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nyaagolor · 1 year ago

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A genuinely shocking amnt of people said they wanted to see my “Apollo backstory but it’s exclusively based on AA4” so huzzah! Self-indulgence on main! It’s under the readmore because I don’t wanna clog anyone’s dash :)

Everything starts with Thalassa because of course it does. She’s part of the Granmarye Troupe but kinda Hates It. Her father gives her very little autonomy, and she feels like they’re treating her more as an asset or employee than family. She's good at putting on a brave face but she has very little autonomy there and is completely miserable, so she sneaks out to meet with the audience sometimes to get a taste of freedom. It’s on one of these little trips that she meets Jove, who she quickly falls in love with. They continue to meet in secret, and Thalassa’s resentment for the troupe only grows. The day she turns 18, she runs away to go elope with him, not leaving a note or any indication of where she’s gone

The two of them are happily married for a year and have a child, but Jove dies in an accident (unrelated to Kuhrain in this version) only a year into their marriage. Thalassa, now a 19 year old single mom with no money and no documents, realizes the only person who can help her now is the last person she wants to see. Desperate, she calls Magnifi, who agrees to help her IF she gives up the kid and comes back to the troupe. He thinks if she still has an attachment to the child she’ll try and run away again as soon as she can (and he’s right!). Thalassa gives Apollo to the orphanage with one of her bracelets and secretly tries to keep track of him— she does plan on coming back for him as soon as she can, Magnifi be damned

Magnifi, knowing that both Zak and Valant are in love with his daughter, actively encourages the both of them to pursue her, hoping one of them will get her to fall in love and give her a reason not to leave the troupe. Zak is the one who ends up succeeding. They have Trucy together and things immediately take a turn for the worse

Thalassa immediately gets very depressed after having Trucy and nothing seems to cheer her up. She can’t stop thinking about being forced to give up her first child and the life she lost and nothing Zak does seems to help. Eventually, Magnifi steps in and says that she needs to get over it and get back to performing. To everyone’s surprise, Thalassa agrees without protest

This is when the “accident” happens. Air quotes here because surprise! It was not an accident at all. Thalassa was tired, desperate, and wanting nothing more than to go scorched earth on the entirety of Troupe Granmarye, so she loaded the gun improperly on purpose in hopes that the aftermath and scandal will bring the troupe down with her. She somehow survives, but only Magnifi knows. Not wanting news of it to escape and seeing an opportunity to hold this over Zak and Valant’s heads, he ships his amnesiac daughter off to Borgnia and tries to wipe his hands of the whole thing

While clearing through Thalassa’s things, Magnifi finds all of the information on Apollo and Jove, which he shows to Zak. Zak, who didn’t know about Apollo, feels wildly hurt by it all. He ends up projecting a lot of his feelings onto Trucy— he still loves her but becomes more distant because he’s grieving Thalassa’s death and “betrayal”

This is how Zak knows about Apollo and why he tells Phoenix about it. Phoenix does try to find Apollo as soon as he learns about him, HOWEVER, Apollo is trans and all of Thalassa’s documents have his deadname on them so they can’t be used to track him down. (By the time Phoenix realizes Apollo is the kid he’s been looking for ((via the bracelet)) he’s already broken Apollo’s trust enough that he doesn’t feel like he can safely drop that truth bomb without scaring him away. By the time Apollo DOES come to trust Phoenix, Thalassa has her memories back, at which point Phoenix feels it’s her truth to tell). Anyway.

Trucy’s story is effectively identical to canon so I don’t have much to say about that

While in the orphanage, Apollo decides he wants to be a lawyer bc he hears about Phoenix (specifically the whole thing about sticking up for people with no one on their side). He goes thru the lawyer track in HS bc that’s a canon thing in AA apparently and tests into a special fast track law program so he can save as much money on tuition as possible

Apollo works his ass off, he has a ton of jobs and works indexing night shifts for the courthouse. Everyone starts to know who he is bc he works every law related job he can no matter how miserable. This is how Kristoph finds out about him

He works all thru law school but basically all of his money goes to tuition so he goes between shitty apartments and crashing at the courthouse / work when he runs out of rent money. This is the OTHER reason everyone knows who he is and how kristoph finds out about him— he’s always loitering around the courthouse. He makes a name for himself as a hard worker, being fast + thorough with paperwork, and having an excellent eye for detail

During internship hunting season, Kristoph approaches Apollo— he greatly values a dedicated hard worker like Apollo and thinks Apollo’s abysmal financials are good leverage for manipulation. I hc that Kristoph specializes in fraud cases, so Apollo’s talents are extremely relevant to Kristoph’s interests. Kristoph’s firm is only himself because of all the illegal shit he does (less eyes less chance of being caught) so he gambles on taking in Apollo. He ends up personally fixing up Apollo’s credit score, ensuring he has proper documents, and gets him set up with a decent paycheck so he can start to develop a savings account. Apollo decides he would die for him

This continues until Kristoph plays a bad hand— he intends on having Apollo defend Phoenix in the hopes that he’ll lose so he can hang the resulting verdict over Apollo’s head to manipulate him. Turnabout Trump happens and Apollo ends up back where he started, broke and with less trust in others than he had before (which is saying a lot). During his internship with Kristoph he managed to get together a tiny rainy day fund and even started to save up for top surgery, but all that money has to be used to cover rent while he’s jobless bc of the Turnabout Trump aftermath. It’s when the money finally runs out that he answers Trucy’s phone call and agrees to work for the WAA

Canon proceeds as normal, but Apollo has extra paranoia because he’s worried all the money and documents and credit that Kristoph gave him were faked. Also, Thalassa doesn't tell Trucy and Apollo about the whole Thing because part of that would be admitting the role she played in how their lives turned out and she is not quite ready to face her demons yet

#ace attorney #apollo justice #mod vex #textpost #headcanons #this is the most indulgent thing i've posted in a while lol

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maxcuntstappen · 6 months ago

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hey hey, ik i could've asked this from anyone, but i wanted someone 'neutral' to answer this (+ you seem sweet <3), but as someone who is relatively new to the fandom (i need to catch up on my lore, though i think i'm almost there), and has absolutely nothing against carlos, wym explaining to me why some people seem to absolutely hate him, like with a passion please? (ty<3)

I ALSO ABSOLUTELY ABSOLUTELY ADORE YOUR FICS MWAHH <<33

hello!! first of all, im glad u think im sweet n neutral enough to approach. rn, i think that is my ideal vibe for myself.

the hate for carlos increased significantly after his move to ferrari, which put him in direct competition with Charles.

there was definitely not a preferred driver in the situation, despite charles having been with Ferrari for years, and this didn't sit right for many people.

i think shit really hit the fan in Silverstone 2022 where Ferrari - stupidly, oh god so stupidly - sacrificed Charles' race (who was in contention for winning the championship) for carlos to get his first win.

carlos has also ignored team orders in the past. he complains a lot if he's asked to switch cars on track with charles, or any such thing. as opposed to charles who people believe that just does it and gets a move on. this has also given people the perception that carlos isn't a team player.

some other things that ella mentioned that i didn't even think of;

carlos whines on the radio too much, saying that he is faster than charles, doing quicker lap times, and that he should be allowed to pass. there have often been times where he's cooked the tyres in the process of putting in faster times than charles so even if they do swap track positions, it's been for nought.

(this also adds to the anti-team player thing cause it does sometimes seem that carlos is always focused on being better than charles than how to best monopolise the situation to benefit the team as a whole)

he entertains ties to right wing politicians in spain (which considering how much MAGA comes up for logan, it's surprising how this isn't as known information)

and something i hear so often when it comes to carlos,

his vibe is off.

i really dont know if this helped better understand people's hatred for carlos. he is surprisingly unpopular amongst my friends' too. but not everyone can like all drivers on the grid (esp. with each of them having their varied range of red flags). and they shouldn't feel the need to either!

i just wish people would use the anti tags and keep their complaints off the main tags so that the people who are fans don't have to come across it. but that seems like a utopian concept.

so i just curate the hell out of my dash instead.

#ask #anti-carlos sainz

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the-moogle-of-your-nightmares · 1 month ago

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trying to decide how to go about talking about system stuff here and whether to move it to a sideblog or what. i'm weirdly self-conscious about putting it on this blog, which is wild given all the other stuff i will broadcast loudly and publicly and at length on here, and part of me feels like i should make a sideblog but part of me just wants to go my usual route of Fuck It We Ball, Let It All Hang Out for God and Everyone to See.

setting up sideblogs and getting traction on them is a lot of effort, so there's that, but also with this i'm kind of at the stage of... not 'do it self-conscious' because i Hate That Phrase and Variations. i am not going to frame things i do for myself that are Hard or Scary as worth pursuing because they're self-harm. fuck that noise.

what i AM going to frame them as is do it for spite. do it because you deserve better than being more beholden than necessary by your own standards to whatever assholes might glance at your blog. do it because you deserve to be seen as much as any of the other people on your dash who talk openly about being plural, on blogs that are dedicated to that and blogs that aren't. do it because you don't owe anyone an image of you that will never surprise them or make them see you differently (even if it did, and frankly especially if they have a problem with it). do it because you deserve to be as defiant as you need to be, and can--and, often, the relief of discovering you didn't even really need to be.

you deserve to live your own life observing and making informed decisions about your mental health, and what it looks like when something is making it better or worse, instead of living under the looming fear that your father's severe, unmanaged mental illness will manifest in you. hereditary or otherwise, you carry no one's relationship with their illness but your own.

you deserve that.

.....yeah. think i'm gonna keep posting about it here.

#moogletalks #disabilitag #traumatag #abuse implied cw #internalized ableism cw #self-harm mention cw #adventures in mental illness #(i also want to clarify that this is about being frank with myself; and purposely evaluating my priorities and needs and course of action)#(instead of just letting Vague Internalized Unprocessed Background Noise decide what i do for me)#(which is distinct from making informed purposeful decisions about how to accommodate for Vague Internalized Mess)#(that i'm not ready to process yet)#(if your personal threshold for emotional and/or logistical safety is to not talk about it publicly; or keep it to a sideblog)#(that's a hundred percent valid and good on you for doing what you need to to protect your peace)#(you're not Letting the Bullies and/or Mental Illness Win by doing so; you don't owe reclaiming ground from them to anyone)#pluralitag

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fandom-imagination-ss · 2 years ago

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part 2 by request of Derek sacrificing himself to save you

Imagine: Derek asking your dad for your hand and then Asking you Finally to marry him after years of waiting.

Parrish for the Win, when Derek almost stupidly sacrificed himself to save everyone and He was pushing Scott away from the Big bad. Parrish took care of burning the MF alive. Eli was relieved that his Dad was safe. you. you were furious Derek almost left, Eli and you. Not the romantic reunion Derek expected when you walked over and hit him in the face when everything was done. it didn’t hurt it. not with his thick Skull and being a werewolf, you knew logically it wouldn’t hurt him but you were furious at him. Everyone was shocked, you instantly groaned out in pain feeling a snap in your hand. Derek heard the Snap as Scott dashed over taking the pain away as you screamed at Derek about being reckless and how he couldn’t Die or at Least not stupidly Sacrifice himself.

you were taken by the Sheriff to the hospital while Eli went with you. you as you both sat getting a cast put on your broken wrist. you broke your wrist in two different places pouching Derek in the face. and he barely flinched. you were slightly impressed. at how thick his skull is to not even cry out in pain. while you were broken. Eli after the relief of being happy that he’s Dad was Safe and alive was now pissed he almost ruined Everything. Derek came to the hospital but was waiting out in the waiting room. He knew he screwed up. he wasn’t going to ask for forgiveness he was going to protect his family. and there is nothing more important than his family. And if something like that happened again he would do it again. you knew what sort of guy Derek was. it shouldn’t be shocking that he would do anything possible to keep you and Eli safe! but as he waited in the waiting room. he could Smell the frustration and anger coming off you. and you were deep in the hospital. He knew he wasn’t in the wrong. but he also knew. he never smelt you this angry at him before. Or this angry period. and in the years of knowing you. he realized.. whatever logical stance he had. he knew when you walked out. He would have to wait until you were calm and level-headed before informing the love of his life. that he didn’t feel sorry or regretted trying to keep her and Eli Safe. Not tonight. Tonight if Derek Slept in the same bed as you. it would be a miracle he was expecting the sofa.

you walked out with Eli as Derek noticed your hand. wrapped up. he was stunned. he figured it was sprained but broken? you walked over to him as you spoke, “I broke my wrist in two different spots.. how’s your face?”

