#gender theft in progress

[newwave-confessions]

[gwenllian-in-the-abbey]

Is there anything support the populat interpretation that old valriya and valryians in general are more feminist, and progressive than the rest in Asoiaf?

Anon, thank you! I've been wanting to address this for awhile, so I'm going to actually answer this really fully, with as many receipts as I can provide (this ended up being more of an essay than I intended, but hopefully it helps)

I think there's in fact plenty of evidence to suggest that Valyria and the Valyrians in general were anything but progressive. Valyria was an expansive empire with a robust slave trade that practiced incest based on the idea of blood supremacy/blood purity. All of these things are absolutely antithetical to progressivism. There is no way any empire practicing slavery can ever be called progressive. Now, the Targaryens of Dragonstone have since given up the practice of slavery, but they certainly still believe in the supremacy of Valyrian blood.

And I'll see the argument, well what's wrong with believing your blood is special if your blood really is special and magic? Which is just-- if anyone catches themselves thinking this, and you sincerely believe that GRRM intended to create a magically superior master race of hot blondes who deserve to rule over all other backwards races by virtue of their superior breeding which is reinforced through brother-sister incest, and you've convinced yourself this represents progressive values, then you might want to step away from the computer for a bit and do a bit of self reflection.

And remember-- what is special about this special blood? It gives the bearers the ability to wield sentient weapons of mass destruction. It's also likely, according to the most popular theories, the result of blood magic involving human sacrifice. So there is a terrible price to pay for this so-called supremacy. Would any of us line up to be sacrificed to the Fourteen Flames so that the Valyrians can have nukes?

And if you are tempted by the idea that a woman who rides a dragon must inherently have some sort of power-- that is true. A woman who rides a dragon is more powerful than a woman who does not ride a dragon, and in some cases, more powerful than a man who does not ride a dragon, but that does not make her more powerful than a man who also rides a dragon. Dragonriding remained a carefully guarded privilege, and Targaryen women who might otherwise become dragonriders were routinely denied the privilege (despite the oft repeated "you cannot steal a dragon," when Saera Targaryen attempted to claim a dragon from the dragonpit, she was thrown into a cell for the attempted "theft,"words used by Jaehaerys). The dragonkeepers were established explicitly to keep anyone, even those of Targaryen blood, from taking them without permission. Any "liberation" that she has achieved is an illusion. What she has gained is the ability to enact violence upon others who are less privileged, and this ability does not save her from being the victim of gender based violence herself.

Politically speaking, it is also true that Valyria was a "freehold," in that they did not have a hereditary monarchy, but instead had a political structure akin to Ancient Athens (which was itself democratic, but not at all progressive or feminist). Landholding citizens could vote on laws and on temporary leaders, Archons. Were any of the lords freeholder women? We don't know. If we take Volantis as an example, the free city that seems to consider itself the successor to Valyria, the party of merchants, the elephants, had several female leaders three hundred years ago, but the party of the aristocracy, the tigers, the party made up of Valyrian Old Blood nobility, has never had a female leader. Lys, the other free city, is known for it's pleasure houses, which mainly employ women kidnapped into sexual slavery (as well as some young men). It is ruled by a group of magisters, who are chosen from among the wealthiest and noblest men in the city, not women. There does not seem to be a tradition of female leadership among Valyrians, and that's reflected by Aegon I himself, who becomes king, rather than his older sister-wife, Visenya. And although there have been girls named heir, temporarily, among the pre-Dance Targaryens, none were named heir above a trueborn brother aside from Rhaenyra, a choice that sparked a civil war. In this sense, the Targaryens are no different from the rest of Westeros.

As for feminism or sexual liberation, there's just no evidence to support it. We know that polygamy was not common, but it was also not entirely unheard of, but incest, to keep the bloodlines "pure," was common. Incest and polygamy are certainly sexual taboos, both in the real world and in Westeros, that the Valyrians violated, but the violation of sexual taboos is not automatically sexually liberated or feminist. Polygamy, when it is exclusively practiced by men and polyandry is forbidden (and we have no examples of Valyrian women taking multiple husbands, outside of fanfic), is often abusive to young women. Incest leads to an erosion of family relationships and abusive grooming situations are inevitable. King Jaehaerys' daughters are an excellent case study, and the stories of Saera and Viserra are particularly heartbreaking. Both women were punished severely for "sexual liberation," Viserra for getting drunk and slipping into her brother Baelon's bed at age fifteen, in an attempt to avoid an unwanted marriage to an old man. She was not punished because she was sister attempting to sleep with a brother, but because she was the wrong sister. Her mother, the queen had already chosen another sister for Baelon, and believed her own teenage daughter was seducing her brother for nefarious reasons. As a sister, Viserra should have been able to look to her brother for protection, but as the product of an incestuous family, Viserra could only conceive of that protection in terms of giving herself over to him sexually.

Beyond that, sexual slavery was also common in ancient Valyria, a practice that persisted in Lys and Volantis, with women (and young men) trafficked from other conquered and raided nations. Any culture that is built on a foundation of slavery and which considers sexual slavery to be normal and permissible, is a culture of normalized rape. Not feminist, not progressive.

I think we get the picture! so where did this idea that Valyrians are more progressive come from? I think there are two reasons. One, the fandom has a bit of a tendency to imagine Valyrians and their traditions in opposition to Westerosi Sevenism, and if Sevenism is fantasy Catholicism, and the fantasy Catholics also hate the Valyrian ways, they must hate them because those annoying uptight religious freaks just hate everything fun and cool, right? They hate revealing clothing, hate pornographic tapestries, hate sex outside of marriage, hate bastards. So being on Sevenism's shit-list must be a mark of honor, a sign of progressive values? But it's such a surface level reading, and a real misunderstanding of the medieval Catholic church, and a conflating of that church with the later Puritan values that many of us in the Anglosphere associate with being "devout." For most of European history, the Catholic church was simply The Church, and the church was, ironically, where you would find the material actions which most closely align with modern progressive values. The church cared for lepers, provided educations for women, took care of orphans, and fed the poor. In GRRM's world, which is admittedly more secular than the actual medieval world, Sevenism nevertheless has basically the same function, feeding the poor instead of, you know, enslaving them.

Finally, I blame the shows. While Valyrians weren't a progressive culture, Daenerys Targaryen herself held relatively progressive individual values by a medieval metric. She is a slavery abolitionist, she elevates women within her ranks, and she takes control of her own sexuality (after breaking free from her Targaryen brother). But Daenerys wasn't raised as a Targaryen. She grew up an orphan in exile, hearing stories of her illustrious ancestors from her brother, who of the two did absorb a bit of that culture, and is not coincidentally, fucked up, abusive, and misogynistic. He feels a sexual ownership over his sister, arranges a marriage for her, and even after her marriage, feels entitled to make decisions on her behalf. It is only after breaking away from Viserys that Dany comes into her own values. Having once been a mere object without agency of her own, she determines to save others from that fate and becomes an abolitionist. But because Game of Thrones gave viewers very little exposure to Targaryens aside from Daenerys, House Targaryen, in the eyes of most show watchers, is most closely associated with Dany and her freedom-fighter values. And as for Rhaenyra in House of the Dragon, being a female heir does not make her feminist or progressive, although it is tempting to view her that way when she is juxtaposed against Aegon II. Her "sexual liberation" was a lesson given to her by her uncle Daemon, a man who had an express interest in "liberating" her so that she would sleep with him, it was not a value she was raised with. In fact, she was very nearly disinherited for it, and was forced into a marriage with a gay man as a result of said "liberation." She had no interest in changing succession laws to allow absolute primogeniture, no interest in changing laws or norms around bastardy despite having bastards; she simply viewed herself as an exception. Rhaenyra's entire justification for her claim is not the desire to uplift women, bring peace and stability to Westeros, or even to keep her brother off the throne, it is simply that she believes she deserves it because her father is the king and he told her she could have it, despite all tradition and norms, and in spite of the near certain succession crisis it will cause. Whether she is right or wrong, absolutism is not progressive.

And let me just say, none of this means that you can't enjoy the Valyrians or think that they're fun or be a fan of house Targaryen. This insistence that Targaryens are the progressive, feminist (read: morally good) house seems by connected to the need of some fans to make their favorite characters unproblematic. If the Valyrians are "bad," does that make you a bad person for enjoying them? Of course not. But let's stop the moral grandstanding about the "feminist" and "progressive" Valyrians in a series that is an analogue for medieval feudalism. Neither of those things can exist under the systems in place in Westeros, nor could they have existed in the slavery based empire of conquest that was old Valyria.

[destined-if]

You and your family moved to Glove City. However, the house caught fire, and you're the sole survivor. Oh, but that was two years ago... you're not still stuck up on that... are you?

After your family died, being 20 with no job or nearby family, you had to live in alleyways, sleep on park benches, and steal food from vendors... until you met them. They hesitantly welcomed you into their little group after you saved their asses, and you've stuck with them ever since. One day, you got commissioned to steal a necklace from a family in the rich part of town for a hefty price, so obviously, your group accepted and prepared for the trip. What you didn't expect is that the family you're stealing from might not be as innocent and powerless as you thought.

Trigger warnings: Violence, drug intake of minor characters, alcohol of main characters (Optional for MC), violence, death, theft, and slight mention of animal cruelty. This list will be updated as the story progresses.

NOTES: Romance options have a ♡ next to their name. Melody is male or female. Optional Polyarmous Route with Melody and Elias. I'll go into more detail with their personalities (As well as appearances) in their character profiles, I've started on them, but they most likely won't come out for a couple days.

