#he’s escaping his abusive family!!

[homehauntsyou]

genuinely sam's face in 05x16 when he goes "I can't control this stuff" kills me every fucking time. he's so resigned. he's teary-eyed but it doesn't matter because dean is more upset. he's reliving the night he was disowned. he's reliving the night he really thought he was free.

and he's talking about the fact that he can’t control the memories in heaven but he's also talking about his existence. he can't control the fact that he has powers in the first place, can't control the fact that they're destined to be on either side of the apocalypse, can't control the fact that evil literally chose him.

and he’s trying to make himself look small, with hunched shoulders and hands in his pockets like. AUGH. this got out of hand.

[fatehbaz]

patience being tested. being forced by a bizarre unfortunate situation to adhere to university requirement technicality by taking this simple basic elementary "introduction to environmental history" class.

this class is from facilitators/program which do, like, "history of the American frontier" or "history of fishing and hunting" and still basically subscribe to that old-school twentieth-century idealization and celebration of characters like Teddy Roosevelt and reverence for a mythical arc-of-history-bent-towards-justice narrative of the often-clumsy but ultimately-benevolent US federal government and its mission to "save nature" through the miracle of "sustained yield," while heroic federal land management agencies and "heritage" institutions lead to way, staffed by exceptional individuals (appeals to nostalgia for the frontier and an imagined landscape of the American West; ego-stroking appeals to flattering self-image that center the environmentalist or academic). where they invoke, y'know, ideas like "ecology is important because don't you enjoy cross-country skiing in The Woods with your niece and nephew? don't you like hunting and fishing?" which makes it feel like a time capsule of appeals and discourses from the 1970s. and it invokes concept of "untouched wilderness" (while eliding scale of historical Indigenous environmental relationships and current ongoing colonial violence/extractivism). but just ever-so-slightly updated with a little bit of chic twenty-first-century flair like a superficial land acknowledgement or a reference to "labor histories" or "history from below," which is extra aggravating when the old ideologies/institutions are still in power but they're muddying the water and diluting the language/frameworks (it's been strange, watching words like "multispecies" and "Anthropocene" over the years slowly but surely show-up on the posters, fliers, course descriptions, by now even appearing adjacent to the agri-business and resource extraction feeder programs, like a recuperation or appropriation.) even from a humanities angle, it's still, they're talking at me like "You probably didn't know this, but environmental history is actually pretty entangled with political and social events. In fact, we can synthesize sources and glean environmental info from wacky places like workers' rolls in factories, ship's logs, and poetry from the era." and i'm nodding like YEP.

the first homework assignment is respond to this: "Define and describe 'the Anthropocene'. Do you think 'the Anthropocene' is a useful concept? Why or why not?" Respond in 300 words.

so for fun, right now in class, going to see how fast i can pull up discussion of Anthropocene-as-concept solely from my old posts on this microblogging site.

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ok, found some

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I think that the danger in any universal narrative or epoch or principle is exactly that it can itself become a colonizing force. [...] I’m suspicious of the Anthropocene as concept for the very reason that it subsumes so many peoples, nations, histories, geographies, political orders. For that reason, I think ideas like the Anthropocene can be a useful short-hand for a cluster of tangible things going on with the Earth at the moment, but we have to be very careful about how fluid and dynamic ideas become concretized into hegemonic principles in the hands of researchers, policymakers, and politicians. There’s so much diversity in histories and experiences and environmental realities even between relatively linked geographies here in Canada [...]. Imagine what happens when we try to do that on a global scale - and a lot of euro-western Anthropocene, climate change and resilience research risks doing that - eliding local specificities and appropriating knowledge to serve a broader euro-western narrative without attending to the inherent colonial and imperial realities of science and policy processes, or even attending to the ways that colonial capitalist expansion has created these environmental crises to begin with. While we, as a collective humanity, are struggling with the realities of the Anthropocene, it is dangerous to erase the specific histories, power-relations, political orders that created the crisis to begin with. So, I’m glad that a robust critique of the Anthropocene as a concept is emerging.

Text by: Words of Zoe Todd, as interviewed and transcribed by Caroline Picard. “The Future is Elastic (But it Depends): An Interview with Zoe Todd.” 23 August 2016.

