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ghostmartyr · 6 years ago

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I love this chapter as long as I can completely ignore the real world implications behind Gabi and Kaya’s talk. The Jewish parallels were one thing, because at least the Marley Eldians were clearly the victims, but Gabi listing off imperial japan’s worst war crimes and the narrative framing her as being wrong for feeling bad about them left a really bad taste in my mouth. In the story context, she’s wrong. If you look at what isayama is saying about the real world through her... yikes.

So, I have never once taken a world history class in my life, and that’s where I’m left approaching this kind of thing. It makes it easier to let fiction be fiction, but obviously that leaves gaps. I’m not very knowledgeable about a lot of stuff I should be.

Starting with the fictional side, I will say that I don’t think Gabi is presented as being wrong for being upset over all the horrors of the Eldian Empire. Her target is wrong, but if there’s one thing the story has always been upfront about, it’s that genocide and war crimes are wrong.

That’s why you have the Restorationists clinging to the idea that their people never did such things. They invent their own history where the Eldians were the good guys and the rest of the world couldn’t handle it.

Again, that’s something that is vividly depicted as misguided, and it’s deeply connected to Grisha’s own ruin. The man who’s claiming Eldia could do no wrong is the man who abuses his son into becoming a fanatic capable of turning his parents in for the cause.

Paradis is not the Eldian Empire. Characters wanting it to be are painted as dangerous, and they are. Paradis, very specifically, is an island built by someone who wanted the Eldian Empire to be overthrown. Karl Fritz sought peace. He locks himself and his people away, and hands over the fate of the remnants to Marley to do with as they will, since they are the primary victims.

As part of this, Karl rewrites the memories of everyone he takes to his island, and murders the rest.

Comparing Paradis to the current Marley, you’ve got easily defined good guys and bad guys.

Paradis in a vacuum is fucking horrifying. It’s built on one ruler making executive decisions for thousands of people. He enforces those decisions by stealing their memories of the world and murdering anyone he might not be able to control. His closest associates are aware of this, and continue the program. For a hundred years, the people with the greatest chance to change things are forced to follow a dead man’s will.

After Wall Maria falls, twenty percent of their population is thrown to the wolves so that everyone else can live. They don’t call it a culling. They call it a mission to retake the wall.

Twelve-year-olds join the military because that’s when they are eligible, and it’s a mark of shame not to. During their training, it is a common occurrence for recruits to end up dead.

Before Uprising, the government is still fine telling its people lies to get rid of what they perceive as threats to their power. They frame an entire military branch to maintain the status quo. They express willingness to let even more of their own people die to keep themselves alive.

The new government is established with the hopes of doing better, but as we see in this very chapter, things are sliding. A regime that starts out with the intent of being honest with the people is putting soldiers in jail for telling those people the truth. They have offered their verbal consent to use their monarch as a breeding tool so that her children will be weapons of war.

Paradis is not all that great. Parts of it actively suck. The reason they’re generally cast as the heroes is because they are working to undo the cycles that created Paradis. The reason the story is so dark at the moment is that it looks like they’ve failed.

Then we take a look at Marley, and… oy.

Marley uses up Eldian bodies like gunpowder. From a very young age, every little Eldian is taught that they’re making up for the sins of their former Empire, and the roots of that Empire still exist on the devils’ island. In order to prove that they are not like them, they’re actively encouraged to become Warriors. Weapons of mass destruction that will expire in thirteen years.

For Eldian children in Marley, one of the greatest things you can wish for ends with being eaten alive. That is the grand dream. Laying down your life for the lie that your people will be recognized as good Eldians, not like the bad Eldians.

Very straightforward, very fucked up.

The initial snag in it is that Marley itself has taken over from the Eldian Empire. They do not have the range the Empire is said to, but they use the same tools. They don’t force people to have children, but Eldians in internment camps know that if their child becomes a Warrior they receive special treatment. They go to war with child soldiers as their primary weapons, and terrorize their enemies. They rob Eldians of their sentience and throw them to a battlefield they have no choice in entering.

For the majority of the story on Paradis, titans are a force of nature. They’re mindless eating machines. Much of the terror they inspire is linked to that. There is nothing there to negotiate with. There is nothing you can do to bargain or beg. When you come against a titan, you will die, and it will not care. It is an inhuman, indifferent monster.

The walls live in fear of them. Not actively until the fall of Wall Maria, but every part of their lives, as far as they’re aware, has been designed to hide them away from the titans.