Ian/Ivy ♡; A street rat the moment they were born. Kinda a jackass, but they keep you and their friends out of harm's way, so are they really as cold as they pretend to be? Possible Tropes: Opposites Attract, Found Family, Slowburn. Isla "Wren" Hill ♡; Best thief you know. The first time you met, she stole your packet of gum without you ever finding out until a year later when she told you. She's playful, affectionate, and a little bit of a smartass. [Healing Mage.] Possible Tropes: Mutual Pining, Friends to Lovers, Found Family. Valerie "Val" Hill; The little sister of Isla. You think it’s nice how she steals for others free of charge, but don’t understand why. She’s sarcastic, bold, and surprisingly attentive. Oh, and also a bit of a smartass. Trope: Found Family. [Made by @dvoilds] Elias "Eli" Wynn ♡; His life before he met you guys is a blur, or at least what he says, but you don't really think that's true. Other than that, he's as sweet as a thief can be. He's caring and considerate of other's feelings, and your group's peacemaker. Will you get him to uncover his secrets? [Water Mage.] Possible Tropes: Mutual Pining, "You came?" "You called." Melody "Mel" Rose ♡; They got tangled up in this mess, and you're not quite sure how it happened. As far as you can make out, they're actually pretty understanding. It's kinda freaky how nice they are to you guys, even after you got them knee-deep in all this shit. You think they're here to stay, but it's not like they have a choice. Do they have an alternative motive, or are they just this kind-hearted? Possible Tropes: Frenemies to Lovers, Love at First Sight (More like Attraction), Strangers to Lovers. Casper Vespertine ♡; The son of the family you stole from and the man you're running away from. He scares you shitless, and it doesn't help that he talks like a robot. Will you outrun him, or will you let him catch you? Possible Tropes: Rivals to Lovers, Slowburn, Right Person, Wrong Time.

and more!

Customize your MC. Choose your gender, personality, pronouns, assets, appearance, name, and sexuality.

Decide how your MC feels about stealing and how they deal with their family being... dead.

Be a mage or a human.

Run from your problems!

Found family <3

Cute stray animals.

Create close bonds, or break them.

A fully platonic route for those who don't wanna romance anyone!

LINKS; Demo [TBA], Pinterest, Playlist, Character Profiles, Mage Profiles

posted july 19, 2023

[gyokutoll]

𝐆𝐄𝐓 𝐓𝐎 𝐊𝐍𝐎𝐖 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐌𝐔𝐍.

———  BASICS!

NAME:  Haju (pronounced "hi, you!")

PRONOUNS: she / her

TAKEN OR SINGLE: married to hotaru*

*delusional, single

———  THREE  FACTS!

My first RP was Warrior cats OCs (real)

I once was half an hour late from lunch because I helped an old lady and had to talk to police about it

I know three languages

———  EXPERIENCE!

PLATFORMS USED: tumblr, twitter, discord, old ass chatrooms, carrier pigeon

PLOTTING / WINGING IT / MEMES: My preferences go plotting > memes > winging it. I can wing it, but it's a little tiring having to be the one always setting the scene and justifying why muses would be interacting. Memes at least give me some vague guidance and plotting can be nice and helpful.

———  MUSE  PREFERENCE!

GENDER: Hotaru is a lie, I usually prefer writing women. He just snuck in and won over my female OCs somehow.

MULTI OR SINGLE: Single. My brain is powered by a hamster on a wheel and if it has too many blogs to focus on, it WILL die.

LEAST FAVOURITE FACECLAIM(S): I truly deeply, in my heart, do not care about fcs that much to have one I dislike

———  FLUFF / ANGST / SMUT

FLUFF: I love fluff... would love to write it one day.

ANGST: I feel like this is the bulk of what I'm working with since I write so much horror. I'm a horror writer by trade so I'm used to writing darker, less than happy themes. It's why it's so easy for me to grab Hotaru by his ankles and fling him into the sun. It's not that I necessarily love trauma porn or anything, I just think dissecting the psyche through horror and angst is very fun.

SMUT : I can write it but it doesn't come up often. Smut-neutral. It can be good for character dynamic progression but it's not something I'm ever really gunning for. I think it should have like... narrative weight and significance. This doesn't even necessarily mean for, like, romantic ships. But if the character is having sex early on in the story, what does that say about them? Why? Are they avoiding it? Why is that? How people interface with others, what kind of sex they're willing to have, and with who can tell you a lot about their value system.

I love theft

[ink-flavored]

HI IM HERE ITS GO TIME FOR SPACE CRUISE WIP LEGGOOOO!!!!!

📅🤔✊😎👾😲

it's TIME!!!!

since this wip is such a baby i'm going to be thinking about a lot of these things for the first time let's do it

📅 How far in the future is your WIP set? Is it a “near” or “distant” future?

It is quite a distant future! It takes place 400-ish years from our present day—we aren't quite ancient history, but it's long enough ago that people don't really consider the 21st century in their daily lives. You learn about it in school and then promptly forget it all

🤔What kind of technology is still being developed in your WIP? What’s something they’re still trying to figure out?

The brain is a fickle little meat sack, and there is no "true" mental hook-up microchip or anything like that. The things you can do to the outside of your body are very impressive, and medical technology has improved a lot of technologies that are inside your body for medical purposes (like pacemakers and stuff), but you can't send/receive text messages with your mind. yet!

✊What is the social climate of your setting? Has society progressed towards equality or regressed? Has it stayed mostly the same?

Progressed in some ways, languished in others.

Since the entire concept of Space Colonialism relies on the idea that planets are big blank slates waiting for Civilization to extract resources and set up tourist traps or whatever, there is still a lot of class disparity and plenty of wealth disparity. Countries and companies can send a "pre-colony" of laborers to terraform a planet and then essentially evict them from the place(s) they built to sell the land to permanent residents. None of the money from that sale touches the pockets of the people who built it, of course, and Space Wage Theft is rampant among these operations.

And of course since colonialism inherently needs to "other" anyone or anything that was already living in the place it colonizes, that also happens quite a bit. Especially when humanity made first contact with aliens who were doing their own space colonialism.

Also Space Cops exist. There are space cops who do predictable cop things. Also robocops (they're not sapient or anything, it's basically a surveillance camera roomba that can call for back-up) are wandering around at most, if not all, space stations, and even some spaceships if you're very important or rich.

Depending on how I structure the rest of the history on the Humans Get To Space Timeline, I will probably be able to add quite a few more to this unfortunate list, but now the good stuff.

Gender is DEAD, being gay is ALIVE, and polyamory is THRIVING!!! Obviously, this varies from planet to planet and country to country, but in the story I'll be telling, it is the case that all of these things are fine and accepted.

Gender first: HRT is so advanced that it can get you all the results in under a year, depending on the dose/method of delivery, and you can get it at any pharmacy. People can transition for a couple years, detransition just as easily, and then switch back! Whatever!

Surgeries are much easier to perform and produce more consistent results across the board, and we ARE at the stage where things like uterus transplants are a thing—either from another person or from a lab-grown organ. They aren't as "versatile" as HRT, in that you can't get your junk swapped in a single day and swap it back the next, but it's easier to customize the results.

Socially, the ease with which transition can occur means that people are more relaxed about the fact that it happens. Especially because it's so easy, it's kind of impossible to ever predict if someone you're talking to is trans unless they tell you (like in real life too but you get it), so everyone is encouraged to just roll with whatever presentation and pronoun combination they're handed by someone. Space bureaucracy means it can be kind of annoying to change your legal name, but there's no such thing as a "legal sex" or "legal gender" anymore, you put your pronouns on your ID instead.

Sexuality next: when people can bang aliens, being gay doesn't seem like that big of a deal. Whether or not banging aliens is in the cards for any given person, experimenting with whoever is normalized. If it turns you gay, people just go "yeah, that'll happen," and move on. Not having any particular label is unremarkable too, because when aliens are in the picture, it's just a lot easier to have a "case by case" sexuality. Humans who exclusively (or almost exclusively) bang other humans do tend to stick with human labels for sexuality for communication's sake.

Polyamory: What with all the experimentation with gender and sexuality, it would be foolish for relationships not to get their own turn in the lab. There are a lot of ways relationships just... work differently, when it comes to existing across the vast distance of space. If you travel a lot, if you're constantly going between the planet and the space station, if you split your life between two different planets, having an open or polyamorous relationship—or to never settle down for a long-term relationship at all—just makes sense for a lot of people. Monogamy still exists, but it's not considered the default state for all relationships ever.

Even with faster-than-light travel, trips through space can take a LONG time, and people can form a lot of really close relationships on those trips. When they inevitably have to leave the ship and go their separate ways, some people stay connected. It's more or less accepted that basically everyone has a "spaceship-ship", either exclusive to that trip or lasting far beyond it. This is foreshadowing for later.

Also, marriage isn't limited to two people anymore. Some people even have a partner on Planet 1 and another on Planet 2, and they're only married on those planets.

And again, when I have better fleshed out this world, I'll have more for the good stuff too.

😎Are there any famous (or infamous) planets known for a particular cultural or material export? What is it? Are the planet’s residents annoyed or proud of this notoriety?

Our protagonist Kavi comes from a Famous Planet (that doesn't have a name, I'm working on it), and they are personally extremely annoyed when it's the first thing people bring up.

Kavi's planet is known as the Pleasure Planet, it's where you go if you want a vacation on a tropical beach, perfect weather year-round, and sex. A lot of sex, from all the not just "legal" sex work, but privatized sex work with franchised brothels. It is the place you go to pay someone to match your freak, and while the population is mostly human, aliens live, visit, and work there too.

The particular area where this tourist hotbed is located is in a single city-state on the other side of the continent where Kavi was born and raised, but nobody really knows, cares, or would want to visit those other places (the ocean geysers can be deadly there), so they are resigned to sighing heavily every time they bring up where they're from. People also tend to assume that people from the Pleasure Planet are just as ready to put out as someone who's getting paid for it, which they also hate.

Outside of Kavi, it's a mixed bag. The people from the Pleasure City can be very proud of their culture's sexual freedom of expression, annoyed at the constant influx of tourists all over the place, or actively hostile toward not just the tourism, but the concept of the city itself. It's a lot less rosy than depicted on the outside, and the sex workers who actually have to serve tourist clients have some... grievances.

👾How many different kinds of aliens are there in your WIP? Describe them!

There will be more than one kind!! But I only have one to describe right now!!

One of the aliens that will be a main focus in this WIP is... a species that doesn't have a name yet, but they're basically crocodile people with neck frills that change color based on their feelings. Their planet has a dense oxygen atmosphere and a slightly lighter gravity than Earth, so they can get up to nine feet (that's 274cm) at the tallest, but tend to hover around 7-8ft (213-243cm) tall on average. They're cold-blooded like IRL reptiles, and don't wear much in the way of clothes because they have to bask (in the sun or under a lamp) regularly to function. They're also obligate carnivores, with like 70-80% of their diets being meat.