“Fine... you didn’t hurt me.” you groaned at that. rationally yo didn’t want to of hurt him. but a slight pain! especially since you broke your wrist on his stupid lovely face!

“Let’s go home.”

you just stated as you got into Derek’s Truck he helped you up. as you sat quietly. in the passenger seat as Eli was quiet. he didn’t know how to smell emotions yet but he could feel the anger radiating off you as you were quiet. as Derek drove.. the 15-minute drive in silence home was tortured. you got inside and you ordered takeout as you sat on the sofa. as Eli bailed. he ran to his room. to be out of the danger zone as Derek walked over as he sat on the coffee table as he sat down you snapped, “you WERE GOING TO LEAVE US!”

“i was trying to protect the two people who mean more to me than my own life! I was trying to keep you safe!”

“hang safety! i want you! we need you! you can’t just stupidly sacrifice yourself! you are our world! do you think it’s one sided? that you can just protect and love us and we wouldn’t what? survive without you? I wouldn’t! Derek! you are the love of my life! you can’t go form asking me to marry you to then Stupidly going to sacrifice you for Scott? SCOTT?! Scott SUCKS! I mean- I dont hate Scott. he’s a great friend but I would rather him Die than you!”

Derek knew you didn’t really mean that. you were great friends with Scott and Alison? you were best friends in school. Derek didn’t take that to heart but he also knew. you were fiercely loyal and protective of the people you love. you only ever had just you and your dad. and he knew you thought and loved him dearly. and that it took a long time for him to gain your full trust and your heart. and he knew. if the world ever threatens him or Eli. you would have the match lite and you would Burn the world for them. Derek realized at that moment if it was between Saving all his friends. and you had to choose to another sacrifice Him or Scott. you wouldn’t even think about it. you would save Derek. and hang anyone who said you choose wrong.

“I wasn’t going to yet that bastard harm you or Eli! your my world! you are my lungs.. to breath Y/n! I was just thinkin about saving and protecting you and Eli! I don’t regret my decision I would do it again.” you groaned as he spoke, ‘Y/n. you know the sort of man i am. I protect the ones i love. you have known that about me since we met. you both were in danger and i needed to protect you.”

“you didn’t use your thick Skull! what if you died Derek!” you snarled. getting up as you spoke, ‘how- How would Me and Eli?- Eli has already Lost a mom! he can’t lose he’s Dad!”

“you know Eli considers you he’s mom. this isn’t about Eli”

“but it is! because Eli is at that point in his life. he needs his Dad! he needs you to show him how to be a good man!” “if i died you could easily do it. I trust you completely with Eli!”

‘I don’t! I make very questionable stupid mistakes daily. and you’re the voice of reason! Derek! you can’t- you can’t Die. It’s unexpectable and If you pull that stunt again! I’ll- Ill do something drastic!”

Derek sighed heavily rubbing his face as the door rang as you walked over to get your and Elis dinner as Derek was starving as you called Eli to get his food. he appeared just enough to grab and disappear as you pulled out your burger. Derek walked over to the empty bag asking for his food.

“Im saving you from the greasy Food! im sacrificing myself for your heath.”

he rolled his eyes going to the fridge and pulling out leftovers as you watched him as you spoke, “I’m not saying I won’t marry you.” he looked over at you stunned as you held your burger in both hands as you spoke “but right Now - Right now.. for at least a week. I need to think. I love you completely but I will not get engaged to you and then have the biggest fight we have ever had. our story deserves better than that.”

he nodded his head, ‘good because I didn’t ask.”

“Good!”

you went to bed. after dinner. when it was ten pm. you walked out to the living room to see Derek stretched out on the sofa. he took up the entire sofa as you noticed the blankets as you spoke, “why aren’t you in bed?” he looked over at you stunned, “I’m allowed On the bed?’

you crossed your arms tightly as you spoke, ‘Yes. come on- we fought before and I never sent you to the sofa.”

“This is a big fight.”

you calmed down. Derek could smell it and see it. you were exhausted but you weren’t Furious anymore. “I get what you did.. and If- If I was in the same position.. I would Do the same thing... that being said. you do that again. and I’ll bring you back to life! to kill you myself! you can’t Leave us! in some heroic brave matter! I dont want that! I want forever with you! “ Derek rubbed his face, “I want that too. you know I do!”

nodding your head. you held your arms tightly, “good. so it’s settled! forever is the minimal sentence!”

“But if you and Eli are in danger.”

“We fight and we survive together!”

Derek realized he wouldn’t win this battle. so he nodded his head saying okay. as you both went to bed. as the morning arrived. you got ready for work as Derek spoke ‘let’s go on a date.”

you smiled nodding your head, ‘that be great.. Oh.. before date night. I and Eli have been talking.”

Derek intensely tensed up at that. whatever you thought of. was Not going to be good. he could already see the evil twinkle in your eyes as you spoke, “Before you ask for my hand again. I’m going to need you to Ask for permission.’

Derek looked over at his Son as he spoke, “from Eli? I just assumed he would be happy- wouldn’t you be?”

Eli chuckled nodding his head, “yea I would love it. but It’s not me you need permission from.” Derek looked back at you as you spoke, “my Dad.”

Derek almost fell off the barstool hearing that. your dad Hated him!

Derek asked you a long time ago about your preference of if he should ask permission from your dad. and you said “if you had a good relationship with him. I would love it.. but he-.. so so with you.”

which Derek always took that he got a pass from asking. but now. you spoke, “Eli and I both agree. this will be best.”

“What How ?”

Derek looked at his son. he’s Son who betrayed him to be on your side. Eli spoke, “I think it would be good for you to work a bit harder on your relationship with Coach. I mean he’s family. And you’re all about family. and it is good for you and him to bond over this.” you smiled wrapping your arms around Eli kissing his cheek, “excellent Point! it would be a great bonding experience! come on I’ll take you to school. while your dad. preps on what he will say to my dad!”

“this is evil” Derek grumbled. you just chuckled patting his back. “So is trying to abandon us!”

“Saving you isn’t abandoning you!”

“Asking you to spend time with my father isn’t cruel! either!” you stated as Derek spoke up, ‘Eli! You suppose to be on my side!”

Eli grabbed his bag fast as he spoke, ‘no way! im on mom’s side.” you smiled beamingly at Derek to that response where you then stuck your tongue out. before stating. “I’m the favorite expect it.” and left.

Derek Knew he wasn’t your dad’s favorite person, by the fact that when you go off to have dinner with him. Coach always wants eli. and he was just a passing person. who didn’t need to be there. and he always called Derek “Joe.” it’s been years and he doesn’t remember Derek's name. Derek sighed going to the school to talk to Coach. he was walking in the gym as Derek spoke, ‘Coach.”

even after all this time Derek wouldn’t dare call him by he’s first name. you call him “Dad’ but everyone else in the world called him coach. Coach turned seeing him as he grumbled greatly as he spoke, “what you doing here Blain?”

“Derek- and I wanted to. ask for your permission.”

“For what?” he turned to look at Derek as Derek took a deep breath as he spoke, ‘Y/N is already a member of my family.. i want- i want to make it official and ask her to marry me.. But she wants to get your permission first.”

Coach smiled widely, ‘you must of screwed up pretty bad. Y/N doesn’t care about that barbaric old tradition. you must of screwed up bad buddy.” Derek sighed heavily lowering his head. he should of realized this wasn’t going to be a quick conversation. Coach chuckled loudly as he spoke, ‘no!’

“No one could Love her more, and I can provide for her and I love Her!”

“Apart of me wanting to ask, the other part says knowing will only make it worst. and it has to be pretty bad if she’s making you come here. for my blessing! th

“Coach if you just-” Derek was interrupted by the bell and forced to leave he returned a few hours later for Eli’s game as he tried again to ask for your hand. he arrived outside the locker room waiting for Coach to come out as he heard him quoting a movie. the Speech from Independence day. Derek knew that was your favorite move. you make him sit thru it every fourth of July and you and Eli have had heated debuts over the second movie. Coach walked out as Derek stepped forward. Coach cursed under their breath as he Derek spoke, “Coach Hi- I just- Please give me your blessing.”

“Im going to make this So profoundly difficult. I’m not even sure you will Get it. you will probably Die before you get it! GREENBERG! NO!” Coach screamed chasing after Jr Greenberg. the day that Kid joined the school was the First time Coach thought about retiring. he looked back at his daughter’s boy toy as he spoke, ‘never you hear! Pretty boy! Never!”

Derek wasn’t sure why he wasn’t good enough for you. He was wealthy, and respected in the community he helps with the police investigations he owned a house and a business.it was after the game as Derek walked over to Coach who sighed heavily hoping he left already.

“why aren’t I good enough for Y/N?”

Coach crossed his arms tightly to himself, and everyone around them moved on as Coach spoke, “I don’t appreciate that you were Dating my daughter when she was a teenager.”

Derek’s jaw fell, “” Coach- I wasn’t- we didn’t get together until she was 20- She had a massive crush on me but I swear I didn’t touch her!”

Coach stared at him unconvinced. Derek stepped forward as he spoke, “I left for three years to make sure- I didn’t do anything stupid I swear. I would never disgrace Y/N that way. I love Her I have since I first met her but I kept my distance.”

Coach nodded his head as he spoke, “then Why the Hell did it take you until Now to ask her to marry you? is she pregnant.”

Derek shook his head as Coach dashed off. and Derek Followed.

you knew that your dad would take a lot of convincing you were his entire world. And he hated Derek. you weren’t sure why. Derek’s great. he’s So much tamer and calms now vs hot head. pouch first asks later Derek he was when you were a teenager. two weeks.

you were coming home after work. exhausted. working in a high school full of hormonal teenagers. and watching Derek Dashing around following your dad. it was entertaining seeing the Famous Derek Hale scrambling to get permission from Coach. But after two weeks. you couldn’t believe he hasn’t gotten it yet. what did your dad see in Derek that you didn’t?

tonight you were going over to find out and watch a movie with your dad. you walked in to change into sweats and off to your dads. getting to his house you made popcorn and snacks. as he came home “Sugar pop?”

“hey Dad.” you walked into the living room as he spoke, “Change of plans i want to get pampered.” Nodding my head as I spoke, ‘Sure?”

your dad loved getting his nails done. so you and he used to have Medi peddi days growing up. so it wasn’t abnormal. after the nails were done you both got burgers. and went back to his place and watched the movie.

“Why don’t you like Derek?”

Dad glanced over at you, he sighed heavily, “he’s a troublemaker, I remember him being connected to murder! he was a subject.”

“he was cleared.” you added as he nodded his head, “but he also.. When did you guys get together.”

“I was almost 21. after I wore him down and convinced him to give me a chance why?”

your dad rubbed his nose as he spoke, ‘So not when you were a kid?”

shaking your head, you spoke, “No- I mean I had a massive crush on him. but he kept turning me down.”

“Seriously?” Coach questioned you nodded your head softly,

“I tired Everything. and I only got worst when he came back- when he finally accepted my date. I was over the moon.”

“So the whole time you were in school- you weren’t with Derek?”

you bite your bottom lip. as you spoke, ‘when-When Derek kept turning me down. I -I. Greenberg asked me out.” it was your biggest regret and Shame. Dating a Greenberg.. your dad Gagged as he spoke, ‘Oh God! my daughter is tainted you need Holly water did you get holly water to cleanse your body? and Soul? God, please tell me you didn’t sleep with Greenberg.”

“I got a Priest to come and make the Kitty pool in the back full of holly water. and I soaked in it for eight hours. No one is more disgusted than I am.”

‘”oh God! i thought I raised you better than that! Greenberg! Why not Scott. or biles?”

‘Stiles- and Stiles..- look we aren’t going thru my sex history.. alright I feel gross.. it was Greenberg!”

“Did he come inside?’

shaking his head you spoke-” No.’ he did. but your dad was to freaked out by the idea of you and his Mortal Enemy that he said you had to go home. you said you loved him as he spoke, “GREENBERG SERIOUSLY!” he groaned as he hugged you bye as you went home.

getting home to see the Lights were off. but the solar panel string lights you bought months ago that Derek promised to install up on the porch were up. and lighting, and there were more lights. then Stiles. you smiled as he was wearing a Suit and holding Daisy.

