#do you understand the relationship between the state and capital

[sh3nlong-promakh0s]

i forgot how much i hate MLs

can't believe i used to associate with them :/ awkward fucking larpers and most of them are like white orientalists :///////// or like russophiles/chinaboos FUCK I HATE THEM GRRRRRRRR

[mesetacadre]

hi, i hope you dont mind me asking this question! i often come across lists of reading recommendations for communists, and they are usually focused entirely on communist theory. which is important and im already on that, but i wonder if you also have recs for learning about history? especially the history of the soviet union, but also other past and present socialist states. i sometimes find myself reading theory and understanding the concepts in a vacuum, but with very little understanding of the historical context they were written in, if that makes any sense. and id like to get a basic grasp of the history of various socialist projects that isnt just the typical western "the ussr was evil!!!!" thing

Hi, historical context is indeed very important for works of theory, especially if it's more than a hundred years old. Lenin's What is to be Done, for example, is very conditioned by its historical context of Russia still being predominantly feudal, with only a timid appearance of the proletariat in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and therefore the very first trade unions, which he talks about. The understanding of these texts is amplified, and quite often enabled by knowing at least the basic historical context. Below I'll list the historical works I've read (and others) with some commentary, but I encourage anyone who has something to add to do so, since I am as of only recently getting more into historiography.

Anything by Anna Louise Strong (I've read The Soviets Expected it (1941) and In North Korea (1941), there's also The New Lithuania (1941), The Stalin Era (1956) and When Serfs Stood Up in Tibet (1959) for example). Her works, which I'd consider primary sources since they are written from her own experience witnessing events and talking to a lot of people, are extremely useful if you wish to form an idea about how some aspects of socialist states worked. The limitation of her works also resides in this specificity and closeness, these are not works that present a broad view of long processes, but a slice of the present with the sufficient historical context. They are still very, very good.

The Open Veins of Latin America (Spanish versrion), by Eduardo Galeno (1971). This one is focused on the history of imperialism in Latin America, how it evolved from the moment the first Spanish foot touched ground to the time it was written in (It talks about Allende before he was assassinated but after achieving power, for example). Perhaps it's not exactly what you're looking for, but it contains very important general context for any social movement that has happened since 1492 to 1971

The Triumph of Evil, by Austin Murphy (2002). I have mixed feelings about this book. While it insists on this weird narrative of absolute evil, which IMO takes away a lot of value from the overall points made, it is an astonishingly in-depth analysis of the economic performance and general merit of socialist systems against their capitalist counterparts. Most of the book is dedicated to comparing the GDR to the FRG, and both the economic and social data it exposes was very eye-opening to me when I read it about 2 years ago. If you can wade through the moralism (especially the beginning of the introduction), it's a gem. I've posted pictures of its very detailed index under the cut :)

Blackshirts and Reds, Michael Parenti (1997). Despite the very real criticisms levied against this book, like its mischaracterization of China, it is still a landmark work. Synthetically, it exposes the relationship between fascism, capitalism and communism.

Red Star Over the Third World, Vijay Prashad (2019); The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World, Walter Rodney (2018). I'm lumping these two together (full disclosure, as of writing I'm about four fifths of the way through RSOtTW) because they deal with the same topic, Prashad being influenced by Rodney as well. Like both titles imply, they deal with the effects the October revolution had on the exploited peoples of the world, which is a perspective that's often lost. Through this, they (at least Prashad) also talk about the early USSR and how it functioned. For example, up until reading Red Star, I hadn't even heard of the 1920 Congress of The Toilers of the East in Baku, or the Congress of the Women of the East.

From here on I'll link works that I haven't (yet) read, but I have seen enough trusted people talk about them to include them

How to Cast a God into Hell: The Khrushchev Report, by Domenico Losurdo (2008). This one talks about how the period of Stalin was twisted and exaggerated through destalinization.

Devils in Amber, by Philips Bonoski (1992). This is about the Baltics and their historical trajectory from before WW1 to the destruction of the USSR (I'm not very sure on those two limits, perhaps they fluctuate a bit, but it definitely covers from WW1 to the 60s)

Socialism Betrayed, by Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny (2004). This one deals with the process leading up to and the destruction of the USSR itself.

The Jakarta Method, Vincent Bevins (2020). This is about the methods the US used in the second half of the 20th century to stamp out, prevent, or otherwise sabotage communist movements and other democratic anti-imperialist movements.

I know some of these aren't specifically about socialist states, which is what you asked, but the history of its opposition is just as important to understand because it always exists as a condition to these countries' development and policies chosen.

[asha-mage]

WoT Meta: Feudalism, Class, And The Politics of The Wheel of Time

One of my long standing personal annoyances with the fantasy genre is that it often falls into the trap of simplifying feudal class systems, stripping out the interesting parts and the nuance to make something that’s either a lot more cardboard cut-out, or has our modern ideas about class imposed onto it.

Ironically the principal exception is also the series that set the bar for me. As is so often the case, Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time is unique in how much it works to understand and convey a realistic approach to power, politics, government, rulership, and the world in general–colored neither by cynicism or idealism. How Jordan works the feudal system into his world building is no exception–weaving in the weaknesses, the strengths, and the banal realities of what it means to have a Lord or Lady, a sovereign Queen or King, and to exist in a state held together by interpersonal relationships between them–while still conveying themes and ideas that are, at their heart, relevant to our modern world.

So, I thought I’d talk a little bit about how he does that.

Defining the Structure

First, since we’re talking about feudal class systems, let's define what that means– what classes actually existed, how they related to each other, and how that is represented in Jordan’s world. 

But before that, a quick disclaimer. To avoid getting too deep into the historical weeds, I am going to be making some pretty wide generalizations. The phrases ‘most often’, ‘usually’, and ‘in general’ are going to be doing a lot of heavy lifting. While the strata I’m describing is broadly true across the majority medieval and early Renaissance feudal states these things were obviously heavily influenced by the culture, religion, geography, and economics of their country–all of which varied widely and could shift dramatically over a surprisingly small amount of time (sometimes less than a single generation). Almost nothing I am going to say is universally applicable to all feudal states, but all states will have large swathes of it true for them, and it will be widely applicable. The other thing I would ask you to keep in mind is that a lot of our conceptions of class have been heavily changed by industrialization. It’s impossible to overstate how completely the steam engine altered the landscape of socio-politics the world over, in ways both good and bad. This is already one of those things that Jordan is incredibly good at remembering, and that most fantasy authors are very good at forgetting. 

The disparity between your average medieval monarch’s standard of living and their peasants was pretty wide, but it was nothing compared to the distance between your average minimum wage worker and any billionaire; the monarch and the peasant had far more in common with each other than you or I do with Jeff Bezos or Mike Zuckerberg. The disparity between most people’s local country lord and their peasants was even smaller. It was only when the steam engine made the mass production of consumer goods possible that the wealth gap started to become a chasm–and that was in fact one of the forces that lead to the end of the feudal system and the collapse of many (though by no means all) of the ruling monarchies in Europe. I bring this up because the idea of a class system not predicated on the accumulation of capital seems pretty alien to our modern sensibilities, but it was the norm for most of history. Descent and birth mattered far more than the riches you could acquire–and the act of accumulating wealth was itself often seen as something vulgar and in many countries actively sinful. So with that in mind, what exactly were the classes of feudalism, and how do they connect to the Wheel of Time?

The Monarch and their immediate family unsurprisingly occupied the top of the societal pyramid (at least, in feudal states that had a monarch and royal family- which wasn’t all of them). The Monarch was head of the government and was responsible for administering the nation: collecting taxes, seeing them spent, enforcing law, defending the country’s borders and vassals in the event of war, etc. Contrary to popular belief, relatively few monarchs had absolute power during the medieval period. But how much power the monarch did have varied widely- some monarchs were little more than figureheads, others were able to centralize enough power on themselves to dictate the majority of state business- and that balance could shift back and forth over a single generation, or even a single reign depending on the competence of the monarch. 

The royal family usually held power in relation to their monarch, but also at the monarch’s discretion. The more power a monarch had, the more likely they were to delegate it to trusted family members in order to aid with the administration of the realm. This was in both official and unofficial capacities: princes were often required to do military service as a right of passage, and to act as diplomats or officials, and princesses (especially those married into foreign powers) were often used as spies for their home state, or played roles in managing court affairs and business on behalf of the ruler.

Beneath the monarch and their family you get the noble aristocracy, and I could write a whole separate essay just on the delineations and strata within this group, but suffice to say the aristocracy covers individuals and families with a wide range of power and wealth. Again, starting from that country lord whose power and wealth in the grand scheme of things is not much bigger than his peasants, all the way to people as powerful, or sometimes more powerful, than the monarch. 

Nobles in a feudal system ruled over sections of land (the size and quality usually related sharply to their power) setting taxes, enforcing laws, providing protection to the peasants, hearing petitions, etc. within their domains. These nobles were sometimes independent, but more often would swear fealty to more powerful nobles (or monarchs) in exchange for greater protection and membership in a nation state. Doing so meant agreeing to pay taxes, obey (and enforce) the laws of the kingdom, and to provide soldiers to their liege in the event of war. The amount of actual power and autonomy nobles had varied pretty widely, and the general rule of thumb is that the more powerful the monarch is, the less power and autonomy the nobles have, and vice versa. Nobles generally were expected to be well educated (or at least to be able to pretend they were) and usually provided the pool from which important government officials were drawn–generals, council members, envoys, etc–with some kingdoms having laws that prevented anyone not of noble descent from occupying these positions.

Beneath the nobles you get the wealthy financial class–major merchants, bankers, and the heads of large trade guilds. Those Marx referred to generally as the bourgeoisie because they either own means of production or manage capital. In a feudal system this class tended to have a good bit of soft power, since their fortunes could buy them access to circles of the powerful, but very little institutional power, since the accumulation and pursuit of riches, if anything, was seen to have negative moral worth. An underlying presumption of greediness was attached to this class, and with it the sense that they should be kept out of direct power.

That was possible, in part, because there weren't that many means of production to actually own, or that much capital to manage, in a pre-industrial society. Most goods were produced without the aid of equipment that required significant capital investment (a weaver owned their own loom, a blacksmith owned their own tools, etc), and most citizens did not have enough wealth to make use of banking services. This is the class of merchants who owned, but generally didn’t directly operate, multiple trading ships or caravans, guild leaders for craftsfolk who required large scale equipment to do their work (copper and iron foundries for the making of bells, for example), and bankers who mainly served the nobility and other wealthy individuals through the loaning and borrowing of money. This usually (but not always) represented the ceiling of what those not born aristocrats could achieve in society.

After that you get middling merchants, master craftsfolk and specialty artisans, in particular of luxury goods. Merchants in this class usually still directly manage their expeditions and operations, while the craftsfolk and artisans are those with specialty skill sets that can not be easily replicated without a lifetime of training. Master silversmiths, dressmakers, lacquer workers, hairdressers, and clockmakers are all found in this class. How much social clout individuals in this class have usually relates strongly to how much value is placed on their skill or product by their society (think how the Seanchan have an insatiable appetite for lacquer work and how Seanchan nobles make several Ebou Dari lacquer workers very rich) as well as the actual quality of the product. But even an unskilled artisan is still probably comfortable (as Thom says, even a bad clockmaker is still a wealthy man). Apprenticeships, where children are taught these crafts, are thus highly desired by those in lower classes,as it guaranteed at least some level of financial security in life.

Bellow that class you find minor merchants (single ship or wagon types), the owners of small businesses (inns, taverns, millers etc), some educated posts (clerks, scribes, accountants, tutors) and most craftsfolk (blacksmiths, carpenters, bootmakers, etc). These are people who can usually support themselves and their families through their own labor, or who, in the words of Jin Di, ‘work with their hands’. Most of those who occupy this class are found in cities and larger towns, where the flow of trade allows so many non-food producers to congregate and still (mostly) make ends meet. This is why there is only one inn, one miller, one blacksmith (with a single apprentice) in places like Emond’s Field: most smaller villages can not sustain more than a handful of non-food producers. This is also where you start to get the possibility of serious financial instability; in times of chaos it is people at this tier (and below) that are the first to be forced into poverty, flight, or other desperate actions to survive.

Finally, there is the group often collectively called ‘peasants’ (though that term is also sometimes used to mean anyone not noble born). Farmers, manual laborers, peddlers, fishers- anyone who is unlikely to be able to support more than themselves with their labor, and often had to depend on the combined labor of their spouse and families to get by. Servants also generally fit into this tier socially, but it’s important to understand that a servant in say, a palace, is going to be significantly better paid and respected than a maid in a merchant's house. This class is the largest, making up the majority of the population in a given country, and with a majority of its own number being food-producers specifically. Without the aid of the steam engine, most of a country’s populace needs to be producing food, and a great deal of it, in order to remain a functional nation. Most of the population as a result live in smaller spread out agrarian communities, loosely organized around single towns and villages. Since these communities will almost always lack access to certain goods or amenities (Emond’s Field has a bootmaker, but no candlemaker, for example) they depend on smalltime traders, called peddlers, to provide them with everyday things, who might travel from town to town with no more than a single wagon, or even just a large pack.

The only groups lower than peasants on the social hierarchy are beggars, the destitute, and (in societies that practice slavery) slaves. People who can not (or are not allowed to) support themselves, and instead must either eke out a day to day existence from scraps, or must be supported by others. Slaves can perform labor of any kind, but they are regarded legally as a means of production rather than a laborer, and the value is awarded to their owner instead. 

It’s also worth noting that slavery has varied wildly across history in how exactly it was carried out and ran the gamut from the trans-Atlantic chattel slavery to more caste or punitive-based slavery systems where slaves could achieve freedom, social mobility, or even some degree of power within their societies. But those realities (as with servants) had more to do with who their owners were than the slave’s own merit, and the majority of slaves (who are almost always seen as less than a freedman even when they are doing the same work) were performing the same common labor as the ‘peasant’ class, and so viewed as inferior.

Viewing The Wheel of Time Through This Lens

So what does all this have to do with Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time? A lot actually, especially compared to his contemporaries in fantasy writing. Whereas most fantasy taking place in feudal systems succumbs to the urge to simplify matters (sometimes as far down to their only being two classes, ‘peasant’ and ‘royalty’) Jordan much more closely models real feudalism in his world. 

The majority of the nations we encounter are feudal monarchies, and a majority of each of their populations are agrarian farming communities overseen by a local lord or other official. How large a nation’s other classes are is directly tied to how prosperous the kingdom is, which is strongly connected to how much food and how many goods the kingdom can produce on the available land within it. This in turn, is tightly interdependent on how stable the kingdom is and how effective its government is.

Andor is the prime example: a very large, very prosperous kingdom, which is both self-sufficient in feeding itself via its large swathes of farmland (so much so that they can afford to feed Cairhien through selling their surplus almost certainly at next to no profit) and rich in mineral wealth from mines in the west. It is capable of supporting several fairly large cities even on its outskirts, as well as the very well-developed and cosmopolitan Caemlyn as its capital. This allows Andor to maintain a pretty robust class of educated workers, craftsfolk, artisans, etc, which in turn furthers the realm’s prosperity. At the top of things, the Queen presides over the entire realm with largely centralized power to set laws and taxes. Beneath her are the ‘great houses’–the only Houses in Andor besides the royal house who are strong enough that other nobles ‘follow where they lead’ making them the equivalent of Duchesses and Dukes, with any minor nobles not sworn directly to the Queen being sworn to these ten.

And that ties into something very important about the feudal system and the impact it had on our world and the impact it has on Jordan's. To quote Youtuber Jack Rackham, feudalism is what those in the science biz would call an unstable equilibrium. The monarch and their vassals are constantly in conflict with each other; the vassals desiring more power and autonomy, as the monarch works to centralize power on themselves. In feudalism there isn’t really a state army. Instead the monarch and the nobles all have personal armies, and while the monarch’s might be stronger than anyone else’s army, it’s never going to be stronger than everybody else’s. 

To maintain peace and stability in this situation everyone has to essentially play Game of Thrones (or as Jordan called it years before Martin wrote GoT, Daes Dae’mar) using political maneuvering, alliances, and scheming in order to pursue their goals without the swords coming out, and depending on the relative skill of those involved, this can go on for centuries at a time….or break apart completely over the course of a single bad summer, and plunge the country into civil war.