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The Great Acceleration is the latest in a series of human-driven planetary changes that constitute what a rising chorus of scientists, social scientists, and humanists have labeled the Anthropocene - a new Age of Humans. [...] But what the Anthropocene label masks, and what the litany of graphs documenting the Great Acceleration hide, is a history of racial oppression and violence, along with wealth inequality, that has built and sustained engines of economic growth and consumption over the last four centuries. [...] The plantation, Sidney Mintz long ago observed, was a “synthesis of field and factory,” an agro-industrial system of enterprise [...]. Plantation legacies, along with accompanying strategies of survival and resistance, dwell in the racialized geographies of the United States’ and Brazil’s prison systems. They surface in the inequitable toxic burdens experienced by impoverished communities of color in places like Cancer Alley, an industrial corridor of petrochemical plants running along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, where cotton was once king. And they appear in patterns of foreign direct investment and debt servitude that structure many land deals in the Caribbean, Brazil, and sub-Saharan Africa [...]. [C]limatologists and global change scientists from the University of London, propose instead 1610 as a date for the golden spike of the Anthropocene. The date marked a detectable global dip in carbon dioxide concentrations, precipitated, they argue, by the death of nearly 50 million indigenous human inhabitants [...]. The degradation of soils in the tobacco and cotton-growing regions in the American South, or in the sugarcane growing fields of many Caribbean islands, for example, was a consequence of an economic and social system that inflicted violence upon the land and the people enslaved to work it. Such violent histories are not so readily evident in genealogies that date the Anthropocene’s emergence to the Neolithic Revolution 12,000 years ago, the onset of Europe’s industrial revolution circa 1800, or the Trinity nuclear test of 1945. Sugarcane plantations were already prevalent throughout the Mediterranean basin during the late middle ages. But it was during the early modern era, and specifically in the Caribbean, where the intersection of emerging proto-capitalist economic models based on migratory forced labor (first indentured servitude, and later slavery), intensive land usage, globalized commerce, and colonial regimes sustained on the basis of relentless racialized violence, gave rise to the transformative models of plantations that reshaped the lives and livelihoods of human and non-human beings on a planetary scale. [...] We might, following the lead of science studies scholar Donna Haraway and anthropologist Anna Tsing, more aptly designate this era the Plantationocene. [...] It is also an invitation to see, in the words of geographer Laura Pulido, “the Anthropocene as a racial process,” one that has and will continue to produce “racially uneven vulnerability and death." [...] And how have such material transformations sustained global flows of knowledge and capital that continue to reproduce the plantation in enduring ways?

Text by: Sophie Sapp Moore, Monique Allewaert, Pablo F. Gomez, and Gregg Mitman. "Plantation Legacies." Edge Effects. 22 January 2019. Updated 15 May 2021. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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Geologists and other scientists will fight over [the definition of the beginning start-date of the Anthropocene] in scientific language, seeking traces of carbon dioxide that index the worst offenses of European empire which rent and violated the flesh, bodies, and governance structures of Indigenous and other sovereign peoples in the name of gold, lumber, trade, land, and power. [...] The stories we tell about the origins of the Anthropocene implicate how we understand the relations we have with our surrounds. In other words, the naming of the Anthropocene epoch and its start date have implications not just for how we understand the world, but this understanding will have material consequences, consequences that affect body and land.

Text by: Heather Davis and Zoe Todd. On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene. ACME An International Journal for Critical Geographies. December 2017. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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From Aime and Suzanne Cesaire, C. L. R. James, Claudia Jones, Eduoard Glissant, through Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, and so many others, critical anticolonial and race theory has been written from the specific histories that marked the Black Atlantic. [...] Glissant also reminds us, secondly, of how cunning the absorptive powers of [...] liberal capitalism are - how quickly specific relations are remade as relations-erasing universal abstractions. [...] This absorptive, relations-erasing universalism is especially apparent in some contemporary discourses of […] liberalism and climate collapse - what some call the Anthropocene - especially those that anchor the crisis in a general Human calamity which, as Sylvia Wynter has noted, is merely the name of an overdetermined and specific [White] European man. […] [T]he condition of creating this new common European world was the destruction of a multitude of existing black and brown worlds. The tsunami of colonialism was not seen as affecting humanity, but [...] these specific people. They were specific - what happened to them may have been necessary, regrettable, intentional, accidental - but it is always them. It is only when these ancestral histories became present for some, for those who had long benefitted from the dispossession [...], that suddenly the problem is all of us, as human catastrophe.

