#but to also scare Jewish people into its embrace

[mariacallous]

Around a dozen masked individuals marched in downtown Columbus, Ohio, on Saturday carrying Nazi flags and hurling antisemitic and racist rhetoric, earning condemnation from a broad range of officials including the White House and the state’s Republican governor.

The display came only a week after another neo-Nazi gathering in Michigan outside a community theater production of “The Diary of Anne Frank.” 

The marches exacerbated fears among Jewish groups and others that the reelection of President Donald Trump may trigger an increase in white supremacist activity.

“I’m sorry the President-elect has emboldened these creeps,” tweeted Columbus City Council President Shannon Hardin, a Democrat. “This community rejects their pathetic efforts to promote fear and hate.”

A White House spokesperson condemned the march Monday morning as a “sickening display” and said President Joe Biden “abhors the hateful poison of Nazism, antisemitism, and racism.”

“We will not tolerate hate in Ohio,” the state’s governor, Mike DeWine, said in a statement published on social media. “Neo-Nazis — their faces hidden behind red masks — roamed streets in Columbus today, carrying Nazi flags and spewing vile and racist speech against people of color and Jews.”

Referring to what he said were reports that the group was “also espousing white power sentiments,” DeWine continued, “There is no place in this State for hate, bigotry, antisemitism, or violence, and we must denounce it wherever we see it.”

Some members of the group were armed, and at least one member sprayed pepper spray at spectators, according to the Columbus Dispatch. Police detained several people on the scene in response to reports of a physical altercation but later told reporters they “determined that an assault did not take place and all of the individuals were released.” Police had separately told the Columbus Jewish News that physical altercations “broke out, stopped and then broke out again.”

National Jewish groups including the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee condemned the march, with AJC regional director Lee Shapiro calling it “another sad example of the bigotry that we have witnessed across the country.” The Columbus Jewish federation and Jewish Community Relations Council also condemned the march, telling the Jewish News they were “disgusted by the reprehensible display of hate.”

The rally was also condemned by the city’s Democratic mayor and by its Democratic city attorney, Zach Klein.

“Columbus embraces diversity of opinions, religions, backgrounds and everything that makes us special, but we will never embrace hate. Take your flags and the masks you hide behind and  go home and never come back. Your hate isn’t welcome in our city,” Klein said in a statement. “I stand with our Jewish friends and all those who continue to be targeted by bias and hate. I’ll always have your back.”

Also over the weekend, hundreds of people in a Philadelphia suburb turned up outside a public library to protest a Nazi flag that had been flown briefly outside a private residence in Whitpain Township. Following media attention, the homeowners replaced the swastika flag with an American flag, according to CBS News. 

A similar, though much smaller, rally had taken place in the state capital of Harrisburg, in August, following a neo-Nazi demonstration there.

“The thing that scared me about this is that someone was willing, in their neighborhood, to put out a Nazi flag because that says something about them,” Lynne Krause, president of the newly formed non-denominational synagogue Darchei Noam in nearby Ambler, told CBS about the Whitpain Nazi flag. “They felt so at comfort to let people know, ‘This is what I believe.’ … White supremacy, Nazi stuff, it’s on the rise, and I think it’s unfortunate.” 

[testudoaubrei-blog]

Content note for discussions of eternal damnation, and all sorts of other shit that will trigger a lot of folks with religious trauma.

Before I get started I might as well explain where I’m coming from - unlike a lot of She-Ra fans, and a lot of queer people, I don’t have much religious trauma, or any, maybe (okay there were a number of years I was convinced I was going to hell, but that happens to everyone, right?). I was raised a liberal Christian by liberal Christian parents in the Episcopal Church, where most of my memories are overwhelmingly positive. Fuck, growing up in the 90’s, Chuch was probably the only place outside my home I didn’t have homophobia spewed at me. Because it was the 90’s and it was a fucking hellscape of bigotry where 5 year olds knew enough to taunt each other with homophobic slurs and the adults didn’t know enough to realize how fucked up that was. Anyway. This is my experience, but it is an atypical one, and I know it. Quite frankly I know that my experience of Christianity has very little at all to do with what most people experienced, or what people generally mean when they talk about Christianity as a cultural force in America today. So if you were raised Christian and you don’t recognize your theology here, congrats, neither do I, but these ideas and cultural forces are huge and powerful and dominant. And it’s this dominant Christian narrative that I’m referring to in this post. As well as, you know, a children’s cartoon about lesbian rainbow princesses. So here it goes. This is going to get batshit.

"All events whatsoever are governed by the secret counsel of God." - John Calvin

“We’re all just a bunch of wooly guys” - Noelle Stevenson

This is a post triggered by a single scene, and a single line. It’s one of the most fucked-up scenes in She-Ra, toward the end of Save the Cat. Catra, turned into a puppet by Prime, struggles with her chip, desperately trying to gain control of herself, so lost and scared and vulnerable that she flings aside her own death wish and her pride and tearfully begs Adora to rescue her. Adora reaches out , about to grab her, and then Prime takes control back, pronounces ‘disappointing’ and activates the kill switch that pitches Catra off the platform and to her death (and seriously, she dies here, guys - also Adora breaks both her legs in the fall). But before he does, he dismisses Catra with one of his most chilling lines. “Some creatures are meant only for destruction.”

And that’s when everyone watching probably had their heart broken a little bit, but some of the viewers raised in or around Christianity watching the same scene probably whispered ‘holy shit’ to themselves. Because Prime’s line - which works as a chilling and callous dismissal of Catra - is also an allusion to a passage from the Bible. In fact, it’s from one of the most fucked up passages in a book with more than its share of fucked up passages. It’s from Romans 9:22, and I’m going to quote several previous verses to give the context of the passage (if not the entire Epistle, which is more about who needs to abide by Jewish dietary restrictions but was used to construct a systematic theology in the centuries afterwards because people decided it was Eternal Truth).

19 Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will?

20 Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?

21 Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?

22 What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction:

The context of the allusion supports the context in the show. Prime is dismissing Catra - serial betrayer, liar, failed conqueror, former bloody-handed warlord - as worthless, as having always been worthless and fit only to be destroyed. He is speaking from a divine and authoritative perspective (because he really does think he’s God, more of this in my TL/DR Horde Prime thing). Prime is echoing not only his own haughty dismissal of Catra, and Shadow Weaver’s view of her, but also perhaps the viewer’s harshest assessment of her, and her own worst fears about herself. Catra was bad from the start, doomed to destroy and to be destroyed. A malformed pot, cracked in firing, destined to be shattered against a wall and have her shards classified by some future archaeologist 2,000 years later. And all that’s bad enough.

But the full historical and theological context of this passage shows the real depth of Noelle Stevenson’s passion and thought and care when writing this show. Noelle was raised in Evangelical or Fundamentalist Christianity. To my knowledge, he has never specified what sect or denomination, but in interviews and her memoir Noelle has shown a particular concern for questions that this passage raises, and a particular loathing for the strains of Protestant theology that take this passage and run with it - that is to say, Calvinism. So while I’m not sure if Noelle was raised as a conservative, Calvinist Presbyterian, his preoccupation with these questions mean that it’s time to talk about Calvinism.

It would be unfair, perhaps, to say that Calvinism is a systematic theology built entirely upon the Epistles of Romans and Galatians, but only -just- (and here my Catholic readers in particular will chuckle to themselves and lovingly stroke their favorite passage of the Epistle of James). The core of Calvinist Doctrine is often expressed by the very Dutch acronym TULIP:

Total Depravity - people are wholly evil, and incapable of good action or even willing good thoughts or deeds

Unconditional Election - God chooses some people to save because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, not because they did anything to deserve, trigger or accept it

Limited Atonement - Jesus died only to save the people God chose to save, not the rest of us bastards

Irresistible Grace - God chooses some people to be saved - if you didn’t want to be saved, too bad, God said so.

Perseverance of the Saints - People often forget this one and assume it’s ‘predestination’ but it’s actually this - basically, once saved by God, always saved, and if it looks like someone falls out of grace, they were never saved to begin with. Well that’s all sealed up tight I guess.

Reading through these, predestination isn’t a single doctrine in Calvinism but the entire theological underpinnings of it together with humanity’s utter powerlessness before sin. Basically God has all agency, humanity has none. Calvinism (and a lot of early modern Protestantism) is obsessed with questions of how God saves people (grace alone, AKA Sola Fides) and who God saves (the people god elects and only the people God elects, and fuck everyone else).

It’s apparent that Noelle was really taken by these questions, and repelled by the answers he heard. He’s alluded to having a tattoo refuting the Gospel passage about Sheep and Goats being sorted at the end times, affirming instead that ‘we’re all just a bunch of wooly guys’ (you can see this goat tattoo in some of his self-portraits in comics, etc). He’s also mentioned that rejecting and subverting destiny is a huge part of everything he writes as a particular rejection of the idea that some individual people are 'chosen' by God or that God has a plan for any of us. You can see that -so clearly- in Adora’s arc, where Adora embraces and then rejects destiny time and again and finally learns to live life for herself.

But for Catra, we’re much more concerned about the most negative aspect of this - the idea that some people are vessels meant for destruction. And that’s something else that Noelle is preoccupied with. In her memoir in the section about leaving the church and becoming a humanistic atheist, there is a drawing of a pot and the question ‘Am I a vessel prepared for destruction?’ Obviously this was on Noelle’s mind (And this is before he came out to himself as queer!).

To look at how this question plays out in Catra’s entire arc, let’s first talk about how ideas of damnation and salvation actually play out in society. And for that I’m going to plug one of my favorite books, Gin Lun’s Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction (if you can tell by now, I am a fucking blast at parties). Lun tells the long and very interesting story about, how ideas of hell and who went there changed during the Early American Republic. One of the interesting developments that she talks about is how while at first people who were repelled by Calvinism started moving toward a doctrine of universal salvation (no on goes to hell, at least not forever*), eventually they decided that hell was fine as long as only the right kind of people went there. Mostly The Other - non-Christian foreigners, Catholics, Atheists, people who were sinners in ways that were not just bad but weird and violated Victorian ideas of respectability. Really, Hell became a way of othering people, and arguably that’s how it survives today, especially as a way to other queer people (but expanding this is slated for my Montero rant). Now while a lot of people were consciously rejecting Calvinist predestination, they were still drawing the distinction between the Elect (good, saved, worthwhile) and the everyone else (bad, damned, worthless). I would argue that secularized ideas of this survive to this day even among non-Christian spaces in our society - we like to draw lines between those who Elect, and those who aren’t.

And that’s what brings us back to Catra. Because Catra’s entire arc is a refutation of the idea that some people are worthless and irredeemable, either by nature, nurture or their own actions. Catra’s actions strain the conventions of who is sympathetic in a Kid’s cartoon - I’ve half joked that she’s Walter White as a cat girl, and it’s only half a joke. She’s cruel, self-deluded, she spends 4 seasons refusing to take responsibility for anything she does and until Season 5 she just about always chooses the thing that does the most damage to herself and others. As I mentioned in my Catra rant, the show goes out of its way to demonstrate that Catra is morally culpable in every step of her descent into evil (except maybe her break with reality just before she pulls the lever). The way that Catra personally betrays everyone around her, the way she strips herself of all of her better qualities and most of what makes her human, hell even her costume changes would signal in any other show that she’s irredeemable.

It’s tempting to see this as Noelle’s version of being edgy - pushing the boundaries of what a sympathetic character is, throwing out antiheroics in favor of just making the villain a protagonist. Noelle isn’t quite Alex ‘I am in the business of traumatizing children’ Hirsch, who seems to have viewed his job as pushing the bounds of what you could show on the Disney Channel (I saw Gravity Falls as an adult and a bunch of that shit lives rent free in my nightmares forever), but Noelle has his own dark side, mostly thematically. The show’s willingness to deal with abuse, and messed up religious themes, and volatile, passionate, not particularly healthy relationships feels pretty daring. I’m not joking when I gleefully recommend this show to friends as ‘a couple from a Mountain Goats Song fights for four seasons in a cartoon intended for 9 year olds’. Noelle is in his own way pushing the boundaries of what a kids show can do. If you read Noelle’s other works like Nimona, you see an argument for Noelle being at least a bit edgy. Nimona is also angry, gleefully destructive, violent and spiteful - not unlike Catra. Given that it was a 2010s webcomic and not a kids show, Nimona is a good deal worse than Catra in some ways - Catra doesn’t kill people on screen, while Nimona laughs about it (that was just like, a webcomic thing - one of the fan favorite characters in my personal favorite, Narbonic, was a fucking sociopath, and the heroes were all amoral mad scientists, except for the superintelligent gerbil**). But unlike Nimona, whose fate is left open ended, Catra is redeemed.

And that is weird. We’ve had redemption arcs, but generally not of characters with -so- much vile stuff in their history. Going back to the comparison between her and Azula, many other shows, like Avatar, would have made Catra a semi-sympathetic villain who has a sob-story in their origin but who is beyond redemption, and in so doing would articulate a kind of psychologized Calvinism where some people are too traumatized to ever be fully and truly human. I’d argue this is the problem with Azula as a character - she’s a fun villain, but she doesn’t have moral agency, and the ultimate message of her arc - that she’s a broken person destined only to hurt people - is actually pretty fucked up. And that’s the origin story of so many serial killers and psycopaths that populate so many TV shows and movies. Beyond ‘hurt people hurt people’ they have nothing to teach us except perhaps that trauma makes you a monster and that the only possible response to people doing bad things is to cut them out of your life and out of our society (and that’s why we have prisons, right?)

And so Catra’s redemption and the depths from which she claws herself back goes back to Noelle’s desire to prove that no person is a vessel ‘fitted for destruction.’ Catra goes about as far down the path of evil as we’ve ever seen a protagonist in a kids show go, and she still has the capacity for good. Importantly, she is not subject to total depravity - she is capable of a good act, if only one at first. Catra is the one who begins her own redemption (unlike in Calvinism, where grace is unearned and even unwelcomed) - because she wants something better than what she has, even if its too late, because she realizes that she never wanted any of this anyway, because she wants to do one good thing once in her life even if it kills her.

The very extremity of Catra’s descent into villainy serves to underline the point that Noelle is trying to make - that no one can be written off completely, that everyone is capable of change, and that no human being is garbage, no matter how twisted they’ve become. Meanwhile her ability to set her own redemption in motion is a powerful statement of human agency, and healing, and a refutation of Calvinism’s idea that we are powerless before sin or pop cultural tropes about us being powerful before the traumas of our upbringing. Catra’s arc, then, is a kind of anti-Calvinist theological statement - about the nature of people and the nature of goodness.

Now, there is a darker side to this that Noelle has only hinted at, but which is suggested by other characters on the show. Because while Catra’s redemption shows that people are capable of change, even when they’ve done horrible things, been fucked up and fucked themselves up, it also illustrates the things people do to themselves that make change hard. As I mentioned in my Catra rant, two of the most sinister parts of her descent into villainy are her self-dehumanization (crushing her own compassion and desire to do good) and her rewriting of her own history in her speech and memory to make her own actions seem justified (which we see with her insistence that Adora left her, eliding Adora’s offers to have Catra join her, or her even more clearly false insistence that Entrapta had betrayed them). In Catra, these processes keep her going down the path of evil, and allow her to nearly destroy herself and everyone else. But we can see the same processes at work in two much darker figures - Shadow Weaver and Horde Prime. These are both rants for another day, but the completeness of Shadow Weaver’s narcissistic self-justification and cultivated callousness and the even more complete narcissism of Prime’s god complex cut both characters off from everyone around them. Perhaps, in a theoretical sense, they are still redeemable, but for narrative purposes they might as well be damned.

This willingness to show a case where someone -isn’t- redeemed actually serves to make Catra’s redemption more believable, especially since Noelle and the writers draw the distinction between how Catra and SW/Prime can relate to reality and other people, not how broken they are by their trauma (unlike Zuko and Azula, who are differentiated by How Fucked Uolp They Are). Redemption is there, it’s an option, we can always do what is right, but someone people will choose not to, in part because doing the right thing involves opening ourselves to the world and others, and thus being vulnerable. Noelle mentions this offhandedly in an interview after Season 1 with the She-Ra Progressive of Power podcast - “I sometimes think that shades of grey, sympathetic villains are part of the escapist fantasy of shows like this.” Because in the real world, some people are just bastards, a point that was particularly clear in 2017. Prime and Shadow Weaver admit this reality, while Catra makes a philosophical point that even the bastards can change their ways (at least in theory).

*An idea first proposed in the second century by Origen, who’s a trip and a fucking half by himself, and an idea that becomes the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, which protestants vehemently denied!

**Speaking of favorite Noelle tropes

[hexalt]

CW for discussion of suicide

- She's the crazy ex-girlfriend - What? No, I'm not. - She's the crazy ex-girlfriend - That's a sexist term! - She's the crazy ex-girlfriend - Can you guys stop singing for just a second? - She's so broken insiiiiiide! - The situation's a lot more nuanced than that!

There’s the essay! You get it now. JK.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is the culmination of Rachel Bloom’s YouTube channel (and the song “Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury” in particular where she combined her lifelong obsession with musical theatre and sketch comedy and Aline Brosh McKenna stumbling onto Bloom’s channel one night while having an idea for a television show that subverted the tropes in scripts she’d been writing like The Devil Wears Prada and 27 Dresses.

The show begins with a flashback to teenage Rebecca Bunch (played by Bloom) at summer camp performing in South Pacific. She leaves summer camp gushing about the performance, holding hands with the guy she spent all summer with, Josh Chan. He says it was fun for the time, but it’s time to get back to real life. We flash forward to the present in New York, Rebecca’s world muted in greys and blues with clothing as conservative as her hair.

She’s become a top tier lawyer, a career that she doesn’t enjoy but was pushed into by her overprotective, controlling mother. She’s just found out she’s being promoted to junior partner, and that’s just objectively, on paper fantastic, right?! ...So why isn’t she happy? She goes out onto the streets in the midst of a panic attack, spilling her pills all over the ground, and suddenly sees an ad for butter asking, “When was the last time you were truly happy?” A literal arrow and beam of sunlight then point to none other than Josh Chan. She strikes up a conversation with him where he tells her he’s been trying to make it in New York but doesn’t like it, so he’s moving back to his hometown, West Covina, California, where everyone is just...happy.

The word echoes in her mind, and she absorbs it like a pill. She decides to break free of the hold others have had over her life and turns down the promotion of her mother’s dreams. I didn’t realize the show was a musical when I started it, and it’s at this point that Rebecca is breaking out into its first song, “West Covina”. It’s a parody of the extravagant, classic Broadway numbers filled with a children’s marching band whose funding gets cut, locals joining Rebecca in synchronized song and dance, and finishing with her being lifted into the sky while sitting on a giant pretzel. This was the moment I realized there was something special here.

With this introduction, the stage has been set for the premise of the show. Each season was planned with an overall theme. Season one is all about denial, season two is about being obsessed with love and losing yourself in it, season three is about the spiral and hitting rock bottom, and season four is about renewal and starting from scratch. You can see this from how the theme songs change every year, each being the musical thesis for that season.

We start the show with a bunch of cliché characters: the crazy ex-girlfriend; her quirky sidekick; the hot love interest; his bitchy girlfriend; and his sarcastic best friend who’s clearly a much better match for the heroine. The magic of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is that no one in West Covina is the sum of their tropes. As Rachel says herself, “People aren’t badly written, people are made of specificities.”

The show is revolutionary for the authenticity with which it explores various topics but for the sake of this piece, we’ll discuss mental health, gender, Jewish identity, and sexuality. All topics that Bloom has dug into in her previous works but none better than here.

Simply from the title, many may be put off, but this is a story that has always been about deconstructing stereotypes. Rather than being called The Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, where the story would be from an outsider’s perspective, this story is from that woman’s point of view because the point isn’t to demonize Rebecca, it’s to understand her. Even if you hate her for all the awful things she’s doing.

The musical numbers are shown to be in Rebecca’s imagination, and she tells us they’re how she processes the world, but as she starts healing in the final season, she isn’t the lead singer so often anymore and other characters get to have their own problems and starring roles. When she does have a song, it’s because she’s backsliding into her former patterns.

While a lot of media will have characters that seem to have some sort of vague disorder, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend goes a step further and actually diagnoses Rebecca with Borderline Personality Disorder, while giving her an earnest, soaring anthem. She’s excited and relieved to finally have words for what’s plagued her whole life.

When diagnosing Rebecca, the show’s team consulted with doctors and psychiatrists to give her a proper diagnosis that ended up resonating with many who share it. BPD is a demonized and misunderstood disorder, and I’ve heard that for many, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is the first honest and kind depiction they’ve seen of it in media. Where the taboo of mental illness often leads people to not get any help, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend says there is freedom and healing in identifying and sharing these parts of yourself with others.

Media often uses suicide for comedy or romanticizes it, but Crazy Ex-Girlfriend explored what’s going through someone’s mind to reach that bottomless pit. Its climactic episode is written by Jack Dolgen (Bloom’s long-time musical collaborator, co-songwriter and writer for the show) who’s dealt with suicidal ideation. Many misunderstood suicide as the person simply wanting to die for no reason, but Rebecca tells her best friend, “I didn’t even want to die. I just wanted the pain to stop. It’s like I was out of stories to tell myself that things would be okay.”