They tend to be long and rectangular in body shape, with comparatively short limbs considering how tall they are. They have HUGE TAILS FOR WHACKING!!!! And for swimming, they spend half-and-half of their lives in land and water basically right down the middle. They have the long snouts with lots of teeth, but also they have the single weakness of not being able to open their jaws if literally anything is holding it closed. Their rougher armored scales are on the back and the soft ones are on their bellies, and they can vary in color and pattern based on where they're from. Mostly greens, browns, blacks, and sandy yellows and oranges. Sometimes a splash of red if they're feeling spicy. They live in both fresh and saltwater climates, though the freshwater aliens can't automatically filter salt like the saltwater aliens do (they have the salt-filtering gland, but it's not "active." It can be activated, but it's nasty because they have to drink saltwater).

Their frill colors are a semi-voluntary expression of emotion. Like how humans can force a smile when they're pissed, these croc aliens can force a happy color when they're pissed. However, it is harder to hide, since usually their "true colors" will show for a bit, or start to creep in along the sides. Because their frills are, in a lot of cases, reflective of their True And Real Emotions, trying to hide them on purpose is considered untrustworthy. If an alien keeps their frills closed all or most of the time, other aliens will look at them funny, or consider them closed off and unfriendly.

I'm taking inspiration from a lot of different animals for this bit, but these aliens are capable of randomly transing their gender at any time. The main alien in this story, Zyg, was hatched female along with all of his sisters. As he started to grow up, though, biology randomly assigned him transgender to balance the population of his family, and he transitioned to male over several years—completely out of his control. This happens all the time, throughout the species.

Now, the most important part: what are their sex organs like? I'm glad you asked.

Like most reptiles, all their sex organs are internal and contained in a cloaca. Males have hemi-penes which basically means they have two dicks that drop down from internal sheathes during sex time, and females have two clitorises up there (hemi-clitoris. that's what I call it). They also have scent glands that secrete body oils when they're mating/aroused, both in the cloaca and on the sides of their jaw (real crocs also have these). They lay 5-12 eggs in a clutch, including when the eggs aren't fertilized. It's common to eat unfertilized eggs, it's not considered cannibalism, but it is bad luck to eat your own unfertilized eggs—people trade clutches sometimes. Even when the eggs are fertilized, though, the embryos don't always survive. Those eggs are not eaten, and are treated sort of like a miscarriage. These aliens can also be intersex but I haven't 100% figured out all that stuff yet

The other types of aliens are gonna include at least one other mammal species, and maybe something fish-related? Still deciding.

😲Are there any human customs that the aliens find strange, offensive, gross, or confusing? Which ones?

When it comes to crocodile aliens, they are super weirded out by species that don't swim all the time. Some of them are convinced humans can't swim at all, and many of them consider humans less civilized for this.

Also, the fact that humans have to... choose? To trans themselves? Just move to a new city. What do you mean, you can't just do it on your own? Why are you doing injections? What do you mean surgery????

On a similar note, these croc aliens also have a mating season, and their libidos basically go dormant when it's over. The fact that humans don't have one can lead them in one of two directions: humans exclusively have sex to reproduce and barely enjoy it (how sad), or humans are SEX CRAZED, ALL THE TIME (HORRIFYING).

Those are the funniest ones I can think of. They're not really customs, but whatever

[try out my sci-fi worldbuilding ask game]

[losingdcgs]

[ … ] ❀ you’re not from around here , are you? i figured because you totally just missed { axel sayaw } walking by. don’t tell me you don’t know who { he } is ? they kind of look like { evan mock } and i could be wrong but i think that they might be { twenty-seven } years old right now. they’ve been living in palmview for the last { three years }. and i don’t know if anyone has ever told them this before but they kind of remind me of { spike } from { buffy the vampire slayer }. if you stick around the town long enough you might catch them in action working at { tidepool drive-in/tba } as a { attendant/aspiring musician }. you see this town isn’t really that big of a place, some folks like to call them the { dirtbag } of palmview! they took a liking to the name too after a while, go figure. oh crap, they must have heard me yapping. they’re coming this way. i got to warn you though, rumor has it they can pretty { sardonic } at times. i wouldn’t take it too seriously though, from the times i’ve spoken to them they seemed pretty { passionate } to me. we see each other all the time since they live in that { three bedroom } apartment beside me over in { mango bay lofts }. i better leave you to it. it was nice meeting you!

Basics !

Full name: Axel Sayaw

Nickname: N/A

Gender: Cis man

Pronouns: He/him

Age: 27

Birthday: March 27th

Sexuality: Bisexual

Relationship Status: Single

Occupation: Attendant @ Tidepool Drive-In + aspiring musician

Time in Palmview: 3 years

Counterpart: Spike (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

Label: The dirtbag

Enneagram: 8w7 (the challenger, the leader)

Aesthetic: Worn leather jackets, the pounding of a bass late at night, ripped jeans, rolling your eyes in the face of every authority figure, chipped black nail polish, staying out into the late hours of the night, confident smirks, a list of wisecracks always on hand, the commotion that comes with causing a scene at the local bar

Quick Backstory ! (minor violence mention tw)

It's not a very original story, a young couple thinks they're in love, have a child before they're really ready to be parents, and stick out the growing disinterest in each other for the sake of said child. That was the family dynamic Axel grew up in. Throw in a dash of feeling invisible at home and it was really no big surprise he turned out the way he did.

Very quickly, Axel learned that acting out and landing himself in trouble would get him the attention he desired. It started to not even matter who the attention came from, his parents, peers, whoever was closest to the chaos that always seemed to surround him. It was was no wonder he fell into what could only be labeled as "the wrong crowd."

Be it the attention or thrill that came with amping up the trouble he caused, things started to get progressively worse. There were a few run-ins with the law in his teenage years. Initially, things were met with a couple slaps on the wrist, "it's just a phase, he'll grow out of it." Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. The mix of theft and a brawl swiftly landed the troubled teen in juvie with the hopes that a more extreme response to his antics would actually make the lesson sink in.

After getting out of juvie he didn't stick around long enough to let anyone know whether or not he was now some sort of model citizen. Instead, he found himself moving around a bit for a while, causing a tornado of problems before taking off again. For now, he's settled in Palmview, a bassist for an up and coming local band (in addition to his dead end job), but there's no telling for just how long he'll be tethered here.

Misc. !

Generally not the type to lend a hand unless there's something in it for him (honestly more likely to purposefully make things worse). Unless of course you're someone he's warmed up to, then he's a lot less selfish and more devoted.

Unfortunately has never learned to shut up and stop being so sarcastic despite his mouth getting him in trouble numerous times! (big fan of getting in or starting trouble so that's probably why)

Massive apologies to other employees at Tidepool Drive-In and regulars, this guy should not work any customer service job and will not be earning employee of the month anytime soon (he's been fired from multiple jobs in the past because the customer service skills are just not there).

Forgive and forget? Never heard of it, he's more of the resent, remember, and revenge type.

A little chaotic, a little unpredictable. Generally likes to play by his own rules rather than listen to any kind of authority figure (he truly never learns). Life's a little more fun that way according to him. Besides, who are petty/minor crimes like theft really hurting anyway?

Thinks of himself as a calm, cool, collected badass in all situations, but honestly if he develops a crush he's lowkey a little pathetic and very much has lovesick puppy vibes.

Wanted Connections !

I'm going to have all my wanted connections here (I still have to go into detail about them), but I'm genuinely open to anything! Give me all the wholesome, angsty, messy connections your hearts desire <3

[utilitycaster]

Does Dock Town only have two bars and are they both named after animals? Discuss.

Companion quests! I mean this in complete seriousness: I know that failure to do companion quests doesn't just mean your party is less bonded and leveled up and happy but also literally the problems you didn't deal with come back to bite and kill you. Which is why it is kind of awesome that Taash's quests have thus been "how do I fit into my culture and my home and my gender and my mother's expectations" because like, not to get too deep but in real life you're way more likely to encounter that being a risk to someone's life and well-being than, say, a blood mage who tortured them for a year in an underwater prison and was also sleeping with their sketchy cousin.

It's been a hot minute since 10th Grade Honors English but I think that Lucanis and Emmrich's companion quests are like, each at one polar extreme of what is technically covered by Gothic Horror. Lucanis is the psychosexual blood-soaked betrayal kind in a setting that makes "Hellfire" from Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame look Lutheran; Emmrich's is in a haunted house. This sounds like I'm dunking on Emmrich's quest and I'm not. Johanna is incredible. I'm obsessed.

Hossberg Wetlands update: solved two more creepy wet mysteries. In one, the person was dead (and the new doctor is nonbinary which was actually hilarious because you ALSO do Taash's realization of their gender in the Hossberg Wetlands. Literally that and Antoine and Evka only things going for it). In the other, two wardens were dead and the third so wracked by near suicidal survivor's guilt that Antoine and Evka sent him to the Free Marches. I get the Wardens are facing existential dread with the theft of the griffons and the fall of Weisshaupt and *gestures around at everything* and their whole deal is fighting the blight but I cannot imagine Lavendel: Come for the Seasonal Depression, Stay Because You Died is helping morale.

GOT HARDING HER TREE AT THE BLACK EMPORIUM. I've gifted everyone everything.

I still have a bunch of sidequests but I have learned from the fucking necropolis dragon; I'm going to progress along a bit further. I think I heard the reviews of YOU CAN GET LOCKED OUT OF SIDEQUESTS and swung too far in the other direction.

I accidentally stumbled on further music room puzzles and now the second door in the library is 2/3rds open. RIP Solas you would have loved Myst. Speaking of I still need to talk about the Crossroads.

There's certainly criticism to be had about some of the writing but I have actually been impressed at how...natural the companions feel? Like, the banter changes notably after Weisshaupt, and further after companion quests! The conversations back at the lighthouse that you can eavesdrop on do as well! Neve actively becomes more emotive and relaxed and sociable after the Cobbled Swan case if you prove to her that you didn't abandon Dock Town, just made an impossible call and couldn't be in two places at once; she is also a shipper on deck for Taash and Harding and she's NOT subtle. Davrin and Lucanis visit each others' rooms and don't kill each other!

