#but when they do it's almost always a bad faith reading about their niche interest in way that is missing the point

[shallowseeker]

What is your most frequent hatemail?

I'm assuming you mean in regards to SPN. Honestly, I don't get much. It's cozy and curated here. I got hazed pretty hard, like, within my first month of being on Tumblr, so I learned pretty quick to curate, curate, curate.

TLDR; Me having opinions about Cas's stubbornness quickly devolved into people making assumptions about my social history and supposed politics based solely on where I live (re: the subject of homelessness). It was...interesting. For sure.

As for what I get hatemail about, I'm gonna say that it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.

[paenling]

no ones saying you cant enjoy daniil? people like him as a character but mostly Because he’s an asshole and he’s interesting. the racism and themes of colonization in patho are so blatant

nobody said “by order of Law you are forbidden from enjoying daniil dankovsky in any capacity”, but they did say “if you like daniil dankovsky you are abnormal, problematic, and you should be ashamed of yourself”, so i’d call that an implicit discouragement at the least. not very kind.

regardless, he is a very interesting asshole and we love to make fun of him! but i do not plan to stop seeing his character in an empathetic light when appropriate to do so. we’re all terribly human.

regarding “the racism and themes of colonization in patho”, we’ve gotta have a sit-down for this one because it’s long and difficult. tl;dr here.

i’ve written myself all back and forth and in every direction trying to properly pin down the way i feel about this in a way that is both logically coherent and emotionally honest, but it’s not really working. i debated even responding at all, but i do feel like there are some things worth saying so i’m just going to write a bunch of words, pick a god, and pray it makes some modicum of sense.

the short version: pathologic 2 is a flawed masterwork which i love deeply, but its attempts to be esoteric and challenging have in some ways backfired when it comes to topical discussions such as those surrounding race, which the first game didn’t give its due diligence, and the second game attempted with incomplete success despite its best efforts.

the issue is that when you have a game that is so niche and has these “elevated themes” and draws from all this kind of academic highbrow source material -- the fandom is small, but the fandom consists of people who want to analyze, pathologize, and dissect things as much as possible. so let’s do that.

first: what exactly is racist or colonialist in pathologic? i’m legitimately asking. people at home: by what mechanism does pathologic-the-game inflict racist harm on real people? the fact that the Kin are aesthetically and linguistically inspired by the real-world Buryat people (& adjacent groups) is a potential red flag, but as far as i can tell there’s never any value judgement made about either the fictionalized Kin or the real-world Buryat. the fictional culture is esoteric to the player -- intended to be that way, in fact -- but that’s not an inherently bad thing. it’s a closed practice and they’re minding their business.

does it run the risk of being insensitive with sufficiently aggressive readings? absolutely, but i don’t think that’s racist by itself. they’re just portrayed as a society of human beings (and some magical ones, if you like) that has flaws and incongruences just as the Town does. it’s not idealizing or infantilizing these people, but by no means does it go out of its way to villainize them either. there is no malice in this depiction of the Kin. 

is it the fact that characters within both pathologic 1 & 2 are racist? that the player can choose to say racist things when inhabiting those characters? no, because pathologic-the-game doesn’t endorse those things. they’re throwaway characterization lines for assholes. acknowledging that racism exists does not make a media racist. see more here.

however, i find it’s very important to take a moment and divorce the racial discussions in a game like pathologic 2 from the very specific experiences of irl western (particularly american) racism. it’s understandable for such a large chunk of the english-speaking audience to read it that way; it makes sense, but that doesn’t mean it’s correct. although it acknowledges the relevant history to some extent, on account of being set in 1915, pathologic 2 is not intended to be a commentary about race, and especially not current events, and especially especially not current events in america. it’s therefore unfair, in my opinion, to attempt to diagnose it with any concrete ideology or apply its messages to an american racial paradigm.

it definitely still deals with race, but it always, to me, seemed to come back around the exploitation of race as an ultimately arbitrary division of human beings, and the story always strove to be about human beings far more than it was ever about race. does it approach this topic perfectly? no, but it’s clearly making an effort. should we be aware of where it fails to do right by the topic? yes, definitely, but we should also be charitable in our interpretations of what the writers were actually aiming for, rather than reactionarily deeming them unacceptable and leaving it at that. do we really think the writers for pathologic 2 sat down and said “we’re going to go out of our way to be horrible racists today”? i don’t.

IPL’s writing team is a talented lot, and dybowski as lead writer has the kinds of big ideas that elevate a game to a work of art, particularly because he’s not afraid to get personal. on that front, some discussion is inescapable as pathologic 2 deals in a lot of racial and cultural strife, because it’s clearly something near to the his heart, but as i understand it was never really meant to be a narrative “about” race, at least not exclusively so, and especially not in the same sense as the issue is understood by the average American gamer. society isn't a monolith and the contexts are gonna change massively between different cultures who have had, historically, much different relationships with these concepts.

these themes are “so blatant” in pathologic 2 because clearly, on some level, IPL wanted to start a discussion. I think it’s obvious that they wanted to make the audience uncomfortable with the choices they were faced with and the characters they had to inhabit -- invoke a little ostranenie, as it were, and force an emotional breaking point. in the end the game started a conversation and i think that’s something that was done in earnest, despite its moments of obvious clumsiness. 

regarding colonialism, this is another thing that the game is just Not About. we see the effects and consequences of colonialism demonstrated in the world of pathologic, and it’s something we’re certainly asked to think about from time to time, but the actual plot/narrative of the game is not about overcoming or confronting explicitly colonialist constructs, etc. i personally regard this as a bit of a missed opportunity, but it’s just not what IPL was going for.

instead they have a huge focus, as discussed somewhat in response to this ask, on the broader idea of powerful people trying to create a “utopia” at the mortal cost of those they disempower, which is almost always topical as far as i’m concerned, and also very Russian.

i think there was some interview where it was said that the second game was much more about “a mechanism that transforms human nature” than the costs of utopia, but it’s still a persistent enough theme to be worth talking about both as an abstraction of colonialism as well as in its more-likely intended context through the lens of wealth inequality, environmental destruction & government corruption as universal human issues faced by the marginalized classes. i think both are important and intelligent readings of the text, and both are worth discussion.

both endings of pathologic 2 involve sacrifice in the name of an “ideal world” where it’s impossible to ever be fully satisfied. in the Diurnal Ending, Artemy is tormented over the fate of the Kin and the euthanasia of his dying god and all her miracles, but he needs to have faith that the children he’s protected will grow up better than their parents and create a world where he and his culture will be immortalized in love. in the Nocturnal Ending, he’s horrified because in preserving the miracle-bound legacy of his people as a collective, he’s un-personed himself to the individuals he loves, but he needs to have faith that the uniqueness and magic of the resurrected Earth was precious enough to be worth that sacrifice. neither ending is fair. it’s not fair that he can’t have both, but that’s the idea. because that “utopia” everyone’s been chasing is an idol that distracts from the important work of being a human being and doing your best in a flawed world. 

because pathologic’s themes as a series are so very “Russian turn-of-the-century” and draw a ton of stylistic and topical inspiration from the theatre and literature of that era, i don’t doubt that it’s also inherited some of its inspirational literature’s missteps. however, because the game’s intertextuality is so incredibly dense it’s difficult to construct a super cohesive picture of its actual messaging. a lot of its references and themes will absolutely go over your head if you enter unprepared -- this was true for me, and it ended up taking several passes and a bunch of research to even begin appreciating the breadth of its influences.

(i’d argue this is ultimately a good thing; i would never have gone and picked up Camus or Strugatsky, or even known who Antonin Artaud was at all if i hadn’t gone in with pathologic! my understanding is still woefully incomplete and it’s probably going to take me a lot more effort to get properly fluent in the ideology of the story, but that’s the joy of it, i think. :) i’m very lucky to be able to pursue it in this way.)

anyway yes, pathologic 2 is definitely very flawed in a lot of places, particularly when it tries to tackle race, but i’m happy to see it for better and for worse. the game attempts to discuss several adjacent issues and stumbles as it does so, but insinuating it to be in some way “pro-racist” or “pro-colonialist” or whatever else feels kind of disingenuous to me. they’re clearly trying, however imperfectly, to do something intriguing and meaningful and empathetic with their story.

even all this will probably amount to a very disjointed and incomplete explanation of how pathologic & its messaging makes me feel, but what i want -- as a broader approach, not just for pathologic -- is for people to be willing to interpret things charitably. 

sometimes things are made just to be cruel, and those things should be condemned, but not everything is like that. it’s not only possible but necessary to be able to acknowledge flaws or mistakes and still be kind. persecuting something straight away removes any opportunity to examine it and learn from it, and pathologic happens to be ripe with learning experiences. 

it’s all about being okay with ugliness, working through difficult nuances with grace, and the strength of the human spirit, and it’s a story about love first and foremost, and i guess we sort of need that right now. it gave me some of its love, so i’m giving it some of my patience.

[popculturebuffet]

Ducktales: Woo-oo! Review! or From the Top

Hello all you happy people! And to those of you just joining this blog, welcome I review ducks, other animated shows and comics... and today’s review is special for me. For a number of reasons. For starters it’s a reminder how far i’ve come. See I always wanted to be a reviewer, ever since high school when a friend showed me a certain online reviewer whose now dead to me, and opened me up to a world of much better reviewers who i’m still fans of to this day, and ones who came after them , and after that and so on and so on. I so badly wanted a community to belong to I struggled to be a youtube reviewer but frankly lacked the talent or self confidence back then to try, so my attempts over the decade were a series of stops and starts. Of me starting to find my niche writing only to stop because I hated myself so much, and still struggle with that, i’d tell myself I could never do it, I wasn’t good enough, I wasn’t funny enough and no one cared. I kept shutting myself down AGAIN AND AGAIN, for far too long. 

But that all changed a year ago next month: I’d long been a fan of the Ducktales Reboot. I was caustiously optimistic when it was announced. The optimism came from a deep abiding love of scrooge as a character despite not having dove into his comics that deep, I didn’t have an easy way at the time, thanks to life and times and what comics I had read, and was excited to see a fresh reboot closer to the comics with my eternal boy Donald Duck back in the main character. The caution.. came from the fact that at the time we’d gotten a string of bad to medicore reboots: Teen Titans GO, Powerpuff Girl, and Ben 10 which started pretty meh but has turned into alirght from some of the later episodes I saw. I wanted to be hyped to all hell but I had no proof this wasn’t going to be another dumbed down reboot. Then comic con came, the first teaser poster dropped, and my skepticism died.

It was perfect: a barksian art style with it’s own twists! Donald full on display! And best of all the triplets FINALLY had not only unique outfits but personalities! I’ve long went on in my reviews about how much that annoyed me and while it worked for the barks comics ever since then it’s just felt like a waste to have three characters there.. and not even the SLIGHTEST difference. 

My anticipation only grew with the full trailer, the promo posters as more and more info showed how good this series would be, how unique it’d be, and how much tw as taking what made the comics great, giving us a better distalation of that while still being very much it’s own beast. And once this episode dropped.. that faith was unfounded. Woo-oo! is without hyperbole, one of the best pilots i’ve seen, one that introduced the entire main cast perfectly, gets the series tone and mission statment out just right and in general set the stage for one of the best shows of the 2010′s (and 2020′s, even if it only lasted a year and some change). Wheras Teen Titans GO actively tried to take a dump on it’s source material, they thankfully have stopped that but it dosent’ make those early years any less grating, Ducktales was a breath of fresh air that honored the past while making i’ts own future. I tried talking about it but it was all in other failed attempts at reviewing: solo podcasts, my breif second video review career.. stuff no one rightly cared about and I just couldn’t get the hang of. 

So this is where we loop back to last year: I decided to finally try and cover it one more time, not realizing this would be my last chance as it came out anyway, and since I was doing text reviews but my output had slid in the new year, I decided to review Season 3 as it came out. If it bottomed out I could always stop.... and I just never did. I kept going, eventually finding new fans, a patreon (The other one’s an old friend of mine), and not only got paid doing what I love.. but found some peace.  I reviewed other shows as they came out, covered things i’d wanted to cover for years like life and times, scott pilgrim and x-men,. I covered other shows as they came out, found people willing to talk over my opinions and found my niche at long last. 

So that’s why the long speech folks: After almost a year of reviewing i’m properly covering the start of something that made me happier than I had been in a long time and gave me hope during one of the worst periods of ALL our lives. Something i’ve wanted to cover since I finally got started last year, and something truly amazing. So i’d be honored if you’d join me under the cut as I talk about the genesis of one of the best series Disney has ever put out. 

Behind the Scenes Stuff:  Most details I could find were sparse. it took going back to the first month the show came out and looking at a LOT of unrelated questions to finally find out Frank and Matt outright pitched the show. This dosen’t suprise me as both are huge ducktales fans with Matt having drawn his own duck comics as a kid and Frank taking it an extra mile having sang the theme song in his first grade talent show, worked it into his vows and got his first daughter’s first word to be “Woo-oo”. It’s very clear this show as a labor of love for them something they dreamed of Disney made possible. 

Otherwise I don’t have much on the genisis of the show: It was in the earliest ideas going to be a revivial but Frank and Matt both decided against it , deciding it’d be unfair to expect kids from 30 years after the original to know the source material, and instead just starting it over outright, which was the right call especailly with Alan Young’s passing. 

Design wise I found quite a bit of concept art thanks to one website, and it’s incredibly intresting. This is why i’ve really gotten into art books: I like seeing this early stuff what characters used to be, figuring out or outright hearing from the creators mouths why they changed it that sort of thing. 

Starting off we have some early designs for Donald, with him wearing the sailor suit as a kid but his Quackshot outfit as an adult, something I honestly wish they’d kept but get why they changed it: The iconic sailor suit both helps contrast him with della and fits his reluctance to adventure in season 1 more. I still wish that they worked the Quackshot outfit in somewhere, but they worked in so damn much, it’s hard to complain> Though I probably will make a list of “things I wished they’d worked” in at some point and i’d be lying inf I siad my mind wasn’t currently turning the gears to figure out how to work this into a fanfic. Oohhh maybe as Dewey’s outfit as an adult but blue, obviously. 

Next we have Donald settled more into his final apperance as well as the boy’s first outfits.  As you can tell from both of these the show originally went more with the classic art style before getting the one we’re familiar with now, one I love by the way and was made to combine a classic cartoon style with the visual of the comics. Donald originally had his classic outfit before they transitioned to the more barks style one, a good call.  

The interesting bit though is obviously the boys original outfits which i’m honestly bummed didn’t make it for Huey and Louie, not so much Dewey minus the visor. I do get the changes though: The hoodie Dewey had fit WAY beter on Louie, and the lumberjack shirt didn’t quite fit the nerdier huey. Still look nice. Dewey’s is okay, but only the visor is something I really gregret them removing same with louie’s fedora. It would’ve been neat ot keep the hat thing, but have each hat be unique. Likely they simplified things to make animation easier and simply removed the hats for some reason, but it’s nice ot see these more detailed original drafts and it is VERY interesting to find that differentiating the triplets was something planned from the earliest concept art. Though given Matt and Frank said in interviews they wanted a more natural family feel, it’s not a huge surprise. 

Scrooge like everyone BUT the boys thus far, naturally also had his original outfit at first, but like he ended up doing in the series rotated a bit, if not as much in the final product. We also see a protoype for his final design, the old coat but with a jacket over it in the last image. I also notice Donald seemed a lot more like his old comics self in the concept art with quackshot!donald. 

Like everyone else, Webby and Launchapd were originally their 87 deisgns, though Launchpad’s slightly diffrent jacket and green scarf were changed from the start. Webby is the closest to her 87 design, and as shown in the previous Lena concept art from my “Spies Like Us and Dime after Dime” double feature, she still had her new personality. More on that in a bit. 

Finally we have Flintheart, whose design is a bit diffrent from 87: He was a chub from day one it appears, though they’d exagerate it, and his beard was a bit longer at first like his other incarnations. 

Beakly is largely unchanged form 87, only given a coat, which would gradually be mofidied, much liekt he boys into her current outfit. 

As you can tell Beakly, Webby and Launchpad were all there from day one as they wanted them from the original ducktales just updated. 

Production wise they wanted to go handrawn, chose the style they did to have something close to the comics that felt classicly aniamteda t the same time, I feel they succeeded and wanted a show that felt like the original. I do think this show has it’s own feel but it does feel ducktales. I badly hope for an artbook at some point though as this show probably hada  LOT more intresting concept art. Seriously Disney I will PAY YOU to look at your neat art. Please. 

So they created a fully formed world and put the characters in it, wanting it to feel like the world had existed before and had throughly been explored and letting our young heroes be the watson to Donald and Scrooge’s holmes. 

Finally Della was indeed part of the initial pitch and a core idea from day one as every family has secrets and Della felt like one that had been lurking around the fringes of the story for 80 years. The rest of the production stuff i’ll weave in as we go but first one last stop, the STELLAR voice cast, none of whom outsideo f Tony i’ve talked about before sooooo...

The All Star Cast

The casting was outstanding here, with Matt admitting the cast brought a LOT to the characters, especially Ben Schwartz whose taken on Dewey was so unique and intresting they actually rewrote some of his dialouge for the pilot to fit this version better. This is far and away one of the best casts in western animation, most coming from comedy backgrounds and one or two coming from a voice acting background, but all bringing their absolute best. And since our main 8 are all in the pilot let’s run them down along with Keith Ferguson shall we?

Playing everyone’s faviorite billionare scotsman  and one of the very few to ever do so, we have David Fucking Tennant. David was their “First and only choice” and for good reason: David is a talented actor with a MASSIVE amount of stage, tv and audio drama credits. His biggest and best known role is playing the 10th Doctor on Doctor Who, which while not my faviorite (That’d be matt smith, as he’s both the one I came in on and hte one who got me hooked) he’s still  VERY close second and damn talented and I need to watch more of his tenure. Outside of that just to condense it to his ongoing roles on stuff and bigger roles: Filmwise he’s had starring roles in the Fright Night remake, You, Me and Him, Fish Without Bicycles and Bad Samartains, and is set to do a voice for the upcoming Loud House Movie, which excites me to no end. 

TV wise where most of his roles have been he got his first big starring role on the Telly with the BBC Mini series Taking Over the Asylum in the late 90′s. He’d go on to make a career out of doing mini’s for a while, also taking part in He Knew He Was Right, The Quatermass Experiment Remake, Casanova, Secret Smile.. and Blackpool. I saved Blackpool for last before we move into the Who era as if you’ve never heard of it.. it’s REALY fucking weird. It’s a jukebox musical about a man who wants to make Blackpool, a real city, into the new vegas and Tennat plays a cop investigating a case around the guy and also trying to get with his wife because they used to date and because our lead is philandering jackass. That’s already kinda nuts.. but then you get to the fact the songs are sung OVER the original songs instead of making a new version of them. It’s surreal to be sure but if you can find it it’s worth it for the handful of good numbers and how weird it looks and you can find clips of the songs on youtube if your intrested. Here’s a starter. 

Your also welcome. He’d go on to play Detective Alec Hardy in Broadchurch to critical aclaim as well as be a part of it’s short lived american remake, would play the Fugitoid in tmnt 2007, Kilgrave in Jessica Jones, one of his few post who roles i’ve seen or heard besides Scrooge and easily some of his best work he NAILS that purple bastard perfectly, would make his own show Staged about a fictional version of himself putting on a Stage play that’s still ongoing, and is currently , along with Ducktales as it wraps up, the voice of Lord Commander on Final Space, with the character returning this season judging by the trailers to fan delight and terror. He’s a VERY talented actor and voice actor and I do hope he goes on to do more and more voice work in years to come as, with his background in radio, he was born for it. 

He was also born for this roll, playing Scrooge perfectly and easily matching Alan Young in quality, not a small feat and i’ts VERY obvious why he was their one and only choice. 

