#family and other propagandists

[paperleef]

May 13 1887, Jose Rizal and Maximo Viola visit the town Litomerice to meet Ferdinand Blumentritt

[bogleech]

Guess I have to make a main thread about this. Someone decided to fight with me in the notes on this post just yesterday about Gaza and made select responses of mine into a callout thread here, where they say my anger towards the IDF is all a cover for antisemitism. This didn't make any sense, because they said they were also against the IDF killing civilians, and I repeatedly said that Jewish people aren't to blame for the IDF or represented by the IDF in any way, putting us supposedly both on the exact same page. What gerry leaves out of their own screenshots, and I'd actually forgotten, is that at first they came at me from an angle that I was disrespecting the victims in Gaza.

So this implies they feel gaza is being subjected to a genocide, and a pretty big one, since they're upset my language made it sound "smaller and tamer." When it becomes obvious that I do in fact consider it a serious genocide, that's when they switch over to saying that my criticism of Netanyahu or the IDF is inherently an attack on Jewish people.

Notice I never actually said "zionists" in this screenshot, even, but that I defined "regular humans" as humans who don't want to kill innocent families. That would automatically include Jewish people since they overall do not wish to kill anyone, but have in fact spent quite a lot more time trying not to get killed. I believe there may be entire books about this fact! I think there's even whole museums about it, if I'm not mistaken?!

So then they pivot to saying I'm an antisemite because I said the IDF and its supporters can "burn in hell," and they say "invoking hell" is an antisemitic dogwhistle, which is definitely news to me?!

So I tried to clarify, again, that I'm only angry at the people who are themselves killing civilians and the "pro-genocide maniacs" who defend the killing of civilians, which they responded to as if I had "lumped them in" with those. You can just see right there that I didn't make any assumption that they were a part of that at all. Thanks to their earlier comments I still thought I was speaking to someone 100% against the IDF's actions, but every time I said that the killers and their advocates alone are bad, they've framed it in some new way as me just not liking anyone Jewish. So now that you have that context:

...In a response to an ask, they finally just say they hated me to begin with and set out with the intention to "bait and sealion" me (their own words!!) into saying something they hoped would be antisemitic, which they believe was successful despite me never saying anything about Jews other than "this isn't their fault." They saw what they admittedly wanted to, so strongly, that they show me saying "this isn't the fault of Jews" as evidence that I blame Jews. But speaking of people "going mask off"

In multiple more recent posts and asks, this person appears to say that they simply do not believe the IDF is really targeting children or ambulances or relief aid, that "none of those are true," and the deliberate targeting of any children is supposedly just a conspiracy theory??? So I guess they did successfully troll me and I feel like a real gullible dumbass, because the only reason I continued responding to this person in the first place was that they said they were in fact against the ongoing massacre. Instead, these comments sound like they think the IDF is being unfairly vilified by dishonest propagandists, and that's why they hated me enough to try and fish for callout fuel. That's the nastiest fucking thing anyone's yet pulled on me about this and it's not one that I'm just going to ignore. I should have smelled a troll early on and just blocked them, but it's SO hard for me to suspect ulterior motives. I always go in thinking people mean well, and that there's just a miscommunication we can work out. I almost feel like this individual noticed that and tried to exploit it?!? Unfortunately I'm sure this kind of thing will happen again simply because I don't intend to obediently shut up about what's being done to Gaza. It's not logistically possible for the death and destruction to all just be accidental collateral damage. Don't let anybody ever fool you into thinking the IDF is the face of the Jewish community or vice-versa, just as you can't let anyone fool you into thinking Hamas represents all Palestinians. Especially don't engage this person, stop doing so if you have been, and block them.

[2hoothoots]

saw this post in the tag earlier talking about how we never really get a detailed look inside Maligula’s mind, and it got me thinking about the themes of the game again so I’m gonna use it as a jumping-off point. because i agree, it’s very significant that we never get to really see Maligula/Lucrecia as she used to be! but i think that fact actually makes the game much stronger, especially on a thematic level.

Lucrecia’s presence haunts the narrative throughout Psychonauts 2. at first, we can only make her out through her absence. she’s the seventh stump around the campfire, the missing center of a torn photo. we see glimpses of her in the ruined fragments of Ford’s mind. in Helmut’s mind, she’s a looming specter, a shadow of the friend he once knew. in Gristol’s mind, she’s a celebrated war hero. and as the game goes on, we learn that everything in Psychonauts 1 – the Aquatos leaving Grulovia, the family ‘curse’, Raz running away to camp – all of that was set in motion because of her. she’s at the very center of the tragedy that PN2 revolves around.

and she does haunt the narrative, even if Nona is still alive. because the old Lucrecia – the real Lucrecia – we never get to meet her. she’s long gone.

the closest we come to actually interacting with Lucrecia, as she used to be, is in Cassie’s mind. while the rest of the Psychic 7 only have a few lines to share, paper Lucrecia has a full dialogue tree. this is probably one of my favourite moments in the whole game. there’s an awe in Raz’s face, getting to meet her, but also this palpable tension throughout the conversation.

(screenshots taken from here! if you don’t remember this conversation, or just want a refresher, i’d highly recommend going back to watch it.)

this dialogue tree is great. it’s funny, and subtle, and surprisingly moving. Raz is full of questions for Lucrecia, and Lucrecia isn’t giving much away, but we get glimpses of her story here that are so tantalising. it’s a fascinating window into the person she used to be: coy, and playful, and a little aloof.

but – this is also very clearly not Lucy. we hear Cassie’s own thoughts coming out of her mouth (“Cassie told us [hydraulic mining] was very bad for the environment, but nobody listened to her, as usual”), but her dialogue is also steeped in Cassie’s confusion, her struggle to understand what happened (“I don’t really know [why I murdered all those people]. I was the nicest person during my time at Green Needle Gulch”). this is the closest we ever get to seeing Lucrecia, face-to-face, but she’s still heavily filtered through someone else’s perception.

how much of this is the real Lucrecia, and how much of it is just how Cassie sees her? we’ll never know.

i think a crucial part of PN2’s themes is that perception – how you can be someone completely different to different people around you. everyone has their own version of the story to tell. the most obviously propagandistic is Gristol’s retelling, which comes as a shock twist at a climactic moment that throws the whole game on its head. here, we get to see the other side of the story, from someone who only ever knew Lucrecia as a protector, a general, a murderer – and thought she should stay that way.

(screenshots from here)

but as entrenched as he is in his narrative, Gristol doesn’t have all the answers, either. and Ford’s version of events, while probably more factually correct, is still steeped in his own biases. Ford was so dedicated to the memory of the woman he loved that he did terrible things for her; and when he tried to bury that memory, it was so deeply entrenched in his mind that it broke him.

(screenshot from here)

but note the wording, when he talks about using the Astralathe to “neutralise” the “problematic” parts of her mind. My Lucy.

something else that PN2 touches on is how experiences change you. after the battle against Maligula, the remaining members of the Psychic 7 become very different individuals. Cassie withdraws from the world, unable to return to normality after everything that happened; Compton becomes an anxious wreck without his support network. Bob is broken with grief after the loss of his husband, and Ford willingly shattered his mind because it was what he thought he had to do to keep Lucrecia safe. and throughout the game, Raz helps all of them – but he doesn’t fix them. he doesn’t undo everything they went through, because how could he? the things that happened will stay with each of them forever.

and it’s the same with Lucrecia. even after she lets go of the rage and grief and violence that Maligula carried with her, symbolically severing the threads that bind her to her past – she doesn’t just go back to her old self. because she’s someone different now, too. she’s a mother, and a grandmother, and she loves her family so truly and so deeply. she’s patched together a new life for herself. and that’s what she affirms to Raz, in the moments before the final fight.

and he loves her right back. even after everything he’s learned, she’s still his Nona.

i think sometimes a story is more satisfying for not giving you the easy answers. Psychonauts 2 leaves a lot of things unsaid. it gives you pieces of the puzzle, glimpses of Lucrecia’s story through other people’s eyes, and asks you to draw your own conclusions from that. and then it says: this is who she is now. this is what matters. and personally, i think it’s stronger for that.