Bloom has never shied away from heavy topics. The show discusses in song the horrors of what women do to their bodies and self-esteem to conform to beauty standards, the contradiction of girl power songs that tell you to “Put Yourself First” but make sure you look good for men while doing it, and the importance of women bonding over how terrible straight men are are near and dear to her heart. This is a show that centers marginalized women, pokes fun at the misogyny they go through, and ultimately tells us the love story we thought was going to happen wasn’t between a woman and some guy but between her and her best friend.

I probably haven’t watched enough Jewish TV or film, but to me, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is the most unapologetic and relatable Jewish portrayal I’ve seen overall. From Rebecca’s relationship with her toxic, controlling mother (if anyone ever wants to know what my mother’s like, I send them “Where’s the Bathroom”) to Patti Lupone’s Rabbi Shari answering a Rebecca that doesn’t believe in God, “Always questioning! That is the true spirit of the Jewish people,” the Jewish voices behind the show are clear.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend continues to challenge our perceptions when a middle-aged man with an ex-wife and daughter realizes he’s bisexual and comes out in a Huey Lewis saxophone reverie. The hyper-feminine mean girl breaks up with her boyfriend and realizes the reason she was so obsessed with getting him to commit to her is the same reason she’s so scared to have female friends. She was suffering under the weight of compulsory heterosexuality, but thanks to Rebecca, she eventually finds love and friendship with women.

This thread is woven throughout the show. Many of the characters tell Rebecca when she’s at her lowest of how their lives would’ve never changed for the better if it wasn’t for her. She was a tornado that blew through West Covina, but instead of leaving destruction in her wake, she blew apart their façades, forcing true introspection into what made them happy too.

Rebecca’s story is that of a woman who felt hopeless, who felt no love or happiness in her life, when that’s all she’s ever wanted. She tried desperately to fill that void through validation from her parents and random men, things romantic comedies had taught her matter most but came up empty. She tried on a multitude of identities through the musical numbers in her mind, seeing herself as the hero and villain of the story, and eventually realized she’s neither because life doesn’t make narrative sense.

It takes her a long time but eventually she sees that all the things she thought would solve her problems can’t actually bring her happiness. What does is the real family she finds in West Covina, the town she moved to on a whim, and finally having agency over herself to use her own voice and tell her story through music.

The first words spoken by Rebecca are, “When I sang my solo, I felt, like, a really palpable connection with the audience.” Her last words are, “This is a song I wrote.” This connection with the audience that brought her such joy is something she finally gets when she gets to perform her story not to us, the TV audience, but to her loved ones in West Covina. Rebecca (and Rachel) always felt like an outcast, West Covina (and creating the show) showed her how cathartic it is to find others who understand you.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is the prologue to Rebecca’s life and the radical story of someone getting better. She didn’t need to change her entire being to find acceptance and happiness, she needed to embrace herself and accept love and help from others who truly cared for her. Community is what she always needed and community is what ultimately saved her.

*

P.S. If you have Spotify... I also process life through music, so I made some playlists related to the show because what better way to express my deep affection for it than through song?

CXG parodies, references, and is inspired by a lot of music from all kinds of genres, musicals, and musicians. Same goes for the videos themselves. I gathered all of them into one giant playlist along with the show’s songs.

A Rebecca Bunch mix that goes through her character arc from season 1 to 4.

I’m shamelessly a fan of Greg x Rebecca, so this is a mega mix of themselves and their relationship throughout the show.

*

I’m in a TV group where we wrote essays on our favorite shows of the 2010s, so here is mine on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, I realized I forgot to ever post it. Also wrote one for Schitt’s Creek.

[innuendostudios]

The newest installment of The Alt-Right Playbook - Endnote 4: How the Alt-Right is Like an Abusive Relationship - is a little different. This installment was presented live at Solidarity Lowell, and includes a bonus Q&A section. This video expands on the ideas put forth in How to Radicalize a Normie.

If you would like more videos like this to come out, please back me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

He is intriguing, yet unpredictable. He demands unconditional loyalty. He seems to have an intuitive understanding of what people want to hear but no actual empathy; he treats others as simply bodies or objects. And he’s surrounded by a network of subordinates but the personnel is always changing.

Does it sound like I’m describing The President? Because these are, according to Alexandra Stein, qualities of a cult leader.

Hi. My name is Ian Danskin. I’m a video essayist and media artist. I run the YouTube channel Innuendo Studios, the flagship endeavor of which is currently The Alt-Right Playbook, a series on the political and rhetorical strategies the Alt-Right uses to legitimize itself and gain power. And, if that sounds interesting to you, and you haven’t already, please like share and subscribe.

The most recent episode of The Alt-Right Playbook is about how people get recruited into these largely online reactionary communities like the Alt-Right, a subject which, as it turns out, is real fuckin’ hard to research.

What I want to talk about with you today is how I go about studying a population that is incredibly hostile towards being studied. It involves finding the bits and pieces of the Alt-Right that we do have data on - the pockets of good research, the outsider observations, the stories of lived experience - as well as looking at older movements the Alt-Right grew out of, that have been extensively researched, and spotting the ways the Alt-Right is continuous with them, and trying to extrapolate how those structures might recreate themselves in the social media age.

So it’s… a lot. And, in the process of researching, I found a wealth of interesting perspectives that, by focusing the video on recruitment specifically, I barely dipped a toe in. All that stuff is what I’d like to get into with you today. But I’m trying to thread a needle here: you don’t need to have seen my video, How to Radicalize a Normie, to follow this talk, but, if you have seen it already, I will try not to be redundant. This talk is one part making my case for why I think the conclusions in that video are correct, one part repository for all the stuff I couldn’t get into, and one part how I’ve come to look at the Alt-Right as a result of this research, including some pet theories I wouldn’t feel right claiming as truth without further research, but I do think are on the right track.

This talk is called Isolation, Engulfment, and Pain: How the Alt-Right is Like an Abusive Relationship. We’re going to cover a lot of ground, from information processing to emotional development, but we’re necessarily also going to cover racism and violence and abuse dynamics. So this is an introduction and a content warning: if some of these subjects are particularly charged for you, no offense will be taken if you at any point leave the room. I have to research this stuff for a living, and it is rough, and sometimes I have to step away. We don’t judge here.

Now. Requisite dash of self-deprecation: don’t give me too much credit for all this. I am proud of the work I do and I think I’m genuinely good at it, but much of this video was compiling the work of others. Besides research I had already done and my own observations, the video had 27 sources: three books, five research papers, six articles, one leaked document, three testimonials, four videos, four pages of statistics, and one Twitter joke. I also spoke to four professional researchers who study right-wing extremism and one former Alt-Righter.

Without all their hard work, I would have nothing to compile.

OK? Let’s begin.

We’re gonna center on those three main texts: Alt-America by David Neiwert, a history of the Alt-Right’s origins; Healing from Hate by Michael Kimmel, about how young men get into (and out of) extremist groups, be they neo-Nazi or jihadist; and Terror, Love and Brainwashing by Alexandra Stein, about how people are courted by and kept inside cults and totalitarian regimes.

I began with Kimmel. The premise of Healing from Hate is that extremist groups tend to be between 75 and 90% male, and that you cannot understand radical conservatism without looking at it through the lens of toxic masculinity. Which makes it all the more disappointing that Kimmel has been accused by multiple women of bullying and harassment. I found the book incredibly useful, and we’re still going to talk about it, I just need to caveat here that retweets are not endorsements. Also, if I spoil the book for you then you don’t need to buy it, give your money to someone who isn’t a creep.

Kimmel’s argument is that extremism begins with a pain peculiar to young men. He calls it “aggrieved entitlement.” I call it Durden Syndrome. You know that scene in Fight Club where Tyler Durden says, “We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rockstars, but we won’t, we’re slowly learning that fact, and we are very, very pissed off”? Yeah, that. As men, the world promised us something, and the promise wasn’t kept.

Some men skew towards social progressivism when they realize this promise was never made to women, or men of color, or queer or trans or nonbinary people, and recognize the injustice of that. Some men skew towards economic leftism when they realize that every cishet white man being a millionaire rockstar movie god is mathematically impossible. But they skew towards reactionary conservatism when they feel the promise should have been kept. That’s the life they were supposed to have, and someone took it from them.

Hate groups appeal to that sense of emasculation. “You wanna feel like a Real Man? Shave off your hair, dance to hatecore, and let’s beat the crap out of someone.” Kimmel notes that the greatest indicator someone will join a hate group is a broken home: divorce, foster care, parents with addictions, physical or sexual abuse. The greater the distance between the life they were promised and the life they are living, the more enticing Real Masculinity becomes. Their fellow extremists are brothers, the leaders father figures.

The group does give them someone to blame for their lot in life - immigrants, feminists, the Jewish conspiracy - but that’s not why they join. They’re after empowerment. According to Kimmel, “Their embrace of neo-Nazi ideology is a consequence of their recruitment and indoctrination process, not its cause."

But once an Other has been identified as the locus of a hate group’s hate, new recruits are brought along when the group terrorizes that Other. Events like cross burnings and street fights are dangerous and morally fraught, and are often traumatic for a new recruit. And experiencing an emotional or physical trauma can create an intense bond with the people experiencing it with him, even though they’re the ones who brought him to the traumatic event in the first place. The creation of this bond is one of the reasons some hate groups usher new recruits out into the field as early as possible: the sooner they are emotionally invested in the community, the faster they will embrace the community’s politics.

This Othering also estranges recruits from the people they are supposed to hate, which makes it hard to stop hating them.

So there’s this concept that comes up a lot in my research called Contact Hypothesis. Contact Hypothesis argues that, the more contact you have with a different walk of life, the easier it is to tolerate it. It’s like exposure therapy. We talk about how big cities and college campuses tend to be liberal strongholds; the Right likes to claim this is because of professors and politicians poisoning your mind, but it’s really just because they’re diverse. When you share space with a lot of different kinds of people, a degree of liberalism becomes necessary just to get by. And we see that belief systems which rely on a strict orthodoxy get really cagey about members having contact with outsiders. We see this in all the groups we’re discussing today - extremists, cultists, totalitarians - but also religious fundamentalists; Mormons only wanna send their kids to Brigham Young. They are belief systems that can only be reliably maintained so long as no one gets exposed to other people with other beliefs.

So that’s some of what I took from Kimmel. Next I read Stein talking, primarily, about cults.

Stein’s window into all of this is applying the theory of Attachment Styles to what researchers calls totalism, which is any structure that subsumes a person’s entire life the way cults and totalitarian governments do. Attachment is a concept you may be familiar with if have, or have ever dated, a therapist. (I’ve done both.)

So, for a quick primer:

Imagine you’re walking in the park with a three-year-old. And the three-year-old sees a dog, and ask, “Can I pet the dog?” And you say yes, and the kid steps away from your side and reaches out. And the dog gets excited, and jumps up, and the kid gets scared and runs back to you. So you hold the kid and go, “Oh, no no no, don’t worry! They’re not gonna hurt you! They were just happy to see you!” And you take a few moments to calm the kid down, and then you ask, “Do you still want to pet the dog?” And the kid says “yes,” so they step away from you again and reach out. The dog jumps up again, but this time the kid doesn’t run away, and they pet the dog, and you, the kid, and the dog are all happy. Hooray!

This is a fundamental piece of a child’s emotional development. They take a risk, have a negative experience, and retreat to a point of comfort. Then, having received that comfort, feel bolstered enough to take a slightly greater risk. A healthy childhood is steadily venturing further and further from that point of comfort, and taking on greater risks, secure in the knowledge that safety is there when they need it. And, as an adult, they will form many interdependent points of comfort rather than relying on only one or two.

If all goes according to plan, that is Secure Attachment. But: sometimes things go wrong when the kid seeks comfort and doesn’t get enough. This may be because the adult is withholding or the kid doesn’t know how to express their needs or they’re just particularly fearful. But the kid may start seeking comfort more than seems reasonable, and be particularly averse to risk, and over-focus on the people who give them comfort, because they’re operating at a deficit. We call that Anxious Attachment. Alternately, the kid may give up on receiving comfort altogether, even though they still need it, and just go it alone, developing a distrust of other people and a fear of being vulnerable. We call that Avoidant Attachment.

Now, these styles are all formed in early childhood, but Stein focuses on a fourth kind of Attachment, one that can be formed at any age regardless of the Attachment Style you came in with. It’s what happens when the negative experience and the comfort come from the same place. We see it in children and adults who are mistreated by the people they trust. It’s called Disorganized Attachment.

According to Stein, cults foster Disorganized Attachment by being intensely unpredictable. In a cult, you may be praised for your commitment on Monday and have your commitment questioned on Tuesday, with no change in behavior. You may be assigned a romantic partner, who may, at any point, be taken away, assigned to someone else. Your children may be taken from you to be raised by a different family. You may be told the cult leader wants to sleep with you, which may make you incredibly happy or be terrifying, but you won’t be given a choice. And the rules you are expected to follow will be rewritten without warning.

This creates a kind of emotional chaos, where you can’t predict when you will be given good feelings and when you will be given bad ones. But you’re so enmeshed in the community you have noplace else to go for good feelings; hurting you just draws you in deeper, because they are also where you seek comfort. And your pain is always your fault: you wouldn’t feel so shitty if you were more committed. Trying to make sense of this causes so much confusion and anguish that you eventually just stop thinking for yourself. These are the rules now? OK. He’s not my brother anymore? OK. This is my life now? OK.

Hardly anyone would seek out such a dynamic, which is why cults present as religions, political activists, and therapy groups; things people in questioning phases of their lives are liable to seek out, and then they fall down the rabbit hole before they know what’s happening. The cult slowly consumes more and more of a recruit’s life, and tightly controls access to relationships outside the cult, because the biggest threat to a Disorganized Attachment relationship is having separate, Securely Attached points of comfort.

And at this point I said, “Hold up. You’re telling me cults recruit by offering people community and purpose in times of need, become the focal point of their entire lives, estrange them from all outside perspectives, and then cause emotional distress that paradoxically makes them more committed because they have nowhere else to go for support?”

Isn’t that exactly how Kimmel described joining a hate group?

Now, these are commonalities, not a one-to-one comparison. A cult is far more organized and rigidly controlled than a hate group. But Stein points out that this dynamic of isolation, engulfment, and pain is the same dynamic as an abusive relationship. The difference is just scale. A cult is functionally a single person having a very complex domestic abuse situation with a whole lot of people, #badpolyamory.

So if we posit a spectrum with domestic abuse on one end and cults and totalitarianism on the other, I started wondering, could we put extremist groups, like ISIS and Aryan Nations, around… here?

And, if so, where would we put the Alt-Right?

Now, I have to tread carefully here. There are reasons this talk is called “How the Alt-Right is Like an Abusive Relationship” and not “How the Alt-Right is Like a Cult,” because the moment you say the second thing, a lot of people stop listening to you. Our conception of cults and totalitarianism is way more controlled and structured than a pack of loud, racist assholes on the internet. But we’re not talking about organizational structure, we’re talking about a relationship, an emotional dynamic Stein calls “anxious dependency,” which fosters an irrational loyalty to people who are bad for you and gets you to adopt an ideology you would have previously rejected. (I would also love to go on a rant puncturing the idea that cultists and fascists are organized, pointing out this notion is propaganda and their systems are notoriously corrupt and mismanaged, but we don’t have time; ask me about it in the Q&A if you want me to go off.)

So I started looking through what I knew, and what I could find, about the Alt-Right to see if I could spot this same pattern of isolation, engulfment, and pain online funneling people towards the Alt-Right. And I did not come up short.

Isolation? Well, the Alt-Right traffics in all the same dehumanizing narratives about their enemies as Kimmel’s hate groups - like, the worst things you can imagine a human being saying about a group of people are said every day in these forums. They often berate and harass each other for any perceived sympathy towards The Other Side. They also regularly harass people from The Other Side off of platforms, and falsely report their tweets, posts, and videos as terrorism to get them taken down. (This has happened to me, incidentally.) I found figureheads adored by the Alt-Right who expressly tell people to cut ties with liberal family members.

We talked before about Contact Hypothesis? There’s also this idea called Parasocial Contact Hypothesis. A parasocial relationship is a strong emotional connection that only goes one way, like if you really love my videos and have started thinking of me almost as a friend even though I don’t know you exist? Yeah. Parasocial relationship. They’ve been in The Discourse lately, largely thanks to my friend Shannon Strucci making a really great video about them (check it out, I make a cameo, but… clear your schedule). Parasocial Contact Hypothesis is this phenomenon where, if people form parasocial feelings for public figures or even fictional characters, and those people happen to be Black, white audience members become less racist similar to how they would if they had Black friends. Your logical brain knows that these are strangers, but your lizard brain doesn’t know the difference between empathy for a queer friend and empathy for a queer character in a video game. So of course the Alt-Right makes a big stink about queer characters in video games, and leads boycotts against “forced diversity,” because diverse media is bad for recruitment.

Engulfment? Well, I learned way too much about how the Alt-Right will overtake your entire internet life. There was a paper made the rounds last year by Rebecca Lewis charting the interconnectedness of conservative YouTube. (Reactionaries really hated this paper because it said things they didn’t like.) Lewis argues that, once you enter what she calls the Alternative Influence Network, it tends to keep you inside it. Start with some YouTuber conservatives like but who’s branded as a moderate, or even a “classic liberal.” Take someone like Dave Rubin; call Dave Rubin Alt-Right, people yell at you, I speak from experience. Well, Dave Rubin’s had Jordan Peterson on his show, so, if you watch Rubin, Peterson ends up in your recommendations. Peterson has been on the Joe Rogan show, so, you watch Peterson, Rogan ends up in your recommendations. And Rogan has interviewed Gavin McInnes, so you watch Rogan and McInnes ends up in your recommendations.

Gavin McInnes is the head of the Proud Boys, a self-described “western chauvinist” organization that’s mostly known for beating up liberals and leftists. They have ties to neo-fascist groups like Identity Evropa and neo-fascist militias like the Oath Keepers, they run security for white nationalists, and their lawyer just went on record that he identifies as a fascist. And, if you’re one of these kids who has YouTube in the background with autoplay on, and you’re watching Dave Rubin? You might be as few as 3 videos away from watching Gavin McInnes.

There’s a lot of talk these days about algorithms funneling people towards the Right, and that’s not wrong, but it’s an oversimplification. The real problem is that the Right knows how to hijack an algorithm.

I also learned about the Curation/Search Radicalization Spiral from a piece by Mike Caulfield. Caulfiend uses the horrific example of Dylann Roof. You remember him? He shot up a church in a Black neighborhood a few years ago. Roof says he was radicalized when he googled “Black on white crime” and saw the results. Now, if you search the phrase “crime statistics by demographic,” you will find fairly nonpartisan results that show most crimes are committed against members of the perpetrator’s own race, and Black people commit crimes against white people at about the same rate as any other two demographics. But that specific phrase, “Black on white crime,” is used almost exclusively by white racists, and so Roof’s first hit wasn’t a database of crime statistics, it was the Council of Conservative Citizens. Now, the CCC is an outgrowth of the White Citizens Councils of the 50’s and 60’s which rebranded in ‘85. They publish bogus statistics that paint Black people as uniquely violent. And they introduce a number of other politically-loaded phrases - like, say, “Muslim fertility rates” - that nonpartisan sites don’t use, and so, if Roof googles them as well, he gets similarly weighted results.

I have tons more examples of this stuff. I literally don’t have time to show it all. Like, have you heard of Google bombing? That’s a thing I didn’t know existed. The point is, the same way search engines tailor your results to what they think you want, once you scratch the surface of the Alt-Right they are highly adept at making it so, whenever you go online, their version of reality is all you know and all you see.

Finally, pain. This was the difficult one. Can you create a Disorganized Attachment relationship over the internet with a largely faceless and decentralized movement? I pitched the idea to one the researchers I spoke to, and he said, “That sounds very plausible, and nearly impossible to research.” See, cults and hate groups? They don’t wanna talk to researchers anymore than the Alt-Right wants to talk to me. Stein and Kimmel get their data by speaking to formers, people who’ve exited these movements and are all too happy to share how horrible they were. But the Alt-Right is still very young, and there just aren’t that many formers yet.

I found some testimonials, and they mostly back up my hypothesis, but there’s not enough that I could call them statistically significant. So I had to look where the data was.

My fellow YouTuber ContraPoints made a video last year - in my opinion, her best one - about incels (that’s “involuntary celibate,” men who can’t get laid). Incel forums tend to be deeply misogynistic and antifeminist, and have a high overlap with the Alt-Right. If you remember Elliot Rodger, he was an incel. Contra’s observation was that these forums were incredibly fatalistic: you are too ugly and women too shallow for you to ever have sex, so you should give up. She described a certain catharsis, like picking a really painful scab, in hearing other people voice your worst fears. But there was no uplift; these communities seemed to have a zero-tolerance policy for optimism. She likened it so some deeply unhealthy trans forums she used to visit, where people wallowed in their own dysphoria.

And I remembered the forums I researched five years ago in preparation for my video on GamerGate. (If you don’t know what GamerGate was, I will not rob you of your precious innocence. But, in a lot of ways, GamerGate was the trial run for what the Alt-Right has become.) These forums were full of angry guys surrounding themselves with people saying, “You’re right to be angry.” And, yeah, if everywhere else you go treats your anger as invalid, that scratches an itch. But I never saw any of them calm down. They came in angry and they came out angrier. And most didn’t have anywhere else to vent, so they all came back.