Cairhien is a great example of this problem. After losing the Aiel War and being left in ruins, the monarch who ultimately secured the throne of Cairhien, Galldrian Riatin, started from a place of profound weakness. He inherited a bankrupt, war torn and starving country, parts of which were still actively on fire at the time. As Thom discusses in the Great Hunt, Galddrian's failure to resettle the farmers displaced by the war left Cairhien dependent on foreign powers to feed the populace (the grain exports from Tear and Andor) and in order to prevent riots in his own capital, Galldrian choose bread and circuses to keep the people pacified rather then trying to substantially improve their situation. Meanwhile, the nobles, with no effective check on them, began to flex their power, seeing how much strength they could take away from each other and the King, further limiting the throne’s options in how to deal with the crisis, and forcing the King to compete with his most powerful vassals in order to just stay on the throne. This state of affairs ultimately resulted, unsurprisingly, in one of Galladrin’s schemes backfiring, him ending up dead, and the country plunging into civil war, every aristocrat fighting to replace him and more concerned with securing their own power then with restoring the country that was now fully plunged into ruin.

When Dyelin is supporting Elayne in the Andoran Succession, it is this outcome (or one very much like it) that she is attempting to prevent. She says as much outright to Elayne in Knife of Dreams–a direct succession is more stable, and should only be prevented in a situation where the Daughter Heir is unfit–through either incompetence or malice–to become Queen. On the flip side, Arymilla and her lot are trying to push their own agendas, using the war as an excuse to further enrich their Houses or empower themselves and their allies. Rhavin’s machinations had very neatly destabilized Andor, emboldening nobles such as Arymilla (who normally would never dream of putting forward a serious claim for the throne) by making them believe Morgase and Trakand were weak and thus easy to take advantage of. 

We also see this conflict crop up as a central reason Murandy and Altara are in their current state as well. Both are countries where their noble classes have almost complete autonomy, and the monarch is a figurehead without significantly more power than their vassals (Tylin can only keep order in Ebou Dar and its immediate surrounding area, and from what she says her father started with an even worse deal,with parts of the capital more under the control of his vassals than him). Their main unifying force is that they wish to avoid invasion and domination by another larger power (Andor for Murandy, Illian and Amadica for Altara) and the threat of that is the only thing capable of bringing either country into anything close to unity.

Meanwhile a lack of centralization has its trade offs; people enjoy more relative freedoms and social mobility (both depend heavily on trade, which means more wealth flowing into their countries but not necessarily accumulating at the top, due to the lack of stability), and Altara specifically has a very robust ‘middle class’ (or as near as you can get pre-industrialization) of middling to minor merchants, business and craftsfolk, etc. Mat’s time in Ebou Dar (and his friendship with Satelle Anan) gets into a lot of this. Think of the many many guilds that call Altara home, and how the husband of an inn owner can do a successful enough business fishing that he comes to own several crafts by his own merit. 

On the flip side both countries have problems with violence and lawlessness due to the lack of any enforced uniformity in terms of justice. You might ride a day and end up in land ruled by a Lord or Lady with a completely different idea of what constitutes, say, a capital offense, than the Lord or Lady you were under yesterday. This is also probably why Altara has such an ingrained culture of duels to resolve disputes, among both nobles and common folk. Why appeal to a higher authority when that authority can barely keep the streets clean? Instead you and the person you are in conflict with, on anything from the last cup of wine to who cheated who in a business deal, can just settle it with your knives and not have to bother with a hearing or a petition. It’s not like you could trust it anyways; as Mat informs us, most of the magistrates in Altara do the bidding of whoever is paying their bribes.

But neither Altara nor Murandy represents the extreme of how much power and autonomy nobles can manage to wrangle for themselves. That honor goes to Tear, where the nobles have done away with the monarch entirely to instead establish what amounts to an aristocratic confederacy. Their ruling council (The High Lords of Tear) share power roughly equally among themselves, and rule via compromise and consensus. This approach also has its tradeoffs: unlike Murandy and Altara, Tear is still able to effectively administer the realm and create uniformity even without a monarch, and they are able to be remarkably flexible in terms of their politics and foreign policy, maintaining trade relationships even with bitter enemies like Tar Valon or Illian.  On the flipside, the interests of individual nobles are able to shape policy and law to a much greater extent, with no monarch to play arbiter or hold them accountable. This is the source of many of the social problems in Tear: a higher sense of justice, good, or even just plain fairness all take a back seat to the whims and interest of nobles. Tear is the only country where Jordan goes out of his way, repeatedly, to point out wealth inequality and injustice. They are present in other countries, but Jordan drives home that it is much worse in Tear, and much more obscene. 

This is at least in part because there is no one to serve as a check to the nobles, not even each other. A monarch is (at least in theory) beholden to the country as a whole, but each High Lord is beholden only to their specific people, house and interests, and there is no force present that can even attempt to keep the ambitions and desires of the High Lords from dictating everything. So while Satelle Anan's husband can work his way up from a single fishing boat to the owner of multiple vessels, most fisherman and farmers in Tear scrape by on subsistence, as taxes are used to siphon off their wealth and enrich the High Lords. While in Andor ‘even the Queen most obey the law she makes or there is no law’ (to quote Morgase), Tairen Lords can commit murder, rape, or theft without any expectation of consequences, because the law dosen’t treat those acts as crimes when done to their ‘lessers’, and any chance someone might get their own justice back (as they would in Altara) is quashed, since the common folk are not even allowed to own weapons in Tear. As we’re told in the Dragon Reborn, when an innkeeper is troubled by a Lord cheating at dice in the common room, the Civil Watch will do nothing about it and citizens in Tear are banned from owning weapons so there is nothing he can do about it. The best that can be hoped for is that he will ‘get bored and go away’.

On the opposite end, you have the very very centralized Seanchan Empire as a counter example to Tear, so centralized it’s almost (though not quite) managed to transcend feudalism. In Seanchan the aristocratic class has largely been neutered by the monarchy, their ambitions and plots kept in check by a secret police (the Seekers of Truth) and their private armies dwarfed by a state army that is rigorously kept and maintained. It’s likely that the levies of the noble houses, if they all united together, would still be enough to topple the Empress, but the Crystal Throne expends a great deal of effort to ensure that doesn't happen,playing the nobles against each other and taking advantage of natural divisions in order to keep them from uniting.

Again, this has pros and cons. The Seanchan Empire is unquestionably prosperous; able to support a ridiculous food surplus and the accompanying flow of wealth throughout its society, and it has a level of equity in its legal administration that we don’t see anywhere else in Randland. Mat spots the heads of at least two Seanchan nobles decorating the gates over Ebou Dar when he enters, their crimes being rape and theft, which is a far cry from the consequence-free lives of the Tairen nobles. Meanwhile a vast state-sponsored bureaucracy works to oversee the distribution of resources and effective governance in the Empress’s name. No one, Tuon tells us proudly, has to beg or go hungry in the Empire. But that is not without cost. 

Because for all its prosperity, Seanchan society is also incredibly rigid and controlling. One of the guiding philosophies of the Seanchan is ‘the pattern has a place for everything and everything’s place should be obvious on sight’. The classes are more distinct and more regimented than anywhere else we see in Randland. The freedoms and rights of everyone from High Lords to common folk are curtailed–and what you can say or do is sharply limited by both social convention and law. The Throne (and its proxies) are also permitted to deprive you of those rights on nothing more than suspicion. To paraphrase Egeanin from TSR: Disobeying a Seeker (and presumably any other proxy of the Empress) is a crime. Flight from a Seeker is a crime. Failure to cooperate fully with a Seeker is a crime. A Seeker could order a suspected criminal to go fetch the rope for their own binding, and the suspected criminal would be expected to do it–and likely would because failure to do anything else would make them a criminal anyway, whatever their guilt or innocence in any other matter.

Meanwhile that food surplus and the resulting wealth of the Empire is built on its imperialism and its caste-based slavery system, and both of those are inherently unsustainable engines. What social mobility there is, is tied to the Empire’s constant cycle of expand, consolidate, assimilate, repeat–Egeanin raises that very point early on, that the Corenne would mean ‘new names given and the chance to rise high’. But that cycle also creates an endless slew of problems and burning resentments, as conquered populations resist assimilation, the resistance explodes into violence that the Seanchan must constantly deal with–the ‘near constant rebellions since the Conquest finished’ that Mat mentions when musing on how the Seanchan army has stayed sharp.

The Seanchan also practice a form of punitive and caste-based slavery for non-channelers, and chattel slavery for channelers. As with the real-life Ottoman Empire, some da’covale enjoy incredible power and privilege in their society, but they (the Deathwatch Guard, the so’jhin, the Seekers) are the exception, not the rule. The majority of the slaves we encounter are nameless servants, laborers, or damane. While non-channelers have some enshrined legal protections in how they can be treated by their masters and society as a whole, we are told that emancipation is incredibly rare, and the slave status is inherited from parent to child as well as used as a legal punishment–which of course would have the natural effect of discouraging most da’covale from reproducing by choice until after (or if) they are emancipated–so the primary source for most of the laborers and servants in Seanchan society is going to be either people who are being punished or who choose to sell themselves into slavery rather then beg or face other desperate circumstances. 

This keeps the enslaved population in proportion with the rest of society only because of the Empire’s imperialism- that same cycle of expand, consolidate, assimilate, repeat, has the side effect of breeding instability, which breeds desperation and thus provides a wide pool to draw on of both those willing to go into slavery to avoid starvation, and those who are being punished with slavery for wronging the state in some manner. It’s likely the only reason the Empire’s production can keep pace with its constant war efforts: conquered nations (and subdued rebellions) eventually yield up not just the necessary resources, but also the necessary laborers to cultivate them in the name of the state, and if that engine stalls for any sustained length of time (like say a three hundred year peace enforced by a treaty), it would mean a labor collapse the likes of which the Empire has never seen before.

A note on damane here: the damane system is undoubtedly one of chattel slavery, where human beings are deprived of basic rights and person hood under the law for the enrichment of those that claim ownership over them. Like in real life this state of affairs is maintained by a set of ingrained cultural prejudices, carefully constructed lies, and simple ignorance of the truly horrific state of affairs that the masses enjoy. The longevity of channelers insulates the damane from some of the problems of how slavery can be unsustainable, but in the long run it also suffers from the same structural problem: when the endless expansion stops, so too will the flow of new damane, and the resulting cratering of power the Empire will face will put it in jeopardy like nothing has before. There is also the problem that, as with real life chattel slavery, if any one piece of the combination of ignorance, lies, and prejudice starts to fall apart, an abolition movement becomes inevitable–and several characters are setting the stage for just that via the careful spreading of the truth about the sul’dam. Even if the Seanchan successfully put down an abolition movement, doing so will profoundly weaken them in a way that will necessitate fundamental transformation, or ensure collapse.

How Jordan Depicts The Relationships Between Classes

As someone who is very conscious in how he depicts class in his works, it makes sense that Jordan frequently focuses on characters interacting through the barriers of their various classes in different ways. New Spring in particular is a gold mine for this kind of insight.

Take, for example, Moiraine and Siuan’s visit to the master seamstress. A lesser writer would not think more deeply on the matter than ‘Moiraine is nobly born so obviously she’s going to be snobby and demanding, while down-to-earth Siuan is likely to be build a natural rapport and have better relationship her fellow commoner, the seamstress Tamore Alkohima’. But Jordan correctly writes it as the reverse: Tamore Alkohima might not be nobly born, but she is not really a peasant either–rather she belongs to that class of speciality artisans, who via the value placed on her labor and skill, is able to live quite comfortably. Moiraine is much more adept at maneuvering this kind of possibly fraught relationship than Siuan is. Yes, she is at the top of the social structure (all the more so since becoming Aes Sedai) but that does not release her from a need to observe formalities and courtesies with someone who, afterall, is doing something for Moiraine that she can not do for herself, even with the Power. If Moiraine wants the services of a master dressmaker, the finest in Tar Valon, she must show respect for both Tamore Alkohima and her craft, which means submitting to her artistic decisions, as well as paying whatever price, without complaint.

Siuan, who comes from the poor Maule district in Tear, is not used to navigating this kind of situation. Most of those she has dealt with before coming to the Tower were either her equals or only slightly above her in terms of class. She tries to treat Tamore Alkohima initially like she most likely treated vendors in the Maule where everyone is concerned with price, since so many are constantly on the edge of poverty, and she wants to know exactly what she is buying and have complete say over the final product, which is the practical mentality of someone to whom those factors had a huge impact on her survival. Coin wasted on fish a day from going bad, or netting that isn’t the right kind, might have meant the difference between eating that week or not, for a young Siuan and her father. 

Yet this this reads as an insult to Tamore Alkohima, who takes it as being treated with mockery, and leads to Moiraine needing to step in to try and smooth things over, and explain to Siuan-

“Listen to me, Siuan and do not argue.” she whispered in a rush. “We must not keep Tamore waiting long. Do not ask after prices: she will tell us after we make our selections. Nothing you buy here will be cheap, but the dresses Tamore sews for you will make you look Aes Sedai as much as the shawl does. And it is Tamore, not Mistress Alkohima. You must observe the properties or she will believe you are mocking her. But try thinking of her as a sister who stands just a little above you. A touch of deference is necessary. Just a touch, but she will tell you what to wear as much as she asks.” “And will the bloody shoe maker tell us what kind of slippers to buy and charge us enough to buy fifty new sets of nets?” “No.” Moiraine said impatiently. Tamore was only arching one eyebrow but her face may as well have been a thunderhead. The meaning of that eyebrow was clear as the finest crystal. They had already made the seamstress wait too long, and there was going to be a price for it. And that scowl! She hurried on, whispering as fast as she could. “The shoemaker will make us what we want and we will bargain the price with him, but not too hard if we want his best work. The same with the glovemaker, the stockingmaker, the shiftmaker, and all the rest. Just be glad neither of us needs a hairdresser. The best hairdressers are true tyrants, and nearly as bad as perfumers.”

-New Spring, Chapter 13: Business in the City.

Navigating the relationship between characters of a different class is something a of a running theme throughout New Spring–from Moiraine’s dealing with the discretion of her banker (‘Another woman who knew well her place in the world’ as Moiraine puts it), to having to meet with peasants during her search for the Dragon Reborn (and bungling several of those interactions), to wading through the roughest criminal parts of Chachin in search of an inn, and frequently needing to resort to the Power to avoid or resolve conflict. Moiraine’s ability to handle these situations is tightly tied to her experience with the people involved prior to her time as a Novice, but all hold up and give color to the class system Jordan presents. It also serves as set up so that when Moraine breaks the properties with a different seamstress near the end of the book, it can be a sign of the rising tension and the complex machinations she and Siuan find themselves in.

Notably, Moiraine and Siuan’s relative skill with working with people is strongly related to their backgrounds: the more Moiraine encounters people outside her lived experience as a noble daughter in Cairhien, the more she struggles to navigate those situations while Siuan is much more effective at dealing with the soldiers during the name-taking sequence (who are drawn mostly from the same class as her–common laborers, farmers, etc), and the people in Chachin, where she secures an lodging and local contacts to help in the search with relative ease.

Trying to navigate these waters is also something that frequently trips up characters in the main series as well, especially with the Two Rivers folk who are, ultimately, from a relatively classless society that does not subscribe to feudal norms (more on that below). All of them react to both moving through a society that does follow those norms, and later, being incorporated into its power structures in different, frequently disastrous ways.

Rand, who is not used to the complicated balance between vassal and monarch (which is all the more complicated as he is constantly adding more and more realms under his banner) finds imposing his will and leading the aristocrats who swear fealty to him incredibly difficult. While his reforms are undoubtedly good for the common folk and the general welfare of the nations he takes over, he is most often left to enforce them with threats and violence, which ultimately fuel resistance, rebellion, and more opposition to him throughout the nations he rules, and has down-the-line bad ripple effects on how he treats others, both noble and not, who disagree with him. 