“you are brave giving me Flowers.. Derek will hit you.” he chuckled as he spoke, “Don’t worry im not hitting on you. just take the flowers. and go inside.” smiling as you took them and walked inside to open the door to see Peter. again in a suit. and with now lilies. you were lead thru out the house. seeing candles were the main source of light. the entire pack was there as you were giving over five pounds of flowers. you walked outside to see Derek and Eli standing under a Tree. and your dad was there. all three were wearing Suit as Eli, Derek and Dad had your favorite flower. a single one each, the big tree that had a swing was full of lights as you walked over as Eli and Dad gave you their flowers. as Derek smiled brightly at your pure shock impression.

he stepped over giving you your flower as you spoke, ‘yes!” everyone chuckled as Derek spoke, “Let me ask!” everyone including you chuckled as Derek spoke, ‘you remember when we drove past this place during the open house. on our first date?” you nodded your head, ’yea- the tile in the kitchen was neon green.” he grinned at that as he spoke, “we came outside to this large yard and you said this was a home. that the backyard was the best place because you could see A Large family doing get-togethers and you could see a swing on this tree and seeing a little kid playing on it for hours. I decided to buy this house the moment you said it was a home. and I wanted a home for me and Eli.. your dad asked me what was the moment I realized. you were It. you were my Soul. you were over for dinner. Eli was seven. and he cried and you went to check on him. you found Eli wide awake as you grabbed him and showed him paint cards and I walked into you both looking at color. I knew you loved Eli when you fought with me. to paint his room from the yellow it was. you instantly loved Eli with your entire heart. I was afraid to ask you to marry me sooner. because what we had was Perfection and I didn’t think marriage could change that... then you brought up a baby.. I never been more excited for that chapter of our lives. But i realized i didn’t want to be your baby daddy.. I Didn’t want to be just some Guy. I already knew I would burn the world for you. it took until recently to realize. you would burn the planet down to the ground if something happened to me. or Eli. I can’t just be your boyfriend anymore.. I want to be your husband. and I want to have a baby with you. and to Fill this yard with family and do family BBQs and to have kids running around. you- Y/N you saved me from the darkness. I can’t bare the days your Sad. and the days you smiling. you melt my heart.. your are Everything I ever wanted and Everything i was terrified of. you can destroy me So easily. and giving someone that much power.. is terrifying.. but you are worst the at heartbreak. make me the happiest man in the world Y/N bug me for the rest of my life.”

Malia was crying. she was pushing tears away from her face as Stiles hugged Lyida tightly listening into their friend’s proposal. when Coach was crying as he spoke, ‘She accepts.”

you all laughed as you said “DAD” Derek looked at you as you were crying as hugged him tightly. crying saying Yes. as you kissed his face and peppered his face with kisses until you found his lips as he squeezed you tightly hugging him tightly. crying also.

Coach broke the celebration as he spoke, ‘I want three more.”

“three more proposals?”

“No! Grandbabies Me and Eli discussed it... we want three.”

Everyone laughed with that as Derek mumbled softly into your ear “I’m good with three more.” you laughed as you said No way to three One baby and that’s it!

****possible part 3 coming******

#fandom imagine #imagine #fandom #teen wolf #teen wolf imagine #derek hale #derek hale imagine

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shadowmaat · 4 months ago

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Biases and belief

I follow T Kingfisher over on Bluesky. So much fun stuff! Wonderful author. Excellent additional nerdery things. Unfortunately, she's become a target for rage trolls because of her very reasonable stance on the recent bombshell in the bookworld.

Look. Everyone knows that when a woman comes forward with allegations about a man regarding SA, it's a good idea to believe her. Chances are that she wouldn't put herself through the shitscape of public scrutiny if something hadn't happened. While there are outliers who only do it for attention or to try and get back at someone, generally speaking there's every chance she's telling the truth.

There is, however, a difference between speaking up on your own, speaking to a credible news source, and going to a hate group with a grudge against the target of those allegations. This doesn't make anything that happened less true, but it's going to vastly alter how the news is perceived by the general public.

The issue is further complicated by a lot of people having a very deep hatred of the accused for various reasons. They are highly motivated to believe the allegations because it "proves" they were right to hate him. That's the whole "confirmation bias" issue and leads people to believe things without fact checking because you're already inclined to believe the worst about someone.

Personally? I've enjoyed a lot of the author's stuff, but I wouldn't consider myself a fan and I don't follow him on any social media sites (though I've reblogged stuff that crossed my dash). I've also defended him in the past when I felt fans were being unreasonable in their expectations of him.

When I heard the news I was inclined to believe it. Because, as stated above, when a woman (or women in this case) come forward, chances are there's truth in what they say. I've also heard questionable things about him before. And, generally, I think men steeped in popularity and with certain levels of money and power are more likely to take advantage of women knowing that they can get away with it.

Then I learned that the source of the news- the ONLY source of the news- was unreliable, heavily biased, and inclined to lie and/or misrepresent information. This is less than ideal because you have "believe women" coming up against "don't trust liars with a grudge."

"Legitimate" news sources have been reporting on the allegations, but every single one of them has cited the same questionable source. This is, again, less than ideal, and I really wish that news agencies cared more about truth than page hits. I wish that they'd make an effort to verify and confirm info themselves rather than leaving it at "so-and-so reported" and pretending that was good enough.

And this is where Ursula (T Kingfisher) has run into trouble. She's stated over and over that it isn't that she disbelieves the women, but that she doesn't find the source credible and that there's no way to confirm the accusers actually exist. I can see how that would be tricky given that victims have a right to a certain amount of anonymity in cases like this, but also, how do you prove they exist?

Ursula has faced a LOT of angry dogpiling, telling her to shut up, demanding she delete her posts/account, and accusing her of being a SA apologist who refuses to believe women. (And probably worse stuff I'm not seeing on account of her blocking/ignoring the really terrible ones). It isn't true, but every time she tries to explain that people just get angrier and keep ignoring her words in favor of raging at her for what they believe she said. If it's exhausting to watch I can't even imagine how it feels to be the target of so much misguided anger like that.

As for me, like Ursula, I'm still inclined to believe the allegations, but it'd be really damn helpful if an independent and less biased source could confirm the details. Maybe even police reports? A court filing? A court filing would really cement the issue, and I know they have provisions in place (at least in the US) to protect identities exactly for cases like this.

Anyway, my points are:

Ursula did nothing wrong and is, in fact, right to want a better source.

Believe women.

Question unreliable sources.

Beware of confirmation bias.

Don't fall for the fallacy that all men are scum.

Remember that some men ARE scum, even if they're your faves.

Read. Carefully.

Don't attack someone when you aren't in possession of all the facts.

Stop assuming the worst out of every conversation you start with someone.

You can believe women and still want a credible source of information.

Also, as an addendum, just because That Author hasn't responded to the allegations doesn't make them true. It means he's listening to his lawyer while the situation is investigated.

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anthraxplus · 1 year ago

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forgive me for writing so much about tumblr but i have a lot of thoughts

here's the thing about tumblr. i've found it interesting how we continue to call our profiles our "blogs" even though they function differently to the common idea of a blog (like livejournal). but in a way, calling our profiles our blogs makes sense. they're our place to post things we've made or repost content we like. it's more personal than twitter, which has an "information" or "discourse" lens applied to it. the focus on twitter has increasingly been to encourage sharing of information (i.e news or opinions). tumblr's focus has always (afaict) been to encourage sharing of our creations, kinda lumping blogging in there as "self expression" or something to that effect. technically speaking, artists should be more at home on tumblr than on twitter.

but people using their blog as ONLY a blog (no reblogs, just their thoughts or creations - like a livejournal) are in the minority on this site, right? make no mistake, i follow tons of artists who use their blog in a very focused way, but mostly we're all reblogging other people's posts, putting their art on our blogs and riffing in the tags on people's jokes. it is very much a site of Content, Things To Share. the fact that we can blog on here almost feels oddly secondary. but, ok. tumblr is a site for people to post their creations/content, and said content finds an audience through being discovered or reblogged.

so why is it so damn hard to find anything?

like, ok, obviously we can do that. type words into the search bar and you will definitely find posts. but dont you often wonder why the hell some posts showed up in your search and others didnt?

you're telling me filtering searches by top posts of all time isnt showing me the post that has this exact string of text (+- punctuation), but is showing me posts that... have those words in them, scattered, and sometimes not even that exact word ("piss" vs "pissing")?

what about when you try to search for a word or phrase that you KNOW is on a blog in some post, but searching for it brings up NOTHING? i just had to deal with this when searching someone's blog for a specific post i had just seen on my dash - i can only imagine tumblr told me no such post existed because it wasnt tagged with that word.

and all of this feels so obviously wrong, right? even without tags, we should be able to search for words or phrases in a more reliable way on both the site and our blogs. i dont think im alone in the thought that the search function is almost useless - even if it gives me what im looking for sometimes, it can be a struggle, and mostly it just doesnt feel worth it. this is how we can keep ourselves in insular circles and struggle to break out of them. it is literally easier to do this than it is to find new shit.

so, yknow, staff isnt wrong when they say this:

tumblr does need growth, but not necessarily by attracting new users (though, idk, i wouldn't mind that). tumblr needs internal growth. this site is stuck in the early 2010s in a way that is baffling to me, and it has continuously failed to adapt to its userbase's needs in a way that honestly doesnt make sense, and when they do change something, it just ends up causing more strife between staff and users.

so, for example: tumblr needs money to keep functioning, obviously. the common practice is to have ads on the site. but oops, the ads suck and everyone hates them. ok, allow users the option to pay to get rid of ads. but oops, a lot of people dont want to give money to the site that continuously breaks itself (among many other complaints). ok, meet users in the middle and allow them to pay to advertise their stuff - this should be, like, the perfect mix of everything, right? being able to advertise your content on the content site? but oops, this is only a good option because finding new content is so goddamn hard that random people shoving their posts onto your dash is the only remaining viable option. when you have to rely on pure chance/luck for your posts to even be found, even when you do everything in your power to increase their visibility, you're not gonna want to stay here.

i feel like addressing the search function should be the staff's top priority before they implement anything else. we need to be able to find content on the content site. i think thats pretty obvious. once it works the way it already should have, then they can worry about what comes after. i think people feel this animosity with staff because we're struggling to continue to use this site while they struggle to find ways to get money out of us. i think if people felt they could actually use tumblr in the way it intuitively feels like it should be used, that kind of animosity would be more rare*. but until we get that, any change to the site is going to feel wrong.

fwiw though, i'm glad to see staff say that the site basically doesn't work. like. goddamn. took them long enough. i just hope (probably baselessly) that their acknowledgement of this issue will lead to some fixes that benefit the foundational usage of the site.

*yes, there is animosity towards staff for other reasons - like, yknow, how innocuous selfies of trans women get flagged as "mature" (among other things) - but that's an issue of culture/enforcement and not necessarily the raw function of the site, so i feel like it's best suited for a different post

tl:dr PLEASE FIX THE FUCKING SEARCH FUNCTION, IT NEVER SHOULD'VE BEEN ALLOWED TO BE THIS BAD AND I THINK ITS ISSUES HAVE BEEN A MAJOR REASON FOR TUMBLR'S STEADY DECLINE

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fizzingwizard · 2 years ago

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Today on things I IMMEDIATELY turned off, lol...

But first, props to tumblr for at least making sure we all knew about the change, not just silently adding it and making some random tumblr user release a psa. And for making it customizable/easy to disable.

I get how this could be fun. I hate blaze, but if you've got cash to burn and you really think so-and-so's video of a hamster in a party hat is the funniest thing ever, sure, it's your money, waste it how you want. Better to throw some coins to tumblr for hamsters in party hats than treat us to more mainstream ad content.

Of course, out of all the blazed posts that have ended up on my dash, very few have been hamsters-in-party-hats worthy. Most have just been stuff I didn't care about or something mildly insulting. But maybe the hamsters-in-party-hats crowd just don't have money.

Biggest concern is whether you get to consent first to someone else choosing to blaze your post. Tumblr says if someone blazes our post we'll be informed, and have the option to cancel it. It's an opt out instead of opt in. That's what bugs me. I hate opt out. I'd rather that if someone wanted to blaze my post, I had to definitively say "Yes." What if someone blazes my post and I'm in the hospital and don't see it before it's live? You CAN pull it after, which is great, but why not skip that whole song and dance by requiring people to opt in before the post can go live?

Lol. I don't agree. But we'll see.

Also disagree. Blazing is not the same as reblogging. I can't control what other people reblog which ends up on my dash, but I CAN choose who I follow, and if their content becomes something I'm not interested in, I can unfollow them. Only way out of Blaze is to cough up money for ad-free browsing. A while ago I tried blocking blogs that put blazed posts on my dash, but the blazed posts continued to appear. Maybe that has been fixed, I don't know.