Text by: Elizabeth Povinelli. “The Ancestral Present of Oceanic Illusions: Connected and Differentiated in Late Toxic Liberalism.” e-flux Journal Issue #112. October 2020.

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The narrative arc [of White "liberal humanism"] [...] is often told as a kind of European coming-of-age story. […] The Anthropocene discourse follows the same coming-of-age [...] script, searching for a material origin story that would explain the newly identified trajectory of the Anthropos […]. Sylvia Wynter, W.E.B. DuBois, and Achille Mbembe all showed how that genealogy of [White subjecthood] was [...] articulated through sixteenth- through nineteenth-century [historiographies and discourses] in the context of colonialism, [...] as well as forming the material praxis of their rearrangement (through mining, ecological rearrangements and extractions, and forms of geologic displacements such as plantations, dams, fertilizers, crops, and introduction of “alien” animals). […] As Wynter (2000) commented, “The degradation of concrete humans, that was/is the price of empire, of the kind of [Eurocentric epistemology] that underlies it” (154).

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. “The Inhumanities.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Volume 11, Issue 3. November 2020.

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As Yarimar Bonilla suggests in regard to post-Irma-and-Maria Puerto Rico, “vulnerability is not simply a product of natural conditions; it is a political state and a colonial condition.” Many in the Caribbean therefore speak about the coloniality of disaster, and the unnaturalness of these “natural” disasters [...]. Others describe this temporality by shifting [...] toward an idea of the Plantationocene [...]. As Moore and her colleagues write, “Plantation worlds, both past and present, offer a powerful reminder that environmental problems cannot be decoupled from histories of colonialism, capitalism, and racism that have made some human beings more vulnerable [...].” [W]e see that contemporary uneven socioecologies associated with the rise of the industrial world ["the Anthropocene"] are based [...] also on the racialized denial and foreshortening of life for the sacrificial majority of black, brown, and Indigenous people and their relegation to the “sacrifice zones” of extractive industry. [...] [A]ny appropriate response to the contemporary climate emergency must first appreciate its foundations in the past history of the violent, coercive, transatlantic system of plantation slavery; in the present global uneven development, antiblackness, and border regimes that shape human vulnerability [...] that continues to influence who has access to resources, safety, and preferable ecologies [...] and who will be relegated to the “plantation archipelagoes” (as Sylvia Wynter called them) [...].

Text by: Mimi Sheller. “Thinking Beyond Coloniality: Toward Radical Caribbean Futures.” Small Axe (2021), 25 (2 (65)), pages 169-170. Published 1 July 2021. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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Indigenous genocide and removal from land and enslavement are prerequisites for power becoming operationalized in premodernity [...]; it was/is a means to operationalize extraction (therefore race should be considered as foundational rather than as periphery to the production of those structures and of global space). [...] Wynter suggests that we […] consider 1452 as the beginning of the New World, as African slaves are put to work on the first plantations on the Portuguese island of Madeira, initiating the “sugar-slave” complex - a massive replantation of ecologies and forced relocation of people […]. Wynter argues that the invention of the figure of Man in 1492 as the Portuguese [and Spanish] travel to the Americas instigates at the same time “a refiguring of humanness” in the idea of race. [...] The natal moment of the 1800 Industrial Revolution, […] [apparently] locates Anthropocene origination in […] the "new" metabolisms of technology and matter enabled by the combination of fossil fuels, new engines, and the world as market. […] The racialization of epistemologies of life and nonlife is important to note here […]. While [this industrialization in the nineteenth century] […] undoubtedly transformed the atmosphere with […] coal, the creation of another kind of weather had already established its salient forms in the mine and on the plantation. Paying attention to the prehistory of capital and its bodily labor, both within coal cultures and on plantations that literally put “sugar in the bowl” (as Nina Simone sings) […]. The new modes of material accumulation and production in the Industrial Revolution are relational to and dependent on their preproductive forms in slavery […]. In 1833, Parliament finally abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, and the taxpayer payout of £20 million in “compensation” [paid by the government to slave owners for their lost "property"] built the material, geophysical (railways, mines, factories), and imperial infrastructures of Britain and its colonial enterprises and empire. [...] A significant proportion of funds were invested in the railway system connecting London and Birmingham (home of cotton production and […] manufacturing for plantations), Cambridge and Oxford, and Wales and the Midlands (for coal). Insurance companies flourished [...]. The slave-sugar-coal nexus both substantially enriched Britain and made it possible for it to transition into a colonial industrialized power […]. The slave trade […] fashioned the economic conditions (and institutions, such as the insurance and finance industries) for industrialization.