[ohsalome]

And I am once again reminding you that for centuries, Ukraine wasn't given its own voice in the world discourse. Our history, politics, culture were written by the people who colonised us and benefited from convincing the world (and us!) of a distorted picture. A good majority of information in English language that exists about Ukraine, that you believe to be the default knowledge of the world, is such distorted information. Because that is how russian propaganda work. They take a snippet of truth and blow it out of proportion and add a bouquet of lies to it and repeat it many-many times until you think that it is just basic information about the world that everyone knows.

No, Ukraine is not run by nazi. Ukraine has a non-zero percent of nazi population that is marginalized out of politics because their rhetoric is not relatable to the majority of the electorate, which leans towards socialistic populism and anarchism.

No, ukraine is not "brotherly nation" with russia. Antropoligically we belong to the same slavic family of nations that includes many other eastern europeans like czechs, polish, moldovan etc. There is no reason to select russians, belorussians and ukrainians into a distinct category that isn't political. The idea of "three brotherly nations" was literally created by a theologist Theofan Prokopovych as a part of philosophical justification to russian imperialism in the 19th century meaning of the word.

No, DNR and LNR are not "people's republics". They were created by russian army, run by the russian army and following the orders from the kremlin. Russis spent decades trying to create a dissident movement in the eastern Ukraine but failed and stepped down to brute force. Everything you see in the southern Ukraine now has happened in the east in 2014. The only difference is that y'all swallowed russian lies back then.

No, Crimea didn't have a "referendum to join russia". Russian soldiers occupied the peninsula, forced the politicians under the gunpoint to announce the referendum, and made sure that the results would be the ones they like. The native population of the peninsula, crimean tatars, that had been twice genocided by the russians in the past, boycotted the referendum. Despite making up only ~12% of the population, crimean tatar rallies were much more numerous than those of the russians in Crimea. The people who "supported" the "return of Crimea" were russian nationals, who moved to the peninsula after the ethnic cleansing of the native population and proclaimed that "it has always been theirs".

No, Ukraine doesn't have a "government-run kill list". Myrotvorets is (1) run by the volunteers, not the government, (2) is a database of pro-russian propagandists, and (3) hardly anyone on that database has been killed so far. FFS, our current first lady used to be in this database.

No, Ukraine didn't ban russian language. Ukraine has implemented laws that would help ukrainian book, music, film industry survive the competition with russian industry that has for many years monopolised our market. Ukraine has implemented the law that our politicians need to know ukrainian language if they want to hold office (this will sound surreal, but many didn't. Can you imagine such scenario in any other country? A spanish minister that doesn't speak spanish?). Ukraine has implemented a law that websites, advertisements published in foreign languages need to have the information accessible in ukrainian as well Ukraine has implemented laws that state that ukrainian citizens have a right to governmental service in Ukrainian. And if you bothered to open the law you criticise at least ONCE, you would have seen that every article has a clarification "the communication can happen in any language as long as both parties consent, but if the consumer requests to be served in ukrainian, the provider is obligated to respond to them in ukrainian".

No, Ukraine doesn't use the war as an excuse to repress the political opposition. The only people that have been "repressed" are the ones who have been colluding with ruZzia and have helped in organising the invasion of Ukraine. FFS one of those "poor oppositioners" is literally putin's godfather, and another visits russian tv channels agitating russians to nuke Kyiv. The proof against them is overwhelming and well-documented, and ukrainian civil society has been pressuring our government to stop them for literal years. Even today, many russian agents remain in governmental structures.

No, Euromaidan was not a "coup". It was a response of civil society to the police brutality and usurpation of power. We do not need white saviours to tell us that being beat up at peaceful protests is bad. We have enough agency to understand this without external help.

It's almost a year of this war. It's high time for people to stop spreading russian propaganda, especially if they claim to support Ukraine. I am yet to see a "both sides are wrong" argument that wasn't based on russian propaganda.

[snovyda]

re: citing a Nazi: Gareth Jones, Holodomor. that bit. the guy only went to the Ukrainian SSR once, on the urging of Nazi propagandists, and personally had a wine and dine with Hitler and Goebbels. it's like three posts down from the anon

Lmaooooooo you really think you did something here, do you? Giving you the benefit of the doubt would be to assume that you are just stupid, and idk how stupid one has to be to say that.

First, Gareth Jones, a Welsh freelance reporter who was in Germany in the early 1930s, reporting on the Nazis coming to power, trying to analyze why it happened and reporting on the nazis beliefs to make the world understand how insane they were, and how horrible their methods were, warning about how dangerous those developments were, for Germany and for the rest of the world. He did interview Hitler and other high ranking pieces of shit at the time, to cite in his reporting. He was very explicitly not a nazi in any way, shape or form.

But thank you for prompting me to read some of his reporting, it's a fascinating look at the era.

Second, I wasn't even citing him - I mentioned him. I don't need to cite a Welsh reporter about something I know about from the actual survivors I grew up around. And from my friends' family stories. And of course there is plenty of academic research, but I wasn't citing any of that.

So no, I was not "citing a nazi". You, however, are showing yourself to lean too close to being either really ignorant, or a fascistic genocide denier.

[theculturedmarxist]

It’s not the big, glaring, obvious lies that get you. The New York Times is the world’s most destructive propaganda outlet not because it publishes giant ham-fisted whoppers, but because it appears trustworthy. Its reporting looks authoritative. Children are taught in school that it’s what credible news media looks like. This lets the well-crafted propaganda slide into people’s minds, undetected and without resistance.

❖

The western media are so ridiculously deceitful and propagandistic that the fact that popular comedy shows and famous comedians aren’t making fun of them constantly proves those shows and comedians are themselves part of the propaganda network.

❖

Most mainstream western reporting on Chinese military activity essentially amounts to “OMG you guys China isn’t just passively sitting there while we militarily encircle it and prepare to attack it!”

Example:

That’s what all the banging on about China’s “military build-up” is doing too; acting like it’s alarming and sinister that China isn’t just passively allowing itself to be surrounded with war machinery amid glaringly obvious western preparations for war without doing anything to defend itself.

China’s still spending vastly less on its military than the United States, both overall and as a percentage of GDP. Yet we’re meant to act like China is the obvious aggressor nation, even as it’s being rapidly surrounded by US war machinery and increasingly militarized US allies.

❖

One thing I’ve learned from interactions with Robert F Kennedy Jr supporters is that many of them sincerely don’t understand why his position of “unconditional support” for Israel is such a deal breaker for many anti-imperialists. They think it’s all about Palestinian rights, but it’s a lot more than that.

Unconditional support for Israel doesn’t just mean supporting apartheid abuses and frequent bombings of Gaza, it means supporting the regular bombing of Syria, the annexation of the Golan Heights, and Israel’s insane warmongering against Iran. Israel is always in a state of war.

“Unconditional support” for Israel means imperialist foreign policy throughout the middle east. This isn’t just conjecture — we already see it in RFK Jr’s other middle east foreign policy like his staunch opposition to the Iran deal.

It’s a nonsensical, self-contradictory position to claim you want to dismantle the empire out one side of your mouth and pledge “unconditional support” for a nation that’s never not at war out the other. If you’re saying both, there’s one you’re not being truthful about.