The sticking point really is a matter of consent. I've been on tumblr for ten years. I don't freaking remember most of what I posted back then. There's probably something embarrassing someone who really disliked me could dig up if they wanted to. If this option MUST be opt-out, then I wish at least all posts made before the change were opt-in only. If the approval process before someone is allowed to blaze your post is more robust than I anticipate, I won't mind as much though. Basically just let people have the MAIN say in whether or not their post gets blazed, instead of treating the informing of the OP like it's a courtesy.

Tumblr should keep in mind that a lot of original content here is diary-like, personal, meant for a small group of followers who feel comfortable with each other. It's not a site many people use to make their BRAND. That's ALSO one of the good things about tumblr - I don't sit around worrying about how fake everyone is like I do almost anywhere else. That's why I'm not interested in this feature. I can see it being used for good - blazing a gofundme for someone in need, for example - but I just don't want to wade through even more cringe I didn't ask for on my dash. Sigh.

Anyway, hopefully everyone who doesn't want this opts out without a hitch (for side blogs too).

#tumblr

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yourtoradorasextendedwarranty · 2 years ago

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Regret

So there are going to be people whom don't agree with me, and that's more than fine but let me be clear with what I'm saying and if your going to bitch at me at least read and TRY to understand why I'm saying what I am.

So I recently came across this on my dash and didn't want anyone attached to it getting hate but I also want to address it. For a long time it was the case that doctors would not tie your tubes for religious reasons. Because well having kids within a relationship was bringing new people into the world who will have to potential to end up in the kingdom of god. After that, it was more likely than not that a doctor would refuse if you were married and had not discussed it with your husband first. More so since society back then was very much man of the house is in charge. Then that shifted to worries about legal issues that might result from people attempting to sue over regret later in life. Now a days it's a general mix of different stuff.

Fact is I don't see tweets like this as helpful at all and I will talk about why. We have become really complacent with easy access to everything and general ignorance and narcissism. We are so fucking full of ourselves. And I know so many women in my own life I have talked to that told me they are glad they did not have the ease of access to get tubes tied or just be sterilized outright because that, "Fuck kids, I never want them ever. Just let me fuck and be done with it. I don't want the responsibility. Kids are evil and awful. They are basically just parasites and global warming". These are all talking points I have heard from real people. And you might think. "Oh well women's birthing rights" when you see stuff like this. And sure. This stuff should not be illegal. However, with that being said, it should not be super easy to find or achieve.

People when they are younger, especially with all the indoctrination and propaganda are becoming more self serving. Something that often times will change with time and maturity. And I will say this. I can not count how many women I have heard from both in person and online that tell me they found doctors who will perform the procedure on them and now that they are older they hate themselves and the doctors that let them get it done with no push back. Now, I'm not saying in any way that women should not have the agency to make that choice. They should have the agency to make that choice. With that said though, again, I can not count the number of women I have talked to or have told their own stories online who hate that they made that choice. They hate that they got not push back at all, or that they were even allowed to do it. And it's a rough line in the sand. Do you stop people from doing it after one kid? Two kids? Don't bother at all stopping anyone and end up with a generation or 2 with enough anger and regret to put it into legislation that it should not be allowed at all? Because that is where we will be if this keeps up.

I don't agree with sharing this information because it ends up screwing people in the end more times than it doesn't. And look, I get that there are asshole doctors that won't do it after 1, 2 or even 3 kids sometimes. I really do get that. At that point though, put in a little leg work to find a doctor that will. Show that you are insistent enough to look for one to do it. Idk. My opinion on this is more swayed by the fact of I've seen the depression and self hating regret that ends up coming from some of these women that will never get to have their own kids. Sure, some of you may say, "Oh well they can adopt", but do you have any IDEA how hard that process actually is in many states? That's not also considering the fact that most of the women I know with kids tell me that while pregnancy is rough sometimes, they would not have chosen surrogacy or adoption over it. I get that's not everyone. I also get that there are people whom will never actually want kids ever. Thing is, Biology is strong when it comes to human nature. Eventually, most people no matter how they feel now, will want kids. Of course, there are also those that will adopt. However, and this is no offense to adopted kids, it's not the same. I'm sure that you can come to love and adopted kid as much as if it were your own. Thing is though, That does not change the fact that it will never be the same as baring your own child. On a fundamental level, that is just a fact.

Long story short? I don't agree with making these resources easier to find. If you want to find it, you should be hard pressed enough to do the leg work yourself. Why? Because if you are SO dead set on it, once you have put in the leg work and the persistence to find someone and get it done, You will have literally no one but yourself to blame. Because here is the hard part you don't get. Eventually, most men want kids of their own. Most men are not fond of adoption because they want a kid that is their own flesh and blood. And if you just say, "Nah I don't care I never want kids" and you get it done. That WILL put a lot of stress on a relationship and eventually might end up breaking it. And sure, if it wasn't meant to be then so be it. Though, I will also say this. If you are going behind your partners back and getting that done, you don't deserve whoever you are with. End of story. If you can't trust them enough to tell them, or ask them what they think about it, then clearly you don't need to be with one another. And maybe he thinks, like many other people know, there is a chance that one day you will want kids. And certainly, maybe you never will. But to decide to throw away any chance of EVER having kids is pretty insane to me.

And yes. Before you say it. I know you can retrieve eggs as a just in case. But most of the people today that scream about never wanting kids would likely never even opt for that. The biggest reason I feel like I do on this is because I have more than one friend who will never be able to have kids. Because they decided to put in leg work and find a doctor, one while 22, one while 24, who would do the procedure. They are now in their late 30's and sometimes cry themselves to sleep because they feel alone. One had a husband of 3 years leave her because she couldn't have kids and when he turned 30, it finally hit him that he wanted one. And he was against adopting because he wanted the kid to be his. View that as shitty as you like and tell me, "There are things he could have done or communicated and they could have compromised or worked things out somehow" and I will agree with you. But he made a decision based on how he felt. And while I feel like that makes him kind of a dick, I also think he was within his rights to decide that. She was devastated. More so because she started wanting kids around the age of 28-29. And she personally doesn't believe in using surrogacy.

This was meant to be a lot shorter but let me be clear about something. We live in a world full of know-it-all's. People older than us have wisdom from the lives they have lived and we just turn our noses up at them and say, "NO! I don't care what you think or say you know. I'll be different. I'll be better. I want things my way and only my way". And they years pass and you realize you were a MORON, and should have listened. There was once a time where we as a society respected wisdom. Now we shit on it because we can't see past our own noses. Really though. If I had a nickel for every girl that told me she didn't want kids only later to want them and love the fact they had them. I'd be pretty fucking wealthy. I think getting your tubes tied before you have even on kid is nuts to me. More so if you are not prepared to have a back up in case you do want a kid. And again. If you are the type that would go behind your partners back to get a procedure like that done, you don't deserve the person you have. And I will not budge on that view.

To wrap up. I don't think it should be illegal. But I also don't think it should be easy to accomplish. I also think we need to stop pushing propaganda of "Live life for yourself, only for yourself and kids are bad". Because like I said before. Keep that shit up. YOU WILL scorn an entire generation who will double back and ban that shit through federal legislation. Or severely limit it. <(That will be the result of making it easier and easier to find and do).

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distort-opia · 1 year ago

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Oh man, it's been so long since you asked for an elaboration with this hilarious art, I'm sorry about the delayed response! This has been in my drafts, half finished, for so long. And the explanation got really long and full of comic panels, so for the health of everyone's dash, I'm putting it under the cut. Hope it's an interesting read!

Alright, as I mentioned in my tags, before The Man Who Laughs, which is Brubaker's retelling of Joker's introduction arc... there was Images by Dennis O'Neill. In it, Joker makes a less dramatic first appearance in the Gotham underworld. He tries to sell an extortion scheme to some gangsters, which Batman promptly shows up to stop; but Joker lies to him that he's got nothing to do with them, and Batman lets him go:

However, Joker's voice sticks with Bruce.

Meanwhile, Joker continues to climb up the Gotham crime ladder with the goal of getting money, with Batman obviously trying to stop him. And the thing is, Joker sees Batman as a pest, an annoyance... At the end of the comic, Bruce disguises himself and manages to fool Joker, and finally places why Joker's voice sounds familiar. And it's really funny to me because Joker is so pissed off, while Bruce is kinda just... having fun with it?

Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #50

So yeah, Joker's appearance on the scene had nothing to do with Batman as his obsession in this comic, with Bruce underestimating him and antagonizing him in a sort of hilarious way. But this isn't the currently canon Joker first appearance story. That one's Batman: The Man Who Laughs, by Ed Brubaker.

This one goes differently, though it shares a lot of similarities. Joker's a new criminal who emerges with a terrifying lethal gas that makes people laugh themselves to death. However, he's not focused on extortion schemes; his goal is very specifically taking Gotham down. He hates the city. And Bruce does not underestimate Joker, he figures out that this is a new kind of criminal, a kind he hasn't faced before-- and takes him very seriously. And here's Joker barely bothering with Batman, paying him attention as an urban legend at first:

Afterwards, when "Bruce Wayne" becomes one of the targets, Bruce pulls the bonkers move of letting himself get affected by Joker's toxin, so that he'd understand Joker's way of thinking. Though I can't really criticize that, since it is what leads him to understand that Joker's ultimate goal is to poison the Gotham Reservoir, so that he'd kill the whole city. Their final confrontation is also funny to me:

Batman: The Man Who Laughs

Bruce's smile as he fucks up Joker's plan really gets me. Again, Joker's so pissed off and Bruce is all "LMAO. Super dangerous psychopathic criminal, you made it too easy for me!" As if that's not gonna come back to bite him in the ass.

Later comics, however, like to paint Joker as being obsessed with Batman from the very start. The instance which you posted from Joker War, more specifically! Tynion has Bruce flashback to The Man Who Laughs, and say the following:

Batman (2016) #95

This supposedly took place as Bruce was on his way to the Reservoir. But we've seen Joker's reactions to him in the actual comic, and they don't really fit with this; the ending rather suggests that Joker gets obsessed with Batman after Batman saves his life. Chronologically, Dead to Rights immediately takes place after that, in which Joker pretty much says that now is when he's getting interested:

Batman Confidential #22

And then Bruce, in all his obsessive I-need-to-understand-this-freak glory, disguises himself as Matches Malone, gets himself in the same cell as Joker, and tries to needle information out of him. But Joker immediately realizes who he is, and taunts him for it. He also keeps pretty much addressing Batman out his window, knowing that Batman's watching him. By the end of this arc, Joker's expressed more than once that he's chosen Batman as his nemesis; hell, he even saves Batman's life.

After this, Joker's pretty much Bat-obsessed, but Bruce is also clown-obsessed. Batman: Going Sane takes place early in the Bruce's career, within the first year or two. In it, Joker thinks he murdered Batman, and as a consequence... stops being "Joker" and invents a new persona for himself, called Joe Kerr. But what's striking about the comic is how mutual the obsession is:

Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #67

That's just one example. This way of thinking keeps popping up in Bruce's internal monologue. And all the while, the reader is shown how desperately "Joseph Kerr" is fighting nightmares of his former Joker persona, and of Batman, because the two are so intertwined he knows that the second Batman comes back, Joker will come back. Which is exactly what happens. Even though we're clearly shown that Joker's obsession with Batman is incredibly pervasive, we're also already shown that Joker resents it. That he genuinely wants Batman dead, and that the desire coexists with whatever other feelings he has towards him:

Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #68

"Let go of me" is such a tragic TKJ callback. The terrified Red Hood asked Batman to stay back, to leave him alone, but Batman doesn't, and Red Hood ends up jumping into the vat. It's no secret that Bruce feels responsible for that, and it undoubtedly connects to Bruce's mutual fixation with Joker so soon after he makes his appearance.

And, well. The fixation continues, but it turns into much more than that, on both of their sides. Joker defines himself by what Batman needs, and the thing is, Batman defines him by that too:

Batman (1940) #682

This is what I meant in my previous tags, when I mentioned that Bruce's self-centredness plays a role in who Joker became. This sequence is all from Bruce's head, it's how he's recounting essential events in his life. He's the one to go "I am sick of these childish pranks" and then connect Joker to it, as well as Joker's constant renewal and recreation of himself.

And Morrison is not even the only one to say with their whole chest that Batman needs Joker. Neil Gaiman said that too when he had Alfred watch Bruce spiral into depression, and then become Joker for the sake of Bruce's mental health-- to give him something to fight, in Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader.

But I've already gotten so long, so I'll stop here! Essentially, many of Bruce's behaviors towards Joker, and his incredible obsessiveness (that more than one character has remarked on, including Alfred, Tim and Barbara) towards him, influenced who Joker became. Scott Snyder picked up on it and used this beautifully in Death of the Family, in which Joker pretty much spells it out and refuses to let Bruce not confront the reality of it. Joker has become Batman's negative and his shadow, and he knows it-- while Bruce knows it too, but he's doing his utmost to repress the knowledge and refuses to admit it.

