#except the latter was not actually in the rules but it was enforced

[homestuckconfession]

Im a big fan of roxy’s gender being different in each timeline. Meat!roxy being a transman is super cool, it makes total sense he would have a different journey regardless his gender than candy!roxy did. What really annoys me is how quick people are to accept that Vriska is a transgirl bcz of pesterquest, and that June is canon via word of god despite us not yet seeing candy!john develop in that direction on the page, but be so adamantly against meat!roxy’s transmascness. It feels hypocritical , if that makes sense?

.

[thegreenwolf]

Howdy! I stumbled across a broken link to your WordPress blog where you mentioned your views on people who believe their religious/spiritual practices exempt them from wildlife laws. I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts, since this is a topic I have a hard time getting through to others about. If you don't have the time (or don't want to), don't sweat it! Have a wonderful day ^-^

@raspberrysquid Well, it's something I've primarily run into in the Pagan/etc. arena. These religions, as a general rule, are recently created, though they may seek to emulate older polytheisms to varying degrees. (There are also polytheist reconstructionists who do not consider themselves under the modern Pagan umbrella for varying reasons, FTR, but that's a whole other discussion I'm not going to get into here. The Venn diagram is complex, and not everyone fits under the Big Tent, so to speak.)

The attitude I seem to run into repeatedly is the idea that Neopagan religions should be on an equal par with indigenous American religions with regards to access to restricted items such as eagle or other migratory bird feathers. For example, Lady Suzy Bunnysnuggles picks up a red-tailed hawk feather that a bird molted, and decides that this must be a sign from [insert deity or other higher power here] that she must incorporate that animal's energy into her spiritual practice somehow, and so she takes it home.

Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with interpreting an encounter with an animal (or its shed bits) as being personally, spiritually profound. However, if Lady Suzy Bunnysnuggles is--like many of us Pagan folk--an American citizen of varying European origins or otherwise not in a federally enrolled* Native American tribe, she is breaking the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) which prohibits the possession of almost all native wild bird parts, other than a few exceptions like turkeys. This law is in place because in the latter 19th and early 20th centuries bird populations in North America were being absolutely demolished for both restaurant tables and the feather trade. Since you can't really tell the difference between a feather that was naturally molted, and one that was torn off of a poached bird, the law has a blanket prohibition on possession regardless of origin.

There are some exceptions to the MBTA, and to the Bald and Golden Eagle Act, for federally enrolled people to have access to otherwise prohibited parts for religious or cultural use. However, people like Lady Suzy Bunnysnuggles, when informed of the laws, huff in indignation that they, too, should have religious exemptions, and that they are not, in fact, going to put that feather back where they found it. In fact, they may very well hang it from their rearview mirror or on a ritual staff, in blatant violation of the MBTA, and with the assumption that they will not run across a USFW law enforcement agent or other authority who is familiar with the laws. If pressed, they may claim "Oh, it's a TURKEY feather**!", but they're banking on the idea that no one is actually going to recognize what they have.

My thought on it, as a longtime Pagan of various European descent, is that it's my people who basically screwed up everything for everyone else by coming over here and overhunting species and systematically destroying their habitats. I've been working with hides, bones, and other remains in my practice for over a quarter of a century, and I am totally fine with staying within the confines of various laws. I have plenty of things I can legally work with, AND I am creative and flexible enough to come up with legal alternatives to prohibited items. My traditions are my own, and they don't pre-date me. Indigenous people, on the other hand, have been dealing with over 500 years of physical and cultural genocide, and the previous ban on their possession of eagle feathers and the like is just one more manifestation thereof; reversing that ban and making allowances for feathers/etc. for their spiritual and cultural practices is a TINY piece of trying to undo centuries of damage.

I am not going to try to argue that the erasure of European polytheistic traditions by Christianity many centuries ago affects me in the same way that the ongoing oppression of indigenous Americans affects them. They're not even comparable. Any problems I may have experienced as a relatively out Pagan in the United States are nowhere near in comparison to the immensity of 500+ years of active racism and other violence enacted upon Native American communities by both individuals and governmental entities.

Moreover, if we open exceptions to Neopagans and other followers of modern nature spirituality, then anyone can step up and say "Oh, hey, I'm a Wiccan/Druid/etc., can I have some eagle feathers?" that would then open up a greater demand for otherwise prohibited animal remains, and feed into a still-substantial black market. Therefore, I think it's best if I and Lady Suzy Bunnysnuggles simply find alternative ways to work with the archetypal spirit of Red-Tailed Hawk, rather than argue that our supposed religious oppression is somehow on par of that of indigenous Americans, and use their plight to try to weasel our way out of following a law that is in place to protect wildlife after other white people have demonstrated time and again that they couldn't be trusted to hunt wildlife at a sustainable level. Is it a case of some bad actors ruining things for everyone else? I mean, sure, maybe. But it's one of those things that I've long since made my peace with.

*This is with the understanding that there are also significant problems with federal recognition of some tribes, but not others, and the immense amount of bureaucratic bullshit a group of indigenous people have to wade through just to prove their legitimacy to the BIA.

**I once pointed out to a fellow vendor at an event that some of the feathers on their wares were, in fact, from various species of owl, because the last thing I want is for someone who is simply ignorant of the law to get in trouble, and generally speaking people are pretty cool about removing the illegal bits of their work and grateful that they met me before they met someone who could actually issue a ticket and/or cause trouble for the event runners. This person instead insisted repeatedly, both to me and to event staff, that they were turkey feathers, in such a manner that it was clear they knew what they were but was assuming we all played the "wink wink, nudge nudge, yeah, those sure are TURKEY feathers!" game. Needless to say, they had to take down anything made with owl feathers in order to stay in the vendors' row.

[warrioreowynofrohan]

Les Misérables - Section 1.5.13 - Solution of Some Questions of Municipal Police

The thing that stands out to me about the scene whete Javert arrests Fantine is that Javert isn’t actually motivated by enforcing the law.

That may sounds counterintuitive. Isn’t Javert’s defining characteristic that he cares about virtually nothing except enforcing the law, at the expense of mercy and compassion?

Yes to the latter; no to the former. Javert’s motivation, shown throughout this scene is not enforcing the law, it is enforcing the social hierarchy, the class system.

M. Madeleine in fact points this out:

“The truth is that I was passing through the square when you arrested this woman; there was a crowd still there; I learned the circumstances; I know all about it; it is the citizen who was in the wrong, and who, by a faithful police, would have been arrested.”

In saying this, Madeleine emphasizes what Javert did not do: ask anyone else what had happened, and whether Bamatabois had done anything to provoke Fantine, as, in fact, he had.

Moreover, the law says that Madeleine does have jurisdiction here to decide Fantine’s case, and it’s delightful to see Valjean out-rules-lawyer Javert, noting that Javert is (if I understand correctly) employed by the national government, whereas this case falls under municipal jurisdiction, which Madeleine has authority over:

“The matter of which you speak belongs to the municipal police. By the terms of articles nine, eleven, fifteen, and sixty-six of the code of criminal law, I am the judge of it. I order that this woman be set at liberty.”

“But, Monsieur Mayor – ”

“I refer you to article eighty-one of the law of December 13, 1799, upon illegal imprisonment.”

Javert does not have any rebuttal to Madeleine’s citation of the actual law.

Now, let’s look at Javert’s motivations and emphases throughout the chapter:

1) He called all the ideas of which his mind was capable around the grand thing that he was doing. The more he examined the conduct of this girl, the more he revolted at it. It was clear that he had seen a crime committed. He had seen, there in the street, society represented by a property holder and an elector, insulted and attacked by a creature who was an outlaw and an outcast. A prostitute had assaulted a citizen.

2) To see a woman of the town spit in the face of a mayor was a thing so monstrous that in his most daring suppositions he would have thought it sacrilege to believe it possible.

3) “This wretched woman has insulted a citizen.”

4) “This girl fell upon Monsieur Bamatabois, who is an elector and the owner of that fine house with a balcony, that stand at the corner of the esplanade, three stories high, all of hewn stone. Indeed, there are some things in this world which must be considered.”

If Javert was merely a ruthlessly impartial enforcer of the law against all who broke it (which would be bad enough!) then Bamatabois’ house would have been perfectly irrelevant, and the fact that he attacked Fantine first would have been highly relevant. But that is not what Javert cares about. What matters to him is being the enforcer of the class system, of the respectable and propertied against the poor and miserable. He diesn’t need to do anything so pointless as investigate anything, because the entire point, to him, is that Fantine is intrinsically guilty simply because of who she is.

[ineed-to-sleep]

1, 3, and 6 for the VtM OC ask game? 💚

Thanks for the ask!! I'll answer these for all the sillies jajdkskks

1. What clan is your OC?

All 3 that I have are Brujahs, and they're sort of a family djdjkdkf Pepper was embraced by Vincent, who was embraced by Caroline.

