#capitalism vs equality

[alwaysbewoke]

[findher-ogg]

I think Piper Wright Fallout 4 is one of those characters who's good in theory but not in practice. I was thinking about her as a character in relation to her setting and I genuinely think her archetype would be better suited to the NCR than it is to the Commonwealth.

Which I think comes down to how Bethesda handles their games, environment and attitude wise, as opposed to Black Isle and Obsidian. The West coast has basically recovered. New Vegas is a tourist attraction. The NCR are on a rapid tirade of imperialist expansion that's only achievable because they, as a nation, have recovered from the war and grown from it. If you compare Shady Sands in Fallout 1 to Diamond City in Fallout 4, its kind of funny. Shady Sands started out with decent houses made from dirt, with solid foundation and some of them having actual windows. The average settlement in Bethesda Fallout (like Diamond City or Megaton), meanwhile, are just shanty towns made from tin.

In the Commonwealth's case this is made even more insane by the fact that Fenway Park (where Diamond City is located) is surrounded by mostly intact houses that, with a bit of fixer-uppering, could be lived in relatively normally compared to the tin shacks of Diamond City. I think Megaton gets more of a pass because the Capital Wasteland got nuked to shit, but you get me.

Returning to Piper for a second, let's take a look at her character: she's a spunky, somewhat annoying character who's very invested in the freedom of the press and so forth. She's got a working printing press and everything, which is super impressive considering how run-down the rest of Diamond City is aside from the Valentine Detective Agency signs (seriously, where did they find the materials for those). She runs Publick Occurences solo with her sister, and it's all well and good. Ignoring the witch hunts she sends people on about synths.

And I get it. I think this specific gripe with Piper as a character comes from having played this game for the first time in 2024. The synths don't really hold up as an allegory for anything, and the entire story surrounding them is very "trying to be progressive in 2014". Which is fine, I think it is just a symptom of the era the game came out in, but still.

Piper's character, as a spunky yet annoying journalist who believes the people deserve to know what's going on, would be far better suited in a more developed location on the West coast -- specifically, Freeside or somewhere within the NCR.

I think Piper would suit the Followers of the Apocalypse, for example, serving as an informant to keep them in the know about what's going on between the Strip, the NCR and the regular Freesiders. Plus, having a funny, anarchist-themed newspaper you can receive in-game where she touts her hatred for the Securitron police force is a funny mental image. Equally, I think she'd suit living in Shady Sands -- right at the heart of the NCR's seediest political manouvres as the decisions are made. Imagine her as a journalist who frequently pushes back against the Mojave expansion, for example, and how the NCR is putting too many resources into a lost cause instead of more important things like healthcare or housing. That way, you could still keep her extreme hatred for the upper class in The Stands while making it make more sense within the setting.

Leading on from this, this made me realise how Bethesda also just aren't very deliberate with how they utilise history in their games. Which makes sense, to a certain extent, given how destroyed absolutely everything on the East coast is. But still. It's a little stupid.

The core conflict of New Vegas -- the Legion vs the NCR -- is actually a really deep-cut history reference at its core. The NCR is the Bear, the Legion is the Bull. In mid-19th century California, people watched bears and bulls fight for fun.

There are other, better examples, I'm sure. But I'm British and this is my personal favourite example, so this is what I'm using. History plays such an important part of New Vegas' themes and messaging -- it's a story about how, when, and why humanity needs to move on from the past and look towards the future.

Bethesda Fallout, by comparison, will frequently and shallowly tout "nukes bad" while letting Liberty Prime lob them at Super Mutants, or encouraging players to nuke each other's houses in Fallout 76.

Piper exists partially as a nod to the Boston Herald, and how it's one of the longest-running/most influential newspapers in America. A lot of publishing has its roots within Boston, and I think it's an interesting reference to take.

And I think this is a part of Fallout that Bethesda does get -- a lot of what people do in the post-war world is inspired by what came before. Caesar's Legion and its ideologies come from Edward Sallow not understanding basic Roman history properly and using it to fuel his agenda because it looks cool. The Minutemen are exactly that. The New California Republic are the new US government, right down to the borderline facist intentions and ideologies. I could go on.

And this comes from Fallout being a series about the cyclical nature of violence. "War never changes, but men do through the roads they walk" is the story here. War cannot change if men do not change, because war exists in an endless cycle of violence that can only be broken if man chooses to break it. And they've failed at it so far, right?

And this is where I go back to Piper. Her nod to history isn't as intentional as anything in New Vegas, and I feel like she would have been better served as a character if she was in New Vegas instead. Because her entire character would make more sense if she was living in the more developed and rebuilt towns of the West coast as opposed to a dilapidated shanty town on the East.

I have more thoughts about this but tl;dr Bethesda should really put more effort into making sure their history references and homages make sense to the setting contextually, in the same way that New Vegas does. That game was developed in 18 months and still has far more care put into its historical references than Fallout 4 does. And I love Fallout 4.

[monstersinthecosmos]

yknow we talk a lot about like, calling fandom fascism & censorship out for what it is, instead of couching it in words like anti/proship that make it sound sillier and less abusive than it actually is, and I think we also should confront the way social media preys on anger responses for engagement and how participating in toxic fandom behavior feeds right into that.

it's not rebellious to lead fandom dogpiles and drown yourself in the mire of drama, it's playing exactly into the outrage algorithm and participating directly into capitalism in a way that is so deeply unethical, not to mention so self-harming. This isn't a situation of no ethical consumption under capitalism -- this is not shopping for groceries at Walmart because it's all you can afford or using a cable provider that endorsed MAGA because it's the only one available your area -- this is something so very easy to boycott and to refuse to participate in.

i was just peeking at some fandom drama on twitter because I am susceptible to watching the circus act just like everyone else lmao, and it genuinely astounds me the way the most abusive and petty people come online and try to cosplay as leftists who are somehow doing all of this for a righteous cause. It's just so deeply cognitively dissonant. (put a pin in this and remember everything we've learned about accountability vs shame and how often people use shame to make themselves feel better when it's entirely unproductive to the issue they claim to care about yatta yatta.)

anyway that's my thought this afternoon--framing fandom drama into more real world contexts always sounds a little bit silly, but I think if you're a person with hobbies who uses the internet as a social space, we have to stop treating it like it's silly and can't harm you, can't influence you, can't hurt your feelings. i'm sure we all have close relationships and countless GOOD things we've gained from fandoming and it's ridiculous to propose that you can't also cause harm in equal measure, and we can't spend every day reading fic, talking to other fans and making friends, hanging out in discord, and then pretend it's not an important space for you.

stop letting capitalism ruin everything. fandom is inherently anarchistic and there's nothing more anarchistic than continuing to be kind to each other when they don't want you to be!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

FTC vs surveillance pricing

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

In the mystical cosmology of economics, "prices" are of transcendental significance, the means by which the living market knows and adapts itself, giving rise to "efficient" production and consumption.

At its most basic level, the metaphysics of pricing goes like this: if there is less of something for sale than people want to buy, the seller will raise the price until enough buyers drop out and demand equals supply. If the disappointed would-be buyers are sufficiently vocal about their plight, other sellers will enter the market (bankrolled by investors who sense an opportunity), causing supplies to increase and prices to fall until the system is in "equilibrium" – producing things as cheaply as possible in precisely the right quantities to meet demand. In the parlance of neoclassical economists, prices aren't "set": they are discovered.

In antitrust law, there are many sins, but they often boil down to "price setting." That is, if a company has enough "market power" that they can dictate prices to their customers, they are committing a crime and should be punished. This is such a bedrock of neoclassical economics that it's a tautology "market power" exists where companies can "set prices"; and to "set prices," you need "market power."

Prices are the blood cells of the market, shuttling nutrients (in the form of "information") around the sprawling colony organism composed of all the buyers, sellers, producers, consumers, intermediaries and other actors. Together, the components of this colony organism all act on the information contained in the "price signals" to pursue their own self-interest. Each self-interested action puts more information into the system, triggering more action. Together, price signals and the actions they evince eventually "discover" the price, an abstraction that is yanked out of the immaterial plane of pure ideas and into our grubby, physical world, causing mines to re-open, shipping containers and pipelines to spark to life, factories to retool, trucks to fan out across the nation, retailers to place ads and hoist SALE banners over their premises, and consumers to race to those displays and open their wallets.

When prices are "distorted," all of this comes to naught. During the notorious "socialist calculation debate" of 1920s Austria, right-wing archdukes of religious market fundamentalism, like Von Hayek and Von Mises, trounced their leftist opponents, arguing that the market was the only computational system capable of calculating how much of each thing should be made, where it should be sent, and how much it should be sold for.

Attempts to "plan" the economy – say, by subsidizing industries or limiting prices – may be well-intentioned, but they broke the market's computations and produced haywire swings of both over- and underproduction. Later, the USSR's planned economy did encounter these swings. These were sometimes very grave (famines that killed millions) and sometimes silly (periods when the only goods available in regional shops were forks, say, creating local bubbles in folk art made from forks).

Unplanned markets do this too. Most notoriously, capitalism has produced a vast oversupply of carbon-intensive goods and processes, and a huge undersupply of low-carbon alternatives, bringing the human civilization to the brink of collapse. Not only have capitalism's price signals failed to address this existential crisis to humans, it has also sown the seeds of its own ruin – the market computer's not going to be getting any "price signals" from people as they drown in floods or roast to death on sidewalks that deliver second-degree burns to anyone who touches them:

https://www.fastcompany.com/91151209/extreme-heat-southwest-phoenix-surface-burns-scorching-pavement-sidewalks-pets

For market true believers, these failures are just evidence that regulation is distorting markets, and that the answer is more unregulated markets to infuse the computer with more price signals. When it comes to carbon, the problem is that producers are "producing negative externalities" (that is, polluting and sticking us with the bill). If we can just get them to "internalize" those costs, they will become "economically rational" and switch to low-carbon alternatives.

That's the theory behind the creation and sale of carbon credits. Rather than ordering companies to stop risking civilizational collapse and mass extinction, we can incentivize them to do so by creating markets that reward clean tech and punish dirty practices. The buying and selling of carbon credits is supposed to create price signals reflecting the existential risk to the human race and the only habitable planet known to our species, which the market will then "bring into equilibrium."