I know I keep making jokes about batjokes but Bruce, buddy, what kind of poetic love letter till death do us part soulmates bs speech is this

(Batman 2016 Vol.2 The Joker War )

#I am once again lovingly marveling at Bruce's unhingedness #batman #bruce wayne #joker #batjokes #batjokes meta

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cardboard-aliens · 2 years ago

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The cast swap AU 100% is an excuse for Jack & Tenenbaum content, but the main swaps are:

Jack - Eleanor

Tenenbaum - Delta

Atlas - Sinclair

Ryan - Lamb

The basic canon divergent background information leading up to 1960 got long so imma put it under a cut.

Big Mommas and Little Brothers are the protector gatherer duo of this AU. There are no Dads and sisters.

Lamb gathers enough followers and momentum to usurp control of Rapture from Ryan.

Ryan gets promptly thrown INTO jail with his most loyal supports.

The most important detail about Ryan going to jail is that he will not be able to kill Jasmine 😌💖

Lamb now has control of the whole city to devote into her Utopian research.

Various people take issue as the notion of everyone being reborn into one collective mind comes forth. Mostly Sinclair, who can't make money as a pile of ADAM goop, so he uses his resources to arm citizens. Wanting to take advantage of the split in the city for his own plays for control.

Fontaine is pissed he didn't take over the city from Ryan, and has to reconsider all his plans, since they were built around Ryan. Ultimately abandoning his contingency plan to fake his death earlier.

Lamb takes over Fontaine's assets once he's gone for ADAM research, and starts funneling out any problematic staff to be turned into ADAM goop so they can be part of the collective.

Tenenbaum has been unimpressed with Fontaine, Ryan and now Lamb , and was preparing the gatherer cure to try and do some damage to the program. But then Ryan goes to jail, and Tenenbaum knows Fontaine's weapon only served a purpose with Ryan in the picture. And then Fontaine 'dies', and Lamb seizes the company and Tenenbaum doesn't trust her to be any more humane to the children. So she tries for a mad dash to disappear with Jack before Lamb discovers Project WYK.

This escape attempt goes poorly, and they get caught. Lamb assumes Jack is just your average gatherer that Tenenbaum was defecting with, and since Tenenbaum is CLEARLY going to be a problem Lamb is like "You wanna hang out with a brother so much I can arrange that" and ships them off tho the protector and gatherer programs to be bonded. (very much like mark and cindy)

There is now an opening for a lead scientist at Fontaine Futuristics that needs filling. No one is qualified for the job, and Lamb takes someone Ryan had a target on: so say hello to Dr. Johnny Topside. Who knows some marine biology which was good ENOUGH for this understaffed department.

Suchong hates working with Topside, and complains about how under qualified he is constantly. And he complains about Lamb's research goals, and how she cancelled his previous projects to focus on ADAM's memory properties.

Suchong's work load gets smaller as more of his projects get handed off to Topside, which makes him even more irritable. And then he starts to suspect Lamb is phasing him out to turn his egotistical behind into a pile of ADAM.

So Suchong disappears, trying to find refuge in Persephone with Ryan (b/c Ryan IS charismatic, and is doing well enough for himself in prison) trying to barter for his own safety by telling Ryan about Fontaine Company secrets, mainly about Project WYK and how Ryan's flesh and blood was put into the Gatherer Program.

Johnny Topside can't keep track of what's going on, because one minute he mapping the ocean floor, the next he found atlantis, then he's been branded a spy, next he's the lead scientist in a department he doesn't understand, and now his life is being threatened if he doesn't experiment on children. He just wanted to collect rocks samples.

The little brothers are baby and he is NOT on board with their treatment, and starts digging into what research was left behind by the woman who had this job before him--and he finds Tenenbaum's research on the Little Brother cure. Which he then picks back up to finish development, and then prepares to go on the run to save as many brothers as he can.

Sinclair and Lamb have been raising their own tensions across the city, proving they're just the same as Fontaine and Ryan as fights break out. Which ultimately escalate back up to riots breaking out against Lamb's rule, headed by Sinclair this time around.

The chaos causes a lot of canon typical events to happen, Rapture is in decline, Ryan can leave prison to kill a big momma and drag his gatherer son to prison to ride out the war, and Johnny takes a run for it to get away from Lamb with a handful of children.

(For convenience sake Eleanor is her BS2 age in 1960, otherwise she'll be like. 9 or 10. and not able to actually fight. and I want her to do COOL BATTLE STUNTS) Eleanor has been paying CLOSE attention to her mom this whole time, and watching her boil people down into ADAM, experiment on children, and manipulate the people to throw their lives away fighting for her has done a lot to disillusion her from Lamb's way. Some come 1960, she's got a gun, a dream to see the sun, and figured the best way to beat her mother is with the enemy of her enemy: Sinclair.

#bioshock #bioshock 2 #bioshock au #cast swap au #big momma au #cardboard cutouts #THIS GOT TOO LONG im not sorry #and none of this is even like. the MEAT that i'm invested in. it's just rapture's set up

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wornoutmouse · 3 years ago

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Fun fact: the type of snake determines how much it will cost to catch it. 500 if venomous, 150 if it's not. Prices may vary of course.

Inumaki will talk often in this cause I'll be damned if I gotta make this story dependent on narration. Also its outside of the jjk world so he can talk

……...2 dicks

Everyone knew not to travel alone in the woods. There always had to be 2 people together. One to stay on the correct trail and the other to keep a lookout. "Why?" Monsters of course.

As a child, you remembered hearing all the stories surrounding the dark forest your small town lived next to. After a certain age of course you stopped believing in the legends but that didn't mean you purposely went into the forest. Even without the demons and jin, there were other things to worry about like poisonous plants and snakes. You hated snakes.

Even so, this situation you put yourself in was partially your fault. The whole week you'd been rushing to and from work, parties, and late night ice cream runs. In the blur of mind maddening chaos, there was a day you forgot to close and lock your back porch.

Just one day was all it took for something to slip inside, and naively you thought nothing of it when your back porch door was open. Your home was your parents childhood home so your backyard was the woods. You didn't expect anything like an axe murderer to slip in, maybe small bugs and the occasional deer. But then the hissing began to start.

All throughout your house you could hear the telltale sound of a snake hissing. At first you thought you were tripping whenever it stopped. You checked the faucets for dripping, the yard for cicadas, and even made sure none of your appliances weren't about to burst into flames. You didn't figure out what it was until you decided to directly follow the sound one day coming along a lower cabinet. You peek through the crack and are introduced to a white scaled face.

You screamed falling back as it slithered out the cabinet. Your heart bounded as more and more of its body pooled out of your cabinet taking up most of the bathroom floor when it finally evacuated. Your grandfather would ridicule you for this claim but you swore up and down it stopped to look at you like it was annoyed before slithering away.

Nowadays the sounds mainly echo from the kitchen so you've been having take out a lot more often having to dash to deliver the leftovers to your refrigerator.

Time and time again you tried calling a snake tamer to lure and capture the creature out but each time, they had come up empty-handed letting 500 dollars go down the drain. When you told your grandfather about it he was of course unhelpful, ranting on how you'd forgotten all your mother and grandmother's old wives’ tales about Nagas and Yokai.

Sitting in your living room eating cheese puffs and painting your nails white, you spoke to him over the phone. The rattling today had been louder and more incessant than usual. "I can't even sleep, it usually would have stopped by now but it's been going on all day. It's like it's trying to kick me out of my own house!" The bell-like voice of your grandfather seeps through the phone, "Maybe it is, or maybe it's trying to lure you into its den!"

You snort, "Well if it is it's doing a shit job cause I was already in here." As if hearing your words the hissing stops. "Thank god! I'm going to go get some sleep before it starts again." Your grandfather stutters out faint words about names and cheesecake. Useless information that meant nothing for you as you took a dash to your bedroom, cutting off all the lights.

You sighed diving atop the comforting softness of your silk sheets. You wait a few minutes to see if the rattling will start again. When it doesn't you smile and allow yourself to get drowsy. When you finally come knocking on the Sandman's door, a soft hiss catches your lagged ears and something pale glints in the sun lit hallway. It wasn't until later you remembered how high on the ceiling the eyes were.

You don't know for how long you sleep, you don't even know if it was the same day. But how agonizing cries and bones snapping sound was not something you wanted to know. You rip your covers off your body and tiptoe towards your bedroom door that was somehow closed. Cracking the door, you see familiar pearl white scales. Unknowingly long, thick, white, and blocking the door from opening farther than a smidgen.

The limb would tremble every now and again before swirling into a different position or rising into the air all together. The next thing you see is red. Splotches and speckles decorating the white canvas the more your eyes traveled until finally, your eyes met flesh, real human flesh. The base of this snake-like tail connected to a man equally as pale if not paler than the pure white appendage.

The man raised his arm and in his clawed hand was the head of a man begging for his life. "Please, let me go. I didn't mean to, I didn't know anyone was here!!"

The snake man said nothing, you still couldn't see his face and was honestly glad you couldn't as the fearful man became pale in the face. "Oh God, what are you!?" Before you could see more you close the door breathing raggedy. You can hear a bone-chilling crunch of bones through the solid wood and the gurgle of the man as he is devoured. Silence ensues before the rattling begins.

Having nowhere else to go you hop into your bed covering yourself with your blankets in hopes that if you go back to sleep it will all be over. You see light creep onto your sheets and hear your carpeted floor rustling as something heavy drags across it. The hissing amplifies as the tail presumably enters your room.

The door shuts and you are shrouded in darkness once again. You shake as your bed dips and your sheet is dragged slowly off your body. You clench your eyes shut feigning sleep. I should have listened now I'm going to die!

Something cool touches your foot and travels up. As it creeps more and more of your body is enveloped in a cool surrounding. You are raised above your bed before settling into a circular area. "Open your eyes." Is almost too easy how you follow the command and stare up at the being you had been terrorizing you for 6 months.

To your surprise his face was normal save for two blue lines protruding from each corner of his mouth before ending in round circles with a dot in the middle. "W-What are you?" The man stares down at you tilting his head but says nothing. You sit up straighter in the cold of his tail. "I asked you what you are and what are you doing in my house?!" This time a coy smile forms on his face. "Not your house, my den, remember?" A distant memory of your conversation earlier crosses your mind.

The man leans towards you with interest in his eyes. He seemed to wonder what you'd do next. "Well, what do you want with me?" He shrugged, still staring incessantly. You were starting to feel uncomfortable so just asked the question resting on your mind. "Are you going to eat me?" To your horror, he shrugged again. "Well can you please get out of my house?" The man straightens in posture yet brings your body up with him. "You are in my den."

You look away, unable to maintain constant eye contact. Something wet and fluttering touches your skin making you jump. As unexpectedly expected, the man had a forked tongue. Based on your knowledge as well this meant he was smelling you. "Can I at least have your name?! The man's eyes widened in surprise as if he'd never been asked his name before. He goes back to nuzzling your neck, tongue flickering periodically. "Inumaki." You snort, "Inumaki, that's a weird name." Inumaki stops his nuzzling to stare at you

"What is your name?" The animosity behind the words sent a chill down your skin. His tail coils tightly as he looks down at you. Hands that hadn't moved before come up to feel underneath your ribs. "Y/n… my name is Y/n." The rattle begins again and the coil unravels. Inumaki's docile demeanor completely shifts to a knowing one. One that made you feel trapped and controlled as his eyes adopted a blue sheen to them "Y/n!" Inumaki exclaims your name as if it was a celebration. He raises your high in the air with his hands as he uncoils his tail.

You were oblivious to what was going on until a small slit that was invisible to the naked eye, opened up where Inumaki was connected to his snake half. Your mouth goes dry when two nubs begin to protrude from the area until 'nub' is no longer the appropriate word for the two white appendages hanging from his presumed crotch area. They were the same phallic shape as a human but became more narrow towards the end. In all honestly they looked like tails as well

Inumaki cups your pussy through your pajama bottoms making you snap back into reality. "H-Hey wait a minute what's this?! What's going on here!" Inumaki used a clawed thumb to press into your crotch, fitting his finger between your pussy lips through the fabric. "Names mean more than gold to me, little Y/n."

You close your legs trapping Inumaki's arm in-between. He chuckles as he has no problem adding more pressure to your clit. The end of his tail rattles at the same rhythm of his finger in an almost hypnotic way. You have nowhere to go as you are suspended high in the air, your arms propping themselves against the ceiling just as your wetness soaks through your underwear and dampens the crotch of your pajama bottoms.

