as Moffat was fulfilling history.

Next up is Blink, Moffat’s first chilling installment of the once brilliant and now sadly tiresome Weeping Angels. Who dies? Well, the nice DI that Sally chats with dies of old age after being displaced in time. The same fate is afforded to Sally’s best friend, but she does manage to write a letter letting us know everything’s pretty much cool, because who wouldn’t want to be taken away from their family and friends to churn butter for 60 years?

But other than that? Nobody. A theme seems to be emerging.

The Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead? Well, Moffat does kill off River Song and her whole crew, but then has their souls uploaded onto the library server so that they’ll never “truly” die. Again, it’s an extremely softened death, similar to the “old age/time displacement,” in that it’s sad but any real cause for grief has been removed.

Then Moffat, of course, took over the show as show runner. And once again, people just seem to keep… not dying. Part of the problem is that Moffat’s a big fan of the Giant Reset Button — so much so that he literally wrote in a Giant Reset Button into the episode Journey to the Center of the TARDIS. One step above the “It was all a dream” plot, the Giant Reset Button absolves the characters and the writers of any repercussions and they can carry on as they were, even though we, the audience, saw a “major event” that is evidently no longer relevant. You can have your fun and adventure, but you need not learn or grow or change from it.

friendly

Other notable not-deaths include any time Rory “died” in the series, the almost-people clones, the Doctor himself during the impossibly confusing 6th series finale, Vincent Van Gogh and, finally, The Ponds who were killed off exactly the way Sally’s security guard almost-lover in Blink was — by being displaced in time in such a way that the Doctor, for hand-wavey reasons, couldn’t just go pick them back up again and they seem to do just fine living in the past because they have each other, I guess.

All of this is leading up to my biggest problem of all: the recent 50th Anniversary Special in which Moffat, not merely content to sap any trace of blood or death or grief or loss from his own era, removed the basis of the show’s reboot plot:

big button

The mass genocide that the Doctor committed — all the people he killed and all of the times he wrestled with that decision and was forced to come to the conclusion that it was for the best — simply never happened now. All of the amazing episodes in which the Doctor, overcome with grief, spoke about the tragic necessity of his decision are rendered meaningless by this newly-invented War Doctor who allegedly “didn’t count” until now. Now he counts. Maybe. Because of the magic of love and Bad Wolf.

Now of course you can argue that the show plays with time constantly, and that it’s possible that this is a new time stream in which it didn’t happen, and that’s all well and good. But the fact of the matter is that from this point on, the Doctor is no longer complicated by this event. Moffat, who has never had the best track record with character development as it is, has actively written a plot which removes an enormous amount of change and progression from the show’s lead character.

But more importantly than that, when you have no death, when nothing truly has weight or scale, when decisions don’t stick and nobody feels the consequences… it’s hard to care about anything. The stakes on the show feel so low at this point that a once addictive program is unengaging, dull and hollow. Even the 50th special had no real gravitas because we were basically watching a plot be un-done, rather than made. We were watching a character be un-banished, rather than created. For a celebration of 50 years of a television show, it felt awfully like a celebration of a writer who’s only been running it for 4 years. And, perhaps most irritatingly for a Davies fan, the complete erasure of everything that was developed during that previous era.

I don’t think it’s an insult against Davies, though — Moffat does it constantly to himself. Amelia Pond grows up without parents because they were erased by a crack in space and time. When they are restored to her by virtue of yet another giant re-set button, we never see them again. Amy rarely talks about them. You cannot have a character whose parents were taken from her at a young age, who then gets them back — and remembers that she had lost them in the first place — and not see a perceivable change in said character. Similarly, you cannot rob that character of her baby, remove her ability to have children, and have the biggest consequence be that she becomes a model who’s moody with her husband for his own good.

model

Or take the latest companion: Clara cannot live and die hundreds of times for her good buddy the Doctor (who she’d known for, what, a month?) and then basically brush it off like it’s nothing.

We can talk for days about Moffat’s other problems as a writer — the sexism, the homophobia — and those are all valid complaints, but what will always be my biggest gripe is his fear of consequences. When you cannot deal properly with grief or loss or change, you cannot write believable characters or interesting stories. And as long as this show lacks believable, real, characters and engaging stories, it will continue to suffer. So please, for the good of Doctor Who, shed a little blood and actually deal with it. Revel in consequences. Let your human characters behave like humans. In short: restore the heart to a dying show.

[bisoroblog]

Teachers’ Strategies for Pronouncing and Remembering Students’ Names Correctly

Sandeep Acharya answered when his teachers and classmates called him Sand-eep, even Sandy, for 12 years before he decided he couldn’t take it any longer: “Junior year of high school, I walked up to the blackboard in every one of my classes and drew a circle with lines radiating from the center. ‘Sun-deep,’ I said in a loud, firm voice. ‘Sun. Like a sun.’ ”

The memory returned to Acharya, CEO of a health care startup, recently when he noticed his 2-year-old daughter introducing herself differently. “To white people, she’d say Savita, with a hard ‘t’ like in ‘torch.’ To everyone else, she’d say her name, Savita, where the ‘t’ makes a soft ‘th’ sound, like in ‘the.’ ”

Rita Kohli, a professor in the Graduate School of Education at UC Riverside, explains the Hindi phenomenon as it applies to her own name: “It’s like Aretha Franklin but without the ‘uh.’ ”

While mispronouncing a student’s name may seem minor, it can have a significant impact on how they see themselves and their cultural background, causing feelings of anxiety, invisibility, shame, resentment and humiliation, all of which can lead to social and educational disengagement. Kohli documented these findings in a 2012 article she co-authored with UCLA professor Daniel Solórzano titled “Teachers, please learn our names!”

Aspirations and motivation can suffer from the cumulative effect of these “mini-disasters,” which also set the tone for how students treat each other. On the other side of the coin, correct pronunciation can help “develop trust and rapport,” according to Christine Yeh, a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Education.