Unfortunately, reality has a distinct and unfair leftist bias. Carbon credits are a market for lemons. The carbon credits you buy to "offset" your car or flight are apt to come from a forest that has already burned down, or that had already been put in a perpetual trust as a wildlife preserve and could never be logged:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/18/greshams-carbon-law/#papal-indulgences

Carbon credits produce the most perverse outcomes imaginable. For example, much of Tesla's profitability has been derived from the sale of carbon credits to the manufacturers of the dirtiest, most polluting SUVs on Earth; without those Tesla credits, those SUVs would have been too expensive to sell, and would not have existed:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat

What's more, carbon credits aren't part of an "all of the above" strategy that incorporates direct action to prevent our species downfall. These market solutions are incompatible with muscular direct action, and if we do credits, we can't do other stuff that would actually work:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/31/carbon-upsets/#big-tradeoff

Even though price signals have repeatedly proven themselves to be an insufficient mechanism for producing "efficient" or even "survivable," they remain the uppermost spiritual value in the capitalist pantheon. Even through the last 40 years of unrelenting assaults on antitrust and competition law, the one form of corporate power that has remained both formally and practically prohibited is "pricing power."

That's why the DoJ was able to block tech companies and major movie studios from secretly colluding to suppress their employees' wages, and why those employees were able to get huge sums out of their employers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation

It's also why the Big Six (now Big Five) publishers and Apple got into so much trouble for colluding to set a floor on the price of ebooks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Apple_(2012)

When it comes to monopoly, even the most Bork-pilled, Manne-poisoned federal judges and agencies have taken a hard line on price-fixing, because "distortions" of prices make the market computer crash.

But despite this horror of price distortions, America's monopolists have found so many ways to manipulate prices. Last month, The American Prospect devoted an entire issue to the many ways that monopolies and cartels have rigged the prices we pay, pushing them higher and higher, even as our wages stagnated and credit became more expensive:

https://prospect.org/pricing

For example, there's the plague of junk fees (AKA "drip pricing," or, if you're competing to be first up against the wall come the revolution, "ancillary revenue"), everything from baggage fees from airlines to resort fees at hotels to the fee your landlord charges if you pay your rent by check, or by card, or in cash:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/07/drip-drip-drip/#drip-off

There's the fake transparency gambit, so beloved of America's hospitals:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/13/a-punch-in-the-guts/#hayek-pilled

The "greedflation" that saw grocery prices skyrocketing, which billionaire grocery plutes blamed on covid stimulus checks, even as they boasted to their shareholders about their pricing power:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-12-war-in-the-aisles/

There's the the tens of billions the banks rake in with usurious interest rates, far in excess of the hikes to the central banks' prime rates (which are, in turn, justified in light of the supposed excesses of covid relief checks):

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-11-what-we-owe/

There are the scams that companies like Amazon pull with their user interfaces, tricking you into signing up for subscriptions or upsells, which they grandiosely term "dark patterns," but which are really just open fraud:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-10-one-click-economy/

There are "surge fees," which are supposed to tempt more producers (e.g. Uber drivers) into the market when demand is high, but which are really just an excuse to gouge you – like when Wendy's threatens to surge-price its hamburgers:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-07-urge-to-surge/

And then there's surveillance pricing, the most insidious and profitable way to jack up prices. At its core, surveillance pricing uses nonconsensually harvested private information to inform an algorithm that reprices the things you buy – from lattes to rent – in real-time:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again

Companies like Plexure – partially owned by McDonald's – boasts that it can use surveillance data to figure out what your payday is and then hike the price of the breakfast sandwich or after-work soda you buy every day.

Like every bad pricing practice, surveillance pricing has its origins in the aviation industry, which invested early on and heavily in spying on fliers to figure out how much they could each afford for their plane tickets and jacking up prices accordingly. Architects of these systems then went on to found companies like Realpage, a data-brokerage that helps landlords illegally collude to rig rent prices.

Algorithmic middlemen like Realpage and ATPCO – which coordinates price-fixing among the airlines – are what Dan Davies calls "accountability sinks." A cartel sends all its data to a separate third party, which then compares those prices and tells everyone how much to jack them up in order to screw us all:

https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/

These price-fixing middlemen are everywhere, and they predate the boom in commercial surveillance. For example, Agri-Stats has been helping meatpackers rig the price of meat for 40 years:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

But when you add commercial surveillance to algorithmic pricing, you get a hybrid more terrifying than any cocaine-sharks (or, indeed, meth-gators):

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tennessee-police-warn-locals-not-flush-drugs-fear-meth-gators-n1030291

Apologists for these meth-gators insist that surveillance pricing's true purpose is to let companies offer discounts. A streaming service can't afford to offer $0.99 subscriptions to the poor because then all the rich people would stop paying $19.99. But with surveillance pricing, every customer gets a different price, titrated to their capacity to pay, and everyone wins.

But that's not how it cashes out in the real world. In the real world, rich people who get ripped off have the wherewithal to shop around, complain effectively to a state AG, or punish companies by taking their business elsewhere. Meanwhile, poor people aren't just cash-poor, they're also time-poor and political influence-poor.

When the dollar store duopoly forces all the mom-and-pop grocers in your town out of business with predatory pricing, and creating food deserts that only they serve, no one cares, because state AGs and politicians don't care about people who shop at dollar stores. Then, the dollar stores can collude with manufacturers to get shrunken "cheater sized" products that sell for a dollar, but cost double or triple the grocery store price by weight or quantity:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes

Yes, fliers who seem to be flying on business (last-minute purchasers who don't have a Saturday stay) get charged more than people whose purchase makes them seem to be someone flying away for a vacation. But that's only because aviation prices haven't yet fully transitioned to surveillance pricing. If an airline can correctly calculate that you are taking a trip because you're a grad student who must attend a conference in order to secure a job, and if they know precisely how much room you have left on your credit card, they can charge you everything you can afford, to the cent.

Your ability to resist pricing power isn't merely a function of a company's market power – it's also a function of your political power. Poor people may have less to steal, but no one cares when they get robbed:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/19/martha-wright-reed/#capitalists-hate-capitalism

So surveillance pricing, supercharged by algorithms, represent a serious threat to "prices," which is the one thing that the econo-religious fundamentalists of the capitalist class value above all else. That makes surveillance pricing low-hanging fruit for regulatory enforcement: a bipartisan crime that has few champions on either side of the aisle.

Cannily, the FTC has just declared war on surveillance pricing, ordering eight key players in the industry (including capitalism's arch-villains, McKinsey and Jpmorgan Chase) to turn over data that can be used to prosecute them for price-fixing within 45 days:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/07/ftc-issues-orders-eight-companies-seeking-information-surveillance-pricing

As American Prospect editor-in-chief David Dayen notes in his article on the order, the FTC is doing what he and his journalistic partners couldn't: forcing these companies to cough up internal data:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-07-24-ftc-opens-surveillance-pricing-inquiry/

This is important, and not just because of the wriggly critters the FTC will reveal as they use their powers to turn over this rock. Administrative agencies can't just do whatever they want. Long before the agencies were neutered by the Supreme Court, they had strict rules requiring them to gather evidence, solicit comment and counter-comment, and so on, before enacting any rules:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

Doubtless, the Supreme Court's Loper decision (which overturned "Chevron deference" and cut off the agencies' power to take actions that they don't have detailed, specific authorization to take) will embolden the surveillance pricing industry to take the FTC to court on this. It's hard to say whether the courts will find in the FTC's favor. Section 6(b) of the FTC Act clearly lets the FTC compel these disclosures as part of an enforcement action, but they can't start an enforcement action until they have evidence, and through the whole history of the FTC, these kinds of orders have been a common prelude to enforcement.

One thing this has going for it is that it is bipartisan: all five FTC commissioners, including both Republicans (including the Republican who votes against everything) voted in favor of it. Price gouging is the kind of easy-to-grasp corporate crime that everyone hates, irrespective of political tendency.

In the Prospect piece on Ticketmaster's pricing scam, Dayen and Groundwork's Lindsay Owens called this the "Age of Recoupment":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/03/aoi-aoi-oh/#concentrated-gains-vast-diffused-losses

For 40 years, neoclassical economics' focus on "consumer welfare" meant that companies could cheat and squeeze their workers and suppliers as hard as they wanted, so long as prices didn't go up. But after 40 years, there's nothing more to squeeze out of workers or suppliers, so it's time for the cartels to recoup by turning on us, their customers.

They believe – perhaps correctly – that they have amassed so much market power through mergers and lobbying that they can cross the single bright line in neoliberal economics' theory of antitrust: price-gouging. No matter how sincere the economics profession's worship of prices might be, it still might not trump companies that are too big to fail and thus too big to jail.

The FTC just took an important step in defense of all of our economic wellbeing, and it's a step that even the most right-wing economist should applaud. They're calling the question: "Do you really think that price-distortion is a cardinal sin? If so, you must back our play." Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

https://clarionwriteathon.com/members/profile.php?writerid=293388

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/24/gouging-the-all-seeing-eye/#i-spy

[nihildes]

"Land and freedom means being able to feed ourselves without having to bend to any blackmail imposed by government or a privileged caste, having a home without paying for permission, learning from the earth and sharing with all other living beings without quantifying value, holding debts, or seeking profit. This conception of life enters into a battle of total negation with the world of government, money, wage or slave labor, industrial production, Bibles and priests, institutionalized learning, the spectacularization of daily existence, and all other apparatuses of control that flow from Enlightenment thinking and the colonialistic civilization it champions.

Land, in this sense, is not a place external to the city. For one, this is because capitalism does not reside primarily in urban space—it controls the whole map. The military and productive logics that control us and bludgeon the earth in urban space are also at work in rural space. Secondly, the reunited whole of land and freedom must be an ever present possibility no matter where we are. They constitute a social relationship, a way of relating to the world around us and the other beings in it, that is profoundly opposed to the alienated social relationship of capitalism. Alienation and primitive accumulation[1] are ceaseless, ongoing processes from one corner of the globe to the other. Those of us who are not indigenous, those of us who are fully colonized and have forgotten where we came from, do not have access to anything pristine. Alienation will follow us out to the farthest forest glade or desert oasis until we can begin to change our relationship to the world around us in a way that is simultaneously material and spiritual.