3. Are they more “traditional” or do they break barriers?

I'd say out of the 3, Caroline is the most traditional- as in she's Camarilla through and through and abides by and enforces the traditions.

Vincent betrayed Caroline to join the Anarchs in the late 80s/early 90s, so he broke out of tradition, but still very much follows masquerade rules and helps enforce the masquerade.

Pepper is the least traditional, being a fledgling with difficulty handling her impulses, and often puts the masquerade at risk while Vincent tries his best to do damage control on her behalf.

6. What was their relationship to their sire? Were they close in any way or mere strangers?

Caroline and her sire were mere strangers. She was embraced thanks to the power of spite- in the early 20th century, a ventrue primogen had his eyes on Caroline and a brujah marxist who harbored a mortal hatred for him decided to beat him to the punch. Still, Caroline rejected her clan and its culture, eventually killing her sire and joining the Camarilla, climbing up its ladder over the decades.

Vincent and Caroline weren't strangers- Caroline was a Camarilla envoy in Los Angeles in the mid-80s who embraced a few childer to help her spy on the Anarch movement. She posed as a university teacher for a while and met Vincent when he was at his last year of college. The embrace was very traumatic and he harbored a grudge against Caroline, eventually betraying her, just as she did with her own sire, except he couldn't bring himself to kill her and only drove her out of Los Angeles for another decade or so.

Vincent and Pepper were in love, actually. Well, Vincent was in love with Pepper, and Pepper thought he was gay. DJJDJCKCKKD NO BUT ACTUALLY, he fell in love with her but refused to get too physically close for fear of hurting her, so their relationship never went beyond friendship, despite them both wanting more at some point. Pepper had a crush, Vincent had an obsession. Despite his best efforts to keep her from being harmed by his vampiric nature, she was still killed by another vampire in the end, which forced him into the position of either watching her die or embracing her to save her life. He chose the latter.

[tanadrin]

There seems to be a common cycle in U.S. law where the federal government establishes some principle to protect citizens in their individual capacity from government abuse (a law, constitutional amendment, or SCOTUS decision) > business uses that principle to try to argue they shouldn't be subject to some law > after much wrangling, the original law is held to protect property rights but not any other rights like voting. The Slaughter-House cases weren't a complete cycle--the butchers lost, and the privileges and immunities clause was gutted--and sometimes you get a bonus Step 1a of "conservative complains that supposedly oppressed people actually have it better than the majority these days" (notably we have Andrew Johnson on record, complaining less than 20 years after the end of the Civil War, that in fact black people have more rights than white people now).

And I think this contributes to the view in the U.S. that individual freedom/civil rights are inherently bound up with capitalism. It's not that there's actually a strong logical interdependence between the two concepts in law, it's just that rules about the former get argued to be actually rules about the latter, and the Supreme Court (which for most of its history has been a pretty reactionary institution; the Warren Court is a major exception) is much more comfortable protecting property rights than individual rights. So what's really on display here is a quirk of American jurisprudence, out of which a philosophical connection has been retconned--even though if that connection were real, you would expect historic protections for civil rights to be a lot stronger in the United States!

A more complete example of this cycle is Lochner v New York (1905), which used the 14th amendment to make labor laws basically a non-starter, while also, of course, not using the 14th amendment for its original purpose: letting black people vote. In the Lochner era in particular there are occasional civil rights wins (Buchanan v Warley), but there's a real reluctance to take the same logic of substantive due process in the sphere of property rights and rights to conduct commerce and apply them to the sphere of civil rigths. No challenges to Jim Crow, no restrictions on private racial discrimination (restrictive covenants are fine, just not municipality-enforced racial zoning laws), and the effect of all these rulings altogether is a court which is weakly protecting of civil rights, but strongly protective of the rights of business owners--in short, more a pro-business court than a really principled libertarian one.

[miniar]

"No politics." and "No religion." rules are Massive Red Flags.

These rules are common in a lot of places that are intended for discussing specific things like your personal disability and relationship to it, or your personal queerness and your relationship to it, or your hobby, be it trains or cross-stitching, and more often than not, this rule creates an unsafe environment for marginalized peoples.

These rules are especially common on US based forums and chat servers, but they're found all over the world.

The problem with these rules should be obvious, but in case you've missed it; Everything is Politics.

Everything in your life is affected by how your country and the world around you are governed. From the price of your tap water to whether or not your postal service works. From whether something is purchasable locally to if it can even be imported or not. From whether you've got a safe place to live to whether or not you can legally drive your car.

Every single moment of every single day of your life is affected by the rules and regulations that exist around you. The fact that you can read this right now is because I live somewhere where my access to the internet and freedom of speech allow me to write this, and where you either have access and freedom to read, or you've found a workaround that lets you get away with accessing and reading what your government has forbidden.

EVERYTHING! Every Damned Thing is affected directly and indirectly at all times by politics.

And everything you do and say anywhere outside of your own personal bubble where not a single soul can hear you is both political and shaped by your politics.

It can be so minuscule and so mundane and normal that it's effectively irrelevant, but every last one of you has some idea, vague as it may be, of what kind of world you long to live in. And not only that, every last one of you, even if that too may seem vague and mundane, is shaped to some degree by the world you Do live in.

Religion, for better or worse (mostly the latter in most cases), is intricately interwoven into the world in much the same way. Even heathens like me are prone to exclaim "Jesus Christ!" or "God Damn It!" when the occasion calls for shouting expletives and throwing your hands up in frustration.

Much of western European and US culture is so steeped in cultural christianity that people treat the idea of going to church for a concert as an entirely secular and non-religious thing, even when that concert is a team of church choirs singing songs from Jesus Christ Superstar to mention a real life example.

So when these rules are set and implemented, they don't actually mean what they say on the packaging, and they're consistently enforced in a way that is based in conflict avoidance first and foremost.

And here's the thing that happens, and while exceptions may exist I have never seen one: - Someone makes a post or writes a comment or shares an image that contains dogwhistles or other forms of fascist propaganda, without using the words that people associate with specific political parties. - Someone else, often times the very target of the fascism in question or at the least a semi-aware ally, responds by calling out the problem with the post or comment or image, calling it out by name. - The rule of no-politics is invoked and the person responding is scolded for either making it political, or failing to keep their criticism of the politics a private matter with either the fascist or the mods.

That's the sequence of events I've watched unfold, and been a part of, too many times to count, and the results are a testing ground for dogwhistles where a fascist feels welcome and protected.

Their politics are never challenged because you're not allowed to talk politics.

They get to feed you tropes and dogwhistles all day long, as long as they don't say the quiet part out loud, and if anyone challenges them, the mods and rules are used in their favor.

Any environment that tells me "No Politics!" and/or "No Religion!" is an environment that tells me that this is a place where I'm forbidden from speaking up for myself when the fascist start implying, polite as can be, that perhaps the world would be better of if people like me were simply not allowed to exist.

Or at the absolutely very least, it tells me this is a place run by people who have forgotten that they live in a world and that pretending otherwise won't make that a political fact.

[loki-zen]

it’s weird i think of space in America as being less… micromanaged than space in the UK. for obvious reasons. but i wonder if space in big cities is actually more micromanaged.

i mean, there are tons of american cities so presumably they vary and maybe here is somewhere in the middle or something. but comparing Portland to like various big UK cities i’ve spent time in and manchester in particular as that’s most fresh in my mind.

it felt like anywhere there was that you could licitly linger in was like An Designated Park, and there are lots of them and they’re great but they have like rules and opening times.

(not that the latter are enforced most of the time except i assume against unhoused ppl but still)

idk hard to words largely Vibes but y’know

[joemuggs]

ESCAPE THE CRINGE

I first wrote this piece for an art mag at the start of the year but they dicked me about over rewrites so much - and I mean really dicking about, like radio silence for three weeks then suddenly demanding changes for the next day - that for the first time in my life I actually pulled a piece. A couple of other outlets were up for it, but needed further alteration to fit house style... With so much going on I let it slide and let it slide, and now it's been so long I just feel like shoving it out there. It still feels relevant (maybe more so now that we're seeing an increasing public collapse of some of the most high profile demagogue scammers, albeit with new hydra heads quickly replacing them), and I'd rather have people see it and maybe feed back, rather than wrangle over it any further. So without further preamble, here's some thoughts about one of the defining reactions of our time and how to get away from it.

👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻

We live in a time when groupthink and echo chambers are everywhere, where ingroup radicalisation, cult-like behaviours and submission to scammers and demagogues seem to be defining patterns of the era. Blame for these things is often laid at the feet of algorithms, of politicians, of capital - in many cases rightly so - but we all individually play the game too. We build the walls of our own cultural gated communities, with tweets and artworks and individual choices about where to go and what to say, and the more we do so the more those spaces that we force ourselves – and others – into become more or less gilded prisons. We all think we’re hip to something, and end up orbiting that something endlessly.