Rand also struggles even with those who sincerely wish to serve and aid him in this context: he is awkward with servants, distant with the soldiers and warriors who swear their lives to him, and even struggles with many of his advisors and allies. Part of that is distrust that plagues him in general, but a big element to it is also his own outsider perspective. The Aiel frequently complain that Rand tries to lead them like a King, but that’s because they assume a wetlander King always leads by edict and command. Yet Rand’s efforts to do that with the Westland nations he takes over almost always backfire or have lasting consequences. Rand is frequently trying to frequently play act at what he thinks a King is and does–and when he succeeds it’s almost always a result of Moiraine or Elayne’s advice on the subject, not his own instincts or preconceptions.

Perrin, meanwhile, is unable to hide his contempt for aristocracy and those that willingly follow them, which leads to him both being frequently derelict in his duties as a Lord, and not treating his followers with a great deal of respect. Nynaeve has a similar problem, where she often tries to ‘instill backbone’ into those lower in the class system then her, then comes to regret it when that backbone ends up turned on her, and her leadership rejected or her position disrespected by those she had encouraged to reject leadership or not show respect to people in higher positions.

Interestingly, it’s Mat that most effectively manages to navigate various inter-class relationships, and who via the Band of the Red Hand builds a pretty equitable, merit-based army. He does this by following a simple rule: treating people how they wish to be treated. He accepts deference when it’s offered, but never demands it. He pushes back on the notion he’s a Lord often, but only makes it a serious bone with people who hold the aristocracy in contempt. He’s earnest in his dealings, fair minded, and good at reading social situations to adapt to how folks expect him to act, and when he breaches those expectations it’s usually a deliberate tactical choice. 

This lets him maintain strong friendships with people of all backgrounds and classes– from Princes like Beslan to horse thieves like Chel Vanin. More importantly, it makes everyone under his command feel included, respected, and valued for what they are. Mat has Strong Ideas About Class (and about most things really), but he’s the only Two Rivers character who doesn't seem to be working from an assumption that everyone else ought to live by his ideals. He thinks anyone that buys into the feudal system is mad, but he doesn't actually let that impact how he treats anyone–probably from the knowledge that they think he’s just as mad.

Getting Creative With the Structure

The other thing I want to dig into is the ways in which Jordan, via his understanding of the feudal system, is able to play with it in creative and interesting ways that match his world. Succession is the big one; who rules after the current monarch dies is a massively important matter since it determines the flow of power in a country from one leader to the next. The reason so many European monarchies had primogeniture (eldest child inherits all titles) succession is not because everyone just hated second children, it’s because primogeniture is remarkably stable. Being able to point to the eldest child of the monarch and say them, that one, and their younger sibling if they're not around, and so on is very good for the transition of power, since it establishes a framework that is both easy to understand and very very hard to subvert. Pretty much the only way, historically, to subvert a primogeniture succession is for either the heir’s blood relationship to the monarch or the legitimacy of their parent’s marriage to be called into question.

And yet despite that, few of the countries in Jordan's world actually use primogeniture succession. Andor does, as do some of the Borderlands, but the majority of  monarchies in Randland use elective succession, where the monarch is elected from among the aristocratic class by some kind of deliberative body. This is the way things are in Tarabon, Arad Doman,Ghealdan, Illian, and Malkier, who all elect the monarchs (or diarchs in the case of Tarabon- where two rulers, the Panarch and the King, share power) via either special council or some other assembly of aristocrats. 

There are three countries where we don’t know the succession type (Arafel, Murandy, and Amadicia) but also one we know for sure doesn't use primogeniture succession: Cairhien. We know this because Moiraine’s claim to the Sun Throne as a member of House Damodred is seen as as legitimate enough for the White Tower to view putting her on the Sun Throne as a viable possibility, despite the fact that she has two older sisters whose claims would be considered superior to her own under primogeniture succession. We never find out for sure in the books what the succession law actually is (the country never stabilizes for a long enough period that it becomes important), but if I had to guess I would guess that it’s designated,where the monarch chooses their successor prior to their death, and that the civil war that followed the Aiel War was the result of both Laman and his designated heir(s) dying at the Bloodsnows (we are told by Moiraine that Laman and both his brothers are killed; likely one of them was the next in line).

One country that we know for sure uses designated succession is Seanchan, where the prospective heir is still chosen from among the children of the Empress, but they are made to compete with each other (usually via murder and plotting) for the monarch’s favor, the ‘best’ being then chosen to become the heir. This very closely models how the Ottoman Empire did succession (state sanctioned fratricide) and while it has the potential to ensure competence (by certain metrics, anyways) it also sows the seeds of potential instability by ensuring that the monarch is surrounded by a whole lot of people with bad will to them and feelings of being cheated or snubbed in the succession, or else out for vengeance for their favored and felled candidate. Of course, from the Seanchan’s point of view this is a feature not a bug: if you can’t win a civil war or prevent yourself from being assassinated, then you shouldn’t have the throne anyways.

Succession is far from the only way that Jordan plays with the feudal structure either. Population is something else that is very present in the world building, even though it’s only drawn attention to a handful of times. In our world, the global population steadily and consistently rose throughout the middle ages and the Renaissance (with only small dips for things like the plague and the Mongol Invasion), then exploded with the Industrial Revolution and has seen been on a meteoric climb year over year (something that may just now be stabilizing into an equilibrium again, only time will tell). This is one of the pressures that led to the collapse of feudalism in the real world, as a growing aristocratic class was confronted with finite land and titles, while at the same time the growing (and increasingly powerful) wealthy financial class of various countries were beginning to challenge the traditions and laws that kept them out of direct power. If you’ve ever read a Jane Austen novel (or really anything from the Georgian/Regency/Victorian eras) this tension is on display. The aristocratic class had never been as secure as people think, but the potential to fall into poverty and ruin had never been a greater threat, which had ripple effects for the stability of a nation, and in particular a monarch who derived much of their power from the fealty of their now-destabilized vassals.

In Jordan’s world however, we are told as early as The Great Hunt that the global population is steadily falling, and has been since the Hundred Years’ War (at least). No kingdom is able to actually control all the territory it has on a map, the size of armies have in particular shrunk consistently (to the point where it’s repeatedly commented on that the armies Rand puts together, some of no more than a few thousand, are larger than any ‘since Artur Hawkwing's day’), large swathes of land lay ungoverned and even more uninhabited or settled. Entire kingdoms have collapsed due to the inability of their increasingly small populations to hold together. This is the fate of many of the kingdoms Ingtar talks about in the Great Hunt: Almoth, Gabon, Hardan, Moredo, Caralain, to name just a few. They came apart due to a combination of ineffective leadership, low population, and a lack of strong neighbors willing or able to extend their power and stability over the area.

All of this means that there is actually more land than there are aristocrats to govern it; so much so that in places like Baerlon power is held by a crown-appointed governor because no noble house has been able to effectively entrench in the area. This has several interesting effects on the society and politics of Randland: people in general are far more aware of the fragility of the nation state as a idea then they would be otherwise, and institutions (even the intractable and mysterious White Tower) are not viewed by even their biggest partisans as invulnerable or perpetual. Even the most powerful leaders are aware, gazing out constantly, as they do, at the ruins of the hundreds of kingdoms that have risen and fallen since the Breaking of the World (itself nothing more, to their understanding, then the death of the ultimate kingdom) that there are no guarantees, no promises that it all won’t fall apart. 

This conflict reflects on different characters in different ways, drawing out selfishness and cowardice from some, courage and strength from others. This is a factor in Andor’s surprisingly egalitarian social climate: Elayne and Morgase both boast that Andorans are able to speak their minds freely to their leaders about the state of things, and be listened to, and even the most selfish of leaders like Elenia Sarand are painfully aware that they stand on a tower built from ‘the bricks of the common folk’, and make a concentrated effort to ensure their followers feel included and heard. Conversely it also reflects on the extremely regimented culture of the Borderlands, were dereliction of duty can mean not just the loss of your life, but the loss of a village, a town, a city, to Trolloc raids (another pressure likely responsible for slow and steady decline of the global population). 

The Borderlanders value duty, honor, and responsibility above all else, because those are the cornerstones holding their various nations together against both the march of time and the Blight. All classes place a high value on the social contract; the idea that everyone must fulfill their duty to keep society safe is a lot less abstract when the stakes are made obvious every winter through monsters raiding your towns. This is most obvious in both Hurin and Ingtar’s behavior throughout The Great Hunt: Hurin (and the rest of the non-noble class) lean on the assurance that the noble class will be responsible for the greater scale problems and issues in order to endure otherwise unendurable realities, and that Rand, Ingtar, Aglemar, Lan (all of whom he believes to be nobly born) have been raised with the necessary training and tools to take charge and lead others through impossible situations and are giving over their entire lives in service to the people. In exchange Hurin pays in respect, obedience, and (presumably) taxes. This frees Hurin up to focus on the things that are decidedly within his ken: tracking, thief taking, sword breaking, etc, trusting that Ingtar, and later Rand, will take care of everything else.

When Hurin comes up against the feudal system in Cairhien, where the failures of everyone involved have lead to a culture of endless backstabbing and scheming, forced deference, entitlement, and mutual contempt between the parties, he at first attempts to show the Cairhienin ‘proper’ behavior through example, in the hopes of drawing out some shame in them. But upon realizing that no one in Cairhien truly believes in the system any longer after it has failed the country so thoroughly (hence the willingness of vassals to betray their masters, and nobles to abandon their oaths–something unthinkable in the Borderlands) he reverts to his more normal shows of deference to Rand and Ingtar, abandoning excessive courtesy in favor of true fealty.

Ingtar (and later Rand) feel the reverse side of this: the pressure to be the one with the answers, to hold it all together, to be as much icon and object as living person, a figure who people can believe in and draw strength from when they have none of their own remaining, and knowing at the same time that their choices will decide the fates and lives of others. It’s no mistake that Rand first meets Hurin and begins this arc in the remains of Hardan, one of those swept-away nations that Ingtar talks about having been left nothing more than ‘the greatest stone quarry for a hundred miles’. The stakes of what can happen if they fail in this duty are made painfully clear from the start, and for Rand the stakes will only grow ever higher throughout the course of the series, as number of those ‘under his charge’ slides to become ‘a nation’ then ‘several nations’ and finally ‘all the world’. And that leads into one of the problems at the heart of Rand’s character arc.

This emphasis on the feudal contract and duty helps the Borderlands survive the impossible, but almost all of them (with the exception of Saldaea) practice cultures of emotional repression and control,spurning displays of emotion as a lack of self-control, and viewing it as weakness to address the pains and psychological traumas of their day to day lives. ‘Duty is heavier than a mountain, death lighter than a feather’, ‘There will be time to sleep when you’re dead’, ‘You can care for the living or mourn the dead, you cannot do both’: all common sayings in the Borderlands. On the one hand, all of these emphasize the importance of fulfilling your duty and obligations…but on the other, all also  implicitly imply the only true release from the sorrows and wounds taken in the course of that duty is death. It is this, in part, that breaks Ingtar: the belief that only the Borderlands truly understand the existential threat, and that he and those like him are suffering and dying for ‘soft southlanders’ whose kingdoms are destined to go to ruin anyways. It’s also why he reveals his suffering to Rand only after he has decided to die in a last stand–he is putting down the mountain of his trauma at last. This is also one of those moments in the books that is a particular building block on the road to Rand’s own problems with not expressing his feelings or being willing to work through his trauma, that will swing back around to endanger the same world he is duty-bound to protect.

I also suspect strongly that this is the source of the otherwise baffling Saldean practice of….what we will call dedicated emotional release. One of the core cultural Saldean traits (and something that is constantly tripping up Perrin in his interactions with Faile) is that Saldeans are the only Borderlanders to reject the notion that showing emotion is weakness. In fact, Saldeans in general believe that shows of anger, passion, sorrow, ardor–you name it–are a sign of both strength and respect. Your feelings are strong and they matter, and being willing to inflict them on another person is not a burden or a betrayal of duty, it’s knowing that they will be strong enough to bear whatever you are feeling. I would hesitate to call even the Saldaens well-adjusted (I don’t know that there is a way to be well-adjusted in a society at constant war), but I do think there is merit to their apparent belief in catharsis, and their resistance to emotional repression as a sign of strength. Of course, that doesn't make their culture naturally better at communication (as Faile and Perrin’s relationship problems prove) but I do think it plays a part in why Bashere is such a good influence on Rand, helping push him away from a lot of the stoic restraint Rand has internalized from Lan, Ingtar, Moiraine, et al.

It also demonstrates that a functioning feudal society is not dependent on absolute emotional repression, or perfect obedience.  Only mutual respect and trust between the parties are necessary–trust that the noble (or monarch) will do their best in the execution of their duties, and trust that the common folk in society will in turn fulfill their roles to the best of their ability. Faile’s effectiveness as Perrin’s co-leader/second in command is never hindered or even implied to be hindered by her temperament or her refusal to hide/repress her emotions. She is arguably the one who is doing most of the actual work of governing the Two Rivers after she and Perrin are acclaimed their lord and lady: seeing to public works projects, settling disputes, maintaining relationships with various official groups of their subjects.

The prologue from Lord of Chaos (a favorite scene of mine of the books) where Faile is holding public audience while Perrin is off sulking ‘again’ is a great great example of this; Faile is the quintessential Borderland noble heir, raised all her life in the skills necessary to run a feudal domain, and those skills are on prime display as she holds court. But that is not hindered by her willingness to show her true feelings, from contempt of those she thinks are wasting her time, to compassion and empathy to the Wisdoms who come to her for reassurance about the weather. This is one of those things that Perrin has to learn from her over the course of the series–that simply burying his emotions for fear they might hurt others is not a healthy way to go about life, and it isn’t necessary to rule or lead either. His prejudices about what constitutes a ‘good’ Lord (Lan, Agelmar, Ingtar) and a ‘bad’ one (literally everyone else) are blinding him, showing his lack of understanding of the system that his people are adopting, and his role in it.

Which is a nice dovetail with my next bit–

Outsiders And the Non-Feudal State

Another way Jordan effectively depicts the Feudal system is by having groups who decidedly do not practice it be prominent throughout the series–which is again accurate to real life history, where feudalism was the mode of government for much of (but by no means all) of Medieval and Renaissance Europe, but even in Europe their were always societies doing their own thing, and outside of it, different systems of government flourished in response to their environments and cultures; some with parallels to Feudalism, many completely distinct.

The obvious here are the Aiel who draw on several different non-feudal societies (the Scottish Highland Clans, the Iroquois Confederation, the Mongols, and the Zulu to name just a few) and the Seafolk (whose are a combination of the Maori and the Republic of Piracy of all things), but also firmly in these categories are groups like the communities in the Black Hills, Almoth Plain, and the Two Rivers.

Even though it’s an agrarian farming community made up primarily of small villages, the Two Rivers is not a feudal state or system. We tend to forget this because it looks a lot like our notion of a classic medieval European village, which our biases inherently equate to feudal, but Jordan is very good at remembering this is not the case, and that the Two Rivers folk are just as much outsiders to these systems as the Aiel, or the Seafolk. 

Consider how often the refrain of ‘don’t even know they’re part of the Kingdom of Andor’ is repeated in regards to the Two Rivers, and how much the knowledge of Our Heroes about how things like Kingdoms, courts, war, etc, are little more than fairy tales to the likes of those Two Rivers, while even places unaffected directly by things like the Trakand Succession or the Aiel War are still strongly culturally, economically, and politically impacted. 

Instead of deriving power and justice from a noble or even a code of law, power is maintained by two distinct groups of village elders (The Village Council and the Women’s Circle) who are awarded seats based on their standing within the community. These groups provide the day-to-day ordering of business and resolving of conflicts, aiding those in need and doing what they can for problems that impact the entire community. The Wisdom serves as the community physician, spiritual advisor, and judge (in a role that resembles what we know of pre-Christian celtic druids), and the Women’s Circle manages most social ceremonies from marriages to betrothals to funerals, as well as presiding over criminal trials (insofar as they even have them). The Mayor manages the village economics, maintaining relationships and arbitrating deals with outsider merchants and peddlers, collecting and spending public funds (through a volunteer collection when necessary, which is how we’re told the new sick house was built and presumably was how the village paid for things like fireworks and gleeman for public festivals), while the Council oversees civil matters like property disputes. 