Next up is another legend, Tony Anselmo who we’ve talked about before when I covered legend of the Three Cablleros: He’s been Donald’s voice since shortly before Ducktales, hasn’t done much else but given he’s THE voice for the character and this show let him show off one hell of a range with teh voice, he dosen’t really need other credits. The man is a treasure and I fear loosing him one day and fear for whoever replaces him as they have a LOT to live up to. 

Getting into the triplets, we’re going by age so starting off we have Huey, voiced by Danny Pudi. Like most of this cast aside from Toks Ogladyve and Beck Bennet (Who I probably HAD seen on SNL but didn’t really know or look out for him on there till after Ducktales), I not only knew Danny but was a huge fan of his going in. This is due to his breakout role on the glorious sitcom Community, which sadly only had a handful of i’ts cast show up on this show. I mean you got Lin Manuel Miranda I’m sure Donald Glover would’ve said yes too. He grew up with Ducktales. Regardless his role as meta guy Abed was easily the best of the cast on that show, with Glover as troy a very close second and the two working at their best as a duo. Outside of that he’s had a few roles being a regular on Powerless, which I forgot existed and currently on Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet, and shockingly hasn’t done a ton of voice work. And given his performance as huey was one of the best parts of this show he REALLY, REALLY SHOULD. Please Danny. He’s also a loving husband, father and surprisingly a marathon runner. Never would’ve guessed.

Next up is SNL Alumn of 9 years, Bobby Monynihan. Bobby is naturally best known for that, my faviorite role of his being Ass Dan. That’s right bitch you know he’s going to live fore..

ASS DAN 1981-2021

He’ll be back. Outside of SNL he’s done a bunch of minor roles. He’s currently on the tragically mediocre sitcom Mr. Mayor, and voiced Panda on We Bare Bears. Hopefully he keeps up the good work as he deserves better than he’s gotten and Ducktales proves it. 

Finally for the triplets we have a rising star in voice acting, Ben Schrwartz. At the time Ducktales launched, I was a fan of his from his roll on parks and Rec as Jen Ralphio, aka older scummier Dewey. 

Outside of his historic recurring role here he played a main role on House of Lies, a show I need to go back to, and has done other live action rolls but has REALLY hit his stride in voice acting. He started with voicing Randy Cunningham in Randy Cunningham 9th grade ninja and since then has hit the ground running: He was Rutabega on Bojack, Josh on Bob’s Burgers, and went on to complete the trifecta of blue nostalgic characters after voicing dewey by voicing Leo in Rise of the TMNT (and having one of the most unique and intresting versions of the character to play) and reprised the roll for the upcoming film. And of course he hit it HUGE by playing Sonic in the suprsingly fantastic Sonic the Hedgehog movie, and will do so again for the sequel and might even take up the roll for the games now Roger Craig Smith has retired. We shall see. Point is this guy’s at the top of his game and Dewey is part of that. Like with his brothers I can’t picture anyone else playing him. 

Rounding out the kids is Webby, played by the wonderous Kate Micucci. Kate is a lovely talented woman who mostly showed up in smaller parts, was part of the musical duo garfunkel and oates which even got their own tv show, and is currently a fairly prolific voice actor with this being her best known roll. I also had a bit of a crush on her once can you tell? Regardless besides absolutely nailing it as Webby she’s voiced Julie Kane in the crimnally short and even more crimnally not on Disney+ Motorcity, “Irma” in the 2012 TMNT cartoon, and the fact that “Irma” is in quotes should tell you how big a waste I felt it was having her NOT actually be Irma, despite Kate’s massive talent, the fact that Irma hadn’t been in anything since the 87 cartoon, and the fact that for added “Fuck you audience points” her krang form was voiced by Gilbert Godfried, who I love but whose casting feels like they wanted to make the twist as grating as possible. Good job there. 

Anyways her second biggest voice gig was as Sadie on Steven Universe, which took WAY too long to show off her absolutely tremendous singing voice. She started voicing Velma Dinkley in the mid-2010′s and has since, voiced Milo’s sister Sarah on Milo Murphy’s Law, Dr. Fox on Unikitty, and most recently voiced a sentient present on close enough who did this. 

So yeah quite the career and like Ben she probably has a long and storied career in Voice Acting ahead. 

Next up is Beck Bennet as everyone’s friend Launchpad where he excels. He’s best known as a castmember on SNL outside of this, and shockingly hasn’t done a ton of voice work. The only other time i’ve caught him is in the same season of Close Enough as Luc, aka dude-bro satan. But like eveyrone else here who hasn’t done a lot of voice work so far or has been more selective I defintely hope he keeps going with it as he’s amazing. He and Ben will be co-starring on MODOK in May so i’m excited for that. 

Last up for the main cast is Beakly, voiced by  Toks Olagundoye, who I hadn’t heard of before this show and hasn’t done a lot outside of the two season sitcom the neighbors, the aliens one not the really terrible looking one, and a stint on Castle, but like everyone here deserves much more and if Beakly is any indication, really should stick with voice acting. 

Last up is Keith Ferguson as only he could as FLINTHEART GLOMGOLD, whose a staple in the voice acting community ever since 2000, and has had a TON of roles some of which I was unaware with him. Given Frank worked with him on Wonder Over Yonder, where he voiced Lord Hater to perfection, the two clearly have a close working relationship. He also has a close working relationship with Wonder creator Craig McCracken and has worked on all of his post-powerpuff girls show, voicing Bloo as his first major role, something I never would’ve guessed, and currently voicing Papa G on Kid Cosmic. 

Outside of Craig and Frank, he played both Karate Kid and Nemisis Kid on Legion of Super Heroes (Which really needs to come to HBO Max), Deputy Durland on Gravity Falls,  and Thunderbolt Ross on Avengers Earth’s Mighteist Heroes. He’s damn good and deserves the world for Glomgold alone and i’m glad Craig rung him up again as so far through my watch of Kid Cosmic he’s great. 

So with our cast in place, our past in place and you all likely ready to get on with it already let’s dive into the episode:

THE EPISODE: Part one Woo-Ooo!

We begin with a shot of a seagull flying overseagulls, a nice way to establish how this world works and how it bends expectations. They’d have to wait till season 3 to get a duck next to ducks but given that gag is one of the best of the series, it was worth it. 

Inside a house boat we meet Donald, Huey and Louie and get a sense of their personalities: Donald is panicked trying to get to a job interview and insists the boys wear life vests, showing his overprotectiveness and responsibility exclusive to this version. Louie stresses that Donald wear a suit instead of his normal clothes to properly impress the interviewer, showing his skill at people reading and manipulation, and Huey is making a nice, if messy, breakfast with a heartwarming message showing his heart and dedication. After finding out said Babysitter was sent to the wrong address, the boys TRY to hustle him out to stay alone.. only for Dewey to blow the scheme by starting the boat too early, letting Donald know he’s been had. Huey’s attempt to lie about it is of course the classic “Who’s Dewey?” Dewey’s caught wiring the boat and Donald throws them in the car, with Donald livid and the boys upset as their chafing at his constant overprotectiveness. 

Both sides aren’t wrong. tThe boys DID do something reckless, putting an old woman in the desert and risking their home just to go on a joyride. What they did was wrong.. but the boys AREN’T wrong for getting annoyed that he won’t let them DO anything and overly hovering over them when they CAN handle themselves as we’ll see. WE now know why: he lost their mother and his sister to her and scrooge’s recklesness. While he got therapy for his anger it’s clear he never properly got help about Della, and thus overcompensates by trying to keep what he has left of her alive. He means well.. but to them it comes off as him being manically overprotective with no good reason. They get into trouble because it’s the only way to DO anything away from him. He’s trying so hard not to loose them he almost has by the time hte series starts, and it’s telling that when they get context in Last Crash, they appricate him more from then on. They do love him, but their frustration is understandable even if what their doing is pretty damn stupid. But their also 10 and Donald’s the grown adult in therapy who should’ve dealt with this or tried to at least by now.

So with no other options Donald sets a course for McDuck manor which excites the boys who have heard of Scrooge McDuck and his exploits, each rattling off something they heard him do that fits their personality (Dewey picks him fighting a stone monster, Huey picks him uncovering a hoax and Louie picks his swimming in money. ) As Donald tries to get them to simmer down, they wonder what he’s up to

He’s up toooo.. depression. He’s in a room with his board, watching them with utter hate and sadness as they talk about cutting the invention and aviation departments. This scene plays ENTIRELY differently after the final two episodes of the season. Before it still plays well as Scrooge clearly resenting being stuck in a boring board meeting, having lost everything that made him him and just having lost his passion for life. Now? It plays as a man utterly disdainful of the men who made him give up on his daughter. While as far as he knows they did it to save his employees from his company collapsing, we know better now... and seriously where IS the rest of the board they just vanished after the Season 3 premiere.

I don’t mind only one being fleshed out, unlike the triplets we only NEED the one I mind that they just never explained it and still haven’t. Hopefully the finale will. 

But back on the plot, it now plays as Scooge just full of hatred for them, knowing they had to do what they did, even if they weren’t emebzlling but still hating them and himself. He’s likely not even paying attention anymore because he just dosen’t CARE: he has all the money int he world.. and it couldn’t bring him his daughter back. As he sadly puts the coins he was fiddling with back and says see you tommorow he can’t even close the vault without a struggle. As we’ll see later the strength never left, it’s not like he stopped execrising.. but he has nothing left to fight for. Nothing left to care about. He could adventure agian so far.. but without Della or Donald, as we’d learn two seasons later the reason he enjoyed it again... what’s the point? He has nothing left except his money. 

This is also a nice parallel to the final Chapter of LIfe and Times. I always felt the first half of woo-ooo was a spiritual adaptation of chapter 12 of that: Scrooge meets the boys for the first time and with their help, and Donalds in the story< Webby and Launchpad here, he regains his passion and more importantly his family after driving them away> The how is very different: he did in life and times due to sinking to his lowest point morally, then cruelly dismissing his family when they tried to welcome him home and bury the hatchet despite what he’d done. Here.. he made a HORRIBLE mistake, one that wasn’t entirely on him but still cost him everything and spent the decade instead of stewing or making more money trying desperately to undo it. The end result is the same, a dried out husk of a man with nothing left to loose and no will to gain anything.

This husk has launchpad though whose introduced as his driver and while good with subs and planes.. isn’t great on the road. After that though Donald pulls up hoping to drop the kids off before Scrooge arrives. Naturally this being a cartoon and Donald having tempted fate with that Scrooge shows up telling him to jettison that Jallopy at once. And finding out who it is, apart from asking how Donald is and Donald doing the same, dosen’t sway him. The boys however freak out after finding out Scrooge is Donald’s and there uncle, with my faivriote bit of that being Dewey exiting the car via a window and rolling across the roof back in. Amazing bit of animation. Wish I had a gif of that. 

Donald makes the situation plane and angry and asks “Can you do that without LOOSING THEM”. And scrooge is so painfully disarmed by his reminder of his past mistakes and the fact his surrogate son still resents him, that he agrees before realizing “Shit I have to watch children now don’t I” as Donald drives off. As you probably guessed, this is another scene that plays differently in hindsight, if not by much: It still plays as two men too stubborn and bitter to reconcile.. but now we know the why behind both their rages it feels even sadder. They both lost the person they cared about most but as it sadly happens in real life both have dug in their heels to reconcile, both feeling their right when neither completely is. While Donald was right to be upset at scrooge and della for what happened, and is mostly taking it out on scrooge because he’s the one left... he’s held onto his anger for 10 years instead of going to help when he’s unemployed, living in a dilapidated houseboat and trying ot raise three children alone and could’ve used what help scrooge would give. Scrooge is right to be upset that Donald is just selectively ignoring everything he’s done to save Della, but is too stubborn and prideful to apologize for what he DID do wrong and feels that’s enough to make up for it when , while it is enough that donald should forgive him, still dosen’t mean he dosen’t have a lot to apologize for. Both are just too angry and too much alike, as much as it woudln’t seem so, to settle with each other and see too much of what they lost. 

So the kids follow Scrooge.. who forgets to open the door, and Beakly lets them in. It’s a nice subtle bit. After some silence, Bentina TRIES to get her old friend and now employer to talk to them, but he naturally refuses and they do the talking, asking tons of questions.. and Dewey ends the conversation by accidently pressing the “imply he USED to be something rather than is something right now “ button

So Scrooge throws them in the twins old room, and Beakly gives them some marbles. You will give them b ack they will be counted. But another subtle touch I missed the first time is there... her sad look. She clearly doesn’t want to do this, but she has to play this carefully or else he might get mad and fire her on the spur of the moment. He’d obviously hire her back, where else is he going to get an ex spy who will both clean for him AND be his bodyguard and security. It’s a very small pool. Mostly because Beakly probably killed most of the other people who’d of fit that description during her spy days. 

Scrooge meanwhile is still rattled by Dewey’s statment, wondering if he really is a “used to be” instead of a “never left”. The fire is starting to spark again.. he just needs more kindling. And more kin. 

Meanwhile Louie and Huey marvel at Dewey’s “Brilliant’ breakout plan: hit the door knob with the sack of marbles til lit breaks. To be fair, they’ve known dewey as long as they’ve been alive and even by season 3 after he’s taken several levels in badass and cunning.. he still crashed a plane because his brother well-meaningly called him basic, and thought being nearly sacrificed the most times was an accomplishment. This is the best he could do and you all know it. It also works, so they can’t fault him for that... though he’s quickly kidnapped as are they. They wake up after the commerical break in a room with pure darkness, hung from the celing with a mystery person asking who they are and who they work for before Louie calls out for “uncle scrooge”... so she claps the lights back on and..

Well close. But it is Webby, who cuts them down, fangirls over meeting the nephews and asks who the evil triplet is. They all point to Louie who shrugs it off. I mean it was funny enough the first time but at this point I know he’s running several fradulent charites, almost all scamming his uncle. He’s earned that title. Webby puts them on the big board and then when asked they find out she’s Webby, her granny Beakly is housekeeper.  She then asks the big questons “Are we friends now?” “If we say yes will you let us live?” “Ha good one new best friend”

She then explains she dosen’t get to leave or anything even eat a hamburger. The boys are moved by this and Louie asks what she does for fun. She leads them to the vents and while Huey and Louie are a bit relcutant, Dewey naturally goes first pointing out it’s better than the marble room. They agree and are on their way. 

Okay unpinning that pin, the crew conciously updated Webby and Beakly as neither really had a lot of purpose in the original. It was also to conciously add more actiony females to the main family lineup, as both creators, both being fathers, preferred someone their daughters could look up to and would enjoy watching. Not someone perfect but someone intresting instead of someone who often got Kidnapped and whose main charactrisitcs were “Sweet and GIRL STEROTYPE” So cleverly they KEPT her being girly, having a skirt, liking ponies. .but also gave her all the training and skill of one Cassandra Cain, a sheltered background and an adorable personality that kept the sweetness but added her probably having killed a man at some point. It worked as Webby is one of the best parts of the show. 

Likewise Beakly was upgraded from fuddy duddy housekeeper, to badass former secret agent whose also a housekeeper, and bodyguard and confidant to scrooge. Demonstrated by her talk with him as he tries to put on his diving suit and go after the jewel of atlantis, having spotted the signs to go after it in the paper.. and wanting to prove a child wrong. Beakly points out the flaws in this, and tries to get him to connect to his family. Having lost hers, it’s easy to see why.. though the how’s a mystery.. for now i’m guess. We’ll see in the finale. But she’s Scrooge’s concisence and the one who can easiest reign him in, to the point two episodes directly have our heroes have to NOT call her or else the plot was end, but have that worked into the plot so it works. She’s the calm in his storm and hte one person he needs more than anyone else even if he dosen’t always realize it. He calls family “nothing but trouble” just as Dewey passes overhead. 

So naturally as Webby shows off Scrooge’s old treasures in a mysterious room, while the other Siblings are rightfully impressed, Dewey dismisses it as “fake” because he’s being a little shit, and they agree after seeing Donald, not knowing his reputation. The cutaway to him struggling with a stapler does not help> it’s only when Webby accidnetly uneleashes Captain Peghook, a vengeful ghost after scrooge, who gets his hand on a ghostly sword do they realize this time the monsters are real. Huey also accidently wakes up Manny, the headless manhorse! 

Things somehow get WORSE as Scrooge finds them.. but is in no state to argue and as our heroes duck and Huey tries to divise a plan.. Scrooge get’s his spark back once agian.. it’s starting to become an ember now... and he charges in despite Dewey’s cries of “No come back your old!”. It then gets VERY badass Scrooge: Oi! Beastie! What's it gonna take to shuffle you off to the afterlife? Captain Peg-Hook: The head of Scrooge McDuck! Scrooge: [cracks his neck, flips his cane around to wield like a sword] Would you settle for his hat?

Now that is how you show how badass Scrooge is in a few lines and gestures. HE proceeds to take both out, as they’ve now teamed up, easily, tricking peghook into cutting off the head of a statue of him in the area, throwinng it at him and finsihing the ghosts buisnesss (”I should’ve been more specifiiiicccccc”) and then giving Manny the head, earning him a loyal employee for life. So our days saved, the kids have faith.. and Scrooge is still pissed. He also reveals this isn’t a treasure room but the garage in what’s easily the best gag of the first half, possibly the whole special but one iconic moment is very close in that one. Webby concedes what about the stack of old magazines or the hose or.. okay he’s probably right. He berates them only for the kids to fire back, pointing out he threw them in a room, they just wanted to spend time with him... but it’s only Dewey throwing his words back in his face that pisses him off. Scrooge bellows at them to get out, clearly having internalized everything with donald into rage and trying to justify pushing eveyrone away instead of working at it... but this dosen’t have time to actually work, nor would Beakly actually throw three children out on the curb, as he hits a mystic gong.. the third time it’s been hit. And after realizing it’s already been hit twice Scrooge is faced with Pixu, the gold hutning dragon! And guess who has a giant bin of it wanting to snack on? Scrooge naturally climbs on the thing and the kids naturally want to follow, with Webby getting her first development by proudly announcing “I’m going to eat a hamburger” then explains the metaphor. They just need a pilto.. and as Launchpad has been saying but I forgot to add in “I’m a pilot”

So we get a GORGEOUS bit of Scrooge riding the dragon over the city, getting banged up as he does before finally being thrown off.. only for the kids to catch him with the planes help and try and come up with a plan. Scrooge overcomes his anger at them not staying put, especailly since Webby brings up the right weakness: as a wise man once said...

So they need some.. like say the Medusa Gauntlet Scrooge had in the garage.. that Louie naturally stole. Huey and Webby eyeroll him but they have what they need.. and Huey brought the hose and quickly comes up with a plan, tying scrooge in, and swinging him to Pixu. The kids hold on tight, Dewey calls his family awesome and our heroes win the day as Scrooge turns the dragon to stone, slips and falls.. and then GRACEFULLY dives into hte bin, showing off his diving skills and his badassery. The day is saved, the gauntlet and the dragon go in the bin for safe keeping and Scrooge calls the kids trouble.. and chuckles fondly. “Curse me kilts how i’ve missed trouble”

He’s impressed: Huey’s quick thinking, Louie’s pickpocketing, Dewey’s drive, and Webby’s magical knowledge all saved them. For once. .he’s happy again. And for the second time in life it took his family to remind him why he does this and show him the true fun of adventure: Getting to share it with those he love. And he finally has people to love again. He has family back, kids who look up to him and want to learn from him again, a REASON to adventure. Money and treasure and eveyrthig couldn’t bring della back.. but he at least sees now that whiel they certianly couldn’t.. they can bring him closely with what he has left. She’s gone, for now.. but she left behind three great kids who could use a mentor and Beakly brought him a fourth. And he just found out he has a pilot. The ember.. is now a raging flame. Scrooge is back. Because i’ts not the money or the glory.. it’s the thrill of it, the discovery.. and the family that makes adventuring worth while and he’s learned that lesson again. So he calls Beakly to clear his schedule.. forgetting she you know PUT A FUCKING PIN INTHE WALL the last time he asked her to play scretary and the onlyr eason she dind’t drive over the choke him to death, is that she’s probably happy he’s back on track.