I found a paper on Alt-Right forums that described a similar type of nihilism, and another on 8chan. What humor was on these sites was always shocking, furiously punching down, and deeply self-referential, but it didn’t seem like anyone was expected to laugh anymore, just, you know, catch the reference. I found one testimonial saying that having healthy relationships in these spaces is functionally impossible, and the one former I talked to said, yeah, when the Alt-Right isn’t winning everyone’s miserable.

So I think it might fit. The place they go for relief also makes them unhappy, so they come back to get relief again, and it just repeats. Same reason people stay with abusers. I wanna look into this further, so, I’ll just say this part to the camera: if there are any researchers watching who wanna study this, get at me.

Finally, I read Alt-America by David Neiwert, a supremely useful book that I highly recommend if you wanna know how the Alt-Right is the natural outgrowth of the militia and Patriot movements of the 90’s and early 2000’s, not to mention the Tea Party. Neiwert also does an excellent job illustrating how conspiracism serves to fill in the gap between the complexity of the modern world and the simplistic, might-makes-right worldview of fascism.

Neiwert also provides an interesting piece of the puzzle, suggesting what people are actually looking for when they get recruited. He references work done by John Bargh and Katelyn McKenna on Identity Demarginalization. Bargh and McKenna looked at the internet habits of people whose identities are both devalued in our society and invisible. By invisible, what I mean is, ok, if you’re a person of color, our society devalues your identity, but you can look around a room and, within a certain margin of error, see who else is POC, and form community with them if you wish. But, if you’re queer, you can’t see who else in a room is queer unless one of you runs up a flag. And revealing yourself always means taking on a certain amount of risk that you’ve misread the signals, that the person you reveal yourself to is not only not queer, but a homophobe.

According to Bargh and McKenna, people in this situation are much more likely to seek online spaces that self-select for that identity. A fan forum for RuPaul’s Drag Race is maybe a safer place to come out and find community. And people tend to get very emotionally tied to these online spaces where they can be themselves.

Neiwert points out that the same phenomenon happens among privileged people who have identities that are devalued even as they’re not actually oppressed. Say, nerds, or conservatives in liberal towns, or men who don’t fit traditional notions of masculinity. They are also likely to deeply invest themselves in online spaces made for them. And if the Far Right can build such a community, or get a foothold in one that already exists, it is very easy to channel that sense of marginalization into Durden Syndrome. I connected this with Rebecca Lewis’ observation that the Alternative Influence Network tends to present itself as nerd-focused life advice first and politics second, and the long history of reactionaries recruiting from fandoms.

So I can see all the pieces of the abuse dynamic being recreated here: offer you something you need, estrange you from other perspectives and healthy relationships, overtake your life, and provoke emotional distress that makes you seek comfort only your abuser is offering. And I found a lot more parallels than what I’m sharing right now, I only have half an hour! But the thing that’s missing that’s usually central to such a system is, an abusive relationship orbits around the abuser, a cult around the cult leader, a totalitarian government around a dictator. They are built to serve the whims of an individual. But I look at the ad hoc nature of the Alt-Right and I have to ask: who is the architect?

I can see a lot of people profiting off of this structure; our current President rode it to great success, but he didn’t build it. It predates him. It’s more like Kimmel’s hate groups, which don’t promote an individual so much as a class of individuals, but, even then, their structure is much more deliberate, designed, where the Alt-Right seems almost improvised.

Well… one observation I took from Stein is that cult recruiters often rely on two different kinds of propaganda: the winding diatribe and the thought-terminating cliche. The diatribe is when someone talks at length, sounds smart, and seems to know what they’re talking about but isn’t actually making sense, and the thought-terminating cliche comes from Robert Jay Lifton’s studies into brainwashing. So, I went vegetarian in middle school, and, when I would tell other kids I was vegetarian, some would get kind of defensive and say things like, “humans aren’t meant to be vegetarian, it’s the food chain.” Now, saying “it’s the food chain” isn’t meant to be a good argument, it’s meant to communicate “I have said something so axiomatically true that the argument need not continue.” That’s a thought-terminating cliche; something that may not be true, but feels true and gives you permission to think about something else.

Both these techniques rely on what’s called Peripheral-Route Processing. So, I’m up here talking about politics, and, Solidarity Lowell, you are a group of politically-engaged people, so you probably have enough context to know whether I’m talking out of my ass. That’s Direct-Route Processing, where you judge the contents of my argument. But if I were up here talking about string theory, you might not know whether I was talking out of my ass because there’s only so many people on Earth who understand string theory. So then you might look at secondary characteristics of my argument: the fact that I’ve been invited to speak on string theory implies I know what I’m talking about; maybe I put up a lot of equations and drop the names of mathematicians and say they agree with me; maybe I just sound really authoritative. All that’s Peripheral-Route Processing: judging the quality of my argument by how it’s delivered.

Every act of communication involves both, but if you’re trying to sell people on something that’s fundamentally irrational, you’re going to rely heavily on Peripheral-Route tactics, which is what the winding diatribe and the thought-terminating cliche are.

I noted that these two methods mapped pretty cleanly onto the rhetorical stylings of Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro. But here’s the question: cults use these techniques to recruit people. But can I say with any confidence that Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro are trying to recruit people into the Alt-Right?

The thing is, “Alt-Right” isn’t a term like “klansman.” It’s more akin to a term like “modernism.” It’s a label applied to a trend. In the same way we debate the line between modernism and postmodernism, we debate the line between Right and Alt-Right. People don’t sign up to be in the Alt-Right, you are Alt-Right if you say you’re Alt-Right. But the nature of the Alt-Right is that 90% of them would never admit to it.

So are Peterson and Shapiro intentionally recruiting for the Alt-Right? Are they grifters merely profiting off of the Alt-Right? Are they even aware they’re recruiting for the Alt-Right? Part of my work has been accepting that you can’t know for sure. It would be naive to say they’re unaware; when they give speeches they get Nazis in their Q&A sections, and they know that. But how aware are they? I suspect Shapiro moreso than Peterson, but that’s just my gut talking and I can’t prove it. Like 90% of the Alt-Right, it’s debatable.

I don’t know if they’re trying to be part of this system, I just know they’re not trying not to be.

A final academic term before we say goodnight that’s been making the rounds among lefty YouTubers is “Stochastic Terrorism.” There’s a really great video about this by the channel NonCompete called The PewDiePipeline. Stochastic Terrorism is the myriad ways you can increase the likelihood that someone will commit violence without actually telling them to. You simply create an environment in which lone wolf violence becomes more acceptable and appealing. It mirrors the structure of terrorism without the control or culpability.

And I hear about this, and I look at this recruitment structure I see approximated in the Alt-Right, and I remember something I learned much earlier in my research, from Bob Altemeyer in his book The Authoritarians. Altemeyer has been studying authoritarianism for decades, he has a wealth of data, and one thing he observes is that authoritarianism is the few exerting power over the many, which means there are two types of authoritarians: the ones who lead and the ones who follow. Turns out those are completely different personality profiles. Followers don’t want to be in charge, they want someone to tell them what to do, to say “you’re the good guys,” and put them in charge of punishing the bad guys. They don’t even care who the bad guys are; part of the appeal is that someone else makes that judgment for them.

So if you can encourage a degree of authoritarian sentiment in people, get them wanting nothing more than to be ensconced in a totalist system that will take their agency away from them, putting them in the orbit of an authoritarian leader, but no leader presents themself… can you just kind of… appoint one?

Like, if you don’t have a leader, can you just find yourself an authoritarian and treat him like one? And, if he doesn’t give you enough directives, can you just make some up? And, if you don’t have recruiters, can you find a conservative who speaks in thought-terminating cliches just because he thinks they win arguments; find a conservative who speaks in meaningless diatribes because he thinks he’s making sense; and then maneuver those speeches and videos in front of people you want to recruit? If you’re sick of waiting for Moses to come down the mountain with the Word of God, can you just build your own god from whatever’s handy?

Every piece of this structure, you can find people, algorithms, and arguments that, put in sequence, can generate Disorganized Attachment whether they’re trying to or not, which makes every part plausibly deniable. Debatable. You just need to make it profitable enough for the ones involved that they don’t fix it. This is a system created collaboratively, on the fly, with the help of a lot of people from hate movements past, mostly by throwing a ton of shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. The Alt-Right is a rapidly-mutating virus and the web is the perfect incubator; it very quickly finds a structure that works, and it’s a structure we’ve seen before, just a little weirder this time.

I’ve started calling this Stochastic Totalism.

Now, again, I’m not a professional researcher; I do my homework but I don’t have the background. I have an art degree. This isn’t something I can prove so much as a way I’ve come to look at the Alt-Right that makes sense to me and helps me understand them. And I got a lot of comments on my last video from people who used to be Alt-Right that echoed my assumptions. But don’t take it as gospel.

Mostly I wanted to share this because, if it can help you make sense of what we’re dealing with, I think it’s worth putting out there.

Thank you.

[random2908]

Ok, it's time for my crack Locked Tomb interpretation that I've promised... the two people I've been reading these books with. I will say first, the theory isn't itself a crack theory--in its general form I actually stand by it as a serious prediction. But some of the textual evidence I'm going to use is way out there, so don’t take this too seriously--I certainly don’t. Spoilers for Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth behind the cut. Sorry it’s long.

Ok, first, the theory, simply put: I think Alecto/AL is a Resurrection Beast. Personally, I found this "insight" fairly uncontroversial the moment the thought occurred to me, but one of my two friends who've been reading these books with me disagrees on the basic evidence; the other friend has embraced it wholeheartedly, though. So, ymmv, I guess.

The basic evidence starts with: well, what the hell else could she be? She's not human. The older Lyctors call her a monster. There is a missing Resurrection Beast: nine were born, five were killed, three are loose, and the narrative actually calls attention to this numeric discrepancy while glossing others (e.g. the number of Lyctors, which does eventually get explained). John presumably can't just kill Resurrection Beasts himself, or he would have (maybe?? who the hell even knows what his abilities or grand plan are at this point). There aren't really other monsters that have been presented other than revenants (of which Resurrection Beasts are the biggest) and heralds (which are spiritually part of Resurrection Beasts), and the third book of a trilogy isn't really the time to introduce them. (This, by the way, is also my argument that it wasn't aliens who destroyed the solar system in the first place--even though everyone else seems to have come to that interpretation (where by “everyone” I mean my two friends who have read this book). Being Doylist, it's kind of a cheap, lazy argument on my part, but whatever, I still stand by that as a prediction: no aliens.) And Alecto must be something much more powerful than a human because John is so much more powerful than a Lyctor. Finally, the stoma opens for John, and it only opens for Resurrection Beasts--it opens for him because he holds part of Alecto's soul and she is a Resurrection Beast.

The potential counter-evidence is the older Lyctors are confident they know her origins (but that doesn't necessarily make her not a Resurrection Beast), and the [other] Resurrection Beasts are drawn to her as much as to John according to Mercy (although in that case why haven't they attacked the Tomb? and also, again, that doesn't preclude her being a Resurrection Beast--we don't know their relationships with each other, and anyway, their attraction to her might have something to do with the Lyctorification process).

Ok, all that's fair enough. Let's delve into the crack interpretations now. I'm going to start with an irrelevant introduction, though, to explain my frame of mind when I came up with this. In the Appendices of Gideon the Ninth, Muir mentions that Isaac is named as foreshadowing for Gideon's sacrificial death, as in the Christian interpretation of the Bible, the Biblical Isaac foreshadows Jesus. My copy of the e-book did not have the Appendices, but my best friend's did, and she shared screens with me. It's slightly embarrassing that my best friend and I, reading this together, did not even guess from this, not even as a joke, that Gideon's father might be God. I mean, it's not... generally embarrassing--no one reading this should be embarrassed for themselves--it's only embarrassing if you know the two of us, know how good my best friend is at this sort of thing (she guessed the entire murder mystery in GtN a little more than halfway through, including that Dulcinea was dead and had been replaced by a Lyctor in disguise who had philosophical problems with God and was rebelling), and know what sorts of in-jokes and ridiculous speculation we tend to bandy around with each other--know just how often we, respectively and together, joke that some character or other is Jesus. And here it was right on the page, we read it out loud to each other and discussed it, and we didn't even see it. We were both completely taken in by the Gideon Episode One red[-haired] herring (as was, to be fair, Gideon himself). This speculation that I'm about to present came right on the heels of the two of us debriefing over this, because I was primed to read way the hell in too much into Biblical references.

The key line is something my best friend caught, not me. She wasn't even done with the book yet, but the line was bothering her (I'd completely glossed and then forgotten it--never let it be said that my bad grades in English Lit were undeserved). Page 327 (and I'm so glad to have an ebook so I can do word searches), Teacher is talking to Harrow in the dream bubble...........

To their silence, [Teacher] added: “I believe we are now being punished for what they did. Even the devil bent for God to put a leash around her neck … and the disciples were scared! I cannot blame them! I was terrified! But when the work was done—when I was finished, and so were they, and the new Lyctors found out the price—they bade him kill the saltwater creature before she could do them harm … Oh, but it is a tragedy, to be put in a box and laid to wait for the rest of time.

"Saltwater creature" stuck with my best friend. She had no idea what it meant, other than that nearly every mention of saltwater (or salt water, two words, the text is inconsistent) in Harrow the Ninth is alluding to Alecto in some capacity (we confirmed this by searching--again, I love ebooks for this kind of thing). But I was like... wait, I might know! This is my favorite Bible lore!

Muir is working from the King James Bible (based on the quotation at the end of Gideon the Ninth) which is impenetrable and also is a translation of the Latin Vulgate, which is mostly a translation of the Septuagint, which doesn’t even have an extant Hebrew version, so ugh all around. But for this purpose it’s close enough, so I guess that's what I'll use for my English version. Here is how the KJV starts:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

Ok, that word there, "the deep." What it says in the Masoretic text (the Hebrew Bible used by both Jews and Protestants) is "tehom," which is not quite a hapax legomenon, but neither is it a word that shows up very often, and importantly it only shows up in very few contexts that reference each other. It is certainly not the usual Hebrew word for sea, and importantly, in the Hebrew there is no "the"; it actually says "darkness was on the face of Tehom" like it's a proper name [capitalization mine for illustration, since Hebrew doesn’t capitalize]. Notice also how on the second day basically the only thing God accomplishes is cutting this thing, this "Deep" made of water, in half, sending one half up into the sky. This is a quick retelling of the defeat of Tiamat (linguistically cognate with Tehom) in the Enuma Elish. Tiamat, the Goddess of the Saltwater Deeps, Mother of Monsters and Dragons, is justifiably angry with the other gods and sets out to kill them; Marduk, the aspiring new head of the Pantheon, cuts her in half. Half of her he leaves on Earth to create the oceans (or just the Earth itself? been a while since I read it), and half of her he throws up into the air and it becomes the sky.

There is a lot of old Jewish writing, some of it predating Christianity, that just starts to touch on this, without daring to delve too deep (...as it were) and pull on the pan-Middle Eastern polytheistic roots of Judaism. (They had enough problems with people still worshiping Asherah, who in southern Canaanite tradition was the sea-and-mother goddess who was the wife of Yahweh the storm god, and who gets mentioned in the Bible a whole lot, without also bringing Tiamat into it.) The Gnostics really latched on, though. They said that this "deep" obviously in the text there predates God's creation, and used that as the foundation of quite a lot of their theological argument: that God (who they call the Demiurge) didn't create the universe ex nihilo (out of nothing) but rather that there was a being even more powerful that came before. And they named this more powerful, older being Bythos (among other things), which means "depth" in Greek. They changed the gender, but they brought Tehom the saltwater goddess back as the most primordial and powerful of all beings.

Bringing this back to Harrow the Ninth... Insofar as it's Biblical allegory (which isn't much--less than Narnia and even Narnia doesn't strictly adhere to Biblical narrative), I think we should take the Resurrection committed by John to be the Biblical Creation not the Biblical Resurrection. First of all, John becomes God by performing the Resurrection, which is a much better parallel to Genesis than to Isaiah or Revelations or whatever. Second of all, after the Biblical Resurrection, everyone who gets to be resurrected is supposed to live in eternal peace in Eden. In contrast, in Genesis, after the creation, people start out in Eden but are quickly expelled and then bad things happen. This matches the story much better, where the expulsion from Eden is due to Lyctorhood--the Resurrection Beasts come for the Lyctors and they have to leave Eden; in this respect, I guess John is really the snake as much as he's God, lol. (Worth noting that in some parts of Christian tradition--although I can't remember about Catholicism specifically--the snake is supposed to be Satan. This also ties back to Gnosticism where the Demiurge is malevolent; John, insofar as he did not actually create the universe on his own, is a much better match for a demiurge than a true god.)

So, anyway, taking John's act of Resurrecting all those people as the initial Creation rather than the Resurrection (the fact that Augustine doesn't remember his pre-Resurrection self, is effectively a new person, also points to this being effectively an initial Creation), the Resurrection Beasts actually come before Creation. They come from the dying of the planets. They predate John becoming God. Furthermore, Alecto is a “saltwater creature,” and she keeps her body after she's Lyctorified, meaning she's split in some way between John and her old body; she is Tehom. Back to the Gnostic idea, Tehom is a more-powerful being who predates God, and the only creatures predating God in Harrow are the Resurrection Beasts who must be comparable to him in power to create such fear: Alecto, then, must be a Resurection Beast.

The problem with this theory is it's a little Jewish and it's very Gnostic but it isn't Catholic. In the Gideon and Harrow, Muir draws references in her language from practically everywhere. But as far as I can tell she only draws allusions and allegory from two mythologies: Greco-Roman and Roman Catholic. And although Jews and Gnostics are drawing on a lot of the same source text, the  understanding is different, and the expansive side stories are different. Although, then again, who am I to say that Muir isn't also drawing on Gnosticism and this isn't our big clue; I've half convinced myself as I wrote this, with the whole John-as-Demiurge thing. It's a fun theory, anyway, and so I thought I'd share it.

(I'm aware that I've completely ignored any connection to Greek mythology, despite her name being Alecto.)

[ugly-crying-over-bucky-barnes]

Roguish Women Part 12

Summary: Kate Rosseau is an American who fled to Paris to escape her past life. Now she's dancing and playing the part of a courtesan at the Moulin Rouge. There she meets Tommy Shelby who thinks she can be useful in expanding his empire. But has he been blinded?

Part 11: Tommy confides in Kate, telling her that he suspects Alfie isn’t loyal. 

            “I tell you, Esme, he’s really something else. I mean fuck’s sake I’ve seen Jewish gangsters before but Alfie Solomons.” Kate let out a low whistle. “I’d have to have an army behind me if I ever wanted to cross him. Knocked a man out cold with one blow. I mean Jesus Christ, that has to be some sort of talent of his.”

            Back in Birmingham, Kate was at the betting shop, alone with John’s wife who she got along well with. She was in the kitchen with the curtain open so she could talk to Esme while making something quick to eat for lunch.

            That’s when she heard the door open and suddenly, she realized Esme was focused on something else.

            “Es?” Kate walked out to see a well-dressed woman walking inside. The room suddenly became tense as the woman appeared out of her element and Esme was on guard. “Don’t think we’ve met.” She tried to break the discomfort in the air.

            “May Carleton.” The woman greeted in a posh accent. “I have an appointment with Mr. Shelby.”

            Kate subtly glanced at Esme who shook her head. “Here? He’s got an office, I mean. And it’s a lot nicer than this place.”

            “Oh, yes, I asked for this address. He said he ran a gambling den and I-” May looked a little pink in the face. “I wanted to see one but I see now I’m early and I don’t know how to behave.”

            “Well, it helps if you can hold your ground. Men ‘round here are a bit aggressive when it comes to placing bets.” Kate smiled and sat down.

            Esme still seemed suspicious of the wealthy looking woman but curious all the same. “What do you do, then?” She went back to her daily tasks about the shop.

            “Oh, I’m going to train Tommy’s horse for Epsom,” May answered as she took a look around the place.

            Kate sat down with her snack. “So that’s why he was asking if I knew anything about horses.” She realized. “He got himself a horse and someone to train it.”

            “You know horses?” May wondered.

            “No, Esme does.”

            John’s wife smiled and nodded. “Most gypsy girls do. We’re born riding horses.”

            “There’s a fucking great Riley parked out there and nobody’s watching it!” John entered the shop loudly, as he usually did.

            “That’s a nice car.” Kate gave May an impressed look. Apparently, her wealth wasn’t limited to just clothing.  

            “John,” Esme stepped in before he made any plans on nicking the car while its owner was in the room.

            “Hey!” Kate smacked his hand away as he tried to snatch her lunch instead. “Fuck off and go find Tommy, Miss Carleton here is looking for him.”

            Speak of the devil and he shall appear. Tommy entered the shop through the kitchen. “Sorry I’m late. Take a look around?” He wondered.

            “Because there’s just so much to see,” Kate mumbled. She couldn’t blame anyone for the monotonous surroundings. Small Heath wasn’t much to look at. Neither was London but at least Alfie Solomons kept Kate on her toes. Returning to Birmingham was like settling into a tepid bath. It was familiar but the same old thing. It didn’t help that she was back to the place where Santo knew she was.

            Tommy ignored the comment. “So, you’ve come to get my girl, aye?”

            “Yes.” May seemed a bit glad to get out of the betting shop.

            “Kate, I’ll be needing a word with you once I return from speak with Miss Carleton.”