Speaking of: Lucanis and Neve flirting is like tell me of your childhood and your deepest fears and your love for your home and rage for the people trying to destroy it and your hopes and dreams. Harding and Taash flirting is, and I'm only barely paraphrasing, "are you looking at my legs?" "yes, you are like 3 feet taller than I am, they're all I can see," "you know they go all the way up?" "*flustered giggling*" Lucanis and Davrin doing whatever the fuck they are doing is like "I would never kill you. No one would take a contract out on you and you're not the type of Warden to take a contract out on yourself." "I'd kill you over Spite but I have been convinced to get the approval of at least two other team members first."

Taash called Emmrich a skullfucker which was funny as hell honestly. I'm playing a Mourn Watcher and the dialogue gets a little wonky due to my not being a mage sometimes (Taash: your necromancy is fine it's spirits not corpses. Reaper Warrior Watcher Rook Ingellvar: bestie I just do necrotic damage when I throw my shield. why is THAT not a dialogue option) but like. honestly an extremely funny conversation. Emmrich has NEVER fucked a skull, he's too professional and not attracted to the dead sexually, but also, Taash you think this man is a top? where is THAT dialogue option. I mean I wouldn't say it because my Rook is like BE NICE NECROMANCY IS NORMAL AND CHILL but like, for other people.

[nightsdreamgates]

NiGHTS Into Dreamgates — Ask Blog focused on NiD content * .

" Welcome dreamer, I am your main host and owner of this blog, Tyloon, but you can call me shortly as Ty. My purpose is to bring your dreams to truth, answering requests from my ask box, posting headcanons and unique characters from my still work in progress Alternative Universe called NiGHTS Into Dreamgates (NiDG); With more I can give, such as drawings, doodles to the most detailed and colourized ones. But for your dreams to be fulfilled, I require your attention to conduct this blog's Terms of Service, like rules of what you can and what not. Please take this seriously, if none of the details from it does not satisfy your desires, then I reccomend for you to leave and even block me. Nonetheless, make it fair for both of us, as well for fun. Let's start this with a small Introduction, you can skip it anytime you wish. "

Quick Intro. 🌙

• Host's Personal Info:

— Name & Alias: Tyloon, Ty and Tyla;

– Age: 19 years old;

— Gender & Pronouns: Cisgender . She/Her;

– Nationality: Brazillian;

— Hobbies: Digital Art, Writting and Singer;

– Favorite Characters: Reala, NiGHTS, Claris, Elliot, Wizeman and Puffy.

Terms of Service (ToS). 🎶

[1]. Theft V.S Inspiration:

• I do not consent by the idea or the action of having my ideas, requests and drawings taken — even if is a repost, with no credits — without my awareness.

• Rather choose having my posts kept in my blog, reblogs and notes are always welcomed, what I do not accept is people taking my artwork and writting as their property; If I find any residues of you using my work for their own benefits, you'll be instantly blocked and reported.

• About taking inspiration about my artworks and writtings, I am fine with it, and no need to ask for it, just by you crediting or mentioning me, already satisfies me.

[2]. NSFW & Illegal Content or Demeanor:

• The highest I will settle my content is 16+ only. There won't be hardcore smut written fanfiction or headcanons about explicit scenarios of each characters. For I create a 18+ only content, I might create a separated blog for it, making this blog more open for everyone.

• What's gonna be in the 16+ content will surround more graphic details that people around this age range and older can tolerate; Such as violence, angst, serious topics (with content warning obviously) and spicy scenarios with no explicit details into it.

• I want to keep my blog safe and comfortable for people around that age range (or even less), I will not accept sensitive topics such as: Non-Con, S_uicide, P_edophilia, C_aniballism and other heavy topics.

• Please be respectful and mindful about this, I will ignore any ask requests or even uncomfortable comments about the characters. This is supposed to be a safe haven for all users who wants to interact and make questions from this fun content. Anyone who tries to enforce this behaviour onto me will be blocked and reported.

[3]. Drama, Harassment & Awareness:

• I ain't no saint, as I myself ended up reblogging and ending up spreading some drama over my blog, but it was never for a stupid reason. Is not even drama from the context behind it, as my behaviour and intentions always surrounded in confronting the user.

• It will not be repeated, not even encouraged or accepted in my blog; Do not send hateful comments towards anyone from my personal space or trying to bring myself into trouble. This can include with people who wants to confront me for any reason.

• My goal is to focus in writting and sharing my fixation over this blog, anyone who want to condone this behaviour here, will be blocked and reported for their actions.

• Now what I will mainly do is tag some posts that is in or out of the topic or from this fandom to spread awareness; Either being about problematic users to posts to help people from their situations.

[4]. Opinions V.S Critics V.S Suggestions:

• I've never really cared about small opinions or share of different views; I'm a open minded person, even if I disagree I will still take little time to read and look into your perspective.

• My breaking point is when people reach to criticize me, invalidate my own views and opinions, also wanting to enforce their beliefs onto my headcanons and work. I appreaciate sharing ideas, but now wanting to assume what's right or wrong (especially if I made clear in my explanations) what I should do on my works, all because I identify a character differently from yours, is getting too far.

• A good example I can give, from NiGHTS fandom, is the gender debate about the characters, here's a note: NiGHTS and Reala are both genderless creatures, including the rest of the nightmarens and other dream creatures, despite that they are aware what gender is, they all are featured by "default", so viewers can have their own perspectives on the characters in game.

• I am open for suggestions and opinions that are REALLY necessary for my AU, writting and drawing improvement. Any "critical constructive opinions" about my work as a way to mock or enforce your headcanons onto mine, will be ignored. Please be respectful.

[5]. Racism, Xenophibia and Transphobia:

• This should be a common sense, don't be racist, xenophobic or transphobic in my asks OR posts. And if you want to become political, please at least be political to share awareness (re-read rule #3) about serious circumstances, not because I interpretate NiGHTS as a androgynous guy and Reala as a buff masculine leaned woman.

[6]. All my work is FICTIONAL and FANMADE:

• Obviously not going to write bad down horrid topics because I am against of it, I am putting this here to make it clear that my own interpretations, my own beliefs/headcanons put around characters and AU and everything I do with the characters are FAN-MADE and FICTIONAL.

• Do not associate my work, especially if I share content warning that relate to some realistic topics such as war or violence, with the real world or my own behaviour; All I do about it is to bring reflection, depth and a philosophy behind. If I do end up getting inspired by real events, I always make sure to not base it disrespectfully and making it unique yet meaningful.

• Also what I write about the characters, headcanons or those about my AU, majority of them are fanmade, not canonical, so please check and don't use my artistic interpretations as a wikipedia of informations about the character that are not identified or confirmed as canon.

[7]. Mutuals, Collaboration & Share:

• As a human being myself, I have my own life and group of friends; I am fine into making new friends, create mutuals or equals.

• Collabs, either art or writting, I am totally down to it! So if you're looking for someone to write with or draw, please ask me.

• I am fine if we share stories together or ideas, debating and talking about theories are always fun and I want to put this here to acknowledge that is fine if you want to talk about it on asks.

• Now my DMs are open to only those I follow, if you want to talk with me, please make sure to ask and wait patiently while I think about it.

ASK General Info. 🔮

[1]. Crossovers

• The fandoms I am open to do Crossovers with NiGHTS Into Dreams are BWW, Kirby or any popular midia that I am in; Besides that, if I don't know about the midia you're asking to do crossover with NiD/JoD then I will reject it and let you know about it.

[2]. NiGHTS Content ONLY

• Will not write headcanons for other fandoms singularly, at maximum, only do crossovers with NiGHTS Into Dreams; I'll not make exceptions.

[3]. Open Requests for OCS

• Writting and drawing requests are open for now, I can write content for your OCs, such as OC x Canon, quick ideas or headcanons for your OCS (from the information you share to me about your character) and I can draw them if you'd wish, but do not expect super detailed or a quick answer for these requests.

[4]. AU Content

• My most popular AU content from my blog is Swap!NiD AU and NiDG, a AU that explores the worldbuilding of Nightopia and Nightmera along with a deeper story and navigation within the knowledge about human's conscience, inconscience and dreams. I will write and draw contents of my AU along with my original characters.

[5]. NxR shipp & Others

• Okay, this one will be bit long and taken bit personally, but I will be clear; I don't care really if you do not see as siblings or as siblings, to me, in both contexts, NiGHTS and Reala will ever be rivals and twin-complex characters. The whole excuse that they are created to serve by a deity as powerful beings and not to be created as children to them, sound pretty vague to me as I view they see eachother as extreme opposite counterparts that always end up in a certain conflict or misunderstanding. Either way so, I will not attend requests for NiGHTS x Reala content, please respect this. This also includes any other shipp like Wizeman x NiGHTS or Reala, NiGHTS or Reala x Visitors, etc...

Extra / Others. 💜

[1]. NFT and AI content

• To make it very clear, I am against any AI content that involves stealing data and artistic styles and identity from other artists without consent; This includes users of NFT (which I am surprised they still exist) stealing other people art's to send as NFT merchandise. Do not take my art or use my content for AI test and generation for your own benefits.

[2]. Scam or Baits

• Using my content or posts to promote suspicious links or works, you'll be reported. Very simple. I will make sure to spread awareness to my viewers if anyone tries to scam me or others from Tumblr.

[3]. Don't be afraid

• Despite the rules and everything here, if scared you, don't worry, as long you just want to ask something silly or pretty safe, you'll fine to go! I made these rules and fixed everything so I can make my blog updated and more organized.

⭐`. * —

* . • ° . , ' Thank you for reading — For any questions or doubt please send me a ask °. * , `

[weirdoonskateboard]

More than anything from GTA VI, I want it to make me cry. I want it to be emotional, to be warm and humane even under all the cynical humor and innuendos and snide jabs about our culture. Rockstar has said in interviews that they don't want to punch down with their satire. They even removed a transphobic random encounter in the current gen versions of GTA 5. Also imagine his gta could work in representation in the game.