You release a whiny moan when Inumaki moves his fingers counter clockwise. "Don't run from it." Your pussy clenches around nothing and the sight of Inumaki's cocks became more and more appealing. Inumaki's forked tongue flickered past his lips as he watched you. Previously circular pupils became slits the more he studied you. The way your eyelashes fanned your high cheekbones. How your bottom lip was shiny and wet from your tongue swiping across it nervously.

You were perfect to carry his eggs so damn perfect, but not yet. Inumaki's tail closes the door behind him, the last words leaving your lips, "Fuck."

Bruh I lost inspiration but I refuse to let 1,855 words go to waste

#inumaki x black reader #unfinished smut #jkk smut #naga #monster fucker #terato #black y/n

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rose2jam · 3 years ago

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Why It Was Practically Inevitable That Severus Snape Would Join A Cult, an essay by Rose Jam

So, let’s talk about Cults. Disclaimer: This is just information I’ve gathered over the years from my personal fascination with religious cults. I’m in no way an expert or a psychologist or whatever. This is just my personal understanding from the research I’ve done.

A cult is started when a wildly charismatic Leader feels like they have a purpose, a higher calling, or a mission to be fulfilled (or they could also just be an egomaniac). Maybe they really do feel like what makes them special comes directly from a higher power, be that God, or the Heir of Slytherin, but either way, this person has a pathological need to be worshiped, and they need followers in order to do that.

So, how does one obtain Followers easily? By finding the misunderstood misfits of society, and promising them something. The people who feel like no one else understands them, or their ideologies. But this Leader? This Leader GETS IT, MAN! The Leader understands them perfectly, vindicates them, and makes them promises along the way. Like, if they stick with the Leader, then not only will they finally be understood, but they themselves will also be revered. That they will rise above all of the others who have put them down for so long, and will come out on top as a superior being.

Any of this sounding familiar?

Charles Manson preyed on young people in the middle of the hippie movement, mostly women, who were feeling lost, lonely, and in need of guidance, or in terms of the men he recruited, seeking power over others. Not all of these people were poor or helpless; some of them came from middle class, or even rich homes and families. Yes, some of them came from broken homes, but all of them felt “broken” themselves, in some way. So Manson used their desires to have a family to draw them in. He then used LSD and other drugs to keep them under his control, and he created a manipulative environment where the members of his “family” felt they could never leave him, and if they didn’t follow his commands, something horrible would happen to them. I’m not going to go into full detail on the Manson Family Murders, but if you’re personally interested, check out the Podcast “Cults” on Spotify.

So back to basics, this Leader draws in Followers with flowery promises of community, power, family, or whatever. But once the Leader has that following, the terror will begin. Cult Leaders are usually master manipulators, and have completely brainwashed their followers into believing the “us vs them” mentality, that the outside world is evil, that the outside world will only harm them, that the outside world would never understand what they’re doing on the inside. And that the Leader is the only one who knows the truth, so they better stick with him. Or maybe the Leader has gaslit his followers so completely, that they become dependent on him for everything, to the point where they don’t know how they would possibly function without the Leader. Or, the Leader has created an environment that’s so hostile, that Followers are too afraid of what might happen to them if they tried to leave, or didn’t do what the Leader commanded. Typically, it’s a combination of all of the above. Destructive cults will either hurt others outside of their circle (The Manson Family, Sect of Nacozari), harm themselves (Heaven’s Gate, The Ant Hill Kids), or both (The People’s Temple, Aum Sinrikyo).

Now that I’ve laid this foundation, I’m going to tell you why it was practically inevitable that Severus Snape would join a cult.

Snape’s childhood ultimately laid the foundation for the mental state he would be in when he decided to join the Death Eaters. He grew up in an abusive household, where his father, the muggle, had his magical wife so thoroughly whipped, that she couldn’t (or chose not to) use magic to defend herself, or her son (1). Eileen had obviously told Severus about magic, about Hogwarts, about what a wonderful place it was, and what a wonderful gift magic could be. Severus also watched as Tobias beat the magic out of her. (I know it’s debated whether Tobias actually physically abused his family, but he certainly verbally/mentally/emotionally abused them, so the term “beat” could be used figuratively as well). I don’t think it’s unreasonable to believe that Severus developed an extreme hatred of muggles with “burn the witch” mentalities from a very young age because of this.

Enter Lily, perhaps the only other magical person in his life besides his mother up to this point. He sees her using magic out in the open, perhaps recklessly, for fun, and he sees an opportunity to make a friend (and, admittedly, to be smarter than someone about something for a while). He was so eager to tell her all about magic, because getting to learn magic, and go to Hogwarts, has possibly been the only thing keeping him going in his young life. And now he’s made a friend, a real friend who doesn’t think he’s weird because he’s magical. Unlike Petunia, yet another muggle who makes fun of him for being weird (2). And Lily actually seems to like him back. For a kid who probably hasn’t received a lot of affection in his life, this is monumental. This friendship is everything. Why wouldn’t he love her?

So the time finally comes to go to Hogwarts. Severus gets to escape his abusive household, and finally has an opportunity to embrace magic for the first time in his life. But almost immediately, he’s met with a hic-up. Specifically, James Potter and Sirius Black. So Severus is no longer facing abuse exclusively from muggles who think he’s weird, but now he’s also getting it from other magical people who think he’s weird (3). And this started on the fucking TRAIN before he even GOT to Hogwarts. You can’t tell me that wouldn’t sour a kids dream right off the fucking bat. And then, when he finally gets there, he’s separated from his only friend, by being sorted into different houses (4). What a way for a life-long dream to be thoroughly dashed in less than 24 hours.

Let’s look at Snape’s Hogwarts experience. He’s a good student, and he pours himself into learning as much magic as possible, and at being the best he can possibly be, probably motivated by a desire to be better than what his Father thinks possible. During this time, he is regularly bullied and abused by the Marauders. Sometime before his 5th year, the Incident at the Shrieking Shack took place. It definitely sucks to have been so thoroughly fucking duped, and put into a life-threatening situation involving a goddamn werewolf (5). But perhaps even worse than that, the salt in the wound, was that no one fucking did anything about it (6). He saw Sirius and James and Remus get out of that situation without facing any sort of proper punishment (as in, they all still stayed at the school as opposed to being expelled like they DEFINITELY SHOULD HAVE BEEN (At least Sirius should have been)). Dumbledore was looking out for the Marauders, but no one was looking out for Severus. On top of that, Severus isn’t allowed to TELL anyone about it, not even Lily. So, he goes through what was possibly one of the most traumatic experiences of his life, and he can’t even tell anyone that it happened.

So, what sort of support system does Severus have during all this? He has Lily, sure (who literally told him he should be GRATEFUL to James, one of his abusers). But, what he really has, is Slytherin House (7). I’ll say it plainly: Severus was sorted into a house that was already full of existing cult members. McGonagall says in Sorcerer’s Stone that “Your house will be like your family” (she at least says it in the movies, I’m too lazy to get up and reference my books rn lol). So, Severus’ family, his support system, for 10 months out of every year, is a house that is already full to the brim with pureblood elitists with prejudiced ideals, who would absolutely vindicate Severus in his dislike for muggles. As a kid first getting sorted into the house, it’s obviously not unreasonable to become friends with the people you’re literally living with. His dorm mates became his family. So, when his dorm mates started to become Death Eaters… This is headcanon, I fully admit, but like, fuck, Severus didn’t have a lot of friends, and was probably already drifting apart from Lily. Do you really think he was going to tell the people he had to live with every single day, not to mention the only people that had been supporting him for years, to go fuck themselves for using Dark Magic? Especially when he was probably feeling like he was on the verge of thinking that their rhetoric made some sense?

On to Snape’s Worst Memory (8). At this point, he’s spent 5 years in Slytherin House, with fellow students who casually throw around the M word. He gets attacked by James and Sirius, he’s practically defenseless, and then the girl who he’d considered his closest friend for so long… has to force herself not to smile when he’s thrown upside down and exposed to everyone on the grounds. Sure, she was trying to defend him at first, but she also fucking nearly smiled at his humiliation, his pain, his abuse. So he hurls the one word that he knows is going to cut the deepest, that will hopefully hurt her as badly as she has hurt him. And it works.

Severus had been beaten down his entire life. By Muggles and Magic Folk alike. And finally, he’s betrayed by Lily, his last lifeline to the light. He betrayed her as well, of course. But he did try to show remorse. And she doesn’t forgive him (9), which was her prerogative, of course.

So. Who does he have left?

I’ve placed little (numbers) throughout my writing here. Each of those numbers denote the specific events that led Severus to becoming an angry young man, who hates muggles, hates (some) magic folk, and resulted in him feeling weak, helpless, and desperate. For what? For power, for a family, for a community. For a world where he is no longer the weird one. For a world where he’s respected, strong. For the world he thought he was going to be a part of, when he arrived at Hogwarts in his first year.

And it just so happens that this is the exact world that Voldemort is (allegedly) trying to create.

Severus Snape was angry, and vulnerable, and as such, he was practically the poster child for the type of person who would be susceptible to falling for a cult. Maybe he was recruited by his friends in Slytherin House. Maybe he was recruited directly. Either way, charismatic Tom Riddle came along, understood how he felt, where he was coming from, told him he deserved better, and offered him all of the things he never had in his life. And being at rock bottom, being the lowest of the low, to Severus it must have seemed like a miracle of an opportunity, or perhaps, like the only chance he had left.

Now, let me be extremely clear; everything I’ve written is not trying to EXCUSE Severus Snape for his actions. There is always a point where personal responsibility must come into play. Except for children born into cults or victims of kidnapping, nearly every person who has ever joined a cult has made the personal decision to join it. I’m just trying to express how unbelievably easy it is, for a Cult Leader to find people with damaged lives and low self-worth, to suck them in with promises of a fulfilling life and grandeur, and for those people to be easily swept up and brainwashed into believing that what they are doing is right. (Or that what they are doing is required, because the alternative is more horrifying.)

The type of people who joined the Death Eaters are the same type of people who joined Heaven’s Gate, or The People’s Temple, or yes, The Manson Family. Now, I’m just going to say, from my own personal point of view, I do not vilify anyone who’s ever joined a destructive cult. On the contrary, I feel sorry for them. Because most people who join a cult, don’t necessarily do it signing up for the… end result of what happened to them. Some of them totally do, like Heaven’s Gate. Most of them knew that the end result was going to be the “evacuation of their earthly vessel”. But the people who joined the Manson Family, for instance, did not initially join it KNOWING how it was going to end. They were part of the family long before Manson even came up with Helter Skelter, and by the time the Tate-LaBianca Murders took place, they were already too far gone to go against it.

I highly recommend anyone who’s interested in a humanizing view of former cult members, to read the essay “Leslie Van Houten: A Friendship” by John Waters. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/leslie-van-houten-a-frien_b_246953

Or, at the very least, listen to this 7 minute NPR interview with John Waters about the essay https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111585116

It’s the story of how notorious film maker John Waters, became friends with former Manson Girl, Leslie Van Houten, and about how she broke away from the cult after her conviction, how she’s spent the last 51 years of her life recovering from the psychotic influence of a maniac who’d promised her the world, and how even though she was convicted to life WITH a possibility of parole, it’s never been granted to her, despite the fact that she has done literally everything possible to try and atone for her crimes.

Maybe I’m just a bleeding heart. I’m pretty much the only person I know who feels sorry for Leslie Van Houten and other cult members who were brainwashed, abused, and manipulated into doing a lot of the horrible things they’ve done. But there are people in the world, who have committed FAR more heinous crimes than the Manson Family murders, and who are far less repentant than Leslie, but because those crimes weren’t as notorious, they get to walk free.

Addendum: When I first posted this, I had a few people point out to me that they had always associated Voldemort and the Death Eaters with Hitler and Nazi Germany. This is a perfectly fair point, but one that I personally don’t jive with, and the reason is simply the numbers. There were literally millions of people in the Nazi party during WW2. Death Eaters don’t even reach triple digits, as far as I’m aware. As I hinted at in this essay, I consider Voldemort and the Death Eaters to be MUCH closer to Charles Manson and the Manson Family. The Manson Family 100% had Nazi ideology, of course. "Helter Skelter” was Charles Manson’s prediction that there was going to be a massive race war; one that the Whites were going to lose, and that he and his Pure White family would emerge from it in order to rule over the remaining Blacks. Kinda... sounds like a Death Eater thing, huh?