            She brushed her hands off and stood up. “I can walk with you now. Unless Esme needs me here.”

            “No, she’ll keep it locked up for now.” Tommy lit up a cigarette. “Walk with us.”

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~

            May seemed to take the hint and lagged behind so Tommy and Kate could converse in private on the way to the Yard.

            “You got along easily with Alfie.”

            Kate crossed her arms over her chest and shrugged. “I get along easily with a lot of people. It’s called being outgoing.” She replied deadpan.

            “What I mean, is he seems to trust you.” Tommy reiterated to get his point across. He didn’t want to talk in circles with her, not when he was so busy.

            “I don’t like where this is going, Tommy. You asked me to conduct business with the man, that’s what I’m doing. You asked me for contacts in America, that’s what I gave you. I wouldn’t double-cross that man for any sum. So, don’t even try bargaining with me.”

            “Those words never came out me mouth, now did they?”

            Kate rolled her eyes. “Oh, don’t play games with me. I know what you were hinting at.” She stopped walking to face him, making sure May wasn’t in earshot. “I know you like to play your pieces and strategize or whatever.” She jabbed a finger into his chest. “But you’re not putting me in those cross-fires. I spelled out what I’d do for protection. Getting myself killed seems to be counterintuitive.”        

            Tommy cleared his throat and reached into the inside of his pocket. Inside an envelope were a train ticket and a roll of cash. “Go to London and pay him a visit. Don’t need to say anything, just discuss business as usual. If you notice something’s wrong, you bring that information back to me.”

            Kate’s hear tbeat rapidly in her chest. It was obvious Tommy knew something she didn’t. “No, no fuck off. I’m not doing that.” She stepped away from him and pushed the envelope back into his hand.

            “He requested a meeting, I said you’d go and see him.” He insisted.

            “And why don’t you go?” She demanded. “You go and find out what you want to know.”

            “I’m busy.”

            “Busy.” She scoffed. “With what?”

            Tommy sighed and glanced over his shoulder to May who was waiting patiently a few yards away.

            Kate let out a sarcastic snort. “Oh, I see you’re too busy with the pretty horse trainer. And here I was thinking you had sworn off women for good.”

            “For the Derby.” He clarified firmly. He didn’t want her going around toting off rumors that he was involved with May. Even if it was the intention, sort of.

            Kate wrinkled her nose in disgust and snatched the envelope from his hand. “Don’t fucking understand what all this fuss is about this Derby. One horse race and Tommy Shelby is going to end up with a key to the world? Isn’t that easy.” She snapped before walking off with the ticket and money in hand.

~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

            “Y’know, I’ve always had issues with Italians.”

            Kate clicked her tongue as she tried to keep track of the numbers on the ledger in front of her instead of Alfie’s out of the blue comment. If Tommy hadn’t said anything about Alfie’s loyalty, then she would’ve gladly accepted the trip to London without a second thought. She enjoyed the man’s presence. He was interesting, to say the least.

            “Is that right? Is it a preference? I knew many Jews in America who didn’t feel the same.”

            “Call it experience.” Alfie idly cracked his knuckles over his cane. “You must have the same preference, then, that right?”

            “I tend not to focus on ethnicities, Mr. Solomons.” Kate didn’t spare a moment to look up from the report he’d given her upon the start of the meeting.

            “’Less they’re hunting you down.”

            That made her set the ledger aside. She laced her fingers together and rested them on her knee. “I thought we had an understanding, Alfie. I like you and you like me. I don’t ask for a list of your enemies and you don’t ask about mine.”

            Alfie ran a hand over his beard a few times as he studied her face. “See, thing is, Kate, if I do business with someone, I do like to know whether there’s any sort of, well, liabilities.”

            It was like Tommy was there in spirit, pointing out all the little tells that something was wrong. Even in the roundabout way Alfie spoke, Kate could see he wasn’t being entirely honest. “Have you been speaking with Italians?” She asked in as casual of a manner she could muster.

            “We don’t ask about each other’s enemies, yeah?” His right hand twitched.

            “Would you like to talk about my enemies, Alfie?”

            He held his arms out as if embracing her from across the desk. “I’ve got all the time in the world, love.”

            That was enough of an answer for Kate. The answer that Tommy was right. There was something Alfie was planning behind the scenes. “His name is Santo Leoni, but I’m sure you already knew that. He’s from Boston. Runs everything on the Italian side, but you knew that as well. Something you might not know, Alfie,” She leaned forward. “but something I know and know very well. He leaves a trail of ash behind him. Everyone he wants dead, dies. He’s after me but he’s also after anyone I’ve been in contact with, anyone he thinks has been hiding me, helping me.”

            Alfie wasn’t scared, obviously, in fact, he looked completely unbothered. “So that’s what you give the Shelbys then, yeah, in return for giving you a bit of work?” He asked. “You set them up to be burned, that right?”