The first rule of hip club is you don’t talk about hip club. That is: if you’re serious about your aesthetic nowadays, you do your very best to not acknowledge that it even is an aesthetic – let alone identify its rules and delineations. Now, of course this doesn’t go for everyone: there are still anime cosplayers, emo kids and others who still gauchely adhere to the overt “style tribe” late 20th century ways of belonging. But these are exceptions that prove the rule. Far more often the things that make us “us”, that hold us together, are still based on taste - but these tastes that provide us with a sense of belonging are signalled covertly. They’re signalled not by discussing, or even necessarily knowing, what preferences make you belong among Your People, but rigidly enforcing the ingroup-outgroup divide with reactions against The Others’ tastes: through a set of real or figurative winces, grimaces and cringes. 

Oh yes, the cringe. That most visceral response, often deployed simply as a single word sentence by the Terminally Online, the argument ender to end all argument enders: just “cringe”. It’s noun, verb and adjective all rolled together into a gut level rejection, and it’s a dead giveaway that so, so many parts of The Discourse - as people solipsistically have it - is based way more on aesthetics than it is on any kind of coherent set of positions. That is, it’s less about showing revulsion at ideas, than about the fact that they’re expressed gauchely or clumsily or simply with the wrong slang. It’s a social cue, a nod to one’s fellows, to acknowledge shared good taste in memes, phrases and cadences, which one’s interlocutor has unforgivably failed to engage properly with. 

This kind of of us-and-them cringe-signalling operates in various ways across society, but perhaps the most fundamental dichotomy is basic vs hip, or normie vs hip. This in itself is framed in a variety of ways, but a super simplified version might run like this: influencer culture, sincere slogans, Will Ferrell and The Office memes, Goop wellness, "Fiat 500 Twitter" on one side - and shitposting, pursuit of the latest zero-caps punctuational microvariant, everything intellectualised but ironised, the moods formerly known as “based” and "dank" on the other. The former sees the latter as smug, pretentious, nonsensical, messy while in the other direction the hip cast the basics as conservative, simplistic, unimaginative, conformist. Each cringes at the other, each considers the other fundamentally in bad taste.

And these dichotomies are held in place firmly by the material interests of vested powers. So to keep with our sample duality, on the basic side, there are the affirmatory or aspirational solution-havers, the Matt Haigs and Johann Haris, Rupi Kaurs and Molly Maes, while on the hip side there’s the Somethingawful-to-Vice-to-Broadsheet ironymonger pipeline and the Politics Podcast Industrial Complex embodied in people called things like “PissPigGrandad”. Each relies on hate and fear of the other to provide a steady stream of attention and income to those who shore up their own self-image, who normalise an way of being, who provide just enough answers to make people feel like they’re on the right track, but not so many that they won’t keep coming back for more. Yet each is, of course, built on a lie. 

The basic think they are commonsensical and unpretentious, but actually adhere to byzantine aesthetic and political codes of belonging. The hip think they are switched on, fast moving and progressive but in fact their gatekeeping is deeply conservative: the solipsism of believing an echo chamber is “The Discourse”, no matter how ironically you try to couch that, is all about normalising enormously limited race, age, nationality and class boundaries around what is acceptable. Both are co-dependent false divisions of ideas and people made to shore up power structures and the interests of the privileged, and both are built on aesthetics above all else. Each is, in its own way, an insistence of good taste.

Once you see this, you see it everywhere. There are so many versions of this mutually exclusionary duality. Sometimes they’ll manifest as ostensible generational, regional or professional divides, sometimes as scene or faction schisms (and note well, political factions have more in common with musical, fashion or social scenes than anyone within them would ever care to admit). Each time, if you look, you’ll find that they are defined more by aesthetics than ethics: by those assemblages of catchphrases, by certain quirks of timing and emphasis. Whether it’s Dawkins and Harris quoting facts-and-reason guys defining themselves against what they think of as a feminised, emotion-driven mushiness in the barbaric masses, or underground music fans against the flash and spectacle of EDM, or vintage specs wearing postgrad ketamine-leftist cliques against “shitlib centrists”, or crypto-bros against anyone who doesn’t have a wallet, all too often the sense of self is generated by what one is NOT. 

And each time if you dig into what is happening in these oppositions, you’ll find someone benefitting in real, material terms: spokespeople, figureheads, demagogues, people whose theories or slogans are rallying points for believers and who rely on those believers for speaking engagements, podcast and newsletter subscriptions, NFT sales, academic tenure, political appointments, newspaper columns. There is a whole egosystem of commentariat and metacommentariat whose job appears to make bogeymen of one another, yet who one all too often finds in the upper echelons are on perfectly friendly terms when they run into one another in green rooms of media recordings, backstage at literary festivals or in the offices of the agents that they share. This last location not picked idly, n.b.: one of the UK’s loudest hip-left commentators of the past decade shares a literary agent with a leading hip-right provocateur and an old-school hard-right rabble rouser: they are very literally all in it together.

All of this, it really bears repeating, is built on lies, and further, is built on consciously or unconsciously deliberate obscuring of the truth, in order to support these power structures. If ever you see an argument that’s built around one of these abstracted dualities - pop vs underground, modernist vs traditional, respectable vs transgressive, health vs pleasure, decadence vs morality, rationalism vs “the blob”, take your pick - you can be sure that not only is there someone making cultural or actual capital out of it, but that they are muddying waters to make it more difficult to make out the connections, genealogies and human realities underlying what is being discussed. An appeal to take a side in one of these, ultimately aesthetic, judgements – an appeal to show good taste – is an appeal to feel the cringe instead of analysing what one is cringing at. It’s an appeal against scholarship.

Which is why we must, with extreme prejudice, abolish the concept of good taste. “In principle,” said the DJ and dance music producer Chrissy in 2020, “I think the idea of good taste is classist and racist! Usually whatever's considered good taste is what the most powerful or most educated or wealthiest people feel comfortable yelling about, and the ones out of them that can yell loudest and most eloquently about it, as a society we call that good taste.” And he is entirely right. No matter how you define “good taste”, you are defining it as a power relation, an exclusionary tool, a way to deride. 

Which is not to say that taste and discernment don’t and shouldn’t exist – but they exist in the sense that scholarship exists. Not ivory tower, status-accrued-by-citations scholarship, but scholarship as in demonstration of knowledge accumulated and the practice of accumulating it. The kind of scholarship that’s as likely – or perhaps more likely – to be exhibited by autodidacts as celebrity professors. You can’t judge scholarship according to winces, grimaces and cringes, you have to take it on according to what it is actually saying about its subjects and objects: and so with taste. Someone’s taste should impress precisely to the degree that they demonstrate that they know and care about the objects of their affection, not for its adherence to a social code imposed by vested interests. 

Maybe there are reasons to hope. The early years of this century were formed by information glut, by seemingly all of cultural history being available all at once. Many thought this would lead to cultural paralysis, a dissipation into undifferentiated “conent”, and a death of innovation – and certainly it can be seen to have driven a retreat into reactive and reactionary positions. When bold statement of preference and belonging is made difficult by the baffling array of choice, covertly coded taste bubbles are an inevitable outcome. But two things abode. 

Firstly, those genuine old-school style tribes, from cosplayers to grime lovers, who grew up together over years, put in the time together, and truly and positively identified with what they do, and the real spatio-temporal existence of what they do, in defiance of the grimaces of others. Second, the rise in value of curation. It’s a word often derided because of its ubiquity in marketing speech, and mocked because “everyone’s a curator” (or “everyone’s a DJ”) nowadays. But curation at its best is precisely the kind of pride in scholarship and individual ability to map connections across the information ocean, that can short circuit the demands of good taste. 

It’s available to all, it can be expressed easily – as punks did with paper fanzines and grime lovers with phone-shot video – and it is by its nature collaborative, sharing, and dependent on positive choices. There ARE glimmers of hope that Generation Z are more able to think in a curatorial way than their predecessors, to cut and paste the always-on data glut of past culture into something more actively expressed than reactively defined – something that can engender a sense of belonging without the need for those gut level micro-rejections of The Other to define itself. And if that is the case, then maybe, just maybe, they can demonstrate new ways to escape the cringe.

[pizkwat1]

Stormcloaks or Imperials?

So, obviously the real answer is "who would your character side with?" And really, the negotiated settlement route is the best choice, kicking the can until hopefully either the Thalmor play their hand and piss off the Empire enough to abandon the concordat and legalize the cult of Talos again or the Markarth incident is forgotten and Skyrim can regain the autonomy it had previously. But, if we're applying real-world ideology to a fantasy setting, and if a side has to be declared "right":

The Stormcloaks have a right to self-determination in the face of the Empire's denial of their right to free worship. Skyrim remaining in the Empire would probably be better for the Nords and Tamriel overall, but that can't be dictated to them. "It's for your own good" can't trump human rights.