Titans are a weapon of mass destruction by virtue of their size, but their greatest use is as a weapon of fear.

Marley utilizes that fear against their enemies and their own recruits. They have no qualms setting the monsters loose. They have no problem creating more of the monsters that symbolize the terror of the Eldian Empire. They have no compunctions about drilling the fear of becoming those monsters into every Eldian child so they won’t dare disobey an order or question their lives.

“Eldians spent thousands of years using the power of the titans to rule and oppress the world! They stole away the cultures of other peoples! They forced them to have children they didn’t want! They killed countless human beings!”

Those are the crimes of the Eldian Empire, for which Paradis is blamed.

Every single point is something that Marley is actively, presently, complicit in.

Marley has created a boogeyman in Paradis for their Eldian prisoners, and they’re attempting to translate that to the world at large. All these evil things? All this awfulness? The only cause of it is a dead Empire. Their sins were so great that it is just to continue punishing every bloodline connected to it.

Pay no attention to the present day. All that matters is what they did.

From a real world context, Paradis is… possibly a dodgy bit of wish fulfillment. It isn’t simply that a hundred years with no contact with the rest of the world has gone by; every person on the island is forcibly enslaved by their King’s revisionist history. Except for key figures in a corrupt cabinet, the citizens of Paradis have been supernaturally removed from the actions of the Eldian Empire.

The extensiveness of that removal means that Paradis is as close to a blameless victim as you can make out of a country. Even though the Empire Paradis is initially part of is definitely not.

In the real world, no, people do not have magical brainwashing powers. They still have corrupt officials invested in denying the truth of their nations’ past crimes and teaching that denial to citizens as gospel. There are atrocities that have been committed that countries would rather deny entirely than admit to being an agent of.

As I understand it (which is an understanding that is severely limited), the specific language Gabi uses is a red flag, because those are all the things Japan insists did not happen, and for very obvious reasons, that rightfully pisses off a lot of people.

Putting that justified outrage in the mouth of a child who has been abused and brainwashed into believing that the evil she is fighting for is really the good guys’ squad… I can see why that would be a concern to audience members. Especially the ones who remember the tweet from a few years back. There are some topics that are best received with caution.

The problem I have with drawing a direct line to the real world is that you have to cut the context almost clean off to get there.

No one except for the Restorationist cult thinks the Eldian Empire was a good thing (and the framing cuts them to pieces for it). Everything we’ve heard about it suggests that it’s better off not existing. Karl Fritz, who is perfectly fine committing mass brainwashing and genocide against his allies, designs the Eldian Empire’s downfall because it is just that awful. He is the highest moral standard of that era.

He’s a dick, in case I haven’t made that clear enough.

What the Eldian Empire is said to have done is probably accurate enough, but Paradis is another victim of its crimes, not a perpetrator denying its involvement. Again with the conceivably dodgy wish fulfillment, but as far as the story is concerned, Paradis has had nothing to do with the rest of the world for a hundred years.

Marley is claiming that crimes that took place a hundred years ago–crimes that Marley itself adopted, crimes that no living person (except maybe the Founding Titan) remembers–is reason enough to justify slaughtering all of them.

That’s the rhetoric Gabi has been indoctrinated with her entire life.

My world history is nonexistent, but I do know a thing or two about American history. The crimes Gabi shouts that Eldians are guilty of are crimes that every perpetrator of genocide in the world has been guilty of. It is not a particularly creative endeavor. The United States slaughtered Native Americans, poisoned them, raped them… honestly, it’d be faster to come up with human rights violations they didn’t check off.

The world Isayama has concocted is one where the people who are loudest about the evils of genocide are the ones currently committing it.

I do not know how loaded it is for a Japanese man to be using that language in such a way. The real world context is lost on me. However, the fictional context is on the up and up:

It is wrong that these things happen. Marley has weaponized that morality in its Eldian citizens. They believe in that wrongness so thoroughly that they’ve become blind to their participation in it.

The monsters aren’t titans. The machinations of evil don’t belong to a single bloodline. The monsters are humans.

I don’t think Isayama is always the most subtle of authors. Especially when it comes to darkness. Several people I know stopped watching the anime when its second season opened with Mike’s death. They felt it was gratuitous and unnecessary. Most of my complaints about the series follow that line. When he wants to make something obvious, he hammers it in.