Sorry. Back to Snape. There is a lot we don’t know about Severus’ actual time as a Death Eater. I think it can be reasonably assumed he’s never actually killed anyone before Dumbledore (In Prince’s Tale, Severus questions if his soul would be safe from killing Dumbledore, and Dumbledore implies that his soul would not be damaged by helping an old man avoid pain and humiliation. This leads me to believe that Severus never committed any soul-damaging murders before this). Beyond being a sneaky spy and delivering the prophecy to Voldemort, his time as a Death Eater is all up for conjecture.

Severus does make one important deviation from the typical cult member mold, however. In the end, he manages to break away from the cult. The scales fall from his eyes. In a figurative sense, the LSD has worn off. What made him sober up, was the threat to his last lifeline to the light. The one good fucking thing he’d ever had in his miserable life. He was brought back by genuine love. Ya know, the ENTIRE MESSAGE OF THE HP SERIES. And not only did he leave the cult, but he then spent the rest of his life actively attempting to destroy it, and atone for the mistakes he’s made, in an effort to bring back the world he’d been excited for, as an 11-year-old kid, so full of hope.

#Snape Meta #Severus Snape #Pro Snape #Snapedom #Snape Community #This will be the TRUE test of the tags #Essay Jam #Why It Was Practically Inevitable That Severus Snape Would Join A Cult

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blackwoolncrown · 4 years ago

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”This essay has been kicking around in my head for years now and I’ve never felt confident enough to write it. It’s a time in my life I’m ashamed of. It’s a time that I hurt people and, through inaction, allowed others to be hurt. It’s a time that I acted as a violent agent of capitalism and white supremacy. Under the guise of public safety, I personally ruined people’s lives but in so doing, made the public no safer… so did the family members and close friends of mine who also bore the badge alongside me.

But enough is enough.

The reforms aren’t working. Incrementalism isn’t happening. Unarmed Black, indigenous, and people of color are being killed by cops in the streets and the police are savagely attacking the people protesting these murders.

American policing is a thick blue tumor strangling the life from our communities and if you don’t believe it when the poor and the marginalized say it, if you don’t believe it when you see cops across the country shooting journalists with less-lethal bullets and caustic chemicals, maybe you’ll believe it when you hear it straight from the pig’s mouth.”

>>Copied here in case anyone gets paywalled when they click the above. The full article is...a lot.<<

WHY AM I WRITING THIS

As someone who went through the training, hiring, and socialization of a career in law enforcement, I wanted to give a first-hand account of why I believe police officers are the way they are. Not to excuse their behavior, but to explain it and to indict the structures that perpetuate it.

I believe that if everyone understood how we’re trained and brought up in the profession, it would inform the demands our communities should be making of a new way of community safety. If I tell you how we were made, I hope it will empower you to unmake us.

One of the other reasons I’ve struggled to write this essay is that I don’t want to center the conversation on myself and my big salty boo-hoo feelings about my bad choices. It’s a toxic white impulse to see atrocities and think “How can I make this about me?” So, I hope you’ll take me at my word that this account isn’t meant to highlight me, but rather the hundred thousand of me in every city in the country. It’s about the structure that made me (that I chose to pollute myself with) and it’s my meager contribution to the cause of radical justice.

YES, ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS

I was a police officer in a major metropolitan area in California with a predominantly poor, non-white population (with a large proportion of first-generation immigrants). One night during briefing, our watch commander told us that the city council had requested a new zero tolerance policy. Against murderers, drug dealers, or child predators?

No, against homeless people collecting cans from recycling bins.

See, the city had some kickback deal with the waste management company where waste management got paid by the government for our expected tonnage of recycling. When homeless people “stole” that recycling from the waste management company, they were putting that cheaper contract in peril. So, we were to arrest as many recyclers as we could find.

Even for me, this was a stupid policy and I promptly blew Sarge off. But a few hours later, Sarge called me over to assist him. He was detaining a 70 year old immigrant who spoke no English, who he’d seen picking a coke can out of a trash bin. He ordered me to arrest her for stealing trash. I said, “Sarge, c’mon, she’s an old lady.” He said, “I don’t give a shit. Hook her up, that’s an order.” And… I did. She cried the entire way to the station and all through the booking process. I couldn’t even comfort her because I didn’t speak Spanish. I felt disgusting but I was ordered to make this arrest and I wasn’t willing to lose my job for her.

If you’re tempted to feel sympathy for me, don’t. I used to happily hassle the homeless under other circumstances. I researched obscure penal codes so I could arrest people in homeless encampments for lesser known crimes like “remaining too close to railroad property” (369i of the California Penal Code). I used to call it “planting warrant seeds” since I knew they wouldn’t make their court dates and we could arrest them again and again for warrant violations.

We used to have informal contests for who could cite or arrest someone for the weirdest law. DUI on a bicycle, non-regulation number of brooms on your tow truck (27700(a)(1) of the California Vehicle Code)… shit like that. For me, police work was a logic puzzle for arresting people, regardless of their actual threat to the community. As ashamed as I am to admit it, it needs to be said: stripping people of their freedom felt like a game to me for many years.

I know what you’re going to ask: did I ever plant drugs? Did I ever plant a gun on someone? Did I ever make a false arrest or file a false report? Believe it or not, the answer is no. Cheating was no fun, I liked to get my stats the “legitimate” way. But I knew officers who kept a little baggie of whatever or maybe a pocket knife that was a little too big in their war bags (yeah, we called our dufflebags “war bags”…). Did I ever tell anybody about it? No I did not. Did I ever confess my suspicions when cocaine suddenly showed up in a gang member’s jacket? No I did not.

In fact, let me tell you about an extremely formative experience: in my police academy class, we had a clique of around six trainees who routinely bullied and harassed other students: intentionally scuffing another trainee’s shoes to get them in trouble during inspection, sexually harassing female trainees, cracking racist jokes, and so on. Every quarter, we were to write anonymous evaluations of our squadmates. I wrote scathing accounts of their behavior, thinking I was helping keep bad apples out of law enforcement and believing I would be protected. Instead, the academy staff read my complaints to them out loud and outed me to them and never punished them, causing me to get harassed for the rest of my academy class. That’s how I learned that even police leadership hates rats. That’s why no one is “changing things from the inside.” They can’t, the structure won’t allow it.

And that’s the point of what I’m telling you. Whether you were my sergeant, legally harassing an old woman, me, legally harassing our residents, my fellow trainees bullying the rest of us, or “the bad apples” illegally harassing “shitbags”, we were all in it together. I knew cops that pulled women over to flirt with them. I knew cops who would pepper spray sleeping bags so that homeless people would have to throw them away. I knew cops that intentionally provoked anger in suspects so they could claim they were assaulted. I was particularly good at winding people up verbally until they lashed out so I could fight them. Nobody spoke out. Nobody stood up. Nobody betrayed the code.

None of us protected the people (you) from bad cops.

This is why “All cops are bastards.” Even your uncle, even your cousin, even your mom, even your brother, even your best friend, even your spouse, even me. Because even if they wouldn’t Do The Thing themselves, they will almost never rat out another officer who Does The Thing, much less stop it from happening.

BASTARD 101

I could write an entire book of the awful things I’ve done, seen done, and heard others bragging about doing. But, to me, the bigger question is “How did it get this way?”. While I was a police officer in a city 30 miles from where I lived, many of my fellow officers were from the community and treated their neighbors just as badly as I did. While every cop’s individual biases come into play, it’s the profession itself that is toxic, and it starts from day 1 of training.

Every police academy is different but all of them share certain features: taught by old cops, run like a paramilitary bootcamp, strong emphasis on protecting yourself more than anyone else. The majority of my time in the academy was spent doing aggressive physical training and watching video after video after video of police officers being murdered on duty.

I want to highlight this: nearly everyone coming into law enforcement is bombarded with dash cam footage of police officers being ambushed and killed. Over and over and over. Colorless VHS mortality plays, cops screaming for help over their radios, their bodies going limp as a pair of tail lights speed away into a grainy black horizon. In my case, with commentary from an old racist cop who used to brag about assaulting Black Panthers.

To understand why all cops are bastards, you need to understand one of the things almost every training officer told me when it came to using force:

“I’d rather be judged by 12 than carried by 6.”

Meaning, “I’ll take my chances in court rather than risk getting hurt”. We’re able to think that way because police unions are extremely overpowered and because of the generous concept of Qualified Immunity, a legal theory which says a cop generally can’t be held personally liable for mistakes they make doing their job in an official capacity.

When you look at the actions of the officers who killed George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, David McAtee, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Eric Garner, or Freddie Gray, remember that they, like me, were trained to recite “I’d rather be judged by 12” as a mantra. Even if Mistakes Were Made™, the city (meaning the taxpayers, meaning you) pays the settlement, not the officer.

Once police training has - through repetition, indoctrination, and violent spectacle - promised officers that everyone in the world is out to kill them, the next lesson is that your partners are the only people protecting you. Occasionally, this is even true: I’ve had encounters turn on me rapidly to the point I legitimately thought I was going to die, only to have other officers come and turn the tables.

One of the most important thought leaders in law enforcement is Col. Dave Grossman, a “killologist” who wrote an essay called “Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs”. Cops are the sheepdogs, bad guys are the wolves, and the citizens are the sheep (!). Col. Grossman makes sure to mention that to a stupid sheep, sheepdogs look more like wolves than sheep, and that’s why they dislike you.

This “they hate you for protecting them and only I love you, only I can protect you” tactic is familiar to students of abuse. It’s what abusers do to coerce their victims into isolation, pulling them away from friends and family and ensnaring them in the abuser’s toxic web. Law enforcement does this too, pitting the officer against civilians. “They don’t understand what you do, they don’t respect your sacrifice, they just want to get away with crimes. You’re only safe with us.”

I think the Wolves vs. Sheepdogs dynamic is one of the most important elements as to why officers behave the way they do. Every single second of my training, I was told that criminals were not a legitimate part of their community, that they were individual bad actors, and that their bad actions were solely the result of their inherent criminality. Any concept of systemic trauma, generational poverty, or white supremacist oppression was either never mentioned or simply dismissed. After all, most people don’t steal, so anyone who does isn’t “most people,” right? To us, anyone committing a crime deserved anything that happened to them because they broke the “social contract.” And yet, it was never even a question as to whether the power structure above them was honoring any sort of contract back.

Understand: Police officers are part of the state monopoly on violence and all police training reinforces this monopoly as a cornerstone of police work, a source of honor and pride. Many cops fantasize about getting to kill someone in the line of duty, egged on by others that have. One of my training officers told me about the time he shot and killed a mentally ill homeless man wielding a big stick. He bragged that he “slept like a baby” that night. Official training teaches you how to be violent effectively and when you’re legally allowed to deploy that violence, but “unofficial training” teaches you to desire violence, to expand the breadth of your violence without getting caught, and to erode your own compassion for desperate people so you can justify punitive violence against them.

HOW TO BE A BASTARD

I have participated in some of these activities personally, others are ones I either witnessed personally or heard officers brag about openly. Very, very occasionally, I knew an officer who was disciplined or fired for one of these things.

Police officers will lie about the law, about what’s illegal, or about what they can legally do to you in order to manipulate you into doing what they want.

Police officers will lie about feeling afraid for their life to justify a use of force after the fact.

Police officers will lie and tell you they’ll file a police report just to get you off their back.

Police officers will lie that your cooperation will “look good for you” in court, or that they will “put in a good word for you with the DA.” The police will never help you look good in court.

Police officers will lie about what they see and hear to access private property to conduct unlawful searches.

Police officers will lie and say your friend already ratted you out, so you might as well rat them back out. This is almost never true.

Police officers will lie and say you’re not in trouble in order to get you to exit a location or otherwise make an arrest more convenient for them.

Police officers will lie and say that they won’t arrest you if you’ll just “be honest with them” so they know what really happened.

Police officers will lie about their ability to seize the property of friends and family members to coerce a confession.

Police officers will write obviously bullshit tickets so that they get time-and-a-half overtime fighting them in court.

Police officers will search places and containers you didn’t consent to and later claim they were open or “smelled like marijuana”.

Police officers will threaten you with a more serious crime they can’t prove in order to convince you to confess to the lesser crime they really want you for.

Police officers will employ zero tolerance on races and ethnicities they dislike and show favor and lenience to members of their own group.

Police officers will use intentionally extra-painful maneuvers and holds during an arrest to provoke “resistance” so they can further assault the suspect.

Some police officers will plant drugs and weapons on you, sometimes to teach you a lesson, sometimes if they kill you somewhere away from public view.

Some police officers will assault you to intimidate you and threaten to arrest you if you tell anyone.