Yes, Ulfric is racist. Deeply racist, his man Galmar evoking the Ehlnofex race war from literally before the dawn of time. Racist not just against the Dunmer, which is honestly almost understandable (how would Mexico feel about American refugees? Especially if Americans lived a thousand years and most of them were alive for the Mexican-American war?), but actually more racist against Argonians, which is honestly pretty weird. (Why? Because of Umbriel? The Knahaten Flu? That was generations ago. Under Hoag Stormcloak they weren't banned from the city. It honestly doesn't make sense.)

Ulfric did also prompt the crackdown on the cult of Talos in the first place. Remember the Markarth Incident? Reachmen (a whole other issue) took over Markarth, and a militia led by Ulfric took it back and said they would occupy it until the Empire legalized Talos worship. Prior to that, Talos worship was definitely illegal in Skyrim as with everywhere else (play Elder Scrolls: Blades), but it wasn't very strongly enforced in Skyrim. After Ulfric's stunt, it was very strongly enforced. Now, it seems most likely that Ulfric did this because he was stupid -- if he was smart he wouldn't have killed Torygg. It can't be ruled out that he did it to create instability in which he could gain power. But it does seem more likely that he was just stupid. But Ulfric's demands were not unreasonable. He voted Green when he should've voted Dem, in essence, and blew it all up. He wasn't pragmatic, but he shouldn't be faulted for idealism.

(The Altmer in Windhelm do not make Ulfric not a racist by the way; The Pocket Guide to the Empire, I forget which edition, pretty much definitively establishes that most Altmer who live outside of the Summerset Isles are exiles. Ulfric would be predisposed to quite like an Altmer political exile.)

Ulfric is a bigot and frankly a bad leader. It really should go without saying that Ulfric is not the entirety of the Stormcloaks. In Riften we see several licensed Argonian merchants and even landowners fully accepted, and a Dunmer holding a prominent position in Dawnstar even despite his shady past. (The latter might be called a token exception, but you gotta remember every city in that game has like 30 dudes in it so Erandur is like 3% of Dawnstar's population.) The Stormcloaks are united by their cause, not by loyalty to Ulfric. The only Stormcloak Jarl who actually seems to even like him is Skald of Dawnstar -- that's probably because, again, Ulfric is probably stupid, and the Jarls know it. Ulfric is undoubtedly an extremely problematic element of the Stormcloak administration, but not really a very powerful one, and to reiterate, a flawed administration, even a bigoted one, does not exempt its people from a right to independence. (There are some recent real-world examples which I feel it would be disrespectful for me to bring up.)

By the way, this is very different from the American civil war. The Confederacy seceded explicitly because the federal government was trying to remove a form of oppression. The Stormcloaks rebelled because the Empire was reasserting oppression. As evidenced by all the talk from Windhelm's Dunmer and Argonians about "ever since Ulfric came along," Windhelm was not a racist city prior to the rebellion. Ulfric's oppression of Windhelm's racial minorities is less akin to Confederate slavery and more akin to American internment camps in World War Two (which to be clear were very bad, and also very different from fighting a war to preserve institution chattel slavery. All throughout human history you see a flareup of xenophobia during wars. War is bad.)

You can also consider the alternative. From a utilitarian perspective, an Imperial victory is worse because the suffering of two small immigrant communities in one city is replaced with the suffering of a religious group representing something like a third of all of Skyrim. (No suffering is not an option because The Elder Scrolls is diet grimdark.) Again, the negotiated settlement really is the best option, but that's a cop-out, so, Stormcloaks. That said, in most of my playthroughs I went Imperial lol.

[shifuto]

ah, thinking about Zexal's motif being XYZ summon and how it was handled and inserted in non-duel settings is interesting..

(hazy memory because I've not watched this show in years, so bear with me)

the first thing is The Door in Yuma's nightmares.. isn't that "lose your most precious thing" an allusion to XYZ summon? To summon that type of monster you "lose" whatever monsters you have in your field, if they meet the requirements. They don't go to the graveyard, but become overlay units (that's the general rule, of course there's exceptions)

both The Door and the Emperor's Key seemed to be requirements for the Zexal morph - at least, at first - and Yuma and Astral are the "monsters" to be "sacrificed" for the summon, becoming "overlay units" themselves

the other part was all the drama that went down with Byron, Kazuma and Faker. The latter actually says so onscreen, about the XYZ summon - that requires 2 souls - and sacrifices the other 2 to have access to the interdimensional worlds

still don't understand why Byron, now Tron, had such a radical change in his appearance but it had probably to do with Chaos and the Barian World - funnily enough, all the main Barians (not only the Emperors) had some kind of alternative form, and Yuma is a being of Chaos so he can also change (Zexal). The only one who actually didn't transform into anything different was Haruto, somehow?

I think Merag's sacrifice also calls back to XYZ summon, just as much as Vector killing Nasch and Merag later on, in the Barian World. Similarly, he and Number 96 become overlay units for Don Thousand and, finally, they all become overlay units for Nasch - interesting enough, the Barians also have access to The Door, a different one at that, and they also have their own "key" in the form if the Barian crest

even the worlds themselves seemed like references to XYZ summon, and the show ends with exactly that, now...

when Astral World was one (before they exiled Don Thousand) there were no issues other than the, seemingly(?), majority of the denizens being a bunch of eugenecists, creating Eliphas to keep the Order and Astral to enforce it, but when the worlds are "back together" things become erratic and much like...... 2 things literally existing as one.. but they were already "one" before.. but it somehow changed after all.. hmm..

likewise, Astral was one whole person before his duel with Don Thousand, but they tied and had parts of themselves lost..

guess, for both Astral and for Astral World, their previous "whole" forms still lacked power! So as things got split, a lot of said power went more to one side (Chaos) than the other: Astral World begun to die and Astral lost his memories and got his life tied to Numbers

when they all morph "back" into one, things are different because more power was cultivated on the other side. Astral-Barian World is overflowing with Chaos that has to be contained - ironically, causing the very issues Astral World denizens wanted to avoid in the first place aha! - and Zexal has a whopping 3 different forms, one stronger than the other!

anyway, it's interesting to think about it and how the while "came back wrong" trope can fit so well for so many of these situations: life is changed forever and it can never quite go back the way it was before, to be born anew is to part with pieces of oneself, change, and be put together again, ad infinitum

just like real life, huh?

[fearlessinger]

How does Athena foil Apollo?

oh in so many ways… Love that you picked her. (Granted Athena herself, like all the gods who aren't Apollo, has had a relatively low amount of screentime in the rrverse so far, but I believe there's enough to paint a pretty complete picture if you read between the lines, and take into account what other characters - mainly Apollo and her children - say/imply of her. So.)

Athena is Zeus's favorite, I would argue even above Artemis, because she's the only one out of all the gods who never feels the need to resort to going behind his back in the course of the three pentalogies. She's the only member of the Olympian council that we know he actively seeks the advice of.

Apollo on the other hand, is possibly the least favored of Zeus' progeny in the present day. In Apollo’s own words, Zeus “hasn’t trusted [Apollo] for millennia”. By the time we meet him, Apollo has been left by his father barely any room to maneuver even within his own domains, as demonstrated by the fact that he can’t even independently choose to cede the reins of the sun chariot to anyone that Zeus might not approve of. He is the one Zeus immediately points to when he needs a scapegoat. He gets hit with a punishment so harsh it's quite literally a miracle he survived, to the point that we find ourselves wondering, in the end, if he was actually meant to.

But it wasn't always like this. Once upon a time Apollo too enjoyed Zeus' favor. He and Athena both used to be Zeus' main enforcers and right hand people. We still see evidence of this in the kind of relationship they seem to have. 

Athena is the only one of Apollo’s family members whose counsel he explicitly wishes he could ask during his trials, as opposed to his wishing for material help from most of everybody else. She is the only one of the gods to openly speak against Apollo’s punishment, right in front of Zeus too. She words her disapproval carefully enough that she retains plausible deniability, but just barely. And she alone bets on Apollo’s survival in Hermes’ pool. In that last council scene, she and Apollo are able to silently communicate with just a glance. It’s clear that they share some deep camaraderie, an old well established ease with each other that the recent distance between them has not diminished. 

We’re never given the full explanation, but it’s not hard to figure out how their paths must have diverged. It’s not even hard to figure out why. Apollo’s ruled by his heart, while Athena can’t fathom following anything but her brain. As Apollo started more and more chafing under their father's rules, more and more refusing compliance, Athena clearly made the opposite choice. Nowadays they play opposite roles: the beautiful fool and the dutiful lieutenant. Everything about the way Apollo chooses to present himself is a middle finger to his father, whereas Athena is the staunchest of Zeus loyalists. 