There’s not enough rage at the US empire for provoking and perpetuating the war in Ukraine. Objections you see to this proxy war are mostly just griping about how much it costs or whether it’s sound strategy or whatever, but how about the fact that human lives are being spent like pennies for the advancement US global hegemony?

Think about how much it hurts to have one death in your family. Think about how much it rocks an entire community to lose even one life to violence. Mountains of human bodies are being piled up in violent deaths, all to secure US geostrategic interests in Eurasia. It’s pure horror.

The empire had multiple opportunities to end this before it started. It had an opportunity to end it in April 2022. It had an opportunity to end it this past November. But it kept shoving it through to advance US interests, and young lives kept being sacrificed to the war god.

Meanwhile US officials openly gloat all the time about how much this war is serving US interests, while anonymously whining to the press that the counteroffensive is failing because Ukrainians are too cowardly to charge through Russian minefields under heavy artillery fire. This should draw white hot rage from everybody.

Basically the US empire’s strategy is to use Ukrainian bodies like a giant sponge to soak up as many expensive Russian military explosives as possible.

❖

For western war propagandists Syria was like a dress rehearsal for the war in Ukraine. The lies are being peddled mostly by the same people, using mostly the same methods, funneled up into the same mainstream media platforms. The only real difference is that the empire is on the side of the official government in Ukraine, so it can simply use its officials and its media platforms as on the ground sourcing instead of setting up a bunch of weird little propaganda constructs like the White Helmets etc. Syria marked a new era of imperial narrative management.

[badbatchposts]

Big fanfic pet peeve of mine

When people majorly infantilize Omega. Like, yes, she's a child, but she's a child in STAR WARS and the clear insert character for kids watching the show. She deserves to have some competence and independence and do cool things! In the season finale she led a prison escape from a highly secretive secure facility! Even during the earlier seasons when she was even more baby, she was constantly learning and developing her skills, not just getting shoved to the side. Put some respect on her name.

And it really drives me crazy when /freader fics immediately have the reader taking on this totally unearned maternal role. Just the heterosexist, subtly propagandistic nuclear family of it all. Sometimes a family can be you and your five older but technically younger brother-dads! I guess it's probably some sort of deep-seated fantasy for some people to step into this motherly space just like any other self-insert fanfic fantasy, and that's fine, but what I don't like is the sort of expectation that somehow a feminine/maternal influence is necessary there, as if Omega's needs can't be met by her FIVE other parental figures.

[dailyanarchistposts]

J.4.6 What are implications of anti-government and anti-big business feelings?

Public opinion polls show increasing feelings of disappointment and lack of confidence in governments and big business.

Some of the feelings of disappointment with government can be blamed on the anti-big-government rhetoric of conservatives and right-wing populists. Of course the Right would never dream of really dismantling the state, as is evident from the fact that government was as bureaucratic and expensive under “conservative” administrations. So this “decentralist” element of right-wing rhetoric is a con (and quickly jettisoned as required by the capitalist class). The “anti-Government” rhetoric is combined with the pro-business, pro-private tyranny, racist, anti-feminist, and homophobic hogwash disseminated by right-wing radio and TV propagandists and the business-backed media which shows that capitalism is not genuinely anti-authoritarian (nor could it ever be), as a social system based on liberty must entail.

When a right-wing politician, economist or business “leader” argues that the government is too big, they are rarely thinking of the same government functions you are. You may be thinking of subsidies for tobacco farmers or defence firms; they are thinking about pollution controls. You may be thinking of reforming welfare for the better; their idea is to dismantle the welfare state (for working class people). Moreover, with their support for “family values”, “wholesome” television, bans on abortion and so on, their victory would see an increased level of government intrusion in many personal spheres as well as increased state support for the power of the boss over the worker and the landlord over the tenant.

If you look at what the Right has done and is doing, rather than what it is saying, you quickly see the ridiculous of claims of right-wing “libertarianism” (as well as who is really in charge). Obstructing pollution and health regulations; defunding product safety laws; opening national parks to logging and mining, or closing them entirely; reducing taxes for the rich; eliminating the capital gains tax; allowing companies to fire striking workers; making it easier for big telecommunications companies to dominate the media; limiting companies’ liability for unsafe products — the objective here is obviously to help big business and the wealthy do what they want without government interference, helping the rich get richer and increasing “freedom” for private power combined with a state whose sole role is to protect that “liberty.”

Such right-wing tendencies do not have anarchistic elements. The “anti-government” propaganda of big business is hardly anarchistic. What anarchists try to do is point out the hypocritical and contradictory nature of such rhetoric. The arguments against big government are equally applicable to business. If people are capable of making their own decisions, then why should this capability be denied in the workplace? As Noam Chomsky points out, while there is a “leave it alone” and “do your own thing” current within society, it in fact “tells you that the propaganda system is working full-time, because there is no such ideology in the US. Business, for example, doesn’t believe it. It has always insisted upon a powerful interventionist state to support its interests — still does and always has — back to the origins of American society. There’s nothing individualistic about corporations. Those are big conglomerate institutions, essentially totalitarian in character, but hardly individualistic. Within them you’re a cog in a big machine. There are few institutions in human society that have such strict hierarchy and top-down control as a business organisation. Nothing there about ‘Don’t tread on me.’ You’re being tread on all the time. The point of the ideology is to try to get other people, outside of the sectors of co-ordinated power, to fail to associate and enter into decision-making in the political arena themselves. The point is to atomise everyone else while leaving powerful sectors integrated and highly organised and of course dominating resources.” He goes on to note that there is “a streak of independence and individuality in American culture which I think is a very good thing. This ‘Don’t tread on me’ feeling is in many respects a healthy one. It’s healthy up to the point where it atomises and keeps you from working together with other people. So it’s got its healthy side and its negative side. It’s the negative side that’s emphasised naturally in the propaganda and indoctrination.” [Keeping the Rabble in Line, pp. 279–80]

As opinion polls show, most people direct their dislike and distrust of institutions equally to Big Business, which shows that people are not stupid. Unfortunately, as Goebbels was well aware, tell a lie often enough and people start to believe it. Given the funds available to big business, its influence in the media, its backing of “think-tanks,” the use of Public Relations companies, the support of economic “science,” its extensive advertising and so on, it says a lot for the common sense of people that so many see big business for what it is. You simply cannot fool all the people all of the time!

However, these feelings can easily be turned into cynicism as well as a hopelessness that things can change for the better and that you cannot help change society. Or, even worse, they can be twisted into support for right, authoritarian, populism. The job for anarchists is to combat this and help point the healthy distrust people have for government and business towards a real solution to society’s problems, namely a decentralised, self-managed anarchist society.

[empirearchives]

Hi! I was wondering is there an actual source stating that calling Napoléon "Buonaparte" was meant as derogatory? I've read here (https://mrodenberg.com/2012/09/13/bonaparte-or-buonaparte/) that on Saint-Helena, the British addressed him as that to undermine his legitimacy as French ruler. Also, I know of another historical figure, Prieur de la Côte-d'Or, who not being very fond of him used the same appellation when talking about Napoleon

Hey! Yes, it was definitely used in a derogatory way to delegitimize Napoleon’s rule by denying his frenchness. Napoleon’s brother, Louis, commented on this in his A Reply to Sir Walter Scott’s History of Napoleon in 1829:

Another visible object is, that of desiring to make Napoleon pass as a foreigner in France. In fact, if such were not the intentions of the author, why this obstinacy in writing the family name of Napoleon, Buonaparte, instead of Bonaparte, consecrated as it is by long habit? Certainly the letter O is not more or less noble or French than the letter U, but it is done to impress a foreign character upon Napoleon, and divide his glory from that of France.