Back at the interview Donald is stapled to the wall and gets the job.. not as an accountant mind but his employer needs a sailor.. and his employer is FLINTHEART GLOMGOLD. Oh boy. 

Part 2: Escape To/From Atlantis First the last bit of background I saved: Originally, Fenton and Gyro were supposed to show up here, starting a gag of Fenton showing up but not being named until “Beware the B.U.D.D.Y. System!”, setting up the sub. But the crew decided this took too much away from the focus on the duck family. The not naming him gag was also dropped, and I have two reasons why: Their given reason, which is it’d take up too much time and a logistical reason: While they gave a heartfelt pitch to Lin-Manuel Miranda, as frank wanted a strong Latino superhero to combat the lack of them on film, Frank and Matt probably thought they woudln’t get such a huge name or at least prepared for it.. and were delightfully suprised when Lin happily and tearfully agreed. So they likely scrapped it so they could properly promote the biggest name in their voice cast. Honestly it was for the best and they still go to do the idea with Drake in “The Duck Knight Returns!”, where it worked much better than it probably would have with Fenton. 

We open with the Glomgold Industries Employee Training Video! Encourging IP Theft, making things cheaper and general scumbaggery, and claming your the world’s most beloved scottish billionare. IN short the perfect introduction to everyone’s favorite insane, fake-scottish, scheming, egotistical , short sighted billionaire. As i’ve made transparent before, I fucking love the reboot version of Glomgold and he’s easily one of my favorite parts of the reboot. They clearly needded to find a new place for Glomgold in the grand scheme of things as the show was more about globetrotting adventure and family and less about getting contracts or bets about whose bigger money and more about family. While they DID do a classic bet storyline with season 2, it’s clear the old glomgold was just a bit too stiff to properly fit into this new zanier and deeper universe. 

So they instead remolded him as a half insane, knockoff scrooge, someone who PURPOSFULLY modeled himself after the guy to try and one up him, and instead of being a fairly low pitched schemer, was a bombastic idiot whose schemes were half baked, whose name was on everything he made, and whose only thing bigger than scrooge was his glorious ego. In short he was perfect for this series and perfect to show up way more often as a bumbling thorn in Scrooge’s side.. but one who COULD be effective in the right circumstances, as to not make him completely pointless. Keith was likewise the only person I could see in the roll now as with Hater he had a history of playing bombastic, egosticial morons, and made Glomgold into the enjoyable ball of ego, bombs, sharks and shouting we know and love. Some people didn’t take to this version after a while... I’m not one of those. I loved him here, I love him now, and he’s every bit as good in season 3 as he was at the start. He’s also wearing a kilt mcduck A KILT. A bit that’st STILL funny four years and 70 some episodes later. 

So we meet Gabby McStabberson and the Smashnikovs as they and Donald file in, though Donald is busy wrapping up a call with Scrooge, who assures them he has a low key day planned.. while in the sub getting ready to go to atlantis. And nearly drowning when Dewey tells Launchpad to dive while he and Scrooge are still up top. Cue credits. 

So on the sub we get our setup for the two main plots for the episode: While the main thrust of everything is Scrooge taking them to Atlantis, each leads to a diffrent plot. Louie talks to Donald and lies entirely about their day, worrying Webby.. who then reveals she just didn’t tell Beakly she took off or where she was going and encourages her to call and lie. To save time, i’m going to cover this subplot now minus the conclusion as it’s pretty simple and this review is already a day behind. Louie wants her to lie so she dosen’t worry, which is oddly sweet.. still a bit greasy, but it’s clear he means well and it shows in his own way the boy cares about Donald: Sure he’ll lie to the guy, and set up a fradulent charity to scam him.. but he also knows not to worry his dad-uncle and kows Donald is better off thinking their safe than knowing the truth. Granted it also prevents consequences for Louie.. but he’s not playing here here. He gets nothing out of Beakly not knowing the truth or helping some girl he just met, he’s just being NICE in his own twisty way. It’s a nice show of his depths: While louie will lie, cheat and steal Eddie Gurrero style, he does have a caring side underneath hit. He can read people well and while he primarily uses it to manipulate people, we’ll see time and time again that he can use it for good too and to help those he cares about. He’s nothing but supportive the whole plot, and even when he says “you can’t back that up” it’s more worrying about her and having a bit of crack than actually being a dick. 

So Webby tries lying, but is about as good as Huey is at it, saying “I’m at a friends house nothing, then makes up a clearly fake name, then says their only talking in swedish for a grandpa. Launchpad DOES help, but only by accident and snake venom. We’ll get to that. As I said this wasn’t the most complex plot. 

The main plot is our focus episode for dewey. In theory each of the kids was supposed to have one in the first five episodes: Dewey here, Webby in Daytrip of Doom, Louie in Great Dime Chase and Huey in Impossible Summit of Mt. Nevverest!. Given the last one was horribly delayed, he instead got Terror of the Terra Firmians, which in hindsight wasn’t the best spotlight episode for him. But it’s a good system; Introduce them all in the first half of the pilot then slowly focus on each one.  So now Idoloizing Scrooge, Dewey is desperate to be his sidekick and be seen as an equal and is in deep denial as scrooge instead has them all buckle up for a 17 hour ride and when Dewey questions the route, which skips the direct path.. but is clearly marked with monsters, Scrooge just snaps at him and shuts him down and disapoints the boy who only wants to prove himself to Scrooge. 

Naturally though, telling someone with that kind of need for attention and validation to wait goes poorly as he redirects the map while Launchapd is distracted.. and we find out WHY the trip is 17 hours as the direct route nearly gets them killed by mer-ducks, krakens and some sort of storm elemental. Dewey is bummed it didn’t work and annoyed to realize he’s just lumping them all together like Huey pointed out earlier. Huey is also delightful here, having brought travel bingo and sea shanties, clearly used to trips with his other uncle. And adorably taking after him. 

But Dewey’s deversion has done more than make him even MORE determined to prove himself to Scrooge whose just trying to NOT loose the son of the daughter he lost...

The Merducks have taken up residence in the bathroom, so they have to make a pitstop. Scrooge, CLEARLY forgetting how to take a trip with children, wasn’t prepared for this but they find a frieghter and make a stop. Naturally it’s GLOMGOLD’S freighter, where his sub took off from, and he and his minons including Donald find Scrooge using the bathroom.. and the boys to Donald’s rage. Unfortunately saying ‘I’ll kill him” to a raging sociopath who takes that as a sign to kill ALL of them, isn’t a smart move. 

So while Donald tries to plan to keep his family alive, said family arrives in Atlantis with a great bit of Scrooge trying to give a big speech only for them to see it first and ooh and ah. They touch down in the city.. which is flip turned upside down. Scrooge notes hti is odd but is able to read the hieroglypchs even upside downa nd notes there’s tones of deadly traps and that they shoudl stay back and..

Huey: Dewey ran in as soon as you said traps. 

So while Scrooge tries to prevent dewey loosing his head, Donald prevents launchpad loosing his and makes up an excuse about “if their dead now we can’t tourture them later” to cover his ass. Glomgold is impressed.  Dewey is Dewcipointed that the traps are upside down, though he does trigger some snakes that get launchpad. He’s fine just delirious. And possibly slowly dying but the fact he’s lived this long is a miracle. Maybe that’s why he’s missing for most of season 3 part 2, the snake venom caught up to him and drake and fenton need to find the cure. Anyways the rest of the party stays behind while Scrooge chases after Dewey, who naturally runs ahead AGAIN. 

Donald ducks out to use the bathroom, as Dewey tries the old dance through the laser grid routine.. but forgets the part where your supposed to actually avoid it, leaving it to an unseen Donald to stop the fire traps from barbqueing his boy. IT’s a really awesome sequence that shows off Donald’s still got it even if he dosen’t want it.  Scrooge naturally works smarter not harder and simply ziplines above like a badass and berates Dewey when he tells him he took “The easy way”

“Why would you want to take the hard way?” The argument that’s been brewing all episode bubbles up and once again both sides have a point: Scrooge rightfully points out Dewey’s being reckless, has no experince and needs to listen to Scrooge and learn something. Dewey claps back that Scrooge isn’t TEACHING them, just teling them to get behind him while he does things instead of trying to actively mentor them. He outright told them he was going to teach them so while Dewey’s been a wee bit overbearing, he’s right in being disappointed that Scrooge instead just wants them to be safe. I see it as his subconscious acting up: He wants and needs the kids along and is right ot keep them safe.. but is too scared to properly mentor them after what happened to Della and is just trying not to loose anybody. His methods have been right, to keep them safe.. he’s just been so determined to save them, he can’t properly TEACH them so he won’t have to forever or explain WHY. And given the First Adventure shows that while protective he did eventually let Della and Donald pull their weight.. but here he lost so much between adventures.. he just can’e bear loosing them. Dewey also rightfully points out he just lumps them together which in any other version wouldn’t be an issue, until the reboot I had no idea which one was which here? They have distinct outfits and personalities and you had 17 hours to actually get to know them. Probably less given the shortcut but still, several hours at a minimum. It’s things like this that make the series work: while there’s plenty of internal conflicts, at their best their nuanced ones, where if one character is clearly in the wrong they have a reason, and if both are right both are also a bit wrong, versus the original where it’d be scrooge or the boys grabbing the asshole ball at times (Not always mind you but when they did it was insufferable. 

However they don’t have time to argue as the bridge goes out and Glomgold finds donald.. and another way around as a result and gets to the treasure first. Scrooge notices they have donald but once again Dewey charges in 

“Unhand my uncle” “No” “Okay wasn’t prepared for that”

Naturally both sides are a bit livid, Donald for dragging his boys into danger after being part of the reason his sister is on the moon right now, and Scrooge for working with one of his greatest eneimies.. though Scrooge has less ground to stand on because as Donald points out “I can’t keep track of ALL of your sworn enemies” I mean he has lived like .. 200 years. That’s a long enemies list and Glomgold, while the most persistent, isn’t exactly the most dangerous they probably encountered. Given the guy’s an artist with Bombs and Sharks that does say a lot about how badass Scrooge is.. and how incompitent glomgold usually is. He’s just having an on day today I guess. 

Glomgold naturally holds Donald hostage, takes what is suppsidley the jewel and leaves them to drown to death, hitting a wall to let it start leaking. HIs minons run into the rest of the heroes and a fight breaks out while naturally Donald, after even more naturally getting his ass stuck in a hole, literally, rails out at Scrooge for doing this telling him “I knew I couldn’t trust you and” “This is the spear of selene all over again”

Scrooge’s only response is “I was not responsible for the Spear of Selene!”

Dude you still paid for the rocket. While Della shoulders most of the blame, SHE choose to take an untested rocket, SHE choose not to come back during the turbulence YOU still built it and hid it from donald and didn’t make sure she couldn’t just take off in it. Your both to blame. And as I mentioned earlier to the least extent but still an extent, so was Donald telling his grown, adult sister whose as stubborn as she is what she could and couldn’t do. He had the right idea and was the only person trying to be an adult here in this situation.. but he still took the wrong approach with stopping her. Still he got far more ground to stand on than Scrooge, who also took his nephews out. Dewey stops both by pointing out that while yes Scrooge took them on an adventure he’s been doing NTOHING but keeping him safe and most of it was his fault which disarms donald a bit. Though Dewey is quickly distracted.. but for once by an obersvation: the gem glowing above thaem that glowed when they entered... and since the city got flipped turned upside down.. THAT’S the real jewel. Dewey asks Donald ot let it flood so they can get it and begs his uncle to trust him despite his doubts which he does. They get it and everyone’s okay and even more when they reunite with the others they find they’ve handily beaten them. To me this is where donalds walls go down a bit: he realizes he’s been smothering the kids, and that while he may hate his uncle for good reason... he’s not going to make the same mistake with them and while he lied.. Don probably realized if Scrooge had been honest Donald would never have let them go. He can trust him.. and he can trust his kids will be alright without him. 

So Glomgold naturally leaves his minions to die, but our heroes manage to make it to the sub, and Gabby asks if they can bum a ride. Not wanting to do any murders they agree. On the surface Glomgold is showing off his jewel, only for Scrooge to upstage him second’s later with the real jewel, and point out his is “nice but defintly cursed”... and right on cue Glomgold gets dragged off with an octopus and let’s off his first “Curse you mcduck!”. Scrooge offers clean water and power thorugh it, for a price because of course he does, and has offically made his grand comeback. 

We get back to Webby’s subplot, as she’s confronted by Beakly.. who naturally being a former spy easily figured it out immieditely but is only upset her grandaughter lied to her. And even at that she dosen’t raise her voice or anything about the matter, knowing it’d only make her feel worse and getting that her grandaughter needs to see the world and that much like donald, she walled her up to prevent loosing what little she had left. And since being with Scrooge is safe as with her, she can go with him anytime just tell her first kay? They hug. Awwww. 

Donald likewise apologizes, admitting that whatever has passed, he misjudged his uncle here and while not forgiving him yet, is at least willing to let him back into his life and into the boys.. on holidays and stuff at least. But fate forces his hand.. or rather his 10 year old nephew-son having left the engine on and neither having turned it off, meaning his boat goes boom and is in no liveable condition. But Scrooge has the space in his heart and mansion for them.

So as we close the kids help move the artifacts all around the house instead of just the garage while Launchapd drops the boat. While clearing out Dewey notices the painting from earlier.. and finds part of it was flipped over...

“Mom?!” 

Now keep in mind, while nowadays Della’s inclusion in the show is one of the most famous and treasured parts of the show.. back then this was a fucking shock. Disney never really cared about the boys mother and outside of one comics story never really went into what happened. So the fact she was not only an actual important part of the plot but we’d find out was a HUGE wham moment and left my jaw dropped after seeing the episode. Like I would with the finales I had read no spoilers and had no idea this was coming but damn was it a huge and welcome suprise and how far they’d take it and how much they’d flesh her out was an even bigger one. Easily one of the best big reveals i’ve ever seen. The only better one I can think of from this series itself... is the end of season 2. But that’s for another time. 

Final Thoughts on Woo-Ooo!:

This two parter/hour long special.. is still one of the episodes best and easily one of the best pilots. It does slow down a bit in pacing in the second half, but otherwise is just an immaculate , beautiful pilot movie that introduces and fleshes out all 8 main characters, maybe Launchpad the least but enough to still work, gives us some big mysteries to work out, and even throws in Glomgold’s first apperance. It sets the tone, reverent and adventuerous but also with it’s own weird and wacky sense of humor and world building, and universe perfectly. I .. don’t have much else to say really it’s just THAT good and really worth checking out. If you somehow haven’t seen it go watch it and if you haven’t seen it in a while might be worth a rewatch before the finale. The absolutely perfect start to an amazing ride. 

Next on the Della Arc: Dewey and Webby try to figure out where Della is while Louie learns a valuable life lesson and  pisses off a killer robot along the way.

Next on the Blog: Amphibia Season 2 is back! 

Until then if you liked this review follow for more and if you could please support me on patreon. Even a buck a month helps and juicy stretch goals give you na incentive to contirbute. We’re 5 bucks away from 20 dollars a month which means a review of super ducktales and a Darkwing Duck review EVERY. MONTH. So contribute now! Until the next rainbow it’s been a pleasure. 

[skaiatemple]

November 23rd is the Festival of Void!

If you follow as a practitioner of Pop Culture Paganism, a user of Homestuck inspired Chaos Magic, or just want to use your favorite series to inspire you throughout the year, Skaia Temple is your resource center!

Whether you want to just celebrate it on the day, use it as a date for empowered energy, integrate it into your more mundane celebrations, or just appreciate your favorite characters and concepts this month, we have suggestions for whatever path you want to take with us!

Read below the cut for a condensed idea & resource list for this month of Void!

Aspect Centered Celebrate the Aspect in all its glory if you’re all about on celebrating the Festivals for exactly what they represent: The Aspect and all the traits associated with it.

“Where others might be compelled to go out and seek answers, the Void-bound lean more toward casting doubt on what is already considered fully understood. They don’t take much on faith and would rather live in a state of confusion than believe something that might be untrue or bow to intellectual authority.”

We’ve spent two months learning everything we could, and now is the time to let the rest of it go. There is no way we can have all the answers, and that's okay. We don’t have to understand everything or be the best in this life. We just need to do what we feel is right for ourselves and others. Now’s a time of cutting cords of whats not important or that isn’t helping us, make as big or little a deal of it as you need. Just know it’s okay to have the peace of not having to explain things.

This month is for leaving things be.

Magical Inspiration If you want to use Homestuck concepts more abstractly and need some ideas for what brands of magic would work best for the season, if you have an Aspect or character-themed spell, feel free to send it in so it can be added to this section!

Now is a good time to cleanse and get the extra unnecessaries out in the open. Ward against things or just straight up banish them away. Don’t let anyone think you need to hold on to anything that isn’t helping you. Let yourself be free.

Here is a short spell for protection. And Here is an old ask meme to get you thinking about everyone Void-y

Integration Route For people in the broom closet who are too timid or anxious to celebrate the Festivals openly- you can always integrate the Aspects traits to fit in with the more common trends and holidays of the month. Not even Hussie is is Homestuck God, no one will mind!

Thanksgiving is close by! A good time to just be thankful for what we have and not have another care in the world about it. It’s getting cold, and sports are being a little too important about this time. Don’t be afraid to hide away if you have to, or go ahead and be happy and at peace for what you’ve been dealt.

Fandom Driven For if you’re not all about spirituality or routine and just want to enjoy going all-out with a beloved story & characters, you can honor the ones of this month by driving full-throttle on the fandom bandwagon.

Void is the Aspect of the Zahhaks, talented men with a focus on their work, niche interests, and little else. They take solace in being in the background, which shouldn’t be viewed as a bad thing. They’re also men who when the time came did what was the right thing to do even when it went against everything they stood for. The Zahhaks aren’t for everybody, but there's certainly admirable qualities we can appreciate and look after.

It’s also the Aspect of the fandoms most beloved Roxy Lalonde!  A bombastic babe who doesn’t care what anyone thinks, but never holds back from caring for friends with every ounce of being. Caring for them and believing in them without hesitation. Roxy has inspired all sorts of people for no shortage of reasons, ranging from a merciless fighting spirit to relentless optimism and even a more internal battle with addiction. In contrast to the Zahhaks, Roxy’s countless fluid facets really does make a character for almost everyone.

Draw art, write fic, and post analysis’ for some characters that represent the everything of nothing, and all that's in-between.

We hope you got some ideas for activities you can do with your friends or otherwise use to inspire and better yourself this month. Everyone plays the game of life differently, and everyone's beliefs are their own. Celebrate yourself as you see fit, and Thanks for Playing with Us.

~Mod Bee

[lessthanthreeman]

Personal Post

I just wanted to write this because it’s been on my mind and I find it frustrating how few resources there seem to be about it. With Cinco de Mayo coming up, and Latino media being all around, I’m reminded that I’m technically of mixed descent, which to be clear, I’m pretty proud of. I was raised by my mother and her side of the family who are white through and through so for a majority of my life that’s what I identified as and where a lot of my mannerisms and cultural understanding comes from. I imagine it was probably for the best, particularly growing up on Long Island, especially considering I am VERY white passing.