And yet it looks like they still have a lot of respect for each other. Which isn’t surprising because they have some significant similarities despite their very different characters. Firstly: they share a similar sense of responsibility. It’s undeniable that Athena takes their job very seriously, and much as it may seem that Apollo has the opposite attitude on the surface, we know, having reached the end of TOA, that that was never the truth. Secondly, they are both extremely intelligent and acutely aware of it. They both expect to be the smartest person in the room at any given time. And they are right except of course for when they are wrong bc their intelligence most definitely does not prevent them from being also incredibly dumb. You may be wondering how can I so confidently make this latter assertion, since we never get a peek into Athena’s head, but I think Annabeth saying that the first lesson Athena’s kids must learn is that “mom is always right and don’t you ever dare suggest otherwise” backs me up here.

On this note, it’s interesting to observe that Athena’s children and Apollo’s children both display a strikingly unusual amount of faith/confidence in their divine parents, compared to… basically all the other demigods. 

Annabeth won’t ever stop singing Athena’s praises/boasting about being her daughter, even as she makes comments like the one I cited above. And Will famously stood in front of the army that was about to raze CHB to the ground in Apollo’s name and called bullshit on the idea that his father would ever approve of such a thing with enough conviction that the matter was considered settled and nobody even for a second thought of doubting Apollo afterwards. 

And yet “dad is always right” is very obviously not an idea that has ever entered the mind of any of Apollo’s children. They show absolutely no reverence, let alone fear, toward their father. Will doesn’t hesitate to legit SCOLD Apollo in front of the whole camp in THO. The loyalty that Apollo’s children have toward their father is nothing like that of the Athena kids toward their mother. In this too it seems like Athena has chosen to stick to the path traced by Zeus, while Apollo has rejected it.

But their divisions aren’t irreconcilable, and that little secret nod she gives Apollo at the end of TON proves it. Remember when I said Athena is the only one out of all the gods who never feels the need to resort to doing stuff behind Zeus’ back? That changes here. For the very first time, we see her take initiative without her father’s knowledge or consent.

[philosopherking1887]

If it's only "many," not "most," your argument makes no sense. I found this source stating that 10% of the Israeli population has dual citizenship. Some proportion of those might be Israeli Arabs rather than Jews, but for the sake of argument, let's say they're all Jews. So if 1 million of the 7 million Jews living in Israel have dual citizenship and can move somewhere else, you've still created a refugee crisis of 6 million. Your argument relied on an equivocation between those two vague quantifiers, "many" and "most." Your allies will read and nod along, thinking, yes, of course most Israelis have a spare apartment in Brooklyn. When an opponent points out that it's not most, you can retreat to say "I only said 'many.'" Well, how many is "many"? How does that actually solve the problem? I was reading your claim charitably as the one that actually supports your overall argument -- though it is empirically false -- rather than a complete non sequitur, which serves no function except to invoke stereotypes about Jews (which you may not realize are antisemitic, but the Left generally considers that to be no excuse in the case of harmful stereotypes about other marginalized groups).

(Putting the rest under a cut because it got long.)

Leftist activists in the West might not want to kick out the Jews (at least, officially), but listen to what actual members of Hamas say (the 2017 revised charter was a piece of cynical propaganda, as their subsequent actions should prove). Listen to what Palestinian children are taught to say about Jews. It is not "an imagined threat"; it is taking them at their word. We -- people who favor a two-state solution (because no one in this conversation is a right-wing Netanyahu supporter) -- do not think Palestinians "must be held on a tight leash and cannot be given autonomy"; we think they should be given self-determination, but should not be given untrammeled power over the Jewish population in Israel. We do not think they're "wild animals"; we think they are human beings, who like all human beings have the capacity -- and in many cases the demonstrated willingness -- to commit horrific acts of violence. Having been oppressed does not make them automatically incapable of doing wrong, and assuming that it does is just as reductive and infantilizing as assuming that they are capable of nothing but violence.

History shows that oppressed people turning violently against their former oppressors when they find themselves in a position of power is not nearly as rare as the Left makes it out to be. Leftists like to hold up emancipation in the US and the end of apartheid in South Africa as "proof," but these are only two examples, which took place in their own unique contexts that are not generalizable to every other situation of historical oppression. Similarly, the context of "land back" movements in, e.g., North America and Australia matters: those populations are vastly outnumbered by the settler population, so even if they were granted legal rights over all of the land, they know that they wouldn't have the power to violently enforce them even if they wanted to, so of course it's in their interests not even to consider the possibility. But there are plentiful historical examples where vengeful violence and persecution did take place, sometimes lasting beyond the acute conflict: the French and Russian Revolutions come to mind (the latter including persecution not only of the former ruling nobility, but also of relatively well-off peasant landowners who were perceived as part of the oppressive system); I have seen people on here hold up the mass expulsion of both European-descended Pieds-Noirs and all Jews (both Sephardi Jews who fled there during the Spanish Inquisition and Maghrebi Jews who had been there for millennia) from Algeria as a positive example that should be emulated by Palestinians.

But since you did say that the oppressed group "is far more likely to react peacefully and be open to cooperation if their rights are actively returned to them than if they have to take them by force," perhaps it would be more persuasive to focus on examples where there was a political settlement, but newly empowered formerly oppressed groups still took revenge against their former oppressors. One such is Uganda, which was granted independence by the UK without a violent independence struggle, but Idi Amin inflamed resentment against South Asians who had been economically favored under the British colonial government and in 1972 expelled nearly all of them as part of a policy of "Africanization." The cases of violent expropriation of whites in Zimbabwe and the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsis (who had been the pre-colonial ruling class and were further empowered by German and Belgian colonial regimes) are a little more ambiguous because there had been earlier armed conflict, but in both cases the revenge violence occurred well after the acute conflict, when the formerly oppressed group had been in power for a while; in Zimbabwe it was part of the implementation of legally agreed-upon land redistribution, while in Rwanda it was a drastically disproportionate response to guerrilla attempts by Tutsis who had gone into exile following the Hutu Revolution (which was facilitated by the departing Belgian colonial government) to overthrow the Hutu-dominated one-party dictatorship in Rwanda and regain citizenship and influence. For that matter, the French Revolution is also a somewhat ambiguous case, since aside from the storming of the Bastille, the abolition of the Ancien Regime was mostly accomplished through legislative means, with many prominent revolutionaries themselves being aristocrats or clergy members who wanted to discard their own privileges; but that did not protect them from being accused of "counter-revolutionary" sentiments and executed during the Reign of Terror.

So your factual claims are largely unsupported by the evidence, but your normative framework is also simplistic and ultimately indefensible. In your first reply you said this:

a victim-oriented approach would focus on giving back what was taken and allowing the victims to direct the course of justice.

What is "a victim-oriented approach"? Does it mean giving the designated victims everything they want, regardless of what it is? Would a "victim-oriented approach" dictate that rape victims who want to see their rapists castrated, or tortured and murdered, should be given exactly what they want? And once again, it is simply untrue that all victims are automatically virtuous, forgiving, and merciful; yes, some are, but vengefulness is also a natural and frequent human response, as history can amply attest.

Your later reply does seem to suggest that your favored approach is to give the victims exactly what they want, consequences be damned:

you can't talk about reparations and ignore that palestinians have actually been incredibly clear about the reparations they want: to return home.

Which of course sounds very simple and reasonable unless you consider that returning to Palestinians who fled or were driven out of their homes in 1948 and their heirs all the land that they owned at the time would require evicting a lot of Israelis, and would likely make Jewish self-determination non-viable by breaking up any territory where there is a majority -- much like the West Bank settlements, which similarly threaten the viability of a Palestinian state (which in both cases is part of the point). Of course, you will respond that these are entirely different because the Palestinians would be reclaiming land they were forced from only 75 years ago, whereas the Jews were forced from their land 2000 years ago, so their claim has long expired. Others have discussed the logical and ethical difficulties with setting an expiration date on indigeneity; I don't need to get into that. As far as I'm concerned, the most relevant question is not just who owned it when, but: what would be the wider consequences of enforcing a given land claim?

The safety and right to self-determination of Israeli Jews (which is almost half of the world's Jewish population) deserves as much consideration as the safety and right to self-determination of the Palestinian people. I absolutely think the 500,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank can and should be evicted because their presence actively endangers Palestinian civilians and threatens the integrity and independence of a future Palestinian state -- but also because they would have somewhere to go: namely, to Israel proper, within the pre-1967 borders. (I also think it would be reasonable to cede more land currently held by Israel to a future Palestinian state, in proportion to the respective populations -- the original 1947 UN Partition Plan was much more generous to the Palestinian Arabs -- but unfortunately, I doubt that's even on the negotiating table.) If hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews were evicted to honor the 1948 land claims of Palestinians, and the state that protects them and realizes their aspiration to self-determination consequently became unsustainable, most of them, as previously established, would not have somewhere else they can go (once again, more than half are descendants of Jews expelled from Middle Eastern and North African countries, who definitely do not have the option of returning there; see, for example, this article about Libyan Jews who have faced danger just returning temporarily to check on the state of abandoned Jewish sites, which also features a photo of Libyan Arab Muslims holding up signs saying "We strongly refuse the Jewish on our land" in response to a proposal to restore the main synagogue in Tripoli).