The Italian nation is sufficiently glorious for one to be proud of belonging to it, especially of deriving one’s origin from this beautiful country; but when one has been born under the laws of France, grown up on its soil, with no other knowledge of foreign countries, even of beautiful Italy, than that gained with the victorious legions of France, it is rather too ridiculous to receive from an English author the certificate of a foreigner.

The name Buonaparte was being used by the coalitions before the St. Helena years, especially by the British, so there are quite a lot of examples.

To be clear, Buonaparte was Napoleon’s birth name and the name he preferred to go by for over 20 years. He changed his name during the French Revolution during a wave of name changes across France to more revolutionary and patriotic names. That being said, Bonaparte is already listed as his name on his baptism certificate* in 1771 (“Neapoleone Bonaparte”) when he was nearly 2 years old, which is 3 years into French rule of Corsica. On the same document, his father’s name is spelled as Buonaparte.

It’s a little complicated. The spelling of names weren’t very standardized and were subject to a lot of variation. But the usage of the name Buonaparte was definitely intentional among Napoleon’s enemies. You can tell pretty easily when someone is saying it in a bad faith manner.

From the historian Andrew Roberts (Napoleon: A Life):

For decades thereafter, British and Bourbon propagandists re-inserted the ‘u’ in order to emphasize Napoleon’s foreignness, such as in François-René de Chateaubriand’s snappily titled 1814 pamphlet Of Buonaparte and the Bourbons and the Necessity of Rallying Round our Legitimate Princes for the Happiness of France and that of Europe, in which he wrote: ‘No hope was left of finding among Frenchmen a man bold enough to dare to wear the crown of Louis XVI. A foreigner offered himself, and was accepted�� (Chateaubriand, Of Buonaparte p. 5). Even after the British royal family changed the name of their dynasty from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor in 1917, some British historians still ridiculed Napoleon for dropping the ‘u’ from his surname.

It becomes obvious when people change how they refer to Napoleon depending on their current stance or relationship with him. For example, when France and Russia were allies, Tsar Alexander I calls him Napoleon or even the Emperor Napoleon. But when the alliances change and Napoleon is removed from power, Alexander referred to him as Buonaparte.

From the historian Marie-Pierre Rey (Alexander I):

Alexander’s use of the Corsican family name of Buonaparte is interesting, implying that for Alexander Napoléon was no longer emperor of the French — and not even French by nationality!

So there were two purposes to calling him Buonaparte: to accentuate his commoner origins as well as his foreignness in order to delegitimize his authority as head of state.

Thanks for the interesting question!

————

* (The baptism document can be found on Archives de la Corse-du-Sud -> Etat Civil -> Ajaccio -> 1771 -> Baptemes -> 6 MI 4/21)

[imfeelingbad]

(As a ukrainian) I lost all hope in humanity forever ago and I'm pretty sure I won't change someone's opinion, but I just want to tell the truth that i cry about every time.

I didn't see my home for 2 years. When I was there all I heard was explosions, bombs and warplanes. I saw ruined houses. I saw my half-destroyed school near which a projectile fell. I saw fire, smoke, a lot of it. I was in there. I heard all this. I heard. I saw. with my own eyes and ears. And what did you see and heard in the west, saying "This is all just Ukrainian propaganda"?

I was in the metro and saw hundreds of my fellow citizens, that a few months ago were casually going in this metro to their jobs, schools, universities etc. Some were sitting on the floor, some on old crusty carpets, with no fresh air, no normal ability just to go pee, not even talking about washing. But they were there just to be safe. Just to not die. They didn't care about hygiene, warm food and bath, delicious drink in their favorite café, all they did care about was just surviving.

Then I heard about Bucha massacre (read about this, if you think "russian soldiers are just poor people who don't want war and against Putin!!"). I heard hundreds women, children, men being raped, killed, tortured and firstly I was shocked. Then I heard about Irpin, Mariupol', Izium, Bahmut, now Avdiivka and many other ukrainian cities, that were completely destroyed by russians. But the difference is now I'm not shocked or surprised. Because now I understand this is Russian world, Russian culture, whole Russia in general.

But no one cares. No one cares about genocide, if the victim is big country in the center of Europe (even though every country has many people of color, and the biggest country in the world terrorizes it).

I saw a girl in the tiktok that was telling about the film "20 days in Mariupol". I looked in the comments and started crying. Why am I, my family, my friends, all ukrainians supposed to suffer while some westerns and russians are just laughing and saying "slava russia"?

Many people were talking about Gaza and I agree, there is total hell in Gaza and I feel very sorry for Palestinian people. I know how it is. But what gives YOU, a person that is sitting in the safe place with all basical human needs and think a war is just some trend, the right to compare the DEATHS of people that DIED from GENOCIDE and say that one GENOCIDE is less bad than another.

I'm not saying that we are suffering more than Palestinians, I'm saying that it's just so cruel to normalize deaths of people.. any people. That DON'T HURT anybody. That just want to live in a free country.

If I say, boycott Israel, all people from Israel are terrorists, people will agree with me. But when I say Russia is the terrorist, people will say "No, you're just xenophobic!"... And the genocide of my people is NOT xenophobic?? And the hundreds of years of destruction of Ukrainian culture is not xenophobic??

"What about Gaza?"

Gaza needs help. Ukraine needs help. Congo needs help. Syria needs help. No one should suffer. THAT'S my point.

Did you hear something about Holodomor in Ukraine? About MILLIONS of Ukrainians that died because soviet government were taking LITERALLY EVERY FUCKING BREAD CRUMB?? around 3.9 million ukrainians died. And this is only according to official data. These are only people whose identities have been established. It does not take into account people who were missing, or who were just horribly maimed.

If you still think I'm an ukrainian propagandist and not some fucking random teen like you who's just sharing my thoughts, read about Holodomor in Kazakhstan, first Russian-Chechen war, SECOND Russian-Chechen war, Russian-Georgian war, Russia’s invasion of Syria, Illegal occupation of Crimea and Donbas or just anything that involves Russia and war crimes.

If you're still saying this is all propaganda, Photoshop, I'm not surprised. Of course, everything around is propaganda. But not your beautiful truthful swamp.

Sometimes I just wish I was in yours shoes. Not caring about anything.

I don't care what russia supporting bots will say, I don't care people will not believe me, I just want to feel alive again.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_war_crimes

[whencyclopedia]

Polycrates

Polycrates (r. c. 535-522 BCE) was the tyrant of Samos who established Samian naval supremacy in the eastern Aegean and strove for control of the Aegean Sea and mainland towns of Ionia in the 6th century BCE. Polycrates had a successful career until the Persian Oroetus (r. c. 530-520 BCE) lured him to the mainland and had him crucified.

Ancient Samos

Greek tyrants originally arose in the 7th century BCE from conflict between aristocratic families seeking total authority over the communities. They employed appealing propagandistic policies to gain the favor and regard of the general public. This tactic may also be seen in modern times when dictators use populistic appeals to the lower classes to conceal other heinous crimes. The Greek tyrants were numerous, some of the most worth noting were Cypselus of Corinth (c. 657-627 BCE) and Peisistratus of Athens (c. 600-527 BCE).

The strategic location of Samos was crucial for the rapid generation of wealth by the local elites. The favorable geographical position of the Samos and its surrounding islands endorsed the Samian control of the merchant ships passing by, capturing the majority of the cargo transported from the eastern Mediterranean Sea to the Aegean Sea and the Hellespont. Thus, since the 8th century BCE, the dawn of Archaic Greece, Samians had created a plundering mentality to survive. That lifestyle of plunder was fused with a strong affinity with the goddess Hera, whose stone temple must have been erected after 800 BCE. With its impressive length of 30,5 meters (100 ft), this temple was one of the earliest and biggest temples found in the archaeological records, reflecting Hera's central role in the local community. The construction of a new Hera temple is almost the only other event that can be traced back to the reigns of the pre-Polycratean rulers.

