#fantasies of fascism

[twobeesornottwobees]

in retrospect, i love that one of the first warnings we hear in freshman year is "don't trust the faculty" because in a world where magic exists, a school full of teenagers with the capacity to do severe damage to the world around them would, of course, be the breeding ground for people who want to manipulate that potential.

of course evil people with evil plots want to teach at the magic kid high school. you have an army of raw power ready to be led.

[beepbeepmfkr]

Read Blood of the Wardens (on Wattpad) https://www.wattpad.com/story/376555223-blood-of-the-wardens?utm_source=web&utm_medium=tumblr&utm_content=share_myworks&wp_uname=beepbeepmfkr 

“Humanity seeks protection against the Chimeran scourge. 

Or at least, that's what the Homeland tells him.

 And for twenty four years, Aiko Colony-Born has accepted that fact without question or hesitation.

But now that childhood Indoctrination training has ended, and his status as a rare Colony-Born amongst the Homeland military caste has earned him the laughable first assignment of liaison to a faraway mining colony, Aiko find himself struggling to keep his resentment contained.

In Sector Nine, childhood friends Veera and Kent find their worlds upended. Twin Mercenaries are on the attack. And what's more, the weight of their bloodlines seeks to wedge them irreparably far apart. Shattering the only moors they'd known since youth; leaving them scattered and alone.

Humanity seeks protection against the Chimeran scourge. 

But is that even true?

Has it ever been?”

Read the prologue of my original fic “Blood of the Wardens” on Wattpad!

Blood of the Wardens is a Queer, blended sci fi & fantasy story that touches on colonialism, fascism, nationalism, and culture in an attempt to ask “what does it really mean to be human?”

I have part 1 mostly done, so I’ll be editing and posting it slowly over the next few days or so. Part 2 will be started during Novella November which is the NaNoWriMo alternative started by @novella-november !

[victusinveritas]

[rhaenin-time]

This is your reminder that ambiguity in a (competently written) story functions to force the reader or viewer to engage on a thematic level, rather than a literal plot level. In other words, you don't "answer" ambiguity with conspiracy-grade theories born and "proven" through easter egg hunts and counting breadcrumbs. The thematic answer, the message of the ambiguous part of the story, should fit regardless of whichever of the likely possible "answers" is the "true answer." Because in cases of ambiguity, the thematic answer is the "true answer."

Do with that what you will.

[sarcastic-salem]

TW Transphobia & Rape Mention

So Rowling has finally lost her shit via a public meltdown on Twitter and shown her true colors. She posted this today insinuating that trans women are rapists. I thought it was fake at first cause this seems out of character for her. I mean, she’s usually a lot more subtle from what I’ve seen in the past. But its real — its really, really real. Its seem that she has opened some sort of charity for rape survivors that offers help solely to cisgender women.

I would recommend, especially if you are trans, maybe not checking out the link. Even though its there if you wanna see it. But its just fucking bad, guys. Like its really, really bad — the whole timeline is a mess of transphobic garbage. Its absolutely disgusting.

This woman needs mental help.

[greenhorizonblog]

Dreaming of cute yurt villages on raised platforms with elevated walkways and hanging bridges between them

[amaiguri]

I did the 24hr Novel Challenge last year...

Last year, I did the 24 hr novel challenge over the course of 48 hours (so the novel was written in 24 hours but I did in 48 hours) and it went about as well as you'd expect:

Fine. I did fine.

I didn't exactly FINISH finish but I did complete a solid 0th draft and I wrote like 26 thousand words (16k the first day, 10k the second day). I learned two really big things from doing this:

The first thing I learned was I really method act when I'm writing -- like, in order to describe emotions, I really simulate them in my body. So simulating a whole rollercoaster ride of stress and love and sadness and terror and desire and despair was A LOT and I would get numb to things as the scenes went on.

The thing that restored me was watching snippets of things that inspired me -- the starts of shows, trailers, music, images, etc. These ended up being a sort of palette cleanser in-between scenes for me.

But when I'm not pushing myself, I learned I really need to just. Write when I'm feeling it. Because my writing is higher quality like that.

Secondly, I learned how fragile my hands were: I really destroyed my hands doing it -- something I didn't anticipate was how much I was going to need to stretch my hands and TO THIS DAY, my hands still get more sore than they ever did when I was younger. I'm getting old >_<

The Characters & Story

Heirs to the Tilted City was (to no one's surprise) a fantasy polticial drama about a city in the wake of a disaster that broke apart and almost fell into the Abyss. The Goddess who ruled the city sacrificed herself to protect it, leaving it behind to her baby Heiress, Shiel.