The question I often find myself wanting to ask Leftists is: do you believe that violence and oppression are wrong in general, on principle, or only wrong when directed at certain people by certain others? Do you believe that all peoples have a right to self-determination if they want it, or only selected ones? If you are only capable of empathizing with one party to a conflict; if you are only permitted to "frame this from the perspective of the indigenous population," or the oppressed victims -- that is, the population whose claim to indigeneity and victimhood you recognize -- and you consider it treason to even consider the perspective or the well-being of people on the other side, you will have a very narrow understanding of the situation, and you will likely end up demonizing an entire population and thus justifying any degree of violence against them -- which is exactly what has happened in Leftist discourse on Israel/Palestine. You can critically evaluate the claims of both sides without necessarily granting them equal weight; after consideration, I still think the Russian justification of their invasion of Ukraine is disingenuous and/or delusional. But I also don't think that random Russian civilians should be brutally murdered, even if they wholeheartedly support the invasion, and the fate of Russian civilians in the Donbas and Crimea should be taken into consideration in the resolution to the conflict. Are you capable of genuinely considering the rights and well-being of Israelis -- genuinely, seriously, without having to falsify the facts of their situation to dismiss any concerns?

Idk it's just weird that people want israel disestablished.

Like do not get me wrong, the Israeli government very much has its wrongs and is not good. However idk? Like maybe instead of metaphorically nuking it all, we should instead focus on improving the Israeli government and laws and policies?

Under the current governments of Palestine, getting rid of Israel would not bode well for jews. And it seems just odd want bad things to happen to jews living in Israel instead of working on making things better for both jews and Palestinians. Like putting one group down to uplift another is not very coexistence.

And it's crazy how going "umm guys maybe we should be promoting coexistence instead of getting rid of a whole country" is seen as bad and radical.

[gentrychild]

Some part of me wonders if the hsc was just waiting for the hero system to fail as badly as it did in canon. I don't mean it in the, they don't benefit from the working hero system, but I mean it in the, the hero system is working exactly as it is meant to. All Might brought peace and peacetime can make it hard to maintain power over a population because people have the luxury of questioning stuff. Obviously the entire culture around pro-heroes and villains would be a good deterrent to people saying "hmm, maybe that was excessive force and also that villain was motivated by poverty and maybe force shouldn't be the go-to way to prevent crime" but peace makes people feel safe enough to ask those things.

But disruption? Terror? All Might gone, heavy losses on the side of heroes, heroes failing to defeat the villains with mass casualties, a loss of faith a system with comparatively a gentle use of force to what the hsc might use, where daytime heroes were under intense scrutiny from the public and help to high standards of behaviour?

All Might made people feel like heroes would always win and so they could demand high standards of behaviour and ethics from them. Without All Might and a guarantee of victory, handing more power to the hsc or allowing more leeway might seem logical to scared people. Perhaps not heroes, but still individual actors using quirks with different branding. It's likely what happened during the Dawn of Quirks and historically, that's often how governments gain greater power as a result of instability. And even once Shigiraki is dealt with, this attitude will extend to all villains/criminals with harsher responses to mild infractions. Perhaps tighter Quirk laws as well, or at least more enforcement.

If left alone, the hero system as it is would likely go through cycles. Chaos, power granted to the government, use of this power to gain stability through force, and either this peace through force is maintained until a stronger disruption/villain, or the amount of force used is lessened through public demand. The hero system collapses once again because root causes are not addressed, chaos, and then power is handed over to the government to regain stability through force. Rinse, repeat, until it inevitably implodes.

I don't think the hsc predicted it failing as badly as it did, or how Endeavour's actions would bite them in the ass with Dabi. But I could see them betting on All Might retiring, the spike in crime and social unrest as a result, and using that to push through more authoritarian measures. Because that's how it often goes in the real world

Panem and circenses, Anon. Bread and circuses. That's how you keep a society from noticing people in power are taking them from fools and that's on what the hero system is based.

Civilians need big good heroes to protect them from the big bad villains. Add some cult of personality.... I mean, hero worship and quirk veneration (since heroes are the elite, the only one allowed to use their quirks, normal people can't use theirs in public places, and villains are usually people with ominous quirks), and you get BNHA!

And the great thing is that if people are brainwashed into loving hero, they don't question the statu quo too much and you don't need force to justify more and more power being given to the heroes.

Well, to a point. Because, as you said, the longer the peace lasts, the more people have time to think about the flaws of the system.

I think that the reasons why this lack of questioning lasted so long despite All Might's enforced peace was because:

1. again, the society worships heroes and propaganda is a nifty tool.

2. that peace was enforced by All Might. There is a real difference between "We live in peace because people wants to be nice to each other" and "Our protector prevents the bad guys from harming us." For the latter, there is still this sense of "the others would harm us if heroes weren't there to protect us".

But even with that, you're right, the public would have grown antsy sooner or later. So, the way to keep the system in place would have been to show that the villains were becoming more vicious, so the Hero Commission would have no choice but to say "See what happens when we don't have free reins to protect you?"

However, i am convinced that the HPSC never would have allowed the hero society to fail this way.

Endangering it a little bit is good to scare the public and make them long for the safety of the past. But when you let a system crumble, odds are that the opponents are the one to get in power and to become the new government. (Or, if said opponents are a bunch of anarchists who don't want to rule, you get chaos then, some time after, government slowly rebuilding itself but it's not the same guys anymore and the HSPC, since it's made of people who like power, would never willingly part with it.)

No, I think that messed everything up was All Might's sudden retirement + the fight in Kamino.

The Hero Commission probably knew that All Might was weakening (that was kind of an opened secret in some circles) but he would have lasted longer if there wasn't for the Kamino fight. So, and I am speculating here but that's kinda my thing, the HSPC probably had something planned so they would slowly introduce the idea of All Might's retirement to the public and a new number 1, ready to walk in All Might's footsteps but different enough for people not to constantly compare the both of them.

And if the HPSC had the time to make it happen, the new number 1 hero would have been that guy:

Alas for the Hero Commission, All Might not only retired sooner than intended but in a very public manner, and worse of all, he almost got killed.

Before Kamino, the LoV was a bunch of scrubs. They had their behind handed to them by high school children (on their first week at hero school, no less).

Then, the summer camp happened. UA being attacked and Bakugou being abducted was a golden opportunity for the Hero Commission if they wanted more power. They had THE excuse to have more influence on the hero schools.

Except that 1. Nedzu didn't call the top heroes to rescue Bakugou. He called the UA alumni, restoring some of UA street cred and (accidentally?) preventing HC heroes to fix the situation. 2. the Hero Commission, even if they were warned that AFO could be there, thought that top heroes would easily take care of the LoV, who had won against students and a bunch of low ranked heroes.

Instead, they got this:

SSS ranked villain. Someone who almost killed All Might. Someone who probably could have razed a town.

That's the kind of power backing the LOV.

And that's terrifying.

But worse than AFO killing so many people, worse than AFO almost killing the Symbol of Peace under everyone's eyes, he revealed the truth.

All Might, symbol of absolute strength, their protector, was actually reduced to this state.

That's the opposite of slowly introducing All Might's retirement to the world. For the moment, everyone who saw this had to live through the eventuality that the one guaranteeing their peace was going to die on this day, leaving the villains free to do whatever they wanted.

After that, they needed to comfort the public, to tell them that they could fix this. Once again, it could be taken as an opportunity to have more power, to have more authority, but now, there was a much higher risk for the Hero Commission.

So, they had the great idea of doing whatever happened during the war arc. To show the threat of the big bad villain and to assemble an army of heroes to defeat them, to show that 1. the heroes have it handled 2. that the Hero Commission helped preventing things from becoming worse so they should be granted more powers.

This was a high risk, high reward situation.

And the Hero Commission failed to assess how great the risk was.

[collecting-stories]

I Think He Knows - Rafe Cameron

Request: can i please request Rafe with I Think He Knows from Taylor’s album Lover ❤️

A/N: I don’t really know where I was going with this...just kinda writing off the song. 

TS Anthology Series | Outer Banks Masterlist

_ . ◦ ⭐︎:*.☾.*:⭐︎◦∙._

The gathering on the beach was small, nothing more than some kook friends having a bonfire in one of their backyards (and the backyard just so happening to be a beach). Rafe usually preferred the louder parties, the house parties that teetered on the edge of losing control, not because he liked the crowd butt rather because he felt like he could disappear inside of it. In a crowd of people, all drinking, no one was putting too much focus on him. Tonight didn’t give him that same feeling, more so he felt a little caged in. Trapped on the beach listening to people he didn’t give a fuck about talk shit with each other. It was boring, even with the light house music someone was playing and the few people that were smoking.  