The scene for the tyrant Polycrates' reign is set by the invasion of Cyrus II (c. 600-530 BCE), the king and founder of the Persian Achaemenid Empire. According to Herodotus, when Cyrus looked towards the west, he must have had a significant numerical advantage against Croesus (r. c. 585-546 BCE), the king of Lydia, despite the fact that Croesus had signed a treaty of hospitality and alliance with Sparta. After Cyrus' presence in Lydia was established, it appears that the Greeks dispatched no troops to Sardis, the capital. Cyrus struck in the midst of winter, catching the Lydian army off guard, and planned a fight at the Battle of Thymbra near Sardis in 547 BCE. Croesus was obliged to seek refuge in the citadel, but the city fell within 14 days. When Cyrus entered Sardis, Croesus surrendered and became Cyrus' vassal. As a result, the aspirant Achaemenid king controlled Lydia, a neighboring area of Samos. The western expansion of the Persian ruler forced the Samian elite to change their economic policy and redirect their plundering assaults toward the west.

Continue reading...

[capricioussun]

Some uf hc bc im sleepy <3

• Asgore did still mentor Undyne, but more so because he saw her fighting potential

• Undyne had a complicated relationship with Asgore. When she was younger, he was still a little softer, or at least could be at times, and he was really the only family she had aside from Gerson. She's aware of how bad he’s gotten, but she can't really convince herself to go against him

• Her and Papyrus have a very strange relationship, she really does care about him, but she tries hard to keep some distance because she doesn't want another vulnerability (she has enough already caring about Gerson and Alphys)

• Papyrus really does admire Undyne, but he worries about how far she'd be willing to go to maintain the status quo

• The dog guards actually like Sans and Papyrus. They used to be intimidated by Sans and not take Papyrus seriously, but over the years have come to trust them and are grateful for their leadership in Snowdin

• MK actually resents Undyne for a while. Generally she's pretty mean and doesn't tolerate kids loitering around (not realizing it's because she worries about them being in danger). Papyrus is the one who changes their spiteful view of the guards, but it still takes a while before they really start looking up to him

• Grillby was a young adult when he met Sans and Papyrus, a few years older than Sans, when they first came to Snowdin. He helped them out a few times, and was one of the first monsters Sans came to...almost trust

• Gerson is one of the few monsters who gets away with vocally disapproving of the king. Him and Asgore have a very tense relationship, but there are some lines Asgore still won't cross

• Gerson is also one of the few monsters who can tell Sans and Papyrus aren't what they seem to be...but he's never been able to figure out much else

• Sans thinks Toriel's fucking crazy but eh, she makes him laugh anyway, so why not keep visiting (he knows it'll bite him on the ass one day, just probably didn't expect it'd be in the way of protecting a human oof)

• Papyrus' vision in his left eye is pretty fucked but he can forcibly balance his vision a lot by focusing on redistributing his magic. Basically he can have good vision in one eye and absolute shit vision in the other or mediocre vision in both

• Undyne just straight up does not have a second eye anymore, but Alphys has offered to make a mechanical one (turned down, because she suspects Asgore would force Alphys to put a camera in it (he absolutely would))

• Papyrus and Undyne share clothes often, neither really remember who's is who's most of the time

• Mettaton hates his stupid baka life acting as a propagandist for Asgore but he does still willing agree to perform so he can have his body and whatnot

• Toriel isn't the best at baking because of the limited available ingredients underground, so she makes a lot of...questionable. Substitutions...

• Alphys and Sans have a very tense relationship, but in some ways, they're actually very loyal to each other, given that Alphys entirely hides things from Asgore for him, and Sans covers for Alphys all the time

• Undyne still loves anime and Papyrus still thinks they're weird cartoons

[gryficowa]

Boycott!

Liberals are showing again that for them genocide is not a red line and they will continue to say that Trump will be worse for Palestine… Because it is clear that genocide is not bad enough for them to criticize their own party for supplying weapons to Israel

Seriously, being so blinded by the party of politicians and believing every lie they lie shows that liberals shouldn't even be allowed to vote because they believe every empty word a politician says…

But what should we expect from people who think that doing almost nothing is enough? Hello, what has Biden done for LGBT+ people and people trapped at the border? He was supposed to get rid of the wall, but he didn't, and he also supplies weapons to Israel (Same Harris), but for you, genocide would only be bad if Trump was to blame…

But what do you expect from people who are detached from reality and call everyone Russian trolls and use the text "Trump will be worse" (which is fucking cynical in the context of fucking genocide), or have the nerve to call someone stupid when they believe in the empty promises of fucking politicians

Choosing the lesser evil is still choosing evil, it shouldn't be promoted as a solution and it sucks that liberals are so closed in their own world that they can accept that their politicians are complicit in genocide as long as they consider them a lesser evil and that's it sucks, especially that liberals don't care about genocide as long as it is convenient in political matters for people to vote for their beloved party, and everyone who is critical suddenly becomes war criminals for them (Even though they choose the party that supports Israel and is Zionist…)

Harris is a bad person (For you, her silencing the strikers with a text about Trump should be a fucking red flag), she has a history of supporting Israel (Colonizer, propagandist and genocidal), so the fact that you are so naive that you believe that electing her will lead to a breakup US relationship with Israel is so fucking naive (And yes, you are stupid yourself because you bought the lies) that the fact that you promote it as fact shows how much you believe in propaganda

You liberals are simply the last ones to call others stupid and evil, because you are that way yourself

Now that I have your attention:

[crossovershipstournament]

SEMIFINALS: Max Goof (Disney)/Yakko Warner (Animaniacs) VS Dimentio (Super Paper Mario)/Jevil (Deltarune)

Propaganda for Max Goof/Yakko Warner:

I just like them. I think its cute. Romeo and juliet vibes because theyre from different studios, Disney vs warner brothers. They're both funny, dorky guys, and they bring out the best in each other. Plus only child vs overworked older child turned parent is a really good dynamic too.

YAX SWEEP

#YAX SWEEEEEEEEP!!!!!!

#yakko x max opened my third eye #this needs to be a thing

Cameo of Max's VA expressing approval of the ship~!

#YAX SWEEP #LETS GOOO

#yax propagandists ASSEMBLE

#yax sweep #they deserve it

Ok I keep forgetting to submit my own Yax propoganga but I have put so much thought into them.

They have the same sense of humor, we literally see them tell almost identical jokes. They’re both such dramatic showoffs and they both are schemers, they're both the brains of their group (friends v family)

They’re complimentary.

They’re foils.

Beause Yakko isn’t as open with his emotions, he’s more sarcasti. But Max has been truthful about what he feels since Goof Troop. It's there on the surface and he communicates and understands in ways that would be SO good for Yakko. They're two sides of the same coin. They are opposites but they support each others weaknesses. Yakko wants so badly to make people laugh, and it’s so important to him to do so. His self worth is connected to it, but Max doesn’t like his laugh and suppresses it. It practically writes itself. So yeah, there’s all the fun WB/Disney forbidden lovers, but it works off a dynamic that would already work really well. That's why I like them so much

Propaganda for Dimentio/Jevil:

#JEVENTIO MADE IT IN!!

They’re both insane clowns, they both have purple and yellow in their colors, they both (if you make it to Jevil’s fight) make an effort to kill the player, there’s so much in common.

Silly little guys who kill

CLOWNS

#JEVENTIO SWEEP #I love my chaotic bastards

#JEVENTIO

#GET THOSE CLOWNS TO THE TOP OF THE BRACKET #CMONNNNNN

#as the number one jeventio fan i order ya'll to vote jeventio #PLS PLS PLS PLS PLS PLS PLS #I CAN'T BELIEVE I'M SEEING THE SHIP GET RECOGNITION THO THIS IS INSANE

#yay for the clowns!!! #I hope they win this!!