Equally, anarchy must be a robust concept. It must be an available practice no matter where we find ourselves—in the woods or in the city, in a prison or on the high seas. It requires us to transform our relationship with our surroundings, and therefore to also transform our surroundings, but it cannot be so fragile that it requires us to seek out some pristine place in order to spread anarchy. Will anti-civilization anarchism be a minoritarian sect of those anarchists who go to the woods to live deliberately, because they don’t like the alternative of organizing a union at the local burger joint, or will it be a challenge to the elements of the anarchist tradition that reproduce colonialism, patriarchy, and Enlightenment thinking, a challenge that is relative to all anarchists no matter where they pick their battles?

Land does not exist in opposition to the city. Rather, one concept of land exists in opposition to another. The anarchist or anti-civilization idea against the capitalist, Western idea. It is this latter concept that places land within the isolating dichotomy of city vs. wilderness. This is why “going back to the land” is doomed to fail, even though we may win valuable lessons and experiences in the course of that failure (as anarchists, we’ve rarely won anything else). We don’t need to go back to the land, because it never left us. We simply stopped seeing it and stopped communing with it." - Land and Freedom An Old Challange

[theriverbeyond]

It's crazy how well-crafted Hadestown is, like there aren't many shows out there that have equally strong messages artistically and politically. What do you think of the balancing of Hades as a character? Personally I love how it's shown that even after his reconnection with Persephone it's his clinging to the existing power structure that leads him to make the deal he does with Orpheus, so it isn't a clear-cut redemption - I think that is what makes it so neither his humanity nor the system he upholds feels hollow.

CRACKS KNUCKLES ok so on a character/thematic/narrative level I'm obsessed with Hades because the political compentary he represents feels so coherent and distinctly recodnizable to like, Figures and Systems Of Power that exist in the world right now

I really really really love how Hades specifically turns to industry because he is *lacking* genuine love/connection/care and using these material comforts trying to fill the void inside him -- "Lover, you were gone so long/ Lover, I was lonesome/ So I built a foundry/ In the ground beneath your feet" -- it feels very similar to how so much of modern life is Being Sold The Idea Of Love And Connection. We too turn to capitalism to replace genuine connection that is lacking in our lives, like how buying and being sold the aesthetics of community is easier than actually creating and being in community. Genuine affection and care vs the feeling of power as you wield it over others.

And Hades doing this only further alienates him from Persephone, and it becomes this vicious cycle of him creating and upholding a system that drives away any actual connection, which then of course only motivates him to Continue Onwards. His "Lover, when you see that glare/ Think of it as my despair for you" with Persephone responding "Lover, what have you become/ Coal cars and oil drums/ Warehouse walls and factory floors/ I don't know you anymore".

And re: Hades' redemption, I think the fascinating thing is he ISN'T redeemed. TO ME!! He gets to the point of redemption and then he turns away, which I think fits really well into the overarching theme of the show, as in, resisting the pull of capitalism feels impossible and often ends in tragedy but we should do it anyway, and also fits the PATTERN of the show, which is people getting to the doorstep of freedom and then turning around.

Specifically, when Orpheus asks "Can we go?" and Hades says "I don't know", that is his redemption point. He wants to help them, but he feels stuck, and trapped in this web he created and sat himself in the middle of. Can he break his own system? And Hades' personal tragedy is he gets SO CLOSE but then the Fates (or like, his own inner dialogue) come in and tempt him away. They make him Doubt -- "If you let him go/ Oh you're a spineless king/ And you'll never get em in line again". He is, at the end of the day, TOO trapped in the system he has created ("Whole damn nation's watching you"), too dependent on the workers he exploits that he doesn't see any other way to live. "That's the way the world is". Hades gets so close to letting them go before he turns around, because he decides that letting them go means letting himself go, and he no longer thinks that is possible.

He does let them try, though. "Give them a rope and they'll hang themselves" he does expect them to fail, because he doesnt himself have hope that another world is truly possible, but he knows Orpheus does. Even as he turns back I feel like he's saying. If you believe another world is possible, prove it. "Show the way so we believe"

And I'm just so obsessed with this sequence because like -- "Show the way so we can see/ Show the way the world could be/ If you can do it, so can she/ If she can do it, so can we/ Show the way" -- the unspoken here is that Hades is watching too, and this is a trial, and a test, and like. He can't break the system. He doesn't know how, he doesn't feel like it's possible. But he's watching, he can't not watch, and so that means like. Orpheus' effort is worth it. His believing is worth it. Even as they all fail, again and again and again, it's worth it.

[teaboot]

Your post about art vs content got me thinking about the differences between the two. To me there is no difference besides the mindsets. One is of creator and the enjoyer, the other is content and consumer it removes the personhood, the joy/emotion, from the equation. Like a writer or video creator may not see their work as art so content creator maybe a way to refer to themselves comfortably but it sounds so machine, emotionless and lifeless, like a cookie cutter recipe mass producing something verses people lovingly crafting something...then again Disney uses a cookie cutter recipe for the most part and it brings out bangers cause people lovingly make it their own so maybe I'm thinking too hard on this

Does my long-winded rant make sense?

see, I get what you mean, but I still feel like the willingness to entertain calling art of any kind "content" reduces it to the facet of consumption where in reality, the experience of consuming art is not the sole defining trait of it.

Reducing arts like music, writing, painting, dance, voice acting, theater, etc. to the role of "content"- a thing created to be consumed, measured and valued by how pleasant or easy it is to digest- I feel that it was our biggest red flag to herald the incoming tide of AI "art".

Because if art is "content", if arts are nothing but consumable matter, then obviously the key to success is to produce as much soft, tasty, edible paste as we possibly can at the lowest possible expense.

It's the same issue I have with "meal replacements", diet culture, nutrient slurries, twenty-step skincare routines, 24/7 body padding and shapewear and laxative teas and "grind culture". It's not a cause, but a symptom, of the disease that is late-stage capitalism.

Things must be produced at low cost and remain in high demand forever. Things must be perfect and palatable and the new hit trend forever. People must pay hand over fist to consume without asking anything in return, and if they start dropping like flies at the unending unrewarded thankless demand of it all, then that must be treated as a weakness. We should all take pride in how much we can spend, pay, give, produce, and think as little as possible about what we ask for ourselves.

So, who cares if, of two identical paintings, one was made by a person and one was made by a computer program? It's the same work, so what does it matter? What does it matter?

I am an artist. I make art. I ask a question, make a statement, declare something horrific or challenging or upsetting or wrong or grotesque, and when you respond, we are together experiencing a conversation. We are existing, two people living one life and reaching out and touching across time and space. No matter the work, you're at the barest minimum saying, "I'm alive, and you're alive, and at one time or another we shared this same world, and at the end of the day we aren't too terribly different. My heart is worth sharing, and your heart is worth the struggle of understanding."

An AI-generated piece, a computer-generated voice, a CGI puppet of someone long since dead and gone, they cannot speak. They have no voice. Ay best, they are the most chewable, consumable, landlord-beige common denominator possible that you can sit and listen to like the lone survivor of a shipwreck listening to the same three songs on a broken record, and at worst, they're the uncaring vomit of an empty, unloving, value-addled hack wearing the skin of someone I know over their own.

When you abandon art to say that you make content, that should not be a point of pride. That's an embarrassment. That's not sitting down for an intelligent discussion with an equal, that's kneeling at the feet of the crowd and saying, "what do you want to see me do? I can be anyone you've ever loved. I can be them, I can be anyone, as long as you love me."

I can make content. I can be consumed. What do you want to consume? I'll make myself consumable. I'll make myself just like anything you like. And I'll make so much of it that you'll never have to go anywhere else, because it'll all be right here, and under all the cut-and-paste schlock you've seen before I will sit alone in the dark and the silence and I will know that I am safe, because I am valued, because I am desired, and I need to be desired or else I am worthless like a factory that no longer churns out steel or a hen that no longer lays eggs or a cow that is too old to make milk.

Content, the most literal meaning, is something which is contained inside a container. What it is doesn't really matter, and the best it can hope to be is something worthy of being scooped out and used.

Art is an experience that transcends value. Art is something you can eat without paying for. You can make it out of anything and anyone can do it. It can be crude and vulgar and bad, and that's a strength because it means something. It always, always means something, and it doesn't matter if you like it or not. It's not content because it doesn't fill anything. It's a living, breathing thing, and whether you want to birth it or eat it, then you're going to have to be willing to put the fucking work in

[bymeraki]

Can ya’ll please start learning the difference between these political and ideological terms instead of using them all interchangeably. 🙏

Right-wing. Conservative. Republican. MAGA. They are not the same thing.

Left-wing. Leftist. Democrat. Liberal. Also not the same thing.

Right-wing and left-wing? These are broad ideological categories.

Republican and Democrat? These are political party affiliations, organizations with shifting platforms and internal divisions. They are not static; they evolve, fracture, realign.

Liberal and leftist? Two entirely different breeds of progressivism. Liberals seek incremental progress and reform within the system. Leftists push for systemic change and demand structural upheaval. One is mainstream, the other often at odds with it.

And yet, we throw these terms around carelessly, flattening them into caricatures, erasing distinctions that matter. Understanding the difference isn’t just semantics—it’s the foundation of meaningful discourse.

So, let’s break it down properly.

Right-Wing vs Republican vs MAGA vs Conservatism

• Right-Wing → An ideological category that favors tradition, limited government, free markets, national sovereignty, and law-and-order policies. It ranges from moderate conservatism to far-right nationalism or authoritarian beliefs.

• Republican → A political party in the U.S. Historically supports lower taxes, deregulation, strong national defense, and conservative social values. While most Republicans lean right-wing, the party includes a mix of moderates, establishment conservatives, and hardline factions.

• MAGA (Make America Great Again) → A political movement associated with Donald Trump. While aligned with the Republican Party, MAGA is distinct in its focus on nationalism, populism, strict immigration policies, and “America First” economics. It prioritizes anti-globalism, anti-establishment politics, and opposition to progressive social movements. Not all Republicans are MAGA, and not all MAGA are republicans—some libertarians and independents also support Trump.