He wouldn’t have come really, except he was already on the beach, begrudgingly having agreed to spend the day with you doing “nothing”, as you had put it earlier. Just laying out under the sun for the most part. When you’d finally decided to pack it in, craving real food over the various snacks you’d brough with you, some kooks from school texted about a small get together.  

“This is boring,” Rafe said, voice just above a whisper as he leaned down near your ear so no one overheard. You were standing by the fire and he’d finally broken away from the group of acquaintances that he’d been entertaining to come over, placing himself so close behind you that you could feel his chest against your back as he spoke, feet practically caging yours in.  

The only good thing about the entire “party” was that you hadn’t bothered changing, standing around in the bright red bikini that you’d worn to sunbathe in. At least the view was worth it.  

“We can go...but my dad is home by now,” you mentioned, tilting your head back to look at Rafe. It was probably more a parental thing than a ‘your dad’ thing but Rafe was not a popular topic in your household. Granted the first time your dad met your boyfriend had been midsummers and you’d been in the men’s locker room together. You had to be grateful for the length of your dress because you thought it might’ve been ten times worse if your dad had actually seen Rafe eating you out and not just the shape of him beneath a satin gown.  

Either way, Rafe Cameron was banned from your house and your person, though the latter was a harder rule to enforce.  

“So, let’s not go home.” He replied, hands settling on your hips.

“Just once,” you whispered back, taking a sip of the vodka lemonade someone had concocted, “I would like to have sex not in the back of your truck.”

“Don’t be dramatic.” He snapped the side of your bikini against your waist, “we did it in the shower like two days ago.”

“The shower at the gym.” You pointed out. You downed the last gulp of alcohol before tossing the cup into the grocery bag someone had tied to the cooler, grabbing your beach tote and letting Rafe lead you away from the party.  

There were no goodbyes and you could practically hear your friends ragging on you for it tomorrow, how you were in such a hurry to leave with Rafe that you hadn’t bothered saying goodbye to them. You’d pretend to care but really you didn’t. You’d never been this “about a guy” before but you couldn’t help yourself, Rafe had you pretty much wrapped around his finger, willing to do anything. Including driving somewhere remote to have sex in the backseat of his truck.  

“Gimme my keys,” Rafe waved his hand out to you, trying to reach for the set of keys that you were already pulling out of your bag. He’d given them to you earlier on the beach and never taken them back. You smiled, waving them by the UNC lanyard and knocking your hip against his.  

“Nope.” You replied, getting between him and the driver’s side door. Rafe wasn’t so particular about things that he couldn’t be swayed, aside from his truck. He never let you drive it. He never let anyone else drive it. Even when he was drunk off his ass and could barely walk. “I’m driving.”

“There is no way in hell I’m letting you drive.” He said, gripping the  

“There’s no way in hell I’m giving up these keys.” You replied, tucking your hand behind your back as if he couldn’t just reach around and grab them from you.  

Rafe’s hand flexed on the edge of the door before he loosened his grip and you smiled, knowing you had won. “If you get a scratch on my car-”

“What’re you gonna do?” You teased, leaning in close to him. When he didn’t say anything, you turned on your heel, pulling yourself up into the truck, “that’s what I thought.” You joked.  

Rafe fiddled with the radio while you backed out of the driveway, trying not to seem like you were intimidated handling the truck. You were used to small cars, four door sedans like your dad drove, not trucks like this. It honestly freaked you out a little bit but as you turned onto the main road and Rafe’s hand dropped from the dial on the radio to your bare thigh, feeling nervous about handling the car was the last thing on your mind.  

“Where are you going?” He asked when you turned down the road that led to the bridge, crossing over into Pogue territory.

“You said you didn’t want to go back to my house...” you shrugged a shoulder, glancing over at him as you rolled the truck to a stop at the sign.  

“Yeah, I don’t wanna slum it over here either.” He replied, shifting down in his seat so he could spread his legs.  

“Don’t be such a baby,” you joked, leaning over the center console and kissing his cheek, your nose bumping against the rim of his sunglasses.  

When you had first started hanging out with Rafe, too casual to describe it as dating, you were already someone else’s girlfriend. To be fair, he had someone else too but that didn’t stop him from expressing an interest in you, one that was hard to ignore. The majority of your friends, on both sides, were quick to warn you that what Rafe did to his last girlfriend, he would do to you.  

“Careful,” he unconsciously reached for the steering wheel as you hit the brake abruptly, jolting the truck a little as a car flew passed, having breezed through the stop sign on their side.  

“I’m not gonna scratch your truck, calm down.” You swatted his hand away as you kept driving.  

“Just pull over somewhere already.”

Your dad hated Rafe cause he was convinced that the only thing on his mind was sex and, to be fair, your dad had a pretty compelling argument. Rafe had about three moods at any given time: drinking with his friends, being grumpy, and having sex. In his defense though, you weren’t much better.  

Being around him was more intoxicating than you had first expected it to be but you shouldn’t have been too surprised. He’d weaseled his way into a two-year relationship and convinced you to go out with him. “God, keep it in your pants.” You joked.  

“I just wanna spend time with you.” He groaned, as if that was a believable enough excuse for you to pull the truck over.  

“That’s some bullshit,” you laughed, “you spent all day with me.”  

Rafe’s hand dropped to your thigh again as you pulled off the road, “yeah and it still wasn’t enough time.”  

[angofwords]

Let’s talk about Blanca.

Mostly, I’ve seen some very well-argued posts about how he’s the absolute worst and should be reviled. It’s a very persuasive stance. While he was employed by Golzine to train Ash, he witnessed horrific child abuse, and yet did almost nothing to protect his student from any of it. It’s completely unforgivable, and yet, in the canon of Banana Fish, he’s forgiven for it. He’s portrayed as almost a heroic figure.

How can that work?

I can’t say for sure how (or even if) it works for others, but I can explain why it works for me.

First, consider Blanca’s backstory: he was born Sergei Varshikov and was trained from a young age to be a killer for the Soviet Union. He tells Yut Lung that he didn’t feel anything at all about his role back then, which seems to indicate either pschyopathy or repressive training in childhood. Because he’s able to fall in love with someone (Natasha Karsavina, who becomes his wife and who is later killed by the government), I think we’re supposed to understand that it’s the latter. Blanca was taught not to feel, and it took falling in love to reprogram him.

Losing Natasha affected him enormously. He defected from the Soviet Union and became a professional killer. I think he’s uniquely suited to such a profession, as he not only has the skills for it, but also his ethics are rooted in logic, rather than morality. I think that his upbringing skewed his perspective of the world: rather than seeing people in terms of “good” and “evil,” Blanca sees only power—who has it and who lacks it.

When he was first asked to train Ash, he fully intended to say no. In the end, however, he took the job because of Ash himself. In Private Opinion, Blanca meets a boy on the cusp of absolute destruction. Ash’s life is out of control—he’s being abused, not just by Dino, but also by his tutors and by Marvin. Ash has become violent, like a wild animal. Blanca takes the job because he sees how powerless Ash is, but also the potential he has to transcend his position to become very powerful. He thinks that harnessing that potential is the only way Ash will survive.

It doesn’t seem to occur to him to “rescue” the boy, or to report Golzine for child abuse. I blame this on his unorthodox upbringing. Blanca doesn’t see Golzine’s actions as inherently evil, because he’s been trained his whole life not to make moral judgements. Instead, he finds way to elevate Ash’s power and therefore improve his life’s conditions. An important element of that elevation is social status, which is part of the reason that Blanca threatens to kill Marvin if he touches Ash again—clearly a boy who is considered a sexual plaything for anyone who wants him must have very low standing. By enforcing a no-touching rule (except for Dino) Blanca elevates Ash into an exclusive plaything, rather than a common one. It’s not a huge step up, but it gives Ash space to become something entirely different. He teaches him to be a weapon. And once he’s a weapon, he has much more inherent value (as well as the ability to fight off unwanted advances).

Golzine also appreciates his boy becoming his weapon (that’s why he hired Blanca, after all) and his own view of Ash shifts as well. By the time Blanca retires, Ash is more to Dino than just a toy. He’s become an enforcer. He kills for Dino now, and this status is a *far* more powerful a position. Blanca leaves for the Caribbean knowing Ash has been elevated and under the impression that Ash has ceased to fight against Golzine, that he has accepted his role in Golzine’s household.

When Blanca returns to New York in volume 12, he’s surprised that Ash and Dino are no longer working together (to me, this speaks volumes about how things must’ve been when he left, because Blanca can definitely read a room) and says as much to Ash, urging him right from the start to get back onto the path of power—Golzine can make him one of the most powerful young men in the world, after all.

After watching him with Eiji, Blanca understands Ash’s reasons for resisting. He tells Ash that a lynx can’t be friends with a rabbit, not because he’s trying to hurt Ash, but because he genuinely believes in the need for power, and Dino Golzine is the obvious source of future power for Ash. Eiji represents an alternate path, one that Blanca doesn’t understand. (Though, to be fair, neither does Ash. He doesn’t think of a future with Eiji because that future in unimaginable to him.)