#please vote jeventio!!! #it's a lot more fun!!

#JEVENTIO SWEEP!! #two chaotic clowns is a match made in heaven!!

#JEVENTIO SWEEEEEP

#JEVENTIO?!???? #GO FOR THE CLOWNS YOU DONT UNDERSTAND #spm 🤝 deltarune (having a singular goofy jester. they’re in love btw) #manipulative evil bastard who almost destroyed the ENTIRE MULTIVERSE #x chaotic little ball whos fully convinced you’re all trapped and doomed #also they’re both non-binary. if you even care

I really feel like Jevil and Dimentio would level each other out well! Sure they’re both villains, but that doesn’t make their ship any less sweet!

#GO GO JEVENTIO! WIN WIN WIN!

#VOTE JEVENTIO!! just because something is chaotic doesn’t mean it’s any less loving!!

Art Credit: Max/Yakko art by @/doodle-poofes Jevil/Dimentio art by @/kannra-orhara

[writerswhy]

This whole week I’ve been trying to write up a post to push my “soul society is a haunted house” agenda and unfortunately, I’ve fallen down a philosophy rabbit hole (and I don’t even like philosophy like that), but it all started with this post:

Since then I’ve asked myself:

What did I mean by “…all ghosts in SS have some amount of spiritual power (+ memory), and that the one-of few-but-most-pervasive pipeline from ghost to soul is through the propagandist nature of the Seireitei. By buying into/exposure of/being taught the self-mythos of shinigami that results in the othering and subsequent neglect/oppression of ghosts.”

And what does #1 have to do with “…Rukongai ghosts [echoing] some vestigial humanness in the land of the dead.” Aren’t shinigami closer to a living soul than a Rukongai ghost? (That’s what the Seireitei says.)

This was supposed to be a pretty straightforward post where I reference the video game Anatomy, specifically this bit from the opening monologue: 

“In the psychology of the modern civilized human being, it is difficult to overstate the significance of the house. Since as early as the Neolithic era, humankind has defined itself by its buildings.”

And from The Haunting of Hill House: 

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality. Even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. ”

The conclusion being: Soul Society is a haunted house. 

Simple. Yet…I feel like it’s missing something. A lot of the haunting in Bleach is sociopolitical and existential given the nature of souls and the power of will that’s intrinsic to Bleach. I’ve branched off and started reading papers on architecture and the soul/heart, time and the nature of memories - basically I’ve spun out of control when all I really wanted to do was circle back to point #2.

All I really want to do is circle back to this: “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”

Because like, ostensibly we know how ghosts “live” in Soul Society. But here’s the catch, Soul Society is not meant to be a home. It’s a transient plane, a nonplace (coined by Marc Augé). When a ghost arrives they are given a number and sent to live in one of its many resource poor districts. They cannot reunite with family. They do not need to eat. They don’t even need their memories.

Here, the house rejects humanity. It sounds haunting, living under this absolute reality. But was it always like this?

Perhaps the butchering of the Soul King unleashed a blood curse so catastrophic it made Soul Society the gravity well it is today (the Soul King is the haunted house; they’re living in his body).

What if the first ghosts to arrive were masses of tissue. Through sheer will and spiritual power (“Being does not see itself. Perhaps it listens to itself.”) these ghosts start shaping their body. Like a phantom pain, their memories echo an arm here or a leg there. Some remember the beating of a heart. Others a pair of eyes. The evolution varies, from faceless ghosts like in The Haunting of Bly Manor to humanoid creatures like the Pale Man from Pan’s Labyrinth.

They could even end up as a hollow, an organism gone insane under the absolute reality of living in a dead body (it’s not the house that’s haunted, some are just predisposed to hollowfication.)

In a bid to restore and maintain balance, the Seireitei was established. And the ghosts they preferred? Ghosts that continuously referenced themselves to the point of creation, recursion in a house that rejects humanity.

They are no longer ghosts. They’re different. Their souls are different. They’re shinigami. That’s what the Seireitei says.

(And now they’re the ones doing the haunting.)

————

“Did it not occur to you that as an organism existing within a greater organism, your intrusion would be felt? And still you harass. And now, like the wayward spider who witlessly settled on a sleeper's tongue, you will be swallowed. Because the truth is this. When a house is both hungry and awake, every room becomes a mouth.”

[linkspooky]

Do you think that Batman could empathize with Tomura and successfully reach out? They are both orphans with a dark side. The difference being is that Bruce was able to work through his darkness to be healthy(er) while Tomura had all his pain cultivated for 15-16 years.

Yes. 100% yes. That’s not even a question for me. I’ve been dying for someone to send me a question like this, because it’s something I’ve noticed in the general fandom response to the pro-heroes and the hero kids. The thing is, the heroes in My Hero Academia don’t really act like good wholesome heroes. They certainly act like marvel movie heroes... in the fact that they have strong superheroes and fight a bad guy and have such a clear delineation between good and evil that many viewers take them to have propagandistic qualities. Like, there’s a reason that marvel movies have degraded to what they are today currently, and besides all the other factors it’s because these comic book heroes are really getting sanded down into a set of superpowers, a costume and a bad guy to beat with no ideals or themes behind their characters. My Hero Academia heroes aren’t really that heroic, they don’t really have any ideals they stand for except the extremely vague notion of defeat the bad guy. Yeah, Deku has “Save people” but Deku is noted several times to be an oddity among heroes. 

The Pro-Heroes and the Hero Kids in My Hero Academia have this weird paradox to them where the story itself, and also in world hero propaganda sells the idea that heroes are incredibly wholesome, always selfless, people who go above and beyond to save and protect. Yet, the heroes in MHA are actually extremely cynical, and pragmatic, and they also really have no guiding principals beyond “Might makes Right.”

You can put all heroes on the scale of Spiderman <---------> Punisher. 

To define them by whether they are a superhero focused on saving innocents, or a violent vigilante who is focused on punishing the guilty, the heroes in MHA are far more on the punisher scale of things than anyone either in setting or the fandom would like to admit. This is a universe where heroes like Hawks and Lady Nagant regularly commit state sponsored executions. This is a setting where Enji Todoroki is revealed to be a heinous abuser of his family and everyone in the superhero community is like... fine with it for the most part. They either don’t bring it up, or they think Enji does such a good job it justifies his position. 

I mean, here to justify my accusation that heroes in MHA are far more on the punisher side of the scale. To compare to another manga, Jujutsu Kaisen and My Hero Academia have a similiar circumstance where a villain, Mahito and Dr. Garaki respectively are able to transform unwilling victims into mindless attack dogs by twisting their bodies into unseemly and horrifying shapes. Mahito’s altered humans, and Dr. Garaki’s nomus respectively seem to retain some sense of humanity and are in a state of pain. Nanami Kento, Shoko and Yuji all come to the harsh reality that there is nothing they can really do for the humans that Mahito has twisted, except for a swift mercy killing, and yet a lot of time is still given to the fact that killing something that is a human being is wrong and a heavy task even though it’s their only option, and two that the decision to kill someone is an extremely heavy burden to bear not made lightly. Nanami straight up loses all focus in a fight, and stops to wipe the tear of a former human when he realizes what they are fighting against. 