Marleyan Eldians don’t just wear identifying markers in their internment camp, it’s a damn star.

Isayama borrowing from the real world to enhance the reality of his fiction is a tried practice, but when you’re writing a story about the evils of genocide, and your borrowings include some of the language discussions of real world genocide has brought about…

You have to work to keep the fiction as the primary consideration when someone is overly familiar with the reality it comes from. Otherwise that reality imposes itself on the fiction.

When the reality you’re borrowing from is at odds with its use in the fictional story… Congratulations, you have formed a mess, you should have maybe not done that. Most of the people upset about genocide nowadays are not perpetrating it or hysterically brainwashed. That role tends to go to the deniers.

The story is blunt enough about what it thinks of genocide that one of its common criticisms is that the antagonists are cartoonishly evil. Its morals and themes are not remotely subtle.

That doesn’t mean its application of language can’t be really stupid.

I don’t think there’s anything suspect about Kaya and Gabi’s conversation from a fictional perspective, and even from a meta perspective, it’s still being very clear about what it thinks of the harms done to children by evil, and what’s defined as evil unquestionably is.

Gabi isn’t wrong to hate the evil in the world. She’s been lied to about where it is. She has a stronger connection to the Eldian Empire than the people of Paradis, but she doesn’t hate herself or her fellow Marleyan Eldians. Just Paradis.

All present day Eldians are victims of the Eldian Empire and Marley. Paradis comes to be from the last Eldian Empire King ripping away their agency, and Marley makes sure every Eldian under their watch knows to hate themselves, and that the world never forgets to hate their abilities.

The story is very anti-genocide. It’s very supportive of the victims. The conversation might have shades of a reality that doesn’t belong to those messages, but the overwhelming feel is that these are children, and because some people thought genocide was a gr9 strategic aim, they’re all horrifically traumatized.

So they help each other.

Falco offers Kaya closure. Kaya offers them a way to make it back home. They’ve been too hurt to want anything but healing, so when they see someone in need of it, they reach out a hand.

I don’t know much about the real world, but… the victories in this series are achieved when people embrace their idealism, and try to be better than what came before them. That isn’t a story I have a problem with.

#1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #SnK 109 #tl;dr #attack on asks

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republicstandard · 6 years ago

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9 Top Tips For Surviving Twitter As A Right Wing Thought Criminal

Should you decide to enlist in the culture war hosted on the Twitter-dot-com hellscape (where every day is Hamburger Hill), there are some things that you need to learn and apply in order to survive to tweet another day. Welcome to boot camp, you scrubs and noobs.

1. Choose Your Fighter

You, dear-never-ever-before-user of Twitter should take the time to read the Terms of Service. There are a plethora of words and behaviors that can get you booted from the platform and all of them are vaguely explained with the broadest interpretation possible. Once you've read Twitters soul sucking list of obligatory rules that severely limit your speech while protecting it for the people you cross intellectual swords with in the idea war, you are ready to build your player.

As Twitter is becoming pretty censorious, I'm also on: Gab: https://t.co/TrQ2JW4sAI YouTube: https://t.co/1NfMOYwkbF FB: https://t.co/zeAtcHTDcf WT: https://t.co/xs18l5Tpkc pic.twitter.com/EkVtklMN10

— Orwell & Goode 🇨🇱 (@OrwellNGoode) May 14, 2018

The limits are on the far end of infinity. You may choose to be a cute doggo, or perhaps an ms-paint frog or toad, an oft overlooked historical figure, a painting, or a parody of a living or dead celebrity with a morbidly hilarious twist. Your creativity in creating your avatar and name has a moment to really shine here but whatever you do, don't choose your own face and name because some of the people you talk to want to kill you. Or, at least completely ruin your life so that you will do it yourself. This is not an exaggeration. Rest in peace, Andrew.

2. Your first tweet

Oh good. You decided to stick around.

For the love all that is holy do not tweet using the hashtag #MyFirstTweet. It's very tempting, I know, but as it's your very first tweet, everyone you run across will already know it's your very first ever tweet on account of there being no previous tweets preceding it. The new friends that you make today will use this tweet to let their friends know that you have taken the monumental step of becoming a brand new Twitter user; so do make it snappy and full of wit, let your personality shine. For goodness sake understand that the monsters that want you dead use the search feature and the hashtag #MyFirstTweet to hunt down brand new baby right wing accounts to have them aborted. Much like they screech about needing the "freedom" to do to actual humans in the streets, wearing nothing but pink knit double peak hats and their own undercoat of rapist-repellent blubber.