            “No.” Kate stood up and gathered her things. “Because I think they’re the only ones capable of taking him down.” Their eyes met for a moment, almost in an understanding. Alfie knew that she knew. And Kate knew that he had figured her out. “Good afternoon, Mr. Solomons.”

~~~~~~~~~~~ 

            At the train station, Kate phoned the office. Lizzie answered immediately.

            “Liz, I’ve got to speak to Tommy, it’s urgent.”

            The secretary paused. “He’s left for Surrey. I could try to find the number for the address but I don’t know how long it’ll take.”

            “Fuck, what on Earth is he doing in Surrey?” Kate threw her hand up in disbelief. The man was always on the move it was hard enough to pin him down when he was just in the office.

            “Visiting the racehorse for the derby,” Lizzie answered.

            “Visiting the-for the love of-too busy for-” She held back a frustrated scream. “Too busy to attend meetings but he can fuck off to Surrey with that woman. Jesus Christ, I need to speak with him now.” She insisted.

            “Arthur or John might be around, want me to get them?”

            “No, no, I-I don’t know what Tommy’s told them.” Kate ran a hand over her face in frustration. She wasn’t enjoying all the secrecy and hushed plans. It made it difficult to know where she stood. “I’m coming back to Birmingham now. If he calls, you tell him that he was right about Alfie.”

            “Right about…”

            “Just say those words exactly, he’ll know what it means.” Kate hung up the phone to hurry off to board the train. “At least I hope he knows.”  

Permanent Tag: @papa-geralt-of-cirilla​ @giftofdreams​ @biba3434​ @kimmietea​

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Masterlist

[nevillel]

⧼ chella man, trans man, he/him / ask by the smiths + the scent of sun-hot grass under your trainers as you tromp off for an afternoon of exploration, the darkness of the night before only in the back of your mind, not following you into the light; the cable-knit sweater flecked with old housepaint and frayed at the wrists that substitutes for the embrace for which you can’t voice your need; collapsing to your knees on the blood-stained cobblestones because it’s over, it’s over, but then why does it still follow you?⧽ ━━ hey, isn’t that NEVILLE LONGBOTTOM? i read a daily prophet article on them, once ; the TWENTY-FOUR year old pureblood WIZARD is a GRYFFINDOR alumnus who has gone on to be a HERBOLOGIST WITH A SMALL SHOP IN DIAGON ALLEY. i’ve heard they can be quite COURAGEOUS & COMPASSIONATE, but i don’t know… they came off very BASHFUL & RETICENT in that interview. it really is hard to know what to believe these days though, isn’t it? 

pinterest || playlist 

quick stats

name: neville longbottom age: 24 gender: male. he is not married to any particular concept of masculinity, but he only uses he/him pronouns and the terms wizard, son, boyfriend, etc. sexuality: he doesn’t use a label for his sexuality, but he often prefers emotional connections first. he could fall for people of any gender.  blood status: pureblood and most assuredly a blood traitor. despite this, however, he lives in a very wix-y way without a mobile phone or a television. he’s not opposed to technology, just not very good with it. hogwarts house: gryffindor. he thought he was sorted wrong for a while, but he was always proud of his house. and then he pulled out the sword of godric gryffindor and killed a snake, so that’s that. patronus: incorporeal, though it can still be powerful and effective when he casts it with enough determination. wand: purchased before ollivander’s disappearance. 13 inches, solid yet a bit yielding. cherry wood with a unicorn hair core profession: herbologist. has learned hands-on, not professionally certified. small business owner. researcher residence: a small studio flat above his shop pets: none. hasn’t gotten another toad since trevor ran away from him at the lake. tends to feed the stray cats of diagon, kind of wants a dog likes: tea, hugs, springtime, the outdoors, sturdy boots and flannel, writing and receiving letters, soup and sandwich deals, spending quiet time with friends, emotional openness, cooperation and solidarity, hand-made gifts dislikes: fancy clothes, dishonesty, cruelty, superiority, severus snape and bellatrix lestrange, getting too drunk or using drugs, quidditch statistics talk, flying on brooms, having to transfigure anything, being the center of attention for too long, uneven spots on the cobblestone

biography 

[Triggering subjects in backstory include dysphoria, trauma, bullying, body image issues, child abuse, drowning, torture mentions, mental health.]

The Longbottom family is an ancient one with origins in China, their surname once Liang. However, a branch has been established in England for centuries, and they are a member of the Sacred Twenty-Eight with a complicated sense of pride about it.  Their historical alignment has not been as consistent as some families; they didn’t always Sort to one House, they married into families on both sides of many divides, they were both agricultural and urban in turns. 

One consistency was that for several consecutive generations, Longbottoms married other purebloods of East Asian descent. Alice, whose family is Jewish, was an obvious deviation from the pattern, but Frank had fallen for her so emphatically and they were such an ideal match that no one really stood in their way. And they were so happy together, for the time they had together as two independent people taking on the world as a pair. 

A baby was born to Frank and Alice Longbottom on July 30, 1996, as the seventh month died. Brave Aurors who were focused on the war, Frank and Alice were nevertheless doting and attentive parents. They had always been prepared for the possibility of war leaving their child behind, and their wills named the fearsome Augusta Longbottom, matriarch of the ancient Sacred Twenty-Eight family, as alternate guardian. When tragedy struck, Augusta took her grandchild to the Longbottom lands in Lancashire.

Growing up, the Longbottoms’ living heir very quickly realized that he was a boy. While a traditional pureblood in many ways, Augusta was also fiercely progressive, and she aimed to smooth his journey as much as possible. Great care was taken to scrub mentions of his assignation at birth and his deadname from all records, and a Hogwarts letter came for Neville, which would have been his parents’ first choice of name for the boy they didn’t know they would have. 

While the family was supportive of Neville’s trans identity, they were less understanding about his struggles with magic. For a long time, it was thought that Neville was a Squib. His uncle Algernon “Algie” Longbottom threw him off of a pier in Blackpool in an effort to get him to manifest his magic. The impact ruptured his eardrums, and while there was an easy magical fix to the injury, Neville was too scared to tell anyone for a long time, and he experienced partial hearing loss. While Healed, Neville still likes to use signs and body language to communicate sometimes. He’s curious about the use of signing for spell-casting without vocalization or wands and has wondered before whether that would help him with some magic with which he still has difficulty.

During his time at Hogwarts, Neville’s physical transition followed a schedule similar to puberty with Poppy Pomfrey helping administer the Attisgali Corrective Draught in the appropriate doses. There were stretches during his seventh year when the supply chain for Potions ingredients was disrupted. Because of this, on top of everything else, that year was when he felt the worst dysphoria he has experienced before or since. 

Because of the nature of his transition, it is not necessarily public knowledge that Neville is trans. It can be assumed that family members, close friends, and romantic connections are aware. Additionally, people who are old enough to remember him being born may be aware. As a result, while Neville was bullied throughout his school career for his awkwardness and ineptness, he did not face specifically transphobic harassment. The fear was always in the back of his mind, however, forming a complex interaction with his insecurities and trauma. He’s always been sure that he was male. He was just never sure whether he was man enough.

He helped defeat Voldemort by slicing the head off of Nagini and then killing him at last along with his friends and comrades of Dumbledore’s Army. Theirs was a bittersweet triumph, but at last, Neville knew in his heart that he was a man that would have made his parents proud. Nevertheless, he still struggles with self-worth, including body image issues on occasion. He’s trying to do the positive self-talk in the mirror thing, but sometimes he’d rather just exist.

The hope of green growing things means everything to Neville. Pomona Sprout was a mentor for him at Hogwarts, and he still conducts research with her. However, he has chosen to be based out of London instead. He opened his shop in Diagon Alley shortly after graduating from Hogwarts, and despite Augusta Longbottom’s disapproval of his relatively soft career compared to his parents’, he decided that he wanted to honor them by naming his shop Frank & Alice’s Fine Flora. 

His shop is a small establishment with a magically Extended greenhouse-like backroom for growing both commercial plants and plants of other use, such as Dittany. At the front of the shop, he sells both domestic and exotic plants, magical and ordinary, including flowers,  herbs, and vegetables, both magical and non-magical in nature. He also lives in a flat above his shop. On the side, he provides consultancy and input on everything from illegal seed possession on the Ministry’s behalf to ailing trees on the trees’ behalf. He sometimes journeys around London and the United Kingdom for field research on native plants and to collect seeds. He is also interested in venturing further afield, but recent events have made him stick more closely to London.

His parents also tie him down to London. He goes to St. Mungo’s and spends time with them as often as he can bear. They do know him and they do love him. He’s convinced of that. But he hasn’t given up hope, not entirely, that they might be healed one day, and he might know them as they were before their torture by Bellatrix Lestrange.

He is one-third leader of Dumbledore’s Army in its third reincarnation, and he takes his duties extremely seriously.  Neville has more confidence in himself now, and he certainly believes in the power of their collective action against the forces of darkness rising again in their world. He does not, however, put a lot of faith in institutions, including but not limited to the Ministry of Magic and the Daily Prophet. This mistrust does also sometimes extend to people older or in greater positions of authority than himself. 

In his mind, he and his peers have been let down and failed one too many times by them. Neville would rather they take matters into their own hands as they did before.

Neville remains in contact with many friends from Hogwarts and has made many new ones. He’s still a bit awkward and frequently forgetful, terminally clumsy, and not the world’s most skilled wizard apart from his reflexes when dueling and his exceptional aptitude for Herbology. While he hasn’t been able to bring himself to attend support group meetings, he’s always slowly processing and healing from everything that has happened and continues to happen. He’s more forgiving of past transgressions than others, and he feels that he can occasionally reach out across the aisle. He has no tolerance for bullies, however, and although he is gentle-natured, that is a vehement position for him. Largely a pacifist, he’s also not afraid to fight for what is right, yet again.

plotted/played connections 

(alphabetical by first name)

alicia spinnet - close friend. appreciates her warmth and looks up to her. is letting her teach him to fly draco malfoy - diagon alley neighbor, since they work in the apothecary. considers a colleague, still a bit uncertain about where they stand, but they’ve had some oddly illuminating conversations dudley dursley - slightly suspicious around him but trying to be open-minded ginny weasley -  his best friend. has a matching cactus tattoo with her that they can use to communicate emotion.  merry lestrange - doesn’t know it, but she’s his cousin. unexpectedly saved his life. very curious to know who she is oliver wood - they were never quite in the same circles in school, but they have mutual respect for each other. susan bones - likes her personally, wary because of her senior position in the ministry for someone their age. they fought over her not rejoining the da. sybill trelawney - former professor. thinks she’s a bit strange, respects that. does not know that she made a prophecy that once potentially pointed to him--unbeknownst to everyone, it turned out that neville was also a boy born in july with the power to defeat the dark lord.  viktor krum - secret pen pals. the two most awkward men on the planet. 

wanted connections 

augusta longbottom! if you bring her, i’ll love you forever, and we can renegotiate anything above. family - longbottom cousin! should be at least part-chinese. see wcs! professional connections - herbologists, people who work with magical creatures, other diagon alley shopkeepers, potential collaborators friends - i love a good friendship thread! feel free to assume friendship but i’ll also happily plot. enemies?? -  death eaters and their allies. people who used to bully him and haven’t turned that around. also, people on the ‘same side’ as neville but who believe in different methods and approaches to the point where they butt heads. past partner -  neville chooses not to label his sexuality, but this could be someone of any gender. if not someone who was a friend, it was likely something with an emotional level to it, possibly long-term, as neville isn’t really one for casual. if a friend, it could have been one awkward kiss or date.

any - i’m always open to other ideas!

(header img credit @ ofmccnlight)

[murdershegoat]

do you think kara struggles balancing/reconciling her native religions beliefs w her jewish beliefs? sorry i love jewish kara and i love ur thoughts on it

i think kara embracing judaism wholeheartedly is a very kara thing to do, especially when she’s young. she feels like she has to be normal and this is something she can latch onto (something to be said for the fact that she chooses a minority religion to hold onto to feel normal -- it still makes her distinct, yet human.) she finds comforts in the parallels between the jewish diaspora and her own, in a nation that yearns for an iteration of jerusalem we can never get back. she also finds comfort in its routine and steady yearlong rhythm. she loves its intellectual depth and learning talmud feels familiar and safe despite the difficulty she faces in learning it.

when she’s young, she’s scared because raoism feels like it would be classified as idolatry on earth and she distances herself from it. and then as she gets older she realises that she can find herself in both her kryptonian religion and her judaism, that a lot of the practices between both religions feel connected and shared. she’s scared for a moment before entering the fortress of solitude because it feels like a place of worship (and jewish people cannot enter places of non-monotheistic worship) but then cuts herself some slack. she does small, tokenistic things, like translating her favorite books of tanach into kryptonese just for the fun of it or making fusion dishes of gefilte fish and that-one-thing-that-comes-as-close-as-i-can-get-to-my-moms-special-sauce-recipe. she’s not practicing in either religion, not as much as when she was younger, but she’s comfortable in what she does and it brings her great spiritual contentment

[thisyearingaming]

2011 - This Year in Gaming

Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective - Nintendo DS, January 11th

A quirky adventure game where you are fucking dead, and you gotta work out who killed you. Ghost Trick is like Ace Attorney at first glance - it looks similar, and is made by effectively the same development team. Give it a shot on iOS.

Dead Space 2 - Multiplatform, January 25th 

Dead Space 2 was the undisputed king of alien horror until Alien: Isolation released. Yeah, you battle massive acid-spitting aliens, but it’s the necromorph babies you’re gonna be shit-scared of. It isn’t quite as unique as it’s predecessor, but it’s definitely much better to play. Bring your brown pants.

The Nintendo 3DS Releases - March 27th

The 3DS was like magic when you first fired the 3D slider all the way up - then it became a gimmick you never used again. Releasing with a few decent launch titles and being able to boast Street Fighter IV as playable, the 3DS arguably didn’t really pick up much steam until a few months after launch. While more powerful than the original DS which was six years old at the time, I can’t remember being particularly interested in it at the time.

Portal 2 - Multiplatform, April 19th 

Valve’s final single player experience until their jump into VR was a bloody good one - very funny and amusingly written with the best Steve Merchant performance since The Ricky Gervais Show, Portal 2′s puzzle solving adventure is rarely a chore to play through, and has thousands of custom maps courtesy of the Steam community.

L.A. Noire - Multiplatform, May 17th

Rockstar’s foray into adventure games has stood the test of time as an enjoyable and often startling journey nto the seedy underbelly of 1947 Los Angeles - as Cole Phelps you’ll threaten a Jewish man with the gas chamber, arrest a paedophile instead of a clearly guilty father, quote Hamlet to a prop skull at the scene of a car crash, destroy thousands of dollars of property, and yell at a child whose mother’s just been murdered. Great fun!

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings - Windows 

CDPR hit it out of the park with a fantastically improved sequel to 2007′s Eurojank diamond in the rough The Witcher, and really introduce Geralt of Rivia to more people for the first time with this game. A branching story that sees Geralt hunting Letho, the killer of King Foltest, and allying either with smelly hippy elven leader Iorveth and his terrorists who don’t appear in the sequel or the very cool but quite racist Vernon Roche and his special forces group, who are supporting characters in the sequel.

Alice: Madness Returns - Multiplatform, June 14th

A surprisingly charming, unsettling dive into the fractured psyche of the Victorian equivalent of an actual goth gf, Alice is a sequel to American McGee’s Alice from 2000. Surreal as fuck and absolutely drowning in atmosphere. Just don’t look at any of the YouTube comments on videos of the soundtrack. Rather bizarre show...

Duke Nukem Forever - Multiplatform, June 14th

Sometimes it’s best NOT to bet on the Duke. I bought this game to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and I did neither - DNF is fucking boring, and I blame it ALL on Randy Pitchford’s devotion to ruining things I like. DNF could’ve been brilliant - either embrace your heritage like Doom Eternal would eventually do, or make it into a “last hurrah” kind of thing where Duke realises he’s getting old and can’t kick ass forever. The greatest disappointment of the 2010s so far - but worse would follow with it. The King is dead - hail to the King, baby.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Multiplatform, August 23rd

The piss-tinted prequel to 2000′s excellent conspiracy RPG Deus Ex, Human Revolution is like smashing Robo-Cop into a world where Detroit is not a humanitarian disaster zone. Adam Jensen, the gravelly-voiced biomechanically enhanced security chief of David Sarif, is dragged into a world of American conspiracies involving FEMA death camps, the government enforcing martial law in US cities and massive Chinese conglomerates plotting to control the world. Just like real life! DXHR is my favourite in the series for its design, atmosphere and narrative.

Dead Island - Multiplatform, September 6th

Eh. Wasn’t that good. Notable for having the most misleading fucking trailer since Metal Gear Solid 2, but nowhere near as fulfilling upon release. An open world zombie survival game with a focus on melee weapons more fragile than your granny’s second hip. Oh great, now there’s a dead kid on my page. Thanks, Techland!

Driver: San Francisco - Multiplatform, September 6th

A game you literally can’t buy anymore, DSF was incredible to play when it came out and has only really gotten better with time. It’s still so unique for a driving game that I’m surprised Ubisoft have had the good sense to just leave it and not go pants-on-head retarded with the franchise since. Nick Robinson had to buy Subway gift cards just to purchase this game. 

Batman: Arkham City - Multiplatform, October 18th

Arkham City was so cool at launch and it still is today. A proper Batman epic with twists, turns, and the most addictive combat arena for years. This whole thing is gold from start to finish, except for the Harley Quinn DLC. I can’t even go into detail about it here, but I fucking LOVE this game.

Sonic Generations - Multiplatform, November 1st

Sonic Generations is the best Sonic game since 3 & Knuckles, but has now unfortunately convinced Sega that not only do people despise the Adventure games, they also really want to see Classic Sonic and Green Hill EVERY GODDAMN DAY. Generations is like a proper celebration of Sonic’s history, even including stuff from every reviewer’s favourite punching bag Sonic 2006 - I really like Generations and it has a stellar modding scene on PC.

Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception - Sony PlayStation 3, November 1st

The “finale” of the Uncharted series until Naughty Dog decided it wasn’t. Uncharted 3 may not be as tight as Among Thieves, but it’s just as enjoyable. As quipping invincible action hero Nathan Drake, you’ll ruin historical artifacts and “incapacitate” about 4000 guys in your quest to find Iram of the Pillars, chased by Cruella de Ville and her mercenary squad of a million faceless Englishmen. 

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 - Multiplatform, November 8th

God I was so excited for this. World War 3 never looked cooler, and then it came out - and it wasn’t that good. It didn’t feel as epic as MW2, not as well-written as MW, and not as interesting as World at War and Black Ops. Multiplayer was... fine? I think this is the point where most people realised that Call of Duty was basically downhill from here.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Multiplatform, November 11th

See this paragraph? You can read it. Another installment in Bethesda’s cross-franchise “Little Lies” series, Skyrim has been released more times than China’s created a pandemic. But it’s still really good and when you rub it the right way it comes all over your screen like a particularly excited storyteller, ready to point in the direction of adventure.

Super Mario 3D Land - Nintendo 3DS, November 13th

Yeah this was the point I decided I wanted a 3DS. It looked incredible and so fluid, and it really was! Playing this was great fun. That’s really all there is - I can’t be funny about it, nor overly critical. What do you want from me?

Assassin’s Creed: Revelations - Multiplatform, November 15th 

I didn’t like this when it came out - I thought the new graphic style was bad, Constantinople was dull, and the music was too different. Ezio was angrier, older, and the complete lack of any supporting cast from Brotherhood had me thinking this was a game that nobody wanted to work on - but now that I’m older, I can see this for how good it really was. Revelations blends the Ezio and Altair stories together, culminating in a satisfying emotional climax. 

Saints Row: The Third - Multiplatform, November 15

This video speaks for itself.

Minecraft - Windows, November 18th

There’s something beautiful about those early builds of Minecraft. Quiet, unassuming, and riddled with potential for exploration. I could talk for hours about the first time I was thrown into Mojang’s survival experience, about how I still get a bit weepy hearing Wet Hands by C418, about how shit-scared I still am of the mines and caves. Minecraft is immortal, and always will be. 

[moviepower]

Why do people criticize Jojo Rabbit?

We'd say that this is uncharted territory for distributor Disney, but the company did previously give us their futures face. Hmm. I saw Jojo Rabbit in the best place I could for movies, in my opinion.

For this list, we're looking at why Tyco ITTS 2019 black comedy has proven. So polarizing for critics just to clarify the critical reception thus far has been mostly positive and even watch mojo gave the film a rave review following its TIFF premiere.

Nevertheless, we can definitely see why a movie like this. Wouldn't win audiences over everywhere. Hey Joe, Joe, my old friend. Hi adults. Number 10, the controversial premise. I don't think I can do this last. Of course you can simply by reading it synopsis, you can tell why Jojo rabbit has stirred up so much controversy.

In the midst of world war II, a young German boy named Joe Joe dreams of becoming a Nazi upon learning that his mother has been harboring a Jewish girl in the attic though, Jo Jo begins to reevaluate his outlook on life. I tell them you will be in big trouble throughout this coming of age journey. Our titular character is guided by his imaginary friend.

Is it worth to watch Jojo Rabbit full movie

Who just so happens to be a flamboyantly incompetent, Adolf Hitler, as inventive as the premises, it was guaranteed to ignite passionate feelings. Critics are unsurprisingly split as to whether the film's premise is inspired or irresponsible. I wish more of our young boys had your blind fanaticism. Okay.

Number nine, how it stacks up to other satires and this world is ruined for everyone and the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way Jojo rabbit. Isn't the first film to satirize Hitler or Nazis 1940 twos to be, or not to be was criticized upon release for its farcical, spin of Nazi occupied Poland.

But today is viewed as a comedy classic. I know you're quite famous in London kernel. They call you concentration camp Earhart. Yes. Yes, we do the concentrating and the poles do the camping Hitler. Technically isn't the protagonist and the great dictator. It's obvious who Charlie Chaplin was parodying. We can learn more about actress playing mother Jojo on Wikipedia.

Arguably the most famous sendup of Nazi Germany is Mel Brooks. The producers. In which two con men put on an intentionally horrible musical entitled springtime for Hitler. Practically a love letter to this own run a week week. Are you kidding display? It's got the close on page four. Some critics are ready to place Jojo rabbit alongside these revolutionary respected comedy.

What do critics write in reviews about Jojo Rabbit?

Others, however, would claim that the film has more in common with the bridge sit-com Hile, honey I'm home, which was so misguided and tasteless that it only lasted one episode. Oh 10 night. You will make an schnitzel. What a joke. You must be real mad at me, honey. I'm a very, very bad Hitler. Number eight, what's going on in the real world right now?

Fuck man. The house, although world war II is in the past. The same, unfortunately can not be said about bigotry. Nowhere was this more apparent than at the 2017 unite the right rally in Charlottesville, which attracted several hate groups, including neo-Nazis. Since prejudice and discrimination remain prevalent in today's world.

It's obvious why various critics would object to a film that makes light of Nazi Germany. Nevertheless, satire can reflect modern times as well as history in ways that straightforward drama can't. Some might argue that now isn't the right time for a Nazi satire, but others would debate that society needs a movie like Jojo rabbit. A great story about the Irishman is here.

Now more than ever, you're not to nuts. Jojo, tenue kids likes dressing up in front of you. If somebody wants to be part of a club. Number seven, the humor, the best weekend ever.

Soundtrack in the highest level of production

Wow. Your enjoyment of Jojo rabbit will hinder on how hard you laugh. Or of course, if you laugh, the film didn't tickle. Roger Freedman. Funnybone who wrote in his showbiz four one, one review Jojo rabbit is actually borderline antisemitic offensive on many levels and not even funny. Sam Adams of slate couldn't have disagreed more proclaiming for Jojo rabbit comedy.

Isn't a means to minimize, but to analyze wise, to pry at the way, hateful ideologies can be embraced as a comfort and how beneath their promise to. Blame how the world really works is an understanding no more sophisticated than a child's it's time to buy some books. Since humor is subjective, we guess there isn't always going to be a clear line between what's offensively funny and what's just plain offensive.

Oh God. Number six. Jewish jokes. Did you know, Jews can Z to each other's mind. So tell us, you know, who saw one? They could look just like us of Tyco. ITT satire is clearly the Nazis. However, the director who's of Jewish and Maori heritage also pokes fun at Judaism. Hi, well, the real Jordan Rumi was horrified by the audience's reception at the screening he attended.

Writing, you have no idea how it is to be surrounded by thousands of people laughing at jokes, specifically directed at Jews. That being said, Rumi seemed to be in the minority of a group that found the film. Hilarious. As with Borat and South park, many would argue that the humor and Jojo rabbit isn't intended to mock the Jewish faith, but to criticize how ignorant and Semites are a cute number five, the life is beautiful comparison, right?

Jojo Rabbit's reaction to mom's death

Yeah. Critics have stocked a Jojo rabbit up against numerous other films. But life is beautiful. Seems to be the one that's invited the most comparisons this 1997, Italian dromedy also presented world war II through a lighthearted lens, centering on a Jewish man who uses humor and imagination to shield his son from the horrors of the Holocaust. It's interesting what they write about this movie on Amazon.

Well, the film won an Academy award for best foreign language film, and even got nominated for best picture. There were those who found the movies comedic tone, inappropriate. Over two decades later, we will continue to debate if the movie is a life affirming fable or a dated misfire. It's actually eerie how much these two films have in common, especially since both one TIFs peoples choice award.

That is the strongest thing in the world. Number four, is it shocking enough? I was your age. I had an imaginary friend come in so much stuff even before the first trailer dropped Jojo rabbit was being built up as one of 20 nineteens most controversial movies. Weirdly enough though, some critics have expressed disappointment that the film isn't more shocking.