I never met my father (who was Puerto Rican [though later DNA tests on myself reveal that genetically speaking he was predominantly Spanish, so white Hispanic)] and have no desire to. Literally, the extent of my knowledge about him is that he was ethnically Puerto Rican to some capacity. I genuinely believed that women just got immaculately pregnant on their own until I was 7 as I just assumed I didn’t have a father (it’s somewhat embarrassing to admit, even if I was young and how was I supposed to know? I didn’t understand what was so special about the story of Mary for a long time to put it mildly.).

I remember the night I found out so vividly. I was at a sports practice and the kids were talking about their dads. I proclaimed that I didn’t have one. One of the older kids informed me that that was impossible. I was honestly offended and went to our coach, who I assume didn’t know how to respond or why I would even ask (I don’t blame him), so he told me that I definitely have a father. Again, outraged, when I got back home I asked my mother about it who told me that I did have a father.I asked “Well if I have a father, that means I must be half something else” as she had grown up telling me her half and that the other half was “American” because I was born in America (lmao). She told me that I was Puerto Rican, which I didn’t have a problem with. I didn’t even know where that was (and I guess by some technicalities, she wasn’t wrong in saying I was “American”, just “American Territory”) so that was of little impact to me. I was furious that whoever my father was chose to have no part in my life and I felt nothing but bitterness, so when she asked if I wanted to know more about him, I said no. I still like to keep it that way if I’m being honest. I am still bitter and if the little snippets I’ve heard in hushed tones from my other family is any indication, I don’t want to know more about him even if I wasn’t.

So, I continued to consider myself exclusively white because that’s what other people considered me, that’s how I was raised, that’s what I look like and likely subconsciously because I was bitter and it did benefit me on some level. As it turns out though, my mother has a thing for Hispanic guys (a little weird I guess, maybe a bit fetishistic [I don’t know the extent and I don’t want to know so I can’t say for certain], but good for her I suppose) and she soon after got involved with another guy, my now pseudo-step father in all but legality really. He’s of Mexican and Puerto Rican descent, his father lived in Mexico (and has since gone back of his own volition), his mother (IIRC) lived in Puerto Rico, etc. He’s not deeply associated with his roots, he’s definitely “assimilated” having grown up in New York and California. He speaks broken Spanish, perfect English, and really is an American through and through, save for some more traditional cultural vestiges (which isn’t bad to be clear). He loves chihuahuas, sombreros, maracas, Mexican cuisine, Speedy Gonzalez etc. It’s somewhat superficial and a bit stereotypical, but I understand why he feels a connection to it as a very American man. It’s an easy way for him to very clearly connect to his roots, even if they’re not pieces of great cultural significance. Whether or not it’s problematic, I’m glad it gives him some of the connection he wants to his culture and it makes him proud.

Growing up around him and his kids, I felt a bit like an outsider, and I’ll probably admit, initially I was arrogant. I grew up being an only child (which definitely was a big shift to begin with) and couple that with the fact that I was still at that time an academic golden child in traditionally very (BIG quotes here) “polite” (Read: white) environments, I didn’t really jive with my brothers for a long time. As things went on though, I had my golden kid breaking point, crashed out a bit, eventually my mom moved in with him bringing me in tow, and I mellowed out a bit as I got over some teenage angst. During that time, I never fully connected with the heritage because it wasn’t mine, I’m not Mexican, but I understood and appreciated it. I can earnestly say, it is one of the cultures that I am the most fascinated and captivated by. I can go on and on and wax poetic about the historical achievements of Native peoples of Central America, their food, their ability to weather adversity, and their faith that things will get better. The culture is so much deeper than the “illegal immigrants” and cartel ties that we’re constantly shown in media, and I’m glad that to an extent things are slowly shifting to show the humanity of the people. But anyway, tangents aside, I’m still very culturally white and white passing, albeit with a better understanding of Latino cultures.

As more and more time goes on though, I am starting to feel like I’m a bit disconnected from a part of my culture and heritage, but I feel uncomfortable claiming it. Not because I don’t want people to know that I’m Hispanic, I have no issue with that, in fact I love whipping out that I’m sleeper Hispanic with a Hispanic family when people think they’re safe to be a little racist with me before I call them out on it. The reason is just because I don’t feel Hispanic enough and I’m too white, and it’s something I’ve struggled with for a while, but it becomes more and more obvious to me as time goes on. I understand that this is a really common issue for people of mixed races, particularly for those with mixed heritage upbringings. They feel adrift between two worlds and people are always looking for a way to categorize them into their preexisting schemas of how we view race in America. Some of what these people say when I’m looking for it resonates with me, but a lot of it also doesn’t. It’s not because my life is harder or I’m special or anything, but it is a very particularly niche scenario. I grew up almost exclusively white, it’s difficult for me to convince a lot of people that I’m more than white, I grew up with white privilege, and I never really had a Hispanic/Latino experience.

I want to be clear, this isn’t me crying about being white, particularly also being male, cis, and generally het. It’s been a privilege for sure that’s opened up a lot of doors that wouldn’t have otherwise been open to me, I’m sure, and I wish I could extend those same rights, opportunities, and safeties to everybody. That said, I feel like a complete outsider to those roots and feel dirty claiming them. Like I’m taking it away, diluting, or appropriating those cultural celebrations from the people who really deserve them. My experiences with the people and the culture is that they’re ecstatic to share it and have people take an interest in it. It’s generally very inclusive, friendly, and they love to treat you (or at least me as a very small boyish looking man) like family. It’s genuinely awesome. I can’t not think of myself as the generic white dude who works a boring office job and says every Spanish word with the whitest accent possible (to be clear I do work an office job, but I do a pretty solid job of pronunciation with EXCELLENT R rolls, trills, etc.) invading a space not made for me.

It’s a really complex topic, one that’s hard to fully articulate, which is what I’ve seen is a consistent thread in writings from mixed race individuals talking about their experiences. I’m friends with a surprisingly large amount of white passing Puerto Rican mixed race people and you’d think I’d talk about it more with them, but no. I probably should, but it’s a personal and somewhat intimate topic to just suddenly spring on people. For now though, I suppose I’m content to observe and appreciate Latin-X culture and people “from a distance” and amplify their voices as much as I can as a white passer.

[ivanaskye]

Alright, Sorting Hat Chats classification it is.

(If you’re not familiar with this particular niche classification system, which is fairly different from traditional hogwarts house classification, click the link above)

Wei Wuxian, of course, is a gryffindor primary. He has a strong set of beliefs about what morality is (eg: genocide is Bad), and nothing can shake those beliefs out of him. He will abandon everything for the sake of justice, and does.

This, of course, is not what the world around him expects or wants him to do.

For the majority of his life, his nearest companions and counterpoints are his siblings—who are both slytherin primaries.  It’s not that Jiang Cheng doesn’t care about morality, or about the plight of the Wen remnants, but he will always put his people first.  And if the rest of the world says that anyone who helps the Wens will themself be destroyed, then of course he won’t help them. He has all of Lotus Pier to care for, after all. And ideally, he also has Wei Wuxian to care for, Wei Wuxian who for some reason can’t care for himself and just let all these people die, like a normal person.

(Readmore because this ended up being 3000 words, oops)

Jiang Yanli is a somewhat more… functional slytherin primary, at least as not advocating for genocide goes.  She, like her brother, cares for Her People—a smaller category for her, mostly consisting of her siblings and Jin Zixuan. Basically, the people she gives soup to. Soup Is Love.  Unfortunately, where her mental state really suffers is in the fact that she herself doesn’t seem to qualify as one of Her People. Doing things for her own sake is very difficult for her, as we see with her, uh, strained courtship with her future husband.

Due to growing up with these two, Wei Wuxian has also developed a slytherin primary model—which is to say, he can fake being a slytherin primary himself, and that ‘fakery’ is at least partially true to him… just not the whole truth, or the deepest truth. His People matter greatly to him (and like Yanli, he doesn’t seem to be one of His People)… but if it comes to a choice between his family and the right thing, he’ll choose the right thing. And because he’s modeled so very convincingly, they will all be shocked.

As for Wei Wuxian’s secondary, it appears to also be a gryffindor secondary. Sure, he can adapt in the moment like a slytherin, but when it comes right down to it—when Wen Qing meets him in the street and tells him to please, please help save her brother—he walks a direct and unwavering path. He just does it, throws himself completely into an action that will change his entire life and push him away from the rest of the entire world. That FUCK IT I’M DOING IT attitude also applies to choosing to give his core to Jiang Cheng, to somehow stubbornly surviving the burial mounds, to his (book!) confession to Lan Wangji while being garroted. If this boy decides to do something, he will do it.

(But yes, when it’s not the worst moments, he will model a slytherin secondary as well. See: everything he ever does at terrible banquets. And at some level, his decision to do something very unusual—demonic cultivation—as a way to adapt to losing his golden core and then being thrown into hell, fits this model as well. Certainly the people around him think that it does. But once again, if you press too hard on him, he’ll reveal himself as the gryffindor he really is.)

Unfortunately for everyone who has been mistaken for being Wei Wuxian, Jiang Cheng is also a gryffindor secondary.  With an extra emphasis on not thinking things through in advance.  I love the grape but he’s not exactly a pinnacle of functionality.

Rounding out the Yunmeng Trio analysis, Jiang Yanli appears to be a hufflepuff secondary. Hufflepuff secondaries achieve their goals with consistent, long-term work, and that’s what she does. With soup. Consistent, long-term soup. Hey, don’t knock it, it’s worked pretty well for her.

Moving over to Cloud Recesses, let’s start with the one who’s stated the way his morality works directly: Lan Xichen. He says that he read every book in the library, looking for the meaning of right and wrong, the answers to how the world works. This desire to find and/or construct a worldview, a moral system is classic of a ravenclaw primary. Of course, the fact that he constructs his morality from evidence/books/etc rather than just feeling his way through it doesn’t necessarily mean he does it very well. But he’s doing his best, okay. He’s doing his best.

Lan Wangji is also a ravenclaw primary, although unlike his brother, he initially fully believed in the rules he was presented. Up until he met one terrible smiling boy, the 3000 rules of the Gusu Lan sect worked fine for him as a system. It was fine!!! And then the Jin clan started killing innocents and only chaotic, rule-scorning Wei Wuxian stood up for them.  And if that weren’t bad enough, once he did, everyone started telling lies about him.  Did they ever care about the truth??? They said they cared about the truth.  Clearly, Lan Wangji needed a better moral system.  So that’s what he works on, from that moment. He pays attention to what happens around him and constructs something for himself, not something he’s been told, not something from books. His own truth, for him.

Of course, that’s not a very fast processes, and indeed it’s not quite fast enough to give Wei Wuxian the support he needs before things go very, very far downhill. (Which he regrets deeply for sixteen whole years). However, tellingly, despite the fact that it isn’t a fast process, it’s one he is quite capable of, and one that doesn’t break him. We as viewers SEE the moment his entire worldview crumbles before his eyes, and he… recovers. This is also classic of ravenclaw primaries, who only burn—lose their confidence in their moral core and break inside—if they lose faith in their ability to construct a moral system, not just in whatever they happen to believe at the time.

Speaking of losing faith in their ability to construct a morality at all, though… poor Lan Xichen. He almost definitely burns at the end of the series—he thought he knew Jin Guangyao, he thought he could trust his judgement, he thought—and I’m not too convinced seclusion will help.

Lan Wangji is also a hufflepuff secondary… which unfortunately is another reason he’s just a little too slow to help Wei Wuxian before his death. He doesn’t react in the moment, he builds. And in fact, I strongly suspect that his unwavering consistency is part of why he retains such a good reputation even after so many people saw him try to save Wei Wuxian from that cliff. He’s still Hanguang-Jun, he’s still the one who goes where the chaos is, the one who can be counted on. Another very useful thing about his secondary is what it allows him to do for Wei Wuxian after he resurrects—be there for him. Be a constant support, anticipating needs and showing his love with actions. I’m going to cry okay.

Lan Xichen, on the other hand, is a slytherin secondary. He is at his most effective when he reacts—typically, by diffusing diplomatic incidents as they occur, or at least trying very hard to. His secondary also shows up in actions such as spur-of-the-moment deciding to flirt with Jin Guangyao, spur-of-the-moment deciding to tell Wei Wuxian all of Lan Wangji’s trauma, deciding to go to the Guanyin Temple to confront Jin Guangyao and just hoping it’ll work out… and so on.

About Jin Guangyao himself, he’s a fairly classic slytherin primary. He wants to get ahead—whatever the cost. Despite this, though, the “me and My People” portion of his primary shows up a number of times. He almost certainly really does care about Lan Xichen, and very likely cares about Qin Su as well. The book also makes it clear that many of his actions—for instance, creating the temple to begin with—are about caring about his mother. In a kinder world, he would have done far fewer of the terrible things he did, if any ‘terrible’ things at all.

As for Jin Guangyao’s secondary, that would probably be a ravenclaw secondary. Many of his effective actions—the infiltration of Nightless City, the two-birds-with-one-stone disposal of his son and a troublesome opposing clan—come about via plans. Despite this, though, we often see him trying to adapt to moment-by-moment changes like a slytherin secondary… however, that’s mostly because he’s forced into a very tight timeframe by certain letters sent to him telling him that he will be destroyed within a week. And of course, the person who sent those letters would be too smart to use that tactic if he knew Jin Guangyao was at his best when adapting.

Speaking of that letter-writer, a certain head-shaker… Nie Huaisang is one of those characters whose secondary is more interesting/important to his analysis than his primary, but I’m going to start with his primary anyway. Like many others in this story, he’s a slytherin primary. His main motivation for his main actions really is revenge for his brother… with a side dish of bringing back his friend from the dead, oh, and clearing that friend’s name. As a treat.

How he does that, however, is where it gets really interesting. Because he’s almost certainly a hufflepuff secondary, which is not only somewhat underrepresented in media to begin with, but is almost never seen as the secondary of outright masterminds. But that’s what he is! He achieves his goals through slow, slow, constant work. In fact, one of the pillars he needed to enact his goals was being seen so thoroughly as uselessness—and that took time. He may not be the best at cultivating cultivation, but he cultivates an image better than any of his peers.

Moving clans again, Wen Qing is another slytherin primary, motivated almost entirely by care for Her People, and especially her brother. Her secondary is a little harder to pin down, but the detail from the book that she’s the one who created the core-swapping procedure hints toward ravenclaw secondary. If only more of her problems could be solved by just letting her study medicine in peace.

Wen Ning, however, is probably a hufflepuff primary. The moral core of hufflepuff primaries is believing that all people are people, therefore caring for the common good and for fairness, and I think he has all of those things. Of course, the potential flaw in hufflepuff primaries is classifying some people out of that all-people-are-people personhood, which Wen Ning never does… but many, many, many people do to him. Ouch.

Wen Ning’s secondary is probably a slytherin secondary—he adapts in the moment. You can see this in one of his first major decisions, to help Wei Wuxian at Lotus Pier… by poisoning everyone’s wine. Hey! It’s what he had on hand! (Later, grass is what he has on hand when he wants to disguise himself, to… some sort of effect.) From what we hear (it’s not shown on screen or on-page directly), his standing up for the other Wen refugees at the concentration camp Qiongqi Way was also a spur of the moment decision. As was going up to Lan Sizhui the instant he figured out he’s A-Yuan. Or going up to Jiang Cheng and asking him to draw Suibian. Wen Ning makes a lot of very sudden executive decisions, okay.

As for the Wen who instigated it all (especially in show canon), Wen Ruohan… is probably a bog-standard evil-style slytherin primary. He cares about himself, and that’s it. His secondary is probably a gryffindor secondary—he doesn’t “plan” or “build things” or “improvise” as much as he just throws power around as he feels like it. Even in the show canon where he does a little more sort-of planning by testing out the Yin Iron, he’s still mostly just throwing zombies at his problems.

It’s also safe to say Wen Chao inherited both his father’s primary and secondary. He has the same morals, or lack of them—and the same rough approach to problems of “Can I kill it? Can I threaten it? Can I torture it?”

Wen Zhuliu, on the other hand, is a little more interesting. His slytherin primary centers more on people other than himself, and his unending loyalty to them—too bad that the people in question are the worst people possible, jfc Wen Zhuliu, please just quit your job. Speaking of jobs, he seems to have the subtle thoroughness of a hufflepuff secondary, though he’s not really explored long enough to say for sure.

One of the final members of the flashback cast, Nie Mingjue, is a good example of the potential pitfalls of a hufflepuff primary. He truly does seem to care about Protecting The People, As A Whole—he just eventually defines anyone with the name “Wen” right out of personhood. Oops. His methodology seems in line with a gryffindor secondary, preferring direct and clear actions, though unlike some people (cough, Wen Chao, cough), he is capable of thinking through his actions, which is why he’s a good general. At least until he explodes all of his tendons.

Moving into the future, (and okay, also a couple of episodes of the flashback in the show, but whatever), let’s look at our Yi City characters, starting with Xue Yang. He’s yet another slytherin primary, one who’s spent very likely his entire life caring only about himself… until he’s neck-deep in an extensive revenge plan against Xiao Xingchen and??? Falls in love??? The worst love??? I’d ask him if he’s okay, but he’s not. He of course only fully realizes how much he cared about Xiao Xingchen once the latter kills himself, oops.

Xue Yang is also a gryffindor secondary. This is most evident when he says, paraphrased, “I don’t lie or exaggerate, if I say I’m going to kill an entire clan, I kill that entire clan, down to the last dog.” That’s uh… very gryffindor secondary! Just of the worst possible kind!

Xiao Xingchen, on the other hand… is our only other gryffindor primary besides Wei Wuxian. And in some ways, he’s a cautionary tale of one.  He has principles, he believes… and somehow, among his beliefs are a lot of trust. Like, a lot of trust. Like ‘live in a town and hunt together with this guy for three years and not even ask him his freaking name’ levels of trust. (So… the exact opposite of Wei Wuxian’s problems.) This goes as horribly for him as it could possibly go. Poor dude.

As for his secondary… I have no idea. He’s shown having very few goals other than just ambiantly being a good person (and being gay), so it’s hard to say what methods he uses to accomplish those goals.

A-Qing, however, has a pretty fun secondary, though let’s stop by her primary for a second to mention that she’s a slytherin primary. Much like Xue Yang, Her People have for a very long time only been her, until she meets Xiao Xingchen. (This is perhaps the only way in which she is like Xue Yang.) Her secondary is a slytherin secondary—she’s a reactive, adaptive girl who can think on her toes well enough to not only steal, but to get herself adopted by some passing Taoist. #Goals. Even her willingness to walk right onto Xue Yang’s sword to prove that she really is blind is evidence of a very successful slytherin secondary.

As for Song Lan… I just don’t have a read on him. Sorry.

With those covered, that means it’s time to move onto the juniors.  Starting with Jin Ling, who… seems to be in the process of figuring out his moral core. Who repeatedly gets his entire life shaken with revelations, but is somehow standing and working through it the next day (more so than Jiang Cheng, though that’s not exactly tight competition). What I’m saying here is, despite every possible appearance, Jin Ling is a ravenclaw primary. I’m… sorry, I think? Oh, who am I kidding, I love this disaster ravenclaw primary.

Speaking of how he’s a complete disaster, it’s pretty safe to say that Jin Ling is a gryffindor secondary. Thinking about things ahead of time? Not rushing into things like, oh, a man-eating bunker, or perhaps a dramatic confrontation at a temple? Fake.

Moving to the opposite end of the functioning spectrum, Lan Sizhui appears to be a hufflepuff primary. He cares about each person, and affirms the value of all people—even disregarded crazy people, like Wei Wuxian is pretending to be in the first episode. And if he’s inherited his uncle Wen Ning’s primary, he’s also inherited his adoptive father’s hufflepuff secondary, being a reliable presence to everyone around him.

As for the other two main juniors, Lan Jingyi and Ouyang Zizhen… I’m not sure. They’re still developing as people, and neither are in a position to make a lot of major decisions. So there’s many options.