On the surface this seems like an ideal community: idyllic, agrarian, decentralized, where everyone cares more about good food and good company and good harvests than matters of power, politics, or wealth, and without the need for any broader power-structure beyond the local town leaders. It’s the kind of place that luddites Tolkien and Thomas Jefferson envisioned as a utopia (and indeed the Two Rivers it the most Tolkien-y place in Randland after the Ogier stedding, of which we see relatively little), but I think Jordan does an excellent job of not romanticizing this way of life the way Tolkien often did. Because while the Two Rivers has many virtues and a great deal to recommend it, it also has many flaws.

The people in the Two Rivers are largely narrow minded and bigoted, especially to outsiders; The day after Moiraine saves the lives of the entire village from a Trolloc attack, a mob turns up to try and burn her out, driven by their own xenophobia and fear of that which they don’t understand. Their society is also heavily repressed and regressive in its sex norms and gender relations: the personal lives of everyone are considered public business, and anyone living in a fashion the Women’s Circle deems unsuitable (such as widower and single father Tam al’Thor) is subject to intense pressure to ‘correct’ their ways (remarry and find a mother for Rand). There is also no uniformity in terms of law or government, no codified legal code, and no real public infrastructure (largely the result of the region’s lack of taxes). This is made possible by the geographic isolation and food stability–two factors that insulate the Two Rivers from many of the problems that cause the formation or joining of a nation state. It’s only after the repeated emergence of problems that their existing systems can not handle (Trolloc raids, martial law under the White Cloaks, the Endless Summer, etc) that the Two Rivers folk begin adopting feudalism, and even then it’s not an instantaneous process, as everyone involved must navigate not just how they are going to adopt this alien form of government, but how they are going to make it match to their culture and history as well.

This plays neatly with the societies that, very pointedly, do not adopt feudalism over the course of the series. The Aiel reject the notion entirely, thinking it as barbaric and backward as the Westerlanders think their culture is–and Jordan is very good at showing neither as really right. The Aiel as a society have many strengths the fandom likes to focus on (a commitment to community care, a strong sense of collective responsibility, a flexible social order that is more capable of accounting for non-traditional platonic and romantic relationships, as well as a general lack of repressive sex norms) but this comes at a serious cost as well. The Aiel broadly share the Borderlander’s response of emotional suppression as a way of dealing with the violence of their daily life, as well as serious problems with institutionalized violence, xenophobia, and a lack of respect for individual rights and agency. Of these, the xenophobia is probably the most outright destructive, and is one of the major factors Rand has to account for when leading the Aiel into Cairhien, as well a huge motivating factor in the Shaido going renegade, and many Aiel breaking clan to join them–and even before Rand’s arrival it manifested as killing all outsiders who entered their land, except for Cairhienin, whom they sold as slaves in Shara.

And yet, despite these problems Jordan never really suggests that the Aiel would be better off as town-or-castle dwelling society, and several characters (most notably the Maidens) explicitly reject the idea that they should abandon their culture, values, and history as a response to the revelations at Rhuidean. Charting a unique course forward for the Aiel is one of the most persistent problems that weighs on the Wise Ones throughout the second half of the series, and Aviendha in particular. Unlike many of the feudal states faced with Tarmon Gai’don, the Aiel when confronted with the end of days and the sure knowledge of the destruction of their way of life are mostly disinterested in ignoring, running from, or rejecting that revelation (those that do, defect to the Shaido). Their unique government and cultural structure gives them the necessary flexibility to pivot quickly to facing the reality of the Last Battle, and to focus on both helping the world defeat the Shadow, and what will become of them afterwards. This ironically, leaves them in one of the best positions post-series, as the keepers of the Dragon’s Peace, which will allow them to hold on to many of their core cultural values even as they make the transition to a new way of life, without having to succumb to the pressures to either assimilate into Westlands, or return to their xenophobic isolationism.

The Seafolk provide the other contrast, being a maritime society where the majority of the people spend their time shipboard. Their culture is one of strong self-discipline and control, where rank, experience, and rules are valued heavily, agreements are considered the next thing to sacred, and material prosperity is valued. Though we don’t spend quite as much time with them as the Aiel, we get a good sense of their culture throughout the mid-series. They share the Aiel’s contempt for the feudal ‘shorebound’, but don’t share their xenophobia, instead maintaining strong trade relationships with every nation on navigable water, though outside of the context of those trade relationships, they are at best frosty to non-Seafolk. 

They are not society without problems–the implication of their strong anti-corruption and anti-nepotism policies is that it’s a serious issue in their culture, and their lack of a centralized power structure outside of their handful of island homes means that they suffer a similar problem to the likes of Murandy and Altara, where life on one ship might be radically different then life on another, in terms of the justice or treatment you might face, especially as an outsider. But the trade off is that they have more social mobility then basically any other society we see in Randland. Even the Aiel tend to have strongly entrenched and managed circles of power, with little mobility not managed by the Wise Ones or the chiefs. But anyone can rise high in Sea Folk society, to become a leader in their clan, or even Mistress of the Ships or Master of the Blades– and they can fall just as easily, for shows of incompetence, or failures to execute their duties. 

They are also another society who is able to adapt to circumstances of Tamon Gai’don relatively painlessly, having a very effective plan in place to deal with the fallout and realities of the Last Battle. The execution gets tripped up frequently by various factors, but again, I don’t think it’s a mistake that they are one of the groups that comes out the other side of the Last Battle in a strong position, especially given the need that will now exist to move supplies and personnel for rebuilding post-Last Battle. The Seafolk have already begun working out embassies in every nation on navigable water, an important step to modernizing national relationships.

How does all this relate to feudalism and class? It’s Jordan digging into a fundamental truth about the world and people–at no point in our own history have we ever found a truly ‘perfect’ model for society. That’s something he’s constantly trying to show with feudalism–it is neither an ideal nor an abomination, it just is. Conversely, the Two Rivers, Aiel, Seafolk, and Ogier (who I don’t get into to much here for space, but who also have their own big problems with suffrage and independence, and their virtues in terms of environmental stability and social harmony) all exist in largely classes societies, but that doesn't exempt them from having problems or make them a utopia, and it certainly doesn't make them lesser or backwards either–Jordan expends a lot of energy to show them as complex, nuanced and flawed, in the same way he does for his pseudo-Europe.

Conclusion

To restate my premise: one of Jordan’s profound gifts as a writer is his capacity to set aside his own biases and write anything from his villains to his world with an honest, empathetic cast that defies simplification. Feudalism and monarchy more generally have a bad rep in our society, for good reasons. But I think either whitewashing or vilifying the feudal system is a mistake, which Jordan’s writing naturally reflects. Jordan is good at asking complicating questions of simple premises. He presents you with the Kingdom of Andor, prosperous and vast and under the rule of a regal much loved Queen and he asks ‘where does its wealth come from? How does it maintain law and order? How does the Queen exert influence and maintain her rule even in far-flung corners of the realm? How did she come to power in the first place and does that have an impact on the politics surrounding her current reign?’. And he does this with every country, every corner of his world–shining interesting lights on familiar tropes, and exploring the humanity of these grand ideas in a way that feels very real as a result.

The question of, is this an inherently just system is never really raised because it’s a simplifying question, not a complicating one. Whatever you answer–yes or no–does not add to the depiction of these systems or the people within them, it takes away. You make someone flat–be it a glorious just revolutionary opposing a cackling wicked King, or a virtuous and dutiful King suppressing dangerous radical dissidents, and you make the world flatter as a result. 

I often think about how, when I began studying European history, I was shocked to learn that the majority of the royalists who rose up against the Jacobins were provincial peasants, marching against what they perceived to be disgruntled, greedy academic and financial elites. These were, after all, the same people that the Jacobins’ revolution claimed to serve and be doing the will of. Many of the French aristocrats were undeniably corrupt, indolent, and detached from their subjects, but when you look closer at the motives of many of the Jacobins you discover that motives were frequently more complex then history tends to remember or their propaganda tried to claim, and many were bitterly divided against each other on matters of tactics, or ideals, or simple personality difference. The simple version of the French Revolution assigns all the blame to the likes of Robespierre going mad with power, and losing sight of the revolutions’ higher ideals, but the truth was the Jacobins could never properly agree on many of their supposed core ideals, and Robespierre, while powerful, was still one voice in a Republic–and every person executed by guillotine was decreed guilty by a majority vote.

This is the sort of nuance lost so often in fantasy stories, but not in Jordan’s books. The story could be simpler–Morgase could just be a just and good high Queen archetype who is driven by love of her people, but Jordan depicts her from the beginning as human–with virtues and flaws, doing the best she can in the word she has found herself. Trying to be a just and good Queen and often succeeding, and sometimes falling short of the mark. The Tairen and Cairhienin nobility could just all be greedy, corrupt, out-of-touch monsters who cannot care for anything beyond their own pleasures–but for every Laman, Weairamon, or Colavaere, you have Dobraine, Moiraine, or Darlin. And that is one of the core tenets of Jordan’s storytelling: that there is no system wholly without merit or completely without flaw, and no group of people is ever wholly good or evil.

By taking this approach, Jordan’s story feels real. None of his characters or world come across like caricature or parody. The heinous acts are sharper and more distinct, the heroic choices more earned and powerful. Nothing is assumed–not the divine right of kings, or the glorious virtue of the common man. This, combined with a willingness to draw on the real complex histories of our own world, and work through how the unique quirks of fantasy impact them, is what renders The Wheel Of Time such a standout as a fantasy series, past even more classic seminal examples of the genre, and why its themes of class, duty, power, and politics resonate with its modern audiences.

[vaguely-concerned]

listen I don't even know what I'm talking about anymore but on this playthrough of DA2 I found myself once more entranced and heartbroken to see hawke reenact their relationship with their mother with the entire cursed city of kirkwall. you can never do enough for leandra, and you can never do enough for kirkwall. leandra is proud of you, and kirkwall uplifts its champion, but no matter how hard you try for them you can't fix everything there that's broken, no one could, and even the fact that anyone would feel the burning responsibility to take that task on is a huge warning sign on its own. leandra will easily allow you to sacrifice yourself on the altar of the family's continued well-being again and again, even when she'll beg you to spare the twins from the same thing. it's such a sad, painfully realistic thing because I truly don't think leandra meant to fuck up her kids, and yet she primed her oldest for an abusive toxic codependent relationship with an entire ongoing dumpster fire of a city state better than she ever could have if she had meant to.

I think what leandra actually, deep down wants from you is something you can never ever give her and that is cruel to ask of anyone, but especially your kid -- to bring her back to a time when she was happy. to reclaim when you were all happy, when nothing was broken that couldn't be fixed, before malcolm died, before you had to leave behind bethany or carver's broken body on the ground. to get her childhood back from where she left it and found it all gone and in ruins when she returned. 'this is all your fault'. this is the tragedy of parenthood sometimes I think, that capacity to define a life: she said that once, in a moment of profound pain, and she probably wouldn't have said it under other circumstances and she apologizes later, but now hawke has to live with that forever. leandra can't bear her own emotions without letting them spill over onto someone else so she won't have to hold the discomfort of them anymore, and hawke is left to shoulder that burden and responsibility again and again, handed the impossible task of making it all okay again, somehow -- of stopping anything bad from ever happening again in the Nr 1 Bad Things Constantly Happening capital of thedas.

and then at the same time there's the mirror of how varric's whole family wants orzammar back (and to him orzammar is just a ghost he's seen in their eyes -- there's something in his voice when he says 'That stupid plate was the whole city of Orzammar to him' that gets me every time, how much he understands that he doesn't understand and how lonely that makes him among them, and on top of it all he's frustrated and ashamed and sad that he just doesn't get it and can't meet them on it -- like it's a betrayal that he actually belongs up here, when varric wants so badly to be loyal), just as the hawkes want happiness back. (I don't think it's Lothering in itself that longing is for, it's for being together. Lothering was just the place they stayed the longest.) they're all in exile, even as they try to make a new home out of that exile.

(varric and hawke's real 🤝 quality across all personalities, affinities and choices is 'parentified child' lmao. so much of varric's character makes perfect sense once you know he grew up supporting a mother who was an emotionally volatile alcoholic, honestly. between varric, the hawkes, isabela, seb if you have him and merrill's whole Situation with marethari I feel like DA2 covertly is to mommy issues what ME2 is to daddy issues fjsdjfa)

basically I think I'm trying to pick apart exactly why the fact that leandra is clearly proud of hawke and tells them so several times doesn't feel like it helps at all, almost feels more like a cage even though it's clearly meant well? and what I'm getting is that it's because my sense of what hawke actually needs, in general but especially from a parent, isn't admiration or approval but to be loved and supported and understood. I don't believe leandra ever quite understands them, and it scares her because it makes her think she maybe never even understood malcolm. (that's the subtext of a lot of what leandra will say about him in legacy, at least. he's slipping away from her as the years pass after his death and she fears she never really had him in the first place, if he had secrets like these.) she consistently treats her oldest more like a partner or peer than as her child, which considering hawke is always described as being very similar to their father… I mean I totally see how that could be easy to slip into for her after he died especially, but it doesn't make it any less fucked up or unfair.

the real leandra in legacy is. she is SO absurdly self-centered, if you really pay attention. I don't want to keep dunking on her because I don't think she's like this on purpose, but it boggles my mind. if you do the quest in act 1 she gets so upset and overwhelmed that the kids just sort of sit there like :( at the end, which adds to the trend that through the game you constantly see hawke comforting leandra, and you pretty much never see leandra comforting hawke, beyond some light vaguely encouraging comments in passing. if you do legacy in act 2 while she's still alive hawke comes to her, tentatively asking if malcolm ever spoke to her about any of it -- clearly requesting some sort of emotional support or help to make sense of it. she then expresses her side of it, but never once does she say anything to the effect of 'hey that was a lot to go through, are you okay after all that?'.

instead she essentially hands them the responsibility of having a good life, to repay what malcolm did for all of them. and in theory that's not the worst takeaway I suppose, malcolm probably would want them all to be happy, but in the moment it only feels like more expectation heaped upon you somehow? especially since you don't really get to express anything about how it made you feel before she goes to the 'ah no use complaining' zone (after SHE got to express her grief at feeling like she's losing more and more of that old life, and hawke barely got to say anything fhsfalkjfs). in general she really doesn't do much like. parenting, does she haha. there is so much love there in that relationship, and yet so little comfort. Oh, those days. All of us, in that simple place. Well, that's neither here nor there, is it. This life, we have to make the best of it. And thanks to you, and him, I will. Oh well, mum, I'm uh. I'm glad you feel better after that, at least. Nice to be of service.

it's varric's ghost-leandra who actually acknowledges what a burden hawke has taken on, that shows an understanding of why they're doing it, acknowledges the loss they've been through and also reassures them in their sense of belonging that still can't be taken from them, despite it all -- The best of him is still with you. The best of all of us. It's what makes you try so hard. You'll always have that. We'll always be family. (you can't take 'loved' away, huh.) you get a bit more of a reconciliation/reconnection between hawke and their dad's memory by being reminded he got like this too, you know (implicitly you're not alone). varric through leandra is the one who tells them what they probably would have wanted and needed to hear from a parent right then -- It's going to be alright. that's what Hawke, The Champion means to everyone else, and for once they get to be the one to hear it. except only in a kind dream that never really happened. I. it. hmmmmmm. crushing. that is crushing. but also so incredibly tender from varric's side, and so moving to me that he's seen all this stuff and so desperately wants to give them that comfort. anyway DA2 is about love in some of the realest and thus messiest and most human ways I've ever seen and it makes my brain go wild it's my favorite game of all time goodnight

[herejusttosufferalong]

This is something that hasn’t been brought up in a while but I somehow find myself stuck on it.

The public follow and liking/NYE video. The InStyle stunt.

And then the push of Luke’s team to do the “he’s single” articles…

I really don’t understand it. Surely if his intention was the make the relationship “public” then he could have done so…or even, for there not to be the whole “he’s single” articles - it would have been him having to approve that approach, so why agree when he was actively contradicting what his team were trying to do for him?