That’s why California’s Santa Clara County Office of Education created the “My Name, My Identity” campaign. The initiative asks community members to take a pledge to pronounce names correctly in order to foster a sense that students of all backgrounds are valuable and belong.

The names of white and nonwhite children alike are mispronounced, Kohli and Solórzano write, but the experience is much more damaging for a child who “goes to school and reads textbooks that do not reference her culture, sees no teachers or administrators that look like her, and perhaps does not hear her home language,” since these cues (plus advertisements, movies and other indicators of societal values at large) already communicate “that who they are and where they come from is not important.” For one Latina study participant, having her name mispronounced made her wish her parents were more Americanized; a Sri Lankan American reported feeling that his name was “an imposition on others.”

They’re not imagining things. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, a sociolinguist at The Ohio State University, says the effort we put into overcoming a “barrier to communication” depends on (and communicates) social values. “You see the difference if you think about the way Americans typically respond to somebody with a heavy French accent versus somebody with a heavy Mandarin accent,” she explains. When it comes to names, an American who mispronounces the British surname St. Clair (think “Sinclair”), she says, will tend to have a sense of, “Oh, they have a fancy, special language, and if I don’t know how to handle that, it’s a flaw in me.” Whereas a Chinese name might provoke the reaction: “Those names are really hard to understand, and it’s not my responsibility to engage with that.”

The latter also “happens a lot with white teachers responding to names that are seen as typically black,” Campbell-Kibler says. According to Robert Bjork—a psychology professor at UCLA who is a leading scholar on human learning and memory—there are several reasons why names of all cultures can be difficult to remember. For starters, they’re arbitrary labels, as opposed to a nickname like “Red” or “Tiny,” which a person’s physical appearance might trigger. Then there’s the fact that “other demands often occupy our attentional and memory processes when we are meeting somebody new.” Whether that’s at a cocktail party or in a classroom with 33 children, distraction can make it impossible to recall a new name just minutes later. Even when initial storage is successful, Bjork says, retrieval is hampered because we accumulate a huge number of names over our lifetimes, many of which are similar.

On top of these difficulties, there can be linguistic barriers to pronouncing names that aren’t in one’s native tongue, particularly when dealing with differing sound systems. Professor Campbell-Kibler offers up Korean as an example. She says there are two separate sounds that occupy what an English speaker would think of as the “s” space, and a teacher might not have the cognitive capacity to perceive the difference between them.

“If I don’t go and actually learn how to speak Korean extensively for years, I may just always get that wrong,” she says, but this type of real linguistic constraint “doesn’t come up all that often.” In other words, teachers are capable of pronouncing most names correctly.

How then can educators overcome the hurdles to doing so?

It’s tempting to put the first key practice—mustering a legitimate interest in the name—into the bucket labeled “duh” by Samantha Giles, a special education teacher at Hill Elementary School in Garden Grove, California, but it stems from neural complexities. Say you were to ask Professor Bjork how to spell and pronounce his last name. He explains that if he replied “Bee-york” you might ask why it is not pronounced “Bah-Jork,” after which he would tell you that it is a Scandinavian name, similar to the word “fjord” where the “j” is pronounced like a “y.” Or he might add that “Bjork” means “birch,” as in the tree. An exchange like this, he says, “will exercise the very types of processing that enhance memory.” In other words, it overcomes the cocktail party problem. The second essential step, he says, is “to produce—that is, actually say, someone’s name, because retrieving a name makes that name more retrievable in the future than does just hearing it.”

“How would you like me to say your child’s name?” is the specific wording Professor Kohli recommends for parents, and the following for students:

“I don’t know how to say your name yet, can you explain it to me? I’m working on learning it, and it’s important to me to say it the way it’s meant to be said, the way your parents say it.”

Then try the name. Ask if you’re right. Try again, “no matter how long it takes.” Once you’ve got the proper pronunciation, repeat it aloud. Eighth-grade science teacher Carry Hansen, who also coaches cross-country and track as well as coordinating the advisory program for Trinity Valley School in Fort Worth, Texas, recommends using kids’ names as much as possible, almost as obnoxiously as a telemarketer would, until they sink in.

If that whole process sounds awkward, good. Professor Bjork’s research, conducted in partnership with Elizabeth Ligon Bjork, shows that difficulty learning something gives the thing being learned a sense of importance, and errors that trigger elaboration produce better retention. This concept of “desirable difficulties” means the discomfort of admitting you’re having trouble pronouncing someone’s name could actually aid in recall, and Bjork says “that such a clarifying exchange has a positive effect, not a negative effect, on the person whose name you are having trouble pronouncing.”

Thanks to the power dynamic that makes it hard for a student to question a teacher, the onus of initiating this type of conversation falls on educators, in Kohli’s view, and she says they should take a learner’s approach in doing so. Start with a little soul-searching:

Is this name hard to pronounce, or is that just my vantage point? (Susan Balogh, a teacher at Baker School in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, reminds herself, “Unless our names are Lakota, Penobscot or Apache in heritage, they are all ‘foreign.’ ”) Then, be explicit, Kohli says, telling the class “that this is our limitation, not any fault of the student.” Use the “I” statements suggested above and avoid the frustrated looks and embarrassed laughs that tend to accompany pronunciation difficulty. Hansen gives students permission to correct her; in fact, she advises, “tell the kid that they MUST correct you if you are saying their name incorrectly.”

Many teachers report playing “the name game” and Professor Yeh, who teaches school counselors with caseloads of 200-500 students, takes a similar approach, asking each of her graduate students to share the story of their chosen name and its proper pronunciation on the first day of class. Then she, too, gets frank about it, declaring that “we won’t consistently mispronounce a name because we are too afraid to ask, or too afraid to correct ourselves.”