• Conservatism → A broad philosophy that generally promotes traditional values, free-market capitalism, personal responsibility, and skepticism of government overreach. In the U.S., conservatism aligns with the Republican Party but also isn’t limited to it—some libertarians and independents hold conservative beliefs. Conservatism can encompass a range of views, from moderate to more traditional stances. It’s important to note that while some people within these groups may express close-minded views, many others hold conservative beliefs without resorting to prejudice or hatred. They advocate for respecting others’ rights and emphasize values such as individual responsibility and freedom.

Left-Wing vs Leftist vs Democrat vs Liberalism vs Wokeness/Wokeism

• Left-Wing → An ideological category that advocates for social equality, government intervention in the economy, progressive taxation, and civil rights. The left wing spans moderate liberals, social democrats, democratic socialists, and far-left movements like Marxism or anarchism.

• Leftist → A term for more radical progressives who advocate for major structural changes beyond what mainstream Democrats support. This includes democratic socialists, Marxists, anti-capitalists, and anarchists.

• Democrat → A political party in the U.S. Historically supports labor rights, social welfare programs, progressive taxation, and civil rights protections. The party includes centrists, moderates, liberals, and progressives, meaning not all Democrats are leftist, and not all leftists are Democrats. Many leftists criticize the Democratic Party for being too moderate, corporate-friendly, or reformist instead of revolutionary.

• Liberalism → In the U.S., “liberal” refers to center-left beliefs that emphasize personal freedoms, civil rights, and government intervention to promote social welfare. However, in a global context, classical liberalism refers to a philosophy that favors free markets, individual rights, and limited government—which in the U.S. would be closer to libertarianism. Again, not all liberals are Democrats, and not all Democrats are liberal.

• Wokeness/Wokeism → A term that originally referred to social awareness, particularly regarding issues of racial and social justice. It comes from the idea of being “awake” or aware of systemic inequalities, discrimination, and oppression. Initially used in Black activist circles to mean being alert to racial injustices and civil rights issues. Later expanded to include awareness of gender, LGBTQ+ rights, economic inequality, and other social justice causes. In recent years, “woke” has been used as a pejorative, especially by conservatives and right-wing critics, to describe what they see as overreach, performative activism, or extreme political correctness.

[txttletale]

Hi! So, i'm going through Capital, great little obscure book sad that it never got any wide-reaching support (/s), have a couple questions so far though if you wouldn't mind giving some time to answer them:

What does Marx mean when he talks about 'unskilled labor' in relation to 'skilled labor'? Doesn't the vast majority of labor, even things like factory work, require training to do and especially to become good/efficient at? In the passage where he mentioned it he also mentions that (some, not all) unskilled labor, in sufficient quantities, can equal skilled labor but like. this doesn't really make any sense if its just, say, factory work vs idfk tailoring or something. So i'm a bit confused. Or is he talking about what i just mentioned where when you start out doing something you're unskilled but gradually become better at it as you do it more and more?

Who the hell is Ricardo?

factory work requires training to do, sure, but it's an order of magnitude less training than it took to learn to do those jobs before the introduction of the factories--on the level of, say, a few weeks (at absolute maximum) of training, done alongside actual work, before being fully able to work in a furniture factory, as opposed to the actual years of apprenticeship it historically took to become a carpenter. being unskilled doesn't mean that nobody can be good at a job, but it does mean, essentially, that you could grab any random person off the street and have them doing it within a week.

this distinction isn't there to be moralized about but to concretely analyze the different economic positions of these jobs--if your job is unskilled, you are going to be paid worse and have less secure employment, because you are easy to replace and the number of people looking to replace you are also competing against you to work for the lowest wages, driving your wages down. you're also paid less because the cost of reproducing your labour (the core determiner of the 'base price' of wages) is much lower. when an e.g. surgeon gets paid highly, their employer (whether the state or a capitalist) is essentially paying them more to retroactively pay for their extensive years of training.

this distinction is at its most clear when it comes to the concept of deskilling, which is crucial to marx's understanding of the industrial revolution -- with the introduction of machinery, years and years of learning how to do something by hand could be replaced with weeks of learning how to operate a machine. this deskilled huge sections of the economy and proletarianized the artisans and manufacturers who formerly did that work by making them dependent on the machines owned by factory workers. deskilling is the mechanism by which advancements in productive technology paradoxically make the jobs of those working in those fields more precarious and onerous even as the task itself becomes much easier, so it's pretty important to understand for an understanding of historical materialism.

david ricardo was a 19th century economist who advanced the ideas first laid forward by adam smith re: the labour theory of value and was the first to postulate (although without addressing the signficant political implications of this!) that real wages had an inverse relationship to real profits. marx draws heavily on his ideas but is also critical of them. capital is subtitled 'a critique of political economy' -- ricardo is a key figure in the field of political economy that he's critiquing.

[faejilly]

so the reason I didn’t watch #ACOFAF as soon as I fell into D20 was because I knew that the combination of GM Aabria Iyengar’s Everything and Good! Society! Regency! Game! plus Brennan Lee Mulligan’s deeply feral approach to fictional devotion (especially in a genre explicitly about service) was probably going to kill me

which it did in fact do, god damn

so now I have to put my brain back together and figure out what I think apparently?

(and this despite the fact that besides their GM they are clearly not Regency Nerds; they absolutely all bought in to the "terrible ways to constrain your character" premise, and got very excited by the gloved vs ungloved hand touch, (which was delightful), so that's kind of irrelevant beyond my occasional urge to shout dumb trivia at them, but it was a thing I noticed! And it's kind of what started this, thinking about what was and wasn't Regency vs what was and wasn't Fey)

This is mostly via RueHob because of the aforementioned Levels Of Devotion™️

//hvfdu K.P. Hob

*

To begin with, in a turn of quality fandom phrasing, there is the Shrek of it all. Here are two people who have lived their lives thinking they’re monsters surrounded by the impossible beauty of archfey elves and nobility. A couple who find each other and relish in everything about each other that the rest of the world told them was wrong.

I definitely think Oscar recognized that at the character introductions as at least a possibility, so he leaned into it, though he was waiting to see if it would click in game.

Which it did, and I have to think, logistically, that happened in ep 2 largely because Gwyndolin was nice to Andhera and the Lords of the Wings are always a team, and he initiated a scene with Brennan because they were what was left… but they were what was left for a reason. (Cheers for how often the dice help tell a story, this time via initiative order?)

Because Andhera and Gwyndolin | BINX are nice, and want to be good, which are not things that necessarily overlap. They both value compassion and kindness and justice, have lived through the lack of it and felt the cost. Even so, they still believe in better. They are young and powerful enough to believe in their ideals, to hope they can make them real, can do something about it.

I adore their relationship beyond rhyme or reason and it is! in fact! both healthy and well-communicated and between people of equal status; their quality of understanding is more important than rank, though rank is not a thing that can be ignored in this setting.

Andhera and BINX have a very Austen relationship, in fact. About finding someone who protects you from your old family, (or the loss of it), and offers to help you build a new one, who is of similar station not because of any sort of aristocratic arrogance, but because that means they understand both the power and the responsibility you live with.

Theirs is a relationship explicitly about what partnership truly is and how to choose to value someone who helps you be better than you were, while always remaining true to who you want to be.

Which is my favorite thing in the world! But I don't have much articulate to say about them, I mostly make happy noises and flap my hands when they're on screen, so there’s that.

*

Hob and Rue are not an Austen couple. Well. She might write them as a warning? Still not really her jam. They are indeed Romantic! (Capitalization to emphasize distinct genre as well as enthusiasm.)

But they are the aftermath of Gothic rather than Regency, feel more of Brontë and melodrama rather than Austen’s lighter touch.

As a side note, Chirp and Squak are absolutely a Wodehouse comedy which is I’m aware 100 years later and a completely different genre but this is fantasy fey nonsense so that’s fine. Everything’s fine. But Also. Advisor as Jeeves. Sorry, I just. Had to. Because Andhera as Wooster whenever he’s around Chirp and Squak is also. Just. I’m crying it’s hilarious #hlep.

uh. right, where was I?

*

Rue and Hob are people who have been so constrained by rules and expectations that they no longer believe in a nebulous better; this is a relationship about how to fight for freedom, because you’ve never had the leverage to indulge overmuch in compassion, never received nor been able to offer justice, have seldom dared to be more than briefly kind.

Rue can offer patronage, and Hob has granted mercy, but there is only so much either could dare risk; until there’s someone else to risk it for. They are about realizing that you can choose someone else, a person rather than a duty, can place them first because keeping them happy is more important than anything else.

Especially because you know, somewhere deep inside, that the only thing that will ever truly make them happy is you, so to keep them happy you must choose yourself as well.

(I despised everyone in Wuthering Heights and adored Jane Eyre, but I have to admit there is a little bit of both Rochester and Heathcliff in Rue, both Jane and Catherine in Hob. Which is to be fair a fun inversion of tropes right off the bat, as Hob is the soldier (who thus ought to have more options than Jane or Catherine ever did and YET DOES NOT) while Rue is the jewel of their Court in a gilded cage but still so very willful and powerful. Rue and Hob are of course much better people and way more likable, but there is a tinge there, despising the social order, relishing the very things they were told were flaws, devotion to a single person to the exclusion of all else.

*

Hob has been forced into a station where he does not naturally fit… but it's still better than no station at all.

His attempt at goblin mischief is generally violence. His nightmare pride is devouring something, his reputation and influence are all a combination of martial prowess and explicitly obvious self-restraint from same.

His Court put him on a leash, and every time he pulls against it they take it as evidence that they were right to do so. Look at their poor Hob, a goblin who can't even play, he cannot do rumpus but only ruin; he flat-out punches a tree and stabs a guy when he’s ordered to relax.

And sure, that is goblin-like enough, their King eats his subjects, kills a goblin for blood to mark his dog before he sends him off to hunt, but Hob doesn’t do so out of instinct, doesn’t feel his way into chaos like a goblin is supposed to, he plans his way into it, calculated and determined and focused.

He is fundamentally opposed to the nature of his Court, even as he excels at the execution of it. They order him to do what is required for their reputation amongst other Courts because he cannot disobey, because then he has neither the nature nor the execution, then he is no longer a goblin at all, despite the fact that other goblins would be applauded for their rebellion.

Thus why they want to use him the way they do as well, because while his manners are clearly studied and steady rather than the quick instinct of a goblin or the exquisite charm of an elf, that study does in fact make him courtly.

A terrible goblin (in their opinion), but a wonderful weapon.