Imagine if we got a drag bar with IRL Florida drag queens. They gave Non-Binary pop artist Arca a radio station for gta online called Motomami(With Latin pop star Rosalia,great music set by the way, IT FUCKING SLAPS, I'LL REBLOG IT). Imagine maybe giving Lucia and Jason the opportunity to be more openly romantic. Remember Bully let you kiss boys, Jimmy Hopkins is canonically bisexual. I know people who were introduced to being bi through this game. And while GTA 4: The Ballad of Gay Tony evidently a bunch of straight guys idea of what queer culture is. It's still nice to sorta be seen by the series. And the characters that are openly homophobic are the antagonists you have to work with to deal with the club's debt.

Plus I have seen queer characters in these games being positively seen. Two character Bernie Crane in GTA 4, Reni Wassulmier in Liberty City and Vice City Stories are iffy depictions of queer people. Reni Claims to be "A little bit of everything, I'm universal" who is canonically gender fluid. I know people who resonate with these characters. There are a lot of good fan artists on tumblr who love Bernie. Also there's a shit ton of Luis Lopez X "Gay Tony" Prince.

There are spouts of Transphobia in the games, admittedly. There's a really bad radio as in San Andreas IYKYK. GTA is to many generations, their Mad Magazine. The edgy rebellious piece of art you know your parents didn't want you playing. They could be juvenile, clunky, gross, or just too edgy for its own good. But it introduced a lot of people to good music, films, shows, and subcultures)

I believe Rockstar has it in them to do better. To mature. To keep being the center of attention, to keep fighting the tainted ads and broken promises of the American Dream. To be heartfelt and show that even amidst the pain and suffering of living in America. That people find ways to keep fighting in the bizarre state of America right now. Maybe I'm too forgiving too these games due to nostalgia but I do believe that there is an art to these games.

PS, The Criminal Historian, the person who made the trans rep video has recently come out and is getting a lot of transphobic hate. If you could all counter that it would be greaaat.

[onecornerface]

Are libertarian scholars shills and useful idiots for the rich?

Are libertarian scholars shills and useful idiots for the interests of the rich? Many people are saying this. My take:

Big financial interests, such as Koch funding, are responsible for some growing hazards to the integrity and quality of some academic professions such as philosophy. My own academic philosophy department (BGSU) received Koch funding several years ago, which has been a catalyst for endless insanely complex controversies.

There is some scholarly work which is bad or flawed, but which financial interests cause to either (A) wrongly come into existence in the first place, or (B) attain a degree of high status and influence disproportionate to its objective value.

This adds to an already considerable pile of non-value-tracking biases which wrongly influence the status of many scholarly works—such as the Matthew Effect, various careerist biases, barriers to access stemming from systemic oppressions such as classism, ableism, sexism, racism, and transphobia, as well as social trend feedback cycles (e.g. many philosophers write about X because a bunch of *other* philosophers are writing about it, even if X’s objective importance is questionable), and the fact that many philosophers believe X or work on X because their department mentors or peers do, etc.

As one possible example: Why are there so many capitalist libertarian philosophers? Sometimes philosophers disproportionately support a minority viewpoint because the viewpoint has serious intellectual merit which the general public irrationally fails to recognize. For instance, I think there are a lot of philosophers who support ethical vegetarianism because the arguments for ethical vegetarianism are objectively very strong-- despite widespread popular disagreement by people who irrationally fail to recognize the strength of the case for vegetarianism. Is libertarianism like this? No, I think it is questionable whether libertarianism is objectively strong enough to merit this degree of philosopher support on intellectual grounds.

On the one hand, I think a lot of libertarian scholars have done good work—often they have noticed many flaws in popular and scholarly pro-redistribution (and pro-regulation) arguments, and a lot of them have made important contributions to critiquing drug prohibition, immigration restrictions, and anti-sex-work laws, and they’ve advocated for Universal Basic Income. Sometimes they have noticed evidence for significant downsides to economic and business regulations, which progressives ignored. Robert Nozick, Michael Huemer, and other right-libertarians have shown that redistributionist arguments tend to be sloppy and badly oversimplified. Bleeding heart libertarians of the Steiner-Vallentyne school have made powerful contributions to the case for Universal Basic Income and other good ideas, and have built on the legacy of classical liberalism e.g. by exploring the implications of the "Lockean proviso" (which sets limits on traditional capitalist assumptions). Many progressives have failed to give credit to the diversity and sophistication of the capitalist libertarian tradition.

Rightwing and leftwing capitalist libertarians have also inspired progressive scholars such as GA Cohen (analytical Marxist) to develop improved arguments for redistribution. I want to give serious credit for this, similarly to how I give some gender critical feminists serious credit (despite the evils of their ideas) for inspiring trans rights advocates to improve their arguments for pro-trans advocacy.

On the other hand, libertarianism is a weird and sectarian school of thought, in some ways quite fringe, with a strong connection to insane beliefs like “taxation is wrongful theft.” In fact, it is very obvious that the horrors of poverty are much more severe and vastly more important than the mild badness of stealing from the rich.

...No, seriously, give me a break. Why does the stupid contrary view hold so much influence despite its being manifestly stupid? Overall, stealing from the rich to give to the poor is blatantly good, cool, and based. Who could disagree?

It is highly plausible that libertarianism is so high-profile in large part because a lot of rich people see it as supporting their interests.

Now, are all libertarian ideas pro-rich? Are they all anti-poor? No, that is a common uncharitable misperception. Some libertarian scholars, even some right-libertarians, have been at pains to show that many of their ideas would support the poor and not the rich. I think libertarians support a cluster of policies--some of which would benefit the rich, and some of which would harm the rich.

If libertarians were to win totally (i.e. make all their policy ideas into a reality), it might or might not overall benefit the rich, and it may even harm them—such as by allowing more small businesses to fairly compete in the market, and by ending government subsidies (corporate welfare) for (or deals with) vicious and mass murderous industries like coal companies, the war profiteering industry, the various prison profiteering industries, some surveillance industries, and animal factory farms.

Total libertarianism would also plausibly benefit the poor in many ways, such as by drastically curtailing the power of police over marginalized poor people, cutting off support to various prison industries, combating conservative and progressive forms of puritanism and paternalism, and ending the terror of deportation and associated abuses that hang over the heads of many migrants. It may also end some forms of day-to-day terror against homeless people, sex workers, and some other groups.

However, this may depend on how much power it hands to big business, and on how much of an interest big businesses have in screwing over marginalized people. Such matters could be highly context-sensitive. For instance, some "hostile architecture" (e.g anti-homeless spikes on places to potentially rest in public) are created by private industry, some by government. If libertarianism wins, will there be more or fewer anti-homeless spikes than before? Well, I don't know. Still, there is a good chance that libertarian polices would overall help the poor a lot.

There is also the problem of many, many high-profile libertarian crackpots—such as Walter Block (of the Mises Institute) who has argued in favor of legalizing workplace sexual assault, and Murray Rothbard who has argued in favor of legalizing the right of parents to starve their children to death (although his views on adoption rights may complicate this reading of his view).

Moreover, many lay non-scholarly libertarians are also insane crackpots, such as the “Mises Caucus” people who have apparently taken over the US Libertarian Party (although most libertarian scholars condemn them). The one anarcho-capitalist who has gained power, Javier Milei, is also probably a crackpot who seems on track to reinforce authoritarianism e.g. by strengthening the power of police to crack down on protestors (despite this move’s obvious incompatibility with libertarian principles). Such issues present a serious black mark on the record of libertarianism as a movement, and strengthen the case for thinking that libertarianism as a movement is unable to improve the world (despite the fact that many individual libertarians have good intentions and actively promote good ideas).

Nevertheless, many libertarians are immensely more principled and clear-cut in their stances on immigration, drugs, and sex work than are many liberals and progressives, and they should be praised for this. For instance, many libertarians explicitly support open borders, while many liberals waffle on whether to condemn the Biden administration’s treatment of immigrants. There may also be some underappreciated convergence between libertarians and leftists in critiquing the corporate capture of government. For instance, I wonder if there’s room for more cooperation between Marxian ideological critics and public choice theorists.

All that said, plausibly some rich people see the advocacy of libertarianism as overall beneficial to themselves and their financial interests in actual practice—perhaps because they think that libertarians tend to succeed in implementing their helpful-to-the-rich ideas but fail to implement their harmful-to-the-rich ideas. This may explain why rich people tend to support libertarianism. And there may be some evidence for this combination of trends.

For instance, over the last few decades, libertarians & libertarian-adjacent scholars (such as Milton Friedman) succeeded in advocating some kinds of big business deregulation, tax cuts for the rich, and welfare-cuts (which helped the rich and hurt the poor), but failed in their advocacy of open immigration, medication patent reform (to lower drug prices), residential zoning reform (to lower housing prices), and the legalization of drugs and sex work—all of which would help the poor, and harm at least some of the rich, helping fewer of the rich. Much of this combination of libertarian success and libertarian failure constitutes what is commonly called "neoliberalism," which in practice consistently benefits (most of) the rich while hurting (at least many of) the poor.

Many of the global poor have also benefited from neoliberal globalization. If this is their best option, then it's a good thing overall, since we should aim to help the global poor the most. However, I wonder if better options (such as international unions, raising the floor of the race the bottom) may have been unduly closed off, to the benefit of the rich. Some comparatively good-for-the-poor deals may also have been implemented alongside bad-for-the-poor deal such as international debt traps. I'm not sure of the best empirical evidence on a lot of this and need to research it more.

I’m oversimplifying, but something like this overall view does seem likely to be a common pattern and plausible hypothesis. Libertarians have also failed in their mild advocacy for polyamorous marriage or civil unions (despite some version of this being obviously the correct position—anti-polyamory views are blatant bigotry), possibly because there aren't enough rich people who’d benefit from it.

Progressives have been uncharitable and mistaken in their view of libertarianism as a whole. However, progressives have been largely correct in their view of what effects libertarianism as a movement has caused. And, in some ways, this is more important than the nature of libertarianism as a whole. If libertarians resent being so negatively and unfairly judged, they should aim to improve the actual effects of their movement.