I think we need to remember that- there was an anon talking about him resenting N for the attention she has gotten, and trying to distance himself from Bridgerton…. But all the stuff that happened before the promo had really even started, just doesn’t fit in with that narrative.

If he wanted to hurt N, then he would come out publicly because she obviously was on board with the promo approach/would have most likely advised him about not going public because she knew how j was impacted/she has spoken outabout 20 year olds in the spotlight .

If he wanted to hurt the tour, the same thing. But he went along with it, in part…. He played the golden retriever but was able to put out photoshoots with his new image… so I don’t get it… he had control over how he presented himself to the public and could have used this, regardless of what his relationship status was but he seemingly seems to have moments where there’s this active opposition to his team’s advise and efforts…

Any thoughts?

I know most of the fandom believe the aforementioned events were to goad the fans.

L and A were assumed to be instigating but I don't quite see it in the same light.

Even back in January when the general consensus is something was off between L and N he still had a jealousy and possessiveness to him.

Why?

He had a gf, that the fandom was accepting as such, and was seeming to be more open about it.

My personal belief is that things were still casual with L and A once he went into the reshoots in December '23. He catches up with N and they fall right back in line as work husband/wife. Their feelings resurface.

I think things were talked about but N ultimately shelved anything happening between them. It was not the right time to start a relationship, even one between themselves.

So we get the NYE vid, the public follow/acknowledgment of A's posts, InStyle stunt, etc. He settled and acted out.

I do think all these things were done for attention just not the fans...

Knowing this, it could be why N would appear off with L not only in Jan '24 but also in Italy until they essentially kiss and make up.

The articles stating him as single always came out at a very pointed time and it was usually after an event/interaction with N.

You could chalk it up to PR to capitalize on any chemistry between L and N or it could be his way of letting someone know that things are still just casual but in a very public way.

Either way it was giving Mixed Messages

[usagikookiejams]

Are you still accepting requests? I hope so, I could write about King Wildfire in the romantic theme, it could be anything at all.

RED STRING OF FATE

King the Wildfire x reader

Part 1

A/N: Hey anon! Thank you for requesting, I hope you like it! Sorry for the long wait 😭🙏

My taglist: @selen1um-hexafluoride hey dear, i was only able to write pt2 for King from my previous scenario. I hope u don't mind 🥲

©️ fanart to the rightful owner

The whole situation in Wano settled down. With Kaido being defeated by Luffy, and his subordinates being captured and thrown into prison. Wano had become the prosperous kingdom it was before the tragedy. Everyone is allowed to enjoy their day without being restricted by any rules implemented during Kaido's ruling. So here you are with Hiyori and Yamato wandering around the capital to pass the time. As you are walking, you couldn't help but remember the moment you came across King, the subordinate of Kaido. Thinking back on how your ring finger had tingled right when you saw him. You felt weird thinking back about it as you recalled your grandma's story about the red string of fate which will be experienced by two soulmates. You laughed at the thought, there was no way your soulmate was going to be King. As a matter of fact, it will be impossible considering you're a Straw Hat member thus, such relationship with King will only cause dispute to arise.

Being pulled back into reality, you noticed a man spying on you from one of the alleyways. You grabbed tightly onto your knives, while ensuring not to alert Hiyori and Yamato so as to not cause panic. You dismissed yourself from them and cautiously followed the man. Upon realizing your presence, the man seems to quicken his step and ran into a secluded garden. You almost didn't get to catch up to his pace but thanks to your knives, you were able to halt his movement. The man stopped running due to shock after your knives were thrown to the ground blocking his way. You looked closely and that's when you saw him. King. The man in front of you. "Why...why are you still here? I thought all of you had been taken to the prison?", you asked nervously. "I got lucky and fled myself before they could catch me," King looked to the ground. "Why are you spying on us? Are you trying to hurt Hiyori-san?", you suspected him of having ill-intention towards Hiyori considering his brother is now the new ruler of Wano. "Silly, it's not because of that...," he retorted, "It is you I was spying on." You were about to attack him when he suddenly grabbed your hand. "Don't you... don't you feel the presence of the red string of fate on your ring finger the first time we met?", he looked you in the eye. Hoping to get the expected response from you.

"Now that I think of it.. I did feel a tingling sensation there. Regardless, why would you wanna know about it?", you still in a state of alertness, preparing for his next move. He sighed and engulfed you in a comforting hug. Then and there he spilled about the story of the red string of fate, and how he witnessed it with his own eyes upon meeting you for the first time. You don't know why, but listening to his confession made you want to believe his words. Truth be told, after some consideration, you do wanna get to know him more. If he indeed was your soulmate. However, realizing the situation going on in Wano right now, you were unsure whether introducing him to the Straw Hats would be a good decision. You sighed and decided to give him a chance, reminding him that you only have 2 days left before leaving Wano.

On the first day,

King and you met at the same garden as before. King reasoned that it is best to get to know each other in a peaceful environment like this. You could still feel the awkwardness going on between you and King. It was understandable though, considering he was your enemy during the battle in Onigashima. Thus, the tension may still be there between you two.

Despite that, King tried to break the tension by asking you questions about yourself; wanting to get to know you better. Not only that, but he also shared some details about himself, such as how particular he is about certain foods. And his favorite things to do in his free time. By the end of the day-one, both of you had known pretty much everything about one another. You could say that you enjoyed spending time with him. Though it was boring at first, but you managed to find an activity or two to enjoy together; fishing at the nearby lake and painting.

On the second day,

You couldn't help but feel excited while getting ready. Opting from a Kimono to a midi sundress.

King was waiting at the same garden, seating on a bench. He turned his gaze towards his right upon feeling someone walking closer to him. He was astonished after looking at you; 'how beautiful,' he thought. You cleared your throat after feeling his intense gaze on you too long for your comfort, you walked closer to him and interlocking your fingers with his; leading him to the next destination while your face displayed the obvious blush.

Now here you are at the capital, enjoying the lively environment there. In which, Wano citizens are still celebrating to welcome their beloved ruler from the Kozuki clan. Thus, there are still many booths in the capital; selling a variety of foods and promoting fun games there. You could sense King becoming a little bit jittery, and realizing this made you come closer to him and whispering comforting words like, "Calm down, they won't notice as long as you keep the mask on," and "It's okay, I'm here so no one will be suspicious of you." Hearing your words really works wonders on his racing heart, he was thankful that you didn't blow his cover and just comforted him as well as you could.

With him feeling less anxious, you just smiled at him and guided him through the booths. Enjoying the plethora of foods and games there. Laughing to your heart's content, forgetting about the worries both of you had just experienced.

By the end of the day, both of you shared a kiss under the firework's display. With people all around you cheering joyfully.

Packing your belongings, you were getting ready to sail back to the sea with the Straw Hats after having been in Wano for quite a while. You were walking to the ship to assist the crew with the boxes and stuff. Once finished and about to return to the castle, you heard Luffy calling out your name, "Y/N, wait." You don't know why but you could feel your heart running miles, feeling nervous for some reason. "I know you have been seeing someone for the past 2 days," Luffy said while looking at the sea. You suddenly felt tears streaming down your cheeks, while profusely apologizing and promising to not do such thing again. You stopped upon hearing Luffy's laugh, "Why are you sorry? I didn't say I want to reprimand you for that. I just want to make sure whether you are serious with him or not."

You couldn't believe yourself whether you hadn't really been hearing things. You looked at Luffy in disbelief, "Are you for real, Luffy?" Luffy just smiled and came closer to pat your shoulders, "Yes I am. Thus, I'm giving you options whether you want to stay in Wano with him. Or you want to continue your journey with us but leave him behind without knowing what will happen to him due to the isolated area of Wano."

So which one would you choose? I will leave the rest to y'all imagination 😝

[transmutationisms]

coke capitalism in 3x06 “what it takes”

in the evening, after the candidates’ dinner, logan calls the establishment candidate dave boyer, inviting him to meet and asking if he’ll “run [him] over a coke.” on a superficial level, this is a simple fuck-you: assigning a bitch-boy task to the man who needs logan’s support in order to become the next president. however, the choice of coke specifically is highly significant to the episode’s political commentary.

coca-cola’s brand image is deeply linked to the american empire (’cocacolonization’) and a rosy, propagandised image of capitalism in general. when logan asks boyer for a coke, we can read this as symbolic of the relationship he wants waystar and potus to have. the president should run errands for logan roy, specifically in a way that subordinates the political office and the state to waystar’s economic needs and the economy in general. 

this is an inversion of older forms of capitalism, like 18th-century court capitalism, wherein corporations were allowed to exist and granted economic privileges only insofar as they served the interests of the state / sovereign. waystar has some value to the american empire, insofar as it exports soft power globally and manufactures consent domestically. but the balance of the relationship between logan and potus clearly tilts in logan’s favour multiple times throughout the show, and demanding the coke is essentially logan telling boyer he expects this arrangement to continue, literally asking the president to bring him american capitalism for his own consumption.

meanwhile, roman meets with mencken in logan’s bathroom (the gold accents in the bathroom, in combination with the coca-cola, also evoke a certain trumpian quality in logan). while mencken denies being a “dancing monkey,” roman understands that atn’s goal is to peddle whatever sells—in this case, fascism, which is particularly well-suited to spectacle and therefore to tv. 

thus, when mencken brings logan a coke after all, he’s conveying two messages. one, that he’s willing to ‘play nice’ with logan. two, that his brand of fascist spectacle will actually do a better job than establishment republicanism of encoding american politics as flows of pure capital. analogously to the eminently consumable soda, this arrangement will melt down all political meaning and transform it into brute monetary value that waystar can use.

by kissing the coke, however, mencken makes it impossible for logan to actually drink it: it’s now been tainted, both by literal germs and by homoeroticism. this is where roman’s role is critical. unlike logan, roman is openly aroused by fascist masculinity, hence his literal flirting with fascism in the bathroom. roman is able to consume the coke, taking a political-economic waste product into his body and ‘consummating’ the deal logan has just made. roman’s body thus serves as both a waste receptacle and a symbolic representation of how american capitalism ‘gets into bed’ with fascism.

on a meta level, the choice of coke is also quite funny because we can presume that coca-cola paid for that product placement, or at least permitted it. despite the fact that the scene and the show have plenty of unflattering things to say about capitalism and fascism, the value of product placement on a popular tv show will always trump any critique being made within the show itself. capitalism is capable of absorbing any criticism of itself simply by selling it: in this case, ‘tv show’ is both an art form and a commodity, and no radical critique internal to the text is capable of altering the underlying economic relation.

[queerprayers]

beloved, I want to take the time to thank you for your honesty and vulnerability, all the time on your blog really, but especially now. I am going through, what I am sure is going to be the most rock bottom situation I will ever have to go through, I have met despair and found hell, and am looking up towards the living and am tired just from looking at the climb. and your posts have given me strength. what Do you do when you just want to pray for death, and yet holy week tells us that death has been defeated? it helps me tremendously to know that we are not alone in feeling this way. sending you so much love <3

My heart is with you, beloved. Thank you so much for this message. You are not alone and never have been. I am so honored and grateful that you've found meaning in my words.

"Looking up towards the living" is such a beautiful way to describe this weekend, and you're right, it's exhausting. Today we remember that Jesus made that climb for us. He entered into our pain and did not escape it. He met despair and found hell, and sweat blood in a midnight garden just thinking about it.

I think of the difference between death as an ending of life on Earth vs. capital-D Death as a destruction of love. I think of St. Francis calling death Sister. I think of the promised future resurrection--whatever I believe that means at the moment I think of it. I think of the icons of Jesus pulling Adam and Eve bodily from the grave. I think of my grandfather's death, when his body fundamentally altered its state of being.

I genuinely believe in an Easter, in Jesus clawing his way out of hell, breaking the bonds of where suffering leads. I believe that changed the way our universe works, for God to die. I don't know what you believe, but the living that you look toward does exist, and the climb is not one you have to make without a God who has done it, does it again every year, and every moment that you have to.

I'm aware that knowing that doesn't change the pain and exhaustion--at least not for me. He defeated Death, but he did not take away our relationship with it, and this has always intrigued me. Death is still something we can know, and fall into, and be terrified of. Hell is still something we can find. I won't pretend to understand that truth, and I won't pretend that hope in a future resurrection fixes our rock bottoms. 

But your rock bottom is the solid foundation you will build a life out of. The act of looking up is exhausting right now, but you're doing it. That's often the hardest part, to see what you want to hope for. Don't force the hope right now, just know it is there. If this is the darkest it will ever get for you, you're in good company on this day of crucifixion.

I often refer to parts of my life as my Holy Saturday seasons—times where I've been stuck in that space between death and life, where I know deep down there's hope but that doesn't mean it doesn't hurt. I think of the disciples spending Passover without their beloved. I think of my namesake Joanna putting together spices with which to adorn the body of one she saw die. Of course they knew the prophecies, or perhaps just desperately hoped—but you hurt first. I don't think the prophecy can come true unless you really genuinely feel the brokenness before it does. 

Praying for death is something I know too well—but know that what you're praying for is rest, the end of what is defeating you. God brings us to death when it is our time (and I won't pretend to understand that) but Death, what defeats us, faces its destruction. You face despair, but Love has won. This is Holy Week. What you do when you want to pray for death is call her Sister, and seek out rest on earth while you're here. Know that the destruction in her was stamped out, and love is the only thing left. Pain remains, rock bottom remains, but separation from God does not.

What you do when you want to pray for death but know Death has been defeated is you trust God knows what you mean. And you look at Life for as long as you can stand it, and do it a little more the next day. It burns like the sun—don't mistake that for hellfire. (Or perhaps formulate a theology in which it is, in the purifying sense. I don't make the rules.)

It's Good Friday. You can exist there. Jesus did not force optimism on the cross. He did not say "Well, it'll all be okay soon." He said, "My God, why have you forsaken me?" And he probably wished for death all morning. You don't have to force optimism when Easter comes, either. Jesus wasn't partying—he was seeking out love. He was dealing with the complicated emotions of his friends. Just look at the joy, for now, try to see it. Holy Saturday is a season sometimes. It bleeds into our celebrations. But it does not take away God's presence. Your despair does not prevent Jesus from rising—it just means embodying resurrection may perhaps be still ahead of you.

May God bless you and keep you, in rock bottom and as you climb. May he make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you, and may you feel his gaze even when you're not looking up. May he look upon you with favor and give you peace as you seek rest. 

<3 Johanna

[mesetacadre]

One mistake that is very common for communists to make (both online and offline, though it's more annoying online) when talking about and participating in trade unions is forgetting both your and the union's place in class struggle.

A trade union is by its very nature a reformist entity that fights partial struggles at best and reinforces the state's management of capitalism at worst. The purpose of any trade union is to represent a group of workers at the a company or sector at the same level of the capitalists who run it to achieve better conditions for the workforce. Two crucial aspects of this are (1) that it simply puts the workers at the same level of capitalists to negotiate, it does not question the very role of the capitalist in the wider economy, and (2) its ultimate goal is always to reform the contract that defines the relationship between the worker and the capitalist, not to remove it altogether. It does not matter the amount or length of strikes the union might organize, or how much they embolden workers to act in their (supposed) interest. Every fight organized by a union is, by definition, reformist. The only situations in which unions seize to have this character are in either a dictatorship of the proletariat, and like any other element of the superstructure it's put to work in the interests of the working class, or a situation with a strong communist party pre-revolution that has been able to influence the union in such a way that it becomes internally aligned with the interests of the vanguard.

Does this mean that unions are worthless and that we should ignore them because they don't immediately acquire rifles and take over human resources? No. What we should do is avoid creating false illusions or misplacing importance on these fights

An organized (that is, in a communist party) communist's role is to elevate the working masses to a revolutionary conscience, so that the party can have the sufficient amount of people, and organizational capability, to exploit the crises of capitalism to their favor. And this never changes, no matter the context of your intervention. When you go to a protest, you are a communist in that protest, not just another protestor. When you do work in a union, you are a communist in a union, not a unionist. This means that your work and your interactions with other workers should always be done as a communist. You may be an active member of a union, in fact that's the main way for organized communists to act in a workplace, if their party does not have the sufficient strength to act on its own. But you're a communist first, a communist who understands the utility of unions to create the seed of revolutionary-political conscience in workers.