Yeah. I went there. Bring it.

3. Follow carefully

Despite the disgusting urchins that lurk about bandying their rotund degeneracy on #findom, the mountain of actual pedophiles that will try to convince you they are the good guys, and the entirety of #blacktwitter, Twitter is actually a very friendly place and you are bound to make lots of wholesome friends fast; especially if you have never ever been on the platform before, not even once.

Exercise restraint in your tender first few days and resist following back your new friends too quickly as this will result in a “shadowban" or will prompt Big Brother to underhandedly investigate your phone number under the guise of checking to see if you're human, as if robots can't be programmed to use a phone. I suggest just a few follows per hour- keeping it under 100 for the first day. Apparently, according to Ze Bluebird Gestapo, having like minded friends is the same thing as terrorism and you will be gulaged for it. Yes, I'm mixing up Nazi and Communist metaphors in the same sentence. Don't @ me.

4. Personal Security

You need to download and use a VPN. The animals you will run across will pull cute little stunts, like e-drag you into an argument by calling you completely true things as if they are an insult, and acting as if per capita is a flavor of snow cone only people who hate communism can taste. and then drop a link as if they are proving a point, but in reality is an IP address snatcher which is used to find out who and where you are, instead of just answering the question about why 13% of the population commits over 54% of all violent crime.

Next you will want to turn on the double authentication feature, because as soon as you say something true, some cyber-SJW is going to start jaw-jacking from the monumental sugar rush from powdered donuts and 17 cases of orange flavored Mountain Dew and try to hack your account. In the same vein, make certain your email address is hidden and that you aren't using @YourRealEmailAddress as your handle. For your password, use a ridiculous combination of letters and numbers that have no connection to your actual life- which the hideous banshees and their he-minions are trying to end. Am I hammering that point home enough?

Remember to self care today. And be kind. And always punch Nazis.

— Emma Evans (@TrancewithMe) June 28, 2018

Finally, delete the phone number you used to set up your account. You may need it later and it would be sad if it were already occupied.

5. Get a Thesaurus

I've said it before but it bears repeating; get a thesaurus. Contrary to popular belief, you are in fact allowed to talk about objective biological realities, religion, the various systems of government in the world, criticize certain groups of rootless manipulative cabals of wandering tribal people without getting suspended if you follow three simple rules.

Frame and maintain the conversation.

Use uncommon synonyms.

Subtlety can be volatile.

It goes without saying that a debate isn't won until it changes someone's mind. Minds can't be won if the conversation gets deleted. Since mein feind maintains control of the flow of information via control of the media, what you say on twitter could be the final straw that bends the balance of someone's mind to the right. We want that, we need that, especially as the left gets more unhinged.

Understand that the globo-tech complex is happy to assist in the restriction of speech through the creation of algorithms and databases in which words are input and some alert dings off in some rainbow diversity cheeto cheese powder crusted dungeon sticky with sips drips where some slack eyed Gollum pushes the ban button; and you're suddenly on the other side of a suspension. One such word is “retard” and there are many more. Aside from minority reporting, there are particular words and phrases searched just to report wrong-thinking accounts. A small price to pay to cleanse the universe of criticism that may mean people have to self-reflect and experience personal growth and take responsibility for their lives, the horror.

Take what you want to say, leave off the slurs, play around with synonyms and you can take a blatant violation of ToS and turn it into poetic philosophy. If you're intent on low brow trolling, I don't blame you, but I'll miss you when you're gone.

6. Engaging the Enemy

Never engage a hostile. There I said it, my legal obligations have been met. You cannot blame me for what you do with the following entirely hypothetical thought experiment. This article is satire and not for use by anyone, ever. I warned you.

If have attracted a swarm of busy-body detractors through the use of hashtags, do yourself a solid and check their bio and follower count. If their bio contains and reference to #resist just block them, they are there for one purpose and it's to bait you into a violation of ToS. Similarly, if they have 0 or 1 followers it is a sock account of a #resist account. If they have less than 50 followers they have nothing to say, no one likes them anyway, and they just want your attention.