Brennan plays it as a joke, of course, because he’s hilarious, but Hob is still fae, and goblin, and old, kills easily, plans ruthlessly, is completely aware of the ways in which his Court controls him, (though he does not, pre-Rue, begrudge them that authority, it simply is, inescapable and eternal) and just about the only freedom he has is to literally eat what he loves. (The only things he ever keeps, the only things that are his.

Besides perhaps his horse.)

And I think, much like Rue explicitly states they hate to see around him later, Hob recognizes a cage when he sees it around another.

Thus he does not kill Andhera when it would be easy in war, despite the fact that Andhera is a Prince and should be more free than anyone else on the battlefield.

Hob risks speaking clearly to Gwyndolin that very first evening partly because she feels more free, less caged, than a Fey of her rank ought to be, and he is goblin enough to want to understand that hint of sneakery, to seek out the potential of her impossibility.

He escorts Rue into the Hunt with him rather than bowing away due to their status like he ought, cannot resist that impossible hint of sympathy, of familiarity, of recognition.

And then he meets BINX, who uses their power to help, which is something archfey do not do, and he cannot resist the desire to see how many cages she might break.

Cannot help but wonder: if someone like BINX had held his leash, would he have learned to be brave rather than simply obedient?

Maybe he can be brave enough, even now, that she will let him help, let his well-practiced violence break a cage instead of those within it.

*

Rue is, when introduced, terrifying. Poised and powerful and even other archfey are careful around them. (Emily comments on how much she likes when Rue is mean, and for all the devotion in the back end is remarkable enough to make it easy to forget, they have no tolerance for fools or upstarts; they just always aim their claws out, and our party has found a way inside their regard, behind their walls.) They have made themself literally and metaphorically untouchable amongst myriad fae of power and sensuality, and no one dares breach that.

Theodore flees when Rue looks at him, and half the reason Rue keeps an eye on Gwyndolin could be this: she is supposed to be in the Court of Wonder, and yet she doesn’t know enough to flinch. That isn’t how things work. Hob catching their eye as suddenly as he does must in part be that he does know enough to flinch, but doesn’t.

Not until Rue is surprised enough by him to try and be kind.

Wuvvy is the only one close enough to breach Rue’s walls; and yet she does not live there with her, does she? There’s a lot that’s very compelling (and sweet) with their relationship with Wuvvy, but I think it’s important to remember:

Rue has lived in a cage for thousands of years and the only person outside their captors who knew it joined the enemy and became another bar of the cage, because she had put Rue on a pedestal as an ideal to try and mirror, as something beautiful she wanted to join, and thought those things were friendship, were love.

(Complicated, of course, by the fact that there is friendship and love between them, there is just also... more. And less.)

Rue quite clearly thought the same, they both thought that it was a kindness for Wuvvy to join them in a cage that neither knew how to break.

But I think it never felt right to either of them, not really, not deep down, and when Hob’s first instinct was to pull Rue out of their usual role, they recognized the difference.

And Rue never saw Wuvvy as an equal either. She was always a servant, Rue condescending to be her mentor even as Wuvvy was, technically, also one of their jailers.

Wuvvy was free in a way her friend was not, and yet was always a step below her, also her second, her servant, her aide.

Was this in fact part of why Wuvvy always always bent to Rue’s opinion, bent until she broke against it, because there was guilt there, as well as deference? (Why Rue always let her bend, pushed until she broke, because there was anger there, as well as gratitude?)

Hob was something else entirely.

*

Rue never saw Hob as a servant, could never have fallen in love with him if they did, if they could not respect him as someone equally powerful and dangerous and real.

Hob is dangerous and real, because Hob agrees to escort Rue through the woods partly because he needs to know what Rue knows, needs to find out about the Court of Wonder, about the machinations behind the failed engagement.

And then he's distracted by sincerity, as is Rue, and they both recognized their cages more explicitly… which of course helped lead to the duel:

Rue strains against their cage and Wuvvy tells them they can ignore the bars, but Rue can never, and isn’t that in fact why Rue flinches when Wuvvy encourages them with that first letter, because Rue is trapped, and how dare Wuvvy pretend otherwise?

Rue breaks Wuvvy’s heart via Command, proof if it were needed that the two of them are not really equals in any way that matters, for all they do sincerely love each other;

And Hob knows down to his bones that he is just a servant who can be struck down for thinking otherwise, for wanting to care, much less daring to imagine he might be cared for in return.

Wuvvy knows that Hob is a fellow servant, which must burn, once she thinks Hob is untrue, once Rue stops confiding in her, once everything goes wrong and she doesn’t know what’s happening, what everyone is doing, that somehow Rue doesn’t recognize Hob’s station, but never once forgot Wuvvy’s.

Rue would never risk a Command on him, would they?

*

That is the thing that none of the rest of the party ever understands. Andhera and BINX, even Chirp and Squak, all of them, think Rue’s interest so very obvious. They are close enough to believe it sincerely romance.

(Rue thinks themself so obvious, has been a literal dancing bear in a cage but never a servant from the lesser fey, so they do not understand how anyone could not know what they mean.)

The rest of the archfey, the entirety of the Bloom, are equally aware of Rue’s attentions, though perhaps for them, instead, it is a case of watching the so-called Master of Ceremonies be aware that they should choose the only other palatable monster, to make it clear they know precisely where they belong, and why.

Perhaps Society assumes that is why the Mistrex revealed themself at last: they found a palatable match. Hob is restrained and reputable (in public at least, and that is of course the most important thing) and that is as good as such things get, is it not?

Rue may have been at the pinnacle of Society, but now the archfey all know that Rue was placed there, that they are a prize, a display, a show of strength by their Court. Above the lesser fey, of course, too good at their magic and tending to the Bloom to be otherwise, (well above the touch of a low-born goblin, regardless of the impression he may have left on Society this Bloom) and yet, and still…

There are the rumors that this is the Last Bloom, and what would the Master of the Bloom be, if that was no more?

Perhaps, they wonder and whisper, the Mistrex is aware they need a… contingency? A secure place to land that is, of course, a fall from their current place, but better by far than having no place to land at all.

Because they are not, and have never, will never, truly be one of them. (I cannot help believe that Delloso de la Rue the True is not quite a compliment, because most archfey are not remotely interested in being true. But they can admire it in their Mistrex, can they not?)

Which is much closer to what the lesser fey and Hob are all acutely aware of, that whether well-meant or not, (and some might be charitable enough to think it is meant in condescension rather than disgust), Rue’s behavior is still and forever part of the archfey’s game. Rue may not truly be one of the nobility, but at least they are a respectable and powerful treasure worthy of display, while Hob can only ever be the victim.

Because he is much further away from them, far too useful to also be valuable. (He is simply a tool, to be used and discarded as needed.) The entire point of him is that he is the Goblin Court’s Soldier. He is not nobility, born to his rank; he clawed his way into it, survived long enough to be granted it, and there is very little worse than earning one’s place.

He exists exclusively for his Court to use against outsiders, to kill them or placate them, to spill blood (theirs or his own) and then apologize for it.

(That is, perhaps, Rue’s saving grace in Society’s eyes; their Court placed them in their gilded cage above them all, it could not, would never, be something such a creature could claim to do on their own.)

There is absolutely no reason for Hob to suspect any partiality on Rue’s part, not in this world, not with these politics, and it makes Rue’s previous isolation even clearer, that they cannot see that.

*

I think, prior to Hob and Andhera and Gwyn/BINX, most of the fey aren’t real to Rue, not anymore, not as people or individuals, only pieces of an endless game that moves around them, too far away to touch, a game they can never win but can’t. stop. playing. (They do love Wuvvy, but still. But still.

She is part of the game. She thinks a life in a gilded cage is better than no life at all, and she’s not wrong.

But still.

Rue is so tired.)

So if people are not, can never be touched, can never feel real, all Rue has left are ideals, concepts, something, anything, that will help them get up each day. They will build ideals to romance and honesty and connection and everything The Courts are not, everything that they know will never be theirs, and they will make it enough.

But even that won't last forever.

*

I don’t think much of anything felt real to Rue anymore. There’s something to be said about the rumors of the Bloom ending at the same time the Bloom Master wanted to stop doing it.

This was the Bloom when Rue was considering breaking their glamour and stepping down, even before Hob and conspiracies and consequences.

The Bloom with a bet wherein, despite their reputations and performative selfishness, Rue wanted to gift their connection to the Bloom to the only archfey of rank they'd ever met who believed in the possibility of joy and pleasure as something separate from authority and control.

(There’s a reason Andhera’s rumor that they saved the Bloom was so easy to spread.)

The Lords of the Wing might be fickle, but at least they know how to play without always being cruel.

Because Rue is in a cage, but Rue does also have power, is closer to the tides of the Bloom than anyone else, (senses it coming first, can ease the crest and support it, knows how to lay the scene for the archfey to benefit from it); they're a conduit for power who never gets to keep it for themself.

But perhaps they can, for once, choose where it goes?

The Lords of the Wing also once forsook power for something they thought more important, stayed a House and never a Court.

Perhaps, perhaps that will be enough to make the next Bloom something else. Something better than anything Rue managed.

They only have to finish this, finish a Bloom, one last time. If they can. But they’ve been alone so long, frozen and despairing and stuck, which must have consequences in a world where magic is so closely tied to desire and emotion and all they want is for it all to end.

And so it almost does, even beyond the damage done by Suntar and Apollo and Courts dying and Portals closing and magic being hoarded away.

Except there is Hob, and Andhera, and BINX, and maybe, maybe they can keep going.

Just long enough.

*

Everything is always painfully, unavoidably, real to Hob. He understands politics and consequences, war and violence, and is aware of how much they all exist at the whims of the powerful, knows exactly what it means to be a lesser fey.

He approaches them during the Bloom, and they are in fact how he verifies that Rue interfered with the marriage that would have raised the Goblin Court into a less precarious position. (The Goblins are, I am sure, quite aware of the fate of the Court of Craft, unlike the average members of the larger Courts like Wonder and Seelie and Unseelie.) They trust him, and he trusts them, because they know, they know, despite his so-called status as a military officer, he is more one of them than one of the nobility.

They trust him, as much as they do, as much as they can, even though they know he’s dangerous.

Hob has assuredly killed people, both in and out of battle, judging by how easily the order to kill Apollo is issued and accepted, despite the difference in rank.