And a misunderstanding of any of these two concepts usually manifests in what I see some communists do, which is taking the reformist slogans of trade unions ("fight for a just wage", "united we bargain", or just an oversimplified "join a union!", for example) and parroting them without much apparent thought. Trade unionism and socialdemocracy go hand in hand, these two currents hinge on the idea of promising workers a bigger slice of the national wealth. But the difference between these two, and part of the reason why many more communists are less critical towards unions I think, is that unions take the position of workers, the "underdog", while socialdemocracy deals directly with putting reforms in place. But ultimately they both misdirect the spontaneous conscience workers acquire by the everyday class antagonism towards policies that reinforce capitalism and the system of wage labor through which workers are exploited in the first place.

[mediacircuspod]

Nice vs. Kind

An attempt to explain how the two concepts vastly differ and how that can be used to understand Crowley in Good Omens. (Both Seasons 1-2)

I’m going to preface this with the fact that these are not the dictionary definitions of these two words and I’m using a distinctly American/English Speaking perspective to give them context and connotations. The differences between the two words in English have been dissected and argued over by people smarter and more experienced than me in academic circles. Look into the works of Tina Malti and RT Lakoff for more understanding, but what I’ve managed to paraphrase is this….

A definition of Nice; Of an agreeable or pleasant disposition.

Ex. Using pleasantries when communicating with others. Please, Thank You, Good Morning, ect.

A definition of Kind; Sympathy to others and a willingness to do what is right, without reward.

Ex. Doing favors for friends in need, or donating to charities.

A simple distinction that makes a world of difference when applying to people, doesn’t it?

Now there is the question of how this applies to Good Omens and it’s two main characters.

Obviously mainly Crowley and Aziraphale.

And I think it relies in this interaction.

Crowley denies being “nice” quite vehemently in this interaction and he’s not exactly wrong.

Crowley isn’t nice, not really. He’s actually rather rude in most of his interactions with others, including some of his interactions with Aziraphale. It would be a stretch in every sense of the word to claim his presence as “pleasant” in general terms, no matter what Aziraphale might think.

But Crowley is kind. The demon is kind from the very beginning due to his relationship with sympathy and the selflessness he manages to pass off as a blasé fair attitude.

And we see proof of it time and time again.

Chronologically and with very few details….

With Adam, Eve, and the the garden, Crowley expresses sympathy. He states that it seems banishment as an unjust punishment for a first offense.

He expresses distaste for the mass killing of the people in Mesopotamia, specifically pointing out the loss of the children.

He refuses to watch more children die in “A Companion to Owls” and saves Job’s Children from their fate.

He expresses sympathy for Jesus and recalls his time spent with the “Son of God”

He performs favors for Aziraphale at The Globe Theater, in The Bastille, and during the Blitz.

He helps Elspeth with her journey and gives her stability in Edinburgh.

He saves the World because he cares about it. Stripped of his facades, Crowley cares very much about the earth, and not just for selfish reasons.

During none of these events, where Crowley is doing the right thing, is he “nice” in the terms defined earlier.

Aziraphale doesn’t distinguish between the two words, or words like them, and so he uses “nice” and “Good”(notice the Capital G) when it might be more accurate to use “kind” and “right”.

I think it might be telling that Crowley does distinguish between them. As he lives far more comfortably in the shades of grey than Aziraphale does.

Fin.

If you liked those thoughts I write metas about good omens sometimes!

Here are a few!

Aziraphale and perspective on Crowley’s fall.

The start of their side and their differing feelings on being separate from heaven and hell. Crowley and Forgiveness

Exactly! Entities and how they fail to communicate.

I also am an artist by trade and have a Kickstarter up that you can check out on my page, it’s enamel pins! And it’s like actually so cool check it out if you want.

Tumblr. where u can see art

Kickstarter. where you can see the project

Goodbye 👋 now!

[lesbiansandgayssupporttheminers]

Genuine question. In an anarchistic society what do we do about folks who want to hurt and kill people like it's the fucking Purge? Do we let them, because having rules is the opposite of anarchy, or do we stop them because even anarchists can have morals?

I honestly don't think there are many people who live in our current society who want to hurt and kill others but don't "because there are rules".

In the UK, 2 women a week are killed by their partners. Part of this is about it being difficult (economically, practically, emotionally) to leave an abusive relationship. Some women stay because their partners convince them they will then use the court system to continue their abuse, or they will get access to the children and hurt them (in England, domestic abuse against a parent doesn't stop the other parent getting unsupervised access).

I genuinely believe, in an anarchist system with solid communities where we all look out for and support each other, this sort of scenario would be less likely, because it would be easier for people to leave abusive partners. I also think a true dismantling of patriarchy would make this less likely, and I'd expect relationships to more closely resemble "relationship anarchy" and be less closed, which I truly believe could be a protective factor against domestic abuse (I'm not saying it would never happen in this scenario, just it would be less likely).

To steal part of a slogan from antifascists "we protect us". Certainly ask people who've experienced domestic violence if the police "make things better"- for many, the answer is no.

Much of the other interpersonal violence in our societies is driven by crime. I think most people accept that decriminalising drugs and moving to a harm reduction model reduces crime. In a society where everyone has what they need, and feels they have a "future" available to them, there's no, or far less, incentive to turn towards violence. Most people involved with violent crime don't want to be- they've ended up there due to lack of other options, or lack of a way out, or a lack of basic resources. These scenarios simply wouldn't exist within an anarchist community.

We can also talk about the violence done in the name of racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia and so on between individuals. All of these prejudices arise out of, and are fuelled by, the state creating the idea of in groups and out groups. The state, particularly in times of financial or social turmoil, feeds fascism, and fascism feeds this kind of violence.

And these groups are not protected by the police. If they are protected, they are protected by the wider community- I've seen this recently in Newquay, in South Wales, in London, and it happens all over the UK. A group is targeted, people turn up to protect them, often the police turn their violence on the protectors, or at a bare minimum protect the fascists.

Do you think <30 fascists would stick around for hours in the face of over 200 counter protestors if they didn't have a long line of police protecting them?

Indeed, you need to consider the violence of the state. On a worldwide level, surely a large proportion of killing and violence is carried out by armies and the police. In an anarchist system, these forces would of course cease to exist, and this would cause a massive net reduction in violence. This is a basic principle of anarchism, I would suggest.

Ultimately, to be an anarchist, you need to believe in the inherent goodness of people. You need to understand what causes violence, how the state creates a system where violence is inherent, how power leads to violence and licences certain types of violence. I think without exploring this, you can only ever have a surface level grasp of anarchism.

Some people will read this, and point towards the fact that serial killers and so on exist. And I would like to point out that we know they exist, because they exist now, under capitalism. Nothing within the capitalist system truly prevents a serial killer from hurting others- yes, in some cases, they may be "caught" or "stopped" by the police- equally in some cases, the police imprison and sometimes the state even kills the wrong person.

Firstly, I do think it's possible that some of the situations that may "create" serial killers may be different in an anarchist society. But even if that's not the case, these individuals represent a vanishingly small proportion of the wider population, and there's no reason to believe they are constrained by laws or social rules.

As I say, my vision of anarchism is one where communities protect themselves. I would hope that we'd be able to help even the most damaged individuals in some way, whilst keeping the wider community safe. And yes, this is a suggestion of a utopia, you can say it's unrealistic, but the system we have now isn't working for a huge range of reasons.

In many ways, although this is a pretty shallow ask, there's so much I could write about this. I have things to say about the inherent violence in capitalism, which causes so much injury and starvation worldwide, but I think I'll leave it here for now, and if people are interested in hearing about why capitalism kills far more people than individuals ever could, perhaps someone could prompt me to write this in the future.

[shirk-ethic]

In his season on the French Revolution Mike Duncan lays out a pretty broad volley against Marxist historiography, which aligns with my understanding of broad critiques of that theoretical framework, as well as its applicability to the French Revolution. Basically that Marxian historiography looks attractive in the big picture and then loses in the details. Pretty familiar stuff.

I find his comment on this interesting - it's one of the first things that Duncan brings up in the first episode. While I'm sympathetic to the critique of Marxist historiography, which I would not necessarily describe as consistent in quality (much of it inheriting certain problems from theoretical antecedents, specifically a kind of morally inverted or modified Whig historiography and a reliance on stageism), the specific things that Duncan flags as problems for the Marxist narrative are the following:

Portions of the nobility were involved in early proto-capitalist development.

There were bourgeois defenders of aristocratic and noble privilege, primarily because they either had just bought into that privilege, or were attempting to do so.

But I think this only presents an issue if you assume that classes and all their members have to act unilaterally and cannot possibly have divergent or conflictual interests. Which just seems like a silly assumption we have no reason to make, nor to consider a fundamental tenet of a materialist or Marxist lens on historical events. Like, sure, the idea that the French Revolution is the inauguration of capitalism or brought in a political order automatically befitting a new economic order is patently false for a variety of reasons - but what we do see is constitutive parts of capitalism and liberalism appearing within a floundering social order. These constitutive elements were often introduced by feudal institutions (Louis XIV's centralization of political power and the variety of attempted but neutered reforms on law and finance by Louis XV and XVI's ministers), only for those new systems to benefit a class of people that wasn't actually responsible for making them. If Marxist teleology is wrong (and I think it is!), that doesn't actually mean that a materialist history, or a historiography based on class struggle, is wrong.

There's actually a pretty interesting Marx passage on this exact topic, in the section on primitive accumulation:

The industrial capitalists, these new potentates...their conquest of social power appears as the result of a victorious struggle both against seigniorial power, with its revolting prerogatives, and against the regime of the guilds, with the fetters it placed on the free development of production and the free exploitation of man by man. But the knights of industry only supplanted the knights of the sword by exploiting events not of their own making.

(Emphasis mine - when Marx says “appears” or “presents itself as,” it is usually quite notable.)

I remember I once said that liberalism is the political order and worldview birthed by a "nascent capitalism" and somebody disputed this because "liberalism predated capitalism" - which I think misses the use of the term nascent, how a lot of the constitutive elements of what we will come to refer to as capitalism were emerging within older social forms, and it is those emergent new political and economic relationships that encouraged the formation of new blocs of ideas. Like, Weber's argument about the relationship between the moral ideas of Protestantism and early capitalist development isn't unmade by highlighting how Catholic states and social formations were engaged in early capitalist enterprise. This point raises interesting and challenging questions that need to be further elaborated on, but to say that kind of detail disproves the analysis is to kind of misapprehend its object.

To some extent I think this is a problem with overemphasizing discrete moments and periods in history as "revolutions" rather than prolonged processes of social transformation, which Marxists definitely do. I dunno, maybe this is because I don't take "worldview Marxism" especially seriously, but I find it an odd critique.

[queen-dahlia]

𝐆𝐢𝐥𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐭 𝐯𝐨𝐧 𝐎𝐛𝐬𝐢𝐝𝐢𝐚𝐧

𝗠𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗥𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗲 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗽𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝟭𝟮

Since they used the エスポワール (espoir; French term of hope) instead of 望み, I'll just go along with the "espoir"

Note: Translation is not 100% accurate. Expect grammatical errors.

// : alternate translation | ⫘⫘ : flashback

The Blood-Stained Rose Day is an essential part of the relationship between Obsidian and Rhodolite.

Now I know two things.

At that time, Prince Chevalier left more than 1,000 prisoners of war held by Obsidian to die,

And the fact that the Emperor, not Prince Gilbert, was leading the invasion.

It's still too early to feel like I know the Blood-Stained Rose Day with just this information.

⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘

Emma: "I don't know about the Blood-Stained Rose Day, so I don't have the right to say anything."

⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘

(Because I really think that's true.)

If we really wanted to communicate, we had to know first.

The full story of the Blood-Stained Rose Day.

══════════════════

Sariel: "—His Majesty the King at that time sent seven princes to the battlefield on the Blood Stained Rose Day."

I handed the documents to Sariel in preparation to help with the White Rose Festival.

At that time, when I asked him about the day of the "Blood-Stained Rose Day,"

He was concerned about Prince Gilbert's presence, but quietly began to explain what was going on at that time.

Sariel: "He himself remained at the court, and if the invasion reached the capital, he would take his head to negotiate with the other kingdoms."   //   "He intended to remain in the court and negotiate with that country with his head if the invasion reached the royal capital."

Sariel: "The king was very much to blame."

Sariel: "The invasion of Obsidian was truly a bolt from the blue…"

Sariel: "If only he had behaved better when he was shown friendliness, the war could have been avoided…"

Sariel: "He seemed to think that he was the one who caused the Blood-Stained Rose Day."

(By the way…)

⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘

Yves: "Perhaps, Obsidian has made a lot of unfavorable negotiations under the guise of "friendship."

Yves: "His Majesty the King has brushed it all off, so the Obsidians have finally announced that they are breaking off diplomatic relations."

Yves: "The two countries were once again in a state of tension, and the day of the Bloodstained Rose Day ten years ago proved to be the deciding factor."

⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘

(… His Majesty the King must have suffered.)

Sariel: "By the way, does Prince Gilbert know the reason for the invasion?"

Gilbert: "Of course I know. "Obsidian border guards have been attacked by Rhodolite soldiers."

Gilbert: "This is a declaration of war against our country. In order to protect the territory, we will launch an attack." Wasn't it?"

Sariel: "On the surface, yes. So we fact-checked it, and it later turned out to be false…"

Gilbert: "That's funny. I thought our country did a fact check and found it wasn't false."

Sariel: "… It's all in the saying."   //   "… What you say wins."

Gilbert: "Hehe, any reason is fine. Our Emperor just likes the battlefield."

Gilbert: "There is no noble cause, no higher purpose. Don't ask for such things in a country of deceit and corruption."

Sariel: "… Yes, and so it was."

Sariel: "You can see how foolish it is to try to understand Obsidian."

Emma: ". . . . . ."

══════════════════

Nokto: "—I don't have much to say about the Blood-Stained Rose Day."

The foreign faction is not as energetic about the White Rose Festival as the domestic faction, though.

Since the day's ceremony would be attended by distinguished guests from other countries, they seemed to be busy preparing for the event.

When I asked them while handing them the documents from the internal affairs group, Nokto and Clavis, who were in the office, answered me.

Nokto: "I was just taking operational command on behalf of King Highness, who was on the front lines."

(I think Nokto's complexion changed as soon as I broached the subject... I wonder what else happened.)

Nokto: "Clavis knows more than I do, don't you?"

Clavis: "No, I told you about 1,000 prisoners before, didn't I? That's the majority."

Gilbert: "Wow, that's all you talk about."

Gilbert: "What about the story of how you went into a prisoner of war camp alone and risked your life to save several people?"

Emma: "Did that really happen?"

(Why didn't he tell me?)

Clavis: "Haha, Lord Gilbert is so mean. A true hero does not flaunt his achievements."

Gilbert: "Sorry, sorry. Was it something you wanted to hide?"

Clavis: "Ah, it would be a problem if Emma fell in love with me after hearing about how cool and brave I am, now would I?"

(… Are you trying to deceive me?)

I couldn't read the true intentions behind Clavis' shady smile.

Nokto: "Aside from talking about your bravery."

Clavis: "... Just letting it aside."

Nokto: "At that time, there was something that King Highness was strangely concerned about."

Clavis: "Oh, come to think of it, Lord Gilbert probably knows."

Gilbert: "What?"

Nokto: "I heard that the Obsidian Supreme Commander was leading the army in the invasion ten years ago…"

Clavis: "We waited and waited, but no sign of the Emperor appeared on the battlefield?"

Emma: "If he were in command, wouldn't it be natural for him to stay in the camp?"

(Because His Majesty the King of Rhodolite has also apparently been holed up in his court.)

Nokto: "Normally, yes. But we're dealing with a blood-crazed, mad emperor."

Nokto: "He's the type of guy who loves combat and would rather ride into battle himself than stay in a camp and command his men."

Gilbert: "Ahaha, you know our emperor well, don't you?"

Clavis: "His Majesty the Emperor's notoriety is as widely known as yours."

Clavis: "So? Where was His Majesty the Emperor then?"

Gilbert: "Oh no, he was right there on the battlefield."

Gilbert: "Just a little bit..."