Well, audiences have arguably gotten more sensitive with time. There are still patrons who crave comedy that pushes the envelope to its limits. It's time to burn some books. Brian Talarico of the Chicago sun times felt Jojo rabbit played it too safe. Writing the final scenes of Jojo rabbit are too easy for a film that needs to be dangerous and daring. 

Are the best scenes already included in the trailer?

Even if the film doesn't go all out with its edgy concept. Seeing Tyco, ITT dresses, Adolf Hitler will be more than enough to make a few jobs drop. What am I going to do? No idea. Going down the house in Glen Winston church one, negotiate number three. It's depiction of Nazis. The playlist Charles romesco took issue with the films, humanization of antisemites writing.

YTT concedes that a good percentage of Nazis really do hold hate in their heart. But maintains that at least some of them aren't you two seem to be getting on. Well, it doesn't seem like a bad cost. How much pain and suffering the Nazis caused many audiences will understandably struggle with this message.

However, if Ron Jones proved anything with his third wave social experiment in 1967, it's that even ordinary people can get swept up in the dangerous ideals of fascism. Likewise, Jojo rabbit poses, a challenging question. If we're not willing to acknowledge the bad and the good in people, how can we ever rid ourselves of prejudice?

Nothing makes sense anymore. Yeah, I know. It's definitely not a good time to be a Nazi. Number two it's message. And mother took me. She's kind me like a person, whatever your thoughts on Jojo rabbit, Tyco ITT clearly wanted to spread an anti hate message. YTT also claims that he started writing the screenplay before Nazis regained relevance in the media.

There's little doubt that why TTS intent was noble, whether or not the final product successfully gets his message across is where critics are split. A doubt of the a V club felt that making fun of Nazi Germany had been done before. Thus taking away from the movies, broader anti hate theme. Peter Howell begged to differ in his Toronto star review writing Taika YTT knocks it out of deer park with the meaningful lunacy of his anti hate satire, which is equal parts.

Adolf Hitler's thread in the movie

Mel Brooks, West Henderson, and  own whimsical brilliance growing up too fast. Ten-year-olds and the celebrating war and talking politics. Before we continue, be sure to subscribe to our channel and ring the bell to get notified a better latest videos. You'll have the option to be notified for occasional videos or all of them.

If you're on your phone, make sure you go into your settings and switch on notifications. Number one it's depiction of Hitler. Well, they call me a scared rabbits. Okay. Let's address the giant rabbit in the room. Tyco YTT spends most of his screen time prancing around in a Nazi uniform and toothbrush mustache. If you want, you can read here about preparations for making a movie and other curiosities.

Without a doubt, YTT, didn't set out to deliver a serious or dignified portrayal of Hitler. Rather YTT aspired to make the fewer look as goofy and idiotic as possible. Oh, . Just painting Hitler as a wacky, even likable buffoon desensitized us to the atrocities. He committed though. Some may say yes while others may argue that it leaves audiences more informed and open-minded.

At the end of the day, everyone is going to have a different opinion of Jojo. Let them say whatever they want. People used to say a lot of nasty things about me. Oh, this guy's a lunatic. Oh, look at that psycho. He's going to get us all killed. Do you agree with our picks, check out this other recent clip from watch mojo and be sure to subscribe and ring the bell to be notified about our latest videos.

[briangroth27]

Back to the MCU Part 2: The X-men

I’m absolutely looking forward to Dark Phoenix and New Mutants—I’ve loved or really liked all of the X-men movies except two and I’m sad to see the franchise end—but I’m also looking forward to the X-men joining the MCU. I was skeptical of the fan insistence that Spider-man would be inherently better just because Homecoming was part of the MCU and I was proven wrong, but I’m still not sure that the X-men going home will be a magical improvement. The Fox-films aren’t perfect, but they’re not the worthless dreck a lot of people make them out to be either and it’ll be a shame to lose all the good things about them (unfortunately along with The Gifted in all likelihood). Still, this is what’s happening and I’ll always be excited for new X-men adventures: they’re my favorite comics and I love seeing them brought to life! In a perfect world, we’d get a new X-men TV series (heck, both a live-action one and a new animated series) because there are just too many characters to explore over a trilogy or two of movies, but for these purposes, I’m going to assume they’ll only be doing X-films.

Full spoilers for the Fox-verse and MCU up to this point....

X-men Origins How should mutants appear in the MCU? This is super-simple: they just do.

There’s always been a handful around, like Xavier, Magneto (their ages and Erik’s Holocaust experience can be explained by saying they knew a mutant who could rejuvenate others), Apocalypse, Shadow King, etc., but mutants are just now starting to appear en masse. They’re a new and mysterious global phenomenon. Importantly, they’re a natural evolution and the most “cause” that should ever be given is the real-life explanation for evolutionary mutation: a reaction a hostile environment. Sure, you could say Thanos’ Snap created that type of environmental condition, but no one should be responsible for making mutation happen. This is something I strongly believe has to hold true: mutants can’t be created in a lab somewhere or Snapped back into existence “wrong” or have their X-genes turned on by Scarlet Witch or something. If anything like that happens, mutants automatically lose their “we’re natural, normal, and we’re supposed to be here�� argument. It’s why the Inhumans aren’t really a great substitute for the mutants-as-minorities metaphor: even though the present-day Inhumans were born that way, they can still be traced back to experiments the Kree conducted on humans. Mutants, however, are completely normal and exactly what they’re supposed to be. Also, it’s that lack of an “explanation” that scares normal people and separates mutants from the other superheroes in the MCU. Bigots can write off a radioactive spider bite or a gamma accident as powers that happened to “those poor people,” but the X-men showing up and saying “this is who we are naturally, our powers come from the core of our being, and we’re the future?” That scares them and brings out the hate. That last point is just as much a source of fear as the others: just look at how white supremacists in real life scream about “being replaced” by Jewish people, Muslims, immigrants, etc.

I’ve been asked on Twitter how the common MCU people would be able to tell that the X-men are any different from the Avengers (Thor vs. Storm was the example I was given), and the answer’s in the characters. Storm and the rest of the team would absolutely self-identify as mutants, feeling they shouldn’t have to pass as aliens/accidents for an easier life (in addition to their stated goal of proving that mutants can be trusted). With that pride and the insistence that mutants are the future, bigoted reactions would mimic LGBTQIA hate: "Why should we cater to a minority? They should be committed/cured, not supported, coddled, and allowed to continue living in their delusions,” etc. People's kids being mysteriously powered is also a much scarier concept than an alien the public barely interacts with (Ragnarok having civilians know about Thor and Jane’s relationship status still rings false to me, unless Darcy’s been blogging). Thor's an external anomaly to the everyday MCU citizen and while the Avengers might accidentally wreck your town, mutants could be in your family and are an intimate threat to The Way Things Are.

I’ve also been asked how you square Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver with Magneto if the X-men just appear now rather than being rebooted into the history of the MCU, and that’s simple too. They aren’t his kids anymore in the comics, so you might not even need to explore that connection in the movies. If they do want to, he could be a secret parent they didn’t know about. They still don’t have to be mutants since their origin is tied to Loki’s scepter. Either way, Wanda’s continued presence in the MCU is not a continuity deal-breaker.

First Class While the idea I’ve seen tossed around of the team suddenly snapping into view after Xavier has been psychically hiding them from the world for years would be a cool reveal, I don’t think they’ll want to burn all the A-list X-men by introducing them as adults. IMO, the X-men are going to be the backbone of multiple future MCU phases since the big-name Avengers are winding done, so they’re going to want to cast X-teens who can grow with the MCU. They’ll also want to start at the beginning and (hopefully) really dig into the team finding its groove, learning as they go. I’ve enjoyed the Fox prequel trilogy immensely so far, but jumping 10 years between each film takes the wind out of proper development arcs. Showing the team’s learning curve as superheroes would also set them apart from the Avengers, who have personality conflicts but essentially came to the team as polished heroes.

Fox’s prequel X-team is a pretty perfect lineup in terms of characters, so I wouldn’t change the core roster much (though I do expect everyone to be recast). We’d meet the X-men as they’re recruited, allowing the film to both touch on the world mutants are living in and to show who these kids were outside the mansion. That’ll not only show the healing effect of having other kids like them in their orbit, but will also emphasize how important the school is as a safe haven (and found family) from the rest of the world. One area where Fox’s films have fallen short (and The Gifted has excelled) is showing what the common people’s reaction to mutants is, rather than just sticking with the military’s thoughts, and I hope the MCU follows that show’s lead.

While every teenager (and even every adult) can relate to the X-men’s outsider status, mutants are also (and most importantly) supposed to represent the oppressed in our society and the next cast should reflect that. So, I’d do a lot of race and sexual orientation switches. For example, Cyclops should be Native Alaskan. He’s closely tied to that region in the comics, Summers isn’t the real family name (it was chosen by an immigrant ancestor in the comics and here could be an example of his family trying to assimilate), and the pressure to be a “model minority” would mesh perfectly with Scott’s constant drive to be a straight-laced boy scout who thinks he’d be useless if he failed. I’d let the comics’ subtext about Storm being bi or pansexual be text here. I’d also stick closer to her having been a “goddess” as well as a thief; she should be the one mutant in history that ruled humans without fear or violence so she can be a voice of reason and experience on the team. Nightcrawler could be updated into a swashbuckling street performer who’s a little internet-famous (part of a growing mutant youth subculture) in addition to his religious struggles. He could also be a positive role model in how he embraces and celebrates his physical differences (like he did on X-men Evolution), no matter who calls him a demon. Kurt could be any race as long as he’s from Germany, though I kinda like the idea of one of the few white guys being blue the whole time. Rouge would definitely start out as a villain if I were writing it. She doesn’t necessarily need to be white and making her an African-American teen from Mississippi could grant her a whole new perspective on the mutants-as-minorities idea: her loss of memories and self could reflect the black American experience of not knowing where your ancestors came from or what their culture was. I also think her reaction to meeting a literal queen who’s also a black woman would be pretty great; Storm could be a role model for her once she starts to reform (and maybe punk Storm could come from interacting with Rogue’s more fun-loving persona). Those new aspects could potentially bolster the outsider feeling she’ll already have thanks to her powers acting like a disease that forbids her from making unencumbered contact with others, so she could be relatable on several fronts.

New Mutants Scott, Ororo, Kurt, and Rogue would be my core team throughout all the films, but there’d be room for others as well. Jean’s another favorite of mine and it’d be cool to see her without the Phoenix as a predetermined end-point in mind for a while. I’ve seen it pointed out on Twitter that one of her biggest assets is her empathy, so let her use that to promote human/mutant understanding and use her comic origin story to drive her towards not letting anyone die. Gambit would be a lot of fun (and, in keeping with making things more diverse, the movies could go through with an intended comic development that he’d be bi), but I would definitely not adapt his charm power: there’s just too much room for that to get rapey to even try including it (plus, he shouldn’t need a power to be charming). Being a roguish thief with a heart of gold would play well against both the X-men and the gruff Wolverine when he’s introduced. Jubilee is more than deserving of a larger, more active role after being a glorified cameo so many times; maybe she eventually becomes the PR face of the school? Iceman’s always been another favorite of mine and his deep-seated denial of his homosexuality would bring another realistic touch to the team. Polaris, X-23, Honey Badger, Eclipse, Quicksilver (who I guess is dead, though; it’s a shame we have to leave the superior cinematic one behind in the Fox-verse), Domino, Bishop, Beast, Firestar, Psylocke, Shadowcat, etc. …the list of great characters in this franchise goes on and on and they’d all be welcome; this is why there needs to be a show, not just films!

Logan, the Wolverine We should get to Wolverine at some point—he’s another one of my favorites and there’s no denying he’s the most popular mutant—and I’d play up the parallels between him and Scott rather than focus on the love triangle with Jean. But first, I want them to hold off on Logan and maybe not even introduce him until something like the third movie. Let the rest of the team breathe and become an ensemble before reintroducing a new Wolverine, who’ll instantly be saddled with comparisons to arguably the most iconic version of the character: Hugh Jackman’s. They’d spend most of their time justifying the new Logan and I worry that the rest of the characters would be sidelined again. Instead, let’s see all of them get the chance to be as fleshed-out and celebrated as Logan is, then add him in and watch as the franchise gets even bigger from there. Maybe a way around Logan stealing the X-spotlight is to do something unorthodox (yet with enough comic precedence to appease the fans) and introduce him in an Avengers movie first. Maybe the Avengers could take the place of Alpha Flight in the MCU (or maybe they’d do something totally unexpected and just make an Alpha Flight movie). Personally I’d like to see a Logan who was absolutely horrible in his past—an animal occasionally pointed in the right direction—who then had the mind-wipe truly make him a better person who’s out to atone for a life he doesn’t remember. I think that would be compelling and would make the mind-wipe matter. Edit: I thought it might work to make Logan a POC to reflect real-life atrocities and experimentation carried out against minorities, but “violent rage machine who becomes a hero after (probably white) scientists torture him and erase his identity” would be a terrible message since you could say it argues they improved him. If he were innocent before Weapon X it would be different (and possibly a comment on the damage white people have inflicted on just about everyone else); I guess it depends on what they want Logan's story to be and what effect Weapon X has on him (and there should be an effect, not that X-men Origins nonsense where he's essentially the same person on both sides of it). If he's an angry white guy who's improved by forgetting who he was/the society that made him that way, that could be an interesting comment on the white male rage we see so much of today too.

Dark Phoenix, Apocalypse (and other X-threats) I definitely don’t want to see Magneto right away (though he’s the best villain in fiction). On film, we need a break from him (though if they wanted to make him Xavier’s co-leader of the X-men for an extended period, I’d be interested). I genuinely liked Mystique’s character development into just that position in the prequel films, but when she returns in the MCU it should be as a villain first (and certainly as Kurt’s mom—or why not his dad, as originally planned?—and Rogue’s adoptive mother). Stryker, the Sentinels, and the Phoenix Saga should all be held off until far down the road as well.

I wish I could remember who on Twitter suggested it, but I love the idea of using conversion therapy as the basis for an X-men villain, so that’s how I’d open the series (let’s call these films The Uncanny X-men, for argument’s sake). Use Mesmero as one of two main villains, mind-controlling mutants into thinking that they don’t have powers to the point where they subconsciously shut down their access to them (like Iceman did to himself after House of M). Do this through Legion-esque twisty, mind-bending psychic sequences (so we can see each character’s inner fears and character traits), but mixed with real-world conversion therapy horrors. Once Mesmero’s phase is completed, the “cured” mutants are thrown into an elaborate deathtrap/maze to make sure they can’t access their powers anymore…this would be a Murderworld designed by an updated Arcade! That would provide the bombastic third act after the Mesmero stuff gives us some great character work. Xavier sends the team in to investigate this process (maybe it’s set on Genosha) and they meet Rogue there, who’s also undercover but for Mystique, out to kill everyone involved whereas the X-men want to expose the torture and shut it down peacefully to be a good example. You could start to argue whether the X-men being upstanding superheroes allows them to go far enough with a third party like Rogue/the Brotherhood.

My second movie would feature Mr. Sinister and his attempts to keep up with mutants by experimenting on himself to give himself powers. I’d make it a cultural appropriation metaphor, by having Sinister create agents for the government (the Freedom Force seems like an appropriate right-wing name and it looks like they might be needed to step in where the Avengers leave off after Endgame) who are heroes and celebrated by the public, whereas the X-men are still hated. The X-men would of course resent the popular “mutates” taking what made them special and being celebrated for it while they’re still hated. If the first movie is about the X-men fighting to prove they should be here, the second would be about mutants establishing their own culture (and the burgeoning mutant subculture would absolutely be a part of this). It’d also be about humans artificially clinging to relevance and fearing losing their status in society (extremely relevant to a huge problem with white society in America today), while larger sci-fi themes about moving toward the future of humanity via evolution are explored through Sinister. Sinister’s base would absolutely be in the Savage Land so we could see X-men vs. dinosaurs: in addition to just being fun and cool (and big business, if the Jurassic World movies are any indication), dinosaurs would metaphorically represent the human race. They’d be a constant reminder of the extinction and irrelevance Sinister is trying to outthink. Perhaps Sauron could be a minor villain in that setting. Since I wouldn’t want to do Phoenix yet, a Madelyne Prior story might be better for this new era (maybe she’s one of Sinister’s Freedom Force mutates). If they don’t want to do the Captain Marvel/Rogue animosity—and I’m not sure I want to see Carol lose her memories and herself again, though you could create a bond between the two of them over Carol being manipulated by the Kree and Rogue by Mystique (maybe that’s how they’d finally resolve their hatred?)—another of Sinister’s mutates being called Warbird and having flight/super-strength would be a fine substitute for Rogue to get her iconic powers and send her to the X-men for help.

As we get into Uncanny 3, I’d do Onslaught, but a more streamlined version that doesn’t involve the Heroes Reborn thing. I’d rather it be confined to the X-men, but since we’re in the MCU now it’d be a good opportunity for the teams to team up. My Onslaught wouldn’t be a Magneto/Xavier mind-meld, but a Xavier who finally lost hope in his dream and decided to force humans to accept mutants. I think Xavier screwing with the team, implanting false memories to manipulate them, sow discord, etc. would be a lot of fun…and a chance to have Rogue be the big damn hero because of her mental training to suss out her actual personality (in these films I’d dedicate time to the team actively helping her try to control her abilities and rediscover herself). A psychic threat would also be a nice bookend to the team’s first film and a response to “how impactful can the X-men be as true-blue heroes?,” while defeating Xavier would be a natural end to this chapter as the team goes on to new adventures under Scott and Ororo’s leadership.

Once we’ve explored new threats, I’m fully open to digging into Magneto, Apocalypse (hopefully maintaining his “I’m trying to save you all by forcing conflict to evolve you” delusion), Stryker, the Sentinels, Mystique, Shadow King, Juggernaut, Sabretooth, Omega Red (who hasn’t been used yet), etc. again. Whatever they do, I hope the MCU goes big and explores all facets of the X-universe, like Genosha, Asteroid M, the Morlocks, the Brood, Madripoor, Mojo, etc. The X-world is a rich one unto itself, so Disney should let it shine and really flesh out the MCU beyond the real-world boundaries they’ve lived in so far and are only just now starting to venture from (at least on Earth). When we do get to Phoenix again, I hope it’ll be a natural evolution and Jean’s quest to make the world better so no one has to die again, not a cosmic space bird trying on feelings or a secret evil split personality (as an early X3 idea pitched, my Jean would evolve into the comics’ cosmic force).

United I absolutely don’t want some sort of Avengers vs. X-men thing. Who wants the Avengers turned into the militant arm of a bigoted government or something? No matter how you slice it, the X-men represent minorities/PoC/the oppressed, so making the Avengers fight them just seems wrong and automatically tips them toward being agents of oppression. If you lean too far into “mutant powers really are dangerous” to justify the Avengers fighting them, the X-men lose their social relevance. At “best,” you’ll have the Avengers making an argument along the lines of “protests that cause property damage are just as bad as the racists/social inequality they’re protesting,” which is not a good look for anyone. Plus, I’m just sick of heroes fighting heroes.

I wouldn’t do House of M or X-men vs. Inhumans either: extinction events not perpetrated by bigots trying to pull off genocide undercut the metaphor of mutancy. The X-men represent oppressed minorities, not snow leopards.

Deadpool: The Last Stand While it would be absolutely crazy if Dark Phoenix ended with Jean re-creating the Fox-Earth into the MCU or something, I don’t think the Fox-verse will get that kind of send-off. Aside from Dark Phoenix, New Mutants (which looks very spooky-cool but who knows if it will be released in theaters or on Hulu), and The Gifted (which will almost certainly be cancelled, sadly) the big dangling thread of the Fox-verse is the still-popular Deadpool. Legion will be ending after Season 3 and I think it’s safe to say Gambit, Shadowcat, Multiple Man, etc. are dead at this point, and that’s probably for the best if Disney wants to create a unified vision and start fresh.

However, a Deadpool 3 (or X-Force) film should definitely still happen, and I have an idea to help the characters (and actors) we love from those movies make the jump to the MCU intact. I think DP3/X-Force should be an adventure on Mojoworld! Deadpool’s probably the only live-action property that would be willing to go all-in on Mojo, so they should be the one to take the dive (especially now that Shatterstar’s mentioned it exists). Everyone gets abducted and the writers can go extremely meta with it. They could structure it similarly to the first Mojo episode of the 90s X-men cartoon, but with jokes about Hollywood’s obsession with sequels, reboots, and the franchise wars (as well as society’s relationship with the media). They could also joke about fan fears about Disney making them PG-13 (though I think those fears are unfounded), via some Good Place-esque censorship. Mojo’s televised world could also allow for cameos galore from the Fox-films, including the much-desired Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds team-up. This isn’t how I’d prefer to see those actors together for the last time, but since it seems like the only option I’d take it. And at the end of this Mojoverse adventure? The Fox-verse is “cancelled,” leaving Wade and friends to be dumped into the MCU. You could cherry-pick the Fox timeline for favorites to save here: Wade, Domino, Negasonic, Colossus, Blind Al, Vanessa, Cable, Dopinder, both Yukios, and Laura/X-23 would all be welcome IMO (alternatively, I’ll take people like Zazie Beetz and Dafne Keen getting cast as Domino and Laura again in the MCU, just with new origins). If there’s a way to get The Gifted characters—especially Polaris and Eclipse—to the MCU too (if Blink’s season 2-ending portal doesn’t do it and make that group the MCU’s Exiles; seeing them come from a hardened anti-mutant world into an MCU where mutants are just starting to pop up in large numbers would be a really cool switch for them), I’m all for that as well. You could even give X-Force’s appearance in the MCU some narrative impact by forcing Xavier to accelerate his plan for the X-men to go public to counteract Deadpool’s team in the public eye, since Wade is not the guy you want at the center of the mutant rights effort.

Days of Future Past I realize most of this won’t happen (especially my ideas for the movies, but hey Disney, if you want some X-novels give me a call), but it’s a vision of the X-Franchise’s future I’d like to see. The big things are that mutants should just appear naturally, Disney should be open to casting and writing the characters more diversely than they’ve been in the comics (a consideration I’d extend to the franchise’s creators behind the scenes and soundtrack as well, though the main theme should absolutely be the 90s Animated Series theme!), and the MCU should take the time to dig into every aspect of the franchise rather than immediately hitting beats Fox has already covered. There are a lot of socially-relevant angles to tackle the X-men world with, and I want to see them all explored. The Disney/Fox deal is officially finalized on March 20, so we’ll soon see how the X-men will fit in. 

Whatever happens, I’m excited to see Dark Phoenix and I can’t wait to see more X-adventures in the MCU!

What do you think? What do you want to see from the X-men in the MCU?

Check out more of my theories, reviews, and original short stories here!

[harryseyebrows]

More parenting questions because we need specifics! Attachment parenting or cry it out? Baby wearing? Homemade baby food? Are any picky eaters? Do they introduce them to any religion? (I imagine Harry showing them all if anyone starts to ask questions) What stance will Jeff and Harry take on underage drinking or age of first cell phones? Who gives the birds and bees talk? Are they the cool house to hang out at for the teenagers? (Harry always has baked goods, Jeff has a killer vinyl collection)

i love you for this.

okay. so in terms of parenting style, it evolves from baby to baby. they had such a hard time getting pregnant with the twins that it makes them super protective once theyre born. harry is a bit more overbearing and neurotic, and not to say that jeff isnt just as scared and nervous, he’s just a bit more rational. they read the same books and know almost all of the same information, but when it comes down to it, harry often foregoes what most people and experts will tell you in favor of rushing down the hall if either twin so much as hiccups. jeff tries to reason with him and urge him to let them self soothe sometimes but its with very limited success. and jeff is kinda constantly battling with himself because he knows that harry is still spooked after the miscarriages (he is too) and when he forces harry to stay in the room and not run to them as soon as they cry, he sees how uncomfortable it makes harry, so he usually relents. however, harry relaxes over time. by the time the twins are around 6 months, he has other things to worry about, namely being pregnant again so soon, so he’s tired and cranky and swollen so letting the twins cry it out is sometimes the better option. he knows that he has a secure attachment with both twins and that they’re not lacking for anything, and that they’re both healthy and happy. with river, harry is significantly more relaxed, and by the time willow comes along, he and jeff are both old pros. 

BABY WEARING. if you think for one second that harry would not be ecstatic over the possibility of having his baby/babies strapped to him so he can walk around and show them off, even if its only at home and his only audience is the house plants, youre a CRAZY PERSON. harry loves a baby sling. jeff is less enthusiastic than harry but he’s still pretty psyched about it. even though when they take the twins out together, one baby per chest, they do look ridiculous. harry never gets tired of it, even after 4 kids. especially when theyre newborns. catch him doing laundry and dishes with his paisley printed baby scarf-sling on. DELIGHTFUL. 

homemade baby food. they try it just for shits when the twins are able to start solids but its a very short-lived project. too much mess. too expensive. store bought it just fine for them lol 

eli will eat whatever you put in front of him, but jude, harrys sweet, otherwise amicable little boy, is the one who goes through a phase where he proclaims ‘i dont like it’ to anything and everything. oddly enough, though, the things he will still eat are mostly healthy, like cubed fruit and baby carrots. however, he’s still a big fan of mac and cheese, but staunchly refuses to eat dino-shaped nuggets, to which eli usually looks at harry and jeff as if he’s saying ‘more for me, right?’ river is easy, too. a little human garbage disposal. harry has had to stop him from trying to eat a banana peel more than he’d like to admit. willow isnt quite as easy as river but she’s pretty close. all of the azoff children have very broad palates, thanks to harry and his adventurous cooking. jeff and harry also like to very very hands-on with the kids eating experiences -- they dedicate one night a week to having the kids help them with dinner. harry also likes to bake with them quite a bit. how many 4 years old do you know that have baked a lemon tart?