Compare this to the way every hero responds to the Nomus in My Hero Academia. Enji without knowing whether or not they are truly sentient or even capable of being turned back into what they were, roasts one alive right away it’s his first action with them. Enji then later on meets a Nomu who is capable of intelligence and communication, and roasts it alive even harder specifically because the way the Nomu Acts, reminds Enji of a darker part of himself, and killing that enemy is perfectly satisfying to Enji because it allowed him to take out those personal frustrations. When Mirko learns that the Nomu are former human bsings she has no hesitation at all at bashing their brains in, in fact she’s almost delighted because she doesn’t have to hold back and that makes it easier than fighting regular villains. If the enemy is sufficiently dehumanized than heroes in my Hero Academia very easily resort to murderous methods, and it’s not just heroes like Enji, Mirko does it, heck Present Mic expresses the sentiment that Oboro would be better off dead then continuing his existence as Kurogiri. 

The heroes in My Hero Academia are dark, almost myopic. I’m not saying you can’t enjoy them, but they are very different from the way heroes act in western comic books and I think a lot of people don’t know this because a lot of manga fans don’t really pick up comic books, and their biggest experience with western heroes therefore comes from movies. 

So when I say BATMAN WOULD NEVER dehumanize a villain to the extent the My Hero Academia heroes do on a regular basis, I’m not saying that as a batman fan, I am saying that because Batman is probably THE MOST IDEALISTIC DC HERO. Yes, even moreso than superman. Batman is Clark’s hero. His inspiration. His good time boy. 

Bruce would have noticed there was something off about Tomura right away in the early stages, if not the very first attack he waged on UA. I’m going to use two examples to prove my argument, one the fact that heroes also noticed that Shigaraki was extremely mentally unwell and just decided not to really care about it, and two Batman was actually faced with an extremely similiar situation in BTAS and his reaction is pretty much the opposite of All Might’s. 

1. There’s Something Wrong with That Kid

To those who were paying attention to Shigaraki’s character from the beginning, even before we got to dig further into his backstory in My Villain Academia arc, or even be shown a more sympathetic and human side to his personality in the Overhaul arc, from his introduction Shigaraki shows signs of extreme mental distress. He is constantly exocriating himself, which is a form of self-harm that manifests under circustmances of extreme psychological stress. Shigaraki has a full on skin disorder that many people have because he is so poor at managing his stress he relentlessly picks and scratches at himself. 

When he starts to lose in the middle of the fight, he essentially throws a tantrum, and not only does he immediately want to give up and go home, but he also lashes out at his own ally to try to vent that anger. 

When All Might removes the hand from his face he has a momentary break from reality, and talks to the hand a physical object like it’s a person calling it “father” and apologizing to it. 

Shigaraki also shows a clear grudge against both heroes, the failure of heroes, and the violence that heroes show (no kidding he’s a victim of violent abuse and the cycle of abuse in his family has an origin in his grandmother’s complete and total failure as a mother) that he clearly states in front of All Might once, and then Deku later the idea that heroes do not save people with their violence, and the implication that there are people that All Might have not saved and both times he is essentially brushed off by both of them. 

Shigaraki’s mental distress is so obvious that even the heroes of My Hero Academia, who’s general response to villains is lock them up and throw away the key, noticed it. The heroes notice several of the symptoms I listed above about Shigaraki, but then decide to dismiss him as a man-child and then go on to say that he represents a kind of “pure evil” that villains may find attractive. The enertain the idea for like half a second that there might be more to Shigaraki that makes him different from the regular street villains heroes usually fight, and then they just dismiss the thought. Once again a common theme, the second All Might realizes he is Nana’s grandson he wants to go after Shigaraki to attempt to find him and reason with him only for once again Gran Torino to dismiss him as the kind of villain who’s beyond redemption and All Might to immediately give up on trying any other tactic than beating him down. 

Now why do I say Batman would have immediately gone after Shigaraki and tried to reason with him and get him the help he needs? Do I have proof of him acting similarly? Batman in fact, comes across a similiar enough situation in one of the most famous episodes of Batman the Animated Series. 

2. Man-Child meet Woman Child 

Baby-Doll Batman the Animated Series season 3, episode 4 is one of the most popular episodes, and it shows most clearly the way Bruce’s brand of heroics is ultimately based on saving and empathy for his villains rather than just putting them down for the greater good. I could have gone with a lot of batman villains with much more clear and tragic origins, Mr. Freeze isn’t even trying to achieve anything villainous he wants to save his wife. Two-Face started out as not only Batman’s best friend, but a good guy and an ally of justice who was driven to insanity by a horrifying and sudden tragedy. Harley Quinn is a victim of grooming and abuse similiar to Shigaraki who has her entire sense of self warped and controlled by an abusive narcissist who quite literally turns her into a crude relfection of himself, to act as a pawn in his own evil schemes. I could use a lot of batman villains, but no Baby Doll, we’re going with Baby-Doll. 

Mary Dahl is a washed up child actress with a physical condition that prevents her from growing up past a child, she’s sort of like Claudia from Interview with a Vampire, an adult mind inside a child’s body. Not only will she always be treated and regarded as a child for her physical appearance, due to her child as a former child star who’s show was cancelled and had no success in acting when she tried to do anything outside of playing the cutsey and innocent “baby-doll” on the sitcom “Love that Baby” she has ended up emotionally stunted and stuck in the past. 

Mary Dahl’s fall to villainry is a bit less tragic than Shigaraki’s, she wasn’t like kidnapped and groomed since childhood by a villainous mastermind and turned into his own pet “make your own supervillain” project. She’s not getting work, but she’s not poor or destitute, there are former child stars who lose out on their childhoods and have no money to show for it, but she seems to have enough money to at least have an extremely competent agent and money to blow on her elaborate schemes. Her backstory is not nearly as tragic as Shigaraki’s, yet she shows several symptoms in common with Shigaraki, being a former child star like many child stars she shows severe dysfunction as an adult because it ate up her entire childhood. Child labor is bad people. Children who are not given room to grow up and develop as kids, have problems late into their adulthood.

She is also someone who feels rejected and left behind by society as a whole, it’s clear her only way of connecting to other people was the attention she received as a child star and the connections she had with cast members. She also experiences severe body dysmorphia I would say on level with Shigaraki’s, Shigaraki’s body dysmporphia is so bad he constantly picks at his own skin, his quirk soemtimes even causes physical damage to him and he feels extreme nausea at a near constant basis b/c of his emotional unrest. Baby-Doll literally experiences a same incompatability with her body, she has an adult mind, she craves to be a fully grown normal body, and a lot of her mental breaks from reality seem to come from how easily people mistake her for and treat her like a child. 

Mary Dahl also shows severe dysfunction when it comes to regulating her own emotions. As tragic as Mary Dahl’s fall from fame is, and as much as it mirrors what happens to a lot of child stars in reality, Mary Dahl kind of also dug her own grave by her actions. Everyone on the cast thought she was notoriously difficult to work with, her show wasn’t cancelled on her, she left because the directors added in a new character she didn’t like and took attention away from her because of plummeting ratings. She left the show to try to take a more serious turn as an actor, once again to get attention and because she was on an ego-trip, then tried to get the show running again when it didn’t work for her but by that point it was too late. She’s also someone who just does not treat people well, she’s manipulative, she never engages people as her true self Baby-Doll is a role she is essentially playing, to both allow herself to violently lash out, but also to evade any responsibility for her own actions. It’s also ambiguous how much of the Baby-Doll persona is a genuine psychotic break (I don’t use the word psychotic lightly, I’m also not saying LOL look at her she’s so crazy, but there are genuine moments where Mary seems to mistake what happened on her TV show for reality which indicates that she’s not just trying to reclaim her former glory, that she is full on having delusions) there are also moments where “Baby-Doll” is a deliberate act she’s putting on, and Mary seems aware of what she is doing. 