Gilbert: ". . . . . ."

Emma: "… Wait, what?"

Gilbert: "Oh, you want to know? Confidential military information."

Emma: "No…!"

(You mean there was something you couldn't tell me?)

Both Clavis and Nokto have smiles on their faces, but their gazes are sharp.

Nokto: "It's a shame, because I thought it would solve a long-standing mystery."

Clavis: "Absolutely. If it's the end of the story, you can tell me something."

Gilbert: "Oh no, the Rhodolite is not the end of the story, is it?"

Gilbert: "Even now, the Blood-Stained Rose Day continues beneath the surface."

Gilbert: "You, who are in the foreign faction, must be particularly aware of this."

Clavis & Nokto : ". . . . . ."

Gilbert: "His Majesty the Emperor of Obsidian has not given up on Rhodolite."

Gilbert: "Isn't that a pity?"

Emma: ". . . . . ."

══════════════════

Licht: "—I stood on the front lines, where the fighting was the most intense. I killed many enemies."

When I returned to the domestic faction's office, Yves and Licht were waiting for me with sweets and tea.

While Yves and Licht pulled back a little at Prince Gilbert, who stuffed his mouth with sweets without hesitation,

It tells me about those days when the sweet scent was disproportionate.

Yves: "Licht almost died there. He fought recklessly…"

Licht: "But I couldn't die."

Yves: "... Licht."

(Not "didn't die" but "couldn't die"…?)

My heart is stirred at the sight of Licht, who lowered his eyes.

Gilbert: "What about you?"

Yves: "... Me?"

Gilbert: "Yes. What were you doing on the battlefield?"

Yves: "I'm…"

Gilbert: "The only prince who returned to the castle spotless and in clean clothes."

Yves: ". . . . . ."

Gilbert: "I've heard that rumor before, but is it true?"

Yves: "… I was useless on the battlefield."

Gilbert: "Heh, that's amazing. Even though you are in Rhodolite, you proudly sided with Obsidian."

Yves: ". . . . . ."

Gilbert: "Even I wouldn't be sorry to do that."

Gilbert: "I'm surprised Rhodolite even forgave you with that attitude."

Gilbert: "If it were me, I might shoot that traitor to death."

Emma: "Please stop!"

Licht: "Stop."

Licht's voice overlaps with mine as if to dispel the malice wrapped in thorns.

(Yves is kind, and probably couldn't hurt anyone.)

Perhaps it is a hesitation because Yves has Rhodolite and Obsidian blood in his veins.

Gilbert: "Aren't you both kind?"

Licht: "… In the first place, it would have been better if you guys hadn't invaded."

Gilbert: "Ahaha, that's true, too."

Even though Prince Gilbert smiled briskly, the atmosphere of the place remained stagnant.

Licht: "Some villages have been destroyed because of you."

Gilbert: "Oh, is it the Espoir Village?"

Emma: "Espoir…?"

Yves: "It's a small village facing the border. At that time, the domestic faction was divided into several squads under Leon's command."

Yves: "I stayed in the rear, but Licht and Leon were on the front lines, and Jin…"

Licht: "He headed for Espoir Village, which suffered the most damage from the invasion."

Licht: "It's been restored now, but the situation at the time was dire."

Licht: "All the buildings collapsed, the roses were stained with the blood of the inhabitants, and fire was rising everywhere…"

Licht: "By the time Jin arrived, it was too late for anything."

Emma: ". . . . . ."

Gilbert: "Didn't I tell you before? Bloody-Stained Rose Day wasn't a war, it was a massacre."

Gilbert: "A thousand people in a prisoner of war camp is a lot, but the invasion of the village of Espoir is about the same…"

Gilbert: "No, it was worse than that."

Yves: "… You're talking like it's someone else's problem."

Gilbert: "No way. I'm involved in this, too. I'm not going to make excuses."

Gilbert: "It's only natural that you hate me. It wouldn't be strange if I got killed."

Emma: ". . . . . ."

Yves: "Emma. Do you remember the bureaucrat who stood up first when you brought Prince Gilbert to our regular meeting?"

Emma: "Yes. I felt like he hated Obsidian more than anyone else."

Licht: "Naturally."

Yves: "His hometown is Espoir Village."

(Oh…)

⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘

Bureaucrat: "… I just can't stand it."

Bureaucrat: "I can't help... but think of my wife's face."

⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘

I was lost for words.

Licht: "No matter what you say, I don't think he can forgive Obsidian."

Yves: "He doesn't hate you. He just can't stand the country of Obsidian."

Licht: "… That country has done just that."

Gilbert: "Fufu… I have nothing to say."

Licht: "… Laugh it up."

Gilbert: "Even if you mourn and make a solemn face, nothing will change, right?"

Emma: ". . . . . ."

══════════════════

Luke: "Emma, what's wrong with you looking so glum?"

Emma: "Luke…"

When I left the office of the domestic faction after helping out for the festival, I bumped into Luke.

Emma: "It's unusual to be at the castle at this hour."

(Luke skips his official duties so often that I don't usually see him…)

Luke: "… I was called out for a while."

Emma: "By whom—"

Luke: "But that's not the point... Gilbert, what the hell are you doing?"

Luke grabbed my hand and pulled me away from Gilbert.

Gilbert: "Ahaha, I'm falsely accused."

Gilbert: "The little rabbit is asking around about the Blood-Stained Rose Day."

Luke: "… Huh?"

Gilbert: "She wants to know what happened back then."

(Wah…!)

He casually grabs my other hand and pulls me away from Luke.

A cold hand held my shoulder, and my body stiffened.

(The stares of passersby hurt...)

Gilbert: "Next, you're going to go talk to the eldest brother, aren't you?"

Gilbert: "Luke, are you coming with us?"

Luke: "… Of course. I'll have to keep an eye on you to make sure you don't do anything to Emma."

Gilbert: "You don't trust me."

Emma: "Are you sure? Someone just called you earlier…"

Luke: "I'll be fine. You just worry about yourself."

Luke: "… You could just shake off his hand, couldn't you?"

Gilbert: "Heh...?"

(Eh, that smile is scary…)

I shook off Prince Gilbert's hand, trying not to be defeated by his threatening smile.

Gilbert: "But we're friends."

Emma: "Doing something like this in public is malicious, isn't it?"   //   "It's malicious to do this in public, okay?"

Gilbert: "Then, is it okay if we're not in public?"

Emma: "No… It's not okay."

Gilbert: "Why?"

(Why...)

Emma: "… When someone of the opposite sex is hugging me on the shoulder, it makes me nervous."

Gilbert: ". . . . . ."

Gilbert: "Pfft... haha."

Emma: "Don't laugh!"

Gilbert: "Impossible. Miss Bunny is a first-timer."

Emma: "Wow, my bad…"

(I was too honest just because Prince Gilbert hates lies. …I'm ashamed.)

Luke: "… You—"

Luke laughed in amazement, but Prince Gilbert only laughed to fool him.

══════════════════

Julius: "Ah, Prince Jin has gone to town."

At the training grounds we visited in search of Jin, Julius, a soldier from the domestic faction, was kind enough to tell me.

(I guess the timing wasn't right.)

Emma: "Thank you very much. Then I will wait for his return—"

Gilbert: "Where did he go?"

(Prince Gilbert…?)

Julius: "I heard it was a private outing."

Julius: "If you really need to see him, I suggest you go over there."

Heading to the table placed in the corner of the training grounds, Julius picked up a piece of paper and a quill.

It was drawn instantly, like a map.

Luke: "This is suburban."

Julius: "Whenever Prince Jin disappears, he is usually there."

Emma: "You know a lot."

Julius: "Because of my profession, I always want to know where they are."

(… There are times when there is an emergency. It's difficult.)

Gilbert: "Thank you."

Julius: "No, I'm glad I could help."

(Huh…)

I don't feel any thorns from Julius, who hands over the map to Prince Gilbert.

This is despite the fact that all the soldiers on the training grounds right now are nervous.

(Is he good at hiding his true feelings, or is he not involved in Blood-Stained Rose Day?)

(I guess there are some people like this.)

══════════════════

Every time the wind blows, the trees in the forest make a gentle rustling sound of leaves.

The place exists quietly deep in the suburban forest,

It's like I shouldn't step in on my own... It's like unreservedly revealing Jin's secret…

It was that kind of thing.

Jin: "You guys…"

Surrounded by honey-colored roses, Jin stood up from his knees on the ground.

Two large stones were lined side by side with a beautiful bouquet of flowers.

(Those are tombstones… right?)

Emma: "My apologies. For interrupting you in your personal time…"

Jin: "No, I don't mind, but I didn't expect Lord Gilbert to be here."

Gilbert: "Was that something that shouldn't have been seen?"

Jin: "I can't say I feel good about it."

Gilbert: "Hehe... that's a bad thing."

(It doesn't look bad at all…)

Luke: "Hey, those are graves, right?"

Jin: "Yes."

Gilbert: "Whose grave?"

Jin: "… You have no modesty, do you?"

Jin returns his gaze to the tombstone as the sun shines through the trees at twilight.

His profile was filled with immeasurable melancholy.

Jin: "They are victims of your country."

Emma: "… Victims of Blood-Stained Rose Day?"

Only a quiet nod is returned.

(… This country has too many scars from 10 years ago.)

My hands, which I unknowingly clenched, hurt.

Emma: "As I recall, you went to the Espoir Village, where the invasion was the worst."

Luke: ". . . . . ."

Jin: "Did someone tell you?"

Emma: "It was Yves and Licht."

Emma: "… I've been asking around about the Blood-Stained Rose Day."

Jin: "You're so serious, aren't you?"

Jin smiled wryly and arranged the ribbons of the bouquet that had been disturbed by the wind.

Jin: "Unfortunately, there's not much I can tell you."

Jin: "Because by the time we arrived, the Obsidians had already taken over."

Jin: "There were more that we didn't protect than those that we did."

Emma: ". . . . . ."

(I am sure that the ones who rest in these graves... are the regrets of Jin.)   //   (The person sleeping in these graves must be Jin's regret.)

Emma: "But I heard that the village was rebuilt. The Rhodolite got it back, didn't it?"

Jin: "No… It might be a bit misleading to say that we got it back."

Jin: "They abandoned the village and retreated before we could engage them in a full-scale battle."

Emma: "What... why?"

Jin: "I don't know. The guy next to you probably knows more than I do."

When I looked up at Prince Gilbert, I could not see his expression due to the backlight of the setting sun.

Jin: "If we had continued to march from our base in the village, the Obsidians would have had the upper hand."

Gilbert: "I wasn't in command at that time. How could I possibly know what the plan was?"

Gilbert: "I just thought... Maybe they met a scary beast on the way and had to retreat?"

Gilbert: "They're idiots who can't even abide by military rules…"

Gilbert: "If something unexpected happens, you can't be surprised if they tuck their tails and run, can you?"

Emma: "… Were they not following military rules?"

Gilbert: "You know, Little Rabbit. Normally in war, you don't attack civilians."

Gilbert: "Naturally, military regulations clearly state that attacks on civilians are absolutely prohibited."

Jin: "I'd never heard of it. I didn't know Obsidian had such conscientious military rules."

Jin: "It would have been better if you could have protected them."

Gilbert: "I'm sorry, okay? I'm not proud of it, but there's a lot of incompetence among our commanders."

Gilbert: "I could have protected them if I was on the battlefield, but His Majesty the Emperor is too lax about that."

Jin: "It's not a problem that can be forgiven by saying, 'I couldn't do it'."

Gilbert: "That's right."

When Prince Gilbert smiles, Jin makes a sullen face.

The tension in the air was so heavy that my breathing unconsciously became shallow.

(It's not the kind of atmosphere where you can say, "Let's compromise.")

The wounds of 10 years ago are so deep that Jin, who is friendly to everyone, expresses so much hostility.

Jin: "… Emma, I'm sorry."

Jin: "Your idea of coming to terms with Lord Gilbert for the sake of "lasting peace" is not a mistake."

Jin: "But as long as there's Blood-Stained Rose Day, I don't think I'll ever get along with Obsidian."

Jin: "Because, for lack of a better word, they're a bunch of bastards."

Gilbert: "Ahaha, that's terrible."

(… I have nothing to say.)

(The more I learn about the Blood-Stained Rose Day, the more the words fade from my mind.) **

Gilbert: "Luke, you said your eldest brother was the kindest in Rhodolite, is that true?"

Luke: ". . . . . ."

Jin: "Luke, what's wrong?"

Luke: ". . . . . ."

Emma: "… Luke?"

Luke: "… Hmm, ahー…"

Luke: "Did you call me?"

With a face somewhat awakened from a dream, Luke mutters absentmindedly.

Gilbert: "Yeah, I called you."

Jin: "You're looking a little pale, aren't you?"

(Indeed…)

Luke: "… It just looks that way because of the sunset."

Luke: "But if you're done with your business, let's go back home."

Emma: "Whoa, Luke!"

Luke pulls me by the hand and starts to walk away, looking languid as usual.

I felt a faint sense of discomfort, but I couldn't grasp it.

(My head and heart are full of it right now.)

Turning around, Prince Gilbert also walks leisurely.

In addition, the two tombstones behind it could not see the future.

(I thought about it when I heard about the "Blood-Stained Rose Day" for this whole day.)

Emma: "Prince Gilbert…"

Gilbert: "What?"

Emma: "Why does Rhodolite have to be trampled?"

(Why…)

(… Just why.)

Prince Gilbert smiles refreshingly as usual.

Gilbert: "I can't give you a good enough reason."

[zvaigzdelasas]

Blaming Moscow, the EU and Azerbaijan think that Russian backed separatists in Armenia are aching to start another war.[...]

The main problem now is with a region in Azerbaijan known as the Karabakh , patrolled by Russian peacekeepers, along with ethnic Armenians who live there and do not want to become Azerbaijani citizens. Karabakh is a mountainous area is in between the two countries, once part of the USSR.

Armenia took the Karabakh region over in a war in the 1990s from Azerbaijan but lost it in the last cease-fire. The two neighbors are still at loggerheads, and tensions are rising at a time when Azerbaijan has a memorandum of understanding with the EU in a lucrative gas deal signed in July 2022. The agreement with Azerbaijan will supposedly double imports of natural gas to at least 20 billion cubic meters annually by 2027. The EU is seeking alternative suppliers to Russia. "Azerbaijan's role as a reliable energy partner is important on the global landscape. By committing to increase natural gas supplies to 20 billion cubic meters by 2027, Azerbaijan is already significantly contributing to strengthening Europe's energy security," British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said in his address to the participants of the Baku Energy Week conference, which ended in the capital city of Baku on June 6.

In the past 12 months, the EU’s energy partnership with Azerbaijan has become one of Europe’s topmost essential strategic relationships. Several EU member states are already importing and using Caspian gas from the Caspian Sea, where Azerbaijan is located. Deliveries began in 2020 using the Trans-Adriatic and Trans-Anatolian pipelines included in the Southern Gas Corridor. In increasing numbers, Azerbaijan gas has been heading to Italy, Croatia, Czech Republic, Portugal, Spain, Germany, Romania, Greece, Austria and Bulgaria.[...]

Could the border problems in the Karabakh, once part of the Soviet Union, upend the European gas deal? “Major oil and natural gas export from Azerbaijan is not dependent on a peace accord between Armenia and Azerbaijan,” says Brenda Shaffer, a faculty member at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in California. She is an expert on Caspian energy and a non-resident fellow at The Atlantic Council.

“The results of the 2020 Armenia-Azerbaijan War impacted the security of the energy export corridor,” she says. “Armenia is now deterred from attempting to attack that corridor, as it did in the past.”[...]

The EU sent a civilian mission to help police the Armenian side of Karabakh region. Azerbaijan was reportedly not happy with the EU presence there, according to a report by Politico EU.[...]

“We are warning certain countries that stand behind Armenia from here…to stop these dirty deeds,” [Aliyev] said in his March 18 statement. “The mediators involved in the Karabakh conflict [try] not to solve the issue but to freeze it,” he said, adding that ethnic Armenians living in the Karabakh region, now Azerbaijan, were not getting any special guarantees beyond what an Azerbaijani citizen would get.[...]