Here's what I suspect is really happening: Libertarians promote a combination of good ideas and bad ideas. In the real world, their bad ideas (the ones which only help the rich) are the ones that win—and the rich know this, and this is why the rich support libertarians. The rich have little to fear from libertarians’ harmful-to-the-rich ideas, because they can ensure these ideas won’t win. The rich can happily fund libertarian scholars to promote welfare cuts & deregulation and zoning reform & cutting subsidies to evil industries—perfectly content in the knowledge that the welfare cuts & deregulation will win, and that the zoning reforms & subsidy-cuts will lose.

(The zoning reforms, or immigration reforms, or whatever, may win if the economic situation changes so that these reforms will help the rich enough, but not otherwise—unless the poor can overcome their collective action problems and successfully fight for their interests and rights, which the rich want to use their power to prevent.)

In fairness, a similar pattern may apply elsewhere too. For instance, maybe bad (authoritarian) leftisms tend to win and defeat the good (non-authoritarian) leftisms, because e.g. (1) authoritarian leftists tend to be willing to screw over the non-authoritarian leftists (their former allies) after the Revolution (e.g. in the USSR), and (2) authoritarian leftist leaders may tend to more successfully prevent counterrevolution and/or imperialist regime-change, compared to non-authoritarian leftist leaders, via repression or suchlike. So maybe leftists, like libertarians, may also face a serious puzzle of how to raise the probability that their *good* versions, rather than *bad* versions, are the ones that will win—yet find that the bad versions have distinctive features which give them strategic advantages over the good versions.

I should also note that not all Koch-funded projects benefit the rich, some leftwing projects are also funded by billionaires (whether Koch or others, such as Soros), and it is disputable whether people should always turn down Koch or billionaire money when it is on offer, especially when other funding sources are scarce. Some people erroneously accuse Koch-funded projects of being objectionable even when they aren’t. For instance, Mich Ciurria insinuated that the Koch-funded project on “Grandstanding” (aka virtue-signaling) by Brandon Warmke and Justin Tosi was biased against leftwing radicals, and I argue she is badly mistaken. In several ways, Ciurria’s description of the “Grandstanding” book is misleading. I defend the Warmke-Tosi “Grandstanding” work as important, even valuable for progressive advocacy.

However, the broader system of funding by rich people in general is an enormous hazard. Rich people have the morally least important needs, and they are the fewest in number. For this reason, their interests are objectively the least important. But they are immensely more powerful than all the non-rich people combined, in most cases. This situation is egregiously unjust. The rich people fund scholarship, in philosophy and elsewhere, largely in order to serve their financial interests—even if not all these projects in fact serve their financial interests.

The rich diversify their investments, and presumably some of their investments don’t pay off for them. The rich may also finance some projects which aren't expected to serve their financial interests, for reasons such as to improve their public image. In light of such facts, I say not all recipients of rich people (e.g. Koch or Soros) funding should be assumed to be shills or useful idiots. Also, on the grounds of my actual engagement with the relevant scholarship, I assert that Brandon Warmke & Justin Tosi’s “Grandstanding” work will not likely function to discredit the viewpoints and advocacy of marginalized people or their allies (even though Brandon and Justin are conservatives), contrary to common allegations. Again, some leftwing scholarship is also funded by billionaires such as Soros, but this does not necessarily discredit it.

All that said, on the whole and in general, the rich are our enemy and we must fight against them. We should take a critical eye toward scholarship that they have an interest in funding.

[mariacallous]

Viktor Orban has just banned Pride and is working to suspend the citizenship of ‘foreign agents’. This is the start of a year-long election campaign that will aim to provoke his main opponent, Peter Magyar, into taking sides over divisive ideological issues.

Hungary’s nationalist-populist government has gone further in its ideological fight against progressive forces than ever before.

On March 18, the Hungarian parliament adopted a law to ban protests that promote or depict homosexuality or gender transition for children, clearly with the aim of banning the Pride parade scheduled for the end of June. The organisers announced that the event would go ahead anyway.

In Hungary, there is no need to get explicit prior permission from the police to hold a march, but protests must be reported to the police in advance, who can opt to ban the protest if it poses a serious danger to public order and security. From now on, however, the police will have to ban protests if there are reasonable grounds to believe that homosexuality or gender transition will be promoted to children at the event.

Unlike with the earlier ‘anti-LGBT’ law passed in June 2021, which aims to prevent children from being exposed to homosexual or transgender content in the media or in schools (and which is subject to an EU infringement procedure), the child-protection reasons behind the ban on Pride cannot be taken seriously. Rather, child protection is just a fig leaf for imposing arbitrary restrictions on one of the most essential civil rights, freedom of assembly, which is a fundamental right of everyone, regardless of the opinions expressed at the event, so long as the demonstration is peaceful.

Participating at a banned protest is already an offence and can result in a fine of up to 200,000 forints (500 euros). What makes this legislation more Orwellian is that it allows the police to use facial recognition to identify people at banned protests. And not just them! From now on, facial recognition could be used against anyone who commits any crime, even the slightest infractions such as littering, shouting at night outside a pub, or taking a dog on a bus or tram without a lead and muzzle. Previously, facial recognition could only be used in cases where felonies, misdemeanours and more serious infractions like prostitution, theft or driving without a driving licence were committed.

The use of facial recognition is not automatic, but can be employed at the specific request of the police. Hopefully, the state does not (yet?) have the technical means and personnel resources to actually deploy facial recognition in the most minor cases. It also probably does not have the capability to use it even in the cases of big demonstrations like Pride, which has attracted tens of thousands over the last few years. But the legal possibility is still concerning.

The new law obviously violates not just the European Convention on Human Rights, but also even the Hungarian constitution. As such, in parallel, a constitutional amendment (the 15th since 2012) has been introduced in parliament, stipulating that children’s right to protection and care necessary for their proper physical, mental and moral development overrides all other fundamental rights, with the exception of the right to life.

Regulating such a hierarchy of fundamental rights at the constitutional level is problematic, because normally such conflicts are resolved by the courts assessing the circumstances of each individual case. (In fact, this is not Fidesz’s first constitutional amendment to come up against such an issue: in order to prevent demonstrations in front of the prime minister’s house, it was written into the constitution in 2018 that “exercising the right to freedom of expression and assembly shall not undermine the private and family life and home of others”.)

The irony is that the constitutional amendment is still before the parliament, while the law on the ban on Pride has already been adopted. Moreover, the country’s president – who previously was the head of the Constitutional Court – immediately signed it into law on Tuesday without sending it to the Constitutional Court for review, so it was published in the official journal on the same day and will take effect on April 15. Oddly, it seems that the president did not have any constitutional concerns even though the law is apparently contrary to the current text of the constitution which does not mention any further specific limits to the freedom of assembly, apart from the right to a private life as previously mentioned.

Yet, making the Pride ban conform to the constitution is not the only disenfranchising element in the newest constitution-amending bill.

‘Suspending’ the citizenship of ‘foreign agents’

The other proposed amendment concerns Hungarian nationals who also hold a citizenship of another country. The quotation marks in the subtitle are not there by accident: for members of Hungary’s government, anyone who disagrees with them can be labelled a foreign agent (of Brussels or of the “global liberal circles”), especially if they’ve ever received support from EU or US sources. And suspending citizenship for such does not exist legally; it is a legal fiction of the prime minister’s Fidesz party.

The proposed amendment says that the citizenship of a Hungarian citizen who is also a citizen of another state may be suspended for a limited period of time. Dual citizens whose other citizenship is that of an EU country are exempted, and the details are to be defined by a separate law.

As this bill has not yet been introduced, no one knows how this “suspension” would happen: on what grounds, under what procedure, whether there will be judicial guarantees. The only thing Fidesz communicated is that the aim is to expel certain persons if necessary for “sovereignty-protection purposes”. The legal issue was that Hungary’s own citizens can’t be expelled from the territory of the country, only foreign nationals. So, they came up with the idea of suspending Hungarian citizenship, which is hard to comprehend.

Citizenship as a status means a lasting link between an individual and the state, which determines a number of rights and obligations. The most basic of these are the right to reside in and return any time to the territory of the state, and the right to vote. Citizenship is not conferred for a limited period of time but for life, and can only be withdrawn in very exceptional cases: never in the case of citizenship by birth, and in case of naturalisation only if it has been fraudulently acquired. As there are international treaties in force to prevent statelessness, only those who have another citizenship can be deprived of their Hungarian citizenship.

There are many countries that do not allow dual citizenship, since citizenship is the basis of some political rights like the right to vote, and a state can expect its citizens to be loyal only to it. However, for a country to allow dual citizenship (i.e. multi-directional loyalty) in principle but selectively reserve it to suspend citizenship for certain individuals temporarily and then graciously restore it, is complete nonsense. The suspension of citizenship as a “sanction” sends the message that citizenship does not come by default but depends on the grace of the state.

It is worth remembering that when Hungary simplified the naturalisation process for ethnic Hungarians residing in neighbouring countries back in 2010, the Fidesz government was understandably furious because Slovakia and Ukraine responded by depriving the affected Hungarians of their Slovak or Ukrainian citizenship if it turned out that they had applied for Hungarian citizenship.

Interestingly, Fidesz has started to back down – something it very rarely does. A few days after submitting the constitution-amending bill to parliament, the ruling party’s parliamentary group leader, Mate Kocsis, admitted that “this matter raises certain legal concerns” and it “might partly undermine confidence in the institution of Hungarian citizenship”.

Beyond the major legal concerns, the party may have realised there were obvious feasibility problems with the idea. Namely, how would the Hungarian state either know who has another nationality or whether that nationality is from a country within or outside the EU?

There are similar questions concerning the Pride ban. Given Fidesz has been in power for 15 years, why has the government failed to ‘protect’ children from Pride during all that time? Were children in danger for 15 years while successive Fidesz governments just stood idly by? Or is Pride still not harmful for children? If so, why ban it then?

The answer lies, in fact, in something that has not really been present in Hungary during the past 15 years: political competition.

All about the new opposition

The relatively new Tisza party, led by former Fidesz-apparatchik Peter Magyar, is now leading the ruling party in the polls – a big area of concern for the government one year out from the next general election in 2026. Magyar has consistently been following a strategy of not getting drawn into ideological, identity-politics related issues, in order to win the support of both liberal and conservative voters. Instead, he pushes topics such as the disastrous conditions in public healthcare, corruption and high inflation.