And…. that’s it! Tl;dr:

Wei Wuxian: gryffindor primary (with slytherin primary model), gryffindor secondary (with slytherin secondary model

Lan Wangji: ravenclaw primary, hufflepuff secondary

Jiang Cheng: slytherin/gryffindor

Jiang Yanli: slytherin/hufflepuff

Lan Xichen: ravenclaw/slytherin

Jin Guangyao: slytherin/ravenclaw

Nie Huaisang: slytherin/hufflepuff

Wen Qing: slytherin/ravenclaw

Wen Ning: hufflepuff/slytherin

Wen Ruohan: slytherin/gryffindor

Wen Chao: slytherin/gryffindor

Wen Zhuliu: slytherin/hufflepuff

Nie Mingjue: hufflepuff/gryffindor

Xue Yang: slytherin/gryffindor

Xiao Xingchen: gryffindor/???

A-Qing: slytherin/slytherin

Jin Ling: ravenclaw/gryffindor

Lan Sizhui: hufflepuff/hufflepuff

[peepingtoad]

@kyugens​ said: Does Jiraiya resent Hiruzen in any way, for the way he handled things regarding Orochimaru, Minato and even Naruto? And even so, is Jiraiya aware of the Third's tendencies to oversee Danzo's vile plans, and how that's affected negatively the village? Does Jiraiya wish he could've done something differently about that? | headcanon asks | always accepting! |

I believe there are a number of things that Jiraiya resents Hiruzen for, the above included—but I think it’s still important, before I go into it, to say that Jiraiya still holds a lot of love and respect for the man, and would never place all the blame on his shoulders for the world’s ills. Especially as he grows older and realises that his own choices during difficult times had consequences, he does have faith that Hiruzen really did have the best interests of the Village at heart... mostly, and even if that in itself was often at odds with his own beliefs of treating people with humanity regardless of where they come from. Even so, he is left in the end with very complex feelings around Hiruzen for a number of reasons.

It’s probably safe to assume that while the Sannin were growing up, they probably thought Hiruzen was the bees knees. I mean, they were being taught personally by the Hokage himself—how cool is that? I believe that Jiraiya considered him very trustworthy, what with Hiruzen being his only male role model, to the point where I headcanon he was the only one Jiraiya told about Gamamaru’s prophecy after he first heard it. This is how I believe a young Jiraiya was allowed to travel the world for a little while even before taking on a genin team of his own (as per filler, which I have happily cherrypicked).

But as far the other scant material we’re given goes, I’d say that the big turning point for them all comes with how the Second War was conducted. Namely, Hiruzen’s refusal to hear Tsunade out regarding the need for more focus on the medical field, which without a doubt shocked Jiraiya (I think I recall seeing him in the background of that scene). He would have expected, being both on the frontlines and close to Hiruzen, that their opinions on the state of affairs would be taken very seriously, so seeing one of their trio being brushed aside definitely stung—and would sting the more their comrades dropped like flies all around them, as realisation sunk in that they were reduced to cannon fodder, with medical support limited to Tsunade and perhaps a few others who had informally discovered a flair for it at the time.

Next comes the relatively light consequences he faced for remaining in Ame for three years to train the orphans, which again Jiraiya (perhaps naively) saw at first as Hiruzen respecting his dreams of realising the prophecy. Given the implication that this is where the Sannin really begin to fall apart, my headcanon is that the years following his return saw him being utilised more for espionage than before, leading him to find his niche as an adept spy... with the downside of not being home enough to reconnect with his friends (whether Tsunade has already gone by that point is variable for me in RP terms, but I like to think she was allowed to stop fighting and establish proper training for medical-nin when it became clear there would be a Third War). 

Of course, there then comes the point where Hiruzen offers Jiraiya the Hokage seat for the first time, which frankly floors him given he’d never expressed an interest before. Worse than that, however, is the fact it drives a more decisive wedge between himself and Orochimaru. This would become a source of resentment as it seemed almost like a deliberate move to pit them against each other or even a cowardly means on Hiruzen’s part to divert Orochimaru’s bitterness away from himself—either that, or the old man was acting on the misguided belief that things were well enough between them that Orochimaru would simply fall into line with Jiraiya becoming the leader. Not to mention, Jiraiya couldn’t help suspecting that there were those who would see him shackled to the village rather than going out into the world and seeking change his own way, rather than the village’s. And after learning what became of Sakumo under Hiruzen’s watch, who could blame him for becoming suspicious of every move?

But I think it’s important to recognise that ROOT, even at this point, was still highly secretive to the point where Jiraiya clearly didn’t have any idea as to its involvement with the death of Yahiko—which, of course, had been reported to Jiraiya as all three of the orphans’ deaths (which I believe was directly and deliberately Danzō’s doing, but for the sake of brevity I’ll maybe go into that another time... tbh I can’t even remember if I’ve written this in a headcanon to date). It wouldn’t be until shortly before the Uchiha Clan Massacre that Jiraiya would gain even an inkling as to how truly bad ROOT was, his only knowledge prior to then being that Orochimaru was able to get away with unethical experiments for so long thanks to being part of ROOT. However by the time the Uchiha Massacre was impending and he confronted his fleeing ex-students, he gained some small insight into the powers behind Hiruzen that he realised could never be ousted while Hiruzen was still in the Hokage seat (which naturally led him to the force of nature that is Tsunade upon Hiruzen’s death, knowing that he would forever be needed far afield).

Of course, by this point Minato, who was the one person Jiraiya truly believed could have changed things, had already perished. While Jiraiya doesn’t place blame on Hiruzen for the fact he and Kushina died (because truly at the time, he was too busy wondering ‘could I have stopped it’), he was aware that Minato himself had entrusted Hiruzen specifically with Naruto’s upbringing. His late student equipped him with the details of Naruto’s seal and the warning of the masked man on purpose, so that he could go on to discover the culprit and put a stop to them where a Hokage couldn’t—and awful as it was, taking on the duty of working in the background was an easy enough thing for a grieving Jiraiya to accept at this point, knowing he’d not be in any position to raise a child (read: knows but won’t admit he is depressed, see the linked headcanon which sort of answers a lot of this question in general now that I look back on it).

By the time we come to the big man’s official First Appearance, with the hindsight of the entire story (and my embellishments) at my disposal, I think the bad blood is pretty clear by the fact he directly tells Ebisu not to let Hiruzen know of his return at all. We don’t see him speak to Hiruzen even once between returning to Konoha after twelve years and the old man’s death, which I think says a lot, and revisiting these themes now I can see a lot of that being to do with what he allowed to fly in terms of ROOT and Danzō, but also what he learns of how Naruto was raised... for which there is really no excuse, because even if Jiraiya also wasn’t around, Naruto could have at least been afforded knowledge of what he was, as per his parents’ wishes (and again, I think Jiraiya was encouraged to go off and do his thing because that secret would not remain safe with him while Naruto was small). Then there’s also the matter of him not going to Hiruzen’s funeral, instead going to the place where he had fond childhood memories to mourn in private—because they really were the only fond ones he had from before Hiruzen became so apathetic.

... So in essence, yeah. Jiraiya’s full of resentment, as much as I think the child in him does still love Hiruzen. In fact, I believe Hiruzen was the prime example of why Jiraiya never wanted to set foot into that office as Konoha’s ruler. However I do think that he recognises where he could have focused his own energies more on the village—for example, had he returned upon learning that there was foul play involved with the Uchiha Clan Massacre, he might even have found out that not all of the Ame kids died, or something else that could have prevented him going into Ame blind to die. But of course, that is a choice he recognises as his own. It was between focusing on cleaning up Konoha and getting embroiled in that whole mess with nobody who would realistically back him up (after helping two fugitives—one being Hiruzen’s own son—to escape no less, as per my headcanon), or allowing those who orchestrated the Kyūbi attack to go unchecked.

TL;DR it’s complicated. He resents Hiruzen, he wishes he could have changed things, but knows what else he would have risked going unchecked to do so.

[kakaji]

HOW THE CONQUEST OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES PARALLELS THE CONQUEST OF NATURE by John Mohawk

For some twenty years I’ve been doing a range of writing, including journalism, as a hobby. As a writer I have brought people a lot of bad news. Describing the fortunes of this hemisphere’s and to some degree other hemispheres’ indigenous peoples provides an endless sequence of bad news. At one time I was the editor of the largest American Indian publication in the Americas, Akwesasne Notes, which dealt with ideas that at the time were definitely not mainstream. I remember putting out issues in which we raised questions about the nature of the relationship of the human spirit to the natural world and broached the idea that human-created societies are inappropriately distanced from the physical realities of the world. We talked about areas of philosophical thought that have not been explored to their depths in the English language, although I imagine they’ve been explored at some depth in other languages.

Lately, though, my thinking has been shaped by my official career. I teach social history, a subject not usually associated with ecology, although I think it’s high time to make that connection. But first let me mention some of the issues I find myself grappling with in social history, which deals broadly with people’s everyday lived experiences in different cultural contexts and also with how people come to think and feel the way they do about what they encounter in the world.

I became interested in social history when I was in college, a small and conservative and Eurocentric college. In those days undergraduates were required to take a course in philosophy; in the course I signed up for I learned that there was really only one genre of philosophers, who occupied a narrow niche in the world of thought: they were all Western European, they were all male, they were all from what we would describe as the elite privileged classes, and as a whole they stayed within a set of boundaries they defined for themselves. They belonged to a club, as it were. Each one was required to know what was said by the preceding one, and each one was required to build on that. If a student asked the professor, for example, if there were any philosophers in China or Africa, the more or less curt reply was, Not that I know of, and stick to the book.

Having been exposed since then to the ideas of people of many different cultures, I ask myself why these ideas are not part of the overall survey of philosophy even though the profession has loosened its collar a little bit in the thirty years since I was a student. After all, there certainly can’t have been only one stream of knowledge in all of history. I think we need to study Western civilization in order to understand when certain narrow and limited ways of thinking first appeared and where we went wrong. Therefore, I dutifully went back and started reading about the foundations of Western thought, trying to understand it in the light of other cultures.

As I studied Greek philosophy, I asked myself, Who were these Greeks, who gave us what we think of as the foundation of our thought, of our culture, and gave us our ideas about nature and society? I soon made a distinction between what the Greeks said and what they did. My philosophy professor had described a group of men sitting under a tree philosophizing; I saw them as an arrogant bunch who thought they had a new and better way to think about the world. But what were the Greeks actually doing? They were the creators of the most astonishing military organization in the world, building on centuries, even millennia, of military experience. Some clever people with good administrative and organizational skills put together armies that were able to march across the world and defeat everybody in their path relatively easily.

Classical Greece is taken as the starting point of European history, but actually Greece was old by the time of the classical Greeks. Over thousands of years the populations of the Mediterranean had been conquered numerous times before the formation of the Greek city-states we associate with classical Greek culture. By the time we get to the Romans, all of the peoples had been Hellenized. It is difficult to find anything resembling the remains of an indigenous Mediterranean culture.

This lack of indigenous culture leads me to William McNeill’s observations in The Rise of the West. He points out that the utopian religions which appeared in the two centuries before and after Christ arose out of rootless urban populations who had no consciousness of place. Successive waves of conquest destroyed any continuity of culture. This tied in with my reading of Isaiah Berlin’s The Crooked Timber of Humanity, in which he points out that episodes of horrific human slaughter and devastation throughout history often are the product of utopian ideologies.

Utopian ideology in the context in which I’m using the term means that people have an idea, they have a plan, and according to their plan a utopian society is at the end of their path. All of humankind’s problems are going to be solved by reaching this goal. But usually while they’re pursuing their goal, they discover that there are other people who are standing in their way or at least occupying ground needed for them to carry it out. You can’t have a utopian society unless you’re willing to crack a few eggs, as it were, and it’s almost always necessary to crack other people’s eggs to get there.

Understanding the nature of utopian ideology helps us find answers to certain troubling historical questions. In Hitler’s Willing Executioners Daniel Goldhagen asks, How could average everyday ordinary churchgoing Germans, who we all know were fully acculturated twentieth-century Western civilization people, get up in the morning, walk outside, shoot women and children in cold blood, and then come back in the evening and have supper as though they were doing nothing more than making widgets? How could people act in such a cold-blooded manner? Well, all we have to do is follow the real story of Western civilization and we’ll see that there has been episode after episode after episode of people getting up in the morning, going out, and murdering people. I think it started in what we call the modern era at that moment when Western Europe exploded out of Europe and expanded all over the world, beginning in the 1450s when the level of intolerance in European societies rose enormously. Pogroms were started against the Jews, and then in 1492 the Jews were expelled from Spain. What we have is a pattern of behavior of utterly unbelievable cruelty in a society that claims to be civilized.

Another example of the consequences of utopian ideology is the campaign against magic during the three hundred years starting around 1450. Individuals who had a spiritual relationship with plants or animals were considered to be practicing magic. In the 1600s it was believed that these people had renounced Christ and were in league with the devil, who promised them the powers of nature in return, powers they then used against their enemies. This same belief that people making use of the powers of nature must be getting their magic from the devil prevailed in New England: when John Mason or Cotton Mather railed against the practices of the Indians, they were really railing against nature as an evil power, an evil power that must be controlled, overcome, and stamped out.

Witches weren’t going to admit to using magic, so a certain amount of coercive force was required, and the Inquisition was invented in order to drag people into dungeons and twist their limbs until they confessed and even named their neighbors, who were then brought in and treated similarly. That was the beginning of the witchcraft trials—for the most part involving women, by the way. According to some accounts, millions of people over three centuries were accused, tortured, and burned at the stake. What were they guilty of? They were herbalists; they were herb doctors, who believed that the powers of nature could heal the human body. This belief was a direct threat to the power of the Church, which proclaimed that when Christ ascended to heaven, God the Father and the Holy Spirit went with Christ. Until they returned to earth, the Church was the only possible intermediary between humans and supernatural powers. The success of herbalists in curing their patients contradicted this faith in the sole power of the Church.

The war on magic was a psychological war on nature. It wasn’t waged by individuals but by the major institutions in Western culture—by the Church and the state in collusion with each other. They were not only making war on nature, they were also cracking eggs along the way. People accused of being witches were frequently selected because they had property that was desired by the local authorities, so quite often doing away with a witch proved profitable for the coffers of both town and Church. They took the property, including the land. Multiplied by hundreds of thousands or even millions of people over centuries, the plunder must have amounted to a great deal. You might say that the witches provided the early capitalization for the formation of European nation states.

Classical Greek philosophy also rejected nature-based religion. Let’s turn to Socrates by way of example. What did Socrates say about the people who were in the temples interpreting dreams and making forecasts and telling fortunes? He said it was all nonsense that should be replaced by rational thought. Socrates argued that the world must be based on reason, not on dreams and myths and the like. As far as I am concerned, one of the great fountainheads of Western civilization’s understanding of the human spirit is actually the old Greek myths that Socrates disparaged. They are among the most interesting artistic forms ever produced by the West.

I gradually came to believe that it’s not enough to study the history of philosophy, because what the philosophers are saying is entirely different from what is happening. Socrates lived at a time when the major form of social organization could best be described as either military oligarchy or military dictatorship. That is what the Greek city states really were. As I kept delving deeper, I found that in the history of philosophy the part that deals clearly with what’s really going on is something we don’t ordinarily read in social history, and that is military history. Military historians don’t shrink back from talking about political agendas. A military historian comes right out and says, The agenda here was to plunder; the plan was to use so many cannons, so many of this and that. When military historians study human behavior, they come to the conclusion that the purpose of organized armed aggression is to plunder. Now, that’s something which should be inscribed on the library wall at Columbia: the purpose of organized armed aggression is plunder!

I believe that philosophy was used by Western civilization to obscure the act of plunder by cloaking it in fancier terms. Aristotle could have said, We’re evil exploiters, and we’re going to conquer these people; we have the arms to do it, and we’re going to do it without any bad conscience whatsoever because we have the power and we can get away with it.

He could have said that, but he didn’t. Instead, he developed a rationale for one culture ruling another. What he said was: We’re a community of very bright people, and we need someone to do all the drudgery. We’ll make these other folks do it because if they don’t, we real bright people won’t have any time to sit under a tree and think about how smart we are. We’d have to be hoeing the garden, washing the dishes, and all the rest. But we need time to think, and if we think long and hard enough, we’ll come up with all the answers. In fact, the future of the world lies in the governance of the intelligent people of the world, and the project we will set for ourselves is to define civilization. It’s a project of organized thought that will lead us to solve all of humankind’s problems in science, in engineering, in art, in every arena.

Columbus Day was observed recently. For me Columbus Day is a reminder of the Spaniards’ behavior in the Caribbean between 1492 and 1516. Apologists for the Spanish say the decline in the Indian population was not great because there weren’t that many Indians there. However many Indians there were, by 1516 they were almost all dead. Whether there were 800 thousand or 800 million, let’s not lose track of the point here: there was a catastrophic decline in the Indian population on the major islands the Spanish were occupying. Another point needs to be made: one of the books I read said that the Indians were killed off by diseases. No they weren’t. They were not killed off by diseases. The viral diseases the Spanish had that devastated Mexico didn’t reach the Caribbean islands until 1518 or 1519.

What happened during that generation-long occupation of Hispaniola, Cuba, Puerto Rico? In his book The Conquest of America Stzvetan Todorov raises the question of how the Spanish could be so callously indifferent to the lives of the Indians on the Caribbean islands. The same question applies to the Spanish on the mainland of Central America and South America and to the English and then the Dutch in North America. How could they? How can there be greater indifference to human life than was exhibited in the African slave trade? Western civilization is filled with such episodes.

Let’s consider the Caribbean islands. What do the major works (excluding Kirk Sale’s book,The Conquest of Paradise) say about the Caribbean islands? Samuel Morison says in Admiral of the Ocean Sea that it was unfortunate the Indian population declined at that time; the Spanish didn’t want the Indians to disappear, it just happened. Or take Lewis Hanke’s book, Aristotle and the American Indians. Hanke reports the existence of torture factories on the Caribbean islands. The purpose of such cruelty was not merely to extract wealth, although wealth was certainly one of the prospects; it went way beyond that. There were torture manuals that recommended using green wood instead of dry wood to prolong the time it takes to burn somebody to death.

In the late sixteenth-century the Dutch artist Theodor De Bry did a series of illustrations based on the reports of Bartholomé de Las Casas, a priest who was offended by the torture. Las Casas wrote thirty pages describing what was happening on the islands. I have to tell you it’s gut-wrenching stuff. Read his descriptions; then read the chapters in Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners and tell me there is a difference between the psychology of those Germans and those Spaniards. The same thing is going on, only the Spanish are a little more artistic. The Germans tended to torture people more at arm’s length, whereas the Spanish were up close and personal about it. And it went on and on for twenty-five years, but it’s essentially an unknown story. You won’t find it in any American history textbook.

The King of Spain was embarrassed by all the reports about the cruelty of the conquistadors. He wasn’t happy that they were getting out of hand and escaping the crown’s control over them, so in 1550 he called for a debate. Juan Gines de Sepulveda and Bartolomé de Las Casas, two priests who were also lawyers, stepped forward to make the arguments. Sepulveda took the point of view of the conquerors. He’s called the father of modern racism because of that. He concocted every excuse he could think of to explain why it was all right for the Spanish to do what they were doing to the Indians, and of course he started off with what the Indians were not—they were not Christian and they were not civilized; therefore, the Spanish were justified in treating them as they did.

Sepulveda would have used pretty much the same language and the same reasoning to explain why the Spanish were justified in doing what they did to the parrots, to the trees, to the fish, to every living organism on those islands: they were all biologically inferior beings lacking the consciousness and culture of Spaniards. They didn’t have any rights and therefore could be enslaved and subjected to whatever the Spanish felt like subjecting them to—and the Spanish didn’t need to have a bad conscience.