Yeh draws attention to another tactic that can help with pronunciation: learning the basic rules from a variety of languages, “like an ‘x’ in Chinese is pronounced as an ‘sh’ sound, with the tip of your tongue down, below your lower front teeth.” (Just as “a” in Savita makes the “uh” sound thanks to Hindi origin, and the letter “j” in Spanish makes the sound English speakers attribute to the letter “h.” If this seems like too much to wrap one’s head around, remember the classic example of “ghoti” as an alternative English spelling of “fish,” because “gh” makes the “f” sound in “enough,” “o” makes the “i” sound in “women,” and “ti” makes the “sh” sound in “nation.”) Campbell-Kibler, the linguistics professor, confirms: “You can go find that out. Each language is a system, just like English, but the question is, is somebody willing to do that, and what influences how willing they are to do that?”

Even those who know how to say a name like a native speaker may hesitate for fear of cultural appropriation: “It might be socially a little strange to perfectly produce somebody’s name as if I were saying it in the language,” Campbell-Kibler says. That’s why this diverse group of experts all come back to the same bottom-line recommendation: Ask the student and family which pronunciation they prefer.

It won’t always be the one used at home. It is not uncommon for students to choose an Americanized pronunciation or a new name entirely. “At the end of the day, I have to respect the person standing in front of me,” Campbell-Kibler says, “and if they are saying, ‘Call me Joe,’ OK, I’ll call you Joe.”

Just so long as it isn’t for the expediency of school personnel. Professor Yeh says that in the early 2000s, she was told by students at Lower East Side Preparatory High School that they had been assigned an American name or asked to choose one. When kids “basically said, ‘We want our Chinese names back,’ ” Yeh talked to teachers and administrators and was told they “couldn’t possibly learn 300 Chinese names.” And yet, when the students hosted a brown bag lunch where they offered to teach the proper pronunciation of their names, Yeh says, “almost every single teacher and counselor and staff member showed up.”

In the absence of a similar initiative, teachers report using time-honored tricks to remember name pronunciation, like word association (which addresses Bjork’s arbitrary label problem), writing down each syllable in English phonetics, and rhyming (“Alazaeia = Princess Leia” is one Giles uses), as well as new-fangled ones like name pronunciation websites (e.g., www.pronouncenames.com).

What if you witness a mispronunciation by another adult?

Kohli says a classmate of her daughter benefited from a Latina kindergarten teacher who referred to him as his parents did. His first-grade teacher, however, changed both the sounds and inflection. (Professor Yeh reminds, “With many of the names that have tildes or umlauts or little markings, that is actually really important, too.” When making name tents and folders, she says, remember “it’s not just the spoken word; it’s the written name as well.”) While Kohli encourages parents to be direct in advocating for their own child’s name, she sought balance in her dual role as a professor and parent of a classmate, figuring, “I can’t just go in there and slap down my research.”

Instead, whenever the first-grade teacher was in earshot, she made a point to properly pronounce that student’s name. Eventually, it worked.

And that might be the most important lesson Kohli and Solórzano have to offer: “[Since] students will often take the cue of fearing or celebrating difference from the climate set up by teachers, … educators are in a unique position to shape the perceptions of their students” about themselves and others. In the age of growth mindset and “marvelous mistakes,” teachers, counselors, literacy specialists, social workers, administrators, yard staff, PTA members and any other adult who interacts with children at a school can reframe name pronunciation as an opportunity rather than a challenge.

Balogh, the Boston-area teacher, sums it up: “If I can’t make a consistent, good-faith effort to pronounce a name correctly, the implicit message is that I can’t be bothered.” Those who show that they can take an important step toward making all students feel seen and respected, necessary prerequisites for an engaging social and academic experience.

Teachers’ Strategies for Pronouncing and Remembering Students’ Names Correctly published first on https://dlbusinessnow.tumblr.com/

[perfectzablog]

Teachers’ Strategies for Pronouncing and Remembering Students’ Names Correctly

Sandeep Acharya answered when his teachers and classmates called him Sand-eep, even Sandy, for 12 years before he decided he couldn’t take it any longer: “Junior year of high school, I walked up to the blackboard in every one of my classes and drew a circle with lines radiating from the center. ‘Sun-deep,’ I said in a loud, firm voice. ‘Sun. Like a sun.’ ”

The memory returned to Acharya, CEO of a health care startup, recently when he noticed his 2-year-old daughter introducing herself differently. “To white people, she’d say Savita, with a hard ‘t’ like in ‘torch.’ To everyone else, she’d say her name, Savita, where the ‘t’ makes a soft ‘th’ sound, like in ‘the.’ ”

Rita Kohli, a professor in the Graduate School of Education at UC Riverside, explains the Hindi phenomenon as it applies to her own name: “It’s like Aretha Franklin but without the ‘uh.’ ”

While mispronouncing a student’s name may seem minor, it can have a significant impact on how they see themselves and their cultural background, causing feelings of anxiety, invisibility, shame, resentment and humiliation, all of which can lead to social and educational disengagement. Kohli documented these findings in a 2012 article she co-authored with UCLA professor Daniel Solórzano titled “Teachers, please learn our names!”

Aspirations and motivation can suffer from the cumulative effect of these “mini-disasters,” which also set the tone for how students treat each other. On the other side of the coin, correct pronunciation can help “develop trust and rapport,” according to Christine Yeh, a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Education.

That’s why California’s Santa Clara County Office of Education created the “My Name, My Identity” campaign. The initiative asks community members to take a pledge to pronounce names correctly in order to foster a sense that students of all backgrounds are valuable and belong.

The names of white and nonwhite children alike are mispronounced, Kohli and Solórzano write, but the experience is much more damaging for a child who “goes to school and reads textbooks that do not reference her culture, sees no teachers or administrators that look like her, and perhaps does not hear her home language,” since these cues (plus advertisements, movies and other indicators of societal values at large) already communicate “that who they are and where they come from is not important.” For one Latina study participant, having her name mispronounced made her wish her parents were more Americanized; a Sri Lankan American reported feeling that his name was “an imposition on others.”