But while the Goddess made the celestial inhabitants of the gorgeous astral whimsigoth city, Shiel's descended from a line of Demons who migrated to the city after a disaster of with their own Goddess. Furthermore, she's so young. Many residents have mixed feelings about her taking control back from the City Chamber -- despite her being born, raised, and educated in the city...

Meanwhile, the former Chamberlain of the Goddess -- removed from power after trying to take power from Shiel when she was a baby -- has a son, Isegael. And in the dregs beneath the city, Isegael, too, has risen to power as his rivals mysteriously vanish. From the head of a crime syndicate to a legitimate local leader, Isegael now has his eyes set on the Chamber too.

And so begins a collision of ambitious young people trying to wrestle power from those who'd maintain a crumbling status quo. Will they overcome their past traumas to become the people the city needs? Or will the Old Guard let the city slide the rest of the way into the Abyss?

...I suck at writing copy. Don't make do it lol

Feel free to take a gander at the writing vlog too -- it's definitely one of my better ones!

[loudlylovingreview]

Video: Earthsea | What the Original Wizard School Got Right

What are the literary origins of the boy wizard and the wizard school? This video takes us on an adventure through 20th century fantasy literature to explore the roots of this trope, the connection between Lord of the Rings, Earthsea and Harry Potter, and how race, feminism, gay wizards and bi witches feature in this universe. Written and narrated by Verity Ritchie Produced by Ada…

[umbranocturnes]

Abendroth Krausse

Another character portrait here! Abendroth is a character from my historical-fantasy war novel series I’m working on. He is one of my favorite side characters and very important to the overall plot. He’s one of only two “Axis characters” (the other is Veit I will talk about him later-) that are ‘decent’ person excluding Setheroth and Valerius who are actually British spies. He also fought in the Great War but, Abendroth is basically Setheroth’s second in command. He is another undead character, a being called a Wraith, which are similar to ghosts but a bit different in my lore. They are incredibly powerful and rare. They can basically harness abilities familiar to ghosts (in my story's case: walking through walls and such) and abilities unique to dead beings, without having to use the large quantities of power (mana) that is required of these abilities by other beings.

I have drawn him here in a WWI undershirt because it was really simple and I was primarily focusing on getting his design down. I have not drawn him in his other uniforms yet. I think my favorite detail about him has to be his eyes.

If you want to know more about his character I have included more below [as well as another version of the artwork!]

CW though for censored mentions of: WWI, WWII, nazis, blackmail, period typical bigotry (not from him but in general), past substance abuse.

Abendroth was born sometime around the 1530s in Austria, during the later part of the German Renaissance to a very religiously-oppressive wealthy aristocratic family who were patrons of the arts. Most of Abendroth’s life was spent rebelling against the expectations of his station. He had not wanted to marry in life and many other wealthy families wanted a stake in his wealth leading to many marriage proposals all of which he turned down in favor of secret relations with men and women alike. Having been largely atheistic his whole life and having ‘scandalous’ attracts led to the upper crust of society having quite a poor opinion of him, labeling him a ‘traitor to his class’ and a ‘deviant’, something his father tried desperately to cover up until his death. Abendroth’s death is a bit of a mystery, most believing he died in a fit of madness having burned his family estate to the ground after a life of many scandals catching up to him, but there’s more to the story than one would think. 

Abendroth came back to life as a undead being then left Austria going to England. There he spends a large chunk of the Victorian era learning English and becoming a Cellist. He becomes a musician to recoup financial losses he suffered upon his death, his family’s wealth now long gone forcing him to live off his own means, but genuinely has a passion for it and loves playing Cello. His vices follow him into this new life, and after burning through his money and over time getting dangerously addicted to various forms of alcohol, tobacco, and drug use especially laudanum. A friend of his (another undead musician) from Germany drags him back to Berlin helping turn his life around. While he recovers, he is set up with an apartment and plays for several orchestras until the start of the Great War.