If a Prince is so easily condemned, a lesser fey is nothing to note at all.

But while Hob is the Goblin Court’s Weapon, the lesser fey all know he does not choose where he is aimed.

None of them get to choose.

Hob is also, as much as he can be, honorable, and that is impossible not to notice amongst the fey who usually revel so much in being misleading, amongst the goblins who attack each other and laugh about it.

He is honest and sincere when he befriends Andhera after the duel… but also he would have killed him if Blemish and Boil had required it.

He would have regretted it.

But the only way he can protect any of his responsibilities is if he knows precisely when he can't, when he has to acquiesce instead.

And he hates himself for it, because if he hated Court and King he'd never be able to bow to them again, and everyone he'd ever tried to save would be dead.

(Or worse.)

As would he.

*

Rue despises their Court and most other archfey, even if they don’t admit it to anyone until BINX gives them an explicit reason, and their position is elevated enough they've never had to acquiesce, never had to blame themself for the things they cannot change.

But neither have they ever been able to change anything, too constrained within their role to even begin to try.

So why is this Bloom different?

I have to think what may finally have pushed them over the edge, past their ability to pretend and finesse and try and build something better, Bloom after Bloom, was in fact Grabalba and Apollo’s engagement.

Not because it was any worse than any other arrangement. It was just one more power move, politics and petty spite hidden behind pretty words, was another example of everything they hate about their cage.

Something that keeps happening, century after century, Bloom after Bloom, despite all their attempts to shift the Courts, to show them something else.

And they would have to watch another cage be built, would have to witness how the Court of Wonder would treat a goblin under their power. That might have been that final, delicate straw, a breath, barely anything at all, yet enough to push them over the edge, to make it all, at last, too much.

They just fucking couldn’t take it anymore.

So they did something about it.

And continued to, even when directly facing The Chorus and their disapproval, just flat out asking them about The Court of Craft and Wonder’s greed without a blink, without a flinch, without offering them a single softening note of their usual grace or manners. Because the Chorus hadn't earned that.

(None of the Courts had earned their grace, and wasn't it exhilarating to realize that? To know that they'd met people who did, and it was so very easy to see the difference.)

I don’t think they will ever regret it either, since it did in fact free Grabalba and leave Apollo out where they could kill him, since it brought them a Hob whose need for answers meant he had to participate in the Bloom, could not let decorum keep him from engaging with even the Bloom Master themself.

How could they regret anything that brought them Hob?

*

And then of course the best part is that, as soon as Hob knows how Rue feels, he doesn't regret it either.

While Hob is aware of consequences and power dynamics in a way that Rue is not, even he can choose, at last, to decide that sometimes it doesn’t matter. That you can reach for something you want, and that’s not a flaw, not a weakness.

Not once he realizes that Rue honestly truly never saw him as lesser.

He recontextualized the entire Bloom in that moment, and realized he did, in fact, for the first time ever, have a way out.

There’s never a way out.

It’s been thousands of years and no one ever has a way out, and yet, with Rue there is.

There is.

And not only is it a way out, it’s a way out that he wants, in a way he’s never let himself want anything before in his entire damn life. Of course he takes it.

He loves Rue.

Nothing else matters, beyond what he needs to know to keep Rue safe.

And of course, that Rue loves him, too.

*

They are, quite possibly, the reason the Court of Craft survives as the Fey so slowly begin to change, because BINX can anchor her magic in a Portal that can no longer be closed, can build a home that’s hidden from enemies somewhere in that liminal space between the Feywild and the Material Plane, is a Weaver of Fate who has the Prince of the Unseelie himself as their paladin…

And even if someone had a plan for all of that, no one is stupid enough to risk a move that Rue or Hob might see, because Rue will not hesitate and Hob will not stop, and neither of them will have a single line that is too far to cross to protect each other.

Which is in fact an excellent end to a fairy tale, however they got there.

[revoltrebel]

We The People Must Unite!

We The People Must Command Our Right!

We The People Must Ignite!

We The People Must Win This Fight!

When We The People Unite.

When We The People Fight.

When We Dismantle The Wrong With The Right,

We The People Will End Our Plight.

DM To Join The Official Plan of Action On Discord

I think EVERYONE needs to read this. Especially parents! For the sake of the future happiness and equality for their children in their own pursuit of happiness.

Luigi:

I believe He let himself get caught. Possibly even told the employee to report and collect. He ate his meal and waited patiently. He supposedly had the 🔫, the suppressor and his manifesto on him. He is martyring himself to fan the flames of revolution 🫡

I thought it was obvious 🤷🏻‍♂️ He is a man with a very blatantly obvious plan/message. He knows there HAS to be a martyr. It’s how revolutions truly begin.

Freedom and fairness in living and the pursuit of happiness. Capitalism has become a greedy dirty monster. Puppeted by the elite and their govt cronies. Using radical ideals from both sides of the aisle to keep Us, “the common poor citizens” at each others throats instead of realizing who the real enemy and threat really are. To keep us down and struggling just to survive when we should be thriving. Together. They need to be stopped. Only We can stop them. United We Win.

Anyone who knows me personally, knows I’ve been jabbering about the 2nd American Revolution since I was a god damn child…

I thought that this was how I’d react when it came…nonchalant, watching it all unfold with a smug “I told ya so look on my face”…

Now I know.

I want to fight.

I want to make change happen.

I want to surround myself with others of the same ilk

To bring 💀 to the system, we must first bring 💀 to those that control it Deny Defend Depose 🫡

Will you join me?

🫡

Deny Defend DEPOSE! Rise, organize, prepare and FIGHT TOGETHER! This NEEDS to happen! I’m rising. I WILL fight back! Will you join me?

WE need to have EACH OTHERS backs. Ants Vs Grasshoppers. Nobody but OURSELVES are going to make any change happen. Rise up TOGETHER. No matter the religion. No matter what side of the aisle. It’s always been Up Vs Down and they have used EVERYTHING to keep us divided. United WE WIN.

Sorry but I am LEGITIMATELY TRYING to gather Us ALL up and actually do something. Need as many as possible to help and be ready to actually fight. People who aren’t scared. People who are tired and angry at the elite and their government cronies and are WILLING to do what TRULY NEEDS TO BE DONE

Deny Defend DEPOSE!!!

[armageddon-is-light-after-dark]

On memes that annoy me because they are wrong

Starting with Kanan lying about his identity and Cal give his name to everyone he meets.

First problem they both have fundamentally different goals. Kanan's is to hide and maybe hurt the empire on a small scale. Cal's is to inspire hope by proving the jedi aren't dead and aren't traitors.

Next, Cal over his two games is never talking to imperial who hasn't already identified him first. Kanan on the other talks with several people both rebel, outlaw and imperial who don't know who he is.

Lastly well maybe a function of his game, Cal main weapon identifies him as a jedi.

For the old school fans

The X-wing vs Star Destroyer poster equaling Leroy Jenkins stupidity.

Trench running capital ship is a proven effective strategy in all nine main movies. And focus on, in 'A new hope and 'Return of jedi' both time with devastating consequences for the empire.

If anyone read this far I might talk in detail about trench running in each of the movies

[call-me-liquid]

Hi Lily!

Hey girlie. See you've been perusing the blog again. See you actually Googled some shit once you finally caught on Carney was our new PM, huh sweetheart? Okay, let's check your homework.

Swing-and-a-miss again there with Bloc there, love. Though, I could see why you could get "politically hard to define by conventional standards of left and right wing" and "centrist" mixed up there. If you twisted my hand I'd call them a rightwing* party-- emphasis on the "*." But, good try.

Big ol' research fail here though Lil'. There are actually 16 registered federal parties-- and way more that aren't registered or have withdrawn:

https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=pol&dir=par&document=index&lang=e

I can see that you've finally fucking did even some bare basics googling here Lily. You're at least half way grasping how the fucking House of Commons works now. Good for you.

Though I can tell you used ME as an uncited source here, darling. I'm glad you found my political analysis that useful.

Again, though, Lily. The OLD tory Cons were neoliberals. Pierre Poilievre is authoritarian right. They are not AS authoritarian as the Republicans (yet), but they are meandering in that direction. You hate Pierre Poilievre, and you love calling people fucking nazies. I would not declare PP a nazi (yet), but he is for sure flirting with it.

You called ME a nazi. What the actual fuck Lily?!

Ya still seem to be failing to grasp it was the NDP that was most responsible for the policy you keep praising the fucking liberals for. They were using the fact that the Liberals have had minority to their advantage to get that shit through.

And the Libs were STILL fucking fighting them on it:

https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/how-ndp-ended-deal-with-liberals

If I am not spilling hairs here as to how Lily words herself, this information is all, technically, accurate.

I can see you did some barebones fucking research Lily. Here is the tinfoil gold star you're looking for for once not being too lazy to use a search engine. Bravo.

With that said though, Lily, you're like a kid trying to make word count in an essay. This is not a demonstration of your political knowledge. This is basic info about the party YOU support. And frankly, this is not compelling or useful information as to why the Liberal Party deserves support.

The NDP ain't going to win this one, gents. They're down to 12%. Ain't gunna be no Orange Wave. I am going to IMPLORE people to vote NDP anyway since they've been able to do a substantial amount just with the seats they have that I want them to keep and/or get more-- but. It'd be disingenuous to call the Libs the "lesser of two evils." I have lost faith the Libs will EVER make this country better when they're not being strong-armed into it. But I have at least some reasonable faith they will not make this country worse. Not like the Cons right now, who have been infected with a bad case of Opps-all-political-corruption-herpes by America.

What you are describing though, that you refuse to name, is neoliberalism. Socially progressive/neutral but fiscally conservative capitalism is kissing the line to straight up soft-core neoliberalism (as well as being an oxymoron, but. )

All depending on your definition of "progressive" and "fiscally conservative."

"Social liberalism" is probably one of the most nebulous, meaningless political identities you could possibly adopt. It's not committal on the matters of equality vs. Equidity. Makes no exact economic ideology known. Gestures generally to a vague sense of individual liberty with no guiding like to the practical realities of that vision.

Because it was an idea born in a dying world of monarchs. When capitalism was an actual tool to breaking apart the long-standing class structures and causing a paradigm shift. An idea that was the coffin of all feudal kings.