They’re not imagining things. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, a sociolinguist at The Ohio State University, says the effort we put into overcoming a “barrier to communication” depends on (and communicates) social values. “You see the difference if you think about the way Americans typically respond to somebody with a heavy French accent versus somebody with a heavy Mandarin accent,” she explains. When it comes to names, an American who mispronounces the British surname St. Clair (think “Sinclair”), she says, will tend to have a sense of, “Oh, they have a fancy, special language, and if I don’t know how to handle that, it’s a flaw in me.” Whereas a Chinese name might provoke the reaction: “Those names are really hard to understand, and it’s not my responsibility to engage with that.”

The latter also “happens a lot with white teachers responding to names that are seen as typically black,” Campbell-Kibler says. According to Robert Bjork—a psychology professor at UCLA who is a leading scholar on human learning and memory—there are several reasons why names of all cultures can be difficult to remember. For starters, they’re arbitrary labels, as opposed to a nickname like “Red” or “Tiny,” which a person’s physical appearance might trigger. Then there’s the fact that “other demands often occupy our attentional and memory processes when we are meeting somebody new.” Whether that’s at a cocktail party or in a classroom with 33 children, distraction can make it impossible to recall a new name just minutes later. Even when initial storage is successful, Bjork says, retrieval is hampered because we accumulate a huge number of names over our lifetimes, many of which are similar.

On top of these difficulties, there can be linguistic barriers to pronouncing names that aren’t in one’s native tongue, particularly when dealing with differing sound systems. Professor Campbell-Kibler offers up Korean as an example. She says there are two separate sounds that occupy what an English speaker would think of as the “s” space, and a teacher might not have the cognitive capacity to perceive the difference between them.

“If I don’t go and actually learn how to speak Korean extensively for years, I may just always get that wrong,” she says, but this type of real linguistic constraint “doesn’t come up all that often.” In other words, teachers are capable of pronouncing most names correctly.

How then can educators overcome the hurdles to doing so?

It’s tempting to put the first key practice—mustering a legitimate interest in the name—into the bucket labeled “duh” by Samantha Giles, a special education teacher at Hill Elementary School in Garden Grove, California, but it stems from neural complexities. Say you were to ask Professor Bjork how to spell and pronounce his last name. He explains that if he replied “Bee-york” you might ask why it is not pronounced “Bah-Jork,” after which he would tell you that it is a Scandinavian name, similar to the word “fjord” where the “j” is pronounced like a “y.” Or he might add that “Bjork” means “birch,” as in the tree. An exchange like this, he says, “will exercise the very types of processing that enhance memory.” In other words, it overcomes the cocktail party problem. The second essential step, he says, is “to produce—that is, actually say, someone’s name, because retrieving a name makes that name more retrievable in the future than does just hearing it.”

“How would you like me to say your child’s name?” is the specific wording Professor Kohli recommends for parents, and the following for students:

“I don’t know how to say your name yet, can you explain it to me? I’m working on learning it, and it’s important to me to say it the way it’s meant to be said, the way your parents say it.”

Then try the name. Ask if you’re right. Try again, “no matter how long it takes.” Once you’ve got the proper pronunciation, repeat it aloud. Eighth-grade science teacher Carry Hansen, who also coaches cross-country and track as well as coordinating the advisory program for Trinity Valley School in Fort Worth, Texas, recommends using kids’ names as much as possible, almost as obnoxiously as a telemarketer would, until they sink in.

If that whole process sounds awkward, good. Professor Bjork’s research, conducted in partnership with Elizabeth Ligon Bjork, shows that difficulty learning something gives the thing being learned a sense of importance, and errors that trigger elaboration produce better retention. This concept of “desirable difficulties” means the discomfort of admitting you’re having trouble pronouncing someone’s name could actually aid in recall, and Bjork says “that such a clarifying exchange has a positive effect, not a negative effect, on the person whose name you are having trouble pronouncing.”

Thanks to the power dynamic that makes it hard for a student to question a teacher, the onus of initiating this type of conversation falls on educators, in Kohli’s view, and she says they should take a learner’s approach in doing so. Start with a little soul-searching:

Is this name hard to pronounce, or is that just my vantage point? (Susan Balogh, a teacher at Baker School in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, reminds herself, “Unless our names are Lakota, Penobscot or Apache in heritage, they are all ‘foreign.’ ”) Then, be explicit, Kohli says, telling the class “that this is our limitation, not any fault of the student.” Use the “I” statements suggested above and avoid the frustrated looks and embarrassed laughs that tend to accompany pronunciation difficulty. Hansen gives students permission to correct her; in fact, she advises, “tell the kid that they MUST correct you if you are saying their name incorrectly.”

Many teachers report playing “the name game” and Professor Yeh, who teaches school counselors with caseloads of 200-500 students, takes a similar approach, asking each of her graduate students to share the story of their chosen name and its proper pronunciation on the first day of class. Then she, too, gets frank about it, declaring that “we won’t consistently mispronounce a name because we are too afraid to ask, or too afraid to correct ourselves.”

Yeh draws attention to another tactic that can help with pronunciation: learning the basic rules from a variety of languages, “like an ‘x’ in Chinese is pronounced as an ‘sh’ sound, with the tip of your tongue down, below your lower front teeth.” (Just as “a” in Savita makes the “uh” sound thanks to Hindi origin, and the letter “j” in Spanish makes the sound English speakers attribute to the letter “h.” If this seems like too much to wrap one’s head around, remember the classic example of “ghoti” as an alternative English spelling of “fish,” because “gh” makes the “f” sound in “enough,” “o” makes the “i” sound in “women,” and “ti” makes the “sh” sound in “nation.”) Campbell-Kibler, the linguistics professor, confirms: “You can go find that out. Each language is a system, just like English, but the question is, is somebody willing to do that, and what influences how willing they are to do that?”