This presents a problem for the government, because it had a tried-and-tested recipe to handle the (old) opposition and distract attention from painful issues. Again and again, the government came up with provocative statements and legislative amendments (anti-LGBT and anti-migration policies, attacking foreign-funded NGOs, etc.), so opposition politicians would immediately run to Brussels to complain, giving further ammunition for government propaganda to depict them as traitors insidiously working against their country abroad. “Cynical power brokers played with hysterical amateurs, and always the former won the match,” is how the political analyst Gabor Torok summarised it.

Magyar knows this strategy well – after all, he used to work in the inner circles of Fidesz and is the ex-husband of a former justice minister – so he has managed to avoid falling into the trap by simply not engaging with such ideological issues. He did not pop up at the demonstration following the adoption of the Pride ban and only commented on it in a very general manner. He condemned “the restriction of the freedom of assembly” in general, without specifically mentioning Pride or telling his supporters whether they should participate in the banned event or not.

Fidesz has realised that simple statements and less relevant legislation is not enough to provoke Magyar, so they are now deploying harsher tools: banning a peaceful demonstration and the possibility of suspending Hungarian citizenship are something that surprised even those who consider Hungary a semi-authoritarian system. But even this did not prove enough to push Magyar into the ‘liberal/traitor/foreign agent’ camp.

The question is whether Fidesz will realise that the old recipe does not work and come up with a new strategy, or will it just keep on raising the stakes, deploying ever more extreme measures to exploit divisions? As pundit Gabor Torok warns, this latter strategy could backfire if they cross a line that even Fidesz voters deem unacceptable.

Nevertheless, the longest and most insane election campaign Hungary has ever witnessed just began.

[dailyanarchistposts]

The anarchist struggle is intimately tied to anti-colonial resistance. State and capitalism occupy the central terrain in both struggles. But many anarchists (as well as many anti-colonial warriors) often fail to take into account the various levels of power and oppression that are at play not just historically but at present. The technological components of colonialism usually get little attention and anarchism frequently has a notable eurocentrism.

To speak about decolonization, it must first be made clear: from what do we want to decolonize, anyway? Colonialism means that a dominant group exploits, assimilates, and forces its own values and ideals on a land and its respective population in order to annihilate the lifeways of the colonized people. Colonialism has occurred all over the world and shown itself through varied forms of oppression: land theft, enslavement, rape, the breaking of bodies through work, imprisonment and genocide, the kidnapping of children, replacement of religions and the annihilation of spiritual lifeways, the imposition of ones own values and imaginaries (for instance the gender binary and heteronormativity), or the plundering of life-giving habitats. All these things have left deep fissures within colonized peoples (physical as well as spiritual and psychological) as a system has been forced upon us which we have neither created nor shaped. These are the things we must heal ourselves from. Here decolonization comes into play.

Decolonization is about reclaiming what was taken from us and honoring what we still have. That demands conscious effort. It is valuable to seek actively what was lost and to remember what was forgotten. We still live with the trauma colonization inflicted on us, and many of us have so internalized the imposed values of colonial domination that they are sometimes more visible in our communities than in today's so-called “progressive” states. To name one example: before Colonialism there existed no clear concept of gender. Settler-sexuality enforced the concepts of the gender binary and heteronormativity in the name of Science. Values which were so strongly internalized that misogyny and queerphobia as well as patriarchal structures are widespread among colonized peoples today.

To decolonize the world, we must therefore first decolonize ourselves. We must heal from the deep wounds that colonialism left behind. That demands killing the colonizer in your own head. Decolonization is a way of life. It is a path that binds us with our past, present and future. It’s not just political but also personal and spiritual.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: William Deresiewicz

Published: Nov 21, 2024

The politics of the academy have been defeated. Its ideas, its assumptions, its opinions and positions — as expressed in official statements, embodied in policies and practices, established in centers and offices, and espoused and taught by large and leading portions of the professoriate — have been rejected. This was already evident before November 5. It can now no longer be denied.

Some data points: A post-election survey from Blueprint, a Democratic polling firm, discovered that, among reasons not to vote for the Democratic presidential nominee, “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues than helping the middle class” ranked third, after only inflation and illegal immigration. Among swing voters, it ranked first. California approved a ballot measure to stiffen penalties for theft and drug crimes by a margin of 69-31. Los Angeles elected a former Republican as district attorney over the progressive incumbent by 61-38. Alameda County, which covers most of the East Bay including Berkeley, recalled its progressive DA by 63-37. Portland, Ore., elected a former businessman as mayor over the leading progressive candidate by 18 points.

We’ve seen comparable results in recent years. In 2020, California rejected affirmative action by 57-43. In 2021, Seattle elected a Republican city attorney over a police abolitionist, New York City elected Mayor Eric Adams — despite his manifest deficiencies — on a law-and-order platform, and Buffalo, N.Y., reelected its mayor as a write-in candidate by 19 points over the socialist to whom he had lost in the Democratic primary. In 2022, San Francisco recalled three progressive members of its Board of Education by lopsided margins, then recalled its progressive DA.

Survey findings tell the same broad story. A Marist poll this year revealed that 57 percent of Latinos surveyed are in favor of deporting all illegal immigrants. A Pew poll showed that 75 percent of Black respondents and 85 percent of Latinos are in favor of voter ID laws. After the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in college admissions, Gallup found that 52 percent of Black and 68 percent of Latino adults supported the decision. Another Pew poll, consistent with earlier findings, showed that only 4 percent of Latinos use “Latinx,” and that of those who have heard of the term, the vast majority reject it. And then there are perhaps the most important data points of all. Donald Trump increased his support among Black, Latino, and Asian voters from 2016 to 2020, then increased it again from 2020 to 2024 (he also got a majority of the Native American vote). The light was blinking. Now it’s solid red.

Over the last 10 years or so, a cultural revolution has been imposed on this country from the top down. Its ideas originated in the academy, and it’s been carried out of the academy by elite-educated activists and journalists and academics. (As has been said, we’re all on campus now.) Its agenda includes decriminalization or nonprosecution of property and drug crimes and, ultimately, the abolition of police and prisons; open borders, effectively if not explicitly; the suppression of speech that is judged to be harmful to disadvantaged groups; “affirmative” care for gender-dysphoric youth (puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones followed, in some cases, by mastectomies) and the inclusion of natal males in girls’ and women’s sports; and the replacement of equality by equity — of equal opportunity for individuals by equal outcomes for designated demographic groups — as the goal of social policy.

It insists that the state is evil, that the nuclear family is evil, that something called “whiteness” is evil, that the sex binary, which is core to human biology, is a social construct. It is responsible for the DEI regimes, the training and minders and guidelines, that have blighted American workplaces, including academic ones. It has promulgated an ever-shifting array of rebarbative neologisms whose purpose often seems to be no more than its own enforcement: POC (now BIPOC), AAPI (now AANHPI), LGBTQ (now LGBTQIA2S+), “pregnant people,” “menstruators,” “front hole,” “chest feeding,” and, yes, “Latinx.” It is joyless, vengeful, and tyrannical. It is purist and totalistic. It demands affirmative, continuous, and enthusiastic consent.

People are fed up, and I don’t just mean people who voted for Trump. A few days after the election, I was listening to The Brian Lehrer Show on New York Public Radio, which was broadcasting one of those endless postmortems that the media has been conducting, when another listener called in. She identified herself as Black, a Berkeley grad, “super liberal,” and a resident of Brownsville, a largely Black neighborhood. Referring to the burden that the influx of asylum-seekers has placed on the city’s resources and therefore on people’s lives (“I’m talking about Black people here, at the lower end of the economic spectrum”), and how you weren’t supposed to talk about it, how if you did talk about it you were accused of being racist, how you weren’t even supposed to notice it, how people were being asked “to engage in a cognitive dissonance that is literally not possible,” she finally said, with beautiful succinctness, “When did liberalism mean no common sense?” It’s clear that many Democrats have been wondering the same thing.

How did things get to this pass? And how did the academy, the school and citadel and engine of this revolution, become so desperately out of touch with reality, including the reality of people’s lives outside the liberal elite, their needs and beliefs and experiences? One answer is that academics tend to live inside a bubble. They socialize with other academics; far more than used to be the case, they marry other academics; and, of course, they work with other academics. When groups whose members are broadly similar in outlook are isolated from external influences, two things happen: Their opinions become more homogeneous, and their opinions become more extreme. Which is exactly what’s been taking place in the academy in recent decades. The ratio of liberals to conservatives has soared, and more of those who identify as left identify as far left. And both of those trends are more pronounced in the fields and institutions that are leading the revolution: the humanities, the social sciences exclusive of economics, the “studies” programs and departments, the schools of education and social work, the elite universities, and the liberal-arts colleges.

The reason that these disciplines can drift so far from reality is that they are not answerable to reality.

Those fields have another thing in common: They are intellectually corrupt. You know what I’m talking about. Any fool idea passes muster, no matter how preposterous, as long as it conforms to prevailing theoretical trends and preferred ideological positions. Nobody wants to make waves: to speak up at a conference, to undermine a colleague or colleague’s student, to invite examination of their own research. Data is massaged; texts are squeezed or bound and gagged. Jargon helps to paper over cracks in logic; countervailing evidence is tucked under the cushions. Standards are ignored to the point where no one can even recall what they are anymore. It’s no wonder that the social sciences are suffering a replication crisis. In the humanities, there is no crisis, because there is no replication to begin with, no factual claims to reproduce, only “readings,” “interventions,” “Theory.”

The reason that these disciplines can drift so far from reality is that they are not answerable to reality. If an engineer miscalculates an equation, the building falls down. But what would accountability to reality even mean in the humanities, given that their findings are never applied? It’s not like there are going to be consequences for saying something stupid about Shakespeare. In the social sciences, and, less often, in the hybrid “studies” fields, findings are applied, but it isn’t clear that there’s much of a feedback loop there either. How many hypotheses in psychology have been abandoned because they led to bad educational policy? How many gender-studies scholars have rethought their suppositions in the face of the calamity of gender youth medicine? The more a field becomes beholden to theory, or Theory, the further it floats away from empirical observation and therefore correction. The enterprise becomes entirely self-referential, words built on words, a kind of intellectual Ponzi scheme.