Mary Dahl is at the same time, delusional enough to believe she can kidnap everyone on her former show, and force them to just pretend to be the characters they were on her show, and playing dollhouse with this pretend family will somehow fix her problems. She is also, lucid enough to carefully plot and execute the kidnapping of several people, control a minion in her agent, and then evade capture from Batman several times. She is both a victim (she’s genuinely mentally unwell) and a villain (but not unwell enough she’s not aware her actions are wrong, she’s deliberately hurting people she just thinks her tragedy makes her entitled to that revenge). Mary Dahl thinks the world has wronged her and left her behind, that her show being cancelled was some great injustice done to her, and something she deserves the chance to rectify, even though as I just explained in detail that Mary was equally as responsible for the cancellation of her show. She is a person not willing to take any responsibility for her actions or see fault in herself. 

You could even argue because of these quality Mary is way less sympathetic than Shigaraki, Shigaraki at least seems to have genuine critques about his society, and feels that he and the people around him have been rejected in an unjust fashion. Mary Dahl is upset her TV Show got cancelled and decided to make it everyone else’s problem. Mary Dahl’s problems are a lot more selfish, and smaller in comparison to Shigaraki’s, and yet the story itself does not downplay Mary’s distress because it is genuine to her. 

In one extent, Mary is a danger to others, but she’s also a danger to heserlf. Like I said, it’s ambiguous how much but she’s clearly a mentally unwell woman. When someone is experiencing delusions on that level it’s a brain chemistry problem, and it’s also not something where it’s fair to go “Well, she has no reason to be mentally ill, it’s not like she was beaten, she’s just having an emotional breakdown because she’s not famous anymore.” I mean, what does it matter the reason whether she’s having a breakdown is a good enough reason or not, she’s clearly in extreme distress. 

Number two, I think society as a whole tends to downplay the suffering of celebrities or child stars and make them seem like they are just entitled or spoiled for acting out, because they’re rich and famous and living a life most people would die for so who cares. But, HollyWood, the spotlight, and public scrutiny has a really bad psychological effect on people. Most people would not do well under such harsh public scrutiny all the time, and also when you make your entire personality around being a star and having the spotlight, also because in Baby Doll’s case there’s really no other career avaiable for her because of her condition then losing that is a pretty huge loss. Like, child stars who cannot either adapt to adulthood, cannot get work as adult actors, or just cannot even function as adults is a pretty common societal problem. 

On top of kidnapping people, holding them hostage, she’s also someone who clearly needs help, like Baby-Doll is not just doing these things because she’s a selfish, entitled brat throwing a tantrum because she’s not famous anymore, she’s experiencing clear mental breaks from reality where she confuses her tv show for reality, she’s mentally sick and in need of treatment. 

Baby-Doll is presented to us as a manipulative child star desperate for the spot light, endangering her cast because she herself cannot let go of the past for most of the episode, people around Bruce are pretty unsymapthetic to her, her attempts to get a more serious career is played off as a joke, the cast members do not like Baby-Doll and found her to be extremely high maintennance and difficult to work with even when she was on the show, Baby-Doll’s clearly not after the cast because of nostlagia, friendship or happy memories she has with her former cast members, but rather because she wants to pretend to be the the sitcom character who was surrounded by family who loved her. People constantly remark how crazy she is for thinking a tv show is reality. Even Robin says that he absolutely despised the “Baby-Doll” show, and it’s dismissed as kind of a cheesy sitcom with no real merit. 

However, the last five minutes turn all of that on its head. Bruce Wayne, my darling, is presented to us as a man of few words. We don’t actually see Bruce’s reaction to what Baby-Doll is doing for most of the episode, we see Dick’s who clearly thinks she’s just crazy, Bruce the whole time is focused on just resolving the incident first, finding the kidnapped people, rescuing them from Baby-Doll’s grip. So Bruce’s absolute first priority is just to stop the villain from doing the bad thing, he stops the bad behavior and makes Baby-Doll unable to hurt others. 

Bruce, the living embodiment of the term “Gap Moe”, because he is so closed off and not reacting to Baby Doll in any way, does not seem to be going out of his way to sympathize with her. That however, changes once the the threat Baby-Doll represents to others is neutralized. Baby-Doll then flees from Bruce with a Tommy Gun out into the middle of the night. The tables have turned and Baby-Doll has gone from a cackling villain, pretending often to be a scared little girl in order to manipulate people, to a genuinely scared and desperate person. Even the image Baby-Doll evokes fleeing from Bruce, is a sympathetic one, Baby-Doll despite being an adult woman still looks like a child, and acts several times like a woman-Child and she is fleeing from an adult man who picked his costume to terrify crimminals into submission. 

Baby-Doll flees into a carnival ground filled with children, she has a Tommy-Gun on her, she’s still pretty much a direct threat to others, but the way Bruce approaches her does a complete 180. Bruce is calling out after her to stop fleeing, when she disappears into a tunnel, he’s telling her to stop not because he wants to arrest her, but because she’s going to hurt herself at this point. Baby-Doll is no longer a danger to others, she’s a danger to herself because she’s scared desperate, and fleeing, and instead of pursuing her to put her down Bruce is trying to stop her from getting hurt as she flees. This is also behavior he has shown to repeat, in Harley’s Holiday he pursues Harley the whole episode not to stop her because she’s on a crime spree, but because she’s freaking out and he doesn’t want her to be sent to Arkham and lose all the progress she made in her recovery. 

Bruce pursues her into a mirror maze and this is where we get the most famous scene in the episode, Baby-Doll is still dead set on killing Bruce (this is also where Bruce shines, Baby-Doll is actively firing a gun at him and he is still calling out at her to stop because she might get hurt). 

Baby Doll fires at the mirrors over and over again, until one of the funhouse mirrors shows her what she might look like as an adult, at which point not only does Baby-Doll come to a complete stop, but she talks not in her Baby Doll voice, but as Mary-Dahl. 

Mary Dahl: Look. That’s me in there. The real me.  Mary Dahl: There I am... BUt it’s not really real, is it?  Mary Dahl: Just made up and pretend like my family, and my life and everything else.  Mary Dahl: Why couldn’t you just let me Make believe? 

She then grows angry at realizing that she is trapped on the other side of the mirror and will never exist in that adult body, she starts firing at every mirror around her trying to get batman who stalks her once again as an unspeaking shadow, until she gets impatient enough to destroy even the idealized image of herself represented in the funhouse mirror. At which point the gun itself runs out of ammo, and Mary breaks downc rying. At that point Batman could say that Mary is just throwing a tantrum, that being a washed up child star doesn’t entitle her to hurt others, he could say  that her tears aren’t even real because Mary Dahl has pretended to be a child in order to manipulate other people and merit sympathy literally this whole episode. Bruce does not do any of that. Bruce’s only action after following her this whole time, is to remove the gun from her hands so  she’s no longer capable of hurting someone, and then when she  hugs him, to return her hug and comfort her. 

Mary Dahl: I didn’t mean to... 

Because, utlimately she’s a human being who needs help. It’s not Bruce’s job to pick and choose who deserves that help, it’s his job to help people who need it. 

So yes, Bruce would have noticed right away that Shigarki wasn’t just a violent child, but a child who is clearly suffering from distress and lashing out. He wouldn’t just dismiss Shigaraki as an entitled man-child because as I’ve just demosntrated, Bruce had a situation where he frankly could have just dismissed Baby-Doll as a selfish an entitled vain womanchild and yet he didn’t do that. He saw a crying person in front of him, and he helped them, and he was even trying to help her before she started crying and asking for comfort like a more standard victim TM. Letting a child who shows clear signs of abuse like Shigaraki has go unhelped is not only out of character for Bruce, it basically is against everything he stands for as a hero. 

And if you still don’t believe me on that, here’s a quote from the director of the final installment of the popular Arkham Series, “Arkham Knight”, a game that features a character Jason Todd who was similiarly groomed over a long period of time by batman’s arch enemy into an enemy for batman to fight.