Even those who know how to say a name like a native speaker may hesitate for fear of cultural appropriation: “It might be socially a little strange to perfectly produce somebody’s name as if I were saying it in the language,” Campbell-Kibler says. That’s why this diverse group of experts all come back to the same bottom-line recommendation: Ask the student and family which pronunciation they prefer.

It won’t always be the one used at home. It is not uncommon for students to choose an Americanized pronunciation or a new name entirely. “At the end of the day, I have to respect the person standing in front of me,” Campbell-Kibler says, “and if they are saying, ‘Call me Joe,’ OK, I’ll call you Joe.”

Just so long as it isn’t for the expediency of school personnel. Professor Yeh says that in the early 2000s, she was told by students at Lower East Side Preparatory High School that they had been assigned an American name or asked to choose one. When kids “basically said, ‘We want our Chinese names back,’ ” Yeh talked to teachers and administrators and was told they “couldn’t possibly learn 300 Chinese names.” And yet, when the students hosted a brown bag lunch where they offered to teach the proper pronunciation of their names, Yeh says, “almost every single teacher and counselor and staff member showed up.”

In the absence of a similar initiative, teachers report using time-honored tricks to remember name pronunciation, like word association (which addresses Bjork’s arbitrary label problem), writing down each syllable in English phonetics, and rhyming (“Alazaeia = Princess Leia” is one Giles uses), as well as new-fangled ones like name pronunciation websites (e.g., www.pronouncenames.com).

What if you witness a mispronunciation by another adult?

Kohli says a classmate of her daughter benefited from a Latina kindergarten teacher who referred to him as his parents did. His first-grade teacher, however, changed both the sounds and inflection. (Professor Yeh reminds, “With many of the names that have tildes or umlauts or little markings, that is actually really important, too.” When making name tents and folders, she says, remember “it’s not just the spoken word; it’s the written name as well.”) While Kohli encourages parents to be direct in advocating for their own child’s name, she sought balance in her dual role as a professor and parent of a classmate, figuring, “I can’t just go in there and slap down my research.”

Instead, whenever the first-grade teacher was in earshot, she made a point to properly pronounce that student’s name. Eventually, it worked.

And that might be the most important lesson Kohli and Solórzano have to offer: “[Since] students will often take the cue of fearing or celebrating difference from the climate set up by teachers, … educators are in a unique position to shape the perceptions of their students” about themselves and others. In the age of growth mindset and “marvelous mistakes,” teachers, counselors, literacy specialists, social workers, administrators, yard staff, PTA members and any other adult who interacts with children at a school can reframe name pronunciation as an opportunity rather than a challenge.

Balogh, the Boston-area teacher, sums it up: “If I can’t make a consistent, good-faith effort to pronounce a name correctly, the implicit message is that I can’t be bothered.” Those who show that they can take an important step toward making all students feel seen and respected, necessary prerequisites for an engaging social and academic experience.

Teachers’ Strategies for Pronouncing and Remembering Students’ Names Correctly published first on https://greatpricecourse.tumblr.com/

[uk-news-talking-politics]

The real Theresa May: How the PM tried to introduce immigration checks in schools

By Natalie Bloomer and Samir Jeraj

This week, Theresa May spoke of giving a voice to those who have been "ignored or silenced for too long". She outlined a "British dream" where it doesn't matter "where you are from or who your parents are". Today we reveal how skin-deep this rhetoric really is, as we document the attempts she made as home secretary to discriminate against the children of undocumented migrants in the school system.

Since last year, new government rules have meant that schools across England have been collecting data on the country of birth and nationality of their pupils. Immediately, the policy caused problems. Reports emerged of staff wrongly demanding to see copies of passports and asking parents to confirm their child's immigration status.

What looked at first like a badly thought-out policy soon became something more sinister. It was revealed that the Department for Education had made an agreement to pass on details of 1,500 children a month to the Home Office for immigration enforcement.

This arrangement was actually a watered-down version of a far more draconian project initiated by May when she was home secretary.

In 2015, then education secretary Nicky Morgan wrote to David Cameron to warn against Home Office plans for undocumented children. Published extracts of Morgan's letter made it clear that May wanted schools to carry out immigration checks on pupils and put the children of undocumented migrants to the back of the queue when it came to admissions.

"I have concerns about the practical and presentational issues of applying our strong position on illegal migrants to the emotive issue of children's education," Morgan wrote. "These cover deprioritising illegal migrants in the schools admissions process, and carrying out immigration checks through schools. Introducing these checks could lead to some children not being registered for school because of real or perceived fear of deportation."

While May wasn't successful in pushing through those changes, the collection of nationality data started shortly afterwards

Thanks to pressure from campaigners like Against Borders for Children, the government confirmed earlier this year that information about nationality would no longer be passed to the Home Office and parents who previously provided the information would have the right to retract it.

"The damaging impact when trusted services like schools share data with the Home Office cannot be understated," Fran Zanatta, a spokesperson for Against Borders for Children, says. "Children will be withdrawn from school and denied an education because of the climate of fear the Home Office is intentionally creating."

But while May's initiative to introduce immigration enforcement to schools was not successful, the government did put children at risk when it came to healthcare.

Frances Travena, of the Coram Children's Legal Centre, tells of a woman who had lived in the country legally for nine years before incorrect legal advice led to her becoming undocumented. Her child later became ill and needed ongoing treatment. Because of her immigration status she had to pay for it - something she couldn't afford to do. She was then told by the hospital that they would no longer be able provide the child with the care they needed. Only life-saving treatment would be available.

"The hostile environment is damaging to children," Travena says. "The majority of families have no recourse to public funds, and live in constant financial precarity. Even where families are able to apply for benefits, many do not because they are afraid that accessing financial support will impact on their right to remain. This leaves children hungry and at risk of homelessness."