But Lily, dearest darling beloved Lily-- to use a metaphor that's likely going to go over your head here:

First Cronus killed his father Uranus for becoming a tyrant, then Zeus killed Cronus for the same. And though Zeus went ahead and literally fucking ate his first wife Metis to try and prevent her boring a son who was destined to kill his tyrannical self in kind, it's already written in fate.

Feaudism beget capitalism, capitalism beget socialism. The father lives, the father fails, the father dies at the hand of the son. Welcome to the history of civilization 101.

Side note before you go back to writing weird incest fics about Digimon, or whatever you're doing with your time now-a-days:

Next time you decide to make an ass of yourself talking about Canadian history on your stream, maybe mention that:

Tommy Douglas? The man you called the "greatest Canadian who ever lived?" He didn't just create our Healthcare system Lily, he was the founder of the fucking NDP. Maybe give his famous Mouseland broadcast a listen sometime:

Maybe don't fucking gloss over that John A McDonald is the architect of Canada's worst crime against humanity, the Residential Schools. Or that he murdered Louis Riel. He's only our first Prime Minister by stupid technicality anyway. Maybe don't blindly parrot right-wing talking points if you don't want to be accused of being a rightwinger.

[prying-pandora666]

On the Disconnect Between ATLA and LOK: Or Why Reactionary Centrism Ruins Everything

I’ve made it no secret that I’m no fan of LOK’s writing for a number of reasons. But today I want to focus on only one issue: its politics.

I am baffled as to why LOK is seen as being the more “woke” story. Just because the protagonist is a buff brown woman with a female love interest (only implied until the comics, really)? This is such an incredibly shallow reading focusing only on aesthetics and ignores the actual content and philosophies LOK espouses.

But let’s not get into religion, iconography, the effects of colonialism and westernization etc, or we’ll be here forever.

Instead let’s just focus on the politics.

The Forge

Part of the disconnect between ATLA and LOK are the cultural conditions in the USA when both were made. The forge from whence they came was quite different.

Avatar: The Last Airbender

ATLA criticized imperialism.

If this show had been made during the height of Manifest Destiny, or during our super fun times illegally annexing territories (like Hawaii), it would’ve likely struggled to tell its story as well as it did. It would’ve been far more controversial and likely would’ve needed to take a more “centrist” approach, making it seem like imperialism isn’t “all that bad”.

It might have even come out and said that it isn’t imperialism itself that is the problem, but that Sozin to Ozai were big mean dictators that did it the wrong way!

But because ATLA came out in the 2000s—during a time in which the world had widely come around to thinking imperialism is kinda some super villain schtick—it was easy for the story to focus on the perspective of the victims of such campaigns and tell it from this point of view.

We don’t get long segments of feeling sorry for Ozai, now do we? The closest we get is Azula, who herself serves as a victim of this war that has consumed her childhood and deprived her of a safe, loving environment in which to grow and develop, instead having been groomed into a living weapon for her father and nation’s war machine.

So now let’s compare this to LOK.

The Legend of Korra

What does the first season of LOK cover? Collectivism, social activism, civil disobedience escalating to acts of violent defiance against the state.

What was going on in the USA in 2012 when LOK came out?

Occupy Wallstreet.

Socialism vs capitalism, the 99% versus the 1%, civil rights and equality; these are all issues we are still grappling with today. They’re highly politicized and divisive. There is no universal agreement about them.

And so LOK had no “safe” villain or “evil” ideology to combat. Instead it had a complicated and widely divisive topic to tackle that was contentious then and continues to be today.

As a result? Too much time is wasted equivocating.

Both Sides Are The Same! (But Not Really)

We get some soft worldbuilding early on in Book 1 of LOK showing how the infrastructure of this city is built to benefit benders and box out non-benders, but this is never given real focus. We SEE how the trains and police are dominated by earth/metal benders, we SEE how factory jobs employ lightning benders, while non-benders live in the slums which subject them to violence. But none of this is ever the focus or the point.

Almost as if the show is afraid to make a real critique from the perspective of the working class or an oppressed minority group.

Instead the story quickly falls off a cliffside as every tired old pejorative thrown at communists is recycled for Amon.

His sympathetic backstory is a complete fabrication meant to hide that he is actually part of the oppressor class.

They pretend to be the powerless oppressed group, and yet have the funding of the richest industrialist in the city?

The rich industrialist is a member of this supposedly oppressed class but really he’s just a secret villain looking to change the world for his own personal reasons and not to protect his fellow nonbenders (these same accusations are thrown at Jewish people re: Marxism).

There are no sincere attempts to communicate their grievances sympathetically or build a coalition or garner public support. Instead The Equalists only use violence, fear, and other oppressive silencing tactics.

The desire to make everyone equal by “stealing” people’s individuality. (The old “make everyone equal heights by cutting tall people’s legs down” chestnut).

And more!

This is kinda bonkers propaganda if you’re looking at it from a left-wing perspective, right?

And it seems weirdly incoherent if you’re trying to look at it from a right-wing perspective, especially with Tarrlok standing in as the villain “on the other side”.

But it makes PERFECT sense as an enlightened centrist horseshoe-theory piece that can’t commit to either side and has to warp and undermine its own story to fit a “both sides are wrong” message. Heck, it’s so heavy handed it even made Amon and Tarrlok brothers!

This is the problem that plagues all of LOK.

Look at the other villains too!

Amon: Civil Rights Activist or Bad Faith Opportunist?

Amon

Pretends to be: A civil rights activist for an oppressed minority group.

Is actually: A bad faith actor whipping up a small or non-issue into a much bigger one and convincing people to turn on each other for his own personal gain/revenge. Once defeated, the problem disappears.

Electing a non-bender somehow makes everyone happy and the problem is never addressed again. Just like electing Obama ended racism! Oh wait…

Unalaq: Spiritual Environmentalist or Environmental Satanist?

Unalaq

Pretends to be: A spiritualist concerned about the environment and the spirits. Basically Al Gore meets Tenzin Gyatso but willing to start a civil war over it.

Is actually: An occultist weirdo who wants to fuse with LITERALLY SATAN and usher in 10,000 years of darkness or something, and willing to start a war over it.

In an attempt to make a spiritual foil for Korra, who struggled with the spiritual parts of being the Avatar, the story took a weird turn and made a choice widely regarded as “fanfiction on crack” by having Unalaq aspire to become “The Dark Avatar”.

But it’s okay, you see, because while Unalaq’s criticisms of waning spirituality and lack of protection of holy sites could be seen as a knock against environmentalism, by the end Korra recognizes that Unalaq had a point and that the spirit portals should be left open.

So why exactly did Unalaq want to be the Dark Avatar and usher in an era of darkness? How was that supposed to resolve the problem he presented and Korra ended up agreeing with?

It doesn’t, and once again we are left with a contradictory centrist message of “protecting the environment is good but you should be suspicious of anyone that actually advocates for it”.

Also thanks for demystifying the origin of the Avatar and ruining the original lore for where bending came from with your Prometheus/Christian allegory. Ugh.

Zaheer: Spiritual Guru Fighting Against Modernity or A Charismatic Dummy Who Learned Everything About Anarchy From a Prager U Coloring Book

Zaheer

Pretends to be: An anarchist seeking to bring down oppressive regimes, therefor resetting the world to a more egalitarian time

Is actually: An idiot who doesn’t even know the difference between an ancom and an ancap and has no coherent ideology. He just wants chaos, I guess, which isn’t whah anarchy or anything is about.

Perhaps realizing they messed up so badly with Unalaq that even the creators were unhappy with the results, they attempted the spiritual foil idea again with Zaheer.

This time they actually had a writing staff which makes this season the agreed upon best of LOK.

But the tip-toeing around making any actual criticisms and falling back on the “both sides are bad” cop-out are only exacerbated by how uninformed and nonsensical Zaheer’s actions are. Not unlike Amon, he takes none of the steps an actual activist would take. He never even speaks to the people of Ba Sing Se to find out what they need or want. He just kills their leader, announces it, refuses to elaborate, then bounces and lets the city tear itself apart in the power vacuum.

It’s an entertaining spectacle! Just like his later torture of Korra is visceral. But none of it has any real substance to support it and so the horrific acts he commits feel like senseless edgelord tantrums.

Even Bolin knows it. Once Zaheer is defeated, Bolin shoves a sock in his mouth, therefor cementing Bolin as my favorite of the Krew for all time.

Kuvira: Literal Nazi or Literal Nazi but she didn’t mean it!

Kuvira

Pretends to be: A fascist, putting people in labor camps and uses the equivalent of an atom bomb to crush her enemies under heel in the name of unifying the continent under her control.

Is actually: All of those things but she had good intentions! She just went too far! Give her a slap on the wrists because her and Korra aren’t so different, you see!

Perhaps the most bizarre writing choice was to make the fascist the only truly sympathetic villain of this series. The reasons become quite clear, however, when we recognize one thing.

Yes, she’s styled after the Nazis.

Yes, her actions in modern day are more reminiscent of Russia.

But who is the only nation to have ever used a weapon of mass destruction on the level of the atom bomb? The USA.

And here is where the unwillingness to make a bold criticism or take a hard controversial stance is the most apparent.

Kuvira acts like a fascist and has a lot of Nazi-vibes, but she is also a grim reminder of the USA’s own imperial history. Of our flippant use of a horrifying technology that still continues to have consequences for the descendants of the victims even today. It is one of the worst violations of human rights and decency in history. And the USA is the only nation to have ever actually used one.

So if you ever feel it’s weird that Kuvira was arguably the worst of the villains but got off with only house arrest and a happy ending with hugs from her family? You’re not alone. Kuvira has to be “not that bad” or else you’re critiquing the USA itself. And that is a level of controversy this franchise doesn’t seem interested in dipping it’s toes into.

It’s the reason they equivocate and justify by having the Earth Prince step down and choose democracy. This isn’t an East Asian ideal. This wouldn’t have been a popular or virtuous choice in that time period. Many would’ve regarded it as tyranny of the majority, or a disorganized chaos without a consistent central authority.

It’s only seen as the perfect solution in the Democratic West. So you see, it’s not so bad, because at least we have democracy! We aren’t as bad as Kuvira who really isn’t all that bad either! Or so the narrative tries to apologize for itself.