So how are academics going to respond to their political repudiation? One alternative — the likeliest one — will be to stay the course. The people have spoken, but the people are wrong. They’ve been misinformed and disinformed. They are victims of false consciousness, too benighted to understand their own interests. They are racist, sexist, xenophobic, yearning for a strongman. The attitude reminds me of the few American Communists who were still around when I was young — scientifically certain of everything as they headed ineluctably toward political extinction.

But academics have another option. They can entertain the possibility that they’ve been wrong, about a lot of things and for a long time. They can consider that the notion that Harris lost because of racism and sexism is belied by the fact that we have already elected a Black president; that Harris received a larger share of the white vote than Joe Biden; that a female presidential candidate has already won the popular vote; that the nation, far from distrusting women with executive office, has elected 44 female governors in 31 states; that 16 of those governors have been Republicans, which means that most Republicans supported them; that those states include not only blue or purple ones but Alabama, Arkansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and South Dakota; that Kansas and Texas have actually elected Democratic women governors; and that while there are surely people in this country who wouldn’t vote for a woman or nonwhite presidential candidate, they also surely wouldn’t vote for any Democrat. That Harris lost for other reasons altogether.

Trump is appalling, evil, criminal. But the worse he is, the worse the liberal elite must be, if so many prefer him to them.

They might further consider that the majority of Black, Latino, and Asian Americans do not share their politics or ideology; that the people who speak for those communities in elite liberal spaces — not only colleges and universities but the media, the arts, the nonprofits — share the politics and points of view not of those communities but of other liberal elites and therefore do not, in the simplest and most important sense, represent them; that progressives have been promulgating policies in the names of those communities that they reject — for Blacks, police defunding and abolition; for Latinos, lax immigration and border enforcement — and that they reject them for good reasons. That identity is not a very useful way of understanding people’s motivations.

Finally, they might consider that to say that certain people “vote against their interests” is not only condescending but wrong. People know what their interests are. They know it much better than you do. Their interests are the same as everybody else’s: public safety, economic security and opportunity, and on top of that a little dignity, a little respect. And while Trump is hardly likely to advance those goals, the 80 percent of the country that lies below the upper middle class is perfectly justified in doubting whether the Democratic Party, and the elites that run and influence it, will do so either, because for decades they have not. Yes, Trump is appalling, evil, criminal. But the worse he is, the worse the liberal elite must be, if so many prefer him to them.

Ten years ago, I published a book, Excellent Sheep, that argued that the meritocratic elite, which includes the professoriate as well as the academy’s administrative class, had become self-serving, self-perpetuating, and, as leaders of our most important institutions, incompetent. It had lost its authority. It had lost its legitimacy. The time had come for it to step aside in favor of a new, more democratic dispensation. Nine months after the book came out, the rough beast glided down his gilded escalator. A few months after that, a wild-haired septuagenarian socialist almost single-handedly destroyed the Clinton-Obama establishment. One would think the message would’ve been received by now. The message is you failed. Sit down, be humble, and listen and learn.

[talebytale]

richard madden, pansexual, cismale + he/him → isn’t that robert fitztooth? i hear that they're robin hood from robin hood. i hear they’re 36. they seem to be altruistic & adroit, but also brazen & recalcitrant. their aesthetics include a green bycocket with a red feather, one eye closed as an arm draws an arrow back, and warm conversation by the fire as he and his merry men celebrate another theft.

Basics

Name: Robert Fitztooth

Nicknames: Robin Hood

Age: 36

Gender: CisMale

Orientation: Pansexual

Species: Were-Fox

Occupation: Outlaw, Leader of the Merry Men

Physical

Hair: Reddish Brown, though he has a grey streak

Eye Color: Blue

Height: 5'10

Personal

Sexual Preference: Versatile

Biography

One would be surprised to learn that Robin Hood, the outlaw that steals from the rich to give to the poor, had actually been born among the elite as a nobleman. Born Robert Fitztooth, the were-fox had grown up watching as the rich and noble used their status and their wealth as an excuse to be rude to those that were less fortunate, and he thought that it was absolutely ridiculous that they treated them like they were lesser simply because they were dealt a lesser hand. Though his father was rude to his servants, his mother taught Robert to treat his servants with kindness and dignity, and so Robert always did - to the point where he wouldn't finish his food so that he could make sure that the servants children could eat as well.

Of course, he was still a kid - and a fox kit at that - and so he did have a bit of a habit with sticky fingers. It started as stealing a couple of eggs from the chicken coop to give to some of the servants' kids and it progressed to seeing if he could pickpocket some of his fathers' wealthy friends... And he found that he was good at it. But he didn't need the gold that he stole, so he would always make sure to hand his prizes to the servants to ensure that their lives would be better - so that they didn't have to endure the torment of some of the more cruel and pretentious of the elite.

Realizing that he was good at stealing, Robert decided that when it was time, he would use what he was good at to benefit others - not himself - and so, when he was old enough, he spat on his father's name and legacy and began to travel to various towns to steal from the wealthy to give to those that needed it. Sometimes he gave to individuals, sometimes to orphanages, and even still, sometimes he would throw the money in the streets for anyone to grab. Soon enough, he began to be known as "Robin", given the fact that he was robbing people, and it was a name that he wore proudly.

For years, Robert continued to steal from the rich to give to the poor, and over time, he wound up getting a lot of people to follow him. People from the towns that he had gone to and targeted would lie to the authorities to protect him, other men began to join him and learned not only how to fight - in case they got into it with the law - and Robert easily gave into his persona of Robin Hood and with his followers, the merry men, they were quickly changing the way that things worked. He even wound up finding love, something he didn't think he would find.

When he received the invitations from the more affluent individuals of other realms, Robin saw it as an opportunity to try and help the less fortunate of other places - knowing that the discrepancy between wealthy and poor wasn't unique to his own realm - and decided to head there.

[thequeenreaders]

T h e D e c r e e 🧧

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[alecbicheno]

Blog post 10 - Representation of women in games

The way women have been represented in video games has evolved significantly over the years, often reflecting societal and cultural changes. The portrayal of female characters has gone through a complex transformation; however, challenges and criticisms still persist.

History of representation

In the early years, female characters were often portrayed in a stereotypical manner, with a common portrayal being the damsel in distress trope such as Princess Peach and Zelda, where they would later be the reward or prize for the male protagonist.

In the 80s the 90s, we see iconic characters who broke away from traditional stereotypes like Samus Aran, who was a strong independent character whose gender was hidden to be a surprise reveal to players. Lara Croft is another example, however her design featured very unrealistic proportions which would be adjusted in later games.

In the 2000s, despite progress there were persistent challenges and some instances of regressive representation. Many games continued to objectify and sexualize women, for example Grand Theft Auto III (2001) and every instalment since has featured women as sex workers.

The gaming industry continued to grow and with it so the demands for better representation. In the 2010s we got to see some complex characters such Ellie from The Last of Us (2013), who had depth and were central to the narrative.

As we reached the 2020s great strides had been taken towards better representation. We got games with strong, well executed female protagonists such as Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn (2017) and Horizon Forbidden West (2022). We also saw examples of complex and believable female protagonists in indie games like Madeline from the game Celeste (2018).

Examples

Lara Croft is a character we were first introduced to in Tomb Raider (1996) and while she was a strong female character, there were many criticisms about her appearance, especially in earlier iterations. Her design focused on exaggerated and unrealistic physical proportions which contributed to the objectification of women in games and reinforced harmful beauty standards, furthermore the focus on her sexualised appearance overshadowed her character depth. Eventually she got a complete redesign in the reboot to the series Tomb Raider (2013), where she is a well-proportioned, more suitably dressed protagonist who also becomes more a fully realised character with flaws, who learns and is overall just more human.

The GTA series of games has often been talk of controversy for the way it glorifies sexual harassment and violence against women characters. In many GTA titles female characters are often objectified and reduced to hyper sexualized roles, such as sex workers like mentioned above. The games frequently depict scenes with derogatory language as well as violence against women, this reinforces negative stereotypes and misogynistic behaviour, as well as contributing to a culture of sexism amongst the gaming community. The larger concern, however, is that the exposure to these things can cause it to become so normalised that when instances of violence and sexual harassment occur in real life, people won’t be as shocked or empathetic about it.

A decade before Lara Croft in Metroid (1986) we were introduced to Samus Aran, who stands out as a positive example of female representation. Her surprise reveal at the end of the game broke the gender norms by showcasing a woman as a powerful and capable space bounty hunter. Since then, she has been consistently portrayed as strong character, her narrative not being driven by damsel-in-distress scenarios or romantic situations, but instead by her battle against threats and the pursuit of justice. Then as the series progressed, she became a well-rounded character with depth and resilience, whose legacy has consistently helped challenge stereotypes surrounding female characters.

Aloy, the protagonist of Horizon Zero Dawn (2017) and Horizon Forbidden West (2022) is a more recent example of positive female representation in videogames. She defies the traditional gender expectations as a skilled and determined hunter in her post-apocalyptic world and is defined by her intelligence, resourcefulness and sense of justice. Her narrative doesn’t revolve around romantic plots but rather a quest for knowledge and understanding of the world she inhabits. Her design is also a great part of her character, not being objectified or sexualised so players connect with her through her personality and abilities. She is a testament to the gaming industry’s ability to create diverse and empowering female protagonists, and the popularity of her character only proves this, setting a standard for future portrayals of women.

What can be done?

Challenging stereotypical representations of women requires diverse character creation by developers which will help ensure depth beyond their appearance. This is something I aim to achieve in my field of 3D modelling, making sure that I avoid exaggerated features and prioritize authenticity in the physical appearance.

There will need to be a large collaborative effort from developers, players, and the industry as a whole in order to create positive change on this matter. Celebrating games that break the traditional norms will incentivize developers towards more of these narratives, and there are also certain discussions that need to be had within the gaming community about gender representation and awareness, as well as education on these matters in order to create positive change.

An interesting example of change is the recently revealed next instalment in the GTA series, which features a female protagonist called Lucia. This is a huge step for Rockstar Games, especially considering the above-mentioned history and controversies and even though the game isn’t set to release till 2025, it will be interesting to see the depiction of Lucia and other female characters in the game.

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