It's not just children who come to the UK with their parents who are affected. Unaccompanied children who arrive here, often after traumatic experiences, face huge uncertainty as they approach adulthood. Just before their 18th birthday, they must apply for extended leave to remain in the UK. This is often turned down. They then face a lengthy and complex legal process to appeal the decision. This is at the same time as having much of the support they received when they were classed as a child cut off.

For many of these children, the experience is deeply traumatic. They have no family or friends to return to in their country of origin. Many of them know no home apart from the UK. They speak and act like any other British child. But their immigration status puts them at risk of sudden removal.

"One of the outcomes of the 'hostile environment' is that coming of age for unaccompanied minors has become a major period of anxiety and insecurity," Dr Nando Sigona, a researcher on the refugee crisis, says. "Services are reduced drastically and abruptly. The fear of being deported back to their country of birth becomes an overriding consideration that affects their social life, educational results and mental health."

In 2012, it was estimated that there were 120,000 undocumented children in the UK. But between 2012 and 2015 only around 15% of them were regularised or left the country. The rest either got caught up in the Kafkaesque immigration system or fell into the shadows of society, where they are vulnerable to criminals, gangs and sexual predators.

Whether it is teachers being expected to act as border guards, children being turned away for healthcare, or unaccompanied young asylum seekers having their support cut, the impact of the government's policies are clear across society.

May's conference speech attempted to portray her record and that of her party as one of social justice, fairness and openness. It will come as a bitter joke to the children whose lives she targeted in her campaign against immigration

Natalie Bloomer is a journalist for Politics.co.uk. You can follow her on Twitter here. Samir Jeraj is a freelance journalist. You can follow him on Twitter here.

[amongssuicideindeigenouspeo-blog]

Questions & Answers

1.Why are the suicide rates in indigenous people so high?

Suicide rate in indigenous people are so high because of many reason. 1.4 million aboriginal members live in poor conditions, these conditions lead them to believe that they are less than the average person. On top of this they lack adequate employment opportunities so many of them stay at home without the opportunity to distract themselves from their own personal trauma. 40% of indigenous youth live in poverty, meaning that after everything they can’t even afford to obtain things to better the conditions they live in. Not only do they experience a hard lifestyle, but ancestors of indigenous children experienced the abuse of residential schools. Since the children were so young in these schools it all they learned so when they  were released they took these issues out on their own children. This is why it has been passed down through 4 generations. Taking all these things into consideration, it is not alarming that suicide rates continue to rise in indigenous communities.

2.Is there a common reasoning for these suicides?

Throughout my research I have been able to find that there is a common reasoning for these suicides. Residential schools went on for so many years that all indigenous people can say that a member from their immediate or extended family went to residential schools. This means that in some way or another, abuse, rape, and trauma are continuously being passed down. Apart from issues within their families, indigenous people do not feel welcome outside of their society. They don’t receive the respect they deserve and even if they were to seek help don’t have the facilities available to them. These reasoning are brought up continuously in different articles about suicide.

3.What is the reasoning behind indigenous people not having the same equal facilities available to them as people off the reserves?

There is no specific reasoning for indigenous people not to receive the same facilities compared to non-aboriginals. However what I found is that according to the health plan provided to them there is loopholes that don’t actually give indigenous people the health care they deserve. When it comes to mental health, facilities aren’t important to the government to provide near them. The government does not see this as an important factor in their budget therefore they are more focused on non-aboriginals, to me this is a form of discrimination and really needs to be looked into.

4.Who has spoken out already about this injustice?

Within indigenous communities, their Chiefs are trying there best to raise the issue to the government. However, more suicides continue to occur and the government won’t listen. After the suicide of a 12 year old indigenous girl on January 10, 2017 the indigenous community in Wapekeka could no longer wait to risk the lives of more children. After years, the indigenous community still is trying to get their voice heard and they won’t stop until they achieve it.

5.What is being done right now about it?

Today suicide rate amongst indigenous people continue to rise. The indigenous community can no longer handle the loss of so many members and has begun their best to handle this issue in their own hands. Letters, meetings, calls have been set to put in order a proper program into mental-health. However, the indigenous people are being denied their request. This is absurd and in justice because there’s only so much the communities can do until they reach a breaking point.

6.Is this legacy of assimilation contributing to the high number of suicide attempts we’re seeing today?

In the past, non-aboriginals did their best to assimilate aboriginals to their own ideas of “normal”. They put agents in reserves, told parents their children were going to be in school an instead took them to residential schools. The truth of what happen in these schools is disgraceful, and has a huge impact on  the high number of suicide attempts today. Family violence is being perpetuated through generations and won’t stop until proper facilities are provided for a long-term solution.

7.What is the catholic church doing about suicide in indigenous communities?

This was the hardest question for me to encounter because it was almost impossible for me to find anything that the catholic church was choosing to do about this injustice. I did however find that on the Catholic Bishop page it read that that Catholic community was always welcoming to aboriginals in their hardship times.. That sounds ridiculous, especially because it is not true.

8.Why does ATTAWAPISKAT face these high suicide challenges?

When looking into suicide I found that there are specific reserves that have much higher suicide rates than others. Attawapiskat is located in James bay, Northern Ontario. It is home to over 2,000 people and is going through an ongoing battle between suicide. Attawapiskat faces these challenges because of its lack of proper structure and mental health facilities. Since it is located in a more isolated area it has little to none hospitals or institutions. Apart from lacking resources indigenous people in Attawapiskat have very poor living conditions to the point where a family of 5 could live with their extended family because they simply don’t have the availability to proper housing. The youth only recently got a new school that was built from an old one that was horrible and run down. These issues are what lead certain people in the community to feel like the only way out of this controversy is through suicide.

9.Are there reserves that don’t face these challenges?

This research proves to me that there could be cases where the government says they provided aid in reserves but in reality it could only imply for certain ones not all.

10.Why do some reserves get more funding towards health care than others?