And this is even more apparent with everyone’s problematic fav!

Varrick: How Elon Musk Wants Us To View Him vs What Elon Musk Wishes He Was

Varrick!

Is presented as: A quirky, funny, Tony Stark-esque genius who made a mistake and deserves a redemption!

Is actually: A war-profiteer willing to escalate tensions and shed the blood of his own people with no remorse to make money. Also he builds the equivalent of the atom bomb for Kuvira and her allegorical Nazis. But he gets a happy ending with a weirdly westernized wedding anyway!

Isn’t it telling that the villain who is written to be the most loveable and sympathetic is, in fact, the capitalist industrialist?

And not like that yucky evil industrialist Hiroshi Sato funding the Equalists and their civil rights movement.

No, no! Varrick is the good kind of industrialist! The kind that is non-political and mostly cares about money and inventions! After all, he only built a weapon of mass destruction for the Nazis, not the civil rights protestors!

Which brings us to…

Our Civilized Poverty vs their Savage Poverty!

And hey, that’s fair because look at the differences between Republic City and Ba Sing Se!

Sure, both had destitute populations starving and without proper shelter due to the disconnected elite leaders who didn’t care about their plight.

But the homeless people of Republic City are presented as jolly and helpful and never state a single grievance even as they live in a tent city underground! Everyone knows that democratic poverty is better! Therefor Sato was totally unjustified in funding an equality movement!

The poor people of BSS, on the other hand, are victims of that mean old non-democratic Earth Queen and later of the power vacuum left by her assassination, therefor their plight is ACTUALLY horrific. Kuvira may have been bad but she and Varrick are justified because of the unAmerican conditions!

Looking at it this way, so many of LOK’s problems fall into place. It perhaps serves as lesson in not tackling complex problems with the intention of a clean solution unless you’re willing to take a controversial stance and stick to your convictions.

I don’t think the creators intended to make a libertarian criticism of every social movement and apologia for capitalism and fascism. It’s just a sad reflection of what is and isn’t controversial in our current society. Divorced from actual morality or perspective.

What a waste.

This Post Brought To You By: Viewers Like You! (or: Check out this thing I made)

All that said, if you want a well-written and more adult take on the ATLA universe, check out the Kyoshi and Yangchen novels! F. C. Yee doesn’t pull any punches and perfectly balanced the darker, more visceral elements an adult story can have, with expert worldbuilding and humanized characters that feel believable even when they’re in fantastical situations.

Or if you want more ATLA instead, kindly check out @book4air: A project creating a pseudo Book 4 using both the official comics and original materials, fully dubbed, orchestrated, and partially animated by industry pros who happen to be fans!

Some comics are getting rewrites too, so whether you love the comics and want a fresh take, or hate the comics and want a change, we are doing our best to make this accessible for everyone including people with disabilities who may not be able to enjoy the originals.

Check out our first episode here!

If you can afford to, consider supporting us on Patreon! Every episode is expensive to produce and we are a bunch of broke artists. Some which don’t even have consistent or reliable housing. Any little bit helps.

If you can’t, no worries! You can still help by spreading the word so our videos can overcome the YouTube algorithm.

With all my love for this franchise and its fandom, I hope you all continue to enjoy your favs regardless of my criticisms.

[cinderellaenjoyer]

This is based off the answer @aishabellasbigblogofeverything gave when I sent an ask about it months back, but the more I think about the Barbie Movie, the more I really think it should have been about intersectionality in feminism, rather than do what they did with Ken. It should have focused on how different types of women, such as women of colour (and different types of women of colour), disabled women, women who present more masculinely etc, get treated by society. So, here are some ideas I have for a Barbie movie rewrite!

Have the President Barbie be the main character. I really liked how the President of Barbie Land is a black woman, and though I'm not black myself, I think showing the difference between the power and respect she holds in Barbie Land vs the struggles Real-World Black women go through even when they are in important roles and positions could be interesting. Of course, this would have to be handled by, you know, black female writers.

Have the inciting incident be reports of multiple Barbies feeling concerned and frustrated about the 'type' of Barbie they are, that they don't fit the 'image' of what 'Barbie' is supposed to be, reflecting how women who don't fit the idea of a white, 'conventially attractive' skinny cishet woman are often made to feel inadequate because of how they're treated by society

Then, have the President go to 'Weird Barbie' for advice on what to do and how to fix the problem. Weird Barbie tells her to go to the real world and find the girls who played with the Barbie's who are struggling (like she does with Stereotypical Barbie in the movie)

Instead of Ken, have multiple other Barbies go with President Barbie to the real world. Have them see that while they can have equality in Barbie Land, it's not quite the case in the real world. Show them as shocked and enraged that this is how real world women and girls still get treated.

You can still have Sasha and Gloria, and have Sasha do her monologue about the problems with Barbie, but have the Barbie's actually take it into account and slowly realise Sasha is kind of right, that Barbie DOES cause unrealistic beauty standards for women, that the brand is so, so based around consumerism and capitalism.

Also, have the Barbie's meet and talk to Sasha's friends and/or other women and girls. Have it revealed that the Barbie's have been feeling insecure and frustrated is because these women and girls have been made to feel insecure for not conforming/not meeting beauty standards and/or frustrated towards the society that makes women feel that way.

Mattel as the villain! Have them want to put all the Barbie's back in their boxes, the Barbie's refusing after listening to the real-world girls, and a Mattel Barbie chase scene/fight scene ensues

Once they've escaped sort-of, have the Barbies take the real world girls to Barbie Land, where the real-world girls are suprised to see how great women have it there

Have the President Barbie realise that even though Barbie Land is a lot better than the real world, it's still not as 'perfect' in terms of how different women get treated, like how Barbies like Weird Barbie got orchestrated and if they're not careful they could fall into the same traps people in the real world do in how women get treated

If you really, really want to do something with the Kens, then have a minor sub plot where they hear how men in the real world treat women and girls, have them be horrifed, and aim to do better in how they interact with and treat the Barbies

Also - have Stereotypical Barbie be some what of a foil to President Barbie, since Stereotypical Barbie is, well, the Stereotype of what Barbie should be. Maybe have a conflict where SB tries to argue against Sasha's criticms of Barbie, which makes Sasha AND President Barbie get frustrated with SB.

This can result in President Barbie going to Weird Barbie and the other Misfits again for advice. Maybe Gloria even follows her and gives her 'being a women is hard' speech, albiet maybe a bit different here because of the different complex

Meanwhile, Stereotypical Barbie talks to the Barbies that went to the Real World, they call her out on her not wanting to aknowledge the flaws and problems with the Barbie brand

Have the Climax be Mattel coming in to try and get the Barbie's to go 'Back in their boxes,' but both the Barbie's and the Real World girls fight against them and win!

The ending would be the President working to make Barbie Land a better place, the Real Worlds going back and learning to both love themselves and not let society get away with them and other women and girls for not meeting hegemonic beauty standards or not conforming to hegemonic feminity, standing up and standing by each other and not tolerating men who treat them poorly.

These are just some ideas for now and not too fleshed out, but I hope they sound good to everyone!

[laerien]

While I'm not necessarily ecstatic about The Acolyte being cancelled as far as the future of Star Wars television goes, rewatching the first season of Rings of Power solidified my thoughts about why I think the former needed a bit more work.

The premises are pretty similar: a story based in a time we haven't seen yet in a world that has extensive lore but lots of grey area. Rings of Power and The Acolyte both capitalized on this to take liberties and add several new aspects; whether to genuinely add to the story or to fit into a studio's motive is anyone's guess. Both had fantastical aspects, established orders who refused to believe evil was returning, love vs duty debates, and an exploration of morality.

As a Tolkien fan, I was left feeling indifferent about RoP when it first aired. There were several things I thought would be established in canon that were suddenly changed, yet there were new additions and stories that I could still trace to very evident Tolkien motifs. While not perfect, the new characters, relationships, and storylines all sat clearly on a timeline that would undoubtedly lead to the Middle-earth we knew from the existing media. The dark was gone, it's returning, and we're going to figure out who, how, and why.

As a Star Wars fan, I thought I was very open to The Acolyte coming in and creating some new stories on the timeline. I have to give them some credit, as the majority of the characters were new to avoid blatant fanservice. However, with so much room to work with, I suppose I expected a clearer establishment of the story. A lot of time was spent with so many new characters and world building, and for what? We know Star Wars for being a battle for a better galaxy, just like the LotR franchise is a battle for a better Middle-earth. Without the war, but with knowing the Sith didn't canonically reappear until the prequel era, what was the intention of the season? The Jedi Order exists, the Sith are hinting at a return, but we're not going to figure out anything by the end of the season besides small hints that the Jedi Order is already corrupt, both Mae and Osha would give up everything we learned about them in their backstories in a single moment for something they've been fighting against the whole season, and Darth Plageius is hiding in the shadows even though there's a rule of two and Qimir's motive of having an acolyte to fulfill the rule of two is supposed to still make sense? Everything else that happened in the season is inconsequential to a larger picture, and I think that's why I struggled to understand it, despite genuinely liking several aspects of it.

I recently rewatched Rings of Power, so it's fresh and, while not without flaws, it was an excellent juxtaposition to The Acolyte. By the end of the season, RoP gave us an immensely satisfying answer to the Sauron plot point given in the first episode. It began each storyline, played adequately in each one, and wrapped up each one, all while leaving plenty of mystery in a way I found exciting. The Acolyte had appeared to have all the characters revolving around one story: the Jedi stopping a mysterious dark force from murdering more Jedi. The audience was left out of the loop on so many important things, that, by the time they were revealed, we already had more questions lined up. For all the work they did in making characters with fleshed out backstories, none of it seemed to matter when they made a choice that seemed irrelevant to it all.

I think I'm mostly annoyed that the Acolyte was cancelled because I hoped they could redeem themselves in a second season. Although, I think that annoyance is about equal to watching the finale and realizing the few mysteries solved were either full of holes or just confusing. If anyone can clearly explain to me if I'm missing something huge about the Acolyte's plot and character choices, I am very open to it. It's always exciting to see something new in the fandom, and it's always discouraging to feel like you side more with the never-happy fan trolls.

In any case, let's hope the second season of Rings of Power survives these never-happy fan trolls. I'm catching a screening tonight, but would also love to hear if people think I'm missing something terrible with this show.