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. "White Utopia/Black Inferno: Life on a Geologic Spike". e-flux Journal Issue #97. February 2019. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

[mother-of-houseplants-2]

fiona gallagher // the angry man in the house

[cheecats]

White Shark & the other Divers actually

[thewingedwolf]

luther: the golden child

diego: the mastermind

allison: the peace keeper

klaus: the clown / mascot

five: the rebel / truth teller

ben: the lost child

viktor: the scapegoat

is this something i think this is something

[aurillio-thoughts]

a complex sirius who loves his family, especially his mom, is so much more tragic and nuanced and interesting than a sirius who flat out hates his family and i will die on that hill

[geneticdriftwood]

i’m having thoughts about batman vs green arrow, and how the central characters shape the stories their supporting casts are allowed

like, in batman comics, bruce’s story is about being permanently shaped by a grief he can never move on from (his parent’s deaths, and later jason’s death). the premise of batman, bruce’s unyielding dedication to his mission, requires that bruce always be living in the shadow of his formative trauma, always responding to it. structurally, he can never be allowed to heal (because a happy bruce wayne isn’t batman), which means he can’t really grow. his supporting cast can develop and grow in their own right, but they can’t leave (bc they’re batman characters), so they stay stuck in the same unhealthy dynamics with bruce. this creates a narrative paradigm where positive change rarely sticks, cycles aren’t broken, and the easiest story to tell is a tragedy. bruce isn’t allowed a happy ending, so nobody who loves him gets one either.

now compare this with green arrow, where ollie’s stories are so often about having the humility, courage, and determination to take accountability for your mistakes and change for the better. transformative change is his whole deal! it’s the point of the island! and his relationships with his supporting cast reflect this. ollie messes up, he learns from it, and his relationships with other characters develop and improve accordingly. the point of the story is that ollie changes, making change possible for everyone. and so green arrow books present a paradigm where characters are allowed to grow in ways that stick, where harm can be learned from instead of brushed aside, and where happy endings aren’t guaranteed but do largely feel possible. yk?

[argesta]

no one is allowed to tell louis “GIRL GET UP 🗣️” ever again. no one is getting up after this

[ocymoron]

And there he stands, Dabi—his big brother— wreathed in flames every shade of blue with this strange look on his face.

His lips downturned and pressed together tightly, trembling. His furrowed brows and scrunched nose. It’s an unfamiliar face, one that he only remembers through cracked doors. No tears fall— they don’t even form, they can’t— but his older brother still looks like he’s holding them back.

“I’m proud of you.”

The air is heavy between them. It feels weighed down by emotions too complicated to name— grief, it’s grief— and he doesn’t know how to respond so he doesn’t.

But it’s fine because his older brother— Touya-nii— keeps talking, voice choked.

“I wish I could’ve known you.”

[deadmegumi]

Gon saying this just nonchalant as all hell. he's crazy.

[randomfoggytiger]

Hoping against hope that DD reads "The House of My Mother: A Daughter's Quest for Freedom" and brings Shari Franke on his podcast to discuss the dangers and horrendous, soulless incentive of family vlogging.

[kellykadesperate]

literally have a fully fledged au in my head about alex representing henry’s husband during their divorce and wanting to make a statement with the case because of henry’s family name and then …… feelings …. occur

[twothpaste]

a long-looming intermission au question in the back of my head is "what the absolute hell was going on with flint and hinawa back in tennessee." the details remain erratic and fuzzy, but if/when i ever hash it out it's so fucking over.