When answering this question I could not directly find information that justified this reasoning. However I found more clues about the way reserves really do have a complex health care system. It is clear that there is unequal access to health care services and it makes sense why the guest speaker who came in said he had access to the same health care as non-aboriginals. All thought I couldn’t find a direct answer to this reasoning it made me realize that their really is many things the government will never be able to explain.

11.Do first nations people have any access at all to the proper treatment facilities for people with mental health issues?

In certain areas there is facilities in place to deal with mental health issues however most of the time there is not. In most reserves for them to be treated they must send a state emergency. This means that they must be taken of the reserve to the closest facilities that are mostly located in the south, living their communities. At times there are cases where they are off the reserve for over a month because it would be fatal for them to go back home. This injustice is ongoing and never seems to have something good coming out of it even though it has been happening for years. Something must be done to give these communities the resource facilities that they deserve.

12.If so, How far and how long does it take to get to them from the reserve?

There are mental health facilities available for indigenous people however they are off the reserve. At times it can take up to 45 min to get them to the service that they need. Even when there is mental health facilities the non-aboriginal health workers lack a connection to specialized services for aboriginals with severe mental illness. These facilities lack the proper workers that don’t make these aboriginals feel discriminates or uncomfortable. Since this barrier exists and the locations are so far it seems as though there really is no hope for them.

13.Does the government try to help or is this all part of a purpose, for wanting the indigenous people to keep passing until there is no more left?

The government has promoted that it is doing everything in its “power” to help these aboriginal communities. However, if suicide still is increasing at an alarming rate then this can not be possible. The statistics and references show that the government has been putting aside money into the aboriginal budget but lacks to provide reasons as to why they aren’t providing enough facilities for those currently dealing with mental health issues. Personally, from reading through all this research I truly believe that the government could care less about what happens to these people. Budget cuts come and go, lifestyle of living is poor, schools are run down, they feel discriminated, they don’t have access to proper healthcare and all these things are affecting the way the aboriginals think. Imagine living in these conditions, there is no way you could say this wouldn’t affect your mind and the way you perceive life. I believe that the government is trying in a discrete matter to dismantle the indigenous communities but I think they are noticing that no matter what they throw at them the community of aboriginals still stays strong. I hope that the government realizes that they owe it to the aboriginals to provide them with AT LEAST mental health institutions.

14.What do the indigenous communities think about this injustice?

The indigenous community is doing everything in there power to stop this injustice. They want help, they want the right to the things they deserve. All the proof is evident that these reserves clearly lack BASIC needs. To stop this dangerous cycle of neglect and abuse they need to be heard. The Chief Fiddler met with prime minister Trudeau and tried to tell him that they have already spoken to a person of higher authority about the need for mental health care and addiction treatment to prevent suicide and explained how new investments aren’t going to help but rather a total new health transformation needs to occur.

15.Why are the suicide rates so high for the teenage group of indigenous people

Researching for this question really made me upset and angry. I have a cousin who in high school went through an immense amount of depression and when she got to that point where she just felt like the world was falling down on her shoulders we were lucky enough to catch her at that moment. Now when I have been researching on this topic it scares me to know how silent these kids are about the immense dark feelings they have inside of themselves. My cousin was 17 when she dealt with this… these children are committing suicide at 12. The reason for this is because the youth are kept in an environment where they feel like they don’t belong, and as if they are a waste of space in their community. A point in the research that was very relevant is the fact that if a group of friends are consistently obsessed with death and dying, the to belong in that group they have to be immersed in that culture of suicide. Living on a reserve doesn’t leave the youth which much of a choice of doing anything else there isn’t the possibility of going to movie theaters or driving fancy cars, or those things kids see on TV. There’s the living conditions of feeling like a second-class citizen when one watches TV and sees what other people have that they don’t. Without the proper guidance or facilities these children are left feeling worthless and result in suicide.

[suicideamongstindigenouspeo-blog]

Questions and Answers

1.Why are the suicide rates in indigenous people so high?

Suicide rate in indigenous people are so high because of many reason. 1.4 million aboriginal members live in poor conditions, these conditions lead them to believe that they are less than the average person. On top of this they lack adequate employment opportunities so many of them stay at home without the opportunity to distract themselves from their own personal trauma. 40% of indigenous youth live in poverty, meaning that after everything they can’t even afford to obtain things to better the conditions they live in. Not only do they experience a hard lifestyle, but ancestors of indigenous children experienced the abuse of residential schools. Since the children were so young in these schools it all they learned so when they  were released they took these issues out on their own children. This is why it has been passed down through 4 generations. Taking all these things into consideration, it is not alarming that suicide rates continue to rise in indigenous communities.

2.Is there a common reasoning for these suicides?

Throughout my research I have been able to find that there is a common reasoning for these suicides. Residential schools went on for so many years that all indigenous people can say that a member from their immediate or extended family went to residential schools. This means that in some way or another, abuse, rape, and trauma are continuously being passed down. Apart from issues within their families, indigenous people do not feel welcome outside of their society. They don’t receive the respect they deserve and even if they were to seek help don’t have the facilities available to them. These reasoning are brought up continuously in different articles about suicide.

3.What is the reasoning behind indigenous people not having the same equal facilities available to them as people off the reserves?

There is no specific reasoning for indigenous people not to receive the same facilities compared to non-aboriginals. However what I found is that according to the health plan provided to them there is loopholes that don’t actually give indigenous people the health care they deserve. When it comes to mental health, facilities aren’t important to the government to provide near them. The government does not see this as an important factor in their budget therefore they are more focused on non-aboriginals, to me this is a form of discrimination and really needs to be looked into.

4.Who has spoken out already about this injustice?

Within indigenous communities, their Chiefs are trying there best to raise the issue to the government. However, more suicides continue to occur and the government won't listen. After the suicide of a 12 year old indigenous girl on January 10, 2017 the indigenous community in Wapekeka could no longer wait to risk the lives of more children. After years, the indigenous community still is trying to get their voice heard and they won't stop until they achieve it.