The one name that always comes up in this story is a famous Armenian financier named Ruben Vardanyan. He is close to Vladimir Putin [...]

On May 28, Vardanyan said separatists should not sign onto any agreements with Azerbaijan on his Russian language Telegram channel. He brought up the awful specter of the Armenian genocide to win them over. He wrote: (Azerbaijan president) “Aliyev has one strategy — the expulsion and genocide of the people of Artsakh.” Artsakh is what Armenians call the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan. “The last line has been passed. You either stand up for Artsakh, or against the entire Armenian people.” Vardanyan has been entwined in the separatist government for some time. On his Twitter page, Vardanyan writes about human rights issues related to Karabakh region and has been especially vocal about the alleged [sic] blockade of a road connecting the region to Armenia.[...]

Azerbaijan’s blockade, or checkpoints as they call them, have allegedly been designed to stop any threats of arms flow into Karabakh. Moreover, Armenia is one of Russia’s ways to get around sanctions. Armenia has been a source for banned products to get into Russia – namely computer electronics, such as microchips used for military weapons, The New York TimesNYT reported in April. Still, for Armenian separatists, the checkpoint is a blockade as it seals off the only road to Armenia. Some say the road is completely closed, and that there is no checkpoint except for maybe official government vehicles.

On June 21, separatists called for an international intervention, saying humanitarian aid could not get to the region because of the situation Another war between Armenia and Azerbaijan is unlikely to stop gas flows, but that depends on whether Europe picks sides. If they come out as anti-Azerbaijan, sanctions could undermine EU energy policy yet again. This is the worst-case scenario. As it is, the U.S. is looking anti-Azerbaijan. The Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission in Washington held a hearing on June 21 spotlighting Azerbaijan’s checkpoints in the Karabakh. At least one member of the Commission, Hollywood, California Congressman Adam Schiff, called for sanctions in his written statement. He even referred to Karabakh by Vardanyan’s preferred term, “Artsakh”. Maybe Clooney got to him.

Would Washington again sanction a country important to European energy security? It’s done so before.[...]

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan is under pressure to protect the rights of the ethnic Armenians in Karabakh, but Baku naturally wants the separatist government and military structures to be dissolved. They want the Armenians there to become full Azerbaijani citizens, Reuters reported.

Azerbaijan denies Vardanyan’s take that they are putting the Armenians through another genocide or that the road checkpoints are designed to make life miserable. [...]

A calm Caucasus is imperative to ensure Europe’s energy security.

Mask fully off moment [25 Jun 23]

[itsclydebitches]

With all the talk about Blake's bisexuality lately, I wanted to revisit the stream where this is "confirmed." I think it's really important not only that Blake's sexuality hasn't been confirmed in canon yet -- a fact which RWDE fans have explained ad nauseum and I won't rehash here -- but that our external "confirmation" is so tentative that it still leaves room for doubt. And that right there is the problem.

That video includes:

Arryn initially ignoring Blake's sexuality as a similarity between them because she "wasn't sure she was allowed to say that." If this were a 100% confirmed, established, 'We planned it from the beginning' bit of characterization, there wouldn't be any hesitation about what they're "allowed" to discuss in a stream. I'd understand the hesitation a little better if Blake/Yang were getting confirmed in the upcoming Volume and the crew was avoiding spoilers... but that wasn't the case.

"I think it's pretty obvious." You're either confirming a fact or you're not. Why the emphasis on what the audience should "obviously" be taking away? And as established, after the Golden Age of Queerbaiting there is no "obvious" reading when homophobic writers and executives can dodge a confirmation at any time.

"I confirm nor deny canonically, but in my headcanon? Oh, that's a whole other story!" This is LITERALLY dodging a confirmation. We are told outright that the crew cannot confirm that Blake is canonically bisexual, but they do support it in their own, RWBY imaginings. That's great! That's also, as explicitly stated, not canon.

The video link I could most easily find is attached to a RWBY Reddit thread titled "Arryn has basically confirmed once and for all that Blake is bisexual." There should be no "basically" in that sentence.

This is why so many fans are wary: because these kinds of "obvious" implications without an explicit confirmation is the definition of queerbaiting. That's what you do if you want your audience to stick around without actually producing a queer relationship. You put a blush here, a forehead touch there, a nudge-nudge-wink-wink from a VA, a comment about bisexual bobs, a ship-inspired song, a "Wait and see ;)" and, and, and ... and then you end the show with nothing ever coming of it. Or, it's a last moment addition so the writers never have to actually write the relationship. This is why Supernatural was (and in many ways still is) the most overt example of queerbaiting. It's not because fans saw the potential for a relationship between Cas and Dean, but the writers never capitalized on it; it's because the writers LOADED the story with "obvious" references and innuendos, spent YEARS having Misha, Jensen, and other cast members talk about the "obvious" love between them... and then just continued on their merry way for fourteen years, doing nothing with it, before throwing out a one-sided confession + death in the final hour. Fans were taught precisely how "obvious" a queer character can be without actually existing.

As a bisexual woman watching RWBY, I want confirmation of this relationship and, furthermore, I have more hope for one than I would have a decade ago. I'd be more willing to put my money on these "obvious" references amounting to something in 2023 than I would have back in 2005. But those of us who are old enough to have been active in fandom during that time know that just because many shows have gotten better about their queer rep doesn't mean that every show is going to follow in their footsteps. I do wonder how many fans who take a "basically" as undeniable confirmation are on the younger side, with "younger" meaning... under 25? Because I can't imagine anyone who was immersed in popular media back then coming in with such confident takes built on so very little, or having such faith in a company with RT's reputation. We've been blessed with the likes of She-Ra, Owl House, Steven Universe, The Last of Us, and a wealth of other stories that have fought for and/or introduced queer rep, and I wonder if those raised on that bounty literally can't picture a show that would tease a popular ship so extensively and not bring it to fruition. The unexpected downside of getting more canonical rep is that there's a generation of viewers who are ignorant -- or at least appear ignorant -- of the history that gave us shows like Supernatural, Sherlock, Teen Wolf, Buffy. And if you're older still, you're familiar with the age of television when a canonically queer character wasn't even a possibility, but that didn't stop writers from both building the show around fans' desire for representation. Sometimes that was done kindly with coding that, legitimately, was the most they could hope to air and showcased the writers' own desire to diversify television... and sometimes it was cruel.

I've said a hundred times that I hope Blake/Yang shippers aren't hurt in the way so many older fans have been, either due to deliberate queerbaiting, or RWBY getting cancelled before a relationship can truly develop. We all deserve to have such prominent confidence in writers treating their queer characters well. But we can't allow hope or personal certainty to blind us to reality, not when that's resulting in a completely unnecessary antagonism within the fandom. And the reality is that no, Blake hasn't been confirmed in the show and her "confirmation" outside of it does not meet many fans' standards -- for very understandable reasons. I can say categorically that I have never seen anyone erase Blake's bi identity because that identity doesn't truly exist yet. The ambiguity of her attraction to Yang is precisely why queerbaiting is a problem and why RWDE folks call so loudly for a 100% canonical relationship: it's too easy to shrug off such moments as a "sisterly" thing, to use the unfortunate words of Arrowfell. And if you scoff and go, "What? Sister don't act like that!" then you don't understand queerbaiting. You don't understand the history of shows writing THE most "obvious" coding you've ever laid your queer little eyes on and then going nowhere with it. That's the point. That's the point! The entire point is to make the relationship as "obvious" as possible so that fans will stick around, praise the show, celebrate rep early, push everyone else to watch it...

...and then fall apart when the relationship never happens.

I hope to god that's not RWBY's future, but after three years of just a single hint each (hand-holding, blush, Blake's fury over Yang's "death") and the lack of hints in the Volume 9 trailer, please don't go after fans who don't have unwavering confidence in the girls' queerness being canonical. Posts that acknowledge Blake's attraction to men, ambiguous attraction to Yang, or point out the comparative wealth of straight confirmation compared to the queer coding aren't attacking queer fans. Those posts are written by queer fans who know precisely how quickly the "obvious" ship can get tossed aside. Or worse, the queer character never really confirmed as queer in the end.

RWBY can ditch Blake/Yang. They can shrug and say that a bi Blake was just Arryn's headcanon -- weren't you listening when we said it wasn't canon? They can make sweet apologies and explain that they never intended the animators to make that so romance coded. You know, just like they never meant for Clover to wink at Qrow. Real talk: I personally can't imagine having this much faith in the show after that fiasco. We got the EXACT same kind of coding (wink + bashful look + "obvious" romance tropes like their opposite semblances) and the ending was Clover dying a bloody death, Qrow hating him, and the writers backpedaling from the idea of an attraction like nobody's business. That set off SIREN alarms in every RWBY fan I know who understands queerbaiting history, but so many others appear ignorant to the warning signs. I'm not saying examples like this means we won't get queer rep in the title team, I'm saying it explains others' hesitation. RT has made no promises, is not beholden to their fanbase, and does not have a good history with its queer rep or its queer employees. If you're a queer fan who has confidence in bi Blake in the face of all that, fantastic, more power to you, but those who are wary aren't your enemy. They're also queer fans, just those who have been burned enough in the past and have learned not to put their whole heart into what they might not get. What we're likely to get? Probably, but you know what they say about counting chickens...

I just wish fandom was better about learning from these past experiences -- listening to older fans and acknowledging that history with an open mind -- rather than learning through another awful, first-hand experience. Though I'm crossing all my fingers and toes that this never happens, I wonder how many RWBY fans might be fruitlessly warning others someday if their queer rep crashes and burns.

[queenlucythevaliant]

In Defense of Wuthering Heights

This is not an “I can make him worse” book. It’s a “we can make each other better in the face of tremendous pressure to do otherwise” book. I promise. 

I’ve already written extensively about my love for Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and while I love lots of other Brontë books with all my heart, what I really want to do tonight is try to make you fall in love with Emily’s Wuthering Heights (generally the most divisive Brontë novel among modern readers) the way that I did.

The thing that a lot of people don’t know which I really think ought to be printed on all the dust jackets is that the Brontë sisters were the daughters of a revered. They were PKs and it totally shows.  

So Wuthering Heights is not a romance; it’s a family tragedy. Specifically, it’s an astonishingly hopeful book about generational trauma. 

Heathcliff is Mr. Earnshaw’s bastard son. This is never explicitly stated, but it is implied so heavily that it might as well be. To boot, Mr. Earnshaw favors Heathcliff over his legitimate son, Hindley. When Mr. Earnshaw dies, Heathcliff is immediately and violently cast out of the family and forced into servitude. Mr. Earnshaw’s hidden infidelity is Wuthering Heights’s original sin.

Of course, Cathy and Heathcliff love each other, but it’s a violent and destructive like-recognizes-like kind of love between two people who, on the one hand, absolutely should not be together and, on the other, totally deserve each other. They’re capital T Tragic and capital R romantic: co-dependent, sharp-toothed sibling-lovers who don’t understand their own relationship as kids because their father lied to them. That lack of understanding follows them into adulthood; they don’t really know how to make sense of what they feel for one another, but boy do they feel it. 

Cathy tells Nellie “I am Heathcliff” and “He’s more myself than I am” and “whatever souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” and it’s half a reaction to the fact that one of her brothers (Hindley) has cast her other brother (Heathcliff) out of the family with a vengeance and half a statement of the fact that although she doesn’t know what Heathcliff is to her, she doesn’t know how to live without him. And while Cathy’s love for Heathcliff definitely fills romantic roles once they’re adults, it’s doesn’t really read as sexual. To use Lewis’s parlance: it’s not eros/gift-love, but rather need-love in the most emphatic sense. It’s storge. Actually, it’s really posessive storge that thinks it’s eros. Hence the problem. 

From the other side, Heathcliff is an outsider from the moment he enters the story. He’s an intruder and a presumed bastard. He’s coded as non-white, maybe Romani or similar. (Probably not actually African-black, but kudos to that one movie for at least making the attempt.) He’s… probably kind of a psychopath in that he displays cruelty to animals and then later on becomes a charismatic, manipulative monster. You can make a nature vs. nurture argument—Heathcliff is definitely on the receiving end of a lot of cruelty—but there’s also something Off about him and that too is othering. And after Mr. Earnshaw dies, Cathy is the one person who still loves him.

But of course, they can’t actually marry. On and off the page, that simply cannot be. Heathcliff runs away, Cathy marries Edgar Linton. They hurt each other badly in the process. Neither Heathcliff nor Cathy can escape the harm that Mr. Earnshaw began and Hindley perpetuated. Cathy dies, Heathcliff marries Isabella, and then things get really interesting.

Because the beating heart of Wuthering Heights, the place where you can profoundly see the fingerprints of the reverend’s daughter, is in the third generation. Cathy and Heathcliff devour each other in life and in death, but the children survive. They forgive. The patriarch died without knowing what he had wrought on his children, the second generation died in anguish, but the third makes it out. Or at least Hareton and Cathy II do.

Cathy’s daughter is named for her mother. Heathcliff’s son by Isabella Linton is named Linton Heathcliff. Heathcliff forces Hareton, Hindley’s son and the only one among the third generation not named for his parents, to live in the same debasement that Hindley once forced on him: he denies Hareton any education and forces him into servitude while simultaneously courting his admiration. In essence, Cathy and Heathcliff implore the next generation to go on living their parents’ tragedy and it. Doesn’t. Work.

Heathcliff tries to force them both into awful situations in which they must act out his trauma, his revenge, to go on perpetuating the pain and bitterness. And at first, it looks like they’re going to play their parts. For a time, they’re as awful to each other as everyone else is.

But then they change. Hareton tries to stand up for Cathy II while she’s essentially being held captive as part of Heathcliff’s 12-Step Revenge Plot. Cathy teaches Hareton to read. She laughs at him, but when she realizes that she’s hurting his pride she apologizes and learns to be patient.  

“I didn’t know you took my part,” she answered, drying her eyes; “and I was miserable and bitter at everybody; but now I thank you, and beg you to forgive me: what can I do besides?”

And after this, they both stand up to Heathcliff. They say, “This ends here. This far and no farther.” Heathcliff is their dragon and they face him together. And when everyone else is dead in grand, tragic fashion, Cathy II and Hareton are left living.

But it’s not just that Hareton and Cathy II survive. They specifically un-do the failings of the previous generations. There’s a kind of atonement to it. They’re honest with each other, unlike Mr. Earnshaw. Cathy recognizes Hareton’s humanity, something Hindley never did for Heathcliff. Hareton lets go of his bitterness and resentment, while Heathcliff let his fester into cruelty and Elaborate Revenge. Cathy II is willful, like her mother, but she is also kind. Hareton is proud, like his father, but he is also compassionate. They forgive each other, while Cathy and Heathcliff only ever held grudges.

At the beginning of the book, Cathy is dead and has explicitly not gone to heaven; with the Brontës, you’ve gotta take these things seriously. Cathy is not in heaven and Heathcliff is a monster and they both seem to be damned, but they do not succeed in damning their children. And in that (I would say because of that), even Cathy and Heathcliff find peace after death.

I also do think that the fact that the story is narrated by Lockwood (weirded out by all of this) and Nellie (unreliable, cares deeply about everyone involved) can make it difficult to see the redemptive arc in the story as clearly as we might if it had an omniscient narrator, or if, say Cathy II was narrating. We're presented the Cathy and Heathcliff love story as this great, horrible, compelling saga (and it absolutely is), but then the following generation can almost seem like a footnote. They're adapted out of most of the film adaptations. But they're the whole point!

I do get why Wuthering Heights just isn’t to some people’s taste. Really. Some people just don’t go for Big Romantic Family Tragedy and that’s fine. But too many people come to the Brontës looking for Jane Austen or Elizabeth Gaskell and that’s just. Wrong. You’ve gotta at least read Wuthering Heights on its own terms before deciding that you hate it (not directed at anyone specific on here, but I do know people irl...). And you really ought to read it with an eye towards Emily’s faith. It makes a world of difference.

TL;DR- There’s a beautiful, very Christian center to Wuthering Heights and it’s one of forgiveness instead of revenge and kindness instead of cruelty. It’s a book about people who are destroyed by the sins of their fathers and those that manage not to be. In a way, it’s almost a fairytale.