Upon the outbreak of war, Abendroth is conscripted into the Imperial German Army becoming a notorious sniper. He gains great notoriety for his skill and intelligence and although he moves up in rank his skills are never forgotten. Following WWI, Abendroth decides to stay in the military as a reservist, rather enjoying the rigged lifestyle thinking it helpful in keeping a reign on his wild tendencies. During the era of the Weimar Republic Abendroth thrives in the queer underground spaces of Berlin as a bisexual man himself, feeling he finally has some semblance of control over his own life and can express in small parts portions of his identity that have largely remained a secret. He plays cello in several Cabaret bars in Berlin and sometimes travels between Austria and France jumping from Cabaret to Cabaret performing and making good money from it. 

When the Nazis begin rising to prominence Abendroth grows worried, moving back to Austria thinking he would be safer if he laid low. However when Austria is annexed at the start of WWII, he falls under the mandatory conscription law placed on undead beings and is forced to resume his duties in the army. He was intent on staying in the German army proper not joining the Wehrmacht or SS wanting no part of it, vehemently opposed to Nazi policies and actively engaging in resistance circles against it. He even tries to flee the country for neutral Switzerland but fails. He finds trouble when the SS came knocking on his door offering him to transfer into their ranks as they are ‘more fitting for someone of his acclaim’ wanting him for his abilities as a sniper and a commander. Abendroth refuses several times, but they eventually come back more persistent than before. They give him the option to take the offer to transfer, or face the prospect of the SD digging into his records as they ‘find it strange a man like him would refuse such a privilege’. Abendroth being bisexual with a long list of previous dalliances, friends, and contacts he did not want falling into the hands of the Gestapo chooses to take the offer to save their lives preventing the nazis from digging into his record. 

He joins the SS as a lieutenant colonel, and when the undead forces are separated from the regular human forces, he’s transferred to the undead army sector where he falls under Valerius and Setheroth’s command. He treats his position as a supervisor one, situating himself as more of a figurehead letting the men under him make their own command decisions so as to not ‘dirty his hands’ with it. He works at sabotaging the Nazi war effort in secret throughout the war despising the Nazis for branding both him and people he cares for as criminals. He’s also the first one to figure out Setheroth is a British agent and from then on he watches his back, protecting him from the scrutiny of other commanders. He later joins forces with Setheroth and Veit to carry out espionage and assassination operations together. Setheroth manages to get Abendroth transferred back to the now Wehrmacht at his request as well, which causes division among the other commanders but Abendroth could care less not wanting anything to do with the SS to begin with having been blackmailed into it. Abendroth and Setheroth become good friends over the course of the war relating to one another quite a bit and Abendroth helps Setheroth with many issues and is regarded by Setheroth to be one of his closest friends. 

[dirhwangdaseul-archived]

How ‘Lord of the Rings’ Inspires Italy’s Giorgia Meloni - The New York Times

posted the entire thing was behind paywall

ROME — Giorgia Meloni, the hard-right leader who is likely to be the next prime minister of Italy, used to dress up as a hobbit.

As a youth activist in the post-Fascist Italian Social Movement, she and her fellowship of militants, with nicknames like Frodo and Hobbit, revered “The Lord of the Rings” and other works by the British writer J.R.R. Tolkien. They visited schools in character. They gathered at the “sounding of the horn of Boromir” for cultural chats. She attended “Hobbit Camp” and sang along with the extremist folk band Compagnia dell’Anello, or Fellowship of the Ring.

All of that might seem some youthful infatuation with a work usually associated with fantasy-fiction and big-budget epics rather than political militancy. But in Italy, “The Lord of the Rings” has for a half-century been a central pillar upon which descendants of post-Fascism reconstructed a hard-right identity, looking to a traditionalist mythic age for symbols, heroes and creation myths free of Fascist taboos.

“I think that Tolkien could say better than us what conservatives believe in,” said Ms. Meloni, 45. More than just her favorite book series, “The Lord of the Rings” was also a sacred text. “I don’t consider ‘The Lord of the Rings’ fantasy,” she said.

Tolkien’s agrarian universe, full of virtuous good guys defending their idyllic, wooded kingdoms from hordes of dark and violent orcs, has for decades prompted scholarly, and convention center, debate over the author’s racial and ideological biases, his view of modernity and globalization. More recently, his works have also provided a fertile shire for nationalists who see themselves in his heroic archetypes.

But in Italy, the adventures of Bilbo Baggins and the maps of Mordor have informed generations of post-Fascist youths, including Ms. Meloni, who, the latest polls strongly suggest, will emerge from the election on Sunday as Italy’s first female prime minister — and the first descended from post-Fascist roots.