as far as religion goes, the kids are raised with ~blended religions ie jewish and christian (i did some research on it, and much like any other polarizing topic, there are a lot of people who claim that it has to be a hard left of right, one or the other, but if you dig a bit past the more sensationalized articles, you can find some info on people who were raised with two faiths and turned out just fine -- its finding a balance and respecting the holidays and traditions of both -- as well as explaining things just as you would if you were raising them with one faith. if given the room to explore both and come to their own decisions, it can actually be very valuable and healthy **also worth noting that i myself am not a religious person but i know its important to a lot of people). jeff and harry do their best to keep things clear and distinct but also make sure that the kids dont feel alienated or distant from either side. they dont force anything on them -- the kids are free to say no to certain things, and they both do their best to answer questions and such, so its not super strict, but more of a ‘its there if you want it’ type of situation. the kids also think its very special that they get to celebrate Hanukkah and christmas 

as neurotic as harry was when they were little, once the kids are older, he’s the more lax one when it comes to certain things ie drinking, pot, tattoos, etc. he’s pro ‘if youre gonna drink id rather you do it in the house than at a party’ so when the boys are 18/19, they’re allowed to have a beer or a glass of wine if they want it, as long as harry takes their keys. he knows that if you make something super off limits, its gonna make it that much more tempting when he’s not around to say no. thats why when river is 6 and asks what beer tastes like, harry lets him have a super tiny sip and is amused when river spits it out immediately, but less amused when he spits it out back into the bottle. jeff is a bit more strict and would prefer that they dont do it at all, but he respects harrys policies and kinda grins and bears it. 

jeff does the birds and the bees because harry is banned from talking about anything sex-related around the kids per their own request, simply because he’s super embarrassing and they hate it lmao sometimes he sits down and watches those shitty daytime talk shows, the one with the doctors as a panel, and he learns some random ass info about penile health and the next thing you know he’s bringing it up at breakfast only to be met with a chorus of ‘shut upppp dad, oh my GOD’ jeff is way more chill and easy to talk to, and the kids dont mind when he tells them because they can see that he’s just as uncomfortable as they are, eager to have it done and over with, as opposed to the theatrics they know theyd get with harry (probably some pseudo guidance counselor nonsense where he’d act placid and calm and stare at them with his laser beam focus, radiating ‘you can tell me anything’ vibes that would make them want to wither away. there’d be hand gestures and a condom demonstration with a banana, a lecture on embracing your sexuality but being careful and safe. NO THANKS, says all 4 kids)

and you are absolutely correct, other kids and teenagers seem to love going to the hazoff household, even though the actual hazoff kids dont know why. one of their dads is a complete goof (and totally embraces it) and the other is significantly more chill but also prone to being nerdy and embarrassing (harry tries to impress under the guise of being casual, whereas jeff is always ready to bust out naked baby pictures while simultaneously be the ~cool one). there are always cookies or some type of loaf cake on the counter and ready to be eaten, and jeff is always working on some new sound or projection system for movies. its just a really nice, open environment where anyone who steps into their house is accepted with open arms. unless they’re rude or mean. then harry is mildly passive aggressive but otherwise still civil. only once that person leaves does he mutter something about ‘well they weren’t very nice’ 

[punk-zionist-vibes]

WARNING! LONG POST INCOMING. 🤧✨✨

(AND POSSIBLE CONTENT WARNING!)

Sections:

1. Disclaimer on mob mentality mindset behavior.

2. What the Countryhumans Fandom is.

3. Not everyone in the fandom agrees with each other. And more on "why your favorite fandom isnt actually toxic",

(Bonus: Double Standards against Countryhumans Specifically.)

4. Just because there are problematics and bigotted behavior in a fandom does not mean everyone in said fandom is a bigot.

5. Mob mentality mindset pt. 2,

6. The actual proper way to manage this (outro)

Hi I see a lot of posts like this and I want to make a response because I'm weary it's going to become a trend among younger users or impressionable scared to not come off as woke teens who use tiktok or twitter too,

Because while Tumblr can be awesome there are still confusing moralities in people and nobodys perfect nor figured out on whats going on all the time. We all make mistakes in judgement

So lets clarify first what this post means.

It is targetting a fandom in particular.

Humanized Countries.

Specifically Countryhumans.

What is The Countryhumans Fandom?

Countryhumans is a fandom of Humanized Countries, all with histories, backstories according to their Country politics, Orgins, and opinions according to their people with certain exceptions in personality as seen fit. This is done to every Country.

First, here are some dislcaimers to be known to those new to discussing heavy topics:

Portraying heavy subjects is not an agreeance of it. Pretending it is to shut them up from using cartoons or art in a fashion as Countryhumans is *capable of*, is a form of censorship that allows the privledged that do not suffer the ongoing issues of it roam free without ever having to feel uncomfortable. And therefor censors and erases voices of those who use Countryhumans, OCS, or even other Fandoms in general to sort of bring and shine light to minorities and their causes to make it easier to understand in some form of media that offers *representation*. Lets say,

Maus, for example is a good form of media representation. (Maus is a Comic series by a Jewish Author going through the damages of the holocaust in the form of mice. Would do more looking into it yourself however if I receive questions I am able to provide more sourced links over what I have talked about.)

So what is the problem here?

In theory, Countryhumans sounds capable of awesome things and bringing a community together for learning opportunities.

However, the Countryhumans fandom has never been perfect. Historical innaccuracies, hellspawn circles of strange, "Im cringe and embracing it cuz I just wanna have fun uwu" mindsets of also sex roleplay and its ""potential""(trust me I have been there and have those ex friends) in ""sexual exploration"",

When in reality it:

Disrespects millions of people who live there,

Puts no actual careful effort into proper research, and Violates everything the Country stands for,

Wastes the potential behind the concept of Countryhumans in the first place, and actually doing things correctly, using it educationally to spread awareness, or have fun politically and historically actually learning new things with accuracy that it is capable of.

(^^^ Same harm also caused by stereotypes.)

And pretty much is misinformation, sexualization(wrongfully so. There has to be limits and sexualization is a big problem.)

HERE IS ANOTHER PROBLEM WITH THAT,

Not everyone in the Fandom is like that. There are genuine, well spirited, educated, trying their best Countryhumans content creators and fans that have generally wanted in a sense, to bring educated, well mused, entertaining, and resourceful content with backed up entertainment sources and genuinity to textbook source material and more,

HOWEVER,

they get drowned out by stereotypers, sexualizers, and bigots who leave careless means of content without realizing the affects of how Countryhumans if to be persued out of concept should actually be treated with care and respect and carefully as history is complicated at times and should be portrayed accurately if we are going to make charicatures of it.

Many people tend to even as a (researchable) survival instinct focus more on the bad.

Further drowning out those who are trying to do well in this fandom.

While I appreciate the OP clarify "racists in the community in specific" I saw a post earlier in particular who may have inspired this post by calling EVERYBODY in the fandom racist, instead of realizing there are racists and non-racists capable of associating with the fandom and nobody who may enjoy Countryhumans are always so responsible or capable of stopping said toxicity so easy.

Which makes it feel the OP may ALSO come from a place of Bias.

That being said.

The anti Countryhumans fans actually also happen to be A LOT MORE toxic at times and thats very saddening because it doesnt really help drown out or wash away the toxicity within the fandom AT ALL, rather contributes to the unhealthy hostile environment of those who just want to research into humanizing Countries for the fun sake of learning, gathering a community in growth, and having a good time.

(We'll get back to this in the Bias factor discussed later.)

With the Bias factor showing up,

Countryhumans is not the only Fandom attacked, but its one that happens to be treated the worst in some cases.

Other Fandoms are Targetted. So what do I mean By That?

Well Interestingly enough, it was enough of a common phenomenon for somebody to make a video about it like THIS:

Saying all Countryhumans fans are racist are like saying

All Undertale fans are pedophiles who sexualize suicide because of that one creator who became popular who made "the sans AU" daycare,

Wasnt it funny that in 2017 people were heavily bullied for being in fandoms?

Oh wait.

This sort of all adds up doesnt it?

Its the common anti fandom behavior that appears because of something we'll also unpack in a bit, but that comes with the mob mentality part of things.

Another good example is saying stuff like "you're all cringe if you like this" or "DNI if you KIN THIS PERSON/ARE IN THIS FANDOM"

or saying all homestuck fans say slurs.

There may be problematic people in all fandoms and sure the fandom isnt for you in specific because all people have niche tastes and interests in specific places,

But we dont control the bad side of our fandoms. None of us do. Right?

You have interests, dont you, OP?

and anyone who stumbles upon this, all you users might feel insecure, or bullied for your interests, and that wasnt normal or ok to go through. The internet has a huge bullying problem I hope some choose to unpack in therapy.

But why would I say the Countryhumans fandom is more Attacked Than Other Fandoms?

A) it doesnt have a canon ground to stand on and is therefor in archeiac ruins (if you ask a fan in the fandon they wont tell you, but there IS secretly a bit of certain canon a lot of ppl abide by without saying it outloud but some of it has to be picked up as problematic and tossed away. If a general sense of community came forward to make canonic lore built on researched foundations, asking voices from Certain Countries, and so on, with corrections where needed and necessary; it could fix SO MANY problems the fandom has. And eliminate misinformation and the need so many have to be influenced by small creep groups within the fandom that dont represent the whole fandom saying its fine and uwu to do whatever.)

B) Countryhumans took all it knew from the influences of Hetalia and Countryball and if those source materials werent so bigotted and problematic to raise quite a few of its fans in the first place Countryhumans would have turned out a lot better but nobody wants to admit that since everybody sees Countryballs as ""classic"", not many actually care what Hetalias doing despite the whole anime being problematic to the point the fans avoided the canon to make their own at most, and everybody wants to propagate Propaganda against Countryhumans being scum specifically like they did to every fandom through the popularization of cringe culture because it makes them feel better?

C) Is the normalization of cringe culture and lack of understanding the depths of concepts being ok and others persuing it in a non problematic manner when others fail to not be bigotted and both being different side of the fandoms too complicated and gone too far for some, apparently? Is that the culprit?

Is it all of the above?

Yeah, it is. It is all of the above.

Speaking of bullying problem,

Lets get to the next section.

Mob Mentality.

Twitter is specifically VERY good at it but allow me to find like two videos on the subject.

Lets start with the Drama Cesspool of any Community.

Covered by the Experienced Ex-Mentality of a cringe psych who never gave anything they didnt like the benefit of the doubt to understand why others liked what they didnt and coming to terms with "to each their own",

This can be applied to Fandoms.

Fingers are pointed,

Everyone attacks something to look cool without looking at the complicated sides of it, and therefor apathizing and only paying attention to factors that support your view you get so caught up and stuck in the ignorance of only validating yourself you never pay attention to anything else.

It becomes a mob mentality. And those seeking validation who turn to you without any other sense of community might grow to hating stuff with you. Because you dont want to feel thrown out.

It goes to the mental gymnastics of demonizing, self patronizing justice, and never providing proper context to support yourself only and make others look bad.

Controlled context is censorship.

When I say propagated bias against fandoms is real I mean it. Especially how harshly DEFEANING the judgement of being hated for liking something you get.

The reason this Bias is higher against Countryhumans is how COMPLICATEDEDLY DIFFERENT that Fandom Currently IS.

Yet people see it through this unfair lens of this standard of things it doesnt have, while ignoring the good it DOES have.

Because that ignorance supports what they WANT to see, not the truth of what is fully happening. There can be problems without throwing it all away to work on, instead of also attacking everyone with anything to do with it.

And while I have nothing else to start with and have made my piece, I shall try to find that other video I cannot for the life of me and edit onto here soon.

In Conclusion for Now, However.

What do we Do now?

Support your local friends who are non-problematic in the Countryhumans Fandom.

However, DEFINITE DNI for problematic bigots within any Fandom; Including the Countryhumans Fandom.

That is all. Thanks for letting me hijack this post for a bit.

Onto the Afternoon News with you, Sarah. 🤧🎙

Hello friends! I've come to send a message.

RASCIST COUNTRYHUMANS FANS FUCK OFF!

Y'all don't realize all the invisible damage you've done. Like, romanticize violent history between two countries? BIG NO! I don't need you racist bruhs on my dash. Get off my dash.

Reblog this to send awareness.

[aliahaider-blog]

Chala Vahi Des (Preface from 2017 for a book I've barely started)

I wrote the following piece a year ago with a plan for a photobook with various poems and short stories to accompany the photos. Many things have changed since then, like my mind about whether this should still be a photobook or should instead just be a novel or memoir, and, despite the title of my blog, I have yet to make that much progress on it. I figured that if I make some of the completed portions public to allow free-flowing criticism or comments, then maybe I'd be more motivated and directed towards creating something that makes remote sense. So the excerpt contained within this post starts from the beginning with a preface of the book. Some initial parts of this preface may be provocative, and if you happen to be outraged by my first two paragraphs, I implore you to just continue and finish it, because it's likely you won't by the end of it. Enjoy the reading!

​2017 has been a year of mishaps. And despite the Trump-era chaos that embodies 2017, it’s not the reason for my dissatisfaction with the year, it’s just a supplement. More than anything, 2017 has been a year of losing some friends and even more battles. A year of bad days and even worse grades. A year of people whom I thought might not ever leave, leaving. A year of sitting and watching as one lived their dreams out in Madrid, another preparing to spend the summer in London, another in India, and DC, and lots and lots in California, and so on. And after watching all this, I'm still in Texas. Texas has been a trap. I've felt stuck, enclosed, like I should be somewhere other than this state. It's like a star dies every time you try to positively represent a state that hits the fan at least once a day. You put a smile on your face ready to go to class and breathe the fresh Texan air around you and then you find out your friend's been arrested for possession of marijuana. He’s facing jail time, contributing to Texas’s shiny “7th highest incarceration rate in the country” honor. A star falls. You lift your head up again, though, trying to take on the next day. Now your friend's pregnant. Just another statistic that puts Texas at #3 on the teen pregnancy rate ranking. A star falls. Move on, keep going. You made it to Social Problems class for once. The topic of the day is child marriage, and you learn that Texas has not yet banned child brides. Another star falls. Well, it can only get worse. And it does when your local public health official couldn't save a mother from dying while delivering her baby. Texas has now become the state whose 3 largest cities are among the top 4 cities with the highest uninsured population, and the maternal mortality rate is 30 per 100,000 births. And you can't do anything about it. I looked these all up, obviously, to feed the already-growing animosity I had towards Texas. I've been finding myself in dilemma after dilemma. Stuck in a state where my gay friends are denied service at restaurants. In a state where seeking women's health services means enduring lines of berating, threatening protestors. In a state where guns are second to Jesus and affordable health care is the spawn of Satan. In a state where Terry Jones is considered a freedom fighter and Malcolm X a terrorist. In a state where refugee labor runs the economy yet it's the first of 50 to deny refugee entry. In a state where mosque burnings are frequent and Qur’an burnings even more frequent. In a state where, because I’m Pakistani, I’m not good for anything if it’s not giving someone surgery or fixing their computer or enduring hate crimes as a gas station clerk. I’ve found myself in the dilemma of wanting to leave. Wanting to venture far out from the remote thought of Texas. Seattle, Portland, Santa Barbara, somewhere with coasts where your feet don’t get tangled in algae every 3 seconds and festivals where you burn 40-feet wooden statues instead of religious sites. Wanting to join my lost friends to all their aforementioned locations, where people that look like me and talk like me can be expected to be the first them the world had seen instead of what their parents’ friends would make of them. ​But I couldn’t. I’d had three years. I went to California but came back. I went to Canada but came back. To Boston. DC. Spain. I could have made myself disappear in any of those places but I came back for something more than the fact that I could provide for myself here, or be provided for by my parents. Being stuck sucks because once you escape you feel uncomfortable, unaware, scared. But being stuck also feels great, because it forces you to make what you can of your resources. It’s not a feeling of homeliness vs. unhomeliness; it’s something bigger. There must have been something I enjoyed about myself in Texas. And I found it being stuck here in the year of mishaps. For every burnt mosque I found, I found a Jewish temple willing to rebuild it. For every Qur’an a zealous pastor tried to burn there was a hero on a skateboard who snatched it from the fire. I found my joy in the South Asian enclaves of DFW and Houston and, yes, surprisingly, Amarillo, where I’ve tasted some of the best chicken karahi and chicken tikka and fried paneer of my life. I found my joy in a dorm room where a Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi, Sudanese, Iraqi, Saudi, Palestinian, Jewish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Mexican and American group of friends set aside their differences because that’s what they’ve had to do their entire lives to make friends. I found joy in the rolling hills and the red canyons and the greenbelts and the blue holes and the cornfields and the wind farms and the riverbeds of this prolific state. I found joy in the fact that being one of the only kids of Pakistani descent in my school only meant being one of the first to do something spectacular for those that came before and those who will come after. And I, surprisingly enough, found lots of joy in Texas blue grass music. Studying literature, I became fascinated with the concept of identity, namely that of diasporic identity. And I missed a major aspect of diasporic identity when it finally came to me determining my own. An identity is one that the identity-seeker creates and the heritage embraces, and vice versa. In other words, I had to accept my identity internally as well as in accordance with my surroundings. All my surroundings. That is what I failed to do since I became sentient. I am American; my country claimed me as its citizen. I am Pakistani, my parents made sure to pass that heritage down to me as I grew up. But almost always, I am only one of those at a time. Other times, I am neither. Rarely was I ever both. In America people ask, “So what are you? Where are you from?” In America, I am presumably not American. I’m Pakistani. But my Urdu has become broken, my knowledge of Pakistani politics has almost zero value, when I go to my parents’ homeland I’m told not to talk to people because they’ll know I’m American. Because when I’m in Pakistan, I’m American. But I’m not both at the same time until I meet other people who experience the same thing. So I’ve come to terms with making that part of my psyche flexible. Some parts of my identity I’ve claimed, but they haven’t claimed me, and vice versa. But by being stuck here yet finding that joy in things, I’ve found that reciprocity in Texas. I am a Pakistani-American Texan. I bask in chicken tikka and American patriotism and southern hospitality all at once. I find solace in the red-pink sunsets across the Amarillo sky, relaxation in the swims in the Barton Creek greenbelt, excitement in SXSW and ACL and all the other musical acts Austin offers, meditation in the 6000-foot deep Palo Duro Canyon, reflection in the icy grasps of Texas’s historic blizzards and the chokehold of its historic floods and the sweaty embrace of its heatwaves. I find inspiration in the ones that get out and give back—in Beyoncé, in Cary Fagan, in Hakeem Olajuwon, in Wes Anderson, in Rick Husband, in Matthew McConaughey, and so many more. I can attribute Texas's setbacks to the many negative experiences I've had my entire life: bullying, Islamophobia, drought, isolation. Yet it would be wrong to discredit the places and people in Texas that have put a genuine smile across my face the past 18 years. I find being Texan to be a challenge every day, but I find that every day I complete that challenge it brings me closer to claiming the place as my own. Every day I mourn a fallen star for every time a Texan or a group of Texans screws something up, but every day I also find a Texan or group of Texans who have stayed long enough to pick up those fallen stars. And that’s the Texan I’ve become. Not one who turns their face away from a dire situation just to be free from Texas’s setbacks, but one who stays long enough to fix those setbacks and free Texas of dire situations. “Chala Vahi Des” is a song by a group of musicians who met in Rajasthan, India to record an album called Junun. The album featured Urdu, Hindi, Hebrew and English singers, who sought to turn the borders that were being fought over in Rajasthan into a place for ghazal, the “poetic expression of both the pain of loss or separation and the beauty of love in spite of that pain." “Chala Vahi Des” literally means “let’s go to that country,” and I found it fit to use such a phrase as the title of this book to invite others into my personal Texan heritage, which spans much broader than state politics and rodeos and southern accents. This book is meant to acknowledge Texas’s fallen stars, celebrate the reignited ones, and illuminate entirely new ones as we progress. It’s somewhat sad and realistic to say that I’ll eventually leave Texas, but before I depart I hope to go so far as encapsulate the glamorous yet rigorous upbringing that I and many others have had for the past 20, 30, 40-something years of our lives here. -Ali Haider Fort Worth, TX

[impressivepress]

Trotsky’s Struggle against Stalin

Joseph Stalin was a hangman whose noose could reach across oceans.

On the afternoon of August 20, 1940, Ramón Mercader, a young Spaniard in the hire of the GPU, Joseph Stalin’s secret police, seized the moment. Under the alias of Canadian businessman “Frank Jacson,” he had infiltrated Leon Trotsky’s household in Coyoácan, a borough of Mexico City, several months earlier. As Trotsky leaned over his desk, Mercader viciously struck him on the right side of the head with a pickax, its handle cut down to hide it more easily under a raincoat. The wound inflicted was three inches deep. Reeling, the old revolutionary found the strength to fight back against the assassin. Trotsky prevented Mercader from inflicting another, fatal blow and battled for his life until his bodyguards arrived. With Mercader beaten unconscious and the police called, he collapsed into the arms of his wife, Natalia Sedova. The next day, Trotsky succumbed to his wounds, dead at the age of 60.  

With his nemesis murdered and Mercader, the murderer, denying any Soviet involvement (he would eventually serve 20 years in a Mexican prison), Stalin could feel a deep satisfaction. The individual, who, more than any other, symbolized opposition to Stalinism, had been eliminated. Mercader’s vile act closed the long, bitter conflict between the two men. From the fictionalized version in Unforgiving Years, the excellent novel by Victor Serge, his one-time comrade, to the 1972 movie, The Assassination of Trotsky, where Richard Burton portrayed him, the lurid details of Trotsky’s death have often commanded more attention than his extraordinary life. Trotsky’s struggle against Stalin and Stalinism, the subject of this article, was a crucial part of his life’s final decade.

Born Leon Davidovich Bronstein to a family of Jewish farmers in Ukraine in 1879, Trotsky came of age among the revolutionary movements operating in the ultra-repressive atmosphere of the Russian Empire. At the age of eighteen, he enthusiastically embraced Marxism. The remainder of his life, one can say, without exaggeration, was based around a single, ultimate goal: worldwide workers’ revolution. During his early involvement in Russian socialist politics, Trotsky clashed with Vladimir Lenin over how a revolutionary party should be organized (such clashes would later serve Stalin well when he depicted Trotsky as hostile to Lenin’s ideas).  During the 1905 Revolution, after the formation of the first soviets (radical councils representing the working masses), Trotsky, only twenty-six at the time, served briefly as Chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet. A long period of exile following Tsar Nicholas II’s crackdown on left-wing radicals ended when he returned in May 1917 to a Russia aflame with revolution. Joining the Bolsheviks a few months later, Trotsky worked closely with Lenin. Together, they prepared the overthrow of the ruling Provisional Government which kept the country in the disastrous world war. Henceforth, throngs of people uttered their names together—“Lenin and Trotsky.” As a member of the Bolshevik-led Military Revolutionary Committee, Trotsky played a decisive role in the insurrection in Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg), events he would later chronicle in his famed History of the Russian Revolution. The following March, he negotiated the punitive Treaty of Brest-Litovsk forced on the Bolsheviks by Imperial Germany.  In the Russian Civil War (1918-1921), he organized and led the Red Army to an impressive victory over counterrevolutionary forces.

Trotsky also witnessed the tremendous setbacks of the early 1920s to revolutionary hopes. Under the New Economic Policy (NEP) set in motion by Lenin in 1921, the Bolsheviks had to concentrate on economic recovery after the severe wartime measures. The working class had been ravaged by three years of civil war. Many workers who survived the conflict had moved into administrative positions in the Soviet government or relocated to the countryside. Internationally, the USSR stood alone. The proletarian revolution Trotsky had expected to spread and take hold elsewhere had been stymied.  The radical Left underwent terrible defeats in 1919 in Germany and Hungary. There was the “Red Scare” in the United States in the same period. Benito Mussolini, a former socialist, acquired power in Rome in 1922 and his Fascist dictatorship became a fierce enemy of the Bolsheviks. More defeats soon followed in Germany, Estonia, and Bulgaria in 1923-25.

After Lenin died in January 1924, the question arose immediately about who would be the next leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Trotsky was one of the most recognizable figures associated with the October Revolution—admired, hated, and emulated within and outside the USSR.  Although history rightly remembers Joseph Stalin as Trotsky’s chief rival and later mortal enemy, in the early 1920s Stalin passed unnoticed by many observers. He had been a “barely perceptible shadow,” as Trotsky put it. One of the classic histories of the Bolshevik Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World, written by the American radical, John Reed, hardly mentions Stalin. Gregori Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, not Stalin, emerged as Trotsky’s principal opponents in the immediate aftermath of Lenin’s death. These two men, who had been with Lenin for years, felt threatened by Trotsky’s popularity and his military record. A mistake, fateful for all three, though, had already been made. In 1922, Lenin, appreciating his organizational talents, chose Stalin for the position of General Secretary of the Communist Party. This gave him authority over party membership and appointments. Stalin quickly accrued enormous power and influence in the party over the next few years. Once Lenin, who, in his last months, sorely regretted his choice of Stalin, was no longer in the picture, Stalin sided with Zinoviev and Kamenev in their opposition to Trotsky.