Doxxxing is officially endorsed by Twitter dot comhttps://t.co/aPr8KZAO65

— These tweets are endorsed by this site. (@EndorsedTweets) June 21, 2018

To engage a hostile blue check mark I recommend to avoid placing your extra-spicy tweet on the thread under their tweet. Instead, drop a teaser; then quote tweet the azure-ticked parasite and drop your main show, curtain call, and encore onto your own wall. Most of the people who sit around deriving sexual pleasure from the fantasy of Nazi scalp-hunting haunt the timelines of these verified whine bags, just waiting for you to show up to report your ‘spouts of hate’. Or, as I like to call them, incontrovertible but inconvenient truths.

7. Types of bans and what to do

You are going to get banned at some point. Deal with it.

Shadowban: this is triggered by following too fast, liking too much, retweeting too often, being too active when new, using too many hashtags, using popular hashtags in multiple tweets, and just for the random inconvenience because you're found to be guilty by association. Your options are to take a break, or power through it. There is some theory that these shadowbans are on timers of 1, 3, 5, 12, and 24 hours and that tweeting resets the timer and extends the discomfort. If you have triggered one you will experience a sudden drop in interaction and may think that your friends are ignoring you. They likely just aren't getting your notifications. If you want to check, DM a friend and ask them to tell you if your notifications are coming through. DO NOT use a shadowban checker website, it's believed that these are run by la resistance, and may put your account at risk; or at least in a database to be watched closely. In any case, shadowbans are usually temporary and you'll be back to normal before you know it. It's worth noting that more shadowbanning occurs during certain news cycles like mass casualty events, terror attacks, and when the President does something noteworthy.

Permanent Shadowban: On rare occasions the shadowban never goes away. I don't know what to do about it but if you have some verifiable information regarding this, please contact me or Republic Standard.

12 hour, 24 hour, and 7 day temporary restrictions: Oooh you bad bad boy! Looks like you broke ToS and had to delete some tweets. You should have followed my advice. Tsk tsk. You can DM your mutual followers, participate in DM groups and you can share tweets from the timeline to the DMs, and block accounts. You cannot like, retweet, or share pictures nor can you follow anyone. There's nothing you can do about this; you're stuck like Chuck, whoever he is. There's no use getting your panties in a twist over it though, it's a good time to get to know your friends a little better one on one and perhaps even explore the possibility of meeting in person. It's an isolating online experience but you do have a little time to reflect on what you can do to refine your technique.

Suspension: Sadly, anything after 7 days and you're gone. Finished. Never to be seen from ever again. No coming back from this, George. It's over. Finito. Buh bye. Later gator. Basically dead. Sayonara. Ciao.

Aren't you glad you remembered to delete your phone number?

8. Opsec

I wish I didn't have to go there, but I have to go there. Even if you have a pure, hate-free, friendly account that never runs the risk of crossing ToS, you still aren't out of the frying pan.

Being right wing has painted a big old target on your back and some of the people aiming arrows at you are going to look a lot like friends, and potential lovers.

Infiltration isn't a new tactic. On anonymous Twitter it's not even particularly hard. Despite the fact that most people who try are hilariously bad at it, some aren't. Despite all the accurate memes about the left being dumb and useless, when it comes to operational security the left is a decade ahead of the right. Whether you agree with the ideas of real-world rallies or not, we have to come to the understanding that social media platforms are not secure places to organize such things. Unite the Right organizers just managed to doxx themselves because they could not get this very simple idea into their skulls. If it isn't on a website you control from the code up and you are operating military grade hardware, it's not even remotely close to secret. Stop thinking that it is.

Hey hey hey time to get doxxed by antifa from using discord YEEEEAAAA BOIIIII https://t.co/zZ3kO54Wmg

— Pikawubz (@pikawubz) May 8, 2018

Don't share your photos, too much detail about your location, or too much detail about your life. If you choose to trust someone, make sure it's mutual. As difficult as it is to imagine loyalties do change. Ideological commitment under certain conditions like bribery, threats of doxxing, or a broken heart, can be overcome. Don't forget that this is an ideological war and the stakes are high.

9. You are not alone

You've made it this far, and this following section truly is the most important part. You have found a warm community of the brightest minds, kindest hearts and most determined people I have ever known to exist. Yeah, we have our in-fights and squabbles; what family doesn't? Helping one another to discover truths that have been hidden from us, fight for a future we want and need, through tough times, and sharing laughter, anger, fears and frustrations bonds us together. If you are ever in a situation where you feel isolated, reach out. If you feel despondent, reach out. If you are being threatened, reach out. We are here for each other. You never have to be alone again.

Happy tweeting. See you in the trenches.

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