Ms. Meloni, who leads the hard-right Brothers of Italy party, and who has called for a naval blockade against illegal migrants and warns her supporters about the dark, conspiratorial forces of internationalist bankers, first read Tolkien, a conservative who once called Hitler a “ruddy little ignoramus,” at age 11. She became a fantasy fanatic.

In her early 20s, she surfaced in chat rooms under the nickname Khy-ri, calling herself the “little dragon of the Italian undernet.” More recently, she named her political conference Atreju, an Italian rendering of the name of the hero of “The NeverEnding Story,” best known as a 1980s cult film featuring a flying animatronic character that appeared to be half dragon, half Labrador retriever.

As a government minister in 2008, Ms. Meloni posed for a magazine profile next to a statue of the wizard Gandalf. In 2019, she honored a manga character, Captain Harlock, the “space pirate,” as a “symbol of a generation that challenged the apathy and indifference of people.” Last month, she lamented that her busy campaign schedule had kept her from mainlining Amazon’s new “Rings of Power” series.

But Ms. Meloni’s otherworldly interests have as much to do with politics as personal taste.

“The genre of fantasy in Italy has always been cultivated by the right,” said Umberto Croppi, a former member of the Italian Social Movement who is now the director of a national association of public and private agencies in Italy’s culture industry. He said that the two worlds shared a “vision of spirituality against materialism, a metaphysical vision of life against the forms of the modern world.”

The modern world did not work out so well for the die-hard Fascists who stayed loyal to Hitler and Mussolini after the official Italian government switched sides to join the Allies during World War II.

After the war, many of those Fascists flocked to the Italian Social Movement, but the party’s efforts to reintegrate into Italy’s institutions eventually hit a wall. Its younger members, feeling excluded from civil society, seized on an Italian edition of “The Lord of the Rings,” prefaced by Elémire Zolla, a philosopher who was a point of reference on the hard right and who argued that Tolkien was “talking about everything we confront every day.”

That resonated with a small group of the party’s Youth Front, already bristling at the cultural dominance of the left. They saw themselves, as one of their leaders, Generoso Simeone, put it, as “inhabitants of the mythical Middle-earth, also struggling with dragons, orcs, and other creatures.” Seeking a more palatable alternative to quoting Mussolini’s speeches and spray-painting Swastikas, which, Mr. Croppi pointed out, “was easy to reproduce on walls,” in 1977, they created the first Camp Hobbit festival.

“The idea to call it Camp Hobbit came from a real strategy,” said Mr. Croppi, one of the founders. The thinking was to move beyond the old symbols and to capitalize on the party’s isolation, smallness and victimization by violent leftist enemies to make their hero “not the warrior Aragorn, but the little hobbit — we wanted to get out of this militarist, heroic idea.”

The party’s old guard was perplexed. But, with the support of hard-liners, Camp Hobbit festivals emerged as formative touchstones for the young activists. Celtic cross flags that meshed perfectly with the Tolkien aesthetic waved. The band Fellowship of the Ring played songs about European identity, including what became the anthem of the party’s Youth Front, “Tomorrow Belongs to Us.”

The song echoed a ballad “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” sung by a member of the Hitler Youth in a chilling scene in the movie “Cabaret.” Mr. Croppi acknowledged that the camps had their fair share of Fascist salutes, but argued they were “ironic.”

When Ms. Meloni entered the picture as a teenage activist in the Youth Front in Rome in the 1990s, the far right — especially in the capital — was still in a trenchlike mentality, struggling to break with the previous generation.

Francesco Lollobrigida, a leader in Ms. Meloni’s party, Brothers of Italy (as well as her brother-in-law), said that he and others had a desire starting in the 1980s “to break with the patterns of a party that still had inside of it people who had been in the Social Republic, who had done fascism.”

Ms. Meloni, seated across from him, agreed.

“There was a desire to get out of that,” she said.

Ms. Meloni attended a new iteration of Camp Hobbit in 1993, which she called a “political laboratory” and where she sang along with Fellowship of the Ring and discussed culture and books.

“We read everything,” Ms. Meloni said.

The bookstore of choice for the hard right in Rome was Europa, just outside the Vatican walls. On a recent visit, it displayed titles like “Mussolini Boys” and “The Occult Origins of Nazism.” A picture of Hitler stood watch above the register next to a cup of pens.