As Trotsky later recognized, Stalin took advantage of the situation not only to appoint his own people but also to advance his own ideas about the future of the USSR. In 1924, he introduced the notion of “socialism in one country.” A socialist society could be built, Stalin contended, in the Soviet Union alone, regardless of the international context. The concept appealed to many Bolsheviks confronting the isolation of the globe’s only Marxist state.  Stalin went on to directly counter this idea to Trotsky’s emphasis on world revolution. Thanks to Stalin, “Trotskyism” soon became a term of opprobrium for elitism, factionalism, and a lack of connectedness to the masses of workers and peasants.   During the mid-1920s, Trotsky responded to these developments by calling for a restoration of workers’ democracy within the Communist Party. While he had advocated centralization during the Civil War, he had done so out of necessity. As the de facto leader of what became known as the Left Opposition, Trotsky assailed the growing bureaucratization of political life, the retreat from the old ideal of revolutionary internationalism, and the transformation of Marxism into “Marxism-Leninism,” a dogma not to be questioned. He gathered many supporters such as Karl Radek, Christian Rakovsky, and Victor Serge. Further support came from unexpected quarters. After Stalin maneuvered them out of positions of authority, Kamenev and Zinoviev threw in their lot with Trotsky in 1926. This Joint Opposition, never the most robust alliance, did not hold. Young “activists” violently broke up Opposition meetings with methods reminiscent of Mussolini’s Fascist squads. Stalin, wielding his power like a club, expelled Trotsky and his followers from the party in late 1927. Prophetically, Trotsky denounced Stalin as the “gravedigger of the Revolution.” Sent into “internal exile” in Kazakhstan for a year, he was then deported to Turkey in February 1929.    

In Prinkipo, a suburb of Istanbul, Trotsky wrote his autobiography, My Life. In that book is this remarkable description of Stalin, by then the sole ruler of the Soviet Union. He is gifted with practicality, a strong will, and persistence in carrying out his aims. His political horizon is restricted, his theoretical equipment primitive. His work of compilation, The Foundations of Leninism, in which he made an attempt to pay tribute to the theoretical traditions of the party, is full of sophomoric errors. His ignorance of foreign languages compels him to follow the political life of other countries at second-hand. His mind is stubbornly empirical and devoid of creative imagination. To the leading group of the party (in the wide circles he was not known at all) he always seemed a man destined to play second and third fiddle. And the fact that today he is playing first is not so much a summing up of the man as it is of this transitional period of political backsliding in the country.

This period was not to be nearly as “transitional” as Trotsky believed. With his opponents removed, Stalin enacted the collectivization of agriculture and state-directed industrialization, programs once championed by the Left Opposition, but now brutally implemented with a staggering toll of lives. He was not yet ready, though, to implement, to quote Trotsky, the “physical liquidation of the old revolutionaries, known to the whole world.” Stalin would bide his time for a number of years. And he could do so while watching his enemy live a refugee’s existence.  

Trotsky did not hesitate to label the Stalin dictatorship “totalitarian,” a concept still relatively new in political thought.  Thus, Stalinism, the counterrevolutionary system and ideology Stalin represented, preoccupied him. In this form of totalitarianism, a bureaucracy, a privileged caste, at the top of which Stalin perched like an absolute monarch, lorded it over the working class. Trotsky likened Stalinist domination to “Thermidor,” the term used to denote the end of the radical phase of the French Revolution and the shift to reactionary politics. As late as 1933, he thought, however, the Soviet system could be reformed by working through the structures of the Communist Party. The Left Opposition might dislodge Stalin from within without directly challenging state power. Trotsky held to this position until Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January 1933. Germany was a country with a modern urban, industrial society he had long regarded as vital to the prospects for socialism. Trotsky decried the impact of Stalin’s policies in this catastrophe. The Soviet leadership had tied the hands of the German Communist Party and hindered a united front against the Nazi Party by construing moderate socialists as the real threat. Subsequently, Hitler crushed the mighty German workers’ movement with hardly a fight.  This disaster forced a profound shift in Trotsky’s thinking. After Hitler took power, Trotsky concluded that reform of the Stalin regime had to be abandoned. Ousting Stalin by working through the channels of the Communist Party was no longer possible.  This much more radical perspective culminated in his 1936 The Revolution Betrayed.  Proletarian revolt would have to topple Stalin and the bureaucracy. This revolution, Trotsky made clear, would resemble the European upheavals of 1830 and 1848 more than the October Revolution. It would be a political revolution, not a social one. Collective ownership and control of the means of production (e.g. land, factories, mines, shipyards, oilfields), railways, and banks, as well as the planned economy, would remain. Trotsky’s designation of the USSR as a “degenerated workers’ state” highlighted his conviction that Stalin had betrayed and degraded the original, liberatory aspects of the Bolshevik Revolution. Still, much could be salvaged from the damage done by Stalinism.

The vision Trotsky held of political institutions in a liberated, post-Stalin USSR may surprise some. He called for free elections, freedom of criticism, and freedom of the press. While the Communist Party would benefit most from this open atmosphere, it would no longer possess a monopoly on power. As long as political parties did not try to restore capitalism, they could operate, recruit, and compete for power.  Stalin’s downfall would also signal new life for the trade unions. Trotsky imagined a restored involvement of workers in economic policy. Science and the arts might flourish once more. The state, no longer bound to the calamitous Stalinist policies, could return to the satisfaction of workers’ needs, like housing.  Stratification would yield to the reinvigorated aim of “socialist equality.” Youth, in whom Trotsky placed so much hope, “will receive the opportunity to breathe freely, criticize, make mistakes, and grow up.”   These thoughts Trotsky put to paper only months before he would be compelled to move again. For eight years, Trotsky traversed what he called a “planet without a visa,” a planet torn apart by the worst economic crisis in the history of capitalism. Since Stalin expelled him and Natalia from the USSR, the beleaguered revolutionaries had found temporary sanctuary in Turkey, France, and Norway. Granted refuge by the leftist Cardénas government of Mexico, their arrival in Coyoácan in January 1937 was greeted with derision and menace by the country’s pro-Stalin Communist Party.

Stalin not only hunted Trotsky but anyone close to him from country to country. In Barcelona, in June 1937, his assassins abducted Trotsky’s former collaborator, Andrés Nin, a leader in the POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unity), the organization of militants made famous by George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Nin disappeared at a critical moment in the Spanish revolutionaries’ struggle against Francisco Franco, never to been seen again.  Thirteen months later, in Paris, Rudolf Klement, who had once worked as Trotsky’s secretary, sat down for breakfast. Klement was kidnapped, presumably by GPU agents. They seized him and left his food on the table untouched.  A few weeks after he vanished, a body, missing its head and legs, washed up on the Seine.  It was not enough to just kill Klement; decapitation and dismemberment were required to incite extra terror.

Stalin’s agents also infiltrated the circle around Trotsky’s son, Leon Sedov. Despite a difficult relationship with his father, Leon worked tirelessly for him in Paris. He communicated with Left Oppositionists still holding on inside Russia, edited the Bulletin of the Opposition, the most significant forum for Trotsky’s analyses of the contemporary world, and wrote an exposé of the Show Trials then taking place in the USSR. Mark Zborowski, Ukrainian-born and known to Trotsky’s supporters under the false name “Étienne,” soon worked his way into Sedov’s circle. Zborowski became Sedov’s personal assistant, helping with his correspondence and eventually taking care of the publication of the Bulletin. Thanks to “Étienne,” the GPU could count on seeing many of the articles from the latter before they even appeared in print. And Zborowski delivered to them vital information about Sedov’s health. When Sedov checked himself into a private clinic in Paris run by Russian emigres complaining of an appendicitis, the Soviets knew. He died there under mysterious circumstances in February 1938, five months before Klement disappeared.  To this day, the cause of death has not been conclusively determined. In a moving tribute to his son, Trotsky told of the terrible grief he and Natalia felt. “Together with our boy has died everything that still remained young within us.” Their other son, Sergei Sedov, had remained in Russia after his parents’ expulsion and always kept politics at arm’s length. That did not save him. He vanished and, it is believed, was shot in October 1937.  

This systematic killing overlapped with the monstrosity of Stalin’s Show Trials. These abhorrent mockeries of justice had their roots in the murder of Sergey Kirov, Stalin’s party boss in Leningrad. Kirov was gunned down in December 1934. Likely, Stalin himself was responsible for the assassination. The murder gave him the pretext for systematically and publicly purging the Communist Party. As the most visible aspect of the Purges, the Show Trials started with the Trial of the Sixteen in August 1936.  Old Bolsheviks, such as Zinoviev and Kamenev, stood accused of conspiring against the Soviet government. Shockingly, they confessed, confessed to submitting to Trotsky’s demands to assassinate Stalin and several of his subordinates. Following their death sentences, several successor trials ensued through 1938. The “physical liquidation of old revolutionaries, known to the whole world” was at hand. Trotsky knew that a combination of torture, threats to family members, and promises of freedom, if confessions were given, allowed the travesties to occur. When he read the infamous sentence uttered by Stalin’s Prosecutor-General, Andrey Vyshinsky—“I demand that these dogs gone mad should be shot—every one of them!”—Trotsky knew this was no idle threat.

Vyshinsky’s words became murderous reality in the USSR in the late 1930s and '40s. The violence swept away both supporters and opponents of Stalin and Stalinism. Radek and Rakovsky, former allies of Trotsky who later submitted to Stalin, were killed. So, too, was Nikolai Bukharin, one of Bolshevism’s leading theoreticians, a sharp critic of Trotsky and the Left Opposition, and a onetime backer of Stalin. Others were murdered in labor camps, the infamous Gulags, or in prisons. Among the thousands of victims were the Marxist economic thinker, Isaak Ilich Rubin, and the great historian of the Left and former director of The Marx-Engels Institute, David Ryazanov. Isaac Babel, whom Trotsky once termed the “most talented of our younger writers,” confessed to working as a spy and terrorist mastermind for Trotsky. The secret police put him to death in January 1940.  In this period, the Soviet Union was perhaps the most dangerous place in the world for independent-thinking Marxists, an astounding thing to say, given the records of the fascist regimes. For their contributions to the butchery, Stalin rewarded Genrikh Yagoda and Nikolai Yezhov, chiefs of the GPU during these years, by having them shot.

From the Show Trials, ever more outlandish tales about Trotsky were spun. The stories relayed by the accused placed him at the center of a massive, worldwide anti-Soviet conspiracy. Turning his calls for an anti-Stalin revolution against him, Vyshinsky pilloried Trotsky, the inveterate adversary of fascism, as the master fascist, as the string-puller and puppet-master. Besides links to the Gestapo, Soviet investigators claimed to have uncovered Trotsky’s connections to Mussolini, the government of Imperial Japan, and the capitalist democracies. Reminiscent of Nazi anti-Semitic theories, “Trotskyism” metamorphosed into a truly demonic apparition during the Show Trials. Yet Trotsky fought back vigorously.

Countering the way Stalin’s handpicked historians distorted the Soviet past, Trotsky had already authored The Stalin School of Falsification. His adherents, many of whom by this point referred to him, with affection, as the “Old Man,” founded the Fourth International outside of Paris in September 1938. Its aim was to provide a revolutionary alternative to the Moscow-led Third or Communist International (Comintern). This Fourth International would bolster radical, anti-Stalinist working-class parties and unions around the world. When it came to repudiating the preposterous charges raised in the Show Trials, he received considerable help. Frida Kahlo, with whom Trotsky had an affair in 1937, and Diego Rivera were his tireless defenders in Mexico City. In the United States, a Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky formed. Similar organizations were founded elsewhere. The American Committee set up a Commission of Inquiry, chaired by John Dewey, the famous Pragmatist philosopher. Only one of the members, Alfred Rosmer, a syndicalist and early supporter of the October Revolution, could be described as a Trotsky supporter. Traveling to the Mexican capital, the Commission held thirteen sessions in April 1937. Trotsky, speaking in his quite imperfect English, responded to every accusation leveled by the Stalinists. He cast a powerful impression on those present, including the liberal Dewey, no admirer of his politics. In September 1937, the Commission issued its findings, clearing Trotsky of all the charges.  

The following years were dark, awful times for Trotsky, Natalia, and their inner circle. Losing two sons and innumerable comrades and friends to Stalin did not break his spirit, but the losses threw a shadow over everything he had done.  With the Japanese in China, Hitler moving into Austria, and threatening Czechoslovakia, and Mussolini dreaming of a  Roman Empire in the Mediterranean, the prospect of a new world war soon overtook him. Almost a year before it started, Trotsky spoke of an impending Second World War as a “new slaughter which is about to drown our whole planet in blood.” Trotsky had good reason to utter such things. And he knew that Stalin’s response to German expansion in Eastern Europe would be critical. Following the Munich Agreement of September 1938, Trotsky expected the Soviet government to seek an agreement with Hitler. Stalin’s 1937-38 purge of the Red Army, including some of its most capable commanders, like Mikhail Tukhachevsky, had so seriously weakened the USSR that a military confrontation with Nazi Germany had to be avoided at all costs. Whatever anti-Nazi sentiments issued from the Kremlin, Trotsky thought, were not worth the paper they were written on. In the aftermath of the Show Trials, he believed an even more important reason would drive Stalin to come to an agreement with Berlin: survival. The Stalin regime was too despotic and unpopular to weather the storm of total war. According to Trotsky, a settlement with Nazi Germany might secure some stability for the dictatorship.    

When Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, and Joachim von Ribbentrop, his German counterpart, signed a Non-Aggression Pact between the two nations on August 23, 1939, Trotsky was scarcely surprised. Earlier that year, he had declared that Stalin’s name will be a “byword for the uttermost limits of human baseness.”  This damning statement received confirmation with Stalin’s next move—dividing up Poland with Hitler.

Trotsky’s struggle against Stalin entered a new and final phase with the start of World War II just a week later. In a steady stream of articles and interviews, he condemned the role of the Soviet Union, a state that, at least in its rhetoric, had sided with the colonized against imperialism. The betrayal of the principles of Red October had reached a new level of treachery. Perhaps Stalin, Trotsky surmised, now seemed content with partitioning Eastern Europe with the German fascists. Whatever the motives, he dubbed Stalin Hitler’s “quartermaster,” a lackey who reacted to his senior partner’s moves.    

The Soviet attack on Finland in November 1939, the beginning of the Winter War, made him wonder how far Stalin was willing to go to create a sphere of interest for himself. While he again damned Soviet aggression, Trotsky, at the same time, despised Marshal Mannerheim, the right-wing Finnish leader rallying his people. Still, Trotsky, true to his Marxism, hoped that “sovietization” in Poland and Finland might free workers and peasants in both countries from the dominance of capitalists and landlords. Yet socialism, he realized, ultimately could not be built on the tips of the Red Army’s bayonets.

This was a huge dilemma for Trotsky. How could one support social revolution in areas under Soviet control without giving any ground on his anti-Stalinism? An even bigger problem posed itself. What if Hitler repudiated the pact and attacked the USSR? Trotsky had no doubt Hitler would do so at the earliest opportunity. His answer was absolutely unequivocal. Socialists and workers everywhere must rally to the defense of the Soviet Union. The achievements of the Bolshevik Revolution had to be defended.

This position, which alienated many of his adherents, coexisted with another claim—the new world war would mean the end of the Stalin regime. Trotsky predicted that the workers and peasants of the USSR, their revolutionary energies revitalized, would put an end to the Stalinist bureaucracy. The revolution he outlined in The Revolution Betrayed would itself form part of a gigantic wave of revolutionism engulfing the Axis powers and the capitalist democracies. Like Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini would meet the severe justice of the proletariat. Trotsky argued that capitalism, stricken for a decade by mass unemployment, immigration quotas, tariff wars, and the constriction of trade, had entered its “death agony” as well. Defiantly, he announced, “from the capitalist prisons and the concentration camps will come most of the leaders of tomorrow’s Europe and the world!” One outcome Trotsky envisioned resulting from this world revolution would be a Socialist United States of Europe. The latter, in turn, would form part of a World Federation of Socialist Republics.  This would have amounted to the greatest geopolitical revolution in human history with socialism becoming a truly global societal form.

Trotsky held to this radical perspective even as Stalin signed a commercial agreement with Hitler in February 1940, then seized Bessarabia and Bukovina from Romania, and annexed Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. He clung to it as his own health deteriorated and, as he had long feared, Stalin’s assassins closed in on him.  At the end of February, Trotsky wrote a final testament, fearing death was near. “Life is beautiful,” he said. “Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.” Three months later, radical evil appeared very much alive and on the move.

On May 1, a day long associated with the Left and labor militancy, 20,000 Mexican Communists marched in the capital and shouted: “Out with Trotsky!” Trotsky and Natalia had already assumed their lives were in jeopardy. With its electrified wires, alarms, and enforced doors, their house in Coyoácan looked more like a fortress than a home. As Trotsky tried from afar to keep pace with Hitler’s invasion of France and the Low Countries, launched on May 10, a plot to kill him took shape. It was led by the painter David Alfaro Siqueiros, once a friend of Rivera, but now a convinced Stalinist. On the night of May 23, Siqueiros’s men broke into the home and fired over 200 shots. Miraculously, Trotsky and Natalia survived. So did their grandson, Esteban Volkov, who had been living with them.     Trotsky proclaimed in defiance, “in the annals of history Stalin’s name will forever be recorded with the infamous mark of Cain.” When the May attempt failed, the GPU decided to go with Mercader. In August, after delays and missteps, he fulfilled his deadly mission. Among the papers next to where Trotsky struggled against his assassin was a long, unfinished manuscript, a biography of Stalin he penned to expose his enemy. The blood spilled in the study confirmed what was etched in ink on the book’s pages. Indeed, with Trotsky’s murder, Stalin demonstrated his most terrifying talent. He was a hangman whose noose could reach across oceans.   In retrospect, it is astonishing just how confident were Trotsky and his supporters like Victor Serge, Isaac Deutscher, and James Cannon in a coming proletarian revolution that would sweep away the Stalin regime. Trotsky’s expectation that World War II would lead to the toppling of Stalin and the restoration of a true workers’ state in the U.S.S.R. never, of course, materialized. In fact, the victory of the Red Army during the “Great Patriotic War” against the Axis states only solidified Stalin’s rule. For many, Marxism became irrevocably defined by and identified with Stalinism. Victory did not mean in this case, though, validity for the system Stalin molded. Trotsky’s critiques of Stalin the person and Stalinism the phenomenon remind us of that.

~

by Jason Dawsey · September 12, 2018.

[tornrose24]

Corpse Bride AU part two

I totally forgot that the tale that the Corpse Bride film is based on has roots in Jewish mythology/tales. Kind of fitting for the fact that Krupp is Jewish... though do they do vows at Jewish weddings? Anyway, let’s continue...

Now the night that Edith decides to go into the woods is also one of the nights that CU gets to roam free. She has doubts as to whether or not she is ready to jump into the marriage but she still tries to practice her vows and places the wedding ring on what she thinks is a twig sticking out of the ground... not realizing that it’s actually the finger to the hand of the arm that CU somehow lost for the umpteenth time in a row.

Cue a very dead and very minimally dressed man popping almost out of nowhere and scaring the living daylights out of Edith.

Realizing that he’s wearing a wedding ring, CU jumps to a lot of conclusions and is over the moon about getting married (especially to a very pretty looking lady). The ‘bride’ however, is horrified at what she has done and is confused for so many reasons as to who the heck this dead guy is and why does he look an awful lot like Krupp (and why is he wearing so little when any any sensible person of that era would have died of embarrassment?!). But before she knows it, Edith finds herself getting picked up by CU, who hurries off to the land of the dead–which is about the same as it usually is, but the number of pranks down there have increased thanks to a certain undead duo.

Unaware as to what the heck is going on, Edith only gets a very carefully edited explanation as to who CU is by George and Harold (who are basically a combination of the characters of Bonejangles and the maggot and the spider). Oh, and also she’s now trapped in the land of the dead, thanks to CU, who was told that he could come back to life if he found someone who would willingly marry him in his current state (though he’s not aware that he DOES come back to life whenever he reverts back to Krupp), though she’s not supposed to be aware of that for the sake of the game.

“So basically, your saying that I’m living out that myth between the Lord of the Dead and that one girl, except this one’s happy and refuses to put on so much as pair of pants, right?” And as you can guess, she’s not too eager to be living the rest of her life down here with someone she doesn’t even know.

Though from now on, every time daylight comes upon the land of the living, CU seems to vanish from the land of the dead. The first time it happens, Edith wonders if she can escape and she begins to wonder if everyone up above is missing her... if Krupp is missing her. Does he even like her enough to go looking for her?

Fortunately for Edith, despite how much of a jerk Krupp is, he’s upset as well as worried when he hears that she has vanished and hasn’t come back since the previous night. Her family has already been looking, but they haven’t had much luck. Not knowing why she left, and worried that he may have scared her away while also fearing the worst, he tries to go looking for her for as long as it would take. If someone has taken her or did something to her, then there will be serious hell to pay.

Couple of problems though: first off, Krupp has no idea that HE’S the one who took her away and has no knowledge of this or where she was taken (he doesn’t know that he’s been getting into trouble at night when he thought he was asleep in bed). He doesn’t even know where the entrance to the land of the dead is.

Second off, George and Harold haven’t forgotten when they were students at his school, under his tyrannical eyes, while they were still alive. At this point they still don’t see an ounce of humanity in him and while they admire that he’s at least going as far as to look for Edith, they wouldn’t want her to marry such a huge jerk either. Cue a lot of roadblocks and pranks from beyond the grave upon a Krupp who is bewildered as to what the heck is going on without realizing who is actually responsible for them.

Actually I have a scenario for this: as he’s getting closer to the entrance to the land of the dead, Krupp hears a voice that keeps saying “I got my eye on you.” He can’t see who it is and as the owner keeps saying “I got my eye on you” he keeps getting increasingly angry until the voice says “Look on your shoulder.” He obeys and... there’s a human eyeball on his shoulder.

Cue Krupp screaming like a girl as he frantically tries to swat the eyeball off and runs away as fast as he could when he succeeds. Meanwhile George and Harold are laughing their butts off and enjoying that they still get to pick on their favorite target. In fact, Krupp has no idea that he’s actually good friends with George and Harold whenever he goes back to being CU. Likewise, CU has no idea that his young friends are trying to hinder his living counterpart during these events.

Meanwhile, Edith slowly grows more comfortable being in the land of the dead, despite its macabre nature. It feels a lot less restrictive compared to the land of the living and she gradually gets to know CU a bit more. Even though she’s not so keen on accidentally engaging herself to a dead guy, she’s drawn to his energetic and optimistic nature as well as his kindness and friendliness towards the children whose time had ended far too soon–especially to George and Harold, who he seems to bond with the most. And even though he did technically kidnapped her (without meaning to) he does treat her fairly and wants her to be happy. However she knows that she doesn’t belong down here since she is still alive and a part of her has grown worried for her actual intended to the point that she wants to see him again and reassure him that she is ok.

After figuring out the pattern of when CU vanishes, Edith is able to trick him into taking her with him. Thinking that he’s going back to the surface to perform more heroic deeds whenever he thinks he’s going back up, CU happily allows this as a chance to show off a little and win her over. But thanks to a delay or two, when they finally return to the surface and the sun rises he suddenly collapses and blacks-out in the woods instead of Krupp’s home. Not knowing why he did it, but seeing that it’s her one chance to escape, Edith makes a run for it.

Moments later, after getting far enough, she begins to feel a little guilty about abandoning CU and as she ponders her choices for a bit, CU reverts back into Krupp. Wondering why the heck he’s out in the woods, despite remembering that he fell asleep in his home, Krupp soon finds Edith and is completely shocked as well as relieved to see that she is alright.

But to his greater surprise, when he sees that Edith is genuinely happy to see him again and she tackles him in a hug, it’s as if something wonderful and warm awakens inside him–a realization that she didn’t run away from him after all like he had assumed after years of being around people who couldn’t stand him. Whatever has happened, she truly missed him during that time she was gone.

It makes him feel something he didn’t think he was capable of feeling as he returns the embrace and doesn’t want the moment to end. For the first time in a long time, he wants to protect and care for another.

Any uncertainty about her is now gone and he realizes that he cannot live without her–his life feels brighter and happier when she is a part of it–but he wants her to be happy and asks if she wants to hold off the wedding for a little longer... or cancel it all together.

Amazed to hear this from a man known to be so hard-hearted, as well as won over by the fact that he never gave up looking for her, her feelings towards him deepen and grow.

Edith promises that she’ll discuss that when she’s ready, but when Krupp asks her where she has been, she’s hesitant before promising to tell him later that night. She wants to see her family again after all and Krupp is willing to allow this for her. For the first time in a long time, he is willing to put another’s needs before his.

This interests the person-in-charge of the land of the dead since it looks like Krupp is capable of love after all, but George and Harold (who’ve seen the reunion) are not convinced that Krupp is still worthy of Edith and demand for further proof. So the person-in-charge decides to do something interesting for when the sun will set on that day... which will eventually lead to the ultimate test to see which side of the same man will win the right to exist as well as the lady’s hand and heart.

And we will get to part three... sometime this week. Stay tuned!