[maliciousalice]

Count the ways I've had a fucked up life:

-Shoved my twin sister when we were 3 and saw blood come out of her ears from the knock on her head. From that point on she was half-deaf. -Twin sister and I nearly drowned at age 6 by being pulled into a powerful rip-tide at an unsupervised beach. My parents thought it was cute until we couldn't swim back and they both had to swim out to get us. I remember being really tired, and them being unsure about being able to swim back to shore.

-At age 11 witnessed my mother forgetting to apply the brake to her car. She tried to get back in and tripped, it subsequently rolled over her, crushing her foot and dragging her down the road. She bled profusely. The crimson stained pavement haunted me for a long time. I blamed myself because I arrived home from a friend's house at the same exact same time and believed I distracted her.

-Accidently electrocuted myself when I was bored while watching my siblings play on the computer. Without looking, I fiddled with the back of an old lamp with my finger tips, but I didn't know that fumbling the cables would cause it to surge. The large shock sent my arm numb for about an hour. Didn't seek treatment because the power tripped and I was worried I would get yelled at.

-Deep in the bush, during a particularly dry summer, family friends stupidly made a bonfire, and I saw our campsite get quickly lit up. As the flames surrounded us and the cars, I was yelled at to go get help/manual water pumps as if it was my fault. Somehow we managed to put it all out. We had to try something because the alternative was getting trapped.

-Was on the phone to my grandma when she had a stroke, I had no idea what was going on, to the point I thought it was a prank. I was crying because it wasn't something I was even aware could happen to someone, I continued to listen and her language skills deteriorated the longer I was on the phone. She became convincedly desperate despite her incoherence and somehow I broke away from my fear and got my dad to help her.

-My mother stabbed my older sister in the arm with a kitchen knife and they both just walked off. I remember being around the corner listening to the argument escalate and saw my older sister clutching her arm. (my sister is very violent so I think it was done in self defense???)

-Dad threw that same sister into the drywall multiple times--Not to excuse it but she was a devil, and would attack / lunge at us, and disrespected my parents from a young age. Dull thudding against walls sends me on edge to this day because it was one way to identify a scuffle with her.

-Mum had a cabinet pushed onto her by my older sister. The cabinet had a glass panel that shattered on her leg and sliced it open.

-My twin sister got upset at me and swung a 10kg metal bar stool at my leg, the blunt force tore my leg open, I now have a very sensitive scar on my shin. -My mum ran at me in an anger spell and I blocked it by pushing her away from me (that's legitimately all), she slipped on the slippery cork floors we had and fell over hitting her head hard. She was unconscious for a few minutes. Her tongue was sticking out and her eyes were open. I thought I had killed her. I wanted to call an ambulance. She woke up and I begged to her that she needed to go to hospital but she brushed it off because we had to catch a flight.

-On my way back from a lunch break I saw a woman go under a Truck. Once again I blamed myself because I crossed in front of the driver at a crossing, and nodded to him. As he rolled forward to leave she sprinted across, I turned and saw that she got hit. -My older sister took advantage of my mum and got into large debts by getting her to co-sign loans behind my dad's back. My mum was paying off things like her phone bill and eventually a car loan. This caused a lot of violent contention.

-Older Sister was kicked out of multiple times but my parents never fully cut her out and now she lives scott-free in a brand new granny flat in the backyard because of their guilt.

-lived in relative poverty and mess most of my teenage life because it was too expensive to send 4 kids to school for my parents. They worked full time but didn't really provide us with any emotional security. Both parents were very messy but blamed us for it as we got older. I tried my best to keep things clean but it was often in vain (it is to this day as things have escalated to full hoarding)

[imaginarianisms]

1 day i will make a meta of sansa's dynamic with her metaphorical champions/suitors & how that correlates to the ashford theory (i.e sansa being betrothed to joffrey baratheon, then promised to willas tyrell, then being married to tyrion lannister, then being married to harry hardying then married to aegon vi targaryen & aurane velaryon but it is not this day. lmao. when i make that meta it'll be so over for y'all.

[staronet]

Everytime I think of the fact that Astarion died before getting his adult name I cry.