Europa has a section dedicated to Julius Evola, an esoteric, deeply taboo, Nazi-affiliated Italian philosopher who became a favorite of Italy’s post-Fascist terrorists and bourgeoisie-loathing nostalgists. Evola argued that progress and equality were poisonous illusions.

“A bit boring,” Mr. Lollobrigida said of Evola’s work.

Ms. Meloni said that instead a more influential writer at the time was the more mainstream Ernst Jünger, a German former soldier, who sought to make sense of war but also glorified combat.

But for Ms. Meloni, all of those took a back shelf to “The Lord of the Rings.” She said she had learned from dwarves and elves and hobbits the “value of specificity” with “each indispensable for the fact of being particular.” She extrapolated that as a lesson about protecting Europe’s sovereign nations and unique identities.

In the 1990s, after becoming the leader of the youth wing of the National Alliance, the party that succeeded the Italian Social Movement, Ms. Meloni started her own political festival, which she called “similar” to Camp Hobbit. But this time, she named it Atreju. “It was the symbol of a boy in battle against nihilism, against the Nothing that advances,” she said.

She joked that Italians could hardly pronounce Atreju, but she said that the annual conventions, including the first one, in 1998, which was about the dangers of globalization, had reach.

“We wanted to say that globalization, you have to govern it,” she said. “If you look around, we weren’t wrong, were we?” she added.

At the Atreju convention in 2018, the guest of honor, Stephen K. Bannon, walked by patriotic posters of “Italy’s heroes” and desks selling Evola-themed T-shirts and works by Evola. Ms. Meloni’s supporters have interpreted her calls to defend Italy from mass migration — and the replacement of native Italians by invaders — as a battle cry to protect Middle-earth. This month, at a rally in Sardinia, Davide Anedda, 21, the leader of the local youth wing of the Brothers of Italy, wore a T-shirt reading “Hobbit.”

“If you’re not from our world, it’s very hard to understand,” Mr. Anedda said, explaining that Hobbit was a post-Fascist far-right rock band and that Tolkien had written “a fundamental part of our history.”

And for Italy, maybe a part of its future.

Ms. Meloni, who seems poised to grab her own brass ring after decades in the political trenches, said that her understanding of power and its ability to corrupt and isolate a person was “closely tied to Tolkien’s reading.”

“I consider power very dangerous,” she said. “I consider it an enemy and not a friend.”

@vague-humanoid @antifaspiderman @beserkerjewel

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

Kreator - Murder Fantasies

[starmeadowsystem]

I've had a game idea bouncing in my head for a while but i don't have the skills to make it and probably won't for the foreseeable future, so instead I want to make it a collaborative comment-driven roleplaying project.

Content Warnings include, but will not be limited to: fascism, genocide, intense violence, fear-based imagery, (possible?) sexual content, major character death, torture, and strong language.

The story is an adult dark fantasy horror where you play as a mysterious winged rabbit in the nation of Veldant, a country currently in the process of exterminating its rabbit population. Your task will be to survive, take care of your kin, and (by extension, hopefully) stop the genocide against your kind. Along your journey you will encounter horrors and mysteries alike, as well as a bunch of survivors who you can form ties with.

You will run, you will fight, and maybe, just maybe, you will be able to thrive.

So what does everyone think of this? It'll probably still be a little while before I figure out everything, so this may take a short while.

-Stella

[karmaphone]

chronically online guys will look at the kindness power fantasy that questions the morals of its own premise and be like 'if you like this you're a fascist'

[fair-fae]

welp, the post in question I keep hearing about finally crossed my dash and I gotta say I'm indifferent to the post itself because I didn't wanna take the time to read all that at the moment, but I peeked in the notes and there was some scary stuff about "emet-selch was right and everything he told us was true" and "perfect Ancient society" in there lol. Real frighteningly bad media illiteracy.

[claremikas]

someone on tiktok was like "why don't many straight men engage in fanfiction" and the answer is that the last time they tried we got aotnr

[ahsoka-in-a-hood]

I’m basically in favor of alternate readings and I don’t consider it some kind of obligation to embrace the authors vision. And like in the case of SW specifically I get not always agreeing with George Lucas I mean he has written some racist shit occasionally and honestly even some of his benign concepts are kinda weird at times. Not everyone is gonna vibe with that. Still, I feel like if you’re gonna engage in analysis it is useful to acknowledge what the intention of the story was, even if to know where and why you’re re-interpreting it.