A non-trivial number of police officers will steal from your house or vehicle during a search.

A non-trivial number of police officers commit intimate partner violence and use their status to get away with it.

A non-trivial number of police officers use their position to entice, coerce, or force sexual favors from vulnerable people.

If you take nothing else away from this essay, I want you to tattoo this onto your brain forever: if a police officer is telling you something, it is probably a lie designed to gain your compliance.

Do not talk to cops and never, ever believe them. Do not “try to be helpful” with cops. Do not assume they are trying to catch someone else instead of you. Do not assume what they are doing is “important” or even legal. Under no circumstances assume any police officer is acting in good faith.

Also, and this is important, do not talk to cops.

I just remembered something, do not talk to cops.

Checking my notes real quick, something jumped out at me:

not

fucking

talk

cops.

Ever.

Say, “I don’t answer questions,” and ask if you’re free to leave; if so, leave. If not, tell them you want your lawyer and that, per the Supreme Court, they must terminate questioning. If they don’t, file a complaint and collect some badges for your mantle.

DO THE BASTARDS EVER HELP?

Reading the above, you may be tempted to ask whether cops ever do anything good. And the answer is, sure, sometimes. In fact, most officers I worked with thought they were usually helping the helpless and protecting the safety of innocent people.

During my tenure in law enforcement, I protected women from domestic abusers, arrested cold-blooded murderers and child molesters, and comforted families who lost children to car accidents and other tragedies. I helped connect struggling people in my community with local resources for food, shelter, and counseling. I deescalated situations that could have turned violent and talked a lot of people down from making the biggest mistake of their lives. I worked with plenty of officers who were individually kind, bought food for homeless residents, or otherwise showed care for their community.

The question is this: did I need a gun and sweeping police powers to help the average person on the average night? The answer is no. When I was doing my best work as a cop, I was doing mediocre work as a therapist or a social worker. My good deeds were listening to people failed by the system and trying to unite them with any crumbs of resources the structure was currently denying them.

It’s also important to note that well over 90% of the calls for service I handled were reactive, showing up well after a crime had taken place. We would arrive, take a statement, collect evidence (if any), file the report, and onto the next caper. Most “active” crimes we stopped were someone harmless possessing or selling a small amount of drugs. Very, very rarely would we stop something dangerous in progress or stop something from happening entirely. The closest we could usually get was seeing someone running away from the scene of a crime, but the damage was still done.

And consider this: my job as a police officer required me to be a marriage counselor, a mental health crisis professional, a conflict negotiator, a social worker, a child advocate, a traffic safety expert, a sexual assault specialist, and, every once in awhile, a public safety officer authorized to use force, all after only a 1000 hours of training at a police academy. Does the person we send to catch a robber also need to be the person we send to interview a rape victim or document a fender bender? Should one profession be expected to do all that important community care (with very little training) all at the same time?

To put this another way: I made double the salary most social workers made to do a fraction of what they could do to mitigate the causes of crimes and desperation. I can count very few times my monopoly on state violence actually made our citizens safer, and even then, it’s hard to say better-funded social safety nets and dozens of other community care specialists wouldn’t have prevented a problem before it started.

Armed, indoctrinated (and dare I say, traumatized) cops do not make you safer; community mutual aid networks who can unite other people with the resources they need to stay fed, clothed, and housed make you safer. I really want to hammer this home: every cop in your neighborhood is damaged by their training, emboldened by their immunity, and they have a gun and the ability to take your life with near-impunity. This does not make you safer, even if you’re white.

HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE A BASTARD?

So what do we do about it? Even though I’m an expert on bastardism, I am not a public policy expert nor an expert in organizing a post-police society. So, before I give some suggestions, let me tell you what probably won’t solve the problem of bastard cops:

Increased “bias” training. A quarterly or even monthly training session is not capable of covering over years of trauma-based camaraderie in police forces. I can tell you from experience, we don’t take it seriously, the proctors let us cheat on whatever “tests” there are, and we all made fun of it later over coffee.

Tougher laws. I hope you understand by now, cops do not follow the law and will not hold each other accountable to the law. Tougher laws are all the more reason to circle the wagons and protect your brothers and sisters.

More community policing programs. Yes, there is a marginal effect when a few cops get to know members of the community, but look at the protests of 2020: many of the cops pepper-spraying journalists were probably the nice school cop a month ago.

Police officers do not protect and serve people, they protect and serve the status quo, “polite society”, and private property. Using the incremental mechanisms of the status quo will never reform the police because the status quo relies on police violence to exist. Capitalism requires a permanent underclass to exploit for cheap labor and it requires the cops to bring that underclass to heel.

Instead of wasting time with minor tweaks, I recommend exploring the following ideas:

No more qualified immunity. Police officers should be personally liable for all decisions they make in the line of duty.

No more civil asset forfeiture. Did you know that every year, citizens like you lose more cash and property to unaccountable civil asset forfeiture than to all burglaries combined? The police can steal your stuff without charging you with a crime and it makes some police departments very rich.

Break the power of police unions. Police unions make it nearly impossible to fire bad cops and incentivize protecting them to protect the power of the union. A police union is not a labor union; police officers are powerful state agents, not exploited workers.

Require malpractice insurance. Doctors must pay for insurance in case they botch a surgery, police officers should do the same for botching a police raid or other use of force. If human decency won’t motivate police to respect human life, perhaps hitting their wallet might.

Defund, demilitarize, and disarm cops. Thousands of police departments own assault rifles, armored personnel carriers, and stuff you’d see in a warzone. Police officers have grants and huge budgets to spend on guns, ammo, body armor, and combat training. 99% of calls for service require no armed response, yet when all you have is a gun, every problem feels like target practice. Cities are not safer when unaccountable bullies have a monopoly on state violence and the equipment to execute that monopoly.

One final idea: consider abolishing the police.

I know what you’re thinking, “What? We need the police! They protect us!” As someone who did it for nearly a decade, I need you to understand that by and large, police protection is marginal, incidental. It’s an illusion created by decades of copaganda designed to fool you into thinking these brave men and women are holding back the barbarians at the gates.

I alluded to this above: the vast majority of calls for service I handled were theft reports, burglary reports, domestic arguments that hadn’t escalated into violence, loud parties, (houseless) people loitering, traffic collisions, very minor drug possession, and arguments between neighbors. Mostly the mundane ups and downs of life in the community, with little inherent danger. And, like I mentioned, the vast majority of crimes I responded to (even violent ones) had already happened; my unaccountable license to kill was irrelevant.

What I mainly provided was an “objective” third party with the authority to document property damage, ask people to chill out or disperse, or counsel people not to beat each other up. A trained counselor or conflict resolution specialist would be ten times more effective than someone with a gun strapped to his hip wondering if anyone would try to kill him when he showed up. There are many models for community safety that can be explored if we get away from the idea that the only way to be safe is to have a man with a M4 rifle prowling your neighborhood ready at a moment’s notice to write down your name and birthday after you’ve been robbed and beaten.

You might be asking, “What about the armed robbers, the gangsters, the drug dealers, the serial killers?” And yes, in the city I worked, I regularly broke up gang parties, found gang members carrying guns, and handled homicides. I’ve seen some tragic things, from a reformed gangster shot in the head with his brains oozing out to a fifteen year old boy taking his last breath in his screaming mother’s arms thanks to a gang member’s bullet. I know the wages of violence.

This is where we have to have the courage to ask: why do people rob? Why do they join gangs? Why do they get addicted to drugs or sell them? It’s not because they are inherently evil. I submit to you that these are the results of living in a capitalist system that grinds people down and denies them housing, medical care, human dignity, and a say in their government. These are the results of white supremacy pushing people to the margins, excluding them, disrespecting them, and treating their bodies as disposable.

Equally important to remember: disabled and mentally ill people are frequently killed by police officers not trained to recognize and react to disabilities or mental health crises. Some of the people we picture as “violent offenders” are often people struggling with untreated mental illness, often due to economic hardships. Very frequently, the officers sent to “protect the community” escalate this crisis and ultimately wound or kill the person. Your community was not made safer by police violence; a sick member of your community was killed because it was cheaper than treating them. Are you extremely confident you’ll never get sick one day too?

Wrestle with this for a minute: if all of someone’s material needs were met and all the members of their community were fed, clothed, housed, and dignified, why would they need to join a gang? Why would they need to risk their lives selling drugs or breaking into buildings? If mental healthcare was free and was not stigmatized, how many lives would that save?

Would there still be a few bad actors in the world? Sure, probably. What’s my solution for them, you’re no doubt asking. I’ll tell you what: generational poverty, food insecurity, houselessness, and for-profit medical care are all problems that can be solved in our lifetimes by rejecting the dehumanizing meat grinder of capitalism and white supremacy. Once that’s done, we can work on the edge cases together, with clearer hearts not clouded by a corrupt system.

Police abolition is closely related to the idea of prison abolition and the entire concept of banishing the carceral state, meaning, creating a society focused on reconciliation and restorative justice instead of punishment, pain, and suffering — a system that sees people in crisis as humans, not monsters. People who want to abolish the police typically also want to abolish prisons, and the same questions get asked: “What about the bad guys? Where do we put them?” I bring this up because abolitionists don’t want to simply replace cops with armed social workers or prisons with casual detention centers full of puffy leather couches and Playstations. We imagine a world not divided into good guys and bad guys, but rather a world where people’s needs are met and those in crisis receive care, not dehumanization.

Here’s legendary activist and thinker Angela Y. Davis putting it better than I ever could:

“An abolitionist approach that seeks to answer questions such as these would require us to imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society. In other words, we would not be looking for prisonlike substitutes for the prison, such as house arrest safeguarded by electronic surveillance bracelets. Rather, positing decarceration as our overarching strategy, we would try to envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment-demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance.”

(Are Prisons Obsolete, pg. 107)

I’m not telling you I have the blueprint for a beautiful new world. What I’m telling you is that the system we have right now is broken beyond repair and that it’s time to consider new ways of doing community together. Those new ways need to be negotiated by members of those communities, particularly Black, indigenous, disabled, houseless, and citizens of color historically shoved into the margins of society. Instead of letting Fox News fill your head with nightmares about Hispanic gangs, ask the Hispanic community what they need to thrive. Instead of letting racist politicians scaremonger about pro-Black demonstrators, ask the Black community what they need to meet the needs of the most vulnerable. If you truly desire safety, ask not what your most vulnerable can do for the community, ask what the community can do for the most vulnerable.

A WORLD WITH FEWER BASTARDS IS POSSIBLE

If you take only one thing away from this essay, I hope it’s this: do not talk to cops. But if you only take two things away, I hope the second one is that it’s possible to imagine a different world where unarmed black people, indigenous people, poor people, disabled people, and people of color are not routinely gunned down by unaccountable police officers. It doesn’t have to be this way. Yes, this requires a leap of faith into community models that might feel unfamiliar, but I ask you:

When you see a man dying in the street begging for breath, don’t you want to leap away from that world?

When you see a mother or a daughter shot to death sleeping in their beds, don’t you want to leap away from that world?

When you see a twelve year old boy executed in a public park for the crime of playing with a toy, jesus fucking christ, can you really just stand there and think “This is normal”?

And to any cops who made it this far down, is this really the world you want to live in? Aren’t you tired of the trauma? Aren’t you tired of the soul sickness inherent to the badge? Aren’t you tired of looking the other way when your partners break the law? Are you really willing to kill the next George Floyd, the next Breonna Taylor, the next Tamir Rice? How confident are you that your next use of force will be something you’re proud of? I’m writing this for you too: it’s wrong what our training did to us, it’s wrong that they hardened our hearts to our communities, and it’s wrong to pretend this is normal.

Look, I wouldn’t have been able to hear any of this for much of my life. You reading this now may not be able to hear this yet either. But do me this one favor: just think about it. Just turn it over in your mind for a couple minutes. “Yes, And” me for a minute. Look around you and think about the kind of world you want to live in. Is it one where an all-powerful stranger with a gun keeps you and your neighbors in line with the fear of death, or can you picture a world where, as a community, we embrace our most vulnerable, meet their needs, heal their wounds, honor their dignity, and make them family instead of desperate outsiders?

If you take only three things away from this essay, I hope the third is this: you and your community don’t need bastards to thrive.

RESOURCES TO YES-AND WITH

Achele Mbembe — Necropolitics

Angela Y. Davis — Are Prisons Obsolete?

CriticalResistance.org — Abolition Toolkit

Joe Macaré, Maya Schenwar, and Alana Yu-lan Price — Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?

Ruth Wilson Gilmore — COVID-19, Decarceration, Abolition [video]

#acab

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