Blanca refuses to promise not to kill Eiji, even when Ash begs.

It's here where we first see any indication that Blanca’s stances are irresolute—once he hears Ash’s pleas, he tells him he regrets coming back to New York at all. He’s still going to do the job he’s been hired to do—he seems to have a deep sense of honor toward duty—but it’s clear that his affection for Ash is complicating things.

Because Ash gives in and returns to Golzine, Blanca’s job is finished. He lingers, however, despite saying that he is eager to get home. Yut Lung tries to hire him (to kill Eiji) and Blanca refuses, but still he doesn’t leave the city. This gives Yut Lung the opportunity for blackmail. He roots out Blanca’s history and threatens to notify the KGB if Blanca refuses to work for him. Blanca concedes, but only as Yut Lung’s bodyguard (having just witnessed the aftermath of an attempt on Yut Lung’s life).

It appears that he takes an interest in Yut Lung, but a careful reading shows that he’s really only interested in Yut Lung’s feelings about, and plans to destroy, Ash. He does his job very well, though, and protects Yut Lung through several skirmishes. Still, twice he tells Yut Lung he’s quitting and twice he’s reminded why he can’t (blackmail). It’s not until Yut Lung sends boys out to ambush Ash and Eiji that Blanca finally quits, choosing to try to protect Ash even knowing it means he could be exposed to the KGB.

He gets to them too late—Eiji is being wheeled into an ambulance and Ash, who has also been shot, is feral and dangerous. Blanca sends Jessica to the hospital with Eiji and prevents Ash from going along. He tells Ash that his presence is a danger to Eiji, that Ash’s selfish feelings about Eiji are what got him shot in the first place. Blanca is pretty intense here—I think he’s speaking from experience, that he sees himself and Natasha in Ash and Eiji.

In order to watch over him, Blanca persuades Ash to hire him. Again, there’s a lot of reason for him to leave at this point (Yut Lung could be bringing Soviet agents down on him at any time, for example) but he seems to need to see Ash through this. He even cryptically tells Jessica that Ash is his “savior.”

I think that means that Ash saved his soul. He had been a soulless killer before he met Natasha, then went back to that emotionless existence after she died. But meeting Ash stirred something inside him, gave him someone to care about and a purpose. Even when he urged Ash to submit to Golzine, he was trying to help Ash obtain the power he needed to survive. It wasn’t until Ash’s love for Eiji reminded him of Natasha, however, that the full effect was complete. Blanca became Sergei once more and remembered what it was to love.

He still cautioned distance—because it was true that Natasha was killed because of him, he believed that Ash was similarly dangerous for Eiji—but it was for Ash’s sake. Blanca he actually understands that, to Ash, Eiji’s safety is more important than any possible happiness together. Blanca understands Ash in a way that his other “fathers” never will. He understands Ash’s limitations as well as his potential, and I don't think either Golzine or Max (and especially not Jim!) ever did.

I think Ash comes to understand Blanca in the same way. They are kindred, bonded by experience and similar ways of thinking. Ash doesn’t need to forgive Blanca for not saving him from Golzine, because he never expected him to. Instead, he sees Blanca is the first man who didn’t let him down, who always had his back and who helped him become more than his situation.

I don’t hate Blanca. He’s deeply, tragically flawed, but he does his best.

[thecurioustale]

I’ve given a fair amount of thought to this as well over the years. Here’s my take:

Instinct covers three things: 1) It covers close-body hugging—more so as a form of mate socialization, comfort, protection, and warmth than as an explicit sexual behavior per se, though these things collapse down into sexual behavior during sex; and I should note that we don’t see most animals do this; 2) more to the point, instinct covers the impulse for and mechanistic knowledge of plain old vanilla-style vaginal–penile intercourse, which exists in the body as an understanding of certain physical positions and motions and in the mind as an abstract desire for contact and fulfillment; and 3) instinct covers the rhythmic thrusting that occurs during sex—something which most other animal species do much less of or don’t do at all.

All of the above would (normally) come even to a pair of feral humans with no social learning. (”Normally” covers my butt for the inevitable stream of exceptions, like sickness, trauma, lack of libido (e.g. when it’s very hot), and asexuality.) A good rule of thumb for “Is it an instinct?” is: Did humanity as a whole have to do it to survive prior to the dawn of civilization? And sex definitely qualifies.

By the way, in same-sex attractions (and also in furry / otherkin attractions) I surmise that the aforementioned impulse for sex is fully intact by default, as are the mental desire for contact and fulfilment, and the mechanistic knowledge of how to actually move one’s body. The latter is especially revealing: This is a deceptively complex system of physical motions; if we didn’t know it instinctively, we would have to be taught. Anyway, gay people absolutely could have straight sex with no social learning or physical teaching, and frequently did throughout history, just as straight people often had gay sex. (Or, to put it another way, human history is a lot queerer than most of us realize.) The only thing that actually changes in same-sex attraction is the type of body one is attracted to, and attraction is a different topic from the knowledge of how to have sex.

Meanwhile, everything else in sex is some combination of socially conditioned behavior and individual behavior (some individual behavior being deliberate and some being the result of sexual stimulation and excitement).

On the socially conditioned side: Kissing is absolutely a construct to the extent that society softly enforces it—although the application of one's lips to a lover's body as though to nibble on them is an understandable cross-circuit of our desire to eat, which is the other fundamental human desire that isn’t immediately provided for by our bodies and the surrounding environment (like breathing or peeing or sleeping). Things like perfume and shaving and lingerie, yeah, I obviously don’t need to say; those are constructs.

On the individual “result of stimulation” side are sexual behaviors that are common but far less common than vanilla intercourse, and are either the result of a person’s reaction to their sexual stimulation and excitement (like moaning, groping, breast play, fantasizing, biting and some kissing, and restraining / grappling / wrestling). Individual sexual behavior on the “deliberate” side can be anything, as it usually intersects with the world of conscious thought. Kinks often play out here, like feeding or bondage or foot play, and most kinks themselves are typically anomalies in our sexual wiring, ultimately stemming from our “attraction” programming, which as I mentioned is kind of another topic independent of the knowledge of how to have sex.

Oral sex, by the way, and manual sex too, I would surmise exist mainly on the individual level. For as integral as these acts are to many people’s sexual experience, they are not as common or desired as pop culture makes it seem, and are not instinctive for most people the way vanilla sex is and typically require learning to perform well. (You could rightly say that of vanilla sex too, but in my opinion the gradient is a lot shallower.)

What new radical forms of outsider sex would humanity come up with if they had to start from scratch armed with nothing but their genes?

I imagine a lot of conditioned and individual sexual behavior is convergent, in that both societies and individuals often independently come upon many of the same sexual acts. Attraction-based kinks, sexual sub-orientations, and some fetishes, for instance, have a biological component and independently re-arise quite often—and should probably be interpreted as the natural variation / diversity of evolved human sexual behavior. Physical reactions like moaning and groping are also going to come up again and again, because these are straightforward, simple actions available to most people. Sadly, patriarchal efforts, to conform the female and male bodies to whatever the arbitrary beauty ideals of the day are, are also likely to come up again and again.

After we move past the vanilla deviations like different lingerie fashions and beard styles and jewelry and makeup norms, and the societal conventions of sexual beauty like the “blond bombshell” and the “tall, dark, and handsome stranger,” I think it’s really only the super-abstract stuff that starts to well and truly depart into “radical” space. And any single constructed sexual behavior is always, necessarily, going to be limited to small numbers of people. Some fetish space exists here as well.

Ultimately, however, I think our potential for sexual radicalism is constrained somewhat by the utter centrality of sex to the human body and our universal existence within those bodies. Just about everything that a body can do, discounting highly abstract behaviors dependent on prolonged series of motions (e.g. dances, songs) or external artifices (e.g. sex toys, pillows, airplanes, etc.), has already been done and is frequently partaken of in the world today.

If, instead, you interpret “radical” in this context to mean “norm-shattering,” then I would propose that the radicalism is usually more about context than about substance—with some exceptions. My own desire for fatness and attraction to fat people is incredibly radical in this sense, and it’s kind of awe-inspiring and disappointing simultaneously to imagine that one of the most subversive things I have done in my life is squeeze flab and like it.

Society is weird, and its weirdness is well-cloaked by the conditioning that comes through normalization.

I always wondered can people who never heard of sex and have no idea what sex is rediscover it on their own?

Like two kids growing up alone in an island, I'd imagine as they hit puberty they would feel attracted and start exploring each other's bodies but how far would instinct alone take them?

What wwould be something that inevitably arises from human nature and what would turn out to be merely socialization?

What if kissing on the mouth is merely cultural convention and they do other things instead? Would they figure out the whole penis in vagina thing or is that something that needs to be taught? What new radical forms of outsider sex would humanity come up with if they had to start from scratch armed with nothing but their genes?