I think we look at this kind of racism from the wrong perspective in our culture. The real issue here is not Spanish racism toward the Indians. It’s the Spanish claim to superiority over every group, whether human or nonhuman. Once you believe that one group is better than all the rest, murder is justified, genocide is justified; in fact, any act against nature is justified. The only thing that matters is the aggrandizement of Spanish culture.

In all of the literature about what’s happening to indigenous peoples, John Bodley’s book Victims of Progress, on the conquest of indigenous peoples in South America today, seems to spend the most amount of time looking at how people rationalize to themselves their right to seize land, to move other people out of the way, to move plants and animals out of the way—all in order to meet the development needs of modern industrial society. They can do this because of their belief system that says what they are doing is not only not wrong, it has to be done in order to create a world which will be able to solve all of humankind’s problems in the future.

What will the payoff be?  One view is that through science we will someday conquer the major diseases of the world, and we’ll be able to live forever. How you get from that idea, by the way, to the idea that it’s all right to bulldoze huge areas in the name of curing cancer is a tremendous leap. Curing cancer has nothing to do with plundering. There’s not a single thing in the way of plundering the earth or destroying peoples that is necessary in order for scientists to be doing research on cancer. The two aren’t connected at all, although when you talk to people, right away they say, Well, we have to do this because we have to cure cancer. What? You have to be two hundred miles from the nearest road killing trees in order to cure cancer?

Think about the Germans in World War Two and the fact that not only were they willing to kill people but they were completely without conscience about it. Most of us look back at that period with horror and ask, How could they have done that? And we say, Well, they were just a little clique of criminals at the top of an aberrant order who had this crazy idea for a while. I encourage people who believe this to read Goldhagen’s book, which claims they weren’t a little clique of criminals at all. According to him, the whole of German society was in on it because they had so valued themselves and so devalued everyone else, not just the Jews. Given that pervasive mentality long enough, most of us would be affected by it too.

The core of Hitler’s message was that Germans as the privileged few deserved to have the fruits of the earth. All the others were in the way, taking up space and resources that should be Germany’s rightful inheritance. So this was not only about race; it was one of the largest projects of armed plundering in world history. But people can’t get up in the morning and say, Oh, we’re pirates and thieves and murderers, and we’re out to plunder. You can’t say that, and the Germans couldn’t either. The Germans said, We’re the master race, we’re the perfect example of humanity, and we’re going to solve all the world’s problems. The same thing the Spanish said.

Those Germans never stopped to reflect about what they were doing, never asked themselves if what they were doing might be wrong. Those Spaniards never stopped to reflect, either. All through history, groups who plundered—like the American miners in California and the American military in the northern Great Plains—never reflected. They built up utopian ideologies that protected them from their conscience. This raises the question in my mind, What about us? Are we like that? Are we blind? Do we have no conscience? Are we so sure we’re on the right path, the right and necessary path, that we have no choice but to follow it and sometimes crack a few eggs? Do we share that attitude?

Every day about forty thousand children die worldwide from preventable causes. You have to look hard to find the literature about it, but there are publications like the United Nations reportThe Fate of the Earth’s Children and Frances Moore Lappé’s Hunger: Twelve Myths. Some of these children die from diarrhea, which can be caused by bad water, but usually it’s assumed that the major cause is the lack of enough food in the world to sustain the poorest people. Lappé says that’s not true. There is enough food, but poor people don’t have the money to buy it. It’s a question of distribution.

What should we do? We should find a way to get food to poor people, shouldn’t we? But that’s not happening. What is in fact happening is that the major financial institutions in the world are imposing something called Structural Adjustment Programs on governments in poor countries. These programs are designed to create hunger. They specifically forbid countries that have a lot of poor people from subsidizing food, and they demand that measures be taken to drive down wages in those countries. The point is to make the poorest people in the world subsidize the richest people in the world by keeping labor at the lowest possible cost. We know that for every percentage point of deprivation they suffer, a number of people will die.

We know this, but we’re willing to live with it. We’re willing to be consciously ignorant. Beyond the fact of hunger is the fact that the engine driving it is the same engine—the same thinking, the same structured institutions—that is driving the destruction of forests and the extinction of animal species, that is at this very moment driving the extinction of the great fishes of the sea, of whole species of plants and animals in many parts of the world. But this is happening far from our vision. Here in New England reforestation is actually taking place. We’re not cutting our trees because we’re cutting somebody else’s. We don’t notice that our newspapers still come from trees, because they don’t come from trees here. For a long time I believed the problem was that people don’t have enough of a connection with nature, and that’s why they’re able to do the things that they do. I don’t believe that anymore.

I publish Daybreak, a magazine in which you’ll find stories about indigenous people trying to think through the issues of free trade and globalization, trying to figure out where they stand, what action they should be taking. Essentially, the purpose of the politics of the intellectual movement of the American Indians in the hemisphere as a whole and certainly in the southern hemisphere is to encourage biological diversity and encourage local food production for local consumption—the kinds of things Schumacher talked about.

Indians understand that self-sufficiency is the antithesis of the global economy. And I think we need to understand that the global economy is playing a major role in the destruction of our natural resources and of species and is rationalizing that destruction in terms of John Locke’s definition of what is rational. According to Locke, rational thought leads you to do that which produces the maximum amount of money for you. This means even down to destroying the last tree, the last fish. As a result of rational thought you try to transform nature into money. Locke argues that it’s a wonderful thing to have money because it transforms our wealth derived from nature into something solid and concrete. Of course, money is not solid and concrete anymore; it’s not even plastic anymore. It’s electronic money we’re dealing with now.

I propose to you that we live in an age of utopian excess that is driving us away from doing what would be sustainable and survivable and is diverting us into participating, in ways we’re not even conscious of, in activities that are destructive in the long term. A good example of this is the electronic information revolution. This revolution will sweep most of us along, whether we want to go or not—in the same way that my ancestors were dragged kicking and screaming into the print revolution. We’ll have to join it because it’s a way of communicating. Some people think the electronic information revolution is going to solve all our problems—the same kind of utopian stuff I’ve been talking about.

Read Wired magazine. It reads as though people have lost their minds. It asks questions like, Is the world growing a brain? No! But our brains are going dead! People who think in the wired mode see a marvelous world of opportunity, without asking themselves, opportunity for whom and opportunity to do what? The information age is concentrating wealth in the hands of the few who have access to and control of resources. The American middle class is being dismantled, and it’s even cooperating; it’s going quietly to its death!

The plan is to make everyone part of a worldwide web, a worldwide marketplace. Internet users have the same capability to communicate with people in another part of the world as with people right in their hometown. This means, for example, that you’re not going to need accountants from North America anymore. You can buy accountants for six dollars a day in Calcutta. You’re not going to need engineers from North America any more because you’ll be able to get all the engineering skills you need on the other side of the world. The idea is to have fewer people doing more things more cheaply, and the cheapest labor of all is on the other side of the world from us. That’s the long-term prospect. But in fact cheap labor does not solve our problems. The things that really matter in human society are not in computers, and they’re not in any utopian vision about solving all the world’s problems.

We are not going to make it to that place called Utopia, folks. It’s not going to happen. The reality is that for all of our ego, which seems to me colossally large, our life span and the space we occupy are incredibly small, and the distance between here and Utopia is insurmountable.

Human cultures have an enormous capacity to reframe things. Part of our problem in Western culture has to do with how we reframed nature. Cultures that are nature based have reframed nature in ways that have given it life and color and energy and excitement. I went to visit a particular group of Indians living on what you might call a gravel pit. No trees, no grass. Why don’t they plant some grass? The place is a desert as far as the eye can see. You’d look at that landscape and think to yourself, My God, this is one of the most depressing places I’ve ever been; it never rains, it’s always so dry. Then you talk with the Indians, and they bring that place to life for you. The place is full of things you can’t see. Live with the Hopis for a little while; their world is full of spirits that come in from the sky, from the ground. Almost every few days the Hopis perform a ritual of one kind or another to acknowledge the spirits of their place. And what a wonderful world they have.

Once I visited a tribe on the northern Great Plains. I was just sitting there with members of the tribe. I looked around and thought, No trees. But they have something else: a culture, built by the creative internal aspects of human society, that establishes a beneficial relationship between the society and nature. Not between the individual and nature. An individual can’t practice Lakota culture or Hopi culture. You need a whole group of people for that. When that culture exists, it has a sort of magic. You can find people who are part of it and who don’t have very much money, but they are living more happily than the people living in California’s affluent Marin County. Of course, the people in Marin County are trying to find that happiness; they’re trying to find that connectedness, that essence which makes your lived human experience truly lived and human. It exists among Buddhist communities throughout the world, it exists among the Australian aborigines, it exists among Indians in the deep rainforest. These are happy, adjusted people who are not destroying their environment, who are in fact celebrating their environment because they aren’t engaged in utopian thinking. They’re reliving a cycle instead.

To have a utopian vision you must believe that time is linear, that someday life will be better than it is here and now, and you have to sacrifice others in order to make it happen. I think this has been, if I may say so, the history of the West, a series of competing ideas about how we are going to get there. When we get there, we’ll all be happy. And where is there? It may be heaven, for example, or it may be a machine paradise.

The actual trend over the centuries has been toward a politics of conquest and plundering. And we have rationalized our behavior in the context of that conquest and plunder. When we make choices about what we’re going to buy, most of us don’t ask ourselves, How does this purchase implicate me in the plunder? Most of us don’t talk to people who are from Indonesia before we go and buy our Reeboks. Instead, we listen to Michael Jordan saying, I wear these shoes; he’s a great basketball player, so they must be good. Most of us don’t ask ourselves, What’s behind my purchase? Could there be military dictatorship behind it, exploitation of people, destruction of towns and villages, pollution?

In choice after choice that people make, they tend to buy things that come from places which create social orders they’d prefer not to support, but in fact they do choose those products because they can claim innocence of the underlying conditions. So people commonly will buy things in the grocery store that were grown 3000 or 4000 miles away. Most people I know can’t tell me where the clothes they wear were manufactured, who manufactured them, or what the conditions were under which they were manufactured. We’re all like the television star Kathie Lee Gifford, who started her own line of clothing, which is produced in the Third World. We don’t know anything about it.

I think this kind of information is part of social history. Social history has to do with where the things in your life come from and what the conditions are that produced them and how the conditions that produced them contribute to the life you’re living. It also has to do with what expectations you have concerning the kind of life you might live, with what options you have for choosing the quality of life you want. This kind of information is not offered to people in college. Where do you find courses on values? Show me a course about choosing your options. You can say, Well, of course, it’s not there because if the college offered a course like that, its funding would be jeopardized.

I began by saying I wanted to emphasize the connection between ecology and social history. Once we recognize this connection, we are led to obvious choices. I don’t believe it’s necessary to cut down the rain forests to satisfy consumer demand for cheap lumber. I don’t believe it’s necessary to create conditions that kill 40,000 children every day in order to maintain the world market economy, which in my opinion shouldn’t be retained in its current form. If you believe that’s necessary, then you can support the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, but I personally don’t believe we have to take steps to starve people in the Third World in order to drive down the price of labor. I don’t believe it was necessary to murder all those Indians in the Caribbean. We should step back and ask ourselves some serious questions: Just how much of that world market economy do we really need? What costs are we paying for what we get?

https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/how-the-conquest-of-indigenous-peoples-parallels-the-conquest-of-nature/

[whetstonefires]

Hi. Um, so, this is going to be a little strange, but I just wanted to let you know that I have a strange relationship with your Cirque de Triumphe fics (not bad, but strange). See, um, when I first browsed you on Ao3 I was really interested with the concept and I read each of the summaries, fascinated. But I didnt open any of the fics because at the time I was two days from exams and I had enough self-control to know a 300k+ verse was a bad idea. 1/5

But knowing the premise without the story meant  I imagined what could happen. And then I dismissed things I knew happened in your verse because my one wasn't shaping the same way. So. I accidentally built my own Earth-3. I’m almost certainly never gonna write it (except maybe very loosely because my version of Owlman has somehow broken into my original WIP as a background villain with a namechange and this is how out of control this is getting). But I like it. 2/5

And somehow now Im almost afraid to read your story, because just by being different people the stories won’t be the same. And in general I think those differences are a good thing and I normally like shared AUs and I get how these things normally work. But for some reason, I don’t want to touch any other E-3 verses, not yours or others or even DCs official, because I feel like it would kind of distort mine (?). And I know its a little unfair, but I like having my own little verse. 3/5            

And, yeah. Its not logical, its maybe not fair to you, but. As half the crux is that I’m not reading CdT, it limits my ability to review... but I wanted to tell you that it meant something to me anyway. Just from the most basic outline I got interested, both in E-3 and your ideas specifically. And I do know you are a great author from your other fics and if I ever am settled enough in my verse to browse yours, I know it’s amazing. 4/5             

Ultimately, all I wanted to say was thank you. Even if its not a traditional way of reading a story (or any way), Cirque de Triumph still meant something to me. And I wanted you to know that. 5/5            

Thank you! I’m happy to know that, and I’m glad it means something. ^^ You’re very welcome. Also tumblr hiccupped; these got delivered out of order and one of them was signed, so gosh it’s good you numbered them.

That is honestly both extremely funny and totally relatable. I mostly stopped consuming much Earth-3 content once I was immersed in writing mine, too, because the initial irritation I had with various canon writing decisions that pushed me toward developing my own thing totally ramped up into ‘No That’s WRONG’ feels.

(I mean, partly that’s because it’s popular to write the setting as Dark for Dark’s Sake and that’s more upsetting once you’re emotionally invested, but still.)

I’m actually pretty flattered that the tags and summaries were interesting enough to read through, let alone stick in the mind and provoke interest and new ideas! Because I do put a lot of effort in on the presentation aspects, but I find it harder to evaluate whether I’ve done it ‘well’ than the writing itself. ^^

Obviously I do like it when people read my stuff, and like it even more when they comment approvingly, but I don’t feel cheated of your attention if you’re worried about that! I’m always pleasantly surprised when my Earth-3 stuff gets more than like 2 responses honestly, I’m aware it’s niche. 😆 Thanks for expressing such faith in me, tho.

If you do someday come and check in with my take on these dudes I’ll be excited to hear what you think, but in the meantime godspeed. If you do do just like, one oneshot set within your version of the setting or something, I’d love to see it. The wheel of fan content turns ever onward. 😉

[casual-romantic]

Samurai Love Ballad Party is Pretty Great

For someone with not one but two sideblogs devoted to Samurai Love Ballad Party, I sure do rag on Voltage a lot. So, in the spirit of the holiday (and definitely not because I’m procrastinating real work), a list of reasons why I’m still playing this game eight months in.

Realistic characters No, they’re not realistic in terms of power levels or historical fact, but nearly all of the characters in SLBP feel like real, actual people. Both virtues and faults can be found in abundance. Furthermore, whether a given trait is a virtue or fault can switch depending on the context. This is key to making a character seem real instead of just a list of traits on a spreadsheet.

For example, Mitsuhide is meant to be a perfect samurai. That’s great - until his devotion to duty and people means he might be separated from MC forever. Yukimura’s innocence and faith in people leads to both good things (hooking up with MC, being friends with Saizo) and bad (leaving himself wide open to being taken advantage of).

Distinct characters Despite a sprawling cast, each character is very different from each other and easy to tell apart at a glance.* That's pretty hard to do! SLBP also adheres to a philosophy espoused by OKCupid** back when they did interesting dating math about how some people thinking a person isn't hot only makes that person more attractive to other people.

*Except for their chins. I swear every male character in this game has the exact same jawline.

**Seriously, if you have any interest in otome games and why controversial characters make the most money read that post. OKC used to have the most amazing blog back when it was run by two statisticians.

Historical setting SLBP massages history a lot, but there’s quite a lot that’s actually pretty accurate (or close enough that you can at least recognize the key events when you read a wikipedia article). I like that. I also like that it gives a very interesting canvas for the writers to play with.

If you’ve ever seen Project Runway or a similar competition, you've probably noticed people do their best work when they’ve got a limitation or two stymieing them because it makes them think more creatively. In the case of SLBP, how will they handle Shingen’s well-known end? Nobunaga is the first unifier - what was it like for the people working for and against him at that time? There were more guns in Japan than Europe in the late 1500s - how did that play out on the battlefield? Restaurant workers from Kyoto weren’t likely to meet multiple samurai lords - how do you get around that believably? There’s a lot of neat stuff to delve into.

Complementary relationships If you like one member of the Date clan, you'll probably like the others. Same goes for Kai. Nobunaga's followers are a more mixed bunch, but that's only fitting because he's got the "big tent" strategy going on as the lord with the most territory. This further contributes to the believability of the stories and makes reading them more engaging. Maybe you like Inuchiyo the best, so you normally wouldn't care so much about a ninja event, but Sakuya's good friends with him so you've got a story to look forward to after all.

Many events There's almost always something to do in SLBP. You're not just limited to five free chapters of the main story per day, even if you're free-to-play. Right now we've got ninja event stories and a samurai fair, we just wrapped up Lord of the Draw with extra side stories and items to get, and there's sure to be another battle on the horizon soon. On the very rare occasions when there’s no event, I realize how much I’ve come to rely on that steady flow of extra content.

Engaged marketing team Voltage is very active on multiple social media platforms and, whether or not they can respond, they do see and pay attention to what fans are saying. They're very encouraging of fanworks and are supportive of their player base. Should be par for the course, but shockingly not as common as you would think.

Pretty good writing I am very critical when it comes to writing. I don't like to see typos, I don't want to have to pause and figure out what's going on because the description was confusing, I do want to each character to have their own individual voice, and I want good pacing and storytelling in general. For the most part, SLBP does a good job and I can largely turn off the editor in my brain and enjoy the stories.

(That's why I get so upset when certain stories don't live up to SLBP's usual standard. I go back into editing mode and can't just enjoy Genya flirting with MC.)

Cute side games I like dressing up my avatar and decorating my castle. I like accumulating a bunch of onigiri to get rewards in the tea garden. I like playing the lotteries to see what I get (need those pearls!). They're all nice little distractions that complement the main game but don't need to be played if you don't want to.

Limited player interaction I can do everything I want in the game without interacting with anyone if I want, or I can make a bunch of allies, compete for a fancy dress, and chat up a storm with someone after complimenting their castle. Block options are available for the rare occasion you need to use them. For me, it's just the right amount of interaction with other players.

Unapologetic fanservice Voltage knows what the fans want and is happy to give it to us (...in exchange for pearls). No need to feel embarrassed for wanting to see Shingen with his shirt off. The stories have also gotten noticeably sexier as I've played, which is nice. Well, sex is an important part of most romantic relationships. It's good to know MC is having her needs met, and it's good to know I can re-read certain epilogues whenever I want in my album.

Autism representation This is pretty niche and may not have even been intended, but Mitsunari is almost certainly on the spectrum. But! He's not portrayed as an asshole who thinks he's always right and justifies being a jerk with a (at the time, non-existent) diagnosis. No, he, like most autistic people, is struggling to do better and learn more about how to interact with others. (Also he thinks he’s almost always right.) And his special interests and ability to retain information come in handy a lot, and he has people who understand him and treasure him for who he is, not in spite of it. That's really great.

Anyway, that's my non-exhaustive list of reasons why I actually really love this game. My complaints are only because I want it to be as good as I know it can be. If I really hated it, I'd stop playing and I'd definitely stop buying pearls. XD

[ruffsficstuffplace]

The Viridian Vanguard (Part 14)

Note: We now return to your regularly scheduled weekly updates.