5.What is being done right now about it?

Today suicide rate amongst indigenous people continue to rise. The indigenous community can no longer handle the loss of so many members and has begun their best to handle this issue in their own hands. Letters, meetings, calls have been set to put in order a proper program into mental-health. However, the indigenous people are being denied their request. This is absurd and in justice because there's only so much the communities can do until they reach a breaking point.

6.Is this legacy of assimilation contributing to the high number of suicide attempts we’re seeing today?

In the past, non-aboriginals did their best to assimilate aboriginals to their own ideas of “normal”. They put agents in reserves, told parents their children were going to be in school an instead took them to residential schools. The truth of what happen in these schools is disgraceful, and has a huge impact on  the high number of suicide attempts today. Family violence is being perpetuated through generations and won’t stop until proper facilities are provided for a long-term solution.

7.What is the catholic church doing about suicide in indigenous communities?

This was the hardest question for me to encounter because it was almost impossible for me to find anything that the catholic church was choosing to do about this injustice. I did however find that on the Catholic Bishop page it read that that Catholic community was always welcoming to aboriginals in their hardship times.. That sounds ridiculous, especially because it is not true.

8.Why does ATTAWAPISKAT face these high suicide challenges?

When looking into suicide I found that there are specific reserves that have much higher suicide rates than others. Attawapiskat is located in James bay, Northern Ontario. It is home to over 2,000 people and is going through an ongoing battle between suicide. Attawapiskat faces these challenges because of its lack of proper structure and mental health facilities. Since it is located in a more isolated area it has little to none hospitals or institutions. Apart from lacking resources indigenous people in Attawapiskat have very poor living conditions to the point where a family of 5 could live with their extended family because they simply don't have the availability to proper housing. The youth only recently got a new school that was built from an old one that was horrible and run down. These issues are what lead certain people in the community to feel like the only way out of this controversy is through suicide.

9.Are there reserves that don't face these challenges?

This research proves to me that there could be cases where the government says they provided aid in reserves but in reality it could only imply for certain ones not all.

10.Why do some reserves get more funding towards health care than others?

When answering this question I could not directly find information that justified this reasoning. However I found more clues about the way reserves really do have a complex health care system. It is clear that there is unequal access to health care services and it makes sense why the guest speaker who came in said he had access to the same health care as non-aboriginals. All thought I couldn't find a direct answer to this reasoning it made me realize that their really is many things the government will never be able to explain.

11.Do first nations people have any access at all to the proper treatment facilities for people with mental health issues?

In certain areas there is facilities in place to deal with mental health issues however most of the time there is not. In most reserves for them to be treated they must send a state emergency. This means that they must be taken of the reserve to the closest facilities that are mostly located in the south, living their communities. At times there are cases where they are off the reserve for over a month because it would be fatal for them to go back home. This injustice is ongoing and never seems to have something good coming out of it even though it has been happening for years. Something must be done to give these communities the resource facilities that they deserve.

12.If so, How far and how long does it take to get to them from the reserve?

There are mental health facilities available for indigenous people however they are off the reserve. At times it can take up to 45 min to get them to the service that they need. Even when there is mental health facilities the non-aboriginal health workers lack a connection to specialized services for aboriginals with severe mental illness. These facilities lack the proper workers that don't make these aboriginals feel discriminates or uncomfortable. Since this barrier exists and the locations are so far it seems as though there really is no hope for them.

13.Does the government try to help or is this all part of a purpose, for wanting the indigenous people to keep passing until there is no more left?

The government has promoted that it is doing everything in its “power” to help these aboriginal communities. However, if suicide still is increasing at an alarming rate then this can not be possible. The statistics and references show that the government has been putting aside money into the aboriginal budget but lacks to provide reasons as to why they aren't providing enough facilities for those currently dealing with mental health issues. Personally, from reading through all this research I truly believe that the government could care less about what happens to these people. Budget cuts come and go, lifestyle of living is poor, schools are run down, they feel discriminated, they don't have access to proper healthcare and all these things are affecting the way the aboriginals think. Imagine living in these conditions, there is no way you could say this wouldn't affect your mind and the way you perceive life. I believe that the government is trying in a discrete matter to dismantle the indigenous communities but I think they are noticing that no matter what they throw at them the community of aboriginals still stays strong. I hope that the government realizes that they owe it to the aboriginals to provide them with AT LEAST mental health institutions.

14.What do the indigenous communities think about this injustice?

The indigenous community is doing everything in there power to stop this injustice. They want help, they want the right to the things they deserve. All the proof is evident that these reserves clearly lack BASIC needs. To stop this dangerous cycle of neglect and abuse they need to be heard. The Chief Fiddler met with prime minister Trudeau and tried to tell him that they have already spoken to a person of higher authority about the need for mental health care and addiction treatment to prevent suicide and explained how new investments aren't going to help but rather a total new health transformation needs to occur.

15.Why are the suicide rates so high for the teenage group of indigenous people

Researching for this question really made me upset and angry. I have a cousin who in high school went through an immense amount of depression and when she got to that point where she just felt like the world was falling down on her shoulders we were lucky enough to catch her at that moment. Now when I have been researching on this topic it scares me to know how silent these kids are about the immense dark feelings they have inside of themselves. My cousin was 17 when she dealt with this… these children are committing suicide at 12. The reason for this is because the youth are kept in an environment where they feel like they don’t belong, and as if they are a waste of space in their community. A point in the research that was very relevant is the fact that if a group of friends are consistently obsessed with death and dying, the to belong in that group they have to be immersed in that culture of suicide. Living on a reserve doesn’t leave the youth which much of a choice of doing anything else there isn’t the possibility of going to movie theaters or driving fancy cars, or those things kids see on TV. There’s the living conditions of feeling like a second-class citizen when one watches TV and sees what other people have that they don’t. Without the proper guidance or facilities these children are left feeling worthless and result in suicide.