The Plushie Palace’s representative was a gazelle Fae and an Honour, dressed in the luxurious robes of her Order, perfectly tailored to her lithe, tall figure, with the insignia on her chest, the bands on her wrists and ankles, and the threads of her clothes glittering in the sunlight and giving her a radiant, imposing aura.

All the folks in the area noticed her, and immediately took action: those that were near her moved aside and let her through with deference, those that were in her path quickly cleared it, and those that were well out of the way looked, eyes widening, eyebrows raising, before quiet whispers began to fill the air.

By the time she neared Weiss, she, Penny, and Jaune were the only three beings inside the invisible barrier that had suddenly been erected around them.

“Good morning, Weaver Schnee, my name is Honour Sharrar, representing the Plushie Palace,” Sharrar said, extending her hand with a polite, measured smile. “I sincerely apologize for the early hour of my visit, and for any convenience I may have caused you because of it.”

Weiss looked at Sharrar’s impeccably manicured and pristine nails-hooves, then at her own fingernails, already stained with fruit juice and some pulp; she quickly grabbed a napkin and wiped them clean, before she hesitantly reached up and shook hands with Sharrar.

“It’s no trouble at all, Honour...” Weiss said, feeling Sharrar’s firm, strong grip. “Please, take a seat,” Weiss said as she let go, and gestured to the number of empty seats nearby.

“Thank you, Weaver,” Sharrar said, smoothly sliding into one of them, at a polite distance from Weiss. “If you do not mind, I would like to skip the rest of the formalities and go straight into business; as I’m sure Mender Polendina has relayed to you, time is of the essence for this matter.”

“She had, and I don’t mind, Honour,” Weiss replied, unconsciously sitting up straighter, glancing down to check where her hands and arms were placed.

Sharrar nodded, read some notes off her comm-crystal, then said, “The Plushie Palace strongly encourages you to please make your first debt repayment on or before the recently extended deadline, which is exactly two weeks from today, midnight on November 18, 1100 AL by the human calendar, or the 19th day of the Season of Death, year 1407 ATG by the Fae calendar.

“Though my client will continue to assist you financially, via the lower interest rates and more flexible deadlines than normal, alongside other forms of assistance we may offer you in the future, should you prove unable to make the minimum payments for three installments in a row, my client finds proof that you are abusing our good will and/or tarnishing their reputation, and especially if you default, then they will not hesitate to use every single legal and economic means available to them to seek recompense.”

Weiss gulped. “And what would that involve…?” she whispered.

“It was intentionally left unspecified in the contract, as it will depend on a number of factors, such as the hypothetical amounts of the debt repaid and left unpaid, and the decisions of my client. However, some commonly used methods include taxes and penalties to all of your future wages and profits for the next 2-25 years, indentured servitude, and asset forfeiture.

“Please note that almost all of your current assets are exempt from seizure for a variety of reasons, but the Eluna plushie that Trader Scarlatina had gifted to you is not. In fact, my client wishes to inform you that should you choose to relinquish it to them within the next 30 days in adequate condition, they will be all too happy to completely forgive the debt.”

Weiss frowned, and shook her head. “I am afraid that’s not going to be happening, Honour Sharrar.”

“If that is your decision, Weaver Schnee,” Sharrar said coolly. “Do you have any other questions about the debt, and the terms of repayment?”

“None at the moment, Honour,” Weiss said.

“Then there is only one more matter to attend to,” Sharrar said as she crossed out an item on her notes, then looked back to Weiss. “Trader Scarlatina wished for me to personally inform you that majority of the executive board strongly opposed the decision to purchase your debt from the Trader’s Guild, return the collateral to you, and without any sort of replacement of similar, equal, or greater value. She believes it was only through your family’s lifelong patronage and loyalty to the company, the SPC’s support and subsidies for our various projects and daily operations, and her clout as the latest in the Scarlatina line that she convinced them to sign off on the decision.”

Sharrar leaned in, her face darkening dramatically. “For both your sakes, please do your best to show that her faith was not misplaced.”

Weiss paled. “I will.”

Sharrar leaned back and smiled. “Trader Scarlatina will be quite happy to hear that. Our business is concluded; good day, Weaver Schnee, and I wish you a swift recovery,” she said as she gracefully stood up.

“Good day, Honour Sharrar, and thank you,” Weiss said.

Sharrar left, the crowds once more stepping aside and giving way to her, showing deference as she passed by.

“Are all Fae lawyers that scary…?” Jaune asked quietly.

“They are called ‘Honours,’ and no, not unless they are also of Honour Sharrar’s specialty and seniority,” Penny replied. “As you might expect, her position and the nature of her work tend to naturally attract Fae of a certain disposition.”

“So what do we do now?” Weiss asked as she turned her attention back to her plate, idly picking at her food.

“It would be prudent to make concrete short term and long term plans for paying off your debt,” Penny said. “I have actually already prepared a proposal, since Honour Sharrar arrived and reminded us of the loan.”

“Let’s hear it, then!” Weiss said, before she put another piece of fruit into her mouth.

Penny began to explain her plans, and they spent the rest of Weiss’ stay in the hospital putting it to action.

They started with Winter, calling her up via comm-crystal. They managed to catch her in one of the hospital’s baths, leaning back on the edge of the pool, steam and candle smoke rising around her, the holo just large enough to clearly show she was naked without revealing anything scandalous.

“Hello, Weiss,” Winter said serenely. “Did you need something?”

Weiss blushed. “Uh, yes, I do, but maybe I can call back at a later time?”

“If you’re concerned about ruining my relaxation, you were already beaten to the punch,” Winter said.

“Hey, princess,” Qrow said from off-screen.

Weiss thought for a moment, before she shrugged, and said, “So, you remember when I told you we pawned off Eluna, then Velvet bought the debt from the Guild to get her back? Well, the Palace has come to collect...”

Weiss and Penny proceeded to explain the debt, along with sending Winter a graphical representation of Penny’s repayment plan. Winter’s eyes widened at her first look at them, her relaxed expression disappearing as she studied the figures.

“I hadn’t quite realized the value of an Eluna had risen so sharply over the years….” Winter muttered as she pulled aside the charts on her end. “That, and how large a Soul Eater bounty is compared to it.”

“To be fair, we get those motherfuckers at least twice a year, and no one is dying to get one all for themselves,” Qrow said.

“So are you willing to shoulder them for a while...?” Weiss asked, butting in.

“Of course I am, Weiss!” Winter said, smiling. “My funds are your funds, and besides, I’m the one that’s been getting the most utility out of Eluna.”

“Speaking of funds, I don’t know about the others, but I’m still open to you making booze for me, and paying you for your time and effort,” Qrow said. “Just make sure it doesn’t kill me this time.”

“Pardon?” Winter asked.

“It’s a long story.”

“I appreciate the offer, Qrow, but I apologize, I’ve already got different plans when it comes to my alchemy,” Weiss said.

“Eh, no feathers off my wings with that,” Qrow said.

Weiss bade them both farewell, before she hung up, and called Bee next. She was at home, taking a day off from the Terrace, but was happy to hear out her predicament, and her plans to get out of it. “… So, what do you think?” Weiss said by the end of it. “Can it work out, or am I just being overly optimistic?”

“It’ll definitely work!” Bee replied, nodding. “With most of the competition joining the expeditions or about to be understaffed, and the Terrace dedicating most of its resource stores to the repairs, the market’s never been better for small-time producers like you to make a killing, maybe even make the necessary preparations to stick around for the long-term!

“You’ll probably need to specialize in rare and niche products and ingredients, though; the more common and safer stuff is only really profitable if you can make and sell them by the tons, day in, day out.”

“Any recommendations on where to start?”

“Nami and Cheska have got some pretty sizable wishlists, even before this whole titan business. Want me to send you them?”

“Please and thank you!” Weiss said, smiling, before she sighed. “I really appreciate the help, Bee, you don’t know how much this means to me.”

Bee chuckled. “Oh, don’t worry about it! It’s like my father always says, ‘goodwill and kindness is almost always an excellent investment.’”

Weiss nodded, before she frowned. “Hey Bee, can I tell you something personal?”

“I’m all ears,” Bee said, her ears twitching.

“I feel really bad for planning to make a profit out of all this,” Weiss replied. “I helped cause the disaster that made the markets fluctuate as they did, and now it feels like I’m taking advantage of all these folks, too.”

“Don’t be,” Bee said, smiling. “Believe me, every weaver I know has at least ONE story when they accidentally broke an expensive something or somethings when their powers got out of hand—the keys here being ‘accidentally,’ and that they sincerely wanted to make up for it as apology, not for unethical profiteering.”

“Most of those affected have also probably filed claims with the Guild to receive their payouts from Keeper’s Mate insurance,” Penny said.

“There’s Keeper Mate insurance...?” Weiss asked.

“Yep!” Bee said. “How do you think the Council paid for all the services, products, and accidents you’ve gotten, used, or had so far?”

“Huh. In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have been so surprised.”

“Anyway: don’t be afraid to call me again for business or legal advice, especially those related to weavers specifically!” Bee said. “I may not be formally trained in either, but I’ve picked up a lot from my parents over the years.”

“I won’t! Thanks again, Bee!” Weiss said, before she hung up, and made her final call.

“Sup, princess!” Yang said as she picked up, sitting on the couch back at Keeper’s Grove. “Had enough time to think about my offer, I’m hoping?”

“It’s more like the universe has yet again forced my hand, and my answer is yes, I will be your partner in the Pits.” Weiss replied.

Yang cheered and pumped her fist. “Fuck yeah!”

“Please know I will still have to seriously object to any ridiculous pun names, regardless of how much that helps our brand,” Weiss said.

“Oh, don’t worry about that, Weiss!” Yang said. “Pyrrha’s already suggested a suitably badass team name: how’s ‘The Furies’ sound to you?”

“Like the Old World myths?” Weiss asked.

“Exactly!” Yang said, shooting Weiss a finger gun. “The best part is, the copyright for it expires in a week, and we just gotta reserve it before the original owners renew, or someone other team takes it! Then, the three of us will be kicking ass and taking names as ‘The Furies!’”

Weiss nodded. “I’m surprised you managed to convince Pyrrha to join up.”

“And apparently neither of us knew her that well, because she was game for it the moment I floated the idea to her!” Yang asid, chuckling. “Anyway, I promise you won’t regret this, Weiss! The three of us? We’re definitely going places, and take that from someone with a lot of experience in Valentino’s underground fighting circuits!

“Just try not to get hospitalized too often from here on out, alright?” Yang said, winking.

Weiss rolled her eyes, and said, “I’ll sincerely try,” before she hung up, and sighed. “Anything else I need to address ASAP, Penny?”

“None that I am, or can be aware of!” Penny said. “Now, the best course of action is to relax, maintain a positive attitude, and try not to hamper your recovery in any way.”

Weiss nodded, got a glass of water from nearby, and took a long, much needed drink.

“Hey Weiss?” Jaune asked. “Sorry for butting in, but do you think there’s any room for me in your plans?”

“I’m not sure,” Weiss replied as she put her glass down. “Penny?”

“If you’re interested, Jaune, you could always become a server to Weiss,” Penny said. “She will most assuredly need someone to assist her with physically laborious tasks for the foreseeable future, what with how serious her injuries were, my presently being bereft of a fully-equipped body, your being very well suited for the job.”

“I’m warning you though, I probably won’t be able to pay you much, even if I wanted to,” Weiss said.

“That’s okay,” Jaune replied. “I’m really just looking for the experience and the echoes, kinda like what Taiyang said he did when first got here in the Valley.”

“Well in that case, I won’t say no to the help!” Weiss said, extending her hand to Jaune.

Jaune smiled, however wearily. “Thanks.”

They shook, and so began Weiss plans for the rest of that year.

Note: Winter and Qrow were put in the same private bath together (with two watchers and a mender on stand-by) to encourage them to talk, communicate, and defuse any potential heated conflicts that might escalate to violence again.

As much of a drunkard as he is, Qrow is one of the most hardened and seasoned veterans of the Watchers, and the Council has great interest in utilizing Winter’s skills and experience as a former Queensguard.

The Keeper’s team are lumped in with regular Keeper’s Insurance, with some specific costs shouldered by Keeper’s Mate insurance, once they are found.

[thecoroutfitters]

Written by Guest Contributor on The Prepper Journal.

Editors Note: Another guest contribution from valknut79 to The Prepper Journal. As Summer vacation approaches. As always, if you have information for Preppers that you would like to share and be entered into the Prepper Writing Contest with a chance to win one of three Amazon Gift Cards  with the top prize being a $300 card to purchase your own prepping supplies, then enter today!

It takes a certain kind of person to become a prepper. This lifestyle has a certain charm, but because it is often backward-looking, it doesn’t appeal much to the next generation and their instant gratification, tech-savvy lifestyle. That said, kids are one of the main reasons why people turn to preparedness, and protecting and preserving a family is one of the main reasons why people are tuned into the idea of future-proofing their life. When you inevitably pass away, will you have done enough to instill the values of preparedness into your children, so that they can live a safe, stable and prepared life?

Parenting Style

I was never in the military, but my wife and I run a household of very near-military precision. My children say “Yes, sir” and “No Sir” and they follow orders. They know hand signals, and can interpret a glare or a look. When it comes to their behavior, we correct quickly, often, and we always pull them aside for an explanation of why they need to alter their behavior. There is no good-cop-bad-cop between my wife and I. We are both disciplinarians, and we planned it that way from the start.

We make it a habit of saying “no” just for the sake of having our children practice disappointment, and we made sure that they had chores from the age of three. A three-year-old can set the table and get the mail, a four year old can change laundry from wet to dry and drag recycling bins out on garbage day.

Our children have responsibility, and they also are familiar with following orders. Because both Dad and Mom are present as disciplinarians, we have only minimal difficulty in having our children follow along with the plan. If we need to move quickly, nine times out of ten, we can get our kids packed up and out the door in a flash. If they are told to be quiet, hold or bring something important, they can do it. They know how to dial out for help, and they know their neighbors in case of an emergency when (for whatever reason) Mom and Dad cannot respond.

Our style isn’t perfect, but in a bug-out situation, I have faith that even our youngest will be able to perform the tasks we need them to do.

Building Interest

My daughter knows the value of studying far before the tests in school. She has seen that when she crams, she does worse on the exams and remembers less when the inevitable final exams come. Despite this, without enforcement from her mother and I, she would cram for every test, even while espousing the value of learning and revisiting along the way. Practicality is always trumped by momentary fun.

This doesn’t make sense to an older person. If you see the value in acting a certain way, then you should act that way. They forget an important part of being a child: young people are all about the concept of play (even well into their late teens and twenties). Regardless of a thing’s inherent practicality, enjoyment, benefit, or any other factor, if it isn’t framed and presented in a fun way, it will never stick.

Therefore, instead of preaching the benefit of a prepared lifestyle, teach them how much fun it is to do prepper things. Want them to gain the benefit of food storage? Take them on a “shopping trip” in the garage and make cookies for breakfast out of the dried fruit and flour you find. Want them to learn about survival gardening? Start with the ultimate kid’s crop – sunflowers. Even teen boys will love growing flowers if you remind them that they are excellent presents for the young ladies they desperately want to win over. If you want them to learn survival skills, print out a hiking bingo sheet, and have them follow you on a short half-mile hike into the woods, increasing in length as they grow older. Camping in the woods is a scary proposition for many kids, but few object to camping in the backyard, especially when bribed with s’mores.

Young Preppers

For myself, I vividly remember the allure of having a pocket knife. My dad made me earn mine: I had to chop veggies for dinner with regularity, whittle a passable tool with his knife, and feather wood for a fire. I practiced for a summer, and after (eventually) demonstrating knife safety, I was given a choice of a few very small knives to begin my collection. This memory has stayed with me, and while I lost the knife long ago, I remember how having such a tool made me feel, and it did open my young mind to the possibility of fun outside of the television and backyard games.

Finding this niche while young was, I believe, quite essential, and while my Dad was no prepper, I think he helped turn me to this field of knowledge with this important lesson he taught.

Youngsters (let’s say 11 and younger) are much easier to work with than teens. You need to expose them to a wide variety of experiences so that they can find the hook that draws them in. I spent a full summer practicing to earn my knife, while my own daughter could care less about this privileged.

Regardless of what you think about their politics, The Boy Scouts of America and Indian Princesses are two very worthwhile organizations for your children to join when young. You don’t need to do too much in terms of fund raising if you are OK with ponying up some cash, and if you have a good organization, they’ll teach kids and motivate them to explore learning about first aid and many survival skills at an early age. Nature camps are available in most suburbs, and if yours is any good, this can be a great option, as are sleep-away camps, where youngsters will finally have the opportunity to fend for themselves in a very supervised environment for a while, and perhaps come back with a love of the outdoors if you’re lucky. Taking them to events with your local park district or zoo is also a good way to teach a variety of skills, from archery to animal husbandry. There are dozens of books for young children that are about surviving the wilderness (see Hatchet by Gary Paulsen for the most famous of these). Even movies can be a good intro, and you literally cannot find a Disney movie that doesn’t have some bent towards practicality or preparedness.

Teens

Teens are easier than they seem (I teach high school and raised three of them, so I can make bold claims like this). I think that the problem that most parents find themselves in is that they let their teens go too soon and too often, or they hold on too tightly. Balance is essential. You might read into the “parenting style” section and think that I rule with an iron fist, but you’d be surprised with what I let my teens get away with.

 or 

Kids legitimately want to talk to you, and most want to get to know you, but are sometimes drawn to talking with specific parents about specific issues. My daughter will talk with me about her boyfriend issues, and my wife is left completely in the dark, just as I know almost nothing about what happened at soccer practice or which of her friends has a boyfriend. When we are together, nobody gets to know anything about her life, other than that school is “stupid” and she did “nothing” with her friends. Each of us fills a role for advice in her life, and neither of us, when together can cross over to the other side. Together, I cannot know anything about her social life outside of boys, while Mom cannot know about boys, so there is literally nothing we can talk about together.

One of the reasons that I think we have such a special relationship with her is that we planned very specific separate trips and activities with her. I took her on a cross-state driving trip to attend a soccer camp, and we spent a good 16 hours together in a car over the few days that she was gone, which is when I was finally allowed into her life space. My wife planned a similar vacation, and in each case, it has led to fun follow-up activities. She asked me about guns, and I took her to a shooting range (shh…Mom doesn’t know yet!). Mom brought her on a less educational trip to the spa. These kinds of trips have encouraged her sharing policy, but they are not the reason for it – this is how teens are wired (I know from my students). Specific people can learn about specific things.

It is also essential to allow your kids to be out and on their own ,and get in trouble to find a way out. My kids know that I am a good safety net, and that I’ll bail them out when things get too scary or dangerous, but we allow them to have a wide range of freedoms when it is their time. I let my son build a bonfire in my backyard once he could demonstrate the ability to safely start a fire. One of my other sons has had a few run-ins with police, and I let him suffer natural consequences. That’s a good thing for kids sometimes, and will teach them how to adapt to changing and unexpected circumstances quite quickly.

Growing Up

As children grow older, they will inevitably leave things behind, and the prepper interests you have cultivated may be among them. What’s great about growing older though, is that while those skills may fade, or be forgotten and left behind, that makes them ripe for nostalgia moments. Nostalgia, when older, makes everything you did as a child seem ten times more fun and adventurous than it once was, and may prompt more serious conversations when your young adults start to come back into the fold. “Remember when we went hiking and you showed me how to purify stream water, Dad?” Yes, I most certainly do, and apparently, my son remembered as well, and I took him out for the same experience later in the month, and he now has his own kit stored in his backpack.

As children grow older and make plans to move away, that is the ideal time to introduce them to the basics of true preparedness. When they get a car, make part of the privilege of borrowing your car be that they must also take a basic auto mechanic class. If they want to start attending parties, they need to learn basic first aid skills so that they can take care of someone suffering from alcohol poisoning, or someone so drunk that they fell down the stairs. Phrasing it like this is important – it makes the learning more real. When they choose their major at college, you can encourage practical skills that lead into a career instead of paying for courses in Basketweaving, Stress Relief or South African History. Part of their college packing should include a get-home bag, complete with emergency chargers, a first aid kit, and hidden away somewhere secret, a few small bills. When they eventually graduate and move to an apartment, they can then learn about food and water storage.

Nurturing a new generation of preppers is difficult, and it’s time consuming, but continuing the cycle is a sure way to ensure that all your own preparedness is going to lead to something, If you truly want and need your family to stay safe, then this is the next step.

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The post Prepper Parenting – Involving the Kids appeared first on The Prepper Journal.

from The Prepper Journal Don't forget to visit the store and pick up some gear at The COR Outfitters. How prepared are you for emergencies? #SurvivalFirestarter #SurvivalBugOutBackpack #PrepperSurvivalPack #SHTFGear #SHTFBag

[sylviajackson10]

No More Struggle – Search Engine Optimization Success Is Yours!

It can be difficult to become great at Lynchburg Search Engine Optimization at first. You will need to do your homework and have a lot of patience. The following article will teach you what you need to know about optimizing your site.

Do things that can optimize your site and make it easy for the search engines to find it. Web spiders are designed to crawl your site for keywords, but without the ability to easily navigate your site, they cannot rank your site properly. If you create a web site map that shows each of your site’s pages along with a link, the web crawler can follow the links to gain an understanding of your site’s layout and page hierarchy.

Choose a domain name for your site that people can readily recall and also gives a clear indication of what you are offering. These are especially helpful for people that find your content on YouTube because they are easy to say and to remember.

Concentrate on a single subject on each page. You should only promote one product per page. This will confuse your readers and discourage them from returning. A page that just focuses on one thing will do well at getting people to visit.

Site Map

To help search engines index all of your pages, create a site map. A site map is also known as the navigation bar. This part of your web site will let search engines know how many pages your web site has and what each one contains. An XML site map will help search engine spiders review your content quickly, thus raising your ranking.

Want to use SEO Agencies to help make your site visible? If so, videos, along with a nice video sitemap, can be used. Videos are a great introductory tool for your company or staff as well as for demonstration purposes. Keep the video posted on your site with proper labeling using keywords. After you get a video sitemap you can use the tools for webmasters at Google so your URL gets submitted to the account you have. Then post your content on YouTube and websites that host videos. Then, you can just wait for customers to get into touch with you.

You might consider trying podcasts. Podcasts are audio or visual content, can be streamed live, and contain information in which the customer is interested. Podcasts are popular, and a lot of people are doing this. All you need is a video camera. Ensure you provide keyword-rich descriptions for each podcast to entice people on search engines to view your content.

One search engine optimization technique that will boost your rank is to create relevant links from your website to other websites that contain high quality content. This is one of the most important aspects of linking. Search engines value relevant off-site links more than the internal links that are in your website. To maximize your rank, be sure to look for options that allow you to direct a hyperlink back to your own website.

The first sentences of an article should have terms that can also be usable as a HTML META descriptor tag. Some search engines use this content instead of the actual tag to use as the blurb that explains your site below your link in page results. Having bad or useless content on your website can harm your Search Engine Marketing.

Business Bureau

Join the local Chamber of Commerce and Better Business Bureau for better search engine rankings. They will link to your website and help with searches that are local. Additionally, potential customers will be more interested in your website based on a good Better Business Bureau rating. It will make them feel more secure about dealing with you.

Give your articles keywords to improve your Local SEO In Lynchburg VA. Make sure you include keywords that are especially pertinent to your content and niche. It will also make it easier for your readers to locate your articles through the search engines. As a rule of thumb, your keyword should appear in the title, the summary, and about four or five times in the main body.

Don’t just make a wall of links on a page. Instead, try to include links as a natural part of your content. Link pages will not hold the interest of viewers and will be ranked accordingly by search engines. Including your links within your text gives search engines the ability to index your content and also give your site a professional style.

Patience is a virtue when building web traffic with Lynchburg SEO Agencies techniques. Sometimes it will seem like all your efforts are being done in vain. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it’ll take time for you to build up a strong presence on the web. It is important to stick with the process, even when it seems like nothing is happening with your site. You will be happy to know that eventually you will see results.

Placing your keywords strategically in the context on your site will help increase the traffic the search engines bring your way. Use keywords at the beginning of your text, but avoid stuffing. Place your keyword two time in the introductory paragraph. Incorporate the keyword again in the following 200 words, being certain that you maintain a smooth flow for the reader. The keywords should not stand out.

Learn about on-page Lynchburg SEO Agencies. Having a good, high ranking on search engines makes a big deal when it comes to how much traffic your site receives; therefore, the layout needs to match SEO Marketing benchmarks.

Search Engine

If a search engine can tell that you are intentionally getting higher rankings through fraudulent methods then they may manually suppress your ranking. In some cases, major search engines will ban your site outright. Be well informed about the ethics of search engine optimization!

You have learned many ways to improve your success with SEO Agencies. You should see results almost immediately, although it will take some time to get to where you ideally would like to be.

Many people would like to understand When it comes to SEO services, you really should not have faith in your company’s Google ranking to someone who is not a Lynchburg SEO Expert. If you are reading this, you most likely are searching for someone who can aid you increase your company’s online visibility, website traffic, and leads.

, but they don’t always know how they should go about it. Luckily, you will be able to find all the information you need right here. It is up to you to apply the ideas you have reviewed.

from Lynchburg SEO Expert https://lynchburgseoexpert.com/no-more-struggle-search-engine-optimization-success-is-yours/ from Lynchburg SEO Expert https://lynchburgseoexpert.tumblr.com/post/620103565106626560

[markdaniel9]

No More Struggle – Search Engine Optimization Success Is Yours!

It can be difficult to become great at Lynchburg Search Engine Optimization at first. You will need to do your homework and have a lot of patience. The following article will teach you what you need to know about optimizing your site.

Do things that can optimize your site and make it easy for the search engines to find it. Web spiders are designed to crawl your site for keywords, but without the ability to easily navigate your site, they cannot rank your site properly. If you create a web site map that shows each of your site’s pages along with a link, the web crawler can follow the links to gain an understanding of your site’s layout and page hierarchy.

Choose a domain name for your site that people can readily recall and also gives a clear indication of what you are offering. These are especially helpful for people that find your content on YouTube because they are easy to say and to remember.

Concentrate on a single subject on each page. You should only promote one product per page. This will confuse your readers and discourage them from returning. A page that just focuses on one thing will do well at getting people to visit.

Site Map

To help search engines index all of your pages, create a site map. A site map is also known as the navigation bar. This part of your web site will let search engines know how many pages your web site has and what each one contains. An XML site map will help search engine spiders review your content quickly, thus raising your ranking.

Want to use SEO Agencies to help make your site visible? If so, videos, along with a nice video sitemap, can be used. Videos are a great introductory tool for your company or staff as well as for demonstration purposes. Keep the video posted on your site with proper labeling using keywords. After you get a video sitemap you can use the tools for webmasters at Google so your URL gets submitted to the account you have. Then post your content on YouTube and websites that host videos. Then, you can just wait for customers to get into touch with you.

You might consider trying podcasts. Podcasts are audio or visual content, can be streamed live, and contain information in which the customer is interested. Podcasts are popular, and a lot of people are doing this. All you need is a video camera. Ensure you provide keyword-rich descriptions for each podcast to entice people on search engines to view your content.

One search engine optimization technique that will boost your rank is to create relevant links from your website to other websites that contain high quality content. This is one of the most important aspects of linking. Search engines value relevant off-site links more than the internal links that are in your website. To maximize your rank, be sure to look for options that allow you to direct a hyperlink back to your own website.

The first sentences of an article should have terms that can also be usable as a HTML META descriptor tag. Some search engines use this content instead of the actual tag to use as the blurb that explains your site below your link in page results. Having bad or useless content on your website can harm your Search Engine Marketing.

Business Bureau

Join the local Chamber of Commerce and Better Business Bureau for better search engine rankings. They will link to your website and help with searches that are local. Additionally, potential customers will be more interested in your website based on a good Better Business Bureau rating. It will make them feel more secure about dealing with you.

Give your articles keywords to improve your Local SEO In Lynchburg VA. Make sure you include keywords that are especially pertinent to your content and niche. It will also make it easier for your readers to locate your articles through the search engines. As a rule of thumb, your keyword should appear in the title, the summary, and about four or five times in the main body.

Don’t just make a wall of links on a page. Instead, try to include links as a natural part of your content. Link pages will not hold the interest of viewers and will be ranked accordingly by search engines. Including your links within your text gives search engines the ability to index your content and also give your site a professional style.

Patience is a virtue when building web traffic with Lynchburg SEO Agencies techniques. Sometimes it will seem like all your efforts are being done in vain. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it’ll take time for you to build up a strong presence on the web. It is important to stick with the process, even when it seems like nothing is happening with your site. You will be happy to know that eventually you will see results.

Placing your keywords strategically in the context on your site will help increase the traffic the search engines bring your way. Use keywords at the beginning of your text, but avoid stuffing. Place your keyword two time in the introductory paragraph. Incorporate the keyword again in the following 200 words, being certain that you maintain a smooth flow for the reader. The keywords should not stand out.

Learn about on-page Lynchburg SEO Agencies. Having a good, high ranking on search engines makes a big deal when it comes to how much traffic your site receives; therefore, the layout needs to match SEO Marketing benchmarks.

Search Engine

If a search engine can tell that you are intentionally getting higher rankings through fraudulent methods then they may manually suppress your ranking. In some cases, major search engines will ban your site outright. Be well informed about the ethics of search engine optimization!

You have learned many ways to improve your success with SEO Agencies. You should see results almost immediately, although it will take some time to get to where you ideally would like to be.

Many people would like to understand When it comes to SEO services, you really should not have faith in your company’s Google ranking to someone who is not a Lynchburg SEO Expert. If you are reading this, you most likely are searching for someone who can aid you increase your company’s online visibility, website traffic, and leads.

, but they don’t always know how they should go about it. Luckily, you will be able to find all the information you need right here. It is up to you to apply the ideas you have reviewed.

source https://lynchburgseoexpert.com/no-more-struggle-search-engine-optimization-success-is-yours/ from Lynchburg SEO Expert https://lynchburgseoexpert.blogspot.com/2020/06/no-more-struggle-search-engine.html

[lynchburgseoexpert]

No More Struggle – Search Engine Optimization Success Is Yours!

It can be difficult to become great at Lynchburg Search Engine Optimization at first. You will need to do your homework and have a lot of patience. The following article will teach you what you need to know about optimizing your site.

Do things that can optimize your site and make it easy for the search engines to find it. Web spiders are designed to crawl your site for keywords, but without the ability to easily navigate your site, they cannot rank your site properly. If you create a web site map that shows each of your site’s pages along with a link, the web crawler can follow the links to gain an understanding of your site’s layout and page hierarchy.

Choose a domain name for your site that people can readily recall and also gives a clear indication of what you are offering. These are especially helpful for people that find your content on YouTube because they are easy to say and to remember.

Concentrate on a single subject on each page. You should only promote one product per page. This will confuse your readers and discourage them from returning. A page that just focuses on one thing will do well at getting people to visit.

Site Map

To help search engines index all of your pages, create a site map. A site map is also known as the navigation bar. This part of your web site will let search engines know how many pages your web site has and what each one contains. An XML site map will help search engine spiders review your content quickly, thus raising your ranking.

Want to use SEO Agencies to help make your site visible? If so, videos, along with a nice video sitemap, can be used. Videos are a great introductory tool for your company or staff as well as for demonstration purposes. Keep the video posted on your site with proper labeling using keywords. After you get a video sitemap you can use the tools for webmasters at Google so your URL gets submitted to the account you have. Then post your content on YouTube and websites that host videos. Then, you can just wait for customers to get into touch with you.

You might consider trying podcasts. Podcasts are audio or visual content, can be streamed live, and contain information in which the customer is interested. Podcasts are popular, and a lot of people are doing this. All you need is a video camera. Ensure you provide keyword-rich descriptions for each podcast to entice people on search engines to view your content.

One search engine optimization technique that will boost your rank is to create relevant links from your website to other websites that contain high quality content. This is one of the most important aspects of linking. Search engines value relevant off-site links more than the internal links that are in your website. To maximize your rank, be sure to look for options that allow you to direct a hyperlink back to your own website.

The first sentences of an article should have terms that can also be usable as a HTML META descriptor tag. Some search engines use this content instead of the actual tag to use as the blurb that explains your site below your link in page results. Having bad or useless content on your website can harm your Search Engine Marketing.

Business Bureau

Join the local Chamber of Commerce and Better Business Bureau for better search engine rankings. They will link to your website and help with searches that are local. Additionally, potential customers will be more interested in your website based on a good Better Business Bureau rating. It will make them feel more secure about dealing with you.

Give your articles keywords to improve your Local SEO In Lynchburg VA. Make sure you include keywords that are especially pertinent to your content and niche. It will also make it easier for your readers to locate your articles through the search engines. As a rule of thumb, your keyword should appear in the title, the summary, and about four or five times in the main body.

Don’t just make a wall of links on a page. Instead, try to include links as a natural part of your content. Link pages will not hold the interest of viewers and will be ranked accordingly by search engines. Including your links within your text gives search engines the ability to index your content and also give your site a professional style.

Patience is a virtue when building web traffic with Lynchburg SEO Agencies techniques. Sometimes it will seem like all your efforts are being done in vain. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it’ll take time for you to build up a strong presence on the web. It is important to stick with the process, even when it seems like nothing is happening with your site. You will be happy to know that eventually you will see results.

Placing your keywords strategically in the context on your site will help increase the traffic the search engines bring your way. Use keywords at the beginning of your text, but avoid stuffing. Place your keyword two time in the introductory paragraph. Incorporate the keyword again in the following 200 words, being certain that you maintain a smooth flow for the reader. The keywords should not stand out.

Learn about on-page Lynchburg SEO Agencies. Having a good, high ranking on search engines makes a big deal when it comes to how much traffic your site receives; therefore, the layout needs to match SEO Marketing benchmarks.

Search Engine

If a search engine can tell that you are intentionally getting higher rankings through fraudulent methods then they may manually suppress your ranking. In some cases, major search engines will ban your site outright. Be well informed about the ethics of search engine optimization!

You have learned many ways to improve your success with SEO Agencies. You should see results almost immediately, although it will take some time to get to where you ideally would like to be.

Many people would like to understand When it comes to SEO services, you really should not have faith in your company’s Google ranking to someone who is not a Lynchburg SEO Expert. If you are reading this, you most likely are searching for someone who can aid you increase your company’s online visibility, website traffic, and leads.

, but they don’t always know how they should go about it. Luckily, you will be able to find all the information you need right here. It is up to you to apply the ideas you have reviewed.

from Lynchburg SEO Expert https://lynchburgseoexpert.com/no-more-struggle-search-engine-optimization-success-is-yours/

[lexiehewitt6]

No More Struggle Search Engine Optimization Success Is Yours!

It can be difficult to become great at Lynchburg Search Engine Optimization at first. You will need to do your homework and have a lot of patience. The following article will teach you what you need to know about optimizing your site.

Do things that can optimize your site and make it easy for the search engines to find it. Web spiders are designed to crawl your site for keywords, but without the ability to easily navigate your site, they cannot rank your site properly. If you create a web site map that shows each of your site’s pages along with a link, the web crawler can follow the links to gain an understanding of your site’s layout and page hierarchy.

Choose a domain name for your site that people can readily recall and also gives a clear indication of what you are offering. These are especially helpful for people that find your content on YouTube because they are easy to say and to remember.

Concentrate on a single subject on each page. You should only promote one product per page. This will confuse your readers and discourage them from returning. A page that just focuses on one thing will do well at getting people to visit.

Site Map

To help search engines index all of your pages, create a site map. A site map is also known as the navigation bar. This part of your web site will let search engines know how many pages your web site has and what each one contains. An XML site map will help search engine spiders review your content quickly, thus raising your ranking.

Want to use SEO Agencies to help make your site visible? If so, videos, along with a nice video sitemap, can be used. Videos are a great introductory tool for your company or staff as well as for demonstration purposes. Keep the video posted on your site with proper labeling using keywords. After you get a video sitemap you can use the tools for webmasters at Google so your URL gets submitted to the account you have. Then post your content on YouTube and websites that host videos. Then, you can just wait for customers to get into touch with you.

You might consider trying podcasts. Podcasts are audio or visual content, can be streamed live, and contain information in which the customer is interested. Podcasts are popular, and a lot of people are doing this. All you need is a video camera. Ensure you provide keyword-rich descriptions for each podcast to entice people on search engines to view your content.

One search engine optimization technique that will boost your rank is to create relevant links from your website to other websites that contain high quality content. This is one of the most important aspects of linking. Search engines value relevant off-site links more than the internal links that are in your website. To maximize your rank, be sure to look for options that allow you to direct a hyperlink back to your own website.

The first sentences of an article should have terms that can also be usable as a HTML META descriptor tag. Some search engines use this content instead of the actual tag to use as the blurb that explains your site below your link in page results. Having bad or useless content on your website can harm your Search Engine Marketing.

Business Bureau

Join the local Chamber of Commerce and Better Business Bureau for better search engine rankings. They will link to your website and help with searches that are local. Additionally, potential customers will be more interested in your website based on a good Better Business Bureau rating. It will make them feel more secure about dealing with you.

Give your articles keywords to improve your Local SEO In Lynchburg VA. Make sure you include keywords that are especially pertinent to your content and niche. It will also make it easier for your readers to locate your articles through the search engines. As a rule of thumb, your keyword should appear in the title, the summary, and about four or five times in the main body.

Don’t just make a wall of links on a page. Instead, try to include links as a natural part of your content. Link pages will not hold the interest of viewers and will be ranked accordingly by search engines. Including your links within your text gives search engines the ability to index your content and also give your site a professional style.

Patience is a virtue when building web traffic with Lynchburg SEO Agencies techniques. Sometimes it will seem like all your efforts are being done in vain. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it’ll take time for you to build up a strong presence on the web. It is important to stick with the process, even when it seems like nothing is happening with your site. You will be happy to know that eventually you will see results.

Placing your keywords strategically in the context on your site will help increase the traffic the search engines bring your way. Use keywords at the beginning of your text, but avoid stuffing. Place your keyword two time in the introductory paragraph. Incorporate the keyword again in the following 200 words, being certain that you maintain a smooth flow for the reader. The keywords should not stand out.

Learn about on-page Lynchburg SEO Agencies. Having a good, high ranking on search engines makes a big deal when it comes to how much traffic your site receives; therefore, the layout needs to match SEO Marketing benchmarks.

Search Engine

If a search engine can tell that you are intentionally getting higher rankings through fraudulent methods then they may manually suppress your ranking. In some cases, major search engines will ban your site outright. Be well informed about the ethics of search engine optimization!

You have learned many ways to improve your success with SEO Agencies. You should see results almost immediately, although it will take some time to get to where you ideally would like to be.

Many people would like to understand When it comes to SEO services, you really should not have faith in your company’s Google ranking to someone who is not a Lynchburg SEO Expert. If you are reading this, you most likely are searching for someone who can aid you increase your company’s online visibility, website traffic, and leads.

, but they don’t always know how they should go about it. Luckily, you will be able to find all the information you need right here. It is up to you to apply the ideas you have reviewed.

from https://lynchburgseoexpert.com/no-more-struggle-search-engine-optimization-success-is-yours/

from Lynchburg SEO Expert - Blog https://lynchburgseoexpert.weebly.com/blog/no-more-struggle-search-engine-optimization-success-is-yours